Zoopoetics at the Crossroads Between Postmodernism and Posthuman. Case Study: The Cat and Contemporary Japanese Literature

In a world overwhelmed by emerging technologies, in which the idea that humanity has lost its “authenticity” is increasingly more widespread, the literary narration that explores the territories beyond the “human” realm becomes an excellent laboratory for conducting observations on the posthuman concerns. Thus, in the final wave of the contemporary Japanese literature – covering the first two decades of the 21^st century (2001-2021) –, seven novels have the word neko (‘cat’, ‘tomcat’) in their titles, written by Takashi Hiraide, Yōko Ogawa, Genki Kawamura, Makoto Shinkai, Naruki Nakagawa, Hiro Arikawa, Sōsuke Natsukawa. These Japanese novels have been translated into several dozens of languages, circling the globe and encountering, in their path, other books dedicated to the aforementioned feline. The present study aims to analyse these Japanese postmodern narrations from a zoopoetic-hermeneutic angle and to emphasise the cat-character’s role as the social marker of a “private space” shared by the human and his animal companion – which, naturally, is part of the “public space” of society –, connected to the present time of postmodern contemporaneity, as a means for “survival” in an alienated urban world. As part of an obvious intertextuality, the cat-character seems to dominate the gallery of non-human animal characters from the contemporary Japanese literature. Postmodernity, by its own means, adds to the study of the relation between the human animal and the non-human animal, which has previously been approached predominantly from an anthropological or a cultural-historical angle.

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