Modern Japanese Literature Research Articles

Haruki Murakami: A Global Literary Journey from Japan to the World

In a world increasingly shaped by globalization, the migration of literature across borders has become more fluid and pervasive than ever before. This phenomenon extends beyond literature to encompass music, film, and other forms of art, facilitated by advancements in technology that grant simple access to global audiences. Haruki Murakami, one of the most important figures of modern Japanese literature, emerges as one of the prime examples of writers who have transcended national boundaries to earn international acclaim. Understanding Murakami's ascent to prominence requires acknowledging the Westernization of Japanese literature following the Meiji period. This era marked Japan's transition from an isolated feudal society to a modernized nation influenced by Western ideals. The societal shift towards Westernization, driven by aspirations of military and economic strength, altered the reception of Japanese writers in Western literary circles. Murakami's immersion in Western culture, coupled with his experiences living abroad and his deliberate incorporation of Western motifs into his works, distinguishes him from his contemporaries in the Japanese literary scene. While critics may scrutinize his portrayal of Japan and find it lacking authenticity, Murakami's global appeal lies in his ability to capture universal themes of isolation, identity, and existential angst that resonate with readers worldwide. Murakami's journey from a local Japanese author to a global literary icon exemplifies the transformative power of literature in an increasingly interconnected world. By bridging cultural divides and transcending linguistic boundaries, Murakami's works serve as a testament to the enduring impact of storytelling in uniting humanity across the vast tapestry of human experience. In this context, this study aims to discuss Murakami's journey from his origins in the Japanese literary market to his recognition on the global stage.

The Relation Between Natsume Soseki's Chinese Poems and Ancient Chinese Poetry

As an outstanding representative of modern Japanese literature, Natsume Soseki has an important position in the history of modern Japanese literature. He is a world-renowned novelist who has written many excellent novels. However, it is far from enough to study Natsume Soseki's literature only from the aspects of novels. Throughout Natsume Soseki's life, he studied Chinese studies since childhood, has great enthusiasm and interest in Chinese literature, and has a high accomplishment in Chinese literature. However, his outstanding ability in Chinese poetry was covered up by his writing ability in novels, which did not get the attention of the academic circle. Natsume Soseki's Chinese poems are in the same vein as Chinese poems, and he draws on and learns from ancient Chinese poems in the aspects of creation techniques and theme emotions. From the perspective of cultural studies, this paper makes an in-depth study of the relationship between Natsume Soseki's Chinese poetry and ancient Chinese poetry by means of comparative study. On the basis of previous studies, this paper expounds Natsume Soseki's Chinese poetry creation and its sinology origin, analyzes and summarizes the Chinese elements in his Chinese poetry works, in order to explore Natsume Soseki's contribution to the cross-communication field of Chinese poetry between China and Japan.

To Africa

Abstract This article examines how one of modern Japanese literature's inaugural texts envisions Japan's geographical self-image. The focus here is on Ukishiro monogatari (Floating Castle) by Meiji statesman Yano Ryūkei (1851–1931). Ukishiro monogatari tells the story of an adventure undertaken by Japanese men with a shared political objective who are diversely skilled in areas such as military expertise, medicine, geography, and technology. They are so dissatisfied with the delay in Japan's territorial expansion that in 1878 they travel to Southeast Asia as the first step in an ambitious attempt to establish Japanese territory in central Africa. By exploring why and how the crew of the Ukishiro heads to Africa, this article argues that the Ukishiro crew's plans take shape in relation to their drive to eschew Japan's status as an island nation (deislandization) and establish Japan as a continent (pseudocontinent).

The Market Life of Japanese Literature in Postwar America: Knopf, Translation, and the Archives of Cultural Commerce

This article examines the aesthetic and economic forms of judgment that guided the Japanese literature translation program at the American publisher Alfred A. Knopf Inc. in the 1950s—1970s. During these years, the editor Harold Strauss coordinated Knopf’s ambitious translation program that made dozens of recently written Japanese novels available in English to an American audience. This article provides a fresh perspective on Knopf’s well-known Japanese literature translation program by understanding it to be an illuminating case study that reveals how the practical business of cultural commerce mixes aesthetic and economic modes of valuation, producing provocative connections that link what might otherwise seem to be the antagonistic realms of art and the market. Guided by documents held in the Knopf corporate archive, the article shows how the aesthetics of modern Japanese literature and the economics of publishing each encountered the other in the transactional territory of translation.

