The book explores the writing of Japanese authors whose work has previously been underrepresented in English-language publications. The contributions feature from a diverse group of scholars from across the spectrum of the academic arena, from different regions of the world, and from different training backgrounds. Thanks to the diverse set of contributors, the book provides a fresh perspective to the ways in which we read and receive contemporary Japanese fiction.

The book explores the writing of Japanese authors whose work has previously been underrepresented in English-language publications. The contributions feature from a diverse group of scholars from across the spectrum of the academic arena, from different regions of the world, and from different training backgrounds. Thanks to the diverse set of contributors, the book provides a fresh perspective to the ways in which we read and receive contemporary Japanese fiction.

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African Diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural borders. Be it focused on the make-up of the blackface ganguro or the haiku of Richard Wright, Rastafari communities in Japan or the black enka singer Jero, the volume turns its attention away from questions of representation to ones concerning the generative aspects of transcultural production. The contributors are interested primarily in texts in motion-the contradictory motion within texts, the traveling of texts, and the action that such kinetic energy inspires in readers, viewers, listeners, and travelers. As our texts travel and travail, the originary nodal points that anchor them to set significations loosen and are transformed; the essays trace how, in the process of traveling, the bodies and subjectivities of those working to reimagine the text(s) in new sites moderate, accommodate, and transfigure both the texts and themselves.

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African Diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural borders. Be it focused on the make-up of the blackface ganguro or the haiku of Richard Wright, Rastafari communities in Japan or the black enka singer Jero, the volume turns its attention away from questions of representation to ones concerning the generative aspects of transcultural production. The contributors are interested primarily in texts in motion-the contradictory motion within texts, the traveling of texts, and the action that such kinetic energy inspires in readers, viewers, listeners, and travelers. As our texts travel and travail, the originary nodal points that anchor them to set significations loosen and are transformed; the essays trace how, in the process of traveling, the bodies and subjectivities of those working to reimagine the text(s) in new sites moderate, accommodate, and transfigure both the texts and themselves.

How did nerves and neuroses take the place of ghosts and spirits in Meiji Japan? How does Natsume Soseki's canonical novel Kokoro pervert the Freudian teleology of sexual development? What do we make of Jacques Lacan's infamous claim that because of the nature of their language the Japanese people were unanalyzable? And how are we to understand the re-awakening of collective memory occasioned by the sudden appearance of a Japanese Imperial soldier stumbling out of the jungle in Guam in 1972? In addressing these and other questions, the essays collected here theorize the relation of unconscious fantasy and perversion to discourses of nation, identity, and history in Japan. Against a tradition that claims that Freud's method, as a Western discourse, makes a bad 'fit'with Japan, this volume argues that psychoanalytic reading offers valuable insights into the ways in which 'Japan' itself continues to function as a psychic object. By reading a variety of cultural productions as symptomatic elaborations of unconscious and symbolic processes rather than as indexes to cultural truths, the authors combat the truisms of modernization theory and the seductive pull of culturalism. This volume also offers a much needed psychoanalytic alternative to the area studies convention that reads narratives of all sorts as "windows" offering insights into a fetishized Japanese culture. As such, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese literature, history, culture, and psychoanalysis more generally.

How did nerves and neuroses take the place of ghosts and spirits in Meiji Japan? How does Natsume Soseki's canonical novel Kokoro pervert the Freudian teleology of sexual development? What do we make of Jacques Lacan's infamous claim that because of the nature of their language the Japanese people were unanalyzable? And how are we to understand the re-awakening of collective memory occasioned by the sudden appearance of a Japanese Imperial soldier stumbling out of the jungle in Guam in 1972?

In addressing these and other questions, the essays collected here theorize the relation of unconscious fantasy and perversion to discourses of nation, identity, and history in Japan. Against a tradition that claims that Freud's method, as a Western discourse, makes a bad ?fit?with Japan, this volume argues that psychoanalytic reading offers valuable insights into the ways in which ?Japan? itself continues to function as a psychic object.

By reading a variety of cultural productions as symptomatic elaborations of unconscious and symbolic processes rather than as indexes to cultural truths, the authors combat the truisms of modernization theory and the seductive pull of culturalism. This volume also offers a much needed psychoanalytic alternative to the area studies convention that reads narratives of all sorts as "windows" offering insights into a fetishized Japanese culture. As such, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese literature, history, culture, and psychoanalysis more generally.

