Novels without Borders

The novel has been equated with modernity itself (Magris 2015) as ‘the only genre to have emerged under the conditions of epistemological and historiographic self-consciousness that characterize the modern period’ (McKeon 2000, 254). From its inception, this most migratory of literary forms has enabled an intense and intensive process of exchange, with novels informing other novels, with novelists creating, borrowing, appropriating or challenging subject matter, narrative techniques and devices. Language has never been an insurmountable barrier, translation having been a powerful tool facilitating its spread over space and time. This modern genre made its entrance into Brazilian ports in the early nineteenth century and soon came to be adopted as a major instrument in the effort to inquire into a national identity. However, the novel's movement in space also entailed a displacement in time, thus making collide two uneven and combined temporalities – the developed European centre, already bourgeois and industrialised (notwithstanding its internal differences), and the peripheral country, newly out of colonial rule and involved in its construction as a nation. The rise of the Brazilian novel owed much to what Brazilian writer Machado de Assis has phrased ‘external influx’ (Assis 1992b, 813) in a process that has been characterised by one critic as the ‘permanent mixture of European tradition and the discoveries about Brazil’ (Candido 2017, 29). This chapter explores the particular contributions of the gothic to Brazilian fiction and examines how its conventions have been deployed to deal with aspects of Brazilian life that the project of nation-building silenced. Gothic ideas and trappings were functional to acknowledge the presence of the country's Other – the enslaved, in this case – and express the anxieties this presence entailed. Gothic flowed over the English borders and crossed the seas to become globalised. As the appropriation of its conventions in nineteenth-century Brazil suggests, ‘globalgothic’ is a term that need not refer exclusively to the contemporary context and can have its spatio-temporal coordinates expanded.

Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822 was the beginning of a long process of nation-building, whose underpinning was ‘the disparity between the slave society of Brazil and the principles of European liberalism’ (Schwarz 1992b, 19). With the enforcement of Portuguese as the country's official language by statesman Marquês de Pombal in 1758, oral culture, which had prevailed during colonial times – even settlers and enslaved Africans spoke ‘tupi’ (the general Indigenous language) – became

The Indigenous church in Canada covers a broad cross-section of geography, demographics and cultural beliefs. Moreover, it came into existence in different time periods, under varying colonial experiences, covering a wide variety of personal and ecclesial traditions. It also engages, perhaps most significantly, a broad range of Christian mission experience, including some good, some clearly bad and a significant amount that was outright ugly.

When I began this essay, I set out to describe the contemporary Indigenous church in situ, connected with the wider Christian church in Canada. After all, each of the denominations that find representation among the mainstream populations of Canada, particularly people of European origin, are also to be found among Indigenous peoples throughout Canada. I had imagined that if any mainstream denominations are not present among Canada's Indigenous populations, they have either not made a wide impact or they are so obscure as not to be readily found.

In the intervening months, however, events in Canada required, in fact demanded, that such an essay be revisited and rewritten to ensure that readers were provided with at least a glimpse of the historical context out of which the Indigenous church rose and in which the contemporary Indigenous church finds its existence. This essay, then, is the outcome of new and significant personal, extended family and community reflection. It is written not as an indictment but rather in the clear hope that what once was considered to be Indigenous Christianity is no longer, and hopefully never will be again – that the Indigenous church will not permit it to be so.

I have chosen to focus on denominational traditions that find a reasonably strong representation in the Indigenous Canadian landscape despite the history, and for some as a result of engaging the history in ‘redemptive’ ways. In some cases, this presence has been made strong by the increased presence of Indigenous leadership; in others, it is a result of risk-taking on the part of non-Indigenous denominational leadership; in still others, a renewed presence has come about because of a cooperative approach by Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to addressing the impacts of colonisation.

Mr. Oliver Cockspur had a pocket compass, and rejoiced not a little in being the agent of our preservation. He re-animated our exhausted spirits, and put new vigour in our wearied limbs, by the glad tidings of our being within a mile of Napoleon, which, by the course we had taken, was considerably nearer than Babelmandel.

As he appeared to wonder a good deal at what could have been the object of our journey, especially when he heard we had spent the night in the bush, I let him partly into my confidence; and never was a time better chosen for any communication, for he had his tests with him—it being a rule and habit with him and his brother never to go into the forest without them; so that, before reaching Napoleon, my business was in a manner determined, for the water proved excellent brine, and I resolved to purchase the land at once.

