In the case of the Tosa Diary, Ki no Tsurayuki adopts a female persona in order to write "like a man," i.e. with authority.  In San'yutei Encho's "Shinkei kasanegafuji," the category of the hysterical woman attempts, but ultimately fails, to assimilate the supernatural to modern scientific discourse.  In Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo, the manifold anxieties of Futabatei's attempt to consolidate speech and writing give rise to a femme fatale whose speech provocatively appropriates the diction of written discourse.  Once genbun-itchi had become firmly established as the standard literary language, the enigmatic figure of the Osaka woman, and particularly her "exotic" speech, emerged in the writing of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro as a critical impetus for reconfiguring the discourse on the Japanese language.  In all of these examples, the female figure renders legible the attempt to establish authority by artists who, for  various reasons, had problematic relationships to the dominant authorities of their day.
 

                                                                                                                    Gus Heldt 
                                                                                                                      Bard College

           It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that Ki no Tsurayuki's Tosa 
      Diary (ca. 935) represents one of the most over-read "acts of writing" in 
      modern Japanese literary history.  In conjunction with the development of 
      a classical canon and the association of a feminine oral tradition with a 
      pure "Japanese language" from the Edo period onwards, the Tosa Diary has 
      often been seen as the mother of all vernacular prose literature in 
      Japan.  However, even the most cursory examination of other writings from 
      Tsurayuki's period reveals this view - and their underlying assumptions 
      about gender and language in the Heian period - to be essentially 
      fallacious. 
           This paper will present a new hypothesis as to why Tsurayuki wrote 
      the Tosa Diary, one that takes seriously the writer's claim that "I will 
      attempt a diary such as men are said to keep." My approach will include 
      the following issues: the political and ritual nature of diary writing in 
      the mid-tenth century as an attempt to create a "body of knowledges" 
      propagated through male aristocratic lineages;  the attempt in the Tosa 
      Diary to represent poetics as a similar "body of knowledges" with textual 
      and corporeal dimensions;  and the gendered politics of "property"  as it 
      was practiced at the Heian court.  Put briefly, I will argue that the 
      attempt to write "like" a man but not "as" one in the Tosa Diary comments 
      on Tsurayuki's social position as a lower-ranking male courtier whose 
      ability to claim a "body of knowledges" vis-a-vis waka poetry was 
      severely limited in practice.

                                                                             Daniel O'Neill 
                                                                            Yale University

           The critical desire to assimilate Encho to the tradition of genbun 
      itchi realism misses a key aspect of his work: his longstanding interest 
      in the supernatural and the form it assumes in modern life.   A long 
      prose narrative which comments on the status of the supernatural in 19th 
      century Japan, Encho's Shinkei kasanegafuchi was published in a time when 
      modernization in Japan was popularly identified with a scientific 
      rationalism that denied the supernatural while reordering how the world 
      would be known. 
           In his attempts to represent the supernatural in a modern world that 
      finds it increasingly unfashionable, Encho draws upon disparate 
      discourses - the visual, scientific and the early  psychological.   The 
      conflation of discourses, in turn, creates an anxiety that is first felt 
      at the level of gender, in the problematic figure of the hysterical 
      woman.   Encho's text, thus, functions as a commentary on how the writing 
      about ghosts has produced problematic, if not essentializing notions of 
      gender.   Through a reading of  Encho's ghost story in conjunction with 
      an examination of popular writings on hysteria during Meiji, I will 
      demonstrate how this anxiety of gender troubles the tradition of genbun 
      itchi realism which which Encho has been associated in literary history.

                The Anxiety of Translation:  interlingual seduction and betrayal in 
                                 Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo
                                                                               Indra Levy 
                                                                         Rutgers University

           As progenitor of the modern vernacular style that would eventually 
      become the dominant language of Japanese fiction, Futabatei Shimei stands 
      at the beginning of modern Japanese literary history.  His dual literary 
      career as translator and novelist illuminates many of the critical 
      dilemmas that both engendered and complicated modern literary production 
      in Japan, which essentially began as an interlingual endeavor.  This 
      paper will examine the underlying relationships between Futabatei's 
      practice of translation, his concept of literature, and the story of 
      seduction and betrayal developed in his first original composition, 
      Ukigumo. 
           Aside from his significant contribution to the development of a 
      modern literary style, Futabatei also created the prototype for an 
      archetypal femme fatale who appears in numerous works of Japanese fiction 
      by self-consciously modern male writers, a character type I call the 
      "Westernesque woman."  The persistence of this gender type in the works 
      of later writers who were particularly concerned with the status of 
      literary language suggests a fundamental relationship between gender 
      representation and the anxieties of translation in modern Japanese 
      fiction.  This paper will attempt to carve out the basic outlines of that 
      relationship by reading the story of disappointed love in Ukigumo as a 
      metanarrative on the failed betrothal of speech and writing inspired by 
      the vernacular model of Western writing.