The acceptance of George Orwell in Japan can be separated into four periods.

　The first period was from 1949 to 1952. At first, Animal Farm was translated into Japanese in 1949 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1950. At that time, these novels were generally considered to be those of simple anti-communism. Only few novelists, scholars and critics knew that they had deeper and more complicated themes.

　The second period was from 1956 to 1961. In this period, mainly his short stories and essays were introduced to Japanese readers. And his stories and essays were used for English textbooks for high school and college students. From that time, the critical studies on George Orwell began to increase.

　The third period was from 1966 to 1973. His nonfiction and journalistic writings such as Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia and four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell were translated into Japanese. His works drew attention from various points of view. He was recognized not only as an anti-communist novelist and a fine prose writer but also as a journalist, nonfiction writer, science fiction writer, democratic-socialist, and a volunteer soldier in the Spanish War.

　The fourth period began from 1982. Of course it was because of the year of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Especially from the latter half of 1983 through 1984, there was a George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four boom. In newspapers and journals, they were treated and mentioned over and over again. His novels were all translated into Japanese. Some biographies and many critical studies of George Orwell have been published. Many kinds of people such as novelists, poets, critics, literary scholars, economists, political scientists, sociologists, architects, government officials, and so on commented on George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

　Through these periods, such novelists as TAKEDA Taijun, KAIKOU Takeshi, KOMATSU Sakyo and ITSUKI Hiroyuki were much concerned with George Orwell and wrote about him and his writings. Especially KAIKOU Takeshi published a book Today Is the Tomorrow of Yesterday which included his critical essays on G. Orwell. KAIKOU praised him and was much influenced by him. He wrote Something Coming from the Seashore and The Shining Darkness under the influences of George Orwell.

　Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956) se trouvait à Paris de 1908 à 1909. Bien qu’il ne nous ait pas laissé beaucoup de documents ni d’oeuvres sur cette période, nous pouvons deviner ce qu’il lui est arrivé lors de son séjour, d’après ses deux oeuvres les plus importantes: «D’un café» et «Liasse de lettres qui n’ont jamais été envoyées».

　Kōtarō, admirateur d’Auguste Rodin et lui-même sculpteur, était profondément touché du fait que «la Beauté mûrit et germe à Paris».

　Dans ces deux oeuvres, il a tout d’abord écrit qu’il s’enivrait de cette ville sensuelle, tout comme Nagaï Kafū qui avait quitté la capitale un mois auparavant. Ils ont tous deux saisi cette cité aux cinq sens comme «l’espace itinérant», défini par A. Leroi-Gourhan, en opposition à «l’espace rayonnant» décrit par les missions diplomatiques à la fin d’Edo et au début de Meïji.

　Toutefois, au contraire de Kafū qui n’avait jamais quitté le monde du rêve, Kōtarō s’aperçut brusquement qu’il ne pourrait jamais «toucher» Paris, pénétrer véritablement dans la réalité, où il se sentait un «Japonais jaune» et aliéné. Comme il l’a avoué lui-même, pour Kōtarō, qui était un vrai sculpteur, le toucher était la source d’une intégration à la vision de ce monde. Par conséquent, une fois trouvé la femme blanche ou le paysage parisien, fugitifs et incompréhensibles au travers du toucher, il fut complètement désespéré et se détacha de cette ville étrangère pour revenir mentalement dans son pays d’origine.

　Cette hantise apparaît également dans son interprétation des peintures de Kees Van Dongen, où Kōtarō a découvert, à travers ses représentations parisiennes, «les traces de plaisir». C’était un monde mélancolique, dépourvu de «la voix du plaisir», menacé par l’extérieur, et qui reflétait son intérieur même.

　Jusqu’à présent la plupart des critiques ont essayé d’expliquer le thème de l’ambivalence —obsession et fascination—, tel qu’il apparaît dans ses oeuvres traîtant de son expérience à Paris. Alors que nous pouvons de cette manière confirmer la présence de cet aspect négatif dans ses deux oeuvres importantes, nous devons nous demander s’il y fut véritablement heureux, comme il l’a écrit particulièrement dans son poème intitulé «Cathédrale sous une pluie d’orage» (1921).

