University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Alice in evasion: adapting Lewis Carroll in Japan

(USC Thesis Other)

Alice in evasion: adapting Lewis Carroll in Japan

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content ALICE IN EVASION: ADAPTING LEWIS CARROLL IN JAPAN by Amanda Kennell A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES) August 2017 ii Abstract Alice in Evasion: Adapting Lewis Carroll in Japan Amanda Kennell This project traces Japan’s reception of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels from their arrival in 1899 until today through adaptations in a variety of media, including literature, comics, stationery, and fine art. The first Japanese Alice publication appeared at a critical moment in the formation of Japanese modernity. The continued importance of Carroll’s books since then makes them an important optic through which one can view the construction of gender, literature, childhood, and culture in modern Japan. Alice has been translated into Japanese more than 400 times, including translations by titans of Japanese literature such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Mishima Yukio. This large body of translations provides a basis for analyzing the important role translation played in the development of modern Japanese literature and how translation is theorized in Japan. Further, Alice translations spawned a tradition of Alice art created by artists as elite as the Praemium Imperiale-winning Kusama Yayoi, whose lifelong self-identification with Alice is shown to be the epitome of the Japanese understanding of Alice. Her Alice works are matched by Alice adaptations in diverse media, including animation, comics, film, computer games, clothing, cafés, and stationery. Within these media, young Alice’s image has been refined to the point that a simple silhouette can be shown to denote herself and by extension her world. Consequently, Alice’s reception in Japan makes practices of cultural transplantation and modern conceptions of femininity visible through the figure of Alice herself. “Alice in Evasion” thus evaluates Alice in Wonderland’s presence in Japanese culture over time through a variety of media and uses Alice to examine Japanese conceptions of gender identity, literature, and culture. iii Acknowledgements This dissertation is the culmination of a decade-plus long academic career that was supported by dozens of individuals and organizations. My deepest thanks go to Akira Mizuta Lippit, who also deserves my deepest apologies. I think I managed everything you wanted me to, but I know I did most of it a couple months after I should have. David Bialock pulled out all the stops to welcome me to the University of Southern California, and I would not have succeeded as much as I did without his guidance and patience. Satoko Shimazaki came to USC after I had already finished my official coursework, and yet managed to open my eyes to new dimensions of Japanese literary and theatrical studies nonetheless. Sunyoung Park spent seven years insisting that her specialization was too different from mine for her to assist me, all while giving me some of the most detailed and encouraging advice imaginable. Leo Braudy was faced with a student who was writing about British literature despite not having taken a single college-level course on said literature, but his unwavering enthusiasm and willingness to follow Alice out of England gave new depth and dimension to a project that might otherwise have never left Asia and America. Throughout the long years of research, Takayuki Tatsumi, Miya Mizuta, Ayako Kano, Linda Chance, Richard Weinberg, Kathryn Hemmann, and Anne McKnight have provided guidance, feedback, introductions, and even the occasional piece of research material, for which they have my gratitude. They have collectively sanded down the sharp edges of my work and re- oriented it to bring out the best side of me. The Andrew W Mellon Digital Humanities program at USC, led by Peter Mancall and administered by Amy Braden, took my research farther than I thought possible. Not only has my work improved, I am able to convey it to a far wider audience than I thought possible because of the training with which they provided me. My Mellon Digital Humanities training was enhanced iv by curatorial opportunities USC Libraries offered me that allowed me to engage in praxis as well as theory. USC’s Visual Studies program, led by Vanessa Schwartz, similarly trained me to speak productively with scholars in a variety of fields. The development of this project has also been supported by the Nippon Foundation, the Modern Language Association, The Journal of Popular Culture, the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, the East Asian Studies Center at USC, the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources, Michael J Downey’s Hashi.org, the US Department of State’s Foreign Language and Area Studies program, and Barbara Inamoto. This dissertation could not have been written without the incalculable support George and Linda Cassady gave me first through access to their collection, and then by funding a major expansion of their collection’s Japanese holdings. I have never heard of anyone else having the unwavering patronage that the Cassadys offered me, and I hope that this final product will justify their faith. Clare and August Imholtz and Yoshiyuki Monma helped me train my eye for Japanese Alice materials before I even began to understand how wide the world of Alice could get through access to their Carrollian collections. In Japan, Eiko Orkney kindly guided me to secret hordes of Alice materials, and Yoko Takeda’s picture-taking enabled me to gain the full- on Alice café experience whilst still getting photo evidence for future use. Patrick Galbraith similarly introduced me to an Alice bar, just to make sure I wasn’t taking my work too seriously. Portions of this dissertation have benefited from feedback from a number of reading groups and workshops. My thanks go out to Laura Isabel Serna, Kohki Watabe, Jonathan Dentler, Clifford Galiher, and Joshua Mitchell of the Visual Studies Writing Group, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Annmaria Shimabuku, John Kim, Sarah Walsh, and Kelly McCormick of the JAG Writing Retreat, and Rika Hiro and Young Sun Park of the G-SEA Writing Group. Yiwen v Zhang, Rebecca Tompkins, Cindi Textor, Anders Blok, Yaritza Hernández, Mycah Braxton, Mike Abele, Kevin Richardson, Will Chou, Kimmy Sanders, Jyana Browne, Emma Ziker, and Harry Schley provided feedback on my first, tentative explorations of Japanese Alice adaptations. Youngmin Choe pushed me to further think through what Alice really is, even when I just wanted to get through a semester. Mikhail Koulikov graciously gave me opportunities to speak both on this topic and – when I needed to take a break from all-Alice all the time – on others as well. Lindsay Nelson-Santos, Anri Yasuda, and Colleen Laird provided advice in person, but also sometimes from a very great distance via the wonders of the internet. Chad Walker, Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer, Keisha Brown, Melissa Chan, Yunji Park, Jesse Drian, Yunwen Gao, Rio Katada, Nicolette Lee, Li-Ping Chen, Victoria Montrose, Jillian Barndt, Wooseok Kang, Haiwei Liu, Wei Wei, and Nate Heneghan are also due thanks for providing similar feedback in less formal environs over and over again, even when I am sure they were tired of hearing about Alice in Wonderland. Brooke McCorkle, Sean Rhoads, Frank Clements, Nathan Hopson, and Laura Miller first set me on the path to a doctorate through their insightful conversations, and then provided proof that one could in fact finish a dissertation. Cassie Stearns’ encouragement was always timely and persuasive. Christine Shaw and Brianna Correa similarly listened to me go on and on about everything from Alice in Wonderland to paperwork, patiently guiding me through the administrative ins and outs of a doctorate. My deepest thanks go out to Colen G and L Elaine Kennell, who have supported me in every way for longer than I can remember. Finally, much of my research was quietly underwritten by Mike and Sue Resner. I have seen far more of the world, and far more people have seen my work, than I should have because of you. vi Table of Contents ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………II ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………….III TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………..VI LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………….IX CHAPTER ONE: A RE-INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………1 MAKING MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE………………………………………………1 GIRLS IN/AND MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE………………………………………..3 ADAPTATION IN THE MODERN WORLD……………………………………………………5 ADAPTATION AND ALICE IN JAPAN………………………………………………………...7 DEFINING ADAPTATION………………………………………………………………………9 TELLING TRANSMEDIA STORIES…………………………………………………………..13 MANEUVERING THROUGH MEDIA MIX WORLDS………………………………………19 LIFE IN ADAPTATION………………………………………………………………………...27 NATURAL REPRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………33 CHAPTER TWO: ALICE IN TRANSLATION……………………………………………...37 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………….37 ALICE AND DISNEY…………………………………………………………………………...41 A KOREAN INTERLUDE………………………………………………………………………46 ALICE OVER TIME……………………………………………………………………………48 TRANSLATION IN THE WEST AND JAPAN………………………………………………52 WHAT IS ALICE IN WONDERLAND? ………………………………………………………60 vii THREE DEVELOPMENTS IN TURN OF THE CENTURY JAPANESE LITERATURE……63 ALICE: THE EARLY YEARS…………………………………………………………………66 ALICE TO TODAY……………………………………………………………………………77 CHAPTER THREE: ALICE IN WRITING…………………………………………………79 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………….79 READING AND REREADING AKUTAGAWA………………………………………………81 AKUTAGAWA’S ALICE STORY………………………………………………………………86 ALICE STORY……………………………………………………………………………………89 KAPPA…………………………………………………………………………………………...94 AKUTAGAWA’S KAPPA AND ARTAUD’S “JABBERWOCKY”…………………………104 FROM TEXT TO ILLUSTRATION……………………………………………………..……107 CHAPTER FOUR: ALICE IN SILHOUETTE……………………………………………..115 WHO IS ALICE? ………………………………………………………………………………115 KUSAMA YAYOI AND ALICE IN ART………………………………………………..……119 SILHOUETTES…………………………………………………………………………..……126 SILHOUETTES IN WONDERLAND…………………………………………………………129 DISNEY, ALICE, AND MOBILE CHARACTERS……………………………………...……133 SILHOUETTES IN MANGA………………………………………………………………….138 BOYS AND ALICE MANGA…………………………………………………………….……142 ALICE IN THE MEDIA MIX…………………………………………………………….……146 CHAPTER FIVE: IN CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………..……150 ALICE AND GENDER…………………………………………………………………………150 IF NOT AN ADAPTATION, WHAT? …………………………………………………..……156 viii WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………….162 JAPAN’S ALICES………………………………………………………………………….….170 OTHER ALICES, CITING ALICE…………………………………………………………….172 ix List of Figures figure 1: Image of a burr by Huw Williams 33 figure 2: A 2014 Putumayo advertisement 39 figure 3: A set of Stipee stickers 39 figure 4: Alice in the Country of Clover video game 39 figure 5: Kusuyama Masao’s 1920 Wonderland 75 figure 6: Tweet by @kuroyatomoya 95 figure 7: Alice Story Hirasawa illustration 108 figure 8: Alice Story Seikō illustration 108 figure 9: The Golden Ship Table of Contents 110 figure 10: Travels in Looking-Glass Land 110 figure 11: Tomoji Washio’s The Wondrous Garden 111 figure 12: Seiichi Shiojiri’s 1947 translation of Kappa 112 figure 13: Illustration by Amanda Kennell 115 figure 14: Alice notebook 118 figure 15: Disney stickers 118 figure 16: Alice temporary tattoos 118 figure 17: Putumayo shirt 118 figure 18: Ringo Akai from Ookami-san & Her Seven Companions 119 figure 19: “Crooked Red Riding Hood” by Weno 119 figure 20: Kusama Yayoi’s NETS-INFINITY OPQR (2007) 121 figure 21: José de Creefts’ Alice statue in Central Park 124 figure 22: Disney Alice stickers 133 x figure 23: Alice tape 133 figure 24: Alice in the Country of Hearts CD cover 133 figure 25: Meiji chocolates from 2013 134 figure 26: Disney Alice stickers 136 figure 27: Disney Alice silhouetted stickers 136 figure 28: Disney notebooks 138 figure 29: Chart of boy-Alice manga 144 figure 30: Scene from Alex in Terrorland 154 figure 31: Picture of bicycle taken in Oxford, England 157 figure 32: Advertisement for Beyond Wonderland 159 figure 33: Advertisement for Beyond Wonderland 159 1 Chapter One: A Re-introduction Making Modern Japanese Literature Early in Okazaki Kyoko’s 1989 manga, pink the protagonist proudly declares that she has, “only read five books in [her] entire life” (37). Given that she is an office worker who moonlights as a prostitute in order to afford food for her pet crocodile, Yumi hardly seems to be an arbiter of high culture. pink’s dramatic tension stems from Yumi’s growing love affair with a young man named Haru and the destruction this wreaks in Yumi’s family as Haru was originally the lover of Yumi’s step-mother. Yet, over the course of the manga, Haru, a would-be, “proper and great” (73) Japanese novelist, is able to achieve literary greatness by following the advice of superficial Yumi and her like-minded little sister. 1 In pink, the few books Yumi has read become the height of Japanese literature. Yumi’s literary lexicon consists of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (37). Where the standard canon of modern Japanese literature is exclusively Japanese and mainly written by and about men, Yumi’s canon eschews all Japanese literature in favor of classic Western girls’ books largely by women and entirely about girls. Yumi is an eccentric character in an edgy manga, but pink’s place as a breakthrough manga by one of the premier artists in the then-emerging field of women’s, or josei ( 女性), manga lends Yumi’s literary preferences greater importance than they at first seem to hold. Yumi’s canon reflects Okazaki’s stance on Japanese culture more generally: Okazaki consistently glorifies the feminine, the popular – the pink – at the expense of traditional (and traditionally masculine) markers of Japanese culture. Since Okazaki works in the medium of manga, which is widely read and in fact competes with 1 It is important to distinguish that Haru’s indirectly stated goal is to be a great Japanese novelist; in a manga full of references to literature and other media, Haru is almost exclusively responsible for the references to Japanese culture. 2 literature in Japan, her creation of a new literary canon simultaneously highlights lacunae in the normal Japanese literary canon and elevates manga as a medium. Today, debates reign over the proper contents of a modern Japanese literary canon. However, even the most ardent reformers envisage a literary lexicon whose authors all at least speak Japanese. Ainu, Okinawan, and ethnic Korean authors might be included in the canon, but most authors would be ethnically Japanese. The vast majority of scholars would further estimate that somewhere between half and a majority of the authors would be male and a similar ratio of protagonists would be men. This dissertation is dedicated to exploding that conception of modern Japanese literature through an examination of one of Yumi’s favorite books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and its assorted sequels and offshoots. Carroll’s books have an extensive history in Japan, having been translated and adapted with increasing frequency since the first Japanese translation was published in 1899. An examination of that history shows that first Japanese literature, and then Japanese culture more widely, have been indelibly marked by the Alice books. 2 Alice is just as much a part of contemporary Japanese culture as any traditional Japanese book. At the same time, as Yumi’s female-dominated canon suggests, contemporary Japanese culture is far from a monolithic construct. Japanese culture can vary widely depending on the viewer’s age, gender, ethnicity, and even preferred entertainments. While women once had little voice in constructing the canon, over the course of the modern period women have attained steadily more prominence in Japanese society. They have used that newfound power to produce stories that reflect their view of Japan, such as the feminized and Westernized literary canon of Okazaki’s pink. Alice’s adoption by Japanese women was one of 2 For simplicity’s sake, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will be referred to as Alice’s Adventures throughout this dissertation and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There will be shortened to Through the Looking-Glass. “Alice” will refer to the titular character, while “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice” will be used to refer to the greater world of the novels, as described in more detail below. 3 the driving reasons why it is so prominent in Japanese culture today. Finally, Alice’s movement from the pages of translations into other media shows the inherently intertwined nature of the media in modern Japan. It is impossible to discuss Japanese literature as a separate medium in the modern period, and so this dissertation will move freely between adaptations into the written word and other media. Girls in/and Modern Japanese Literature Though this project is an exploration of adaptation as a phenomenon, its focus on a world with a young, female protagonist ties in to a wave of scholarship on women and girls in modern Japanese culture and worldwide. As this body of work has grown, it has become apparent that the visual depiction of women has been and continues to be key to how they are perceived by society. In early twentieth century Japan, the Modern Girl, or moga ( モガ), was defined by her bobbed hair, stockings and Western-style dress as much as if not more than by her activities. 3 By the 2000s, the Modern Girl had been replaced with the Parasite Single ( パラサイトシングル), young women who had the audacity to remain unmarried while living at home. 4 Despite the tie between Parasite Singledom and a specific lifestyle, Parasite Singles are often discerned visually: women in their twenties or thirties with well-dressed hair who clad themselves in expensive designer clothing, jewelry, shoes and bags. As this précis suggests, scholarship on women in modern Japanese culture has often used a specific trope – including also the New 3 While I focus here on the analysis of women and girls in Japan, the Modern Girl in particular was a worldwide phenomenon that has prompted a great deal of study. In response to the global nature of the concerns raised by modern girls, a sextet of researchers from different fields together formed The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group in 2002 and jointly created The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, modernity, and globalization. The Modern Girl describes Modern Girls as a “heuristic device” (1) which the author/editors use to explore issues of race, nationalism, consumption and modernization in Japan, China, India, the United States, France, the USSR and other areas. 4 While “Parasite Single” was coined with both men and women in mind, the angriest commentaries on this phenomenon have been reserved for women. 4 Woman, the Kogal ( コギャル), and others – as a window onto the effects of social, political and economic change. 5 While this work has been very revealing, it can present a skewed view of society: even if the Modern Girl/New Woman/Parasite Single is an important trope that reveals important social changes, no single trope can describe all aspects of woman- or girlhood in Japan. Moreover, tropes like the ones listed above are often limited to a specific time period. To talk about the Modern Girl or New Woman is to discuss the early twentieth century, while Kogals and Parasite Singles belong to the new millennium. Scholars like Jennifer Robertson and Deborah Shamoon have attempted to describe women in Japan in a less stereotypical fashion. Robertson’s Takarazuka, about the Takarazuka Revue theater company, spans that company’s history, which itself spans the pre- and post-war periods. Shamoon’s Passionate Friendship attempts a much-needed linkage between the pre- and post-war periods by collapsing three terms related to young women – shōjo ( 少女), shojo ( 処女) and otome ( 乙女) – into a discussion of girls’ culture from the late Meiji period (1868-1912) to today. 6 Shamoon concentrates on girls as objects and subjects, as characters and as readers. She ranges widely in many ways, covering girls depicted by men and by women over roughly 150 years of intense social, political and economic change in Japan and in a variety of media. In consequence, Shamoon concentrates on girls in relation to (largely serialised) literature, the illustrations for that literature and comics. Yet, she acknowledges that these are only three aspects of girls’ culture, rather than its entirety. Wherever possible, Shamoon takes a multimediated approach to her topic. She includes an analysis of the national meet-ups that 5 There are now many, many studies of this type. Of particular interest are Miriam Silverberg’s Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, Barbara Sato’s The New Japanese Woman, John Whittier Treat’s “Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: Shojo Culture and the Nostalgic Subject”, Oshiyama Michiko’s 少女マンガジェンダー表象論：＜男装の少女＞造形とアイデンティティ, Yokota Inuhiko and Washitani Hana’s 戦う女たち：日本映画の女性アクション and Jan Bardsley’s The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911-16. 6 As Shamoon notes, these three terms’ meanings have shifted over the course of the twentieth century, but the object they described can be usefully related to what we call a girl today. 5 girls’ magazines organized for their readers, for example, and notes that the artists who illustrated girls’ magazines worked in a variety of media including, “kimono patterns, wallpaper, stationery, and other commodities” (58). 7 To put it another way, she contextualises each work of literature or art that she analyses in terms of other works of literature and art. Shamoon’s tome exemplifies this method, but the basic integration of media in Japan was known as early as 1960, when Abe Kōbō stated that “the linguistic arts and audiovisual arts must not be mechanically opposed to each other, for it is only by discovering their shared task that one can reveal their respective identities” (61). I continue this approach by examining all Alice adaptations explicitly in terms of the overall body of Alice works. 8 Adaptation in the Modern World This project represents a study of adaptation in Japanese popular culture. By adaptation, I mean the creation and remaking of a story over time, across different media platforms and for new purposes. Japanese popular culture presents particularly fertile ground for the study of adaptation because a theory known as the “media mix” has dominated Japanese media industries’ production methods for decades – media scholar Marc Steinberg even argues that Japanese media have been produced in this way for virtually the entire post-World War II period. Similar to Henry Jenkins’ concept of convergence, the term media mix refers to the intentional 7 While this dissertation is concerned with culture in modern Japan, intertwined media are not unique to this period and studying the greater cultures existing in and through them can lead to great insights. Kabuki, for example, has long been tied to the production and sale of woodblock prints depicting actors in various roles. In a study of kabuki in the early modern period, Satoko Shimazaki further entwines everything from towels to tobacco pouches with kabuki plays to discuss a “culture of the theater” (18). 8 It is worth noting that scholars based in literary fields are not alone in moving to examine literature as part of a greater, multimediated culture. As far back as 1979 the art historian Douglas Crimp argued that, “The work that has laid the most claim to our attention throughout the seventies has been situated between, or outside the individual arts, with the result that the integrity of the various mediums… has dispersed into meaninglessness” (76). Two decades later, Nicolas Bourriaud implicitly agreed with Crimp when in the course of describing the current state of the “artistic field” he felt the need to immediately insert “(and here one could add television, cinema, or literature)” (17). 6 creation of stories across multiple media at the same time, such as when Marvel Studios teamed up with Marvel Entertainment and Marvel Press to release The Avengers as a film, comic book and children’s storybook, respectively. This simultaneous creation of stories in multiple media challenges our preconceptions about the secondary (and therefore inferior) nature of adaptations: if the film version is created at the same time as the supposed source, by some of the same people, do we still view it as an adaptation? If not, what do we call these products, and how do people consume them? This phenomenon is becoming standard industry practice across the globe, so understanding how audiences and creators interact with these types of media is integral to understanding how people experience the modern world. Because stories have been developed in this manner to a far greater degree and for a longer time in Japan than elsewhere in the world, Japan is the perfect location to study these issues. In the last thirty years, studies of how creators express stories across media have proliferated. Largely falling into two camps, these studies usually propound either Henry Jenkins’ model of transmedia storytelling or Ōtsuka Eiji’s media mix model. Theorists working off of both models tend to take an industrial perspective, emphasizing how a company either could or has produced a story across multiple media. While this work has been both fascinating and useful, as a result the lines between different intellectual properties and what we might call different iterations of a single piece of intellectual property have become blurred. In other words, theories designed primarily with contemporary media conglomerates in mind have been elaborated in such a way that they can also be applied to earlier types of media interactions. Ōtsuka, for example, explicitly creates that linkage in his essay introducing the media mix model, “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative”, by deriving media mix from traditional kabuki production patterns. In this project, I use the phenomenon of adaptation, 7 which both precedes and coexists with transmedia and the media mix, to examine how stories move between media, cultures and times. I am using Japanese popular culture – which I define broadly to include anime, books, food, manga, video games, movies, clothing, stickers and other media – to focus my analysis, though some attention will also be paid to Korean and other popular cultures. Like the literature that forms one part of Japanese popular culture, the industries that produce anime, video games, et cetera are too intertwined to analyze separately, since the artworks they produce are often too closely tied to variant forms expressed in alternate media to be analyzed singly. To put it more simply, the popular visual culture of contemporary Japan is full of adaptations, making it perfect for an analysis of this kind. Adaptation and Alice in Japan My dissertation tackles the vast sea of adaptations in Japan by focusing on one particular story – Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland series – and the different ways it has been expressed in a variety of media. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), are famous in the English- speaking world, but Alice has also become a mainstay of Japanese culture. Since the first Japanese translation appeared in 1899, the Alice novels have been translated into Japanese over 400 times by some of Japan’s foremost authors, including Mishima Yukio, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kikuchi Kan. Alice was first published in Japanese at a critical moment in the formation of the modern Japanese identity. Working amid a massive importation of Western culture, Japanese translators were simultaneously introducing new concepts to Japan and drastically changing the face of Japanese literature. In particular, Alice translators helped build a modern understanding of both childhood and girlhood. The continued importance and near 8 constant retranslation of Carroll’s books since then makes them an important optic through which one can view the construction of literature, gender, childhood and culture in modern Japan. Alice’s importance extends beyond the medium of literature into Japan’s visual culture. Kusama Yayoi, the world’s foremost contemporary female artist, is perhaps the best known artist to have tackled Alice, but creative lights like Kaneko Kuniyoshi and Hirai Takako have made Alice works the cornerstone of their careers. Like translators, artists seem unable to leave Alice alone, forced to draw the same characters and scenes over and over. Alice’s long-term popularity among artists provides us with a way of examining how depictions of a specific girl have changed over the twentieth century in a way that cannot be done by analysing the text alone. That is, the trend in Japanese translations over the past 150 years or so has been towards greater fidelity to the translated text. Consequently, literary Alices were least like Carroll’s creation in early translations but are largely uniform today. In contrast, Alice imagery has grown more diverse over time. Where the earliest Japanese translations included recreated versions of the John Tenniel illustrations from the English publication of Alice, Japanese illustrators quickly began issuing their own visions of Alice, the Cheshire Cat and the other denizens of Wonderland. While Japanese artists have tackled every aspect of Wonderland imaginable, the majority of Alice art has included the titular character herself. Consequently, my work on Alice illustrations centres on depictions of Alice specifically. This constant production of new Alice art is matched by an unflagging reiteration of Alice in popular culture. Creators in almost every medium imaginable have used Alice to tell their own stories, and those stories veer far from Carroll’s novels. For example, Alice in Fatland ( ふとめの国のアリス, 2012), the first feature-length production from director Matsukuni Mika, dipped into the world of Alice to depict contemporary social problems related to homosexuality, 9 obesity, adolescence, work and responsibility. In contrast to the complicated issues explored by Alice in Fatland, the new Alice on Wednesday store in the Omotesandō neighbourhood of Tokyo sells hair ties, jewelry, tea cups, snack foods, bags and other items for personal use – all of which are decorated with elegant, Alice-themed designs commissioned by the store itself. Shoppers can thus carry out their own Mad Tea Party, or merely wear cute hair baubles while doing their daily chores. Whatever medium she is embodied in, young Alice is omnipresent in Japan today. Defining Adaptation While I will discuss both transmedia and media mix theories in more depth shortly, I want to highlight that both theories foreground the intentional creation of a single story across multiple media by one group of people (though this is emphasized to a lesser extent in the media mix). These theories work very well when applied to, for example, Marvel Studios’ team-up with Marvel Entertainment and Marvel Press to release The Avengers in a variety of media. However, when we look at the body of works included in the definition of adaptation, it quickly becomes clear that these theories fail to cover a wide swath of what we consider to be adaptations. For example, contemporary reworkings of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice in Wonderland books, such as Ninomiya Ai and Katagiri Ikumi’s Are You Alice? manga series, are created by people wholly unrelated to anyone involved in the publishing of Carroll’s books. Ninomiya and Katagiri are also completely unrelated to Matsukuni Mika, the director of Alice in Fatland, the owners of the Alice on Wednesday store et alia. This is not to say that media mix and transmedia theories do not apply in those cases; rather, these theories would stress how Are You Alice? was produced in various media over its place in the greater Alice in Wonderland 10 pantheon. 9 This project is aimed at resituating the concept of adaptation in the current transmedia/media mix milieu. “Adaptation”, while a fairly simple term by academic standards, still bears unpacking. Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of Adaptation, notes that the term applies to both the process of adapting a work and the final product. As such, she shifts one’s focus away from the previous model of adaptation, where a single source work was adapted into a later, secondary (i.e. presumed inferior) adaptation. She offers a new, three-part definition intended to grant more respect to adaptations. Namely, she argues that an adaptation is, “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works; a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging; an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” (8). Hutcheon gestures towards the burgeoning realm of fan studies with her third definition, which is vague enough that it might be thought to include the act of choosing and consuming works. However, later she drastically limits her definition by effectively excluding fan-produced works like fanfiction, products which merely allude to other works, and secondary media tie-ins such as sequels and toys. Hutcheon argues that these works are not adaptations because they are the product of a fan’s wish to have the original story continue forever, do not display an extended engagement with the source work, and/or do not stand as products in their own right. This understanding of adaptation is a bit limited, and excludes important types of adaptations. First, the assumption that fan-created products such as fanfiction and fanzines are simply an attempt to continue the original story without commenting on it or changing it in any way is somewhat simplistic. If nothing else, the majority of fanfiction portrays sexual relationships which were either nonexistent or at least not graphic in the source works. In those instances fanfiction 9 In point of fact, Jenkins has argued that adaptations are not examples of extensions, though he was later convinced by Christy Dena to widen his conception of adaptations. 11 authors are intentionally adding an extra dimension to the adapted work. Second, by barring all works which allude to other works without having an appropriately extended engagement with them, Hutcheon ignores properties such as the Japanese anime Princess Tutu (2002-2003). The creator of that series, Itoh Ikuko adapted a host of European story ballets, folk tales, operas and other works, many of which are not engaged with extensively. Looked at in terms of a single opera or folk tale, Princess Tutu might fall into this category of works which merely allude to other works. Yet, when viewed against the greater, collective background of classic European ballet culture, it is clearly an adaptation. 10 At the same time, Hutcheon’s unease with including secondary tie-in products is well founded, and it is true that the more we broaden our definition’s borders, the less useful it is as an analytic category. Where Hutcheon would exclude all secondary tie-in products from the adaptation umbrella, I would argue for a more circumspect limitation. Specifically, we need to further consider how to deal with works created in series. For example, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings book trilogy is a sequel to The Hobbit, but the relationship between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring is qualitatively different from the relationship between The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King. The first two share a few characters and take place in the same world, but are aimed at different age groups, fall into different genres and were published roughly two decades apart. In contrast, Tolkien intended the latter two novels to be published as a single tome which would trace a specific group of characters across a grand adventure. This is not to say that any of these books constitute an adaptation, necessarily, but it needs to be noted that the “secondary tie-in products” label conceals a great deal of diversity. 10 This leads one to reconsider what constitutes an adaptable work. Though I will not deal extensively with this end (the “origin” or “source work” of an adaptation) in this dissertation, I have done some work on this issue in other forms. See “Origin and Ownership from Ballet to Anime”. 12 The question of secondary tie-in products is also complicated by the existence of merchandise. Hutcheon’s exclusion of tie-in products helpfully removes merchandise from consideration as adaptations, but as Marc Steinberg chronicles in Anime’s Media Mix, the line between merchandise and adaptation can be vague. 11 Steinberg describes the surprisingly complex development of Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu, 鉄腕アトム) stickers: while they were first created to be simple give-aways included in chocolate packages to advertise the animated Astro Boy television show, over time the stickers came to greater prominence than the chocolates. Ultimately, the chocolate company changed the form of their own chocolates to match the Astro Boy characters on the stickers. Despite these issues, Hutcheon’s basic definition of adaptation – “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works; a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging; an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” – is the most appropriate definition yet produced. 12 What I would like to introduce to this definition of adaptation is a consideration of source. This source haunts Hutcheon’s definition, whether it is the “recognizable other work or works” being transposed or something that the adaptation “salvage[s]”. Because an adaptation cannot exist without this source (or sources), a definition of adaptation that excludes the source is an incomplete definition. As Marc Steinberg suggests when he uses the word “iteration” to describe later Astro Boy works, an adaptation must be considered as part of a larger group, and the adapted works are part of this group. 11 The question of merchandise also recalls Hutcheon’s point about the word adaptation having two meanings: the final product (say, a film adaptation) and the processing carried out to create that product. In particular, where the vast assortment of Alice merchandise is concerned, one could argue that consumers use merchandise to adapt their own lives to be more reminiscent of Wonderland. As Bourriaud noted, “artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work” (13). Bourriaud argues that his artists are using adaptation, “to find [their] bearings in the cultural chaos” (14), but we can apply a similar logic to consumers define themselves through their relationship with the fashions they don, the tools they use at work, the foods they eat and so on. 12 I would clarify that when Hutcheon refers to a “work”, she is referring to the overall piece. In other words, simply imitating a work’s style, for example, as in a pastiche, does not constitute an adaptation. 13 Telling transmedia stories As the copious references to Steinberg’s work above suggest, transmedia storytelling and media mix theory are relevant to any consideration of adaptation. Both theories developed in recent decades and describe industrial methods of creating new intellectual property. Transmedia storytelling is most closely associated with Henry Jenkins, who introduced it as a part of what he calls “convergence”. By convergence, Jenkins is referring to relationships between different media as they have come to be in the twenty-first century. In other words, convergence “describes technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes in the ways media circulates within our culture… Perhaps most broadly, media convergence refers to a situation in which multiple media systems coexist and where media content flows fluidly across them” (Jenkins 282). Convergence, then, is the background against which transmedia storytelling occurs. Moreover, it is not a static background, but “an ongoing process or series of intersections between different media systems” (ibid.). The relationships between media are in flux, and changes in those relationships will have an effect on the stories told through different media. Within the context of convergence, transmedia storytelling is the intentional creation of a story across multiple media, rather than the creation of one story in a single, primary medium and then the development of one or more spinoffs in other media. While how transmedia storytelling works will be explained in more detail shortly, the immediate impact of this concept is that it destabilizes the (primary) source/(secondary) adaptation paradigm discussed above. For example, rather than a children’s television-focused production company subcontracting the development of a card game or action figure to cash in on an already-popular television show, a transmedia approach might involve a multi-media conglomerate planning a new science-fiction story aimed at children that would be manifested 14 through a comic, a television show, and a card game. The difference is that transmedia stories are from the start planned to have multiple manifestations in different media. In theory, each of these manifestations would contain different elements of the overarching story so that consumers would have to find and consume multiple manifestations to understand the story completely, but each manifestation would still stand on its own. 13 Transmedia storytelling offers two counterpoints to the (primary) source/(secondary) adaptation paradigm. First, in transmedia storytelling what one might call sources, adaptations and spin-offs become merely different iterations of a single story, and they appear in a chronological order that is divorced from the order in which they were planned. In other words, the date when a product appears on the market is no indication of when that work was initially thought of within a transmedia story’s planning cycle. To look at a common example, while a film’s novelization often appears on the market prior to the film’s opening, those novelizations are generally planned after the films are already underway. The reasoning behind the earlier publication of the novelizations is half practicality and half necessity: novelizations can be produced more quickly than films and function as advertising to build consumer interest in the film. Though the film is chronologically secondary, it is conceived as the primary property. This has sometimes led to differences between novelizations and their films; authors are usually only given early drafts of scripts as a basis for their work. Most notably, there are major differences between the film and novel versions of Star Wars: A New Hope and 2001: A Space Odyssey. This distortion in works’ release dates compared to their planning dates is a marker of 13 In practice, the most famous attempt to draw consumers to different manifestations in multiple media in order to understand a story, the Matrix group of films, games and other works, instead drew scorn from viewers and critics alike. While the first film was a smash hit, later manifestations were derided as unnecessarily confusing and more interested in linking to other manifestations than telling an interesting story. 