Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-260) and index.

1. National-cultural phantasms and modernity's losses -- 2. Itineraries of knowledge: trans-figuring Japan: Travels of the nation-culture; Discovering "Myself"; Exotic Japan; The neo-Japonesque; Re: new Japanology -- 3. Ghastly insufficiencies: Tono Monogatari and the origins of nativist ethnology: Civilization and its remainders; The distance between speech and writing; The modern uncanny; Undecidable authorities. An originary discipline -- 4. Narrative returns, uncanny topographies: The home away from home; Museum'd utopias; Memorable ruins; Textual recursions; Reminders of the archaic -- 5. Ghostly epiphanies: recalling the dead on Mount Osore: Memorialization and its others; Boundaries of excess: markings, offerings, garbage; Ghosts in the machine; Dividing the voice; Trance effects: mourning and predictions; Dialect and rransgression -- 6. Theatrical crossings, capitalist dreams: Low-budget Kabuki and its promises; The grand show; Doubled crimes, tendered travesties; Counternarrative and figurality; Powers of attraction; Ephemeral gifts.

Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties--and the attempts to contain them--as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompani.

Description based on print version record.