UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores the foundational role that representations of literary intimacy have played in generating and shaping the work of Japanese writers between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The critical thrust of this project is to reimagine Japanese literary history through the lens of what I call “literary friendship”—a set of literarily mediated relations between writers and readers, or among readers themselves—by which literature becomes both a textual materialization of, and a generative space for, webs of intimacy. Whereas prior scholarship often explores friendship in Japanese literature through biographical, sociological, and anthropological lenses, “Reading Friendships” examines how friendship provides a new paradigm—small and intimate yet interconnected—for reading Japanese literature and literary history, which has often been interpreted through grand, linear narratives of political and social change. This dissertation reveals how friendship functions as a lens for understanding the workings of literature; for rethinking stylistic developments as resulting from dialogues between friends; and for recasting linear narratives of literary history as emerging from intersubjective entanglements. “Reading Friendships” investigates two key literary-historical moments in the evolution of textualized relationships and examines writers engaged with Japanese as well as Chinese and European literary traditions. Chapters One and Two focus on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the end of Japan’s early modern period. Chapter One, “Constellations of Early Modern Friendship,” examines how early eighteenth-century thinkers such as the Confucian scholar Muro Kyūsō (1658–1734) conceptualized the pursuit of knowledge as an affective and dialogical process, rooted in a conception of literary friendship informed not only by Japanese classics such as the monk-poet Yoshida Kenkō’s (1283–1350) fourteenth-century Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa), but also by Confucian classics and Chinese poetry. While thinkers like Kyūsō treated literary intimacy as a model for acquiring knowledge, Chapter Two, “Santō Kyōden: Inventing a Literature of Friendship,” turns to the popular writer Santō Kyōden’s (1761–1816) reimagining of this kind of literary sociability as a framework for a new conception of writing amid the commercialization of publication at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this vision, literature emerges from webs of intimacy with the past, present, and future, rather than from market demands. Shifting to modern Japan and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), a foundational figure in modern Japanese literature, Chapter Three, “Bloody, Sublime Intimacy: Rereading Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro,” shows how modern notions of literary friendship were shaped not only by the genealogy of literary sociability within East Asia but also by conceptions of textual intimacy informed by Western thought. This chapter discusses Sōseki’s vision of literary friendship, in which literature constitutes a form of aesthetic intimacy (akin to the sublime of Burke and Kant) between the writer and his reader: an experience that transcends rational comprehension and forges a transformative bond between them.