Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World 9781501752933

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Disruptions of Daily Life

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

Disruptions of Daily Life Japanese Literary Modernism in the World Arthur M. Mitchell

Cornell East Asia Series an imprint of Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mitchell, Arthur M., author. Title: Disruptions of daily life : Japanese literary modernism in the world / Arthur M. Mitchell. Identifiers: LCCN 2020011026 (print) | LCCN 2020011027 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501752919 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501752926 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501752933 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Japanese literature—Taisho¯ period, 1912–1926—History and criticism. | Japanese literature—Sho¯wa period, 1926–1989—History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)—Japan. | Literature and society— Japan—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PL747.57.M577 M58 2020 (print) | LCC PL747.57.M577 (ebook) | DDC 895.609/112—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011026 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011027 Number 202 in the Cornell East Asia Series

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Shattering the Status Quo: Reading Modernism in the Early Twentieth Century the West in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯’s A Fool’s Love

vii

1

1. Fetishism of

Ethnicity in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Neo-Sensationist Writings

52

2. Subversions of

100

3. Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa

and the Narrative of the Present

154

4. “Love” and (Male) Subjectivity in Hirabayashi Taiko’s

“In the Charity Ward”

192

Coda: Against the National Literary Narrative

238

Bibliography Index

249 255

Acknowledgments

The finished book, complete with hard binding and glossy cover, has a way of concealing how arduous and at times tenuous the long enterprise has been. I want to acknowledge all those who have fueled my fire and guided my journey as well those who have offered the warmth of their help, support, and companionship along the way. My gratitude goes first to Christopher Hill whose courses on history and literature expanded my literary and political imagination, introducing a historical consciousness and an ethical imperative to my literary readings. This book was inspired by his many teachings and would not have been possible without his genial guidance and sage counsel. I also owe more than I know to John Treat who taught me that scholarship is not just an intellectual enterprise but a self-search. He helped me learn to trust myself, have faith in my own instincts, and to have the courage to take big swings. In Japan, Toeda Hirokazu was unbelievably generous and unceasingly gracious with his time, his mentorship, and his friendship. I am eternally grateful. I have been extremely fortunate to receive institutional support for my studies. The dissertation research from which this book emerged was conducted with grants from the Japan Foundation and the Yale University Council on East Asian Studies, and the final manuscript was completed while on a sabbatical leave supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Social Science Research Council, and Macalester College. The final phase of publication was aided by a Wallace Grant from Macalester College. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Waseda University for hosting many years of my research and in particular to the Waseda Central Library. Their archive of periodicals laid out in open stacks was my scholarly sandbox for several years and the kindness of their dedicated librarians were for countless months a daily encouragement. Several people had a direct impact on this book. Seiji Lippit and William Gardner were there at the ground floor and their early guidance helped me chart my course and set sail. Their monographs on Japanese modernism paved the way for me to say everything I have said on the subject. Pericles Lewis believed in my work and gave me the confidence to take on such a big topic. Edward Kamens invited me into the field itself and gave me my foundation in Japanese literary analysis. I would like to thank Mai Shaikhanuar-Cota and Alexis Siemon, my editors at Cornell University Press, for their care and commitment to this vii

viii       Acknowledgments

manuscript, and Ross Yelsey, formerly at the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asia Institute, for recognizing the book and helping it take its first steps into the world of publication. I would also like to thank Paul Anderer for believing in my work and helping me get the publication process started. For their invaluable feedback on different sections of the book, I would like to thank Reiko Abe Auestad, David Blainey, Jim Dorsey, Aaron Gerow, Rivi Handler-Spitz, Reto Hofmann, Inoue Ken, Kate Nakai, Haruko Nakamura, Chelsea Scheider, Angela Yiu, and the anonymous readers for WEAI and CUP. For their conversation and invaluable friendship during these years, I would like to particularly thank, Will Bridges, John Graves, Kendall Heitzman, ShuntaroKishikawa, Christine Marran, Mariko Naito- , Yasufumi Nakamori, Patrick Noonan, Marcos Ortega, Parker Smathers, Luciana Sanga, Brian Steininger, Ellen Tilton, Daniel Williams, Naoki Yamamoto, Sho-ichiro- Yamashita, and the members of La Fondation. And for their essential encouragement and mentorship, or for simply providing a warm family table, I would like to thank, Barbara Bassous, Ernie Bassous, Steve Focios, Satoshi Hamaya, Rashed Judeh, Mutsuko McIlroy, Robert McIlroy, Masato Ogura, John Reinartz, Satoko Suzuki, and Michiko Yoshida. Finally, I want thank my parents, my sisters, Sono and Kano, and Ella for her love and her marvelous meals. This book is very much about the vital importance of literary art. For feeding this faith in me I would like to thank James Shea, Tracy Dahlby, Ai Kudo-, and Marie Focios. I dedicate this book to my father, who taught me how to think and introduced me to the world.

Disruptions of Daily Life

Introduction

Shattering the Status Quo: Reading Modernism in the Early Twentieth Century

Disruptions of Daily Life explores the ability of formalist literary narratives to interrupt the sense of dailiness that we all inhabit. It traces and clarifies how certain types of narrative fiction can make us aware of the discursive structures that undergird the imaginative relationship we have to our social world, thereby displacing the hold these structures have on our lived realities. By confirming and elaborating how this function operated historically, as it worked for contemporary Japanese readers in the 1920s, I want to suggest that such works continue to serve this function for us in the present day. Focusing on a handful of texts—some major, some not yet widely known, some recognized as modernist literature and some not yet—by Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko, I show how the potency of their formalist disruptions had everything to do with their deep interconnections with the social discourses operative within the media of that decade. Contrary to prevalent conceptions of high modernism as art-objects sequestered from the utilitarian language of capitalist society, modernist literature was highly enmeshed in the language of the mass print media, one of the major sources of social ideology since the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, it was through this nexus that modernist formalism attained its subversive edge. This book arose from an inkling that the real-world significance of modernist literature was getting lost in the scholarly gap that emerged between textual hermeneutic approaches that focused purely on the craft of the material text and cultural studies approaches that focused exclusively on the historical and 1

2       Introduction

cultural circumstances of its production. The effectiveness of modernist fiction was rooted in the intersection between the two, in the representational distortions of historical culture. Readers can expect on the one hand close textual analyses of the works being treated here. But these close readings are performed in the context of a detailed and concrete history of social thought in 1920s Japan. In my approach to modernist fiction, the two vectors of textual analysis and historical study are not just contiguous but intimately interrelated. I read works deeply and formally for the ingenuity of their design and textual play while, at the same time, I locate the linguistic source of these representational strategies empirically within the print media of that time. As a result, the language of literature is understood not as purely linguistic signs, but simultaneously as linguistic signs embedded in and operative within late-Taisho¯ and early-Sho¯wa society. The myriad social nuances and connotations of that language were, I argue, indeed the ultimate targets of modernism’s disruptive strategies. Though it has been well established that works of modernist literature are characterized by a reflexive awareness of the signifying operations of linguistic conventions, I show here how that reflexivity in fact applied to the language that circulated throughout the social institutions of modern Japanese society. My approach shows how modernist works challenged the innocence of the language that pervaded the media of 1920s society, exposing its modes of meaning production and displacing the social ideologies it embodied. Such an approach reveals the way modernist defamiliarization was far from just an ambition toward transcendental aesthetics, but was in fact aimed at the broader social world, deployed to foment large-scale renovations of social perception. Modernist works were meant to incite social transformation. Hirabayashi Taiko declared that her literature was about far more than simply “conquering the territory of the literary establishment.” She regarded her works as a form of “action” toward the creation of a “new culture” for the “oppressed class of women.”1 Yokomitsu Riichi believed that the new literary expression that he was developing held a “necessary and fundamental relationship to the form of culture.”2 Kawabata was also convinced that new forms of literary expression would affect the very way in which people lived. The goal of his writing and that of his collaborators, he wrote, was nothing less than the “eradication” of the “status quo of our own daily life

1.  Hirabayashi Taiko, “Josei bungei undo¯ no shinshutsu,” Yomiuri Shimbun, December 30, 1926. 2.  Yokomitsu Riichi, “Kankaku katsudo¯: Kankaku katsudo¯ to kankakuteki sakumotsu ni taisuru hinan e no gyakusetsu,” in Kindai bungaku hyo¯ron taikei 6: Taisho¯ 3 to Sho¯wa 1, ed. Miyoshi Yukio (Tokyo: Kawade shobo¯, 1973), 49.

Shattering the Status Quo     3

and literature.”3 In the pages that follow, I hope to demonstrate just how brazen and provocative these texts were, and remain. Viewed within the glass case of literary aesthetics in which we often place them, modernist works carry the salubrious glow of linguistic virtuosity and high cultural achievement. But restored to the context of the social milieu in which they were generated, they reveal themselves to be rude, flippant, and outrageous, openly contemptuous of the visions and worldviews that society embraced. It is precisely this creative hostility, expressed through the renovation of linguistic and narrative norms, that I hope to recover. Doing so means uncovering ways these artistic works indeed undermined middle-class norms that made social life seem attractive, progressive, and virtuous. The texts I examine in these chapters were invested in objectifying, reifying, and displacing the social language that made lives seem staid, steady, and connected. They sought to disrupt the ideologies that made daily living appear seamless and comfortable. They did so however to expose the way such norms were bolstered by narrow, constrictive, and essentialist notions of gender, ethnicity, society, and nation, to reveal the way such norms were employed to discipline the minds and behaviors of Japanese citizens, and finally to provoke cognitive and sensational liberation from the supremacy of these norms.

Modernism, Media, and Daily Life One of the central convictions underlying this book’s approach to modernism is that the division between literary language and social language is a myth engendered by literary criticism. The Russian Formalist critics first devised the bifurcation between poetic language, which foregrounds the sensual or material qualities of language, and communicative language, which prioritizes the conveyance of information and thus fulfills the utilitarian functions of capitalist society.4 Though modernism is often associated with precisely the type of art that eschews the communicative, and thereby critiques society through opposition to its linguistic norms, it is more accurate to say that it was modernist fiction that first exploited the absence of this distinction, or the inability to distinguish between literary and nonliterary language. This is the premise underlying Astradur Eysteinsson’s innovative formulation that modernism accrued its subversive

3.  Kawabata Yasunari et al., “Atarashiki seikatsu to bungei,” Bungei jidai, October 1924. 4.  See Boris Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method,’” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).

4       Introduction

function not through its opposition to communicative language but in its resistance to the communicative valence of that language. He writes: Even if we understand the message to be focusing on itself, it is referring to its language as social reality. Once we have adopted this perspective, the aesthetics of the “other slope” of language acquires social significance and helps us approach the modernist enterprise. For this “slope” is not “poetic language,” it is the “other” of language in a more violent sense, since it resists the communicative-semiotic function of language.5 Modernist practice depended for the power of its critique on the inability, at least provisionally, to distinguish between the two types of language. Material language had to be read first as communicative language in order to achieve the traction of its negation. That is to say, modernism’s linguistic strategies work against the assumption and expectation that its language is communicative. Such a formulation reveals a new way to conceive of aesthetic formalism in literature and its possibilities for social criticism. It also paves the way for a new understanding of modernism’s dialectical relationship with the communicative and semiotic norms of social language, opening up new avenues for studies of modernist fiction. Specifically, it allows us to trace the ways in which modernist narrative discourse is indeed steeped in the social language of bourgeois society—what Eysteinsson calls the language of social institutions, which include “predominantly the family but also the political arena, official administrations, schools, churches, newspapers, and the judicial system.”6 To locate and bring in, in a concrete way, the social language that Eysteinsson theoretically names, I analyze the language of the mass print media. Surveying articles in general-interest magazines such as Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron (The Central Review), Kaizo¯ (Reconstruction), Fujin ko¯ron (Lady’s Review), Shufu no tomo (The Housewife’s Companion), and Shincho¯ (New Tide), as well as major newspapers like the Tokyo Asahi, O¯saka Asahi, and Yomiuri Shimbun, it examines the rhetoric surrounding key terms and topics such as seikatsu (生活, “daily life”), katei (家庭, “home”), kankaku (感覚, “sensation”), fukko¯ (復興, “renaissance”), ai (愛, “love)” and jinkaku (人格, “character”). It identifies the patterns of language that surrounded these terms and the ideological connotations they embodied. I then show how the narrative discourse of modernist works was constituted by this language, how the texts had indeed assimilated these social discourses

5.  Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 200–201. 6.  Ibid., 194.

Shattering the Status Quo     5

and provisionally affirmed the ideologies they expressed. In this sense, the texts of modernist works masqueraded as social texts, offered themselves to be read as communicative language. Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929–1930), for example, which appeared in installments in the front page of the evening edition of the Osaka Asahi newspaper, could have been consumed as a work of nonfiction journalism, focused as it was on the back alleys of the Asakusa district and the people that inhabited them. The installments were full of observations and commentary about events that had occurred not long before their date of publication and contained numerous references to the infrastructural reconstruction projects that had been ongoing in Asakusa since the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake of 1923. The chapters reprised from newspaper articles the stastical analysis and descriptions of projects like the reconstruction of the much vaunted Kototoi Bridge. These articles had chronicled the steady linear progress of Tokyo’s infrastructural rebuilding after the earthquake and, taken together, established a narrative of recovery and transcendence from the earthquake’s destruction. But modernist works assimilated this language in order to ultimately subvert its ideological projections. Works like Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang did so by integrating this language into a narrative that undermined its communicative functions. The novel responds to the teleology of progress and completion embedded in this narrative through its fragmented narration, and through a narrative discourse that eschews any narrative arc. The structure of Kawabata’s narrative is anything but linear. It proceeds through fragmented vignettes of multiple characters and venues and features a plot that can only be pieced together in retrospect. The plot (once pieced together) concerns Yumiko’s assassination underneath the Kototoi Bridge of a man who raped her sister in the direct aftermath of the earthquake, suggesting that the trauma of that catastrophe cannot be so easily suppressed or supplanted. Overall, Kawabata’s modernist work exposes the repressive motivations of a linear narrative and its inability to account for the realities of present-day Asakusa. As this example demonstrates, social discourse was more than the backdrop or context for the literary works. These works, moreover, did more than just reflect, satirize, or parody this language. Social discourse, and the ideologies they embodied, were the point of departure for these modernist texts, and was also the target of their aesthetically derived critiques. In each chapter I will delineate the contours of a specific discourse, identify its key terms, point out its characteristic forms of rhetoric, and make explicit the type of ideologies it expresses. Adopting Carol Gluck’s understanding that ideology “does not march disembodied through time, but exists in a concrete and particular social history that has not only dates but also names and faces,” this project traces the social ideologies of 1920s Japan through actual articles from mass magazines and their authors,

6       Introduction

articles that contributed to and in aggregate constituted the social ideologies of that decade.7 While I depend on historical scholarship for context, my focus is on the language that circulated in the mass media of the 1920s and examining its utilization, connotations, and social impact. In identifying, moreover, the nexus between social language and the narrative discourse of given modernist texts, the emphasis is not on simply finding word matches between novel and newspaper but rather more broadly on tracing the concurrence of rhetoric and the larger understandings of reality that this rhetoric conveyed, and ultimately how these understandings of reality are engaged. In Kawabata’s novel, for instance, the textual coincidence of infrastructural statistics found in the newspapers is an indication of the novel’s assimilation of a social discourse. But this coincidence would not signify much if it did not point to a conjunction, and ultimate antagonism, on the level of social ideology. In tracing the contours of a social ideology through the language of specific articles, I do not mean to imply that their authors were self-regarded or even actual ideologues. Nor do I wish to establish, even implicitly, a hierarchy of texts wherein sophisticated literary narratives hover above simplistic media propaganda to complicate and subvert its language. The authors of mass media articles, moreover, are not treated here as strawmen to be torn down. To be sure, some of the commentary perused here constituted narrow viewpoints about society. But in many cases these articles offered insightful and discerning commentary on the topics of the day. In surveying these articles, I trace trends and patterns of language and rhetoric that run through them in the aggregate. As Gluck goes on to explain, even “ostensibly ‘non-ideological’ sources help to situate the civic roles being urged on the people in the context of the rest of their social life, surrounding data of ideological consciousness with the ideas and values that continually competed, reinforced, and conflicted with them.”8 In examining the primary sources of the 1920s, I look to limn the ideas and values that competed, reinforced, and conflicted with the each other in order to outline some of the reigning social ideologies of that decade. While this book brings a historical awareness to the language of literary texts, it also brings a literary awareness to the language of media texts, looking to their rhetorical structures, motifs, and metaphors to identify the social ideas that they engender. The decade of the 1920s in Japan featured the emergence of a sense of contemporaneousness with the rest of the world, a consciousness of synchronicity with

7.  Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 8. 8.  Ibid., 15.

Shattering the Status Quo     7

the modern that contributed to a cultural interest in the present and the now. By 1920, Japan’s colonial territories had grown considerably. In addition to Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea, it had just acquired the South Pacific Mandate in 1919. Japan’s support for the Allied Powers in World War I, moreover, earned it a seat at the League of Nations. It was also invited to the Washington Naval Conference, a post–World War I disarmament summit where it gained international recognition for its colonial territories in Manchuria and Mongolia. The consumer industries, mechanisms of mass production, and new financial institutions that developed in this decade occurred in what Harry Harootunian has described as a “historical conjuncture” with the rest of the industrializing world.9 Shared among modernizing cities around the globe was a new attention to the now and to the present as a hallmark of what would be understood as the “modern experience” or the experience of the “everyday.” Harootunian writes that “everydayness is a form of disquiet, a moment suspended; it is a new present, a ‘historic situation’ that violently interrupted tradition and suspended the line and movement of the past.” Thus, this notion of the everyday was both destructive and creative. It inaugurated a new awareness of and focus on the “conditions of lived experience” that marked not only a break from the past and all its expectations, but also the possibility to create new, yet-unrealized meanings within one’s practices.10 The cultural reification of the present was amplified by a major expansion of the print publication industry in the 1920s, which made available to a larger readership an abundance of relatively cheap books, magazines, and newspapers. The mass media institutions, which themselves symbolized the commodification of language, also became a means of disseminating talk about society and social change. There was an academic quality to the articles of the mass media of this time; they contained references to sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, and social critics. It was a vogue that reflected an excitement for new knowledge partly inspired by an influx of foreign ideas brought in through a proliferation of new translations. But it was also stimulated by a faith in the untapped potential of academic study and deductive experimentation. In the pages of general-interest magazines one could find pieces on Albert Einstein, articles referencing new German scholarship on child pedagogy, a commentary on the women’s suffrage movement, or an advertisement for Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Social commentary in the newspapers and magazines was pragmatic, thoughtful, and serviceable, but it also included a distinct strain of moralism or social

  9.  Harry D. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 66. 10.  Ibid., 21.

8       Introduction

prescription. It was marked by a heady, almost bombastic, optimism about the ability to change, shape, and reshape Japan. This attitude reflected an ethos of earnestness and ambition, seemingly shared throughout the entire middle class, toward developing and cultivating visions for the ideal self, society, and nation. Implicit, moreover, in such an attitude was the sureness that such visions could be realized. Not only could social formations and the individual role within those formations be altered, they could be altered through rhetorical persuasion, instruction, and inspiration. In this sense, the rhetoric of social commentary embodied the simultaneously destructive and creative ethos rooted in the culture of everydayness. Indeed, the intersection between the idea of everydayness and the proliferation of mass media in the 1920s could be located in the nearly ubiquitous appearance of the term seikatsu (生活), which I here translate as “daily life,” in the pages of magazines and newspapers. It was a term that was abstract even as it pointed to concrete practices, allowing it to be utilized to demarcate a rather expansive range of issues as targets of reform, such as the self, the household, social customs, marital relations, and even love. One of its most explicit employments can be seen in the discourse of the “daily life reform movement” (seikatsu kaizen undo¯, 生活改善運動), a nationwide and government-endorsed effort of the early 1920s to change Japanese society to be more in line with Western nations by rationalizing and streamlining habits of consumption and daily practices within the home. The imagined goal was to achieve a cosmopolitan and humanistic life style of efficient ease and sophistication. In examining the rhetoric of reform surrounding daily life one can see that it possessed a dual nature. On the one hand, it registered a contingency in the way life could be lived and livelihoods achieved, a sense of liberation from the traditional norms that governed the habits, routines, and purposes of living, including how one loved and what kind of person one should be. Yet this freedom was often modulated by a new set of prescriptions for the way one should live, prescriptions that came with their own forms of discipline. I use “daily life” to translate seikatsu in order to capture this very duality. On the one hand, the term exists as a concept of aesthetic and cultural criticism that identified the historical and artistic significance of individual actions. Henri LeFebvre used the term la vie quotidenne to identify a central feature of nineteenth century and early twentieth century French aesthetic awareness, which was the discovery of the “marvelous” in the realm of the quotidian, the plain, and the poor, in the “humblest facts of everyday life.”11 Michel de Certeau, using his word le quotidien,

11.  Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, special ed., 3 vols. (London: Verso, 2008), 132.

Shattering the Status Quo     9

recast the term as a sociological concept that demarcated a space of agency for the individual vis-à-vis the hegemonic ideologies of a given society. The term identified the capacity of individuals to practice daily activities in a way that did not conform to the way they were intended to be practiced, “procedures” that “manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them.”12 On the other hand, daily life (seikatsu) refers to the ways that this term of contingency was employed in mass media discourses of the 1920s in Japan to articulate new visions of society but also prescriptions for how daily procedures should be practiced. The identification of this tension between the two valences of this term in Japanese history, a tension between a philosophical term that points to the culturally contingent practices of people in history and a discursive term operative within the social language of the Japanese mass media, has spurred a host of groundbreaking and innovative studies in the field of Japanese history. Barbara Sato has used the “social and cultural history of the commodificaiton of the everyday” to construct a new women’s history. Her work traces the development of new images of the feminine in the media of the 1920s, but these media ideals serve as counterpoints, against which she identifies and elaborates the many variations of female identity that were constructed by historical women as they engaged in unique ways with these images and ideals.13 Jordan Sand’s history of household architecture and domestic culture in prewar Japan arrives at many of its insights by delineating the dynamic between beliefs concerning Japanese home and society and the way these ideologies were consumed and absorbed by a populace that was in fact very different from the way it was projected by those ideologies. In her history of prewar popular culture, Miriam Silverberg sought to “illuminate the modern practices of the 1920s and 1930s by focusing on their representations in the mass media . . .”14 While tracing the contours of mass media images and popular thought, Silverberg uses these models to distinguish and describe the consumer who was endowed with the agency to create their own meanings through the control they had over their own participation in those popular notions.15

12.  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xiv. 13.  Barbara Hamill Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 6. 14.  Miriam Rom Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 6. 15.  Ibid., 32–33.

10       Introduction

The present volume’s analysis of modernist literature has been made possible by the identification of these new dimensions of historical analysis. I, too, rely on the tracing of media discourses to lay out a fine-grained social history against which the negations of modernist literary practice are conceived. In pitting modernist texts against strands of social discourses with specific dates, names, and faces, moreover, I articulate modernist critique in a way that is concrete, specific, and local. For instance, surveys of mass media language reveal the way the 1923 Great Kanto¯ Earthquake did not just inflict infrastructural damage on the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama but also called into question the entire country’s selfimage as a progressive advanced nation. Consequently, the exhortations for social reform in the early 1920s became more radical in the wake of the earthquake, advocating the need to return to a more spiritually pure subjectivity, one that was immersed in ethnically based forms of perception. Yokomitsu’s modernist writings, often regarded as purely academic engagements with linguistic signification, were explicitly aimed at undermining this social discourse, which posited ethnic purity as the basis for a successful urban renaissance in the wake of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. Yokomitsu’s elaboration of alternate phenomenologies rooted in the urban space was a direct challenge to the cultural essentialism that emerged in mass media articles beginning in 1923 as part of this new rhetoric of reform. But more than just utilizing this tension, embedded in the term “daily life,” of discursive ideology versus contingent individual practice to delineate a more socio-historically grounded version of modernist subversion, I ultimately demonstrate how modernist works themselves targeted and exposed this inherent contradiction. In each chapter, I follow the way “daily life” and related terms that originally indicated the newfound freedoms of a historical period defined by new consumer choices, family formations, and domestic roles, would ultimately become marshalled within prescriptions to recast and reinforce a sense of social totality. I then show how modernist texts take daily life, and all of its discursive manifestations, and reverse this transformation, disrupt it by reverting it and restoring it back to its original denotation of the contingency that is definitive of the experience of modernity. Tanizaki’s 1924 novel, A Fool’s Love, for example, assimilates the language of the daily life reform movement in the context of a love relationship between two people who seek to lead the progressive and efficient lifestyle that that discourse promulgated. As the couple’s relationship, however, is revealed to be based in sadomasochism, the language of daily life reform that fueled their relationship is revealed to be based in the imperatives of social discipline and the logic of fetishism toward the West. Thus, I am not just interested in demarcating a new history of Japanese modernism in relationship to social

Shattering the Status Quo     11

media but in demonstrating the dynamic way modernism operated within history as a disruptive practice.16 Examining modernism in this way offers the possibility of capturing a different sense of history; that is, not a historical account but a sense of history as it might have been experienced. By exploring literary negations of historical media discourses, it presents history not as a time and place in the past but as a living process. Examining the way modernist texts upended ideological language permits us to render a historical time through an elaboration of the array of practices available at the given time—practices that were subject to multiple competing social narratives but were nonetheless completely subject to none of them. Thus, recovering the social critique of modernism through the terms of daily life amounts to recovering the fluidity of a historical moment. Ultimately, Harootunian understands everydayness not just as a phenomenon of history but as a methodology for writing history: “What has been absent in the practice of history devoted to reconstructing the past of a present is the present, what is given as the historical present and how it shows itself.”17 I show how modernist fiction, as a literary strategy working to effect social change, did so most often by exposing the radical potential of the present. However, the pedagogical implications of studying modernism in this way are not limited to historical recovery. By reperforming the disruption of the ideological hold media discourses have on the way individuals imagine their relationships to social reality, modernism has the power to impact the reader’s lived reality by bringing them closer to an awareness of how the social imaginary is constructed. Modernist fiction demands that we remain aware of the way language masquerades as natural and organic. By drawing attention to the way meanings are produced through language, modernism made readers less naïve about the ideologies of nationalism, ethnic privilege, and progress—ideologies that became prevalent in 1920s Japan. To the extent that such ideologies continue to hobble our thinking about history, society, and culture today, modernist strategies still hold a place of particular importance. One might argue that, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we remain inundated by a more varied but similar type of media language that continues to make claims on our reality and on our devotions. The need for modernist subversion, and its promise of liberation, remains in this sense as urgent today as ever.

16.  For a theory of “daily life” that addresses the problem of how literary practice can constitute a social practice, see Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 17. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 18.

12       Introduction

Modernism and the I-Novel Any accurate recognition of the way literary modernism operated in Japan requires an understanding of the I-novel genre. If literary modernism has been understood to consist of textual strategies that defied readerly expectations, in Japan it was off of the readerly expectations established by the genre of the I-novel—its narrative form as well as its language—that modernism pivoted. A type of récit narrative influenced by French Naturalism, the I-novel emerged in the years following the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and had become standardized as the manifestation of serious or “pure” literature in Japan by the 1920s. Modernism in Japan emerged in open defiance of this literary genre. Tanizaki coyly described A Fool’s Love as “a type of ‘I-novel,’” hinting at the way his novel distorted that genre.18 Yokomitsu declared that he “rebelled against the persistent former style called naturalism, around which clung old sentiments,”19 while Kawabata explained that “the breakthrough in our daily lives and art” that he and his fellow modernists sought necessitated a “breakdown in the literary establishment itself.”20 Hirabayashi Taiko inveighed against the Romanticism of the Bluestocking writers of the 1910s, demanding a literature of “ideas” and “action” to replace their literature of “shouts for freedom and chiefly emotional revolt.”21 A brief analysis of a representative I-novel will help to make these assertions more concrete while also providing a counterpoint to the various modernist practices treated in this book. For this purpose I turn to the 1917 novella Reconciliation (Wakai, 和解) by Shiga Naoya, who was credited with reforming, refining, and defining the prose of the I-novel. Shiga’s novella, which was seemingly a self-reflective description of Shiga’s own life, is a first-person narrative of a writer who attempts to write and publish an account of his troubles with his father. Throughout the work, the writer in the story repeatedly fails to complete his work, which he titles “The Dreamer” (muso¯ka, 夢想家), because of his conflicting and unresolved feelings about his father. As the title “reconciliation” suggests, the work depicts the ultimate resolution of this emotional and somewhat intangible feud between the narrator and his father. Though some reasons for the rift are hinted at— miscommunication, slights to pride, perceived indignities—no specific cause is ever given. This lack of a concrete obstacle, and thus a conceivable solution, is

18.  Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, “Chijin no ai,” Josei, November 1924. 19.  Yokomitsu Riichi, “Kaisetsu ni kaete 1,” in Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zenshu¯ vol. 13 (Tokyo: Kawade shobo¯ shinsha, 1982), 584–585. 20.  Kawabata Yasunari et al., “Atarashiki seikatsu to bungei,” 7. 21.  Hirabayashi Taiko, “Josei bungei undo¯ no shinshutsu.”

Shattering the Status Quo     13

suggestive of the nature of the problem. Rather than a conflict of interests to be rectified, the problem assumes the form of “inharmonious and unpleasant feelings” (fuwa, 不和; fuyukai,不愉快) that ripple through the narrator’s life, affecting his mood, his health, and his relationship with his wife and family. These feelings obstruct his ability, for instance, to see his beloved ailing grandmother, who lives in the same house as his father. At one point, even the death of an infant is attributed to this tacit enmity. The novella begins with the mention of this dead infant and, in terse and direct sentences, dramatizes the way the narrator’s hostility toward his father keeps the family from coming together. This July 21st would be the one-year anniversary of the death of my first child, who was born last year and died fifty-six days later. It was to visit the grave that I made the trip for the first time in a long time from Abiko to Tokyo. From Ueno Station, I called the Azabu House. I had the maid who answered get my mother. “How is Grandmother?” I asked. “She’s well, but it’s still too soon for her to leave the house, so I went by myself to visit the grave in Aoyama this morning,” my mother replied. “Is that so. I am about to go to Aoyama myself.” The two stayed silent a moment. “Will it just be Aoyama today?” my mother asked. “I also plan to stop by a friend’s house,” I replied. My mother’s voice grew quiet, as if it were something difficult to say. “Your father is at home today . . . ,” she said. “Is that right. Well, then perhaps I will stop by there some other time.” I said this in as detached a way as I could manage but, all the more because I was talking into a telephone, I could feel an expression of unpleasantness rooted in my deep indignation come unabashedly to my face.22 Aside from some interesting momentary shifts into the third-person perspective— e.g., “The two stayed silent . . .”—the narrative is completely absorbed by and into the emotional subject position of the narrator. His rancorous emotions toward his father are depicted through a mode of candid self-reflection that make them all the more vivid while placing them deeply into the subjective perspective of the protagonist.

22.  Shiga Naoya, “Wakai,” in Shiga Naoya zenshu¯ vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1973), 323–324.

14       Introduction

As exemplified in the last lines above, the entire story is written in a limpid, pared-down prose that carefully and concretely depicts the narrator’s psychological workings and emotional states. The I-novel would eventually utilize and standardize this narrative style, which depended on the adoption of a vernacular prose, referred to as genbun itchi, that consolidated a written style with spoken language. But the psychological lucidity of Shiga’s prose was just as much a function of his artistic innovation as it was the colloquial language in which he wrote. When the narrator, who has snuck into his mother’s house to see his grandmother, must leave before his father’s return, the narrator/narrative explains: I was unhappy. I even had a feeling of irritation. But because nothing had occurred that was outside of my expectations, I was able to prevent all of my feelings from being drawn down into this unhappiness. In fact, I was consciously preventing them from doing so.23 The narrator’s focused consideration of his own feelings and his relationship to them is written in a prose style that imposes very little objective distance from the reader. This lack of a boundary between narrator and reader is clearer in the Japanese where pronouns like “I,” which demarcate an integral subject position, are grammatically unnecessary and usually elided. Shiga was also famous for developing the “ta-stopped” sentence ending, a grammatical formation that denoted perfective completion but avoided any sense of past tense, further closing the gap between narrative time and the reader’s time. While the features of I-novel language can be described in terms of grammatical features, it was the artistic innovation of writers like Shiga that engendered this narrative translucency. The net effect of these strategies was to create a language and narrative framework in which readers could fully project themselves into the narrator’s subjective position as the narrator recounted and reflected on the details of his inner drama.24 In the I-novel genre, this effect of linguistic transparency was closely tied to notions of sincerity and authenticity in storytelling. The language of the I-novel was regarded as unstudied and childlike in nature, giving the impression that it was unconscious, instinctual, and unsullied by self-conscious usage of idiom and linguistic play. But this sense of direct communication was also a function of the character being rendered. As can be seen in Shiga’s text, the ability of the narrative

23.  Ibid., 391. 24.  Historically speaking, the I-novel as a genre was associated only with male writers. Gendered aspects of writing were the object of Hirabayashi Taiko’s modernist critique and will be the focus of chapter 4.

Shattering the Status Quo     15

discourse to invite the reader’s subjective introjection is dependent upon the narrator’s own guilelessness regarding his feelings and his interactions with others. When the narrator finally talks to his father, he deliberately avoids planning what to say or what tone to use, leaving it to “the emotions he has at the moment.” When his words come out with unexpected anger, he explains that this was the “most natural tone, for it was born from the current situation.”25 In short, the lack of a boundary between narrator and reader is enabled by a lack of segregation between the narrator’s feelings and his surrounding social reality (the feelings of the father, for example). Such seamless integration of artlessness, direct and honest self-reflection, and emotional egoism are the hallmarks of the mode of representation that define the I-novel. The I-novel attained the status of high literature because of its perceived access to and conveyance of what was true as opposed to made up. This understanding was bolstered by the way I-novel narratives most often present themselves as relating the thoughts and experiences of their real-life authors. Just as I-novel narrative discourse effaces the distinction between reader and narrator, it also effaces the distinction between narrator and author, and thus by extension that between reader and author. As such, the I-novel represented a departure from the contrivances, exaggerations, and ornate wordplay of previous literary styles. In contrast to what was considered the cheap and frivolous motivations of past styles, the I-novel was considered a serious literary genre that transmitted unvarnished authenticity. This sense of authenticity, however, was not a feature inherent in the (Japanese) language per se but the artistic effect of this innovative mode of linguistic representation.26 At this point, one can begin to see how the conflict presented in the novella’s plot is an outgrowth of its own mode of linguistic representation. In other words, the indefinable problem with the father is, in essence, a problem of exogenous feelings—the presence of feelings that diverge from those of the narrator’s own, resulting in a heterogeneity that manifests itself as “unpleasantness.” Thus, as one might expect from this perspective, the eventual reconciliation of this drama

25.  Shiga Naoya, Wakai, 403. 26. Tomi Suzuki has made the essential point that the sense of linguistic transparency and authentic expression identified with the I-novel was not “instrinsic” to the novel, let alone the Japanese language, but was part of a “mode of reading.” While I agree that these assumptions were part of an “ideological paradigm,” I do not go as far as Suzuki in claiming that they are arbitrarily projected onto what we now refer to as I-novels. Instead, I would argue that the “mode of reading” was a product of the novel’s mode of representation. Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 6.

16       Introduction

consists of a reconstitution of direct communication and emotional simpatico between the narrator and his father: With an odd look on my face that was somewhere between frowning and tearing up, I looked at my father’s eyes. Suddenly, a certain expression arose from my father’s eyes. It was something that I was seeking. It was something that I was seeking unconsciously. The frowning and the tearing of my face increased with the pleasure and excitement of my heart touching his heart.27 This articulation of nonverbal emotional connection and communication between father and son represents the resolution of the story’s conflict and, at the same time, marks a triumphal justification of its linguistic mode of representation. The mode of writing, in other words, is retroactively rescued and legitimized, a sanction indicated in the story by the narrator’s sudden ability to finish his manuscript about his father, which is presumably the text we have just read. This strong sense of narrative closure is another central feature of the I-novel genre. The reconciliation between father and son allows for the recommencement of other relationships in the family, signaled by the father deciding to take all members of the household to visit his son’s home. The narrator can now freely see his grandmother, and his wife can now have a relationship with her father-in-law. Thus, the resolution of individual emotional problems is inscribed within a resolution of the family unit and the socialized self. Suzuki Sadami characterizes the I-novel as a confessional genre in which the narrator acknowledges and avows contemptible or abject parts of his inner life. Such divulgence is rooted in an attempt to purify oneself and achieve the “rebirth of a new self and a new ethical subject.”28 In one of the most far-reaching narrative analyses of Shiga’s novella, Tomi Suzuki concludes that the family reconciliation at the end was indicative of the establishment of a much larger cohesion. The coming together of the family in the plot represented a more ontological “homecoming” on the level of narrative discourse. Arguing that the narrator’s difficulties in writing were in essence rooted in an impulse to defy “a linear, causal mode of temporality,” the reconciliation then marked “the recognition of the inevitability and necessity of a narrative and temporal shaping of life, a shaping inevitably more or less intentional and teleological.”29 It is by this means

27.  Shiga Naoya, Wakai, 412. 28.  Suzuki Sadami, Nihon no “bungaku” wo kangaeru (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1994), 128. 29.  Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 122–123.

Shattering the Status Quo     17

that Shiga’s narrative reconstitutes the “I.” Suzuki’s reading offers another way to understand the way these narratives of the self, while occupied with asocial thoughts and actions, were ultimately invested in establishing a reformed and socially compatible subjectivity. In this sense, closure in such narratives signifies reconciliation with social norms and public ethics. Inscribed within this narrative discourse was a specific relationship between the individual and society, a relationship that would have important ramifications for the efforts at social reform. For implicit in the narrative discourse of the I-novel is a conception of the individual as being a microcosm of society, rather than an actor within it. It presents a fractal relationship between society, the family, and the emotional/ethical individual, each folding into and bearing the identical structure of the larger order. The result is a notion of society as being an outgrowth of the inner state of its individual members. One implication of this logic is that if society needs to change, such change is best enacted by focusing on the individual, or more specifically by calling on the individual to focus on reforming the self. It is here that we can begin to see how the I-novel, as represented by Shiga’s bracing narrative innovation, marked a powerful convergence of artistic literary achievement and liberal social ideology. This convergence is the basis for comprehending the synchronicity between the language of the I-novel literary discourse and the rhetoric of social reform in 1920’s Japan.

The I-Novel as Social Text The emergence and the establishment of the I-novel in Japanese literary history marked an important period of confluence between the language of literature and the language of society. This correspondence went beyond the utilization of more commonplace parlance in the vernacular prose of literary language. Shared between literary language and social language was an attitude of confession and transparency, an assumption of shared community and seamless communication, as well as an ethos of social reformation that would be achieved through a focus on the individual self. This conjuncture is emprically revealed by surveys, included here, of magazine and newspaper articles in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The daily life reform projects, for instance, which was discussed incessantly in the mass media of the late 1910s and early 1920s, was undergirded by an assumption that the practices of one’s domestic or private life, the sphere of concern demarcated by daily life, could, should, and needed to be publicly shared and communicated. As one writer of his daily habits writes, “Because I think there are others in this wide world who are in the same circumstances [as I am], I will lay bare without restraint the conditions of the daily life

18       Introduction

that I continue to live and offer it as a reference.”30 In such rhetoric, the individual private life is offered as stand-in for all private lives, and thus by extension to society as a whole. This same logic whereby the individual becomes not a constituent but a microcosm of the whole of society operated in the calls of daily life reformers to make one’s daily routines more efficient and one’s lifestyle more sophisticated for the sake of the country. “Because the daily life of the household is a miniature (shukuzu, 縮図) of the daily life of society, the movement to reform society must begin in the laboratory of the home,” wrote Morimoto Ko¯kichi, an important advocate of reform in the interwar years.31 In the language of daily life reform, the configurations of private life were implicitly tied to the needs of the nation. Similarly, in the call to reform marriage through the promotion of “love” in the early 1920s, one can see a rhetorical attempt to initiate a transformation of society as a whole by altering the nature of one of its foundational institutions, that of marriage. The philosopher Nishishin Ichiro¯, for instance, wrote that “the family was a ‘miniature’” of society, and its relationships—between mother and father, parent and child, or siblings—were the ‘miniatures’ of all moral relationships in society. Because the family was understood in an analogous rather than constitutional relation to society, private matters in the home became a matter of public concern. The home itself was rendered social; the family became the point of departure for the ‘moral daily life of all humanity.’”32 But marriage was also seen as an entryway into a more moral way of life. There was a consensus among many writers in the mid-1920s that one of the end goals of love was the establishment of jinkaku (人格, “character”), a liberal conception of a moral subject possessed of rational free will. “A world governed by pure love,” the physicist Ishihara Jun wrote, “will give way to a human daily life characterized by a truly free character (jinkaku) that supercedes conventional morality.”33 “Character” was a term closely integrated in the middle-class calls for self-cultivation. As demonstrated by these examples, the reform language of the 1920s shared with the language of I-novel fiction concerns about a society and family being based on the honesty, honor, and integrity of the self. In the years after the 1923 Great Kanto¯ Earthquake, the call for urban reconstruction also contained explicit references to spiritual community, direct communication, and Japanese ethnicity. The earthquake not only destroyed the infrastructure of two of Japan’s major cities, it also shook the very foundations of national ideology, radically questioning Japan’s legitimacy as an advanced

30.  Sho¯so¯ Shien, “Tsuki jyu¯goen no seikatsu,” Seikatsu, March 1914, 111. 31.  Morimoto Ko¯kichi, “Kekkon kaizo¯ ron,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, January 1921, 60. 32.  Nishishin Ichiro¯, “Kekkon no shinri,” Kaizo¯, January 1922, 24. 33.  Ishihara Jun, “Ren’ai to seikatsu,” Kaizo¯, February 1925.

Shattering the Status Quo     19

modern nation. The reform discourse centered on daily life that flourished before the quake continued afterward. However, the rhetoric was inflected by the cataclysmic event to focus more intensely on self-reform, spiritual purity, and ethnic authenticity. The reconstruction effort was referred to as a “renaissance” (fukko¯, 復興), a term that embodied the dual imperatives of infrastructural rebuilding and spiritual rebirth. According to the literary critic Yoshie Kyo¯matsu, the great tremors of the earthquake had “shed light upon the bottoms of the deepest valleys of our way of life (seikatsu) and awakened the deepest part of our consciousness, which had been asleep on those valley floors.”34 A law professor, Inoue Kinji, wrote that, “by putting people in touch with true reality, the earthquake had succeeded in making them aware of the lack of ‘interiority’ (naimensei, 内面性) in their daily life.”35 For Inoue, social and political revolutions would not suffice. External changes in one’s way of life—changes in the structures of labor or property—would not, he believed, bring about fundamental change. Reconstruction would succeed only if it “derived more from the inner part of our way of life.” Inoue called for the reborn self to be based on a new universal “emotion” of daily life (fuhenteki seikatsu kanjo¯, 普遍的生活感情), one that would not only direct the internal world, but would at the same time, through its role in the formation of the self, “project a single new model onto the outer world and all of human society.”36 Finally, he advocated for a sense of “responsibility,” self-control, and self-reflection that would ensure direct communication between people and between citizens, “a strength that will make possible the direct exchange of spirit to spirit.” “Only through this means,” Inoue wrote, “could there be established within the interior relations between human beings a direct and essential unity.”37 In his conception of a direct and pure communication as the basis for social structures such as the family, one can see Inoue’s debt to the form and language of I-novels like Shiga’s Reconciliation. But one can also see more generally in the rhetoric of Inoue and Yoshie the way in which the conceptions of self, society, and ethics embodied in the language of the I-novel were operative within social reform discourse. The rhetoric of these reform efforts conflated the project of urban reform with the process of self-reflection and emotional and spiritual communion. The narrative of being reborn into a new self was projected onto the large-scale infrastructure project to rebuild the city into a new ideal imperial metropolis.

34.  Yoshie Kyo¯matsu, “Haikyo no kokoro,” Kaizo¯, November 1923, 265. 35.  Inoue Kinji, “Bunmei no muyu¯byo¯sha ni mukete saisei oyobi saiseijin no igi wo toku,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, May 1924, 66. 36.  Ibid., 68. 37. Ibid.

20       Introduction

In one of the first studies of Japanese modernism to carefully trace the history of literary form within the contexts of local political and social history, Seiji Lippit identifies an overlap between the language and form of the modern novel and the establishment of a modern subjectivity, or a new sense of self, in the years after the Russo-Japanese War.38 This new sense of self emerged from the perception that Japan had militarily overcome a Western nation in its defeat of Russia, had successfully set up the systems of a capitalist economy, and had established itself as a colonial power. The confidence spurred by such developments allowed Japanese to begin to sense a commonality with the “West,” instead of the gaping gulf felt by an earlier generation. Referring to this cultural phenomenon as “Taisho¯ cosmopolitanism,” Lippit explains that it indicated “an apparent rejection of a localized conception of culture in favor of participation in a universalized realm of modernity, one in which Japanese and European civilization are perceived to coexist in the same shared space.”39 Taisho¯ cosmopolitanism, however, was based on a central contradiction. While it “tended to elide the mediating categories of nation, society, politics, and economy in favor of an apparently direct link between the individual and the world of universal cultural values,” this “consciousness of an expansive, universal modernity was typically translated into a narcissistic focus on the representation of the self.”40 The fantasy of universalism, in other words, was premised on a disavowal of geopolitical realities, such as for instance Japan’s imperialist enterprises in Asia. Nonetheless, Taisho¯ cosmopolitanism would become the ideological context for a new mode of writing centered on a conscious, reflective, ratiocinating subjectivity. This narrating subjectivity was enabled by the institutionalization of the vernacular language (genbun itchi) as the standard language of modern literature. Following the theories of Karatani Ko¯jin, Lippit notes that the language of genbun itchi, “which ostensibly moves toward an unmediated relationship between consciousness (speech) and expression (writing),” initiated a “epistemological inversion,” or a “process of mapping that first projects an image of an external topography against which the boundaries of an internalized consciousness are drawn.” The modern novel thus features a narrative with a clear distinction between a narrating interiority and the external landscape that is observed and narrated. “To this extent,” writes Lippit, “the language of genbun itchi . . . provided

38.  Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). What I call the I-novel is referred to by Lippit as the “modern novel.” He reserves the term “I-novel” to identify a series of texts that emerged in the 1920s, in parallel with modernism, as a response to the decline of the “modern novel.” 39.  Ibid., 12. 40.  Ibid., 13.

Shattering the Status Quo     21

the linguistic basis for constructing a modern subjectivity in literature.”41 But for Lippit, there was an intimate relationship between the subjectivity of modern literature and the selfhood of Taisho¯ cosmopolitanism, between the literary form and the modern experience in Japan. According to Karatani, this process of “epistemological inversion” was not just a literary development but was in fact a metaphor and articulation of the trauma of Japan’s modernization. Thus the narrative organization of the modern novel, with its observing and ratiocinating narrator, was utlimately based upon an unstable political subject, one that achieved its ego-ideal of simultaneity with the “West” through a suppression of its immediate political realities. According to Lippit, this instability of the Taisho¯ Cosmopolitanism subject gets exposed by the sociological transformations of the 1920s. First there was the politicization of writing production inaugurated by Marxist and proletarian literature. These groups introduced a new concept of art that challenged the modern novel’s pretense of autonomy from politics, impugning the inwardly focused self it featured for reneging on social responsibilities. The new concepts of the “mass” or the “masses,” ushered in by international labor movements and absorbed by the publishing industries and the new media of film, defied the liberal idea of individual integrity and “character” (jinkaku), challenging the way this subject could serve as stand-in for a cohesive nation. Finally, Lippit points to the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake of 1923, and the ensuing violence against Koreans and socialists, as a “massive and violent externalization of the traumas of modernization.” In each case, Lippit demonstrates how those aspects of society that had been repressed through the establishment of the transparent interiority of Taisho cosmopolitanism—class, nation, empire, race—were now being “externalized” in the form of material culture. It is here that Lippit positions modernist literature. Modernism emerged as a negation of the form and language of the genre that manifested the Taisho¯ Cosmopolitanism subject. It represented the collapse of that subject through a literature that dismantled the structures of the modern novel. If the modern novel was structured to sustain the narration of interior emotions in contradistinction to exterior landscape, then one of the defining features of the modernist novel was a narrative discourse that featured the break down of this mechanism. In this way, the artistic works of modernism had highly explicit social and cultural ramifications. Inasmuch as the modern novel represented a convergence of literary form and the modern subject, modernism’s negation of the form and language of the modern novel entailed a dissolution of that modern subject. Modernist works do

41.  Ibid., 11.

22       Introduction

not just effect the dissolution of literature but the disintegration of the subject formations of modern culture more broadly. Of this interconnection between the literary and the sociocultural, Lippit writes: Within the texts themselves, modernist writings rejected the representation of interiority. It is in the field of representation that the link between dismantling the structures of modern literature and depicting a disintegrating national subjectivity become clearest. The concept of interiority can be seen as defining the parameters of an individual as well as a national subjectivity, and it links the formalist resistance against the language of genbun itchi to a broader representation of modern culture.42 At stake here is the central thesis that modernist literature, though a literary enterprise, had consequences for broader society. Modernism was not merely an aesthetic revolution. If modern literature—its form and language—represented an attempt to “situate individual bodies and psyches within rapidly shifting cultural and social fields,” then modernist literature represented the breakdown of this “process of negotiation.43 Modernist literature sought to undermine boundaries of subjectivity that were explicitly social and political, boundaries that included those of ethnicity, nationality, gender, and class. Lippit’s penetrating analysis inspires and provides a framework for this book in its explicit identification of the real-world ramifications of the literary revolution perpetrated by modernist literature. He arrives at this thesis through the pioneering way in which he delineates the interconnections between modern culture and the development of literary forms. The current project diverges from Lippit’s, however, in its introduction of a third term, that of social language (or more specifically, the discourses of the mass media), in conceiving the dynamic between modernist negation, previous forms of literature, and social critique. I adopt the nexus that Lippit discerns between the form and language of the modern novel on the one hand and the contours of modern subjectivity on the other. However, it reformulates this nexus between literature and social subject as a correspondence that depended upon a preliminary congruence between the form and language of the modern novel (what I refer to as the I-novel) and the form and language of the social institutions of the 1910s and 1920s. Lippit’s model relies on a projection of the subject rendered in novelistic narrative discourse onto the subjectivity of an entire historical people living in the

42.  Ibid., 31. 43.  Ibid., 7.

Shattering the Status Quo     23

modern period. Literary scholars like Jonathan Zwicker have since called for a more accurate literary history, one that tracks the social impact of narrative fiction through the interactions between distinct histories of political institutions, literary form, and cultural practice.44 Exposing, for instance, through primary source research, a gap between what literary histories claim were important works in the late nineteenth-century and what actual people in the 1880s and 90s were in reality reading, Zwicker calls for more accuracy in the way literary historians connect the books they study to the “social and imaginative experience” they attribute to a given period. The proposition of a media discourse that reprised the language of the I-novel enables just this more historically specific account for the correspondence between the subjectivity rendered by a novel form and the subjectivity of a historical citizenry as a whole. We can here point to the mass media, as a social institution that shared the language of the I-novel, as the historical source for the way people of the time conceived of or imagined the self. The same ideas of subjectivity enshrined in the I-novel can be found within society because it was a society that absorbed, by means of mass media institutions, the same type of language, and the ideologies of subjectivity that that language embodied. But this formulation also suggests a different and more active dynamic of modernist negation. In one sense, I affirm much of what Lippit articulates as the target of modernist critique: the socially detached, self-absorbed, and repressive cosmopolitan subject enshrined within a progressive social formation that has based fixed ideas of class, ethnicity, and gender on political suppression and empire. However, it locates the notion of this subject and social formation not in the pages of the I-novel per se but in the social discourses of the 1920s. It reconceives modernist negation by shifting its orientation away from a problematic cultural formation that was becoming increasingly defunct (i.e., Taisho¯ Cosmopolitanism) and toward institutions of the mass media that continued to promulgate the ideologies of that social formation in the present time. Modernism was not a symptom of collapsing sociocultural frameworks. Rather it was a representational strategy that actively undermined the ideologies of a social language that threatened to perpetuate those very sociocultural frameworks. Lippit, for instance, perceives in the phenomenological turmoil of Yokomitsu’s neo-sensationist writings a statement about the inadequacy of the principles of coherent subjectivity and intellect that had bolstered modern culture up until

44.  Jonathan E. Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 4.

24       Introduction

the radical social transformations of the 1920s. The impact of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake was part of these transformations. Yokomitsu’s emphasis on corporeal sensation, he writes, signaled: [. . .] the collapse of a certain totalizing understanding of modernity. The reduction of external phenomena to fragmentary sense perceptions in the early work of Yokomitsu and others reflects a collapse of intellect (chisei) . . . but it also means that for these writers, the world can no longer be fully grasped intellectually, that it exceeds rational cognition. The focus on “sensation” in these writings thus suggests a failure of understanding, of the capacity to integrate cultural and social phenomena into a coherent whole.45 While not gainsaying the distinct sense of psychological break down that underlies Yokomitsu’s aesthetic enterprise, I seek to reorient Yokomitsu’s dismantling intentions, reading them against the rhetorical strategies of the reform discourses that emerged in the wake of the earthquake. I locate the “totalizing understanding of modernity” that Yokomitsu sought to puncture within the rhetorical efforts of reformers at the time, writers who used Japanese ethnicity and traditional Japanese aesthetics as the foundation for a new self and a new society. It was the ideological efforts of this social language to “integrate cultural and social phenomena into a coherent whole” that Yokomitsu impugned in his writings on sensation. Thus, Yokomitsu’s response to the I-novel was simultaneously a strategy to counter the ideological momentum of social reform language in the mid-1920s. In reorienting modernist negation against social language, I do not mean to suggest that it was not responding to literary conventions of the I-novel, for certainly it was. I demonstrate, rather, how reactions to the I-novel and reactions to social language were, in a sense, one in the same. In the wake of the Kanto¯ Earthquake, as noted above, the rhetoric of urban rebuilding had become merged with conventions of I-novel narration. The language ideologically encouraged people to identify personally with the city itself, to invest their individual sense of ethical and moral recovery, as well as their desire for self-renewal, into the reconstruction effort of the city and by extension the nation. It is in this context that Yokomitsu wrote urban fiction that, through its emphasis on corporeal sensation, obstructed the easy identification of reader with narrator. His narratives thus sought to undermine the conventions of the I-novel but attempted at the same time to cultivate different more complicated relationships between the individual and the city. It is in this way that the formalistic virtuosity of

45. Lippit, Topographies, 82.

Shattering the Status Quo     25

Yokomitsu’s modernist works simultaneously constituted statements of trenchant social critique. But the way in which the I-novel becomes a catalyst for modernism’s capacity to subvert social language requires further explication.

The I-Novel and Realism The notion that modernism achieved its social critique by exploiting the intertextual nexus between the conventional novel and social language was a central pillar of Eysteinsson’s theory. In his analysis, the development and establishment of literary realism was an essential precondition for the strategies and tactics of literary modernism. Eysteinsson describes the essential inventiveness of realist fiction in terms of the convergence it inaugurated between literature and social language: “Through its emphasis and dependence on contemporary social affairs, realism brought literature in close contact with the prevalent communicative and pragmatic function of language.”46 It was this confluence of realist narrative discourse with the content and functions of social language that provided the basis for realism’s characteristic verisimilitude. Implicit in this confluence, however, was not just the adoption of a type of language but a discourse that projected a vision of society that was cohesive and stable. Eysteinsson writes that through its language, therefore, in its very form, realism implicitly presents culture as a unified sphere. . . . Realism is a mode of writing in which the subject “comes to terms with” the object, where the individual “makes sense” of a society in which there is a basis of common understanding. One could perhaps say that nineteenth-century realism consolidates as a re-creation of the “public sphere,” at a time when some see that sphere as entering a process of fragmentation.47 In this ultimate formulation, Eysteinsson understands realism as a mode of representation that affirms and reproduces a social totality, not just as a matter of plot or content but of language and form. Here, he also identifies a crucial ideological function of literary narrative discourse. Modernist negation, then, was a representational strategy that sought to interrupt and undermine the ideological nexus between a social totality and the realist mode of representation. “Modernism,” he writes: can be seen to emerge because realism, as a form of historical thinking, is felt to deal inadequately with secularized reality in its own terms, so

46. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 186. 47.  Ibid., 195.

26       Introduction

to speak. Even though realism may be highly critical of capitalist reality (as many nineteenth-century realists were), it evinces a tendency to reproduce the narrative structures and the symbolic order that form the basis of this society and its ideology. Nevertheless, modernism was dependent on realist practice for the expectations that would make its negation socially subversive and thus significant. Modernism achieves this intervention, so to speak, within the ideological projection of the realist mode of representation by provisionally adopting its language and representational codes. In other words, though the modernist mode is characterized by antimimetic practices and the use of material language, these strategies only achieve their potency against realist readerly expectations. “Realism,” Eysteinsson writes, “proves to be an inevitable intertextual basis for an understanding of modernist writing as social text.”48 Ultimately, Eysteinsson articulates a model of modernism in which its challenge to realism’s linguistic and representational characteristics was also a critique of social language, or the discourses that surrounded and laid interpretative claims upon modernization. It is one of my central propositions that the I-novel played a role vis-à-vis modernism in Japan that was analogous to the role realism played vis-à-vis modernist practice in Western Europe. One way to understand realism, Eysteinsson notes, citing David Lodge, is as “the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely descriptions of similar experience in nonliterary texts of the same culture.”49 Surveys of mass print media of the 1920s demonstrates just this congruence. The I-novel was historically important in that it consolidated literary prose with social language. It was a meeting ground between literary efforts, since the 1880s, to develop a more vernacular prose style befitting the new “modern” novel and government efforts to create a standardized Japanese that would provide a common idiom for a national population that spoke in diverse dialects. It was this nexus of the literary and the social—or the consolidation of social mores in the narrative discourse of the I-novel—that would become the target of modernist literary strategies. If the confluence of the literary and the social in the Western European context provided the basis for realism’s verisimilitude, then the same confluence can be said to have formed the basis for the I-novel’s characteristic authenticity. This distinction is highly suggestive, for it proposes possible ways to productively explore divergences in the cultures and literary practices of Japan and Western

48.  Ibid., 199. 49.  Ibid., 195.

Shattering the Status Quo     27

Europe in the two decades after the turn of the century. It also suggests that one way to think about the distinctiveness of modernism in Japan is to ask how the negation of I-novel discourse differs from the negation of realist discourse, a formulation that raises the question of the differences between the I-novel and the realist novel. Though such a comparison lies outside the scope of this book, a productive place to start would be the I-novel’s intensive focus on the subject’s emotional constitution, a convergence of attention that would likely register as a disqualifying solipsism within the codes of realist fiction. However, what I aim to highlight here is a difference in content, not function, by which I mean that the I-novel, despite qualitative differences, is analogous to realism in the way it reproduces, within the codes of its narrative discourse, a cohesive conception of society. Through its representational practice, it articulates a consistent idea of what the individual is and what the individual’s relationship to others consists of; or, to use Eysteinsson’s language, it “consolidates a re-creation of the ‘public sphere.’” Thus, modernism’s antagonism toward the I-novel was not a rejection of its representational practices per se. Rather, it would be more accurate to understand modernist negation as assailing the I-novel within a larger strategy of disrupting and displacing the social ideologies it sustained. In this model, modernist literary practice did not so much aim to dismantle the representational structures of the I-novel by embracing linguistic materialism; rather, by using language in its material aspects, it disrupted the I-novel’s ideologically affirmative relationship with social language. Modernism took the language of the I-novel and, through strategies that resisted the communicative valence of that language, exposed and thereby undermined the ideologies of subjectivity and society that it supported. From this point of view, it would be more historically accurate to understand the I-novel as a form that not so much consolidated a historical subjectivity (as Lippit’s scholarship suggests) as propagated an ideology that mediated the way historical subjects understood their social reality. Modernism did attempt to undermine the formal features of the I-novel, but it did so not to subvert the subjectivity it projected but to interrupt the imaginative relationship it established with social reality. If the I-novel aimed to promulgate the conception of a unified public sphere just as that sphere was “entering a process of fragmentation,” modernism attempted to undermine such consolidation to bring readers closer to the reality of that fragmentation. Thus, modernist critique contains a more active and pointed dynamic. Much of Lippit’s criticism is overlaid by a sense of genuine pathos, a sense that modernism revealed and announced the collapse of the intellect, a fragmentation of social structures, and perhaps most of all the end of the novel. Modernism, Lippit wrote, “expresses the dislocation of the novel as the central genre of cultural

28       Introduction

production”50 and to the extent that the novel occupied the central position in the institution of modern literature, this reflected a “transformation in the cultural and social status of literature as a whole.”51 This sense of an ending forecloses the possibility of something constructive and truly generative coming out of the breakdowns and fragmentations of literary form, a prediction that is belied by the many rich and innovative narratives that he examines so fruitfully in his work. Moreover, the fact that this “disintegration” is being effected by modernist novels would itself demonstrate that not only is literature alive and well albeit in a new form with new narrative strategies, but that it has developed and in this sense progressed. Writers and critics at the time may have been lamenting the demise of the novel, but this did not mean it was happening. More to the point, we might productively distinguish between “the institution of modern literature” and the modern novel, or the I-novel, itself. The I-novel was not the instantiation of modern literature but an iteration of it, one genre, one mode of linguistic representation, that flourished for a time within the genealogy of modern fiction in Japan. Modernism must be understood in the same terms, as a mode of representation that flourished at a particular time amidst the convergence of developments in literary form and cultural transformations.

Historicizing Modernism One of the most important contributions of Eysteinsson’s work was the historicization of the modernist paradigm, taking what has conventionally been understood as a revolt against Western traditions and instead elaborating it as a mode of linguistic representation that emerged from a dynamic involving the development of literary form, readerly expectations, and social language. Many modernism scholars have criticized Eysteinsson for promoting the Eurocentric model of modernism, almost always pointing to the line in his work in which he describes modernism as “a major revolt . . . against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world . . .”.52 But this line is taken out of the context of Eysteinsson’s larger critical endeavor, which was precisely to interrogate

50. Lippit, Topographies, 7. 51.  Ibid., 17. 52.  Susan De Sola Rodstein, “Review of The Concept of Modernism by Astradur Eysteinsson,” MLN 106, no. 5 (1991): 1083. Lippit, Topographies, 5. William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 34. William Jefferson Tyler, “Fission/Fusion: Modanizumu in Japanese Fiction,” in Pacific Rim Modernisms, ed. Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword, and Steven G. Yao (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 216–217.

Shattering the Status Quo     29

concepts like “tradition” and “revolt” that most modernism scholars took for granted, rearticulate them in sociological terms, and place them within the history of social language and literary discourse.53 This historicization of the modernist paradigm is what enables the identification of analogous paradigms in other parts of the world. Utilizing this model, I conceive of literary modernism as it occurred in Japan in a way consistent with the European paradigm by drawing key parallels in the way the reading practice of modernism emerged from historical developments of literary genre. Following Eysteinsson’s lead in trying to decouple modernist texts from the literary history of modernism, it sees modernism as a thoroughly historical phenomenon, emanating from the historical dynamics of literary form and social language. Instead of tracing the development of modernism through a sequence of uber-texts that, in their aestheticism, rose above historical circumstances, it instead regards modernism in light of “underlying intertextual systems that make possible and generate the production of certain kinds of texts during certain historical periods.”54 Eysteinsson’s conceptions have been criticized for affirming the status quo of canonical designations because of his ahistorical theoretical analysis. “A small group of ‘superwriters,’” writes Susan De Sola Rodstein, “is privileged over the historical texture of broader literary movements,” and his categories are not based in “historical particularity and a consideration of the spectrum of literary activity existing at any particular moment.”55 While such a critique does not perhaps give Eysteinsson’s critical intentions enough credit, it does point to an important weakness. For all Eysteinsson’s talk of communicative language, he does not gives one specific historical example of it, nor then is he able to give examples of what the negation of such a language would actually look like. In this sense, Disruptions of Daily Life can be regarded as an empirical substantiation of Eysteinsson’s theoretical claims. It articulates his model of modernist negation with distinct “historical particularity” and within the “spectrum of literary activity existing” in Japan during the 1920s. In doing so, moreover, it reveals a complexity of interaction between literary narratives and social discourse that Eysteinsson’s could not perhaps have anticipated. If Eysteinsson leaves us with a model of superior literary text subverting inferior historical text, the surveys of the mass media discourses included here reveal a more complicated picture, in which multiple often quite sophisticated media discourses competed against

53.  For instance, he ultimately reconceives “tradition” as “conventionalized modes of behavior and communication according to which society ‘functions’” (102). 54. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 68. 55.  De Sola Rodstein, “Review,” 1085.

30       Introduction

each other. Modernist texts, then, did not so much overturn the linguistic conventions of social language as a whole. Rather, they targeted certain social ideologies that emerged from these discourses taken in aggregate. The critiques of modernist texts, moreover, had more to do with the way in which literary form was interacting with social language, in this case the nexus between the I-novel and the rhetoric of social commentary in the 1920s, than it did with the rebellious spirit of an individual writer. This project understands modernism in terms of formal strategies that, through their engagement with previous ways of writing, critiqued the ideologies of modernization. It is through such a formulation, moreover, that this project offers an opportunity to identify and examine not a peripheral but an alternate formation of modernist literature—one that challenges the touchstone status of Western European modernism. The modernist works examined here are not only worth thinking about in themselves, they become critical fulcrums for opening the study of modernism into a truly transnational and more historically accountable discourse. A recent trend in modernism studies, often referred to as regional modernism(s) studies, reflects the urgency of displacing the primacy of the Western European example in studies of modernist fiction and locating examples of modernism is other parts of the globe. Challenging the “distinction usually drawn between politically engaged writing and self-consciously aesthetic or experimental modernism,” Jessica Berman has sought to use locally rooted but globally oriented ethical concerns of modern narratives—what she terms “situated political commitment”—as a way to bring together texts from around the globe under an umbrella of transnational modernism.56 Steven Yao has succinctly articulated the latent racism underlying the dismissal of the possibility of authentic modernist production in non-Western parts of the world: Due in no small measure to the constraints imposed by entrenched disciplinary divisions and their attendant methodological conventions that reinforce familiar national and linguistic distinctions, contemporaneous cultural production in Asia, as well as in other world regions, simply has not figured in any substantial way within existing dominant approaches to conceptualizing, historicizing, and locating the expressly transnational phenomenon known across various particular national contexts and linguistic forms as “modernism.”57

56.  Jessica Schiff Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 9. 57.  Steven Yao, “A Rim with A View: Orientalism, Geography, and the Historiography of Modernism,” in Pacific Rim Modernisms, ed. Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword, and Steven G. Yao (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 5.

Shattering the Status Quo     31

In order to challenge Europe and the United States’ status as “both originary site and principal theatre of operation,” Yao suggests two tactics. The first is to historicize the East Asian texts from which European modernist texts drew their inspiration, to shed light upon their place within historical developments within Asia. This work would endow “the Orient” with “a degree of cultural agency in both inspiring and helping to shape the terms of Western literary production.”58 The second tactic is to move “beyond conceptions of ‘modernism’ based on Western models” by identifying modernist practices in different parts of the world.59 In an effort to avoid methods that “fix our conception of ‘modernism’ as a stable and unified notion,” a view that he sees as threatening to “reproduce established hierarchies of cultural value in which . . . the West occupies the dominant position,” Yao advocates for plural definitions of modernism, or modernisms.60 In this model, modernisms around the world “signify” and “operate” differently in different historical contexts,” representing a “range of cultural and intellectual responses to the advent of socio-political modernity.”61 Thus, these modernisms reflect the distinctive cultural responses that different nations had within their own experiences of modernity. Yao sees in this approach an ability to challenge and reinvigorate the existing approaches to modernism established by the Euro-American canon; such studies would “highlight the transformation, adaptation, and function of the very idea of ‘modernism’ as it migrated and was constructed within contexts other than Europe and the United States.” As an example of just such a study of a locally inspired modernism, Yao points to the phenomenon of modanizumu that occurred in Japan in the 1920s and 30s and William Tyler’s work on the subject. Modanizumu, as Tyler defines it, was a “cultural, artistic, and philosophical phenomenon that occurred across the globe circa the turn of the twentieth century.” By pointing to modanizumu as a domestic term that “transformed and naturalized” the word “modernism” into Japanese and its “divergent orthography,” Tyler argues for the simultaneous “affinity with” and “distance from” modernism as it occurred elsewhere.62 In Japan, modanizumu became a “powerful intellectual idea, mode of artistic expression, and source of popular fashion” that “manifested itself as radically new movements in the arts, dramatic shifts in lifestyle, and sweeping socio-economic changes.”63 Tyler uses

58.  Ibid., 12. The chapter includes an analysis of the way Ezra Pound’s Cathay was responding to discourses of Yellow Peril in the US media. 59.  Ibid., 13. 60.  Ibid., 16. 61.  Ibid., 13–14. 62.  William Jefferson Tyler, Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 18. 63.  Ibid., 19.

32       Introduction

the figure of modanizumu to conceive of a Japanese modernism, distinct from the Western European definition, that could be defined on its own terms: the new “measures of fashion, mores, and manners” introduced in the name of the “modan,” or modern. Tyler, moreover, understands this framework to be in line with a wave of Japanese scholarship that, beginning in the 1980s, focused on the local space of the Japanese city in the 1920s as the starting point for thinking about the literature being produced at that time.64 These studies, led by Unno Hiroshi, Maeda Ai, and Suzuki Sadami among others, constituted a major intervention in the field of literary scholarship in Japan. If the study of the Japanese modern novel had been vexed by questions of how to deal with Western influence, this new approach anchored the Japanese novel within the sociological realities of the Japanese urban landscape. Tyler refers to the works of fiction borne from this space and society as modernist literature, or the literature of modanizumu. Though modanizumu pointed to experiences of cosmopolitan cities shared the world over, it by nature also referred to those conditions as they occurred specifically within Japan. Thus, modernist fiction becomes the set of literary narratives that reflected the writer’s local response to the modern, their own engagement with its local manifestations. As one proceeds through the work of Tyler and other critics of regional modernism, however, what becomes clear is how their object of study is not so much modernist literature as it is literature about the modern. Tyler himself has separate categories for “artistic modernism,” in which he includes movements of selfconscious formalism, and “vernacular modernism,” which refers to works “inextricably tied to powerful socio-economic forces that initiated an intensely urban phase in twentieth-century Japanese history.”65 Works of vernacular modernism, in other words, were defined as texts that registered and responded to the new cultural formations of modern life brought about by modernization. The lumping together of modernist literature with literature about the modern is enabled by a mistaken assumption that “modanizumu” was a translation of the English “modernism.” Barbara Sato understands the former term as a neologism that combined the transliteration of the English word “modern” with a transliteration of the English suffix “ism,” i.e., “modan” and “izumu.” Modanizumu, far from designating an aesthetic category, was a catchall term for all things considered modern. In contradistinction to kindai (“modern”), with its roots in Meiji-period industrialization,

64.  Tyler provides a helpful rundown of the history Japanese literature criticism as it pertains to the issues of formalist fiction and academic geopolitics. 65. Tyler, Modanizumu, 19–28.

