Keio University

Modern Japanese literature is filled with ghosts and goblins--if only you know where to look. This course is designed as an introduction to the strangest, scariest, and wildest fiction in modern Japan, meaning that no prior knowledge of Japanese literature or Japanese history is required. The course begins at the "beginning" of modern Japanese literature in the late nineteenth century up to contemporary works and explores a range of ghost stories, fairy tales, as well as the literary equivalent of the splatter film. The course explores the following questions: How did the broad genre of today's gensō bungaku (roughly corresponding to supernatural, horror, and fantasy genres) emerge and develop as a set of assumptions about the nature of modern life in Japan? How do these assumptions challenge our way of interacting with the world, with other people, and ultimately with our own sense of self? What kind of new understandings of various boundaries--between the real and the unreal, the present and the past, the foreign and the native, the living and the dead--might these stories suggest? And how are these texts part of a larger global network of weird fiction--what, in other words, does it mean to call a Japanese text "Gothic"?

This course is designed for students who have already learned the first half of elementary- level grammar. It aims to enhance one’s reading and writing skills, as well as the ability to use elementary-level vocabulary and grammar. 

The course design is based on sentence structures and grammatical patterns learned in the textbook, Elementary Japanese for Academic Purposes Vol.2 (Lesson 19 to 24). 

This course is aimed at those who have already studied the first half of elementary grammar. The course focuses on learning grammar and sentence patterns according to the textbook, "University Japanese: Beginner's Course, Tomodachi vol.2" compiled by the Japanese Language Education Center for International Students, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

This workshop provides a firm grounding in cultural, social, historical, and practical aspects of art in contemporary Japan. The course provides engagement in diverse activities both in and outside of class – workshops, field trips and research - within the multicultural student body.