Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Asia Pacific Modern) Review

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Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Asia Pacific Modern) ReviewStudy modern Japanese history in any detail and, if you don't blink and miss it, you'll probably come across the keyword "Ero-Guro-Nansensu"--usually it merits a rushed and almost politely dismissive reference as a sort of decadent hiccup between Taisho democracy and Showa militarism. If this ever piqued your curiosity, then this is the book for you: a fine, critically astute, scholarly historical study, it takes a focused look on everything you ever wanted to know about Erotic-Grotesque-Nonsense but were afraid to ask.
And then some. Extensive research went into this book, and that in the kind of ephemeral sources that are hard to track down and harder to evaluate, and as a result something of the vibrant popular culture of Japan from 1923 until the late 1930's is communicated to the reader--the cafes, the movie theaters, the dance revues, magazines and cartoons, modern girls and juvenile delinquents, Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple, Ginza and Asakusa, and all that jazz. Some of this intentionally stretches the usual parameters of the three terms just a bit, but this allows Silverberg to analyze the given cacophony of mass cultural phenomena in a wider historical sense and so explore larger issues such as cultural borrowing and code-switching, changing family and gender roles, and complex political tensions at work therein. And all of this in a very attentive, nuanced fashion that does justice to the subject, avoiding the fruitless but tempting binaries of modern/traditional, imitative/authentic, complicit/resistant and the like. As such, though, the prose is a bit stiff and academic for such a lively subject, especially at the beginning, but this seems to stem more from the author's attempt to take these supposedly frivolous matters seriously as history, which was especially innovative when she first apparently started working on this book and still is intriguingly fresh even yet--besides which, every so often flashes of a pleasantly dry wit glimmer through, and Silverberg's use of montage as an organizing principle for the study is as creative as it is appropriate.
If there's one thing that annoys me about the book, it's that three of the chapters have already been published as individual articles elsewhere*. I know this is standard practice nowadays so I won't hold it against this particular title, but it still makes me feel a bit like I've been suckered into buying the same book several times over by the disreputable Asakusa shills and hawkers described right herein. Still, in this book all of that prior work is revised and brought together with lots of new and intriguing material to form a fascinating overall consideration of the otherwise mostly overlooked and definitely underestimated phenomenon of erotic-grotesque-nonsense. This is sure to become a seminal work in the field and a standard reference for up-and-coming cultural historians of Japan. Highly recommended.
*In Japan in the World, Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945, and Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Twentieth-Century Japan, the Emergence of a World Power , No 9).Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Asia Pacific Modern) Overview

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