The Superfluous Modern Girl: Osei in Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo Available to Purchase

Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo (Floating Cloud; 1887) is roundly considered “Japan’s first modern novel” by both Anglophone and Japanese scholars; its only English translation, by Marleigh Grayer Ryan in 1967, proclaims the achievement in the very title of the book. The significance of the label, combined with the novel’s incompleteness, has led to discussion over the nature of Japanese literary modernity itself. For Futabatei and his contemporaries, the sense of this modernity was heavily informed by comparison to foreign literature, and in Futabatei’s case, he aspired to the Russian realists he read and translated. Studies on the Russian influence in Ukigumo have focused on the novel’s hero, Bunzō, as a “superfluous man” of the Russian literary tradition. This article further draws attention to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and its superfluous figures, Bazarov and Odintsova, as a comparative touchpoint. It explores the possibility that Osei, who has so far been read as a Meiji schoolgirl or as a national allegory, could be a “superfluous woman.” This article argues that consideration of Osei as a “superfluous woman” ultimately leads to establishing Osei’s materiality—her appearance and attire—as the least distorted lens through which to see the “modern Japanese woman” she represents.