Organizer: Emanuel Pastreich, University of California, Berkeley
Chair and Discussant: Joshua A. Fogel, University of California, Santa Barbara
Although China as a cultural other played a considerable role throughout all of Japanese literary history, the full range of the reception of Chinese literature cannot be properly understood without a consideration of how exposure to that literary tradition shaped not only the formal structures of official discourse, but also supplied the schema Japanese employed in different ages to define the world they inhabited and redefine the China they perceived. The contours of both Japanese social reality and the imagined China were determined by the adaptation of Chinese linguistic and conceptual structures. This panel will examine the literary conventions and strategies taken from the Chinese tradition and how they recapitulated images of both the self and the other.
In every era of Japanese history, the reception of Chinese conventions directly influenced the practice of literature to a degree often underestimated. Paul Rouzer’s paper will explore the role that an early poetry anthology played in articulating an ideological history of the Yamato state. Japanese poets not only carefully adopted the practice of poetry, they had a firm grasp of its political role as a legitimating medium for the state.
In the Tokugawa period, Chinese fiction played a substantial role in the reconfiguration of the Japanese narrative tradition. Not only did Chinese fiction offer new vocabulary and structures to Japanese authors, it offered new schema for analyzing and framing the quotidian experience of the close at hand and popular fiction in general. The papers of Stephen Roddy and Emanuel Pastreich will treat the reception of Chinese vernacular fiction in Japan within the framework of Japanese narrative history.
The last paper by Atsuko Sakaki will consider the critical, although poorly understood, role of Chinese literature in the constitution of modernity within the Japanese tradition. Through a complex strategy of borrowing, denial and opposition, the schema of Chinese literature were molded into a new articulation of modernist ideology, an ideology that while employing Chinese elements, completely inverted the previous cultural hierarchy.
Paul Rouzer, Harvard University
Most scholarly examinations of early Japanese kanshi (poetry in Chinese) have tended to emphasize Chinese "influence" and the imitative and "unoriginal" nature of the verse. However, just as Japanese rulers and advisors of the seventh and eighth centuries were self-consciously adapting Chinese social and government institutions in order to consolidate their own power, early Japanese poets of Chinese as well saw their work as part of a cultural project of imperial consolidation. A sympathetic reading of early kanshi will lead not to a concern with Japanese poets’ originality, but with an examination of the poets’ own goals and interests in writing.
The anonymous editor of the first anthology of kanshi, the Kaifûsô demonstrates these concerns explicitly. Influenced by a Chinese poetics that emphasized the role of poetry as a ritual meant to cement ties between rulers and minister and ultimately as a vehicle for expressing the concrete concerns of the politically active poet, the preface to the Kaifûsô presents recent Yamato history as a process of cultural recovery following the disruptions of the Jinshin War. The minister-poets of the 680s and 690s, the editor suggests, were carrying out the same mission as their literati counterparts in China who resurrected the classical tradition following the Qin Burning of the Books. Even more strikingly, the editor has arranged his poets and their verse in a clear sequence meant to retell recent Yamato history through the emotional and autobiographical content of the poetry itself.
Stephen Roddy, University of San Francisco
The most celebrated work of Japanese supernatural fiction, Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu monogatari, is indebted to several Ming dynasty short-story collections popular in Japan during the Edo period. While numerous scholarly studies have described the subtle and often ingenious alterations Akinari made to his sources, relatively little attention has been given to what is surely one of his most significant innovations: the articulation of an overarching thematic framework that implicitly transcends the moral economy, and structural autonomy, of the Ming vernacular tale. Centered on the interaction between the supernatural and human worlds, this thematic frame chronicles a steadily intensifying alienation between these two ontological realms over the nine tales of the collection. As such it essentially undermines what has been called the "single moral community" shared by animal, spirit, and human that has been characteristic of Chinese accounts of anomaly in general, and in particular of the Ming works from which Akinari borrows substantially.
This paper will compare relevant sections of Ugetsu monogatari with their Chinese sources in an effort to demonstrate the degree to which Akinari’s revisions serve not only aesthetic ends, but also the purpose of articulating the thematic concerns described above. This paper takes into account precedents for such developments in setsuwa collections of the medieval period, as well as analogous trends in several collections of supernatural tales of early- and mid-18th century China. Finally, these new developments will be placed within the context of Akinari’s views on China, kokugaku (nativism), and kami (supernatural beings) found in his scholarly writings.
Emanuel Pastreich, University of California, Berkeley
In the early eighteenth century the introduction of Chinese vernacular fiction played a critical role in extending the conception of literature to genres that previously had been considered marginal within the Japanese tradition. In particular, the fortuitous correlation of content and plot structure between the Chinese vernacular narratives recently imported from China and the ukiyo-zôshi narratives of Ihara Saikaku and other late seventeenth century Japanese authors captured the imagination of Japanese readers. Both literary genres depicted the fluctuating world in which merchants, con-men and prostitutes carried out their stark exchanges.
The depiction of an everyday life so much like that of Japan within Chinese vernacular narratives imported from that far-away, and previously much idealized, place known as China caused the study of Chinese artifacts to collapse into the Japanese social reality. Although the immediate analogies between the Chinese and the Japanese vulgar world of getting and spending may have served to reduce the romantic image of China, they also pulled the daily experience of Japan up to the level of material worthy of intellectual analysis. The reception of Chinese vernacular fiction lead directly to the reevaluation of the Japanese indigenous vernacular tradition.
This paper will consider the prefaces to the first two collections of huaben Chinese vernacular tales published in Japan by Oka Hakku, as well as the particular selection of tales for clues as to what significance these works had for Japanese readers and how the collections related to the more general project of understanding the vernacular Chinese language as a key to Chinese culture.
The paper will conclude with a consideration of Sawada Issai’s rewriting of a contemporary joruri puppet play concerning the execution of a courtesan named Kashiku as a huaben vernacular Chinese narrative. The use of the Chinese vernacular genre allowed Issai to reframe the Japanese tale in such a manner as to defamiliarize it and thus allow greater resolution in his analysis. By resetting a familiar Japanese tale of banal urban violence in a language that was at the same time both foreign and vernacular, he was able to present the topic from a new vantage point.
Atsuko Sakaki, Harvard University
Since the arrival of another hegemonic power, "the West," in the 1840s, the relationship between Japan and China, in which the latter had been between the hegemonic and subordinate, China in Japanese literary imagination began to assume one of the three roles: a comrade; an object of colonization; and a model of resistance to Westernization. This process re-engendered China, which used to represent "masculinity," as "feminine"—passive, timeless, and physical. Japanese fiction often aestheticizes things Chinese, while lamenting Westernization in Japan. Such seemingly sympathetic observations of China are made by the "colonizing" voice in that the narrators fetishize China.
In his fiction of the Taisho period, the renowned fetishist Tanizaki Jun’ichiro worships China, while succumbing Japanese characters to social disgrace, verbal and physical abuse and slavery conducted by Chinese characters. Tanizaki inverts the power hierarchy in reality established by the increasing Japanese control over China. One should note, however, that Tanizaki ahistoricizes China to create the illusion as if China were the master of Japan, and that his Japanese characters as victims or masochists do control Chinese characters who seem dominant/sadist, as the masochists narrate the stories. Tanizaki’s Japanese characters prevail as they are conquered by Chinese characters who are objectified in narration.
The sado-masochistic struggle for power plays a significant part in colonial and postcolonial writings in general, as subordination to cultural dominance is accompanied by fetishism, and the colonized becomes the "colonizer." This paper attempts at theorization of a colonial setting in modern East Asia, by reading specific texts.