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.