Did the single-author study ever go away? John Treat, in a recent assessment of the state of modern Japanese-literature studies, noted with approval the appearance in Japanese of “many fine critical biographies of canonical writers,” adding that such “‘single-author’ studies” are “unfairly disparaged” by some in the United States.1 Certainly, there was a sense at the start of the century that such studies had fallen out of favor so long after the “death of the author” and post-structuralist challenges to notions of a unitary self. At the same time, as a mentor told me then, “We all know that the author is a construct, but it's a useful one,” and scholars have continued to employ the format to productive, even brilliant, effect in studies of Shimazaki Tōson, Higuchi Ichiyō, Uchida Hyakken, Nakagami Kenji, and Narushima Ryūhoku, among others.2
This approach, like any other, carries risks. Examining an oeuvre...