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The “political novel” emerged as a literary genre during the 1880s in the wake of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement. It has long been assigned a marginal place in history because of its supposedly outdated language, its nature as a hybrid of both Eastern and Western narrative traditions, and its utilitarian conception of literature. This article deals with one of the most popular examples of the genre, Tōkai Sanshi’s Kajin no kigū (Chance Encounters with Beautiful Women, 1885-1897), in which the author and main protagonist develops a conception of Japan based on sovereigntism through heated discussions with nationalist partisans around the world. It will investigate how the political novel entered the discursive space of modernity, i.e. a space whose unity comes from a specific language derived from classical Chinese writing (kanbun kundokutai), through which Meiji intellectuals thought about the upheavals of their time, translated Western texts, and founded state institutions.