This paper examines a previously-undiscussed literary relation between the Maghreb and Japan. European and American scholarship has primarily understood Maghrebi literature in relation to former European imperial powers, mainly France. Recently, scholars have begun to draw attention to other circuits of influence and circulation that Maghrebi cultural production has taken throughout its modern history, from Shaden Tageldin’s argument that the Maghreb was not isolated from the Arabic nah?a while under French rule to Brian Edwards’ rereading of Maghrebi avant-gardes’ engagements with the United States and others beyond postcolonial binaries. As understandings of Maghrebi literature’s place in the world expand, thinking on a global scale should not forget about boundaries at other scales. The Journal of North African Studies began 2018 with a special issue devoted to “A postcolonial Maghreb without borders”, an image the editors call “utopic”, but warranted to enable comparative work on representations of political violence across the region. Ultimately, however, only these violent practices of political control circulate freely, restricting the movement of those subject to them. Discovering new connections also reveals additional boundaries that regulate circulation of bodies and texts. Not unlike how Ottoman modernizers had looked to Japan as an alternative model to Europe (Michael Laffan, Ahmed Riza, Renée Worringer), the Moroccan novelist and philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi (Ombres japonaises, 1988) and the Franco-Tunisian writer Hubert Haddad (Le peintre d’éventail, 2013) have turned to Japan to reconceptualize literary history, emblematized by the Kit?b Alf layla wa layla, as well as the relation between artistic creation and territory writ large. Khatibi’s essay reflects on the 1977 French translation of a Japanese work from 1933, itself meditating on Western views of Japan. The protagonist of Haddad’s novel is a master painter who must restore and pass on his life’s work after it is nearly destroyed in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. These texts stage the challenge of writing about a place their authors have never been without falling into the same kinds of exoticizing practices to which the Maghreb has often been subjected. I argue that their Japanese interlocutors allow them to explore the processes of the formation and transmission of artistic traditions at an additional remove. They explore nested encounters with difference and erasure that are folded back onto each other like frame stories and retellings, calling attention to the structure of storytelling as a high-stakes sites for determining the borders of cultural and political imaginaries.