The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

During the Taishō era (1912 – 1926) when the country was madly racing to play
catch-up with the industrialized Western world after centuries of isolation, the
bizarre and unbalanced mood of the times was captured in a series of obsessive
and fetishistic mystery stories by author Edogawa Rampo (a pseudonym
constructed to sound like “Edgar Allan Poe”). His works, among them The Human
Chair and The Blind Beast, helped carve out a new genre known as ero-guro, an
abbreviation of the words “erotic” and “grotesque”. 43
It was in the 1980s, around the same time that the Western Goth scene was
making itself known internationally, that ero-guro sensibilities were revived in
Japan. Rampo-like imagery started surfacing in underground comics and
magazines and artists began to adopt “harrowing depictions of Taishō-era
sex and death” in their work. 44 This development was the backdrop to a
burgeoning Goth music and fashion industry, which became the Japanese
ancestor of Visual Kei and the G&L movement. It was out of this landscape
that Malice Mizer and Mana rose to fame, spawning the Cult of the Lolita and
the Gothloli fashion movement.
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