Iyami, the subversive voice in the wartime writings of Nagai Kafu; with a complete translation of 'The Other Shore of the Sumida (Bokuto kidan)', 'Enduring Images' ('Omokage'), 'The Maid's Story' ('Jochu no hanashi'), and other late works

The literary legacy of Nagai Kafu (1879--1959) is a conundrum: his novels, though perennially popular and critically well received, often appear hopelessly old-fashioned and needlessly obtuse. While influenced by the French avant-garde (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Gide), Kafu fashioned his popular image after Edo writers, styling himself a recluse ( sanjin) in the manner of Ota Nampo and "frivolous writer" (gesakusha) in the manner of Tamenaga Shunsui and Narushima Ryuhoku. In his late novel The Other Shore of the Sumida (Bokuto kidan, 1937) and late novellas "Enduring Images" ("Omokage," 1938) and "The Maid's Story" ("Jochu no hanashi," 1938), Kafu fused the foreign avant-garde with the Japanese past to subvert the contingencies of modernism, which tended to equate temporal progress to human progress while fueling a mass-produced culture that appeared increasingly invalid and inauthentic, especially as the military enmired the country in a bloody, doomed war in China (1937) and the Pacific (1941).; Kafu's late novels assume a suprahistorical perspective on such contemporary events, recasting them as a history of devolution---an antihistory he recorded in a straightforward fashion in his private diary. The late novels employ particularly Japanese techniques of sarcasm to circumvent strict censorship and convey this subversive message. These techniques I collectively call iyami, a word connoting sarcasm and irony, and also denoting social boundaries surrounding unpleasantness and awkwardness. In Kafu's late novels, iyami functions subtly as a transgression of the social values placed upon referents---people, places, and events. Iyami blurs referents' normative values, thereby providing textual interstices in which the reader is free to (re)interpret recent history. Employed here for the first time as an analytical tool, iyami is informed by the critical thinking of Bakhtin ("heteroglossia") and Foucault ("fellowships of discourse"). Kafu's use of iyami reaches its apex in The Other Shore of the Sumida, "Enduring Images," and "The Maid's Story," fiction suggesting an oppositional stance toward militaristic nationalism and an age of thought police, routine censorship, and rigid social regimentation.; Complete translations of The Other Shore, "Enduring Images," and "The Maid's Story" are appended to this dissertation.