Alex Bates’ The Culture of the Quake is a significant addition to recent studies of cultural responses to disaster in Japan. Bates focuses on the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923, a mega-disaster that struck at the very heart of Japan's largest city and cultural/ political capital. This made the 1923 quake a far more devastating disaster than, for instance, the more powerful 2011 Tohoku quake, at least in the short term (there was, of course, no nuclear fallout), in terms of both human lives lost and traumatic impact on the society and culture. Surprisingly, scholarly attention in English has only recently begun to focus in depth on the vast and diverse array of cultural responses occasioned by this disaster: most notably, Gennifer Weisenfeld's Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012), Charles Schencking's The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (Columbia UP, 2013), and two chapters in my edited book, When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan (Global Oriental, 2014): Leith Morton's ‘The Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 and Poetry’ and Mats Karlsson's ‘Proletarian Writers and the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923’. Whereas Schencking focuses mainly on sociopolitical responses, Weisenfeld on visual culture, and Morton and Karlsson on particular literary genres and movements, Bates's new work is the first to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the full range of literary and cinematic responses to the disaster, from sensationalistic popular melodramas to high-cultural literary reminiscences, from old-guard naturalist I-novels to avant-garde neo-perceptionist (shinkankaku) urban fictions and Marxist social-realist plays and stories.

The inclusion of this wide range of fictional material allows for some instructive comparisons and contrasts – for instance, between popular melodramatic treatments of real earthquake stories (jitsuwa) in the mass media and in popular literature and the generally more muted and nuanced responses to the disaster by members of the highcultural literary establishment (bundan); or between the politically charged responses of the proletarian writers and the more literarytechnical responses of the modernist aesthetes. Altogether, Bates provides a satisfyingly complete picture of post-quake literary and cinematic culture, a culture that ranged from mass popular entertainment to the radical experiments in artistic representation that appealed to the intellectual elite.