Abstract
Perversion and Modern Japan is a collection of 13 essays analysing modern and contemporary Japanese culture from a psychoanalytic perspective. The term ‘perversion’ is intended very broadly, covering not just topics such as panty fetishism, but also such phenomena as phallic imagery, wars of national aggression, ‘mother love’, and psychosomatic illness. The collection also manages to cast the net of perversion wide enough to include cartography and the guilty memories stirred up by Japanese army stragglers. The methodology in the essays tends towards the highly theorised, and seems to be a conscious response to traces of an earlier Japanese literary critical tradition. In Irena Hayter's intriguing discussion of the Japanese rhetoric of fascism, and its literary subversion by Ishikawa Jun, her opening sentence announces, ‘Until “theory” burst upon the scene in the 1980s, literary criticism in Japan was focused mainly on explications of single works, sakuhinron, or on discussions of the unified oeuvre of a writer (sakkaron), with a strong biographical slant’ (p. 203).
Published Version
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