Literature and Literary Theory: 16th Annual Meeting for the Association for Japanese Literary Studies - November 2-4, 2007

This panel will explore the various boundaries of modern Japanese literature, both as a cultural form and as an academic discipline, in an attempt to identify new definitions and directions for the field. What links among works are presumed by the fundamental logic of the field, and what texts are excluded from its purview? How do these implicit and explicit boundaries affect not only the objects of inquiry, but the methodologies of the inquiring subjects? By examining a variety of concepts, including “Japanese Naturalism,” “Colonial Literature,” and “Japanese-ness”, panel members will consider productive aporias that provide moments for disciplinary self-reflexivity.

Although often dismissed as the precursor of the "I-novel," the naturalist novel in Japan bore international and extra-literary filiations that challenge the conventional delimitations of Japanese literature in the American academy. When a school of Japanese naturalists appeared in the late 1890s, including Kosugi Tengai, Tayama Katai, and the young Nagai Kafū, the naturalist novel already had proponents throughout the world. As a form based on stripped-down mimetic language and ostensibly non-moralistic representations of the social the naturalist novel was an international phenomenon. Naturalist writers also strove to incorporate in their work a range of non-literary modes of social representation, including criminology and proto-psychiatric theories of mental dysfunction, which were themselves in international circulation. By examining the role of ideas of neurasthenia (shinkei suijaku) and degeneration (daraku) in the naturalist novel this paper will argue that the international and extra-literary dimensions of the school offer an opportunity to extricate the study of Japanese literature from its usual position in area studies.

In my paper, I would like to discuss the writer Hayashi Fusao’s essay for the 1942 “Overcoming Modernity” symposium, entitled “The Heart of Imperial Loyalty.” In this essay, Hayashi discusses Japanese history in terms of the notion of impurity. According to Hayashi, the crisis facing modern Japan is directly caused by the impurities that have somehow afflicted Japan through the process of western modernization. In order for Japan to recover its purity, it must restore the national essence that consists in those manifestations of pure Japanese-ness, such as the emperor and Japanese literature. My reading of Hayashi’s essay seeks to draw forth some of the implications of the distinction he makes between national essence and national actuality.

In April 1932, the Japanese-language newspaper Burajiru jihō (Noticias do Brasil), published in São Paulo, named the first-, second-, and third-place winners of its first Colonial Literary Award for Short Fiction (Shokumin bungei tanpen shōsetsu). The three works reflect well the diverse strategies of Japanese immigrants to narrativize both their unconventional experiences and their new, binational subjectivities. The award, for its part, was given amid an on-going discourse in the Japanese-language press in Brazil concerning the relationship of domestic literary production to “Modern Japanese Literature.” My paper explores not only the construction of subjectivities within the winning works – as the characters identify themselves variously by race, gender, language, and class – but also the attempts to create identities for the texts themselves, within existing discourses of Japan’s national literature. The goal is not to reinforce the center through an emphasis on the periphery, but to illustrate the importance of such discourses of interrelation to the “lives” of texts.

How has literature associated with the bubble years in Japan been transformed in post-bubble Japan?  How have new economic exigencies and modes of dissemination impacted literature and definitions of the literary?  This paper explores what happens to the “postmodern” literary disavowals of plot, character, and meaning so popularized in the 1980s in this new era.  And further, through a look at the reception of three ostensibly new forms, my paper also engages with new critiques and definitions of how literature itself is being reimagined.

Whether fiction that imagines counterfactual historical realities, graphic novels that attempt to establish a new purity for literary endeavor, or serial episodic sagas glorifying and popularizing AIDS death, popular literature’s displacement of realities continues to  find both retail and intellectual pull through appeals to the  unprecedented.  The rhetoric of the new has become convincing and seems to be readily understood by producers, consumers, and critics alike.  My paper concludes with some speculation as to why the current and the novel have survived as important characteristics of literature and the literary.

The notion of Japanese literature—whether in its “premodern” or “modern” guise—is, as is well known, irretrievably enmeshed within a network of nation-state-oriented discourses intended to promote historical continuity, cultural cohesion, and a shared linguistic base. Between the close of WWII and the present, East Asian Studies in America has, by accident or design, deferred to the nationalist-oriented prescriptions meant to confirm that Japan, Korea, and China each are in possession of a distinct premodern “national literary heritage.” With the tripartite configuration of East Asian studies laid out as, ontologically, the way things are, premodern literary studies has been driven by a discourse of differentiation, of detecting forms, themes, elocutions, or other features that can be construed as singular to one of the Big Three minzoku. Even the seemingly cosmopolitan enterprise of East Asian comparative literature has tended, ultimately, to be animated by the agenda of rendering one literary culture distinct from the other two.

This paper will ponder the implications of shifting discussion about ancient East Asian poetry away from the discourse of differentiation toward one that articulates networks of cultural commonality. Granted, efforts to develop pan-Asian, or at least pan-East Asian, approaches are fraught with the legacy of Japanese colonial-era rhetoric. Old-school sinocentrism also must be reckoned with. And yet, the last ten years or so have given rise to other forms of East Asian regionalism, political and economic—even if expressed as a solidarity against-the-West. My presentation will consider the following questions: on what principles might a postnationalist approach to ancient East Asian literature take shape? Do some texts lend themselves more easily than others to “regionalist” readings? What modes of analysis can articulate local/regional interchanges without resorting to statist conceptions?

Historicism continues to be one of the most vital currents in contemporary literary/cultural studies. Whether the term ‘history’ is explicitly foregrounded, as in the New Historicism of Greenblatt and Montrose, or left to the reader to fill in, as in the cultural sociology of Bourdieu and Williams, the notion of historical milieu is central to a number of today’s most compelling critical projects.

Does a fully articulated historicist methodology exist in Japanese literary studies? The answer is yes. “Japanese” historicism originated in the mid-fifties, propelled by the growing popularity of social history and Marxism, and soon established itself as one of the dominant forces in literary study.

This paper examines a particular brand of historicism which developed within waka studies: the ‘history of poetry circles’ (kadanshi). The main tenets of this approach are reviewed, and the work of a number of foundational figures like Fujioka Tadaharu, Yamaguchi Hiroshi, and Inoue Muneo is discussed. A critical comparison with the more recent trends within historicism outside Japan is also given.

By presenting evidence of important theoretical work done in Japan, the paper aims to contribute to dispel any residual hesitations regarding the applicability of “theory” to Japan, and encourage dialogue on the merits and flaws of competing approaches, and of the modality of their application.

