Abe Tomoji's Hoshū (1973) is an unfinished novel dealing with the Japanese philosopher Miki Kiyoshi's death in prison in 1945. The reason Abe cast Miki as the hero of his novel is because Abe regarded Miki as a symbol of modern personality with its egocentric tendencies.

　Abe had already displayed an interest in such symbolic figures in his critical biography Byron (1948). In addition to Miki, Lord Byron was also a symbol of modern personality for Abe; Abe sometimes modeled Miki's personality on that of Manfred's, ‘a mental portrait of Byron,' in Hoshū.

　Miki's personality in Hoshū, however, does not always correspond to Manfred's. Abe portrayed Miki as a person with a strong will for life. Such a personality differs dramatically from that of Manfred's, whose egocentrism caused his death. Essentially, Miki in Hoshū managed to reject the Byronic egocentrism which leads to nihilism.

　It is in D. H. Lawrence's humanism that Abe discovered a possibility for overcoming the Byronic egocentrism as a ‘disease in modern civilization'. Abe contrasted the Byronic nihilistic egocentrism with Lawrence's vital humanism in Byron, and one image of Miki's strong will for life in Hoshū comes from Lawrence's The Man Who Died.

　Given all this evidence, we can conclude that Abe imagined a possibility of overcoming “modernity” in the textual site of contact between Miki, Byron, and Lawrence in Hoshū

　In 1916, after coming back from his first visit to Korea, Yanagi Muneyoshi announced his project of shedding new light on literary works in the East. This project centered on Korean literary works begun in 1919, when he contributed an article titled “Speculations on Koreans” to Yomiuri Shimbun. It was soon after the March First Independent Movement took place in Korea. For this reason, Yanagi’s project was carried out in the situation where Japan shifted its imperial policy from her military control of Korea to her cultural one.

　Former studies insist that Yanagi’s and his wife’s project concerning Korean culture corresponded with Japan’s shift of her policy. But there has been one problem on which they differ: which side̶Japan or Korea̶proposed to support the musical concert held by Yanagi’s wife Kaneko? And those studies have totally ignored the influence of Yanagi.

　This paper addresses the problem of how much Yanagi contributed to the musical concert by analyzing the remarks of Yanagi, and examining how Korean media responded to his remarks.

　This article attempts to elucidate the unique significance and narrative functions of the motif of “metamorphosis” in Izumi Kyoka’s works from around 1897 (Meiji 30) through comparison with Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. In Kyoka’s texts, the imaginative yearning for alien worlds often manifests itself in concrete form through motifs of metamorphosis or division of self into alien forms, motifs that then provide the driving force for the narrative. A typical example can be found in his masterpiece, Koya hijiri (1900). It should be noted, however, that his reception of Kinro monogatari (1887), a Japanese translation of The Golden Ass by Morita Shiken, had much to do with the development of his narrative method, especially his use of nested-box structures. This tendency can already be seen in Shirakijo monogatari, a work belonging to Kyoka’s juvenilia. In addition, the writing style in Kecho (1897) has been identified as the turning point where the novel-of-ideas genre that characterized his early career gave way to the characteristic fantastic style of his mature period. In this work, the rhetoric that represents metamorphosis as an aspect of the boy’s worldview ultimately leads to a transformation of the hero himself. The rapport between the voice of the Other and the body of the narrator manifested in this work cannot be found in his earlier “novels of ideas”. Situating Kecho in the development of Kyoka’s narrative style from Shirakijo monogatari to Koya hijiri allows us to rethink these metamorphosis fantasies, the concrete monstrous phenomena depicted at the level of narrated content, as being Kyoka’s methodological experiments at the level of narrative performance.

　Between 1930 and 1931, Kawabata Yasunari, who was at that time influenced by Ito Sei’s novels and criticism, Freudian psychoanalysis and James Joyce’ s Ulysses, brought out some avant-garde texts such as‘Hari to garasu to kiri (A Needle, Glass and Mist)’ and‘Suishô gensô (The Crystal Fantasy)’, which are categorized as his ‘New Psychological Approach’ works. The essence of these attempts by Kawabata has not been sufficiently elucidated and they are slighted by critics either as manifestations of his impetuous experimentalism or stemming from his own innate tendency. This paper, making comparative investigations on the cross-disciplinary discourses between psychoanalysis and literature around 1930, will show Kawabata’s unique perspective and make clear the characteristics of his works.

　Kawabata is distinguished from his contemporaries in that he was a methodologist literary innovator who aimed at reforming literary forms and styles rather than ontologically examining the human mind. Actually, his attitude accords with that of ‘Hari to garasu to kiri’. With all of its psychoanalytic elements, the work also deviates from them and produces a fluctuating, complex écriture, avoiding direct presentations of the depth of the mind. In fact, the characteristics of Kawabata’s ‘New Psychological Approach’ are harbingers of his later works. Thus, the problem of his ‘New Psychological Approach’ can mean a key reexamining of the literary dogma which connects Kawabata solely with the ideas of ‘Japan-ism’ and ‘traditionalism’.

　This paper attempts to examine the formation and the nature of Lu Xun (1881-1936)’s perception of his “revolutionary woodcut”, by focusing on the intersection between his woodcut-related activities and the Russian avantgardes. Since the middle of the 1920s, in the process of Lu Xun’s search for a change in his own literary creation, his interests in the revolutionary art and literature of the Soviet Russia increased. Through the works of Syomu Nobori, a Japanese scholar of Russia, Lu Xun encountered the contemporary Russian avant-gardes arts.

