Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911–1932 ed. by Angela Yiu (review)

A malnourished subaltern, confined for years in a tiny subterranean capsule, emerges from the bowels of a vertiginous twenty-ninth-century tower city into sunlight to apotheose into a new form of sentient being. A wealthy young aesthete sinks his vast fortune into a sprawling metatheater of myriad gardens, lavish architectural works, and costumed tableaux and orgies, ultimately sacrificing himself for his work in a decadent “golden death.” A bizarre island society dominated by the compulsive cultivation and study of vegetables serves as a satirical foil to the absurd contradictions and excesses of consumerist society in 1920s imperial Japan.

Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911–1932, edited by Angela Yiu, is an important and refreshingly original curation of textual artifacts produced by Japanese writers during a particularly voluptuous and intriguing period in the history of modernizing twentieth-century Japan. The anthology is dedicated to modernist work that explores sensory distortions and temporal slippage, urban space, and relatively little-known non-Western interpretations of utopia and dystopia—no doubt of particular interest to the readers of this journal—and the current review will direct the bulk of its attention onto material that has direct relevance to utopian studies.

The title of the book riffs off of the Japanese term for cubism, rittai-ha, whose root can also connote “three-dimensional.” In editor Angela Yiu’s robust and cogent introduction, she places Japanese modernism within the broader sweep of modernist production by largely European artists and writers up until about the 1930s. Yet she also makes the convincing case that Japanese literary modernism constitutes a distinct variant worthy of study in its own right and on its own terms (7). The stories, constituting a mix of work by both established and more obscure writers, are not universally brilliant but largely succeed in communicating the intellectual and social turmoil of the time, and they certainly include a few gems along the way. For the scholar of utopias, dystopias, and heterotopias, modernizing Japan is perhaps particularly intriguing due to its long-standing predilection for hypersafe “pure” environments, rosy nativist characterizations of the “harmony” of the archipelago (e.g., Dale 1986), and constructed realms such as manicured gardens, not to mention its transwar leveraging of utopian visions to promote colonial expansion (see Young 1998) and the unfortunate destructive and dehumanizing outcomes of the nation’s erstwhile rampant militarism. Indeed, the anthology serves to educate nonspecialist readers in some of the important sociohistorical currents that helped inform the outlandish and inventive proliferation of dystopian manga comics and anime films that have enlivened postwar Japanese cultural production. Certain of these stories not only spring out of broader period discourse over social reform, empire, and imaginary worlds during this aggressively colonial period but also prefigure the more or less emblematically Japanese affinity for and fascination with the saccharine, constructed spaces of theme parks such as Huis Ten Bosch, Tokyo Disneyland, Sanrio Pure Land, Tobu World Square, and the (now-defunct) artificial indoor beach Miyazaki Ocean Dome, among many others.

Rather Orwellian pre-1945 rhetoric over the creepy imperialist project of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere aside, one story, Nakajima Atsushi’s “Landscape with an Officer” (1929), furnishes a rare and unusually arresting vision of the social and political strains developing among Korean citizens, Japanese colonialists, and the “native” police force attempting to maintain the peace in restive and resentful occupied Korea. Another story, Inagaki Taruho’s “Astromania” (1928), describes adolescent boys constructing elaborate diorama-like models, inspired by multiple cinema visits, which provide an outlet for their inspiration and desire for alternative realities. Yet the primary interest for students of utopia lies, unsurprisingly, in the final section, entitled “Utopia and Dystopia” (159–250).

The first story of the section is...