The Dawn That Never Comes : Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism

A critical rethinking of theories of national imagination, "The Dawn That Never Comes" offers a detailed reading of one of modern Japan's most influential poets and novelists.

It surveys the ideologies of national imagination at play in early 20th-century Japan, specifically in the work of Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943).Bourdaghs analyses Toson's major works in detail, using them to demonstrate that the field of national imagination requires a complex interweaving of varied - and sometimes even contradictory - figures for positing a national community.

While many scholars have shown, for example, that modern hygiene has functioned in nationalist thought as a method of excluding foreign others as diseased, this study explores the multiple images of illness in Toson's fiction to demonstrate that hygiene employs more than one model of pathology.

Others have argued that nationalism is inherently ambivalent and self-contradictory; Bourdaghs shows more concretely both how this is so and why it is necessary.