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This chapter focuses on Yasuda Yojūrō's “Japanese Bridges”, an essay about the cultural and literary meanings of Japanese bridges. The essay evokes moments of authenticity or purity—beauty that can be evoked beyond the fractured space of modern life and consciousness. These moments form Yasuda's fascist aesthetic. Though they may feel merely aesthetic, they are rife with political implications and suggest an endorsement of violence. Indeed, from innocent musings on bridges Yasuda arrives in “Japanese Bridges” at a spiritual glorification of the shedding of blood. How he makes this aesthetic and ideological leap—or, to use his metaphor, how he bridges this gap—is the driving question of the chapter.

This chapter considers the close connection between modernism and fascism in Japan. It discusses how Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's modernism displays the origins of a distinctly Japanese fascist aesthetic. Though Akutagawa died before Japan's entry into war and totalitarianism and never married those aesthetics to a politics of violence or death, we might wonder still whether his aesthetics would have led to such a politics. It is argued that Kobayashi Hideo's modernism, so richly informed by Akutagawa's, made that very turn.

This book has explored some of the voices that contributed, through a kind of synergy with their historical context, to creating a formal environment that helped bind Japanese subjects to the state and its demands. It has paid particular attention to the timbre of those voices, understanding that their power to convey and promote acts of binding relied as much on the form of their expression as on the content. Aesthetic fascist language worked as a balm to soothe the agitations, and smooth out the complexities, of the fracturing forces of modernity. Often it was a rhythmic language of surfaces lulling readers into unreflective assent to the urgings of beautifully rendered aesthetic moments—moments that promised the comfort of giving oneself over, in quiet avowal or passionate self-sacrifice, to tradition and the state. Writers of the fascist aesthetic were acutely attuned to the sensuous power of language, and they channeled that power in precarious directions. Yet the fact that there were writers writing against the fascist aesthetic reminds us that reading beyond the mesmerizing surface of prose can undo its power.