Topographies of Japanese Modernism 9780231500685

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Topographies of Japanese Modernism

Topographies of Japanese Modernism

Seiji M. Lippit

columbia university press new york

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Japan Foundation toward the cost of publishing this book. Columbia University Press Publishers Since  New York

Chichester,West Sussex

Copyright ©  Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lippit, Seiji M. Topographies of Japanese modernism / Seiji M. Lippit. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn ––– (cloth : alk. paper) isbn ––– (pbk : alk. paper) . Japanese fiction—Taisho period, –—History and criticism. . Japanese fiction—Showa period, –—History and criticism. . Modernism (Literature)—Japan. I.Title. PL. .L .'—dc

 

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Designed by Audrey Smith c           p          

To my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Fissures of Japanese Modernity



. Disintegrating Mechanisms of Subjectivity: Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s Last Writings  . Topographies of Empire: Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai



. Mapping the Space of Mass Culture: Kawabata Yasunari’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa . Negations of Genre: Hayashi Fumiko’s Nomadic Writing



. A Phantasmatic Return: Yokomitsu Riichi’s Melancholic Nationalism Notes  Bibliography  Index 





Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to many people for their advice, guidance, and support as I worked on this book. I first encountered many of the texts analyzed here at Columbia University in the seminars of Paul Anderer, who patiently and expertly guided this project from its beginning. Karatani Kojin generously offered his time and instruction, as well as intellectual inspiration. I am grateful to Haruo Shirane for his guidance and continual encouragement, to Tomi Suzuki for her many insightful comments, and to Jonathan Crary for his helpful suggestions as a member of my dissertation committee. I also have benefited greatly from detailed comments from Indra Levy and numerous discussions with Giles Richter. Michael Bourdaghs, Akira Lippit, Shu-mei Shih, Miriam Silverberg, and Dick Stegewerns have read all or portions of the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback. I would like to thank the faculty and staff in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA for providing a supportive environment in which to work and to express my appreciation to the Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA. I am grateful to Jennifer Lee for research assistance and for proofreading the manuscript. This work has also been enriched in many ways by discussions with my graduate students at UCLA, as well as by the opportunity to present some of these ideas at various conferences and colloquia. I would also like to thank Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University Press for her support for this project, Margaret Yamashita for copyediting the manuscript, and Irene Pavitt for her careful editing.

x

Acknowledgments

A Fulbright/IIE dissertation research grant allowed me to conduct research in Tokyo from  to . I also am grateful to the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies and to UCLA’s Center for Japanese Studies and Academic Senate for funding my research. I thank the staffs at Columbia’s C.V. Starr East Asian Library, UCLA’s Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library, the Hosei University Library, the National Diet Library, and the Nihon kindai bungakukan in Tokyo for their assistance. An earlier version of chapter  appeared as “The Disintegrating Machinery of the Modern:Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s Late Writings” in the Journal of Asian Studies , no.  (): –. A version of chapter  is included in Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan, ed. Dick Stegewerns, forthcoming from Curzon Press. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Michelle Tanenbaum for her support over many years and to my parents, to whom this book is dedicated.

Topographies of Japanese Modernism

Introduction: Fissures of Japanese Modernity Where there is no memory, there is no home. If a person does not possess powerful memories, created from an accumulation of hard and fast images that a hard and fast environment provides, he will not know the sense of well-being which brims over in the word kokyo. No matter where I search within myself for such a feeling, I do not find it. Looking back, I see that from an early age my feelings were distorted by an endless series of changes occurring too fast. Never was there sufficient time to nurture the sources of a powerful and enduring memory, attached to the concrete and the particular. I had memories, but they possessed no actuality, no substance. Kobayashi Hideo

The Literature of Dislocation In his essay “Literature of the Lost Home” (Kokyo o ushinatta bungaku, ), literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (–) identifies the fundamental feature of contemporary Japanese culture as a pervasive spirit of homelessness and loss. For Kobayashi, the sense of dislocation is embodied in the city of Tokyo, which, in its continual transformations, does not provide any material link to his childhood. The city serves not as a repository of accumulated memories—the necessary condition for a “home” to function as such— but only as an ever shifting marker of disassociation from the past. At the same time, Kobayashi writes, nature does not offer a refuge from this sense of alienation produced by the city, which extends throughout the modern world. Hence even the natural landscape is reduced to an abstraction: he finds that his excursions into the countryside are as unreal as his obsession with any immaterial ideas. “I have grown increasingly skeptical of the existence of anything concrete and actual behind my being moved by the beauty of Nature,” Kobayashi writes.“Looking closer, I see much in common between intoxication by the beauty of a mountain, and intoxication by the beauty of an abstract idea. I feel as though I am looking upon two aspects of a spirit that has lost its home.”1 Thus Kobayashi sees both the urban and natural landscapes as different versions of phantasmagoria, as spectral images without substance. This unsettling experience of an “unreal” world described by Kobayashi is linked to a sense of disconnection from a shared tradition as well as to an uncertainty regarding the boundaries of Japanese culture. In particular, Kobayashi writes about the deep-seated intertwining of native and foreign found in Japanese modernity. This phantasmal quality of modernity is one effect of the massive internalization of foreign culture, which has already advanced to the point that “self ” and “other” can no longer be effectively distinguished.This, Kobayashi claims, is the foundation for contemporary literature: “It goes without saying that our nation’s modern litera-

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Introduction

ture—for which in everything the word ‘modern’ and the word ‘Western’ have the same meaning—cannot have survived without the influence of the West, but what is important is that we have become so used to the reception of Western influence that we no longer can identify it as Western influence.”2 In effect, Kobayashi writes, the outside (the West) is no longer recognizable as such, which is only to say that the inside (Japan) has also been made unrecognizable. As a symptom of this dislocation, Kobayashi cites the popularity of two types of cinema: chanbara (sword fighting) period films and Western contemporary films (gendaimono).Within the “intoxicating” state of unreality and flux that defines the modern environment, cultural identification is not grounded in tradition or cultural memory but is instead bounded by mass-media images. Paradoxically, it is not the films depicting contemporary Japanese life that fulfill this function, Kobayashi writes, but those set in the past or in distant lands. As an example, Kobayashi cites his fascination with the film Morocco ().What Kobayashi finds appealing is not the film’s “content,” which he claims to be less impressive than that of any number of Japanese films being made at the time. Rather, the film seems to produce an allure, an “inexplicable attraction” (rikutsu no nai miryoku) that is generated beyond the realm of plot. Kobayashi expresses surprise at being drawn to something so seemingly distant, at the strangeness of an affinity with this externally projected image. It is one that does not come from internal “memory” but from the outside, yet it is nevertheless able to create an affective link. Given Kobayashi’s emphasis on the experience of homelessness, we can speculate that his fascination with Morocco may have originated in the atmosphere of exile and dislocation permeating the film, which depicts the encounter in the North African colony between a French cabaret singer (played by German exile Marlene Dietrich) and an American soldier in the French Foreign Legion. Even more, we can locate here the workings of a double enjoyment and anxiety of identifying with a Western, orientalist gaze. It is a perspective for which the desert landscape of Morocco—with all its familiar cultural and natural markers of orientalism—becomes a site of exoticism.Yet this identification also conceals an uneasiness, a dis-

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turbance in the experience of one’s own cultural landscape.What happens when it is one’s own home that is experienced as exotic— as other? Thus Kobayashi writes: “The style elicits a sense of intimacy, so that we feel closer to the Moroccan desert we have never seen than to the landscape of Ginza before our eyes.”3 What Kobayashi identifies with in the film Morocco is not, however, its cultural space or the figures that inhabit it—hence his dismissal of the work’s “content.” Instead, the identification lies with the other’s (the Westerner’s) gaze.The effect of this identification—what Kobayashi points to in his discussion of “style”—is that the surrounding, “native” landscape itself may appear strange, alien. The disorientation that Kobayashi describes in his essay provides a framework for my study of Japanese modernist fiction from the s to the s. Kobayashi’s essay indicates a sense of unease in the experience of Japanese modernity, what he describes as a pervasive feeling of cultural homelessness. For Kobayashi, the city, especially, elicits an experience of shifting identifications and an instability of place and borderlines (although as noted earlier, nature itself does not offer a release).The dreamlike quality of city space frames the loss of the shared memories that help define a national community, as well as their substitution by phantasmal, mass-mediated images.4 Expressions of such unease can, of course, be found in other texts and other moments of modern literature, but in the writings considered here, this experience of dislocation and disjunction becomes a dominant, organizing theme, and at its extreme, it is expressed as the unraveling of a doubled subjectivity. As a critical category, modernism has been used to designate a broad range of literary and artistic practices—primarily of latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe—that have most readily been identified on the level of formal rupture.The dominant narratives of modernism have been articulated as a “crisis in representation,” a breakdown in established modes of representation and expression.5 As one critic observed, it marks “a major revolt . . . against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world.”6 This moment of rupture in representational practices has been theorized by different writers and critics through such concepts as self-criticism, interruption, defamiliarization, and negation. The notion of self-criticism has framed the



Introduction

analysis of both formal and ideological implications of modernist practice as, on the one hand, a critique of the work of art and, on the other hand, a negation of the social institution of art.7 More broadly, modernism has also been situated in the experience of life in industrialized, urban environments in this period and has included the emergence of new forms of cultural production and dissemination, the intervention of technology into the experience of everyday life, and the mass commodification of culture. As a category of literary or art history, modernism covers a wide range of heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory practices, as numerous critics have pointed out by now.8 The general definitions of a breakdown in representation and a critique of modernity allow for the inclusion of diverse forms of literary and artistic practice that reflect a variety of conflicting political and ideological contexts, ranging from Communism to fascism.9 For this reason, a significant amount of critical energy has more recently been directed toward establishing further internal distinctions, including, for example, that between high modernism and the historical avant-garde movements (both of which, in turn, may require even more differentiation).10 Although the historical frame used here is narrower, limited mainly to the s and early s, this ambiguity exists in Japan no less than in the European context. Any consideration of a non-Western modernism also covers an additional concern:What happens when a critique of modernity—a “revolt against the traditions of the Western world”—is situated in a nonEuropean context, in which the concept of the modern has been tied to the image of the West?11 For these reasons, this study does not claim to be a totalizing analysis of Japanese modernism. Rather, it focuses on a specific set of writings, by Akutagawa Ryunosuke (–), Yokomitsu Riichi (–), Kawabata Yasunari (–), and Hayashi Fumiko (–), that delineate certain key aspects of modernist fiction in the s and early s. Nearly all the works considered (with the notable exception of Yokomitsu’s Melancholy Journey) were first published between  and , the early years of the Showa period (–).The works of these writers are linked through their experimentation with literary form and, especially, through their rejection of the linguistic and narrative foun-

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

dations of the modern novel. Modernist writings are formally characterized by the fragmentation of grammar and narrative and by the mixing of multiple genres, which in part is a response to new forms of expression and representation, including the impact of media such as film. In this sense, modernism expresses the dislocation of the novel as the central genre of cultural production within the explosion of mass culture in Japan in the s. This study also links the disintegration of literary form to the representation of space within modernist fiction. Against the dominant topographies of Taisho-period (–) fiction, which tended to focus on enclosed, interior spaces, modernism moves out onto the streets, beyond the boundaries of the private and domestic worlds and onto the fluidity of city space.These urban landscapes, situated both in Tokyo and at the borders of the nation-state, stage a certain disturbance or unsettlement in the experience of Japanese modernity. As a number of critical studies have argued, if one function of literature since the Meiji period (–) had been the construction and representation of a “modern self ”—an attempt to situate individual bodies and psyches within rapidly shifting cultural and social fields—in modernist literature this process of negotiation is clearly breaking down. In the texts examined here, modernity is marked by fragmentation and dissolution. The urban topographies materialize a sense of fluidity in the boundaries of subjectivity, conceived in terms of ethnicity, national identity, gender, and class. As Kobayashi’s essay indicates, the sense of displacement within one’s own culture evokes complex sensations of both pleasure and anxiety, at once an intoxication and a painful sense of loss. It is these heterogeneous responses in the literature of the early Showa period that are seen as the basis for Japanese modernist fiction.

Taisho Literature and the Cosmopolitan Subject Kobayashi’s claim that in Japanese literature the modern had always been associated with the West reflects the inevitable experience of non-Western cultures, as Karatani Kojin has pointed out. Karatani notes that for this reason,“in non-Western countries the critique of modernity and the critique of the West tend to be confused.”12



Introduction

Indeed, the dominant discourses of modernization in Japan have typically relied on a model of internalization or assimilation of an external (Western) culture.The identification of modernity as essentially Western, for example, permeated the so-called Overcoming Modernity symposium of  in which Kobayashi was a participant. It was only to the extent that the two terms could be seen as interchangeable that overcoming the modern could be conceived as possible.13 In the field of literary studies, James Fujii has shown how the conventional narratives of modern literature in Japan described a process of conforming to or deviating from a Western standard, a conception established early on by Tsubouchi Shoyo (–) in his Essence of the Novel (Shosetsu shinzui, –). Fujii writes: “The story line of modern Japanese letters is henceforth drawn by standard literary histories as the shared mission of writers and critics alike to fulfill these requirements of the Western novel.”14 As a number of recent critical studies, including Fujii’s, have argued, however, the formation of a consciousness of modernity in literary (or, more broadly, intellectual) discourse in Japan cannot be reduced solely to the assimilation of an external culture or an identification with the West.15 In the first instance, for Japanese writers and thinkers,“the West” did not always function as a monolithic or undifferentiated construct, as Kobayashi himself indicates in one passage of “Literature of the Lost Home.”16 Karatani, for his part, has identified a more complex mechanism, one that can be seen as a dialectical process of simultaneous identification with and negation of an exteriority posited as primary. It is such a complex logic, for example, that underlies the account of Japanese art presented by Okakura Kakuzo (–), who regarded Japanese culture as a heterogeneous repository and museum of foreign civilizations that somehow maintains an original “purity.”17 The specific role of literature in helping construct particular representations of modernity has been the subject of a number of critical studies of a variety of different historical and cultural contexts. In The Literary Absolute, for example, Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy excavate the European origins of the concept of “literature” in early German Romanticism.According to them, literature was conceived as an overarching category with the capacity to synthesize the concepts of philosophy and

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

poetry (that is, thinking and affect) as well as ancient and modern civilization. Literature was an “absolute genre,” subsuming all the diverse forms of intellectual and creative activity. In this sense, they note, literature’s essence was presented as a fundamental mixture: “It could be said that this is precisely what the romantics envisage as the very essence of literature: the union, in satire (another name for mixture) or in the novel (or even Platonic dialogue), of poetry and philosophy, the confusion of all the genres arbitrarily delimited by ancient poetics, the interpenetration of the ancient and the modern, etc.”18 In its ostensible capacity to provide a dialectical synthesis of heterogeneous elements, including the union of antiquity and modernity, this conception of literature (and especially of the novel, which served for the Romantics as model for the whole) seems to reflect the conceptual form of the nation.19 To Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s account, we might add that the establishment of literature as concept and institution in Japan also involved a synthesis of the native and foreign. In Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, for example, Karatani describes the creation of the epistemological basis of literature as a process simultaneously internalizing an external culture and demarcating boundaries between inside and outside, native and foreign. On the one hand, Karatani analyzes the formation of modern literature as a process of internalization or translation that takes place along a double trajectory. In the first instance, it means the literal translation of American, European, and Russian writings, which directly helped establish modern literature.The importance of this process is indicated by the substantial impact of Futabatei Shimei’s (–) translations of Turgenev, by Mori Ogai’s (–) translations of European writings, or, even more radically, by the fact that Futabatei reportedly tried first writing the second part of his novel Drifting Clouds (Ukigumo, –) in Russian and then translating it into Japanese.20 At the same time, Karatani also identifies the assimilation of premodern writings into the conceptual space of modern literature, which is characterized by such concepts as self-expression and representation.Thus, he notes, it is only in the modern period that the writings of Matsuo Basho (–) could be analyzed in terms of the faithful depiction of nature, or the works of Ihara Saikaku (–) could be interpreted as a form of realism.21



Introduction

Within this double process of assimilation, Karatani also finds a critical process of differentiation,which he terms the construction of a space of “interiority” (naimensei) in literature. In various key works, this process takes place primarily on the level of individual psyches, delineating the boundaries of an “autonomous” self-consciousness against an external topography (indicated in Karatani’s analysis of the concept of landscape). On a broader level, it defines the space of an indigenous cultural field, as Karatani himself noted in the afterword to the English edition of his work.22 The conception of landscape (which also signifies the concept of “exteriority”[gaimensei]) is in this sense a complex constellation that links ideological formations and state institutions, as indicated by Karatani’s analysis of Kunikida Doppo’s (–) work “Musashino” (), which he situates as a foundational text of modern fiction. Doppo’s work reveals the construction of literature as a specifically cartographic project. It creates a contemporary map of a noted literary terrain (Musashino), which is shifted from the world of premodern texts into the context of translations of “Western” (in fact, Russian) literature.At the same time, the intrusion of the West is accompanied by the reorganization of this cultural space by institutions of the modern nation-state.Thus Doppo writes that although Musashino includes in its purview the capital city of Tokyo, in his literary representation “we must leave out [the capital], because it is impossible to imagine what it must have been like in the days of old when, now, it is filled with busy streets and soaring government offices.”23 The assimilation of a storied literary topography into the context of Western writings, which is one of the explicit effects of Doppo’s exploration of Musashino, is thus mediated by the structures of the nation-state, although this mediation is immediately obscured and repressed.As the various intrusions of military images (the sound of a “cavalry patrol out on manoeuvres” or the “boom of the noon gun”) into the supposedly pastoral landscape suggests, this literary exploration of Musashino also conceals the traces of violent territorial conquest that was an essential aspect of the establishment of the modern nation.24 According toYuri Lotman, the construction of culture as a semiotic space (a “semiosphere”) is based on the demarcation of boundaries between internal and external space, between what is bounded and closed and what is open and heterogeneous.25 For Karatani, the

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

construction of the language of interiority through genbun itchi signifies the construction of such a semiological field. What he describes as an “epistemological inversion” also indicates a process of mapping that first projects an image of an external topography against which the boundaries of an internalized consciousness are drawn.To this extent, the language of genbun itchi, which ostensibly moves toward an unmediated relationship between consciousness (speech) and expression (writing), provided the linguistic basis for constructing a modern subjectivity in literature. The ultimate implication of Karatani’s analysis is that modernization was not simply the assimilation of foreign culture into a native context but, rather, that the distinctions themselves between national and foreign (that is,Western) culture—between, as he says, subject and object—were in effect mapped out by this process. For this reason, he likens it to the concept of introjection in psychoanalysis: interiority (or national consciousness) is an effect of the traumatic process of modernization and does not predate it.Thus Karatani writes: “We might say that ‘landscape’ was not so much discovered within the epistemological inversion concentrated in genbun itchi as it was invented.”26 In Karatani’s analysis, genbun itchi in fact functions as a kind of symbolic law, through which the multiplicity and heterogeneity represented by the languages and discourses existing before the advent of modernity are repressed by the construction of a centralized language and state. Although Karatani’s analysis focuses on texts of the Meiji period, it may be in the literary discourse of the Taisho period that the complex and ambiguous relationship between the representation of interiority in literature and a consciousness of modernity achieves its fullest expression. According to Suzuki Sadami, it was in the years following the Russo-Japanese War (–) that the concept of literature in its modern sense—that is, as “linguistic art”—became firmly established in Japan.27 On a material level, as Yamamoto Masahide showed, it is in the writings of this period that the colloquial style was consolidated as the dominant language of literary expression, mainly through the efforts of Naturalist writers and subsequently through the writings of the Shirakabaha (White Birch school).28 It also was during this time that the representation of interiority became a dominant orientation of fictional



Introduction

writings, manifested especially in the genre theorized as the I-novel (watakushi shosetsu) in the s.These developments can be seen to extend tendencies already present in Meiji literature, as Maeda Ai, for example, demonstrated in his discussion of the representation of the self from Futabatei’s Drifting Clouds to Tayama Katai’s (–) The Quilt (Futon, ).29 In certain key writings of the Taisho period, however, the representation of interiority is situated in a new ideological context, what has been at times referred to as “Taisho cosmopolitanism.” Even as the field of representation in fiction narrowed into ever more constricted spaces, literature was also placed into a universal field of modern culture. H. D. Harootunian has analyzed the transition from Meiji to Taisho in terms of a shift in emphasis from “civilization” to “culture” among intellectuals, which indicated a general withdrawal from politics that simultaneously “marked a cosmopolitan opening up to the wider world.”30 The category of cosmopolitanism also has been used to indicate a certain conception of a universalized modern culture that can be identified in key writings of this period, especially those of what Karaki Junzo (–) refers to as the kyoyo-ha (culturalists), including the Shirakaba group. It is also manifested in different forms in the work of other writers, including early pieces by Akutagawa and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (–), as well as the philosophical writings of Abe Jiro (–). Cosmopolitanism signals a weakening of the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Japan and the West that had tended to color the works of an earlier generation of writers such as Natsume Soseki (–) and Mori Ogai.31 This general discursive context is encapsulated in the claim by the novelist Mushanokoji Saneatsu (–) that “to an extent that those older than we are cannot understand, we have become children of the world.”32 Mushanokoji argued that his identity was formed through his inclusion in a generalized conception of humanity (jinrui) rather than through an identification with a particular society.“Cosmopolitanism” in this context thus indicates 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. If Taisho represents a stage at which

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

the literary representation of modernity achieves consolidation, as critic Aeba Takao has written, then its content may be precisely this type of universalism.33 Of course,this concept cannot account for the totality of Taisho literary discourse (which, after all, is quite diverse), and it is also closely tied to a specific class position—many of the Shirakaba writers were members of the aristocracy—that allowed access to this realm of foreign culture. This discourse also reflected a perception among intellectuals that the nation had achieved many of the goals of modernization, including the consolidation of Japanese capitalism and the growing acquisition of empire.34 These accomplishments were symbolized most prominently by Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War and by its annexation of Korea in , two events that helped form the historical context for Taisho literature. In , Natsume Soseki speculated on the effects of “consecutive wars and consecutive victories” on the nation’s literature. He compared postwar Japan with Elizabethan England, asserting that the flowering of Elizabethan letters could be traced to the nation’s defeat of the Spanish Armada. Soseki predicted that intellectuals’ sense of inferiority regarding the West and the idea that European civilization was the absolute standard to be imitated would dissipate with a renewed sense of confidence in the value and uniqueness of Japanese culture.35 As Karaki found, however, the form that this renewed confidence took—particularly among Soseki’s own disciples—was a conception of culture that, on the surface, 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.36 The discourse of cosmopolitanism, especially in its manifestation in the writings of Mushanokoji and other Shirakaba writers, was thus organized around an underlying contradiction. When put into practice in Mushanokoji’s fiction, the consciousness of an expansive, universal modernity was typically translated into a narcissistic focus on the representation of self. In her analysis of Taisho “culturalism” as the context for Kuki Shuzo’s (–) theory of Japanese aesthetics, Leslie Pincus has analyzed this double structure, observing that the “cosmopolitan concentration on values of an intangible and universal nature encouraged adher-

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Introduction

ents to withdraw into an expanded and enriched realm of interiority while distancing themselves from more immediate and more material social realities.”37 For Mushanokoji, the self served as the ultimate “authority” (ken’i), the source of all value in art and literature. In his writings, the expansive and universal world implodes into a bounded and enclosed world of the self.38 His first major work, A Blessed Man (Omedetaki hito, ), describes the narrator’s obsession with a young woman named Tsuru.The novel, based on certain episodes in Mushanokoji’s life, opens with a note from the author stating that “I believe in the existence of a selfish literature, a literature for the self.”39 The narrator, who announces at the outset that he is “starved for women,” catches a glimpse of his neighbor Tsuru, with whom he decides he has fallen in love. He proposes marriage to her family three times and is rejected each time. Throughout the work, Tsuru remains nothing more than an imaginary projection of the narrator’s fantasies and desires and never displays any agency of her own. The narrator admits, for example, that during this entire courtship he has never exchanged a word with her.This discursive rendering of the relationship between self and other—in which the figure of the other is reduced to a phantasmal image—can be seen to provide the framework for Mushanokoji’s fiction as well as his consciousness of modern culture. This conjunction of the space of universality and that of interiority is made explicit in Friendship (Yujo, ), perhaps Mushanokoji’s best-known novel.40 The work’s opening follows the model of A Blessed Man: the protagonist Nojima, a playwright, is obsessed with a young woman named Sugiko, whom he believes (again mistakenly and against all evidence) shares his feelings. In his mind, Nojima manufactures all types of narratives that apparently bear no relation to her actual sentiments.The main plot development consists of the eventual revelation of the protagonist’s mistake. At the end of the work, however, a remarkable shift takes place in the field of representation. The last section of the novel is presented as an exchange of letters between Sugiko and Omiya, the narrator’s friend and rival. Sugiko remains in Tokyo while Omiya is in Paris,where he has gone to study. The contiguous placement of the letters, without any mark of temporal or spatial distance between them, effects an implosion of the

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space separating the two sites.The last section of the work is a dialogue between two characters that folds the vast distances between Japan and Europe into a common discursive space.The fact that with a few notable exceptions, the central figures of Taisho literature had never themselves traveled to either Europe or America, in contrast to key figures of an earlier generation of writers, only underscores the extent to which this image of the “West” served as a phantasmatic, constructed object.41 As Pincus’s statement just quoted suggests, the contradiction inherent in this type of cosmopolitanism was often expressed as an opposition between material and imaginative space. In particular, key works of Taisho literature included representations of space marked by a double characteristic—the conjunction of extreme physical constriction with an almost limitless expanse of the imagination. In the story “Dreaming Room” (Yume miru heya, ) by Uno Koji (–), for example, the narrator rents a secret four-mat room in a boarding house, hidden from his family, where he indulges in his desires and fantasies. The boarding house is described almost as a prison—small rooms opening off a narrow corridor, with windows in the doors through which to pass food. Inside, though, the space opens up onto an expansive and utopian world of the imagination, and the narrator sets up a slide projector in the middle of the room to project onto the walls pictures of the mountains and of Western paintings. According to Elaine Gerbert, the representation of such spaces in Taisho fiction offered writers an opportunity to engage foreign culture within controlled and managed environments.42 As a number of critics have pointed out, the universalism of Taisho literary discourse was in fact based on a series of exclusions, especially the exclusion of the question of Japanese imperialism in Asia. Sofue Shoji, for example, cites the evasion of questions of imperialism in the Shirakaba group’s journal. He notes that the years of the journal’s founding and folding ( and ) correspond to significant political events, which he argues constitute the boundaries of Taisho as a period of literary history. Thus  marked the beginning of the Imperial Treason incident, which led to the execution of a number of socialists and anarchists for allegedly plotting to assassinate the Meiji emperor, and the annexation of Korea (both were aftereffects of the Russo-Japanese War).

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Introduction

In turn,  witnessed the mass killings of Koreans and leftist activists after the Great Kanto Earthquake. In each case, Sofue writes, Shirakaba addressed the domestic side of the events but generally ignored or obscured issues relating directly to Japanese imperialism.43 The repression of imperialism in Taisho intellectual discourse has also been analyzed by Murai Osamu, who sees in Yanagita Kunio’s (–) focus on the topography of the “southern islands” and the concept of the jomin (eternal folk) a sublimation of the question of Japanese imperialism, including the suppression of Yanagita’s own role as a government bureaucrat in the colonization of Korea.44 The following statement by Mushanokoji, cited by Sofue, indicates the elision of questions about imperialism and their replacement with a generalized concept of culture:“I don’t believe Carlyle was exaggerating in the least when he said it would be better to lose India than Shakespeare. In truth, just thinking about great people— of any country,since we Japanese have so few—gives me a far greater feeling of courage than the realization that Japan has made a subject nation of Korea.”45 It is, in fact, the very acquisition of empire that allows Mushanokoji to disavow it and to claim an equivalence between Japan and Britain.To this extent, Mushanokoji’s discourse of universalism indicates a phantasmatic identification between Japanese and European civilization that excludes contemporary Asia. If, according to Kobayashi, the identification between modernity and the West was the foundation of modern literature in Japan, then the so-called cosmopolitanism of Taisho literature is its most explicit manifestation.This cosmopolitanism signifies the assimilation of, and identification with, an external, dominant culture.46 As I contend in chapter , the early writings of Akutagawa, so often denigrated for being nothing more than imitations, perhaps best exemplify this discourse.The image of the bookstore as an embodiment of the European fin-de-siècle that opens his work A Fool’s Life (Aru aho no issho, ) symbolizes the consciousness of a universalized space of modern culture. This concept of literature or, increasingly, a more expansive notion of culture served to frame an understanding of a universal modernity.The idea of assimilation or interiorization can also be seen in certain narratives of national culture, including Okakura’s notion of Japan as a “museum” of

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Asian civilization or Japan’s “power to remake” depicted in Akutagawa’s short story “The Smiles of the Gods” (Kamigami no bisho, ). It is this phantasmal space of modernity that collapses in the writings of the s.The fragmentation of the cosmopolitan conception of modernity finds its expression, in the first instance, in the dismantling of literary form, as well as through the delineation of fragmented cultural topographies.

Anxieties of Literature The context of modernist practice during this period is a generalized sense of anxiety surrounding the institution of literature.The writings that I consider here are linked through their destruction of established forms of literary expression. In different ways and contexts, these writings record the internal, formal dismantling of the structures of the modern novel (shosetsu).This process includes the rejection of the conventions of narrative fiction and, more important, the language of genbun itchi, the “colloquial” writing that had served as the central medium of modern literature.The novel had almost always occupied a central position in the institution of modern literature, and to this extent these writings reflect a transformation in the cultural and social status of literature as a whole.47 Two specific transformations in cultural production can be cited as contexts for the shifting conceptions of literature manifested here. The first is the explosion of different forms of mass culture in the late s through the s.This period witnessed an acceleration of urbanization and the consolidation of a mass, consumer capitalism based on the spread of new technical media and the commodification of all levels of culture. By the end of the s, critical discourse was focusing on mass culture (taishu bunka) as a new type of cultural formation, one that was perceived as a threat to traditional modes of literary production. Critics saw new technical media and popular forms of entertainment as undermining the central position of literature, and of the novel in particular, as a dominant mode of cultural production. On the level of technique, the impact of new (or relatively new) forms such as cinema on literary expression became especially noticeable

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Introduction

during this period. At the beginning of the decade, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro demonstrated the impact of this new medium when he interrupted the serialization of his novel Mermaid (Kojin) in  to work (for a few years) on film production.48 By the end of the decade, critics were writing frequently of the demise of the novel, a form suited to individual production and individual reception, in favor of the mass-produced and mass-oriented medium of film.At the same time, writers found themselves thrust into the market on an unprecedented scale. Mass culture generally provided new forms of enjoyment and consumption, and it yielded financial opportunities for certain writers, as exemplified by the enpon (one-yen book) phenomenon. It also decisively shifted the conception of the literary text into the realm of commodity, a consciousness manifested in a number of works from this time. For example, the Marxist critic Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (–) wrote about the increasing encroachment on artistic value by the “commercial value” of literature in his essay “The Modern Novel as Commodity” (Shohin to shite no kindai shosetsu).49 Second, the s witnessed the rapid and extensive politicization of literary practice, most prominently in the emergence of a vigorous Marxist literary movement that reached the peak of its influence in the early Showa period. This politicization, whose effects reached throughout the literary establishment, raised questions about literature’s status in society and the author’s responsibility toward issues of social and economic injustice. In particular, the “aesthetic value” of literature as independent of its “political value” was questioned and became a subject of debate at the end of the s.50 At the same time, the rise of a politically committed literary practice was accompanied by the government’s increasingly violent repression of oppositional discourse, which also contributed to intellectuals’ general sense of anxiety. Together, these two cultural phenomena of the s—what some critics schematically termed the Americanization and Sovietization of culture—helped shift the conception of literature.51 In particular, they undermined any conception of a pure or autonomous literature, one that would be independent of the marketplace or politics. In his article examining the category of Taisho as a unit of cultural history, Harootunian noted that the concept of

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culture as manifested in Taisho-period intellectual discourse was a realm separate from the public sphere and distinguished from the notion of “civilization” that had served as a touchstone for an earlier discourse on modernity.52 To some extent, this concept can be seen as an extension of tendencies that had existed at the origins of modern literature, which, as Harootunian and others have pointed out, was largely established by those who had been excluded from political participation.53 One hallmark of modern literature was in fact the delineation of a space of interiority, marked off against an external (social and political) space. Perhaps the most prominent manifestation of this tendency was the confessional writing that appeared after the end of the Russo-Japanese War in . By the s, however, any faith in the autonomy of literary practice had been decisively undermined; it was only as a reaction formation that the concept of “pure literature” (junbungaku) was first widely circulated during this period. Both these phenomena can also be placed in a broader, international context.The unprecedented spread of mass culture and the politicization of literature are reflected in European literary and artistic production in this period as well, and these issues occupied a preeminent position in critical discourse.54 The relationship between new technologies and forms of representation and the political significance of the literary or art work became one of the primary focuses of criticism during this time, as exemplified by the work of critics associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Walter Benjamin’s writings, especially, attempted to negotiate between the transformation wrought by the pervasive commodification of culture—one of whose effects he described as a radical “recasting of literary forms”—and the politicization of aesthetics in avant-gardist practice. His use of the concept of technique, which encompasses both the formal properties of the artwork and its position in the mode of production, provides a powerful tool for such an analysis of modernism.55 Mass culture and the politicization of literature not only were transnational phenomena but, more significantly, also posed the question of transnationalism, a conception of culture that exceeds national boundaries. For example, in his denigration of the inauthentic culture of “kitsch,” Clement Greenberg emphasized its

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Introduction

imperialist character: “Another mass product of Western industrialism, it has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld.”56 Both the worldwide spread of forms of mass entertainment, foremost among them film, and the expansion of the international labor movement that served as the context for proletarian literature are linked (although in qualitatively different ways) to this global spread of capital. In turn, s modernism can be seen as marking the stage at which writers and critics became conscious of the effects of this process of globalization on the internal structure of literary production. At the same time, what Greenberg refers ironically to as the first “universal culture” needs to be distinguished from the universalism often associated with Taisho literature. Although, as suggested earlier, the explicit disavowal of national concerns in Taisho cosmopolitanism in some ways merely masked the assumption of a national subjectivity seen to be equivalent to that of the West, the effects of this consciousness of transnationalism conversely tended to destabilize the borders of national culture.The rapid expansion of various forms of mass culture was premised on a worldwide spread of capital and technology that in some cases was seen to threaten the integrity of national boundaries. For certain intellectuals, for example, the influx of mass culture (typically identified as American) signaled the nation’s colonization by foreign culture and capital.57 Yet what was in fact occurring during this period was an expansion of Japanese empire; that is, the wave of accelerated urbanization and industrialization of the period beginning in World War I can be linked to Japan’s growing economic extension into Asia.58 By the end of the war, Japan had acquired an extensive formal empire that included Korea, Taiwan, and Sakhalin. Peter Duus argues, however, that the “informal” empire in China, which began to expand after the war, represented an increasingly greater stake for the nation’s economy and constituted a significant part of the domestic political agenda.59 In literature, the reflections of this expansion of empire become more visible in the writings of the s—in works associated with proletarian literature such as “In the Charity Ward” (Seryoshitsu ni

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te, ) by Hirabayashi Taiko (–) or the nonfiction Demonic City (Mato, ) by the popular writer Muramatsu Shofu (–), but also the modernist novel Shanghai by Yokomitsu, which I examine in chapter .The globalization of culture was in this sense characterized by an influx of foreign culture as well as the expansion of Japanese national space outward—both flow and counterflow represented their own shifts in the boundaries of national culture. In many instances, the shifting of these borderlines provides the content of the writings grouped together here as modernist texts. To take one well-known example, the subject of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s novel Naomi (Chijin no ai, –) is a certain undecidability between the native and the foreign, which is literally embodied by the character Naomi. Her association with Western culture is established initially through her resemblance to a film image, that of American actress Mary Pickford. She thus becomes an object of desire (although the novel is equally about a certain disgust) precisely because of the double inscription of her body as both Japanese and Western. As Miriam Silverberg has explained, she is depicted as “a Westerner who is not Western.”60 Modernism here indicates the shifting borderlines of this distinction, a process that, as Tanizaki’s text demonstrates, can evoke both pleasure and anxiety. Thus the writings of the s in Japan can be linked to a broader global context. For example, the cultural context of Tanizaki’s novel was similar to that of contemporaneous European discourses on mass culture.The spread of American mass culture in Europe also placed into question the coherence of “organic” conceptions of national community.61 Furthermore, beginning in the s, the influx of the European and Russian avant-gardes was an important instigator of the formal experimentation in Japanese art and literature. For these reasons, critic Unno Hiroshi persuasively argued for discarding the categories of Taisho and Showa literature, which are conventionally used in literary histories, in favor of the category of the s, in order to highlight this simultaneity.62 But just as Silverberg has argued against the analysis of mass culture in Japan as a mere imitation of Western cultural phenomena, it is also important to note that modernism in Japan cannot be analyzed solely as the transplantation, or even replication, of literary practices

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Introduction

that originated elsewhere.63 What is at stake is the unraveling of the very process of internalization. It is in the globalization of culture that the boundaries of Japanese modernity come into question.

Tremors The general sense of radical cultural transformation was punctuated by the catastrophic earthquake that destroyed significant areas of Tokyo and Yokohama on September , , and that is typically seen to have had far-reaching effects on literary and cultural production.Although, as Unno has pointed out, one cannot ascribe all historical transformations to natural disasters, the material and psychological impact of the earthquake, its cost in lives and resources, was immense. The earthquake, its numerous aftershocks, and the ensuing fires killed nearly , people. Entire sections of the capital city were reduced to ashes, and damages were estimated to exceed . billion yen.64 Furthermore, this catastrophe cannot be reduced to just a “natural” event. It also included specifically human disasters: the massacre of Koreans (and others deemed foreign or dangerous) at the hands of vigilante groups and the police, as well as the arrests and murders of leftist activists including, most famously, Osugi Sakae (–) and Ito Noe (–), as well as their young nephew.65 The earthquake as an event—taken as a whole to include these other instances of violence—was a tremendous shock with intense and often contradictory effects on writers’ consciousness of modern culture.The destruction of the nation’s capital called into question the entire project of modernization, revealing the instability of national institutions and making explicit the violence running throughout different levels of society.Uno Koji’s statement about the earthquake, for example, reflects the sense of fragility of the modern city:“This metropolis that had been constructed through more than fifty years of Meiji and Taisho . . . had disappeared entirely like smoke after that one, momentary earthquake on September !”66 At the same time, the destruction intensified the sense of distancing from the past, as much of the damage to Tokyo was concentrated in the shitamachi (downtown) section of the city, which had until then

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

retained the most traces of the old city of Edo.67 Large sections of the city were rebuilt, and to this extent the earthquake accelerated the sense of urbanization and modernization, even as it created a nostalgia for a past that was increasingly seen as lost.68 This massive transformation of the city provides one context for Kobayashi’s lament over the loss of memory in “Literature of the Lost Home”; by , the urban environment seemed to have no connection to the city that he had known in childhood. The reconfiguration of the urban landscape after  (a process that was officially completed in ) also reflected a transformation in the cultural landscape.69 This period of reconstruction coincided with the spread of new technologies and forms of cultural production, what Fujitake Akira refers to as the “formative” period of mass culture in twentieth-century Japan. These phenomena included an upsurge in film production and spectatorship, the inauguration of radio broadcasts in , the construction of the first subway line (running between Asakusa and Ueno) in , the one-yen publishing boom and the appearance of such masscirculation magazines as Kingu (King), and the establishment of the first genuinely national newspapers.70 New sites of enjoyment and consumption—including cafés, dance halls, and revue theaters— appeared. After the earthquake, Western-style buildings and makeshift “barracks” were constructed throughout the city, and steel and concrete bridges replaced the wooden ones destroyed in the earthquake and fires. Jinnai Hidenobu tells us that for the first time for many residents of Tokyo in the s, modernization and Westernization directly intervened in the space of everyday life, instead of being confined principally to public and official spaces.71 In literary and intellectual discourse, the earthquake signaled the end of the journal Shirakaba and the leftist journal Tanemaku hito (The Sower, –), two significant centers of literature and criticism of the Taisho period.They were replaced by the journals Bungei jidai (Literary Age) and Bungei sensen (Literary Front), both of which first appeared in .These organs of modernist and Marxist writings have typically been seen as the origin of “Showa literature.” As Hirano Ken remarked, the literary output of these two journals represented the “revolution of literature” and the “literature of revolution,” respectively. Together with the I-novel they

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Introduction

represent, in Hirano’s view, the primary coordinates of s writing.72 The influence of the European avant-garde movements, which had been introduced to Japan before the earthquake, also intensified during this time.73 The earthquake brought together into one symbolic locus the various transformations taking place in Japanese culture at that time, many of which had already been set in motion. If the earthquake cannot be made the cause of all these historical transformations, it can nevertheless be seen as a symptom of them.The destruction and subsequent reconfiguration of the city can, for example, be read as a massive and violent externalization of the traumas of modernization. It also brought into the open certain contradictions in the Japanese discourse of colonialism, which were expressed as a form of racist paranoia—specifically, the fear of being unable to distinguish between Japanese and Koreans. According to Yoshimura Akira, the outburst of mob violence against Koreans reflected in part an underlying consciousness among the public of Japan’s repressive rule of Korea, especially its response to the Korean independence movement.74 Given the manner in which outsiders were identified—passersby were accosted and forced to recite phrases in Japanese in order to discern any accent—the mob violence seemed to indicate an even more fundamental anxiety produced by the contradictions in the colonial discourse of assimilation (doka). As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has pointed out, the coexistence of discourses of nationalism and colonialism, which relied on conflicting notions of the assimilation and exclusion of colonized peoples, led to the contradictory need to “produce both similarity and difference in its subjects.”75 The charged space between the double gestures of assimilation and exclusion was an important site of discourse on national and racial identity during this period. Oguma Eiji has argued that discourses of ethnicity and culture in prewar Japan were worked out and contested in relation to the “borderline” spaces of nation and empire, including Hokkaido, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea.76 In a sense, Tokyo, especially after the earthquake, was also transformed into such a borderline space. On the one hand, the use of standardized language and pronunciation when interrogating Koreans was a materialization of the violence inherent in the idea of a cen-

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tralized national language, which is based on the elimination of difference. On the other hand, it also indicated the presence of a powerful anxiety, of being unable to tell the difference between self and other (the ostensible goal of doka).This anxiety can be seen as the other side of Kobayashi’s statement that it was impossible to distinguish between what was Western and what was Japanese. As Murai Osamu pointed out, the post-earthquake violence rarely found expression in literary works,77 although the leftist playwright Akita Ujaku commented on the strong (if largely unrepresented) impact that the brutality against Koreans and leftists had on writers during this time. Ujaku wrote an expressionist play entitled Dance of Skeletons (Gaikotsu no buyo, ), which condemned the vigilante groups’ violence against Koreans.78 He also wrote that the events represented a manifestation of “Japanese capitalism,in the face of crisis, turning violent” and that it was the materialization of this violence that helped establish the European postwar avant-gardes in post-earthquake Japan.79 The disaster and its violent aftermath thus created a psychological shock that intensified the sense of rupture that was a necessary foundation of modernist literary practice.

The Discourse of Form:Theories of the I-Novel and Formalism In critical discourse, the sense of a fundamental transformation in literature was reflected in the focus during the s on questions of literary form. Manifestations of this concern range from the discourse on the I-novel, to the plotless-novel debate between Akutagawa and Tanizaki in , to the polemic over literary “formalism” late in the decade. One might also include lesser-known debates such as the exchange in the early part of the decade between Kikuchi Kan (–) and Satomi Ton (–) concerning the relationship between form and content. During this period, there were continual attempts to rethink the category of literature, its status in relation to other cultural and social practices in general as well as its specific relation to a national culture. In these various discourses, the concept of form, or keishiki, was a fluid one that referred to questions of language, style, and technique, as well as to the broader meanings of genre or medium.

