Japanese immigrants in Hawaii started writing creative works around the time of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars (1894-1905), when the Japanese written language underwent significant transformations. Japanese language newspapers in Hawaii at the time carried many works written by non-professional writers, and many of them depicted Japan's natural scenery from memory, employing classical rhetoric and an aesthetic sensibility. Although those works have not been a subject of literary study, it is important to understand the role they played in the immigrant community, consisting as it did of people with different backgrounds and regional dialects, living in Hawaii where sensitivities, values, and norms from the mother country were not valid. In fact, these works became an important arena for the Japanese immigrants to construct and re-invent their identity as "Japanese" by recalling, analogizing and reconstructing their representations of Japanese Nature.

View full abstract

The seven-five rhythm of the poems in Shimazaki Toson's Wakana shu (Young Leaves; A Collection of Poetry, 1897) has been considered in recent years as a mere classical cadence from the pre-modern era. However, the audience at the time appreciated the poetical value of the phrasing for its capacity to offer variation and compact structure. Toson in fact consciously made efforts to create pleasurable cadences and to avoid monotony, and he searched for the right phrasing to convey complex ideas in a unified way. In addition to the seven-five rhythms, he learned from the Man'yoshu a number of techniques, such as omission of particles and auxiliary verbs, word formation, and couplets that pair mornings and evenings. Besides those features, he also made a number of creative efforts to express a sense of wonderment, and to fashion new metaphors to govern the poetic tone. The reason Toson relied especially on the Man'yoshu was because it was the only poetry collection that included a large number of long poems, and also because he found in them the expressions of people's unadulterated emotions.

View full abstract

Natsume Soseki's Higan sugi made (To the Spring Equinox and Beyond, 1912) is generally considered to be a work without any clear structure. This study shows through a close analysis that there is in fact an overall mechanism that is present throughout the novel-the hidden struggles of men who are expected by their families and friends to succeed. These struggles operate to provide meaningful connections among the individual, his close community, and the larger society. It is noteworthy that older generations of men towards the end of the Meiji Period had high hopes for the younger generation. With that in mind, this article studies the chain reaction of jealous sentiments which the male characters in Higan sugi made develop towards each other. Their jealousy, derived from their competitive mindset, nurtures the dark hope to see their competitors fail, and that in turn feeds their own anxiety. Analyzing such emotional reactions to their great expectations helps us discover an implicit but important link that ties together the novel's content and structure.

View full abstract

This paper offers an overview of poetry aimed at a young female audience, with a focus on the poems that appeared in Shojo no tomo (Young Girls' Magazine) during the Taisho Period. The magazine's editorial policy underwent significant changes during this period, and yet its poetry column has received hardly any attention from scholars so far. This study reveals that while Shojo no tomo had always been bound by the editorial requirement to include some expression of sentimentalism, the poems which were published in it went through a transformation from long, colloquial epic to concise, self-asserting short poems (called shojo shokyoku, or shojo shi) for a young female audience. This transition accompanied the process by which readers became writers themselves. It also participated in a larger development, by which young girls' poetry was diffused to a broader audience, such as children, women and indeed the general public, via other genres such as short songs, children's songs, and folk songs.

View full abstract

Kikuchi Kan's story, "Tokyo koshin-kyoku," (Tokyo Marching Song) was serialized in Kingu from June 1928 to October 1929. Before it was finished, Nikkatsu, a large movie production company, turned it into a silent film under the direction of Mizoguchi Kenji, for which a theme song (to be played live during screenings) was produced by Saijo Yaso and Nakayama Shinpei. One study concludes that both the original story and the film were failures. It argues that the director was too faithful to the story, and that the author became too conscious of the effect of the cinematization. However, the novel was never finished, and therefore the end of the film could not have been influenced by the end of the novel. This paper takes a fresh look at the relationship among the three-the film, the novel, and the theme song. Saijo wrote the lyrics without any knowledge of the storyline, and the record of the theme song was sold before the movie was released. The movie, "Tokyo koshin-kyoku," was a "kouta eiga" (a movie forsongs), a silent movie which was presented by a live narrator-singer in a varied, improvisational manner. The latter half of the novel is highly likely to have been written under the influence of the movie and especially the lyrics of the theme song. This representative work of Kikuchi Kan's is thus part of a multilayered synthesis that includes not only novelistic narrative but also the traditional theater and the silent film as presented to the public.