During his lifetime, Hagiwara Hiromichi (1815-63) was most successful as a poet and judge of poetry. Struggling to survive by dint of sheer literary talent and interpretive insight he sought to publish a number of innovative treatises and works of both fiction and non-fiction including travel guides, collections of comedic verse, a tract on the transliteration of Western military terms, a sequel to one of Bakin’s best-selling works of vernacular fiction, and a comprehensive analysis and revised format for Genji monogatari. Hiromichi’s extant, mostly unpublished, manuscripts provide a glimpse into a world of literary taste in which many of the dichotomous values associated with Edo period interpretive practice, such as high and low, classical and vernacular, foreign and native, commercial and artistic, are freely mixed. Hiromichi’s views never succeeded in revolutionizing nativist theory because his rejection of precedent outstripped the penchant of both scholars and general readers for easy categorization. Subsequent efforts to both revive and dismiss his legacy highlight the importance of historical context and political influence in the interpretation of literature. Using the reception of Hiromichi’s work as a touchstone, this paper will examine the role of censorship, and self-censorship, in the process of establishing boundaries for national literature and literary theory among Japanese scholars during the late Edo and early modern eras.

In The Literary in Theory, Jonathan Culler argues that while “theory” is very much alive and well, “work on language, desire, power, the body, and so on has led to a neglect of theoretical issues that are particular to literature and the system of the literary” (p. 5). He even goes so far as to confess his own contributions to this neglect, which he seeks to rectify with his book.

Apart from this strange mea culpa, the most striking aspect of Culler’s assertion is the implication that there may be a fundamental divide between literature and theory – or, more precisely, between literary theory and theory as the term is more generally understood and applied in the humanities.

My paper will consider this implication in detail by reversing Culler’s formulation and exploring the theoretical in Japanese literature. Specifically, I will look at three different scenes – the discussion of monogatari in the “Hotaru” chapter of Genji monogatari, the lessons on letter writing in Kōshoku ichidai onna, and the critical essay in Enchi Fumiko’s novel Onna men – that give us sophisticated examples of literary theory used to analyze discursive practices and expose their culturally constructed quality. These examples, and the narrative contexts in which they appear, compel a reconsideration of our own contemporary notions of literary theory by exposing theory itself as a discursive practice -- a performance that seeks not just to discipline and create knowledge, but to seduce, undress, and control.

The relationship between Japanese literature and literary theory has always been an ambiguous one. On the one hand, when literary theory is regarded as a system of axioms or a methodological tool which can be applied to a particular text to reveal hidden meanings, ideological assumptions, or a deep formal structure, the specificity of Japanese literature is subsumed under the universal applicability of theory. On the other hand, when the irreducible difference of Japanese literature is asserted, literary theory becomes more window dressing than a means of critical intervention. It is therefore not particularly surprising that theory is sometimes treated with skepticism. Yet mapping the current state of Japanese literature as an academic field in terms of the dichotomy of anti-theory and pro-theory is highly unproductive. What is at stake is not the relevance of theory for studying Japanese literature but the legitimacy of the field organized around the identity of the nation state called Japan. Despite many attempts to problematize the putative unity of Japan and the history of Japanese national literature, Japan for the most part remains a fundamental framework within which ideological contradictions, dissenting voices, and alternative possibilities are discussed. Japanese literature continues to live its afterlife precisely to the extent that it is posited as an imagined construct, and that it is believed to be worth criticizing its putative unity repeatedly. The efficacy of theory is now seriously being put to test by the fundamental contradictions of national literature whose only means of survival is an endless process of self-negation.

Debates over the boundaries of early twentieth-century Japanese literature often focus on the volumes of Japanese-language literature written by semicolonial Chinese and colonial Koreans and Taiwanese and published throughout the Japanese empire. Part of both modern Japanese literature and the modern literatures of China, Korea, and Taiwan, these texts greatly expand the conventional boundaries of “Japanese literature.” Further undermining conventional boundaries were transnational literary movements, where connections with writers and creative texts from abroad often ran just as deep as with those from closer to home.

Although fertile, these and other discussions of what constitutes early twentieth-century Japanese literature have neglected the paradox of translation – translation both into and from the Japanese language. Translations naturally facilitate the cross-pollination of literary worlds. But even more significantly, they defy perhaps more than anything else the division of literature along purely national lines. This presentation will focus on one of the most striking sets of colonial and semicolonial translations of Japanese literature, namely Chinese and Korean translations of heavily censored Japanese proletarian and battlefront texts, where fuseji and missing pages are replaced with Chinese and Korean words, creating literary works that are no more “Japanese” than they are “Chinese” or “Korean.” I also will address the further reworking of Japanese literature in Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese intertextual reconfigurations of censored literature, and the deep yet regularly overlooked intertwining of the early twentieth-century Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds (particularly the intra-Asian friendships) that allowed this transculturation to flourish.

In 1976 Chinen Seishin published the critically acclaimed play Jinruikan (The House of Peoples) in Okinawa’s central arts journal Shin Okinawa bungaku. Upon the recommendation of Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, Okinawa’s leading postwar writer, it was subsequently published in the premier mainland drama journal, Teatoru. The play is based on an historical incident that took place during the Fifth Industrial Exhibition held in Osaka in 1903 when Okinawans protested the inclusion of two fellow Okinawans in a “human pavilion” that showcased, among others, Koreans and Taiwanese.

Just as the historical event speaks of two types of discrimination, that of the mainland toward Okinawans, and of Okinawans’ discrimination toward groups they perceived beneath them hierarchically, the play also emphasizes differing levels of discrimination. Though the play repeatedly returns to the space of the “human pavilion”, through multiple transformations by its cast of three (one Japanese from the mainland and two Okinawans, configured in a master-slave relation), the work also engages in a series of contentious issues in Okinawa’s history, including the Battle of Okinawa, Expo ’75, military bases, folk customs, art, and language.

Through five discrete temporal spaces—the “human pavilion”, the Expo site, a police interrogation room, a mental hospital, and the battlefield—Chinen enacts the very process of subject formation about which Michel Foucault writes. In my analysis of Jinruikan I will consider how the play’s rapidly changing scenes foreclose the possibility of a unified narrative of Okinawa, and how its characters’ myriad transformations point to their contingent identities.

The number of multicultural writers is increasing all over the world. USA and Canada have a long tradition of writers come for other countries and among them Japanese too. In Europe multicultural writers are mostly from Middle East or from African countries and, in France, there are many of them from Tunisia, a post-colonial heritage.

