Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 382. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2015. xiv, 178 pp. (Illustrations, B&W photos.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-50432-5.
How could the monster be a thing of the modern imagination? Miri Nakamura’s Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan shows that the uncanny was reinvented as the other in the modernizing of the Japanese self. Nakamura explores how Japanese fantasy novelists used scientific language to distinguish the monsters, or the abnormal “beings that evoked fear” (6) associated with women, colonies, and extramarital relationships. In doing so, Nakamura shows that these fantasy novels were not as subversive to Japan’s nation and empire-building projects as scholars have previously assumed. The central objects of analysis in this book are five novels, but Nakamura goes beyond the realm of narrowly defined literary history by locating these novels within the broader social and cultural history of modern Japan. She understands literature as a text that “registers this anxiety over how science and technology changed and shaped the understanding of the body (6),” which reflected, if not justified, the shaping of social hierarchies between men and women; the colonizers and the colonized; and legitimate and illegitimate birth. Although the main focus of this work, the uncanny, is not clearly defined nor historicized, this book is a welcome addition both to the field of Japanese literature and history.
Monstrous Bodies consists of four chapters, alongside the introduction and conclusion that contextualize the book within the existing literature on the “uncanny,” empire, and fantasy novels. Each chapter presents an analysis of the historical background of the novel, as well as the expected biographical information on the author. The first chapter explores the modern adaptation of Tokugawa tales of monstrous women through the lens of The Holy Man of Mount Kōya (Kōya hijiri), a novel by Izumi Kyōka published in 1900. In this novel, a monk manages to escape the spell of a femme fatale who seduces and kills other male characters, and he shares his scientific knowledge to reveal the abnormality of the seductress with the readers. Nakamura distinguishes this novel from its Tokugawa predecessors by looking at the scientific language that distinguished the otherwise dubious normality of the monk and the abnormality of the seductress, as reflected by the novel’s backdrop—hygiene campaigns of the Meiji state in the 1890s. The second chapter explores the Twins (Sōseiji), published by Edogawa Ranpo in 1924, a story that centres around the murder of a twin by his own brother. Contextualizing this story within the modern reincarnation of the premodern myth of inauspicious twins using medical language and its association with Japanese colonialism, Nakamura reads the anxiety of Japanese colonizers to distinguish them from the colonized Koreans, which Edogawa imagined as the monstrous murderer. Her insight that the massacre of Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake remarkably resembles this story is intuitive rather than well-substantiated, but a highly inspiring interpretation. The third chapter examines Yumeno Kyūsaku’s magnum opus Dogra Magra (Dogura magura) published in 1935, a complicated story of a man hospitalized without the memory of his own identity. In the novel, medical practitioners analyze the protagonist’s psyche, which is split between his Japanese self and Chinese ancestry, and they try to figure out his past. The protagonist becomes suspected of murdering his mother and fiancée but it turns out to be an unborn fetus dreaming the entire story. Nakamura explores the formation of schizophrenia studies at Kyushu Imperial University, which was closely associated with the war trauma of soldiers fighting for Japanese imperial expansion. This connection accentuates the role of this scientific knowledge to diagnose the protagonist’s anxiety with the indistinguishability between the colonizing Japanese and the colonized Chinese, which was a driving force for murder and the memory loss of soldiers. The fourth chapter looks at two novels of the same title, Artificial Humans, by Takada Giichirō published in 1927 and Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke in 1928. These stories describe a scientist’s efforts to create robot-based reproduction to free women from the pains of childbirth, only to realize that it was a dream (Takada) or to confess that the project was a hoax to hide the birth of his extramarital son with his student (Hirabayashi). Nakamura argues that the birth control movement and the advancement of eugenics blurred the demarcation between the anatomized female body and machines, reducing the female body to its reproductive function by this new “science.” In so doing, she also highlights that these two novels switch the normal and abnormal binary to correspond to the perceptual hierarchy between the legitimate and extramarital children (shiseiji).
In these novels, Nakamura manages to locate this anxiety by the distinction between the normal and the abnormal as confirmed with modern science. This book offers a superb guide to scholarship on the “uncanny,” empire, and fantasy literature both in Japanese and English. But, Nakamura fails to explain how she arrived at her definition of the monsters as “beings that evoked fear” (2) and how this concept can be applied to the four novels. The seductress in Izumi’s novel can best be understood as such, but it is not clear how the illegitimate babies in the novels of Takada and Hirabayashi evoked fear. Accordingly, readers who think historically remain curious as to whether the concept of the monster evolved in early twentieth-century Japanese novels, and if so, how. Also insufficiently explained is Nakamura’s choice of novels. This book explores novelists who were male and from the Japanese mainland. Nakamura claims to cover both canonical and not-well-known writers (9), but a brief comparison between the novelists highlighted in this book to novelists of the peripheries—i.e., those who were women, from Japan’s colonies, or illegitimate children—could have enriched the arguments of this book.
That said, this book is a remarkable contribution to our understanding of Japanese literature and its place in Japan’s cultural and social history, which will inspire scholars interested in science, gender, and empire. Also, the chapters of this book can be wonderful reading assignments for an undergraduate classroom, as they address the author, the story, and historical backgrounds despite their short length.
Jamyung Choi
Yanbian University, Yanji, China