Abstract
Reviewed by: Holy Ghosts: The Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction by Rebecca Suter Stephen Roddy Holy Ghosts: The Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction. By Rebecca Suter. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 208 pages. Hardcover $45.00. In Holy Ghosts, Rebecca Suter has produced a well-researched, fascinating, and often provocative study of modern and contemporary fictional renderings of the Christian Century, the period that began with St. Francis Xavier’s landing at Kagoshima in 1549 and ended in the suppression of the Shimabara Rebellion in 1637–1639. Although the book’s subtitle suggests a narrow focus on literary works, Suter’s use of the term “fiction” encompasses nonliterary media such as manga, anime, and video and online games. Suter probes these disparate materials for their relevance to sociopolitical and cultural themes of the twentieth century, such as Taishō cosmopolitanism, nihonjinron, and the consequences of the post-bubble economic contraction. In doing so, she identifies various factors that have contributed to the persistence with which the events and personalities of four centuries ago continue to inhabit, or, in her phrase, to “haunt,” the Japanese literary and popular imaginary down to the present day. While the book encompasses an extensive range of subject matter, the bulk is devoted more narrowly to three main topics: the history of Christian proselytizing (chapter 1); literary texts of the early- to mid-twentieth century (chapters 2 and 3); and the array of multimedia products that treat or are in some way inspired by Amakusa Shirō (d. 1638), the quasi-mythical leader of the Amakusa Rebellion (chapters 4 and 5). Chronologically, the book moves from Christianity’s sixteenth-century reception, seventeenth-century migration underground (kakure Kirishitan), and nineteenth-century reemergence to the fictional treatment of that history in Taishō and early Shōwa-era literature, and finally, to the proliferation of Kirishitan themes in late-Shōwa and Heisei era popular culture. Insightful and meticulous readings of canonical “Kirishitan mono” by writers such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) and Endō Shūsaku (1923–1996) set the stage for an examination of imaginative, increasingly fantastic renderings of Christian themes in digital games and other multimedia entertainment, all the while demonstrating both the continuities and the surprising transformations of this subject matter across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The analyses of these materials are undergirded by the judicious application of conceptual tools culled from the works of Judith Butler, Karatani Kōjin, Furio Jesi, Linda Hutcheon, and others; scholarship about the Kirishitan and other relevant topics [End Page 233] in Japanese historical studies is also deployed in support of the author’s interpretative strategies. As Suter sums up in her concluding remarks, twentieth-century writing about the Kirishitan has served variously as a means to “alternatively reflect on the complexity of Japan’s relationship with the West” or to “challenge the identification of the West with science and rationality” (p. 170). In the post-World War II era, Kirishitan figures evolved from being embodiments of cultural and national hybridity to serving as vehicles for exploring gender and sexual ambiguity; in their latter guise they have, to some (mainly youthful male readers), represented a fearful maliciousness, while to others (consumers of shōjo-themed products), they have introduced “a new model of interaction with foreign culture, a third way beyond the assimilation/rejection dichotomy that had characterized their previous incarnations.” The Kirishitan ghosts are “an object of fascination and horror, desire and fear” that force contemporary Japanese to “rethink conventional notions of East-West relations and mutual representations” (p. 171). These and other thought-provoking observations place the transmogrifications of the Kirishitan within the arc of modern Japan’s complicated, sometimes fraught relationship with the wider world over the past century. Chapter 1 (“Contexts”) presents a concise yet informative history of Christian evangelism from the 1550s until the end of the nineteenth century. Suter highlights some lesser-known historical figures, such as the Jesuit Gnecchi-Soldo Organtino (1530–1609) and Amakusa Shirō, who emerge as the protagonists of the twentieth-century fictional texts taken up in later chapters. She also surveys the Christian fathers’ conflicts with the Buddhist clergy and the early-Tokugawa creation...