Somehow, Dialogic: The Dialogic Self and the Rejection of the Modern in Nantonaku, kurisutaru

Tanaka Yasuo's short novel Nantonaku, kurisutaru won the Bungei literary prize in 1981, to furious controversy. The novel is a young woman's account of sex and shopping in Tokyo and includes hundreds of footnotes with detailed consumer information. Most critics dismissed the text as a novelistically unsophisticated fashion guide at best or a crude paean to 1980s consumerism at worst. This article, however, argues that the text and the footnotes should be read together as a dialogue that constructs the protagonist's subjectivity and that this dialogic subjectivity contains a subtle resistance to Japan's projects of modernity.