Romantic Entanglements Occidentalism, Love, and Nanshoku in Mori Ōgai’s “Maihime”

Abstract

Mori Ōgai’s “Maihime” (The dancing girl, 1890) tells the story of the romantic relationship between Ōta Toyotarō, a Japanese exchange student studying constitutional law in Berlin, and a German dancer named Elis. Celebrated as a cornerstone of Japanese Romanticism, the tale reflects key aspects of the movement: pursuit of individual freedom, fascination with the exotic, reverence for national culture, and most importantly deep engagement with heightened emotion. This attention to feelings enables the short story to meet the needs of the historical moment by exploring the affective dimensions of high-stakes political, social, cultural, and intellectual transformations that were overwhelming Japan. My essay explores three Romantic themes in “Maihime”: Romantic Orientalism, Romantic love, and Romantic nanshoku—a homoerotic subculture among elite Japanese students. Through analysis of the narrative and its intertextual relations to other works, I consider how these three themes shape the structure and content of Ōgai’s composition. I argue that their interplay not only accounts for the seeming inconsistencies in the depiction of Toyotarō’s emotional journey but also contributes to the short story’s representation of the welter of conflicting feelings elicited by the experience of modernity.