The Collapse of Futurity and Narrativity in Hikaru Okuizumi’s The Night to Kill a Snake

This paper examines how Hikaru Okuizumi’s novella The Night to Kill a Snake (1992) destabilizes religiously mediated futures—often sustained by cohesive narrative structures—by proliferating religious imagery to the point where narrativity itself collapses. Through free association, the text disperses snake metaphors drawn from Shinto myth, Genesis, Greek legend, and Japanese imperial symbolism without allowing them to converge into symbolic resolution. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of modern literature as repetitive language without securing memory, this paper argues that the novella’s proliferating religious imagery exposes the fragility underlying both religious futurity and interpretive desire. As images multiply, the protagonist’s imagined future unravels, and the reader’s interpretive expectations are similarly frustrated. Literary art here neither redeems nor resolves; instead, it reveals futurity as radically open, suspended within the unsettling repetition of religious language itself.