The Uncanny and the Feminine Sublime in Japanese Political Fantasy
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The sensation of the uncanny lies in the fact that something is attention-getting, not because it is unfamiliar or new, but because what used to be familiar has somehow become strange. As Schelling put it: “unheimlich is that which ought to have remained hidden, but has nonetheless come to light.”1 It is both frightening and exhilarating because, in psychoanalytic terms, it represents the return of the repressed. Freud defined the uncanny as “something familiar or old-established in the mind that has been estranged by the process of repression.”2 Uncanny events have the power to provoke a sense of dreadful fascination precisely because they are at once strange and familiar. This strangeness is what endows them with a supernatural quality that in Japanese popular culture is sometimes used to relate the construction of a national narrative to the search for authentic origins.3