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Introduction

At the same time, this emphasis on form brought together questions of mass culture, the social status of literary practice, and the boundaries of national culture. Underlying the discourse on literary form was an effort to articulate different conceptions of cultural and national space.The debate over the I-novel, for example, was one of the most prominent examples of the discussion of form during the s. Although it was mainly concerned with defining the proper boundaries of the novel, it also reflected the impact of mass culture as well as a consideration of the borderlines of Japanese culture. As Tomi Suzuki has explained,the theory of the I-novel represented the construction of a genre (ultimately nothing more than a “mode of reading”) that was retroactively projected onto the writings of the previous decade. We need, therefore, to distinguish between the Inovels themselves and the critical articulation of the concept of the I-novel.The latter was based on the identification of the author with the protagonist of the work and on the rejection of conventions of fictional narrative. It suggests a faith in the transparency of language and unmediated expression. As Suzuki notes, this conception also emerged from an emphasis on matters of the “self ” (jiga), which had become prominent in Taisho-period intellectual discourse. Accordingly, the appearance of confessional fiction can be placed in the general discursive construction of the private sphere (another possible meaning of watakushi) during this period.80 As the assertion by Kume Masao (–) that the “stateof-mind novel” (shinkyo shosetsu) represents the “homeland” (furusato) of the novel indirectly suggests, the attempt to define the novel’s proper boundaries in discourse on the I-novel was also an attempt to define the proper boundaries of a specifically Japanese literature.81 The theoretical exposition of the I-novel kept trying to define the essence of the Japanese novel according to a standard form of the genre represented by the nineteenthcentury European novel. Both detractors and supporters thus contrasted the I-novel with the “authentic” (honkaku) European novel.82 The idea that the I-novel is a unique product of Japanese culture has been, for the most part, shared by critical discussions of it, whether these discussions are framed in positive or negative terms.83 Suzuki argues for this reason that the discourse on the Inovel was consistently used to frame a narrative of Japanese

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modernity as a deviation from the Western standard. In effect, in the s discourse on the I-novel, a modern form of psychological narrative, was reinscribed into a native “tradition” dating back to such figures as Basho and Kamo no Chomei (– ).84 The discourse on the I-novel was formed through the transposition of the general emphasis on matters of the self—the details of everyday life—onto the context of a national culture, onto the particularity (or uniqueness) of Japanese literature. The theory of the I-novel was also part of an attempt to define a “pure” literature (junbungaku), which meant excluding both political issues and mass culture. Kume, for example, compared the Japanese I-novel with the masterpieces of the nineteenth-century European novel (such as War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and Madame Bovary). He conceded that the latter were “certainly high-quality works” but ultimately dismissed them as “nothing more than great works of popular fiction. In the end, they are make-believe, light reading.”85 Kume’s rejection of the European novel as popular fiction was an effort to gauge the proper boundaries of an indigenous literary practice. At the same time, it linked the concept of the Inovel to contemporary conditions of literary production, in which changes in the dynamics of the publishing industry (most notably the increasing prominence of certain popular narrative forms in mass-circulation newspapers and magazines) were threatening the established writers of the older “marketplace” that was the bundan.86 For Kume, the move inward, the constriction of the proper field of the shosetsu to matters of the self (watakushi), functioned as a defense against this popularization of fiction.For example,he wrote,“To take anything other [than the self] as a pretext is, ultimately, merely one method of making art popular, and is nothing but technique.”87 The denigration of technique (giko) can be traced back at least to Naturalist writings on literature, as exemplified by Tayama Katai’s “Plain Description” (Rokotsu naru byosha, ). This essay rejected the use of ornamental language in literature, although the gesture assumes a different significance in Kume’s denigration of the popular novel.88 The statement identifies the main characteristic of discourse on the I-novel as a reaction against the threat posed by the new technics of a burgeoning mass culture, a defensive maneuver based on the consolidation of a native (and “pure”) literary form.89



Introduction

The theory of the I-novel was one of the most significant examples of the focus on questions of literary form in s discourse.The theory of the I-novel has a double significance.While it inaugurated a critique of the modern novel, it also tried to reduce the novel to an essentialized form of representation and native culture. The attempt to define the essence of the novel around a conception of the author’s interiority, and especially the rejection of fictional technique, can be contrasted with the discourse of literary formalism, which was developed during a polemical exchange between writers associated with the Shinkankakuha (New Sensationists), primarily Yokomitsu Riichi and Nakagawa Yoichi (–), and such Marxist critics in the late s as Kurahara Korehito (–) and Katsumoto Seiichiro (–). Formalism, in turn, can be seen as one of the fundamental theoretical expositions of modernist practice as a whole. This polemic, which began in part as an offshoot of the debate over the formalist school of literary analysis in the Soviet Union, has typically been reduced to an unproductive argument pitting the value of form (aestheticism) against content (ideology).90 But as the critic Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (himself an early opponent of formalism) argued, underlying this discussion (in both the Soviet Union and Japan) was anxiety regarding the social and cultural status of the novel, that the old forms of literature could not remain valid within the accelerated mechanization of modern life.91 The theory of formalism reflects the general impact of the avantgarde movements that had begun appearing in Japan in the mid- to late s.At the forefront were experiments by poets such as Kanbara Tai (–), Hirato Renkichi (–),Takahashi Shinkichi (–), and Hagiwara Kyojiro (–), emphasizing the visual effects of the printed word.92 As Tamamura Zennosuke wrote, Dadaist poetry in Japan marked “the purely visual victory of the sign.”93 In addition, both Yokomitsu and Nakagawa situated their theories of formalism in the contemporaneous discourses on literary form and semiotics,including Russian formalist criticism.As suggested by Nakagawa’s critique of Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of literature as only another version of aestheticism, however, the Japanese formalists tried to distinguish their theory by orienting it toward

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

what they termed a type of “literary materialism” (bungakuteki yuibutsuron).94 ForYokomitsu, this signified an emphasis on the material properties of the written word itself, which he referred to as a physical object. His theory of formalism was essentially a rejection of the language of genbun itchi—the “colloquial” idiom that served as the basis for the formation of modern literature in Japan. By the s, what was referred to as the genbun itchi style (or, increasingly, simply kogobun, or colloquial writing) had been largely established as the mainstream language of literary expression.95 In earlier years, the concept of genbun itchi had maintained a sense of the new and foreign.Tayama Katai, for example, recalls that genbun itchi represented a desire to create “what was newest and most progressive” in literature and began as an attempt to imitate writing in English.96 In many ways, this otherness was obscured in Taisho literary discourse. In the s, in fact, the concept of colloquial language helped establish the theory of the I-novel through its association with an ideal of pure expression. Sato Haruo (–) explained that the language of genbun itchi was the basis for a genuine or “total” self-expression, for writers’ ability to “communicate our spirit.”97 In an essay on the I-novel, Uno Koji stated that he considered Mushanokoji to be the founder of the Inovel (watakushi shosetsu) because of his “remarkable style.” Uno described this style as naïve and childlike and identified its central feature as the deployment of a “colloquial” literary language and the reformation of the written language: Mushanokoji’s remarkable style is, in a certain sense, the origin of the I-novel. In a way, Mushanokoji is a great man. For as I have said repeatedly, looking back after a long period of time, one finds that he was the founder of a true colloquial Japanese style, or else a revolutionary, or else in the vanguard of kanji restriction and kana reform. In his usual way of free painting, he did not consciously try to create a true colloquial style, nor did he think that it would be more convenient to restrict the use of Chinese characters or to make the kana script strictly phonetic. Rather, he just followed his instincts and naturally wrote in this way.This is also one of the reasons that I say he is the founder of the I-novel.98



Introduction

Although other writers of the time also recognized Mushanokoji as the creator of perhaps the first truly colloquial style in literature, it is significant for Uno to link this linguistic development to the essence of the I-novel.99 For Uno,as for Kume,the I-novel is defined by a certain directness of expression, an attempt to reduce the intervention of language and to create instead a vehicle for unmediated communication between author and reader. Thus, according to Edward Fowler, the style of confessional fiction was meant to “come as close as possible to the communicative act and thus do away with the mediative quality of written language.”100 This attempted erasure of language as a mediating structure contains a notion of direct communication based on the capacity of “natural” speech. Nakamura Murao (–), for example, defined the I-novel as a form in “which the author himself appears in the work and speaks directly.”101 While critics acknowledged early on that the I-novel was not limited to first-person narration (a point also made by Nakamura himself), this type of monologic structure can be considered its formal archetype. Against this ascendancy of colloquial writing,Yokomitsu defined New Sensationism as an attempt to return to the Meiji-period literary movement of the Kenyusha—that is, to a non–genbun itchi discourse.102 Even during his polemic with Marxist critics,Yokomitsu proclaimed that what he really feared was the “murderous realism” of Naturalism. Instead of writing as one speaks (which Sato named as the ideology of colloquial writing), he announced that the Bungei jidai authors were trying to “write as one writes.”103 This statement can also be linked to Akutagawa’s resistance to genbun itchi. In responding to Sato’s insistence that he use a colloquial writing style, Akutagawa said that he was more interested in “speaking as one writes.”104 In both cases, the concept of writing is seen as an irreducible materiality that cannot be recuperated into any theory of unmediated expression or communication.105 Formalism can thus be seen as an attempt to shift the conception of literature away from the expression of an interiority toward a conception of the text as material object that circulates within a complex economy of signification.Yokomitsu described the literary text as an “assemblage of written characters.”106 Content, in turn, was a “phantasm of the reader arising from form,” a “quantity of energy” varying

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

from individual to individual.At the same time,Yokomitsu wrote that the effect produced by writing could never be adequate to the author’s intended effect,“for the material of writing and the material that writing signifies can never be identical.”107 The materiality of writing signified a disruption of the circuit between sign and thing. For Yokomitsu, the written word was both an object in itself and a representation of something else, and signification was produced in the space between these two functions.Yokomitsu described his theory as a form of “mechanism,” and, indeed, his conception of the literary text can be likened to a machine that is cut off from the author’s consciousness and generates heterogeneous (and finally uncontrollable) significations in the reader’s consciousness. The formalist negation of interiority, which I trace through various writers and different contexts, provides a framework for analyzing modernist writings as a whole.Yokomitsu once described his New Sensationist style as a “rebellious war against the national language” (kokugo to no futeinaru kessen), a formulation suggesting the connection between questions of form and subjectivity.108 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.The formalist externalization of the literary text as a material writing irreducible to any interiorized consciousness is translated in modernist writings into a focus on heterogeneous urban topographies.

The Modernist Landscape in Literature The theory of formalism reflects an experience of estrangement from the Japanese language, a sense that this language is irreducibly external, a material object separated from consciousness. In modernist fiction, this relationship to language coincides with a transformation in the field of representation. It is in the movement from



Introduction

a theory of language to the representation of space in language that the significance of formalism is found.The modernist literary landscape can be understood as rejecting the representation of interiority, in terms of both psychological and material space, which had been one of the preeminent characteristics of confessional fiction in the late Meiji and early Taisho periods. Both the enclosed boundaries of the field of representation of Taisho fiction—what Paul Anderer has described as “personal impressions gathered about culturally refined and mostly domestic scenes”—and the phantasmatic cosmopolitanism that framed it now collapse.109 In these writings, modernity exceeds the limits of domesticity and interiority. The bounded private space that had become a hallmark of confessional fiction is exploded, turned inside out, and the representation of enclosed space containing an internalized modernity is fragmented. If the novel served as the genre of national community par excellence, its disintegration in modernism opened heterogeneous topographies at the margins of the nation-state. These are spaces characterized by fragmentation and abjection, liminal spaces at the borders of national community. The urban landscape becomes a focus for literary expression in these writings and frames the image of a grotesque modernity. Kobayashi mentions in his essay that the physical landscape of contemporary Tokyo could not function as a repository of memory, as it blocks the emotional investment required to create a sentiment of home. Instead, in its dreamlike but also violent state, it assaults the senses.There are a number of works written before the s in which the representation of the city (especially Tokyo) plays an important role. Precursors for the depiction of the urban landscape in s modernism can be found in various works of the preceding decade, in, for example, the writings of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro. As Unno Hiroshi argued in Modern City Tokyo (Modan toshi Tokyo, ), in the writings of the s, the city becomes the focal point and ground of literary expression. Isoda Koichi pointed out that the key figures of s modernism, including writers such as Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi, often were of rural origin.110 To varying degrees, the writers I am considering perceived themselves as having no fixed origin, no “home” in the sense that Kobayashi uses in his essay. In their writings, the city becomes the

Fissures of Japanese Modernity



ground for representing a fragmented consciousness of modern culture.The boundaries between internal and external space—the demarcation that, as Karatani and others have argued, was one of the key operations of modern literature—become untenable. This book examines some of the different topographies revealed by this process of disintegration. In the first chapter, I look at Akutagawa’s late writings as the record of the collapse of a universalized conception of literature that can be associated with Taisho discourse.Akutagawa himself had been one of the exemplary figures of Taisho cosmopolitanism, and in his early writings, he drew on multiple literary traditions of both Asia and Europe. His conception of literature was, in effect, an embodiment of a modernity perceived as a universalized cultural space in which Japanese and European civilization existed in the same framework. In his late writings, however, this conception of literature disintegrated, a process manifested in the formal heterogeneity of these works and in Akutagawa’s theory of the plotless novel, which he also described as the destruction of the novel. Akutagawa’s last works make explicit the connection between the question of literary form and the consciousness of Japanese modernity. The second chapter analyzes Yokomitsu’s novel Shanghai (Shanhai, –) in the context of Japanese empire. If the literary discourse of cosmopolitanism reflected an underlying identification with the West at the expense of political questions concerning Japanese imperialism, the collapse of this discourse is marked by the return of conflicts regarding Japan’s relation to the West and its economic and military presence on the Asian continent.Yokomitsu’s novel depicts the Chinese city through representations of waste, decay, and death. These images can be situated in the context of conventional colonial narratives emphasizing the backwardness of Asian countries as a justification for Japanese imperialism.This representation of abjection is also marked by ambivalence, as it represents a source of both horror and fascination for the novel’s characters, particularly the protagonist Sanki, who finds himself progressively drawn into the city’s depths. The space of Shanghai in Yokomitsu’s novel frames the conflicts in Japanese modernity, articulated here as a simultaneous identification with the Western impe-



Introduction

rialist powers and with China as an Asian nation. In Shanghai, this double identification comes to the fore in the historical event known as the May  movement, which Yokomitsu represents as at once a struggle between Chinese workers and Japanese capital and between the civilizations of Asia and the West.The novel uses corporeal sensation and the circulation of the human body through different social and economic contexts to represent this conflict, which remains unresolved at the novel’s close. The third chapter examines representations of mass culture in Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Asakusa Kurenaidan, –). Published at the same time as Yokomitsu’s novel, Kawabata’s work discovers its own topography of modernity in the space of Asakusa, located at the margins of the city of Tokyo and national culture. Kawabata represents this space as a container for burgeoning forms of mass culture,a point of intersection for various cultural fragments. Asakusa is both a repository for premodern culture and a receptacle for the latest trends of foreign culture.These disparate levels are held together not through any integrating or cosmopolitan subjectivity found in certain theories of national culture, however, but through the logic of the commodity and of the marketplace. In turn, the dissolution of a coherent national culture is expressed by the disintegration of novelistic form. Kawabata’s work is a conglomeration of various literary and nonliterary genres, undermining the formal and conceptual boundaries of the novel as a genre. The fourth chapter explores Hayashi Fumiko’s Tales of Wandering (Horoki, –). This work represents a radical mixture of literary styles and ideological discourses, combining aspects of proletarian literature, confessional fiction, modernism, and mass culture. Tales of Wandering—which occupies only a marginal position in studies of literary history—questions the divisions and categories that have conventionally been used to narrate this history. The collapse of genre characterizing the formal structure of Hayashi’s work also indicates its theme, a nomadic movement across various social and cultural categories of subjectivity, including gender, class, and family. Hayashi concentrates on the parameters defining gendered subjectivity, as in the concepts of “home” and domesticity, on the one hand, and the absolute commodification of the female body, on the other. Tales of Wandering narrates

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

the heroine’s attempt to negotiate her own subjectivity within a social topography located between these two poles. The novel encapsulates a certain consciousness of exile and dislocation that underpinned literature during this time, and it also demonstrates the link between literary form and subjectivity. The last chapter considers the fate of modernist literary practice in an atmosphere of increasing ultranationalism and the encroachment of the fascist state into literary production in the late s and s, by way of Yokomitsu’s Melancholy Journey (Ryoshu,–). This novel reveals the transformation in Yokomitsu’s writing from an engagement with modern culture to an exploration of traditional aesthetics, a route also taken by other prominent modernist figures. This chapter examines both ruptures and continuities between Yokomitsu’s modernist and nationalist writings. I contend that Shanghai and Melancholy Journey are united by a thematic of homelessness and exile.Whereas Shanghai was based on an image system that emphasized corporeal sensation and for which no resolution to the crisis of subjectivity was possible, however, Melancholy Journey translates this thematic concern into the problematics of affect and spirit (seishin).Within this disembodied realm of spirit—marked by the sentiments of melancholy and loss—a resolution to the conflict of national subjectivity is pursued through the construction of a phantasmatic cultural home. Yokomitsu’s work shows the reconstruction of a consciousness of Japanese modernity in the writings of the late s and s, although now in the context of a “new Asia” rather than that of a universalized image of the West. This last chapter tries to illustrate the complex dynamics of this evolution of modernist writings in the wartime period. There is a crucial transformation in Yokomitsu’s conception of language between Shanghai and Melancholy Journey, indicated by the announcement of his “subjugation to the national language.”The exploration of the problematics of spirit is made possible only by eliminating the sense of alienation from the national language that had made it an external and material object. At the same time, however, this chapter identifies the thematic links between the two periods of Yokomitsu’s career. His last novel provides a key to understanding the ways in which the consciousness of “homelessness” (which Yokomitsu indicates by the term ryoshu) is ironically



Introductions

transformed into the basis for reconstructing a national subjectivity. If Shanghai depicts the “deterritorialization” of Japanese modernity, Melancholy Journey represents its “reterritorialization” in the context of Japan’s expansion into Asia. The possibility of this type of reconstruction was perhaps already suggested in the closing lines of Kobayashi’s “Literature of the Lost Home.”The essay, as indicated earlier, rejected a return to nature as an antidote to the homelessness of the city. Similarly, Kobayashi dismissed the “return to the classics” as an illusory gesture, writing that “at this juncture, it is indeed pointless to call out for the ‘Japanese spirit’ or the ‘Eastern spirit.’ Look wherever we might, such things will not be found.”Yet his essay ends by suggesting that the sense of loss may also be compensated by a phantasmatic recovery, a rhetorical gesture that anticipates the paradoxical logic of the return to Japan: “History seems always and inexorably to destroy tradition. And as individuals mature, they seem always and inexorably to move toward its true discovery.”111

chapter i

Disintegrating Mechanisms of Subjectivity:Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s Last Writings Akutagawa Ryunosuke opened a hole in our consciousness.We circled the edge of this abyss, peering into its depths. Yokomitsu Riichi

Only by overcoming Akutagawa will it be possible to understand him Karaki Junzo

The Defeat of Literature Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s suicide in July , coming little more than half a year after the beginning of the Showa period, seemed to many at the time to signify the end of an era.A number of writers and critics, for example, interpreted his death as marking the defeat of an intellectual (or aestheticized) literary practice disengaged from historical and social reality.This point was emphasized by several prominent Marxist critics who read his personal crisis as “one aspect of a collapsing bourgeoisie.”1 Miyamoto Kenji (b. ) crystallized this sentiment in his landmark essay “The Literature of Defeat” (Haiboku no bungaku, ), in which he wrote that Akutagawa’s late writings and death constituted a warning to bourgeois intellectuals of the inevitable and disastrous result of their aestheticism and hermeticism.2 Indeed, Akutagawa’s expression of “vague anxiety” as the cause of his suicide, coupled with the turbulent and transitional character of the s, transformed his death from a personal, private catastrophe into a general historical allegory, an empty vessel into which various narrative interpretations could be projected.3 In this way, Akutagawa’s suicide achieved the status of a historical gesture. By now, the reading of Akutagawa’s suicide as an ending or “defeat” has been largely institutionalized in Japanese literary histories, for which his death typically serves as the end point of the Taisho period (–). Retrospectively, Akutagawa has been transformed into the exemplary Taisho intellectual, a designation epitomized by Sato Haruo’s claim that his writings symbolized the literature of the Taisho period.4 Sato’s assertion underscores the general character of Akutagawa’s critical reception: his work has consistently been analyzed in terms of categories such as “self-cultivation” (kyoyoshugi), intellectualism, aestheticism, and fin-de-siècle decadence. By this means, the divide between his work and that of “Showa literature”—represented most prominently by modernist and Marxist writings—has been firmly established.



Disintegrating Mechanisms of Subjectivity

This chapter challenges this artificial division of literary history and examines the connection, often ignored or obscured, between Akutagawa’s writings and modernist literature in Japan.The issues that Akutagawa addressed in his late works—subjectivity, representation, and cultural identity—were, I would suggest, central to the formation of what is known as Showa literature. In particular,Akutagawa’s last writings outline an anxiety concerning the status of literary practice, a concern that plays a central role in modernist literature. Although the process of mourning and memorializing Akutagawa began immediately after his death, it is clear that he represented something that could not simply be relegated to the past, to the death throes of a moribund and irrelevant literary practice. Even Akutagawa’s severest critics often found themselves unable to separate fully his experience from their own. Aono Suekichi (–), a leading theorist of the Marxist literary movement, captured this ambivalence: “We can critique Akutagawa. Yet we cannot discard him without a backward glance. For even within ourselves we find Akutagawa, and we find Akutagawa’s death.”5 As Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi explains, Miyamoto’s essay established the concept of “overcoming”Akutagawa as a central theme for subsequent writing about him.6 The very frequency with which such calls to overcome or transcend Akutagawa were repeated only reveals the extent to which the questions that he represented lingered on. In many ways, the “crisis” exposed by Akutagawa’s suicide provided a framework for the development of modernist writing in the late s and even for the discourse on literature and culture well into the following decade. One contemporary critic, Inoue Yoshio (b. ), wrote that the implications of his death went far beyond any personal tragedy and marked a general crisis for an entire generation of thinkers and writers. The event, he said, had caused writers to rethink their own roles as intellectuals. In one of the most insightful essays on Akutagawa from the period,“Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Shiga Naoya” (Akutagawa Ryunosuke to Shiga Naoya, ), Inoue wrote: “From this day forward, we can no longer afford to be involved in intellectualism. What Akutagawa’s death has already proved to us is nothing other than the

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

powerlessness of our intellects.”7 His death thus seemed to have had an unnerving effect on other writers and to symbolize a pervasive (and, by definition, “vague”) anxiety at the heart of the literary world of the s. It was a crisis relating to the institution of literature itself. Akutagawa had been regarded by many as the archetype of the man of letters (bunjin) and a representative of the ideology of selfcultivation, which placed almost limitless faith in the value of literature and in “culture” generally.8 In his later writings, however, any coherence or unity of literary practice seems to have disappeared. Marked by the breakdown of literary form and narrative technique, his late writings seem to question the very basis of literary expression. The transformation in his writing during this period in fact reflects not only a personal impasse in his own work but also a general upheaval in the s in various forms of literary expression. Throughout the decade, literary discourse focused on the social and aesthetic value of literature.This questioning of literary practice is evident in the debates and critical exchanges, including the generally defensive posture of discourse on the Inovel (watakushi shosetsu ron); the subsequent attempt to consolidate the boundaries of a “pure literature” in the face of the rising force of popular fiction; the debate over formalism between modernist and Marxist writers; and the debates among leftist critics concerning mass culture as well as the primacy of the aesthetic or political value of literary expression. Indeed, during the s, the conventional boundaries of literary practice were assaulted by various cultural developments, including the growing emphasis on class consciousness and the increasing demand for literature to engage social reality, as well as the rise of popular fiction and other forms of mass culture. Akutagawa’s late writings reflect this shifting cultural and aesthetic landscape. More significantly, they mark the decline of a specific, historically determined conception of literature. For Akutagawa, the concept and practice of literature had been the basis of a consciousness of modernity defined as “universal”—that is, a world in which the distance between Japanese and Western culture had been largely eliminated.Aeba Takao has found that for some Taisho writers and thinkers, what the concept of “self-cultivation” in fact



Disintegrating Mechanisms of Subjectivity

signified was a rejection of a particularist notion of culture and a desire for universality. He quotes a passage from Abe Jiro’s Diary of Santaro (Santaro no nikki, –):“The fundamental motivation that drove us to seek cultivation was a desire to achieve a universal content. It was a desire to escape from the boundaries of individual existence and participate in the life of the whole. . . .Therefore, we sought cultivation not from the particular status of a ‘Japanese person’ but, rather, the universal status of ‘person.’”9 Abe goes on to describe how this conception of universality opened for him a world made up of a mixture of European and Asian literary texts, a world in which the qualitative differences among cultures dissolved into the universal space of the modern. For Akutagawa, this consciousness of universality was unimaginable outside the practice of literature. Perhaps the most frequently repeated criticism of Akutagawa’s work was its supposed lack of originality.The majority of his works can be traced back to one or more sources in either classical Japanese texts (such as the Konjaku monogatari or Uji shui monogatari) or a wide range of American, Chinese, and European works.10 As Donald Keene has pointed out, even critics supporting Akutagawa considered him a kind of “mosaicist” who pieced “together fresh masterpieces out of the materials gleaned from many books.”11 For Akutagawa, though, this was precisely the point of literature: its unlimited access (through gestures of imitation, citation, and rewriting) to all other cultures and historical periods. In turn, it is this concept of universality (which might also be rendered as “textuality”) that provides the context for situating his own subject position in relation to modernity. For Akutagawa, “literature” mediated between the particular world of the individual and the universal world of modernity, serving as the conceptual basis for his self-consciousness. What we find in his late writings is the disintegration of this ideology of literature, together with its capacity to organize a consciousness of modernity. A number of critics have analyzed the fragmentation of identity in Akutagawa’s late writings. Dennis Washburn, for example, situates Akutagawa’s writings in an overall literary response to the sense of “cultural discontinuity” generated by modernization. Washburn sees the late writings as a failed attempt to transcend the multiple narrative perspectives that had

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been a significant element of his earlier writings, exemplified in works such as “Kesa and Morito” (Kesa to Morito, ) and “In a Grove” (Yabu no naka, ).12 I would like to suggest, however, that this dissolution of self in Akutagawa’s late works can be situated in relation to the dissolution of a particular conception of modernity organized around the institution of literature.This dissolution is manifested in practice as the fragmentation of literary form in Akutagawa’s last works, and in theory as his concept of the plotless novel (hanashi no nai shosetsu).13 What Inoue and others referred to as “intellectualism” was a specific, ideological conception of literature. Inoue himself recognized this connection. In the same essay, he wrote: “Akutagawa’s Cogwheels may have indeed been, as people say, the literature of defeat. Yet, five years after Akutagawa’s death, what surrounds us today is no longer even the literature of defeat. It is only the defeat of literature.”14 In other words,Akutagawa’s death may have represented the end of an aestheticized and disengaged literature, but by the early to mid-s, the literature of the left was itself facing collapse owing to both internal and external forces.The “defeat of literature” was thus a crisis for not only the “aesthetic school” (geijutsu-ha) but also Marxist writers, whose practice was necessarily premised on a faith in the political value of literary expression. As a category of literary history, modernism remains a highly ambiguous one that is often reduced to vague questions of style and formal experimentation.The internal collapse of the ideology of literature in the s thus may offer a way to define modernism more specifically. In fiction, this collapse is expressed as a dismantling of the generic structures of novelistic writing. Hayashi Fumiko’s Tales of Wandering, in which the distinction between poetic and prosaic language is blurred, and Kawabata Yasunari’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, which is composed of a mixture of diverse literary and nonliterary genres, are two examples. Both works explore the eroding borderlines of modern culture within the fluid context of urban space, and in both cases, the representation of modern culture is tied to the disintegration of literary form. It is in Akutagawa’s late writings that the connection between an ideology of literary practice and a specific consciousness of modernity among Japanese intellectuals becomes explicit.

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Disintegrating Mechanisms of Subjectivity

The Plotless Novel and the Limits of Narrative The critical evaluation of Akutagawa’s late writings has been determined to a great extent by the reading of what is known as the “plotless novel” debate between Akutagawa and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro in . This exchange between the two writers provided a context for analyzing the transformation in Akutagawa’s writing in the s from primarily historical fiction to works treating contemporary and personal themes.Typically, critics read this shift as moving from aestheticism to an embrace of the Inovel, a move from entirely fictionalized subject matter to autobiographical and confessional forms.15 Consequently, Akutagawa’s late writings become merely different manifestations of confessional fiction (and thus another regression into the realm of Taisho literature, for which the I-novel as a genre is exemplary). But Akutagawa’s “plotless novel” in fact reflected a loss of faith in narrative and especially in the possibilities of self-expression and self-representation in literature. The debate began with Tanizaki’s denunciation of fictional works that do nothing more than describe the author’s personal experience. In an echo of Oscar Wilde’s attack on realist and naturalist literature in “The Decay of Lying,” Tanizaki wrote that he enjoyed reading only those works of literature that were composed of “lies.”16 What he admired most in a novel was its plot (suji), which he defined as “architectural beauty,” the ability to assemble in “geometric” fashion a variety of complex story lines: The appeal of plot, in other words, is the method of construction, the appeal of structure—an architectural beauty. It cannot be said that there is no artistic value in this. (Material and construction are inherently different questions.) Of course, this is not the only value, but essentially in literature, it is the novel that is most able to maintain a structural aesthetic.To exclude the appeal of plot is to discard the special privilege of the novel form. And what is most lacking in the Japanese novel is this capacity to construct, the ability to put together geometrically variously interwoven plot lines.17

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In distinguishing between material (zairyo) and construction (kumitate),Tanizaki was careful to emphasize that by “plot,” he was not referring simply to the narrative or story. Tanizaki later asked whether Akutagawa’s opposition to his position was due to his confusing plot with raw material.There may in fact have been a fundamental difference between the meaning of Tanizaki’s “plot” and Akutagawa’s “story” (hanashi), as Karatani Kojin maintains.18 At the core of Tanizaki’s argument is a distinction—similar to that providing the foundation for the Russian formalist theory of prose— between the original material (the events of the story) and its discursive presentation in a work of literature, which constitutes a structure distinct from the story itself.19 In one sense, both Tanizaki and Akutagawa recognized the devaluation of “story” in modern fiction.The real issue was not the “content” of a novel but differing versions of literary formalism.The underlying concern can be framed as the contrast between construction and deconstruction, between the creation of architectural beauty and the dismantling of literary form. In response to Tanizaki, Akutagawa staked out the ground for a “pure” literature (which he defined as the absence of popular or vulgar [tsuzoku] elements).20 In “Literary,All Too Literary” (Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeiteki na), he argued for the merits of the “novel without a story.”Although this is not necessarily the highest form of fiction, he wrote, the quality or even the presence of a story does not determine the aesthetic value of the novel.Akutagawa was careful to distinguish this kind of novel from the I-novel: Of course the novel without a proper story is not merely a novel depicting the details of one’s personal life. It is, among all novels, the closest one to poetry.Yet it is also much closer to the novel than the prose poem. . . .To cite once more the example of painting, a painting without dessin [figuration] cannot exist (with the exception of the several works of Kandinsky entitled Improvisations). Some paintings, however, are given life more by color than by dessin.This fact is proved by the several paintings by Cézanne that have fortunately made their way to Japan. I am interested in works of fiction (ARZ :) that are similar to these paintings.

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In defining the “plotless novel” as the absence of a “vulgar” interest aroused by the narrated events themselves, Akutagawa seems to be critiquing not only popular fiction but also certain forms of autobiographical fiction that typically were based on generating an (“vulgar”) interest in the details of the author’s life. Instead, what is essential to the novel,Akutagawa writes, is what he terms a “poetic spirit,” defined as “lyric poetry in the broadest sense” (ARZ :). Both Tanizaki and later commentators discovered contradictions in Akutagawa’s argument, especially in the ambiguity of the term “poetic spirit.”21 Akutagawa himself recognized that his assertions often lacked a persuasive force. In one sense, however, the internal contradictions in Akutagawa’s position merely reflect his understanding of the complexity of the novel and what it means to proclaim the purity of this most impure of literary genres. Akutagawa’s concept of the plotless novel can be situated in the broad context of modernism. As Saeki Shoichi has explained, the debate between Akutagawa and Tanizaki paralleled contemporary discussions of the novel in Europe among such writers as E. M. Forster,Virginia Woolf, and André Gide.22 More generally, Akutagawa’s questioning of the novel reflects the modernist self-criticism of artistic form, a tendency toward defining artistic modes that is a central characteristic of European modernism.This self-criticism is expressed, for example, in Paul Valéry’s conception of “pure poetry” or in the theories of abstraction offered by painters such as Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. Clement Greenberg outlined an influential theory of modern art based on the reduction of the different arts to their essential characteristics and the eradication of all effects not emanating from them. His definition of modernism as a type of “self-criticism” in which each sphere of art “criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized,” has served as the dominant account of modern art.23 Greenberg described, for example, the movement toward “purity” in modernism:“Guiding themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, by a notion of purity derived from the example of music, the avant-garde arts have in the last fifty years achieved a purity and a radical delimitation of their fields of activity for which there is no previous example in the history of cul-

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ture.The arts lie safe now, each within its “legitimate” boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy.”24 According to Greenberg, the modernist progression toward abstraction was an attempt to eliminate the orientation toward “literature” that had dominated each of the arts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In painting, this rejection of literature was expressed as an emphasis on “flatness,” on the two-dimensional plane of the canvas serving as the definitive characteristic of the art form. As Greenberg also pointed out, a similar procedure can be found in modernist literature itself. Thus Valéry, defining the essence of poetry as an effect of language, presented the notion of a “pure poetry” that would be cleansed of all prosaic—that is, practical—aspects of language. Gide, in turn, described the concept of the pure novel as an attempt to “purge the novel of all elements that do not belong specifically to the novel.”25 This modernist assertion of artistic purity provides a context for understanding Akutagawa’s claim that a novel without a story is the purest form of fiction. Akutagawa related the pure novel to modernist art, specifically to the movement toward abstraction from Cézanne to Kandinsky.26 For Akutagawa, the eradication of plot from the novel paralleled the removal of figuration (dessin) from painting.The notion of color and line as the essence of modernist painting is equivalent to Akutagawa’s notion of the “poetic spirit” as the essence of the novel. In fact, however,Akutagawa’s argument is more complex, for what he designates as “purity” does not describe the essentialization of the novel as a genre but, rather, its destruction.The very use of the term “poetic spirit” to define what is most pure in fiction already suggests, ironically, a transgression of generic boundaries. Indeed, Akutagawa extended his account of the novel beyond the theorists of the I-novel and beyond other formalist accounts of literature when he wrote that the plotless novel represents nothing less than the negation of the genre. Citing the French novelist Jules Renard as an example of a writer who had written this kind of work,Akutagawa maintained:“If, as some critics assert, Cézanne is the destroyer of painting, then Renard is also the destroyer of the novel” (ARZ :). Although critics tend to read in Akutagawa’s theory of the plotless novel a defense of pure literature or the acceptance of an ideology of personal fiction

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that essentialized (in both generic and cultural terms) the Japanese novel, it actually is a rejection of the conventional terms of fictional writing.That is, Akutagawa’s concept of “purity” ultimately signifies the negation of the category of the novel. Although Akutagawa tried to reevaluate the contributions of poets to the construction of the language of modern literature, his “poetic spirit” does not refer to specific poetic works or poets but, rather, to a general literary category opposed to prose—in the same way that Valéry opposed poetic to prosaic (practical) language. When Tanizaki complained that Akutagawa had failed to define adequately the meaning of “poetic spirit,” Akutagawa responded that “Madame Bovary, Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, and Gulliver’s Travels all are products of the poetic spirit” (ARZ :). Saeki notes the contradiction in Akutagawa’s claim: just when one might expect a clear formulation of a theory of the novel, Akutagawa cites these works from diverse genres.27 It is perhaps no accident that each work mentioned—with the exception of Flaubert’s—lies outside the framework of the modern novel. Akutagawa’s poetic spirit is neither a literal reference to poetry nor a general characterization of the I-novel. Rather, it signals Akutagawa’s resistance to the reduction of the novel—an essentially mixed genre—to a single principle of confession or autobiography. In this context, the most relevant illustration of what Akutagawa termed the “destruction of the novel” may not be the writings of Shiga Naoya (–) or other I-novelists but the diverse range and experimentation of Akutagawa’s own late work. In the last months of his life, for example, he produced works in a multiplicity of genres. They include those classified as watakushi shosetsu (Cogwheels and “Mirage” [Shinkiro]); the fictional story “The House of Genkaku” (Genkaku sanbo); a fragmentary text that he called an “autobiographical esquisse” (A Fool’s Life); a satire that he modeled on Gulliver’s Travels (Kappa); two experimental film scenarios, “Temptation” (Yuwaku) and “Asakusa Park” (Asakusa koen); a “sketch” of Tokyo (“Honjo Ryogoku”); and various critical essays. including his most important critical works,“The Western Man” (Saiho no hito) and “Literary, All Too Literary”; a series of aphorisms,“Ten Needles” (Juppon no hari); and different forms of poetry, including tanka and haiku.

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Akutagawa had always used a variety of linguistic styles in his early works, but they had more or less obeyed the demands of the short story form.These late writings, however, blurred the boundaries of genre, dissolving into a multiplicity of forms. Rather than representing any simple sense of “defeat” or an uncritical conversion to the I-novel, Akutagawa’s output in the final months of his life was an active exploration of different avenues of literary expression and different modes of representation.28 In this sense, Akutagawa’s reference to himself toward the end of his life as a “poet/journalist” was a historical reduction and dismantling of the category of the novel into disparate genres. Karatani has argued that Natsume Soseki’s use of the eighteenthcentury satire form in his I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, – ) constituted a critique of the hegemonic solidification of the modern novel in Japan. According to Karatani, Soseki employed a multiplicity of styles and genres in this single work,“at a time when different genres and writing styles that had existed since the Edo period were being eradicated through the consolidation of the new style called genbun-itchi.”29 In his last period of literary output,Akutagawa also revived the satire form in Kappa. Yoshida Seiichi has written that there were no precedents for this type of satirical novel in modern Japanese literature, with its privileging of realism, yet Akutagawa’s work can be considered a reference not only to Gulliver’s Travels but also to Soseki’s work.30 Although critics tend to ignore or discount the satirical aspects of Kappa and to place it into the category of self-expression, it is clear that by using the satire form and exploring other forms of literary expression, Akutagawa was registering his own critique of the reduction of the essence of fiction into the principle of confession or autobiography. In contrast to Soseki, whose critique of the novel came near the beginning of the modern novel’s history in Japan,Akutagawa’s resistance occurred at the other end of the novel’s development.Akutagawa’s resistance was directed against the discourse of the I-novel, which repressed the consciousness of literary form (through the rejection of fictional technique) and condensed the essence of prose fiction into an imaginary, privileged access to internal reality. Akutagawa’s negation of plot can be understood, in part, as an evocation of Soseki’s concept of shaseibun (sketching), which, as Karatani points

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out, Soseki defined according to its lack of plot, thereby opposing it to the form of the novel.31 What Akutagawa designated as the “purest form of the novel” can thus be distinguished from junbungaku (pure or high literature), which itself emerged as reaction to the upheavals in literary form in the s. Akutagawa recognized the novel (shosetsu) to be an essentially heterogeneous (zappaku) form. In “Literary,All Too Literary,” he states: “The reason that I write shosetsu is because they have the capacity to subsume everything, and I can throw anything I want into them” (ARZ :–). Akutagawa’s theory of the plotless novel reveals his awareness of the dialectic between purification and destruction at the core of modernist discourse: any attempt to recover a true, essential form of the novel would merely reveal it as an amalgamation of different genres.The logical extension of Akutagawa’s attempt to define the “purity” of the novel is in fact its destruction.

The Collapse of Genre If Akutagawa’s “novel without story” is not the reduction of the novel to confessional fiction but a critique of literary genre, the most relevant illustration of this concept may be A Fool’s Life, which explicitly blurs the distinctions among genres.The work was originally presented as an autobiography, but Akutagawa’s use of the third-person pronoun and almost total elimination of proper names locates the work on an ambiguous borderline between autobiography and fiction, between the specificity of reference and the creation of an imaginary narrative. Ultimately, A Fool’s Life is an unclassifiable work, a mixture of diverse genres that contains aspects of the autobiography, prose poem, lyric, short story, confessional novel, film scenario, and aphorism. On the first page of the manuscript, Akutagawa originally identified the work as an “autobiographical esquisse.”The French word, meaning “sketch,” signals the foreignness of the work, the impossibility of fitting it into any familiar category of writing (except, perhaps, as a distorted translation of shaseibun).Akutagawa eventually crossed out even this designation, revealing his ultimate inability to name the work’s genre.

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A Fool’s Life consists of fifty-one brief, numbered, and titled segments about significant episodes in Akutagawa’s life. Structurally, it is similar to his aphoristic work “The Words of a Petty Man” (Shuju no kotoba), also composed of titled fragments.This aphoristic fragmentation is a prominent feature of a number of Akutagawa’s late writings, including “The Western Man” and “Literary, All Too Literary.” A Fool’s Life also appears to incorporate formal elements of the film scenario; it is, in effect, constructed of a series of isolated, momentary scenes of his life that have been joined together.32 Nonetheless, its structure reveals Akutagawa’s inability to create a novelistic narrative of his life. He instead had to reduce the story to a succession of separate moments in time stitched together to form a somewhat disjointed, patchwork personal history.The main technique Akutagawa uses in this work is montage, a series of rapid shifts between seemingly random events, without reference to any sense of logical or linear development.The material body of the text—the graphic laceration of the work and the prominent blank spaces between the scenes— represents the complete breakdown of Akutagawa’s faith in the capacity of fiction, and narrative in general, as a vehicle of selfexpression. In ,Akutagawa experimented with writing for film in two works: “Temptation” (translated by Arthur Waley as “San Sebastian”) and “Asakusa Park.”An earlier work,“Shadow” (Kage, ), also incorporates in its structure aspects of the film scenario.The general principle of montage seems to have had a significant impact on his late writings. In effect,Akutagawa discovered in the film scenario a process that violently fragments literature, and montage here represents literature’s dismemberment into a series of short, discrete units connected according to their contiguity rather than any linear logic of plot development. For Akutagawa, montage in the literary text was thus a destructive, rather than a constructive, principle, performing the literal dismantling of the novel form. A Fool’s Life opens with a well-known episode entitled “The Age” (Jidai), set in the second floor of the bookstore Maruzen in Tokyo, an important site in the representation of the cultural space of modern Japan and its relation to the West:33

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It was the second floor of a certain bookstore.Twenty years old, he climbed a Western-style ladder leaning against the shelves, searching for new books. Maupassant, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw,Tolstoy. . . . Soon, dusk fell, yet he continued to read the titles of the books intently.They seemed less a row of books than the finde-siècle itself. Nietzsche, Verlaine, the brothers Goncourt, Dostoevsky, Hauptman, Flaubert. . . . Fighting the gathering darkness, he read their names. But on their own, the books began to sink into the melancholy shadows. He gave up at last and began to climb down the Western-style ladder. Just then, a bare light bulb suddenly clicked on above his head. He stayed on the ladder and looked down at the clerks and customers through the row of books. They seemed strangely small. And so wretched. “Life cannot compare to a single line of Baudelaire.” He stayed like this for a time, watching them from atop the (ARZ :) ladder. . . . This scene provides a vivid image of the connection between literature (or texts in general) and modernity in Akutagawa’s early writing. Literature (reduced here to the fetish of proper names) organizes an entire world.The structure of this space mimics that of the Panorama Hall, with the observer placed in the center of an expansive spectacle that extends across the walls around him. In this scene, the entry into this universal world also signifies the construction of a specifically modern subjectivity based on the intellectual’s privileged access to other cultures. The protagonist achieves this transcendence via the “Western-style ladder,” a technology that carries him into a world marked by light (and, figuratively, enlightenment) far above the dark and wretched world below.The space is thus organized according to an opposition between the world of the imagination and intellectual activity, on the one hand, and the economic realm of labor and consumption (“clerks and customers”), on the other. The passage also undermines the distinction between the early “historical” works and the late “personal” writings. As Akutagawa himself acknowledged, if the former were in fact ahistorical (in that they were meant to examine particular aspects of human psy-

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chology and not to re-create a specific age), his most autobiographical work opens with an explicitly historical characterization. Isoda Koichi has pointed out the importance of the title of this episode, that it was the age itself, and not Akutagawa, that was its primary subject.34 As this example indicates, his personal writings were thoroughly historical. For Akutagawa, therefore, literature organized a consciousness of modern culture and framed his own relation to the West; literature provided access to a world of “universality.” It is this ideology of literary practice, its capacity to organize a consciousness of a universal modern culture, that disintegrates in his late writings. By the end of A Fool’s Life,Akutagawa has registered his inability to maintain such clear distinctions between art and life. In the forty-ninth installment he writes: Using all his remaining strength, he tried to write his autobiography.Yet it was no easy task.This was due to his still lingering sense of pride and skepticism, as well as his calculations of profit and loss. He could not help feeling contempt for himself. At the same time, he could not help but think that “everyone, underneath a layer of skin, is alike.”. . . After finishing A Fool’s Life, he accidentally discovered a stuffed swan in a used goods store. Although it stood with its head raised, even its yellowed wings had been eaten by insects. He thought of his entire life and felt tears and cruel laughter welling up inside. All that remained for him was either madness or suicide. (ARZ :)

This passage contains an impossible moment when the work announces its own completion (“After finishing A Fool’s Life”). With this gesture of self-reference, the text seems to fold back onto itself, even though it is unable to close the circle. It reveals Akutagawa’s inability to provide closure to the work, to close the gap between writing and experience, and it remains essentially open, unfinished. If Akutagawa’s last works do in fact describe the “dissolution of the self,” as critics have noted, this process is tied to the disintegration of literary form.This is not because the fragmentation

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of the literary text was the most suitable means for representing the breakdown of consciousness but because for Akutagawa that consciousness was, from the beginning, inextricably linked to the concept of the literary text.

