Organizer: Haruko Iwasaki, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chair: Howard S. Hibbett, Harvard University
Discussant: Henry Dewitt Smith II, Columbia University
This panel offers a cross-genre exploration of an age-old Japanese literary convention, known as shuko. Defined roughly, shuko is the practice of creating strikingly new discourses out of codified texts, images, or patterns of actions, which were called sekai.
Originating in ancient imperial waka anthologies and developed through the system of linking in medieval renga and haikai, shuko came in the Edo period to dominate virtually all creative processes in popular culture—from Kabuki, gesaku, ukiyo prints, music, to social and commercial activities such as theme parties, gift exchanges, visits to brothels, marketing, etc. Among the major techniques of shuko were visual association (mitate), collage (fukiyose), enumeration (...zukushi) and splicing (naimaze). Each of these techniques would rebound on the others, mixing and multiplying to produce even further variations. The resultant works were appreciated for the skillful application of shuko, and their complex kinship with other forms.
Shuko’s long history, the diversity of the fields it involved, and its constantly changing repertory of techniques present formidable difficulties to the modern reader. By taking on this major convention, we wish to articulate basic operative principles in what often appears to be a hopelessly entangled reflexivity in Edo and Meiji cultures. Haruko Iwasaki explores illustrated comic fiction (kibyoshi) to see how prefaces guided readers through the labyrinth of shuko. Timothy Clark analyses the codification of contemporary ukiyo prints in the shuko system. Robert Campbell challenges the accepted view that shuko ended with the Meiji Restoration. This panel is a preliminary effort to put "shuko" on the agenda of Edo studies and to initiate comparative discussions among different fields.
Haruko Iwasaki, University of California, Santa Barbara
Rooted in the linked verse tradition, shuko operated according to the "challenge and response" dynamics that were central to the group game. The artist selected a codified text/image (sekai), added a new twist (shuko), and presented it as a riddle; the audience responded by identifying the sekai and appreciating the finesse of the twist. The level of the challenge varied according to the nature of the genre and the composition of the audience. When the game took place in small tête-à-tête groups (linked verse group or ukiyo-e exchange parties, for example), riddles could rise to a degree of complexity undecipherable by outsiders. In more public forms of art (such as popular fiction or the Kabuki theater), however, the artists needed to develop various measures to reach their audience and help them to play the game.
My paper explores this development in kibyoshi, a genre that appealed to both private and public elements in its audience. Created by a few samurai poets of haikai, kibyoshi naturally thrived on shuko, but the growingly popular genre also attracted less aware readers who needed extra help. Some writers met the dual need by the ingenious use of the preface. Exploiting the authorial intimacy of this space, they previewed the particular sekai and shuko for the beginners to follow. At the same time, they amused knowing readers by presenting the prefaces themselves visually and textually as shuko, disguised as mitate. My slide discussion will introduce representative prefaces. These take the form of (1) a tongue-in-cheek bibliography in the dignified Chinese format, (2) a fake geneology table, (3) the menu of an anachronic literary feast, and (4) a diagram of a dissected body. All illustrate the basic creative processes of shuko—the fragmentation and realignment of the original sekai.
Timothy T. Clark, British Museum
"Increasingly, mitate-e fed off each other, not ancient culture" was how I concluded a recent paper concerning this very common "transformational" genre of pictures in Ukiyo-e, which seem to rework classical imagery in an up-to-date manner.1 The paper also summarized recent debates about problems of terminology in describing two apparently different kinds of pictures of this type: (1) absurd comparisons between unrelated things—"brain-teasing collisions (mitate-e); and (2) parodies of classical themes—"elegant reworkings" (furyu yatsushi-e). The Kabuki historian Suwa Haruo has since published an article that deliberately separates transformational pictures that parody ancient culture from those that parody contemporary culture.2 This seems a useful step towards sorting the apparently disparate types of imagery of this kind. It is clear that transformational pictures changed and developed in the course of the Edo period, and it would be logical to suggest that increasingly they were weaned off the classics and began to cannibalize living culture.
In my paper I would like to put this thesis to the test, by examining changes in the mechanisms of meaning of (what may still be called for convenience) mitate-e from various eras in the 18th and 19th centuries. I would hope to learn from fellow panelists if there are parallel changes of taste in other applications of shuko in poetry, novels and the theater as the Edo period progressed.
1. Timothy T. Clark, "Mitate-e—Some Thoughts, and a Summary of Recent Writings," Impressions 19 (July 1997), pp. 6–27.
2. Suwa Haruo, "Ukiyo-e no mitate," Kokka 1213 (Dec. 1996), pp. 28–33.
Robert Campbell, National Institute of Japanese Literature, Tokyo
The growing rush to express plain, personal sensibility (ninjo) in the Meiji novel was made final by publication of Shosetsu shinzui in 1885–86. Elevation of the current form to art, Tsubouchi Shoyo argued, required a process of mending (kairyo) that would unfetter fiction from the tangled pastiches of transmitted types, and provide the reader with a whole, immanent range of sentiment visible within the text. He chafed at contemporary readers, who "convinced themselves they’d gathered up all the fruits of pleasure by simply following the plot." What Shoyo meant here by plot was no unified entirety but shuko, the disparate repertory of old and new elements from which much of later Edo and contemporary Meiji written and illustrated discourse was modeled. The term itself inundates Shosetsu shinzui, appearing nearly forty times in a wandering spectrum of contexts that displays Shoyo’s own unease at having to slay a looming, feudal dragon.
In my paper I will trace the unfolding of the very old notion of shuko from bakumatsu into the mid-Meiji, both in and outside the fictional text. Predictably, older style fiction remains fiercely loyal to its origins, but the new art form too is riddled with the recombinations of discrete twists of story and place. Beyond the individual text itself, publishers often serialized novels and other fiction forms to resemble a whole not immediately recognizable in its parts—the lasting signature of a shuko-based aesthetic.