Shattering the Status Quo     33

modanizumu was used in journalistic circles to indicate the “latest ‘lowbrow’ fads and fashions that were representative of the everyday.”66 The possibility that modanizumu was a rendering of the English word “modernism,” or that, as Yao suggests, one could follow the idea of “modernism” as it migrated from Western Europe to other places, is further thrown into doubt by the fact that modernism in Western Europe was not a term used by so-called modernists themselves, but was rather a label attached retroactively by intellectual and artistic historians. Yao and Tyler’s purpose is to broaden the definition of modernism to encompass a broader diversity, especially geographical diversity, of literature that falls under that paradigm. Tyler’s book, moreover, is primarily intended to introduce through English translation a broader range of hitherto unnoticed (within Anglo-American scholarship at least) works of Japanese literature, and in this he succeeds. Finally, by using transnational experiences such as modernization (or the ethics of global politics, as Berman does), to juxtapose modern work of literature from different positions around the globe, regional modernism studies successfully draws fascinating connections between the literatures of disparate places, unearthing common themes and concerns among literatures produced in different parts of the globe in the early twentieth century. However, while expanding the potential geography of modernism, such studies often run the risk of diluting its definition, almost to the point that it loses specificity, making modernism coterminous with literature about the modern. Unless purported works of modernism can be identified consistently with the European model, i.e., modernism defined as a representational strategy, they forfeit the possibility of actually challenging the assumptions of such models and expanding their frameworks. Indeed, such approaches could even leave the status quo untouched, further entrenching the prejudices of the current hierarchy by positing regional modernism as the realm of the vernacular, while Western Europe remains the realm of the formally artistic. If the modernist paradigm could be truly historicized, then an insistence on a stable and unified notion of modernism does not have to imply, as Yao warns, a reproduction of established cultural hierarchy and an affirmation of the dominant and originary position of Western Europe. It would seem, moreover, that a more direct challenge to the primacy of the current model would be achieved by finding instances of the same formalist definition of modernism occurring in other parts of the world, so as to reveal the possibility of an alternate formation. In this sense, Disruptions of Daily Life is not about Japanese modernism per se but about modernism in Japan. Studying modernism in Japan opens the concept of

66. Sato, The New Japanese Woman, 7.

34       Introduction

modernism to the possibility that modernism has occurred in different places around the world, even at different times and in many different ways. But not all critics who, working in line with the new wave of historically oriented Japanese scholars like Unno Hiroshi and Maeda Ai who sought to ground Japanese literary practice in Japan’s socio-cultural history, gave up on the insistence on modernism as a linguistic mode of representation. William Gardner, for instance, was one of the first scholars to resituate the modernist critique of the representation of subjectivity directly within the transformations of society and culture taking place in Japan in the 1920s. Unlike Lippit, who understood modernist fiction to reflect the collapse of the bulwarks of modern culture, Gardner sees it as playing an affirmative role vis-à-vis the forces of modernization, assimilating, embodying, illuminating, and amplifying the “rapidly transforming experience of urban life” that it ushered in. These included the proliferation of mass media and advertising institutions, new concepts of the “masses” and the “crowds,” and the faster-paced tempos and rhythms of daily activities.67 Literature responded to the prevalence of advertisements by assimilating its practices, becoming more attuned to the “materiality of the poetic text and its mediation in print culture.”68 The new conceptions of the masses inspired works of literature that interrogated the idea of a solitary individual and authentic self, possessed of interiority, and instead posited a fusion between man and machine, a type of subjectivity capable of mass production.69 Modernist works also reflected the new forms of daily life through fragmented narrative structures that foregrounded “elements of speed and tempo, which—associated with such new urban phenomena as assembly lines, subways, motor cars, motion pictures, telephones and radio communication—became key words in the 1920s discourse of modernity.”70 Gardner is in line with critics like Unno, Tyler, and Yao in his attempt to delineate a non-Western, specifically Japanese modernism by embedding its subversion in the local context of the largescale upheavals of Japanese society in the 1920s. For Gardner, it is imperative that modernist works be read as “an active response” to domestic historical developments.71 In doing so, he brings to bear a sophisticated understanding of modernist practice first, as a mode of linguistic representation, and second, as a mode of representation whose fragmented prose reflected the fragmented experience of a society undergoing an intense process of modernization. In this approach, Gardner is furthering an

67. Gardner, Advertising Tower, 8. 68.  Ibid., 10. 69.  Ibid., 111. 70.  Ibid., 11. 71.  Ibid., 9.

Shattering the Status Quo     35

important line of Euro-American modernism scholarship that posits disruptive historical events, whether they be large-scale war, natural disaster, or simply the forces of modernization, as impetus for the disruptive formalism of modernist literature.72 In such formulations, the fragmentation of the narrative form in modernist works either mirror, reflect, or manifest the experiential fragmentation brought on by historical events. While I follow Gardner’s lead in reading the representational practices of modernist texts alongside and against the contours of local history, I diverge from Gardner’s model in the way that I orient the formalist ruptures of modernist fiction toward the actual ruptures of history. While Gardner sees the former as reflecting the latter, I begin with the conviction that, historically speaking, the disruptive forces of the 1920s were in fact met with wholesale efforts to stifle the very disruptiveness of those forces. This is nowhere more evident in the media discourses that, in response to the radical transformations of that period, promulgated ideologies of coherence and linear progress with regard to society and nation. Urban life, in addition to catastrophic events, may have led to fragmented experiences, but this sense of contingency was not reflected in the way society responded to them. Rather it was often suppressed by the reigning discourses of magazines and newspapers. When the “fragmentation” was touched on in the media, it was always framed as an aberration, a sickness of the city that needed to be healed. Thus, I take a different approach: I read modernist works not in direct relationship to historical events themselves but alongside the discursive tremors that these events sent throughout the mass media of that decade. It identifies the ways in which the ideologies of media discourses were inevitably invested in suturing these ruptures and reconstituting the fabric of society and the bonds of the nation. From this perspective, modernist literary representation does not so much reflect and affirm the fragmentation of modern culture as it breaks up and subverts linguistic attempts to disavow or suppress that fragmentation. By dint of that subversion, moreover, it embodies the chaotic contingency of modernity. Modernist strategies did not passively reflect the contingencies of history, but rather they actively sought to expose them.

Modernism versus Modanizumu Thus far I have insisted on a distinction between modernist fiction and modern fiction (literature about the modern), but also that the two cannot be told apart on

72.  Important pioneering studies in this vein include Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982, and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

36       Introduction

the basis of their language (both modernist literature and modern literature assimilated social language) nor on the basis of their content (modern literature can flout social norms just as modernist fiction does). The distinction must lie in a difference in the way their modes of linguistic representation interact with social language. But such a distinction is subtle and requires some demonstration. Namely, it is important to empirically show the distinction between modernist engagements with communicative language and nonmodernist engagements with communicative language. To do this, I take two works of literature that Tyler has identified as modernist or “signaling” modernism, and compare them to the text of Tanizaki’s A Fool’s Love and Hirabayashi’s “In the Charity Ward.” I hope to demonstrate how the former works, while compelling in themselves, differ in linguistic practice from the latter works, which I take to demonstrate the modernist mode of representation. The first work is an earlier work by Tanizaki himself, the “Tattooer,” which Tyler describes as a one of the “harbingers of modernism” in its opposition to the naturalist school. A short story, the “Tattooer” concerns a genius tattoo artist who, after many years of searching, finally finds in the pleasure quarters of Kyoto the perfect woman to be the subject for his masterwork. The tattooer exhausts himself spiritually and artistically etching the figure of a magnificent spider on the woman’s back. His work becomes an artistic feat, but the woman too transforms in the process, morphing into a beautiful and all-powerful conqueror of other men, a self, it is implied, that was latent within her all along. It was the tattooer who is able to discern this powerful and dominating self within her and only through his art is she able to realize this self. While the story is set in an earlier time, the text itself also stands out for its ornate, almost baroque style of prose. The story opens with a description of the historical setting: It was a time long ago when “foolishness” was still a virtue that people held dear, a period that was not as strained as things are today. It was a time of ease when the tranquil visage of lords and masters never clouded over, when the seeds of laughter for maidservants and courtesans were never in short supply, when those with occupations like jester and steward that thrived off of verbosity could have a splendid existence. Onna sadakuro¯, Onna jiraiya, Onna narikami—whether in the theater or in the storybooks, always the beautiful were the strong, and the ugly the weak. Each and every person strove to be the most beautiful, going so as far as to pour paint onto their heaven-given bodies. Whether it was for redolence or splendor, lines and colors danced upon people’s skin.73

73.  Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, “Shisei,” in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ zenshu¯, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ko¯ron, 1981), 63.

Shattering the Status Quo     37

The passage not only points culturally to a past time, it is also written in a language that harkens back to an older, early modern style of writing. Its idioms— e.g., “thrive off of verbosity” (jyo¯zetsu wo uru, 饒舌を売る), “have a splendid existence” (rippa ni sonzai shite, 立派に存在して), “dance on the skin” (hada ni odotta, 肌に躍った)—as well as its phrases—e.g., “splendor” (kenran na, 絢 爛な) or “heaven-given body” (tenpin no karada, 天稟の体)—are archaic and evoke the imagination of an earlier time. It also employs early modern grammar at times, such as in, “strove to be the most beautiful, with the result that” (kozotte utsukushikaran to tsutometa ageku wa, 挙って美しからんと努めた挙 句は). This usage of language, combined with the sinister and macabre plot, was deliberately angatonisitc to the progressive associations of art and the values of self-cultivation typical of early twentieth century Japanese society. Tyler sees this antagonism as a reason for its association with modernism. In contrast to the “flat, unvarnished, and sincere” description of the naturalist school, or the I-novel, Tanizaki’s prose is “spectacle driven.” In its celebration of the cult of the artist, Tyler reads the story as critiquing the demands of the Meiji state on Japanese citizens to become strong and successful contributors to society. The story, which is only a few pages in length, is indeed indicative of a sculpting hand, the work of exacting intentionality with respect to language. In its deliberate employment of Edo-style literary prose, the work can be grouped within an important literary movement at the turn of the century, represented by writers like Izumi Kyo¯ka and the Kenyu¯sha group, that rejected the use of vernacular prose. Bucking the reformist trends of their day, these writers insisted on employing older prose styles and the literary values they represented. This writing style was, as Tyler suggests, inspirational to the writers of modernist works. Indeed, Yokomitsu Riichi looked to the Kenyu¯sha group as a model as he rebelled against the naturalist writers’ demand that one “write the way one speaks,” instead calling for a prose in which one “write the way one writes.” “The physiological functions of the people, which is another way of referring to the ‘words of everyday day life,’” Yokomitsu wrote, “has become surfeited on ‘writing as one speaks.’ . . . It must now turn to formalism and find its expression from the word itself.”74 However, while embodying some of the artistic principles of modernist writers, works like the “Tattooer” and the writings of the Kenyu¯sha group were not themselves modernist works. This is primarily because they were not written in the vernacular, in the language of social institutions. If works written in Edo-style prose were influential on writers like Yokomitsu in their production of modernist works, it was because it gave them direction in their struggles to depose naturalist writing. What they had in common was a reverence for the word itself and

74.  Yokomitsu Riichi, Bungei jihyo¯ 3, 159–160.

38       Introduction

the connotative richness of its visuality and rhetoric. But in trying to undermine the assumptions of naturalist prose, modernist works were written, at least provisionally, in a social vernacular, in the language of society, the type of language that coursed through the mass media of the 1920s. It was in fact in this tension, this strain between formalist intentions that undergirded the work and the vernacular language in which it was written, that modernist works attained their subversive potency. We see the development of this very dynamic if we turn to Tanizaki’s 1924 novel, A Fool’s Love, a text which can be understood as a work that takes the formalist seed of the “Tattooer” but develops and expands it into a fully fleshed-out novel clothed in the language of internationalism and middle-class reform in the early 1920s. Compare the opening lines of the novel: In what follows, I will attempt to write as honestly and as sincerely as possible the facts just as they are that concern the marital relationship that I have with my wife, a relationship which I don’t think has many examples in this world. At the same time that this will be a dear record to me that I will never forget, perhaps to each one of you as well, it will no doubt become some type of reference material. This is because, particularly in times like these, when Japan’s relations have gradually broadened internationally, when locals and foreigners interact more frequently, when various “isms” and philosophies have come into Japan, when men of course but women too have brusquely become more high-class, in an era like this the type of relationship that I have with my wife, which until now has had very few examples, will likely crop up amongst you.75 The time period being referenced is “now,” but so is the language in which it is all written. The prose is the seemingly transparent, sincere, and direct language of the naturalists, or in this case more precisely the I-novel. This story is set among the trends of the current day, and it is also written in the language of the current day: “marital relations,” “foreign philosophies,” and “gender roles” were the topics being discussed in the pages of magazines and newspapers of that time. The plot trajectories of these two stories are identical. In A Fool’s Love, the protagonist Jo¯ji discovers a young café waitress and falls in love with her Westernesque visage, eventually marrying her and raising her up to be a fashionable and progressive woman. Instead, she matures into a domineering and daemonic

75. Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, “Chijin no ai,” in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ zenshu¯ (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ko¯ronsha, 1982), 3.

Shattering the Status Quo     39

beauty, fulfilling the protagonist/narrator’s latent desires for a masochistic relationship. The two stories even have parallel scenes. In both stories, the young female protagonist is said to be discovered at age sixteen. In the “The Tattooer,” the girl’s . . . face was developed like that of a mature woman, one who had spent years in the gay quarters toying with the souls of countless men. It was a visage that must have emerged from the innumerable dreams of the many pretty men and women who had lived and died over many decades within this capital city, where the sins and treasures of the entire Nara Basin find their way.76 Naomi, the object of Jo¯ji’s desire in A Fool’s Love, however, is described as . . . a novice who had just begun service work at the café. She was not a full-fledged hostess, but an apprentice . . . nothing more than a budding waitress.”77 But by the time Naomi matures and takes on her full adult form toward the end of the novel, Jo¯ji finds that she has transformed into a “enigmatic, indescribable, and mysterious girl . . . More than Naomi . . . [she was] the spirit of Naomi, the expression of some ideal beauty.” Jo¯ji feels that a man like him can only “kneel down before her, an object of adoration before which one could do nothing more than worship.”78 From all of these correspondences, we can see that the plot of A Fool’s Love is inscribed within “The Tattooer.” In a sense, “The Tattooer” serves as a decryption key for Tanizaki’s motives in A Fool’s Love. Written in the progressive language of the day, the novel promises to be helpful reference material for forward-thinking citizens of the new Japan as they seek out possibilities for enlightened living. By the end, the story reveals itself to be something of the opposite, a tale of eroticism, power, and masochistic worship. This is the defining tension of the modernist work. It assimilates and provisionally affirms the meanings of social language, but it is in the crucible of the transformation into an aesthetic tale that that language is perverted. It is this that distinguishes A Fool’s Love as a modernist text from “The Tattooer,” a work of baroque creativity. If a literary work that exhibits a self-conscious attention to linguistic signification but is nevertheless not written in the social vernacular falls short of

76.  Shisei, 66. 77.  “Chijin no ai,” 3. 78.  Ibid., 266–267.

40       Introduction

the definition of modernist fiction, so too does the opposite: a work of literature written in the social vernacular but lacking an awareness of the processes of linguistic signification. A helpful example of this distinction is Uno Chiyo’s Confessions of Love, which is itself in turn a creative adaptation of Tanizaki’s A Fool’s Love. Uno’s protagonist, also named Jo¯ji, is an amorous pursuer of women and the novel consists of detailing a string of relationships that he finds himself embroiled in. But Jo¯ji’s romantic visions are constantly running aground on the reality of the women he meets. The narrator Jo¯ji’s ineffectuality, his inability to get a grip on any of the situations he finds himself in, lends a farcical tone of comedy to the narrative as it cycles through tragic story after tragic story. The novel’s knowing adoption of the language of male-driven heterosexual romance is what forms the basis for this humor. Uno was known for her inviting and comfortable, yet still complex, prose style. It was also well known that Uno derived the material for Confessions from her own romantic encounters and the stories she learned from those men, who were often celebrities in their own right. Interestingly enough, she would eventually become accepted within the literary establishment because of her ability to “write like a man.” Confessions is written from the first-person perspective of the male protagonist who enjoys the modern night life of cafés and dance halls, and regards women in much the same way Jo¯ji of A Fool’s Love did his Naomi. The narrator’s first dalliance involves a woman whose face is described as “having the expression not so much of a woman but of a babyish child.”79 As a child of a wealthy father, she could easily play the refined and polite young lady, but she could just as easily play the role of the delinquent girl.80 Thus, one night Jo¯ji finds himself, “a man of thirty-two” being led to a hotel by a young eighteen-year-old girl. Jo¯ji, usually the seducer, finds himself being seduced by the woman, who takes him to a room and insists that “she is going to do what the man does.”81 This power reversal sets up a situation in which Jo¯ji finds himself helpless against the woman’s powerful allure: . . . she began to take off the crimson kimono she was wearing, and when she undid her obi, the kimono slipped right down to the floor. I was taken aback by the sensuality of her naked body, which was now not covered by a single thread of clothing. The softness of her white skin, something one could not have imagined in one’s dreams from looking at her clothed figure, was so alluring that if my hand felt it, it would get

79.  Uno Chiyo, “Irozange,” in Uno Chiyo zenshu¯, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ko¯ronsha, 1977), 110. 80.  Ibid., 111. 81.  Ibid., 117–118.

Shattering the Status Quo     41

stuck and I would be unable to take it away. The woman likely knew this quite well. The woman who had taken off her kimono also knew quite well that she could capture the heart of any man she chose . . . “Why are you just standing there? Are you that much of a coward?” The woman’s voice stung my cheek like a whip.82 The perpetuation of the language of almost fetishistic objectification in the context of a man who is being verbally abused and whose masculinity is being dominated is what creates the outlandish almost hilarious aspect of this ridiculous scene. Tyler aptly describes it as a “seriocomic tone,” a “facetiousness or doublevoicedness,” which he ultimately sees as constituting the novel’s “modernistic relativism.” He understands the novel as “parodying the conventions of romantic love and courtship,” “a modernist farce that mocks not only male privilege and passivity, but also the supposedly modern girls who are all too eager to indulge the whims of their ‘Jo¯ji boys.’” Ultimately, Tyler argues that the novel is modernist because of its “anti-naturalist” stance, its ironizing of the I-novel, and the author’s intention to “revolt against commonsense realism.”83 Tyler’s observations are astute. The ironic displacement of the narrative discourse, which can otherwise be regarded throughout the entire novel as the monologic voice of a male protagonist, is tipped off only in very first line: “I wonder where’s the best place to start. After thinking for a while, he slowly began to tell the story.”84 This brief first line of the novel indicates the existence of a listener, someone who is hearing the story of the protagonist as he tells it, perhaps Uno herself who listens and records what she hears. The reader implicitly identifies with this listener, and is thus distanced from the narration. Conscious that it is being told, the reader is clued in to the possibilty that Jo¯ji is putting a spin on things. His narration become the object of a critical focus. But this narrative arrangement is not so much aimed at mocking masculinity as it is aimed at exposing the social constraints of female narration. The story is told in such a way that Jo¯ji’s lovers are rendered with more vividness than he himself is. The ineffectual passivity of the male narrator makes way for the much stronger female characters that are the objects of his desire in the novel. What results is a gauzy narrative in which the actual protagonists of the novel (the powerful women he dates) can be seen, but only through the vehicle of a male

82.  Ibid., 118. 83. Tyler, Modanizumu, 11–12. 84.  Uno Chiyo, Irozange, 105.

42       Introduction

narrator. Women can be heard but only through a male voice. Direct address is impossible. This narrative situation reflects the situation of Uno Chiyo, the writer, and other women writing in this period, a situation in which women writers were dominated by male expectations, where the social institutions did not allow women a voice. The novel can thus be read as a commentary on the way social restrictions on gender and language restricted the way women writers can treat their own experience.85 In this way, the novel’s engagement with social langauge and even the presence of a critical stance with regard to it is undeniable. The nature of this critique, however, remains on the level of rhetoric and satire, and does not attain the more radical interrogation of linguistic signification that is a defining feature of modernist fiction. Strategies of parody, as represented by Uno’s novel, lampoon social language, calling attention to its limitations and inherent hypocrisies. Modernist ficiton, by contrast, subverts social langauge by calling attention to the way in which its meanings are produced. A central passage in Tanizaki’s A Fool’s Love, in which Jo¯ji explain what first attracted him about the childlike Naomi, serves to illustrate this type of engagement: . . . probably, at first, it was because I liked that child’s name. “Naochan” was what everyone called her, but once when I asked for her real name, she said it was “Naomi” [written in the text with Chinese characters; 奈緒美]. This name, “Naomi,” really excited my curiosity. At first I thought “Naomi” was pretty, but written as “NAOMI” [written in the text in the Roman alphabet] she seemed completely like a Westerner. From that point on I began to pay attention to her. It is a mysterious thing, but once the name is stylish, things like her face somehow became Westernesque. She then began to seem decidedly intelligent, and I began to think to myself “what a waste for this girl to be a waitress in a place like this.” In fact, Naomi’s [now written in the text in katakana, ナオミ] face (to be clear, I will from now on write her name in katakana characters. Somehow if I do not do this it does not elicit any feeling) bore a certain similarity to the film actress Mary Pickford. 86 In Tanizaki’s novel, Naomi’s eroticism derives from the way in which she, and particularly her name, catalyzes the fantasy of a Westernesque woman. She is

85.  I owe the insights in this paragraph to a lecture by Christopher Hill on this novel. 86.  Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, “Chijin no ai,” 4.

Shattering the Status Quo     43

neither Western nor Japanese and, in this hybridity, represents an illusion of prestige that had become an object of fetishism in the culture of the 1920s. But the narrative makes clear how this illusion is textually produced. First, Naomi’s name is textually written on the page in kana characters, a character set reserved for the denotation of words adopted from foreign languages, neither completely “Western” or completely “Japanese.” But even more to the point, the passage above clearly explains the process through which this spectre of attraction, an attraction that drives the narrative of the entire novel, was produced arbitrarily through the textual word. Naomi seemed like a plain nondescript girl until Jo¯ji learned her name and thought about how it was written. It is this level of linguistic interrogation, and examination of the way ideologies are produced as a matter of linguistic representation, that is a defining hallmark of modernist texts. A modernist version of the type of gender criticism that Uno brings to bear upon male, I-novel narration can be found in Hirabayashi Taiko’s “In the Charity Ward.” The short story challenges some of the very same naturalized associations between narration of experience and male subjectivity, but it does so in a way that undermines the linguistic, and even syntactic, architecture that supports and perpetuates that linkage. Toward the beginning of the story, the narrator describes herself as she enters the hospital where she is a patient: When I came to the top of the stairs leading down into the half-basement of the charity ward, I felt a dull throbbing pain sear through my right leg then suddenly I was drawn and suspended by some type of a recoil, and as if my legs were taken out from under me I fell face flat on the cold concrete floor. When I tried to plant my hand and rise to my feet, my knees wobbled and knocked about like metal fittings, and the two hands that tried to support the body with its large belly grew shaky and all atremble. Faint shudders ran through my four limbs and crawled up toward my body.87 The female narrator of this story begins in the vein of the I-novelist, inviting readers to project themselves into their subject position, only to disrupt the seamless coherence of the subject’s experience. Whereas Yokomitsu interrupts this subject position through cerebral complications, questioning assumptions of empirical observation, Hirabayashi does this through references to bodily pain, and eventually female bodily pain (the narrator is suffering from pains of pregnancy and

87.  Hirabayashi Taiko, “Seryo¯shitsu nite,” in Hirabayashi Taiko zenshu¯ vol. 1 (Tokyo: Ushio, 1979), 93.

44       Introduction

malnutrition), interrogating the assumptions of gender. If “I” is the subject of the first few sentences in the passage above, it is replaced by body parts—“two hands,” or “faint shudders”—in the latter sentences. This progression undermines the sense of detached cerebral subjectivity—the opposition of an interior self against the exterior landscape—that was a central feature of I-novel fiction. What is exposed, however, through this mode of representation is the way in which that notion of subjectivity was implicitly male. If Uno is able to show the limitations of that type of (male) writing in representing female experience, or permitting women to write their own experience, Hirabayashi uses a narration of female experience to reveal the linguistic underpinnings of that type of writing. Uno cannily deflates the pretensions of that rhetoric while Hirabayashi exposes its representational strategies. The first three texts discussed above, “The Tattooer,” A Fool’s Love, and Confessions of Love, bear strong connections of intertextuality. But taken together, they also exemplify succinctly the working definition of a modernist text that will be utilized in this book. It is not sufficient for texts to be either linguistically focused nor on the other hand concerned with culture and the language of the modern day. Modernism inheres when these two aspects are brought together, when the foregrounding of the material aspects of language is brought to bear antagonistically upon the utilization of social language. Modernism results when these two aspects are brought together in such a way that the signifying process of that language, that is to say its mode of representation and the ideologies it thus supports, become the objects of scrutiny. Finally, all of the examples above are also helpful in illustrating two additional points about modernism that underlie the explorations of this project. The first is that the label of modernism applies to the text, and not the author. A writer like Tanizaki can write a modernist novel in 1924, but write a nonmodernist work before that time, or even afterward. The second is that modernism should not represent, as is often implied, the apogee of literary development. It does not occupy some privileged position of supremacy in the history of literary arts. It is not, because of its interrogation of representational practice itself, necessarily more complex than other types of writing, modern or otherwise. “The Tattooer” demonstrates by counterexample the linguistic limitations of modernist literary discourse, and Confessions of Love shows how the ability to draw attention to issues of narration and form are not the sole domain of modernist literature. While a modernist text like “In the Charity Ward” is powerful for its attention to meaning production, Confessions responds directly to the way such language was circulating in the social world. The field of modernist studies, especially as it attempts to expand to other regions of the globe, would benefit significantly from a demotion of itself on the hierachy of literary practices. Nonmodernist texts can be equally rich and

Shattering the Status Quo     45

sophisticated, and presumably any given modernist text could be flat and onedimensional. The historcization of the mode of linguistic representation that defined modernism is the first important step in this process. Modernism must be understood as a mode of representational practice that thrived and was viable within a given set of historical conditions, the parameters of which include not just the state of media discourse and media institutions, but also the history of representational practices that came before it.

Deconstructing the “East/West” Binary Scholarly efforts to locate modernist practice in non-Western European regions in order to expand the Eurocentric paradigm of modernism into a more global and transnational category have insufficiently questioned how the motivation for that search derives from the Eurocentric paradigm they attempt to displace. Studies of transnational modernism, in other words, have focused perhaps too much on finding counterexamples—moments of “genuine” modernism in the peripheral areas—rather than questioning the basis for this judgment of peripherality. Consequently, more important than discovering modernism in the history of every part of the globe is the decoupling of modernism from the arch narratives of modernity and globalization. Or better yet, an interrogation of the validity of these very narratives to begin with. I contend that modernist texts themselves harbor the potential to challenge these ideological narratives. In their subversions of social language, modernist texts themselves gave the lie to the ideologies of modernization that were the result of geopolitical power inequalities. In order to elaborate this critical capacity, however, modernist fiction must be recognized as texts that subverted the linguistic manifestations of modernization. In the field of literary modernism, the attempt to identify this critical function and challenge the prejudices of Eurocentricism have been tied to efforts to break down the divide between the purported language of high modernist literature and the language of mass culture. Mark Wollaeger was perhaps the first to explore the permeation of this divide in the context of modern British fiction, arguing that the assumption of an antithetical relationship between literary language and the formations of mass culture has “blocked recognition of their symbiosis,” blinding us to ways that “modernists and their texts were always more actively engaged with their cultural surroundings than earlier historians of modernism were inclined to admit.”88 Will Norman, however, in his work

88.  Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton, 2006), xiii. Wollaeger analyzes how the works of some of the more canonical modernists,

46       Introduction

on modernism in the United States, discerns how this blindness is particularly acute when examining modernist literary practice outside of Western Europe. He traces it to the Eurocentricism of modernist criticism, which remains bound by “reified categories of nation and cultural hierarchy.” This critical tradition, which insists on modernism’s “radical autonomy from the social,” “occludes” the nexus between modernist literature and mass culture in the United States as it prioritizes the cultural continuity between the United States and Western Europe.89 In other words, the cultural hierarchy of nations compels an emphasis on the lateral connections of high culture that further eclipses recognition of the vertical symbiosis of literary language and local mass culture. If geopolitical cultural hierarchies set up this divide, Norman’s work aims to interrogate this hierarchy by transgressing the divide it has instituted. The very same problem that Norman identifies operates in modernist studies of Japan and Asia more broadly, with the difference that the geopolitical divide is much wider, literally global in its scope, and the epistemological boundary, that of “East” and “West,” is even more prominent and insidious. The “reified category” of Japan as a nation and its place within the geopolitical “hierarchy” of East versus West obfuscates the relevance of local history to literary practice and suppresses the connections between modernism and mass culture there as well. The application of the problem Norman identifies to the situation of East Asia is perhaps best articulated by Christopher Bush, who criticizes the field of modernist studies for remaining “captive to essentially dehistoricizing reading practices:” The reason for this is that history is almost always defined as context. This reduction of history to context is misleading in a number of ways. First, it reifies established historical narratives and cultural paradigms, tending to make history predominantly something that answers questions, rather than something about which questions are asked. Second, by locating history primarily if not exclusively outside the literary text, this reduction of history to “context” severely limits the senses in which we can understand the historicity of the literary texts themselves. “History” is not, or is not only, something that might be summoned up to

such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Ford Maddox Ford, and James Joyce were engaged with social language, or what Wollaeger refers to as “propaganda.” For an analysis of how everyday language was assimilated into the diction of modern English poetry, see Daniel Tiffany, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Hopkins, 2014). 89.  Will Norman, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016).

Shattering the Status Quo     47

surround and define what can be found inside the magic circle of the text; the text is itself a historical artifact.90 I follow Bush’s forceful injunction to historicize reading practices, and apprehend literary texts themselves as part of the fabric of a history of textuality. It does so by reading literary narrative discourses not above but alongside media discourses in order to discern the type of interactions that occur. Such an approach holds out the possibility of undoing the blindness toward Asia. For as Bush writes, the “figural logics” that create these divisions “are themselves an expression of the West’s difficulty of relating to China as historical,” and reflect the “West’s more fundamental problem of recognizing the contemporaneity and even reality of China.”91 In addressing the problem of recognizing the contemporaneity and even reality of Japan, in this case, it is important to avoid the temptation to locate the source of the problem within the “West” and the geographical/geopolitical regions it points to. The tendency here is to understand this dynamic of misrepresentation as a problem of the “West” whose distorted and distorting views misrecognizes a more or less passive “East,” whether Japan, China, or another Asian entity. But first, this formulation blinds us to the way such epistemological distortions— particularly the dehistoricization of literary production and reading practices as a function of cultural hierarchies—operate within Asia. The treatment of the colonial literatures of Korea and Taiwan in the Japanese metropole is a concrete example, but such hierarchies exist in other microcosms as well, including across the larger geopolitical divide of North/East Asia and South/East Asia. Overlooked too would be the way it operates within the “Western” cultural sphere, as Norman points out with respect to Western Europe and the United States. It is perhaps safe to generalize that this “figural logic” does not just exist strung out across the “East”/“West” divide but threatens to cloud visions wherever the epistemological hierarchies of modernity exist. Additionally, and more pertinent, understanding the blindness to inhere in the “West” also blinds us to the way and the extent to which the “East”/“West” divide, as an epistemological structure, permeated the culture and everyday life of citizens in modern Japan. The pages of the newspapers and magazines of the period show clearly enough how the symbolic power of “the West,” and by extension its putative opposite, “Japan” or “East Asia,” saturated the landscape of daily life. Carol Gluck has referred to it as the “dichotomized distinction” in which a conceptual “East–West axis was laid over the landscape of modern Japan.” Gluck

90.  Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xv. 91.  Ibid., xxvii–xxviii.

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refers to this phenomenon in a larger effort to caution historians to avoid the pitfall of “allowing these conceptions from the historical past to continue into the historiographical present” and instead deconstruct the narrative of a “single ‘Euro-American’ model of modern society.”92 The point should not be lost, however, that Gluck could be referring to Japanese historians just as much as Western historians. The problem of being unable to recognize the historicity of cultural practices that Bush attributes to the West can just as well be attributed to Japan, and the Japanese. Though in the latter case, dehistoricization can be inspired not just by a fixation on the “Euro-American” model of modern society, but alternately, and just as hazardously, by the prejudiced privileging of a purely non-Western, or “Japanese,” ethnos. The hierarchy of the East/West binary must be understood not just as a doctrine perpetrated by the “West” upon the “East” but as a global ideology that pervaded all parts of the globe. It was this very ideological binary, however, as it existed in Japan, that modernist works in Japan were invested in deconstructing. In its interrogation of discursive operations themselves, modernist literature is uniquely positioned to generate a critical awareness of the ideology of modernization, which in the end is a discursive operation. This is not a feature specific to Japanese modernism— it can potentially be located in modernist works from anywhere around the globe—but the feature is particularly useful to trace and delineate within studies of Japanese and non-Western modernism, where the prejudices of modernization ideology have yet to be thoroughly contended with. Tanizaki’s A Fool’s Love, more than just a scandalous novel that piqued the decorum of middle-class society, exposes the logic of fetishism underlying the epistemological specter of the “West.” Meanwhile, Yokomitsu Riichi’s modernist works were aimed at displacing the ideologies of an essentialized “Japan,” or a reified “East.” His articulation of a new phenomenology, in both his modernist manifestos and his urban fiction, constituted polemics against the reductive articulation of daily practices as manifestations of a national aesthetic or a Japanese ethnicity. I demonstrate how, read against the discourses of the mass media, Japanese modernist texts can themselves serve as fulcrums for displacing the ideological narratives structured by the East/West divide. In doing so, it enables a a more accurate grasp of Japanese history and cultural production that encompasses and includes, and thereby remains free from, the implicit determinations of that epistemological binary. Each chapter in this book focuses on the modernist work—novels, short stories, or treatises—of an individual writer and reads it in conjunction with an

92.  Carol Gluck, “Japan’s Modernities 1850–1990s,” in Asia in Western and World History, ed. Ainslie Thomas Embree and Carol Gluck (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 562.

Shattering the Status Quo     49

analysis of the specific social discourses it engages. The works covered in the first three chapters, spanning the time period from 1924 to 1930, coalesce around their engagements with media discourses that contextualized and responded to the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake of 1923. Though written in 1924 in the post-earthquake moment, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯’s A Fool’s Love responds to the early 1920s rhetoric of social reform that led up to that watershed event. Collectively referred to as daily life reform (seikatsu kaizen, 生活改善), these high-minded reform initiatives sought to discipline citizens, particularly women, to align their daily habits of consumption within the home with the interests of the state. The language of these reform efforts sublimated national geopolitical ambitions into consumer fantasies of efficient and sophisticated “Western style” living, as well as ideals of “love” (ai, 愛), marriage, and “moral character” (jinkaku, 人格). Tanizaki’s novel features a middle-class narrator who tells the story of how he fell in love with a young café waitress and divulges the details of their married daily life together. Thus, while the narrator’s fantasy life is cloaked in the language of progressive reform, the actual life he describes turns out to be based in sadomasochistic pleasure and fetishistic desire. Chapter 1 shows how the novel in this way subverts the language of daily life reform that was ubiquitous in the magazines and newspapers of the late 1910 and early 1920s, exposing the contradictions of the ideologies embodied in that rhetoric. Chapter 2 examines Yokomitsu Riichi’s urban fiction, as well as his modernist treatise, in the context of the rhetoric of urban renewal that emerged in the wake of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. The earthquake, which precipitated a crisis in the ideology of progress that had fueled national modernization for the previous several decades, inflected the fervor over consumption practices promoted in the language of daily life reform to focus much more intensively on the self and the spirit. Indeed, in the wake of the catastrophe, writers and social critics began to conflate the need for urban infrastructural reconstruction with an exigent need for spiritual rebirth and ethnic purity. Tokyo was recast as the “imperial city” (teito, 帝都), indicating both an externalization of an identity that had been sublimated by liberal ideas of progress but also how that progress was now being envisioned. It was no longer domestic habits that needed to be reined in, but literally the “sense perceptions” (kankaku, 感覚) of the populace that had to be regrounded in a communal spiritualism. Yokomitsu responded to this through his “neo-sensationist” (shinkankaku, 新感覚) literature. His essay of that title strategically employs Kantian phenomenology to complicate and subvert essentialist phenomenological models and expose the ideologies of ethnic purity they implied. His urban fiction employed perceptually disorienting language to narrate the experience of protagonists who become cognitively estranged from their

50       Introduction

environments. In this way, his fiction directly disputed the ethnic essentialism that was chauvinistically being posited as the foundation for a new imperial urban renaissance. Chapter 3 uncovers the engagement of Kawabata Yasunari’s novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa with the language of earthquake reconstruction as it reached a climax in the late 1920s. In the latter half of the decade, the major Japanese newspapers sought to track the progress of post-earthquake reconstruction efforts through a language of science and objectivity, regularly publishing articles that featured aerial photographs, statistics, and gradually increasing completion percentages. These reports collectively announced and anticipated the finalization of these efforts in the spring of 1930 when municipal and national government bureas had planned an extravagant festival to celebrate the successful renovation of the “imperial city.” But the hectic rush to complete these projects in time for this festival revealed the way the event was not so much a celebration of work accomplished as it was a national strategy to symbolically institute an end to the disruptions caused by the natural disaster and reorient the populace toward a bright imperial future. The serialization of Kawabata’s novel spanned the time period both before and after this festival with a suggestive hiatus during the few months in which the festival actually took place. The novel assimilated the language of this mass media reportage, reproducing statistical analyses and even reprising some of the exact language being used to describe the new bridges and parks. But the story is rendered through a kaleidoscopic narrative that shuffles and reshuffles a bric-a-brac of details and events into momentary patterns of coherence. These patterns revolve around the axis of a plot: Yumiko, whose sister was raped in the aftermath of the earthquake, seeks to assassinate the man who did it underneath one of the newly built bridges that was touted to be emblematic of the new imperial metropolis. In this way, Yumiko’s story, and the way it is embedded within a highly fragmented narrative rendering of the urban space of Asakusa, challenges the linearity of the reconstruction completion narrative. Kawabata’s novel subverts national attempts to suppress the traumas of the recent past, insisting on an alternate way of narrating the psychology of the city. Chapter 4 traces the discourses of international feminism in the 1920s, specifically the way critics and intellectuals, inspired by European writings on sexology and women’s emancipation, promoted the notion of a rational self-willed subjectivity, encapsulated in the term “character” (人格), as the basis for conceiving the sameness between men and women. Hirabayashi Taiko’s 1927 short story, “In the Charity Ward,” also has an important link to the earthquake—the narrator explains that she first became aware of the baby that she gives birth to in the story during the chaos of the quake—but the narrative more directly engages liberal feminist discourses surrounding women and maternity.

Shattering the Status Quo     51

Hirabayashi’s story begins with a normative narration that reproduces just such a rational self-willed subject. But the apparatus of this mode of narration breaks down as the narrator, a pregnant woman afflicted by beriberi, enters the half-submerged quarters of a charity hospital in colonial Manchuria, where she has fled to avoid socialist persecution in Tokyo. The narrator’s raw phenomenological illustrations of the sensations running through her pained pregnant body undermines the pretenses of a detached coherent subjectivity. The specificity of the female body, moreover, exposes the assumptions of male gender, inherent in such a concept, that liberal feminism sought to suppress in the name of sameness. While the work is examined in the context of this liberal feminist discourse, Hirabayashi’s writing also occasions a larger interrogation of the assumptions of gender, class, and nation that have undergirded all texts treated in the previous chapters. Hirabayashi directly roots out the male-gendered foundations of narration that writers like Tanizaki and Kawabata sought to displace but could not fully challenge. In this way, she is able to much more radically challenge the ideologies of love, character, and daily life that both writers repudiated. Hirabayashi’s text, moreover, constituted a feminist intervention in Yokomitsu’s attempt to render a disruptive phenomenology, pushing his project of new-sensations further to mount a more trenchant subversion of the phallogocentric frameworks of knowledge and experience.

Figure 1.  May 1924 cover of Woman. Source: National Diet Library Archives

Chapter 1 Fetishism of the West in Tanizaki ¯ ’s A Fool’s Love Jun’ichiro

About two-thirds into Tanizaki’s sensational 1924 novel, A Fool’s Love, the drama reaches a scandalous pitch. The story is a first-person confessional narrative about a middle-aged, middle-class electrical engineer, Jo¯ji, who falls in love with a teenage café waitress, Naomi. Jo¯ji and Naomi buy a Western-style house together and eventually live in it as husband and wife. While Jo¯ji takes keen pleasure in watching Naomi grow up—even bathing her and recording her physical development—he devotes himself to cultivating her into a sophisticated, voguish, and progressive woman. Naomi, for her part, eagerly assents. The two lead a blissful domestic life until eventually the relationship begins to fray. Their liberal lifestyle affords Naomi ample opportunities to consort with other boys her age, and she begins to take full advantage of them. Aiming to remove Naomi from this environment, Jo¯ji whisks her away to a vacation spot by the ocean. However, he comes home one day to find she is not there. Panicked with jealousy, he goes to search for her on the beaches, and between some trees he spies her in a cloak and boots cavorting with several of her male friends. It is Jo¯ji, however, who is spotted in the woods by the boys, whereupon Naomi comes bounding up to greet him. Just as her cloak slipped open, she extended her arm and placed it upon my shoulder. When I looked, I saw that underneath she was not wearing a single thread of clothing. “What are you doing! You humiliate me! Harlot! Whore!” 53

54    Chapter 1

“A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha” Her laughing voice reeked of alcohol. Up until now, I had not once seen her drink.1 This was the content of the thirty-fifth installment of A Fool’s Love’s, published on June 12, 1924, in the Osaka Asahi Newspaper. Two days later its serialization was brought to a sudden halt by state censors and discontinued from the Osaka Asahi.2 While the work had previously been subject to warnings and bowdlerizations, this scene apparently crossed the line. The reason why the scene caused offense is not entirely obvious. The grounds for obscenity are not so clear: Naomi’s nudity is only visible to the narrator, and her naked body had been an object of close scrutiny in previous installments. Naomi’s promiscuity is certainly a part of the offense, but her indiscretions, whatever they might have been, are not described, only suggested—a matter of jealous suspicion in the narrator’s mind and conjectural fantasy in the reader’s mind. Nakanishi Teruo argues that Tanizaki’s novel antagonized the “social conscience,” as represented by the Osaka Asahi Newspaper: it was not Naomi’s transgressions that caused offense but the fact that Jo¯ji could be so easily manipulated, foretelling, on an “unconscious level,” the overtaking of the middle and upper classes by the lower classes.3 Nakanishi’s comment suggests that the story’s provocation lay not so much in its content but in the effect of the storytelling. Whatever it was that spurred the censors, rather than a description or action, it was something in the way the story was told— something in the allure of Tanizaki’s craft. It is worth speculating about why the novel was censored because it provides clues about the real-world potency of Tanizaki’s literary artistry. The extensive scholarship on this novel has been unable to account for the historical tangibility of its subversiveness. This is mostly because the approaches of previous studies are hemmed in by longstanding assumptions rooted in modernist criticism. That is to say, with a few notable exceptions, the classical division between social language and literary language has driven a wedge into critical approaches to this text. On the one hand, scholars have analyzed the creative virtuosity of Tanizaki’s narrative, locating its subversion in the way it overturns the linguistic assumptions of previous literary forms, such as the I-novel. Missing from such approaches is an awareness of the social discourses the novel was undoubtedly

1.  Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, “Chijin no ai,” in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ zenshu¯ vol. 10 (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ko¯ronsha, 1982), 184. Hereafter cited in parentheses. 2.  The remainder would be published later that year in the monthly coterie journal Woman (Josei), a publication with a far narrower readership. 3.  Nakanishi Teruo, “Media mikkusu no naka no tsu¯zoku sho¯setsu,” in Haikyo no kano¯sei: Gendai bungaku no tanjo¯, ed. Kurihara Yukio (Tokyo: Inpakuto Shuppankai, 1997), 118.

¯’s A Fool’s Love     55 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro

engaged with, an oversight that relegates its social impact to the realm of the symbolic. On the other hand, another vein of scholarship has focused squarely on the way Tanizaki’s novel intersects with and responds to the socioeconomic transformations of the 1920s. This sociohistorical approach, for its part, disregards the instability of representation in the text and the social critique embedded in its modernist mode. Without such awareness, the novel is either read too literally (fictional characters are endowed with historical agency) or its engagement with society is limited to parody and satire, not subversion. In what follows, I enmesh these essential perspectives, bringing analysis of surveyed social language to bear upon examination of the narrative discourse in order to allow us to see with greater clarity the critical value of Tanizaki’s novel. I argue that A Fool’s Love is a modernist work whose engagement with the I-novel genre is inseparable from its assimilation and subversion of social discourses that ran through the mass media of the early twentieth century. I begin by discussing the novel’s engagement with the linguistic assumptions of the I-novel by juxtaposing it with one of its intertextual sources, Tayama Katai’s The Quilt. Through this comparison, I show how Tanizaki’s novel adopts but then undermines the promises of that narrative discourse—objectivity, pragmatism, and coherent male subjectivity—not just in its plot but in its narrative tone. However, the subversiveness of the narration is rooted in more than just literary engagement. Section 2 shows how the narrative discourse of the I-novel was in fact complicit with the broad discourse of social reform encapsulated by the notion of “daily life” in the 1910s and early 1920s. The section explains how “daily life” served as a banner term in print media for discursive efforts to lend coherence to national identity and fulfil national interests in a society experiencing new freedoms in daily practices and uncertainties in gender roles. The discourse of “daily life” promoted women’s freedom, progressivism, and Westernization, but these ideals were underscored by the same imperatives of paternalism and social obligations implicit in the I-novel genre. This connection enables the discussion in section 3 of how the novel’s adoption and undermining of I-novel expectations is indeed a mechanism for assimilating and subverting social language and its attendant ideologies. A Fool’s Love exposes how the liberal projects of progress and Westernization were in fact ideologies designed to discipline citizens, especially women, and compel them to manage their daily practices in the interests of the nation and its concerns about geopolitical competition. Naomi herself, and the way her character is rendered in the novel’s discourse, reveals the logic of commodity fetishism that underlies ideas of “the West.” Precisely at a time when the progressive media were inculcating an idea of daily life that served Japan’s geopolitical interests, Tanizaki exposed the semantic strategies of those ideologies and thereby displaced their claims on the way individuals could understand their reality.

56    Chapter 1

Perverse Language and the I-Novel Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ is among Japan’s most widely read and taught authors, both inside and outside Japan, and A Fool’s Love is one of his most famous works. Tanizaki was an ironist and a masterful manipulator of tone, and his fiction playfully engages with Japanese aesthetics through unusual characters. Born in the popular theater district of downtown Tokyo, Tanizaki was initially associated with the burgeoning of mass literature as well as cinema that began in the late 1910s. His work at this time featured obsessive tattoo artists and transvestite flâneurs. A student of sadomasochism via the work of Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Tanizaki’s common themes were obsession, fetishism, and sexual perversion. Tanizaki’s career, however, is marked by the watershed event of the 1923 Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. This crisis precipitated his move from the modish and cosmopolitan Tokyo/Yokohama areas to Japan’s more quaint and traditional Western Region, first to Kyoto and then Osaka. This geographical shift seemed to directly affect his work, which began to embrace themes and stories associated with traditional Japan. In 1932, he published In Praise of Shadows, a wily treatise on Japanese aesthetics. Then, from 1935 to 1941 (the period of Japan’s mobilization and entry into World War II), he worked on a vernacular translation of the eleventh-century classic The Tale of Genji. After that, in 1942, he began work on a long novel about a genteel Osaka family called The Makioka Sisters. The shift in the content of his work has been conventionally used to construct a “return to Japan” narrative out of Tanizaki’s career, an explanation that bolsters notions of the prestige and singularity of (traditional) Japanese culture. According to this narrative, Tanizaki spent his youth preoccupied with the superficial trappings of modern Western culture, and his move to Kansai paved the way for his mature expressions of a more genuine and authentic Japan. A Fool’s Love was written immediately after his move to Kansai, and in the way that it dramatized a couple’s indulgences in Western culture it can be seen as a eulogy for Tanizaki’s cosmopolitan Tokyo days and a swan song to his Western phase. Depending on how critics see the virtues of Tanizaki’s alleged conservative turn toward traditional Japan, A Fool’s Love has been judged as either the last superficial work of a superficial phase or a work that marked the promising development of a critical view that was unfortunately abandoned.4 Such opposing evaluations operate

4.  Nakamura Mitsuo lambasts Tanizaki and his works, claiming that their shallowness is a reflection of Tanizaki’s own infatuations with materialistic trends. Nakamura Mitsuo and Chiba Shunji, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ ron, Kindai sakka kenkyu¯ so¯sho (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Senta¯, 1984), 148–162. Takeda Torao, on the other hand, wrote that though A Fool’s Love contains the promise of the deeper critical penetration of the works to come, Tanizaki instead takes a step back in his subsequent writing

¯’s A Fool’s Love     57 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro

under the common critical apprehension that A Fool’s Love marked the end of Tanizaki’s valorization of Western culture and the beginning of his celebration of Japanese tradition. A closer critical look at A Fool’s Love suggests that the novel does not demarcate but rather deconstructs this seductive binary. Tanizaki’s ironic tone, more than flamboyant humor, is integral to an acute and penetrating critique of social norms. Such a critical position suggests a suspicion of not just Western culture but also positive affirmations of culture in general, a suspicion that Tanizaki arguably never abandoned. Any analysis of Tanizaki’s later work must begin with an assessment of the irony in its tone and its critical connotations. In a preface to the publication of the remaining sections of A Fool’s Love after its serialization was censored, Tanizaki referred to the work as “a type of ‘I-novel.’”5 The narrative is indeed set up to be read as a thinly veiled confession of actual deeds and events from Tanizaki’s life. Not only was there presumably a real-life model for Naomi but, like Jo¯ji, Tanizaki was himself materialistically captivated by the “West” and enthralled by big-screen Hollywood starlets when he lived in the Kanto¯ region. Moreover, the novel’s narrative timeframe roughly corresponds to historical time.6 Finally, the first-person narrative begins with the narrator’s pledge “to write as honestly and as sincerely as possible the facts just as they are that concern the marital relationship that I have with my wife” (3).7 The narrator assures his readers that the story will be a helpful reference for living in Japan’s new international times. In this way, the narrative sets up the expectation of an autobiographical confessional narrative. Readers of the time would have expected a socially pragmatic account of the actions and inner private details of the narrator’s earlier self. However, the coyness of Tanizaki’s assertion cited above—the scare quotes and the qualifier “type of ”—hints that this is not exactly what the novel aimed to do. In terms of plot, the novel ultimately defies the characteristic closure of the I-novel, a feature that shores up the integrity of the emotional (male) ego, affirms the stability of the home, and ensures the sociopragmatic value of the story. On a linguistic level, moreover, the narrative betrays an awareness of textuality that

into the safe grounds of tradition. Takeda Torao, Tanizaki _ Jun’ichiro¯ sho¯ron: Seikatsu riso¯ to bungaku riso¯ no yu¯go¯ten ni umareta Tanizaki bungaku (Tokyo: Ofu¯sha, 1985), 59. 5.  Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, “Chijin no ai.” Quotations marks are in the original. 6.  When the narrator returns to the time of narration at the end of the novel, for instance, he makes reference to the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake, which occurred just about seven months before the novel began serialization on March 20, 1924. 7.  Phrases like “facts just as they are” [arinomama no jijitsu, ありのままの事実] were leitmotifs of the I-novel that invoked a faith in the narrator’s ability to apprehend and convey his story objectively.

58    Chapter 1

countermands assumptions of objectivity and linguistic transparency. Jo¯ji’s attraction to Naomi, for instance, is rooted in the fact that her name can be written in both Japanese characters and Roman letters. Such aspects hint that the novel’s operations are more sophisticated than a straight autobiographical reading suggests. However, to say the story is not confessional overlooks the way the novel deliberately sets up such expectations. A Fool’s Love does not simply oppose the linguistic and narrative assumptions of the I-novel—it subverts them by first foregrounding those expectations, only to frustrate them in the end, thus revealing the narrative functions they support. To explicate these functions and how they are exposed through a subversion of I-novel conventions, it is helpful to juxtapose Tanizaki’s story with one of its important source texts, Tayama Katai’s 1907 novella The Quilt. The story’s protagonist is a Tokyo-based writer, Tokio, who takes in a young college girl, Yoshiko, as his pupil to help her fulfill her literary ambitions. The pair establishes the thematic duality of, on the one hand, a youthful, feminine devotion to literary pursuits and, on the other, a frustrated middle-aged writer manqué leading a dull daily existence. Yoshiko represents a cure for Tokio’s lonely ennui. She lent “beautiful color to his desolate daily life (seikatsu, 生活),” the narrator writes, “and [gave] him limitless strength.”8 Indeed, there is repeated mention of Tokio’s desolate and fraudulent daily life in contrast with the potential for a bright, new daily life with Yoshiko. In Japan at the time, female college students represented a new and progressive class of women who had internalized Christian ideals and cultivated liberal values, setting them apart from previous generations of women. While they symbolized the culturally advancing society, their new freedoms also produced great anxiety for educators and social critics who thought these women also needed guidance and protection. Such sociohistorical tensions are played out in Katai’s narrative, where Tokio praises Yoshiko’s forward-thinking ways but also feels responsible for protecting her. The plot develops when Yoshiko begins a relationship with another man her age. The lustful jealousy Tokio feels is cloaked in the language of idealism and guardianship. When dwelling on the idea of the two of them being together in private, Tokio could not stand it. “This concerns my duty as a supervisor!” he roared inwardly. “I cannot leave matters like this. I cannot allow such freedoms to a woman whose spirit is unmoored. I must supervise. I must protect.”9

8.  Tayama Katai, “Futon,” in Tayama Katai zenshu¯ vol. 1 (Tokyo: Bunseido¯ shoten, 1973), 536–537. 9.  Ibid., 542.

¯’s A Fool’s Love     59 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro

Tokio’s concern about Yoshiko’s chastity is expressed through a language of admonishment that posits a binary of spiritual versus physical love. He lectures her on “love of the spirit, love of the flesh, and the relationship of love to human life.” He reminds her that the strictures of old that safeguarded a woman’s chastity were not so much the result of social morality but a means to protect women’s “independence”: “Once a woman gives herself physically to a man, her freedom is completely destroyed.” If she had given herself to that man, “spirit and body,” then Yoshiko, whom Tokio had formerly “placed on the borders of heaven,” would become “something whore-like, her body inferior, and he would start to feel that her beautiful attitude and expressions were contemptible.” Here we see the beginnings of a male-oriented view of women that pervaded progressive social thought in early twentieth century Japan; namely, the subjection of women to a polar opposition of angelic purity or whorish defilement. This was a manifestation of public anxiety regarding women’s education and changing gender roles that would also inform a broader discourse about spiritual love versus physical love, or between “love” and “lust” in the 1920s. This duality was a target of Tanizaki’s novel, but we will also see in chapter 4 how the latent misogyny of this formulation is exposed by Hirabayashi Taiko’s modernist work of the late 1920s. The conflict of Katai’s story is resolved when Tokio finally has Yoshiko sent back to her home in the countryside and the protection of her father, dashing her hopes of realizing her writerly ambitions and leading a progressive life. The problem is attributed not to Tokio but to the general condition of young modern women: “Even that strong-willed Yoshiko had met this fate,” the narrator muses, “It’s no wonder the educators keep on about the problem of adolescent girls.”10 Here, the narrator references the media discourses generated by the public anxiety surrounding college-bound women. Despite the narrator’s resigned acceptance regarding this denouement, the novella ends infamously with Tokio going to the room where Yoshiko had boarded and shamelessly, wretchedly burying his face in her still unwashed bedclothes. Katai’s story is widely regarded as an I-novel because it exhibits the key I-novel characteristic of unsparing description of the self situated in a framework of full disclosure and strong narrative closure. The story is generally based on actual events in Katai’s life, and, while there are key discrepancies between the story and what actually occurred, nothing in the narrative distracts the reader from consuming the story as a real-life confession. The story, moreover, in its narrative structure, neutralizes the threat posed by the new modern woman.

10.  Ibid., 602.

60    Chapter 1

The narrative is completed and sealed off through the containment of the liberated woman. Thus, the novella alleviates the anxiety caused by the threat of newfound female freedom and sexuality. This strong sense of narrative closure is an essential aspect of the I-novel. However antisocial the confession, the form of the I-novel promises resolution—a reintegration into the social fabric and social mores it manifests. Despite this novella’s fulfillment of key I-novel features, there are aspects of the story—namely, narrative and linguistic ones—that set it apart.11 To begin with, it is not, strictly speaking, a first-person narrative; it features a third-person narrator narrowly focalized around the protagonist Tokio. This slight distinction between the narrator and the protagonist becomes a mechanism for introducing what Tomi Suzuki describes as a “gap between [Tokio’s] narrow perception of the world (and of himself) and those events that occur around him (and in himself) of which he remains unaware.”12 This “blindness” on the part of Tokio takes the form of “self-consciousness” at the level of narrative discourse since it allows the text to introduce notes of self-indictment or self-condemnation in the acts of confessional divulgence. In other words, the reader is given an objective perspective on Tokio’s narcissistic self-pity. The ultimate result of this mechanism, Suzuki explains, is an irony that lends the story a comic layer. The ridiculous wretchedness of Tokio in the final scene is a prime example. Indeed, while the intensity of Tokio’s obsession with his own tortured thoughts does tend toward the ridiculous, the irony Suzuki highlights also exposes more serious hypocrisies. The comedy of the final scene reveals the truth of Tokio’s posturing. It reinforces a theme developed throughout the story—namely, that Tokio’s high-minded bombast about purity and supervision sublimates his erotic desire for his young ward. Finally, to the extent that Tokio’s language reflects the social attitudes of his day, it is even possible to see Katai’s novella as exposing the sanctimonious misogyny of late Meiji society. The method by which Katai embeds within his narrative an awareness of the narrator’s actions that becomes a source of both humor and critique provides a blueprint for the way Tanizaki’s text marshals its own form of social critique. However, while Tanizaki was no doubt inspired by Katai’s method, he enhanced it and made it into something more subversive. Where Katai introduces his linguistic satire through the vehicle of a foolish male character, Tanizaki injects his linguistic critique into the narrative discourse as a whole through the vehicle of a

11.  The I-novel genre was not fully established in 1907, and Katai was better known for his earlier works and his interest in Emile Zola as a naturalist writer. 12.  Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 72.

¯’s A Fool’s Love     61 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro

fetishized woman. Where Katai includes a strain of social satire in his I-novel narrative, Tanizaki achieves modernist negation in his faux I-novel approach. This distinction will be fleshed out in the discussion below, but it is worth mentioning here that one story was censored while the other was not. Since both works depict the sexually wayward behavior of a young girl who is under the supervision of a male narrator, it is fair to venture that the offensiveness of Tanizaki’s text had to do with the way it was told and the particular nature of its social critique. However, before discussing the meaningful departures of Tanizaki’s text from Katai’s, it is helpful to first consider the ways A Fool’s Love reprises the theme, structure, and language of Katai’s I-novel. Below is the full opening paragraph of A Fool’s Love: In what follows, I will attempt to write as honestly and as sincerely as possible the facts just as they are that concern the marital relationship that I have with my wife, a relationship which I don’t think has many examples in this world. At the same time that this will be a dear record to me that I will never forget, perhaps to each one of you as well, it will no doubt become some type of reference material. This is because, particularly in times like these, when Japan’s relations have gradually broadened internationally, when locals and foreigners interact more frequently, when various “isms” and philosophies have come into Japan, when men of course but women too have brusquely become more highclass, in an era like this the type of relationship that I have with my wife, which until now has had very few examples, will likely crop up amongst you. (3) A Fool’s Love thus begins with an address to the reader—the narrative’s audience— and references the social context of progressive life and internationalization. Jo¯ji, the narrator, suggests that what follows will become a type of reference material for his audience, something they can make use of in their own lives. In this way, the narrative promises to be a socially pragmatic text, one that affirms or at least fits within the fold of public values. The dynamic between Jo¯ji and Naomi reprises in key ways the relationship between Tokio and Yoshiko. Jo¯ji takes Naomi into his home in the hopes of adding “a little change into his overly ordinary and overly monotonous day to day life (amari ni heibon na, amari ni tancho¯ na sono higurashi ni, あまり 平凡な、あまりに単調なその日暮らしに)” and “some color to his dreary daily life (sappu¯kei na seikatsu, 殺風景な生活)” (6). He pledges to educate and cultivate her into a lady, and Naomi, for her part, pledges to devote herself to becoming the modern and progressive woman he desires. Like Tokio, Jo¯ji apprehends Naomi within the extreme binary of spiritual angel and physical

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prostitute. Naomi ultimately frustrates Jo¯ji’s hope that she will excel in her education, but what he considers her “spiritual failing” is compensated by her highly pleasing physical development (59). For him, Naomi has lost her angelic qualities and has instead become a prostitute. Jo¯ji ultimately relents, giving in to the pull of her physical charms: “I have thrown away my integrity, scruples, and my purity, and I have cast away my pride,” Jo¯ji says, “and while bowing down in front of this prostitute, I have no longer come to think of this with shame” (210). Having reached this pitch, the direction of the novel begins to shift toward the resolution of closure. Jo¯ji attempts to forgo his overly liberal ways and rein Naomi in. Jo¯ji suggests they start a family together and cajoles her into assuming the role of a more traditional wife (212). Wondering if their fall can be attributed to the freedoms enabled by their progressive way of life, Jo¯ji suggests selling their Western-style home and moving into a more traditional Japanese home. They would get a cook and a maid, and he would have piano and English teachers come to the house. This way, she would never have to leave the home. Naomi, of course, flatly refuses and leaves. At this point, Jo¯ji’s devoted mother dies, reintroducing the theme of the family and its attendant duties, further completing the circle of closure. Back home, he imagines hearing a voice saying that his mother, who had always “prayed he would succeed in his career” (256), has died as a warning to him. He takes a trip to the mountains and woods where he grew up, and there he feels a “sparkling purity, as if all the dirtiness has been cleansed,” suddenly sensing that his mother did not die without meaning. If the novel were to end there, it would hew to the expectations of the I-novel format. Despite considerable trouble and pain, Jo¯ji would have renounced Naomi, and the social order of the family would have been reinstated. Having dabbled in the perverse, the novel would have ultimately contained Naomi and the waywardness she represented. It would have fulfilled its promise as a useful sociopragmatic text, in this case a cautionary tale. Of course, this is not how the story ends: Naomi reenters Jo¯ji’s life in dramatic fashion, having transformed into a “strange and unfathomable girl.” “The spirit of the old Naomi had become, by some working, a ghost possessing an ideal beauty” (266). Jo¯ji’s feelings change from love and desire to fear and worship. Naomi asserts that she will no longer brook any resistance to her demands, and Jo¯ji readily assents. The novel ends with a description of their new life together. They live in a large Western-style house that had been owned by a Swiss family, and Naomi leads a life of luxury, sleeping in every morning and waking only to read fashion magazines and smoke foreign cigarettes, offering Jo¯ji only her hand to kiss before he is sent away.

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Jo¯ji concludes his narrative by once again addressing the reader: With this I conclude the record of our marital relationship. If you read this and think that I am foolish, please go ahead and laugh. If you think there is a lesson to be gained in this, please use me as an example. As for myself, I am completely taken by Naomi, so whatever you think there’s nothing that can be done. (302) In this bookend to the opening paragraph, Jo¯ji abandons his promise to provide useful reference material for his readers and reneges on his implicit commitment to establish a new ethical self. At the end of the novel, Jo¯ji verbally gives up on writing a “story,” a narrative that hews to the norms of communicative language and the social pragmatism it supports. Read against the expectations established by I-novels such as Tayama Katai’s The Quilt, the final lines of this novel become particularly perverse. The narrator, whose integrity was to serve as bulwark for social order against the chaos of female liberation, has himself given up. Instead, he says only that he has “been taken” by Naomi. He not only abandons the promise he made to his readers in the opening lines but, more importantly, defaults on his implicit promise to keep Naomi in check. His final lines—“and there’s nothing that can be done”—sound a renunciation of the effort to control Naomi and everything she represents. There is a perverse, excellent horror in these lines, suggesting Naomi’s victory and the demise of everything the I-novel narrator is supposed to represent. The provocativeness of the beach scene could very well lie in the way it represents the seed of this very development in the I-novel narrative. However, while these points in the plot demarcate the manner in which the story contravenes the promise of the I-novel narrative, it is important to note that such defiance is present throughout the novel and indeed immanent in its narrative discourse. The novel, after all, is a first-person recollection, a structure that allows us to distinguish between the Jo¯ji who narrates and the Jo¯ji who is being narrated. Given this distinction, we can assert that the Jo¯ji who narrates knows the story’s denouement from the start. Rereading the opening paragraph, we can detect a conflicting ulterior motive for the story’s narration: In what follows, I will attempt to write as honestly and as sincerely as possible the facts just as they are that concern the marital relationship that I have with my wife . . . At the same time that this will be a dear record to me that I will never forget, perhaps to each one of you as well, it will no doubt become some type of reference material. (3) In these opening lines, there are two motivations offered for Jo¯ji’s narrative. In addition to his hope to create “reference material” for the general public, the

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narrator also mentions the motive of creating a “precious and unforgettable record for myself.” Jo¯ji, having lived through the failure of his efforts to spiritually cultivate Naomi, and now experiencing a relationship of masochistic worship, looks back to record for himself the pleasures of the Naomi of the past. In contrast to the transparent, honest, and public language of confession and explanation, there is the sensual, pleasurable, and private language of recording and describing. What makes this duality perverse is not just that these dissonant motives are sustained throughout but that the latter narrative of pleasure is enabled by the narrative of disclosure and pretended compunction. Throughout the novel, Jo¯ji’s sensual descriptions of Naomi and his life with her are not only justified by the need to “tell all” but are framed and structured by a stance of objective and honest recounting. He justifies his need to describe Naomi’s body, for example, by explaining that while it might be unpleasant “to talk so luridly and let so many people know about the girl that would later become my wife,” if he were to forgo it, “the whole significance of writing down this record would be lost.” By “whole significance,” he might equally and simultaneously refer to the pleasure of his writing and the commitment to narrate all: It is thus necessary that I set down here, once and for all, just what type of body Naomi had in the August of her 15th year as she stood on the beach in Kamakura. Naomi’s height at that time, if we stood next to each other, would probably have been about an inch shorter than I . . . but though her upper body was short, her legs were long, and one of the remarkable characteristics of her frame was that if you looked at her from a short distance, she looked a lot taller than she really was. That small torso then was curved very deeply in the shape of the letter S, and at the part near the bottom of that curve was the swell of her rear, which took on a richly feminine roundness. (34–35) Jo¯ji’s description of Naomi is set within the framework of public objectivity, but the content of the description itself quickly veers into the sensual. The description, in fact, inflects the very nature of his language, the material aspects of which are increasingly foregrounded, reaching something of an extreme in the literal comparison of Naomi’s physique to the curves of the letter “S.” A Fool’s Love undermines the expressivity of the I-novel in the way it posits the promise of objectivity as a pretense for the actual desire to write a sensual record. Jo¯ji the narrator never had any intention of writing a public confessional in the first place. His implications of remorse and contrition were always an excuse. He never had any desire to confess or gain absolution but was instead satisfied and happy with his world of knowledge, desire, emotion, and subjectivity. This duality— this perverse combination of motives—manifests itself in what Nakamura Kan

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has identified as the “flat tone of narration”: a narrative voice that is about to recount absurd activities (like having Naomi ride him like a horse) with an attitude of matter-of-fact nonchalance. “Perverse things when narrated by a perverse person are simply perverse things and nothing else” writes Nakamura.13 He can relate the abnormal in the voice of the everyday. The subversiveness of the narrative discourse, more than the content of any erotic encounter, can be located in the flatness of tone with which such encounters are described. “The novel’s confessional voice,” writes Gregory Golley, “becomes itself the substance of a far-reaching parody.” Golley views the dual motives of reference and sensuality as a “pornography” that “resisted the I-novel’s ‘expressive’ posture—with its mimetic implications of an autonomous interior subject.”14 On the one hand, the narrative pursues a referential ambition. Descriptions of Naomi, he points out, follow the visual system of a movie camera in the way they zoom out, focus on individual body parts, and are induced by Jo¯ji’s efforts at documentation. At the same time, this referential valence is enhanced by the sensuous and extraordinary content of that description. The product of this mixture is pornography, which Golley defines as the “capacity to fulfill the voyeur’s demand for ontological realism as well as the dreamer’s requirement of transcendence,” “combining the intoxication of fantasy . . . with the credibility of documentary.”15 Golley’s penetrating critique helps to clarify the novel’s scandalousness as a product of its narrative voice. I would argue, however, that the dual motives of reference and sensuality, rather than combining to create pornography, are at odds with each other. More than a pornographer, Jo¯ji is a fetishist. He is more interested in the parts of Naomi’s body than he is in her as a whole. He is more interested in the words and images that capture and record her than he is in being with her physically. Further, Jo¯ji is more interested in capturing the Naomi of his past than he is in possessing the Naomi of the present. More than the satisfaction of voyeuristic desires, Jo¯ji the narrator is characterized by his ridiculous frustrations. “High pornography” might be the objective of the narrated Jo¯ji, as he gazes with pleasure upon the curves of his young charge, but masochism is what defines the objective of the narrating Jo¯ji who, like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, yearns for a young girl he no longer possesses.

13.  Nakamura Kan, “‘Chijin’ no katari: Jun’ichiro¯ sho¯ron,” in Taisho¯ bungakuron, ed. Takada Mizuho (Tokyo: Yu¯seido¯ Shuppan, 1981), 167. 14.  Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 82. 15.  Ibid., 93–94.

