Cover of The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature
The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature
by John Whittier Treat
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Cloth: 978-0-226-81170-3 | Paper: 978-0-226-54513-4 | Electronic: 978-0-226-54527-1
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state’s hand in shaping literature throughout the country’s nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood.
 
Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyō’s stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Sōseki’s satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country’s turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the “end of literature”—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan’s writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.
 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

John Whittier Treat is professor emeritus in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He is the author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb and the novel The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House.

REVIEWS

"Treat has chosen literary landmarks that offer him fertile ground for an 'excavation' . . . of the social and economic forces at work on them."
— New York Review of Books

“Noting the trend in Japanese literary historiography, up to and including the 1980s, to schematize material by historical period and occasionally even by periods of imperial reign, Treat homes in on the all-important truism that a national literary history is also the history of a nation and, as such, inextricably linked with the history of the modern in general. . . . In his open challenge to the conventional wisdom, Treat offers both interesting and readily accessible fodder for the uninitiated and a call for an element of recalibration from those raised, like it or not, on Katō, Keene, and that previous generation of scholars. At the same time, both sets of readers—plus those in between—will be left in no doubt of Treat's conviction that talk of the ‘end of literature’ in Japan is premature.”
— The Journal of Japanese Studies

"Formidable. . . . Though he does, briefly, engage in textual analysis, Treat is less concerned with what the story says than what it is and what it does. That is, he is interested in its function in the larger context of Japan’s literary development. To this end, Treat takes the reader on a surprising journey that includes the emergence of libel and slander laws, competition between highbrow and lowbrow newspapers, and the occasional mention of Hillary Clinton's alien baby. . . . A very welcome addition, and counterpoint, to the existing body of English-language Japanese literary histories."
— Australian Book Review

"John Whittier Treat’s new book offers some brilliantly original, delightfully offbeat perspectives on modern Japanese literature. . . . Treat himself is at his best here when he writes with personal warmth and enthusiasm about certain writers one might describe as “rebellious outsiders” to the Japanese literary establishment.."
— Japan Review

"John Whittier Treat’s latest book is true to form as a meticulously researched and insightful survey of modern Japanese literature that courts controversy, but delivers on substance. . . . Treat eschews repeating the banal encyclopedic approach set by Donald Keene’s Dawn to the West or the all-too-familiar critiques of area studies and Orientalism that reduce literature to an afterthought of methodology. He instead assembles a corpus of representative texts that include such unlikely popular sources as Numa Shōzō’s erotic sci-fi manga Kachikujin yapū (Yapoo, the human cattle, 1956–1991) alongside works by the customary literary icons – Higuchi Ichiyō, Natsume Sōseki, Yoshimoto Banana, and Murakami Haruki – to chronologically and thematically chart the course of ‘the rise and fall’ of Japanese literature."
— Seth Jacobowitz, Japanese Studies

"Erudite but saucy, The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature succeeds in making the history of modern Japanese literature as colorful as the neon-lit back alleys of Tokyo. The book features a broad range of characters, including a Meiji 'poison woman,' Korean nationalists, and a serial killer enamored of anime. As for the final verdict on the future of Japanese literature, Treat wisely leaves it up in the air."
— Minae Mizumura, author of The Fall of Language in the Age of English