15 transmedia storytelling. However, in transmedia storytelling the chronological order of a story’s manifestations is not necessarily important. This leads to the second difference between an adaptation and a transmedia story. A transmedia story does not have a single manifestation. Rather, in Jenkins’ words, transmedia stories “play themselves out across multiple media” (97) – meaning that the overall story can only be understood by consuming multiple manifestations. He uses “The Kid,” a character from The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), to show how this works in practice. Jenkins argues that these two films, sequels to 1999’s The Matrix, are part of a wider transmedia story that includes comics, computer games and a suite of animated short films entitled The Animatrix (2003). In the live-action films, The Kid first appears briefly in The Matrix Reloaded before becoming “one of the core emotional hooks” (103) of The Matrix Revolutions. Yet, the Kid’s first appearance in Reloaded is of short duration, and he is treated as though the audience should already recognize him rather than being introduced to the audience as a new character. Jenkins argues that the Kid is relied upon to provide affect in Revolutions not because audiences came to know and love him in the previous film, but because his character and history are fleshed out in one of The Animatrix’s short films, “Kid’s Story”. Reloaded and Revolutions are not simply two parts of a trilogy, they are two manifestations of a greater transmedia story. Therefore, some characters, such as the Kid, are not fully characterized within the films; consumers must hunt the character down in other media to understand what sort of person he is supposed to be. Events are not fully explained within a single iteration either: another animated short, teamed with the Enter the Matrix video game, explains the delivery of crucial intelligence to characters in The Matrix Reloaded. Viewers who have not seen the The Animatrix will not know 16 where the intelligence came from or what exactly it consists of, and viewers who have not played the game will not know how the intelligence came into the hands of the film’s characters. Jenkins argues that consumers might benefit from transmedia storytelling such as that in The Matrix, because the more effort they put into a transmedia story, the more they will understand it. That knowledge – not spoon fed to all but earned by a select few – then becomes a source of pride in addition to enjoyment. On the other hand, this can also become a burden to viewers who feel they are being forced to work for their entertainment over and above having paid the cost of entry. Consumers unwilling to do this work have found transmedia properties confusing rather than enjoyable. Jenkins concludes his introduction of transmedia storytelling by saying, “the key point is that going in deep has to remain an option – something readers choose to do – and not the only way to derive pleasure from media franchises” (130). In other words, Jenkins is arguing that each manifestation of a transmedia story must stand on its own just as Hutcheon argues that a work must stand on its own to count as an adaptation. These two distinctions between adaptations and transmedia stories seem straightforward, and the two concepts appear distinct, but in practice they can be hard to differentiate. This is in part because Jenkins is describing a theoretical model. Real world examples of this model are invariably informed by pre-existing contracts, competing interests within production companies, and other mundane concerns. Returning to The Matrix as an example, to fully understand the third film, viewers need to have played multiple games, watched a direct-to-video release of animated shorts, read comics and perhaps also done online research. This is contrary to the premise, shared by Jenkins and Hutcheon, that each work must be consumable within itself. 17 In the case of The Matrix, most film viewers had not consumed all – or even some – of these other products. As a result, audiences became confused as the series progressed and far fewer people saw the final film in the trilogy than had watched the earlier films. Transmedia storytelling, though made possible by today’s complex media ecology, is not destined to be the only way that stories are told. Consequently, it might be better to consider it as a viewpoint and toolbox that media creators can adopt depending on the circumstances of each new project. Even in the case of The Matrix, merchandise (including action figures and Halloween costumes) was created through traditional subcontracting methods alongside the new transmedia manifestations in video game, film and other forms. This then leads to an analysis of transmedia storytelling in practice, a messy process that often scarcely resembles the theory Jenkins expounded so elegantly. For a transmedia story’s various manifestations to function as a single whole but still be understandable on their own, the creators of each manifestation must work closely from the initial stages straight through to launch day. Called co-creation or collaborative authorship, this form of production holds potential dangers that at least equal its benefits. It is natural that companies would have difficulty collaborating with latter-day competitors, but even different units within a larger media conglomerate often see their counterparts within the company as potential competition. Well- intentioned collaborators may also find themselves blocked by honest disagreement. Jenkins cautiously notes that “so far, the most successful transmedia franchises have emerged when a single creator or creative unit maintains control” (106). Eight years after the publication of his 18 book, this seems to still be the case, and little progress has been made on the root cause – competition between co-creators with equal authority. 14 Marvel Entertainment’s multimedia superhero saga now stands as the largest and most successful transmedia property. 15 Structured around blockbuster films, television shows and comics, Marvel’s sprawling transmedia complex overshot the range one person or even creative unit could reasonably oversee long ago. Michele Fazekas, executive producer of Marvel’s Agent Carter television show, describes its production process by saying, “it’s interesting in a writer’s room on a TV show where you have somebody who is not on the writing staff in the room, it doesn’t always work. And [Marvel Studios’ Eric Carroll is] so good at it, it’s great. I’d have him in the room everyday if I could” (in Woerner). In other words, even a manifestation of the most successful transmedia property in existence relies not on a structural method of managing competition between different manifestations, but on the personal skills of specific individuals. As Marvel’s transmedia ambitions have grown, so have the stresses upon the company and the executives managing these properties. People like Eric Carroll who are acting as lynchpins between a new manifestation in the greater Marvel story and Marvel’s corporate management can face directives from above that prove deleterious to the final product. In Marvel’s case, the president of Marvel Studios (which produces all films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe transmedia grouping) worked until recently under the supervision of executives from Marvel Entertainment, Marvel Studios’ parent company. These executives, led by Marvel Entertainment’s CEO Ike Perlmutter, are experts in the comics publishing industry but 14 Adaptations of works whose owners are still active, or even in a position to argue about it, face similar difficulty. The estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is particularly notable for its willingness to litigate would-be adapters of Sherlock Holmes even after Doyle’s early works had left copyright protection. 15 Marvel’s assorted projects are a perfect example of why it is problematic to completely distinguish adaptations and transmedia properties. All of Marvel’s current movies and television shows are clearly built on the transmedia model, yet they all also adapt pre-existing characters, events and stories from Marvel’s comics. 19 lack experience in the film industry, and consequently required Marvel Studios to operate in a way that might best be described as stingy. For example, Kim Masters reports that, “Perlmutter once complained that journalists at a junket were allowed two sodas each instead of one, and Disney ran out of food at an Avengers media event because of Perlmutter's constraints, causing reporters to pilfer from Universal's nearby suite for The Five-Year Engagement.” Forcing reporters to scavenge the occasional meal may seem unimportant (and not a little comical), but that same frugality has been applied to rather more important aspects of film production. Masters joined with Borys Kim in another article to note that Marvel’s contracts with actors are “notoriously tough” and lack such standard forms of income as royalties for any merchandise featuring actors’ characters for all but the biggest stars. As a result, Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, took advantage of Disney’s 2009 purchase of Marvel Entertainment to engineer an administrative reorganization that granted a greater degree of freedom to himself and Marvel Studios. While Marvel’s transmedia extravaganza has been astonishingly successful, the boundaries of what can be accomplished with transmedia storytelling still seem to be drawn by human limitations. Maneuvering through media mix worlds The concept of transmedia storytelling is, in a sense, premature. Jenkins proposed it after analyzing trends in media production that suggested a path which some companies appeared to be headed down for some of their projects. Successful examples were few on the ground when he first began writing about the phenomenon. Because it originated in a mix of current practices and prognostications of future production patterns, transmedia storytelling in theory is much neater than transmedia storytelling in practice. However, Ōtsuka Eiji expounded a similar theory 20 with the obverse orientation in Japan in the 1980s. Like Jenkins, Ōtsuka is identifying and analyzing pre-existing entertainment industry practices. 16 Unlike Jenkins, Ōtsuka himself is a member of the entertainment industry and a practitioner of the same practices that he propounds. Consequently, Ōtsuka’s early work, in particular, is written from the standpoint of an insider attempting to convince fellow members of the entertainment industry to adopt certain practices that he has already found to be successful. The idea that not just a single company but a single creative unit within a company will control all iterations of a media mix property underlies his work, obviating the difficulty with competition that arises in transmedia properties. Ōtsuka was able to assume this standpoint because he works in what might be called an inbred entertainment industry. Japan’s animation industry, in particular, has developed patterns of business that require even major companies like Pierrot to subcontract to and be subcontracted by other animation companies on a regular basis. Traditionally, thin profit margins led studios to maintain minimal levels of staffing, levels that could not sustain periods of high activity without outside assistance. At the same time, reliable freelance animators are too few to handle the regular work overloads, resulting in an unusual degree of subcontracting between established companies. 17 Moreover, the Japanese entertainment industry pursued horizontal integration earlier and to a greater extent than other major entertainment industries. Ōtsuka’s own Kadokawa Books created a film division in the 1970s, roughly two decades before Marvel Entertainment created their film division, specifically to craft film versions of Kadokawa books. Kadokawa then also sold soundtracks for the films. As Marc Steinberg details in Anime’s Media 16 Ōtsuka first described this theory in the 1989 essay, “Sekai to shukō: monogatari no fukusei to shōhi” (“ 世界と趣向―物語の複製と消費,” in 大塚, 5-54). This essay has been translated by Marc Steinberg as “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative” (2010). Translations here are the author’s own, from the essay’s 2001 republication in Ōtsuka’s A Theory of Narrative Consumption: Standard Edition ( 定本物語消費論). 17 For more on the history of animation in Japan, see Jonathan Clements’ comprehensive Anime: A History. 21 Mix, Kadokawa inspired the majority of Japanese media companies to pursue horizontal integration strategies. Kadokawa found great success with this strategy: each of the three products (novel, film and soundtrack) generated sales for the other two, and all spurred interest in other Kadokawa books by the same author. Kadokawa’s tripartite business strategy was however only one version of what came to be called the media mix. Steinberg notes that although Kadokawa Books has been given credit for the invention of the media mix strategy, the media mix actually predates Kadokawa’s novel, film and soundtrack system. Rather, Kadokawa’s historical significance stems from its role “transposing the methods of media connectivity practiced by television anime to the realms of film and the novel” (Steinberg 135). Anime’s “methods of media connectivity” ultimately came to be known as the media mix or “the development of a particular media franchise across multiple media types, over a particular period of time,” in Steinberg’s words. 18 Media mix is often viewed as simply the Japanese equivalent of Jenkins’ media convergence, and this view is not entirely inaccurate. Both refer to how media relate to each other today. However, Steinberg proves that media mix developed in Japan in the 1960s, decades before the emergence of convergence. 19 In addition, Ōtsuka crafted a theory against this background of mixing media that is often also referred to as media mix or media mix theory in English rather than its actual translation of “narrative consumption theory”. Use of this 18 Steinberg also points out that the recent (circa 2001) rise of the production committee ( 政策委員会) system, wherein multiple companies band together on a temporary basis for a single media mix, has effectively not changed the media mix system. 19 Jenkins does argue that one can find historical antecedents of transmedia storytelling – but not transmedia storytelling itself – far earlier, going back to L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien in “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections”, and even going back to the Middle Ages in “A Remediated, Premediated, and Transmediated Conversation with Richard Grusin (Part Three)”. 22 nomenclature incorrectly implies that Ōtsuka’s theory is the same as Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling. 20 Ōtsuka drew on a wide variety of sources in creating his narrative consumption theory, ranging from kabuki theater to American marketing terminology. He proved his theory by analyzing children’s consumption of Bikkuriman Chocolates or, rather, by analyzing how children bought the giveaway stickers included in Bikkuriman Chocolates instead of the chocolates themselves. Bikkuriman included a sticker depicting a monster with each chocolate. The stickers alone were not much of a draw. However, like America’s Garbage Pail Kids cards, the Bikkuriman monster stickers included additional information on the reverse side. Each sticker contained a bit of biographical information about the featured monster, things like which other monsters s/he liked or disliked. As children collected more and more stickers, they built an understanding of the monsters’ lives and world. Ōtsuka argues that children actually used the stickers as fragments (danpen, 断片) that fit together to form a grand narrative. Therefore, he concludes that children were consuming neither the chocolates nor the stickers, but a grand narrative that unfolded across the many stickers produced. Ōtsuka formulates his theory of narrative consumption through a pair of kabuki concepts related to the creation of new plays, sekai ( 世界) and shukō ( 趣向). Sekai, which literally means world, refers to a work of art’s background information: the historical time period, characters’ names and basic personalities, and even the rough outlines of the events portrayed. As Ōtsuka 20 In Japanese, Ōtsuka’s theory is referred to as monogatari shōhiron ( 物語消費論), or “narrative consumption theory”. The translated title is suggestive of narratology, or monogatariron ( 物語論) in Japanese, despite the fact that the two are completely different. It is possible that this is why Ōtsuka’s work is usually mentioned in reference to media mix rather than narrative consumption theory. 23 describes it, “sekai has the same meaning as worldview or grand narrative” ( 大塚 19). 21 While Ōtsuka’s phrasing draws parallels between kabuki playwrights from the eighteenth century and Lyotard’s twentieth century grand narrative concept, kabuki’s use of sekai is more complex than this would imply. Rather than defining sekai in great detail, Satoko Shimazaki referred to them in a discussion of kabuki in the city of Edo as, “established historical frameworks… that had long been central to the theater” (24). Katherine Saltzman-Li, a scholar of Japanese theater, describes sekai as, “the basic background story of a play, a story that a playwright could expect his audience to know” (129). While the English word “world” is used in a similar context in media studies, shukō does not have an English equivalent. Saltzman-Li provisionally defines it as “plot”, and then proceeds to expand on the term’s history and meaning. She notes that playwrights began new plays by first choosing the sekai, then adding “innovative twists in plot” (ibid.), or shukō. Saltzman-Li further argues that this method of production did not originate with kabuki, but descended from a method of writing waka poetry called “taking from the original poem” (honkadori, 本歌取り) by way of jōruri plays. In its most accurate and least compact translation, shukō refers to a change made to a pre-existing property to mark a creation as one’s own. 22 Kabuki thus begins to resemble adaptation in that new plays were created by taking a known entity (the sekai) and altering it to add originality (those alterations being the shukō). 23 Shukō thus has a double meaning: it refers to both the process of adding a new 21 Ōtsuka uses a variety of simple terms interchangeably to define his two terms. Sekai, worldview (sekaikan, 世界観), program, (puroguramu, プログラム), software (sofuto, ソフト), order (chitsujo, 秩序), system (shisutemu, システム) and grand narrative (ookina monogatari, 大きな物語) form one set; shukō, small narrative (chiisana monotagatari, 小さな物語), individual product (kobetsu no shōhin, 個別の商品), thing (mono, モノ) – in the sense of Jean Baudrillard’s thing-as-sign – and original work (gensaku, 原作) the other. This dissertation uses only sekai and shukō. 22 Similar to Bourriaud’s later concept of postproduction in art. 23 While Saltzman-Li translates shukō with terms like “plot” and “woof” (of warp and woof) and Marc Steinberg uses “variation” in his work, the difficulties these scholars have had with translating shukō have convinced this scholar that the best solution is simply to leave it untranslated. 24 contrivance to a pre-existing sekai, and any individual piece of art which results from that style of creative process. Moreover, sekai and shukō are scalable concepts. Ōtsuka uses shukō in regards to specific anime series but also single episodes of anime series. In the same way, sekai might be used to refer to a specific anime’s world, or it could pertain to the greater world of products (books, manga, soundtracks, etc.) of which that anime is a part. In the case of adaptations, these terms might be used to refer to the greater world that multiple works, such as Alice in Wonderland adaptations, share. Ōtsuka did not write with this angle in mind, but the scalability inherent to his work lends itself to this application. In fact, he tackles fan-made adaptations in passing, anticipating the rise of fan studies. Ōtsuka introduces a glut of dōjinshi, or amateur stories and comics, adapting Captain Tsubasa (Kyaputen Tsubasa, キャプテン翼), a soccer manga aimed at boys ( 大塚 15- 18). The teenage girls who created these dōjinshi manipulated the characters of the manga’s world to create new shukō depicting homosexual liaisons that did not exist in the manga. Ōtsuka argues that the manga is raw material (sozai, 素材) to these amateur adapters from which they can pull out (hikitoru, 抜きとる) the program (puroguramu, プログラム) that is the manga’s world. The manga might be thought of as an unfired pot, an object that might be manipulated into new forms by consumers but that remains clay. Since Ōtsuka is writing as though touting media mix practices to other members of the entertainment industry (despite the general audience that he is actually addressing), he has to address these fan activities. Dōjinshi have come to be a major business in Japan. Popular dōjinshi artists can sell tens of thousands of copies, and many successful professional artists got their start through dōjinshi. Some artists continue to work in dōjinshi even after becoming professionals to maintain a connection with their fans or for the artistic freedom. Yet, companies 25 rarely earn money on dōjinshi. 24 If the manga is merely a doorway consumers pass through to reach a greater world, as Ōtsuka argues, then there is no intrinsic reason that potential consumers should read an official manga instead of an unofficial dōjinshi that would grant the same entry. Ōtsuka consequently raises the issue somewhat ambivalently. He counters the standard industry view of dōjinshi creators’ originality by saying of the soccer dōjinshi that “concretely realized ‘works’ are at the least not plagiarism” (“Gutaitekini arawareta ‘sakuhin’ ha sukunaku to mo tōsaku de ha nai,” 「具体的に現れた＜作品＞は少なくとも盗作ではない」, 大塚 18). Although this is not exactly rousing support, when Ōtsuka’s quiet insistence that producers achieve success by producing superior products is considered, the message is clear. Companies need not fear fan-made adaptations of their products as long as their creative staffs are doing their jobs properly. In the quarter of a century since Ōtsuka’s book first appeared, relations between fans and producers have become complicated in the United States while remaining largely stable in Japan. American companies’ interactions with fans are perhaps most famous for a series of lawsuits brought by the Recording Industry Association of America in the early 2000s against individuals who had shared music files online. Unfortunately, the shadow of litigious action has covered other, less oppositional aspects of consumer-company relations. Many American film and television companies overlook fan-made music videos featuring scenes and images from their products. 25 American authors and comics artists display a similarly split reaction, some being 24 Over the past few years, some small, professional imprints that publish dōjinshi anthologies have appeared on the market. Each anthology collects comics and stories by a variety of artists adapting a single manga, anime or other property. It is not clear what these publishers’ relationships are to the manga companies whose work they are using, but there are hints that rights holders are either receiving royalties or directly subcontracting these publications of “amateur” works. Additionally, some companies are producing their own lines of manga anthologies themed on their properties which blur the lines between dōjinshi and manga. 25 As it happens, American fans of anime seem to have invented the fan-made music video genre. American studios’ tolerance (and occasional encouragement) of these videos is probably tied to the role that anime music videos played in the anime boom of the 1990s and 2000s. The music industry, in contrast, has suppressed many fan- 26 vocally against fan-made works and others, such as Neil Gaiman, Tamora Pierce and Gail Simone, being in favor. In general, fan-made works tend either to be embraced or vehemently objected to by individual rights holders across the American entertainment industry. Meanwhile, Japanese industries have continued to navigate consumer-company relations with circumspection. In contrast to the quiet oversight companies exercised in the 1980s, companies today actively delve into dōjinshi. QuinRose, the gaming company behind the blockbuster Alice in the Country of Hearts (Haato no kuni no Arisu, ハートの国のアリス) video game franchise, has attempted to earn money from fan production by supervising the production and publication of numerous Alice in the Country of Hearts dōjinshi anthologies. Another sports-themed manga, Konomi Takeshi’s Prince of Tennis (Tenisu no ōjisama, テニスの王子様), was put into the same position as Captain Tsubasa when it became popular among girls. Where Captain Tsubasa’s creators ignored the scads of dōjinshi depicting its characters in homosexual relationships, the creators of Prince of Tennis cashed in on its young protagonists’ appeal with a series of live- action musicals retelling various story arcs from the manga. These musicals have been staged regularly since 2003 because of their popularity among young women and have become known as a launching pad for young male actors and singers. Companies match the way that they relate to their consumers to each property, but they do seem to reap the benefits of plentiful consumer feedback on a regular basis. made music videos on rights grounds. An artist will occasionally create a music video for one of their songs by soliciting fans to submit short videos that are compiled into the official music video, but those who submit are required to give up all rights over their submissions. 27 Life in Adaptation In contrast to the responsiveness of today’s Japanese rights holders to consumers’ desires, Walter Benjamin introduced his seminal essay on translation by noting that, “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener” (69). Benjamin argues that translators’ true aim is not the simple transposition of a text from one language to another but to stretch the boundaries of the language into which they are translating the text. His language is grandiose, full of references to God and the Scriptures: translators are not merely expanding languages to be more interesting, they are attempting to create a universal language that all human beings would understand regardless of their origin. In addition to glorifying translation as a practice, Benjamin exalts translations themselves. It is easy to see why he would do so. Translation has enabled cultural communication for centuries, yet as Lawrence Venuti noted several decades after Benjamin, “translation continues to be a largely misunderstood and relatively neglected practice” (viii). What concerns me here is the specific language Benjamin used to glorify translations. He repeatedly refers to translations in terms of pseudo- or partial life, as when he says that, “a translation issues from the original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife” (71). So the translation arises from the afterlife of the original, which was never alive. At the same time, the source work’s translation marks its “continued life” (ibid.) in a new form. Throughout his essay, Benjamin oscillates between a bold new definition of life and a pseudo-life or afterlife that is the special realm of art. This afterlife is given to art by human beings in a sense. When artworks gain their “potentially eternal afterlife”, Benjamin argues, it “manifests” as “fame” (71) among people. We thus create the (after)life of art, but we are also perhaps a threat to it: “translations that are more than transmissions of subject matter come into being when in the course of its survival a work has 28 reached the age of its fame” (72). The work survives us, the depredations enacted by people over time, and if it survives long enough it achieves not a life but an afterlife. 26 Benjamin’s language regarding life, and how to translate it, has been the subject of critique before. The two words in contention (überleben and fortleben, translated above as afterlife and survival, respectively) are similar in that they both imply that the subject has lived through something. Yet, as Caroline Disler astutely pointed out, überleben is far more common than fortleben, and Benjamin’s usage of the terms further evinces his timidity. Disler observes that Benjamin uses überleben precisely once (in “a translation issues from the original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife”) to introduce the concept of an afterlife. Überleben would have been “familiar to all [Benjamin’s] readers” and “unequivocally means ‘survival’— ‘über-leben’ ‘sur-vival’” (185). Moreover, because the word was put in quotation marks in Benjamin’s original, German text, Disler argues that it was “chosen tentatively, hesitatingly, distinguished by quotation marks, as if to familiarize readers with a strange, novel idea by introducing it with a commonplace term” (185-6). From that point on, Benjamin uses fortleben exclusively. In this fortleben, “which could not be called that [fortleben] if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living – the original undergoes a change” (Benjamin 73). Disler uses this phrase to argue that for Benjamin fortleben is not an afterlife or survival at all, but a “stage” that consists of, “metamorphosis, evolution, transformation, renewal, renovation, supplementation” (193). Like Benjamin, she removes the possibility of life with one hand while offering it in another. Fortleben is not an afterlife, Disler argues, because, “there has been no death, no damage, no catastrophe to the original” (ibid.). The original has to die for there to be an afterlife and be injured to survive. Since neither of these things has occurred, the 26 Benjamin also vacillates over the degree to which humanity is necessary elsewhere in the essay, as when he earlier argues that, “one might speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it” (70). On those occasions when he argues that humanity is unnecessary, however, Benjamin requires that God substitute for us. 29 possibility of an afterlife is foreclosed from the start. This is not the same as saying that neither source nor translation possesses life. Benjamin thought of life as, “determined by history rather than by nature” (71). This history had to be “a history of its own” (ibid.), which is to say that a work of art cannot simply be the background for historical events. To have a history of one’s own, one must change. A book cannot merely sit quietly in a shed forever, never read, never enacted as a play, never retold to a new audience; it must evolve. Indeed, evolution is one of the terms Disler uses to describe fortleben. Disler contends that the work undergoing evolution is the original text though, not the translation. Even as she argues that translations can be neither afterlives nor survivals, her essay maintains the idea that there is life in literature. The desire to see works of art as alive appears over and over again in theoretical writing on how those works travel across time and space. When Ōtsuka collected his essays on narrative consumption theory into a larger book, he divided them into four major parts. The first part expounded his theory, while the second covered “Replicated Stories” (fukusei sareru monogatari, 複製される物語) and the third “Consumed Stories” (shōhi sareru monogatari, 消費される物語). The final section’s title, however, is a touch more complicated. It could be translated as “Replaying Stories” or “Stories that replay” (saisei suru, 再生する物語) in the mechanical sense of an .mp3 player playing music. Yet the verb saisei suru also means “to come back to life”, and this meaning fits much better into the narrative arc Ōtsuka has created in the book. 27 Stories are first replicated, or manufactured for mass audiences, and then those audiences consume them, until finally the stories are reborn. Stories thus have their own circle of life, replicating themselves to carpet the ground in plant life which we humans consume. In consuming those 27 It is worth noting that saisei suru is the verb used when characters are brought back to life in video and role playing games, as well as manga and anime to a lesser extent. As a manga editor who is clearly conversant with those subcultures, Ōtsuka would have been familiar with that usage of the word. 30 stories, we then scatter the seeds which allow new plants to be (re)born at a later date. Like Benjamin, Ōtsuka does not take the metaphor quite this far. He is not arguing that stories are alive, but glimmers of life appear in the words he chooses to describe his theories. 28 Where Ōtsuka and Benjamin explicitly use variations on the word life to describe stories, other analysts have appropriated terms usually applied to the living for art forms normally considered dead. Tracing the rise of the anime industry, Ian Condry attributes its success to what he calls its “soul”, a special social dynamic that supports collaborative creative endeavours. This social dynamic is carried out by human beings, but it is not human beings to whom Condry attributes this soul. Rather, it belongs to anime… except that, as Condry notes at the end of his book, “anime is just part of a broader transmedia nexus that includes manga, videogames, fashion, design, contemporary art, and more” (204). His soul thus extends across a multitude of media and is innately tied to the adaptive process. The necessity of adaptation to the anime industry’s success is a recurring theme in Condry’s work. Historically, the amount Japanese television stations will pay for animated shows is far exceeded by the cost of production. This is one reason why anime are a prominent feature of media mixes. The majority of anime are created with adaptation in mind from the start, and that adaptation is supported by what Condry calls anime’s soul. 29 28 Ōtsuka’s use of biological terms to describe his theories is unsurprising when one considers that he is adapting concepts from kabuki. In Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the worlds of the samurai to the vengeful ghost, Satoko Shimazaki rejects, “the very notion that a play has an ‘entirety’” (9) in the early modern period. Rather, popular plays would “evolve” (8) not just over the years, but over the course of a single season. Similarly, “old plays spawned new plays” (31) much like Ōtsuka’s manga spawn new iterations in other media. 29 The disparity between anime’s production costs and what its buyers are willing to pay has been the subject of significant scholarship. Fault is often laid at the feet of Tezuka Osamu, who created the first animated half-hour Japanese television show, Astro Boy ( 鉄腕アトム). Tezuka sold Astro Boy for much less than it cost him to create it, earning money through promotional tie-ins and merchandise. Because the show was a massive success, it is seen at having set the standard for how much a television station would pay for animation. However, there are additional financial concerns that have suppressed the amount stations will pay for animation (such as the relatively high cost to produce an animated show versus a live-action show). For more on this topic, see Frederik Schodt’s The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, manga/anime revolution and Jonathan Clements’ Anime: A History. 31 The link between life and artistic adaptation is so strong that Richard Dawkins devoted an entire chapter of his landmark study of evolution to it. He premises his argument on the idea that, “cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, though basically conservative, it can give rise to evolution” (189). In Dawkins’ view, the basic unit of evolution as we have understood it in the past is the gene. Or rather, evolution stems from (imperfect) replication. Anything that replicates thus becomes the foundation of evolution. The majority of his book is devoted to proving that argument through the example of genes. However, he allows that other replicators can and do exist, and he offers the meme as a cultural replicator. The meme is a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (192). Dawkins’ examples vary widely – a tune or fashion can be a meme, but so can an idea or a way of making a pot. It is his treatment of memes, rather than the specific things that he says are memes, that I am interested in here. In Dawkins’ eyes, memes, like genes, can have a “high survival value” (194), or be particularly likely to survive and thrive in the future. Dawkins breaks this down into three parts: “longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity” (ibid.). The first two are fairly straightforward, but his discussion of fidelity is quite nuanced. Like Ōtsuka’s sekai and shukō (and the genes upon which he based the idea), Dawkins’ memes are scalable. There are, “large and small genetic units, and units within units” (195). It is this scalability that enables memes to appear to be, “subject to continuous mutation, and also to blending” (ibid.), when in fact surface changes can be explained by the observer’s misapprehension of what precisely the meme is. In other words, if one notices changes in, for example, Alice’s depiction over time, it is not that the Alice meme has changed, but that one had misidentified what features constituted the meme. For example, if the colours of Alice’s dress change, then those colours were not in fact part of the meme. The Alice-meme perhaps only 32 included the style of the dress, its cut or its length. Consequently, the Alice-meme has not changed, and the meme has maintained copying-fidelity. Dawkins’ view of copying-fidelity is a bit difficult to work with, as any perceived changes in a meme over time could be explained away by saying that those changes were not part of the actual meme in the first place. Memes, like genes, work in concert. Alice could theoretically be scaled down further, beyond the character level. Perhaps she is composed of countless memes: youth; girlhood; blondeness; dress-ness… she could be broken down into infinitesimal pieces, each of which is a meme. “Alice” then becomes a meme of a higher order which consists of a specific configuration of these lower-order memes, and Alice added to other memes (Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, etc.) becomes the meme that is Alice. My challenge to this argument would be that if copying-fidelity were truly a necessary part of a meme, then in fact the meme is not scalable; it can only describe the minutest level of culture. Consequently, the meme concept does not describe how or why a specific characters, plots and stories are adapted (or “evolve”) over time sufficiently. Aside from that issue, Dawkins’ linkage of life and cultural transmission through the metaphor of evolution is intriguingly in line with that of Benjamin. Whether describing genes or memes, Dawkins’ focus lies on the microscopic level. He writes about the addition of a word here or there to a song, stiletto heels and Darwin’s theory of evolution, not the plays of Shakespeare, The Tale of Genji or Swan Lake. Where Benjamin hedges his writing by talking about survivals or afterlives (but not lives), Dawkins restricts his argument to the level of the minute: the item or idea so small that it cannot change on its own. If the meme itself cannot change, then it is not truly evolving and is therefore not alive. 33 Natural Reproduction If stories are alive, it makes sense to look, like Dawkins, at other life forms to understand how they work. Plants and animals have found an astounding array of ways of replicate themselves, whether one looks at humanity’s artificial insemination or the way the bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) mimics the sight and scent of female bees to induce male bees to spread its pollen. While it is my contention that stories are alive, I am not so bold as to call them sentient or even capable of feeling. Plant life is the most suitable corollary, and plants provide an eminently suitable metaphor: the burr. 30 figure 1: By Huw Williams (Huwmanbeing), https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2856138 Burrs are prickly seedcases that stick to any animal unfortunate enough to walk too closely. That animal carries the burr (and its seeds) to new, hopefully hospitable grounds where it can flourish in peace. The animal in no way changes the seed material – in fact, the burr covering the seed protects it from any depredations. Yet, the seed will not grow into a carbon copy of the plant that produced it. An abundance or lack of water in the new location will influence its size, a different PH in the soil may change the colour of its flowers à la hydrangeas, 30 Both “burr” and “bur” are common spellings for this term, but burr will be preferred here. 34 high winds could force it into an unusual shape, an overbearing sun might even burn the seedling to death before it can establish itself. If sight is insufficient, testing the new plant’s genetic material will reveal its relationship to the original plant, but as plant produces plant produces plant the changes compound until the plant evolves. Even the idea of the burr seems to sneak its way into new environments. In gemology, burr is another word for a whetstone (or buhrstone) used to improve cutting edges. Similarly, a construction bur is a drill bit that expands previously made holes which are found to be of an inadequate size. Dental nurses also refer to a type of drill as a bur, in their case used for the drilling of teeth in preparation for a filling. In all of these uses, the burr is a tool used to improve preexisting materials – uncut gems, too-small holes, rotten teeth. Applying the term burr to a tool is a bit of wishful thinking; actual burrs travel regardless of human desires and have sparked countless painful episodes where parents attempt to de-burr their energetic children. The idea of a burr as a mechanism for changing something into an improved state, however, is flatly within the burr’s purview as part of evolution. This dissertation argues that stories are living, if not breathing, things that change – evolve – over time. Like animals that have collected burrs in their fur, human beings collect stories over the course of our lives regardless of our intentions. These stories work their way into our minds and then fall free from us at different points in our lives. The resulting adaptations are marked by the cultural milieu into which they fall. While stories do not consciously control their evolution, some stories survive better than others. Put another way, some stories have stronger burrs than others. They cling to their audiences more tightly than other stories and sprout in wilder climes. 35 Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland stories possess particularly strong burrs. Alice has found fertile ground in diverse nations around the world for more than 150 years now. It is generally acknowledged to be a unique work, to the extent that a genre (nonsense literature) was created for it and consists largely of Alice and works by authors inspired by Alice. Based in Victorian culture as it is, even mundane aspects of Alice like teatime and chess were received as new and strange in turn of the (twentieth) century Japan. It therefore presents an unusual opportunity to trace a burr as it settles into new environs and propagates itself. At the same time, by proving Alice’s central role within modern Japanese culture, I show the extent to which that culture is marked by adaptation. I begin by demonstrating Alice’s growth in Japan through the proliferation of Japanese translations in the following chapter, Alice in Translation. Situated within the greater history of translation in Japanese literature, Alice has been translated excessively – far more often than is called for by the complexity of the language or difficulty of the concepts. Japanese literature developed in tandem with Alice, as new reading audiences arose and society recognized different types of people as capable of writing. Throughout, Alice served as a testing ground for authors, a safe space in which they might hone their craft. In Chapter Three: Alice in Writing, I limn a joint translation of Alice by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kikuchi Kan. Created under unusual circumstances towards the end of Akutagawa’s life, this translation is a rare co-authored work of fiction by two of the most prominent authors of the modern period. In examining this translation, I show that Akutagawa also adapted Alice in a separate work, Kappa (河童), which includes illustrations by Akutagawa himself that call back to a rarely-treated part of Carroll’s books. Viewed together, Akutagawa’s two Alice works show why Alice is so popular in Japan. 