Paper short abstract:

The paper explores Takami Jun's 1935 novel Kokyū wasureubeki (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot) and its formal inventions as symptoms of the aporias of tenkō and their effects on the structures of narrativity, subjectivity and psychic temporality.

Paper long abstract:

In a seminal study the critic Honda Shūgo referred to Takami Jun’s Akutagawa-prize shortlisted novel Kokyū wasureubeki (Let Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, 1935) as one of the high peaks of tenkō literature. Most tenkō writing tends to conform to the rhetorical structures of the shishōsetsu (I-novel), narrating the author’s own experiences in a thinly disguised autobiographical form. Takami’s work, however, features multiple points of view, distortions of linear temporality and an eccentric narrator who openly manipulates the narrative and interferes with his characters. Despite those, critical discourse has insisted on treating it as a shishōsetsu, either ignoring its idiosyncratic formal structures or bringing in extra-textual – biographical – explanations for them.

Rather that rely on the organic, self-evident unity between author and writing, my reading aims to push to the foreground other, less obvious and less naturalized convergences between the text and the larger material and discursive contexts around it. The unravelling of linear plot and the deconstruction of narrative authority performed by the text betray a concern with broader issues of representation and subjectivity. I argue that the formal structures of the work are symptomatic of the historical aporias of the 1930s. To grasp their meanings, we need to situate the text in its field of discourse, namely the crisis of subjectivity brought on by tenkō and the reactionary politics of representation embraced by the so-called cultural revival (bungei fukkō).