The Machinery of Self-Consciousness In A Fool’s Life, Akutagawa depicted the formation of his sense of self (routed through the modern philosophy and literature of the West) as a specific kind of technics. In the chapter entitled “Artificial Wings” (Jinko no tsubasa) in A Fool’s Life, Akutagawa writes: He turned from Anatole France to the eighteenth-century philosophers. But he never approached Rousseau. This may have been due to one side of him—the side that was close already to Rousseau, the side of him that could so easily succumb to passion. Instead, he approached the other side of himself, the side that was closest to the philosopher of Candide, filled with cold rationality. At the age of twenty-nine, life no longer held any light for him.Yet Voltaire was able to supply him with artificial wings. He spread these artificial wings and soared easily into the sky. At the same time, the joys and sorrow of the world, bathed in the light of reason, disappeared beneath his eyes. Dropping ironic smiles down on the wretched [misuborashii] towns below him, he climbed straight toward the sun, through a sky without obstacles. As though he had forgotten the ancient Greek whose same artificial wings had been burned by the sun and who had finally plunged to his death (ARZ :–) in the sea. The opposition between “cold rationality” and affect frames Akutagawa’s articulation of his sense of self, and it also provides the basis for a series of other oppositions in his writing—between reason and madness, technology and nature, prose and poetry,West and East, masculinity and femininity. Like the “Western-style ladder” that in the first scene of the work allows a transcendence of the

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mundane,“wretched” world of everyday life, the artificial wings in this episode—a figure for literature, philosophy, and modernity in general—provide the foundation for an artificial construction of the self. It represents Akutagawa’s privileging of an immaterial realm of the intellect over the material realm, which, in turn, is associated with various functions of the body. For example, this opposition is made explicit in the movement from the first to the second episode of A Fool’s Life, from the intellectual and cultural space of the bookstore to the grotesque and horrific space of the mental institution. This second space is marked by corporeal images: an unpleasant bodily odor, the brains kept in glass jars. In addition, the imaginative expanse of the bookstore is contrasted with the confining and repressive space of the asylum, in which the walls outside the building are “planted with shards of broken glass” (ARZ :). In his other major work from this period, the autobiographical Cogwheels, Akutagawa develops the technological image, using it specifically to mark the breakdown of a world constituted as text. One scene in Cogwheels, set once more in the bookstore Maruzen, contrasts sharply with the opening episode of A Fool’s Life and illustrates the extent to which the construction of an alternative world of pure textuality has collapsed onto itself. The formerly protected space of the bookstore has been transformed into a site of anxiety and panic: I found Strindberg’s Legends on a shelf on the second floor of Maruzen and glanced at two or three pages.What was written there was no different from my own experience. Even more, it had a yellow cover. I returned Legends to the shelf and dragged down a heavy book at random. But in this book, there was an insert depicting a row of cogwheels that had eyes and noses, no different from human beings. (It was a collection of drawings done by madmen, assembled by a German.) I felt a rebellious feeling stir in my melancholy, and like a crazed, desperate gambler, I opened one book after another. Yet for some reason, each book had hidden in it one or more needles, either in its text or illustrations. Every book? —Even when I picked up Madame Bovary, which I had read again and

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again, I felt that I myself was none other than the petit bour(ARZ :) geois Monsieur Bovary. The center of the cultural space represented by the bookstore is now occupied by the frightening apparition of gear teeth, indicating the eruption of madness into the carefully constructed world of rationality. It is as if the inner mechanisms of the construction of subjectivity presented in the other passage is here becoming visible. It is a mechanism based, moreover, on a class identification (as petty bourgeois) that is made explicit. If Akutagawa had earlier discovered himself as a reflection of the (Western) other, this process has now been reversed—every Western text in the bookstore has now been transformed into a reflection of himself. The bounded and ordered world of literature found in the first episode of A Fool’s Life has disintegrated in this work into an open and indefinite urban landscape. The original title of the work, A Night in Tokyo (Tokyo no yoru), suggests the importance to Akutagawa of the representation of city space in this work.Although his writings are generally not known for their depictions of Tokyo, the city here plays an important role in framing the narrator’s descent into madness. The space through which he wanders is made up of multiple textual allusions, as a number of critics have pointed out. Yet rather than forming an enclosed container for subjectivity, as in the bookstore of A Fool’s Life, the city creates fluid and unstable significations and is a source of paranoia for the narrator. That is, his experience of the city is labeled as an acute consciousness that everything signifies, that almost all objects function as signs. They may be coded, for example, according to color: he is haunted by yellow taxis, the yellow cover of Strindberg’s book, the title of the poetry collection Red Light, the red dress of a Westerner, sepia-colored ink, Black and White whiskey. These colors represent the disintegration of the world and the structures of society into a collection of signs.According to Akutagawa,“I began to feel that everything was a lie. Politics, industry, art, science—all these appeared to me then as nothing but a multicolored enamel concealing the horror of life” (ARZ :). What “madness” in Cogwheels signifies is precisely this inversion of

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the distinction between text and life, the collapse of the ordered textual universe and the production of random, uncontrolled flows of signification. The image of the haguruma—literally “toothed wheels”—evokes various aspects of orality, including language (speaking and writing) and ingestion (introjection and incorporation).A number of scenes in the work revolve around the narrator’s ingestion of food or various medications.The images of the corporeal intake of both food and drugs suggest the process of assimilating foreign culture that constitutes Japanese modernity and Akutagawa’s own formation as a writer. In fact, in one passage of “Literary, All Too Literary” dealing with the question of Japan’s “imitative” culture, Akutagawa played with the double meaning of the word shoka as both “digestion” and “assimilation.”35 In Cogwheels, food and foreign languages are linked in one early scene: at a wedding reception, where the narrator talks with a scholar of Chinese literature about the similarity of the mythical creatures of East and West, he discovers a squirming insect on the side of his dinner plate, which “evoked in my mind the English word ‘worm’” (ARZ :).The sudden emergence of this English word from the depths of the narrator’s consciousness marks the beginning of a series of interventions by foreign languages throughout the work. Cogwheels records the progressive disintegration of the narrator’s speech into a number of European languages, including English and French. On the way back to his hotel room, he overhears a bellhop saying the words “All right” in English. Once in his room, he tries to work on the manuscript of a short story he has been writing, but the only words that emerge from his pen are “all right,” which he writes mechanically over and over again. In a later scene, still in the hotel room, he is called to the telephone, but the only sound coming through the receiver is the word “mole,” which he immediately translates into the French la mort.At the end of the work, when he is walking through the streets of a small village and comes across “the rotting corpse of a mole,” he reads the signs (routed through different semiotic registers) of his own impending death:“With every step I grew more anxious that something was targeting me” (:). The narrator’s mental collapse is signaled specifically by a breakdown of his linguistic capacity.The eruption of foreign languages

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in his consciousness is thus accompanied by a loss of his mother tongue, which becomes manifest when he meets a friend in a Tokyo café: “It’s been a while. Since the dedication of the memorial to Shu Shunsui, I think.” He lit his cigar and spoke to me across the marble table. “That’s right. Since that Shushun . . .” For some reason I found myself unable to pronounce the words Shu Shunsui correctly. Since they were Japanese words, (ARZ :–) it made me a little uneasy. When the friend later asks him about his sleeplessness, the narrator finds himself unable to pronounce the last syllable of the word “insomnia” (fuminsho) and says: “It’s only to be expected from the son of a madwoman” (:). For Akutagawa, the madness that he fears he has inherited from his mother is accompanied by the loss of his capacity to use his native (mother) language, specifically its disassembly into a variety of foreign languages. Similarly, at the end of Kappa, Patient ’s madness is marked by the sudden eruption of the alien, unintelligible Kappa language into his speech. Throughout his career, Akutagawa’s writings reflected a consciousness of language as an artificial medium. In the section of “Literary, All Too Literary” entitled “Our Prose” (Bokura no sanbun),Akutagawa elaborated on his resistance to the exclusive use of colloquial language, which had become the dominant form of fictional writing in the Taisho period. In response to Sato Haruo’s statement about the superiority of colloquial writing, Akutagawa noted: “Of course, it’s not that I don’t have the desire to ‘write as one speaks.’Yet, at the same time there is another side of me that wants to ‘speak as one writes.’As far as I know, Natsume Soseki was truly an author who spoke as he wrote. . . . As I said before, there are authors who write as they speak. But when will an author who speaks as he writes appear on this solitary Far Eastern island?” (ARZ :). This passage expresses skepticism of any concept of natural speech. Rather than trying to reduce writing to any supposedly unmediated economy of colloquial language,Akutagawa is more interested in a form of speech that would be as complex, as

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artificial, as writing. Perhaps as much as any other writer of this period, he was conscious of the historicity of modern literary Japanese, crafted through both the successive contributions of different writers and the influx of foreign languages (via translation). Akutagawa’s works are generally characterized by a textual density, an opaqueness of language resisting any smooth transfer of meaning between author and reader. In the stories “The Death of a Believer” (Hokyonin no shi, ) and “The Legend of St. Christopher” (Kirishitohoro shoninden, ), for example,Akutagawa adapted the language of the sixteenth-century vernacular renditions of the Heike monogatari and Aesop’s Fables.36 In “The Enlightenment Murder” (Kaika no satsujin, ), he employed the archaic style of early Meiji translations of European literature. Akutagawa inscribed linguistic styles from different periods of Japanese history into these and other works.The use of historical language may lend a certain air of authenticity to the historical fiction, but it simultaneously calls attention to their status as fabrications (as translations). In Cogwheels, this artificial, constructed language unravels into a variety of foreign languages. It is like a translation in reverse, as though modern Japanese were being separated into its various foreign components.The eruption of foreign languages in the text is matched by the appearance of Westerners at certain moments throughout the text—for example, in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel and in the seaside town at the end of the story.This dissolution is also figured in the work through technological imagery.The narrator is threatened by various manifestations of modern technology, beginning with the spectral image of the translucent gearteeth that fill his field of vision from time to time, blocking out the landscape. Akutagawa himself had complained of these hallucinations in a letter to poet and psychiatrist Saito Mokichi (–), expressing his fear that he would spend the rest of his days in a mental hospital.37 In Cogwheels, the gears appear suddenly before his eyes at several points: “Soon I noticed in my field of vision a strange thing. A strange thing? It was a semitransparent cogwheel spinning ceaselessly. I had experienced this a number of times before. Gradually the cogwheels increase in number and partially close off my field of vision” (ARZ :). For Akutagawa, the

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appearance of the cogwheels seems to signify an imminent descent into madness, a fear reflected in his account of the madman’s illustration of human gear-teeth that he discovers at Maruzen.38 As this quotation indicates, the very image of the cogwheels generates a sense of continual motion, which also characterizes other aspects of the narrative, from the opening passages consisting of the narrator’s speeding from automobile to train through the countryside, to his extended wanderings in the streets of Tokyo. In addition to the cogwheels, other threatening images of technology in the work include the train that has killed his brother-in-law, the yellow taxis that always seem to crash when he rides in them (the color yellow is always coded as threatening to the narrator), the telephone lines at the Imperial Hotel transmitting warnings of his own death, and the sudden and shocking appearance of an airplane in the sky. Near the end of the work, Akutagawa tries to describe to his wife’s family the contradictions in his character: “It’s like the two poles of electricity. In any case, it combines things that are entirely opposite” (ARZ :–). It is at that point that the narrator is startled by the roar of an airplane that flies overhead. The airplane and other images of silver wings are an explicit reference to Icarus’s “artificial wings,” which in A Fool’s Life signified Akutagawa’s self-representation. In Cogwheels, the narrator first hears the wings in his hotel room:“No one passed in the corridor in the middle of the night.Yet, from time to time I could hear the sound of wings outside the door” (ARZ :). Later he sees a signboard in front of a store that evokes a sense of anxiety:“It was a trademark depicting an automobile tire with wings. This trademark made me recall the ancient Greek who relied on artificial wings” (:). In the hotel lobby, the only cigarettes on sale are the “Airship” brand:“Once more the artificial wings floated before my eyes” (:). At the house of his wife’s family, when he is startled by the sudden appearance of the airplane in the sky, his brother-inlaw tells him about “airplane sickness,” in which “the people riding in those airplanes breathe only high-altitude air, and they gradually become unable to stand the air down here” (:). At the very end of the work, the hallucinatory vision of the cogwheels has been transformed into an image of metallic wings:

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After about thirty minutes, I lay down in a second-floor room and closed my eyes tightly, trying to endure a terrible headache.Then, on the back of my eyelids, I began to see the image of a wing, with silver feathers folded like scales. It was clearly visible on the membrane. I opened my eyes to look at the ceiling, and confirming that there was no such image on the ceiling, I closed my eyes once more.Yet the silver wing was clearly visible in the darkness. Suddenly I remembered that an automobile in which I had recently ridden had wings (ARZ :) on its radiator cap. The wings are associated throughout the work with images of modern technology, a reminder of Akutagawa’s own technologies of self-creation. Ultimately, the phantasmatic cogwheels figure the gears of a disintegrating machine of subjectivity, the collapse of the literary apparatus that had supported and sustained Akutagawa’s representation of the self. Whereas Akutagawa’s account of subject formation in A Fool’s Life seemed to be routed through “imitation” of the West, this principle of imitation (or reflection) in Cogwheels has the opposite effect of generating an internal division of consciousness.The narrator is thus haunted by a doubling of his identity, by the appearance of a doppelgänger, which Akutagawa had understood as a sign of one’s impending death.39 Soon after hearing the word “mole”/mort through the telephone, the narrator confronts his own image in a mirror: In the midst of my anxiety, I also sensed something humorous. Where did this amusement come from? I did not know the answer myself. I stood in front of a mirror for the first time in a long while and faced my reflection directly. Of course, my reflection was also smiling. As I stared at this reflection, I thought of my second self. Fortunately I had never been able to see my second self—what the Germans call a Doppelgänger [German in original]. However, my friend K’s wife, who had become a movie actress in America, had spied my second self in a corridor at the Imperial Theater. . . . Perhaps death would (ARZ :) come to my second self rather than to me.

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In this confrontation with his reflected image,Akutagawa’s sense of “amusement” (okashisa) and the smile of his reflection seem to express an ironic consciousness by which his identity is divided in two. Akutagawa had written about the figure of the doppelgänger before, in “Two Letters” (Futatsu no tegami, ) and “Shadow,” and it is associated with an important theme of his literature.The double seems to express an anxiety of being imitated (or of imitating others), which, as the invocation of German in the quoted passage suggests, also involves an uneasy relationship to other cultures and other languages.At the same time, the double functions as a literal manifestation of a fragmented consciousness left in the wake of the disintegration of the universal space of literary practice.

Modernism and the Crisis of Subjectivity Although Abe Jiro described the Taisho ideology of “cultivation” as the rejection of a localized conception of culture in favor of a universal one, the desire for universality also seems to have been coextensive with the attempt to define a particular, national subjectivity. In describing the discursive space of Taisho, for example, Karatani explains that it was simultaneously characterized by cosmopolitanism and a withdrawal into interiority, that the desire for universality and the erasure of the consciousness of exteriority were not contradictory but mutually dependent.40 In literature, the genre that most explicitly manifested this double orientation was the I-novel. An example can be found in the writings of Mushanokoji Saneatsu, who claimed to be, above all else, a citizen of the world while delineating a space of absolute, narcissistic interiority in his literary works.41 When discourse on the I-novel first began in the mid-s, this dialectic between cosmopolitanism and interiority collapsed, and the I-novel was written into an indigenous literary history, an essentialization of Japanese culture. Louis Althusser’s definition of subjectivity in terms of the ideological relation of an individual to an external, dominant authority provides a framework for understanding a particular, national subjectivity through the incorporation of a concept of universality. For Althusser, ideology is neither worldview nor false con-

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sciousness but, rather, what constitutes the subject itself: the glue linking the individual to the social. Drawing on the psychoanalytic account of ego formation,Althusser thus believed that subjectivity is constituted by the internalization of an external authority (whose material manifestations include state, religious, and educational institutions).The primary instance of this constitution of the subject takes place on the level of language—for example, in the act of naming (the imposition of the patronym), which marks an individual’s entry into the symbolic (or social) world.42 This specular definition of subjectivity (as in Lacan’s mirror-stage, the subject misrecognizes himself or herself in the reflection of the other Subject) also provides an analytical framework for situating the relationship between the universal (cosmopolitanism) and the particular (national subjectivity) in Taisho discourse. In this context, the specific Japanese identity emerges only through its reflection in the panoramic, universal space of the modern. The articulation of a unique cultural identity through the massive internalization of other cultures was demonstrated by Okakura Kakuzo in The Ideals of the East (). In his reworking of the Hegelian dialectic, the “particular” (a unique Japanese identity) is produced through an internalization and overcoming of the universal (which, for Okakura, means Asia), not the other way around.43 Thus he posits Asia (which he reduces to China and India, eliding Korea) as a “universal” world, while Japan’s identity emerges as a repository or storehouse of this universality.44 For Okakura, the basis for a unique Japanese identity is not in any indigenous culture but in the capacity to maintain and preserve, as “museum of Asiatic civilization,” the artifacts of other civilizations.45 In effect, the concept of uniqueness is based on the absence of an originary culture, combined with a limitless capacity for assimilation. Elsewhere, Okakura writes that “vacuum is all-potent because all-containing.”46 A similar process of cultural formation is described in Akutagawa’s short story “The Smiles of the Gods” (Kamigami no bisho, ), which, as Karatani pointed out, is also a formulation (although in negative form) of the uniqueness of Japanese culture.47 While for Okakura the cultural identity of Asia exists in the realm of art, for Akutagawa it is specifically literature that can effect a dialectical

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overcoming of exteriority, which is presented in the story as the “remaking” of monotheism (singularity) into polytheism (plurality). Set in early-seventeenth-century Japan, “The Smiles of the Gods” opens as the missionary Padre Organtino strolls on the grounds of Nanbanji, a Catholic church in Kyoto. He feels an inexplicable fascination for the “beautiful Japanese landscape” yet is also disturbed by the mysterious power that he senses in the natural world there, a power that he feels may have the capacity to resist his own all-powerful God. As he prays for the strength to overcome these indigenous spirits, a bizarre apparition suddenly appears before him in the cathedral, a “Japanese Bacchanalia” of the native gods: Before his eyes, the human figures grew ever more distinct. They formed a crowd of primitive men and women, the likes of which he had never seen before. Threaded jewels hung from their necks, and they laughed with joy. As their forms came into focus, the countless roosters filling the inner sanctum of the church crowed even louder than before. At the same time the wall of the inner sanctum—the wall that was painted with an image of St. Miguel—was swallowed into the night like mist. In its place— The Japanese Bacchanalia flowed in like a mirage before the dumbstruck Organtino. He saw a group of Japanese in ancient dress form a circle in the glow of a red bonfire, passing cups of saké among them. As Organtino watches, the Japanese spirits perform a scene from ancient mythology in which the sun goddess Amaterasu is lured from her hiding place in a cave, restoring light to the world. It is a scene that represents for Organtino a vision of “sexual passion itself,” of intoxication and the abandonment of self.48 The following day, Organtino encounters an old man who turns out to be one of the native spirits. He explains to Organtino why his “Deus” will not be able to conquer Japan: Deus is not the only one to come to this country from afar. Confucius, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, and many other philosophers came to this country from China. Moreover, at the time

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this country had only just been born. In addition to the Way, these philosophers also brought many items, such as silk from the kingdom of Wu or jewels from the Ch’in dynasty. They even brought miraculous writing, so much more precious than any of those treasures.Yet was China able to conquer us? Take the example of writing. Rather than conquer us, it was we who conquered writing. There was a native poet named Kakinomoto Hitomaro that I once knew. . . . In order to record his poetry, Hitomaro used Chinese writing.This writing was not used for the purpose of meaning but for sound. Even after the character for vessel arrived,the word boat was always boat.Otherwise, our language may have been transformed into Chinese. The spirit explains to Organtino that the power of the Japanese gods resides not in the “power to destroy” but in the “power to remake” (ARZ :–). The transformation of the missionary’s name in the course of the work from Padre Organtino (in roman letters) to Orugantiino (in the phonetic katakana script) to Urugan Pateren (in Chinese characters) symbolizes his eventual assimilation into the Japanese landscape. A number of critics have read “The Smiles of the Gods” as a reference to the process of modernization in Japan and an appreciation of a native culture that is able to assimilate anything from the outside. The position of the narrative voice remains ambiguous. The last lines of the work mention “our black ships,” as if it is being narrated from the Westerner’s perspective. Susan Napier, for example, remarked that the story is filtered through his perceptions and that the work presents Japan itself as exotic.49 Akutagawa, with his reference to a mythological past, does seem to express a cultural and discursive basis for a Japanese national community. It is important that in this piece, it is specifically literature (in the figure of Hitomaro) that maintains the ability to mediate between outside and inside, between the universal world of a monotheistic religion and the multiplicity of indigenous spirits. Japanese culture is produced as an act of poetic translation and through the incorporation of a foreign writing system. The “bacchanalia” of “The Smile of the Gods” is an archetype of the cultural space represented by the bookstore in A Fool’s Life.

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A similar cultural space—marked by intoxication and the mixture of cultures—is represented by the Rokumeikan in Akutagawa’s story “The Ball” (Butokai, ).The Rokumeikan, a Western-style building in Tokyo that was used to stage social gatherings for the aristocracy and foreign dignitaries, served as a symbol of the assimilation of European manners by the Japanese elite.The work describes a fictionalized encounter between the seventeen-yearold protagonist, Akiko, and a French naval officer who is revealed at the end of the story to be the French author Pierre Loti;Akutagawa, in fact, used Loti’s work Japoneries d’automne () as the basis for the story. The characteristics of this cultural space are encapsulated in the following scene, with its markers of different languages and cultural icons: From time to time, he [Loti] whispered flattering words in French into her ear. As she responded to his kind words with embarrassed smiles, she glanced around the ballroom where they danced. Beneath the purple banner dyed with the imperial seal and the Chinese flag, with its image of a dragon with claws bared, the chrysanthemums in their vases shone among the waves of people, sometimes with a bright silver color, at other times a melancholy gold. The waves of people were fanned by the breeze of the melody of German orchestral music that flowed out like champagne.50 In this work, the cosmopolitan space of the Rokumeikan once more frames an image of Japanese modernity as a meeting ground of different cultures.Akutagawa also intentionally contrasts Akiko, who has been able to learn European manners, with the Chinese, who are depicted as exemplars of a premodern culture: “In truth, Akiko that night represented the full beauty of the Japanese girl of the Enlightenment, such that was certain to surprise the Chinese officials with their long queues” (ARZ :). Ando Hiroshi states that the structure of “The Ball” is based on the intersection of the gaze of the French officer as he looks at Akiko and Akiko’s own gaze directed at both the Frenchman and the ballroom.51 To the officer, Akiko represents an intriguing and

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exotic mixture of Japanese and European culture. For example, he wonders:“Can such a beautiful young girl as this reside after all like a doll in a house of paper and bamboo?” (ARZ :).At the same time, for Akiko the night at the Rokumeikan represents the naive excitement of an encounter with an alien culture. It is the collision of these two gazes that generates the piece’s central thematic structure. Underlying this meeting is the textual encounter between Loti and Akutagawa, between an exoticizing and orientalist discourse and the gaze that appropriates, transforms, and returns it. The bacchanalia of “The Smiles of the Gods” is also similar in structure to Nietzsche’s account of the festival of Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy, as well as Mikhail Bakhtin’s depiction of the Renaissance carnival (whose origins he traced back to the Roman saturnalia).52 For Nietzsche, the Dionysian ritual—characterized by flow, excess, and transgression—is one in which the “individual forgets himself completely” in a multitude, an intoxication in which the boundaries among individuals, and between men and animals, dissolve.“Dionysiac excitation,” he wrote,“is capable of communicating to a whole multitude this artistic power to feel itself surrounded by, and one with, a host of spirits.”53 Both Nietzsche’s Dionysian festival and Bakhtin’s carnival describe a space defined by an intermixture of different cultures, a space where different languages, races, and ideologies encounter one another and that provides the basis for the formation of modernity.Thus, for example, one of the motifs of The Birth of Tragedy (which Nietzsche wrote in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War) was the rebirth of the spirit of Greek tragedy in contemporary German music. Similarly, Akutagawa locates in sixteenth-century Japan a transitional period in which modern Japanese culture was in a process of becoming. The subject of many of Akutagawa’s historical works was the formation of modern cultural identity.Although he used a range of historical settings in these works, he seemed to be concerned primarily with periods of transition, when Japan was most open to outside influence. For example, two of his most frequently used settings are the early missionary period (represented by “The Death of a Believer,”“Temptation,” and other works) and the period of Meiji “civilization and enlightenment” (“The Ball,”“The Enlightenment Murder,” and “The Husband of the Enlightenment” [Kaika no otto,

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]).54 They describe the encounter between Japanese characters and foreign religions and customs, thus depicting the formation of a cultural space constituted through the internalization of the (Western) other. In this sense, the underlying narrative (or “plot”) of his historical writings was the process of modernization. It is the capacity of literature to organize a particular subject position that comes into question in Akutagawa’s late writings. In “Literary,All Too Literary,”Akutagawa registers a breakdown in the process of assimilating other cultures, leading to a fragmentation of consciousness: “The ‘call of the West,’ like the ‘call of the wild,’ is always on the verge of leading me elsewhere. The poet of Zarathustra, who discovered his image in Dionysus as opposed to Apollo, was truly fortunate. Having been born in modern Japan, I cannot help but feel countless divisions [bunretsu], both artistically and within myself. Can this be something limited to myself alone—I who am so easily influenced by everything?”(ARZ :). The quality of being “so easily influenced” by external cultures (the capacity for limitless imitation) is, by this point, the cause of a fragmentation of identity.The external difference among different cultures has been transposed into an internalized difference within the culture. Elsewhere in “Literary, All Too Literary,” Akutagawa defends Japanese culture against charges that it is based on only imitation (moho) without any originality of its own, a charge that has also been frequently leveled against Akutagawa himself. Every civilization, he writes, is based on “imitation,” even of itself, of its own past; thus all imitation is ultimately internal (:–). But in this passage, as Aeba Takao has found, even this internal history is absent, for Akutagawa finds himself unable to retrieve the sort of mythological past available to Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy.55 It is this fragmented consciousness of modernity that provides the context for Akutagawa’s “destruction of the novel.” In “Literary,All Too Literary” he wrote that the value of the novel (shosetsu) stems from the fact that he can put absolutely anything he wants into it, that it has the formal capacity to internalize anything.Yet in his “novel without a story,” he rejected all plot and narrativization. As his two final autobiographical works, A Fool’s Life and Cogwheels, show, this dismantling of the novel’s formal structures was not a retreat into an unproblematic economy of self-representation

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but instead a loss of faith in the capacity of literature to organize any coherent narrative of subjectivity. It is in this sense that Akutagawa’s works offer a context for analyzing modernist fiction in Japan.The subtext of the disintegration of literary form in modernist writing exemplifies the kind of crisis in subjectivity (expressed in national or more general cultural terms) that one finds in Akutagawa’s late works.As I mentioned in the introduction, in “Literature of the Lost Home,” Kobayashi Hideo identified the principal characteristic of contemporary literature in Japan as a sense of homelessness, the consciousness of the absence of a cultural “home” or origin as a ground for literary production.This articulation of cultural displacement frames the intellectual context for modernist fiction in Japan, a practice that was expressed through a dismantling of literary form but that was essentially a questioning of the borders of modernity and the limits of cultural identity. In the next chapters, I examine the writings of Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi and this sense of displacement through the representation of heterogeneous cultural topographies. This analysis of Akutagawa’s late writings may also provide a ground for discussing the complicated relationship between modernist writing and the discourse of cultural essentialism that became prominent in the following decades. Many of the modernist writers later turned to an exploration of an essentialized, indigenous cultural identity in the s. Once more,Yokomitsu is the paradigmatic case of this development. Although he led the modernist movement in literature in the s, with the publication of Melancholy Journey he withdrew into the phantasmatic landscape of an originary, indigenous culture. Kawabata Yasunari, another major figure of modernism, also retreated into an ahistorical, aestheticized natural landscape in his novel Snow Country (Yukiguni, first published in ), rejecting the representation of the urban landscape that had played a central role in his earlier works. What links the writings of the earlier period to the later one is the articulation of and response to a crisis in subjectivity.The general sense of anxiety articulated by Akutagawa developed into the rhetoric of the “crisis of spirit” mobilized in the s and early

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s, which was analyzed, for example, in Kawakami Tetsutaro’s closing remarks at the “Overcoming Modernity” conference of  as the essential conflict between Western “intellect” and Japanese “blood.”56 The desire for transcendence that characterized the discourse of this period can be seen as a reaction against the disintegrating cultural landscape explored in modernist writings, a response marked by, in Yasuda Yojuro’s formulation, a “nostalgia for a home [kokyo] that is unknown to me.”57 The problems outlined in Akutagawa’s late writings continued to resonate during this period, as reflected, for example, in the essays on the “age of anxiety” that proliferated in the early Showa period.58 The cultural discourse in the s was also directed toward reconstructing an ideology of literature that had earlier been questioned. Such an attempt to resuscitate the concept of literature can be seen in the calls in the early to mid-s for a bungei fukko (literary renaissance), a revival of the very concept of literature (and the resuscitation of the careers of a number of “Taisho” writers).59 As part of this revival, a memorial literary award was established in Akutagawa’s name in , transforming his proper name into a signifier for pure literature and institutionalizing the division between high and low fiction.60 The reconstruction of a literary ideology can also be seen in certain aspects of the Japanese Romantic movement, with its nostalgic (and ironic) evocation of a concept of poetry that would provide access to a now vanished cultural tradition. It was a reformulated conception of the “poetic spirit” that was mobilized to fill the gaps left by the disintegration of literary practice in modernist writings.61 The rhetoric of “overcoming” Akutagawa—originally proclaimed by Marxist critics—eventually slid into the rhetoric of “overcoming modernity.”As Yamagishi Gaishi (also associated with the Japanese Romantics) wrote, Akutagawa came to represent the “modern spirit” itself.62 It was not because of the characteristics associated with “Taisho literature” that Akutagawa became a symbol of modernity but because of what Akutagawa expressed as his inability “to transcend the age,” the impossibility of locating a position beyond (or, in what amounts to the same thing, before) the modern.This, for example, is also the conclusion of Inoue’s article. Noting Akutagawa’s inability to resolve the crisis of modernity, he

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stated that “only a genuinely new person standing outside modernity, a man who is truly able to call himself the enemy of modernity, a man able to negate modernity in practice, will be able to resolve this final crisis of culture.”63 Inoue located such a mythic figure in Shiga Naoya, while Akutagawa remained for him the symbol of an intellectual trapped in the conceptual parameters of modern culture. For Akutagawa, overcoming the “intellect” could indicate only a kind of madness, the shattering of consciousness and the disintegration of language as well as the world that he had constructed through language. Akutagawa himself offered no escape from this impasse; the only avenues available to him, he wrote near the end of A Fool’s Life, were “madness or suicide” (ARZ :). In Cogwheels, he also mentioned that both the “traditional spirit” and the “modern spirit” were sources of unhappiness for him (:). Caught in the marginal spaces between rationality and madness, between universality and a native cultural imaginary, in his late writings Akutagawa defined the outlines of an intellectual crisis that would haunt Japanese writers and thinkers over the coming years.

chapter 2

Topographies of Empire: Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai Firefly larvae feeding on a snail are careful not to kill it.They merely paralyze it so there will always be new flesh to eat.The attitude toward China of the great powers, beginning with the Japanese Empire, is essentially no different from the attitude of the firefly toward the snail. Akutagawa Ryunosuke

The question of the International Settlement remains the most obscure among the world’s problems and yet also contains all the questions of the future. Simply put, there is no other place in the world where the character of modernity is so clearly revealed. Yokomitsu Riichi

The Colonial Gaze In his short story “The Pale Captain” (Aoi tai-i, ), published in the year of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s death, Yokomitsu Riichi writes about a Japanese man who visits Korea after his father has died there.The work is based on Yokomitsu’s own experience (his father, a railway engineer, died in Korea in ) and is one of a series of his stories set in the Japanese colony.1 In these works, Yokomitsu, whose writings explored the fragmentation of consciousness amid the dizzying sensations of urban culture, for the first time set his literary experiments explicitly in the context of the Japanese empire.The narrative of “The Pale Captain” is punctuated by the recurring figures of Korean and Chinese drug addicts, who live in a junkyard across the street from the narrator’s mother’s house.They are described through images of destitution and without any signs of agency.Yokomitsu writes, for example: “The faces of the beggars and thieves were like smashed tiles.You never saw them smile no matter when you looked at them.They merely hung around, smoking, injecting. Sometimes they would fight among themselves with their expressionless, dull faces.”2 These characters live on the margins of the narrative, an ever present marker of the squalor of this colonial space that was a familiar aspect of Japanese travel writings on Korea as well as a key aspect of the general discourse of Japanese empire.3 At the end of the story, however, there is a significant transformation: one of the Korean addicts dies and falls on his face in the mud, leaving behind a “death mask” imprinted on the ground. In the last scene of the work, the narrator peers into the mask and discovers there an image of himself: The trembling, shaking beggar was no longer there among the heap of rubbish. Now there was merely a heap of silent waste like a dark wall. I suddenly recalled that death mask of the cripple. Now where was it? I struck a match and searched

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around in the muddiness at my feet. In the light of the match the wrinkled mud glittered like skin stained with oil and reflected my face. Then in the mud I saw one sunken mask, expressionless like a dog, with its forehead trampled in by someone’s boot. I stopped, and remained still. This was it. I dropped my match in my eagerness, then struck another, and gradually moved my face closer to the mask.Within that death mask I discovered my own contorted face. I threw the match down into the mud without thinking. I began to feel all round my own face with my hands. No matter how much I felt my own face, it was the face of the shaking beggar that was there, living, before my eyes, countless trembling faces, weaving before me, clinging and sucking like tentacles. I ran back home and went indoors. Father’s remains were staring at me.4 Yokomitsu’s story is framed by the death of father figures—both the protagonist’s father, whose death opens the story, and the “pale captain” who lives next door and whose death is announced at the very end.These symbols of authority—and, especially in the case of the captain, of national authority—are represented as either weak and ineffectual or corrupt.And with the death of the father, the son’s identity is thrown into flux.The narrator is immediately thrust into the workings of the economy, which reflects an unstable system based on continual circulation and exchange: “From that day on, my life as a creditor, my dunning life, began.”5 Ultimately, at the very end of the story, distinctions between the Koreans and Japanese are also thrown into question. In this moment, when the addict’s death mask functions as a mirror—when the colonial gaze is turned back on the subject—the borderline between self and other (and thus, center and margin) suddenly collapses. “The Pale Captain” provides a counterpoint to the literary image of modernity found in Akutagawa’s bookstore at the beginning of A Fool’s Life. In that elevated and cosmopolitan space, filled with the literary and philosophical artifacts of European modernity, there is no room for any products of East Asian civilization.As I stated in the introduction, a number of critics have suggested that the cosmopolitan subjectivity of Taisho literature was founded on

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the exclusion of questions regarding Japanese imperialism in Asia. In psychoanalytic terms, the formation of this subjectivity was based on a process of foreclosure or repudiation, an exclusion of other Asian cultures accompanied by an identification with European civilization. In some works of modernist literature in the s, however, which this study analyzes as a disintegration of this cosmopolitan space of modernity, it is possible to find a return of excluded, abjected objects. These objects haunt the writings of Yokomitsu, including “The Pale Captain” and, even more, his first novel, Shanghai (Shanhai, –).6 It was in fact Akutagawa who had, by Yokomitsu’s own account, urged the latter to visit Shanghai—where,Akutagawa said, his mind would inevitably be filled with political concerns.7 The work that resulted from Yokomitsu’s one-month stay in the Chinese city in  is an examination of national subjectivity in the context of Japan’s economic and military encroachment onto the Asian continent. The novel explores the uncertain borderlines of national subjectivity in this semicolonial space at the external borders of the nation-state, an intersection of Japanese, Chinese, European, and American interests. In particular, Shanghai offers, by way of a fractured linguistic and narrative grammar, a double inscription of Japan as an imperial power (which thus identifies it with the West) and as an Asian (non-Western) culture. Shanghai emerges in his work as a materialization of this conflict, a space that frames (as this chapter’s epigraph by Yokomitsu states) the principal conflicts underlying Japanese modernity. With the publication of Melancholy Journey beginning in the late s,Yokomitsu became one of Japan’s most prominent literary proponents of nationalism and cultural essentialism. This earlier work, however, maintains a more ambivalent engagement with the landscape of modern culture. In Shanghai, modernity is figured as a type of grotesque body, one in which the borderlines of national subjectivity blur in the expansion of global capital.The parasitical economy about which Akutagawa writes in the first epigraph is, in Yokomitsu’s novel, also a question of subjectivity. As a space of abjection, Shanghai is, for the novel’s characters, an object of both revulsion and attraction. The city, which Yokomitsu described as “waste heap,” is a container for what is necessarily excluded in the

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formation of national subjectivity but that also establishes its border. It is this borderline space of exclusion that forms the basis for Yokomitsu’s modernist topography.

The City and Sense Perception The name Shinkankakuha, or New Sensationist school, was applied by the critic Chiba Kameo to a group of young writers who had founded the journal Bungei jidai in , motivated by a general sense of rebellion against the literary establishment.8 The group had formed in the context of the influx of European avantgarde movements into Japan. Indeed,Yokomitsu claimed that the movement represented an amalgamation of these avant-gardes, including Futurism, Cubism, expressionism, Dada, symbolism, and constructivism: ”I recognize all of these,” he wrote, “as belonging to New Sensationism.”9 The connection to the European avantgardes was also acknowledged by Kawabata Yasunari, another leading figure in the group, who underscored the influence of Dada and expressionism on their writings.10 The early works published in the journal were noted for their attention to the phenomena of urban culture—speed, technology, city space—which were expressed through the use of unconventional grammatical structures and tropes, including fragmented sentences and montage constructions. Initially, New Sensationist writings were known primarily for their style.The first lines that Yokomitsu published in Bungei jidai— the opening to his short story “Heads and Stomachs” (Atama narabi ni hara, )—became the focal point of a well-known polemic:“It is high noon.The packed superexpress train ran at full speed.The small stations by the tracks were ignored like stones.”11 The opening lines are paradigmatic in their emphasis on speed and technology, but the personification of the mechanical object drew perhaps the most attention. The passage represents the projection of human agency and sense perception onto a machine, a gesture that Yokomitsu later theorized as “the direct stimulation of subjectivity leaping into the thing in itself.”12 Similar stylistic devices can be found throughout his writings and those of other writers asso-

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ciated with the New Sensationists.These works, as Chiba was quick to point out, do indeed focus on the representation of sensation, but it is often a sense perception that is shifted away from human consciousness. The subject of sensation in these writings approaches the status of a technological apparatus, a device that records external, (predominantly) visual stimuli. Yoshimoto Takaaki has contended that the New Sensationist style enacted a “dissolution of the ‘I,’” which, in turn, reflected a broader sense of anxiety concerning social transformation and instability, a “loss of a sense of presence, of any secure existence within the social structure.”13 Yoshimoto tied this anxiety to the expansion of capitalism, in which all objects, including human beings, become subject to exchange. In Tokyo’s urban landscape, especially amid the destruction and reconstruction following the  earthquake, New Sensationist writers discovered the material embodiment of a society experiencing a rapid and radical transformation. In this context, the aesthetic of “speed” was used to denote a culture of mechanization and acceleration, reflecting the consciousness of an unsettled world experiencing massive social and cultural dislocations.14 This conceptual underpinning of the literary group was underscored in Kataoka Teppei’s (–) essay “Manifesto of New Sensationism” (Shinkankakuha wa kaku shucho su) published in the July  issue of Bungei jidai. Kataoka noted that New Sensationism was a “rebellion against the value judgments of realism, which has formed the mainstream of Japan’s (perhaps the world’s) literature.”15 The literature of Bungei jidai, he asserts, represents the construction of literary values based on a new understanding of the world. Instead of the “static” reality assumed by the Naturalist writers, New Sensationism recognizes that “all things are in continual flux.”According to Kataoka,“Of course, even the New Sensationists recognize the existence of objective reality. Yet this objective reality is a momentary reality. And it is not our point of departure. We do not start with or return to that reality. At the moment of departure and the moment of return, objective reality maintains a different content.”16 In effect, this theory of literature was premised on an injection of temporality into the conception of writing. Between the beginning and the end of the narrative process, the

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object described has undergone a transformation. In this way, New Sensationism reflects a sense of social and cultural unsettlement, a consciousness that was typically materialized as city space.17 Yokomitsu’s representation of the city was to a significant extent shaped by his experience of the  earthquake. Although he complained of New Sensationism’s being “vilified” as a type of “earthquake literature” or “the literature of the end of capitalism,” Yokomitsu also at times emphasized the experience of the earthquake in shaping his own aesthetic sensibility.18 Years later, for example, he remarked on its powerful impact on his writing: My prior faith in beauty was completely shattered by this tragedy.The period that people have labeled New Sensationism began at this time.The great metropolis had been reduced to unimaginable, smoldering ruins before our very eyes; in the midst of these ruins, the manifestation of speed called the automobile began to crisscross the city for the first time, and soon after the strange mutation of sound called radio appeared, and then the artificial birds called airplanes began to fill the skies as machines of practical use. All these material embodiments of modern science first appeared in our country following the earthquake. Faced with these manifestations of modern science in the midst of the burned-out fields, the sensibilities [kankaku] of a youth could not help but be transformed.19 Yokomitsu’s depiction of the earthquake focuses on the jarring juxtaposition of total devastation and technological progress. The city is a space of nearly total ruin which is also inscribed by the traces of new technologies that transform natural phenomena into mechanical ones. The complex and fragmented experience of the city can be tied, as well, to a consciousness of Tokyo not only as the capital of the nation but also as the imperial capital, an awareness punctuated by the violence in the aftermath of the disaster.20 According to Raymond Williams, the European avant-garde was in part based on a qualitative shift in the experience of the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifically, he cites the modern metropolis’s function as a node in the world system of imperi-

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alism: “This development had much to do with imperialism: with the magnetic concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitals and the simultaneous cosmopolitan access to a wide variety of subordinate cultures.”21 The metropolis in this sense contains its own internalized periphery, an internalization that also comes to the forefront in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, seen mainly in the extreme violence toward Koreans perpetrated by both vigilante groups and the police. As mentioned in the introduction, this violence can be seen as reflecting an anxiety of being unable to distinguish between colonizer and colonized. In some of Yokomitsu’s pieces, the urban landscape also seems to be colored by this anxiety of internalized otherness, with the city framing a topography whose boundaries between inside and outside have been blurred. Although the postearthquake violence was only rarely depicted in literature directly, various traces of these events can be found in Yokomitsu’s writings—in his claim, for example, that his Shinkankakuha phase represented a “traitorous battle against the national language” (kokugo to no futeinaru kessen); the adjective futeinaru was typically associated with Koreans in the aftermath of the disaster.22 And as described earlier, his story “The Pale Captain” is organized around the sense of shock generated by the collapse of the distinction between self and (colonized) other. In the context of European literature, Fredric Jameson has argued that the “mutation in literary and artistic language” of modernism marks the impact of the transformations in the perception of national space, which, in turn, is closely tied to the acquisition of empire. He notes that the movement toward a certain type of formalism—and the evacuation of political questions at the level of content—was closely connected to an unrepresentability of the vast imperial system. It reflects, he claims, an inability to comprehend the relationship between the distant colonial territories and the more immediate national space: For colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the

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water whose own life experience and life world—very different from that of the imperial power—remain unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power, whatever social class they may belong to. Such spatial disjunction has as its immediate consequence the inability to grasp the way the system functions as a whole.23 According to Jameson, the expansion of empire produces an aporia in the experience of everyday life in the metropole. The national community can no longer be grasped as a coherent entity; there is always something missing, an essential lacuna. As will become clear, although “formalism” in this context does not mean an elimination of politics on the level of representation (and Jameson is, in any case, skeptical of such a characterization), it is possible to see in the disintegration of literary form in Japanese modernism a similar link to the representation of national or cultural space. In the Japanese context, however, what disintegrates is a cosmopolitan subjectivity, the positioning of the subject in a universal field of culture.The emphasis on corporeal sensation and on the representation of urban space in the works of Yokomitsu and other writers in this period signals 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), as was proclaimed after Akutagawa’s suicide, 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.This failure is indicated, for example, by the protagonist of Yokomitsu’s story “The City Depths” (Machi no soko, ). Faced with the overwhelming sensory assault of the city, which is divided into zones that cannot be integrated, he states:“What is it that I must think?”24 In Yokomitsu’s writings, it is with the novel Shanghai that the disintegration of the world in New Sensationist writing is most explicitly and extensively situated in a political context and linked specifically to questions concerning Japanese imperialism.

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Between Text and History Yokomitsu’s novel is set in Shanghai in , with the narrative revolving around various Japanese characters and a Chinese Communist Party activist during the events known as the May  movement.This incident began in February  as a strike against Japanese textile mills by Chinese workers to protest the harsh working conditions.After Japanese guards killed a Chinese striker on May  and troops under British command fired into a crowd of demonstrators on May , killing a number of demonstrators, the protest escalated into a general strike and uprising directed against the imperialist presence (of Japan and Britain in particular).25 Yokomitsu’s novel (which, he claimed, was an attempt to bring the details of this historical event to ill-informed Japanese readers) follows two Japanese characters: Sanki, an employee at a Japanese bank, and Osugi, a hostess at a bathhouse. Both lose their jobs and subsequently descend into the underworld of the semicolonial city. Osugi winds up as a prostitute living in the squalor of the city’s slums. Sanki wanders throughout the city, where he encounters a series of women: Miyako, a Japanese dancer courted by a group of European,American, and Japanese suitors; Olga, a Russian aristocrat exiled from her country since the revolution; and, most notably, Ho Shuran (Fang Qiulan), one of the leaders of the Communist Party in the city and a key figure in the labor movement. Sanki also interacts with a variety of Japanese male characters: Koya, his childhood friend who has come to the city in search of a wife; Koya’s brother Takashige, who manages the Japanese textile plant where the uprising started; and the architectYamaguchi. Sanki finds himself increasingly drawn to the beautiful Qiulan, and twice he saves her from the frenzy of mass demonstrations, which are the backdrop for some of the novel’s best-known passages. Afterward, they debate the merits of the strike and the effects of the Japanese presence in China. At the novel’s close, Sanki arrives in the middle of the night at Osugi’s home, where they lie side by side in the darkness of a city completely shut down by the general strike. As Dennis Keene has pointed out, the novel seems to combine aspects of both proletarian literature and popular fiction.26 Indeed,

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Yokomitsu’s description of Shanghai can be related to images of the city that circulated in contemporaneous popular writings. Prominent among them was Muramatsu Shofu’s Demonic City (Mato, ), a work of reportage that reproduced stereotypical images of vice and corruption associated with the city. Muramatsu described Shanghai as boasting “all the accoutrements of civilization—it is dazzlingly beautiful and offers every desirable entertainment.” Only one step behind the civilized “facade,” however, was a dark and threatening world populated by all sorts of criminals: “Thieves, murderers, con men, gamblers, kidnappers, smugglers, secret societies, prostitutes, pimps, opium dealers.”27 Yokomitsu retained this double image of the city, its mixture of East and West, luxury and squalor. His depictions contain elements of both exoticism and filth that typically characterized representations of the rest of Asia for domestic Japanese consumption. For instance, the Chinese (and other Asian workers) in the novel are portrayed in nonhuman terms as vegetation, animals, and waste. At the same time,Yokomitsu was responding in this work to the demands posed by the rise of a committed leftist literature in Japan.When he left for China in April , it was at the beginning of a protracted polemical exchange with Marxist critics that culminated in the formalist debate.28 Yokomitsu’s formalism is sometimes characterized as a brand of aestheticism that denies both a political function for literature and the importance of ideological content in individual literary works.Yet Shanghai, which was written in the context of Yokomitsu’s theory of formalism, seems to refute the equation of this discourse with aestheticism. The novel, which Yokomitsu had apparently intended to entitle A Materialist (Aru yuibutsuronsha), marks instead an engagement with explicitly political questions—including imperialism and revolution—as well as with a textured social and ideological landscape.29 Although Yokomitsu maintained his opposition to Marxism throughout this period, he also felt compelled to respond to the challenge of producing a literature reflecting the social and political complexity of modern society, as his private letters during this time attest.30 Underlying the discourse of formalism was a concern with the relationship between subjectivity and what Yokomitsu called “materiality.” In his theoretical writings, this

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relationship was embodied by the written word as a material object that exceeded the boundaries of the author’s consciousness. In Shanghai, the concept of materiality is shifted onto the city itself and also the complex economic, social, and ideological systems that structure it. In Yokomitsu’s novel, the city of Shanghai comes to frame a general image of modernity. In part, this reflects specific attributes of the city that created a strong impression on Yokomitsu.As Nozawa Toshitaka has recognized, no comparable city existed in Japan at the time; Shanghai was Asia’s most cosmopolitan city, “incorporating every possible opposition and contradiction: West and East, modern and premodern, wealth and poverty, prosperity and decline.”31 For Japanese writers, the city of Shanghai seemed indeed to be a striking conjunction of the civilizations of Asia and the West.The Bund, or waterfront, was lined with European-style buildings, forming a facade (or “false front,” as it was called) behind which was hidden China’s largest and most industrialized city and the workings of a complex international economy. Shanghai was a massive opening in China to the world, the entry point for the flow of foreign capital, goods, and people.The International Settlement, what some people referred to as a “country within the country,” represented an extensive zone of foreign sovereignty and multiple jurisdictions on Chinese soil.32 The poet Kaneko Mitsuharu (–), who visited Shanghai several times in the s, wrote about the effect of this large foreign presence in the city: “There was no port city in the world, nor is there ever likely to be, as ‘mixed,’ and as mixed together, as the Shanghai of that era.”33 Yokomitsu was especially fascinated with what he described as the internalization of multiple foreign nations within a single city. As he wrote in a letter to his wife:“In Shanghai, each nation assembles here to form its own government.”34 For Yokomitsu, the city’s massive internalization of alterity represented a breakdown in the formal structure of the nation-state, producing “the newest form of city in the world.”35 Although the city had not been formally colonized, Japan and the Western imperial powers maintained a strong presence in Shanghai, with powers of extraterritoriality and economic and political control. The Japanese presence in Shanghai in particular

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had been increasing steadily throughout the s and included a growing number of Japanese-owned textile factories; by the end of the decade Japan’s economic stake in China as a whole surpassed that of Britain, and the number of Japanese in Shanghai greatly outnumbered the British population there.36 As Peter Duus wrote, Japan’s informal empire in China had become more important to the nation’s economy than were its formal colonies of Korea and Taiwan. At the same time, as “semicolonial” space, China was not under the exclusive control of any one imperial power but was forced to deal with the collaborative presence of the Western powers and Japan.37 In her discussion of the complex political trajectories of Chinese modernism and the representations of Shanghai by the Chinese New Sensationist writer Liu Na’ou, Shu-mei Shih points out the particular complications imposed on Chinese writers by the condition of semicolonialism. She notes, for example, that “the multiple and multilayered colonization of China by competing foreign powers vying for more power and profit resulted in specific colonial experiences.”38 This aspect of semicolonialism, which creates conflicts not only between the imperial power and the colonial/semicolonial subjects but also among the imperial powers themselves, helps shape the ideological terrain of Yokomitsu’s novel. In his work, Shanghai serves as a space of shifting struggles and alignments, between Japan as an imperial nation exerting its power and economic interests in China and Japan as an Asian country aligned against the Western powers. Yokomitsu originally intended to depict Shanghai as an abstract marker of Asia as a whole. In June , for example, he described his conception of the novel in a letter to Yamamoto Sanehiko, the president of the Kaizosha Publishing House:“I would like to take the various interesting things about Shanghai, without making it specifically Shanghai or anywhere else, and turn it into the rubbish heap of all Asia, and write about this type of strange city.”39 In fact, in the original Kaizo installments Yokomitsu did not explicitly designate the setting of the work as Shanghai, referring only to “this muddied Chinese port.”40 Later, however, in the  Kaizosha edition, in addition to specifying the setting of the work, he also inserted other references to the city.

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Yokomitsu perceived in Shanghai a condensation of the most significant problems of modern culture in general. Later he wrote: “The question of the International Settlement is, among the world’s problems, that which remains most obscure, and yet at the same time contains within it all the questions of the future. Simply put, there is no other place in the world where the character of modernity is so clearly revealed.”41 For Yokomitsu, Shanghai not only represented the intersection between Europe and East Asia but also framed the question of Japan’s ambivalent position within Asia—at once belonging to the region and yet also identified with the Western colonial powers. It is this question that occupies the work’s ideological core, a contradiction that lies at the heart of Japanese modernity and one that came to the forefront of intellectual discourse in the years leading up to the war.

