Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan 0674504321, 9780674504325

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Monstrous Bodies

Harvard East Asian Monographs 382

Monstrous Bodies The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan

Miri Nakamura

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2015

© 2015 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College Printed in the United States of America The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japa nese Studies, and other facilities and institutes, administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nakamura, Miri, 1975– author. Monstrous bodies : the rise of the uncanny in modern Japan / Miri Nakamura. pages cm.—(Harvard East Asian monographs ; 382) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-50432-5 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Fantasy fiction, Japanese— History and criticism. 2. Monsters in literature. 3. Uncanny, The (Psychoanalysis), in literature. 4. Literature and myth—Japan. 5. Human body in literature. I. Title. PL721.F26N35 2015 895.609'37– dc23 2014032978 Index by the author Printed on acid-free paper Last figure below indicates year of this printing 22

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In memory of my father, Kengo Nakamura, and in memory of my beloved cat, Mochi

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction 1

1

The Invisible Monster: Translating Hygiene into Supernatural Language

13

2

Colonial Doubles in Edogawa Ranpo’s “Twins”

42

3

Colonial Doubles: Doppelgänger in Dogura Magura

71

4

Robot Babies: Artificial Reproduction

102

Conclusion: Uncanny Modernity

129

Notes

135

Bibliography

155

Index

169

Illustrations

I.1 1.1 1.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2

Mori Masahiro, “The Uncanny Valley,” diagram Ryūkō akueki taisan no zu (The defeat of epidemic, 1880), woodblock print The monster in Atarashiki zōbutsusha (New creator, 1889) Kure Shūzō, photograph The courtyard scene from Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari Gakutensoku, Japan’s first automaton Robot with physiological organs

4 14 39 77 90 107 109

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help of my brilliant mentors, kindhearted colleagues, generous friends, and family. My academic mentors: My academic adviser, Jim Reichert, made everything happen. Not only did he tirelessly comment on every single draft of my chapters, but he gave me the academic and moral support I needed at every stage of my academic career (and still does). No words can sufficiently express my gratitude for his wisdom and support. Dan O’Neill possesses a heart of gold and a sophisticated mind. I finished typing the very last words of my dissertation in front of him at a café in San Francisco. It was an honor to co-organize a symposium and co-teach a class with him at the University of California, Berkeley. I hope that he will remain my fellow academic for years to come. William Johnston, my mentor at Wesleyan University, guided me through the tenure system every step of the way. He generously gave me his unpublished works on the history of cholera to read, which greatly helped me to revise chapter 1. I cannot imagine what my years at Wesleyan would have been like without his inspirational presence. Indra Lévy gave me the most detailed, brilliant comments on my original dissertation. She also edited and published an earlier version of chapter 1 in her anthology of essays. I am indebted to her sharp mind and her continued academic support. Miyako Inoue, Steven Carter, and Estelle Freedman made my dissertation defense one of the most intellectually stimulating and enjoyable experiences of my graduate career.

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Acknowledgments

Tomiko Yoda gave me meaningful feedback and an endless amount of encouragement on this project. This book would have been very different without her astute observations. Christopher Bolton has offered me significant opportunities to expand my professional experience and circle of colleagues from my early years as a graduate student. He encouraged me to publish an earlier version of chapter 3 and invited me to join the wonderful Mechademia crew. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki gave me the foundation I needed to conduct studies in Japanese literature. Shuhsi Kao was the reason I decided to become a literature teacher. I recommend that any graduate student of Japanese literature study under my advisers, Oshino Takeshi, Nakayama Akihiko, and Nakagawa Shigemi. Oshino is a walking encyclopedia of Japanese fantastic fiction, Nakayama is literally the smartest person alive, and Nakagawa is utterly inspiring. While in Japan, be sure to knock on the door of Yoshida Morio, who taught me everything I know about robots, and find Yoshihara Yukari, the amazing subculture specialist. My awesome colleagues: My department proudly boasts that it is “the happiest department on campus,” and every bit of that is true. I thank my Asian Languages family: Etsuko Takahashi, Shengqing Wu, Xiaomiao Zhu, Terry Kawashima, Ao Wang, and Ann “Mom” Gertz. I also thank everyone in the East Asian Studies Program for their support and collegiality. Joseph Fitzpatrick, my number one ally at Wesleyan, has read and commented on almost everything I have written. His generosity knows no bounds. Mariah Schug, my confidant, comforted me during the most difficult times. Uli Plass is the best upstairs neighbor. Jill Morawski took amazing care of me at the Center for the Humanities. My fellow yoginis, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Deb Unferth, and Annalise GlautzTodrank, made sure I held on to my sanity during the tenure process, as did the Downey House Girls—Kate Birney, Eirene Visvardi, and Lauren Caldwell. I am grateful for the friendships of Courtney Fullilove, Paul Erickson, Gretchen Bakke, Susan Cohen, and countless others at Wesleyan University. My graduate years at Stanford University were equally amazing. My senpai Michael Foster and Michiko Suzuki treated me like family. Atsuko Ueda’s theoretical knowledge was inspiring. Michelle Li and I talked about monsters all day long. Bob Tierney is a pure delight and gave me indispensable comments on my colonial chapters. I was fortunate to

Acknowledgments

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have as classmates and senpai Roberta Strippoli, Mark Gibeau, Caroline Hirasawa, Christopher Scott, David Gundry, Daniel Sullivan, Shu Kuge, Nancy Stalker, and Julia Bullock. Molly Vallor was an absolute delight, and Andre Haag gave me amazing feedback and research materials for chapter 2. Last but certainly not least, Joanna Sturiano supplied me with an endless amount of positive energy, not to mention helping me locate key material for chapter 3. A personal thanks also goes to J. Keith Vincent for his warm reception of my works; Michael Bourdaghs for introducing me to my advisers at Hokkaidō University; Ryan Cook for his insight into Japanese cinema; Reggie Jackson for all the laughs and support; Allison Alexy for giving me her article to read; Kerim Yassar purely for his amazing presence; Joshua Chambers-Letson for his wonderful book and for being the best office neighbor, along with Yves Winter; Jennifer Feeley for her hospitality and kindness; Mimi Long for being an amazing co-editor for Mechademia Reviews; and Sayumi Takahashi Harb for being a wonderful fellow Connecticut friend and colleague. The editorial team: I am indebted to the committee at the Harvard University Asia Center. William Hammell took my manuscript to his last committee meeting at the press. Robert Graham is an extremely capable editor. Deborah Del Gais’s kindness can be felt even in her emails. The two anonymous readers’ comments were utterly indispensable. Anthony Lee designed the beautiful jacket cover that emphasizes the monster’s anatomy. Kimberly Giambattisto meticulously edited the final draft. Last but not least, I want to express my special gratitude to the anonymous member of the committee who volunteered to read this manuscript and its revisions to consider it for a contract. Your kindness will never be forgotten. I thank Ann Brash, my hero, for copyediting my revised manuscript; Robert Huddleson at New York University for editing an earlier version of chapter  4; Julia Knobloch for helping to edit chapter  4; and Parker Smathers for going over my introduction with his astute editorial eye. Fellowships and grants: This project would not have been possible without the generous funding from a Stanford Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures Doctoral Fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Fellowship, a Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Fellowship, a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a Mellon Foundation Summer Research Grant, a Wesleyan Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and Wesleyan Research Project grants.

xiv

Acknowledgments

My people (and one cat): My mother, Akiko Nakamura, and my sister, Lemee Nakamura, taught me how to be an independent woman. My best friends—Karen Emi, Veronica Lee, Cheryl Yamashita, Kyle Oba, my “little bro” Matthew Kinoshita, and Lili Smith—are basically family. Sasha Davina Tarder, your presence is very much missed. My Litquake family (led by the formidable Jack and Jane) and Bay Area writers— especially Jennifer Siraganian, Gravity Goldberg, Caitlin Myer, James Warner, Meghan Thornton, Daniel Heath, Ross Peter Nelson, and Nina Lesowitz—refueled my passion for literature during my sabbatical. Matt Teel and Kathy Crane provided me with a place to write the first draft at Yerba Buena Nursery. Darcy Hansen is my savior. And last but not least, special thanks to Drew Oliveras and Kiva for their loving presence. I bow with humility and gratitude to each and every one of you. September 15, 2014 Oakland, California

Introduction

onsters have haunted the Japanese literary imagination since the earliest recorded writing. Eight-headed snakes, giant spiders, water spirits, mountain goblins—frightening, supernatural creatures of all sorts infest premodern Japa nese literature. Spectacular bodies to behold, colorful demons, and human-animal hybrids adorned the pages of religious anecdotes and vernacular tales. But monsters are not just creations of the past; modern Japanese literature is haunted by myriad monsters, not remnants of an earlier time but new creatures imagined through advances in technology and medical sciences. This book is about the rise of these modern monsters and the stories told about them. To understand the significance of these modern monsters, I will be situating them in relationship to the scientific discourses of a modern Japanese empire hell-bent on improving the bodies of its citizens. During the modern period, from the Meiji era (1868–1912) through the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1937, Japan witnessed an enormous shift in the perception of human anatomy. New scientific discourses imported from Europe fed into this reimagining of the body, bringing the human anatomy to the forefront of debates over how best to move the nation forward into modernity.1 As a result, the individual body became the object of study, scrutinized by the eyes of the empire. Through scientific discourses such as hygiene, reproductive science, and eugenics, modern citizens were encouraged to regulate and improve their health and physique, to “think of their bodies as plastic, in the sense of capable of being molded, and as adaptable, pliable, and transformable through new hygienic regimens of nutrition and physical exercise.”2 For the first time in history, they were

M

2

Introduction

made to understand their bodies as collectively constituting the nation, as something inseparable from the national body politic. Within this context of promoting new and improved national bodies, images of monstrosity also proliferated: pathogenic women, evil twins, psychological doppelgängers, and humanoid automata. These strange beings found their way into literary fiction as a new kind of monster. Whereas so many of the monsters in premodern literature took on strange physical shapes, the monsters of modernity were more elusive—their weirdness was not physically marked but more subtly encoded, legible only through the scientific discourses that promoted bodily enhancement. I use the term “monsters” to describe these literary bodies because they came to be narrated as beings that evoked fear. Although they were often marked by a bodily difference that was indiscernible to the naked eye, this subtlety made them all the more frightening. The monster tales in this book all share a common story line. There is a character that appears to be an ordinary being, but the reader is told that this being is actually different, that the character is hiding his or her otherness in order to pass as a normal being. The reader cannot determine whether this information is correct, for this bodily difference is never obvious. This initial confusion leads to an anxiety that permeates the narrative: Is the body really monstrous? If so, how can one tell? In these tales, the monstrous element is always presented as a secret to be unraveled, and there is a delaying of the answer, for a specific knowledge is required to determine the truth. The horror here is marked by this postponement and unexpectedness—one that arises from the doubt and uncertainty caused by a character with a bodily secret. This is the type of fear that these new monstrous bodies produce, a fear that comes from an encounter with what I am identifying as the uncanny. To introduce this notion of the uncanny is almost inevitably to invoke the theoretical structure that Freud set forward in his famous essay, “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919). In one of the essay’s most quoted passages, Freud claims that “everything is unheimlich (uncanny) that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”; it is the moment of fear that comes about when something traumatic that one had repressed is triggered by an event, “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”3 This moment of fear, when the present is disturbed by the past and the “familiar” becomes unfamiliar, has come to be known as “the return of the repressed.” 4 Freud’s essay was written to explore the psyche of veterans suffering from shell shock and

Introduction

3

trauma in the aftermath of World War I, and it reveals his shift from examining the pleasure principle to examining the death drive after observing the tendency of his patients to compulsively relive their traumatic experiences.5 The uncanny is the return of the original moment of shock and terror, a haunting by the past. It is a temporal disturbance, when one’s repressed memory is suddenly unearthed. This familiar repression model of the uncanny will become useful at certain important moments in the chapters that follow, moments at which the role of repression in the construction of Japa nese modernity (especially the repression of colonial violence discussed in the middle chapters) influences our understanding of the literary monsters. But whereas Freud’s theory offers a good starting point to consider the signification of modern monsters, it tends to obscure another very useful definition of the uncanny. Early in his essay, Freud cites Ernest Jentsch, whose work points to a specific kind of confusion that the uncanny addresses: “Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become a cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.” 6 Although Freud generally develops his psychoanalytical model of the uncanny in contradistinction to Jentsch’s approach, he never completely rejects Jentsch’s original definition. He describes the automaton Olimpia in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” for example, as a body that encapsulates “uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate.”7 He makes a similar statement about twins, psychological doubles, and waxwork figures—the representative figures of the uncanny, what Terry Castle calls the “itemized tropology of the weird.”8 All of the examples that Freud discusses in the essay are in fact marked by the Jentschian uncanny—a fear arising from uncertainty over whether an object is animate or inanimate. Even though Freud tries to distinguish himself from Jentsch by redefining the uncanny as “the return of the repressed,” the question of animation persists in his imagination. Lydia Liu, among others, has thus observed that Jentsch’s study of the uncanny has been “repressed” by the more popular Freudian version.9 It is in fact the Jentschian defi nition—the fear arising from the uncertainty of an object being animate or inanimate—that has been emerging as the more prominent, popular understanding of the uncanny in recent years.10 One good illustration of this definition is roboticist Mori

Introduction

4 +

uncanny valley

moving still

bunraku puppet industrial robot

stuffed animal

okina mask ordinary doll

human likeness

50%

100%

yase otoko mask (noh play) −

ill person

death

affinity (shinwakan)

humanoid robot

healthy person

corpse

prosthetic hand myoelectric hand zombie

Figure I.1 Mori Masahiro, “The Uncanny Valley,” translated by K. F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, IEEE Robotics and Automation 19, no. 2 (2012): 98–100 (diagram originally published in Japa nese in Energy 7, no. 4 [1970]: 33–35). Courtesy of K. F. MacDorman.

Masahiro’s theory of the uncanny valley (bukimi no tani). In 1970, Mori, currently professor emeritus of Tokyo Institute of Technology, set out this theory in the form of a graph (fig I.1).11 The graph is a study of the subjective reactions of humans to various kinds of robots and other humanlike objects. The horizontal axis represents “human likeness,” and the vertical axis represents “affinity”—the human audience’s sense of comfort with the likeness of the robot or other object.12 The graph reveals that at fi rst, the more humanlike the objects become, the more people are attracted to them and express positive sentiments.13 However, as soon as this humanlike factor approaches but falls short of lifelikeness, people become revolted. The uncanny valley is the site of this anxiety. It represents the human repulsion stemming from an object that provokes confusion between what is human and what is nonhuman, what is animate and what is inanimate, just as Jentsch observed. This concept of binary confusion plays an important role in the literature I examine. The central binary of this book, however, is not the animate/ inanimate distinction of Jentsch and Mori. Rather, it is a binary that was

Introduction

5

produced in modern Japan by the newly imported scientific discourses on the body—the binary of the normal and the abnormal. This book focuses on the decades leading up to the Pacific War, precisely because scientific discourses such as hygiene and eugenics were introduced to Japan in the mid-1800s and arose as dominant forces throughout the imperial era. By the end of the 1930s, images of healthy, “normal” bodies proliferated in various journals and newspapers, as voices against “abnormal” and “deviant” bodies intensified. The Japanese empire upheld the well-trained physiques of its soldiers and their healthy mothers while monitoring the bodies of the unhealthy as an effort to efface them from the national image. There was a constant effort, in other words, to demarcate those who belonged to the empire by dividing them from those who did not. This book thus treats the uncanny as a discourse of the body. The uncanny requires the element of fear, but in this case, it is a very specific fear embedded in the discourse of modern science. I aim to historicize the uncanny, to explore it in conjunction with the discourses that were targeted to improve the Japanese body. In this approach, I am inspired by scholars like Sabine Frühstück and Jennifer Robertson, who have similarly claimed that scientific discourses were part of the imperial project. As both scholars have shown, the improvement of the human anatomy was one of the foremost goals for modern Japan’s project to construct a “civilized” nation. Frühstück has discussed how the individual body became tied to the national body through a strict regimentation of hygienic cleanliness and “correct” sex education. She has revealed how the binary of normalcy and deviance became marketed in both academic and popular writings as the key knowledge for improving the Japanese national body. Robertson has similarly described Japanese modernity as a “eugenic modernity” in which scientific methods functioned as “the primary means to constitute both the nation and its constituent subjects.”14 She has elucidated how scientific discourses such as eugenics and hygiene were instrumental in the creation of the category of the “stigmatized other.”15 The two scholars’ concept of “internal colonialism”—the imperial state’s indoctrination of its own people via the regulation of their bodies—has greatly informed my reading of monstrous bodies.16 What underlies my work, then, is the kind of skepticism that Michel Foucault exhibited toward the value systems created in modern Europe. Foucault argued that a certain power, distinct from any forms of power preceding it, emerged in the nineteenth century: the power of normalization. This power appears to be inclusive and productive: “The norm brings

6

Introduction

with it a principle of both qualification and correction. The norm’s function is not to exclude and reject. Rather, it is always linked to a positive technique of intervention and transformation, to a sort of normative project.”17 Its function is to declare what is both medically and legally acceptable for society, at the same time justifying the powers of such boundaries to “transform judicial power as well as psychiatric knowledge and to constitute itself as the authority responsible for the control of abnormal individuals.”18 As Foucault makes clear, the discourse of normalization was a new power of regulation that penetrated each individual. It created, for the first time in history, the concept of the “abnormal individual” and educated each citizen to strive toward social norms by disciplining the individual body. As I will show, the uncanny in modern Japan arose as a by-product of this kind of bodily regimentation—the “internal colonialism” governed by the power of normalization. The impetus to improve the Japa nese national body was never quite straightforward. It was not simply that the modern empire enforced scientific ideologies, to be subsequently followed without question. With the obsession to defi ne the ideal body of the nation came a fixation with the opposite—the unhealthy, nonreproductive bodies unfit for the new nation. The motivation to understand the normal required a new attention to and an endlessly expanding knowledge of the abnormal. Delinquents, perverts, and the diseased—what Foucault calls the “human monsters”—all became visible, dominant figures precisely because of the effort to defi ne their opposite.19 Th is ironic turn is a critical focus within my project: the normal bodies of modernity were not threatened by the abnormalities of deviant bodies (which were necessary to define the very concept of the normal) but by the ambiguous bodies that resisted classification. As the aforementioned sociohistorical works have shown, the binary of the normal and the abnormal was constantly being undermined in modern Japan, the categories continually reestablished and rewritten. It is the articulation of this anxiety—the uncertainty about whether or not the normative binary could be sustained—that lies at the crux of the uncanny. Th is book contends that literature registers this anxiety over how science and technology changed and shaped understandings of the body, especially how they demarcated the divisions between the normal and the abnormal. What I am calling modern monsters are anatomies, informed by newly imported sciences, that ignite an uncanny sense of terror by blurring the normal–abnormal binary. These characters only become

Introduction

7

“abnormal” when a scientific gaze is directed at them. Throughout the book, I will illustrate how modern sciences contributed to the imagining of these modern monsters and show how they were born from the divisions that these scientific discourses were so carefully crafting.

The book is organized chronologically, starting from the mid-Meiji period and proceeding through the 1930s. The chapters trace, in historical order, the demarcations of normal and abnormal in Meiji hygienic discourse; the emphasis on “healthy Japanese” bodies in Taishō-era Japan (1912–26); the eradication of the “mentally unstable” in psychological writing during the early Shōwa period (1926–89); and the emphasis on the healthy, reproductive female body by birth control activists and eugenicists during mid-Shōwa Japan. Each chapter explains how the monster’s emergence is tied to a dominant, contemporary scientific discourse. Chapter 1 examines how the discourse of hygiene and the virus came to be translated in the literary language of Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939), an author known for his hygienic obsessions. I focus especially on the figure of the mysterious woman in Kōya hijiri (The holy man of Mount Kōya, 1900), who produces hybrid monsters by having intercourse with men. I outline the shift in the trope of the monstrous woman in the Meiji period by focusing on the role of modern hygiene in the creation of a new scientific language for capturing the otherness of the female anatomy. Kyōka purposefully takes up the popular image of the monstrous female in the Edo period (1603–1867)—a female body fused with that of animals—but develops the image further by inscribing it as a diseased, unsanitary vessel that poses a threat to the modern nation. This chapter thus attempts to capture the first instance of scientific vocabulary entering the fantastic literary domain in order to better describe the monstrosity of both diseased and female bodies. Chapter 2 investigates the image of twins as monstrous births in eugenic writings as well as the detective story “Sōseiji” (Twins, 1924) by Edogawa Ranpo, “the Father of Japanese Detective Fiction” (1894–1965). Twins were traditionally viewed as abhorrent and monstrous in Japanese culture, and they continued to be seen as inferior beings in the modern period. In the 1920s, the Japa nese picked up the famous nature-versusnurture debate taking place in Western eugenics and began to experiment with twins to prove whether heredity (nature) or social circumstances (nurture) was the key to determining a person’s characteristics. Around

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Introduction

the same time, in 1923, the Great Kantō Earthquake occurred, followed by the massacre of thousands of Koreans (among other minorities). Th is chapter situates Ranpo’s fiction against the historical background of 1920s Japan and explores how the unspeakable violence following the 1923 earthquake, brought on by the volatile relationship between Japan and its colonial other, came to be expressed through the metaphor of twinship. Chapter 3 examines the rise of doppelgänger literature and psychology in early Shōwa Japan. I focus on the works of writer Yumeno Kyūsaku (1889–1936), especially his famous novel Dogura magura (Dogra magra, 1936), which revolves around a Japanese protagonist haunted by a Chinese double. I read the figure of the double as a metaphor for the relationship between Japan and its colonies and try to shed light on the dual nature of colonial discourse, one that assimilates and welcomes its colonial subjects on the one hand, but also excludes and rejects them on the other. I also examine how the psychological double is inseparable from the idea of schizophrenia, a term that was used to describe war trauma (post-traumatic stress disorder today). A writer known for his depictions of mixed-blood children or konketsuji, children born between a Japanese national and a colonized other, Yumeno’s works consistently explore how to represent figures that waver between national borders. Chapter 4 outlines the birth of robots, commonly known as jinzō ningen (artificial humans), in 1920s literature. With the introduction of Karel Čapek’s (1890–1938) play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in 1923, Japan witnessed a boom of literature about robots. Early Shōwa Japan was undergoing a rapid mechanization process through which machines were incorporated into the modern landscape, and these robots became the epitome of the machine’s power and authority. At the same time, however, they also brought about great anxieties about the mechanization of the human body and its reproductive process. I offer close readings of two stories that were each titled simply “Jinzō ningen” (Robot): Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke’s (1892–1931) from 1929 and Takada Giichirō’s (1886–1945) from 1927. I argue that these figures pointed to a new anxiety, not only about artificial reproduction but also about “natural,” biological reproduction, for in all these robot tales, human women mysteriously stop giving birth. I situate the two representative stories against the rise of the birth control movement at a time when imperial authorities were desperately trying to increase the birth rate for their colonial endeavors. I then continue to explore how these stories pointed to a specific social problem: how

Introduction

9

to represent illegitimate children—an identity that did not legally exist during the early Shōwa period. The conclusion reexamines the book’s central questions: Why was there such a proliferation of these uncanny bodies in prewar Japan? What observations can we make about the modes of the uncanny in the Japanese context? After discussing the uncanny in Japan as a mode informed by science, I elaborate on what makes these monsters “modern,” not in the sense of there being a clear schism between premodern and modern but because of the texts’ close alignment with the empire. I reemphasize the fact that what makes the figures within these texts both modern and monstrous is their conflation of the normative binary, and that the confusion does not revolve around any ontological binaries (animal and human, dead and alive) that we traditionally associate with monsters. These monsters represent the “abnormal” bodies of the modern empire— diseased beings, colonial subjects, and illegitimate existences—bodies marked by the uncertainty of whether they fit the modern imperial definition of the normative. I thus end by highlighting the close relationship of the uncanny mode to the concept of normativity.

The book examines fiction of both canonical, famous writers (Izumi Kyōka, Edogawa Ranpo, and Yumeno Kyūsaku) and more marginal writers who have never received critical attention (Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke and Takada Giichirō). All of these writers produced fascinating works that revolve around monstrous bodies, but they have never been read together. By examining these literary works together with a wide range of media—film, hygiene textbooks, abnormal psychology journals, eugenic debates, and popular science textbooks—I weave a literary history of modern monsters grounded in the historical rise of modern science and the empire. I show how literary writers, even the lesser-known ones, participated in both reinforcing and questioning bodily norms in imperial Japan. My discussion of literary history is oriented by specific questions about the general reception of these authors, who have generally been understood as representative writers of fantastic fiction (gensō bungaku). Izumi Kyōka especially is often hailed as the forerunner of Japa nese fantastic fiction. The other four writers—Edogawa Ranpo, Yumeno Kyūsaku, Takada Giichirō, and Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke—were all associated with the journal Shin seinen (New youth), known for its erotic grotesque nonsense (ero guro nansensu) aesthetic: “the prewar, bourgeois

10

Introduction

cultural phenomenon that devoted itself to explorations of the deviant, the bizarre, and the ridiculous.”20 The identification of these authors with the fantastic is particularly important, because scholars of fantastic fiction have often emphasized the genre as a subversive mode. Tzvetan Todorov originally defi ned the fantastic as a “hesitation” experienced by the story’s characters and readers when they were uncertain about whether the supernatural event in the story was “real” or not. His definition began the trend to contrast fantastic fiction with the “real” and with so-called realistic fiction.21 Rosemary Jackson and Susan Napier then built on this definition to claim that fantastic fiction is more than just escapist literature, that it is a “literature of subversion”—literature that criticizes the dominant ideologies and norms of the time. In her seminal work on Japanese fantastic fiction, Napier states that “the very raison d’être of fantastic fiction is its existence in contrast to the ‘real,’ ” the “real” defined as dominant political and social ideologies and the literature associated with them.22 Fantastic fiction thus came to be viewed as a marginal genre that originally arose in opposition to the realistic novel and the ideological project carried out by it.23 However, as Napier herself states, “Fantasy is most importantly a literature of subversion,” which to me says that subversion is but one aspect of the literature.24 My own study therefore draws on these discussions of fantastic literature while suggesting a more open reading of the fantastic. By focusing on the literary bodies of monsters in relation to scientific discourses on the body, this book demonstrates how these fantastic fictions could also be read not as subverting but as complicit with imperial ideologies aimed at disavowing deviant bodies. The uncanny fear that the reader experiences comes from uncertainty about whether the object is normal or abnormal. Although these fictions might be considered subversive insofar as they often undermine scientific binaries and bring about anxiety, they are also, ideologically speaking, complicit, for they privilege imperial sciences as the proper mode of knowledge for locating the abnormal element, a privileging that often results in depicting these figures as, indeed, monstrous. These literatures thus cannot be accounted for by any simple dichotomy of subversion versus complicity. As the chapters show, they embody all the ambiguities, uncertainties, and multiplicities of the modern experience—what Harry Harootunian called the “unevenness” of modernity—that existed in imperial Japan.25 Although there is a great deal of scholarship concerning traditional monsters—folkloric figures, religious entities—the meanings of the new

Introduction

11

monsters of the modern landscape are still in question.26 The few works that exist on the relationship between modernity and the monstrous have focused on the figure of yōkai. Gerald Figal, for example, showed how today’s commonly accepted binary of rational and irrational or civilized and uncivilized was carefully constructed during the Meiji period.27 Under Meiji Japan’s project to bring civilization and Western knowledge to the nation, folkloric monsters ( yōkai, bakemono), along with many of the older supernatural traditions, were placed under the rubric of the irrational—as things impossible to prove by modern science. For the first time, these monstrous figures became marked as representatives of an outdated, uncivilized past, in contrast with the nation’s idealized image as a Westernized, enlightened nation. My uncanny monsters greatly differ from these folkloric figures, dubbed as “premodern” and “uncivilized,” for they are products of modern scientific discourses employed for the “civilization” project. Furthermore, the monstrosity I examine is not one associated with such temporality—that is, the equation of the monstrous with premodernity. This is also where my application of the uncanny veers away from Marilyn Ivy’s evocation of the term to describe modern Japan. Ivy defines the uncanny as “the movement of something passing away, gone but not quite, suspended between presence and absence, located at a point that both is and is not here in the repetitive process of absenting.”28 For her, absenting (or vanishing, as she calls it) is grounded in a sense of loss and nostalgia that accompanies modernization and technological progress. In other words, the uncanny always carries with it a sense of impossibility of returning to the origin, and for Ivy, it is a rearticulation of the Freudian “return of the repressed,” when the past disturbs the present. Both Figal’s and Ivy’s works have been instrumental in my research on the relationship between the monstrous and modernity. Ivy clearly situates the uncanny as a product of Japanese modernity, and Figal highlights how the binary of modern and nonmodern was always carefully constructed. As I have outlined in this introduction, however, this book does not treat the uncanny as a haunting by the past; it is concerned with what kinds of new monsters were produced by the scientific discourse of the body. For this reason, the one work that this project most closely aligns itself with is Michael Dylan Foster’s astute analysis of the yōkai in modern Japan.29 In his chapters on Meiji Japan, Foster illuminates the conflation of the supernatural and scientific thought: in the effort by the founders of yōkaigaku (folkloric monster study) to separate the “false

12

Introduction

mysteries” from the “true” ones, Western science (electricity, human psychology) came to function as the “true” explanation behind the occult, replacing traditional beliefs in monsters and spirit possession. That is, yōkai did not simply disappear; they were “a common language, a shared set of metaphors to explain otherwise unexplainable terms,” and this language was transformed and informed by modern technology and scientific knowledge.30 Modernity, in this manner, often allied itself with the monstrous, creating new uses for familiar monsters. Foster’s conceptualization of the monster as a kind of language that can translate newly imported scientific concepts has been fundamental in my research. Modern monsters are often evoked to explain and narrate the “correct” application of modern sciences, which were themselves not without ambiguities. Chapter 1 is precisely about this kind of translation, in which a certain discourse of modern science becomes rewritten into a special brand of “supernatural language.” Ironically, nowhere is this transmission of modern scientific knowledge more visible than in the fantastic works of Izumi Kyōka, a writer regarded as being atavistic and premodern, disinterested in rational, modern discourses like Western sciences.

Chapter One

The Invisible Monster Translating Hygiene into Supernatural Language

hen cholera arrived in Meiji Japan, it became a monster. Commonly called korori, onomatopoeia for “dropping dead,” cholera’s new name reflected the helplessness of its victims. It came to be depicted as a hybrid beast with the head of a ko (tiger), the torso of a ro (wolf ), and the genitals of a ri (badger). In the 1880 illustration Ryūkō akueki taisan no zu (Illustration of the defeat of epidemic), the cholera monster growls as it is sprayed with a sanitizer held by hygienists in Western clothing (fig.  1.1).1 The hygienists (right middle) protect the common Japa nese citizens (right bottom corner), and some Westerners can be seen moving toward a fi rst-class train leaving Japan. The monster’s body, already captured as a supernatural hybrid, is also inscribed as a racial other by the words written below it: “I’m going to China” (Shina e ikō). The power discourse is clear: Westernized Japan triumphantly stands alone as it protects its own by sending the monster off to its “inferior” Asian neighbor. This chapter offers a new reading of a canonical work, Kōya hijiri (The holy man of Mount Kōya, 1900, Kōya hereafter) by Izumi Kyōka, the so-called father of fantastic fiction, informed by the history of modern hygiene.2 Ever since its first publication, Kōya has been called an “unrealistic” work, and famous Meiji critic Takayama Chogyū labeled Kyōka himself an unrealistic writer.3 Scholarship on Izumi Kyōka has often been mainly psychoanalytical, scholars reading his supernatural themes as either a psychological reflection of his childhood or part of his “romantic” fiction. Waki Akiko, for example, borrows from Jung, Bachelard, and Eliade in her analysis of Kyōka’s works, interpreting the female figures in

W

Figure 1.1 Ryūkō akueki taisan no zu (The defeat of epidemic), woodblock print, 1880. Courtesy of Katagiri Seiryūdō Collection and Naitō Memorial Medical Museum, Kakamigahara, Gifu Prefecture. Epidemics like cholera were often depicted in the form of hybrid monsters in Meiji Japan.

The Invisible Monster

15

his fiction as reflecting the author’s actual loss of his mother.4 Other scholars, such as Tōgō Katsumi and Maeda Ai, emphasized Kyōka’s works as being nonmodern in a sense.5 Tōgō describes the protagonist of Kōya as a modern hero fighting a “premodern” monster, and Maeda insists that another character in the story, the vulgar medicine peddler, is a “premodern” other as well. This is a typical reading of Kyōka’s works, since he was associated with the Ken’yūsha circle (Friends of the Inkstone), whose works were often read as Edoesque and classical. The monstrous and the fantastic elements in his stories were thus constantly dehistoricized and treated as nonmodern. Kōya, at first appearance, certainly seems to surround the theme of the supernatural. There are hybrid monsters in a strange place in the mountains. The woman in the woods is described as possessing special powers. The story reads like typical ikai (strange space) folklore, in which the protagonist enters a fantastic space and must return to the “real” world. However, as I will argue, the work must be read as a purely modern and Meiji text, a product of its historical moment. In particular, my reading will show how the “supernatural” language of Kōya overlaps with that of Meiji hygienic discourse. It was no coincidence that this text was written at the apex of the Meiji government’s promotion of a hygienic, healthy kokutai (national body politic), when the word eisei (hygiene) became one of the key words of the era.6 From the beginning, Kyōka’s text plays on the established Japanese trope of the monstrous female. The process by which the mysterious woman in the story slowly transforms into a monstrous figure offers us a way to see how scientific language participated in the envisioning of a new type of dangerous body. She becomes an important part of conveying hygienic knowledge, for it is her fluid, tainted body that becomes the vehicle of the invisible pathogen. Her body, if not for this single factor, would otherwise appear to be a “normal” Japanese citizen’s body. However, a hygienic monk will bring this concealment to light, thus disclosing her body as an “almost-human,” uncanny being. The underlying goal of this chapter is to examine scientific writings together with fantastic fiction, as a way to problematize the binary that still plagues contemporary thought: science and literature, the rational and the irrational. Modern hygienic discourse was not always represented as just rational and scientific; as evidenced by the illustration of the cholera monster, it, too, disseminated its knowledge through a “supernatural” language. How do both Kyōka’s work and Meiji hygienic writings borrow

16

The Invisible Monster

the metaphor of the monster to narrate the danger of disease? Where can we locate the overlaps of this supposedly “fantastic” fiction and scientific writings? By rereading Kyōka’s canonical text, together with hygienic writings, this chapter will undo the image of Izumi Kyōka as an unrealistic writer trapped in premodern literature and situate him squarely in modernity.

Visualizing the Invisible Izumi Kyōka’s hygienic phobias were notorious.7 “[Kyōka’s] fear of germs was so extreme that it was an illness. He never tasted anything unless it was boiled beyond one hundred degrees, and even in the middle of a hot summer day, he would boil his chicken hotpot and sip it while blowing on it.”8 Numerous anecdotes about the author’s neuroses have survived from the Meiji period. Kyōka carried around a bottle of disinfectant at all times and never ate any raw food, including vegetables such as green onions. He even boiled his tofu until it was hard and overcooked, and as a meticulous writer sensitive to the written word, he refused to use the character for fu (to rot) in tofu and replaced it with the character for fu (regime). During one particular cholera breakout, it is said that he feasted only on boiled tofu and beans for one hundred days straight. Kyōka was certainly an extreme case, but by the third decade of the Meiji period (1868–1912), hygienic fear had embedded its roots in Japanese society and was part of people’s everyday life. Japan suffered a major cholera epidemic every other year, beginning in 1877, when soldiers returning from the Satsuma Rebellion (Seinan sensō, January–September 1877) brought the disease to various cities and the countryside.9 Cholera was an epidemic specific to the modern period, and these large outbreaks of epidemic proportions were new to the Meiji era. Over 30,000 people died during each major outbreak, and the cause of the disease was at first unknown. The prevention and eradication of cholera became one of the top priorities for the Meiji regime, which swift ly sent its top scientists to Germany for training in modern hygiene. Cholera was thus fittingly given the name eisei no haha (the mother of hygiene), and it was not until 1886 that the public was informed of its probable cause: the cholera bacillus discovered by Robert Koch (1843–1910) in 1884. Whereas in the Edo period, people blamed shōki (miasma or vaporous exhalation) as the cause of the disease, they now blamed the invisible pathogen, turning to hygiene and

The Invisible Monster

17

sanitation as their saviors. Before we turn to Kōya, let us first establish its sociohistorical background by examining how these hygienic discoveries affected the understanding of the body. Meiji Japan was witnessing a drastic shift in how people envisioned their own bodies. The body was slowly becoming the site of individual discipline and cultivation. In his famous essay “Shintai no nōryoku” (The ability of the body, 1879), renowned Meiji educator Mori Arinori (1847– 89) asserted that in order to cultivate oneself, one had to first train the body, stating that physical exercise was a required measure not only for health but for attaining an educated mind.10 His ideas were further supported by his colleague Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901), who stated in “Shintai o taisetsu subeshi” (One must take care of one’s body, 1883) that “people of today must learn to yearn for a healthy, long life, devote themselves to physical exercise, know how to properly choose their food, and see a doctor when they are afflicted by illness instead of trying to take care of it themselves.”11 The body represented the space where these ideals would be practiced, and numerous textbooks on “home hygiene” (katei eisei) continued to preach to housewives about how to maintain healthy lifestyles, introducing these notions into the modern quotidian sphere.12 By the mid-1880s, it was no longer enough for the modern subject to have an educated mind; one also had to discipline one’s body and be healthy. Hygiene was a national ideology that sought to make its citizens conscious of their own bodies. As Ruth Rogaski has elegantly outlined, the Japanese term eisei was translated from the Chinese characters weisheng by a doctor named Nagayo Sensai (1838–1902) in an endeavor to fi nd a Japanese word that could encapsulate the kind of federal monitoring of health that he discovered in his studies in Europe and America.13 The Bureau of Hygiene (Eiseikyoku) first found its home in the Ministry of Education before moving to the Home Ministry in 1875. And as Sabine Frühstück has shown, hygiene quickly became incorporated into the education system toward the end of the 1890s, as the bureau turned its attention to enforcing its practices in schools, in addition to the military and brothels.14 Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929), who headed the Private Hygienic Association of Great Japan (Dainihon Shiritsu Eiseikai), wrote in Eisei seidoron (On hygienic policies, 1890) that strict hygienic policing was necessary to maintain a healthy nation and live without spreading illnesses among the growing population.15 Borrowing from Michael Bourdaghs: “The rise of new industrial, military, educational, and medical regimes required literal incorporation into human bodies of previously nonexistent physical

18

The Invisible Monster

lifestyles. . . . Within all of these ideological debates and regimens, the status of individual human bodies was repeatedly linked to the well-being of the nation as a whole.”16 Each man, woman, and child of the nation was now responsible for maintaining a healthy kokutai and governing his or her own body in accordance with new hygienic doctrines. Hygiene thus created “new” Japa nese subjects, who learned to police their own anatomies.17 In order to implement its new hygienic policies, the Meiji government turned to pointing out its enemy—what exactly threatened its healthy subjects—and pushed for the populace to not only acquire a brand-new vocabulary to define the different parts of their anatomy but also learn about the inside, the unseen parts, of their anatomies. To illustrate, the health manual Tsūzoku mubyō kenzenhō (Popu lar ways of being disease-free and healthy, 1893) states, “Maintaining one’s health requires the [knowledge] of both the inside and the outside [of the body]: the inside being the functions of the human body, and the outside being clothing, food, and living conditions. . . . Dividing the body and analyzing its parts and its systematic construction will prove to be useful. . . . Humans are all five-limbed (gokakutai) animals, and in order to bring out their natural force to the full extent, they must understand both functions (kikan).”18 Body theorists like Barbara Stafford have often viewed the human body as a representation of the imperceptible, a metaphor of one’s desire to display what is hidden beneath the body’s surface. For Stafford, body metaphors act as visual representations of “the unseen”—ideas one could only conjecture about or not know.19 With the new binary of inside– outside, translating the unseen and the unknown became the regime’s foremost task. The discovery of the bacillus especially serves as an interesting example of this phenomenon, and here is where the discourse began to take a monstrous turn. By the early 1880s, Kitasato Shibasaburō (1852–1931), who studied under Robert Koch in Germany and became the head of the Research Center of Epidemics (Densenbyō Kenkyūjo) in 1892, had already written extensively on the dangers of the pathogen and its ability to invade the body through sources invisible to the naked eye.20 Although Kitasato’s writings were aimed at the educated elite, the Home Ministry translated the idea of the pathogen in simpler terms for the general public: In this world, there are enemies with shapes (katachi aru) and enemies without shapes (katachi naki). They consistently threaten people’s lives and

The Invisible Monster

19

harm people’s health, even stealing their lives once in a while. . . . Wars, floods, droughts, storms, fires, earthquakes are mostly those with shapes. . . . However, shapeless enemies are far more threatening than those with shapes. . . . They are not detected by people’s ears or eyes, and one can know their horror only after they have already done damage. These enemies are cholera and other epidemics. . . . I call them “enemies without shapes” because one’s eyes cannot catch them.21

Diseases came to be narrated with a rhetoric of fear that portrayed them as “enemies” that invaded healthy bodies. Ironically, the discovery of the bacillus—the cause of the epidemics—was far from reassuring, for the enemy was now known to be imperceptible, impossible to detect with one’s own eyes. The pamphlets of the times almost read like science-fiction novels: humans were being invaded by newly arrived invisible foes. Hygienic discourse then translated these invisible foes into more concrete metaphors, focusing on the visual body as an inscribable surface.22 Bodies are not always presented as a direct replica of what one actually sees; often they are captured in an imaginary, speculative manner. As cultural historian Sander Gilman has suggested, body images are often used to reduce “the anxiety about the multiple meanings of the images themselves to a controlled, single interpretation.”23 In other words, body metaphors provide readers with a simplified form of the amorphous, invisible nature of disease, thus quelling their fear of the unknown. They offer a surface on which “unseen” differences (disease, mental illness, and so forth) can be inscribed to make them visible and apparent. A case like that of the cholera monster allows us to see how an abstract, invisible object like bacteria is often translated into a concrete yet “different” body. As literary scholar Naitō Chizuko has argued, Meiji Japan was plagued by the invisibility of disease. The imperceptible pathogen could never be captured, and the borderlines of one’s body thus became threatened by its invisibility, with anatomical borders coming to resemble “ripples in the water” that would disappear once one tried to grasp them.24 In fact, the body became more fluid and less knowable, and the late Meiji period can be understood as a time when people engaged in the impossible attempt to draw stable borders around it. Finding ways to visually demarcate the body’s borders was an important part of this project. Therefore, in the Meiji era, modern hygienic discourse translated the invisible into visible bodily differences and into language more accessible by the populace. One common example was the association of filth with

20

The Invisible Monster

animals. Before the words saikin (bacteria) or wirusu (virus) were established in Japan, pathogens were generally called dōbutsu (animal/insect) after an actual bug was found inside a cholera victim’s stomach.25 Moreover, when Japan suffered large cholera epidemics from 1877 to 1895, amounting to over 600,000 deaths, stray animals were burned as a measure to control epidemic breakouts. Th is fear of animals and their connection to disease came to overlap with attitudes toward the burakumin minority, who were associated with animals because of their occupations as butchers and inugoroshi (literally “dog-killers”) and those in charge of catching and burning unsanitary animals. As Michael Bourdaghs explained in his work on Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), burakumin were “ideologically located somewhere between the categories of animal and human” in Meiji Japan, and their bodies were viewed as a diseased site that attracted the germs of tuberculosis, which was understood to be transmittable from cows to humans.26 Wild beasts have of course long been associated with filth and disease, so it is not surprising that the invisible pathogen came to be seen as a hybrid beast-like monster. One also cannot forget the other group of people traditionally associated with beasts: women. In premodern Japan, female monsters were typically represented as bakemono (things/monsters that transform): animals that shape-shifted into humans and disguised themselves as beautiful seductresses. Sexuality, femininity, and animal metaphors have constantly overlapped in Japanese literary history. One need only look to the famous tale of Dōjōji, in which the jealous heroine transforms into a snake and kills the monk she lusts after, or to the countless setsuwa (short folkloric tales) about female fox spirits who seduce men of power. In the famous Dōjōji picture scroll, the female body was represented as an animal-human hybrid that would eventually turn into an animal, and the later Meiji prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–92) continued to depict these monstrous women as hybrid bodies, their monstrosities hidden within seemingly beautiful bodies. The theme of beautiful temptresses seducing monks also occurred frequently in Buddhist parables. In addition to Kōya, Kōda Rohan’s Skull (Tai dokuro, 1889) tells the story of a monk who encounters a strange female in the mountains and survives her seductions and wickedness.27 In the years surrounding 1900—the date of Kōya’s publication—the discourse of hygiene was in fact witnessing a large shift, in that the target of the Bureau of Hygiene was shifting to the country’s female population. Acute epidemics like cholera were slowly beginning to die out, only to be

The Invisible Monster

21

replaced by chronic epidemics like tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).28 To prevent these epidemics, the focus shifted to the domestic sphere, where wives and mothers became educated on how to keep their homes free of “shapeless enemies.” But it was not only that women became the intellectuals’ target for hygienic education; the female body also became a target of blame for many of these outbreaks. Fukuzawa Yukichi, for example, declared in “Nihon fujin ron” (On Japa nese women, 1884) that the female bodies in Japanese society were weak and diseased, and that it was on these bodies that jinshu kairyō (improvement of race) had to be conducted: Pleasure is like a food for the senses. Japanese women hunger for this food and seek to satisfy themselves by cultivating shunjō (sexuality). . . . They bring about the perils of weakening their body and mind and passing (their weakness) down hereditarily to their children. . . . Although there are some that claim to be healthy, they are diseased. . . . They suffer from hysterias, uterine illnesses, and neuroses. . . . Women all over Japan will suffer from these traumas and pass down this peril to their children and descendants, preventing the development of our race.29

Hysteria and menstruation were often invoked as probable causes behind crimes committed by women, and some intellectuals even declared that female kleptomania was the result of a “shift in mind and body that occurs during menstruation.”30 Mothers were often blamed for not keeping up their hygienic habits and for passing down tuberculosis and other diseases to their children. The government began responding to female sexual threats by disseminating numerous warnings about attractive prostitutes with sexually transmitted diseases. When it came to STDs, Meiji texts blatantly accused female prostitutes, calling them byōma (disease demons) and fuketsunaru fujin (unsanitary ladies) who infected their male victims.31 Sexuality in the Meiji period was an ambiguous, mysterious force within the human body that could be seen as either positive or negative. As folklorist Kawamura Kunimitsu explains, “Sexuality was not only seen as animalistic human nature that was uncontrollable, filthy, or immoral; it was also praised as the source of life and as a force necessary in protecting the [Japanese] race. It was an ambivalent ‘power’ that governed the modern populace’s bodies and minds.”32 However, women were often the ones linked to sexuality’s negative effects, and their cultivation of sexuality was seen as a form of illness that would affect the future generation.

