Neko ni koban: Properties of the Animal in Natsume Sōseki

• In Event: 260. Japanese Literature and the Animal in Person

Abstract

This presentation is part of a larger project that reconsiders Natsume Sōseki’s critical and fictional writings as creative responses to the modern system of property ownership that was instituted in Japan during his lifetime—a system that included legal codes, embodied practices, ideologies, and forms of knowledge, among other elements. Animals proved an often complex case for modern property regimes. Does anyone own wild or stray animals? Do we possess domestic animals in the same way that we possess real property or inanimate objects? And are human property systems a product of ‘civilization’ and hence something that distinguishes our species from other animals, or are they rather a product of natural instinct and hence akin to practices of territoriality in other animals? As Sōseki explored the potential of narrative fiction to imagine alternative modes of owning and sharing, he experimented with narratives about, and sometimes by, animals. Fictional tales of beasts provided imaginary access to a defamiliarizing position outside existing norms for property, one that potentially allowed for new ideas and practices. I will look in particular at I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905-6), Sōseki’s first full-length work of fiction, to see not only how questions of property enter into the narrated content, but also how the feline narrating voice itself performs alternate modes of possession, thereby producing narrative pleasure by troubling common-sense notions of the proper and the propertied.

Author

• Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago