The Culture of the Quake

the long version

"The Culture of the Quake is first and foremost an exploration of Taishō-era narrative fiction. Every major film studio produced earthquake films, and authors from I-novelists to modernists, proletarian writers to popular fiction writers wrote something o the earthquake. In every case pre-existing attitudes toward their work shaped the way these people represented the earthquake, and yet the overwhelming destruction and mass suffering also posed particular challenges in representation."