Japan story : in search of a nation, 1850 to the present / Christopher Harding.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: Harumi and Heisaku -- Part 1. Weaving, tearing (1850s to 1910s) -- 1. Japan goes global -- 2. Blood tax -- 3. The dancing cabinet -- 4. Happy families -- Part 2. resistance is fertile (1900s to 1930s) -- 5. Contesting the cosmos -- 6. Haunting the Orient -- 7. Great escapes -- Part 3. Leading Asia / Leaving Asia (1920s to 1940s) -- 8. Self power, other power, state power -- 9. Theatre -- 10. Divine bluster -- Part 4. Modernity 2.0? (1940s to 1960s) -- 11. Afterlives -- 12. Blue note -- 13. Bright life -- Part 5. Twisted visions (1950s to 1990s) -- Part 6. Raising spirits (1990s to 2010s) -- 17. Telling Tales -- 18 Fragments -- Epilogue.

"Japan Story is a fascinating, surprising account of Japan's culture, from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid 19th century to the present, through the eyes of people who always had their doubts about modernity - who greeted it not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's familiar modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms'- both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new masonry and mortar of mainstream Japan."--Publisher information.