Description: A much-needed English translation of writings by one of Japan's major 20th-century cultural critics, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, supported by a wealth of critical essays covering key areas.
Brief description: Seth Jacobowitz is Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of World Languages & Literatures at Texas State University, USA. He is the author of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (2016), which won the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities in 2017. He is the translator from Japanese of The Edogawa Rampo Reader (2008) and from Portuguese of Fernando Morais' Dirty Hearts: The History of Shindo Renmei (2021).
Review Quotes:
"A major thinker of the twentieth century, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke engages with media, class, politics, and gender forcing us to rethink our presentist notions about film, detective fiction, capitalism, and reproductive labor. This exemplary selection of his works (fiction and non-fiction) from the peak of his career captures his creative artistic brilliance and remarkably prescient thought processes." --Jonathan E. Abel, associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
"This volume examines the polyglot and politically charged world of one of Japan's most intriguing modernist intellectuals of prewar era. Hirabayashi's production stretched from popular to politics, and film, engaging with the burgeoning discourse on technology and society. He observed Japan at a crucial time, positing if 'conquering the world of fantasy would allow it to become a reality." --Barak Kushner, Professor of East Asian History, University of Cambridge, UK "The brilliant editors Seth Jacobowitz's and Aaron William Moore's timing is uncanny. Together with a cast of other talented translators they have not only secured Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke's works' survival (Überleben) and continuing life (Fortleben), as Walter Benjamin would have it, but have indeed given a second life to one of interwar Japan's most visionary, critical voices." --Sabine Frühstück, Distinguished Professor and Koichi Takashima Chair, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA "Consciously departing from Orthodox Marxism, Hirabayashi innovatively contributed to early twentieth-century understandings of mass culture via the lens of science and technology. Through his own stories and writings on new art forms ranging from detective stories to radio and film, he reflected and refracted modern Japanese popular intellectual life. Jacobowitz and Moore's reader offers us an intriguing contribution to the global intellectual history of modernities." --Sho Konishi, Director Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Oxford, UK