An new matter of fact is now emerging: Japanese writers in european languages or with a significant experience in Europe; european writers with a similar, but opposite, experience; a state of multiculturality that enlarges the Japanese literary boundaries.

Beside the well known case of Kazuo Ishiguro, let have a look to other countries. Suga Atsuko and Shiono Nanami spent a long time in Italy and their writings underwent the influence of their life, anyway their language is Japanese. But a more interesting couple of writers are Amélie Nothomb and Asuka Fujimori: both of them have been born ‘abroad’, in Kobe and Génève respectively, while both of them write in French and the subject-matter of their stories are soaked in Japanese sensibility. Yoko Tawada, for her part, writes and wins awards in both languages.

My paper aims to point out the peculilarity of european writers whose work is ‘Japanese’ from the standpoint of multicultural literature.

As it has developed over the past few decades, queer theory is predominantly a Euro-American formation, rooted in Michel Foucault’s seminal work on the invention of (homo)sexuality in nineteenth-century Europe and Eve Sedgwick’s queer readings of British and American literature. While many scholars have begun to think more globally and locally about same-sex desire and the politics of sexual identity, queer theory—like much literary theory—remains divided between “the West” and “the rest.” Japan, with its long history of same-sex practices, ranging from nanshoku (male-male eroticism) to the all-female Takarazuka revue, and its complicated modern identity vis-à-vis “the West” and “the rest (of Asia),” forces us to rethink the universality of terms like “gay” or “queer.” To echo David Halperin, we must redo the history of homosexuality in Japan.

This panel brings together three papers that engage with key concepts from queer theory (namely, genealogy, homoeroticism, and diaspora) to illuminate and historicize the place of homosexuality in modern Japanese literature. By pairing queer theory with Japanese literature, which might seem like strange bedfellows, we aim to show how they are in fact intimately intertwined. Jeffrey Angles uses Foucault’s and Halperin’s genealogical approaches to reframe the trope of samurai love in works by Murayama Kaita and Edogawa Ranpo. Julia Bullock addresses Teresa de Lauretis' problematic of "sexual indifference" through an analysis of three postwar Japanese women writers who challenge models of female homoeroticism. Finally, Christopher Scott questions the self-evident nature of the term “Japanese literature” through the lens of queer diaspora.

Queer theory, especially the work of Eve Sedgwick, has led to radically new ways of reading works about same-sex desire, especially those from eras when one dominant paradigm of interpreting same-sex desire (such as the influential idea of homosexuality that grew in psychological and medical circles in nineteenth-century Europe) was replacing other, older paradigms. Still, despite these great advances, queer theory has given us remarkably few tools to think about the ways that authors, especially those working at moments of paradigmatic change, have drawn upon historical paradigms of sexuality in their own projects.

This paper will examine this problem, especially in reference to Murayama Kaita (1896-1919) and Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965), who drew upon pre-Restoration images of samurai in Taishō and early Shōwa-period Japan. Their “historical” work has draw less attention from critics than their works set in contemporary times, perhaps because they draw so often on stereotypes and establish the illusion that past instances of same-sex eroticism followed a certain grammar fully knowable in the present. Still, as David Halperin has noted, the deployment of historical paradigms always says something about identification and political projects in the present. Drawing on Halperin, this paper will argue that Kaita and Ranpo’s historical deployments not only helped forge a backward-looking queer genealogy of queer history, they also started to establish the parameters for a burgeoning field of Japanese queer literature that did not mirror queer writing of the West. In other words, looking back at critical moments in literary history, however insufficiently historicizing that gaze might be, has helped provide new directions for the future.

While queer theory aspires to think sex, sexuality, and gender differently, outside of the binary oppositions enforced by heterosexist society, it seems forced to navigate uneasily between models of homoeroticism as a desire for the same, and as a desire for the other in the guise of the same—or as Teresa de Lauretis puts it, between homosexuality and “hommo-sexuality.” “Within the conceptual frame of that sexual indifference, female desire for the self-same, an other female self, cannot be recognized.” This paper examines several narratives by postwar Japanese women authors that encode expressions of desire that trouble distinctions between heterosexuality, homosexuality, and autoeroticism, in ways that seem productive for queer theory’s project of envisioning sexuality otherwise. The short stories "Majiwari" (1966) by Takahashi Takako, "Warui natsu" (1966) by Kurahashi Yumiko, and "Yoru o yuku" (1963) by Kōno Taeko, all depict the body of the Other Woman as a site of privileged knowledge that is simultaneously eroticized and experienced as an extension of self, in ways that paradoxically highlight the differences between women even as they forward an autoerotic aesthetic. My analysis explores both the possibilities and the problems of employing queer theories of Western origin to Japanese expressions of female homoeroticism, given the very different cultural and historical contexts that produced these narratives.

In recent years, critics such as Komori Yōichi, Kawamura Minato, and Numano Mitsuyoshi have used the concept of “Nihongo bungaku” (literature in Japanese) to problematize the conflation of Japan, Japanese nationality, Japanese language, and Japanese culture inherent in the term “Nihon bungaku” (Japanese literature). Although not a recent term—it emerged during the colonial period and has been discussed by zainichi Korean writers for many years—“Nihongo bungaku” is largely a contemporary phenomenon, with many writers and critics, both Japanese and non-Japanese, now questioning what is “Japanese” about Japanese literature. All too often, however, the discourse of “Nihongo bungaku” merely masks or rewords the stubborn ideologies of “national language” (kokugo) and “national literature” (kokubungaku). Instead, we need to ask how the “nation(al)” reproduces and conceals itself through “natural” or “normal” ways of reading, writing, and speaking Japanese.

Queer theory, which interrogates the naturalness or normativity of gender roles and sexual practices, can help us better understand this turn from “Nihon bungaku” to “Nihongo bungaku.” This paper shows how “Nihongo bungaku” critiques the heteronormative and homogeneous boundaries of the nation-state. In particular, I examine the articulation of queer desire and diasporic subjectivity in three well-known works of “Nihongo bungaku”: Ian Hideo Levy’s “Seijōki no kikoenai heya” (Andō’s room, 1987), Yi Yang-ji’s “Yuhi” (Yu-hui, 1988), and Tawada Yōko’s “Inu mukoiri” (Doggie-style marriage, 1993). I read these texts through the lens of queer diaspora, which, as David Eng, Gayatri Gopinath, and others have argued, highlights the entanglements and antagonisms between home and homosexuality.

