Session 137: Markings of Modernity: Spatial Representation and Everyday Life in Chinese and Japanese Literature

Organizer: Peter Bruce Tillack, University of Oregon

Chair and Discussant: Lingchei Letty Chen, Washington University, St. Louis

Henri Lefebvre discussed everyday life as symptomatic of the "internal colonization" of the modern nation. Gaston Bachelard wrote that the everyday is "that which is most difficult to discover." It would seem that, for all its ubiquity, everyday life in the modern world approaches the unfathomable. Reading against the grain of criticism asserting the "apoliticality," the "obscurity," or even the "incomprehensibility" of literary works depicting everyday life in modern(izing) China and Japan, our panel crosses borders. We delineate the local spaces of quotidian modernity peculiar to different locales and temporalities, even as we interrogate their relationships to a larger, global process.

I-Hsien Wu argues with critics’ contentions that Han Bangquing’s novel Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai (1892) lacks focus. Wu asserts that the focus here is not the plot itself, but the setting, a space new to late-nineteenth-century Shanghai, the compact modern city complex, denoted by details such as lighting, sound, clocks and domestic animals.

Kota Inoue takes up Kunikida Doppo’s "Bamboo Gate" (1908), depicting the mundane life of a Tokyo suburb. Inoue argues that the newly-emergent suburb was a space peculiarly modern, pointing to the larger space of the consolidating Japanese Empire.

Peter Tillack asserts that Gotô Meisei’s "Nameless First-Lieutenant’s Son" (1967) elicits the continuity of wartime past to postwar present through the representation of toilet spaces occupied by the author/protagonist. In such a way the veil of critical myopia constitutive of postwar everyday life is loosened, evoking the discursive nature of clean, efficient, "democratic" postwar Japan.

Leitmotifs of Everyday Life in the Fin-de-Siècle Pleasure Quarters: A Reading of Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai

I-Hsien Wu, Columbia University

Han Bangqing’s (1856–94) Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai (Haishang hua liezhuan) portrays life in the Shanghai pleasure quarters at the turn of the century. Contrary to common complaints that the novel is obscure and uneventful, this paper argues that the brilliance of Sing-Song Girls lies exactly in its lack of a focal point. Instead of centering the narrative on romantic love affairs and melodramatic business deals between courtesans and their clients, the author chose to highlight aspects of everyday life unique to the compact and complex modern city space, organized by details such as lighting, sound, clocks, domestic animals, etc. These details not only provide a rich source of fin-de-siècle material culture, but also reveal the author’s sensitivity to the rapid rhythm of the modern commercial city. Most importantly, they function as leitmotifs that string the novel together, featuring a narrative technique that moves between the lines of everyday events and objects to penetrate characters’ varying psychological states. Observing the significance of the ordinary life in the most extraordinary time and space, Sing-Song Girls is a dazzling array of everyday affairs, the first of its kind in the history of Chinese courtesan novels and city novels.

More Than a Domestic Tragedy: Suburban Families and the Nation in Kunikida Doppo’s "Bamboo Gate"

Kota Inoue, University of California, Irvine

The urbanization of Meiji Tokyo dramatically altered the city’s appearance. But the sweeping changes also entailed a fundamental reorientation of the experience of urban space. As Tokyo was permeated with modern inventions and institutions, and as a massive number of people relocated to the city, individuals were negotiating and redefining their relations with the city and each other. Emerging at this time, the suburb, where existing rural communities were increasingly incorporated into the urban-centered industrialized economy, was a peculiarly modern space in which different economic and social orders inevitably encountered one another. To the degree that Japan’s industrialization that shaped Tokyo on physical and immaterial levels was inseparable from the ongoing remapping of Asia by the Western imperial powers, the economic and social tensions in the suburb also had much bearing on Japan’s national policies and colonial projects.

My paper explores how we could read Kunikida Doppo’s "Bamboo Gate" (1908), a short story set in a Tokyo suburb, with a keen eye on the connection between the suburb and the nation. The story revolves around such mundane and domestic issues as access to water and heat in the suburb. My paper will examine how the domestic space of the protagonists’ families can be understood in the larger context of the emerging empire. When such connection is made, the tragic ending of the story that Natsume Soseki once deemed "unnatural" will be found to have logic of its own.

Out of Place: Effaced History, Embodied Memory in Gotô Meisei’s "Nameless First-Lieutenant’s Son"

Peter Tillack, University of Oregon

My paper centers on the writer Gotô Meisei, a member of the so-called "Naikô no sedai" (Introspective generation). Hailed into being by way of this eponymous epithet, this "generation" was defined by writers criticized for "escaping ideology," eschewing the writing of a "literature of engagement" for depictions of a highly-introverted everyday life.

Independent of such assertions, critic Maeda Ai contended that writers such as Gotô warped the limits of realistic representation in depicting spaces having no organic relationship to the land they occupied, such as those of the public housing complex, built during Japan’s years of postwar, high-speed economic growth. Interesting in this connection is the fact that such representation, while indeed realistic, nonetheless fails to correspond to the grounding of narrative in a recognizable place—a space of affective connotations—as evinced in prose narratives of earlier "generations." This suggests is a crisis of representation owing to dramatic changes in demographics and the city.

I read Gotô’s 1967 "Mumei chui no musuko" (Nameless First-Lieutenant’s Son) against the background of dramatically-changing material conditions contemporary with its production. Concentrating on alternating domestic imagery of "present-day" Tokyo with that of wartime northern Korea, I argue that Gotô’s treatment of that most banal of everyday spaces, the toilet, renders such images "dialectical." This effect evokes not only the persistence of a highly-controversial past in a putatively "apolitical" present. It also serves to loosen the veil of critical myopia constitutive of 1960s "everydayness" which obscures the discursive nature of clean, prosperous, "democratic" postwar Japan.