36 The penultimate chapter, Alice in Silhouette, explores diverse Alice adaptations to delineate how young Alice has evolved in Japan. While the first Alice translation published in Japan used copies of John Tenniel’s illustrations for the English Alice, now artists working in a variety of different media and styles have depicted their own visions of Alice. These visions have departed from Tenniel’s Alice in strikingly uniform ways. By examining these changes, first through the art of Kusama Yayoi and then through a host of other media, Alice’s importance in Japanese society becomes clear. In the final chapter, Alice adaptations worldwide are compared to show Alice’s universality and question how much information consumers need to recognize a work as an adaptation. Additionally, the effects of an adapter’s gender are examined to show how Alice’s importance differs for men and women. 37 Chapter Two: Alice in Translation Introduction Adaptations of Alice in Wonderland appear in almost every medium imaginable, but this chapter will deal with perhaps the most obvious type of adaptation: translation. Translation has played a major role in the development of modern Japanese literature, and an examination of Alice translations reveals that contemporary Japanese conceptions of childhood and gender are neither as sacrosanct nor as traditional as they appear. At the same time, the main producer of Alice works worldwide is far and away the Walt Disney Company, yet careful study of Japan’s Alice translations clearly shows that Disney’s influence is largely irrelevant to Alice’s popularity in Japan. In addition, investigating the extended history of Japanese Alice translations exposes the fact that neither “translation” nor “adaptation” can be applied to adaptive activities in Japan in a straightforward manner. Rather, Japanese contains a variety of concepts which are best described as subcategories of translation and adaptation. Finally, the extensive history of Japanese Alice translations is compared to Korea’s shorter, but in some ways more vibrant, history with Alice to argue that Alice has been fully adapted into Japanese culture. In the simplest terms, translation is the adaptation of a text in one language or dialect to another. In some cases, the difference between the two languages may be one of time, as when Old English or Classical Japanese literature is translated into the relevant modern dialect. While scholars working on both translation and adaptation agree that the two phenomena are related, translations and adaptations are rarely analyzed together. Yet, ignoring Alice translations would leave an incomplete discussion of the Alice in Wonderland world. 31 The translations themselves 31 “World” here refers to the characters, plot, settings and other basic information shared by a work and its adaptations. For more on this concept, see Ōtsuka Eiji’s “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption 38 are the subject of this study, which is to say that this is not a history of Alice’s reception in Japan. It is true that people interact with the work by consuming Alice adaptations, but it is also true that the act of creating a new adaptation, of translating and re-translating Alice’s Adventures or Through the Looking-Glass, extends and develops the world of Alice beyond Lewis Carroll’s initial vision. As Michael Emmerich wrote about adaptations of The Tale of Genji, “We are not only looking backward, here – interacting with a given textual product of the past – but also, and more crucially, creating new images of the past for the present and for the future” (9). Each translation of one of Carroll’s books serves as a link in a chain that connects Alice past to Alice today and on to the future of Alice. Translation theorists, like the theorists of adaptation described in the previous chapter, argue that translations ought to be analyzed not as a dichotomy between source and translation, but as instantiations of broader cultural phenomena. The Alice books have been translated into Japanese a combined total of 425 times between the initial, 1899 translation and 2013, the most recent year for which solid publication numbers exist. There are more editions of Alice in Japanese than in any other language worldwide. 32 The reasons prompting each translation differ: while some translators are intending to improve upon earlier translations, others aim their work towards a new group of readers or use the translation for a new purpose. 33 Translations are used here as a point of entry for the study of the greater cultural phenomenon that is Alice in Japan. Effectively conveying the extent of Japan’s engagement with Carroll’s books is difficult. Alice adaptations exist in a variety of media and are produced on both large and small scales. of Narrative” as translated by Marc Steinberg and Satoko Shimazaki’s Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the worlds of the samurai to the vengeful female ghost. 32 Translation publication data throughout this dissertation is drawn from Jon Lindseth and Alan Tannenbaum’s Alice in a World of Wonderlands (2015), which contains a survey of Alice translations in all languages up to 2013. Information on later publications draws from the author’s own research. 33 Translators’ motivations can sometimes surprise. Naoki Yanase first translated Alice’s Adventures in 1982, but then re-translated it in 2010 out of dissatisfaction with his own prior translation. 39 figures 2-4: A 2014 advertisement for a Japanese clothing company’s pop-up store in Paris. A set of stickers by Stipee that includes Alice from 2015. The cover of the PlayStation 2 version of the Alice in the Country of Clover video game by QuinRose; published for PlayStation 2 consoles in 2010, this game is the second installment in a long-running multimedia franchise. See Chapter Four for an analysis of how young Alice is depicted in Japan. It is nearly impossible to determine how many Alice adaptations are produced each year because of the existence of amateur and semi-professional works produced with little fanfare in limited production runs. However, collectors, fans and scholars have worked hard over the years to create a complete bibliography of Alice translations worldwide, 2015’s Alice in a World of Wonderlands, which has enabled an analysis of Alice’s changing popularity in Japan. As translation was the initial medium of adaptation for Alice and continues to be a vibrant part of the Alice world, the rate at which Alice was published in Japan, the types of audiences publishers expected to be interested in Alice and the variety of people adapting it can be tracked merely by looking at translations. In the process of conducting research for this project, the author encountered multiple Japanese fans who attributed Alice’s contemporary popularity not to any interest in Carroll’s books, but rather to a love of the 1951 Disney film. Thus, this chapter begins with an examination of Alice translations both before and after the Japanese release of Disney’s first 40 Alice film. Disney will reappear in later chapters, at which time its role within Japan’s visual Alice culture will be examined. However, the company’s Japanese Alice books can be used both to show how popular Alice is in Japan and to separate that popularity from any assumptions of Western dominance. To whit, Alice was not imposed on the Japanese by a foreign company but spread organically through Japanese culture because it appealed to the Japanese. After showing how Alice grew into Japanese culture, Alice translations are examined as part of the greater history of translation in Japan. The field of translation studies grew out of work on translations into and out of various European languages. Translation studies emphasizes written texts where adaptation studies stresses newer media such as television and film. Otherwise, the phenomena studied by translation and adaptation theorists are quite similar. Here, translation is situated as a form of adaptation that has its own, specialized field of studies. Scholars such as Indra Levy and Judy Wakabayashi have identified conceptions of translation in Japan that differ strikingly from the traditional, European-style understanding of what constitutes a translation. Japan has a rich history of translation. Not only have many foreign works been translated into Japanese, but a special written language unique to Japan was created to help native Japanese speakers read Chinese. Because this language, kanbun kundoku, also functioned as the only written form of Japanese for its early history, it could be regarded as simply the written Japanese language. However, its status as a bridge between two languages – Japanese and Chinese – means that it also functions as a type of translational language. Levy’s work on the ramifications of this translational language offers rich parallels with the work of Ōtsuka Eiji, Linda Hutcheon and Henry Jenkins discussed in the previous chapter. Turning from Japanese translations in general to Alice specifically, the Japanese literary environment at the turn of the twentieth century is examined in depth using the earliest Alice 41 translation, Hasegawa Tenkei’s Mirror World (Kagami sekai, 鏡世界, 1899), as a lens on Japanese culture. Far from being an unusual work, Alice was part of a veritable flood of Western literature, science and art to enter Japan around the turn of the century. Some of the new ideas introduced to Japan at this time related to the nature of childhood, gender and literature, all of which can be examined through an analysis of Mirror World. In particular, Mirror World’s lack of a clear political message contrasts with how scholars have been analyzing other works that were serialized in the same magazine around the same time. Alice and Disney The single most prolific producer of Alice works in Japan today is the Walt Disney Company. The avalanche of Alice products with Disney’s name on them, combined with the age of Disney’s first Alice film, makes it plausible that Disney is responsible for Alice’s contemporary popularity. By placing Disney Alice products – in this case, the various Alice books Disney published as merchandise for its films – within the context of Japanese Alice works, one can determine Disney’s precise relationship to Alice in Japan. Between Mirror World’s publication in 1899 and 2013, the Alice books have been translated into Japanese a combined total of 425 times. In other words, 3.7 translations of Alice came out each year on average. Translation is a booming business in Japan and has been since the Meiji era (1868-1912), but few books approach this level of popularity. Moreover, as a detailed analysis of the publication data will show, Alice is currently even more popular than this average suggests. First however, a few caveats must be noted. This average includes only those translations published in physical, i.e. book or magazine, format. In recent years, Japanese students of 42 English have started translating Alice as a fun form of practice and posting their translations online. It is possible that earlier English students engaged in similar practice translations that were never officially published. Indeed, the existence of multiple published translations that were created specifically for English-language learners suggests this to be the case. Second, World of Wonderlands’ list of Japanese translations includes ten books that do not have publication dates. As the following analysis examines the history of Alice translations for periods of activity according to their publication dates, these ten undated books lend a slight degree of variation to the results. Finally, the 3.7 translations per year figure includes books which might more accurately be called translated novelizations of Walt Disney’s 1951 animated film, Alice in Wonderland. In order to facilitate an examination of the Walt Disney Company’s role in popularizing Alice in Japan, these translations are included in the initial analysis and then reviewed separately. While Disney does not create merchandise for its animated Alice in Wonderland film as much as for its premier Princesses line of films in America, it produces much more Alice merchandise in Japan. 34 Perhaps as a result, some have attributed Alice’s popularity in Japan to Disney. 35 While it would be nearly impossible to determine whether Disney sparked a boom in Alice adaptations or merely created Alice goods upon realizing the story’s local popularity, translations are a different matter. New translations have appeared steadily since the 1899 publication of Mirror World. Consequently, the rate at which new translations were published 34 As of October 20 th , 2015, the American Disney Princesses line includes: Ariel (The Little Mermaid); Cinderella (Cinderella); Aurora (Sleeping Beauty); Belle (Beauty and the Beast); Rapunzel (Tangled); Snow White (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs); Mulan (Mulan); Jasmine (Aladdin); Tiana (The Princess and the Frog); Merida (Brave); and Pocahontas (Pocahontas). 35 This view was expressed by two Alice fans in conversations with the author in the summer of 2014. The fans in question had very different backgrounds – one was a salaryman in a cosmetics company who wrote articles on Alice and science-fiction in his spare time, the other a young, female bartender at an Alice-themed café – but both declared that Alice was popular in Japan because of Disney. 43 can be tracked over time, with publishing booms or dry spells potentially tied to historical events like the release of Disney’s Alice. Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland film came out in 1951 in America, but was not released in Japan until 1953. However, the film was preceded by the 1952 translation of a Disney Alice book. Though it was titled Fushigi no kuni no Arisu ( ふしぎの国のアリス), the set translation of the title “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, it was actually a translation of a book called Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland Meets the White Rabbit which was published by Random House’s Little Golden Books imprint. From 1899 to 1951, the last year before the appearance of Disney Alice products, 1.21 translations of Alice came out per year on average. In contrast, from 1952 to 2013 an average of 5.56 translations came out per year. So it would appear that the Disney film (and/or its associated merchandise) did indeed spark an Alice boom which continues to this day. However, these numbers are a bit misleading. It takes time for anything introduced to a new culture to gain a foothold; after Mirror World appeared in 1899, no one else translated either book for eight years. 36 Japan never went without a new Alice translation for that long again. The next-largest gap in Alice translations is a seven-year period between 1938 and 1946, the height of wartime rationing and material shortages. This seven-year gap is more than twice as long as the third largest gap, which, again, occurred early in the course of Alice’s history in Japan (between 1913 and 1917). Not coincidentally, this third gap occurred at roughly the same time as World War I. If the translations are divided not into pre-Disney and post-Disney periods, but wartime and post-war periods, we see very different patterns. Due to Japan’s near-constant state of war 36 A book appeared in 1901 which could be counted as a new translation, but it appears to be a collected and revised edition of Mirror World. For the most part, collected publications of previously serialized translations are considered new translations for this project as they often involve revisions and were regularly accompanied by new illustrations. 44 from the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-1895, through the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, the colonization of Korea, World War I, the Second Sino-Japanese War and so on, all Alice translations prior to 1946 are here referred to as wartime translations. 37 Those three extended dry periods – between 1899 and 1908, 1938 and 1946, and 1913 and 1917 – all took place in the wartime period. In fact, every single year Japan has gone without a new Alice translation occurred before 1946. From 1946 on, there have been at least two translations per year every year, and as many as thirteen in 2010. 38 It was noted above that there were an average of 5.56 new translations per year in what one might call the Disney period, compared to an average of 1.21 translations per year in the pre-Disney period. In contrast, the six-year period after World War II but before Disney’s arrival saw the publication of twenty translations, or an average of 3.33 translations per year. To put it another way, the rate at which new Alice translations were published was ramping up prior to the introduction of any Disney Alice properties. Disney’s first Japanese Alice book, Alice in Wonderland ( ふしぎの国のアリス) came out in 1952. Disney’s second Alice book followed in 1953, the year the film was released in Japan, but no Disney Alice books appeared in 1954 or 1955. This is the Disney of sixty years ago rather than today’s merchandising behemoth: they did market the film in the Japan, but they did not swamp the market with tie-in books, toys and clothing as they do with contemporary films like Frozen (2013). Disney has never published more than three Alice books in a single year in Japan, and the first year they published three books was 1989, the high point of Japan’s postwar prosperity. 37 Nobuko Anan suggests another alternative to the standard categorization: modern (1868-1945) and contemporary (end of World War II-present). While I agree that categorizing Japanese literature according to who was reigning when it was published is unproductive, I shy away from the idea that the modern period consists of only 78 years. 38 Though hard numbers are not available, based on the many, large bookstore displays of new Alice translations around the greater Tokyo area in 2015, it is likely that the year of Alice’s 150 th anniversary saw the publication of more translations than 2010. 45 In the four years immediately prior to the Disney Alice’s arrival in Japan (1948-1951), four translations came out per year on average. In the four years after Disney arrived (1953- 1956), an average of 6.25 translations came out each year. If that number is discounted by the number of translations Disney itself produced to go along with the film, the post-Disney average falls to 5.75 translations per year. In other words, there is only a slight rise in the frequency of publication. Moreover, other factors affected even this slight growth in translation. First, Japan was occupied by the Allied Forces, principally the United States, from 1945-1952. Publications had to be approved by the Occupation authorities, which hampered the rate of publication for all new works. Second, Japan’s economy was sunk into a depression after it lost World War II. There was not much money to publish anything, and even if a book were published few people had the resources to buy it. Finally, in 1952, the same year that Disney’s first Alice book arrived in Japan, Mishima Yukio, a major author in the Japanese literary canon, published his own translation of Alice’s Adventures. Mishima began working on this translation before Disney’s first book was published, so he was clearly not inspired by either the film or its attendant books. Mishima was and is known as an incredibly serious author who was conversant with Western culture, so the fact that he respected this work of children’s nonsense literature enough to translate it himself doubtless had an impact on readers’ perception of Alice. Because the film is at best associated with, and more likely just one part of, a minor rise in the rate of translation publication that could be explained by other factors, it can be concluded that Disney did not have a major impact on Alice’s existence in Japan in print. This aligns with media theorist Marc Steinberg’s analysis of Disney’s impact regarding other media of children’s popular culture in the same period. Steinberg argues that Disney, “had a limited role in expanding the circulation of character images and products… In part, this can be explained by the relatively limited 46 influence of Disney characters and products within the boys’ and girls’ magazines of the time” (102). 39 Look at in a different light, the growth of Alice translations is part of what the scholar of Japanese literature Ann Sherif calls a postwar, “outpouring of literary creativity and… diversity of voices and interests” (239). Indeed, the body of postwar Alice translators is more diverse than those engaged in wartime translation as will be described below. A Korean Interlude By way of comparison, the first Korean translation of Alice was published in 1959 under the title Alice in Wonderland ( 이상한 나라의 애리스, literally “Wondrous Land’s Alice”). 40 Like many Japanese translations, it was published in a series of books for children. Like early Japanese translations, the first Korean Alice was published with what might be called benevolent ulterior motives. Kang-hoon Lee, a scholar of English literature who has written extensively on Lewis Carroll, notes that the series that included Alice, “Boys and Girls World Literature,” is a rare example of Korean literature aimed at children in the period immediately following the Korean War (in Lindseth and Tannenbaum, 331). Perhaps due to the story’s later introduction in Korea, a standard translation of the title solidified instantly. Occasional translations have appeared under alternative titles – such as 1972’s Ippeuni in Amazing Land ( 신기한 나라의 이쁜이) and 1987’s An-Il Sook’s Adventures under the Land of the Morning Calm ( 안일숙의 조용한 아침의 나라모 험기) – but these translations are anomalies. The latter translation, for example, was created by an American couple while they lived in Seoul. Already Carrollian 39 These other media, and Steinberg’s work regarding them, will be discussed further in Chapter Four. It is worth noting that steadily more and more scholars are arguing for the importance of magazines within modern Japanese literature. Deborah Shamoon’s work with girls’ culture presents the most direct argument along this line. 40 Publishing data for Korean translations is also drawn from Alice in a World of Wonderlands, though translations of the Korean titles are the author’s own. 47 collectors and enthusiasts, Victoria and Byron Sewell were dismayed at their inability to find Korean translations and, in Victoria Sewell’s words, amused themselves, “by creating a Korean version of Alice” (in Lindseth and Tannenbaum, 333). This “Korean version” was intended to localize the text. Korean poems were parodied rather than the British poems and songs parodied in the English text, for example, and Korean clothing, technologies and social systems are interposed throughout the text (ibid. 333-334). 41 Examining the number of Korean translations published per year provides an interesting contrast to the analysis of Japan’s translations above. 42 As in Japan, it took awhile for Alice to gain a foothold. The first decade after Alice appeared in Korean literature saw only three translations: one each in 1959, 1962 and 1965. However, by 1979 nine Alice translations were published in a single year, including the first translation of Through the Looking-Glass. Japan had hit the same mark in 1952, and by 1977 had reached eleven translations in a single year before maxing out at thirteen translations in 2010. If Korea followed a similar path, it would be reasonable to expect to see no more than thirteen translations per year at any time, particularly given the nation’s late start in translating Alice. Yet, the number of Korean translations appearing per year continued to rise in fits and starts. Twelve appeared in 1994, 1997 and 2001 before 2004 blew past Japan’s record with sixteen new translations. 2008 saw a further 41 The role of Carrollians in spreading Carroll’s works is difficult to underestimate. For instance, when in the process of creating Alice in a World of Wonderlands certain languages were revealed to lack a translation of Alice, new translations were commissioned. The sole Hawaiian translations of Alice’s Adventures and Through the Looking-Glass were created in this manner. While this process might seem unnatural at first, it can give rise to unexpected benefits. Keao NeSmith, the Hawaiian language professor and linguist commissioned for the project, has situated his translation as fighting against the loss of the Hawaiian language. He notes that Hawaiian, “is one of the most severely endangered languages in the world today” (in Lindseth and Tannenbaum, 282) and that attempts to save it have included translations of literature into Hawaiian to serve as language learning aids for would-be new speakers. 42 This analysis is slightly limited by the author’s lack of Korean Alice expertise. While both sets of data were drawn from Alice in a World of Wonderlands, the Japanese numbers were scrubbed to remove translations that had been republished without substantial revisions or lacked publication dates. As the author is not as intimate with the Korean texts, the Korean numbers have not been so scrubbed. Additionally, only two Korean translations’ publication dates are unknown, perhaps because the history of Alice in Korean begins sixty years after Alice was published in Japan. 48 seventeen translations, and twenty whole translations appeared in 2010, an unprecedented four of which were of Through the Looking-Glass. There are many potential reasons for this growth in Alice translations. Lee suggests that translations from the 1970s and 1980s were insufficient, often abridged and aimed at establishing a “basic literacy” rather than conveying the humor of the English (in Lindseth and Tannenbaum, 331). The sudden proliferation of Alice translations could therefore be a response to the perceived limitations of earlier work coupled with the effects of South Korea’s economic growth. Regardless, the now-substantial body of Alice translations in Korea is likely to continue growing, and suggests that Korean interest in Alice has not yet been sated. Alice over time Aside from sheer numerical prevalence, the content of Alice translations and method of publication have also changed over time. During the wartime period, Alice was being introduced to the nation alongside Western culture and mores. On top of Carroll’s famous wordplay and nonsense language, translators had to impart basic cultural information, like what Western-style clothing looks like, to readers who were not familiar with those aspects of everyday British life. Japanese Carollian scholar Chimori Mikiko details several changes made to the first Japanese Alice, Mirror World because Japanese children would not understand the British concepts. “Shaking hands”, for instance, becomes “bowing” (Chimori 121) as readers would not have known that one shakes hands as a way of greeting someone. This type of alteration disappeared gradually as the Japanese people learned more about Western culture and is now entirely gone. The necessity of introducing readers to an exotic culture was complicated by the fact that the Japanese were only beginning to recognize “children’s literature” – and, indeed, the “child” – 49 as categories distinct from “literature” and “people”. While books using simplified language had existed prior to the late 1800’s, these texts were aimed at a general mass of women, children and anyone else incapable of reading literary Japanese. It was only after Western literature began to be imported on a massive scale that authors and editors began to conceive of children as a unique group with special reading needs of its own. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Japanese translators and editors were working through decisions such as whether to use vernacular language that anyone could understand or the classical literary language only understood by elite members of society. 43 Translators also had to decide whether to depict children realistically or as virtuous paragons that could serve as exemplars to their actual, imperfect young readers. Hasegawa Tenkei, the translator of Mirror World, made a complex alteration to a poem about a carpenter and a walrus that exemplifies early translators’ difficulties. In Carroll’s version, the carpenter and the walrus lure a group of young oysters off of an oyster bed against the elder oysters’ advice only to eat them. In Mirror World, this becomes a parable about the carpenter building a pagoda all the way to a Buddhist paradise. Hasegawa thus changed a comical and dark episode into a strong moral narrative conveyed through a familiar, Buddhist form. Alice’s characterisation was also regularly altered by early translators to make her appear more respectful of the adults she encountered. Changing conceptions of childhood have naturally had an effect on how Alice was received throughout its history. Similarly, writers and translators experimented with vernacular literature not just during one brief period but over the course of decades, and some of today’s authors still use classical literary language in their work to add effect. These changes occurred gradually, without any particular starting or ending 43 For more on the vernacular literature debate, see Indra Levy’s Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque femme fatale, translation, and vernacular style in modern Japanese literature. 50 point. For the most part, these early issues were settled by the postwar period, by which time Alice had become a part of the Japanese children’s literary canon. One final change in Alice translations ought to be mentioned, and that is the type of person doing the translation. The earliest translations were created by men and serialized in magazines. Most of these serializations were aimed at the emerging child audience, but some were also aimed at English-language learners. There is one exception, a 1918-1919 translation by Kako Yuko which ran in a magazine aimed at adult women. This translation is also the first to be done by a woman. 44 While the data on Alice translators’ genders is incomplete, it can be said that at most two wartime translations were done by women, yet in the first decade of the postwar period alone at least six translations by women were published. 45 The following decade saw another eight publications by women, and this growth continued, eventually totaling thirty translations by women in the decade spanning 2004 to 2013. The growth in translations by women may stem from Alice settling into girls’ or women’s culture (as opposed to children’s or popular culture), or it might be due to the growth of opportunities for women over time combined with rising interest in Alice across Japan. The latter factor definitely plays at least a small role, as the Japanese publishing world has become more open to female creators in the modern period. If a magazine serialization was popular enough, it would sometimes be collected, revised and published as a book, perhaps with new illustrations. Some of the earlier book translations of Alice were created in this manner, but many were initially published as stand-alone volumes. 44 It has been suggested that Kako Yuko was a pen name, and the actual translator was male. However, there does not appear to be any hard evidence behind this assertion, so this author assumes that the translator is indeed of the gender indicated by the name Yuko (i.e. female). 45 In addition to the uncertainty produced by undated publications, analysis of the translators’ gender is hampered by the existence of translations whose creators are unknown. Of the three decades described here, there were four, seven and four publications translated by people of unknown gender, respectively. Moreover, it has been suggested that two translators may have been men writing under female pen names. 51 Over time, new translations began to be published for the first time in a book format, but as part of a series of books. The subject of the following chapter, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kikuchi Kan’s 1927 translation, was part of a series called Complete Works for Elementary Schoolers (Shōgakusei zenshū or 小学生全集). These series are presented as a collection of great books with the implication that an educated person (or child) has read all of them and the implicit promise that a less-informed parent can simply buy all of the books in the series should he wish to ensure that his child is properly educated. Shortly after Alice began to be included in these series, companies started mixing the two formats – book series and magazine serial – by publishing series of children’s books that consisted of thin, cheaply-made volumes containing abbreviated versions of one or two stories like Alice with perhaps a few short fables or a puzzle. This type of magazine-book hybrid seems to have died out while the earlier style of great books series – where each volume contains the translation of one or two works of world literature – persists today. In an evolution of the great books series, the majority of translations appearing now are published as stand-alone volumes under a publisher’s children’s imprint. Alice is thus situated alongside other classics of children’s literature. 46 Recreated versions of early Alice serializations appear regularly as well. There is extensive interest in Japan in revisiting early Alice translations, so they are being reprinted for Alice enthusiasts and new readers. At the same time, new translators are extending the bounds of translation. “Translations” have appeared in comic-book form, as audio books and using paper-theatre (kamishibai, 紙芝居) illustrations. 46 In a break with British (and American) practice, Japanese publishers commonly have separate imprints for Japanese children’s literature and foreign children’s literature. In the realm of children’s literature, Alice is consequently situated quite visibly as foreign and other. This contrasts with adaptations into other media, as will be shown in Chapter Four. 52 Mirror World was Alice’s first sprout in Japan. Over the past 118 years, Alice has grown to become part of the canon of children’s literature in Japan. Today’s children are assumed to have a basic understanding of the British culture referenced in the books. It is standard for publishers to include a translation of at least Alice’s Adventures in their children’s imprints, if not Through the Looking-Glass as well. Where the first translations cautiously re-used European illustrations, today’s creators are confident enough in their grasp of the material that they experiment visually and even with audio. Alice, or Arisu, is not only recognized as a name but applied to Japanese children using Japanese characters. In recognition of Alice’s extensive history in Japan, early translations are being reprinted as historical documents attesting to Japanese history in their own right. Alice may have started off as a British story that editors thought could be used to educate children about a strange, foreign land and its ways, but it created a place for itself in the children’s literature canon. Because Alice is now part of Japanese culture, it is being retold in Japanese styles – whether the traditional kamishibai or the newer manga – without alteration to its basic story. This contrasts with the work of early translators who altered the story considerably while experimenting wildly with style in an attempt to make the story appear more Japanese. Alice has taken on a life of its own in Japan and developed its own, unique imagery as will be shown in the following chapters, but that was only possible because Alice has become part of Japanese culture in its own right, and translation enabled that joining of Alice to Japan. Translation in the West and Japan The first Japanese translation of Alice landed in a shifting literary environment created by literary styles and genres that differed sharply from those familiar to Alice’s English readers. 53 Even the idea of translation itself varied from the United Kingdom to Japan. Understanding the general history of translation and how it compares to translation in Japan should clarify how Alice translations fit into Japanese literature and why it is important to include translations in the study of literature. In the West, translation originated as a respectable way for would-be writers to hone their craft. Rewriting texts in their native tongue allowed writers to develop their own voice and style. However, Susan Bassnett, one of the foremost scholars of translation today, notes that the number of translations created by people who had no intention of becoming writers rose dramatically in the nineteenth century. These amateur translators were motivated by a desire to make materials available in their own languages during a time when nationalism was raising barriers between cultures that had mixed more freely in the past. Bassnett argues that the growth of amateur translations led to the development of an attitude that a translator is not “a creative artist” but “an element in a master-servant relationship with [the source] text” (16). The result of this attitude can be seen in the fact that English translations of foreign literature today rarely display the translator’s name prominently – if at all – instead advertising the author of the foreign-language text. Lawrence Venuti refers to this form of translation as “a weird self- annihilation” (7) in his book, The Translator’s Invisibility, because translators erase themselves in creating a translation. These erased or invisible translators are not recognized by readers or even book critics. Once translators became merely mechanics transferring texts from one language to another, fidelity to the original text quickly became the main standard for judging translators’ work. If input equaled output at the level of vocabulary and grammar, the translator was praised. Though this approach has been attacked by scholars at length, even today translations are generally valued according to two basic criteria: fidelity to the translated work and literary 54 quality of the translation. Translations do tend to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but still largely according to those two basic criteria. A loose translation of a mediocre novel may be praised for improving the source text where a literal translation that hews closely to a beautiful work of classic literature may be equally praised for faithfully transmitting the source material’s allure to a new audience. 47 Bassnett eloquently condenses scholars’ argument against this limited view of translation by saying that “there can no more be the ultimate translation than there can be the ultimate poem or the ultimate novel, and any assessment of a translation can only be made by taking into account both the process of creating it and its function in a given context” (21-22). A translator may, for example, simultaneously translate a work of classic literature into a different language and edit it for a younger audience. In that case, a proper evaluation would have to take into account the translation’s function as a work for children, in addition to other factors. Venuti makes a similar point when he notes that, “a foreign text is the site of many different semantic possibilities that are fixed only provisionally in any one translation, on the basis of varying cultural assumptions and interpretive choices, in specific social situations, in different historical periods” (13). Venuti’s description of a work to be translated as a site of possibilities is reminiscent of way we tend to talk about seeds and babies. What a story might go on to be or where it may end up is unknown, but until it takes root and sprouts countless possibilities are encapsulated within it. Because the field of translation studies originated among scholars of Western literature, its preoccupations fit to non-Western literatures imperfectly. Translations developed along a 47 Venuti has offered an alternative typology of translations. First, there is the “domesticating” British-American form of translation wherein the translator is meant to disappear so that the reader can read a book that appears as though it were borne from their own culture. This is the traditional form of translation criticized widely by contemporary translation theorists. In contrast, Venuti advocates a “foreignizing” translation that is meant to read as though it were part of a foreign culture, constantly battering its readers with its difference such that they are forced to grapple with the foreign and their relationship to it. 55 distinctly different trajectory in Japan than in the West. Historically speaking, there was no dichotomy between literal and loose translations in Japan, so there has not been a need to debate translations’ fidelity in Japan as there was in Europe and America. Scholars of Japanese translation, including Judy Wakabayashi, J. Scott Miller and Rebekah Clements, have successfully examined Japanese translations without treating fidelity as a major concern. Consequently, it may be useful to offer here a short and limited history of translation in Japan on its own terms. While the spoken Japanese language is unique, written Japanese consists of modified Chinese characters. 48 Chinese characters were imported to Japan in the fifth century AD. Those characters, now called kanji, were used to read and write Chinese at first. Over time, kanji were appropriated to stand for the sounds of the Japanese language. In the ninth century, the Japanese began modifying kanji to more fully represent their language. These modified characters initially appear as an aid for readers in the margins of Chinese texts, before eventually being developed into two syllabaries, katakana and hiragana. Consequently, written Japanese came to be composed of a mix of kanji, which can be read multiple ways and are attached to a specific meaning, and simplified katakana and hiragana characters that can only be read a single way but carry no independent meaning. While a written Japanese language developed, the Japanese elite adopted a variation on classical Chinese as their lingua franca. Kanbun kundoku ( 漢文訓読), or the practice of reading Chinese writings in Japanese via the addition of guidance marks, remained dominant in Japan until the late-nineteenth century. At that point, Indra Levy notes, “the palpable threat of Western domination supplanted the study of Chinese with the study of multiple Western languages (with 48 See Indra Levy’s Introduction to her edited volume, Translation in Modern Japan for a concise description of the introduction of Chinese characters to Japan. 