ABSTRACT
This article examines how an invisible entity like the cholera virus came to be translated through the language of the monstrous and the supernatural in Meiji hygienic discourse. Specifically, I turn to a literary text whose main characters must face various hybrid monsters: Izumi Kyōka’s The Holy Man of Mount Kōya (Kōya hijiri, 1900, Kōya hereafter).2 The works of the so-called “father of Japanese fantastic fiction” may not appear at first to be the most obvious place of investigation. After all, ever since its first publication, Kōya has been called an “unrealistic” work,3 and Kyōka scholars have often read his supernatural themes as a psychological reflection of his childhood or as part of his “romantic” fiction.4 However, I show in contrast that it was no coincidence that this text was written at the apex of the Meiji government’s promotion of a hygienic, healthy kokutai (national body politic), when the word eisei (hygiene) became one of the keywords of the era.5