The Novelty of Nature: Kojima Usui and Hierarchies of Genre in Modern Japanese Literature

Abstract: Kojima Usui's (1873–1948) efforts to craft a Japanese mountain literature ( sangaku bungaku ) present a fascinating case study of the Meiji-period (1868–1912) creation of a national literature that could address the issues faced by individuals in modernizing Japan. Navigating a complex web of nascent modern genres and writing styles, Japan's literary tradition, and international mountain literature, Usui deployed kikōbun (travel writing) to both align himself with and differentiate himself from existing traditions and trends. Usui's idiosyncratic negotiation of traditional and modern provides a fresh look at the intricate innovations that took place in Meiji Japan.

Unnatural Elements in Works of Tawada Yōko and Ogawa Yōko

A woman growing scales which must be removed using skin-care products, or a man whose body disintegrates into dust after he left an elevator where he had spent his whole life. Modern Japanese literature is full of elements that run against our everyday experience such as these and writings of female writers Tawada Yōko and Ogawa Yōko are especially inundated by disconcerting and puzzling dreamlike scenes. What meaning are they trying to convey? What function does their inclusion in the text fulfil? How do they influence structure of their worlds? These questions pose a vexing problem for anyone attempting to analyse many of the works of contemporary Japanese literature as it is not easy to find a suitable theoretical approach to answer them. In this paper through interpretation of two shorter works by both authors E.B.'s Unfulfilled Wish by Ogawa and The Bath by Tawada) using a theoretical framework based on unnatural narratology and fictional world theory I attempt to answer these questions and show the central role these elements fulfil in both world-formation and meaning-formation of the texts. I will also point out how the usage of unnatural elements places both authors firmly into the realm of the ontology-dominated postmodern literature as defined by Brian McHale.

Enpon “Complete Collection of Modern Japanese Literature” and Female Writers

Enpon “Complete Collection of Modern Japanese Literature” and Female Writers

Letter Troubles: Rereading Futon in Conversation with Japan’s Epistolary Discourse

Scholarship on letters in modern Japanese literature typically describes their discursive transformation from objects of practical import to texts of literary significance in the late Meiji 30s and 40s, a transformation contemporaneous to and engendered by the sudden explosion of interest in autobiographical literary texts. Such an approach, however, unintentionally denigrates the complexity of late-Meiji era fiction’s negotiation with the epistolary discourse that flourished in this era. Seeking a broader engagement with this hitherto underexamined discourse, I take Tayama Katai’s (1872–1930) famous I-novel, The Quilt (1907), as a test case, arguing that the letters embedded there engage with the contemporary conversation on letters on four levels: content, linguistic style, subjectivity, and hermeneutics. I argue that, far from reaffirming the overlap between letters and literature, Katai’s text evinces a consistently oppositional stance toward contemporary epistolary dogma, problematizing, interrogating, and subverting it at every turn. I conclude by proposing that this defiant stance toward typical conceptualizations of the letter is common to other I-novels of the period, suggesting that the I-novel was only born through a conspicuous disavowal of the letter form.

Queer Subjects in Modern Japanese Literature: Male Love, Intimacy, and Erotics, 1886–2014 ed. by Stephen D. Miller

Reviewed by: Queer Subjects in Modern Japanese Literature: Male Love, Intimacy, and Erotics, 1886–2014 ed. by Stephen D. Miller Erik R. Lofgren Queer Subjects in Modern Japanese Literature: Male Love, Intimacy, and Erotics, 1886–2014 ED. STEPHEN D. MILLER Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press. 2022. 474 pages. STEPHEN D. MILLER has assembled an engaging collection of fourteen short stories, numerous poems in varied forms, and two essays spanning the better part of the modern and contemporary eras (1868–present) that explore and extend our understanding of an important dimension of Japanese literature. The works are arranged in a very rough chronological order and split pretty evenly between pre- and post–World War II material. Miller has gathered a broad range of translators, many of whom are noted in this field, which gives the anthology a wonderfully eclectic feel. This helps ensure that the many authors—not all of whom are male, it should be noted—represented in this collection have palpably different voices in English, a polyphony that is one of the many pleasures of this wide-ranging work. Although it is not essential to do so, readers would be well served to read Miller's informative introduction prior to delving into the meat of this anthology. First, it explores the limitations and advantages of the contested term "queer" used in the title. The term certainly refers to "topics and people, characterized [End Page 92] by peculiarity, eccentricity, uncanniness, nonconformity, subversiveness" but also to "a pleasing and even necessary variation upon pattern." Miller seeks to encompass and enfranchise this diversity while also suggesting the difficulty inherent in providing a simplistic categorization for the works included here. Second, the introduction provides a cogent historical summary of male-male love in Japanese literature from the ninth century until the modern day, framing that undergirds the translations. This basic contextualization is supplemented by the short biography and introduction found at the beginning of each chapter, which provide context for the text to follow. In and of themselves, these briefs make for engaging reading, providing a variegated bird's-eye view of the authors and literature in Queer Subjects. It is impossible, in this limited space, to comment on each of the pieces comprising this robust sampling of male intimacy, which is a shame as many deserve a moment in the spotlight. Suffice it to say that the variation ensures that there will be something for everyone, but I will mention two in particular. "Is This Love" (1909), by Yi Kwangsu, is notable for its intersection with Japan's colonial aspirations and the "heterolingual writing" it spawned. "Worse for Love" (1960), written by Mishima Yukio under the pseudonym Sakakiyama Tamotsu, is a harrowing literary dry run for "Patriotism" written later that year. Whether you are looking for literature to accompany a morning cup of coffee, an academic seeking a text for a course on sexuality, or desire an introduction to modern Japanese literature that eschews most of the "canonical" authors, Queer Subjects should be on your shortlist of possibilities. Erik R. Lofgren Bucknell University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Reframing Modern Japanese Literature: Translation and Science Fiction in Meiji-Era Japan