This is an innovative, scholarly and original study of the ethics of modern Japanese aesthetics from the 1930s, through the Second World War and into the post-war period. Nina Cornyetz embarks on new and unprecedented readings of some of the most significant literary and film texts of the Japanese canon, for instance works by Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe K b and Shinoda Masahiro, all renowned for their texts' aesthetic and philosophic brilliance.

Cornyetz uniquely opens up the field in a fresh and controversial way by showing how these authors and filmmakers' concepts of beauty and relation to others were, in fact, deeply impacted by political and social factors. Probing questions are asked such as:

• How did Japanese fascism and imperialism ideologically, politically and aesthetically impact on these literary/cinematic giants?
• How did the emperor as the 'nodal point' for Japanese national identity affect their ethics?
• What were the repercussions of the virtual collapse of the Marxist movement in the 1960s?
• What are the similarities and differences between pre-war, wartime and post-war ideals of beauty and those of fascist aesthetics in general?

This ground-breaking work is truly interdisciplinary and will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature, film, gender, culture, history and even psychoanalytic theory.

"The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature" is a study of the ethics of modern Japanese aesthetics from the 1930s, through WWII and into the postwar period. What makes this book unique is that Nina Cornyetz opens up the field in new and controversial ways by exploring the tensions and harmonies between psychoanalytic ethics of the drive and socio-political ethics of relation to the other. Rejecting the convention of viewing these as contradictory, Cornyetz insists that the exemplars of psychoanalytic ethics are to the contrary, simultaneously politically ethical. Cornyetz embarks on innovative and unprecedented readings of some of the most significant literary and film texts of the Japanese canon, including works by Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo and Shinoda Masahiro, all renowned for their texts' aesthetic and philosophic brilliance. The study looks at how relations between individuals and communities in these texts either reiterate or transcend stereotypes, and how desire is or is not limited by sociocultural norms. Cornyetz argues that these authors' and filmmakers' concepts of beauty and relation to others were, in fact, deeply impacted by political and social factors. Ranging from a discussion of fascist aesthetics to heterosexism in modern Japan, "The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature" shows how certain changing political, intellectual and artistic issues, as well as sociocultural norms, variously nuanced these texts' depictions of desire and the 'other'. Through her analysis of cultural texts such as the films "Woman in the Dunes" and "Double Suicide," Cornyetz challenges the convention that praises the universality of theirartistic, existential or intellectual achievements. Rather she seeks to reorient these within a specifically Japanese historical context to give a new and insightful interpretation to the work. This ground breaking study is truly interdisciplinary and will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature, film, gender, culture, history and even psychoanalytic theory.

"Dangerous Women, Deadly Words" is a materialist-feminist, psychoanalytic analysis of a modern Japanese literary trope--the dangerous woman--in the works of three twentieth-century writers: Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939), Enchi Fumiko (1905-86), and Nakagami Kenji (1946-92). Linked to archaisms and magical realms, the trope of the dangerous, spiritually empowered woman culls from and commingles archetypes from throughout the Japanese canon, including mountain witches, female shamans, and snake-women.
In radical opposition to the conventional interpretation of the trope as a repository for transhistorical notions of "female essence" and "Japaneseness," the author reads the dangerous woman as connected in complex ways with twentieth-century Japanese epistemological upheavals: the negotiation of modern phallic subjectivity, modernization of a homosocial economy, the radically changed status of women, reified maternity, compulsory heterosexuality, and the function of literature.
The dangerous woman enabled the literary birth of a modern, phallic, national subject as its constitutive Other, the locus of "originary" desire, thus the domain of the Lacanian Real and, accordingly, the abject. Determined by the cultural abhorrence that gives shape in language to the earliest psychic processes of separating self from not-self, the dangerous woman is also the locus for "jouissance, " a type of erotic pleasure that threatens the stability of the experiential subject.
The book's close literary readings are deeply anchored in the gendered cultural and literary characteristics of three periods in Japan's modernity. The author traces the trope of the dangerous woman through its establishment as a male imaginary by gothic storyteller Kyoka, its subsequent cooption for female erotic agency by Enchi, and its ultimate destabilization by Nakagami through a phallic retroping of archaisms partly dependent on an equation of the social discourses on outcaste pollution with those of homosexual and female abjection.