　En effet, il a écrit ce poème sous-titré «Une fantaisie de Paris», plus de dix ans après son séjour, et il l’a composé, non pas d’après ses expériences directes, mais s’est inspiré des idées sur les cathédrales gothiques d’A. Rodin, tout en employant la rhétorique qu’il avait perfectionnée dans sa traduction japonaise (1921) des Heures Clarires d’Emile Verhaeren.

　Il en ressort que Takamura Kōtarō n’avait jamais réussi à se fondre effectivement dans l’intimité de Paris, comme il l’a rêvé dans cette fantaisie, et sa tragédie nous suggère en même temps un tournant dans l’histoire de l’image de Paris vu par les Japonais.

　In 1913, a young Japanese writer KORI Torahiko (1890–1924) left for Europe with a high ambition to be a great international literary man. He stayed there and followed literature until his death in Switzerland. Japanese as he was, he wrote his plays, poems and other works in English.

　In 1917, Kanawa, his earlier work written in Japan and translated into English by himself soon after his arrival in England, was produced at the Criterion Theatre ; London, by the Pioneer Players. This one-act play is based on a Japanese Nô play of the same title. It, however, shows a strong influence of the Western artistic trend of his days. Fascinated with the aetheticism and decadence of the end of the 19 th century, KORI tried to synthesize a traditional Japanese stage art and modern Western poetic drama created by Hofmannsthal, Maeterlink, etc. He admired the passionate and gorgeous style of D’Annunzio and applied it to his own style. He seems to have chosen Salomé, a poetic drama by Oscar WILDE, as a good model of his Kanawa.

　Known as a unique Japanese dramatist in London, KORI gave some information about Nô to W. B. YEATS, who, profoundly attracted by Nô and admiring it as the “subtlest of all arts”, wrote some plays in the manner of Nô. Thus KORI could play an important role as a cultural intermediary.

　The fifth decade of Meiji, when the literary current of the ‘fin de siècle’ became popular, was also a transitional period in Japanese modern literature. Kitahara Hakushū (1885–1942), who had great sensitivity, and intelligence, reacted to the various trends of the ‘fin de siècle’ art, and was able to make use of them in the creation of his own poetry.

　The first collection of poems of Hakushū, Jashūmon (1909), is filled with a lot of elements that can be studied in the context of ‘fin de siècle’ art. His Nanban (Christian) poetry has been considered as a sort of exoticism until now, but it can be cosidered also as having a heathenish tone which was very popular among the ‘fin de siècle’ artists, with Huysmans as leader.

　The theme of the hothouse, repeatedly appearing in his early poetry, is related to that in Serres Chaudes by Maurice Maeterlinck and A Rebours by J. -k. Huysmans, and it is also connected with the motif of the Artifitial Paradise which is one of the major motifs throughout his early poetry, not only in Jashūmon.

　 It was the artist, James McNeil Whistler who had the most important influence on his poetic world. Whistler’s a set of paintings of the Thames River, based on woodblocks prints of the Sumida River, made Hakushū perceive anew Tokyo and the Sumida River, which had been transformed into a ‘fin de siècle’ design.

　 In Tokyo Keibutsushi (1913), there are discriptions of Tokyo, transformed into a great labyrinth. This recognization of the city is similar to that of many of the ‘fin de siècle’ artists. His tendency to emphasize consciously the descriptions of rivers and canals, among urban scenery, seems to be influenced by Georges Rodenbach.

　 Hakushū, with his native sensibility and his power of expression, digested the main elements of the 'fin de siècle' art and made it his own. In this sense, I think that he was the leading poet of the transitional epoch, which Japanese modem poetry had to pass through in order to obtain true modernity.

　Atomic bomb literature includes a wide spectrum of writings: historical, political, scientific, journalistic, as well as what is traditionally considered literary: novels, poems, and plays. But such distinctions encounter special problems when they are applied to atomic bomb literature, two of which I will discuss in this paper: fictionalizing fact in first-person narratives and fictionalizing fictions.

