Migrant Cat: Family, Nation, and Empire in Prewar Japanese Migrant Fiction

This essay contributes to the burgeoning study of transnational texts written in vernaculars other than English by providing a case study of Hosaka Ki’ichi’s The America That I See (1913-14), written as a sequel to Natsume Sōseki’s famous I Am a Cat (1905-6). The article is concerned with discursive identity formation and focuses on the literary and ideological strategies deployed by the author in his attempt to unify a Japanese community fractured by migration and to bring the Japanese American community back into the protective embrace of the Japanese nation. These strategies include using Sōseki’s cat as an arbiter of cultural communication, the trope of the family and its role in adhering divided communities, and creative interpretations and implementations of prewar Japanese expansionist ideologies.