Front Matter, including an Editors’ Preface by Atsuko Ueda and Richard Okada

Atsuko Ueda and Richard H. Okada

The fate of the Japanese language in the age of English

Mizumura Minae

Owning up to Sōseki: the theory of literature vs. the theory of copyright

Michael K. Bourdaghs

The specter of empire in Matthew Arnold, Natsume Sōseki, and Kōtoku Shūsui

Mark Anderson

Stumbling past the threshold of languages: Natsume Kinnosuke’s contiguous space of language, literature, and theory

Atsuko Sakaki

読者としての漱石 Sōseki as Reader

Iida Yuko

Discussant’s comments on ‘Rethinking Sōseki’s Bungakuron: a centennial celebration’

Brett de Bary

The naturalist novel and the boundaries of Japanese literature

Christopher L. Hill

Translating, intertextualizing, and the ‘borders’ of ‘Japanese literature’

Karen Thornber

The European border of Japanese literature

Teresa Ciapparoni La Rocca

Haunted by the sexy samurai: Ranpo’s mobilization of the queer past in ‘Shudō mokuzuzuka’

Jeffrey Angles

Eroticizing the other woman: what queer theory can(not) tell us about Japanese women’s writing

Julia C. Bullock

Queer / nation: from ‘Nihon bungaku’ to ‘Nihongo bungaku’

Christopher D. Scott

‘Nothing more than useless luxury’: literary theory after disaster

Alex Bates

Politics of writing: Nakano Shigeharu and Tenkō literature

Yukiko Shigeto

Cultural translation in modern Japanese children’s literature: Uno Kōji’s rewriting of ‘Fuki no shita no kamisama’

Kyoko Ando

Narrating Hokkaidō: Kunikida Doppo and a new vision of literature

Young-ah Chung

Frameworks of meaning: old aesthetic categories and the present

Michael Marra

The vicissitudes of drama as a literary genre in Meiji-Taishō debates

M. Cody Poulton

The literary theory of Shimamura Hōgetsu and the construction of Japanese naturalism

Massimiliano Tomasi

‘Two irreconcilable, but also inseparable, nevertheless incomparable greatnesses’: Mori Ōgai’s parallax reading (and writing) of literary theory

Shion Kono

Performance anxieties, or hitting on theory

Dennis Washburn

Cognitive theories of embodiment and metaphor in Japanese Buddhist poetry (shakkyō-ka): an exploratory essay

Stephen D. Miller

The chrysanthemum and the gourd: theorizing the formation of literary identities in early modern Japan in the context of signets, seal marks, and pseudonyms

Dylan McGee

Potentiality of literary experience: the role of the past in medieval poetic theories

Mariko Naito

The language of mourning: Miyake Kaho’s elegy for Higuchi Ichiyō and the end of classical literature

Timothy J. Van Compernolle

The novel and the end of homosocial literature

Keith Vincent

On the ‘end’: Mishima Yukio and the double dislocation of literature

Gavin Walker

Chasing the tails of tales: Nakagami Kenji and the end of folklore

Nina Cornyetz

Manchukuo and the creation of a new national literature: Kawabata Yasunari and ‘Manchurian’ culture, 1941–1942

Annika A. Culver

Mimicry in Japanese colonial fiction

Robert Tierney

Theorizing the house of Unwelcome: re-reading Yū Miri’s Furu Hausu and Jacques Derrida’s De L’Hospitalité

Catherine Ryu

Detecting the unconscious: Edogawa Ranpo and narratives of modern experience

Satoru Saito