The Haunted Graph: Signifiant Studies of Nakajima, Borges, and Nabokov

The name that can be named Is not the constant name.

—Tao Te Ching

Although the focus of my studies has been on Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), it was Nakajima Atsushi (1909-1942)¹ who gave me a consuming interest in Japanese literature. The purpose of this paper is to map some connections between Nakajima's texts and other works where arguments about écriture and translation arise. The goal of this study will be two-fold: to introduce Nakajima's works, and to show the similarities between Nakajima's writings and those of Borges and Nabokov.

In Japan, from the Meiji to the early Showa period, the popular image of writers of fiction was different from that of their Western counterparts. The writer was expected to be poor, to have numerous extramarital affairs, suffer from some intractable disease, or to experience financial problems. The confession of personal woes was seen as an important element in the writer's fiction. This, however, was due mainly to the literary circumstances of Japan. Most writers were men and, hence, expected to behave in a manlike way. Literature, however, was not recognized as a masculine undertaking and readers did not accept fiction as such. As Natsume Sôseki has said, the Japanese had, spiritually and substantially, no margin of daily life, and diligence was highly regarded. As a result of westernization, some writers nonetheless aimed at literary works that mimicked western fiction. This created a cornucopia for Japanese scholars of comparative literature, but such writing resulted in an ambiguity between fiction and non-fiction. Unconsciously, many writers resorted to a writing that was both fictitious and real: testimonial. Only a writer's confession of his life evoked a sense of reality in readers in prewar Japan, an austere, staid society that disliked humor.

Most of the so-called Shi-shôsetsu, Watakushi-shôsetsu, or "I" novels are written in the third person, perhaps because the "I" writer who exposes himself to readers in order to gain readers seems more real to them than a man of letters who is immersed in the joy of writing. Readers focus on the writer's life with the aim of getting the context or paratext of the written text. This, of course, is only one element of the circumstances surrounding "I" novels. It is also no longer entirely true of the Japanese literary situation today. Japanese readers, however, tend to be so naïve that they are apt to "identify the designer with the design."² While Nakajima Atsushi did not exactly conform to the literary situation of his time, his circumstances did, however, influence his writing.

I

Nakajima appears to be a writer marked by self-doubt even though this disposition is a secondary derivative in that it rises from his fundamental linguistic problem. An exploration of his 1934 masterpiece, "Toragari" (Tiger Hunt), will elaborate this point.

Nakajima devoted himself to writing "Toragari" because he wanted to become a professional writer by winning a writing contest held by the Chûô Kôron magazine. To his disappointment, however, "Toragari" finished in eighth place. The main theme of "Toragari"—postcolonialism—was a difficult concept for readers to understand at the time. Moreover, the "I" narrator is unreliable. The most important theme in "Toragari" is that of the relationship between the "strong" and the "weak," and those of language or signifiant or metonymy: the connection between postcolonialism and language. The story begins as follows:

I would like to talk about a tiger hunt. But this isn't a humorous one, not like the lion hunt undertaken by Mr. Tartarin, the hero of Tarascon. It's a real tiger hunt. The place is Korea, in the mountains that are only fifty miles away from Seoul, and [. . .] Well, if I said such a thing, some people would come back with, "That's absolutely ridiculous. These days tigers do not exist in such a place," and they would make my story a laughingstock. But twenty years ago, in the suburbs of Seoul, actually at the Hirayama Ranch outside the Tôsh...