The Urban Planetary and Tokyo Modernity

The Urban Planetary and Tokyo Modernity: Dwelling in Passing analyzes everyday experiences in Tokyo during the 1910s and 1920s, showing how urban literature and urban ethnography both tried to come to terms with an emerging planetary situation defined by both ongoing movement and an intensification of local experiences. This book argues that modern urban experiences are not primarily a question of alienation, consumerism or national life but first one of dwelling, and in particular of figuring “a dwelling in passing”. Looking at the work of the Japanese urban ethnographer Kon Wajirō in relation to early 20th century literary mappings of Tokyo in Japanese literature such as Mori Ōgai’s 1912 novel Youth to Tayama Katai’s 1916 The Tokyo Near-Suburb, Christophe Thouny argues for the need to reconsider these texts in terms of a speculative genealogy of local answers to an insistent planetary situation.