In 1903 a high-school student, Fujimura Misao, committed suicide, leaving a note stating that "The truth of all matters can be described in one word : mysterious." This strange incident stirred up a great deal of public discussion, and three years later, in 1906, a directive was issued by the Ministry of Education in an effort to chastise and control students sympathetic to Fujimura. This study sheds light on the way the Naturalist Movement reacted to the authorities' treatment of the incident. What is particularly noteworthy is the provocation supplied by conservative critics and educators who fiercely attacked Fujimura and the influence literature had on his suicide. Their attacks grew fiercer as they built close ties with the authorities. It seems that those who participated in the Naturalist Movement were keenly aware of this development: that encouraged them in carrying out their slogan, "Overcoming the Old Virtues, Destroying the Conservative Ideology." This also engendered a literary approach that valued depth of sympathy for Fujimura's mental struggle. Furthermore, this development was closely tied to the advent, as the leading author of Naturalism, of Kunikida Doppo, a writer who had previously overcome a great deal of adversity.

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The goal of this article is to clarify the underlying principles of Natsume Soseki's Bungaku-ron (Theory of Literature). Soseki presents a formulaic, schematized approach to literature in Bungaku-ron: "Generally, the format of a literary content needs to be (F+f)," by which he means a unity of cognitive and emotional elements. An important characteristic of this proposition lies in his emphasis on emotional factors in literature. In Bungaku-ron he identifies emotions and feelings as the shared outcomes of intimate engagements that both author and reader have with a literary work. Sympathy refers to a psychological union between the author and the reader when sentiments and emotions come to be shared between them. In Bungaku-ron, Soseki gives examples of Romanticism, Realism, and "sympathetic works" from British literature. Through those examples he argues that the author's, as well as the reader's, sympathy brings out psychological, emotional truth that in turn establishes the universality of literature or "literary truth." The approach to "sympathy" seen in Bungaku-ron can help us better understand the discussions of art, literature, and even philosophy that evolved in 18^<th>-century Europe.

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Okada Michiyo (later Nagayo Michiyo) is a female writer who is known to have been used by Tayama Katai as a model for the young female live-in student the protagonist novelist secretly falls in love with in Futon. This article examines the obscure works she wrote before she married Nagayo Shizuo, as well as the letters exchanged between Katai and her until just after the publication of Futon. The result of this investigation reveals how the male mentor (Katai) and the female student (Okada) fought over the literary treatment of Michiyo's romantic affair. After Michiyo became romantically involved with Nagayo, her parents forced her to leave Tokyo and return home to Hiroshima. She then wrote fictionalized versions of her relationship with Nagayo, and used some parts of Katai's letters in her stories. Elsewhere in his letters, Katai was critical of Michiyo's subjective narrative. While he forbade her to continue fictionalizing her own affair, Katai himself used her affair in writing Futon. This leads us to consider this famous novel a work of sexual harassment : Katai robbed Michiyo of the authorship of her own story, and meticulously concealed her identity as a woman capable of exerting literary authorship over her own affair.

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Towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Tayama Katai wrote modern poetry themed on young girls, to be carried each month on the first page of the magazine, Shojo sekai, a publication for young girls, from September 9, 1909 to February1, 1910. This paper examines all forty-two poems that appeared in Shojo sekai in order to understand why Katai employed the Romantic rhetoric that he did, and why it was employed in a young girls' magazine. This is discussed in the context of the coexistence of both Romantic and Naturalistic approaches in Katai's other writings during the same period. The intent is to help explicate the process by which "girls' sexuality" was constructed (to use a term that came into critical favor in the last two decades). This includes an examination of the term "Romanticism" itself as used by Katai to typify the outlook of young girls.

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Tanizaki Jun'ichiro is known to have owned a six-volume set of The Works of Plato (Bohn's Classical Library; London : George Bell and Son, 1848-54). There is some evidence that he was particularly familiar with the content of the second volume, which contained The Republic. It is in The Republic that the famous "Allegory of the Cave" appears. There are previous studies that point out the similarities between what the allegory describes and the mechanism of film projection. This paper argues that Tanizaki made use of the concept of the limitations of human perception described in the "Allegory of the Cave," as well as the concept of Idea, in those of his works that feature blindness, such as Shunkin sho (A Portrait of Shunkin,1933). The ultimate goal for Plato was for humans to see the light itself. Tanizaki seems to have wanted to warn against the danger of too much light, by transferring this allegory into the projection of films in modern times. In his time, films were made with nitrate, and they often caught fire while being projected, causing the destruction of the images on the screen. A Portrait of Shunkin and other stories with the theme of blindness can be understood as Tanizaki's expression of what may be called "the degree zero of representation" caused by excessive light.

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Previous studies have shown that the series of concerts Kajii mentions in his "Kigaku-teki genkaku" were given by a French pianist, Henri Gil-Marchex(1894-1970), who visited Japan in 1925. Although Kajii's essay may appear to be merely testimony to his presence at a historic musical event in modern Japan, what the author tries to convey has deeper implications. This paper argues that Kajii was referring to historical transformations of the subject of perception. Kajii's text depicts two completely different reactions he had at a concert. While he notes that he listened attentively to a sonata, and that that was a moving experience, he also writes that listening to modern French musical selections at the same concert inevitably caused his focus to self-destruct, resulting in hallucinations. The contrast between the two musical experiences corresponds to the contrast in musical compositions between the classical and modern music of the West. Kajii, however, focuses on the transformation undergone by the perceiving subject. It is important to understand the transformation of the perceiving subject, delineated as a reaction to Western musical performance, in the larger context of the nascent mass consumer culture of the time.

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Tokunaga Sunao's Taiyo no nai machi was published in 1929, and its German translation soon followed, appearing in the very next year. Both the original and the translation caught media attention in both countries. Senda Korenari(1904-1994), who was living in Berlin at the time, was the moving force behind this project, and undertook the translation with the help of a German friend. Although it was not free of errors, it inspired translations into other European languages, and the novel came to be known widely in Europe. The depictions of Japanese workers going on a strike awakened European readers from their Orientalist exoticism, and the novel received high acclaim for showing what was really happening in contemporary Japan. One difficulty the translators of Japanese proletarian literature in those days had to face was what to do with the portions eliminated by government censorship. This paper evaluates the significance of this German translation by examining the issues the translators had to tackle and the decisions they made.

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Shakan Asahi serialized a number of short mystery stories by Matsumoto Seicho between 1958 and 1960 under the series title, Kuroi gashu (A Black Book of Paintings). Through a close analysis of one of those stories, "Shisso," and of articles by other authors that appear in the magazine, this study identifies similarities in the ways they bring in different sources and narrate stories. They all use similar narrative techniques to attract the reader's attention and build a corpus of knowledge. They also heighten the reader's interest in some current social incident, and promote speculation and discussion. The Readers' Column is offered as a space to encourage such activities. The magazine editors also selected letters from the readers that would contribute to the manipulation of the ways in which the articles and stories were digested.

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