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1920s and 1930s Tokyo Nonsense: “Nansensu” in Japanese Modernist Literature and Film
Organizer: Alisa Freedman, University of Oregon
Chair and Discussant: William J. Tyler, Ohio State University
In the 1920s and 1930s, Tokyo authors and filmmakers, especially men who experimented with artistic techniques and media, used images of nonsense to capture the excitement and contradictions of what they viewed as a unique historical period. During a time of both urban growth and increasing state control, nonsense was a means to expose darker aspects of modernity and ways the city affected human subjectivity and cultural production. They used the Anglicized term “nansensu,” popular slang to describe decadent urban culture, both playfully and pejoratively to connote the futility felt living among evidence of the failed promises of capitalism and the general atmosphere of social instability. "Nansensu" was often used with “ero” (“erotic”) and “guro” (“grotesque”), which have received more academic attention and have less political undertones. This interdisciplinary panel investigates prevalent urban absurdity in literary and visual media and the ideological implications of this seemingly frivolous trend. Jeffrey Angles discusses how journalistic fascination with the strange shaped vernacular modernism. Alisa Freedman explores the significance of “nonsense literature” (nansensu bungaku) through analyzing stories by spokesperson Asahara Rokurô. Kyôko Ômori explains how silent film narrator Tokugawa Musei created a language to articulate youths’ reactions to paradoxes of city life. Junji Yoshida shows how nonsense was integral to creating a Japanese national cinema. All papers explore the intersection of different media and question the division of high and popular culture and parameters of social engagement. These nonsense works demonstrate the importance of Japanese modernism and show city life omitted from historical accounts.
“Creating Strange Space: The Fashion for Ryôki (Curiosity-Hunting) in 1920s and 1930s Japan”
Jeffrey Angles, Western Michigan University
A fascination with cataloguing strange and unusual aspects of city life developed in conjunction with the rise of Japanese vernacular modernist culture. The word "ryôki," generally translated by contemporary authors as “curiosity hunting,” exploded into popular circulation in the mid-1920s. "Ryôki" was used to describe the active search for stimulating places, things, and practices and appeared in much popular writing. Several magazines and fictional works were devoted to the adventures of self-styled "ryôkisha" or “curiosity hunters,” who wandered Tokyo as flâneurs with a specific purpose. Namely, these writers were on the hunt for manifestations of the erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical. This presentation examines literary and mass media examples of "ryôki," including stories by authors Edogawa Rampo and Yumeno Kyûsaku and the magazine "Ryôki gahô" (Curiosity-Hunting Pictorial), to show the discursive links forged between the pursuit of nonsense, urban modernity, criminality, eroticism, and the formation of national identity. In particular, this paper focuses on the ways that "ryôki" involved the enactment of seemingly “uncivilized” behaviors that Japanese society otherwise attempted to control. This similar dynamic of both reveling in and suppressing the strange in Japanese culture shaped both the form and content of vernacular modernism. Thus, the simultaneous desire and disdain for nonsense became characteristic to literature of the times and reflected many of the dominant ideologies associated with interwar Japanese modernization projects.
“Asahara Rokurô’s Nonsense Stories of the Daily Commute: Showing the Absurdity of Interwar Tokyo Life”
Alisa Freedman, University of Oregon
In the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese authors, especially young men who sought to convey the power of the city, called for the creation of literary realism based on nonsense. They used the contemporary buzzword “nansensu” to describe aspects of Tokyo that epitomized their historical moment and to position themselves against proletariat literature, which they attacked for failing to present the realities of modern life. Although glamorizing poverty, “nonsense literature” (nansensu bungaku) made ordinary occurrences alluring and critiqued social conditions. These stories both parodied Tokyo middle classes and made them emblematic of the times. Nonsense literature entailed formal experimentation, especially with Edo literary techniques and contemporary journalism, to create an immediate experience of the city. Particularly, author and journalist Asahara Rokurô (1895-1992), widely read but now rarely studied, used nonsense to combine a celebration of Tokyo modernity with a concern for middle-class businessmen, revealing much about this group who came to represent Japan. Asahara focused on the daily commute, which he believed best disclosed paradoxes underlying daily life and showed how individuals envisioned and experienced change. My paper explores the content, form, context, and political and literary significance of Asahara’s stories of businessmen and trains published in intellectual literary journals. These writings, which seem to merely catalogue Tokyo spectacles, reveal much about the contradictions of urban modernity during a complex historical period and question the parameters of socially engaged writing at a time of increasing state control over cultural production.
“The Narrating Detective: Nansensu and Formulaic Inversion in Absurdist Japanese Detective Fiction”
Kyoko Omori, Hamilton College
To better convey the effects of rapid modernization, interwar Japanese authors adopted techniques that went beyond conventional literary realism. Nonsense was integral to this exploration. For example, Uchida Hyakken and Toyoshima Yoshio of the elite bundan circle reacted to inexplicable aspects of everyday life in their often absurdist works, while Yokomitsu Riichi and other avant-garde writers created new narrative structures. Popular authors also investigated the quotidian unknown through formal experimentation. In particular, many subverted aspects of the flourishing detective and science fiction genres. My paper discusses how Tokugawa Musei (1894-1971), the most famous "benshi" or silent film commentator of the time, undermined conventions detective fiction to both show the limitations of literary form and convey a truer sense of the mysteries of Tokyo. His works also demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of much interwar Japanese culture. Tokugawa added aspects of "benshi" narration to the typical formula of detective fiction. This resulted in nonsensical stories that overwhelm the reader with too much contradictory information and overturn the logic upon which detective fiction is premised. To illustrate Tokugawa’s techniques, I analyze his 1927 “Obetai buruburu jiken” (The Case of Obetai Buruburu), published in the popular magazine Shinseinen (New Youth). This story exemplifies how Tokugawa created an alternative logic to represent the challenges of the growing metropolis. Tokugawa’s absurdity and humor reveal the potentially deadening effects of literary formulae and show how the rationalist epistemological assumptions of conventional narrative fiction were too limited to depict the contradictions of Tokyo life.
“Nonsense as a Cinematic Problem: Parody of Samurai Legends in Early Showa Film”
Junji Yoshida, Wesleyan University
In the early 1930s, Japanese filmmakers debated the social values and artistic implications of the current trend of “nansensu eiga” or “nonsense film.” While many directors disdained such movies as mere distraction for the rising urban middle classes, some saw the formal and ideological potential of nonsense films to shape a new national cinema. These discussions not only concerned movies set in the current historical moment but also affected the representation of Japan’s past in “jidai geki” or “period films.” My paper examines how nonsense affected the form and content of 1930s period films and presented a challenge to other dominant paradigms of the developing Japanese national cinema. I discuss how nonsense operated ambivalently in the interstices of competing textual components and contradictory social forces specific to the Japanese film industry. To illustrate, I analyze Inagaki Hiroshi’s “Horo Zanmai” (1928). This film not only offered a sarcastic sketch of fanatical samurai at the dawn of the Meiji restoration but also generated a new cinematic form. In particular, the “benshi” or silent film narrator’s interpretation of visual images was integrated into a highly unconventional flow of temporality, which both disrupted and became integral to the genre of period films. The result was a nonsensical effect of dislocating the movie star’s auratic body from illusory representation of samurai legends. “Horo Zanmai” also contains the theoretical machinery to provide critical readings of nonsense that challenge the belief that realist melodrama was the primary shaping force in early Japanese film history.