The Fragmented Terrain of Shanghai In a groundbreaking analysis of Yokomitsu’s novel, Maeda Ai showed that the text’s representation of the city is organized according to three distinct topographies, what Maeda terms the colonial city, the revolutionary city, and the slum city. Each zone is depicted according to certain recurrent images (light/flowers, masses/waves, and stagnant water/waste), and each is associated with a specific female character (Miyako, Qiulan, and Osugi). He reads the main narrative of the novel as consisting of Sanki’s movement across this feminized space and through these three zones and different women: Yokomitsu’s Shanghai can be read as a city novel structured so that the protagonist Sanki moves from the pole of Miyako to Fang Qiulan, from Qiulan to Osugi, and thereby descends from the surface levels of the city to its depths. Sanki, who had been ensnared in the trap of the light filling the gardens and dance halls, passes through the masses assembling at the factories and in the streets and, after undergoing the baptism of the boat of excrement, achieves a restful sleep in Osugi’s room, enveloped by deep darkness.42

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Maeda’s topographical analysis of the novel, which underscores Yokomitsu’s attempt to represent the city itself as a marker of multiple conflicts and interests, is a useful framework for reading Yokomitsu’s work.At the same time, Maeda projects onto this narrative movement an ideological significance that seems to simplify the text’s ambiguities.Thus he sees Sanki’s descent into the space of destitution as linked to a spirit of “return to Japan” and a reawakening of nationalist sentiment in the main character. Yokomitsu himself may have suggested such a reading of the novel when he claimed in the preface to the  edition that “the event that forms the backdrop to the novel, the May  incident, was the first new battle between Europe and Asia in the modern history of East Asia.”43 The book was published after the Manchuria incident of  and the Shanghai incident of , which had generated an upsurge in popular nationalism (and which had led the editors to suggest the title of the book, which had not been specified in the Kaizo installments).As can be seen even in the simple fact that the May  movement began as a Chinese worker’s protest directed against Japanese factories, however, the politics of this historical event were considerably more complex. The novel’s ideological landscape is, likewise, extremely heterogeneous, with a variety of shifting alignments and competing interests, which cannot be reduced to only a conflict between East and West. Komori Yoichi’s sophisticated reading of Shanghai more closely engages this complexity. Komori emphasizes the representation of the body in Yokomitsu’s novel, noting that there is no other work by Yokomitsu “that is as pervaded by the word ‘body’ or other words signifying body parts and their movement.”44 Komori examines the semiotic construction of the novel in close conjunction with Yokomitsu’s theory of formalism. In his analysis, individual signifiers function in the text in the same way that bodies do: as units of exchange placed into fluid networks of assemblage and disassemblage.According to Komori, the content of the novel is the disconnection between signifier and signified—a separation that is materialized as bodies-as-things, disassociated from the ground of national territory. For Komori, the text’s narrative movement marks the reification (mono-ka) of Sanki’s body—it is transformed into a

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“thing” or a sign that can be exchanged like any commodity. Komori also sees Yokomitsu’s attempt in Shanghai as representing “the process of individual consciousness and psychology, as well as the morals, ethics, and ideology that go along with it, becoming entirely uncertain and floating within the ‘speed of reality,’ together with the emergence of the powerful motif of the body as thing, having had all traces of humanity stripped from it.”45 In his reading, the narrative movement of the text is not an awakening to nationalism but the emergence, within this “international city,” of the body as a commodity, separated from national territory.46 Komori’s analysis, like Maeda’s, provides an important framework for this reading of Yokomitsu’s work—especially Komori’s focus on the representation of the body. In Shanghai, the body indeed serves as a site of struggle for competing interests and networks of power. During the narrative, the human body is circulated through different social contexts and is branded by various political and economic institutions. In this process of transformation, the body also serves as a site of contestation for conflicting ideological discourses. It functions both as its own topography—as a territory subject to colonization—and as a commodity subject to exchange. Building on Komori’s argument, we might say that the body is an analogue of Yokomitsu’s conception of language, in that like the written word, the body is both a representation of something else (for example, territory) and a material object in its own right. And it is the consciousness of this double inscription that frames the central conflicts of the novel. Here, writing functions like the role of gold in a monetary economy, as analyzed by Marc Shell: as both a commodity in itself and a currency that can be exchanged for all other commodities.47 In turn, the body in Yokomitsu’s novel both represents internal consciousness and exceeds it, by its circulation through different social and ideological contexts. Shanghai’s narrative moves along a general trajectory of the body’s “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization,” in the sense of the “decoding” and “recoding” defined by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which here also assumes a literal meaning.48 Yokomitsu’s novel describes the situation of human bodies in an economic system in which each character’s subjectivity is determined by his or her relationship to flows of capital. The colonial

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city identified by Maeda, in which Sanki states that his body is national territory, is marked by conflict among nation-states. The various sites making up this zone of the city include the International Settlement, the dance halls, the banks, the Public Garden, and the Bund.This space is characterized by what Shih names as one of the key characteristics of the semicolonial city: competition among the various imperial powers, which is represented (as Maeda notes) by the group of multinational suitors who surround Miyako, each, in turn, associated with a different nation-state and a different multinational corporation.Within this space, Sanki is conscious of his body’s value as national territory. At the other end of the spectrum, the slum city is a space of abjection and exclusion, a repository for the waste products of the economy that are disengaged from mechanisms of national identification.The revolutionary city—embodied by the protests on the streets and in the factories—is a space of contact and conflict between these two sites.As both Maeda and Komori point out, during the novel Sanki moves from one end of the city to the other. Whereas Komori sees this movement as a progressive commodification and reification of the body, Sanki’s final immersion into the space of abjection takes place during the momentary collapse of the economic system, which has been brought to a standstill by the general strike.To this extent, the lower depths of the city, and the abject bodies that inhabit it, maintain a double significance.They point to the basic functioning of the economic system (that is, through the commodification of the body) but also indicate the possibility of its disruption. This space, which is made visible at different moments during the narrative, always flickering at the edge of Sanki’s consciousness, is a container for excluded, abjected bodies, a space occupied by exiles, prostitutes, beggars, and laborers. Here Sanki’s body is finally deterritorialized, forcibly (and literally) ejected from mechanisms of national subjectivity, a gesture symbolized by his being thrown into a boat in the sewer filled with excrement. At the end of the novel, amid the breakdown of the economy, such elements of abjection overwhelm and overrun the city.The body is here figured as waste product, mere excess or residue. This narrative movement should also be read in conjunction with the political discourses that structure the surface level of the text.

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Sanki’s movement through the city effectively maps a conflict underlying the construction of Japanese subjectivity, specifically the split consciousness of existing at the same time in both Asia and the West (as ideological and cultural space).The visceral sensation of displacement experienced by Sanki is thus linked to the political ideologies and debates presented in the novel—debates about the conflict between Asia and the West engaged in by Koya and others, over Asianism between Yamaguchi and Amri, and concerning “foreign capital” between Qiulan and Sanki. Sanki’s movement through the city places him in a shifting relationship to these discourses. In the space of the semicolonial city, marked by competition among the imperial powers, the primary conflict for the Japanese characters is that between East and West. Through his accidental involvement with the revolutionary movement and his experience in the mass demonstrations, Sanki is eventually placed in a different ideological context. In the first instance, the “revolutionary city” is characterized by the political struggle between imperialist and anti-imperialist forces (between Japanese capital and Chinese labor), rather than by competition among the imperial powers themselves. This conflict is expressed in Sanki’s extended debates with Qiulan, in which he situates Japan in the general context of “foreign capital,” thus identifying Japan with the Western imperialist powers. At the same time, in this revolutionary space, Sanki becomes conscious of a division between his imaginary ties to his nation-state and the material conditions of his body’s existence in this semicolonial city. Finally, the darkness of the last scene of the novel, in which the narrative perspective shifts from that of Sanki to that of Osugi, represents, as Maeda observes, an extinction of the city’s visual presence that had previously dominated the narrative. For Osugi, this moment represents a temporary escape from the workings of an economic system through which bodies are circulated as commodities, indicating a suspension or breakdown of the economy (brought to a standstill by the general strike). For Sanki, it is also marked by the failure of ideological discourse, of thinking in general. Of course, this space of darkness is only a temporary respite: Osugi is aware that Japanese troops will arrive to restore order as well as the economic system that fixes her identity as

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prostitute. Shanghai ends in this state of suspension.To this extent, the novel outlines a crisis for which there is no resolution; it ultimately arrives at no genuine “outside” of the economy, but only in-between spaces of abjection at its margins.

Economies of Subjectivity The representation of the city as a site of contestation and struggle is established in the novel’s opening passage, which has been the subject of frequent critical analysis. This passage, set at the very edge of the city, describes a world characterized by both flow and fragmentation: At full tide the river swelled and flowed in reverse.A wave of necks from the pack of motorboats, lights extinguished. A line of rudders. A mountain of cargo thrown ashore. The black legs of the jetty tied with chains. The weather station signal reflected a calm wind speed as it rose to the top of the tower.The steeple at maritime customs began to smoke in the night fog. Coolies dampened on barrels stacked atop the pier. Torn black sails began to creak back and forth among the heavy waves. Sanki, whose fair and wise face was like that of a medieval warrior, circled the city and returned to the Bund.49 As critics have pointed out, the scene encapsulates many of the formal and thematic elements of the novel as a whole. It inaugurates the imagery of flow and counterflow that recurs at various points later in the novel (for example, in the scenes of mass demonstrations) and that has been linked to the thematic opposition of revolution and counterrevolution.The fractured grammar of the sentences—reminiscent, as Chiba Nobuo reminds us, of a film-scenario style—also suggests the impending collapse of economic and social structures.50 Maeda stated that the passage is formed of an underlying tension arising from the opposition between flow and stagnation and that it may be read as an image of the city, which will soon be engulfed in tides of revolutionary protest.51 Another

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characteristic of this scene, set at “the water’s edge,” is its formal structure: it establishes a topographical opposition based on the representation of a margin, or limit. The passage focuses on the borderline of the city (the pier), where Sanki stands, and a space of flow that exists beyond it. Symbolically, it lays out the boundary of subjectivity as well as a turbulent and chaotic space that exists beyond it. In Shanghai, subjectivity is most strongly determined by one’s position in relation to the economic system. The title of the first Kaizo installment,“The Bathhouse and the Bank” (Furo to ginko, ), indicates the general framework for Yokomitsu’s depiction of the city in a global capitalist economy. The two sites serve as metonyms of two central characters in the novel who are introduced in the first chapter: Sanki, the bank employee, and Osugi, the bathhouse hostess.The two sites mentioned in the title also represent two institutional nodes of Shanghai’s semicolonial economy, signifying both the incursion of Japanese and Western capital (which, in turn, are linked closely to the threat of military force) and the pervasive commodification of the body. This opposition suggests Yokomitsu’s attempt to represent the points of intersection between individual bodies and the global capitalist system.Through various images and scenarios, the novel depicts different moments of contact between these two symbolic sites, tracing the insertion of the body into the expansive network of circulation and exchange. In the opening scene, Sanki, waiting at the pier for his friend Koya, encounters a Russian prostitute sitting on a bench. She tells him (in English) that she has “no money, and no country either” (TYRZ :). Like the other Russian characters in the novel, she is an exile from the revolution and symbolizes the community of displaced peoples appearing throughout the work. As Komori suggests, in this scene a clear opposition is established between Sanki and the prostitute. Sanki is an extension of the Japanese nation. As an employee at a Japanese bank, one of the central institutions of the Japanese economic presence in China, his body is part of the network of national power. Conversely, the prostitute exists on the outer margins of the nation-state. An exile who is subject to exchange as a commodity, she represents a realm of corporeality

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disengaged from national identification. Sanki and the prostitute thus represent two sides of the economic system through which bodies circulate as objects, and the contrast between them parallels the opposition between the pier and the space of flow beyond it. Each of the other characters is also placed in different relationships to the circulation of capital. Thus Koya, the man for whom Sanki waits at the pier, is employed by the foreign-sales division of a lumber company based in Singapore. He has arrived in Shanghai in search of a wife and to unload a shipment of timber from the Philippines. He discovers that the British repayment of war debts to the United States has set off a chain of events that ultimately causes the Singapore market to crash, which, in turn, threatens to cut short his stay in Shanghai:“Koya had never imagined that the British government’s proclamation to repeal restrictions on rubber would have such an immediate impact on his search for a wife” (TYRZ :–). Koya’s elder brother Takashige is a manager at a Japanese textile mill, which later serves as the fountainhead of the Chinese uprising. Qiulan, who makes an appearance at the Japanese-run dance hall early in the novel, is a worker at the factory and one of the leaders of the labor movement.After being fired from the bank, Sanki goes to work at Takashige’s factory, which throws him into the middle of the uprising. Miyako, whose life revolves around the international meeting ground of the dance hall, is surrounded by American and European suitors. Each, in turn, is associated with a major international corporation such as General Electric or the Mercantile Marine Company. Olga, a former Russian aristocrat, is mistress to the Japanese tycoon Kimura, who has six Russian mistresses but sells them at the racetrack one by one to cover his gambling losses (“For him, having mistresses is like having a savings account”). Kimura “gives” Olga to Yamaguchi, an architect who also runs a gruesome side-business selling corpses to British doctors. On the margins of the economy—not inside it, yet not wholly outside it either—are the ever present figures of prostitutes and beggars. The economic system that structures the city functions according to a double process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Thus as commentators have pointed out, the city is distinguished by its transnational quality. Shanghai is depicted as a node in a global economic system that transcends the specificity of place

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and enfolds vast geographical distances into the immaterial space of capital. For example, Yokomitsu describes the financial center of the city in the following manner: When Koya entered the business center, a swarm of horsedrawn carriages carrying exchange brokers sped toward the row of banks. The carriages, with the rapid clip-clop sound of hooves like countless stones being thrown to the ground, raced one after another down the avenues and side streets. Hour after hour, the speed of the Mongolian horses that moved these carriages also moved the exchange markets in New York and London. . . . The exchange brokers riding in the carriages were for the most part Americans and Europeans. With smiles and agility as their weapons, they circled from bank to bank.The balance sheets on their sales of stock expanded and contracted with each moment and every hour, becoming a fountainhead of activity for both East and West. (TYRZ :)

The flows of capital exceed boundaries of place and nation. As Yokomitsu put it,“In Shanghai, each nation assembles here to form its own government.”52 Against this process of deterritorialization is also a series of reterritorializations, which reinvoke institutional sites of subjectification, including the nation-state. Deleuze and Guattari assert that this double process of decoding and recoding is an essential aspect of the capitalist machine’s functioning:“Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities. Everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families.”53 In this context, Shanghai may represent an “international city,” as critics have labeled it, but it is also the very international quality of this space that encourages the mobilization of ideologies of national and racial identification. For a number of characters, the contests of power in this economic system are cast in terms of a conflict between the Japanese and Western empires and, more generally, as an opposition between East and West. For example, Koya, who courts Miyako, is resentful

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of the attention she gives to her American and European suitors. Yokomitsu writes that his appeal to Japanese women had always been based on the fact that he looked like a Westerner, but in the face of competition from actual Westerners, this does him no good. The spaces of the colonial city—the dance halls and the Public Garden—impose a consciousness of racial hierarchy on the Japanese characters. Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese are allowed to enter these spaces, but always in a subordinate position to the Europeans and Americans. In his discussions with Sen Sekisan (Qian Shishan), the Chinese owner of the bathhouse run by Oryu (his mistress), Koya senses the need for racial solidarity among Asians against the Western threat:“Suddenly, Koya felt that his consciousness of being of the same yellow race as the Chinese was leading him to the enjoyment of making the Europeans a common enemy” (TYRZ :). Other characters express a similar sense of opposition between East and West.At gatherings of Asianists that include Chinese and Indian intellectuals, for example,Yamaguchi defends Japanese militarism as necessary to combat Western imperialism. For his part, Sanki feels that Japan is caught in a vise between the Communism of Soviet Russia and the “laissez-faire” capitalism of the British Empire and identifies the latter as the “ruler of Asia.” In addition, the characters are also situated in imaginary economies tying them to their respective nations.At the opening of the novel, Sanki is conscious of his own body as “territory,” an indication of his continuing identification with the nation-state. This psychological link to Japan is also expressed in the enduring images of two women that Sanki retains in his mind: his mother and his former lover Kyoko (Koya’s sister). During the narrative, he meets a succession of women of different nationalities, including Qiulan, Miyako, and Olga. Sanki at first resists any involvement with these women because of his long-held secret love for Kyoko.The women serve as substitute images of his unattainable desire.As Sanki states, “What are these phantasms that come and go in my mind? Osugi, Kyoko, Oryu, Olga.” He is described as a Don Quixote–like figure (hence his anachronistic face of a “medieval warrior”) who inhabits his own imaginary world, which is divorced from his immediate environment. In the first instance, this means that he rejects all women in favor of the phantasm of Kyoko he retains in his mind.

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Sanki wonders why he is “unable to lay a finger on any woman he likes,” yet ultimately he realizes that the reason is his attachment to the memory of Kyoko: “It was only his belief that Kyoko was his secret lover that had turned him into a Don Quixote who evaded the endless pack of women who pressed in on him” (TYRZ :). This attachment to an unattainable object of desire is paralleled by the persistence of his national identification.The phantasmal images of both Kyoko and his mother thus mediate his own relation to his “mother country” [bokoku]. Hence Sanki, who thinks “my body belongs to my mother,” also asserts that “my body is territory”: Those who had gathered in this Chinese colony had no means of survival in their homelands. It was only people who had had their lives taken away from them by their native countries who assembled here, forming an autonomous nation unprecedented in the world. Yet all these different races functioned as the tentacles [kyuban] of their native countries. For this reason, each single body—no matter how idle and unemployed—as long as it takes up space, becomes a manifestation of nationalism, just by aimlessly being here, with the exception of the Russians. Sanki laughed as this thought came to him. In truth, if he were in Japan, he would simply reduce Japan’s food supply by that much.Yet as long as he remained in Shanghai, the space occupied by his body (:–) flowed continually as Japanese territory. This passage describes the double status of the body in this space—at once literally disconnected from the ground of national territory and also reinscribed into ideological networks of territorialization. In some ways, it is precisely the fact of being physically situated outside national borders that leads to a strengthened identification with the nation. In effect, Sanki’s body, like the city itself, is also subject to colonization. It is transformed into an extension of Japanese territory, a literal embodiment of the grotesquely expanding borders of Japanese empire. The severance of Sanki’s tie to the bank (and Osugi’s story forms a parallel narrative) begins a process of unraveling for this psychological economy of identification. Bereft of these institutional

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supports, the two characters are subsequently immersed in the fragmented and disintegrating environment of the city, and their identities are thrown into flux. Both Osugi and Sanki move from the surface levels of the city’s economy, represented by the circulation of capital and goods, to its lower levels, marked by the circulation of bodies as a form of commodity. In one scene, Osugi wanders into the “mouth” of a darkened alleyway—an entry point into the city’s nether regions—and is literally swallowed up by its waste: “Then, the mountain of rags piled against the wall, which Osugi had thought was just trash, suddenly began to creep from all corners. She collapsed to the ground and was sucked into the wave of rags clumped together and disappeared” (TYRZ :). Sanki, for his part, also comes into contact with Qiulan and the revolutionary Chinese labor movement. During this descent through a fluid environment, Sanki finds himself thrown into a variety of shifting ideological and social contexts.

The Space of Resistance Yokomitsu’s depiction of Shanghai extends the representation of city space found in his early writings; in particular, “The City Depths” can be cited as a close precursor. As its title indicates, this short story also deploys the vertical structure of surface and depth that Maeda identified in Shanghai, which, in the earlier work as well, is closely tied to social status.Thus in “The City Depths,” the vertical topographical structure explicitly frames class divisions: The northern embankment was lined with spacious aristocratic mansions. There, wind and light were allowed free access.At times dignitaries and ladies raced their automobiles inside while thinking of the effect of their own gravity on the stone gates. At times gorgeous dancing girls, bunched together like a bouquet of flowers, were seen to the gate. Sometimes it was polished silk hats, then birdlike frock coats. Yet he thought nothing. He looked down on the streets to the south, narrow like the bottom of a valley. There the disgorged carbon dioxide

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formed its own air pressure, and only the east wind that blew in dust, typhus fever, and the smoke from the arsenal moved freely. No plants grew there.All that gathered there were tiles and bacteria and empty bottles and unsold goods from the marketplace and laborers and prostitutes and rats. “What is it that I must think?” he thought. (TYRZ :)

In this example,Yokomitsu explores a fragmented representation of the urban landscape, one divided into different social classes. The oppositions of light and darkness, nature and death, technology and disease, mark a division of city space that is also present in Shanghai.The protagonist’s capacity for a rational comprehension of sensory phenomena collapses in the face of this fragmentation. It was this failure of totalization—the inability to integrate fragmentary perceptions into a coherent analysis of socioeconomic conditions—that became the target of the most sophisticated Marxist critiques of New Sensationist writings. Instead, Yokomitsu describes the disintegration of consciousness in the chaotic sense impressions of the city. As indicated earlier, the topography of Shanghai is even more complex and heterogeneous than what is presented in “The City Depths.” In addition to divisions of class, the city is fragmented along racial, gender, and ideological lines. Like the protagonist of the earlier story, Sanki is a nomadic figure who is able to move through the different zones of the city. For other characters, certain zones are restricted: Chinese residents are denied access to some areas of the Settlement (a notorious sign at the Public Garden prohibits Chinese and dogs, for example), while foreigners face danger in the Chinese areas during the uprising.The women characters (with the exception of Qiulan) are largely confined to specific sections of the city; Olga’s inability to leave Yamaguchi’s house is an example. In contrast, at the beginning of the novel, Sanki is introduced as a wanderer, a walker of the city:“Sanki . . . circled the city and returned to the Bund” (TYRZ :).54 Sanki has access to the different worlds of Shanghai, from the financial center to the mass demonstrations to the Chinese sections (when he is disguised in Chinese clothing).Among the female characters,

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only Qiulan seems to provide a counterpart to Sanki’s mobility.At various points in the narrative, she appears in the International Settlement, in the midst of the demonstrations, in a Japanese textile factory, and in the Chinese sections of the city. Sanki’s movement across the different zones of the city represents a fractured consciousness. As mentioned earlier, Sanki is described as a Don Quixote figure, one who inhabits his own phantasmal world. But in the course of the narrative, as he traverses the topography of Shanghai and as his body is inscribed into different social and political contexts, he himself becomes conscious of a split in his identity.Two events begin to shift Sanki’s imaginary economy of identity.The first is Sanki’s dismissal from the Japanese bank, a symbol of the nation’s imperialist presence in Shanghai. His defiant confrontation with the corrupt manager of the bank is the first sign of transformation in Sanki’s passive attitude, as well as a crack in his identification with the nation: Sanki wondered what either he or Osugi had ever done to trouble anyone.Then, in the manner of the thinking that was rapidly beginning to agitate China, he suddenly thought of the bank manager as a despicable person. He forgot that for him to hate his superior had the same result as hating his mother country itself. And the only activities open to any Japanese in Shanghai who did not recognize their mother (TYRZ :–) country were begging and prostitution. The second event is when he learns that Kyoko’s husband has died, an event that Sanki has been secretly anticipating over the years. But when the possibility that he can be united with Kyoko is realized—when the unattainable object of desire is transformed into something within reach—Sanki begins to feel antipathy for Kyoko:“Suddenly, a feeling of anger welled up in his belly. He was inflamed [juketsu shita] with the attempt to thrust aside Kyoko, Takashige’s sister.Then, the actions of the women he had rejected for her sake arose in his mind in disarray. Oryu, Olga, Osugi, Miyako, . . .” (TYRZ :).This rejection of Kyoko is expressed in corporeal terms: it is literally an attempt to eject her image from his body. It is only after this bodily expulsion that Sanki is shaken from

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his isolation and attempts to approach the women surrounding him. He enters the fray of the uprising in Takashige’s factory and saves Qiulan, one of the factory workers, from the crowd. He draws closer to her in an attempt to finally “spit out Kyoko from his mind,” realizing that the time “when he avoided pursuing his own desires was in the past” (:).The following day, Sanki walks with Qiulan in the Chinese section of the city, where he discovers for the first time a sense of enjoyment in his physical surroundings: “All he needed to do now was to lose himself in the pleasure of strolling through the landscape of the Chinese quarter with this Chinese woman” (:). Sanki’s experience in the crowd represents a materialization of his internal ideological crisis.The first encounter takes place in the Japanese textile mill (based on the Naigai cotton factory where the May  incident began) where Kyoko’s brother Takashige works as a foreman and where Sanki takes a position at the business desk after his dismissal from the bank.There, Sanki becomes embroiled in the workers’ uprising—which was started by anti-Communist forces in an attempt to discredit the Communist Party—and eventually dives into the midst of the demonstration to try to extricate Qiulan from the mass of female workers: Sanki began to be tossed about amid the smell of the female workers’ hair as they exchanged blows. As his body swayed, he tried to discern where Qiulan had gone. She was crying out as she floated up and down amid the surrounding faces that were raised up to scream. He began to panic, trying to move toward her from the center of the whirlpool that surrounded him. The flames spread from the baskets of discarded cotton to the roof of the corridor.The mass of female workers, who had lost their one outlet, crashed into the steel door of the emergency exit. But the door repulsed the group and shook them back again toward the ceiling of flames. By now, Sanki had begun to feel the danger to himself. (TYRZ :–)

This experience, in which Sanki’s body experiences the danger of being lost in a sea of female bodies, is symbolic of the transgression

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of the barrier between himself and the surrounding environment. It marks the second stage in his body’s deterritorialization.The factory workers are described as a terrifying mass that has dissolved the contours of individual bodies into a group entity. Within the demonstrations, individual consciousness melts into the flow of a massive, shapeless form.The danger that Sanki senses is the dissolution of the boundaries of self, a threat that also extends throughout the entire city.The masses here serve as a manifestation of the “noise”[soon] that Yokomitsu identified in a  essay as one of the primary characteristics of modernity and whose representation he claimed to be the main task of modern literature.55 Sanki’s accidental involvement in the workers’ uprising can be seen to represent the assault of the external world on the boundaries of interiorized subjectivity, ultimately leading to a conflict between the social and political encoding of his body and consciousness. This internalized split is also reflected (particularly in the original Kaizo installments) in the discussions between Sanki and Qiulan, which initially take place in Qiulan’s apartment after their first encounter. In this scene, Sanki defends Japan’s economic presence in China, although he also expresses some sympathy for Qiulan’s cause. The exchange serves as the central ideological debate of the novel and indicates Sanki’s (and the novel’s) ideological ambivalence. If Sanki and the other characters’ experience of the colonial city places them in conflict with the other imperial powers, Sanki’s entrance into the mass demonstrations and his discussions with Qiulan frame a conflict between Japan as a capitalist/imperialist nation and the Chinese workers who resist. Sanki’s debates with Qiulan force him to identify with the other imperial powers.The framework of Asia versus the West (which Yokomitsu had ascribed to Shanghai in the  preface) is thus shifted within these exchanges:56 “Of course, I am unhappy that you have chosen [to strike at] Japanese factories. I love Japan.Yet I cannot believe, as you do, that this should necessarily lead to a struggle with China.” “That is because you are an Asianist. We’re now at the point where we must calculate how much Asianism has contributed to your country’s bourgeoisie.We can no longer trust anyone who is not a Marxist.”

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“It’s too bad that you think of me as such an Asianist, but my desire to love Japan is no different from your desire to love China. I feel some inconvenience that my sentiment of loving my mother country also means, as you say, that I end up loving its bourgeoisie, but just because of that, I don’t see at this point any reason why I should stop loving my mother country and love China.” “Yet to me, it appears that it is not that you love your country, you are merely taking its side. If you truly loved your country, then you would no doubt love its proletariat. The reason we resist your country is not because of your proletariat.That’s why I say such things to you . . .” “As I mentioned before, I don’t know what to say about the fact that you are planning to stop the machines at our factories.Yet I feel that the end result of expelling foreign capital from China will be nothing else but that China’s culture will fall behind that of other nations. Of course, I realize the impertinence of my words, but I would like to hear your response, as an accomplished Communist, to this objective and mundane problem—since China is right now so pressed for the importation of capital.” Qiulan, as if proud of the opportunity to display her mental agility, lightly spread her Chinese fan and smiled. “Yes, that is one of the central problems that we are always faced with. But it is also a problem for which we don’t need any input from the people of the International Settlement, which is nothing more than a waste dump of the bourgeoisie of the great powers. Of course, this is a rude way to put it, but do you think there is any means, other than our way of thinking, for us Chinese to escape from the military might of all the nations that are pressing in on us?” (TYRZ :–, italics added)

In this passage, Qiulan places Sanki in the “waste dump of the bourgeoisie of the great powers”—that is, the International Settlement. Whereas in an earlier scene, Sanki had railed against the British Empire as the “ruler of Asia,” here he situates Japan on the side of “foreign capital.” At the same time, Sanki’s ambivalence

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about his identification with Japanese capital (already reflected in his enduring desire for Qiulan) is also expressed in his statements to Koya after his meeting with Qiulan:“I’ve been bitten by the bug of Marxism.” He is also critical of his friend, saying:“If you could understand what unhappiness is, Marxism wouldn’t need to exist. In other words Marxism is a machine to make people happy” (:–). On the level of ideological content, the novel’s central conflict, between Sanki’s nationalism and Qiulan’s revolutionary Marxism, is never resolved. Sanki never reconciles his patriotic sentiments with his sympathy for Qiulan and her labor/anti-imperialist movement. Instead, Sanki becomes aware of an internal fissure in his consciousness, expressed through the contrast between his abstract “love” for his country and his corporeal desire for Qiulan. Sanki’s ambivalent relationship to the Chinese Communist leader in this sense indicates the contradiction that organizes the ideological content of Shanghai: the simultaneous coexistence of an anti-Western (anti-imperialist) position with an identification with the West (as an imperialist power). Later, in the scene based on the historic street demonstration of May , when troops under British command fired into the crowd and killed a number of Chinese demonstrators, Sanki once again enters the fray in an attempt to rescue Qiulan. After this second experience among the masses, Sanki himself becomes aware that he simultaneously inhabits two different topographies, which might be described (following Yokomitsu’s own language) as material and spiritual landscapes. Thus, for example, as Sanki walks through the streets that are by now occupied by revolution, he thinks of the disjunction between the world inhabited by his consciousness and that inhabited by his body: He imagined the sight of his body flowing out from his mother’s body and, simultaneously, the sight of himself walking in the present.The time that flowed between those two scenes was none other than the time of Japan’s body [Nihon no nikutai]. And it would likely remain so.Yet what could he do about the desire of his spirit to be free, to separate from his body and make him forget his mother country? His body

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could not resist the pressure of the outside world that forced on him his Japanese identity. It was not his spirit but his skin that must fight against the outside world. And then his spirit (TYRZ :–) would follow his skin and fight. The revolutionary conflict being staged on the city streets in this sense externalizes a split in Sanki’s subjectivity, one expressed as an opposition between spirit (seishin) and body (nikutai). In a fragment published in , Yokomitsu wrote: “According to our understanding, we assert that reality never shifts.Yet with our senses, we perceive that reality is a string of continual shifts. Between the world that does not shift and the world that is constantly shifting, there is always a ‘difference’ that never reveals itself to us—the ‘difference’ of all things is a third world of reality that has never maintained any essence.”57 This passage expresses one of the concerns of formalist theory, the conflict between consciousness (“understanding”) and materiality (accessed through “sense perception”), which also forms the thematic framework of Shanghai.

Spaces of Abjection The city space into which both Sanki and Osugi are increasingly absorbed after the severance of their institutional ties is characterized by images of abjection. Qiulan, for example, refers to the International Settlement as the “waste dump of the bourgeoisie of the great powers” (TYRZ :). In his depictions of the city, especially the slum quarters,Yokomitsu focuses on images of waste and decay: “Facing the river was the disintegrated entrance to the slums. Surrounding the entrance, the piled waste extended like waves” (:).The metaphor of the waves links this space of the city to the river that Sanki confronted in the opening passage. Noting, in particular, the prevalent images of food and ingestion throughout the work, Suga Hidemi has pointed to the connection between Shanghai and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of carnival.58 At the beginning of the work,Yokomitsu writes that Sanki wanders the city,“watching the almost reckless antics of people from different countries as if going to a carnival” (:). To some extent,

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Yokomitsu does depict Shanghai as a carnivalesque site, an international “marketplace” and meeting ground for different languages and cultures. In one reminiscence of his stay in Shanghai, Yokomitsu emphasized this sense of the city as a type of marketplace. He wrote of being in the lobby of a movie theater enveloped by “the whirl of languages from different countries: The fluctuations of the sounds emerging from that strange, inorganic mass no doubt determined the fate of those people as surely as the fluctuations of prices in the marketplace.”59 The city itself is, as Suga suggests, a grotesque body, a city turned inside out and entirely opened up to the outside and containing, as Yokomitsu noted, several nation-states. At the same time, Suga also points to the limitations of this comparison with carnival, writing that the concept of revolutionary laughter, which for Bakhtin is central to the phenomenon of the carnivalesque, is absent in Yokomitsu’s novel. Indeed, this absence indicates the fundamental difference between the cultural and social formations depicted in Shanghai and the type of phenomena that Bakhtin analyzes. In Bakhtin’s analysis, the Renaissance carnival that forms the basis for Rabelais’s writings is an idealized prehistory of the modern nation, a moment of transition between the medieval authority of the Church and the emergence of nation-states in Europe. In this sense, the hybrid forms of the grotesque body—the term “grotesque” was itself first applied to images depicting hybridized human–animal and human–plant forms—can be seen to indicate a process of becoming for the national community. The openness of the grotesque body described by Bakhtin signifies the formation of a communal social body, the opening of the individual onto the world. In turn, the acts of eating and drinking, in which “the body transgresses . . . its own limits,” emphasize this connection between body and world.60 In Yokomitsu’s novel, the images of the grotesque do not signify a process of becoming but of disintegrating.The pervasive images of food in the novel do not correspond to the “popular feasts” of Bakhtin’s carnival but in fact are tied more closely to images of violence, expressed through representations of waste and excrement. It is not the process of the body incorporating the world (eating) but the ejection of the world from the body (as waste) that forms

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the basis of the novel’s image system. If Shanghai exists as a grotesque body, it is one that has been dismembered and disemboweled by the military and economic encroachment of the imperial powers, a body that has been violently blocked from forming a national community. Instead of Bakhtin’s joyous and revolutionary laughter, then, we are left at the end of the novel with Sanki’s “ironic laughter” as his body is immersed in excrement. The images of waste that pervade the novel can perhaps also be analyzed in terms of the psychoanalytic category of abjection. As embodied in images evoking horror and fascination, such as those of a corpse or excrement, abjection has been analyzed by Julia Kristeva as an essential element in the formation of subjectivity (and as an essential component of literature). For Kristeva, the abject signifies a process of exclusion that constitutes subjectivity. She writes that the abject is what must be excluded and rejected in order for the “I” to exist: “The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being.There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded.”61 Kristeva distinguishes this gesture of exclusion or foreclosure from the process of repression. The excluded objects do not reside in the unconscious but at the outer borderlines of the subject, on the margin between inside and outside.The abject, which Kristeva associates with the maternal body, defies placement and categorization, inhabiting instead the in-between spaces of being. It forms its own peculiar topography, the excluded space that is, in turn, necessary for “the mapping of the self ’s clean and proper body.” This necessary exclusion also explains why abjection is marked by ambivalence, for it exists as the limit of subjectivity and to this extent defines it (for example, the corpse negatively defines the living body).The abject in this sense must be both repudiated and acknowledged.62 This analysis can also be extended to the formation of national subjectivity.The national body (designating both the national community and its individual subjects) is formed, as critics have noted, through an exclusion of other, abjected bodies, those that exist at the margins of society.63 The demarcation of a communal space, as

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well as the representation of a “homogenous, empty time” as the common experience of the national community, also entails the identification and abjection of those who inhabit the outer edges of this boundary, both spatially and temporally.64 In the Japanese context, for example, Michael Bourdaghs has examined literary representations of the burakumin (or so-called outcastes) as precisely such abjected bodies inhabiting the marginal spaces of the communal body. Bourdaghs points out the association between burakumin and discourses of hygiene and disease in modern writings and analyzes the character Ushimatsu in Shimazaki Toson’s Broken Commandment (Hakai, ):“Like the pharmakos, the ritual scapegoat of ancient Greek societies, Ushimatsu occupies a position simultaneously inside and outside the Iiyama community; he is the foreign element who nonetheless originates within the community and whose expulsion to the exterior allows the social community to produce/reproduce its internal identity—its health.”65 In discourses on empire in which the distinctions between national and imperial subjects form a terrain of continual contestation, such marginal spaces have special significance. On the margins of empire, imperial subjects maintain a double status of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. In this context, Oguma Eiji’s examination of the multiple discourses on Japanese ethnicity demonstrates how such discourses were typically forged in relation to “borderline” spaces of the nation and empire such as Korea,Taiwan, Hokkaido, and Okinawa.66 Kristeva focuses on sites of disturbance in subjectivity and argues that the abject’s exclusion can never be complete or absolute. In particular,“literature” designates one site of its return as an element that disturbs and threatens being: “On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.”67 In Yokomitsu’s novel, Shanghai also can be seen to represent such a borderline space.The city, located at the outer edges of the Japanese Empire, represents a container for the dejected, excluded bodies inhabiting the outer margins of national community.They exist as waste products of the international capitalist system, represent-

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ing what was excluded in the formation of national subjectivity. The spaces of destitution at the margins of the narrative, which erupt from time to time in Yokomitsu’s description of the city, are situated both inside and outside the economic system that structures this semicolonial city. This description figures a space of exclusion and destitution. Here, the boundaries of individual bodies dissolve—as in the scenes of Chinese demonstrations in the streets and factories—and individual subjectivity melts into a horrific mass. The Chinese laborers and the prostitutes who inhabit this space also represent the absolute commodification of the body that is the prerequisite for the economy to function. In terms of the conflicted yet linked discourses of nation and empire, the abjection of colonial/semicolonial bodies also has a double meaning—it is what has to be rejected in the formation of the “clean and proper body” of the nation but also assimilated into the space of empire. As suggested earlier, this contradiction is the subject of “The Pale Captain” and also turns up in Sanki’s ambivalent attitude toward the city of Shanghai and, particularly, the space of destitution.The images of abjection appear throughout the novel and are most closely associated with Chinese figures who, like the drug addicts of “The Pale Captain,” are described as material objects, excluded from the realm of human agency. For example: Streets of crumbling brick. In the narrow passage, a large mass of Chinese wearing long black shirts gathered, stagnant like seaweed on the ocean floor. Beggars crouched on the road made of gathered pebbles. In the storefront above their heads hung fish bladders and sliced carp dripping with blood.At the fruit stand next door were piles of mango and bananas, overflowing onto the street. Next to the fruit store was a pig store. Countless skinned pigs with their hooves hanging down were darkly sunk to the ground, creating flesh-colored caverns. From the depths of that wall packed completely with pigs, the single white dot of a clock face glittered like an eye. (TYRZ :)

As in the scenes of mass demonstrations, the Chinese here are represented at the edges of human existence, associated with vegeta-

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tion, animals, and waste. Like the food offered for sale at this store, set in a disintegrating environment, the Chinese bodies that inhabit the text are objects to be consumed. The images of abjection occupy an explicitly economic context in the description of Yamaguchi’s “corpse factory” (:–) in the basement of his house, where he cleans dead bodies to sell to British doctors.This gruesome, subterranean “factory,” depicted through gothic images of skeletons and swarming rats, is a counterpart to the textile mill where the Chinese workers’ uprising began. In the scene just quoted, the image of the eye staring out from the grotesque mass of flesh is an uncanny marker of agency inside the city’s waste. By the end of the novel, Sanki wanders the city alone, dressed in Chinese clothes. The city has been turned into a militarized zone, marked by mobilizations of force and resistance. Food has become scarce for the residents of Shanghai. As Suga points out, the images of abundance in the first half of the novel have shifted to images of starvation in the second.68 As Sanki’s body literally begins to empty out, it also merges with the physical environment: “He felt as if his body had lost all weight and become transparent. The landscape before him and behind him became indistinguishably entangled in this body without bones” (TYRZ :–). By now, his body has been emptied out by hunger and has become literally deterritorialized. It is no longer a material extension of Japanese territory but has disappeared into the surrounding landscape. Finally, Sanki is discovered by a group of Chinese strikers, who throw him over the railing into the sewer, where he lands in a boat filled with excrement: Suddenly, Sanki realized that his body, which had stopped moving, was grasping the edge of a wooden ledge. —Yet this was . . . —he stretched his legs and discovered he was in the boat.When he looked around him, a soft horizon drawn by waste covered his body to his neck. He tried to get up. But then he thought, what will I do after I get up? The heavy sash of his past life flowed before him, covered with black dots.As he lay down face up in the excrement and closed his eyes, he began to feel his mind moving again freely on its own. He went after his mind to see how far it would go.Then, when

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his body, as if measuring its own density, realized that it lay (:) prostrate in excrement, he began to laugh coldly. This scene closed the fifth Kaizo installment, which Yokomitsu had designated as the end of the first half of the novel, and, to this extent, indicates a provisional ending to the work. Sanki’s ironic laughter here seems to suggest a sense of the distance between his consciousness, which wanders off on its own, and his body, which remains immersed in excrement. By this point, his degraded, abject body is figured merely as a kind of waste or excess, forcibly ejected or excreted from the material and psychological economies of national identification.This moment of bodily ejection is a counterpoint to the earlier scene in which Sanki imagines his own birth, “the sight of his body flowing out from his mother’s body.” The episode is also structurally analogous to the penultimate scene of “The Pale Captain” in which the narrator’s identity is suddenly revealed to him as he peers into the muddy ground. In that story, however, the revelation is presented as a kind of shock, a traumatic discovery of himself in what he had always considered to be other. In this case, the shock is soon displaced by a sense of irony. As he lies in the excrement, Sanki thinks: “Ah— the smell of manure packed tightly in the ship—this is the smell of home in Japan.At home, mother is probably darning socks with thread wrapped around her rusted glasses. She wouldn’t even dream that I am here in this boat. No, I’ve got to think of Qiulan. Qiulan, help me up from this place” (:–). Although Maeda cites the invocation of Sanki’s mother as a marker of Yokomitsu’s lingering nationalism, in fact Sanki imagines two possibilities of salvation at this point—a return to the national (maternal) body or the path of revolution represented by Qiulan.This is the moment of suspension and ambiguity in which Sanki finds himself near the end of the narrative.

