Mark Driscoll's Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque joins an overdue but growing body of English-language scholarship that examines Japan's empire from new critical and theoretical angles. Driscoll writes in his preface, “As the fleshly container of life and labor is the body, working bodies, desiring bodies, addicted bodies, and dying bodies are offered as evidence for what I call the peripheral a priori: the spatiotemporal prioritizing of peripheral marginalia as the primary agents of culturo-economic change” (p. ix, italics mine). What follows is a phantasmagorical, compulsively readable journey through the darkest recesses of the imperial Japanese body politic.

Driscoll triangulates Minakata Kumagusu's 南方熊楠 (1867–1941) philosophy of the “bio-logic of creative, desiring life” with Tanabe Hajime's 田辺元 (1885–1962) dialectical logic of species and Michel Foucault's (1926–1984) theory of biopolitical modernity. This theoretical complex operates within a broader Marxist discourse emphasizing capitalist subsumption and the primitive accumulation of capital in colonial context. The disparate thinkers above make strange bedfellows, but Driscoll's ambitious attempt to synthesize a new hermeneutic edifice for understanding Japan's empire is always thought-provoking, and often illuminating. In brief, Driscoll sees Japan's early imperial ambitions as a form of self-inoculation against Western imperialism, one that leads from a two-pronged program of “enhancing life” and “letting people fare for themselves” (the phase of Foucauldian biopolitics proper, which lasts from 1895 to 1914), to the transformation of living labor into dead, frozen labor – a regime of commodification that captures not only physical commodities but also “all human sensations,” the cultural logic immanent in the practices of erotic-grotesque modernism (neuropolitics, 1920–1932). This cultural logic in turn intensifies the capture and extraction of biological labor power – in this case, forced, unremunerated labor in Manchukuo – to its absolute maximum, up to and including the death of the laborer (necropolitics, 1932–1945).

The presiding spirit of the biopolitical regime was Gotō Shinpei 後藤新平 (1857–1929), head of civilian affairs in Taiwan and a medical doctor who articulated a hygienic and immunological theory of empire that Driscoll encapsulates in the following four axioms: (1) the “life principle”; (2) respect for the local; (3) the beneficence of capitalist markets; and (4) competition (pp. 32–36). Space limits further elaboration, but Driscoll goes on to show how these axiomatic foundations of Gotō's biopolitics bring into focus the exploited labor power of Chinese coolies, the sexual and affective labor of kidnapped Japanese sex slaves, the hustling business sense of Japanese pimps in the colonies, the colonial drug trade, and the usurious practices of Japanese absentee landlords in Korea.

The section on neuropolitics boomerangs us back to the metropole and the writings of modern Japanese sociologists such as Gonda Yasunosuke 権田保之助 (1887–1951) and Akagami Yoshitsugu 赤神良譲 (1892–1953, erroneously transliterated in the book as Yoshitsuge), as well as popular sexologists such as Tanaka Kōgai 田中香涯 (1874–1944) and Nakamura Kokyō 中村古峽 (1881–1952). We are also treated to an “intertext” on the appearance of the figure of the vampire in the writings of Edogawa Rampo 江戸川乱歩 (1894–1965). This seeming detour away from the work's colonial heart of darkness is actually a dialectical bridge between the cultural logic of the metropolis and the material logic of the colonies. Driscoll discerns in this urban cultural production a “grotesquing” of the human nervous system as a function of the commodification of labor and affect. The trope of the vampire links metaphorically with the regime of “undead labor” that he elaborates in the final third of the book.

Driscoll coins the term “deformal subsumption” to describe the capitalist logic of this latter period, a logic in which “drugs, forced labor, and sexual slavery were not intended to reproduce labor power and consumer investment; they were directly and indirectly linked to their death” (p. 230). Between 1936 and 1939 Kishi Nobusuke 岸信介 (1896–1987) was the most powerful civilian bureaucrat in Manchukuo and Driscoll draws a sharp contrast between him and Gotō to illustrate the trajectory from biopolitics to necropolitics: Kishi had no interest in judicial or legislative affairs, he disdained the Chinese as subhuman, and he was a prodigious consumer of commercial sex. Kishi's axioms, as Driscoll sees them, were “colonial Taylorism, a generalized state of exception and extortion, an ethnoracial governmentality that denigrated Chinese, the deployment of sexuality as inducing death, not life, and most important, an intensification of the reification of human life in neuropolitics” (p. 300).

Driscoll's archival research in both Japanese and Chinese sources has brought to light extremely valuable material, and for that he is to be thanked. He is at his best when narrating the horrific realities endured by the denizens of empire, non-Japanese and Japanese alike; he unearths new facts and vivifies the stories of his actors with the deftness of a novelist. It is impossible to read this book without outrage and profound sadness, and his efforts in bearing witness are humbling.

