Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- The regional imperative -- Interregional, interdisciplinary -- Literatures of disenchantment -- The outline of the book -- Chapter One: The Scope of the Enquiry -- Regionalism in practice: cultural convergence in post Cold-War East Asia -- Regionalism and 'alternative modernities': towards a fruitful intersection -- Literary studies and the resistance to regionalism -- Contemporary East Asian comparative literature: an embattled discipline -- Old-school comparativism: a compromised practice -- The theory conundrum: promise and pitfalls -- Towards an intraregional comparative practice -- The dystopian impulse: roots, targets, and terminology -- Western modernism: borrowing and beyond -- Japan and Taiwan: the background to comparison -- Time-frame, themes, and tropes -- Writers -- Chapter Two: Rest & Recreation in the City: Dystopian Visions of US power in Cold War East Asia -- US hegemony in Cold War East Asia -- The US and its East Asian allies: the background to literary dissent -- Triangular paradigms for the geopolitical world -- Politics and sexuality: "Leap Before You Look" and the occupation narratives of Ôe Kenzaburô -- The past in the present: Nosaka Akiyuki's "American Hijiki" -- Huang Chunming's Young Widows: Vietnam, R&R, and the entertainment boom -- Pimping on the grand scale: Wang Zhenhe's Rose, Rose, I Love You -- Conclusion -- Chapter Three: Discord at Home: The Ruptured Family in Postwar Fiction -- Transformations in the family: basic themes -- Kinship change: the socio-cultural background to literary opposition -- The city and sexuality: the circuit of loss and substitution -- Wang Wenxing's "Mother": modernity, neurosis, and the incest taboo -- Paternalism and patriarchy in Bai Xianyong's Cursed Sons -- Tokyo in apocalypse: Murakami Ryû's Coin Locker Babies.

A fake fairytale of the consumer family: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto -- Conclusion -- Chapter Four: Sex and the City: Commodities of Choice -- Consumption in East Asia: general remarks -- The cult of consumerism in contemporary East Asia: the socio-economic background to literary opposition -- The urban marketplace: city and sexuality -- Mishima Yukio's "The Million Yen": income-doubling, 'the three imperial regalia', and consumption as sexual labor -- Journeys through the consumer maze: Murakami Haruki's Dance, Dance, Dance -- Closed circuits of consumption: Dark Nights by Li Ang -- KTV city: Zhu Tianwen's "Red Rose is Paging You" -- Conclusion -- Conclusion -- Glossary -- Japanese section -- Chinese section -- Bibliography -- Index.