Reframing Modern Japanese Literature: Translation and Science Fiction in Meiji-Era Japan

A Note on Digital Humanities Research on the Reception of Matsuo Bashō in Modern Japan ：Crossing Borders between Human Reading and Machine Reading

In this essay, I provided a brief report and perspective on digital humanities research related to the study of modern Japanese literature. First, I reviewed the recent increase in the availability of digital full-text databases, including Aozora Bunko, the National Diet Library’s Next Digital Library, Maruzen eBook Library, and Google Books. Next, as an example of digital humanities-based literary studies using the Next Digital Library, I attempted to study the reception of Matsuo Bashō between 1868 and 1945. Specifically, I searched the Next Digital Library—which currently has about 280,000 modern books available for full-text search—for Bashō’s <i>haiku</i> and found over a thousand works by him, although the total number differs depending on the counting method. I researched the <i>haikus</i> individually for the full-text data in books published between 1868 and 1945, using the computer language Python to automate the search and retrieve the results. Consequently, the top 30 most frequently cited works were identified. For the top five, the number of mentions by year of publication was also investigated. Results between the human- and computer-based reception studies were compared, and the strengths and weaknesses in understanding the context were highlighted. As for future prospects, I discussed the importance of human-computer collaboration, the necessity for combining large-scale full-text data sets with other databases, and the possibilities for structuring text using TEI and other methods.

Student-centered, “embodied inter-referencing” as antiracist and anticolonial pedagogy

This article reflects on an experimental pedagogical approach I developed in aJapanese literature course that examines sex, gender, and sexuality in response toinstitutional and epistemic racism that exist in university in Canada and in the specificcontext of the COVID-19 pandemic when the number of anti-Asian hate crimes rose atan enormous rate in the city where my university is situated. Building on the intellectualmovements of “Asia as method” and “diaspora as method” my project attempts tomove beyond the convention of studying Asian culture by referencing western theory,knowledge, and experience. More specifically, I developed an assignment called Peer-Engaged Embodied Reflection Journal where students discuss what they learned fromJapanese literature by referencing their own, local experiences and engage in peerinteractions in small groups. In this article, I discuss the effectiveness of mypedagogical approach based on the classroom study conducted in the fall of 2020 andthe spring of 2021, semi-structured interviews with teaching assistants (TAs), and myown teaching experience. Based on my qualitative analysis of student engagementwith the assignment as well as TAs’ and my grading experiences, I conclude thatrecentring student experience and peer engagement produces meaningful sites fordecolonial and antiracist pedagogy while teaching Japanese modern literature in aCanadian institutional context.

Angela Carter and Modern Japanese Fiction: Her Reencounter with Western Literary Legacies

Abstract This paper discusses the echo of modern Japanese literature in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), which was written in Tokyo and Chiba, paying particular attention to four of the most influential authors in this intertextual novel: Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima. Significantly, as well as being innovators of Japanese fiction, these writers were also great reinterpreters of Western literary legacies, who constructed their own original styles by absorbing both Japanese and non-Japanese literary traditions. The article, therefore, explores how Carter reencountered Western literary legacies through reading modern Japanese literature in order to clarify her feminist and political responses to the reinterpretation of the European and American canon by authors from the Far East.

