The thesis examines the problem of evil in the works of the Japanese writer Endo Shusaku (1923-1996). The duality within the title of the thesis - "the problem of evil" and "between reading and writing': - aims at indicating the processual character of the writer's approach to this issue at different stages of his literary activity. The investigative perspective adopted in this thesis was conditioned both by the topic itself (evil) and by the distinctive character of the materials that constitute the object of the study: essays and critical texts written between 1947 and 1985, and Endo's last novel, Deep River (1993). The confrontation between non:"fictional texts and the fictional one demonstrates constant reoccurrence of the problem of evil within Endo's horizon of experience; his essays and critical works register the process of reading on evil whereas his fiction reflects specific ways of transforming this experience of reading into writing. The texts chosen for the analysis reveal another important motif of End6's writing - his encounter with the Western world, in particular with the French literature and thought. The problem of evil in End6's literature is situated within Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics and selected concepts that are contained in his interpretive project (symbol, cogito, distance, meaning, reference, and mimesis). Following Ricoeur, the problem of evil is subject to analysis on three levels: the semantic, the reflective and the existential, which, consequently, leads to capturing various forms of manifestations of evil depicted by End6. In accordance with Ricoeur's narrative theory, the thesis accentuates the subjectivity of End6, his identity as the reader and the writer.

Japanese popular commercial fiction developed in relation to the performing arts, borrowing elements from the oral tradition and theatre. It flourished using the woodblock printing medium. Edo period woodblock-printed books retained a manuscript-like quality, although could be produced in large numbers. Since the Meiji period, scholars have striven to put Edo fiction into "more accessible" movable-type editions, causing, I believe, modem misconceptions about pre-modern methods of reading. Recent scholarship admits we have forgotten how fiction was read in Edo Japan. We are hindered by the modern practice of swift, silent reading. I combine a bibliographical and theoretical approach in response to these problems. Due to its ties with the theatre, I consider fiction as a type of performance, and suggest the key to understanding how fiction was enjoyed lies in close attention to the original woodblock-printed books. The fiction writer, Shikitei Sanba was the son of a woodblock-carver, and grew up in the publishing trade. He was also a particular theatre aficionado. This thesis uses his example to demonstrate how performance was represented in popular fiction. In Sanba's fiction, the connection between woodblock and theatre emerges in two ways. My first chapter conducts a bibliographical study of (1) theatre-related works written by Sanba and works published by him in his capacity as a publisher. Following chapters explore how (2) the expressiveness of woodblock is used to represent elements of performance in Sanba's fiction. The last chapter indicates how a work of fiction in its entirety reflects conventions of performance. Sanba particularly sought to convey the whole of a (imaginary) performance on the page, in a comprehensive set of cues for oral interpretation and re-enactment by the reader. Many genres of pre-modem Japanese popular fiction are shown to hold clues, of varying degree and subtlety, for recollecting and recreating performance.

This thesis presents a reading of borders, difference, and translation in selected fictional writings by Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-ji, and Tawada Yōko. Each of these three writers is typically considered within distinct sub-genres of Japanese fiction: Okinawan, resident Korean (zainichi), and border-crossing, respectively. While each of these categories prescribes certain characteristics and aesthetics, the narrative works discussed here frequently subvert those expectations. In particular, in terms of narrative and writing strategies each shares a commonality of interest and approach as yet unearthed, crucially, in the challenge each poses to standard Japanese as a narrative language through their uses of other vernaculars, multiple voices, and fragmented narratives. These analyses are foregrounded by a critical consideration of border-crossing literature whose emphasis on overcoming inequalities and focus on the fluidity of passage has been celebrated amid the return of cosmopolitanism. By contrast, Chapter One presents strategies of hybridity and polyphony in Sakiyama’s ‘Kuja’ narratives that incite hidden memories of the past and terrorise the Japanese language. In Chapter Two, the protagonists in Yi’s Kazukime and Yuhi enact a similar violence against the text and their own bodies to leave irreducible gaps of absence and silence. Chapter Three focuses on Tawada’s The Travelling Naked Eye, wherein the protagonist’s linguistic displacement is accompanied by the fragmentation of her vision, bringing questions of sight and blindness to bear on the preceding focus on language. By tracing shared concerns with voice, silence, female bodies, memory, and colonial experience, this combined study reveals the ways in which the texts discussed here cast linguistic and spatial borders as rupture, loss, and irretrievable distance. Although such strategies are precarious, I argue that these narratives empower through their conscious engagement in struggles with difference and distance vis-à-vis a hegemonic Japanese national/linguistic centre: struggles that an emphasis on “crossings” threatens to overlook.

