Following the publication of Tsubouchi Shōyō's Shosestsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel), the late 1880s to the 1890s was a period dominated by realism in the Japanese novel. Tokutomi Soho's view of the novel, however, differed from that of Shōyō. Around 1890, Soho asserted that the introduction of Victor Hugo's viewpoint would lead to a renewal of Japanese literature. Soho's assertion, supported by Morita Shiken's article Shakai no tsumi (“A Crime of Society”), obtained wide support in literary circles, stimulating writers to produce a new kind of novel. This new movement later came to fruition in the novels of Higuchi Ichiyō. A reconsideration of the literary activity surrounding “A Crime of Society” helps to shed new light on the connection between Soho and Ichiyō, two writers who, although generally assumed to be unrelated, can actually both be placed firmly within the sphere of influence of “A Crime of Society.”

Among the many foreign writers and philosophers mentioned in the writings of Ishikawa Takuboku, Maxim Gorky is particularly noteworthy. After becoming acquainted with Gorky's work at the age of sixteen, Takuboku constantly wrote down his impressions of Gorky's novels, comparing his own life situation with that of Gorky's characters, and eagerly discussing key concepts of Gorky's literature with friends. Gorky's “vagabond's philosophy” became particularly important to Takuboku in 1907, when he himself was forced to leave his home and drift around the island of Hokkaido as a vagabond. This paper focuses mainly on the short story “Drifting,” written in Hakodate in 1907. Analysis of this text proves that when writing it, Takuboku was strongly influenced by Gorky's works. Although the concept of “drifting” in Takuboku's literature is often associated with Takuboku's personal experience and/or his knowledge of Japanese classical literature, as this paper points out, one origin of this leitmotiv can be traced to foreign literature, specifically that of Maxim Gorky.

Mishima Yukio's “Shishi” (1948) is an adaptation of Euripedes's tragedy Medea. In this essay, I examine Mishima's position in the postwar literary scene, and the reasons why he was inevitably drawn to drama through an analysis of this novel. Mishima preferred drama because he wanted to avoid the novel, which requires the writer to describe his characters' amorphous psychological states. I show that, by idealizing the reality of his characters' voices in “Shishi,” Mishimi rejected the romantic literary ideal. I furthermore argue that Mishima's pose as a “classicist” was in accordance with his intentional misreading of Raymond Radiguet as a model for postwar writers.

The post-structuralist philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler asserts that the subject and the sexed body are not natural, but culturally constructed by the power structure. Although this is certainly true, Butler and other post-structuralists have neglected an important aspect of women's material bodies, namely, the capacity to become pregnant and give birth. In this essay, by focusing on the involuntary aspect of “the pregnant body” in Kurahashi Yumiko's Kurai Tabi (Dark Journey) and early short stories, I present a method of resistance to power that keeps “the pregnant body” firmly in sight. I begin by examining Kurahashi's early short stories, using them to analyze the power structure of man/woman (subject/object) that is constructed through social and cultural discourse on pregnancy. I then move on to Kurai Tabi, showing how the protagonist is forced at first to accept the gender “woman” when the unnamed narrator addresses her as “Anata” (you), but later, through involuntarily becoming a “pregnant body,” transforms her feminine gender into a “performative act.” I furthermore show how the gender performance of the protagonist “Anata” not only subverts the power structure, in which man is assumed to be the subject, but also makes possible a form of resistance that is not dependent on the subject.

Kim Dalsu's novel Rakushō (落照、1979) was first published under the title Zokufu (族譜), and was rewritten twice before it reached the form available to readers today. In this paper, I explore the meaning behind the ideological changes that took place between the two versions of Zokufu and the final version, Rakushō. First, I compare the three versions to see how the story and theme of the novel changed through the rewriting process, examining these changes in the light of the times in which Kim Dalsu was writing and rewriting, and his political and ideological stance. I then focus on the transformation of Gweiom (貴厳)、who appears as the protagonist's uncle in the earlier versions, into the ‘new protagonist' of Rakushō. Through the process of revision from Zokufu to Rakushō, Gweiom is transformed into an archetypal figure, representing all the Koreans who were massacred during the process of the founding of South Korea, and then abandoned in the midst of the ideological conflict between socialism and nationalism. This transformation shows that during the process of rewriting the novel, Kim Dalsu came to understand that men like Gweiom were, in fact, the true protagonists of Korean history. I conclude by noting that this new understanding reveals the transition in Kim Dalsu's ideology from the two versions of Zokufu to Rakushō.

Readers of novels follow the words with their eyes while listening to the voice of an imagined narrator, feeling his or her presence. Through this process, the reader becomes embodied as a listener, face to face with a fictitious narrator. But what, exactly, does such a listener experience? In this paper, I focus on the experience of listening to real voices on situational CDs as an aid to answering this question. The voice on a situational CD can be compared to that of the first-person narrator of a novel. I compare the experience of “listening” to both the written word and to the actual voice of a narrator, and confirm the importance of the listener's experience to an understanding of what, exactly, we absorb when we enter a fictional world.