Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature

Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature examines selected contemporary Japanese writers and their use of fantastical spaces. Such spaces grant access to phenomena occluded from everyday life, including the geographically peripheral, the culturally marginalized, the psychologically liminal, and the physically intangible.

Murakami Haruki, Ogawa Yōko, Tawada Yōko, Kanai Mieko, Hino Keizō, Murakami Ryū, Kawakami Hiromi, Murata Sayaka... These acclaimed authors are united by a shared fascination with fantastical conceptions of space. In highlighting these luminaries of contemporary Japanese literature, Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature examines the role of extramundane topos from an interdisciplinary approach. As writers navigate fantastical spaces in resistance to the logic of everyday life, they are able to challenge the dualistic norms on the body and mind that typify modern Japanese life. These studies demonstrate the essential role played by fantastical spaces in the development of modern Japanese literature to the present day. Scholars of Japanese studies, literature, and other fields will find this book an excellent resource for teaching and research.

Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature: An Introduction by Mina Qiao

Chapter One: The Layered Everyspace in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki by Matthew C. Strecher

Chapter Two: Shōjo, Mother, and the Uncanny Space in Ogawa Yōko’s Writings by Mina Qiao

Chapter Three: Textual, Liminal, Fantastical Spaces in Kanai Mieko’s Early Writings by Anthony Bekirov

Chapter Four: Cannibalistic Space and Reproduction in Japanese Speculative Fiction by Kazue Harada

Chapter Five: Ports in a Storm: The Poetics of Space in Hino Keizō by Amanda C. Seaman

Chapter Six: The Foreign Land Outside Japan: an Attempted Solution to Abjection in Murakami Ryū’s Fiction by Francesca Bianco

Chapter Seven: The Fantastical Space of Exile in Tawada Yōko’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Barbara Hartley

Chapter Eight: Minding the Gap in Kawakami Hiromi by Mina Qiao and Matthew C. Strecher

About the Contributors