Penned at the end of 1904 and published in January 1905, ‘The Carlyle Museum' (CM) is one of Soseki's earliest pieces in remembrance of his days in London. The work is said to be rather prosaic and personal, and less fascinating than ‘The Tower of London', another London story with mysterious, dramatic visions. A great admirer of Carlyle, Soseki made his first visit to Carlyle's House on 3 August 1901, which served immediate material for CM. Also, preceding studies have revealed that a large part of detailed desciption is based on Carlyle's House Catalogue, a guidebook he brought home from London.

　This paper aims to introduce hitherto unnoticed sources of CM, concerning the very beginning of the work. In the first passage the narrator tells an interesting episode called “the story of Carlyle and the speechmaker”. The story has no relation either to Soseki's visit or to the guidebook, and has been considered to be a figment of his imagination. However, the present writer herein indicates a source book: namely, Literary Geography(LG), collected essays published by William Sharp in October 1904. In a chapter entitled ‘The Country of Carlyle', the author recounts “an amusing story” which bears a striking similarity to that in CM. As to description of Carlyle's appearance, Soseki seems to have taken hints, not from LG, but from Carlyle's portrait by E. J. Sullivan in the illustrated edition of Sartor Resartus.

　Sharp had much in common with Soseki. He was closely connected with D. G. Rossetti, George Meredith, Watts-Dunton, and many other literary figures and artists related to the Pre-Raphaelites. Like Carlyle, he was a Scotsman, and had a traumatic, distressful time in London. As Flavia Alaya rightly put it, “they were all ‘foreigners'” by nature.

　It has already been noted that Yanagi’s book entitled William Blake (1914) gives proper explanation in Japanese about idiosyncratic features of Blake's philosophy, such as his emphasis on energy, passion and imagination and his unique form of antinomian Christianity. However, one of the characteristics of Yanagi's studies on Blake, which has so far been overlooked, is that he frequently uses the term ‘temperament’ to describe Blake’s art. According to Yanagi, Blake fully expresses his ‘temperament’ in his poetry and paintings, and his philosophy is also based on his ‘temperament’, derived not from abstract reasoning but from careful introspection of his everyday experience. ‘Temperament’, Yanagi says, plays a significant role in the process by which one establishes one’s sense of values, and Blake was faithful to his ‘temperament’.

　Yanagi used the word ‘temperament’ without translating it into Japanese because he learned the concept by reading English books about religion, psychology, philosophy and fine arts in which ‘temperament’ was used as a crucial keyword. The list of the authors that Yanagi must have referred to includes William James, James Huneker, A. C. Swinburne, Arthur Symons and Laurence Houseman. It is most likely that Yanagi interpreted Blake under the influence of the philosophical theory of ‘temperament’ by James, as well as contemporary Blake studies. In this sense William Blake, the book that Yanagi published in 1914, is a composite result of his studies of religion, philosophy and Blake’s art.

　Qian Daosun (1887-1966) was the first scholar to seriously take on the Chinese translation of the Manyôshu and The Tale of Genji. But although he published two selections of the Manyôshu's translation respectively before and after his death, and was highly complimented for his splendid classical style translation of the Manyôshu’s uta, only the chapter of “Kiritsubo” among the five translated chapters of The Tale of Genji survived his death.

　Documents show that Qian started the translation in the same year that Arthur Waley completed the publication of his six-volumed English translation. Apparently this was an important incentive for Qian, even though he decided not to imitate Waley’s free style.

　There were two remarkable characteristics of his translation of “Kiritsubo.” First, Qian used the Ming-Qing period Baihua (written vernacular) as the main style without any modern words or expressions in order to parallel it to the Heian period monogatari-style of The Tale of Genji.

　Second, apparently different from his other translations, many expressions and sentences in Qian’s “Kiritsubo” preserved the original Japanese expressions and syntax in order to convey the tone and atmosphere of the original, making the translation in places foreign and obscure to modern Chinese readers.

　Qian’s translation forces the readers to concentrate on the language form itself, instead of the meaning. In doing so, the translator himself is made visible, reflecting the prominent theory put forward by Lawrence Venuti. It is an example of how foreignization can reveal a source culture more clearly, and provide a more faithful and ethically appriopriate vision of it.

　Фтабатэй Симэй (настоящее имя: Тацуносукэ Хасэгава) широко известен как знаменитый японский писатель и переводчик русской литературы в эпоху Мэйдзи. У Фтабатэя, однако, была и другая сторона – он являлся одним из основоположников научного изучения России. Располагая огромной информацией о России того времени, он исследовал не только русскую литературу, но и русскую политику, дипломатию, военное дело, общество, культуру и мысль.

　Несмотря на то, что Фтабатэй всю жизнь работал в области политики и дипломатии, а многие его статьи и эссе о ситуации в России вошли в полное собрание сочинений, большинство исследователей не уделяло достаточного внимания этому обстоятельству и не анализировало подобные тексты подробно. Представляется, что будет важным рассмотреть данный вопрос, так как многие японские литераторы в эпоху Мэйдзи были не только великие писатели, но и видные специалисты в иностранных делах.