Accordingly, though in need of rest and refreshment, I sent the party on to the tavern, to order some repast to be prepared, and went myself straight to the land-office, where I made an extraordinary discovery of the cunning of Bailie Waft. On speaking to the agent for the lot of land, which I described as well as I could, for we did not happen to notice any of the surveyor's marks and monuments—indeed, the weather was such we could not look for them; he mentioned Mr. Waft had been with him some time before, with a proposal to disclose the secret of a mineral discovery he had made on the shores of the lake; but the agent, having no faith in his judgment, did not listen to his proposition. It was, therefore, most fortunate that I had sent him on to the tavern; for had he been with me, suspicions might have arisen, as well as troublesome cross-questioning—a thing which I do not like; I had really had enough of it as it was, for the agent expressed his surprise that I should think of buying only one lot of land so far from the settlements.

On the day preceding our farewell to Judiville, I assembled all my friends and the connections of my family; I even invited Mr. Bell, but I must honestly confess this was not done without a struggle; not that I bore him any ill will, nor could doubt his penitence sincere; but he had manifested such an ungovernable spirit, that I never could reconcile it to my notions of propriety, to countenance a man who had raised his hand against his neighbour's life.

There may be those who will think I was actuated by the murderous intent having been aimed against myself; and from the secret recesses of the heart, whence influences issue upon our wills unknown to ourselves, doubtless some antipathy may have worked upon me to that effect. But I was unconscious of the evil—I believed myself to have pardoned his fearful malignity, with a charity that had not a scruple of reservation in it; but, nevertheless, I could not escape from a sense of horror, when I thought of his demoniac purpose. Still, as the occasion was little short of a death's leave-taking, I stifled my feelings, and, on account of our relationship, invited him to be present, and he came.

We all spent a jocund afternoon together; the women overwhelmed me with small commissions to execute for them in London. I thought they ought rather to have employed my wife; but she was of a sedate humour, and they at all times used more freedom with me than with her. Of course I was not wanting in giving good advice to my sons, nor did I think my daughters and the gentle Volumnia, my eldest son's wife, without the need of a modicum of that same unction—at least they got it.

Mr. Bell sat almost quite silent during the greater part of the entertainment, but his countenance was less morose than usual; and when he did make an observation, there was a penetrating pathos in his voice deeply affecting.

Any discussion of Global Gothic, Horror and Weird (GoHoW) needs to address, at least, two basic questions. First, how can we avoid the bias of Amero- Eurocentrism that considers texts throughout the world only as derivative of preceding works from the metropolitan core? Second, how can we balance the drive to link a text to a cluster of other works through similarity of plot or figuration, what might be called the act of genreification, against our desire to give every document its own specificity of meaning and particularity of historical, social and geographical context? The intersecting challenges of decolonising and de-derivatising texts may well stand as the basic problematic for the emerging domain that we are here considering as Global GoHoW.

The persuasive goal of this chapter is to argue that a world-systems analysis – outlined in more detail below – ought to be fundamental to any consideration of GoHoW as one way to answer the above questions. Here I want to briefly outline what is meant by a world-systems analysis, and then suggest some ways that Global GoHoW can be considered in terms of its cultural objects of analysis, temporality and geography through a world-systems approach. I will argue that GoHoW studies still leans too heavily on a binarised outlook that is a legacy of centrist liberalism and its false promises of developmental equality. Once we move away from this framework of othering, we can also perceive a non-linear history of cultural production and realm of GoHoW creativity beyond the West/North's metropolitan control. Below I will suggest that world-systems provides a different set of ways of looking at GoHoW, even ‘unthinking’ some otherwise commonly accepted viewpoints. The point here is not to provide simply ‘new’ outlooks on GoHoW, but to radically and thoroughly transform them for greater emancipatory action.

World-systems analyses are most well known through the works of Immanuel Wallerstein and their editorial work on the journals Review (1976–2015) and Journal of World-Systems Research (1995–present). Though Wallerstein was a prolific and learned scholar who wrote in an accessible prose, it does nothing to diminish their achievements to note that readers who focus only on their work will not see the wider horizon of world-systems approaches. Wallerstein insisted that world-systems was not a methodology, but a perspective. World-systems approaches are not a mechanism to deliver relatively predetermined answers, but a way of asking questions.

