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By comparing Murakami’s evolving library spaces, this paper shows how The City and Its Uncertain Walls positions the Z** Town Library as a non-institutional, unhistorical counter-memory space that resists postwar systemic historicity and enables a reflexive, self-restorative mode of nostalgia.

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This paper offers an analysis of the dual-library system in Haruki Murakami’s latest novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls, situating the novel within a comparative genealogy of libraries across Murakami’s oeuvre. Drawing on Jan Assmann’s cultural memory theory, Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, and Nietzsche’s notion of the “unhistorical,” I argue that the Z** Town Library marks a decisive departure from earlier Murakami libraries that operate under institutional, ideological, or epistemic constraints—such as the Komura Library in Kafka on the Shore, the communal library of Hard-Boiled Wonderland, and the disciplinary architecture of The Strange Library.

Through its non-institutional autonomy, pre-digital anachronism, and deliberate absence of historical sedimentation, the Z** Town Library embodies what Murakami calls a ‘space of individual recovery’: a liminal zone where memory circulates outside the purview of what Nietzsche and Nora describe as the historicizing violence of the modern system. In contrast to postwar Japan’s technocratic library apparatus—shaped by state ideology, modernization discourses, and democratic-educational agendas—this library resists the epistemic authority of the archive and instead privileges affective, interpersonal, and idiosyncratic modes of remembering.

The narrator’s nostalgic dialogue with the deceased Mr. Koyasu and the boy M**’s construction of an encyclopedic ‘personal library’ illustrate a model of memory that is neither state-sanctioned nor system-compatible. Rather than reproducing hegemonic narratives, the Z** Town Library fosters a reflexive, self-constitutive form of nostalgia that reactivates personal history as a resource for self-continuity. This process culminates when M** carries his ‘ultimate personal library’ into the walled Town, inserting non-systemic memory into a closed disciplinary structure and destabilizing its temporal regime of timelessness and forgetting.

By comparing Murakami’s shifting library architectures, the paper shows how The City and Its Uncertain Walls reconfigures the logic of memory and subject formation within Murakami’s recent narrative project. The Z** Town Library functions as a counter-institutional utopia that interrogates postwar regimes of knowledge, history, and individuality, offering an alternative epistemology in which nostalgia becomes generative, dialogic, and ultimately emancipatory.

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The paper reads Nozaki Mado’s novel Titan alongside recent Japanese AI fiction and AI automation discourse to ask what becomes of work, value, and hidden human labor when planetary AI automates production and a post-work Japan is imagined.

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Recent Japanese fiction has become a key site for thinking about artificial intelligence. For example, Yamamoto Hiroshi’s The Stories of Ibis and Ogawa Issui’s The Lord of the Sands of Time imagine AI robots and android envoys as custodians of history, while Kawakami Hiromi’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird and Enjoe Toh’s Self-Reference ENGINE recast AI as dispersed overseer and self-reflexive text. More recently, Kudan Rie’s Tokyo Sympathy Tower brings these tendencies into everyday life, domestic space, and the writing process itself.

In parallel, “Society 5.0” policy discourse in Japan frames AI and robotics as tools to manage ageing, labor shortages, and overwork, sustaining social reproduction with fewer workers. General debates on AI and work often swing between utopian relief and dystopian dispossession. Against this backdrop, I read Nozaki Mado’s bestselling novel Titan within the ongoing automation debates and technocratic futurism. Bookstores market the novel around the provocation that AI has rendered most human work obsolete, inviting readers to confront the implications of a jobless world. Titan follows an AI-powered android avatar exhausted from endless labor and its human counselor, Naishō Seika, as they investigate the AI’s “malfunction” and refusal of frictionless governance. The novel asks what becomes of “work” when needs are met, scarcity recedes, and labor turns structurally marginal. I argue it complicates anxieties about work and value by imagining post-growth life where work’s centrality persists.

The novel oscillates among three horizons: post-scarcity provisioning; residual market hierarchies that assign status without labor; and machinic control, where optimization overrides human consent. At the same time, it insists on the hidden human labor that underwrites automated abundance, such as the programmers, data workers, and caregivers whose contributions are effaced even in a post-work order. Putting Titan into conversation with contemporary Japanese AI narratives and debates on post-work, basic income, and AI social contracts, the paper shows how Nozaki complicates Anglo-American automation imaginaries and reopens, from a Japanese vantage point, the question of what forms of meaning and solidarity might replace the company and the career as dominant units of belonging.

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This paper compares Tachibana Sotō’s "My Memories of Prince Nalin" (1938) and "Miss Emilia Geireck’s Diary" (1939), showing how exotic settings in India and sub-Saharan Africa and sensualized protagonists produce fiction meant to titillate a mass audience.

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Tachibana Sotō’s "My Memories of Prince Nalin" (1938, Naoki Prize) recounts the story of a young Indian prince who comes to Japan for educational purposes. The prince’s androgynous appearance and exotic charm captivate the narrator, who becomes his friend. The story of their friendship, marked by veiled homoerotic undertones that challenge gender norms in prewar Japan, gradually takes on the characteristics of a spy narrative, in which the Japanese protagonist sides with the Indians against British interference in an attempt to save the prince from his tragic fate.

"Miss Emila Gerieck’s Diary", on the other hand, tells of the discovery of an imaginary diary belonging to a young English woman who accompanies her father on a research mission on gorilla behavior and language in the region between Angola and the Congo. From the pages of the diary emerges the young woman’s dramatic story: having survived the death of her companions, she is ultimately killed by the very gorilla she was studying.

Both stories are the result of the author’s extensive research into the historical and political conditions of India and sub-Saharan Africa—the latter setting being decidedly unusual in prewar Japanese fiction—and in both works erotic attraction functions as a driving force of the narrative. In short, My Memories of Prince Nalin and Miss Emila Gerieck’s Diary reveal Tachibana Sotō’s construction of exoticism, blending ethnographic interest, Western imperialist perspectives, and hints of ero-guro-nansensu, shedding light on a little-studied area of mainstream prewar Japanese fiction.

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Yukio Mishima was greatly inspired by ancient Greece. Shigeichi Kure, a scholar and translator of Greek literature, also inspired Mishima to create wonderful novels. The researcher analyzed the connection between Kure and Mishima and their impact on the reception of western classics in Japan.

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Western classics have long fascinated and inspired many Japanese writers and artists. In particular, the works of Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), one of Japan’s best postwar writers, strongly reflect the author’s love of Greece. Mishima was greatly inspired by ancient Greece and used ancient Greek literature to create his own written works. For example, Mishima’s Shiosai (The Sound of Waves, 1954) was based on Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, and Mishima’s Suzakuke no Metsubō (The Fall of Suzaku Family, 1967) was an adaptation of Euripides’ Hercules. Furthermore, Mishima’s masterpiece, Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask, 1949), included metaphors and expressions related to ancient Greece. Thus, his appreciation for that culture is evident throughout his works. Many translations of his works have been published overseas, so Mishima’s love of Greece is well-known.

However, it may not be well-known that Shigeichi Kure (1897–1977), who was an outstanding Japanese scholar of western classics, had a major influence on Mishima’s love of Greece. Kure was the first president of the Classical Society of Japan which was founded in 1950, and he published many Japanese translations of Greek and Latin works. Kure himself and his translations inspired Mishima to create wonderful novels. For example, Mishima read Kure’s translation of Daphnis and Chloe to create Shiosai.

Moreover, Mishima studied ancient Greek, and Kure was his teacher. Mishima attended Kure’s class at the University of Tokyo to read works of Plato and Aristotle. Although Mishima stopped learning ancient Greek, Kure continued to be a teacher whom he respected. In addition, nearly every time Mishima published a book, he always signed it and sent it to Kure. Mishima and Kure greatly respected each other, and they were not only connected through books, but they also had a personal friendship.

Until now, little attention has been paid to the friendship of Kure and Mishima. Therefore, the researcher analyzed the connection between Kure and Mishima and their impact on the reception of western classics in Japan.

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This paper explores the literary representation of "secondary victimization" in Inoue Areno’s Namakawa: A Scene of Sexual Harassment (2022). By referencing Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa (2020), it analyzes the structural violence survivors encounter "after speaking out."

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This research investigates the literary representations of secondary victimization—the social and psychological distress experienced by survivors after speaking out—within the context of Japan's post-#MeToo era. While the global movement has heightened awareness of sexual violence, the "aftermath" for those who challenge institutional power remains fraught with systemic hostility and skepticism. By analyzing Inoue Areno’s Namakawa: Aru sekusharu harasumento no kokei (Raw Skin: A Scene of Sexual Harassment) (2022) and positioning it alongside Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa (2020) for comparative context, this study clarifies how contemporary fiction portrays the traumatic consequences of allegation.

The analysis primarily focuses on the power asymmetry inherent in the mentor-mentee relationship in the literary world. In Namakawa, the established male author weaponizes his "literary status" and pedagogical authority to groom and silence an aspiring writer. This research explores how these entrenched patriarchal structures facilitate initial abuse and, more importantly, justify the subsequent marginalization of the victim through character assassination and victim-blaming. By comparing this with Russell’s depiction of academic authority, the study highlights the universal nature of institutional grooming and the structural barriers to justice.

