ABSTRACT
This book follows on from a previous work, Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Culture (2005), in which I used the perspectives of postmodernism, feminism, queer studies and postcolonial studies to analyse material by four contemporary Japanese writers: Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kdjin. In that work, rather than defining modern/modernity/modernism as a spatiotemporal term, I regarded this idea mainly as an ideology that valued notions such as power, ideals, enlightenment, the future, development, progress, advancement and evolution. I also argued that, although this ideology had existed throughout history, it had become particularly entrenched in the present globalised world. This interpretation of modernity is generally maintained in the current book. Sometimes, however, I use the term in the spatiotemporal sense. There are also times when the ideological and spatiotemporal implications overlap.
