Chapter 13 - Osato-san’s Hands

Summary

This chapter proposes a framework of gestural analysis to read the untimely qualities of Nagahara Shōson’s serialized novel Osato-san [The Tale of Osato]. Osato-san was first published from 1925 to 1926 in the Rafu Shimpo, a Japanese-language newspaper in Los Angeles; an English translation was published in 2012. In the first half of the chapter I situate gestural analysis between the historical horizons of, on the one hand, recent turns to the aesthetics of gesture in Asian American literary and performance scholarship, and on the other, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attitudes toward gesture as exemplary of forms of “ethnic style” opposed to standardization and mechanization. The second half of the chapter demonstrates how the analysis of gesture can illuminate qualities of untimeliness across multiple temporal layers: from the horizon of expectations laid out by a Rafu Shimpo review of an earlier Shōson novel, through untimely temporal disturbances in the serial production of Osato-san, to shifts described in the closing horizons of the novel itself.