Encounters with the Planetary: Mori Ōgai’s Cartographic Writing

Far from conflating urban reality with the homogeneous and functional surface of a space of commodity exchange and military circulation, Ögai/Öson keeps playing with the tension between the dual layers of referentiality of the map to shape a planetary urban subjectivity in the circulation between the various positions occupied by the author and the main character, Jun'ichi. In this respect, Youth is a powerful critique of both the rhetoric of interiority of naturalist writing and the ideology of the lost home (the domus) that grounds the definition of the national subject in both state nationalism (kokkashugi) and ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi).\n In other words, the letters of the grandmother come from a relative outside of urban space that externalize the immanent, mechanical temporality of both the national territory and the global space of circulation, linear and cyclical, "the repetition of the eversame in the evernew.