Session 71: Competing Sources of Japanese Literary Modernity: Detective Fiction, Kannen Shôsetsu, New Theater, and Late Meiji–Early Taisho Modernism

Organizer: Indra Levy, Stanford University

Chair: Tomi Suzuki, Columbia University

Discussant: Stephen B. Snyder, University of Colorado, Boulder

This panel explores hitherto neglected—and sometimes even disparaged—areas of Meiji literature in an effort to bring new perspectives to bear on our understanding of Japanese literary modernity. Satoru Saito’s paper on Tsubouchi Shôyô’s Nisegane tsukai suggests a surprising, integral connection between the lowly genre of detective fiction and the very concept of the modern novel itself. Dan O’Neill’s paper focuses on another belittled genre, the kannen shôsetsu, to examine the relationship between melodrama, gender codification, and Meiji social and literary discourses. Indra Levy’s paper proposes the New Theater as the ultimate and spectacular manifestation of the exotic origins of genbun-itchi, the ostensibly Japanese vernacular style that became the standard language for modern Japanese literature, Tomi Suzuki’s paper reveals the influx of literary modernism in late Meiji as a critical catalyst for the concept of modern Japanese literature that emerged in the early 20th century, and further examines its relation to the Bildungsroman genre, Japanese Naturalism, and the figure of the New Woman. All papers attempt to revisit the foundations of Japanese literary modernity by investigating competing genres within the broader socio-cultural context of Meiji Japan. Stephen Snyder will serve as discussant.

The Novel’s Other: Detective Fiction and the Emergence of Modern Literature in the Late 1880s

Satoru Saito, Columbia University

A distinctively modern phenomenon, detective fiction became an established genre in Japan in the late 1880s via the adaptations of Western detective stories by Kuroiwa Ruikô. Its overwhelming popularity, which resulted in diminished sales of works by the literary group Ken’yûsha among others, was viewed as a danger by many Meiji authors and critics. For them detective fiction was devoid of any literary value and detrimental to the development of "the novel" propounded by Tsubouchi Shôyô’s Shôsetsu shinzui. While this sense of antagonism would characterize the attitude of Japanese intellectuals in years to come, it was Shôyô who was one of the very first—even before Ruikô—to experiment with detective fiction in Japan, translating Anna Katharine Green’s XYZ as Nisegane tsukai in 1887.

While this connection between detective fiction and the modern novel in the nascent stages of their development might appear coincidental at first, it becomes understandable when one considers that detective fiction’s focus on the search for truth behind human behavior was also at the heart of Shôyô’s understanding of the novel. Indeed, the detective functioned as a perfect metaphor for the narrator/novelist described in Shôsetsu shinzui, for they shared the task of linking effect to cause through power of observation and logic of psychology. By examining Shôyô’s Nisegane tsukai in conjunction with his notion of the novel, this paper considers the implications of the detective fiction genre to our understanding of modern Japanese literature that often locates Shôyô at its source.

The Weight of Womanhood and the Suffering Kannen Shôsetsu

Dan O’Neill, University of California, Berkeley

Certain literary genres appear to have as their abiding point the provocation of specific emotional states in their readers. The works of Izumi Kyôka and Kawakami Bizan reflect a shared fascination with the power of affects to hold the reader’s attention, with emotions as the site for literary innovation. This paper will examine their early writings, with a focus on their kannen shôsetsu, a type of social novel often disparaged for its theatrical displays of good confronting evil and for its lavish sentimentality. To generate new understandings of the kannen shôsetsu, the paper will discuss some of the more striking elements of the genre, such as its interest in overwrought emotions and the embodiment of those heightened states of emotive urgency in the figure of the suffering female protagonist.

To encompass the genre’s cultural significance, this paper will explore how the genre’s staged thematic between sympathy and duty is linked to a wide network of social discourses. While conforming to traditional notions of justice, how does the genre train readers to feel appropriately compassionate? What kinds of moral demands, if any, are made on readers when they witness the spectacle of women’s suffering vulnerability? By raising these questions, I hope to offer an understanding of the Meiji kannen shôsetsu and its melodramatic impulse as a complex cultural formation, one that carries the weight of ongoing debates about gender, aesthetics, melodrama’s place in literary history and its relation to material practice.

Embodying Genbun-itchi: New Theater as Exotic Spectacle

Indra Levy, Stanford University

Literally translating as the "consolidation of speech and writing," the genbun-itchi movement in modern Japanese literature can easily assume the appearance of a primarily intralingual project. In this case, the attempt to revamp the written language according to the terms of Japanese speech would seem to be a nativist rejection of linguistic otherness (particularly Chinese, but also antiquated Japanese) in favor of the mother tongue. Yet in actual practice, the genbun-itchi style was created through a complex process of translation from Western languages. As a literary style, it began as an uneasy coalescence of the native body of speech with the exotic textuality of foreign letters.

Nowhere is the underlying exoticism of the genbun-itchi project more apparent than on the New Theater stage. Here, the fundamental contradiction of genbun-itchi—its dual claim to better approximate not only spoken Japanese, but also the more prestigious written vernaculars of the West—gives birth to the exotic spectacle of Japanese actors and actresses combining Japanese speech with Western body language, costumes, and sets. With particular attention to the work of Osanai Kaoru and Shimamura Hôgetsu, this paper will examine the ideological and aesthetic underpinnings of New Theater as exotic spectacle, and consider its ramifications for our understanding of genbun-itchi in the Meiji and Taisho periods.

Gender and Competing Notions of Literature: Realism, Modernism, and Japanese Literature in the 1900s–1910s

Tomi Suzuki, Columbia University

From the late 1880s, the notion of literature began to be defined in Japan within a configuration of newly implanted modern fields of knowledge, such as science, political science, history, philosophy, religion, and art. Competing notions of literature and literary language continued until the mid-1900s, when, following the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the field of literature rapidly assumed an independent cultural status, differentiating itself from an earlier, broader notion of literature (which fused Western and Confucian notions of the humanities). It was a time when the so-called Japanese Naturalists gained a hegemonic literary position, supported by the authority of the newly standardized genbun-itchi written language. It was also in the mid-1900s that fin-de-siècle European early modernism—with its emphasis on anti-utilitarian aestheticism—began to inspire Japanese writers.

As I will argue, realism and modernism developed almost simultaneously in Japan, and the discourse on modern Japanese literature—which actively contributed to the representations of national identity—was from its origin deeply implicated with the discourse of literary modernism, which in Europe emerged as a counter-discourse to bourgeois industrial modernity, taking a "feminine" position in opposition to bourgeois "masculinity." I will analyze the gender politics of this convergence of realism and modernism by focusing on Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s early works and those of Tamura Toshiko in relationship to the Bildungsroman genre, the discourse of Japanese Naturalism, and the emergent figure of the New Woman—which were all conspicuous in the formation of the new field of literature in early-20th-century Japan.