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410 Pages·2018·3.68 MB·English
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The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature John Whittier Treat The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-22681170-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-22654513-4 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-22654527-1 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Suntory Foundation toward the publication of this book. Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Treat, John Whittier, author. Title: The rise and fall of modern Japanese literature / John Whittier Treat. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017041010 | ISBN 9780226811703 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226545134 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226545271 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Japanese literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Japanese literature—20th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PL726.55 .T68 2018 | DDC 895.609—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041010 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Contents Introduction: Modern, Japanese, Literary, History 1 Bird-Chasing Omatsu 2 Midori’s Choice 3 Sōseki Kills a Cat 4 Narcissus in Taishō 5 Imperial Japan’s Worst Writer 6 Creole Japan 7 Beheaded Emperors and Absent Figures 8 Reading Comics/Writing Graffiti 9 Yoshimoto Banana in the Kitchen 10 Murakami Haruki and Multiple Personality Conclusion: Takahashi Gen’ichirō’s Disappearing Future Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index Introduction Modern, Japanese, Literary, History In Italo Svevo’s novel The Confessions of Zeno, Zeno Cosini is seated in a café when he overhears one man tell another how fifty-four bones in the human foot must work in perfect coordination for a human to walk. When Cosini rises to leave, he finds himself limping, now so aware of the theoretical complexity of bipedal locomotion that he can no longer do what was once natural. The predicament of Svevo’s hero resembles that of anyone today who would write literary history, or any history predicated on causality so abridged as to be easily articulable. Indeed, apropos another academic discipline that has stalled before the difficulty of synchronizing the complex, Clifford Geertz named “the hallmark of modern consciousness . . . its enormous multiplicity.” 1 Anthropologist or historian, we are now so cognizant of the manifold subtleties of cultural artifacts, their genealogies, and our interpretations of them that we hardly know where literally or figuratively to begin tracing their trajectory. Cosini only hopes to walk across the room. The literary historian must circumambulate his subject’s entire edifice. Literary history’s charge to us was once ambitious but straightforward. It was to tell a story that combined other stories—our fiction, poetry, and plays—with their moment in time, and thus model history. It was by necessity a hybrid genre, encompassing criticism, biography, and intellectual or social historiography but organized under and by a narrative of progress. We are now more skeptical about the utility of history and narrative. Indeed, the illusionary coherence with which we now indict any narrative, but perhaps especially the historical, is a sign of how far the assumptions of literary modernism, already apparent in the nineteenth century, have undermined the foundations of many arenas of knowledge. So axiomatic is our skepticism that a book even as casually structured and argued as the present one, purporting to narrate something as elusive as literary history, must either coyly renounce the aims it pursues (by insisting, for instance, that history has nothing to do with the past but still signifies something) or install an apology as a coda. I do the latter. I am interested in how something called modern Japanese literature coalesced, and I believe answers can be found in the archive. But at the same time (here comes the apology) I understand that no resulting literary history claims durable authority. For while each subsequent attempt will doubtlessly add to the immense inventory of how and why writers write what they have, the accounting is never total as long as one deduction only begs another to amend it. The search in Western literary history for a chain of determined causes and effects in modernity is, in Japan, often a search for West–East influences and effects and just as quixotic. The generation of Japan’s literary historians who sought something definitive to say about Japan’s century and a half of print culture, including Hirano Ken, Nakamura Mitsuo, Isoda Kōichi, and Etō Jun, is gone. We are left with kasō bungakushi: hypothetical literary history whose subject is no longer always literature but its systems (seido), ranging from the now unfashionable busywork of sorting writers into schools (Naturalist, Proletarian, Neo-Perceptionalist, New Third Generation, etc.) to the hypercommercialized business of awarding prizes to new and not so new writers. 2 That is not to say that all pretensions to literary history have to be bracketed as contingent because history itself is. Things do not have to be fully true to still be true. Just because René Wellek conceded that our attempts at evolutionary history have failed, this does not mean that any sort of history is futile or misleading. 3 But to be true, the arguments of a literary historian have to reconcile with an enunciable theory of the historical, a word I prefer to history because an attribute is easier to live with than an entity, and much less messy philosophically. I am aware that our current reduction of history is the consequence of our modern abandonment of a certain kind of metaphysics. 4 Whether we are right about that, though, hardly matters: what should be obvious in our present time of undoing is the “need to resist the understandable suspicion that codified literary history is a bankrupt enterprise. The truth is that we cannot escape from it and, even if we could, should not.” 5 The historical is commonly construed nowadays as radically subjective in determination. In Michel Foucault’s words, it is “the most cluttered area of our memory.” But that subjectivism nonetheless constitutes a real, insofar as history “is equally the depths from which all beings emerge into their precarious, glittering existence.” 