Project Background

Why Choose Japanese Literature

The origin story of my interest in Japanese Literature began when a classmate of mine introduced me to the anime Bungou Stray Dogs(BSD). The anime is cast with characters inspired by renown Japanese authors from the 19th and 20th centuries, with the most notable members of the cast being inspired by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Dazai Osamu, Nakahara Chuuya and Nakajima Atsushi.

This made Japanese literature known to me and many other people on the internet, which sparked an increase in interest in Japanese Literature. Many who were more knowledgeable about the authors began to write character analyses comparing the characters with their real life counterparts. Which made me even more curious about the authors who inspired the characters from one of my favourite animes.

Why do a literary analysis

When I came to know about Guided Learning , I proposed to the guided learning team, that i wanted to read Japanese works in Japanese and then analyse them to learn more about Japanese Culture. I felt that the only way to fully appreciate the literary works, was to read the literary works in their original Language. In the first consultation to refine my learning goals and Learning Contract, my advisor advised me to cut out the learning of Japanese from my project as it would have been too ambitious. I then decided to shift my project towards investigating the influence historical events had on Japanese literature and culture through a Literary Analysis.

Choosing An Author

I did not want to limit the learning potential of this project by limiting myself to the few authors I knew about through BSD and set out to compile a list of famous Japanese Authors. The list included both authors featured in the anime and other authors I found through researching online. This step was just to cast as wide of a net as possible as my goal was to find an author I could learn the most about Japan from.

The next criteria the author had to meet, was being active after the Meiji Era as, this was where most of modern Japan's culture came to be. I then eliminated authors if they were active before the Meiji Era or active too close to the modern day. I also eliminated poets as my advisor told me that the poems would be too hard to understand without a good grasp of Japanese and Japanese culture.

I was then left with a list of 12 authors from which i tried to source for books online. As most sources were paid I decided to use the National Library Board and Internet Archive as my sources. I then eliminated the authors based on the availability of their works, and was left with 7 authors.

I then researched the 7 remaining authors and found 2 representative works each for the authors. Then based on the page count, I selected 5 novels to read for the next phase.

Choosing The Novels

The 5 books I selected were, Kokoro by Natsume Soeseki, Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata, Jigokuhen and Rashoumon by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and the Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai. I chose two books Rashoumon and Jigokuhen, from Akutagawa ,as his stories were relatively short. For Dazai I did not want to choose No Longer Human as I felt that many others before me had already wrote analyses of the book. Instead, I chose The Setting Sun which I felt was still a good choice that I could use to explore further in my literary journey.

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