This volume attempts a comprehensive examination of Christianity in North America, which includes a large land mass (Canada and the USA are the second and fourth largest countries in the world, respectively). However, North America includes only five countries: Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and the USA. Since some 90% of the region's population lives in the USA, this book focuses its major themes and issues within that country, while also taking account of Canada and the small nations to the east of the American mainland. The modern nations in North America were founded relatively recently, compared with European or Asian countries that are built on many centuries of history. However, North American countries are prominent in innovation and have become economic leaders, with influence around the world. The USA, in particular, wields great political and economic influence globally. As a result, how Americans practise or understand Christianity has a worldwide impact.

Christianity in North America is a vibrant, informative and challenging volume as it traverses various regions of North America to understand the origins, rise and impact of Christianity in the different areas. This volume examines pertinent themes and issues, such as gender, ecology and racism, as well as the different forms of church life in North America such as Anglicans, Independents, Protestants and Catholics. Through these various lenses of exploration and research, this volume seeks to challenge preconceived understandings of Christianity and to discern emerging trends in a land thirsting for spirituality, reconciliation, growth and flourishing.

Christianity in North America has taken on some distinctive cultural characteristics of the region. Some have argued that it is a highly individualistic culture. The Western culture of individualism has created churches and a theology that are highly individualistic in nature and less communal than in other parts of the world such as Asia and Africa. This individualism has consequences for our faith practices, as it tends not to promote communal worship and fellowship. The COVID-19 pandemic has not helped in building communities as, since March 2020, much interaction has moved online. This tends to isolate people further, especially the elderly, single people and other groups on the margins of society. Furthermore, COVID-19 has also led to an increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans as some in white society (following former US President Donald Trump) have continued to call COVID-19 the ‘Chinese virus’, which perpetuates racism and xenophobia.

Before the rigour of the winter began to relent, and the snow to slip away at the gentle coming of the spring, I had many opportunities of observing the character and disposition of the settlers among whom my lot was cast; and it was often the cause of heavy thoughts to me, in the meditations of my solitary walks, to see how the habits of orderliness, which many had brought with them, were daily slackening.

In Mr. Herbert, who was prospering in his school to the fullest extent of every reasonable expectation, we had obtained a great blessing; but the gracious influences of his calm and excellent methods reached not beyond the children: we still required a voice of authority among the parents; not that flagrant offences prevailed, but every one did too much according to the pleasure of his own will. The men were growing more coarse and familiar in their language than consisted with decorum; and the women took less heed, both of their appearance and apparel, than betokened a wholesome sense of propriety.

This falling off, so visible in the do-well-enough expedients of the slatternly days of winter, either was not visible, or had not been heeded, during the fine weather; but before the frost broke up, it was too plain that the corrosion which roughens the inhabitants of the backwoods was beginning to show itself amongst us.

For some time, I thought it was owing to the lack of magistrates, and stirred with the agent of the settlement to get a justice of the peace appointed; but a difficulty arose which I had not foreseen, never having, till this period, meddled in political matters. I had imagined, that by the help of a good recommendation and a fair character, no objection would be made, in such a needful case as ours, to an appointment of me, or some other sober character; but it turned out, that justices of the peace could only be made through the instrumentality of the supervisors of the towns, and judges of the county courts; so that at this time, no supervisor having been appointed for Babelmandel, and as the agent and the majority of the judges were pulling opposite ends of the political rope, in the presidential question, my stirring was of no avail.

The myth of Gabriele D’Annunzio in Russian culture, which goes back almost 130 years, can be seen as falling into three distinct phases: the period of his greatest fame, covering the first quarter of the twentieth century; his almost total disappearance during the Soviet era; and, from the 1990s to the present, a resurgence in interest. In the early twentieth century, at the peak of D’Annunzio's ‘translatability’ (to use Walter Benjamin's term), perceptions of him as an ‘artist of his own life’ meant his personality aroused the same interest as his works. Studies on the Russian enthusiasm for D’Annunzio during this period are greatly indebted to Cesare G. De Michelis, who demonstrated that at the beginning of the century D’Annunzio stood alongside Ibsen, Hamsun and Maeterlinck, the European writers most translated, discussed and represented on the stages of Imperial Russia; knowledge of his work had become common in learned circles of the period. Between 1918 and 1989, in a political climate that was increasingly hostile to bourgeois culture and D’Annunzio's ideologies, the image of the soldier-poet resurfaced occasionally, but in a more peripheral way and mainly in satire. The interest in D’Annunzio that Russian culture had sustained in the early twentieth century had a rather muted but still significant echo in some circles within the Russian diaspora in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1990s, D’Annunzio once again attracted attention as a political figure and a European forebearer of radical activism. Interest in D’Annunzio the writer was also rekindled: with new research in Russia into the country's ‘Silver Age’, there was a revival of studies on his work and his contacts with the Russian world. These two strands of interest have been fuelled by the republication of not only D’Annunzio's literary works, sometimes in new translations, but also his political oratory from the Great War period. This new phase culminated in the first Russian biography of the poet, Krylatyi tziklop (The Winged Cyclops), by the St Petersburg poet Elena Shvarts.

Robert Johnson was an essentially common-place man, with no feature to distinguish him from a million others. He was pale of face, ordinary in looks, neutral in opinions, thirty years of age, and a married man. By trade he was a gentleman's outfitter in the New North Road, and the competition of business squeezed out of him the little character that was left. In his hope of conciliating customers he had become cringing and pliable, until working ever in the same routine from day to day he seemed to have sunk into a soulless machine rather than a man. No great question had ever stirred him. At the end of this snug century, self-contained in his own narrow circle, it seemed impossible that any of the mighty, primitive passions of mankind could ever reach him. Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilisation and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.

Johnson's wife was a quiet little woman, with brown hair and gentle ways. His affection for her was the one positive trait in his character. Together they would lay out the shop window every Monday morning, the spotless shirts in their green cardboard boxes below, the neckties above hung in rows over the brass rails, the cheap studs glistening from the white cards at either side, while in the background were the rows of cloth caps and the bank of boxes in which the more valuable hats were screened from the sunlight. She kept the books and sent out the bills. No one but she knew the joys and sorrows which crept into his small life. She had shared his exultations when the gentleman who was going to India had bought ten dozen shirts and an incredible number of collars, and she had been as stricken as he when, after the goods had gone, the bill was returned from the hotel address with the intimation that no such person had lodged there. For five years they had worked, building up the business, thrown together all the more closely because their marriage had been a childless one.

As the twenty-first century unfolds with the longest US military intervention on record ending in failure and violence (Afghanistan, after twenty years), the gothic continues to be an important genre for exploring and questioning the global dynamics of war. This chapter will focus on the transmedial and transnational circulation of gothic tropes in the context of contemporary war writing and popular culture. With an eye on the larger imperial, neoliberal and ecological issues framing the globalgothic portrayal of war in literature and popular culture, I will explore how recent war-themed gothic texts have responded to anxieties about the unfinished business of empire and fascism from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anxieties about new technologies and state agencies, and the continuing fascination generated by the highly mutable and adaptable trope of the living dead. Drawing on Glennis Byron's account of how local and non-Western cultures use local mythologies to resist silencing in their encounters with the West, this chapter shows that the globalgothic represents a culturally hybrid vocabulary to encode disturbances in local lifeworlds by transnational forces, including economic and military.

Although the gothic is often seen as mainly a British and American literary genre, it was a much broader transnational movement from the start, especially if we look at its blood-soaked military roots. Historically linked to modernity and industrialisation, as a literary and visual exploration of the darker aspects of both, the gothic was also a child of global war. Even before the Age of Revolutions with which it is often linked (e.g. American, French, Haitian), the gothic actually emerged in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), known as the French and Indian War in the United States (Wright 2013, 12). This conflict, fought by France, Britain, Spain, Prussia, Russia, Austria, Sweden, India and the Iroquois Confederacy, left somewhere between 900,000 and 1,400,000 people dead across the globe. It was the first of many violent conflicts that would shape the gothic imaginary throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter will look at war-themed globalgothic in three parts: first, a look at its historical obsessions and revisitations of the unfinished business of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially colonialism and fascism, then an examination of its new developments, including notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of visual and surveillance technologies, and a willingness to scrutinise institutions that have previously escaped gothic attention, such as the CIA.

