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306 Pages·2011·8.547 MB·English
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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 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Eileen Meehan Marketing by Michael Campochiaro 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.

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