보은(報恩) 모티브의 공유와 변이

This paper is a comparative study of Giketsukyouketsu and The Prosecutorand the Female Teacher. Giketsukyouketsu is the work of Izumi Kyoka, oneof the representative writers of modern Japanese literature. The Prosecutorand the Female Teacher is the work of Choon-kwang Kim, one of therepresentative theater writers of Korea during the colonial period. In themeantime, The Prosecutor and the Female Teacher has been known as KimChoon-kwang's complete creation. However, in this paper, the fact that thiswork is an adaptation was proved using evidence. The Prosecutor and theFemale Teacher is highly likely to be a rewritten work based onGiketsukyouketsu.

Masks of the Author in Dazai Osamu’s Fiction

The present article reexamines the work of Japanese modern writer Dazai Osamu (1909-1948)2 in an attempt to revisit its conventional placement within the tradition of the modern Japanese literary category of the shishōsetsu (approximately, I-novel). By briefly exploring the very elements and definitions of the category itself, as well as Dazai’s literary evolution, the article endeavors to understand what led to the works of his final years life and to the change in narrative techniques that makes those works Dazai’s best writings and some of the most accomplished in modern Japanese literature. KEYWORDS: Dazai Osamu, Authenticity, Author-Function, Michel Foucault, Modern Japanese Fiction, Shishōsetsu

Knowledge as Play: Comics by Japanese Modern Literature

In the context of Japanese cultural postmodernism, the phenomenon of resuming literary masterpieces in comic book form appears as a juxtaposition with a specific purpose, resulting in a hybrid form which we would regard as komiXLit. As part of a specific way of knowledge, we interpret komiXLit as an alternative model whose characteristic is that of the combination of two apparently contradicting terms: the “high” literature and the manga pop culture publication, a cultural move placed by the Japanese publishing houses under the credo “understanding literature through manga”. Using the illustrative example provided by the masterpiece authored by Yasunari Kawabata Snow Country (1935-1937/ 1948) and its manga version (2010), with drawings by Sakuko Utsugi, the present endeavour proposes a reading in which the komiXLit version is interpreted as an architectonic structure inspired by the former, in an attempt to identify the dominants of the textual poetics. We propose that the term komiXLit designate the cultural and social phenomenon of resuming the masterpieces of the Japanese literature in manga (comics) versions, as a self-sustainable category within the genre, meant to complete the already existing ones: story manga‚ dramatic pictures, graphic novels, boys’comics, girls’comics, men’s comics, ladies’ comics.

A Study on Japanese Settlers’ Experiences and Memories of Colonial Korea

July 2020 this research team has been conducting joint research with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea, and is now in its second year of work. The team is composed of researchers from the fields of modern and contemporary Japanese history, modern and contemporary Korean history, modern Japanese literature, and Japanese political science, and as a result it is ideally positioned to engage in multidisciplinary research. In relation to Korea-Japan relations such research is vital, because after the Second World War Japanese society pursued the goals of forming both a ‘cultural state’ and a ‘peace state’ as a result of criticism of prewar militarism. These tendencies began to exert influence on the practical politics of the period from 1945 to the 1960s, when the study of Japanese and other colonialism began in earnest. The protagonists who investigated the issues of the responsibility for the war and of colonial rule were intellectuals and cultural figures who filled the void in the study of colonial history in the 1950s.research team is focused on making an academic and social contribution that can help to transcend the historical conflicts in Korea-Japan relations and the historical absence of a regime of peace in East Asia. It does so by examining the various circuits of colonial experience and memory which came to the fore in Japanese society after the defeat in the World War 2 and the return of the Japanese settlers to Korea.

