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This paper introduces a group of five articles dealing with interrelations of text and film in the field of Japanese studies. The articles are based on presentations given in February 2016 at a Japanese studies conference hosted by the Seminar of East Asian Studies (Japanology) of Freie Universität Berlin.

This paper examines the translation techniques of Mori Ōgai in his rendering of the story Weißes Glück by Rainer Maria Rilke. It investigates Ōgai’s approach by comparing his translation to versions by Ōyama Teiichi and Itō Yukio. The paper argues that Ōgai pays particular attention to a smooth Japanese expression, easy to read and understand. On the other hand, examples discussed in detail show that Ōyama Teiichi’s and Itō Yukio’s translations are much closer to the German original. These contrasting approaches will be elucidated by analyzing the following features: title, sentence length, pronouns and personal references, representation of colors and noises, culture-specific realia, and rhetorical techniques.

The aim of my paper is to highlight the influence of cinema and of visual techniques in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s narratives of his Yokohama period (1921–23). Famous novels by Tanizaki have been adapted for the screen, and they are widely studied by critics of the history of Japanese cinema. My perspective is not these filmic adaptations, nor the correlations between text and film. I will focus instead on the impact of Tanizaki’s experience of cinematic production during his stay in Yokohama on his narrative style. In Yokohama he actively cooperated with the Taishō Katsuei film company and with the director Thomas (Kisaburō) Kurihara after the latter’s return to Japan from Hollywood. The focus of my paper is on the novel Ave Maria (1923), which has not yet been studied from this point of view, and on the effect cinematic techniques had on Tanizaki’s literary world of dreams. I will examine in particular the references to films and Hollywood actresses, literary descriptions influenced by close-ups and motion pictures as well as the black and white cinema as sensual and aesthetic experiences of light and shadow.

Although the Korean minority in Japan is of colonial origin, most studies dealing with zainichi literature do not focus on its (post)coloniality. This paper argues that analyzing zainichi writing from the perspective of postcolonial theory provides a fruitful contribution to the study of zainichi literature. Since postcolonial theory is usually biased towards Western (post)colonialism, emphasizing the dichotomy between Western colonial powers and their colonies, it is necessary to adapt it to the case of Japan. The first part of this paper therefore maintains that the dichotomy between Japan and its former colony Korea is fundamentally interwoven with a third factor: The West. The second part of this paper concentrates on the text Nason no sora (2001) by the zainichi author Kim Masumi, stressing its postcolonial character and illustrating the potential of a postcolonial reading.

Philosophy is often associated with two antithetic prejudices. One is the opinion that it describes the eternal structures of the world and is therefore not connected with reality. The other is the belief that philosophy is a dangerous tool that manipulates people subversively. In the latter case, it is too connected with reality. There is undoubtedly some truth in these concepts. If we look at Japan’s entry into the Second World War, the question of the role of philosophy within this development becomes immediately apparent. This paper tries to answer this question by focusing on articles published in the journal Risō based on the assumption that this is one of the best methods for obtaining an overview of the tendencies prevalent during the 1930s, as the journal is necessarily strongly bound to the time in which it was published. The paper is divided into three main parts. The first will provide an interpretation of the term “dark valley”, the second – after summarizing the developments within philosophical writings during the 1930s in general and Risō in particular – discusses four authors who published articles in this journal: Honda Kenzō, Ōshima Masanori, Miyamoto Shōson and Takashina Junji. The third part connects the first two and argues that the 1930s can give us an idea of how philosophy in a Japan approaching the Second World War increasingly developed into a way of reasoning within the frame of Japanese thinking. On the one hand, a shift to defend the Japanese culture can be observed. On the other, it will become clear that Japanese philosophy – as revealed in Risō – was much more autonomous than one would expect.

I focus in this paper on the way fiction produced after the 3.11 disasters has engaged with the daunting task of giving meaning to suffering and outliving a traumatic event. I argue that the present practice is based on an overarching literary convention that combines three main tropes. First, how questions over the responsibility in representing trauma appear reflected in the way characters relate to the traumatic event. Second, the articulation of elements of corruption of the body or mind as unavoidable reminders of the trauma. And third, the construction of victims and survivors as invisibilized and ostracized individuals. I show how post-3.11 literary production both follows and enhances a convention set to blame instituted socio-cultural dynamics for perpetuating the violence of the traumatic episode by failing to address survivors as a social responsibility. This piece will explore these themes in Yū Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, Furukawa Hideo’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure, and Tawada Yōko’s The Emissary. My ultimate goal is to explore how literary representations of trauma in 3.11 literature challenge hegemonic propositions that shape the cultural memory of the event.

