ABSTRACT
In the previous two chapters we have discussed the role of fantasy women in the fiction of both male and female writers. In the writings of both sexes there exists a pattern of development whereby male and female are increasingly left sundered and alone, the male characters lamenting, even raging against this fact and the women characters often celebrating it. For both male and female characters the use of the fantasy woman also became a means of exploring their own identities, often with disturbing results. If there is no Heimat, no womb, where is the Japanese self located? Even worse, in a postmodern world of endless change and fragmentation, is there even a fixed self to find? This chapter continues to focus on the exploration of the self through fantasy but this time by discussing the variety of alternative beings, or, more accurately, alternative selves, that are presented in modern Japanese fantasy. Even more than the fantasy females previously discussed, these alien identities are ambivalently delineated. The presentation of the alien ranges from the threatening and grotesque to the attractive or even seductive, sometimes within the same texts, and it is this complexity which makes it so challenging a subject in both literary and extraliterary terms.
