Pau Pitarch-Fernandez

Characters that suffer from some form of real or imagined mental disorder populate early twentieth-century Japanese literature. Many Japanese authors from this historical moment likewise publicly discussed their experiences with psychological ailments or their fear that they might be close to one such pathological experience. This essay considers why so many writers were interested in what was called “abnormal psychology” ( hentai shinri), even to the point of embracing this self-conception as a...