Abstract This article examines how Unicode reshapes the humanities by asking what happens when a supposedly universal encoding system meets the demands of the Japanese writing system. Focusing on EnJoe Toh's 2018 collection A Whirlpool of Glyphs, it shows how his fiction probes the tension between standardization and expression that underlies script reform from the Qin dynasty to contemporary Unicode debates. EnJoe's stories stage conflicts between inclusion and exclusion—what counts as an encodable character, which graphic forms are discarded, and how these decisions constrain or enable writers working with Sinographs, kana, and their visual and expressive possibilities. By dramatizing everything from Qin-era script reforms to rebellious furigana and proliferating variant characters, EnJoe makes visible the technical infrastructures that underwrite the process of writing. In doing so, the article argues, he exploits the Japanese writing system's capacity for orthographical variation at the limits of possibility. Unicode functions simultaneously as a tool of global standardization and a platform that “standardizes the nonstandard,” with significant consequences for how the humanities preserve, classify, and imagine written forms, and EnJoe's work offers a key case for understanding how script technologies condition literary creativity across languages and periods.
Christopher Lowy (Thu,) studied this question.