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With “only words to play with,” he desperately and only fleetingly captures her through the senses of language.16 In some ways Katai’s novella fits Golley’s characterization of pornography more than Tanizaki’s novel does. The Quilt’s object of ridicule is ultimately the narrator, whose depraved desire to physically possess his young female student can only be fed by metonymic objects (such as Yoshiko’s bedclothes), and his inability to access her results in imputations of whorish qualities. For Jo¯ji, by contrast, physical possession (which is achieved early on) is not the primary interest but the means to what he really desires, which is the sustainment of his fantasy. In a novel that provokes more smiles than stimulation, it is the fetishism of scopophilia—more so than the eroticism of pornography—that defines the pleasure of Jo¯ji’s watching. The fetishistic narrator is what allows for the use of objective reference as a pretext for the pursuit of sensual indulgence through words, memory, and aesthetic vision. This suggests that the expressive posture of the I-novel—its pretensions toward an honest, sincere, and socially restorative confession—is not just resisted but betrayed. The narrator’s true intention of creating a sensuous record exposes and undermines the I-novel’s pretentions of a transparent, objective, and coherent male subjectivity. However, the nature of critique in Tanizaki’s novel is not limited to the epistemological or the literary. His upending of the assumptions implicit in the I-novel is a strategy for a more direct engagement with the discourses of mass media. In the next section, I will elaborate on what those discourses were, focusing specifically on the notion of “daily life” (seikatsu), a term referenced in the openings of both Katai’s I-novel and Tanizaki’s pseudo I-novel. One thing that will be borne out is the way the assumptions of I-novel discourse were shared by the social language surrounding daily life reform in the early 1920s. Thus, Tanizaki’s undermining of I-novel conventions served as a vehicle for assimilating and subverting social language. If the pornography of Katai’s work exposes the hypocrisies of social language, the fetishism of Tanizaki’s novel allows for a more immanent subversion of social language and the ideologies it supported.

The Social Discourse of Daily Life In October 1919, The Women’s Review (Fujin ko¯ron) published an article that solicited brief responses from various social commentators regarding the question,

16.  Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Knopf, 1992), 33. The correlations between these two novels—one published in Japanese in Tokyo (1924), the other in English in Paris (1955)—are striking, especially given that Nabokov could not have read the former. Nabokov would have been aware of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, however, which was an important source for Tanizaki’s novel.

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“What is it that requires the most urgent reform?” Some of the suggested areas included the self, the structure of the house, customs within the household, the home, husband-and-wife relations, servants, and the nation. These topics regarding self, nation, and household practices were often addressed via the recurring term “daily life.” The literary critic Katakami Noboru noted the “unnaturalness and irrationality of political and social daily life.” Women’s educator Miyata Shu¯ said that people needed to “eliminate false formalities and appearances” and instead “be more dutiful in [their] daily lives.” The philosopher Hoashi Ri’ichiro¯ mentioned the need to dispense with the “daily life of tatami mats” and “introduce the simple daily life of Western clothing.” Journalist Kayahara Kazan asserted that “the daily life of women” was what needed reform, while the poet Yosano Akiko asserted that it was “love” that needed to be deepened and purified. Another contributor declared that each person must begin the process of reform by looking to the “daily life of their homes.” “For example, as it concerns my home,” he continued, “I must change the wrongful way in which husband and wife exist in a masterand-servant relationship.”17 While all of these notions are thematized in Tanizaki’s novel, these comments show how they were simultaneously sites of reform after the end of World War I in Japan, tied together through the notion of “daily life” (seikatsu). Daily life reform, as it came to be called, derived its urgency from larger issues of geopolitical competition and national solidarity, but it addressed these issues through an intense focus on the domestic space, marital relations, and women’s roles. It was also instrumental in efforts to elevate the position of women in society. This reform discourse was a continuation of cultural notions developed in the late nineteenth century that posited the home, the family, and the self as the crucibles of social and national renovation. Thus, while reforms were called for within a generally optimistic and progressive outlook, the exhortations also contained strains of obligation and constraint. This language of reform reflected a newfound freedom in gender roles and daily practices of middle-class society but also responded to such liberation with attempts to guide people toward choices that served the interests of society and the state. In what follows, through a survey of mass media I trace the outlines of the discourse of daily life and the many social themes it encompassed in the early twentieth century. Through samples of language taken from articles in various general-interest magazines, I examine the rhetoric of this reform language, analyzing how it was used and with what connotations. I argue that the social

17.  “Kaizo¯ no kyu¯ o yo¯ suru mono ha nanika,” Fujin ko¯ron, October 1919.

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discourse of daily life, in the shape it assumed in the early 1920s, was effectively a social ideology, one that sought to discipline citizens, especially women, to act in the interests of the nation. I conclude by showing how the rhetorical strategies of this reform discourse—especially in the way it dealt with managing female freedoms and the discussed notions of progress, love, and subjectivity— were completely consistent with the narrative discourse of the I-novel genre. In its assumptions about gender and social practice, the I-novel, to use Eysteinsson’s words regarding nineteenth-century European realism, consolidated a recreation of the Taisho¯-period public sphere. The roots of “daily life” and the language of reform it encompassed can be traced back to late-nineteenth-century efforts to renovate society through the introduction of a new domestic arrangement referred to as the katei (家庭), a Japanese translation of the English word for “home.” Popularized in the 1890s by the Christian thinker Iwamoto Yoshiharu as a means to spread Christian values, the katei was a nuclear-family-based domestic structure that differed markedly from the ie (家) or the “household” system that would soon be formalized in the Civil Code of 1898. The ie system was based on the unit of a multigenerational family managed by a single male household head (koshu, 戸主), who had complete authority over property ownership and distribution as well as decisions about marriage.18 The ie structure was supported by relationships of duty toward parents, elders, and ancestors, and at the same time it was socially integrated into a web of “intersecting relations of obligation with the village community, occupational association, or vassal group.”19 By contrast, the katei was understood as an independent unit based on one married couple and their children, and it designated a space “sequestered from society.”20 As opposed to the diachronic structure of the ie, which was based on the hierarchical child-and-parent relationship and designed to perpetuate itself across generations, the katei was synchronic, based on the bond between husband and wife, and understood to last only one generation.21 Renewing itself with each generational iteration, it became the basis for imagining and introducing new practices within society.

18.  Ken K. Ito, An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-theCentury Japanese Novel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 28. 19.  Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930, Harvard East Asian Monographs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 22. 20.  Ibid., 21. 21.  Nishikawa Yuko and Mariko Muro Yokokawa, “The Changing Form of Dwellings and the Establishment of the Katei (Home) in Modern Japan,” US–Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement 8 (1995): 26.

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First and foremost, the katei foregrounded the agency of individuals with a relationship of equality. It was founded on a marriage that was not arranged, as in the ie, but freely and mutually chosen. In the writings of Iwamoto, this freedom of choice is introduced through a discussion of the love relationship between husband and wife. In contrast to the natural and biological relationship between parent and child, the relationship between husband and wife is a matter of free will. It is with the wife, Iwamoto wrote in 1891, that “with our wills, we are able to love another as equals.” In a society defined by hierarchical relations, the katei, and the husband-wife relationship it enshrined, was envisioned as a type of utopic space where “equality” and “true friendship,” as Iwamoto put it, could exist for the first time.22 For the political activist Tokutomi Soho¯, the equality achieved in the love relationship between husband and wife formed the basis for achieving equality among men and women in society. He opposed the practice associated with the ie system of wives entering a household and becoming subservient to multiple authorities in the house, sometimes sharing a husband with one or more mistresses. Tokutomi instead called for one-husband-one-wife family structures. “It was only when the husband stood opposite his wife,” he wrote, “that the basis of equal rights between man and woman could be achieved.” Tokutomi’s view represented the way this new formation of the family was deeply tied to progressive civic reforms for women. Liberated from subservience to multiple masters, wives could “exalt in the virtue of their native innocence, . . . become great philanthropists, and apply new scholarship.” They could also “bestow the fullness of their love onto their husbands.”23 For both Iwamoto and Tokutomi, the family was a vehicle for introducing what they considered revolutionary reform into society as a whole. In their language, as Ken Ito points out, “overlapping analogies aligned the family with the state.”24 Tokutomi, for instance, described the katei as the “molecule” or “seed” of society. “What happens in the seed,” he wrote, “happens everywhere else.” While the home could be understood as an instrument for widespread social reform, it could also be understood as a bulwark against negative influence. “If we do not attempt to revolutionize the Japanese wife, revolutionize the Japanese home, revolutionize the Japanese spirit, and revolutionize Japanese society,” Tokutomi warned, “the home of the old Japan will overtake the home of the new Japan.” Through the first two decades of the nineteenth century,

22.  Iwamoto Yoshiharu, “Kon’in ron,” in Meiji bungaku zenshu¯ (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯, 1973). 23.  Tokutomi Soho¯, “Shin nihon no jiban, sono isshin katei,” Katei zasshi, November 1892. 24. Ito, An Age of Melodrama, 26.

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the discourse of katei would become an avenue for promoting many different reforms concerning society, state, and nation. However, the discourse would be perpetuated and amplified not by individual thinkers but by a bourgeoning industry of new magazines and newspapers. Though Iwamoto and Tokutomi played pioneering roles in establishing ideas regarding the katei, the notion was developed and disseminated by a slew of general interest magazines that cropped up around the turn of the century. “The major so¯ go¯ zasshi, or ‘general magazines,’” writes Ito, “which then as now served as key nodes for the formation of public opinion, began to run numerous articles advocating the transformation of the Japanese family toward the model of the katei.”25 The reform discourse of katei would quickly leave the hands of a few elite ideologues and be embraced by a public that advocated these reforms with a zeal of its own.26 As the term katei entered the public sphere, however, it shed its associations with Christian morality and its overt connotations of civic progressivism. It became more secular and more closely associated with specific practices of consumption. Magazine articles about the “home” concerned themselves with household-management methods, cooking practices, the price of goods, furnishings, and interiors.27 The Housewife’s Companion, for instance, solicited household budgets from its readers and published them alongside commentary from experts.28 Critics denigrated the Japanese house as “primitive and unsanitary”; the use of tatami mats, for example, was “unclean, damaged the body, and promoted lazy habits.”29 Other reformers chastised citizens for their casual visits and receptions, arguing that it was a waste of time.30 What emerged as the object of focus was an idea of the home solely as a place of consumption that could and would be managed, rationally and efficiently, by the housewife.31 It is in the context of katei, understood as a secular space of managed consumption, that the term seikatsu becomes useful. As the space of the katei was conceived of and elaborated as a product of material life and practices, “daily life” would become operative as a way to designate the contents of that space and the significance of those practices.

25.  Ibid., 53–54. 26.  Nishikawa Yuko and Mariko Muro Yokokawa, “The Changing Form of Dwellings,” 34. 27. Sand, House and Home, 25. 28.  Nishikawa Yuko and Mariko Muro Yokokawa, “The Changing Form of Dwellings,” 24. 29. Sand, House and Home, 39. 30.  Cited in ibid., 46. 31.  Nishikawa Yuko and Mariko Muro Yokokawa, “The Changing Form of Dwellings,” 21–24.

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In the first decade of the 1900s, “daily life” was used to flesh out the content of a katei that served as a model for or definition of the new middle class. Jordan Sand argues that a bourgeois identity was being shaped by means of material possessions, and “new moral meanings were invested in material life and daily practice.”32 Sand notes a good example of this usage in a 1904 article from Women’s Education World entitled “One Hundred Walks of Life” (shakai hyaku seikatsu, 社会百生活), which contains descriptions of various households. One description titled “Daily Life of a Naval Officer” details each piece of furniture in the reception room and includes an account of dinnertime conversation, along with a month’s worth of menus and the husband’s income.33 Sand notes, moreover, how such elaboration was made possible by the freedom to choose such lifestyles in the first place, both for the family that consumed and demonstrated them and presumably, at least in aspiration, for the reader of the article. The naval officer in question had rented his house instead of inheriting it, making the advertised lifestyle the product of deliberate choices. Many members of the middle-class elite were part of a new generation who, having newly moved to the city, were “literally without the baggage of the old house.”34 Such circumstances suggest a central aspect of the term seikatsu. It emerged as a term to describe lifestyles, or walks of life, precisely at a time when the content of those lifestyles was no longer fixed and was being deliberately and self-consciously created. In the 1910s, “daily life” began to grow in importance in the mass media, even as it assumed more egalitarian inflections, encompassing the conditions of labor and the economics of livelihood instead of just lifestyle. This development can, in part, be seen in the pages of a magazine titled Seikatsu that ran from 1913 to 1918. As seen in one writer’s contribution, seikatsu was useful for discussing life in a language free of the teleological associations of religion and philosophy. “So long as such a thing as eternity did not exist,” Funnami Sho¯ writes, “then the history of our daily lives is a sequence of destruction and construction.” Funnami was writing in the shadow of World War I, and like many people the world over, the scale of senseless death and violence engendered by that conflict caused him to lose faith in ideals regarding scholarship, industry, and nation. “Civilization,” he writes, “was the mask of the barbarian.” In the absence of high-minded ideals, he talks about the need to return to nature and calls for the “renovation” and “simplification of daily life.” While Funnami ends up advocating familiar reforms, his exhortations are expressed in the terminology of seikatsu rather than katei.

32. Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930, 23. 33.  Cited in ibid., 27. 34.  Ibid., 28.

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Another article from the same magazine sheds further light on the way seikatsu would become a more flexible term, applicable to livelihood in general and not just the model middle-class citizen. A brief submission entitled “Daily Life on 15 Yen a Month” by Sho¯so¯ Shi’en provides budget breakdowns for three different living arrangements the author had attempted over the past year on a meager monthly income of 15 yen. Each living arrangement is described as an “experiment” or “trial,” and, in addition to rent, each arrangement includes descriptions of the costs of personal items such as toothbrushes and soap, as well as minute expenses such as miso, fish, newspapers, and magazines.35 This article serves as an interesting juxtaposition with the abovementioned article about the daily life of a naval officer. Sho¯so¯’s interest in reading and his mention of a planned vacation signify his aspiration, despite his low income, to be middle class. Like the article from 1904, it expresses the way seikatsu was associated with choices and the idea that one’s life is the sum of one’s consumer decisions. This writer, of course, has far fewer choices than the naval officer, but the whole premise behind his self-described “experiments” is that he has quite a bit of agency over how his money, the little that he has, is spent and allocated. This freedom is also made possible by the fact that the author, as he describes it, is “on his own” (tandoku, 単独)—that is, free from the obligations of his ie. He is, in other words, making a katei of his own, suggesting the ways that katei and the new arrangements it introduced enabled the imagination and the possibility of seikatsu.36 However, unlike the article from 1904, the daily life described here is not offered as a paragon to be aimed for and imitated but as more of a reference for those trying to get by and make a living. The material objects that make up daily life are more mundane but also more personal and private. The author takes the stance of disclosure for the benefit of his readers, who he assumes privately share the same difficulties. By way of introduction to his budgets, Sho¯so¯ explains, “Because I think there are others in this wide world who are in the same circumstances, I will lay bare without restraint the conditions of the daily life that I continue to live and offer it as a reference.” In this language, we find a distinct correspondence between one sample of social language concerning “daily life” and the stance of self-disclosure that was a central feature of the I-novel. Regarding Tanizaki’s narrative in particular, the language of this article corresponds almost exactly with that of his introductory

35.  Sho¯so¯ Shien, “Tsuki jyu¯goen no seikatsu,” Seikatsu, March 1914. 36.  The two words were also often used in conjunction: katei seikatsu (“daily life of the home”), where katei is the modifier and in this case the locus for seikatsu.

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paragraph. This concurrence suggests the way that I-novel literature, despite its intensive concern with the self and the ego, was indeed a highly socialized text. Much the same way that Sho¯so¯ wishes to provide pragmatic and useful information for readers in their ambitions to establish a livelihood, the I-novel also positions itself as a sociopragmatic text that can be useful for readers in their attempts to establish their sense of social subjecthood. This concurrence also demonstrates how the I-novel stance—in which pragmatic utility becomes a justification for an unusually forthright divulgence of personal details—was operative in the pages of mass magazines. That is to say, at this historical juncture, the same notions of writing and reading were shared in common by literature and social language. The language and assumptions of narration flowed from one type of text into the other and back again, passing easily through what can be understood as a highly permeable membrane. Moreover, this type of relationship between author, narrative, and reader was made possible by the new conceptions of society and social life embodied in the term “daily life” and the way it was used in the 1910s. First, there was a distinct egalitarian sensibility that allowed an author figure to imagine that the matters of his personal life were potentially the same as those of a mass of other people. Second, underlying the possibility of a personal narrative as a referent is the premise that the personal situation was arrived at through a series of choices—the same types of choices that were available to the reader. Such were the connotations of the term “daily life” in the 1910s as it changed from describing pictures of perfection to detailing plans framed by contingency. Tracing the roots of “daily life” in the discourse of katei clarifies the concept’s associations with not only the domestic space but also with a spirit of reform that had a distinctly progressive and liberal tenor. It also demonstrates how the term emerged from a newfound liberation in social practice and material consumption. In the mid-1910s, however, seikatsu grew in prominence and in some ways escaped its direct associations with katei. In the reform discourse of daily life reform (seikatsu kaizen), as well as cultured life (bunka seikatsu, 文化生活), the term shifted from an abstract term useful in rethinking the ideal way of middleclass life to a more specific and concrete term referring to those daily practices. Writers began to understand “daily life” not as the product of new choices but as shorthand for the choices themselves. In this sense, seikatsu is highly resonant with the concept of “everydayness” that Harry Harootunian identifies as an organizing principle of awareness rooted in the perception of the now that constituted the experience of modernity in cities around the world from the period before World War I up until World War II. This consciousness—what he refers to as “the minimal unity of the present” as a way to “organize the experience of the everyday”—was brought about by

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Figure 1.1  Occurrences of “Daily Life” (seikatsu 生活) in the Titles of Periodical Articles (1895–1933). Chart adapted from the data and histogram generated by the Complete Database for Japanese Magazines and Periodicals from the Meiji Era to the Present (Ko¯seisha), accessed May 23, 2011.

a culture of commodification spurred by accelerated modernization in these countries, and specifically the metropolises.37 Miriam Silverberg draws an even more direct line between seikatsu and “everyday life,” viewing the Japanese term as pointing to Michel de Certeau’s concept of the everyday and the material practices that constitute it.38 While Harootunian and Silverberg do essential work in tracing the everyday as it emerged and developed in the context of modern Japanese history, they both overlook the way “daily life” simultaneously had a rich discursive life of its own in early twentieth-century mass media. While the concept of everydayness remains operative in the usage of “daily life,” the term was increasingly employed in prescriptive calls for social reform. The Daily Life Reform movement, which began in the late 1910s and reached its peak in the first half of the 1920s, represented the culmination of this trend.

37. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 3–4. 38.  Harootunian does not link everydayness with seikatsu, which he calls a neutral term. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 14.

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Figure 1.1 shows the emergence of the term “daily life” and its distinct growth in relative importance in at least one major category of mass media in the early twentieth century. The term starts to become significant in the first decade of the 1900s. The frequency of occurrence roughly doubles in the 1910s and then doubles again in the 1920s, reaching a new peak in 1924, the year A Fool’s Love was serialized. From 1920 onward, “daily life” was coupled with the term “reform” (kaizen, 改善), and together “daily life reform” (seikatsu kaizen) became a central node in the discourses of middle-class reform. In the daily life reform discourses of the early 1920s, “daily life” ultimately became complicit in the dissemination and articulation of daily life as a social and national ideology. What began as a term indicating newfound contingency in the practices that made up one’s life eventually became marshaled into rhetorical efforts to direct those practices toward the interests of society and the nation. These efforts, moreover, often employed and recapitulated the progressive reform initiatives of the 1890s. Though hardly the only advocate for daily life reform, the Japanese government assumed a leadership role. The Daily Life Reform League, which was formed as part of the Ministry of Education, held its first meeting in December 1919. Its stated objective was “to eliminate all waste concerning food, clothing, housing, and social relations, to banish ostentation, and amend the ways of daily life, making it into a matter that is much more rational.” “Through these means,” it continued, “we will provide citizens with stability in their daily life.”39 Some of the League’s recommendations focused generally on limiting or abandoning what were deemed profligate rituals such as festivals, weddings, and funerals. Others were very specific, focusing on the minute aspects of one’s daily schedule. For instance, people were to limit the duration of home visits and guest receptions in strict accordance with the business at hand, restrict sending New Years’ greeting cards, and make hospital visits “brief and sincere.”40 For some government bureaucrats, like Tago Ichimin, daily life reform had explicit ties to the dissemination of national ideology. “That which we call daily life,” he wrote, “is the expression of national ideology. . . . Thus, you will not be able to achieve true daily life reform unless you initiate the ‘reconstruction’ of the national spirit, which is the foundation of national daily life.”41 Nakajima

39.  Cited in Nakajima Kuni, “Taisho¯ki ni okeru ‘seikatsu kaizen undo¯’,” Shiso¯ 史艸 15 (October 1974): 54–55. 40.  Cited in ibid., 63–64. 41.  Tago Ichimin, “Seinen dan, joshi seinenkai,” in Shakai kyo¯iku ko¯enshu¯ (Tokyo: Teikoku chiho¯ gyo¯sei gakkai, 1921). Cited in Chino Yo¯ichi, Kindai Nihon fujin kyo¯iku shi (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1979), 184.

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Kuni, a historian of daily life reform, explains how materialist philosophy— which posits that people’s thoughts and ideologies are largely influenced, if not determined, by daily practices—guided a newfound government interest in the possibilities of influencing and enlightening minds at the civic level. In an age of labor movements, farming movements, democracy, and socialism, the matters of daily life—which were once considered popular education and beneath the purview of the state—were now understood as critical sites of ideological competition. The government felt a need to take a proactive approach in the “guidance toward good thought (shiso¯ zendo¯, 思想善導)” and believed the best strategy was to influence daily household affairs by reforming women, who were considered the managers of the home.42 In the rhetoric of daily life reform, larger concerns about the Japanese nation and its position in the race among world powers manifested themselves in injunctions regarding efficiency and rationality in the minute details of daily practice. Tsuneoka Ryo¯zo¯, for instance, a bacteriologist who had spent time abroad in London and Paris, said the low efficiency of Japanese production, “which was not even half that of the United States,” was due to the fact that Japanese daily life had not adapted to the new age.43 Regarding food, Tsuneoka recommended making preparation processes more rational by using hourglass clocks when boiling eggs to avoid unnecessary cooking, and using a thermos to preserve rice so an entire day’s portion of rice could be cooked all at once in the morning.44 For housing, he emphasized the passage of air through the house, the presence of light, and the use of Western chairs to replace the practice of sitting on one’s heels on tatami mats. The latter inhibited blood flow, put pressure on the nerves, and stunted the growth of bones and muscles, not to mention that it also disinclined one to stand up, encouraging lethargy. Tsuneoka also recommended Western suits over Japanese hakama, which, he argued, restricted body movement and was too loose around the sleeves, allowing for the loss of body heat.45 Tsuneoka was typical in the way he invoked the Japanese nation and the exigent need to compete with other advanced nations as the motivation and justification for these reforms. If Japanese society failed to quickly become more efficient, he warned, it would fall far behind in the race among nations.46 As is evident from the discussion above, the ideas promoted in the language of daily life reform were hardly new; they merely reprised reform discourse that

42.  Nakajima Kuni, “Seikatsu kaizen undo¯,” 56–57. 43.  Tsuneoka Ryo¯zo¯, “Wagakuni ishokuju¯ no kairyo¯ mondai (ue),” Taiyo¯, November 1921, 114. 44.  “Wagakuni ishokuju¯ no kairyo¯ mondai (shita),” Taiyo¯, December 1921, 127–128. 45.  Ibid., 128–131. 46.  “Wagakuni ishokuju¯ no kairyo¯ mondai (ue),” 114.

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had been in place for the last three decades. There were, however, some key differences. First, the reform discourse of the 1920s was inflected by a heightened sense of global anxiety. Because of the political power Japan garnered after World War I, the motives for reform were imbued with an awareness of the country’s new role in the global power structure. Japan had benefited from the fallout of World War I; its support for the Allied Powers earned it a seat at the League of Nations. It was also invited to the Washington Naval Conference, a post–World War I disarmament conference where it gained international recognition for its colonial territories in Manchuria and Mongolia. The daily life reformer, Morimoto Ko¯kichi, wrote, If we look back at the time right after the Great War, our country had stepped out onto the international stage and had become “Japan of the world.” And then we were surprised to notice something for the first time. This was the fact that the civilization of the Yamato race, which we had been so proud of for hundreds of years, had several deficiencies when compared with the culture of the world. We should praise the fact that because of this we were quick to catch up and in recent years announce issues for reform in all areas.47 While the content and concerns of social reform had remained mostly unaltered from the previous two decades, in the early 1920s the project of reform was much more explicitly situated within a framework of international and even racial juxtaposition and, moreover, was inflected by a new urgency brought about by geopolitical competition. In this framework, daily life reform promised not just a life of efficiency but a more enlightened and universal lifestyle. This fantasy was encapsulated by the term bunka, a translation of the English word “culture,” which was often combined with “daily life” in the phrase bunka seikatsu or “cultured daily life.” “Culture” (bunka, 文化) was a term that signified progressive and enlightened “Western” cosmopolitanism.48 Together with “daily life,” it designated a lifestyle that was not just a gauge of middle-class identity but also a fantasy of enlightened cosmopolitanism. Reform discourse since the 1890s had always tapped into people’s desire for a more ideal way of life. In the 1910s, calls for efficiency were cloaked in enticements toward a more leisurely, elegant, and even pleasurable lifestyle. They offered the promise of easy sophistication embodied in such phrases

47.  Morimoto Ko¯kichi, “Kekkon kaizo¯ ron,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, January 1922, 58. 48.  Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 14. See also Sand, House and Home, 204.

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as “easygoing daily life” (kan’i seikatsu, 簡易生活) and “simple life” (shinpuru raifu, シンプルライフ). In the 1920s, however, this vision of ideal living took on the added connotations of the international. “Culture” stood in for a fantasized set of values that were considered universal and shared mutually by Japan and the nations of the “West.” It was, moreover, attainable by means of the proper management of time and consumption. In a January 1923 article published by The Housewife’s Companion, Nagai Takeyo describes the way she “fundamentally renovated the form of her daily life (seikatsu yo¯shiki, 生活様式)” and achieved an “easygoing daily life” to set an example for other readers. She criticized those who, despite the fact that “society was progressing” and “civilization and science were being utilized on all fronts,” hold on to “primitive ways” with respect to the “daily life of the home (katei),” which she called the basis of all “our lives.” Nagai relates the way she and her husband moved to a smaller house and dismissed all but one maid. By managing a weekly schedule and streamlining her daily chores, she has been able to free up a few hours every day for herself. The purpose of such reforms, she writes, is to “liberate Japanese housewives from their miserable slave-like daily lives.” However, worried lest she waste the time she has made so much effort to save, she decides to use this time to start helping her sister, who lives in the United States, ship timesaving appliances to Japan. Thus, during her free time, she will do work that will help increase the nation’s efficiency.49 In this story, we see how the purpose of streamlining domestic practices, while purportedly to make time for rest and leisure, was really to increase social, and national, productivity. The language of daily life reform in the 1920s was also more explicitly tied to consumer culture and advertising than in the past. Pointing as it did to the West, “daily life reform” and “culture” designated a vision of life more aspirational than practical, more ideal than real, more about the production of desire than plans to achieve specific goals.50 This aspect of the reform language became evident as it eventually came to be employed in advertisements to sell mass-produced commodities such as pens and soap in the pages of the same periodicals that published articles on daily life reform.51

49.  Nagai Takeyo, “Kasei seiri no kagakuteki kenkyu¯: kan’i na seikatsu yo¯shiki ni yotte umidashita shufu no jikan,” Shufu no tomo, January 1923. 50.  Sand has argued that “culture” was rooted in an idea of European elite culture and as such provided a sense of space apart from Japanese mundaneness as well as a cosmopolitanism that escaped the confines of time and history. Sand, House and Home, 204–206. 51.  An advertisement for soap using the tag line “seikatsu kaizen,” or “daily life reform,” appears in the same newspaper as one of the installments of A Fool’s Love. Sand sees the commercial use of reform language like “culture” (bunka) as something that occurred after it had escaped the “institution of reform.” I would argue, however, that the discourse of daily life reform itself was from the

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The global framework of reform also inflected the recommendations aimed at women, adding a new urgency to the call for women to expand their interests but also generating a renewed interest in the ideas of love and marriage. There was a call for increased education for women, which, it was believed, would help expand their interests beyond their private domestic lives. Miyata Shu¯, for instance, writes about the need to build a society based on women’s love. However, for women’s love to fulfill this great mission, it must be enlarged and made universal through education.52 The social critic Nii Itaru promoted science education as way for women to “broaden their concerns beyond their private daily life and beyond the daily life of the family” toward the state of the human race. To accomplish this, women needed to deepen their knowledge and understanding of social institutions.53 Cooking, sewing, and raising children were now just one aspect of women’s duties. They now had to do their part in building an enlightened society and a “cultured daily life.” According to the theologian and women’s educator Ikue Takayuki, women had to be mothers of the household when indoors and mothers of society outdoors. The mothers of society, he explained, are those women who participate in and lead movements for world peace, social temperance, child protection, daily life reform, and women’s liberation.54 The virtues of progressive and enlightened living, it was believed, could also be inculcated through marriage reforms and the promotion of new ideas about love. Such discourses were, again, recapitulations of ideas advocated by Iwamoto Yoshiharu and others in the 1890s. These topics, however, were renewed in the 1920s through references to contemporary European feminists like George Sand and Ellen Key, lending them the necessary air of internationalism. Citing Sand and Key, British literary critic Honma Hisao writes of love as that which transcends the material borders of the physical body, that which spurs the desire of two independent people to become one. “Love,” he writes, “is the coincidence of body and spirit that is understood as the inseparable union of spirit and sensibility.”55 Another proponent of “lovism” (ren’ai shugi, 恋愛主義), as it would come to be called, was the writer and Bluestocking Society member Kamichika Ichiko. She envisioned a utopian society founded on love in which inequalities have been swept away, people are fair and rational, and relationships between the sexes are based on mutual respect and the acknowledgment of each other’s independence and

beginning exploiting the marketplace of cultural capital. It was thus natural for retailers to adopt this reform language from its inception. 52.  Miyata Shu¯, “Ai no bunka e,” Fujin ko¯ron, January 1922. 53.  Nii Itaru, “Futatsu no shiko¯,” Fujin ko¯ron, January 1922. 54.  Ikue Takayuki, “Bosei ai no kiso no ue ni,” Fujin ko¯ron, January 1922. 55.  Honma Hisao, “Shin seiteki do¯toku no jo¯ken,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, June 1923, 122.

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personal value. “The morals of an age that centered on subjugation,” she writes, “will give way to the morals of an age based on friendship and friendly love.”56 Lovism proposed to find the solutions to gender inequality and materialism in the humanist values of compassion and spiritual bonds. These new ideas about the nature and role of love in modern society went hand in hand with the new urgency to reform marriage. Morimoto Ko¯ kichi, a subscriber to lovism, demanded that marriage be based on personal love and mutual respect. In an article published in Chu¯ o¯ ko¯ron entitled “Arguments for the Reformation of Marriage,” Morimoto emphatically calls for the promotion of free, or “love,” marriages. This refers to marriages determined not by factors of economic exchange or family needs but by the free will of the two people involved.57 He advocated marriage based on mutual understanding, trust, and compassion, which he believed to be inherently part of human nature. Without feelings of mutual understanding, marriages were based purely on money, position, and houses. Such marriages caused frictions that in many cases led wives to commit suicide since the pressure fell disproportionately on women. The calls to reform marriage were directly tied to the larger projects of social reform. This was because the katei or household that would spring from such marriages was understood to be a microcosm or “miniature” (shukuzu, 縮図) of society. Morimoto wrote that, “Because the daily life of the household is a miniature of the daily life of society, the movement to reform society must begin in the laboratory of the home.”58 Insisting on free, love-based marriage was a way to begin dismantling the feudal patriarchal family system and introduce the values of democracy in society via the home. For the philosopher Nishishin Ichiro¯, the familial relationships—between mother and father, parent and child, or between siblings—were the “miniatures” of all moral relationships in society. Because the family was understood in an analogous rather than constitutional relation to society, private matters in the home became a matter of public concern. The home itself was rendered social; or, in the bombast typical of the reform rhetoric of the time, the family was the point of departure for the “moral daily life of all humanity.”59 The married couple, moreover, was the basis for this family. As a result, it was not the purpose of marriage to simply create this family; rather, marriage itself became a type of entryway into this more objective, public, and moral way of life.

56.  Kamichika Ichiko, “Do¯toku no gendai ni okeru itchi,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, June 1923, 104. 57.  Morimoto Ko¯kichi, “Kekkon kaizo¯ ron,” 60. 58. Ibid. 59.  Nishishin Ichiro¯, “Kekkon no shinri,” Kaizo¯, January 1922, 24.

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The rhetorical efforts to extol the virtues of ideal love also involved ardently rejecting what was considered its opposite—lust. Yokubo¯ (欲望, “lust” or “physical desire”) was in fact a much-discussed term in the liberal media of the early 1920s. For Honma, love was that which sanctified male-female relationships. Without it, they would be purely based on sexual play and prostitution.60 According to another critic, Sugimori Ko¯jiro¯, love was the “foundation from which all cultural activities draw their water,” whereas lust was the “passion for the other sex that blinds one and leads one to superficial pursuits of culture.”61 The repressive aspects of such highly idealistic postures were pointed out by critics such as the economist Hayashi Kimio. Influenced by Nietzschean thought, Hayashi argued that reformist utopianism denied the passions, the physical body, and the fact of one’s sexuality. Instead, he called for the acknowledgment of natural human urges toward sex, seizure, power, and destruction. The failure of the daily life reform movement, he believed, was in its denial of these basic truths about human nature and the consequent lack of an effort to reconcile them with society and morality. He declared that the unity of body and spirit that the partisans of lovism spouted was purely rhetorical and suggested that such idealistic visions of human relationships suppressed the darker part of human nature.62 In Hayashi’s criticism of lovism, we again find clear parallels between social discourse and assumptions supported by the language of the I-novel. The opposition of “love” and “lust” was central in Katai’s The Quilt. Tokio’s education of Yoshiko regarding new and ideal types of relationships, romantic ideas of love, and the importance of spiritual development are all couched in a structure of paternalistic and protective authority founded on repressed erotic desire. Tokio employs the language of progressivism to control his charge’s sexual freedoms and ensure the stability of his own (male) subjectivity. The protagonist’s conscientiousness in executing his duty to oversee, manage, and correct the liberal ways of the female college student he mentors reflects what can be seen as the paternalistic consciousness of daily life reformers threatened by unsanctioned expressions of female sexuality. The feminist anarchist Ito¯ Noe highlighted this element when she opined that the problem with social reform was with the educators themselves. She dismissed these leaders as mostly old men who were excessively concerned with women’s chastity.63 Daily life reform represented an

60.  Honma Hisao, “Shin seiteki do¯toku no jo¯ken.” 61.  Sugimori Ko¯jiro¯, “Konponteki ren’ai no hogo kaiho¯ oyobi seiyo¯,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, June 1923, 72–74. 62.  Hayashi Kimio, “Ningen no honno¯ to shakaikaizo¯ no kicho¯,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, August 1923. 63.  Ito¯ Noe, “Wazawai no ne wo nasu mono,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, June 1923, 82.

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intense concern about the sanctity of the family and the home as a space whose management had to reflect and emblemize the ideal forms of society and nation. This space privileged the spirit and denigrated the flesh. It was a space, moreover, that was based on a husband-wife relationship characterized by seamless communication and simpatico emotions. This sanctity of an orderly home based on love, moreover, was premised on the rejection of lust and the evacuation of sexual desire. If Katai saw the female college student in 1907 as the social figure who represented the newfound freedoms and opportunities for women as well as the social anxieties they provoked, the equivalent figure in the early 1920s was the café waitress. The café was a new type of entertainment establishment directly tied to modern culture that offered uniquely liberal opportunities for sexualized socialization between men and women—or most often between male customers and their waitresses. Café waitresses, for their part, played the role of flirtatious women, in some cases gaining popularity and fame through movies and newspaper articles. Partly because of its popular appeal, and partly because of the lack of required professional skills, waitressing was among the most popular occupations among newly employed women, and became a main avenue for women to achieve a modicum of economic independence. Miriam Silverberg has categorized the occupation of café waitress as a type of erotic labor. Their economic independence, ability to conclude their own employment contracts, and their control over their own sexuality set them apart from the prostitutes and women in government regulated pleasure quarters such as the Yoshiwara.64 But, Silverberg points out, a café waitress’s “income depended . . . on her own ability to marshal conceptions of the erotic and place them in the context of exchanged conversation, including culturally coded teasing or flirtation, gazes, and other practices of female-male engagement.”65 Because it became a site for the free invention and practice of eroticized social relationships between men and women, cafés and café waitresses, more so than licensed quarters and prostitutes, came to be viewed as oppositional to households and housewives.66 Indeed, a type of dialectical relationship existed between

64. Sheldon M. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 107. 65.  See Miriam Rom Silverberg, “The Cafe Waitress Serving Modern Japan,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 214. 66.  For a historical account of the shocking visit to the Yoshiwara Pleasure Quarters by members of the Bluestockings, including Hiratsuka Raicho¯, see Jan Bardsley, “The New Woman Meets the Geisha: The Politics of Pleasure in 1910s Japan” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, no. 29 (2012), http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue29/bardsley.htm.

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these two spaces and roles, a tension physically manifested in the ways wives and café waitresses were in a virtual competition for the time and attention of husbands. For example, columnists in women’s magazines warned housewives that getting into fights with their husbands could send them off to the café.67 While housewives in pursuit of a modern relationship with their husbands might look to the Western-style romantic relations practiced in cafés, they were also warned by magazines to eschew the airs of a café waitress and were thus barred from any type of eroticism.68 As “mothers of society,” women were to be sources of nurturing and reproduction to the exclusion of sexuality.69 At this point, it might become easier to see how Tanizaki’s engagement with the I-novel was simultaneously a direct confrontation with social discourses and the ideas they perpetuated about love, lust, marriage, and the home. Precisely at a time when the home was a central site for disseminating social reforms and a vehicle for ideological guidance—posited as the locus for love, ideal marriage, and true friendship—Tanizaki wrote a novel about a middle-class man who brings a café waitress into the space of the home to live as “friends” and then get married and lead a progressive life together. The transgression of bringing a café waitress into the home is legitimized, to himself and to others, through the language of modern marriage taken from the discourse of daily life reform. This language helped Jo¯ji cloak the sexuality and the commodified nature of their relationship through its ideals of education and spiritual cultivation. In this context, the connotations of the title itself become more clear. “A fool’s love,” or “the love of a fool”—where the word for “fool” (chijin, 痴人) also connotes a pervert, a deviant, or an obsessive—suggests the way the novel promises to address a key theme in contemporary social reform but within the framework of fetishistic desire. The novel promises to be a story about the perversion of love. Ultimately, Tanizaki wrote a novel about perverse activities in the home right at a time when prescriptions about practices in the home had reached peak intensity in the mass media, and the domestic space was being claimed by the national interest as never before. The novel assimilates the language of daily life reform but does so to subvert the ideologies it represented.

67. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 153. 68. Ibid. 69.  This bifurcation between wife/lover or mother/temptress, and the way they were mapped across the space of the home versus the public, has roots in early modern Japan. For an analysis of concepts of femininity or “female-likeness” and the gendered division of space in the Tokugawa period, see Jennifer Robertson. “The Shingaku Woman: Straight from the Heart,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein, 88–107. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

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The discourse of daily life can be understood as a national ideology. To be sure, the Ministry of Education was just one player in a “collaboration” between government and a diverse set of actors in middle-class society.70 Moreover, the parties involved were not always ideologically motivated but were oftentimes simply interested in promoting their own private causes. However, the lack of ideological intention does not necessarily mean the language itself was not ideological. Carol Gluck argues that while sources might not consciously propound a civic view, they might indeed express one. “Ostensibly ‘non-ideological’ sources,” she writes, “help to situate the civic roles being urged on the people in the context of the rest of their social life, surrounding data of ideological consciousness with the ideas and values that continually competed, reinforced, and conflicted with them.”71 Whatever the specific interest, the language itself expressed and spread an ideology defined by the attempt to establish a community consciousness that would encompass Japanese society as a whole. Despite the plurality of its contributors and the diversity of their intentions, the discourse of daily life as a whole sought to make people, and especially women, more civically conscious in the practices of consumption. The suggestions were practical and the reasoning very rational, but they were also comprehensive and exhaustive in dealing with the individual’s daily habits. The president of Japan Women’s University, Aso¯ Sho¯zo¯, remarked that “the modern government has intruded all the way into our kitchens and has now begun to go so far as to manage our miso and soy sauce.”72 These recommendations were also tied to the need for a cultural change that was urgently if only vaguely associated with the fate of the nation. While many of the reforms were highly prescriptive and rational, their purpose was not aimed at any measurable standard or quota. Encouraging people to bring the nation’s production efficiency closer to that of the United States meant very little. It seemed to have concrete ramifications but in reality said nothing specific, except to be more efficient and thereby generally raise the efficiency of society. The reforms were less about quantifiable results and more about making ordinary citizens more conscientious of society and the nation in their daily habits. Only under the influence of daily life reform could one connect the way one boils an egg with the interests of society as a whole. Overall, daily life reform was an effort to direct people’s energies and activities toward the interests of society through concrete recommendations that formed

70. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 18–19. 71. Gluck, Modern Myths, 15. 72.  Aso¯ Sho¯zo¯, “Bosei ai no kakucho¯teki jitsugen,” Fujin ko¯ron, January 1922.

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a comprehensive prescription for how to live one’s life. By inculcating principles of rationality and efficiency in the practices of consumption and quotidian habits in the home, daily life reform, more than trying to attain a certain goal or even disseminate a certain philosophy, strove to instill a consciousness of civic unity founded on the exigencies of modernization. In doing so, it designated a set of ideas that oriented the position and roles of individuals within their social realities. If, as Louis Althusser defines it, ideology is “the imaginary relation of . . . individuals to the real relations in which they live,” then “daily life” was a way for Japanese people to talk about and define the lived relationship between people and their society, people and their state.73 Thus, the word “daily life” began to proliferate as a modifier for myriad aspects of social life: kekkon seikatsu (the daily life of marriage), kazoku seikatsu (the daily life of the family), kanjo¯ seikatsu (emotional daily life), or kokumin seikatsu (the daily life of the national subject). However, instead of indicating the daily practices associated with the given subject, it denoted the scope of that subject as it related, as a matter of practice, to the social totality. The meaning of kaizen in seikatsu kaizen (“daily life reform”) was to adjust and improve, not to renovate or reshape. Therefore, implicit in the phrase was the assumption that its objective, the creation of a social fabric, was already there from the start. The term “daily life” (seikatsu) was in effect transformed through the rhetoric of daily life reform. That which had once indicated the dissolution of an abstractly conceived social totality into a plurality of practices left up to the agency of individuals began, instead, to refer to a group of practices that constituted that social totality. Here, we can detect the central contradiction inherent in the talk about daily life and the purported need to reform it. The exhortations made under the banner of “daily life” to flout tradition and seek new modern forms of daily life were circumscribed by an effort to impose a sense of national solidarity and civic consciousness. While “daily life” marked a newfound fluidity, variability, and liberation in the way one lived, in the media the term heralded a sprawling set of new recommendations, exhortations, and prescriptions surrounding the way one lived. This was the contradiction that A Fool’s Love would ultimately expose. Written as a faux I-novel, A Fool’s Love adopts the stance of a confessional, self-reflective, rehabilitating narrative but utilizes that stance as a vehicle to perversely set down a narrative of personal pleasure and private play. However, this subversion of a literary form and its expectations was conducted in the context of the social discourses of the time. Just as its sensuality undermines and exposes the

73.  Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 155.

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contradictions inherent in the pretenses of transparent and confessional narrative, the novel also subverts and displaces the contradictions and pretenses inherent in the progressivism of daily life discourse. With this overlap in mind, we can begin to read the novel’s critique within the interface it contains not between plot and social history but between narrative discourse and social language.

Linguistic Perversion and the Modernist Novel Recognizing how the subversive strategy of Tanizaki’s novel operates not on the level of plot but on the level of language is essential to perceiving its modernist critique. The novel is just as much a drama of language as it is a performance of theater. The story is rife enough with unseemly acts and aberrant behavior. But the novel’s true perversity lies in the way these deeds are clothed in the language of progressive social reform. Toward the beginning of the novel, Jo¯ji the narrator explains to his audience what his motivations were for taking Naomi in: Far more appealing to me than establishing a formal home was the idea of living brightly and cheerfully in a single house, making that young girl my friend and watching day and night the way she developed. In other words, Naomi and I would innocently and carelessly play house. Nothing like that bothersome idea of “having a household,” we would lead an easygoing la vie simple.74 This was my hope. Actually, in the “home” of today’s Japan, you must have wardrobes, hibachis, and zabutons all in their proper places, the work of the wife, the husband, and the maid are rigidly divided, and obligations to neighbors and family members are always annoying, forcing you to incur wasteful costs. Things that can be handled easily become complicated and constricting. To a young salary man it holds not the slightest pleasure and is not good in the least. (8) As we can see from the survey of social discourses above, the language employed in this passage invokes themes—domestic arrangements and practices, marriage,

74.  The phrase la vie simple comes from the title of a French Protestant tract, written by Charles Wagner in 1894, that advocates frugality in one’s daily habits as a way to restore sincerity in one’s life. A 1904 English translation of it became a bestseller in the United States and was likely the source of a 1913 Japanese translation undertaken by the Ministry of Education. The phrase, which appeared either in katakana (シンプルライフ), as it does in this passage, or in translated form as tanjun seikatsu (“simple daily life”) or kan’i seikatsu (“easygoing daily life”), was taken up by social reformers as a way to advocate for a more modern and Western way of life.

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love, friendship, maids, and labor—that were central to the discourse of middleclass reform that had existed at least since the late Meiji period but reached a peak in the early 1920s. We also find here a picture of the couple’s “daily life”—a key concept in the Taisho¯ period that ties many of these themes together. Perhaps most striking in this passage is the way Jo¯ji’s immodest aim to watch Naomi day and night as she grows up is couched in the language of childlike and idyllic leisure, freedom, and amusement, characterized by the phrase “play house.” The tension between Jo¯ji’s playfully erotic desire and the language of middle-class social reform used to convey it is key to understanding the novel’s scandalous nature—an outrageousness that should be traced not through its elusive sexual content but through its ubiquitous subversion of social language. The social critique in A Fool’s Love has often been understood in terms of its scandalous recalcitrance toward the social norms of middle-class Taisho¯ society. Because of the novel’s relevance to contemporary issues, the indulgent, erotic, deviant life revealed in the confessional narrative is read as defying bourgeois morality. Jo¯ji, and especially Naomi, become agents of transgression who symbolize elements of socially sublimated fears and anxieties. Nakamura Kan, for instance, argued early on that Jo¯ji and Naomi’s domestic life represents a space of defiance against a “modern social system that has sought to manage the female body as a reproductive resource through the system of daily life.” In this way, the novel “overturns the system of daily life.” Central to the operation of subversion is the way the aesthetic sphere is masked by a veneer of social living. “The secret to Jo¯ji’s life of aestheticism,” Nakamura writes, “is that it is firmly encased within the appearance of ‘daily life’.”75 “Encasement” in this case is represented by the physical space of the home. However, the nexus identified above between the form and language of the confessional I-novel and the rhetoric of social reform shows how the “system of daily life” Nakamura theorizes indeed had a literal linguistic manifestation. The exterior of social norms, or “daily life,” is a product of not merely being in the home (a matter of plot on its surface) but of assimilating the actual language of “daily life,” a discourse fixated on domestic space. A Fool’s Love, it can be said, is a tale of “daily life.” Most of the story takes place in a house and involves activities and relations that coincide almost exactly with the concrete manifestations of daily life as conceived by the Daily Life Reform League: “food, clothing, housing, and social relations.” These were the aspects of living that had become a subject of almost obsessive concern by government

75.  Nakamura Kan, ‘Chijin’ no katari, 167–169.

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bureaucrats, educators, journalists, and middle-class social reformers. These were the activities around which “ostentation” needed to be “banished.” They were the activities that needed to be made “more rational” as a means of “amending ways of daily life.” The novel’s plot traces the discursive contours of the katei versus the ie, the former being the social institution that lay at the heart of the concept of daily life and the domestic space targeted by daily life reform. The son of a farming family, Jo¯ji was spared the ancestral obligations of the ie by a brother who assumed the burden. This frees him to pursue a life in Tokyo as a white-collar salary man (an engineer, to be precise) and have a disposable income for himself. Jo¯ji falls in love with Naomi because of the fantasy she enables of a new progressive way of life. The dramatic moment when Jo¯ji contemplates leaving Naomi behind happens when he returns to his family home for his mother’s funeral. Nishikawa explains that the ie and katei systems in reality existed side by side, the former serving as a type of private social security system for the latter. Those who tried and failed to make it on their own and establish their own katei could return to the protection of the ie.76 Following these outlines, Jo¯ji’s near rehabilitation and potential for reintegration into society take the form of him forsaking the failed project of the katei and retreating to the more conservative parent/child-, ancestor/ descendent-based structure of the ie. Ultimately, of course, Jo¯ji chooses the liberated husband-and-wife structure of the katei. As if to drive the point home, Tanizaki has Jo¯ji mention that the new house they buy at the end and the luxurious life they lead is financed by the sale of Jo¯ji’s family home following the death of his mother. But the subversion, again, is a matter of language. The plot-based drama of katei versus ie is a conduit for the reformist language surrounding the katei. Jo¯ji does not want a “proper house.” Instead, he wants a “simple” and “easygoing” life, free of obligations toward neighbors. Moreover, with views on marriage that are “progressive and stylish,” Jo¯ji wants an arrangement that is “free and easy,” not one where the wife “take[s] care of him.” In sentiments that echo even Iwamoto’s conservative rhetoric, Jo¯ji describes his hopes of them becoming “friends,” equals who devote themselves to each other. Though Naomi is the object of the narrator’s obsession, a more primary concern of the narrative is the establishment and elaboration of their living experiment. The actual content of the novel comprises an account of their katei and all the daily activities that occur inside. Jo¯ji describes the home they purchase together as a “culture

76.  Nishikawa Yuko and Mariko Muro Yokokawa, “The Changing Form of Dwellings,” 33.

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house” (bunka ju¯taku, 文化住宅), a popular commodity in 1924 that signified a progressive, Western, enlightened form of dwelling: On the first floor, there was an immodestly large atelier, a very small foyer, and a kitchen. On the second floor were two rooms of fifty and seventy-five square feet each, but you could not easily make use of them as they were more like the storage spaces of an attic than actual bedrooms. In order to get to this attic space, you needed to climb a set of stairs that rose up from the atelier and then walk along a landing fitted with a banister. Like the balcony in a theater, the room was set up so that you could look down from the banisters upon the atelier. (20) The rooms of practical utility—the foyer, the kitchen, the bedrooms—are small and marginal to the main space of the atelier, which, visible from the balconylike stairs, in fact takes up both stories of the house. This atelier forms a large unstructured space of leisure, play, and creativity: Certainly, it was a good house for an easygoing man and young girl who wanted to live life playfully, and in any way possible unlike a household . . . As long as it were just the two of us, even that one single atelier would give us more than enough room for sleeping, waking, and eating. (21) The atelier’s utility is understood in terms of its capacity to permit a free and playful routine of “sleeping, waking, and eating,” verbs that conceptually structure the practice of daily living. It is, moreover, a place of privacy, shut off from the rest of society. It is in this room that Jo¯ji and Naomi enjoy another one of their playful pastimes: Naomi trying on clothes. Jo¯ji confesses to Naomi that he wants to “have clothing of different shapes made for her” and “day in and day out put her in and out of different clothes” (44). Jo¯ji refuses the Japanese kimono, saying it would not suit Naomi, who, Western-like in her appearance, must also be part of a new generation of more active women (44). Insisting that her clothes be original and eccentric, the two spend their Sundays going to major department stores, such as the Mitsukoshi and the Shirokiya, in search of fabrics. When those retailers are exhausted, they go to drapers, carpet stores, and places that sell business shirts and Western fabrics. Naomi is described as being put in and out of fabrics like a flower is put in and out of different vases. Much of the narrative discourse proceeds through a language of iterative and habitual actions: waking, sleeping, bathing, eating, dressing, playing, and purchasing, as well as teaching, learning, and dancing. These are the events through which Jo¯ji and Naomi’s relationship is represented. Jo¯ji keeps a photo journal in

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which he writes daily entries concerning Naomi’s physical development. We are told of Jo¯ji’s ritual bathing of Naomi in a Western-style bathtub and, in a vivid and sensational image, of their game of horse where Jo¯ji gets on all fours with Naomi on his back. Finally, the reader is informed early on of Jo¯ji’s salary of 150 yen, the often-exhausted fund that finances their trips to steakhouses, movie theaters, and eventually fabric stores for dresses. Overall, their relationship is formulated in terms of what they purchase, where they live, what they eat, and how they spend their time. Ultimately, what is scandalous in A Fool’s Love is not the couple’s behavior but the way it is enabled—or quite literally communicated—through the social language of daily life reform. The novel’s resistance is based on a perversion more linguistic than thematic. A Fool’s Love does not simply mime social tensions; it assimilates the very language of social reform and, by means of a faux I-novel narrative structure, undermines the communicative functions of that language, displacing the ideologies it supported. The novel’s critique is not represented in the drama of its plot but rooted in the dynamics of its language. Characters like Naomi are not agents of transgression but vehicles for the subversion of social language. By assimilating reform discourse into a narrative in which the intentions of progressivism and efficiency become an excuse, or rather a means, for a focus on pleasure and play, A Fool’s Love exploits and exposes the contradictions inherent in this language. The novel shows how recommendations for efficiency—helpful and useful at face value—contain implicit injunctions that secure the prerogatives of society and the nation, especially by means of disciplining women. Calls to liberate women from the crush of their domestic duties were embedded within larger anxieties concerning the choices they would make given their new freedoms in the ways they could spend their time and money. One supporter of daily life reform advocated economics lessons in girls’ schools so that women, who otherwise had no firsthand knowledge of making money, would not waste money.77 Iwaya Sazanami similarly couches a call for economics in an appeal to achieving an “easy life,” except this time the object of concern is time. “Instead of making substantial contributions to the state,” he writes, many homes will let the day pass “pointlessly without any type of order.” He calls on women to “lead a disciplined and orderly daily life within the home (katei seikatsu, 家庭生活).”78 Here, the fear was that the new freedoms associated with domestic practice would give way to overindulgence in behavior that did not serve society or the nation.

77.  “Shufu kaizo¯ no dai ichigi,” Seikatsu, January 1915. 78.  Iwaya Sazanami, “Kasei kairyo¯ to jikan no keizai,” Shin katei, April 1918.

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A Fool’s Love undermines the ubiquitous social discourse that was invested in corralling the newfound freedoms associated with daily life into activities and habits that were in line with the interests of society and the state. The novel not only defies but disrupts the sense of social totality imposed by the ideologies perpetuated by daily life reform. It does this by first adopting the language of daily life reform and provisionally legitimizing the social fabric the language supports. However, the ideology of “daily life” is undermined in a process by which the reformist values of efficiency, rationality, and culture become facilitators not of productivity and civic mindedness but of private pleasure and sexual play. If social discourse had transformed the term seikatsu into a term of ideology, the novel restores it to its contingent form by displacing the ideological hold of that term. The grasping of critique in its linguistic manifestation is, however, only the first half of comprehending modernist literary practice. As the above example shows, we must also be able to read narrative discourse interchangeably with social language, i.e., to provisionally not distinguish between the two. It is only on the basis of this congruence that the formalist disruptions that operate within modernist texts gain their teeth. The warped textual representations of literary modernism, in other words, are not funhouse reflections of social reality but are distortions of the very language that constitutes that reality. Identifying this distinction allows us to see how modernist critique goes beyond simply satire but can indeed constitute direct assaults on ideologies of daily life. An analysis of the character Naomi demonstrates this point. In the novel, Jo¯ji’s desire to cultivate Naomi into a stylish, progressive, and cosmopolitan woman is articulated using the language of “culture” and Westernization that circulated in the mass media of the time. As Jo¯ji’s project begins to fall apart, however, the relationship is revealed to be based on the less virtuous motivations of physical lust, masochism, and economic exchange. Such a development hints at the novel’s critique vis-à-vis the social ideas of the West—namely, that the logic of consumption infused the ideologies of culture and Westernization in the 1920s. Michiko Suzuki, who has done pioneering work juxtaposing literary narratives against contemporary social discourse, has pointed out that Jo¯ji and Naomi’s relationship, based on “clear economic exchange,” undermines the public discourse presenting marriage as a union of “body and soul.”79 The sexual and economic basis of their marriage, she writes, “questions the naïve idea of transcendence of power differences between the sexes.” Suzuki ultimately

79.  Michiko Suzuki, “Progress and Love Marriage: Rereading Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯’s ‘Chijin no ai’,” Journal of Japanese Studies 31, no. 2 (2005): 372.

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argues that through this arrangement, the novel “twists, distorts, and plays with [the model of marriage], parodying and problematizing it.”80 This critical function in the novel can be extended more generally to the culture of progressivism driven by daily life reform. Despite Morimoto’s convictions about human nature and human rights, his calls for progressive social reform were rhetorically circumscribed and propelled by a consciousness of a race among nations vis-à-vis Europe and North America. Never far from any assertions about liberal values was the point that these values had been adopted in the West, and Japan needed to do likewise to compete. Women’s work must be respected because their work is respected in Western countries, and Japan must follow suit. The Japanese family needs to become democratic because families in the West are democratic, and Japan needs to catch up. At face value, this reasoning presents a paradox. There is a conflict between the humanistic idealism underscoring Morimoto’s arguments and the geopolitical pragmatism used to justify them. His condemnatory stance, for instance, on marriages based on socioeconomic exchanges between families was situated in a larger framework based on socioeconomic exchanges among nations. Based as it is on a careful survey of media discourse during this period, Suzuki’s work grasps the nature of the social ideas the novel responds to more specifically and accurately than any other critical work. In doing so, it does much in the way of uncovering and clarifying the novel’s skepticism toward the liberal progressivism of the day. In an analysis informed by a keen awareness of Tanizaki’s interest in linguistic materialism and his strategies of textual representation, Gregory Golley argues that Naomi herself is textually produced. Jo¯ji’s enchantment with Naomi begins when he notices that her name can be written not just in katakana phonetics but also in kanji characters and in the Roman alphabet.81 All three versions are reproduced textually on the page itself, indicating the way Naomi, and the social ideology she represents, is a textual production, not just for Jo¯ji but for the reader as well (see introduction for a full discussion). It is the interchangeability of these textual signs that catalyzes the visage of Jo¯ji’s dreams. Naomi is attractive because of her hybridity, her Western-ness. Golley concludes from this that the novel establishes Naomi as a “consumer item,” someone to be visually consumed by Jo¯ji and the reader, “the object of a depraved and pornographic obsession, an optical commodity in a photographically inflected web of consumption.”82 This contradiction in Naomi between ideal fantasy and object of visual consumption,

80.  Ibid., 374–375. 81. Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See, 88. 82.  Ibid., 106.

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Golley argues, draws attention to a similar contradiction in the ideology of culture, exposing the roots of this social fantasy in consumer logic. Naomi must be seen as a commodity herself, one that functions ultimately to subvert the humanistic values associated with bourgeois advocacy of Westernization and the progressive way of life. It is worth noting that Suzuki and Golley arrive at a similar conclusion—that the novel exposes the humanistic pretenses of Westernization and “culture”— but from opposite directions. Suzuki studies the context of surrounding media discourses while Golley examines the representational strategies of the text. However, a more accurate assessment of modernist critique, particularly as it occurs in Tanizaki’s novel, can be found in the intersection of these interpretative approaches, where representational strategy and media discourse are treated as one. The true critical potential of Tanizaki’s modernist text lies in a strategy that brings history and narrative together in a more direct and realworld way. Tanizaki does not merely explore the materialism of language at a symbolic level, thereby allegorically ironizing social tensions. Rather, the novel’s mode of representation engages social language itself in all its political realities. In this way, it draws the reader’s attention in a more concrete way to the materialism of social texts. To develop this point, and to arrive at the meeting point of these interpretive vectors, I turn to the earlier criticism of Komori Yo¯ichi, a critic for whom both Suzuki and Golley were no doubt providing necessary correctives. In his work on A Fool’s Love, Komori identifies a misogynistic narrative structure wherein the male narrator’s vision has power and control while the female is objectified, denied agency, often idealized, and fragmented into sexualized body parts. Jo¯ji’s narrative, employing the characteristics of the visual representation of women in classical Hollywood cinema, hides and suppresses “what could be thought of as the physical voice of the flesh-and-blood Naomi in reality.” He adds, moreover, that these visual codes of representation were in fact derived from the newspapers and magazines of 1920s popular culture. These media codes, he argues, contain an inherent gender bias against women—a bias based in ideologies of social evolution and modernization—and thus support what he terms “the narrative of the male gaze.” The sexism of these codes is not visible to many readers today, he suggests, because such codes still exist in contemporary mass media.83 Komori concludes, however, that the power reversal between Naomi and Jo¯ji that takes place toward the end of the novel signifies Jo¯ji’s abandonment of the

83.  Komori Yo¯ichi, “Tanizaki “Chijin no ai” kigo¯ronteki dokkai,” Mainichi Shinbun, September 13, 1986.

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male gaze and marks the point at which Jo¯ji sees the flesh-and-blood Naomi for the first time. In a later essay, Komori elaborates on this power reversal and the narrator’s abandonment of the male gaze, arguing that it potentially alters the reader’s sensibility. If the system of male visuality is adopted from the codes of society, then the reversal of these codes in the narrative enables readers to transcend the biased epistemological system in which they live.84 Komori’s argument that the novel, by abandoning the social codes it had assimilated, can alter the reader’s awareness represents an early articulation of the novel’s modernist structure and capacity. His effort, moreover, to use the novel to critique the writer’s society, and by extension our own, is also admirable and anticipates my own conclusions about modernist fiction. However, there are significant problems with Komori’s argument. Perhaps most glaring is his erroneous assumption that the social codes of 1920s Japan were overtly sexist. My survey above demonstrates the opposite—that the social discourse of the time, on its face, in fact championed the ideals of gender equality and women’s rights. In a more direct challenge, Ubukata Tomoko criticizes as too idealistic Komori’s conclusion that Jo¯ji relinquishes the male gaze and the gendered authority upon which it rests. If the male gaze that subjugates Naomi is built into the narration, she reasons, then the male gaze cannot be overturned without displacing the narration itself. Following Komori’s premises to their logical conclusion, she argues that because Jo¯ji never loses his narrative position, his subjugation of Naomi through visual desire remains intact.85 Komori’s argument nevertheless remains valuable for the way it touches on a critical intricacy in Tanizaki’s text. Namely, in identifying what he calls “the fleshand-blood Naomi in reality,” which is suppressed by the male gaze and social discourses produced by Jo¯ji’s narration, Komori identifies the presence of two different Naomis in the novel. Specifically, there is the Naomi of Jo¯ji’s fantasy and the real Naomi. Komori’s mistake is in positing the real Naomi as real, an assertion that conflicts with his own awareness of the operations of textual representation. If there is a “real Naomi” (i.e., a Naomi that is distinguished from the Naomi that Jo¯ji sees), then that Naomi must also be a product of narrative discourse. Implicit, perhaps, in Ubukata’s argument that Jo¯ji cannot possibly relinquish his narrative position is a more primary concern that the novel cannot possibly relinquish its operations of linguistic representation and somehow access the real Naomi for the first time.

84.  “Jissen to shite no tekusuto bunseki,” in Chi no ronri, ed. Kobayashi Yasuo (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1995), 262. 85.  Ubukata Tomoko, “‘Chijin’ no senryaku: Chijin no ai ni okeru jenda¯ no wakugumi,” Bungaku kenkyu¯ ronshu¯ 5 (1996).

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The presence of a “real” Naomi—a Naomi not circumscribed by Jo¯ji’s fantasy of her—complicates the politics of the drama. It allows for the possibility that Naomi the character has some agency in producing Jo¯ji’s fantasy of her. In the early parts of the novel, Naomi is frequently posing for Jo¯ji, self-consciously working to create the image he desires: “What do you think? If I do this, doesn’t my face look like a Westerner?” Saying things like this, Naomi would put on different expressions for me in front of the mirror.86 Even more pertinently, it indicates that Naomi has not been effaced by the narrative discourse. It is not so much that Jo¯ji wants to suppress the “real” Naomi but that he is simply not interested in the “real” flesh-and-blood Naomi. Jo¯ji is not so much a misogynist as he is a fetishist. The visual process that Komori notes— that of Jo¯ji focusing on Naomi’s body parts as sexualized fragments—is typical of the way the desire for a part replaces the desire for the whole in fetishistic desire. Jo¯ji’s habit of idealizing Naomi into the image of Hollywood starlets is, moreover, an excellent example of the male gaze—but not the way it is often misconstrued as sexual objectification but as it was originally theorized by Laura Mulvey as an explanation for the pleasure of watching female starlets in Hollywood cinema. According to Mulvey, castration anxiety is dealt with by turning the represented female figure into a fetish object such that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. In this “fetishistic scopophilia,” the viewer “builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself.”87 Hence, what Tanizaki dramatizes is not so much pornography as scopophilia. But for Tanizaki/Jo¯ji, it is a type of “logophilia,” in that the word and the fantasy it produces is what is “satisfying in itself.” Thus, returning to Golley’s formulation, we might say that it is not so much the logic of commodity that Naomi’s character represents but the logic of the commodity fetish. The character Naomi does not just reveal the consumerism latent in ideas of culture but the fetishistic logic latent in the idea of the West. Just like Naomi, “the West” has, as Marx writes of the commodity fetish, “already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning.”88 But the novel exposes this process. If the first half

86.  Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, “Chijin no ai,” 43. 87.  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 64. 88.  Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 323.

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of the novel depicts the textual construction of the plain, “real” Naomi into the Western-like fantasy of Jo¯ji’s dreams, by the end of the novel, through a power reversal in which the “real” Naomi takes control over her own fantasy, the fantasy of Naomi becomes naturalized. She ceases to be a product of historical development and becomes a stable and natural form of social life that is only there to be interpreted and consumed. This trajectory within the narrative discourse reveals the same logic operating in notions of “culture” and the “West,” ideas that emerged from the exigencies of geopolitical competition but were transformed into natural forms of social life. By the 1920s, Japan—which previously understood itself as apart from, competing with, and antagonistic to Western nations—began to imagine itself as part of the “Western” order. Daily life reformers like Morimoto thus defined the domestic deficiencies of Japan against a newly imagined standard glossed as “culture.” “Culture” and the “West” thus functioned as natural social forms. Interrogating their historical character reveals the way they represented an inversion of a geopolitical relationship of competition into the domestic marketplace of reform. The quest for enlightenment and progress that they announced was a sublimation of national struggles for power and territory. The demands for the individual productivity and civic duty necessary for Japan’s international ambitions could be made using the language of love and personal cultivation. Like Naomi, terms such as “culture” and the “West” would seduce and circulate as commodities. Their historical character is rarely, if ever, impugned. Through its narrative operations, the novel makes us aware of the historicity behind what Gluck calls the “dichotomized distinction” in which a conceptual “East—West axis was laid over the landscape of modern Japan.” Such a critical angle demonstrates Tanizaki’s sophisticated awareness of the phenomenon of culture—specifically, its basis in desire and the mechanisms of representation. Rather than assume that this awareness simply petered out in Tanizaki’s subsequent years, as his move to the Kansai region stimulated a more naïve connection to Japanese traditional culture, the subtle but subversive aspects of A Fool’s Love give us reason to suspect that similar critiques of culture exist in his later works. Modernist strategies can certainly be detected in In Praise of Shadows, for instance, a work commonly understood as a full-throated panegyric to Japanese aesthetics. Identifying the critical strategies at work in A Fool’s Love—the novel thought to mark the turning point in Tanizaki’s “return to Japan”—can help cast that narrative in a different light. The transition did not renounce “the West” and embrace “Japan”; rather, it involved turning a subtle, ironic, and critical eye from the pleasurable and indulgent illusions that undergirded one social construct to those that supported the other.

¯’s A Fool’s Love     97 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro

As this discussion has shown, Tanizaki’s novel did not merely present scandalous material that piqued the prudishness of middle-class readers. Far more consequentially, it exposed and subverted some of the foundational ideologies of middle-class identity, social cohesion, and national collectivity. The focal point of this negation, finally, is the character of Naomi, not as agent or objectified victim but as a site for assimilating and undermining the social discourse of daily life. By viewing and describing her and her body in the space of the home, the language of reform—so trained on the space of dwelling and domesticity—is invoked but then undone as it becomes a pretext for unbridled consumption, thriftless play, and Jo¯ji’s obsessive pleasure. In conclusion, I return to the scene at the beach. At this point, it is possible to attain a deeper understanding of why this scene would have been so provocative. It is the one scene, we might say, in which the “real” Naomi enters the stage of the narrative. Here, Naomi is outside the confines of the home and has temporarily escaped Jo¯ji’s protective and desiring eye. Though Jo¯ji first spies Naomi, it is she who discovers and then approaches him. She is in complete control of her body, her freedom, and her sexuality. Naomi is described as naked underneath her cloak, but what is exposed is not Naomi but all the pretexts of domesticity and spiritual cultivation that had covered her prior to this point. The pursuit of culture and Western enlightened living, it is revealed, has nothing to do with Naomi and everything to do with bourgeois desires and fantasies. The language of enlightened and efficient living, the progressive home, and the enshrinement of emotional communion—what Nakanishi terms “social conscience,” as represented in the Osaka Asahi Newspaper—is revealed to be a farce. Removing, as it does, the fig leaf provided by the language of middle-class reform, this scene can indeed be thought of as pornographic, to use Golley’s term. Here, however, the pornography is linguistic. What had previously been veiled by the socially endorsed language of middle-class progressivism was now plainly visible. Visible in the scene at the beach—where Naomi is sexually free in public, and Jo¯ji could not or perhaps did not care to stop it—is the contingency daily life discourse attempted to deny as well as the way it attempted to deny it. It was this pornography—the pornography of modernism—that had to be sanitized by state censors. Written in 1924, the novel contains a very slight mention of the massive earthquake that struck the Tokyo-Yokohama area in September of 1923. In describing the luxurious Yokohama home where he now lives with Naomi, Jo¯ji mentions that his house was virtually unscathed by the tremors that had levelled much of the city. The extent of the damage, he explains, was only a crack in the wall. The remaining chapters in this volume will consist of exploring the levelled city,

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so to speak, as the works of the next three writers deal with the earthquake and its repercussions much more substantially. The works of both Yokomitsu and Kawabata were written in response to the discourses of urban reconstruction that emerged in the wake of the national crisis. Hirabayashi herself was rounded up for socialist activities immediately after the earthquake and released on condition that she leave Tokyo. The narrator of her story, based on her own life experience, ends up in a hospital in Dalian, China, giving birth to the baby conceived around the time of the earthquake. In chapters 2 and 3, we will see how the discourses of daily life reform discussed above were inflected by the natural disaster to focus less on practices of material consumption and focus more on the spiritual imperatives of rebirth into a new ethnically pure and complete self.

