Patient X by David Peace – A fictionalised (or is it?) biography of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, populated with lashings of rehashings of the famed Japanese writer’s own work. It has a thematic emphasis on in/sanity and containment. The friendlier critics suggest it has stylistic echoes of Henry James and Edgar Allen Poe. (Sarah Olive, Bangor)
Circulating Fear: Japanese Horror, Fractured Realities, and New Media explores the changing role of screens, new media objects, and social media in Japanese horror films from the 2010s to present day. Lindsay Nelson places these films and their paratexts in the context of changes in the new media landscape that have occurred since J-horror\’s peak in the early 2000s; in particular, the rise of social media and the ease of user remediation through platforms like YouTube and Niconico. This book demonstrates how Japanese horror film narratives have shifted their focus from old media—video cassettes, TV, and cell phones—to new media—social media, online video sharing, and smart phones. In these films, media devices and new media objects exist both inside and outside the frame: they are central to the films’ narratives, but they are also the means through which the films are consumed and disseminated. Across a multitude of screens, platforms, devices, and perspectives, Nelson argues, contemporary Japanese horror films are circulated as an ever-shifting series of images and fragments, creating a sense of “fractured reality” in the films’ narratives and the media landscape that surrounds them. Scholars of film studies, horror studies, media studies, and Japanese studies will find this book particularly useful.
This annotated biblio/film/discography, crowd-sourced internationally from students and scholars of Gothic in East Asia (particularly Japan), came out of a priming project funded by the University of York\’s Culture and Communications Research Champions funding during summer 2016. This was led by Sarah Olive (then York, now Bangor, UK) and Alex Watson (then Nagoya, now Meiji, Japan). It was expanded through the Gothic in Japan symposium, held at Nagoya University in January 2018, with Daiwa and ESRC funding. Making it a freely-available, online resource was intended to offer starting points for teachers, students and researchers interested in the influence of British Gothic monsters (with a focus largely on the nineteenth century) on twentieth- and twenty-first century East Asian culture (with a focus on Japan as the symposium’s host country). The rationales for the project were that existing research focuses almost exclusively on identifying Orientalism in British Gothic monster texts. This is despite the fact that for over two hundred years, British Gothic literature has been highly popular in East Asia, inspiring a slew of adaptations, reinventions and afterlives. The organisers’ aim beyond the priming project was to develop a more reciprocal, cross-cultural model of scholarship, in which Asian Gothic is recognised as an important part of the Gothic tradition.
A new book, edited by Katarzyna Ancuta and Deimantas Valančiūnas has been released, aiming to explore South Asian Gothic themes in a variety of different types of media. The volume is made up of 15 chapters, each written by regional experts in literature, film and culture studies of South Asia. It is available through the University of Wales Press.
Anthem Press have a very specific interest in International Gothic, including a few Asian-themed proposals. For a more indepth look, information on their scholarship can be found on their website: https://anthempress.com/anthem-studies-in-gothic-literature
For researchers interested in releasing shorter form content, Anthem Impact publishes shorter works between 10,000 and 30,000 words involving several titles by Gothic in Asia authors.
Affiliated with the BAFTSS Horror Studies Special Interest Group, Hidden Horror Histories is a new series to be published by Auteur/Liverpool University Press focusing on creative individuals in horror screen media throughout the genre’s history. The series places particular emphasis on the contributions of horror creatives which have not been covered extensively in scholarship to date. Proposals on Asian Horror are welcome. For more information follow this link.