His argument for the priority of the peripheral, however, is incomplete. It rests on the record of the actions of Japanese bureaucrats and criminals in the colonies; though such actors may be in the periphery, are they in fact, as Japanese colonizers, of the periphery? Driscoll writes that, “human and nonhuman resources stolen from colonial and domestic peripheries, together with excessive profits jacked from colonized renters and subaltern wage laborers, built Japan's imperial behemoth” (p. 6), but such an assertion is obvious – that's what empires do. Driscoll shows how central planners reacted to developments in the colonies but this is a step removed from those developments being “the primary agents of culturo-economic change.”

The book does suggest a kind of osmotic relationship between colonial material exploitation and metropolitan cultural production; I call it “osmotic” because it is almost never directly acknowledged by Driscoll's cultural producers themselves. Although he devotes some space to colonial cultural production (he writes about the prize-winning Chinese-language works in the Greater East Asia Writers Congresses in 1943 and 1944), his far more extensive treatment of the metropole reinscribes the hierarchy he had set out to overturn. The emphasis on capitalist subsumption also re-centers the center since that's where the subsuming capital interests originated. Driscoll's sources are overwhelmingly Japanese, his theoretical forebears European and Japanese, and the preponderant attention lavished on Japanese discourses and practices leaves little sense of Chinese and Korean sites of resistance or even agency.

There is, in short, a tension between the Marxist and subaltern legs of Driscoll's theoretical framework. The universalist and reductive tendencies of Marxist theory don't always play well with the particularism of more modest forms of historiography, or with subaltern studies' insistence on the local (even while subaltern thinkers embrace many of Marx's core principles).Footnote ¹ This problematic has long exercised subaltern studies but Driscoll never addresses it head-on, which is puzzling since his commitment to, and broad knowledge of, subaltern theory have been amply demonstrated in other venues, where he has also cautioned that modernity-coloniality shouldn't be “configured as a theoretical master narrative” like Marxism.Footnote ² Yet in this book his Marx quite contentedly eats his subaltern for lunch.

Driscoll's vivid depictions of the exploitation endured during the biopolitical phase are horrific enough, leading one to wonder whether the difference between biopolitics and necropolitics isn't one of kind so much as of degree. In the latter period Japan was, after all, at war, and the material pressures and brutalization of war could have simply ratcheted a pre-existing order without need for recourse to the mediating phase of neuropolitics. Schematic periodizations of history are aesthetically seductive but potentially obscure as much as they clarify. The commodification of culture clearly began in Japan well before 1920, and it may be the case that biopolitics and neuropolitics were at least partially coeval.

Unfortunately, there are also many problems of translation and scholarly apparatus. A couple of examples drawn from the many I found: a sentence on page 58 of the Muraoka Iheiji jiden 村岡伊平治自伝Footnote ³ that reads “kaisha ga shutchōsho wo dasu” 会社が出張所をだす (“companies will open branch offices”) is transliterated by Driscoll as “shakaiha shuttyōsho o dasu” and translated (unaccountably, even with the misreading of kaisha as shakai) as, “All the different parts of society will then be mobilized towards business” (p. 75). This kind of conceptual and rhetorical inflation happens even when the translations are basically correct: Umehara Hokumei's 梅原北明 (1899–1946) novel Satsujin gaisha 殺人会社 (“killing company”) has its title rendered as Killing Kapitalist Konglomerate – a clever alliterative allusion to Umehara's research on racism in the United States, but not what the author penned and not exactly considerate of the reader unable to check it against the Japanese.

There are incorrect transliterations of names, missing macrons, errors even of common knowledge: on page 35, Clausewitz is referred to as a “French military strategist.” In the bibliography Uchida Roan 内田魯庵 is listed as “Ryoan” and Rampo as “Rampo Edogawa” under the Rs instead of under the Es, where he belongs.

Even more disturbing than the large number of errors is Driscoll's habit of paraphrasing passages, redacting portions or creating composites of fragments, and then presenting these as direct quotations without ellipses or other indications that he's done this kind of cherry-picking.Footnote ⁴ Just as frustratingly, one often goes to the pages cited in a source text only to find that the quoted passage isn't there at all, or even in the vicinity. Driscoll cites numerous passages in Muraoka that are nowhere to be found (I checked the edition he cited – perhaps his page numbers are based on another edition). A majority of the quotations I spot-checked had significant problems of one sort or another. This is tragic, as Driscoll's material and ideas are far too important for him to risk discredit in this way.

This is a problematic work, and yet in terms of provocative conceptualization and informative research it is indispensable reading for anybody interested in the topics of Japanese imperialism and modernity. Just keep a bucket of salt next to you at all times.