Figure 2.  November 1919 cover of Kaizo ¯. The two subheadings read “Issue on the Shattering of the Current State of Daily Life” and “Theory for the Official Recognition of Labor Unions.” Source: Waseda University Library

Chapter 2 Subversions of Ethnicity in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Neo-Sensationist Writings

Of all the writers of modern Japanese fiction, Yokomitsu Riichi was the most self-consciously modernist in his style and agenda, explicitly foregrounding formalist strategies as a way to inaugurate not only a new literary aesthetics but a new way of life. Forming the neo-sensationist school, a coterie of young rebellious writers that included Kawabata Yasunari, Yokomitsu endeavored to pioneer an aesthetic for the modern age through the establishment of a new literary style. The scholarship to date on Yokomitsu and the neo-sensationist school he helped establish has identified different points of origin for his style and concerns. William Gardner has productively situated the neo-sensationist school among artistic movements around the globe that responded to largescale changes occurring within modernizing cities and nations around the world. He relates the literary works of this school to that of other twentieth-century artistic groups that registered the perceptual shocks of the modern city in a decade of cultural flux and social upheaval. For the Japanese, these shocks would have included encounters with Western technologies and radical changes in the structure and pace of everyday life.1 Yokomitsu himself was conscious of embedding his work, and the undertaking of the neo-sensationist school as a whole, within the broader

1.  William O. Gardner, “New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Films and Japanese Modernism,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 3 (2004): 60. 101

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context of the European avant-garde. Toward the end his essay, “The Theory of Neo-Sensation,” he writes: Futurism, cubism, expressionism, dadaism, symbolism, constructivism, and parts of realism, I recognize all of these as part of NeoSensationism . . . The Futurists, in their efforts to apply a simultaneity to the tempo of their images, affected a three-dimensional sensation, and they thus incorporate many cubist elements. [These writers] affect in us numerous complex sensations. The cubists, just as in Kawabata’s Short Story Collection, sought to do this not so much by making [the reader] forget the concept of time with respect to the progression of the plot but by grasping the nucleus of the self and having it take the mechanical form of the constructivists.2 In his explicit references to multiple schools of art, Yokomitsu was clearly attempting to situate the new wave of neo-sensationist Japanese writers into the context of the vanguard of European artistic movements, establishing a continuity in the literary production of the two regions. Seiji Lippit has understood Yokomitsu’s work to be more directly a response to the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake that struck Tokyo in September of 1923, about a year before the first publication of the neo-sensationist journal The Literary Age. The earthquake caused the conditions necessary for modernist writing to take place, he argued: “The disaster and its violent aftermath created a psychological shock that intensified the sense of rupture that was a necessary foundation of modernist literary practice.”3 Lippit explains that Yokomitsu’s “emphasis on corporeal sensation and on the representation of urban space,” his “reduction of external phenomena to fragmentary sense perception” signaled the “collapse of the intellect.”4 Yokomitsu’s style reflected not just the infrastructural devastation wrought by the seismic event but the cultural and psychological damage as well. While it is essential to locate the correspondences between Yokomitsu’s works and the European avant-garde in its response to modern technology or its reflection of catastrophic events, this focus also runs the risk of overlooking Yokomitsu’s critical agency with regard to his own contemporary society. It also leaves his work vulnerable to claims of imitation and unoriginality. Bolstered by prejudiced conceptions of Japanese culture as derivative of the cultures of the “West,” early

2.  Yokomitsu Riichi, Kankaku katsudo¯, 48. Hereafter cited in the text. 3. Lippit, Topographies, 25. 4.  Ibid., 82.

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critics panned the modernist movement in Japan as shallow and infantile.5 From a European point of view, Yokomitsu references so many avant-garde movements in his explanation of the neo-sensationist school that the movement itself seems to lose specificity and coherence. Such criticism derives not only from an implicit bias toward Western European history as primary, but also from a disregard of the Japanese local historical context. Though Yokomitsu’s linguistic innovations were undoubtedly related to the earthquake, understanding his texts as mere reflections of the damage and destruction misses the way in which his writing actively engaged with and critiqued contemporary society. As Astradur Eysteinsson warned: Positioning modernism parallel to the tumultuous aspects of modernity, however, can lead to an unproductive view of its semiotic practices. The changes that can be observed in modernist aesthetics, the disruptions and breaks with tradition that it seems to call for, do not directly reflect social modernity or lend us an immediate access to its distinctive qualities. Most of us do not experience modernity as a mode of disruption, however many disruptive historical events we may be aware of. I find it more to the point to see modernism as an attempt to interrupt the modernity that we live and understand as a social, if not “normal,” way of life.6 What is necessary in order to identify the critical function of Yokomitsu’s modernist works is a sense of the “social . . . ways of life” that these texts sought to disrupt. What is essential for a more accurate and nuanced understanding of Yokomitsu’s modernism is an accounting of the local society against which it lodged its critique. In this chapter, I bring this social context to bear by reading Yokomitsu’s modernist work through and against certain strands of social discourse that were prevalent in the mass media of the 1920s. I argue that his works were not just manifestations of global trends or reflections of historical crises, but direct critical engagements with their social contexts. While Yokomitsu and his coterie waged an explicit war against the literary style of the old guard, their linguistic innovations were simultaneously attempts to undermine social ideologies and the daily life they supported.

5.  In a critique that long determined Anglo-American views of Japanese modernism, Dennis Keene described one modernist poet as being “in a world of hearsay and ignorance.” Dennis Keene, Yokomitsu Riichi, Modernist (Columbia University Press, 1980), 62. 6. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 6.

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The chapter is split into three sections. In the first section, I examine Yokomitsu’s modernist manifesto, “The Theory of Neo-Sensation,” and argue that, more than a clever dalliance with Western European philosophy, the essay was in fact a pointed response to a treatise published by the writer Sato¯ Haruo that linked literature with Japanese ethnic nationalism. Sato¯’s ethnically essentialist aesthetics were rooted in a notion of “sensation” that Yokomitsu sought to undermine through his essay on “neo-sensation.” In the next section, I further contextualize Sato¯’s essay within a larger social reform discourse that, reacting to the ideological damage inflicted by the catastrophe of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake, sought to ground not only urban reconstruction, but daily life itself firmly into aspirations of spiritual purity and ethnic identity. This context allows us to more accurately grasp the critical agendas of Yokomitsu’s urban fiction, which I turn to in the final section. Through close readings of “Heads and Bellies” (1924) and “Ruthless City” (1924), I demonstrate how these works represented attempts to render the more complex phenomenology that Yokomitsu articulates in his “Theory of Neo-Sensation.” In doing so, these works defied the ideological claims of the urban reform discourse that Sato¯’s essay reflected. In both cases, understanding the sociolinguistic context for Yokomitu’s modernist works illuminates the way in which they represented disruptions of the daily life as defined by essentialist visions of Japanese ethnicity and urban development.

Yokomitsu’s “Theory of Neo-Sensation” It was not long after the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake in September of 1923 that Yokomitsu Riichi, already known for his ambitious experiments in prose style, began to produce a series of unorthodox short stories set in urban environments centered on the narration of complex subjective experience. In February of 1925, he wrote an essay, eventually titled “The Theory of Neo-Sensation,” in which he articulated the phenomenological theory that these works attempted to dramatize. Published in the inaugural issue of his coterie’s mouthpiece journal, The Literary Age, the essay would come to be regarded as the mission statement of not only this group of young writers, eventually regarded as the Neo-Sensationist School, but of the modernist literature movement as a whole. Denouncing the literary establishment and the culture it represented, the essay is written in dense recondite prose that borrows heavily from Kantian phenomenology. But this esoteric language was employed strategically to stage an attack on what he understood to be reductive models of aesthetics and daily life not just intellectually but materially through the very qualities of the essay’s language. In this sense, the essay can itself be regarded as a modernist text.

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Yokomitsu’s use of the term “sensation” immediately creates associations with contemporary modernist movements around the world and embeds his discourse within the cultural changes brought on by technological developments around the globe: mechanical mass production, communication technologies such as cable and radio, transportation technologies such as trains and automobiles, and media technologies such as film and the phonograph. The impact of these technologies was often apprehended in terms of a frenetic hastening in the pace of daily life, which led to new experiences or sensations. While Yokomitsu was no doubt responding on some level to these global currents, there were specific circumstances in 1920s Japan that made his interest in “sensation” more deliberate and less inevitable. In the conclusion of his essay, Yokomitsu writes that, “I’ve only been using this word because it is the right time and opportunity to use this word” (49). His employment of the term, in other words, was circumscribed by the time and place in which he used it. Though the term “sensation” (kankaku, 感覚) has varied uses and applications in Japanese, Yokomitsu’s heavy deployment of Kantian phenomenological language in his essay signals that he was using the term, on the most literal level, as it was used in Kant’s critical elaborations on cognitive processes. It was in 1921 that Iwanami Press published a complete Japanese translation by Amano Teiyu¯ of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kantian phenomenology enjoyed a certain popularity in Japan during the 1920s as part of a general interest in European intellectual history. Not only were Japanese university students absorbing Kantian philosophy through the original German, but some intellectuals were even traveling abroad to Germany to attend the lectures of neo-Kantian thinkers such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. These study-abroad students, one of whom was a good friend of Yokomitsu’s, brought these ideas back with them to Japan when they returned.7 Ultimately, despite the inaccessibility of Kant’s text, the Japanese translation of the Critique was heavily advertised in the pages of general interest magazines as a must-read book that was important for anyone seeking self-cultivation and the development of “character” (jinkaku, 人格).8 It might be said that Kantian thought and the issues of phenomenology that it brought to light was in vogue in 1920s Japan. But Yokomitsu’s interest in Kantian phenomenology was not part of a sustained intellectual concern. He had never engaged Kantian thought before writing this

7.  Masashi Inden has written in detail about Yokomitsu’s exposure to trends in neo-Kantian thought through a close colleague, Yura Testuji, who studied in Germany. See Inden Masashi, Kankaku to sonzai: Yokomitsu Riichi o meguru konkyo eno toi (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 2014). 8.  One advertisement claimed that it would help readers become a “true person who combines the sensibility of nature with historical culture” (Kaizo, May 1924).

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short but dense treatise, and he would never use it again afterwards. This suggests that his use of Kantian terminology, as meticulous at it was, was tied to the specific purpose of his essay. The treatise was essentially devoted to taking a basic model of cognition that he referred to as “sensation”—a model in which a pure subject observes a pure object—and complicating it into a more complex and dynamic model of cognition that he referred to as “neo-sensation” (shinkankaku, 新感覚). In neosensation, the two categories of the subject and the object can intermingle, i.e., an object can take on subjective associations, while subjective associations can themselves become objects of perception. His purpose in the essay, Yokomitsu summarizes, is to “first analyze the category of the objective form (kyakkanteki keishiki, 客観的形式), then analyze the category of the subjective form (shukanteki keishiki, 主観的形式), and then finally to discuss the operations of negotiation between the contents of these forms” (44). Mediating the “negotiation between the contents of these forms” are the two opposing faculties of sensibility (kansei, 感性; Sinnlichkeit) and understanding (gosei, 悟性; Verstand) (45). According to Kantian phenomenology, sensibility denotes the reception of physical and sensory perceptions, while understanding represents the active intellect and the power of reasoning and conception. During the process of cognition, there is a hand-off between the faculties of sensibility and understanding whereby sensibility provides the sensory matter that understanding then organizes and structures in order to produce signification. Yokomitsu articulates the added complexity of “Neo-sensation” by explaining that it involves “a difference in the object that manifests [itself] within an altered structure of sensibility” as well as “a difference in the subject [that is] characterized by a different quality of the understanding.” Simply put, in this model, the object of cognition is capable of including subjective elements, while the subjective cognitions themselves can become objects for further cognition. Now as to the difference between sensation and neo-sensation, neosensation refers to the sign of the material during sensible cognition affected by a subjective object [emphasis mine], which is to say that the object that is the affecting body is not just a pure object but a unified body that includes the formal illusions and the representational content of the general consciousness. Moreover, regarding the material for the affected sensible cognition, in the case of neo-sensational signs much more than with [just] sensational [signs], the work of understanding functions much more as a mechanical form. In other words . . . the difference between the two [sensation and neo-sensation] in terms of the

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affecting sensation is a difference in the form of the object and a difference in the work of the subject. (45) In neo-sensation, the pure object is replaced by the “subjective-object” (shukanteki kyakkan, 主観的客観), a category that includes the pure object, but also encompasses within it “representational content of either formal appearances (kasho¯ , 仮象) or the general consciousness” (45). In Kantian phenomenology, appearances (Schein) refer to the content of subjective representations, distinguished from phenomena, which are based on experience. What Yokomitsu theorizes is that the contents of appearances, those subjective associations and fantasies that we have concerning an object, are also included in the object and can be cognized by sensibility even though they are not strictly speaking sensory objects. The object now contains subjective elements, which is why he calls it the “subjective-object.” On the other hand, the category of the subject also changes as the workings of understanding begin to take on a “physical form” (rikigakuteki keishiki, 力学的形式) capable of “instigation” (shokuhatsu, 触発), or we might simply say signification (45). In other words, the workings of understanding in the process of cognition take on a physical quality that endows it with the objectlike capacity to instigate sensation. The workings of the mind can thus become similar to objects for further cognition. Though Yokomitsu does not say it explicitly it might be imagined that, within this model, the workings of understanding, as they take on a more “physical form,” become the “representational content of formal appearances” that make up the “subjective-object,” which manifests itself within the structure of sensibility. The system thus comes full circle: the processes of reasoning used to organize the sensory perceptions become themselves sensory perceptions available for further organization by the processes of reasoning. So that in fact the system is perhaps more spiral than circle, for the processes self-perpetuate ad infinitum. This describes well the cognitive entanglements in which Yokomitsu’s characters find themselves. Overall, one might sum up the theory of neo-sensation as broadening the categories of subject and object to account for a more dynamic and interactive relationship between them, completely undermining the underpinnings of the former model of sensation. If the former model of sensation privileged the status of the object, it might be more simply stated that Yokomitsu’s neo-sensation introduced elements of the subject into the target of cognition. As Yokomitsu wrote in the beginning of the essay: “All I have done is taken sensation as it has been applied up until now and changed the object of its instigation from an objective form to a subjective form” (44). Although the sophistication of this conceptual framework bespeaks a fair amount of rigor and precision in Yokomitsu’s employment of Kantian

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terminology, even novice scholars of Kantian philosophy would quickly perceive the significant discrepancies that exist between the way Yokomitsu uses this terminology and the way it was used by Kant. Tamamura Shu¯ identifies perhaps the main disparity, which is the way Yokomitsu ignores Kant’s essential distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, as indicated in his use of the term “thing-itself.”9 Yokomitsu writes: Now, what I call the concept of sensation, i.e., the sensational sign referred to by Neo-Sensationists, is in a word the affecting object of intuition associated with the subject that peels away the exterior of nature and dances into the thing-itself (mono jitai, 物自体). (44) The notion of a subjectivity entering into the “thing-itself ” violates a basic premise of Kant’s phenomenology; namely, that human cognition is not capable of perceiving the noumenal thing-itself, but only its manifestation within the phenomenal world. However, this is not the least of Yokomitsu’s departures. His use of the term “sensation,” for instance, is also very far from the specific role it plays within Kant’s system of thought as one of the intuitions belonging to sensibility. Instead, it functions more as a stand-in for signification, or cognition as it relates to literature. Perhaps the most fundamental difference is in fact that Yokomitsu was, as will be shown further below, primarily interested in literary signification, or the overlap between phenomenology and literary art. That is, he was ultimately more interested in language than he was in cognition. Though Tamamura critiques the discrepancies between Yokomitsu’s use of Kant’s phenomenology and Kant’s articulation of it, he also identifies points of sympathy. Like Kant, Yokomitsu was interested in the way the subject places many a priori cognitions into the object it cognizes. Tamamura ultimately contends that Yokomitsu’s discrepancies were not misreadings of Kant’s Critique so much as they were an “expansive and modern interpretation.”10 He sees Yokomitsu’s engagement not as an adaptation of Kantian philosophy but as a repurposing of his language toward the enactment of a type of revolution at home. Tamamura was defending Yokomitsu against accusations that his writing, and the movement that it represented, had “no ideological basis,” that neo-sensationist literature was nothing more than an academic and thus ineffectual dispute about linguistic expression.11 Tamamura maintains that Yokomitsu’s theory was instead aimed at the very practical goal of empowering people to change their daily lives.

  9.  Tamamura Shu¯, “Yokomitsu Riichi ni okeru ‘Shinkankaku’ riron: ‘Kankakukatsudo¯’ no kaishaku wo chu¯shin to shite,” Kokugo to kokubungaku, no. 9 (1978): 30–31. 10. Ibid. 11.  See Nakagawa Yoichi, “Shinkankakuha no undo¯,” Kindai Bungaku, no. 8 (1950).

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The neo-sensationist school, he argued, had social aims and interests beyond linguistic renovation. By forging new types of expression or new styles of literature, the group sought to achieve a new type of cognition and indeed create a new daily life. They were seeking, Tamamura writes, “in some shape or form a new cognition, a new way of life, a new humanity.”12 Tamamura’s insight that Yokomitsu’s project sought nothing less than a renovation of “daily life” is visionary, but hard to grasp concretely without a more clear conception of how and why the essay was socially subversive. It is necessary to recover its polemical thrust, a critical stance that has been obscured by futile and perhaps misconceived attempts to integrate Yokomitsu’s essay directly into the history of European intellectual thought. This picture can be completed by uncovering the way the term “sensation” (kankaku, 感覚), and the relatively more simplistic phenomenology it represented for Yokomitsu, was in fact operative within social discourses aimed at reconceiving “daily life” along the lines of an aesthetic and ethnic community. Yokomitsu’s essay was not an intellectual improvisation on philosophical discourse, but was designed as a vigorous polemic against this broader discourse of social reform that had emerged in the mass media in the wake of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. The full original title of the essay when it was published read, “The Practice of Sensation: A Rebuttal to the Criticism Aimed at the Practice of Sensation and Sensational Writings.” In the fourth section of the essay, entitled “The Sensationization of Daily Life,” Yokomitsu elaborates on the nature of the criticism he was inveighing against: There are critics who say to members of the Sensation Group that their sensation is ultimately an external make-up, like a coat of paint, because their sensationism does not emerge from the basic practices of their daily life. But such critics are uncritical people who cannot but conflate the sensationization of daily practices with the literary signification of sensation. So long as there are healthy and intelligent people among us, then it is dangerous for those calling themselves sensationists to conflate the sensationization of daily life with the literary signification of sensation. (46) The high level of abstraction in Yokomitsu’s language makes for a somewhat difficult translation, but the gist of his assertion is a warning against the tendency to confuse the “literary signification of sensation” (bungakuteki kankaku hyo¯cho¯, 文学的感覚表徴), what he himself is concerned with in his writings, with the

12.  Tamamura Shu¯, “Yokomitsu Riichi ni okeru ‘Shinkankaku’ riron,” 29.

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“sensationization of daily life” (seikatsu no kankaku-ka, 生活の感覚化), a simplification that he ascribes to his detractors. In more basic terms, Yokomitsu is insisting that people draw and maintain a distinction between sensation and daily life, between the realm of the aesthetics and the realm of the everyday. Though the latter should be impacted by the former, equating them would be reductive and “dangerous.” Yokomitsu is at pains to ward off efforts to draw overly literal connections between the aesthetics of art and the realities of daily life, and to recognize literature as a mode of representation that distilled and critiqued daily life but did not embody it.13 Although he does not name names, the critic that was doubtless foremost in his mind was the writer Sato¯ Haruo, who in a review of Yokomitsu’s neo-sensationist work “Ruthless City” panned the artistic innovation it represented as a superficial “coat of paint.”14 This short story will be discussed below. Yokomitsu’s engagement with Sato¯ and like-minded critics was not just a response to a harsh review, but a fulsome rejoinder to a larger aesthetic vision. Later in section 4, Yokomitsu identifies an emerging school of thought that his critics were associated with: If there were something that was denouncing and contradicting the Sensationist Group, it would be the dull minds of critics who treasure “fu¯ryu¯” as a relic of the past century. Fu¯ryu¯ ultimately refers to the sphere of coincidence between the sensation passed down from the manners of a previous age and the sensationization of the daily life of that age. (47) Yokomitsu draws a link between the effort to imbue the workings of everyday life with an aesthetic purpose to a nostalgic desire to connect the modern now with a nostalgic conception of the past. Fu¯ryu¯ (風流), roughly translated as “elegance” or “refinement,” was an aesthetic concept related to poetry and poetic criticism that dates back as far as the ninth century. But writers and critics had resurrected the term in the 1920s in an effort to define a concept of modern aesthetics that nonetheless preserved a connection to the Japanese past, and that could thereby provide a basis for prescribing the proper form of daily life for people living in contemporary Japan. Describing its advocates as obsequious followers of the culture of the past century, Yokomitsu was concerned that

13.  Yokomitsu is careful to note at one point in this essay that his use of the term “sensation” (kankaku) as it relates to literature is always meant as a shorthand for the “signification of sensation” (45). 14.  Sato¯ wrote: “lest [you have a stronger subjectivity], the new age [that neo-sensation represents] will be nothing more than a peculiar array of mechanisms or the painted coating of an exterior that is easy to peel off.” Sato¯ Haruo, “Bungei, Aki no Yonaga (2),” Ho¯chi Shinbun, September 14, 1924.

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fu¯ryu¯ collapsed the distinction between the type of phenomenology represented by the art of a past period with the phenomenology of daily life in the present time. The category of phenomenology became a site for the collapsing of art and daily life, which in turn enabled the collapsing of past and present. One way to understand Yokomitsu’s “Theory of Neo-Sensation” is to see it as an attempt to expand the category of phenomenology in such a way that this type of collapsing would be impossible. Sato¯ Haruo was one of the main proponents of this aesthetic theory. His treatise on the subject, “The Theory of ‘Fu¯ryu¯’,” was published in April of 1924, ten months prior to Yokomitsu’s publication of his “Theory of Neo-Sensation.” A reading of this essay will not only help clarify Yokomitsu’s motivation for insisting on literature being distinct from daily life. A thorough understanding of this piece is essential, I argue, for grasping the socially radical intentions behind Yokomitsu’s modernist manifesto. “The Theory of ‘Fu¯ryu¯’ ” articulated a system of perception rooted in classical Japanese literature and ethnicity. One of the ultimate objectives of the essay was to bring the practice of daily life in line with an ethnically rooted aesthetics, an argument moreover that hinged upon Sato¯’s usage of the concept “sensation.”15 Sato¯’s essay begins by demonstrating the relevance of classical concepts of Japanese aesthetics to the present day, arguing for the modern-day existence of concepts like fu¯ryu¯ and mono no aware (もののあわれ), another term of literary aesthetic criticism rooted in the poetics of premodern literature. Translated loosely as “the splendid ephemerality of things,” mono no aware was important for eighteenth-century scholars like Motoori Norinaga in defining Japanese aesthetics as a function of Japanese ethnicity. In Sato¯’s aesthetics, both these terms refer to the shock and sadness that arose in response to a coming into knowledge, a moment he places historically for Japan at the end of the Heian period (794 to 1185). Sato¯ expounds on a historical parable in which the ethnically pure Japanese culture, imbued with the poetic aesthetics of the Heian court, was introduced to foreign philosophies and religions such as Buddhism from China.16

15.  “ ‘Fu¯ryu¯’ ron,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, April 1924, 18. For an abbreviated reprint of this article, see “ ‘Fu¯ryu¯’ ron (sho¯),” in Kindai bungaku hyo¯ron taikei 6: Taisho¯-ki 3—Sho¯wa-ki 1, ed. Miyoshi Yukio (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1973). As Sato¯ explains in his prefatory remarks, “The Theory of ‘Fu¯ryu¯’ ” was written as a follow-up to a debate that took place between Sato¯ and other contemporary writers, including Tokuda Shu¯sei and Kume Masao, on the status of “fu¯ryu¯.” See: Sato¯ Haruo et al., “Shincho¯ gappyo¯kai: dai jyukkai—ni no so¯saku,” Shincho¯, March 1924. While the other writers argued that fu¯ryu¯ was a thing of the past, something fundamentally different from present day aesthetics, Sato¯ insisted that this aesthetic endured from Japan’s Heian period to the present. 16.  Sato¯ is playing fast and loose with historical facts. Buddhism in Japan dates back to at least the sixth century.

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This marked the point, he writes, when man came into consciousness; i.e., he became aware of his self and its distinction from nature. Out of this awareness grew a troubling duality in which nature is understood as “eternal and limitless,” while humans are understood by contrast to be temporal and minuscule. This, then, leads to the shocking and tragic realization that the self, humanity, and all the great works of civilization that humans have produced are all in fact part of this ephemeral and minuscule world. This is what Sato¯ describes as the beginning of knowledge.17 Fu¯ryu¯ was an aesthetic associated with this pain.18 However, it was, according to Sato¯, a “sensation” and not a philosophy or a religion. For this aesthetic could not be conceived or intellectualized, but rather it was merely felt and intuited. Though this was a historical narrative, Sato¯ traces an analogous development within the psychology of the modern individual. The sensation of fu¯ryu¯ is felt at the moment when one comes into consciousness, when one perceives the distinction between the self and the other, or between the minuscule self and eternal nature. Sato¯ describes this realization as a “sensation” (kankaku, 感覚),19 something that occurs naturally and effortlessly. While religions attempt to describe this realization, the sensation itself is instinctual and nonintellectual. The two processes, historical and psychological, are not distinct in Sato¯’s theory. In fact, the coming into consciousness of the modern-day individual is just the realization of the understanding that has come down from generations past and has been imprinted on the unconsciousness of the growing individual. Thus, sensation becomes a key term for Sato¯, who employs it to conceptually merge the aesthetics of the past with the experiences of the present in a moment of naïve and innocent intuition. Sato¯ uses this narrative to differentiate Japan from the rest of the civilized world.20 Other civilizations erected religions, philosophies, and arts as a way to escape from, reject, or compensate for this tragic realization of separation from nature. These represented attempts to either establish, in relation to eternal nature, some undying aspect of human effort or to reject reality altogether as a way to deny humanity’s inferiority to nature. Sato¯ names Walter Pater’s cult of the moment as an example of such an attempt: it aimed to establish an aesthetic world based upon the notion that within the moment, if only within the moment, one could compete with the eternal. All of these efforts, however, were ultimately nothing more than manifestations of the human will (ishi, 意志). While such

17.  Sato¯ Haruo, “ ‘Fu¯ryu¯’ ron,” 221–222. 18.  Ibid., 228. 19.  Ibid., 222–223. 20.  Ibid., 230.

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works of art, religions, and systems of thought represented valiant efforts, they could never actually reach a solution, becoming instead a cause of pain and suffering in human life. A life based on the “will” and “reason,” what Sato¯ called the labor or practice (katsudo¯, 活動) of life, would eventually become torturous in its vain attempts to escape or deny its status. Such a life makes us into “ferocious animals trapped in an unbreakable cage,” longing only for death. In Japan, by contrast, the development of sensation into religion and philosophy was arrested at birth and instead transformed into an aesthetic, the aesthetic of mono no aware, which painlessly established a space in which the moment and the eternal could be one. By pioneering a new poetic ground based on this recognition, the Japanese were able to gain gratification from their sadness and pessimism. This was painless because their sensation never reached the stage of religion or philosophy, in which the “will,” positive or negative, or “reason” became involved. This sensation, moreover, would develop not as a logic of the Buddhist religion, but as an artistic intoxication that would resolve the sadness and shock from the discovery of man’s separation from nature. Unlike the people of the West, Sato¯ explains, the ancestors of the Japanese discovered suddenly, innocently, and intuitively that humans were not opposed to nature, but could be embraced by it. This aesthetic, cultivated and passed down over the centuries, ultimately defines the poetic soul of the Japanese people.21 Sato¯ wrote: [Fu¯ryu¯] succeeded in capturing the moment of the exact merging between the subjective world and the objective world, or in other words that between man and nature, and it accurately depicted the stature of man at the moment in which he had been embraced by nature. It expressed humans not just as humans but as a human sphere that was completely coexisting with the universe.22 Here, in the articulation of the sensation of fu¯ryu¯ as a merging of the subject and the object, we begin to see the relationship between Sato¯’s ethnic essentialism and his phenomenology. Ultimately, Sato¯ is concerned with how this ethnically based aesthetic can become the basis for daily life through an embrace of this mode of perception. Sato¯ admired the poetic masters of the sixteenth century, such as Basho¯, for their achievement in making the whole of daily life into a matter of art by taking the ordinary and turning it into something aesthetic. Never doubting that daily life

21.  Ibid., 122–123. 22.  Ibid., 227.

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and art could be joined into one, they constructed this extreme way of life. For modern people as well, aesthetics must itself be a way of life, or a daily life (seikatsu, 生活), lest it become a matter of will. For this to happen, this aestheticism must become part of our senses. In the absence of will, we are able to perceive the beauty of a fragrance with a purified nose, which he calls the “heart-nose (shinbi, 心鼻),” and we see beauty with purified eyes, called “heart-eyes” (shingan, 心眼) (27). Sato¯ notes that he uses the term sensation because it articulates his belief that followers of the fu¯ryu¯ aesthetic can see feeling with the eyes, hear it with the ears, and touch it with the hands of their daily life. The term sensation functioned to secure fu¯ryu¯ as a matter of everyday life (nichijo¯ seikatsu, 日常生活), something that can be felt by modern people in the contemporary world. It involved the everyday physical sensations of sight, sound, smell, and touch. Sato¯ did not see this aesthetic as separate from daily life, but as a part of it; one might say that the achievement of fu¯ryu¯ implied the aestheticization of one’s everyday life.23 Thus, Sato¯’s essay, while explicitly about aesthetics, also put forth a model of how to define and establish one’s way of life. Though Sato¯’s does not associate fu¯ryu¯ with violence or death, his conception of it can clearly be seen as an early precursor of the aesthetics of fascism that Alan Tansman has identified as emerging most saliently in the 1930s. Tansman describes the 1930s as a period in which the “cosmopolitan liberalism— the elevation of atomized individual interests and personal cultivation through consumerism and culture . . .” had “lost ground to what was increasingly perceived to be a more organic social ethic: the political ideal of a comunitarian social order undergirded by a rhetoric of authenticity calling for a restoration of ‘Japaneseness.’ ”24 Sato¯’s essay is an example of how this tension was playing out even in the early 1920s, exposed perhaps by the cataclysm of the earthquake. Tansman himself associates Sato¯ Haruo with the many writers who became “entranced by new myths that had the power to seem not to be myths.” In what would be an apt description of what Sato¯ was trying to do through his theory of phenomenology, Tansman describes such writers as being fascinated by “beautiful objects into which one might submerge one’s subjectivity and thereby heal the fracture between self and the world.”25 At pains to call attention to the significance and importance of fascism as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon over and beyond its mere political manifestation, Tansman’s work suggests the stakes involved in Sato¯’s essay and Yokomitsu’s determination to subvert its ideologies.

23.  Ibid., 212–213. 24.  Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2009), 9. 25.  Ibid., 10.

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The study of Sato¯’s essay also provides an opportunity to further expand the possible definition of what Tansman understands as the language of fascism. For Sato¯’s emphasis on the lack of will and an a priori knowledge of truth is reflected in his argumentation, and even the very language of his prose. Sato¯’s style throughout the essay is colloquial and narrative, a style that he attributes more to the topic of the essay than to his own writerly voice. “The thoughts I have today have come about digressively and thus it will be easiest for me to express them digressively,” he explains, “I always love things that are easy and done according to nature—even when it comes to my prose.”26 Later, toward the end of the essay, Sato¯ again remarks on his own writing, claiming that he has “only been narrating as directly as possible, the truths just as [he has] felt them (kanzuru mama no jijitsu, 感ずるままの真実),” and that the writing style of the text had “nothing to do with [his] will.”27 Sato¯’s words invoke the authorial stance of the I-novelist who promises to write in as unaffected a manner as possible as way of guaranteeing the authenticity of the statement. The justifications for his ideas, moreover, are just as personal as the I-novel narration. He justifies the validity of his own claims through a reference to his own personal experience alone. He believes fu¯ryu¯ exists ultimately because he himself has felt it. Fu¯ryu¯ is based in the “fact,” he writes, “that there is something that hits my body or my breast with a certain force,” something “that I am unable to get from the Western arts.”28 His own essay, he contends, is an “exploration” and an “investigation” within himself of the “fu¯ryu¯ type feelings” that reside in all of us. “If I possessed no feelings of fu¯ryu¯,” he suggests, “then my ideas of fu¯ryu¯ would be nonsense.” I quote here a section at some length to convey a sense of the rhetoric that Sato¯ employs: Let me ask all of you. Have you never felt, from time to time, the ways of the world grow pale and the heart that clings to the self begin to leave you? At that moment have you never felt an emotion that’s hard to name—at least it appears to me as an emotion—one that made you think vaguely, “Ah, that must be the feeling of ‘sadness’ (sabishiori, さびしおり) that ancient people talked about. That must be aesthetic pathos (mononoaware, もののあわれ),” or something like that. It is a sad feeling but also a joyous one, joyous but still you would call it sad, a certain slight continuous strangeness, one that brought to your body an almost purifying rapture, or intoxication, or in some cases a quiet

26.  Sato¯ Haruo, “ ‘Fu¯ryu¯’ ron,” 203. 27.  Ibid., 218. 28.  Ibid., 204.

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passion. Have you never had a memory of gaining such a feeling from anything in the wild world? You must know that I am frustrated in not being able to express myself clearly. My way of explaining is utterly unclear. But if my manner of speaking is poor, do not get caught up on that. To respond, I would just want you to say “Ah! I’ve had that feeling before.” If not, there is no way I can keep on writing.29 The validity of Sato¯’s stance is supported only by the authority of his own subjective feelings. Because of this, Sato¯ states that he does not intend to force anybody into agreement with his views. He wants only to show “to all of you readers” that his argument comes “naturally” to him. But, in so doing, Sato¯ employs a rhetorical stance that continually disowns its rhetorical nature. For the persuasiveness of Sato¯’s writing is based on the assumption of a prior agreement, an emotional compatibility, between speaker and listener, writer and reader. The essayist implicitly demands agreement as a precondition for unfolding his argument about what is natural. It was the same type of transparent language that the I-novel had projected and that, as we shall see below, social reformers were using to articulate a new more authentic daily life. But Sato¯’s confidence also comes from his conviction that the feeling he talks about is rooted in ethnic and even national identity. “It is a feeling that is so second nature to all Japanese,” Sato¯ writes, “that they must understand what I am talking about even if I don’t express myself very clearly.”30 His definition of sensation is thus rooted in an idea of shared ethnic subjectivity that is assumed and thus never articulated. The essay simply invokes this shared ethnic experience and then goes about filling in what that common ethnicity consists of. Thus, disagreement with his ideas is impossible. A contrary viewpoint merely implies that you are not in sufficient sympathy with his feelings, or that you do not share the common identity that would permit a meaningful disagreement. In short, if you do not feel what he feels, then it is simply because you are not ethnically Japanese. If you are ethnically Japanese, you must feel what he feels. This understanding of one of the objects of Yokomitsu’s critique illuminates the critical thrust of his treatise, whose purpose was ultimately to overhaul the ethnically essentialist model of sensation that Sato¯ had developed in his “Theory of ‘Fu¯ryu¯’.” In response, Yokomitsu developed a theory of “neo-sensation” that assimilated and displaced this more simplistic model of “sensation.” The polemical import of the essay’s original title, “Practice of Sensation,” now becomes

29.  Ibid., 205. 30. Ibid.

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clear: “practice” (katsudo¯, 活動) was associated in Sato¯’s writing with “will” and “labor,” something antithetical to “sensation,” which was by contrast natural and instinctual. Yokomitsu attempts to reverse the creation of this antithesis, developing a model of phenomenology in which subjective projections and the “will” was incorporated within the process of perception referred to as sensation. Ultimately, Yokomitsu’s reconceptualization of “sensation” becomes a basis for him to overturn Sato¯’s system of phenomenology and reconstitute a distinction, or the possibility of negotiation, between literary aesthetics and the subject of daily life. The target of his linguistic strategies was not Kant per se, nor was it literary theory, but rather conceptions of social life. Yokomitsu was most concerned with the conflation of aesthetics and daily life that Sato¯ had established through his concept of fu¯ryu¯. Returning to the fourth section of Yokomitsu’s treatise, in which he critiques fu¯ryu¯, he writes: Fu¯ryu¯ is born . . . from the sphere of coincidence between the sensation possessed by the manners of a given period and the sensationization of the daily life of that period. Because of this, in comparison to the form of cognition that is a synthesis of understanding and sensibility [i.e., neo-sensation], fu¯ryu¯ is ultimately an independent synthesized form of cognition that prohibits analysis and that includes neither will, sensible intuition, or intuition. (47) It is noteworthy that in this treatise, Yokomitsu does not so much attack Sato¯’s conception of sensation as he displaces it, delineating its reductiveness by regarding it through his own more sophisticated system. If Yokomitsu conceives of sensation as a form of cognition that is a synthesis of both understanding and sensibility, sensation as conceived through fu¯ryu¯ is a form of cognition in which understanding and sensibility are collapsed, resulting in a process that is impossible to analyze. What remains is an inflexible set of perceptions, a set that does not permit subjective interaction, a set moreover established in fu¯ryu¯ through literary aesthetics that individuals are meant to indeed obliged to accept into their daily lives as a function of being within the Japanese ethnic community. The problem with fu¯ryu¯, Yokomitsu concluded, was that it claimed that literature ought to “sensationize daily life” and thereby establish a mode of perception by which people should live. (47) At the very least, Yokomitsu wrote, this would not lead to a more artistic daily life, as its advocates believed. Yokomitsu insisted that, “Literature itself should not, like fu¯ryu¯, desire the sensationization of daily life.” By “sensationization (kankaku-ka, 感覚化),” Yokomitsu refers to the limiting of perception within daily life to the realm of sensibility—i.e., the physical

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and sensory perceptions—to the exclusion of understanding, i.e., the active intellect and the power of reasoning and conception. He argued that “humans by definition pursue the practice of understanding, and we absolutely cannot allow the activity of the understanding to be fundamentally replaced by the activity of sensation.” Any theory of phenomenology had to allow for the contingency in which subjective associations affect and become incorporated into the sensibility, changing the nature of what was previously cognized. Yokomitsu sought to write a literature that interrupted attempts, that occurred in the language of other types of literary art, to (implicitly or explicitly) suppress the operations of the understanding in the name of establishing the supremacy of a sensibility. In such a stance, he was setting his sights directly at the assumptions of authority and authenticity implicit in the narrative conventions of the I-novel. Implicit in those narrative conventions, in other words, was the assumption that the phenomenology the novel supported was not only shared by its readers, but had claims to truth. The primary purpose of Yokomitsu’s prose was to cultivate an awareness of this more sophisticated process of cognition in his readers. The function of literature, he held, was to “lead our subjectivities toward ever deeper cognitions.” This deepening involves the shift from an essentialist perception, one based on “experiential cognition of that which is known,” to a “transcendental intuition that allows one to cognize that which is not yet known.” (49) Through their signification of neo-sensation, works of literature affect the reader by altering the reader’s perception, leading it toward a more sophisticated, nonessentialist phenomenology. Yokomitsu’s fundamental aim was the development of a society based on what he understood as a more stable “principle of individuality (kosei genri, 個性原理),” one that could be extended to a global scale: Works that compel our subjectivity to pursue ever deeper cognitions affect richer sensations in accordance with the depth of that pursuit. This is a sensation instigated when our subjectivity is tempted away from empirical cognition, which is based on the already known, toward the practice of cognition based on the unknown and mediated by a priori intuition. The works that I respect are those that contain sensations that lead us toward this deeper cognition. (49) For Yokomitsu, literature could potentially lead the individual to reject the conflation of literary aesthetics with essentialist notions of phenomenology in their own daily life. As Tamamura Shu¯ has argued, Yokomitsu and his school were not only aiming to initiate innovations in literary expression. Through the

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establishment of a new literary expression, “they were seeking in some shape or form a new cognition, a new way of life, a new humanity.” Tamamura concluded that the discrepancies between Yokomitsu’s use of Kantian terms and Kant’s own system of thought were not products of a misreading, but the result of an “expansive and modern interpretation” of Kant’s Critique (30–31). Now, however, we can be even more precise. These discrepancies do not indicate so much a loose interpretation as a different purpose. Yokomitsu was not so much interested in Kantian thought as he was in the possibilities for articulation concerning phenomenology that Kant’s terminology enabled. Toeda Hirokazu has written with respect to Yokomitsu’s reading of Japanese translations of foreign literature that it was not the foreign texts themselves that inspired him, but the new forms of Japanese that the translation of a foreign text occasioned: “Yokomitsu attempted to offer new worlds, terrains that could not be expressed with the language used in normal everyday life, by utilizing the unique style and expression that emerged from translations.”31 In the same way, the language of Kantian phenomenology enabled for Yokomitsu a certain type of expression that was not possible with the language of everyday life. Kantian terminology provided him with a level of abstraction with regard to the processes of perception that would allow him to eschew the vernacular, which was itself implicated in the type of essentialist phenomenology that Sato¯ advocated. Meanwhile, it enabled him to describe and articulate an entirely alternate model of perception. If Sato¯’s concept of sensation was expressed through the studied artlessness of the vernacular, then Yokomitsu’s reconceptualization was rendered in the recondite and scientific language of translated Kantian phenomenology. Or looked at slightly differently, Sato¯ was already employing a popular version of Kantian concepts to put a modern sheen onto his theory of literature and daily life. Yokomitsu, then, is not simply introducing an alternative vocabulary but is rather bringing some of the original rigor of Kant’s terms to bear upon the discussion. In either case, it is in this strategic employment of language to simultaneously assimilate and undermine the language of the vernacular and its ideological implications that the essay, though not strictly speaking fictional, employs a distinctly modernist textual strategy. Yokomitsu’s engagement with Sato¯’s theory and its claims upon daily life can be seen as an extension of the dynamic laid out in the previous chapter. There, I discussed daily life as a term that emerged from the conditions of a modernizing society. As social life becomes increasingly stripped of fixed social roles,

31.  Toeda Hirokazu, “Tenkyo no shiko¯sei: 1923, Yokomitsu Riichi no bundan to¯jo¯ki wo chu¯shin ni,” Kokugo to kokubungaku 87, no. 5 (2010): 97.

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predestined purposes, and a sense of a larger teleology, individual actions within that socio-cultural space take on a contingent aspect. Individual practices are in themselves radically free of predetermined meaning, or rather individuals are free to create the meanings and connotations for their own practices. Chapter 1 traced the ways in which mass media discourses, specifically the daily life reform movement, stepped into this void to define and determine these meanings for the middle-class population, and ultimately in a way that foregrounded national geopolitical interests. The catastrophe of the earthquake, if anything, prompted the redoubling of such efforts, expanding the compass of such endeavors to include not just habits of consumption but the sensuous relationships individuals had to their environment. Just as Tanizaki’s novel sought to disrupt these ideologies of daily life in order to reveal and recover some of its original contingency, so too was Yokomitsu keen on interrupting the efforts to organize and discipline individual phenomenology, to restore an apprehension of its original freedom and mercurial chaos. Sato¯’s treatise was only a highly articulate and well-thoughtout manifestation of the conservative rhetoric surrounding the self and daily life that circulated through the mass media of post-earthquake Japan. The following section will empirically examine this social discourse itself and trace ideologies it expressed. The final section of this chapter will return to Yokomitsu’s fiction to examine how the short stories written in the wake of the earthquake, as artistic implementations of his theory of neo-sensation, must be read as deliberate attempts to disrupt these ideologies.

Discourses of Urban Reform After the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake When the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake struck Japan on September 1, 1923, it not only razed large swaths of Tokyo and Yokohama, two of the country’s major metropolises, it also shook the very ideological foundations of the Japanese nation-state. Casualties exceeded 110,000, and damages have been estimated to have been over 6.5 billion yen.32 The fires that broke out after the quake were responsible for much of the death and destruction in Tokyo,33 and self-appointed vigilante groups massacred Koreans and socialists amid the anarchy that ensued. In addition to the mass destruction of buildings, bridges, and government offices, important sites of cultural infrastructure, including libraries, universities, and museums, were

32.  J. Charles Schencking, “The Great Kanto¯ Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 34, no. 2 (2008): 296. 33.  Ibid., 299–301.

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also reduced to rubble, giving citizens at the time the sense that the loss inflicted by the quake included not just lives and livelihoods but culture itself.34 The psychological impact of a natural disaster is intimately tied to the cultural significations of the location it strikes. Thus, one of the reasons for the deep psychological impact of the 1923 quake was its large-scale destruction of vast swaths of Tokyo, the nation’s capital. Tokyo was the political center of the country, but it also played an essential ideological role for the nation. It was the paragon of modernization, cultural advancement, and imperial power, all core tenets of Japan’s purpose and direction in a world of competing nations. In the immediate aftermath of the quake, Tokyo was suddenly rechristened the “imperial city” in the mass media, and the analogy of it being the “brain” or “head” of the nation was often employed in commentary that sought to both convey the seriousness of the damage and make appeals for the exigency of national mobilization and full-scale reconstruction. The damage wreaked by the quake, in other words, intercepted currents of discourse about civilization, culture, and national progress that had already been coursing through the spaces of that city. The earthquake seemed to both halt and reverse the advancements made in those efforts. Or more to the point it seemed to expose the utter deficiency and fraudulence of that national project. Though it was a natural disaster, the earthquake was never apprehended as merely an unfortunate catastrophe that beset a hapless nation. The calamity was internalized, the responsibility for it owned and projected back onto the national culture, instigating a full-scale indictment of everything that was thought to be wrong about the contemporary culture. On the one hand, the disaster and the damage it caused were blamed on the “feudal” building codes and inadequacies in the urban planning of Japanese cities. On the other, they were attributed to the deficiencies of humanity itself, rooted in a contemporary Japanese society that had become superficial and decadent as it indulged in lifestyles that were “profligate and luxurious” (shashi zeitaku, 奢侈贅沢). An analysis of the mainstream print media in the months and years that followed reveals that the earthquake had shattered the self-image of progress and advancement inherent in the national narrative and cast severe doubt on the success of Japan’s execution of the “civilization” (bunmeika, 文明化) project that had formed the core of its national ideology since the Meiji period. The sense of what had been lost and what was at fault would also serve to outline the content of what had to be restored and reformed. Thus, beyond just physical rebuilding, the crisis of the earthquake was met with discursive

34.  Watanabe Tetsuzo¯, “Fukkatsu e no michi,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, October 1923, 9.

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attempts to heal the ideological ruptures caused by the quake, reassert the project of rationalization, and further stabilize the relationship between the nation and its subjects. Government leaders, city planners, and architects were galvanized into projects to rebuild the city not to its previous state, but as a brandnew ideal city with bigger and cleaner parks and a more rational system of transportation than before. Alongside these calls for reconstruction, journalists, politicians, and academics called for a fundamental reconstruction of Japanese daily life (seikatsu, 生活) and the social values it upheld. Citizens were enjoined to give up their own selfish desires in the interest of the public good. Such calls had the idealistic intent of forging tighter, more cohesive social communities, but they also had a very literal manifestation, as large-scale infrastructural projects such as widening the roads and redistricting the city wards required many to give up their land. A survey of mass media articles shows, moreover, that concurrent with these calls for rebuilding a more rational city and encouraging the sacrifice of personal interests for civic needs was a more individual injunction to lead a more pure and spiritual life. The trials of the earthquake provided the people with an invaluable opportunity to doff the superficial clothes of civilization and return to their natural selves through a process of self-reflection. These efforts would result in the rebirth and restoration of a more direct and pure communication between individuals, a transformation that would become the foundation for the new society that reformers envisioned. Janet Borland has identified the way the earthquake “presented a significant opportunity to reorder Japanese society both on a physical and psychological level.”35 Educators, religious conservatives, and government officials attributed the lack of composure and the excessive chaos during the quake to the weak psyche in modern Japanese society. At the behest of the emperor, efforts were made through the Ministry of Education to “renew the people’s minds.”36 Borland touches on the way the language of infrastructural rebuilding would get mixed up with that of ideological reform in the exhortations to reconstruct the city. Significantly, none of these reform discourses was especially new. The movement for daily life reform, discussed in chapter 1, had been attempting to introduce practices of efficiency and a civic consciousness into the daily life of citizens since the beginning of the decade. Criticism of the deleterious effects of the “civilization” project, concerns about the lack of community within the city, and

35.  Janet Borland, “Capitalising on Catastrophe: Reinvigorating the Japanese State with Moral Values through Education following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake,” Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 4 (2006): 875. 36.  Ibid., 891.

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anxiety about the materialistic pursuits of urbanites were all part of the debates surrounding the symptoms of modernity that had been taking place for more than a decade. This debate was naturally rooted in the urban centers, Tokyo being chief among them. Finally, in the call for self-reflection and new societies based upon new selves and more sincere communication, one hears the distinct echoes of the I-novel discourse, as demonstrated by narratives like Shiga Naoya’s Wakai (See Introduction). Both Janet Borland and J. Charles Schencking have analyzed the way the devastation of the earthquake was seen and used by various leaders and commentators as a great opportunity for the furtherance of their previously established agendas for reform. Schencking demonstrates how many commentators interpreted the event as a “wake-up call” or a “divine punishment” in order to “admonish Japan’s subjects for leading what many elites believed were immoral, self-centered, and extravagant lifestyles and therefore contributing to the decline of the nation.” The crisis was “not only a unique, perhaps unparalleled opportunity to reconstruct Tokyo but a chance to arrest the perceived moral and ideological regress of Japan.”37 However, these pre-earthquake discourses of social reform were not merely precedents for those that occurred afterward. The image of opportunistic ideologues might suggest that those spouting this rhetoric before the earthquake used the catastrophe as chance to simply make their case again more forcefully. It would be more accurate to say that, like the ideologies of modernization and nation-building, these pre-earthquake discourses expressed the ideologies through which the earthquake was experienced and understood. It determined the deep psychological context in which the natural disaster occurred. It in this sense that the earthquake, with its death toll and its destruction of infrastructure and daily life, was more than just a catastrophic tragedy. It manifested itself as a radical disruption of the extant societal and national ideologies that had run through the metropolis. The destruction of the city was utterly inseparable from the anxieties and investments that reformist ideology had injected into that space and into those

37.  Schencking, “The Great Kanto¯ Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan,” 297. Under a similar framework, Schencking has also written about the failed reconstruction plans of then Home Minister Goto¯ Shinpei [“Catastrophe, Opportunism, Contestation: The Fractured Politics of Reconstructing Tokyo Following the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake of 1923,” Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 4 (2006).] and the way the language of war was used to galvanize the nation around reconstruction efforts [“1923 Tokyo as a Devastated War and Occupation Zone: The Catastrophe One Confronted in Post Earthquake Japan,” Japanese Studies 29, no. 1 (2009).]. For a full-length study on the relationship of ideology to earthquakes in Japan, see Gregory K. Clancey, Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

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structures. Not only was the incident cognized and interpreted in the context of these preexisting social discourses, but these same discourses were inflected and altered by the quake. They were also refashioned and reemployed with a vengeance, so to speak, in the wake of the crisis to determine the path forward. Only when accounting for the way the earthquake intercepted preexisting ideologies can we comprehend the reason why a natural disaster brought on such a wave of national self-loathing. Only by accounting for the way the earthquake inflected these preexisting ideologies can we accurately understand the historical impact of the crisis and the changes in society that it instigated. In what follows, I will examine these two developments by tracing two interrelated strands of social discourse that emerged in the wake of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. The first is the language with which the earthquake’s damage was interpreted and understood within the mass media. This rhetoric betrays the way the earthquake, centered as it was on the capital city, seriously challenged current ideologies of national cohesion. The tremors of the quake did not just destroy buildings and take lives, it shook the very structures of national identity, causing previously sublimated anxieties of ethnicity and empire to come to the surface. The second is the discourse of post-earthquake urban renewal efforts. In the wake of the earthquake’s challenge to national ideology, the reform efforts underway in the early 1920s redoubled, expanded, and deepened. The reform of daily life, for instance, which previously concerned itself with daily practices and habits of consumption, now focused more intensively on self-reflection and spiritual purity. At the same time, these exhortations for reform took on a tenor that was at once more urgent and also more literal as they were aligned with the project of rebuilding the fractured city. The successful rebirth of the nation was linked to the successful practice of self-reflection and the attainment of sincerity and purity. The integration of these two discourses, the reform of the city and the reform of the self, demonstrates how prescriptions of phenomenology, such as Sato¯’s formula for the way one should seek to experience daily life, were provoked by the earthquake and directly tied to what was perceived as the fate of the city, the nation, and the empire. The earthquake’s devastation was apprehended both as a human calamity and a great blow to the national project of civilization. Many critics at the time described the crisis as a literal setback in time. The educator and industrialist Watanabe Tetsuzo¯, for instance, wrote that “a hundred years of efforts by the national subjects [had] been extinguished in a matter of moments.” Rebuilding the culture that was lost would require at least ten to twenty years.38

38.  Watanabe Tetsuzo¯, “Fukkatsu e no michi,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, October 1923, 9.

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The social critic Sugimori Ko¯taro¯ described it as effectively reversing the course of Japanese civilization.39 Such language demonstrates the temporal framework of social evolution ideology through which the destruction of the earthquake was experienced. The destruction was conceived as bringing about a demotion of the nation’s status in its social progress and a loss of its favorable position within the race of nations. Under the survival of the fittest logic of the doctrines of progress and the race of nations, such a hit to the nation’s geopolitical rank was directly tied to its geopolitical fate. As such, it would be accurate to say that, psychologically speaking, the natural disaster posed nothing less than an existential threat to the nation itself. Yet it posed this threat not because of the mass destruction it wrought, but because of the way it interrupted and threatened to displace the ideologies of the nation that had held the polity together. In rousing the people in the wake of the quake, the Buddhist social critic Takashima Beiho¯ referred back to key historical moments of national consolidation. He recalled the spirit of the Meiji Restoration (1868) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), reminding his readers that the “unified nation” had had many such trials before, and urged them to now complete what he dubbed as the “Taisho¯ Restoration.”40 In his words, Takashima related the earthquake to historical moments when Japan had demonstrated coherence as a modern nation-state, when it achieved successful modernization, and took its place among the world’s powers. It was exactly this coherence, this achievement, and this place that the earthquake had cast into doubt. Notably, the earthquake was understood as a modern event. The publishing magnate Kikuchi Kan commented that, though he had read about disasters and great crises in history, he had never thought he would see such horrors “in the modern period.”41 His words suggest that such horrors were circumscribed within the imagination of a feudal time, a time before Japan had progressed in science and civilization. The shock of the earthquake, in other words, was that it had occurred within Japan’s modern history. Its threat, moreover, was its potential to send Japan back to that feudal period. The earthquake’s threat to the distinction between the feudal past and the modern present could also be seen in the way the rationale of “divine punishment” (tenken, 天譴) never took root in the more elite media. The literary critic Honma Hisao, for instance, lashed out against the notion that the earthquake was punishment for the moral decay of modern

39.  Sugimori Ko¯jiro¯, “Kokusaiteki kokuminteki oyobi zenshiminteki shakaika aru To¯kyo¯ wo tateyo,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, October 1923. 40.  Takashima Beiho¯, “Shin To¯kyo¯ no kensetsu to To¯kyo¯kko no iki,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, October 1923. 41.  Kikuchi Kan, “Saigo zakkan,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, October 1923, 118.

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society, insisting that the natural disaster was “simply the accidental mischief of nature, which had no will of its own.” To think otherwise, he continued, would be to indulge in anachronistic sentimentalism.42 He believed that the earthquake had brought to light social failings, but he sought to litigate these not as problem of morality but as problems of culture and nation. Because it had occurred within the modern era, the earthquake posed a problem for the discursive history of the modern nation. While it was compared to past earthquakes of historical record in pre-Meiji Japan, it was also compared to the modern-day earthquakes of other dominant nations such as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake in the United States, the 1906 Swansea Earthquake in Britain, or the 1908 Messina Earthquake in Italy. Rhetorically, the 1923 Great Kanto¯ Earthquake in Tokyo was being placed along the axes of Japanese premodern history and the modern history of “Western” nations. This language was locating Japan’s experience within the history of other powerful nations, mapping the Japanese event onto the matrix of Western history just when its place within that matrix was being radically challenged. Another notable attempt to find equivalence in the history of other “Western” nations consisted of comparisons to the Great War in Europe. The architect Okada Shin’ichiro¯ took the simple comparison a step further, writing that, while the quake’s damage in Japan may not have been as great as that inflicted by the four-year war, not even the Great War had caused so much damage in so short a time.43 Taken together, narratives of the earthquake balanced the need for equivalence with other powerful modern nations with need to delineate a historical development unique to Japan. Such motivations describe what Christopher Hill has identified as a central function of national history, i.e., “suturing the disjunction between the national particular and the systemic universal.”44 The need to resew these sutures is indicative of the way the earthquake had disrupted Japan’s national narrative. The earthquake’s threat to national narrative, moreover, is inseparable from the damage it caused to the capital city, Tokyo. Though the city of Yokohama, located about 17 miles southwest of Tokyo, was equally damaged by the tremors of the quake, it never played as large a role in the social discourse surrounding

42.  Honma Hisao, “Hansei to kibo¯,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, January 1924, 216. In this same article, discussed below, Honma would nonetheless encourage people to see the earthquake as an opportunity for self-reform. 43.  Okada Shin’ichiro¯, “Teito saikenron,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, October 1923, 71. Okada went so far as to claim that the earthquake that hit Japan, bigger than any war or any other natural disaster, was a “catastrophe . . . unheard of since the beginning of the human race.” Ibid. 44.  Christopher L. Hill, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 42.

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the earthquake. Tokyo was not just the center of government and the city with the largest concentration of businesses, museums, and universities; it was the center of social progress and technological advancement within the nation, the vanguard of the national project of civilization, and the symbol of the country’s imperial power. As a result, above and beyond the national infrastructure it supported, it also served an essential ideological role within the nation-state. This helps to explain how the earthquake, though its damage was limited in scope to large areas of Tokyo and Yokohama, was very quickly understood as a problem of the nation as a whole. In the assessments of the damage and the calls for reconstruction, Tokyo was frequently referred to as the “brain” or the “head” (to¯gai, 頭蓋) of the nation.45 This equivalence was also operative in the many voices advocating for the relocation or “return” of the capital (sento, 遷都) to Kyo¯to as a preliminary measure for reconstruction. It was too risky for the “head” of the nation, it was argued, to be rebuilt on seismically vulnerable ground. “It is not just the fear that the order of the entire state can be destroyed, or the greatness of the danger to life and resources,” wrote Watanabe Tetsuzo¯, one of the supporters for capital relocation. “Our main reason is the fear that the wellspring of culture for our entire country will be eradicated.”46 Written into the analogies of Tokyo as the “brain” of the nation and the proposals for capital relocation was the assumption that Tokyo was a keystone of the structures of national ideology and the source of the Japanese national identity. If the leveling of large parts of Japan’s capital was experienced in the context of the nation’s geopolitical ambitions, one highly suggestive consequence of this was the rechristening of the city almost immediately after the earthquake as the “Imperial City” (teito, 帝都), or the capital of the empire. The word itself dates back to at least the twefth century, denoting the city where the imperial palace was situated.47 But the archaic term was resurrected in the months after the earthquake and virtually became the official term for Tokyo in the mass media, beginning with the first newspaper reporting on the earthquake by the Osaka Asahi on September 2. In Chart 1 below, adapted from a histogram generated by the Ko¯seisha Database for Magazines and Periodicals, the word “imperial city” appears in the titles of magazine articles 177 times in 1923, and 66 times in 1924, compared with only 3 times in 1922. In 1923, all occurrences were in articles

45.  One example is Okada Shin’ichiro¯, “Teito saikenron,” 73. 46.  Watanabe Tetsuzo¯, “Fukkatsu e no michi,” 8. 47.  The city where the emperor was installed officially became Tokyo for the first time during the genesis of the modern Japanese nation-state in 1868. In fact, the name Tokyo itself, meaning “eastern capital,” denoted this shift as it replaced Edo as the name of the city at that time.

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Figure 2.1  Occurrences of “Imperial City” (teito, 帝都) in the Titles of Periodical Articles (1915–1935). Chart adapted from the data and histogram generated by the Complete Database for Japanese Magazine and Periodicals from the Meiji Era to the Present, accessed May 23, 2011. The second spike in the occurrences of the term in 1930 (108 occurrences) was caused by the nationally sponsored festival to celebrate the official end of earthquake reconstruction, which occurred on March 24, 1930. Much of the reform and reconstruction rhetoric that emerged in the wake of the earthquake was reprised in association with this event, which marked its completion. This festival is the focus of Chapter 3 and the discussion of Kawabata Yasunari’s novel, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa.

published between October and December, after the earthquake, clearly showing that the spike in the use of the term was a direct effect of the earthquake. In comprehending the full impact of the disaster, the city was apprehended in its full traditional, national, and colonial significance.48

48.  The term’s usage may have arisen from a literal apprehension of the city in crisis. Narita Ryu¯ichi has detailed the way in which the first reports of the earthquake came from Osaka because the Tokyo headquarters of the major newspapers had been destroyed. These reports were characterized

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Though the term “imperial city” did not in itself connote imperialism, the connotations of colonial power were apparent in the way it was being used at this juncture of Japanese history. By the 1920s, the Japanese Emperor was invested with authority over a large Japanese colonial empire. It was relatively recently, at the Washington Naval Conference in 1922, that Japan consolidated its colonies by having the Allied Powers recognize its interests in Manchuria and Mongolia. The rhetoric surrounding the use of this term made explicit the implications of Japan’s imperial status. Takashima Beiho¯, for example, in lamenting what was destroyed, referred to the “proud and glorious Greater Tokyo, the foremost capital of the East.”49 That terms like “imperial city” emerged immediately after the earthquake suggests that its employment was not deliberate, strategic, or politically motivated. Rather, such articulations of the city in its full symbolic value registered the full impact of the earthquake’s damage, touching on the vast psychological and ideological implications of the crisis. Alternately, the term’s usage could be indicative of a need to reassert the city’s function within the ideology of the nation at precisely the time when that ideology was being so radically challenged. A more visceral and violent way in which the earthquake externalized anxieties about empire and ethnicity was the brutal massacre of approximately 6,000 Koreans amidst rumors of arson, murder, and rioting in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe.50 Largescale migration of Koreans to Japan had begun in 1910 when Korea was annexed as part of the Japanese Empire. With the growth of industry after World War I, employers looked to Koreans as a source of cheap labor in textile mills, foundries, shipyards, and construction companies, leading to the appearance of Korean ghettos in the early 1920s.51 The official policy was that Koreans were, or could become, the same as Japanese simply by assimilating the language and culture. Kita Sadakichi, a historian who helped shape government policy, asserted that there were no ethnic or racial

by a birds-eye-view look from afar. The Osaka Asahi, for instance, hired an airplane to take aerial photographs of the city to assess the damage and then communicate the extent of that damage to the public. For this purpose, photographs were taken of the most representative sites of the city such as the Twelve Story Tower in Asakusa (see figure 3) and the Imperial Palace. The term “imperial city” appears in the headlines alongside these pictures. Narita Ryu¯ichi, “Kanto¯ daishinsai no metahisutorii no tame ni,” in Kindai toshi ku¯kan no bunka keiken (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003). 49.  Takashima Beiho¯, “Shin To¯kyo¯ no kensetsu to To¯kyo¯kko no iki.” 50. Jin-hee Lee, “The Enemy Within: Earthquake, Rumours, and Massacre in the Japanese Empire,” At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries 47 (2008): 188. 51.  Jeffrey Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan (Cambridge: Harvard East Asia Center, 2013), 124.

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differences between Koreans and Japanese. “If the Korean people can gradually assimilate in large numbers,” he wrote, “changing their language, manners, and customs . . . all distinction between them and us will be removed, and a single great and harmonious Japanese people will be realized.”52 The significant tensions hidden under the surface of such claims to sameness and harmony seemed to bubble up in the wake of the earthquake. Self-appointed vigilante police forces attempted to single out Koreans amid the crowds by forcing individuals to say Japanese words that were difficult for Korean speakers to pronounce, demanding that they recite the lyrics of the national anthem, or by identifying presumably distinctive physical features.53 The immediate effect of the earthquake, it seemed, was to dramatically heighten anxieties about Japanese ethnic and imperial identity. The parameters that defined what was lost in the earthquake’s destruction would become the parameters that defined what had to be rebuilt. Or perhaps it could equally be said that envisioning that which was to be rebuilt involved a projection into the past of that which had been lost. For the term “imperial city,” while emerging as a way to apprehend the damage of the city would be equally operative in the endeavor to rebuild the city, as evident from what would become the common way to refer to the rebuilding enterprise: “Imperial City Reconstruction” (teito fukko¯, 帝都復興). It was not just a city that had to be rebuilt but the imperial metropolis. The synecdoche of Tokyo for the entire nation and its position of imperial power among other nations would figure prominently in the clarion call to rebuild not just its infrastructure, but national culture itself, and to reassert Japan’s status as an advanced civilized nation. The need to rehabilitate the ideological foundations of the nation drove the goals of reconstruction beyond the recreation of the old city; what was needed was a new, ideal city that demonstrated the principles of civilized rationality and community more than ever before. The term “reconstruction” (fukko¯, 復興), while designating physical rebuilding, also had connotations of “revival” and “renaissance,” and thus captured perfectly the dual goals of infrastructural reconstruction and cultural rebirth. Honma Hisao, for instance, suggested that this “great tragedy” could be useful as an opportunity not only for the “reform of our future daily life” (wareware no seikatsu no kaizen, 吾々の生活の改善), but also the “rebirth of our current culture” (to¯rai bunka no fukko¯, 当来文化の復興).54 Okada also frequently

52.  Cited in ibid., 148. Kita Sadakichi, “Cho¯sen minzoku towa nanzo ya—nissen kankei wo ronzu,” Minzoku to rekishi I, no. 6 (June 1, 1919). 53.  Lee, “The Enemy Within,” 193. 54.  Honma Hisao, “Hansei to kibo¯,” 216.

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employed or reemployed the language of daily life reform (seikatsu kaizen, 生活改善) in his exhortations for reconstruction after the earthquake, writing: If it is possible for us to overcome this hardship and reconstruct a complete and total city of civilization then we can for the first time, as a nation full of promise, boast to the rest of the world and to future generations . . . We can yield a new city on the basis of this bitter experience and lead a new daily life.55 For Okada, the destruction of the material manifestation of daily life in the earthquake provided an unprecedented opportunity to start over from a new foundation. People now more than ever could no longer afford to buy things that were not simple, rational, and useful. Those suffering from “dual lives” (niju¯ seikatsu, 二重生活), i.e., inefficient lifestyles that demarcated work from leisure, would now give up that way of life altogether. It was a chance for people to separate themselves from their old lifestyles and build a new way of life for themselves from scratch.56 Moreover, this change would contribute to the construction of the new city. “It would be best to cut out and throw away the old customs that are filled with the complicated vanities of old Tokyo. Based on this, you will be able to preserve the energy needed for the construction of the new Tokyo.”57 Thus, the earthquake had not only created a clean slate that would greatly facilitate such a change in daily practices, but those new, more efficient and more rational practices would aid directly in the reconstruction of the city. Social reform, moreover, was now directly tied to the nation’s geopolitical rank, and thus its geopolitical fate. “Because our country occupies a superior position in the race of civilization,” Okada wrote, “Tokyo must be meaningfully reconstructed as a modern city . . . [if this does not happen] Japan will no longer be able to maintain its position of international dominance.”58 Alongside those calling for urban reconstruction and the reform of people’s attitudes toward their civil obligations, there was a group of social commentators that demanded that the target of reform be less society as a whole and more the individual self. While they agreed that the earthquake had exposed the decay in modern society and prompted a need for a renewed social community, they believed these goals depended on a more fundamental purification and rebirth of the self. Many of these reformers were writers themselves, and they employed

55.  Okada Shin’ichiro¯, “Teito saikenron,” 73. 56.  Ibid., 83. 57.  Ibid., 84. 58.  Ibid., 73.

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the language of the I-novel in articulating their prescriptions for social reform, self-criticism, and self-renewal. These critics, more than others, were concerned about shoring up the identity of Japanese ethnicity itself. One common thread among these critics was the conviction that infrastructural reform and social reorganization were incommensurate with the scope of the problem, unequal to the immensity of the experience that the earthquake had occasioned. In an article published in Kaizo¯ (Reconstruction) just one month after the earthquake in November of 1923, the poet and French literary critic Yoshie Kyo¯matsu critiqued the reconstruction effort as being too focused on material things. He acknowledged that buildings would need to be rebuilt, that monuments to the earthquake would need to be erected and preserved along with the writings of many authors. He understood that roads would need to be widened and paved, and that parks and public squares should be constructed for the people to have a place of respite. However, he argued, these types of reform would be insignificant without a more personal renewal. “This would be a revival, even a rebirth,” he wrote, “but at the same time, so long as you sustain the same condition of the heart, no matter what happens you must always perpetuate the same ugliness, the same ignorance, and the same short-sightedness.”59 According to Yoshie, the great tremors of the earthquake had “shed light upon the bottoms of the deepest valleys of our way of life (seikatsu, 生活) and awakened the deepest part of our consciousness, which had been asleep on those valley floors.”60 This realization made the people suddenly and startlingly aware of the ugliness of their customs. Like the other daily life reformers, Yoshie was concerned with changing social habits and customs, but he saw the impact of the earthquake and the reforms it prompted primarily in terms of human psychology and subjectivity. This sentiment was echoed by law professor Inoue Kinji, who published an article in the Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron (The Central Review) in May of the following year, questioning efforts initiated by government advisory groups to “revive the spirit.”61 Such efforts, he argued, amounted to wagging one’s finger at the decadent ways of the surfeited moderns. Such a response was simply inadequate to what he called the “precious physical experience” bestowed by the earthquake.62 Inoue felt the earthquake could be interpreted as a blessing because, despite the death and destruction it caused, it gave people a “direct

59.  Yoshie Kyo¯matsu, “Haikyo no kokoro,” Kaizo¯, November 1923, 266. 60.  Ibid., 265. 61.  Inoue Kinji, “Bunmei no muyu¯byo¯sha ni mukete saisei oyobi saiseijin no igi wo toku,” Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, May 1924, 65–66. 62.  Ibid., 66.

