Camellias and Vampires: Reading the Spermatic Economy in Natsume Sōseki's And Then (2008)

Abstract

Miyazaki Kasumi is a professor of English literature and intellectual history at Wakō University in Tokyo. This 2008 essay of hers reframes Sōseki’s work in the context of nineteenth and twentieth century European literature and social history. Showcasing both a rigorous feminist perspective and a background in the same British literature that informed Sōseki’s own scholarly work, the essay explores how fears and anxieties regarding female autonomy and sexuality manifested in literary images of blood-sucking, vampiric temptresses. Through stunning close readings of Sōseki’s And Then (Sore kara, 1909), as well as other novels of his such as Kusamakura (1906) and Sanshirō (1908), Miyazaki engages discourses of sexology and bourgeois domestic politics to reconfigure the space of Sōseki’s novels within both a new literary context and in light of Japan’s burgeoning empire.