Nenashigusa (Rootless Weeds, 1763): The Chrysanthemum and the Sword(fish). Appearance and Truth, Language and Emotion in an Eighteenth-Century Japanese Novel

This paper focuses on Hiraga Gennai’s (1728-1779) debut novel Nenashigusa (1763) and seeks to analyse the way it works as a literary text. The paper casts doubt on the alleged “polyphony” traditionally attributed to Gennai’s oeuvre and, by highlighting some weaknesses of the “Bakhtin-inspired reading” proposed by Ishigami (2002), it suggests a different approach through which a re-reading of the novel is possible. Gennai’s katari-like narration could be more precisely defined as a mechanism driven by a multiphonic voice, which determines an impression of multiplicity of voices and stances but is rather monolithic and produces flat characters, which do not take part in or question the opposition between truth and fiction. It is the multiphony itself that produces what Gennai calls the focus on ninjō (human feelings) of his novels, by means of the emotional content already entwined with the words of the massive web of intertextual references on which Nenashigusa textual fabric is woven.