ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to take distance from both the universalist and particularist biases. It discusses the problematics of the Japanese novel via a different route–a route suggested by Franco Moretti's hypothesis about the structural compromise that foregrounds the collision of forms and the hybrid product that it forces into being, using Natsume Soseki's narrative experiment in his novel, Light and Dark. The chapter focuses on what the modernisationist view has left out and examines the novel as an interesting instance of a Morettian structural compromise through which "the historical conditions reappear as a sort of 'crack' in the form; as a fault-line running between story and discourse, world and worldview". It explores the historical conditions surrounding the questions of "third person and the preterit" in the realist novel, and of love marriage, both of which were "foreign forms" and yet seen by Japanese writers as indices of modern civilisation in the Meiji period.