Kurahara Korehito was the leading Marxist theoretician during the heyday of the Proletarian Art Movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Emerging as the “winner” from a series of famous theoretical disputes, it was Kurahara who came to define orthodox theory within the movement. It is safe to claim that it was Kurahara who set the agenda for much of the theoretical debate, both concerning organizational matters and artistic method. Yet, Kurahara was criticized, at the time as well as in retrospect, for precipitating the decline of the movement by subjecting proletarian art to direct political dictates.

This paper takes a look at the articles Kurahara published from 1927 until his arrest in 1932. In opposition to commentaries on the proletarian art movement that understand its eventual demise as an unavoidable result stemming from inherent shortcomings it seeks to discern the potentials of Kurahara’s Marxist methodology. A close reading of Kurahara’s literary critique shows that he did not, in fact, advocate a uniform and programmatic type of party literature. Furthermore, focusing on his advocacy of proletarian realism the paper argues that Kurahara’s discourse on literary method should be understood in the wider context of his utopian rhetoric.

In the first issue of Chūō kōron following the Great Kanto Earthquake Kikuchi Kan wrote an essay questioning the value of literature after a disaster of such magnitude. In that essay, “Post-disaster Impressions,” he claimed that literature was “nothing more than a useless luxury.” Satomi Ton saw this article as the latest salvo in a debate between the two authors that began the previous year, the “Naiyō-teki kachi ronsō” (“The debate over the content value of literature”). Satomi’s rebuttal, “The pearl will not be broken” asserted that “Art” could not be shaken by outside events. Much of Satomi’s argument for the permanence of art lies with the individual artist. Satomi claims that as long as the artist remains, even if he were “the last living person,” art will continue. This focus on the individual creator is central to the philosophical differences between these two critics. Kikuchi Kan was much more interested in art as a social phenomenon. Thus for Kikuchi, by destroying the social connections, disaster has a palpable effect on art.

My paper places these post-quake essays by Satomi Ton and Kikuchi Kan in the context of both the debate over “content value” and the disaster they had both experienced. I show how these authors interpreted the disaster and its effect on literature to fit their individual projects. Whereas Satomi Ton saw nothing in the disaster to shake his ideals of high art, Kikuchi Kan saw validation of his assertion that literature must be socially relevant to be worthwhile.

Nakano Shigeharu’s work, The House in the Village (1935), demonstrates a critique of oppositional thinking exemplified in such binary terms as politics vs. literature, abstract theory vs. concrete reality, the universal vs. the particular. This critique was timely precisely because in mid-1930s Japan this type of binary logic was strongly in operation. A strong denouncement of the former terms in the aforementioned binary parings (politics, theory, the universal) was prevalent as well as the valorization of the latter terms. This was a time when a mass recantation of communists, namely tenkō, took place in Japan. What led to this phenomenon were not only the harsh government suppression but also how the communist movement unfolded in Japan: Marxists in Japan, including proletarian writers, adhered to the theory created in Moscow and lost sight of the “reality” of Japan. Under these circumstances, with the collapse of Marxist movement, many of those who recanted returned to “concrete reality” and away from politics. Such an uncritical affirmation of “concrete reality” in place of politics resulted in a different kind of politics, i.e. fascism.

The on-going debate over Constitutional revision in Japan has resulted in shifting conceptions of what constitutes the boundaries of “Japan” and “Japanese-ness.” This dispute involves not only judgment of the suitability of individual articles of the “postwar” Constitution for the Japanese state in the post-Cold War era, but also emphasizes the origins of the Constitution as alien and as primarily symptomatic of the U.S.’s seemingly infinite hegemonic status. My paper will consider the influences of the contest over the Constitution’s future on literary writing and literary authors today. On a discursive level, the push for changing Article 9, a central text in the discourse defining Japan as pacifist, on a higher moral plane than the war-mongering of advanced capitalism, complicates the culture authority of “Soft Power,” Cool Japan, and Ōe Kenzaburo’s Nobel Prize (the material reality of the Self Defense Forces and its mobilization in Iraq not withstanding). Advocates of constitutional revision furthermore assert the necessity of changing the education system with the goal of modeling citizens for a new type of Japan. This vision of education has already challenged the notion of kokubungaku, canonization, and institutional articulations of the literature-as-discipline model. Philosophically, intellectuals and writers seek definitions of constitution as text, as national narrative, as contract, and as defining of culture. Specifically, the paper will consider the activism of prominent writers such as Ōe, Inoue Hisashi, and Komori Yōichi, who advocate preserving Japan’s “peace constitution” and thus stand in opposition to the revisionists.

In this paper I would like to address the formation of Japanese aesthetic categories (biteki hanchū) in the 1920s and 30s, and the impact that they had on the interpretation of literary texts in the twentieth century. By the time Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888-1959) transformed into aesthetic categories what in pre-modern Japan was known as poetic styles (for example, yūgen-tai, or style of depth and mystery), aesthetic categories were already a dead issue in Europe. Nevertheless, the impact of Ōnishi’s work on major literary historians of the first half of the twentieth century (for example, Hisamatsu Sen’ichi of the University of Tokyo) was quite extensive. It is not uncommon to see even today discussions of Japanese literary classics framed around mummified notions of makoto, yūgen, sabi, etc. In this paper I will analyze whether there might be a possibility to rescue such categories from total oblivion, by concentrating on the concept of “makoto” (sincerity, truth, good faith) as derivative from the idea of “koto” (thing/word) which, in my opinion, is still relevant today to an analysis of Japanese language and thought. Beginning with a discussion of the notion of “thingness” in modern Japan, I will briefly touch on other components of a hermeneutics of koto: makoto, kotodama, kotowari, and mikoto. In my paper I will refer to work done by Watsuji Tetsurō and Kimura Bin on koto, Ōmori Shōzō and Kuwako Toshio on kotodama, and Yanabu Akira on mikoto.