　Одним из важных источников, по которому можно исследовать этот аспект деятельности Фтабатэя, является японский журналист Оба Како (настоящее имя: Кагэаки Оба). В настоящее время его имя почти забыто, но он был хорошо знаком с ситуацией в России в период с конца эпохи Мэйдзи до эпохи Тайсё. Фтабатэй и Оба познакомились у их общего учителя русского языка Цунэитиро Фрукава около 1895 года. Их дружба, усиленная общим интересом к России, продолжалась всю жизнь. Фтабатэй, вероятно, благотворно влиял на Оба в отношении реалистической точки зрения на японо-русские связи и собирания информации о России. Можно сказать, что благодаря Фтабатэю Оба мог играть более активную роль как исследователь России. В дальнейших исследованиях, посвященных Фтабатэю, необходимо учитывать эту сторону его деятельности и его отношения с Оба.

　Francis Galton (1822-1911) studied composite portraits and published books and articles such as “Generic Images.” Although Hearn often mentioned Galton in his works, the relationship between them has scarcely been studied. This paper shows how Hearn accepted Galton’s theory of composite portraits, focusing on Hearn’s idiosyncratic idea that ‘one is multiple.’ This idea has been studied from several aspects such as Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Shinto, Buddhism, and Hearn’s personal experiences. I suggest that Galton’s theory also influenced the formulation of Hearn’s unique idea.

　Galton claimed that a composite portrait, which superimposed several portraits so as to accentuate their common features, should represent ‘the portrait of a type and not of an individual.’ Hearn made a composite from his students’ English compositions. Just as Galton expected to detect a feature of a certain type by making a composite portrait, Hearn also manipulated his students’ compositions expecting to grasp a generic feature of Japanese people.

　Galton’s theory is based upon the idea that a body or a face is a palimpsest. Hearn related this idea to the idea of re-incarnation and changed it into his own idea that each individual is a composite portrait, or palimpsest.

　Paul Auster, who focuses on “the death of the subject” in The New York Trilogy (1990), is a leading American postmodern novelist. In an interview, Auster referred to Franz Kafka as a major influence on his writing. In his essay “Kafka’s Letters,”Auster states that reading Kafka’s letters will definitely change our understanding of Kafka. He attaches special importance to the bond of absolute friendship between Kafka and Max Brod.

　Although Kafka had asked Brod to burn all his manuscripts after his death, Brod preserved them. This paper focuses on the role of Max Brod in order to explore the interaction between Kafka and Auster. Paul Auster has explored the theme of a heritage received from another. In The Locked Room (1986) and Leviathan (1993), he describes friendship between male writers. The narrators of both the novels are appointed as the heirs of their friends’ heritages. The two novels begin with the same situation as Max Brod’s. As a postmodernist, Auster describes the death of the “self-authored” subject based on freedom; however, he simultaneously seems to explore the notion of the “passive” subject who is obligated to another's demand.The narrators of The Locked Room and Leviathan struggle to keep alive the memories of the others by narrating their lives.

　On the other hand, it is difficult to find any kind of subject in Kafka’s fiction, because language is always used to show that the other has been lost in oblivion. Kafka and Auster both deconstruct the traditional humanist notion of subjectivity in their works. I, however, would like to show that Auster’s works hint at the advent of a new subject, by discussing Kafka and Auster from the perspectives of “language” and the “other.”

　Dans La Méditerranée du crépuscule (Tasogare no chichûkai), qui décrit l’histoire d’un voyage en bateau entre le détroit de Gibraltar et l'Algérie, le narrateur se réfère à plusieurs œuvres musicales. Si, en contemplant le rivage de l’Espagne, le narrateur évoque les impressions qu’il a eues à l’écoute de Don Giovanni et de Carmen, c'est parce qu’il rêve à la liberté de ces protagonistes et qu’il a lui-même voulu se révolter contre une société japonaise traditionnelle qui ne la lui permettaient pas. Pourtant, après avoir quitté l'Espagne, il commence à admirer les arts des Anciens, dont l'ordre et l'harmonie sont toujours intacts depuis des siècles. Il reprendra les mêmes expressions, trois ans plus tard, pour qualifier les cultures traditionnelles du Japon. Nous comprenons donc que Nagai Kafû a caché sa sympathie pour la société traditionelle japonaise. Les paroles du début de la chanson des matelots de Tristan und Isolde de Wagner, également mentionnée dans La Méditerranée du crépuscule (« Vers l’Occident erre le regard ; vers l'Orient file le navire. Frais, le vent souffle vers la terre natale »), révèlent cette ambivalence. En parsemant son texte d’images tirées d’oeuvres musicales, Kafû laisse transparaître les thèmes du conflit intérieur, qu’il évoquera, sous diverses formes, à maintes reprises. Nous pouvons considérer La Méditerranée du crépuscule comme le prélude – dont un des rôles est d’introduire les thèmes principaux dans l’opéra classique – des créations littéraires de Kafû qui vient alors de rentrer au Japon.