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0001
[Japanese literature;literary history;Meiji period;Taguchi Ukichi;Mikami Sanji;Takatsu Kuwasaburo;Donald Keene;Kato Shuichi;Konishi Jin'ichi;New Historicism]
The writing of literary history in Japan began in the late nineteenth century and continues to flourish today. Literary history was always part of the process of modernization in Japan, helping to carry it out as well as to describe it. It is impossible to write literary history today without revealing or suppressing the contexts within which authors produced their works and the public thatread them, and this literary history of modern Japan explores those contexts—such as the writing of constitutions, the establishment of commodity exchanges, self-portraiture in the visual arts, boogie-woogie music and the late twentieth-century epidemic of multiple personality disorders—heretofore absent in literary historiography both within Japan and outside of it. The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature demonstrates that modern Japanese literature shares its fate with the rise and fall of the Japanese nation-state itself.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0002
[Torioi Omatsu;dokufu;poison women;Kanagaki Robun;Meiji;newspapers;libel;slander;Kubota Hikosaku;Michel Foucault;Takahashi Oden]
The first newspapers in Japan emerged during and in the wake of the Meiji Revolution (Restoration) in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Especially popular in their pages were the highly fictionalized accounts of female criminals, such as Torioi Omatsu and Takahashi Oden (1847–79). As the Meiji state became more concerned with policing the distinction between the true and the false in public media, especially newspapers, legal definitions of libel and slander were refined as part of the drive to separate discourses of what was deemed "news" and what was "fiction." The serialization of Kanagaki Robun and Kubota Hikosaku'sTorioi Omatsu no den(The Tale of Bird-Chasing Omatsu) was forced out of the newspaperKanayomi shinbun in 1878 and subsequently published that same year as a book, Torioi Omatsu no kaijo shinwa(Torioi Omatsu's New Maritime Adventures), marking the start of the modern quarantine of fictional discourse (shosetsu) from state-governed discourse of the factual.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0003
[Higuchi Ichiyo;Yoshiwara;prostitution;Takekurabe;textiles industry;economic liberalism;marriage;Meiji;modernization;labor movement]
Higuchi Ichiyo's 1896 novellaTakekurabe(Child's Play) tells the story of young girl Midori who, entering puberty, is being groomed for sex work as a prostitute geisha in the famed Yoshiwara licensed quarter in Tokyo. This work achieved great popularity at precisely the time the exploitation of female textile workers in Japan was gaining wide public notice and concern. Both the favorable reception of Ichiyo's novella and the outrage over the labor scandals of the day occurred against the backdrop of a society-wide rethinking of individual rights within a modernizing economy that required the increasingly free migration of labor. InTakekurabe, that backdrop lies behind the struggle Midori undergoes in attempting to reconcile her romantic affections for a young boy with the requirement that she only sell her sexual labor to men, not award it freely as women outside Yoshiwara were increasingly able to do in choosing marriage partners on their own.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0004
[Natsume Soseki;I Am a Cat;rakugo;orality;Wagahai wa neko de aru;Meiji;stenography;San'yutei Encho;print culture;San'yutei En'yu;protest;literary vernacular]
Natsume Soseki's most canonical novel,Wagahai wa neko de aru(I Am a Cat, 1905-6), is highly regarded as the preeminent work of national literature (kokumin bungaku), despite its many flaws as modern fiction. Significantly, however, a story narrated by a cat awkwardly manages the changing stakes of traditional Japan's forms of collective oral culture with the emerging modern practice of silent reading and the commodification, in print, of all storytelling. The introduction of stenography and the decline of the vaudevillianrakugotheaters speeded this process of state-monitored and supervised print culture replacing the spontaneous and therefore potentially subversive public gatherings not just in theaters, but at political rallies and protest demonstrations.Wagahai wa neko de aru, often considered a challenge to the state's hegemony over an increasingly standardized language, is better thought of as a key and early accomplice in just that project.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0005
[Kishida Ryusei;narcissism;self-portraiture;Sato Haruo;Shiga Naoya;shi-shosetsu;I-novel;Shirakaba school;Taisho;consumerism]
