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A fresh take on the dopplegänger and its place in Japanese film and literature—past and present

Since its earliest known use in German Romanticism in the late 1700s, the word Doppelgänger (double-walker) can be found throughout a vast array of literature, culture, and media. This motif of doubling can also be seen traversing historical and cultural boundaries. Double Visions, Double Fictions analyzes the myriad manifestations of the doppelgänger in Japanese literary and cinematic texts at two historical junctures: the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s and the present day.

According to author Baryon Tensor Posadas, the doppelgänger marks the intersection of the historical impact of psychoanalytic theory, the genre of detective fiction in Japan, early Japanese cinema, and the cultural production of Japanese colonialism. He examines the doppelgänger’s appearance in the works of Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, as well as the films of Tsukamoto Shin’ya and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, not only as a recurrent motif but also as a critical practice of concepts. Following these explorations, Posadas asks: What were the social, political, and material conditions that mobilized the desire for the doppelgänger? And how does the dopplegänger capture social transformations taking place at these historical moments?

Double Visions, Double Fictions ultimately reveals how the doppelgänger motif provides a fascinating new backdrop for understanding the enmeshment of past and present. 

The Culture of the Quake is first and foremost an exploration of Taishō-era narrative fiction. Every major film studio produced earthquake films, and authors from I-novelists to modernists, proletarian writers to popular fiction writers wrote something on the earthquake. In every case pre-existing attitudes toward their work shaped the way these people represented the earthquake, and yet the overwhelming destruction and mass suffering also posed particular challenges in representation. How could one show the pain without exploitation? Other scholars have looked at some of these groups of writers or filmmakers individually, but there are no studies looking at how they each tackled a similar subject.

The Great Kanto Earthquake is an understudied event that has only recently caught the attention of scholars. By focusing on the way it was represented in high and low culture, The Culture of the Quake gives insight into how people experienced the disaster and how they interpreted it in the years following. This book should be of interest to scholars of Japanese and Asian literature, film, culture, and history, and scholars of disaster studies.