I was born in the little village of Bonnytown, so cosily situated in one of the pleasantest holms of the sylvan Esk. Many a day, both of cloud and sunshine, has passed over me since I bade it farewell; but the trees and hedges are still evergreens in my remembrance; and I never look at “the pictures in the big Ha’ Bible,” where the saints are seen crowned with glory, but I think of the sanctified old church, surrounded, in the solemnity of the churchyard, with its halo of tomb-stones.

My father was a poor man, but honest and industrious. With hard labour, constancy, and the fear of God, he followed the trade of a nail-maker. In his religious principles, he was a Presbyterian of the old leaven; and, since I have had an opportunity of seeing men, and of observing their walk and conversations in the world, I have not met with a more conscientious Christian. He was lowly and meek in his dispositions, and regarded with a sorrowful gentleness the frailties of human nature.

His constitutional piety made him see all things with the eyes of benevolence, and he cherished a sedate persuasion, that whatsoever came to pass, though at the time it might be an affliction, was yet the forerunner of good. Supported by this comforting opinion, he endured misfortunes with singular patience, even whilst it was evident, that to him evils were no lighter than to those who were more audible in their sufferings. He enjoyed, likewise, a large gift of common sense, which enabled him to discern the latent folly of many a plausible speculation; and by this sober mother wit, he obtained greater reverence amongst his neighbours than belonged to his humble station, or even to the sanctity of his office, as an elder of the parish.

Over the past three decades, the subject of cinematic remakes has emerged as a major subdiscipline in film studies, giving rise to a host of critical, philosophical and theoretical approaches that highlight the historical significance of iterative storytelling within and across different national contexts. Thanks to the ongoing efforts of Daniel Herbert, Thomas Leitch, Kathleen Loock, Lucy Mazdon, Claire Perkins, Constantine Verevis and several other scholars who are drawn to the remake's contradictory appeals and intertextual complexities, this long-disparaged category of filmmaking – once brushed off by critics as little more than a derivative copy or pale imitation of an original text – is now recognised as a legitimate cultural form in its own right, one that aesthetically reframes the distant or recent past while providing a paradoxically nostalgic vantage on modern-day issues. Indeed, with so many published studies of remakes currently available, it would seem that very little remains to be said about a topic that is already brimming with taxonomies and terminology unique to this most bankable and pervasive type of cultural production.

Despite a proliferation of books and articles about remakes, however, a regional survey of representative films produced in East Asia is only just now – with this publication – coming to fruition. This volume seeks to fill a significant gap in the history of remakes by bringing together original contributions from experts in Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese cinemas, thereby providing fresh perspectives on a subject that has largely been confined to North American and European contexts. It builds upon a few important publications, including Yiman Wang's Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (2013) and Sarah Woodland's Remaking Gender and the Family: Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese-Language Film Remakes (2018), which have been instrumental in securing a place for what Wang refers to as ‘peripheral and subaltern’ remakes in US, British and other academic arenas where Sinophone studies now sits comfortably alongside film studies. However, as an edited collection of fifteen chapters (including a roundtable discussion about the pan-Asian ‘Miss Granny’ phenomenon that began in 2014 with the Korean-language Suspicious Girl [Susanghan geunyeo] and has so far resulted in seven remakes across East and Southeast Asia), this book does not focus exclusively on any one nation's cinematic output.

It was the first day of the winter session, and the third year's man was walking with the first year's man. Twelve o’clock was just booming out from the Tron Church.

‘Let me see,’ said the third year's man, ‘you have never seen an operation?’

‘Never.’

‘Then this way, please. This is Rutherford's historic bar. A glass of sherry, please, for this gentleman. You are rather sensitive, are you not?’

‘My nerves are not very strong, I am afraid.’

‘Hum! Another glass of sherry for this gentleman. We are going to an operation now, you know.’

The novice squared his shoulders and made a gallant attempt to look unconcerned.

‘Nothing very bad—eh?’

‘Well, yes—pretty bad.’

‘An—an amputation?’

‘No, it's a bigger affair than that.’

‘I think—I think they must be expecting me at home.’

‘There's no sense in funking. If you don't go to-day, you must to-morrow. Better get it over at once. Feel pretty fit?’

‘Oh, yes, all right!’

The smile was not a success.

‘One more glass of sherry, then. Now come on or we shall be late. I want you to be well in front.’

‘Surely that is not necessary.’

