Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper offers an account of the challenges, possibilites, and limitations of drawing connections between Japanese dystopian fiction and dystopian fiction in the context of developing a system of structured annotation for a dystopian fiction database.

Paper long abstract

Keywords: Dystopian Fiction; Critical Dystopia; Mesotext; Japanese dystopia

This paper offers an account of the process of building a mesotext for documenting and connecting works of dystopian fiction across media, with a particular focus on Japanese dystopian fiction. A mesotext is system of s a system of structured annotations to draw connections across primary sources and research outputs (Boot 2025 [2009]), developed as a digital approach to the study of emblems. These typed annotations can "facilitate entry into and exploration of primary texts, and can provide the supporting arguments for the articles and studies that scholars write about primary texts" (ibid.). It ultimately reflects a model of the area that is being put under study. Beyond emblem studies, the concepts underpinning the idea of mesotexts have been applied in the developed of ENDLIT, a multi-area database for works of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. Building upon dystopian fiction and postapocalyptic fiction as 'fiction that warns' (Cavalcanti 2022; Moylan 2018) on the present - especially as critical dystopian fiction - ENDLIT has operationalized a model for documenting dystopian fiction across areas that has forced itself to content with the peculiarities of dystopian fiction in local contexts.

In the Japanese case, this has resulted in the highlighting of specific emphases and warnings that run in contrast with the underlying sensibilities of hegemonic critical dystopian fiction, especially when the future of Japan is discussed through a lens that is nevertheless dystopic, and critical. One aspects that is most evident is the focus that Japanese dystopian fiction places on the Japanese polity as a set of persons, worldviews, social roles and way (cf. Tanaka 2014; Masataka 2011; Oguma 1995). Within this framework, ruin is not universalized or abstracted to a global scale, but rendered as local and situated, unfolding within a socially and culturally specific horizon of meaning. By outlining such contrasts throught the development of the ENDLIT database, this paper highlights the challenges and the possibility of looking at dystopia from Japanese perspectives, and how it might be, or might not be, connected to other geo-socio-cultural contexts.