| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Gerald Figal. Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan. (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society; Studies of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 290. Cloth $49.95, paper $17.95.

This is a welcome addition to a growing body of works that have turned away from simple exceptionalist analyses of "Japanese culture" and toward more nuanced and theoretically informed approaches to culture and modernity in Japan. While some readers will find resonances with Harry D. Harootunian's writings on the "invisible" and Marilyn Ivy's discussion of the "vanishing," Gerald Figal makes several unique contributions. Most importantly, he presents a number of close readings of writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who explored what they often called fushigi: the supernatural, the fantastic, or the mysterious. The great insights that he offers are that during this period a range of thoughtful and prolific writers became obsessed with the fantastic—including ghosts, goblins, monsters, and mysterious things of all kinds—and that rather than consider these uncanny phenomena as scattered leftovers of a disappearing past, we ought to regard the discourse on them as a constitutive element in Japan's modernity. . . .

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