Nagai Kafu's Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self

306 Pages·2011·8.547 MB·English

by  Rachael Hutchinson

Nagai Kafu’s Occidentalism
Defining the Japanese Self
Rachael Hutchinson
Nagai Kafu¯’s Occidentalism

Nagai Kafu¯’s Occidentalism
Defi ning the Japanese Self
RACHAEL HUTCHINSON
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hutchinson, Rachael.
Nagai Kafu's occidentalism : defi ning the Japanese self / Rachael
Hutchinson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3907-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Nagai, Kafu, 1879–1959—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Civilization,
Western, in literature. 3. East and West in literature. 4. Japan—
In literature. I. Title.
PL812.A4Z6565 2011
895.6'344—dc22 2011003126
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Chapter One
Constructing the “West”: Binarism and Complexity in
Kafū’s America 17
Chapter Two
Imagining Authenticity: Literature and Civilization in
Kafū’s France 59
Chapter Three
Positioning the Observer: Kafū’s “Orient” and Orientalism 95
Chapter Four
Occidentalism: Contrast and Critique in the Returnee Stories 133
Chapter Five
Resistance: Defi ning and Preserving the Japanese Self 173
Conclusions 219
Notes 235
Bibliography 251
Index 263

Acknowledgments
The bulk of this volume was completed on a sabbatical supported by a
Picker Research Fellowship, granted by the Colgate University Research
Council. I owe sincere thanks to Julie Nelson Davis and Cappy Hurst
of the University of Pennsylvania Center for East Asian Studies for
hosting me as visiting researcher for 2006–2007. The original research
project was carried out at the University of Oxford, with the generous
support of the Kobe Steel Postgraduate Scholarship at St. Catherine’s
College, in conjunction with an Overseas Research Students’ Award.
The dissertation was completed with the assistance of the TEPCO
Senior Studentship at Pembroke College. I would like to express my
sincere thanks to my dissertation supervisor, Brian Powell, for his
confi dence in my approach and his continued support. I am grateful
to many people for their insightful comments on various stages of
the manuscript, including Roger Goodman, Arthur Stockwin, Ann
Waswo, Phillip Harries, Keiko Tanaka, Stephen Dodd, Peter Kornicki,
and Ivo Smits. I thank Mark Morris, Atsuko Sakaki, Susan Napier,
Stephen Snyder, and Charles Shirō Inouye for their useful questions
at conferences and workshops. For their encouragement I must thank
Mark Williams, Michael Bourdaghs, Faye Yuan Kleeman, Hiroshi Nara,
Caroline Rose, Frances Weightman, Nicky Bray, and Jacqui Langford.
I must also acknowledge the support and encouragement given to me
by Henry Chan and Leith Morton, who saw this project grow from its
very beginnings in my Honours thesis at the University of Newcastle,
Australia. Leith challenged me to fi nd my own response to Kafū’s
material, and gave me the confi dence to carry through with it, while
Henry’s teaching on national and cultural identity has shaped all my
work to the present day.
For funding that enabled me to present my work at a number
of conferences, I would like to thank the British Academy, the
British Association of Japanese Studies Council, Gakushūin Women’s
University, the University of Leeds School of Modern Languages
vii
viii Acknowledgments
and Cultures, the Colgate University Faculty Development Council,
and the University of Delaware College of Arts and Sciences. Many
thanks are due to Hiroshi Nara, Amy Dooling and Fred Dickinson for
inviting me to present on my research at the University of Pittsburgh,
Connecticut College, and the University of Pennsylvania. I would
like to thank Jeff rey Angles for his warm welcome in Kalamazoo,
especially for showing me Kafū’s boarding houses and introducing
me to so many people interested in the local history. Many thanks go
to the Soga Japan Center for supporting my talk at the University of
Western Michigan, where discussion and questions were very helpful.
Some material in Chapter 1 appeared originally in a somewhat
diff erent form in Monumenta Nipponica 62.3 (Autumn 2007), pp. 323–345.
Chapter 1 also includes some material revised from the essay ‘Who
Holds the Whip? Power and Critique in Nagai Kafū’s Tales of America,’
in Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams (eds.), Representing the Other
in Modern Japanese Literature: A Critical Approach, Routledge, British
Association of Japanese Studies Series, 2006, pp. 57–74. Some parts of
Chapter 4 are revised from my article “Occidentalism and Critique of
Meiji: The West in the Returnee Stories of Nagai Kafū,” Japan Forum,
13.2 (2001) pp. 195–213.
I am grateful to the University of Delaware College of Arts and
Sciences and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
for granting a publication subvention for this book, and to Nancy
Ellegate at SUNY Press for her guidance in manuscript preparation.
I thank the two anonymous readers of my text whose questions and
comments helped me refi ne my approach and express it more clearly.
Thanks go to Carrie Lorensen for her help in retyping sections of the
manuscript. I am extremely grateful to Izumi Tytler and her staff at
the Bodleian Japanese Library for all their help and advice, as well as
the helpful people at the East Asian Library at Princeton University. I
would like to thank all my students at the University of Leeds, Colgate
University, and the University of Delaware for listening to my ideas
on Nagai Kafū during our literature courses, regardless of whether
he was included in the original syllabus.
Finally, I thank my family, who have supported all my eff orts
with unceasing good humor and encouragement. I am sorry that my
Mum is not around to see the fi nal product of a project that took so
long in the making, but thank her and my Dad for their unfailing
support through the years. My sister Ruth has long put up with
my ramblings on Orientalism, while the Bohm family provided a
cheerful environment in which many early drafts of chapters were
Acknowledgments ix
fi rst completed. Thanks especially to my wonderful husband Chris
and daughter Natalie, who help me every day to do my work and
be a Mum as well.
❈
Japanese names will be given in the Japanese order, with family name
fi rst. I follow general usage with writers’ names, so that Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō is referred to as Tanizaki while Natsume Sōseki is referred
to as Sōseki. Where the pen name is more recognizable than the given
name it is used throughout—Futabatei Shimei instead of Hasegawa
Tatsunosuke; Nagai Kafū instead of Nagai Sōkichi.