Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan by Miri Nakamura (review)

Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan situates a set of modern Japanese literary “monsters” in the realms of uncanny colonialist imaginaries and anxieties over then-developing ideations concerning norm and aberrance, criminality and nationalist identity. This approach is largely in keeping with Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower. In so doing, Miri Nakamura attends to the important and interesting task of historicizing these fictional monstrosities in relation to coterminous scientific discourses: Meiji-era concepts of hygiene, Taisho eugenics and discourses on birth control, and early Showa psychological theories. She also reads assonance between textual depictions and contemporaneous debates over Korean and Chinese (colonized) versus Japanese (colonizer) identities. Ultimately, Nakamura argues that it is monsters possessing bodies which can be classified as neither fully normative or abnormal, exhibiting the most ambivalence between the categories (hence uncanny), that represent the epitome of early modern Japanese anxieties over modernizing, identity, and scientific discourses. With the objective of laying bare these sociocultural anxieties that undergird and are symbolized by modern monsters, and with the term “uncanny” as her theoretical lynchpin, Nakamura analyzes Izumi Kyōk’s Kōya hijiri (The saint of Kōya, 1900), Edogawa Ranpo’s “Sōseiji” (Twins, 1924), Yumeno Kyūsaku’s Dogura magura (Dogra magra, 1936), and two texts by Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke and Takada Giichirō both entitled “Jinzō ningen” (Robot, 1929 and 1927). She brackets these chapters with a short introduction and even shorter conclusion.

The chapters on Ranpo and Yumeno are by far the best. Chapter 2, “Colonial Doubles in Edogawa Ranpo’s ‘Twins,’” is the story of the murder of a man by his twin brother, who then assumes his identity, commits a second murder for which he is incarcerated, and finally confesses to the first murder. Nakamura begins with a short contextualization of the tale within the modern genre of detective fiction and its concern with scientific discourses, and as an example of modernism—both consumerist and characterized by fragmentation in the form of montage and pastiche. Turning quickly to the Japanese convention of viewing twins as inauspicious and shameful, Nakamura argues that Japanese colonial discourses reshaped this premodern antipathy. She calls this a “colonial uncanny,” in which the Korean subject, trained to be uplifted into a (hierarchical) brotherhood with the Japanese national subject, presents a context for anxiety by being transformed into the double that either cannot be differentiated from the original or must be revealed as a sham. “[T]win bodies became marked with both a fear of and desire for sameness” (p. 47).

In chapter 3, “Colonial Doubles: Doppelgänger in Dogura magura,” Naka mura claims that “the whole novel is presented to us as a film” (p. 75) and thereby imbricates the politics of visuality with Japanese racialism. Sketching out Japanese discourses on schizophrenia of the 1920s and 1930s, she describes a conflation of the disorder with wartime trauma (posttraumatic stress disorder) and the multiple rubrics by which schizophrenia inherited the dualism of fox-spirit possession (e.g., “splitting soul illness” and “psychological doubling”). Hence, psychologists of the time regarded the disorder as a kind of possession of one identity by another, or as one in which a doppelgänger resides within the subject. Ichirō, the protagonist and narrator, residing in an insane asylum, does not know who he is, and throughout the novel he searches to discover his identity. Eventually he realizes that he is a Japanese serial killer and also, nonsensically, a Chinese national—well illustrating the notion of schizophrenia as a “splitting soul illness” and an anxiety over colonial identity.

These two chapters are well written, densely theorized, and appropriately in discussion with both English and Japanese (-language) studies on related themes. For example, in chapter 2, Miriam Silverberg’s important work on modernism is cited and discussed alongside Mark Driscoll’s on colonialism.¹ Just as I noted in the margins that Homi Bhabha would be a good...