Engineering nonsense: ideology as absurdist farce in Kuno Toyohiko's experimental stories

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Nonsense was an essential part of modernist author and economist Kuno Toyohiko's (1896–1971) creative process. Long before nansensu became a journalistic buzzword, Kuno published stories that defied the conventional logic of literature, both in terms of their style and subject matter. Kuno's background as a student of economics further contributed to the unusual quality of his stories. He tried to translate economic theories into literary expression, thereby combining two of his principal interests. Kuno became a vocal critic of Marxist literature in the 1920s, during the height of the proletarian culture movement. In his critical writing he employed C. H. Douglas's theory of social credit to question what he perceived to be the futile and sentimental strategy of organizing labor, and in his fictional work he used nonsense to expose popular Marxism as an absurdist farce. In both of these seemingly disparate approaches, Kuno championed the notion of ‘impassive and calculated engineering’, either of society through financial regulations or of literature through such techniques as free association and disjointed plots. Discontented with what he saw as the absence of stoic materialism in Marxist fiction, Kuno attempted to redefine literature in purely mechanical and technical terms.