Recent natural as well as man-made cataclysmic events have dramatically changed the status quo of contemporary Japanese society, and following the Asia-Pacific war-s never-ending -postwar- period, Japan has been dramatically forced into a zeitgeist of saigo or -post-disaster.- This radically new worldview has significantly altered the socio-political as well as literary perception of one of the world-s potential superpowers, and in this book the contributors closely examine how Japan-s new paradigm of precarious existence is expressed through a variety of pop-cultural as well as literary media.
Addressing the transition from post-war to post-disaster literature, this book examines the rise of precarity consciousness in Japanese socio-cultural discourse. The chapters investigate the extent to which we can talk about the emergence of a new literary paradigm of precarity in the world of Japanese popular culture. Through careful examination of a variety of contemporary text