The Taisho period, defined in literary history as the years between 1910 and 1927, is usually slighted by historians but is nonetheless not only the heyday of the most problematically "Japanese" of all literary genres, the "I-novel" (shi-shosetsu), but also of self-portraiture in the visual arts. This chapter looks at Kishida Ryusei (1891–1929), an artist who was active in both literary and art circles, and argues that both worlds were preoccupied with developing a modern subjectivity for both literature and painting via an appreciation of how adult narcissism canfunction as healthy and not always potentially destructive as Freud and his followers often saw it. Along with long-lived Shirakaba-ha (White Birch school) writers such as Sato Haruo (1892–1964), Shiga Naoya (1883–1971) and Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885–1976), the short-lived Ryusei used his self-portraits and, even more famously, the portraits of his daughter Reiko to develop a workable concept of the modern individual amid the burgeoning narcissism across Japanese culture, until the rise of militarism in the 1930s put an end to all cults of the individual inJapanese literature and the arts.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0006
[colonial Korea;Kim Mun-jip;Naisen ittai;kominka;Kim Sa-ryang;Second World War;collaboration;Arirantoge;Tenma;Edward Said;postcoloniality]
From imperial Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 until the end of the war in 1945, Japan's imposition of the Japanese language in the peninsula's public and private life, and the steadfast campaign to eliminate all vestiges of native Korean culture, placed Korean writers, many of whom would write in the Japanese language to achieve both fame and a greater readership, in the classic bind of colonial writers described, for instance, by Edward Said in the case of the British and French empires. Kim Mun-jip (1909–?), whose collection of Japanese-language short storiesArirantoge(The Arirang Ridge, 1938) may in hindsight represent the most abject literary effort by any Korean writer to ape and flatter his country's masters, is an especially tragic example of how this bind distorted and ruined not just one writer's career, but the chance Japanese-language literature once had to exceed its parochial, mono-ethnic boundaries. Kim Sa-ryang's (1914–1950?) roman-á-clef Japanese-language novel about Kim Mun-jip,Tenma(Pegasus, 1940) explores with both sympathy and criticism the impossibly ambivalent position Kim Mun-jip and other Korean intellectuals of the day were consigned to by Japanese imperialism.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0007
[Occupation period;Americanization;creolization;Shishi Bunroku;Jiyu gakko;postwar constitution;boogie woogie music;Kasagi Shizuko;Abe Kobo;Tobu otoko;Derek Bickerton;hybridity]
After the end of the Second World War came seven years of America and its allies' occupation of defeated Japan. During the intense and ongoing Americanization of Japan's culture both high and low—specifically, Shishi Bunroku's (1893-1969) bestselling novel and filmJiyu gakko(Learning to be free, 1950), the American-written postwar constitution, the national fad for conversational English lessons, jazz singer Kasagi Shizuko's appropriation of Africa American boogie woogie music, and Abe Kobo's (1924-93) unfinished last work, Tobu otoko(Flying man, 1993)—Japan can be said to have produced a creolized culture out of the various linguistic, mass cultural and political pidgins that characterized the Occupation period. Nonetheless, the chapter suggests that the recent boom among Japanese critics to regard their culture as creolized stems less from a recognition of a hybridized past, and more with how Japan wants to rethink itself in the present-day global, transnational economy.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0008
[Fukazawa Shichiro;Furyu mutan;terrorism;censorship;waka;emperor system;television;Shimanaka Incident;postwar constitution;utakai-hajime;poetry;right-wing movements]
The right-wing terrrorist attack on the home of publishing company Chuo koron president Shimanaka Hoji in January 1961followed only a few months after its publication of maverick writer Fukazawa Shichiro's (1914–87) ribald parody of the imperial family, "Furyu mutan" (The Story of a Dream of Courtly Elegance, 1960). Conjoining the imperial palace's modern tradition of symbolic poetry—waka—composition with the grotesque beheadings of Emperor Hirohito, his Empress, Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko during a popular uprising, Fukazawa's story sent the author into hiding for five years but, more long term, marks the last time in Japanese literature the personages of the imperial family have appeared in fiction, with consequences for what themes writers in Japan today can freely pursue.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0009
[manga;graffiti;student movement;1968;Shirato Sanpei (1932– );Ninja bugeicho;Mishima Yukio (1925–70);Nagai Go (1945– );Harenchi gakuen;Takarajima;Kamui den;shojo manga;left-wing movements]
