Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan

Abstract

Monstrous Bodies is a cultural and literary history of ambiguous bodies imperial Japan. It focuses on what the book calls modern doppelgangers, robots, twins, hybrid creations bodily metaphors that became ubiquitous the literary landscape from the Meiji era (1868 1912) up until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War 1937. Such monsters have often been understood as representations of the premodern past or of stigmatized others figures subversive to national ideologies. Miri Nakamura contends instead that these monsters were products of modernity, informed by the newly imported scientific discourses on the body, and that they can be read as being complicit in the ideologies of the empire, for they are uncanny bodies that ignite a sense of terror by blurring the binary of normal and abnormal that modern sciences like eugenics and psychology created. Reading these literary bodies against the historical rise of the Japanese empire and its colonial wars Asia, Nakamura argues that they must be understood relation to the most monstrous body of all modern Japan: the carefully constructed image of the empire itself.