Disappearing penises, filicidal old women, and monkeys that demand human sacrifice are just a few of the many wild subjects Michelle Li takes up as she considers grotesque phenomena in setsuwa literature. Acknowledging her unwieldy subject matter and slippery theoretical apparatus, she uses whatever interpretative (historical, psychological, symbolic, or feminist) approach seems likely to yield results in any particular case. The interpretation she offers most frequently is that the grotesque is used to “undermine hierarchies and dominant ideologies” (p. 2) but she acknowledges that the grotesque can both “subvert and support” (p. 3) those in power. Li's specific interpretations of individual tales are sometimes obvious, farfetched or inconclusive, but occasionally they are satisfyingly provocative.
Li begins by reviewing scholarship on setsuwa and Western theories of the grotesque. She picks out Mikhail Bakhtin's point that the grotesque often involves a focus on basic bodily functions as the most useful for reading...