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sense of the physical experience that is the true reality of one’s daily life, or the interiority (naimensei, 内面性) of one’s daily life.” By putting people in touch with true reality, the earthquake had succeeded in making them aware of this lack of “interiority in their daily life.”63 According to Inoue, the reform and rebirth of the self was the only means by which to bring about revolutionary change in society: In order to develop the self externally, we must first deepen our interiority. In order to realize the utmost of the exterior way of life or the social way of life, we must always first make this achievement within ourselves. This must be an a priori condition. For this reason, the revolution of way of life can only be expected through a rebirth of the individual. That then would at the same time lead to the renewal of society as well as the entire human race.64 In other words, social and political revolutions would not suffice. External changes in one’s way of life—changes in the structures of labor or property— would not, he believed, bring about fundamental change. Contemporary movements for democracy or socialism were flawed, in his view, because they were not focused enough on the interiority of the individual. They would succeed only if they “derived more from the inner part of our way of life.” Real change would not occur through the work of leaders or groups but could only truly be achieved within the confines of the self and by the self. At the same time that “we ourselves are the objects of revolution,” he wrote, “we are also the agents of that reform.”65 Thus, for both Inoue and Yoshie, the earthquake served to put people in touch with a more fundamental part of themselves: for Yoshie, it was their deep consciousness, while for Inoue it was one’s own interiority. This demanded not just material reconstruction, but individual reformation. This deeper sense of self elicited a truth or purity that made one aware of the superficial ways in which one had been living. “As people for the first time are put face to face with the true reality of a completely naked human nature,” wrote Inoue, “what will be needed most of all is self-reflection (hansei, 反省).”66 The term self-reflection, one that would be used by many reformers during this period, referred to the activity of self-improvement through

63. Ibid. 64.  Ibid., 68. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid.

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self-criticism, repentance, or contrition, and served to focus the energies of reform reflexively upon the individual self. This reflexive aspect was central to the call for social reform. It was not a public call to reform the citizen or a theoretical effort to reimagine the individual within society, but a personal directive demanding that people look to and reform themselves. This was the reason, for example, that the literary critic and progressive social reformer Honma Hisao rejected the interpretation of the earthquake as divine punishment. He criticized the explanation for being unscientific, but the real reason he rejected it was because it encouraged an air of self-righteousness and externalized the need for reform. In fact, he was willing to accept the theory of divine punishment so long as the condemnation associated with it would be applied to the self, as an incitement to “self-reflection (jiko hansei, 自己反省).”67 Honma specifically wanted people to recognize the falseness inherent in their previous daily lives and pursue one that was more sincere and truthful: “What kind of daily life were we actually pursuing? With what kind of attitude towards our daily life were we passing the days? Were we not wearing the clothes of falseness? Were we not simply engaging in literary embellishment under the beautiful name of civilization? Had we not wrapped our bodies with the atmosphere of falsehoods, adulation, and frivolity? Instead of facing the world with an attitude of resolute seriousness, did we not approach everything with an attitude and feeling of easygoing-ness?”68 The term “self-reflection” was thus not just an invitation to think critically, but a moral critique of previous ways of life and a new prescription for how to live one’s life going forward. The motif of clothing and nakedness was often employed in articulating this critique and this prescription. What was needed in order to pursue a better way of life was to doff superficial clothing and return to nature and the nakedness of humanity. “Most important in this current situation,” Honma wrote, “is a bearing towards our way of life in which we take off the false clothes of civilization and return to the naturalness of humanity.”69 A new start from a completely new foundation of the self, he added, would be critical to the “revival” (fukko¯, 復興) and “rebuilding” of culture.70

67.  Honma Hisao, “Hansei to kibo¯,” 216. 68.  Ibid., 216–217. 69.  Ibid., 217. 70. Ibid.

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In employing terms like “self-reflection,” “interiority,” and “nature” (shizen, 自然), critics like Honma, Inoue, and Yoshie were in fact drawing upon the language of the I-novel in their articulations of social reform. As discussed in chapter 1, the genre typically featured a male first-person narrator who steadfastly records and recounts the superficial, perverse, or immoral pursuits of his past. Through the process of complete confession, the narrator not only gains selfknowledge and self-recognition, but also achieves an implicit absolution of his wrongs. In effect, by taking off all of one’s clothes, returning to nature, and standing before the world naked, one gains a mandate to start one’s life anew based on a new and more ethical identity. The writings of Honma, Inoue, and Yoshie demonstrate most explicitly the interchangeability between the discourse of the literary genre and the discourse of real social reform. In this discursive intersection, notions of personal reform intermingled with notions of urban reconstruction. Phrases like “reconstructing the foundations of the self ” illustrate how metaphors of urban reconstruction were employed in exhortations of self-renewal, while expressions like “rebirth of the city” demonstrate the way the personal scope of the I-novel narrative was simultaneously applied to the project of urban social rehabilitation. The paradigm of rebirth and renewal through self-exposure and self-critique was mapped onto society itself and used to shape and support an ideology of urban and national reconstruction. The creation of a new ideal city required contrition and the inward purification of individuals within society. The honesty and purity of one’s self and one’s way of life was intertwined with the purity and progress of the city. For the social reformers who focused on the individual, this reborn, pure self would be both the impetus and the basis for a new society. The reborn self, wrote Inoue, would become “a new foundation that would prescribe a new relationship between the individual and society, and by extension between people and the nation.”71 Inoue wrote of this new foundation as a new universal emotion of daily life (fuhenteki seikatsu kanjo¯, 普遍的生活感情) that would not only direct the internal world but would, through its role in the formation of the self, at the same time “project a single new model onto the outer world and all of human society.”72 If the new “universal emotion” provided the foundation of a new society, that which Inoue referred to as “responsibility” (sekinin, 責任) would be the basis on which a communal society would be established. “The consciousness of responsibility” was the basis for an ethical society. It ensured the structures of family, society, and nation, forming the “mast of the individual way of life,”

71.  Ibid., 67. 72.  Ibid., 68.

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providing the foundation for social progress, and serving as the glue that made possible the “joining of all people.”73 The idea of “responsibility” embodied the impulses of self-control and self-reflection that were the means of rebirth. Particularly significant, moreover, was the way in which “responsibility” functioned to ensure direct communication between people and between citizens. Inoue writes of it as “the strength that will make possible the direct exchange of spirit to spirit (shinrei, 心霊).” “Only through this means,” Inoue wrote,” could there be established within the interior relations between human beings a direct and essential unity.”74 Inoue’s call for rebirth and the deepening of the self was integral to the creation of a new society based on a direct internal sense of community in individuals. Unlike Inoue, who envisioned the new society as based on universal principles and functioning as a model for the world, critics like Yoshie and others understood social reformation more as a matter of national and ethnic identity. Which cultural value, Yoshie asked rhetorically, is the “true essence of Japanese people?” That of inimical competition or that of cooperative living? “Which is the basis for the construction of Japanese culture?”75 Yoshie decried the materialistic values of the “advance of civilization” and the “spread of culture.” He found fault with the way they encouraged a tendency to “always create enemies” and incited impulses toward “exclusion, domination, and conquest.”76 For Yoshie, the earthquake exposed the “cruel and unsightly blood-thirst” of a people who deep down harbor a “tearful and deep purity of a mutual aid and reciprocation.”77 Honma Hisao, despite his reliance upon progressive European thinkers such as Ellen Key, also understood the process of national renaissance as a return to an original and purely Japanese character. The challenges of reconstruction required that the Japanese rebel against their fatalistic and resigned tendencies by looking further back into their ancient literary tradition for more dynamic roots. Citing the nationalist literary critic Haga Yaichi, Honma wrote that, “at this time of a revival within all the fields of national culture, it is necessary for us to return to the bright and primal Japanese of the time before the coming of Buddhism.”

73.  Inoue Kinji, “Bunmei no muyu¯byo¯sha ni mukete saisei oyobi saiseijin no igi wo toku,” 69. 74.  Ibid. In his conception of a direct and pure communication as the basis for social structures such as the family, one can see the nexus between Inoue language and the language of I-novels like Shiga Naoya’s Wakai. As discussed in the introduction, that novel dramatized the reconciliation between father and son and by extension the entire extended family, through the achievement of a clear and direct communication of emotions. 75. Ibid. 76.  Yoshie Kyo¯matsu, “Haikyo no kokoro,” 266. 77. Ibid.

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In the visions for a new ideal society articulated by Inoue, Yoshie, and Honma, we can begin to suss out the larger discursive context for Sato¯’s essay on art, phenomenology, and daily life. Inoue’s call for social bonds that ensured interior relations based upon heart-to-heart exchanges recalls Sato¯’s articulation of an ethnically based community in which everyone could perceive truth through their “heart-senses.” Yoshie’s search for the essence of the Japanese people invokes Sato¯’s definition of that ethnic essentialism. Honma’s exhortation to return to the bright and primal Japanese of the time before the coming of Buddhism is a reprisal of Sato¯’s ethnically based history. The prescriptions of these reformers, their reversion to notions of Japanese essentialism as a foundation for a more pure and sincere society, were responses to the damage of the earthquake and the threat it posed to the ideologies of the nation. It was Sato¯ that articulated this response in terms of a phenomenology that resulted from the merging of literary aesthetics with daily life. This survey of mass media discourses substantiates the understanding that large-scale destructive events do not instigate the disintegration of social formations nor do they birth cultures of fragmentation. While such events could and did induce traumatic experiences on the individual level and threaten the stability of ideologies on the social level, it was in response to this very trauma and this threat that society marshalled its resources toward the reestablishment of cohesion and comprehension. The 1923 earthquake in Japan, if anything, caused an upswelling in the ideologies of ethnic purity and imperial power. Histories of modernist art rely perhaps too casually upon a purported consonance between the chaos of events like war and natural disaster and the fragmented forms of the artistic productions that they examine. At work on the one hand is the reading of history as a projection of literary forms. Here, the existence of fragmented artistic forms is proof of the existence of a fragmented culture, and events like wars and earthquakes, or simply the disruptive forces of modernization, are turned to as explanations for the existence of both. In the absence of a richer social context, transgressive practices are given outsized roles in the historical trajectory, further supporting the narrative of chaotic culture. On the other hand, there is also a reading of such cataclysmic events as occurring outside of history. With natural disasters like earthquakes in particular, the immense scale and compact duration of its destruction, the vast temporal scale introduced by its tectonic causes, and the fact that it occurs outside human agency tempts us to set it against broad narratives of human or global history. Such events are seen to disrupt history itself, bringing the aggregate of cultural forces to a momentary halt. The study of mass media discourses paints a different picture, allowing us to recover a history that gets effaced by such narratives of intellectual history. This

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history shows how the disruption of even cataclysmic events occur in the context of local culture. Their disruptions are received and interpreted by this context, and this context is then inflected by the event’s disruption. An understanding of the real impact of such events thus requires that we piece together historically the distinct social forces that were operative at the time and place in which that disaster struck. What we see from this perspective is much more continuity than rupture, or more precisely the urgent manufacture of continuity in the face of rupture. The earthquake struck at a time in history when there was already widespread concern within society about the cohesion of the nation and the commitment of its subjects, given a new culture of consumption, to the enterprise of national progress and advancement. There was already anxiety about the materialism of modern society and the ethnic diversity brought about by imperialism. This was the filter through which the earthquake was encountered. Its disruption was consequently understood to have brought to light the worst possible fears embedded in these anxieties: the reality of the Japanese nation as fraudulent, superficial, racist, and feudal. In reaction, proponents of social reform doubled down on their calls for civic duty and ethical rehabilitation, this time tying these needs much more explicitly to the fate of the nation. But further underlying the rhetoric of pre-earthquake social reform was a language and a narrative about the possibility self-transformation through a coming to terms with one’s flawed and authentic self. This narrative would be deployed in apprehending the crisis of the earthquake, would form the contours through which the impact and consequences of the quake would be interpreted and defined. The destruction and atrocity that it unleashed and the defects that it unveiled would be interpreted as revelations that compelled the Japanese individual to come to terms with their true natures. But this honesty would form the basis for the creation of a more authentic self and a more ethical society. Thus, the physical rebuilding of the city could never be decoupled from the need for individual Tokyoites to undergo, through selfreform, a transformation into a more spiritual being with more authentic ties to their society and their urban environment. Finally, this more precise understanding of the post-earthquake socio-cultural landscape allows us to more accurately grasp the nature of the subversive strategies of writers like Yokomitsu Riichi. More than expressing a fragmented experience, his work sought to disrupt the efforts of social discourses to suppress such experiences and undermine the efforts of such rhetoric to discipline and regiment the way individuals were supposed to relate to each other and their environment. At a time when reformers exhorted the reestablishment of a new and vibrant city based upon affirmations of ethnic community, Yokomitsu wrote stories set in the city that featured radical subjectivities that defied or undermined any sense of

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shared experience. At a time when reformers had fixated on the need for spiritual purity and communal emotions as a basis for a new daily life, Yokomitsu wrote stories of protagonists whose grasp of daily life is continually disrupted by their own subjective associations. At a time when reformers insisted upon a return to a commonly shared perceptible truth, Yokomitsu wrote stories that foregrounded experiences in which realities were constantly being created and re-created through the process of cognition. His fiction, in short, was dedicated to disrupting the ideologies of essentialist ethnicity that were being promulgated by the social critics of his day. In the final section of this chapter, I present an analysis of two such stories.

New Urban Phenomenologies in Yokomitsu’s Short Fiction With “Ruthless City” in September of 1924 and “Heads and Bellies” the following month, Yokomitsu began a series of stories set within the city exactly one year after the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake in September of 1923. These stories were written precisely at a time when the city and the daily life it harbored had become the focus of a social reform discourse that sought to renew and rehabilitate urban culture through a reassertion of ethnic identity. Writing with the language of the I-novel, these critics called for a process of self-reflection and rebirth in which citizens could doff the superficial clothing of civilization and rediscover purity and sincerity through their nakedness. This new self, moreover, which had its roots in Japanese ethnicity, would become the foundation of a new city, a new society, and a new nation, a community based on verifiable truth and direct spiritual communication. Yokomitsu’s urban fiction dislocates these ideologies by articulating an alternative urban phenomenology that undermined the language through which they were expressed. Yokomitsu’s short story “Heads and Bellies,” which was published in the inaugural issue of Yokomitsu’s coterie journal The Literary Age, could be considered the first flag to be planted for literary modernism in Japan. It was a tour de force of linguistic innovation packaged in a short, light, and playful morality tale. The story concerns a certain limited express passenger train hurtling along its tracks, described in an opening line that made a splash on the literary scene for its daring defiance of literary convention: It was high noon. The limited express train, completely filled with passengers, was running at full speed. A small station along the train line was utterly ignored like a stone.

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But in the middle of this phenomenon, amidst the passengers of this tightly packed train car, was mixed in a brazen little boy.78 Wrapping a towel around his head and tapping time on the window frame with both hands, the boy loudly sings a nonsensical song: My old lady, yeah She’s rich, yeah Yup, yup Rich is rich It’s filthy rich Yup, yup . . . . . . It’s cold, it’s cold I told you it’s cold What is it that’s cold! It’s darn cold Yup, yup . . . (396–397) The other passengers are greatly amused until they become aware that “in the demeanor of the singing boy, there had audaciously lain a passion that paid not the slightest attention to the feelings of those in his environs” (397). The plot develops when, because of an “incident” further up the tracks, the train suddenly slows down and stops at a small station. Great confusion and chaos ensue as the crowd of passengers is unable to decide whether to wait for the tracks to be cleared and the train to start up, to take a detour train that has just arrived, or simply head back home. It is then that a single wealthy and corpulent gentleman, in some ways the opposing figure to the boy, announces his decision to take the detour train, and the crowd follows suit. They rush into the detour train and are whisked off. The only person remaining in the original train is the indifferent boy. The story ends when, very shortly after the detour train departs, it is announced that the tracks have been cleared and the original express train starts up again, this time ironically with only the singing boy on board. The final lines: The train, completely empty, began to run full speed toward its destination.

78.  Yokomitsu Riichi, Atama, 396. Hereafter cited in the text.

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And the boy? Tapping time on the window frame in high spirits . . . Alone, swinging his black pupils against the whites of his eyes like a pendulum . . . Ah— Oh plums Oh cherries Oh peonies Oh peaches Today Alone I couldn’t wait Yup, yup. (402–403) The description of the train running at full speed functions as a book end to the very similar passage that began the narrative, lending the story a neat, almost humorous symmetry. The same train, which was “completely filled” with passengers is now “completely empty.” Humor also emerges from the irony that the only person being transported by this express train, which will presumably arrive at its destination with only a short delay, much faster at least than the detour train, is the one person who cares nothing about getting to the destination on time. This has led many critics to read the story as a social allegory, with the boy and the gentleman as the main protagonists. Interpretations of the story as a whole depend on what these two figures are thought to represent. Tamamura Shu¯ argues that the boy symbolizes the artist, perhaps Yokomitsu himself, or the will of the truly independent subject. He thus becomes the hero of the story because of his insusceptibility to mass psychology and his utter disregard for the values of wealth and the types of human relationships it creates.79 The final image of the boy on the express train represents a victory and an implicit condemnation of the rationalizing efforts of modernization, as well as the type of society it produces. Hamakawa Katsuhiko argues something of the opposite, asserting that the story is a nihilistic piece that deliberately leaves the reader with nothing but a “void.” Between the empty “head” of the boy, the fickle “minds” of the worldly crowd, and the wealthy and confident “belly” of the gentleman, there is no trace of human character or intelligence.80 In a technological civilization where a packed train car is the same as an empty train car, human beings have

79.  Tamamura Shu¯, Yokomitsu Riichi: Damasareta mono (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 2006), 80. 80.  Hamakawa Katsuhiko, Ronko¯ Yokomitsu Riichi (Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 2001), 40–41.

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no value. Hamakawa concludes, therefore, that the story was an expression of Yokomitsu’s disillusionment with humanity. While the readings of both critics are plausible, their search for an allegorical hook to hang their hat of interpretation upon leads them to ignore some of the fascinating complexity occurring on the linguistic surface of the story. A fictional manifestation of the polemical model of cognition Yokomitsu articulated in his “Theory of Neo-Sensation,” the story’s engagement with issues of phenomenology is indicated through the use of specific terminology from the very first descriptions. When describing how the boy ignores his surroundings, Yokomitsu employs the term “environs (shu¯i, 周囲)” (cited above), a word that was part of a lexicon used to talk analytically about the process of sensation within a system of empirical experience.81 The fact that the boy “pays no heed to his environs” suggests not only the boy’s audaciousness, but also that he, in fact, had a different basis for his perception. The other keyword here is “phenomenon (gensho¯)” (also cited above), a central concept of Kantian phenomenology that refers to the world that is subjectively created, and not actual, which the individual imposes through semblances and elements of their own subjectivity. “Heads and Bellies” was composed as a work that, to reprise a quote from the “Theory of Neo-Sensation” cited above, contained “sensations instigated when our subjectivity is tempted away from empirical cognition, which is based on the already known, toward the practice of cognition based on the unknown and mediated by a priori intuition.” It sought to reveal the possibilities for “deeper cognition” by complicating the models of empirical cognition. If the “head” is the symbol of understanding (gosei, 悟性) and “bellies” represent sensibility (kansei, 感性), then the story explores the ways in which these two processes are literally interrelated, rendering the object into a subjective-object and the subject into an objective-subject. Yokomitsu renders this world of phenomena by doing away with the convention, baked into the practices of modern literature, of using a perceiving subject as the organizing principle of the fictional world. This perceiving subject was a particularly important centerpiece of the I-novel, where a single lens, a single perspective of emotional subjectivity circumscribed the fictional space of the narrative to the exclusion of all other subjectivities, let alone events occurring in the external world of the streets. In this story, Yokomitsu’s ditches this

81.  The Nikkoku Dictionary cites a 1917 use of the term by the writer Terada Torahiko: “The five senses are the providers of the raw material that serves as the foundation of human experience (知識経験) of the natural world that makes up one’s environs.” Terada, a member of the Shirakaba group and writer of naturalist fiction, was instrumental in the movement toward empirical realism in literature.

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convention, displacing this narrating subject in order to bring the reader directly in contact with the chaos of worldly phenomena. The structure of the I-novel consists of a narrating “I” who narrates his feelings and observations, who uses the five senses. In Yokomitsu’s prose, that mediating subject is gone, and with its departure also goes the clean separation between subjectivity and objectivity, subject and object, understanding and sensibility. It was the integrity of the narrating “I,” in other words, that kept these two categories rigidly separated within narrative fiction. But one of Yokomitsu’s most salient techniques involves not just the displacement of a central narrator but the disavowal of any singular subject position. His frequent use of passive constructions—“a small station . . . utterly ignored like a stone”—intransitive verbs—“the breakdown occurred”—or personification of inanimate objects—the “clouds . . . peered in through the window”—help create a narrative that deflects the fixed orientation imposed by any subject’s position. Things happen; events occur. They are not perceived or remembered. Once decoupled from a subject position, the narrative environment can suddenly encompass a number of different subjectivities, or, in his case, personified positions—e.g., the train, the station, and the passengers—all at once, often in a type of antagonistic simultaneity. This is perhaps what was so jarring and provocative about Yokomitsu’s infamous opening lines: It was high noon. The limited express train, completely filled with passengers, was running at full speed. A small station along the train line was utterly ignored like a stone. But in the middle of this phenomenon, amidst the passengers of this tightly packed train car, was mixed in a brazen little boy. (396) The first line introduces and holds in equal suspension at least three personified positions—the train, the passengers, and the small station—all in simultaneous and interrelated motion under the organizing umbrella of a certain time of day. The entirety of these dynamics is aptly referred to as a “phenomenon” (gensho¯, 現象). And though the brazen little boy is here introduced as a type of protagonist, the perspective of the entire narrative remains on the level of the phenomenon, that is at a level of remove that permits the encapsulation of all of the multiple objects and subjects interacting at once. Needless to say, this type of writing implicitly necessitated a different readerly experience and a different readerly process. The prose carves open a new space in which narration is no longer a transparent medium between the emotions of the narrator and the emotions of the reader. Attempts to relate to the narrative through the normal operations of empathy with and projection into story

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characters are constantly frustrated by a language that either does not permit this or deflects such emotional energies into quandaries of logic or toward the appreciation of language on a more material level. That is to say, just as the narrative discourse removes the mediating function of a centralized subjectivity, it also opens the way for a direct relationship between the reader and the text itself as a matter of cognition. The narrative does not just describe the process of neo-sensation but performs it vis-à-vis the reader through its textual practice. This is discernible in the way the repeated motifs of the “head” and the “belly” get mixed and melded together within the syntax of actual sentences. The motif of the confused “heads,” which is at first counterbalanced by the motif of the “belly,” is gradually merged with the head through figurative constructions involving the train and the confusion of the crowds. At one point, the train is described figuratively through the “belly”: The ribs [lit. the belly sides] of the motionless train were lying down idly next to the nameless winter train station in the middle of the field. (398) Meanwhile, the figure of the “heads” becomes instrumental in describing the chaos of the confused crowd on the station platform: Everything was unclear. There was absolutely nothing that anybody could do. Therefore, every person there was unfortunate. And as this sense of unfortunate fate flowed out through the heads of the people who were now lost in space, the groups of people for the first time began to break like waves. (399) If the “belly” is used to describe the physically objective aspects of the train and the “head” is used to portray the psychologically subjective workings of the crowd, the two figures merge together in the description of the crowd rushing into the detour train: The crowd inundated the new train. The heads of people, loaded to the brim, wrapped up the fat belly and departed. (401) [emphasis mine] Though Yokomitsu’s linguistic style throughout the story is characterized by the use of words and sentences that take on symbolic value through their defiance of conventional idiom, this is the only sentence in the story that violates diction outright. In a linguistic manifestation of neo-sensation, the nonsensical syntax of the final line effects a confusion or blending between the heads, the bellies, and the train car. The subject of the sentence is the “heads of the people,” while the main verb is “departed,” suggesting that the heads are now the train car. Likewise, the heads are “loaded to the brim.” The verb “loaded” (mansai), which refers to

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objects of cargo, links this line with the two bookend lines of the story, recalling the “filled” of the first line and the “empty” of the line near the end. In word and form, this line, which occurs in the middle of the story, represents a central node within the large structure of symmetry that governs the narrative. It is the story’s linguistic high point. In the achievement of its syntactic legerdemain, the text provokes and cultivates a neo-sensation within the reader. The creation of new objects through subjective association now occurs not on the level of the story, but within the reading process itself. The reader now “sees” the distorted congruence of the head, the belly, and the train. A grasp of the phenomenological intervention being carried out within the language and narrative of the text helps to deepen the two allegorical readings above—the boy as insusceptible hero of the story or the boy as symbol of the work’s nihilism—and shows how these two seemingly opposite readings can be consolidated. The boy, alone on the train with his nonsense lyrics, does indeed denote a void. His presence on the train, which carries on as before even after being evacuated of its passengers and thus its meaning, exposes the vacuity in the logic of the transportation system. But this void is not so much there as a statement of nihilism as it is there to expose false certainty. Ultimately, the character of the boy functions to undermine notions of empirical perception within the story. While the train is stopped at the station, the stark contrast between the anxious crowd waiting on the platform and the disinterested boy sitting in the train is used to raise a problem of cognition. Making nothing of the accident before his eyes, [the boy] opened and closed his mouth as if to bite into a cluster of clouds in the sky that peered in through the window. (400) [emphasis mine] This description strikes at the central irony in the story, making us question the nature of our empirical senses. Through the phrase “before his eyes,” the narrator draws attention to the supposed empirical reality of the crisis. In fact, the problem, which seems real, has no empirical presence at all. No one can see the problem. It consists purely of the crowd’s confusion and its anxiety about whether it is more worth their time and money to wait for the train to start, head back home, or spend the night in a remote location. In contrast, the boy believes he can “bite into” the clouds, which are thus more empirically real than the problem at hand. The “accident” is not an empirical fact, but rather one produced through the logic of capitalist labor—time and value—manifested in the system of the limited express train. To be more precise, the problem arises out of a breakdown in that logic, a disruption of that system, a sudden lack of clarity. The character of the boy is used to expose the way in which, absent the supporting structure of

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the functioning train system, perceptions are generated by subjective thoughts, and those subjective thoughts in turn can become objects of perception. Published just about a year after the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake, “Heads and Bellies” directly registers the impact of this event. The Japanese word used to refer to the “accident” in the story is chinji (椿事), a rare word meaning a sudden or disastrous occurrence. This was also the word often used in the mass media coverage of the earthquake. Moreover, the turbulence that affects the crowd of passengers in the train is described repeatedly throughout the story with verbs such as “tremble” and “shake,” which connote the effects of a quake. If the stoppage of the train in the story can be understood to represent the earthquake that struck Tokyo in 1923, then we can begin to understand the story’s linguistic engagement with that historical event. Yokomitsu himself was keenly aware of how deeply his aesthetics of neosensation was rooted in the impact the earthquake. “The faith I had in my beliefs about beauty was completely destroyed by this tragedy,” he wrote in a reflective essay in 1941. “The period of the neo-sensationist school that people attribute to me began at this time,” he continued, “The great capital had been reduced to an unbelievable expanse of burned out fields in front of my eyes . . . and for those who had spent their youths in that time when the [manifestations of modern science such as automobiles, radios, and airplanes] emerged amidst those burned out fields,” “their sensations inevitably transformed.”82 Just as the “accident” of the story disrupts the complacence of empirical perception to reveal a more complex process of cognition, the earthquake jolted Japanese society into a recognition of more complex phenomenologies. The mass media discourse of social reform in the years after the earthquake sought to redress this “crisis” through reform ideologies that reasserted the self and the purification of that self as the means of social suturing. Sato¯ Haruo amplified the tenor of this discourse by generating a phenomenology based upon essentialist notions of ethnicity. Moreover, he understood literature as a primary means for cultivating people into seeking and pursuing this type of phenomenology within their daily lives. Yokomitsu’s “Heads and Bellies” was aimed at complicating this phenomenology, and thereby resisting and denouncing it. The story was not, as many critics have held, simply a formal experiment of language. Its overturning of the conventions of empirical realist narration was incorporated within a direct critique of the contemporary discourses of social reform. If the social discourses that emerged after the earthquake represented discursive attempts to suture the tears in national ideology caused by the earthquake’s destruction, then the story

82.  Yokomitsu Riichi, “Kaisetsu ni kaete 1,” 584.

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sought to describe and artistically depict that ideological disturbance in order to reveal and recover the different possibilities of subjectivity that the discourses of reform implicitly sought to expunge. Yokomitsu’s short story “Ruthless City,” published just a month earlier, was similarly invested in complicating essentialist phenomenology and the type of relationship it prescribed between the individual and the city. It did so, however, by more directly targeting the I-novel narrative conventions that supported it. If “Heads and Bellies” flouted the narrative apparatus of the I-novel outright, “Ruthless City” is a narrative that provisionally assimilated the expectations of the I-novel narrative. It featured a solitary male protagonist whose selfreflections invite readerly identification. These expectations, however, are assimilated only to be undermined. The protagonist’s attempts to empirically perceive and comprehend urban space are constantly hindered by the intrusions of his own subjective thoughts. This obstruction on the diegetic level is paralleled on the readerly level by a text that perpetually draws attention to its own material/visual features. The reader must come to terms with a different relationship to the literary text, one in which their own subjective associations, triggered by the Chinese characters on the page, become part of the reading experience. But this dynamic is mirrored in the protagonist who must accept a more complex relationship to his urban environment. The narrator of the story is presented, in attitude and desire, as an I-novel protagonist. He is a single male narrating in the first person who leads a reclusive life. His room is strewn with potted flowers that “release a small amount of vitality into his solitary and emotionally pure daily life.”83 The serenity of this life, however, is undercut by a central problem: his wife has left him and he doesn’t know why. The problem of his wife’s mysterious disappearance, and the pure daily life he maintains as a result, form the backdrop for the strange events that transpire as the plot unfolds. Yokomitsu, who greatly admired the prose of Shiga Naoya, makes reference to and borrows from the motifs and the language of Wakai (“Reconciliation”) in this story. The narrator of “Ruthless City” refers to himself as a “dreamer” (muso¯ka, 夢想家), which was the title of the manuscript that Shiga’s protagonist was struggling to compose.84 Shiga’s novel begins at a graveyard where the protagonist lays flowers upon the grave of his dead child. These themes are scattered throughout “Ruthless City,” where the plot centers around a missing baby, with recurring flower motifs throughout the story.

83.  “Burei na machi,” 366. Hereafter cited in the text. 84.  As discussed in the introduction, it is implied that the manuscript that the protagonist is struggling to write eventually becomes the story itself.

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The theme of reconciliation with the authority of the father in Shiga’s novel, however, is ultimately transmuted into a rebellion against authority imputed to the city. “The city is a carnival” (365): this terse yet blustery statement opens the narrative and sets up the theme and tone of the piece. It utilizes Shiga’s ta-stopped sentence ending, but whereas Shiga used it to mark a sense of present time in his narrative allowing the reader’s time to sync with the narrator’s time, Yokomitsu employs it to furnish a strong declarative statement, distancing the reader from the narrative while also demarcating the city as an active but alien space. It is along these lines that Yokomitsu’s novel adapts and updates the themes and language of Shiga’s work. The novel commences, however, with a passage that invites readerly identification with the solitary protagonist: On the treeless and dilapidated sides of the city street at night, the awnings of street stalls lined up all the way up to the edge of the gutter. The waves of people were sweaty and gave off the sweet smell of dirt. I walked and looked around uneasily at the faces of people. What was I looking for? Perhaps my wife, who had run away, might come floating by on a whim? But the feeling that made me think this way was something I always felt when being jostled by waves of people and was not specific to now. It was something else.—I was vaguely looking for a thief. (365) This opening paragraph sets up the two basic aspects of the story’s structure, a narrator alienated from the crowd with a peculiar penchant for self-reflection and the device of a search that will drive the plot forward. This search delineates what the narrator, and by extension the reader, is trying to accomplish. The protagonist’s question—“what was I looking for?”—also becomes a question for the reader. However, the search for something empirical—his wife, a thief—is belied by associations generated by the material features of the text; that is, by the Chinese characters themselves. The characters for “edge of the gutter” (doromizo no katawara, 泥溝の傍) visually and aurally suggest the word for “burglar.” The first character of the compound “gutter” (doromizo), 泥, is the first character in the compound for “burglar” (doro-bo¯, 泥棒), and the sound of the second character in this compound, 棒, is suggested visually by the character “edge” katawara (傍), whose Chinese on reading is bo¯. The linguistic effect might be loosely compared to the verbal play of hidden words that occurs in English acrostics. In what becomes a recurring device within the story, visual cues of Japanese typography are employed to create meanings that run alongside but separately from the strictly voiced aspect of the narration. In this specific case, the technique is used

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to subtly or subliminally implant the idea of a burglar just before the “thief ” is announced outright by the narrator as the object of his search. The linguistic cue also suggests that what the protagonist is looking for, the thief, may be located in the mud of the gutter, or, perhaps more radically, within the lines and words of the text. The line “I was vaguely searching for a thief ” (watashi wa bakuzen to suri wo sagashite ita no da, 私は漠然と掏摸を捜していたのだ) is another instance of this semantic play in the correspondences of the visual characters. The first character in the compound “vague” (bakuzen, 漠然) has a radical in common with the second character in the compound “thief ” (suri, 掏摸), the only difference in the two characters being their chief radicals. The chief radical of the first character in “vague,” 漠, signifies water or river (氵), a semantic component that draws on and carries forward the water imagery associated with the carnival that had been built up in the past few sentences; the “gutter” (溝), the “waves of people” (波), and the “sweat” (汗) are all Chinese characters that contain the same chief radical of water (氵). Furthermore, the character in “thief ” (摸) contains the chief radical for hand (扌), a radical that is repeated three times in the phrase “looking for a thief ” (suri wo sagashiteita, 掏摸を捜していた).85 The hand, emphasized here through the repetition of the chief radical, signifies a desire for indexical empiricism that is repeatedly frustrated within the story by the fluidity of the urban environment. Yokomitsu’s simultaneous utilization of the aural readings and visual semantics of the written language creates a tension within the reader. The sacrosanct identification of the reader with the narrator is breached as the text exhibits a materiality that deflects the reader’s ability of and desire for symbolic identification. The symbolism of personal and emotional identification, forged in the naturalist prose of Shiga Naoya, is shifted to a more abstract symbolism that occurs on the level of the material text. As Suga Hidemi has noted, “while it may seem that ‘Ruthless City’ was written as an exploration of self-consciousness, the words themselves that are written there quietly dislocate this structure.”86 This technique represents an argument for a different type of reading—a different type of relationship to literary art, even—in which the reader is made aware of the reading process. The desire to identify is transmusted into a desire to decode.

85.  In the Japanese typography, where characters are lined up from top to bottom, the correspondence between these chief radicals is visually more prominent as the three hand radicals form a straight vertical line on the left side of the character column. 86.  Suga Hidemi, Tantei no kurichikku: Sho¯wa bungaku no rinkai (Tokyo: Shincho¯sha, 1988), 58.

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Komori Yo¯ichi, who was attuned to the act of reading and the “meaning production of the printed word on the page itself,” has argued that Yokomitsu’s texts are structured in such a way as to encompass two processes of meaning production: meaning produced by “the reader tracing the lines of characters one by one,” and meaning produced through the “reconstitution of this meaning within the reader’s memory.”87 Komori’s articulation of the reading process here can be mapped onto Yokomitsu’s theory of neo-sensation. Instead of the reader directly absorbing the content of the work, Yokomitsu’s text established a layer of separation. This separation establishes a distinction between the text on the page and the text in the mind of the reader and creates a space in which they can interact. Specifically, meanings that are stimulated and then reconstituted within the working of the subjective mind take on an integral role in the combined process of meaning production. This method of readerly interpretation—i.e., how to read, perceive, and interpret—is not just a feature of the language, but a central subject of the plot. The redefinition of the reader’s relationship to the novel is executed and illustrated through a story about the redefinition of the protagonist’s relationship to his environment. As the story proceeds, the object of the search is given concreteness in the form of an abandoned infant. At home, the narrator is visited by a strange woman who confesses to him that she has abandoned her baby at a temple atop a nearby hill. The narrator leaves his house in search of the helpless toddler, but as he does so several thoughts occur to him that affect his reality and refract the straight line of his empirically focused intentions. The first is the sinking feeling that he has just fallen for a lie: But, even if it were a lie, a lie about abandoning your child was a lie too unlike a lie. It was too good of a lie [so it had to be true] . . . [but] even so there was a lagging part of myself in which there remained the feeling that made me think it was a lie. Of course, this may have been because abandoning your child was by nature such a rash and outrageous act. But even if her story were true, I had the feeling that the abandoned child was not there [at the temple]. This was not because I thought the child would have been picked up already but because the lie-like act made me think in this way. (380) [emphasis mine] Here, too, there are textual semantics to unravel. The narrator’s obsession with the lie and the textual repetition of the character for lie (嘘) that this produces

87.  Komori Yo¯ichi, Ko¯zo¯ to shite no katari (Tokyo: Shin’yo¯sha, 1988), 44–45.

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visually suggests to the reader that it was, in fact, a lie, an implication that undercuts the narrator’s own feeling that it wasn’t, that the lie was too much like a lie to be a lie. The narrator’s self-conscious thoughts have gummed up his direct perception of the facts. His subjective feelings drive him to hold two contradictory conceptions of reality. He tends to believe that the story is true—for it was just too outlandish to be a fabrication—while the same outlandishness also makes him believe that the child is actually not there. His ratiocination also traces the way his subjective feelings not only influence but engender his reality. The narrator continues up the hill until his thoughts are arrested by yet another problem: if he did in fact find the child, what was he going to do with it? He wasn’t about to keep the child, nor could he very well give it back to the mother who had just abandoned it. His temptation to turn back is overturned by the objective factuality of his feelings: But no matter [what the baby’s fate], there was no way I could turn back now. My clear encounter with the fact [of the abandoned child] elicited in me a responsibility that I could not avoid. I felt a sense of duty arise in me from the simple fact that I had already felt something about this issue, a duty to see this child’s fate out to the very end. (381) The narrator is no longer acting based on a knowledge of reality, but on his perceptions of reality. Hearing about the baby caused it to become a reality within his mind, a reality that induced feelings of responsibility to see the child’s fate out to the very end. He continues out of this sense of responsibility, which has its own integral reality even though its basis in actual fact is open to serious doubt. It is the objective reality of his feelings that keeps him engaged with and tied into the task of seeking the abandoned baby. The story does not so much put reality into doubt as it complicates our notions of how reality is produced and shaped, thus bringing attention to the fact, with all its attendant anxieties, that reality is indeed produced and shaped. The story concludes with the narrator and the woman going up to the temple together in the early morning. The woman stands straight in front of the spot where she had left the child: “It’s not here,” she says, “it was right here” (394). The woman points downward “at a spot in front of a stone basin,” bringing the motif of fingers and indexicality to bear on the crux of the plot. The pointing finger paradoxically marks the existence of the child by indicating its literal absence. According to Suga’s “neo-sensational” reading of the text, the presence of the woman in front of the stone basin conjures up the Japanese word for “barren woman” (umazume, 石女), a compound that is formed by the characters for

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“woman” and “stone.” Through this link, he argues, the text suggests that the child never existed at all. “The story itself,” he concludes, based as it is on a narrating “I” in search of this abandoned child, becomes “suspended in space.” In the final lines of the story, the narrator has a dialogue with the personified voice of the city: “I accept all things,” the city said contemptuously as it remained behind. I breathed in deeply, holding out against the ruthless city. “You are a crystal of continuous contradictions.” (395) “Contradictions” is an inadequate translation for the Japanese word sakugo (錯誤), which literally refers to the gap between reality and one’s own perceptions. The “ruthlessness” (burei, 無礼) of the city lies in its constant presentation of these gaps and its insistence on maintaining them. In this final scene, it is as if the narrator’s acceptance of the child’s nonexistent existence, his acknowledgment of the city’s phenomenology, has given him an awareness of an alternate system of ethics that allows him to resolve his issues with the woman for leaving her child, as well as his confusion over being abandoned by his wife. His efforts at empirical investigation have been interrupted and overwhelmed by an alternate and more dynamic phenomenology. Comparing Yokomitsu to Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯, Komori Yo¯ichi has insightfully pointed out that, while the two are extremely distant from the perspective of literary schools, they had virtually overlapping attitudes toward literary expression. Specifically, they shared an “awareness of the literary text as a single system of signs” and commonly embraced the notion that “the system of word-signs, printed in type [on the page], was included as one component of the workings of meaning production in a literary text.” On the basis of this understanding, while Tanizaki intentionally suppressed the materialism of the word, using kanji characters sparingly and depending mostly on the phonetic kana script, Yokomitsu did the opposite, lining up characters in order to emphasize the signifying powers of their visual features.88 In Yokomitsu’s text, reading is no longer a passive process of perceiving and emulating feelings cued by the language based on the premise of preestablished empathy and identification. Rather, it is a dynamic process in which the written word initiates subjective connotations that can then be projected onto and used to interpret other parts of the text. Yokomitsu’s embrace of such textual materialism flew in the face of the conventions of literary practice as embodied in the autobiographical narrative discourses of the I-novel. The possibility that the visuality of the printed character

88.  Ibid., 74–75.

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could signify and produce meaning countermanded the aspiration, inscribed in the I-novel form, of a transparent, purely communicative language that could directly convey the inner truth of the author. Yokomitsu’s emphasis on the “material properties of the written word itself,” writes Seiji Lippit, “was essentially a rejection of the . . . ‘colloquial’ idiom that served as the basis for the formation of modern literature in Japan.”89 This full-frontal attack on the language, aesthetics, and daily life projected by the institution of modern literature was the purpose that galvanized the members of the neo-sensationist school. However, as has been demonstrated in this chapter, the colloquial idiom of the I-novel was not just integral to proclamations of ethnic essentialism, but also complicit in the articulation of prescriptions for urban reform and the ideologies of daily life. An understanding of this intimate link between language, authenticity, ethnic identity, and daily life evinces the brash iconoclasm of a writer such as Yokomitsu who attacked head-on the pretensions of this language and the social ideologies it undergirded. In the wake of the Kanto¯ Earthquake, the project of urban reconstruction was directly tied to the necessity of personal and spiritual renovation. In the spirit of reform, the people were urged to identify spiritually with the city and to see their own personal rebirth as an analogy for the renaissance of the metropolis. Citizens were to invest their individual sense of ethics and morality, as well as their desires for self-renewal, into the effort to reconstruct the city and by extension the nation. It was within this sociohistorical context that Yokomitsu wrote works of urban fiction that challenged representations of this phenomenology by challenging the conventional literary language of his day. It was also at this time that Yokomitsu employed the language of Kantian phenomenology in his modernist manifesto to impede the conservative and reform-oriented uses of “sensation” in the public discourse of the post-earthquake years. Yokomitsu’s narrative thus critiqued such nationalistic ideologies by subverting the language in which they were expressed and by rendering an alternate phenomenology that had implications for a radically different way of being in society.

89. Lippit, Topographies, 29.

Figure 3.  October 1923 cover of the The Ho ¯chi Weekly Photojournal, Vol. 1, Issue 4. The Taisho¯ Great Earthquake Photo Notebook. This photograph, which would become one of the iconic images of the earthquake, captures what remained of the Twelve Story Tower. The decimation of this architectural symbol of Westernization and national progress visually expressed the broader ideological impact of the disaster.

Chapter 3 Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and the Narrative of the Present

A Tokyoite browsing the evening edition of the Tokyo Asahi Newspaper on Sunday, January 5, 1930, would have seen the thirteenth installment of Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa toward the bottom of the front page (Figure 3.1). The reader would have been situated into the events of the story by the narrator himself, who explains to his reader exactly where he has just stopped in the Asakusa neighborhood. He is standing at the Kaminari Gate, just at the entrance of the Nakamise shopping alley, and he is being accosted by the pleas of Salvation Army officers asking for toy donations for the poor. There is an automatic telephone, a mailbox, and then a public message board with a single message on it: “Meet at the Hanakawado¯—The Scarlet Troupe.” The message was cipher sent by the Scarlet Gang and “The Hanakawado¯,” the narrator explains, was a code word for the tower of the Subway Restaurant. Erected a year earlier in 1929 above the location of Tokyo’s first subway, the Subway Restaurant had been built to replace the Twelve Story Tower, a landmark of Western-style architecture and symbol of national progress from its construction in 1890 that, the narrator describes, had been “split in half ” by the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake in 1923. Though the Subway Tower’s six floors was only half the number of the Twelve Story Tower, the narrator explains, it was nonetheless 40 meters tall (compared to the 50-meter height of the Twelve Story Tower), and was the only structure in Asakusa that could boast of an elevator and a lookout tower with a panoramic view of the city. It was from this tower, he tells the reader, that he and the rest of the Scarlet Gang would be able to spy Yumiko who, “just about now,” had untethered her boat 155

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from the shore of the Sumida River and was headed toward the Kototoi Bridge. If the reader had been following the serial, they would know that Yumiko has lured a man into a rendezvous on that boat. The reader would also know it had something to do with Yumiko’s desire to meet the man who her older sister fell in love with a long time ago. But beyond this it is unclear what Yumiko intends to do and why. One of the Scarlet Gang members has agreed to steer the boat while Yumiko and the man sit together inside the cabin. But it appears now that this boat steerer is white with jealousy, trying unsuccessfully to hear what is going on inside the cabin. In an abrupt digression, the narrative veers off from Yumiko’s plotline to tell the story of this gang member, Umekichi, his past, his love life, and how he was recruited into the gang. The installment ends as this explanation begins. This section illustrates the overall narrative style of the story. The narrative situates the reader in medias res, standing with the narrator as he observes the bric-a-brac of the urban environment that surrounds him. At one point, the narrator/narrative catches hold of the plot line and furthers it for a short while before it gets sidetracked into a subplot, the backstory of a character, or a description of the neighborhood and the livelihoods it contains. In this way, depictions of the fictional characters and their backgrounds are interspersed with and integrated into a type of reportage panoramic survey of this down-and-out district of vibrant popular culture. The locations described, moreover, are relatively new places and the events are rather current events, taking place not long before the time in which the serial was being read. The Subway Tower that the narrator referenced had just been completed a few months earlier in the fall of 1929. Along with the Casino Folies Revue, it was part of what the narrator refers to as “the 1930’s caste of Asakusa.”1 Maeda Ai has noted that even the line of sight from the tower to the river featured in the above installment was specific to 1930, for that particular view would have become obstructed by the construction later that year of the Asakusa Matsuya building, which opened for business in December 1931.2 Taken together, these elements create the effect of situating the narrative/ reader within the present time. The reader of the newspaper could be fooled for a second into thinking the literary text was in fact a feature on current events and local spots of interest. In this sense, the novel aspired to create a snapshot of the present, one that could withstand time in its objectivity as a type of record. But its absorption into the present action indicated an interest not so much in capturing

1.  Kawabata Yasunari, “Asakusa kurenaidan,” in Asakusa kurenaidan, Asakusa matsuri (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha bungei, 2006), 44. Hereafter cited in the text. 2.  Maeda Ai, “Gekijo¯ to shite no Asakusa,” in Maeda Ai chosakushu¯ dai 5 kan: Toshi ku¯kan no naka no bungaku (Sho¯gakkan, 1986), 299–300.

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what was notable about the absolute time of 1929/1930 but an effort to capture what was interesting about the perpetual now. Much of the criticism of Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang has focused on the novel’s fragmentary narrative structure and how it embodied the modern mass culture of Asakusa (and by extension Tokyo, and Japan) after the destruction of the 1923 Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. Just as the narrator notes that the destruction of the Twelve Story Tower gave way to the construction of the Subway Tower, the damage inflicted by the earthquake in effect cleared the ground for the emergence of a new mass culture that could be seen in its most raw form in the Asakusa neighborhoods. The disjointed narrative and linguistic pastiche of the novel has been understood to reflect the chaos of this new urban landscape and the popular culture’s obsession with the new. While the novel was certainly deeply engaged with the earthquake and its destruction, I argue that the novel and its interest in rendering the present was actually responding to a social phenomenon much nearer at hand, one that could be glimpsed literally a few inches above the print of the serial. Returning to the evening edition of the Tokyo Asahi Newspaper where the thirteenth installment of the novel appeared, a glance at the top of the front page reveals a series of articles related to the earthquake. At the very top left corner is a large photo collage that included pictures of the newly opened Sumida Park (one of the main sites of the novel’s drama), the brand new Kiyosu Bridge, and the newly paved Kobiki-cho highway, all major accomplishments of the postearthquake reconstruction project that had consumed the city of Tokyo as well as the national government in the years since the earthquake. The accompanying headlines announce in bold type: “Admirable Human Strength—The Greatness of New Tokyo!—This Spring, The Completion of the Project to Reconstruct the Imperial City—To be Remembered for Eternity,” and “Following Imperial Tour— Magnificent Reconstruction Festival—To Be Expected in the Warm Month of March.” (Figure 3.1) The story was one of many such articles that appeared in the pages of the newspapers in the years after the earthquake, and particularly frequently in the months leading up to the Reconstruction Festival, a citywide celebration (announced in the second headline above) to mark the completion of the reconstruction projects. In the rhetoric of the mass media articles, the end of the infrastructural renovation marked the moment of Tokyo’s rebirth as a new, modern, and rational city. It was to mark the moment of completed recovery from the crisis of the earthquake, the time at which the earthqake could be put into the past. Written on the same pages and in some of the same language, Kawabata’s novel assimilated the geography and the language of the reconstruction project but did so in order to undermine the ideologies of completion and rebirth that it supported. In its focus on the now, the narrative denied the chauvinistic pretension that recovery from the crisis could be completed, insisting instead on a

Figure 3.1  Front page of the evening edition of the Tokyo Asahi Newspaper, January 5, 1930

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present that includes and houses the past. In its central plot, the novel argues against the possibility of concluding and moving past traumatic events. Yumiko’s assignation with Akagi, the reader soon discovers, is an assassination attempt. He had raped her sister in the aftermath of the earthquake, and her plot for revenge symbolizes the peristence of traumatic events and the continuation of its consequences. In what follows, I argue that Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang was not responding to the earthquake per se, but to the media discourses, running concurrently with the novel’s serialization, that sought to shape the narrative of the city in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. I demonstrate how the narrative structure of the novel is not so much fragmented as it is organized in such a way as to bypass the arbitrary constructions of time and space associated with a narrative arc and to create instead a narrative experience of the present moment. This narrative strategy specifically targeted the discourse of the post-earthquake reconstruction projects and its ideological attempt to discursively produce a city that was completely recovered and newly reborn from the crisis.

Narrating the Now Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakakusa was a novel about many things: the Asakusa neighborhood, the impoverished people that inhabited it, the troupe of kids that gathered on its bridges and in its alleys, the cabaret theaters, the earthquake, modern technologies, destitution, the past, and the future. But perhaps more than any of the rest it was a novel that concerned itself with rendering the present; and the present as an all-consuming category. The novel form and the way it was designed to be read represents a particularly innovative accomplishment of the breakdown between literature and everyday life or the assimilation of art into daily life. Yokomitsu Riichi objected to the attempts by literary critics and social reformers to make everyday life into an aesthetic project, to conflate the two in such a way that the quotidian was transformed into something spiritual, ahistorical, and transcendent. As discussed in chapter 2, Yokomitsu’s fiction sought to disrupt this transformation. It might be said that Kawabata, who was part of the same literary coterie as Yokomitsu, attempted the reverse: to take the aesthetic autonomy of the novel form and meld it into the quotidian. This occurs first and foremost along the trajectory of time. Seiji Lippit cogently asserts that the novel “collapses the distinction between the temporality of fiction and that of everyday life.”3 The bounded and separate diegetic time and space natural to most fictional

3. Lippit, Topographies, 128.

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narratives is never allowed to form in Kawabata’s text, leaving the reader pressed up against the temporality of their own reading present. Through the novel’s serialization and magazine publication, moreover, Kawabata sought not just to write about the present but to actively and continuously capture it over time. The Scarlet Gang has become notorious for the difficulty it presents to its readers. Though the story does contain a central plot, which is Yumiko’s assassination of Akagi, the story proceeds in a way that makes even this scenario difficult to grasp. This central story line is scattered throughout the multiple vignettes and descriptions of places and individuals directly or indirectly associated with the members of the Scarlet Gang. The narrative swerves from character to locale, from locale back to character. Characters are often disguised and only later unveiled, and the motivations for their actions are given only after the fact. The end result is a plot that can only be pieced together after the novel has been completed. But even then it is submerged in a wealth of information, descriptions, and substorylines that, while evocative and poignant in themselves, are only tangentially related to the development of the main story line. This is not helped by the fact that the main character Yumiko disappears from the pages of the novel halfway through the story and appears again only once at the very end. Maeda Ai, who described his first impression of the novel as being an incoherent mess, like “a box of toys overturned,” warned that the playfulness of the text required a nimble reader who was at home with its elusiveness. To the overly earnest reader, he wrote, the novel would seem an extremely cumbersome read, littered with stones to stumble upon. He became satisfied, however, when he understood that: The misleading narrative was really a mechanism for bringing out the nature of transformation, and at the same time was an innovative method that incorporated the syncopation of jazz and the scene changes of a variety show at the Casino Folies. There was a direct link between the evasiveness of a narrative that was deliberately disjointed and the strange fascination of Yumiko and her performance of androgyny.4 Maeda perceptively points out that the haphazard nature of the narrative, as unwieldy and bothersome as it was, was integral to the larger aesthetic statement of the novel and was a crucial component in its bewitching power. It was, moreover, instrumental in conveying the nature of the main character who was at the center of the plot. According to Kawabata himself, this style “left the work in a meandering and incomplete state, but it was the narrating of the unimportant

4.  Maeda Ai, “Gekijo¯ to shite no Asakusa,” 296.

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details that gave the work its animation and was perhaps the reason why it could be read with interest.”5 The difficulty of the narrative can be traced to Kawabata’s methodology in writing the novel. The story, according to Kawabata, was prompted by his move to Ueno Sakuragicho two months prior to serialization. It was not far, he explained, to walk from Ueno past the ground bridge at Uguisudani to the back neighborhoods of Asakusa park, and thus he took that walk day and night. He was never more than a tourist to the area, he explained, someone who merely walked through it, but his curiosity drove him to write the novel.6 Kawabata was conscious of employing the “sketch” (shasei, 写生) method, a writerly method that attempted to emulate the objectivity of a painter and record only what one saw and heard. But unlike the painterly stance that inspired this approach, Kawabata was not just interested in the object abstracted from time and place. The year, the month, and the location were part of the stamp of Kawabata’s sketches. He wanted to set down the multidimensional aspects of an experience, recording objects and how they were incorporated into a sense of society, community, space, and then of course temporal change. One of the ways Kawabata captured the temporal change of the neighborhood he observed was by stitching the poetic or fictional aspects of his novel into the minute details of the neighborhood that he observed. His narrative straddled the line between reportage writing and fictional narrative. The narrator of the novel posits himself as an observer who investigates the geography, the neighborhood, and the culture of Asakusa. At the same time, he follows and tells the story of the young members of the Scarlet Gang. These two narrative modes are employed simultaneously throughout the text. Kawabata wrote of his novel that it is “an oddly structured work. It is written in the style of reportage, as well as that of descriptive poetry.” Kawabata arrived at this melded style by struggling with and ultimately giving up on expectations to write a more conventional novel and to sustain a more coherent plot line. “I thought about it again,” he explains, “and realized that I didn’t care if it were seen as an essay on Asakusa or if it broke off at any point. I decided to abandon myself . . . to free and reckless associations. Of course I still feel it has some coherence.”7 The novel was unorthodox in the way that it unabashedly assimilated the language of reportage journalism into its narrative discourse. Doing so meant disregarding the

5.  Kawabata Yasunari, “Asakusa kurenaidan ni tsuite,” in Kawabata Yasunari zenshu¯ vol. 12, 383. Published in May, 1951. 6. Ibid. 7.  Cited in Lippit, Topographies, 127. Lippit’s translation.

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temporal and linguistic dictates of the traditional novel. But it also meant capturing a different temporal dimension. In taking up this journalistic stance, Kawabata was positioning his novel within an increasingly popular genre of literary essay-writing devoted to exploring and recording the culture of destitute yet lively urban areas such as Asakusa. Jeffrey Angles has identified the cultural prominence during this time of “Curiosity Hunting” books that reflected a “fascination for the strange and erotic.” The stories, both fictional and nonfictional, took up cases of crime and investigation, and were published in magazines as well as the mainstream newspapers.8 Such stories became popular alongside the publications of government-sponsored surveyors like Gonda Yasunosuke and Kusama Yasuo who went through Asakusa to gather statistics on the number and identity of the vagrants and prostitutes in the neighborhood. The novel also closely followed the narrative setup of city guide essays. These works, published in newspapers and mass magazines, featured male writers who narrated their observations of and insights into the cultural trends and habits of the locals, which they acquired by walking the streets and interacting with the residents. The authors of these city guide essays acted as virtual tour guides, analyzing and interpreting the local knowledge that they gleaned from their trips into the neighborhood. Kawabata not only mentions these writers by name as essential sources for his novel—Sato¯ Hachiro¯ , Soeda Azenbo¯ , and Ishizumi Harunosuke9—but even cites some of their words within the text of his novel. Soeda Azenbo’s essay, Record of the Asakusa Underworld (Asakusa teiryu¯ki, 浅草底流記), was an especially important source for the tenor and the style of Kawabata’s narrative. Kawabata’s depictions took many of its cues from that work’s portrayal of Asakusa as “a large symphony of different rhythms, of a fluid place where the barriers between audience and actors, between merchant and performer, has faded away.”10 Soeda’s essay examined the different types of people in Asakusa, including the vagrants, the homeless, and the prostitutes, and describes in vivid detail the scenes of abjection that he witnessed. Kawabata’s novel also turned an unflinching eye to the abject parts of the area. In doing so, it would at times borrow images and vignettes from Soeda’s text, such as the metaphoric description of vagrants as “flowers of mold” or the description of beggar women who make their children cry to elicit sympathy. Kawabata even borrows the noun-heavy prose and episodic narrative style that Soeda used to render the social milieu of the district. Kawabata,

  8.  Jeffrey Angles, “Seeking the Strange: Ryu¯ki and the Navigation of Normality in Interwar Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 63, no. 1 (2008): 102.  9. Kawabata Yasunari, Asakusa kurenaidan ni tsuite, 382. 10.  Soeda Azenbo¯, “Asakusa teiryu¯ki,” Kaizo¯, May 1928.

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moreover, follows Soeda’s typographical example of including glosses for local lingo in parentheses after the word. Kawabata could have found the definitions of the numerous slang words that come up in the novel in Ishizumi Harunosuke’s 1927 guidebook Little-Known Asakusa Stories (Asakusa ritan, 浅草裏潭).11 Though Kawabata’s text was ultimately a fictional story with invented characters, it presented itself in language and style as nonfiction reportage. The narrative fusion of fictional story and reportage writing, and the resulting absence of any overarching linear structure in the narrative, has led many critics to identify and emphasize fragmentation and rupture within the novel. Unno Hiroshi has pointed to what he called a montage technique employed to create a semiotically three-dimensional world, a methodology that he suspected was inspired by the Dadaists and the surrealists.12 Miriam Silverberg also identifies montage in the novel, interpreting it as reflecting the “montage of social relationships throughout the Japanese nation during the modern years.” She traces the documentary novel’s fragmentation to Soeda Azenbo, who titled the opening segment of his essay, “Fragments.”13 The terms “fragment” (danpen, 断片) and “fragmentation” (danpen-ka, 断片化) occurred frequently in the social discourses concerning modern culture in the 1910s and 20s and was a key concept through which Kawabata’s contemporaries reflected upon their own cultural moment.14 Describing the experience of reading The Scarlet Gang as a “process of continual interruption,” Seiji Lippit argues that the work represents the disintegration of the novel form’s generic boundaries. Pointing to the multiplicity of narrating positions, Lippit argues that the “unity of the narrative voice is fragmented and disseminated into a fluid, shifting environment.” “The reader is situated,” he continues, “in the gap between the disembodied, abstract position of observation and the physical, corporeal perspective of the narrating subject.”15 Lippit also draws attention to the randomness of objects that litter the descriptions, passages that include quotes, citations, and found objects: “. . . the menu from the subway tower cafeteria, an evening’s program from a revue theater, different variations of a legend, the text of an omikuji (written oracle), a complete short story, popular

11.  Alisa Freedman, “Translator’s Preface,” in The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), xli. 12.  Unno Hiroshi, Modan toshi Tokyo: Nihon no senkyu¯hyaku niju¯nendai (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ko¯ronsha, 1983), 57. 13. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 183. 14.  Under the topic of “Impressions of ‘Automobiles,’ ‘Moving Pictures,’ and ‘Café’s,’ as Symbols of the Trends in the New Age,” Tanaka Jun refers to the “fragmentary pasttimes of people living in the city,” while the painter Ishii Hakutei refers to the “fragments of the times.” (Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron, September 1918). 15. Lippit, Topographies, 132.

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songs, subway advertisements, movie and theater billboards, and quotations from the earlier works by Kawabata, Soeda, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯ . . .”16 Through such strategies, Kawabata dissolves the novel into multiple forms of writing and other media. This disintegrated form enables the expression of Asakasu as a “space in which hybridized, heterogenous cultures are generated without any unifying principle of national spirit.” These approaches have in common the projection of fragmentation upon the physical spaces of the neighborhood, the city, or the nation. Here, the traditional novel form becomes a stand-in for actual urban space. The breakdown of these forms, on the narrative level but also on the level of description and linguistic prose, therefore symbolizes the same phenomenon taking place within a city that had been shaken, as Silverberg notes, by “the Meiji Restoration, the earthquake of 1923, and the onset of the depression in 1927.”17 While fragmentation is certainly a central feature, the analysis of the novel can be pushed further by taking into account the equally important elements of cohesion that help frame the chaos of the narrative discourse. There are abrupt shifts to be sure, and the pieces of the narrative have been disjointed and taken apart in a way that is difficult to fit together. The novel form as a whole has been shattered into pieces. But the end result is not scattered shards. The pieces, rather, have been carefully sewn into the social, public, and private everyday language of the district. Each fragment of story emerges almost seamlessly from the context of the Asakusa neighborhood. Serving as the ground for myriad found objects and bits of text, the narrative is less montage and more collage, a collage that is framed and structured in its own idiosyncratic manner. The shards, it would seem, have been gathered into a mosaic. The novel appears fragmented only when set against the blueprint of a normative narrative structure. But once this structure is dispensed with, we can begin to detect rules of a different order. The 61 installments or sections of the novel coalesce into 24 groupings, each consisting of two to three sections. These groupings, moreover, generally have a common structure: A description of the neighborhood—e.g., a group of vagrants in Asakusa Park, or a legend associated with a part of the neighborhood—merges into the storyline of one of the characters, who eventually plays a role in the central plot of the novel. Or vice versa, the story of one of the characters leads organically to the description of some aspect of the district. Section 10, for instance, begins with a citation from Soeda Azenbo’s essay about Asakusa as the heart of Tokyo, a “foundry in which all the old molds are

16.  Ibid., 129. 17.  Ibid., 206.

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regularly melted down to be cast into new ones.”18 This prompts a description of The Aquarium, which is “in the process of being recast into the latest model” (38). The Aquarium is the narrator’s way of referring to the Casino Folies revue theater, which had just opened up on the third floor of what used to be an aquarium. A mix of “eroticism, nonsense, speed, cartoonish humor, jazz songs, and women’s legs” is how he describes the theater. But in the very next sentence, the description seamlessly transitions to the characters of the novel and its central plot: “But the seats on the third floor are not crowded enough for the conversation between the man and Yumiko to be overheard” (44). The conversation is between Yumiko and Akagi, the man Yumiko is now attempting to lure into a private meeting on the boat. Section 11 details Yumiko’s seduction and Section 12 Akagi’s journey to the boat. To give another example, section 21 begins with the introduction of another gang member, “Boat Runt,” who has found a piece of paper on which Yumiko has neatly written a poem. The narrator, Boat Runt, and two other gang members attempt to decipher the meaning of the poem as they ascend the stairs to the top of the Subway Restaurant Tower. The top of the tower has windows on all sides and thus affords a panoramic view of Asakusa: From the east window, right before your eyes is the Kamiya Bar. And toward the bottom left, the construction site of the Tobu Railway Asakusa Station is a fenced in vacant lot. The big river. The Azuma Bridge, the makeshift bridge and the powerline construction by the Zenidaka group. The Iron Bridge construction by the Tobu Railway. Sumida Park. And the Asakusa riverbank also under construction. On this bank, a stone factory and a group of boats, the Kototoi Bridge. On the far bank, the Sapporo Beer Company. Kinshibori Station. The Oshima Gas Tank. Oshiage Station. Sumida Park, the elementary school, an industrial park. Mimeguri Shrine. The Okura Villa. The Arakawa Canal. Mt. Tsukuba shrouded in winter fog. (119) The muddle of this urban landscape is encapsulated by another gang member Haruko’s remark that Tokyo looks like “the bottoms of several muddy geta sandals all lined up” (120). This segues into a type of kissing ritual involving Haruko and the other gang members in the tower. In the next section 22, further descriptions of the city under renovation are interspersed with the drama inside the tower, as the gang members spy Akagi, covered in blood, being taken away and

18.  Soeda Azenbo¯, “Asakusa teiryu¯ki,” 102.

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Yumiko being approached by a police boat that “kicks up the river’s reflection of the Kototoi Bridge” (123). These examples demonstrate how the switching between the fictional stories of characters to the reportage description of the area is neither frenetic nor jarring. The characters and their stories are natural extensions of the neighborhoods and the neighborhoods extensions of the character. Yumiko is perpetually in various disguises throughout the novel. But this chameleonic nature is fully contextualized within the neighborhood which, it is described, is full of theater houses and costume stores. These stores would allow customers to try on costumes and rent them on the spot. Yumiko herself remarks that she feels like a “mannequin girl”19 for the costume store, advertising their wares on the streets. Ginza too had many costume stores but that area, explains the narrator, is more known for its makeup. Ginza, unlike Asakusa, did not “have the shadows that are required by costumes” (93). Yumiko’s disguises are thus literally inscribed within the culture of the Asakusa neighborhood. The scattered storylines of the various characters, picked up here and there, are what give the reportage descriptions a sense of cohesion. The characters are like needles; their very elusiveness is what stitches the fabric of the neighborhood descriptions together. These two modes of narration, reportage sketch and fictional storytelling, are not distinct but joined and overlaid seamlessly within the novel. The narrator integrates his role as surveyor of Asakusa and stand-in for curious readers with his role as teller of the personal stories of the Scarlet Gang members. The characters and their backstories in this way are woven into the narrative. Many of the characters act as guides for the narrator, or become lenses through which the narrator sees other characters and incidents. Consequently, what seems at first read like a highly fragmented and disconnected narrative reveals itself to be a highly interconnected weave of different lives and histories. Essentially, Kawabata’s novel needs to be read twice. The first reading—defined by a linear progression and linear expectations—results in the perception of fragmentation. The second reading reveals the ways in which the parts are interconnected, the way events in later chapters fill in the gaps left by earlier chapters, the way images and motifs recur to create association and continuity. In this way, the sections become connected through internal links, forming networks of characters and stories that only afterward become identifiable as the fabula of the novel.

19.  “Mannequin girls” (マニキンガール) were women who modeled clothes live in store windows. The occupation became popular for women in the 1920s.

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This method of grading fact and fiction, the city and the characters, the roles of surveyor and storyteller, renders in the reader’s mind the illusion that the plot and characters are wholly integrated into the reality of the present day. This was effected not only through its language and form but also in its mode of publication. The first 37 sections of the novel were published on the front page of the evening edition of the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun from December 20, 1929, to February 16, 1930. The chapters meanwhile reference real events that occurred as recently as November 1929—e.g., the closing of the Casino Folies revue theater—and depict events such as the Asakusa New Year’s celebration at the end of 1929. The remaining 24 sections of the novel were published in two installments that came out simultaneously in the September issues of two magazines: the literary magazine Shincho¯ and the mass magazine Kaizo¯. These chapters refer to the events of July and August of 1930. Kawabata explained that his reason for publishing the remainder of his manuscript in two large magazine installments was that by the time the manuscript was complete, serializing them in the newspaper would have meant too large a gap between what was being narrated and the time it was published and read.20 Kawabata wanted the novel to be about the present while also being read in the present. Incidentally, Kawabata never considered the novel finished and had always intended to continue writing. The references to current events were so frequent that the serialized novel created a type of feedback loop with the culture it was attempting to depict. It was well documented, for instance, that the novel contributed to a comeback in the popularity of the Casino Folies revue theater through references to the show and the use of the location as a setting for one its scenes (the scene where Yumiko meets Akagi in the Aquarium). In the gap between the stoppage of the newspaper serialization and the publication of the remainder of the story in the fall issues of the magazines, an actual film version of the novel was released, and this film would in turn be referenced in the beginning of the fall magazine publication.21 But this stitching of the narrative time with the historical time of the reader was also effected by the process of serialization. The novel, in other words, virtually unfolded in real time and real space to its readers. With no plot to “follow,” it was designed to be consumed intermittently, once every two or three days when the installments were published. Read in this way, the story in effect grafted itself onto the daily life of the reader, each piece latching more directly onto the current-day experience of the reader than to the other parts of the story. In other words, the lack of links between plot points, or the lack of

20.  Kawabata Yasunari, “Asakusa kurenaidan ni tsuite,” 383. 21.  Freedman, “Translator’s Preface,” xxxv.

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an overarching narrative arc, meant that nothing prevented these details from being lifted from their fictional context and associated more closely with the events of the day within the life of the reader. This direct link to the reader’s daily life, moreover, was abetted by the structure of the groupings whereby the narrative included a little about Asakusa and its neighborhoods before introducing a character or developing the plot. The structure virtually mimicked the experience of reading fiction amid the news. Toeda Hirokazu has observed that the insertion of actual occurrences and information about current events not only adds a dose of reality to the fiction of The Scarlet Gang but enables the narrative to “share memory with the reader.”22 Toeda notes the way such a narrative invites the reader into its imaginative space, the gateways into that space being the shared references to current events. Equally as important as Kawabata’s concern with the merging of fact and fiction was his interest in the merging of geography and the past. Just as the characters and the current events were folded into the present through the machinations of the narrative structure, so too was Asakusa’s geography and the associations it stored of times past. Descriptions of specific spots, buildings, and monuments in the area were often augmented with references to associated literary tropes or historical legends. Most often, the blending of character, locale, and past occur all at once. When Yumiko draws a map for Akagi to follow to their rendezvous on the boat, for instance, she has him walk past the Tsuga memorial stone and the old Uba Pond, sites that are associated with the legend of Ubamiya, an old woman who killed the man who solicited her daughter by crushing his head on a stone pillow. Maeda Ai suggests that this legend provides a blueprint for Yumiko’s assassination of Akagi; she embodies both the innocent desire of the daughter but also the malicious will of the old woman. The novel, he argues, generates a “dual world.” The depiction of an urban area that, culturally speaking, was on the cutting edge of the 1920s is spliced together with its hidden folklore.23 Kawabata creates his topography by collapsing the maps of different time periods on each other such that the legends of those time periods persist in the present. It is not a nostalgic gesture, nor a rejection of the modern present in favor of a more romantic and coherent past. Rather the novel embraces the present but does so in a way that integrates the stories and places of the past, arguing that they still have a relevance and bearing not just on the present but the future as well insofar as they are in the present.

