This is a study of grotesque representations in Japanese setsuwa, popular short tales often about bizarre or extraordinary events informed by Buddhist moral sensibilities. The author, keenly aware of the interpretative difficulties of a genre whose definition is ambiguous, and provenance, audience, setting, and reception unclear, makes a stab at it through a close analysis of over one hundred tales from various collections from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, such as the famous Konjaku monogatari shû. Drawing theoretically primarily from Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, the author argues that setsuwa can help shape a theory of the grotesque—a concept she most clearly defines (unfortunately) in her conclusion. Her reading is invariably political, interpreting the grotesque as embodying “the tensions between individuals and groups and groups competing for power as well as between the dominant and the suppressed”—all of which occurs within setsuwa's largely Buddhist framework. While showing an impressive command of her East Asian sources, her research focuses on archetypes of the grotesque that are fascinating—”fantastic detached body parts,” “curious sexual encounters,” “flesh eating demons and power struggles,” and so on. This useful study, however, is marred by a clumsy introduction that tries to do too much, giving an overview of Western theories of the grotesque, on the one hand, while giving an expansive literary critical history of setsuwa studies on the other. Another problem is that by being too faithful to the originals, her translations are too literal—detracting from the pleasure these tales certainly afforded medieval readers and listeners. Nonetheless, much can be learned by this interesting contribution to medieval religious literary studies.
