Images of the city in literature and film help constitute the experience of modern life. Studies of the Japanese city have focused on Tokyo, but a fuller understanding of urban space and life requires analysis of other cities, beginning with Osaka. Japan's "merchant capital" in the late sixteenth century, Osaka remained an industrial center--the "Manchester of the East"--into the 1930s, developing a distinct urban culture to rival Tokyo's. It therefore represents a critical site of East Asian modernity. Osaka Modern maps the city as imagined in Japanese popular culture from the...