Afterlives of LettersWhen East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernization profoundly destabilized cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era. Satoru Hashimoto offers a novel way of understanding the origins of modern literature in a transregional context, drawing on Chinese