Implosion The final scene of Shanghai, which was written more than a year after the penultimate scene of the boat, is an attempt to bring clo-

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sure to a work that otherwise remains necessarily open, unfinished. Yokomitsu originally envisioned a longer work, as indicated by his notice at the end of the December  Kaizo installment that it was the end of the first half. But with the chapter entitled “Prostitute” (Shunpu), published in November , Yokomitsu completed the narrative.After extricating himself from the boat, Sanki, starving, thinks of Osugi and wanders off to find her new dwelling in hopes of also finding food there. Having remembered the address of her new residence in the city’s slums, he knocks on her door in the middle of the night. Osugi is surprised yet happy to find that Sanki has sought her out. She is too ashamed to light a lamp that would illuminate her squalid environment, so the two of them lie in pitch darkness as the novel ends. Komori notes the circular structure of the novel: in the opening scene, Sanki, with his powerful institutional backing, rejects the entreaties of the Russian prostitute, while in the final scene, he finally ends his resistance to Osugi, who has since descended to the lowest possible social status.69 In addition, as Maeda points out, the blackness of the room represents a negation of the city’s materiality, whose depiction is central to the rest of the novel. This final scene provides a momentary release from the conflicts that have haunted the characters throughout the novel. In the last scene, the entire economy of the city has been brought to a standstill, shut down by the general strike that has spread throughout Shanghai (and beyond). Osugi anticipates that Japanese troops will soon arrive in Shanghai to restore the previous order, which for her means a return to a miserable and degrading existence. She is grateful for this state of suspension, which has enabled her, for this one brief moment, to escape the workings of the economy that fixes her identity as a prostitute:“Yet it was probably only this one night that they could be together like this.When this thought came to her, Osugi could not help but wish for the city’s uprising to continue for even a day longer. If Japanese landing troops arrived tomorrow, the city would no doubt return to its normal peaceful state. If that happened, Sanki would probably leave here, never to return” (TYRZ :–). From the time of his first appearance in the opening passage of the novel, Sanki is associated with movement, a symbolic indication of his body’s circulation

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through different networks of subjectification. Here, however, he is finally brought to rest, rendered immobile. In this moment of suspension,Yokomitsu was able to bring a stylistic closure to the work. The earlier sections of the novel are organized around external, visual descriptions of the city. But in the darkness of Osugi’s room in the last scene, this world delimited by visuality is extinguished. Osugi is too embarrassed to light a lantern, which would expose the room’s filth as well as the many gifts that she has received from her customers. In place of external description, the narrative voice here is filtered entirely through Osugi’s consciousness.The final passages follow Osugi’s memories of her experience since being fired from the bathhouse, a repetition of the narrative. In one sense, the entire novel, as well as the vast topography of the city, has imploded in this last scene, internalized in Osugi’s consciousness. The internalization of the external environment is, for example, indicated by a passage in which Osugi looks back on her recent life, remembering the days when she used to lean against the railing over the sewer and look at the debris floating in the water: Yet Osugi remembered the sadness of the day that Sanki left the house never to return, leaving her there alone, when she stood by herself day after day staring at the surface of the water in the sewer.At the time, oil patterns floated on the surface of the sewer water beneath the fog, as duckweed sprouting on the side of the mortar lapped at the oil on the water’s surface. Nearby, the yellow corpse of a chick laid its head among the rape leaves, stockings, mango peels, and scraps of straw, gathering the pitch black bubbles that welled up from the depths to form a small island in the middle of the sewer. (TYRZ :–)

This passage is a rewriting of an earlier scene; a description that was previously in the narrator’s voice is here filtered through Osugi’s consciousness (:–).The city as a figure for the external world has, in other words,imploded into her consciousness,into a mental image. The shift in style between the body of the work and the last chapter is indicative of a broader transformation in Yokomitsu’s

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writing. Between the publication of the fifth installment in Kaizo and the publication of the installment entitled “Prostitute” in , Yokomitsu published the well-known short story “Machine” (Kikai), in September . The publication of this work (or, according to some critics, a lesser-known earlier work entitled “Bird” [Tori]) was a significant stylistic shift for Yokomitsu. As discussed in chapter , this story marked Yokomitsu’s shift away from questions of the “external world” (gaikai) toward a concern with interiority. In the last scene of Shanghai,Yokomitsu uses this withdrawal into interiority, and the shift from Sanki’s to Osugi’s consciousness, as a negation of the city and the economic system that structures it. In some ways, the shift away from an emphasis on the representation of corporeal sensation that is already suggested in this closing scene had a strong impact on Yokomitsu’s later writing. In the s, this focus on psychological interiority—which Yokomitsu seemed to describe as a conversion from his resistance to the national language to his “subjugation” to it—was transformed into the problematic of “spirit” (seishin) that was the basis for his exploration of the essence of Japanese culture.70 In the mid-s,Yokomitsu turned to an explicitly nationalist discourse, as in his Melancholy Journey.This later work, discussed in chapter , can be seen as an attempt to overcome the crisis in subjectivity outlined in his first novel. In Shanghai, the possibility of this overcoming is not yet realized. The space of abjection at the end of the novel offers a glimpse of a release from the conflicts of subjectivity, but even here, there can be no genuine transcendence of the capitalist economy or the world that it structures.Thus in the darkness, Osugi imagines with pleasure the past images of Sanki that are stored in her memory, images that are soon displaced by the images of her endless chain of customers, evoking a sense of revulsion: And then, different images of Sanki’s face and shoulders, from the days when she used to gaze at him enraptured from the corner in Oryu’s bathhouse, arose in her mind. Soon, however, those white and cold faces of Sanki became increasingly immersed in the waves of the long tongues, the hair slicked back with oil, the hard nails, the teeth biting into her breast,

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the gooseflesh, the breath reeking of opium, that belonged to the customers who paid their money night in and night out. (TYRZ :)

Osugi strives toward a space outside the economy of exchange, where she can establish a relationship with Sanki not mediated by the commodification of the body.This last scene demonstrates the impossibility of such a transcendence. The city and its economy (indicated by the imagery of the “waves” repeated from the first scene of the work) have infiltrated too far into her consciousness, and the novel ends with Osugi “staring into the darkness that spread across the ceiling” (:).

chapter 3

Mapping the Space of Mass Culture: Kawabata Yasunari’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa We are in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms, a melting down in which many of the opposites in which we have been used to think may lose their force. . . .The theater of this literary confusion is the newspaper. Walter Benjamin

The masses move forward at every moment— their Asakusa is a foundry that continually melts down all forms of the old and transforms them into the new. Soeda Azenbo

From External to Internal Margin Kawabata Yasunari began serializing his first extended work, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Asakusa Kurenaidan, –), a little more than a year after Shanghai began to appear in the pages of Kaizo.1 Together with Yokomitsu Riichi’s novel, it stands as the major literary legacy of the New Sensationist movement. In certain ways, it also is a parallel project. Both works might be described as “cartographic,” for they are organized around the mapping of a specific urban topography.This space, in turn, frames a particular image of Japanese modernity. In their own ways, the two works focus on the representation of borderline, in-between spaces, those situated at the margins of national culture. These topographies—marked by fragmentation and flux, as well as by the circulation of human bodies as commodities—are points of tension and instability in the constitution of national subjectivity.There also are significant differences in the two works’ form and thematic emphasis. Yokomitsu’s investigation of modernity led him to a semicolonial setting outside Japan, to Shanghai, which he represents as a space heavily marked by ideological and political conflict. In his work, the city functions as a node within a transnational political and economic system characterized by competition among the imperialist powers and resistance among the Chinese. The overriding tone of the work is one of crisis and struggle. Throughout the novel, Yokomitsu uses images of abjection and destitution to describe the double process of the construction and exclusion of subjects within this system. Kawabata located his own image of modernity within national borders, in Asakusa (which is also situated on the margins of the city of Tokyo, the capital of the national and imperial state). As a number of critics have pointed out, however, Kawabata’s work has a greater sense of playfulness, what might be described as an enjoyment of the fluidity of contemporary cultural forms at the edges of the nation. Roughly the first half of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa was

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published in the evening edition of the Tokyo Asahi shinbun, one of the major daily newspapers. Scarlet Gang describes transformations in the sites and forms of contemporary cultural production, and Kawabata’s representation of Japanese modernity is, to a significant extent, shaped by its engagement with various manifestations of mass culture. Formally, the work is characterized by a mixture of multiple writing styles and genres, both literary and nonliterary. Together with Hayashi Fumiko’s Tales of Wandering, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is perhaps the most radical expression of a core tendency of modernist literature generally, a dismantling of the conventional structures of the novel form.As Mikhail Bakhtin argued in his history of the genre, if the novel developed according to the cannibalization of surrounding forms of writing (among them the diary and epistolary forms), modernism presents this process of internalization and assimilation in reverse: the disintegration of the novel into heterogeneous fragments of other genres.2 This breakdown of form can be understood historically as marking an end to the dominance of the novel as a cultural medium.The centrality of the novel form in constructing the institution of modern literature has been generally acknowledged, yet its privileged position in literary and cultural production was increasingly threatened during this time by the rapid spread of competing media, foremost among them film. In turn, this transformation in cultural status is inscribed within the novel as a formal rupture. It was during this period that the concept of “pure literature” (junbungaku) emerged as an attempt to define the essence of prose fiction—and, more specifically, the essence of Japanese prose fiction—through the exclusion of popular fiction and other forms of writing. Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, by contrast, breaks down the distinction between pure and “mass literature,” dissolving the novel into multiple,“impure” forms of writing. These formal characteristics also shape the work’s representation of the space of Japanese modernity.The novel form existed as one of the privileged sites for delineating a space of national consciousness in modern Japan. As reflected in some of the key writings of Taisho literary discourse—in the cosmopolitanism of the Shirakaba writers or the personal fiction of I-novelists—this cultural space was organized around the construction of an integrat-

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ing subjectivity. In Kawabata’s work, however, this subjectivity— the cosmopolitan subjectivity perhaps best exemplified by the figure at the center of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s bookstore—is imploded. In effect, Kawabata’s Asakusa exists as the topography opened by this implosion, one that exposes a breakdown in narratives of assimilation and internalization.While theories of national culture such as those suggested by Okakura Kakuzo’s Ideals of the East or Akutagawa’s “The Smiles of the Gods” were premised on a distinction between an external civilization and a native cultural vessel into which the foreign is internalized and incorporated, in Asakusa’s liminal space such distinctions are problematic. Kawabata’s novel describes a culture suspended between the foreign and the native, between past and present, belonging properly to neither. His disassembling of genre opens a space of social and cultural marginality, one that evades narratives of national culture and is unassimilable to binary oppositions of Japan and the West, or the premodern and the modern. As Soeda Azenbo’s metaphorical image of a “foundry” suggests, Asakusa embodies a space of cultural production based on a disjunction.Asakusa is a repository of fragments of a cultural past that are continually recycled and recirculated in new contexts. At the same time, Asakusa serves as an opening in the body of the city (and nation) to the outside, an entry point for new technologies and aesthetic forms. As a number of theorists of nationalism have argued, the ideology of the modern nation-state typically involves a double temporality, one that synthesizes an “imagined” national community of the present with the phantasmatic memory of a mythic past. In Kawabata’s Asakusa, this process of synthesis has broken down.These cultural artifacts and fragments are not interiorized, assimilated into any national body.What links these variegated, fragmented levels of culture is not any uniquely Japanese mechanism of assimilation and transformation or any integrating subjectivity but, rather, the logic of the commodity. Kawabata’s portrayal of Asakusa may be likened to Bakhtin’s carnival, as it reflects the model of the marketplace, where different cultural and social strata are brought into contact and exchanged as commodities.3 Whereas Bakhtin’s carnival stages the overturning of social hierarchies and the formation of a popular

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culture as the prehistory of the modern nation-state, Kawabata’s carnivalesque space of mass culture is, conversely, opened through the disintegration of the space of national culture. Furthermore, although there is undeniably a strong element of “play” in Kawabata’s description of contemporary culture, as Maeda Ai has pointed out, it is also marked by alienation and marginalization. On the one hand, the work describes the pleasure of a deterritorialized consumer culture that moves freely away from the ground of tradition and social institutions, an enjoyment of the ability to reconfigure and shift identities. On the other hand, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa also represents the destitution and marginalization produced by that same consumer culture. In addition to presenting images of internalization and assimilation, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa also highlights what is excluded, marginalized by mechanisms of modernization. It is in this double image of modern culture that the work’s significance lies.

Mass Culture and the Aestheticization of Speed Mass culture (taishu bunka) was a dominant topos in the literary discourse of s Japan. From the discourse on the I-novel to the exchange over the “plotless novel,” the debate on the “popularization” (taishuka) of literature among Marxist writers, and the theory of formalism that occupied the literary world at the end of the decade, nearly all the major literary debates of this time were shaped, to varying degrees, by the perception of changes in the production, dissemination, and reception of culture. For literary critics,“mass culture” was a term that covered a wide range of cultural phenomena, many of which had developed in earlier years but which became a critical preoccupation after the  earthquake. It signified in the first instance the impact of technology on cultural production, especially the proliferation of new or expanding media, including film, radio, recorded music, and mass-circulation journals and newspapers, which changed both directly and indirectly the conditions of literary practice. On the level of literary representation, it brought attention to new urban sites of consumption and entertainment such as department stores, revue the-

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aters, and cafés. Critics wrote about the “aestheticization of speed” and the transformative impact of “mechanized civilization” (kikai bunmei)—including the acceleration of industrialization and the spread of various new technologies—on everyday life. Typically, these manifestations were associated with foreign, particularly American, culture. Kawabata, for example, refers to it as the culture of the “foreign modern” (hakurai modaan). As Miriam Silverberg contends, however, the mass culture of this period cannot be reduced to borrowing or transplanting from contemporary European or American culture. Instead, it represented the emergence of complex and often ambivalent cultural formations that negotiated among the conflicting demands of state ideology, the marketplace, and consumer desire and that reformulated discourses of gender, class, and national/cultural identity. Silverberg refers to the complex production and reception of mass culture during this time as a “form of cultural code-switching.”4 These transformations had a great impact on literary practice. New, popular forms, such as the detective novel and mass-circulation journals such as Kingu (King, first published in ), threatened the privileged position of the literary establishment. Techniques of producing and marketing literary works as commodities reached newly sophisticated levels, exemplified by the enpon (oneyen book) phenomenon. More significantly, as mentioned previously, the novel (shosetsu) itself as a cultural form was regarded by some critics as nearing the end of its historical dominance.Among those who most forcefully articulated this transformation was the Marxist critic Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke. One of the members of the pioneering leftist journal Tanemaku hito (The Sower, –) and a leading theoretician of Marxist literature, Hirabayashi was one of several leftist critics (Nii Itaru and Oya Soichi were others) who responded at least somewhat positively to the phenomenon of mass culture, or what was often referred to in contemporary discourse as modanizumu. Hirabayashi had been one of the strongest critics of Yokomitsu’s theory of formalism (the latter had inaugurated the debate, in part by responding to an article written by Hirabayashi), but he later claimed to have converted to formalism by way of film. Hirabayashi himself wrote and published detective fiction and identified a “progressive” value in mass culture, one

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

based on its violence toward established social and cultural institutions.5 He especially saw in the machine aesthetic an embodiment of transformations in the experience of everyday life:“The matrix of modernism is the machine. It is the machine that overturns tradition and subverts values. . . . For this reason, I believe that there is a progressive aspect to modernism.The development of machines and the resulting acceleration of everyday life are a legacy that should be handed over from bourgeois to proletarian society.The aestheticization of speed is in no way a characteristic specifically of consumer culture but, rather, represents a revolution of aesthetics according to the machine.”6 Hirabayashi added that it is more important for writers to grasp the reality of contemporary life in its totality than to “memorize the formulas of Marxism.”7 In Hirabayashi’s view, among the elements of established culture being destroyed by new technologies was the novel form. In his essay “The Technical Revolution in Art and Literature” (Bungaku oyobi geijutsu no gijutsuteki kakumei, ), Hirabayashi examined the impact of the new media on literary practice. He attributed the decline of the novel to changes in cultural and social formations. Thus Hirabayashi linked the novel to the emergence of printing technology, democracy, and the ideology of individualism, as well as to the development of national languages. In contrast, he presented film as representing a new technology that was able to transcend the boundaries of national languages (and cultures) and was tied to newly emergent mass social formations.8 The strong formal and conceptual impact of film on literary practice during this period can in fact be seen in such hybridized genres as the cinépoème, the written scenarios of Akutagawa, and stylistic aspects of the works of Yokomitsu and Kawabata. As Hirabayashi pointed out, this reformulation of literary practice was the general context for the debate over literary formalism, which itself (as Hirano Ken emphasized) was an offshoot of the discussion of mass culture among Marxist writers and critics.9 Indeed, at their core, the theories of form set forth by Yokomitsu and Nakagawa Yoichi were an attempt to rethink the process of literary production, particularly the production of literary value (meaning).10 In the theory of formalism, writing, as a material object—in effect, as a commodity—is considered separately from

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the moment and site of production (the act of writing). Instead, in the formalist theory of literature, meaning is generated in the act of reading (consumption). It is in this moment of exchange, in the contact between the material written word and the reader, that literary value is produced. To this extent, formalism can be seen as expressing the fetishization of writing in the context of what Yokomitsu called the “capitalist-nationalist state.”11 It was, however, Kawabata—who was not directly involved in the debate over formalism (once referring to himself as nothing more than Yokomitsu’s “skeptical ally”)—who most forcefully underscored this context of formalist theory, through his work Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. Kawabata had served as one of the leading theoreticians of the New Sensationists.12 His early essay, “Analysis of New Writers’ New Trends” (Shinshin sakka no shinkeiko kaisetsu, ), had helped provide the group’s theoretical underpinnings, linking the movement to the European avant-garde. Kawabata’s literary activity during the s and early s had in fact developed along heterogeneous trajectories.13 During this time, he was working through a complex engagement with contemporary culture that required working in different media and genres (including short stories, “palm-of-the-hand” stories, criticism, and film), as well as mapping out different cultural landscapes. Scarlet Gang of Asakusa works through this connection between mass culture and the reformulation of the literary text.

In the Margins of the Newspaper The plot of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa revolves around the narrator’s encounter with a group of “juvenile delinquents” (furyo shonen) in Asakusa who call themselves the Kurenaidan, or Scarlet Gang.They are a youth gang with theatrical aspirations. The narrator, who is older than the Kurenaidan members and an outsider to the culture of Asakusa, is commissioned by them to write a script that will “shock society.”14 The narrating “I” is initially drawn to one Kurenaidan member,Yumiko, whom he first finds in an open doorway in a back alleyway and then follows throughout Asakusa.Yumiko thus becomes the narrator’s guide to the district, explaining the

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

language and customs of its subculture while also pointing out to him the impoverishment of laborers and the homeless.The narrator meets other members of the Scarlet Gang:Tokiko,Akiko (really Yumiko dressed as a boy), Umekichi, and Haruko.The main narrative development of the first half of the work is a revenge drama: Yumiko seeks revenge on a man named Akagi, who had seduced and then abandoned her older sister, leading to her mental breakdown. In a climactic scene midway through the text,Yumiko confronts Akagi in a boat on the Sumida River, kissing him with her mouth filled with arsenic. But after this episode, both this plotline and Yumiko herself abruptly disappear (until the last scene of the book). In the second half of the work, a new character, Haruko, replaces Yumiko as the heroine, and any semblance of plot dissolves into sketches and fragmentary images of Asakusa. Even from its outset, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is not based primarily on plot. Instead, the work is organized as a kaleidoscopic overview of Asakusa’s culture. It is written in a fragmentary style, with the narrative moving from image to image in rapid succession and frequently interrupted by anecdotes, myths, and reminiscences. Kawabata once described the style as akin to “the succession of images in a newsreel film.”15 He also labeled his novel an “advertisement” for Asakusa, serving as a guidebook to contemporary Asakusa offered to the readers of the newspaper in which it was serialized. In different ways, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa continually moves against and beyond the boundaries of the novel form. Silverberg has also identified the work’s connection to ethnographic studies of contemporary urban culture by Gonda Yasunosuke and Kon Wajiro.16 In addition, Unno Hiroshi has shown that the work can be read as urban reportage, which emerged as a prominent genre of writing during this period.17 Indeed, Kawabata acknowledged the writings of Sato Hachiro, Soeda Azenbo, and Ishizumi Harunosuke, as well as assorted studies of delinquent youth, as some of the textual sources for his work.18 Kawabata also noted that his work was shaped in various ways by the fact of its publication in a newspaper. He mentioned that he had first worked out the general outline of a plot for his novel but found that the format of newspaper serialization did not allow for the sustained development of a central narrative:

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Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is an oddly structured work. It is written in the style of reportage, as well as that of descriptive poetry.This was not the original plan. I had set up its general plot, but midway through I realized that I didn’t have nearly the number of pages I needed, and I didn’t want suddenly to change my writing style to develop the plot further, because of the attachment I had to the sections already written. So I thought about it again 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 the direction of my pen, entrusting myself to free and reckless associations. Of course I still feel it has some coherence. I accepted the fact that there would be deficiencies in novelistic method.Yet some aspects were made that much more interesting by these deficiencies. As a record of life and customs in Asakusa, I recognize myself that it is extremely shallow, but still, as an account of my observations and impressions of Asakusa, this work will no doubt persevere. If only for nonliterary aspects, it will undoubtedly be read by future generations.19 Here Kawabata is underscoring the principal characteristic of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa as a mixture of the literary and the nonliterary, a hybrid genre organized around both an internal narrative and an opening onto an extraliterary field. It is as if the frame of the newspaper has affected the work, orienting it along two different trajectories. The ambiguity of the novel’s borderlines was indicated by Kawabata in his epigraph to the first installment on December : “It is hard to gauge what kind of imposition this novel will bring on members of the Kurenaidan or any of the others who make their lair in and out of Asakusa Park. But I hope it will be forgiven, as in the end it is only a novel” (AK, ). While Kawabata later asserted that no real-life models for the work existed, it is clear that confusion regarding the empirical status of events and characters referenced in the work was an essential aspect of its conception. Thus some of the characters who appear in the novel—the homeless prostitute Dote no Okin, the Russian dancer Anna Lubowsky, the man with “a mouth in his stomach”—were actual figures who

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

were living or performing in Asakusa and who appear in other contemporaneous accounts. Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is situated on the borderline between the literary and the nonliterary, between the discursive space of “reportage” (where the narrator speaks directly to the reader) and the imaginary space of the novel. Kawabata consciously plays on the confusion between them. The impact of the newspaper’s discursive space can also be seen in Scarlet Gang’s treatment of narrative time. In his announcement in  that he would write a sequel to Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Kawabata wrote that “if the heroine Yumiko had been twenty years old at the time I was writing for the Asahi shinbun, then she would be twenty-five this year. Since the old work followed a flow of associations and yet was also a sketch of each day and moment in Asakusa, if Yumiko is to appear in the new manuscript, it should treat her as twenty-five and describe the Asakusa of .”20 This statement indicates the work’s unusual temporal structure: it is written in “real time,” like a journalistic account of current events, collapsing the distinction between the temporality of fiction and that of everyday life. The journalistic effects of Kawabata’s work were illustrated most immediately by the sudden increase in popularity of the Casino Folies after Kawabata mentioned the revue theater, first in passing in the third installment (December ) and more extensively in the episode of December .21 In the latter, Kawabata listed the Casino Folies and the recently constructed subway tower as symbolizing the Asakusa of , incorporating “eroticism, nonsense, speed, the humor of cartoons, women’s legs.”22 In many respects, the work is written as an introduction to Asakusa, including its history, attractions, and famous places. Kawabata himself acknowledged the importance of this aspect of the work: “It seems that it was the sketching of contemporary Asakusa, rather than the work’s literary value, that drew the interest of the newspaper readers.”23 As Walter Benjamin stated, the main value of communication in the age of journalism’s ascendancy was information rather than narrative.24 Contemporary Japanese critics offered similar views of literature. Oya Soichi, for example, claimed that “reportage” was the main driving force of the age.As the tempo of literature increased with the tempo of modern life, he argued, a literature that was

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more closely connected to everyday life was required, one that reflected “news value.”25 What Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke articulated as the “commercial value” of the literary work (a supplement to his well-known distinction between artistic and political value) is materialized here as information.26 Kawabata maintained that he had conducted extensive research for the work, spending entire days in Asakusa, wandering throughout Asakusa Park sometimes all night, and always taking copious notes. He claimed that he was ultimately able to use only a fraction of his material, as though, he said, he were opening a small shop but had bought enough merchandise to fill a department store.27 Kawabata’s metaphor underscores the nature of the work as a storehouse of contemporary culture centered on Asakusa. In the work, Asakusa itself is presented as an externalized department store, a site in which everything is for sale to the consumer.28 In turn, the principal value of the text is information—a commodity to be consumed by the reader of the newspaper—rather than narrative.The work, therefore, not only is about consumer culture, but is embedded in it—it displays, in effect, the formal structure of the commodity.

Ruptures of Form At the same time, however, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa cannot be reduced solely to consumer culture, for its form can also be seen to resist this commodification of literature. Through its rejection of linear plot, the frequent use of interruption in both language and narrative, and the deployment of multiple, interweaving points of view, the work resists easy consumption by the reader.The experience of reading Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is in fact a process of continual interruption.The sheer difficulty of reading this text is indicated by the experience of Maeda Ai, who wrote that when he first tried to read this “exceptionally difficult” work as a college student, he was unable to make his way to the end.29 That is, in addition to the information being conveyed in the work, there is also a great deal of “noise.” In certain ways, the work’s form represents a disintegration of the modern novel’s generic boundaries.The technique underlying the

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

composition of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa can be compared to collage. As Ozeki Kazuhiro has pointed out, the work is filled with citations from literary and extraliterary sources.30 These citations, which are grafted onto the text, include 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 songs, subway advertisements, movie and theater billboards, and quotations from earlier works by Kawabata, Soeda, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro.The text also uses multiple languages (including a substantial amount of slang) and narrative perspectives. The intermingling of these disparate voices throughout the text thus produces a heterogeneous discourse. It makes the novel a porous and open grotesque body, pierced by the foreign bodies of extraliterary genres and the half-digested fragments of popular culture, an unfinished process rather than a coherent whole. Kawabata’s work dissolves the novel into multiple forms of writing and other media. In terms of content, the work depicts various sites of cultural production, including film, radio, and revue theaters. The text itself also was closely intertwined with other media. For example, each installment in the Asahi shinbun was accompanied by an illustration by Ota Saburo, whose name appeared alongside Kawabata’s to the left of the title.These visual markers help shape the text’s reception, as they depict specific characters and episodes—the earthquake scene, the Casino Folies dancers,Yumiko—but, more important, establish the text’s association with an unmistakably “modern” iconography (by means of clothing, hairstyles, and the style of the drawings themselves). Furthermore, a film version of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa was produced before the novel’s serialization was even complete (and which starred, coincidentally, Hayama Michiko, Tanizaki’s sister-in-law and the model for Naomi in Chijin no ai).31 The film, in turn, affected the written work. In the second half of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, the narrator refers to the film version of the novel and explains the introduction of the character Haruko as a result of Yumiko’s death in the film. In addition, a performance of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, based on a script by Shimamura Ryuzo, was staged at the Casino Folies, the very theater whose survival and popularity had been established by its mention in Scarlet Gang.32

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According to Ireneusz Opacki’s formalist analysis of literary genre, the “hybridization” of genre marks the transition from one “dominant” genre to another, a shift in stages of literary history. Within this transitional stage, he writes, the newly dominant genre begins to infect the others, producing elements of hybridization: “At the point of transition from one literary trend to another, there takes place a revaluation of the hierarchy of genres: a previously secondary genre, because it possesses features which are especially serviceable to the new trend, rises to the top. . . . Now, once it becomes a royal genre, it imparts these distinctive features, which brought about its promotion, to other genres.”33 In the field of literature in s Japan, formerly marginal forms such as poetry and drama emerged as significant factors in establishing modernist literature. The effects of both genres can be seen in modernist fiction; the influence of avant-garde poetry is especially noticeable in the fiction of the New Sensationist group. But whereas Opacki concentrated exclusively on the question of “literary genre,” we have here a rupture in the boundaries of literature. For Bakhtin, literature (and, above all, the novel) is formed through the digestion of nonliterary genres (what he terms “primary speech genres”). In modernist writings, however, this process unfolds in reverse.34 The mixing of genres is also matched by continual shifts in the narrative’s perspective. In her analysis of the work’s narrative structure, Ota Suzuko concluded that the text is composed of three distinct narrative voices that intersect with one another throughout the work.35 One is the voice of the narrator as the author of the text who speaks directly to the reader (as shokun), referring to previously published works by Kawabata, self-consciously introducing characters to the reader, and describing his research for writing the novel. Another voice is that of the narrator as a character in the novel, who interacts with the other fictional characters.The third is a third-person objective voice who relates those events at which neither of the first two narrators is present. All three narrative voices converge in the climactic episode of the first half of the work, the confrontation between Yumiko and Akagi on a boat on the Sumida River.The episode proceeds as two scenes unfolding simultaneously, a double structure emphasizing the spatial

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

dislocation between the objective observer and the subjective narrator. On the one hand, the position of the narrator-as-character is given a specific locale, the observation deck of the subway tower. Here Kawabata describes the panoramic view of the city from the tower, including a detailed listing of the buildings in sight, as if to fix the narrative perspective at a specific location in space. On the other hand, he recounts from an objective viewpoint the events unfolding simultaneously in the interior of the boat.The simultaneous occurrence of these two events accentuates the distance between these two positions of narration. Finally, there is the abrupt intrusion of the third voice, the authorial voice, incorporating his own reminiscences of the earthquake into the narrative:“At the time I was a student living in a boarding house in Hongo” (AK, ). The text thus continually shifts among the different narrative perspectives. The position of the narrating subject, who is at one moment able to observe events from a fixed position, is destabilized in the next scene, when the narrating subject is thrust into the kaleidoscopic flux of the fragmented landscape. In this way, the unity of the narrative voice is fragmented and disseminated into a fluid, shifting environment.The work is structured as an irreducible difference among these narrative perspectives, and the reader is situated in the gap between the disembodied, abstract position of observation and the physical, corporeal perspective of the narrating subject. At the end of the text, as Ota points out, there is an unusual conjunction of these different levels; when the narrator/author takes a boat out onto the Sumida River in order, he says, to research the continuation of the scene between Yumiko and Akagi.36 The first half of the narrative was suspended in February , at a point when Yumiko was being led away on a white motorboat after delivering her arsenic-laced kiss to Akagi. In the second half of the work, which was resumed after a suspension of several months, Yumiko was replaced by Haruko as the main protagonist. Kawabata explained that this was necessary because in the film version of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, which had opened in the interval between the last two installments,Yumiko dies. In the last scene of the novel, however, the narrator/author happens to see Yumiko herself on the boat, disguised as an “oil seller” (aburauri, a term that is also slang for

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“idler”). The work thus closes on this self-reflexive note, with an encounter between the author and one of his fictional characters. Formally, then, Kawabata’s work proceeds according to a multiplication of narrative perspective and a disintegration of the novel form into a variety of literary and nonliterary genres. It moves into and out of the boundaries of conventional literary practice, in particular transgressing the boundaries of “pure literature,” which by this time had become associated with the monologic discourse of the I-novel. In its shifting through different narrative levels and its incorporation of heterogeneous voices, the novel creates a sense of destabilization for the reader.At the same time, this disintegration of the boundaries of literary practice frames the work’s representation of modern culture as a type of grotesque body, in which the borders between the inside and the outside are open and uncertain.

Asakusa as Literary Topos Kawabata’s literary output in the s was divided into various cultural topographies. Hatori Kazuei, for example, found a division in Kawabata’s fictional writing in this period, represented by his “Izu” and “Asakusa” works.37 The area in and around the hotsprings resorts of the Izu peninsula is the setting for several of his stories, especially “The Dancing Girl of Izu” (Izu no odoriko, ). This short story is Kawabata’s best-known work from this time and still one of his most widely read.38 Although it was published in Bungei jidai, it is more conventional in language and theme than most of the New Sensationist writings that magazine published.“The Dancing Girl of Izu” is written in the first person and is about a twenty-year-old student who joins a group of traveling performers as they wander from village to village. He is drawn especially to one of the young dancers, who is described through the following markers of an antiquated culture: “Her hair was arranged elaborately in an unusual old style unfamiliar to me. . . . She gave the impression of the girls from illustrations in old romances who were depicted with an emphasis on their extravagant hair.”39 As a number of commentators noted, the story is a

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

depiction of the melancholy and longing of youth and an archetype of the “lyricism” and “sentimentalism” often regarded as a hallmark of Kawabata’s later fiction.40 Around the same time as these Izu works, Kawabata also wrote a series of stories centered on Asakusa.These stories, which include “Asakusa Diary” (Asakusa nikki, ), “Sisters of Asakusa” (Asakusa no shimai, ),“The Mynah Bird of Asakusa” (Asakusa no kyukancho, ), and “Asakusa Festival” (Asakusa matsuri, –), are organized around the representation of urban space. Against the seemingly aestheticized and purified space of “The Dancing Girl of Izu,” in these other stories Asakusa is a disordered mixture of classes, cultures, and languages. In Scarlet Gang of Asakusa Kawabata describes the topography: “Geisha making a morning visit to the temple. Students on their way to school. Beggars. Nursemaids. Day laborers. Men returning home in the morning. Homeless. Seeing such mixed crowds may not be unusual, but it is entirely the peculiarity of Asakusa that at seven or eight o’clock in the morning the stalls in the temple grounds are surrounded by such crowds of unworldly people” (AK, ). The two proper names Izu and Asakusa refer to two distinct tendencies in Kawabata’s early writings (although, as I will mention later, there are important points of interconnection between them). Kawabata had moved to Tokyo in  to enter the First Higher School.The following year, he took a trip to Izu, and this experience formed the basis for his later story. During the s, Kawabata moved his residence back and forth between Asakusa (and its environs) and Izu. Similarly, his writings from this period shifted between two separate aesthetic trajectories. One (Asakusa) represents his engagement with modernity and the urban landscape, with mass culture and technical experimentation.The other (Izu) is associated with nature, lyricism, classical aesthetics, and sentimentalism.41 The struggle between these two topographies is the core issue of Kawabata’s early writings.As I show later, it is in many ways the Izu line—and the sensibility that it represents—that eventually won out over the other. To this pair we could add Kawabata’s screenplay for A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji, ), the landmark avant-garde film directed by Kinugasa Teinosuke, which has received renewed crit-

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ical attention since Kinugasa’s discovery of a surviving print in the early s. According to Kinugasa, the screenplay (which was published under Kawabata’s name) was in large measure a collaborative effort, and of course the independent status of any screenplay as a work is questionable.42 (This is a problem that also applies in varying degrees to many literary works, including Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, which also interacted with various media.) In any case, Kawabata’s work uncovers a third topography that contrasts with both the Izu and the Asakusa series. Against the almost exclusive representation of exterior space in those works, A Page of Madness takes place mainly in the internalized space of the asylum, where one of the protagonists—a woman whose infant has drowned—is confined.The focus on interiority marks out a certain social topography: the repressive regimes of modern medicine and science, which are symbolized by the men and women in white lab coats (one of whom is played by a European actor).This focus on internalized space also suggests the enclosed realm of the psyche. In one sense, the topography of A Page of Madness is defined by the transgression of the borders between internal and external space. For example, as Vlada Petric indicated in an analysis of the film, the space of the asylum is marked by the mixture of objective and subjective points of view, between the images shared by all characters and those representing private hallucinations or memories.43 The main effect of the film—its depiction of “madness”— is the blurring of boundaries between the two. In addition, just as the objective and the subjective perspectives come together, the world outside the asylum and its internal space are, at key moments, blended, symbolized by the “marriage” of the woman’s daughter to one of the inmates.The film’s main character, a janitor, has access to both worlds; he is also by profession a sailor, able to transcend national borders. The three representative works of Kawabata’s writings of the early Showa period thus represent attempts to work through different landscapes of contemporary culture. Of these three works, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is most explicitly presented as a cartographic text. Kawabata, for example, writes in the first chapter: “Readers, let me spread before you the map of Showa, newly redrawn by the reorganization of city wards after the

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

Taisho earthquake” (AK, ). In this way, he announces the work’s goal of tracing the reconfigured space of the post-earthquake city and culture. As a type of map, the text also has a double relationship to the urban landscape.The map creates its own closed semiotic system but is also connected to an external (extraliterary) space. Examining the question of referentiality in literature, Paul de Man wrote that “political and autobiographical texts have in common that they share a referential reading-moment explicitly built in within the spectrum of their significations, no matter how deluded this moment may be in its mode as well as in its thematic content.”44 A similar observation could be made of the cartographic text as well. As a type of map,Scarlet Gang of Asakusa does not progress according to the linear logic of plot but, instead, through rhizomic extensions along multiple trajectories.The work, like the city space being depicted, also contains branching paths and side streets, detours that delay the progression of the narrative. In the first chapter, for example, the narrator promises to guide the reader down “a certain alleyway,” where the Kurenaidan assemble. But before actually doing so, he inserts an extended anecdote about rickshaw men in Asakusa who lead their customers to houses of prostitution. Other interruptions may last several chapters—indeed, the central event of the story,Yumiko’s encounter with Akagi on the boat, is left unfinished in mid-narrative and is not mentioned again until the final passage of the work. As Viktor Shklovsky remarked in his analysis of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, such digressions and interruptions indicate the self-referential quality of the literary text, stressing the distinction between the story (the narrative that exists outside the text) and the plot (the textual combination of those events).45 At the same time, Kawabata’s work maintains a referential function, its connection to a specific urban topography.This referential function is indicated by the prevalence of proper names in the text. In contrast to Yokomitsu’s Shanghai—which was originally written with almost no specific markers of place—or Kawabata’s later work Snow Country, for which he admitted to purposely suppressing the name of the setting, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is filled with proper names and is grounded in a particular time and place.46 In fact, Kawabata registers the distinction between Scarlet Gang of

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Asakusa and previous literature as the specificity of reference in his work. After mentioning a “certain alley” where the Kurenaidan is to be found, Kawabata writes: “But to say ‘a certain alley’ sounds too much like the opening of an outdated novel [furukusai shosetsu]” (AK, ). He then furnishes directions to its location for the reader. These proper names operate in this text like material objects, situating the text in a particular cultural and urban landscape. In discussing the question of translation, Jacques Derrida has emphasized the unique status of the proper name in relation to language.The proper name, possessing a singular materiality and a specificity of reference, resists translation. In one sense, it belongs both inside and outside any language. To Derrida, “a proper name, in the proper sense, does not properly belong to the language; it does not belong there, although and because its call makes the language possible.”47 The dual quality of the proper name can also be seen to operate on the level of an individual text such as Scarlet Gang of Asakusa.As a guide to contemporary culture and a contemporary cultural scene, Kawabata’s novel is formed as an accumulation of proper names—Asakusa, Kurenaidan, Casino Folies. This accumulation helps circumscribe the boundaries of its textual space as a work of literature and, at the same time, establishes points of rupture in the text, openings to the outside world and to a historically specific cultural landscape. At the same time, however, any distinction between textual and empirical (or historical) space cannot be rigidly upheld, for the external landscape that is the referent of the work is itself already phantasmal. The “outside” of the text, the material world, is itself spectral and fluid—in a word, textual. In an essay on Asakusa, Kawabata wrote:“There is no other territory that so sensitively and daringly reflects the age moment to moment as Asakusa.The shows go without saying. But from the mouths of salesmen, the songs of enkashi, the toys peddled on the street, from inside the eateries, people will no doubt feel that they are being shown an intense cartoon.”48 In this description, the very landscape of Asakusa comprises a visual text, an assemblage of objects and people that act as signs. Kawabata’s description of the urban landscape can be tied to a generalized consciousness of the phantasmal quality of the city in

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

the writings of this period, perhaps best expressed in the critical works of Kobayashi Hideo. Kobayashi, who wrote about the loss of memory in an urban environment that was continually changing, also remarked on the “dreamlike” qualities of the city, the sense of unreality underlying the experience of the urban landscape: As machine violence continues to agitate and alter our sense of form and movement in Nature, the lineaments of Nature gradually come to resemble a dream. At this point, a human, spiritual need to shape our own dreams fades away. Both the capacity and the patience to dream for oneself are lost.Yet the craving to dream remains. How convenient, then, for people to just go and stand dumbfounded in the city streets, where the high-speed, manufactured motion seems already dreamlike.49 For Kobayashi, a similar effect is generated by the technology of film, which functions as an external substitute for an internal human capacity to dream that has by now atrophied. Kobayashi presents a negative and violent version of what Susan Buck-Morss refers to as Walter Benjamin’s conception of the “dream world of mass culture.”50 Kawabata’s writings are, for the most part, far removed from Kobayashi’s anxiety. But his representation of Asakusa maintains, from the beginning, a certain sense of spectrality, which might be defined in this context as the disjunction between the surface phenomena and the historical context.This doubleness is materialized as anachronistic images and artifacts of past culture. For example, the work opens with a detailed description of an antiquated figure who is said to still inhabit present-day Asakusa—a “bird catcher” (tori sashi) reminiscent of an Edo-period woodblock print: An antiquated tobacco pouch, made of tanned deer hide with bronze metal fittings, an agate-tipped tie string, silverplated pipe, green herb stems stuck inside so that the Kokubu tobacco doesn’t dry out; with such a pouch at his side, wearing white, close-fitting trousers, black gaiters and white hand covering, an austere blue kimono with the hems tucked into his sash, the sight of such a bird catcher, straight out of a pic-

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ture book from grand Edo, supposedly still appears in today’s Tokyo.The person who says so is a police detective, so it must (AK, ) not be any playful nostalgia. The description of this phantom figure (not seen firsthand but only in rumor) helps demarcate the cultural space represented by Asakusa, as well as the conceptual oppositions that support it.The bird catcher is an anachronism, a residue of the past who has moved from images in antiquarian books onto the streets of present-day Tokyo. He is something on the order of what Marilyn Ivy has termed a “vanishing” figure, a spectral trace of the past inhabiting the space between presence and absence, who serves as a marker of the loss engendered by modernity.51 This opening introduces Asakusa as a space in which the differences between text and world (picture book and Tokyo) and between past and present are already being questioned. Kawabata is also careful to note that the medium by which this figure is transmitted is a police detective, immediately negating any aspect of “playful nostalgia.”The figure of state authority provides the frame or borderline of this spectral space. Along with these phantom pockets of the past,Asakusa is a point of contact with an external culture, with what is described as the “foreign modern” (hakurai modaan), represented most prominently by the Casino Folies theater. Kawabata writes that his references to “grand Edo” at the outset of the work are not indications of an antiquarian aesthetic taste and that he would rather describe the landscape of present-day Asakusa. For Kawabata,Asakusa is not the nostalgic repository of old Edo, as it is, for example, in certain writings of Nagai Kafu (–). In contrast to Kafu’s idealized, ahistorical portrayal in “Sumida River” (Sumidagawa, ), Kawabata’s river is “stagnant with the waste products of the city” (AK, ). Kawabata also describes the steel bridges spanning the river that have replaced the picturesque structures found in Hiroshige prints, noting that they “have little ornamentation, are simple, dynamic, and represent the beauty of the modern city, the aesthetic of science and steel.”52 In one scene, this aesthetic is represented by a public bathroom in a small park near Yoshiwara, which attracts the attention of

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

impoverished children living nearby. The narrator has discovered that for some reason, several of the neighborhood children have decided on their own to clean the bathroom every day. He remarks that he has never seen such a clean public toilet: “No doubt, the public toilet is incomparably more splendid than anything in the children’s own homes.Yet, more than likely, it is the attraction of concrete that makes the children love the public bathroom. Adults may praise this behavior as good public responsibility, but it may be that the children are doing this out of a fascination with modern architecture.” For Kawabata, the bathroom embodies “the attraction of asphalt and concrete” (AK, –).The obsessive behavior of cleaning the public space indicates a certain hypnotic and fetishistic fascination with modern culture (as well as modern culture’s class association). The public bathroom—itself associated with waste and openings in the body—becomes for the children a point of contact with modern culture, an opening in the body of the community to the outside. It inverts the relationship between private and public space, since the public toilet is precisely what does not exist in the children’s homes. At the other end of this urban space conceived as grotesque body is the cafeteria above the newly built subway station in Asakusa (the first in Tokyo), whose advertisements in the trains proclaim it to be the “flower of culture at the vanguard of the age” (). In this way, Kawabata’s Asakusa is defined through the conjunction of such symbols as the bird catcher and public toilet, which nonetheless coexist without any unifying element. Kawabata uses this image of Asakusa to delineate the topography of a spectral modernity—one based on disjunction and doubleness, rather than assimilation. Kawabata’s representation of Asakusa as heterogeneous space is shaped by the history of Asakusa’s social and cultural position in the city, as well as by prior literary representations of the district. The history of Asakusa is closely tied to the Kannon Temple (Sensoji), one of the central religious institutions of both Edo and Tokyo; the development of the area and its importance in the city’s life were based on this temple. Located at the edge of the city of Edo, Asakusa was also the place where “outcaste” groups were concentrated, under the authority of Danzaemon. In the words of Saida Masanori,“The history of Asakusa is not located in the bus-

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tle of Sensoji. Asakusa was established by people oppressed by caste discrimination.”53 In addition, Asakusa was for years a locus of popular entertainments in the city, especially after the banishment of the pleasure quarter to the north of Edo in , after which Asakusa became a popular way station on the road to Yoshiwara.54 Kawabata mentions this function of Asakusa in the opening passages of his work—the “horse path” followed by travelers on their way to the pleasure quarter.Asakusa was further enhanced as a center of popular entertainment by the banishment of the Kabuki theater to this region in . Like the pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara to the north, Asakusa became a “licensed” space of what was perceived to be socially dangerous activity by the authorities, safely confined to the margins of the city and social order.55 In terms of physical topography, the Kannon Temple occupied the center of this space of entertainment. In the surrounding area were theaters of various types and performance spaces, carnivallike sideshows. One Western observer during the Meiji period wrote about the Okuyama section behind the temple: “Here, too, are all sorts of sights to be seen, such as wild beasts, performing monkeys, automata, conjurers, wooden and paper figures, which take the place of the waxworks of the West, acrobats, and jesters for the amusement of women and children.”56 The space leading up to the temple was (and is today) occupied by the commercial corridor of the Nakamise (“inner shops”), the row of shops and stalls that had stood as a permanent marketplace since the Edo period. Next to the Nakamise was the entertainment district of the Rokku (Sixth Ward), with its carnival show-houses and theaters as well as the prostitutes and the homeless near Hyotan Pond. In the Meiji period,Asakusa, especially in the area surrounding the Twelve Stories Tower, was closely associated with unlicensed prostitution. In this way,Asakusa combines aspects of the sacred and the profane. Furthermore, the boundaries between these zones are fluid and easily traversed by the crowds in Asakusa, as illustrated by the appearance of vagrants at the Casino Folies performances in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. In Kawabata’s work, these characteristics are also linked to the historical association of Asakusa with mass spectacle, including

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

sideshows, theater, cinema, and “Asakusa opera.” According to Edward Seidensticker, Asakusa in the early twentieth century was “the place where Tokyo outdid itself and the rest of the nation at the fine old art of viewing things.”57 Since the Meiji period, Asakusa had served as a conduit for presenting to the public new technologies and devices of visuality. For example, the Nihon Panoramakan (Japan Panorama Hall), which opened in Asakusa in May , displayed a massive painting of scenes from the battle of Vicksburg (like many panorama paintings, the theme was war). It extended around  degrees, with actual objects placed in proximity to the spectator to create the illusion of depth.58 Certain forms of the panorama, Benjamin found, prepared the way for the mass reception of motion pictures.59 In fact, it was Asakusa’s Electricity Hall (Denki-kan)—initially dedicated to displaying electrical devices—that became Japan’s first permanent movie theater in .60 The same year in which the Panorama Hall opened, the Ryounkaku, more popularly known as the Junikai (Twelve Stories), was built in Asakusa. Kawabata devotes a chapter in his work to this observation tower, which had become known as a symbol of Asakusa and a Tokyo landmark.61 In regard to the tower’s function, we can draw a parallel to the Panorama Hall, with an observer placed in a central position with a bird’s-eye view of the city extending on all sides. In the case of the Twelve Stories, however, it is the city itself that was presented to the observer as a spectacle, as an object that could be viewed from a position of detachment. This variegated history of Asakusa has helped shape the modernist representation of the region as a space on the margins of society and of national culture, one that frames a phantasmal image of modernity. The transposition of phantasmagoria (the apparent materiality of the specular) from the panorama (or other misemono, such as the diorama, peep show, and cinema) onto the landscape of the city is a gesture in the construction of the literary topography of Tokyo during this time.62 Modernist works used the topos of Asakusa to depict a phantasmal quality of modernity. For example, the representation of Asakusa as a space of mystery and visual transformation can be found in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s short story “The Secret” (Himitsu, ). In Tanizaki’s story, the narrator

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retreats from society into “an obscure, labyrinthine neighborhood in the shadow of the Twelve-Story Tower” in Asakusa.63 He rents a room in a Shingon-sect temple, where he spends his days reading works of decadence and exoticism (such as The Arabian Nights).At night, he slips out disguised as a woman, taking pleasure in mixing with the crowds on Asakusa’s streets and movie theaters. Asakusa here serves as a materialization of the narrator’s unconscious; it is a world of fantasy, where boundaries of identity begin to shift and mutate. It represents a hidden, mysterious realm of desire and intoxication, a space of transformation and hybridization. The historical association between Asakusa and foreign visual technologies was explored in a work by Edogawa Rampo (–), “The Traveler with the Pasted-Rag Picture” (Oshie to tabisuru otoko, ). The story begins with the narrator’s account of going to see a mirage over the ocean, a phantasmagoric vision that “seemed as though a few drops of India ink had been spilt on the surface of a milk-colored film and then projected enormously against the sky.”64 In the train on the way home, he catches a glimpse of “another world” through a story told to him by a fellow traveler.The story is about the traveler’s brother, who long ago become infatuated with a woman whom he had glimpsed through antique Dutch binoculars from atop the Twelve Stories Tower.The woman turned out to be a figure in a cloth picture contained in a peep show. Then, when the man’s younger brother looked at him through the binoculars held in reverse, he transported him into the world of the picture.The antiquated foreign binoculars and other visual technologies in the story provide access to another world separated from the space of everyday life. The world in the cloth picture is also one of stasis, as it exists outside temporality, cut off from the world of modernization.This is the source of the brother’s obsession with the picture as well as his desire to be assimilated into it. (He is ultimately unsuccessful, as the woman remains in her unchanging state while he continues to age.) For Rampo, Asakusa serves in this way as emblem of both nostalgia for the past and a point of entry for foreign technologies. Both works establish a literary tradition of Asakusa as phantasmagoria and as space of intersection of nostalgic past and alien cultures.

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

In his film scenario “Asakusa Park” (Asakusa koen, ), Akutagawa Ryunosuke links the confusion between image and reality to the specific topography of Asakusa.The scenario is of a father and son who have come to the city from the countryside.The son soon loses sight of the father and wanders through the frightening carnival of the Asakusa streets, filled with menacing figures and hallucinatory visions. He never finds his father.Akutagawa uses the medium of film to portray the city as fluid and constantly shifting in appearance, a space in which images and people are transformed in every moment and every shot. It is a site of anxiety in which it is impossible to take for granted the appearance of any person or object.65 In Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Kawabata is careful to separate the Asakusa of early Showa from the type of Meiji landscape that provides the backdrop for the works of both Tanizaki and Rampo. He stresses that his map is the reconfigured Showa landscape, the city reborn and reconstructed after the earthquake. Kawabata’s Asakusa is formed when the Twelve Stories Tower is destroyed after the earthquake. The implosion of the landmark tower, whose upper floors had toppled in the catastrophe, is a key episode in the first half of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. Yet Kawabata retains the essence of Asakusa as a liminal space of modernity, a characterization found in the other works. Kawabata once described Asakusa as a space marked by “extraterritoriality.” For him, it is also a space of contradiction, both a repository of the past and an opening in the body of the city and the national culture onto the outside. More important, however, it has become impossible to distinguish definitively between the two, to identify the boundaries that separate past from present and native from foreign culture. It represents, in the first instance, a warping of the sense of temporality, a transgression of strict divisions between the modern and the premodern. Cultural elements are divorced from contexts of tradition and placed into new contexts, mixing with other cultural elements to produce hybrid forms.The lack of any unifying historical or cultural principles is clear when Kawabata writes that “it’s an Asakusa where Hikaru Genji sings classical love letters as opera.These grand courtiers speak Japanese from all different periods at once” (AK, ). Or “Look into the musicals

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[kageki] at the Teikyo Theater: Hikaru Genji and Lord Narihira are doing a jazz dance” (). As mentioned earlier, Kawabata describes Asakusa as a container for the “foreign modern,” which here means American mass culture, such as jazz, film, and vaudeville. In Kawabata’s work,Asakusa also contains traces of Japan’s expanding colonial empire. One chapter, “The Winter Cherry Market and the Foreign Girl” (Hozuki ichi to ijin musume), describes the different foreign figures (mostly female performers) who inhabit Asakusa: A procession of South Seas visitors scatters the mourning doves of Sensoji Temple. It’s a tourist group.A Korean woman ties her child to the side of her white ch’ima with a black sash, in the Korean way, and walks barefoot on the asphalt. She carries her canvas shoes in her hand. Any number of them pass in a night. . . . On the darkened eaves of the Shochiku The(AK, ) ater, four Chinese children play hide-and-seek. In his short story “The Dancing Girl and Her Foreign Mother” (Odoriko to ikokujin no haha), Kawabata writes that foreigners in Asakusa “are mostly wandering Russian women chased out by the revolution or else traveling performers from the colonies.”66 The performers in Asakusa thus represent a mixture of races.The cultural space of Asakusa is defined by the incursion of Western culture and contains the tracks of Japan’s expanding formal and informal empire in Asia. In this sense, the topography of Asakusa mimics the open, grotesque, and heterogeneous shape of the work itself, with the dissolution of genre providing the framework for the dissolution of the boundaries of national culture within the work. At the edges of modern culture, beyond any connection to an organic or a natural principle of national subjectivity, Asakusa represents a space in which hybridized, heterogeneous cultures are generated without any unifying principle of national spirit. Instead, Asakusa is depicted as container of a mass culture operating outside the dominant narratives of modernization and assimilation. Kawabata’s Asakusa, then, materializes a process at the edges of Japanese modernity.A combination of spectacle and phantasmagoria, it frames, as Maeda’s description of Asakusa—and, by extension,

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

Tokyo—as “theater” indicates, the “performativity” of modern culture.67 As a point of contact between both past and present and between native and foreign culture, it highlights a consciousness of the artificial essence of the modern.As mentioned earlier, although this space is carnivalesque, it is important to note that the modernist grotesque represents Bakhtin’s carnival in reverse. For Bakhtin, carnival signified both the prehistory of the nation-state and the prehistory of the modern novel.The cultural space of Renaissance carnival represented a transitional state between the religious order of medieval Europe, which was organized around the official language of power, Latin, and the emergence of what would become nationstates organized around the various vernacular languages: A single national language did not exist as yet; it was being slowly formed.The process of transferring the whole of philosophy to the vernacular and of creating a new system of literary media led to an intense interorientation of dialects within this vernacular (but without concentration at a center).The naïve and peaceful coexistence of the dialects came to an end; they began to clarify each other, and their variety was gradually unveiled.We can also observe a scientific interest in the dialects and the artistic search of dialectalisms.68 For Bakhtin, carnival thus represents a space of intersection and conflict among languages and social positions. He also further differentiates each of these languages, two types of Latin, for example, as well as dialects within the vernacular languages, such as the “low” language of the marketplace. Timothy Brennan has examined the connection between Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and the formation of the nation-state, explaining that the novel provides a literary counterpart to the form of the nation.The novel, he writes, embodies the “nation’s composite nature: a hotch potch of the ostensibly separate ‘levels of style’ corresponding to class; a jumble of poetry, drama, newspaper report, memoir, and speech; a mixture of the jargons of race and ethnicity.”69 We also should note that Bakhtin makes a critical distinction between polyglossia and heteroglossia in novelistic discourse, a distinction that applies to the emergence of the nation-state organized

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around a national language. Polyglossia, or the interaction of various distinct languages, provides the context of the prehistory of the modern novel. In contrast, the modern novel, which emerges in the context of the modern nation-state, is characterized by heteroglossia, the internal differentiation and stratification of discourse and social position within a language (rather than between languages). For Bakhtin, the novel serves an important role in this differentiation and development of a national language.The development of the novel is coextensive with the construction of a space of national (“popular”) culture, for which carnival serves as prehistory. In contrast, the cultural space that Kawabata’s novel describes represents the collapse and disintegration of borders of national culture within the influx of mass culture.

