Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print (circa 1910–1990)

A special issue of Literature (ISSN 2410-9789).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 12113

Special Issue Editor

Department of East Asian Studies, Centre for Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Interests: Japanese literature; narrative theories; image and text; photography and narrative; urban space and transportation; sports as practices, events, and spectacles; subject-object dynamics; corporeality; materiality; space-time; trajectories; transmediation

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Non-visual sensations aroused through interaction between things and bodies in space–time—sound, scent, touch—were essential elements of both the physical production and the content of premodern Japanese literature in the age of manuscript culture.

How did this change with the advent of print culture in Japan?

On the one hand, there is the “discovery of interiority” and “discovery of landscape” (Karatani), with which the binary of (human) subject and (inanimate) object is demarcated and naturalized. The themes of literature appear to be divided into matters of the mind and matters of the environment. Meanwhile, the transparency of the medium of observation—whether the vernacular national language or the scientific technology of image reproduction (the camera)—was propagated and largely undisputed.

On the other hand, “the age of mechanical reproducibility” (Benjamin) normalized the physical distance and imagined closeness between artists (in our context, literary writers) and their anonymous and indefinite audience, through repetition of sameness in the printing and circulation of literature. The author’s aura (Benjamin) was lost in the ubiquity and accessibility of texts and images in the mediated space (the pages of printed matter).

The images and texts that tend to dominate printed pages, as each other’s illustration or commentary in the representation of meaning/message, are flat, fixed, framed, and finite. Silent and inert, their purported transparency, objectivity, and truthfulness obliterate the material and corporeal contingencies of the processes of their reproduction.

How is modern Japanese literature relevant to the non-visual sensations that travel across space–time, haunt us with memories of matters experienced, and remind us of our corporeal presence? How are non-visual sensations negotiated in the processes of literary (re)production (writing, publishing, reading)? How can they be reinstated in the reception of literary discourse? How can modern Japanese literary discourse restore and evoke the corporeal experience of sensation? How can non-visual sensations—sound, touch, smell, taste—inform modern vernacular Japanese literary texts (other than plays, screenplays, and songs)? How can these sensations be transferred/translated in texts?

We welcome papers that inquire into literature–sensation relations across the mind–body-thing–space–time continuum that informed and formed modern Japanese literary works. These relations may be represented in the texts, though they do not have to be as long as they are discernible as formative through sources (primary or secondary—the latter not in themselves but to enhance the quality of exploration of the former).

Theoretically, we can benefit from inspirations from phenomenology (“being-in-the-world”; “immanent time”), semiotics (“indexicality”), media studies (“prostheses”; “haptics”), sound studies (“acoustic space”; “sonorous/lyrical bodies”), thing theory/new materialism/object-oriented ontology (“thingness”), neuroscience (“plasticity”), cognitive psychology/human-centered design (“affordance”), mobility studies (“kinetics”), human geography/qualitative ethnography (“narrative turn”), urban studies (“lived space”), and other related disciplines.

Ethically, this collaborative project calls for awareness and caution vis-à-vis human subjects’ self-entitlement of superiority to the effects of inanimate things, which tends to be assured through image and text. This approach can take a step toward a non-hierarchical, non-objectifying, non-coercive, and non-anthropomorphic order of things, senses, thoughts, and words. Since we live in a world that envisions a post-human, post-anthropocene paradigm, we look back to find forerunning resistance to the regime that subordinated non-lingual, non-visual, and non-human phenomena. This project, however, does not intend to silence humans or disavow images and texts. Instead, we seek interactive, synthetic, and humane negotiations between formerly divided senses, mediums, categories, and practices in the heyday of modern print culture, and release images and texts—or sight and language—into a larger and more fluid nexus of experience and the literary formation thereof.

The approximate time frame of 1910–1990 is proposed to articulate the period between the dominance of manuscript culture and that of digital culture: 1910 as roughly the date for the normalization of the use of vernacular literary language and the practice of silent and personal reading of mass-reproduced and mass-distributed texts; and 1990 as roughly the declaration of digital culture (e-books, e-journals, digitized publication on the internet, social media platforms, etc.) as normative in the distribution and reception of literature. This historical range is posited only to give a degree of coherence to the material and technical conditions that informed sources, and is not absolute. Studies of any example of anticipatory or residual practice will be considered.

Given the regime of cultural production and consumption that multi-sensorial practices face, the primary sources discussed should be texts written for publication and silent reading (Maeda). Scenarios and screenplays, which are primarily intended for oral and corporal performance and a live audience, cannot therefore be the center of attention, though they may be cited adjunct to the argument made about printed texts.

Both close and distant reading is expected to be performed in any given article.

The general orientation of the papers should be geared toward:

Indexicality (through trace, resonance, and other extensions of experience into adjacent space–time) rather than iconicity (the capture of essence in timeless and immobile enclosure); residue (including but not limited to forensic evidence in detective fiction) rather than existence; affect rather than essence; the process rather than the product (e.g., metafiction about how a work is being written); surface rather than (imagined) depth; relations rather than identity (e.g., characters without intrinsic personality portrayed by way of their positioning/action in relation to their environments); itinerary rather than the map (e.g., not an omniscient narrator telling the story in retrospect, but the story unfolding concurrently with the narrative discourse); a worm’s-eye view rather than a bird’s-eye view; apprehension rather than comprehension; immersion rather than anatomy; and contiguity in space from things to human subjects, rather than distance between them (not for analysis or ownership but for co-existence, as in eco criticism). Take Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s “Yoshinokuzu” (English trans., “Arrowroot”) as a prime example of all these proclivities listed above.

Possible topics may include, though are not limited to, the following (either as represented in literary texts or as they contribute to/affect the process of literary production formatively):

Layering of an author’s handwritten drafts, dictated texts, editors’ notes, printers’ directions. Editing, formatting, layout, illustration, book design, printing, binding.

Stationery—pens, paper, ink—as things themselves (rather than neutral instruments).

Ergonomics—desks, chairs, cushions, lighting, and other things that affect the author’s arms, hands, shoulders, neck, back, thighs, knees, legs, eyes.

Writers taking a walk, sipping a drink (water, caffeine, alcohol), smoking, stretching, and engaging in other non-literary activities for a change of air, clearing of the mind, or restoration of energy in the osmotic system that connects rather than divides the interior and the exterior.

Prostheses (e.g., eyeglasses, hearing aids, dentures, wigs, canes, shoes, hats, gloves, clothes, accessories) and tools (e.g., musical/artistic instruments, sport equipment, cooking and other household utensils, technological apparatuses, vehicles), used with varied degrees of success.

Texture, grain, tailoring, and the rustle of clothes, paper, and other surfaces, touched for effects.

Affective environments (e.g., architecture, land, urban space; flora, fauna, minerals; air, water, soil; cosmos).

Kinetics and choreography (e.g., posture, gesture, antics, habits, steps, swings, swirls, kicks, jumps).

Rhythm, tempo, pace, pause, repetition, and echo in sound (musical/created or ambient/incidental, including industrial or quotidian noise).

Fitness, illness, disability, aptitude, caregiving, convalescence, trauma, rest, fatigue.

Accidents, injuries, issues with mobilities, and adjusted coordination of things and humans around injured bodies.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Atsuko Sakaki 
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • Acoustic space/sonorous bodies (LaBelle, Nancy)
  • Affordance (Gibson, Norman)
  • Being-in-the-world (Heidegger)
  • Haptics (Deleuze, Derrida, Nancy)
  • Immanent time (Husserl)
  • Lived space (Lefebvre)
  • Plasticity (Malabou)
  • Prostheses (McLuhan, Heidegger, Derrida)
  • Rhythm (Lefebvre)
  • Thingness (Heidegger, Brown)

