Getting Along with Imaginary Others: Case Studies in Japanese Fiction with Christopher Weinberger

Can novels contribute to the ethical lives of readers? What responsibilities might they bear in representing others? Are we ethically accountable for how we read fiction? Modern Japanese novels and contemporary metafiction, neither of which have figured centrally in Anglophone scholarship on novel ethics, offer innovative answers to these and other questions. This talk will offer new readings of seminal works of Japanese literature to demonstrate how their metafictional strategies can provide new perspectives on contemporary concerns, including debates about identification and empathy, the representation of alterity, and widespread disagreement about whether novel ethics consists in the manner of reading, the effects of reading, or the content of novel representation. We will briefly trace the development of an overlooked “ethical reflexivity” in the fiction of modern writers often critiqued for ethical failures: Mori Ōgai (1868-1922) and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. The talk will then focus on the relevance of their work for the contemporary moment through analysis of a writer whose ethics continue to provoke debate: Murakami Haruki (1949–). In the end we find a startling continuity between the methods of Japan’s novel progenitors and some of the supposedly recent innovations of metamodernism as well as an original methodology for the further study of world literature.