Among the many poems written in Chinese (kanshi) during the Meiji and Taisho eras, Soseki's have captured an unusually large readership. Yet aside from the sixteen included in his long essay “Omoidasukoto nado” (Things I Remember), one cannot say that Soseki's kanshi were widely read during his lifetime. In this paper, focusing on the fact that between Soseki's youth and the decade or so after his death, the readership of his kanshi gradually shifts along with the passage of time, I examine various groups of readers and their different ways of reading Soseki's kanshi. In addition, in order to further delve into the meaning of these various ways of reading kanshi depending on who is reading and when, I also examine the media through which the poems were published, including the reception of individual kanshi collections and editions of Soseki's complete works and, furthermore, trends in the criticism that appeared in magazines such as Daichōwa and Panthéon.

In this article, I focus on some of Soseki's famous disciples, such as Abe Nōsei (1883-1966) and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), who graduated from the School of Letters of Tokyo Imperial University and became professors. They were referred to pejoratively as “representatives of a ‘Soseki culture'” by Tosaka Jun, who went on to point out that this “Soseki culture” was already a phenomenon that was not necessarily related to the cultural tradition of Soseki himself. Members of the intellectual elite, these disciples started out as anti-authoritarian youth, or “educated idlers” who dared to abandon worldly success. Eventually, however, some won positions at Imperial universities, and came to be seen as guardians of the cultural status quo, or intellectuals who sided with the establishment. Furthermore, they were also disparaged as dilettantes who were neither authoritative scholars nor original writers. This paper shows what the discourse surrounding these “representatives of Soseki culture” reveals about modern Japanese views on universities, literature, journalism, and writers.

In Japan's rapid modernization, which took place under the influence of Western modernization, Natsume Soseki saw not the progression of history, but rather the loss of history. His discourse on this subject can be said to present a geopolitical framework in that it contains such geographical terms as “Japan and the West” or “Asian and Western culture,” along with the implied power structure these terms denote. In this paper, I examine the formation of the theme of modernity in Japan, which was one important source of Soseki's language. I then consider how this theme changed through history, and shed light on its limitations. At the same time, with an awareness of contemporary issues, I think about the possibilities for recycling the theme of modernity today.

Due partly to the Japanese translation of Jean Baudrillard's study La société de consummation: ses mythes, ses structures, the sociology of consumption was disseminated in Japan during the 1980s, leading to the formation of the idea of a consumption society. This phenomenon also influenced the 1980s reevaluation of Natsume Soseki, as can been seen in the consumer-friendly cover illustrations, designed by Watabe Seizō for the Kadokawa paperback editions of Soseki's works, and the film adaptation of Soseki's novel And Then, directed by Morita Yoshimitsu. This film, however, can also be seen as the “after-life,” or residuum, of the novel. This aspect of the film is revealed in the visual representation of the female protagonist, and in freeze frame shots or surreal sequences. Focusing on these images and sequences, I analyze the “un-consumable something” that is expressed in the film version of And Then.

We are in the midst of a Soseki boom. I am not talking about Japan, where Soseki was born and died. On April 8, 2017, when the Spring Academic Conference of the Japanese Language and Literature Association of Korea was held at Myongji University in Seoul, the theme, which commemorated the 150^th year of Soseki's birth, was “Natsume Soseki: A Journey of 150 Years, and Korea.” This interest in Soseki is not limited to experts engaged in work relating to Japan. A fourteen-volume collection, The Complete Novels of Natsume Soseki, translated into Korean, was issued by a South Korean publisher in 2016. In this paper, I focus on this complete collection of Soseki's novels, and examine the Soseki phenomenon under the various conditions surrounding current literature.

Until 1907, when he wrote Gubijinsō (The Poppy), Soseki constructed his novels by taking styles from various available genres with particular social connotations, and transposing them into different contexts. This sense of literary style was well suited both to the variety of styles available to writers during the period when the novel suddenly became popular in Japan, and to the reading and writing activities of Soseki's audience. After the normalization of genbunitchi, a style that was supposed to unify written and spoken Japanese, Soseki began to use expressions in his novels that called to mind the classical Chinese that had long pervaded the Japanese language, but this had the effect of implying a bond among educated Japanese men, while at the same time excluding women and the people Japan had colonized. Even after genbunitchi became the basic style of Japanese novels, Soseki widely used rhetoric and vocabulary from various remembered genres, a point which requires further discussion.

