Le campagne allucinate: sul modernismo rurale nella letteratura giapponese di inizio Novecento

In this essay, making use of concepts from the scholarship on rural modernism and Mark Fisher’s aesthetic reflection on the “weird” and the “eerie”, I analyze some texts in Japanese literature from the first three decades of the twentieth century. In the works of Yamamura Bochō, Hagiwara Sakutarō, and Miyoshi Tatsuji we find traces of a representation of the countryside as a site with its own specific form of modernity; the treatment of rural settings in non-realist modes; humus as the source of a weird externality; and the rural landscape as a powerfully eerie place.