Guest Editors’ Introduction: Spirits and Modern Japanese Literature

Part of the appeal of storytelling – be it literary, oral, or in any of the multiple forms in between – comes from its ability to take uncomfortable and complex social issues and render them more palatable to the reading public. Tales of the supernatural use otherworldly elements to confront social anxieties and explore possible futures, not only through content but also through compositional form. The articles in this issue focus on imaginative internal and transcendent horizons of fear, change, knowledge, and despair in modern Japanese literature: the spiritual, the spooky, and the spuriously scientific. These articles broadly address the ways in which spirits intersect with modern ideas that structure society. The central problem for the authors is how different notions of the supernatural or the spiritual are mobilized in modern Japanese literature to question assumptions about the nature of literature, gender, Japanese society, or modernity itself. Collectively, these articles address a number of Japanese authors, including giants of Japanese literature such as Kōda Rohan (Kōda Shigeyuki, 1867–1947), Mori Ōgai (Mori Rintarō, 1862–1922), and Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), but shine a new light on their work, demonstrating how they ventured into unempirical territory with experiments in ghost stories, religious poetry, and temporal lapses. These authors, as well as the lesser-known ones, overturn the perception of modern writers as either generally embracing formal and stylistic innovations or romanticizing an invented past. Further, they engaged with the political, technological, and artistic issues of their time, questioning received social and aesthetic values or certainties, exploring and learning to accept innovative uncertainties. Ghosts, spirits, and other metaphors for manifestations of the uncanny as they appear in ‘weird’ fiction have all enjoyed an evergreen status in both popular culture and ‘pure literature’ from early-modern to contemporary Japan. The Tokugawa period saw a boom in the popularity of spirits in various forms, such as ghost-storytelling parties (hyaku monogatari) and elaborately painted picture scrolls depicting parades of monsters (hyakki yagyō). During the rapid modernization and democratization of the Meiji and Taishō eras, writers like Izumi Kyōka (Izumi Kyōtarō, 1873–1939) and Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971), and later authors of popular detective fiction authors like Edogawa Ranpō (Hirai Tarō, 1894–1965), used uncanny stories to grapple with the