Angela Carter and Modern Japanese Fiction: Her Reencounter with Western Literary Legacies

Abstract

This paper discusses the echo of modern Japanese literature in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), which was written in Tokyo and Chiba, paying particular attention to four of the most influential authors in this intertextual novel: Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima. Significantly, as well as being innovators of Japanese fiction, these writers were also great reinterpreters of Western literary legacies, who constructed their own original styles by absorbing both Japanese and non-Japanese literary traditions. The article, therefore, explores how Carter reencountered Western literary legacies through reading modern Japanese literature in order to clarify her feminist and political responses to the reinterpretation of the European and American canon by authors from the Far East.