A Chance Meeting: My Way to Japanese Literature:
Gitte Marianne Hansen (U.K.)

As the autumn leaves fell in 2004, I came to Waseda University as an exchange student. Although already at the MA level at Copenhagen University, my Japanese was not impressive, and I found myself frustrated at having only two options available to me - - Japanese language classes or classes taught in English on Japanese culture. Then, in my second semester, as I read through the catalogue of modules on offer to international students, I came across a class on contemporary Japanese literature. While I was not particularly interested in literature, what caught my attention was the sentence in bold beneath the main description: ‘This class is taught in Japanese. Students must be excellent at speaking, writing and understanding Japanese’. To say I was any of those would have been a huge exaggeration.

Apart from a few works such as Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country, Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen and Murakami Haruki’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (which I stopped reading half-way through), I had not read much Japanese literature at all (and indeed at that time many would have argued that two of those three books were not even literature at all). Expecting to fail the class due to my limited language skills and knowledge of Japanese literature, I decided to register anyway thinking that I would at least expose myself to real Japanese language from just being present. Nervous, I showed up to the first class to find a very small group of just eight students, a huge contrast to most of my other classes which had from 60 to 100 students. As the sensei walked in, my original goal of just listening to Japanese immediately fell to the ground as he began to read in English from a manuscript. In his late fifties, he explained that he had just moved from Meiji Gakuin University to Waseda and that this was his first time to teach in English. Although slightly disappointed by this turn of events, something about him immediately caught my interest from that first day. The passion with which he spoke about Japanese literature opened my eyes to a completely new world. His interpretations of the works we read were so convincing and yet so surprising that I always found myself thinking of them long after classes ended. His readings of Murakami and Yoshimoto – whose significance he, as one of very few, had argued for since their debut works – was always unique and refreshingly situated in the context of postwar and contemporary Japan, and I came to see not only Japanese literature in a new light, but Japanese history and culture as well. But perhaps most importantly, I learned to trust my own instinct when reading. ‘The first step in literary analysis’, I clearly recall him saying in one of his very first classes, ‘is to feel something. To then explore that feeling and turn it into a hypothesis. You can always discard it later and start over if it doesn’t work out’. That was when I realised how literature is just as much about the reader as it is about the text and its author. This sensei taught me that to understand literary works I could not just read secondary sources and literary history; I should also participate in creating meaning of the work through my own reading and thinking. ‘Of course, you must have evidence to make a convincing and strong argument’ he often repeated, and from his weekly classes in which he always took us through a detailed step by step explanation of his own readings, I got to see how this could be done in a fun and unique way. I have kept this idea with me ever since.

As the semester came to an end, I recall writing a final essay on Murakami’s short story ‘The little green monster’. My idea, that the monster was the narrator’s own other self, seemed to sit well with the sensei who casually asked me if I would work for him as his TA the following year. I felt very honoured, knowing how much more I could learn from him, and immediately I wrote to my supervisor at Copenhagen University to say that ‘Professor Katō Norihiro had asked me to work as his TA at Waseda and I would therefore not return as planned’. Today, it is with a bit of embarrassment at my own ignorance that I admit this: only after reading my supervisor’s reply did I realise the high-status Katō-sensei held within the circles of Japanese literary and cultural criticism. Only then did I discover how many books he had written on various topics within cultural and literary criticism, including Murakami Haruki. More than all of that, to me he was just a passionate, humble yet incredible knowledgeable man, who had mind blowing ideas about Japanese literature and always listened open-mindedly to his students.

To my regret and many others, Katō-sensei passed away too early, but I am grateful for the opportunity to meet him in his very first class at Waseda University and for the ensuing relationship we forged until his passing in 2019. As he told me several years after we first met, he had only accepted the invitation to move to Waseda’s School of International Liberal Studies as he was under the impression that he could teach in Japanese – hence the sentence in bold I had seen in the module catalogue. From my years as his TA and later RA, I know first-hand how much time and effort he put into those English lectures, but I am still grateful for this misunderstanding as I might otherwise not have met him or found my own way to Japanese literature. And as for my own Japanese language skills, I did improve throughout my time at Waseda, but that is of much less importance to me now.

There is no doubt in my mind that my chance meeting with Katō-sensei is the direct reason why I did a PhD in the field and why I today continue to work with Japanese literature – in particular Murakami Haruki’s works.

(Reader in Japanese Studies, Newcastle University)