22

The Invisible Monster

The beautiful female body then quickly became seen as the site where the newly discovered “invisible enemies” roamed. To the old monstrous fusion of sexuality, women, and animals, a new factor was added to further evoke fear: disease. The Meiji populace knew that illnesses were no longer something visible (like a hybrid body) but often hidden to the eye. They were aware of the ambiguous nature of disease, one that fused the hygienically tainted with a beautiful appearance. In the arena of literature, too, male authors established this trope of the diseased, beautiful female, describing heroines stricken with tuberculosis as possessing white skin and alluring faces.33 And newspapers published popular serials about the poison women (dokufu) who were beautiful yet malicious, their figures often described as diseased and also compared to beasts.34 These beautiful female bodies were far more threatening than those with visible signs of disease, as they displayed no obvious markers of contamination. Furthermore, these bodies were alluring and seductive, inviting men to touch them and become contaminated themselves. Monsters dwell “at the gates of difference,” and the notion of otherness marked by race, gender, and sexuality acts as a powerful catalyst for the creation of monsters as a cultural discourse.35 Indeed, Meiji-era hygienic discourse was not a simple or rational scientific discourse. When it spread to the populace, this supposedly logical discourse was often tainted with irrational elements. As with the case of the cholera monster, as the fear of the unseen enemy grew, diseased bodies became coded with social or racial difference, and this overlapping of codes became one of the new ways of capturing the unknown as a concrete other against which the healthy Japa nese could defi ne themselves. Invisible disease was thus turned into a physical monster, marked by perceptible bodily and racial differences (although at the same time, it was still a representation of the unknowable). The new bodily metaphors of hybrid monsters captured the Meiji subjects’ anxiety about the invisible foe, representing the desire to depict and control the unseen but also the impossibility of protecting the body from its destabilizing forces. The new rational science of hygiene often borrowed the older language of the supernatural as its linguistic and visual medium. If cholera was the mother of hygiene, hygiene was the mother of many modern monsters. It contributed to the language of the racial, and it stigmatized others and designated them as such in bodily and linguistically discriminating terms. Monstrous bodies provided the surface on which hygienic discourse could inscribe invisible differences (psychological illnesses, hereditary inferiority,

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and so forth) onto a visible exterior. Although the spokesmen of Meiji modernity and Western science employed hygienic discourse to further their aims, they incorporated the older voice of Edo Japan and its folkloric beliefs, using old motifs and iconography to transmit newfound scientific knowledge. Thus, hygienic discourse had a hybrid nature, just like the cholera monster itself. It was advertised as the new method of cure and prevention at the same time that it became fused with older superstitions surrounding the unseen. And it is these two tensions—the dialectic of the invisible and the visible, of the necessity to materialize the imperceptible enemy within, and also the negotiation between this new form of “rational” knowledge and the “irrational” supernatural—that are the focal points in our reading of Kōya.

Enter the Hygienic Monk A student from Tokyo, the narrator in Kōya, encounters a monk named Shūchō on the train to Wakase. They arrive at Tsuruga to spend the night at an inn, and the monk begins to tell the student about a strange incident he experienced in his younger days. This story occupies the majority of the text: On the way to Tsuruga, the monk meets a medicine peddler from Toyama, who later takes a wrong turn in the woods. In order to save him from getting lost, the monk decides to follow him into the forest, where he must go through several ordeals, such as walking through snakes and bloodsucking leeches. He then arrives at a lonely hut in the mountains, where he meets three people: a beautiful woman, her mentally incapacitated husband, and her male servant (referred to as oyaji [old man]). The monk is astounded by the woman’s beauty and almost decides to stay there with her. However, he makes the decision to leave, and on his return voyage, he runs into the male servant, who discloses that the woman is actually a witchlike being who turns men into beast-like bodies merely by her touch, and that the Toyama medicine peddler had already been turned into a horse. Only Shūchō escapes the fate of being turned into an animal when he is bathed by the female figure and is thus able to return to the real world. Revering the monk, the student watches him walk into the distance as the two part ways. Although the story at first appears to be full of fantastic elements, complete with a Circe-like figure, the story contains equally abundant references to modern hygiene, medicine, and epidemic. To begin with, the

24

The Invisible Monster

medicine peddler is introduced specifically as a Toyama merchant who specializes in a medicine called hangontan, one of the most famous household kanpōyaku (Chinese medicine) at the time.36 In the Meiji era, the Toyama peddling business still functioned as an important subsystem for medicine distribution, but it was also well understood that Chinese medicine could not combat any of the epidemics. It was quickly discredited by the Meiji regime, which realized its uselessness against modern epidemics. Although Toyama medicines continued to be used in the countryside and in more remote regions, they were coming to be seen as objects of the past. Along with these Toyama peddlers, hijiri (traveling monks) were also known as medicine merchants, carry ing medications belonging to the Pure Land sect. In fact, the Toyama merchants and hijiri belonged to rival businesses, and even though Shūchō is not described as a medicine peddler per se, he, too, exhibits some specialized knowledge of medicine and disease. Shūchō’s story begins at a tea shop in Echizen, where he encounters the Toyama medicine peddler for the first time. From the outset, the monk is surprisingly knowledgeable about diseases and modern hygienic practices. It is an extremely hot day when he arrives at the tea shop, and the monk thinks about drinking from a nearby river. However, he remembers in that instant: “Horrifying, terrible diseases had spread because of the heat, and the village named Tsuji that I had just passed through was covered in limestone powder.37 The passage mentions crushed limestone (sekkai), which was thrown onto the roads to prevent epidemics and sanitize the houses of cholera victims.38 The monk asks the tea-shop maid if the river in front of them flows downstream from the “epidemic” village, and at this point the peddler enters the scene, speaking in his country-accented, vulgar-sounding tone, “If you’re scared about your life, I’ll give you medicine. That’s what I’m for.” The monk, however, still refuses to drink the water. This may seem like a minor scene, but it gains new significance when read together with texts on hygiene from the third decade of the Meiji era. Shūchō’s behavior toward the river water in fact reflects his modern understanding of sanitized water. The third decade of the era experienced a huge historical change in the way people conceived of water itself.39 With the outbreaks of cholera, people sought to possess hygienically sanitized water for the very first time, and an overall expansion and enhancement of the pipe system was undertaken in Tokyo and other large cities.

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25

Virtually every commentary on public and private hygiene discusses the improvement of water conditions as a key topic. Fukuzawa Yukichi’s “Eiseiron” (On hygiene, 1887) even declares that one should not “drink the water from the sink without first thinking about it.” 40 Shūchō’s paranoid behavior about drinking the water from the river reflects this shift in attitude, and the monk is presented as a surprisingly modernized hijiri. Shūchō’s hygienic gaze extends to human bodies as well, and it is through his perspective that we find descriptions of diseased beings. As much as he aestheticized certain objects, Kyōka was also transfi xed with “filthy things [shūwai na koto] from which one would turn one’s face away” ever since his earliest days in the literary coterie Ken’yūsha (Friends of the Inkstone).41 Kōya is no exception, and the protagonist monk often zooms in on human bodies, many of which are grotesquely depicted. For example, when Shūchō encounters the husband character for the first time, he describes him as follows: “He [the husband] was like a child. . . . His stomach stuck out, smooth and stretched out like a drum. On top of that, his belly button extended outwards, resembling a pumpkin stem. He picked at this strange thing with one hand, his other hand hanging in the air like a ghost. . . . Was he a mute, an idiot? . . . I was shocked. . . . He might attack me by surprise, hold me down, and lick me while twisting his belly button.42 The monk’s paranoid gaze portrays the invalid as both mentally and physically demented, translating invisible differences into visible bodily ones. Kyōka often described lepers or eta/hinin (literally, “great filth/nonhuman”) minorities in discriminatory terms, and this description of the husband fits right alongside them.43 The monk, furthermore, is afraid of being touched and “licked” by the husband, expressing the same kind of hygienic fear that the Meiji Japanese held toward tuberculosis, which was known to spread through sputum.44 As it turns out, the husband is actually ill and suffers from an incurable disease. The woman explains her husband’s condition to the monk: “Neither the doctor nor that water could cure his [the husband’s] disease. He cannot even stand, so no matter what I teach him, he is useless. . . . he gradually forgot how to move his hands or speak.” 45 Consistently referred to as an idiot (baka) by the monk, the husband is treated by both the monk and the woman as a grotesque nuisance. The monk’s hygienic gaze consistently reflects the Meiji-era fear of “enemies without shape,” and the husband’s disfigured and contaminated body cannot hide from the paranoid monk’s eyes.

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Female Body as Invisible Enemy With this hygienic monk as the main character, it is not surprising to discover that the story’s main villain is none other than disease. The longer Shūchō stays in the mountains, the more disease he discovers, sometimes in forms he does not expect. The wooded area is associated with epidemics from the very beginning of the story. Just before Shūchō enters the woods to rescue the Toyama merchant, he receives some information about the place from a farmer passing by. The farmer points to a remnant of a mansion and tells Shūchō that there used to be a village on the mountain. According to the farmer, thirteen years prior (specific year unknown), a flood destroyed the entire village, killing its inhabitants, and the only thing that remained was the ruin of a doctor’s mansion. This information, which is later repeated by the mysterious woman and the male servant, places emphasis on the topic of epidemics. Villages prone to inundations were understood to be more prone to epidemic outbreaks, and as we have already seen in the river scene with Shūchō, the text constantly refers to the strange, disease-carrying quality of the flood and river water.46 The flood is blamed for the death of the villagers (except for the three survivors: the woman, her husband, and the servant); more importantly, however, it is marked as the turning point in the woman’s own transformation from a healer to a disease carrier. Through the servant’s story, the connection between the flood and the woman becomes clearer, as does her association with disease. Her father was the owner of the mansion, a doctor who ran his own hospital in the woods, and she had strange powers from a young age. In the beginning, however, this power was not one that transformed men into animals but one that healed. The woman could not completely cure all her father’s patients, including the husband, but her touch had the effect of easing pain and healing minor diseases: “The lady used to see older patients everyday, asking them: Do your hands hurt? [They would answer] Yes, they do, and when her soft hands touched theirs, she completely cured their rheumatism, including that of a young man named Brother Jisaku. There was someone else whose stomach she rubbed, saying, ‘That looks painful,’ and the man’s water poisoning (mizuatari) was then cured.” 47 When she was younger, her touch was used to cure diseases, and according to the servant, it was only after the flood that her power turned to the bad. What is more, the woman is described as the cause of the flood,

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for “rumor had it that the fact that such a beautiful woman was born in this desolate country side was an omen of change in the land.” 48 Water imagery plays a key role in this story, and there is a magical river that flows near the woman’s hut. As the woman tells Shūchō, this river has a healing effect: “That water works on any disease. . . . Monkeys with bullet wounds, storks with broken legs, various things come to bathe in it.” 49 In fact, the woman bathes Shūchō in the river to cure his leech bites. When she takes off her clothes, Shūchō can only admire what appears to be the most beautiful body he has ever laid his eyes on: “Without my knowing, the woman had taken off her clothing and exposed her entire silk-like body. . . . Compared to when she was dressed, her skin seemed softer, her body fuller. . . . She raised her hand to push down her black hair, and using both hands, wiped beneath her armpits with a hand towel. Her body resembled snow purified by the splashing holy water.”50 The monk is clearly intoxicated by the woman’s beauty and also feels a healing sensation in the river water. Water and woman always go hand in hand in Kyōka’s writings, and it is important that both the river and the flood are associated with the female body. At this point, both the woman and the water are described as “purified” and “holy,” implying that they are clean in terms of the religious and hygienic standards of the monk. If the first half of Kōya is about Shūchō’s sexual attraction to the beautiful woman, the second half in contrast narrates how she becomes a monstrous presence in the monk’s eyes. Toward the end, Shūchō learns from the servant that he was lucky to escape from the woman, who bathes in the “mysterious water that seduces men, from which none can escape with their lives.”51 The river he had bathed in had altered its state after the flood and become something lethal to men. What had once had a positive healing effect had morphed into a dangerous, supernatural, and specifically feminine power, and it is in this mysterious river that the woman turns men into hybrid monsters, whose “faces, legs, and arms are human,” but everything else, animal parts.52 Shūchō quickly turns on the woman after hearing the servant’s tale, running out of the woods without turning back. The narrative thus changes from simply being a story about an intoxicatingly beautiful woman to one about the hidden dangers behind such beauty. As stated earlier, the Meiji public was well aware of these kinds of femme fatales. The female figure in Kōya represents the new trope of the sexually alluring yet diseased female. She is a blend of the traditional animal–female trope and the new diseased female trope. It is not her body

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that turns into an animal but her diseased power that can turn men into hybrid creatures, a feat she accomplishes by seducing men. The servant directly tells the monk that the woman is an irogonomi (desirous/sexual thing), who prefers younger men and turns them into hybrid beasts once she has had intercourse with them. As Saeki Junko brilliantly points out, Meiji intellectuals used the term irogonomi to connote a kind of “barbarism” and “physical desire resembling the copulation of male and female animals.” Described as an outdated notion of lust or eros, the word stood in direct opposition to the more modern, “civilized” notion of ai, which translates as “love.”53 As if to emphasize this “barbaric” sexuality, the woman is often naked in the text, such as in the bathing scene or when she opens her kimono in an attempt to appease a horse (who is later disclosed to be the Toyama peddler). Shūchō confesses to the sexual tension between the two when he says: “I was secretly beginning to breathe harder while she washed my back.”54 Like the prostitutes in Meiji Japan, the woman’s sexuality in Kōya is coded as dangerous. Although Kyōka’s female figures have often been described as “maternal,” the female body here is the opposite. It is dangerous precisely because it is diseased and infertile; it is a dysfunctional body, useless to the state according to Meiji eugenic thought.55 The woman may appear flawless and healthy, but the hygienic monk warns the reader not to be fooled by what you see. In fact, the monk’s escape has often been attributed to his refusal to sleep with the woman, thereby upholding his religious vows. Like the female body that Fukuzawa describes, the female body here may appear to be healthy, but it may actually be impure, like the bodies of STD-ridden prostitutes. Her body is a contaminated vessel whose sexual danger to men can only be proven by the deformed beings that inhabit the forest, and she and her “bad seeds” must remain quarantined in the space of the woods. The woman thus presents an interesting transition from the older, established trope of the monstrous female discussed earlier. A typical premodern story would end with the big secret—the woman’s true identity as an animal—being divulged to both the male protagonist and the reader. Kōya follows this tradition of the “surprise ending” narrative, but here, the big revelation is not that the woman is a beast but that she carries a disease. In other words, her beauty masks not an animalistic origin but an invisible pathogen. Furthermore, it is remarkable that it is not the female body that undergoes a transformation. Whereas the woman’s body remains beautiful

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and seductive, the men she touches are disfigured and hybridized, turning into bakemono of sorts. In this manner, the text cleverly turns the old trope of the monstrous feminine around and applies it to male bodies. The woman here is dangerous, not only because she is diseased but also because she has the potential to turn the gender hierarchy upside down. In fact, after Shūchō discovers the truth about the woman and her beastly powers, the woods suddenly become a horrific place of evil (osoroshii masho), and interestingly enough, the other things that frighten him in the text—contaminated objects and diseased people—are also described as horrific (osoroshii) or chilling (zottosuru).56 The woods transform into a diseased space where the only men present are a patient with an incurable disease, the male servant who is described as “lacking” sexual capabilities, and men who have been transformed into beast-like hybrids. Thus, the woman’s body is a contaminated vessel that poses sexual danger to men. As his story concludes, the monk’s language of hygiene and scientific discrimination actually results in designating both the ugly husband and the beautiful woman as monstrous others, and their bodies are not as contrasted as they were in the beginning. Instead, they are presented as “filthy” beings, as others that challenge the stability and clarity of bodily borders. The woman’s astonishing beauty becomes a marker of disease, as her deceptively “pure” body harbors an invisible foe. The two characters thus come to represent two sides of the same coin: the latter embodying the invisibility and contagion of disease; the former, its grotesquely visible ravages. The monk’s warning is clear: diseases come in all shapes and sizes, and the most dangerous illnesses are those that have no visible markers but deceive men with the allure of visible beauty. By the end, the forest turns into a contaminated, isolated space where diseased beasts run free without a possible treatment—that is, until the monk finally comes up with the cure.

Transmitting the Cure How exactly does the monk manage to quarantine the “bad seeds”? What kind of a cure does he offer to both the Tokyo student and the reader? Focusing on the formalistic elements of the text shows how the narrative itself becomes the cure. First, Kōya is narrated entirely in the first person by the student from Tokyo.57 Shūchō’s and the servant’s words are marked as quotations, so

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that their voices are never separate from the voice of the Tokyo student but are contained within it. The truth behind the female character is narrated to the reader through the Tokyo student, who recalls what he has heard from the monk, who in turn recalls what he was told by the servant (oyaji). In other words, we are listening to a tale passed down by three men: the servant tells the monk, the monk tells the student, and the student tells the reader.58 One scholar has insightfully called this “a narrative of silence,” in which each male speaker says what the one before him does not want to say.59 In other words, the first speaker stops talking once he has given certain information about the woman and allows another to take over the narration, letting the second person reveal the secret or truth to which the first speaker does not have access. This next secret reveals something sinister about the woman and the people in the woods and could be seen as almost derogatory. The monk lets the servant expose the woman’s past, and the student in turn asks the monk to tell the story about the “fi lthy” people in the woods. Thus, the two men remove themselves from the responsibility of actually saying anything important (and discriminatory) themselves, silencing their voice at convenient moments. The narrative thus forms a highly complicit circle of listeners, not just speakers, in which all the information about the woman is completely dependent on the three men’s words. The key point here is that the servant does not hand over the baton to the woman herself. This complicit network of information is what ultimately silences the female figure. Her voice disappears by the end of the narrative. And although she is the one who holds the key, her side of the story is kept from the reader. Like a diseased body, she is an object to be observed, studied, and exposed. And it is within this tightly knit male circle that Shūchō reveals his secret for survival. If one is to escape, one must abide by two rules: first, as already mentioned, a man cannot have any sexual contact with a woman; and second, one must not break a linguistic taboo against storytelling. And this is the one condition that the woman sets for the monk before allowing him to spend the night at her hut: “My worst habit and illness ( yamai) is to hear stories about the capital (miyako). I will try to get the information out of you, even if your lips are sealed. Please don’t tell me anything. . . . Do not speak to me [about it] no matter what.” 60 Unlike the husband, in the beginning the woman has a voice. She clearly sets the rules, as she tells the monk not to speak of Tokyo. Toward the end, the servant informs us that the woman “must have said something to you, but once you do her bidding, your shape changes.” 61 According to

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the servant, in addition to refraining from a physical relationship, there is a linguistic taboo that must not be transgressed if one is to avoid being turned into a hybrid monster. The monk holds to both of these rules: he never breaks his promise to remain silent, and he never succumbs to his lust. Observing both linguistic and physical taboos assures his successful escape from the woods. The moral at the end of the monk’s story is precisely the revelation of this secret. How can we men escape from the diseased monsters in the woods? We must refrain from both oral and sexual intercourse: “narrating stories to women” and “touching female bodies.” The cure comes in the form of prevention or abstinence. A man must resist the urge to partake in either of those forms of intercourse if he does not want to be turned into a hybrid monster and lose both his human appearance and human speech.62 We must also partake in modern hygienic practices just like the sanitary monk, who appears to be the only male immune to the woman’s powers. Every man must thus avoid drinking from dirty rivers and coming into contact with seductive yet diseased bodies, which, as we have learned, may not be obviously visible. The act of narrating and passing down this secret information becomes the goal of the complicit male network. The fact that Shūchō is a traveling monk of the Shingon sect fits in nicely, for the sect is traditionally known to practice a form of esoteric Buddhism—a highly exclusive tradition in which religious teachings are passed down from master to disciple in limited male circles.63 In the text, the knowledge of the monk, accordingly, is passed down to the Tokyo student, who in turn transmits his story to the reader. The basic structure of the narrative follows the pattern of esoteric oral transmission. Modern hygienic discourses often built on older Buddhist beliefs of defilement and saw religious references as a useful narrative device.64 Anthropologist Jennifer Robertson, drawing on Nishida Tomomi’s work on the history of blood, has shown how modern eugenic thought redefined the older relationship between blood and filth in more scientific terms. It is well known that in premodern times, women were seen as defiled because of menstruation and were forbidden from entering most temples; they also fell into their own hell. Incidentally, through various blood imageries (Shūchō must cross over bloody bodies of snakes, is attacked by raining leeches, and has an apocalyptic vision of a bloody world), the text fuses religious and hygienic concepts of “fi lth” as a way to emphasize Shūchō’s point of view. The monk borrows the rhetoric of hygiene to tell

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the reader about the dangers of hybrid monsters in the mountains. Through him, the invisible foe is inscribed with overlapping codes: feminine, sexual, diseased, beast-like, filthy, sinful, and hybrid. Through these codes, the narrative renders the invisible threat of contagion and contamination visible and material. Shūchō, a Shingon monk, thus serves as the perfect spokesman for modern hygiene. He is equipped with both old and new understandings of disease and fi lth, and as a traveling monk, he can also disseminate privileged information about how to combat diseased monsters. In Meiji literary criticism, Kōya was read as a piece of travel writing (kikōbun), with the hijiri as its protagonist.65 The first words of the text, in fact, refer to a map—“the map of General Staff Headquarters (Sanbō Honbu),” the most famous military map of its time. Carefully drawn by the Land Survey unit, these were the maps used by the Japanese military for their colonial conquests in Asia. As in these maps, place names are carefully established throughout the text—except for the unmarked area of the woods, with its nameless inhabitants. The priest’s narrative thus serves as a vehicle for passing on useful information about an unknown, dangerous space to an agent of progress. It is by now well established that the acts of writing and narrating in travel literature are inseparable from power discourse.66 Literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt, exploring colonial travelogues, has observed how the discoveries of a traveler—whether different species of humans, savages, or colonial land—have no power to validate themselves. It is only when the traveler can return to his or her homeland, write them down on paper, and disseminate the information as objective knowledge that these discoveries become validated as “truths”—that is, as privileged information. In Kōya, travel becomes a key factor in disseminating and authenticating the events witnessed by the male characters. A traveler (the monk) tells his story to another traveler (the student), and the latter writes down the whole thing to pass down to the reader. Moreover, body boundaries—particularly women’s sexuality—have always played an important role in marking geographical borders in travel writing.67 Women’s sexuality, depicted as diseased and contaminated, was often cordoned off as the central transmitter of cultural contagion. “Dangerous” places become marked as feminine and anachronistic, thereby projecting femininity onto a prehistoric, atavistic, and irrational space that does not belong to modernity. In many ways, the silencing narrative

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of Kōya echoes this construction of coded space, as is evident from the countless scholarly readings of the feminized space as “premodern” or “primordial.” The male voices in Kōya mark the female figure as a threat to the modern space represented by the General Staff Headquarters map. The diseased female body thus comes to stand for the entire geographical space of the woods, which must remain quarantined. Hygienic knowledge validates the claims of the male travelers as scientifically established truths, and its rhetoric establishes borderlines, around both the ambiguous female body and the contaminated topography she represents. The shapeless, invisible foe is conquered by the objective rhetoric of travel and hygiene, and the story ends as a cautionary tale told by men to warn the modern populace about the dangerous, mysterious woman in the mountains. The narrative itself, then, is the cure for the monstrous disease. The three men’s stories function like a viral rumor that must be passed on to their readers in order to erase the female body from the map of Meiji Japan. As Shūchō reveals to the reader in the beginning, the woods are not located anywhere on his map, and he never discloses their exact location. The reader must listen to the words of these scientific travelers and pass down their wisdom to those around them. Although the text begins with three medicinal forces (the Chinese medicine of the Toyama peddler, the mysterious healing power of the woman, and the monk’s modern hygiene), by the end of the tale, the victor is clear. The Toyama medicine peddler is turned into a horse and sold off by the woman; the woman herself disappears from the narrative, her death left completely ambiguous. Only the holy monk with his hygienic knowledge is able to walk through the boundaries guarded by leeches and snakes, encounter the supernatural powers of the mysterious woman, and return to the modern space marked by the map of General Staff Headquarters that he always carries with him. He escapes not only because he successfully guards the two taboos of sexual and oral intercourses but also because he is the epitome of the modern healthy body, one that is immune to illness. His hygienic wisdom for combating the shapeless enemy is the moral of the story. As the Tokyo student reverently sees the monk off at the end of the tale, so, too, must we the readers learn from his ordeal and pass down his lesson to the next in line: the new male subjects of the hygienic nation awaiting their vaccination.

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The Uncanny Monk A story that builds on an older trope, Kōya adds a modern twist. The monstrous—the woman and her hybrid monsters—are marked as dangerous and contaminated by the monk. Their bodies are described as uncanny, in the sense that they are seemingly innocuous, “normal” bodies that may actually be “abnormal.” The monk teaches the student and the reader how to see through the seemingly “normal” façade and locate the abnormality that is hidden from sight. Through their eyes, the female figure becomes tied to the invisible pathogen. She becomes a modern monster, a body informed by the new discourse of hygiene. However, the story does not necessarily end by siding with the monk’s view. That is, it does not simply mark the woman as the only abnormal presence in the text. It ends with an uncertainty, one that deals with another possible uncanny body in the text: the monk. Are the two characters—the monk and the woman—really all that different? Can we simply claim that one is abnormal, the other normal? Although scholars have generally focused on the figure of the woman as the “supernatural” character, the monk is just as strange and extraordinary. If one considers his unexplainable immunity to everything, he appears to possess a special power invisible to the eye, just like the woman. Even though he tells everyone else not to conduct “oral” (speak) or “sexual” (touch) intercourse, he himself is bathed naked and touched by the woman in the bathing scene. He also has oral communications with her, except for when he is asked not to speak about the city. Yet the monk mysteriously survives his encounter with her to tell his tale, and there is never a single explanation of why he is so special. Can he also not be read as occupying a new body that is not quite normal or human? If there is one character in the story that possesses a bizarre power, it is the monk himself. Emily Martin’s theorization of the flexible body informs my reading here.68 Martin examines the discourse of the body and of hygiene from the 1940s to contemporary America, discussing the shift in focus from the exterior of the body in the 1940s and 1950s to the interior of the body and the immune system beginning around the 1970s. She locates the rise of what she calls “flexible specialization” in medical discourse, which is intertwined with the late capitalist idea of flexibility—that producers must learn to cater to customers’ every random request and be extremely adaptable—showing the gradual shift to this ideal over time. What is

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especially applicable here is her analysis of how the human body, when it pertains to the functions of the immune system, is constantly narrated in military metaphors. Martin states that in describing the body as a “scene of total war between ruthless invisible enemies and determined defenders,” medical discourse displays “a masculinist bias to views that divide the world into sharply opposed, hostile categories, such that the options are to conquer, be conquered, or magnanimously tolerate the other.”69 She points out that even the different types of cells are gendered, and the immune system T cells are the “male potency, the virile heroes, the commander in chief.”70 That is, the human body is a geographical territory constantly under attack and must be defended. Th is rhetoric of war lies beneath the seemingly fantastic façade of Kōya. As stated earlier, the story relies on geographical metaphors. The female geography (the diseased forest) is conquered by the alliance of the male characters in the end. However, there is also a masculinized geography, clearly represented by the first words on the page: “the map of sanbō honbu,” the military map. The empire and its militaristic face rise to the surface from the very beginning. The monk—the commander in chief— can be read as leading a campaign to not only attack the enemy but also defend the nation, which is slowly becoming poisoned by the invisible foe (recall the contaminated-river scene in which Shūchō refuses to drink the water). Like a military spy, he is on a mission to locate the enemy and destroy her. It is worth noting, however, that his geography is open only to an exclusive list of healthy male occupants. Although he seeks the help of the other male characters, it is not just any man who can come into and inhabit this sanitized space. The oyaji (servant) and the “idiot” (baka) husband are left behind in the mountains. The medicine peddler also falls victim to the foe during the “war.” What connects all of these men is the fact that they are seen as sexually degenerate or sexually incapable beings. The Toyama medicine peddler, constantly described as “vulgar,” is called a pervert (sukebei). The husband is of course described as not even being mentally capable of the sexual act, and the oyaji is described as “lacking a certain physical tool,” implying that he is impotent.71 There is no place in the empire for these “abnormal” men. The empire upholds only the healthy and the normal. Hence, the sole fellow male that the monk actually accepts into his exclusive clique is the Tokyo student. What is ironic, however, is that the monk himself is far from normal. He is the ultimate flexible body, which can fight off any foe—even before

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he knows anything about the enemy. His is a hygienically enhanced body, one that will help him withstand any situation, be it being showered by leeches or coming into contact with diseases. He exhibits an incredible power to survive, and it is this super-immune power that makes him stand out from the other characters. In fact, both the woman and the monk possess similar powers. Recall that the woman’s power is also that of healing and extending life. Her power only goes awry after the flood that attacks her land. This supernatural potential—the power to fight disease and prolong life—closely aligns the monk and the woman in the story. They both possess the power to extend life, except the woman’s is that of healing or attacking the disease, and the monk’s is that of defending from disease. The story centers on how healing is replaced by defending from contagion, how immunity becomes privileged over the older forms of cure. This rhetoric of defense is not surprising, since hygiene was constantly being marketed as a kind of everyday prevention. As the historical background in this chapter clarifies, one was taught to “take care of one’s body” on a daily basis. In the Meiji period, in women’s journals like Nyokan, authors explained how housewives could keep their houses sanitary. The August 1891 issue, for example, contains a section called “Kanai eisei chogen” (Notes on household hygiene), in which housewives are told to pay special attention to their family’s clothing and food.72 Textbooks and manuals for maids (kahi, jochū) from the Meiji period emphasized how to properly clean the house and especially how to keep the kitchen area sanitized.73 Hygiene was to be a quotidian, defensive act that would be deeply embedded into the unconscious of every Japanese citizen. The story thus concerns the battle of one form of medicinal power over two others. The monk not only gets rid of Chinese medicine (the peddler) but also dismisses the healing power of the mysterious woman. Imbued with the new, modern power of immunity and hygienic practice, the monk becomes the new fantastic body that the empire upholds. He promises the power to survive any disease and live a healthier, longer life, thereby marking the new nation that he represents as the source of such a power. Postcolonialist scholar Pheng Cheah has astutely remarked on the ghostly nature of the nation: The metaphor that has replaced the living organism as the most apposite figure for freedom today is that of the ghost. It is epitomized by the post-

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colonial nation, whose haunted life or susceptibility to a kind of death that cannot be unequivocally delimited and transcended suggests the need to reconceptualize freedom’s relation to finitude.74

By “freedom,” Cheah means the idea or illusion of being able to transcend teleological time.75 And for Cheah, it is the postcolonial nation that gives its citizens this illusion of “freedom.” Time is never linear or teleological, but in order to exist and to live, we imagine it to be. In order to maintain this illusion, we imagine a higher being, a being that can transcend teleological time and thus give it to us. A specter is a body that attributes and generates this temporality, but in the postmodern world, it is no longer God or a nonhuman deity. It is a techne—a program, an artificial body. For Cheah, this body, the specter, is the nation, for the postmodern nation that gives us the illusion of the fi nitude of time and “freedom” and feigns to be the terminus of global capital.76 The modern Japanese empire obviously differs from the postcolonial nation that Cheah envisions, but the idea of the nation as the source of transcendent time is still relevant here. The monk is a spectral presence like the nation Cheah captures, in the sense that he offers transcendental time to the new citizens of modern Japan. Just like the body of the Meiji emperor, who was deemed a deity-like, immortal, and sacred body, the monk is marked by an unexplainable power to conquer any disease and survive. It is precisely this power that makes him “holy” and aligns him with the Meiji Empire, and to add, he is the ghostly being who can give this gift of longer life to the chosen ones. He participates in the selective process of determining who deserves to receive this new power, and he passes down the tale, the secret knowledge of life, to only those deemed worthy (the Tokyo student). Hence, the tale ends, not as a story about an “abnormal” supernatural power being defeated by a “normal” citizen, but as one about two uncanny beings who possess similar powers of overcoming disease. Th is alignment adds another layer of uncertainty to the text and posits that modern hygienic knowledge may be just as strange as its older, “supernatural” counterparts. Kōya leaves the reader with this question in mind, as it sends the monk off into the distance, and he disappears “as if he climbed up onto the clouds.”77

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Conclusion: Hygienic Monsters I began this chapter with a monster, and I want to close with one. In the 1889 issue of Kuni no motoi (Basis of the nation), a strange story called Atarashiki zōbutsusha (New creator) was serialized.78 One illustration depicts a large body that towers over a shorter man. The body is grotesquely drawn, its muscular structures uneven and exaggerated (fig. 1.2). The written text describes him as a “large man”: The large man (ōotoko) that was completed had fairly good proportions of arms and legs. His face was supposed to have been created to be beautiful, but after his breath had been given, it had changed. He had flowing, shiny hair and pearl-like white teeth. But his muscles and veins protruded excessively, and his yellow skin barely covered them. His face was frightening, but his two eyes were perfectly made. . . . His ugliness was indescribable.79

This scene describes the birth of Frankenstein’s monster. New Creator was Japan’s fi rst literary adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, later edition 1831).80 As is typical with Meiji-period translations, virtually nothing is known about the translator, Master of Gourd Hut (Hisago no Yado no Shujin). Shelley’s name is also never mentioned, and the Japanese reader was probably not aware of the original British author. The journal Kuni no motoi was edited by notable scholars from the Meiji period, such as politician and scholar of Western science and philosophy Baron Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916), horticulturalist Yatabe Ryōkichi (1851–99), and doctor of medicine at Tokyo University Miyake Hiizu (1848–1938). In the opening issue of the journal, Katō clearly establishes the readership of the journal and states his goal: “Tokyo School for Girls (kōtō jogakkō), in accordance with the social condition of today’s Japan, who is moving forward towards enlightened civilization (kaimei), aims to create and educate good wives and good mothers. How commendable their goal is.”81 The journal, in other words, was published to introduce “Western” science to a new generation of Japanese women: the schoolgirls at women’s schools who would eventually become the “civilized” mothers of the modern nation.82 New Creator was published along with articles like “The Direction of Women’s Education,” “Stories on Illness and Healthy Lifestyle,” and “On Improving Your Body Type.” The loose translation of Shelley’s monster was a didactic text that aimed to educate female readers

Figure 1.2 The monster in Atarashiki zōbutsusha (New creator), illustrated by Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915), Kuni no motoi (1889). Courtesy of National Diet Library, Tokyo.

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about how to improve their mental capabilities and bodily health in order to attain an “enlightened civilization.” The Meiji era created a minor genre called “hygiene tales” (eisei shōsetsu), used to educate Japan’s citizens about hygiene. Often times, as in the case of New Creator, these tales revolved around the figure of the monster. As elucidated in this chapter, Kōya is not an unrealistic fantasy set in a nonmodern world. Far from it, it may be placed alongside these hygiene tales, and the face of a modern nation very clearly peeks out from the pages of the texts. The representatives of the modern nation—the Tokyo student, the train, and the military map—quarantine and suppress the unhygienic monster. Although traditionally read as a premodern body, the female figure here is a product of hygienic modernity. The story reveals a strong continuity from premodern literature, borrowing its tropes of the monstrous feminine and the language of the supernatural, but I cannot emphasize enough that the woman here is a modern other, not some remnant of a premodern or ahistorical world. Her body is carefully coded by the male characters in the language of new science, which conveniently appropriates the older language of disease. This fantastic fiction thus cannot be understood without considering the history of disease and national hygiene that shaped its imagination. Japanese modernity often presents the past and the supernatural as being very much part of the present, thus constantly undoing the binary of the old and the new, the premodern and the modern. The supernatural language in Kōya, too, collapses these binaries, as it captures the transitional moment when Japan was still grappling with the ideas of its own nationhood and the modern self. It disrupts the carefully constructed notion of a linear historical time of Meiji modernity, showing that the seemingly rational face of science can be an ally of the irrational supernatural, and how these two seemingly opposed forces learned to cohabit the modern space of Meiji. Moreover, this text can be read as being complicit in promoting the national ideology that pushed for the creation of the new, healthy Japanese citizenry, whose body was inseparable from the national body politic. As discussed earlier in the chapter, Meiji hygienists aimed to disseminate the knowledge about the invisible pathogen to the new citizenry. The entire story of Kōya is precisely about this spreading of hygienic knowledge. Here, in a strangely Freudian manner, the cure is storytelling, a kind of talk therapy. The hygienic monk, in a sense, is a miraculous survivor of an unnamed epidemic, and his story lives on through the body of the

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Tokyo student, who will presumably teach the rest of the nation how to live a disease-free life. In his telling, the invisible monster—the pathogen— becomes the villain of the tale, and modern hygiene, its hero. The monk acts as a translator, deciphering the monstrous motifs and classical tropes for the younger Tokyo student. There are two uncanny bodies in this text: the woman and the monk. On the one hand, the beautiful yet contaminated body of the mysterious woman is clearly marked as monstrous. It is the vessel of the invisible pathogen, and through the three male narrators, her body becomes imagined as a dangerous geography. She is presented as someone with a diseased, abnormal body who pretended to be someone with a healthy, normal body. In the end, though, she fails to pass as a “normal” Japanese citizen, and her secret is exposed. The monk, though, may be the true modern monster here. His is a newly imagined body, enhanced by modern science. He, like the mysterious woman, possesses an invisible power: immunity. The story never discloses exactly why he was not turned into a hybrid beast, even when the woman touched him in the bathing scene. It is this miraculous immunity from disease that makes him holy (sei) like the empire, or the emperor. His enhanced body exhibits a kind of potential for extended life. Although he appears to be a figure from the past—an itinerant Shingon priest— beneath his cloak lies a strange, unexplainable power. His body, like the woman’s, undermines the binary of the normal and the abnormal, bringing into question whether such a distinction can exist in the first place. Chapters 2 and 3 continue to trace the image of the nation that underlies fantastic fiction and examine the uncanny as a kind of mimicry and imitation. However, instead of the abnormal pretending to be normal, the theme becomes more specific. In colonial Japan, with innovations in racial hygiene and eugenics, the main mimicry became that of the nonJapanese race pretending to be Japanese.

