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Paper short abstract

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.

Paper long abstract

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.