[Mar 4] Mediating Value in Japanese Literature: Ruins, Marketing, and Paratexts [Three talks…]

Mediating Value in Japanese Literature: Ruins, Marketing, and Paratexts [Three talks…]

Date: March 4, 2026 (Wed)

Time: 15:30-17:30

Venue: CRT-4.36 (4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU)

Talk 1: Worlds in ruins: ecological crises, resistance and affect in Japanese contemporary novels (Guilia Baquè)

Abstract: 

Ruins are a common theme in Japanese literature. Processes of ruination do not affect only urban and natural landscapes, but they extend to the human body and human society as well. Focusing on the intersection between the affective geographies of destructed landscapes, the often contaminated and ruined bodies, and the ruination of emotional bonds, this paper explores the affective affordances of ruins in novels by Furukawa Hideo, Project Itoh, and Murata Sayaka. By exploring the affective ecologies of these ruined fictional landscapes and worlds, this paper argues that ruined landscapes and ruined bodies can become generative spaces for the emergence of a subversive and more-than-human affect resisting conventional gender, social, and anthropocentric power structures. 

Presenter:

Giulia Baquè is currently a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Post Doctoral Fellow at Tsuda University (Tokyo, Japan). She obtained her PhD from Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy) with a dissertation on posthuman representations in Japanese contemporary literature. Her current research project intervenes at the crossroad between affect theory, ecocriticism and Japanese literary studies to map and analyze the varied literary strategies that Japanese literature employs to narrate affective and emotional responses to environmental damages. Her other research interests include ecofictions and ecocriticism in Japan, posthumanism, animal studies, comparative and world literature.

Talk 2: Marketing Taste: Shumi, Consumption, and Ogai’s Mitsukoshi (Jurriaan van der Meer)

Abstract: 

This presentation examines three short stories written by Mori Ogai (1862-1922) for the PR magazine of the department store Mitsukoshi in 1911-12 and explores how literature was mobilized in Mitsukoshi’s marketing machine to justify a culture of lavish consumption. Since its declaration to become a modern department store in December 1904, Mitsukoshi positioned itself as more than a shop that sold goods, presenting itself instead as a cultural leader that guided people in their engagement with the commodity-as-sign in order to assert themselves as civilized citizens of high taste. I demonstrate how the concept of shumi– initially inserted into the modern Japanese vernacular as a translation of the word ‘taste’ – was strategically deployed by Mitsukoshi’s marketeers to cultivate certain aesthetic sensibilities while leveragingconsumer desire for profit against the backdrop of emerging middle-class identities. While literary competitions surrounding the department store’s brand and collaborations with literary authors were used to give Mitsukoshi cultural legitimacy, I argue that Mori Ogai’s contributions were critical of the very consumerism Mitsukoshi promoted. Situating Ogai’s short stories within the rhetoric of shumi allows us to understand how aesthetic discourse actively mediates the formation of consumer subjectivity and reveals the politics of taste behind it. 

Presenter:

Jurriaan van der Meer obtained his PhD degree from Leiden University in 2024 and is currently a JSPS Fellow at Waseda University. His research focus is the politics of aesthetics in late Meiji and Taisho era literature. 

Talk 3: Authorship and Authority in the Paratexts of Kimitachi wa dō ikiru ka (Stephen Choi)

Abstract:

This presentation examines the long publication history of Kimitachi wa dō ikiru ka (How Will You Live?, 1937) to explore how authority over a text is produced, transferred, and reconfigured through paratext. Although Yoshino Genzaburō is the de facto writer of Kimitachi, authorship did not always coincide with authority over how different editions presented the text to its audience. Rather than treating the text as a stable work with a fixed meaning, I argue that its significance has been repeatedly reshaped by figures who advocated for the text in different historical moments. The presentation traces key moments in this process, from the text’s original publication under the authority of editor Yamamoto Yūzō, through Yoshino’s postwar revisions, to its later repositioning as a work for adult readers and its recent revival through manga and media adaptation. By foregrounding paratext as an apparatus of authority, the presentation offers a framework for understanding how texts persist, acquire legitimacy, and circulate across changing social and cultural conditions. 

Presenter:

Stephen Choi received his PhD degree from Columbia University in 2024 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. In April 2026, he will begin a new position as full-time faculty in the Department of Children’s Culture at Shirayuri University. His main research fields are modern Japanese literature, childhood, and culture and media studies.