Complicit Fictions

In "Complicit Fictions", James Fujii challenges traditional approaches to the study of Japanese narratives and Japanese culture in general. He employs current Western literary-critical theory to reveal the social and political content inherent in modern Japanese literature and also confronts recent breakthroughs in literary studies coming out of Japan. The result is a work that explicitly questions the Eurocentric dimensions of our conception of modernity. Modern Japanese literature has long been judged by Western and Japanese critics alike according to its ability to measure up to Western realist standards - standards that assume the centrality of an essential self or subject. Consequently, it has been made to appear deficient, derivative or exotically different. Fujii challenges this prevailing characterization by reconsidering the very notion of the subject. He focuses on such disparate 20th-century writers as Natsume Soseki, Tokuda Shusei, Shimazaki Toson and Origuchi Shinobu, and particularly on their divergent strategies to affirm subjecthood in narrative form.
The author proves what has been ignored or suppressed in earlier studies - the contestation that inevitably marks th