A new map of hell: Satō Haruo's dystopian fiction.

In this paper, I examine two major aspects of Satō Haruo's dystopian imagination as articulated in his absurdist, futurological story of 1929 titled A Record of Nonchalant, referring to the eponymous city in which the story was set. First, I trace how Satō experiments with the construction of a science-fiction-type dystopian world before the concept and the terms to express it gained acceptance in modern Japanese literature. Second, I place his story in the narrative upheavals of his time, when proletarian literature, mass fiction and modernist expressions were jostling for a place in the 1920s and 1930s literary scene. Much of so-called modernist literature was influenced by a fascination for the erotic, grotesque and nonsensical, or ero guro nansensu, aspects of interwar culture. Capturing a time when narrative modes were undergoing dramatic transformation because of the changed relationship between the production, distribution and consumption of literature, Satō uses the modernist idiom to construct a dystopia in which art becomes a mere commodity. In assessing the value and internal conflict of this minor work of a major writer, I hope to identify its relevance and legacy in Japanese modernist literature and, at the same time, to position it in the larger intellectual discourse of utopian/dystopian literature, which until now has been largely dominated by the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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