UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how authors, critics, and filmmakers engaged with tensions between a variety of cultural and scientific understandings of sensory perception present in Taishō and early Shōwa-era Japan. I posit interwar Japan’s geopolitical context as a particularly rich node for cross-pollination between different conceptualizations of the senses, ranging from Western science to Sino-Japanese aesthetics to colonial mediations of indigenous cultural practices. On this basis, I reframe modernist moments in silent film, translation, historical fiction, and colonial poetry as negotiating multiple representational realisms brought together by processes of modernization and colonialism. I trace how perceptual tensions across media forms and genres embody a complex web of anxieties around modernity and multiculturalism in Japan that fueled, in certain quarters, a reactionary obsession with aesthetic purity into the 1930s. Troubling this narrative’s hegemony, I locate intermedial engagements within these same representational tensions that embody genuine attempts to imagine cross-cultural and transhistorical connections between disparate sensoria in literature and film. I conclude that any vision of Japanese and global modernism must incorporate alternative sensory epistemologies, of differing hierarchies and divisions between senses, toward an understanding of modernist praxis as a fraught yet generative mediation of culturally inflected difference around sensory categories and embodied experience.Chapter One explores non-visual approaches to the medium of silent film in 1920s Japan through the lens of the Shinkankakuha journal Bungei jidai and the 1925 film adaptation of Yokomitsu Riichi’s 1923 novel Nichirin. Chapter Two reads Itō Sei and Morita Sōhei’s Japanese translations of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the early 1930s as instances in which the anxiety of influence around Western modernism transformed into an anxiety of resonance between an Anglophone futurity and a Japanese antiquity. Chapter Three revisits historical fiction by Orikuchi Shinobu and Hori Tatsuo in the late 1930s and early 1940s to argue that these works’ historical focus subverts the essentialization of a Japanese past, instead defying a fascistic vision of cultural purity while exposing and subtly critiquing the mechanisms of its nostalgic construction. Finally, Chapter Four engages the Japanese poetry of Korean modernists Chŏng Chi-yong and Yi Sang in order to demonstrate how both poets expand a “Japanese” sensorium of beyond the boundaries of a national identity or language.