In this book, Japanese studies scholars from Japan, Britain, Australia, the United States, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria draw on their expertise, positions, and experiences to develop a new perspective on the "body" inscribed in the literary and cultural texts of contemporary Japanese society, going beyond stereotypical Orientalism. Using Japanese literary and cultural studies as their subject matter while drawing on previous research, the authors question how the body is reimagined, understood, performed, and experienced in contemporary Japan; what value it has in relation to others; and what functions it performs as a site of memory, transformation, play, illness, and ritual.
 
Just as other existing concepts and categories are being questioned and redefined today, the body is continually being reinvented too. It is modified to fit aesthetic ideals or the image required for a particular task; it is created to project a particular image of the self, or is created to perform an identity that is always in flux. The most important imagined community to which humans owe allegiance is no longer the nation. Race has been dismantled as a category based on actual physical indicators, gender is separated from sexuality and considered a continuum, the boundaries between human and non-human are blurred, and their transcendence is conceivable and often necessary. In the dichotomies between individual and state, physical and spiritual, what position does the body currently occupy? In the contemporary age, what happens to the dichotomies that have been established over the years, such as male and female, natural and artificial, human and animal? These are some of the questions that are discussed in this volume.
 
This book traces the body in postwar Japan historically and thematically through a variety of texts, identifying it as a point where the processes of meaning formation converge. With an interdisciplinary approach in mind, the book not only integrates research from fields such as literature, anthropology, sociology, film, and performance studies, but also includes essays that intersect two or more disciplines and methodologies. The book in its entirety attempts to dismantle the dichotomies of male and female, natural and artificial, human and non-human, and body and mind, by collapsing some of the "boxes" that are known to enclose the body, thus offering new perspectives.
 
The volume is organized into fifteen chapters based on three "types" of bodies: the performed body, the de-formed body, and the conformed body. By exploring topics such as mind/body dualism, aging and illness, spirit possession, beauty, performance, and gender, it offers a new socio-cultural and literary perspective on the "body" in contemporary Japanese culture and thought.
 

(Written by SEKIYA Yuichi, Professor and Irina HOLCA, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2021)

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Book reviews (presented on the publisher’s website)
The body functions not only as a ground for the unique particularities of individual subjectivity, but also as a model of universality that mirrors the community and the society at large. Through this connection between the individual and the whole, the body thereby gives physical shape to the universal order and its microcosmos, while likewise serving in modern society as the political “field” through which the conflicts and contradictions between the two become visible. It is the nature of this “field” of body politics that Irina Holca and Carmen Săpunaru Tămaş illuminate in their exploration of the varying representations of the body across contemporary Japanese literature, performance, and popular culture.
— Hideto Tsuboi, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
 
This edited volume is a fresh and very rich addition to our understanding of a crucial topic—the body—as thought, felt, and acted by contemporary Japanese. It will enrich the field beyond Japanese studies, since it brings together two important elements; in addition to familiar names in Japanese studies, the editors—both Romanians with Ph.D.s from Japanese universities—have included authors from highly diverse backgrounds, and their ‘ethnographies’ engage with literature, performing arts, and everyday behaviors, rather than only social science materials.
— Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, University of Wisconsin
 
This meticulously edited volume gathers scholars from a range of disciplines and geographical backgrounds to provide powerfully written essays that expand scholarly thought on bodies. These cogent essays by young scholars respond to recent Japanese fiction and social and artistic phenomena—while paying attention to the centrality of the body—and do much to expand our understanding in the theoretical lineage of attention to the body. There is much to learn from these essays.
— Douglas Slaymaker, University of Kentucky
 
This is a refreshing collection of articles addressing the subject of the body from a variety of appealingly eclectic angles. Drawing on less well-known insights gathered by social and cultural anthropologists as well as literature scholars, the chapters offer surprise after surprise—approaches that bewilder the boundaries between human, animal, and spirit, and that amuse as well as inform. This is highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about Japan's cultural creativity.
— Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University

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