Yoko Tawada’s drama Kafka Kaikoku (2013) depicts Japan’s encounter with Western culture from the Meiji era on as the catalyst for a metamorphosis much like Gregor Samsa’s in the work of the same name by Franz Kafka. Ironically, the victim of this East-West clash turns out to be Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939), a man who was anything but an enthusiastic adopter of European literary style. Interweaving elements also from Kafka’s Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor, 1919), Tawada’s play suggests further that Izumi’s fate was set, since he—and, by extension, all Japanese—could not resist roles the West had prepared for him. Ultimately, this article explains, Kafka Kaikoku offers a critical view of modernization as a force that made Japanese into beings with a hybrid literary consciousness who lacked both much of their own native particularity and also their very humanity.

I. Introduction
 II. East-West Encounters and Cultural-Morphological Hybridity in Tawada’s Work
 III. Izumi Kyōka—Kafka-esque Japanese Writer Before Kafka
 IV. Tawada’s Izumi and East-West Hybrid Japanese
 V. Conclusion
 REFERENCES

• Lee M. Roberts(Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne)