Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For Sōseki, literature was a means for thinking through—and beyond—private property. Bourdaghs puts Sōseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentarō, author of Japan’s first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kōjin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Sōseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.
- Cover
- Contents
- Note on Usage
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction / Owning Up to Sōseki
- Chapter One / Fables of Property: Nameless Cats, Trickster Badgers, Stray Sheep
- Chapter Two / House under a Shadow: Disowning the Psychology of Possessive Individualism in The Gate
- Chapter Three / Property and Sociological Knowledge: Sōseki and the Gift of Narrative
- Chapter Four / The Tragedy of the Market: Younger Brothers, Women, and Colonial Subjects in Kokoro
- Conclusion / Who Owns Sōseki? Or, How Not to Belong in World Literature
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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