Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Andre Haag (bio) This special literary section of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society presents new English translations of short fiction by two border-crossing writers from the era of the Great Japanese Empire who, by sheer coincidence, shared the same Sinitic characters in their surnames: the acclaimed Nakajima Atsushi (中島敦, 1909–42) and the largely-forgotten Nakashima Naoto (中島直人, 1904–40). Products of a time of imperial expansion and colonial migration who belonged to roughly the same generation, both Nakajima and Nakashima experienced their formative years in spaces outside the confines of the insular Japanese naichi, or home islands. Nakajima Atsushi spent his teens in colonized Korea, then later served with the administration of Japan's South Seas Mandate in Micronesia. Nakashima Naoto was born to a family of settlers in the Territory of Hawaii, and lived on the island of Oahu until about the age of 13. Both men would ultimately make the return trip to the metropole, where they would receive elite higher educations and initiate writing careers that drew on those peripheral experiences as one inspiration for their creative contributions to imperial literary production. In this sense, Nakajima Atsushi and Nakashima Naoto might be regarded as representative practitioners of gaichi no Nihongo bungaku, or the Japanophone literature of the "Outer Lands," a category recently re-envisioned by comparative literature scholar Nishi Masahiko. Given that the term "gaichi," in distinction to the naichi center, generally referred to imperial territories subject to formal or informal Japanese control and often targeted for settlement, the Japanophone literature of the gaichi could be regarded as a euphemism for Japanese colonial literature. Nishi Masahiko, however, proposes understanding it as a Japanophone literature that arises out of "relations of unremitting contact and adjacency between speakers or users of the Japanese language and non-Japanese languages."1 Redefined expansively in this fashion, the category can encompass not only novels and poetry born of Japan's colonial empire in Taiwan, Korea, [End Page 191] and northeast China, but also literary works that inscribed experiences and voices from sites of Japanese overseas migration like Brazil or Hawaii, which while not formally Japanese imperial territories nevertheless served as major destinations for Japanese diasporic movements in the early twentieth century. The creative output of Nakajima Atsushi and Nakashima Naoto collectively captures the multiple directionalities of an expansive body of Japanophone literature embroiled in the dynamics that Eichiirō Azuma christens Japan's "borderless settler colonialism," to underscore the inseparable links between movements within the formal empire and migrations to and from territories dominated by other empires.2 As Azuma has shown, the migratory motions of settlers who shuttled back and forth between locations in the Americas and Hawaii and the naichi, or re-migrated from U.S. territories to Japan's Asia-Pacific spheres of influence and formal colonies, brought back experiences and knowledge that informed and expanded both colonial policies and discourses at the center. The distinctive cases of Nakajima and Nakashima suggest how similar migratory flows shaped imperial cultural production by broadening the horizons of Japanese-language literature in the 1930s and '40s, when the rise of "gaichi" no Nihongo bungaku became particularly pronounced. Of the two border-crossing writers, Nakajima Atsushi is undoubtedly the better known and more extensively studied.3 Despite a very short period of productivity—his major literary debut as a novelist came in 1942, the same year that his life was cut short by illness—Nakajima has secured a place in the canon of modern Japanese literature, thanks in no small part to "The Moon over the Mountain" (Sangetsuki), a celebrated short story often included in postwar Japanese language textbooks. While there is an abundance of scholarship on Nakajima Atsushi in Japanese, a great deal of his fiction has yet to appear in English translation. To remedy that, this section offers two stories by Nakajima that suggest something of the writer's orientation and diversity. "The Curse of Letters" (Mojika, 1942), translated by Nicholas Lambrecht, was one of Nakajima's "ancient tales" (kotan), a body of stories set in the distant past in locales outside of Japan—most often China. "The Curse of Letters" ranges far outside of the scope of modern...