Abstract

This article traces the significance of the notion of shumi through a comparison between Kunikida Doppo’s ‘Musashino’ and Natsume Sōseki’s Kusamakura. I demonstrate how the language of shumi functioned as a mediator between an observing subject and an observed object, ultimately in order to establish an aesthetic vocabulary for a burgeoning middle class. Both narratives make use of shumi in order to draw out a specific experience of the narrator’s natural surroundings but with very different outcomes.Whereas Doppo’s text uses the language of shumi to draw the attention of the reader to the aesthetic features of the Musashi Plain and presents this way of seeing as natural and universal, it simultaneously works to mask the socio-political unbalance between the possessors of such sensibilities and the inhabitants of the land that is the object of the aesthetic gaze. By contrast, Sōseki’s narrative exposes the untenableness of such an artificial language as the basis for the construction of a bourgeois identity and rejects the narrator’s claims to any kind of mastery over the landscape or its occupants as a result of his heightened sensibilities. Analyzing both narratives from the vantage point of shumi therefore reveals the political, aesthetic, and ontological tensions present in its own discursive structures.