Chapter Two

Colonial Doubles in Edogawa Ranpo’s “Twins”

he 1920s saw a boom in literature around the theme of reproduced bodies—the artificial, the biological, and the psychological. Whether automata, twins, or doppelgängers, images of body doubling and copying could be found at just about every turn in Taishō period (1912–26) and early Shōwa literature. Kawamoto Saburō, writing on the dominance of this theme, aptly captured this period as an era of phantasm (gen’ei), in which fantastic fiction (gensō bungaku) became dominant as a result of the loss of the aura, the original referent, in the rapidly changing cityscape of Tokyo.1 Again and again Taishō writers depicted the modern cityscape as a ghostly space, expressing nostalgic sentiments for places and objects that had disappeared by the period. Literature from this period engaged with the figure of the double and what Kawamoto calls “split selves” as expressions of this loss of identity. Th is chapter, together with chapter  3, examines two examples of literary doubles—twins and doppelgängers, respectively—to shed light on their historical significations. This chapter focuses on Edogawa Ranpo and his popular detective story “Sōseiji” (Twins, 1924), published in the journal Shin seinen (New youth) right after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. The story is centered on an evil twin who plots to take over his twin brother’s life. It is a dark story of murder and perverse identities, subjects that often characterize Ranpo’s dark detective fiction. Shin seinen was the foremost journal of tantei shōsetsu (detective fiction), a literary genre that cultural historian Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (1892–1931) identified as being integral to Japanese modernism. The majority of Japa nese detective fiction belonged to a category Hirabayashi

T

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called henkaku tantei shōsetsu (irregular detective fiction), so called because its approaches differed from the more objective and rational methods of honkaku tantei shōsetsu (regular detective fiction).2 Because of its frequent scientific themes, this category of “unhealthy detective fiction” ( fukenzen na tantei shōsetsu) is now treated as the forerunner of contemporary Japanese science fiction.3 As Sari Kawana has clarified, science became a popu lar theme in detective fiction following Albert Einstein’s famous visit in 1922. Shin seinen writers began to participate in the larger debate on the role of science in society, the majority focusing on its darker aspect: scientific experiments gone wrong and out of control.4 Japanese detective fiction often exhibited “the problem of popular ignorance about science and the danger of scientific advancement unchecked by ethics.”5 Ranpo is no exception to this phenomenon, and he is squarely placed in the “irregular detective fiction” lineage. Although Shin seinen did not originally begin as a journal purely for detective fiction, by the mid-1920s, under the editorship of Yokomizo Seishi, it had become the representative journal of the genre. Furthermore, the journal reflected the Japa nese modanizumu (Japa nese modernism) movement and its predominant aesthetic of ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense): “the prewar, bourgeois cultural phenomenon that devoted itself to explorations of the deviant, the bizarre, and the ridiculous.” 6 According to Miriam Silverberg, ero guro nansensu was a sentiment inseparable from being modan (modern), a concept similar to “modernization” but also different, in that modan points to a kind of “open-endedness” and “dynamism of capitalism” (that is, consumerist culture) and is not restricted by national boundaries.7 Modanizumu tried to capture the new consumerist lifestyle and the effect of the rapidly changing cityscape of post-earthquake Tokyo during the two decades of the modan years—from the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923 to Pearl Harbor in 1941. This era was represented by the emergence of department stores and the proliferation of cafés and bars, as well as new technologies like radio broadcasting and the subway system. The flapperlike moga (modan gāru, “modern girl”) and her male counterpart mobo (modan bōi, “modern boy”) came to epitomize the eroticism, grotesqueness, and absurdities of this modernity by strolling down the avenues of the Ginza district.8 Ero guro nansensu was an aesthetic movement that embraced the consumerist lifestyle of modanizumu and was mainly directed toward the male audience of the new middle class.9 Artists and writers of ero guro nansensu attempted to capture the speed and fragmentations of

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the self in the new cityscape through pastiches and montages, in which opposing images or texts were juxtaposed and woven together into one tableau.10 The combination of the three words into one phrase—erotic grotesque nonsense—suitably represents a kind of montage itself. Silverberg astutely politicizes the ero guro nansensu aesthetic as follows: ero stands for the sexual promiscuity of the female body, but also expressiveness and affirmation of social intimacy; guro represents the malformed and obscenely criminal, but also social inequities and economic hardships; and nansensu, though associated with slapstick, refers to the “political, ironic humor that took on such themes as the transformations wrought by a modernity dominated by Euro-American mores.”11 For twin literature, the most applicable term is probably guro, as these texts consistently depict twins as deviant criminals. Silverberg later expands on guro, going beyond the traditional understanding of it as just being “monstrous” or “abnormal.” She redefines it as being tied to a voice of protest by the marginalized, as “protests by those imagined as voiceless, far from able to give voice to a social critique,” thereby illuminating the movement’s potential for subverting dominant ideologies of modern Japan by giving a voice to the suppressed.12 For literary scholar Mark Driscoll, this social element of the grotesque was a politically charged expression as well, one tied to “colonial pillage and capitalist profiteering.”13 It was an aesthetic that exposed the actuality (the grotesqueness) of labor and the brutality of capitalist and imperialist power. Ero guro nansensu literature was a useful tool for unmasking the darker side of the modern nation, and Ranpo is known as an author who embraced this aesthetic in his works, which often revolve around overtly sexualized femme fatales (ero) and an array of deformed, “abnormal” criminals (guro). The story “Twins” has received much critical attention in recent English scholarship. As Yoshikuni Igarashi has shown, the story was based on an actual event in 1917, in which the fingerprints found at the crime scene turned out to be a negative image of the originals.14 The evil twin in the story uses this method of “faking” the fi ngerprints to cover up one of his murders. Yoshikuni analyzes the figure of the twin as a body that undermines ocularcentrism—the privileging of vision as the sense of rationality. He describes the post-1923, newly rebuilt Tokyo landscape as offering new sensory experiences, informed by such technologies as film, electricity, and railroads. Applying Lacan’s idea of the “fragmented bodyimage,” he reads the elder twin’s body as a reflection of the “ego” that the younger twin yearns to attain in order to become a complete subject. His

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split body functions as a critique of discourse that simply equates modernity to the West (vision/rational). Baryon Posadas has likewise linked the figure of the twin to visuality. Following in the footsteps of such Japanese scholars as Matsuyama Iwao and Kawamoto Saburō, Posadas links the rise of doubles in Japanese literature to the emergence of cinema.15 He reads the figure of the younger twin as a site of “compulsion to repeat the same actions and events,” but he carefully veers away from the Freudian model of repression to suggest that there is no underlying truth in the twin’s confessional narrative that must be uncovered. Rather, it is a performative, “discursive production.”16 Thus, the story of “Twins” becomes a metaphor for the repetitive construction of the text itself, ultimately leading to Tsukamoto Shin’ya’s adaptation of the story in his 1999 fi lm Gemini. All of these scholars point to the rise of new technologies and media as a way to ground the story in its historical background, a focus that certainly deserves attention. I explore this connection further in chapters 3 and 4, but here I want to offer another possible connection to a force that was reaching its height in late Taishō and early Shōwa Japan: colonialism. Most scholarship on Ranpo focuses on the relationship between the imaginaries of the West and Japan in his works. This is of course not surprising, since Ranpo famously took his pen name from Edgar Allan Poe and wrote often about the image of “Westernized Japan” in his works. Mark Silver has gone so far as to call this dominant theme a kind of “anxieties of influence,” reading Ranpo’s grotesque characters as reflections of the author’s anxiety about the “mutation of Japanese cultural identity,” which is combined with a longing and admiration for the exotic West.17 Silver draws out “the original versus the copy” motif in Ranpo’s works and sheds light on the dominant place of the West in Japanese detective fiction. Satoru Saitō also elucidates how Ranpo switched to unhealthy detective fiction and became the forerunner of ero guro nansensu to criticize the analytical nature of Western detective fiction. Switching from the “healthy” (more traditional, “rational” detective fiction like Sherlock Holmes) to the “unhealthy” allowed him to undermine both the causal, linear relationships prevalent in Western detective fiction and techniques like framing, in which the initial story is always overshadowed.18 Saitō intriguingly shows how Ranpo’s famed detective Akechi Kogorō epitomizes a new mode of detection that is unlike the rationalistic “search for truth” model of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle. He shows that Ranpo’s new model was based in psychoanalysis, in which the detective relies on

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psychological evidence over physical evidence. In Ranpo’s stories, however, this search overlaps with the search for the true “Japanese self,” which always fails because the modern nation depicted is one that can never escape from the dominance of the West.19 Thus, Ranpo’s stories should be read not as being directly influenced by European and American detective stories but as deriving from a very original tactic that reveals its ambiguous relationship with the West. My reading adds another presence to this oft-cited relationship in modern Japan: that of the colony. In this sense, I am in alignment with Sari Kawana, who examines the connection between Japanese modernity and the genre by taking into consideration the historical event of war and the space of the colony as “an uncanny space that inspired fear and curiosity.”20 Although Kawana does not write directly about Ranpo, her study of wartime Japanese detective fiction is informative here, for it reveals the multiple stances of these writers toward nationalism, fascism, and colonialism.21 There is a need to put the triangular structure of Japa nese colonialism, consisting of the West, Japan, and Asian colonies, back into the mix. As Mark Driscoll points out, scholarship on Ranpo thus far has veered away from analyzing his works as anything political in nature.22 This is mainly due to the fact that Ranpo himself constantly described his prewar political stance as “nihilist,” and he has never commented directly on any political incidents. However, Ranpo’s father actually lived in colonial Korea for two years, and Ranpo spent two months there in 1911.23 Furthermore, as Driscoll writes following his interview with Ranpo’s son, Hirai Ryūtarō, “His father [Ranpo] held mainly socialist positions in the 1920s, although those wavered significantly in the mid-1930s,” and in many of his works of detective fiction, the detective Akechi Kogorō travels from imperial Japan to Asian colonies.24 Th is approach to reading Ranpo is highly informative and opens up a new line of inquiry about the relationship between Japanese modernity and detective fiction, one that puts the colony back into the equation. My reading aims primarily to ground Ranpo’s story in the history of eugenics (studies on twins) and draw out the less visible, less obvious colonial existence that underlies “Twins.” Therefore, I begin with how the rhetoric of “sameness” was becoming established in the eugenics discourse and heredity studies of 1920s Japan. Of course, twins existed throughout Japa nese history and have played major roles in premodern literature as well, but in the 1920s, a new understanding of twins arose, based on newly imported theories on heredity and eugenics. Eugenicists conducted

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studies on twins throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and twins became the new scientific wonder for understanding the power of heredity. They became the center of the nature–nurture debate, in which scientists argued whether one’s surroundings and social environment governed one’s characteristics, or whether heredity was the ultimate power that determined a person’s behavior. I will first outline the history and the reception of twins in modern Japan to clarify the old and new myths surrounding twinship. I will then elucidate how twin bodies became marked with both a fear of and desire for sameness, which can only be understood through a historical analysis of colonial identities on domestic soil, finally turning to how this rhetoric of sameness becomes articulated in “Twins.” Together with chapter 3, this chapter explores the colonial uncanny—wherein the colonized mimics the Japa nese to the point that the two identities become indistinguishable. As we shall see, the phantasm that Kawamoto locates in this era cannot be separated from the specter of the colonized that haunts the literary landscape of modern Japan.

Modern Myths of Monstrous Twins The history of twins in Japan is a dark one. From ancient times, twins were viewed as inauspicious presences. Multiple births were treated as misbirths, as unnatural phenomena that should only happen to animals. For this reason, twins were often called chikushōbara (beastly births), for they were seen as reincarnations of beasts instead of proper human beings. Accordingly, literature of the Heian (794–1185) and Kamakura (1192–1333) periods describes twins as asamashii mono (shameful things). In order to avoid this “calamity,” women avoided eating split daikon roots or any deformed food in which two things were stuck together. One scholar notes that the traditional dislike for twins may be allied to similar biases concerning persons of the same age, and that in premodern Japan, multiple births also resulted in inconvenient, financial burdens.25 Not much scholarship exists on twins in literature, but Hillel Schwartz’s scholarship stands out as an exception. Schwartz describes twins in European culture as “vanishing twins,” for at the turn of the twentieth century, midwives and psychologists believed that every womb carried two children, and that the stronger killed and ate the other, coming out alone.26 In other words, every human being was thought to have originated from a twin pair, yet one of them had to vanish for the other to

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exist. He explores various reasons for why twins were detested in Western history, citing René Girard, who proposed that twins “threaten the social order through their very existence, because their shared position within the family blurs the distinctions on which peace and order depend. This erasure of difference inevitably gives rise to sacrificial violence.”27 Indeed, in Japan, twin vanishing took an extremely violent, morbid turn, for twins were literally killed and discarded by their parents or by midwives right after birth. In Nihon sanka sōsho (Collected essays of Japanese obstetrics, 1895), which contains a collection of key medical texts from the late Edo period and early Meiji era, one can find chilling descriptions of how people murdered various twins—especially Siamese twins, which were described as a form of kai’i (supernatural).28 In most cases, the father would order the midwife to suffocate the twins or float them down the river; but in other cases, the parents themselves would strangle their own newborns. Even in the Shōwa era, the act of twin murders continued. The newspaper Yomiuri shinbun alone lists numerous incidents in which either parents killed their twin children or twins were dumped in boxes in Tokyo.29 In Japan, not just one but both twins often vanished. The persistence of this inauspicious belief surrounding twins manifests in Japan’s imperial history itself. Kawahara Toshiaki, a journalist who specializes in the history of the imperial family, has revealed that when a set of twins was born to the Taishō emperor (Yoshihito), the girl, Itoko, was sent away to the nunnery at the young age of five. Among all the negative superstitions surrounding twins, the worst was that which was associated with male–female twins.30 Male–female twins were referred to as meotogo, reincarnations of lovers who killed themselves in their former lives, and thus the younger sister of the Shōwa emperor came to be exiled from the imperial family. The Taishō emperor himself nearly did not become an emperor because of a similar occurrence. Although not twins, two sons were born to the Meiji emperor on the same day to two consorts. Since in Japan, the one born later is seen as the older sibling, Yoshihito was chosen to become the crown prince, and the other son was sent away to a temple to become a monk.31 Victims of the old beliefs continued to be produced in imperial Japan. Eugenicists and scientists aimed to be the myth busters of these older misconceptions. From as early as the Meiji era, doctors claimed that twin births were actually “incomparably auspicious,” and Taniguchi Toratoshi (1902–63)—professor of anatomy at Keio University and one of the leading eugenicists in twin studies—warned the populace about their

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misconceptions about twins, lamenting that “if many babies are sacrificed because of this superstition, it would be a tragic occurrence for human society.”32 Many other eugenicist writings support Taniguchi’s stance, describing the suffocation of twins as a brutal act unfit for modern society. These scholars admonished the populace about their superstitions and attempted to undo the myth by explaining the science behind twin births. Ironically, however, these eugenicists did not simply undo the old myths but wove new modern myths about the uniqueness or “abnormality” of twins. Eugenics, in fact, made twins more different than ever before by turning them into the ultimate object for heredity studies. As the founder of twin studies, Francis Galton, claimed in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), twins occupied a special place for him because “their history affords means of distinguishing between the effects of tendencies received at birth, and those that were imposed by the special circumstances of their after lives.”33 In other words, Galton endeavored to discover to what extent nature (heredity, blood) and nurture (living conditions, diseases, education) affected an individual’s personality and upbringing. Galton studied two cases: one in which the twins exhibited similar characteristics as children but then diverged in adulthood, and one in which the twins were fairly opposite in personality when young but became similar later on. He even went so far as to say that one twin tends to be more powerful than the other. But at the same time, he argued against popular fictions that claimed that differences in upbringing and nurturing could turn any pair of twins into opposing characters. For him, these differences in the twins’ social behavior resulted from their original hereditary mappings. Nature controlled the majority of the twins’ characteristics, and nurturers could at best help shape these inherent personalities. For him, twins were the “proof positive of the perdurability of human Nature,” and he concluded that “Nature is far stronger than Nurture.”34 Galton also captures the uncanny quality of twins—that their similarity blurs the line between their two identities to the point at which one almost becomes translated into the other, and vice versa. He repeatedly describes twins as being almost interchangeable. Saying that twins are fundamentally similar and connected, Galton remarked, “It must be remembered that the conditions which govern extreme likeness between twins are not the same as those between ordinary brothers and sisters.”35 In his study, there is a curious quote by a mother on the interchangeable

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likeness of her sons: “ ‘There seemed to be a sort of interchangeable likeness in expression, that often gave to each the effect of being more like his brother than himself.’ ”36 In a Baudrillardesque manner, the copy, or the other twin, is more authentic than the actual twin, his brother, for he can mimic and reproduce his brother’s features and expressions better than his own.37 Galton called this interchangeability of appearances “close similarity,” and in the 1920s, Japa nese studies tended to focus on this strong resemblance between twins. An article in Shinri kenkyū claimed that even if twins had other siblings, their similarities would surpass those with their siblings, in fact, “by twice as much.”38 Another in Yūseigaku also proclaimed that monozygotic twins would end up having not just similar faces but also parallel personalities.39 Identical twins were often described as “mirror images” of each other, and one eugenicist lists comic instances resulting from this fact, such as a mother accidentally having the wrong twin’s tooth pulled, and twins fooling their teachers.40 To summarize, twinship was viewed not simply as a sibling relationship but as a uniquely close relationship that surpassed any other relationship— one that came to symbolize sameness and identicalness; one that could erase any differences. In Japan, twin studies took up the nature–nurture debate (soshitsu vs. kankyō) begun by Galton and added to the mystique of twins.41 By the 1920s, twins had become one of the most popular subjects of study for understanding human heredity. Obonai Torao (1899–1968), professor of psychology at Tokyo Bunri University, saw twins as the ultimate tool for studying human heredity, referring to them as “nature’s experiment.” 42 Taniguchi Toratoshi commented in 1934: “Twins have become a research target that is integral to studying human heredity today.” 43 Taniguchi explained that the abundance of studies on twins was due to the fact that these results were important not only to eugenics but also to the fields of anthropology, medicine, criminal studies, sociology, psychology, and education.44 By the late 1910s, twins had come to act as “controls,” the tabulae rasae, of scientific experiments in both Eu rope and Japan. As Schwartz describes, “During the 1920s, twins assumed a more active, continuous role as truth-tellers about human nature.” 45 Twin pairs were studied together, their physiognomy and psychology tested and compared, in order to determine the extent to which heredity controlled human intelligence and appearances. Twins eventually came to represent the triumphant power of nature, the unquestionable truth that heredity ruled all.

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Komai Taku (1886–1972), professor of biology at Tokyo Imperial University, was one of the leading scholars of the heredity studies. In particular, he outlined how to tell identical twins apart, or how to identify the one untranslatable mark on a twin’s body. In “Criteria for Distinguishing between Two Identical Twins” (1928), he states, “We have a very sharp sense for discriminating slight details of facial appearance, so that the close resemblance of twins in physiognomy to such a degree that even near relatives cannot tell them apart, must involve the identity of every minute facial feature.” 46 The most accurate “minute feature,” he concludes, is the fingerprint: “They [Western eugenicists] found that the corresponding fingers of identical twins are usually very similar, to such an extent that at least seven, and at most nine, fingers have the same type of patterns, but at least one fi nger shows dissimilarity.” 47 The crime in Ranpo’s tale is based on this bodily difference—the fingerprint—as well as a mole that the evil twin erased in order to become the same as his brother. Komai also points to the fact that these fi ngerprints could reveal “symmetry reversal,” which the murderer in Ranpo will use to his advantage. Identical twins were also believed to have tsumuji (hair whirl) that went in opposite directions, so if one was right handed, the other was left handed. As Komai argued, “Identical twins represent the right and left halves of one individual, and there is often symmetry reversal in some feature or other.” 48 Komai’s argument is in accordance with that of Galton, who called monozygotic twins “complementary”; that is, even if the twins acted in a dissimilar manner from each other, their behaviors were interpreted as being complementary to each other, two halves of one identity. If one was weak, the other was strong. If one was smart, the other was lacking in intelligence. No matter how you saw it—either identical or complementary—twins were mere reflections of each other and constituted one singular being.49 On top of this understanding of twins as “identical” beings, eugenicists also designated them as inferior beings. Although scholars argued against the older myths embedded in Buddhist traditions, they still inscribed twins with a new kind of stigma based on hereditary studies. Even in the late 1930s, Taniguchi Toratoshi reveals that there were two scientific beliefs in par ticu lar that were popu lar among the public and even among his colleagues. The fi rst stated that twins were often inferior in their health and intellectual capacities because they were typically born from people with mental illnesses. The second argued that twinning resulted from abnormalities in cells, caused by viruses and infections

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like tuberculosis. Taniguchi, instead of completely refuting these myths, states, “I can’t believe all of them completely, but I also cannot dismiss any of them.”50 In other words, although he admits that recent scholarship has proven otherwise, he himself believes at least partly in these new fallacies. As early as 1916, twin bodies were also being written about as representing split psyches—as bodies suffering from schizophrenia. In the article “Sōseiji no seishinbyō” (Psychological illness of twins, 1916), Sōshi Akijirō mentions a pair of identical twins who had symptoms of dementia praecox (an early term for schizophrenia) and plagiokephalie (a condition in which heads are tilted).51 Okuta Saburō likewise writes that if one twin exhibits a hint of hereditary illness, the other will soon begin to show symptoms as well. The cause of schizophrenia is not known, but heredity definitely plays a role, and studies have shown that both twins often carry the same disease.52 The renowned eugenicist Nagai Hisomu in his epic work Yūseigaku gairon (Introduction to eugenics, 1936) then added that monozygotic twins were at a higher risk for both physical and mental diseases than were fraternal twins.53 After covering the nurture–nature debate of Francis Galton and agreeing with his view that heredity wins over social circumstances, Nagai cites the works of German criminologist Johannes Lange to point out the identicality and criminality of monozygotic twins: Lange chose thirty pairs of twins from a group of prisoners. Out of those, thirteen pairs were monozygotic, and the other seventeen dizygotic. Out of the thirteen, ten pairs were all criminals whose nature of the crimes, the age when they committed their crimes, their actions in court, and their attitudes towards their punishment, were all completely the same. The other three pairs had only one of the twins condemned for a crime. However, as it turns out, those were cases where one of the pairs had accidentally damaged the brain, bringing about mental abnormality (seishin ijō) and turning to the path of crime.54

For fraternal twins, the rate was much lower, with only two out of fifteen pairs both committing crimes. Likewise, in the journal Yūseigaku, an advice column cites contemporary concerns about marriage with twins: “My friend is hoping to marry a twin girl, but I am worried about its results. Please tell me if this would bring about bad results from hereditary and eugenic point[s] of view.” The columnist assures the anonymous

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subscriber that it is difficult to determine such an outcome, and that the only thing that one should be aware of is that marrying a twin will increase the chances of producing more twins.55 Twins were often treated as degenerate beings, who inherited weaker dispositions and criminal minds. In the 1930s, this “degeneracy” of twins became even more pronounced as it was discussed within the colonial context. Eugenicists began to analyze different races of twins, the most notable being the Bunker brothers—Chang Bunker and Eng Bunker—who were born conjoined in 1811. Taniguchi Toratoshi notes how even though the twins were born in Thailand (Siam), it was apparent that they were Chinese because “the Chinese walk facing the front, and their skin is of yellow tone, their hair black. Eng and Chang epitomized these features, and the fact that they were of the Chinese race ( jinshu) was apparent to one’s eyes.”56 Taniguchi’s Iden, Taishitsu, Konketsu (Heredity, body types, and hybridity, 1939) focuses on the figures of twins and mixed-blood children in the colonies as a way to examine the dominance of specific traits that are passed down through heredity: “In order to correctly determine one’s race, there are three important research methods: the study of twins (sōseijihō), the study of families (kazokuhō), and the study of hybridity (konketsuhō).”57 He specifically states that these racial studies ( jinshugaku) were extremely important for Japan’s colonial policies (shokuminchi seisaku) and argues that the Japanese must not mix with other races, for their own hybridity (such as short height) already requires improvement. The discourse of twins takes a strangely patriotic turn in his work, as he claims that the number of twins in Europe is higher than that in Japan, and that according to Komai Taku’s previous studies, the rate is especially low in Japan because people killed off the hereditary pool from early on by murdering twins. Hence, he concludes, “According to this hereditary logic, Westerners are closer to being animals than we, and we are superior to them.”58 Both twins and mixed-blood children came to be designated as other by eugenicists like Taniguchi, who saw them as degenerate beings that were inhibiting the eugenic evolution of the Japanese race. Instead of demystifying the phenomenon of twin birth, prewar eugenic discourse further construed twins as abnormal objects. Jim Reichert has shed light on how the binary of the normal and the abnormal came to be constructed by social Darwinist discourse in early Shōwa Japan and how this binary repeatedly appears in Ranpo’s works. The dichotomy created an uneven hierarchy in which “the categories of ‘normal’ and

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‘Japanese’ occupy a higher position than the categories of ‘abnormal/deviant’ and ‘foreign.’ ”59 Twins, even if separated, were still treated like Siamese twins and placed in the “abnormal” category. They were turned into uncanny presences, like doppelgängers, viewed as split halves of the same person, one approaching the identicality of the other. They were abnormal freaks that traversed between sameness and difference. Although Japanese eugenicists did not go as far as the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who killed over 250 pairs of twins, they, too, were “obsessed with reproduction and replication,” and twins were scrutinized by their scientific gaze and seen as monstrous bodies.60 They were a biological wonder, whose double identities could slip in and out of each other and undermine bodily boundaries.

Colonial Brother in Ranpo’s “Twins” It is the portrayal of twins as abnormal criminals that appears in Ranpo’s “Sōseiji: aru shikeishū ga kyōkaishi ni uchiaketa hanashi” (Twins: A tale confessed by a death row inmate to a priest, 1924).61 Ranpo’s text tells a story about a murder of a man by his twin brother. The story is told in a first-person confessional style, in which the criminal on death row opens up to his priest. On top of the murder for which he has been sentenced— killing a man to steal thirty thousand yen from his safe—he confesses to yet another murder, that of his older, identical twin. From early on, the man harbored resentment against his older brother, for the latter had inherited more money than he had and had also married his ex-lover. The elder brother at first helps his younger brother out of financial problems, but he eventually stops doing so, telling his twin, “[I] will not help until you fi x your behavior.” 62 From that day, the younger brother begins to study his twin’s habits and learns to mimic his brother perfectly. He decides to slice off the one bodily marker that could identify him, a mole on his thigh, and then he strangles and pushes his brother down an old well. He thus replaces his brother and lives happily for a year, spending his brother’s money and sleeping with his wife. However, old habits die hard, and he once again begins to gamble, digging himself into a financial hole. One day he finds a fingerprint in his brother’s diary and discovers that although it is extremely similar to his own, it is slightly different. Concluding that it belonged to his dead brother, he makes a stamp from the image. He then commits the second murder and leaves the fingerprint at

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the crime scene. To his great surprise, however, the cops arrive at his house to arrest him. It turns out that the fingerprint was actually his own and that he had misrecognized it because it was a negative image of the original. The print had been pressed into the diary after he had wiped his inkstained fingers, the ink representing the grooves between the ridges. This story is a key example of the hitori futayaku (one person playing two roles) plot that Ranpo employs in many of his stories.63 As a writer who named Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) as the most influential work in his life, it is not surprising to see references to evolutionary and eugenic thought in Ranpo’s work.64 Twins as deviant creatures with criminal tendencies is certainly the dominant image here. The younger brother, for example, makes a reference to the nature–nurture debate when he searches for the source of his criminal behavior, stating, “It’s not that I had so much hatred towards my older brother. . . . It is more the fault of our parents, who gave my brother a [higher] status than mine.” He thus blames his social circumstance of receiving less inheritance than his brother as the underlying cause behind his crimes. At the same time, however, he also wonders if “a man like me was born as a criminal (akunin),” and he ponders the hereditary nature of his crooked ways.65 The text goes beyond these scientific reasonings, though, and introduces a third reason: the very existence of the other twin—or, more specifically, the inability to distinguish himself from his twin. The protagonist describes his hatred toward his brother in bodily and biological terms: You must be shocked that I have killed my only sibling without any remorse. That’s understandable, but I wanted to kill him because he was my brother. I don’t know if you have any experience like this, but humans feel hatred towards their blood relations (nikushin). . . . It’s the kind of hatred that goes beyond what one feels towards strangers, and in a case like mine, where the twin has completely identical facial structures, it is unbearable beyond belief. Even if there is no other reason, the fact that it is a blood relation that has the same face, is reason enough to want to kill that person. I think that one reason why I, a weakling, could kill my brother so easily was because I felt this kind of hatred.66

Hence, the social factor may have affected his motive to murder his brother, but the real motive lies in a more complex, bodily factor—that someone with an identical body and face to his exists. He is a man obsessed about killing someone who looks like him, and ultimately, he even

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ends up on death row himself, thus effacing the sole remaining identical being. An important idea here is that this identicality does not apply to just anyone but specifically to “blood relations” and, more specifically, brothers. Ranpo and other writers from this period often used twin brothers in their stories, which speak of a specific type of fear toward identicality that could only arise between blood relations.67 That is, unlike in doppelgänger stories, in which a protagonist often meets a complete stranger who looks exactly like him, in these tales of twinning, the uncanny moment can only occur between two blood relatives.68 It is this emphasis on blood connection—the sameness that exists between twin brothers—that stands out in these twinship tales. So, why this specific emphasis on brotherhood? There is a particularly illuminating fact in the story that sheds light on this question, and it deals with the alibi for the two murders. After the younger brother studies diligently the daily life and behaviors of his older brother and the brother’s wife, he finally decides to murder his brother. At this point, he tells his brother, “I am going to go make profits abroad in Korea” (Chōsen e dekasegi ni yuku).69 He then boards a train, waving farewell to the couple; disembarks partway; and returns secretly to Tokyo. With the help of this made-up lie of going to colonial Korea, he successfully carries out the murder of his brother. This colonial alibi is used again for the second murder. The twin contemplates, “Let’s say that I were to kill someone on my own. In that case, I would pretend that my ‘younger brother’ in Korea has returned to Japan (naichi). Then I would dress up as him, pretending to be the disheveled (rakuhakushita) brother in both personality and appearance. Then, as the ‘older brother,’ I would prepare an alibi. Then commit the murder.”70 And this is exactly what he does. He leaves what he believes to be his already-dead brother’s fingerprint (which he would pretend belonged to the “disheveled” younger brother) at the crime scene. Thus, the original Shin seinen version mentions the word “Korea” (Chōsen) multiple times.71 The criminal’s alibi revolves around the colony, and Korea becomes the imaginary site where the “other brother” (himself ) resides. It is the “otherized” place where criminals and the socially degenerate (rakuhakushita) roam. Ranpo uses colonial-era rhetoric like dekasegi (working away from home) and naichi (“inner land,” as opposed to gaichi, the term for colonies, meaning “outside land”) repeatedly. There is a need to consider how the text is informed by the political landscape

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of his time, especially when works like this employ noticeable use of colonial references. In fact, “brotherhood” (kyōdai) also falls into this category of Japanese colonial terminology. As part of the political propaganda, Meiji Japan produced numerous legends and anecdotes about Japan and its colonial “brother” to draw racial, ethnic, and topographical connections between the mainland (naichi) and its colonies (gaichi), and this rhetoric persisted throughout the Pacific War. Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933), known as the educator and politician who spearheaded the colonial project in Taiwan, clearly states, “If the Formosans or the Koreans approach us in customs and manners, we will not repulse them. We will receive them with open arms and we will hold them as our brothers, but if they do not desire to adopt our way of living, we will not pursue them.” 72 By using the “brotherhood” language, Nitobe promotes the idea of nissen dōsoron (theory of common ancestry of Japan and Korea). As Oguma Eiji has shown in his fundamental work on Japanese colonialism, many colonial theorists, rather than promoting an image of a pureblood, homogeneous nation, advocated this kind of mixed-race ancestry.73 “Brotherhood” was a typical terminology for advocating this connection between Korea and Japan. Oguma and Robert Tierney have both pointed out, for example, that Koreans were often referred to as the offspring of Susano’o no Mikoto, the brother of the sun goddess Amaterasu, for Susano’o had supposedly ruled ancient Korea.74 Japa nese educator Hori Sadajirō likewise calls Koreans “the emperor’s infants” (heika no akago) as well as “our brothers” (warera no kyōdai). He reiterates the language of nissen dōsoron by claiming that “from ancient times, Korea and Japan (naichi) were a single land and an ethnicity of same race and same roots (dōshu dōkon no minzoku).” He then posits the notion of “brotherhood” as a prerequisite for becoming “Japanese”: “after fully gaining linguistic ability (of Japanese) and completely merging into Japanese culture and attaining the Japanese spirit, thus reaching the level of the Japanese (naichijin), this position as brothers and sisters will naturally disappear.”75 Hence, sibling relationship was advertised and promoted as a step toward total assimilation, as if such a thing were actually possible. Ranpo’s “Twins” must be understood against this kind of colonial discourse. The motive behind the younger brother’s murder is that he feels hatred toward “a blood relation that has the same face.” As Mark Peattie and Robert Tierney have both astutely described, one of the main distinctions between Japanese colonial discourse and its European counterpart

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was the “rhetoric of sameness”—in which the colonized were described “as racially akin to their Japanese rulers with whom they shared a common cultural heritage. This sense of cultural affinity with its subject peoples made Japan unique among the colonial powers of modern times.”76 Because Japanese colonialism took place under the threat of being colonized themselves by the West, Japan employed the rhetoric of sameness—that we are all “victims” and “brothers” with the same enemy (the West)—as a form of legitimization for its own imperial invasions. The main rhetoric of Japanese colonialism was this emphasis on racial closeness and identicality, which “smothered the identities of the colonized and repressed any form of cultural difference.”77 Sameness within the colonial context was a form of extremely violent suppression. Under this light, the literary representation of “identical twins” comes to overlap with the colonial rhetoric of “same brothers.” The story depicts this relationship in a complex way, as it is not just about hatred, as the younger brother “in Korea” states at the beginning, but also about his desire to become the other brother. From the beginning, there is a structural affinity with the idea of colonial assimilation—the “inferior brother” wanting to become the “superior brother.” Although this story has often been read as one man trying to emerge as an individual (thus cutting himself off from the identity of his twin), it is notable that he erases the one marker that distinguishes himself from his twin: the mole on his thigh. If the protagonist wanted to become a separate individual, why would he remove the one individualistic element that marks him as different from his twin? It is because even though he detests identicality, he simultaneously desires it and wants to merge with his twin.78 This strong desire on his part to transform into his older brother becomes narrated in a strikingly bodily manner in the text. Right after he kills his brother, he confesses in his brother’s own diary that he “locked himself up in my brother’s study and thoroughly studied his diary and account book,” and he continues to make entries in the diary in order to fool his wife and the maids.79 The diary—fittingly the ultimate transparent medium for the self—becomes a bodily object when he discovers what he believes to be the fingerprint of his brother on one of its pages: One day, I was carefully mimicking my brother’s handwriting and making an entry into my brother’s and also my diary. . . . When I was done, as usual, I was comparing my entries with my brother’s real entries. Then, something shocking struck me. There was a well-defined fingerprint on the corner of

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one of the pages that had one of my brother’s entries. I felt like I’d made a big mistake and felt caught (gikuri to shimashita). . . . I’d heard that even for twins, fingerprints are different from one person to another. When I discovered the fingerprint that had to belong to my brother, I turned pale, worrying that the fingerprint would result in my unmasking.80

This is the most revealing moment in the story for many reasons. First of all, this is when the younger twin formulates his plan to make a stamp out of the fingerprint in order to mask his murder and robbery. More important, though, this is when the two identities become conflated, for he claims the diary to belong to both him and his brother. Text (the written word) and body occupy the same discursive space in this text. The diary becomes a direct representation of his brother’s body, and the protagonist’s textual entry in the diary can be read as a form of bodily entry into his brother—what Juliana De Nooy has called “the fetal desire to reenter the brother’s body.”81 In twin texts, the older one is typically depicted as being maternal and wanting to separate the other (the younger son figure) from him. Thus, a younger twin’s desire to enter into his elder brother’s body could be understood as an infantile desire to reenter the body of the mother.82 My point is not to argue that the two brothers somehow represent a mother–son relationship; instead, I want to emphasize that this passage exposes the twin’s strong desire to become his identical twin, which of course becomes more complicated by the fact that the fingerprint will turn out to be his own. Thus, his desire to enter his brother’s body really becomes him entering his own body. It marks this moment as a kind of perverse embodiment, in which the self does not establish its borders by rejecting the (fearful) abject other but by engulfing itself and a supplementary identity (the identical brother). Furthermore, this passage captures (twin) identities as spectral, or “phantasms”—identities that move between surfaces and are both singular and divisible.83 If one were to understand the ego and body as surfaces that one has projected (rather than any interiority), one’s subjectivity becomes a phantasm. And here, the younger twin projects his subjectivity as double—belonging to both himself and his brother—and since the fi ngerprint eventually turns out to be his own, the brother’s body is an imaginary projection that becomes posited on the surface of the page. Identity, represented here by the (supposed) fingerprint of the older brother, could only function as a trace—a specter, an absence that signifies. It is this nonpresent other that continues to haunt the surviving twin.

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This spectral and plural aspect of (twin) identity is also captured in a scene in which the younger twin describes his hallucinations: “I came to fear mirrors from the day I killed him [the older brother]. . . . I would see in glasses and mirrors the man I killed—which is actually my own reflection—staring in my direction with hatred in his eyes. One time, I almost fainted in front of a mirror store. There, numerous [reflections] of the same man, the man that I had murdered, were all directing their gazes towards me.”84 In an essay entitled “Renzu shikōshō” (Lens-philia, 1936), Ranpo describes his obsession with ocular objects, such as panorama, telescopes, and microscopes. He recalls a time when he picked up his father’s magnifying glass and thought he saw a “hallucination” (genkaku), “something that resembled a ghost,” and thought himself to be mad. He confesses that he absolutely fears concave mirrors, which augment the image “ten times” as much as the original, and ends up running away every time he tries to look at himself in one. For him, any surface or technology that fools one’s vision is “magic” (majutsu) that “makes one see things that could never have been seen.”85 In the passage from “Twins,” the protagonist suffers from this type of ocular “illusion/phantasm” (maboroshi) and becomes haunted by the ghost of his brother, which becomes multiplied on the surface of the mirror. Twin identity here interestingly goes beyond just being “two”—it is plural and in excess. Note here, again, how the reflection is recognized as being that of the younger brother himself, just like the fingerprint turns out to be his own. Twin identity, in fact, is constantly being described as one of supplement, in which the older brother acts as both a replacement and an addition to the identity of his evil twin. The latter recognizes his own identity in the mirror, but he still interprets the reflection as belonging to someone who is not present. It is as if he acknowledges that his own self is being supplemented. Twins here do not operate on a simple “self versus other” binary. There are no “others” in this story; instead, there is a never-ending chain of identical plural copies. If we read “Twins” as encompassing the younger twin’s desire to be exactly like his brother, then he must become a spectral body himself. The notion of a singular, coherent identity with its interiority does not function here, and ultimately, the younger twin must rid his physical corporeality to become a specter himself. There is a kind of dissolution of the physical body that takes place, for the body depicted (the fingerprint) is marked only as a part and not a whole—a metonym that points to an

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absence. As Yoshikuni Igarashi describes, bodies in Ranpo’s works are always “placed in the scopic field, hence they are in constant peril of disintegration. . . . The body exists only as fragments without visionary integration, yet his stories demonstrate that integration through the privileged sense of vision is inachievable.”86 Although the brother turns the trace into something more material and tangible by making a stamp out of it, thus attempting to turn the absence into a presence, he could only fail miserably, as the fingerprint in actuality is just a part of himself. But in a way, this is a fitting end for him, for with this failure and the subsequent death penalty, he succeeds in becoming his brother, or rather, the fingerprint on the page—a phantasm, a surface identity, himself. One twin kills the other because “a complete identification with the ideal ego can only be attained through destroying the other’s or his own body.”87 The older brother represents the younger one’s ideal ego and is inscribed with everything he wishes he himself could have—financial stability, beautiful wife, and so on—and in order to become him, the evil half must kill both his brother and himself. From the very first page, the reader can only meet him as a dead man, as an absence. He only exists as a textual identity, as words on a page.

The Massacre of Identical Brothers Thus far, I have been focusing on the colonial rhetoric that appears in the content of the story—the recurring theme of Korea, the rhetoric of sameness and brotherhood, and the desire of the younger twin to assimilate. However, the most significant connection to colonial history resides in the actual narrative form of the text—the confessional speech of the criminal. It is easy to forget that the story of “Twins” is being told entirely by a murderer on death row. It is his final confession told to a priest, who will presumably take this “will” to the narrator’s wife. Before the twin begins his confession, he tells the priest: “Before I die I must receive his [his brother’s] forgiveness. Or rather, I want to examine the anxiety within my heart that cannot help but to be haunted by him. . . . There is only one way. I must confess my crime to my wife. . . . I know that this is a bothersome request, but is there any way that you could promise to tell my story to my wife? Oh thank you for accepting. Now I shall tell you about my other crime (mō hitotsu no zaijō).”88

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As Baryon Posadas has elucidated, the whole narrative—the confession—is highly performative.89 It is an open-ended narrative, in which the text is written for an audience composed of the wife, the preacher, and the reader. The reader of course never finds out if the confession reached the wife’s ears, and without her voice, there is no way to confirm any truth to this unreliable narrator’s story. But the Freudian model of repression is not to be dismissed completely, for, as we shall see, the form of the tale invokes the repression model and involves a suppression of a specific narrative. The strangest part of Ranpo’s story is how this “show” of his is a confession to a crime to which he did not have to confess. He is not being held for his brother’s murder but for the second murder he committed. No one ever asks him, but he volunteers the confession. The detective is only concerned with the murder of the banker, and the younger twin could have just died without ever telling his tale. It is this strange plot of double murder—one that is legally condemned and the other, completely under the legal radar—that deserves attention. Why tell the story of the second murder in the first place? There are several ways of reading this strange confession. One answer would be to read it as a slap in the face to the wife. From the beginning, the entire confession is addressed to the only woman in the story, and even though the wife is remarkably absent from the text, the narration cannot be sustained without this implied female listener. The narrator tells the priest that he wants his wife to know about his brother’s murder in order to “attain my brother’s forgiveness before I die,” and that he “feels so bad for my wife” (amarini tsuma ga kawaisō ni omoeru).90 However, his words are questionable and not supported by his actions. After all, in this last moment, he chooses to tell his wife that she has been duped, that the man she has been sleeping with all this time was him, not her real husband. His confession surrounds a sexual violation, and by telling her something he doesn’t “need at all to take the trouble of confessing,” he violates the wife a second time, this time through narration. In the very last paragraph, he once again tells the priest to relay his story “to my wife,” and one could read these final words as his final devilish act.91 But this does not resolve the aforementioned difference between the two crimes, which is central to understanding this text. That is, the first crime, the murder of the banker, is deemed a legitimate, illegal crime, whereas the second crime confessed was never considered to be a crime. I would contend that through the act of voluntary confession, the text

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posits the question of what exactly constitutes a crime in imperial Japan. It asks the reader to ponder the strange “second and unnecessary” nature of the murder, the crime that is not legally a crime. What crime can reside outside the space of law? How could such a horrendous crime go unnoticed this whole time? It is this fact, that the murder of the brother takes place in a space ungoverned by law, that brings us specifically to 1923—the year “Twins” was published and also the year of a significant event in imperial Japan: the massacre of Korean nationals immediately following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Amid the chaos following the earthquake, on September 1, 1923, a European living in Negishi was told that “three Koreans” who had escaped from the Negishi prison were setting fire to houses in the neighborhood. The word spread quickly that bands of Korean prisoners had broken out of the fortress and had embarked on a crime spree in Yokohama, poisoning the wells and lighting houses on fire. A crowd formed, led by vigilantes calling themselves “self-defense committees,” who distinguished themselves as Japa nese by wearing red armbands. The vigilantes, followed by the angry mob, roamed the streets, asking Koreans to sing the Japa nese national anthem, to name the railway stations on the Yamanote line, or to repeat Japanese phrases like “Jūgoen, gojūgo sen,” which most Koreans mispronounced as “Chu goen, go chu go sen.” Failure brought about instant execution, often of a grotesque nature. Vigilante groups continued to find justification for their actions, claiming that the Koreans committed arson and poisoned the wells. At the time, approximately 200,000 Koreans lived in Japan, including about 12,000 in the Tokyo area. Between September 1 and September 8, close to three thousand Koreans were killed in Yokohama and Tokyo, but it is surmised that the numbers were actually much higher than reported. Approximately four thousand Koreans had been sent to military-organized concentration camps, which mainly served to protect them from the vigilantes but also kept possible “bad” Koreans under military control. Thus, the remaining unaccounted-for eight thousand were presumed dead, victims of either the natural disaster or the man-made calamity: the massacres. Ranpo had just started working as a reporter for Ōsaka mainichi shinbun (Osaka daily newspaper) two months prior to the massacre in July 1923, and although the details were not released for several months, it is hard to imagine that he was not well informed of the horrible aftermath.92 This event reveals a certain fear and confusion that existed in Japanese society at the time—the difficulty of distinguishing a Japanese from other

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colonized Asians. The rhetoric of sameness is a paradoxical rhetoric: the colonized can be our identical brothers as long as they are actually different from us. Th is is the rhetoric that manifests in publications such as Chōsenjin shikibetsu shiryō ni kansuru ken (Regarding materials for identifying Koreans), a pamphlet published in 1914 by the head of the Secret Police (Keihokyoku) under the Ministry of Home Affairs.93 The pamphlet was sent to metropolitan and prefectural police departments to educate them about the differences between Korean and Japa nese physiognomies, much in the same way the pamphlets passed around in the United States during World War II outlined the physical differences between the Japanese and the Chinese. Most of the pamphlet addresses the kind of linguistic differences previously noted. However, it also lists minute physical differences. For example, it states that Koreans are “not much different from the Japanese, but” they are slightly more slouched in posture, possess coarser hair, lack facial hair, have more muddled eyes, and have long pinky nails “just like the Chinese.” That is, “sameness,” or rather, fear directed toward it, was the main rhetoric associated with this event, and it is difficult to separate this discourse from that of the identical blood relatives that Ranpo depicts. What is more significant, though, is that the structure of the story parallels the space of the massacre, which is outside the scope of the law. As Sonia Ryang has brilliantly demonstrated, the one factor that allowed the horrific massacre to take place in imperial Japan was that law ceased to function, resulting in a “state of exception.”94 According to Ryang, the massacre was referred to as chōsenjin sawagi (Korean disturbance), the first word connoting not a nationality per se but a “categorical term denoting some species other than human being,” and the second word connoting a kind of disturbance—but not hanzai (crime) or bōryoku (violence). Her argument does not suggest that Koreans were simply equated with animals but that they occupied an undefi nable category, a “dislocation” from the mapping of the imperial state, for they were never registered under the family registry law of Japan (koseki). She applies Giorgio Agamben’s description of homo sacer: “ ‘In the case of homo sacer a person is simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. . . . Homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificeability and is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed.’ ”95 The killing of homo sacer is a nonhomicide, for in the sovereign sphere, one may be “sacrificed” but not “murdered.” Ryang draws attention to imperial Japan’s main contradiction—that the emperor

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was simultaneously both the law and above the law—and she astutely points to the connection between the sovereign and the Koreans: “This topological paradox is to a great extent shared between this supreme sacred being and homo sacer: neither belongs to the human order or the divine order and the killing of neither constitutes the ordinary homicide.”96 Thus, the martial law ordained by the emperor at the time of the massacre set the stage for a state of exception, in which the murder of thousands of Koreans could take place without it being deemed “murder” or “crime.” The murder of the brother, in a similar manner, is marked as a “nonmurder” and a “noncrime.” It resides outside the space of law. It is a death completely forgotten by everyone including the police, buried deep in the well. It would have been the perfect murder, had the younger brother not decided to confess it. His decision to tell the story is an insult not only to the wife but also to the law itself. The text resonates with the exceptional nature of the massacre. Both events are murders of “brothers.” Both are motivated by hatred toward “a blood relation that has the same face.” Both are at fi rst suppressed and only manifest as highly delayed narratives, the massacre only appearing in the papers a month after the fact. I am not arguing that Ranpo was somehow trying to criticize the Japanese media or the emperor by writing a story about a “noncrime” murder, but I am interested in how the structures of the two resonate with each other in remarkable ways. Both are narratives about how violence tied to the colonized is repressed, only to surface when one least expects it. In that manner, there is a kind of Freudian logic that underlies this text. The colonized becomes an uncanny specter that comes to haunt Japan. However, because of the protagonist’s performative speech, there is no method of ascertaining its validity. And as we are never told whether the wife read the confession, the twin’s plea is forever suspended in the text, its transcription and words staining the pages and attesting to his presence, just like the fingerprint.

