Decadent Returnees: The Dialogic Labor of Sensibility in Nagai Kafū’s Sneers and Ueda Bin’s The Vortex

Abstract

In this chapter, we empirically apply theories of heterogeneity to narrative voice in the Japanese Decadent literature of the post-Russo-Japanese War period. Our purpose here is to shed new light on the role of complex socio-cultural sensibilities as a form of non-material labor, acknowledging those psychic effects as a significant contributor to Japanese Decadence. Drawing mainly on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, we will examine the process through which the self is constructed via interactions with heterogeneous others who share and differentiate socio-cultural beliefs. In so doing, we will extend our consideration to the issue of dilettantism through which the subject negotiates with multiple spectrums of ongoing cultural modernity. Within the framework of dialogic interaction, Japanese Decadents remained calm and self-reflexive, in contrast with the turbulent psychological agitation that fin-de-siècle European Decadents tended to evince. For Japanese Aesthetes of the epoch, “decadence” was a novelty as well as a new cultural platform, wherein they witnessed the decay of indigenous traditions and the rise of Japan’s eclectic culture. In reality, their psychological dispositions were, generally in a positive sense, closer to those of dilettantes. With these perspectives in mind, we will focus on two stories considered to be seminal to the fiction of Japanese Decadence and kichōsha (returnee from the West) stories: Nagai Kafū’s Reishō [Sneers] (1910) and Ueda Bin’s Uzumaki [The Vortex] (1910).