Between Fire and Water: Miyazawa Kenji's Reimagining of Opposites in <i>Ginga tetsudō no yoru</i>

This thesis explores how Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji playfully uses opposites and binaries to create thematic richness in his famous children's story Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night on the Milky Way Railroad). Despite being a children's book, the text works with mature themes such as loneliness, grief, and purpose, themes which are elevated through Kenji's idiosyncratic stylings. Through a close reading of the original Japanese text, the author isolates moments where Kenji conveys his Nichiren Buddhist worldview as part of his proselytizing mission, as well as moments that increase thematic richness, resulting in a multifaceted text that continues to puzzle, challenge, and engage readers nearly one hundred years after its writing. Kenji treats human constructed binaries as insignificant and hindrances to productive social connection, while at the same time treating pairing of opposites in the natural world as ordinary and beautiful, allowing for creation of a galactic adventure composed of altogether familiar components, and a worldview that can subsume elements as disparate as Christianity and paleontology.