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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the visual and audio representations in Tanizaki Junichirō's "Longing for Mother" (1919). The story unveils the influence of silent film on Tanizaki's literary writing. It also shows the ambiguity of Japanese modernity.

Paper long abstract:

"Longing for Mother" is told in a dream narrative by a middle-aged Japanese man who, in his dream, becomes his younger self and goes on a phantasmagorical journey looking for his deceased mother. The story mixes the protagonist's childhood memories with Tanizaki Junichirō's (1886-1965) aestheticism of the vernacular culture of the Edo period (1603-1868). It is also known for its famous depiction of a beautiful Japanese woman as a Japanese fox with supernatural power. Previous studies show that this famous dream narrative demonstrates Tanizaki's enchantment with Edo vernacular culture, Japanese folklore, and the mother figure, who is beautiful, mysterious, dangerous and powerful. Acknowledging past scholarships, I read the story from the perspective of film studies and affect studies. I show that the protagonist immerses himself in the aura of the Edo past through his sensory experiences with space and sound in his dream. Tanizaki's narrative technique to craft this dream narrative is reminiscent of the film techniques he discusses in detail in his essays on film-making, published in the 1910s and 1920s. Tanizaki was involved in the Pure Film Movement of the 1910s and early 1920s. Cooperated with Thomas Kurihara (1885-1926), the famous film director of Taishō film Cooperation Company, they produced at least three silent films together. Cinematic effects are everywhere in the story, from the surreal description of the bright moonlight against the darkness that feels artificial to the continuous ambient sound of the shamisen song that guides the protagonist to his mother. These effects create a fantasy world that dissolves the border between present and past, dreams and reality. I argue that the story's nostalgia for Edo is not about calling for a return to a "lost" feudal past. Instead, it recreates an imagined, feminized cultural past that lives in the present and is built on one's fragmented personal memories against the backdrop of modern Japan's development in modernization, urbanization, and militarism.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the shaseibun-like sensory quality in Murata’s international breakthrough novel. The emphasis will be on its defamilializing/queering effect, which I would argue invites our empathy for the protagonist’s otherwise “quirky” and at times “chilling” positioning act.

Paper long abstract:

A convenience store is a world of sound. From the tinkle of the door chime to…the calls of the store workers, the beeps of the bar code scanner, the rustle of customers picking up items and placing them in baskets, and the clacking of heels walking around the store. It all blends into the convenience store sound that ceaselessly caresses my eardrums.

(Murata 2019, 1)

Surprising as it may sound, there is a shaseibun-like sensory quality to this “sublimely weird” late Heisei text, Convenience Store Woman (CSW for short), which has become an international million seller. As many have pointed out, the foremost agenda for the Meiji novelists was to establish the unified external point of view in a genbun-itchi style without relinquishing the long-treasured sense of rinjôkan (a sense of being on the scene), which was not easy because they often worked against each other. In this challenging process emerged the now standard narrative pattern that switches between -ru and -ta, of which Natsume Sôseki’s shaseibun can be seen as a distinct variant. Although he abandoned the shaseibun project after a while, my hypothesis is that its spirit has survived the vicissitudes of genre formations and trends in the post-Meiji history of Japanese literature.

The aim of this paper is to read CSW through the shaseibun-oriented cognitive lens to analyze its impact on our reading experience. Shaseibun has a great potential for defamiliarization as it is an attempt at “transforming standardized conceptual expressions into something that evokes more perceptual (sensory) experiences” (Komori Yôichi 1996), which I would argue is precisely what CSW does. It is written exclusively from the “unreliable,” first-person perspective of Keiko the protagonist for whom the social norms that others take for granted (“doxas”) are mere “noises” that interfere with her well-being as a konbini-worker. The world filtered through her mind’s eyes looks quite different from what we are used to, which has a radically defamiliarizing/queering effect on our perception. The paper will examine how this cognitive estrangement invites our curiosity and even empathy for Keiko’s otherwise “quirky” and at times even “chilling” positioning act.

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Paper short abstract:

Yoshiya Nobuko’s "Aru orokashiki mono no hanashi” is a lesbian novel that is characterized by its abrupt, tragic ending. This paper considers the novel by examining the author-reader interaction and argues that the ending of the novel is Yoshiya’s critical response to readers’ incomprehension.

Paper long abstract:

In 1925, Yoshiya Nobuko, a lesbian writer and a representative of the “shojyo shosetsu” (girl’s fiction) genre, launched her private magazine “Kuroshobi” (Black Rose). This monthly magazine, targeted at her fans, features Yoshiya's short stories, articles, and a readers' column. "Aru orokashiki mono no hanashi” (A Tale of a Certain Foolish Person) is a full-length novel about female same-sex love, serialized from the first to the last issue.

"Aru orokashiki mono no hanashi”, which depicts teacher-student same-sex love, is characterized by its abrupt ending. The story begins when a female high school teacher, who identifies as a congenital homosexual, falls in love with one of her female students. Their relationship grows closer as the novel goes on, but it ends abruptly with a tragic episode in which the student is murdered. Because of its abrupt ending, the novel is considered conservative, valuing sentimentalism rather than sexual fulfillment and refusing to protest the contemporary view that female same-sex love is ephemera.

This perspective, however, overlooks Yoshiya's active negotiations with readers during the writing process. Throughout the serialization, the magazine's readers' forum published reader comments every month, providing Yoshiya with a diverse array of responses; And these reader responses,would undoubtedly have a significant impact on Yoshiya's writing. I analyze "Aru orokashiki mono no hanashi" by focusing on author-reader negotiation and interpret the novel's tragic ending as Yoshiya's critical response towards unsympathetic readers.

In the first half of the novel, Yoshiya develops radical arguments about the legitimacy of same-sex love and the difficulties of surviving as a lesbian through the protagonist‘s monologue, but readers seem to have been not concerned with Yoshiya’s argument. Some viewed the novel pornographically as Yoshiya’s personal experience, while others read it as a romantic girl’s fiction. In response to the reader's lack of sympathy, Yoshiya refrained from revealing the privacy of her homosexuality, while bringing the novel to a tragic ending. By doing so, she not only protests against the pornographic gaze but also criticizes readers for indulging in romantic fiction.