The Meiji era (1867-1912) still deserves critical attention simply because Japanese people wholeheartedly experienced a great change. In the four decades and five years, the Japanese people and their set of minds have been greatly changed after the Edo shogunate (1603-1867) and its longstanding system of values were violently denied. Some of the Meiji people learned to internalize what was immediately brought from the Western countries, others didn’t.

Our examination in this panel of their internal and social struggles for and against the Western modernization of the Japanese society helps understand part of the ways in which Japanese people’s sense and sensibilities that are still dominant in the twentieth first century was newly created and has been gradually established in the Meiji era. Three scholars of comparative and English literature will focus on three Japanese famous (and less famous) writers in the Meiji era – Aeba Koson, Natsume Soseki and Kuroiwa Ruiko – in order to illustrate the ways in which they translated, interpreted and appropriated the literary works of their counterparts in the contemporary European society – Charles Dickens, James Thomson and A. M. Williamson.

Our textual examinations of the literary representations of the newly established concepts particularly in terms of tradition, season and time will uniquely show what was actually in the past, what is available in the turbulent present and what will probably be in the unstable future.

The Newspaper Serialization of Aeba Kōson’s “Kagebōshi”: Modernization and Tradition

Motoko Nakada (University of Tsukuba)

In Meiji 21 (1888), Yomiuri Shimbun serialized “Kagebōshi [A Shadow]” by a novelist-journalist Aeba Kōson (1855-1922). Based on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, through domesticating the setting and characters, it tells the story of the conversion of a miser. The alterations made to the original text showcase the commitment to modernizing Japanese society around Meiji 20. Placed in a newspaper, “Kagebōshi” smartly reflects various news articles; new products, services, and institutions never miss an opportunity to be mentioned in the story, thus making people satisfied with and proud of their modernizing society.

On the other hand, “Kagebōshi” endorses the traditional ethics of an Edo era tradesman. Dickens’s original text markedly emphasizes a benevolent Christmas spirit. Scrooge’s stinginess becomes all the more unacceptable, as it is a time of love for mankind. For the readers who knew little about Christmas, to say nothing of the Christmas spirit, “Kagebōshi” shifts the moral emphasis to the prohibition of miserliness. The added opening maxim and the last supposed Chinese anecdote, which tells of the tragic death of a miser, together with the emphasis on Saheiji’s stinginess, clearly reject miserliness and encourage people to retain the Edo mercantile spirit.

Examination of “Kagebōshi” as a newspaper article will contribute to a clearer understanding of the mindset of the people of Japan at the time, who were willing to modernize while retaining their traditional values.

The Sense of Time Represented in A. M. Williamson’s A Woman in Grey and Kuroiwa Ruikō’s Yūreitō

Xiaoqin Ou (University of Tsukuba)

The development of Japanese detective novels started in the early Meiji period, and the translations and adaptations of the Western counterparts have played a crucial role in this process. One of the most eminent writers in this history is Kuroiwa Ruikō (1862-1920), an influential writer whose understanding of appropriation has influenced many Japanese detective novelists, including Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965), who is still widely regarded as the father of Japanese detective novels. From 1899 to 1900, Ruikō serialized “Yūreitō” [The Phantom or Ghost Tower] in Yorozu Choho. This novel is now acknowledged as an adaptation of A. M. Williamson (1858-1933)’s novel, A Woman in Grey（1898）, a story of a treasure hunt and of a search for the truth about a murder in a house with a clock tower.

The aim of this presentation is to compare Ruikō’s “Yūreitō” and Williamson’ A Woman in Grey with focusing on the two important features of the story — the “clock tower” and the “time. After the change to the solar calendar and teijiho (system of uniform length hours) in 1872, the Western concept of time surprised and deeply influenced the minds of the Japanese people so that they came to feel disconnected in their sense of time. This presentation shows how Ruikō reinterpreted Wiliamson’s sense of time so as to describe their complex perception of temporalities that had been in the process of formation during the Meiji era.

The Eastern Reception of the West: Circling Seasons in The Seasons and Kokoro

Ching-wen Wu (University of Tsukuba)

Natsume Soseki (1867−1916), a well- known Japanese novelist of twentieth century, introduces James Thomson (1700-1748), a Scottish poet, to the Japanese society in his early critical writings and Theory of Literature (1907). One of Thomson’s major works, The Seasons, consisting of five separate parts -- Spring (1728), Summer (1727), Autumn (1730), Winter (1726) and A hymn on the Seasons (1730) -- describes what is called Divine Nature. Soseki didn’t concern about Thomson’s complex perspectives in terms of Deism, Pantheism, or Christianity in The Seasons, but he valued Thomson as an eminent poet of landscape when he referred to the English Romanticism and Henry Beers’ A history of English romanticism in the eighteenth century (1899).

Soseki’s reference to Thomson and Beers is important mainly because it highlights the importance of the description of circling seasons in his masterpiece Kokoro (1914), published two years after the end of the Meiji era. A comparison of circling seasons in The Seasons and Kokoro amply shows that in both of them human minds are described connecting with Nature and proves that Kokoro possibly adopts some parts of descriptions from The Seasons. What matters most is that Thomson’s connection of the four seasons and the divine nature of Britannia is transformed by Soseki into the human drama of confession in regard to the gap between tradition and modernization. Soseki’s interpretation of Thomson deserves special attention as one of the examples of the Japanese writers’ reflection on morality in terms of the individualism of Western modernity.