Second, the study examines the temporal lag in speaking out. In Namakawa, the protagonist breaks her silence years after the event, a period necessary to deconstruct internalized manipulation and reclaim her narrative from the perpetrator’s logic. This paper argues that this time lag often triggers "secondary victimization" (the second rape), where public skepticism questions the validity of "delayed" allegations. The study analyzes how the narrative uses sophisticated internal monologues to represent the survivor's struggle.

Finally, drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s theory of "literary imagination," this paper argues that Inoue’s narrative creates an ethical space that forces readers to confront their own complicity in a culture of silence. Ultimately, this study aims to redefine the role of literature in witnessing the ongoing struggles against structural violence, contributing to the international presence of Japanese literary studies by engaging with global ethical issues of gender-based violence.

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I will examine female subjectivity and Tanizaki’s use of sapphic titillation to construct the novel Manji. Tanizaki exploits the allure of female-female sex in the service of heteronormative male desire and the male gaze. The conspicuous allusions to Yoshiya's tales support the lesbian ambiance.

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Representation of same-sex desire between women in Japanese literature has historically played second fiddle to that of men. This presentation will examine female subjectivity and Tanizaki’s use of sapphic titillation to construct the novel Manji (1928-30). Reinforcing the pinwheel of sex among the four characters, as emblazoned in the manji symbol, the narrative uses the word “fushizen” (unnatural) to describe lesbian sex. Although denigrating the sexual practice, the term simultaneously renders it salaciously enticing.

In short, Tanizaki exploits the allure of female-female sex in the service of heteronormative male desire and the male gaze. The allusions to shōjo bunka (girls’ culture), s kankei (Class S) relationships, and Yoshiya Nobuko’s world of Hana monogatari (Flower Tales, 1916-24) are conspicuous, as evidenced in Yoshiya’s Yellow Rose and Sweet Pea.

Coincident with the obvious, “sensational” sex, is the framing of this epistolary narrative. An implied reader called the “sakusha” (author) has the last word in the recording of this story and the edits and descriptive comments along the way. The author’s (rational, patriarchal) voice contrasts with the emotionality of Sonoko, who is driven by her passion for Mitsuko. Additionally, it seems that the four major characters, including Sonoko, are all liars. Therefore, absent confirmation of what actually happens or any possibility of sincerity, the reader of this novel can only be certain of one thing–we were baited by the exoticism of lesbian sex. Is it the author or Tanizaki who capitalizes on this boobytrap?

The epistolarity of Manji accomplishes three important constructs: it mimics/alludes to Yoshiya Nobuko and associations with her Flower Tales; it implies that the letter writer is speaking honestly in a confessional manner; and it gives the author the opportunity to comment and edit the letters, revealing that the author has the final word. In addition, it establishes a covenant between the sakusha and the reader of the novel and assumes we’re in agreement on the sakusha’s conclusions. To be clear, when I use the word author/sakusha, I am referring to the character-author and not to Tanizaki.

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This paper examines Japanese poetry written by authors aged 85+, focusing on Shibata Toyo and the concept of the Fourth Age as a framework for rethinking literary representations of late old age.

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The rapid aging of Japanese society has been accompanied by the growing presence of literature addressed to older readers and increasingly authored by members of the same age group. While memoirs, guidebooks, and prose written by elderly authors have attracted some scholarly attention, poetry created by individuals belonging to the so-called Fourth Age (85+) remains a largely unexplored phenomenon within contemporary literary studies. This paper seeks to describe and characterize this emerging form of late-life literary expression through an analysis of the poetry of Shibata Toyo (1911–2013).

Shibata Toyo began writing poetry in very advanced old age and composed primarily in free verse. Despite the fact that her poetry collections sold millions of copies and she achieved the status of a cultural phenomenon, her work has so far remained marginal in academic discourse.

The analysis focuses on two of Shibata’s poetry collections, Kujikenaide (Do Not Give Up) and Hyakusai (One Hundred Years). Through close textual analysis, the paper identifies recurring themes and motifs such as aging, bodily decline, loneliness, resilience, memory, and everyday life in advanced old age. Special attention is paid not only to thematic content but also to formal aspects of Shibata’s poetry, including simplicity of language and direct emotional expression.

Methodologically, the paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary analysis with selected sociological concepts. In particular, it draws on the notion of the Fourth Age developed by sociologists Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard. According to this framework, the Fourth Age is not merely a biological stage but a socially constructed imaginary associated with dependency, illness, and marginalization. This concept is used to critically examine poetic representations of old age in contrast to the dominant model of the Third Age, which emphasizes activity, autonomy, and productivity.

By analyzing poetry written from within the experience of the Fourth Age, this paper demonstrates how elderly authors attempt to renegotiate prevailing narratives of aging and reclaim literary subjectivity in the context of social exclusion.

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This study discusses repressed homosexuality in Haruki Murakami’s oeuvre by highlighting the influence from Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, arguing that the triangular relationship in Williams's work is diachronically adapted into the basis of Murakami’s depictions of sexual minorities.

Paper long abstract

This study examines the representation of homosexuality in Haruki Murakami’s literature by analyzing the reception of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. While referencing prior research on Williams and homosociality in Murakami’s work, this paper employs René Girard’s theory of “triangular desire” and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “homosocial-homosexual continuum” to conduct a close reading of Hear the Wind Sing, Norwegian Wood, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

The analysis yields three primary arguments. First, in Hear the Wind Sing, a triangular relationship is identified between The Rat, The girl without a little finger, and the narrator (“I”), arguing that the bond between The Rat and “I” transcends friendship. Second, in Norwegian Wood, the study asserts the existence of homosexual affection between Kizuki and Toru Watanabe. Consequently, the sexual relationship between Naoko and Toru Watanabe is interpreted as a mutual utilization to bridge the gap to their common object of affection, Kizuki. Third, the paper interprets Tsukuru Tazaki’s homophobic thoughts as a reaction that arose to conceal his latent homosexual affection for Fumiaki Haida in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. By identifying the archetype of the frameworks in these three works within Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it can be deduced that the latter functions as a significant influence in shaping Murakami’s depiction of homosexual relationship and its intersection with heterosexual discourses.

Significant criticism in existing scholarship argues that Murakami’s narratives exhibit homophobia or objectify women. This study, however, offers a counter-narrative by considering the possibility that the protagonists themselves are homosexual or bisexual. From this unexamined perspective, the representations are reinterpreted not as the results of an authorial bias rooted in homophobia, but as depictions of the characters’ repressed homosexuality. Through this approach, the research aims to clarify the intricate existence of sexual minorities in Murakami’s literature.

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This paper discusses Japanese literature after 2000 through the lens of contemporary history, literary history and memory studies. The focus will be on how memory of WWII has been politicized by writers born in the 1930s, with two anthologies by poet Wakamatsu Jōtarō (1935-2021) highlighted.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to discuss Japanese literature after 2000 through the combined lens of contemporary history, literary history and memory studies. The focus will be on how individual and collective memory of the Second World War has been reevaluated and politicized by an older generation of authors born in the 1930s, who personally experienced the war and whose late work can and should be read alongside gravitational shifts in the country’s pacifist self-perception throughout the 2010s and early 2020s. The two last anthologies written by the late regional poet Wakamatsu Jōtarō 若松丈太郎 (1935-2021) will be highlighted in this regard: While Wakamatsu became well-known for his “prophetic” writings premonitory of the 3/11 catastrophe as well as the poetic topos of the “nuclear”, his mode of engagement with the principles of democratic accountability went further into the essence of post-war and pacifist sensibilities of his country. Besides memories of the war itself, the American occupation of Japan, the role of the emperor and the now seemingly historic post-war political, cultural and intellectual modes of thought are evaluated in Wakamatsu’s last poems – texts that can be read both as a warning to a generation continuously more forgetful of its past and, in this line of thought, as a counter-argument against a new Japanese “narration of nation” (Bhabha 1990) that has been labeled or at least discussed as a right-wing shift in support of remilitarization.

Alongside Wakamatsu, well-known authors like Ōe Kenzaburō (1935-2023) and Oda Makoto (1932-2007) were in their late years forerunners not only in the literary debate in support of pacifism in Japan after 2000, but as the last remaining representative figures of a literary generation and literary system after 1945 strongly influenced by World War, national defeat and a critical reassessment of nationalism. Other figures of the same generation born in the 1930s, with their literary memories, complement a framing of these oftentimes overlooked late work contributions as a relevant aspect of Japanese literature – in its recent generational shifts and in its relevance to a national and global memory culture of the 20th century.

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Haiku's global spread followed two routes: first, through Western centers via English and French; second, through Japanese imperialism in East Asia pre-war, reviving as postcolonial/immigrant literature post-war. Brazil experienced both routes, which intersected through immigrant mediation.

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Haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry, has now spread throughout the world. There are primarily two routes for this dissemination. The first route reached the Western centers of Britain, France, and America, then spread globally through English and French. This pattern fits Moretti's world literature system theory, which posits that literature spreads from center to periphery. While haiku is traditional poetry in Japan, it was received as free verse in the West. This is because Western formal poetry is characterized by even-numbered lines and rhyme, whereas haiku consists of three lines without rhyme and is, above all, short as poetry. Before World War II, haiku spread alongside literary movements such as Modernism and Symbolist poetry. After the war, it proliferated as part of Postmodernist and Posthumanist literary and social movements. Through these two waves, haiku spread to many countries worldwide. The second route is the dissemination of haiku through Japanese imperialism. In East Asia, haiku spread to peripheral countries (colonies) through Japanese imperialist expansion before the war. After the war, following a hiatus, haiku was revived as postcolonial or immigrant literature. This route centers on Japanese-language haiku dissemination.

