Monsters, ghosts, the supernatural, the fantastic, the mysterious. These are not usually considered the stuff of modernism. More often they are regarded as inconsequential to the study of the modern, or, at best, seen as representative of traditional beliefs that are overcome and left behind in the transformation toward modernity. In Civilization and Monsters Gerald Figal asserts that discourse on the fantastic was at the heart of the historical configuration of Japanese modernity that the representation of the magical and mysterious played an integral part in the production of...