Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this conjoining of ethnography, history and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties, as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early 20th-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of pre-modern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theatre.

玛里琳·艾维，美国康奈尔大学人类学博士，现为哥伦比亚大学人类学副教授。主要研究方向为日本政治与文化，尤其关注日本的现代性问题。《日本生活风化物语——俗世生活定义日本现代化的历程》是她在1995年出版的第一部学术著作，深入探讨了日本现代形象背后的精神源流。