Colonial Uncanny Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933), one of the most influential theorists on colonial policy, made the following observation in his famous essay “Koshikoku Chōsen” (Withering Korea, 1906).

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Although his name is usually associated with Taiwan, Nitobe did make his sole trip to Korea in 1906, four years before the annexation, to prepare for an upcoming lecture on its colonization at Tokyo Imperial University.98 The result is this striking description of Korea as a dying nation. Claiming that both Korean “ethnic” and “national” progress are impossible, Nitobe carefully lays out his justification for the colonization of Korea. Koreans are awaiting their Japanese colonizers to lead them to progress and civilization. They are half-dead corpses, ghostly presences waiting to be imbued with life. Nitobe’s grotesque descriptions of the colony as the place of the dead are informative for understanding the uncanny in 1920s Japan. Like the body of the twin, the colonized becomes narrated here as an abject space and a spectral body that haunts Japanese modernity. In alignment with other Japanese ethnographers and intellectuals, Nitobe emphasizes the teleological temporality that places Japan as the ultimate telos for its fellow “backward,” “primitive” Asian colonies. Time, for colonialists, is a linear trajectory. Modernity and civilization are set up as the end-all, and the colonized must engage in an endless cat-and-mouse chase to attain them. This temporality warrants attention, for it is this same teleological, colonial time that is precisely the temporality of the uncanny. Freud’s model requires this temporality, for the uncanny is something that belongs to the past but comes back to haunt the present. In his envisioning, the past is like the dead specter that Nitobe locates in the colonial space. It is something that does not belong in the present and disturbs the carefully maintained linearity of modernity. Thinking back to the graph of the uncanny valley (fig I.1), recall that the human is placed as the telos, whereas the robots mimic the human without being able to become fully human. In Ranpo’s story and Nitobe’s text on Korea, the concept of the “human” becomes replaced with that of the “Japanese.” That is, the words “healthy

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person” on the graph become interchangeable with the words “superior Japanese.” There is something remarkably similar about how the structure of the uncanny works in relation to the rhetoric of colonization. They both require the imagining of teleological time and an unattainable telos; they both depend on the rhetoric of sameness—“you are like us but not quite.” The younger twin here becomes uncanny in that he mimics and performs being the “brother of higher status,” as the story says. The uncanny in this story closely resonates with the postcolonial idea of mimicry, posited by Homi Bhabha. Bhabha famously defi ned the term colonial mimicry as “the desire for a reformed, recognized Other [the colonized], as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”99 Mimicry is achieved by almost-perfect repetitive per formance by the colonized of the colonizer. It is important to note, however, that even though Bhabha uses the word “desire,” he is not discussing mimicry as some sort of repressed desire on the part of the colonized to become more like the colonizer. For Bhabha, mimicry is a subversive act. Culture here is a semiotic system that can be reduced to signs that become copied, iterated, or reinscribed with new meanings. A colonized subject can learn the signs of what constructs the identity of the colonizer and copy the latter to the point at which he is “almost the same but not quite.” In other words, the colonized reveals how the identity of the colonized, too, is just an imitable reproduction. The fact that this act of imitation is never perfected is important. For Bhabha, the “almost but not quite” ambivalence produces a kind of slippage, excess, and difference each time. By creating such difference each time, mimicry disturbs colonial authority by exposing what is absent in the subjectivity of the colonizer: an essence, a privileged signified (normalcy, civilization, superior blood), that the colonizer pretends to have. To use another synonym, mimicry is a kind of simulacra. It stems “from the radical negation of the sign as value,” where the sign no longer points to anything real, for the real is dead.100 It is a sign with no referent, or rather, one that exposes the absence of the referent. Mimicry, a purely performative repetition, does not depend on any essence that can be located within the colonized (or in the colonizer, for that matter), and thus it is a “form of resemblance that is the most terrifying thing to behold” for the colonizer. Through its repetition, the colonizer’s identity is reduced to signs, and even though he may try to present his privileged characteristic, the copy shows that the supposed “original” (the colonizer) is also

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just a copy, trapped in the endless chain of simulacra. Mimicry thus leads to a new form of cultural hybridity, in which the boundary between self (West) and other (East) becomes blurred—Bhabha’s defi nition of the uncanny.101 Bhabha’s formulation applies at two levels in Japanese colonialism. As scholars of Japanese colonial history have pointed out, what distinguished Japanese colonialism from Western colonialism is the triangular formation of the colonizer (the West), the almost colonized (Japan), and the colonized (Japan’s colonies). In this formulation, it is not just the Asian countries that become marked as the colonized. Japan is placed under a similar power dynamic, and colonizer Japan can be interpreted as a copy of the West, which attempted to imitate and reproduce the latter. In his formulation, it would not be Korea that is the living dead. The “peninsula governed by death” that Nitobe describes would be imperial Japan itself. Ranpo’s “Twins” likewise captures imperial Japan as an uncanny locale. The story can be read as an allegory of the Great Kantō Earthquake, a story about Japan’s repression of its historical memory. It is a nation haunted by the specter of colonial violence. The structure of the narrative reveals an almost dictionary definition of the Freudian uncanny, for it is based on an uncovering of what the nation concealed—a massacre not considered to be a crime. Something that was repressed—the unofficial murder—came to light in a manner that disrupted the present. In essence, this story is about a specific absence, an absence of (national) crime. Avery Gordon uses eloquent language to analyze absences as an important object of study that opens up critical space. Gordon sees ghostly haunting as a significant social figuration, and she tackles the question of how certain absences become visualized in the world today— a world still haunted by modernity. She examines literature in which “there is no actual ghostly presence but it is all about the absence that haunts,” pointing out how these absences ironically become extremely pronounced and visible because this type of literature “precisely detours around the site of power to make that power visible.”102 This power depends on what she calls hypervisibility: Hypervisibility is a kind of obscenity of accuracy that abolishes the distinctions between “permission and prohibition, presence and absence.” No shadows, no ghosts. In a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe not only that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for our consumption. In a

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culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe that neither repression nor the return of the repressed, in the form of either improperly buried bodies or countervailing systems of value or difference, occurs with any meaningful result.103

The ghostly, the uncanny—here, “the return of the repressed”—has been devalued in a world that enforces this belief in omniscient sight. However, contemporary society is still very much uncanny and haunted by its specters, even though it tries to repress this precise haunting. Ranpo’s tale is precisely about this kind of repression. The absence of the colonial narrative becomes pronounced, or visualized, exactly because it is not clearly locatable in the confession. The story is all about this white elephant in the room. It is a story of detours of various sorts; the story is not about the murder under legal investigation, nor is it about the murder of the twin brother; the murder that matters is still unarticulated. Gordon, in her illuminating work, discusses the blatant absence and erasure of Sabina Spielrein, the lover of Jung and Freud, in the latter’s scholarship. Even notably absent from her own graduation picture, her absence–presence manifests as a “trace of a ghost,” haunting the present. In Ranpo’s tale as well, the absence can only be visualized as a trace, as a fingerprint in the diary. But it is precisely this disembodiment, this pronounced lack, that allows this specter to haunt 1923 Japan. The figure of the twin—through his mimicry and confession—hints at the colonial history of modern Japan.104 Or rather, Ranpo’s ero guro detective fiction points to the absence of colonial history. Moreover, it shows how this suppressed historicity is about to be erased once again. The entire tale is called a “tale confessed by a death-row inmate to a priest,” as the subtitle states. It hints at the fact that the story’s author will never have a name, and that the story will die with him in prison. This colonial specter did not go unnoticed by his fellow Shin seinen writers. Two years after Ranpo’s text appeared in Shin seinen, Yokomizo Seishi published a story by the same title, proclaiming it to be “a sequel to the story of same subject by Mr. Ranpo Edogawa.”105 The claim is somewhat strange, for although there are certain similarities, the story is not a continuation of Ranpo’s plot. The story is better understood as an homage to, or an adaptation of, Ranpo’s tale. However, he kept the most important elements. It has twin brothers who switch identities, and the narrative is written in a confessional style. Moreover, there is the colonial connection: the evil twin in this story supposedly died in colonial Taiwan.

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Chapter 3 looks at another detective fiction writer and a contemporary of Ranpo, Yumeno Kyūsaku, and continues to explore this colonial performance of the literary double. In Yumeno’s Dogura magura, the narrator is also a man trapped in an institution. This time, however, he is in a different type of prison—an insane asylum—and is even more unreliable, for he is literally a madman, haunted by his psychological double. The theme of the colonial double did not stop at Ranpo’s “Twins.” The trope of a Japan being haunted by its Asian twin continues to be narrated throughout the imperial era.

Chapter Three

Colonial Doubles Doppelgänger in Dogura Magura

he famous critic and writer Satō Haruo quipped in 1923: “The scariest thing in this world is a doppelgänger.”1 Taishō Japan was continuously fascinated with the theme of doubling, and alongside the figure of twins, the period witnessed the rise of what is now called “doppelgänger literature” (bunshin shōsetsu)—writings that grappled with the concept of the psychological double. Japanese scholar Watanabe Masahiko has posited that the term bunshin (literally “split body”) first appeared in 1913 in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s “Strange Mirror” (Fushigi na kagami).2 The word was then popularized through the screening of the German silent film Der Student von Prag in 1916 (1913 in Germany). Works such as Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839) and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) were also translated into Japanese around this time, familiarizing the Japanese audience with this type of imagery. Images of schizophrenic identities proliferated when another German film about an insane character was released in Japan, Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919, 1921 in Japan). This film immediately became a huge hit in Japan and influenced the writings of numerous authors. Scholars have made numerous suggestions as to why this imported figure captivated the Japanese audience during this period. Watanabe Masahiko suggests that the double emerged in Japanese literature to replace older beliefs in folkloric monsters ( yōkai) and kitsunetsuki (fox possession), which were increasingly becoming historicized as nonmodern and outdated; this new monster succeeded these folkloric figures as the representative monster of the new, modern era.3 Yamashita Takeo has taken a similar approach and defined the double as another articulation of the

T

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premodern phenomenon of spirit possession, such as one that appears in The Tale of Genji.4 He has also attributed the literary representation of doubles to the modern author’s own “physical and psychological instability,” treating the literary doppelgänger as a reflection of the authors’ actual psychological illnesses.5 Then there is Doi Takeo’s famous yet essentialist thesis on the matter, which argues that the phenomenon of the double can be attributed to the fact that the Japanese psyche came to be split in two— tatemae (what one projects as one’s identity to others) and hon’ne (one’s true identity that one keeps inside)—marking modernity with a kind of identity crisis that splits the ego.6 But if one were to cite the most dominant force credited for the popularity of the doppelgänger, it would be the rise of cinema in modern Japan. As many scholars have pointed out, the emergence of the double was strongly tied to this new visual medium. Matsuyama Iwao was the first scholar to point out the connection between the image of reproduced bodies and the media of film. Writing on Ranpo, he claims that the “1920s was an era when the relationship between the self and Other began to be questioned. This was because the society that one idealized and the actual society contradicted one another. As a result, one’s self-image became split between one’s idealized image and one’s actual image.”7 Mass media, such as photography, film, and phonographs, also brought an “inversion” (tōsaku), in that what was reproduced became more real than the actual image or voice.8 Watanabe Masahiko likewise claims that the concept of doppelgängers could not have come about without technological innovations and the Pure Film Movement because technological developments such as special effects made mass productions of the same image possible.9 These technologies, for example, made it easy to incorporate the hitori futayaku plot (one actor playing two roles), discussed in chapter 2, in which the actor’s body would be reproduced using the split-screen method. Thus, cinema technology facilitated the reproduction of bodies. More important, however, fi lm also brought a defamiliarizing, uncanny effect on the audience. Kawamoto Saburō cites the famous episode in which actress Mary Pickford cries out in fear when she first sees herself on-screen, observing that audiences of that time were often frightened about viewing the performing body on-screen, for it brought about a confusion as to which body was more real—the actual actor’s body or the reproduced body on-screen. He astutely argues that this conflation between the self on-screen and the self in the audience was a muchexperienced cultural phenomenon in Taishō Japan and identifies what has

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come to be known as “the photographic uncanny”—a fear that arises from the inability to distinguish between the represented image on-screen and the “real” body offscreen—in the writings of this era.10 Robert Spadoni places this specific type of the uncanny in the birth of sound cinema and its defamiliarizing effect on its audience. He argues that in early sound cinema, the audience was aware of the mechanical nature of fi lm because the dialogue was not perfectly synchronized with the image; thus, the bodies on-screen were “lacking in human quality.” This nonsynchronicity rendered the on-screen bodies as “talking shadows,” ghostly beings that lacked actual physicality.11 Describing these uncanny “shadows,” Spadoni states: “The uncanny body was a modality. Its appearance marked a shift in a viewer’s perception of the space, sounds, rhythms, bodies, acting gestures, and spoken language in a film. And like the numbers in a musical film, this body came and went.”12 The “shadow” thus has a fleeting quality to it, which the medium of the photographic film can capture but the eyes of the audience cannot. This chapter contributes to this conversation by bringing in another factor to the popularization of the psychological double: colonialism. It is intriguing how the uncertainty of racialized identities—“Am I Japanese or non-Japanese?”—becomes consistently articulated in the works of this period and how this verbalization becomes translated into the representation of the twin or the double. When Freud first wrote “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” he stated that the double was one of the most dominant themes of the uncanny: We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent, and with seeing whether they too can fairly be traced back to infantile sources. These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the “double,” which appears in every shape and in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because they look alike. . . . The subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing, and interchanging of the self. And finally, there is the constant recurrence of the same thing—the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations.13

Here, Freud commits a Jentschian slip—the doppelgänger brings about “the doubt as to which his self is.”

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This chapter explores how this “doubt” of self-identity comes to be narrated as a crisis of national identity in modern Japanese literature. To illustrate this point, I turn to yet another Shin seinen contributor: Yumeno Kyūsaku (b. Sugiyama Naoki, 1889–1936), a writer of irregular detective fiction (henkaku tantei shōsetsu) like Ranpo. To give a brief background, Yumeno worked in Fukuoka as a journalist for Kyūshū nippō (the Kyushu daily) before delving into fiction, and was also a master of Noh theater and a Buddhist monk. He is also well known as the son of Sugiyama Shigemaru (1864–1935), one of the prominent figures of the protonationalist political group Gen’yōsha (Society of the Black Sea), leading many scholars to focus on the nationalistic ideologies embedded in his works.14 From 1926 until his death, Yumeno published detective fiction and numerous short stories in Shin seinen and quickly became a representative writer of the journal. Yumeno owes much of his fame to his last novel—Dogura magura (made-up word hereafter translated as Dogra Magra, 1935)—which focuses on the figure of the psychological double. The curious title, according to the book itself, means “trickery” in Nagasaki dialect. Because of its enormous length—fifteen hundred pages in manuscript form—Yumeno published the novel from Shōhakukan (Pine and Oak Publishing House) with his own funds. The subheading of Dogra Magra—“a fantastic, strange detective fiction” (genma kaiki tantei shōsetsu)—presents a fairly accurate description of the text. The story is about a paranoid mental patient, who is told by his doctors that he may be a murderer named Kure Ichirō. The patient searches for his identity throughout the novel, which is the “detective fiction” part of the story. The novel ends with one of the strangest, most discussed endings in modern Japanese literature: Ichirō discovers that not only is he the murderer but he is also a fetus dreaming inside his mother’s womb. Even though Yumeno thought of this novel as the culmination of his literary career, the contents of the epic novel befuddled critics and readers at the time of its publication, and it failed to receive any scholarly attention until the postwar era.15 The reception of this work during his time was probably best captured by Edogawa Ranpo, who said, “I could never really understand Mr. Yumeno’s works about insanity. . . . The world of insanity that he drew is like one written by an actual insane man and not one depicted by a writer.”16 Yumeno himself stated, “I promise you that if you read Dogra Magra five times, it will give you a different feeling

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each time.”17 In other words, the novel was meant to appear to be utter nonsense. Since then, however, the novel has been praised as Yumeno’s magnum opus, a representative work of pre-1945 subcultural and subversive “heretical literature” (itan bungaku).18 Cultural critic Takami Shunsuke, for example, hailed the novel as a work that criticizes the rapid mechanization of everyday life that was taking place in Shōwa Japan.19 Ōishi Masahiko likewise reads the novel as one that undermines “the Tokyo that Yumeno feared and the mass production and consumption associated with that Tokyo,” implying that the novel subverts the dominant ideologies of his time.20 American scholars have also emphasized the subversive potential of his works: Susan Napier describes him as a writer of “extraordinary fantasy,” who repeatedly wrote on the theme of the insane asylum and revealed the darker side of Japanese modernity.21 Sari Kawana has also astutely pointed out how Yumeno’s works expose the unethical side of modern science.22 Dogra Magra has come to be known as a kind of avantgarde metafiction that criticizes the effects of modernization. However, there is a need to put the political back into Yumeno’s “fantastic fiction.” This chapter thus continues to examine the discourse of colonial uncanny outlined in chapter 2. The double in Dogra Magra, on the one hand, is a good example for exploring the relationship between the cinematic medium and the literary double, as the whole novel is presented to us as a fi lm. However, what comes out in this “fi lm” is the previous question of national identity that undermines the binary of colonizer and colonized—the colonial uncanny. These two forces— cinema and colonialism—are fused together in the novel, and this chapter will examine how the issue of visuality (cinematic representation) is presented as being necessary for the racialization (and deracialization) of a Japanese body.

Schizophrenia and War For Yumeno, Dogra Magra was not just a fictional work but a study of psychology. According to his diary, Yumeno spent approximately a decade on this novel. As his entry from 1925 states: “I have written a draft of the psychological study (seishin shinrigaku),” a study now understood to be an early version of Dogra Magra.23 The novel is set in the psychology

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department of what was then Kyūshū Imperial University, and Sugiyama Kura, Yumeno’s wife, noted his frequent trips to the psychology department of the university in order to collect materials for the novel.24 Kyūshū Imperial University was the center of the study of psychoanalysis in the 1920s, and although psychology was at that time considered little more than a form of popular science, scholars there were conducting extensive research on Freud, Krafft-Ebing, and Otto Rank.25 Yumeno also based the protagonist Kure Ichirō on Kure Shūzō (1866– 1932), one of Japan’s foremost psychologists, who introduced European methods of treatment to Japa nese institutions upon his return from Austria in 1901.26 Kure Shūzō is mainly credited with trying to enforce a less brutal and more ethically correct environment—a more “modern” European treatment—at his home institution, Sugamo Hospital. His records indicate that he attempted in par tic u lar to prohibit the use of chains and handcuffs and focused on managing corrupt department heads and controlling the brutal treatment of the patients by the nurses at the hospital. Yumeno is reputed to have studied the works of Kure at the Kyūshū psychology department proper before writing the novel.27 The psychology department at the time was led by Kure Shūzō’s disciples, and it is generally accepted that the two psychologists in the novel—Dr. Wakabayashi and Dr. Masaki—are based on two actual figures at the university: Takayama Masao, the head of the Department of Medicine at the time, and Shimota Mitsuzō, the head of the Department of Psychology (seishinbyō gaku) and a disciple of Kure Shūzō (fig. 3.1). It is my contention that Yumeno’s take on the figure of the double cannot be understood without considering the works of Kure, in particular his works on schizophrenia. Kure’s research involved the effect of war on the human psyche, and he was one of the first Japanese psychologists to study what has now come to be known as PTSD. To be sure, the field of psychology in Japan was inseparable from the Japanese military itself.28 From its introduction in 1876 through the 1930s, psychology was referred to as seishingaku or seishinbyō gaku (study of the spirit/psyche, or study of the disease of the spirit) instead of the current term shinrigaku (study of the logical working of the mind). Seishin was a newly created word that became disseminated as a term for describing “Japanese-ness” in the famous text by political theorist Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Towards Enlightenment” (1875). In it, he defines the nation not by geography but by “spirit/psyche,” which ties people together through common language and “enlightened” thought.

Figure 3.1 Kure Shūzō, photograph from Shinkeigaku zasshi 22, no. 4 (November 1922). Courtesy of National Diet Library, Tokyo.

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It was a “sense of solidarity and group loyalty that was assumed to spring from shared customs, language, and ethnicity.”29 This concept was then transported to the colonies— especially to Taiwan and Korea, where Japan’s assimilation movement aimed to turn the colonized into “true Japanese,” not only in deed (military conscription) but also in “spirit.” Used repeatedly in phrases such as “the spirit of the military nation” or “imperial nation’s spirit,” seishin became the touchstone of the wartime Japanization movement in the colonies and is hence “intrinsically tied to Japanese wartime diction.”30 Moreover, the field of psychology in Meiji Japan was actually funded by the military. In the 1860s, the only asylums that existed were those controlled by the military, and the first public asylum was not established until 1875 in Kyoto, followed by Kure’s Sugamo Asylum (later renamed Matsuzawa) in 1880. Psychology arose as a discipline—not as a way to cure soldiers’ war psychosis but as a way to train soldiers’ minds in order to prepare for war.31 The Japanese military in fact hired Kure as a researcher, whose goal was to improve the psyche of the soldiers. Kure held residence at the Sugamo Asylum, as well as at other notable military asylums in the Kansai region, to observe the effects of war on the veterans of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). He then published his findings in his seminal work, Meiji sanjūhachinen sen’eki rikugun eiseishi (Hygienic history of the war time army of 1905), which may be the first psychological study in Japan that speaks of war being the direct cause of a mental illness. Through close observation of his patients, Kure noted how soldiers’ war experiences continued to haunt them. They all seemed to suffer from hallucinations of sorts. Some would have auditory hallucinations of nonsensical sounds (pokopen pokopen, perhaps the sound of drums on the battlefield). But most of the soldiers suffered from visual hallucinations, which revealed the common sentiment that they had somehow failed the empire. These veterans had hallucinations about being thrown in jail for their crimes or getting the death penalty for their poor performance on the battlefield. In other cases, veterans experienced a sense of false victory and accomplishment in their hallucinatory state. For one veteran, the emperor himself appeared in his hallucinations to give him honorary medals for killing countless Russians or Chinese. Many of these patients committed suicide because of these auditory and visual hallucinations. Th rough observing all of this, Kure surmised that this hallucinationcausing illness was a kind of psychosis, one that was strongly tied to a

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soldier’s patriotic sentiments, and called it “patriotic insanity” (aikokukyō or folie patriotique).32 As for the scientific name for this repetitive haunting of trauma (what may be called PTSD today), Kure termed it “schizophrenia” (mōsōsei chikyō). Thus, schizophrenia in modern Japan was equivalent to war trauma. Kure is in fact credited with introducing the concept of schizophrenia to Japan. Before the introduction of Emil Kraepelin’s system of classification of mental illnesses, several systems coexisted within the field of Japanese psychiatry. After studying with Kraepelin and returning to Japan in 1901, Kure and fellow psychologist Miura Kinnosuke (1864–1950) founded the Japanese Society of Neurology, introducing the Kraepelin system. Schizophrenia went by numerous names at the time: it was first called sōhatsu chikyō (dementia praecox), coined by Benedict Morel in 1860; then hakabyō (hebephrenia/disorga nized schizophrenia common at adolescent age), termed by Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum in 1865; and finally kinchōbyō (katatonie/catatonic schizophrenia/hyperactivity, or loss of motor skills), coined by Kahlbaum in 1874. Kure introduced these terms in a series of lectures from 1904 to 1906. In his 1905 work on the Russo-Japanese War veterans, he defined schizophrenia as a symptom of war trauma, citing it as the most predominant mental illness among war veterans. He divided the concept into the three categories of hebephrenia, katatonie, and what he called “delusional schizophrenia” (mōsōsei chikyō). He isolated war as the sole source of this delusional paranoia, stating that war-related psychosis was not necessarily tied to one’s heredity but was brought about by the technological destruction on the battlefield. According to Kure, the schizophrenic patient believes that there is another presence, a “real brother,” that resides within his body.33 The patient suffers from hallucinations, which manifest as a possession of sorts. Kure describes one veteran’s “shame of being possessed by a fox,” describing schizophrenia as a kind of fox-spirit possession (kitsunetsuki)—an old folkloric belief that was still accepted by scientists at the time in understanding various mental conditions.34 The schizophrenic, then, suffered from another identity, one inside himself, be it a sort of truer self or an outside spirit. This second identity comes to be known as a “doppelgänger” (bunshin) in Kure’s later writings. Throughout the Taishō period, Kure continued to study this phenomenon of one identity being possessed by another. In a series of essays called Isobe gūshō (Seashore wanderings, serialized 1915–23 in Shinkeigaku zasshi), he began to explore the concept of

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“splitting soul illness” (rikonbyō). Examining Chinese texts from the Song period (960–1279) and Japanese texts from the Edo period, Kure describes this disease as one in which a person sees his or her exact look-alike: Numerous Japa nese and Chinese texts talk about splitting soul illness. Among those, there are disease-like cases and supernatural cases. If we were to define this disease today, the most fitting correspondence would be dual personality disorder (nijū ishiki shō), that is, where one lives a double life (nijū seikatsu) within one’s mind. Natsu’s “Strange Illnesses” (Kiekihō) is akin to [today’s] bipolar disorder (sōutsubyō) where one loses sense in the half of one’s body, and the other half appears as a stranger.35

Kure then describes this disease as a form of “hallucination” (mōsō), in which one body becomes occupied by its “double” (bunshin). This depiction of “split bodies,” he concludes, was the manner in which premodern writers imagined the modern schizophrenic subjectivity (bunretsu nijū hon’nin). He thus connects schizophrenia to the phenomenon of the psychological double. Kure’s formulation of the psychological double as a manifestation of schizophrenia can be found in various psychological journals at the time. However, as is evident in Kure’s own writings, schizophrenia still lacked a concrete definition and precise vocabulary in Taishō Japan. The vocabulary of schizophrenia would eventually be stabilized in 1937, when the Society of Neurology established the modern Japa nese equivalent tōgō shicchōshō (literally “disease of lacking stable unity”), but until then, terms like “dual personality disorder,” “psychological doubling,” and “hysteria” were constantly being conflated. The most interesting reworking of Kure’s theory from this time may be found in the writings of Nakamura Kokyō, a writer who studied under Natsume Sōseki and became one of the foremost scholars of abnormal psychology (hentai shinri). He founded the journal Hentai shinri, (Abnormal psychology, 1917–22), to which Kure Shūzō was a regular contributor. Nakamura serialized two major works on schizophrenic patients in the journal: “Nijū jinkaku no shōnen” (Boy with two personalities, 1917) and “Nijū jinkaku no onna” (Woman with two personalities, 1919).36 He then republished the former essay on the schizophrenic boy as “Nijū jinkaku shōnen no hanzai” (The crime of the boy with two personalities), together with its sequel “Futatabi nijū jinkaku shōnen no hanzai

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ni tsuite” (The crime of the boy with two personalities revisited) in a collection of essays called Hentai shinri to hanzai (Abnormal psychology and crimes, 1930).37 In the opening chapter of the anthology, Nakamura describes the various types of schizophrenia, or what he calls “the splitting of the mind” (ishiki bunretsu). The basic source of this phenomenon lies in the modern condition, which forces us to multitask, where we must constantly try to figure out one thing while thinking about what to do next: “This multitasking (dōjiteki katsudō) has become more and more of a problem, and our psychology (seishin) can no longer function as a single united thought.”38 He then goes on to describe the phenomenon of jidō shuki (automatic writing), in which “a deity or other spirit borrows the hand of the automatic writer and reveals to the world its intentions and desires.”39 The examples Nakamura gives include kokkuri-san (Japa nese version of the Ouija board); Shintō priestesses who tell oracles; and a female patient of his whose second personality can write in foreign languages such as Greek, Latin, and French, even though her real personality cannot. Nakamura states that although these phenomena have traditionally been viewed as “supernatural” occurrences, they actually have a scientific name: schizophrenia (ishiki bunretsu). What is notable here is the language he uses to explain this schizophrenia. After describing automatic writing, he mentions a different kind of schizophrenia, in which one falls into a dream state (muyū jōtai). This type differs from the automatic writing type, Nakamura explains, since for the latter, the two personalities occupy the same place and time. There is a kind of symbiotic relationship in which the real self writes what the second self tells him, and they exist simultaneously, sharing the present moment. However, in the dream-state type, the two personalities occupy different temporalities. They take turns occupying the body. The patient could be cleaning the house when suddenly the second personality takes over and starts talking to the patient’s dead father in a scene from the past. There is no cooperation as in the automatic-writing type, because there is no connection whatsoever between the two. To illustrate this distinction, Nakamura uses the analogy of film: If we were to compare this field of study to that of moving pictures (katsudō shashin) . . . the conscious progression of the patient in the [schizophrenic] dream state (muyū jōtai) would be like a fi lm reel’s continuous succession; however, the conscious becomes separated like a fi lm reel that is suddenly

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Nakamura here clearly aligns the conscious with a film reel. The splitting of the mind occurs when its reel is either edited by attaching another film or shown in split screen with another reel. There occurs a mediafication of the body that Nosaka Akio locates in the body of the surrealist poet: “Occultism generally emphasizes the psyche/spirit over the materiality/body, but at the same time, it requires something that can be a medium (baitai) for the former. It requires a media = medium, an unconscious, mechanical body. If one were conscious, logical, or critical towards the spirit’s message, the medium would fail in conveying (or writing) the message. On the other hand, a body that would react unconsciously, like a hysteric’s body, would succeed.” 41 The schizophrenic body is media-like. It has the ability to “react unconsciously” without thinking. Its mind is a mechanical medium, a camera that records the desires of the other self that resides in the unconscious. As Walter Benjamin eloquently put it, “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as psychoanalysis does to unconscious impulses.” 42 It is not surprising, then, that the main schizophrenic subject for Nakamura turns out to be a boy who suffers from fi lm addiction. In “Nijū jinkaku no shōnen,” Nakamura’s “boy with two personalities” is a teenager named Yamada, who steals money from his parents to run off to Asakusa, the film mecca of Tokyo. Time and again Nakamura uses hypnosis on the boy, for he never remembers what he did in Asakusa, the titles of the fi lms he saw, or even why he skipped school to go to the cinema: “If you don’t even remember anything about it [the film], what is so great about moving pictures?” I [Nakamura] asked. “I try to hold myself back because I know that my mother and brother will worry, but there is something that pushes me to go there, and I can’t not go,” Yamada spoke, shyly. “What is that thing that ‘pushes you’? You know the name of it, don’t you?” I asked sternly. “My evil heart (akushin)! It’s my evil heart!” 43

At one point in their interviews, Yamada remembers that he dashes off to Asakusa when he sees a phantasm (gen’ei): a row of willow trees.

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Nakamura racks his brain to figure out if this image is somehow tied to a fairy tale that Yamada read in his childhood, or perhaps to an image from a film he has watched. And one day, Nakamura solves the puzzle. In the sequel, “Futatabi nijū jinkaku shōnen no hanzai ni tsuite,” Nakamura achieves success with the hypnosis and discovers why the boy obsessively watches films. During their final session, the mystery of the “willow trees” is solved. The following passage is a bit long and grotesque, but since it is extremely important to my reading of Dogra Magra, I quote it in full: When Yamada was around eight or nine, he lived in Korea’s (Chōsen) Shingi prefecture with his parents. One day, he came home from school and left the house to go buy pencils and notebooks with the allowance money his mother had given him. To get to the stationery store, he had to turn several corners, go over a bridge, and then get to the other side of the river. There was a police station at the beginning of the bridge. From there to both sides of the river, large willow trees lined the river. Right when he had gotten to the bridge, he spotted something swaying in the wind beneath the willow trees in front of the police station. He could see that it was covered with a straw mat. Beneath the mat, it seemed that there were strangely shaped things stacked on top of one another. Drawn by his childish curiosity, he took a couple of steps towards it, and in that moment, the wind lifted the mat. Beneath it were three or four Korean corpses (Chōsenjin no shigai) with pale faces and wearing the typical white robes. There was one in par ticu lar that had bright red blood on his pale lips, which stunned the boy. He suddenly remembered that, that morning, in a village not far from his town, around ten Korean robbers had been killed by our police force. Witnessing this horrible, bloody scene [in front of him], his entire body turned to stone. Lacking the strength to immediately turn away, he had stood there for a while, staring at the stacked corpses of the robbers.44

Nakamura thus uncovers the boy’s trauma. What set the boy dashing off to the cinema was this horrifying memory—the memory of the brutal murder of Koreans by the Japanese police. In other words, colonial violence is the underlying cause of the boy’s fi lm addiction. Nakamura analyzes that “the willow illusion that seduces him” is precisely the row of willows he saw in colonial Korea. He surmises that the boy goes to movie theaters because he desires to somehow return to the grotesque scene from his childhood. A textbook case of the Freudian death drive—the repetitive, masochistic compulsion to return to one’s traumatic moment—is at work here. Nakamura deduces that Yamada’s second personality, his

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double—the “evil heart”—must be a manifestation of the colonial violence the boy had repressed. What robbed the boy of his wholeness was his witnessing the butchered, destroyed bodies of the colonized. Colonial memory, like the ghost that possesses the body of the medium, takes over the body of the Japa nese boy. The boy, wanting to see again the scene of the dead bodies, looks for it on the screen of the theater, seeking the ultimate blockbuster war fi lm. There is a double repression revealed in the boy’s tale. Obviously, there is the boy’s memory of the event, which he has forced himself to forget. But within the content of the story is the detail of the straw mat and what lay beneath it—what his country had done and had literally covered up in their colony. The boy’s confession thus reads like an allegory of colonial violence that Japan repressed. The lifting of the mat is like a peek into the national unconscious: what lies beneath the empire are the corpses of the colonized. When the mat is lifted by the wind, the boy suddenly remembers the stories behind their death. It was “our police force” that were the murderers. The uncovering of this national trauma, the recognition of Japan’s crime, then turns him into “stone”—the Freudian moment of castration. It is the recognition that his own country had committed such heinous crimes that emasculates and fragments him. From that moment, he is frozen in the traumatic moment. The only thing that can free him from this reproduction purgatory, that can move him out of the frozen moment, is to watch “moving pictures.” Thus, Nakamura’s study is about a Japa nese boy who seeks his doppelgänger—his colonial other half—on-screen. If we follow Nakamura’s Freudian psychoanalysis that the boy desires to return to his trauma, the boy is watching these films to remember the colonial violence that his nation (and, by extension, he) has committed—that is, to uncover what the nation itself has repressed. Until then, he will be split in two—one half residing in Japan, the other in colonial Korea. It is precisely this dynamic of covering and uncovering, repressing and remembering, that will be seminal in Dogra Magra. As we shall see, Ichirō is uncannily similar to Yamada, torn between the two spaces of the colony and the empire.

Cinematic Mirror Stage Yumeno was an author deeply informed by the Japanese expansionist policy and the historical events taking place around him. One cannot forget

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that Yumeno grew up in a highly politicized environment, for, as mentioned earlier, Yumeno’s father was Sugiyama Shigemaru, a politician who became (in)famous for his plot to assassinate Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi for being too “westernized.”45 Sugiyama once claimed to have “started the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895)” by convincing other politicians with his eloquent tongue. After his failed assassination attempt, Sugiyama met the leader of the right-wing group Gen’yōsha (Black Ocean Society), Tōyama Mitsuru (1855–1944), and became involved in the group’s pan-Asianist movement. Although dubbed a protonationalist group, Gen’yōsha actually held a complicated stance toward the Japanese government and its imperialist endeavors, often strongly opposing them. For example, after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the group showed great sympathy toward the murdered Koreans and threatened to publicize the government’s participation in the brutal killings.46 A precursory examination of Yumeno’s works just preceding Dogra Magra reveals his deeply embedded political interest in colonial identities. In the same year that he published Dogra Magra, Yumeno wrote about his interviews with Uchida Ryōhei (1874–1937)—nephew of Hiraoka Kōtarō (1851–1906), one of the three leading figures of the Gen’yōsha, along with Tōyama and Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855–1932). Sugiyama and Uchida had pushed for the annexation of Korea but saw the government’s annexation policy as a failure. Yumeno visited Uchida two months after his father’s death and wrote Nikkan gōhei omoide banashi (Memories about the annexation of Korea, 1935), basing it on his interview.47 In it, he quotes Uchida, who states, “It is only on the surface that the Japanese and the Koreans seem to be in complete harmony.” Like the Gen’yōsha, Uchida describes himself as being betrayed by the Japanese government and heavily criticizes Japan’s colonial officials: “The officials in Korea are a culturally ignorant race who knows less about shame, propriety, and human emotions than the [Korean] race.” What emerges from his words is a new kind of nationalism that is separate from a blind submission to imperialist tactics. It becomes clear that Uchida and the Gen’yōsha envisioned a different kind of Asian empire that still encapsulated the pan-Asianist ideals of “the Japanese race stepping forward into the [Asian] continent in order to build peace, spirit, and culture” but in a manner different from what they were witnessing in their time.48 Yumeno actually claims to have begun writing his magnum opus from around the time of the Great Kantō Earthquake, when, as a reporter, he witnessed firsthand blind madness and cruelty against foreign

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nationals by Japanese citizens during the massacre of Koreans, Chinese, and the Socialists.49 His diary entry on December  25, 1923, the day the Taishō emperor died, simply reads: “The emperor has passed away. The whole day, I wrote the manuscript on the insane (kyōjin no genkō kaki).”50 This second sentence contains a double entendre when read against the backdrop of the highly controversial “madness” of the Taishō emperor. Was Yumeno making the suggestion that he was writing about both the fictional world of the madmen in his novel and the actual empire led by the “insane,” or perhaps that the two were in fact indistinguishable? One may only surmise, but as I will show, the nonsensical world in Dogra Magra does indeed point to the madness of Japan’s war. No synopsis can do justice to this gigantic novel, but here is the basic plotline. Dogra Magra takes place in an insane asylum and involves three main characters. The fi rst two are Dr.  Masaki and Dr.  Wakabayashi, two rival psychologists who work at the mental institution and conduct psychological experiments. The third is the narrator and the protagonist of the novel, the anonymous patient who has no recollection of his true identity. Throughout the novel, he searches for his identity and his past, and eventually learns that he may have been a serial killer named Kure Ichirō, who has killed both his mother and his fiancée. As the story progresses, it is slowly revealed at multiple points that the narrator is indeed Ichirō, the murderer. However, nothing is certain in this strange novel. At the very end, Ichirō realizes that he is a fetus dreaming the entire history presented in the novel. To put it simply, the unborn Ichirō has just had a long nightmare in his mother’s womb about his possible future murders. What makes this convoluted plot even more difficult to follow, both for the protagonist and for the reader, is the novel’s fragmented style. Its pages are composed of a collage-like mixture of media—newspapers, film scripts, scrolls, and even business cards. Yumeno was a modernist, a writer who embraced what is referred to as modanizumu (modernism), which reached its apex in the early 1920s. Modanizumu is not simply the process of modernization (the establishment of the modern nation, for example), as it refers to the “strong preference for ‘nowness’ over tradition” that emerged after the Great Kantō Earthquake and the reconstruction of Tokyo following the destruction.51 In the literary sphere, this term normally applies to avant-garde writers who tried to capture the effect of the rapidly changing cityscape and the sensations of the newly emerging consumer lifestyle. These modernist writers experimented with a variety of formalistic styles, including repetition, montage, metafiction, and the

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mixing of media. As Miriam Silverberg has elucidated, montage was the foremost method of the “erotic grotesque nonsense” movement, seen as an artistic expression that stood in contrast to the kind of totalizing, univocal discourse of 1920s and 1930s state ideology.52 Thus, montage became the most appropriate expression for capturing the fragmentation and the fleeting moments of everyday life. Modernist writers refuted linear narrative structures and totalizing significations, and Yumeno was no exception. His writing embraces the aesthetic of montage, making readers feel as if they are reading a very long picture book or a video installation interwoven with words.53 These various visual media also represent fragments of the protagonist’s lost memory. The novel presents itself like an enormously prolonged mirror stage. The main motivation for the novel is to figure out the identity of the patient, who needs to piece together information in order to complete his self. The story actually opens with the protagonist standing in his cell, looking at himself in a “gigantic full-length mirror” and not recognizing his own reflection: “This was the first time I had seen myself, and although I was shocked, I could not recall a single thing.”54 He also constantly sees his reflection in his cell window, and is shown films and photographs of himself. These reflections eventually lead him to be introduced to his possible true identity, Kure Ichirō. But of course, the patient is completely uncertain of that information as well: “My soul, no matter how hard I tried, could not recall the past as Kure Ichirō. I repeated the name ‘Kure Ichirō’ over and over in my head, but I could not feel any nostalgia or familiarity that says, ‘this is my name’ towards it at all. . . . No matter what others said, and no matter what evidence they showed me, I could not admit that I myself was Kure Ichirō.”55 Is he really Kure Ichirō, or is the man on the screen just an actor? Th roughout the novel, the patient must collect his fragmented information in order to figure out his identity, and these clues often come in the form of visual media. The patient, even though he sees himself in a variety of visual media throughout the novel, cannot recover from his amnesia. Curiously enough, the most important and recurring form of visual medium is film. The patient watches a film made by Masaki called Kyōjin no kaihō chiryō (Treatment of the insane by free roaming), in which “the protagonist is a beautiful boy actor,” himself. In the film, Wakabayashi is dressed in a costume as the actor, and he performs autopsies on two dead girls, one of which is Moyoko, Kure Ichirō’s fiancée. Masaki acts as the narrator:

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Colonial Doppelgänger Oh my, what to do. The entire moving picture shot in natural light, and actual dialogue has now just turned into a conversation. This is like a horrible radio or record player. It’s deceptively difficult to do benshi narration. . . . This fi lm is not like the outdated, unsubtitled fi lms of Germany. . . . I have rewritten every single page of my report [on the patient] into a sequence and am presenting it as a fi lm. . . . I am just going to insert the gist of it into my will . . . ahem. I think that you, audience, can tell by just reading this . . . this is a trick fi lm (torikku eiga) newly invented by yours truly.56

These passages are written like fi lm scripts, complete with cues like “fade” and “subtitle.” Recall that the title Dogra Magra means “trickery” in Nagasaki dialect, to which Masaki refers in the above passage. The novel is thus presented as a “trick fi lm,” by which readers are meant to believe that they are watching a fi lm rather than reading a book. Masaki thus addresses the “audience” (shokun) and acts as the benshi (a narrator who usually accompanied silent fi lms), and the various written media (newspaper articles, lab reports) following this scene are presented as being diegetic to this “trick fi lm.” In other words, the entire rest of the novel is supposed to be a fi lm. Dogra Magra is the title of this strange movie. It is befitting, then, that the most seminal moment in the novel—when the patient learns key information about his identity—is also a cinematic moment. During his confined state at the institution, Ichirō repeatedly suffers from a strange vision: that of a man who looks exactly like him. The two psychologists agree on the diagnosis: the patient is clearly suffering from sōhatsusei chikyō, Kure Shūzō’s terminology for schizophrenia. The protagonist sees his double for the first time when looking out the asylum’s window. He later thinks to himself, “If that’s Kure Ichirō, who am I? . . . The moment I looked outside the window, I felt as if I had left my body and was standing out there.”57 Dr. Masaki comes in at this point to tell him that “ ‘that young man and you were born from the same woman on the same date,’ ” and the patient inquires if he and Kure Ichirō could be twins.58 However, Dr. Masaki clarifies that this is not the case, as the patient suffers from “splitting soul illness” (rikonbyō), once again Kure Shūzō’s synonym for schizophrenia. Masaki states, “ ‘That person you see outside the window is the objective image (kyakkanteki eizō) of your past self, and you are the subjective conscious that exists in the present. You are simultaneously watching dream and reality at the same time.’ ”59 In his diagnosis, Ichirō is what Nakamura Kokyō called an “automatic

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schizophrenic,” for his psychosis is like watching two different fi lms— “dream and reality”—on a single screen. This perpetual search for the identity of the look-alike eventually leads to the following scene, in which the patient reads the following newspaper clipping: Around noon on the nineteenth (Tuesday), the doctor-in-charge Dr. Masaki was napping in his classroom. As usual, in the outdoor free-roaming area, there were around ten patients, who were left alone and were each performing their own madness (kyōtai o enjitsutsu). . . . Ichirō began to smile, and lift ing again the bloody hoe, approached the two women who were standing there. He first cornered the girl who suffers from a dancing madness (butōkyō) and smashed her forehead. Then he approached the older woman who was in a costume ( funsō) of a queen and had been parading around the courtyard. But when she yelled, “Insolent fool! Don’t you know who I am?” Kure Ichirō was shocked and halted with his hoe in his hands. “Oh, you are Empress Yang Guifei,” he shouted, and knelt upon the sand.60

It is after this seminal scene that the patient finally discovers that he is indeed the murderer: “A sliver of truth (shinsō), as clear as ice, appeared in front of me. . . . I had fallen into a double illusion, what Dr. Masaki had called ‘split soul illness.’ ” 61 The patient instinctively knows that this is the truth. The courtyard scene, in this sense, is the revelation scene, in which the protagonist and the reader confirm the fact that the patient is Ichirō the murderer. Any connoisseur of popular films from this period would have recognized this scene as a direct adaptation of one of the seminal scenes from Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari (fig. 3.2).62 Caligari is about a character named Francis, who chases after the eponymous Dr. Caligari—a mysterious doctor who controls a murderous somnambulist named Cesare. The viewer is made to believe that Caligari is the villain of the story, but in one of the final scenes, it is revealed that the protagonist Francis is actually a mental patient, and that the entire film, including his story about the horrific murderer Dr. Caligari (who turns out to be the director of the asylum), was created in his imagination. In the still from the fi lm, the protagonist Francis approaches his “fiancée” Jane, who is sitting in the middle of the asylum’s courtyard, pretending to be a queen. In the English translation (released in the United States in 1921), Francis approaches her and asks, “Jane, I love you—won’t you be my wife at last?” To this she

Figure 3.2 The courtyard scene from Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene (1916; released in Japan 1919), fi lm still. Courtesy of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Siftung, Wiesbaden.