56 English at the forefront)” (2). Moreover, Japanese authors were reconsidering what could constitute “written Japanese”. Members of a movement referred to as genbun itchi ( 言文一致) were supposedly reformulating the relationship between oral (gen, 言) and written (bun, 文) Japanese. Yet, the eminent Japanese literature scholar Kojin Karatani describes genbun itchi as not a specifically literary project, but a general movement to emphasize direct experience over idealization that was enacted differently in different media. For example, in the theatre actor Ichikawa Danjūrō limited his use of makeup and avoided exaggerated movements in order to portray his characters realistically (Karatani 54-57). Karatani argues that literary proponents of genbun itchi were similarly focused on direct experience in a surprisingly basic way. Though the movement ostensibly revolved around the unification of spoken and written Japanese, Karatani determines that it, “was a reform of writing, ‘the abolition of kanji’” (51). In other words, Japanese authors began to turn away from the idealized concepts that kanji signified in favour of the direct meanings created by stringing together phonetic hiragana and katakana characters. This in turn changed the possibilities available for translations. Translators could use kanji to transmit idealized concepts, or they could use hiragana to transmit foreign sounds. Genbun itchi’s effect can be seen in the establishment of “Alice” (Arisu, アリス) in Japanese. Early translations of Carroll’s novels experimented with different ways to name the protagonist. Some, like Maruyama Hakuya’s Ai-chan’s Dream Story (Ai-chan no yumemonogatari, 愛ちゃんの夢物語, 1910), used kanji to create a new name for Alice (Ai, or 愛, which means “love” and is a common name for Japanese women). Others, like Hasegawa Tenkei, attempted a new name that used the phonetic hiragana (in his case, Mii-chan or みいちゃん). The debate over how frequently kanji should be used and which kanji should be required knowledge still rages today 57 with descendents of the genbun itchi movement arguing that Japanese uses too many kanji and conservatives arguing that kanji are linked to Japanese identity and therefore must be protected. Kanbun kundoku presents an interesting problem for theorists of translation: since it predates written Japanese – or rather, was written Japanese in a time when written Japanese did not correspond with the spoken language – how could kanbun kundoku be a “translation”? It was not “translating” one language into another. It merely consisted of a method for reading and annotating Chinese language materials so that Japanese speakers could understand them. The question is not academic; Japanese translations of Alice still use many of Carroll’s invented English words written out in the katakana syllabary today. For roughly a millennium, kanbun kundoku functioned as a language between Japanese and Chinese. Neither Chinese nor Japanese, it allowed the creation of true Benjaminian translations. Cultural critic Walter Benjamin argued that the point of translation is to regain a pure language, understandable by all, that was lost with the Tower of Babel. In Benjamin’s view, a translator should aim, “to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” (80). In other words, a translator should strive to alter and expand the language they are translating a work into through their translation. Indra Levy contends that kanbun kundoku did indeed influence the structure of Japanese as native elites, educated in kanbun kundoku since childhood, wrote the kanbun kundoku-inflected classic Japanese literature that is still studied by children today. Because of kanbun kundoku’s role in the development of written Japanese, Levy argues that Japan produced a “linguistic hybridity” unparalleled in world history (2). Building on Judy Wakabayashi’s work with kanbun kundoku, Levy proposes thinking of translation in Japan in 58 terms of trialectics, or the interaction of three opposing forces, rather than dialectics. In the case of kanbun kundoku, those three opposing forces would be written Chinese, oral Japanese and the mediating language of kanbun kundoku. Starting with kanbun kundoku, a number of “translations” emerged. If kanbun kundoku refers to a specific type of translation – a translation from Chinese to an intermediate form of Japanese – then there have been many other types of translation in Japan since kanbun kundoku’s emergence nearly a thousand years ago. Rebekah Clements identified nearly two dozen types of translation in her study of translation in early modern Japan. As a general rule, Clements describes types of translations that were categorized by the language the work was being translated from and/or the degree of formality expressed by the Japanese. Yakujutsu ( 訳述), for example, most often referred to Japanese translations of Dutch works (Clements 10-11). Western culture was unfamiliar to most readers at that time, and translators of Dutch literature had to add some explication (the jutsu [ 述] of yakujutsu) so that readers would understand the material. Over time, most of the types of translation Clements finds in early modern Japanese literature fell out of use in favour of today’s standard hon’yaku ( 翻訳). When a translator comes across the word hon’yaku today, she translates it as “translation”, but hon’yaku is merely one vestige of a system of translations that was always more specialized than the English “translation”. 49 Words like hon’yaku and yakujutsu referred to writing that English speakers would call translations, but those words were not synonymous. Nor was there a word for an overarching concept that would include all of these translation terms 49 Michael Emmerich points out that there are two Japanese words in use today are commonly applied to the concept of translation: hon’yaku and gendaigoyaku ( 現代語訳), or “modern-language renderings” (10). Gendaigoyaku is reserved for translating classical Japanese texts into modern Japanese. In line with Emmerich’s approach and my own categorizing of translations as merely one type of adaptation, I would also condense hon’yaku and gendaigoyaku into a mass of Japanese translations. 59 under one umbrella. Over time, hon’yaku became what translation theorist Yanabu Akira calls a translation word (hon’yakugo or 翻訳語): a Japanese word that was created specifically to translate a foreign (generally Western) word and retains the flavor of the foreign thereafter. Yanabu was writing before Levy theorized the trialectics of translation, but his translation words function as a hybrid language much like kanbun kundoku. Not wholly Japanese, they are yet incomprehensible to anyone who does not speak Japanese. Where, then, does this leave translation? It could be argued that the word hon’yaku is only a stand-in for a concept that never truly became part of the Japanese language. If that were the case, suddenly other translational conundrums become clear. Just as “translation” has multiple translations in Japanese at different points in time, the word “adaptation” is equally difficult to translate today. Words like eigaka ( 映画化) and animeka ( アニメ化) are commonly translated into English as “adaptation”, but like yakujutsu before them their meaning is specialized. In its verb form, eigaka means “to transform into a film”. Similarly, animeka means “to transform into an anime”. Consequently, eigaka refers to not just an adaptation, but a film adaptation. Likewise, an animeka is an anime adaptation. There is a word that functions for adaptation as hon’yaku does for translation, kaisaku ( 改作). Yet, inserting “kaisaku” into a conversation with Japanese people invariably results in confusion, followed by a request for examples and the inevitable suggestion that the speaker must have meant something like eigaka or animeka. Viewed in terms of Levy’s trialectics of translation and Yanabu’s translation words, words like eigaka and animeka come from Japanese, “adaptation” is English and kaisaku a hybrid word created to join together these related ideas. “Hon’yaku” has a different history, but it, too, can only be translated as “translation” with a bit 60 of trepidation. Consequently, this chapter and this dissertation are examining phenomena for which there is no clear category in Japan. What is Alice in Wonderland? Alice in Wonderland, for most, refers to the books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) by Lewis Carroll. 50 Carroll is the pen name of an Oxford mathematics professor named Charles Dodgson. However, these two novels are not the only Alice works Carroll wrote. The published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was based on a story Carroll told to his neighbors’ children. There is a second, self-published version of the same story called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Hand-written and illustrated by Carroll, it was gifted to Alice Liddell, one of the children to whom he told the story, the year before Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published. In addition, Carroll rewrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for a younger audience and published it as The Nursery Alice in 1890. A proper listing of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books thus includes four books, two of which are rather obscure. 51 This history concerns Alice in Wonderland’s presence in Japan. In particular, it is an investigation into how the average person in Japan has perceived Alice over time. Of the works listed above, only Alice’s Adventures and Through the Looking-Glass are popularly known. Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and The Nursery Alice are known to Japanese Alice aficionados, but not the general public. 52 The Under Ground story differs from the later version 50 While Through the Looking-Glass appeared on the market in 1871, the first edition’s title page is actually dated 1872. The former date is given above as it is the books’ circulation among readers that is under consideration here. 51 At a stretch, 1876’s The Hunting of the Snark: An agony in eight fits might even be included. Consisting of an extended poem, this slim tome borrows a few minor characters and its setting from the main Alice books. 52 2015, the 150 th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, saw the publication of many Alice books in Japan, including multiple translations of The Nursery Alice. It is probable that this has spread 61 (Alice’s Adventures) in some ways, and has a complicated publication history. The original, handmade volume given to Alice Liddell is now part of the British Library. Carroll published a facsimile of it in 1886, and various other groups have re-published it in limited editions. As such, Under Ground has always been a niche product pursued by readers who already know of Alice in Wonderland. The Nursery Alice, on the other hand, reveals subtle differences between what constitutes literature for children in Japanese and English. It has become common to rewrite classic literature like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for younger audiences in both the West and Japan, but how books are rewritten varies. In the English-speaking world, the complexity of words used in a book increases concomitantly with the intended readers’ age. Likewise, some topics are deemed too mature for younger readers, so sections of a book might be censored. The extensive use of “nigger” and “Injun” in Huckleberry Finn, for example, has prompted substantial debate over whether to edit the classic so that students are not forced to face the complicated problem of racism while they are still too young to understand it. 53 The Nursery Alice reflects these two strategies with simpler words and a curtailed plot, but Carroll utilized another tactic as well: revising the narrative voice to resemble an adult reading a story to a child. The text of The Nursery Alice thus includes questions about the child listener’s preferences and opinions. Parents are expected to read the questions to their children and then wait for a response. This novel approach has remained relatively rare in literature rewritten for children in both English and Japanese. awareness of this particular book, but any effects of the 150 th anniversary are too new to measure at the time of writing. 53 It is worth noting that literature rewritten in this fashion, like the NewSouth edition of Huckleberry Finn edited by Alan Gribben, is also a type of translation. Modern English versions of the Old English Beowulf or Chaucer’s Middle English The Canterbury Tales may be easier to recognize as translations, but Gribben’s Finn clearly functions as one of Levy’s hybrid languages. 62 One strategy for translating literature for younger audiences is particular to Japanese. As mentioned above, written Japanese is composed of a mix of complicated kanji and simple katakana and hiragana characters that each represent a syllable. While adults read and write Japanese using a mix of kanji, hiragana and katakana, writing aimed at small children uses only hiragana or katakana. For example, the sentence “The cat died.” (Neko ga shinda.) would be written as “ 猫が死んだ。” for adults, but “ ねこがしんだ。” for children. Because the Japanese school system introduces a set list of characters to children in each grade, publishers know precisely which characters each age group will be able to read. Therefore, publishers can vary the characters they use in each book depending on which age group they are targeting. In practical terms, this means that a Japanese translator’s first concern while rewriting literature for younger children is neither the complexity of the words used nor the maturity level of the story but which of several ways to write each word she will choose. As will be discussed in more detail shortly, early Japanese translations of Alice departed significantly from the two novels’ content in terms of the plot, cast and concepts employed. 54 Moreover, Alice was initially translated as part of a wave of translations spurred by a desire to learn more about Western culture. As such, translators were actively selecting which new concepts they wanted to introduce to their readers through their Alice translations. The earliest translators thus manipulated the text much like Carroll himself did while writing The Nursery Alice, drawing readers’ attention to certain sections of the text while minimizing or outright dispensing with others. Later translators attempting to rewrite Alice in Wonderland for young audiences were able to draw on these early Japanese translations instead of The Nursery Alice’s 54 Alice translations in other languages also feature changes to Carroll’s books. The most common changes involve inserting local animals for the non-human characters (i.e. the cats, caterpillar, walrus, etc.) and dressing characters in local garb. Nancy Sheppard’s Alitji in Dreamland: Alitjinya Ngura Tjukurmanjala (1992), a translation into one of the aboriginal languages of Australia, features outstanding illustrations with local resonance by Donna Leslie. Alice is nude, per the local custom, and she chases a white kangaroo instead of a white rabbit. 63 simplified plot or language. As a matter of course, translators intending to create Japanese Alice translations for younger children focused on translating Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland directly. This use of the text is fascinating, but it would be obscured should The Nursery Alice be treated as having equal prominence in Japan as Alice’s Adventures. Having thus eliminated Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and The Nursery Alice as central concerns for this study, the following overview of Alice in Wonderland translations focuses on the two main Alice novels. Three developments in turn of the century Japanese literature 1899, the year Alice first appeared in Japan, was a pivotal year in Japanese history only in the sense that it marks a midpoint between two wars: the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War and the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. Yet, a three decade-old push to modernize Japan had produced a cultural maelstrom wherein signs of change could be found every year. That included a wave of translations of works by authors as diverse as Shakespeare and Frances Hodgson Burnett, John Stuart Mill and Lewis Carroll. The wide variety of translations Rebekah Clements described was beginning to settle into the simplified category of hon’yaku, but one type in particular was still quite vibrant. Many translations at the turn of the nineteenth century appeared in a form called hon’an ( 翻案). “Hon’an” here refers to works produced in this time period by mining a literary volume in a European language for ideas that the author would use to create a new story, though the term’s definition has varied over time and scholars debate its precise meaning. J. Scott Miller suggests that hon’yaku and hon’an can usefully be thought of as antonyms that are “often used in a similar context” (13). In other words, both describe more or less the same activity, but the former emphasizes correspondence and the latter transmutation or evolution. In particular, Miller contends that these two types of translation reflect two different 64 attitudes towards the Western culture then flooding into Japan. Hon’yaku writers translated with “efficiency and accuracy in the service of progress and enlightenment” (ibid.) so that their translations could change Japan. Hon’yaku thus were usually translations of some kind of medical or technical manual. In contrast, hon’an authors attempted to “tame and modify the foreign to fit domestic sensibilities, usually in the service of art and entertainment” (ibid.) as opposed to science or technology. Hon’an, consequently, were created by members of the Japanese literary world, authors and editors whose own literary styles were affected by the literature they translated. This dichotomy is simplified to an extent; the term hon’yaku has certainly been applied to literary works written during this time in addition to scientific tomes. However, it is true that hon’an tended to be written by authors who were using the hon’an as a medium in which they could test out new literary styles. The works translated through hon’an – largely Western literature that was new to Japan – also offered authors inspiration for new writing techniques and subject matter. As such, hon’an offer today’s scholars a way to examine the roots of modern Japanese literary styles. At the same time that Japanese literature was being flooded with translations of Western literature, Genbun itchi’s century-old push to make the language used in literature resemble everyday Japanese speech was hitting its stride. Genbun itchi was spurred by the same concerns that prompted the flood of translations. Reflecting the basic similarity between the two terms, Miller separates hon’yaku and hon’an translators based on how they attempted to change Japan through translation, but derives both types of translation from a desire to modernize Japan to be more like the West. Describing femme fatales and vernacular literature, Indra Levy points out that genbun itchi proponents were similarly, “driven by a desire to achieve parity between Japanese and modern European languages” (38). Thus, both the stories being translated and the 65 form of language they were being translated into were new to Japan and marked by the changing relationship between Japan and the West. 55 Even as Japanese literary styles were altered by the addition of new stories and the use of new language, a third development was also changing the literary landscape. This development is also tied to the sudden influx of Western culture, but relates to the appearance of a new reading audience rather than changes in how literature was produced. Prior to the 1890’s, literature was not written for a child readership in Japan. Books were written for children, but these had educational rather than literary purposes. Drawing on work by the Japan Children’s Literature Association, Judy Wakabayashi proffers a three-part definition of children’s literature as it is conceived in Japan today: that it is written or translated by adults for children; that it socializes the child; and that it triggers children’s emotions and interest (228). Wakabayashi observes that literature meeting some of these criteria existed in Japan as early as the late seventeenth century, but that no literature met all of these criteria until the close of the nineteenth century. 56 More specifically, historian Brian Platt argues that childhood was not widely understood to be important in Japan until the 1890’s, which he traces to a mix of economic developments combined with a strong interest in social regulation by prominent members of society (975). The flood of translated Western literature entering Japan at the time carried with it literature meeting all three of Wakabayashi’s criteria, and prompted Japanese author-translators to begin creating their own children’s literature. 55 It is important to note that the translations in questions are not, as critical theorist and translation scholar Naoki Sakai put it, the, “tritely heroic and exceptional act of some arbitrator bridging two separate communities” (3). Rather, early Alice translations in particular exemplify Sakai’s vision of translation as, “an essentially hybridizing instance” (ibid.) that brings together diverse cultures within and without Japan. 56 Wakabayashi points in particular to “red books”, or akahon ( 赤本), a genre of woodblock-printed picture book for children that was popular from 1662 to roughly 1750 as a predecessor to children’s literature. Referring to Joan Ericson’s introduction to A Rainbow in the Desert: An anthology of early twentieth-century Japanese children’s literature, Wakabayashi notes that red books served as primers for schoolchildren rather than children’s literature. 66 These three trends – the condensation of different types of translation into hon’yaku, an influx of translated Western literature and the development of literature for children – created a vibrant environment for Alice’s introduction. Indeed, translations of children’s literature could and did play an important role in the development of Japanese literature at the time. For example, Rebecca Copeland credits author Wakamatsu Shizuko’s 1890 translation of Little Lord Fauntleroy (Shōkōshi, 小公子) with not only opening, “the door to the entirely new genre of children’s literature” (100), but even, “substantially advanc[ing] the campaign to invent a modern literary idiom” (ibid.), as the earliest example of the genbun itchi movement. Alice in Wonderland was introduced to Japan in the midst of this major literary upheaval. Alice: The early years Today, childhood is subdivided by both age and gender in Japan, but those divisions developed over the course of the modern period. Since Alice translations were published regularly throughout most of that history, where those translations were published and the terms used to describe their audience show how childhood was conceived (and re-conceived) in Japanese culture. Perhaps fitting for a nonsense story like Alice in Wonderland, the novels were translated into Japanese in reverse order. The first Japanese translation of Alice was not Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland but its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Titled Mirror World, or Kagami Sekai ( 鏡世界), it was published in 1899, 28 years after the novel’s English publication. The first translation of Alice’s Adventures was called The Golden Key (Kogane no Kagi, 黄金の鍵) and did not appear until 1908, nine years after the initial translation of Through the Looking-Glass and 43 years after the English publication of Alice’s Adventures. 67 The rise of children’s literature in Japan had quickly prompted enterprising publishers to create magazines aimed at children. Shōnen Sekai, or Youth World ( 少年世界), was one of the first magazines aimed at this new audience. 57 Launched in 1895, in 1899 it published Mirror World, an unannounced hon’an of Through the Looking-Glass. Leaving aside the hon’an itself for a moment, the fact that it ran in Shōnen Sekai presages the shifting place Alice takes in Japan’s evolving gender landscape. The standard translation of “Shōnen Sekai” is Youth World, but the term “shōnen” refers specifically to male youths today. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Japanese language underwent an expansion and compartmentalization regarding childhood. As mentioned above, the concepts of childhood and children’s literature were invented towards the end of the nineteenth century in Japan. By the end of the twentieth century, that child had been subdivided into the boy (shōnen) and the girl (shōjo, 少女). Boys have their own manga, for example, in anthologies such as Shōnen Jump and Shōnen Sunday, while girls have manga magazines like Shōjo Comic and Shōjo Friend. 58 Children were further divided by age group, with children passing through a non-gendered state during the toddler years (yōnen, 幼年) before becoming boys (shōnen) and girls (shōjo) on their way into a similarly gendered young adulthood as seinen (young, male adults) and josei (adult women). All of these terms – yōnen, shōnen, shōjo, seinen and josei – are now used as categories in the manga magazine industry, and are even loosely (albeit incorrectly) referred to as genres. The gendered path from birth to adulthood demarked by publishers of both manga and literature developed over time, however, and one can see how it was established through an examination of Alice’s publication history. 57 As this section analyzes how gendered Japanese terms were used and how their meanings changed over time, those terms are given precedence here over their English translations. 58 Though the magazines are ostensibly divided by gender and age group, actual readerships vary greatly from the official target audience. This is discussed further in Chapter Four, but of interest here is the development in Japanese culture of first the idea of the child and then steadily more specific subtypes of child. 68 The first Japanese magazine aimed at children was 1888’s Shōnen’en (Youth Garden, 少年園) (Carter iv), which emphasized educating children over entertaining them. The meaning of “shōnen” was already in flux when it appeared in the title of this groundbreaking magazine. Japanese children’s literature scholar Nona Carter contrasts shōnen with jidō ( 児童), the other major term used to refer to young people at the time, observing that jidō, “referred to the rather undefined group of people who were not yet adults” (6), while shōnen pertained specifically to the young. In other words, people of all ages who were not seen as adults – perhaps because they were not yet married – were considered jidō, but shōnen were youthful non-adults. Shōnen Sekai, launched seven years after Shōnen’en in 1895, was still on the bleeding edge of Japanese children’s literature. Therefore, it was created for children by people who were still unsure of what exactly a child was. Carter even argues that it, “ushered in a new era of popular magazines” (63) distinguished by a higher degree of both professionalism and competition. Unlike earlier children’s magazines, Shōnen Sekai prioritized literature like Mirror World over educational content. Created by Hasegawa Tenkei (1876-1940), Mirror World follows a young girl named Mii-chan into a mirror and on several adventures. Hasegawa was a fairly prominent member of the literary establishment, but he is best known as an editor and critic. 59 Through the Looking- Glass was one of his earliest assignments upon joining Youth World and remains one of few translations by him. It was serialized in eight issues, from April to December of 1899. Reflecting the flux that translation was in at the time, translator and Carollian scholar Kusumoto Kimie notes that Mirror World is “not a hon’yaku, but also not quite a hon’an” (“Hon’yaku da to ha ienai ga, mattaku no hon’an de mo nai”,「翻訳だとはいえないが、まったくの翻案でも 59 In addition to Youth World, Hasegawa was an editor for The Sun (Taiyō, 太陽), an early general-interest magazine. His critical writings engaged in the debate on the merits of naturalism in literature. 69 ない」, 楠本 21). While Miller has attempted to clarify the distinctions between hon’yaku and hon’an, in practice it is difficult to define which translations belong to which category. Hasegawa, like other hon’an translators, took great liberties with his source. He began with Through the Looking-Glass despite the fact that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was unknown in Japan, and he altered its story considerably. The first part of Mirror World follows Carroll’s book rather closely, only for Hasegawa to take Mii-chan on a journey of his own devising thereafter. Mirror World departs from Through the Looking-Glass midway through the eighth chapter, “The Lion and the Unicorn”. After a short digression wherein she is chased by a demon (oni, 鬼), Mii-chan awakens much like Alice. Hasegawa’s inventions therefore form only a small part of the serialization, and solve a pressing problem presented by Through the Looking- Glass. The decision to translate Looking-Glass first is curious. It is unclear who made that choice and whether they even knew of the existence of Alice’s Adventures. Regardless, Looking- Glass presented a difficulty that the first novel did not: the plot was structured around a game (chess) that was more or less unheard of in Japan. Hasegawa dealt with this hiccup by replacing chess with shōgi, a Japanese game, but shōgi did not completely solve the issue. The plot of Looking-Glass follows Alice’s journey from being a pawn to becoming a queen, yet shōgi has no equivalent to chess’ queens. Given that Mii-chan could not completely follow Alice’s path, it is unsurprising that Hasegawa abandoned the final chapters of the book in favour of a variation on traditional Japanese folk tales. By temporarily abandoning the text when the constrictions of its chess-based plot progression became tightest, Hasegawa was able to present a significant chunk of Looking-Glass to Japanese readers despite their lack of knowledge about British culture. In this case, the hon’an format allowed Hasegawa to stretch his readers’ mental boundaries without 70 forcing him to translate terms or ideas that his readers simply would not understand. Mirror World is thus made to seem familiar to its readers, in the style of Lawrence Venuti’s domesticating translations. Chimori Mikiko further points out that, because Mirror World was serialized and Looking-Glass was not, Mirror World, “needed the thrill of serialization, which would be different from the original novel. At the end of each issue, child readers should look forward to the next, be tantalized and finish the chapter by complaining that ‘hey, Mii-chan is about to go on a trip’” (“Gensaku to ha kotonatta rensai toshite no daigomi ga hitsuyō de atta. Kakugō no saigo ha, kodomo no dokusha ga jigō wo tanoshiminishi, shumi wo sosorareru, ‘Saa, kore kara Miichan ga tabi wo suru no desu’ nado no kimarimonku de owaru.”, 「原作とは異なった連載としての醍醐味が必要であった。各号の最後は、子供の読者が次号を楽しみにし、興味をそそられる、「さあ、是から美ちゃんが旅をするのです」などの決まり文句で終わる。」, 190). As a canny editor, Hasegawa would have made a point of ending each issue’s installment on a high note. His treatment of the third chapter suggests he held the twin goals of educating and entertaining his readers paramount. This chapter, “Looking-Glass Insects”, begins with a ride on the new-to-Japan technology of trains, followed by discussions between Alice and every child’s favorite creature: bugs. Hasegawa went to the trouble of dividing “Looking-Glass Insects” into two installments and pairing the second with a reduced “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” chapter. “Tweedledum and Tweedledee”, a perennial favorite in English, features a long poem recounting the story of the young oysters recited by Tweedledee. Hasegawa changes this poem into a traditional Buddhist parable about building a pagoda to paradise, but he also cuts it out of the fourth chapter and uses it to begin the fifth. His rationale can only be speculated at, but the effects of this change are clear. Because of Hasegawa’s reordering, the 71 third, fourth and fifth chapters of Mirror World all end on an interesting note, and the third and fifth both begin with educational passages. Between the need to be intelligible to a Japanese audience uneducated in British culture, the requirements of serialization and the translator’s own difficulties understanding Carroll’s nonsense language, Mirror World differed greatly from Looking-Glass. While the “shōnen” of Shōnen Sekai means “youth” rather than “boys”, it only predates that linguistic shift by a few years. Scholars have pointed to some articles and stories as being intended specifically for female or male readers. In a study of the development of modern gender roles, scholar Nilay Calsimsek has shown that the earliest issues of Shōnen Sekai obscured, “sex and age distinctions among children… to prompt the ‘little citizens’ to feel that they belonged to a ‘nation’ and shared a common culture” (62) as part of a rise in nationalism surrounding the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War. Calsimsek argues that all children between six and seventeen years old constituted shōnen in the first few issues, but that the magazine began creating gender and age divisions amongst its readers shortly after it started publication. 60 Pointing out that the magazine assigned headings – “shōnen”, “shōjo” and “yōnen” – to each article between 1895 and 1898, Calsimsek argues that shōjo articles were intended for girls of all ages, whereas boys were subdivided into younger (yōnen) and older (shōnen) age groups. Shōjo articles, in Calsimsek’s telling, covered home life issues such as housework and raising children, while shōnen articles covered war, science and technology. Calsimsek notes that yōnen articles were not officially aimed solely at boys, but that “it was very obvious from [their] content that the yōnen part was not addressed to girls” (68). This conclusion depends on applying our current 60 Calsimsek notes that some of the characteristics explicitly described as preferable for boys or men in the later, gendered issues of Shōnen Sekai were also promoted more generically in earlier issues. He hypothesizes that this means that the magazine’s editors were intending to form a specifically masculine identity for boys even from the beginning, but did not research whether that was actually the case. 72 understanding of gender to articles that were not necessarily intended for a gendered audience. In fact, the idea of a gendered childhood was still being created and as such was not so calcified that today’s scholars can point to specific articles as having been written for a specific gender or age group based solely on their content. Calsimsek draws distinctions between genders a bit too forcefully, as for example his association of war, science and technology exclusively with shōnen, yōnen and masculinity. As he himself points out later, articles describing and promoting nursing for and by girls were a common feature, yet Calsimsek does not connect nursing to the natural aftermath of a war. Calsimsek assumes that stories about war were intended only for male readers, when in fact they were perhaps also intended for girls. Likewise, articles about nursing may have provided future soldiers with faith that they would be cared for if injured in battle. Shōnen Sekai articles were separated according to gender for a period of roughly three years after the magazine’s establishment, but the fact that those divisions were then dropped suggests that the editors did not find them useful. War was a common theme in Shōnen Sekai, but its effects were depicted differently in the shōnen and shōjo sections. Male protagonists were described fighting in wars; female protagonists were depicted nursing men who may have been injured fighting. The applicability of war to all children’s lives is underscored in an 1899 story that Calsimsek describes as “intended for girls” (75) despite the fact that the shōnen, shōjo and yōnen labels were no longer in use. This story finds a girl, stranded alone in Paris after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, becoming a nurse for wounded soldiers. Over the course of the story, the girl travels unchaperoned, gains employment outside the home and assists the war effort, yet Calsimsek concludes that, “in the modern state, the ‘man’ was constructed as the only ‘rightful person’ of 73 the public sphere, and the woman was assigned to be a ruled person, dependent on the ‘man’ and kept in the private sphere” (75). Calsimsek is applying the theories of political theorists, Benedict Anderson and George Mosse, which were not written with early Japanese children’s literature in mind. Consequently, the mutable, then-undetermined nature of boyhood, girlhood and childhood becomes a stumbling block to his analysis. However, his overall argument that gender roles in the changing world of children’s literature are imbricated with adult roles in a changing Japanese nation in this time period is entirely accurate. Shōnen Sekai stopped using the three headings of shōnen, shōjo and yōnen the year before Mirror World was first published. Calsimsek attributes this to an emphasis of national similarity over (gender) differences in the run-up to the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War (though he continues to describe stories as “intended for” specific audiences). How, then, does Mirror World fit into this de-gendered, nationalist picture of children’s literature? It follows a female protagonist who is made more polite than her English-language counterpart as she falls through a mirror into a strange world and embarks on an adventure that climaxes much like a traditional Japanese morality tale. In her analysis of Japanese Alice translations, Kusumoto notes that Mirror World is a minor chapter in the history of Shōnen Sekai translations, but argues that it is important not just as the first Japanese Alice translation, but because it “prepared the way for mysterious stories” (“Kaiki monogatari no omokage wo jūbun ni sonaeta”, 「怪奇物語の面影をじゅうぶんに備えた」, 楠本 26) by introducing characters, images and plot devices that were strikingly different from local traditions. 61 Kusumoto does not address gender issues other than to say that “As to why it ran in a shōnen magazine, rather than saying that it was because there 61 The phrase translated here as “mysterious stories” is kaiki monogatari ( 怪奇物語). A literal translation would be “mystery stories”, but in practice stories of this type tend to be about spooky events rather than crime and punishment. Thus, the phrase “mysterious stories” is invoked to avoid confusion with the mystery genre. 74 were no magazines aimed at shōjo at the time, it is natural to think that it was because Shōnen Sekai assumed at the time of its publication that it also had female readers” (“Shōnen zasshi ni kisai sareta no ha, tōji tekitō na shōjomuke zasshi ga nakatta tame to iu yori ha, ‘ Shōnen Sekai’ ha sōkanji kara shōjo no dokusha wo mo sōtei shiteita kara do to kangaeta hō ga shizen darō”, 「少年雑誌に記載されたのは、当時適当な少女向け雑誌がなかったためというよりは、『少年世界』は創刊時から少女の読者をも想定していたからだと考えた方が自然だろう」,楠本 27). Kusumoto thus implies that Mirror World was intended at least in part for those female readers, but she argues that the translation is important in a clearly non-gendered way. That is, Kusumoto only mentions gender briefly because she sees Mirror World as being significant in the history of the development of mysterious stories and Alice translations first and foremost. Nationalism does not enter into the equation, and gender merits only a brief mention. Looking-Glass was not translated by anyone else until 1920. By that time, Alice’s Adventures had been translated thirteen times. 62 The 1920 book, Wonderland (Fushigi no kuni, 不思議の国, figure 5), offers proof of how far knowledge about the West had spread into Japanese culture. Alice is denoted by a Japanized version of her name, Arisu ( アリス), that had already become a set translation for “Alice”. Since 1920, Arisu has even become a common name for Japanese girls. The Name Dictionary (Onamaejiten, お名前辞典), a website dedicated to helping parents name their children, lists Arisu as the 104 th most popular name for girls. The site also offers an astonishing 135 different ways to write Arisu with kanji. In addition to using the name Arisu, Wonderland contained new translations of both Alice’s Adventures and Looking- Glass and benefitted from being released as a novel from the start instead of being serialized. The translator, Kusuyama Masao, assumed that his readers knew fairly complex terms, such as 62 One of those translations was a revised version of 1908’s serialization, Sumakko’s Golden Key. 75 Anglo-Saxon (Anguro Sakuson, アングロ・サクソン, 345), and even inserted English words that Carroll had invented – “mome” and “outgrabing” (332), for example – in English characters with Japanese glosses on the side to preserve rhymes and rhythm (Image 4). Kusuyama clearly expected his readers to be familiar with British culture, but he still adjusted the text in some areas. Ham sandwiches seem to have been a known entity (Hamu sandouitchi, ハム・サンドウィッチ, 345), but the Queen’s tarts became manjū, or steamed buns. figure 5: A page from Kusuyama Masao’s 1920 translation of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Image courtesy of the National Diet Library. 76 Mirror World may not have been thought of as one of Shōnen Sekai’s major serials historically, but it reveals quite a bit about children’s magazines, Japanese literature, the gendering of Japanese children and the relationship between Japan’s interest in the West and its people’s desire to hold onto Japanese traditions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Literary experimentation was occurring at such a great rate that it could be found even in minor translations serialized in children’s magazines. British culture was deeply interesting, but it had to fit into Japanese forms and reflect Japanese morals. Those morals, however, were not set in stone, at least not for women. Alice had to behave politely to the adults around her, but she could enjoy train rides, travel about on her own and speak freely to strangers in her search for knowledge. Hasegawa’s moralizing over a carpenter’s attempt to reach Buddha’s paradise may seem quaint now, but he subtly encouraged both girls and boys to behave like children – a rather audacious proposition for a society whose nascent children’s literature had thus far depicted idealizations more often than actual children. Mirror World launched Alice in Japan with little fanfare, but great daring. The first twenty Japanese translations of Alice’s Adventures and Through the Looking- Glass suggest a unified world of literature. Eleven translations were published as single volumes of literature. Of the remaining nine, five ran in magazines aimed at a general child audience and one – Sumako’s Golden Key (1908-1909) – ran in a magazine aimed at girls, Girls’ Friend (Shōjo no tomo, 少女の友). Two translations ran in magazines aimed at women, leaving the final translation to run in a magazine aimed at English-language learners. In other words, Alice was introduced to a Japanese audience comprised of boys and girls, women and men. Alice translations introduced both children and adults to European life and culture, but they also served as a tool to help people learn English. The numbers supporting those conclusions may only be 77 drawn from an analysis of those translations that were serialized in magazines, but they apply to translations that appeared in novel form as well. Ōmizo Iichi’s 1911 translation, Alice’s Dream Story (Arisu yume monogatari, アリス夢物語), for instance, was clearly created for language learners. The book was designed with a two-page spread that enabled readers to see the English text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the left page and Ōmizo’s translation on the right simultaneously. While there is no evidence that Alice was marketed towards adults for their own reading pleasure, it is clear that Alice’s exact place in the literary firmament was undecided as of the early 1920s. It was clearly already popular enough to have rated a number of translations, but with no fixed group showing a particular interest in it, its popularity might reasonably have died out. That it did not is due to the efforts of authors and artists from all levels of society over the ensuing decades. Alice to today That translation played an important role in the development of modern Japanese literature has never been a secret. That role, however, has often been downplayed. Japanese authors were influenced by Western works to create new genres and styles, but the primary literature studied by scholars has always been those authors’ original works. Even when authors like Akutagawa Ryūnosuke created loose adaptations of Western stories, their original (or apparently original) works were discussed more often. As the preceding discussion of Alice translations in Japan shows, translation has functioned as a proving ground for new audiences, genres, and styles. The ideas of childhood, girlhood, and boyhood that appear eternal today were in fact created in the pages of magazines through the translation and re-translation of Alice and stories like it. The fact that authors and editors used foreign literature to develop these concepts, 78 however, does not mean that they were simply ceding the right or authority to create their own culture. Disney’s near irrelevance to Alice’s popularity in Japan despite the company’s international dominance proves that the Japanese are exerting their own agency regarding what foreign works they adapt and why. That agency can be seen clearly through the terms used to describe adaptation in Japan. The Japanese have chosen to categorize and prioritize different types of adaptations and translations in a way that corresponds to contemporary Japanese methods of media production rather than international norms. Through translation, the inarguably foreign Alice has thus become Japanese. 