Department of Comparative Literature and Department of Asian Studies, Spring 2027

This dissertation chapter examines the allure of the preliterate and the logic of literacy in Nakajima Atsushi’s literary imagination of empire. A quintessential imperial writer, Nakajima Atsushi (1909–1942) lived in multiple parts of the Japanese empire and produced fiction and travel writing set in colonial Korea, northern China, and Micronesia. A traveler in literary imagination as much as in life, he also wrote stories set in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Scythia, and China, and fictionalized the life of Robert Louis Stevenson in Polynesia. The chapter identifies the tension between orality and literacy as a key productive contradiction in Nakajima’s imperial construction. On the one hand, his tales of antiquity reveal a primitivist fascination with the preliterate and participate in the exoticizing construction of Japan’s “Orient.” On the other hand, his travel writing about encounters with oral cultures in Micronesia systematically effaces indigenous speech while establishing spoken Japanese as the imperial norm. Although the longing for the preliterate and the negative inscription of indigenous orality as a lack of Japanese fluency may seem to pull in opposite directions, I argue that both are predicated on literacy as the locus of Japan’s modernity and imperial authority. Japanese orality in Nakajima’s texts is constructed relationally: against Sinitic literacy, in a phonocentric articulation of Japanese identity; and against indigenous orality, in the literary-linguistic reterritorialization of Micronesia as Japanese imperial space. Ultimately, Japanese orality emerges as a fundamentally literate—and literary—construction.