The Tree of Life: The Politics of Kinship in Meiji Japan (1870-1915)

This dissertation examines writings by transnational Japanese literary writers around the turn of the 20th century, showing how they drew upon the languages of the Victorian sciences in order to imagine broader forms of literary kinship outside the framework of a single national canon. I define “transnational Japanese writers” as writers who were registered by the state as Japanese citizens, but whose peripatetic careers and multilingual streams of influence make a compelling case for positioning their work outside of the frame of a single national literary canon.The primary argument of this dissertation is that Japan’s transition from nation to empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries depended heavily upon the conflation of nationalist and familial rhetoric; yet, simultaneously, Japanese writers and thinkers were bound up in a transnational circuit of Victorian scientific discourse that posed serious challenges to the naturalness of the nuclear family form. From anthropological accounts of alternative kinship systems in the colonies, to Marxist critiques of the nuclear family as an upholder of private property, to Galtonian technologies of eugenics, Japan’s encounter with the British empire deeply challenged traditional notions of family, as well as the equation of family and state. The four chapters of this dissertation follow the writings of Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) and Koizumi Yakumo, né Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), whose ambiguous position as Japanese subjects caught between the borders of nations afforded them a unique vantage point from which to criticize the language of kinship invoked by the state. By showing how these writers employed literary language to forge bonds of belonging between distant subjects not necessarily related by blood, my dissertation reveals how literary writing itself was imagined by these writers to constitute its own form of reproduction that ensured the continuity of one’s identity across space and time