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.