In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the word “invent” is used twice. The word, however, does not appear in the process or concept of Victor Frankenstein’s scientific creation, “the accomplishment of my toils” into which he infuses “a spark of being” (Frankenstein 1818 Text p.36). Shelley uses the word to describe two opposite poles of artistic creation. One is an art of literary creation represented by Henry Clerval’s tales. The other is an art of depriving life, whether by execution or by a slow torturing manner: Elizabeth Lavenza compares the execution of Justine Moritz with the punishments “the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge” (vol.1. ch.7). 

Shelley’s Frankenstein is, unlike Clerval’s wonderful literary creation, a “hideous progeny” (“Introduction” to the 1831 text), in which she explores the art of tortures and death in medicine, science, and law. She delineates human sufferings experienced by all the main characters, including the nameless being created by Victor, who assembled parts from dead bodies of humans and animals. In doing so, she fails the characters whose intellectual or physical abilities make them more than or less than human. Her attempt in Frankenstein to seek what humanizes a being, whether it is a human being or not, has attracted and influenced numerous later artists and writers, producing many hideous offsprings all over the world.  

This paper considers Mary Shelley’s attempt to construct the human as inventing the human/e through literary imagination. It examines Frankenstein and two of its numerous sequels written beyond Europe in our century. The paper focuses on Banna Ren’s short fiction, “Three Laws of Frankenstein, or Usurpation of Corpses” (2015), in which the created being sets up the Zeroth Law of preservation of life, and Fujita Kazuhiro’s manga (a graphic novel), “Crescent Moon, Dance with the Monster” (2022-) in which Mary Shelley names the female monster. The paper hopes to show how those two Japanese works share important concerns with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and seek a way of inventing the human/e in the Anthropocene era.