Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (review)

In 1991, Miriam Silverberg published two path-breaking essays: "The Modern Girl as Militant" and "Constructing the New Cultural History of Prewar Japan." ¹ Together these essays put the modern girl on the scholarly map and demarcated an intellectual field that has subsequently been explored and expanded by numerous scholars following Silverberg's lead. She was one of a handful of U.S. historians of Japan who had a fine sense of the new cultural history and demonstrated a firm analytical grasp of the enormous complexities and contradictions of the 1920s and 1930s. Her scholarship conveyed the excitement, hope, and decadence of a period that had been notoriously marginalized either as an afterthought to the glorious nation-building effort of previous decades or deemed insignificant because of the brutal war and ultimate defeat that followed.

In 2008, a group of five scholars trained in literary criticism, history, cultural and feminist studies, and political economy edited a volume entitled The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization.² Representing regional expertise in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, the authors approached the modern girl of the 1920s and 1930s as a global phenomenon, thus constituting a fruitful expansion to Silverberg's earlier essay. Silverberg addressed the modern girl as a broker of the contradictory forces produced by modernity and modernization. Her modern girl was of flesh and blood and a creation of urban fiction. She was a creature who constantly engaged and demanded of others what Silverberg refers to as "code switching" (essentially the necessity to adapt continuously to differing demands), hence rendering the political individual through literary, social, and cultural maneuvers. Expanding on Silverberg's methodological foundation, the authors of The Modern Girl Around the World approached the modern girl from no particular place of global modernity, presenting her as the figure of the twentieth century who "reveals the complexity of global economic and cultural processes" (p. 52) like no other.

Silverberg completed the project she laid out in 1991 15 years later. Due to her premature death, the book under review here, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Time, is her last word on a field of scholarship that has proven to be productive and essential, demonstrated most recently in The Modern Girl Around the World. She set a new standard for the sensitivity with which historians must study the intricacies of everyday lives of people who would otherwise go unnoticed and unnoted. Her sensitivity to the intellectual, textual, emotional, and particularly the visual character of the mass culture of Japanese modern times has set an example for us all. And, she has done something truly courageous: rather than making order of the disorder of history, Silverberg adopted "montage in motion" as her organizational strategy for the book. This nonlinear way of writing this history creates the possibility of assembling forms in an innovative and unexpected way, thus creating differing conceptions of the moment rather than a unified and unitary whole. Likening her approach to the practice of montage, a technique widely used by avant-garde artists of the period under consideration, Silverberg is careful to note that hers is only one montage, "only one series of juxtapositions, of angles, of perspectives. It is a series of moments and images that can be reordered in numerous ways to reorient us" (p. 269).

Two of the most intriguing characteristics of the early twentieth century in Japan (and elsewhere) are what Silverberg refers to as the "documentary impulse," which she originally addressed in the second of her 1991 essays, and the centrality of the consumption of images of objects rather than the objects themselves, the workings of which she carefully describes in part 1 of Erotic Grotesque Nonsense on "Japanese Modern Within Modernity." Japan's first ethnographers and sociologists, social critics and (later) population policymakers carried out the first studies of literacy, poverty, leisure, and numerous other popular or mass activities. They...