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replies, “We queens are not permitted to follow the dictates of our heart.” 63 In the Japanese version, narrated by the benshi Tokugawa Musei (1894– 1971), the conversation goes as follows: My lovely princess, I love you. Please marry me. But after all, she is mad. You, commoner, what do you mean? The blood in your body and the blood in my body are completely different. Give up; this is a hopeless love, she honorably says.64

At the surprise conclusion, when viewers discover that it was not Dr. Caligari who was the madman but the protagonist Francis, whom they had stood with throughout the hour-long film, their trust is betrayed. Yumeno almost directly adapts this scene from Caligari. In Dogra Magra, the woman in the middle of the courtyard is Moyoko, the fiancée of Kure Ichirō. As with Jane, Moyoko plays a woman of “royal blood.” But Yumeno gives a twist to the “queen” character of Jane; the “fiancée-queen” of Ichirō claims to be Yang Guifei, the Chinese imperial consort and femme fatale renowned for her beauty. This strange insertion is explained by the backstory of Ichirō’s ancestor, the mad Chinese artist Kure Seishū ࿇㟯⚵ (alternate name Go Seishū). According to Dr. Masaki, Seishū was a fervent patriot and a renowned artist, whose works were commissioned by Emperor Xuanzong, for whom Yang Guifei was consort. Seishū, in order to produce art for his emperor and empress, killed beautiful women. He watched their bodies rot and painted the bodies’ decomposition at every stage.65 When the emperor and Yang Guifei were suddenly attacked and killed, Seishū went insane, and his scroll for her was left incomplete. This strange scroll was passed down through his male heirs and finally to Ichirō. This history of the scroll provides the explanation for the murders. The male descendants are programmed to kill when the scroll triggers their ancestral memories. Once they see the scroll, they transform into Seishū, as if his spirit possesses them, and they go on a hunting spree for beautiful female victims. The scene points to Ichirō’s recognition of this murderous Chinese descent. In other words, it is in this moment that he (or at least his double) becomes racialized as Chinese. Before the courtyard scene, the only information that the patient is certain of is his racial identity as Japa nese. Throughout the novel, Masaki toys with the patient regarding his identity

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and the possibility that he may be related to a Chinese killer. The racial feature of the Chinese is in fact singled out in the novel. Ichirō is described as a kind of racial hybrid, possessing the skin color of “a white race,” nostrils resembling that of “a Mongol,” a “Latin” facial structure, “Ainulike” eyes, and a “Greek” nose.66 But Dr. Masaki points out that all of the different bloods existent in Ichirō have docile characteristics except for one: “the brutal, cruel blood of the Continent [mainland China].” 67 However, right before the courtyard scene, Ichirō himself shouts out: “I may be crazy, but I do know that I am Japanese. I recognize that I have the blood of the Japanese race (minzoku).” 68 Thus, in the courtyard scene, this one certainty of his racial identity is tossed out the window as the Japanese patient becomes marked as a Chinese subject. The theatricality of the entire act here is striking. Moyoko (Yang Guifei) defiantly asks the negative, declarative question, “Don’t you know who I am?” to which Ichirō automatically answers, “Oh, you are Empress Yang Guifei,” kneeling on the ground in an act of physical obeisance. Moyoko’s declaration serves as a clear example of hailing that Althusser outlined in his seminal work on state apparatuses and subject formation. He famously claimed that “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals . . . or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects by that very operation which I have called Interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: Hey you there!” 69 As Judith Butler notes, interpellation requires this type of performative language, in which the state (police) calls out to name an individual (“hey queer!” “hey Japanese!”), and this language simply points to this action of hailing itself. Once the individual answers to that call and accepts the name, she or he becomes initiated into the subjected status entailed by that “name.”70 This scene is presented as a cinematic performance of this subject formation. Here, in the dramatic reenactment of Caligari, Ichirō is bequeathed the name “Chinese” on-screen. The empress initiates Ichirō into the status of the subject, interpellating him into a Chinese national, and Ichirō kneels on the sand, accepting his name. As Joshua ChambersLetson has lucidly illustrated, there is a “slippery ground between performativity and performance,” between the legal formation of the subject and theatricality.71 State apparatuses often require theatrical rhetoric to explain the functions of subject formation, and the Chinese doppelgänger scene captures this precisely by overdramatizing the moment of interpellation.

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It is especially important that this performance is cinematic, for fi lm is the perfect metaphor for discussing subject (ego) formation. Friedrich Kittler brilliantly showed how the technology of the photographic image, or film, directly correlates to Lacanian imaginary—the prelinguistic realm where one’s identity is drawn from images. Kittler cites as his example of this fragmented self a tale in which the protagonist sees his doppelgänger at a cinema: The reason is technological: fi lms anatomize the imaginary picture of the body that endows humans (in contrast to animals) with a borrowed I and, for that reason, remains their great love. Precisely because the camera operates as a perfect mirror, it liquidates the fund of stored self-images in La Marr’s psychic apparatus. . . . And all that not because media are lying but because their trace detection undermines the mirror stage. That is to say: the soul itself, whose technological rechristening is nothing but Lacan’s mirror stage.72

Kittler’s argument is this: Film is the technology of the imaginary, for it provides the mirror stage. Film puts together single frames into a sequence, then it projects those frames as a continuous progression, creating a sense of wholeness. Thus, it functions just like the Lacanian mirror stage, in which the child’s fragmented body becomes whole for the first time by putting all the different pieces together and witnessing a perfect reflection. A full-length feature fi lm is like the fully formed subject, the ego. The entire novel encompasses exactly the kind of Lacanian mirror stage that Kittler elucidated. The unconscious—the story of what the patient has repressed—has turned into a film, just like Yamada’s willow trees. There is a constant alignment of a visual medium with the unconscious, the other notable one being a scroll. Ichirō at one point escapes from the asylum and finds his ancestor’s scroll at his family’s house: “My hand began to open the white part of the scroll. For the first minute or so, I wanted to focus and examine the section in detail, but no matter how far I went, I was forced to just stare at the whiteness of the Chinese paper. Having understood this, I began to feel the stupidity and the anguish of someone who was forced to traverse an endless, white desert, not knowing where to go.”73 The scroll, like the film, is the visual metaphor for the patient’s memory, its blank space representing his incompleteness and amnesia. The patient must collect the various fragments of his past and

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figure out their sequence to put together a whole narrative. Only when this “film” is complete can he graduate to the mirror stage. And here the mirror stage—the completion of the film—involves not only a formation of the ego but a specifically racialized one. There is in fact both a racialization and a deracialization that occur here. Ichirō is deJapanized as he witnesses his other self being turned into a Chinese subject. He is made to forget both his Japanese identity and that of the one other Japanese person close to him—Moyoko—as they are both transformed into Chinese actors on-screen. Moreover, this deracialization is a violent process, accomplished only through brutal killings of Japanese women. By repeatedly watching his “evil” half kill those around him, the colonizer comes to the realization that he may actually be the colonized. The only thing he was certain of—his Japanese “blood”—is stripped from him. Visuality constantly plays an important role here in the process of racialization. As stated earlier, Ichirō is repeatedly introduced to his lookalike via various visual media. That is, there is always a viewing distance maintained between the self and the double, and the one curious marker of this doppelgänger tale is that there is never a physical face-to-face encounter between the two halves. In similar films, the story typically culminates in this sort of encounter. In Paul Wegener’s Der Student von Prag, for example, the self kills the double, which leads to the protagonist’s own death. A similar story is told in Poe’s “William Wilson,” in which the protagonist and his double know each other from childhood, and the death of the protagonist occurs in the same fashion. However, Dogra Magra lacks this encounter scene. Ichirō looks at his double through windowpanes; he reads newspaper articles about his double’s murders and pictures them in his mind; and he watches films about his double, seeing his body only on-screen. The doppelgänger, even in the courtyard scene, is depicted as an actor on-screen. The act of seeing this reproduced image of himself on-screen eventually leads to the completion of his mirror stage. Although he does not initially allow the reproduced images to determine his racial identity, by the courtyard scene, he accepts his names: murderer and Chinese. In a Baudrillardian turn, the reproduction actually becomes more real than his Japanese self. Like in Ranpo’s short story “Hell of Mirrors” (Kagami jigoku, 1926), the protagonist here is surrounded and tormented by his own reflections. These images endlessly call out to him in the manner of hailing, and this repeated action finally defeats him. The shadow on-screen is no longer the shadow; the shadow is he himself.

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Colonial Doppelgänger In this manner, the novel, like Nakamura’s story about the film addict, ties together the rhetoric of cinema with that of colonialism. The act of viewing a film becomes the metaphor for one’s subject formation, which in this case involves racialization. Film is the key medium that triggers what is repressed—the colonial past and colonial identity—to rise to the surface. As in the case of Nakamura’s boy patient, the Japanese self is portrayed as fragmented and incomplete until it finds its colonial half to complete its mirror stage. The novel thus plays on the idea of photographic uncanny—the fright that arises from the inability to distinguish between the represented image on-screen and the “real” body offscreen—by adding a colonial element to it. The reproduction, or doppelgänger, is marked with the same kind of fear discussed in chapter 2, colonial uncanny: an anxiety brought on by uncertainty about whether the line between the colonizer and the colonized can be sustained—in this case, if one is Japanese or Chinese. I want to emphasize that this is not some kind of discriminatory fear toward the Chinese—that the “mad” Chinese blood is somehow contaminating the Japanese nation. The main fright arises from Ichirō’s confusion about his racial identity. Just like in Ranpo’s tale, there is a colonized subject that looks exactly like the colonizer, and his anxiety raises the question, Can one really draw the line between these two groups so seamlessly? Numerous scholars have in fact pointed to the colonial condition as a kind of schizophrenia—a kind of splitting—itself. Albert Memmi, in his classic work The Colonizer and the Colonized, observed that for the colonized subject, the “possession of two languages is not merely a matter of having two tools, but actually means participation in two psychical and cultural realms.”74 For him, the colonized subject is a dual identity, one whose identity simultaneously rests in two domains. Th is is similar to what literary scholar Angelina Yee has termed a “psychic split.” Describing the Taiwanese writer Yang Kui’s works on Japanese colonialism, Yee states that Kui “articulates the intellectual’s deep anguish at his own multiple psychic splits: assuming the colonizer’s values with a guilty conscience, endeavoring to love one’s land in all its glory and ugliness, and abandoning mainland China’s forgotten culture.”75 She describes how the colonial condition is to be always torn between the new ideologies upheld by the colonizer and the memories and the history that belong to one’s past. Yumeno’s protagonist, who must constantly negotiate his present

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Japanese self with his past Chinese ancestry, also suffers from this psychic split. Thus, the double, or doppelgänger, is the perfect metaphor for describing the colonial condition. Note how these scholars emphasize the “twoness” or the “split-ness” of colonized subjects. That is, just because they participate in two cultures does not somehow mean they are “transnational” or that their identities are conflated into one. They can only participate as two split halves, as double identities with two languages and two histories. Ichirō can only act as either Japanese or Chinese at any given time, and he cannot be both races at once. He is either Kure Ichirō the patient or Ichirō the Chinese murderer. And the only thing separating Jekyll from Hyde is a very thin screen (or, more precisely, a scroll). Fittingly, the battle of the two identities culminates in the controversial ending of the novel—the dream of the fetus—the final “film.” The opening epigraph of the novel is a poem: Fetus Fetus Why do you dance? Is it because you are frightened, for you understand the heart of your mother?76

In the very last pages of the novel, Ichirō realizes that he is just an unborn fetus, who dreamt the entire story of Dogra Magra in his mother’s womb: “Everything is a dream of a fetus. . . . I am still in my mother’s womb and am suffering from this fearful ‘dream of a fetus.’ ”77 This is the final twist in the novel, when the reader realizes that the entire epic novel was just a dream sequence of a madman. This ending has occupied much of the scholarly discussion of Dogra Magra. The predominant understanding of the ending has been Karigari Hiroshi’s claim that Yumeno is playing with the Buddhist concept of rinne (karmic cycle), which is the idea that one’s behavior can be attributed to the sins and the actions of one’s past lives.78 I would contend, however, that we are meant to read the dream as the final visual medium of the text, the final film. When the concept of a fetus’s dream is first explained by the psychologists, it is specifically described as a “frighteningly long serial film.”79 The psychologists expound on the theory that certain past memories are recorded in the cells of the human body, and these become passed down biologically. Hence, even a

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fetus can actually remember the past, if he or she so desires. While explaining this scientific theory to the patient, Wakabayashi states: “At some point, when you have recovered your past memories, you will realize who the protagonist of the horror film Taiji no yume (The dream of the fetus) is.”80 And the ending of the novel, the dream scene, certainly has a filmic quality. The final passages resemble a montage of shots: Buun . . . I opened my eyes wider . . . buun . . . Along with the sound, I saw Dr. Masaki’s emaciated face, sweat pouring down his face with his glasses. . . . He looked down, as if bowing in silence, and it disappeared with a snicker . . . buun . . . The suffering, bloody face of Chiyoko appeared . . . buun . . . The girl Asada Shino’s butchered head and dark liquid flowing out of it . . . buun . . . The bloody face of Yayoko looked up menacingly . . . buuuun buun buun buun buun.81

In this manner, the final pages are composed of extremely short paragraphs, interspersed by the onomatopoeia buun (ambient noise or sound of something spinning). The novel explains that this is the sound of the clock down the hall, but if one is to accept the psychologists’ description of the dream as a film, one may interpret the sound as that of a film projector. As essayist Kawata Tadasu reminisces, early cinema “did not even have the narration by benshi, and the only sound that the silent audience, watching the silent films, could hear was the sound of the projector spinning around.”82 The sequencing here resembles fi lmic shots, as various images of characters appear one after the other as a montage, and a mechanical sound is used to separate these “shots.” The ending thus represents the very last chance for Ichirō to complete his mirror stage—to put together his film. The dream is the final evidence he views in order to collect the fragments of his past. This time, he comes extremely close, for the last flicker of an image that he sees is that of his mad ancestor, Kure Seishū. The very last words of the novel are: “ ‘Oh! Kure Seishū!’ I barely had the chance to shout before he disappeared into thin air. Buuuuuuun.” The novel ends before he can confirm his lineage, again erased by the sound of the (cinematic) machine. The mirror stage thus ends in failure, and Ichirō remains a split subject. Everyone in the novel, in fact, is turned into a split identity. Moyoko is just like Ichirō, in the sense that her persona is a Chinese empress, and Dr. Wakabayashi and Dr. Masaki are gradually just coded as “W” and “M,” mirror images of each other. Wakabayashi’s first name, in fact, is Kyōtarō, or “mirror child.” Just

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like the boy Yamada, who never finds the image of the willow trees in the dark space of the theater, Ichirō never finds the image that makes him whole.

Nonsensical Madness This chapter offered a reading of Yumeno’s Dogra Magra, regarded as a nonsensical, metafictional work. I began by introducing the works by Kure Shūzo, who served as the model for the protagonist, Kure Ichirō, focusing on his definition of schizophrenia as trauma brought on by war. I then turned to Nakamura Kokyō, who explained this splitting of the psyche by employing the rhetoric of cinema. Dogra Magra is presented to the reader as a “frighteningly long” trick fi lm. The horror—the uncanny— arises when the protagonist, as part of his incomplete mirror stage, is forced to face his Chinese look-alike on-screen, causing his repressed Chinese ancestry to return to him. At this point, it becomes unclear if the border between the colonizer and the colonized can really be sustained. Like Nakamura’s boy patient, Yamada, Ichirō watches countless films over and over but in the end cannot attain his mirror stages because he fails to complete his film. Yumeno’s novel may seem extremely nonsensical at first, as if it really was “written by an actual insane man,” as Ranpo quipped. The story is incessantly long, full of repetitions and a strange juxtaposition of texts and media that resist any coherence or totality. Although the setup resembles a detective fiction in its search for a truth—the madman’s identity— the search ends more or less in futility, and every time the reader discovers what may be a clue, it turns out to be a red herring. However, this nonsensical universe served as a highly political space for Yumeno. In a philosophical essay called “ ‘Seikatsu’ + ‘sensō’ + ‘kyōgi’ ÷ 0 = noh” (“Life” + “war” + “sports” ÷ 0 = “Noh”), Yumeno elaborates on his own understanding of the aesthetic of nansensu: “The epitome of everyday life’s nonsense becomes war. The epitome of war’s nonsense becomes sports. From everyday life, war is born and from war, sports. Then once sports are transformed into nonsense, they turn into dance, song, and rhythm. Hence the epitome of nonsense is Noh theatre.”83 In this essay, Yumeno aligns Noh theater with war. For him, the essence of traditional Noh is the sublimity that arises from “diligently repeating a single action,” an action that is equivalent to the drills that a soldier must perform on the battlefield. Yumeno constantly compares war zones to the Noh

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stage, where aestheticized bodies must follow repetitive orders to perform, resulting in an intense sublimity that wavers between life and death. War is consistently captured as a form of theatricality, in which each body on stage must continually perform to its nonsensical music. Thus, in “Senjō” (War zone), published posthumously in the May 1936 issue of Kaizō, Yumeno uses the word nonsense to describe war itself and compares the “rhythm” of war to the Japanese dance of baka bayashi (fool’s dance), undermining the dignity of Japanese soldiers by intimating that they are a kind of fool themselves: War—I become ill when I hear that word. War is when pointless logic and science embrace each other chaotically and frantically. War is when rows of pale corpses dance around aimlessly, where red, living human crowds are pushed over, cut into a million pieces, torn apart, made to rot, turning into poisonous gas and dissipating in the wind.84

Dogra Magra, to be sure, is not set in a war zone, and the theme of war is not conspicuous. However, it is ever present in the backdrop of the novel, like the ambient sound of buun. In the aforementioned essay on nonsense, Yumeno curiously mentions a “vigorous man in a green suit, who repeatedly slams down a large hammer,” as another example of a nonsensical performer.85 This imagery of the hammer-wielding man, which appears in Dogra Magra, is based on a real incident. In his memoir of Yumeno Kyūsaku, Yumeno’s son, Sugiyama Tatsumaru, recalls his father’s story: There was the time when, searching for a society that values humanity, he [Yumeno] decided to live at a certain factory in Edogawa, among the crowd of factory workers. Every afternoon, he ate his boxed lunch at the riverbed of Sumida River. There was a man, who would also come to the other side of the river every afternoon to smoke his cigarette. Several days later, even though they could not see each other’s faces, he began to just raise his hand to greet my father for whatever reason, so my father, too, began to reply to his greeting by raising his hand as well. One spring day, my father sat down there as usual, surrounded by dandelions and Chinese milk vetches. The other person, too, greeted him and sat down, smoking his cigarette. My father could see the purple smoke from his hand float away in the spring air. He opened the lunch he had wrapped in newspaper and grabbed a rice ball. As he brought it near his mouth, he

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saw a man in a green and black work suit approach the man who was smoking. This man snuck up behind the smoker. He drew out a hammer that he had hidden behind his back, raised both hands, and suddenly struck the head of the smoker. The head of the victim was smashed into a concave shape by the hammer, and he fell to his side. The man with the hammer, once again, raised the hammer to his head, and the hammer glared in the sunlight. But once he observed that the man was not moving, he lowered his hammer and kicked the dead man. The man had probably died in an instant. The dead man’s body rolled down the riverbed, falling into Sumida River. His body floated down the river, in which cherry blossom petals floated about. The man with the hammer followed the body with his eyes, but he must have already confirmed the man’s death. Resting the hammer against his shoulder, he walked off away from the riverbed, disappearing in an instant. My father could only witness the whole incident in utter shock, just screaming in his mind “Oh! Oh! Oh!” and still holding his rice ball to his mouth. After that, he feverishly read the newspaper everyday, searching for an article about a dead body in the Sumida River. However, he could not find even a single line. The reason, the identity of the murderer, and the motive of the incident remained inconclusive. My father said that because of this, he learned that there was no such thing as the humane society that he was seeking, that there was a world that killed for no reason, not for a name and not for a status. He said he learned of the horror of human society.86

This episode of a hammer-wielding murderer is uncannily similar to the hoe-wielding murderer of Dogra Magra. Here, a murderer for no known reason brutally murders another and gets away with his crime. Even though there is evidence and a witness, the murder is never made public, and no historical or legal record of it exists. It is this erasure, this injustice and repression by the media, that Yumeno described as “the horror of human society” (ningen shakai no kyōfu), not the act of murder itself. This is not to imply that Dogra Magra should be read as an autobiography or as a psychoanalytical study of the author; rather, the hammerwielding psychological double can be read as a complex metaphor that points to institutional violence and the repression of certain narratives. As in Ranpo’s tale of repressed colonial history, Yumeno in his anecdote criticizes the media’s irresponsibility of letting a man get away with murder. For him, the media and the larger Japanese society were just as responsible for the crime he witnessed as was the actual murderer. They suppressed the narrative, ignoring the witness and the dead body that floated down

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the river. This historical erasure, this “horror,” is what becomes articulated in the novel. In Yumeno’s eyes, Taishō and early Shōwa Japan itself was mad. The wartime empire was an institution of fools, just like an asylum. His nansensu works encompassed his personal critique of the irrationality and criminality exhibited by society, and his tales of madness surrounded the repression of narratives that unethical institutions carried out. The two cruel psychologists, W and M, basically functioned like the media, feeding the patient whatever information they wanted to and hiding the rest. In a way, the most frightening aspect of the novel is the nansensu format (the juxtaposition of multiple media) itself. Readers become lost in a world where they never know if what they are reading is really true, or if they are in fact reading a text or watching a fi lm. Yumeno’s nonsensical writing thus aligns his readers with the patient and traps us in the world of madness as well. We, too, are forced to watch the “frighteningly long serial film” and become the target of trickery, unable to escape the space of the asylum.

Chapter Four

Robot Babies Artificial Reproduction

n an essay entitled “Modanizumu to shakaiteki konkyo” (Modernism and its social basis, 1930), cultural historian Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (1892–1931) captured his era as follows: “Contemporary people, since they were born, have been seeing steamships, telegrams, telephones, moving pictures, and airplanes. For them, these kinds of things represent the natural environment, just like trees growing on mountains and like water occupying the oceans. It is not [considered to be] strange at all.”1 Late Taishō and early Shōwa Japan witnessed a growing fascination with mechanical objects. Machines were quickly becoming incorporated into the everyday landscape. X-rays became commonplace in the medical field. The first airplane route in Japan was established in August 1928, just one year before the famous Zeppelin landing. Elevators bedecked Ginza department stores, and telephones no longer required operators after 1926.2 Hirabayashi distinguishes between the older generation, which had not grown up with these machines, and the new generation, which had learned to coexist with machines as part of their natural environment. This generation had witnessed the dawn of what he calls “the age of machines” (kikai jidai). In this chapter, I focus on the epitome of this mechanical wonder, the so-called jinzō ningen (literally “man-made humans” or “artificial humans,” often written with the kana robotto), whose popularity saw its apex precisely during this “age of machines,” from the mid-1920s through the 1930s.3 Although Hirabayashi is mainly known for his criticism on proletarian literature and later popular literature (taishū bungaku), he also published numerous articles on women’s issues and birth control in the

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latter half of his academic career. This chapter examines one of his short stories, simply called “Jinzō ningen” (Robot), published in the April 1928 issue of Shin seinen (New youth), together with the short story of the same name by Takada Giichirō (1886–1945), which had been published in the same journal one year before. These publications mark a moment in which new human anatomy—in this case, mechanized bodies—came to be imagined in modern Japanese culture. Mechanical bodies have always held a special place in the discourse of the uncanny. Drawing from Jentsch, Freud described the automaton Olimpia in Hoff mann’s “Sandman” as a figure that encapsulates “uncertainty [as to] whether an object is living or inanimate.” 4 He repeats Jentsch’s declaration that “among all the psychical uncertainties that can become a cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.”5 Thus, the fear of automata and robots arises from the blurring of the natural body and the artificial body, the mistaking of the machine for an actual human. This issue has continued to be addressed even in contemporary fiction, and scholars like Christopher Bolton have located the uncanny in postmodern cyborgs. Bolton has shown that ambivalence toward machines is tied to the moment when machinery finds its way into the bodies of humanlike beings, disappearing and hiding itself in the guise of the natural: “This gradual internalization of technology is the central trope of the cyborg and the key step in blurring the line between bodies and tools, or humans and machines.” 6 Automatons and robots have long haunted the literary sphere as uncanny objects that can simulate human behavior to the point of appearing indistinguishable from real human beings, effacing any outside markers that would make them stand out as machines. Th is chapter argues that this uncertainty regarding human and machine, at least for the Shōwa robots, surrounded the female body— specifically its reproductive system and the creation of robot babies. Robots were not just a fascination of Shin seinen writers. Various circles, ranging from children’s literature writers to eugenic specialists to Marxist scholars, called on these mechanical beings as a way to explore the possibilities of the human body—its limits, boundaries, and evolutionary process. Hirabayashi’s text is just one small part of this robot boom, and

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it addresses precisely those anxieties associated with technological advancement. It reveals both desire for and fear of the mechanization of human bodies, and explores the boundaries and responsibilities of female bodies. In particular, it addresses the question, What would happen if robots began to have babies? And, as we shall see, these literary and scientific dialogues about mechanized bodies gained momentum with the introduction of a specific discourse that arose at the same time (not at all coincidentally) as the robot boom: the birth control movement.

The Birth of Jinzō Ningen Mechanical bodies had been a source of wonder long before the 1920s.7 In Japan, mechanical devices such as karakuri ningyō (trick dolls), jōruri (puppet theater), and chahakobi ningyō (tea-carrying dolls) were beginning to provide entertainment for their Edo period audiences, as this desire to visualize the invisible workings of the human anatomy was becoming the main focus of scientists. The Dutch introduced anatomy and biology, and intellectuals such as Sugita Genpaku (1733–1817) partook in dissections of the human body, publishing detailed drawings of the human anatomy. It was during this rise of anatomical science, typically known as Dutch studies, that automaton-like dolls were first created. In fact, Matsuzaki Yoshinobu points to the sakazuki hakobi ningyō (sake cup–carrying dolls) from 1775 as Japan’s very first “robot.”8 Virtually nothing about its creator, Wakai Nobuchika, is known. However, his invention was followed by books like Karakuri zui (Illustrated works of trick dolls, 1796), which showed the workings of automata, not to mention a wide range of mechanical dolls themselves. Since medical writings were only disseminated among a tight circle of scholars, it is doubtful that Dutch studies and the anatomical drawings they produced directly influenced inventors like Wakai Nobuchika. However, the creations coincide with the larger, ongoing development in science and technology in Japan. Many of the inventors were scientists in their own right; some built agricultural machines, while others created cameras, medicines, and even fireworks. These Japa nese automata were considered to be scientific projects, not merely curios. Modern jinzō ningen arose from this desire to visualize the invisible parts of the human anatomy and thus reveals a certain continuity with its predecessors. However, it would be a mistake to simply group

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these mechanical bodies together as automata, for unlike their Edo counterparts, these new machines blurred the boundary between the natural human body and the artificial. To outline a brief history of jinzō ningen, the word “robot” was fi rst introduced to Japan by Czech writer Karel Čapek’s (1890–1938) famous play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1920). The play was brought to Japan in 1923 and translated into two versions, one by Suzuki Zentarō (1883–1950) and the other by Itsuo Uga (dates unknown). Suzuki’s version was performed in Tokyo the following year. According to Yomiuri shinbun (Yomiuri newspaper), the play was even performed as a rakugo at the Tsukiji theater in July 1924.9 It was also republished as Ningen seizō kaisha (The company that produces humans) in Bungei kurabu (Literary club) and made into a film by Nikkatsu the same year. R.U.R. presented robots (meaning “slaves” or “labor” in Czech) that were extremely different from their older counterparts. These robots were no longer mechanical toys made for aristocratic pleasure, nonhuman objects carry ing sake or tea. As scholars have observed, they were “not robots but androids that preceded the word ‘androids.’ ”10 Their bodies were indistinguishable from those of actual human beings and resembled Frankenstein’s monster because they consisted of “a hybrid of organic materials.”11 In the play, the robots begin to develop human emotions like love and pain, becoming more lifelike at every step. Čapek blurs the distinction between human and machines to the extent that not only do machines become more like humans but also humans become more machinelike. As the visiting Helen notes when she meets Sura, the secretary-robot: “Sura is not a robot! She is a girl just like me!”12 By the end, the humans lose their ability to reproduce and face extinction. R.U.R. is a blatant critique of modern capitalism, and the rich capitalists in the play are incapable of human emotion. Revolting against the capitalist bourgeoisie, the robots represent the proletariat and eventually take over the world. The mechanical slaves thus conquer and destroy the Rossum Company (“Rossum” meaning “rational” or “reason” in Czech). Čapek’s play brought about a robot boom in modern Japan. Books on how to make your own artificial human began to appear; more and more children showcased or presented their homemade robots at school exhibits. Aizawa Jirō, the author of this series, outlines the history of jinzō ningen and dates it back not to the Edo period dolls but specifically to Čapek’s play.13 Fascinated with how much machines have come to resemble humans, Aizawa cites other examples: robots exhibited as “machine

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boxes” in 1860s London, and Televox, the robot manufactured by the Westinghouse Electricity Company in 1928, which apparently behaved exactly like a human in both language and movement. In 1929, Televox appeared in New York, producing voices through a recording device. Soon after, a British inventor, whom Japa nese writers simply referred to as “Mr. Robert,” invented a female robot that could walk. And in 1931, Westinghouse created a robot that reacted to simple commands. In his book, Aizawa calls for more serious, “practical” applications of jinzō ningen—such as using them in wars—rather than merely inventing them for entertainment purposes.14 Other writers and journals also helped disseminate the popularity of these android-like beings. Publications such as Yomiuri shinbun (Yomiuri newspaper) and Kagaku gahō (Illustrated journal of science) published numerous jinzō ningen stories. Journals reported on jinzō ningen creations abroad; a picture of the famous robot Eric delivering a speech to its British audience, for example, was disseminated in Japan. Authors of detective fiction turned to mechanical imagery, while proletarian writers depicted the harshness of Taylorism—the automation of the human body in workplaces—in modern factory settings. As in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936), machines in these works represent objects that alienate and dispossess the laboring classes, as workers lose their jobs and livelihoods or become like automated machines themselves.15 Japan’s robot boom hit its high point when the country introduced its fi rst robot in 1929.16 Invented by scientist Nishimura Makoto (1883– 1956), it was named Gakutensoku and was exhibited all over Japan (fig. 4.1). The robot held in his left hand an “inspirational light” symbolizing human creativity, and in his right, an arrow representing the beginning of all things—the creation.17 Nishimura’s goal was to produce a robot that “could transcend racial distinctions,” and he therefore “compiled features of various ethnicities.”18 For him, racial hybridity was a way to transcend racial boundaries. In other words, his aim was not to simply produce something humanlike but to create a robot that embodied a kind of universal human physical form. The robot thus wore a cosmos flower on its chest, symbolizing the universe. It was also inscribed with the signs for male and female on the right and left upper corners, respectively, so as to avoid any hint of sexism. The result was so lifelike that it could even change its facial expressions, impressing its audience with its simulation of human behavior.19 Nishimura

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Figure 4.1 Image of Gakutensoku. The caption “Seimei o kataru” (Talking about life) refers to Nishimura’s chapter title in Daichi no harawata (Innards of earth) (Tokyo: Tōkō Shoin, 1930), p. 505. Courtesy of National Diet Library, Tokyo.

states that “while watching Gakutensoku’s movements [viewers] behaved as if under hypnosis, mimicking his movements. This proves how the audience forgot that they were looking at a ‘doll’ and actually felt as if they were looking at a large person with warm blood and breath.”20 The machine was quickly becoming the new metaphor of the human body, as both scientific and literary writings drew analogies between the biological and the mechanical. Nishimura presented a chart that compared the body of a natural human (shizenjin) to that of an artificial

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human ( jinzōjin), drawing similarities between veins and rubber tubes, food and electricity, and so forth (fig. 4.2).21 Images of jinzō ningen in Kagaku gahō often emphasized these parallels as well, representing mechanical parts comprising the human body.22 Moreover, Cartesian philosophy was witnessing a revival among eugenicists. Nagai Hisomu, one of the leading eugenicists of this era, argued for mechanism (kikaisetsu) and grounded his philosophy in that of Descartes. He placed the body before the soul and treated it as an all-knowable machine, stating that every physical phenomenon could be explained by the power of science.23 Eugenicists were deeply engaged in debating which philosophy should govern their field—mechanism or its opposite, vitalism (shunkisetsu). Nagai and his colleagues leaned toward the former as they explored ways of enhancing and improving the human body. In an essay called “Seitai jinzō ron” (On creating artificial bodies, 1929), Nagai even proclaimed that society was now doing what Goethe dreamed of in Faust: “creating living organisms from inanimate objects.”24 To Nagai, the human body was a machine that still needed fi ne-tuning and improvements. By the late 1920s, human bodies were turning into what Mark Seltzer has termed “statistical persons,” entities that could be converted into objects of statistics and surveillance, into numbers and measurements.25 In his famous work Kikai to geijutsu to no kōryū (Communion of machines and art, 1929), Marxist scholar Itagaki Takao (1894–1966) claimed that the machine was the ultimate aesthetic governing his era: “Whereas in former times, people believed in religion, the people of today believe in the power of machines. In the past, architects focused their energies on constructing temples, but now factories have taken over. . . . As today’s social lifestyle idealizes ‘the rationalization of life,’ new religion is born from the authority of machines.”26 In essence, Itagaki’s opinion is extremely similar to the ideas of Hirabayashi, who noted the incorporation of machines into everyday life. Both scholars recognized the dominance of machines in their era, observing their quasi-religious power over the populace; both saw the machine as one of the fundamental metaphors of Japanese modernism (modanizumu). The mid-1920s in Japan witnessed the importation and appropriation of various European movements, such as dadaism, surrealism, and symbolism. Suzuki Sadami has accordingly commented on modanizumu as a “dialogue” between various discourses:

Figure 4.2 Robot with physiological organs. Th is robot was exhibited in London and introduced to Japan in Kagaku gahō (Illustrated journal of science) 12, no. 3 (March 1929): 328. Courtesy of National Diet Library, Tokyo.

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The reception of Japan’s classical art acted as a stimulus for European modernism, and in turn, this was then received by Japan and pushed forward her own modernism. In this manner, Japan’s modernism in the literary sphere was engaged in a constant dialogue with other movements, such as the development in art and aesthetics, which advanced through reciprocal interactions with foreign countries and also with critiques of classical literature.27

In Japan, various images came to be associated with this modernist movement: the figures of moga (modern girls) and mobo (modern boys), who dressed in Western clothing and reveled in consumerism; the new cityscape of Tokyo, with its high-rises, cafés, movie theaters, and Ginza department stores; not to mention machines and technological advances. These representations of modernity were interconnected with one another, and artists and writers alike sought to express their admiration for their epoch by constructing a new aesthetics of the city and its trends. For scholars like Itagaki and Hirabayashi, the machine was the epitome of this new modern aesthetic. Itagaki praised the “speed” and the “order” of mechanical objects and wished that literature would change its tempo according to the rhythm of machines, believing that machines could influence not just architecture or material forms but literary creation as well.28 Hirabayashi, as we have seen, identified the ubiquity of machines as the key difference between the older generation and the new one, presenting the machine as the metaphor of the latter. As cultural historian Ôya Sōichi declared, “ ‘Modan’ signifies a period’s avant-gardism. . . . It is a nation’s transmitter that receives new and rare things and passes them on to the people of its era.”29 Modanizumu is often described as being all about kankaku (sense, affect), and mechanical metaphors functioned to capture the stimulation and the rapid pace of modern city life. Early Shōwa-era Japan can indeed be described as maintaining a love– hate relationship with machines, and it is clear that Itagaki and other Marxist writers saw a certain danger in modern technology, especially for the proletariat. They would define the naturalization of machines—what is called “mechanical realism”—against the idea of “mechanical romanticism,” a movement that merely “fetishizes” machines and does not propose freeing them from the control of the bourgeoisie.30 Citing Čapek, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), and F. T. Marinetti’s futurist works as key examples of this mechanical romanticism, these Marxists criticize the darker images of machines that haunt the art and literature of their times.

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For them, these romanticist works evade the current social dilemmas of factory workers and the question of how to give the working class control of mechanical production. In other words, mechanical romanticism is seen as asocial and apolitical, simply reproducing the image of machines as authoritative figures that control and torment workers and remaining apathetic to their cause. Itagaki calls for a mediation between this romanticism and mechanical realism, warning the reader that the time has come to decide who should control the power of machines. The shift from mechanical romanticism to realism became the foremost concern for many writers and intellectuals. Suzuki Zentarō, the aforementioned translator of R.U.R., had already observed that the people of his time, especially the proletariat, were becoming slaves to machines.31 Kimura Yoshimi, another Marxist scholar, seconded Itagaki’s ideas. He proposed to study machines not merely as symbols and metaphors in art but as objects related to everyday life. Only from that perspective, he claimed, could we understand how machines governed “human anatomy, how scientific study related to psychology, biological studies of exercise, engineering, and other pure sciences.”32 Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960), social activist and writer of the Taishō-era bestseller Shisen o koete (Crossing the deathline, 1920), similarly envisioned the people of his era as entering into a maze where their fate would be entwined with that of machines: would they be used for destructive purposes in colonialism and war, or could they coexist with and improve human life? His work ends with a manifesto: “With freedom of thought, break apart the chain of machines. What will save us is not bread, meat, factories, the military or power. It is thought (shisō).”33 The image of the machine was thus inseparable from Marxist thought and the world of R.U.R., and implicit within this portrayal was skepticism toward systemized labor. Under factory conditions, mechanism—the idea of the human body as a machine—was not only an imminent reality but a major social concern.

