Fuzzy Traumas: Animals and Errors in Contemporary Japanese Literature

by Tyran Grillo

Overview

In Fuzzy Traumas, Tyran Grillo critically examines the portrayal of companion animals in Japanese literature in the wake of the 1990s "pet boom." Blurring the binary between human and nonhuman, Grillo draws on Japanese science fiction, horror, guide-dog stories, and a notorious essay on euthanasia, treating each work as a case study of human-animal relationships gone somehow awry. He makes an unprecedented case for Japan's pet boom and how the country's sudden interest in companion animals points to watershed examples of "productive errors" that provide necessary catalysts for change.

Examining symbiotic concepts of "humanity" and "animality," Grillo challenges negative views of anthropomorphism as something unethical, redefining it as a necessary rupture in, not a bandage on, the thick skin of the human ego. Fuzzy Traumas concludes by introducing the paradigm shift of "postanimalism" as a detour from the current traffic jam of animal-centered philosophies, arguing that humanity cannot move past anthropocentricism until we reflect honestly on what it means for the human condition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501775987
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2024
Pages:	170
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Tyran Grillo is an educator, scholar, author, photographer, and avid music critic. His research focuses on marginalized subjects in Japanese literature as well as critical disability theory writ large. He is the translator of The Running Boy and Other Stories, Parasite Eve, and other works.

Table of Contents

Animals and Errors: An Introduction
1. A Sacred Secret
2. A Canine Triptych
3. Back to Life
4. Shell Is Other People
Postanimalism: A Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Takayuki Tatsumi

Fuzzy Traumas is fabulous, provocative, and convincing. It opens a brand-new discursive integrated circuit that enables a variety of transdisciplinary scholar-critics to exchange opinions and develop new debates in ecocriticism, disability studies, and the Anthropocene.

Dominic Pettman

Fuzzy Traumas makes a significant contribution to the rapidly evolving field of the posthumanities. Tyran Grillo's lively and beguiling book has much to say about the 'productive errors' that occur in the skewed spaces of Japanese writing as well as in the slipstream of our clumsy rush to think with animals.

Kazue Harada

Tyran Grillo is a great storyteller. Fuzzy Traumas offers critical analysis of the representations of animals (so intricately intertwined with the relationships with humans), posthumanism, and (dis)ability studies in Japanese literary studies and beyond. This remarkably interdisciplinary, carefully crafted, and highly readable work will engage readers from undergraduates to specialists.