Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature: An Introduction by Mina Qiao
Chapter One: The Layered Everyspace in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki by Matthew C. Strecher
Chapter Two: Shōjo, Mother, and the Uncanny Space in Ogawa Yōko’s Writings by Mina Qiao
Chapter Three: Textual, Liminal, Fantastical Spaces in Kanai Mieko’s Early Writings by Anthony Bekirov
Chapter Four: Cannibalistic Space and Reproduction in Japanese Speculative Fiction by Kazue Harada
Chapter Five: Ports in a Storm: The Poetics of Space in Hino Keizō by Amanda C. Seaman
Chapter Six: The Foreign Land Outside Japan: an Attempted Solution to Abjection in Murakami Ryū’s Fiction by Francesca Bianco
Chapter Seven: The Fantastical Space of Exile in Tawada Yōko’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Barbara Hartley
Chapter Eight: Minding the Gap in Kawakami Hiromi by Mina Qiao and Matthew C. Strecher
About the Contributors
Mina Qiao is professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
If Japanese fiction today is inexorably linked in the minds of
readers with the fantastic—the absurd, the ridiculous, the
unconscious real—then rising star Mina Qiao and her fellow critics
explain why: a national literary imagination is responding to
traumas unique to Japan and others common to us all; to traumas
both recent and looming. Starting with Murakami Haruki but moving
on to younger, female writers such as Ogawa Yōko, Murata Sayaka,
Kawakami Hiromi and Tawada Yōko, the collective project is this:
Via close attention to space and time, Fantastical Spaces speaks to
how Japanese writers understand the improbable world now itself
uncannily unfolding before us.
*John Whittier Treat, Yale University*
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