2012
This article is my early attempt at theorising Asian Gothic. Far from offering the complete picture, it should rather be treated as an exploratory journey through some potentially gothic territories of Asian literatures. The article is limited to a part of Asia only, focusing on East, South-East and South Asia with the exclusion of Japan (as Japanese Gothic is discussed separately in the collection). The texts discussed here will only provide the reader with a very sketchy idea of the gothic dimensions of the region but hopefully this can serve as a starting point for further ruminations on the subject.
S.P. Somtow’s novel The Other City of Angels (2008) portrays Bangkok as a Gothic metropolis: a city stuck between illusion and reality, where dreams and nightmares come to life, simultaneously backwards and modern, spiritual and material, and full of peculiarities that make one doubt whether such a place exists at all. It is a temple to consumerism filled with fortune tellers and high society serial killers that for Somtow, a composer himself, can best be expressed through the jarringly haunting sounds of Béla Bartók’s music. The Other City of Angels (2008) is a modern retelling of the Gothic tale of Bluebeard’s wife and her fatal discovery of her husband’s dark secret, and – true to its Gothic origins – it is filled with romance, terror, and laughter. This paper focuses on the novel’s comic dimension and discusses Somtow’s use of dark humour and the Gothic grotesque as a strategy to exoticize Bangkok for foreign readers by simultaneously reinforcing and defying Western stereotypes of Bangkok as the Oriental city, once (in)famously described as the city of temples and prostitutes. The paper also explores the way comic elements are used to offset the critical commentary on class division and social inequality that are seen as ingrained in the fabric of Thai culture and further aggravated by the materialism and consumerism characteristic of contemporary Thai society.
This article discusses the vampiric representation of the jiangshi in Hong Kong and Chinese cinema. The paper argues that while the jiangshi is a monstrous creature in its own right, over the years it has undergone a number of changes to align it with Western vampires. The article begins with a brief discussion of the jiangshi as a literary trope introduced in Chinese stories of the strange, particularly those written during the Qing period. The paper then examines three major shifts in cinematic representation of the creature from its early appearances in the 1980s Hong Kong cinema where it is compared and contrasted with Western vampires, and its post-Handover evolution that follows two different trajectories – reinventing the jiangshi as a pan-Asian horror icon and utilizing it as a tool of the Chinese government anti-superstition propaganda.
This article discusses three major media forms that drive the globalisation of Asian Gothic: literature originally written in English, film, and original television series created specifically for global SVOD platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime or HBO Go. The article focuses in more detail on three texts: a novel Ponti (2018) written by a Singaporean author Sharlene Teo, discussed in a larger context of texts featuring a Malay monster known as the pontianak; a Taiwanese film The Tag-Along (Cheng 2015) examined in relation to other East Asian films that feature forest-dwelling child-like spirits/demons that imitate human voice and lure their victims into the wilderness; and an Indonesian mini-series Halfworlds (2015) produced by HBO Asia and directed by Joko Anwar, which will be situated in the context of the director’s overall engagement with folk horror. The article argues that such productions promote an understanding of globalgothic in terms of texts that reconfigure elements of Gothic in order to negotiate transnational relationships from the socio-historical or cultural vantage point of a certain region, in this case the regions of East and Southeast Asia, and that these texts are to a large extent the results of specific production and distribution practices and strategies characteristic of global media.
The waiting woman is a ghost who appears to be endlessly waiting – for recognition, for her lover, for a chance to reincarnate, or to exact revenge. In Asia, her roots can be found in early medieval Chinese records of the strange, arguably the oldest written ghost stories in the region. The romanticized version of this ghost, introduced in Tang Xianzu’s drama Peony Pavillion (Mudan ting, 1598), influenced many writers of Japanese kaidan (strange) stories and merged with East and Southeast Asian ghostlore that continues to inspire contemporary local fiction and films. The article proposes to read the figure of the waiting woman as a representation of the enduring myth of the submissive Asian femininity and a warning against the threat of possible female emancipation brought about by the socio-economic changes caused by modernisation.
Contemporary Japanese crime writers frequently resort to gothic themes and conventions in their works. This is hardly surprising, since Japanese detective fiction, which dominated Japanese popular literature in the early twentieth century, began as a reaction to nineteenth-century gothic crime stories of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle. This article discusses crime novels of Otsuichi, Natsuo Kirino, and Fuminori Nakamura as examples of Japanese crime gothic, focusing on the Japanese conceptualisation of monstrosity in relation to the figure of the criminal, complementarity of the victim and killer characters, and aestheticisation of violence in the context of Japanese aesthetics of impermanence and imperfection.
The chapter argues that the search for Asian Gothic should be a three-directional quest: a re-examination of classic texts from the perspective of existing theories about the Gothic; an investigation of the concept of the Gothic from the perspective of self-defined Asian Gothic authors; and a re-categorization of some contemporary pop-cultural forms, such as film, music, manga, anime, visual arts, or street fashion as “Gothic,” leading to a further appropriation of the term by various Asian cultures. All of the above can only be achieved if we abandon the narrow understanding of the Gothic as a distinct literary genre and opt for a more flexible and multidisciplinary use of the term instead.
This article discusses the changing representation of suicide in selected Japanese literary and visual texts, focusing on four 20th and 21st century novels (Kokoro by Natsume Soseki [1914], The Silent Cry/Man’en Gannen no Futtoboru by Kenzaburo Oe [1967], Norwegian Wood/Noruwei no Mori by Haruki Murakami [1987], and Gray Men/Gurei Men by Tomotake Ishikawa [2012]), and concluding with a brief mention of Sion Sono’s film Suicide Circle (Jisatsu Sakuru, 2002) and the manga it inspired (Jisatsu Circle, Furuya Ukamaru, 2002). The article argues that the discussed texts have departed from the historic/nationalistic notion of suicide as noble death in favour of a more Gothic positioning of the theme. In Gothic, suicide has been conventionalised as a declaration of guilt, a side-effect of madness, an extreme form of self-harm, the ultimate withdrawal from life, and a reason for a ghostly return. In Japanese texts, suicide is at the same time civilised and barbaric, elegant and chaotic. It is a perfectly composed act of ascetic renunciation and achievement of a Buddhist ideal, as well as an unstoppable viral outbreak that threatens all life. It is an act of submission to societal norms, a cry of rebellion, and a call to revolution; a choice of an individual, but also the play of karmic forces bound to be repeated. While proposing a familiar Gothic positioning of suicide in the context of depression, alienation, inertia, defiance against authority, dysfunctional relationships, death instinct, or masochistic submission, the discussed texts, a testament to the convergence of Western and Eastern philosophies in modern Japan, invite us to revisit these Gothic conventions from a transcultural perspective.
This chapter traces the development of the Chinese-style ghost story in Asian literatures from the classical Chinese genres of zhiguai, and chanqui, through their transformation into Japanese kaidan, to contemporary versions of them. It discusses the structural characteristics and shared themes of such stories, and argues that their modern reincarnations can be divided into reproductions (where contemporary stories are written in a style closely resembling older texts), utilizations (where contemporary authors make use of their audience’s knowledge of the old texts), and hybridizations (where contemporary stories alter older texts, introducing elements of local folklore, modern settings, or other literary influences). As the name suggests, stories of the strange relate to all manner of extraordinary phenomena. To simplify things, the discussion will be limited to the stories that understand ghosts as the returning spirits or souls of the deceased, often taking very material forms in their interactions with humans. The ghosts in question should also be understood as individuals rather than a collective entity, even when they are described as one’s ancestors.