著者

剣持 武彦 ケンモチ タケヒコ Takehiko Kenmochi

雑誌

清泉女子大学紀要

巻号頁・発行日

vol.44, pp.51-62, 1996-12-25

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Why has so little attention been paid to the relationship between Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura (June 1906) and Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy ? It may well be because Soseki's Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat), which had been completed just before his writing Kusamakura, is so clearly established to have been influenced by Tristram Shandy. In Kusamakura, on the other hand, Soseki deliberately changed his setting, style, and technique, and as a consequence, critics ignored any similarity between I am a Cat and Kusamakura in terms of their indebtedness to Tristram Shandy. What do I Am a Cat and Kusamakura have in common ? Both works had been written to destroy the traditional concepts of the novel. Soseki had been studying 18th century British literature with special attention to Tristram Shandy and its powerful influence on the canon of British fictional writing, having written an essay on Tristram Shandy in March 1897, nine years prior to writing Kusamakura. The novel Tristram Shandy demonstrated that a novel could be successfully written without a coherent story line. As is well known, 19th century realism had reached its ultimate limit in France and Russia and had nowhere to go. Then, the 20th century produced the literature of Proust and Joyce, whose works are associated with the technique known as the "stream of consciousness." Might it be said that Soseki wrote Kusamakura using the stream of consciousness technique, seven years before A la recherche du lemps perdu (1913-27) and 16 years before Ulysses (1922) ? The present study explores this possibility.

著者

剣持 武彦 ケンモチ タケヒコ Takehiko Kenmochi

雑誌

清泉女子大学紀要

巻号頁・発行日

vol.46, pp.1-18, 1998-12-25

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A great number of chohen shosetsu (long works of fiction) have been written since the end of the Pacific War. But, if we are to choose the most representative works of the genre written in Japan's early modern (kindai) or pre-war period, the following three come most readily to mind: Shimazaki Toson's Yoakemae and Shiga Naoya's An'ya Koro, both written before World War II, and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Sasameyuki, begun during the war but not completed until after the war had ended. This paper will discuss these works asking the following questions. First, how was it possible for these authors to write such great works of fiction during a period-before and during the war-when the government was imposing restrictions on the subject matter and the language of all lirerary works ? Second, after the war, when such restrictions were removed, these three works continued to be influential pieces of Japanese literature. Why ? And, thirdly, although each of the three works was written under different circumstances, they are all long novels. As chohen shosetsu, what other characteristics do they have in common ? In addition, all three works have been translated into English : Yoakemae, tr. by William E. Naff as Before the Dawn (Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1987) ; An'ya koro, tr. by Edwin Mc Clellan as A Dark Night's Passing (Kodansha International, 1978) ; and Sasameyuki, tr. by Edward G. Seidensticker as The Makioka Sisters (Charles E. Tuttle, 1957). For this reason, I will also examine these English translations and consider their impact-what contribution these three representative Japanese works of long fiction can now make to world literature.