The 1960s and early 1970s in Japanese mass culture are distinguished not only by high economic growth but by the rise of manga (graphic novels) pitched to the interests of young men; the intense struggle by New Left radical students on university campuses to wrest control of their schools; and the widespread proliferation of often political delinquent graffiti in public spaces. Looking at the best selling serialized gekiga("dramatic," as opposed to comic) manga by Shirato Sanpei (1932– ), Nagai Go (1945– ),and others, this chapter traces the rise and fall of the student movement and the subsequent shift of many ex-radicals' energies into the new, small, and entrepreneurial manga publishing enterprises of the 1970s. Concluding with Mishima Yukio's (1925-70) comments on manga from the right-wing point of view he expressed shortly before his spectacular 1970 suicide, this chapter proposes that the 1960s marks the end of modern Japanese literature's focus on the disillusioned young male intellectual, and moves toward the themes of young women's comics (shojo manga) and fiction of the increasingly consumerist culture of the 1970s and beyond.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0010
[Yoshimoto Banana;shojo;Kitchin;1980s;consumerism;Oedipus;Deleuze and Guattari;postmodernity;family structure;transgender;globalization;Kitchen]
The immense popularity of Yoshimoto Banana (1964– ) worldwide in the 1980s and 1990s confounded literary critics in Japan and abroad, in part because her stories and novels about adolescent and young women (shojo) seem so devoid of any of the conventional themes usually found in serious fiction. Her debut novelKitchen(Kitchin, 1988) describes the unusual nuclear family of a transwoman Eriko, her biological but gender-ambivalent son Yuichi, and orphaned teenager Mikage who lodges with them for half a year. That this household is happy while wholly detached from the traditional duties of a modern family—namely the reproduction of heterosexuality and the indoctrination of children into a capitalist labor economy—suggests that Japan and perhaps other developed nations are reorganizing the family structure as well as their post-industrial economy in ways formerly scandalous but now oddly rational. Citing the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this chapter suggests that the absence of an Oedipal triangle in Kitchen's family is comprehendible within the context of a contemporary, evolving late capitalism.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0011
[Murakami Haruki;Miyazaki Tsutomu;otaku;multiple personality disorder;dissociation;The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle;Raymond Williams;structure of feeling;schizophrenia;postmodernity;Saito Tamaki;Kayama Rika;Azuma Hiroki]
The late-twentieth century saw an explosion of diagnosed cases of multiple personality disorder (MPD), also known more recently as dissociative identity disoirder (DID), in the United States. But cases proliferated in Japan as well, despite its historical low incidence.MPD/DID became a more pervasive theme in Japanese fiction, film, television,anime, and mangathan it has even in American popular culture, where it is also rife. Murakami Haruki (1949– ) may be regarded around the world as a preeminent postmodern writer, but in Japan he has also been called the novelist of dissociation (kairi)without equal since the 1990s. In works such as hisThe Wind-Up Bird Chronicle(1994–95), psychiatrist-critics Sato Tamaki and Kayama Rika have found evidence of a current "structure of feeling," a concept pioneered by Raymond Williams to identify new social realities as yet unnamed, in which real experiences and imagined fantasies of dissociation suggest an increasingly traumatized society that has entered late capitalism, and with its reorganization of the pysche as well as of the workday: precisely what Japan and the United States share as the largest capitalist world economies.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226545271.003.0012
[Takahashi Gen'ichiro;Nihon bungaku seisuishi;Numa Shozo;Kachikujin Yapu;science fiction;parody;nation-state;end of literature;animals;futurity;Meiji;Anthropocene]
Many critics today bemoan, as they long have, the end ofJapanese literature in the face of its current vulgar commercialization. Takahashi Gen'ichiro (1951–), in a series of novels he wrote just before and after the new millennium, but nowhere more than inNihon seisuishi(The Rise and fall of Japanese literature, 1997–2000), uses satire, parody, and pastiche to tell the history of modern Japanese literature as a corollary to the rise and fall of the modern Japanese nation-state itself. His most recent fiction imagines a future world in which human dominion over the world has been ceded to animals, just as one of his favorite novels, Numa Shozo's underground science-fiction classic,Kachikujin Yapu(Human cattle, 1956–91) conversely posits a future four thousand years hence in which the Japanese have been reduced to the animalized slaves and literal tools of a matriarchal white human race governing a galactic empire. The conclusion argues that while the future is unknowable, whatever comes after modern Japanese literature is understood as something that will be no longer modern, probably not recognizably Japanese, and hardly literary at all.

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2018. Page maintained by BiblioVault.