UCLA

This dissertation reconceptualizes Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon kindai bungaku) as a metanarrative that advances by repeatedly looping back onto its own conditions of (im)possibility. I argue that this recursive structure arises from modern Japan’s oscillation between the residual past of the Sinographic Cosmopolis, the premodern East Asian republic of letters linked by Literary Sinitic (i.e. Classical Chinese), and the perpetually deferred future of Western modernity, mediated through the emergent universal language of English and marked by racialized forms of exclusion. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Sinographic Cosmopolis, within which Japan had been able to negotiate a workable relationship vis-à-vis the idea of “civilization,” lingered on as a historical memory, while Japan’s full assimilation into Western civilization was foreclosed by racial difference. During Japan’s imperial expansion, Japanese briefly assumed the status of a cosmopolitan language, yet the Japanese Empire’s defeat in the Second World War reprovincialized its language, which became increasingly overshadowed by English. By the end of the century, the tradition of Modern Japanese Literature itself became retroactively constituted as a lost universal, uneasily occupying the structural position once held by Literary Sinitic. The first two chapters examine the recursive structures underlying the works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), two foundational figures of kindai bungaku. The next two chapters evince how this recursivity unfolded across the translational space of the Japanese Empire by juxtaposing Yu Dafu (1896–1945), a Chinese writer who spent nearly a decade in Japan and whose early fiction reflects the affective and stylistic contours of kindai bungaku, with Nakajima Atsushi (1909–1942), a Japanese writer who reimagined classical Chinese literature (kanbungaku) through the idiom of modern Japanese. The coda investigates the ways in which the specter of the Sinographic Cosmopolis haunts the work of Mizumura Minae (1951–) as kindai bungaku confronts its looming end in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.