79 Chapter Three: Alice in Writing Introduction Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels revolve around a young girl whose image is famous throughout the world. Pale and blond, wearing a blue dress with a white pinafore and black shoes, Alice’s image seems set in stone. Yet, a mystery lurks at the heart of Alice, and that mystery has come to the fore in contemporary Japanese images of Alice. This chapter examines the Alice works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, acclaimed author and cultural touchstone for a generation, to show how this mystery became embedded in Japanese culture and simultaneously recast our understanding of Akutagawa’s oeuvre. Akutagawa produced a number of works in the months leading up to his death, some of which indicate a deep engagement with Alice. Yet, scholars have neglected to account for Alice in previous studies of Akutagawa’s work, to the extent that Akutagawa’s co-translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been entirely forgotten outside of Carrollian circles. Alice’s physical appearance today has largely been determined by the stellar work of illustrator John Tenniel and the Walt Disney Company. 63 Moreover, the novels’ Alice openly stood in for an actual girl, Alice Liddell. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was based on a fantasy tale the author told three sisters – Lorina, Alice, and Mary Liddell – while floating down the river Thames around Oxford. Alice Liddell served as both initial audience for the story and inspiration for the protagonist. Consequently, Alice seems a very concrete character; even small children can describe her coloring and dress with little trouble. Unlike most novelists’ 63 Tenniel’s illustrations for the first editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There have had a profound influence on later illustrators. Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland (dir. Geronimi, Jackson, and Luske, 1951) had a similar influence on the public view of Alice. In particular, where Tenniel adjusted Alice’s clothing to match children’s clothing trends over time (see Vaclavik in Carrington and Harding, 68-75 for more on Alice’s early clothing), Disney’s depiction of Alice in a blue dress with a white pinafore cemented the public view of Alice. With few exceptions, the standard image of Alice now includes Disney’s costume. 80 inspirations, the gestation of Alice’s Adventures is described in the text of the novel itself: Carroll prefaced his story with a poem, commonly called “All in the Golden Afternoon,” that describes the boat trip, story, and listeners. The girls’ identities are hidden to unknowing readers; they are referred to as Prima (Lorina, the eldest), Secunda (Alice), and Tertia (Mary, the youngest). On the other hand, Carroll hints at the story’s gestation heavily in the first stanza through the repetition of the word little, punning for Liddell: “For both our oars, with little skill,/ By little arms are plied,/ While little hands make vain pretence/ Our wanderings to guide” (Carroll 7). The three girls’ very real presence and desires – “There will be nonsense in it! [the story],” Secunda demands (ibid.) – thus haunt the text from the very beginning. This shadowy presence is complicated at the end of the poem. The final stanza begins with a direct appeal to “Alice! A childish story take,/ And, with a gentle hand,/ Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined/ In Memory’s mystic band… ” (Carroll 8). It is a lovely sentiment, and a fitting beginning for a Victorian children’s tale. Yet, it is clearly addressed to Alice, and Alice Liddell has been referred to only as Secunda until that point. The directive to preserve “a childish story” in one’s memory suggests that Carroll is speaking to Alice Liddell, and asking her to use the following, written version of the story he told Alice and her sisters to remember that “golden afternoon” even after she grows up. The final stanza of “All in the Golden Afternoon” is the first time that the name Alice appears in Alice’s Adventures. Because that final stanza serves as a hinge between a poem about the story’s emergence and the story itself, whether the name Alice denotes Alice Liddell or merely the titular character of the novel is unclear. It is impossible to know who this Alice is. Nor will she ever be precisely defined. When Carroll wrote the second Alice novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, he prefaced it with a similarly multifaceted poem 81 that ends with a sly reference to Liddell’s middle name, Pleasance (“The pleasance of our fairy- tale,” Carroll 158). Alice is an unknown quantity, a silhouette whose nature is never entirely understood. That mystery, which is central to the world of Alice in Wonderland, has evolved over time through the process of adaptation until it is the central feature of Alice in Wonderland in Japan today. The mystery of Alice in Japan descends from Akutagawa’s complex relationship with Alice. Akutagawa’s use of Alice epitomizes his relationship to other authors’ works throughout his career, and foreshadows his death. Consequently, it is important to examine Akutagawa’s place in Japanese literature and his role as a conduit between different cultures and ages. Reading and Rereading Akutagawa While Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927) is generally agreed to be Japan’s foremost short story author, in the ninety years since his suicide scholars have struggled to comprehend his oeuvre, his life, and his relationship to the tumultuous political, cultural, and economic world in which he lived. 64 Akutagawa committed suicide the year following the death of Emperor Taishō, and his death in that pivotal year was read from the start as marking the end of an era. Because Taishō was a sickly man, the fifteen years of his reign saw imperial power devolve to Japan’s National Diet. As a result, the Taishō period (1912-1926) is commonly considered a brief flowering of democratic society prior to a pre-World War II rise in fascism under the Shōwa emperor (reigned 1927-1989). The related historical periods – Taishō, Shōwa and also the Meiji 64 Glenn Shaw, an early translator of Akutagawa’s work, calls him, “a sort of literary ascetic” who “had more individuality than any other writer of his time” (in Akutagawa, vii). Susan Napier gives Akutagawa the backhanded compliment of “popular but serious” (14) where Edward Fowler simply calls Akutagawa an, “acclaimed short story writer” (250). Angela Yiu goes into more detail, arguing that Akutagawa, “transcend[s] the narrow confines of a single school or movement by virtue of [his] versatility and prolific career” (9-10), while Mark Silver writes that Akutagawa is a “highbrow writer” who became “trapped in the shadow of… Western models” (2). 82 period (1868-1912) which preceded both – demarcate political transitions which may be superficial. 65 Viewing the reign of the Taishō emperor as a separate political period encouraged some scholars to read Japanese history in the first half of the twentieth century as a set of discrete conflicts interspersed with peace rather than a continuous time as described in the previous chapter. Extending these weak political divisions into the realm of literature makes even less sense. However, as Seiji Lippit has described, contemporary scholars and the general reading public memorialized Akutagawa at the time of his death as an emblem – if not the embodiment – of a literary age that had passed into history with the Taishō era (39-41). The wide variety of works Akutagawa published in the months leading up to his death was thus seen not as an accomplished artist’s experimentation but the artistic defeat of a practitioner of pure literature. 66 This simplification of Akutagawa and his work made him into an icon inextricably tied to wider events despite the fact that his writing was known for its distance from contemporary life. 67 Perhaps because of this internal contradiction, later scholars reconsidered his works as part of wider stylistic and thematic trends. Rebecca Suter, for instance, sweeps Akutagawa’s Christian stories into a survey of how historical Japanese Christians have been depicted in modern Japanese literature. Suter analyzes Akutagawa’s work alongside Christian author Endō Shūsaku (1923-1996), mystery writer Yokomizo Seishi (1902-1981) and popular culture doyen Takemoto Novala (1968- ) in an effective collapse of both the imperial reign-based literary periodization 65 For a nuanced look at political issues that extend across the Taishō and Shōwa eras and their role in various wars, see Frederick Dickinson’s World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919-1930. 66 For more on Akutagawa’s place in literature after his death, see Seiji Lippit, 39-43. 67 Akutagawa was engaged throughout his life with debates on Japanese culture and society, most notably through writings like “Literary, All Too Literary” (“ 文芸的な、あまりに文芸的な”, 1927) on the development of modern Japanese literature. However, Donald Keene points out that Akutagawa was thinking and writing about the social ramifications of literature, specifically through the proletarian literature movement (576). Even so, because his stories are overwhelmingly set in the past and the veracity of his narrators is routinely challenged within the texts themselves, Akutagawa’s literature comes across as dissociated from contemporary struggles. 83 and the division between high and low culture. Where Suter focuses on Akutagawa’s subject matter, Lippit situates Akutagawa’s late works within the burgeoning modernist movement of 1920s Japan. Aaron Gerow, on the other hand, avoided both style and substance to discuss the role of another medium – cinema – within three Akutagawa works, two of which were published in the year of his death. Regardless of which approach scholars take, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is consistently revered as one of modern Japan’s most talented writers. If Akutagawa is one of modern Japan’s most respected authors, he is also one of its most contested. His life and his oeuvre have been conflated, and together they are seen as embodying the defeat of Taisho democracy. However, the impact of Akutagawa’s work is undercut even aside from the political implications of his death. His work is derided as derivative and unoriginal. 68 Even those who would praise Akutagawa’s work find themselves dragging out Akutagawa’s use of others’ works as proof of his imperfection. Yet, disparaging Akutagawa’s work as imitative is simply another way of saying that Akutagawa’s ability to reinvigorate stories is unparalleled. Akutagawa was a voracious reader of both European and Japanese literature, and the texts he read created a huge, constantly growing mass of ideas that reemerge in his texts in startling new configurations, bred together by Akutagawa and guided by his masterful styling. Akutagawa’s stories are regularly encased in a frame; a narrator tells the reader how he came to hear a story, recounts said story and then ends by saying something to the effect that he does not know if it really happened. The frame narrator is even Akutagawa himself occasionally, as when he narrates a story as it was supposedly told to him in “Death of a Disciple” ( 奉教人の 68 Seiji Lippit notes that, “perhaps the most frequently repeated criticism of Akutagawa’s work was its supposed lack of originality” (42). A measured example of this criticism can be seen in Susan Napier’s comment that Kappa is “problematic” because, “it seems to combine aspects of the confessional shishōsetsu within a clearly fantastic genre inspired by both Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon” (191). A less measured example can be found in Glenn Shaw’s description of Akutagawa as, “an Oriental saturated with western [sic] literature playing with an old theme in a highly amusing and clever way” (in Akutagawa, v). It is worth noting that all three authors respect Akutagawa’s work. 84 死, 1918). By placing himself in the position of a mere transmitter of information, Akutagawa highlights that the central story as fictive (since Akutagawa tacitly admits having chosen the wording himself) while simultaneously being positioned as something that might have happened to someone else. Akutagawa’s narrators often imply that they were told the story just as it was written down, thus suggesting that the main episode did in fact happen to someone. This sense of a real basis behind his stories is heightened by Akutagawa’s use of adaptation; stories are likely to seem familiar to readers even when they cannot identify the adapted work. Akutagawa’s most obvious adaptation is also one of his most famous works: “Rashōmon” ( 羅生門, 1914), one of two short stories that formed the basis of the Golden Lion-winning film Rashōmon (dir. Kurosawa Akira, 1950). Akutagawa’s “Rashōmon” was adapted from stories in Tales of Times Now Past ( 今昔物語集), a roughly millennium-old collection of Japanese folktales with which his readers would have been familiar. Akutagawa adapted foreign literature as well as Japanese, though he rarely acknowledged his works as adaptations. “The Spider’s Thread” ( 蜘蛛の糸, 1918), for example, was revealed to be an adaptation of Paul Carus’ Karma: A story of Buddhism – itself an Orientalized adaptation of a tale in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov – only in 1968 (Miller 1-3). Mats Karlsson similarly describes Akutagawa’s “Cogwheels” as an adaptation of August Strindberg’s Inferno, though he also notes that some of the things Akutagawa took from Inferno Strindberg had picked up from other literature. In Karlsson’s words, “Akutagawa’s personal hell turns out not to be completely his own after all. It is not even, in the final analysis, Strindberg’s. On the contrary, what we find on the pages of ‘Cogwheels’ are verbal constructions, 85 reverberations, and echoes from all kinds of literary sources and cultural trends” (186). 69 Akutagawa might not have known of Carus’ lifting of Karma from The Brothers Karamazov, but as an astute reader of up-to-the-minute European literature he would have understood the complex background that produced Inferno. Akutagawa was thus a conscious adapter of works that were embedded in a constantly-shifting cultural milieu. There would have been no need to announce his works as adaptations; educated readers would have understood the literary and stylistic conversations in which he was engaging while uneducated readers would have enjoyed well-written stories. At the same time, Akutagawa occasionally played with readers’ expectations by stating in his works’ frames that the following stories were adaptations when in fact the ensuing tales were original. For example, Akutagawa claims within the frame of “Death of a Disciple” that he is merely republishing a section of a Japanese translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, but Thomas Beebee and Ikuho Amano note that this translation never existed (23). They also point out that Ikegami Keiko, while searching for this nonexistent Japanese translation, found that Akutagawa did rely upon a number of texts in writing “Death of a Disciple,” including French and English translations of the Legenda Aurea and Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese translation of Anatole France’s novel, Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (ibid.). Donald Keene points to the latter novel as one of several influences for Akutagawa’s “Death of a Martyr” – along with Lamartine’s Jocelyn, Henri de Régnier’s Vengeance, Mori Ogai’s translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s Improvisatoren, Henryk Sienkiewicz’ Quo Vadis, Friederich Hebbel’s Judith, and a 69 Other adaptations by Akutagawa include “The Ball” ( 舞踏会, 1920) – from Pierre Loti’s “Un Bal à Yeddo” (1887) – and the early story “Hyottoko.” David Fahy notes similarities between “Hyottoko” and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s “Hōkan” (624), and it resembles Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in some respects as well. Thomas Beebee and Ikuho Amano suggest that another of Akutagawa’s final works, A Fool’s Life ( 或阿呆の一生, 1927) might be considered a pseudotranslation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Western-Eastern Divan (West-östlicher Divan, 1919). 86 number of Japanese works. Faced with a list that long, it is unsurprising that Keene concluded that “Akutagawa’s lack of originality” was his “crucial weakness” despite there being “no question of direct imitation” (565-566). Akutagawa’s ingenuity in obscuring his adaptive activities has led scholars to search his works for any hint of influence. Consequently, Akutagawa has at times been misrepresented as a stylistic genius with no creativity. Keene summed up this view succinctly by saying that, “Later in his career, a seeming inability to invent materials forced him to draw on even the most trivial incidents of his life” (565). Yet, the final year of Akutagawa’s life brought forth a flowering of works of startling breadth and ingenuity, many of which stand among his greatest masterpieces today. Two of those works represent a little-known, yet extended engagement with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Akutagawa’s Alice Story That Akutagawa co-translated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may surprise scholars of Japanese literature, but it has been common knowledge in Carrollian circles for years. Kusumoto Kimie devoted a section of her book on Alice translations to it ( 楠本 98-101), and Chimori Mikiko regularly introduces it in both her English and her Japanese work (Chimori, and 千森 349-357). In contrast, the work was omitted from Chikuma Shobō’s Complete Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke ( 芥川龍之介全集, hereafter Complete Works) reference collection, does not appear alongside Akutagawa’s other works on the otherwise-comprehensive Japanese literature website Aozora Bunko, and has not been referred to by those writing about modern Japanese literature more broadly. As the Complete Works does include Akutagawa’s translations of Anatole France’s Balthasar (1889), W.B. Yeats’ “The Heart of the Spring” (1897), and Théophile Gautier’s La Morte Amoreuse (1836), its omission of Alice is striking. In another 87 tome dissecting the author’s life and works, Yoshida Seiichi tackles several of Akutagawa’s lesser known works, but entirely misses his Alice ( 吉田精一). The general consensus among scholars is that translations of Western literature played a vital role in the development of modern Japanese literature, yet scholarly neglect of those translations has undermined their position in literary history. In Alice’s case, its perceived position as part of children’s literature doubtless enabled its sidelining from studies of Akutagawa specifically and Japanese literary history more generally. Julia Mickenburg and Lynne Vallone note that children’s literature “was not thought important” (The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, 7) in the English- speaking academic world in the 1980s. Scholarly writing on children’s literature has been similarly ignored in Japan, though Michiyo Hayashi and Ariko Kawabata trace the history of scholarly Japanese writing on children’s literature back to a 1909 book by Kishibe Fukuo (242). The literary community’s ignorance of Alice Story is perhaps abetted by the translation’s unusual history and place within Akutagawa’s oeuvre. Akutagawa was a sickly child, and the son of a sickly woman. His mother is said to have been mad, and young Akutagawa was haunted by the idea that he, too, would one day lose his mind. Whether his presumption was correct or whether his own belief in his oncoming madness eventually generated his symptoms is impossible to say, but Akutagawa sank into a deepening depression in the mid-1920s which ended with his suicide in the summer of 1927. 70 The period immediately before his death was rather prolific, with the publication of the classics “Cogwheels” ( 歯車), “A Fool’s Life” ( 或阿呆の一生), and “A Note to a Certain Old Friend” ( 或旧友へ送る手記), among others. Akutagawa’s worsening depression was obvious to his friends and even the public at large: his stories had changed over time, with madness becoming a key theme and Akutagawa’s writing 70 For more on Akutagawa’s life, see Donald Keene’s Dawn to the West (556-593). 88 style morphing to resemble the semi-autobiographical I-novel genre. One of those friends, Kan Kikuchi, thought he was in a position to help. Kikuchi (1888-1948) and Akutagawa were old schoolmates, though they did not become close friends until later in life. 71 By 1927, Kikuchi was a renowned playwright known for merging the Irish and Japanese theatrical traditions. He was a burgeoning editor as well, and it is perhaps in his extra-authorial activities that his greatest influence ultimately lies. Kikuchi’s spiralling ambitions moved from writing to editorial activities and then the beginnings of a career in politics. As part of his erstwhile political adventures, he supported Japan’s wartime mobilization by collaborating with militarists. Consequently, his influence was drastically curtailed after the war and his plays are rarely spoken about in scholarly literature today. However, many of the authors whom Kikuchi supported went on to earn places in the modern Japanese literary pantheon. In particular, Kikuchi founded the monthly literary magazine Bungeishunjū ( 文藝春秋) in 1923. Bungeishunjū remains one of Japan’s most respected literary magazines today, and still nurtures talent in part through an award established by Kikuchi in honor of Akutagawa. The semi-annual Akutagawa Prize ( 芥川龍之介賞) is awarded to the best work of literature to run in a newspaper or magazine, with winning works re-published in Bungeishunjū. Since the prize was established in 1935, it has been awarded to a diverse group of authors including Kōno Taeko, Abe Kōbō, Hayashi Kyoko, Oe Kenzaburō, Yū Miri, Murakami Ryū, Lee Yangji, Machida Kō and Kawakami Mieko. 71 For more on Akutagawa’s friendship with Kikuchi, see G.H. Healey’s Introduction in Bownas’ translation of Akutagawa’s Kappa or Glenn Shaw’s Introduction to Tales Grotesque and Curious. 89 In 1927, Kikuchi was editing a series of books for children called The Complete Collection for Elementary Schoolers ( 小学生全集, hereafter The Complete Collection). 72 Concerned at his friend’s deepening depression, Kikuchi attempted to distract Akutagawa from his problems by asking him to translate Alice’s Adventures and Peter Pan for The Complete Collection. Akutagawa committed suicide midway through his translation, on the 24 th of July. Kikuchi finished the translation himself, making their Alice Story ( アリス物語, 1927) a rare co- publication by two of modern Japan’s most important writers. As Kikuchi puts it in the postscript to Alice Story, “This Alice Story and Peter Pan were given to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, and he started work on them during his lifetime. I took them up, and have finished them” ( 「この「アリス物語」と「ピーターパン」とは、芥川龍之介氏の担任のもので、生前多少手をつけていてくれたものを、僕が後を引き受けて、完成したものです。」in 芥川 and 菊池、254). Due to the unique circumstances behind these two translations, it is unlikely that a literary work like them will occur again. 73 Alice Story What kind of story is Akutagawa and Kikuchi’s Alice? By 1927, the name Arisu ( アリス) had solidified as the proper way to refer to Alice, and abbreviated translations of the novel were becoming rarer. Alice Story contains all twelve chapters of Alice’s Adventures. However, 72 The series eventually ran to more than 80 volumes. Other books included translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales and The Jungle Book; stories about naval battles; histories of other nations and educational information about topics like physical chemistry and raising livestock. 73 It is unclear how much Akutagawa contributed to each translation, but Alice Story was published in November of 1927, mere months after Akutagawa’s suicide. Peter Pan was published in April of 1929, almost two full years after Akutagawa’s death. It seems reasonable that Akutagawa had made significant progress on Alice Story at the time of his death, but may have completed little to no work on Peter Pan. 90 like most Japanese translations, it omits the explanatory poem “All in the Golden Afternoon.” 74 In consequence, the story opens with a third-person description of the character of Alice sitting on an embankment rather than a first-person account of the ensuing story’s gestation. Given that Akutagawa is famous for framing his stories within other stories, the removal of a preexisting frame seems curious, but it must be remembered that the story of Alice’s sojourn in Wonderland is still framed by two short interludes on the embankment with Alice’s sister. Even so, by removing “All in the Golden Afternoon,” Akutagawa solidified young Alice in a way that she was not in the English version. Alice Story’s opening differs from Alice’s Adventures’ first chapter in its characterization of young Alice in other ways as well. Carroll’s Alice is bored and listless, almost irritable in the summer heat and uncaring of either her sister or her sister’s book. Akutagawa and Kikuchi’s Alice brings to mind those early Japanese Alices whose manners were improved in translation. However, where Hasegawa Tenkei’s first translation of Alice had made the young girl more polite as part of a general moralizing impetus, that focus on morality is reduced in Alice Story. Hasegawa’s Mirror World was part of the first wave of children’s literature in Japan, when moralizing and the idealized depiction of children were quite common. Thus, Hasegawa made his Alice more polite and inserted a Buddhist parable about salvation. In Alice Story, that moralization has given way to a nonjudgmental focus on education. Akutagawa and Kikuchi pursue an educational agenda throughout Alice Story in a variety of ways. Alice’s motivations and emotions are subtly tweaked to help her symbolize a good child to their readers. For example, where Carroll’s Alice is “tired of” both “sitting by her sister 74 The varying treatment of this poem could spawn a paper of its own. While most hard-copy, English-language publications of Alice’s Adventures include it, versions posted online (such as those on Project Gutenberg and Literature.org) consistently omit it. One conjectures that this is due to the poem’s placement prior to the first chapter. Because the poem is not listed separately in the table of contents, organizations posting the book online may not realize that it is properly part of Alice’s Adventures. 91 on the bank, and of having nothing to do” (11), in Alice Story Alice is bored because she has nothing to do despite sitting with her sister on the bank (“Arisu ha neesama to issho ni, dote ni nobotteimashita ga, nan ni mo suru koto ga nai no de, sukkari akiaki shite kimashita,” 「アリスは姉さまと一緒に、土手に登っていましたが、何にもすることがないので、すつかり飽き飽きして来ました。」, 7). Similarly, where Carroll’s Alice responds to heat-induced lethargy by debating whether to make a daisy-chain for the “pleasure” of it (11), Akutagawa and Kikuchi’s Alice is motivated by a virtuous desire to “suppress” her sleepiness (“Atsusa ni karada ga darekete, nemuku natte kuru no wo osaeru tame ni, dekiru dake isshokenmei kokoro no uchi de, hitotsu okiagatte hanawa wo tsukuru,” 「暑さにからだがだらけて、眠くなつて来るのをおさへるために、できるだけ一所懸命心の内で、一つ起きあがつて花環を作る」, 7). In both cases, Alice’s actions remain the same, but Akutagawa and Kikuchi diminish feelings (boredom with her sister) that good children are not supposed to have and insert motivations (being active rather than lazy) that would inculcate healthy behaviors in their readers. The skillful manner of these alterations maintains the overall story and feel of the book while adapting it to local customs such as restraint from criticizing one’s elder family members. Had Akutagawa and Kikuchi limited themselves to changing Alice’s behaviour, Alice Story might simply seem to be a less religious yet still moralizing version of Alice à la Mirror World. They went a step farther still, introducing global terms and ideas much like Hasegawa had, but with a much stronger emphasis on education. In addition to inserting new-to-Japanese terms such as pocket (poketto, ポケット, 8) and jacket (chokki, チョッキ, ibid.) throughout the text, the translators maintained Carroll’s basic sentence structure, in the sense that they did not compile shorter English sentences into long Japanese sentences. English sentences tend to be shorter and simpler than Japanese sentences, so the translators’ choice here simultaneously 92 supplied simple sentences for young readers and familiarized them with a foreign literary style. Akutagawa and Kikuchi also applied a plethora of commas to divide sentences into short phrases. Examine the following sentence, one of the longest in Alice Story: アリスはその壷を、下にはふり込まうと思ひましたけれど、下に生物でも居たら殺す心配がありましたので、止めて落ちて行きながら、途中にある戸棚に、やつとそれを載つけました。(11) Despite not being a particularly long sentence by Japanese standards, it is broken into six pieces. The first and last breaks, in particular, are neither grammatically necessary nor common locations to place a comma. By dividing sentences extensively throughout the book, Akutagawa and Kikuchi make it easier for young readers to process complicated ideas and chains of action when they were present in the English. In addition to changing Alice’s Adventures for educational purposes, Akutagawa and Kikuchi exercised artistic license. Carroll’s wordplay and humor are particularly difficult to translate; translators are often faced with the choice to either translate literally and lose humor or create humorous translations that misrepresent Carroll’s characters and/or story. In Alice Story, a few canny insertions add humor in a way that maintains Carroll’s interest in wordplay while taking advantage of new opportunities opened up by the Japanese language. Take the following section of Alice and its translation: “Well!” thought Alice to herself. “After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling downstairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! (13) 93 “‘Maa.’ to Arisu ha hitori de kangaemashita. ‘Konna ochikata wo sureba, kore kara ha nikai kara okkochiru koto nanka, heiki no heiza da wa. Sō suru to uchi no hito nanka, watashi wo zuibun tsuyoi to omou koto deshō nee. (11-12) 「まあ。」とアリスは独りで考へました。「こんな落ちかたをすれば、これからは二階から落つこちることなんか、平気のへ平左だわ。さうするとうちの人なんか、わたしをずいぶん強いと思ふことでせうねえ。(11-12) Carroll’s English is translated faithfully, but the translators manipulate the text to include an uncommon saying with a humorous sound. Heiki no heiza ( 平気のへ平左) literally means “nonchalant”. It is therefore not a direct translation of Carroll’s passage, but the phrase it is translating, “I shall think nothing”, makes no sense in Japanese. While “I shall think nothing” is not particularly humorous in English, the translators took advantage of the important role homonyms and similar-sounding words play in Japanese humor to expand on Carroll’s own wordplay. Akutagawa and Kikuchi’s Alice Story is a serviceable translation that maintains Carroll’s sense of humor while incorporating lightly educational terms and concepts. Between Akutagawa and Kikuchi’s precise characterization and the removal of “All in the Golden Afternoon,” Alice Story depicts a unified Alice. It is fun to read, but it would remain an amusing oddity in Akutagawa’s oeuvre were it not for one thing: Alice Story is not his only Alice. In the same year that Akutagawa turned his hand to Alice Story, he published a loose adaptation of Alice’s Adventures under another title, Kappa. 94 Kappa As stated above, Alice Story is well-known amongst Japanese Carrollians whilst being virtually unknown amongst scholars of Japanese literature. Akutagawa’s novella Kappa, on the other hand, is reasonably well-known among scholars of Japanese literature but of little interest to Carrollians. 75 Moreover, those scholars have yet to connect Kappa with Alice in any meaningful way. Kappa is fairly prominent among Akutagawa’s works, in part because it is his only successful long-form piece. Akutagawa published Kappa in March of 1927, the year that Kikuchi finished and published Alice Story, the year that Akutagawa committed suicide. Kappa is closely associated with the mental or emotional deterioration that led Akutagawa to commit suicide – and thus tied to Akutagawa himself – in the minds of readers and scholars, to the extent that the anniversary of Akutagawa’s death is called Kappaki ( 河童忌), or “Mourning Kappa.” On July 24 th of every year, the anniversary of Akutagawa’s death is used as an excuse to celebrate his life and works in ways large and small, but always under the name of Kappa. For example, the online platform Twitter saw 46 tweets on or around July 24 th , 2016 using the hashtag 河童忌. Some of these are general wishes for Akutagawa to rest in peace, but the majority refer specifically to Kappa. Manga artist, Tomoya Kuroya, for example, tweeted a photograph of a sign wherein a kappa warns readers not to litter. Kuroya appended the note, “Today is the anniversary of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s death, Kappaki, isn’t it? Here’s a photo of a scary kappa I met in Shizuoka Prefecture. #Kappaki” (Image 1). Other tweeters were less irreverent, but all saw Akutagawa’s death through the lens of Kappa. I would like to reorient that lens to consider Kappa’s origins in Alice and how Akutagawa’s treatment of madness in Kappa relates to his own incipient demise. 75 The title of Kappa refers to one of Japan’s traditional demons. Kappa are notable for carrying bowls full of water on their heads. 95 figure 6: Kappaki tweet by user @kuroyatomoya from July 24 th , 2016. Kappa has been associated with Alice in Wonderland before, but not directly tied to it. In his book on modernism in Japanese literature, William Tyler makes an extended comparison likening Kappa’s protagonist’s fall into Kappaland to Alice’s into Wonderland. Tyler concludes that, “What may seem like Alice in Wonderland [sic] can all too quickly devolve into Animal Farm” (35). In the same year, Akira Mizuta Lippit read Kappa together with Carroll’s Alice novels and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915) in a study of animality in the modern period. 76 However, Kappa is most often associated with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726); the first English translation of Kappa was even subtitled Gulliver in a Kimono. 77 Thus, Lippit introduced Kappa “in part as a response to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels” prior to mentioning Alice (154). Scholars including Seiji Lippit and Jonathan Abel have also likened Kappa to Gulliver’s Travels in varying degrees. Sometimes Kappa is, “modeled on” Gulliver’s Travels (Seiji Lippit 48), at other times it merely displays, “a satirical derangement on par with” the novel (Abel 63). Yoshida Seiichi, an Akutagawa specialist who edited Akutagawa’s Complete Works, listed Gulliver’s Travels, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: or, Over the 76 More tenuously, Angela Yiu argues that “Wonder Island” ( “ 不思議な島”, 1924) is “a draft version” (201) of Kappa in various respects, and that it (as opposed to Kappa) is “modeled on Alice in Wonderland” (ibid.). 77 Translated by Seiichi Shiojiri in 1948. See Koon-ki Ho’s “Kappa as a Dystopia: A study of Akutagawa’s anti- utopian thought” for more on Shiojiri’s translation and an analysis of Kappa in relation to utopianism and Gulliver’s Travels. 96 Range (1872), and Anatole France’s L'Île des Pingouins (1908) (in 芥川龍之介全集 vol. 3, pg 417) as sources. It is easy to see the connection: both Kappa and Gulliver’s Travels feature, after a short frame that questions the narrator’s judgment, a man describing his travels in a strange, fantastical land to the reader. However, the two novels are also quite different. Where Kappa’s narrator traveled only to one land, Gulliver traveled to an assortment of nations which were designed to complement each other. For example, Lilliput, a land of miniscule people, was his first port of call, and it was followed by Brobdingnag, land of the giants. Where Gulliver traveled outside of his home nation to reach these various islands, Kappaland exists underneath Japan. Further, Gulliver never met fantasy creatures that could match Japan’s kappa. Rather, he met small humans, large humans, weird humans, and horses. 78 Consequently, at best Kappa is slightly reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels. In contrast, Kappa is clearly related to Alice in Wonderland. The protagonist’s narration begins amid the greenery of the Japan Alps. He spies a strange animal – the kappa – and gives chase, ultimately falling down a seemingly-endless hole into Kappaland. The narrator consequently sojourns awhile in a strange land ruled by a type of unlogic where the rules of human society sort of, but do not quite, apply. Akutagawa makes a point of noting that the kappa at first appears gray, only to later seem green ( 芥川, 7). Given that kappa are traditionally a muddy shade of green, Akutagawa’s decision to make his narrator chase a whitish creature down an animal-made hole must be an intentional reference to Alice. 79 The protagonist’s character is similar to Alice as well, in that he displays curiosity, practicality and a pragmatic 78 In his final sojourn, Gulliver went to a land he considered utopia, Houyhnhnms. Houyhnhnms was occupied by creatures of the same name, who are particularly advanced horses, and a vile creature that readers quickly understand to be a savage form of humanity. 79 Akutagawa later notes that kappa can change color like chameleons. For more on kappa, see Michael Dylan Foster, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese monsters and the culture of yōkai and The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious creatures of Japanese folklore. 97 fearlessness. Like Alice, the fear he feels whilst falling down the endless kappa hole fades and he begins to think of commonplaces. Also like Alice, he prosaically questions the locals he meets throughout his journey as to how their unlogical society operates, at times finding their answers alarming. For instance, one group of kappa are propounding a breeding programme intended to raise the quality of the kappa species as a whole. Where “logical”, real-world breeding programmes of this sort have historically relied on the suppression of breeding by undesirable populations, the kappa programme involves mating superior kappa with lesser kappa. The protagonist responds thusly: “Of course, I informed Lap [a kappa] then as well that that sort of thing couldn’t happen” (“Boku ha mochiron sono toki ni mo sonna koto no okonawarenai koto wo Rappu hanashite kikasemashita,” 「僕は勿論その時にもそんなことの行はれないことをラップ話して聞かせました。」芥川龍之介全集 vol. 3, 348), only to be laughed at by all of the kappa within earshot. Lap further points out that that humans already practice kappa-style breeding whenever elite sons fall in love with maids or elite daughters fall for drivers. In this exchange, Akutagawa is playing with readers in the same style Carroll uses. First, he presents a jarring scenario in a strange and fantastical land prompted by a normal, human visitor to that land. Then, local residents turn the visitor’s pragmatism on its head to make everyday life seem absurd and comical without any sense of mean-spiritedness. Compare Akutagawa’s narrator to Alice upon meeting the Mad Hatter at tea: “‘Then you should say what you mean,’ the March Hare went on. ‘I do,’ Alice hastily replied; ‘at least–at least I mean what I say– that’s the same thing, you know.’ 98 ‘Not the same thing a bit!’ said the Hatter. ‘Why, you might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!’” (Carroll 84-85) Alice offers a simple response that most readers would accept without a second thought. However, the Hatter observes that the two phrases are entirely different; a person might stand behind what one has said, but that is different from speaking words which accurately reflect one’s thoughts in their entirety. As with the unlogical aspects of Alice, Kappa displays logical arguments that somehow fail to quite persuade. Kappa resembles Alice stylistically in a variety of ways. Akutagawa matches Carroll’s simultaneously odd and familiar character names with intentionally alien kappa names that sound like they might be English words. Character names like Lap (Rappu, ラップ), Bag (Baggu, バッグ), Chuck (Chakku, チャック), Tock (Tokku, トック), and Mug (Maggu, マッグ) are clearly marked as foreign by the katakana in which they are written. They are further tied to the Romantic family of languages through the deployment of Kappanese within the text. When Akutagawa inserted Kappa-language text in his novella, he used Roman letters. Moreover, his few invented Kappanese phrases are reminiscent of the brief references to Latin common in English literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. For example, “Quax, Bag, quo quel quan?” (Roman letters in the original, 芥川龍之介全集 vol. 3, 345). By removing the first x and taking advantage of the French quel, this phrase could be read, “Which way, Bag, where which how?” Much like Alice’s inability to get a straight answer from the Mad Hatter or the Cheshire Cat, Kappanese denies speakers the ability to express logical thoughts, let alone answer 99 questions. 80 Given that Akutagawa was likely already preparing to translate Alice for Kikuchi when he wrote Kappa, it can be said that Kappa is yet another unannounced Akutagawa adaptation, this time of Alice. Akutagawa read and was influenced by Gulliver’s Travels, but that novel is not the primary inspiration for Kappa. 81 To understand Kappa, one has to keep in mind that Akutagawa excelled at obfuscating his inspirations, influences, and sources. In a February 2 nd , 1927 letter to the poet Saitō Mokichi, Akutagawa wrote that he was in the middle of two works, one of which was, “a piece called Kappa in the style of Gulliver’s Travels” (“‘Kappa’ to tsutau Guarivā no ryokō kishiki no mono wo mo seizōchū,” “ 「河童」と伝ふグアリヴアの旅行記式のものをも製造中”, 芥川龍之介全集 vol. 8, 84). That sentence seems to be the basis for the argument that Kappa is an adaptation of or was inspired by Gulliver. However, nine days later Akutagawa wrote his disciple Mosaku Sasaki to that say that Kappa was his The Story of Reynard the Fox (Reineke Fuchs), a satiric fable about a sly fox by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (“‘Kappa’ ha boku no Rainekke fukkusu da,” “ 「河童」は僕のライネツケフツクスだ。”, 芥川龍之介全集 vol. 8, 85). In fact, during the short period in which Akutagawa wrote Kappa, he was thinking about a host of other works. In his letters, he refers to the writings of several British men of the Victorian age, including John Ruskin, William Morris, and George Bernard Shaw. 82 While it is uncertain when Akutagawa was first introduced to Alice, he does at least know of The Complete 80 Akira Mizuta Lippit further notes Carroll’s influence in a kappa who lives his life backwards, which Lippit compares to a conversation in which Alice and the White Queen discuss the same concept (240 n. 46). 81 Akutagawa first refers to Swift’s work in a November 1 st , 1913 letter to his friend the industrialist, Hara Zen’ichirō where he mentions taking a course that included an unnamed work or works by Jonathan Swift ( 芥川龍之介全集 vol. 7, 39-43). He did not mention Carroll’s work in the letters contained in the Complete Works, but his letters to Kikuchi are not included in that volume. 82 Letter from this time also refer to William Caxton’s translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, the Gesta Romanorum collection of stories for preachers, and an assortment of Japanese authors and writings. 100 Collection, the series for which he would translate the novel, by March 28 th . 83 In fact, Yoshida Seiichi notes in a chronology of Akutagawa’s life that Akutagawa was actually a co-editor of The Complete Collection as of early February – the short but intense period Akutagawa spent writing Kappa (in 芥川龍之介全集 vol. 8, 291)\. 84 In this context, Akutagawa’s response to Kappa’s reception is also important. On April 3 rd , he wrote Yoshida Yasushi, whom he had neither met nor corresponded with previously, in response to Yoshida’s review of Kappa. He declared that Yoshida’s review was the only one to move him, as the novella had been borne from his disgust with the world and himself, such that others’ praise of Kappa’s “cheerful wit” (“Akarui kichi,” “ 明るい機智”, 芥川龍之介全集 vol. 8, 90) merely depressed him further. Yet, cheerful humor with a dark edge is a hallmark of both Goethe’s Reynard and Carroll’s Alice. Akutagawa’s letters make clear that his mood was not unrelievedly dark at the time he was writing Kappa. For instance, the day after he told Sasaki that he had finished Kappa, Akutagawa wrote about William Morris’ “Love is Enough” to the poet Okuma Nobuyuki. Though short, “Love is Enough” movingly evokes the beauty of love in an oft tragic world. In the midst of his growing despair, the literary arts Akutagawa loved seem to have still been shining a light in the depths of his mind. That Alice’s structure, plot, style, and tone haunt Kappa is clear. Akutagawa’s irritation with his reviewers’ immediate attraction to those aspects of Kappa that most resemble Alice and his repeated attempts to align Kappa with 83 In a March 2 nd , letter to Saitō Mokichi, Akutagawa notes that, “When I get to Tokyo, Kikuchi and the rest are beginning some sort of yomihon yet again with a great deal of energy. ” (“Soko he mairu to Kikuchi nado ha taishita ikioi ni te mata mata nantoka yomihon wo hajimesō,” “ そこへ参ると菊池などは大した勢ひにて又又何とか読本をはじめ候。”