22.  Toeda Hirokazu, “Modan toshi, Tokyo wo egaku: ‘Asakusa Kurenaidan’ no kodo¯,” in “Meisaku” wa tsukurareru: Kawabata Yasunari to sono sakuhin, Karucha¯ rajio bungaku no sekai (Tokyo: Nihon Ho¯so¯ Shuppan Kyo¯kai, 2009), 83. 23.  Maeda Ai, “Gekijo¯ to shite no Asakusa,” 298.

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If the language and narrative form made it difficult to distinguish the novel from other nonfiction essays, so did its place on the bottom of the front page of the evening edition of the Tokyo Asahi, not the typical place for a newspaper serial. One could imagine readers picking up the paper and every other day or so reading the next installment of a reportage-like “curiosity hunting” story that mentioned the incidents of the very recent past. While the text proceeds in a disjunctive manner, viewed as a whole these fragments are pieced together to engender a three-dimensional panorama of Asakusa. But this panorama is not just spatial but temporal and psychological as well, all organized around the central axis of the present. The novel works like a kaleidoscope. Turning the cylinder of the novel within one’s mind, the fragments shift and revolve, turn and tumble, but as they do so they momentarily settle into a geometric pattern revealing all types of structure and design. Another slight turn of the cylinder sets the pieces in motion again, only to reveal another formation, but still organized around the axis of the present. Kawabata’s novel works in this ingenious way by bringing the form of the novel as close as possible to the contingency of the present. The structure eschews the tendency of the novel form to ultimately close itself off from present time. To say that it is an unfinished novel is almost tautological, for his novel was never designed to end. To a greater extent than any of the other modernist texts examined thus far, Kawabata’s novel refuses to complete the circle of novelistic form. It refuses to take that step of elevation, of external coherence and integrity that has so often been considered an essential aspect of the work of art. And yet the story still manages to have vivid characters, aesthetic moments, and tearful scenes. There is plot development and character analysis. There is amidst the chaos of form a tender story about children growing up in a destitute neighborhood. Such a technique manifests itself in a statement of what Asakusa is, but also more broadly of how to write and represent human experience. But within the context of the serial’s publication, this representation of human experience, of the experience of Asakusa, was being carried out against another discourse that was laying its own claim on how that experience should be narrated. For years leading up to the point of the novel’s publication, magazine and newspaper articles had been tracking the progress of the earthquake reconstruction projects. These projects, which involved large-scale renovations of roads, parks, and bridges, were largely focused on Asakusa, one of the areas hardest hit by the earthquake. Moreover, Asakusa Park, and the Kototoi Bridge that joined it, were featured initiatives of the reconstruction effort. These articles together generated a narrative of successful progress, one that would end in a culminating event: the festival of earthquake reconstruction completion, to take place

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over four days from March 23 to 27 in the spring of 1930. Though the festival is rarely mentioned in Japanese histories of the period, the newspapers of the time anticipated that it would be a major historical event. On March 9, the Tokyo Asahi reported that the city of Tokyo would be spending 300,000 yen. Arches were erected, memorials constructed, and the souls of 60,000 people would be put to rest. On March 24 the Emperor himself would make a tour of inspection around the city in an automobile. These events represented discursive efforts to shore up national identity in the wake of the national crisis of the quake and establish a national narrative in which the traumas of the earthquake could be placed into the past. It was just around this time, from December 1929 to September 1930, that Kawabata serialized a novel focused on depictions of Asakusa park in which the main character assassinates a man underneath the Kototoi Bridge. In fact, Sato¯ Hideaki notes that the cessation of the novel’s publication, from February to September of 1930, coincided neatly with the occurrence of the reconstruction completion festival itself, a correspondence he did not believe was a coincidence.24 More broadly, it was against this national narrative of modern progress and future-oriented zeal that Kawabata wrote a novel that privileged the “grotesque” details of Asakusa and defied the narrative closures of time, insisting on a form that embodied the contingency of the present. Lippit argues that the novel, through its heterodox structure, set itself against cohesive ideas of national culture. Kawabata’s “disassembling of genre,” he writes, “opens a space of social and cultural marginality, one that evades narratives of national culture.”25 In the following section, I locate this “narrative of national culture” in the discourse of earthquake reconstruction. I show how the media representations of progress in renovation projects and the celebrations of their completion generated an ideology of national rebirth that would become the target of Kawabata’s modernist critique.

The Discourse of Post-Earthquake Reconstruction and the Narrative of Recovery Through reports on infrastructural progress leading up to and culminating in the reconstruction completion festival, one can trace a social discourse of earthquake reconstruction that strove to portray Asakusa, and by extension Tokyo,

24.  Sato¯ Hideaki, “‘Asakusa kurenaidan’ ron—yu¯hosha no me to katari no me,” in Kawabata bungaku no sekai vol. 1, ed. Tamura Mitsumasa (Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 1999), 195–196. 25. Lippit, Topographies, 121.

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as a modern urban space that had healed its wounds, moved beyond the past, and now looked entirely toward a bright future. The discourse of earthquake reconstruction attempted to contain the ideological damage of the earthquake by structuring it within narrative closure. The resistance of Kawabata’s novel to such a narrative structure was central to the work’s strategy of subverting this discourse, and insisting on the persistence of psychological damage despite the cosmetic makeover of the district. In this section, I will identify the features of the earthquake reconstruction discourse and demonstrate how it has been assimilated within the narrative discourse of the novel. By and large, this assimilation is achieved through the novel’s focus on the locales of Asakusa Park, and the Kototoi bridge, two of the biggest and most heavily promoted projects of the reconstruction effort. In the final section, I will demonstrate how the ideologies implicit in this discourse were subverted through a close reading of Yumiko’s climactic assassination scene. Not only is Yumiko’s homicide motivated by events that occurred during the earthquake, but the entire incident is formally narrated in a manner that insists on the persistence of the traumatic past within the present. The post-earthquake reconstruction project of the 1920s, spearheaded by the newly created Reconstruction Bureau, was largely bifurcated into the reconstruction of Tokyo and Yokohama. These efforts were further divided into different spheres of action, such as parks, bridges, and roads, and financially its support was split by the national government and the municipal governments of Tokyo and Yokohama. For example, one major task was to widen and pave the roads to ease traffic but also to create larger barriers between neighborhoods to prevent the spreading of fires like those that had devastated much of the metropolis immediately after the earthquake. The national government was responsible for funding the network of main arteries that would crisscross the city, while the building of supporting roads was left to the municipal governments.26 The responsibility for the building of new parks was likewise split between national and municipal governments. In Tokyo, the national government, through the Reconstruction Bureau, would build three new large parks, Kinshi Park, Hamamatsucho¯ Park, and Sumida Park, while the city government was responsible for building another fifty-two smaller parks.27 These parks, built in some of the most densely populated and hardest-hit areas of Tokyo, were meant to promote sports and leisure. But like the wider roads, they also were designed to serve as barriers to prevent the spread of fire between neighborhoods and to function as

26.  “To¯kyoku ga chikara wo sosogu itsutsu no nanjigyo¯,” Yomiuri Shinbun, January 6, 1925. 27. Ibid.

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places of refuge in the case of another catastrophe. Of the 136 new bridges large and small that were being planned around Tokyo, the priority and the lion’s share of funds were given to the six large-scale bridges that would straddle the Sumida River: from south to north, the Ai’ou Bridge, the Eitai Bridge, the Kiyosu Bridge, the Kuramae Bridge, the Komagata Bridge, and finally the Kototoi Bridge.28 The focus on these bridges was part of the reconstruction policy to give priority to the areas of Tokyo that sustained the most damage and were thus deemed most in need of restoration: the Honjo Fukagawa region and Asakusa. From 1923 onward, the news media closely followed the plans and the progress of these projects and reported on their progress in the bureaucratic terms of budget figures, time-to-completion estimates, and percentage figures for completion. These numerical figures and statistical reports reflected a newfound interest on the part of both the government and the media in statistical measurements. In the media reports, moreover, these statistical figures were integrated with the more poetic language of rebirth into a brand-new imperial city. For instance, the article referenced in the beginning of this chapter contained paragraphs on each of the project categories: roads, bridges, canals, parks, and ward redistricting. For roads, it gave information regarding the number of meters the current roads will be widened, the length of road left to be paved, and the specific cost estimates of the work to be done. For parks, it gave the surface area of each park to be built along with a description of the park itself. But the article began with the same type of rhetoric that emerged in reform discourse immediately after the earthquake (see chapter 2), explaining that Tokyo must not stop at restoring its old form but must “move forward and equip itself to develop in the future.” The piece ends with an exhortation to the citizens of Tokyo to cooperate with the Reconstruction Bureau—e.g., to allow the government to appropriate certain properties, and to cope with the inconveniences caused by construction—for the sake of a city plan that will “last for eternity.” Many articles tracked the progress by publishing statistics and figures for the percentage of completion. One article published on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the earthquake—August 31, 1927—reported that the roads projects had achieved 33 percent completion, the bridges were over 70 percent complete, the canals 45 percent, and the parks 35 percent finished. It also provided statistic concerning the number of wards that had been successfully redistricted in Tokyo and Yokohama. The article predicted that the city of Yokohama would be completed in 1928 and Tokyo in 1929, and thus looked forward to the “development

28. Ibid.

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of the new imperial city.”29 A January 5, 1928 article gave an update on the progress of the roads, bridges, and parks, and included a letter from the director of the Reconstruction Bureau, Horikiri Zenjiro¯ , which stated that “because of the efforts of the city’s denizens, 70 percent of the entire reconstruction project has been completed, and 80 percent of the ward redistricting effort has been achieved.” Horikiri concluded by reassuring his readership that the city was moving as fast as possible toward achieving the infrastructure and appearance of “a modern city.” He added his hopes that he could “rely on the passionate support of the citizens.”30 But much of the grandiose language used in connection with the reconstruction projects was employed to justify, and later vindicate, the actions of a brand new government bureaucracy that was overseeing an extremely costly and often very contentious public works enterprise. An article published in August 1926 reported that the reconstruction projects had become mired in the selfish interests of the people and, not 10 percent complete after three years, were in complete disarray.31 One article, announcing the completion of redistricting in the Kanda Ward, enumerated the hurdles the project had overcome. Some groups had formed a “slight opposition” by pursuing very small profits, there were complaints from storeowners, and finally people had dug up parts of the newly paved roads. Other than this, it reassured its readers, the project was going very smoothly and could be seen as a model for others.32 Though cast in pro-government narratives, these articles register the fact that these projects met with significant opposition among private citizens. Some articles in the paper directly addressed the citizens of Tokyo and asked them for their cooperation, an indication this cooperation was not always forthcoming.33 The reconstruction project itself was also the target of criticism in the news media. One article published in January 1930, almost three months before the festival, asserted that much of the project was actually not finished at all, and would not be finished until July or August of that year. Although the arterial roads over which the emperor would drive had

29. “Daishinsaigo sudeni yonshu¯nen fukko¯ jigyo¯ no shinchoku buri,” Yomiuri Shinbun, August 31, 1927. 30.  “Ho’ippo to shinko¯ shita kusei no sainan jigyo¯,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, January 5, 1928. 31.  “Shinsai sannen to naru ni mada sansan no fukko¯ jigyo¯,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, August 24, 1926. 32.  “Fukko¯ no sakigake nari Kandakko no oiwai,” Yomiuri Shinbun, November 15, 1926. 33.  “Teito fukko¯ no dai-jigyo¯,” Yomiuri Shinbun, January 6, 1925. The subheading of this article read: “The Understanding and Cooperation of All Private Citizens Is Necessary for a Prompt Completion.”

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indeed been completed, most of the capillary roads were still left unfinished and had been simply covered over with gravel.34 Accompanying the usage of statistics to report on the reconstruction projects in the wake of the earthquake was a growing trend in the employment of aerial photography. Photographs of the newly built structures and recently paved avenues taken either from airplanes or from tall buildings nearby embellished many of the articles tracking the progress of reconstruction through numbers and percentages. Other times the view was simply sketched. But these images offered the viewer a position of authority and objective distance, a commanding view that complemented the statistical objectivity featured in the articles. The expansive images of city streets, buildings, and structures provided visual support for the articles’ claims regarding the development of the city into a new imperial metropolis. An image of the clean angles of a newly built network of roads, for instance, would function as direct visual evidence of an article’s blustering assertions about the city’s increasing modernization. Perhaps no site carried this symbolic value more than the newly planned “river side” Sumida Park, built to encompass two opposite banks of the Sumida River, and the Kototoi Bridge that connected its two parts (See Figures 3.2 and 3.3). The new major parks financed by the national government were described as “symbols of the new face of a new city,” and the six new bridges crossing the Sumida River were considered “fitting parts of the new face of the new imperial city.”35 Perhaps partly because it stood as the single instance of a bridge and park being on the same site, Sumida Park and the Kototoi Bridge were invested with extra significance as the symbol of the new modern city. Planned to span over 25 acres (31,000 tsubo) of land, Sumida Park was far larger than the other two major parks. By the time construction neared completion in March of 1930 the area of the park had extended to 42 acres (52f,700 tsubo).36 Because the Sumida Park would straddle the Sumida River, the only one of its kind, it was nicknamed the “Water Park.”37 Orishimo Yoshinobu, the head of the Parks Division of the Reconstruction Bureau, asserted that extra resources would be devoted to the Sumida Park to make it into a “truly exemplary” park.38

34.  “Fukko¯ shikiten madeni kansei obotsukanai do¯ro,” Yomiuri Shinbun, January 5 1930. 35.  “Kanashiki omoide no hi yori nananen’me mezamashiki ko¯sei no warera ga shin dai-To¯kyo¯ kagayaku sono fukko¯ buri,” Yomiuri Shinbun, August 29 1929. 36.  Nakagawa Nozomu, “Gendai kagaku wo soudo¯in shi fukko¯ teito imaya naru,” Yomiuri Shinbun, March 20, 1930. 37.  “Mizu no ko¯en,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, July 4, 1930. 38.  “Te¯musu gawa ko¯en wo sono mama Sumida ko¯en,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, March 24, 1927.

Figure 3.2  Evening edition of the Tokyo Asahi Newspaper, April 20, 1924, p. 2. The article at the top left is entitled, “The Form Tokyo Will Be Reborn Into,” and features a sketch of Sumida Park and the Kototoi Bridge from an aerial point of view.

Figure 3.3  Evening edition of the Tokyo Asahi Newspaper, March 24, 1927, p. 2. The caption for the image reads at the top left: “A Bird’s-Eye-View Blueprint of the Sumida Park.” The title of the article reads, “The Thames River Park Becomes the Sumida Park As Is: A Road for Cheering on the Regatta Races to Be Setup—To Be Completed by the End of Next Year.”

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Though financed by the national government, the park by agreement would be handed over to the city upon completion. An article reported that one of the conditions of this transfer, however, was that the park would never be “marred with vulgar buildings, memorials, or bronze statues,” allowing the park itself to always stand as “a memorial for the reconstruction of the imperial city.”39 The illustration accompanying this article was a sketch of an aerial view of what the park and bridge would eventually look like. In symbolizing the transformation of Tokyo into a modern metropolis, the park and the river were compared to other famous rivers of Europe such as the Seine of Paris or the Thames of London. According to another article, Orishimo desired to make this area of theriver the central site of a citywide regatta. He would have the bridge pillars of the Kototoi bridge built enough distance apart to allow the passage of at least three boats abreast. The Muko¯ jima embankment of the east side would be extended from five yards to eighteen and would feature a concrete path, four yards wide, right by the river for crowds to sit on and run along as they cheered the boats. The same article also featured a bird’s-eye-view sketch of this new plan for Sumida Park and Kototoi Bridge (See Figure 3.3).40 This area in Tokyo was unique for the rich literary associations it possessed from classical and early modern times, making it somewhat ill-fit to be a symbol of the modern. The Muko¯ jima bank of the Sumida River, for instance, was famous for its appearance in a poem by Lord Narihira, included in the tenthcentury classic Tales of Ise, in which he uses the figure of “birds of the capital” (miyakodori, 都鳥) to describe his longing for his lover in Kyoto. The medieval playwright Zeami Motokiyo would take up the same trope in his Noh play Sumidagawa, which was in turn adapted into a Kabuki play by the early modern playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Some newspaper commentators at the time maintained that the park reconstruction would still preserve the historical vestiges of the area.41 Others, however, used the historical associations as part of a narrative in which the modern was replacing the old and the antiquated. One such article proclaimed that the atmosphere of the late Edo period had been completely eradicated, along with all the associations of the Tokugawa period, the Japanese style gardens, and the old-style roofs of the Ushijima Shrine. In its place stands “the elegant French-style Water-Side Park that remains very attractive to the people of modern Tokyo.”42

39.  “To¯kyo¯ ga umare kawaru sugata,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, April 20, 1924. 40. Ibid. 41.  “To¯kyoku ga chikara wo sosogu itsutsu no nanjigyo¯.” 42.  “Keito¯ sareta ningen no chikara i-narukana shin-To¯kyo¯,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, January 5, 1930.

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Returning to Kawabata’s novel, the Sumida Park and the Kototoi Bridge were central recurring locations in an otherwise chaotic narrative. In the first section of the novel, the narrator lays out to the reader the geographical setting of the novel: “My reader, let me spread before you the ‘Sho¯ wa Map,’ the new one that was redrawn through the ward redistricting of Asakusa after the Taisho¯ earthquake.” (52) The narrator proceeds to gives a sketch of the neighborhood as he introduces the members of the Scarlet Gang. First showing how he discovered Yumiko’s house, he mentions the asphalt road extending from Ueno to the Kototoi Bridge, the Asakusa Kannon Temple, and the Fuji Elementary School. The narrator’s description of the neighborhood map provides an encrypted key for the novel’s engagement with the discourse of the earthquake. All the sites that are mentioned were simultaneously areas of focus for the reconstruction projects in Tokyo as well as sites that would become key locations within the plot of the novel. The asphalt road that the narrator mentions would have been newly paved, and Kototoi Bridge newly constructed in 1928. The Asakusa Kannon Temple and the Fuji Elementary school were some of the only structures that withstood the tremors of the earthquake. The school thus becomes a place of refuge for the displaced and would be the location where Yumiko’s sister develops her relationship with Akagi. The Kototoi Bridge, whose great symbolic importance to the reconstruction projects was discussed above, was a point of fixation in the plot of the novel. As the setting for the beginning, middle, and end of the novel, the site lends a formal rigor to the digressive narrative. It is the place where the narrator accosts the Scarlet Gang members for the first time. It is roughly the site of the assassination, which occurs on a boat heading toward the bridge, in the middle of the novel. The boat under the Kototoi Bridge is also the focus of the other gang members who look down from the lookout tower of the nearby Subway Restaurant in the scene mentioned in the chapter introduction above. Finally, the Sumida River under the Kototoi Bridge is also the general area of the last scene in which the narrator encounters Yumiko again on another boat sailing up the river toward the bridge. The narrator tells us that the bridge was “opened in February 1928, constructed by the Earthquake Reconstruction Bureau.” He describes it as “bright and flat, spacious and white, like the deck of a modern boat . . . it looks as though a clean, healthy line has been drawn above the sluggish waters of the [Sumida River], littered with the city’s garbage” (60). Later, literally adopting the language

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of figures employed by the media and bureaucracy of the Reconstruction Bureau, the narrator describes the bridge and the surrounding park: Sumida Park, having very little decoration, was a perfect H, like a plan drawn onto the earth. In other words, the lines formed by the two banks of Muko¯ jima and Asakusa were joined in the middle by the Kototoi Bridge . . . [The bridge] was 158.5 meters in length. Though it showed the curve of a gradual arc, amongst the six new bridges of the Sumida River, the curve of the Kiyosu Bridge showed the beauty of the curve, and the Kototoi Bridge showed the beauty of the straight line. (190–191) The description of the clean lines of the rationally planned park and bridge, along with the measurements of the bridge itself, would have been straight out of the newspapers reporting on the status and progress of the government-sponsored reconstruction projects. This language is further referenced when the narrator follows the members of the Scarlet Gang to the Kototoi Bridge and then over the bridge to the eastern Muko¯ jima bank. The aspects of the eastern part of Sumida Park that were of interest to the reconstruction project and published in the newspaper are all mentioned here: The new Sumida Park runs from here all the way to the Cho¯ mei Temple. Or, to put our new landmarks to use, it covers an area defined by the asphalt path that accompanies the riverbank from the business college boathouse to the end of the boat racecourse. (59) Here, Kawabata reprises the renaming that occurred in the media by revising his use of older landmarks and describing the new landscape using the landmarks of the newly constructed park. As mentioned above, the boathouse and the boat races were the brainchild of the Park Division Chief of the Reconstruction Bureau, Orishimo Yoshinobu. The two Scarlet Gang members, Yumiko and her brother, watch as a family of four races down the asphalt path, which was planned by Orishimo to enable just such cheering crowds to run alongside the boats during races. Kawabata’s narrative even references the length of three-boats-abreast that Orishimo reportedly ordered for the legs of the bridges to allow for the regattas on the river. In the novel, however, the space between the “large concrete masts” are filled with three cargo boats going about the preparations for dinner (61). In this way, the narrator also points out aspects of the bridge that undermined the image of clean and modern architecture evoked by the language of the media.

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As the narrator walks under the bridge, he notices signs in chalk under the bridge—“This is not a place to stay,” “You are not to lie down here”—that are there to ward off the population of homeless people that have used the protection overhead as a roof. As he walks back over the bridge for the second time, the narrator notes how “the lights of the billboards and street lamps had fallen into the black water underneath, where flowed the sorrow of the city.” The inhospitable nature of the newly built bridge is also evoked in a late scene when a character puts her cheek up to the steel of the rail, exclaiming, “Oh, it’s so cold!” Here we get a glimpse of Kawabata’s larger strategy in assimilating the language of urban reconstruction. Descriptions of the misery and destitution that surround the site of the new park and the new bridge undercut and clashed with the glossy image of a modern future that these structures were used to project in the mass media. The newspaper reporting on the reconstruction projects found an endpoint in the much-touted festival to celebrate and commemorate the completion of postearthquake reconstruction. Over the three days from March 24 to 26, 1930, the city of Tokyo was roused into a national celebration that marked the completion of the reconstruction projects that were begun in the wake of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake of 1923. The Imperial City Reconstruction Completion Ceremony (teito fukko¯ kansei shikiten, 帝都復興完成式典) literally designated the technical completion of the infrastructural projects planned and executed by the recently established Reconstruction Bureau. But the celebration also trumpeted the success of the more symbolic and utopian goals of establishing a new and ideal city for the nation. The festival marked not just the finalization of the nationally financed project but was the last and largest of a sequence of reconstruction completion festivals that celebrated the completion of municipally funded projects in more local wards and areas. One such “preliminary” celebration was the reconstruction completion festival for Yokohama, an event that would become a model for the finale in Tokyo. Because of delays in the public works projects, the festival for Tokyo was continually postponed, indicating that it was not so much a deadline for completion as it was an opportunity to mark the end of a building national narrative about the fate of Tokyo and the nation as a whole after the earthquake. Taking place over three days, the Tokyo festival featured dance troupes, children’s choirs, orchestral concerts, nighttime illuminations, movies by Charlie Chaplin, and the exhibition of one of the world’s four electronic phonographs, to be loaded onto a car and driven around the city. There were two main events. The first, occurring on the 24th, was a tour of the city by the emperor himself. Beginning with the hardest-hit areas of Honjo, Fukagawa, and Asakusa, the emperor would be driven in a car down the newly widened roads paved with concrete and

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over the newly built bridges in order to survey the completion of the reconstruction projects. On the 26th there would be a large ceremony outside the Imperial Residence to which foreign ambassadors were invited and the bureaucrats that had participated in the various projects would be presented with imperial commendations. In remembrance of the dead, the city would also open the newly completed Earthquake Remembrance Hall. The coordinated construction projects were extolled as an endeavor the likes of which the world had never before seen. Commemorative stamps were issued with an image of the newly constructed Kiyosu Bridge over the Sumida River and were made available for three days at every post office.43 There was even a debate among city officials about making March 26 into a municipal holiday, arguing that this undertaking, which had completely changed the face of the city, was the biggest undertaking since the founding of Edo.44 One commentator claimed that the completed urban reconstruction project had established a record as the biggest of its kind in the world.45 Nakagawa Nozomu, the second head of the Reconstruction Bureau, explained that the “reconstruction of Tokyo, the capital of the empire, was not merely a matter of restoring the shape of a single city, but rather it actually laid the foundation for the development of the empire and the improvement of the national daily life.”46 He also referred to the project as a “mobilization of the sciences” that had resulted from the “progress of the modern period.”47 The event of the festival provided a rhetorical opportunity to complete and inflect the narrative of the city’s reconstruction that had been invoked so ardently in the months and years after the earthquake. As the completion of the reconstruction was celebrated, moreover, much of the discourse surrounding the initiation of those projects was reprised. Nakagawa, for instance, reflected on the sudden onset on September 1923 of an earthquake that was so large it shook the city and plunged all into despair, leading some to even contemplate removing the capital to another location.48 Anticipating the festival, Takebe Rokuzo¯ , a bureaucratic coordinator who was actively involved in the government reconstruction efforts, also mentioned the contemplated removal of the ¯ saka to emphasize how far the city had come from that period capital to O

43.  “Teito fukko¯ matsuri no kinen sutanpu,” Yomiuri Shinbun, March 21, 1930. 44.  “Fukko¯ kinen matsuri wo sho¯rai shi no saijitsu ni eikyu¯ ni kinen no keikaku,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, January 17, 1930. 45.  “Teito fukko¯ kansei,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, March 26, 1930. 46.  “Gendai kagaku wo soudo¯in shi fukko¯ teito imaya naru.” 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid.

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of fear.49 Many articles covering the event recapitulated the established narrative that the city’s people had gathered themselves up from the ashes to lend their energies to the reconstruction project.50 According to Nakagawa, it was the Emperor himself who restored order, preserved peace, and laid the basis for reconstruction.51 The city and the nation celebrated the accomplishment of the original goals of constructing a new, ideal, “imperial city.” The term teito or “imperial city” (teito, 帝都), which had become closely associated with the project of urban renaissance since the earthquake, enjoyed another spike in popular usage as it was employed in almost every headline and magazine article title that referenced these projects (See Figure 1.1 in Chapter 2). Moreover, much of the rhetoric surrounding the completion of these projects celebrated the “renewal” and the “rebirth” (fukko¯, 復興) of Tokyo into a new and ideal city. The headline of one article read, “The seventh year from that day of sad memories—A remarkable revival [sosei, 甦生], our new great Tokyo—A brilliant rebirth.” The article explained that it was the untiring efforts of the city’s denizens that enabled the manifestation of a “great new Tokyo” that had “completely renewed (isshin, 一新) its old appearance through new roads, bridges, parks, and schools.”52 Aerial views also supported the concept of reconstruction completion. When the neighboring city of Yokohama celebrated its own reconstruction completion festival in April of 1929, the event was capped with a visit by the emperor, whose first scheduled stop was the newly built prefectural office and included a climb up to the building’s rooftop observation deck.53 The following day the morning edition of the Yomiuri Shinbun reported that the emperor “viewed the reconstructed city of Yokohama with a pair of binoculars.” According to the report, after having surveyed the city from this vantage point the emperor conveyed to his regent his satisfaction that the city, which was once scorched earth, had within five years and eight months reconstructed itself into a splendid international port city.54 In anticipation of this event, however, the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun had begun a series of six articles entitled, “A Record of Aerial Observations Before the Honorable Visit of His Glory.” The series began on March 26, before the imperial visit and ended on April 4, after the Yokohama

49.  “Kyu¯wari made kansei shita teito no fukko¯ jigyo¯,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, August 31, 1929. 50. Ibid. 51.  “Gendai kagaku wo soudo¯in shi fukko¯ teito imaya naru.” 52.  “Kanashiki omoide no hi yori nananen’me mezamashiki ko¯sei no warera ga shin dai-To¯kyo¯ kagayaku sono fukko¯ buri.” 53.  “Yo¯shun hyakka saku koro seijyo¯ Yokohama e gyo¯ko¯,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, March 21, 1929. 54. “Sakae no shigatsu niju¯san nichi wo fukko¯ kannsei kinenbi ni ima ni kino¯ seijyo¯ heika nogyo¯ko¯ wo aoida,” Yomiuri, April 24 1929.

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reconstruction completion ceremonies had concluded. The series featured large photographs of Yokohama taken from an airplane and accompanied by an extended description pointing out the various landmarks of the city. The first article in the series pointed out the new baseball field and the famous Yokohama pier, and concluded by drawing the reader’s attention to the city grid that was part of the newly reconstructed city.55 Though something similar would not be repeated in Tokyo (the emperor would survey the new city by car instead), the event demonstrates the association of aerial views with sweeping vistas of a renovated or “reborn” city. The scope of the view embodied the ambitions of rationality and comprehensiveness held by the reconstruction projects. In this case, moreover, it also took on direct associations with the authority of the emperor himself. In addition to recovery of the city itself, a large part of the achievement being celebrated was the restoration of Japan’s image as an advanced nation and its position among other advanced nations. One article, entitled, “A Concentration of Human Strength—A Great New Tokyo!” explained that Tokyo, with all the accoutrements of a modern city, was now positioned to proudly represent all cities within the nation. It went on to praise in particular the new more rational network of widened roads within the city. Before the earthquake, one could occasionally glimpse vestiges of the Edo period in the tangle of narrow twisting roads. Such a system was important, the author of the article adds, during the premodern Tokugawa reign when it was necessary to defend against the outbreaks of civil war within the city. But this system, he concludes, has been completely overhauled and brought up to date after the destruction of the earthquake.56 Nakagawa Nozomu also commented on the new network of roads, boasting that the incomplete and chaotic network of roads from before the earthquake had been completely cleaned up. It had been replaced by a network of looping and radiating roads with Tokyo station at its center, all connected with the local city roads. As a result, “the imperial city now beheld the dawn of the completion of a road network that was nearly close to ideal.”57 It was clear that the achievement of the infrastructural reforms was a new and modern city that had effaced the old remnants of the Edo. The city, moreover, as imperial city, would be representative of all other cities as well as the nation itself. Affirming this symbolic and central role of the city toward the nation, Prime Minister

55.  “Fukko¯ nareru dai-Yokohama, Sakae no gyo¯ko¯ wo mae ni ku¯chu¯ shisatsuki (1),” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, March 26, 1929. 56.  “Keito¯ sareta ningen no chikara i-narukana shin-To¯kyo¯.” 57.  “Gendai kagaku wo soudo¯in shi fukko¯ teito imaya naru.”

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Hamaguchi Osachi called during the festival for continued investment in the “imperial city,” which was to be “the axle of politics and economics and the wellspring of national culture.”58 The Imperial City Reconstruction Completion Ceremony, with all its popular fanfare and imperial symbolism, was used to mark the completion and achievement of an ideological rebirth of the city and the nation. It marked an official end to the devastation wrought by the earthquake and celebrated the emergence of a completely new and modern metropolis from which would spring the advanced culture of the nation. At its most literal level, the event marked the completion of large-scale public works projects that were centered upon the hardest-hit downtown areas of Tokyo. The completion of these projects was represented through aerial photos depicting the new rational vistas and by statistics indicating the number of structures erected, the length of roads rebuilt, the land area of parks established, and of course the amount of public money spent. But this language—visual, verbal, and statistical— represented the culmination of media coverage that had been tracking the lapses and advancements of these projects in this way for several years. Most importantly, through this language the festival discursively concluded and thereby secured the narratives of the nation that were produced in the wake of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. It signaled the reinstatement of the modernization project that the earthquake had challenged. Despite the opening of the Earthquake Remembrance Hall and some mentions of those lost in the quake, the event was largely a celebration meant to officially mark the victory of Japan’s response to the crisis. In this victory was also implied a conclusion. The earthquake could be put into the past and put to rest. It was precisely this discursively generated sense of completion that Kawabata’s novel undermined. Published in the very same pages in which articles concerning the reconstruction projects and the reconstruction completion festival were published, the novel assimilated that language, but subverted the ideology of completion that it expressed through a linguistic style and narrative structure that defied attempts at narrative cohesion and narrative closure. It also addressed the issue of the earthquake and memory directly through its main character and its central plot. As mentioned above, the festival was not treated in the novel, an omission so glaring it suggests that the novel was indeed engaging the event through its omission of it. The newspaper serialization drops off on February 16, a little more than a month before the festival takes place. The festival is marked

58.  Hamaguchi Osachi, “Nananen mae ni tareka kyo¯ no so¯zo¯ seshiya,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, March 27, 1930.

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by a void, a gap in narration and time at the center of the novel. The event is mentioned only once in the novel. In section 21, titled “The Great Taisho¯ Earthquake,” the narrator mentions that Tokyo’s glorious renaissance festival will take place in the spring. He adds that the “new Tokyo was shaken out by that earthquake; and of course so too was Asakusa born anew from that event” (72). The line designates a point of origin that differed markedly from that which was announced by reconstruction and the completion festival discourse. While the latter sought to portray Tokyo as being reborn from the ashes of the earthquake’s destruction, the narrator here implies that Asakusa, as well as Tokyo, was born from the quake itself.

Yumiko’s Kiss and the Recurrence of the Past I return to the scene, described in the opening of this chapter, where the narrator joins the rest of the Scarlet Gang in the tower of the Subway Restaurant and from high above looks down at Yumiko’s boat, which is approaching the Kototoi Bridge. Though Yumiko is alone with Akagi in the cabin of the boat, the reader is made privy to the drama that unfolds within. The novel presents this event alternately from two different narrative points of view. Sections 18 to 26 narrate the events from inside of the cabin just discussed, which has been sealed off from outside perspectives by Yumiko deliberately shutting all the portholes. Sections 13–17, and then 29–37 narrate the gradual congregation of the Scarlet Gang members, along with the narrator, at the lookout tower of the Subway Tower Restaurant. This double vision, introduced through the establishment of at least two narrators—a narrator that hews closely to the observer reporter who wanders the streets and observers the neighborhood, and a more omniscient narrator who can convey events that no one else sees—is essential to the way the narrative engages the social discourse.59 In gazing downward from above through a telescope at Kototoi Bridge and Sumida Park, the narrator’s view from the tower can be understood as an assimilation of the rational bird’s-eye view that had become established in the media in association with the reconstruction projects. Sato¯ Hideaki has noted that Kawabata’s narrator avoids expressions about the “totality” of Asakusa that was typical of government journalists and instead focused on the “parts.” Instead of

¯ ta Suzuko was the first to identify and analyze this hybrid narrative perspective. “Asakusa 59. O kurenaidan no katari”, Gakuen, January 1987, 146–159.

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capturing the “heart of Tokyo,” “the city of humanity,” or “everyone’s Asakusa,” the narrative focused on reporting very concrete details. The narrative never zooms out. The exception to this, however, is the narrator’s view from the Subway Tower Restaurant. It is here for the first time that the narrative takes on an authoritative and public perspective.60 The ingenuity of Kawabata’a narrative could be described in terms of its achievement of a simultaneity of these two perspectives, the personal perspective and the perspective of the cityscape, the individual and the public. This dual perspective enables him to capture the city in all of its contingency. In this, Kawabata succeeded where Tanizaki failed. According to Unno Hiroshi, Tanizaki’s unfinished novel The Mermaid, set in Asakusa as well, represented Tanizaki’s attempt to pioneer a new novelistic space that could capture the entirety of the city. But Tanizaki had to give up, he explains, because he had not yet discovered the linguistic expression that would permit this. In his encounter with 1920s Asakusa, Tanizaki was not able to transcend the confines of the individual and have the reader encounter the entirety of the city space. This was why he gave up on his novel.61 Kawabata, however, was able to forge a narrative apparatus that, clunky though it is, was able to move beyond the individual and captured the entirety of the city. But the development of a public perspective in his narrative discourse was more than just a virtuosic literary achievement. It was part of a strategy that involved intervening in the ideologies of public discourse in order to capture the contingency of the city in a more literal way than perhaps Unno imagined. The juxtaposition between the aerial view from above and the narration of the personal and psychological drama between Yumiko and Akagi in the cabin below maps onto Narita Ryu¯ichi’s conception of metahistory, a concept that he developed with regards to the aerial photography that emerged in Japan in the wake of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. As mentioned in chapter 2, the quake destroyed the major Tokyo newspaper offices, leaving the first reports of the crisis to come ¯ saka newspaper branches, which had hired planes to fly over the city and take from O photographs. The aerial photograph representation of the earthquake-stricken city that came through this reporting contrasted markedly with the narratives of first-hand personal experiences that would gradually come from the Tokyo newspapers as those bureaus were reestablished. In Narita’s thinking, these two media representations symbolize two perspectives, the objective and the personal, on the events. His innovative work focuses

60.  Sato¯ Hideaki, “‘Asakusa kurenaidan’ ron,” 194. 61.  Unno Hiroshi, Modan toshi Tokyo: Nihon no senkyu¯hyaku niju¯nendai, 34.

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on how these two perspectives interact to form the historical narrative of the earthquake. He uses the term “metahistory” to designate the tension that exists between the experience of an event on the individual level and the way that event gets apprehended and narrated as a matter of collective history, particularly national history.62 Narita explains: While the experience of individuals is unique, and absolute in its own right, the process of cognizing the experience of the earthquake as the experience of the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake is the process of being conscious of it as a historical experience. Put another way, what I want to elucidate is the structure/mechanisms through which personal experience becomes remembered as a collective experience. While historical research takes this function on in the long term, news organizations do it in the short term. What I want to look at here is the framework with which the news organizations engendered the “earthquake catastrophe” (The Great Kanto¯ Earthquake).63 The newspaper discourses of the earthquake examined in the previous section represent what Narita would identify as the “collective experience” of the nation-state “engendered” by the news media. The Imperial City Reconstruction Completion Festival and the media reports that anticipated it had the effect of containing the volatility of the crisis and all its ramifications by subjecting it to a narrative arc, by transferring personal experience to historical experience. It fashioned that historical experience, moreover, in the language of modernization. Kawabata’s novel then reverses this process, undermining the historical narrative by insisting on the existence of the personal experience, and bringing forth that experience through his narration. This tension between the collective and the personal is played out in the scene of Yumiko’s assassination through the juxtaposition of the two narrative perspectives, one looking down at the renovated park and bridge and the other depicting Yumiko’s psychological drama. In the suspenseful scene between Yumiko and Akagi, the novel articulates a narrative of the traumas rooted in the earthquake that had been effaced by the rational language of the media and the ideologies of state-sponsored reconstruction. The aerial view, while incorporated into the narrative discourse, is ultimately blocked off from the private happenings in the cabin. Protected from that public and rational gaze, the hermetic space of the cabin provides a place in which the personal and psychological version of

62.  Narita Ryu¯ichi, “Kanto¯ daishinsai no metahisutorii no tame ni,” 192. 63.  Ibid., 198. Emphasis mine.

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events can unfold. This version of events by contrast incorporates human memory and explores the vestiges of psychic distress. The narrative not only acknowledges the psychological damage that endures in the minds of individuals, promising that the earthquake cannot so simply be put away. In its reenactment of the past, it represents the structure of trauma itself in the way it dramatizes the way past events recur within the psyche of the present. But this replication of the dynamics of trauma is made possible only through Kawabata’s narrative of the now, that is a narrative structure that grafted itself onto the contingency of the present. In the novel, the reader learns for the first time what occurred between Akagi and Yumiko’s sister during this assassination scene. In a more conventional, teleological narrative, the past is conveyed as precursor to understanding the events of the present or it is revisited after current events to help explain or rationalize what has already occurred. In Kawabata’s novel, revelations of the past are interspersed and integrated into this dramatic scene of personal revenge. It arises through and within the psychological present. The result is that this scene becomes more than merely the dramatization of a desire for revenge. Through the representational strategies of this mode of linguistic representation, the novel expresses an insistence that we contend with the impact of past events within the present. Specifically, of course, this is the insistence on contending with the impact of the 1923 earthquake in the present of 1930. As Yumiko confronts Akagi with the story of her sister, Akagi, in his male role, represents the insistence on forgetting the past. When she mentions how she first saw Akagi and her sister watching a dirigible pass overhead from a lookout tower, he dismisses her as indulging in fairytales. But when she recalls the Fuji Elementary School, the area of refuge after the earthquake where he and Yumiko’s sister met, the reality of the past suddenly comes back to him. “You see that. It’s no longer a fairytale is it?” Yumiko says, reading this realization on his face (100). Yumiko then recalls the demolition of the Twelve Story Tower and the kind of horror she felt at the way people cheered and celebrated its destruction. Akagi claims that such a response is childish, but Yumiko associates this drawing of pleasure from destruction with the way her sister has continued to love Akagi even after he abandoned her. “It is the same with a woman, who once cut down, grows to like the man,” she explains (102). While Akagi continues to trivialize and dismiss, it is Yumiko who must deal with the past in the form of her sister gone mad, a sister who has fallen to the lowest rungs of Asakusa society and whom she must continually care for and look after. Though it eventually becomes clear that Yumiko seeks to kill Akagi in the boat for having raped her older sister during the aftermath of the earthquake, the confrontation is about more than retaliation. It is also about a reclaiming of

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her sexuality from the damage of the past. When Yumiko and Akagi are alone, Yumiko begins to describe the past: “I was really a girl back then. Everywhere there were burnt-out walls of dirt and tiles, burnt electric wires and rusted corrugated roofs, with clouds of dust and ash everywhere. It was a time when it was not unusual to see people beaten to death with iron rods, twins being born in the middle of the street, the bodies of dead horses floating among the bodies of dead people down the Sumida river. It was not unusual to go without eating for three days. And love, well it was not an ordinary love.” (104) The love Yumiko refers to is the love her sister Ochiyo¯ had for Akagi, and she explains it in order to convey the severity of the impact his rape and abandonment had on her sister, and then by extension on herself. Her sister’s trauma has translated into her own inability to, as she puts it, become a woman. Ever since she saw her sister go crazy after being abandoned by Akagi during the days after the earthquake, Yumiko “decided then and there that there was no point in becoming a woman” (76). For Yumiko, who was in the fifth grade, her older sister Ochiyo¯ was her model of female sexuality. But Ochiyo¯ ’s madness, that is her vulnerability and her insistence on continuing to love the man who raped her, in effect closed off that path for Yumiko. “I am a daughter of the earthquake,” Yumiko exclaims to Akagi in the climactic scene, “I was reborn in the middle of the earthquake, you know” (106). The experience during these days was in short completely transformative for Yumiko. It is posited as the cause of the arrested development of her sexuality. Thus, while posited as revenge for her sister, Yumiko’s plan to kill Akagi also involves an attempt to reclaim her own sexuality. She explains to Akagi at one point: It’s all mixed up. Poor Ochiyo¯ . I will most certainly fall for that man. The man whom she loved so much that she went mad, I also want to love him and go mad. You know I really regretted what happened to my sister. I thought I’d never become a woman in my entire life. But if I think about it carefully, even before that feeling, the kid as I was, I can’t tell you how envious I was of her love. I often posed as my sister and practiced falling in love. That’s why, no matter what happens to me, I want to meet that man. (79–80) Her problem, she says, is that “she wants to become a woman, but she cannot.” Bringing Akagi onto the boat and seducing him is way of reenacting the love relationship between her sister and Akagi. This allows her to both gain sexual identity

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by emulating her sister but also creates the opportunity to conquer and overcome where her sister had fallen victim. Yumiko’s murderous desire is wrapped up in her need for sexual expression, a psychological complexity that is brilliantly encapsulated in the gesture of the kiss she gives Akagi, a kiss that is full of poisonous arsenic. Yumiko can become a woman but only by killing Akagi. She wants to kiss but cannot do so without the poison. She cannot express sexual desire without also unleashing her hostility and giving in to her homicidal fixation. In the moments before his death, Yumiko apologizes to him: “I’m sorry, it was all theater. But if I hadn’t done it that way, I could not have ever kissed” (116). Yumiko explains that the whole ruse, her seduction of Akagi into an assignation on the boat, was an elaborate and necessary effort to reenact the past. Without doing this, she could never have kissed, or achieved a sexual expression. Yumiko achieves a qualified victory through her actions when Akagi, realizing his impending death, begins to look at her differently. Yumiko exclaims: “Why do you look at me like that. Just now, you have begun to see me for the first time. Ever since the aquarium the other day, you wouldn’t treat me as anything but a child or a peddler” (116). Yumiko explains that what she did was not for her sister, but it really was for herself. By repeating and reliving the traumatic events of the past, by emulating her sister, Yumiko achieves a type of sexual expression and a harmony with her gender identity, a development that is registered in Akagi’s gaze. The arsenic kiss is a pregnant moment within the story, one that stitches together many of the dualities that the narrative sets up. The act is homicidal, indicating an act of violence within the present, one predicated on a depth of psychic pain and confusion. It is also, of course, an erotic act, one that fulfills the expectations of an erotic female protagonist that have been placed on her by the narrative. Yet at the same time it is a reenactment of the past, a recollection of past traumas, and a reconfirmation of the devastated cityscape and personal psychological experience. This represents a coming together of many of the disparate narrative and thematic elements that have been developed through the story, a culmination that is thematically represented by Yumiko’s maturation, her reclamation of her adult womanhood. Yumiko, as she says, was born of the earthquake, but as a character she is also borne out of the structures of the narrative discourse itself. It is in the poignant act of the arsenic kiss and the murder of her sister’s rapist that the narrative achieves an apotheosis, a moment of temporary unity, and Yumiko passes from adolescence to adulthood. She returns at the end of the novel, but only briefly and in a very different manner. The moment is produced within a narrative space that stands in marked contrast to the public-oriented, objective, and telescopic view of the boat from the Subway Restaurant tower. Within that space, there is a coming together of

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past and geography, of history and personal experience, eroticism and traumatic memory that has been suppressed by the panoramic, bird’s-eye-view, or the national narrative of the event. In this way, the novel works to undermine the language of the state and the ideology of reconstruction. The long-running projects of reconstruction that culminated in the Imperial City Reconstruction Completion Ceremony had been the crux of a teleological narrative of rebirth adopted by the state. If the language of reconstruction insisted on the rebirth of the city due to the reconstruction after the earthquake, Kawabata’s novel reframes the origin of this birth, insisting that it occurred as a consequence of the earthquake itself. Yumiko was reborn during the crisis, becoming as she says a “daughter of the earthquake.” The social discourse of earthquake reconstruction completion depended on a statistical rigor that denied human memory and psychological complexity and a language of modernization that effaced the past. The narrative also involved a masculine scopic regime that associated aerial views of the city with the notions of rationality and advancement that were associated with state authority. The narrative of the novel did not so much deny the narrative of modernization as it negated its ideological pretensions to teleological purpose and national coherence. It moreover exposed its simplicity by bringing out, within a language of the present, the memory of the past and the psychological integrity of individual experience.

Figure 4.  February 1924 cover of Woman. Source: National Diet Library Archives

Chapter 4 “Love” and (Male) Subjectivity in Hirabayashi Taiko’s “In the Charity Ward”

A staunch feminist and dedicated leftist, Hirabayashi Taiko was the most socially outspoken and politically committed of all the writers treated in this book. In a manifesto for a new coterie of women writers that she had helped to assemble in 1926,1 Hirabayashi defined their mission in contrast to the bourgeois organization of the “Bluestockings,” a women’s literary group that had advocated for women since their journal’s publication in 1911: “Though the Bluestockings rebelled mainly through emotions, shouting about freedom,” she opined, “what we cry out for is a literature of ‘purpose’ and ‘action.’” Claiming that “shouting and exclaiming about an unequal society” were no longer sufficient, she called feminist writers to focus only on “liberation” and the “action” needed to lead us there. “The chief topic of our literature,” she wrote, “is the purpose toward action.” By liberation, Hirabayashi did not mean simply more space and recognition for women. Through her literature, she hoped to “pioneer the new culture of the oppressed class that is ‘woman.’” She moreover understood her literary production to be directly involved in this struggle. She regarded her texts as “actions” that lead directly to this “liberation.”2

1.  Hirabayashi formed the League of Socialist Literature in 1926 along with fellow women writers Yagi Akiko, Wakasugi Toriko, and Hayashi Fumiko. 2.  Hirabayashi Taiko, “Josei bungei undo¯ no shinshutsu.” 193

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In her ambition to establish such a liberated society, Hirabayashi concerned herself deeply with a debate taking place in the late 1920s about “love” (ai, 愛). It was continuation of the discourses of love in the early 1920s discussed in chapter 1, but by the mid- to late 1920s, talk about love had extended beyond marriage to issues of sex and lust. In the language of reform, moreover, love was now more directly incorporated into prescriptions for self-cultivation and the attainment of a universal and rational subjecthood encapsulated in the term “character” (jinkaku, 人格). Hirabayashi shared in the assumption, held by many intellectuals and social critics in Japan at the time, that the relationship between men and women was the foundation for the development of social subjecthood. Redefining what shape this relationship should take, which was the underlying concern of the debates on “love,” was therefore a means to bring about fundamental change in the individual’s relationship to society. For Hirabayashi, refashioning love held out the possibility of revolutionizing society itself. In an essay entitled “The Newest Love,” published in the September 1927 issue of Bungei Sensen (The Literary Front), Hirabayashi defined the type of love that would mark the transition from an individualistic society to a socialist society. She explained that the foundation of a feudal society was the self-sacrificing love of women who lived soley for the sake of men. For capitalism, it was the free and selfish love in which women lived purely for themselves. The relationship that would engender the new era would be a love that was tied to the proletarian cause.3 Hirabayashi was responding specifically to feminists like Takamure Itsue who idealistically promulgated free love and envisioned a new society based upon the “female primitive instinct.” Stating that free love was absurd and that notions of the “female instinct” were no more than fictitious myths, she criticized Takamure and others for developing theories that had no connection to the problems of reality and furthering ideas that were rooted in an overly romanticized image of society. The “Newest Love,” she asserts, is not free love but love that is determined by the imperatives of class struggle. Love in the new age, Hirabayashi argued, must rouse the morale of men and women to fight and harden each other’s resolve. Love that tempts one toward flight or that weakens one’s resolve is nonproletarian, bourgeois, and feudal in outlook.4 One can see in Hirabayashi’s stance against this type of love the blend of feminism and proletarianism that characterized her critical perspective. Hirabayashi’s activism as a proletarian, a feminist, and an artist were tightly intertwined. In another essay, she lamented the state of current society in which women “live

3.  “Mottomo atarashii ren’ai,” in Hirabayashi Taiko zenshu¯ vol. 11 (Tokyo: Ushio, 1979). 4.  Ibid., 15.

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as if the object of their entire daily life was the subjugating love of men.” These women, she wrote, “not only lack class consciousness, but they also do not have, with respect to subjugating men, a realization that they are a subjugated class.” She blamed this state of affairs partially on women writers, whom she criticized for “prostituting” themselves to a “male-centered bourgeois literati” by employing “a honey-sweet literary style that was mild and lacking in any thought.” While she dismissed efforts to essentialize women as instinctually more gentle or loving, she just as vehemently opposed liberal efforts to efface the difference between men and women, to conceive of everyone as human beings, a strategy she believed to be inherently mysoginistic. “Liberation of the subjugated class,” when and if ever it came, would consist in the “liberation of women’s sex (sei, 性).”5 Hirabayashi’s concerns about class struggle, female liberation, love, and women’s writing were encapsulated in a highly innovative short story, “In the Charity Ward,” which was published in the very same issue of Bungei Sensen in which her essay “Newest Love” appeared. Based heavily on personal experiences, Hirabayashi’s story was a first-person narrative of a woman who has been arrested with her husband in Dalian, China, for destroying the freight car of a railroad company in protest of working conditions. Because the narrator is pregnant, however, instead of being sent to jail with her husband she is sent alone to a charity hospital until she gives birth. On one level, the story is focused on the bonds of love between the protagonist and her husband and how that relationship relates to the larger proletarian struggle. On the other hand, it is written in a studied and sculpted prose that is striking for its unorthodox representation of subjectivity and sensation. A central formalistic feature of the story is the process by which a rational perceiving subjectivity is undermined by intensive and elaborate renderings of the pain felt in the narrator’s own diseased maternal body. Hirabayashi’s political polemic is borne out just as much if not more through her linguistic innovation as in the plot of her story. But, characteristic of much of the scholarship on Hirabayashi’s ouevre, criticism on the story has dealt with her proletarianism to the exclusion of other aspects of the story, such as its feminism and its formalist innovation. Okano Yukie has rightly argued that Hirabayashi’s work transcended the political framework of the proletarian literature movement, a framework that tended to ignore women’s issues by collapsing them into the single dimension of class struggle. Such limited critical treatment of Hirabayashi and her work has continued today, prompting Okano to insist on a reevaluation of Hirabayashi’s work as writing

5.  “Fujin sakka yo, sho¯fu yo [Oh Women Writers, You Prostitutes],” Hirabayashi Taiko zenshu¯ vol. 11 (1979).

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that embodies an intersection of class, gender, and ethnic perspectives.6 I argue, moreover, that the perspectives of class and gender need to be further combined with attention to features of her narrative and linguistic style in order to grasp the full scope and sophistication of her social critique. Furthermore, in order to capture the real-world consequences of Hirabayashi’s story and understand the way it constitutes political “action,” one needs to read it against the social discourse of “love” that had become dominant in the mass magazines of the mid-1920s. In drawing the critical links between Hirabayashi’s formalism and the social discourse of “love,” I employ the theories of feminine écriture developed by French feminists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Both theorists delineate the disavowal of female sexuality implicit in Freudian psychoanalytic discourse. The relevance of their criticism is in many ways borne out of the historical moment that is under analysis. The discourse on “love” in Japan, while invested in defining social problems and prescribing social formations, was influenced and inspired by the translation and absorption of writings by European sexologists like Auguste Forel and Phillip Rappaport, thinkers who shared Freud’s position on scientific inquiry into gender and sexuality.7 The new wave of feminism in Japan, of which Hirabayashi was a part, directly addressed the issues of sameness and gender that lay at the heart of Irigaray’s critique. Indeed, influenced by European feminists like Ellen Key and Alexandra Kollontai, feminism in Japan, though necessarily possesed of its own local variations, must be understood transnationally as taking part in the very same traditions of feminism as Irigaray and Cixous. Irigaray’s critique is particularly useful in drawing out the intersections of leftism, feminism, and formalism in Hirabayashi’s writing because she, like Hirabayashi, relates problems of economic class exploitation with female suppression, arguing that the designation of women as commodity is written into the capitalist system itself.8 Her critique of Freudian discourse, moreover, helps to draw out the implicit disavowals of feminine sexuality embedded in the discourses of “love” in the mass media of the mid-1920s, connecting it with the contentious debates among the feminists of that period. But perhaps most of all, Irigaray is invaluable in her articulation of a feminist response to an exclusion that is fundamentally discursive in nature. Irigaray writes:

6.  Okano Yukie, Hirabayashi Taiko: Ko¯saku suru sei, kaikyu¯, minzoku (Tokyo: Seishido¯, 2016), 24. 7. Auguste Forel, Die Sexuelle Frage [The Sexual Question] (1905) (translated into Japanese in 1915, Seiyoku kenkyu¯, 性欲研究), Phillip Rappaport, Looking Forward (1906) (translated 1924, Shakai shinka to fujin no ichi, 社会進化と婦人の位置). 8.  Irigaray writes, for instance, that “Women are thus in a situation of specific exploitation with respect to exchange operations: sexual exchanges, but also economic, social, and cultural exchanges in general.” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 84.

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What remains to be done, then, is to work at “destroying” the discursive mechanism. Which is not a simple undertaking. . . . For how can we introduce ourselves into such a tightly-woven systematicity? There is, in an initial phase, perhaps only one “path,” the one historically assigned to the feminine: that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it. Whereas a direct feminine challenge to this condition means demanding to speak as a (masculine) “subject,” that is, it means to postulate a relation to the intelligible that would maintain sexual indifference. To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the “perceptible,” of “matter”—to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible; the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language.9 Though the object of Irigaray’s polemic was Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, her formulation of discursive critique amounts to a feminist reformulation of Eysteinsson’s theory of modernism. Eysteinsson’s modernist apparatus of a mode of representation that assimilates in order to undermine communicative language can be traced in Irigaray’s strategy for destroying the discursive mechanism of phallogocentric language. Women cannot challenge this language directly, for to do so would mean taking the masculine subject, i.e., speaking like a man, and would thus necessitate an erasure of sexual difference. The parallel to Eysteinsson’s discussion here would be works of realist fiction whose anti-capitalist plots lack efficacy because of the communicative language, or the capitalist mode of representations, in which they are written. The best and only mode of attack for women consists in mimicking, assuming the role of the feminine deliberately, converting a form of subordination into an affirmation. But in playing this role, and recovering her place of exploitation, women must not be completely reduced to it; they must use and indeed overuse and amplify the strategies in order to make them visible, to draw attention to them and thereby displace their hitherto unseen authority and expose their suppression of feminine language.

9.  Ibid., 76.

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I take this formulation as a blueprint for the type of modernist literary critique that Hirabayashi enacts. In the following chapter, I demonstrate how the discourse of love from the mid 1920s embodied notions of sameness that effaced and suppressed the feminine while perpetuating capitalist logic. I then show how Hirabayashi’s work attempts to destroy the discursive mechanism of this discourse through a strategy of “mimicry.” Through her narrative setup of a selfreflecting subject, she absorbs the logic of male narration embedded in the talk about sexuality and love. But she does so to recover the place of women’s exploitation within this discourse. Her constant focus upon the physical sensations of the (female) body insists on the presence of “matter” and the “perceptible,” making visible what had been made invisible. In Hirabayashi’s text, narrative form and linguistic style effect a liberation of the self from the subjectivity imposed by male domination and capitalist society.

The Problem of the Body in “In The Charity Ward” Hirabayashi’s “Charity Ward” is highly amenable to a plot-based interpretation of its social critique. While in the charity hospital to give birth to her child, the narrator suffers from beriberi, a thiamine deficiency. But this condition is ignored by the hospital staff because a pregnant woman with beriberi, it is explained, will need care for several years. The hospital director wants to keep his staff small so that he can pocket as much of the municipal funds as he can. Meanwhile, longer patient stays mean a lower number of total patients treated, which is the only number that interests the hospital’s wealthy benefactors. Though the mother successfully gives birth, the miserly hospital director will not provide her with healthy milk, forcing the penniless narrator to feed her baby tainted milk from her diseased body. The baby dies and, like all patients of the charity ward, is taken to the mortuary where its body will be dissected for the purposes of medical science. In the penultimate paragraph of the story, the narrator announces that, from their autopsy, the doctors will no doubt be able to make the following certification to the medical world: “Caution regarding beriberi infected breastmilk. Infants must be nursed with artifical milk or through a wetnurse.” However, she bitterly quips, they “will not be able to draw from the dissection of my poor baby’s dead body any conclusion about what is to be done for the kind of human being who does not have the money to buy artificial milk.”10

10.  Hirabayashi Taiko, “Seryo¯shitsu nite,” 105. Hereafter cited in the text.

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This poignant indictment of the institution of the charity ward is reinforced by the symmetry of the highly structured narrative form. The description of the experience inside the charity ward, which constitutes nearly the entire story, is bookended on both sides by a short description of the protagonist approaching the charity ward in a rickshaw in the beginning, and a short description of her leaving it on a rickshaw in the end. In the beginning, she is returning to the hospital from a visit to her husband in jail, and in the end, bereft of her child, she is being transported back to jail. These two outer descriptions frame and foreground the space of the charity ward, a zone that is spatially demarcated as a half-submerged basement. At precisely the narrative center of the entire story is a vivid description of the mortuary and the stone autopsy table that lies in the middle of that room. It is the object of much anxious gossip among the patients of the charity ward, for those who die in the hospital are taken there and dissected for the sake of medical research, their body parts eventually being cut up and sold for money to help reimburse the medical costs they incurred. The autopsy table is at the core of the story in terms of position, plot, and theme. This overall structure lends extra coherence to the message of the story. The baby is the reason that the narrator goes to the charity ward in the first place and it is the death of the baby, along with its dissection on the autopsy table, that prompts her departure and the denouement of the story. It is as the narrator leaves that she delivers her indictment, setting off the space of the charity hospital as the container of the allegorical content of the critique she is finally able to mount. The space of the hospital gets read as a microcosm of the dynamics of the individual within society. Cut off from her husband, the narrator is isolated, and narrates from the position of a solitary individual. It is from this solitary perspective of the vulnerable patient that we perceive the failings of the economy that supports the system as well as the sentimental bonds of charity that are meant to tie people together. The narrator’s statement does not just condemn the logic of (medical) science, it critiques the way capitalism contaminates the social bonds of “love,” the word “charity” (ji’ai, 慈愛) in Japanese containing the character for “care” and “love.” The charity hospital’s official mission to love and care for the poor is perversely premised upon an indifference to the body, and the bodily manifestations of economic disenfranchisement. The victims of this system are the poor, who must literally pay with their dissected bodies. While such allegorical readings of Hirabayashi’s text are powerful, they perpetuate on a critical level a similarly perverse indifference to the body within the narrative. They assume a strong subjectivity, a rational coherent subject—in this case the female narrator—that is there to deliver the condemnation. But such an assumption requires an almost willful neglect of the ways the stability of the subject is eclipsed by vivid descriptions of the narrator’s own bodily sensations

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throughout most of the story. The coherence of the narrator’s self-reflection, its objectivity, lucidity, and transparency, is perpetually disrupted by a narration that constantly refers back to her own physical body, to her physiology, and to her parturient pain. For instance, the narrator explains: Every time I moved my back in order to change the position of my feet, a sharp awful pain crawled like tendrils through my lower abdomen. What is that? Some kind of contracting pain continued to press upon me. I curled my back and put both hands on my lower abdomen in order to withstand the pain. I felt the smooth distention of swelling skin against my palms and the pads [lit. bellies] of my fingers. I caressed myself slowly. A drowsiness that I could not resist came over my eyelids, when suddenly a stomach pain came on me like an angry roar. It hurt. It was an unbearable pain. Impulsively I sat up and, hugging my fat thighs with my hands, I pressed them to my stomach. A precious warmth that could hardly seem to have come from my own body spread through my cold abdomen. (96) The self-reflective subject position of the narrator, indicated by her concrete and expressive descriptions of her experience, is simultaneously challenged, in a sense overwhelmed, by the vividness of her pain. Her physical affliction induces a separation from the self, such that the object of the narrative’s focus is not so much on personal experience as it is on physical sensation as a type of phenomenon detached from the subject. This estrangement from the self becomes such that the narrator does not even recognize the warmth emanating from her thighs to be her own, and only sees that it transfers from one part of her body to another. The narrator literally describes the feelings felt by the fingers. The vivid metaphors—the “tendrils” of stomach aches, or the “angry roar” of pain—illustrate not personal emotions but corporeal sensations. The allegorical reading demands that we pass over the stylistic complexity of this viscerally embodied descriptive style, a prose-style that very much defines the tenor of the entire narrative. Such allegorical interpretations can be indicative of an impulse to read narratives literally, either as mimetic reference to reality, or as emblematic dramatizations of that reality (i.e., allegory), and to neglect its status as mode of linguistic representation. The tendency testifies to the power of the realist mode itself, a form of representation so convincing and so dominant that it has desensitized us to the way in which it, as well as all literary writing, is a system of signification. In fact, one way to describe the modernist project is to say

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that it seeks to expose the artifice of the realist mode by adopting, exaggerating, and subverting its mechanisms, making us sensitive again to its processes of signification and thereby aware of our own susceptibility to be desensitized to them. This allegorical impulse and the critical blindspot it engenders was pointed out with respect to Yokomitsu Riichi’s “Heads and Bellies” (chapter 2). And indeed the perpetual iterations of stomachs, bellies, and abdomens in Hirabayashi’s text indicates the way she was responding directly to that work, adopting and recasting its stylistic strategies for representing alternate subjectivities in service of social critique. In the case of Hirabayashi’s text, however, more is at work than merely an aversion to regarding literature as a mode of linguistic representation. Inscribed in the discourse of the I-novel, which was the mimetic mode in Japan, was an implicit disavowal of the body, particularly the female body, as part of the apparatus for coherent narration. In fact, the self-reflecting I-novel narrator was often constructed opposite the presence of a mysterious and inscrutable female body. Thus, it is not just the complexity of the processes of linguistic signification that repels mimetic readers of Hirabayashi’s writing, but the fact that this complexity is closely enmeshed with vivid descriptions of the female body. The female body itself registers as a problem, a problem that is best dismissed or ignored. But this critical tendency, then, points directly to the subversive intentions of Hirabayashi’s text. If one purpose of modernist writing was to expose the artifice of the realist mode, to reveal the textual mechanisms that its mimeticism concealed, Hirabayashi’s text seeks to expose the sexism inherent in the I-novel narrative mode, to reveal the female physicality that its mimeticism suppressed. She does so by provisionally adopting its apparatus through the self-reflective narrator, but subverting it through that narrator’s constant reflection upon her own pained and pregnant body. Hirabayashi’s unorthodox style of description is meant to make us literally sensitive again to the contours, textures, and sensations of the (female) body, making us aware of the way (male) I-novel narration has numbed us to its existence. Ultimately, the textual feminist criticism embedded in the linguistic style of Hirabayshi’s “Charity Ward” does not supplant the proletarian impeachment of capitalist society furnished by the allegorical reading. Rather it deepens and enriches that critique. But grasping this most robust subversiveness of Hirabayashi’s short story requires that we recognize the alignment of both proletarian and feminist critique, and how this combination exists within strategies of linguistic representation. One of the first critics to identify links between the critical potential of “Charity Ward” and its linguistic style, particularly its focus upon the body and its sensations, was Naoko Ishikawa. In her pioneering criticism, she argued that the story’s ability to foment political activism was based not in its plot but in its

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linguistic style and that style’s intensive focus on the body and its sensations. Because the story’s activism operated on the level of language, it could do more than simply inspire people to action. It could alter the social consciousness of the reader. Ishikawa explains that “Charity Ward” is a story of a protagonist that gains “ideological resolution” through the mediation of her physical sensations and through the impetus of her “emotional/love/sex” relationship with her husband.11 The narration is devoted to depicting the process by which the narrator undergoes this self-transformation and attains a socialist worldview: Comrade that I love. Don’t look around at your surroundings. Look ahead. Look ahead. I called out to the visage of my husband that I had etched into the deep ceiling. Expanding my throat into the shape of a flute, I began to sing “The Flag of the People” in a low voice. As I came to a high note in the song, I thrust out my shoulders and pushed the air from my lungs, listening intently to my own quavering voice. A single tear brushed past my cheek and trickled down to my ear. (96) Ishikawa observes that the husband’s love comes in the form of a “bodily sensation.” This not only makes the “I” cry, it is none other than the moment in which she “resolves” that she will “live believing in the future.” The narrator’s bodily sensations enable her to become conscious of the man that is her activist husband, and it is through this husband that the “I” gains the perspective of a proletarian activist and is able to face up to real society. In her new consciousness, she wants to see her child grow up as a Bolshevik and refers to her husband as a comrade instead of her husband.12 Ishikawa envisions that, as the narrator goes through this process of expansion toward a consciousness that encompasses the world, so too does the reader. “In their own way,” she writes, “[proletarian writers] aspired to create, based upon proletarian logic, a new expression that would lead to a stronger self.”13 But for Hirabayashi, the content of this new consciousness and this new relationship to the world is contained within the very mode of expression itself. To simply read ideology into the story is to overlook the way it has been integrated or “crystalized” into the writing. Once the reader is locked into this mode of expression, “things that were not seen or understood before are suddenly

11.  Ishikawa Naoko, “Shiso¯ to shite no bungaku hyo¯gen,” in Hirabayashi Taiko Kenkyu¯, ed. Miyasaka Eiichi (Osaka: Shinshu¯ Shirakaba, 1985), 47. 12.  Ibid., 44. 13.  Ibid., 48.

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visible and understandable.”14 Its articulation of political activation as a matter of bodily sensation, she explains, is what enables it to excite the same type of transformation in the reader. Ishikawa’s penetrating identification of the way the text’s subversion, a revelatory moment of ideological resolution, is “crystallized” into its mode of linguistic representation shines a light upon the modernist strategies at work in Hirabayashi’s short story. Her argument, however, still depends for its success on plot development—in this case the ability of the protagonist to become a committed socialist—and the reassertion of a strong coherent (socialist) subjectivity. It is far from clear that the very textual operations that Ishikawa points to were indicative of such a coherent subject. Descriptions like “pushed the air from my lungs” and “listening intently to my own quavering voice” do not signify a socialist activist ready to join the struggle so much as it indicates an internalized, selfreflexive, passive yet highly sensuous consciousness. For Ishikawa, who is so attuned to the power of this language, the inference of a strong political subjectivity in the text seems forced, and could be regarded as a vestige of the proletarian criticism that she was trying to emend. Ishikawa’s interest in Hirabayashi stems from the way the story challenges proletarian criticism’s insistence that the politically committed novel should not concern itself with the individual subjective experience or the bodily sensations and emotions, such as love, that it encompassed. Founding proletarian scholars like Kurahara Korehito (1902–1991) associated such matters with bourgeois society and the solipsistic narratives of the I-novel. In such narratives, the narrator encloses itself within itself, creating an occluded situation that avoids social analysis. Consequently, in proletarian literature, emotions should never motivate the actions of characters. Emotions, Kurahara claimed, needed always to be folded into the “perspective of the avant-garde.”15 Recognizing the subversive qualities inherent in Hirabayashi’s treatment of the bodily sensations, emotions, and love, however, Ishikawa attempts to rescue Hirabayashi from this dismissal and, indeed, use her text as an example that complicates those principles of proletarian literary criticism. Ultimately, however, she affirms the larger proletarian critical agenda, causally linking the subversiveness of bodily/emotional descripition with the proletarian requirement of a strong political persona. Lacking in Ishikawa’s attempt at recovery is a full appreciation of the feminism inherent in Hirabayashi’s work and in her socialist politics, a feminism that could

14.  Ibid., 47. 15.  “Hirabayashi Taiko ni okeru ‘shintai kankaku’ to ‘shiso¯teki ketsui no kiseki’: ‘keibo¯teki riarizumu’ no kakutoku,” 58.