Performance and Trauma Kawabata’s three representative works from the early Showa period—the screenplay for A Page of Madness, “The Dancing Girl of Izu,” and Scarlet Gang of Asakusa—are each linked by the representation of the female body, particularly the figure of the “dancing girl.” In these works, the female body is an emblem for specific cultural formations, which appear on the surface to be strictly differentiated.Thus in “The Dancing Girl of Izu,” the narrator’s glimpse of the girl’s naked body transforms her in his mind from an object of desire into an idealized aesthetic object marking the unsullied naïveté of youth. In A Page of Madness, the figure of the dancing girl who appears at the beginning of the film is an embodiment of irrationality, and her confinement signals the repressive state institutions of the asylum and prison (and more generally of science and medicine). In the film, the dancer’s madness is tied to modern culture through the hallucinatory images of the fantastic stage set as well as the later jazz band, which represents the (imagined) music that accompanies her dancing.The superimposition of prison bars on top of this space of fantasy underscores the political framework of this representation. A Page of Madness is a portrayal of modern culture, which appears as a delusion or hallucination that functions only to conceal the dark reality of confinement and repression.

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

In Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, the body of the female performer marks the theatricality of modern culture. In his analysis of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Maeda Ai emphasizes this theatricality of urban space in Kawabata’s work. As stated previously, Kawabata describes the Casino Folies revue theater as a symbol of Asakusa, focusing on its display of the female body. From the beginning of the work, the concept of performance is also linked to the figure of Yumiko.The narrator of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa first encounters Yumiko when he is wandering down an alley in the backstreets of Asakusa, searching for a room to rent. He spies her through an open doorway marked by a sign advertising a piano practice-room. She is dressed in “red, Western clothes” as if “she were wearing dance clothes from the stage at home” (AK, ) and with her hair cut like a man’s. This description identifies Yumiko as a performer and suggests her manipulation of gender codes as well as her association with Western objects. She also is presented as an object of desire for the narrator:“To the extent that I’m not a detective or a policeman, if the piano girl weren’t so beautiful I would have just left.” His encounter with Yumiko mimics the encounter of the male consumer with the prostitute in the private brothels of Asakusa as he looks through a peephole from the street at the woman inside; descriptions of such encounters can be found in reminiscences of this period.70 In this regard,Yumiko is depicted as commodified object. She also eludes the narrator’s gaze, however.Yumiko’s performance is characterized by her continually transforming her appearance. In each of the scenes in which she appears, she is in a different guise. After glimpsing her in the alleyway, the narrator notices someone like her playing the accordion (the “Taisho koto,” now renamed the “Showa koto”) in a music shop. Immediately afterward, he sees a young girl, singing a jazz tune and dancing the Charleston as she sells rubber balls, who also seems identical to the piano girl. Later, he meets a young boy (Akiko) on a bicycle whom he believes to be her twin brother, and then a girl selling tickets to a merry-goround. These characters, who appear in quick succession, are ultimately revealed to be different manifestations of Yumiko, which nonetheless fool the narrator (and perhaps the reader). Thus he chases after the boy on his bicycle to ask about his sister, not realizing that he is in fact Yumiko.71

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Through these transformations, Yumiko constantly moves beyond the boundaries of the natural into the realm of the inorganic object, or fetish.The descriptions of Yumiko focus less on her body than on her external accoutrements or ornaments, such as clothing, hairstyle, and makeup. By this means, she is presented as an inanimate commodity, an object to be “picked up” (AK, ) by the narrator. But simultaneously, through this very same process, she avoids being fixed in place by any desiring gaze.Yumiko represents an ability to move beyond the social and cultural constrictions of subjectivity. She is a marker of the fluidity of identity and the capacity for its reconstitution in different contexts, based on a refashioning of external appearance.Yumiko is an emblem—or, in Siegfried Kracauer’s term, an “ornament”—of a mass culture that transcends the stability of tradition and national space. In his essay “The Mass Ornament” (), Kracauer wrote about the importance of dealing seriously with the phenomenon of mass culture, noting that these surface manifestations may contain more “truth-content” than do the products of so-called high culture. He focuses on the phenomenon of the “Tiller Girls,” a troupe of dancers who performed in Berlin and whom he describes as “products of American distraction factories.”72 Kracauer cites the review as the sign of a general transformation in “body culture,” noting that in the Tiller Girls’ performances, individual bodies dissolve into mass geometric patterns. It is a type of spectacle, he explains, that is performed throughout the world—whether in India or America—and that maintains a transnational quality, the possibility of its performance anywhere in the world. Kracauer emphasized the political ambivalence of this form of cultural representation.The spectacle was an expression of extreme capitalist rationalization, the mechanization of human life, and the insertion of the human body into the geometric ordering of machine production:“The structure of the mass ornament reflects that of the entire contemporary situation. Since the principle of the capitalist production process does not arise purely out of nature, it must destroy the natural organisms that it regards either as means or as resistance. Community and personality perish when what is demanded is calculability.”73 For Kracauer, the “truth-content” of the mass spectacle is the destruction of “organic” conceptions of

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both community and individual identity. In turn, the fragmentation of body parts into the spectacle of geometric forms was the exact counterpart to the fragmentation of the body in factories. For this very reason, however, Kracauer believes that the mass ornament indicates (although in a false manner) the promise of a genuine rationality existing beyond the mythology of organic (national) community. Thus capitalism does not rationalize too much, he says, but too little. The mass ornament’s “rationality reduces the natural in a manner that does not allow man to wither away, but that, on the contrary, were it only carried through to the end, would reveal man’s most essential element in all its purity.”74 For Kracauer, the mass ornament is never able to fulfill this utopian promise but always remains a marker of the ambivalence of mass culture. This type of ambivalence also defines the character of Yumiko and, by extension, the cultural space of Asakusa.Yumiko functions as a figure for the city after the earthquake and for the transformations in the physical environment and the culture as a whole in the years after . She refers to herself as “a daughter of the earthquake,” clearly becoming for Kawabata a metaphor for the reconfigured Asakusa and, by extension, the city of Tokyo. Kawabata writes that “the new Tokyo was created by the earthquake. Of course Asakusa too was reborn then” (AK, ).Yumiko symbolizes the reborn Tokyo as an inorganic thing or ornament, a marker of the artificial and continually changing mass culture. In this respect, there are both similarities and differences between Yumiko and the title character of “The Dancing Girl of Izu.” Both characters represent a movement away from social constrictions but along different trajectories.While Yumiko’s theatricality represents a movement into the realm of the inorganic commodity, the Izu dancer’s naked body is inscribed into depictions of nature and sentiment. Moreover, Yumiko’s performativity is linked to an underlying trauma, symbolized in the text by the  earthquake. For Kawabata, the earthquake signifies a traumatic rupture with the past, with family and home. In his short story “Sentiments of an Orphan” (Koji no kanjo, ), for example, the narrator recounts his experience of sleeping outside in a park soon after the earth-

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quake, when fires were still burning throughout Tokyo. After he spreads out his bedding and sets up a mosquito net, the wife of his landlord crawls in with her child, without saying a word to him. Many people are in the area, and he imagines they must assume that they are a family. He muses: What if she had forgotten, like the others, that we were not husband and wife and that she was married to the businessman? And what if all the people in the world lost that function of the mind called memory? A husband forgets his wife of yesterday, while the wife forgets her husband. Parents forget their children, the children, their parents.Then all people would become orphans, and this would become “a city without homes”—everyone would become like me.75 For Kawabata, the earthquake represents this loss of memory— it is a symbol of a sudden and violent break with the past and the catalyst for the creation of a city in which everyone is homeless like himself. Kawabata was orphaned at a young age, and during his childhood he suffered the tragic loss of one more family member after another. Like Yokomitsu Riichi and Hayashi Fumiko, Kawbata spent his childhood years without a permanent home, and this experience of unsettlement also casts its shadow over his writings. Yumiko and the other members of the Scarlet Gang also exist outside the structure of a stable family, and the mass culture depicted in the novel is disconnected from the ground of tradition as well. Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is an ambivalent portrayal of post-earthquake Tokyo as a site of both enjoyment and trauma. On one level, the novel is a celebration of the “reconstruction festival” of the city, yet lurking behind this celebration, always just slightly beneath the surface, is the memory of catastrophe, the trauma of modernization represented here by the earthquake that appeared literally to destroy the ground of modern culture. Kawabata presents the period from the destruction of Asakusa to its reconstruction by —the official “restoration festival” was held in March of that year—as a condensed allegory of modernization.Yumiko herself experiences the earthquake as a collapse of established institutions and structures of subjectivity. In the same way, for example, that

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

she and the other elementary-school students were forced to construct a makeshift school in the ruins,Yumiko is forced to reconstruct a personal identity, one that has been dislodged from prior gender or family identifications. “I’m not a woman,”Yumiko says. “After watching my sister, I decided as a child that I wouldn’t become a woman” (AK, ). In this catastrophe, there is a momentary collapse of institutions (the family and the state) that play a key role in constructing gendered subjects, leading to a fluidity in gendered identification.Yumiko vacillates throughout the narrative, and she makes her choice during the climactic scene on the boat.When Akagi enters the boat’s cabin, he first thinks of her as merely a girl “for sale,” but then her legs appear to him “as clean as a young boy’s” (). She is torn between identifying with her sister or with Akagi, and her gesture of simultaneously kissing him and trying to kill him reveals this double, conflicted identification.76 In this way, the female body as object of display, consumption, and transformation is rewritten into a historical narrative of rupture and reconstruction. This element of emotional trauma is embodied by the inmates of the psychiatric ward in A Page of Madness. Similar characters also appear in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, most notably Yumiko’s sister.These two characters need to be considered together as a pair, representing play, transformation, and fluidity, on the one hand, and madness, trauma, and destitution, on the other. Both women are portrayed as products of the earthquake and represent different sides of early Showa culture. In Kawabata’s work, this double structure, which pairs the modern Yumiko with her destitute sister, pervades the social and cultural topography of Asakusa. On the surface,Asakusa appears as a culture of consumption and enjoyment, but just below it is a layer of economic and social marginalization. Scarlet Gang of Asakusa works in this sense through the fetish of consumer culture, exposing what is concealed by the surface manifestation. Kawabata quotes a story that he wrote seven years earlier, in which he described his plan for what eventually became Scarlet Gang of Asakusa: “At one time, I wanted to write a long, strange novel, set in Asakusa Park, filled with all sorts of lowly [iyashii] women, such as the factory girls in the tobacco factory at Kuramae, movie theater attendants, circus girls, and gymnasts” (AK, ).

Kawabata Yasunari’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa



While Kawabata’s obsessive focus on the figure of the dancing girl seems to reflect the commodification of the female body as an object of desire, something else is also at work here, the depiction of social and economic marginality. Again, the most explicit manifestation of this marginalization may be the dancing girl in A Page of Madness, who is imprisoned in the nightmarish space of the asylum. Even in a work like “The Dancing Girl of Izu,” the girl is a marginalized figure, a member of a traveling band of street performers.As Roy Starrs has pointed out, the initial critical reception of this work concentrated on its “bright” and “youthful” side: “Critics characterized it as ‘lyrical’ and even ‘sentimental’ and used words such as ‘pure,’‘clean,’‘fresh,’ and ‘healthy’ to describe its general effect.”77 In fact, this story includes unmistakable traces of class discrimination: at each stop, innkeepers show their disgust at the traveling performers, and several times they encounter signs prohibiting their entrance into town.78 Okaniwa Noboru has claimed that this type of discrimination forms a significant, if typically ignored, context for Kawabata’s early writings, including Scarlet Gang of Asakusa.79 As stated earlier, Asakusa had been long associated with discriminated groups: physically situated beyond the edge of the city, it was a place where the marginal and discriminated people of Edo society were concentrated, including outcaste groups. According to Matsui Toru, these discriminated groups under the control of Danzaemon, the head of outcastes in Asakusa, included street performers, actors, showmen, and fortunetellers.80 The traveling performers and dancing girls that populate Kawabata’s early work, beginning with “A Scene at the Festival of Spirits” (Shokonsai no ikkei, ), can thus be situated in the context of this history of discrimination. The reference to the history of discrimination is made explicit in Kawabata’s “Sisters of Asakusa” (Asakusa no shimai, ), a story of three kadozuke, or street musicians. In one passage in the story, Kawabata writes: In the old days, kadozuke women and tori-oi [bird chasers] were either the wives or daughters of hinin. . . . The houses they lived in were limited to nine feet, two rooms. If they encountered settanaoshi [those who repaired leather-soled

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

sandals], they always had to greet them as they passed. With cotton kimono, a duck-cloth sash, carrying a wooden lunch box over their shoulders, red cotton hand-coverings, white tabi, matted clogs, and round sedge hat, they perhaps resembled the oil-selling girls of today’s Tokyo, but their attire was limited to cotton. There is no comparison with the impudence of the flimsy artificial silk of today’s kadozuke women. But there is no difference between past and present in the fact that kadozuke women are despised.81 The aburauri, or oil seller, whom Kawabata cites in this passage as the contemporary version of the Edo street musician, is the final incarnation of Yumiko in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. Traces of discriminatory practice can be seen throughout Kawabata’s early work, including “The Dancing Girl of Izu” and the Asakusa stories from this period. Ultimately, then, the representation of “performance” is tied to social and economic marginalization. Kawabata’s work articulates the narrow line separating the working class and the destitute. The youth and dancing girls are also only a step away from that bottom level, themselves a kind of commodity circulating through the “human marketplace” of Asakusa.82 This dual characteristic of Asakusa—represented by the Scarlet Gang and the shadowy world of vagrants and prostitutes—is presented as the product of current economic conditions. For example, Kawabata writes:“Readers, you know that the homeless of Asakusa survive on leftovers received from restaurants. But did you know that laborers and poor people go to these homeless to buy their food—in other words, the leftovers of leftovers—for two or three sen? Since this is the state of the world, it’s no wonder that forty thousand or fifty thousand criminal youths come under the jurisdiction of the police department” (AK, ). Kawabata’s depiction of mass culture, in other words, cannot be separated from contemporary economic conditions. The pleasure of a deterritorialized mass culture, which moves freely across cultural and social categories of subjectivity, is counterbalanced by depictions of destitution and social marginalization—the other side of the same economy that produces this culture of mass consumption.

Kawabata Yasunari’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa



Beyond Asakusa In , Kawabata announced that he would be writing a continuation of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, noting that his novel had received a great deal of attention at the time of its publication. By the time that he decided to write its sequel, however, there were significant changes both in Kawabata’s own writing and in the general political and cultural environment. Kawabata added in his announcement that he had not reread the original work since it was published and now found himself “nauseated” at its style. (This is also why he decided to give the continuation a different title.) Asakusa itself had changed considerably as well.The transformation is indicated by a statement by the chairman of the Asakusa Festival Preparation Committee, published in the Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun and quoted by Kawabata:“Asakusa is no longer the Asakusa of the past. There are no more lumpen or delinquents. It is a happy Asakusa, where you can play at ease, without anxiety. So enjoy once more the old, nostalgic Asakusa.”83 Kawabata also cited a letter that he had received from a reader of Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, who told him: “I wonder if simply through a historical investigation of ancient matters, or the detailed description of the phenomena of Asakusa, that you can represent the true picture of Asakusa.”84 Of course, what attracted Kawabata’s attention in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa was precisely the cultural phenomena of Asakusa. In the age of expanding economic recession and increased government control over matters of culture deemed subversive to the social fabric, however, these elements of vitality in Asakusa had begun to disappear, and thus the “happy” Asakusa had, for Kawabata, lost its appeal. He writes that the “purification” of Asakusa Park had led to the restriction of restaurants and cafés, and street vendors, performers, and even beggars had to carry licenses issued by the police: “Just as people say, Asakusa Park has lost its soul, its shadows are vanished, the depths are shriveled up.”85 A number of characters from Scarlet Gang of Asakusa appear in Asakusa Festival, including Haruko and, briefly,Yumiko. Here too, though, there have been significant changes. Haruko is now called

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Mapping the Space of Mass Culture

Oharu and runs a machiai—a restaurant and assignation house—in the back alleyways of Asakusa. Her machiai is struggling financially, in part because the new, stricter police regulations will not allow waitresses to pour saké for the customers.The food on the menu is actually ordered from other restaurants and brought in through the back entrance. Oharu’s matronly appearance is quite different from that when she was a member of the Scarlet Gang—she comes clattering after the narrator in clogs, dressed in what looks like undergarments, exposing her arms from the shoulder. Whereas in the earlier work she was described as a paragon of femininity (in contrast to Yumiko), here she speaks in a masculine voice. She asks the narrator to advertise her store in his novel and offers to sell information about Asakusa to him. Later, he catches a brief glimpse of Yumiko, performing on the traditional koto. Kawabata ended Asakusa Festival after only a few installments, and the following year he began to publish Snow Country (completed in ), which became the representative work of his writing career.While Kawabata’s literary explorations in the s and early s involved, as mentioned earlier, mapping out several conflicting cultural topographies, it was eventually the trajectory in “The Dancing Girl of Izu” that prevailed.The short story is a prototype of the literary space found in Snow Country. Both works open with a scene of a border crossing, the passage across the Amagi Pass in “The Dancing Girl of Izu” and through the “long border tunnel” in Snow Country. These movements into another world describe an entry into an ahistorical realm separated from modernity.86 In its pervasive images of whiteness and cleanliness, for example, the purified and aestheticized space of the snow country is far removed from the heterogeneous and fragmented urban landscape of Asakusa. Snow Country also reflects the development of a space of cultural nostalgia that Kawabata expanded in his postwar writings. After Japan’s defeat in the war, Kawabata proclaimed his intention to devote himself to the “beauty of Japan,” an emphasis that finds perhaps its most complete expression in his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize in Literature, “Japan the Beautiful and Myself ” (Utsukushii Nihon no watashi, ).87 By this point, he clearly saw his writing as a process of aestheticization, of creating an imag-

Kawabata Yasunari’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa

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inary, phantasmal zone of a native culture that had already in fact been lost. Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, however, resists the aesthetics of nostalgia.Against the later process of aestheticization and purification, the dissolution of the novel form in Scarlet Gang attempts to demarcate a heterogeneous space at the edges of contemporary culture, one that is unassimilable to binary oppositions of Japan and the West, premodern and modern.

chapter 4

Negations of Genre: Hayashi Fumiko’s Nomadic Writing Myriad people gather in the city Those fallen from hunger Atrophied faces, a whirl of sick bodies The rubbish heap of the lower classes The emperor has apparently gone mad Tokyo—city only of the diseased! Hayashi Fumiko

In the Margins of Literary History If Kobayashi Hideo can be said to have formulated a theoretical framework for understanding Japanese modernist literature, it may be located in his explorations of the space between theory and literature, the dominant preoccupation of his early writings. Thus in “Multiple Designs” (Samazama naru isho, ), Kobayashi engaged in a self-reflective critique of literary criticism, at once rejecting criticism’s division of literary production into different “ideological designs” while also making the case for the value of criticism as a genre in its own right, a practice on the order of literature itself.1 As Paul Anderer writes: “It was Kobayashi’s fundamental insight that criticism is expressive, baring through its forms and arguments the values and tastes of the critic; in other words, that criticism could itself be a style of literature.”2 At the same time, while calling for criticism to be in some way literary, Kobayashi also made the opposite demand, that literature too must maintain a critical self-consciousness.This is, for example, one of the motifs of his later essay “Discourse on Fiction of the Self ” (Watakushi shosetsu ron, ), a work that shaped the dominant view of the I-novel as well as of Marxist literature in Japanese literary history. Kobayashi’s essay is perhaps best known for its call for the representation of a socialized self (shakaika sareta watakushi) in confessional fiction, which, he argues, has typically ignored the conflict between individual and society. For Kobayashi, the representation of the socialized self is also a question of literary form, one that revolves around a transgression of the novel’s formal boundaries. For example, he praises André Gide’s The Counterfeiters as a central monument of the contemporary novel because of its critical self-consciousness, because it is both a novel and a theory of the novel. Kobayashi asserts that Gide’s work succeeds in representing the socialized self by means of a rupture in novelistic form, by the division of the novel into the narrative itself and the character Edouard’s journal (he himself is a novelist), as well as

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Negations of Genre

the further addition of Gide’s own journal concerning the composition of the work. Gide thereby underscores the difference between the literary and the empirical self: The Counterfeiters is both a novel and, as Edouard says of his own work, “a running criticism of my novel—or rather of the novel in general.”3 For Kobayashi, Gide’s work incorporates into its formal structure a rupture—he refers to the work as a “laboratory” (jikkenshitsu, a space of experimentation)—that marks the limits of literary representation.Whereas Kobayashi himself in these essays tended to be rather dismissive of contemporary Japanese fiction, I argued earlier that this critical questioning of the boundaries of literary practice is one way to understand the fictional experimentation characterizing Japanese modernism.4 The current running through each of these writings is a questioning of the boundaries of literary practice.This critique of the categories of literary production provides a context for this analysis of Hayashi Fumiko’s Tales of Wandering (Horoki, –).5 Although at least until recently, Hayashi’s work has tended to occupy the margins of literary history, it can be seen to represent an intersection of nearly all the major tendencies (or “ideological designs”) of early Showa literature. It is, in effect, a literary performance of the critical project outlined by Kobayashi in “Multiple Designs.”6 Tales of Wandering is an autobiographical work based closely on a diary that Hayashi had kept since arriving in Tokyo in  from the countryside. The work chronicles the personal life and relationships of a woman living in poverty, who works at myriad jobs while writing poetry. Tales of Wandering was originally serialized in a feminist arts journal, Nyonin geijutsu (Women’s Art), and then released by the powerful Kaizosha publishing house as part of its new literature series in , which also included works by Takeda Rintaro, Hirabayashi Taiko, Nakamoto Takako, Kataoka Teppei, Nakano Shigeharu, Hayashi Fusao, and Tokunaga Sunao, among others.7 It was an immensely popular book—Ogata Akiko claims that perhaps no other work was so widely read in the early Showa period—that immediately made the author famous, and a sequel was published several months later.8 The work’s depictions of poverty and hardship, as well as the dizzying urban culture of Tokyo, resonated with a readership mired in economic depression.

Hayashi Fumiko’s Nomadic Writing

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Takenishi Hiroko has remarked on the difficulty of classifying this work, that “Tales of Wandering is a truly unique work, and it is impossible to say whether it is a diary or novel or poetry.”9 Indeed, Hayashi’s work is more than a diary and also undermines the division of literature into discrete ideological discourses and genres. Although the literature of the early Showa period was conventionally discussed in terms of an opposition between Marxism and modernism, Tales of Wandering shows that in certain cases it was impossible to maintain this strict distinction. In fact, Hayashi’s work contains elements of each of the categories discussed by Kobayashi in “Multiple Designs” and “Discourse on Fiction of the Self,” including proletarian, New Sensationist, confessional, and mass literature—which is only to say that it cannot be comfortably categorized in any of them.10 Like the confessional form of the I-novel, the work is based on the author’s personal experience.At the same time, Tales of Wandering describes a woman’s life on the periphery of the social and economic structure and fits into the general framework of “proletarian literature”and also literature depicting the marginalization and commodification of women in society.11 In addition, Tales of Wandering, one of the best-selling works of literature of this period, also fits in the category of “mass literature” (taishu bungaku) about which Kobayashi wrote. Finally, in terms of form, Tales of Wandering breaks down the generic boundaries of the novel. Like Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, it is a mixture of genres, which especially undermines the distinction between poetry and prose. The work, then, foregrounds the question of literary genre in the broadest sense: the division of writing according to both form and content, and even the division between literature itself (the total or “absolute” genre) and other types of writing.12 The main distinguishing feature of Tales of Wandering is its formal fluidity, the nomadic quality of the writing, which moves continually through different forms. Hayashi’s writing is distinguished for its lack of respect for borders and categories, but at the same time these formal characteristics also shape its thematic significance.The collapse of generic boundaries and categories of literary production provide a frame for the topography of modern culture represented in the work. The shifting quality of the writing, which moves from genre to genre (and from subgenre to subgenre), creates the con-

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Negations of Genre

text for the work’s theme, a movement through a fluid cultural and social landscape.The work traces the narrator’s negotiation of various spaces, which are themselves associated with different economic and social categories, including gender, family, and class. The question of genre,according to Jacques Derrida,is never simply a question of form but also indicates more broadly gestures of classification and discrimination as well as concepts of law and authority. In short, genre is closely linked to questions of subjectivity.He argues that the “law of genre”is based on a prohibition against mixture and the transgression of boundaries, pointing out that the law’s implications reach beyond the category of literary work into the cultural and social spheres:“The question of the literary genre is not a formal one: it covers the motif of the law in general, of generation in the natural and symbolic senses, of birth in the natural and symbolic sense, of the generation difference, sexual difference between the feminine and masculine gender, of the hymen between the two, of a relationless relation between the two, of an identity and difference between the feminine and masculine.”13 For Derrida, the very conception of genre implies a prohibition against intermixture.At the same time, he argues that there is always the possibility of contamination within the law of genre because of what he terms a “parasitical economy.”The very articulation of the genre (whether through an act of naming or the inscription of a less explicit generic marker) is already a transgression of its boundaries, a movement outside the proper sphere of the genre. In Hayashi’s work, this contamination of categories and genres is foregrounded in various aspects of the text’s form, in the mixture between poetry and prose or between fiction and autobiography. Again, the question of genre in Tales of Wandering evokes differences among literary modes as well as between literary and nonliterary forms of writing. At the same time, it also indicates, as Derrida suggests, multiple social and cultural institutions of subjectivity. It is in the complex relationship to these boundaries of subjectivity and classification that the thematic space of Hayashi’s work is established. For example, the connection between categories of writing and the conceptualization of gender is made explicit in the concept of “women’s literature” (joryu bungaku), which has played a substantial

Hayashi Fumiko’s Nomadic Writing

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role in Japanese literary criticism as well as in the differentiation of gendered subjectivity in Japanese culture.14 In a book on Hayashi, Joan Ericson has analyzed the formation of this category and the uneasy position of Hayashi’s writings within it. Ericson notes that during the s, when the increase in women’s literacy and the expansion of the publishing industry helped create a mass market of women readers, the category of women’s literature was consolidated with literary criticism.15 She also points out that the designation was never simply a generic classification of writings by women but always maintained specific value judgments.According to one critic, for example, women’s literature was supposed to lack the intellectualism (chisei) of that of male writers.16 Thus the critical concept of “women’s literature” always exceeds the categorization of literary writing and helps shape and reinforce gender boundaries in a broader cultural and social sphere as well.The way in which this category has affected the critical reception and analysis of Hayashi’s works is illustrated by an essay by the prominent literary critic Nakamura Mitsuo. Nakamura places Tales of Wandering (and other writings by Hayashi) in the category of women’s literature, which he divides into two types: masculine and feminine. Hayashi, he writes, belongs in the latter group, which maintains “women’s sensibility and women’s weaknesses more than others.”17 More generally, the text’s complex relationship to categories of subjectivity is reflected in its content, in the narrator’s ceaseless movement through a variety of different social and economic topographies.The relationship between subjectivity and social categories is expressed in the work as a relationship between the narrator and different types of space. If in formal terms Hayashi’s work can be seen as a transgression of what Derrida labels the law of genre, its field of representation is also marked by contamination, mixture, and the transgression of social boundaries. In particular, the terrain through which Hayashi’s narrator circulates is bounded by the concept of “home” (kokyo), on the one hand, and the market economy, on the other.The work opens, for example, with an account of the exile from “home” suffered by the narrator’s family, an originary expulsion that sets the narrator in motion in a fluid social landscape. In its absence, the home provides a dominant point of reference for the entire narrative and is a topos

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Negations of Genre

to which the author returns repeatedly. It signifies both a vilified and an idealized space located at a remove from the realm of modern culture. The narrator, liberated or expelled from this topos, consequently encounters new forms of enjoyment as well as “subjectification” in the economic system that structures the landscape outside. These liminal sites represent two poles of gendered subjectivity: on the one hand, the restrictive and often oppressive space of domesticity—indicated by the institutions of marriage and family and most strongly associated with the countryside—and, on the other hand, the absolute commodification of the female body in the city as marketplace.18 Symbolized at its extreme by prostitution, this commodification also pervades the social and cultural space through which Hayashi’s narrator moves. It is between this nexus of inside and outside, domesticity and absolute commodification, that the space of this work unfolds. In her discussion of the social and cultural construction of gendered subjectivity, Judith Butler argues that while it exceeds the realm of biological determination, the “performativity” or constructedness of gender is necessarily constrained and inscribed by specific ideological parameters or “regulatory norms.” Butler writes that “performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms.And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject.”19 She stakes out the terrain of gender between a naturally given category and one that is ideologically fixed or determined, and in this inbetween space, gender emerges as a site of contestation between ideological forces, a place of conflict between individuals and social norms from which human agency is produced. This is the topography of Hayashi’s work.Although the intensely personal, autobiographical nature of Tales of Wandering cannot be minimized, it also moves beyond recording personal experience to map out a broader cultural terrain of s Tokyo.The city is shown as a site where the established social and cultural institutions that fix subjectivity are dissolving while new networks and spaces of subjectification are being formed. The nomadic movement that Hayashi’s work describes is through this fluid and transitional land-

Hayashi Fumiko’s Nomadic Writing

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scape—across social categories such as domesticity, femininity, desire, and class. Tales of Wandering not only is rooted in personal experience, but also takes as its theme an exploration of the limits of the personal—the historical, social, and literary borders of subjectivity. Ultimately, this theme unfolds as a question of writing, of a continual translation between different genres of writing.

Beyond Autobiography Like Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai, Tales of Wandering has a complicated textual history. Hayashi explained that the work’s origins lie in a diary that she began keeping at the age of eighteen.20 In , she started to serialize revised versions of the entries, each with the subtitle “Horoki,” in Nyonin geijutsu.A total of twenty installments were published in this journal, for which, Ogata Akiko notes, Hayashi was one of the most visible contributors.21 In July , fourteen of these installments, along with an introductory chapter (which had been published in  in the journal Kaizo), was published as a book by Kaizosha. In November of that year, a sequel entitled More Tales of Wandering (Zoku horoki) was issued by the same publisher.This book included a number of the Nyonin geijutsu installments excluded from the original volume, as well as some unpublished material.As an epilogue, Hayashi appended the chapter “My Understanding After Tales of Wandering” (Horoki igo no ninshiki), a counterpart to the introductory chapter (which had been titled “Before Tales of Wandering” [Horoki izen]).The two volumes were published together in  as one book. In , a “definitive” edition included substantial revisions by the author, and in , Hayashi began serializing what became the third section of the work, using material that the threat of censorship had prevented from being published in the prewar and wartime editions.All three sections were published together as one book in . My analysis is of the  Kaizosha editions of the first two volumes. In all its incarnations, Tales of Wandering maintains a close connection to the diary form. It retains the format of journal entries, each headed by the month and day (with the day crossed out).At the end of each chapter is the year of composition, thereby embedding the

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Negations of Genre

narrative in a concrete history and lived experience.Through these and other direct markers—such as using the author’s name for the protagonist and having well-known literary figures such as Tsuboi Shigeji (–) and Chikamatsu Shuko appear—the work’s mode of presentation offers a promise of authenticity.To a certain extent (although this will require further qualification), the chapter that Hayashi appended to the beginning of the work intensifies its character as autobiography. It is presented in the author’s voice (as distinguished from the narrator’s voice in the body of the text) and provides an account of her life before her arrival in Tokyo. Of course, as Hirabayashi Taiko points out, many of the episodes recounted in the work are no doubt fictional, and it also is possible to find discrepancies between the narrative of the author’s life presented here and other accounts.22 It goes without saying that text and life cannot genuinely coincide and that the generation of difference between them is one of the effects of the act of writing.As I will explain later, there is an inevitable slippage between the author’s voice and the “I” of the text. Nonetheless, in its mode of presentation, the text clearly manipulates a code of authenticity, establishing what Philippe Lejeune calls the “autobiographical pact.”23 The diary format places Tales of Wandering in a complex relationship to the autobiographical form of the I-novel, whose parameters as a genre had taken shape by the mid-s. As critics pointed out at the time, the I-novel was meant to go beyond the transcription of the author’s daily life. Kume Masao also differentiated the concept of the I-novel from autobiography in general, in that the former was supposed to represent experience refracted through a certain literary sensibility.The basis for the I-novel—and especially what Kume referred to as the “state-of-mind novel” (shinkyo shosetsu)—was an “I” represented in distilled fashion, mediated by an artistic consciousness. As a number of scholars have pointed out, literary critics tended to exclude women writers from the genre of the I-novel.24 It may be that the characteristics typically ascribed to the I-novel—an emphasis on the private world, representations of affectivity (for example, “mood” as a basis for Shiga Naoya’s writings), and sensibility—brought it closer to the supposed characteristics of women’s literature, thus necessitating a strict gender differentiation between the two categories.25

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As mentioned in the introduction, the concept of authenticity in the discourse of the I-novel involved not only the identity between text and life (what Edward Fowler has referred to as the “myth of sincerity”) but also a conception of an authentic, native literary tradition.26 As Tomi Suzuki contends, the idea of the Inovel functioned as a critique of the European novel and of the cultural standard of the West. It served, Suzuki writes, as a key element in the construction of a discourse of cultural difference and the assertion of a divergence between Japanese and Western modernity.27 This discourse always maintained a double significance. It was a critique of novelistic convention, but it also tended to reduce the novel to an essentialized genre in terms of both authenticity and a national tradition. Formally, Tales of Wandering can be situated somewhere between the novel and diary forms. Susanna Fessler has pointed out that Hayashi uses certain devices, including extensive dialogue, that are associated more with novelistic discourse than with the diary form.28 At the same time, the text lacks a linear narrative structure. It has no immediately discernable plot, although it is possible to piece together a narrative simply through the contiguous placement of disconnected events.The original installments in Nyonin geijutsu were not published in the chronological order of events that they describe. Rather, for the first Kaizosha edition, Hayashi selected certain chapters and rearranged them in chronological order. Even so, the chapters remain largely autonomous and typically have no explicit narrative links to the surrounding chapters. Accordingly, there are noticeable gaps in the narrative, significant shifts in time and space that are left unexplained.The disruption of the linear narrative becomes most noticeable in the transition from the first to the second volume: in chronological terms, the second volume returns to the beginning of the first book, to . The chapters of this second book cover roughly the same time span as the first volume of Tales of Wandering, with the entries dated from  to  and the afterword dated . Instead of a linear extension in narrative time, the second volume is a return to the beginning, filling in gaps in the narrative. In some ways, the second volume functions as a type of commentary on the first book, offering different perspectives on the same events, extending some

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Negations of Genre

sequences and adding new material while changing the impressions and significations of others. Michel Foucault has written that the lack of closure is characteristic of any book—which is necessarily situated in an expansive discursive network: “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.”29 In Tales of Wandering the openness of the book’s borders is intensified to an extreme—the text has difficulty coming to an end, arriving at “the last full stop.” And even when the first volume of Tales of Wandering does come to an end, the second volume returns us once again to the beginning.30 Tales of Wandering thus questions the very notion of a text or a work.The title Horoki has multiple referents, including the serialized work in Nyonin geijutsu, the  Kaizosha version, the  combined edition of Horoki and Zoku horoki, the  definitive edition, and the expanded postwar version.The work continually shifts, maintaining no coherency or consistency. Like Shanghai, Tales of Wandering poses problems for any textual analysis and any attempt to place the work into a definite historical context. The disruption of autobiography is indicated in the opening chapter, “Before Tales of Wandering,” whose title situates it outside the work even as it also serves as the beginning of Tales of Wandering. This double structure of being both inside and outside the work replicates the status of the author of autobiography, who both produces the work and is the subject of the work.The “I” is both the subject of enunciation (the speaking subject) and the subject of the utterance.31 The narrator of Tales of Wandering, for example, is also at times referred to as “Hayashi” or “Fumiko.”32 For Derrida, the “distinctive trait” that marks any text’s inclusion in a particular genre or genres—a necessary component of any act of writing—itself belongs outside the genre. The very mark or inscription that names a genre, that establishes its boundary, is in effect already its transgression.33 This double structure of both inclusion and exclusion is explicit in autobiography, whose double status is announced in the first use of “I.” For Lejeune, this “distinctive trait” of autobiography is contained

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in the signature of the text, in the implicit or explicit contract that the author is the ultimate reference to the text’s narrative.Theoretical studies of autobiography also find an inevitable slippage between the two. For example, in linking the “textual logic” of autobiography to the performativity of power (which he terms “absolutism”), Stephen Bretzius has remarked on the paradoxical generation of difference between sign and referent inherent in the very act of trying to close this gap: “Absolutism” will name here an authority that, answering only to itself, rules by the power it rules with, a performativeconstative difference developed most fully by de Man in his reading of autobiography, a genre which shares the textual logic of absolutism. . . . It is this difference which every mandate or imperative seeks to close, but necessarily deepens, occasioning a stronger imperative. Absolutism in this sense is absolute not because it reaches everywhere, but because it can’t stop. Or start. It can’t stop because it can’t start—this we will refer to as its properly historical power.34 Bretzius’s analysis reveals the paradox of autobiography: the very attempt to establish the authority of the text—that is,the coincidence between text and life—only widens the divide between them.35 The materiality of writing, which necessarily substitutes for an absence, introduces a disjunction between text and experience. In Hayashi’s work, the generation of this difference is visible in the first chapter. As indicated earlier, this opening chapter, which emphasizes the work’s autobiographical character, also creates a certain gap between itself and the body of the text.The preface establishes the experiential authority of the narrative but also introduces, through this very gesture, a rift between the authorial voice and the narrative voice in the body of the text. Even in the citation of Tales of Wandering in the title of the first chapter, the “I” of this chapter is set off from the “I” of the rest of the text; that is, the “I” here exists both inside and outside (“before”) the text. In the last chapter as well, Hayashi refers to Tales of Wandering, thereby adopting a metatextual perspective.There are two different voices here, two modes of address. One is a direct address to the reader, representing a certain self-reflexive posture.The

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Negations of Genre

other is what might be termed a lyric mode,an “utterance overheard,” a message addressed to someone other than the reader.36 Beginning already in the title of the first chapter, Hayashi thus initiates an internal fissure in the text, and a greater part of the work’s meaning flows from this primary difference. This fissure is a formal question that revolves around the status of autobiography, but it also translates into questions of subjectivity within the narrative. This schism thus also marks the difference between producer (author) and commodity (object of representation), between a woman who is writing and a woman who is represented.

Fissures of Subjectivity The connection between formal questions and questions of subjectivity is indicated in the opening lines of the work: In a certain elementary school in northern Kyushu, I once learned this song: In the late night of autumn, under a traveler’s sky, I struggle alone with feelings of sadness How I long for home, for dear mother and father. I am fated to be a wanderer. I have no home. I am a mongrel [zasshu] and a bantam [chabo]. My father comes from Iyo in Shikoku and is a peddler of cotton goods. My mother’s family runs a hot springs inn in Sakurajima, Kyushu. My mother was cast out from Kagoshima for being with a stranger [takokumono], and when she finally settled down with my father, it was in Shimonoseki. And it was in Shimonoseki that I drew my first breath. With both parents in exile from their own birthplaces, traveling is my home.37 The passage establishes the core themes of the work, that of wandering and exile, a nomadic existence on the social and economic

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fringe that is also linked to the consciousness of being a hybrid figure (zasshu).The question of species (shu), of classification and the intermixture of classes, is initially conveyed to the reader through literary form (and, in fact, theories of genre have often maintained a close proximity to theories of race, evolution, and inheritance).38 The passage begins with the citation of a song, a gesture that prefigures the work’s primary formal characteristic, Hayashi’s interspersing of her poems throughout the text.The text is continually interrupted by poetry (which Hayashi also published separately; she had already begun her writing career as a poet). As noted in chapter , Akutagawa Ryunosuke described his conception of the “novel without plot” as a novel close to poetry but also still in the sphere of fiction. Hayashi’s text is situated on this uncertain borderline. In his essay “General Theory of Literature” (Bungei ippanron, –),Akutagawa defined the difference between poetry and the novel (shosetsu) as a difference in emphasis between affect (josho) and understanding (ninshiki), a formulation that appears to draw on Natsume Soseki’s argument in Theory of Literature (Bungakuron).39 According to Akutagawa, poetry, which he claimed was the closest form to music (which, in turn, is purely affective), conveys more sentiment than information. For its part, the novel form is closest to philosophy. In this formulation, these two genres also stand in for two modes of writing, a material versus communicative (or performative versus constative) use of language. To a certain extent, the intrusion of poetry into the space of prose in Tales of Wandering represents moments of rupture and transcendence, a movement beyond reference and beyond the space of everyday life.The formal structure of the work rests on this uneasy opposition, on the process of translation and transformation that takes place between the narrative sections and the poetic interruptions.The opposition establishes a relationship between content and expression, everyday language and poetic language, reference and performance. It is an “uneasy” opposition because these differences can never be absolute but instead exist in constant danger of collapse. The two genres constantly affect each other, and in this sense, the distinctions between the “ground” narrative and the poetry are impossible to maintain. From the outset, this formal split is less

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Negations of Genre

about establishing divisions and oppositions than about a mixture, the contamination of one genre by the other and of one subject position by the other. Even in the first passage, for example, the writing that surrounds the song is itself fragmented; almost every sentence constitutes its own line. In addition, each genre itself is not homogenous but multiple. For example, Hayashi’s poetic interruptions also include Chinese poetry, and it is unclear where one would place a journal entry that merely lists the names and prices of household items. In the most general sense, however, the interaction between lyric poetry and narrative prose is also linked to the formal question of autobiographical narration that was cited earlier.The opposition suggests a disjunction between two voices and two forms of first-person expression. As suggested earlier, it is not that each genre stands for each subject position or each characteristic of language in any absolute sense, since each position can be found in both genres. Rather, the difference between the genres symbolizes this difference, which also defines the formal essence of autobiography. At the same time, the fragmentation of the speaking subject is never simply a question of form, of writing in an abstract sense.As established by the very first lines of the work, the formal rupture is also situated in a particular social context—to borrow Kobayashi’s phrase, Hayashi’s “I” is always a “socialized I.” In particular, the double structure of being both subject and object of representation can be related to the specific situation of a woman writing within and against genres organized around the representation of women. For example, as mentioned earlier, the I-novel was considered by some critics to be an exclusive province of male writers. Furthermore, in its content, works of confessional fiction were typically organized around the figure of a woman, who is represented as object of desire for the (male) protagonist. For instance, if Tayama Katai’s The Quilt (Futon, ) is the founding text of the I-novel tradition (as Nakamura Mitsuo and others have argued), the space of confessional fiction is effectively inaugurated through the transformation of the character Yoshiko into such an imaginary construct.This space of interiority is established in the final scene of the work, in which Yoshiko—the object of desire for the protagonist, Tokio, and a boarder in his home—has already disappeared.

