Lectures in Criticism: Queer Transmission in Japan 4/13 at 6pm, Professor Keith Vincent
Queer Transmissions in Japan: A Haiku Hauntology
J. Keith Vincent, WLL
The close friendship between Natsume Sōseki, Japan’s greatest modern novelist, and Masaoka Shiki, the inventor of the modern haiku, is legendary in the annals of modern Japanese literature. Both born in 1867, the two men met in their early twenties and remained extremely close until Shiki died in 1902 after spending the last seven years of his life confined to his bed with tuberculosis of the spine. While Shiki had revolutionized Japanese poetry and become a beloved national figure by the time of his death at the age of thirty-five, Sōseki only began writing novels in his late thirties, after his friend’s death. In this talk, I disinter a number of Shiki’s haiku that lie buried in Sōseki’s novels to ask what a queer reading of the relationship between these two men has to tell us about the persistence of the past in the present, about the genres of haiku and the novel, and about the changing shape of the male homosocial continuum in modern Japan.
