ABSTRACT
The novelist Natsume So¯seki may be Japan’s most famous neurasthenic, but in the early years of the twentieth century he was not alone in complaining of a nervous exhaustion whose origin seemed to be modern civilization itself. Shinkei suijaku or “nerve fatigue,” as neurasthenia was translated, first appeared as a diagnostic category in Japan in the late 1870s, and by the turn of the century was recognized as a widespread affliction whose symptoms ranged from insomnia and loss of appetite to debilitating fatigue and melancholy. Debates on the causes of this modern malady and its implications for Japan reached well beyond the medical community. As a “disease of civilization” (bunmei no yamai), the plague of neurasthenia worried not just patients and their doctors but also a range of commentators reflecting on the changes in the economy, education, and daily life that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868. From its beginnings in the USA this neurological diagnosis, based on the idea that somatic dysfunction of the nerves produced psychic symptoms such as melancholy, was susceptible to a variety of metaphorical appro - priations that turned it into a social condition. In Japan after the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) a boom in writing about neurasthenia made shinkei suijaku a keyword for social critique as shakai mondai, “social problem,” had been for the 1890s. The story of the rise and fall of neurasthenia is a medical history – of neurology, psychiatry, and psychology before Freud – but also a cultural history properly told in both international and national terms. An essential part of the period Yamazaki Masakazu called “The Grumpy Era,” neurasthenia was an opportunity to question the transformations of the Meiji period and their ideological justification, from the pursuit of European models of civilization to the state’s suppression of dissent.1
