ABSTRACT
In commenting on the notion of the ‘worldliness’ of literary texts, Edward Said once noted that ‘texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society’ (Said 1983: 35). The ‘circumstance’ referred to here is what we otherwise may call politics – the social processes in which the dominant power relations are enforced and contested. Consideration of politics in literature is especially relevant to those of us in North America and Europe who read Japanese and other non-Western texts. One of the weightiest intellectual interventions Said makes in Orientalism (1978) is the argument that the way in which Western intellectuals read, study and construct a discourse on the culture of the Other has been essential in developing and exercising dominating power over it. In other words, politics is embedded not only in the literary text itself, but also in the act of reading. This observation puts a sober and rather uncomfortable question to us: what is the politics that frames our investigative projects when we read Japanese literature?