The proposed paper here wishes to investigate what happened to drama as a literary genre during a crucial period in Japan’s modernization during which concepts of “literature” (bungaku) and literary genres in Japan begin to crystallize. There is no question that Japan possessed a rich tradition of written works for the theatre before the Meiji era, or that kabuki in particular was a powerful focus for popular cultural expression; but it was not until the 1880s that a number of critics, including Suematsu Kenchō and Toyama Masakazu, in part drawing on the theories of Aristotle, sought to raise drama to a new and “respectable” literary status. The Society for Theatre Reform attempted to use the stage as a sphere for promoting the public program of “civilization and enlightenment.” At the same time, writers like Kitamura Tōkoku, Tsubouchi Shōyō and Mori Ōgai, were especially active in formulating sophisticated theories of drama as well as writing plays. The stage continued to attract the energies of many of Japan’s most talented writers well into the 1920s. Why then has drama been neglected by modern literary theorists and historians as an object of serious study? Drawing upon the ideas of such critics as Kamei Hideo and György Lukacs, this paper will suggest that the most crucial factor in drama’s fall from literary stardom had to do with the loss of a public space for cultural discourse and the attendant rise of a privatized consciousness for which fiction seemed a better form of expression.

Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871-1918) was one of the most prominent literary critics of the Meiji period. An accomplished rhetorician and scholar, Hōgetsu was instrumental in providing the theoretical foundation for the period’s most central literary movement— naturalism—. Despite his role, however, the critic was initially criticized for the alleged anti-naturalist posture he took in “Torawaretaru bungei,” an essay that appeared in January 1906, three months before the publication of Shimazaki Tōson’s Hakai. In this essay Hōgetsu predicted the imminent arrival of symbolism, dismissing an approach to literature based on knowledge rather than emotions. This caused generations of scholars to express reservations on his early understanding of naturalism, since it was only after the appearance of Hakai that he truly, and suddenly, began to support it.

Although a careful reading of “Torawaretaru bungei” shows that the piece did not necessarily reject naturalism per se, it is nonetheless true that for many authors and critics Hōgetsu’s call for a symbolist literature was in conflict with the main themes of Tōson’s novel. Hōgetsu then found himself needing to reconcile the basic tenets of the rising naturalist school with his own symbolist and neo-romantic literary quest.

This paper discusses how Hōgetsu constructed a naturalist literary theory that fitted his own theoretical agenda. Hōgetsu’s theory was only on the surface an attempt to interpret and explain naturalism: its was rather a manipulation of critical discourse that sought above all to legitimize his personal view of literature and authenticate his own evolving acceptance of the naturalist movement.

In the margin of Mori Ōgai’s personal copy of Shōsetsu Shinzui are handwritten notes of German literary terms, suggesting that Ōgai read the first modern literary theory in Japan side by side with European theoretical texts – most likely Gottschall’s Poetik. The reading process was never a simple one of “applying” a more advanced Western theory to a Japanese one; the marginal notes in these and other books in Ōgai’s personal library reveal Ōgai (during and immediately after his studies in Germany) making cross-cultural correspondences in all directions: Shōyō to Gottschall, Gottschall to Hartmann and Shōyō, Schwegler’s Geschichte der Philosophie to Chuang Tzu.

As Matsumura Tomomi has recently argued, Ōgai during these years did not embrace a single rational system as the sole authority, but was fascinated with the irreconcilability of two philosophical views such as empiricism and idealism. Ōgai’s fragmentary memo “Eindrücke” (“Impressions”), which describes “material” and “mind” as irreconcilable, inseparable and incomparable, illustrates Ōgai’s fluctuations between two perspectives, thinking in a pair.

In Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Karatani Kojin argued that, in the “submerged ideals” debate with Shōyō, Ōgai rearranged Shōyō’s juxtaposed categories into a perspectival system around a vanishing point. It would be misleading to generalize this to describe Ōgai’s theoretical strategy in his period, however. A better visual metaphor would be a parallax vision – recognizing plural, coexisting positions and shifting among them to differentiate itself from a monocular view. This strategy seems to re-emerge in his later fiction and nonfiction, allowing him to critique alternately (or simultaneously) literature and science, the West and Japan, and premodernity and modernity.

Our panel poses questions about the relationship between literature and the modern spatial imaginary by examining one of the key spatial nodes in Japanese geo-political discourse of the early twentieth-century: Hokkaidō. Each panelist will examine a writer whose literary work came, in one form or another, to involve an encounter with the landscapes and inhabitants of this island. In doing so, we hope to highlight the critical role that Hokkaidō played as object of spatial imagining and cultural self-definition, but also to think more generally about how such peripheral and colonized spaces have been rendered “literary” in the modern era.

For modern Japanese children’s literature, the act of rewriting was a popular means of producing new narratives. Many authors readily adapted folk tales, even in the magazine Akai tori, which had originally been founded so as to purge folk elements from existing children’s literature.   

Andre Lefevere has described translation as the rewriting, or manipulation, of an original text (1992). Translation does not happen in a vacuum and involves the process of transfer across linguistic and cultural boundaries. (Suzan Bassnet and Harish Trivedi 1998).  Analysis of such rewriting, I argue, can thus reveal its power to produce the boundary between “here” and “there”, between “Subject” and “Other”.

In my paper, I analyze an Ainu folk tale rewritten by Uno Kōji, “Fuki no shita no Kamisama” (Akai Tori, 1921). This folk tale was passed down from generation to generation by the Ainu in the Tokachi region of Hokkaido. Uno Kōji rewrote/translated it into a new story that tells the origin of “the Ainu extinction”. In this new story, the idea that the “Ainu are almost extinct” is narrated “naturally” in the pattern of the folk tale genre. As a result, the institution of the genre works to naturalize Ainu extinction.

Uno Kōji’s act of translation can also not be separated from contemporary discourses of anthropology and media. I will analyze these discourses synthetically to demonstrate how the Ainu were constructed as “Other” or “possessed subject” and how the Japanese were constructed conversely as “Subject” or “unconscious subject.”

Kunikida Doppo’s Gyūniku to bareisho (Meiji 34) could be rather simply interpreted as an allegorical story about idealist and realist views of life cleanly dividing Meiji youth, or different generations within it, and the protagonist’s meta-discursive questioning of such a binary framework through his yearning for ontological mystery. Within this apparently simple story, however, are embedded references to several significant issues dear to contemporary literary youth, such as love, Christianity, and nature.

As a locale and locus on which these different elements are superimposed and homogenized, Hokkaidō provides a site of order, which is always already in contestation. In the process, Hokkaidō becomes objectified as a blank space without previous history, in a fashion typical of a colonial narrative. Simultaneously, however, this literary narrative complicates and even counters the national narrative of colonization. One noticeable difference between the two is that while the national project of colonization of Hokkaidō continued to proceed, Doppo’s novel leaves colonization incomplete: as their longing for Hokkaidō comes to an end, the young poets desert the island and return to Tokyo. Thus, the literary project of colonization is represented as a bygone past. But what present or what future replaces this past?

My aim is twofold: First, by investigating the constitutive elements of the ways in which Hokkaidō is imagined, I will demonstrate how Doppo’s narrative colonizes the island differently than the national narrative. Secondly, by seizing upon the tension between the incomplete colonial narrative and the protagonist’s apparent position outside it, I will attempt to configure the shifting relations of nature, nation, and literature.

The colonization of the Ainu Yaun Moshir transformed it in the Japanese cultural consciousness and legal reality from Ezochi or Ezogashima into Hokkaidō, a space that was both of and yet apart from the modern Japanese nation. Despite its hybrid status, by the late Meiji era this former peripheral wilderness had come to occupy a place of prominence in the minds of the first generation of writers of Japan's modern literature through the articulation of a series of complementary, if occasionally incongruous, discourses.

In this paper I explore the Meiji-era literary imagining and accounting of Hokkaidō through one author's writings, taking as my sources his recorded encounters with the reality of life on the island. Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912) made Hokkaidō his home for less than a year, from May 1907 to April 1908; however, in his poetry and prose, in both traditional and modern forms, we can read traces of his intellectual and emotional engagement with a number of its constituent discourses.

To Takuboku, as to many other visitors and and readers, Hokkaidō appeared to offer a cultural tabula rasa, the promise of whole range of new beginnings. In Takuboku's repeated fresh starts, in Hakodate, Sapporo, Otaru , and Kushiro, and finally in his decision to reject Hokkaidō and turn back towards the cultural center in Tokyo, I believe we can read a practical critique of important literary and social theories of the day that underlay that promise.

Like the other modern writers discussed in this panel, Miyazawa Kenji too found in Hokkaidō an important source of literary and ideological inspiration. He traveled to the island on three separate occasions during his lifetime: first as a middle school student in 1913, second on his way to visit the island of Sakhalin in 1923, and third as a supervisor for a week-long school field trip in 1924.

Significantly, Miyazawa ventured north as someone who was socially committed to, and who consciously identified with, his native Iwate prefecture. He thus encountered Hokkaidō from a place where it loomed large in local media and public discourse as an ideal to which not only Iwate, but also the rest of the “economically backward” Tōhoku region, should aspire. His acute awareness of the inverted relationship between domestic periphery and external colony is made starkly apparent in an official report he submitted after returning from his 1924 excursion (“Shūgaku ryokō fukumeisho”), a report in which he repeatedly praised the social space of Hokkaidō as a model for Iwate to emulate.

Taking this “report” as my departure point, I will examine some of the ways in which Miyazawa took seriously the possibility of transposing the landscape of one place onto that of another. The very notion of such a transposition raises important theoretical questions about how physical landscapes can become incorporated into discourse and made to circulate across space and time; about the role that literature can play in this process; and about the limits imposed on this circulation by the brute reality of space itself.

What would a Buddhist theory of Japanese Buddhist literature look like? On what basis would interpretations and evaluations be made concerning the aesthetic value of or the uses of Buddhist literature? One possible set of criteria might be derived from theorists like the cognitive scientist and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner Francisco Varela, the linguist George Lakoff, and the scholars of English and Comparative Literature and cognitive science Patrick Colm Hogan and Mark Turner.

While Varela’s contributions to this discussion, based in part on Merleau-Ponty, are concerned with the body’s “enactment” of what the mind cognizes—something that is studied by cognitive scientists and practiced in Buddhist meditative disciplines, Lakoff, Hogan and Turner are more interested in how this enactment of cognition is reflected in metaphorical language. Lakoff (and Turner) proposed that metaphor both structures and is structured by our cognition of the world, making it possible to propose that metaphoric language is not so much a “special language” as it is a reflection of the inherent (enlightened?) nature of the world (hongaku) as well as something that enacts that nature (in, for example, writing). If cognition, enactment, and metaphor are all embodied and enacted, this could help to explain how the particular usages of metaphor in Buddhist literature (and the actual literature itself) were considered to be not just expressions of an enlightened state, but the enlightened mind enacting itself in the world.

I will apply these ideas to Konishi’s interpretation of medieval Japanese literature as michi and examine how they could provide an explanation for a new category of Japanese Buddhist poetry (shakkyō-ka) in the imperial poetry anthologies of the late Heian period.

One consequence of the initial movement towards proprietary authorship in early modern Japan was the emergence of a rich culture of self-designation, wherein writers working in diverse fields of literary production could make names for themselves, in a manner of speaking, through the adoption of emblematic signets, seal marks, and pseudonyms. The example of Ejima Kiseki notwithstanding, this was not simply a matter of using a designation to claim a portion of the profits generated by one’s work; for many, like physician, essayist, and minor haikai poet Katsube Seigyo, another concern was how to protect one’s public identity while still working to amass symbolic capital within a given field.

In this paper, I pursue several lines of inquiry into the relationship between material emblems of authorship (like Tsuga Teishō’s gourd-shaped seal mark, alluded to in the title) and the formation of literary identities in early modern Japan. I begin with the simple question: why did so many writers of the period adopt five, six, seven—and sometimes as many as forty-two—pseudonymous handles over the courses of their careers? The case of Osaka playwright and haikai poet Naniwa Sanzō illustrates the common practice of writers to adopt different designations when working in different fields; by composing linked verse under the haigō alias of Fueto, Sanzō in effect maintained a nominal distinction between his identity as a playwright with the Toyotake-za and his identity as a poet in the circles of Matsuki Tantan and Ono Shōren. This and a nearly a dozen other common practices identified in this paper—such as that of distinguished haikai poets inheriting the atelier names of their deceased haikai masters—provide some explanation for the preponderance of self-designations adopted by writers of the period. However, it is my position that recourse to historically defined practice alone cannot give us a complete picture of the formation of literary identities; we must also examine how writers sought to mythologize their roles as authors within the collective imagination. Therefore, in addition to providing background on the social contexts of identity formation, I also provide analyses of specific literary contexts in which emblems of authorship are deployed and glossed—title pages, prefaces, petitions for publication, and other paratexts.

The study of Karon, or poetic theories, has mainly focused on the aspect of improving understanding of poetry. In fact, in their literary criticism, medieval poets developed theoretical issues related to time and memory. In this paper, I will show that Fujiwara no Shunzei developed a peculiar concept of time by juxtaposing the argument done by his contemporary, Kenshō.