6 The question of the historical and the real is deferred to speculating what that depth could be: psychology, sets of discourses, even as ineffable a thing as the human spirit. Literary history without the question of just how “beings emerge” would be as tedious as literature itself without that same inquiry. What we modern beings are is a matter of social practices that, while conditional and variable, are the product of a logic as well as accident. My working assumption in this book is that the history of modern Japanese literature may be impossible to tell without taking note of the odd quirks of individual novelists, but that it also obeys what we understand as the form (read history) of culture in a modern nation-state that has preserved certain institutions and habits of its non-Western past. Literature and so too literary history are themselves integral parts of Japanese modernity and therefore also partake of a worldwide developmental model if with identifiably Japanese elaborations of that model. This is an uneasy cohabitation, and its fragility plagues those who attempt the history of modern Japanese literature. To the extent that we have learned culture —“that complex whole,” in E. B. Tylor’s definition, “which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” 7—is not a vulgar production of social or economic relations, we are also tempted to retreat into a naïve ethnography of Japanese literature that never queries how our categories of study are themselves the legacy of the same history we pursue. These two temptations are why the history of modern literature in Japan, like in many places, is a history of prose fiction. This book will have relatively little to say about poetry or drama. It is with modernity and not just Japanese modernity that public and private life are integrated in ways that call for a literary genre that encompasses both historiography and biography. Novels do not succeed if their characters are no more than symbols of some collectivity or if their characters live in some purely private inaccessible space. A deceptively simple genre in some ways, the novel endorses a complex historical process but within a surprisingly stable and coherent structure because of, as has been observed of the novel in English, “its unrivaled power both to formulate, and to explain, a set of problems that are central to early modern experience.” 8 That said, the structures of many Japanese novels in this regard do not correspond with what readers raised on their Western equivalents might expect. Japanese history since the early seventh century CE has been so shaped by its interrogative responses to the significance of the foreign models imported or imposed (Chinese, Korean, Euro-American) that its novels will inevitably trace a singular history. 9 More important is a far briefer history than literate Japan’s millennium-plus: that of the opportunities or accommodations that literature has pursued or been consigned to within Japan’s prison-house of modernity. My history of modern literature in Japan is not the result of an arbitrary periodization. I believe in modernity as a distinct and describable episode, and one I suggest in the last chapter that has come to an end and a beginning. Despite the modern period’s brevity, two of the three truly major events in all of Japanese history—the 1868 Meiji Revolution (usually referred to as the Meiji Restoration) and the Second World War in the mid-twentieth century—occurred within it. Western modernity, now over three hundred years old, registered that moment when the word modern came to mean “now,” but defining the modern is harder than dating it, and so it is in Japan. It has been identified with the rise of a self-conscious subjectivity and with our status as objects of technological modernization; with rationality and faith in progress, the rise of capitalism and the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie and with the critique of those ideas as an inevitable ensemble; with an attitude toward historical chronology that posits origins and with life as a sense of the fleeting and ephemeral that lacks historical reference; with structures and with their impossibility; with a structure of feeling toward contemporary reality and with social orders where feelings mean nothing; with the contradiction of being both individuals and interrelated. The modern has been linked with the sureness of scientific truth and the honesty of both madness and the imagination; with a split between some meanings that are firmly anchored to their referents and those that are not; with Enlightenment values and the efficiency of Auschwitz; and with both the empowerment and containment of human potential. These definitions, gleaned from thinkers as diverse as Baudelaire, Marx, Darwin, Dewey, Nietzsche, and Foucault, were once intended to be only descriptive of modernity in the West. Moving beyond Europe and its colonies, the nature of the modern has to become more complex if only because so much of it is grafted upon places and cultures whose own histories interact with it both well and badly. To be sure, many cogent observers have identified Japanese modernity, whether native or borrowed, in terms cognate with those used in and for the West. Fukuzawa Yukichi argued across his oeuvre that civilization (bunmei) commences with doubts generated within the self, but he was only the first to note critical subjectivity as indispensable to it. More materially, all that Japan aspired to since 1868—W. G. Beasley’s wish list was “constitutions, conscript armies, factories, Western-style novels and art” 10—has long been analyzed as congenitally related desires embodying universal, not merely Western, values. If since the 1950s, the notion of a non-Western modernity largely congruent with the West’s experience has been replaced by that of modernization, it is only because world events such as the Chinese Revolution, decolonization and the Cold War required, in Jürgen Habermas’s words, a term that “dissolves ‘modernity’ from its modern European origins and stylizes it into a spatio-temporally neutral model” amenable to ideological machinations. 11 It is nonetheless impossible to speak of modernization without the model of modernity, destined to be imprecisely derived worldwide since modernity is a process of local subjectification as well as rationalization. In Japan, we can find many examples of modernity (kindaisei) defined as a functional model, which is to say a society with certain sets of features that largely coincide with those found in Euro-American societies. One of Japan’s leading literary historians, Miyoshi Yukio, defines modernity for Japan in just such terms as the period (jidai) of capitalist and democratic civil societies that prize notions of human liberty and freedom and the dignity of the individual. 12 But this model is best illustrated by the descriptions of Japanese modernity/modernization produced by the 1960 Hakone Conference, at which Japanese and foreign scholars (largely American) came together to describe the rise of modern economic production, social rationalization, and enfranchisement in Japan and implicitly elsewhere in the non-Western world via a model largely devoid of historical determinism. At the time, dialectical materialism was an ideal dangerously Marxist in its implications given the worldwide stakes of the Cold War and the local challenge to American hegemony. In hindsight, historian Victor Koschmann concludes with little effort that the Americans were in Hakone on a political mission fueled by values and ideology even as they seemed eager to promote a “value-free” definition of modernization. 13 For a conference strikingly devoid of insights from cultural or literary studies, one contribution was telling: Katō Shūichi’s characterization of the lists of features to be found in modern societies (urbanization, a high degree of use of inanimate energy, mass communications, etc.) as akin to the symptoms of a disease. Katō, an important figure in postwar literary circles as well as a trained physician, recommended that his fellow conferees consider these symptoms’ “relationship in a syndrome so as to obtain a complete picture.” 14 John Whitney Hall, the dean of the American scholars gathered at Hakone, responded that “the syndrome of symptoms described in our revised list . . . serves then to isolate a process of change and a condition of society,” an isolation that in Hall’s view exempted the Hakone Conference’s

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The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literaturetells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and
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