At the height of state censorship in Japan, more indexes of banned books circulated, more essays on censorship were published, more works of illicit erotic and proletarian fiction were produced, and more passages were Xed out than at any other moment before or since. As censors construct and maintain their own archives, their acts of suppression yield another archive, filled with documents on, against, and in favor of censorship. The extant archive of the Japanese imperial censor (1923-1945) and the archive of the Occupation censor (1945-1952) stand as tangible reminders of this contradictory function of censors. As censors removed specific genres, topics, and words from circulation, some Japanese writers converted their offensive rants to innocuous fluff after successive encounters with the authorities. But, another coterie of editors, bibliographers, and writers responded to censorship by pushing back, using their encounters with suppression as incitement to rail against the authorities and to appeal to the prurient interests of their readers. This study examines these contradictory relationships between preservation, production, and redaction to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse. (Winner of the 2010-2011 First Book Award of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)
Jonathan Abel is Assistant Professor In the Department of Comparative Literature at Penn State University
“Redacted is a major work of original scholarship and a signal critical accomplishment. With impressive daring and persistence, Jonathan Abel has investigated rarely used archives to open a body of materials virtually unknown to English-language readers. This is a stunning achievement, and it is sure to change the landscape of Japanese literary studies.” - Marilyn Ivy, author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
“A masterful blending of incisive, close textual analysis, subtle situating of literary texts in their historical moments, attention to the very materiality of book culture, Redacted is a truly original thinking about how literature is formed and malformed, written, received, and read, under the pressure of censorship. It does nothing less than reveal a complex but hidden history of modern Japanese literature. A thrilling example of literary historical scholarship that combines the palpable excitement of archival work and the elucidating intensity of close reading.” - Alan Tansman, author of The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism
376 pp.6 x 9Illus: 15 b/w photographs, 10 line illustrations
9780520273344$85.00|£71.00Hardcover
Sep 2012