Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how two prominent authors working in very different moments in modern Japan—Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) and Murata Sayaka (b. 1979)—have made tactical use of sound in selected works. It considers the utility of sound in writing, and what its deployment in text makes possible.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars insist that storytelling—broadly conceived—is is deeply implicated in the generation of social, cultural, and political life (Jackon 2002; Polletta 2006). Authors like Natsume Sōseki recognized this world-producing promise in literature, too, decades before the so-called “storytelling turn” (Fernandes 2017) of the 1960s and beyond. Sōseki saw literature as a site where the contours of different possibilities for social and economic life could be sketched out and different relations articulated, a project that required connecting author and reader, text and everyday life. (Bourdaghs 2021) But realizing this promise is easier said than done. What tactics do authors deploy in channeling text beyond its own limitations, freeing it from the confines of a page that is always already at arm’s length and splicing into the storytelling that animates everyday life? In this paper, I build on recent work advocating for multisensorial readings of modern Japanese literature (Innami 2021; Aalgaard 2019) and argue for the centrality of sound as one key mechanism by which the literary can be made to infiltrate the everyday, thereby opening avenues to realizing the alternative possibilities that Sōseki recognized more than a century ago. I explore how two prominent authors working in very different moments in modern Japan—Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) and Murata Sayaka (b. 1979)—have made tactical use of sound in selected works (Sanshirō [1908] and Convenience Store Woman [2006], respectively), tapping and deploying it in ways that help position the reader “in harmony” (Natsume 2009) with the storytelling priorities of the author and force a confrontation with the questions that the author wishes to address. I also show how the specific types of sound deployed by these authors—their sonic resonances, their contexts—help lay the groundwork for the re-imaginative critiques of modernity that each were/are interested in developing. By considering two authors who occupy opposing ends of an historical arc that encompasses much of modern Japanese literature itself, this paper proposes anchorpoints for the development of further sonic readings of textual storytelling in modern Japan—in other words, for listening to modern Japanese literature.

Paper short abstract:

By taking up Ōoka's Fires on the Plain, I will explore the fundamental relationship between memory, writing, and trauma. My aim is to open a dialogue with studies that focus on traumatic events, as they tend to assume a direct causal link between the original event and its subsequent expression.

Paper long abstract:

For the last several decades, literary studies have taken up “trauma” as one of the main topics of exploration. Typically, such studies examine how traumatic events—in Japan’s case, the Great Kanto Earthquake, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, or the 3.11 Fukushima disaster—affected or reshaped artistic expression. As valuable as this scholarly trend has been, I wish to step back and reexamine this notion of trauma from the more fundamental perspective of memory. Memory, I contend, does not simply allow for a direct causal link to be drawn between the traumatic event and its subsequent expression.

I wish to explore this issue by focusing on the quintessentially “traumatic” work of literature, Ōoka Shōhei’s Nobi (Fires on the Plain, 1952). While previous scholarship has assumed that the narrator/protagonist Tamura is driven to insanity because of his experience in the Philipines (e.g., cannibalism, his own killing of a Filipino woman, etc.), I argue that Ōoka actively questions the causal link between the original traumatic experience and subsequent psychological trauma. The novel suggests that it is only through repetition (both of recollecting and writing the event) that the protagonist arrives at a state of madness through which trauma is expressed.

Ultimately, my objective is not to offer a rereading of Ōoka’s classic, but to more rigorously explore the fundamental relationship between memory, writing, and trauma. I wish to open a dialogue with studies that posit the traumatic event as the originary point of expression, designating memory as a simple rememberance of the event. As honorable as such gesture is, it reduces memory to the level of consciousness. Memory and hence trauma haunts and returns regardless of one’s willngness to remember. To further the study of trauma, it is vital that we unpack the complex relationship between the event and its repetition.

Paper short abstract:

I propose a distinction between literature and the literary to consider how something literary echoes across popular anime forms in contemporary Japan, looking at three case studies where the literary begins with contribute to an emerging global vernacular.

Paper long abstract:

In his account of the emerging art of cinema, Sergei Eisenstein drew a distinction between the cinematic and cinema. Cinema for him was studios, actors, cameras, and directors, while the cinematic involved a quality or sensation that reverberated across painting, poetry, theatre, novels, which filmmaking was able to condense and localize. Similarly, I wish to introduce a distinction between literature and the literary, to take seriously the idea that the literary may not be confined to the realm of what we commonly take to be literature. Literature, then, would not be taken as the model for the literary, but as a limit-case. Literature in Japan today presents almost an inverse image of cinema in Eisenstein’s day: Japanese literature seems so settled in its modern forms and appraisals, so institutionalized in its legacy, and at the same time, something literary echoes emergently across popular media forms, such as light novels, visual novels, and fan fiction, and in a host of manga, anime, games, and fictions featuring literary figures, not to mention the dizzying variety of modes of literary adaptation.

I propose to trace the contours of the literary emerging in popular media in contemporary Japan. Because it would be impossible to grapple with all of them, I turn to examples in which Japanese animation plays an integral role. One line of inquiry centres on two recent anime versions of Heike monogatari: Yamada Naoko’s series, and Yuasa Masaaki’s film of Furukawa Hideo’s Inu Oh, which imagines an untold chapter of the Heike tales. A second line of inquiry addresses the visions of canonical novels by Dazai Osamu and Natsume Sōseki. A final line focuses on the reincarnation of literary figures in animated worlds. Across these lines of inquiry, anime offers a tactical frame of reference. Anime often functions as the other limit-case for the literary, where dispersion and non-localization combine with modes of energetic superposition. This is also where the literary finds itself enmeshed with the emergence of Japan’s global vernacular.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores alternative possibilities for rethinking Japanese literature as world literature in ways that go beyond the forms of 'world' that are legacies of capitalism and imperialism, focusing on the work of three important writers: Natsume Sōseki, Hotta Yoshie, and Tsushima Yūko.

Paper long abstract:

There have been a number of productive attempts to break through the problematic pattern of national literature studies by resituating Japanese literature as a world literature, one whose domain exceeds the boundaries of the nation-state of Japan. These include the attempt to rethink the object of study as Japanese-language literature (Nihongo bungaku) as well as various attempts to resituate Japanese literature as a world literature, whether as part of a transregional Asian literature or as a participant in the global circulation of various literary forms. These important and productive innovations, however, are often marked by problematic assumptions about what constitutes a world, presuming as givens forms of global systems that derive from the logics of capitalism and imperialism. This paper explores a series of alternative possibilities for rethinking Japanese literature as world literature based on the work of three important Japanese writers, each of whom addressed the problematic assumptions of world literature by proposing new, critical conceptualizations of the world. Natsume Sōseki rejected existing definitions of literature and proposed a new definition of the category of literature as one universal mode of cognitive experience—a definition that resituated the category of ‘world’ into a phenomenological mode that we might call ‘worlding.’ Hotta Yoshie, the primary Japanese participant in the Cold War-era Afro-Asian Writers Conferences associated with the decolonizing and nonaligned Bandung Movement, confronted the imperialist and capitalist dimensions of the existing world order in a radical attempt to think of Japan as participating in an emergent and future-oriented Third World literature. Tsushima Yūko in the early 21st century likewise sought a way out from existing conceptualizations of world literature by turning to indigenous forms of knowledge which provided an alternative mode of knowing the world around us—as well as a framework for grappling with the Anthropocene and its limited and limiting figuration of our world.