In his 1935 lecture on “La formation de l’homme moderne,” Paul Valéry says that the distinction between modern and primitive mindsets is vaguer than often thought. “Civilized nations,” he claims, contain numerous people whose modes of thought are barely different from the “primitive” ways of thinking described in anthropological texts on remote peoples. As a corrective to the idea of the modern, Valéry advances another concept: the contemporary. Valéry meant “the contemporary” as a critique of anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s separation of humankind into “civilized” and “primitive” ways of thinking, as well as of the rise of fascism in Central and Western Europe, part of what Valéry deemed “le naufrage de la civilisation moderne.” But the very year Valéry gave his address, literature written in French, including many of Valéry’s works, overtook Russian to become the most translated body of literature into Japanese. French literature’s triumph occurred even as the militarist Japanese government, the unfortunate outcome of Japan’s modernization that began with the 1868 Meiji Restoration, encouraged Japanese intellectuals to assert the incomparability of Japan and Japanese culture. In recent years, scholars of modernism have, like Valéry, promoted “the contemporary” to include more non-Western artists, critics, and writers in discussions of modern literature. By looking at texts written in French and Japanese from 1935 to 1950, this paper tries to deploy the contemporary differently: to see whether the contemporary can be put into a fruitful opposition with the concept of modernity, and whether that opposition can produce new ways of thinking of art and literature produced during the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, Asia, and beyond.