　The Russian avant-gardes advocated the “living arts” and denied the “modern art” which simply functions as an object of aesthetic appreciation. Since Lu Xun rejected the direction of the distorted modernization in China, he was greatly inspired by those Russian avant-gardes. And he paid a particular attention to their practice of woodcuts. He considered the development of woodcut in Soviet Russia in connection with the revolution of the people’s spirits, and attached importance to the possibility of the interaction between the producers and the recipients of woodcuts.

　In The Selected Works of the New Russian Arts, Lu Xun introduced Russian Constructivism together with its representative works. Through that he tried to present the fundamental issues of the revolution and the methodology of “active construction”.

　In my paper, I will not only regard Lu Xun’s interest in the Russian avantgardes as his response to the so-called “ Polemic of Revolutionary Literature” at that time, but also as his strong expectation toward the possibility of woodprint as an revolutionary art.

　This paper examines how America is represented in Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1956), perhaps the most famous of Mishima Yukio’s works.

　First, Mishima portrays the occupation army in relation to the reception of “Japanese tradition.” In 1945, Kyoto Shimbun reported how the occupation army in Kyoto visited temples and took part in many cultural events. GHQ prohibited Japanese mass media from reporting the occupation army’s affairs in Tokyo or Okinawa, but permitted it in Kyoto because they wanted to present an image of America as being respectful of “Japanese tradition.” This footage in turn affected Japanese people’s attitude toward their own tradition, reminding them of the importance of preserving cultural heritages.

　Second, Mishima describes the occupation army’s violence, not as physical but as representational violence toward Japan. GHQ prohibited the reporting of the occupation army’s violent affairs with Japanese women. But the image of occupation army men with prostitutes has become the symbol of American occupation. Mishima’s attitude toward this image is negative because it creates the image of an effeminized Japan.

　Third, Mishima portrays the occupation army’s peace-making activities in Maizuru City. However, this “peace” is characterized as deprived of human nature. Mishima’s recognition that violence is also a part of human nature is also echoed in the portrayal of America’s violence in the movie Blackboard Jungle which he saw. This is one of the reasons why “I” burns Kinkaku in this text.

　Analyzing the images of America represented in Kinkakuji helps us understand what happened during the American occupation of Japan, and indicates how difficult it was for a Japanese person to escape from American influence in the 1950’s

　The so-called debate on traditionalism, one of several large-scale literary disputes in 1910’s Japan, was set alight by Emile Louis Heck, the first professor of French literature at Tokyo Imperial University, and his erstwhile student Dazai Shimon. Heck and Dazai founded the France Society in 1916, introducing French traditionalist literature into Japan.

　The study of French literature in Japan was still in its infancy. This debate involved not only Heck, a Marianist priest and hired foreigner, and Dazai, later the first professor of French literature at Kyoto Imperial University, but also Naito Aro (translator of The Little Prince), Honma Hisao (professor of literature at Waseda), Mitsui Koshi (a nationalist poet) and Eguchi Kan (a socialist). Why did this debate achieve prominence in the middle of the First World War?

　A major factor was certainly the declining status of “France” in Japan's academic domain during the Meiji period. This is why Heck was so insistent on the usefulness of French literature at the national level. Elsewhere, however, the Japanese literary world was embarking on a new search for Japanese “tradition.” This research, in the long run, was reduced to giving a cultural veneer to the status quo and the ideology in power (although only a handful of socialists actually pointed this out). Eventually, Japanese “tradition” was realized as “Japanese spirit (Nihon Seshin)” and the “national polity (Kokutai),” those stalwarts of fascism.

Against the background of current attempts to legislate “tradition,” I propose to reconsider the original use of “tradition” as an ideological keyword.

　Enfance (Yônen, 1964) de Fukunaga Takehiko (1918-1979) est un roman qui fixe un motif original de cet auteur, la 《mémoire pure》(junsui-kioku) de sa prime enfance, conservée à l’état pur dans son esprit. Cette étude aborde la relation entre ce motif et l’esthétique de 《Correspondances》de Baudelaire (1821-1867).

　Fukunaga emploie ici une méthode en trois phases. Dans la première, la mémoire est suggérée comme une sorte d’amalgame mental sans image concrète. Dans la seconde, les images concrètes de la mémoire, amalgames d’impressions sensitives, analogues aux synesthésies de 《Correspondances》, se confondent avec le premier type de mémoire. Dans la dernière, les souvenirs concrets, grâce à la fonction d’imagination, apparaissent l’un après l’autre, reliés à ces amalgames.

　Dans son interprétation de 《Correspondances》, Fukunaga utilise souvent l’expression 《protomusique》 (gen-ongaku), relevant d’une dimension mentale réelle, quoique vague, qui sous-tend et permet les correspondances des sens. Il semble que les deux premières phases correspondent à cette dimension, et que cette relation soit ce qui garantit la réalité de la 《mémoire pure》. La troisième phase suit un développement différent de 《Correspondances》, mais l’idée élémentaire selon laquelle c’est la fonction d’imagination qui donne la forme aux souvenirs est bien héritée de Baudelaire.

　En conclusion, Fukunaga emploie l’esthétique de 《Correspondances》 pour assurer la réalité de sa mémoire primaire, la reliant à celle du poète français créée grâce à l’imagination, établissant ainsi une méthode de 《fiction》 pour représenter la 《mémoire pure》 avec cette authenticité garantie.