The fantastic brings out the repressed anxieties, fears and hopes of modern Japan. Susan J. Napier's exploration of fantasy in literature, film and comics puts the dark side of Japanese society under the spotlight. She argues that the fantastic reveals the ambivalence felt by many Japanese toward the modernization, economic success and Westernization of Japan in the twentieth century. The bizarre creations of the fantasists produce radically different visions of contemporary Japan from those that stress Japan's success story.

The author talks about the present book and her next project.

A little more about the book ...

The fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature explores the dark side to Japanese literature and Japanese society. It takes in the nightmarish future depicted in the animated film masterpiece, Akira , and the pastoral dream worlds created by Japan's Nobel Prize winning author Oe Kenzaburo. A wide range of fantasists, many discussed here in English for the first time, form the basis for a ground-breaking analysis of Utopias, dystopias, the disturbing relationship between women, sexuality and modernity, and the role of the alien in the fantastic.

What was it that motivated you to produce a work of this nature?

I had always loved Western fantasy, such as Tolkien or Alice in Wonderland, and had noticed over the last decade how Western critics were increasingly dealing with fantasy as an important literary genre. I was prompted to write a book on Japanese fantasy in part because in my previous research I kept coming across wonderful fantasy novels and stories that Japanese critics never seemed to talk about, perhaps because they felt such literature was frivolous and not "serious" enough. In fact, I found Japanese fantasy to be very serious stuff, exploring issues such as the dark side of modernization , the increasing tension between the sexes, and the nightmare of technological apocalypse, in ways that were often much more vivid and memorable than anything in "serious" fiction. At the same time, the works were thoroughly entertaining, tremendously fun both to read and to write about. The book tries to accomplish two major goals: to discuss a previously unexplored genre and show how fascinating it is, and also to use fantasy literature as a key to exploring the dark side of Japanese modernization, the sacrifices, the fears, and the nightmares and dreams that have gone into the last hundred years of Japanese history.

What are you working on for your next book?

I am currently expanding my interest in fantasy and popular culture into a new book on Japanese comics and animation (manga). The book looks some of the important changes in Japanese society through analyzing a number of important themes such as "The Body", Dystopias and Utopias", "Technology" and "Apocalypse". It will also include interviews with and discussions of some of the most important manga artists, writers and animators now working in Japan such as Otomo Katsuhiro and Miyazaki Hayao.