SOURCE: Frank, Frederick S. “Ueda Akinari.” In Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide, edited by Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, and Frederick S. Frank, pp. 12-19. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

In the following excerpt, Frank discusses Akinari's work as part of the Western Gothic tradition.

The writings of the eighteenth-century Japanese Gothicist Ueda Akinari confirm the presence of the Gothic spirit in oriental literature. All of the traditional features of the genre are firmly embedded in Akinari's tales of terror, with a special place given to the psychological monstrosities of the dream life and the intrusion of the malicious supernatural into human lives at their most vulnerable moments. The residue of feudalism and bushido codes of Japanese culture in the eighteenth century provide that sense of enclosure and entrapment crucial to the evocation of Gothic fear. The superiority of evil to goodness in Akinari's Gothic work...