小堀 洋平

Tayama Katai's Nikko (Nikko, 1899) has some textual characteristics that shed light on the advent of the Realist Novel around the turn of the century. This work straddles two genres-travel literature and fiction-and a third-person narrative is occasionally interjected into the first-person narrative. This type of blending of narrative styles in one work was in fact common across a wide range of contemporary works, including what were conceived of in Japan as disparate genres such as the descriptive essay and belles-lettres. In Nikko, however, Katai is quite original in the way he took advantage of the changes in location in the progress of the journey in order to introduce a third-person narrative that goes astray from the norms of a travelogue. He was also creative in the way he used quotations from Western literary works to prompt a switch into third-person narrative. These innovative techniques set Nikko apart from and above numerous other works of travel literature of the same era.