JPN 312 - Haunted Japan: Monsters and Wrathful Gods from Ancient Times to the Present

This course explores the prominent tradition of monsters, wrathful gods, and ghostly phenomena related to religious beliefs, politics, wars, and environmental disasters in Japanese visual culture, literature, and historical records from the eighth century to the present. Using critical historical and theoretical perspectives, we will analyze a wide variety of literature, wood-block prints, present-day films, anime, and manga, to explore wrathful gods, terrifying monsters, vengeful spirits, and comical yokai, as well more recent cultural icons such as Godzilla, Princess Mononoke, and Sadako from the J-horror film Ringu. We will learn how these monstrous figures serve as literary and visual tropes that embody various social and cultural fears and fixations while deepening our understanding of how such figures often embody various marginalized populations. Our themes deal with relationships between monsters and politics, gender dynamics, and traumatic disasters. In addition, we will also read seminal theoretical and historical scholarship on horror, monsters, gender studies, postcolonialism, and Japanese ghostly culture in order to acquire the methods and vocabulary necessary for forming our own arguments about haunting figures and the monstrous.