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A NUMBER OF IMPORTANT SCHOLARLY WORKS on modern Japanese literature in English have questioned the reduction of post-Meiji literary history to the process of Westernization-the incorporation of the norms of the modern European realist novel (Miyoshi 1991; Fowler 1988; Fujii 1993). These studies have cautioned us against the uncritical application of modern literary categories to Japanese novels, drawing our attention to the complex relations between modern novels and premodern narrative forms in Japanese literary history. While building on some of the inquiries launched by these studies, in this essay I hope to readdress the problem of how to deploy the term modernity as a framework through which to understand the development of late nineteenth-century Japanese literature. I believe that profound transformations that took place in mid-Meiji literary discourses must be studied in relation to the spread of modern social institutions, practices, and ideas in Japan. At the same time, I insist that the question of modernity in Japanese literary history cannot be fully investigated through the received schema of modernization-that is, the tendencies to naturalize the dualistic (and hierarchical) relations between the West versus Rest, modernity versus tradition, and the linear model of history implied by these binaries.
I will approach these issues by examining the construction of the modern subject in literary discourses. Mori Ogai's novella "The Dancing Girl" (Maihime), first published in 1890 and reputed to be one of the earliest examples of the full-fledged modern novel in Japanese, serves as a focal point in my analysis. I identify the text's self-conscious experimentation with modern novelistic form in its tightly crafted firstperson narration. Through the analysis of the text, I examine a peculiarly modern modality of subject that the convention of first-person narration points to. This subject inscribes itself self-referentially-a first-person narration tells a story, but it also posits the narrating subject (the subject of enunciation) that is putatively prior to and transcendent of the story-world represented. The first-person I, which is at the center of this narratological apparatus, is also one of the most paradigmatic signifiers of the modern subjectivity.
In my analysis of "The Dancing Girl," I examine how the text constitutes the first-person form of subject at a variety of discursive levels: linguistically, through the manipulation of pronominals that invokes...