First, by analyzing their arguments on Manyoshū in Roppyakuban utaawase, which Kenshō attended and where Shunzei served as a judge, and Shunzei’s treatise, Koraifūteishō, I will expose the conflicted viewpoints on their understanding of the past. When Shunzei describes Manyoshū as “ancient words” he perceived the past as completely separated from his time, while Kenshō treats the past time as something that has endured to the present. Secondly, I will consider how Shunzei put his concept of time into practice: a poetic method, honkadori, actively introduced by Shunzei, is an attempt to disclose the fact that the poem itself is lost, that is to disclose its absence by recollecting the original poem through the new poem. By revealing the poem as absence honkadori puts in motion a type of anachronism that postulates from the present retrospectively the time of the past when the poem was created. I will demonstrate that Shunzei’s conception of time could be perceived as a past arriving through the present, in other words, the modality of the present time lived as past. I will conclude that the present past could be alternative to the chronologically arranged past.

From the putative end of writing in the “pure Japanese” of the Man’yōshu and the Kojiki, to the end of kanbun and gesaku literature in the mid-Meiji, and the end of “pure literature” in the postwar, critics have repeatedly forewarned of an impending “end” or “death” of literature in Japan. And yet in spite of such dire predictions writing has continued to be produced and consumed in ever- increasing volumes, although the forms taken by writing and reading may indeed be ever-changing. This panel will take up forms of writing that have appeared or are appearing at putative “ends” of literature from various perspectives. The papers will argue not only that what is the end from one viewpoint is often a beginning from another, but also that the very notion of the “end of literature” may be an indispensable horizon to any writerly endeavor that sets out to capture the past on paper. If, as Roland Barthes once remarked, in writing we are always already dead, is there not some deep relationship between literature and its ends? Timothy J. Van Compernolle writes about the eclipse of women’s literary wabun prose as it was eulogized in a text by Miyake Kaho on the occasion of the deaths of Higuchi Ichiyo and Wakamatsu Shizuko in 1896. Keith Vincent argues that Natsume Soseki’s famous conversion to modern novelistic writing in his late work was marked by an ambivalence resulting from his lingering attachment to an earlier, “homosocial” practice of literature. Gavin Walker reads Mishima Yukio’s essays on the “aesthetics of the end” to argue that the notion of the end functioned productively as a rhetorical horizon against which Mishima could generate his characteristically doubled authorial self. And Nina Cornyetz takes up Nakagami Kenji’s oxymoronic attempts to preserve a dying oral tradition in writing. Ranging from late Meiji to the late postwar, the papers suggest that the end of literature may always be just around the corner, but that new horizons open up with every turn.

A few months after the death of Higuchi Ichiyō in 1896, which followed the death of Wakamatsu Shizuko and the fire that destroyed the Meiji Jogakkō earlier that same year, Miyake Kaho (1868-1943) penned a miscellany, “Shinobugusa” (1897), which served as an elegy for her departed friends and as an homage to an institution that educated so many prominent Meiji women. Death is the impetus for writing, but awareness of death also animates the essay on a stylistic level. “Shinobugusa” is written in a carefully crafted, highly polished, and allusive wabun style that pays due literary tribute to the dead in a way that seems entirely suitable to the traditions of the Haginoya poetry conservatory, where both Kaho and Ichiyō received much of their education. Beginning in the mid-1890s, many male writers—starting with several Ken’yūsha members and continuing through Kunikida Doppo and some precursor Naturalists—were launching a second wave of experiments with the colloquial genbun itchi style pioneered in the late 1880s. Read contrapuntally, Kaho’s elegy for the dead seems to be a conscious, even consciously obstinate, attempt to resist the possible displacement of classical language styles by genbun itchi prose. Thus, “Shinobugusa,” which seems to reach all the way back to the Heian era for stylistic inspiration, is more than an elegy; it can also be read as performing or enacting a certain ideal of women’s literary wabun prose in the face of the possible end of those older styles.

Led off to slaughter
In the autumn wind
The bull’s behind.

Natsume Soseki wrote this haiku in the rickshaw on his way to the clinic for a painful operation on an anal fistula in 1914. Two years later, in his last (unfinished) novel Meian [Light and Darkness] he would subject his protagonist Tsuda Yoshio to the same malady, keeping him confined to his hospital bed for hundreds of pages, supine and vulnerable to the machinations and intrigues of the various women in his life. This paper reads Meian against Soseki’s earlier works such as Wagahai wa neko de aru and Botchan in which women are largely relegated to the margins of an all-male world rendered textually by poetic virtuosity, sprawling digressions, and generic hybridity. I argue that this transition from the early to the late Soseki can be understood as a shift from what Eve Sedgwick has called “sunny homosociality” towards an increasingly novelistic and heterosocial type of writing—one from which women could no longer be excluded and masculinity, like the bull in Soseki’s haiku, is always being led off to slaughter. If, as Mikhail Bakhtin famously argued, the novel was the genre to end all genres, for Soseki it spelled the end of “literature” as he knew it in his youth. His ambivalence towards the very genre that he did so much to develop must thus be understood in relation both to the emergence of women as subjects to be reckoned with and to the eclipse of premodern forms of male homosociality that he sorely missed.

In February 1966, Mishima Yukio published a series of reflections collectively called "Lectures on the Aesthetics of the End" (Owari no bigaku kōza) in the women's magazine Josei jishin. Like much of his writing from the early 1960s onwards, these texts operate as interruptions between "literature" and its theorization, aimed at enclosing literary criticism into an autofictional system of self-referentiality. Mishima's constant dislocations between critique and literature articulate a series of endings: the end of strict genre classifications, the end of "high" literary criticism, the end of the authorial function, and so on. But Walker argues that this particular type of literary practice is precisely enabled by a sense of "the end" that is projected retrospectively from the future. Mishima's own discursive practice shows us that as a textual operation, "the end" is not final but rather infinite: it is a constant flow that sustains, circulates, and nourishes. But for "the end" to function in this way, it has to be repeatable, capable of being written and rewritten, while its rhetorical effects operate precisely because it must be absolutely singular. This paper attempts to closely examine the curious status of this Doubled structure in Mishima's texts and its relation to another central problem of his writing: the double nature of the authorial self.

“It is Tokyo dialect to pronounce Shingū as SHINGUu. ShinguU is correct.
‘SHINGUu’ is a falling intonation (tail-end down or 尻下がり) while ShinguU’s
is rising (tail-end up or 尻上がり).”
- Nakagami Kenji, Kishū

Nakagami Kenji was dubbed after his death by Shimada Masahiko “the last novelist.” Critics generallly separate Nakagami’s fiction into two categories of monogatari and shishōsetsu, but he also wrote non-fiction.  In his Kishū: Ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari, Nakagami hurried to record regional tales from a dying generation of elderly locals near his hometown of Shingū. The collection is an attempt to preserve an “ending” oral tradition in writing – an oxymoronic task that Nakagami was not the least bit naïve about. Cornyetz’s paper will explore how this entailed an attempt to navigate between writing as ecriture and a capture of orality in text by drawing a connection between the modes of narration shared by all three genres (non-fiction, monogatari, shishōsetsu).

Against what Rey Chow called the “instrumentalization” of modern literary studies as performative exhibitions of a putative transparent cultural competence, this paper seeks to interpret Nakagami’s narratives as encoded, or signifying symbolically rather than transparently. Moreover, if as literary theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes have insisted – the literary text is constitutively interlinked with desire and the death drive – then one can read Nakagami’s attempt to preserve Shingū folklore as a doubled dealing with literary “ends,” or chasing the dying with death.

From 1941-1942, at the height of the second Sino-Japanese War and the Japanese military’s invasion of southeast Asia, the well-known Japanese author and critic Kawabata Yasunari was invited to the nominally independent “nation” of Manchukuo three times by the Kantō Army and the Manshū nichinichi shimbun [Manchurian Daily Times] in accordance with propaganda prerogatives of the state-run Manshūkoku kohōdōshō [Manchukuo Publicity and News Bureau]. This organization first enlisted him to participate in a zadankai [roundtable discussion] on culture in Manchukuo. Kawabata soon obligingly published a serialized novel in the above newspaper and edited at least two collections of literary works by the five “official” ethnicities in Manchukuo. These collections appeared in Japanese, the language of the imperial center, with Japanese avant-garde authors largely represented. In his introduction, Kawabata warned of the Chinese “threat” while extolling the past accomplishments of the Han Chinese ethnicity whose now-moribund nation could only revive through Japanese guidance and cultural superiority. The zadankai and these editions compiled by Kawabata asserted that Manchukuo was a template for the future establishment of Pan-Asian ideals elsewhere.

The fact that a literary giant from the imperial capital became a mouthpiece of the new “Manchurian literature” and Japanese cultural superiority is historically significant. It implies that Manchukuo was not “independent” from the naichi despite official rhetoric, and that this interdependence between the two “nations” functioned in a hierarchical, paternalistic fashion. Cultural production in the form of literature served as a means of cultural integration with domestic Japan, now viewed as crucial to the success of the Japanese imperial state in wartime. Despite Kawabata’s utopian intentions, these writings illustrate that the creation of an independent literary culture in Manchukuo is soon subsumed under the exigencies of war.

Where does Japan fit within the field of colonial and post-colonial studies? My paper engages critically with the work of Homi Bhabha’s notion of “colonial mimicry.” Bhabha defines mimicry as the “desire for a reformed, recognizable other as a subject of difference that is almost the same but not quite.” At first glance, this concept well describes Japanese assimilation policies that forced the colonized to adopt Japanese ways while refusing them rights. On closer examination, Bhabha’s idea is problematic since Japan’s imperialism itself was a hybrid product of mimesis, like many aspects of Meiji modernization.

I will complicate Bhabha’s notion by applying it to the South Seas fiction of Nakajima Atsushi (1909-1942). I explore both the mimetic relationship between Nakajima and Western writers and the theme of mimesis in his fiction. Shortly before Nakajima traveled to Japanese-ruled Micronesia, he wrote a “fictional autobiography” about Robert Louis Stevenson last years in Samoa. For Nakajima, Stevenson was a model of the romantic artist in flight from modern civilization that he appropriated to construct his own imperial subjectivity. However, in his own fictional works, Nakajima laments that he cannot free himself from servile mimicry of European exoticism. Furthermore, in “Mariyan,” a portrait of a well-educated Palauan woman, he confesses that he is distressed at Mariyan’s efforts to imitate the colonizers. His distress suggests that he identifies with this colonized woman insofar as he considers her a mimic, an identification that seems worlds away from the narcissistic colonizer in Bhabha’s theories.

This paper focuses on Yū Miri’s Full House, a novel that has been read primarily as this second-generation zainichi woman writer’s portrayal of a dysfunctional family in contemporary Japanese society. Scholars and critics have hitherto focused largely on the nature of dysfunctionality (i.e., incest, adultery, violence, etc.), while paying cursory attention to the house itself only as the necessary physical stage on which this family drama unfolds. In my analysis of the novel specifically as an exploration of the relation between Self and Other, the house—a newly constructed mansion devoid of family members but filled with strangers—represents more than the father’s failed attempt to bring together his family under the same roof so as to “recreate” a home that never existed. By theorizing the significance of the house and its relations with each member, and non-member, of the family, it is possible, I contend, to elucidate conceptual convergences and divergences between this literary project by Yū Miri and Jacque Derrida’s philosophical meditation on hospitality, a notion articulated through a set of similar tropes including house, home, master, guest, host, and hostage, among others.

The ultimate goal of this paper is thus three fold: first, to un-ghettoize zainichi writing in the hegemonic constellation of Japanese national literature; second, to efface enduring disciplinary barriers within the field of humanities, that is, between literature and philosophy; and third, to traverse the conceptual boundaries still deemed necessary to maintain the hierarchy between the West and the East even in increasingly globalized scholarship.

This paper examines the relationship between literary production and the theories of psychoanalysis and abnormal psychology in early twentieth century Japan. It will consider how literary works from this period, including those by Natsume Sōseki, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Edogawa Ranpo, take up the issue of human psychology to provide a mapping of modern subjectivity. In the works by these authors, the modern subject is often characterized by the blurring of barriers between reality and fantasy—whether it takes form as delusion, perversion, or psychosis—that is intricately tied to the ever-changing urban landscape confronting him at every turn. These literary depictions will be analyzed against the backdrop of Western psychological theories, including those of Kraft-Ebbing and Freud, that gained currency in Japan during the first decades of the new millennium. In so doing, this paper hopes to shed light not only on the ways that theory informs practice (literary production) but also on the ways that practice reveals the particular inflections of theoretical reception, adaptation, and application within the sociohistorical context in which texts were produced, circulated, and consumed.