Organizer and Chair: Sari Kawana, University of Massachusetts Boston

Discussant: Rebecca Copeland, Washington University of St. Louis

This panel aims to look beyond the moral façade of the canonical works of the Meiji period (1868-1912) by casting light on the sociocultural contexts that shaped (and were shaped by) other spheres of literary production in late nineteenth century Japan.

Detective fiction will serve as a gateway to this discussion in the first two presentations. Saito’s paper examines the political contexts of late Meiji popular literature by examining the correspondence between the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement and contemporary texts by Kuroiwa Ruikô (1862-1920), a prolific translator, journalist, and author. Jacobowitz looks at how forensic science - a new branch of scientific inquiry at the time - shaped the course of literary realism through domestically produced adaptations of contemporary Western novels. Kawana investigates the economic context for literary production - including texts similar to those discussed by Saito and Jacobowitz - in order to gauge the potential as well as creative limits of Meiji popular literature. Lastly, Takahashi provides a different perspective by exploring how poets in the prose-dominated Meiji literary field sought to appeal to an expanding readership (that included greater numbers of women) by manipulating and appropriating the image and legacy of the reclusive female poet and nun Rengetsu-ni (1791-1875).

Satoru Saito, Rutgers University

Kuroiwa Ruikô (1862-1920)—a journalist and a political activist who was deeply involved in the Freedom and People’s Rights movement—was a prolific translator of Western stories most often credited for popularizing the detective fiction genre in Japan. From the late 1880s to the early 1890s, Ruikô serialized over twenty adaptations of Western detective stories in various newspapers and single-handedly fashioned a detective fiction boom during a critical period of Japan’s development into a modern nation-state (Constitution was promulgated in 1889 and the Diet opened in 1890).

In this paper, I examine Ruikô’s Yûzai muzai (Guilty, not guilty), which was serialized during the later months of 1888. One of his most commercially successful works, Yûzai muzai posits itself as a quintessential Ruikô text, exhibiting most, if not all, of the primary characteristics that recur throughout Ruikô’s detective stories. Considering these characteristics in conjunction with paratextual evidence—including prefaces and editorials—I discuss how Ruikô utilized the existing narrative tropes of Meiji Japan, such as scandal journalism and the Meiji political novel, to manipulate reader expectations and identifications. In so doing, I argue the highly political nature of Ruikô’s literary project, which involved the redistribution of political energies thwarted by government suppression during the Freedom and People’s Rights movement in general and the protest against the treaty negotiations of 1887 in particular.

Seth Jacobwitz, Harvard University

In the essay "Meiji no shimon shosetsu" (Fingerprint Novels of Meiji, 1950), Edogawa Rampo describes the first appearance of fingerprinting in Japanese fiction: Australia-born raconteur Kairakutei Black’s Gento (The Magic Lantern, 1892), a rakugo tale transcribed in shorthand and published as a novel. As Rampo continues, the fingerprint as a tool of criminology had been "discovered" in Japan by Henry Faulds, a surgeon at the Tsukiji Hospital, who published his findings in the journal Nature in October 1880. Yet fingerprinting was but one of a host of standardizing techniques and recording technologies that might collectively be called the "forensic turn" in the late nineteenth century. The dawn of the international genre of the detective novel during this time was accordingly tied to the increased surveillance and disciplining of private and public bodies by the modern nation-state.

Although Rampo and subsequent scholarship of the Japanese detective fiction have largely placed it in a separate or oppositional relationship to mainstream realism, this paper explores how "forensics" emerged as a common locus for the early Meiji novel. Forensics should be understood not only as observation and evidence given before a court, but as an application of science and recording technology that establishes a horizon of legibility, and indeed of realism, across the spectrum of literature and print culture. In addition to Black’s Gento, this paper analyzes two earlier texts that attest to the forensic turn and its impact on the formation of the nation and the novel alike: Yano’s Ryukei’s political novel Keikoku bidan (1883-84) and Morita Shiken’s Tantei Yuberu, a translation of Victor Hugo’s "Hubert the Spy" (1886).

Sari Kawana, University of Massachusetts Boston

This presentation examines the professional careers of Kanagaki Robun (1829-1894), Kuroiwa Ruikô (1862-1920), and Ozaki Kôyô (1868-1903) in order to discuss six key developments within the publishing world during the Meiji period - especially the late 19th century - that shaped the industry in the subsequent Taishô and Shôwa periods and possibly beyond. During the Meiji period, the publishing industry underwent several changes: 1) physical transformation of the reading material (Western style design, which resulted in a shift from horizontal to vertical storage); 2) emergence of bestsellers; 3) rise of literacy and the expansion of potential readership (therefore market for books) to include a significant part of the population; 4) professionalization of authorship; 5) tie-ups between literature and other creative media for maximum marketing effect; 6) assumption of capitalist identity by individual business entities and eventually the industry at large. Some of these are new developments, while others are intensifications of tendencies that existed already in the late Edo period.

Though these three figures may be primarily known as authors today, they also contributed to the flowering of publishing as an attractive business opportunity, a worthwhile career, as well as a creative endeavor. Ruikô was a successful translator and a newspaper publisher; Ozaki Kôyô mentored later generations of prolific authors; and Kanagaki Robun merged fiction and reality to generate sensational tales and used other media such as theater and newspapers to garner success for his creations.

Sayumi Takahashi, University of the South

By the third year of the Meiji period, at least two unauthorized woodblock anthologies of the Bakumatsu literati nun Otagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875)'s poetry (e.g. the Rengetsu shikibu nijo wakashu of 1868 and Ama no karumo of 1870) had appeared on the Kyoto publishing scene, despite the author's adamant and repeated refusals to have her work disseminated in such mass-reproduced print formats. Beyond these initial editions, the compulsion to re-present and reprint Rengetsu (often erroneously) intensified throughout the Meiji years and into the Taisho and Showa periods, culminating in a veritable Rengetsu boom during the years of the Asia Pacific war with a critical Rengetsu biography by Omi Michiko (a disciple of Yosano Akiko), a 1943 Noh script about the nun's life, and multiple runs of Murakami Sod's Rengetsu-ni zenshu. Several of Rengetsu's poems were even printed and recited in grade school textbooks from this period.

This paper examines the germination of this Rengetsu publication industry through the earliest representations of the nun and her work during the Meiji years, and traces how the nun's idiosyncratic life and work eventually came to be framed among readers (especially the emerging, expanding female readership) as characteristics of an exemplary woman with chaste, loyal, and imperial values. In the progression from reprinted lyrical works in anthologies to full-blown biographies/hagiographies, the case history of Rengetsu-in-print underscores the extent to which paratextual concerns such as gender politics and pre-emptive literary nostalgia during this period of modernization color subsequent interpretations and evaluations of the work of Bakumatsu women poets.