Jesty, JustinHill, Genevieve M2020-08-142020-08-142020-08-142020Hill_washington_0250O_21543.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/45700Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2020Japanese mystery fiction author Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965) frequently depicted disability in his novels. While some have criticized these works’ highly negative imaginings of disabled characters by appealing to contemporary standards, this thesis argues that it is important to historicize the status of disability in the 1920s and 1930s when reading these works. While these stories stand out today because of the characters’ recognized positions as disabled minorities, in an era before an overarching concept of “disability” had consolidated, these figures were part of a larger trend Rampo exhibited: a fascination and sympathy with all kinds of different, strange, modified, and transformed bodies and minds. Rampo used physically disabled characters as cultural and political symbols that reflected the transformations of the interwar era, whose narrative use in turn worked to develop novel nuances of understanding surrounding the value of deviance versus the norm. This paper examines Rampo’s Issun bōshi (The Dwarf (1926-1927)), Imomushi (“The Caterpillar” (1929)), Kotō no oni (The Demon of the Lonely Isle (1929-1931)), and Mōjū (The Blind Beast (1931)), first contextualizing themes of physical disability in historical terms of the rapidly modernizing and globalizing society of the 1920s and 1930s. Second, I analyze how physically deviant characters function as plot-driving devices to clash with powers of the norm and attempt to transgressively reappropriate the value of deviance. Rampo’s struggle between the desires to control, objectify, pity, and fear difference signifies a modern struggle to reconcile stereotypical ideas about deviance with what it means to be a part of modern society in an era when the masses were pushed to understand the different types of bodies and minds newly revealed to them through advancing science, technology, consumerism, and imperialism. The works of Rampo’s early ero guro period use disability to fashion hyper-concentrated depictions of the tumultuous interwar era and rebelliously champion the outsider through the timely medium of the erotic grotesque.application/pdfen-USnonedisabilityEdogawa RampoEdogawa Ranpoero guroerotic grotesque nonsensemodernityAsian literatureLiteratureDisability studiesAsian languages and literatureThesis