Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times

Asia Pacific Modern

by Miriam Silverberg

This history of Japanese mass culture during the decades preceding Pearl Harbor argues that the new gestures, relationship, and humor of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) expressed a self-consciously modern ethos that challenged state ideology and expansionism. Miriam Silverberg uses sources such as movie magazines, ethnographies of the homeless, and the most famous photographs from this era to capture the spirit, textures, and language of a time when the media reached all classes, connecting the rural social order to urban mores. Employing the concept of montage as a metaphor that informed the organization of Japanese mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s, Silverberg challenges the erasure of Japanese colonialism and its legacies. She evokes vivid images from daily life during the 1920s and 1930s, including details about food, housing, fashion, modes of popular entertainment, and attitudes toward sexuality. Her innovative study demonstrates how new public spaces, new relationships within the family, and an ironic sensibility expressed the attitude of Japanese consumers who identified with the modern as providing a cosmopolitan break from tradition at the same time that they mobilized for war.

Genres: Japan, History, Nonfiction, Academic, Asia, Japanese Literature, Art History

388 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Benemint · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting topic. I have an issue with her writing style as well as how she uses materials. I am not quite sure what she wants to do with the idea of montage: seems to me that there is a big confusion between how we (or they) look at the time and what it really was constituted of.

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a tragedy that Professor Silverberg was battling illness while finishing this book; her attempt to match the form of her subject and create a montage-like prose style doesn't quite cohere.

Her section on "Modern Girl as Militant," however, makes for an outstanding stand-alone piece.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in a very 1990s American academic style which can be poetic and suggestive but can also be rather precious, but worth it for the material, a goldmine of fragments and anecdotes of low modernism in interwar Tokyo and Osaka, ingeniously put together.

[Mayu Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

admittedly skimmed this one

[toots · Rating 3 out of 5]

montage doesn’t really work as a literary device so it made for an unsatisfactorily disjointed read. i had some thoughts about the author’s usage of “eroticism” which i may return to write at some point i’m just tired of thinking about this book. it had some useful information and drew me in because of the chapter titled “modern girl as militant”, which ultimately was just ok. the best part was on the grotesquerie of asakusa and possibly the one on early modern japanese movie culture. and i loved learning about hayashi fumiko and will most definitely be checking out her work. the jokyu and sexual exploitation stuff really bothered me in how the author was critical but not willing to take a negative stance, opting instead to celebrate the “agency” women were able to eek out in such narrow and dehumanizing confines, in classic liberal feminist fashion. i was mostly annoyed with how conclusions weren’t satisfyingly drawn out and the author would just jump from one thing to the next leaving threads to hang, and often bringing up things that were never referenced beforehand, somehow expecting the reader to be caught up. it left me going back looking for things that were never mentioned and being confused as they were obscure details related to the text that would have been the job of the book to cover. again i will say it definitely has merit in the describing political dispositions, culture and colonial relationships of the time period and i learned a lot. overall a noble attempt to illustrate the cross-sections of japanese modern culture, but a disappointing execution.

[Nuria Sánchez]

No me ha terminado de convencer cómo está escrito. Creo que hay ideas muy buenas pero no llego a conectar con ellas por la narrativa. Me perdía muchas veces y tenía que retroceder en la lectura para ver qué narices estaba leyendo.