Robotic Mothers and Artificial Wombs It was during this period of anxiety toward machines that two stories with the same title appeared in Shin seinen: “Jinzō ningen” by Takada Giichirō (1886–1945) in the 1927 issue, and Hirabayashi’s in 1928 (hereafter “Robot”). Hirabayashi was undoubtedly influenced by Takada’s work, for the stories are uncannily similar. Both feature a mad-scientist character who

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dreams of artificial reproduction. Takada’s story is written in the manner of a reported conversation; the narrator is seated outside a famous professor’s office and eavesdrops as the professor discusses his “artificial uterus” ( jinkō shikyū) project with an unknown listener. The professor describes his invention as one that will save women from the pains of childbirth and claims that he has already succeeded in carry ing out several cases. At the end of the tale, however, the narrator wakes up in his bed, and the whole story about the artificial uterus is revealed to have been a dream. Similarly, in Hirabayashi’s tale, a prominent scientist, Dr. Muraki, announces to the public that he has succeeded in creating a robot fetus ( jinzō taiji) and that he will be presenting this specimen at a conference in eight months. On the day of the conference, Muraki, as expected, displays a baby in a glass case. Loud applause fills the conference room. However, in the next scene, we quickly discover that Muraki has committed suicide and has left a note to his lover and disciple Fusako. The whole project turns out to be a hoax, as the baby was his illegitimate child with Fusako. He had drugged Fusako and stolen the baby shortly after its birth. In his suicide note, he confesses that he had only undertaken the jinzō ningen project to hide Fusako’s pregnancy from society. In the end, Muraki leaves the baby to Fusako. The cheerful tone at the beginning of the story is undercut in the end, with Fusako crying over Muraki’s suicide note. I want to begin my analysis by pointing to the common theme of these tales—artificial reproduction without women. As outlined in the previous section, there were multiple significations for the image of the robot in 1920s Japan—proletarian (robot as “slave”), modernist (robot as representing the modan sentiment), and eugenicist (the body as machine), to name a few. However, the main focus of early Shōwa robot literature was without a doubt the female reproductive system, or rather the machine as a replacement for the maternal body. In these two short stories, both protagonists justify their experiment from a feminist standpoint. When Muraki announces his experiment, a “feminist” reacts to it: “ ‘Women’s issues ( fujin mondai) will now be resolved,’ she declared. If a woman no longer needed to concern herself with pregnancy or childbirth, there would be no biological distinction between men and women, and women would be able to fully participate in cultural production.” A eugenicist then chimes in, “Eugenics has now become the rational basis [of science].” In Takada’s tale, the professor explains the reason for his “test tube baby” experiment:

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There are new women who say they do not want to suffer the pains of pregnancy, turn into an ugly body, or age faster just because of pregnancy. Some also fear that they may hurt the fetus because they would not be able to take good care of themselves during pregnancy. Some men also always wished to have artificial reproduction ( jinkō ninshin) from a eugenic standpoint, but they could not imagine borrowing a superior person’s seed and placing it into their own wives’ wombs. However, with this artificial womb ( jinkō shikyū), they would not have any emotional connection and hence would be able to get their ideal hero’s seed without hesitation.34

The rhetoric here of “freeing women from childbirth pains” and “solving women’s issues” is directly taken from the two social groups mentioned—eugenicists and feminists—and it is no accident that the publication of these two stories coincided with the height of the Japanese birth control movement, which united feminist activists and eugenicists for the first time in Japanese history. Yoshida Morio, in his seminal essay on 1920s robot literature, brilliantly demonstrated that modern robot texts, especially R.U.R. and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926, 1929 in Japan),35 were inseparable from the birth control movement. In a prototypical jinzō ningen story, female robots are depicted as creatures that lack reproductive capabilities and are cast against motherly humans (the human Maria and the robot Maria in Metropolis being the prime example). In Metropolis, the robot Maria—whose nude female body was the first of its kind—is represented as a femme fatale figure in opposition to the human Maria, with her purity and religious faith. The female robot here is marked as a dangerous, sterile body. She is, as Yamada Natsuki has described, an “incomplete body” ( fukanzen na shintai), a body that was contrasted to the “complete” body of the human and the male.36 R.U.R., furthermore, describes a world where human beings mysteriously stop giving birth as robots rise to power. In the second act, the robots fi nally rebel against the humans. Helen, the company president’s daughter, discovers two separate bits of information in the newspaper on the day of the rebellion: (1) over 700,000 people were murdered by robots, and (2) there were no human births in the past week. By the end of the second act, all humans have stopped giving birth, and we discover that robots are not capable of having children. R.U.R., as much as it is an overt criticism of capitalist society, is also a bleak story about the end of human procreation. It ends with every single human dead, and the only hope left

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for civilization are the two robots Primus and Helena, sent out into the world with the new names of Adam and Eve. The story thus concludes with the scientific fantasy of mechanical procreation, the creation of robots that can become pregnant and repopulate the world. The topic of the reproductive capability (or incapability) of female robots was incorporated into Japanese jinzō ningen literature. In Koyama Eijuka’s short story “S Mibōjin to robotto” (Widow S and robot, 1929), robots are depicted as sterile bodies and as either femme fatales or lifeless lovers.37 Mizushima Niou’s satirical work “Jinzō ningen jidai” (The age of robots, 1929) picks up where R.U.R. left off; in this work, robots can now give birth, and their numbers begin to surpass that of the human population. In his unique scenario, robots and humans produce mixed-blood children (konketsuji), and the human strain is slowly being superseded or replaced by that of robots.38 The narrator captures mechanical reproduction with a certain angst: “Who invented these artificial humans ( jinzō ningen)? No, it’s all right if they just stopped at inventing them, but who exactly gave them different sexes? No, the two sexes can be tolerated, but it is terrible that they now have the ability to . . . give birth to children. . . . The real people (honmono no ningen) are gradually becoming restless.”39 These 1920s robot tales do not simply address a conflict between machines and humans; rather, they are commentaries on the future of biological reproduction. They depict a world where women have stopped becoming pregnant and where machines are replacing human mothers. As a result of the rise of the birth control movement, the anxiety about the possible end of biological reproduction in 1920s Japan was not as farfetched as it might seem.40 Taishō Japan was suffering from a specific population problem: The working class (musan kyūkai) was experiencing an increase in its birth rate, while the educated upper class was witnessing a decrease in its numbers.41 At the same time, Japan was suffering from an increased rate of infant mortality. As intellectuals argued that these deaths were related to the physical weaknesses and illnesses of the mothers, all eyes turned to the nation’s potential mothers. The Japanese birth control movement, led by Ishimoto (or Katō) Shizue, stepped in to promote the movement as the ultimate solution, not only to the population problem but also to the improvement of the Japanese race.42 With the arrival of Margaret Sanger in 1922, the birth control debate became heated in Japan. Activists like Yamamoto Senji and Ishimoto were concerned about the growing population among the working class. Ishimoto observed that “ironically, the poorer the family, the more children

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they have,” and Yamamoto wrote specifically that working-class women “should not have more than two children.” 43 They saw population reduction in the lower classes as a way to improve the future generation of the country. As Abe Isoo declared in 1922, “Although people normally think that the main goal of birth control is to limit the number of children, this is a secondary issue. The first issue is to produce a superior race (yūshūnaru shizoku).” 44 The birth control movement thus “reflected the popularity of internationalist, pacifist sentiments and eugenicist ideas that characterized the 1920s.” 45 As Hirabayashi’s tale reveals, feminists and eugenicists teamed up for the fi rst time with the introduction of Sanger’s works. Eugenicists had hitherto opposed feminism.46 The birth control movement was seen as antinationalist and socialist, and up until the late 1910s, most eugenicists advocated positive eugenics, which focused on increasing the number of “superior” offspring rather than reducing “inferior” seeds. However, with the spread of tuberculosis and STDs immediately following World War I, and the ensuing fear of “social degeneration,” eugenics switched to its negative form, turning its focus to lowering the birth rate of the lower classes. Eugenicists began to attend Sanger’s talks around 1921 and to support her idea of sterilization (of the inferior lower class).47 Both eugenicists and feminists believed that quality rather than quantity was important to the strength of the nation’s population, and this emphasis on racial superiority brought the two discourses together. It was the female body in 1920s Japan that best fit the definition of a “statistical person,” for the potentially fertile body of the woman became the focus of eugenic improvement. Together, the two movements—birth control and eugenics—defined the specific and narrow requirements of the modern mother. Ikeda Shigenori published numerous photos of what he perceived as the eugenically ideal mother and children in Yūsei undō (Eugenics movement).48 The women had to be “talented” (sainō ga aru) individuals, educated in music, writing, and other cultural accomplishments. More important, they had to emanate bosei (“motherhood,” derived from the Swedish word moderskap) and bosei ai (motherly love)—words that did not exist in Japan until the beginning of the Taishō era. Taishōera textbooks began to introduce bosei and bosei ai as natural sentiments that all women possessed, claiming that motherhood was a physical and psychological attribute inherent in all women. Margaret Sanger herself upheld and naturalized the concept, stating that “it is natural for the mother to give her love to her child, it is the raison d’etre for being a mother.” 49

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Th rough the fields of child psychology and medicine, too, motherhood came to be regarded as a part of women’s intrinsic nature (honshitsu), an unquestionable fact attested by scientific knowledge.50 The terms were thus widely established by the early Shōwa era.51 Th is was of course not the fi rst time that Japan emphasized the maternal nature of women. Ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother), a carefully constructed imaginary with which the state tried to mold their female citizens into what they viewed would be advantageous for their plans to build a stronger nation, existed from the Meiji era. However, although the term ryōsai kenbo conjures two images of women—the wife and the mother—by the end of the First World War, the main emphasis had clearly shifted to the latter. Conflicts between the image of the wife and that of the mother emerged with the flourishing of the women’s liberation movement in Europe and the United States. The idea that women, too, could earn their own living and gain independence through their salaries was an attractive idea for the writers of Seitō (Blue stocking), but it was still not clear exactly how to merge the figure of an independent woman with that of the good mother. For someone like Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), the leading figure of Seitō, it seemed that a woman must choose between being an economically liberated career woman and being a mother who took care of her children at home. As the Second World War encroached on Japan and the need to produce more “imperial subjects” became eminent, the nation’s eyes were focused on mothers, not wives. Whereas the signification of ryōsai changed constantly throughout the prewar era, the notion of kenbo was becoming increasingly stabilized. Motherhood thus emerged as a dominant ideology and became naturalized as part of the discourse of the female body.52 In eugenic writings from this period, one can note certain shifts in rhetoric surrounding biological reproduction. Negishi Seiji, another birth control supporter, reminded women that a child was something that mothers made (tsukuru), as opposed to being given (azukaru): In our country, the general idea that a child is a gift (azukarimono) was widely accepted, and people thought that it is out of their hands if children are not born or if many are born. In today’s society, with our scientific development, if one wants children, one must find the reason why they are not born . . . and at the same time, one must perform birth control for those that would only be troublesome if they are born.53

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Whereas in the premodern era, people described childbirth as an act of receiving (azukaru, ataerareru), and infants were viewed as gifts given to people by deities of another world (ikai), this thought was being replaced by the idea that a child was something one made.54 Ikeda Shigenori also emphasized the role of the mother in this act of making. He portrayed heredity not as a biological phenomenon but as deriving from social customs and the quality of the mother–child relationship: “In order to determine if a person is a hero or a genius, one must fi rst look at the mother.”55 Women were becoming increasingly responsible for family planning, and though childbirth continued to be a sort of communal activity in which women gave birth surrounded by family members, expecting mothers were slowly beginning to visit hospitals and seek more medical attention. With the establishment of the kekkon sōdansho (marriage counseling clinics) in the larger cities, the notion of natural childbirth gave way to a more artificial, carefully planned process. The phrase kodomo o tsukuru (make children) was synonymous with yūshū na shison o tsukuru (create superior descendants). The supporters of this idea used the metaphor of the machine to describe the bodies of mothers. In other words, mothers were robots. In her 1936 autobiography, Ishimoto claimed that women in Japan were “automatons afraid of their own shadows,” for they lacked the will to govern their own bodies.56 Christian activist Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) also called out for a separation of the female body from its reproductive responsibility, describing the women of the lower class as “machines of maternity.”57 As anthropologist Jennifer Robertson has shown, the modification and the improvement of the female body in early Shōwa Japan was a dominant issue in eugenics, which lent itself to mechanical metaphors. The very first Miss Nippon of January 1931 was thus the first “cyborg” in Japanese history, signifying “the aestheticization of the erosion of a boundary between human and machine, a boundary that had begun to blur with the relentless pace of Japan’s industrial revolution.”58 Hirabayashi, too, in “Fujin no seiki” (The century of women, 1924), uses the word “mechanical” to describe women, suggesting that they are unfortunately still “slaves” or “dolls,” who must constantly work for and depend on male “masters.” He notes that women are the ones stuck in mechanical, Taylorist jobs: When one makes a phone call, one hears a female voice that says “What number?” When one leaves to run an errand and take entarō (100-yen taxis)

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or trains, a conductress punches the ticket. When one goes to federal buildings, banks, or companies, a female typist is there, punching away on the typewriter. . . . The majority of the workers in silk factories that are the basis of the Japanese economy are female laborers, and there isn’t a single factory that doesn’t have women in their [company] departments.59

Female laborers occupy corporate and industrial spaces, their bodies turning into automatons. Thus, the female body was often translated into mechanical metaphors. The maternal body was carefully monitored in imperial Japan, and eugenicists agreed that superior women—modified in whatever way—were necessary for their vision of the new Japan, as the biological producers of better offspring. As Yoshida Morio has shown, by the time Metropolis arrived in Japan, there were over sixty birth control clinics in Tokyo alone. The Japanese Birth Control Research Group (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Kenkyūkai) had already been established in 1922, and Yamamoto Senji had begun publication of the journal Sanji chōsetsu hyōron (Essays on birth control) in 1925. The birth control movement set off a widespread scare in the popular imagination over the emergence of a society like the one pictured in R.U.R.—a “brave new world” without children, a world of infertile women. Because of the growing influence of the movement, these eugenicists were concerned that women would actually choose not to become pregnant and limit or terminate childbirth. The female robots in R.U.R. and Metropolis could be read in this context as metaphors for the nonpregnant bodies of Japanese women influenced by the birth control movement—women who chose not to give birth.60

Illegitimate Robot Children Hirabayashi’s and Takada’s tales are set against the historical debates over the mechanization of the female body, but their stories go one step further. They skip the female body altogether and shift the focus to the offspring: robot babies. The main issue for the birth control movement— “how to free women from the burdens of childbirth”—sets up the stories, but at their heart is the product of the experiment: the child. Human women in these stories do not stop giving birth; they are in fact portrayed as mothers, as bodies that can become pregnant (the scientist Muraki’s legitimate wife has three children, and his lover is obviously fertile as well).

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Unlike the aforementioned Mizushima Niou, who imagined female robots gaining reproductive abilities and becoming fertile, the question for Hirabayashi and Takada was not whether robots could become pregnant; rather, they were concerned with the possible repercussions of artificial reproduction. What would happen to the custody and the legal identity of these “babies”? The two texts explore the angle that no eugenicist or feminist touched: the possible future of the artificial baby. Hirabayashi, in “Kōsokudo jidai— gojūnengo no bungaku” (The world in fift y years, 1928), speculated that it should be possible to produce babies in test tubes within fift y years.61 In the same vein as British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, who originated the idea of the artificial womb, or “ectogenesis,” and Frederic Edwin Smith, who proposed the same method in The World in 2030 A.D. (1930), Hirabayashi considered the elimination of women from the reproduction process altogether.62 And in his fictional short story, he decided to reveal its consequences.63 As it turns out, there are legal repercussions to messing with natural birth. In Hirabayashi’s tale, besides the feminist and the eugenicist, there is a third figure who voices his opinion about Muraki’s experiment: a lawyer. The lawyer states: “The invention of robots will completely undo established laws,” and the limitations of law in modern Japan are mentioned in the story multiple times.64 In one crucial scene, Muraki and his wife discuss the legal outcomes of artificial reproduction: “One of them [reporters] said, what is going to happen to the family registry of the child if the doctor’s experiment is successful?” She [the wife] spoke, looking at her husband’s face diagonally. The doctor was silent as a stone statue. “What’s going to happen? I want to know too.” The doctor now had a deep frown. However, it quickly disappeared, and his face returned to its usual warm expression. “Scholars need only to concern themselves with research. More practical individuals can deal with the results of that kind of research. Lawmakers will one day decide what to do [with the family registry of artificial babies]. Of course, the sperm I used in the experiment was my own, so I do believe that I should be declared as the father.” “If that’s the case, does that mean that there is no mother?” She now had a sad expression. The doctor noticed her expression, and as if to cheer her up, said, “That does mean that there is no mother. However, with this development in science, there will soon be children without fathers as well.

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Robot Babies If we could succeed in creating artificial sperms, then that is sure to happen in the near future.” 65

By bringing up the issue of the family registry, Muraki alludes to the Civil Code of 1898, the law commonly viewed as being central to the formation of the modern family. The Civil Code expanded on the individual registration (koseki) rule of 1872 and ordained that citizens register as a family unit. This meant that every marriage, divorce, and child custody must be recorded as well.66 The problem here, then, is that the “robot baby” is born out of wedlock (between Muraki and his lab assistant, Fusako). Muraki goes on to suggest that if someone had to be named the mother, Fusako would probably have the legal right (kenri), since she helped “create it” in the lab. This at first upsets Muraki’s wife, but in the end, she sees the reasoning behind his words. Fusako, however, has no idea that it is her actual biological child that Muraki plans to present to the public as the “robot baby.” By the end of the story, the scientist’s prediction comes true. The father (Muraki) is dead, the mother (Fusako) is now an unmarried single mother, and the child is illegitimate and unregistered. It is significant that the text ends with a legal document—Muraki’s will—and the last statement addressed to Fusako is “Please take care of the child.” The story functions as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unnatural births. In the very last moment, Fusako breaks down on the birthing table with this piece of legal document in her hand, and the text ends by emphasizing the social repercussions of artificial creation. In Takada’s tale, the professor jokes that his robot babies would all be “illegitimate children (shiseiji) that I would have to adopt.”67 The unnamed status of artificial babies becomes a comical episode in Takada’s story. The professor discusses one incident in which two police officers showed up at his door, asking about someone named Yamada Jirōsaku. Because Yamada had an infant whose identity could not be proven, the police could only accuse and prosecute Yamada’s wife for having carried out an abortion (datai). However, because Yamada confessed that the baby was a jinzō ningen created in the professor’s lab, they were at a loss as to how to handle the situation. The professor laughs at the situation, saying, “They must then create a law that states that ‘Even humans born outside of the human body must be treated as humans.’ ” 68 Lacking laws that would define and restrict artificiality, children born outside of the mother’s body could only be defi ned as a form of “abortion.” The nameless professor in fact

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laughs at being accused of dataizai (abortion crime), an offense that was policed and stigmatized ever since the banning of abortion in Japan in 1868. Clearly these two stories satirize the dysfunctionality of the law in Shōwa Japan, especially laws pertaining to child custody and illegitimacy. Takada Giichirō was a particularly socially active figure, who called out for legal reform to improve the lives of Japan’s illegitimate children. One year prior to publishing his short story, he published a eugenic treatise titled Yūryōji o mōkeru hōhō (How to create superior children, 1926). In it, he discusses illegitimate children (shiseiji) as the one group that desperately needs representation in the Japa nese legal system. Addressing the current “illegitimate children issue” (shiseiji mondai), he criticizes the gap between law and practice—how the “illegitimate” status was created—because even if parents got married, they did not always register themselves, thus leaving the marriage unofficial.69 “Amending the law is not going to be done in one night. Even if it is eventually amended, until then there will be children who have to live with the name of illegitimate child (shiseiji) for the rest of their lives, just because of their parents’ choice. Is this not cruel?”70 Takada quotes the voice of an abandoned child, who laments, “I feel bitterness towards my father. I also sometimes feel the same toward my mother. Whose sin (tsumi) is this anyway? Or is it the sin of society, which enforces these policies? . . . A child who can show off two parents in public is truly fortunate. That is my only wish at this point.”71 Takada calls for parents to stop treating their children like possessions, behaving like “they can do whatever they want with them,” and to stop blaming the law for the creation of these out-of-wedlock children.72 The status of illegitimate children was actually a seminal social issue in the 1920s. Namae Takayuki, a scholar belonging to Jidō Hogo Kenkyūkai (Child Protection Research Group), discusses how the recent war in Europe (World War I) produced a higher number of shiseiji, both because of women being raped on foreign soil and because the war destroyed the standards of the family.73 He describes these children as suffering from “the most brutal treatment by law and custom” and cites six contemporary British laws as examples: 1.

Illegitimate children do not legally possess fathers, and they may not be named after their father’s line. 2. If the mother shall die, no one can be considered the legal guardian.

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3.

If, while the mother still lives, the illegitimate child fails to gain recognition by the father, the mother shall not request any aid from the father whatsoever. 4. Even if the father wills his assets to go to the mother and illegitimate child after his death, this shall not be carried out. 5. If an illegitimate child with assets passes away, no matter how poor the mother is, she possesses no right to claim the capital, and the assets will go to the government. 6. Even if the mother and the father eventually marry, the illegitimate child will never be admitted as a legitimate child.74

Namae succinctly summarizes: “If one is born an illegitimate child, no matter what happens and no matter what method one may undertake, one could never become legitimate.”75 The Child Protection Research Group advocated that the name shiseiji never be used for family registries and that the state require fathers to pay child support until the age of sixteen. According to its research, approximately 8 to 9 percent of all infants born were registered as shiseiji in Taishō Japan.76 As Harald Fuess has shown, although the Civil Code required every marriage to be registered, marriage at this time was still an ambiguous concept, and not everyone followed the rules. Because of the ambiguities, conflicting definitions of out-of-wedlock childbirth emerged. And even though the adulterer responsible for the birth of out-of-wedlock children faced severe punishment under the 1871 Criminal Code, one can still find ample evidence that children were being born out of wedlock.77 There were several ways of skirting the law and registering illegitimate children as legitimate. One could get the relationship approved by the parents; have the child registered as the brother or sister of the natural father, or the child of paternal grandparents; or find foster parents. But not everyone took the time to follow through with this process. Hence, unregistered children were simply grouped together under the name shiseiji. Thus, in addition to robot stories, Hirabayashi’s and Takada’s tales may be read as shiseiji stories of 1920s Japan. In 1924, Alphonse Daudet’s Jack, a novel about a mistreated illegitimate orphan, was released in Japan under the title Shiseiji. The translator, Yagi Sawako, gives the following reason for the title change: “Illegitimate child (shiseiji)! What a heartwrenching name! They are born, carrying the weight of a crime that is not their own. Their entire life is one where they will never be saved under

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the cross. Is it right that ‘People interpret their misfortune as their fault and blame their parents’ mistake on them’?”78 She changed the title’s proper name to Shiseiji to capture the issue at the heart of the narrative. Her new title reveals how these children were nameless individuals, grouped together by their unofficial status. The two “robot baby” stories thus borrowed the metaphor of artificial babies—babies created in labs without a biological mother (at least apparently)—to discuss the issue of shiseiji. The infants here lack not only legal parents and guardians but also identities: proper names. In both stories, the scientists’ creations are referred to simply by the categorical name of “artificial baby” ( jinzō taiji) or “robot” ( jinzō ningen), and when Muraki shows off his “creation” at the press conference, he says, “This child (kodomo) is now eight months old. I was able to control the temperature and the minerals in the liquid to shrink the pregnancy time by two months. I am hoping to be able to shrink it down further to six months [in the future]. This child is a boy, but his sex can be easily changed with an operation right after birth. . . . After about a month, we would be able to take care of [it] just like a normal child ( futsū no kodomo).”79 Though it may seem like a minor point at first, Muraki never refers to the child by any proper name. There is no Maria, Eric, or Televox here. Even in the will, he refers to the baby as the “child.” Furthermore, Muraki leaves the child not only nameless but sexless. He declares the child to be a boy but adds that “his sex can be easily changed.” It is also significant that in his will he never calls the infant “son” (musuko) but uses the terms “child” (kodomo), “robot,” and “love child” (aiji). If a proper name, as Judith Butler would argue, marks one’s entrance into the symbolic realm and designates a social role, the lack of naming here signifies a lack of subjectivity and (legal) identity. Butler observes that “once the proper name is elaborated as a patronym, then it can be read as an abbreviation for a social pact or symbolic order that structures the subjects named through their position in a patrilineal social structure,” adding that “the name institutes the law.”80 If subject formation requires a repetitive naming process through interpellation, especially a proper name that situates the subject in patriarchy, the “robot babies” here never attain subjectivity—or sexual identity, for that matter. They remain unnamed throughout these stories, nonexistent according to the law and marked as ambiguous figures in terms of their social and sexual status.

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In fact, the babies are treated merely as objects in the most literal sense. In Takada’s story, they may eventually be sold off by merchants: “I don’t know how they found out, but a man who doesn’t appear to be that informed showed up at the lab. He had everything organized already and came to me asking for permission to market and sell the minerals necessary for the artificial wombs. . . . I was so impressed. How clever that he thought of making a fortune by taking advantage of someone else’s hard work.”81 The professor here, tongue in cheek, remarks on the possibility of artificial babies becoming commodities. And Muraki of course sticks his baby into a test tube filled with wine-tainted water as a spectacle for the press. The babies here are unformed subjects, waiting to be named. As Takada’s professor announces: If this is the case, my research lab would have to fi ll out birth registries every day. What bother it would be to deal with something even more cumbersome than illegitimate children (shiseiji)! Ha ha ha! This would make the traditional term shiseiji even more complicated, and since we may have to claim that name for ourselves [for describing robot babies], the former [illegitimate children] may just have to be renamed as “lacking-father children” (chichi fushōji).82

Once again, the issue of the law (the name, as Butler would have it) is raised, and the problem of what to name robot babies is reiterated over and over in these texts. As Joshua Chambers-Letson shows in his thoughtprovoking analysis of one of the most famous illegitimate children in literary history—Trouble, from Madame Butterfly—the illegitimate child in the artistic imagination is consistently represented as a voiceless object—a puppet, a commodity, a spectacle: Where most productions of Madama Butterfly face the significant challenge of incorporating child actors into the opera’s staging, Minghella’s production opted instead to produce Trouble as a Westernized manifestation of traditional Japa nese bunraku puppetry. Various elements of “traditional Japanese arts” make their way into the performance, which includes a strange fan-dance prelude inserted before the opening of Puccini’s score and the kuroko stagehands mentioned earlier. But Trouble stands out as the only puppet onstage in the entire production. . . . The result is that the rendering of the character as “a baby, a boy, [and] a human being” and simultaneously an inanimate object both negates the character’s humanity and intensifies the Butterfly fantasy.83

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Shiseiji cannot be declared “human,” for they have no status in the legal space. For a nameless, fatherless child born out of wedlock, the closest thing to identify with, in 1920s Japan, was a robot.

Uncanny Babies This chapter traced the history of jinzō ningen in prewar Japan, focusing on the 1920s robot boom. It began by considering the variety of significations and the discourses that used mechanical metaphors to capture the human body. It then built on Yoshida Morio’s scholarship to demonstrate how these humanlike robots were almost always depicted as female, for they were intrinsically connected to and aligned with the birth control movement. The chapter then examined the two tales from Shin seinen to show how the focus shifted from female reproduction to the proprietorship and custody issues of their offspring. The two robot tales reveal a nexus of the cultural and the social, where legal identities intercross with literary representations of mechanical bodies to participate in the nation-making process. Hirabayashi’s and Takada’s writings concern themselves with how legitimacy is created, both inside and outside the legal system. They explore who becomes defined as a legitimate citizen of Japan and who becomes marked as an outsider. Through the figure of the robot baby, the two texts disclose the insufficiencies of the Japanese legal vocabulary. The two stories also show how the literary imagination of the robot changed as the eugenic ideals of the period shifted. When Čapek’s R.U.R. was first introduced, the predominant image of jinzō ningen was that of a female robot. Depicted as a femme fatale, with an image opposing that of the mother, the female jinzō ningen became the appropriate image for both the eugenicists and the proponents of the Japanese birth control movement, who expressed concern over the declining birth rate and the possibility that Japanese women might stop giving birth. By the late 1920s, however, as the two Shin seinen writers exhibited, the offspring—artificial babies—had begun to replace the predominant image of jinzō ningen.84 It is fascinating that these Čapekian, humanlike jinzō ningen were strictly a 1920s phenomenon. These humanlike robots saw their birth in 1923 but had already disappeared by 1930.85 Their rise and disappearance coincided with the Japanese birth control movement, which also experienced a rapid decline in the 1930s. As the war approached and people

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began to chant imperial Japan’s famous slogan “umeyo fuyaseyo” (give birth, raise numbers), birth control was seen as an anti-nationalistic movement that stood in the way of building a stronger nation. When situated within the history of reproductive sciences, the figure of the automaton complicates the Freudian uncanny to a large extent, especially the understanding of the uncanny as being intrinsically tied to the death drive. As stated in the introduction, Freud wrote “The ‘Uncanny’ ” after World War I based on his experiences with veterans, who kept returning to the original moment of terror. His definition of the uncanny as “the return of the repressed” was based on this compulsion and death drive, as indicated by his reading of the automaton Olimpia in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” Freud analyzed her as the figure that drove the protagonist Nathanael to his death, as one who unleashed the repressed memories of his father. The automaton, like the doppelgänger, was viewed as a “harbinger of death.” The two Japanese robot stories, in contrast, used the metaphor of the automaton to posit the possibility of a new form of life, a new reproductive (eugenic) future. This is why the similar ending—the failure of the experiments—is actually important. Recall that there are no actual mechanical robots that appear in the stories, for either the story was a dream (Takada) or the “robot” was actually a human (Hirabayashi). Either way, the two works revolved around the image of robot newborns and children and their possible futures. Hirabayashi’s final image of the crying infant is in strong contrast to the female robot in Freud’s essay. Here, it is not an automaton who mimics a human but a human who is put in the guise of a robot. Thus, the line between human and nonhuman becomes blurred in an unexpected way. The Japanese jinzō ningen arose alongside new innovations in reproductive sciences, discourses about enhancing the human body and improving women’s reproductive conditions. This is in stark contrast to the Freudian uncanny, which arose from the obsessive compulsion to return to death. By aligning robots with newborns, the jinzō ningen becomes inscribed with a certain desire to make life, to enhance life. Here there is a certain echo of biopower—the power of “making live” and extending life.86 The uncanny becomes tied to this specific desire—the male desire and the scientific institutions’ obsession with how to improve “life” and produce better offspring. The two male scientists exhibit the eugenic desire to make life but do so in an extreme way. Not only do the robots imagined by them have

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bodies free of disease and pain but, more significantly, they require no human body at all. Both scientists envision “test tube babies” that preclude not only human women from biological reproduction but also men. David Skal has shown how narratives involving “mad scientists” are about violations of gender norms, in which male scientists discuss various methods of artificial childbirth and try to parent their own offspring (often monsters, here robots) without the existence of women.87 The scientists’ laboratory thus turns into a scientific womb, where children are conceived and created solely with male hands, where fathers act as mothers. But here, the situation is slightly different. There is no desire for the male scientists to replace mothers (Muraki dies and leaves his child to Fusako) or to parent their children in any way. There are no possible parents, period. They are attempting to create a purely artificial life that precludes the human body. However, as most jinzō ningen stories did before them, the two works vacillate between the desire to go beyond the human body and that of returning to it. Ultimately, the stories end by choosing the desire to return to the human body, the “narcissistic” obsession to continually create artificial life in the image of the “original” human. In Hirabayashi’s version, they literally return to the human by having the human baby mimic a robot. It is fascinating that even though they fail, the motivation for the uncanny experiment was the eugenic improvement of the female (or human) body and biological reproduction. The male scientists here are pushed by the obsessive compulsion to produce life, not to repetitively return to death. In a way, their aim is similar to that of Mori’s “uncanny valley” graph in the introduction, in which the goal was to produce robots with lifelikeness, except that there is no like here. Hirabayashi’s tale ends with a newborn, a very literal representation of life.88 Life drive, not death drive, fuels the uncanny imagination. In his essay “Seimei o kataru” (Narrating life, 1930), Nishimura Makoto—the aforementioned creator of Japan’s very first robot—discusses what he calls the “strangeness of life” (seimei no fushigi).89 He describes how a worm could still move its body when cut into pieces, and he wonders if life could be artificially made in labs. He made his robot Gakutensoku in hopes of eventually developing this simple program into a more complex organism. Like the scientists in the two stories, he saw robots as an idealized, evolutionary life-form. Nishimura notes how people watching Gakutensoku’s exhibit would watch the robot’s movements and begin

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mimicking the robot, completely unaware of their imitative movements. To him, this reverse imitation—humans mimicking robots—signaled that his robot had indeed attained humanness, that it had been imbued with life. Thus, rather than seeming to be a failure, the fictional plot ending of the newborn baby mimicking a robot baby may point to this kind of vitalism, artificial bodies fi lled with life. Nineteen-twenties Japa nese robot fiction went beyond the question of if robots can reproduce, for by the end of the decade, they did.

Conclusion Uncanny Modernity

onstrous Bodies examines the question of why uncanny bodies proliferated the literary imagination of imperial Japan, a period that continuously upheld and enforced the ideology of the normative. It proposes that the uncanny—the uncertainty about whether or not the normative binary could be sustained—arose as new scientific discourses were introduced to Japan and as imperial leaders began to participate in the project of defining what anatomies were to be deemed appropriate for the Japanese empire. Beginning with hygienic practices in chapter 1, subsequent chapters investigate how eugenics, psychology, and the birth control movement outlined what bodies should have been able to attain a legitimate place in the new, “healthy” nation. These discourses taught the populace that there was a new type of danger in the modern nation: bodies that seemed normal on the surface but may be abnormal. None of these modern monsters were monsters until scientific knowledge marked them as such. When one merely looked at any of these bodies, one could not denote any markers of difference. That is, they could not be told apart from “normal” humans. They all defied ocularcentrism and required a specialized knowledge to see through them. It was specifically the important revealing role of this scientific knowledge that made these monsters uncanny. The hygienic knowledge of the monk exposed the diseased female. Eugenic studies on twins marked them as new abnormalities. The psychologists in Dogura magura brought the repressed colonial memory to light. And mad scientists showed that there was no difference between a human and a robot baby. In these tales, scientific knowledge unravels the pretension, the mimicry, of the

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monster. All the modern monsters—diseased women, twins, doppelgängers, and automata—were thus anatomies that were informed by the new sciences. These bodies, however, were not simply “abnormal” anatomies that stood in opposition to the ideal bodies of the nation. Modern monsters proliferated in imperial Japan because of the empire’s obsession with defining normativity and, consequently, its opposite, but as Monstrous Bodies shows, these literary monsters ironically blurred the boundary of the normal and the abnormal that these new sciences were trying to establish. There is always a question of which body is “normal,” which “abnormal,” a conflation of identities. In Kyōka’s tale, there is an uncertainty of if the body of the woman or the monk is more uncanny than the other. In the colonial identity tales, this blurring pertains to the colonized and the colonizer positions, if one could clearly demarcate the two. The robot tales literally fused the human and the nonhuman together. This uncanny, this uncertainty, is exactly what made them monstrous. The stories do not end by frightening the reader with the monster’s abnormality. They bring about a fear toward bodies that question if the binary of the normative could even exist in the first place. There were other discourses besides the scientific strand that contributed to this uncertainty. These become apparent in the notable, interrelated strands that come to the surface in these tales. The fluidity in citizenry and national identity, for example, is a recurring theme in all the chapters. The first of these deals with the issue of law, which comes up most prominently in chapters 2 and 4. The twin on death row and the illegitimate “robot baby” connect in an unexpected manner, for they both reveal how identity had to be defined in legal terms in modern Japan. There is a perversion of the relationship between the Japanese subject and the law in these tales. Both are in some sense about “identity theft”; the evil twin tries to take over his brother’s identity, and the scientist in Hirabayashi’s tale commits adultery and tries to get rid of his illegitimate son by telling the public that the child is actually a robot. Both serve as cautionary tales for what happens when one tries to bend the law—a law requiring identity to be fi xed in society. Identity is depicted as being extremely fluid and reproducible in modern Japanese society, as one’s identity is basically a document, a name on a piece of paper. It is no coincidence that the twin in Ranpo’s tale successfully becomes his brother by taking over the latter’s diary and that Hirabayashi’s short story ends with a will, an official document that reveals the true identity of the illegitimate child. Both the twin

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and the robot reveal how the law (or its limitations), on top of science, often participates in creating ambiguous identities. The two middle chapters also play on this idea of criminality by aligning delinquency with colonized identity. In both “Twins” and Dogra Magra, the origin of the protagonists’ criminality is located in colonized Asia. Ranpo’s twin pretends to go to colonial Korea and returns to Japan in the guise of his older brother. The anonymous narrator in Yumeno’s novel discovers that he killed Japanese women because of the mad genes of his Chinese ancestor. In both these tales, the colony became a kind of excuse for the protagonists’ crimes, the reason for their illegal acts. The crime of these characters was a specific identity theft—that of a colonized mimicking the colonizer. The colonial uncanny arose precisely when this pretension was exposed—that is, when one realized that one’s national identity was not as secure or fi xed as previously thought, and that it could be mimicked to perfection by another that resembles oneself. Monstrous Bodies also consistently raises questions about the dominant theory of the uncanny. It treats the uncanny as a discourse of fear, but also places a large emphasis on its bodily nature instead of the purely psychological. The chapters historicize the uncanny, veering away from treating it as a universal phenomenon and squarely grounding it in the rise of new sciences. The uncanny in modern Japan could not have arisen without the shifts in the conceptualization of the human anatomy, and the proliferation of these ambiguous bodies reveals a repeated interrogating of the normative. Monstrous Bodies also questions the application of the Freudian understanding of the uncanny in these literary works. Yumeno’s and Ranpo’s tales, for example, reveal the impossibility of reference and representation. In Yumeno’s tale, the psychoanalysts wrote and rewrote the analysand’s story at every step. Nothing was clear, even in the end, and the novel refuted any closure. Likewise, Ranpo’s tale resisted any coherent closure. The confession of the twin was left open, addressed to his wife, who never confirmed her receipt of the tale. Although I read the story as a kind of allegory of the Kantō Earthquake massacre, I was more interested in how the twin’s tale resembled the historical event in its structure, not how the event functioned as a clear referent. In both tales, the main source of horror—the moment of the uncanny—belonged not to the revelation of a represented past but to the constant confusion the reader experienced from the identicality of appearances, the incapability of distinguishing between two characters. That is, far from being about a

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connection to a past temporality (the return of the repressed), the uncanny in these tales dealt with the present moment—both in the sense of the affect of fear that the reader experiences and in the fact that it is very much a product of modernity. Each literary work I explored also exhibited a certain dissonance of perception on one level versus another—that is, a certain inability to tell different bodies apart. As I stated earlier, this dissonance revolved around the identification of a “normal” body as opposed to its “abnormal” counterpart. In that sense, the Japa nese uncanny is much closer to Jentsch’s defi nition than to Freud’s, for at the heart of it lies the uncertainty (cognitive dissonance) that Jentsch emphasized in his theory. However, in these stories, uncertainty does not lie in telling the animate from the inanimate, the dead from the alive. Rather, the uncertainty centers on two different humans, one accepted and idealized by the modern empire, the other rejected. The exemplary uncanny body here was not a corpse, as it was for Jentsch (or a zombie, as it was for Mori). It is notable that the Japanese uncanny arose alongside reproductive sciences—eugenics, the birth control movement, and even hygiene, which emphasized the governing of the female body and sexuality—and exhibits an obsession more with the production of life than with death. In a way, as mentioned in chapter 4, it is in close alignment with Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower—the power of making and extending life.1 In each tale, I find that scientific knowledge serves as a tool for biopower, knowledge that should be disseminated to Japan’s imperial citizens in order to maintain life and produce healthier offspring, thereby enhancing the modern nation’s body. In Izumi Kyōka’s story, for example, the hygienic monk is in a sense a miraculous survivor of an unnamed epidemic, and his story lives on through the body of the Tokyo student, who teaches the modern nation how to continue to live a disease-free life. Ranpō’s “Twins” is a story about a man who wishes to take over another’s body in order to live happily as a married, debt-free man. Although on death row, he, like the monk, yearns to pass down his tale, and he survives as a trace by leaving his fingerprint, the sole marker of his identity, on the page of his “will.” Yumeno’s novel ends with one of the most discussed, controversial moments in modern subculture literature—the image of the fetus. Even though most of the novel revolves around death and corpses, it ends with this striking image of new life and the sense that Ichirō will continue to be reborn, over and over. Finally, the robot tales resonate strongly with Yumeno’s “fetus” ending—particularly Hirabayashi’s tale, which ends with the image of the

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crying human baby. All of the tales emphasize an insistence on the living body. In every fictional story, there is the desire to make life, to extend the human life span. The uncanny becomes associated not with the death drive but with a kind of life drive. Related to this, the scientist characters’ ambition is to succeed in this dream of reproduction and extended life. They each attempt to create a newly enhanced body that will live longer and be healthier than an ordinary body. Every figure in the stories fits into this pattern. This is most evident in the automata chapter, in which humans are creating robots, artificial beings that can live forever, unhindered by the constriction of biological ailments. The twin chapter is about an evil twin brother who desires to take the other brother’s body and identity. The doppelgänger is trapped in an endless cycle of reincarnation and ends with Ichirō’s realization that he is about to be born again. Finally, in Kōya, the one figure I find the most uncanny is actually the “immune” monk, not the woman. All of these stories exhibit not just the desire to live and survive but the desire to create a better, improved body, assisted by the knowledge of modern science. For all of these reasons, the fantastic in modern Japan was deeply engaged with Japan’s nation-making process. It was very much tied to the narratives the empire itself weaved. The modern monsters listed here are all products of everyday social life under imperial rule. In fact, if one were to name the most uncanny body of all in modern Japan, it would be the entity represented by the military map that the hygienic monk carried with him—imperial Japan itself. Always disguised in another garb or hidden from sight as legal or psychological institutions, the empire lies beneath each piece of literature in this book. It is the source of the power of life, an entity that could endow and improve the life of the ones who fit the bill. But at the same time, the empire is the source of the power of death and punishment, for appearing in opposition to its norms meant (in one case literally) capital punishment, just as it did for those who actually acted against the emperor. In that sense, the empire itself may be claimed to be uncanny, because it is the ambiguous entity marked by both life and death (a zombie, according to Mori’s graph). Monstrous Bodies thus shows how these literary works, the so-called fantastic or unrealistic fiction, are truly historical in their own right. My point, however, is not to say that these works were complicit with national ideologies, as opposed to previous scholarly arguments that emphasize their subversive nature. Rather than arguing that they are somehow

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supporting the imperial projects, my point is simply to state that they were very much engaged with these discourses. They excavate the paranoia that modern Japan was experiencing at the time, one that arose as specific bodily definitions and divisions were constructed by scientific discourses. Monsters did not simply disappear with the dawn of modernity. Although certain preexisting monsters came to be marked as “premodern” and “irrational,” new monsters continued to be born, inseparable from the modernization process. Far from being anachronistic beings, these uncanny monsters continued to haunt Japan in their newly imagined anatomies.

Notes

Introduction 1. For more on the importation of various technologies and their effect on the envisioning of a new body, see Satō Rika, “Kindaiteki shisen to shintai no hakken.” 2. Robertson, “Blood Talks,” p. 197. 3. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” quotes on pp. 220 and 225, respectively. 4. As Anthony Vidler has elegantly elucidated, the uncanny “was more than a simple sense of not belonging; it was the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream.” Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 7. In his introduction, Vidler traces the history of the thought from Heidegger to Adorno to the postmodern uncanny represented by Lacan, Derrida, and Baudrillard. 5. Vidler points this out, as does Winchell in “Century of the Uncanny.” 6. Jentsch, “Document,” p. 221. 7. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” 230. However, to distinguish himself from Jentsch, he calls her a “doll” (puppet) to deemphasize the animate/inanimate uncertainty. 8. Castle, The Female Thermometer, p. 4. 9. Liu, The Freudian Robot, p. 221. 10. Recent scholarship on Japan has more and more been focusing on Jentsch. Christopher Bolton turned to the Jentschian uncanny to analyze contemporary cyborgs, and Japa nese scholars Baba Akihiko and Yoshida Morio have both focused on this type of psychical uncertainty as being a fundamental way to understand robots in Japa nese literature. 11. Mori, “The Uncanny Valley.” 12. In the original Japa nese, the zombie here is actually a dead person (shinin). Mori defi nes human likeness in terms of sound rather than visual markers. Th is explains why the bunraku puppet is closer to the healthy person than it is to the humanoid robot. Th is graph only makes sense if one considers humanness from a

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nonvisual aspect, as Mori was defi ning a kind of uncanny based on phonetic mimicry. 13. Other scholars have developed Mori’s graph since the date of its publication. Karl F. MacDorman, for example, has determined that human likeness is not the only factor that creates a sense of eeriness, and his research has complicated the simple dip in the valley. His mapping is more complex, for he has determined that it is actually the middle examples (on Mori’s graph, most likely the humanoid robot) that bring about the most heightened sense of eeriness and strangeness. However, it is still seen as a fundamental work for Japa nese and American roboticists, a starting point for exploring the relationship between lifelikeness and horror. MacDorman, “Subjective Ratings.” 14. Robertson, “Blood Talks,” p. 192. 15. Ibid., p. 201. 16. See Robertson, “Japan’s First Cyborg?”; Robertson, “Blood Talks”; and Frühstück, Colonizing Sex. The term colonial in this book refers to both the foreign colonization of Japan’s Asian neighbors and the “internal colonization” project on domestic land. It is not the intent of this book to outline the history of colonialism, but I discuss how the nations of Japan’s “original empire” all make an appearance in these literary stories as ghostly presences that haunt modern Japan. For what constituted the “original empire” and “war time empire” of 1931–45, see Peattie, introduction to The Japanese Colonial Empire. 17. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 50. 18. Ibid., p. 42. 19. Foucault identifies three key figures that represented the “abnormal individual” in nineteenth- century Eu rope: the human monster, the individual to be corrected, and the onanist. See Foucault, Abnormal, pp. 55–80. 20. Reichert, “Deviance and Social Darwinism,”  p.  114. I explain this term in detail in chapter 2. 21. Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. 24–40. 22. Napier, Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, p. 5. 23. Ibid., p. 8. 24. Ibid. (italics mine). 25. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 26. I am thinking of Michelle Li’s works on medieval setsuwa (short stories with oral components), Noriko Reider’s works on kaidan (ghost stories) and oni (demons), and Susan Klein’s study of the famous Dōjōji female serpent. Li, Ambiguous Bodies; Reider, Japanese Demon Lore; Reider, Tales of the Supernatural; Klein, “Woman as Serpent.” Nina Cornyetz’s insightful work on the abject and Japa nese modernity is an exception, and her work will be discussed in the next chapter. 27. Figal, Civilization and Monsters. 28. Marilyn Ivy, as I do here, invoked the theory of the uncanny for studying modern Japan. For her, it was a haunting of premodern temporality, a zeitgeist of nostalgia. Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, quotes on p. 23 and p. 20, respectively.

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29. Foster, Pandemonium and Parade. 30. Ibid., p. 98.

Chapter 1 1. Naitō Kusuri Hakubutsukan, Hayaribyō no nishiki- e, p. 100. On the cholera monster, see Ono, “Seiketsu” no kindai, pp. 60–88. For a detailed history of cholera, see Johnston, “Epidemics Past and Science Present.” 2. I am using the original Shin shōsetsu version of the tale, published in February 1900. The English title here is in accordance with Charles Shiro Inouye’s eloquent translation of the story, but the rest of the translations are mine. Inouye, Japanese Gothic Tales. For an extensive biography of Kyōka, see Inouye’s The Similitude of Blossoms. 3. Takayama Chogyū had established Kyōka as an unrealistic writer as early as 1896. See his criticism “Izumi Kyōka,” p. 12. Kōya was viewed as an “unrealistic” and “unsuccessful” work that does not fit into any genre in Bungaku, March 1900. On the reception of the work: Muramatsu, Izumi Kyōka jiten, pp. 65–67. 4. Tōgō, Gensō no ronri. For a detailed outline of the historiography of Kyōka studies, see Yomota’s “Kyōka, shinpa, nihon eiga.” 5. Tōgō reads Shūchō as a “modern” figure who combats “premodern” monsters he encounters in the mountains. Tōgō, “Kōya hijiri no suichūmu.” Susan Napier also conducts a similar reading, reading the woman as “non-modern.” Napier, Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, p. 23. Maeda Ai also reads the monk as a “holy” figure who contrasts the “vulgar” medicine peddler. Maeda, “Izumi Kyōka Kōya hijiri.” My reading argues against these binaries. 6. According to Komori Yōichi, it was precisely in 1900, the publication year of Kōya, that eisei was established as a key word. Komori, “ ‘Sōsetsu’: sabetsu no kansei,” p. 41. 7. Yoshida, “Teito no ‘mizu’ ga kawaru toki,” pp. 87–88. For more anecdotes, see Sarai 5, no. 10. 8. Teragi, “Kyōka no sukigirai.” 9. Ono, “Seiketsu” no kindai, pp. 64–66. 10. Mori, “Shintai no nōryoku.” 11. Fukuzawa, “Shintai o taisetsu subeshi,” quote on p. 425. 12. See, for example, the anonymous article “Kanai eisei chogen.” 13. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity,  p.  136. It is fascinating how the translation was created, as eisei, as Rogaski argues, was a neologism—a new lexicon with a different meaning than weisheng. Eisei implied its ties to the modern nation and tied every person of the state—the military, the scientist, and the general populace— together as members of what Rogaski terms “hygienic modernity.” In China, weisheng at this time was being used to simply describe personal dietary practices to strengthen the body’s immune system. 14. Frühstück, Colonizing Sex, p. 50. 15. Gotō, Eisei seidoron.

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16. Bourdaghs, “The Disease of Nationalism,” p. 643. 17. Jennifer Robertson discusses this creation of the “new Japa nese” in various places, mainly in her article “Blood Talks.” 18. Kenkō, Tsūzoku mubyō kenzenhō, pp. 2–4. 19. Stafford, Body Criticism. 20. See Kitasato, Kitasato Shibasaburō ronsetsu shū. Some of his writings have been translated into English and German, such as Collected Papers of Shibasaburo Kitasato. 21. Home Ministry Bureau of Hygiene and Bureau of Shrines and Temples, Korera yobō no satoi. 22. Barbara Stafford’s idea of the body as the representation of the unseen, things one could only conjecture about or not know at all, is extremely applicable here. Stafford, Body Criticism. 23. Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness, p. 33. 24. Naitō Chizuko, “Yamau shintai,” p. 57. 25. Naitō Kusuri Hakubutsukan, Hayaribyō no nishiki- e, p. 101. 26. Bourdaghs, The Dawn That Never Comes, p. 64. 27. Kōda, Tai dokuro. 28. Narita, “Eisei kankyō no henka,” p. 92. 29. Fukuzawa, “Nihon fujin ron,” pp.  21–23. See also Naitō Chizuko, “Yamau shintai,” footnote 17. 30. Narita, “Eisei kankyō no henka,” pp. 110–11. 31. Frühstück, Colonizing Sex, pp. 19–50. 32. Kawamura Kunimitsu, Sekushuariti no kindai, p. 82. 33. William Johnston discusses literature centered on tuberculosis, citing Tokutomi Roka’s Hototogisu (Warbler, 1900) and Hirotsu Ryūrō’s “Zangiku” (The lingering chrysanthemum, 1889). As he states, these novels “helped create a new, romantic atmosphere—or, more accurately, fog— around tuberculosis,” and both works created an image of the disease as belonging to upper- class women. Johnston, The Modern Epidemic, especially pp. 126–32. 34. The term dokufu (poison women) was used to describe actual notorious women who murdered their husbands as well as other men. The most famous of these women was Takahashi Oden, who was sentenced to death in 1876. Kanagaki Robun wrote a popular story based on her tale, which continued to inspire directors and writers alike throughout the modern period. For a detailed analysis of Robun’s story, see Marran, Poison Woman, chap. 1. 35. Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” p. 10. 36. For information on the Toyama medicine network, see Ono, “Seiketsu” no kindai, pp. 24–27. 37. Kōya, p. 6. 38. Sekkai (written as ishibai in Kyōka’s text) was a type of phenol produced from limestone or chalk. Curiously enough, it was also used during Meiji imperial pageants to sanitize the roads that the emperor and his men traversed. Although there is no room here to discuss the strong role of imperial ideology in Kōya, this and the fact that the monk is carry ing a military map of sanbō honbu further strengthens the connection between the monk and the nation-state.

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39. Yoshida, “Teito no ‘mizu’ ga kawaru toki,” pp. 87–88. 40. Fukuzawa, “Eiseiron,” p. 242. 41. Watanabe Naomi, Nihon kindai bungaku to “sabetsu,” pp.  49–52. Michael Bourdaghs also summarizes Watanabe’s argument in a very nuanced manner and expands on the importance of visible bodily “marking.” See Bourdaghs, “The Disease of Nationalism,” pp. 648–49. 42. Kōya, pp. 21–22. Although there is no room to delve into this question here, the descriptions of clothing are always interesting in Kyōka’s writings. In contrast to the husband, the monk is described by the Tokyo student as meticulously dressed, not even taking off his clothes when he goes to bed. Clothing, along with food and living space, was one of the three categories cited in modern hygiene texts to which one must pay special care to remain sanitary. One of the key phrases from these texts was shoku i jū (food, clothing, living space). 43. There are numerous words for describing the outcast groups in Japan, and their meanings have changed over time. Eta is a term that was generally used during the premodern era to describe today’s burakumin population. Hinin was also used during the same time, but it appears to have been more generally used to describe beggars, whereas eta mainly referred to butchers, executioners, and other occupations that dealt with animals and blood—objects deemed “filthy” by the Buddhist code. 44. Kitasato Shibasaburō writes extensively on how diseases are transmitted through saliva. Also, Michael Bourdaghs quotes socialist activist Kinoshita Naoe, who attacks this idea of germs being transmitted through sputum. See Bourdaghs, “The Disease of Nationalism,” p. 645. 45. Kōya, p. 49. 46. Kitasato Shibasaburō, for example, writes extensively on the dangers of floodprone areas as places of epidemic outbreaks in “Enzetsu: Tsutsugamushibyōgen ni tsuite.” Tsutsugamushi disease is a mite-borne infectious disease. 47. Kōya, p. 59. Water poisoning refers to an illness caused by drinking contaminated or heavy water, causing indigestion and diarrhea. 48. Ibid., p. 63. 49. Ibid., p. 47. 50. Ibid., p. 35. 51. Ibid., p. 64. 52. Ibid., p. 58. 53. See Indra Levy’s translation of the fi rst chapter of Saeki Junko’s Iro to ai no hikaku bunkashi in Translation in Modern Japan. I fi nd this description of irogonomi as “barbarism” to be particularly interesting because it ties together the figures of the animals in the texts to the highly sexualized body of the woman. Also, as I discuss later, both the space of the forest and the woman become categorized as “premodern,” which also seems to fit into the idea of the older form of sexuality that the term connotes. 54. Kōya, p. 34. 55. Nina Cornyetz also analyzes Kyōka’s women as dangerous and abject. However, my reading veers away from the definition of the abject, since the abject depends on a maternal body (a body that can become pregnant). Cornyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words, pp. 21–95.

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Notes to Pages 29–38

56. Kōya, p. 18 and p. 28, respectively. 57. Scholars have traditionally discussed the narrative structure as an irekawari (turn-taking) style, in which there are three speakers that take turns, but as Akama Aki has pointed out, the only narrator/speaker is actually the Tokyo student. Akama, “Kōya hijiri ron.” 58. I thank Michelle Li for pointing out the similarity of this narrative construction to that of setsuwa (premodern short stories, understood to come from an oral tradition), which also pass down information. 59. Akama, “Kōya hijiri ron,” pp. 12–20. 60. Kōya, p. 24. 61. Ibid., p. 64. 62. The transformation into beasts can be read as a loss of speech of sorts. The beasts make animal noises in the text, but it is only the woman who can understand them. 63. For more information on Shingon practices, see Blacker, The Catalpa Bow. 64. Robertson, “Blood Talks,” pp. 191–216. 65. Muramatsu, Izumi Kyōka jiten, pp. 284–85. 66. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, especially p. 204. 67. McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 21–47. 68. Martin, Flexible Bodies. 69. Ibid., p. 53 and p. 60, respectively. 70. Ibid., p. 57. 71. As Akama Aki has emphasized, the woman turns men into animals only when they express sexual desire and have intercourse with her. Th is is why the oyaji and the “idiot” are safe from her touch. Akama, “Kōya hijiri ron.” 72. “Kanai eisei chogen,” pp. 44–49. 73. For example, see Hani Motoko’s Jochūkun (1912), National Diet Library Meiji Digital Database. 74. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality, p. 383. 75. Ibid., p. 383. 76. “The postcolonial nation must be seen as a specter of global capital (double genitive): it is originarily infected by the prosthesis of the bourgeois state as the terminal of capital. But it is also a specter that haunts global capital and awaits reincarnation, the undecidable neuralgic point that refuses to be exorcised. That is why it is the most apposite figure for freedom today.” Cheah, Spectral Nationality, p. 395. 77. Kōya, p. 65. 78. Henceforth referred to as New Creator in both text and notes. All translations are mine. Some issues have the furigana (Japa nese phonetic reading) as Shin zōbutsusha. Hisagosha, Atarashiki zōbutsusha. 79. Hisagosha, Atarashiki zōbutsusha, no. 5, p. 221. 80. I refer to the 1831 version rather than the 1818 one, since the translation appears to be based on the 1831 version. 81. Katō Hiroyuki, “Kuni no motoi no hakkan o iwasu,” p. 1. The journal was edited by educator Nose Sakae (1852–95), who worked directly under Mori Arinori (1847–89) and the Ministry of Education. 82. Yokota, Meiji no yume kōbō, pp. 17–23.

Notes to Pages 42–48

141

Chapter 2 1. Kawamoto, Taishō gen’ei, especially pp. 123–44. 2. Hirabayashi, “Tantei shōsetsudan no shokeikō.” Hirabayashi was a vocal opponent and critic of henkaku tantei shōsetsu. The Marxist scholar supported regular detective fiction, criticizing “unhealthy” tales for being “detrimental” ( fukenzen) to the education of the populace. For an excellent analysis of what was then considered regular detective fiction as opposed to what was “unhealthy” and “deviant,” see Reichert, “Deviance and Social Darwinism.” 3. Ishikawa Takashi makes this connection between “unhealthy detective fiction” and “early science fiction” in SF no jidai, p. 134. Robert Matthews claims the same in Japanese Science Fiction, p. 13. 4. Kawana, “Mad Scientists and Their Prey,” p. 99. 5. Kawana, Murder Most Modern, p. 124. 6. Reichert, “Deviance and Social Darwinism,” p. 114. 7. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, p. 13. 8. Ibid., p. 29. 9. Eguchi, “Modanizumu e mukete,” p. 36. 10. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, especially pp. 29–38. 11. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 12. Ibid., p. 203. 13. Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque, pp. 7–10. 14. Igarashi, “Edogawa Rampo and the Excess of Vision,” p. 314. 15. Matsuyama Iwao was probably the fi rst scholar to point out the connection between the image of the double and the media of fi lm in his Ranpo to Tokyo; see chapter 4 on Ranpo’s short story “Kagami jigoku” (Hell of mirrors). Kawamoto, Taishō gen’ei, especially pp. 105–6 and pp. 124–25. Watanabe Masahiko makes a similar argument in Kindai bungaku no bunshinzō. Posadas, “Rampo’s Repetitions,” p. 165. 16. Posadas, “Rampo’s Repetitions,” p. 170. 17. Silver, Purloined Letters, p. 133. 18. Saitō, Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, pp. 236–38. 19. Ibid., p. 276. 20. Kawana, Murder Most Modern, p. 14. 21. See Kawana’s later chapters on Shupio writers and Yokimizo Seishi’s postwar works. 22. Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque, p. 213. 23. Ibid. I agree with Driscoll that political-colonial readings of Ranpo are possible. The older brother, Japan, is clearly marked as the economic center that sends its weaker brother, Korea, for dekasegi (working away from home), so that he is no longer draining the life source of the homeland. 24. Ibid., p. 213. 25. Norbeck, “Yakudoshi,” p. 112. 26. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, pp. 18–47, especially p. 20. 27. Ibid., p. 23.

142

Notes to Pages 48–50

28. Kure and Fujikawa, Nihon sanka sōsho, pp. 547–48. 29. Yomiuri shinbun lists numerous articles from the 1910s to the 1930s on the murdering or the abandonment of twins. It is clear from these articles that the old superstitions surrounding twins still held a fi rm grip on society at the time. 30. It is interesting that male–female twins were also considered to be the most “wondrous” pair in both the Western and Japa nese imagination. Jennifer Spinks, for example, has shown that in medieval Europe, male–female conjoined twins were considered to be more rare and special than same-sex pairs. She has also shown that twins were not always depicted as horrific and sometimes even represented the figure of the Christ child. See Spinks, “Wondrous Monsters.” 31. Kawahara, Shōwa Tennō no imōtogimi. Kawahara also states that the reason behind choosing Yoshihito as the next emperor was not only his elder status but also that his house had more fi nancial power and social status than the rival house. See pp. 45–47 on the Taishō emperor and his brother. 32. Taniguchi Toratoshi, “Sōseiji no shinkenkyū,” 12/20/1934, p. 10. 33. Galton, “History of Twins,” p. 217. 34. The first quote is from Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, pp. 31–34. Schwartz also describes the rise of twin studies in eugenics. For example, in 1918, six hundred twins responded to the American Gene tic Association’s desire to study them, and in Japan as well, there were volunteer twins who began to participate in various psychological experiments around the same time. The second quote is from Galton, “History of Twins,” p. 235. 35. Galton, “History of Twins,” p. 232. 36. Ibid., p. 224. 37. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. 38. Thorndike, “Futago no kensa,” p. 287. 39. K, “Sōseiji to kekkon.” 40. Taniguchi Toratoshi, Iden, Taishitsu, Konketsu, p. 104. 41. Although there were some opposing voices, the majority agreed with Galton’s argument, and even postwar studies on twins clearly stated that twins could develop into completely opposite personalities, even if they grew up under the same circumstances. See Uchimura, Sōseiji no kenkyū, pp. 137–41, where Uchimura concludes that soshitsu far more outweighs kankyō. The nature–nurture debate continued throughout war time and postwar Japan. For the opposing side, see Abe Yoshio, “Futago no hanashi,” p. 12. Th is writer cites Brandes’s argument that differences in twins are caused by possible differences in gender and living circumstances after birth. For later writings, see Fukuoka, “Anthropometric and Psychometric Studies.” Fukuoka does not necessarily oppose Galton but states, “While in physical features, the preponderance of hereditary influence is clearly shown, this is not so much the case in the psychical features” (27). The debate became more complicated as scientists began to distinguish between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, often arguing that the former exhibited more similar psychological traits than the latter. 42. Obonai, “Sōseiji ni yoru shinri.” 43. Taniguchi Toratoshi, “Sōseiji no shinkenkyū,” 12/9/1934, p. 9. 44. Taniguchi Toratoshi, “Sōseiji no jinruigaku,” p. 1.

Notes to Pages 50–56

143

45. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, p. 34. 46. Komai, “Distinguishing Identical and Fraternal Twins,” p. 409. 47. Ibid., p. 411. 48. Ibid., p. 409. 49. For an interesting story and research on this complementary view, see Watanabe Tōru, “Futago no kenkyū.” Watanabe tells the story of twins named Earl and Harold. He describes them as a complementary pair: Earl, who suffered from illness, was constantly plotting mischief, and Harold was friendlier. Earl was slower at learning alphabets, and Watanabe wonders to what extent Earl’s illness influenced his personality. He cites from Galton, who claimed that one twin tends to be more powerful and brave, the other more timid and weak. 50. Taniguchi Toratoshi, Iden, Taishitsu, Konketsu, p. 111. 51. Sōshi, “Sōseiji no seishinbyō.” 52. Okuta, “Sōseiji to sōhasseichihō.” 53. Nagai, “Kekkaku, seibyō, oyobi seishinbyō.” 54. Nagai, Yūseigaku gairon, p. 108. 55. K, “Sōseiji to kekkon,” p. 44. 56. Taniguchi Toratoshi, Iden, Taishitsu, Konketsu, p. 152. 57. Ibid., p. 44. 58. Ibid., p. 110. According to Taniguchi’s statistics, in Japan, only about 1 in every 174 births produces twins. However, the numbers differ according to region, with Okinawa being the highest among all the prefectures. Scarcity of dizygotic twins, he argues, is a common feature for the whole Mongolian race (Koreans and Formosans). 59. Reichert, “Deviance and Social Darwinism,” p. 118. 60. For more information on Mengele, see Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, p. 35. Also see Skal, Screams of Reason, especially chap.  6, “The Doctor Will Eat You Now,” pp. 230–70. Skal discusses the rise of the dispassionate “clinical gaze” of modern times, described by Foucault, and the spread of corporatized medical authorities, like HMOs. Josef Mengele is discussed on pp. 235–37. Mengele personally selected for extermination between 200,000 and  400,000 human beings at Auschwitz. He became obsessed with the issue of multiple births, and his cruel experiments included determining whether one twin could be more susceptible to poison than the other. 61. I am using the original version of Ranpo’s “Sōseiji: aru shikeishū ga kyōkaishi ni uchiaketa hanashi,” published in Shin seinen in October 1924. 62. Ranpo, “Sōseiji,” p. 140. 63. For an interesting analysis of Ranpo’s use of hitori futayaku, see Sari Kawana’s analysis of “Ryōki no hate” in Murder Most Modern, pp. 61–67. 64. Ranpo is quoted as stating this in an interview published in Shin seinen. See his essay “Edogawa Ranpo zenshū,” especially p. 168. Th is eugenic reading is Jim Reichert’s main point in his aforementioned essay, “Deviance and Social Darwinism.” 65. Ranpo, “Sōseiji,” both quotes on p. 137. 66. Ibid., pp. 142–43. 67. I am thinking here of the “sequel” to Ranpo’s tale, fittingly titled “Twins” by Yokomizo Seishi, which I will briefly discuss later. Yokomizo, “Futago.” See also

144

Notes to Pages 56–63

Johnston McCulley’s “Sōseiji no fukushū,” a translation of “The Avenging Twins.” McCulley was extremely popu lar in Japan at the time, and his story was serialized in Shin seinen from 1924 to 1926. 68. For example, in Tanizaki’s “Mr. Bluemound” (Aozuka-shi no hanashi, 1926), a fi lmmaker runs into a complete stranger, who appears to know more about his actress wife than he does, and the two identities eventually become conflated. Tanizaki, “Mr. Bluemound.” 69. Ranpo, “Sōseiji,” p. 140. 70. Ibid., p. 145. 71. I am indebted to my colleague at Stanford University, Andre Haag, for pointing out the multiple mentions of Korea. I originally used a later version of the text, which had omitted these key details. 72. Nitobe, The Japanese Nation, p. 230 (italics mine). Formosa was the name for Taiwan in the colonial era. 73. Oguma, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, pp. 87–88. 74. Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, pp. 115–16. 75. Hori, Naisen fūshū rikai no shō, pp. 4–5. It is interesting that he uses the word “sisters” here as well as “brothers.” So far, however, I have seen no cases in which Korea–Japan relations are described as female siblings, and thus fi nd “brotherhood” to be more applicable here. 76. Peattie, introduction to The Japanese Colonial Empire, p. 10. Original quote in ibid., p. 17. 77. Tierney, Tropics of Savagery, p. 31. 78. Th is brother-brother desire is not overtly described as a homosocial desire like in many of Ranpo’s tales, but it is certainly possible to read it as thus. Jeff rey Angles notes such a theme in Ranpo’s works from this period. More importantly, J. Keith Vincent’s brilliant analysis of “two-timing” narratives applies here, as the two temporalities of the past and the present create an intricate dialogue about one brother’s desire for the other, where in the present, the criminal brother reminisces about his past connection to the older brother. Angles, Writing the Love of Boys, pp. 107–42; Vincent, Two-Timing. 79. Ranpo, “Sōseiji,” p. 143. 80. Ibid., p. 144 (italics mine). 81. De Nooy, Twins in Contemporary Literature. 82. Ibid., p. 79. 83. Lippit, Atomic Light, p. 76. 84. Ranpo, “Sōseiji,” p. 137. 85. Ranpo, “Renzu shikōshō,” p. 56. 86. Igarashi, “Edogawa Rampo and the Excess of Vision,” p. 312. 87. Ibid., p. 313. 88. Ranpo, “Sōseiji,” pp. 138–39. 89. Posadas, “Rampo’s Repetitions,” p. 171. 90. Ranpo, “Sōseiji,” pp. 9 and 137, respectively. 91. Ibid., p. 137. 92. Although Ranpo claims to have been apolitical and “nihilistic,” he is actually known for his antiwar stance. His short story “Caterpillar” (1929, Imomushi,

Notes to Pages 64–73

145

originally titled Akumu) was censored by the Keishichō for its grotesque depiction of a veteran. 93. Pak, Zaininchi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō, pp.  27–29. I am indebted to my colleague at Stanford University, Andre Haag, for generously sharing this important research material with me while I was rewriting this chapter for publication. 94. Ryang, “The Tongue That Divided Life and Death.” 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Nitobe, “Koshikoku Chōsen,” pp. 106–7. 98. For a brief discussion of the background of Nitobe’s essay, see Dudden, Japan’s Colonization of Korea, p. 134. 99. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 100. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 6. 101. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 37–39. 102. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 15. 103. Ibid., p. 16. 104. Ranpo’s tale has a similar structure to what James Fujii called complicit fiction—modern fiction that constructs new imageries and subjects needed for the Japa nese Empire—but often hides its ties to the nation. Like the figure of the Westerner in Natsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) Kokoro (1914), who functioned as a signifier of absence and who leaves clues for the reader to figure out what other things are absent from the novel, the figure of the twin—through his mimicry and confession—hints at the colonial history of modern Japan. But Ranpo’s tale is both subversive and complicit, for it is about what is suppressed and brings the historicity more to the foreground. Fujii, Complicit Fictions; see p. 149 for his reading on Sōseki. 105. Yokomizo, “Futago,” p. 132.

Chapter 3 1. Satō, “Kaidan.” 2. Watanabe Masahiko, Kindai bungaku no bunshinzō, pp. 18–20. 3. Ibid. 4. Yamashita, 20-seiki Nihon kai’i bungakushi, p. 8. 5. For example, he states that Tanizaki’s “The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga” was inspired by the author’s own “physical and psychological instability.” Ibid., p. 386. 6. Doi, “Human Beings Split Apart.” 7. Matsuyama Iwao, Ranpo to Tokyo, p. 141. See also his chapter on Ranpo’s short story “Kagami jigoku” (Hell of mirrors), pp. 107–42. 8. Ibid., p. 124. 9. Watanabe Masahiko, Kindai bungaku no bunshinzō. 10. Kawamoto, Taishō gen’ei. See his chapter “Jiko bunretsu to iu monogatari.” For the use of the term “photographic uncanny” in Japa nese cinema, see Chika

146

Notes to Pages 73–79

Kinoshita’s wonderful essay on J-Horror, “The Mummy Complex: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Loft and J-Horror,” especially p. 114. 11. Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies, p. 24. 12. Ibid., p. 29. 13. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” 234 (italics mine). 14. See, for example, Williams, “Visions and Narratives,” p. 190. 15. For the 1930s reception of the work, see the fi rst section of Nishihara Kazumi’s Yumeno Kyūsaku no sekai, which contains essays from that period. 16. Ranpo, “Yumeno Kyūsaku-shi to sono sakuhin.” 17. Th is is quoted in Ishikawa Ichirō’s “Wakare,” p. 118. 18. For more information on itan bungaku and its boom in the 1960s and 1970s, see Kawamura Minato, Nihon itan bungaku. 19. Tsurumi, Yumeno Kyūsaku, p. 261. 20. Ōishi, Shin seinen no kyōwakoku, p. 121. 21. Napier, Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, p. 112. 22. Kawana, Murder Most Modern, pp. 130–39. 23. This diary entry is quoted by Nakajima Kawatarō in the afterword (“Kaidai”) to the reprinted 1969 edition of Dogura magura, p. 381. All citations are taken from this edition of the text, and all translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 24. Sugiyama, “Dogura magura shippitsu chū no omoide,” p. 112. 25. Oda Susumu cites Dogura magura as an important record of psychoanalytic studies at the university. Oda, “Seishin igaku no kenchi kara mita Nakamura Kokyō to Hentai shinri,” p. 17. For background on psychoanalysis in Japan and on the role of Kyūshū Imperial University, see Taketomo, “Cultural Adaptation of Psychoanalysis in Japan.” Ōishi Masahiko also notes that psychology was a science that did not fit into Japan’s modernization schema. Ōishi, Shin seinen no kyōwakoku, p. 24. 26. Oda Susumu makes this point in “Seishin igaku no kenchi kara mita Nakamura Kokyō to Hentai shinri.” For more information on Kure Shūzō, see Omata, Seishin byōin no kigen, pp. 30–33. 27. Sugiyama Kura, “Dogura magura shippitsu chū no omoide.” 28. Omata, Seishin byōin no kigen, p. 227. 29. Morris-Suzuki, “Becoming Japa nese,” p. 106. 30. Chou, The Kōminka Movement, p. 42. The term seishin is a new Sino-Japanese compound that was created in the Meiji era to translate the English word “spirit,” the French word “esprit,” and the German word “geist” (Fukuzawa based his notion of “civilization” on Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe and Buckle’s History of Civilization in England). However, because of Fukuzawa’s insistence on the continuation with the past (e.g., kokugaku movement, samurai/feudal spirit that can be transformed into a nationalistic spirit), it is a term also fused with older ideas of Japanese essence. There are various words that stood for “spirit,” such as kokutai (national polity), but Fukuzawa Yukichi used seishin to describe an enlightened spirit. 31. Numerous writings from the Meiji period state how “spirit/psyche is the greatest tool for war” and defi ne bushidō (the way of the warrior) as a form of “psychological education.” Nitobe, Bushidō. See also Nitobe, Sensō to seishin, pp. 1–23. 32. Kure and Araki, Meiji sanjūhachinen sen’eki rikugun eiseishi, p. 44.

Notes to Pages 79–87

147

33. Ibid., p. 64. 34. Ibid., p. 43. On fox possessions, see Smyers, The Fox and the Jewel, p. 90. Kitsunetsuki was also used to describe female hysteria, as it was seen to be a hereditary condition passed down through the matrilineal line. 35. Kure, Isobe gūshō, p. 761. I will discuss hysteria later in this chapter. Just to give one example, though, Kure references Santō Kyōden’s Legend of Princess Sakura (Sakura hime akebono sōshi), describing Princess Sakura as a “hysteric”: “She turned into one body with two forms (ittai nikei), and these two voices and gestures were completely different” (p. 768). 36. Nakamura, “Nijū jinkaku no shōnen” and “Nijū jinkaku no onna.” Both of these texts discuss instances in which his subjects, put under hypnosis, reveal at least two competing personalities occupying their minds. The second personality is normally the “bad” one. For biographical information on Nakamura Kokyō, see Oda, “Seishin igaku no kenchi kara mita Nakamura Kokyō to Hentai shinri.” 37. Nakamura, Hentai shinri to hanzai. 38. Ibid., p. 11. 39. Ibid., p. 20. 40. Ibid., p. 24. 41. Nosaka, “Shinreigaku to iu media to kindaishi,” p. 131. 42. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” pp. 211–44. 43. Nakamura, Hentai shinri to hanzai, pp. 410–11. 44. Ibid., p. 438. 45. For a recent discussion on the relationship between Yumeno and his father, see Tada, Yumeno Kyusaku dokuhon, especially chap. 2, pp. 56–63. 46. Tada, Yumeno Kyusaku dokuhon, p. 128. Contrary to popu lar belief, neither Yumeno nor his father ever became official members of the Gen’yōsha, which upheld the notion of kokusuiteki ideologī (pure national ideology) and viewed Japan as a homogeneous state—a concept toward which Yumeno and Sugiyama expressed their ambivalence. Instead of aligning his son with the right-wing group, Sugiyama preferred to describe Yumeno as a “red” (a term for socialists or revolutionaries) who dreamt of a boundaryless, peaceful world. 47. Included in Yumeno, Kinsei kaijinden. 48. Ibid., p. 56. Nikkan gōhei omoide banashi provides some insight into why Yumeno did not wholly embrace Uchida’s stance. 49. Matsuyama Shigeo, Gunshū, pp. 219–39. 50. This is also quoted in Tada, Yumeno Kyusaku dokuhon, p. 126. I find this quote particularly interesting, for the Taishō emperor himself was known to be a kyōjin (insane person). It would be fascinating to analyze Taishō nationalism/imperialism as tied to insanity and abnormality, rather than the more traditional understanding of it as a promotion of the healthy, homogeneous nation. 51. Tyler, Modanizumu, p. 37. For a thorough explanation of the term modanizumu, see pp. 1–48. 52. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, pp. 4–16. 53. For more information on Yumeno and modernism, see Williams, Visions and Narratives, pp. 158–211.

148

Notes to Pages 87–92

54. Yumeno, Dogura magura, pp. 36–37. 55. Ibid., p. 258. 56. Ibid., p. 188. 57. Ibid., p. 267. 58. Ibid., p. 271. 59. Ibid., p. 272. 60. Ibid., pp. 370–71. 61. Ibid., p. 375. 62. As Sari Kawana has pointed out, Dogura magura “shares its central premise” with the Dr. Caligari fi lm. Kawana, Murder Most Modern, p. 132. Yumeno was so inf luenced by this film that he even wrote a story called Inugami hakase (Dr. Inugami, 1931), taking the title from the fi lm. 63. Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari, quotes/intertitles at 1:08:14 and 1:08:32. 64. Translation by Kyoko Omori can be found at the Comparative Japa nese Film Archive initiative’s website: http://cjf.dhinitiative.org/fedora/repository/Hamilton Japa neseComparativeFilm:58/PDF. 65. Yumeno may have been inspired by the Buddhist kusō-zu (painting of the nine stages of a decaying corpse). Produced in Japan from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, these scrolls depicted decaying female bodies, and viewers were encouraged to contemplate the nine stages of a decaying corpse (kusōkan) as a way to learn about the defi lement of a decaying human body, that they might liberate themselves from worldly, sexual desires. Yumeno, being a priest at one point in his life, often draws from Buddhist traditions. For more information and analysis of kusō-zu, see Kanda, “Behind the Sensationalism.” 66. Yumeno, Dogura magura, pp.  168–69. Th is discourse dates back to the 1880s, when early racial studies argued how a superior Japa nese race may be created. Takahashi Yoshio, whose famous Nihon jinshu kairyō- ron (Theories for improving the Japa nese race, 1884) introduced the theory of kōhaku zakkon (yellow-white interracial marriage), argued that if Japan wanted to beat the Western powers, the Japa nese must marry Caucasians to produce superior offspring. Baron Katō Hiroyuki, on the other hand, contended that mixing blood would only result in creating a new race and would eventually obliterate Japanese blood, and that the Japa nese were not inferior, as Takahashi claimed, but superior to Caucasians. Katō’s ideas eventually prevailed over Takahashi’s, establishing junketsu- ron (pureblood theory) as the dominant theory over konketsu- ron (mixed-blood theory) in Meiji eugenics. Takahashi, Nihon jinshu kairyōron. Katō, “Nihon jinshu kairyō no ben.” Suzuki Zenji has a section on this racial-hybridity debate; see Nihon no yūseigaku, pp. 34–38. Jennifer Robertson also summarizes this konketsu vs. junketsu debate nicely in her article “Japan’s First Cyborg?” 67. Yumeno, Dogura magura, p. 169. 68. Ibid., p. 349. 69. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” https://www.marx ists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm#n18. 70. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 122. 71. Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different, p. 16.

Notes to Pages 93–104

149

72. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 150. 73. Yumeno, Dogura magura, p. 361. When he reaches the very end of the scroll, he discovers Dr. Masaki’s name, making him think that Masaki had planned this whole thing, that he had an affair with his mother. At this point, he thinks that Dr. Masaki is his actual father. But this moment is undercut in the next confusing scene, in which he fi nds the scroll again, this time untouched by him. 74. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, p. 107. 75. Yee, “Constructing a Native Consciousness,” p. 91. 76. Yumeno, Dogura magura, p. 6. 77. Ibid., p. 378. 78. Karigari, Dogura magura no yume, chap. 9. As stated earlier, Yumeno was once a Buddhist priest, and there are undoubtedly Buddhist influences in the novel, such as the aforementioned kusō-zu and the concept of karmic cycle. 79. Yumeno, Dogura magura, p. 129. 80. Ibid., p. 68. 81. Ibid., p. 379. 82. Kawata, “Musei eiga no koro.” 83. Yumeno, “ ‘Seikatsu’ + ‘sensō’ + ‘kyōgi’ ÷ 0 = noh.” 84. Yumeno, “Senjō,” p. 233. 85. Yumeno, “ ‘Seikatsu’ + ‘sensō’ + ‘kyōgi’ ÷ 0 = noh,” pp. 408–11. 86. Sugiyama, Waga chichi: Yumeno Kyūsaku. Tsurumi Shunsuke has also pointed out the importance of this memory in Dogura magura.

Chapter 4 1. Hirabayashi, “Modanizumu to shakaiteki konkyo,” p. 843. 2. Wada, Tekusuto no kōtsūgaku, pp. 19–26. 3. Although the term jinzō literally means “man-made” and may not appear to necessarily signify mechanical bodies like robots, the term itself means “artificial” or “not naturally occurring,” and the rubi (accompanying phonetic reading) clearly marked it to mean “robot.” Inoue Haruki’s work offers the most comprehensive history of these robots in modern Japan. See his Nihon robotto sōseiki. 4. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” p. 230. 5. Jentsch, “Document,” pp. 221–22. 6. Bolton, “From Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls,” p. 741. Baba Nobuhiko has also made a similar observation about how robots are humans’ “doppelgängers.” Baba, Robotto no bunkashi, p. 20. 7. In Europe, too, the fascination with mechanized bodies is often traced to Descartes (1596–1650), who had already announced in the seventeenth century that all animals were machines. Matsuzaki, “Shohatsuteki robotto,” pp. 30–31. For an interesting analysis of these Eu ropean mechanical objects, see Barbara Stafford’s works, which argue that these inventions are strongly tied to our desire to understand and depict how the human body functions. Stafford, Body Criticism, p. 152. See also Stafford and Terpak, eds., Devices of Wonder, pp. 1–25.

150

Notes to Pages 104–114

8. Matsuzaki, “Shohatsuteki robotto,” pp. 35–36. 9. Rakugo is a form of storytelling in Japan that dates back to the Edo period. It is often comical, and in that sense it can be compared to stand-up comedy or one-man plays. The storyteller typically sits on the stage and masterfully narrates the tale to his audience, using various vocal techniques and minor gestures. 10. Taneda and Hashimoto, “Robotto ga bungaku no tēma ni naru toki,” p. 235. See also Wood, Edison’s Eve, p. xix. 11. Inoue, Nihon robotto sōseiki, p. 33. 12. Čapek, Robotto (R.U.R.), p. 28. 13. Aizawa, Sekai yūshū jinzō ningen, pp. 15–20. 14. Ibid., pp. 28–30. 15. Modern Times. 16. Yokota, Meiji ‘kūsō shōsetsu’ korekushon, p. 94. 17. Nishimura, “Seimei o kataru,” p. 576. 18. Ibid., p. 575. 19. Aizawa, Sekai yūshū jinzō ningen, p. 28. 20. Nishimura, “Seimei o kataru,” p. 576. 21. Ibid., p. 570. 22. Kagaku gahō 18.1 (1932): page unmarked. 23. Nagai, “Kikaisetsu to shunkisetsu,” p. 49. 24. Nagai, “Seitai jinzō ron,” p. 864. 25. Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, pp. 91–118. 26. Itagaki, Kikai to geijutsu to no kōryū, pp. 46–47. 27. Suzuki Sadami, “Rewriting Art and Literary History,” p. 17. 28. Wada, Tekusuto no kōtsūgaku, p. 68. 29. Ôya, “Modansō to mondansō.” 30. Kimura Yoshimi, Kikai to geijutsu kakumei, p. 259. 31. Čapek, Robotto (R.U.R.), pp. 2–3. 32. Kimura Yoshimi, Kikai to geijutsu kakumei, p. 4. 33. Kagawa, “Kikai no ningen yokuhakushi ron,” pp. 8–18. 34. Takada, “Jinzō ningen,” pp. 180–84. 35. Yoshida, “Ninshinsuru robotto.” 36. Yamada, “Robotto to jendā,” pp. 25–37. Yamada shows that even today, the Japa nese imagination insists on picturing the robot as female. He includes an interesting quote from Tezuka Osamu, who originally wanted Atomu to be female. 37. Koyama, “S Mibōjin to Robotto.” 38. Hibi Yoshitaka also points this hybridization out. See “Kikaishugi to Yokomitsu Riichi ‘Kikai.’ ” 39. Mizushima, “Jinzō ningen jidai,” pp. 308–9. 40. Again, I want to give a nod to Yoshida Morio’s enlightening piece “Ninshinsuru robotto” for pointing this out. 41. See Abe Isoo’s Jinkō mondai to sanji seigen, in which he calls out to limit the number of children per family, because “with the rise of population, the number of the poor would increase. Then the number of crimes would increase as well” (7). 42. Elise K. Tipton reveals how a large population was believed to be a symbol of national strength, yet there was actually overpopulation with decreasing food

Notes to Pages 115–116

151

supply. She describes the 1920s cabinet as being “ambivalent” about the movement, since they did see the overpopulation but still promoted the former belief. Tipton, “Ishimoto Shizue: The Margaret Sanger of Japan.” See also her “Birth Control Movement and the Population Problem.” 43. Sanger and Yamamoto, “Sanga joshi kazoku seigenhō hihan,” p. 31. Katō (Ishimoto), “Mazu naniyorimo hinin o,”  p.  172. Both citations quoted in Ishii, “Sanji chōsetsu undō no gensetsu ni tsuite,”  p.  81. Ishii analyzes the rhetoric of both eugenics and the birth control movement and offers a good overview of the history of the birth control movement as a whole. 44. Abe, Jinkō mondai to sanji seigen, p. 7. See also his Kodomo hon’i no katei, in which he calls out to the lower class to stop producing children if they cannot afford to do so, for these children would not be able to receive good education. 45. Tipton, “Birth Control Movement,” p. 51. 46. According to Matsubara Yōko and other scholars, the term “eugenics” ( yūzenikkusu) itself was not established until 1919. Ikeda Shigenori established the Nihon Yūsei Undō Kyōkai (Japan Eugenics Movement Association) in 1926 and began publishing his journal Yūsei undō the same year. I want to note that even though eugenics is often compared to militarism and Nazism, and is usually defi ned as a science that aims to improve the hereditary qualities of human beings and to produce or retain superior seeds by ridding inferior genes, Japanese eugenics actually encompassed much more than this limited defi nition. It came to connote any “ ‘progressive’ value system” not limited to genetic studies, and included fields like education, diet, the happiness of individuals and families, and even antiwar sentiments. Its discourse should in fact be understood more broadly as one that seeks to control and “improve” individual bodies (especially offspring) by establishing the rhetoric and the binaries of normal–abnormal and inferior–superior and making each subject’s body inseparable from the body politic of the nation. See Matsubara, “Yūsei mondai/jinkō seisakuhen/kaisetsu,” p. 1. Ikeda Shigenori, one of the key eugenicists of Taishō and early Shōwa Japan, once stated that “eugenics is not just a movement to improve race ( jinshu) but essentially a movement to improve society.” Ikeda, “Yūsei undō to wa nani ka,” p. 9. Also, for the most comprehensive history of eugenics, see Suzuki Zenji, Nihon no yūseigaku. 47. For more history on the merging of the birth control movement and the eugenics movement, see Ogino, “Ningen no ‘ryō’ to ‘shitsu,’ ” especially pp. 190–91. 48. See, for example, the very fi rst issues, 1.1 (1926.11) and 1.2 (1926.12). 49. Sanger, Sanji chōsetsuron, p. 288. 50. For details on the role of psychology and biology in establishing the meaning of bosei, see Ozawa, “Nyūyōji seisaku to boshi kankei shinrigaku.” See also Koyama Shizuko, Ryōsai kenbo to iu kihan, especially pp. 52–54. 51. Both Ōhinata Masami and Kanō Mikiyo point to the history of the term bosei. Ōhinata, “Bosei gainen o meguru genjō,” p. 29; Kanō, “ ‘Bosei’ no tanjō to tennōsei,” see especially pp. 56–57. Also, for a good resource and bibliography of contemporary criticisms of bosei, see Katō Shūichi’s introduction in Feminizumu korekushon II. 52. For a comprehensive history of ryōsai kenbo, see Koyama Shizuko’s seminal work on this topic: Ryōsai kenbo to iu kihan, especially pp. 93–94; and Kimura Ryōko, “Fujin zasshi ni miru.”

152

Notes to Pages 116–123

53. Negishi, Ninshin chōsetsu no jissai chishiki, p. 84. 54. Shinmura, “Shussan ni okeru onna to otoko,” p. 50. 55. Ikeda, “Yoi kodomo o tsukuru ni wa,” p. 98. But for these eugenicists, “mothers” implied solely the educated middle and upper classes. Ikeda declared that eugenics was not only about kekkon kairyō (marriage improvement) or ninshin chōsetsu (pregnancy control). His ideals required good seeds and upbringing, and his main targets were the socially marginal, including the disabled and criminals. See also Ikeda, “Yūseigakuteki ninshin chōsetsu no hitsuyō to hōhō.” Koike Shirō also promoted good mother–child relationships in “Yoki ko o umu tameni.” 56. Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, p. 273. For background information on Ishimoto and the birth control movement, see Tipton, “Ishimoto Shizue.” 57. Frühstück, Colonizing Sex, p. 128. 58. Robertson, “Japan’s First Cyborg?,” p. 2. 59. Hirabayashi, “Fujin no seiki,” p. 776. 60. Yoshida, “Ninshinsuru robotto.” 61. Hirabayashi, “Kōsokudo jidai—gojūnengo no bungaku.” 62. Haldane surmised that by 2074, ectogenesis would be the most popu lar form of childbirth. Haldane, “Daedalus or Science and the Future.” 63. Slightly later in Japan, the anthology Hyakunengo no sekai (The world in a hundred years, 1936) published an article called “Jinzō ningen de shussan ga tasukaru” (Childbirth is saved by robots), which pointed to mechanical reproduction as the savior of women, who would then be able to obtain the same social status as men, for they would not have to suffer from pregnancy. See Inoue Haruki, Nihon robotto sōseiki, p. 84. 64. Hirabayashi, “Robot,” p. 59. 65. Ibid., p. 63. 66. Fuess, Divorce in Japan, chap. 6. 67. Takada, “Robot,”  p.  183. For historical information on shiseiji, see Moriyama and Nakae, Nihon kodomoshi. 68. Takada, “Robot,” p. 183. 69. Takada, Yūryōji o mōkeru hōhō, p. 210. As stated before, ever since the Civil Code of 1898, families were required to register with their municipal offices. They often did not, however, and their children would then become unregistered and undefi nable, thus called shiseiji. 70. Ibid., p. 211. 71. Ibid., pp. 203–4. 72. Ibid., pp. 214–15. 73. Namae, Jidō to shakai, p. 300. 74. Ibid., p. 301–2. 75. Ibid., p. 302. 76. Ibid., p. 318. 77. Fuess, Divorce in Japan, pp. 51–54. I also want to thank Allison Alexy for sharing with me her informative work on divorce in contemporary Japan. Alexy, “The Door My Wife Closed.” 78. Daudet, Shiseiji. 79. Hirabayashi, “Robot,” p. 68.

Notes to Pages 123–132

153

80. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 154. 81. Takada, “Robot,” p. 184. 82. Ibid., p. 183. 83. Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different, p. 64. He also emphasizes the lack of subjectivity and voice of the baby. 84. I am not advocating a clearly demarcated linear history from female robots to baby robots; rather, I am pointing out that new forms of robots appeared in the late 1920s, but there were still plenty of female robot images and others coexisting. 85. Not surprisingly, the majority of 1930s robot literature surrounded the theme of war. For some interesting examples, see Unno, “Jinzō ningen hakase”; Yumeno, “Ningen rekōdo”; Matsuyama Shisui, “Satsujin kōsen.” 86. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” pp. 239–63 (quote on p. 247). 87. Skal, Screams of Reason, p. 55. 88. I fi nd this ending to be strangely similar to Yumeno’s ending in the previous chapter. 89. Nishimura, “Seimei o kataru.”

Conclusion 1. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” p. 247.

