“With Sidewise Crab-Walk Western Writing”: Tradition and Modernity in Shimazaki Tōson and Natsume Sōseki

Abstract

Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey explores the ways in which British Romanticism stimulates the growth of new modes of writing that attempt to bestride the gap between Japanese tradition and Western modernity, by examining how Shelleyan images of the autumnal wind and the sky-lark are used and transformed by Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). Using Marvin Marcus’s concept of “synergy,” Alvey focuses on Tōson’s “To Autumnal Wind” and “The Grass Pillow” from Collection of Seedlings (1897), and Sōseki’s travelogue The Grass Pillow (1906), examining the literary contexts in which Tōson and Sōseki transplanted “horizontal” European literature into the vertically-inscribed Japanese system. The essay demonstrates how Shelleyan poetics were drawn on by both writers to produce new forms of writing that explored the impact of Western modernity on the Japanese consciousness.