The Uncanny Intertextuality: Discomfort toward Technology Development in Soseki’s Yume Juu Ya and Kurosawa’s Yume

This paper is about the uncanny of the intertextuality between Natsume Soseki’s series of short stories Yume Juu Ya (1908) and Akira Kurosawa’s film, Yume (1990). Freud (1919) explained uncanny as a class of the terrifying which leads back to something very familiar yet it was become alienated from the mind through the process of repression, so when it comes to light it gives a strange terrifying feeling. The method of this research is textual analysis on Soseki’s Yume Juu Ya and Kurosawa’s Yume. The research result shows the reasons why the intertextuality could be perceived as uncanny are the repetition, the concept of dream, and the sublimation of repressed discomfort toward the development of technology in Japanese society. The fact that both artworks internalized the discomfort toward the issue, means that the issue of technology development continued from its beginning in Meiji era in 1900s all the way to the contemporary period in
1990s.