Introduction

Abstract

Decadence is a concept with a historical presence in many cultures. It designates a given historical moment as a phase of decay vis-à-vis an irretrievable past as the golden age. This phase is permeated by sensibilities tinged with both nostalgia and pessimism. Nonetheless, this moment of degeneration is part of the cycle of history that conceives of a possibility of renewal. This perspective accords with the fact that history is not a mimetic representation of social or cultural events, but in fact a reflection of human sensibilities upon a certain historical moment. Likewise, decadence is not an objective fact of history but an epistemological device that envisions the phase of decay vis-à-vis previous epochs up to the present. “Decadence,” a Latin loanword entered the Japanese literary vocabulary around 1905, immediately after being imported from the French word décadent.1 As a neologism, the term was spelled out “dekadansu” in katakana and gradually incorporated into literary discourse as well as other popular art forms. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the Japanese had not conceived of the sensibilities before being designated by the Latin word. Indigenous nouns describing sensibilities roughly equal to “decadence” existed prior to the early twentieth century. They still exist in written form, and also, though to a lesser extent, in spoken form. These words and phrases include 駘蕩 (taitō), 退厂 (taihai), 遊蕩 (yūtō), 放蕩 (hōto), and 「落 (daraku), which respectively denote “playful indulgence,” “delinquency,” and “downfall.”KeywordsJapanese LiteraturePhenomenal WorldCollective SocietyLiterary DiscourseLiterary StyleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.