Natsume Sōseki's Kusamakura (Grass Pillow) demonstrates the evolution and transformation of texts from folklore. These stories also evolved as entertainment and eventually led to the establishment of modern literature.

In Kusamakura, there is a song and an anecdote which are taken from Man'yōshū; however, the two are unrelated in the Man'yōshū. This paper examines why they are connected in Kusamakura. The hidden connection between the two is an otogi-zōshi (an illustrated short story) from folklore about the Nagara Bridge, particularly the ‘Story of Nagara (Nagara no sōshi)' and the ‘Tsu no kuni Nagara no hitobashira' in Jōruri and Kabuki.

These stories have been passed down through oral tradition with the accompanying physical gestures, which embed a dimension of physicality in the words of the story just as performing arts involve the movement of the bodies of modern storytellers. The body can be depicted through novels, and this derives from the relationship, passed down from premodern times, that links a series of words to physical style or element. These two pieces evoke one another, and they have continued to produce art. It is clear that Kusamakura also partakes of this relationship.

In order to shed light on Soseki's early period (from late 1904 to early 1905), this paper examines unpublished portions of the lectures he would later expand and publish as Theory of Literature (Bungakuron), as recorded in his students' notebooks and diaries, and his own manuscript. In his lectures, he expresses “being tricked” and “enjoying fiction” in similar ways and, citing the Don Quixote and Shakespeare's plays, argues that tragedy and comedy are formally the same, but distinguished by a difference in the reader's psychological attitude. These unpublished lectures are related to the foundation of Soseki's theory of fiction, which asserts that readers/spectators become immersed in the world of a story by undergoing a sort of emotional self-hypnosis.

Although Soseki failed to draw a clear distinction between “lies” and “fiction” in either his lectures or in Bungakuron, in his work The Tower of London (Rondon Tō), he succeeds in telling a lie that is effective enough to allow readers to suspend the truth in a way peculiar to fiction.

“Symposium on Meiji Literature” is an organization that was founded in 1933. One of the fundamental starting points for the academic study of modern Japanese literature, it sponsored academic presentations and bibliographical research into individual authors, held interviews with elderly literary figures, and systematically collected books and other necessary materials. The aim of this paper is to rethink the concept of the “history of literature.” To that end, I have surveyed the journal published by this organization and other relevant materials, examining them from the perspective of the “history of scholarship,” which allows me to shed an objective light on the study of literature. As an example of the power of “discourse,” I focus particularly on a series of recorded remarks made by Kinoshita Naoe, following the ways in which historical materials concerning the “High Treason Incident” were unearthed, and the opportunities and modes they provided for connecting historical discourse to “literature.” In addition, I trace this organization's influence on Itō Sei's Nihon Bundan-shi (History of the Japanese Literary Scene), and consider the possibilities for historical narrative when it is stimulated by methods of listening to and recording “discourse.”

In this paper, I take issue with the interpretational framework that structures the “history of modern Japanese literature.” Specifically, I focus on the action and writings of women involved in the class struggle, centering my research on the journal Nyonin Geijutsu (Women's Arts). In the 1920s and 1930s, women fighting for a political ideal were often relegated to the role of “housekeepers” for male activists, causing them to fall into a gap in the interpretative framework for discourse on the proletarian movement, which accepted clearly defined gender roles even as it privileged the working class and the avant-garde. As a result, these women's writings were overlooked both by contemporary literary critics and by literary historians. In this paper, I assert that reading these women's novels now means not only listening to their forgotten voices, but also posing a challenge to the framework of modern Japanese literary history itself.

In this paper, I analyze images of violence that appear in Hagiwara Sakutarō's poetry from his early tanka to his first poetry collection Howling at the Moon, such as pistols and executions by firing squad and the electric chair, while also referring to his unpublished notes. These images are grounded in Sakutarō's consciousness of the events of his time, such as the High Treason Incident, a form of state violence, and twentieth century war, beginning with the Russo-Japanese war and culminating in World War I. I assert that Sakutarō's ominous poetic symbols of the violent energy of war show that, while the destructive power of state violence terrified him, he was also strongly attracted to a pure violent energy that is akin to what Walter Benjamin calls “divine violence.” I also point out that Sakutarō's interest in violent energy may well have continued into his last years, during World War II.

How did Satō Haruo's devotion to oil painting before his debut as a writer affect his later literary activity? The Post-Impressionists Satō favored expanded the concept of “realism,” which was originally supposed to be objective, to include the state of subjectivity. The resulting confusion became the theme of Satō's first short story “Enkō” (“The Halo”). His masterpiece Den'en no Yū'ustsu also contains excessively visual imagery intended, in accordance with Post-Impressionist theory, to capture the will of an object, creating a conflict with the protagonist's literary sensibility which, it may be argued, structures the work. The conflicts among the sensibilities that different artistic genres require was a theme Satō pursued throughout his life, and originates in his experience as an oil painter at the beginning of his career.

The proletarian writer Murayama Tomoyoshi's first work after his recantation (tenkō) was the novella Byakuya, which depicts the marital relationship between Eiji, a proletarian writer who, like the author, has officially recanted in court and recently returned from prison, and his wife Noriko. After his release, Eiji begins to suspect that Noriko has had physical relations with someone during his absence; in response, Noriko asks for a divorce, and confesses that she has long been in love with their comrade Kimura who, having refused to recant, is still behind bars. By passively listening to her love story, Eiji enters into an imaginary rivalry with Kimura, a man he admires as an ideal revolutionary. I argue that the construction of the text Byakuya allows for two contradictory interpretations of the role of Noriko's story. On the one hand, his wife's love story lets Eiji reconstruct in his imagination the solidarity with a male comrade that the repression inflicted by state power has destroyed. By examining Murayama's presentation of his protagonist's reaction to his wife's love affair, I show that this work can be read as the author's attempt to validate his own recantation. On the other hand, however, the nested narrative of Noriko, a woman who has supported and mediated this homosocial male bonding from the margins of the leftist movement, also works to defamiliarize it. In this paper, I compare the narrative structure of this novella, with its framing device in which Noriko's first-person narrative is nested, to a mirror that reflects left-right images reversed, and assert that this structure facilitates the defamiliarization of the leftist male homosocial continuum. I also give a detailed analysis of Noriko's language, and show how it creates a twisted image of the protagonist's homosocial desire.

During the 1930s, Japanese critics, writers, and scientists all used the phrase “scientific spirit.” Although members of these three communities attached different definitions and connotations to “scientific spirit,” using this phrase seems to have been, for all of them, a strategy for forming a common intellectual foundation. Discussions in which the same phrase was used with a variety of different meanings resulted in a vague new standard which evaluated the authority of “science” according to the level of its “scientific spirit.”

In this paper, I analyze the gūzen bungaku ronsō, a mid-1930s literary controversy that concerned the role of “the haphazard” in literature as a case in point. First, I focus on the debate among critics, writers, and scientists. Then, in order to examine this literary controversy in detail, I discuss its influence, particularly the ways in which the phrase “scientific spirit” was used in this context. By strongly asserting their mutual understanding of the “scientific spirit,” critics, writers, and scientists sought to interlink their world views based on their “scientific” knowledge, leading to their relationship as silent accomplices, which I hope I have revealed in the conclusion.

This paper considers the relationship between the concept of decadence in Darakuron (Shinchō, 1946.04) and the dekadensu (“decadence” written phonetically in the katakana script), advocated by Yasuda Yojūrō during World War II. Even while resisting history and fate, the first-person narrator of Darakuron is enthralled by his memories of the overwhelming “beauty” of aerial bombardment, and the word decadence emerges from the midst of those memories. Sakaguchi's decadence is a concept wrested from conflict with and resistance to the aesthetics of dekandensu as advocated during the war by Yasuda Yojūrō, an aesthetic that found beauty in young men heading to their deaths and naturalized the idea of fate. In this paper, I show that by embracing the possibilities of decadence, the narrator of Darakuron refutes the concepts of fate and beauty that trapped his earlier self. This demonstrates that in Darakuron, Sakaguchi performatively constructs a self that spans both the wartime and postwar periods.

This paper seeks to shed light on Henmi Yō's criticism of poetic expression after the Great East Japan Earthquake as revealed in his poetry collection A Sea of Eyes―to My Dead. I first examine other works that were also published after the earthquake, in order to ascertain that the metaphysics of the cadaver, hidden from view by the spectacle of the earthquake, problematizes the “criminal intent” of the individual by confusing ideological distinctions between the living and the dead. Through my analysis of two poems from Henmi's collection, I show that the poet positively creates a conflict between the cadaver, which is materialized, and language, which resists this materialization, and that the very existence of the cadaver can falsify the poet's own sense of reality. From this arises the question of whether it is even possible to think of one's own responsibility without imagining the dead.