Brazil has two streams: haiku reception via France and haiku brought by Japanese immigrants. Furthermore, in the late 1980s, these two routes intersected through immigrant mediation. Goga Masuda, a 1.5-generation Japanese-Brazilian haiku poet fluent in both Japanese and Portuguese, incorporated Japan's association system into Portuguese haicai and created groups that compose haicai emphasizing seasonality. The haiku they create contain seasonal words (kigo), which are unique seasonal words based on Brazilian nature and culture. Groups inheriting this philosophy are now spreading throughout Brazil.

The roots of haiku lie in haikai. Haikai means deviating from orthodoxy and represents counterculture. World haiku can be understood as counterculture against traditional poetry and Modernist poetry in each country. While Japanese haiku is traditional poetry, world haiku represents free verse and poetic innovation.

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This paper examines Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s creative practice through translation and adaptation. Focusing on marginal notes in his English dictionariy, it challenges the binary opposition between imitation and originality by foregrounding language itself as a generative force.

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This presentation examines the continuity between translation and adaptation as creative practices in the works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, taking as its starting point marginal notes discovered in his personal books, particularly in English–English dictionaries. These handwritten entries, which imitate the enumerative and fragmentary structure of dictionary definitions, reveal a form of creative pleasure rooted in direct engagement with language itself. As such, they offer rare material evidence of Akutagawa’s creative process prior to and beyond the production of literary texts.

Akutagawa’s literary works frequently originate in acts of reading and take shape through the adaptation of preexisting texts. Stories such as The Mine Cart (Torokko) and Hell Screen (Jigokuhen) exemplify this practice: while their narrative sources are clearly identifiable, the act of rewriting generates new ethical tensions and sensory dimensions. These cases foreground the problem of adaptation as an intermediate zone between translation and original creation. Moreover, Akutagawa’s texts themselves continue to circulate through processes of quotation and reconstruction, as seen in David Peace’s Patient X, which reappropriates Akutagawa’s works within a contemporary literary framework.

Akutagawa’s interest in translated Chinese literature, together with the possibility that he inserted his own creative writing into groups of translated texts, indicates his affirmative stance toward the strange and indeterminate worlds that emerge through translation. Rather than treating translation as a secondary or derivative act, Akutagawa appears to have valued the unique imaginative space opened by linguistic displacement, where authorship becomes unstable and new meanings arise beyond clear attribution.

This concern resonates with Akutagawa’s late work Cogwheels (Haguruma), which depicts a subject increasingly invaded and overwhelmed by language. Rather than presenting language as an instrument controlled by the author, Akutagawa’s writings reveal moments in which language itself generates new orders and incorporates the subject within them. By combining close readings of adapted literary works with an analysis of material traces such as dictionary annotations, this paper repositions Akutagawa’s oeuvre as a set of linguistic practices that transcend the binary opposition between imitation and creation.

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Sakaguchi Reiko's Mother's Image (1970) depicts a family facing a dying mother. The father insists on prolonging life; the daughter cannot choose. Her hesitation forms narrative wavering. This essay reads wavering as response to the unspeakable: mortality beyond medical reason and family duty.

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Main Points and Aims:

This essay reexamines Sakaguchi Reiko's novel Mother's Image (1970) as a fundamental interrogation of how language itself fails before aging and death. Rather than a conventional family narrative, the work articulates what modern discourse cannot fully speak: the unspeakability of mortality within contemporary medical and rational frameworks. The study asks: How does the narrator-daughter's persistent "wavering" articulate the limits of language? What does this hesitation reveal about 1970, when medical technology and family structures underwent radical transformation? How might we reconceptualize the novel as an "ethical record" bearing witness to the difficulties that modern rationality cannot contain?

Key Arguments:

A father refuses medical counsel and insists on life-prolonging measures; his daughter attempts caregiving while caught in ambivalence. The narrator-daughter cannot align with either her father's conviction or the physician's rationality. Standing before her mother's weakening body, she finds herself at a loss for words. This narrative "wavering" expresses the fundamental unspeakability of aging and death within modern linguistic orders. The novel's formal properties—its narrative hesitation and temporal complexity—enact rather than merely represent this linguistic aporia.

At the historical juncture of 1970, Mother's Image poses fundamental ethical questions about life-prolonging treatment and familial care. By reading the novel through care ethics and narrative theory, the essay contributes to contemporary discussions of how literature articulates what philosophical and medical discourse cannot speak. The work reconceptualizes Mother's Image as an "ethical testimony" to the enduring difficulties of articulating mortality in the modern age.

Keywords: narrative impossibility; unspeakability; care ethics; postwar Japanese literature

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Analyzing Kishi Yusuke’s fiction, this paper traces the psychopath's genealogy from "deviant" to "high-achiever." The shift from the excluded monster in The Black House to the successful leader in Lesson of the Evil reflects Japan's changing moral landscape since the 1990s.

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This study elucidates how the shifting social discourse surrounding "psychopathy" since the 1990s is represented in the works of Yusuke Kishi, with a primary focus on The Black House (1997) and Lesson of the Evil (2010).

In the mid-1990s, the dominant clinical and social narrative of psychopathy shifted from Kurt Schneider’s definition of a "suffering" deviant to Robert Hare’s concept of the "incurable predator." Accelerated by the importation of FBI profiling narratives and the social trauma of the Aum Shinrikyo affair and the Kobe child murders, this discourse established the psychopath as a label for explaining incomprehensible evil. Kishi’s The Black House serves as a literary embodiment of this specific 1990s discourse. While it reflects the tendency to view the psychopath as a terrifying "other" to be excluded, the narrative simultaneously exposes and critiques the discriminatory nature inherent in such criminal psychological frameworks.

However, the 2000s marked a paradigm shift in this social écriture. Coinciding with the spread of neoliberalism and theories positing the "wisdom" of psychopaths (e.g., Kevin Dutton), psychopathic traits—such as ruthlessness, lack of empathy, and superficial charm—began to be reevaluated as advantageous skills for corporate and social survival. Kishi’s Lesson of the Evil manifests this discursive shift by depicting a protagonist who functions as a "successful psychopath" or a charismatic leader within a competitive system, eliciting complex reactions of fear and exhilaration from the reader.

Ultimately, this paper argues that Kishi’s works do not merely trace a literary lineage, but rather serve as a site where the changing social discourse—from the exclusion of the "deviant" to the valuation of "psychopathic utility"—is vividly projected. This transformation mirrors a fundamental fluctuation in Japanese societal values regarding morality and success in the post-growth era.

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Through close readings of Mishima Yukio (as Sakakiyama Tamotsu), “Ai no shokei” (1960), and Fukushima Jirō’s “Basutaoru” (1990), this paper traces how rural cottages and apartments shape gay subjectivity, staging taboo teacher–student desire as a Foucauldian heterotopia.

Paper long abstract

Gay subculture is often discussed through the lenses of urban space and (post)modernity. This paper asks what becomes visible when attention shifts to rural interiors—cottages and rented apartments—and to the ways such spaces shape gay subjectivity in modern and contemporary Japan. It examines two short stories that stage a teacher–student romance in countryside settings: Mishima Yukio (writing as Sakakiyama Tamotsu), “Ai no shokei” (Words for Love, 1960), and Fukushima Jirō’s “Basutaoru” (Bath Towel, 1990).

Both authors occupy an important place in the genealogy of Japanese gay literature. Fukushima is also known for Mishima Yukio: The Sword and the Red Winter (1998), which records anecdotes about Mishima and includes the author’s claim of an intimate relationship. Rather than treating biography as verification, this paper uses that affiliation as a point of departure for considering how influence and authorial self-positioning may be negotiated through spatial representation.

Through comparative close reading, the analysis traces how cottages and apartments operate as narrative technologies: they organize visibility and secrecy, set the conditions for intimacy, and attach distinct affects to rural life. In Mishima’s story, the cottage and its surrounding landscape heighten the asymmetry of the teacher–student relation and concentrate desire within a secluded scene shaped by discipline and stylized performance. In Fukushima’s story, the apartment and domestic objects—most notably the bath towel—shift attention to routines of care, vulnerability, and the management of exposure, producing a different affective map of rural life.

Adopting an influence-studies perspective, the paper also considers how Mishima’s “literary topography” is echoed and revised in Fukushima’s later text. It argues that these rural dwellings function as provisional “other spaces” in Foucauldian terms: heterotopic enclaves that allow socially taboo desire to unfold while remaining bounded by heteronormative constraint and the possibility of disclosure. By foregrounding rural spatiality, the paper contributes to queer geographic approaches to Japanese literature and complicates the tendency to read gay cultural formation primarily through the city.

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A close reading of Hoshi Shin’ichi’s dystopia shows how the suppression of the word “war” masks rather than prevents violence, challenging strong assumptions about linguistic determinism.

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Hoshi Shin’ichi’s dystopian short fiction is often read as an ironic exploration of technological rationality and social conformity. This paper proposes a different emphasis: Hoshi as a critic of linguistic engineering and of strong interpretations of linguistic relativity. Focusing on the postwar dystopian story “The Man in White” (Shiroi fuku no otoko), in which the word “war” (sensō) is systematically eliminated from language and thought in the name of peace, the paper argues that Hoshi exposes the fundamental limits of coercive language reform as a tool for ethical or social transformation.

