Table of Contents

Series editor’s preface, Acknowledgements, A note on the text, 1 Introduction, 2 Woman found: encounters with supernatural women in prewar Japanese fantasy, 3 Woman lost: the dead, damaged, or absent female in postwar fantasy, 4 Desert of mirrors: the construction of the alien in modern Japanese fantasy, 5 Logic of inversion: twentieth-century Japanese Utopias, 6 The dystopian imagination: from the asylum through the labyrinth to the end of the world, 7 Conclusion: is there a “Japanese” fantastic?, Bibliography, Biographical reference, Index

About the Author

Susan Napier

Reviews

"Napier must surely be one of the most widely-read scholars in the field of modern Japanese literature, and she cogently weaves together textual elements from works...seemingly unrelated.... Napier's writing is, as always, compact and sophisticated without being at all ponderous. Her active disregard for boundaries between so-called high- and pop-culture forms is refreshing and exhilerating.... Finally, this book is a major contribution to modern literary and cultural studies in its attention to the alternative, subversive visions of society constituted by the "fantastic..""
-"Journal of Asian Studies
"By adopting a cultural studies approach, she succeeds in probiding the general public as well as Japan specialists with a work that discusses the fantastic worlds in Japanese literature.... remarkable for time and effort alone that must have gone into the preliminary research, not to mention the final product."
-"Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies