Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature: A Critical Approach

by Hutchinson; Racheal

• ISBN13: 9780415361859
• ISBN10: 0415361850
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 10/31/2006
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literaturelooks at the ways in authors writing in Japanese in the twentieth century constructed a division between Self and Other in their work. Using a cross-section of authors and texts as case studies the contributors illuminate themes and issues related to this delineation of the Other and the Japanese Self. Part one of the book concentrates on the West and Asia as a contrastive Other, focusing on Japan looking at Others outside Japan. Taking geographical, racial and ethnic identity as a starting point to explore Japan's vision of 'non-Japan', representations of the Other are examined in terms of the experiences of Japanese authors abroad and in the imaginary lands envisioned by authors in Japan. Part two goes on to look at Japan's perspective of Others inside the borders of Japan and within the same ethnic grouping and how Japanese society looks out at the peripheries and margins of its own society. Finally, part three discusses whether there isany middle ground between this typical Japanese society and the Others on the periphery.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Hermes and Herm+¼s: Othernesses in modern Japanese literature

Meet Me on the Other Side: Strategies of otherness in modern Japanese literature

External Others

Who Holds the Whip? Power and critique in Nagai Kafu's Tales of America

Foreign Bodies: 'Race', gender and orientalism in Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's The Mermaid's Lament

Self and Other in the writings of Kajii Motojiro

Yokomitsu Riichi's Others: Paris and Shanghai

Internal Others

Passing: Paradoxes of Alterity in The Broken Commandment

The burakumin as Other in Noma Hiroshi's Circle of Youth

Sincerely Yours: Uno Chiyo's A Wife's Letters as wartime subversion

Foriegn Sex, Native Politics: Lady Chatterley's Lover in post-occupation Japan

The Way of the Survivor: conversion and inversion in Oe Kenzaburo's Hiroshima Notes

Free to Write: Confronting the present and the past in Shiina Rinzo's The Beautiful Woman

Liminal Sites

Yuta as the Postcolonial Other in Oshiro Tatsuhiro's Fiction

Modernity, History, and the Uncanny: The colonial encounter and the epistemological gap

There's No Such Place As Home: Goto Meisei, or identity as alterity

Beyond Language: Embracing the figure of 'the Other' in Yi Yang-Ji's Yuhi

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