Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times

Reading Miriam Silverberg's book on “erotic, grotesque, nonsense,” a popular catchphrase for Japanese urban mass culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s, brings you into a seductive world of popular magazines, ethnographic commentary, social surveys, novels, and movies that depicted the popular culture of everyday life in the entertainment districts of Tokyo. Like much of the lexicon of Japanese modernity, the use of foreign loan words ero guro nansensu underscored the self-conscious newness and foreignness of the modern. Of course, all modernities represent a radical epistemological break with the past and the introduction of something alien to received cultural practice. For Japan, however, the foreignness of the new in a temporal sense was united with the conviction that modernity came from “over there”—that its source was external. Silverberg's book takes up this encounter between the new and the old, the foreign and the indigenous, in an effort to understand...