The collaboration of ‘ghostwriting’ and literature – the case of Kawabata Yasunari

Abstract: Kawabata Yasunari is Japan's first Nobel Prize recipient for literature and thus an emblem of the modern Japanese writer, but as this essay demonstrates, this writer's career, like that of so many throughout Japan's premodern and modern history, is spanned by the curious practice of ghostwriting. Taking up the specific case of Kawabata, the article exposes a wider conflict between the modern West's notion of the original artist, underwritten by its idea of individualized creativity, and modern Japan's persistent adherence to ghostwriting's more collaborative premodern concept of creativity. Subjecting fine-grained literary historical analysis to its far-reaching theoretical consequences for the modernness of modern literature, Japanese and otherwise, this essay shows how the spectre of Kawabata's ghostwriting haunts our contemporary, and therefore possibly anachronistic, understanding of ‘modern’ literary practice.     

清末中国研究日本的先驱者沈筠事迹考

本论文通过发掘传世文献以及新发现的史料，尝试考察并复原了长期湮没无闻的清末浙江平湖乍浦出身的文人沈筠（沈浪仙1802--1862）的事迹。指出：无论从沈筠所编著的有关日本著作的数量以及涉猎的范围来看，还是从他研究日本的深度和广度而言，沈筠都当之无愧堪称清末中国研究日本的先驱者之一。