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She has been recalled to her family home in the countryside, leaving behind only a trace—her smell: He went upstairs to Yoshiko’s room, which was still as she had left it the day of her departure. Overcome with nostalgia and longing, he wanted to recall something of her from those of her things that were left behind. . . . He opened a drawer of her desk. An old oil-smeared ribbon had been thrown in there. He picked it up and sniffed it. Presently he stood up and opened the sliding partition.Three large wicker traveling cases, tied with cord, were waiting to be sent off and beyond them in a pile lay the bedding that Yoshiko normally used— a mattress of a light green arabesque design and a quilt of the same pattern, with thick cotton padding.Tokio pulled them out. The familiar smell of a woman’s oil and sweat excited him beyond words.The velvet edging of the quilt was noticeably dirty, and Tokio pressed his face to it, immersing himself in that familiar female smell. All at once he was stricken with desire, with sadness, with despair. He spread out the mattress, lay out the quilt on it, and wept as he buried his face against the cold, stained, velvet bedding.40 As Maeda Ai maintained, one of the dominant recurring images of modern Japanese literature is the protagonist holed up in his second-story boarding room, which becomes a marker of psychological interiority and a withdrawal from a broader social landscape.41 In this case, the empty second-story room is a space of sexual fantasy and desire in which the female body has been translated into mnemonic traces inhabiting the various abandoned objects in the room.The scent serves as a marker of Yoshiko’s body, a trace of a materiality that is by now necessarily absent (except in fantasy).42 The spectral trace of woman—a translation of the female body into phantasmal images—also forms the limit of the field of representation for other key works of confessional fiction.This gesture is replicated, for example, in Chikamatsu Shuko’s “Suspicion” (Giwaku, ), which Hirano Ken identified as the origin of the I-novel. Chikamatsu’s work opens where The Quilt leaves off, with

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Negations of Genre

the narrator huddled in his bedding, lost in thoughts of his wife, who has left him. It is also found in A Blessed Man by Mushanokoji Saneatsu, whom Uno Koji identified as the founder of the I-novel. In Mushanokoji’s work, the female character Tsuru is depicted as nothing more than a projection of the narrator’s desire. In Uno’s own “Dreaming Room,” the woman as object of desire (Yumeko) is represented by a technological image projected onto the walls of a secret room, which is set up to mimic the workings of a magic lantern machine (or miniature panorama hall). In Uno’s story, as well as in his earlier work “In the Storehouse” (Kura no naka, ), the enclosed space of the field of representation is a materialization of the narrator’s unconscious, a storehouse of memories and desires.43 The machine at the center of the “dreaming room” makes material the mechanism of the text itself (and even confessional fiction in general), which also functions as an apparatus projecting an imaginary desire.The image of woman functions as the border, or frame, of the cosmopolitan subject, which is also thereby gendered as male. As we have seen, in modernist fiction the representation of the female body plays an important role in the depiction of contemporary cultural formations, from the female characters of Shanghai, to Tanizaki’s Naomi, to Kawabata’s Yumiko. In Yokomitsu’s work, Miyako and Qiulan represent two contrasting images of modern culture: Miyako embodies a transnational economy framing an intersection of the Western powers and Japan, and Qiulan embodies a force of resistance to the global expansion of these networks of capital and military force. For Kawabata, the figure of Yumiko becomes an emblem of a modern culture that is continually shifting in appearance. In modernism, the emphasis shifts from the disembodied, phantasmal image of woman found in confessional fiction to the representation of female bodies. Tales of Wandering works both within and against these representations of the feminine. In her analyses of the cultural representations of women in the s, in particular those of the “modern girl” and the café waitress, Miriam Silverberg has shown that these female figures were constituted as objects of desire in literature and in media but that what was truly unsettling about them was that they were also bearers of their own desire. Critics tended to define

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the modern girl, for example, as “aggressive and erotic,” and her promiscuity was both alluring and threatening to cultural standards and norms, whereas the café waitress “both sold and experienced desire.”44 For Silverberg, these cultural figures indicate historical transformations in the material existence of women, including their movement in increasing numbers into the workforce—and onto the streets—as well as the renegotiation of conventional gender roles.The surface media representations, which emphasized the status of the female body as a commodity, mask a deeper reality of women as producers of culture and bearers of political agency: “The obsessive contouring of the Modern Girl as promiscuous and apolitical (and later, as apolitical and nonworking) begins to emerge as a means of displacing the very real militancy of Japanese women.”45 This complex terrain of gender representations, especially those revolving around the question of desire, is also reflected in Hayashi’s work, which Silverberg cites as an important text in the cultural formation of the image of the modern girl.The term “wandering” in the novel’s title signifies an unsettled movement through space and a movement from lover to lover. Hirabayashi Taiko, for example, refers to the depiction of Hayashi’s “sexual anarchy.”46 If the I-novel was organized around the gaze of a desiring (male) subject, Hayashi’s work both replicates this gaze and inverts it. In this sense, the female narrator of Tales of Wandering is both a subject and an object of desire, and this doubleness provides a framework for the depiction of subjectivity in the work. The self-consciousness of these media representations of women is revealed in a passage in the work in which a character makes an ironic statement about the figure of the “modern girl.” Okei, a café waitress “who speaks like a man,” exclaims that she is fed up with love:“such promises don’t mean a thing.The man who made me like this is now a member of the Diet, but as soon as I got pregnant, it was over just like that. If we give birth to an illegitimate child, everyone calls us ‘modern girls.’ How idiotic.”Yet in the following passage Hayashi also describes another waitress,Toshi, as “having the eyes of Mary Pickford and the body of Swanson” (Horoki, –).47 The passage illustrates Hayashi’s consciousness and ironic subversion of representations of women circulating in the media of the time.The depiction of femininity in the work is

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Negations of Genre

circumscribed by literary and media images of women as projections of both desire and fear. Hayashi’s text of necessity works within the circulation of such images, and there is also a countermovement, an attempt to disrupt them. On the level of content, this dual thematic structure corresponds to the formal opposition between the positions of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the utterance.48 It is in this gap, in the space between the “I” as an object of representation (commodity) and the “I” as the author (producer), that Tales of Wandering unfolds. The attempt to negotiate this double imperative leads to the representation in the text of a multiple, fragmented subjectivity. Tales of Wandering traces the narrator’s continual transformations of sensation, affect, and consciousness. This process is indicated, for example, by the title of the fourth chapter, “A Hundred Faces” (Hyakumenso).The term refers to an actor who is capable of playing a great number of different roles and who thus continually changes the appearance of his face. In the chapter, the name seems to apply to the narrator’s lover, an actor who had once worked with Matsui Sumako.49 He is described derisively as a disingenuous performer who spouts lines about class struggle and yet also makes women work to support him. He is portrayed as an insincere man who is always playing a role, as being “cold as a commodity” (Horoki, ), and he also serves as an emblem for left-wing bourgeois intellectuals.The two lovers have separated by the end of the chapter. The ending of the chapter makes it clear that the “hundred faces” refers to the narrator herself rather than the actor. In the last scene, she has parted from him and boarded a train to return to her parents’ home. Filled with a desire to escape, she wants “to wander the entire country as a vagrant.”As she looks out the window at the passing landscape, she suddenly sees the reflection of her face in the glass.As she looks at her image superimposed on the landscape outside, she is overtaken by various emotions: “Immersed in childlike fantasies, I cried, laughed, played the fool, and when I happened to glance at the window there were my strange ‘hundred faces’” (Horoki, ).The name captures the narrator’s many desires—for stability and freedom, domesticity and wandering.Another moment of shifting identities takes place when the narrator imagines that she

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has become a man, experiencing desire for another woman: “I felt like touching Oito’s beautiful hands, with their white, downy hair. I felt like I was now completely a man and loved Oito in her long red undergarments” (). The multiplicity of subject positions in Tales of Wandering reflects a dissolution of the monologic narrative voice that organizes the Inovel.The conception of interiority that one finds in theories of the I-novel—the “self ” that is also tied to the “homeland” (kokyo) of the novel—is evacuated here. At the same time, this dissolution is also closely tied to the specificity of women’s writing, to the text’s ambivalent position regarding the representation of women in the literature of this period.As noted earlier, it is a tradition that Hayashi both writes in and opposes; it is the double imperative that frames her work. Although there is an element of “escape” in the text’s depiction of a fragmented subjectivity and although the dissolution of literary form can also be related to conceptions of l’écriture feminine or to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic jouissance of poetic language as rupture of the symbolic, the fragmentation here is also an effect of the exclusion of female bodies from certain normative structures of subjectivity. This ambivalent multiplicity, which is experienced as both liberating and alienating, structures the urban space that is the setting for Hayashi’s work.

The City as Liminal Space Much of Tales of Wandering takes place in the city of Tokyo.The representation of urban space plays a significant thematic role in the work, beyond merely serving as setting for the narrative. As mentioned earlier, the city’s conceptual boundaries are marked by two sites, what might be termed its internal and external margins. On one boundary is the concept of kokyo or furusato (home), a place of origin outside the city, which also suggests concepts of childhood, family, and nature. This topos exists in the novel almost as pure affect—that is, only in the realm of the imagination (since it has no material existence). At the other limit is prostitution, which marks the extreme commodification of the female body. This second topos is, conversely, associated with exchange, materiality, and

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Negations of Genre

corporeality. The space through which the protagonist of Tales of Wandering moves is situated between these two poles. As numerous critics have pointed out, these two sites or concepts—domesticity and prostitution—also define the typical parameters of dominant cultural representations of women.50 The space between this opposition, which can never be quite assimilated to either side, is materialized in this work as urban space.The work thus proceeds according to the narrator’s continual movement through various spaces in the city—homes, boarding houses, streets, cafés, factories, stores. As a number of critics have pointed out, much of Taisho-period literature was concerned with establishing the world of internal consciousness, expressed through the demarcation of interior spaces.51 Tales of Wandering, however, displaces this topography of interiority; like Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, Tales of Wandering takes place largely outside the bounds of domestic or private space. The narrative of Tales of Wandering begins with a primal expulsion from home (furusato). In the work’s first chapter, Hayashi offers a brief sketch of her early life leading up to her experience in Tokyo, including her nomadic existence with her parents, who worked as peddlers, moving from place to place.The opening section thus is a prehistory of Tales of Wandering. The nomadic existence of the “I” in the body of the text is traced here back to an origin in her family history. Both her parents, born in different parts of the island of Kyushu, were cast out of their respective homes.The second “exile” takes place when her mother leaves her father (who has taken up with a geisha), taking the young narrator with her. “I now have multiple fathers,” Hayashi writes. “Since being taken by my mother to live with [my stepfather], I have passed the time without any proper home” (Horoki, –). The topography of displacement is thus opened through the family structure’s disintegration and specifically through the absence (or, more precisely, multiplicity) of the father. In the absence of paternal authority, the mother remains as a source of longing and sentiment throughout the work. These originary exclusions form the basis of a series of subsequent exclusions and rejections suffered by the “I” at the hands of society in the body of the text. These are originary traumas that

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initiate a ceaseless movement through the fissures of society. The family moves from flophouse to flophouse, because, as her mother says, her current father “doesn’t like houses, doesn’t like furniture” (Horoki, ).They thus exist outside the familiar markers of private or domestic space. Similarly, the topography depicted in the opening chapter is populated by social outcasts and misfits.At one time, for example, Hayashi’s narrator and her family stay in a mining town. Hayashi describes the group of characters who gathered in one of the many cheap boarding houses of her childhood: In the flophouse there was a madman who used to be a miner and who went by the nickname of Shinkei [Nerves]. The other boarders said he had been thrown by an explosion of dynamite and rendered a fool. He was a kind madman, who went early each morning with the women from town to push the trolley. I often had lice picked from my hair by this Shinkei. Afterward, he moved up in the world as a prop-man in the mines. Others included a traveling priest who had drifted from Shimane and who had a fake eye, two miner couples, a crooked peddler who sold snake wine, a prostitute missing a thumb—it () was a gathering more colorful than any circus. The laborers in this mining town are described using animal images, as a “pack of gorillas” () or goldfish that snatch at the air after coming up from underground. Korean laborers also are living in the midst of this community in wretched conditions (“ten families under one roof ”).They are figures who inhabit the fringes of the economy and who rarely are mentioned in literature.There is also an indication of an economic hierarchy here: the Koreans ask for money from Hayashi’s father, who is himself a traveling salesman of common goods. The work thus opens in a peripheral region of the nation (in Shimonoseki). In the second chapter, which inaugurates the main portion of the text, the setting shifts to a central location, to Tokyo.This shift parallels a movement between different types of economic activity, from her family’s nomadic peddling of goods

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Negations of Genre

to a consumer capitalism on a vast, imperial scale.The movement from periphery to center (and vice versa) is one of the core narrative movements of the text, one that is repeated a number of times. At the same time, the cultural and social divisions implied by the opposition between city and country are also maintained within the space of Tokyo itself, a space where demarcations between inside and outside and between private and public are shown to be in a state of continual dissolution and reformulation. Excluded from any stable locus of bourgeois existence, Hayashi’s heroine is forced to “wander” from job to job. She takes a position at a toy factory painting celluloid dolls intended for a lower-class market; works as a clerk for a stockbroker; and is employed as a maid, café waitress, journalist, and shop girl in an imported goods store—Hayashi’s work maps out the range of positions available to women in the s.52 These jobs are almost universally unfulfilling, marked by boredom and exploitation (in the last position, for example, she is reprimanded for reading women’s journals on the job). In one case her employer does not pay her for an entire month’s worth of labor. In another instance, she accepts a position at a stockbroker’s office that requires calculating figures, something she finds herself unable to do.The next day, she receives a telegram that simply states:“No need to come to work.” She is often on the verge of starvation, at times going days without a proper meal. The narrative proceeds as a movement through different spaces across this urban landscape, both living and working spaces (which sometimes are not distinguished). She lives in decrepit flophouses, in apartments with other women, with her lovers, in a Shinjuku café. In the second chapter, “The Whore and the Cafeteria” (Inbaifu to meshiya), Hayashi’s narrator is presented as inhabiting the edges of bourgeois households, markers of domesticity and of the family structure.The chapter opens in the bathroom of a house in Tokyo; Hayashi’s narrator is working as a maid in the household of the established Naturalist writer Chikamatsu Shuko. She is in charge of taking care of the writer’s infant, but she writes that “I can’t stand babies” (Horoki, ), a rejection of the socially sanctioned role of motherhood.The bathroom—a space of exclusion and abjection—is the one place in the house, she says, where she feels as if her body belongs to herself. The fact that the chapter

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opens in Chikamatsu’s bathroom also symbolizes her marginal status in relation to the literary establishment. In the next entry, Hayashi’s narrator is fired by Chikamatsu; out in the streets, she opens the folded paper envelope he had given her, only to find a mere two yen in exchange for her two weeks of work.With nowhere to go, she wanders down a street and finds an empty “culture house” (bunka jutaku), a symbol of middle-class status. She notices the large yard and the glass windows glittering in the December wind. It is precisely the type of house that plays an important role in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Naomi (Chijin no ai). In that novel, the culture house frames a space of cultural and sexual fantasy, its combination of Japanese and European architecture a materialization of the narrator’s desire for mixture that he projects onto the body of Naomi. In this scene in Tales of Wandering, Hayashi’s narrator decides on a whim to enter the house, which is empty, to rest. Inside, she finds a kitchen strewn with empty cans and a tatami floor covered in dirt, a reality at odds with the middle-class image of the culture house. She feels a chill in the empty house and leaves but realizes that she has nowhere to go. Critics such as Maeda Ai and, more recently, Nishikawa Yuko have stressed the importance of the delineation of internal, domestic spaces in establishing the boundaries of subjectivity in modern Japanese literature.53 As these two scenes just described show, Hayashi’s narrator exists in a complex relationship to such boundaries, inhabiting their margins. She is an interloper never quite at home in such domestic worlds. The representation of space here does not offer a stable context for the demarcation of subjectivity. Instead, the city is represented as being in continual motion and is experienced through sensations of speed, poverty, intoxication, hunger, and desire.54 Hayashi’s narrator moves from job to job, from apartment house to apartment house; the city is a place of continually shifting relationships as well as changing emotions and physical states. After leaving the “culture house,” the narrator decides to rent a room in a flophouse in Shinjuku, a traveler’s inn under a stone wall where rooms rent for thirty sen a night.There she rests her body, which, she writes, feels like mud. She describes this boarding house as a place that seems to predate the Meiji period. In the middle of

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Negations of Genre

the night, a woman runs into the room and dives into her bedding. She is followed moments later by a police detective, who leads the woman away and interrogates the narrator, asking for her legal domicile, her age, her parents, and her destination. The boarding house teeters on the edge of respectable society, associated with criminality and prostitution, a space regulated and observed by the police, embodiments of state authority. The following morning, the narrator has breakfast in a cheap cafeteria. A laborer enters and asks the waitress whether he can be fed for ten sen, all the money he has. He is served a bowl of rice with meat and tofu, which he eats eagerly, a sight at which Hayashi’s narrator is moved to tears.These two figures, the prostitute and the laborer, represent the two economic positions between which Hayashi’s narrator is caught. Throughout the narrative, she exists close to these two limits. The early part of the story chronicles the narrator’s attempts to find a meaningful job. She goes to an employment agency, which informs her that the only job for which she is qualified is that of maid. She writes: I am not so different from last night’s prostitute. The landscape through which the narrator moves from job to job is thus placed in opposition to the institutions of bourgeois society, embodied by marriage, home, and family. Later in the work, Hayashi writes Like a pig sniffing out some stench, I walked around from café to café To me, with my rotting brain, love or family or society or a husband seem like things so far away. (Horoki, )

In her own self-representation, she is reduced to an abject corporeality, an existence beyond the sites of domesticity. At the same time, however, to escape her life of boredom and physical deprivation, the narrator sometimes harbors fantasies of marriage, of living the conventional life for a woman.The character Matsuda also represents the temptation of domesticity. Her well-

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meaning neighbor at the apartment house, Matsuda proposes marriage to her.In one scene,she imagines his face and wonders whether she should finally agree to marry him, to free herself from this cycle of disagreeable jobs.55 But Hayashi’s narrator continually rejects his entreaties. The second volume of the work opens in the countryside, with a description of the narrator’s visit to the family of the man (“the man from the island”) who abandoned her in Tokyo, despite his promises of marriage. She receives a cold reception from the family, and this rejection from his relatives in the nation’s periphery repeats the narrative events that opened the first volume: both begin with a rejection from family. Hirabayashi Taiko wrote that her abandonment by this lover was a tremendous shock to Hayashi, initiating what Hirabayashi calls her “internal wandering” of the spirit, as opposed to her physical and social drifting.56 As some of the previous examples have already indicated, the space at the other extreme of domesticity is represented by prostitution. In the second chapter, for example, Hayashi’s narrator sees herself as not far removed from the prostitute who one night seeks sanctuary in her room from the police. In one scene, fed up with her poverty, she wonders: “Isn’t there anyone who would buy my body?” (Horoki, ). At one point, she accepts a job as a midwife, only to find that the women working there are in fact prostitutes. She leaves before the day is over. She writes later: “To think—if I want to survive, it’s either café waitress or whore” (Zoku horoki, ). She also refers to the cafés as being “like brothels.” While working there, she lives upstairs with the other waitresses; privacy is not an option (Horoki, ).The narrator herself is always living and working close to these two limits of domesticity and prostitution, between these two socially and culturally prescribed roles for women.

Assimilation and Expulsion The narrator’s relationship to this city space is characterized by experiences of both exclusion and assimilation and by sensations of fascination and alienation. Like Shanghai in Yokomitsu’s work,

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Negations of Genre

Hayashi’s Tokyo is a space characterized by abjection, a repository of excluded and abjected objects. The poem quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, which Hayashi did not use in the prewar versions, describes Tokyo as an imperial capital and as a space of disease and madness. The emperor himself, a symbol of paternal authority, is presented as insane. In short, Hayashi describes a mobile, shifting cityscape whose center is contaminated. In her study of the ideological formation of gender identities, Judith Butler has argued that subjectivity, which she also refers to as “subjection,” is shaped by regulatory norms that establish standard models of gender identities while also creating a realm of excluded, abjected bodies outside the norm, those that are denied human agency. She describes the formation of subjectivity as the regulation and disciplining of bodies through a double process of both inclusion and exclusion. In Hayashi’s work, the city materializes this borderline space between inclusion in and exclusion from normative subjectivity. The narrator’s experience of the city is tinged with foreignness. In the first chapter, Hayashi writes about the impact of seeing an image of Katusha, the heroine of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, in an advertisement for the film version of the novel. “Katusha’s Song” (Kachusha no uta), the song popularized by the stage version of the novel, has infiltrated even the remote mining town where her family lives. Hayashi sneaks into the theater to watch the film and for some time afterward dreams of Katusha.Tolstoy’s heroine presents an image of a distant and exoticized vision of a woman, a vision of an alternative space to her own existence in the margins of society and the nation. The poster of Katusha, the “foreign girl” (ijinmusume) waiting by the train, thus represents one of the allures of modernity. It is a heterogeneous world composed of a mixture of poetic fragments, European and Japanese literature, films, popular songs, and media images. Nakazawa Kei described her association of Hayashi’s works with the space of a Westernized modernity that was not the exclusive privilege of the elite:“I first learned of early Showa culture, including the milk halls and cafés, through the fiction of Hayashi Fumiko. The city that was depicted there was a bustling space filled with Western-style goods and pleasure and entertainment, at a price within reach for salaried workers and

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poor students.”57 The appeal of this space of enjoyment is exemplified in one scene in which Hayashi’s narrator is taken by her boss to Asakusa, which is depicted as a space of intoxication and enjoyment: “Whirling around through the fast lights, I’m a wandering Katusha. I haven’t used cream on my face for so long it’s hard like earthenware, but drunk on cheap saké, I’m not afraid of anything” (Horoki, ). Once in the city, she has assumed the identity of the image she had seen years earlier on a film poster. Katusha is a figure of identification and fascination for Hayashi’s heroine, but some of the elements of a Westernized city space emphasize the experience of exclusion. For example, in one early scene, she is sent by an employment agency to the Italian embassy for an interview: A foreign child came out on horseback. Next to the gate was a broken-down guard house, and the white and blue and green landscape and gravel path extended into the distance. It was no place for someone like me. I was led into a large room with a map and red carpet. Dressed in a white and black costume, the foreign wife was beautiful, more beautiful still when seen from a distance. . . . A foreign man also came out, but he was not the consul but, rather, a secretary or something. Husband and wife were so tall I felt overwhelmed. (Horoki, )

She leaves without knowing whether she has the job. Her sensation of being out of place also symbolizes her initial experience of the city in general. As she wanders the streets afterward, amid the red flags of the shops fluttering in the December wind, she feels like returning home to the countryside.The sight of electric trains merely makes her think of death. At times, a consciousness of racial difference is superimposed on that of class difference. Hayashi’s description of herself as a “mongrel” in the opening passages is thus later linked to questions of class. At one point, for example, Hayashi writes that she feels herself a different “race” (jinshu) from the bourgeois. In another scene, in the summer, riding a train through the city streets on her way to a job interview, she thinks:“I know the bourgeois race would have

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Negations of Genre

only contempt for the body odor of my damp sweat” (Zoku horoki, ). One night, in the café where she both lives and works, she “sings a foolish song with a sadness like a Negro bought by a white man’s nation” (Horoki, ). She also works for a time at the Café Étranger in Yokohama, run by a German woman and catering to foreigners. On the surface, the culture of the city is coded as Western, a foreign space to which the narrator is simultaneously drawn yet excluded from.There is also another side to the city’s “foreignness”: under this surface manifestation of modernity extends the Japanese imperialist economy, of which Tokyo serves as a central node and through which female bodies are circulated as commodities. In the opening chapter, for instance, Hayashi writes about her childhood friend Matchan, who was “sold off to Tsing Tao” (Horoki, ) at the age of fifteen. In Tales of Wandering, the cafés represent condensed images of an imperial economy. In her study of the café waitress as a cultural figure during this period, Silverberg cites the imperial colorings of the cafés, including the visual artifacts of colonized cultures that adorned the interior spaces of some and that were used to sell an exoticized eroticism.58 Here the narrator’s co-workers arrive at the cafés after traversing different regions of the Japanese Empire. One of these co-workers is Toshi, who has come alone to Tokyo from Sakhalin, after spending years in Hakodate. Another waitress, Yoshi, was born in Sakhalin (Hayashi later writes that she was born in “the basement of a hotel in Harbin”) and is proud of her “white skin” (Horoki, , ). Yoshi’s two children live with her mother in Korea.Another woman, Ohatsu, recounts her personal history: “I was born in Yotsuya [in Tokyo] but when I was twelve I was taken by a strange man and abducted to Manchuria.There I was immediately sold into a geisha house, so I soon forgot that man’s face” (). She was brought back to Tokyo by a man working for a Manchurian newspaper.This network of exchange of women’s bodies extends throughout the empire (although the focus in Hayashi’s text is on the experience of only Japanese women). The narrator’s experience of the city space is therefore complex, characterized by exclusion and alienation but also desire and intoxication. She is excluded from certain sites of bourgeois exis-

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tence, but she is also assimilated into an economic system of exchange, the circulation of women’s bodies as commodities of labor and sexuality.This double structure also governs the work’s portrayal of modern culture. Tales of Wandering explores the dehumanizing effects of consumer capitalism, highlighting the experience of hardship and deprivation at the fringes of the economy. It also reveals the pervasive reach of the process of commodification, which extends into human relations.When the narrator is working in the café, the faces of all her customers seem like commodities (shohin). Hayashi writes:“Ever since I came to work in the café, the illusion that I held toward men disappeared like a dream, and they all seem like a bunch of goods for sale” (Horoki, ).At the end of the first volume,Toki, the narrator’s friend and roommate, has been seduced by an older man, who gives her money, a diamond ring, and a purple coat.The man takes her away, and only later does she discover that she is to be kept as his mistress.The narrator refers to this forty-two-year-old man as “Mephistopheles,” as he represents the temptations of an economy in which bodies can be exchanged for money. Tales of Wandering describes, as well, the enjoyment of this consumer culture. The narrator’s relationship to this space of consumption is marked by desire as well as resistance to the body’s commodification. According to Silverberg, the figure of the café waitress in this period represents an intersection between the proletariat and the consumer of modern culture: “The jokyu created an eroticized identity within the context of a working-class culture at the same time that she sold a commodified gendered identity within the class-based and class-coded leisure culture inhabited by the café.”59 Hayashi’s narrator occupies this median space between the two worlds, both commodity and consumer of commodities. This ambiguity is illustrated by the following passage from the text: April XX The young women walking the city streets wear light shawls like flowing water. I want one. The shop windows at the Western stores are decorated this month with silver and gold and cherry blossoms.

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when cherry branches spread in the sky are lightly stained with blood there—a flower-color thread lowers from the tip of a branch a lottery of passion if, unable to eat, I ran into a vaudeville show and saw a dancer dancing naked, this is no fault of the cherry blossoms one line of passion two lines of debt the cherry flowers in full bloom against the blue sky a strange thread pulls in the naked lips of all living women it is not that the flowers wish to bloom those in power make them bloom the impoverished women when night falls throw their lips like fruit at the great sky the peach-color petals of cherry coloring the blue sky are forced kisses of sad women traces of lips turned away. Moving from prose to poetry, this passage links the commodity to nature to the female body according to a “strange thread.” The goods in the window of a shop selling Western clothing evoke a desire for material objects, which is translated in the poem into sexual desire (passion), which, in turn, is embodied by the cherry blos-

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soms in bloom. It turns out, however, that this inauguration of desire—the opening of the female body—is not natural but “forced” by the powerful (kyokensha). The thread that pulls these women’s bodies links the production of commodities (the economy) to forms of mass culture (vaudeville). This passage also links the production of desire and the circulation of commodities to the question of writing, specifically the translation of one form of writing into another. In this respect, the text can be seen to work through a certain fetishization of writing, and of poetry in particular. Tales of Wandering is a self-reflexive work whose theme is the narrator’s existence not only as a laborer but also as a writer (representing another type of labor). As stated earlier, Kobayashi saw in Gide an attempt to create a “laboratory” of literature, to call attention to its limits by reaching beyond them, in the form of the author’s journal (which is mirrored in Edouard’s own journal in the novel).A similar operation can be discerned in Hayashi’s work. By incorporating her poetry into the work, Hayashi brings into relief a certain limit of writing, the boundary between literature and her personal experience. By using poetry in the context of the narrator’s everyday life, Hayashi undermines any autonomous conception of poetry and instead introduces the poetry into the context of lived experience. The poetry in Tales of Wandering is therefore not only artifact but also historical process. In this way, the text de-fetishizes poetry by situating it in a specific relation to a certain type of labor. On the one hand, the work of poetry is contrasted with her other work. Hayashi writes:“I never thought of working as hardship, but now, just now, I long for the written word” and “When I’m surrounded by this noise of the café, even writing in my diary becomes painful” (Horoki, , italics in original). Hayashi stated that she began as a poet rather than a novelist because amid the hardship of her daily existence of work, she never had time to write a novel.60 On the other hand, poetry is also directly related to the body; for example: I’ll throw up art like I’m throwing up blood and dance with joy like a madwoman. ()61

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Negations of Genre

In these lines, art or poetry is seen as something ejected from the body, an image that simultaneously evokes pleasure, bodily pain, and madness. Nonetheless, writing cannot finally escape its commodity status. The end of the first book closes with the receipt of twenty-three yen for a children’s story that the narrator had submitted for publication.The arrival of the money comes just after the passage that laments the disappearance of Toki, led away by the forty-two yearold “Mephistopheles.” Toki and Hayashi’s narrator were living together, enjoying a semblance of domestic stability. After her disappearance, the narrator wanders around their boarding room, which has been emptied out just like her body (from hunger and desire). The passage reads like a rewriting of the closing scene of The Quilt, in which Tokio, consumed by desire, explores Yoshiko’s empty room: I reached my hand out and opened the closet. I grabbed the remains of some cabbage, imagined the taste of white rice on my tongue. There is nothing. Emptiness. Tears well up. Maybe I’ll turn on the electric light. . . . I see my stomach was not satisfied with the cheap cakes, it grumbles . . . with annoyance. In the used clothing store owner’s room next door—ji . . . the offensive smell of fish grilling. Hunger and sexual desire! Like Toki-chan, maybe I should let myself be treated to a bowl of rice, at least. Hunger and sexual desire! I felt like crying and bit these words. (Horoki, )

In this passage, language is inscribed in an economy of bodily desire: the narrator literally chews the words as if they were food. In the following entry, a letter arrives from Toki, explaining that she

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had been intimidated by the man who gave her the ring and coat and that she is now being kept in a machiai (assignation house) in Asakusa. She writes that the man, a contractor, has a wife. Hayashi’s narrator cries over this “unreadable” letter from the woman who has abandoned her for the temptation of money and material goods. But on the same day, a registered letter arrives with twentythree yen from the publisher in exchange for her story. Hayashi laments that her companion who would share her joy is being embraced by Mephistopheles. She opens her window and hears the bells of Ueno and plans to eat sushi for dinner. In this way, writing is assimilated into a corporeal economy of money, hunger, and sexual desire.At the end of the second volume, Hayashi refers to the two books as “my child” (Zoku horoki, ). What keeps her text from falling into a kind of anarchic writing on the order of l’écriture feminine is this continual consciousness of the commodity function of writing itself. In Hayashi’s text, the act of writing can never exist outside the system of symbolic exchange. (In addition, the exchange of her writing for money that closes the first book of Tales of Wandering is also a foreshadowing of the fate of the work, its enormous commercial success.) Therefore, while Hayashi’s narrator continually resists the insertion of her body into a system of exchange—whether it is the institutions of marriage and family or the economy/prostitution—the text also registers the impossibility of simply going outside this ideological system. Instead, it is in the marginal, in-between spaces of the city and of the culture that Hayashi’s heroine negotiates her own subjectivity.

On the Ambivalence of Modernism As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, despite its immense popularity, Tales of Wandering occupies only a marginal place in literary histories. As I have tried to demonstrate, however, Hayashi’s work forces a reconsideration and reconfiguration of the conceptual foundations of such histories. In particular, she questions the opposition between political and experimental literature, a familiar

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Negations of Genre

framework for analyses of literary works from this period. Beyond the caricatured portrayals of a proletarian literature in the rigid grip of a foreign and abstract ideology and a modernist literature enthralled by the surface manifestations of consumer capitalism, Hayashi’s work explores the ambivalent and marginal spaces of modern culture, spaces characterized by both desire and destitution. In this context, then, the opposition between aesthetic and political revolution established by Hirano Ken as a prism for understanding the literature of the s does not hold up. Like the writings of Akutagawa,Yokomitsu, and Kawabata discussed in earlier chapters, Hayashi’s Tales of Wandering places the dissolution of novelistic form into a textured social and cultural landscape, which in Hayashi’s work is more explicitly framed in terms of both class and gender. Perhaps even more than the other writers, Hayashi links the question of literary form to the ideological parameters of subjectivity. In its field of representation, Tales of Wandering extends the exploration of urban space found in the writings of Yokomitsu and Kawabata. In particular, Hayashi’s work can be considered a literary evocation of Kobayashi’s argument in “Literature of the Lost Home,” in its delineation of a culture existing in a condition of exile and displacement. The dissolution of the concept of home (kokyo) is foregrounded as the central theme of Hayashi’s work— in effect, the entire narrative is launched by the expulsion from home. Hayashi’s work underscores the ambivalence underlying the modernist experience of this space of abjection and fragmentation, for this experience is characterized by alienation and exploitation as well as enjoyment and intoxication. In turn, this ambivalence can also be seen as preparing the way for the transformation that would take place among modernist writers in the s. Paradoxically, the evacuation of the concept of home, its loss and displacement, becomes a framework for the articulation of a nostalgic and nationalist aesthetic that would come to dominate the literature of that decade. The lost home becomes an object of nostalgia, haunting literary discourse in its very absence. Like Kobayashi’s essay, Tales of Wandering reveals that the concept of “home” as an organization of desire also organizes the margin or edge of modernist discourse—modernism is defined

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in part through its dislocation from this concept, yet as a phantasmatic object it also lingers on the borders of modernism. Modernist writers in the mid- to late s attempted to recover this phantasmatic object as cultural/national essence, rewriting the modernist topographies of fragmentation and dissolution into ones of loss and nostalgia.

chapter 5

A Phantasmatic Return: Yokomitsu Riichi’s Melancholic Nationalism Without even being aware of it, the younger generation had changed even its soul into the Western style. It was an age in which the melancholy of the wandering traveler, who had no soil on which to rest, was ever deepening. Yokomitsu Riichi

Narratives of Return In a well-known essay,“The Return to Japan” (Nihon e no kaiki, ), the poet Hagiwara Sakutaro (–), a leading figure of modernist poetry in Japan, wrote about his recent awakening from what he termed an intoxicating dream of the West: “Until just recently, the West was our home [kokyo]. Just as the child Urashima long ago tried to find his soul’s homeland and pictured an image of the Dragon Palace beyond the sea, so too did we imagine the mirage of the West across the ocean.” Hagiwara drew on the modernist trope of modernity as phantasmagoria, describing this mirage as the projection of a “magic lantern” that shows alluring, utopian images of civilization and enlightenment: “Yet now, the dream streets that we saw in that magic lantern have emerged into the reality of Tokyo, and we wander amid its neon signs.”1 For Hagiwara, the end of the magic lantern display is a rude awakening to reality, to a “real homeland,” which by now lies in a state of ruin: Yet we have played far too long outside. And now as we return to our home, it no longer retains any shadows of the past—the eaves have rotted, the garden is overgrown, no trace of anything Japanese remains. We feel the shock of having lost everything.As we trace the pathways of memory, searching the ruined land from end to end in search of the “Japanese things” it once contained, we form a gathering of sad drifters, wandering in sorrow, without destination.2 This Romantic image of loss and ruin provides the backdrop for Hagiwara’s call for the construction of a new Japan—not, however, through a rejection of the West but by means of “Western intelligence.” Hagiwara’s argument reflects the paradoxical logic, or “irony,” that organized the discourse of Japanese Romanticism and that also appears in his lines, “We have lost everything / and we

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A Phantasmatic Return

have lost nothing.”3 As Kevin Doak explains, Hagiwara in this essay expresses the “need for an ironic return to a Japan that no longer existed.”4 “The Return to Japan,” published during the rapid escalation of Japan’s invasion of China, which had erupted into full-scale war the year before, can be read almost as a direct response to Kobayashi Hideo’s “Literature of the Lost Home,” written some five years earlier. Both essays are organized around the same central trope, the loss of home. Against Kobayashi’s attraction to the style of the film Morocco and to Western films in general, Hagiwara describes an intoxication with the utopian mirage of the magic lantern image. Hagiwara’s essay also indicates a crucial shift in the modernist discourse of cultural homelessness, the point at which the pervasive sense of exile is directed into a moment of nostalgia and longing and, more significantly, into an attempted reconstruction of a cultural home.As studies by Marilyn Ivy and Harry Harootunian have shown, by the Taisho period, such recuperations were already being prepared in various fields, and in this sense it is impossible to posit any absolute break between the cultural discourse of the s and s.5 Hagiwara’s essay does, however, reveal the presence of a key rhetorical turn, whereby the modernist emphasis on displacement and fragmentation could be subsumed into such nostalgic narratives of return. The essay marks the point at which the very absence of home, its irrevocable loss, is transformed into the basis for an ideological reconstruction. In certain ways, the paradigmatic case of such a shift is provided by the writings of Yokomitsu Riichi. In the late s,Yokomitsu began to work on what became his last novel, a monumental work that was published as a five-volume set in , although it remained essentially unfinished at his death in early .The novel, Melancholy Journey (Ryoshu), was based on a trip to Europe that Yokomitsu had made in .6 The immediate reference of the journey in the title is this experience, but the journey also refers to an ideological passage, one that involves a rejection of the West and the rediscovery of a native cultural tradition.The journey to Europe and return to Japan that takes place in the novel is the physical embodiment of a specific psychological and ideological experience of early-twentieth-century intellectu-

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als. Yokomitsu’s novel became emblematic of the expression of nationalism in literature during the war years. For this work and his various other prominent public activities in support of the war effort,Yokomitsu was censured by literary critic Odagiri Hideo in  as one of the writers who bore “war responsibility.”7 Yokomitsu is a highly visible case of a general shift among a number of writers associated with modernism in the interwar and war years. Prominent modernist figures such as Kawabata Yasunari, Nakagawa Yoichi, Hayashi Fumiko,Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Sato Haruo, and Hagiwara—each in different ways and to various degrees— turned from an engagement with modern culture toward an exploration of a native cultural aesthetic. In part, this was a reflection of external historical pressures. As has been well documented, the movement toward total war in the s was marked by a rising tide of ultranationalist discourse and sentiment (in the mass media and the institutions of the literary establishment) as well as by the increasing encroachment of the fascist state apparatus into literary activity. Government monitoring and censorship of journals, newspapers, and books became increasingly severe, and state-sponsored institutions—such as the Nihon bungaku hokokukai (Japanese Literature Patriotic Society)—were established to consolidate governmental control over literary practice.Writers were mobilized by the military to accompany troops to the battlefront, forming what was known as the pen butai, or pen corps” in . Prominent among them was Hayashi, who had been the first Japanese woman to go to Nanjing after the Japanese attack of .8 The nationalist turn in modernist writing was not only a response to such external pressures, nor did it represent a simple movement from an embrace of modernity to an “antimodernism” or a rejection of modernity (as Yokomitsu once suggested).9 In Yokomitsu’s case, for example, we can find moments of both continuity and rupture between New Sensationism and his later, explicitly nationalistic writings. In essence, the later writings were an attempt to overcome contradictions and conflicts that always were present in the discourse of modernist literature, which this study has analyzed.This attempted overcoming involved a critical rhetorical turn, whereby the trope of “homelessness,” which had organized the discursive field of modernism, was transformed into

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A Phantasmatic Return

the basis for a narrative of loss and nostalgia. As Melancholy Journey reveals, this movement was facilitated by a shift from an aesthetics of corporeal sensation to one of affect. On the one hand, Melancholy Journey extends the earlier thematics of exile and dislocation found in Shanghai. In fact, Kobayashi’s “Literature of the Lost Home,” which lamented the loss of cultural grounding for a generation of writers, can be seen as providing a theoretical framework for both works. The underlying theme of Yokomitsu’s writings throughout this period remained an exploration of the ways in which human consciousness is shaped and transformed through conflicts with an external world perceived to be continually changing. In both Shanghai and Melancholy Journey, this exteriority is materialized as a space located outside national borders. On the other hand, a significant transformation in form takes place between the two novels.Yokomitsu’s early writings had been organized around an image system that emphasized the representation of corporeal sensations.This image system represented a fracture of consciousness within the dynamic transformations of urban culture in s Japan. In turn, this representation of disintegration and fragmentation was the basis for the writing style of the New Sensationists, who rejected the colloquial language of mainstream literary writing, instead treating the written word itself as a material object divorced from human consciousness.There was no possibility in this image system of overcoming the crisis in subjectivity. For Yokomitsu, language, like the body, maintained an irreducible materiality that could not be subsumed into any discourse of interiorization and national identification.Thus in Shanghai, any resolution of the conflict between internal (national) consciousness and the external (transnational) environment remained blocked. Yokomitsu abandoned this style of writing in his later work, as indicated by his reference to his own “subjugation to the national language.”This was marked, in the first instance, by his use of exclusively colloquial language in his short stories “Bird” and “Machine” (and also indicated in the last scene of Shanghai).At the same time, this transformation in writing style also indicated a general shift in thematic emphasis. Increasingly,Yokomitsu turned toward the question of what he termed the “excess of self-consciousness” (ji-ishiki no kajo), which he claimed to be the dominant issue facing con-

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temporary Japanese intellectuals. In the mid-s, he began to frame this question in terms of “spirit” (seishin) instead of “sense” or “sensation.” The question of spirit is expressed in Yokomitsu’s late writings through what can be termed a poetics of affect, or sentiment.The sentiment of “melancholy” (urei), for example, pervades his final novel, lending it a certain coherency. In turn, within the disembodied realm of affect or spirit, a reconfiguration of a national subjectivity is pursued.The conflicts of Shanghai, presented primarily in terms of corporeal sensation, are transposed onto a problematics of spirit, a disembodied space within which a resolution to the conflict of national identity is pursued through a retreat into an imagined concept of an Eastern tradition (although as the rhetoric of illness in Melancholy Journey indicates, this “resolution” is never more than phantasmatic). In Melancholy Journey, the experience of “homelessness,” of an absence of connection to a shared cultural tradition, is transformed into the basis for a (violent) reconstruction of a national subjectivity.The exploration of cultural displacement is turned into an aesthetic of cultural mourning, a nostalgic evocation of a lost cultural essence or home.

The Discourse of Anxiety By the mid-s, Yokomitsu had emerged as one of the literary establishment’s most prominent figures. By /, the institutions of proletarian literature had largely collapsed through a combination of harsh government suppression—including strict censorship, mass arrests, and the murder of the writer Kobayashi Takiji (–) by the police in February —and internal conflicts over the general direction of the movement.10 Several months after Kobayashi’s murder, Communist leaders Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika issued a “conversion proclamation” from prison, where they had been incarcerated for four years. In this statement, which marked an “important transformation” in their assertions and practice, they renounced their ties to the Communist Party and the Comintern while affirming the status of the imperial system.11 Sano and Nabeyama claimed that in this time marked externally by war and internally by unprecedented reform, the

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Communist Party had failed to provide leadership to the masses angry over the decay of the capitalist mechanism, that “objectively, the party cannot be called the party of the working class.”12 This declaration had a far-ranging impact on the Marxist literary movement. Proletarian writers such as Hayashi Fusao (–) and Tokunaga Sunao (–) had earlier expressed dissatisfaction with the leadership of the movement, but the June proclamations were followed by a rash of announcements of ideological conversion by Marxist writers.13 Finally, in early , the umbrella organization KOPF (Japanese Proletarian Culture Association) formally disbanded. In turn, the demise of proletarian literature as an organized movement was accompanied by a call from the literary establishment for a literary revival (bungei fukko or bungaku fukko). In October , a group of prominent writers and critics—including Yokomitsu, Kobayashi Hideo, Uno Koji, Kawabata Yasunari, Hayashi Fusao, and Takeda Rintaro—formed the journal Bungakukai (Literary World), which served as the center of literary practice over the following decade. Kawabata wrote in the first issue of Bungakukai that there were signs of a “literary revival” and that this was a development to be welcomed. The notion of “renaissance” had a double significance during this period. It indicated, first, a reconstruction of a “pure” literary practice in the wake of Marxist literature’s demise, thus including the return to prominence of a number of writers associated with Taisho-period literature, such as Uno Koji and Shiga Naoya, and a resurgence of confessional fiction among tenko writers.14 The literary revival also encompassed the formation of the Japanese Romantic school, whose discourse on literature was based on a critique of modernity. Overall, these tendencies can also be seen as a reinstitution, in a literal sense, of a function of literature that was perceived to have been lost or degraded in the s through radical politicization and commercialization. This effort was made explicit, for example, by Nakajima Eijiro, a writer associated with the Japanese Romantics. In the first issue of the journal Nihon romanha (Japanese Romantic School), Nakajima wrote that the function of literature was the creation of a community (kyodotai) of authors and readers and that Romanticism was trying to reestablish

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this function: “What today’s Romanticism aims for is not literary works but, rather, the literary function.”15 At the same time, however, it is clear that certain writers who had been associated with the leftist literary movement viewed Bungakukai as the formation of a “popular front,” a last defense of culture against the encroachment of the fascist state. Indeed, in a postscript to the April  issue, the editors referred to the journal as the “Japanese NRF.”16 This attitude of resistance was adopted by Takeda Rintaro, one of the central figures behind the journal, which also included former Marxists Hayashi Fusao and Funahashi Seiichi, as well as critic Nakamura Mitsuo, also associated with the proletarian literary movement.17 Over the years, both these trajectories were betrayed. Bungakukai did become the center of a politicized literary practice, but one that supported an authoritarian and expansionist state policy. For example, in , the journal was the primary sponsor of the conference “Overcoming Modernity,” which, despite the notable presence of some critical voices, served largely as a philosophical justification for the war, as Takeuchi Yoshimi noted.18 Yokomitsu was a central figure in Bungakukai and helped shape the discourse of the literary revival. His essay “Theory of the Pure Novel” (Junsui shosetsu ron, ) was a significant contribution to this discussion. In this essay,Yokomitsu called for a resuscitation of literature through the creation of the pure novel (junsui shosetsu)— a term that he borrowed from André Gide’s notion of le roman pur but that he understood idiosyncratically as a combination of “high literature” (junbungaku) and popular fiction.Yokomitsu also introduced here his theory of the “fourth person” (dai yoninsho), which he conceived as a synthesis of subjective (first-person) and objective (third-person) narration.This concept was Yokomitsu’s attempt to reject the insular and monologic discourse of the I-novel (Japanese realism, he asserted, was largely “an extension of diary literature”) and to discover a technical means of representing multiple perspectives in narrative. For Yokomitsu, the fourth person was an attempt to represent the “spirit of anxiety called self-consciousness,” which he also described as “the self looking at the self.”19 In the latter half of the decade, the multiple perspectives represented by Yokomitsu’s conception of “self-consciousness” were

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increasingly framed in terms of national or cultural difference.This development was already suggested in Yokomitsu’s “Theory of the Pure Novel.” Despite writing that “the tradition of Japanese literature is Russian literature and French literature” and proclaiming the need to look at Japan from an external perspective, he also asserts the existence of a cultural difference between Europe and Asia.Toward the end of the essay,Yokomitsu notes his skepticism of the “extent to which European reason [richi]” is compatible with the “sentiment [kanjo] of Asia” and writes that perhaps the time has come to think through the difficult question of “ethnicity” (minzoku), which had been avoided until that point.20 This distinction between reason and sentiment played a significant role in the literary discourse of the s and formed the conceptual framework for Yokomitsu’s ideological return to Japan. The opposition between intellect and affect, for example, is the basis of an essay by Miki Kiyoshi,“The Discourse of Anxiety and Its Overcoming” (Fuan no shiso to sono chokoku, ).21 As mentioned earlier, the famous letter that Akutagawa Ryunosuke left at his deathbed in  blamed his suicide on a “vague anxiety” about the future. In some ways, this declaration—and the attempt to overcome the sense of crisis that it indicated—helped determine the general atmosphere of literary and intellectual discourse of subsequent years. As the “vagueness” of Akutagawa’s declaration suggests, the discourse of anxiety generated multiple significations and was applied to multiple contexts. In , Kobayashi Hideo wrote about the “anxiety of modern literature,” which for him reflected a general loss of faith in the stability of social and cultural institutions: “Nothing remains fixed and certain.” For Kobayashi, the reason for his anxiety seemed to be a doubt concerning the mechanisms of industrial society and consumer capitalism: We go into the streets full of anxiety. Nothing exists out there that we can call “the city” or “society” with any certainty. Strangely, each and everything necessary for a city or a society lies right before our eyes: the railway station, the post office, buildings, and factories. But we have no stable belief in what exists behind them, the strings that make them run.And

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when we dive into a bar, driven by a purposeless urge to consume something, aren’t we even suspicious of the money that pops from our wallets?22 Kobayashi also mentions the intrusion of technology into human experience: “Nature and man no longer confront each other. Standing between them is the machine.”23 Miki, for his part, privileges the political context, arguing that the discourse of anxiety had been imported from Europe and had not truly taken root in Japan until after the Manchurian incident of , when a genuine unsettlement had spread among Japanese intellectuals. At a time when worldwide economic depression produced a growing awareness of a global crisis in capitalism, the acts of Japanese military aggression abroad spurred a rise of nationalist sentiment as well as increased government repression of political discourse and a tighter control of various forms of popular culture. In this sense, the literary and philosophical assertions of anxiety that Miki described can be seen as a counterpart to the rhetoric of crisis (hijoji) that pervaded journalistic writings around this time.24 Miki regarded the spirit of anxiety emerging in Japan as a reaction to Marxism as an intellectual force, for which the main question had been “how to act.”25 In contrast, he wrote, it represented a turning inward, toward questions of psychology. Miki noted that in Europe, the literature and philosophy of anxiety had been produced by the sense of social crisis following World War I and marked a loss of faith in intellect and reason (in anything, he says, having to do with “logos”). Miki notes the importance of psychoanalysis in establishing this general discourse of anxiety, for the discovery of the unconscious exposed the power of a hidden and purely affective level of the psyche, a space where all contradictions are able to coexist.This space of affect exists beyond the realm of rational consciousness yet nevertheless governs human existence as the essence of being.26 In addition, Miki named Marcel Proust and André Gide as the main purveyors of the literature of anxiety and Martin Heidegger as the main figure of its philosophy.These men also played a prominent role in Japanese intellectual discourse of the early s. (Miki himself was one of a number of Japanese philosophers who had

