/guro/ - Guro

The basics:

Ero guro nansensu, frequently shortened to ero guro or just guro, (エログロ ero-guro?) was a literary and artistic movement originating circa 1930 in Japan. Ero guro puts its focus on eroticism, sexual corruption and decadence. While ero guro is a specific movement, many of its components can be found throughout Japanese history and culture.

The term itself is an example of wasei-eigo, a Japanese combination of English words or abbreviated words: ero from "ero(tic)", guro from "gro(tesque)", and nansensu from "nonsense". In actuality the "grotesqueness" implied in the term refers to things that are malformed, unnatural, or horrific. Items that are pornographic and bloody are not necessarily ero guro, and ero guro is not necessarily pornographic or bloody. The term is often used incorrectly by western audiences to mean "gore"—depictions of horror, blood, and guts.

Ero guro nansensu is characterized as a "prewar, bourgeois cultural phenomenon that devoted itself to explorations of the deviant, the bizarre, and the ridiculous.


The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as grotto, "a small cave" (which itself originated from Greek κρύπτη krypte, "hidden place").

Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks.

In art, performance, and literature, however, grotesque may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as sympathetic pity.

Rémi Astruc has argued that although there is an immense variety of motifs and figures, the three main tropes of the grotesque are doubleness, hybridity and metamorphosis. Beyond the current understanding of the grotesque as an aesthetic category, he demonstrated how the grotesque functions as a fundamental existential experience. Moreover, Astruc identifies the grotesque as a crucial, and potentially universal, anthropological device that societies have used to conceptualize alterity and change.