As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of objective observation, modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. "When Our Eyes No Longer See" portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.
The displacement in science of...
As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of objective observation, modern writers and po...