The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age by Hoyt Long

Reviewed by: The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age by Hoyt Long Steven Ridgely (bio) The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age. By Hoyt Long. Columbia University Press, 2021. 368 pages. $95.00, cloth; $30.00, paper; $29.99, E-book. I suspect most of us working on modern Japan have, at some point, stared long and hard at Natsume Sōseki's fan-shaped F-F-F-F-F-F tapered grid from Bungakuron, with its demarcations of minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, and centuries and concluded that it would take centuries of our own emotional response (f) attending to various "impressions or ideas at the focal point of consciousness" (F) to figure out what on earth he really [End Page 471] meant by "F+f" or how that is supposed to help us understand how literature operates within a social and historical system. As useful as it is to have key sections of Sōseki's "theory of literature" available in English (thank you Atsuko Ueda, Joe Murphy, Michael Bourdaghs), perhaps I am not alone in my gratitude that Japan's most revered modern writer took the jeers of his students to heart and quit his job as a professor to write novels full time until his untimely death (at age 49!—Setouchi Jakuchō, who passed recently, lived more than twice as long). Hoyt Long mobilizes our various frustrations with digital humanities to approach Sōseki's relationship to quantifiable data as a launching point in his fascinating study on how to read the relationship between modern Japanese literature and the haunting rise of quantification as its context. In short, we might understand this as a claim that our current big data and moneyball moment did not arise with the Internet but is woven into a process coextensive with modernity itself, so if we want to understand literature (perhaps as the tip, or a mirroring of the tip, of the information economy's spear) to be operating in a relational system with the dominant logic of a social formation, then we stand to gain by tracking tension between literature and information in the texts and paratexts of literary production. All of this is combined in Long's work with various experiments with a digital humanities (DH) approach to answering our questions about literature's relationship to modern Japanese social structure through the use of quantifiable data and computation. It is important to note that Long maintains at least as much skepticism about the efficacy and pitfalls of this approach as most critics of DH, and that a good deal of the impetus driving this approach is coming from attempting to continue and extend the work not so much of Franco Moretti but of Raymond Williams, who sought to shore up cultural critique with solid empirical data but was frustrated by the lack of available information at sufficient scale to do so. While we now have the data to investigate many questions Williams wanted to pursue, the remaining barrier might be our lingering attachment to various critiques of science intruding on the turf of the humanities, or a caricatured depiction of poststructuralism as relativist (rather than relational). Long's book, The Value in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age, consists of seven chapters organized around the following topics: Uncertainty in Numbers, Facts and Difference, Archive and Sample, Genre and Repetition, Influence and Judgment, Discourse and Character, and Difference in Numbers. This is a study as much about "what we talk about when we talk about numbers" as it is about using quantitative methods to analyze or test assumptions about modern Japanese literature, as seen when Long points out the "quantitative fiction" of Sōseki's table charting out romantic versus realist fiction on a scale of thematic and expressive intensities with numerical values he assigns from 50 to 120 (p. 30). [End Page 472] Long's project is also a survey of twentieth-century efforts within Japan to utilize quantitative methods to analyze literary language, tracing these studies back to work by Hatano Kanji in the 1930s, Nakamura Akira in the 1950s, Yasumoto Biten and...

서간문을 통해서 본 소세키(漱石)와 시키(子規)의 교류에 관한 고찰

This paper examined the life and death of Shiki and Soseki, as well as their friendship and passion for literature over 13 years. Soseki and Shiki, who recognized each other’s literary talents as classmates during their preliminary period at Tokyo University, exchanged Haiku corrections and various literary reviews through a letter. The two, who both liked Rakugo and writing letters, were together for the rest of their lives-enough to share their daily lives through letters.<BR> The relationship, which began at the age of 22, had them spending a short time together until the age of 35, leaving a great mark on modern Japanese literature and enjoying an era as literary companions. Shiki lived a short life of 35 years, but he launched a Haiku innovation movement to instill new energy into the modern Haiku literary circle. Soseki has been called Daemunho enough and has been also called the Shakespeare of Japan for writing novels steadily for 12 years, and is still loved by several citizens as a national writer.<BR> Soseki and Shiki fought against long-standing diseases and always crossed the boundary between life and death, but reformed literature and left a gem-like article until death due to their passion for literature. Even after a long time, their great achievement remains unforgettable with the epistle they left, which is still loved by many people.

서간문을 통해서 본 소세키(漱石)와 시키(子規)의 교류에 관한 고찰

This paper examined the life and death of Shiki and Soseki, as well as their friendship and passion for literature over 13 years. Soseki and Shiki, who recognized each other’s literary talents as classmates during their preliminary period at Tokyo University, exchanged Haiku corrections and various literary reviews through a letter. The two, who both liked Rakugo and writing letters, were together for the rest of their lives-enough to share their daily lives through letters.<BR> The relationship, which began at the age of 22, had them spending a short time together until the age of 35, leaving a great mark on modern Japanese literature and enjoying an era as literary companions. Shiki lived a short life of 35 years, but he launched a Haiku innovation movement to instill new energy into the modern Haiku literary circle. Soseki has been called Daemunho enough and has been also called the Shakespeare of Japan for writing novels steadily for 12 years, and is still loved by several citizens as a national writer.<BR> Soseki and Shiki fought against long-standing diseases and always crossed the boundary between life and death, but reformed literature and left a gem-like article until death due to their passion for literature. Even after a long time, their great achievement remains unforgettable with the epistle they left, which is still loved by many people.