Michael Dylan Foster’s Pandemonium and Parade provides a fresh and provocative take on the role of y?kai (“monsters”) in Japan’s experience with modernity and post-modernity over the past several centuries. The title suggests the drive toward classification Foster traces in this broad-ranging volume: y?kai in premodernity were treated as the unseen and unclassifiable (pandemonium) but move through phases of classification to become disciplined, describable, and commodifiable (parade). But as Foster states from the outset, this continuum does not constitute a straightforward teleology; throughout the book he demonstrates the variety of meanings y?kai held at any given moment.
The first chapter situates the Japanese “weird” within critical discourses on the uncanny, the monstrous, and the evolving meanings of what the author terms the “numinal.” Foster’s historical stretch is ambitious, reaching from the late-seventeenth through the late-twentieth centuries. Each of the four substantive chapters addresses a historical moment that the author characterizes in terms of the prevailing conceptual model for y?kai in that period: natural history, science, museum, and media, respectively. The methodological approaches he uses to probe the shifting meanings of y?kai draw on Todorov, Freud, and Foucault, but also on recent studies in monster theory, cognitive science, and the history of science, for starters. One of the true pleasures of the work is the author’s ability to view his slippery subject from many angles, using his tools judiciously.
Chapter 2 locates the middle of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) as the starting point for y?kai studies. This period saw a growth of what Foster terms the “encyclopedic mode”: numerous compendia of natural phenomena were written as part of a renewed interest in Japan in materia medica. In discussing a series of encyclopedias published from 1666 to 1784, Foster argues that during the Tokugawa period the term y?kai became a distinct taxonomic category. He focuses particularly on the work of thinker and artist Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788), whose illustrated compendia of y?kai not only describe, but, through their illustrations, give shape to the formerly invisible monster. Foster notes that Sekien’s publications on the one hand provide concrete, knowable characteristics to the formerly indescribable, while on the other create floating signifiers, monstrous beings to which, unhinged from the contexts in which they are originally articulated, could adhere a wide variety of meanings. This process is demonstrated in Sekien’s inclusion of a large number of monsters of his own invention—creatures often the product of visual and verbal punning—in his compendia.
The third chapter considers kokkuri, a cultural practice derivative of the “table turning” phenomenon popularized by the Spiritualist movement in the West. In kokkuri, a group of people placed their hands on a tray set atop a tripod, which would tilt in response to players’ questions. The practice flourished during the 1880s, a period exemplified by the movement to “disenchant” and modernize Japan by the government and public thinkers such as Inoue Enry? (1858–1919), the central figure of this chapter, known for his treatises on y?kai and the mysterious. Enry?’s life work was to demonstrate that rational explanations existed for most weird phenomena. To him, kokkuri was a sham that could easily be debunked through scientific and psychological explanations.
In the kokkuri craze Foster instead finds a ludic context where the complex relationships between tradition and modernity, the West and Japan, and magic and science came into relief. Kokkuri posed no real threat to official projects to modernize, and therefore was not criminalized as other, more “serious” forms of spirit possession (such as shamanic practices) were. It was moreover a space where mystery could be embraced and modernized. Enry?’s contemporary Ry?k? Yajin explained the mysterious movements of the tray in kokkuri as the result of “human electricity,” an interpretation that reframed the inexplicable by describing it in the theoretically demystifying—but ultimately equally enchanted—language of “science.”
Chapter 4 describes the y?kai as museum piece: the monster becomes a residue of the past representing a locus of desire and dread for modern Japanese in the early decades of the twentieth century. Foster’s close readings of several short stories by the prominent authors Natsume Soseki (1867–1916) and Mori ?gai (1862–1922) reveal the uneasy relationship between modern scientific knowledge and a lingering belief in the weird, exemplified by the authors’ struggles to define the modern individual and national “self” vis-à-vis a “premodern” (and less-self-aware) past. Y?kai become the flashpoint for their anxieties: as modern men, the stories’ protagonists are rational and educated, yet find themselves inexplicably drawn toward experiencing the uncontrollable in their lives as the work of spirits and monsters. In his fine analyses, Foster points to the authors’ ambivalence toward modernization and its scientific trappings; he convincingly situates their interest in y?kai and the mysterious as a shift to the denaturing of the fantastic that has occurred by this time. Y?kai have become the nostalgic objects of the desires best captured by the poetic imagination.
The center of this chapter is a sensitive portrayal of Japan’s founding father of folklore studies, Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962). Much has been written about Yanagita’s role in creating a national narrative of Japan’s past at a time when historical narratives were utilized to imperial ends. Here we find also a fuller representation of the social scientist with a poet’s soul, a man who saw in the scientific and modern explanations of y?kai a lamentable passing of a (better) past. Foster’s reading of Yanagita underlines the lost place of the now-demystified and absent y?kai for the modernizing state, and the modern subject’s response to that absence. With Yanagita, we find the y?kai finally fixed as a museum piece, a record of past beliefs and ways of knowing that have disappeared in the rush toward modernity, a perspective akin to that of his contemporaries, Soseki and ?gai.
Foster concludes with a discussion of post-war Japan’s media boom and the vital position of y?kai in the rapid changes occurring as Japan took a prominent place in the global economic scene in the late 1970s. He focuses specifically on manga (“graphic novel”) artist Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922), famous, à la Toriyama Sekien, for his drawings and descriptions of y?kai. Foster points out the similarities between the two—Mizuki also created his own y?kai to add to the extant pantheon—but also notes the role of various modern media (manga, television, etc.) in expanding the canvas upon which this takes place: Mizuki’s hometown of Sakaiminato boasts a “Mizuki Shigeru Road,” where over one hundred statues of Mizuki’s y?kai adorn a downtown street. Foster elucidates the post-modern y?kai of this period in a description of the kuchisake-onna (“slit-mouthed woman”), the subject of a very popular urban legend, which was reified primarily through the circulation of media images produced by Mizuki and others. This final examination of the meaning of monsters in contemporary culture draws attention to the ongoing process of re-envisioning and re-imagining that began with Sekien and continues today.
A work about what it means to be a monster at four critical moments in Japanese history, Pandemonium and Parade is one of the most theoretically nuanced and interesting interpretations of Japan’s experience of modernity and post-modernity. Although extremely readable, the work addresses the complexity of each period and the wide range of factors bringing y?kai to life. Pandemonium and Parade represents an important contribution to the field of Japanese studies and the study of the weird and its roles in modernizing societies.
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[Review length: 1224 words • Review posted on April 27, 2009]