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Accepted Paper:

Numa Shōzō's Human Cattle Yapoo and Prophetic Posthumanism  
John Whittier Treat (Yale University)

Paper short abstract:

Numa Shōzō's scifi Human Cattle Yapoo (Kachikujin Yapū, 1956-91) has been typically read as a racialized analogy of a masochistic Japan under American occupation, but the work is also a precursor of current speculative writing imagining a posthuman future.

Paper long abstract:

Numa Shōzō's multivolume scifi novel of a post-nuclear world, Human Cattle Yapoo (Kachikujin Yapū, 1956-91) has been hailed by Tatsumi Takayuki as Japan's most important literary work since 1945. Typically read as a racialized analogy of a masochistic Japan under a sadistic American occupation, I argue that it is better understood as what Mishima Yukio called it: the greatest intellectual novel (kannen shōsetsu) postwar Japan produced. I will argue the work is a precursor of current speculative writing imagining a posthuman future, one in which Japanese serve as living commodes, sex machines, clothing, furniture, door mats, and even meals.

Panel S7_20
The World to Come: Discourses of the Body, Politics, and War in Japanese Future Writing, 1905-1990
  Session 1 Thursday 31 August, 2017, -