View full abstract

Shugan Seiryo Koji (1934) is an unpublished long poem by Nakahara Chuya. The title is a Buddhist name given posthumously to Nakahara's brother; it invokes the purity and cool refreshing nature of an autumn shore. This paper investigates the relationship between this poem and Nakahara Chuya's critical work on Miyazawa Kenji, mostly written around the same time he wrote the poem. First, it examines Nakahara's reading of Miyazawa's works, and how he tried to keep a critical distance from him in the midst of heightening posthumous enthusiasm about him. In "Shugan Seiryo Koji" Nakahara quotes from Miyazawa's "Haratai Kenbairen" (Sword Dancers of the Haratai Village), and that is concrete evidence of Miyazawa's direct influence on Nakahara. However, it is Nakahara's linguistic gestures in this poetic work, commonly called referred to by scholars as doke-cho, or comedic tone, that proves a more substantive influence. An analysis of this comedic tone, as well as the use of multiple first-person narratives, and quotations from Nakahara's work on Miyazawa, lead us to consider the role of "naming," an important element that affects the structure of this poem.

View full abstract

An overview of the history of critical studies of Dazai's Onna no ketto (A Women's Duel, published in Gekkan bunsho [Literary Monthly], 1976) reveals some felling aspects of the literary climate of the time-period in which Dazai's work was published. Dazai's work quotes the entire text of Mori Ogai's "Onna no ketto" (1912), which is a Japanese translation of Herbert Eulenberg's "Ein Frauenzweikampf" (A Women's Duel, 1911). Through Dazai's critique and comments on Ogai's text, the reader can examine the methodology of 19^<th>-century Realism, and how the discourse on the narrative subject "I" was constructed in the second decade of the Showa Period. In the context of the discourse on the I-Novel, the fact that Gekkan bunsho carried this work indicates that there was some methodological link between the journal and Dazai's work. Dazai's Onna no ketto was in fact a parody of the developmental process of literature of its time: Dazai casts a critical eye on the contemporary framework of the modern novel and the literary landscape of the time, and presents his views in a novelistic form.

View full abstract

Meoto zenzai firmly established the impression of Oda Sakunosuke as an Osaka writer, and that persists today. In the history of Showa literature, however, Meoto zenzai (Wedded Bliss, 1939) was also at one point considered one of a group of genealogical works that became popular around 1940, and was valued for its participation in the "artistic resistance" to the War. This study distances itself from these previous categorizations, and analyses the historical background in which this work came to be acknowledged as a genealogical novel. A close textual analysis clarifies that the novel's important characteristics reside in the typical narrative construct of a genealogical novel, which helps the narrative cover a long history with speed. This understanding should help overcome our stereotypical view of the novel as the work of an Osaka writer, and revise our understanding of Oda's contributions in the context of a broader literary history.

View full abstract

Oe Kenzaburo's Okinawa Noto (Okinawa Notes, 1970) has a reputation still today as a work which successfully exposed the Japanese people's scornful views of Okinawa under the U.S. Occupation through a self-disclosing narrative. It is known that, in the process of writing, Oe was deeply influenced by Ralph Ellison in the way he depicts racial diversity in his Invisible Man. As a result, Okinawa Notes exhibits Oe's close attention to the issue of diversity even among the Japanese, who are mostly considered to be homogenous. It has been pointed out, however, that Ellison's idea of diversity in no way contradicts the containment policy of the U.S. under the Cold War, and that Ellison and other intellectuals (typically Jewish), called "New York Intellectuals," played an important role in re-constructing the American identity during the Cold War period. In fact, Oe's concept of diversity present in Okinawa Noto was concocted under the direct influence of the New York intellectuals. The narrative style seen in Okinawa Nato, this paper argues, was the product of Oe's intent to give some physical expression of the New York Intellectuals' approach.

View full abstract

It has been told that in the Musha Incident of 1930, desperate native Taiwanese living under the oppression of the Japanese occupation in Taichung killed a number of Japanese residing there. Tsushima Yuko's long novel, Amarini yabanna (So Barbaric, 2008), builds on this incident, as well as on a well-known Taiwanese legend. The novel tells of the history in which a person (the protagonist of the novel) of a particular nationality and ethnicity aspires to find universal values. One notable theme is the differences of attitudes towards life and death between Akihiko, a sociologist who studied with French sociologist Emile Durkheim, and who teaches French at Taihoku High School, and his Taiwanese wife, nicknamed Meecha. This paper investigates Meecha's view of life and death as a cycle, and the significance it carries in the novel.

View full abstract