In the past few years a number of book-length English-language studies of the cultural dimensions of disasters in modern Japan have appeared in print.2 The question arises: Why do we need another? The reason is that none of these books concentrates solely on literature, as this book does, and only a few of the volumes treat the disaster spawned by World War II—the most destruc-tive military c…
Stuff is happening. The book Hyperobjects is now in a way irrele-vant—everyone knows, everyone intuitively feels (which is much more important) what a hyperobject is. Coronavirus is everywhere. You can’t see it. It operates on all kinds of different scales—terrify-ing interpersonally or if you’re being forced back to work or school; weirdly amazing…