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.