　The first-person narrative in atomic bomb literature challenges the boundaries of fiction in a number of ways. Ōta Yōko, for example, attempted to fictionalize the facts of Hiroshima. The series of novels and short stories from Shikabane no machi to Yūnagi no machi to hito to is clearly based on Ōta’s experiences of the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath, and yet these works are also clearly fictionalized, so that her works are at the same time documents, commentaries, and novels.

　The second problem, fictionalizing a fiction, is exemplified by the case of Claude Eatherly, who was depicted in the mass media and later in works of literature as the “Hiroshima pilot” who repented his crime. A comparison of Eatherly’s letters to Günther Anders with a number of novels, plays, and poems in the context of the facts revealed in William B. Huie’s biography of Eatherly, The Hiroshima Pilot, will illustrate the intricacies of this second border clash on the boundaries of fiction.

　Dans cet article, nous allons traiter de Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918) et de W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) pour mettre en parallèle la relation entre le mouvement littéraire et le mouvement occultiste à la fin du XXI^e siécle en France et en Angleterre. Sâr Péladan fonda la Rose-Croix catholique en 1890, organisa le Salon de Rose-Croix 6 fois entre 1892 et 1897 et eut une influence considérable parmi les symbolistes du domaine esthétique.

　Dans son Vice Suprême, Péladan choisit un mage (nommé Mérodack comme lui-même) comme héros, et utilise des termes occultistes. Ici, les éléments occultistes imprègnent autant les détails que l’intrigue et nous ne saurions pas séparer sa théorie occultiste de ses préoccupations esthétiques fin-de-siècle.

　Yeats commença par être adepte de la Société de Théosophie de Mme Blavatsky et se tourna bientôt vers la Golden Dawn d’origine franc-maçonne et rosicrucienne. Il n’y avait pas de relations systématiques entre ce mouvement anglais et le mouvement occultiste en France, mais, lors de ses visites répétées à Paris, Yeats fréquenta les milieux occultistes en même temps que les milieux symbolistes. L’occultisme est donc important dans l’importation du symbolisme en Angleterre.

　Dans les poèmes d’Yeats, l’association de la rose et de la croix est très visible, et dénote une influence rosicrucienne; l’association de la rose et du rubis est elle aussi significative parce que c’est le nom du Second Ordre de la Golden Dawn. Enfin, dans sa Rosa Archemica, Yeats décrit les milieux occultistes à Londres.

　Dans les deux cas, l’écrivain alimente son imagination à des sources occultes. En conclusion, nous proposons de réinterpréter ce phénomène par la notion de “la mort de toi” définie par Ariès et de le replacer dans un contexte historique élargi.

　 Creative reading and writing should be, in a sense, understood as a kind of citation, which summons words, not into court but into a ‘literary space.’

　The fourth piece in Borges’“Tankas” (1972) will certainty remind many readers of Atsushi Nakajima’s short story “Sangetsu-ki” (1942). The resemblances between the two works, in fact, will make a strong impression on almost everyone, their dates of publication enhancing and deepening that impression.

　 A number of cogent analogies between the two writers can be found without the least difficulty; their erudition, favourite authors (F. Kafka and R. L. Stevenson), family situations, metafiction, etc. But simplistic comparisons are not enough to constitute meaningful literary scholarship. As for transtextual theory, comparative study is still in embryo; positivism is liable to depend too readily on ‘influence’, and parallelism does not have appropriate criteria for «poétique» (Genette’s term).

　The aim in this paper is to point out one author’s influence upon another, the relationship which should be always in the foreground of comparative studies. If influence is over-emphasised, the originality of the given text or author will be buried out of sight. If subjected to too hard an inquisition, the influence will soon vanish into thin air. The Japanese word for ‘influence’ ei-kyo appropriately means ‘影 shadow and 響 echo.’

　We must read or write not only with a positive, paternal productivity, but with a passive, maternal one that I would call poetic situation, which is something more comprehensive, more environmental, more deep-rooted in readers’ or writers’ literary entity, and which gives birth to valid and meaningful transtextual relationships.