Anxieties of Authorship, Critique of Readership: Mishima Yukio’s Modern Noh Play Genji kuyō

Mishima Yukio's dramatic suicide half a century ago ensured that his name would forever be associated with a certain fanatic imperialism, and largely fulfilled his own wish that he would die as a military man. And yet, he was until the end foremost a literary artist, concerned with the critical reception of his written works and preoccupied with his lasting reputation as an author. This paper examines Mishima’s portrayal of the celebrity writer, as well as the potentials and limitations of literature as presented in his oft-neglected modern noh play Genji kuyō (Devotional offering for Genji, 1962). It positions the play within the long history of prayers for Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, ca. 1008) that began in the twelfth century in response to the perceived ambiguous morality of the author Murasaki Shikibu (d. ca. 1014). Mishima's Genji kuyō provides a pointed criticism of readers, as well as anxieties regarding a writer's life and literary recognition. Though Mishima himself famously disowned it after its initial publication, Genji kuyō offers critical insights regarding the writing and reading of literature.

Contributors

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Tense Alternation in Japanese Literature: Translating Free Indirect Discourse and Focalization in Kashimada Maki’s Meido meguri

This paper examines the phenomenon of tense alternation in Japanese literary narrative, making specific reference to Kashimada Maki’s (鹿島田 真希) novella Meido meguri (冥途めぐり Touring the Land of the Dead, 2012) as a case study. It argues that tense alternation in sentence‑final predicative verbs should be regarded a stylistic technique that serves as an indicator of free indirect discourse and of focalization through a central character, and that it moreover establishes an opposition between external narration and internal focalization. It then illustrates how this dynamic is employed in Meido Meguri to create a contrast between a mode suggesting narrative distance and another suggesting mental interiority. This paper thus highlights a significant linguistic difference in the construction of free indirect discourse in Japanese and English narratives.

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Enduring Postwar: Yasuoka Shōtarō and Literary Memory in Japan

A review of Kendall Heitzman's book, Enduring Postwar: Yasuoka Shōtarō and Literary Memory in Japan.

Love in the Time of Corona: Heterosexual Romance, Space, and Society in Japanese Fiction on COVID-19

I will examine representations of heterosexual romance in Japanese pandemic fiction published during COVID-19, so as to scrutinize the employment of pandemic in the discussion of social issues and dynamics between the public and private interests. Ueda Takahiro uses the protagonist’s love dilemma to question the postmodern condition, where the digital attempts to replace everything, disturb the master narratives, and transform our society. Tsukui Itsuki’s story has a rather optimistic view of technological responses to the pandemic. In his work, the protagonist’s romantic pursuit realizes individual development as well as civil society building. Kanehara Hitomi incorporates the element of pandemic in the representations of anti-sociability and precarity of youths in post-bubble Japan. Furthermore, the element of pandemic enriches the depictions of anxieties and issues of contemporary Japanese society from before the emergence of COVID-19: techno-induced postmodern crisis, ideological disputes, and socio-economic stagnation. Keywords: COVID-19, pandemic, heterosexuality, reproduction, space, science fiction, Kanehara Hitomi

The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media

A tension runs through Nathan Shockey’s well-researched book of essays on the topic of the medial transition to print culture; it is this: does the value of print material lie within its semantic content or within its market value? Although at several points the book refers to this as a dialectic as though each side of the tension were in equal balance, ultimately Shockey is more concerned with the latter notion of books and print as media objects in the world rather than as conveyors of meaning. This is evidenced by the preponderance of instances in which he highlights that reading does not matter and where writing (in the sense of the noun not the gerund) does or simply is matter.

Unbinding The Pillow Book: The Many Lives of a Japanese Classic

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