The Excremental Imagination

Disgust, Compassion, and Laughter in Medieval Japan

The Excremental Imagination takes the reader on a journey into uncharted territory, tracking the presence of faecal matter in the diverse narratives of medieval Japan. Providing close textual readings of Buddhist canonical writings, popular tales, romance narratives, and pictorial scrolls, it boldly addresses a subject which, for the most part, has been excised from intellectual lifesomething deemed too disgusting or infantile to merit serious academic attention. Here we encounter a highborn lady who farts in her lovers presence, an eccentric monk who defecates in the imperial precincts, and a noted calligrapher who uses an imperial anthology of poetry to mop up his diarrhea. These stories form only a portion of the large corpus of tales that Rajyashree Pandey brings together for the first time in this book.

Pandey argues that the meanings assigned to excrement in thes