ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes “Utakata no ki” (“Record of Transience,” 1890) and “Hanako” (1910) by Mori Ogai (1862–1922), a leading literary writer in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Japan. Both stories depict a male visual artist’s relationship with his female muse. In each work, Ogai highlights the arts as a transcendental realm that enables his characters to bypass and commune across social and cultural distances, as well as a critical arena for addressing the hierarchical norms that separate them. Yet, by depicting aesthetics as apart from the regimes of mainstream social discourses, and portraying his heroines as embodiments of this “alternative” register of beauty, he seems to problematize the constraints imposed on women in modern society. Ogai probes in these stories the relationship between artists and their models, the representational capacities of literary language in relation to visual imagery, women’s rights and the gendered nature of subjectivity, and the dialectics of cultural differences, all of which were major topics of debate throughout Japan’s period of rapid modernization.
