The subversive potential of parody in Danchōtei nichijō, Nagai Kafū's World War II diary

Unable to publish during World War II, 2 the aging social novelist 3 Nagai Kafū (1879-1959) made his diary, Danchōtei nichijō 1 This paper is based partly on my PhD dissertation, "Iyami, the Subversive Voice in the Wartime Writings of Nagai Kafū; with a Complete Translation of The Other Shore of the Sumida (Bokutō Kidan), 'Enduring Images' ('Omokage'), 'The Maid's Story' ('Jochū no hanashi'), and Other Late Works" (Washington University in St. Louis, 2001); hereafter "Iyami." 2 Much ink has been spilled over the correct appellation of the war that raged in Asia in the early 1940s.Japan had been at war in China, intermittently, since the invasion of Manchuria in 1931.All-out war between Japan and China commenced in the summer of 1937, a conflict most historians refer to as the Second Sino-Japanese War but called the "China Incident" (Shina Jihen) in the contemporary Japanese press.Japanese forces continued to fight in China until the end of World War II, a fact reflected by the Chinese term for the conflict: the War Against Japanese Aggression.The Japanese blitzkrieg of December 1941 opened a vast new front of fighting.An Imperial Edict proclaimed this epic struggle to be the Great East Asia War (Dai Tō A Sensō), a name that fell into disfavor after Japan's defeat, although occasionally still used by Japanese rightwing groups.Meanwhile, the Japanese left wing treats the entire period of warfare from 1931 to 1945 as one conflict, aptly named the Fifteen Year War (Jūgonen Sensō).From the Japanese perspective, World War II (Dainiji Sekai Taisen) took place primarily in Europe.For the sake of simplicity, in this essay, the "Pacific War" (technically, the Asian Pacific War) indicates the Pacific Theater of World War II, 1941-1945.3 Several of Kafū's early works, published between 1903 and 1917, were banned for indecency.See Earhart, "Iyami," pp.9-16, especially p. 34, n26.In the prewar era, the censorship board noted only that a work was banned on grounds of being morally or politically offensive, rarely providing further elaboration.Kafū publicly announced his retirement as an author in a seminal 1919 essay, "Fireworks" ("Hanabi"), which commented acerbically upon the closed trial and execution of the Socialist conspirators in the Kōtoku Incident of 1911 and the futility of the political novel in Japan (Earhart, "Iyami," pp.17-19; Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984], pp.120-121).Kafū reemerged as a major writer with a string of late works first appearing in 1931.In particular, he is remembered today for his 1937 masterpiece, Bokutō Kidan (The Other Shore of the Sumida, a Romantic Narrative of Kafū the Recluse, partial translation by Edward Seidensticker published as A Strange Tale from East of the River [Stanford: University of California, 1965]), a complex metafiction centering on an aging

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