L’ascesa di K: il doppio e l’ombra nei racconti di Kajii Motojirō

“K no shoten, aruiwa K no dekishi,” by Kajii Motojiro, is a short story with a rich array of features, such as elements of the suiri shosetsu genre, the theme of the doppelgänger, intertextuality, and epistolary style. This paper aims to analyze K no shoten, focusing on the relation between the story’s doppelgänger theme and Kajii’s creative method. The paper be gins by examining the motifs of the moon, the shadow, and the double through the story’s intertextual connections with the nineteenth-century Eu ropean Romantic and Symbolist movements. It then goes on to discuss K no shoten’s connections with authors contemporary to Kaiji, like Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Sato Haruo, who also wrote doppelgänger stories. Through a comparison with other stories by Kajii, the final part of the paper addresses the question of K’s identity and the role of seeing as underlying the process of Kajii’s doppelgänger representation.