Japanese Modernism And Cine-Text : Fragments And Flows At Empire\u27s Edge In Kitagawa Fuyuhiko And Yokomitsu Riichi

This article notes that Kitagawa Fuyuhiko\u27s writings from the 1920s and 1930s, together with the contemporaneous works of prose author Yokomitsu Riichi, are strongly marked by the confluence of the literary and the cinematic. Kitagawa and Yokomitsu\u27s engagement with film was not limited to a fascination with the precision, objectivity, or mobility of the “camera eye.” Rather, it extended to the entire ability of the cinematic apparatus to capture the temporality of objects in motion, and of the ability of the filmmaker to organize segments of space into a new synthetic whole. The article explores this confluence through a brief examination of four instances of “cine-text”: Kitagawa\u27 poetry collection War, Yokomitsu\u27 novel Shanghai, the concept of literary formalism Yokomitsu proposed around the year 1930, and the theory of the “prose film” that Kitagawa unveiled in the following decade

Shiina Rinzo: imaging hope and despair in occupation Japan

With defeat in the Pacific War in 1945, the very notion of ‘community’ (as described by Benedict Anderson) in Japan was under threat, the future of the nation dependent, as never before, on the response of the international community. Viewed in a different light, however, the slate was clean—the possibilities, indeed the need, for revised terms of reference for this ‘imagined community’ now of paramount importance. The ensuing attempts to define the parameters of the emerging national identity were far-reaching and multi-faceted, seeking as they did to encompass the memories of loss and devastation through the realm of everyday culture as well as through political discourse. The focus of this paper will be on the contribution to this radical reassessment of the relationship between the nation and the individual made by the group of authors collectively known as the Sengoha (après guerre literary coterie). More specifically, I shall be examining the novellas, Shin'ya no shuen (The midnight banquet, 1947) and Eien naru josho (The eternal preface, 1948), two early texts by the author, Shiina Rinzo, arguably the most representative Sengoha writer, for evidence of the extent to which this literature helped to shape and modify the ‘imagined community’ of Japan

Syntax and semantics of the nominals mono and koto in Japanese : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Japanese at Massey University

There is a group of words which are usually referred to as keisiki-meisi (i.e. formal nouns) in Japanese. The formal noun is defined as a noun which does not have a substantive meaning, and is not used in isolation, but requires a preceding modifier. In this thesis, examinations of various aspects of the Japanese nouns mono and koto, which are widely acknowledged as typical examples of formal noun, will be presented. Mono and koto occur with a variety of terms to produce additional derivatives. For example, when the copula da is attached to mono or koto at the end of a sentence, it becomes a sentence-final modality which strongly reflects the speaker's emotions or feelings. However, owing to the fact that mono and koto are also used on occasion as substantive nouns without preceding modifiers, scholars tend to merely clarify the boundary between the use of mono or koto as a substantive noun, and its use as a formal noun, giving two separate labels to the same noun. In this study, the existence of continuity between these two usages - substantive and formal - is hypothesised. The syntactic and semantic features observed throughout the derivative forms of mono and koto offer a chance to explore and identify the unifying features of the two different usages. It is also demonstrated that, viewed in the light of the framework of grammaticalisation, the category 'formal noun' is only a label that has been put onto a group of nouns which can be grammaticalised or which have already been grammaticalised

A critical review of Japanese scholarship on modern Chinese fiction and translation studies

This paper introduces Western readers to Japanese scholarship on late Qing and early Republican fiction and translation. It begins with a historical background on the development of modern Chinese literature studies in Japan, covering research societies, publications, and scholars in the field. Next, it discusses questions related to new directions in the study of the May Fourth Movement. Then, it addresses groundbreaking studies on writers and translators outside the main stream of research, covering Lin Shu, Liu Tieyun, and Li Boyuan. Further discussion examines thematic studies, including detective novels and Japanese political fiction

A Genealogy of Literal Translation in Modern Japan

In modern Japan, especially in the Meiji period (1868-1912), translations occupied a dominant position in the literary polysystem. This paper claims that, since the Meiji period, “competing translational norms” have existed in the Japanese literary polysystem, which is to say that “literal” (adequate) and “free” (acceptable) translations have existed in parallel, vying for superior status. Moreover, this paper traces the literalist tradition in modern Japan. Though “literal” translation has been widely criticized, the styles and expressions it created have made a significant contribution to the founding and development of the modern Japanese language and its literature. Among the arguments in favor of literal translation, Iwano Homei’s literal translation strategy—the so-called “straight translation”—had different features than the others, and thus the potential to produce translations that maintain the cohesion, coherence, information structure and illocutionary effects of the source text.Dans le Japon moderne, particulièrement à l’ère Meiji (1868–1912), la traduction a occupé une position prédominante dans le polysystème littéraire. Cet article suggère que, depuis l’ère Meiji, il existe des « normes traductionnelles en concurrence » dans le polysystème littéraire japonais, ce qui veut dire que des traductions « littérales » (adéquates) et « libres » (acceptables) existent en parallèle et rivalisent pour obtenir la supériorité. Par ailleurs, cet article retrace la tradition littéraliste dans le Japon moderne. Bien que la traduction « littérale » ait été amplement critiquée, les styles et les expressions qu’elle a produits ont apporté une contribution significative à l’élaboration et au développement de la langue et de la littérature japonaises modernes. Pour plaider en faveur de la traduction littérale, nous prenons l’exemple de la stratégie de Iwano Homei – connue sous le nom de « traduction directe » – qui a des caractéristiques différentes des autres et permet ainsi de produire des traductions qui maintiennent la cohésion, la cohérence, la structure informative et les effets illocutoires du texte de départ

Allereinfachste Sätze. Kleine Narratologie der zeitgenössischen japanischen Literatur

This article explores characteristic narrational contents, styles and structures of recent Japanese literature. Provided that narrational concepts of Heisei Literature have hardly been explored, I will argue that after Murakami Haruki was first published in the early 1980s, and with the paradigm shift from junbungaku to "J-Bungaku" in the late 1990s, Heisei Literature has consistently produced “superflat narratives”. An example for a superflat narration is Kawakami Hiromi’s “Furudōgu Nakano shōten” , translated into German in 2009. Kawakami’s text offers narrational flatness to a global readership that is indulging in the pleasures of the moratorium culture of contemporary Japan; the German version offers yet another aspect of narrational pleasures: the ethnolect “J-Deutsch” (J-German)

New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke\u27s Films And Japanese Modernism

This essay offers a reading of Kinugasa Teinosuke\u27s independent silent films as responses to the traumatic experience of twentieth-century modernity. Of particular interest are the global and local intertexts in A Page of Madness and Crossways, their connections to the literary criticism of the shinkankakuha, or New Perception school, and the centrality of sensory perception in Kinugasa\u27s work