New Studies in Modern Japan The Urban Planetary and Tokyo Modernity

This book revisits Japanese modern literature in relation to Kon Wajirō’s urban ethnography and draws a speculative genealogy of dwelling practices in the Japanese capital defined by mobility, affect and the beautiful, in particular what Kon called “accidental beauty.” The Urban Planetary and Tokyo Modernity: Dwelling in Passing analyzes everyday experiences in Tokyo during the 1910s and 1920s, showing how urban literature and urban ethnography both tried to come to terms with an emerging planetary situation defined by both ongoing movement and an intensification of local experiences. This book argues that modern urban experiences are not primarily a question of alienation, consumerism, or national life but first one of dwelling, and in particular “a dwelling in passing”. Looking at the work of the Japanese urban ethnographer Kon Wajiro in relation to early 20th century literary mappings of Tokyo in Japanese literature such as Mori Ogai’s 1912 novel Youth to Tayama Katai’s 1916 The Tokyo Near-Suburb, Christophe Thouny argues for the need to reconsider these texts in terms of a speculative genealogy of local answers to an insistent planetary situation.