, 芥川龍之介全集 vol. 8, 90). He writes as though he is still writing Kappa, saying that he hoped “to add tens of more pages to Kappa if I could only find the time” (“‘Kappa’ nado ha jikan sae areba, mada nanjūmai de mo kakeru tsumori,” 「河童」などは時間さへあれば、まだ何十枚でも書けるつもり, ibid.), but in fact Kappa was published shortly thereafter. 84 Yoshida says that Akutagawa was put in a difficult position at this time due to a slanderous announcement about The Complete Collection and another book series. Other than this single reference, The Complete Collection is not mentioned in the Akutagawa’s Complete Works. 101 other works merely reveal that he either was unaware of Alice’s presence within in his mind or chose to hide his main source for Kappa as he had for other works. Understanding Kappa as an adaptation of Alice naturally changes how one reads the novella. Akutagawa’s adaptation makes two major changes to Alice’s story. First, he inserts an adult Japanese man for Carroll’s young British girl. Early Alice translations were regularly serialized in magazines for child audiences (as opposed to girl audiences) as well as magazines aimed at adults. Kappa, featuring an adult male protagonist and aimed at an adult audience, continued to reach out to a diverse audience. Perhaps this audience was too diverse. As Linda Hutcheon has argued, an adaptation must be, “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works” (8). In other words, readers must know that a work is an adaptation of another work, whose presence they recognize in the adaptation, in order for a work to function as an adaptation. The continuing insistence on reading Kappa in terms of Gulliver’s Travels by scholars who acknowledge the difficulty of accurately attributing Akutagawa’s works suggests that Kappa has not been fully understood for the majority of its existence. In consequence, the majority of scholarly analyses of Kappa stress the novella’s darker aspects and tie those sections directly to Akutagawa’s worsening depression. Examining Kappa in relation to Carroll’s work, on the other hand, highlights the humor reviewers were initially drawn to, before Akutagawa committed suicide. The Queen of Hearts’ incessant threats to behead her subjects could be terrifying were it not for the fact that she never follows through on any of them. Similarly, the death of a kappa baby could be horrific were it not for the fact that the fetus chooses not to be born in the first place in protest of its father’s insanity through a comical sequence wherein the fetus’ father kneels by his wife’s groin and whispers to it. Kappa is dark, as many of 102 Akutagawa’s 1927 works were, but to focus on that darkness exclusively because of Akutagawa’s actions after writing Kappa is to do a disservice to the text. The second major change Akutagawa wrought to Alice lies in a manipulation of the story’s frame. Alice’s frame is entirely separate from Wonderland. Her sojourn is treated as a dream which has no lasting effect on her. The continuing popularity of the Alice stories stems from this stability. To read Alice is to be faced with a world where logical thought no longer yields logical results, and to return from this world unscathed. Alice deals with a central paradox of human communication: if humanity could truly communicate perfectly, the arguments that persuade oneself ought also persuade others, and yet disagreements persist. At heart, Alice shows that a person can travel into the unlogical mind of the other and return safely. Wonderland’s array of charming cats, crazy teatime rituals, and dictatorial queens appeal to readers of all kinds because the concern being remedied exists at all ages and for all genders. As Akira Lippit and Antonin Artaud argue, Carroll, “like Alice returns, in the end, to his senses” (142). In contrast, Kappa’s frame opens with a potential madman and closes on an undeniable lunatic. 85 Lippit ties Kappa, Alice, and The Metamorphosis together through their common depiction of, “the collapse of a stable human subjectivity” (159). In Alice, this collapse stems from Wonderland’s lack of, “a referentially stable language” (138), or the fact that words spoken in Wonderland no longer mean what one would expect them to. This unstable language and subjectivity extends to Kappaland as, “Akutagawa explodes his mother’s madness[… ] across the landscape” (159). Indeed, Kappa’s madness is, in fact, Akutagawa’s mother’s madness rather than his own. Akutagawa wrote many times of his belief that his mother’s madness was hereditary. His growing mental distress led him to spend most of 85 Incidentally, here is found the strongest influence of Gulliver’s Travels. Though Gulliver lacks a closing frame, his madness becomes steadily clearer at the close of the novel as he discusses preferring his horses to his family and servants in a clear satire of the horse-mad British nobility. 103 1926 in retreat with his family in his wife’s hometown. He wrote little, focusing instead on recovering his equilibrium. It is impossible to say to what extent this respite helped, as four days after their return to Tokyo the family was greeted with the news that Akutagawa’s brother had committed suicide. Given Akutagawa’s belief in the hereditary nature of his mental issues, the open contrast between his wife’s quite sane parents and the brother who would also have inherited his mother’s insanity must have been obvious and appalling. The bulk of Kappa was written in a fortnight in February, with the final version published in March. In the context of two sons suffering suicidal tendencies, Kappa’s darkly comic depiction of a child choosing whether or not he ought to have to live takes on new light. Though the young kappa gives as his reason for not living his father’s insanity rather than his mother’s, female kappa literally run through Kappa forcing male kappa to propagate against their will. The children thus produced live incredibly insecure lives. (It is revealed midway through the book that kappa manage economic difficulties by killing and eating excess kappa.) In Kappa, producing children is a mad process, pursued by female kappa who act madly and whose actions provoke more madness to ensure the species’ continuation. The kappa fetus gives as its reasoning its father’s madness, but it would not have been conceived in the first place had its mother not pursued its father, seemingly against his will. The continuation of insanity consequently becomes the mother’s fault. Kappa marks a pivotal point in Akutagawa’s final works. A year pondering his mental state and family resulted in a short burst of work on a novella that constitutes Akutagawa’s most extensive engagement with the ongoing effects of his mother’s madness, a novella which is also indelibly marked by a famous children’s story that Akutagawa may well have been read or read himself as a child. Exorcising his mother’s spirit left Akutagawa with only his own self to 104 examine. Between Kappa’s publication in March and his death in July, Akutagawa wrote and rewrote his own madness into “Cogwheels” ( 歯車, written from March to April), “A Note to a Certain Old Friend” ( 或旧友へ送る手記, written in July), and “A Fool’s Life” ( 或阿呆の一生, published postmortem, in October). If the point of Alice is that one can enter the world of unlogic – a world one might call insane – and return safely, Akutagawa’s death was likely forecast in his manipulation of Carroll’s novel to center on a man doomed to insanity before the story proper has even started. Akutagawa’s Kappa and Artaud’s “Jabberwocky” Akutagawa is not the only artist to foreshadow his imminent death in Alice. Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), a French actor, theorist, and poet, resembles Akutagawa in this and many other ways. Though they lived on opposite sides of the globe, both artists lived in the shadow of looming fascist states, operated at the forefront of the arts in their respective nations (particularly in the 1920s), were plagued by mental issues throughout their lives, and were given Lewis Carroll’s work to translate as a means of ameliorating their mental disorders. 86 Like Akutagawa, Artaud’s oeuvre has been seen as inextricable from his biography. As Ros Murray put it, “Artaud’s life and his work are intricately bound, and everything he wrote was a direct result and expression of his own corporeal experiences” (1). Artaud himself steadfastly pulled experience out of his physical body to create his art. This bodily approach to art led Susan Sontag to call him, “modern literature’s most didactic and most uncompromising hero of self-exacerbation” (xix). At the same time, Artaud’s physical body was damaged. Noting that Artaud, “had been mad all his life” (liii), Sontag argues that, “the insane person has a dual identity in Artaud’s 86 Artaud also adapted other authors’ works – most notably in his play Les Cenci, adapted from an earlier play by Percy Bysshe Shelley and a novella by Stendhal (both of the same name) – much as Akutagawa did. 105 works: the ultimate victim, and the bearer of a subversive wisdom” (lvi). Artaud thus used his lifelong mental issues to simultaneously present himself as a victim and claim a mystic higher ground. Artaud was institutionalized in a series of mental hospitals from 1937 to 1946. In January of 1943, Artaud’s friend and publisher, Henri Parisot moved Artaud to a psychiatric hospital in Rodez, France, out of fear that the Nazis would execute him as mentally infirm. It is in Rodez that Artaud produced his Alice works. Much as Akutagawa was given Alice’s Adventures to translate to distract him from his depression, Artaud’s doctor in Rodez, Gaston Ferdière, gave him some of Lewis Carroll’s work to translate as a form of art therapy. Ros Murray suggests that Carroll’s works were chosen because they would allow Artaud to, “write through what was considered to be the rather more well-reasoned voice of the Oxford academic” (45). In other words, Carroll’s unlogical world was assumed to appeal to Artaud whilst serving as a step towards the presumed sane, logical world in which he actually lived. 87 Artaud was given the sixth chapter of Looking-Glass (“Humpty Dumpty”), which contains the first stanza of the “Jabberwocky” poem, as well as two poems, “Ye Carpette Knyghte” and “The Dear Gazelle.” 88 Artaud’s Carrollian translations incorporate glossolalia and wordplay in line with his larger body of work. However, his writings about these translations reveal an unease with himself that provides an enlightening contrast with Akutagawa’s case. Artaud did not respond to his Carrollian treatment well. In a pair of letters to Henri Parisot in September of 1945, Artaud evinces distress at the very thought of Carroll. The first 87 It is worth noting that Artaud was moved to Rodez in 1943, at the height of World War II and during the German occupation of France. The real world is unlikely to have appeared sane to even nominally sane people at this time. 88 It is unclear whether or not Artaud was given the entire “Jabberwocky” poem. In a letter to Henri Parisot of September 22 nd , 1945 shows that he knew of its existence, and implies that he at least considered translating the entire poem. The text of Artaud’s two Carrollian translations can be found in his Oeuvres Complètes, vol. IX, 132- 147. 106 letter, occasioned by Parisot’s request to publish Artaud’s translation of “Jabberwocky,” begins truculently: “I do not remember having done in 1943, during the summer, a translation of a fragment of this ‘Jabberwocky’ of which you speak and I do not like it besides” (“Je ne me souviens que d’avoir fait en 1943, pendant l’été, une traduction d’un fragment de ce Jabberwocky dont vous me parlez et que d’ailleurs je n’aime pas,” Oeuvres 1012). Following two days later, Artaud’s opinion of Carroll has not improved: “I haven’t done a translation of ‘Jabberwocky.’ I tried to translate a fragment of it, but that bored me” (“Je n’ai pas fait de traduction de Jabberwocky. J’ai essayé d’en traduire un fragment mais cela m’a ennuyé,” Oeuvres 1013). Murray notes that these letters, which have been written on fairly widely, including by Sontag and Lippit, reflect Artaud’s suspicions of both Carroll and Ferdière. Consequently, Artaud manipulated Ferdière’s exercise in logic and art to become, “writing the text that Carroll should have written but was not able to because he had not suffered, and thus did not understand what Artaud saw as the essence of all creative practice” (46). In other words, because Artaud conflated physical experience with artistic depth, he had to reject Carroll, the happy writer. Carroll’s sanity and pleasant-seeming life were an affront to Artaud, who justified his mental issues by making them necessary components of an artistic life. In contrast, Akutagawa does not seem to have referred to Carroll in his letters at any time. 89 Akutagawa thus seems to have interacted with Alice first and foremost, and Carroll not at all, whereas Artaud could not help but read Carroll’s life in his work. In his letters to Parisot, Artaud repeatedly reads authors’ lives into their works. He prefers the literature of Edgar Allan Poe (died suspiciously, impoverished, and in mourning for 89 As previously noted, Akutagawa’s letters to Kikuchi are missing from his Complete Works. It is likely that Akutagawa discussed Carroll at some point in the course of Kikuchi asking him to translate Alice’s Adventures, but it is also possible that they only ever discussed the matter orally. Kikuchi lived near Akutagawa and visited him regularly. Additionally, Akutagawa may have simply agreed to the translation without commenting on the works to be translated. 107 his wife) and Charles Baudelaire (died in debt and partially paralyzed) to Lewis Carroll (died wealthy and widely popular). In short, he prefers the doomed. If hints of Akutagawa’s death can be seen in his manipulation of a sane girl into a madman, Artaud anticipates his death in his discussion of “Jabberwocky”: “I am sure that a reader of my posthumous oeuvre (think of that!) in a few years will understand [my letter] – because there must be distance from time and bombs to judge a situation correctly” (“Je suis sûr qu’un lecteur de mes œuvres posthumes [pensez donc!] dans quelques années la comprendra – car il faut le recul du temps ou des bombes pour juger de la situation comme il convient,” Oeuvres 1015). To Artaud, art is inextricable from its creator’s circumstances. Since he views Carroll as a happy man, Alice cannot but be superficial (one of “les langages de surface,” Oeuvres 1013) to him. Consequently, Artaud refuses to follow Alice’s path through unlogic and back again, as Akutagawa refused when he replaced Alice with a madman, but Artaud is fully aware of the implications of that choice: clinging to the faults of his body – his insanity – will lead him to his death. Oddly, by having the sanity to see where his desperate hold on insanity will lead, Artaud managed to survive longer than Akutagawa. He died just over two years after he corresponded with Parisot about Alice. From text to illustration There are two additional players in the saga of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s relationship with Alice whose importance should not be overlooked. Akutagawa’s co-translation of Alice was illustrated by one Hirasawa Bunkichi and featured a frontispiece by Unno Seikō (figures 7 and 8). Hirasawa’s spare, Art Nouveau-inflected illustrations strike a markedly different note from Seikō’s vibrant celebration of childish glee. 90 Seikō’s joyful, colorful frontispiece is in line with Kan Kikuchi’s description of Alice as, “a story that takes children’s hearts to the land of dreams 90 Though his surname is Unno, Seikō signed his works “Seikō”. 108 all unawares” (“Jidō no kokoro wo shirazu, yume no kuni he tsurete itte shimau, monogatari de arimasu,” 「児童の心を知らず知らず、夢の国へつれて行ってしまふ、物語であります,」in 芥川 and 菊池, 3,). Hirasawa’s illustrations suggest another sort of dream, a refined realm that surrounds a girl in distinctly modern, Western garb with comical crocodiles and dark hallways. All of the imagery aligns with Akutagawa and Kikuchi’s promotion of an educated child audience. Seikō’s Alice is depicted in modern, Western garb, surrounded by Western playing cards. Hirasawa’s art repeats the Western clothing motif, but depicts it in an up-to-the- minute art style imported from Europe but incorporating Japanese, Middle Eastern, and other cultural references. These two visions of Wonderland were able to coexist in a single volume because Japanese artists had already developed the ease that comes from familiarity where Alice was concerned. figure 7: Hirasawa illustration from Alice Story figure 8: Seikō illustration from Alice Story The first Japanese translation of Alice, Hasegawa Tenkei’s 1899 Mirror World serialization, contained copies of John Tenniel’s illustrations for the original, English-language publication of Through the Looking-Glass. By 1908, Sumako’s abridged translation of Alice’s 109 Adventures was published with original illustrations by Kawabata Shōtarō. Thenceforward, both Japanese and foreign illustrations appeared on a regular basis in new Japanese translations of Alice. Tenniel’s images are a perennial favorite in Japan as they are worldwide, but the work of Margaret Tarrant, Blanche McManus, Thomas Heath Robinson, Tove Jannson and others has found a ready audience as well. This analysis will largely forgo an analysis of these foreign illustrators in favor of a focus on how Japanese artists collectively re-imagined young Alice alongside early textual translations, specifically Akutagawa’s images and those that preceded his personal illustrations. As Alice was illustrated by more and more Japanese artists, a clear trope emerged. This trope centered on the character of Alice herself, and over time it came to be the predominant way of depicting Alice in Japan. Specifically, Alice has come to be embodied by a silhouette. Silhouettes were first tied to Alice in Wonderland in 1921 through Saijo Yaso’s translation of Looking-Glass, Travels in Looking-Glass Land (Kagamiguni meguri, 鏡国めぐり). Saijo’s translation was serialized in the children’s magazine Golden Ship (Kin no fune, 金の船), whose table of contents was illustrated with silhouettes (figure 9). Obviously, this is a rather tangential connection, but there are a few random silhouettes illustrating the text of Looking-Glass Land itself (figure 10). Silhouettes were relatively common within children’s literary magazines at this time, presumably because of the speed with which they could be produced and their efficient use of the single color used to print children’s magazines. Alice herself is tied to silhouettes four years later, in Washio Tomoji’s 1925 translation of Alice’s Adventures, The Wondrous Garden (Fushigi na oniwa, 不思議なお庭, figure 11). From this point on, Japanese artists first occasionally, and then regularly, began to depict characters and tropes from Carroll’s novels as silhouettes. In contrast, silhouettes became less common in 110 other children’s stories. Though the role of silhouettes in other children’s literature is not a focus of this study, the decline of the silhouette in non-Alice children’s literature paralleled a rise in multi-color illustration in children’s literature. One conjectures that silhouettes were common in early Japanese children’s literature less because of artistic taste and more because of economic constraints. Nevertheless, the silhouette has persevered and even become predominant in depictions of Alice in Japan today. figure 9: Table of Contents of The Golden Ship featuring installment of Travels in Looking-Glass Land by Saijo Yaso figure 10: Text of Travels in Looking-Glass Land (pgs 110-111) 111 figure 11: Cover of Tomoji Washio’s The Wondrous Garden In 1927, when Akutagawa was feverishly writing Kappa, Alice was already associated with silhouettes. It is worth pointing out that Akutagawa was conversant with new developments in children’s literature. His letters are littered with references to stories like Peter Pan, Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” and The Jungle Book. Moreover, he edited a collection of foreign fairy tales in Japanese translation that he explicitly introduced as “so-called youth literature” (“Iwayuru shōnen bungaku,” “ 所謂少年文学”, 芥川龍之介全集 vol. 5, 368). 91 Though it is unlikely he knew of all 26 translations of Alice published from 1899 to 1926, he may well have seen Alice connected with silhouettes in some way. Regardless, Kappa was illustrated with a silhouette of a kappa created by Akutagawa himself (figure 12). 91 See Chapter Two, Alice in Translation, for an analysis of the meaning of the word 少年 in the early twentieth century. 112 figure 12: Cover of Seiichi Shiojiri’s 1947 translation of Kappa, featuring an illustration of a kappa by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. Over the course of his life, Akutagawa drew many kappa, and Kappa is the only work he illustrated. 92 It is perhaps more accurate to say that Akutagawa was drawn to sketch kappa silhouettes, and having later written a book featuring kappa, he incidentally provided an illustration to suit. Akutagawa’s obsessive interest in drawing kappa had two parts, which is to say that he drew kappa, yes, but he also drew silhouettes. Every kappa image Akutagawa made is a silhouette. Alice and its emerging association with silhouettes enabled Akutagawa to stretch his idée fixe in new directions. Akutagawa’s KappAlice silhouette, like the novella itself, came to represent more than just Kappa. Where Akutagawa’s death is memorialized by Kappaki, Akutagawa’s Complete Works are marked by a simple kappa silhouette on the cover – the same kappa silhouette shown above. Just as Alice rooted itself in Akutagawa’s mind only to emerge in Kappa and Alice Story, Akutagawa’s Kappa rooted itself so solidly in readers’ minds that Akutagawa’s kappa silhouette now stands in for his entire body of works and his own life. Thus, the way we view Akutagawa today is indelibly inscribed with the works of another author, best 92 Akutagawa’s kappa illustrations are relatively easy to find. The Museum of Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon kindai bungakukan, 日本近代文学館) displayed one from December 3 rd , 2016 to March 25 th , 2017 as part of an exhibit on Akutagawa’s personal possessions (“ 芥川龍之介－内なる慶びと苦悩”). When another Akutagawa kappa appeared on an Antiques Roadshow-like Japanese television show, the judges noted that many of these kappa drawings exist (“ 芥川龍之介の河童図”). 113 known for his children’s stories. Akutagawa’s legacy grew out of Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels. Yet, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, even a translation of Alice openly bearing Akutagawa’s name on the cover and containing a memorial to him by his co-translator has been forgotten by all who study him. The loss of Alice in Akutagawa’s works can be attributed in various ways. Akutagawa’s suicide so soon after publishing Kappa led later consumers to read Kappa through the lens of Akutagawa’s mental deterioration. Where early reviewers irritated Akutagawa with praise of Kappa’s light-hearted tone, later critics viewed it as a straightforward satire, focusing on how, “the mistakes and hypocrisy of human society are ridiculed” (Keene 580) rather than Kappa’s zany humor. Further, Akutagawa’s playful attitude towards his sources – sometimes denying a source, at other times actively misleading readers – combined with the massive library of works he is known to have read, makes it difficult to say precisely which works influenced him and to what degree. Recognizing those influences is important; in the case of Kappa, they are the difference between a light-hearted tale with a seedy underside and an unrelentingly dark satire of human life with a side of insanity. Akutagawa is noteworthy in the degree to which he adapted other works to his own ends, but he is hardly alone. Modern Japanese literature is marked by translation, as discussed in Chapter Two, Alice in Translation, but it was also formed by adaptation. Outside of the period immediately following Japan’s opening to the West, however, scholars have tended to avoid acknowledging Japanese authors’ intense relationship with non-Japanese literature. Akutagawa is an exception to this rule to some extent as his playfulness with his sources has forced scholars to examine stories like “The Spider’s Thread” and “Death of a Disciple” in detail. Even so, these analyses tend to view Akutagawa’s adaptive activities negatively. His use of other sources is 114 said to reflect a lack of originality rather than a masterful re-embodiment of global cultural concepts. Ultimately, this negative view of adaptation obscures important aspects of literature and our understanding of the authors who create it. In Akutagawa’s case, scholarly neglect of translations resulted in an incomplete Complete Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. Moreover, once Alice Story was forgotten, it became easy to misread the novella which has come to represent Akutagawa and his oeuvre. In depicting Alice as a (kappa) silhouette, Akutagawa drew out the kernel of Carroll’s stories: the unknown quantity that is Alice herself. 115 Chapter Four: Alice in Silhouette Who is Alice? figure 13: Created by Amanda Kennell The above image is misshapen, chintzy, and frankly ugly. No attempt has been made to make it attractive – or rather, an attempt to make the skirt more attractive has, by its misshapen nature and contrast with the smooth lines of the rest of the image, made the whole even uglier. Yet, that ruffled darkness is nonetheless identifiable as a skirt, lain atop two sticklike legs, hung from a torso topped by an eerily ovoid head and from which two uneven arms protrude like fallen pick-up sticks. The image is near to a stick figure and therefore easily recognized as human. In Japan today, this image can be further understood to symbolize not just any human, but the protagonist of Alice in Wonderland. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Alice novels came to be illustrated more and more often with silhouettes in Japan. By the twenty-first century, those silhouettes centered on the character of Alice herself. Other characters are also depicted in silhouette, but the silhouette is the predominant way of depicting Alice in Japan today. This chapter examines the growth of Alice’s silhouettes outside of the pages of translations of the novels themselves to show how Japanese creators are approaching the 116 character of Alice. Beginning with Kusama Yayoi’s art happenings in the 1960s and covering media as diverse as manga, themed cafés, and stickers, the silhouette is shown to enable consumers and creators alike to reenact Alice’s journey through a mad world and back again, thus providing comfort to those, like Akutagawa, who struggle to deal with the stresses of the modern world. One hint to the origin of Alice’s silhouettes lies in her non-silhouetted pictures. Unlike characters such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Alice’s portrait is decidedly uniform. Cinderella’s ball gown is blue in the Disney cartoon, white in Disney’s live action version of Rodger and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, and gold in Disney’s recent Into the Woods film. Some versions have abundant lace, others do not. The dresses vary greatly from one iteration to the next. Disney is not alone in this respect; the distinguishing detail in Cinderella’s costume in the world of Cinderella is the contrast between the protagonist’s initial soot-covered, ragged dress and later, gorgeous ball gown rather than any particular aspect of either dress. Consequently, the specific details of either ball gown or rags can and do fluctuate a great deal. Even her famous slippers are said to be made of everything from glass to fur. 93 In contrast, Alice possesses a standard outfit of blue dress falling just below the knee covered by a white pinafore, coupled with black shoes and accessorized with a hair ribbon. This uniformity creates a striking silhouette: a long-haired, trim girl in an A-line dress that sweeps out from her waist to fall just below her knees and a flat pair of Mary Janes. 94 It is easy to see how artists were inspired to reduce that image to its essence, but a touch more difficult to understand how the image works. How do consumers see a shadow of a girl and know it to be Carroll’s Alice? 93 For more on Cinderella, see Jack Zipes’ Why fairy tales stick: the evolution and relevance of a genre. 94 Hair has been omitted from the above silhouette due to the author’s lack of artistic capability. 117 The secret seems to lie in a surprising degree of conformity. When Japanese Alice silhouettes are measured, their dimensions are remarkably standardized. For example, the width of Alice’s skirt divided by her height produces a ratio that falls between 0.5555 and 0.5757. In other words, across all of the silhouettes studied, the ratio of Alice’s skirt width to her height varied by a mere 0.0202. Those statistics derive from figures in assorted poses, including running Alices and an Alice who is holding her skirt out to the sides as she curtsies (figures 14- 17). There is some natural variation between different images, but it is quite limited. Of the four sets of dimensions studied – width of the head to waist; width of the head to width of the skirt; width of the skirt to height; width of the skirt to distance between top of head and bottom of skirt – the greatest range in ratios (0.3) came from the difference between the width of Alice’s head and the width of her waist. The skirt/height ratio mentioned above displayed the smallest range. 95 These ratios were used to create the image above. 95 Before data collection began, it was noticed that the various images of Alice depicted her in a range of poses. Hypothesizing that this might affect the results, the distance between the top of Alice’s head and the bottom of her skirt was measured with the expectation that this would avoid any distortion caused by running legs versus sitting legs, or bows that were flapping in a nonexistent wind versus bows of exaggerated size. When the final ratios were calculated, the width of Alice’s skirt was divided by first a straightforward height measurement and then this head- to-skirt measurement. When the range of the resulting numbers was calculated across all of the Alice silhouettes measured, the range of ratios resulting from the modified height measurement was over seven times as large as the range of the straightforward skirt/height ratio (0.1515 versus 0.0202). This suggests that the important dimensions for creating identifiable Alice silhouettes relate to the overall look of the image rather than how its individual pieces mesh together. One image’s hair bow may be larger than another’s, but its legs or bodice will be shortened to maintain the overall ratio. This conclusion is also supported by the great range within head/waist ratios (0.3) compared with the limited range between head/skirt ratios (0.02144). Alice silhouettes could perhaps be reduced to three measurements: head width; skirt width; and height. 118 figures 14-17: A selection of silhouetted Alices collected in Japan from 2012-2015. From left: a notebook, Disney stickers (removed from package for photographing purposes), temporary tattoos, and a T-shirt by Putumayo. The similarity between the dimensions of Alice silhouettes presents a stark contrast to the silhouettes of other, comparable characters. Though Alice is not generally compared to fairy tales like Snow White or Cinderella in America, it is often consumed in a similar manner and is certainly marketed in kindred fashion in Japan. Among older fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood’s costume resembles Alice’s the most. Where fairy tale princesses often get glamorous, full-length ball gowns, Red Riding Hood and Alice are part of a minority in simple dresses with shorter, but still voluminous, skirts. Even so, Red Riding Hood is depicted in a strikingly different manner in Japan. She is generally drawn to look younger than Alice, and rarely shows up as a silhouette (figure 18). She is also shown in skimpy outfits and erotic poses more often than Alice is (figure 19). In short, Japanese Red Riding Hood imagery has travelled farther from the Little Red Riding Hood story than Alice imagery has, displays a wider variety of physical shapes and clothing types and is rarely made into a silhouette. Alice is not silhouetted so regularly because of a Japanese trend towards depicting all characters – or even characters of a certain type – in silhouette. Something sets Alice apart. One artist, in particular, has consistently 119 embodied Alice in her work across six decades in a variety of media. Examining her work reveals how and why the trope of the silhouetted Alice spread through not only book illustrations but all media in which Alice is portrayed in Japan today. figure 18: Ringo Akai from the anime figure 19: Crooked Red Riding Hood Ookami-san & Her Seven Companions ( くねる赤ずきんちゃん) Image courtesy Funimation. by Pixiv user Weno ( ゑの) Kusama Yayoi and Alice in art Kusama Yayoi ( 草間彌生, 1929-present) has operated at the forefront of the international art scene since she first visited the United States in 1957. Her work has been recognized by several major international awards, in particular with the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Officier) in 2003 and Japan’s own Praemium Imperiale in painting in 2006. She was also elected as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. The list of venues that have exhibited her art contains the major players of the contemporary art world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate 120 Modern. 96 She is one of the most successful female artists alive today, and she has quietly identified herself with Alice throughout her career. Kusama’s oeuvre has evolved over time to encompass traditional Japanese-style paintings, sculptures, happenings, films, novels, abstract oil paintings, a clothing line, poetry and, of course, illustrations for one Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 97 She shot onto the international art scene with a series of paintings called Infinity Nets (figure 20) that she began in 1958 and continues to this day. While creating an Infinity Net, Kusama uses small daubs of paint to build a larger, repetitive pattern that is meant to convey a sense of the infinite. According to Lousie Neri, “the inherent philosophical paradox of these unprecedented works – that infinity might be quantified within the arbitrary confines of a readymade canvas – combined with the more subjective and obsessional implications of their process, broke with the Abstract Expressionism that preceded them and set them apart from the rational Minimalist abstraction that followed” (in Yayoi Kusama, 25). Infinity Nets are, on one hand, incredibly controlled works: they tend to have a limited palette and canvas size, individual brush strokes do not vary much from each other and the overall pattern is relatively simple. Yet, conceptually they have no limits whatsoever. Akira Tatehata argues that, “this mechanical process of endlessly repeating certain patterns was an attempt to escape from the obsessions that had plagued [Kusama] since her childhood” (in Yayoi Kusama: I who have arrived in heaven). The artistic process that Neri deems obsessional becomes an escape from obsession in Tatehata’s hands. Either way, both 96 She is highly regarded in Japan as well, having shown at the Sogetsu Gallery, the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art and 2005’s Yokohama Triennale. The exhibitions and recognitions noted here are drawn from Louise Neri and Takaya Goto’s Yayoi Kusama. 97 Fully analyzing Kusama’s Alice works is beyond the scope of this project, but it is worth noting that Kusama’s Infinity Room series of installations effectively places the viewer through the looking-glass, and her polka dot paintings are referred to in Japanese as mizutama (水玉), or water drops. Given Kusama’s close relationship with Alice and that poruka ( ポルカ), a Japanized pronunciation of polka, is also in use to describe polka dots, this phrasing suggests the scene in Alice’s Adventures where an enlarged Alice’s tears fall to become drops of water in a sea in which the shrunken Alice then swims. 121 critics are tying Kusama’s life to her artistic production much as early readers and scholars of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s literature argued that his later stylistic experiments were merely a symptom of his worsening depression. figure 20: Yayoi Kusama’s NETS-INFINITY OPQR (2007). Where conflating man and art shows an inappropriate lack of regard for Akutagawa’s skill and curiosity, Kusama is in a rather different position. Kusama has tied her self to her work since the beginning of her career, leading scholars to examine the work in terms of what it reveals about the self. In Neri’s terms, Kusama, “has convincingly collapsed the distinction between her own consciousness and external realities” (in Yayoi Kusama, 25). The psychological issues that were seen as having a detrimental effect on Akutagawa’s work consequently are considered the stroke of genius in Kusama’s oeuvre. Where Akutagawa was thought to have been driven away from the forms and styles he loved because of depression, Kusama’s “obsessional” personality is seen as having driven her to the heights of artistic expression. Where the vague cogwheels Akutagawa saw spinning in midair were considered a 122 sign of his growing illness, Kusama’s delusions are described in clinical terms that only make her sound more qualified to philosophize on human existence: “Kusama’s mental illness – predicated on ‘depersonalization,’ a dissociative disorder wherein the perception or experience of oneself is altered so as to feel detached from one’s mental processes or body – is an established fact and a self-professed locomotive for her art” (ibid.). Kusama’s well-publicized illness thus becomes her font of creativity. Akutagawa and Kusama worked in different times – one in the midst of rising Japanese colonialism, the other in Japan’s postwar confusion – and the reception of their work was affected by the differing statuses accorded to men and women in Japanese culture. Even so, the inherent similarities between Akutagawa and Kusama are startling. Both are twentieth-century Japanese artists of great renown who have produced both written and painted works, both suffered mental issues that they felt made it impossible for them to live in everyday society, both dealt with those disabilities in extreme ways – Akutagawa through suicide, Kusama by living most of her adult life in a mental institution – and both became involved with Alice in Wonderland in an extended way. Where Akutagawa’s involvement had to be teased out through a minor co-translation and an unannounced adaptation, Kusama boldly declared that, “I, KUSAMA, AM THE MODERN ALICE IN WONDERLAND” (Kusama, 125) as early as 1968. Is it any wonder then, that this “modern Alice in Wonderland” from the sixties would proceed to illustrate Alice’s Adventures in the 2010s? Kusama’s declaration was part of the advertising for a happening in New York City’s Central Park. Happenings, or performance pieces that were at least partially improvised and involved audience participation, reached their zenith in the 1960s. Roselee Goldberg links Kusama’s happenings to the Woodstock festival of 1969, noting that her performances, “were 123 part protest, part ‘be-in’ and part public announcement” (in Yayoi Kusama, 152), thus giving her a platform to debate both politics and art. Like many other artists of the time, Kusama was concerned about civil rights, the Vietnam War, sexual freedom and economic equality, all of which were key themes for her happenings. For example, another of her happenings – in July of 1968 at the Statue of Liberty – involved passing out leaflets that equated stripping off one’s clothing with divesting oneself of a superficial obsession with money. Kusama herself lists her Alice happening as one of “the more notable Happenings among the many we staged [in 1968]” (121). Included alongside it are the Statue of Liberty happening, two similar events on Wall Street, a flag burning in front of the United Nations building, a homosexual wedding, a happening before the New York Board of Elections that included an open letter advocating pacifism to Richard Nixon, and an antiwar demonstration in front of a church. Kusama was very active in this period, so this is only a sample of the happenings she organized. However, it is significant that all but one of the happenings she chose to highlight when writing her autobiography thirty-four years later are centered on major political issues of the day. At first glance, Alice appears to be an apolitical outlier, perhaps remembered for its oddity rather than its notability. Kusama’s Alice happening took place in front of a famous statue of Alice, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter and other denizens of Wonderland (figure 21). The statue occupies an intriguingly liminal position: at once depicting part of the English cultural legacy, it is openly tied to the circumstances of its construction. The Mad Hatter’s face is modeled on one George Delacorte, founder of the immensely successful Dell Publishing Company. Delacorte was so immortalized because he donated the funds for the statue in memory of his wife, Margarita. It was crafted by Spanish sculptor José de Creeft and installed in 1959 as a public work that 124 visitors can touch and even climb on. Featuring George Delacorte’s face and Margarita’s favorite poem, “The Jabberwocky,” the statue is inextricable from the time and place that produced it. On the other hand, the characters’ costumes and the story itself are a reminder of the Victorian age in which they were produced. A decade after its establishment, Kusama re-read this contradictory monument for a new audience. figure 21: José de Creefts’ statue of Alice in Central Park. Kusama’s advertisement for this happening read: featuring me, Kusama, mad as a hatter, and my troupe of nude dancers. How about taking a trip with me out to Central Park… under the magic mushroom of the Alice in Wonderland statue. Alice was the grandmother of Hippies. When she was low, Alice was the first to take pills to make her high. 125 __________________ I, KUSAMA, AM THE MODERN ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Like Alice, who went through the looking-glass, I, Kusama, (who have lived for many years in my famous, specially built room entirely covered by mirrors), have opened up a world of fantasy and freedom. You too can join my adventurous dance of life. (ibid., 123-124) It is fairly easy to see why a young, avant-garde artist like Kusama might invoke Wonderland’s trippy pills and potions in the middle of the 1960s. Other artists of the time were making a similar connection, as in Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” a top-10 hit song from 1967. However, it becomes clear that she is not merely making a psychedelic connection to Alice in the latter half of the advertisement. In the second section, it becomes clear that Kusama is more concerned with Alice herself than the drugs Alice takes. In fact, the pills and mushrooms of the earlier half of the announcement have been replaced with repeated references to the looking- glass. That’s in line with the trajectory of the books themselves; size-changing pills and the opium-smoking caterpillar’s mushroom appear in the first novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, while mirrors appear in the second, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. In this event, Kusama clearly identifies herself as Alice, but not just any Alice: Kusama is the Modern Alice. Shaking off any potential sense of obsolescence, Kusama argues 126 that Alice was the prototypical hippy. She further contends that those aspiring to be hippies themselves should follow Alice’s lead – or rather, they should follow Kusama the Modern Alice’s lead. By identifying herself as Alice, Kusama makes herself into a gateway to a better world, “a world of fantasy and freedom” for all the restless searchers in the big city. Kusama seems to be describing a very concrete Alice – herself – but she is actually presenting the audience with another silhouette. Goldberg notes that Kusama’s “public presence became integral to each work [she created during this time period]” (in Yayoi Kusama, 152) which lent her happenings an intimacy that stood in contrast to large events like Woodstock. Kusama was physically present, but her body served as a conduit between audiences and the larger world she consistently depicted in her Infinity Net paintings, mirror rooms and other works. Consequently, Kusama’s Alice happening represents the first appearance of a silhouetted Alice outside of the pages of Alice translations. To understand what that means, it is necessary to consider what precisely a silhouette is. Silhouettes While silhouettes are thought of today merely as images of a person or object depicted in a single colour, historically they were created by cutting out an image in black paper and affixing the cutout to a white sheet. Where today they are flat, arguably even superflat, earlier silhouettes were created by the careful layering of one object over another. According to Emma Rutherford, the word silhouette is derived from the name of a short-lived French Finance Minister, Étienne de Silhouette (1709-1767). Installed in office by Louis XV to cut a deficit, de Silhouette pursued his duty too zealously and was kicked out within a year. Slang of the day tied de Silhouette with all things inexpensive, the paper cut-out portraits that came to bear his name included. 