The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature

410 Pages·2018·3.68 MB·English

by  John Whittier Treat

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
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Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
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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