The essays collected here theorize the relation of unconscious fantasy and perversion to discourses of nation, identity, and history in Japan. By reading a variety of cultural productions as symptomatic elaborations of unconscious and symbolic processes rather than as indexes to cultural truths, the authors combat the truisms of modernization theory and the seductive pull of culturalism.

Nina Cornyetz is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at New York University, USA.

J. Keith Vincent is Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at Boston University, USA.

Introduction: Japan as Screen Memory: Psychoanalysis and History Nina Cornyetz 1. Speculations of Murder: Ghostly Dreams, Poisonous Frogs, and the Return of Yokoi Shôichi Bruce Suttmeier 2. Japan's Lost Decade and Its Two Recoveries: On Sawaragi Noi, Japanese Neo-Pop and Anti-War Activism Carl Cassegard 3. The Corporeal Principle of the National Polity: The Rhetoric of the National Polity, or, the Nation as Memory Machine Yutaka Nagahara 4. Penuses/ Phallises: The Multiplication, Displacement and Appropriations of the Phallus Ayelet Zohar 5. Penisular Cartography: Topology in Nakagami Kenji's "Kishu" Nina Cornyetz 6. Two Ways to Play Fort-Da: With Freud and Tanizaki in Yoshino Margherita Long 7. The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine Gavin Walker 8. Navigating the Inner Sea: Utsumi Bunzô's Affects in Ukigumo Dawn Lawson 9. In the Flesh: The Historical Unconscious of Ishikawa Jun's "Fugen" Irena Hayter 10. Sexuality and Narrative in Sôseki's "Kokoro" Keith Vincent 11. Exhausted by their Battles with the World: Neuraesthenia and Civilization Critique in Early Twentieth Century Japan Christopher Hill 12. Freud, Lacan and Japan Kazushige Shingu