Portrait of an artist in Tokyo circa 1910: Mori Ogai's Seinen
Titel:
Portrait of an artist in Tokyo circa 1910: Mori Ogai's Seinen
Auteur:
O'Neill, D. Cuong
Verschenen in:
Japan forum
Paginering:
Jaargang 18 (2006) nr. 3 pagina's 295-314
Jaar:
2006-11
Inhoud:
This article discusses Ogai's mobilization of youth in relation to the palpable descriptions of urban space in his 1910 novel Seinen. Embedded within the novel, I argue, are a series of external descriptions of city life, disquieting images of urban space invested with a temporality of their own, staged in opposition to the novelistic destiny of a protagonist who is to achieve a form of self-mastery proper to the hero of a bildungsroman. By shifting the focus of my analysis from the protagonist's troubled development to a set of questions concerning the problem of representation, I argue for an understanding of Ogai's descriptive language not as a failed attempt at a mimetic transcription of Tokyo, but rather as a highly specific form of representation that attends to the changing experience of modern city life and the new and varied forms of temporal disorders inhabiting that life. With this reading, I hope to recover the ongoing critical work the novel performs as it reveals the metropolis to be a problematic locus of Japan's modernity and speaks to the continuing need for a better view, however fleeting it may be, of the past's complex and shifting relationship to the present.
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