The Long Sleep of Belatedness: Nonsynchronism and Modernity in Maruoka Kyūka’s ‘Rippu ban unkuru’ (1886) and Tawfīq Al-Ḥakīm’s Ahl Al-Kahf (1933)

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article juxtaposes a long Japanese poem (Maruoka Kyūka’s 1886 ‘Rippu ban unkuru’) and an Egyptian play (Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm’s 1933 Ahl al-kahf) to examine representations of cultural belatedness and departures from normative temporalities. In these texts, the protagonists have a supernaturally long night of sleep and come to consciousness in what seems to them, on waking, a different world. The protagonists eventually discover that they are out of sync with the recognized, official timeline; dismayed and alienated, their reactions indicate how drastically the world changed while they slept. Both texts allude to contemporary conditions in modernizing Japan and Egypt – representing the distresses of those who were perhaps unwilling to embrace rapid, irreversible Westernization – and are self-conscious of their formal novelty. Kyūka’s text is a ‘new-style poem’, retelling a story by an American author who was then unknown in Japan; al-Ḥakīm’s play is a philosophical drama of a sort that was unprecedented in Arabic literature. Belatedness is thus represented, in each of these texts, from a vehemently neophilic (and pro-modern) perspective.