127 Rutherford further explains why these images came to be known as silhouettes: “first, due to his request that a plate be melted, the word silhouette signaled a reduction to the simplest form; second, it implied that the victims of his tax policies were reduced to mere shadows” (27). Regardless of the exact reason, an art form previously known as shades or profiles came to be known as silhouettes. Silhouettes have similarities with images from as far back as the Paleolithic period, but their apocryphal invention comes from a roughly seventh century BC woman named Dibutade. Facing her lover’s departure on a long journey, Dibutade traced the outline he cast in candlelight on a wall. Early shades retain this memorial orientation, but by de Silhouette’s time the practice of cutting paper shades had bifurcated. Quick artists sold shades cheaply to those who could not afford painted or drawn portraits. However, the upper classes also enjoyed making silhouettes as a hobby in much the same way that the next king’s wife, Marie Antoinette enjoyed playing at being a milkmaid. Rutherford, whose tome Silhouette concentrates on the history of silhouettes in Europe and America, cites the late eighteenth century as the golden age of silhouettes. Circumstances at the time combined to propel the silhouette to both a renown and a ubiquity unmatched in other periods. Two trends combined to produce this effect. First, shade cutting’s popularity amongst the aristocracy gave it credibility beyond the cheap art of the lower classes. Then, the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution led to a cultural emphasis on science and reason that affected how people understood and used silhouettes. Although it has since been debunked, physiognomy, or the science of understanding a person’s character by reading the shape of their face, was a major realm of scientific inquiry in the late eighteenth century. Rutherford notes that, sparked by the publication and translation of Essays on Physiognomy by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 128 people at all levels of society became interested in shade cutting not for its traditional memorial purpose, nor as a hobby for the nobility, but as a method of learning about the characters of the people around them. Unsurprisingly given these popular origins, silhouettes have traditionally been viewed as a lesser form of art. As Rutherford summarizes, “While they were extremely popular – due to the demand for accurate likenesses – silhouettes were never considered artistically complex enough to compete on the same level as portrait miniatures or oil paintings and thereby gain the respect of art critics and the public” (116). Consequently, contemporary mass media companies’ use of silhouettes in single-use items like stickers makes sense. Yet, if that were the only reason for silhouettes’ spread in Japan, all characters would be portrayed equally in silhouette. Rutherford’s Silhouette recounts not the decline of silhouettes so much as their replacement by photography. Silhouettes, the scientific bastion of cheap, exact replication, could not match photography’s delineation of facial and other details. If early photography gave more detail than silhouettes despite its lack of color and grainy images, today’s full-color, instantaneous digital photography certainly manages the task. This suggests that Japan’s Alice illustrators have turned to silhouettes for an entirely different reason. What, then, is a silhouette? At its heart, a silhouette is a shadow. It may be gussied up with a bit of detail by the artist, but it is the physical and temporal capturing of a shadow. Shadows are perhaps the ultimate example of uncertainty: they exist, and that existence can be proved by the naked eye, yet they have no physical substance and therefore cannot be grasped. By their existence, shadows prove that something else also exists. Should an artist paint a landscape, she most likely stood in the area depicted as she painted and looked directly at the scenery depicted. In contrast, silhouette makers work not with the face or figure that they are 129 attempting to portray, but the shadow it casts. Silhouettes are thus one step further removed from their subjects than are other art forms that purport to represent reality. The shadow stands as a third partner in the relationship between silhouette and subject, much like an artistic version of Indra Levy’s trialectics of translation. Considering the other terms used to describe silhouettes, shade and profile, reinforces this sense of liminality. One might rest in the shade on a hot summer’s day, but the shades of the dead would inspire chills of a different sort. A profile depicts a person, but presages that person’s future death through the empty space – Kusama Yayoi (1929- ) – that represents her future death. Introducing her subject, Rutherford says that “a silhouette is both something and nothing, a negative and a positive” (8). Though Lewis Carroll is never mentioned in her book, this sounds remarkably like something a resident of Wonderland would say. An art form that purportedly shows the true representation of an object while in fact showing only its absence, silhouettes are a fitting medium to depict a world of unlogic. Silhouettes in Wonderland Today, silhouettes are used to depict many members of Wonderland in Japan. The White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat, in particular, often appear in silhouette alongside Alice. Other tropes of Alice in Wonderland – such as tea cups, card suits and hats – are also depicted in silhouette. However, Alice is a constant, the eclipsed North Star about which other shadows circle. Part of Alice’s pre-eminence arises from her status as a character. Characters are “a material-immaterial composite” (Steinberg 194), in much the same way that silhouettes are “both something and nothing” (Rutherford 8). This explains why the White Rabbit and other characters appear in silhouette, but it does not explain why objects such as teacups and playing 130 cards appear in silhouette more often than any one of those characters do. The only character that appears more often than inanimate objects is Alice. Alice’s ubiquity might be due to her status as a shōjo, or girl. Authors such as John Whittier Treat and Anne McKnight have analyzed the symbolism of shōjo in contemporary Japan to great effect, but surely that alone does not explain Alice’s silhouettes. 98 Alice’s predominance stems from two factors. First, she is depicted more frequently than either the other characters or the physical objects of Wonderland because she is the protagonist of Carroll’s two novels. As the protagonist, Alice traverses the entirety of the Alice world, from the green bank where the story begins through Wonderland and back to Victorian England. Ultimately, the character is the key to a media mix’s success as Steinberg argued. Responding to Lamarre’s conception of the animetic interval, or the space between an animation cel’s layers and the different cels in an anime, as a source of productive movement, Steinberg proposes the dynamically immobile character image as a force tying different media together. The character’s image is immobile because it is ultimately still. Whether it appears in a sticker or as an animation cel, the image does not move. Yet, it is dynamic because the physical medium in which the image appears can and does move. Stickers are applied to notebooks which are then carried to and from school, while cels are flashed on and off the screen to create the illusion of movement. When the character’s image appears in other media, it links those media back to the medium that produced it. In other words, a sticker featuring the unique image of a young girl is single, alone, but if the image of Carroll’s Alice is placed on a sticker, that image would tie the sticker to all other works in the Alice in Wonderland world. Viewing the sticker would spur a person to think of the story, the other characters and so on. Characters’ 98 For more on the role of shōjo in the contemporary period, see Treat’s “Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: Shojo Culture and the Nostalgic Subject” and McKnight’s “Frenchness and Transformation in Japanese Subculture, 1972– 2004.” 131 images become conduits that shunt consumers’ minds from a subjective position, where they are considering a single item within the physical environment surrounding them, to a networked view of the world, where they are surrounded by not just a physical environment but an artistic overlay composed of the Alice in Wonderland world. Steinberg uses Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy manga and anime and its merchandise to show the concrete effects of a dynamically immobile character image. Astro Boy’s success was based in three converging trends. Japan’s toy companies had been put on hold during World War II, but in the postwar period they were resuscitated and quickly grew into a globally competitive industry. Up to the 1950s, television sets were quite rare in Japan, so shows could not build massive audiences. As Japan’s economy recovered from World War II, and particularly in the run up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, television ownership rates soared. Finally, and also tied to Japan’s postwar economic recovery, children’s manga magazines multiplied and grew their readerships substantially. As these three media (toy, television show and manga magazine) grew, they also became intertwined. Magazines gave away toys which sometimes came bedecked with characters from the magazine’s manga, and toy companies produced toys that allowed children to pretend to be manga characters. Tezuka’s development of Astro Boy as an animated television series, a serialized manga and a plethora of toys coincided with and spurred further changes in how those media related to each other. The growth of television ownership allowed Tezuka to use anime as his primary medium for telling (or selling) Astro Boy. Prior to Astro Boy, manga was the preeminent medium for reaching children, but Steinberg argues that with Astro Boy, “the axis of children’s culture had shifted to television” (109), where it still remains today. Anime enabled a uniformity of character representation that previous media had not. For example, characters in live action television shows naturally resembled the actor who played them. That 132 actor’s face could be redrawn for merchandise, but anything other than a photograph would look different from the person him- or herself. On the other hand, images of anime characters could be easily pasted on any number of different media and look exactly the same. The rise of anime as a medium led to a concomitant change in the realm of toys. Where in the past companies had mainly produced toys that allowed children to pretend to be manga characters (such as swords and masks), Astro Boy toys predominantly replicated images of Astro Boy himself. Astro Boy’s massive success in manga, anime and other media was thus enabled by its development and exploitation of the dynamically immobile character image. Today, the Alice in Wonderland novels are outside of copyright protection and therefore open to use by anyone. Yet, the look of Alice’s silhouette is practically set in concrete down to the ratio of her height to the width of her skirt. Since Alice’s dimensions are so uniform, the entire image is unnecessary. Moreover, removing extraneous details actually enhances consumers’ ability to use the character to enter the world of Alice in Wonderland. Steinberg discovered that the “stillness of the character image was the principal way of linking its various incarnations and assuring its consumers of its fidelity and consistency” (201). The creators of Alice silhouettes have taken this consistency one step farther. By depicting Alice in a silhouette of standardized dimensions, they link their specific Alice to the greater Alice in Wonderland world. Yet because the silhouette is so empty, creators can manipulate their personal intervention in that world to a great extent. For example, one set of silhouetted Alice stickers is decorated with sparkly glitter to give the stickers a fancy effect attractive to teenagers while a roll of tape features images drawn in a curvy fashion appealing to a younger audience (figures 22 and 23). A CD case layers silhouettes to achieve a disorienting yet elegant effect popular in turn 133 with those in their twenties (figure 24). Silhouettes’ status on the boundaries of depiction – neither something nor nothing – gives them a flexibility more detailed depictions cannot ape. figures 22-24: Disney Alice stickers, Alice tape, and the cover of a CD for Alice in the Country of Hearts game Disney, Alice and mobile characters One specific Alice has played so prominent a role in Japanese culture that she must be considered in her own right. Walt Disney Productions released their animated Alice in Wonderland film in 1951 in the United States. It was released in Japan two years later and while it is not responsible for Alice’s massive popularity in Japan, it has still had a lasting impact there. Alice is not currently a favored Disney title in America, but it ranks among the best-loved Disney films in Japan. In consequence, while Alice is excluded from the Disney Princesses line of products in America, she is granted a similar level of prominence in Japanese Disney merchandise. The Disney Princesses marketing line has been hugely popular in America, but a 134 campaign with the same name has had a quieter impact in Japan. Whether the Princesses line was not stressed in Japan because of preexisting strong support for the relevant princesses or whether the absence of strong Princesses branding opened market space for other characters is not clear. Regardless, Alice and its characters appear frequently in merchandise and are used to market many products in Japan. Disney merchandise can be organized into a class of its own, in that Disney will often introduce a line of products that depict characters from multiple franchises in the same fashion. For example, in 2013 the Meiji chocolate company sold a line of tea- flavored chocolates in a box festooned with Disney characters. Each box had a small image of Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney in the upper left corner and a much larger image of a single character below. The large characters were drawn in full color, but the lines used were suggestive of a sketch, and subtle wire frame details suggested that the drawing had not been completed (figure 25). While the image included here is of Alice’s box, all of the boxes in this line followed the same format. figure 25: Meiji chocolates from 2013. 135 Disney products are worthy of their own dissertations, and so will not be dealt with in depth here. It is worth noting though that the silhouetted Alice is prevalent in Disney products. In the following two sets of Disney stickers (figures 26 and 27), Alice is depicted first with complete detail (if in a manga-esque style), and then in a modified silhouette. Several Disney products featuring silhouetted Alices have been produced in the last few years, but this is not to say that Alice alone in the Disney pantheon has been depicted as a silhouette. In line with Disney’s tendency to craft a single piece of merchandise and then manufacture it featuring multiple characters, other Disney characters have been depicted as silhouettes as well. 99 It is unclear whether Disney intentionally began creating silhouetted Alices after one of their employees picked up on the trend or whether they inadvertently fell into line with other companies producing Alice products. What is clear is that Disney products feature a silhouetted Alice more often than other Disney characters are silhouetted. 99 The picture of Mickey and Walt Disney in figure 25 shows them in silhouette. 136 figure 26: Manga-style Disney stickers from Japan figure 27: Silhouetted Disney stickers from Japan Disney, corporate behemoth that it is, was moved to follow the silhouetting trend because of attributes possessed by characters. Describing these attributes, Steinberg calls the character “a material-immaterial composite” (194). Material, because a character must be embodied in a medium. Immaterial, because characters bring additional information to their embodiments. In other words, consumers of the Disney stickers above have access to information that is not presented in the stickers themselves. The characters’ names, for example, are not printed on the stickers or their packaging. Consumers understand at a glance what the characters’ names are, where they are from, what major events have happened to them – even why they are in the poses 137 depicted. Consequently, even a child knows that the Cheshire Cat is laughing at Alice, the Mad Hatter is offering to pour her a cup of tea, and the White Rabbit is checking his pocket watch because he is late. Characters carry that extraneous information with them when they are embodied in new media. Put another way, characters serve as succinct methods of entering Ōtsuka’s worlds, which incorporate the characters settings, plots and more from both Carroll’s novels and adaptations thereof. Steinberg argues for the preeminence of characters by saying that they are “the presence of the synergetic whole in each of the parts” (195). A character represents its world, and automatically denotes that entire world merely by its presence. That whole, the world, serves as the cohesion between media mix products. Steinberg is effectively contending that characters – particularly characters’ images – hold these worlds together, providing a method of connecting the different shukō within them, but also enabling differentiation between those different shukō. In Disney’s case, the company’s serialization of its merchandise combines with its ability to blanket a market with its own products to enable Disney to take advantage of the local tendency to depict Alice as a silhouette without losing the linkage between those silhouettes and Disney’s Alice. That is, Disney’s use of series of products that all utilize the same design allows the company to subtly tie its Alice silhouettes to the Disney Alice world, rather than the larger world of all Alice materials. Moreover, Disney takes pains to ensure that its silhouetted Alice products, in particular, are tied to the Disney brand. Below are three samples from a series of notebooks featuring silhouetted Disney characters (figure 28). The Alice version was the only notebook labeled with the word “Disney” in addition to the character’s name. Disney deploys its materials thoughtfully as well; goods like the notebooks below are generally displayed as a group. Grouping Alice with Rapunzel and Ariel implicitly suggests Disney, as the only company to 138 retell all three stories in a single product line, to viewers’ minds. Disney thus employs the Japanese trope of the silhouetted Alice to link consumers to a greater Alice world whilst indelibly marking that world as a Disney world. figure 28: Three notebooks from a series featuring Disney characters in silhouette. Silhouettes in Manga Thus far, the silhouettes discussed have been single, static images. Obviously stickers and memo pads can show Alice as a silhouette, but this method of depicting her has been adapted to other media as well. Mangaka, or manga artists, have been particularly creative in silhouetting Alice. It may be hard to imagine even one manga depicting its protagonist as a shadow, let alone many of them. Yet, it would be odd if a character as prevalent in Japanese culture as Alice is were not to appear in manga, arguably the major medium of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Japan. Alice does indeed appear regularly between the covers of manga, and manga artists have manufactured an assortment of new silhouettes to bend the shadowed art form to their medium. In fact, only one manga draws Alice as a shadow outright, yet all of them depict her as a silhouette. The trick is to keep in mind silhouettes’ 139 historical origins in such varied media as layered paper and shadows cast on walls. Silhouettes truly are, “both something and nothing, a negative and a positive” as Rutherford characterized them, but the manner of their appearance varies based on each medium’s characteristics and every artist’s ingenuity. Manga is an intensely visual medium based on mixing image and text, lines and screen tones. Alice in Wonderland manga have been appearing since 1981, and artists quickly began to silhouette the young protagonist. 100 In 1991, a group of female mangaka including the path- breaking artist, Takemiya Keiko published a pair of manga anthologies entitled Alice Book I and Alice Book II through a publishing collective they had created called the March Hare Tea Party Club. Though both books are named after Alice herself and produced by an organization named after Wonderland’s mad tea party, and despite the fact that the stories contained within all feature female protagonists, Alice does not appear in a single story. Alice in Wonderland served as the inspiration for the collective and the books, yet each artist skipped past young Alice to tell a story they had been yearning to draw, but for which they could not gain editorial approval. These two Alice books are heavy-handed in their silhouetting of Alice, but techniques for (not) depicting her have progressed in the intervening twenty-four years through dozens of manga adaptations. These techniques generally devolve to either giving several characters equal claim to the name of Alice or denying the name to any character. Hatori Bisco exemplified the former approach in her series, Ouran High School Host Club (Ouran kōkō hosutobu, 桜蘭高校ホスト部). Ouran is a romantic comedy about a group of male high school students at an expensive private school who become enamored of one female scholarship student. Hatori 100 Alice has appeared in comics around the world. In American comics, the story was adapted as early as 1946, when the titular protagonist guest-starred in Superman #41 and the story was jokingly adapted into “Alec in Fumbleland.” 140 appended an Alice in Wonderland-themed side story to the fourth volume that begins as though it were a straightforward retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland using Ouran’s characters. That premise quickly falls apart as the male characters realize that Haruhi, the female protagonist of the series, is far too indifferent to chase a rabbit down a hole. One of the male characters thus changes into an Alice costume and plays Alice long enough to fall into Wonderland. Haruhi resumes her role, only to quickly be replaced again by another male character. This pattern continues throughout the chapter as the story goes off the rails provided by Carroll’s novel. At the climax, the male characters argue over which of them will get to win Haruhi, their goal in Ouran’s main story, while Haruhi’s place is taken by one of the few male characters who is not attracted to her. Haruhi herself is shown waking up in the real world in the final illustration of the chapter. Ouran hides Alice twice over in this side story. From the start, Alice and all of the other characters in Ouran’s Alice’s Adventures are played by characters known to readers from the main Ouran story. Indeed, Alice adaptations often have an air of mystery or ethereality about them, giving the sense that the consumer has stepped outside of the everyday world. However, Hatori singles out the character of Alice for a second round of mystification. Alice is the only character who is shown to be incompletely portrayed. Almost every character has played Alice by the end of the story, but no other denizen of Wonderland has been portrayed by more than one member of Ouran’s cast. In other words, every single character in Wonderland can be amply portrayed by a single member of the main cast, even if that member occasionally leaves their duties to play Alice as well. Be that as it may, no one is capable of completely representing Alice; all are insufficient in some way. They can only join together to limn her outline, leaving her core in shadow. Ouran’s doubled hiding of Alice goes a step beyond the silhouetted Alices 141 of stickers and other, purely visual media. When looking at Alice sticker sets, for example, it only becomes apparent that Alice is singled out for secrecy when one examines a number of sets. As described above, other characters and motifs of Alice in Wonderland are also silhouetted in sticker sets; it is the degree and regularity with which Alice is portrayed as a shadow that is notable. The shadow of the unknown is inextricable from the story of Alice in Wonderland, and it is natural that that would be reflected in Alice adaptations. Yet, as Ouran shows us, Alice herself is culled from that larger group for special treatment. Where one must examine a significant number of stickers and other visual adaptations to determine that Alice is being singled out for special treatment, mangaka use manga’s fusion of text and image to draw readers’ attention to the silhouetting of Alice immediately. Series like Mochizuki Jun’s Pandora Hearts (Pandora hātsu, パンドラハーツ) follow this pattern of flaunting several semi- or not-quite-Alices in front of readers in quick succession. The protagonist of Pandora Hearts, a boy named Oz Vessalius, falls into the Wonderland-like Abyss in the very first chapter. His journey clearly mimics Alice’s, but his name and gender proclaim him not to be Alice. Oz is protected on his journey through the Abyss by a young woman who is first introduced as the Bloody Black Rabbit, or B. Rabbit, only to later be named Alice. B. Rabbit has a sister who is introduced as the Will of the Abyss, but later named as the original Alice from whom B. Rabbit inherited the name of Alice. Moreover, both the Bloody Black Rabbit and the Will of the Abyss physically resemble Alice in Wonderland’s Alice, albeit with different colour schemes. To sum up, Oz Vessalius enacts Alice’s journey, but Alice’s name and image are attached to two other characters, and it remains uncertain which one is the true Alice. In contrast to Pandora Hearts’ over-determined Alices, Tachibana Higuchi’s Gakuen Alice (Gakuen Arisu, 学園アリス) refuses to name a single character Alice. In this series, the 142 word “Alice” (Arisu, アリス) refers to a superpower in the same way “mutation” functions in X- men or “magic” functions in Harry Potter. Gakuen Alice is the name of a school (literally, “Alice School”) for children with these Alices. Tachibana’s protagonist, Sakura Mikan, follows an Alice-like path, falling over a wall onto the school’s grounds while chasing after a friend and finding herself in a topsy-turvy world where superpowers are real. But on top of not being named Alice, the nature of Mikan’s Alice evades her. Professors at the Alice School determine that she has one, but they struggle to make it appear. They eventually figure out that Mikan’s Alice has the power to nullify other people’s Alices. Mikan consequently finds herself at the center of a major power struggle because her missing Alice – the hidden Alice that hides other Alices – is considered the most powerful Alice of all. Despite working in a medium which would seem to demand they represent Alice in her entirety, mangaka have nonetheless found a variety of means to silhouette her. Boys and Alice Manga Pandora Hearts is also representative of another way Alice’s depiction changes in manga. As noted above, Oz Vessalius acts out Alice’s journey through Wonderland, but categorically cannot be Alice due to his masculinity. Pandora Hearts is part of what one might call a subgenre of manga where artists adapt Alice in Wonderland, but manipulate Alice into somehow becoming male. Altogether, six series featuring male Alices were serialized in major manga magazines over the two decades spanning 1993-2012. Alongside Pandora Hearts, Kobayashi Tamayo’s Boy Alice in Wonderland (Fushigi no kuni no shōnen Arisu, 不思議の国の少年アリス), Asō Hara’s Alice in Borderlands (Imawa no kuni no Arisu, 今際の国のアリス), and Ninomiya Ai and Katagiri Ikumi’s Are You Alice? (Ā yū Arisu, アーユーアリス？) follow male 143 protagonists who accidentally wander into Wonderland. Another variation on the theme sees male characters in Kanou Ayumi and Visualworks’ I am Alice (Ore Arisu: Danjo gyakuten, 俺アリス：男女逆転) and Ihara Shiro’s Alice on Deadlines (Dsenjō no Arisu, D 線上のアリス) switch bodies with female characters to become Alice. These works suggest the creation of a new shukō and its spread across the Alice in Wonderland world as it is embodied in manga. The new shukō began in Japan with the 1993 serialization of Boy Alice in Wonderland in Wings, a weekly manga magazine aimed at shōjo, or a teenaged female audience. 101 Wings specializes in fantastical stories which often hint at or openly portray romance between male characters for female readers’ pleasure. However, when Alice on Deadlines came out in 2005, it was published in a magazine, Monthly Gangan Wing, aimed at shōnen, or young boys (figure 29). Pandora Hearts and Alice in Borderland came out in magazines with a similar focus. 2009’s Are You Alice? marked a return to the female audience when it was published in Monthly Comic ZERO-SUM (Gekkan comikku ZERO-SUM, 月刊コミック ZERO-SUM), a magazine that focuses on josei, or young, female adults. It was followed a year later by I am Alice, which ran in a relatively new magazine, Media Factory’s Monthly Comic Gene (Gekkan comikku Jīn, 月刊コミックジーン). Monthly Comic Gene was launched in 2010 aiming to “destroy the concept of shōnen- and shōjo-focused magazines!!” (“Kison no shōnenshi ・shōjoshi no gainen wo hakai suru!!,” 「既存の少年誌・少女誌の概念を破壊する!! 」, メディアファクトリー). 101 As the title of 1946’s “Alec in Fumbleland” suggests, comics artists outside of Japan have also depicted male Alices. American deployments of male Alices tend to be of shorter duration than Japanese male-Alice manga, suggesting that artists were briefly inspired by an idea, but were not drawn to engage with it extensively. 144 Manga Magazine’s Target Audience Year of Initial Publication Boy Alice in Wonderland Sh ō jo 1993 Alice on Deadlines Sh ō n e n 2005 Pandora Hearts Sh ō n e n 2006 Are You Alice? Josei 2009 Alice in Borderlands Sh ō n e n 2010 I Am Alice N/A 2012 figure 29: Chart of boy-Alice manga, their publication dates and the type of magazine each ran in. Analyzing manga magazines’ stated intended audience is usually a pointless exercise. The magazines with the highest circulation numbers are all officially shōnen magazines, but they are known to have a significant female readership (estimates range up to 40%). However, the magazines’ supposed audiences are mentioned here to negate a common assumption about Alice in Wonderland and Japanese Alice adaptations. Contrary to what one might expect, Alice in Wonderland is not solely part of girls’ culture in Japan. Rather than being relegated to a gender- defined box, Alice in Wonderland travels freely across gender and age binaries in the manga magazine world, hearts, cards, frilly skirt and all. This gender fluidity even extends to Alice herself, as she becomes male and male readers are given a way to become her. Because these manga were all produced under the media mix model, many of them also exist as computer games, drama CD’s or anime. Iterations of these stories in non-manga media maintain the body-switching plot device, but that motif has not taken hold in Alice adaptations that do not include manga iterations. In other words, if creators are planning a new Alice shukō that will include a manga iteration, they may opt to make Alice male, but if they do not intend to create a manga version of their shukō they definitely will not create a male Alice. As with transmedia storytelling, the order in which each iteration is released is divorced from the order that governed their planning. Are You Alice?, for example, was planned to have multiple iterations in media ranging from handheld video games to manga, but it first emerged as a series 145 of drama CD’s. Were these boy-Alice properties analyzed according to which medium they first appeared in, the relationship between manga and male Alices would be obscured. By incorporating an understanding of contemporary production patterns into the analysis, on the other hand, it becomes clear that the male Alice is a peculiarity of the manga medium. One other pecularity of the boy-Alice manga lies in their titles. The first boy-Alice appeared under the direct and unequivocal title of Boy Alice in Wonderland. It was perhaps premature as twelve years passed before the second title, the unclear Alice on Deadlines, appeared. It and the following series, Pandora Hearts, were both titled without reference to their male protagonists. However, the next title to appear, 2009’s Are You Alice?, directly addresses both the reader and the (male) protagonist, questioning whether they truly are Alice. This question was quickly answered by 2012’s I am Alice, whose title is even more assertive than its English translation suggests. The full title is Ore Arisu: Danjo gyakuten ( 俺アリス：男女逆転). “Ore” does mean “I”, but it is a gendered pronoun that is used by men. Moreover, the title does not contain a verb, so a literal but clunky translation of the first phrase would look like “I (male) Alice”. The effect is similar to that of switching between words like actor and actress. The subtitle, danjo gyakuten, is similarly ungrammatical. “Danjo” means “both genders” or “men and women”, while “gyakuten” refers to a reversal. Gyakuten happens to be in common use as a sports term, where it denotes a come-from-behind win. The complete Japanese title thus does not merely state that its protagonist is Alice. It actively proclaims a changed state of affairs, with men rallying from a weakened position to claim Alice as their own. In manga, Alice is the equal property of male and female readers, and artists will fight for her if they have to. 146 Alice in the media mix Captain Tsubasa, Prince of Tennis and the other media mix properties discussed in the first chapter differ from the subject matter here in one major respect. The properties Eiji Ōtsuka had in mind when he created his narrative consumption theory were either comparatively recent or potential future productions, all of which Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels predate by decades. Alice’s age means that it lacks copyright protection; anyone adapting it is free to change it as they please without interference from picky rights holders. This results in a different dynamic where new adaptations of Alice are concerned. Creators can borrow from or modify the first two novels with impunity but face the spectre of competition which Henry Jenkins warned about from other creators’ Alice in Wonderland adaptations. As Jenkins cautioned, unchecked competition should sink a property’s viability. Yet, that does not seem to be the case with Alice in Wonderland adaptations. One might assume that this is because there simply are no adaptations of Alice in Wonderland in Japan. This would also be wrong. Today, there are thousands of Alice adaptations circulating in Japan. These adaptations take many forms: cafés, stickers, clothing, manga, anime, art, and more. They are produced by various companies, and some even possess their own media mixes. The video game series Alice in the Country of Hearts (Hāto no kuni no Arisu, ハートの国のアリス, QuinRose), is one such example. Its world now includes the first game, sequels, anthologies of dōjinshi, or fan-made comics and stories, manga, drama CD’s (an updated version of the old radio serial) and other iterations. All of these items fall within the Alice in the Country of Hearts world, and Alice in the Country of Hearts falls within the greater Alice in Wonderland world. 102 In this paper, rather than focus on single product lines like Alice in the Country of Hearts, these works (and others 102 To maintain continuity, “Alice in the Country of Hearts” refers to the greater world of works linking to the Alice in the Country of Hearts video game, while “Alice in the Country of Hearts” refers solely to the first video game installment. 147 that have not spawned their own media mixes) are analyzed as adaptations of Alice in Wonderland. Ōtsuka was not thinking of adaptations specifically when he set up the world/shukō framework, but it allows scholars to include important factors in analyses of adaptations. In particular, changes in the Alice in Wonderland world over time and influences outside of Carroll’s two Alice books play an important role in Japanese Alice adaptations that a strict focus on the first novels alone would not reveal. As a group, Japanese Alice adaptations are at once different and similar. They appear in diverse media, and their content seems disparate as well at first glance. The works range from a staged reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland featuring an all-male cast to a piece of luggage with Alice’s image splashed across it. A Gothic-Lolita clothing company sells the Mad Hatter’s hat while a drama CD label launched with a series following an amnesiac young man who wakes up in Wonderland and takes on Alice’s name. Even as the diversity of adaptations is evident, one trend cuts across the different media, different products and different companies. Beginning in the 1950’s, Japanese adaptations of Alice began to depict the character Alice as a shadow or silhouette. Adapters do not always depict Alice in this way, but it is fair to say that the silhouetted Alice became the predominant motif of Alice in Japan. A silhouetted Alice might be accompanied by other Alice characters in silhouette, but she is often on her own. This chapter has discussed how Japanese Alice in Wonderland adaptations approach the character of Alice. All of the adaptations analyzed here depict Alice as a silhouette, in that they simultaneously depict her and hide her from consumers. However, the method of silhouetting varies depending on the affordances of the medium in which an adaptation appears. Works decorated with two-dimensional images – like notepads and stickers – silhouette Alice literally, though one must examine a group of them to figure out that Alice is being silhouetted more often 148 than either other characters from Wonderland or characters from other worlds. Manga, which contain textual and temporal information in addition to visual imagery, silhouette Alice by obscuring which of several characters is in fact the real Alice. A subset of manga artists have taken this a step further by bestowing Alice’s name or storyline on a male character with the result that that character’s relationship with Alice is undercut even as it is built. In theory, a set of stickers could be produced that depicts a male Alice, but this has not happened because that method of silhouetting Alice is dependant on manga’s extended temporal engagement with the consumer. That is, stickers are consumed quickly. Consumers peel them and then stick them on something, perhaps glancing at it on occasion thenceforth. Memo pads are regarded mostly for the notes written upon them, not the background designs decorating them. However, to read a manga is to invest time in it. Even if the reader decides they are not interested after the first chapter they have still spent several minutes being introduced to its world. The dynamically immobile character image in the sticker may link the sticker to a greater world as Steinberg argues, but the extended temporal requirements of manga allow artists to create more complicated shukō. The temporary nature of consumers’ involvement with stickers and other, similarly disposable decorated media gave rise to a normalization of Alice’s dimensions that speeds consumers into Alice’s world even faster than a complete drawing of her image would. With Alice’s silhouette defined all the way down to a “correct” ratio of her height to the width of her skirt, consumers need not examine these images closely to find themselves falling, Alice-like, into her world. Alice’s silhouettes thus present an extreme example of how character images can serve as the glue holding media mix worlds together. At the same time, while Alice’s silhouette can be described with clinical precision in some media, the work of Kusama Yayoi shows that even when a woman stands before the 149 audience and asserts that she is Alice, it still may not be so. To say that Alice is a silhouette means that Alice herself is “something and nothing, a negative and a positive”, and so she can never be pinned down. But to be there and not there at the same time means that one can serve as a conduit between there and not-there. Throughout her career, Kusama has used her body as a conduit between the dreary, everyday world of war, homophobia and economic inequality and “a world of fantasy and freedom… an adventurous dance of life” (Kusama 124). Consequently, she is indeed the Modern Alice. 150 Chapter Five: In Conclusions Alice and gender This project was devoted to defining Alice in Wonderland’s life in Japan. In describing that life, I argued that Alice exemplifies the self-propagating nature of stories. The increased production of Japanese Alice translations over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries resembles nothing so much as a newly planted seed colonizing the land with a thicket of first translations, and then adaptations in other media. Artists’ repeated reliance on Alice during times of mental distress – seen most notably in the works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kusama Yayoi – shows that the process of producing and consuming new Alices has served as a method of mastering the stresses of modern Japanese life. Yet, Alice creeps into English- speaking minds as easily as it does Japanese. Take Thomas C. Foster. A professor of English at the University of Michigan-Flint, he wrote the best-selling How to Read Literature like a Professor: A lively and entertaining guide to reading between the lines. Over the course of the book, Foster refers to hundreds of novels and authors, ranging from established classics like Lady Chatterly’s Lover to contemporary gems such as Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. 