X-Files from Modern Japan: Spirits, Spirituality, and Parapsychology in Modern Japanese Literature

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Part of the appeal of storytelling—be it literary, oral, or things in between—comes from
its ability to take uncomfortable and complex social issues and render them in a form more palatable to the reading public. Tales of the supernatural use otherworldly elements to confront social anxieties and explore the possibilities of future paths. This is done not only through content, but also through the form of the narratives. This panel focuses on imaginative internal and transcendent horizons of fear and hope—as well as knowledge and despair—in modern Japanese literature: the spiritual, the spooky, and the spuriously scientific. Writers such as Kōda Rohan (1867-1947), Mori Ōgai (1862-1922), and Kitamura Tōkoku (1868-94) ventured into unempirical territory with their experiments in ghost stories, religious poetry, and parapsychology. They overturn the idea that writers are seen either to embrace formal and stylistic innovations or to romanticize an invented past. But that is not to say that they avoided the political, technological, and artistic turmoils of their time. Rather, they questioned received social and aesthetic values or certainties by exploring and embracing innovative uncertainties. Collectively, this panel explores the way in which modern Japanese storytelling embraced the supernatural and the ghostly as a means to cross boundaries and question social and political issues in both their content and their form.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Kathryn Tanaka, Otemae University

Chair

• Nicholas Albertson, Wake Forest University

Individual Presentations

• Takagi Kyōzō, Yugi Onago, and the Fantastic Placeness of Tsugaru - Joshua Solomon, University of Chicago

• Hansen’s Disease in Ghostly Tales: A Cross-Cultural Reading of Koda Rohan’s Taidokuro - Kathryn Tanaka, Otemae University

• Kitamura Tokoku's Horaikyoku and the Spirits of Free Verse - Scott Mehl, Bard College

• Monstrous Narratives: Storytelling and Denial in Mori Ōgai’s As If - Christophe Thouny, The University of Tokyo

• Love’s Religious Purity and Guilt in Yamakawa Tomiko’s Tanka - Nicholas Albertson, Wake Forest University

Discussant

• J. Keith Vincent, Boston University