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| 1 |
ID:
167202
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| Summary/Abstract |
Kōda Rohan’s (1867–1947) ‘Tai dokuro’ (Encounter with a Skull) is often treated as a tale of karmic retribution and transcendence. In addition to drawing on Buddhist philosophy, the text is rich in allusions to classical literature and philosophy. Yet, as this paper argues, Rohan’s tale is decidedly modern. His depiction of illness places his story in dialogue with modern regimes of health, gender, and class, while also drawing on traditional notions of illness and Buddhist aesthetics of decay as associated with the Kusōzu (Nine Stages of Death Scrolls). For centuries, Hansen’s disease was feared as an illness that reduced sufferers to a living corpse, and the 1873 discovery of bacilli that caused the illness did little to assuage public fear – rather, the new attention to the disease increased social stigma. Rohan’s 1890 piece, written before Japan’s 1907 legislation calling for quarantine of sufferers in some cases, draws on modern understandings of Hansen’s disease while at the same time complicating the stigma surrounding the disease. Through a close examination of ‘Encounter with a Skull’, I draw attention to the meaning of illness and the abject woman, as well as the play between archetype and innovation in this distinctly ‘modern’ text.
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| 2 |
ID:
167206
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| Summary/Abstract |
Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) held a deep interest in modern spiritualism and applied his knowledge of it to his literary process in diverse ways. Spiritualism was widely employed as metaphor and narrative methodology in twentieth-century literary modernism, and Kawabata stood out among his peers for his prolific use of it. It has typically been assumed that Kawabata distanced himself from modernism after World War II, enacting a complete return to ‘Japanese tradition’. Yet modernist and spiritualist connections can still be observed in his writing during that period. This paper looks at the connections between postwar Kawabata and contemporary modernism, focusing in particular on a close reading of the short story ‘Mugon‘ [Silence] (1953). The story is framed by an episode involving a haunted tunnel and depicts a series of events as a novelist visits an elderly writer who has fallen mute due to illness. Kawabata uses stream-of-consciousness narration to present radical ideas about literary composition and the relationship between language and reality and subverts common-wisdom understandings of language and literature. I conclude that the composition of ‘Mugon‘ demonstrates clear continuity between Kawabata’s pre- and postwar writings.
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| 3 |
ID:
167205
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper explores the multifaceted construction of the Tsugaru region by its literary community in order to illuminate a fantastic theory of place. Writers who identify themselves as part of this ‘regional literary establishment’ [chihō bundan] have engaged in a sustained process of reflexively performing and defining their place-consciousness. Processes of localization are enacted in a wide variety of forms, particularly through the invocation of vernacular language, place-specific knowledge, and ideological discourse. This paper explores the conceptual writings of Fukushi Kōjirō (1889–1946) and the ‘dialect’ [hōgen] works of Takagi Kyōzō (1903–87), among others, bringing these influential and important – yet strongly marginalized – Japanese literary figures further into the purview of English-language scholarship. It analyzes Fukushi’s ‘regionalism’ [chihō shugi], its central concept of ‘spirit’ [seishin, tamashii], and the related invocation of place-based practices like ‘Tsugaru esprit’ and ‘godagu’ [bullshitting]. It then places Takagi’s strategic deployment of vernacular speech and localized folk knowledge within the context of that discourse in order to elucidate the active and intentional construction of Tsugaru within the local literary landscape. These writers move against the centralizing and homogenizing discourses of modernization theory, and provide a refreshing vantage for rethinking place and place-consciousness in modern Japan.
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| 4 |
ID:
167200
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article juxtaposes a long Japanese poem (Maruoka Kyūka’s 1886 ‘Rippu ban unkuru’) and an Egyptian play (Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s 1933 Ahl al-kahf) to examine representations of cultural belatedness and departures from normative temporalities. In these texts, the protagonists have a supernaturally long night of sleep and come to consciousness in what seems to them, on waking, a different world. The protagonists eventually discover that they are out of sync with the recognized, official timeline; dismayed and alienated, their reactions indicate how drastically the world changed while they slept. Both texts allude to contemporary conditions in modernizing Japan and Egypt – representing the distresses of those who were perhaps unwilling to embrace rapid, irreversible Westernization – and are self-conscious of their formal novelty. Kyūka’s text is a ‘new-style poem’, retelling a story by an American author who was then unknown in Japan; al-Ḥakīm’s play is a philosophical drama of a sort that was unprecedented in Arabic literature. Belatedness is thus represented, in each of these texts, from a vehemently neophilic (and pro-modern) perspective.
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| 5 |
ID:
167198
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this reading of Mori Ōgai’s 1912 short story ‘As If’ (‘Kanoyō ni’), I examine how the monstrous is both central to the understanding of modern Japanese experiences and potentially allows for subverting established narratives of Japanese nationhood and modernity. While a number of readings emphasize Ōgai’s conflicting relation with the Japanese imperial state, I argue that the use in this story of monstrous figures such as goblins and ghosts is part of an ongoing experiment in writing to answer to a global urban situation. I call this particular mode of writing a monocularism and argue that it allows us to decenter and displace debates on Ōgai’s work that focus too often on questions of national subjectivity, Japanese modernization and individual alienation. In addition to this contribution to modern Japanese literary studies and Mori Ōgai studies, attention to the monstrous in fiction writing also shows the relevance of recent debates in urban studies, environmentalism and object-oriented ontology for the study of canonical texts of Japanese modern literature. In conclusion, I argue that ‘As If’ allows us to articulate a new relation between the local and the global, already prefiguring the present interest for planetary thinking.
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| 6 |
ID:
167201
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| Summary/Abstract |
Yamakawa Tomiko (1879–1909) was one of the ‘leading ladies’ of the Myōjō (Venus) circle of poets. In her decade of poetic productivity before her premature death from tuberculosis at age 29, Tomiko was known as the melancholy friend and rival of the more famous Yosano Akiko (1878–1942). Not only did the two vie for the romantic affections of the Myōjō leader, Yosano Tekkan (1873–1935), but they also collaborated on one of the great tanka collections of the era, Koigoromo (Robe of Love, 1905), and frequently employed supernatural symbolism in ways that were both traditional and strikingly modern. In this study, I draw Tomiko’s poetry out from under Akiko’s shadow. By examining the era’s gender politics and poetic practices alongside Tomiko’s Christian education and personal anguish, I show how she exquisitely compressed complex worlds of longing, guilt, and defiance into the 31-syllable tanka form.
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| 7 |
ID:
167204
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| Summary/Abstract |
Yumeno Kyūsaku (1889–1936), a leading figure in the genre of henkaku tantei shōsetsu (strange or unorthodox detective fiction), often used strange happenings and a gothic atmosphere to thrill readers. The supernatural spills over into his fictional worlds in the form of bizarre events that force his protagonists to confront the border between sanity and madness. They are tormented by voices, visions, and the inability to discern reality. Unlike many writers, Kyūsaku remained in his hometown, Fukuoka, and he regularly incorporated local events and themes into his work. This article examines how the supernatural and the local are intertwined in two of his texts to critique Japan’s course of modernization and how the tamashii – spirit or soul – of the past changes with the times
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