<Articles>Real Animals and Where to Find Them: in the Works of Shimazaki Tōson and Shiga Naoya

Abstract

Nature in general and animals in particular are part of our lives: we might love to be near them and take solace in interacting with them; or we might be disgusted or afraid of them. Nevertheless, in the end we are still largely dependent on them for air, food, labour, protection, or companionship. Nature and animals have also always featured widely and in various forms in visual arts and literature. Fables and folktales impart moral teachings by personifying animals, or by temporarily making their world come into contact with the human world; since the beginning of time, humans have projected their loneliness, longing, or anger on quiet forests, the starry sky, or a raging bull, through what David H. Thoreau, the pioneer of nature writing, called “correspondences”--a trope that often ends up making nature itself invisible. This paper discusses four early 20th century works by novelists Shimazaki Tōson of the Naturalist movement, and Shiga Naoya of the Shirakaba movement, in search for “real animals, ” i.e., animals that do not quite “correspond” to the narrators' or characters' feelings, do not impart any kind of moral teachings, but instead look back at us, “without moving, just to see, ” like Derrida's cat in “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” Focusing on the “Otherness” these animals--wild as well as domesticated--display, I analyse their interactions with the humans around them, in order to shed light on issues such as death, destiny, guilt and responsibility.