The Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke Reader: Mass Culture and Intermediality in Imperial Japan

This edited volume brings a wide array of writings by Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, one of 20th-century Japan’s most important intellectuals, into the English language for the first time. Part One contains translations of Hirabayashi’s fiction that embody the diversity of his work, including science fiction (’The Artificial Human’), detective fiction (’The Apartment Murder’), and more idiosyncratic works such as ’Demon at the Pulpit’, an antitheist and anticlerical story.

In Part Two, The Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke Reader also provides a range of invaluable auxiliary critical essays which are written by expert scholars based in the USA, the UK, Australia, Italy and Japan. These essays examine Hirabayashi’s views on numerous topics, including the emerging women’s movement, popular politics, Marxist theory, filmic and literary trends, and the relationship between mass production and modern aesthetics.

Sometimes referred to as ’Japan’s Walter Benjamin’, Hirabayashi is widely known in Japanology, but has remained inaccessible to the English-speaking world until now. This book reveals how his varied literary texts and essays capture the rapid transformation of Japanese society and culture before World War Two in a way that makes them an integral part of the history of global modernity.

Seth Jacobowitz is Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of World Languages & Literatures at Texas State University, USA. He is the author of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (2016), which won the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities in 2017. He is the translator from Japanese of The Edogawa Rampo Reader (2008) and from Portuguese of Fernando Morais’ Dirty Hearts: The History of Shindo Renmei (2021).

Aaron William Moore is Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of many articles on Chinese and Japanese wartime childhood and youth, as well as two books: Writing War (2013), which analysed over 200 combat soldiers’ diaries from China, Japan, and the United States, and Bombing the City (2018), which compared the air raid experiences of civilians in British and Japanese regional cities.