The evolution of women’s writing in East Asia has not only been shaped by but also contributed significantly to global literature in the 21st century. This paper explores a comparative analysis of Can Xue’s The Last Lover (2005) and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007), examining their innovative representations of violence within a global framework. Both novels experimentally depict the sensations and deformations of the female body, illuminating the oppression and resistance women face within stifling familial relationships and rigid social structures. By examining the body as a sensory medium, a distorted image, and an embodied allegory, Can Xue and Han Kang collectively redefine and reflect on women’s traumatic experiences—historically marginalized within male-centered artistic and intellectual traditions. This study argues that the modernist reconfiguration of corporeality, femininity, and marginality in these works transforms the portrayal of violence, both historical and gendered, in contemporary fiction, advancing the empowerment of women’s writing in global literature. This interdisciplinary study further highlights how female authors challenge patriarchal literary traditions, bridging East Asian cultural transformations with global socio-historical modernization and offering valuable insights into the cultural and intellectual shifts explored in comparative literature.

Ae-ran Kim is a well-known South Korean writer, but her work has rarely been studied in Chinese academia. Her short story collection, How Was Your Summer? focuses on depicting the life experiences of urban marginal groups in the context of consumerism and liquid modernity. It is a reflection of the individual identity anxiety of the South Korean “post-80s” generation in the wave of compressed modernity. In the story “There Is Night There, and Songs Here,” Long Da, the protagonist, due to the dual constraints of family and social relationships, chooses to exile himself and run away to rebuild his subjectivity. This paper, attempting to interpret the work from the perspective of existentialism, will approach from three subject-object interaction forms: “gaze,” “disregard,” and “mutual gaze,” to explore the realistic connotations of the work and investigate the possibility of creating spaces for individuals to converse with others in the complex modern society.

In 1877, the Chinese classics studies academy “Nishogakusha” was opened by Mishima Chushu, a famous scholar of the end of the Meiji Era, in his own house in Kojimachi, Tokyo. Among the many prestigious private schools of Chinese studies at that time, the Nishogakusha was undoubtedly the largest and most influential one. Since the establishment of the school, the ancient Chinese book “Wen Zhang Gui Fan” has been the textbook of Chinese literature used in the Nishogakusha. The book “Wen Zhang Gui Fan” is a collection of essays compiled by Xie Bingde, a famous literary scholar at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty. In this book, sixty-nine essays by famous writers from the Three Kingdoms to the Tang and Song dynasties are collected, with genres ranging from prose to poetic essay, and the essays are classified into two disciplines of “Fearless (Da Dan) ” and “Caution (Xiao Xin) ” according to the psychological process at the beginning of learning how to write, and suggests the method of composing chapters and sentences with detailed annotations. Therefore, “Wen Zhang Gui Fan” is an important book for those students who are ambition to take the exams in the Imperial Examination.

Kato Fukusai, formerly known as Kato Shintaro, came from Rikuzen, and his date of death is not known. Kato Fukusai went to Kyoto to study at Nishogakusha around the 24th year of the Meiji Era (1891), and was promoted to the position of dormitory manager and Teaching Assistant in charge of the Composition Course in November 1895. In 1902, Kato Fukusai, who had started out as a normal student, was appointed to the principal of Nishogakusha. It is undeniable that the ten years that Kato Fukusai went through in Nishogakusha are important enough to make him a witness to the history of Nishogakusha, and his notes of the lectures have a high documentary value in terms of representativeness and authenticity.

According to Nishogakusha-University The Institute for East Asian Studies, the collections of Kato Fukusai from Nishogakusha University are about 360 pieces of materials. These old collections span a wide range of time, covering notebooks from the 1920s to the 1930s of the Meiji Era, and most of them bear traces of having been used or even annotated by Kato Fukusai, making them excellent materials for understanding the teaching content of Chinese classics studies in the Nishogakusha during the Meiji Era, also for studying the reception of specific Chinese book in modern Japan. These lecture notes provide us with a practicable research perspective, and based on the contents of Kato Fukusai's notes, we are able to restore as much as possible the teaching environment at that time, and then reasonably deduce the characteristics of the teaching of the “Wen Zhang Gui Fan” in the private school of the Futamatsu Gakusha in the 1920s and 1930s of the Meiji Era and the acceptance of the students, as represented by Kato Fukusai.

The discussion of world literature began with Schleicher in 1773 and has lasted for nearly two hundred years. Since 1891, when the term “world literature” was first introduced in Japan, a rich and unique understanding of world literature has been accumulated. Yappari sekai wa bungaku de dekite iru, published in 2012, invited a number of Japanese experts on Japanese, Russian, French, and American literature, as well as poets and novelists who have won various literary awards, to engage in dialogues on a variety of topics related to world literature. This is an important window into the discussion of “world literature” in Japan, as it brings together the current state-of-the-art understanding of “world literature” in Japan. This paper takes Yappari sekai wa bungaku de dekite iru as the main object of study, and combines the discussion contents of the interviewees, the interpretation of classics, and the criteria for the selection of works of world literature in order to further demonstrate the development and change of the concept of world literature in the Japanese academic circles today. This change is mainly manifested in the following: the gradual process of “World Literature” from Western-centeredness to East-West dichotomy to “East-centeredness” since its birth; the creative experience of multilingual authors coinciding with the connotation of World Literature; the re-interpretation of classics; and the rise of popular literature reflecting the development of World Literature in Japan. The reinterpretation of classic works and the rise of popular literature reflect the development of the connotation of “literature” and further impact the connotation of world literature. Yappari sekai wa bungaku de dekite iru brings together twenty-six scholars and writers engaged in literary research or creative writing to discuss key issues in the discussion of world literature from a variety of perspectives, and provides a clear picture of the understanding of world literature in contemporary Japanese literary studies.