Monstrous Bodies is a cultural and literary history of ambiguous bodies in imperial Japan. It focuses on what the book calls modern monsters--doppelgangers, robots, twins, hybrid creations--bodily metaphors that became ubiquitous in the literary landscape from the Meiji era (1868-1912) up until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Such monsters have often been understood as representations of the premodern past or of "stigmatized others"--figures subversive to national ideologies. Miri Nakamura contends instead that these monsters were products of modernity,...