Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I take a step away from historically normalized "I-novel" style of reading to focus on how, in the three of his most important novels, his novelistic language zeroes in on certain "omens," or "portents," that seem to emerge from archaic layers of the Japanese language.

Paper long abstract:

The term "I-novel" [watakushi shōsetsu] is said to have appeared in print for the first time in September of 1920, in Uno Kōji's novel Amaki yo no hanashi, published in the magazine Chūō Kōron. Originally meant to critique and contest the state of the modern Japanese novel, by the late Taisho and early Shōwa period the term "I-novel" had become normalized as its meaning shifted to designate a uniquely Japanese genre now understood to dominate the main stream of Japanese literary history from the late Meiji period on.

Shiga Naoya's novels have acquired their canonical status through repeated critical interpretations informed by "I-Novel"-style reading protocols. And yet, considering just the publication dates of three of his most important novels : Kōjinbutsu no fūfu and Wakai (1917) and Takibi (April, 1920), it is problematic to read them exclusively as "I-novels" that are reflective of the author's own experiences, as works that record the impressions, sensibility, and mental state of the author via a description of his or her immediate experiences and surroundings.

In this presentation, I take a step away from this "I-novel" style of reading to focus on how, in these three Shiga texts, his novelistic language zeroes in on certain "omens," or "portents," that seem to emerge from archaic layers of the Japanese language. These layers subtend and connect each of Shiga's works to the others, and together allow us to glimpse a very different version of Shiga's received authorial image. Rather than the "purest" of novelists focused only on the most mundane aspects of everyday life, my rereading of "Koujinbutsu no Fufu", "Takibi", and "Wakai", shows how the so-called God of Novels [shōsetsu no kamisama ] gave us glimpses of the divine in daily life.