著者

Vincent Keith

出版者

国文学研究資料館

雑誌

国際日本文学研究集会会議録 = PROCEEDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE LITERATURE (ISSN:ISSN0387)

巻号頁・発行日

no.35, pp.137-155, 2012-03-31

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This presentation is drawn from a book I am about to publish on what I call “homosocial narratives” in modern Japanese literature. In these texts (such as Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro and Mori Ogai’s Gan), desire between men was not so much rendered “taboo” (as it was in the West) but rather relegated to and contained within the past, both on an individual level-within the period of adolescence, and on the collective level-as something that belonged in the museum of “history.” In the book’s last chapter I discuss Mishima’s Confessions of A Mask as both a late-perhaps even the last-example of such a “homosocial narrative” and as an early example of what would later be known as “homosexual literature.” Mishima’s novel is thus a text that straddles two distinct moments in the history of sexuality in Japan, while also reminding us of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the “unrationalized co-existence” (合理的な説明のつかない共存) within many literary texts of otherwise historically distinct understandings of sexuality. In this presentation I discuss how Mishima’s surprisingly paradoxical narrative strategy of writing an “I-novel in the first person” serves simultaneously to contain his narrator’s desire for other men within the past, while also keeping it alive in the present.