Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses Nagai Kafū’s literary engagement with Western accounts of life in early modern Japan: he reshapes these narratives into a form of nostalgia, yet reading them sometimes as a mirror of his own times.
Paper long abstract
After purchasing Ernest Satow’s A Diplomat in Japan on June 5, 1935, Nagai Kafū continued, until May 4, 1939, to acquire and read original accounts written by Westerners who had resided in Japan from the late Edo period to the early Meiji era, works that documented contemporary Japanese customs, social conditions, and landscapes. In his historical–critical essay “Tamenaga Shunsui,” completed in August 1941 and published postwar on February 1st, 1946 in the journal Ningen, Kafū remarks, «Some years ago, for a different purpose, I immersed myself in Westerners’ writings concerning Japan’s past».
During this period, Japan’s military was expanding its operations in China and would soon enter the Pacific War; meanwhile, the daily life of Tokyoites was undergoing profound material and psychological changes. Under such circumstances, Kafū turned to these Western accounts of life in Japan, discerning within them lingering traces of Edo and early Meiji, worlds rapidly disappearing before his eyes. Moreover, by exploring his diary, Danchōtei Nichijō, this paper aims at suggesting that he read the depictions of late-Edo social unrest comparing them with the ominous conditions of his own time.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed): | 荷風は、1935年6月5日にアーネスト・サトウの『日本滞在記』を購入して以降、1939年5月4日に至る間、幕末から明治初期にかけて日本に滞在し、当時の日本の世態人情や風景を記録した欧米人の原書を購入し繙読している。 荷風は、1941年8月に脱稿し、戦後の1946年2月1日に発表された雑誌『人間』所載の考証随筆「為永春水」のなかで「わたしは数年前別の目的で日本の過去に関する西洋人の著書を読みあさったことがある」と記している。 この時期、日本の軍部は中国で戦線を拡大し、やがて太平洋戦争へと突入、東京人の生活様式は物心ともに大きく変化していく。そのような状況下で、荷風が欧米人の滞日記録のなかに失われていく江戸や明治の面影を見ていたこと、また、記録された幕末の世相に現在の不穏な世相を重ね合わせていたことなどを、『断腸亭日乗』の記事のなかに探っていく。 |
Japan in the Mirror: Otherness as Self-Representation at the Turn of Modernity