ABSTRACT
A text which openly flaunts its fictionality and emphasizes the performativity of writing, Fugen is animated by an erudite imagination traversing centuries of Eastern and Western culture. This heightened consciousness of artifice in Fugen – and in other early works such as Kajin (The Beauty, 1935) – is often viewed by critics in the context of Ishikawa Jun’s engagement with Gide and his roman pur. Noguchi
Takehiko has discussed in depth the influence of Gide, Mallarmé and the symbolist movement for pure poetry, while Chiba Sen’ichi’s comparative study of modernism includes a chapter on Ishikawa Jun, Gide and the pure novel.3 Suzuki Sadami finds in The Beauty a self-inscription of narrative similar to Gide’s The Counterfeiters. Suzuki argues that this work represents “pure reflexivity spontaneously generated by words,” an experiment more radical than Gide’s: the narrator of The Beauty is experiencing and writing simultaneously; it is “a novel about writing this novel” (kono sho¯setsu o kaku sho¯setsu).4