103 Foster uses all of these works to help readers break literature down into themes, symbols, and tropes that recur throughout literature and which readers can learn to recognize on their own. These works are thus not adapted so much as referred to or analyzed. On the other hand, Foster’s engagement with certain novels exceeds the realms of reference and analysis. Foster devotes an entire chapter to adaptations of children’s literature. In it, he argues that the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel is the most frequently adapted work of children’s 103 Foster also makes a point of noting that “all literature grows out of other literature” (72), by which he means that literature as a medium is connected to/adapts/is adapted from other media. He thus refers to films, plays and other media throughout his book. He defines the media related to literature as “novels, stories, plays, poems, songs, operas, films, television, commercials, and possibly a variety of newer or not-yet-invented electronic media we haven’t event seen” (ibid.). 151 literature. Yet, this chapter, ostensibly devoted to Hansel and Gretel, is haunted by Alice. Even though the chapter mainly consists of an analysis of Hansel and Gretel’s appearances in other novels, the chapter is named “Hanseldee and Greteldum” in a clear reference to Alice’s Tweedledee and Tweedledum. In effect, Foster is telling readers that this chapter will be about Hansel and Gretel in Wonderland, Hansel and Gretel transformed into something new and different, but in such a way that readers could still find their way from the strange and wondrous new Hanseldees and Greteldums to the old, familiar world of Hansel, Gretel, and the witch’s gingerbread house. Alice jointly symbolizes narrative evolution and continuity here. It signals to readers that Hansel and Gretel is not unaltered in its transmission – somewhere along the way, it changes and grows – yet it is nonetheless recognizable in its new forms. The title connects the chapter to Alice, but Foster cannot restrict himself to a single reference. After introducing “kiddie lit” (74) as the subject of the chapter, Foster bookends his analysis with Alice references. The first work of actual children’s literature that Foster mentions in this chapter is not Hansel and Gretel but Alice in Wonderland. Alice then recurs at the end of the chapter to be the final work of children’s literature Foster refers to by name. He describes his analytic reading process to the reader: “If you’re like me, you’ll start looking for glimpses of the familiar… Oh, wait, that’s out of Alice in Wonderland. Now, why would she draw a parallel to the Red Queen here? Is that the hole in the ground?” (italics in original, 81). Foster’s attempts to write about Hansel and Gretel are repeatedly broken by eruptions of Alice. Alice grows into the chapter bit by bit, finally colonizing even the title. So has Alice grown into cultures worldwide. Alice is not only present in literary scholarship. Japan has produced numerous Alice computer games, but the first Alice computer game worldwide appears to be Massachusetts- 152 based Windham Classics Corporation’s Alice in Wonderland (1985). As the developer’s name suggests, during its brief existence Windham focused on adapting classic literature like Johann David Wyss’ Swiss Family Robinson and Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Below the Root into the new medium of the computer game. Windham’s game was quickly followed by a series of American Alice games. 104 Most prominent amongst these was American McGee’s Alice. Published in 2000 by renowned computer game company Electronic Arts, American McGee’s Alice presented a grown Alice who has to save Wonderland. Morphed into a horrifying nightmare, Wonderland is revealed to have always been the creation of Alice’s own mind. Consequently, as the player moves through Wonderland, they are rebuilding Alice’s healthy mind. There is nary a silhouette in sight, yet the result is the same: Alice is both there, as a character, and not there, as the player character, who only exists as a stand-in for the player herself. Through Alice, the player (re)enacts a journey through an unlogical, scary world, and then returns to reality safe once more. American McGee’s Alice is part of a group of works in various media that merge Alice with the horror genre. For example, Alex Toth and Mike Peppe’s “Alice in Terrorland” (first published 1952, reprinted in Alice in Comicland, 86-90) recasts the denizens of Wonderland as doll-sized alien invaders who had once been repelled by young Alice, only to return to threaten Earth’s people again in contemporary America. Published in a form – American comics – that was mainly aimed at boys at the time, “Alice in Terrorland” replaces Alice with a male protagonist. Toth and Peppe retain Alice’s name in the title and briefly imply that she had repelled the aliens’ original invasion in the text, but otherwise the comic focuses on young Freddy and his baby sister. Freddy naturally saves the day, which maintains the reassuring 104 Japan has also produced a host of Alice computer games. Beginning with Namco’s Märchen Maze (Meruhen meizu, メルヘンメイズ, 1988), games both forgettable and iconic have been launched featuring Alice. The two most prominent are both series: Square Enix’ Kingdom Hearts (first game, 2002) and QuinRose’s Alice in the Country of Hearts (first game, 2007). Both series include several installments on assorted platforms, and have been adapted into manga and other media. 153 aspect of Alice. At the same time, the creators’ recourse to horror and replacement of Alice with a boy suggests unease with the idea that a young girl could provide both adventure and, ultimately, safety. In writing about fifteenth- to nineteenth-century European narratives about underground journeys, Kiera Vaclavik noted that these tales display strong gender divisions. A substantial proportion of these stories, “foreground[] and elevat[e] male heroes and masculinity whilst demonstrating hostility towards and/or marginalizing women” (92). Even those stories which, like Alice, feature heroines rather than heroes tend to reproduce these patterns of depiction: “always young and often dreaming, the female travellers are largely passive and their behaviour circumscribed” (ibid.). This clearly includes Alice, whose youthful adventures are ultimately revealed to be dreams and who is unable to control how her speech is understood by others. Vaclavik concludes that the act of placing a female character in the protagonist’s role is transgressive in and of itself, which casts a problematic light on later creators’ replacement of Alice with male characters. In particular, when Alice is replaced by male characters, a crucial aspect of the narrative is invariably abandoned: Alice’s morphing physicality. As Vaclavik notes, “whereas male travellers are the adversaries of the monolithic, fixed female landscape [in underground travel narratives], Alice’s shifting form enables her to become integrated with the shifting environment, without being fully equated with it” (89). In “Alice in Terrorland,” Freddy never changes form in any way. Moreover, the unchanging size differential between Freddy, a human boy of normal proportions, and the doll-sized denizens of Wonderland enables Freddy to save the day at the end of the comic by easily smacking away the aliens and smashing their spaceship on the floor (figure 30). In Alice, readers can identify with a protagonist who falls into a strange world where logical arguments will never succeed, yet who manages to maintain her 154 (mental) integrity while still being flexible enough to fit herself into Wonderland’s variously- sized buildings, gardens, and hallways. In “Terrorland,” it is Freddy’s refusal (or inability) to meet Wonderland on its own, doll-sized turf that allows him to conquer the aliens. The feminine strength found in Alice’s variable size is repudiated with a masculine stability. figure 30: Freddy defeats the Wonderlandian aliens that had beaten his father and scared his sister. From “Alex in Terrorland,” in Lost Worlds #5, pencils by Alex Toth and inks by Mike Pepe. In Alice in Comicland. Toth and Peppe augment their insertion of a boy into Alice’s role by giving Freddy a younger sister to save named Alice. Coupled with references within the text to “another Alice” (italics in original, 88), who impotently ran screaming from the aliens when they first arrived on Earth, “Alice in Terrorland” manipulates Carroll’s empowering tale of a flexible girl whose logic ultimately conquers all into a pat reiteration of masculine superiority and feminine cowardly weakness. Thus, as one sees in Japanese Alices, Alice is removed from her own story, made multiple yet in such a way that neither of the two Alices in the comic are the real Alice, the one true Alice in (Terror)land. Adaptation is a double-edged sword. The silhouette allows Alice to 155 travel anywhere through only the sketchiest outline, but that same flexibility enables creators to change and distort the story to the point that it becomes a shadow of itself in a different way. Like Alice herself, Alice’s relationship with gender transforms in every adaptation. Male Alices lose Alice’s transformation ability in a grotesque undermining of the story’s central character. On the other hand, gender-unbent Alice adaptations also fall into a continuum of liberation that varies over time. The mere act of translating Alice had transgressive overtones in 1950s Japan, but Kusama Yayoi had to strip her participants naked to force social change in 1958 New York City. While women seem to have taken control of Alice later then men in cultures across the globe, the act of producing and arranging Alice adaptations seems to transgress gender norms in much the same way that Vaclavik argues Alice did when Carroll first wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is important to note the latter action as well. That act of producing enables creators to make social change, but consumers’ conscious selection and deployment of those adaptations also redraws social norms. Consuming Alice adaptations in the twenty-first century often entails public statements and activities that convey the (largely female) consumers’ ownership and mastery over culture. Alice stickers are applied to cell phones and notebooks that will be seen by both the owner and her friends, family, and coworkers. Alice cafés are by definition public spaces that position patrons as masters of the table who can order waitstaff around. Alice clothing declares the wearer’s ability to meld Alice to her will to even casual passersby. For this reason, the unknowable nature of Alice becomes its greatest strength even as Alice’s role in creating and contesting gender norms evades a simple thesis. 156 If not an adaptation, what? Alice escapes the bonds of language in Japan, as the name Alice, Arisu, entered Japanese as a girls’ name that is somehow inextricable from the story’s reassuring affect. Common Japanese girls’ names often express a desire for the type of woman the child will grow up to be – names like Aiko, the “child of love,” and Hikaru, who is “shining,” suggest the effect that parents hope their children will have on the world. Arisu, then, seems to embody reassurance and safety in an unsafe world. In Japanese Alice adaptations, young Alice half-disappears into a silhouette as she becomes a bridge between the here-and-now, on one hand, and the world of a young girl’s journey through a mad Wonderland and back again, unscathed. Though Alice’s Japanese popularity may initially surprise, it is easy to see why the story would prove resilient in Japan over more than a century of cultural, political, and economic upheaval. Yet, as “Alice in Terrorland” and American McGee’s Alice suggest, Alice is not only popular in Japan. There is a large and growing body of Alice adaptations worldwide. Some of these are obvious and stunning in scale: Walt Disney Company’s trio of animated and live-action Alice movies have collectively earned over a billion dollars at the global box office. Others are less well known (figure 31). Yet, much like the silhouetted Alice in Japan, many of these adaptations test our understanding of how closely a work must be tied to a source to function and be enjoyed as an adaptation. 157 figure 31: Adaptation of Alice by a party organizer and tour guide. Seen in Oxford, England in April, 2015. I have already shown that the name Alice, or Arisu, is inextricable from Carroll’s creation in Japanese popular culture. Merely mentioning the name dredges thoughts of Wonderland and mad tea parties from people’s minds. Yet in English, the name Alice pre-existed Carroll’s books, in the form of young Alice Liddell, the books’ inspiration, and scores of other women named Alice. Wonderland is also a contested term; predating Alice by at least a century, it remains in common use today outside of Alice in phrases like “winter wonderland.” At the same time, it retains strong links to Alice in English. For example, American music festival organizer Insomniac Events has embodied Alice in a series of festivals unified under the term wonderland: Beyond Wonderland, Nocturnal Wonderland, Escape from Wonderland, and White Wonderland. Aside from the word wonderland, Alice tends not to be highlighted in festival promotional verbiage or imagery. The 2017 iteration of Beyond Wonderland (figure 32), for instance, is subtitled “The Endless Sea” and relies on aquatic imagery for its promotional materials. Insomniac Events expects consumers to associate the festival with Alice given only the barest of hints – a word, a short video featuring an untitled book floating on water, a disembodied young, female voice. Should one dig more deeply, there are references to an Alice (as well as a Queen, 158 a fox, and leopard ladies, among others) amongst some of the limited text on Beyond Wonderland’s website. The names of two of the festival’s six stages (Cheshire Cove and The Queen’s Domain) suggest Alice, but the majority (The Outer Realm, Upside-Down House, Boombox Art Car, and The Aquarium) are utterly unrelated. As limited, as these clues are, they are still enough for Beyond Wonderland to be, “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works” (8), in Linda Hutcheon’s words. One need look no farther than Jenna Romaine’s article announcing the opening of ticket sales to see how these small hints are collected and augmented by consumers. After briefly noting that tickets are now available and that this year’s festival will take place in a new location, Romaine introduces the festival’s theme: “Drawing inspiration from the aquatic creatures and colors of the sea, Beyond Wonderland puts an underwater twist on Alice In Wonderland.” Romaine proceeds to list the names of the stages and link to Insomniac’s short film, which features a young girl’s narration over video of an untitled book floating on water. Although Insomniac’s promotional materials do not mention Alice or its characters by name at any time (figure 33), and its website merely contains a few references from a previous year’s festival, Romaine subordinates Insomniac’s new and heavily featured aquatic flourishes to Alice. In her eyes, Alice is the premier attraction, which happens to be embodied in an aquatic form for this event. 159 Returning to the second part of Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation, “a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging” (ibid.), surely the added aquatic element constitutes creativity, and the linkage between book, sea, music, and festival provides a new interpretation of Carroll’s stories. Finally, Hutcheon argues that an adaptation must be, “an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” (ibid.). Beyond Wonderland’s nearly decade- long history of reimagining Alice to include the sea, leopard ladies, steampunk, and a host of other elements is clearly an extended engagement. Beyond Wonderland, and by extension its fellow Wonderland festivals, thus function as an adaptation – which means that they are related to by consumers as part of the Alice world – despite their minimal usage of Carroll’s material. In my analysis of Japanese Alice adaptations, I argued that Marc Steinberg’s theorization of the character image as a synecdoche for the entire world of a work could be extended to the point that a character’s pointed absence, rather than its dynamically immobile presence, could also serve as a conduit moving consumers into and through an entire world. Beyond figure 32: Advertisement for seventh annual Beyond Wonderland music festival. figure 33: Advertisement for seventh annual Beyond Wonderland music festival. 160 Wonderland’s attenuated references suggest that consumers do not even require a complete character. Consequently, I would argue that today’s Alice in Wonderland adaptations present a challenge to Charles S. Peirce’s categorization of signs into icons, indices and symbols. 105 Regardless of into which category any given sign falls, Peirce declares that all forms of sign fulfill three conditions. As with adaptations, a sign must be recognized as a sign in order to function. As Peirce points out, “it is only a sign to that mind which so considers and if it is not a sign to any mind it is not a sign at all” (142). In this, signs and adaptations are both dependant on human knowledge. The viewer must already know of the signified before the sign is seen, or else the sign is meaningless (as a sign). In addition to being recognized, Peirce argues that a sign has its own “material quality” (141), or a materiality that belongs to the sign in and of itself. Peirce’s description of the materiality of signs is strikingly similar to Ōtsuka’s definition of shukō. That is, both Peirce’s material quality and Ōtsuka’s shukō refer to those aspects of a work that is intrinsically tied to a larger work which are specific to the former and differ from the latter. Peirce’s final qualification is what Peirce calls its “pure demonstrative application” (142): some form of linkage between sign and signified. As Peirce notes, this relation, “does not consist in one’s being the effect of the other but in both being the effect of the same cause” (ibid.), a cause which precedes both sign and signified. Peirce thus describes a triangular relationship between cause, signified, and sign. Yet, Alice disturbs this equilateral relationship. Alice presents not a triad, but a quartet: the world of Alice (i.e. the signified), signs of Alice (such as a still of Alice from the Disney animated film), the cause behind the two, and Alice’s silhouettes. Alice’s silhouettes stand uneasily amidst sign, signified, and cause, linking them into a unified whole. The 105 Peirce’s icons share some element with that which they signify, where his indices are actually connected to that which they signify in some way. Finally, his symbols only denote that which they signify because we choose to recognize them as such. 161 silhouette’s aggressive absence enables consumers to experience sign, signified, and cause simultaneously, giving them mastery over meaning. 106 Peirce’s categorization relies on the presence of a sign; Alice silhouettes are significant because of their structured absence. Alice is hinted at, but never fully deployed. Moreover, Alice silhouettes signify not the character of Alice, but the entire world of Alice in Wonderland, much as Steinberg’s “material-immaterial composite” anime characters do. Even so, these silhouettes clearly signify Alice in Wonderland, as opposed to, for example, A Little Princess or The Secret Garden. That absence can be subtle, but those small absences bridge consumers’ everyday reality with a world where rabbit holes and mirrors are doorways into Wonderland, logic can turn against even the most rational speaker, and the body is a malleable partner in adventure. Unreality thus becomes the constant companion of reality, a safe space when the world becomes too real. In this topsy-turvy unreal reality, Alice becomes whatever a creator or consumer wants it to be. 106 As seen in Japanese women’s deployment of Alice adaptations to claim authority described above. 162 Works Cited Abe Kōbō. The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō. Edited and translated by Richard F. Calichman. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Abel, Jonathan. Redacted: The archives of censorship in transwar Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke. Tales Grotesque and Curious. Translated by Glenn W. Shaw. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1938. ----. Kappa. Translated by Seiichi Shiojiri. Japan: The Hokuseido Press, 1949. 芥川、龍之介。芥川龍之介全集。東京：筑摩書房、1958． “芥川龍之介－内なる慶びと苦悩。”日本近代文学館。Accessed January 19, 2017. http://www.bungakukan.or.jp/cat-exhibition/cat-exh_rend/522/ “ 芥川龍之介の河童図.” 開運：なんでも鑑定団. Accessed January 19, 2017. http://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/kantei/kaiun_db/otakara/20150811/07.html Alice in Comicland, Edited by Craig Yoe. San Diego, CA: IDW Books, 2014. Allen, Graham. Roland Barthes. London; New York: Routledge, 2003. Anan, Nobuko. Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing girls’ aesthetics. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Angles, Jeffrey. Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of bishōnen culture in modernist Japanese literature. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. “ ありす.” お名前辞典. Accessed August 18, 2015. http://name.m3q.jp/list?g=2&s= ありす. Artaud, Antonin. Œuvres. Edited by Évelyne Grossman. France: Quarto Gallimard, 2004. ----. Œuvres Complètes IX. France: Gallimard, 1979. ----. Antonin Artaud: Selected writings. Edited by Susan Sontag. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1976. Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies: Fourth Edition. New York: Routledge, 2014. Beebee, Thomas and Ikuho Amano. “Pseudotranslation in the fiction of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke.” Translation Studies 3.1 (2010): 17-32. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. London: Fontana, 1973. “Beyond Wonderland.” Beyond Wonderland, accessed February 10, 2017. http://beyondwonderland.com/ 163 Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York, NY: Lukas & Sternberg, 2007. Britt, Ryan. "Weird Differences between the First Star Wars Movie and its Preceding Novelization." (2013). “Bur.” A Dictionary of Construction, Surveying and Civil Engineering. 2016. http://www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy2.usc.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780199534463.00 1.0001/acref-9780199534463-e-1008 “Bur.” Dictionary of Gems and Gemology. 2016. http://link.springer.com.libproxy2.usc.edu/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-540-72816- 0_3160. “Bur.” A Dictionary of Nursing Sixth Edition. Edited by Elizabeth A. Martin and Tanya A. McFerran. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Calsimsek, Nilay. “Gender Identity Formation in Children’s Magazines in Japan during the Meiji Era.” Hemispheres 28 (2013): 57-76. Carter, Nona. “A Study of Japanese Children’s Magazines 1888-1949.” Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2009. 千森、幹子。表彰のアリス：テキストと図像に見る日本とイギリス。東京：法政大学出版局、2015. Clements, Jonathan. Anime: A History. London: BFI by Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Clements, Rebekah. A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Coats, Karen. Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children's Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Coillie, Jan van. Children's Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies. Manchester, UK; Kinderhook, NY: St. Jerome Pub, 2006. Condry, Ian. The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. Copeland, Rebecca. Lost Leaves: Women writers of Japan. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000. Creed, Barbara. Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003. 164 Crimp, Douglas. “Pictures.” October 8 (1979): 75-89. Danziger-Russell, Jacqueline. Girls and their Comics: Finding a Female Voice in Comic Book Narrative. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1990. Disler, Caroline. “Benjamin’s ‘Afterlife’: A productive(?) mistranslation in memoriam Daniel Simeoni.” TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction 24.1 (2011): 183-221. Emmerich, Michael. The Tale of Genji: Translation, canonization, and world literature. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Fahy, David. “Review: Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation.” Journal of Asian Studies 48.3 (1989): 623-624. Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 2010. Flanagan, Damian. Critical Lives: Yukio Mishima. London: Reaktion Books, 2014. Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Gerow, Aaron. “The Self Seen as Other: Akutagawa and Film.” Literature/Film Quarterly 23.3 (1995): 197-203. Hadfield, James. “The ‘dwarf’ architect of Japan’s literary boom.” The Japan Times. 9 May 2015. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/05/09/books/dwarf-architect-japans- literary-boom/#.VW9HTkZUU5J Hara, Sho. “ わが国における Alice's Adventures in Wonderland の翻訳受容 : ナンセンスの笑いの喪失.” Chukyo English Literature 7 (1986): 45-75. 長谷川、天渓。“ 鏡世界：第一回：鏡の家。” 少年世界、April 15, 1899. ---- 。“ 鏡世界：第二回：鬼園。” 少年世界、May 15, 1899. ---- 。“ 鏡世界：第三回：鏡世界の蟲。” 少年世界、July 1, 1899. ---- 。“ 鏡世界：第三回：鏡世界の蟲（つづき）。” 少年世界、August 1, 1899. ---- 。“ 鏡世界：第四回：太郎吉と次郎吉。” 少年世界、August 1, 1899. ---- 。“ 鏡世界：第五回：海馬と大工の歌。” 少年世界、September 15, 1899. ---- 。“ 鏡世界：第六回。” 少年世界、November 1, 1899. ---- 。“ 鏡世界：第七回。” 少年世界、November 15, 1899. 165 ---- 。“ 鏡世界：第八回。” 少年世界、December 15, 1899. Hayashi, Michiyo and Ariko Kawabata. “Children’s Literature Research in Japan.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2003): 241-246. Henry, David. “Japanese Children’s Literature as Allegory of Empire in Iwaya Sazanami’s Momotarō (The Peach Boy).” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 34.3 (2009): 218- 228. Ho, Koon-ki T. “Kappa as a Dystopia: A study of Akutagawa’s anti-utopian thought.” Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens/Hamburg 153.1 (1993):45-62. Hoptman, Laura, et al. Yayoi Kusama. London: Phaidon, 2000. 伊藤整、亀井勝一郎、中村光夫、平野謙 and 山本健吉, ed. 日本現代文学全集・講談社 27. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1968. Jackson, Emily. Silhouettes: A History and Dictionary of Artists. New York: Dover Publications, 1981. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Karatani, Kojin. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Edited by Brett de Bary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998. Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1984. Kelen, Christopher, and Björn Sundmark. The Nation in Children's Literature: Nations of Childhood. 88 Vol. New York: Routledge, 2012. Kit, Borys and Kim Masters. “Marvel's Civil War: Why Kevin Feige Demanded Emancipation From CEO Ike Perlmutter.” The Hollywood Reporter. 3 September 2015. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/marvels-civil-war-why-kevin-820147 Kline, Stephen. Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children's Culture in the Age of Marketing. London; New York: Verso, 1993. Kondō, Motohiro. “Japan’s Dependent Singles”. Japan Echo. 27.3 (2000): 47-48. クローチェ、ベネデット。長谷川天渓、大槻憲二（訳）。世界大思想全集 46 ：美学。東京：早稲田印刷、1930。 166 Kusama, Yayoi. Infinity Net: The autobiography of Yayoi Kusama. Translated by Ralph McCarthy. London: Tate Publishing, 2011. 楠本、君恵。翻訳の国の「アリス」：ルイス・キャロル翻訳史・翻訳論。東京：末和谷、2001. Lathey, Gillian. The Translation of Children's Literature: A Reader. Clevedon, England; Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Lefevere, André (ed.). Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 1992. Levy, Indra. Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque femme fatale, translation, and vernacular style in modern Japanese literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. ----- (ed.). Translation in Modern Japan. London: Routledge, 2011. Lindseth, Jon (general ed.), and Alan Tennenbaum (technical ed.). Alice in a World of Wonderlands. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2015. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Lippit, Seiji. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Lloyd, Fran. Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Lovett, Charles. Alice on Stage: A history of the early theatrical productions of Alice in Wonderland. London: Meckler Corporation, 1990. Lubbock, Tom, and Marion Coutts. English Graphic. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2012. McKnight, Anne. “Frenchness and Transformation in Japanese Subculture, 1972–2004.” Mechademia 5 (2010): 118-137. Marran, Christine. Poison Woman: Figuring female transgression in modern Japanese literature. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Masters, Kim. “How Marvel Became the Envy (and Scourge) of Hollywood.” The Hollywood Reporter. 23 July 2014. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/how-marvel-became- envy-scourge-720363 Maxwell, Richard. The Victorian Illustrated Book. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. 167 “ メディアファクトリー新コミック誌『コミックジーン』サイトオープン!!!!!.” Comic- gene.com. Last modified December 2, 2010. http://www.comic-gene.com/blog/?m=201012. Milk, Chris. The Johnny Cash Project. Accessed May 11, 2015. http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/ Miller, J. Scott. Adaptations of Western Literature in Meiji Japan. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. Morton, Leith. The Alien Within: Representations of the exotic in twentieth-century Japanese literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009. Murray, Ros. Antonin Artaud: The scum of the soul. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Napier, Susan. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The subversion of Japanese modernity. London; New York: Routledge, 1996. Oittinen, Riitta. Translating for Children. New York: Garland, 2000. “ 女の子の名前人気ランキング.” お名前辞典. Accessed August 18, 2015. http://name.m3q.jp/ranking?g=2&page=3. Ōtsuka, Eiji and Marc Steinberg. "World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative." Mechademia 5.1 (2010): 99-116. 大塚、英志。定本物語消費論。東京：角川文庫、2001． The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, Edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Peace, David. “Last Words.” The Guardian. December 29 th , 2016. Sept. 8 th , 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/08/featuresreviews.guardianreview13 Pierce, Tamora. "The Dreaded Movie Question." Dare to Be Stupid: The public Live Journal of writer Tamora Pierce. Mar. 26th, 2008 at 11:23a.m. 2008. http://tammypierce.livejournal.com/9409.html. Platt, Brian. “Japanese Childhood, Modern Childhood: The nation-state, the school, and 19 th - century globalization.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (2005): 965-985. Romaine, Jenna. “Beyond Wonderland Announces 2017 Ticket Sale, Venue Change.” Billboard. Jan. 20 th , 2017. 2017. http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/7654226/beyond- wonderland-2017-ticket-location 168 Rutherford, Emma. Silhouette. New York: Rizzoli, 2009. Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and cultural nationalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997. Saltzman-Li, Katherine. Creating Kabuki Plays: Context for Kezairoku, “Valuable Notes on Playwriting”. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010. Schodt, Frederik. The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, manga/anime revolution. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Sherif, Ann. “A Confucian Utopia: Kōda Aya and Kōda Rohan.” In The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese literary women and the law of the father, edited by Rebecca Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, 238-264. Honolulu: U. of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Shimazaki, Satoko. Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the worlds of the samurai to the vengeful female ghost. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Silver, Mark. Purloined Letters: Cultural borrowing and Japanese crime literature, 1868-1937. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Sorensen, Roy A. Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Steinberg, Marc. Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. ----. "Condensing the Media Mix: Multiple Possible Worlds in the Tatami Galaxy." Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21.2 (2012): 71. Stephens, John. Subjectivity in Asian Children's Literature and Film: Global Theories and Implications. New York: Routledge, 2012. 高山、宏。表象の芸術工学。東京：工作者、2009． ---- 。アリス狩。東京：青土社、2008. Tierney, Robert Thomas. Tropics of Savagery: The culture of Japanese empire in comparative frame. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2010. Treat, John Whittier. “Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: Shojo Culture and the Nostalgic Subject.” The Journal of Japanese Studies 19.2 (1993): 353-387. 169 Trendacosta, Katharine. "Why Tamora Pierce Should Be Hollywood's Favorite Author Right Now." io9. 11/18/14 12:44a.m. 2014. 12/08/2014 http://io9.com/why-tamora-pierce-should- be-hollywoods-favorite-author-1660018656. Tyler, William. Modanizumu: Modernist fiction from Japan 1913-1938. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Vaclavik, Kiera. Uncharted Depths: Descent narratives in English and French children’s literature. London: Legenda, 2010. ----. “The Dress of the Book: Children’s literature, fashion and fancy dress.” In Beyond the Book: Transforming Children’s Literature, edited by Bridget Carrington and Jennifer Harding, 62- 76. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 2008. van Staden, Cobus. “The Golden Glow of the Alps: Capitalism, Globalization and Anime’s Dreams of Europe.” In Genre in Asian Film and Television: New approaches, edited by Felicia Chan, Angelina Karpovich and Xin Zhang, 178-193. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Wakabayashi, Judy. “Foreign Bones, Japanese Flesh: Translations and the Emergence of Modern Children's Literature in Japan.” Japanese Language and Literature 42.2 (2008): 227-255. ----. “Japanese Translation Historiography: Origins, strengths, weaknesses and lessons.” Translation Studies 5:2 (2012) 172-188. Woerner, Meredith. “Agent Carter's Showrunner Spills What's Next For Our New Favorite Spy.” io9. January 12, 2015. Accessed May 9, 2015. <http://io9.com/agent-carters-showrunner- spills-whats-next-for-our-new-1679055161/+morninggloria>. Yayoi Kusama, Edited by Louise Neri and Takaya Goto. New York: Rizzoli, 2012. Yayoi Kusama: I who have arrived in heaven, Edited by Julia Joern. New York: David Zwirner, 2014. 吉田精一。近代作家研究叢書 121：芥川龍之介。東京：日本図書センター、1942、この板 1993． Zahlten, Alexander. "The Role of Genre in Film from Japan: Transformations 1960s--2000s." Ph.D. Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz (Germany), 2007. Germany: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 170 Japan’s Alices Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke. Kappa. Translated by Geoffrey Bownas with an Introduction by G.H. Healey. Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1990. ---. Kappa: Gulliver in a kimono. Translated by Seiichi Shiojiri. Osaka, Japan: Akitaya, 1948. 芥川、龍之介 and 菅菊池。アリス物語。東京：興文社、1927．アリスミステリー傑作選。Ed. 中井英夫。東京：河出文庫、1988．有栖川、有栖。赤い鳥は菅に帰る：有栖川有栖エッセい集。東京：講談社、2003. ---- 。謎は解ける方が魅力的：有栖川有栖エッセい集。講談社、2006. Carroll & Alice: 「不思議の国のアリス」展. Ed. アプトインターナショナル and 寺岡たかし。Np: アプトインターナショナル、1993．ふとめの国のありす. Directed by 松国美佳. 2012. Tokyo: トリウッドスタジオプロジェクト, 2012. ハートの国のアリス～Wonderful Wonder World ～：公式ビジュアルファンブック。東京：enterbrain 、2007. ハルチカ〜ハルタとチカは青春する〜. Directed by 橋本昌和. 2016. Nantoshi, Toyama Prefecture: P.A. Works, 2016. Episode ten of this series features the protagonists solving a minor mystery with clues from Alice in Wonderland (in particular, the phrase, “through the looking-glass” and the name Jabbberwocky). Kanou, Ayumi (art) and Visualworks (story). I am Alice?: Body Swap in Wonderland: Volume One. Translated by Jocelyne Allen. Canada: Seven Seas Entertainment, 2014. 木下、さくら。Alice in Wonderland Picture Book 。東京：幻冬舎コミックス、2006. 楠山,正雄. 不思議の国. 東京：家庭読物刊行会, 1920. 魔法少女なんたもういいですから。Directed by 米田和弘. PINE JAM, 2016. March Hare Tea Party Club. アリス・ブック I 。Ed. by 増山のりえ. 東京：新湖社, 1991. ----.アリス・ブック II 。Ed. by 増山のりえ. 東京：新湖社, 1991. 萬里、アンナ。人形の国のアリス。東京: 小学館、2015．三原、ミツカズ。アリス中毒。東京：インデックス・マガジンズ、2002. 171 ----. “Alice in Underground.” In chocolate, pgs 97-100. 東京：インデックス・マガジンズ、 2005. Mochizuki, Jun (created and illustrated by) and Shinobu Wakamiya (written by). Pandora Hearts: Caucus Race. Translated by Taylor Engel. New York: Yen On, 2015. Okazaki, Kyoko. pink. New York, NY: Vertical, Inc, 2013. 南房、秀久。アリス・イン・ゴシックランド：霧の都の大海賊。東京：角川文庫、2011． ---- 。アリス・イン・ゴシックランド：II 怪盗紳士と大聖堂の秘法。東京：角川文庫、 2011．坂本、真綾。少年アリス。CD. 作・編曲：菅野よう子。2003．Victor Entertainment. 鈴見、敦。うるわし怪盗アリス: １。東京: 電撃コミックス、2011．高山、宏。アリス狩り。東京: 春士社、2008． Terayama, Shūji. The Crimson Thread of Abandon: Stories. Translated by Elizabeth L Armstrong. Portland, ME: MerwinAsia, 2014. 内田、康夫。軽井沢の霧の中で。東京：角川文庫、1995. 渡瀬、悠宇。ありす 19th：I 。東京：小学館、2001. ---- 。ありす 19th：II 。東京：小学館、2002. ---- 。ありす 19th：III 。東京：小学館、2002. Wonderful Wonder Book: Alice Archives: Greencover ～ハート＆クローバー＆ジョーカーの国のアリス SS＆イラスト集、Edited by 株式会社ヘッドルーム。東京：宙（おおぞら）出版、2010. 薮内、貴広。イン・ワンダーランド。東京：Beam Comix 、2010. Yuki, Kaori. Alice in Murderland: Volume One. Translated by William Flanagan. New York: Yen Press, 2015. ----. Grand Guignol Orchestra: Volume One. Translated by Camellia Nieh. San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, 2009. ----. Grand Guignol Orchestra: Volume Two. Translated by Camellia Nieh. San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, 2009. ----. Grand Guignol Orchestra: Volume Three. Translated by Camellia Nieh. San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, 2009. ----. Grand Guignol Orchestra: Volume Four. Translated by Camellia Nieh. San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, 2010. ----. Grand Guignol Orchestra: Volume Five. Translated by Camellia Nieh. San Francisco, CA: Viz Media, 2010. 172 Other Alices, Citing Alice “Alice in Wonderland.” Rubelli, 2016. Viscose and silk-blend lampas fabric by Venetian textile company. Mainly available through American home décor company Donghia, also available in Canada through TÉLIO. Beaton, M.C. Death of a Nurse. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016. Chapter Seven is prefaced with a quote from Looking-Glass regarding Anglo-Saxon attitudes which is then referred to within the chapter (pg. 193). This same quotation has been cited several other times, most notably in the 1956 book Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson. Bolger Hyde, Katherine. Arsenic with Austen. New York: Minotaur Books, 2016. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are used to describe one character’s posture (234), and another character applies the Red Queen’s advice to herself (51) in a literary-minded novel that mostly refers to the works of Jane Austen, but also occasionally cites J.K. Rowling. Christie, Agatha. Postern of Fate. London: Harper, 2015. Dennis, Patrick. Auntie Mame. New York: Broadway Books, 2001. Book detailing an orphan’s life under the care of his eccentric aunt; later made into popular stage and screen versions. In a pull quote on the back, Camille Paglia writes, “Auntie Mame is the American Alice in Wonderland.” Elle Decor, November 2016. Issue contains multiple references to Alice. Cover image is a close-up of a photograph from a London townhouse owned by a Spanish jeweler and decorated by Patricia Sanchiz. The close-up focuses on the living room’s art: a set of Salvador Dali Alice prints. The house tour covers pages 178-183 and includes another picture of the Dali prints. Additionally, the final non-advertising page of the magazine contains a feature called “Endpaper” that shows off a newly-available fabric pattern; in this issue, that pattern is Rubelli’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature like a Professor: A lively and entertaining guide to reading between the lines. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 2014. Goldberg, Whoopi. “Alice in Wonderland: Whoopi Goldberg.” Central Park Conservancy. Accessed October 4, 2016. http://www.centralparknyc.org/things-to-see-and- do/attractions/alice-in-wonderland.html A history of José de Creeft’s Alice statue. Kilcher, Jewel. Goodbye Alice in Wonderland. CD. Performed by Jewel Kilcher. 2006: New York, NY: Atlantic Recording Company/ A Warner Music Group Company. 2006. CD. Performing under her given name alone, Jewel is a multi-platinum-selling singer and songwriter who shot to fame with the songs “Who Will Save Your Soul” and “You Were Meant For Me” from her debut album in 1995. Goodbye Alice in Wonderland, her third album, is named after an autobiographical song of the same name. 173 Lewis, 2006-2015. TV series. A spin-off of the Inspector Morse television series, Lewis was set in Oxford, England, like its predecessor. Multiple episodes refer to Alice, in particular “The Soul of Genius” (season five, episode one). “The Soul of Genius” traces the titular detective’s attempt to solve the murder of a man who devoted his life to solving a riddle by Lewis Carroll. Sayers, Dorothy L. Busman’s Honeymoon. New York: Bourbon Street Books, 2013. Alice is referred to and quoted throughout this novel, arguably Sayers’ best and a depiction of newly-married life between Sayers’ classic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and his mystery author wife, Harriet Vane. See pages 28, 107, 244, 346, 379 and 401. Sayers, Dorothy L. The Complete Stories. New York: Bourbon Street Books, 2013. See “The Queen’s Square” and “Absolutely Elsewhere”. Star Trek, “Shore Leave”. Directed by Robert Sparr. 1966. The crew of the starship Enterprise survey an alien planet that brings their thoughts to life. The first sign that something is strange on the planet follows Doctor McCoy’s statement that “It’s like Alice in Wonderland down here.” Moments after he speaks, he sees a life-size White Rabbit check its pocket watch and run off, followed by the appearance of a young blonde girl in a blue dress and white pinafore. Alice asks Doctor McCoy where the rabbit went, McCoy points, and she runs off again. Cue opening credits. The crew spends the remainder of the episode chasing the White Rabbit, whom they never find again, through Wonderland. Ultimately, the planet is revealed to be an alien amusement park that brings to life whatever visitors think of. Star Trek, “Who Mourns for Adonais?”. Directed by Marc Daniels. 1967. Chekov refers to the Cheshire Cat in regards to an alien, Adonais, who disappears in front of the crew. As usual, he mis-identifies the Cat as belonging to a Russian story and is corrected by Doctor McCoy. Alice is not named directly. Interestingly, the actor who played Adonais, Michael Forest, later provided the English voice of a character in Serial Experiments Lain, an anime adaptation of Alice, under the pseudonym Alfred Thor. Zdarsky, Chip (story), Katie Cook (art), Heather Breckel (colour) and Travis Lanham (lettering). “Logic and Proportion” in Zdarsky, Quinones, Rivera, Renzi, Rosenberg and Lanham, Howard the Duck #4. New York: Marvel Worldwide, Inc, 2015.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Floating signifiers: tracing zainichi Korean identity in postcolonial literature and visual media

PDF

The space of Japanese science fiction: illustration, subculture, and the body in SF Magazine

PDF

Embracing the demon: the monstrous child in Japanese literature and cinema, 1946-2008

Asset Metadata

Creator Kennell, Amanda E. (author)

Core Title Alice in evasion: adapting Lewis Carroll in Japan

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 06/21/2017

Defense Date 05/02/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag adaptation,Akutagawa Ryūnosuke,alice in wonderland,comics,Japan,Japanese popular culture,Kusama Yayoi,Lewis Carroll,manga,media studies,modern Japanese literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,silhouette,translation

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira M. (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Park, Sunyoung (committee member), Shimazaki, Satoko (committee member)

Creator Email kennell@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-390197

Unique identifier UC11264372

Identifier etd-KennellAma-5447.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-390197 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KennellAma-5447.pdf

Dmrecord 390197

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kennell, Amanda E.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA