Tokyo in Transit Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road [Hardcover]

Increased use of mass transportation in the early twentieth century enabled men and women of different social classes to interact in ways they had not before. Using a cultural studies approach that combines historical research and literary analysis, author Alisa Freedman investigates fictional, journalistic, and popular culture depictions of how mass transportation changed prewar Tokyo's social fabric and artistic movements, giving rise to gender roles that have come to characterize modern Japan.Freedman persuasively argues that, through descriptions of trains and buses, stations, transport workers, and passengers, Japanese authors responded to contradictions in Tokyo's urban modernity and exposed the effects of rapid change on the individual. She shines a light on how prewar transport culture anticipates what is fascinating and frustrating about Tokyo today, providing insight into how people make themselves at home in the city. An approachable and enjoyable book,Tokyo in Transitoffers an exciting ride through modern Japanese literature and culture, and includes the first English translation of Kawabata Yasunari'sThe Corpse Introducer, a 1929 crime novella that presents an important new side of its Nobel Prizewinning author. Freedman has produced an engaging literary ethnography, using the vast writings of the times centered on transportation and its effects on social mores during Tokyo's dizzying jazz age. Commuter rail, department stores, cafes, and dance halls bustle with people on the move, and Freedman captures the excitement of modern life through writers who celebrated (or deplored) the new city. Freedman weaves into her study a history of Tokyo's mass transit system and descriptions of material culture that provide readers a heightened sense of the everyday experience of urban modernity. Based on a large amount of historical material, literary works, journalistic and popular cultural depictions, it examines the development of the Tokyo mass tl(