No description available.

This thesis examines and contextualises the early writings of Kanai Mieko, concentrating on the ways in which they instigate challenges to conventional inscriptions of gender, love, and text through a deployment of avant-garde narrative techniques. The first chapter argues that Kanai’s early writings interrogate and problematise conventional inscriptions of identity and gender: her short stories ‘Rabbits’ and ‘Rotting Meat’ borrow the form of paradoxical concepts that arise out of various surrealist avant-garde theories (such as Okamoto’s polaroppositionalism and Sakaguchi’s ‘Discourse on Decadence’) and can be read as a commentary upon the collective endeavours by contemporary feminists and women writers to create a written ‘feminine’. The second chapter further explores the subversive potential of Kanai’s writings. It argues that Kanai’s debut novella, Love Life, addresses the crisis of representation of the late 1960s by constructing two constellatory matrices of literary meaning: Ai-body-presence and F-narrative-absence. The first of these matrices, Ai-body-presence, is discernible in the inscription of the protagonist Ai’s physical origin as abject and can be read as a specific critique and enactment of how the crisis of representation affected the female body. The second, F-narrative-absence, is present in Ai’s attempts to inscribe her absent husband F, enabling her to pursue an understanding of what it means to love. The final chapter examines another matrix of literary meaning in Kanai’s writings in which text is described as if it is a body possessed of a consciousness, which Kanai herself refers to in her essay, ‘Text/Reality/The Body’, as the ‘corporeal text’. It contends that the ‘corporeal text’ acts as a challenge to conventional understandings of both the relationship between body and consciousness, and between the reader and a given text. In so doing, it pursues a deliberate textual strategy to transform the reader into an active creator of meaning.

As the daughter of liberal-minded and affluent parents, the writer Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951) had unusual freedom for a young Japanese woman in defining herself. Her pivotal three years in Soviet Russia and Europe in 1927–1930 brought about her conversion to communism in the Stalinist era and changed the course of her life. The fundamental question of this thesis is how travel can transform an individual’s sense of self. I address this by using the concept of positionality to analyse how Miyamoto Yuriko presented her experience of travel across several genres of self-writing. Drawing on Chloe Starr’s (2013) approach to different genres of self-writing as individual components of an overarching narrative, I take as my source material Yuriko’s various accounts of her three years abroad: the autobiographical novel Dōhyō (Roadsigns) (1947–1950), two key essays from her Sobieto kikō, ‘Mosukuwa inshōki’ (Record of Moscow Impressions, 1928) and ‘London 1929’ (1930), and Yuriko’s diaries from this period. By reading these accounts, written at different times in different genres, against and through each other, I will analyse the variations and commonalities to produce a more detailed and nuanced picture of the relationship between Yuriko’s travels and her self-conception. In my analysis of travel as a transformational experience, I draw on cultural geography to explore the interaction of place and self, in particular, the city. Historically I situate Yuriko’s travels in the context of opposed models of modernity – the newly formed Soviet Union and ‘Old’ Europe – and the different implications of these modernities for women.

