Routledge The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity (Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies)

Modern Japan's repressed anxieties, fears and hopes come to the surface in the fantastic. A close analysis of fantasy fiction, film and comics reveals the ambivalence felt by many Japanese towards the success story of the nation in the twentieth century.The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature explores the dark side to Japanese literature and Japanese society. It takes in the nightmarish future depicted in the animated film masterpiece, Akira, and the pastoral dream worlds created by Japan's Nobel Prize winning author Oe Kenzaburo. A wide range of fantasists, many discussed here in English for the first time, form the basis for a ground-breaking analysis of utopias, dystopias, the disturbing relationship between women, sexuality and modernity, and the role of the alien in the fantastic. Review "Napier must surely be one of the most widely-read scholars in the field of modern Japanese literature, and she cogently weaves together textual elements from works...seemingly unrelated.... Napier's writing is, as always, compact and sophisticated without being at all ponderous. Her active disregard for boundaries between so-called high- and pop-culture forms is refreshing and exhilerating.... Finally, this book is a major contribution to modern literary and cultural studies in its attention to the alternative, subversive visions of society constituted by the "fantastic..""-"Journal of Asian Studies "By adopting a cultural studies approach, she succeeds in probiding the general public as well as Japan specialists with a work that discusses the fantastic worlds in Japanese literature.... remarkable for time and effort alone that must have gone into the preliminary research, not to mention the final product."-"Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies