Remembrances of Literary Genres: the Transposition of Bun in the Works of Natsume Soseki

Abstract

Until 1907, when he wrote Gubijinsō (The Poppy), Soseki constructed his novels by taking styles from various available genres with particular social connotations, and transposing them into different contexts. This sense of literary style was well suited both to the variety of styles available to writers during the period when the novel suddenly became popular in Japan, and to the reading and writing activities of Soseki's audience. After the normalization of genbunitchi, a style that was supposed to unify written and spoken Japanese, Soseki began to use expressions in his novels that called to mind the classical Chinese that had long pervaded the Japanese language, but this had the effect of implying a bond among educated Japanese men, while at the same time excluding women and the people Japan had colonized. Even after genbunitchi became the basic style of Japanese novels, Soseki widely used rhetoric and vocabulary from various remembered genres, a point which requires further discussion.