This thesis presents an analysis of Japanese modernist texts from the 1930s, with an emphasis on the writings of Takami Jun (1907-1965), Ishikawa Jun (1899-1987) and Dazai Osamu (1909-1948). Rather than discuss these experiments within the problematic of influence and see them as secondary gestures imitating the techniques of Gide or Joyce, I attempt to show that Japanese modernist fiction is deeply implicated in its cultural, political and technological moment. 1 begin with a mapping of the historical and discursive forces behind the so-called cultural revival (bungei fukko) and the revolt against the epistemic regime of Westernized modernity: its soulless positivism, its logic of instrumentality which objectified nature and the historical teleologies which inevitably relegated Japan to a secondary place. I examine the works of Takami, Ishikawa and Dazai in this context, against close-ups of specific material and discursive developments. The transgressions and dislocations of linear narrative in Takami Jun's novel Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot (Kokyu wasureu beki, 1936) are read as radical deconstructions of the deeply ideological discourse of tenko (the official term for the political conversion of leftists) as a regeneration of the self, as the return to a natural organic Japaneseness. The narrative of Ishikawa Jun's Fugen (Fugen, 1936) is structured by dualistic tropes which can be seen as configurations of mediation and unity; I explore the meaning of these narrative strategies against the collapse of political mediation in the mid-1930s and the swell of fascist longings for oneness with the emperor. The marked reflexivity of the stories in Dazai Osamu's first published collection The Final Years (Bannen, 1936) is discussed in the context of the profound anxieties generated by the accelerated logic of cultural reproduction and the technologically altered texture of experience. I argue that in their shared emphasis on discursive mediation and the materiality of language, the texts of Takami, Ishikawa and Dazai become figures of resistance to a nativism which strove for immediate authenticity and abandoned representation for the metaphysics of timeless Japaneseness.

'The Tale of Genji' had been out of print in Japan for nearly two centuries when its first English translation debuted in 1882. Ironically, as fin de siècle Anglophones encountered early reviews of 'Genji' in 'The New York Times' and elsewhere as a Japanese classic, the text was unavailable in Tokyo bookstores. This study investigates the millennium-long history of 'Genji', shedding light particularly upon how its English translators introduced textual and marketing strategies that were adopted by Japanese to domestically popularize the work. Such findings will extend those of G.G. Rowley (1997), who first contended that 'Genji' had fallen out of print between the years of 1706 and 1890. This study builds upon Rowley's research, clarifying how English translations of 'Genji' were responsible for the work's return to print in Japan, where 'Genji' has subsequently become the country's national classic. Methodologically, in exploring how translators have creatively enriched Murasaki's legacy up until the present, this study applies Anthony Pym's notion of humanization (2009) and Pascale Casanova's call for literary historicization (2007). Additionally, this thesis contributes to translation research by introducing the Japanese concept of reverse-importation. The term describes a process through which objects can gain recognition in their domestic market due to perceptions of popularity achieved abroad. Murasaki's tale provides a case to better understand how English translations of 'Genji' have, through reverse-importation, altered the work's standing in Japan.

This is a study of some of the works of the Japanese novelist, Ozaki Koyo (1867-1903). The aim has been to identify the legacy that the fiction of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) left in his work, so comparatively little attention has been paid to his life or to works that throw no light on this question, such as his adaptations and translations of western literature. Koyo's fiction was influenced by two distinct literary traditions from the Tokugawa period. His interest in ninjobon, a genre of romantic novel, spanned his creative life and imparted to his works a tendency towards complex romantic plots and a concern for realistic dialogue. For a few years, however, this source of influence yielded to another: Koyo was involved in the revival of the works of Ihara Saikaku which took place in the years around 1890, and this profoundly affected his language and style for several years. Attempts to imitate Saikaku's fiction also enabled him to experiment with uses of the narrator that were foreign to ninjobon writers, and he became progressively more interested in probing the minds of his characters. He took these developments further in his last two novels, stimulated both by the western fiction he had read and by current literary fashions. In Tajo takon he used the narrator to express his rejection of views of marriage imported from the West; in Konjiki yasha he combined the qualities of ninjobon with a study of usury. Apart from revealing some of the areas in which Meiji fiction was indebted to tradition, Koyo's works show that the influence of Tokugawst fiction was not always as harmful as it is often supposed to be.