Gazing at and beyond the Horizon of Ecocriticism: A Dialogue with “Ecocriticism in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe” and “Hanshin”

An increasing awareness of global environmental issues, such as climate change, has been shared among literary scholars, leading to a growing body of work grounded in ecocriticism. Against this backdrop, the collection “Ecocriticism in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe: Aspects of Slavonic Literature and Environmental Problems” was published. This volume opened a new horizon in ecocritical studies, most of which had previously focused on Anglo-American literature and culture, while also exposing current limitations in the development of ecocriticism as a critical theory. This paper aims to reconsider both the challenges and possibilities of an ecocritical approach. It first reviews the aforementioned volume as a recent achievement, highlighting its fundamental stance on ecocriticism as well as perspectives it leaves underexplored. In particular, the book tends to conflate “environment” with “nature” and to treat the environment solely as a physical entity. What is lacking, therefore, is attention to the plurality of environments and to the possibility of conceiving of environment as a dimension rather than as a singular substance. The paper then turns to an ecocritical reading of Moto Hagio's well-known manga “Hanshin (The Half-God),” incorporating precisely such perspectives. Thus, this study serves both as a book review and as an interpretive attempt at reading manga through the lens of ecocriticism.