On the 11th of March 2011, a giant earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 hit the east coast of northern Japan and triggered a tsunami which caused massive destruction in the Tōhoku region. This event and its nuclear aftermath led to severe psychological stress for the victims. How should one deal with this type of traumatic experience? What can be done to prevent or treat mental disorders like PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)? Based on the concept of poetry therapy and its Japanese counterpart shiika ryōhō, this paper examines the possibility of dealing with and overcoming trauma by reading and writing literature. The case analysis of Asahigaoka, a district of Minamisanriku in Miyagi Prefecture, illustrates how these theories can be applied. About one month after the threefold catastrophe, survivors gathered together at the local community center to exchange their thoughts about the disaster. They not only talked to each other, but also chose senryū, a classical Japanese short poetic form that consists of seventeen morae, to express themselves. This study shows that in the case of Asahigaoka, daily collective reading, presenting, and writing of senryū was not only a stabilizing factor in the everyday life of the people, but also helped them to open their hearts to others. This led them to talk about their feelings, which resulted in the opportunity to experience a special form of emotional healing.

We all know that both literature and film have power to move us, inviting us to identify with strangers, creating an opportunity to make all relations “thicker.” It is a challenging task, however, to represent an event that involves a lot of emotions, especially traumatic ones, on behalf of someone else. There is also a problem of priority, when there are many competing stories of “victimization” that need to be told at the same time. Ibuse is not a victim of A-bomb himself, and his strategy in Black Rain was to draw extensively on a “real-life” diary by a survivor who has witnessed the carnage in Hiroshima, which has been received positively by some as an exemplary “non-victim novel” with a documentary look, but criticized by some as a work of plagiarism disguised as fiction. With Imamura’s filmatization, another issue related to representation is introduced. Even as the film is generally acknowledged to have successfully strived for “the look of nonfiction” with its minimalism, Carole Cavanaugh argues that the film, by adding a story about the female protagonist’s romantic union with a veteran soldier suffering from PTSD, attempts to “fixate world memory on the icons of Japanese suffering” and “simultaneously blott[s] out recollection of Japan at war” and of marginalized others.[i] Whose story deserves to be told, and how? This paper tries to probe into these questions by using Ibuse Masuji’s Black Rain, and Imamura Shohei’s 1989 filmatization of it as case studies, with the specificity of the media in mind. [i] «A Working Ideology for Hiroshima: Imamura Shôhei’s Black Rain,” Word and Image in Japanese Cinema (Cambridge UP 2001): 266.

This study analyzes Miyazaki Hayao’s movie Kaze tachinu as an homage to the writer Hori Tatsuo’s famous novel Kaze tachinu, and also takes into account Miyazaki’s earlier comic version of Kaze tachinu (by the same title). While both titles are taken from Hori’s famous novel, Miyazaki’s movie, in contrast to his comic, strongly diverges from the book’s plot. Still, in both cases, the narrative centering on the female protagonist and her fatal illness contains conspicuous similarities regarding images and locations, as well as structural parallels concerning for example the omission of major events such as death. These structures, just as the role of the verse “Le vent se lève!…” and the connected motif of wind, both of which exhibit similarities to Hori’s novel, are noticeably incorporated into the seemingly unrelated main plot, focusing on the main protagonist Horikoshi Jirō’s dreams and on his work constructing war-planes. The multilayered identities embodied in him reflect on several real and fictional persons, amongst them Hori Tatsuo himself, underscored by various techniques of authentication and fictionalization. This paper analyzes all three works comparatively to find out if – and how – movie and comic are inspired by and related to Hori’s novel Kaze tachinu, and will in the process show how Miyazaki changes meanings, statements, and motifs in his works.

This paper examines the correlation between political thought and poetic expression by introducing the literary work of Ōishi Seinosuke (1867–1911), a Japanese socialist and physician who was executed during the High Treason Incident of 1910/11. It shows that personal opinions regarding society and government do have a strong influence on the individual style of an author, not only in the matter of content, but also concerning the chosen language and the mode of expression. However, Ōishi himself, who studied in the United States from 1892 to 1895, seems to have been aware of several discrepancies between his own political ideals and the reality of literary creation. In fact, he suddenly abandoned his efforts in Japanese short poetry at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and thenceforth conveyed his political message to the audience via the more conservative way of writing essays. This change of medium indicates that Ōishi no longer thought of poems as an appropriate means to fight the injustice of society and the destructive foreign policy of the Japanese authorities.

This paper focuses on the erotic and sexual relationship between elderly men and young women as a literary subject in novels by the Japanese author Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) and by the Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) as well as on possible roots and parallels in premodern Japanese texts on medicine and sexuality. The earliest example for texts of this kind is Ishinpō 『医心方』 (Prescriptions from the Heart of Medicine, 984), dealing with “correct” sexual practices as a means of prolonging the rulers’ life in health.

The German film director Doris Dörrie (born in 1955) concerned herself much not only with Japan but also with Zen Buddhism. This enabled her to transcend mere representations of national and cultural entities (such as “Germany” and “Japan”), their differences and relations or non-relations, and instead to imagine a trans-national and trans-cultural sphere based on human troubledness and Zen practice’s answer to that. Our paper firstly gives insight into Dörrie’s reception in Japan and finds support there to deal secondly with her tragicomic essay film Enlightenment Guaranteed (released in 2000) in regard to some correlations between Zen Buddhism and film.

