What does censorship produce? Does censorship leave a trace? Where would we find it? How would we measure it? What would this trace capture and indicate about the censor? Redacted opens with these basic questions in order to examine one of the most thoroughly documented modes of literary reception—suppression. The extant archive of the Japanese imperial censor (1923–1945) and the archive of the occupation censor (1945–1952) stand as tangible reminders of the contradictory function of censors—while they remove books from immediate circulation in their own moment, they also secrete them away, pr ... More

What does censorship produce? Does censorship leave a trace? Where would we find it? How would we measure it? What would this trace capture and indicate about the censor? Redacted opens with these basic questions in order to examine one of the most thoroughly documented modes of literary reception—suppression. The extant archive of the Japanese imperial censor (1923–1945) and the archive of the occupation censor (1945–1952) stand as tangible reminders of the contradictory function of censors—while they remove books from immediate circulation in their own moment, they also secrete them away, preserving for posterity the very books deemed dangerous to society. Censors remove specific genres, topics, and words from circulation, but authors and publishers use their encounters with suppression as incitement to rail against the authorities and to appeal to the prurient interests of their readers, consciously risking bans through the intentional appropriation of the censor's categories for offense and modes of deletion. Redacted examines the relationships between collection, suppression, and production to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse. Redacted considers not only the tangible traces and marks produced by censorship in various archives, but also what those marks delineate—the outline of the black box of the unwritable. The book's three major divisions explore these relationships: “Preservation” examines the way information about censorship is known through three sources (archives, indexes, and essays); “Production” delineates connections between censorship and the growth of three literary mega-genres (proletarian, erotic, and war); and “Redaction” focuses on the X marks printed in the place of deleted words.