‘Oh, it is far better! What a drove of students! There are plenty of new men among them. You can tell them easily enough, can't you? If they were going down to be operated upon themselves they could not look whiter.’

‘I don't think I should look as white.’

‘Well, I was just the same myself. But the feeling soon wears off. You see a fellow with a face like plaster, and before the week is out he is eating his lunch in the dissecting rooms. I’ll tell you all about the case when we get to the theatre.’

The students were pouring down the sloping street which led to the infirmary—each with his little sheaf of note-books in his hand.

“Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!” were the first sounds I heard on recovering from the faint into which I had fallen; and the first object I saw was Mr. Waft, with the tears coursing down “his pitiful nose,” standing at my side and wringing his hands. “Are ye dead, Mr. Todd?— oh! oh! Mr. Todd, are ye dead? are ye dead?” were the next sounds.

Having recovered my senses, I said to him, “Help me up, bailie.”

“I’ll do that, I’ll do that, Mr. Todd,” cried he, stooping down and taking me under the right arm and hauling me up with might and main.

“Where's Mr. Bell?” said I softly, and cautiously looking round— “where is he? I hope he is gone home; poor man!”

“Oh, Mr. Todd, Mr. Todd, if it had na been for you and your dexterity, where indeed would have been Mr. Bell, or his precious soul?” exclaimed the still distressed bailie: “he would have been over the Falls, food for fishes—food for fishes.”

Being by this time quite recovered, I requested the bodie to compose himself and to lend me his arm to help me home, for the shadow of the world was coming on, and the night had closed her window-shutters. I then again enquired in a more collected manner for Mr. Bell.

“In his drookit condition,” replied the bailie, “what could he do but to run for help? He just said ye had snatched him from perdition, bade me look to you till he could send help; and with his teeth chattering with the cold as if his jaws were mill-hoppers, he ran off to the town. Gude guide us! how did he happen to fall into the water? surely it was not a fell-in-the-sea concern; he did na mean to drown himself, though every body says he is by himself.”

“No, Mr. Waft,” was my grave and solemn response; “ye may contradict whoever says he intended to drown himself;” but in a moment I was smitten with a consciousness of having laid an emphasis on the last word that had been better softer; and therefore I added, “This pathway on the raging river's brink is not a road for folk to take in the twilight; alas for him, he was in great jeopardy!”

From Noh theatre and ukiyo-e woodblocks to radio dramas, cinema and manga, adaptations and remakes have been prevalent in the creative and cultural industries of Japan for centuries. The sheer amount of transmedial texts bears witness to the pleasure and benefits that Japanese audiences and producers have traditionally found in the repetition of familiar stories, scenarios and character types. From the early post-war era going forward, creative and cultural industries expanded at an unprecedented pace, leading to a greater crosspollination among different media outlets (film, radio, television, etc.); an increase in the number of media-literate audiences; and the consolidation of a rich tradition of criticism in print. Examining the Japanese ‘Gate of Flesh’ (Nikutai no mon) media franchise that was launched two years after the end of the Second World War and which was based on and inspired by Tamura Taijirō's novel Gate of Flesh (1947), this chapter explores the industrial contexts, textual features and critical discourses that shape the intricate relations among its iterations. Approaching remakes as a powerful means for a nation to come to (cultural) terms with its past, I hope to shed light on the cultural image of this franchise and its role over several decades in shaping the popular memory of this tumultuous historical period along gendered narratives.

As the basis for eight adaptations and remakes, including theatrically released motion pictures, a telefilm and a stage play, Tamura's original text from the immediate post-war period is regarded as a progenitive work in the cultural imagination of Japan in the aftermath of defeat. Alongside the literary output of writers such as Noma Hiroshi, Dazai Osamu and Sakaguchi Ango, Tamura's novel is representative of the ‘literature of the flesh’ (nikutai bungaku) that depicted the liberated carnal body as the gate to a new, autonomous subjectivity in opposition to the national body (kokutai) of the pre-war militarist regime that systematically repressed corporeal desires. Despite the relevance of Tamura's work and the large number of iterations it has germinated, thus far no attempt has been made to critically unpack the potential of ‘Gate of Flesh’ to further our understanding of how adaptations and remakes both capitalise on and encourage the crosspollination of cultural and creative industries in Japan, while playing an important role in the continuous remembering and reimagining of national history.