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 1273 KiB  
Article
Media as Metaphor: Realism in Meiji Print Narratives and Visual Cultures
by Jonathan E. Abel
Literature 2023, 3(3), 313-326; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3030021 - 15 Aug 2023
Viewed by 962
Abstract
This article begins with the assumption that the specificity of metaphors used to discuss narration and mediation matter for understanding them. For instance, arguing for a paradigm shift in literature concomitant with the visual revolution of Meiji, critic Maeda Ai saw Mori Ōgai’s [...] Read more.
This article begins with the assumption that the specificity of metaphors used to discuss narration and mediation matter for understanding them. For instance, arguing for a paradigm shift in literature concomitant with the visual revolution of Meiji, critic Maeda Ai saw Mori Ōgai’s famed early work of realism “Dancing Girl” (Maihime) as translating the effects of the panorama hall into literature. By the end of his career, Mori Ōgai’s narrator of Wild Geese (Gan) compares his own storytelling to stereoscopy. These two different visual medial affordances suggest two different techniques. However, I argue that it is in a third visual medium (one that draws on the marketing of panorama and the visual techniques of stereography) that we may find a metaphor suggesting a continuity between these two modes of realism, between Ōgai’s early career and his later opus, between Maeda’s medial understanding and Ōgai’s own. This third metaphor for understanding Ōgai’s narration implies his mode of narration is never flat, always polyphonous, and advertising one aesthetic on the surface while providing another within. In the end, this view suggests a modernist realism that understood and expressed its own limitations and was, therefore, all the more realistic. Full article
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18 pages, 1835 KiB  
Article
A Virtual You: Reading Kurahashi Yumiko’s Kurai Tabi through Virtuality
by Jason M. Beckman
Literature 2023, 3(3), 278-295; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3030019 - 25 Jun 2023
Viewed by 1670
Abstract
Within literary criticism, the second-person narrative is frequently read within the conventions of the modern realistic novel, tackling the narratee/protagonist as a narratological problem. Such an approach, however, overlooks a core component of what second-person fiction aims to do: that is, draw the [...] Read more.
Within literary criticism, the second-person narrative is frequently read within the conventions of the modern realistic novel, tackling the narratee/protagonist as a narratological problem. Such an approach, however, overlooks a core component of what second-person fiction aims to do: that is, draw the reader into the narrative and experience the world of the text firsthand. Seeking instead to theorize the ways in which second-person narratives involve the reader in the text and invite the act of perspective-taking, I turn to virtual reality, which is deeply invested in the cognitive mechanisms through which a sense of presence is produced and in questions of how the mediated experience of virtual reality can influence human thought and behavior. Examining Kurahashi Yumiko’s Kurai Tabi (1961), one of the earliest examples of the literary form in Japanese literature, I consider how the reader can experience presence during moments in the text, and how the text drives the reader’s identification with the “you” who is the target of the narration. Analyzing the second-person narrative as a virtuality provides a new avenue for understanding the reader’s cognitive engagement and experience of second-person fiction. Full article
12 pages, 996 KiB  
Article
Projected on the Dusk: Seeking Cinema in 1910s and 1920s Japanese Poetry
by Andrew Campana
Literature 2023, 3(1), 133-144; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010011 - 07 Mar 2023
Viewed by 1751
Abstract
In this article, I explore a set of poetic works from early 20th-century Japan that took cinema—films, movie theaters, screenings, sets, and a variety of cinematic technologies—as their main subject. An enormous range of poets, including some of modern Japanese poetry’s most canonical [...] Read more.
In this article, I explore a set of poetic works from early 20th-century Japan that took cinema—films, movie theaters, screenings, sets, and a variety of cinematic technologies—as their main subject. An enormous range of poets, including some of modern Japanese poetry’s most canonical figures, took a diverse set of approaches to the subject matter, but all were less interested in portraying films themselves, and more in how poetry could use “cinema” and the “cinematic” to grapple with questions of memory, media, ecology, the body, and social change. Looking at these works—most of which appear here in English for the first time—we can find a new archive of early cinematic thought and sensation not bound to the screen. Full article
10 pages, 243 KiB  
Article
Sound, Smell, Objects, and the Discursive Space of Nagai Kafū’s 1920s Fiction
by Gala Maria Follaco
Literature 2023, 3(1), 123-132; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010010 - 23 Feb 2023
Viewed by 1340
Abstract
Throughout his life, Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) tackled crucial issues of modernity, such as the urban experience and conflicting notions of selfhood. This article explores some aspects of his narrative practice that enrich our understanding of his literary output while suggesting new avenues for [...] Read more.
Throughout his life, Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) tackled crucial issues of modernity, such as the urban experience and conflicting notions of selfhood. This article explores some aspects of his narrative practice that enrich our understanding of his literary output while suggesting new avenues for future research on space-time representation in twentieth-century literature. I focus on passive senses such as hearing and smell, and on material objects and physical sensations as narrative devices employed by the author in order to broaden comprehension and enrich the experience of objective reality. In particular, I examine Yukidoke (Melting Snow), a 1922 short story understudied thus far but that offers useful insights as regards the author’s intent to defy superimposed notions of affect and space. Full article
11 pages, 222 KiB  
Article
“That Day Does Not Belong to Our Generation”: Komatsu Sakyō’s Affective Futurities
by Baryon Tensor Posadas
Literature 2023, 3(1), 112-122; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010009 - 16 Feb 2023
Viewed by 1239
Abstract
Commentary that observes the frequency of the appearances of images of disaster pervades much of the discourse surrounding postwar Japanese popular culture, and especially Japanese science fiction. Against such approaches, I argue that it is more productive to read these narratives of disaster [...] Read more.
Commentary that observes the frequency of the appearances of images of disaster pervades much of the discourse surrounding postwar Japanese popular culture, and especially Japanese science fiction. Against such approaches, I argue that it is more productive to read these narratives of disaster through the critical lens of the genre’s engagement with the problem of futurity. My contention then is that these narratives of disaster do not merely function as imaginative repetitions or re-enactments of past events, but also take on an anticipatory quality, affectively preparing and the ground for and pre-empting responses to future events. I examine the work of Komatsu Sakyō (1931–2011) in particular, whose writing makes for an illustrative test case for articulating the premediative dimension of disaster narratives in postwar Japanese science fiction. Full article
18 pages, 892 KiB  
Article
The Rhythm of Breath in Natsume Sōseki’s Recollecting and Such
by Matthew Mewhinney
Literature 2023, 3(1), 94-111; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010008 - 08 Feb 2023
Viewed by 2274
Abstract
This article examines Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) memoir Recollecting and Such (Omoidasu koto nado; 1910). I argue that Sōseki invites the reader to imagine breath through his literary representation of both physiological and metaphysical experience and the rhythm of the [...] Read more.
This article examines Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) memoir Recollecting and Such (Omoidasu koto nado; 1910). I argue that Sōseki invites the reader to imagine breath through his literary representation of both physiological and metaphysical experience and the rhythm of the narrative’s experimental poetic form. In concert with the theme of this special issue, I show how Recollecting and Such self-reflexively restores and evokes the corporeal experience of sensation beyond just visual perception: the narrative reveals itself as a poetic form of measurement and its first-person narrator a “rhythmanalyst”, someone who listens to the internal rhythms of his own body and then to that of the external world (Henri Lefebvre). The narrator’s awareness of the duration, frequency, and intensity of sensation as well as his regular compositions of metered verse—haiku and kanshi (traditional Chinese poetry as practiced in Japan; Sinitic verse)—are ways that the narrative measures the limits of life, memory, and sensory experience. The oscillation between prose and poetry in the narrative generates an organic rhythm, simulating the long and short breaths of a convalescing body, which invites the reader to breathe together—“to conspire” in the literal sense—with the text as a form of sympathy. Full article
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