ABSTRACT

The following translation represents the first chapter of Saeki Junko’s Comparative Cultural History of “Iro” and “Ai” (“Iro” to “ai” no hikaku bunkashi, 1998), a study of the profound shifts in the conception of intimate relations between men and women that occurred with Japan’s turn toward the West. As Saeki points out in her introduction, to explore the question of how the Meiji Japanese attempted to “reform” male-female relations is to “think through the meaning of Japan’s ‘modernity.’”1 Building upon the work of translation scholars such as Yanabu Akira and Matsushita Teizō, her study traces the intricate process by which the Western concept of love entered the Japanese lexicon and profoundly altered Japanese conceptions of the relations between the sexes. Setting her sights squarely on literary discourse, she adapts the Annales School’s “history of mentalities” to an investigation of the educated elite of Meiji, whose advocacy of ai has had a profound and lasting impact on modern Japan.