We are a group of PhD candidates who meet the invitation of Comparative Literature by working across unexpected and underexplored axes of Japan Studies. In light of the transnational turn in literary scholarship, we seek to foreground comparisons that complicate the traditions of East-West and North-South analysis. Thus we have found productive common ground in our challenge to the assumptions of literary influence. In place of a hierarchy of texts (as implied in popular theories such as Moretti’s law of literary evolution), we seek to read in juxtaposition and consider the multilateral influence and resistance of literary cultures and voices. To this end, we have found genre studies to be a fertile ground for such reconsiderations.

Julia’s presentation examines A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, as symptomatic of a transpacific dialogue in autofiction. Approaching this genre from the perspective of shishōsetsu, or the “I-novel”, a Japanese genre to which Ozeki calls attention in her text, the work is read as an intervention into the deeply gendered generic histories on both sides of the Pacific. Through the doubled voices of Ruth and Nao, two Japanese women who write to each other across an ocean, Ozeki underlines the effacement of women’s writing across time and space, broadening the contours of genre whilst presenting reading as a form of care.

Oliver’s work in crime fiction juxtaposes the earliest detective fiction in Japan and Argentina, a hitherto unexplored axis that sheds light on the impact of genre on an emerging global market. As the successful model of the literary detective spread from Europe and America, its impact had remarkable parallels in both Tokyo and Buenos Aires. Lawyers and policemen found new routes into a literary marketplace, where imported structures of law enforcement and justice were challenged on a narrative level. Read in comparison, the assumptions of imitation embedded in detective fiction must be reevaluated in light of narratives of resistance and rebellion from the Global South.

Harry's paper offers a comparative reading of the Russian exilic poet Eduard Limonov’s It’s Me—Eddie with Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. Drawing upon the socio-political context of each author, the presentation identifies unexpected traces of far-right extremism in their earliest literary work. Through their glorification of tight muscles, killing machines, purity, and the absolute binary of Self/Other, both writers hint at a fascist aesthetic driven by a fetish for the perfect and able-bodied male physique. In dialogue, these texts suggest that while the personal is political, the political is also transnational.

The title of this inquiry comes from the question found in a number of Zen koans: “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West?” Its starting point is the fact that the American poet Jane Hirshfield (born 1953) began her practice of Zen in the San Francisco Zen Center, which was founded by the Japanese roshi Shunryu Suzuki in 1959. True to the spirit of the panel, what follows is a number of complications. What distinguishes this inquiry, though, is its attempt to break the very intellectual approach of literary scholarship: an aspiration for transcendence true to Zen.

Although the teaching of beginner’s mind originates from Dōgen Zenji, the first Japanese Zen Master, Suzuki’s own pithy articulation of it is that, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” What meaning does this teaching hold, then, for the titular “mind of poetry” in Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry? What follows, then, is an examination of the influence of Zen Buddhism and Japanese aesthetics in Hirshfield’s first book of criticism.

From this, a complication arises: how does one make sense of the fact that Hirshfield finds the mind of poetry even among poets and traditions that had no direct contact with Zen and Japanese poetry? The first koan from the Mumonkan or Gateless Gate asks, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Similarly, do poets have beginner’s mind even when they had no contact with teachings like beginner’s mind?

The next complication pulls back towards the panel’s theme of Japan studies. Does it make sense to ascribe Zen to Japan and to thus claim that Japanese poetry and spirituality influenced Hirshfield? What about Hirshfield’s poems that bear no explicit trace of anything Japanese? What about Suzuki urging American practitioners to develop their own kind of Zen distinct from their Japanese forebears?

Joshu’s answer to the koan from the Gateless Gate cited above is “Mu!” Although the word literally means emptiness, Zen practitioners take the answer as a call to practice and experience their Buddha-nature for themselves, rather than sinking into intellectualization. Would a focus on Japanese or American husks lead one away from the pith of beginner’s mind/the mind of poetry: from experiencing this mind for oneself? Although the answer might be yes, the Zen definition of nondualism as “not one, not two” then comes to mind. What meaning does Zen hold for Japan studies? How can critics not assume perfect identity between Japanese and American poetry and thereby pay attention to their differences (not one) while not assuming a dualistic separation when comparing literatures (not two)? What does it mean to transcend the intellect while knowing there is no separation between the poet, the critic, and the intellect of both?