The narrative depicts a society that equates the eradication of a word with the eradication of the phenomenon it denotes. State authorities police linguistic usage with extreme rigor, convinced that lexical purification will prevent the recurrence of violence. However, Hoshi constructs a deliberate tension between the disappearance of the signifier and the persistence of what the signifier once named. While institutional actors internalize the imposed linguistic logic, aggression continues to manifest itself in everyday practices—not only in their own actions, but most strikingly in the spontaneous play of children, who reenact conflict despite lacking historical memory.

Through close reading, this paper shows that Hoshi does not confirm a strong Sapir–Whorf position in which language determines cognition. Instead, he dramatizes its failure. The children function as a narrative counterexample to linguistic determinism: without access to the term “war,” they nonetheless reconstruct its behavioral patterns. What is eradicated is not violence itself, but historical awareness and moral reflection on violence. Language reform thus produces amnesia rather than peace.

While the story can be situated within the broader tradition of dystopian and anti-totalitarian narratives in world literature, this presentation focuses instead on close reading in order to highlight a less familiar dimension of Hoshi Shin’ichi’s prose—one that complicates his common classification as a science fiction writer and foregrounds his ethical critique of language and power.

Keywords:

Hoshi Shin’ichi; dystopian fiction; linguistic relativity; language and power; postwar Japanese literature

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This paper reexamines the novels of Eiki Matayoshi from the perspective of modernity and the fantastic. The fantasy in his works can be seen as a literary methodology explored within the process of contemplating how modern realities are formed amidst a history of oppression.

Paper long abstract

This paper reexamines the novels of Eiki Matayoshi, a representative author of Okinawan literature who won the 114th Akutagawa Prize in 1996, from the perspective of modernity and the fantastic. Many of Matayoshi's works feature fantastical settings often perceived as unrealistic. This fantasy can be seen as a literary methodology explored within the process of contemplating how modern realities are formed amidst a history of oppression and exploitation, and how to reconstruct and reimagine the modernity that arrived alongside violence. This study analyzes how modernity is interrogated through the unrealistic and fantastical settings found in Matayoshi's works. By doing so, it seeks to explore how Okinawan literature, and literature more broadly, can fictionalize history and memory.

First, this paper broadly categorizes Eiki Matayoshi's works into two main types based on their themes and modes of representation, focusing specifically on those featuring the souls of the dead or regions existing at the boundary between reality and fantasy. Focusing particularly on his recently published collection, The Battle of Okinawa Fantasy Stories: The Dreamlike Kingdom (『沖縄戦幻想小説集 夢幻王国』), this paper examines how memories of violence and death during the Battle of Okinawa are rendered in literary form within fantastical settings. It further explores how this approach offers insights into contemplating the 'postwar' era in Okinawa, Japan, and East Asia. As is well known, questions concerning history and memory, rethinking the 'postwar' perspective, and how to remember and commemorate the dead are not limited to Okinawan literature alone; they are also significant from the perspective of East Asia. Secondly, from the perspective of fantasy and reality, studies comparing Okinawan literary works, including those by Matayoshi, to Latin American magical realism have long been conducted. Building upon these prior studies, this paper seeks to examine how the unreal elements in Matayoshi's literature form a new reality through a more fundamental reflection on realism and modernity, and how this might provide clues for a critique of modernity.

Keywords: Eiki Matayoshi, Battle of Okinawa, Postwar Memory, Magical Realism, Okinawa Literature, Modernity, Fantasy

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This study focuses on Hajime Kijima, who participated in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1970s, and Kenji Nakagami, who attended in the 1980s. Drawing on archival research conducted at the University of Iowa, it examines their experiences in Iowa and the influence on their literary development.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on primary materials collected through archival research in the Special Collections of the University of Iowa Libraries, this study examines the experiences of Japanese writers who participated in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and considers how their encounters in Iowa influenced the development of Japanese literature. By focusing on two authors from different generations—Hajime Kijima and Kenji Nakagami—the presentation highlights the contrasting ways in which Japanese writers engaged with the Workshop and the broader cultural environment of Iowa.

Hajime Kijima, a central figure in “the postwar poetry movement” of the 1950s, attended the Workshop in 1972–73. His participation served as a crucial catalyst for the publication of "The Poetry of Postwar" (1975) Japan, an English-language anthology introducing Japan’s “postwar poetry”, issued by the University of Iowa Press. Extensive archival materials—including correspondence with Paul Engle, then director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—reveal the complex intentions, negotiations, and institutional dynamics that shaped the publication process. These documents demonstrate that the anthology emerged not simply from literary enthusiasm but from a convergence of cultural diplomacy, institutional interests, and personal networks that positioned Kijima as a mediator of Japanese poetry abroad.

A decade later, Kenji Nakagami—who became the first postwar-born recipient of the Akutagawa Prize and a major literary presence in the 1980s—joined the Workshop. Unlike Kijima, Nakagami actively sought interaction with other participants. During his stay, he engaged extensively with writers from Europe, Africa, and especially Asia, cultivating sustained cross-cultural exchanges. The interviews he conducted with these participants were later compiled into a book and published in Japan. His activities in Iowa thus reveal a markedly different mode of engagement, one shaped by his position within the Japanese literary establishment and his interest in developing new forms of dialogue with international writers.

By comparing these two Iowa experiences, this presentation examines how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop functioned as a site of encounter for Japanese writers and explores the broader impact of such encounters on the development, translation, and international dialogue surrounding modern Japanese literature.

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This article examines the 1965 Soviet publication of Abe Kōbō’s Daiyon Kanpyōki, its passage through censorship, and Arkady Strugatsky’s influential translation. It traces how mistranslation, ideology, and SF debates shaped the novel’s reception across the Communist world.

Paper long abstract

The publication of Abe Kōbō's Daiyon Kanpyōki in the Soviet Union in 1965 represented a significant cultural moment. Although Abe had recently been expelled from the Japanese Communist Party for demanding artistic independence from party ideology, his ambivalent vision of a future where technological progress leads to the complete transformation of society became immensely popular in Khrushchev-era Russia, where the optimistic certainties of Stalinist futurism were slowly beginning to crack.

The novel's central premise that attempts to predict and control the future through technology may lead to unintended and irreversible transformations stood in stark contrast to Soviet confidence in planned development. Yet the work managed to pass Soviet censorship, aided by an ideologically orthodox preface written by the translator Arkady Strugatsky under the pseudonym Berezhkov. This strategic framing allowed Abe's complex meditation on revolution and transformation to reach Soviet readers, even as its deeper philosophical implications could be seen to challenge official optimism about planned social development.

The article takes a look at letters and diary entries Arkady Strugatsky wrote during translation process to shed some light on the reasons why he was fascinated with Abe’s SF masterpiece. His translation became a template that shaped reception across multiple Soviet-sphere languages, including Estonian, Latvian, Armenian, Hungarian and Serbian versions. Strugatsky’s mistranslation of the title from "Fourth Interglacial Period" to "Fourth Ice Age” is echoed across the Communist world and clearly delineates a group of translations using Russian as an intermediary language. Looking at the reception of Agu Sisask’s Estonian translation published in 1966 we can see how Abe quickly became a preferred example for those who defended science fiction as a form of “serious literature” which served as a platform for discussion complicated social and philosophical issues.

The study demonstrates how literary traditions can develop distinctive approaches to Japanese literature through personal choices of translators, creating alternative canons that differed from dominant Western patterns (English translation of Daiyon Kanpyōki was published much later). By tracing how Japanese science fiction found audiences across the Communist world, the article reveals translation as a dynamic process of cultural dialogue that continued across ideological divisions.

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This paper examines, through the lens of trauma theory and care ethics, two novels by Kimura Kumi, exploring the characters’ ambiguous attempts to heal from trauma and compensate for fractured human connections in the aftermath of 3-11 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

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This paper examines two novels by Kimura Kumi within the framework of trauma and post-disaster literature. Both set in Tōhoku, the novels are haunted by the spectre of the 2011 triple disaster. Anata ni anzen-na hito (2021) is a novella about two strangers who, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, find comfort in each other as they grapple with feelings of guilt and fear stemming from traumatic events in their past. On the other hand, set seven years after the tsunami, Kuma wa doko ni iru no (2025) follows the story of four women and their relationship with an unknown child who enters each of their lives, prompting them to confront the trauma engendered by sexual abuse, natural disasters, and the looming threat of bears.

Drawing on trauma theory, this paper investigates how these novels portray the effects of traumatic events and their impact on social relationships. In particular, employing LaCapra’s notions of “acting out” and “working through” (2001), it explores the characters’ response to individual and collective trauma. Building on Herman’s discussion of trauma’s impact on human relationships and their importance in the healing process (2015), and connecting these ideas with care ethics’ emphasis on the centrality of care, the paper examines the novel’s portrayal of isolation and fractured social relationships. Specifically, it explores the characters’ attempts to remedy and compensate for a systemic lack of connection and care. These attempts reveal the interweaving of care and abuse and the porous boundaries between victims and perpetrators, highlighting the profound ambivalence of the characters’ coping mechanisms.

By analysing Anata ni anzen-na hito and Kuma wa doko ni iru no and how their characters both cope with and replicate trauma, this paper contributes to broader discussions of trauma literature and explores the possibility of its intersection with an ethics of care.

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This presentation sheds light on the unstudied synergies between sexuality and aesthetics in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s (1886–1965) literary fiction. It argues that, in his writings, art is identical to masochistic and sadistic erotic pleasure, of which the core is male-male sexual pleasure.

