This collaborative research project explores how literature and media in contemporary Japan grapple with “fragmented realities”—realities shaped by trauma, precarity, infrastructural violence, ecological crisis, and affective dissonance. Focusing on the decades from the 1960s through the 2000s, it considers a wide range of historical transformations: political mobilizations and feminist movements, Japan’s Cold War entanglements, the shifting urban geographies and gentrification, the rise of consumer culture and lifestyle markers, the collapse of the bubble economy, and the intensifying crises of the environment, labor, and social belonging.

　Against this backdrop, the project asks: how do Japanese cultural texts mediate experiences of anxiety, embodiment, and contested national belonging? What innovations and new critical possibilities emerge in moments of rupture?  How do media and literature reimagine “reality” itself under conditions of uncertainty? And in what ways do media ecologies shape perceptions of the real and the unreal?

　Possible points of inquiry include (but are not limited to) the fantastic and the uncanny, horror and monstrosity, affect and embodiment, the nonhuman, as well as media mixes and urban ecologies. While foregrounding cultural production in Japan (and Asia), this project also critically examines how dialogues on reality and unreality are often framed through orientalist lenses that emphasize the uniqueness of Japan. By centering interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches, the collaborative project aims to build new theoretical frameworks for understanding how form, genre, and embodiment intersect in moments of rupture and uncertainty. The project will culminate in an international symposium that brings together scholars across disciplines and career stages, while fostering collaboration between faculty and graduate students.