Decadence and Japan

In the second half of the nineteenth century, literary decadence developed in parallel with japonisme, the taste for Japanese art and culture that seized Western countries following Japan’s opening to foreign trade. This article starts with an analysis of how the intertwining of japonisme and art for art’s sake pioneered by visual artists influenced writers associated with decadence, such as Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde. The evolving relationship between decadence and japonisme assumed a distinctive character in the work of Lafcadio Hearn, who lived in Japan all through the 1890s and wrote a series of influential books about the country. The article closes with an account of how ideas of decadence traveled back to Japan. Yōshū Chikanobu’s color prints reverse the orientalist gaze of Western artists by documenting a Japanese fascination with European culture that traditionalists viewed as a symptom of decadence. As Japanese literature opened itself to cosmopolitan influences, key writers such as Natsume Sōseki, Tanizaki Junichirō, and Mishima Yukio borrowed from Western literatures to provide ambivalent depictions of Japan’s social and cultural changes.

A Fictional Commons

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For Sōseki, literature was a means for thinking through—and beyond—private property. Bourdaghs puts Sōseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentarō, author of Japan’s first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kōjin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Sōseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.

Feline Affinities Between E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr and Natsume Sōseki’s I Am a Cat

Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) was an eclectic writer and voracious reader during a historical period when western literary influence flourished in Japan. This article hypothesizes that the German novel, The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1819-1821), by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), is as strong a formative influence in terms of structure and satirical perspective on Sōseki’s novel, I Am a Cat (1905-1907), as other satiric contenders. It pursues this argument by examining correlations between these two polyphonic novels which mix many registers and discourses in a similar way. Biographical, historical and literary analysis underpins this comparison.

I Am a Cat

This English version of 吾輩は猫である (Wagahai-wa neko de aru: I Am a Cat), Chapters I and II, written by Natsume Sōseki, pseudonym of Natsume Kinnosuke (1867–1916), and translated by Kan-ichi Ando (1878-1924), was published by Hattori Shoten, Tokyo, in 1906. It begins: "I am a cat; but as yet I have no name." Its sardonic feline narrator describes his origins, his settlement in the household of a Meiji teacher-intellectual, and the goings-on and conversations among the cats and humans about the neighborhood. Of the men he concludes: "They are miserable creatures in the eyes of a cat. Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki studied literature in England and became professor at Tokyo Imperial University. The success of his stories, beginning with "I Am a Cat," launched a successful career that produced 22 novels, including Botchan, Kokoro, and Light and Darkness.