Abstract

The “J-horror boom” of the 1990s and early 2000s saw the international success of films like Nakata Hideo’s Ring (1998), bringing considerable and laudable attention to Japanese horror in the realm of film and media studies. Yet even Ring’s Sadako, one of the most popular contemporary figures in Japanese horror, first appeared as a literary character years before her debut on screen. The average layperson’s unfamiliarity of such a famous horror icon’s literary origins illuminates the comparative lack of literature-centric scholarship on major writers and figures of Japanese horror that this dissertation seeks to rectify.

First interrogating the fluidity of what we call “horror” and tracing the threads of the frightening that contributed to and shaped the genre, I center my project on the popular writer Otsuichi (1978-). Examining selections of Otsuichi’s fiction published from 2000-2019, I scrutinize his eerie, thought-provoking fiction through two major lenses of analysis, the Freudian psychoanalytic uncanny and Rahel Jaeggi’s social philosophical theory of alienation. I argue that Otsuichi commands uncanny tropes like the unfamiliar, the uncertain, uncanny twins, repetition, and the evil eye to illustrate real-world societal concerns that exist beyond the fictional realm. Among the concerns he tackles are youth’s lack of futurity, child abuse and neglect, problems facing women vis-à-vis their careers and motherhood, issues of self-identity, perpetrator trauma, bullying, corporate culture problems, and anxieties stemming from the rise of the Internet. I contend that such issues are indicative of fraught social systems and institutions that no longer adequately serve the people who must live within them. While Otsuichi offers no concrete solutions to the real-world horrors he points to with his fiction, he allows small glimmers of hope to shine through the gloom, compounding an unnerving sense of perpetual in-between-ness that the concepts of the uncanny and alienation attempt to describe.

Committee Chair

Rebecca Copeland

Committee Members

Diane Lewis; Jamie Newhard; Lori Watt; Marvin Marcus

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Japanese Language & Literature

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

8-11-2026

Language

English (en)

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