Paper long abstract

This presentation seeks to bring to light the unstudied synergies between art, perversion, and male-male sexuality in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s (1886–1965) literary fiction as an entryway to a larger project investigating the intersections of aesthetics and sexuality in modern Japanese literature. I primarily focus on “Kin to gin” (“Gold and Silver,” 1918) and “Aozuka-shi no hanashi” (“Mr. Aozuka’s Story,” 1926), two early stories by Tanizaki about artist protagonists that, although little-discussed, exemplarily bring to focus these synergies and thus allow for a new understanding of his oeuvre more broadly. Whereas previous scholarship has largely discussed Tanizaki’s well-known writing of perversion in terms of male-female desire, I argue that, in his fictions, art is identical to masochistic and sadistic erotic pleasure, of which the core is male-male sexual pleasure. I start by examining Tanizaki’s homosocial plots where art as queer perversion alienates the artist from the community of his peers, highlighting what Eve Sedgwick has described as the traumatic rupture in the male homosocial continuum—the exclusion of male-male sexuality from homosociality. Tanizaki’s narratives dramatize this exclusion through pleasureless interactions between men defined by masochistic suffering and sadistic violence, what I call sadomasochistic homosociality. Sadomasochism here is not a sexual practice, but a social and psychological dynamic. As I demonstrate next, however, art has the potential to transform this toxic homosociality into masochistic and sadistic sexual pleasure. In what I describe as Tanizaki’s masochistic and sadistic aesthetic, respectively, art and sexuality are indistinguishable. Art is both an aesthetic and a sexual practice, and aesthetic pleasure is sexual pleasure. Art thus allows the male artist to experience the erotic pleasure that was absent from his toxic homosociality. At the same time, art homosocially empowers him through its prestige and value, even if this empowerment remains imaginary. Tanizaki’s fictions thus showcase how, by encompassing queer pleasures and homosocial empowerment, art—perhaps more than any other cultural practice—could restore the homosocial continuum and, at least vicariously, redress the trauma of modern male sexuality.

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This paper analyzes Rie Qudan’s Tokyo-to Dōjō-tō as a critical examination of AI within the narrative. Despite Qudan’s own use of AI in her work, the paper demonstrates that she takes a fundamentally skeptical stance toward AI-generated writing.

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Rie Qudan’s novel Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō (東京都同情塔; translated by Jesse Kirkwood as Sympathy Tower Tokyo) was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 2024. At the award ceremony, Qudan revealed that approximately five percent of the novel had been written with the assistance of artificial intelligence. This statement led to an intense public debate, as the use of AI in literary production is widely considered controversial. However, beyond this societal discussion, the novel itself offers a far more critical and nuanced exploration of the linguistic capabilities and limitations of artificial intelligence.

The narrative alternates between the perspectives of two protagonists: Sara Machina, a successful architect, and her boyfriend, Takuto Tōjō, a poor fashion sales assistant. Sara enters an architectural competition to design a luxurious prison in the form of an immense tower in central Tokyo, while Takuto supports her in developing an appropriate conceptual framework for the project. Throughout the novel, both characters use AI for different purposes and to varying degrees, resulting in divergent outcomes.

This paper examines the use of AI in Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō from multiple perspectives through close textual analysis, supplemented by interviews in which Qudan further articulates her views on artificial intelligence. In addition, Qudan’s experimental collaboration with AI in Kage no ame (影の雨; Shadow Rain), a work in which she designed a prompt that enabled AI to generate 95 percent of a novel, published in March 2025 in the journal Kōkoku, is contrasted with Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō to show her critical stance toward AI-generated writing. The analysis demonstrates that Qudan consistently takes a skeptical position toward AI, both within her fictional narratives and in her creative practice, questioning its linguistic competence and, in particular, criticizing its excessive and stylistically problematic reliance on loanwords.

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Through a reading of Zainichi Korean author Fukazawa Ushio's recent novel about the comfort women issue, this paper will explore ethical issues of storytelling and appropriation. Who has the right to tell a story, and can someone who does not "own" a story tell it truthfully?

Paper long abstract

Ever since her debut in 2012, Zainichi Korean writer Fukazawa Ushio has been a critical voice in contemporary Japanese literature, giving voice to people who are silenced, overlooked, and forgotten – often Zainichi Koreans, but also others subject to discrimination and inequality in contemporary Japanese society, such as women and migrant workers.

In her recent novel, however, her protagonist is a “Yamato” Japanese – a young aspiring novelist travelling to Okinawa for research, hoping to achieve fame and recognition by writing about something controversial, such as the comfort women issue. Along the way, she receives many words of warning: that this issue is too difficult, too politically charged, too massive for her to handle. Some even say it straight out: “Anything a Yamato person writes about the Okinawan war will be a lie”.

These harsh words form the fundamental question that inspires this paper: Are certain topics off limits to certain writers? Who can tell a story truthfully? Does one need to have personal connections to an issue in order to shed light on it? Ever since the Second World War, and in a European context in particular in response to literature about the Holocaust, the ethics of narration and storytelling have been fiercely debated. Narrative, in particular fiction – literature – has been seen as something that violently imposes order where there is none, or as a form of appropriation.

Inspired by Hanna Meretoja’s non-subsumptive model of storytelling, which focuses on dialogical exploration over appropriation, this paper will seek to demonstrate how Fukazawa’s novel opens for new insights and deeper understanding. Her novel follows two stories in parallel. One is the story of Hana, this young, naïve – and ignorant? – writer flailing to find her “breakthrough” plot. The other is the story of a nameless young Korean girl, brought to Okinawa to work as a prostitute for the Japanese army. My reading will show that it is precisely in the juxtaposition of the stories of these two women, and the manner in which they become intertwined, that the potential for a non-subsumptive dialogue lies.

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This paper rereads Shiba Ryōtarō’s Kōu to Ryūhō through a Cold War lens. By analyzing narrative temporality, it explores the interplay between historical representation and the political context of the 1970s.

Paper long abstract

Shiba Ryōtarō (1923–1996) was among the many writers who actively produced rekishi shōsetsu—historical narratives—from the 1960s to the early 1980s, with a particular focus on late Edo and Meiji Japan. Many of his works, including Ryōma ga yuku (Ryoma Goes His Way, serialized between 1962 and 1966) and Saka no ue no kumo (Clouds Over the Hills, 1968–1972), became bestsellers. Notably, Shiba also wrote Kōu to Ryūhō (Xiang Yu and Liu Bang, serialized between 1977 and 1979), his only work to focus on ancient Chinese history prior to the Han dynasty, drawing extensively on Sima Qian’s Shiji. This turn toward ancient China may be partly attributed to Shiba’s visit to “New” China (that is, communist China) in the early 1970s, after which he published a series of travelogues reflecting on his experiences. At the same time, his long-standing engagement with Chinese history is suggested by the fact that his pen name itself was inspired by the historian of the Western Han dynasty.

Given Shiba’s sustained interest in Chinese history and culture, particularly during the 1970s, this paper examines how that interest is articulated in Kōu to Ryūhō, in which Sima Qian’s Shiji serves as the principal historical source. By focusing on the narrative structure of the work, this study considers two temporal dimensions: how the narrator interprets ancient Chinese history, and how this perspective implicitly engages with the contemporary situation of China in the 1970s. In doing so, the paper seeks to trace Shiba’s attitude toward New China in the postwar period and to explore the extent to which his historical vision may be reread when situated within the broader context of the Cold War.

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This paper examines Asianist solidarity with Filipino anti-colonialism in Oshikawa Shunrō’s Battleship Series. Focusing on representations of Emilio Aguinaldo, it argues that the series reworks Filipino anti-colonialism to ease Japan’s anxieties over early twentieth-century global power politics.

Paper long abstract

In the middle of the Meiji period (1868–1912), representations of the Philippine Revolution and the subsequent Philippine-American War attracted sustained attention from Japanese writers. Emilio Aguinaldo (1869–1964), a revolutionary affiliated with an anti-colonial secret society Katipunan (Association), emerged as a central figure in these resistance movements. The Philippine-American War concluded in July 1902 when Aguinaldo issued a ceasefire declaration and pledged allegiance to the U.S., signifying the beginning of American colonial rule. In response to these events, Japanese writers such as Yamada Bimyō (1868–1910), Hiraki Hakusei (1876–1915), and Oshikawa Shunrō (1876–1914) engaged with Aguinaldo and Filipino anti-colonialism in their writings.

Oshikawa’s engagement took the form of a six-part adventure fiction series commonly known as the Battleship Series (Gunkan shirīzu, 1900–1907). In this series, Oshikawa, out of yearning for Asianist solidarity, sympathetically narrates the struggles faced by Aguinaldo and other Filipino revolutionaries fighting for independence from Spain and the U.S. After his defeat by the U.S., Aguinaldo leaves the Philippines and joins the secret organization Heroism Group (Bukyō dantai), which operates together with another underground group, Eastern Group (Tōyō Danketsu), to support Japan amid rising tensions with Russia and Euro-American powers. Oshikawa’s Battleship Series is worth examining because it depicts Japan’s desire for Filipino anti-colonialism within early twentieth-century global power politics, thereby illuminating the historical conditions under which representations of Asianist solidarity emerged.

