The Coronavirus Pandemic in Japanese literature and popular culture

This volume is the first book-length collection on Japanese literary and popular cultural responses to the coronavirus pandemic in English. Disrupting the narrative of COVID-19 as a catastrophe without precedent, this book contextualizes the COVID-19 global public health crisis and pandemic-induced social and political turbulence in a post-industrial society that has withstood multiple major destructions and disasters. From published fiction by major authors to anonymous accounts on social media, from network TV shows to contents by Virtual YouTubers (VTubers), in both "high" and "low" culturescapes, timely representations of coronavirus and individual and social livings under its impact emerge. These narratives, either personal or top-down, all endeavor to fathom this unexpected disruption of modern linear progress. Exploring the paradoxes underlying the "new normal" of Japanese society of the present day, the book collectively demonstrates how the narratives of coronavirus are not "neo-" but "re-": returning to the past, revealing existing problems and reclaiming memories lost and lessons forgotten. This edited volume will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Japanese culture and society, Japanese literature, and pandemic studies.

1. Corona Narratives as Return and a Reminder: An Introduction 2. Corona Diaries and the "Boring Apocalypse" in Japan 3. Of Miracles and Mourning: Reading COVID-19 Environmentally in Uchidate Makiko and Ito Seiko 4. Marginalizing Body and Space in Kanehara Hitomi's COVID-19 Literature 5. Senses and Emotions: Post COVID-19 Imaginations in Japanese Science Fiction 6. Open Becoming: A Disabled VTuber and Her Community in the Era of COVID-19 7. Narrating the Nation in a Global Crisis: The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Japanese Morning Drama (Asadora) 8. Turning the Page: Reading Manga in the Pandemic Age 9. Pandemic and Mass Media: The Amabie Boom as Counterculture 10. Novelvirus Viral Novels and the Irony Poisoning of Social Media Engagement 11. Writing in the New Age of Pandemics