Modernist beginnings : Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kobayashi Hideo -- The beauty of violence : Yasuda Yojūrō's "Japanese bridges" -- Objects of the sublime in literary writing : Yasuda Yojūrō, Yanagi Sōetsu, Kawabata Yasunari, and Shiga Naoya -- The rhetoric of unspoken fascism : the essence of the national polity -- Sentimental fascism on screen : Mother under the eyelids -- An aesthetics of devotion : Kobayashi Hideo's cultural criticism -- Filaments of fascism in postwar times -- Coda : Reading fascist aesthetics.