In order to consider how and why Oshikawa’s Battleship Series represents Aguinaldo and Filipino anti-colonialism, this paper situates the series within the global context surrounding the Philippines and Japan in the early twentieth century. In so doing, it critiques the conventional reading of the series as a celebration of Japan’s imperial confidence and expansionist ambition. Instead, this paper argues that Oshikawa’s representation of Aguinaldo and Filipino anti-colonialism should be understood as a response to the Japanese empire’s national anxieties shaped by early twentieth-century global power politics. By reinterpreting Oshikawa’s Battleship Series, this paper contributes to broader discussions of Asianism, colonial discourse, and the transnational circulation of anti-colonial narratives in modern Japanese literature.

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Using Rie Qudan's AI-written short story "Kage no ame" and its published chat log as a case study, this paper analyses AI-assisted literary production through Azuma Hiroki's theory of database consumption, arguing that LLMs transform authorship from writing to database operation.

Paper long abstract

After admitting in January 2024 that a chatbot had written 5% of her Akutagawa Prize-winning novel "Sympathy Tower Tokyo" (2023), the Japanese advertising magazine Kohkoku invited author Rie Qudan to take part in an experiment: creating a story composed 95% by a large language model (LLM) and only 5% by herself. The result was the short story "Kage no ame" (2025), in which the narrator – suggestive of an AI network – reflects on the extinction of humanity. Alongside the story, Kohkoku also published the chat exchange between Qudan and the LLM, providing insight into the process behind the text.

Using "Kage no ame" as a case study, this paper conducts a close reading of both the short story and the accompanying chat exchange to analyse the creative process behind generating a literary work in collaboration with AI technologies. The analysis is informed by Azuma Hiroki’s theory of "database consumption", as articulated in "Dōbutsukasuru posutomodan" (2001; translated into English as "Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals" in 2009), describing a postmodern cultural logic in which narrative meaning emerges from recombining elements from a database rather than from a unified authorial intention. Drawing on this framework, the paper argues that using LLMs during the writing process shifts the author's role from writer to database operator, with creative contributions taking the form of prompt design, constraint-setting, and targeted intervention.

The use of AI for literary text production has provoked intense debate in recent years, given that LLMs draw on preexisting texts to generate their replies, raising concerns about issues such as copyright infringement and plagiarism. Yet, as the case of Rie Qudan demonstrates, AI-assisted literary writing is already in active use, highlighting the importance of a careful and nuanced analysis of the author's role within this process.

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This paper discusses the role of multilingualism and historical narrative in Ri Kaisei's The Woman Who Fulled Clothes and My Sakhalin. I argue that a study of Ri's diverging use of Korean and Russian alongside Japanese in each text reveals their grounding in larger historical narratives.

Paper long abstract

This paper discusses the role of multilingualism and historical narrative in the works of Ri Kaisei. Though Ri Kaisei has received considerable study in Anglophone scholarship, the multilingual aspect of his works has yet to be fully explored. The use of language is closely related to key themes in Ri’s oeuvre such as identity, nationalism, and imperialism, and a careful analysis reveals historical and political undercurrents in these works. To this end, I put in conversation Ri’s Akutagawa Award-winning novella, The Woman Who Fulled Clothes, (1972) and his 1975 novella My Sakhalin to reveal the author’s diverging strategies of multilingualism as the Japanese imperialism in the margins of the former text gives way to Soviet hegemony in the latter. My study will rely on close readings of each text and also draw from historian Kerwin Lee Klein’s critiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard’s disavowal of historical narrative. Klein argues that in these thinkers’ attempts to escape metanarratives, they relied on their own, new grand narratives, and thus were unable to offer a convincing alternative to historical thinking. While previous scholars (Foxworth, 2010) have labeled The Woman Who Fulled Clothes a ‘little narrative,’ one of Lyotard’s les petits récits, I argue that Ri’s texts are caught up in larger historical narratives, and instead ask us to rethink what we constitute as history. A study of the multilingualism in these novellas reveals their historical grounding.

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This presentation examines Konbini Ningen through the lens of invisible disability, arguing that Keiko’s sustained performance of normality and movement between convenience stores signal permanent liminality rather than autonomy.

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Murata Sayaka is a prominent contemporary voice in Japanese literature whose work engages with the social pressures and normative expectations of everyday life in Japan. Her novel Konbini Ningen (Convenience Store Woman), which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2016, has attracted sustained attention both in Japan and internationally. Since its English translation in 2018, the novel has generated a growing body of scholarship, yet remains open to other critical perspectives. This presentation examines one such perspective, that of invisible disability.

Konbini Ningen follows Furukura Keiko, a 36-year-old woman who has worked for eighteen years in a convenience store she describes as a “brightly lit box.” Through episodic recollections from childhood to adulthood, the narrative presents behaviors and cognitive patterns that suggest neurodivergence. As an adult, Keiko learns to mask these traits by imitating the speech patterns, gestures, and emotional responses of those around her, performing normality with guidance from her sister. Despite sustained efforts to conform to socially sanctioned expectations and to lead what is perceived as a “normal” life, Keiko eventually leaves her workplace and later ends up working at another convenience store, foregrounding both the exhaustion produced by continuous performative labor and the limits of social accommodation.

Drawing on disability studies and Japanese literary scholarship, this presentation reads Keiko’s neurodivergence as an invisible disability, one that may be understood in relation to autism without relying on formal diagnosis.

Rather than being recognized as disabled, Keiko is repeatedly othered as “not normal” through everyday interactions, revealing how invisible disabilities often become legible only through moments of social misrecognition. The presentation challenges celebratory readings that interpret Keiko’s decision to work at a convenience store as an act of radical autonomy or creative self-fashioning. Instead, it argues that her movement from one convenience store to another signals a condition of permanent liminality, in which Keiko is neither fully assimilated into normative society nor meaningfully accommodated within it. The convenience store thus functions as a space that contains and regulates her difference without recognizing it, producing an ongoing cycle of containment rather than resolution.

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Murata Sayaka’s World 99 imagines a society in which reproduction is outsourced to a non-human species called “Pyokorun”. This paper situates Murata’s vision within a lineage from Aldous Huxley’s ectogenesis to feminist and posthuman reworkings of reproduction.

Paper long abstract

Murata Sayaka’s recent novel World 99 depicts a society in which human reproduction has been entirely outsourced to a pet-like non-human species called “Pyokorun.” This radical displacement of reproduction from the human body raises fundamental questions about gender, agency, and the legacy of eugenic thinking in modernity. This paper proposes to situate World 99 within a longer transnational literary genealogy of reproductive imagination, tracing a line from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminist and post-humanist reconfigurations of reproduction.

In Brave New World, ectogenesis functions as a central technology of social control, enabling the state to manage population, stratify bodies, and eliminate maternal bonds. While this vision is often read as a critique of industrial rationality and eugenics, later feminist and speculative writers reworked artificial reproduction in more ambivalent ways. Authors such as Marge Piercy and Shulamith Firestone reimagined ectogenesis as a potential means of liberating women from the biological burdens historically imposed on them, while writers like Margaret Atwood emphasized the persistent entanglement of reproduction with power, coercion, and violence. In these texts, reproduction becomes neither purely oppressive nor emancipatory, but a contested site where biopolitics, gender norms, and technological imaginaries intersect.

Murata’s World 99 extends this lineage by pushing reproductive displacement beyond technology and into interspecies delegation. Unlike Huxley’s mechanized wombs, “Pyokorun” reproduction is neither industrial nor overtly political; it is naturalized, domesticated, and affectively neutral. This apparent neutrality, however, conceals a profound reorganization of human subjectivity, in which responsibility for the continuation of the species is externalized and ethical questions surrounding birth, kinship, and care are radically deflected.

By reading World 99 alongside earlier Anglophone texts, this paper argues that Murata’s novel marks a shift from the governance of reproduction to its abdication. What emerges is not a utopia of reproductive freedom, but a posthuman condition in which reproduction no longer belongs to the human at all. This shift illuminates the transformation of eugenic logic from explicit population management into more diffuse forms of biopolitical disavowal, and invites us to rethink the relationship between feminism, posthumanism, and the future of reproduction.

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This paper explores how the novelist Sōseki Natsume relates aesthetic genres of poetry, painting and the novel in Kusamakura (1906). I contend that the work’s prosodic imagination unsettles novelistic teleological narrative while also dissolving the formal binary between poetry and painting.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the Japanese novelist Sōseki Natsume defines and relates aesthetic genres, focusing in particular on his Kusamakura (1906) – a novel that frequently flirts with elements of stream-of-consciousness.

Kojin Karatani called Kusamakura ‘a novel about the novel’, because of its keen awareness of the contours of genre. This novel is almost a non-novel, evading the coherent development of plot and character. This scepticism about novelistic formulation has understandably been associated with its attention to the idea of the painting – an artistic mode concerned less with temporal process than with the impression of a single moment. The first-person narrator is a painter who meets a woman Nami whose intricate facial expressions he tries to capture.

Although the binary between the novel and painting dominates Kusamakura, the work also allocates some of its attention to another genre: poetry. At the beginning of the work, the narrator sighs at the difficulty of living one’s life: ‘When one realises that it will be hard to live no matter where one goes, poetry is born and paintings come into being.’ Poetry and painting are repeatedly compared throughout the novel, interestingly without any sustained discussion of their stylistic differences. Sōseki treats poetry and painting as almost interchangeable, defining them only in relative contrast to the genre of the novel. The smooth flow of the paired phrase, ‘poetry is born and paintings come into being’, which recurs later in the novel, may even lead us to suspect that the juxtaposition exists primarily for the sake of euphony rather than aesthetic philosophy.

