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A comparison between a translation and its original sends the author on a quest to explain a seeming discrepancy between the two versions. Edogawa Ranpo’s 1925 story “Ningen isu” contains four paragraphs that have been silently omitted from James B. Harris’s 1956 translation, “The Human Chair.” The omitted passage treats the theme of political assassination, and it is plausible that the omission is not accidental. Investigation into the matter, however, has not yet clarified how the passage came to be omitted. The author of the present paper describes how he structured a lesson on Edogawa’s text, summarizes his students’ contributions to a discussion of the omitted passage, and offers some observations on the benefits of disseminating seemingly inconclusive research results.

In The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry , Scott Mehl analyzes the complex response of Meiji-era Japanese poets and readers to the challenge introduced by European verse and the resulting crisis in Japanese poetry. Amidst fierce competition for literary prestige on the national and international stage, poets and critics at the time recognized that the character of Japanese poetic culture was undergoing a fundamental transformation, and the stakes were high: the future of modern Japanese verse. Mehl documents the creation of new Japanese poetic forms, tracing the first invention of Japanese free verse and its subsequent disappearance. He examines the impact of the acclaimed and reviled shintaishi , a new poetic form invented for translating European-language verse and eventually supplanted by the reintroduction of free verse as a Western import. The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry draws on materials written in German, Spanish, English, and French, recreating the global poetry culture within which the most ambitious Meiji-era Japanese poets vied for position.

In his essays on the dynamics of cultural change, the semiotician Yuri Lotman proposes a model to explain the fact that when an area of culture—poetry, for example—develops a set of self-descriptions—such as poetry criticism, histories of poetry, and so on—that area of culture (or semiotic system, to use Lotman's term) is in a position to become rigidly self-repeating: once it draws up rules for itself, then there is the possibility that it will follow those rules. The semiotic system is described as having become rigidified, under such circumstances. Lotman posits another alternative: the semiotic system might instead choose to break or alter its own rules, renovating and transforming itself by incorporating elements from other semiotic systems. In this essay I argue that the appearance of modern Japanese free-verse poetry can be explained using a modified version of Lotman's model. It is common for historians of modern Japanese poetry to say that the poet Kawaji Ryūkō was the first to publish free-verse poetry in Japanese (in 1907). This essay places Ryūkō's work in context, characterizing it as a synthesis of a number of elements from the contemporary criticism—the principal among these being the current of negative criticism of Japanese poetry, on the one hand, and the current of positive response to Western free-verse poetry, on the other. By synthesizing elements from various strands of poetry and poetry criticism, Ryūkō created a poetic form that is now prevalent in the Japanese poetry establishment today.

Adapting a term coined by Ian Hacking, this article analyzes certain of the styles of reasoning that appear in two novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Zapiski iz podpol'ya (Notes from Underground, 1864) and Natsume Sōseki's Kokoro (1914). The confession of the underground man, the protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel, includes an argument against the Chernyshevskian doctrine of rational egoism. The underground man's argument may, as this article shows, be analyzed using logical truth tables to demonstrate that, however thorough the underground man's argument may appear, it does not consider the counterexample of selfless altruism. This omission prepares the way for the underground man's rejection of Liza at the climax of the second part of the novel. Sōseki's novel, too, contains a confession, namely Sensei's testament, in which Sensei relates how he arrived at his belief that humanity is fundamentally selfish. Sensei's style of reasoning is primarily inductive, in contrast with that of other characters in Sōseki's novel, and the present article argues that Sensei's style of reasoning is a primary cause of his suicide. In each novel, then, there is a sustained consideration of how and to what extent a style of reasoning is bound up with a character's fate.

If it is true, as Ezra Pound wrote, that in literature “every allegedly great age is an age of translations,” then the modern era meets that criterion for greatness as no other has done (1954, 34-35).¹ Having read such a claim, a reader is likely to expect to be presented with statistics showing the vitality of the translation wing of the publishing industry—number of books translated per year and so forth. But the reader will, I hope, look tolerantly on my choice to omit such figures, which can rapidly become outdated in any case, and will accept in their

Octavio Paz’s Spanish-language version of the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō’s 松尾芭蕉 (1644-94) travel narrative Oku no hosomichi 奥の細道 (posthumous, 1702) contains haiku translations that I admire very much. Paz translated the text in collaboration with Hayashiya Eikichi, publishing their Sendas de Oku (Paths of Oku) in April 1957, whereupon “it was received with the usual indifference,” as Paz recalled ([1970] 2005, 9). Theirs was the first complete version of Bashō’s text in a Western language, to be followed by four others in the 1960s—three in English, one in French. Paz and Hayashiya republished Sendas de Oku in a revised

Of the three compilers of Shintaishi shō , only one of them, Inoue Tetsujirō, lived to see the twentieth century. Toyama Masakazu died in 1900; Yatabe Ryōkichi, in 1899. Inoue died in 1944, aged eighty-eight. His views on the career of the shintaishi in the twentieth century are therefore of particular interest. In an article published in Teikoku bungaku in 1918, Inoue reminisced on the events that led to the publication of Shintaishi shō. His article begins: “We can very well say that the shintaishi arose almost completely by chance” (1918, 87). He described how Yatabe, a botany professor, showed