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allow Ishikawa to conceive of Hirabayashi’s attention to the body as politically subversive in its own right, but which might also cause her to see Hirabayashi in disagreement with proletarian politics. This was one of the powerful arguments put forth by Linda Flores, who recalibrates Hirabayashi’s relationship toward proletarian criticism in terms of an antagonistic feminist critique. Flores employs Elizabeth Grosz’s understanding that “the Cartesian dualism of mind and body are the result of a primary abjection in which phallogocentric knowledge has accomplished the separation of the two terms.”16 “Within the categories of mind and body, psychology and biology, interiority and exteriority,” writes Flores, “the latter terms are subordinated to the former.” This hierarchy is of course gendered: “The body . . . is associated with the female, while the disembodied mind is associated with the male.” As Grosz has argued, femininity has been implicitly coded with “the unreason associated with the body.”17 Flores identifies the operation of this biased hiearchy in the proletarian and Marxist theories of literature. While Kurahara’s position “represented a deliberate attempt to shift literary focus away from the internal life of the author toward a socially based proletarian perspective,” this rejection of the embodied subjectivity results in the dryness of proletarian fiction and Marxism’s “fundamental inability . . . to address issues of feminism, female production and reproduction.”18 Hirabayashi’s works then upends this model in the way that it “resists gendered dualisms of mind and body and becomes the locus of intersection for these spheres.”19 As such, they “reinscribe the body into a literature that was regarded as “disembodied,” and demonstrate how the political can be intensely personal as the very flesh of her protagonists is invested in their ideological struggle.”20 By bringing feminist theory to bear on Ishikawa’s approach to Hirabayashi, Flores demonstrates how the focus on the body need not be integrated into a broader plot where the protagonist achieves a strong socialist subjectivity in order for it to be subversive; the focus on the body constitutes a subversion in and of itself. Ideological struggle can be articulated in the “very flesh of her protagonist.” Ishikawa and Flores each identify essential aspects of Hirabayashi’s text: Ishikawa is attune to the provocative and socially subversive capacity of Hirabayashi’s embodied writing, identifying the way it draws in and tranforms the

16.  Linda Flores, “Reading the Maternal Body in the Works of Hirabayashi Taiko,” Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 5 (2004): 27. 17.  See Elizabeth Grosz. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 4. Cited in Flores: ibid., 28. 18.  Ibid., 22–23. 19.  Ibid., 32. 20.  Ibid., 24.

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reader. Flores aptly identifies the way Hirabayashi’s focus on the maternal body in itself undermines implicitly gendered dualisms of mind and body and the schools of literary criticism that have assimilated this understanding. These two approaches to Hirabayashi’s writing can be brought into closer alignment by tracing the roots of the gender hiearchy found in proletarian literary criticism (as represented by Kurahara) back to its origin in the literary establishment of the I-novel. Proletarian literary criticism rejected the body because of its function within the I-novel as the repository for the solitary apolitical individual. In the process it overlooks and leaves unquestioned, and there by inherits, the structure of knowledge and gender established by the treatment of the body. The gender hierarchy remained invisible in proletarian criticism, its suppression suppressed by the agenda of socio-economic struggle. Hirabayashi was keenly aware of this double suppression. By situating the biased gender hierarchy within the language of the I-novel, we can begin to productively merge Hirabayashi’s proletarianism with her feminism, and finally merge both of these with her literary formalism. That is to say we can begin to comprehend the way she expresses her radical politics through the instrument of an unruly prose style. The I-novel mode of writing, a style of high seriousness in which authetic truths were conveyed through broad and objective self-reflection, was always associated with men. This became more explicit in the 1920s with the emergence of the category of “woman-style writer” (joryu¯ sakka, 女流作家) to demarcate the growing number of female novelists. Joan Ericson attributes its emergence in the 1920s in part to a higher rate of women’s literacy, and in part to marketing strategies of mass media editors to target that market niche. But Ericson explains how the function as more than just a category. It conflated sex with aesthetic judgments of style, in this case “attributes presumed to be natural in a women’s voice—sentimental lyricism, and impressionistic, nonintellectual, detailed observations of daily life.”21 Even when women writers wrote stories of personal reflection, these narratives were considered simply autobiographical, lacking the “intellect” required to write authentic I-novels. Rebecca Copeland observes that “as long as the woman writer remains a ‘woman writer,’ the insistence on her inherent ‘womanliness,’ her imitative nature, her physicality, and her vanity remains constant.”22 All women were “believed to share quintessential and irrefutable feminine qualities that were manifest in their subsequent

21.  Joan E. Ericson, “The Origins of the Concept of ‘Women’s Literature,’” in The Woman’s Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 101. 22.  Rebecca L. Copeland, “A Century of Reading Women’s Writing in Japan: An Introduction,” in Woman Critiqued (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 3.

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literary productions.”23 The narrative discourse of the I-novel epitomized the subordination of exteriority to interiority, privileging the disembodied mind as the wellspring of truth and sincerity. Women were excluded from its practices through the implicit association of femininity with “the unreason associated with the body.” To be sure, these gendered definitions were not always rigidly applied. Janice Brown has identified the way male writers could be excluded from the label of capital-“L” “Literature,” and Ericson notes how certain female writers could escape the label of “woman writer” and write I-novels like men.24 Hirabayashi, in fact, was just one of these writers. A contemporary writer counted Hirabayashi among those “who give the reader the feeling of outdoing men, rather than being women.”25 But the bestowal of “exception” status only indicates all the more the presence of immanent and prejudicial expectations that all women writers had to contend with. The French feminist Hélène Cixous has pointed out that “until now, far more extensively and repressively than is ever suspected or admitted, writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy.”26 The situation for writers like Hirabayashi is perhaps best articulated by Copeland’s observation that women writers “are constantly being reminded that they are women writers and are put in the position of needing to write either in accord with or in opposition to prevailing (male) attitudes about what that means.”27 Female writers like Hirabayashi, in choosing to write serious fiction, had to contend with and negotiate with a set of writerly and readerly expectations that implicitly disavowed the feminine body and permitted only female voices that were sweet and sentimental. “Women,” Copeland explains, “had learned that they could not write about themselves or about collective female experiences without resorting to codified notions of the feminine.”28

23.  Ibid., 7. 24. See the discussion of Tokuda Shu¯sei in Janice Brown, “De-siring the Center: Hayashi Fumiko’s Hungry Heroines and the Male Literary Canon,” in The Father-Daughter Plot, ed. Rebecca L. Copeland and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, 143–166. Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2001. It is important to note that there was a cadre of women writers, including Mizuno Senko, mostly productive between 1905 and 1920, that were associated with the Naturalist school. Yukiko Tanaka has redressed their omission from literary histories based on their gender. See Yukiko Tanaka, “Women Writers of the Naturalist School: Mizuno Senko, Shiraki Shizu, Ojima Kikuko, and Tamura Toshiko,” in Women Writers of Meiji and Taisho¯ Japan: Their Lives Works and Critical Reception, 1868–1926, 103–136. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2000. 25.  Cited in Ericson, The Origins of the Concept of “Women’s Literature”, 96. 26.  Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 879. 27.  Copeland, “A Century of Reading Women’s Writing in Japan,” 4. 28.  Ibid., 10.

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Uno Chiyo, in her Confessions of Love (discussed in the introduction), is an example of a woman writer who approached this dilemma by reproducing those very same “codified notions”—those very same ways of writing about women—in a narrative of satirical parody. Hirabayashi, however, took a different tack. In “Charity Ward,” Hirabayashi’s narrative has self-positioned itself as a confessional I-novel narrative. Its first-person narrator, its basis in autobiographical details and concern with the self, and its explicit and unsentimental treatment of a personal experience signaled the narrative voice of (male) I-novel writers. But Hirabayashi’s minute and tactile descriptions of the physical body repeatedly undermine the implicit rules of that genre. While the objective stance toward personal experience made this narrative seem masculine, the very same detachment when applied to one’s own physical frame permits an alienation from the body that was antithetical to the coherence of the subject enshrined by I-novel narratives. The view of external landscape, or inscrutable (female) other, was now being redirected toward the actual self. The tight focus on pain in the body, while inviting the empathy of the reader, reifies the physical body in such a way as to create distance between the body and the (narrating) subjectivity that inhabits it. This process reflects Ishikawa’s identification of the way the reader undergoes a type of transformation along with the narrator, and how this new consciousness, this new relationship to the world as she puts it, is contained within the mode of expression, “crystallized” into the writing. If the modernist strategies of Tanizaki, Yokomitsu, and Kawabata had involved assimilating this structure of (male) narration in order to subvert the ideologies that were projected through it, Hirabayashi’s modernist text subverts the structure itself, exposing the ideological associations of gender, narration, and experience that it supported. The dissonance produced by the opposition between the masculine I-novel narrator and estranged descriptions of bodily pain is brought out most saliently by the fact that the body is female, and moreover pregnant. While the narrator is afflicted by beriberi, the pains in her abdomen are also the result of her pregnancy. The narrative treatment of childbirth can be read within a lineage of texts treating the subject that, as Flores writes of Hirabayashi’s texts, “flout conventional notions of motherhood and maternity and disturb the boundaries conventionally delineating these ‘sacred’ social spaces.”29 Yosano Akiko was known for her poems on childbirth and Hirabayashi would have certainly been aware of Mizuno Senko’s “Forty Days,” a short story depicting the discontents of

29.  Flores, “Reading the Maternal Body in the Works of Hirabayashi Taiko,” 21.

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a pregnant girl in the provinces.30 What is remarkable about Hirabayashi, who also wrote other stories that featured childbirth and infanticide, was the unvarnished and at times unsightly ways in which she handled these situations. But Hirabayashi’s stylistic treatment of pregnancy also reflects her intervention in male writing about the subject, beginning with Shiga, and the I-novel literature that he represented, but also including Yokomitsu, Tanizaki, and Kawabata as well. In Shiga’s Reconciliation, the scene of the wife’s childbirth is summed up in glowing terms: As for the birth, there was nothing unsightly about it. One reason no doubt was that it was a natural birth. Not one unsightly thing appeared in my wife’s face or her posture. Everything was beautiful. Hirabayashi’s narrator paints a starkly different picture: At five o’clock in the morning, the head nurse who had come down from the second floor to use the bathroom discovered me in labor, and on top of a single spotted old cotton bedspread, I gave birth to a baby girl all red like a monkey. Hirabayashi’s blunt and brutal description reads almost antipathetically to Shiga’s beaming sentiment. But the difference is not just a matter of tone but also of perspective. For Shiga, the beauty emanated from his countenancing of his wife’s face. The potential pain and ugliness are externalized in the wife, who is opposite him, kept at a safe distance from the coherent and stable observing (male) subject. Hirabayshi, by contrast, seems to give free reign to the unsightliness Shiga’s narrator dreads, but conveys it through a solitary self-narration. Yokomitsu too engages the theme of pregnancy in “Ruthless City,” where the narrator searches for an abandoned baby on the altar of a temple, but he treats it as a problem of knowledge. Tanizaki and Kawabata hardly touch the subject; Naomi refuses to have children, and Yumiko’s purported “birth” from the earthquake represents a purely thematic treatment of the subject. It is interesting to remember, in this respect, that Hirabayashi’s narrator had her first birth pangs during that earthquake. Hirabayashi intervenes in the representation of pregnancy by male writers not only by depicting it with a reality that undercut the way it was sanitized and intellectualized by male writers, but also by situating it squarely within an

30.  For a discussion of this story, see Barbara Hartley. “Mizuno Senko (1888–1919),” in Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan, ed. Rebecca L. Copeland and Melek Ortabasi, 311–318. New York: Columbia University, 2006. I am indebted to one of the readers of this manuscript for bringing my attention to this lineage.

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“I”-narrative. Her narrative, through its intensive focus upon the body, undermined rather than affirmed the trappings of the stable subjectivity established in that autobiographical genre. It is through this process that she exposed the disavowal of the female body latent in the narrative structure of the I-novel. To this extent, Hirabayashi’s story manifests the type of feminine écriture theorized decades later by Cixous, who understood the writing of the female body to be an act of resistance against the male libidinal economy. She writes: “We’ve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty . . . [Thus] . . . Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve—discourse . . .”31 Cixous articulates succinctly the alignment of feminism and proletarianism inherent in the forging of a new language, one that would “wreck partitions [and] classes.” This conception stems from a foundational conviction that the ultimate “reserve” of such power structures is “discourse.” This writing, she adds, would “surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system” and will take place in areas other than those “subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination.”32 This almost spatial conception of the linguistic critique—an “evasion” of the system that takes place in alternate “areas”—suggests a way to reconceive the space of the half-submerged charity hospital, to free that space from its subjugation to the allegorical reading. In that reading, the space is used in service of a plot-based indictment. The space, centered as it was on the literal sacrifice of the body, is itself sacrificed in this reading, this time at the altar of an assertive indictment delivered through a strong socialist subject. Understanding the representation of the pained body as a type of subversion in and of itself allows us to recast the space of the charity ward. Instead of regarding the realm of the halfsubmerged charity ward as a negative space, a wormhole of physical and psychological affliction that the narrator must go through and come out of before she can finally utter her recriminations, this underground space must be understood as the site of the subversion itself. The bookends of the narration outside the hospital instead become the frame that establishes this space of insubordination. This space becomes the site for a narration focused upon the (female) body that

31.  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 886. 32.  Ibid., 883.

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undermines the male economy of subjectivity. This stable (male) subjectivity is established in the initial paragraphs outside of the charity hospital, but its coherence is disrupted within the hospital as the narrator reflects upon her abject circumstances and her own bodily pain. But the target of Hirabayashi’s subversion was not I-novel narrative discourse per se. The “philosphico-theroetical domination” of female subjectivity was not just occuring in the pages of I-novel fiction. It was just around the mid-1920s that the social discourse on “love” and “character” had begun to take on precisely such characteristics in the mass media. Coupled with the twin notion “lust,” the discourse on “love” took on a scientific ambition as it sought to examine the role of love and sexual desire in the psychology of the individual and in the structures of society. A central concept within such analysis was the notion of a free and universal subjectivity encapsulated by the term “character” (jinkaku, 人格). Thus, the subversion of I-novel language was a means toward displacing an ideology of cultured (male) progressive subjectivity that had become dominant in the reform discourse of the 1290s. The next section will demonstrate how the discourses of “love” and “character,” very much extensions of I-novel language, constituted a “phallocentric system” that repudiated the (female) body and excluded women. Examining the nuances of this social discourse will further clarify the scope of Hirabayashi’s modernist critique. Section 3, below, will return to Hirabyashi’s text to examine just how the linguistic subversion is taking place. But grasping the social ramifications of Hirabayashi’s linguistic critique will set us up to understand how such a subversion in fact consituted a type of “action” toward “liberation.”

(Male) Subjectivity in The Discourses of Love, Lust, and Feminism As discussed in chapter 1, the discourse of love in Japan, which emerged in the late Meiji period, took on decidedly secular and progressive connotations in the early 1920s. Social reformers touted “lovism” and love-based “free marriage” as a means to achieve a more liberal and democratic society. Marriages based on spiritual unions, it was assumed, would become a vehicle for introducing democratic ideals into Japanese society. Love, moreover, was understood as a union of spirit and sensibility that transcended the lower functions of the physical body. Therefore, implicit in such high-minded notions of love was the deprecation of lust, the opposite of love, as all that was base and vulgar with respect to the relationships between the sexes. By the mid-1920s, however, the discourse had changed in tenor. Not only did it become more prevalent within the mass

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media, but talk of love was augmented with more frank discussions of sexuality and sexual desire. In Japanese, these discussions introduced a host of new words into the public discourse, such as “sexual love” (sei’ai, 性愛) and “sexual desire” or “lust” (seiyoku, 性欲). Sexual desire became something that was no longer to be condemned but rather analyzed and understood. Okano Yukie explains that in contrast to the abstract and enlightened theories of love that had characterized the mid-Taisho¯ period, the 1920s were characterized by theories of sexual love. She points out that though historians refer to a surge in the talk about love during the 1920s (ren’ai-ron buumu, 恋愛論ブーム), a look at the magazines at the time reveals that many of these articles did not just limit themselves to love but broached the issue of sex and sexuality as well.33 In the following section, I will trace the outlines of this social discourse by looking closely at the writings of a handful of prominent voices on the topic of love, sexuality, and women’s rights. I will show that despite its pretensions to scientific inquiry, the discourse of love and lust was a vehicle for articulating ideals and directives about marriage and relationships. Such discourses, undergirding visions of progressive society in Japan, also dovetailed with liberal feminist doctrines that ironically disavowed the feminine through its assumptions of universal subjectivity. In the tone of mass media talk about sexuality in the mid-1920s, there was a notable tension between a bashful self-consciousnes about publicly discussing issues of physical intimacy on the one hand and the stance of objective analysis and recourse to the imperatives of scientific inquiry that were used to justify doing so on the other. The semblance of rigorous investigation was in large part inspired by the translation of the works of European sexologists, books that contributed significantly to the liberalization of public attitudes toward sex. The philosopher Tsuchida Kyo¯son, for example, felt that love played such an important role in people’s lives that it merited treatement as an object of philosophical inquiry. “In order to make correct judgments about the acts of love in society,” he wrote, “it is essential to maintain a systematic knowledge of the topic.”34 Though aware of the skepticism with which it would be met, Tsuchida nonetheless wished to establish a new field of academic investigation that he dubbed “eroticology (the philosophy of love), ” the aim of which would be philosophical reflection upon people’s sexual daily lives (seiteki seikatsu, 性的生活).35 The theoretical physicist, Ishihara Jun, was slightly more modest, mentioning that he was not someone with expert

33.  Okano Yukie, Hirabayashi Taiko: Ko¯saku suru sei, kaikyu¯, minzoku, 24. 34.  Tsuchida Anson, “Saikin shoka no ren’ai kan wo ronzu,” Fujin ko¯ron, March and April 1924. 35. Ibid.

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knowledge or specialized training in philosophy. Nonetheless, he believed it was sufficient for him to approach the subject of love in a general way simply as a human being given that he maintained a “heart of utmost solemnity.” “As much as possible,” he wrote, “I, as a single individual human being, will reflect upon the effects of life, and thus search out and discover the ideal value contained in the facts of love.”36 Ishihara indeed expressed some embarassment about talking publicly about sexual stimulation, and assured his audience that he would avoid talking about his own personal experiences with love. It is no accident that such a rhetorical stance resembled that of the I-novel confessional narrator. Indeed, in an article about the “pitfalls” of love, the playwright Kurata Hyakuzo¯, in a language perfectly reminscent of the narrator in Tanizaki’s faux I-novel, states that one of his reasons for writing about love is to provide reference material to people who, for the most part, experience love when they are too young and have too little experience.37 The same posture of transparency with which people wrote about their marriages or their monthly budgets was now being used to justify talk about sexuality. Meanwhile, as the discourse on sexuality moved from rigidly academic circles to more popular media such as magazines and newspapers, the authority to hold forth on the topic became more personal, and the approach to the topic less clinical and more prescriptive. But even writers like Ishihara used justifications of science and analytical rigor in communicating their rationales for broaching the topic of lust. Demanding “investigations of fine-grained precision,” Ishihara criticized other commentators for avoiding explanations of perfect clarity in their treatment of love and sexual desire.38 The discussion of love by writers like Ishihara was characterized by a lean and straightforward logic and an ambition to treat the topic from a detached academic position. The new interest in topics such as love and lust was driven by an implicit belief that these hitherto unexplored aspects of human life contained the secrets for achieving higher ideals of truth and authenticity in one’s life. Kurata wrote that, “Love is the sexual manifestation of the desire for self-completion, a fundemental need of life (seimei, 生命) . . . Sexual desire . . . is more than just a matter of existence, it is related to the fact of value, and is one with the desire for truth, morality, and beauty.”39 According to Ishihara, getting to the bottom of the feelings of love and lust is tantamount to “essentially discovering the true path in life.” It is the duty of thinkers like himself, he wrote, to think about such things carefully in

36.  Ishihara Jun, “Ren’ai kachi ron,” Kaizo¯, July 1924. 37.  Kurata Hyakuzo¯, “Ren’ai no meiro,” Kaizo¯, May 1925. 38.  Ishihara Jun, “Ren’ai kachi ron.” 39.  Kurata Hyakuzo¯, “Ren’ai no meiro,” Kaizo¯, May 1935

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order to “deepen daily life.”40 Kurata also writes that love is the “most important thing when it comes to the content of one’s daily life.”41 The talk of love and sexuality was, in its own way, an extension of the “daily life” (seikatsu, 生活) debates that emerged in the early 1920s (discussed in chapter 1). This way of discussing daily life as something that could be deepened was, moreover, indicative of the new inflection the term took on in the years after the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake. As detailed in chapter 2, the discourse of “daily life” reform was altered by the catastrophe of 1923. Before the earthquake, reformers sought to change “daily life” along the lines of material practices such as consumption, or time management. But the threat of the earthquake, the way it challenged the stability and inevitability of progress within the capital city and by extension the nation as a whole, prompted reformers to focus on daily life on a more spiritual, even ontological, level. The attempt to examine daily life through the facets of love and sexuality was related to this more metaphysical interrogation of life. To the extent that the two terms of “love” and “lust” were understood in a more or less equal relationship, the discourses surrounding sexuality represented a genuine interest in libidinal desire. Spurred by European sexology, the 1920s saw the emergence of a newfound acceptance of the physical body and curiosity about the role that it played in human behavior and society. Kurata, for instance, writes of the importance of recognizing both the spiritual and the physical in a relationship. One cannot be in love with someone purely because of the spirit, a mistaken assumption has often led people to believe they were in love when in fact they merely had feelings of affinity and platonic affection. He was, however, mostly concerned with the opposite problem. By moralistically dismissing the need for the physical, people make themselves vulnerable to its allure, mistaking for love obsessions with the flesh and appearance.42 This would have been a very apt diagnosis of Jo¯ji, Tanizaki’s protagonist from A Fool’s Love. Such commentary reflects a newfound honesty and insightfulness about human psychology in the mass media of the late 1920s. When it reflected such a neutral and dispassionate attitude toward sexual desire, discourses of lust marked a significant advancement for debates surrounding women’s issues and female equality. It elicited a more open and explicit approach to issues of female physiology, sexuality, and desire, allowing writers to address the issues confronting women with a directness that had not been possible even

40.  Ishihara Jun, “ren’ai to seikatsu,” Kaizo¯, February 1925. 41.  Kurata Hyakuzo¯, “Ren’ai no meiro.” 42.  Kurata Hyakuzo¯, “Ren’ai no meiro.”

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half a decade before. Frank discussion of sexuality and sexual desire, moreover, paved the way for hitherto unspoken topics such as birth crontrol, open marriages, and the economic recognition of domestic labor. From advocacy of “free love” and suggestions of nonpermanent marriage to straightforward treatises on sex, the talk about love and lust enabled journalists, academics, social critics, and magazine readers alike to articulate and contemplate alternate and sometimes radically new familial formations. Barbara Sato notes the way the rhetoric of love and self-cultivation gave some women a way to resist unwanted arrangements, offering “a new context within which to express their opinions and desires.”43 These public debates fed and were fed by a resurgence of feminist activity in the mid-1920s that took place on many fronts including women’s suffrage, women’s employment equality, and gender equality in education. But this unbiased approach to sexuality was not always maintained. Though many writers professed to have the same scientific objectivity with respect to lust as they applied toward love, more often than not the two terms were subject to value judgments within the pages of magazines and newspapers. In discussions of sexuality, sexual desire (seiyoku, 性欲) was paired with love (ren’ai, 恋愛) to serve as a type of counterpoint, redirecting attention from the physical back to the ideal. The terms were set within a hierarchy whereby love was understood as the impetus for the transcendence of sexual desire, or sexual desire was valuable but only because it was the sole pathway to love. Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Modern Views of Love, a best-selling book at the time, for instance, included explicit references to lust and sex as natural parts of a relationship. However, they were at the same time instincts that required purification in order to have proper sexual congress, the type of appropriate sex that was the expression of love and “character.”44 According to Ishihara, love is essentially different from lust, but lust is an indispensable impetus for the awakening of love. Sex is an opportunity for the complete mutual knowledge that love entails. Love is like other emotions, but unlike other emotions, it can impel individuals toward higher causes because of its integration of reasoned reflection. “A world governed by pure love,” Ishihara writes, “will give way to a human daily life characterized by truly free character that supercedes conventional morality.”45 It is because love has such a relationship to social morality that it represents an extremely important field of study. As can be gleaned in these examples, the two terms would function as the nodes through which to elaborate a path of individual development that was

43. Sato, The New Japanese Woman, 148. 44.  Kuriyagawa Hakuson, Kindai no ren’ai kan (Tokyo: Kaizo¯sha, 1921). 45.  Ishihara Jun, “ren’ai to seikatsu.”

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needed to bring about an ideal progressive society. Ishihara, for instance, divided social life into three different levels of daily life: First there is physical or instinctual daily life (kanno¯ seikatsu, 官能的生活), which is the daily life of animals. This can be cultivated into emotional daily life (kanjo¯ seikatsu, 感情的生活). While this represents a progression, animals have this type of existence as well. Only humans, however, have the ability to move beyond primal instincts and, through the use of their will (ishi, 意志), lead a life of thought, or principles (shiso¯ seikatsu, 思想的生活). The daily life of principles is governed by the intellect and premised on a belief in the universal freedom of people who are free to act and free to make choices about their actions. It is in this daily life of principles that one finds assurances of eternity and evolution. It is in the reflection and imposition of our will on the emotional daily life that human beings achieve moral value and beauty.46 The social critic Muramatsu Masatoshi elaborated a similar progression, but one cast in the terms of world history, with the Renaissance as the watershed moment in human civilization. Before the Renaissance, when civilization was based on religion, he explains, the will of the gods was paramount. Humans, who had only to obey this will, did not possess a conscience and did not have the ability to judge right from wrong. They had no control over their own daily lives because gods ruled everything. This changed during the Renaissance when human beings discovered the “self ” (ga, 我). Through this discovery, over time human beings developed reason (richi, 理知), which in turn gave way to a world of critique. In this process, daily life “evolves” from being “non-subject-oriented” to being “subject-oriented.” Thus, the daily life that was once based on religion and ethics is now based on science and knoweldge.47 Ishihara and Muramatsu both agree on the notion of a reflective and reasoning self as the basis of a social life that transcends or evolves beyond the sordid life of mere instinct and desire. This notion of an ideal, free-thinking self, referred to as “self ” by Muramatsu, and “character” by Ishihara, was a key term in the discourses of lust, love, and social reform. In early twentieth-century Japanese liberalism, “character” referred to a notion of a subjectivity that possessed free will, was capable of making choices, and had the ability to take on moral responsibility. Talk about love and sexuality often revolved around the establishment of “character,” articulating its role and its ideal position within one’s daily life. In his writing on love, Ishihara was interested in removing the social stigma from sexual desire, and posited the free-thinking “character” as that which was

46. Ibid. 47.  Muramatsu Masatoshi, “Josei kaiho¯ to bunmei no sho¯rai,” Josei kaizo¯, May 1924.

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designated to regulate what he regarded as a natural impulse. Because sexual desire has been allowed by God, Ishihara reasoned, it cannot be considered good or evil, noble or disgraceful. He equated lust to other appetites such as the desire for food and the desire for sleep, both desires people need to fulfill in order to survive.48 Unlike other appetites, however, it is regulated by the “will” of the subject, and it is the will that makes human life complex. There is a constant negotiation, he explains, between impulses such as sexual desire and the will-possesing “character.” He agrees with Tsuchida Kyo¯son that biological urges on their own mean nothing, are netural in effect, while it is “character” that adds meaning to daily life. Pure impulses, like lust, are blind and irrational, and thus cannot be subject to rational judgments. What can, however, be judged is the “character,” whose role it is to reflect upon the impulses and either supress them or follow them in such a way as to generate value in daily life. Sexual desire gets denounced, he writes, when people act on impulses without regard to their character and to the character of the other. But in such cases, what needs to be vilified is not the impulse or the desire but the failure of the individual’s character to regulate it. In such formulations, the social ills associated with “lust” are resituated within notions of individual responsibility. The ability to regulate natural impulses through one’s will to maintain ideals is what defined the free-thinking and freewilled subject defined by “character.” One can see in Ishihara’s writing the way the concept of “character,” and its role in undergirding the ethical concerns of society, is actually tied to the effort to de-stigmatize lust. Nonetheless, a hierarchy is established and the notion of “character,” with all of its associations of a liberal humanist subject, comes to designate the end goal of a progression that goes from lust toward love. Ultimately, the pairing of sexuality and love becomes the basis for envisioning and theorizing a social life that is founded on this free, universal, self-reflecting subject. “Character,” consequently, becomes central to the prescriptions for social reform. For Ishihara in particular, the formulation of a sexuality regulated by the will of the character, the completion of which is the purpose of love and marriage, serves as a model for the type of daily life that is most desireable in society. Love, he writes, is a “mutual action whereby two people come together through respect for each other’s character and seek to complete [that character] in an ideal manner.” The ideal is when two people come together, offering themselves to each other in order to “fuse” their characters, with the hopes of improving that character.

48.  Ishihara Jun, “Ren’ai kachi ron,” Kaizo¯, July 1924. In Japanese, the analogous structures of the compound words for lust (sei-yoku, 性欲), hunger (shoku-yoku, 食欲), and the desire for sleep (suimin-yoku, 睡眠欲) make the comparison even more compelling.

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Both Kurata and Ishihara saw the completion of character as the guiding principle for love and marriage. The principle of character completion, for instance, was the basis for Kurata’s assertion that people, in certain cases, should seek divorce. If there was no love and thus character completion within a marriage, the marriage should be dissolved. Couples in this case should not stay together, even for the sake of their children. But the principle of character completion also meant that people should not pursue love to excess. Doing so and forgetting about one’s obligations to society and humanity would be to divide the character. Ishihara also asserted that marriage should not be pursued for any other reason than for the people involved; not for parents, not for children, not for society. Like Kurata, Ishihara asserted that it was through the character completion achieved through love-based marriage that society could be improved. He cited Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s declaration that “marraige without love leads not only to meaningless existence for the people involved, but it also creates large barriers to the evolution of development of the people and the evolution of mankind.” “If marriages are empty,” Ishihara wrote, “then we create nothing more than a society of living organisms with no value.”49 Love-based marriage was directly tied to progressive and reformist notions of self-improvement, self-cultivation, and the development of character. Michiko Suzuki has identified the way that “love treatises published in intellectual and popular magazines as well as newspapers and books came to be an integral aspect of the culturalism (kyo¯yo¯ shugi, 教養主義) movement.”50 “Marriage,” she writes,” was seen as an ideal locus of the practice of love, as a microcosm of an advanced egalitarian society in which husbands and wives could mutually progress and complete their characters or personalities.”51 The narratives in which sexual desire and love mapped a path to the desired goal of “character,” “self, ” or equivalent notion of a universal humanist subjectivity were often deployed as arguments and directives for women’s liberation. Muramatsu, for example, roots misogyny in the religion-based rule of pre-Renaissance civilization. All religions, he writes, have in their narrative origins stories that tell of a threatening sexual desire. Because men controlled religion, he explains, sexual desire, “which was always related to both sexes,” becomes “attributed to women.” Consequently, “contempt towards sexual desire was then and there tied together with women.” Here, Muramatsu reveals the deeper social connotations that link notions of sex/sexuality (sei, 性), sexual desire (seiyoku, 性欲),

49. Ibid. 50.  Michiko Suzuki, Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 72. 51.  Ibid., 69.

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and women (josei, 女性). He articulates insightfully the way misogyny is grounded in a general anxiety about sex, and how the female gender becomes the site for social debates about human sexuality in general. Muramatsu, however, locates this linkage in the past, in the pre-Renaissance society where the “self ” (我) has not yet been discovered and humans had yet to develop the ability to judge and reflect. In the modern period, this concept of the “self,” which is free of the associations of sexual desire, is what allows us to recognize the fundamental equality between men and women. The only thing that stands in the way of women’s equality in the present day then is a change in mental outlook. Above all, what is needed is the “recognition of the self (ga, 我) of women.” Once the “self ” of women is recognized, all prejudices will fade away and all perceptions of significant difference will disappear. From the perspective of the “self,” all differences between men and women are superficial, a matter of prejudice and not a matter of fact. In any of the fields of science, economy, art, philosophy, and politics, he claims, there is no significant distinction between men and women. In literature, for instance, distinctions in sex do not impact the way we enjoy the poetry of Sappho, and George Elliot is treated the same as male writers in some circles of the British literati. The fact that Murasaki Shikibu was a woman, he adds offering a local example, does not in any way add to the value of the Tale of Genji. Muramatsu’s point is that men and women have always been equal, and equal contributors as a practical matter to society. To the extent that differences exist, they are surface differences, matters of custom and mores, and not relevant in their impact on civilization. The economist and women’s rights advocate, Kawata Shiro¯, similarly pointed to the concept of “character” as a way to erase difference between the sexes. Like Muramatsu, he begins with an astute analysis of the nature of the debate surrounding women in society. Kawata asserted that women’s issues were not just “isolated problems that came about on their own,” but were in fact the result of larger ideological conflicts within contemporary society. Women’s issues were simply the concrete manifestation of these larger social changes.52 The current debate around women’s roles, he explained, was really a manifestation of a much larger societal tension between the traditional family system of the ie and new values of individualism that defined the modern age. The family system was in fact oppressive to all individuals. Its rigid and arbitrary hierarchy based on male lines of descent oppressed individual men just as much as it oppressed individual women. Yet, it was women’s call for the recognition of individuality, equality, for human rights

52.  Kawata Shiro¯, “Fujin mondai no igi to eikyo¯,” Ko¯min ko¯za, February 1925.

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and civil rights, that becomes the flashpoint for this tension. Again, the female gender becomes the site for larger debates about family structure and social roles. Kawata sees the fundamental issue, however, as a problem “character.” What was most concerning about the erosion of the traditional family system was the potential disappearance of “character,” which that system was built to cultivate and secure. New mechanisms had to be put into place to ensure the continued development of “character” in modern society. Kawata thus promoted new social formations, such as socialism, for its ability to balance the need for the realization of the self with the recognition of “character.” It is on the basis of this notion of “character” that Kawata believed equality among people, and equality between the sexes, could be established. There may be differences in our “sexuality” (sei, 性), Kawata wrote, but there is no difference in the “value of our character.” For Kawata, the notion of character becomes the basis for his ideation of an ideal society that transcends base differences. Kawata allowed that men are stronger and “excel further in knowledge,” but explained that this does not prevent us from establishing our own commuity based on our own values. Explicitly using Roussean terms, Kawata talks of a community based on a social contract that all subjects enter into wilfully. This community can establish rules, such as equality between the sexes, that do not exist in nature. In their own ways, both Muramatsu and Kawata, while locating some of the deep roots of misogyny in the debates and rhetoric around women in society, find recourse in concepts of a humanist subjectivity that transcends sex, sexuality, and gender, and thus provides a foundation from which to establish, if only by the will of its participants, a truly equal society. One can trace, in these arguments, however, a certain optimism that effaces more than solves the complexity of the gender discrimination that they themselves identify. The formation of an equal society is based not so much on confronting and undoing the root mechanisms of gender discrimination (e.g., the projection of anxiety around sexuality onto the female gender), but creating social relations that do away with gender altogether, prompting women to seek equality by forgetting about their femininity. The regard for sexuality and the body is necessarily sacrificed for the sake of creating this egalitarian society. These were some of the arguments made by feminist, writer, and social critic, Hiratsuka Raicho¯, who wrote in direct response to an earlier article by Kawata. Hiratsuka explains that the way of thinking represented by Kawata and others was indicative of the inital stage of the women’s movement, one that regretted the natural differences between men and women and thought of them as a hindrance to the achievement of true equality. Thus women’s advocates asserted nondiscrimination through a disregard or denial of that distinction. But such a stance, Hiratsuka discerned, implicity showed great contempt toward women. For those

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women who advocated for it, it was an act of self-debasement. The distinction of sex, she claimed, must not be abandoned: We believe that we must properly recognize the difference in sex (sei, 性) as it arises in daily life, or in society, a psychological or spiritual difference that derives naturally and normally from “natural differences,” and that based on this recognition we can see that women have their own distinct precious value, that women have the rights of humans, and a reason to exist. Thus, as a result of their liberation, we hope that these gender characteristics can be spread throughout the wide field of social daily life (shakai seikatsu, 社会生活). Further, as a result, in contrast to being satisfied as the initial female activists were with simply receiving from men the same seats in the present social structure that was created by men (to the extent that women try as much as possible to become men), we will overhaul the current male society, wrapped as it is in silence, injustice, and wrongdoing, and we will carry an ambition that is more than simply “seeking the rights and freedoms of women themselves” but is rather about the creation of society of humankind in which men and women as two respective sexes are harmonized and integrated.53 Hiratsuka critized men for overlooking, in the interest of getting rid of superficial divisions that they themselves created, “sexual characteristics that lie below the surface of the lives of women themselves.” She advocated the exploration of this hidden world, concluding that the sexuality of women must be understood “not as a prison but as a sanctuary.” For both Muramatsu and Kawata, the concept of “character” aids in the papering over of sexual difference, as it projected the idea of a universal subjectivity that transcended gender specific characteristics and asserted the fact of sameness. Hiratsuka identifies the way this assertion of sameness provides a framework for denying women’s value and agency under a veneer of universalism. It is interesting to note, in this respect, that though much of the writing about love, sex, and character discussed men and women as if they were equals with no difference between them, there is a distinctly male perspective implicit throughout. Articles would address men and their selection of women, for example, and not the other way around. Hiratsuka uses this insight as the basis for a feminism that seeks not uniformity with men, but a more fundamental restructuring of society such

53.  Hiratsuka Raicho¯, “Mushiro sei wo reihai seyo (“jyosei no seireihai” wo yomite Kawata Shiro¯ shi ni),” Josei Kaizo¯, May 1924.

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that both sexes are allowed to thrive respectively. Such a stance is mirrored in Hirabayashi’s assertion that the new movement of women’s literature that she was a part of did not seek to take over the literary establishment. Rather, its aim was the creation of a “a new culture for the subjugated class that is ‘woman.’” “We must not be the Nora that leaves her house,” writes Hirabayashi, referring to the famous character of Henrik Ibsen’s play who left her husband, Torvald Helmer, because of his retrograde ideas of love, women, and marriage. “We must be the Nora that throws Helmer out the house!”54 Hiratsuka’s suspicion of sameness and equality, of feminist efforts to gain more status within the current system rather than question the premises of exclusion that the social system is based on, is echoed and elaborated by the French feminist thinker, Luce Irigaray’s commentary on love, philosophical logos, and the masculine subject. Irigaray insists that women not simply aim for a “change in the distribution of power.” The result would be to leave “intact the power structure itself ” which would entail “resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order.” To change women’s status, she argued, women’s movements must “challenge the forms and nature of political life, the contemporary play of powers and power relations.”55 This was no doubt Hiratsuka’s ambition, embodied in her call for the “creation of a society of humankind.” The heralding of a free universal subject by self-regarded feminists themselves ironically stood squarely in the way of achieving this more radical feminist vision. Indeed, in her insistence on difference, Hiratsuka anticipated Irigaray’s central critique: The domination of the philosophical logos stems in large part from its power to reduce all others to the economy of the Same. The teleologically constructive project that it takes on is always also a project of diversion, deflection, reduction of the other in the Same. And, in its greatest generality perhaps, from its power to eradicate the difference between the sexes in systems that are self-representative of a “masculine subject.”56 Irigaray’s feminist criticism helps to clarify the way liberal notions of sameness, as embodied within the universal subject, actually denied female sexuality. In this process, her criticism also brings to light the way the language surrounding love, closely tied as it was to the concept of this universal subject, in the term “character,” subtly and implicitly disavowed the sexuality, sexual desire, and the

54.  Hirabayashi Taiko, “Josei bungei undo¯ no shinshutsu.” 55. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 81. 56.  Ibid., 74.

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physical body represented by the language of “lust.” The discourse of love and lust and the feminism it supported in 1920s Japan constituted such a philosophical logos, one whose domination stems from its power to eradicate difference between the sexes in a system that is self-representative of a “masculine” subject. This rhetoric, which maintained pretensions of scientific inquiry, sought to define a daily life based on the values of self-refinement and self-completion and premised on the assumption of a universal subject with choice and free will. This subject was nonetheless made possible only through the transcendence of difference and sexuality. In 1920s Japan, “character” would become the concept that represented the subordination of sex to logic and the discourse of truth. Irigaray ultimately understands this notion to exclude female sexuality and thus suppress the feminine. The notion of “character” could very well correspond to what Hélène Cixous refers to as the “masculine-conjugal subjective economy.” Woman sees the “reductive stinginess” of this notion, the inanity of “propriety,” which has “extorted” her “right to herself ” by means of “law, lies, blackmail, and marriage.”57 The way in which the notion of “character” was complicit in the suppression of the feminine can be seen in the role the concept played in feminist thought in the 1920s. Many of the rationales put forward by liberal thinkers for the fact of male and female equality, and thus the need to bring it about through social change, were centered on notions of universal selfhood and subjectivity. However, such notions, encapsulated in the term “character,” projected an implicitly masculine free-thinking and free-willed self that was based upon the suppression of bodily impulses. Latent in the liberal notions that women were capable of transcending their difference and achieving this type of ideal character was the association of femininity with the body that needed to be suppressed or overcome. The critique of postwar French feminism is perhaps most helpful here in discerning, from a discursive point of view, the way this language perpetuated male power in the name of science and truth. Though Irigaray and Cixous were writing in the 1970s, they were in large part targeting the language of Freudian psychoanalysis, which was central to the sexological discourses that underwrote the talk the love and lust in 1920s Japan. Irigaray’s analysis of the discourse of psychoanalysis perfectly describes the conservative tendencies of what was considered to be a progressive debate in the late 1920s. “Psychoanalytic discourse,” Irigaray wrote, “really does nothing” other than “talk about love.” “The claim of analytic discourse,” she writes, “and this is perhaps, after all, the reason for its emergence at a certain point in scientific discourse—is that talking about love is

57.  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 888.

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in itself a pleasure.” She explains that this pleasure is rooted in the ability of this discourse, a language, to supplant actual sexual relations. The discourse of love has stood in place of sexual relations for centuries, she writes, and as this discourse is “an effect of language, those who know can limit themselves to dealing directly with the cause.” That is, they can limit themselves to the causes of language. The discourse of love represents a method of taking control over the sexual relation, suppressing it through the use of language, the discourse of knowledge, whose economy of logic excludes it. “Might psychoanalysis remain entangled in the discourse of truth?” Irigaray writes: Speaking of love, as has always been done. A little more scientifically? With a little more provision for enjoyment? And so bound once again to the speech act alone? The surest way of perpetuating the phallic economy. Which, of course, goes hand in hand with the economy of truth.58 Irigaray’s criticism clues us in to the ways the discourse of love perpetuated a male-centered economy that implicitly disavowed sexuality despite its intentions to do the opposite. The hierarchy of love over sexual desire was another way of privileging language over sexual relations, of controlling and regulating sexual desire through language. The recognition of the way these ideologies of gender were embedded in the social discourses surrounding love and feminism in the mid-1920s helps to clarify the nature of the critique expressed in the language of Hirabayashi’s story. Specifically, understanding how the concept of “character” functioned simultaneously to transcend the body and disavow the feminine by glossing over sexual difference helps to clarify the reasons, the rationale, and the methodology for Hirabayashi’s dismantling of subjectivity in her text. Hirabayashi’s text directly targets a philosphical discourse that needed, in Irigaray’s words, to be “challenged” and “disrupted.” Hirabayashi’s narrator occupies the position of the free, self-reflecting, subjectivity. Yet, this self-directed ratiocination both enables and is by turn undermined by a focus on the physical sensations of the female (maternal) body. Through such a mechanism, Hirabayashi’s narrative interrogates the basis of such a subjective integrity. Finally, positioning Hirabayashi’s text against social language and locating her critique vis-a-vis social discourse helps us understand the nature of the political engagement effected by the form and language of her narrative. More than attempting to render and express an alternative subjectivity, the text positions itself as the negative side of the social discourse it engages, undermining that

58. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 99–100.

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language and the ideologies of daily life that it supported through a process of modernist negation. It is worth noting here that Hiratsuka’s argument about sexual difference was made possible by the new openness to talking about sexuality, sex, and physiology, as well as the rethinking of social formations of which it was a part. Encompassing everything from open marriage to the economic valuations of domestic labor, the discourses surrounding libidinal desire permitted the recognition of sexual difference as it “arises in daily life,” rather than how those differences contribute to the creation of an a priori idealized daily life. For a moment in the late 1920s, we glimpse in the media discourse moments when daily life was thought of as being constituted through sexual difference, and not the other way around. The major social institutions of marriage and the family were reconceived based on the needs of individuals, rather than the needs of individuals being prescribed by the demands of the social institution. But the radicalness of such reconceptualizations was constantly being neutralized by sexologists, social commentators, and feminists alike who quickly reversed this formula, insisting on the primacy of an ideal social formation and articulating the prescriptions for marriage, sex, and desire that followed from it. Hiratsuka was calling for a reconfirmation of difference and the social contingency that it entailed. This too describes the orientation of Hirabayashi’s modernist agenda. If the discourse of love sought to control the radical potential inherent in recognizing and accepting the importance of sexuality and sexual desire, then Hirabayashi’s story aimed to undermine that language of control. If, as Irigaray informs us, the language, as language, sought to supplant sexual relations, take control over it, suppressing it through the use of language, whose rules were known and whose logic could exlude it, then Hirabayashi’s story seeks to disrupt that language. But Irigaray’s formulation helps to clarify not just what Hirabayashi sought to do but the consequences of it. For if sexual relations could be “supplanted” by language, then negating that language could indeed have the effect of restoring those sexual relations, and all the potential they contain for disrupting daily life.

Modernist Negation in “In The Charity Ward” Section 1 of this chapter argued against the allegorical reading of  “Charity Ward,” where the narrator’s exit from the hospital represented a socialist victory, her escape allowing her a platform to pronounce her condemnation of the hospital and the capitalist system it represented. Instead, I suggested that the embodied language of the narration inside the hospital represented a critique of its own, a subversion of the male-centered narrative conventions of the I-novel

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and the coherent subjectivity it established. Section 2 detailed how these very same linguistic conventions were operative in the reformist discourses of love and lust, and their promulgation of a free-willed universal subjectivity. While this language was deployed in arguments supporting male and female equality, it discursively disavowed the body, sexual relations, and the feminine. In the following section, I seek to combine these vectors. The two passages outside of the hospital that bookend the narrative do not simply setup an allegorical drama in which the underground space of the hospital symbolizes an alternative or rebellious identity. They serve as a linguistic manifestations of the free-willed subjectivity, the rational self-reflecting agency referred to as “character” (jinkaku, 人格), that Hirabayashi seeks to undermine. They thus frame the submerged space of the charity hospital in which that mode of narration and its implications of gendered subjectivity are exposed and negated. The bookending descriptions outside of the hospital mark a social allegory, in other words, but not one based on plot and space but one based upon language. That is to say, it structures the semantics of the story but less visually and spatially and more linguistically. As the narrative moves from the space outside the hospital to the space inside, there is a distinct shift in the mode of narration. The space outside of the hospital in “Charity Ward” is narrated in a conventional manner. “When I returned to the hospital from the military police regiment, it was already dusk. The driver of a carriage, surrounded by customers, loosened the reigns to his horse and, heading toward the town square, ran noisly atop the paved road.” (93) The first sentence features the terse and factual “datta” ending that was typical of I-novel prose and the simultaneity it established between narrator and reader. The narrator notices some details of the scene and conveys them in straightforward, observation-driven language. What follows is a short and simple monetary exchange: the narrator buys some scratch paper in order to make change for the rickshaw driver who does not have change for her bank note. This conventional manner of linguistically rendering subjectivity, which comes back only in the last paragraph when the narrator leaves the hospital, stands in stark contrast to the pained, disoriented, sensation-based narrative rendering associated with the half-underground space of the charity hospital that dominates most of the story. It is as the narrator enters the ward, moreover, that the transition between these two styles takes place, steadily but drastically: After I bowed my head to the old receptionist who had stuck his wrist out below the lamp, I changed my shoes to indoor sandals that were oily and cold to the touch. The thighs of my fat legs were heavy.

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As I irritably pushed up some straggling locks of hair, I felt an awful gloom descend onto my forehead. When I came to the top of the stairs leading down into the halfbasement of the charity ward, I felt a dull throbbing pain sear through my right leg, and suddenly I was drawn and suspended by some type of a recoil and, as if my legs were taken out from under me, I fell face flat on the cold concrete floor. When I tried to plant my hand and rise to my feet, my knees wobbled and knocked about like metal fittings, and the two hands that tried to support the body with its large belly grew shaky and all atremble. Faint shudders ran through my four limbs and crawled up toward my body. I flung the sheaf of scratch paper to the dark floor and as I watched the white rectangles float dreamily three feet in front of me, I put my ears to the ground and waited for someone to come. But the corridor leading to the half-basement was as damp, dark, and still as a coal mine. I strained my ears to hear, when from the floor of the corridor reeking with dust the clear sound of mosquito wings combined with a breeze carrying a strange odor and glanced off my cheek as it passed by. The body that could not stand up, cradling a belly large like a mosquito that had engorged itself on blood, could be thought of, without emotion, as a single heavy log of wood being dredged out of a river. I tried to rub my left hand, which was as weak as the stems of perrenial plants, with my right hand, and felt on the pads [lit. the bellies] of the five fingers on my right hand a wiry numbness, as when one touches crepe. It’s beriberi. These are the rumored symptoms of gestational beriberi. (93) The passage depicts a dramatic shift in the nature of subjective perception and consciousness as the narrator enters the dark, dank, half-submerged space of the charity hospital. It is a physical description: the narrator’s legs literally give out on her and, with her limbs weak and trembly, she is left face down on the cold concrete floor. But the proces of falling, described in the first person, also denotes a transition into an altered phenomenology. With the head literarly on the ground, the narrator does not just see things differently but perceives things differently. Most salient is the intensive focus on pain, perception, sensation, and the body. The perceptions are at times surreal—“floating rectangular shapes”—and at times even synaesthetic, where the corridor reeks of dust and the sounds of

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mosquito wings glance off the cheeks. The metaphors—like the description of body parts in terms of plants and insects—are elaborate. The descriptions, moreover, remain detached, objective, and self-conscious. The narrator compares her body to a log being dredged from a river “without emotion.” Even when illustrating her own physical pain, there is nothing sentimental or self-pitying about her description. The only emotion belied in the entire passage occurs at the beginning, outside the hospital, when the narrator feels “irritation” at having to push up stray strands of hair. Once within the space of the charity ward, all reactions seem to be channeled toward a keen focus on what is being felt by what part of the body. Ironically, the feelings felt are often feelings of numbness and tingling. If the story begins with matter-offact observations of the external world, like the fact that “it was already dusk” or that a carriage “ran noisly atop the paved road,” it transitions with the narrator’s entry into the hospital into highly subjective reactions to a more immediate external reality. The narrator’s description heading into the charity ward takes on an added level of self-consciousness: “the corridor . . . was as damp, dark, and still as a coal mine.” If the initial mode of description permitted a type of projection on the reader the part into the perspective of the narrator, the transition interrupts this projection. As the narrator focuses more intently upon the interactions of external stimulation, physical body, and mental association, we, the reader, become estranged from her positionality. We become onlookers and empathizers instead of participants. The transition in style as the narrator moves into the charity ward is what sets up, as a matter of language, Hirabayashi’s critique of the masculine subjectcentered narrative convention of the I-novel and the assumptions of gender that it perpetuates. Hirabayashi does this not by deposing the conventions of the I-novel narration, offering some alternate way of approaching the world, as for instance Yokomitsu does in “Heads and Bellies.” Rather, she undoes that mode of narration. She reveals the conditions under which its “specular economy,” to use Irigaray’s term, operates. One way to challenge the “domination of the philosophical logos,” Irigaray writes: . . . is to interrogate the conditions under which systematicity itself is possible: what the coherence of the discursive utterance conceals of the conditions under which it is produced, whatever it may say about these conditions in discourse. For example the “matter” from which the speaking subject draws nourishment in order to produce itself, to reproduce itself; the scenography that makes representation feasible, representation as defined in philosophy, that is, the architectonics of its theatre, its

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framing in space-time, its geometric organization, its props, its actors, their respective positions, their dialogues, indeed their tragic relations, without overlooking the mirror, most often hidden, that allows the logos, the subject, to reduplicate itself, to reflect itself by itself.59 Irigaray’s articulation suggests ways to see how Hirabayashi’s development of subjective phenomenology is actually examining the conditions under which the systematicity of the I-novel discourse is made possible, conditions which are concealed by the coherence of that discursive utterance. We can begin by pointing to the actual space, a half-basement, half-submerged in a type of limbo that is neither at the same level nor completely below. Speaking of the props and actors, there is transportation, the roads, the places to go to and from, the bartering, the economic transactions, and of course the crowd. These props work to support a subjectivity that is cogent, perceptive, able to take in, so to speak, the entire scene and relate it as a matter of personal experience in such a way that the reader can project themselves into that position. The narrator feels her legs being taken out from under her. But stylistically, it is the uprightness of perception, the tripod that supports the camera of the perceiving mind, that is taken away. But perhaps most decisive of all is the way Hirabayashi upends the systems of “reduplication,” the ability of the logos or the subject to “reflect itself by itself.” It is the “mirror” that Hirabayashi disposes of, and in doing so reveals its hidden presence. Hirabayashi’s narrator is always looking at herself but not through a mirror. It would be better to say that she is constantly feeling herself. Each perception of the self produces an intimate but foreign physical body, foreign to her and thus foreign to the reader as well. Hirabayashi reveals the way the “coherence” of the subject is dependent upon a self that is blithely unaware of its own body, so in love with the authenticity of the reflection in the mirror that it chooses not to acknowledge its supporting equipment. Hirabayashi reveals this love affair by refusing to re-enact it, instead bringing experience back to its material source, reversing the break with it, and denying the possibility of a specular economy. It is no coincidence, finally, that this body is necessarily feminine, a fact that is announced clearly through the fact of a diseased pregnancy. For central to Irigaray’s argument is that the logos, the coherent subjectivity, is established at the expense of, or through the disavowal of, the female body and female sexuality. But Hirabayashi’s text also eschews the architecture of a cogent perceiving subject, whether in her narrator or in her reader, through a narrative that avoids

59. Ibid.

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the organization or the motivations of plot-based events. The fact that the narrator has beriberi, a vitamin deficiency disease with both physical and neurological effects, is a key plot device. It thus justifies a narration in which the physical and psychological are merged, and the aspiration to logos is thwarted. The beriberi also makes the narrator slip in and out of consciousness, making way for a stream-of-consciousness narrative that is structured more by images and sensations than by actual events. Repeating and recirculating figures generate webs of association through the course of the story. A number of motifs, for instance, are spaced out symmetrically both before and after the central description of the mortuary: a prostitute who has failed in her attempt at suicide, an old woman who mumbles Buddhist prayers, the sound of the wind passing through acacia shrubs, or a description of the bedpans covered with flies. When the narrator first returns to the charity ward, she starts thinking of raising her child in prison, feelings that lead to thoughts of her husband. Toward the end of the story, the narrator again notices feelings of motherhood toward her newborn child and is again prompted to think of her husband, who has just written to her inquiring after the child. The story also generates meanings through a layering of image and metaphors. From the very beginning, motifs have been overlaid and altered, slowly repeated and changed in order to include new ideas and events, even as the story seems to be just telling a story. For instance, the line depicting the narrator’s entrance into the hospital ward cited above features a pattern of character-based symmetry. The line, along with a trot, is as follows: 丁寧に頭を下げて、脂で冷たい草履と履きかえた。肥った足の太股が気だるい。

Politely head bowing oil cold slipper || wear replace fat legs thighs heavy The line pivots on the centrally positioned particle “to” (double underlined above), which grammatically marks in this case objects of substitution, of outdoor shoes for indoor slippers, and thus a liminal boundary between the outside and inside of the charity ward. The particle is surrounded on both sides by identical characters, functioning to the left as a part of a compound noun, “slipper,” and on the right as the verb, “to wear.” Seven character spaces away on each side, another pair of characters bear strong similarities and build a link of association: “oil/fat” (脂) to describe the texture of the slipper and “fat/thick” (肥) to describe the human leg. Finally, thirteen spaces from the central particle on both sides is another pair of contrasting characters, “head” (頭) and “thigh” (股). This type of visual symmetry designates an alternate type of meaning production in the text. The organized placement of characters that are both visually and semantically either identical or similar creates on the one hand a merging of

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images. The oiliness of the slipper that the narrator slips into becomes correlated, in retrospect, with human fat tissue. The symmetry of the line also undergirds a larger thematic progression, a movement from the abstract sociality associated with the “head” toward the heavy physicality associated with the thigh. The symmetry contained in this line can be seen as a microcosm of the larger symmetry of the story as a whole, one described above in terms of the frames that structure the narrative. As such, both operations of meaning, the associative merging of images and motifs along with a larger thematic development from cognition to physical sensation, can be traced throughout the text. To follow just one strand of layered association, we see in the long passage cited above the repetition of certain key figures and metaphors. First there is the establishment of the body and the belly with the image of “two hands” that try and “support” the “body with the large belly” and that of the shudders that run through her “four limbs and crawl up toward the body.” The motif of the mosquito, introduced through the description of its buzzing sound, is then merged with the image of the body, as the heaviness of the body, “cradling” a large belly, is compared to a mosquito engorged on blood. Later the narrator speaks of “nursing” her baby in prison, the verb for “nurse” (idaku, 抱く) being visually syonymous with the verb to “cradle” (kakaeru, 抱える) used in reference to the large belly.60 Finally, all of these associations are brought together in the theme of pregancy when the narrator explains that it was while in prison during the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake that she first realized that she was “carrying a baby in her stomach,” “carrying” being the same verb (idaku, 抱く). These repetitions and slight variations serve to merge together the images of body, belly, mosquito, and blood, resulting in the final notion of baby in the belly. While the baby, as a matter of plot, is of course the result of the conception with her husband near the time of the earthquake, it is also practically engendered through the building up of semantic associations in the very language of the narrative discourse. This intense focus on the body and the sensation is always affiliated with the workings of the head, which are ultimately the source of these very reflections. The “inside of the [narrator’s] emotionless head” is fused with the pads or, literally the “bellies,” of five fingers, rubbing and feeling the skin of the other hand. Hirabayashi’s style consists of reflections on the phenomenon of feeling upon feeling. This strategy in her prose, constructed through the figures of “heads” and “bellies,” represents a deliberate intervention into the type of phenomenology introduced by Yokomitsu’s celebrated short story of that name (discussed in chapter 2), published just

60.  In Japanese, the two verbs are kakaeru (抱える) and idaku (抱く). They are pronounced differently but utilize the same character and are very close in meaning.

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three years earlier. That story was, in its own way, a challenge to the I-novel narrative conventions that rendered a stable, coherent, reflecting subjectivity. However, Hirabayashi and Yokomitsu’s attacks differ in telling ways. While Yokomitsu’s concern was with cognition and perception, Hirabayashi was more concerned with the physical sensations of the body. Yokomitsu’s association with the term “sensation” is often misleading, for he engaged the term in its strictly phenomenological implications; that is, as a Kantian term that took its place in a systematic analysis of the processes of cognition. Yokomitsu was ultimately interested in complicating an essentialist model of phenomenology, which promoted the possibility of being able to see, smell, hear, touch, and taste the essence of things. It was a model that he objected to in part because of its reductive definition of artistic signification, in part because of its association with ideas of Japanese ethnic ideology. His use of “heads” and “bellies” was thus a strategy for complicating the relationship betwen objects and the way they are perceived by the subject. If Yokomitsu was introducing into a phenomenology based upon the “belly” the complexities that are represented by the “head,” Hirabayashi was moving in the opposite direction, introducing into a phenomenology based upon the “head” the forgotten or suppressed sensations of the body or “belly.” More precisely, her prose assimilated the narrative of the “head”—a stand-in for the coherent (male) subjectivity—but did so in order to undermine it through a preoccupation with the “belly.” This juxatposition of the two approaches first of all reveals a poignant contradiction contained within the I-novel discourse itself. At the same time that it posited an independent pscyhology that was free from the body and available for deep psychological exploration, it also tethered that subjectivity to a strictly empiricist model of phenomenology in which objects were ontologically essential. Like Freudian psychoanalysis, it represented a fascination with the forces of the unconscious that was nonetheless circumscribed by a faith in the primary importance of the conscious self. If Yokomitsu attacked this latter assumption, seeking to demonstrate the signifying power of the unconscious, then Hirayabashi attacked the former assumption, aiming to undermine the very notion of a subjectivity that was free and independent. But Hirabayashi’s intervention also reveals a gap in Yokomitsu’s thinking. While he seeks to undermine pretensions of phenomenology built into the I-novel discourse, he does not address the assumptions of gender that are built into that narrative discourse, or for that matter, that phenomenology. Hirabayashi is not concerned with exposing the physical sensations that underlie pretensions of an integral subjectivity. Rather she is concerned with exposing the ways that notions of such subjectivities, and the discourse that supports them, both literary and nonliterary, are complicit in a suppression and disavowal of the feminine. Again, I turn to Irigaray:

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Female sexualization is thus the effect of a logical requirement, of the existence of a language that is transcendent with respect to bodies, which would necessitate, in order—nevertheless—to become incarnate, “so to speak,” taking women one by one. Take that to mean that woman does not exist, but that language exists. That woman does not exist owing to the fact that language—a language—rules as master, and that she threatens—as a sort of “prediscursive reality?”—to disrupt its order.61 Irigaray’s polemic uncovers the female suppression that is implicit in the supposition of a coherent language. Because coherent language was forged at the expense of the body, the body is seen as a threat, as is woman who is associated with the body. In an insight reminiscent of Muramatsu’s talk of misogyny relating to sexual threat, Irigaray suggests that women are sexualized as a way to forestall the threat represented by their bodies, sexualization here understood as a type of repudiation, the attachment of a stigma. In “Charity Ward,” Hirabayashi takes the subjectivity proposed to be “transcendent with respect to bodies,” and makes it perpetually and incessantly aware of its body, of its pained body, and of its pregnant body. It performs the perpetual disruption of language’s mastery through the introduction, the horrifying introduction, of the of the female body. Through this process, the misogynist sexualization of the female is reversed. Though Hirabayashi’s writing was unprecedented in the directness with which it dealt with female physiology, the directness served precisely to undercut even the potential of any eroticism that one might be tempted to apply to the represented female body. Though Hirabayashi’s descriptions shocked her contemporary audience,62 perhaps what was most shocking about her portrayals was the description of the female body that was stripped of this veil of erotic visuality. In a narrative discourse centered upon a woman in touch with and focused upon her own physical sensations, not only is there no possibility of visual eroticism, but the very foundations of such a specular engagement is being undermined. Hirabayashi’s writing manifests Irigaray’s definition of a hypothetical women’s style in the way that it does not privilege sight, instead, it takes each figure back to its source, which is among other things tactile. It comes back in touch with itself in that origin without ever constituting in it, constituting itself in, as some

61. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 88–89. 62.  Flores, “Reading the Maternal Body in the Works of Hirabayashi Taiko,” 20–22.

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sort of unity. Simultaneity is its “proper” aspect—a proper(ty) that is never fixed in the possible identity-to-self of some form or other.63 Hirabayashi’s prose always brings figures of language back to the tactile, back to its origins in the sensate experience. The narrator is constantly touching the self but avoids, in and through this very process, presenting any type of self-identity or even self-unity. In its writing of the “belly,” it refuses to constitute a “head,” it refrains from proposing any fixed identity. Understanding the nexus between ideas of a (male) universal subject and the social prescriptions expressed in the language of love and lust helps to show how this eschewal of stable subjectivity is simultaneously a socialist critique. For Hirabayashi, the feminist critique and the socialist critique are inseparable. Proletarian critics such as Ishikawa are eager to read a development of an activist identity within the story in order to rescue it from accusations of effete literature. However, it is through the very suppression of an active and integral individuality that the story achieves its potent social critique. The story functions not as a medium for self-development, but as a modernist negation toward the social discourse of love and the ideologies of a middle-class society that it supported. To return to Ishikawa’s reading of the narrator’s vision of her husband as a moment of ideological commitment, the narrator’s remembered and imagined confrontations with her husband are not moments of transition into a political activism, but rather moments of restraint. They represent moments at which the narrator refrains from indulging in the type of emotional attachments that would distract her from her cause. Such emotional attachments would lead to the constitution of an individual subjectivity, a self that is possessed of will, a self that is atomized and no longer available to the cause of the proletariat. In the story, despite emotional agony, the narrator resists. She is furious that her husband can only think of her and their baby, and not the larger cause, while at the same time she is overwhelmed by feelings of sentimentality for him. Nonetheless, she does not give in. Returning again to the passage cited above: Comrade that I love. Don’t look around at your surroundings. Look ahead. Look ahead. I called out to the visage of my husband that I had etched into the deep ceiling. Expanding my throat into the shape of a flute, I began to sing “The Flag of the People” in a low voice. As I came to a high note in the song, I thrust out my shoulders and pushed the air from my lungs, listening

63. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 79.

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intently to my own quavering voice. A single tear brushed past my cheek and trickled down to my ear. (96) The narrator’s focus, while initially locked onto her imagined husband, turns instead to a socialist song, before it returns to a focus on her physical body: first the breath in her lungs that allow her to sing the song, and then the tear drop that streaks down her cheeks down to her ear. The scene might be juxtaposed to the tearful conclusion of Shiga Naoya’s “Reconciliation,” (discussed in the introduction) when the narrator looks into his father’s eyes and, feeling a wordless communication of heartfelt feelings, begins to cry. In this scene, not only is the narrator’s interlocutor imagined, leaving no room for the possibility of any type of emotional communication, but the emotions the narrator feels, in the form of tears, fall back on herself. The scene concludes with only a concrete description of the body. There is no sharing of bonds, no establishment of emotional sympatico, no commitment to another individual. The narrator remains committed to the proletarian cause by refusing the love of her husband and resisting the temptation to establish an individual identity. These denials, which occur on the level of plot, are indicative of a larger subversion that is taking place on the level of form and language. The narrative’s eschewal of a unified subjectivity is causally related to its strategy of negation. The story’s critique does not consist in the proposition of an alternate subjectivity, or alternate society. Rather it functions to merely undermine the language of strong subjectivity that it has assimilated. The space of the hospital is a negative space. It is tempting to read the charity ward as a space of the opposite, one that presents the possibility of a world and social community that lies outside of the primary world of science, medicine, capitalism, and love. It is further tempting to then regard this enclosure as the space of the feminine, the realm of feminine unconscious or sexuality perhaps, a place, to reprise Cixous, outside the “phallocentric system.” But this would miss the potency of Hirabayashi’s modernist intervention. Hirabayashi’s narrative discourse is not the articulation of a female space. It is rather the underside of male speech, the negative of the logos that shores up masculine subjectivity. Rather than Cixous’s theorization of an escape from the phallocentric economy, it is more useful in comprehending Hirabayashi’s critique to use Irigaray’s formula of “mimicry,” by which one introduces oneself into the “tightly-woven systematicity” in order to “destroy the discursive mechanism.”64 Like Hiratsuka, Hirabayashi understands the implicit trap in attempting to define

64.  Ibid., 76.

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the feminine. Instead, she reveals the way in which it is suppressed by exposing the mechanisms of male language. In doing so she displaces the ideology of the masculine subject that was embedded in the discourse of love. One can see in the narrative’s portrayal of the unscrupulous hospital director and the perspective of wealthy hospital donors an indictment of greed and the nature of the sentimental bonds that structure society. But the power of this censure derives from the narratives practice of negation. In order to clarify this, we must go back to the mortuary scene: In front of the stone windowless mortuary, shaded over with small acacia leaves, lay a pair of moldy half-clogs, carelessly removed, as if they floated over in a stream. On top of the autopsy table, a faucet that could not be completely turned off leaks water onto the stone creating the sound of a perpetual drip-drop. On the front part of the autopsy table, made of cut stone about the size of a tatami mat, was clearly carved the shape of a rear, an arm, a head, and a shoulder. Because of the neverending drip-drop of the water, a rusted groove had been etched into the top of the granite-like cut stone, a groove that somehow smelled like the aftermath of hacked human flesh. For those who have fought and lost the battle of long life and dragged the chains of their daily life into this basement [of a hospital], even more than the time spent in the charity ward until their death, the hardest thing to bear is the thought of the moment before death laying on that autopsy table. On top of the cold stone, one’s hands and feet are cut into pieces and sold to reimburse the hospital expenses incurred while one was alive. How can such a person believe in that phrase “go to heaven in peace,” which was written on a dusty scroll-like thing hanging above the autopsy table. (100) Recalling the embedded frame structure of the story, the description of the mortuary occurs exactly in the middle of the narrative and is thematically at its core. The presence of the half-clogs recalls the indoor slippers at the entryway to the hospital at the beginning of the story and marks this as a second gateway, signifying entrance into the innermost, and thematically final, space of the story. The seemingly incessant repetition of “stone” and “autopsy table” linguistically marks and conveys the importance of this description. It is not just the heaviness of the stone that enhances the signification of this space as the central nadir of the narrative. The autopsy table represents the culmination of the thematic development of the body. The space where the body becomes the most literal and the most physical, the autopsy table signifies the ultimate subjection of the body to the logic of science, but also in this case to the logic of the capitalist economy that undergirds

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the “charity” of the charity hospital. The body is literally chopped up and converted into both money and scientific knowledge. It is this dissection of the human body into body parts, commodity, and science that lays the ground for the biting sarcasm at the end of the passage, exposing the hypocrisy of the religious piety expressed in the phrase, “go to heaven in peace.” The social indictment is explicit, but it is embedded in the description, in the way the room is described. The mechanism of this passage, central as it is within the structure of the narrative, provides the blueprint for the critique of the story as a whole. Toward the end of the story, the narrator writes: “I could no longer recall the face of my child; instead all I could hear was the drip-drop of the water from the faucet in the mortuary. It was just about time to start the dissection.” Thus, a type of thematic resolution is achieved through the symmetry of the framing structure in the story. The dripping faucet recalls the passage of the mortuary, marking the undoing of the reason the narrator came to the charity ward in the first place: her child. In this case, the undoing consists of the subjection of the child, the child’s body, to the capitalist economy of charity and science. The narrator is thus free to go, and the last paragraph describes her departure from the hospital in a rickshaw, to be transported to a prison, thus providing the bookend of the final outer frame. Just as the baby has died and been dissected, so the narrator too fails to make anything of her experience. She too has been defeated by the charity ward, unable to pierce its logic, and fight the system. But this very failure, this leaving the ward the same way she came, though now bereft of her child, is what enables the linguistic critique of the story. Just as the complete subjection of the human body to the science and economy of the stone autopsy table exposes the emptiness of the Christian conception, the failure of the narrator sets up the indictment of the charity ward and the social ethics it represents. Recall the narrator’s indictment which, announced in the penultimate paragraph, works as the explicit “message” of the story. They “will not be able to draw from the dissection of my poor baby’s dead body any conclusion about what is to be done for the kind of human being who does not have the money to buy artificial milk” (105). The statement is in the negative. It exposes more than accuses. It articulates what science cannot do. Likewise, the story stands as an indictment of the hospital, of society, of charity, and finally of love, by exposing what it cannot show, or more precisely, that which it hides and supresses. Conventionally, the cohesive subject is understood as avatar of the reader and crusader of the narrative’s critical interests. In Hirabayashi’s modernist work, this very procedure is under interrogation. In examining the ills of capitalist society and the misogyny of social discourse, it grasps the problem through the framework of the individual, and even the individual consciousness. Thus, as this framework is dismantled, the eager reader is not spared. The narrative discourse

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forces the reader to confront their own pretensions of integrity in a more direct way than other modernist texts. Hirabayashi’s critique is in a sense more personally directed than Yokomitsu’s, Tanizaki’s, or Kawabata’s for that matter. The narrator addresses you even as it addresses itself. While the disruption of self is objectified in the modernist texts of these other writers, here the disruption is itself subjective. The attack on subjectivity is a second person attack, ultimately directed at the symbolically inclined mimetic reader “himself.” In writing a feminine body that is criminalized, diseased, destitute, and forced to commit infanticide, Hirabayashi expresses the negative consequences of a discourse that leaves no room for the feminine. Her narrative is the other side of male-centered I-novel discourse and the pleasure that it gives. It is not a narrative that denies it, or that posits a competing source of power. Rather, it is a discourse that exposes its negative side, its pain and suffering, an underside that conforms to the half-submerged half basement space of the hospital. It is through this space of negative language that Hirabayashi’s prompts a reevaluation of the way society can and should be formed.

Coda

Against the National Literary Narrative

It is often the expectation of books that examine, elucidate, and generally acclaim the work of writers in the prewar period to account for what happened next. The question is informed by an awareness of the transformation of Japanese society into a fascistic community in the 1930s and Japan’s eventual entry into World War II on the side of the Axis Powers. Indeed, the need to explain this apparent failure or breakdown of liberal culture underlies much of scholarly inquiry into the artistic production of the 1910s and 20s. If writers were capable of producing such socially critical works of high art in the 1920s, what happened to these writers and their works in the decades afterward? Did they resist? Did they acquiesce? This question becomes all the more poignant in studies of literary modernism, a genre that continues to occupy a privileged position in the hierarchy of literature and art in academia more broadly, and in large part because of the disruptive capabilities attributed to it. If Japan was to quickly become an illiberal society in the ten years after many of these works were published, how are we to judge the effectiveness of literary works that were purported be socially subversive? How can we judge the value of such literature and its effectiveness given the fallout of the next two decades? It is certainly useful in understanding the life of the writers treated here to contextualize the place of these modernist works within their lives and their overall body of work. Tanizaki, who had written prolifically before A Fool’s Love, continued to write prolifically afterward. During the war years, he turned to translating the eleventh-century Japanese classic The Tale of Genji and in the postwar period 238

Against the National Literary Narrative      239

continued to write on themes of sexuality and the family. His move to Kansai, his interest in classical literature, and his publication of the long novel Makioka Sisters, about a genteel Osaka family, has often been taken to represent a “return to Japan.” Subtly satirical works such as In Praise of Shadows (1933) would indicate, however, that he never lost his sense of irony concerning the expressions of any culture. Kawabata, after a distinctly avant-garde period in the 1920s, would go on to write novels like Snow Country (1935–1947) and Sound of the Mountain (1949–1954), texts that have come to be associated with traditional Japanese aesthetics. Though Kawabata himself would affirm this association in the speech he delievered in accepting his Nobel Prize in 1968, close readings of these texts reveal that they were hardly realist novels or I-novel narratives. Unlike Tanizaki and Kawabata, who stayed mostly out of politics, there is more of a conscious political transformation in the lives of Yokomitsu and Hirabayashi. Yokomitsu’s view of language changed from a full attack on the national language in the 1920s to an ultimate embrace of standard Japanese, i.e., the language of Shiga, in the 1930s and 40s.1 His works after the war, moreover, were informed by a newfound nationalism. Hirabayashi too renounced socialism during the war, and wrote prolifically after the war critical of the communist party and the Soviet Union. Despite the various developments in the trajectory of these authors’ lives, one thing that they all had in common was that they no longer produced modernist works after the 1920s. Nonetheless, while it is worthwhile to investigate the interaction between creative individuals and the onset of a repressive society, the approach to modernism I elaborate—where modernism is understood historically, and modernist texts are understood as historical products that were reflective of contemporary historical forces—demands a different line of questioning. First of all, it exposes an unnaturalness in the practice of juxtaposing the life trajectory of an author, strung together through the works they produced, with the trajectory of liberal society within a nation’s history, as if the two were actually commensurate. It is worth pointing out to begin with that many modernist works, as demonstrated in these chapters, actually subverted liberal notions of society and progressive efforts at social improvement. But apprehending modernist texts from a historical point of view reveals that modernist works need to be decoupled from their authors. Individual works were modernist, not the authors themselves. These works moreover flourished during a certain historical time, and did not necessarily reflect a certain height of maturity, a high plateau of artistic sophistication

1.  Toeda Hirokazu, “Yokomitsu Riichi ni totte ‘kokugo’ to wa nanika” (Paper presented at the Showa bungaku kenkyu¯ dai 41shu¯ nukizuri, Tokyo, September 2000).

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that authors either sustained or lost. The same authors wrote worthwhile works before and after their modernist productions. But apprehending modernist works historically also means that their “effectiveness,” i.e., their potential to have an actual historical impact, must ultimately be calculated, at the very least, as a function of who and how many actually read the given works at a given historical time. Compared to the conventional method of determining effectiveness, which more or less equates historical impact with how largely the name of the author looms in the sequence of literary history, this method is far more accurate but also also implies a far more modest valuation of a given work’s historical impact. In assessing the value of the literary works we admire, literary scholars perhaps unecessarily exaggerate the agency individual writers had over the tempest of historical forces to which they themseles were subject. Refraining from crediting such artistic individuals with the flowering of liberal culture in a given period also saves such individuals from being held accountable for its decline. If modernism in Japan was enabled in large part by the convergence of historical forces—the establishment of the I-novel, the proliferation of mass media, the Great Kanto¯ Earthquake—then an account of its decline can perhaps be better discerned by following the development of those same historical forces. Literary modernism in the 1920s depended for its fodder on a bombastic mass media discourse that was both international and transnational in outlook. There was a high seriousness to the tone of its rhetoric that was driven by a sense of power and duty to shape society through language. There was also an almost naive optimism about the positive power of advertisement and commodity culture. It was against this “phantasm” of Taisho¯ democracy that the modernist works examined here enacted and achieved their negations. One way to think about the decline of modernism is to think about how the tenor of these media discourses changes in the 1930s, and then again in the postwar period, and how this change was reflected in the literary practice of those periods. But the task of finding explanations for Japan’s decline into fascism in the trajectory of literary modernism in Japan hides another insidious assumption. Namely, that the value of modernist fiction can only be understood historically, or that its worth is circumscribed by its agency vis-à-vis the developments of a historical past. Implicit here is the idea that modernist fiction had its time and has run its course, that it is no longer relevant to us, no longer important to read and think about for us today. Though I have delineated the socially subversive functions of modernist texts as historical phenomena, I have supposed all along that the linguistic awareness regarding social ideologies cultivated through modernist texts remains just as relevant today. We have only to look at the rhetorical strategies of environmentally conscious green living, or the “Smarter Living” section

Against the National Literary Narrative      241

of the New York Times, to see contemporary US incarnations of daily life reform, albeit with importance differences. Natural disasters are still apprehended and responded to through the narratives of national ideology, and the specter of the “East/West” binary is as alive as ever in world politics. Thus, it is most productive in evaluating modernist texts to ask not what it was able to do or not to do during its time of production but rather are there any ways in which it has social relevance today. In their reconception of global modernism, Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz propose that instead of reformulating modernism in a global frame, we can more profitably use modernism to rethink terms such as the “global” that we have accepted as self-evident, or examine how modernism “thought through” such terms in historically and geographically specific ways.2 “Categories operate through social activity,” they write, and “use reifies them into abstractions, at which point they seem to emerge by themselves rather than from a series of linked practices.”3 Hayot and Walkowitz propose to start from the ground up using the methods developed by literary modernism of investigating the “linked practices” of language in order to come to better understandings of the globe. One concept that all four modernist works I’ve examined “thought through” in geographically specific ways was the relationship between writing, gender, and geopolitics. Shiga’s “Reconciliation” and Katai’s The Quilt represent two common arrangements of narration with regard to women. In both cases, the self-referential, confessional male narrator is established opposite, and is indeed dependent for its ability to self-narrate upon, the presence of an inscrutable female counterpart. In “Reconciliation,” the primary source of anxiety is the narrator’s relationship with his father and his ability to understand his own self, about which he is perpetually concerned. While the wife is there, she is not an object of curiosity for the narrator. About her giving birth, he writes: I began to think that there was a reason for the old custom that a husband should not see his wife giving birth. Other than safely having the child, I felt it wasn’t good to give one’s wife any other concerns, such as having to show her husband an unsightly face or an unsightly position. I even felt that it wasn’t good for me myself to see my wife’s unsightly face and unsightly position. I also did not like the pain of having to sit still and watch my suffering wife.4

2.  Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., A New Vocabulary For Global Modernism (New York: Columbia University, 2016), 6. 3. Ibid. 4.  Shiga Naoya, Wakai, 381. Translation by Roy Starrs.

242       Coda

His thoughts about her are really in the end reflections on his own feelings and attitudes. The wife’s role is as a bulwark for the perpetuation of this kind of reflection. She is the object against which self-analysis can continue to proceed. Though the setup in The Quilt is slightly different due to the dynamic of heterosexual eroticism, it still follows a similar structure of the contemplative male narrator situated across from a mysterious female character. In this case, much of the mystery stems from the narrator’s own attempts to understand, and to possess. Jealous of her relations with a younger man her own age, he wonders whether she might be deceiving him. But, he explains, “while he could, being a literary man, consider his own state of mind objectively, the mind of a young woman was not something that could easily be fathomed.”5 The contrast here between the writer with objective mastery of his own mind and the woman whose psychology is unavailable to rational analysis is stark and cleanly drawn. The narrator ascribes this impenetrability to her gender: “Given the modest sexuality of women, how could she be able to make it any clearer than that. It may be that she caused the recent events because of the despair she felt because of this mental state.”6 It becomes clear from the narrative, however, that his desire to know and his inability to decipher are both driven by his desire to sexually possess her. Luce Irigaray has pointed out that it was Freud who “qualified feminine sexuality as the ‘dark continent’ of psychoanalysis.”7 And Hélène Cixous elaborates: Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/passivity, from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a “dark continent” to penetrate and to “pacify.” . . . The way man has of getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for the other but for his own, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory. One can understand how man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, might feel resentment and fear of being “taken” by the woman, of being lost in her, absorbed, or alone.8 (877) It was the fear of being lost in Yoshiko, of being “taken” by her, and the resentment about that threat that made Tokio send her packing back to her country home, dashing her hopes of being a progressive woman. As Cixous recognizes,

5.  Tayama Katai, Futon, 522. 6.  Ibid., 522. 7. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 48. 8.  Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 877.

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moreover, this impulse is an injunction that men themselves feel, an obligation toward virility, something they are not always comfortable with but feel compelled to carry out. Irigaray describes this from the perspective of the necessarily passive woman: Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation. While her body finds itself thus eroticized, and called into a double movement of exhibition and of chaste retreat in order to stimulate the drives of the “subject,” her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see. (26) Taken together, Cixous and Irigaray describe two essential aspects of the narrative structure of the modern novel as it relates to the production of gender. The modernist works I’ve treated can be juxtaposed in their response to this formation of gender and narration. Tanizaki’s A Fool’s Love is a full-throated performance of this scopic economy in which woman is the “beautiful object of contemplation.” Naomi’s character, however, is a willing participant in this game of being looked at. Her entry into the scopic economy is deliberate. Her intention, moreover, is shared with Jo¯ji, as when she consults him about whether she is putting on the right look as she gazes at herself in the mirror. The activity/passivity opposition, which remained inexplicit in the relationship between Tokio and Yoshiko, is made explicit in the marriage between Jo¯ji and Naomi. These roles, moreover, are self-consciously taken up by the respective actors who participate willfully in the roleplaying relationship. Finally, the fear of being taken, which was latent in Tokio’s desire, is ironically embraced by Jo¯ji, who takes pleasure in what becomes a masochistic desire. Put another way, it is through a perversely sadomasochistic relationship that Tanizaki makes plain the way in which gender is produced through narration. Not only this, it also tests the limits of those rules. In the scandalous beach scene that precipitated the halting of the novel’s serialization, Naomi is breaking the narrative contracts that produce representations of women. Her laughter is the laughter that Cixous sees as the means to “smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth.’”9 From this perspective, it is no wonder the novel had to be censored. Kawabata takes up where Tanizaki left off. His novel still depends on the tried and true structure of the desirous male narrator set against an inscrutable female. He first describes her as a “bunch of deep red flowers being thrust in front of

9.  Ibid., 888.

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him,” a glimpse he gets as he gazes through a door that has been cracked open (56). He would have gone home, the narrator admits, and ceased following the gang members if “that . . . girl weren’t so beautiful” (58). To a limited degree, Kawabata’s narrative is also driven by erotic visual desire. But the novel attempts to complicate this narrative model in several ways. The novel takes place in the streets of Asakusa, and thus this core mechanism is overshadowed by the presence of a multitude of other characters and stories. The narration of Yumiko’s encounter with Akagi in the boat cabin, and the delving into her past, is executed through a detached narrator, different from the perambulating narrator who is looking on from above. While this utilization of multiple narrators can be seen as a technical innovation, it is also a somewhat unwieldy attempt at displacing the convention of the male narrator who is unable to surmise the workings of the female mind. The character of Akagi plays this role—too cavalier to read into Yumiko’s actions and understand what is going on until it is too late—allowing for this structure to be a subject of critical dramatization. In this way, Kawabata is constantly attempting to objectify the “scopic economy” by depicting the way in which it operates. In one scene where Yumiko is collecting tickets for a merrygo-round, he describes the way she is reflected in the rotating axis of the merrygo-round, which is made up of eight panels of mirrors. The merry-go-round . . . was a wonderful mount to display her beauty. Why, because like a mannequin-girl on top of a platform, as the wooden horses turned round, her figure could be gazed at by men from every angle.10 The merry-go-round symbolizes the narrative structure, which also gazes at her against the backdrop of the bustling Asakusa streets from every angle through the perspective of different men. In Kawabata’s Asakusa Kurenaidan, Yumiko is “called into a double movement of exhibition and chaste retreat in order to stimulate the drives of the ‘subject.’” In this case, Yumiko’s retreat is not exactly chaste, but certainly she takes advantage of this, especially as it regards Akagi. The “subject” in this case is the narrator and the narrative, as well as Akagi. Performing a masquerade of femininity, Yumiko’s elusiveness propels the drive, the drive to read, the drive to know, the drive to understand. In this sense the novel might be considered a dramatization of the process by which the female imaginary evades the male scopic regime. However, it is not the female imaginary that Kawabata recovers. Rather, Kawabata sheds light on the problem that is there to begin with, without really offering solutions.

10.  Kawabata Yasunari, Asakusa kurenaidan, 71.

Against the National Literary Narrative      245

But Kawabata nonetheless succeeds where Tanizaki failed in his ability to dramatizes the conflict between the male scopic economy and the female imaginary. If Tanizaki’s A Fool’s Love satirized this framework, Kawabata displaces it, combining it with another narrative schema—that of the city observer—that qualifies and augments this conventional narrative setup. Jo¯ji found Naomi, after all, at an Asakusa café. But if Jo¯ji takes Naomi home with him and attempts to integrate her into a middle-class lifestyle, Kawabata’s narrator does the opposite, seeking to observe Yumiko in her own environment. If Jo¯ji teaches Naomi the language of the middle-class—English and piano lessons—Kawabata’s narrator follows Yumiko around studying her language. If Naomi is the misfit in Jo¯ji’s world, Kawabata’s narrator becomes the misfit in Asakusa. Of course, the narrative perspective has not diverged from the middle-class position, and the gender opposition remains in place. Miriam Silverberg argued that like Tanizaki, Kawabata was “aware of the gender fluidity of the Japanese modern moment,” but was yet nonetheless “determined to maintain the separation of the two sexes in the face of this flux.” Such a rigid gender binary ultimately results in the “impossibility of a stable female position,” the reason Silverberg gives for Yumiko’s disappearance half way through the novel.11 Despite his careful outlining of Yumiko’s character, Kawabata never addresses the female imaginary. The novel attempts to look at gender in a different way, to get away from the paradigm of the viewing male narrator and the viewed female protagonist. But Kawabata is never really able to undermine this ideology of gender because he cannot dispose of his centralized narrating subject, upon which he depends to tell his story. Yokomitsu’s engagement with the structure of male narration engages Shiga’s model of self-reflection more directly than it does Katai’s model of heterosexual male desire. Like Kawabata, Yokomitsu may not jettison the structure but interrogates some of its assumptions. Namely, the type of security and stability needed to self-reflect that is provided by the passive wife. Thematically speaking, the narrator’s subjective discombobulation is set off by the sudden absence of his wife, a fact established in the opening paragraph. The narrator is abruptly visited by a strange woman, a seeming substitute for his wife, but his interactions with her prompt not a serene self-reflection but a disconcerting confusion: “No, it’s not that,” the woman says. Why did she say something like that? It was as if she was provoked by my deeply suspicious seeming eyes and wanted to correct any thoughts

11. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 195.

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I had. If any person, not just me, had taken one look at her, it would be without a doubt that they would have gotten from her attitude a whiff of something shabby in her daily life. But I hardly had enough connection with her for those matters to change the look in my eyes. My interest in her was only this. The color of this overly familiar woman who suddenly dropped in and whose real character was impossible to glean gave me the feeling of a strange attraction as if looking momentarily at a black flower.”12 The woman’s real character is impossible to grasp and she remains, like a “black flower,” unavailable but attractive. But the narrator’s engagement with this woman creates a self-conscious of his own self-consciousness. The narration describes the process of the narrator trying to interpret his interactions with the woman, an analysis that includes the narrator’s own thoughts about the reasons that communication is unsuccessful. It is the woman’s admission that she has abandoned her baby at a nearby temple that sends the narrator into the city, where the frustrations of his search, for the baby and for his wife, is set against the background of urban space. Thus Yokomitsu reproduces the conditions for self-conscious narration found in Shiga’s text, but instead of using it as platform to reproduce the stable subject he employs it to render a radically unstable subjectivity. This departure from Shiga is also marked by the movement of narration from the anchoring domestic space of the house, the central site of Shiga’s family drama, to the “contradictions” of the city. Finally, Hirabayashi’s text brings all these concerns together in a strategy that more directly addresses the problem of gender and narration than do any of the other three texts. It is the only text to do away completely with the structure of male narration pitted against a female counterpart. Her text is a text that “take[s] pleasure more from touching than from looking,” and thus turns the tables on the entire scopic economy and its demand of female passivity. Her self-conscious reflections on her body’s physical traumas seems to anticipate and deny any attempts at eroticization. But it also signifies the narration of the female “I,” but an “I” that is not narrating as a viewed object, as a masquerade of femininity, but as itself, as herself. The half-submerged basement is analogous, as a space of narration, to Yumiko in the cabin of the boat. But instead of being narrated, she narrates. If the cabin of the boat, floating on the river underneath the Kototoi Bridge in Asakusa, represents a marginal space, that marginality is taken to an extreme in the halfsubmerged basement of a hospital in the outskirts of the Japanese colony.

12.  Yokomitsu Riichi, “Burei na machi,” 317.

Against the National Literary Narrative      247

This coincidence of space and narration points again to the essential relationship between gender, writing, and imperialism. If the sequence of texts, from Shiga to Tanizaki to Yokomitsu to Kawabata, represents a gradual movement from the sanctuary of the home into the city streets, and then into the down-andout neighborhoods, Hirabayashi takes us outside of the mainland proper and finally into colonial space. If the male-centered egoistic narrative of the I-novel is based in the new upper-middle-class homes of Tokyo, the negative of that discourse is the pain experienced in the maternity wards of charity hospitals in Dalian, Manchuria. It is only here, in this subterranean space on the margins of the empire, that this structure of male narration can finally be subverted. What I aim to demonstrate is the possibility of using the methodologies developed by literary modernism to investigate what again Hayot and Walkowitz refer to as the “categories that operate through social activity,” categories such as gender that have become reified through use and passed down as abstractions. I aim to demonstrate the way modernist fiction can and should be extracted from the nationally inscribed literary histories, or in fact how the works themselves contain the seeds of these narratives’ deconstruction. National literary histories exaggerate the power of the literary works while simultaneously circumscribing their literary value within the chronologies of history. At work in the elaboration of national literature is a forgetfulness of how and why modernist works were so perverse, an amnesia that feeds the confidence that such disruptiveness is quaint, that it no longer has bearing on us and our society, some one hundred years later. Recovering the radically disruptive essence of modernist fiction by delineating its contortions of social ideology allows us to activate anew its critical capacity and bring it to bear upon our own daily lives.

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Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University

Selected Titles

(Complete list at: http://weai.columbia.edu/publications/studies-weai/) Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand, by Duncan McCargo. Cornell University Press, 2020. Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border, by Sören Urbansky. Princeton University Press, 2020. Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China, by Fei-Hsien Wang. Princeton University Press, 2019. The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media, by Nathan Shockey. Columbia University Press, 2019. Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City, by Haydon Cherry. Yale University Press, 2019. Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education, by Raja Adal. Columbia University Press, 2019. Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China, by Mary Augusta Brazelton. Cornell University Press, 2019. Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan, by Franz Prichard. Columbia University Press, 2019. The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961, by Sidney Xu Lu. Cambridge University Press, 2019. The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the end of Empire to Maoist State Socialism, by Robert Culp. Columbia University Press, 2019. Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam, by Claire E. Edington. Cornell University Press, 2019. Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China, by Martin Fromm. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1949, by Alyssa M. Park. Cornell University Press, 2019. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War, by Jeremy A. Yellen. Cornell University Press, 2019. Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan, by Max Ward. Duke University Press, 2019. Statebuilding by Imposition: Resistance and Control in Colonial Taiwan and the Philippines, by Reo Matsuzaki. Cornell University Press, 2019. Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies, by Sayaka Chatani. Cornell University Press, 2019. Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges, by Corey Byrnes. Columbia University Press, 2019. The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, by Emily Baum. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

253

254       Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University

Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire, by David Ambaras. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953–1961, by Cheehyung Harrison Kim. Columbia University Press, 2018. Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945, by Kerim Yasar. Columbia University Press, 2018. Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965–1975, by Olga Dror. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable Despite Rising Protests, by Yao Li. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Raising China’s Revolutionaries: Modernizing Childhood for Cosmopolitan Nationalists and Liberated Comrades, by Margaret Mih Tillman. Columbia University Press, 2018. Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea, by Juhn Y. Ahn. University of Washington Press, 2018. Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth Century Japan, by Robert Tuck. Columbia University Press, 2018. China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965, by Philip Thai. Columbia University Press, 2018. Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet, by Max Oidtmann. Columbia University Press, 2018. The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China, by Charlene Makley. Cornell University Press, 2018. Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan, by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit. Harvard University Asia Center, 2018. Where the Party Rules: The Rank and File of China’s Communist State, by Daniel Koss. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives, by Chad R. Diehl. Cornell University Press, 2018. China’s Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century, by Ori Sela. Columbia University Press, 2018. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan, by Yulia Frumer. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China, by Diana Fu. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after the Second World War, by Laura Hein. Bloomsbury, 2018. China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949, by Brian Tsui. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945, by Hikari Hori. Cornell University Press, 2018. The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies, by Alexander Zahlten. Duke University Press, 2017. The Chinese Typewriter: A History, by Thomas S. Mullaney. The MIT Press, 2017. Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine, by Hilary A. Smith. Stanford University Press, 2017. Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Ties, by Becky Yang Hsu. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Food of Sinful Demons: Meat, Vegetarianism, and the Limits of Buddhism in Tibet, by Geoffrey Barstow. Columbia University Press, 2017. Youth For Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea, by Charles R. Kim. University of Hawaii Press, 2017.

Index

Figures and images are indicated by italicized page numbers. advertising, 34, 78, 79n51, 105n8, 205, 240. See also mass print media aerial imagery and photography, 129n78, 174, 175–176, 177, 182–186, 190–191 A Fool’s Love (Tanizaki): censorship of, 53–55; critical response to, 56–57; daily life reform and, 10–11, 61–62, 66, 85–91, 97; East/West binaries and, 57; formalism/ vernacular tension in, 38–40, 42; gender and, 60–61, 63, 90, 242–243, 245; Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 57n6, 97; I-novel genre and, 55, 57–58, 60–66, 90; linguistic signification in, 42–44; love discourses and, 212, 213; The Quilt compared to, 55, 58–63, 60n11, 81; sexuality in, 242–243; social language and, 39, 54–55, 63, 66, 83, 86–91, 97–98; “Tattooer” and, 39 agency of modernist fiction, 240–241. See also specific authors; specific works ai. See love Ai’ou Bridge, 172 Althusser, Louis, 85 Amano Teiyu-, 105 Angles, Jeffrey, 162 appearances (kasho-) in Yokomitsu’s neo-sensation, 107 artistic modernism. See modanizumu; modernism Asakusa Kannon Temple, 178 Asakusa neighborhoods: in The Mermaid, 186; Reconstruction Festival and, 180–181; in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, 155–157, 161–166, 168, 169, 178–179, 244; urban reconstruction and, 169–172, 185. See also Tokyo Aso- Sho-zo-, 84 authenticity: daily life reform and, 116; ethnicity and, 19, 114–115; fascist aesthetics and, 114; I-novels and, 14–15, 15n26, 26–27, 205; love discourses and, 212–213; modernist critiques of, 34; urban reconstruction and, 123, 124, 138; Yokomitsu and, 153

authors. See writing; specific authors avant-garde, 102–103, 203, 239 Axis Powers, 238 Bardsley, Jan, 82n66 Basho-, 113 beriberi, 51, 198, 207, 226, 229 Berman, Jessica, 30 Berman, Marshall, 35n72 Bluestocking writers, 12, 79, 82n66, 193 body: in A Fool’s Love, 64, 65, 93, 95, 97; feminism/proletarianism and, 204–206, 242; Hirabayashi and, 198, 204–205; I-novels and, 231; “In the Charity Ward” and, 199–203, 207–210, 226–228, 230, 232, 234–237; love discourses and, 210, 213, 219, 225, 232; women and, 204–206, 222. See also perception and the senses; sensation Borland, Janet, 122, 123 Brown, Janice, 206 Buddhism, 111, 113, 136 Bungei Sensen (Literary Front), 194, 195 bunka (culture) in daily life reform, 77–79, 88–89, 91, 93, 96 Bush, Christopher, 46–48 cafés and café waitresses, 82–83, 163n14 canon of Western modernism, 31, 240 capitalism: Hirabayashi on, 194; “In the Charity Ward” and, 199, 201, 235–237; Irigaray on, 196; language’s role in, 3–4; love discourses and, 197 Casino Folies Revue, 156, 160, 165, 167 censorship of A Fool’s Love, 53–55, 61, 97, 243 Certeau, Michel de, 8–9, 74 character (jinkaku), 4; cosmopolitanism and, 21; daily life reform movement and, 49; “In the Charity Ward” and, 225; Kant’s Critique and, 105; in love discourses, 18, 194, 215–223; suppression of femininity and, 222 “Charity Ward.” See “In the Charity Ward”

255

256       Index

Chiba Shunji, 56–57n4 chief radicals, 149 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 177 childbirth and pregnancy, 207–209, 232, 241, 246. See also “In the Charity Ward” Chinese characters in “Ruthless City,” 148–149 Christianity and Christian values, 58, 68, 70, 236 Chu-o- ko-ron (Central Review), 4, 80, 132 cities. See urban reconstruction; specific cities civic consciousness: daily life reform and, 70, 84–85, 91, 96, 122; mass media discourses and, 6; urban reconstruction and, 122, 136, 153 Civil Code of 1898, 68 civilization (bunmeika) project, 121–125 Cixous, Hélène, 196, 206, 209, 222, 234, 242–243 Clancey, Gregory K., 123n37 class: A Fool’s Love and, 48, 54; female suppression and, 196; “In the Charity Ward” and, 195–196; social norms from, 3. See also middle class; proletarianism cognition: “Heads and Bellies” and, 142–146; in “In the Charity Ward,” 230, 231; in Yokomitsu’s neo-sensation, 24, 106–109, 117–119, 139, 146, 231 collage, 164 colonialism and colonial power, 129. See also East/West binaries; Washington Naval Conference commodification: daily life reform and, 78; everydayness and, 7, 9; fetishism and, 95–96; “In the Charity Ward” and, 235–237; mass media discourses and, 240; women and, 196 communism, 239. See also proletarianism confession and confessional voice: A Fool’s Love and, 53, 57–60, 64–65, 85–87; I-novel genre and, 16, 17, 73, 135, 207, 241–242; love discourses and, 212 consumption and consumerism: A Fool’s Love and, 90–93, 95–96; daily life reform and, 70–74, 78, 84–85, 213; Great KantoEarthquake and, 49, 98, 124, 138; mass media projections and, 9 Copeland, Rebecca, 205–206 criticism: Eurocentrism in, 46–47; fu-ryu- and, 110–117; language divisions from, 3, 54; modanizumu and, 32; Tyler on, 32n64. See also feminism; specific critics cultural hierarchies. See East/West binaries; modernism

daily life (seikatsu), 4; A Fool’s Love and, 10–11, 61–62, 66, 85–91, 97; bunka (culture) and, 77–79, 88–89, 91, 93, 96; civic consciousness and, 70, 84–85, 91, 96, 122; consumption and, 70–74, 78, 84–85, 213; contemporary incarnations of, 240–241; dual nature of, 8–10, 11n16; ethnic identity and, 104, 109; Great KantoEarthquake and, 98, 213; home and, 18, 67–73, 72n36, 76, 78, 80, 83, 90; I-novels and, 17–18, 55; Kawabata and, 159–160; love discourses and, 49, 68–69, 79–82, 213, 215, 220, 224; mass print media and, 8–9, 11, 67–68, 71–75, 74; national identity and, 18, 55, 67–68, 75–78, 84–85; neo-sensation and, 109–110; The Quilt and, 58; Reconstruction Festival and, 181; in “Ruthless City,” 147–148; Sato- and, 113–114, 119, 120; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 159, 167–168; social reform and, 8, 49, 67, 74–75, 77–79; Tanizaki and, 49; urban reconstruction and, 19, 122, 131, 132, 135–136; the West and, 8, 55, 76–78, 78n50, 89, 92; women and, 49, 55, 67–68, 76, 78–80, 82–84, 90; Yokomitsu and, 109–111, 117, 119–120, 139, 153, 159 Daily Life Reform League, 75, 87–88 dehistoricization, 46–48. See also history and historicization De Sola Rodstein, Susan, 29 diction. See language divine punishment (tenken), 125–126 domestic space. See home and household earthquake reconstruction. See urban reconstruction Earthquake Remembrance Hall, 181, 184 earthquakes. See Great Kanto- Earthquake; natural disasters; urban reconstruction East/West binaries: A Fool’s Love and, 57; cultural hierarchy from, 45–48, 57–58; fetishism and, 10, 48; Japan and, 46–48, 96, 102–103, 113, 241; modernism and, 45–48; modernization and, 20, 45, 48 Edo, 127n47, 183 efficiency: A Fool’s Love and, 90, 91; daily life reform and, 77–78, 84–85, 122; urban reconstruction and, 131 elegance (fu-ryu-) in aesthetic criticism, 110–117 Ericson, Joan, 205 Etai Bridge, 172

Index     257

ethnicity and ethnic purity, 10; Great KantoEarthquake and, 98, 104, 129–130; Sato’s fu-ryu- aesthetic and, 111–117, 137; urban reconstruction and, 18–19, 24, 49, 132, 136–139, 146; Yokomitsu and, 48, 104, 139, 153, 231 Eurocentrism, 45–46. See also East/West binaries everydayness, 7, 8, 11, 55, 73–74, 74n38. See also daily life Eysteinsson, Astradur, 3–4, 25–29, 29n53, 68, 197 family: A Fool’s Love and, 62; daily life reform movement and, 18, 68–70, 80, 92; I-novels and, 17, 136n74; love discourses and, 214, 218–219, 224; state aligned with, 69–70 fascism, 114–115, 238–241 feminism: “In the Charity Ward” and, 50–51, 201–205; feminine écriture and, 196, 209; Hirabayashi and, 193–197, 203, 221–222, 233; love discourses and, 211, 214, 220–223; Tanizaki and, 56; transnationalism and, 196. See also gender; sexuality; women and femininity fetishism: A Fool’s Love and, 42, 49, 55, 61, 65–66, 83, 95; East/West binaries and, 10, 48 Flores, Linda, 204–205, 207 folklore in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, 168 Fool’s Love. See A Fool’s Love Forel, Auguste, 196 formalism: Gardner on, 35; Hirabayashi and, 196; “In the Charity Ward” and, 195, 234; language divisions from, 3; modanizumu and, 32; regional modernisms and, 33–34; social language and, 4, 91; vernacular and, 38; Yokomitsu on, 37 fragmentation: A Fool’s Love and, 93, 95; Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 137; modernization and, 27–28, 34–35, 137, 163, 163n14; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 50, 157, 159–161, 163–164, 166, 169; Yokomitsu and, 102, 138 free love, 194, 210, 214 Freud, Sigmund and Freudian discourse, 196–197 Fuji Elementary school, 178, 188 Fujin ko-ron (Lady’s Review), 4 fukko- (renaissance), 4, 18, 50, 130–131, 138. See also urban reconstruction Funnami Sho-, 71 fu-ryu- (elegance) in aesthetic criticism, 110–117

Gardner, William, 34–35, 101 genbun itchi (vernacular prose), 14, 20, 22. See also social language gender: A Fool’s Love and, 60–61, 63, 90, 242–243, 245; daily life reform and, 67, 69, 80–82, 94; education and, 58–59; Hirabayashi and, 43–44, 196, 204, 246–247; I-novel genre and, 14n24, 43–44, 59–60, 201, 204–206, 231–232; in love discourses, 218–220; narrative discourse and, 241–247; proletarianism and, 204–205; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 243–245; writing and, 42, 205–206, 206n24. See also feminism; men and masculinity; sexuality; women and femininity geography. See Asakusa neighborhoods globalization, 45, 48, 241 Gluck, Carol, 5, 6, 47–48, 84, 96 Golley, Gregory, 65, 92–93 Gonda Yasunosuke, 162 Goto- Shinpei, 123n37 Great Kanto- Earthquake (1923), 120–122, 154; A Fool’s Love and, 57n6, 97; “In the Charity Ward” and, 50, 208, 230; daily life reform and, 98, 213; ethnic essentialism and, 114; “Heads and Bellies” and, 146; historicization and, 124, 126, 137–138, 186–187; media discourses from, 10, 49, 50, 121–122, 125–129, 128, 137, 146; modernism’s decline and, 240–241; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 155, 157, 188; subjectivity and, 24; Tanizaki and, 56; violence following, 21; Yokomitsu and, 102, 103, 120, 139, 146. See also urban reconstruction Grosz, Elizabeth, 204 Haga Yaichi, 136 Hamaguchi Osachi, 184 Hamakawa Katsuhiko, 141–142 Hamamatsucho- Park, 171 Harootunian, Harry, 7, 11, 73–74, 74n38 Hartley, Barbara, 208n30 Hayashi Fumiko, 193n1 Hayashi Kimio, 81 Hayot, Eric, 241, 247 “Heads and Bellies” (Yokomitsu), 139–147; I-novel narration and, 227, 231; phenomenology of, 142–147, 230–231; as social allegory, 141–142, 145, 201 Heian period, 111, 111n15 Heidegger, Martin, 105 Hill, Christopher, 42, 126

258       Index

Hirabayashi Taiko: on Bluestocking writers, 12, 193; capitalism and, 194; feminism and, 193–197, 203, 221–222, 233; formalism and, 196; gender and, 43–44, 51, 196, 198, 204, 208, 246–247; imperialism and, 247; I-novel genre and, 43, 44, 201, 237; Kawabata and, 237; love discourses and, 194, 196, 198; “The Newest Love,” 194; phenomenology and, 51, 231–232; political commitment of, 193–195, 223–224; on role of literature, 2, 221; Shiga and, 208, 234; socialism and, 98, 193n1, 194, 239; subversive strategies of, 198, 201–205, 207–210, 224, 228, 234–235; Tanizaki and, 237; Yokomitsu and, 230–232, 237 Hiratsuka Raicho-, 82n66, 219–220, 224 history and historicization: A Fool’s Love and, 54–55, 57, 96; East/West binaries and, 46–48; Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 124, 126, 137–138; love discourses and, 215, 218; media discourses and, 47, 73–74; modernism and, 11, 23, 28–35, 45, 46, 137, 239–241; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 167–168, 186–191; social language and, 29–30, 49; urban reconstruction and, 137–138, 159, 184 Hoashi Ri’ichiro-, 67 Ho-chi Weekly Photojournal, 154 home and household: in A Fool’s Love, 86–89, 97; cafés and café waitresses vs., 82–83; consumption and, 70; daily life reform movement and, 18, 67–73, 72n36, 76, 78, 80, 83, 90; I-novel genre and, 57; wife/lover divide in, 81–83, 83n69 Honma Hisao, 79, 81, 125–126, 135–137 Horikiri Zenjiro-, 173 The Housewife’s Companion, 70, 78 Husserl, Edmund, 105 I-novel genre: A Fool’s Love and, 55, 57–58, 60–66, 90; authenticity and, 14–15, 15n26, 26–27, 205; confessional voice and, 16, 17, 73, 135, 207, 241–242; disavowal of bodies in, 201, 209, 231–232; gender and, 14n24, 43–44, 59–60, 201, 204–206, 231–232; Hirabayashi and, 43, 44, 201, 237; “In the Charity Ward” and, 207–208; Lippit on, 20n38; love discourses and, 212; modernism and, 12, 20n38, 21–22, 24–27, 240–241; proletarianism and, 204–205; The Quilt and, 59–60; realism and, 25–28; Reconciliation and, 12–17; “Ruthless City” and, 147; Sato-’s fu-ryu- aesthetic and, 115, 116; as social text,

17–25, 55, 68, 72–73, 81, 87; subjectivity in, 27, 81, 142–143; Tanizaki and, 38; urban reconstruction and, 132, 135, 136n74, 139; Yokomitsu and, 118, 152–153 Ibsen, Henrik, 221 ideologies: A Fool’s Love and, 55, 66, 83–85, 90–93, 97; daily life reform and, 9–10, 55, 75–78, 83–85, 91; East/West binaries and, 45, 48; Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 49, 104, 121–125; “In the Charity Ward” and, 51, 202, 207, 223–224; linguistic representation and, 43, 92–93, 97, 240–241; love discourses and, 210, 218–219, 223; modernist disruption of, 3, 5, 11, 23, 24, 27, 30, 44, 91, 103, 247; nationalism and, 18–19, 247; from print media, 1, 5–6, 23, 35, 75; realist narratives and, 25–26; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 157, 159, 170, 184–186, 191; Tokyo and, 121, 129; urban reconstruction and, 123n37, 127, 130, 135–136, 139, 146–147, 157, 159, 170–171, 184–185; Yokomitsu and, 49, 103–104, 114, 119–125, 139, 146–147, 153 ie system, 68–69, 72, 88, 218. See also home and household Ikue Takayuki, 79 Imperial City (teito), 49–50, 121, 127–130, 128, 128–129n48, 172–173, 177, 182–184. See also nationalism and national identity; Tokyo; urban reconstruction Imperial City Reconstruction Completion Ceremony, 157, 169–170, 180–185, 187, 191 imperialism: earthquake reconstruction and, 49–50, 137; Hirabayashi and, 247; Japan and, 20, 128–129; Reconstruction Festival and, 182–184 Inden Masashi, 105n7 individuals and individual practice: daily life discourses and, 10, 17–19, 21, 131–132; fu-ryu- and, 112; in I-novels, 17–18, 23–24; love and, 194; modernist critiques of, 34, 120; proletarianism and, 233; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 186, 191; urban reconstruction and, 131–136, 138; Yokomitsu on, 118, 120, 138. See also self and self-reflection; subjectivity infrastructure. See Great Kanto- Earthquake; urban reconstruction Inoue Kinji, 19, 132–133, 135–137 “In the Charity Ward” (Hirabayashi): allegorical readings of, 199–201, 209, 224; the body in, 199–203, 207–210, 226–228,

Index     259

230, 232, 234–237; capitalism and, 199, 201, 235–237; femininity and, 50–51, 232–233, 234–235, 237; formalism and, 195, 234; Great Kanto- Earthquake (1923), 50, 208, 230; ideologies and, 51, 202, 207, 223–224; love discourses and, 195, 202–203, 225, 236–237; phenomenology and, 226–227, 230–231; pregnancy and childbirth in, 50–51, 207–208; sensation and, 51, 195, 199–203, 226–227, 229, 231; structure of, 198–199, 235, 236; style and, 196, 198, 200–202, 225–227; subjectivity and, 43–44, 195, 199–201, 203, 208–210, 223–229, 231–234, 236–237 Irigaray, Luce, 196–197, 221–223, 227–228, 231–234, 242–243 Ishihara Jun, 18, 211–212, 214–217 Ishikawa, Naoko, 201–205, 207, 233 Ishizumi Harunosuke, 162, 163 Ito, Ken, 69, 70 Ito- Noe, 81 Iwamoto Yoshiharu, 68, 69, 79, 88 Iwanami Press, 105 Iwaya Sazanami, 90 Izumi Kyo-ka, 37 Japan, 6–8; Daily Life Reform Movement and, 75–78, 84; East/West binaries and, 46–48, 96, 102–103, 113, 241; fascism in, 238–241; geopolitical anxiety in, 76–77, 92, 96, 120, 125, 129, 131, 138; Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 10, 146; I-novel and, 12, 17; Korean migration to, 129–130; modanizumu and, 31–32; modernism in, 27, 33–34, 48, 139, 237–240; modernization and, 21, 34; Reconstruction Festival and, 183; Russo–Japanese War and, 20, 125 Japanese language and typography: analogous structures of love discourses in, 216n48; I-novels and, 15n26; in “In the Charity Ward,” 229; pronouns in, 14; in “Ruthless City,” 148–149, 149n85; standardization of, 26; Yokomitsu and, 239 jinkaku. See character Kaizo- (Reconstruction), 4, 100, 132. See also Great Kanto- Earthquake; urban reconstruction Kamichika Ichiko, 79–80 kana, kanji, and katakana characters, 42, 43, 86n74, 92, 152. See also Japanese language and typography

kanjo- seikatsu (emotional daily life), 85. See also daily life kankaku. See sensation and sense perceptions Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Pure Reason, 105–106, 108, 119 Karatani Ko-jin, 20, 21 Katai. See Tayama Katai Katakami Noboru, 67 katakana characters, 42, 86n74, 92. See also Japanese language and typography katei (home), 4, 68–73, 88 Kawabata Yasunari: earthquake reconstruction and, 50; Hirabayashi and, 237; neo-sensationist school and, 101, 102; on role of literature, 2–3; Scarlet Gang’s composition and, 161–163, 167; subversive strategies of, 171, 180, 184–185, 187–188, 191, 207; Tanizaki and, 164, 186; Yokomitsu and, 159; works by: Asakusa Kurenaidan, 244–245; Snow Country, 239; Sound of the Mountain, 239. See also Scarlet Gang of Asakusa Kawata Shiro-, 218–219 Kayahara Kazan, 67 kazoku seikatsu (daily life of the family), 85. See also daily life; family Keene, Dennis, 103n5 kekkon seikatsu (daily life of marriage), 85. See also daily life; marriage Kenyu-sha Group, 37 Kern, Stephen, 35n72 Key, Ellen, 79, 136, 196 Kikuchi Kan, 125 Kinshi Park, 171 Kita Sadakichi, 129–130 Kiyosu Bridge, 172, 179, 181 kokumin seikatsu (daily life of the national subject), 85. See also daily life; nationalism and national identity Kollontai, Alexandra, 196 Komagata Bridge, 172 Komori Yo-ichi, 93–94, 150, 152 Korea and Koreans, 7, 21, 47, 120, 129–130 Ko-seisha Database for Japanese Magazines and Periodicals, 74, 127–128, 128 Kototoi Bridge, 5, 169–172, 174, 175, 177–180, 185 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 56 Kume Masao, 111n15 Kurahara Korehito, 203–205 Kuramae Bridge, 172 Kurata Hyakuzo-, 212–213, 217

260       Index

Kuriyagawa Hakuson: Modern Views of Love, 214, 217 Kusama Yasuo, 162 Kyo-to, 56, 127 labor and labor movements, 21, 76, 145–146 language: feminism and, 197, 232; in “Heads and Bellies,” 142, 144–147; historicization and, 29; I-novels and, 14–15, 15n26, 17, 20–21, 26, 27, 153; “In the Charity Ward” and, 195, 223–227, 230–233, 235–237; literary/social divide in, 3–6, 22, 25, 28–29, 45–46, 135, 159; in modern vs. modernist fiction, 36; neo-sensation and, 108, 119; in “Ruthless City,” 148–152; in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, 156, 179; social imaginary and, 11, 24; urban reconstruction and, 123n37, 153. See also negation; social language League of Nations, 7, 77 League of Socialist Literature, 193n1 LeFebvre, Henri, 8 liberalism and liberal values, 92, 114, 211–212, 239–240 Lippit, Seiji: on form and subjectivity in modernism, 20–23, 34; I-novels and, 27–28; on Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, 163–164, 170; on temporality in novels, 159; on Yokomitsu, 23–24, 102, 153 The Literary Age (neo-sensationist journal), 102, 104, 139 Lodge, David, 26 love (ai) and love discourses: body in, 210, 213, 219, 225, 232; capitalism and, 197; character in, 18, 194, 215–223; daily life reform and, 49, 68–69, 79–82, 213, 215, 220, 224; feminism and, 211, 214, 220–223; Hirabayashi and, 194–196, 198, 202–203, 225, 236–237; ideologies from, 210, 218–219, 223; marriage and, 210, 211, 214, 216, 217, 224; scientific language in, 211–212, 215, 222–223; sexuality in, 194, 210–215, 217–222, 224, 225, 232; social discourses of, 81, 196, 210–214, 217, 224; subjectivity and, 194, 210, 217, 219–221 lovism, 79–81, 210 lust (yokubo-), 59, 81–82, 194, 210, 212–214, 216. See also love Maeda Ai, 32, 34, 156, 160, 168 magazines. See mass print media; specific magazines male gaze, 93–95. See also men and masculinity

Manchuria, 7, 77, 129, 247 marriage: A Fool’s Love and, 38, 91–92; daily life reform movement and, 18, 49, 67–70, 79–83, 92; in ie system vs. katei, 68–70, 88, 218–219; love discourses and, 210, 211, 214, 216, 217, 224 Marx, Karl, 95 Marxism and Marxist literature, 21, 204. See also proletarianism; socialism mass print media: A Fool’s Love and, 55, 83; daily life reform and, 8–9, 11, 67–68, 71–75, 74; East/West binaries in, 47–48; essay-writing genre in, 162; feminine in, 9; Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 10, 49, 50, 121–122, 125–129, 128, 137, 146; “Heads and Bellies” and, 146; historicization and, 47, 73–74; ideologies from, 1, 5–6, 23, 35, 75; love discourses in, 81, 196, 210–214, 217, 224; methodology in reading, 5–6, 10, 22, 29, 35; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 159, 161–162, 168, 179–180, 187–188; social discourses from, 4–5, 7–8, 26, 29–30, 49; urban reconstruction and, 50, 146, 157, 169–170, 172–177, 180, 182–184, 186–187; women’s education in, 59; Yokomitsu on, 109 materialism: daily life reform and, 76; Tanizaki and, 92, 93, 152; urban reconstruction and, 138; Yokomitsu and, 152–153 maternity. See family; pregnancy and childbirth; women media. See mass print media Meiji period, 210 Meiji Restoration (1868), 125 men and masculinity: Grosz on, 204; Hirabayashi and, 43–44, 51, 198, 208; I-novel narration and, 43, 66, 205, 247; “In the Charity Ward” and, 207, 210, 235; Irigaray on, 197; love discourses and, 217–221, 223; progressive social thought and, 59; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 191; Uno and, 40–41, 44; writing and, 206 metahistory, 186–187 middle class: daily life reform and, 8, 18, 38, 67, 71, 73, 75, 77, 120; modernist disruption of, 3 migration of Koreans to Japan, 129–130 mimicry and mimesis, 197, 198, 201, 234–235 Ministry of Education, 75, 84, 86n74, 122 misogyny. See sexism and misogyny Miyata Shu-, 67, 79 Mizuno Senko, 206n24, 207–208 modanizumu, 31–33, 35–45

Index     261

modernism: cultural hierarchy in, 33, 44–45; daily life reform movement and, 10, 119–120; decline of, 240–241; as disruptive practice, 11, 21–22, 26, 103; Great KantoEarthquake and, 49, 102; “Heads and Bellies” and, 139; historicization and, 11, 23, 28–35, 45, 46, 137, 239–241; I-novel genre and, 12, 20n38, 21–22, 24–27, 240–241; Japan’s fascistic turn and, 238–239; as label, 44; Lippit on, 21–22, 27–28; literary/social language divide in, 3–6, 25–26, 42, 44, 54, 91, 135; modanizumu vs., 31–33, 35–45; realism and, 25–26, 200–201. See also fragmentation; negation; representation; specific authors; specific works modernization: civic unity and, 85; daily life reform and, 76; East/West binaries and, 20, 45, 48; fragmentation and, 27–28, 34–35, 137, 163, 163n14; Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 123, 184; “Heads and Bellies” and, 141–142; interpretive discourses and, 26, 30, 103; Japan and, 7, 21, 34, 101; neosensationist school and, 101; subjectivity and, 34; transnational nature of, 33; as trauma, 21; urban reconstruction and, 174, 177, 184, 187, 191; Yokomitsu and, 105 Mongolia, 7, 77, 129 mono no aware, 111, 113, 115 montage, 163, 164 moralism in mass print media, 7–8, 123, 214 Morimoto Ko-kichi, 18, 77, 80, 92, 96 motherhood and maternity. See “In the Charity Ward”; pregnancy and childbirth Motoori Norinaga, 111 Mulvey, Laura, 95 Muramatsu Masatoshi, 215, 217–219, 232 Murasaki Shikibu, 218 Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita, 65, 66n16 Nagai Takeyo, 78 Nakagawa Nozomu, 181–183 Nakajima Kuni, 75–76 Nakamura Kan, 64–65, 87 Nakamura Mitsuo, 56–57n4 Nakanishi Teruo, 54, 97 Narita Ryu-ichi, 128–129n48, 186–187 narrative discourse: A Fool’s Love and, 57, 58, 60–61, 63–65, 89–90, 95, 243–245; Confessions of Love and, 41–42; East/West binaries and, 45; gender and, 241–247; “Heads and Bellies” and, 143–145; I-novels and, 14–17, 21–22, 27, 57n7, 60, 118, 135,

142, 147, 201, 203, 228, 231, 241–242; “In the Charity Ward” and, 199–202, 207–210, 225, 227–230, 232–237, 246–247; of Japanese progress, 121, 126–127, 138; repressive motivations of, 5; “Ruthless City” and, 245–246; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 156, 157, 159–166, 168, 185–188, 190–191, 243–244; social language in, 4–5, 20–21, 29, 73, 86; social reform and, 17, 20, 24, 68; transnational, 30; urban reconstruction and, 135–137, 169–171, 181–182, 184, 187, 191. See also fragmentation; ideologies; mass print media; nationalism and national identity nationalism and national identity: A Fool’s Love and, 97; daily life reform movement and, 18, 55, 67–68, 75–78, 84–85; ethnic essentialism and, 104, 138; Great KantoEarthquake and, 18–19, 121–122, 124–127; modernism and, 247; natural disasters and, 241; Sato-’s fu-ryu- aesthetic and, 112–113, 116; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 164, 170; Tokyo and, 127; urban reconstruction and, 131–132, 170, 183, 184, 187, 191; Yokomitsu and, 153, 239 natural disasters, 35, 121, 137, 241. See also Great Kanto- Earthquake; urban reconstruction naturalism: A Fool’s Love and, 38; Confessions of Love and, 41; I-novels and, 12; Tanizaki’s “Tattooer” and, 37; Terada and, 142n81; vernacular and, 38; women writers of, 206n24 nature in Sato-’s fu-ryu- aesthetic, 111–113 negation: Hirabayashi and, 224, 233–237; of modern subjectivity, 21–22, 240; realist representation and, 25–27; against social language, 4, 10–11, 23–24, 29; of Taishodemocracy, 240; Tanizaki and, 61, 97 neo-sensationist (shinkankaku) literature: daily life reform and, 109–110; “Heads and Bellies” as, 144, 146; perception and, 106, 117–119, 231; reading processes and, 150; subversion through, 49, 108–109, 153; Yokomitsu and, 101–104, 106–109, 116–119, 146 newspapers. See mass print media; specific newspapers Nii Itaru, 79 Nishikawa Yuko, 88 Nishishin Ichiro-, 18, 80 Nobel Prize, 239 Norman, Will, 45–47

262       Index

novels: Cixous and Irigaray on, 242–243; Kawabata and, 159–161, 164, 169; Lippit on, 20, 27–28, 159–160 Okada Shin’ichiro-, 126, 126n43, 130–131 Okano Yukie, 195–196, 211 Orishimo Yoshinobu, 174, 177, 179 Osaka, 56 Osaka Asahi Newspaper, 4, 5, 54, 78n51, 97, 127, 129n48 parks and bridges in earthquake reconstruction, 171–172. See also specific parks and bridges Pater, Walter, 112 paternalism, 55, 81. See also men and masculinity perception and the senses: fu-ryu- and, 111, 114, 117–118; in “Heads and Bellies,” 145–146; “In the Charity Ward” and, 226–228; neo-sensation and, 106, 117–119, 231; in “Ruthless City,” 147 personification, 143, 152 perversion: A Fool’s Love and, 63–65, 83, 85, 86, 90, 243; “In the Charity Ward” and, 199–200; modernism and, 247; Tanizaki and, 56 phallocentrism, 51, 197, 204, 209, 210, 221, 234 phenomenology: Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 124; “Heads and Bellies” and, 142–146; Hirabayashi and, 51, 231–232; I-novels and, 231; “In the Charity Ward” and, 226–227, 230–231; “Ruthless City” and, 147, 152; Sato- and, 113–114, 137, 146; Yokomitsu and, 49–51, 104–111, 117–119, 139, 153, 231–232 pornography, 65–66, 97 Pound, Ezra: Cathay, 31n58 pregnancy and childbirth, 207–209, 232, 241, 246. See also “In the Charity Ward” progressivism: A Fool’s Love and, 61, 62, 88, 90, 92–93; daily life reform and, 69, 70, 73, 79, 86; I-novel genre and, 68, 81; love discourses and, 211, 217; modernist subversion of, 239–240; social evolution ideology and, 125. See also daily life proletarianism and proletarian literature, 21, 194–195, 201–205, 209, 233–234 prostitutes and prostitution, 81, 82, 162, 195 psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic discourse, 196, 197, 222–223, 231, 242–243

race and racism, 30–31, 77. See also East/West binaries Rancière, Jacques, 11n16 Rappaport Phillip, 196 readers and reading processes: calculating volume of, 240; “Heads and Bellies” and, 143–145; I-novels and, 15; “In the Charity Ward” and, 202–203, 227, 236–237; “Ruthless City” and, 147–150, 152–153; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 160–161, 163–164, 166; sensation and, 24, 43; social language and, 73 realism: feminism and, 197; I-novel and, 25–28; Kawabata and, 239; modernism and, 25–26, 200–201; Terada and, 142n81; Yokomitsu and, 146 rebirth: aerial imagery and, 183; Great KantoEarthquake and, 98; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 157, 159, 170, 184, 191; social language and, 19, 24, 49; urban reconstruction and, 124, 130–136, 139, 157, 159, 172, 175, 182, 184 Reconciliation. See Shiga Naoya reconstruction. See fukko-; Great KantoEarthquake; urban reconstruction Reconstruction Bureau, 171–173, 174, 178–181 Reconstruction Festival, 157, 169–170, 180–185, 187, 191 regional modernism(s), 30–33, 44–46, 240–242 renaissance (fukko-), 4, 18, 50, 136, 138. See also Reconstruction Festival; urban reconstruction reportage writing. See mass print media; social language representation: A Fool’s Love and, 92–96; allegory and, 200; Hirabayashi and, 44, 201, 203; I-novels and, 15–16, 15n26; modernism and, 23, 25–26, 28, 33–35, 45, 91, 197; in modern vs. modernist fiction, 36, 44, 93; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 188; sociohistorical approaches and, 55; Yokomitsu’s neo-sensation and, 107, 110 responsibility (sekinin) and urban reconstruction, 135–136 Russian Formalists, 3 Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905), 20, 125 “Ruthless City” (Yokomitsu), 110, 147–153, 208, 245–246 Sand, George, 79 Sand, Jordan, 9, 71, 78–79nn50–51

Index     263

Sato-, Barbara, 9, 32, 214 Sato- Hachiro-, 162 Sato- Haruo: ethnic nationalism and, 104; on neo-sensation, 110n14; “Theory of ‘Fu-ryu-,’ ” 111–117, 111n15, 119; urban reconstruction discourse and, 137, 146; Yokomitsu and, 110–111, 114, 116–117, 120 Sato- Hideaki, 170 Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Kawabata), 50; dual perspective in, 185–186; essay-writing genre and, 162–163, 169; fragmentation and, 50, 157, 159–161, 163–164, 166, 169; historicization and, 167–168, 186–191; narrative difficulty of, 160–162; present time in, 156–157, 159–160, 167–170, 188, 190–191; serialization in Tokyo Asahi, 50, 155, 158, 167, 170; social language assimilated by, 5, 6, 162–163, 166–167, 171, 180, 184–186, 191; structure of, 164–166, 185; urban reconstruction and, 50, 128, 157–159, 164–166, 168–171, 178–180, 184–185 Schencking, J. Charles, 123, 123n37 science and scientific inquiry: earthquake reconstruction and, 50; “In the Charity Ward” and, 235–236; love discourses and, 211–212, 215, 222–223 Seikatsu (magazine), 71 self and self-reflection (hansei): A Fool’s Love and, 63; daily life reform and, 49, 67, 131–132; fu-ryu- and, 112; Great KantoEarthquake and, 122; Hirabayashi and, 198, 223, 237; I-novel genre and, 73, 135; “In the Charity Ward” and, 200, 203, 207, 228, 233; love and, 194, 215–218; in Tanizaki’s “Tattooer,” 36–37; urban reconstruction and, 126n42, 132–136, 138, 139, 146, 153; Yokomitsu and, 245–246. See also daily life; individuals and individual practice; subjectivity sensation, 4; in A Fool’s Love, 64; in “Heads and Bellies,” 142; “In the Charity Ward” and, 51, 195, 199–203, 226–227, 229, 231; Lippit on, 24, 102; narrator/reader identification and, 24, 43; Sato-’s fu-ryu- aesthetic and, 104, 112, 114, 116; Yokomitsu and, 105–110, 110n13, 116–119, 146, 153, 231 sense perceptions (kankaku), 49 senses. See perception and the senses sensibility (kansei) in Yokomitsu’s neo-sensation, 106–109, 117–118, 142–143 serialization, 50, 167–169, 184–185, 243

sexism and misogyny: A Fool’s Love and, 93–95; “In the Charity Ward” and, 201, 236–237; love discourses and, 217–219, 223, 232; The Quilt and, 60; women’s education and, 59 sexuality: daily life reform and, 81–83; feminine écriture and, 196; gender and, 242–243; Hirabayashi and, 198, 228, 231–232; “In the Charity Ward” and, 234–235, 246–247; love discourses on, 194, 210–215, 217–222, 224, 225, 232; in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, 189–190. See also perversion Shaw, Bernard: Pygmalion, 66n16 Shiga Naoya: Hirabayashi and, 208, 234; naturalism of, 149; Reconciliation (Wakai), 12–17, 19, 123, 136n74, 147–148, 208, 234, 241–242; Yokomitsu and, 147–148, 239, 245–246 Shincho- (New Tide), 4 shiso- zendo- (guidance toward good thought), 76 Sho-so- Shi’en, 72, 73 Shufu no tomo (Housewife’s Companion), 4 signification, 42 Silverberg, Miriam, 9, 74, 82, 163, 164, 245 sketch (shasei) method, 161 social evolution, 93, 125, 215, 217 socialism: daily life reform and, 51; Hirabayashi and, 98, 193n1, 194, 239; Inoue on, 133; “In the Charity Ward” and, 194–196, 201–204, 209, 233–234; love discourses and, 219; vigilante violence against, 21, 51, 120 social language: advertisement and, 78; A Fool’s Love and, 39, 54–55, 63, 66, 83, 86–91, 97–98; Confessions of Love and, 42; contemporary incarnations of, 240–241; East/West binaries and, 45, 46n88; feminism and, 220–223; historicization and, 29–30, 49; I-novels and, 30, 81, 87; “In the Charity Ward” and, 196, 210, 223–224, 233; literary/social divide in, 3–6, 22, 25, 28–29, 45–46, 135, 159; love discourses and, 221–223; in modern vs. modernist fiction, 36–40; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 5, 6, 161–163, 166–167, 171, 179–180, 184–186, 191; urban reconstruction and, 123–124, 135–137, 136n74, 172–173, 180, 184, 187, 191; Yokomitsu and, 103–104. See also daily life social reform: A Fool’s Love and, 38, 49, 83, 86–88, 90, 97; daily life and, 8, 49, 67, 74–75,

264       Index

social reform (continued) 77–79; ethnic identity and, 136; family and, 18, 69–70; geopolitical anxiety and, 76–77, 96, 131; Great Kanto- earthquake and, 10, 24, 122–124, 213; “Heads and Bellies” and, 146–147; I-novel narratives and, 17–18, 55, 87, 135; katei vs. ie systems in, 88, 218–219; love and, 194, 214–215, 217; marriage and, 80; modernist fiction and, 11, 23–24; as reform of the self, 37, 132–136, 214–215; urban reconstruction and, 132–136, 146; Yokomitsu and, 109, 159 society: authors’ trajectory vs., 239–240; Daily Life Reform Movement and, 75, 84–85, 91; family and, 18, 68–70, 79; fascistic turn of, 238; fragmentation and, 34–35; I-novel narratives and, 17–19; love and, 219; marriage and, 80; negative language and, 237; realist narratives and, 25–26; tradition and, 29n53; urban reconstruction and, 122, 123, 135–138 Soeda Azenbo-, 162–165 South Pacific Mandate, 7 Soviet Union, 239 spirituality: daily life reform movement and, 81–82, 97, 132–133; ethnic identity and, 104; Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 98, 104, 122, 124; urban reconstruction and, 132, 139, 153, 159; women and, 61–62 state. See ideologies; Japan; nationalism and national identity; society statistics and measurements in reconstruction discourse, 172–174, 179, 184, 191 style: “In the Charity Ward” and, 196, 198, 200–202, 225–227; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 161; in Tanizaki’s “Tattooer,” 36–37 subjectivity: fascist aesthetics and, 114, 116; feminism and, 204, 221–222; in “Heads and Bellies,” 142–147, 201; Hirabayashi and, 43–44, 50–51, 198, 221; I-novels and, 27, 81, 142–143; “In the Charity Ward” and, 195, 199–201, 203, 208–210, 223–229, 231–234, 236–237; love discourses and, 194, 210, 217, 219–221; modernist disruption of, 21–23, 34, 138–139; neo-sensation and, 106–108, 117–118; proletarianism and, 204, 233; in “Ruthless City,” 147; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 245; social reform discourse and, 20–23, 55, 73, 147, 203. See also self and self-reflection Subway Restaurant Tower, 155–157, 165, 178, 185–186, 190–191 Suga Hidemi, 149, 151–152

Sugimori Ko-jiro-, 81 Sugimori Ko-taro-, 125 Sumida Park, 157, 171, 174, 175–176, 177–179 Suzuki, Michiko, 91–93, 217 Suzuki, Tomi, 15n26, 16–17, 60 Suzuki Sadami, 16, 32 Tago Ichimin, 75 Taisho- cosmopolitanism, 20–21, 240 Taisho- Great Earthquake Photo Notebook, 154 Taisho- Restoration, 125 Taiwan, 7, 47 Takamure Itsue, 194 Takashima Beiho-, 125, 129 Takebe Rokuzo-, 181–182 Takeda Torao, 56–57n4 Tamamura Shu-, 108–109, 118–119, 141 Tanaka Jun, 163n14 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro: background and career of, 56–57, 238–239; Hirabayashi and, 237; I-novel genre and, 12, 83; Katai and, 60–61; Kawabata and, 164, 186; linguistic materialism and, 92, 152; representational strategies of, 92, 93, 96–97; social discourses disrupted by, 55, 61, 120; subversive strategies of, 66, 86, 93, 207; Western culture and, 57; Yokomitsu and, 152; works by: The Makioka Sisters, 56, 239; The Mermaid, 186; In Praise of Shadows, 56, 96, 239; The Tale of Genji (trans.), 56, 238–239; “Tattooer,” 36–39, 44. See also A Fool’s Love Tansman, Alan, 114–115 ta-stopped sentence endings, 14, 148, 225 tatami mats, 70, 76 “Tattooer” (Tanizaki), 36–39, 44 Tayama Katai: The Quilt, 55, 58–63, 60n11, 81, 241–242 technology and modernization, 105 Terada Torahiko, 142n81 textuality in “Ruthless City,” 149–150 “Theory of Neo-Sensation” (Yokomitsu): cognition and, 24, 106–109, 117–119, 139, 146, 231; European artistic movements and, 102; phenomenology of, 49–51, 104–111, 117–119, 139, 142, 153, 231–232; Sato-’s ethnic nationalism and, 104 Tiffany, Daniel, 46n88 time in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, 156–157, 159–160, 167–170, 188, 190–191 Toeda Hirokazu, 119, 168

Index     265

Tokuda Shu-sei, 111n15, 206n24 Tokutomi Soho-, 69–70 Tokyo: Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 120–122, 126–127; “imperial city” terminology for, 127–130, 128; origin of, 127n47; Reconstruction Festival and, 180–185; Tanizaki and, 56; urban reconstruction and, 49, 123, 130–131, 138, 157, 170–174, 177, 178 Tokyo Asahi Newspaper, 4; on reconstruction festival, 170, 182–183; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 155, 157, 158, 167, 169; urban reconstruction and, 175–176 tradition: daily life reform and, 85; ethnic identity and, 136; Eysteinsson on, 29n53, 103; Kawabata and, 239; Tanizaki and, 56–57, 57n4, 239 translation: la vie simple and, 86n74; pronouns and, 14; regional modernisms and, 33; Yokomitsu and, 119 transnational modernism, 30–33, 44–46, 240–242 truth in love discourses, 213–214, 218–220, 222–223 Tsuchida Kyo-son, 211 Tsuneoka Ryo-zo-, 76 Twelve Story Tower, 155, 157, 188 Tyler, William, 31–33, 36, 37, 41 typography. See Japanese language and typography Ubukata Tomoko, 94 understanding (gosei) in Yokomitsu’s neo-sensation, 106–107, 117–118, 142–143 United States, 46, 47, 84, 86n74 Unno Hiroshi, 32, 34, 163, 186 Uno Chiyo: Confessions of Love, 40–42, 44, 207 urban reconstruction: daily life reform and, 18–19, 49, 73–74, 104; essay-writing genre of, 162; ethnic purity and, 18–19, 24, 49, 132, 136–139, 146; Great Kanto- Earthquake and, 122–124, 127, 128; modanizumu and, 32; opposition to, 173–174; projects and funding for, 171–172, 174, 177; Reconstruction Festival and, 157, 169–170, 180–185, 187, 191; reform of self and, 126n42, 132–136, 138, 139, 146, 153; in “Ruthless City,” 147, 149, 152; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 50, 128, 157–159, 164–166, 168–171, 178–180, 184–185; Yokomitsu and, 101, 104, 138–139. See also Great Kanto- Earthquake Ushijima Shrine, 177

vernacular modernism. See genbun itchi; modanizumu; modernism visual semantics, 148–153, 229–230. See also katakana Wagner, Charles, 86n74 Wakai. See Shiga Naoya Wakasugi Toriko, 193n1 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 241, 247 Washington Naval Conference (1922), 7, 77, 129 Watanabe Tetsuzo-, 124, 127 Western society: A Fool’s Love and, 56–57, 89–93, 95–97; daily life reform movement and, 8, 55, 76–78, 78n50, 89, 92; earthquake narratives and, 126; East/West binaries and, 45–48, 96, 126, 241; Eysteinsson on, 28–29; fetishism and, 95–96; Japan’s commonality with, 20, 21, 29; Japan’s divergence from, 26–27, 32; neo-sensationist school and, 102; realism and, 26–27; regional modernisms and, 30–31, 33; Yokomitsu and, 102–103, 109 Wollaeger, Mark, 45, 46n88 Woman, 52, 54n2, 192 women and femininity: A Fool’s Love and, 60–61, 90, 242–243; body and, 204–206, 222; Confessions of Love and, 41–42; Copeland on, 206; daily life reform and, 49, 55, 67–68, 76, 78–80, 82–84, 90; Hirabayashi on, 193–195; I-novels and, 201; “In the Charity Ward” and, 50–51, 232–233, 234–235, 237; Irigaray on, 196–197, 196n8, 197, 243; love discourses and, 213–214, 218–220, 222; narrative discourse and, 241–247; proletarianism and, 204; The Quilt and, 58–60, 241–242; Robertson on, 83n69; “Ruthless City” and, 245–246; Sato- on, 9; Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and, 244–245; writing and, 205–206, 213–214 Women’s Education World, 71 Women’s Review (Fujin ko-ron), 66–67 World War I, 7, 71, 77, 126 World War II, 238 writing: daily life reform and, 73; gender and, 205–206, 208–209, 242; geopolitics and, 241–242; Japan’s fascistic turn and, 238; modernist label for, 44; in Reconciliation, 16–17; sketch method of, 161 Yagi Akiko, 193n1 Yao, Steven, 30–31, 33 Yellow Peril discourses, 31n58

266       Index

Yokohama and Great Kanto- Earthquake, 120, 171–173, 182–183 Yokomitsu Riichi: daily life reform and, 109–111, 117, 119–120, 139, 153, 159; ethnic perception and, 10, 48, 50; formalism and, 101; Hirabayashi and, 230–232, 237; Kawabata and, 159; Kenyu-sha Group and, 37; linguistic materialism and, 152–153; Lippit on, 23–24; nationalism and, 153, 239; on naturalism, 12, 37; neo-sensationist school and, 49–50, 101–105, 116–117; reader/narrator identification and, 24–25, 43; on role of literature, 2, 118; Sato- and,

110–111, 114, 116–117, 120; Shiga and, 147; subversive strategies of, 108–109, 138–139, 143, 151–153, 159, 207; Tanizaki and, 152. See also “Heads and Bellies”; “Ruthless City”; “Theory of Neo-Sensation” Yosano Akiko, 67, 207 Yoshie Kyo-matsu, 19, 132, 133, 135–137 Yoshiwara Pleasure Quarters, 82n66 Yukiko Tanaka, 206n24 Yura Testuji, 105n7 Zeami Motokiyo, 177 Zwicker, Jonathan, 23