Abstract

The dissertation explores the period 1905--1935 to critically examine Japanese modern literature. I draw on newspaper accounts, popular fiction and philosophy to argue that the dominant form of aesthetic modernism in metropolitan Japan must be understood within the context of Japan's colonialism in East Asia. My research suggests that a cultural logic I call "erotic-grotesque-nonsense" from ero-guro-nansensu, or the genre name for the most popular narrative fiction written at the time, best describes this moment in Japan. I draw on the work of tabloid essayists like Ishimori Sei'ichi and novelists like Yuasa Katsuhiko who were based in the Japanese colonial cities of Seoul, Korea and Dalian, China. Their concerns, including gender blurring, ethnic passing among Japanese, Chinese and Korean, and the uncanny, anticipate by some 20 years similar themes arising in metropolitan Tokyo. The body of the thesis focuses on the modernist erotic-grotesque-nonsense literature---especially the wildly popular horror/detective novels of Edogawa Rampo and Yumeno Kyusaku---and shows that it is inextricable from colonial imperialism. For example, both Rampo and Kyusaku. draw on the work of the popular sexologist Tanaka Kogai who was chief colonial psychiatrist in Taiwan from 1896--1905; colonial themes and experiences fill Tanaka's essays published in Tokyo during the 1920's. Similarly, Umehara, Hokumei's scandalous and widely 1896--1905; colonial themes and experiences fill Tanaka's essays published in Tokyo during the 1920's. Similarly, Umehara Hokumei's scandalous and widely read literary monthly Grotesque was conceived and published first in Shanghai in 1927, and highlights colonial themes and inscriptions. Edogawa Rampo's novels describe the travels of his famous detective Akechi Kogoro back and forth between Tokyo and Korea, China, and India. In considering colonial texts from the 1910's and metropolitan Tokyo from the late 1920's and early 1930's together, following post-colonial theory and cultural studies, I insist that only when Japan's colonial periphery in East Asia is treated together with the center of Tokyo in the same analytic field, can we adequately apprehend Japan's imperial modernity and the war that it spawned