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Index

Page numbers for figures and tables are in italics. Abe Isoo, 115, 139n55, 150n41 abject, the, 59, 66, 139n55 abortion, 120–21 Agamben, Giorgio, 64 Aizawa Jirō, 105–6 Akechi Kogorō, 45–46 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 71 Althusser, Louis, 92. See also interpellation anatomy. See bodies anxiety. See fear artificial humans. See robots artificial reproduction, 112–14, 119, 126–28, 133, 152n63 Asakusa, 82 assimilation, 57, 58, 78 asylums, 70, 75–76, 78, 86, 88–89, 93, 101 Atarashiki zōbutsusha (New creator, anonymous), 38–40, 39. See also Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (Mary Shelley) automata. See robots avant-garde movement. See modanizumu bacteria, 19–20 bakemono, 11, 20, 29. See also monsters

Baudrillard, Jean, 50, 94 Benjamin, Walter, 82 benshi, 88, 91, 97 Bhabha, Homi, 67–68 binaries, confusion of: animate and inanimate, 3–4, 103, 108, 124, 132; the colonized and the Japanese, 8, 41, 66, 98, 130; East and West, 68; healthy and unhealthy, 22, 40–41, 67; human and nonhuman/machines, 4, 25, 66, 103, 105, 126–27, 130; modern and premodern, 11–12, 32–33, 40, 134, 137n5; normal and abnormal, 2, 4–5, 9–10, 34–35, 37, 41, 53, 129–32, 151n46; original and copy, 42, 45, 50, 60, 67–68, 72, 127; rational and irrational, 11,15, 23, 32–33, 40, 134; real and unreal, 10; science and fantastic literature, 15, 40; self and other/another self, 68, 72, 94, 98 biological reproduction, 8, 42, 105, 112, 114–18, 127 birth control movement, 7, 102, 104, 113, 114–18, 125–26, 129, 132, 150n42 bodies: ambiguous, 6, 10, 21, 33, 131, 133; as copies/reproductions, 42, 72–73, 95; degenerate, 25, 35, 51–54; of the emperor 37, 41, 48, 57, 133; female

170

Index

bodies (continued) body as geographical metaphor, 32–33; female body as site of promiscuity and sexuality, 27–28, 44, 132; female body as target of eugenic improvement, 20–22, 38–40, 103, 112, 114–18, 126–27, 132; flexible, 34–36; fragmented and split, 44–45, 61, 71, 79–82, 93–94; idealized images, 6, 36–37, 40, 132–33; immune, 33–37, 133; mechanization of, 8, 103–11, 114, 117–18, 127–28; normalization and disciplining of, 1, 4–7, 17–18, 20–22, 36; spectral 36–37, 59–61, 66, 84; as visual representation of the invisible, 16–23. See also monsters Bolton, Christopher, xii, 103 bosei, 115–16 Bourdaghs, Michael, 17, 20 bourgeoisie. See Marxism Buddhism: and hijiri, 24; parables of, 20; Shingon, 31–32; and Yumeno Kyūsaku, 148n65, 149n78 bukimi no tani. See “Uncanny Valley” (Mori Masahiro) bunshin. See doppelgänger bunshin shōsetsu. See doppelgänger literature burakumin, 20, 139n43 Butler, Judith, 92, 123–24 Cabinet des Doktor Caligari, Das (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), 71, 89–92, 90, 148n62 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The. See Cabinet des Doktor Caligari, Das Čapek, Karel, 8, 105 capitalism: and colonialism, 44; and the concept of flexibility, 34–35; and consumerism, 43; and postcolonialism, 36–37, 140n76; and robot tales, 105, 113 capital punishment, 54, 56, 61, 132–33 Cartesian philosophy, 108, 149n7 Castle, Terry, 3 Chambers-Letson, Joshua, 92, 124–25 Chang and Eng, 53. See also twins Chaplin, Charlie, 106

Cheah, Pheng, 36–37, 140n76 China, 13, 17, 92, 95, 137n13 Chinese: as doppelgänger, 8, 91–96, 98, 131; massacre of, 86; medicine, 24, 33, 36; plant, 99; racial studies of, 53, 64; studies of schizophrenia, 80; twins, 53; and war, 78; and Yang Guifei, 89, 91, 92 cholera: bacillus, 16, 18–19; epidemic, 16, 20, 21, 24; as monster, 13, 14, 15, 20, 22–23; prevention and sanitization of, 16, 24, 138n38 cinema: and Asakusa, 82; and colonialism, 82–84, 95; and mirror stage, 87–94, 96–98; and photographic uncanny, 72–73; as repressed memory, 82–84, 95; and the rise of doubles in literature, 45, 72–73, 75; and schizophrenia, 81–84; silent, 71, 88, 97. See also German fi lms; Pure Film Movement citizenship, 120, 125, 130. See also law Civil Code of 1898, 120, 122, 162n69 colonial discourse: 56–57, 64, 66; of assimilation and exclusion, 8, 57–58, 61, 78; and cinema, 82–84, 95; and normativity, 6–8; as a paradox, 64; of racial “otherness,” 131; of racial “sameness” and brotherhood, 46–47, 50, 54–58, 61, 63–64, 67, 131; in travel writing, 32, 46. See also colonial mimicry; colonial uncanny; colonialism; seishin colonialism: internal, 5, 136n16; and twin studies, 45–46 colonial mimicry, 41, 67–69 colonial uncanny, 47, 65–70, 95–98, 131 confusion of binaries. See binaries, confusion of Criminal Code of 1871, 122 criminality. See criminals criminals: and the colonized, 56; as “degenerate” beings, 50, 52–55; and ero guro nansensu, 44; and women, 21; studies of, 50, 52–53 criminology. See criminals, studies of

Index deracialization, 75, 94 Derridian trace. See trace (Derridian) Descartes, René. See Cartesian philosophy degeneracy, 35, 53, 56, 115. See also criminals desire: to become the same as the other, 47, 58–61, 67, 82, 133; to extend life, 126–27, 133; homosocial, 144n78; to be human, 127; for mechanization of the body, 95, 104, 149n7; to return to past trauma, 83–84; sexual, 27–28, 31, 140n71, 148n65; to transcend the human, 127; to visualize the invisible anatomy, 18, 22–23, 104–5 detective fiction: and Edogawa Ranpo, 7, 42, 45–46, 62, 69; irregular (henkaku) 43, 74, 141n2, 141n3; and mechanical imageries, 106; regular (honkaku), 43; and Yumeno Kyūsaku, 70, 74, 98. See also “Twins” (Edogawa Ranpo); Dogura magura (Yumeno Kyūsaku); Shin seinen (New youth) deviance, 5, 44 difference. See otherness discrimination: language of, 22, 29, 40; against minorities and other races, 25, 95; against monstrous others, 29–30; against women, 20–22, 29–30. See under Great Kantō Earthquake, and the post-earthquake massacre diseases: and animals, 20, 27; and invisibility, 19–20, 28; as marker of otherness, 22, 25–26, 29; mental, 52, 76–80; mizuatari, 26; power to overcome, 36–37, 41, 127, 132; premodern perception of, 20; STDs, 21; tuberculosis, 20–22, 25, 52, 115, 138n33; and twins, 52; and women, 21–22, 27–33, 35–36, 41, 129–30. See also cholera; epidemic; schizophrenia disembodiment, 69 Dogra magra. See Dogura magura Dogura magura (Yumeno Kyūsaku): and adaptation of Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari, 89–92; colonial

171

elements and colonial uncanny in, 8, 84–86, 95–98, 131; controversial ending of, 74, 86, 96–98, 132; as doppelgänger literature, 71, 74; mirror stage in, 87–94; and modanizumu, 86–87; overview and reception, 8, 74–76, 84–87; and photographic uncanny, 72–73, 93–95; and psychological studies of schizophrenia, 75–84, 88–89; and racialization, 91–94; and Yumeno’s theory of nonsense, 98–101. See also doppelgänger; Yumeno Kyūsaku Doi Takeo, 72 Dōjōji, 20 dokufu, 22, 138n34. See also criminals doppelgänger: Chinese, 8, 80, 91–94; and cinema, 45, 72–73, 75, 81–84, 87–98; and colonialism, 73, 95–98; Freud’s analysis of, 73, 126; as mental illness/schizophrenia, 72, 75–84, 95–96, 98, 101; as popu lar literary metaphor, 2, 42, 54, 71, 130; as symptom of modernity, 2, 71–72 doppelgänger literature, 8, 56, 71 doubles. See doppelgänger; twins Doyle, Arthur Conan, 45 Driscoll, Mark, 44, 46 Dutch studies, 104 ectogenesis, 119. See also artificial reproduction Edogawa Ranpo: and colonialism, 8, 45–47, 56–58, 63–65, 68–69; and detective fiction, 7, 42–46, 55, 62, 69; and fear of mirrors, 60; reception of, 9–10, 44–46; and social Darwinism, 53–55; on Yumeno Kyūsaku, 74. See also “Twins” (Edogawa Ranpo) Edogawa Ranpo, works of: “Renzu shikōsho” (Lens-philia), 60; “Hell of Mirrors” (Kagami jigoku), 94; “Caterpillar” (Imomushi, originally titled Akumu), 145n92. See also “Twins” (Edogawa Ranpo) Einstein, Albert, 43

172

Index

Eisei seidoron (On hygienic policies, Gotō Shinpei), 17 eisei shōsetsu (hygiene tales), 40 eisei. See hygiene embodiment, 59 Emily Martin, 34–35 empire: and colonialism, 84–85, 136n16; and complicity in narratives, 9, 41, 78, 66, 84–86; as hidden presence in narratives, 35–36, 145n104; and ideologies of normativity, 35–36, 130, 132; and the modern body, 1, 5–6, 36, 129; rise of, 9; as site of transcendent time and biopower, 37, 41, 133; as uncanny entity, 133; Yumeno Kyūsaku’s views on, 86, 101 epidemic. See under cholera ero guro nansensu, 43–45, 69, 87 eugenics: and birth control movement, 111–18, 132, 152n55; and colonialism, 5, 41; as a discourse that regulates the modern body, 1, 5, 129; and improvement of the Japa nese race, 148n66, 151n46, 152n55; and mechanization of the body, 108; negative, 115; positive, 115; and twin studies, 7, 46, 49–54, 142n34. See also heredity fantastic fiction: as complicit mode, 10, 40–42, 133–34, 145n104; and modernity, 42, 133; as reception of authors, 9, 13–16, 40–41, 75; as subversive mode, 9–10, 133–34 fascism, 46 fear: of colonial identities, 46–47, 63–64, 95, 98; of decreased childbirth rate, 8, 114; of degeneracy, 115; of diseases, 16, 19–20, 22, 25; as historical erasure, 100–101; of machines, 111; of monstrous bodies, 2, 5, 10, 130; and the reading experience, 132; and repressed trauma, 2, 98; of sameness and identicality, 4, 47, 56, 60, 64, 72, 131, 136n13; of modern society, 75, 100–101; of uncertainty of binaries,

2–4, 6, 10, 63, 72–73, 95, 103, 130–31; of Westernization, 45. See also abject, the; photographic uncanny; uncanny feminism, 112–13, 115–16, 119 femme fatale, 27, 44, 91, 113–14, 125, 138n34. See also dokufu Figal, Gerald, 11 fi lm. See cinema flexible body. See under bodies Foster, Michael Dylan, 11–12 Foucault, Michel: and biopower, 132; and normalization, 5–6, 136n19 Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (Mary Shelley), 38, 39, 105 Freud, Sigmund: and castration complex, 84; critique of, 131–32; and death drive, 3, 83–84, 126; and Jentschian uncanny, 73, 103; and pleasure principle, 3; and repression model, 11, 45, 62, 65–66, 68–69, 126; and Sabine Spielrein, 69; and talk therapy, 40; and the theme of doubles, 73; and World War I, 3, 126; and Yumeno Kyūsaku, 76. See also uncanny; “Uncanny, The” (Sigmund Freud) Frühstück, Sabine, 5, 17 Fuess, Harald, 122 Fukuzawa Yukichi: and the female body, 21, 28; and regimentation of the modern body, 17, 21, 25, 76–77; and the terminology seishin, 76, 146n30 Fukuzawa Yukichi, works of: “Eiseiron” (On hygiene), 25; Nihon fujin ron (On Japa nese women) 21; “Shintai o taisetsu subeshi” (The ability of the body), 17; “Towards Enlightenment,” 76–77 Gakutensoku, 106–9, 107, 127–28 Galton, Francis, 49–52, 142n41 geist, 146n30 Gemini (Tsukamoto Shin’ya), 45 General Staff Headquarters, 32–33, 35 gensō bungaku. See fantastic fiction Gen’yōsha (Society of the Black Sea), 74, 85–86, 147n46

Index German expressionism. See German fi lms German fi lms: Metropolis, 110, 112, 118; Der Student von Prag, 71, 94. See also Cabinet des Doktor Caligari, Das German sciences, 16, 18, 52, 54. See also eugenics; hygiene; Mengele, Josef Gilman, Sander, 19 Girard, René, 48 Gordon, Avery, 68–69 Gotō Shinpei, 17 Great Kantō Earthquake: allegory of, 68, 84, 13; and modanizumu, 43; and the post-earthquake massacre, 8, 63–65, 85–86 Haldane, J. B. S., 119 hallucinations, 60, 78–80, 83, 89 hangontan, 24 Harootunian, Harry, 10 Hentai shinri, 80–84 heredity, 7, 46–53, 79, 117 Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke: and concerns about artificial reproduction, 111–19, 122, 125; and detective fiction, 42–43, 102, 111; and views on modern technology, 102, 104, 108, 110, 117–19 Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, works of: “Fujin no seiki” (The century of women), 117; “Kōsokudo jidai: gojūnengo no bungaku” (The world in fift y years), 119; “Modanizumu to shakaiteki konkyo” (Modernism and its social basis), 102. See also “Jinzō ningen” (Robot, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke) Hiratsuka Raichō, 116 hitori futayaku, 55, 72 Hoff man, E. T. A., 3, 103, 126 horror. See fear human likeness. See lifelikeness hybridity: cultural, 68; and monstrous bodies, 1, 7, 13, 15, 20, 22–23, 27–29, 31–32, 34, 41, 105–6; and racial studies, 53, 92, 106, 148n66

173

hygiene: as a language of translation, 7, 19–20, 22–23, 29, 31–36, 41; and modern body, 1, 5, 17–19; as preventive measure for cholera and epidemics, 16, 24–25, 36; and sanitization of water in Meiji Japan, 24–25; and terminology of eisei, 15, 17, 137n13; and women, 20–22, 132. See also racial hygiene hygiene tales. See eisei shōsetsu (hygiene tales) hypervisibility, 68–69 hysteria, 21, 80, 147n34, 147n35 Igarashi Yoshikuni, 44, 61 Ikeda Shigenori, 115, 117, 152n55 illegitimate children: as identities undefinable by law, 124–25, 130–31; as robots, 118–25; as Shōwa era social issue, 9, 121–23, 152n69 internal colonialism. See under colonialism interpellation, 92, 123 Inugami hakase (Dr. Inugami, Yumeno Kyūsaku), 148n62 Inukai Tsuyoshi, 85 Ishimoto Shizue, 114–15, 117, 150n42 Itagaki Takao, 108, 110–11 itan bungaku, 75 Itō Hirobumi, assassination of, 85 Ivy, Marilyn, 11 Izumi Kyōka: and discriminatory gaze, 25; and hygienic phobias, 7, 16; reception of, 7, 9, 12–15, 28. See also Kōya hijiri (The holy man of Mount Kōya, Izumi Kyōka) Jack (Alphonse Daudet), 122 Jackson, Rosemary, 10 Japa nese Birth Control Research Group (Nihon Sanji Chōsetsu Kenkyūkai), 118 Japa nese Society of Neurology, 79 Jentsch, Ernst, 3–4, 73, 103, 132, 135n10 Jidō Hogo Kenkyūkai (Child Protection Research Group), 121–22

174

Index

jinzō ningen. See robots “Jinzō ningen” (Robot, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke): and anxiety toward machines, 8, 103–4, 111–13, 115; and the eugenic imagination, 126–28; and the issue of illegitimate offspring, 118–23, 125 “Jinzō ningen” (Robot, Takada Giichirō): and anxiety toward machines, 8, 103, 111–12; and the eugenic imagination, 126–28; and the issue of illegitimate offspring, 118, 120–22, 124–25 “Jinzō ningen jidai” (The age of robots, Mizushima Niou), 114 Kagaku gahō (Illustrated journal of science), 106, 108, 109 Kagawa Toyohiko, 111, 117 Kahlbaum, Karl Ludwig, 79 Katō Hiroyuki, 38, 148n66 Kawahara Toshiaki, 48 Kawamoto Saburō, 42, 45, 47, 72 Kawamura Kunimitsu, 21 Kitasato Shibasaburō, 18–19 kitsunetsuki, 71, 79, 147n34 Kittler, Friedrich, 93–94 Koch, Robert, 16, 18 kokkuri-san, 81 kokutai. See national body politic Komai Taku, 51, 53 konketsuji, 8, 53, 114, 148n66 Korea: colonial, 46, 56–58, 65–66, 68, 78, 83–85, 131; as land of the dead, 65–66; as otherized space in literature, 56–58, 61, 65–66, 68; as repressed image, 83–84 Koreans: as Japan’s twin “brother,” 56–65; massacre of, 8, 61–65, 85 Kōya hijiri (The holy man of Mount Kōya, Izumi Kyōka): and creation of a new monstrous-female trope, 7, 26–30, 32–34; discourse of war in, 34–37; as eisei shōsetsu, 38–40; and the empire, 32, 35–37, 41; formalistic elements of, 29–32; hygienic

discourse in, 23–29, 32–34; and the idea of flexibility, 34–35; immunity as power in, 31, 33–36, 41, 133; narrative as cure in, 31–33; reception of, 13–15; super natu ral language in, 15, 22–23, 27, 33–34, 36–37, 40; synopsis of, 23–24; water imagery in, 26 Kraepelin, Emil, 79 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 76 Kuni no motoi (Basis of the nation), 38, 39 Kure Shūzō, 76–80, 77, 88 Kure Shūzō, works of: Isobe gūshō (Seashore wanderings), 79; Meiji sanjūhachinen sen’eki rikugun eiseishi (Hygienic history of the war time army of 1905), 78 kusō-zu, 148n65 Kyūshū Imperial University, 76 Lacan, Jacques: 44, 93. See also mirror stage Lang, Fritz, 110, 113 law: British, 122–23; of child custody, 118–25; and the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate crimes, 62–65, 131; of family registry, 64, 120; fluidity and limitations of, 130–31; martial, 65. See also Agamben, Giorgio; citizenship; illegitimate children lifelikeness, 4, 105–6, 127, 135n13. See also Mori Masahiro; uncanny Liu, Lydia, 3 machines. See technologies Madame Butterfly (Giacomo Puccini), 124 madness: fi lms about, 71, 89–91; of the Japa nese empire, 85–86, 98–101; “patriotic insanity,” 79. See also mad scientists; schizophrenia mad scientists, 111, 127, 129–30 Maeda Ai, 15 Marinetti, F. T., 110

Index Marxism, 103, 105–6, 108, 110–12, 141n2 male desire for childbirth without women, 119, 126–27 male narrative, 30–33, 35, 40–41 Matsuyama Iwao, 45, 72 mechanical realism, 110–11 mechanical reproduction. See artificial reproduction mechanical romanticism, 110–11 medicine: Chinese, 24, 33, 36; field of, 38, 50, 76, 116; and hijiri, 24; Toyama, 23–24, 33, 36 Meiji emperor, 37, 48, 138n38 Memmi, Albert, 95 Mengele, Josef, 54, 143n60 mental illness. See madness; schizophrenia mental institutions. See asylums meotogo, 48 metafiction, 75, 86, 98 miasma, 16 mimicry. See colonial mimicry minorities. See burakumin; Chinese; Koreans mirror stage: 84–94, 96–98. See also Lacan, Jacques; Kittler, Friedrich Miura Kinnosuke, 79 mixed-blood children. See konketsuji mizuatari. See under diseases mobo, 43, 110 modanizumu, 43, 86–87, 108–10, 112 Modern Times (fi lm), 106 moga, 43, 110 monsters: bodies marked by uncertainty of their normativity, 1–3, 6–7, 9–10, 34, 41, 129–30, 133; cholera, 13, 14, 15, 19, 22–23; creations of mad science, 126–27; female, 20–22, 34; human, 6, 22; as hybrid bodies, 7, 20, 22–23, 27, 31, 34, 38, 39, 105, 140n62; as metaphors of pathogens, 16, 18–22, 31–32, 41; premodern, 1–2, 10–11, 15, 71, 134, 136n26; as products of modernity, 9–12, 22, 38–40, 129, 133. See also Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (Mary Shelley)

175

montage, 44, 86–87, 97 Morel, Benedict, 79 Mori Arinori, 17 Mori Masahiro, 3–4, 127, 132. See also “Uncanny Valley” (Mori Masahiro) motherhood. See bosei mothers: as antithesis to robotic women, 113–14; and Izumi Kyōka, 15; as target of bodily enhancement and bodily education, 5, 21, 38, 114–18, 152n55 Nagai Hisomu, 52, 108 Nagayo Sensai, 17 Naitō Chizuko, 19 Nakamura Kokyō, 80–84, 88, 98 Nakamura Kokyō, works of: “Futatabi nijū jinkaku shōnen no hanzai ni tsuite” (The crime of the boy with two personalities revisited), 80–81, 83–84; Hentai shinri to hanzai (Abnormal psychology and crimes), 81; “Nijū jinkaku no onna” (Woman with two personalities), 80; “Nijū jinkaku no shōnen” (Boy with two personalities), 80–83; “Nijū jinkaku shōnen no hanzai” (The crime of the boy with two personalities), 80 Namae Takayuki, 121–22 Napier, Susan, 10, 75 national body politic, 2, 15, 40, 151n46 nation as site of transcendental time. See Cheah, Pheng nature-nurture debate, 47, 49–55, 142n41 Negishi prison incident, 63 Negishi Seiji, 116 New Creator (anonymous). See Atarashiki zōbutsusha (New creator, anonymous) Nishimura Makoto, 106–8, 127 Nitobe Inazō, 57, 65–68 Nitobe Inazō, works of: “Koshikoku Chōsen” (Withering Korea), 65; nissen dōsoron, 57 nonsense, 98–101 normal and abnormal binary. See normativity

176

Index

normalcy. See normativity normativity, 2, 5–7, 9–10, 15, 34–35, 37, 41, 44, 49, 52–54, 67, 129–32, 151n46 Nosaka Akio, 83 Obonai Torao, 50 ocularcentrism, 44, 60, 129 Oguma Eiji, 57 On the Origin of Species (Charles Darwin), 55 otherness, 2, 7, 13, 22, 29, 40, 67–68, 80, 82, 84, 94. See also abject, the Ōya Sōichi, 110 Pacific War (1937–45), 1, 5, 57 Pearl Harbor, 43 performative language, 45, 62, 65, 67, 92 perversion, 6, 35, 42, 59, 130 phantasms, 42, 47, 59–61, 82–83. See also hallucinations photographic uncanny, 72–73, 95, 144n68 Poe, Edgar Allan, 45, 71, 94 Posadas, Baryon, 45, 62 postcolonialism, 36–37 Pratt, Mary Louise, 32 Private Hygienic Association of Great Japan (Dainihon Shiritsu Eiseikai), 17 proletariat. See Marxism psychoanalysis, 45, 76, 82–84, 146n25. See also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques; uncanny psychology, the field of 8, 50, 75–84, 111, 116, 129, 146n25. See also psychoanalysis PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), 8, 76, 79. See also schizophrenia; trauma Pure Film Movement, 72 racial hygiene, 41 racial improvement, 21, 53, 115, 148n66 racialization, 75, 91–94, 95 racial studies of ethnicities, 58, 106, 115, 148n66 Rank, Otto, 76

Reichert, Jim, 53–54 repetition: bodily, 98–99; and compulsion, 45; in identity formation, 45, 67, 73; of narrative, 45, 75, 86, 98 repression, 2, 45, 62, 65, 67–69, 84, 93, 95, 98, 100–101, 126, 129, 132. See also Freud, Sigmund reproductive science, 1, 7–8, 103, 112–14, 117–19, 126, 132. See also artificial reproduction; eugenics; birth control movement Research Center of Epidemics (Densenbyō Kenkyūjo), 18 rikonbyō, 80, 88 Robertson, Jennifer, 5, 31, 117 robots: of Edo period, 104; female, 103, 112–18, 125, 150n36; history of, 102, 104–11, 125, 149n3, 149n7, 153n84; as humanlike bodies, 3–4, 66, 103, 105 109, 117, 125, 130; as illegitimate babies, 1–3, 118–25, 127, 129–32; as proletariats, 105, 110–11. See also artificial reproduction; Gakutensoku Rogaski, Ruth, 17 R. U. R. (Karel Čapek), 8, 105–6, 111, 113–14, 118, 125 Russo-Japanese War, 78–79 Ryang, Sonia, 64–65 ryōsai kenbo, 116 Saeki Junko, 28 Saitō, Satoru, 45–46 Sanbō Honbu. See General Staff Headquarters “Sandman, The” (E. T. A. Hoff man), 3, 103, 126 Sanger, Margaret, 114–15 Sari Kawana, 43, 46, 75 Satō Haruo, 71 Satsuma Rebellion (1877), 16 schizophrenia: and cinema, 71, 81–84, 89, 141n15; and colonialism, 8, 95, 98; as PTSD, 75–80; and twins, 52 Schwarz, Hillel, 47–48

Index sciences. See birth control movement; eugenics; hygiene; psychology; reproductive sciences. See also individual sciences by name seishin, 77–78, 146n30 Seitō (Blue stocking), 116 self-defense committees, 63 Seltzer, Mark, 108, 115. See also statistical person setsuwa, 20 sexuality: dangers of female, 20–22, 28–35, 132, 139n53; of degenerate male, 35; and ero guro nansensu, 44 See also desire, sexual sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). See under diseases Sherlock Holmes, 45 Shimota Mitsuzō, 76 Shinri kenkyū, 50 Shin seinen (New youth), 9–10, 42–43, 56, 69, 74, 103, 111–12, 125 shiseiji. See illegitimate children Shōwa emperor, 48 Silver, Mark, 45 Silverberg, Miriam, 43–44, 87 simulacra, 50, 67–68, 94, 103, 106. See also Baudrillard, Jean “S Mibōjin no robotto” (Widow S and the robot, Koyama Eijuka), 114 Smith, Frederic Edwin, 119 social Dawinism, 53–54 “Sōseiji.” See “Twins” (Edogawa Ranpo) Spadoni, Robert, 73 spectral identity, 37, 47, 59–61, 65–69 Spielerein, Sabina, 69 Stafford, Barbara, 18 state of exception, the, 64–65 statistical person, 108, 115 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Robert Louis Stevenson), 71 Student von Prag, Der (fi lm), 71, 94 Sugamo Hospital (Matsuzawa Hospital), 76, 78 Sugita Genpaku, 104 Sugiyama Shigemaru, 74, 85, 147n46

177

Sugiyama Tatsumaru, 99 supernatural, the: beliefs, 1, 11, 48, 80–81; and the fantastic, 10; as language of translation, 12, 15, 22–23, 40; as narrative theme, 1, 13, 15; as tied to female power, 27, 33, 37; as tied to power of immunity, 34–37. See also monsters Suzuki Sadami, 108 Suzuki Zentarō, 105, 111 Tai dokuro (Skull, Kōda Rohan), 20 Taishō emperor, 48, 86, 147n50 Taiwan, 57, 66, 69, 78, 95 Takada Giichirō, 8–9, 103, 111–12, 119–22, 124–25. See also “Jinzō ningen” (Robot, Takada Giichirō) Takayama Chogyū, 13 Takayama Masao, 76 Taniguchi Toratoshi, 48–53 technologies: and cyborgs, 103; of hypervisibility, 68–69; and modernity, 1, 6, 11–12, 43–45, 72, 102, 104, 108, 110; visual, 60, 72, 93; and war, 79 Televox, 106, 123 theatricality, 92–93, 99 Tierney, Robert, 57 Todorov, Tzvetan, 10 Tōgō Katsumi, 15 Tokugawa Musei, 91 Tōyama Mitsuru, 85 trace (Derridian), 59, 61, 69, 132 trauma, 2–3, 8, 21, 79, 83–84, 98. See also PTSD; schizophrenia travel literature, 32–33, 46 Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 20 tuberculosis. See under diseases twins: beliefs surrounding, 7, 47–48; and colonial discourse of identicality/ sameness, 8, 49–51, 55–56, 143n49; and criminality/degeneracy, 7, 44, 52–55, 115, 131; eugenic studies and the nature-nurture debate of, 7, 46–54, 129, 142n41; and imperial family, 48; male-female pairs, 142n30

178

Index

“Twins” (Edogawa Ranpo): as allegory of the massacre of Koreans, 61–65; colonial discourse in, 46–47, 54–58, 61–65; colonial uncanny in, 65–70; desire for sameness in, 58–61; and eugenic study of twins, 7, 46–55: and ero guro nansensu, 9, 42–44, 69; fingerprint as identity in, 44, 51, 54–56, 58–61, 65, 69, 132; and hypervisibility, 68–69; scholarship on, 44–46; sequel of, 69 “Twins” (Yokomizo Seishi), 43, 69 Uchida Ryōhei, 85 umeyo fuyaseyo slogan, 126 uncanny: and biopower, 34–37, 41, 126–27, 132–33; as bodily mode, 5–7, 131; and cinema, 72–73, 95–98, 135n4; and colonial rhetoric, 41, 46–47, 56, 65–70, 73–75, 95–98, 131; as fear of otherness, 2; Freudian (unheimlich), 2–3, 62, 65, 68–69, 73, 103, 126, 132; Homi Bhabha’s theory of, 68; Marilyn Ivy’s theory of, 11; as mode of uncertainty, 3–7, 9–10, 33–34, 37, 41, 73–74, 103, 129–32; as product of modernity, 10–12, 132–34; and temporality, 66–67, 132. See also colonial uncanny; Jentsch, Ernst; photographic uncanny “Uncanny, The” (“Das Unheimliche,” Sigmund Freud), 2–3, 73, 103, 126

“Uncanny Valley” (Mori Masahiro), 3–4, 4, 66, 127, 135n12, 136n13 unheimlich. See uncanny, Freudian violence: colonial, 3, 8, 65, 68, 83–84; institutional, 100; post-earthquake, 8, 64–65; sacrificial, 48. See also Koreans, massacre of virus, 7, 20, 51 Waki Akiko, 14 Watanabe Masahiko, 71–72 Westinghouse Electricity Company, 106 “William Williamson” (Edgar Allan Poe), 71, 94 women’s journals, 36 Yagi Sawako, 122–23 Yamamoto Senji, 114–15, 118 Yamashita Takeo, 71–72 Yee, Angelina, 95 yōkai, 11–12, 71. See also monsters yōkaigaku, 11–12 Yokomizo Seishi, 43, 69 Yomiuri shinbun, 106 Yoshida Morio, 113, 118, 125 Yumeno Kyūsaku: biography, 74–76, 84–86, 99–100, 147n46; and Buddhism, 96; and modanizumu, 86–87; and nonsense, 98–101; reception of, 9, 74–75 Yūseigaku, 50, 52

Harvard East Asian Monographs (titles now in print)

7. Chao Kuo-chün, Economic Planning and Organization in Mainland China: A Documentary Study, 1949–1957 13. S. M. Meng, The Tsungli Yamen: Its Organization and Functions 31. Madeleine Chi, China Diplomacy, 1914–1918 36. Peter Frost, The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis 38. Robert R. Campbell, James Duncan Campbell: A Memoir by His Son 39. Jerome Alan Cohen, ed., The Dynamics of China’s Foreign Relations 40. V. V. Vishnyakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, 1925–1927, trans. Steven L. Levine 41. Meron Medzini, French Policy in Japan during the Closing Years of the Tokugawa Regime 46. W. P. J. Hall, A Bibliographical Guide to Japanese Research on the Chinese Economy, 1958–1970 47. Jack J. Gerson, Horatio Nelson Lay and Sino-British Relations, 1854–1864 48. Paul Richard Bohr, Famine and the Missionary: Timothy Richard as Relief Administrator and Advocate of National Reform 50. Britten Dean, China and Great Britain: The Diplomacy of Commercial Relations, 1860–1864 51. Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847–1880 53. Richard M. Pfeffer, Understanding Business Contracts in China, 1949–1963 55. Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution 60. Noriko Kamachi, John K. Fairbank, and ChşzŇ Ichiko, Japanese Studies of Modern China Since 1953: A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Supplementary Volume for 1953–1969 61. Donald A. Gibbs and Yun-chen Li, A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of Modern Chinese Literature, 1918–1942 62. Robert H. Silin, Leadership and Values: The Organization of Large-Scale Taiwanese Enterprises 63. David Pong, A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives Deposited at the Public Record Office of London

Harvard East Asian Monographs 69. Eric Widmer, The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking during the Eighteenth Century 73. Jon Sigurdson, Rural Industrialism in China 74. Kang Chao, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China 75. Valentin Rabe, The Home Base of American China Missions, 1880–1920 78. Meishi Tsai, Contemporary Chinese Novels and Short Stories, 1949–1974: An Annotated Bibliography 80. Endymion Wilkinson, Landlord and Labor in Late Imperial China: Case Studies from Shandong by Jing Su and Luo Lun 84. J. W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954 85. Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan 86. Kwang Suk Kim and Michael Roemer, Growth and Structural Transformation 89. Sung Hwan Ban, Pal Yong Moon, and Dwight H. Perkins, Rural Development 92. Edward S. Mason, Dwight H. Perkins, Kwang Suk Kim, David C. Cole, Mahn Je Kim et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea 93. Robert Repetto, Tai Hwan Kwon, Son-Ung Kim, Dae Young Kim, John E. Sloboda, and Peter J. Donaldson, Economic Development, Population Policy, and Demographic Transition in the Republic of Korea 94. Parks M. Coble, Jr., The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927–1937 96. Richard Wich, Sino-Soviet Crisis Politics: A Study of Political Change and Communication 97. Lillian M. Li, China’s Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World, 1842– 1937 98. R. David Arkush, Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China 100. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin 101. Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Chen Liang’s Challenge to Chu Hsi 102. Thomas A. Stanley, ņsugi Sakae, Anarchist in TaishŇ Japan: The Creativity of the Ego 103. Jonathan K. Ocko, Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China: Ting Jih-ch’ang in Restoration Kiangsu, 1867–1870 104. James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911–1915 105. Neil L. Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists: The Transition from Bakumatsu to Meiji in the Kawasaki Region 106. David C. Cole and Yung Chul Park, Financial Development in Korea, 1945–1978 107. Roy Bahl, Chuk Kyo Kim, and Chong Kee Park, Public Finances during the Korean Modernization Process 108. William D. Wray, Mitsubishi and the N.Y.K., 1870–1914: Business Strategy in the Japanese Shipping Industry 109. Ralph William Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Economics of Railroads in China, 1876–1937 111. Jane Kate Leonard, Wei Yüan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World

Harvard East Asian Monographs 117. Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853–1955 119. Christine Guth Kanda, ShinzŇ: Hachiman Imagery and Its Development 121. Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectual and Folk Literature, 1918–1937 123. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times 124. Steven D. Carter, The Road to Komatsubara: A Classical Reading of the Renga Hyakuin 126. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The “New Theses” of 1825 127. Atsuko Hirai, Individualism and Socialism: The Life and Thought of Kawai EijirŇ (1891–1944) 129. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Chien-lung Era 130. Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 131. Susan Chan Egan, A Latterday Confucian: Reminiscences of William Hung (1893– 1980) 132. James T. C. Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century 134. Kate Wildman Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule 137. Susan Downing Videen, Tales of Heichş 138. Heinz Morioka and Miyoko Sasaki, Rakugo: The Popular Narrative Art of Japan 139. Joshua A. Fogel, Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit 140. Alexander Barton Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century 141. George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan 144. Marie Anchordoguy, Computers, Inc.: Japan’s Challenge to IBM 146. Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi 147. Laura E. Hein, Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in Postwar Japan 148. Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919–1937 149. Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic 150. Merle Goldman and Paul A. Cohen, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin L Schwartz 151. James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War 152. Gail Lee Bernstein, Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946 154. Mark Mason, American Multinationals and Japan: The Political Economy of Japanese Capital Controls, 1899–1980 155. Richard J. Smith, John K. Fairbank, and Katherine F. Bruner, Robert Hart and China’s Early Modernization: His Journals, 1863–1866 157. William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan’s Military, 500–1300

Harvard East Asian Monographs 159. James B. Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea 161. Roger R. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform, 1898–1911 162. William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: History of Tuberculosis in Japan 163. Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan 164. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: ShishŇsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon 165. James C. Baxter, The Meiji Unification through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture 166. Thomas R. H. Havens, Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the SeibuSaison Enterprises in Twentieth-Century Japan 167. Anthony Hood Chambers, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction 168. Steven J. Ericson, The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan 169. Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution 170. Denise Potrzeba Lett, In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class 171. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Hiraizumi: Buddhist Art and Regional Politics in TwelfthCentury Japan 173. Aviad E. Raz, Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland 174. Deborah J. Milly, Poverty, Equality, and Growth: The Politics of Economic Need in Postwar Japan 175. See Heng Teow, Japan’s Cultural Policy toward China, 1918–1931: A Comparative Perspective 176. Michael A. Fuller, An Introduction to Literary Chinese 177. Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 178. John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902–1978) 179. Edward Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the GŇnŇ 180. Atsuko Sakaki, Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction 181. Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory 182. JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler, Culture and the State in Late Chosʼnn Korea 183. John W. Chaffee, Branches of Heaven: A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China 184. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea 185. Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa SensŇji and Edo Society 186. Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937 187. Hyung Il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories 188. Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan 189. Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity

Harvard East Asian Monographs 191. Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization 192. Michael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868–1945 193. William C. Kirby, Man-houng Lin, James Chin Shih, and David A. Pietz, eds., State and Economy in Republican China: A Handbook for Scholars 194. Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan 195. Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946–1368 196. Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932 197. Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction 199. Haruo Iguchi, Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations, 1937–1952 200. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey, Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600 201. Terry Kawashima, Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and Kamakura Japan 202. Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China 203. Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin, eds., Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.-China Diplomacy, 1954–1973 204. Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott 205. David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography 206. Christine Yano, Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song 207. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Oldőich Král, with Graham Sanders, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project 208. Robert N. Huey, The Making of ‘Shinkokinshş’ 209. Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467–1680: Resilience and Renewal 210. Suzanne Ogden, Inklings of Democracy in China 211. Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945–1995 212. Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China 213. Aviad E. Raz, Emotions at Work: Normative Control, Organizations, and Culture in Japan and America 214. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China 215. Kevin O’Rourke, The Book of Korean Shijo 216. Ezra F. Vogel, ed., The Golden Age of the U.S.-China-Japan Triangle, 1972–1989 217. Thomas A. Wilson, ed., On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius 218. Donald S. Sutton, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan

Harvard East Asian Monographs 219. Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansionism in Asia, 1883–1945 220. Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century 221. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History 222. Rania Huntington, Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative 223. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 224. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation 225. Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song Poetry 226. Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 227. Joyce A. Madancy, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s 228. John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects 229. Elisabeth Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China 230. Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 231. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China 232. Eric C. Rath, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art 233. Elizabeth Remick, Building Local States: China during the Republican and PostMao Eras 234. Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time 235. D. Max Moerman, Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan 236. Antonia Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850 237. Brian Platt, Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750–1890 238. Gail Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds., Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950: Essays in Honor of Albert Craig 239. Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture 240. Stephen Dodd, Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature 241. David Anthony Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850 242. Hosea Hirata, Discourses of Seduction: History, Evil, Desire, and Modern Japanese Literature 243. Kyung Moon Hwang, Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea 244. Brian R. Dott, Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China 245. Mark McNally, Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of Japanese Nativism

Harvard East Asian Monographs 246. Yongping Wu, A Political Explanation of Economic Growth: State Survival, Bureaucratic Politics, and Private Enterprises in the Making of Taiwan’s Economy, 1950–1985 247. Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan 248. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China 249. David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, eds., Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond 250. Wilt L. Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, eds., Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature 251. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History 252. Hiroshi Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan 253. Wai-yee Li, The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography 254. William C. Kirby, Robert S. Ross, and Gong Li, eds., Normalization of U.S.-China Relations: An International History 255. Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits: Takano ChŇei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan 256. Jonathan W. Best, A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi 257. Liang Pan, The United Nations in Japan’s Foreign and Security Policymaking, 1945– 1992: National Security, Party Politics, and International Status 258. Richard Belsky, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing 259. Zwia Lipkin, “Useless to the State”: “Social Problems” and Social Engineering in Nationalist Nanjing, 1927–1937 260. William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s 261. Stephen Owen, The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry 262. Martin J. Powers, Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China 263. Anna M. Shields, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Huajian ji 啀栢楕 (Collection from among the Flowers) 264. Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860) 265. Sara L. Friedman, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China 266. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics 267. Sophie Volpp, Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China 268. Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in NineteenthCentury China 269. Steven B. Miles, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in NineteenthCentury Guangzhou 270. Man-houng Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856

Harvard East Asian Monographs 271. Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China 272. Mark Halperin, Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung China, 960–1279 273. Helen Dunstan, State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China 274. Sabina Knight, The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction 275. Timothy J. Van Compernolle, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi IchiyŇ 276. Paul Rouzer, A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese 277. Jonathan Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan 278. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 280. Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods 281. Eugene Y. Park, Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination in Late Chosʼnn Korea, 1600–1894 282. Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System 283. Patricia M. Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making in Modern China 284. Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics 286. Charo B. D’Etcheverry, Love after The Tale of Genji: Rewriting the World of the Shining Prince 287. Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring & the Construction of Qing Rule, 1680–1785 288. Carol Richmond Tsang, War and Faith: IkkŇ Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan 289. Hilde De Weerdt, Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127 –1279) 290. Eve Zimmerman, Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction 291. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 292. Richard J. Smethurst, From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes 293. John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200– 1700 294. Tomoko Shiroyama, China during the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929–1937 295. Kirk W. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Chosʼnn Korea, 1850–1910 296. Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism

Harvard East Asian Monographs 297. Barbara Ambros, Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The ņyama Cult and Regional Religion in Early Modern Japan 298. Rebecca Suter, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States 299. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II 301. David M. Robinson, ed., Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368– 1644) 302. Calvin Chen, Some Assembly Required: Work, Community, and Politics in China’s Rural Enterprises 303. Sem Vermeersch, The Power of the Buddhas: The Politics of Buddhism During the Koryʼn Dynasty (918–1392) 304. Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature 305. Chang Woei Ong, Men of Letters Within the Passes: Guanzhong Literati in Chinese History, 907–1911 306. Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception (427–1900) 307. Peter K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History 308. Carlos Rojas, The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity 309. Kelly H. Chong, Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the Negotiation of Patriarchy in South Korea 310. Rachel DiNitto, Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in Prewar Japan 311. Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China 312. Jay Dautcher, Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China 313. Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai 314. Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–2000 315. David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China 316. James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue ◦が) in Medieval China 317. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan 318. James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan 319. Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe KŇbŇ 320. Si-yen Fei, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing 321. Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan 322. Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity

Harvard East Asian Monographs 323. Lucien Bianco, Wretched Rebels: Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution 324. Cathryn H. Clayton, Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness 325. Micah S. Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China 326. Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1750–1868 327. Robert Ashmore, The Transport of Reading: Text and Understanding in the World of Tao Qian (365–427) 328. Mark A. Jones, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth Century Japan 329. Miryam Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return 330. H. Mack Horton, Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yŇshş Account of a Japanese Mission to Silla in 736–737 331. Dennis J. Frost, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan 332. Marnie S. Anderson, A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan 333. Peter Mauch, Sailor Diplomat: Nomura KichisaburŇ and the Japanese-American War 334. Ethan Isaac Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan 335. David B. Lurie, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing 336. Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Picturing Heaven in Early China 337. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 338. Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871–2010 339. Michael Schiltz, The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895–1937 340. Daqing Yang, Jie Liu, Hiroshi Mitani, and Andrew Gordon, eds., Toward a History beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations 341. Sonia Ryang, Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry 342. Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China 343. Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture 344. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912 345. Satoru Saito, Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930 346. Jung-Sun N. Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino SakuzŇ and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937 347. Atsuko Hirai, Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912 348. Darryl E. Flaherty, Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan 349. Jeffrey Paul Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan 350. Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Kwanho Shin, From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy

Harvard East Asian Monographs 351. Michel Mohr, Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality 352. J. Keith Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction 354. Chong-Bum An and Barry Bosworth, Income Inequality in Korea: An Analysis of Trends, Causes, and Answers 355. Jamie L. Newhard, Knowing the Amorous Man: A History of Scholarship on Tales of Ise 356. Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan 357. Christopher P. Hanscom, The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea 358. Michael Wert, Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan 359. Garret P. S. Olberding, ed., Facing the Monarch: Modes of Advice in the Early Chinese Court 360. Xiaojue Wang, Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature Across the 1949 Divide 361. David Spafford, A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan 362. Jongryn Mo and Barry Weingast, Korean Political and Economic Development: Crisis, Security, and Economic Rebalancing 363. Melek Ortabasi, The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio 364. Hiraku Shimoda, Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan 365. Trent E. Maxey, The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan 366. Gina Cogan, The Princess Nun: Bunchi, Buddhist Reform, and Gender in Early Edo Japan 367. Eric C. Han, Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972 368. Natasha Heller, Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben ₼⽿㢝㦻 (1263–1323) 369. Paize Keulemans, Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination 370. Simon James Bytheway, Investing Japan: Foreign Capital, Monetary Standards, and Economic Development, 1859–2011 371. Sukhee Lee, Negotiated Power: The State, Elites, and Local Governance in TwelfthFourteenth China 372. Ping Foong, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court 373. Catherine L. Phipps, Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899 374. Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 375. Barry Eichengreen, Wonhyuk Lim, Yung Chul Park, and Dwight H. Perkins, The Korean Economy: From a Miraculous Past to a Sustainable Future 376. Heather Blair, Real and Imagined: The Peak of Gold in Heian Japan

Harvard East Asian Monographs 377. Emer O’Dwyer, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria 378. Martina Deuchler, Under the Ancestors’ Eyes: Kinship, Status, and Locality in Premodern Korea 379. Joseph R. Dennis, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700 380. Cathy Yeh, The Chinese Political Novel: Migration of a World Genre 381. Noell Wilson, Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan 382. Miri Nakamura, Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan 383. Nara Dillon, Radical Inequalities: China’s Revolutionary Welfare State in Comparative Perspective