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1 Introduction The matter of life and death sits at the heart of every questionthatpeopleask.Literatureisonewayofengagingwiththatmatter. The early death of Kajii Motojirō (1901–1932) from tuberculosis (TB)meantthatheleftabouttwentyfinelycraftedshortstoriesandalarger number of unfinished works. He was already attracting positive responses from a number of fellow writers during his lifetime, and the fact that the major literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) addressed Kajii’s work in an article in 1932 indicates that this was a young writer worthy of note for members of the literary establishment (bundan).1 The appearance of Kajii’s final story, “The Carefree Patient” (1932),2 in the mass circulation journal Chūō kōron demonstrated the publishing world’s confidence that this author had the potential to appeal to a national audience. But it was not until after World War II that Kajii gained a wider critical readership. Today, most Japanese are familiar with Kajii, if at all, from their reading in high school of “Lemon” (1925),3 his first published work and one that established his reputation for a poetically inspired prose style, an almost obsessive attention to detail, and intriguing narrative plots. The brevity of Kajii’s seven-year writing career has inevitably marked him as a minor writer in the history of modern Japanese literature. Despite this, there is a considerable body of critical works devoted to Kajii in Japan, although it is largely biographical in nature.4 The most extensive Japanese study to date is by Suzuki Sadami, who not only supplies a huge amount of background information but also explores the writer’s relationship with wider literary trends and social currents.5 However, although Suzuki’s book covers a wide range of topics, it does not pursue any particular area in 2 Introduction great depth. Among scholars outside Japan, Kajii has received surprisingly little attention to date. There is only one full-length study and translation of Kajii’s literature, by Christine Kodama de Larroche, written in French.6 My book not only offers translations into English of almost all his completed stories for the first time but also presents an introductory series of chapters that try to demonstrate ways in which his writing can be seen to provide important insights into the broader literary and cultural environment of his age. Kajii’s work asks some basic questions related to life and death. This is most obviously true in his confronting through his texts the pressing matter of his own mortality. He had hardly begun to establish himself as a young and ambitious writer before it became ever more obvious that he would most likely succumb to the TB that afflicted him. In fact, this was not such an unusual fate at the time. As Kajii was growing up, he saw several members of his family pass away. The result was that his awareness of limited time heightened his sensitivity to the sensations and feelings through which life is experienced. At the same time, he struggled through his literature to imagine a world to which he might in some way still belong even after he physically ceased to exist. Such personal circumstances invite some consideration of the motives that drove this young man to write. For instance, what was it that compelled Kajii to translate those complex feelings into such aesthetically appealing literature? And how could he use his linguistic skills to construct a reality that might reconfigure his own brief individual existence into a broader historical continuum? However, it is the nature of Kajii’s literary representation of the body that has most fundamentally informed my overall critical stance in this book. I have chosen to employ a manner of literary analysis that might be characterized as a kind of middle ground, seeking to negotiate a space between an author-centered, biographical approach and a text-centered, cultural studies approach. While such a position will not be to every reader ’s taste, my own view is that this degree of hybridity is necessary specifically because Kajii is my object of study. That is to say, Kajii’s subjective literary presence was grounded first and foremost in his sick, TB-stricken physical body, and hence one cannot be studied without the other. Moreover , it was Kajii’s very concern over health and mortality that drove him to play a central role in constructing a language for modern literature and to offer new insights into the themes that also intrigued so many other [18.222.67.251] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 12:01...

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