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studied with Heidegger.) For example, although Freud’s ideas had been introduced in various essays in earlier years, it was in the early Showa period—when two translations of Freud’s collected writings appeared as well as journals devoted to psychoanalysis—that their impact on literature and culture became strongly felt.27 In certain cases, Freud’s writings were advertised by Japanese publishers as a form of popular fiction, and their effect can be seen in literary writings during this time, especially in popular literary forms such as detective fiction (Edogawa Rampo published articles, for example, in a journal of psychoanalysis).28 Psychoanalysis, together with the stream-of-consciousness experiments of Proust and James Joyce, also created the foundation for Yokomitsu’s “Machine” (Kikai, ) and Kawabata’s short story “Crystal Fantasy” (Suisho genso, ). Both these stories explore a realm of the psyche existing beyond conscious control but erupting from time to time into the space of consciousness and everyday life. Of the two works, Yokomitsu’s story, which Ito Sei claimed was influenced by the translations of Ulysses (for which Ito was one of the translators) and Swann’s Way that appeared contemporaneously, reflects a more politicized context.29 “Machine” is set in a name-plate factory in Tokyo, where the narrator works with chemical processes that gradually corrode his consciousness. He is enmeshed in various rivalries and conflicts with the other workers in the factory, conflicts revolving around the possession of secret chemical formulas kept hidden in a “dark room” at the factory’s center.These conflicts result in ever escalating violence, and finally, at the end of the story, one of the workers is found dead, the result of either an accident or murder. The narrator himself is unsure of whether he is guilty of the crime and claims at the end: “I no longer understand myself. I only feel the sharp menace of an approaching machine, aimed at me. Someone must judge me. How can I know what I have done?”30 By this point, the narrator feels that his own actions, even his own memory and will, are alien, existing in a realm beyond his conscious control.Although the machine of the title in this sense signifies the unconscious, more specifically it indicates a violence found in social and economic institutions (represented in the story by the factory) that has simultaneously been internalized into the narra-

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tor’s psyche. In this context, the machine of the story’s title represents a radical otherness that is all the more uncanny because it exists internally. Thus, even five years earlier than “Theory of the Pure Novel,” “Machine” had already indicated Yokomitsu’s turn toward the question of “self-consciousness.”The themes of this story are similar to those explored in Shanghai (which he was still serializing at the time of the story’s publication), here framed in terms of a technological corrosion of subjectivity. Shanghai’s expansive landscape of modernity, with all its political and ideological conflicts, has imploded, internalized into the narrator’s mind. In a discussion Yokomitsu held with university students in , he noted the distinction between these two works, that in writing Shanghai he had “tried as much as possible to write about matter [busshitsu] rather than spirit or consciousness. I wrote about matter to the furthest extent possible, and then, when I had had enough, I wrote ‘Machine.’”31 It is also possible to see in the short story the impact of theories of “mechanized civilization” (kikai bunmei), which posited the assimilation of human agency into vast, unrepresentable social and economic mechanisms.32 For Yokomitsu, the most immediately noticeable change was in style. The visual effect of the work on the reader is striking, as Kawabata has remarked.33 There are almost no paragraph breaks in the text, and the dialogue is not set off from the main text; thus the pages are filled from top to bottom with no relief. In addition, Yokomitsu had stopped using fragmented, short sentences and the montage technique characteristic of the New Sensationists in favor of long internal monologues.“Machine” is an example of the kind of first-person, subjective narrative technique that Yokomitsu had previously rejected in his writing. In effect, it was a shift from the representation of extreme exteriority (the concern with the dynamic movement of sensory phenomena) to that of radical interiority (the representation of psychological experience). Like Shanghai, “Machine” appropriates a topography that would not have been out of place in a work of proletarian literature. Shanghai’s expansive environment, however, has been internalized into the psychological mechanisms of “Machine.” Both works describe the configuration of certain relational structures (figured as the

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economy in Shanghai, the machine in the short story) in which Yokomitsu situates the theme of the corrosion of subjectivity. Kobayashi Hideo proclaimed that “Machine” was a narrative experiment unprecedented in world literature, and other writers also sensed the birth of a new direction in Japanese fiction. But in the postwar period, critic Odagiri Hideo lamented the direction that Yokomitsu’s writings took with the publication of this story, complaining that Shanghai had not been properly understood or appreciated by leftist writers. (Although Marxist critics Katsumoto Seiichiro and Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke did view the work positively, the majority of leftists, as Odagiri notes, either ignored it or were hostile to it.)34 According to Odagiri, if Yokomitsu’s endeavor in Shanghai been properly evaluated by Marxist critics and if Yokomitsu had not abandoned his effort, the history of Showa literature may have taken a different course.35 He regarded Yokomitsu’s turn toward “new psychologism” (shin-shinrishugi) in this work as a retreat from social complexity toward an investigation of individual psychology. In effect, Odagiri appeared to situate “Machine” as Yokomitsu’s ideological conversion, which might also be defined as a movement from exteriority to interiority. (As Nakamura Mitsuo pointed out, the later conversions of proletarian writers were also often mediated by a recuperation of confessional fiction.) It was after the publication of “Machine” that Yokomitsu wrote about his “subjugation to the national language.” It might be more accurate to say, however, that the formal and thematic shifts of “Machine” prepared the way for what only later took on an explicitly ideological cast. Yokomitsu thereafter was concerned mainly with the “excess of self-consciousness,” which he had also described as “the spirit of anxiety.” Only when a critique of reason was expressed specifically as a critique of European reason did Japanese modernism shift to the development of a nationalist aesthetic. In discussing the analysis of non-Western modernism by Neil Larsen, Leslie Pincus has identified the association of a critique of reason with a critique of the West: “On the modernist periphery—or semiperiphery, as the case may be in Japan—the resources of modernism, particularly its penchant for antirationalism, are mobilized in a ‘countermediation’ against the West, from which they were culled.”36 In his “Theory of the Pure

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Novel”Yokomitsu had already contrasted European “reason” with an Asian affect or sentiment. In other writings of the s, the related concept of “intellect” (chisei) came to be a general signifier for modernization, and its rejection framed the attempt to “overcome modernity.” This underlying intent can also be seen in Yasuda Yojuro’s essay “On the End of the Logic of Civilization and Enlightenment” (Bunmei kaika no ronri no shuen ni tsuite, ), in which he cites Marxism as the last stage of the logic of enlightenment and the final form of “intellect” in Japan. Against this European intellect, embodied in what he called the “prose spirit” of both Naturalist and proletarian literature, Yasuda called for the reenactment, or revival, of the “poetic spirit” that was the basis for classical Japanese literature.This poetic spirit, elsewhere articulated as the sentiment of awaré, or pathos, also serves as a “bridge” linking the spirit of the classics and contemporary Japan, the integration of the past and present.37 As Doak explains, poetry for Yasuda served as mediation between modern literature and the classical tradition: “The poetic voice intimated a continuity with the ancient past that, when resurrected in the present, promised to reintegrate the fragmentation of modern life into a new, cultural whole.”38 Yokomitsu’s writings during this period can be considered in the context of this discourse of Japanese Romanticism in the s and s. Melancholy Journey itself was received ambivalently by Romantic critics. It was largely dismissed by Hagiwara, for example, although it was evaluated more positively by others such as Kamei Katsuichiro.Yokomitsu’s work, of course, lies squarely in the tradition of the modern novel and the “prose spirit” rejected by Yasuda. What is ironic about Melancholy Journey is that—even more so than any of his earlier writings, which represented a formal revolt against the novel—it is clearly, and conventionally, “modern.” Indeed, this may be the reason that it can be seen in the context of Japanese Romanticism, which attempted to construct an entire poetic and aesthetic discourse around a structurally similar type of “irony.” In Japan, the dominant forms of nationalist discourse in the s and s were organized around a conception of transcendence of the modern, as exemplified by the “Overcoming Modernity” conference. Like Hagiwara’s essay,Yokomitsu’s work expresses

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a transcendence of modernity that nevertheless takes place within the conceptual frame of the modern.The work shows an awareness that there is no space outside modernity that could contain a cultural identity. This is the source of crisis in Melancholy Journey, which attempts, despite this consciousness, to delineate a space of authentic national culture. In this sense, Yokomitsu’s novel marks the destination of modernist practice during this time as an attempt to overcome the crisis of subjectivity posited in earlier writings through the construction of a phantasmatic cultural home.

The Background of Melancholy Journey Yokomitsu left for Europe in February . His trip was sponsored by the Tokyo Nichinichi and Osaka Mainichi newspapers, which published advertisements promising the appearance of Yokomitsu’s observations of Europe in the pages of the newspaper.39 By this point, of course, it was not unusual for a journal or newspaper to sponsor a trip to Europe by a prominent Japanese writer.Yokomitsu helped promote the media event by participating in a number of discussions before he left, but he apparently disclosed privately that he had no desire to make the trip. Publicly, he expressed hope that the “age of New Sensationism” would return to him once more.40 His ship, the Hakone-maru, left from the port of Kobe and stopped in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The ship then visited Colombo and Egypt before crossing the Mediterranean Sea for Marseilles. For Yokomitsu, this journey was a temporal as well as a geographical passage: “When we pass through the Indian Ocean, we will be moving gradually from unexplored lands to the height of European culture. In other words, it is like passing through their long history and arriving at modernity.”41 Soon after Yokomitsu left Japan, the nation was rocked by the socalled February  incident, an attempted coup d’état led by a group of young, fanatical military officers that marked an important turning point in the consolidation of Japanese fascism. In European Travelogue (Oshu kiko, ‒),Yokomitsu wrote that as the ship passed through the Taiwan Straits on February , the passengers were given the news of the assassinations and attempted

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coup. He described a group of young passengers playing golf on the deck: “The entire group exclaimed in disbelief and were grimly silent for about two minutes.Then one of them said,‘OK, let’s play the next round.’ Instantly, their faces lit up with smiles and everything was forgotten as they picked up their clubs once more and resumed hitting golf balls. As I watched from the side, I thought, is that it?” (TYRZ :). Yokomitsu’s initial experience in Europe was evidently not a happy one. In the second installment of his travelogue (and the first since arriving in France), he wrote:“So this is Europe. It is more of a hell than I ever imagined” (TYRZ :).The dispatch, which was published in the journal Bungei shunju, was entitled “The Paris of Disappointment” (Shitsubo no Pari), a title that elicited a strong reaction from the Japanese community in Paris.Although the essay was given this title by the editors of the newspaper, rather than by Yokomitsu himself, it captured the overall mood of the piece.42 Yokomitsu spoke almost no French, and he seemed to feel very much an outsider in Paris, describing to his wife the atmosphere of never-ending melancholy that seemed to envelop the city.43 But after he met the young artist Okamoto Taro (–), who was residing in Paris at the time,Yokomitsu’s experience began to take a turn for the better. The son of writer Okamoto Kanoko (–) and manga artist Okamoto Ippei (–), Okamoto Taro spoke French fluently, and he introduced Yokomitsu to such prominent figures of the European avant-garde as Tristan Tzara, the self-proclaimed founder of Dada, and the Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Yokomitsu also delivered an address on Japanese literature at a forum sponsored by L’Association Bolza (whose members included Albert Einstein and Paul Valéry) in July.44 While in Paris,Yokomitsu frequented museums and art galleries and was particularly drawn to an exhibition of Matisse’s work, which he visited for several days in succession:“I felt keenly the similarity between literature and painting. In Japan there is still no authenticity in either” (:). Yokomitsu’s growing acclimation to his surroundings is reflected in his travelogue, and it also colors the depictions of Europe in Melancholy Journey. He even admitted in his travelogue that after returning to Paris from a trip to London,“I felt for the first time as

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though I had returned home” (TYRZ :). Some of the most memorable scenes in the novel are detailed depictions of different locations in Paris—for example, a Japanese photographer leading other characters through the mysterious inner chambers of Notre Dame, eerie boat rides at night in the Bois du Bologne, and an extended sequence on a night spent at the opera.These exotic and intoxicating images of a foreign landscape were undoubtedly part of the novel’s appeal to Japanese readers.Yokomitsu’s experience abroad also was the occasion for a significant shift in his thinking about modern culture.This transformation is expressed in European Travelogue, in which Yokomitsu reflects on differences between Asian and Western civilization. In one section, he writes about being in Berlin in July to attend the opening of the Olympic Games;Tokyo has just been announced as the site of the next Olympics. But the Japanese who are there appear crestfallen—everyone is wondering, he says, how Japan will be able to create a culture comparable to what was on display in Berlin. Then immediately afterward,Yokomitsu criticizes the negative attitude of Japanese living abroad: “Asians who have left their home countries typically lose their ability to critique European culture. Is it true that there is nothing for us to be proud of? Is it true that the only possibility for our existence is to despise the cultures of our own nations? I don’t think that the three thousand-year history of Asia is without value” (:). In moments like these, European Travelogue is a record of the growing sense of cultural and racial difference between Asia and Europe.Yokomitsu wrote, for example:“There are times when the beauty of the faint yellow skin-color, when mixed in among whiteness, appears to me like an elegant silver” (TYRZ :). It was this sensation of being an outsider to a culture to which he had harbored an unconscious sense of belonging that evoked, in turn, an “awakening” of national identity. On the train ride back through the desolate landscape of Siberia,Yokomitsu wrote that “only the fact that I am Japanese—only this do I not doubt” (:). This consciousness of racial and cultural difference—a rather common feature of writers’ experience in the West, especially in the face of blatant expressions of racism—is further developed in Melancholy Journey. Yokomitsu began serializing the novel in  and worked on it for roughly a decade until a “completed” edition

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was published in , the year before his death.The first sixty-five installments were published in the evening editions of the Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun and Osaka Mainichi shinbun from April  through August , .Yokomitsu later wrote that he had decided to suspend serialization of the novel following the outbreak of war in China in July of that year.45 He resumed publication of the work in the May  issue of Bungei shunju, and over the following six years, installments were published in that journal as well as in Bungakukai. During this time, Kaizosha published the novel as a twovolume set in , adding a third volume in . In , Yokomitsu published a continuation as a separate short story. This became the last installment of the work, which was left unfinished. Kaizosha published the entire novel as a five-volume set in . In this way, Melancholy Journey, like Shanghai, is a fluid text published during a time of tremendous historical changes and remains essentially (and perhaps unavoidably) unfinished.46

A Melancholic Nationalism Melancholy Journey parallels the structure of Shanghai in various ways. Both works were based on Yokomitsu’s own experience of traveling abroad, and both feature as protagonists Japanese men struggling with questions of their own cultural identity. In particular, as Ban Etsu has pointed out, the scene in Melancholy Journey describing the June  general strike that shut down the city of Paris, as well as the depictions of violent confrontations between leftist and rightist demonstrators, echo certain prominent scenes of the earlier work.47 More important, the intersection between the two novels is a representation of the general condition of displacement and homelessness. In Shanghai, it is the basis for the main character’s fragmented consciousness and his alienation from any possibility of national identification, which finds its most extreme expression in the scene of Sanki’s body being emptied out at the end of the novel.This thematic is extended in Melancholy Journey. With the change in emphasis from “matter” (busshitsu) to “spirit” (seishin), however, there is also an attendant shift from the representation of corporeal sensations to sentiment in Yokomitsu’s writings.

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Melancholy Journey thus describes a retreat into the disembodied realm of spirit, which is characterized by an almost exclusive emphasis on affect.The visceral sensation of displacement experienced by Shanghai’s Sanki is in this sense translated into the sentiment of melancholy expressed in the title of the work. In the novel, the term “melancholy” indicates an overpowering sense of sadness, loss, and separation that afflicts almost all the characters. One critic described it as a kind of pathology, and in fact, the novel is filled with references to illness and psychological disorders.48 This indication of a hidden trauma forms both the work’s affective undercurrent and its ideological core. For Yokomitsu, this sentiment is the defining characteristic of an entire generation of intellectuals. For example: “Without even being aware of it, the younger generation had changed even their souls into the Western style; it was an age in which the melancholy of the wandering traveler, without any soil upon which to rest, was only increasing” (TYRZ :). The sentiment is linked in the novel to states of mourning, principally the protagonist Yashiro’s grief over the death of his father. More generally, it also indicates a complex psychological attitude toward modern Japanese culture.The yearning for cultural wholeness and authenticity is tempered by an awareness of the impossibility of returning to any purified “native” culture unsullied by foreign intervention.At the same time, the melancholy that haunts the novel’s characters also seems to point to the presence of an ineradicable residue of the West, or the “European spirit,” no matter how much it is disavowed. The first half of Melancholy Journey is set in Paris and consists of a running dialogue between the two male protagonists,Yashiro and Kuji. Kuji is depicted as an ardent admirer of European civilization who propounds the virtues of universalism, rationalism, and science against the “particularity of ethnicity.” At one point he exclaims,“Why wasn’t I born in Paris?” (TYRZ :). In this way, Kuji symbolizes modern Japanese intellectuals’ infatuation with European culture. In contrast, Yashiro arrives in Europe with a markedly hostile attitude, like “a soldier going to the battlefield” (:).While he is at times overwhelmed by the beauty of the city, he also becomes increasingly conscious of a rift between Japan and the West, what he later terms the difference between “Western sci-

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ence” and “Eastern morality.” He is resentful of the European and American colonization of Asia and even more of Japanese intellectuals who, he thinks, slavishly worship the West. The events of the first section of the novel are narrated from Yashiro’s perspective; then, after a few chapters, the perspective shifts to that of Kuji. This narrative structure reflects the dialogic design that Yokomitsu originally intended for the novel. The novel’s third major character is Chizuko, a Japanese woman who traveled with Kuji and Yashiro to Europe. She becomes an object of desire for both men, and their running debate over the merits of the West versus Japan is linked to their relationships with Chizuko. For her part, Chizuko comes to signify the feminized body of the motherland.The feelings that Kuji and Yashiro harbor toward her are thus explicitly presented as a reflection of their feelings toward Japanese culture. During the long voyage, for example, Kuji draws close to Chizuko, but on their arrival in Europe he quickly rejects her in favor of a French woman. Later, however, he realizes that he loved Chizuko all along. Meanwhile,Yashiro feels increasingly drawn to Chizuko, a desire represented as an extension of his homesickness. Upon arriving in the port of Marseilles, Yashiro and Chizuko find themselves left alone on the ship; in an apparently hysterical symptom of his aversion to Europe,Yashiro’s leg has gone numb and he is unable to join the others on land. Even though this is the beginning of his attraction to Chizuko,Yashiro is aware that he is transferring his love for Japan to her: “It is not as though I love Chizuko at all. It is only that I miss Japan so much” (TYRZ :). This seemingly accidental relationship between Chizuko and Yashiro occupies the bulk of the narrative. Later, Chizuko is revealed to be a Catholic, a fact that poses certain problems for Yashiro, with his increasing obsession with traditional Japanese culture and especially with native religious practices. Each time, for instance, that he sees Chizuko kneel down in prayer, Yashiro has as a defensive response a mental image of the torii gate at the Ise Shrine. We also find out that one of Yashiro’s ancestors, a daimyo in Kyushu, had been defeated by another lord who converted to Catholicism and used cannons and guns imported from Europe to his advantage. After his return to Japan,Yashiro visits the ruins of

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this ancestor’s castle.Yokomitsu here makes an explicit connection between Western thought and the threat of military force. The threat, however, comes not from a foreign force but from the inside, through the internalization of foreign technology into Japan. In this context, Chizuko, as a Catholic, is an emblem of the encounter between Japan and Europe, but even more specifically, she represents Japanese modernity, for which the foreign other has already been internalized. Yashiro’s conflicted feelings toward Chizuko reflect his own uneasy relationship with modern Japan. He is upset over Chizuko’s Catholicism, seeing it as a marker of European civilization, yet he is also inexplicably drawn to her: “He [Yashiro] wondered what this thing was that rendered powerless his will and intelligence, that merely grew stronger, despite his countless attempts to flee from Chizuko and his resolution to leave her” (TYRZ :). The first half of the work provides a rather complex and conflicted representation of European culture.The critical evaluation of Yokomitsu’s novel typically revolves around the question of whether Yashiro, with his obsessive expressions of nationalist sentiment, represents the author’s own views or whether Yashiro and Kuji together are externalizations of a conflict within Yokomitsu himself. In the first half of the novel, at least, it appears that Yokomitsu is working through a conflicted, ambivalent relationship to European civilization. This can be seen even in the case of Yashiro, who, despite his anti-European sentiments, increasingly falls under the spell of the city of Paris and revels in the natural beauty of other regions in Europe that he visits. As the work developed, however, Yokomitsu almost entirely abandoned the novel’s dialogic structure. Kuji thus largely disappears from the narrative, only to make a brief reappearance in Tokyo near the end of the work. This shift in narrative structure occurs around the time of Yashiro’s return to Japan, a decisive turning point in the novel.Yokomitsu may have discarded this structure as he withdrew into a nationalist ideology in the late s and early s. Another reason that Kuji drops out of the picture is that there was no need to externalize the conflict, since it exists entirely inside Yashiro himself. For the same reason, Chizuko remains a highly opaque character throughout the novel, the nar-

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rative never providing direct access to her feelings or thoughts. She has no subjectivity of her own but is merely one of the self-images of Yashiro that are externalized in other characters. From Yashiro’s perspective, Kuji and Chizuko are almost interchangeable figures; for example, when Kuji reappears in Japan near the very end of the novel,Yashiro feels that he and Kuji are “more husband and wife” (TYRZ :) than he and Chizuko are. Yashiro’s relationships with the other characters, as well as his experience of foreign cultures, are ultimately reduced to a narcissistic circuit of desire. Both Kuji and Chizuko are projections of Yashiro’s internal struggle, which is precisely the conflict of the internalized other. Thus Yashiro did not go to Paris in order to study Europe but, instead, to study himself, as he admits to Chizuko on the ship when he says:“It seems that I didn’t come in order to see a foreign life or a foreign landscape but, rather, to see myself. Of course I will see the scenery and visit museums too, but what interests me most of all is seeing the changes take place in myself ” (TYRZ :). For Yashiro, then, from the outset the journey has a certain narcissistic quality.The novel poses the question of where, for the Japanese intellectual, “the West” is located. It is not merely an external, material place, as Yashiro discovers through his journey to Europe. It is also located in consciousness—as image and concept—and Yashiro’s struggle is thus an internal struggle. The West exists as a phantasm and a specter for Yashiro, just as it did for generations of Japanese writers, and the crisis presented in Yokomitsu’s novel results in part from the realization of the difference between the internal and external manifestations of the West.

Separation from the European Spirit Yashiro’s separation from the European spirit begins early in the novel, when the Japanese passengers enter a cathedral soon after the ship docks at Marseilles.There,Yashiro is startled by the sudden appearance of what he takes to be a blood-stained corpse but which he soon realizes to be a lifelike sculpture of Christ. For Yashiro, its resemblance to an actual body is emblematic of a “barbaric” aesthetic that insists on shocking people with a literal

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faithfulness to reality. In this episode, the figure of Christ functions as the literal embodiment of European culture, which Yashiro perceives as a corpse. More generally, it represents his experience of arriving in Europe, his encounter with the material form of something that had existed only as phantasm and an immaterial ideal. The cathedral sculpture creates a sensation of shock for Yashiro. Symbolically, it functions as the material remains of a former ideal, which now call forth only sensations of revulsion and horror. Yashiro’s encounter with the sculpture and the more general experience that it symbolizes indicate the beginning of his separation from the European spirit, which is represented in the work as a type of mourning over a lost ideal, a process beginning with the identification of its lifeless remains.49 The episode is thus symptomatic of Yashiro’s rejection of the European spirit.This act of separation remains blocked and incomplete throughout the work, however.Yashiro discovers that his rejection of the West can never be absolute, for there always will be a residue, a remainder that cannot be eradicated.The European spirit is no longer an ideal, and yet it remains inside him, as a type of phantasm:“Everyday, he [Yashiro] was engaged in a struggle, unknown to anyone else, to come up with ways to escape from the power of the phantasm [gen’ei] of the West that arose without fail in his mind” (TYRZ :).Yashiro’s encounter with Europe is not only a confrontation with the other but also a revelation of the other existing within him.This already suggests the origins of the trauma, of Yashiro’s melancholy, which is based on the difficulty of overcoming something that is part of himself. Yashiro finds it impossible to recover any authentic self existing before the intervention of the foreign other, because this intervention is in fact constitutive of the self.The European spirit here signifies an alterity that has always been inside, a structure that Yokomitsu had already articulated in his earlier short story through the trope of the machine. For this reason, there is a noticeable disjunction between Yashiro’s protestations of love for his country—his seemingly unshakable belief in his identity as a Japanese—and the melancholy that torments him throughout the novel. By the time he returns to Japan at the midpoint of the narrative,Yashiro claims to have rid himself of any emotional attachment to European culture, saying

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that the one thing in which he could have faith was his identity as a Japanese. He refers to a period of illness that those returning to Japan inevitably seem to suffer, describing it as a natural misogi, the Shinto ritual of purification. In this context, it signifies an eradication of the diseased traces of the other. Hence he states upon his return:“I thought of my foreign trip as a method of detecting the impurities and agents of disease within me—in other words, it was like examining myself from end to end with X rays” (TYRZ :). Despite this determination and desire for purification,Yashiro’s crisis of identity continues even after his return to Japan, and the “impurities and agents of disease” are never entirely expurgated from his psyche or body. In some ways, it is after his return that Yashiro’s genuine crisis begins.Thus Yokomitsu writes:“He felt the wandering of his own body, to which the smell of foreign countries still lingered, and he lamented the fact that the melancholy of travel would only deepen within him from now on” (TYRZ :).At another point,Yashiro realizes that it is only after coming back to Japan that his true (that is, psychological and ideological) journey begins. The sentiment of “melancholy” in Yokomitsu’s novel is linked not only to feelings of loss and yearning but, as the preceding quotation suggests, also to conceptions of impurity and disease, as well as the lingering traces of foreignness in the body.This depiction of melancholy recalls psychoanalytic accounts of incomplete or impossible mourning, which Freud analyzed under the category of “melancholia.” In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud explained that in such cases of mourning,“there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love.”50 For Freud, melancholia differs from other examples of mourning in that the subject’s emotional investment has not been successfully and gradually withdrawn from the lost object but instead transferred to the ego itself. In effect, melancholia indicates “an identification of the ego with the abandoned object.”51 In melancholia, the lost other—its image—is “incorporated,” symbolically ingested. The melancholic carries inside himself or herself the lost other, which is secretly preserved, “encrypted.” As Jacques Derrida has characterized it,“The dead person continues to inhabit me, but as a stranger.”52

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This analogy to mourning suggests that Yashiro’s melancholy is based on the persistence of an internalized otherness—a sensation of the self itself being strange or foreign—an awareness that makes its way, in fragmentary moments of excess affect, into consciousness. In Yokomitsu’s novel, this foreignness of the self becomes a kind of psychological and physical crisis after Yashiro’s journey to Europe. It is an experience that confirms the materiality of the West as something entirely different from the “European spirit,” which exists as an internal, phantasmal product of Japanese consciousness.Thus while the material embodiments of the European spirit—represented, for example, by the sculpture of Christ or the detailed depictions of the city of Paris—are rejected, its specter or image remains inside Yashiro’s body as an “impurity,” as a “stranger.” Yokomitsu’s trope of travel melancholy extends and complicates the sense of cultural homelessness found in Kobayashi’s “Literature of the Lost Home,” which articulated contemporary writers’ consciousness of displacement, the absence of a stable ground for cultural identity. Yokomitsu’s later work is distinguished from Kobayashi’s essay, however, in the attempt to overcome this homelessness.As Kamei Katsuichiro decided, Melancholy Journey is a work expressing “the realization of the sadness of a double alterity [niju no ihojinsei] and the path of escape from it.”53 This path of escape takes the form of a search for a homeland that is acknowledged to be lost and that thus can exist only as an imaginary construct; it cannot be discovered in the external world. But as Yokomitsu writes in the novel: “Even when things of the past are evoked in thought, they become real” (TYRZ :).This is the ultimate destination of the work of mourning described in the novel.

The Impossible Return Soon after Yashiro returns to Japan, his father dies, in Yashiro’s own home, which is thereafter stained with this traumatic memory. Yokomitsu describes Yashiro’s father as a representative figure of the Meiji period, someone who received instruction from Fukuzawa Yukichi. He is clearly a reflection of Yokomitsu’s own father, who, like Yashiro’s, was an engineer who helped build rail-

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way tunnels, a symbol of the nation’s modernization.54 Like Chizuko and Kuji,Yashiro’s father is part of a constellation of characters embodying Japan’s internalization of the West. One night, Yashiro finds his father unconscious, lying in his own bodily discharge.The shocking image of his father’s body is a counterpart to Yashiro’s earlier, strangely vivid dream of Chizuko, in which she lies beside him and “pure water welled up from her mouth engorged with blood.”This bodily expulsion in the dream signifies for Yashiro Chizuko’s expulsion of the internalized other, a return to the state in which she was authentically Japanese before being “violated” by Catholicism (TYRZ :, ). After his father’s death,Yashiro’s feelings of melancholy explicitly assume the character of mourning. He feels as if “a large cavity had been born inside his body, which was being filled with something cold, something he had never seen before” (TYRZ :). The process of mourning his father—especially the act of bringing his ashes to rest in his ancestral home—is superimposed on Yashiro’s own search for a lost cultural tradition.The two forms of mourning become inseparable. As Yashiro states, “Recently, whenever I think about anything of importance, I can’t help but think of it in conjunction with my father’s death” (:). The meanings encompassed by Yashiro’s father as a symbol also reveal the complexity of the double loss suffered by his son: the father represents the tradition of an ancient culture, the embodiment of a bloodline that leads back to Fujiwara no Mototsune and includes feudal lords of the sixteenth century. At the same time, his father, who actually participated in the project of nation building, is also a symbol of the period of “civilization and enlightenment” of the Meiji period, when the West provided an idealized image of the other. In effect, both historical moments are lost to Yashiro, and both are being mourned—the “double alterity” about which Kamei wrote.55 After his father’s death,Yashiro travels to his ancestral home in Kyushu, a journey that functions as a symbolic repetition of his voyage to Europe (each is described as a “journey to the west”). The intent here, of course, is not a “separation” but a return to his own heritage and the assumption of his father’s legacy. In the end, though, Yashiro finds that this return is impossible. In the final

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instance, he senses that he still is alienated from the ancient landscape, with which no reconciliation is possible:. “Then, when he [Yashiro] was alone and looked up at the mountains, he realized for the first time that even here he remained a traveler to the end” (TYRZ :).“Among those who took even one step away from their homes, there was likely none whose spirit did not wander between the place where they lived and the home they imagined in their hearts” (:). In this scene Yashiro finds the path of return to an ancient culture blocked to him in the natural landscape. His “return to Japan” cannot take place: it can be achieved only by constructing an artificial homeland, something not found but made. This consciousness can be compared with the nationalist aesthetic of the Japanese Romantics, which, as Doak found, is based on an awareness that access to an authentic, premodern culture has already been cut off: “The Japanese romantics made clear . . . the artificial nature of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘culture’ in modern Japan and, hence, the need to consciously produce within the context of the modern world what will appear as native, traditional, and pure.”56 In this context,“irony,” one of the key concepts of Yasuda Yojuro’s writings, reflects a consciousness that the “home,” or kokyo, does not exist in the natural world.Yasuda’s expression of a “nostalgia for a home that is unknown to me” (shirazaru kokyo e no nosutarujii) describes the functioning of this nationalist discourse. It is a selfconscious discourse that aims to construct an artificial genealogy of native culture, to substitute in the realm of aesthetics for something that is lost in the world. Yokomitsu’s novel describes the difficulty of returning to a cultural homeland. In the end, purifying the self of traces of the West is impossible because the two do not exist independently. Instead, a return is possible only by fabricating another, displaced space that will be ideologically encoded as a cultural home.Two possibilities are presented in the novel as the basis for constructing this culture. The first is the principle of what Yokomitsu refers to as ancient Shinto (ko-Shinto).Yashiro claims that this faith is characterized by the “innate desire of the Japanese to deny all oppositions [tairitsu]” (TYRZ :). Unlike Christianity and Buddhism, Yashiro claims, Shinto does not exclude other belief systems; rather, it is able to assimilate anything from the outside. Ancient

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Shinto provides for Yokomitsu a mystical realm in which all the earlier conflicts that had haunted him are resolved because the very principle of conflict is not recognized. This conception of ancient religious practice can, in this sense, be situated in the context of what Harry Harootunian identified as a general social discourse during this period that cut across different intellectual fields and political positions, an attempt to overcome the divisions and fragmentations of social life and the contradictions and conflicts generated by industrial capitalism and modernization. Harootunian maintains that this discourse was “aimed at representing the essence of society, by appealing to a timeless culture or figure of community, to perform a virtual poeticizing of everydayness in order to negate the divisions, fragmentation and conflict that instituted society in Japan.”57

The Reterritorialization of Japanese Modernity There is one moment in Melancholy Journey in which the artificially constructed homeland assumes a material form, one not confined to the realm of aesthetics or religious practice. It is in the middle of the narrative, during Yashiro’s return to Japan. Like Yokomitsu himself,Yashiro returns to Japan by the Siberian railway. For him, therefore, the border of Japan is displaced as the border of Manchuria (Manchukuo): he left from Yokohama but “returns” to the Japanese-controlled territory. Between his departure and return, the borders of “Japan” have thus shifted a great deal. By this time, the colonized space has acquired all the characteristics that Yashiro has attributed to Japan in his mind. As the train approaches the Manchurian border,“Yashiro’s heart began to beat quickly when he thought he would soon be breathing Japanese air” (TYRZ :).58 It is just after daybreak when Yashiro gets off the train in the border town of Manzhouli, and he feels a “pleasure as if he were seeing the light of day for the first time”; it is, he whispers repeatedly, “a truly beautiful place” (:). When the police detective who has met him at the station tells him that many people commit suicide in the border town,Yashiro thinks that it is in fact “beautiful enough to make you want to die” (:). In this

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way, Manchuria is encoded with the affective and aesthetic values associated with the concept of home, and the aestheticization of death in this passage underscores the violence of this projection of affect. In the second half of the novel, the concept of Asia or, more specifically, “the new Asia,” functions in the text as a displaced homeland. As Kamiya Tadataka observed,Yokomitsu deployed the concept of the “Eastern spirit” (Toyo seishin) as a means of overcoming the European spirit.59 This concept of Asia as a unified field of culture or spirit reflects, of course, the various political discourses mobilized to justify Japan’s military expansion throughout Asia and Southeast Asia, including the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” or “East Asian Cooperative Community,” which was advocated by intellectuals such as Kuki Shuzo and Royama Masamichi. We could also point to the appropriation of the thought of Okakura Kakuzo by Kamei Katsuichiro and other figures of the Japanese Romantic movement. In fact, in a speech by the character Tono near the very end of the work,Yokomitsu explicitly cites Okakura’s writings on a unified Asian civilization. Tono, a novelist whom critics have sometimes read as a representation of Yokomitsu, delivers an address entitled “The New Asia.”60 The theme of the speech is the melancholy afflicting the entire nation, and at the very beginning he states: “In life there must always be a certain amount of melancholy; otherwise it would be impossible to lead the nation [kokumin] to health” (TYRZ :). The inference of Tono’s speech is that the construction of a “new Asia” is the path of recovery from the national melancholia.This ideological construction is offered as a means of overcoming the loss of the West as an ideal: “Yashiro thought that the purpose of all their struggle was to reconstruct the virtues of Asia to take the place of the West” (TYRZ :). The mobilization of this concept in fact indicates an ambivalence toward the West and suggests its lingering, spectral presence in Yashiro’s psyche, despite all his attempts to disavow it. In Yokomitsu’s work, the “Eastern spirit” is both different from and an imitation of the European spirit. Thus what is striking about Yashiro’s assertion of the value of the Eastern spirit is not that he tries to establish its uniqueness or difference but that he tries to

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identify it with the European spirit.Yokomitsu’s “new Asia” is in effect a symbolic reproduction of the West. For this reason, Yashiro’s defense of Eastern culture is consistently based on the fact that it already contains—before the fact—all the advances of Western civilization.61 Or as Tono remarks to Yashiro after returning from Europe: “Don’t you think that China is just like Paris? Paris—that’s China” (TYRZ :).The mobilization of the Eastern spirit is not only a triumph over but also a symptom for what Tono describes as a national melancholia. It suggests the hidden yet ineradicable residue of the European spirit that had already been internalized long before.Yokomitsu’s focus on melancholy, therefore, points to one of the underlying problems in the discourse of the transcendence of modernity: the impossible imperative of overcoming something that is part of oneself, something that is in effect the very basis for self. In analyzing the nationalist theories of the Kyoto school philosophers during this time, Naoki Sakai has argued that the assertion of Japanese particularism necessarily and simultaneously affirmed “the putative ubiquity of the idealized West,” that intellectuals’ critique of the West during this period was actually a disguised expression of “the will to pursue the path of modernization.”62 This problem was also brought up by some participants at the “Overcoming Modernity” conference.Although a number of participants at the symposium asserted the identity between “modernity” and the West, philosopher Shimamura Torataro contended that by now it was impossible to maintain that modernity was only something foreign: “Modernity is ourselves, and the overcoming of modernity is the overcoming of ourselves.”63 Nakamura Mitsuo also noted that the call to transcend the modern had first arisen among European intellectuals and that therefore the rejection of the West in Japan was, paradoxically, expressed through a Western concept. This double bind frames an important segment of the discourse of cultural essentialism of this period, from Hagiwara’s call to construct a “new Japan” by way of Western reason to Yokomitsu’s “Eastern spirit” which, although ostensibly a rejection of the West, is also in some sense its imitation, both an overcoming and a “becoming.”Thus the violent construction of “a new Asia,” enacted through the literal incorporation of foreign territory into the national body, takes place

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through the assumption of the very imperialism and technology being rejected in the critique of modernity. In this way,Yokomitsu’s “return” from his first to his last novel moves along a complex trajectory. Ironically it does not pass from the West to Japan but from Shanghai to the “new Asia.” For Yokomitsu in the late s and early s, Shanghai served as the setting for an unresolvable conflict—the undecidability of Japan’s position between Asia and the West—that is violently overcome in the process of his return. If the earlier modernist writings had reflected the collapse of a faith in literature and a fragmentation of a cosmopolitan subjectivity, we can see in the literary theory and practice of the late s both an attempted reconfiguration of the institution of literature and, in a certain sense, a reconstructed conception of modernity organized around the idea of East Asian civilization.64 Yokomitsu’s nationalism was not a simple repudiation of his earlier writings but an attempt to work through and overcome the conflicts that they presented. In effect, the site of conflict is transformed into the basis for restoring the self.The space that previously staged the anxiety concerning cultural identity is now recoded and reterritorialized as cultural home.The trajectory of a “return to Japan,” traveled by a number of modernist writers and exemplified by Yokomitsu, cannot be presented merely as a rejection of an earlier engagement with modern culture. Both Shanghai and Melancholy Journey have the same conceptual framework—a sense of loss and displacement engendered by modernization.The “return” does not take the form of a simple conversion from modernism to antimodernism but a rewriting of the same thematic concerns. It is, in effect, a reterritorialization of the same literary topography that had earlier framed a crisis in subjectivity and that now becomes the ground for the creation of a phantasmatic cultural home.

Notes

Introduction: Fissures of Japanese Modernity . Kobayashi Hideo,“Literature of the Lost Home,” in Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, –, ed. and trans. Paul Anderer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), –.As Anderer notes, the Japanese term kokyo, translated as “home,” signifies “the place of one’s birth” or “ancestral home” (). . Kobayashi,“Literature of the Lost Home,” . . Ibid. . Ernest Renan, for example, wrote of the “possession in common of a rich legacy of memories” as an integral aspect of the nation (“What Is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha [London: Routledge, ], ). .The phrase “crisis in representation” is used by Neil Larsen in Modernism and Hegemony (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). . Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), . . See, especially, Clement Greenberg,“Modernist Painting,” Arts Yearbook  (): –; and Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). . David Bathrick and Andreas Huyssen, for example, write: “One of the reasons that earlier accounts for modernism have recently fallen into disrepute is precisely that they have attempted to homogenize a widely heterogeneous field of discourses and practices, to press them into a relatively rigid framework of categories and concepts, the implied ideology of which has increasingly become evident” (“Modernism and the Experience of Modernity,” in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, ed. David Bathrick and Andreas Huyssen [New York: Columbia University Press, ], ). . The diversity of political affiliations in European modernism was

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Notes

analyzed by Raymond Williams, who noted that the generalized sense of rupture with the past, with established order, necessarily led to a diversity of different forms: “Although Modernism can be clearly identified as a distinctive movement, in its deliberate distance from and challenge to more traditional forms of art and thought, it is also strongly characterized by its internal diversity of methods and emphases: a restless and often directly competitive sequence of innovations and experiments, always more immediately recognized by what they are breaking from than by what, in any simple way, they are breaking towards” (The Politics of Modernism [London:Verso, ], ). The connection between modernism, particularly Italian Futurism, and fascism is the subject of Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ). . Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. On the concept of “late modernism,” see Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ). A comprehensive overview of the debates over the concept of modernism can be found in Eysteinsson, Concept of Modernism. . Larsen examines the question of what he terms “modernism on the periphery” and analyzes the dynamics of this type of shift. He uses the concept of “transculturation” as a framework to analyze the displacement of modernism from center to periphery (from Europe to the non-West). In Larsen’s usage (applied to the Latin American context), this concept “describes the mediatory agency whereby the Latin-American work of art actively transforms and regrounds the modernism of the metropolis by prompting a synthesis of the metropolis’s antirationalism with the prerationalization of rural peasant and indigenous tribal cultures” (Modernism and Hegemony, xxxvi). In Larsen’s analysis, the critique of the modern (a form of self-criticism) is thus transformed into the basis for an antirationalist nativism. See Leslie Pincus’s analysis of Larsen’s argument and her extension of it to Japanese modernism in Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ). . Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Bary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), . On this issue, see also Naoki Sakai,“Modernity and Its Critique,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –. .The papers presented at this symposium were not unified in their approach, however, and ranged from skepticism about the project of “overcoming the modern” to a radical rejection of all traces of Western influence. Among the thinkers expressing a measure of skepticism was Nakamura Mitsuo, who stated:“To borrow a Western concept in order to reject the West is itself no doubt a misguided contradiction. For it was

Notes

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none other than a group of Western thinkers who expressed the problem of contemporary culture through the phrase ‘overcoming modernity’” (“‘Kindai’ e no giwaku” [Skepticism of “Modernity”], in Kawakami Tetsutaro,Takeuchi Yoshimi, et al., Kindai no chokoku [Overcoming Modernity] [Tokyo: Fuzanbo, ], ). See also Shimomura Torataro’s essay “Kindai no chokoku no hoko” (The Direction of Overcoming Modernity), in which he asserts that since Japan had already achieved modernity, its overcoming was also necessarily an overcoming of Japan (–). . James Fujii, Complicit Fictions:The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press,),. . Suzuki Sadami, Nihon no “bungaku” gainen (The Concept of “Literature” in Japan) (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, ), –. . In “Literature of the Lost Home,” Kobayashi distinguishes between the West and Russia, whose literature played such an important role in the formation of modern Japanese literature. In discussing a work by Dostoevsky, Kobayashi contended:“It struck me too that Dostoevsky’s youth is no stranger—a youth whose mind is in turmoil because of Western ideas and who, in the midst of this intellectual agitation, has utterly lost his home. How very closely he resembles us. Indeed, I repeatedly ran into scenes that made me feel the author was describing me, that he had me firmly in his grasp” (). This passage suggests that Russian literature served as such an important standard for modern literature in Japan not because it represented the West but because it represented a culture on the margins of European civilization, a mirror for Japanese culture. . Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East (Tokyo:Tuttle, ), –. . Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), . . Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write that the critical project of the early Romantics involved “doing better or more than Antiquity: at once surpassing and fulfilling the unfinished or incomplete aspects of Antiquity, wherever it failed to effectuate the classical ideal it envisaged. This amounts, in the end, to performing the ‘synthesis’ of the Ancient and the Modern—or, if you like, to anticipate the Hegelian word (although not the concept), to sublate, aufheben, the opposition of the Ancient and the Modern” (Literary Absolute, ).The link between the novel and the formation of national consciousness has been the subject of a number of recent studies, most prominently Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (London:Verso, , ). See also Timothy Brennan,“The National Longing for Form,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, –. . Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, . . Ibid., . On the reorganization of various writing genres under the newly established rubric of literature in modern Japan, see Haruo Shi-



Notes

rane,“Sozo sareta koten: Kanon keisei no paradaimu to hihyoteki tenbo” (The Constructed Canon: The Paradigm of Canon Formation and Its Criticism), trans. Kinugasa Masaaki, in Sozo sareta koten, ed. Haruo Shirane and Suzuki Tomi (Tokyo: Shin’yosha, ), –. . Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, . See also Karatani Kojin, “Teikoku to nation” (Empire and Nation), in “Senzen” no shiko (“Prewar” Thinking) (Tokyo: Bungei shunju, ), . The concept of “landscape” as a marker of national community also was picked up by Homi K. Bhabha:“The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity emphasizes the quality of light, the question of social visibility, the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its forms of collective expression” (“DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, ). . Kunikida Doppo,“Musashino,” in River Mist and Other Stories, trans. David Chibbett (Tokyo: Kodansha International, ), –. . Ibid., , . .Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind:A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman (London: Tauris, ), –. See also Karatani Kojin, “Kotsu kukan ni tsuite no noto” (Notes on Communicative Space), in Yumoa to shite no yuibutsuron (Materialism as Humor) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ). . Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, . . Suzuki Sadami, Nihon no “bungaku” gainen, –. .Yamamoto Masahide, Genbun itchi no rekishi ronko (Essays on the History of genbun itchi) (Tokyo: Ofusha, ), . . Maeda Ai, “Nikai no geshuku” (The Second-Floor Boarding Room), in Toshi kukan no naka no bungaku (Literature in the Space of the City), vol.  of Maeda Ai chosaku shu (The Collected Writings of Maeda Ai) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ), –. . H. D. Harootunian, “Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taisho,” in Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho Democracy, ed. Bernard S. Silberman and H. D. Harootunian (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), . .This distinction was analyzed by Karatani Kojin in “The Discursive Space of Modern Japan,” trans. Seiji M. Lippit, boundary  , no.  (): –. . Mushanokoji Saneatsu, Mushanokoji Saneatsu zenshu (The Complete Works of Mushanokoji Saneatsu), vol.  (Tokyo: Shogakkan, ),  (hereafter cited as MSZ). Compare “Truth that is convenient only for one’s nation—how can such a thing exist? We want to live as humans belonging to humanity.We want to achieve such status as quickly as possible. National concerns can be left to the nationalists; we want to think of the concerns of humanity. It is about time for people who think of

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humanity as their nation to appear.They must appear” (“Jikoku ni nomi tsugo no ii shinri” [Truth Convenient Only for One’s Nation, ], in MSZ, vol.  [Tokyo: Shogakkan, ], ). .Aeba Takao, Nihon kindai no seikimatsu (The Fin-de-Siècle of Japanese Modernity) (Tokyo: Bungei shunju, ), . . Harootunian, “Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taisho,” . . Natsume Soseki,“Sengo bunkai no susei” (The Trends of the Postwar Literary World), in Kindai bungaku hyoron taikei (Survey of Modern Literary Criticism), vol. , ed. Inagaki Tatsuro and Sato Masaru (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, ), –. . Karaki Junzo, