From Postcolonial (2001)

Abstract

For more than thirty years, University of Tokyo narratologist Komori Yōichi (b. 1953) has pioneered new ways of reading Natsume Sōseki’s work in relationship to questions of empire. Komori’s 2001 primer Postcolonial (Posutokoroniaru), first published as part of Iwanami’s “Frontiers in Thought” series, draws on currents in postcolonial criticism to trace the “doubled structure” of Japanese colonialism that took shape through the nation’s preemptive “self-colonization” and “mimicry” of imperialist Western powers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The excerpt translated here is the book’s second section, which is devoted entirely to Sōseki. Komori explores how, during his stay in London from 1900-2, the future novelist Natsume Kinnosuke came to acquire a critical understanding of the contradictions of nationalism, social class, and cultural identity in a non-Western colonizing power that itself occupied a semi-colonial status vis-à-vis the political and cultural hegemony of the West. In the remainder of the excerpt, he shows how the novelist Sōseki dramatized these insights in his I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905-6), Botchan (1906), The Gate (Mon, 1910) and To The Spring Equinox and Beyond (Higan sugi made, 1911).