The present study seeks to explain this association between poetry and painting by paying closer attention to Kusamakura’s poetic and prosodic imagination. The work’s inclination for neat epigrams and rhythmical phrasing signifies its resistance to novelistic storytelling. I argue that such phonetic sensitivity paradoxically dissolves the apparent formal opposition between prosodic and visual arts, highlighting their shared tendency to deconstruct the developmental and teleological narrative of the novel. In Kusamakura, poetry, painting and the novel form a triangular relationship – a pattern that mirrors the love triangles in some of Sōseki’s novels.

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Mishima Yukio cast a long shadow over Japanese cultural space, as seen in numerous works of fiction produced after 1970 that feature Mishima or are inspired by him and his work. This paper focuses on several fictionalized versions of Mishima and explores the symbolic potential of these spectres.

Paper long abstract

Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) was outspoken about his pessimistic views on Japan’s present and future, especially towards the end of his life. His grotesque suicide and puzzling body of work (mainly Hōjō no umi tetralogy) cast a metaphorical „gaze“ or „shadow“ on whatever possible future was in store for his country and became a „curse“, that keeps „haunting“ Japanese cultural landscape to this day. This is evident in an unprecedented number of novels, poems, comic books, films or even video games produced since 1970 that feature Mishima or are inspired by him or his work. These portrayals range from fictionalized versions of the historical Mishima to supernatural ghosts, from talking severed heads to alternative history, from minor cameos to leading roles.

A hauntological analysis of Mishima's spectres reveals that the past is present and still alive in contemporary Japan, and questions the legacy of Japanese modernity, post-war development and historical consciousness. Fictionalized Mishima is mainly characterized by the tension between absence and presence, history and fiction. While the approaches of different authors vary greatly from serious to parodic, Mishima in fiction is always a product of a reading that transforms his absence into a symbolic or metaphorical presence, thus keeping the spectre "alive". Historical Mishima embodies contradictory and complicated nature of modern Japan, while fictional Mishima can be both historical and atemporal, with authors using him as a device to create a space for self-reflection of Japanese (post)modernity and its future.

In this paper I will present an outline of various incarnations of Mishima’s continued presence in fictions written after his death, and focus more closely on three works: Kasai Kiyoshi’s metaficional mystery novel Tenkei no utage (Revelation Banquet, 1996) where Mishima and the political turmoil of post-war Japan is contrasted with the idea of "the death of the author“, novel Sayōnara, watashi no hon yo! (Goodbye, my books!, 2005) where Ōe Kenzaburō continues his long-lasting creative involvement with Mishima that began shortly after his death, and finally Fukanō (Impossible, 2011) by Matsuura Hisaki, which envisions a world where Mishima (named Hiraoka) survives and leaves prison to enter the contemporary world.

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Focusing on narrative structure and speech representation, this paper reads Mori Ōgai’s “The Snake” (1911) as a reflection on social hierarchy and discrimination embedded in the ie system and Meiji-era governance.

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This paper examines the representation of discriminatory structures embedded in the national administrative system of Meiji Japan through a close reading of Mori Ōgai’s short story “Hebi” (“The Snake”), published in Chūō Kōron in 1911 and set in rural Nagano in the late Meiji period. Narrated by an unnamed government-employed scholar temporarily lodged in the household of the once-influential Hozumi family, the story depicts the family’s gradual decline following the death of the former matriarch and the subsequent mental collapse of the master’s wife.

Because of its publication date and its references to anarchism and socialism, existing scholarship has tended to read “Hebi” in relation to the High Treason Incident, which involved the arrest of prominent socialists and anarchists accused of plotting to assassinate Emperor Meiji. While this historical context is significant, such readings have often overlooked the story’s sustained engagement with the everyday structures of authority that shaped Meiji society.

I argue that “Hebi” represents social hierarchy and discrimination not only thematically but also at the level of narrative structure, particularly through the differential treatment of characters’ speech. By analyzing the distribution of direct and indirect discourse, the use of dialect, and evaluations of intelligibility, this paper demonstrates how narrative voice functions as a mechanism of authority within both the Hozumi household and the Meiji state. Characters occupying positions of power—such as the narrator and the master of the household —are granted stable, direct speech, while the master’s wife and the servants are discredited.

Special attention is given to the contrast between the former master’s “unintelligible” final words, which are nonetheless accepted as authoritative, and the current master’s wife’s speech, which is consistently dismissed as irrational or meaningless. This asymmetry reveals how legitimacy is conferred not by speech itself but by one’s position within hierarchical structures. Through this analysis, I show that “Hebi” offers a critical reflection on discrimination inherent in the ie system and the broader administrative logic of the Meiji state, exposing how governance operates through narrative control, linguistic standardization, and the regulation of who is allowed to speak—and be heard.

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Revisiting Ariyoshi Sawako’s The Doctor’s Wife, this paper explores how women’s voices are articulated through silence, bodily endurance, and rivalry, revealing a feminist subtext embedded within historical narrative.

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Sawako Ariyoshi’s novel, The Doctor’s Wife, revisits the life of the historical figure Dr. Hanaoka Seishu by centering the perspectives of the women in his household. In doing so, Ariyoshi shifts the narrative focus away from traditional scientific achievement toward the significant personal sacrifices. The paper argues that the novel constructs a plural and relational model of women’s voices that emerges from the tension between historical context and feminist subtext.

Although the story is set in the late Edo period, Ariyoshi wrote the novel during a time in postwar Japan when literature was increasingly engaged with women’s rights. Under the traditional ie (household) system, women were systematically excluded from public authority, formal education, and intellectual recognition. Ariyoshi highlights these structural restrictions while simultaneously exploring how women find ways to express agency from within them. Rather than granting her characters overt power, she locates their "voice" in silence, physical endurance, and emotional strategy.

A central focus of this study is the rivalry between Otsugi, the mother, and Kae, the wife. This paper interprets their conflict not as a personal moral failing, but as a direct result of a patriarchal system that forced women to compete for limited social recognition. Their shared willingness to submit their bodies to experimental anesthesia is analyzed as an "embodied speech act"—a performance through which pain, risk, and sacrifice become forms of testimony. In this context, silence functions as a charged narrative space that conveys both resistance and deep affective knowledge.

Drawing on feminist literary theory and Japanese gender studies, this research challenges readings of the novel that frame these women primarily as passive victims. Instead, it proposes a redefinition of voice that includes internal thoughts and physical actions. Ariyoshi’s narrative reveals how scientific history often relies on the hidden exploitation of women’s bodies. Ultimately, the novel rewrites history from the domestic sphere, forcing a reconsideration of how gender, power, and agency operate in both historical and literary narratives.

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Drawing on Catherine Malabou’s theory of Destructive Plasticity, a critical intervention into essential and formalist feminisms, this paper analyzes how an incomplete metamorphosis produces a state of subjective foreclosure, resulting in the suspension rather than the emancipation of the subject.

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Throughout centuries, women have been subjected to different forms of persecution, considered a lacking being despite being in excess, a reduction of the male body, a site of promulgated relentless oppression and violence. With far enough ink being spilled over this matter, the perennial philosophical and political question of female subjectivity still holds great significance today. However, despite a plethora of work being produced in both essential and formalist feminisms, none suggests a relatively different form of liberation. This leads us to Catherine Malabou’s theory of Destructive Plasticity, which posits subjectivity as forged through the acceptance of the impossibilities of flight, a catastrophic annihilation of prior form rather than through essential continuity or formal integration, and provides a critical intervention into essential and formalist feminist paradigms.

This paper, therefore, uses Destructive Plasticity combined with the anthropological concept of ritual endocannibalism to analyze Yuten Sawanishi’s Filling Up With Sugar. Drawing on the central metaphor of saccharification and its impact on the protagonist Yukiko as her mother is consumed by the disease, this paper argues how the mother’s turning into sugar stages on an arresting foreclosure resulting in an incomplete metamorphosis. It is representative of an event that fissures the essential role assigned to Yukiko, who questions her existence and purpose. As informed by Malabou, this constitutes a catastrophic annihilation of her prior biological and social form and should give way to a new, crystalline, and utterly alien ontology. However, since Yukiko, entrapped in her performative self, not only fears this radical shift and forecloses its possibilities, she ends up in a state of suspension.

Additionally, this paper contends that beyond this impasse, the only way for Yukiko to hold onto any form of female subjectivity is through the logic of endocannibalism in her final act. Finally, in suggesting that resistance emerges not through bodily integrity or autonomy, but through a radical, plastic acceptance of deformation, a negative identification of the mutated self, this paper hopes to critique Yukiko’s reaction to her mother’s gradual saccharification, suggesting her acceptance of the mutation caused by this event would have been far more emancipating.

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This presentation examines abjection and cannibalism in Murata Sayaka’s Sokumeishiki (Life Ceremony) and Chikyū seijin (Earthlings), showing how bodily transgression challenges norms of gender, reproduction, and humanity.

Paper long abstract

Murata Sayaka is one of the most influential voices in contemporary Japanese literature. Her works repeatedly depict individuals trapped within rigid social systems that enforce normative models of family, gender, and reproduction. By positioning her narratives at the boundary between the rational and the irrational, Murata exposes the violence inherent in social conformity and challenges conventional definitions of what is considered “normal” or “human”.

