Down the Rabbit Hole: In Pursuit of Sh∂jo Alices, from Lewis Carroll to Kanai Mieko Mary A. Knighton Alice is immortal. The wife of Hargreaves in the photos will age, as that brief passing moment of the transient form only, but now more than ever she continues to live and play a hundred years later as the bright shining eternal sh∂jo, ignoring all those others in the children’s books. Yes, and, as that poet in Looking-Glass Land time and again asks of us, if life is nothing but a dream, is it not also precisely as a dream that the life of this world exists? So, in conclusion—and this is what I really wanted to say—perhaps the sh∂jo is nothing more nor less than a pitifully sweet living thing, but precisely because she is ruled by a strict logic, preserved in a space governed by a lucid intellect, and, above all, held in a gaze of joy so bright and clear, is it any wonder that she gives off such brilliance? Yagawa Sumiko “Fumetsu no sh∂jo” (The immortal sh∂jo, 1972) 1 Here in Shika, more than 100,000 guests last year visited the P.R. building where Alice discovers the wonders of nuclear power. The Caterpillar reassures Alice about radiation and the Cheshire Cat helps her learn about the energy source. Instead of going down a rabbit hole, Alice shrinks after eating a candy and enters a 1:25 scale model of the Shika nuclear plant nearby. Norimitsu Onishi “‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Nuclear Crisis” The New York Times, June 24, 2011 2 Mary A. Knighton has taught language, comparative literature, and culture at Osaka University and the University of Tokyo, and was most recently Visiting Assistant Professor in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Washington & Lee University. She is completing a monograph on insects as narrative devices in Japanese fiction, film, and manga. Her essay “The Melancholy Melodrama of ‘Honorary Whiteness’: The Case of Yuasa Katsuei’s Colonial Fiction” appeared in the “Three Asias” issue of ParaDoxa (2011). © 2011 by J∂sai International Center for the Promotion of Art and Science, J∂sai University