This paper analyses Bijutsu no hongi (1885) and Shōsetsu sōron (1886) by Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909) in respect of their roots in the theories of art and literature by Vissarion Belinskij (1811–1848) and in Georg F. Hegel's (1770–1831) philosophy of idealism as well as with regard to their correlation and their role in the emancipation of narrative prose as a form of art in the early phase of modern Japanese literary history.

The Hyakunin isshu eshō is a series of ukiyoe consisting of illustrations by Utagawa Toyokuni III (1786–1865) to the medieval poetry anthology of “Waka poems by one hundred poets”. It has become known as a series of woodblock prints with women from the pleasure districts as its central topic as well as with motives from the lives of townspeople, and until now, it has been interpreted as such. A comparison with the illustrations of the famous Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (“A false Murasaki and a rustic Genji”, published between 1829 and 1842), written by Ryūtei Tanehiko (1783–1842) and illustrated by the same Toyokuni III, shows that the artist used not only the same motives but also the templates with small alterations, adapting them to the poems. The following paper argues that in view of these findings, a new evaluation of the Hyakunin isshu eshō is needed.

Although the study of literature stood at the beginning of area studies and has also inspired cultural studies at their inception, nowadays, literary studies have lost much of their traditional relevance. What are the reasons for this loss of vigor and how can we react to this development in the 21st century? To answer these questions, we must first consider the status of Japanese literary and philological studies abroad in their interdependency with literary studies in Japan (kokubungaku), as well as with literary studies in other countries, e.g. German literature in Germany, French literature in France, and comparative literary studies in general. What is the specific locus and target audience of the study of Japanese literature in the academe and beyond? This paper identifies a number of possible, partly overlapping, disciplinary-scholarly and general reading communities and discusses their different potentials. In an increasingly Anglophone world, will Japanese studies in Germany or France and elsewhere lose their cultural and lingual specificity and merge into globalized English-speaking Japanese studies? Working in the field of Japanese literary studies, we should ponder these questions as they affect our self-image as mediators between cultures.

Kawabata Yasunari is known not only for the traditionalist poetics of his later days but also for his modernist period during the late 1920's and early 1930's, when he wrote as a member of the avant-garde movement Shinkankakuha. This paper provides a detailed reading of one of his last modernist works, the experimental novel Suishō gensō (Crystal Fantasies). While showing certain parallels to the psychological I-novel of its time in its exploration of subjectivity, the text distinguishes itself especially on a narrative level, implementing new forms of storytelling that unleash a lyrical and fragmented imagery upon the reader. My analysis seeks to illuminate the diegetic structure of Kawabata's text, showing how it functionally replaces the omnipresent voice of the self-reflexive narrator by cinematographic techniques of montage and collage, and how it provides an alternative „interior view“ of its characters, mediated via stream of consciousness. Following the split-second flow of associations, sounds and images, the reader is drawn into a world of intertextual cross-references to mythology, (pseudo-)science, psychoanalysis and popular culture ‒ discourses that left their imprints on the language of modernity and, in their contradictory co-presence, reveal a conflicted scenography of the modern mind.

What is most important about a Rakugo performance? Is the performer supposed to follow a set of norms? Or is he free to do as he likes in order to entertain the audience? Using Fischer-Lichte’s concept of performance, this paper examines current trends in Rakugo theory and criticism, discussing the approaches of Horii Ken’ichi and Hirose Kazuo, as well as examples of contemporary Rakugo artists such as Shunpūtei Shōta or Kawayanagi Tsukushi, in whose performances the performative aspect of Rakugo comes to the fore.

While Japan has often been regarded as a culture of silence, in fact there has always been a rich tradition of eloquent speech, storytelling and preaching. In this paper I will explore the “performative” nature of sermon ballads (sekkyōbushi) and Buddhist sermons (sekkyō), focusing on some key aspects of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s concept of “performativity” and “theatrality” as well as on related concepts by Sekiyama Kazuo. I will describe how medieval Buddhist sermons underwent a kind of “performative turn” and developed a “theatralic style”. As a performance of texts, sermons share certain features with sermon ballads, such as vocal delivery or entertaining aspects. Sermon ballads are a sub-genre of katarimono (“storytelling”), and it is interesting to note that the verb kataru means recitation as well as narration. While a performance studies approach to literature prefers the act of narrating and recitating to the literary artefact, the performative acts by their very nature are ephemeral, therefore the researcher must deal with the paradox that the artefacts are all we have. In performance theory, the power to change reality is regarded as a key feature of performative acts. A speech act, as Fischer-Lichte put it, can change the world “like magic”. However, as I will argue, at least from the perspective of premodern concepts, the performative power of speech acts, such as kataru, does not just work “like magic” but also “by magic”.