‘Beautiful Town’: the discovery of the suburbs and the vision of the garden city in late Meiji and Taishō literature

Yiu, Angela

doi:10.1080/09555800600946944

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…These include his debut story Supein inu no ie (House of a Spanish dog, 1917) and the twin stories, Den'en no yūutsu (Rural melancholy, 1917) and Tokai no yūutsu (Urban melancholy 1923). Most remarkably, in Utsukushiki machi (Beautiful town 1919), he laid out the plan and constructed a diorama for an entire utopian garden city, which no doubt inspired the burgeoning of real garden cities in suburban Tokyo in the 1920s (Yiu 2006). Satō's spatial obsession made him a particularly apt candidate for science-fictiontype writing, since one distinctive mark of the genre is its fascination with space (Jameson 2005: 296-313).…”

Section: Utopian and Dystopian Imaginingsmentioning

confidence: 98%

A new map of hell: Satō Haruo's dystopian fiction

Yiu¹

2009

Japan Forum

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In this paper, I examine two major aspects of Satō Haruo's dystopian imagination as articulated in his absurdist, futurological story of 1929 titled A Record of Nonchalant, referring to the eponymous city in which the story was set. First, I trace how Satō experiments with the construction of a science-fiction-type dystopian world before the concept and the terms to express it gained acceptance in modern Japanese literature. Second, I place his story in the narrative upheavals of his time, when proletarian literature, mass fiction and modernist expressions were jostling for a place in the 1920s and 1930s literary scene. Much of so-called modernist literature was influenced by a fascination for the erotic, grotesque and nonsensical, or ero guro nansensu, aspects of interwar culture. Capturing a time when narrative modes were undergoing dramatic transformation because of the changed relationship between the production, distribution and consumption of literature, Satō uses the modernist idiom to construct a dystopia in which art becomes a mere commodity. In assessing the value and internal conflict of this minor work of a major writer, I hope to identify its relevance and legacy in Japanese modernist literature and, at the same time, to position it in the larger intellectual discourse of utopian/dystopian literature, which until now has been largely dominated by the West.

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Section: Utopian and Dystopian Imaginingsmentioning

confidence: 98%

A new map of hell: Satō Haruo's dystopian fiction

Yiu¹

2009

Japan Forum

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“…In a previous Japan Forum special issue, edited by Angela Yiu, textual examples and historical data are used to connect individual experiences of particular spaces to images of the city as a whole (Yiu 2006b). The issue explored literary explorations of the 'new' post-Edo suburbs of Tokyo (Yiu 2006a); the ways in which the representation and production of light in Tokyo places it in specific historical temporalities (Mizuta 2006); efforts to present the city as 'cool' on a global scale (Waley 2006b); and youth experiences of an increasingly contradictory city as presented in literary descriptions of place (Freedman 2006). These examples show that alongside its geographic qualities exists a 'Tokyo of the mind, an idea (or many ideas), a phenomenon and a world city that begs interpretation' (Yiu 2006b, p. 291).…”

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confidence: 99%