　My presentation examines two of Murata’s works: the short story Sokumeishiki (Life Ceremony) and the novel Chikyū seijin (Earthlings). In both texts, the protagonists—Taketani and Natsuki—fail or refuse to adapt to the demands of a collective that prioritises reproduction, productivity, and heteronormative family structures. Their resistance is articulated through abjection, most visibly expressed in bodily transgression and cannibalism.

　In Sokumeishiki, Taketani inhabits a society in which the bodies of the deceased are consumed in ritualised meals, and the sokumeishiki ceremony requires one person to eat another to sustain reproduction. While Taketani eventually accepts this worldview, she resists the social order by rejecting the physical act of procreation. Her relationship with a gay man, another social outsider, offers an alternative form of relationality that circumvents reproductive obligation without directly confronting the system.

　Chikyū seijin follows Natsuki from childhood into adulthood. Believing herself to be an alien, she perceives society as a “factory” designed to condition individuals into forming families and reproducing. Traumatised by familial rejection, maternal aggression, and sexual abuse, Natsuki retreats into a fantasy of extraterrestrial belonging. Together with her husband and her cousin, she withdraws from society. This isolation culminates in acts of cannibalism and mutual bodily consumption, which function as an extreme rejection of social, moral, and biological norms.

Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection (1982) and feminist interpretations of cannibalism as a reclamation of subjectivity (Moreira Vitzthum 2023), this paper argues that Murata further complicates these readings by depicting cannibalism as a shared practice among marginalised men and women. Through abject bodies and taboo acts, Murata destabilises fixed gender roles, humanity, and social belonging, compelling readers to reconsider the limits of identity and the violence embedded in normative social orders.

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Silver Senryū are short poems written by and for older people in Japan. This paper examines how humour works in the form, using humour theory and the GTVH to show how brevity, incongruity, and self-directed satire articulate ageing through shared moments of laughter.

Paper long abstract

Silver Senryū, senryu poems written by and for older people, have become increasingly visible in contemporary Japan. The humour they rely on has, however, received limited critical attention. Existing discourse tends to focus on social context, demographic change, or the positive effects of creativity, while paying less attention to how humour actually works within the poems themselves. This paper offers a literary analysis of humour in Silver Senryū, asking how these short texts produce laughter, recognition, and emotional resonance.

Building on earlier corpus-based research, the paper shifts the focus from thematic classification to humour as a poetic practice. It examines how Silver Senryū use incongruity, satire, and self-directed humour to articulate experiences of ageing from an internal perspective, rather than framing later life through idealised or external viewpoints. Particular attention is given to how bodily decline, memory lapses, medical routines, and the nearness of death are rendered ordinary and laughable, without tipping into sentimentality or despair.

Methodologically, the analysis draws on humour theory, with reference to the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH). The GTVH offers a flexible framework for analysing how humour is structured at multiple levels, including script opposition, logical mechanisms, and narrative strategy. Applied to senryū, it allows for close attention to how minimal verbal cues activate incongruity and guide readerly interpretation. Rather than treating humour as an effect that can be inferred from topic alone, this approach foregrounds how humour is produced through form, wording, and shared cultural knowledge.

The paper further argues that the senryū form enables a distinctive mode of humour. Its brevity and lack of explanation produce moments of laughter that are fleeting but recognisable, grounded in shared experience. Rather than asking whether humour functions therapeutically or improves wellbeing, the analysis explores what humour allows ageing speakers to do narratively: how it affords agency, preserves dignity, and creates a sense of community.

By situating Silver Senryū within broader discussions of humour and ageing, this paper contributes to literary understandings of the form as a genre that is able to articulate later life through small, but resonant, acts of laughter.

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This presentation examines Shirin Nezammafi's Salam and Kirino Natsuo's Nichibotsu, showing how both expose the violence of the legal state against “legal outsiders.” Drawing on law and literature, it traces confinement, language, and abjection to reveal contested justice.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines the intersection of confinement and law in two contemporary fictional works— Shirin Nezammafi short story “Salam” (2006) and Kirino Natsuo’s novel Nichibotsu (2020) —as critical interrogations of the tension between human rights, law, and captivity in contemporary Japan. Ultimately, I argue that the stories put the inherently violent project of the nation-state itself on literary trial. In the context of recent revelations regarding miscarriages of justice in the Japanese legal system—whether the death of Wishma Sandamali or the belated release of Iwao Hakamata—I turn to literature to understand where justice can be, or is still being, contested.

As a well-known story of an “illegal” young Hazara migrant, Nezammafi’s “Salam” may at first seem an unlikely pairing with Kirino’s comparatively underexamined, provocative novel Nichibotsu, which stages a fictional literati purge in Japan. The female protagonists of the two texts—an illiterate young migrant and a professional Japanese novelist—could not, on the surface, be more dissimilar in their positioning within the Japanese nation-state. Yet what the stories share is a stark account of the violence exercised by the legal state apparatus against those it renders “legal outsiders,” revealing a common concern with regimes of legal exclusion.

Drawing on the frameworks of law and literature and global carceral studies, this presentation explores how each text constructs and interrogates legal outsiderhood to expose the coercive mechanisms through which the modern state defines, disciplines, and expels subjects. By tracing narrative depictions of spatial closure, breakdown of language, and abjection, I demonstrate how these stories intervene on behalf of those denied agency and access to law. .

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This paper examines the convergence of diverse cultural practices around the figure of the rose in Japan around 1970. Rather than conveying a shared meaning, the rose functions as an organizational principle linking heterogeneous works across media, politics, and aesthetics.

Paper long abstract

In Japan at the turn of the 1970s, one can observe what appears to be a convergence of a wide range of cultural practices around a single recurring figure: the rose. Concentrated primarily between 1968 and 1969 this “rose phenomenon” cuts across multiple domains of cultural life ranging from mainstream advertising and the press to commercial cinema, artistic production, and the so-called underground and avant-garde circles. This configuration can be observed, for instance, in Hosoe Eikoh’s Barakei (1963; reissued in 1971 with graphic design by Yokoo Tadanori), in Mishima Yukio’s writings, as well as in works by authors such as Nakai Hideo or Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. It is equally present in cinema—most notably in Matsumoto Toshio’s Bara no sōretsu (1969) and Fukasaku Kinji’s Kurobara no yakata (1969)—as well as in critical discourse, as exemplified by Matsuda Masao’s essay collection Bara to mumeisha (1970). The rose-connoted works do not conform to a common thematic program, nor do they exhibit symbolic coherence; the rose functions as an underlying organizational principle linking, by virtue of structural affinity, heterogeneous productions whose internal logics remain divergent or even opposed. Taking this convergence as its object, this paper will pursue three related aims: (a) to demonstrate, through Félix Guattari’s concept of “a-signifying chains,” how the use of the rose motif, be it conscious or unconscious, draws disparate materials into a single organizational grid, hierarchizing and overcoding variegated semiotic contents; (b) to question the centrality accorded to “meaning” in dominant interpretive approaches to cultural phenomena; and finally (c) to outline the problems posed by the concept of “culture” insofar as it operates as a flattening and generalizing analytical category, and to attempt its deconstruction.

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This paper examines ethical challenges in translating Japanese fantastic literature into Romanian. Using Osamu Dazai’s short stories “Seihintan” and “Chikusei”, it explores how translation functions as cultural mediation across asymmetrical literary and cultural systems.

Paper long abstract

Keywords: translation ethics, Japanese fantastic literature, cultural mediation, Japanese-Romanian translation

Translation is not a neutral transfer of meaning between languages, but an ethically charged practice shaped by interpretive choices and asymmetrical power relations. Translation ethics addresses the responsibility of translators towards source texts, their socio-cultural frameworks, and target audiences, particularly when literary works circulate beyond their original contexts. Rather than prescribing universal norms, contemporary approaches increasingly understand translation ethics as emerging from situated practices and concrete decision-making.

This paper examines ethical challenges in translating Japanese fantastic literature into Romanian, focusing on Osamu Dazai’s short stories ”Seihintan” and “Chikusei”. These texts rework East Asian folklore through a modern Japanese literary sensibility. Fantastic narratives provide a particularly productive site for this analysis, as their reliance on ambiguity and culturally specific imaginaries intensifies the ethical stakes of translation. Such features resist domestication within European literary systems, raising questions about how alterity can be mediated without being neutralised.

The Romanian context offers a particularly revealing case study because translations are produced directly from Japanese, without mediation through dominant pivot languages such as English or French. This direct translation trajectory foregrounds ethical and interpretive decisions that are often obscured in globally circulating translations shaped by Anglophone literary norms. As a semi-peripheral European language, Romanian makes visible the asymmetries involved in cross-cultural literary circulation. Translating the Japanese fantastic into Romanian thus highlights how genre expectations, cultural references, and narrative opacity are negotiated in the absence of a standardised global template.

By analysing specific translation strategies, including the handling of folklore-derived imagery, ambiguity, and stylistic estrangement, the paper conceptualises translation as cultural mediation rather than equivalence-seeking transfer. Situated within a trans-regional framework, the study traces the movement of texts from Chinese folklore to Japanese modern literature and into a European cultural space.

The paper argues that examining translation from a peripheral, non-pivot linguistic context has broader implications for Japanese studies, translation studies, and world literature. It demonstrates that ethical translation practices shape not only textual outcomes but also the conditions under which Japanese literature becomes legible beyond its original context, challenging centre-periphery models of literary circulation.