Author Archive: kancuta@gmail.com

Beauty is a Wound

Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan got me hooked from the moment I read the first sentence of the blurb: “One stormswept afternoon, after twenty-one years of being dead, the beautiful Indonesian prostitute, Dewi Ayu rises from her grave to avenge a curse placed on her family.” What could be a more perfect introduction to Indonesian Gothic than a story filled with colonial and post-colonial hauntings, curses, demonic pregnancies, communist ghosts and undead heroines ready to right the wrongs? (KA)

Goth

Goth by Otsuichi is a collection of six stories told in fragmented narratives from competing perspectives of killers, victims, and a dog and linked by two recurring characters brought together by their shared interest in the macabre. Modelled on the honkaku mysteries that showcase deduction skills and lead to a surprising discovery, Goth is an example of a “light novel” – a serialised pulp magazine style fiction targeting young adult demographics. (KA)

The Vegetarian

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith) – Set in modern day South Korea, this short novel reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman in its body horror centered around a young woman’s decision to stop eating meat (or more) and the pathologising reactions of those closest to her. Other critics have traced its ecogothic credentials. (Sarah Olive, Bangor)

The Bonesetter’s Daughter

The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan – These novels add ghostly and gory dimensions to Tan’s trademark plots featuring young, Chinese-American women questing after their family tree and a sense of belonging, negotiating their transnational ethnic identity. (Sarah Olive, Bangor)

The Astonishing Colour of After

The Astonishing Colour of After by Emily X.R. Pan -Set in America and Taiwan, this young adult novel has elements of gothic, including allusions to Emily Dickinson’s poetry,  ghosts and ghostly communications …including an explanation of the East-Asian buddhist concept of the hungry ghost and its associated festival, supernatural avians and a central concern with memory and remembering. It’s also notable for its heterosexual, lesbian and cross-cultural love stories (Sarah Olive, Bangor).

Patient X

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

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.

Book release

Gothic Monsters in East Asian Culture

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.

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