Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke Reader

Seth Jacobowitz is Assistant Professor of Japanese in the Department of World Languages & Literatures at Texas State University, USA. He is the author of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (2016), which won the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities in 2017. He is the translator from Japanese of The Edogawa Rampo Reader (2008) and from Portuguese of Fernando Morais’ Dirty Hearts: The History of Shindo Renmei (2021).Aaron William Moore is Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of many articles on Chinese and Japanese wartime childhood and youth, as well as two books: Writing War (2013), which analysed over 200 combat soldiers' diaries from China, Japan, and the United States, and Bombing the City (2018), which compared the air raid experiences of civilians in British and Japanese regional cities.

• Editors’ Introduction: Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke and Modern Japan’s Mass CultureShort Stories1. The Artificial Human, Seth Jacobowitz (Apr. 1928)2. The Devil’s Altar, Rebecca Suter (Jan. 1927)3. A Night at the Zoo, Seth Jacobowitz (Oct. 1928)4. This Is How I Died! Seth Jacobowitz (Jun. 1929)5. Mystery Woman, Gabriel Fernandes (Jan. 1932) The EssaysI. Social Criticism and the Cultural Sciences6. The Embodiment of the Modern Era, Yingzi Feng (Jan. 1929)7. The Social Basis of Modernism, Yingzi Feng (Mar. 1929)8. The Problem of the Cultural Sciences, Christopher Perkins (Jan. 1927)9. The Limits of So-Called ‘Scientific Criticism’, Edwin Michielsen (Nov. 1930)10. The Objective of the Women’s Movement, Aaron William Moore (Aug. 1922)11. The Feminisation of Culture, Jorinde Wels (Apr. 1926)12. The Social Duty of Youth Groups, Aaron William Moore (n.d.)II. Literary Theory and Proletarian Culture13. Literature of the Fourth Class, Edwin Michielsen (Nov. 1921)14. The Arts of the Proletariat, Edwin Michielsen (Jun. 1922)15. The Scope of What I Can Know, Christopher Perkins (Jan. 1923)16. Self-Reflection, Christopher Perkins (Oct. 1925)17. The Essence of Literature, Parts 1 and 2, James Dorsey (Mar. 1927)18. Theorising Depictions of Psychology in Fiction, Aaron William Moore (Apr. 1929)19. Political Value and Artistic Value: A Re-examination of Marxist Literary Theory, Stefano Romagnoli (Apr. 1929)III. Popular Literature and Genre Fiction20. The Genius of Popular Literature, Gala Maria Follaco (Jul. 1925)21. On Popular Literature, Gala Maria Follaco (Mar. 1929 – Feb. 1930)22. The Modern Novel as Commodity, Nathan Shockey (May 1929)23. Modern Japanese Detective Stories: On Edogawa Rampo in Particular, Seth Jacobowitz (Apr. 1925)24. A Personal View on Agrarian Literature, Seth Jacobowitz (May 1929)IV. Film and Media Theory25. Film as a Mechanism of Americanisation, Aaron William Moore (Feb. 1929)26. On Reality in the Arts, Giuseppe Strippoli (Aug. 1930)27. The Technological Revolution in Literature and the Arts, Seth Jacobowitz (Jan. 1928)28. Literature Fifty Years in the Future, Aaron William Moore (Mar. 1928) Index

A major thinker of the twentieth century, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke engages with media, class, politics, and gender forcing us to rethink our presentist notions about film, detective fiction, capitalism, and reproductive labor. This exemplary selection of his works (fiction and non-fiction) from the peak of his career captures his creative artistic brilliance and remarkably prescient thought processes.