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This paper builds on the discussion of Bungakuron in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993). It focuses on Soseki's collaboration with Masaoka Shiki to revive haiku and the links that Soseki found between the haiku-related genre of shaseibun (literary sketches) and the grotesque, loosely plotted realism of Laurence Sterne. Like Bakhtin, Soseki recognizes something in early novelistic forms that would later be disciplined out. Furthermore, this paper argues that in the preface to Bungakuron Soseki provides both an encomium to his dead friend Masaoka and a prescient announcement of the 'end of literature', perceived 100 years early from his vantage point as a non-Western subject witnessing the 'end of empire' in London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corpus of haikai (haiku) poetic material produced from the early until the latter part of the nineteenth century in Japan has been largely dismissed as unliterary since Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). In particular scholars have avoided the study of the poetic practice known as tsukinami haikai, a form of poetic competition. By examining a specific tsukinami haikai text as well as looking at the process of tsukinami haikai competitions, I argue that they had an important pedagogical and cultural value. The poets who composed poems for tsukinami haikai competitions gained the education necessary to read Masaoka Shiki's arguments in favor of a 'literary poetry'. In addition the vocabulary that they learned from tsukinami haikai was 'universal' and thus transcended local identities. Tsukinami haikai is important for understanding the cultural history of nineteenth century Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]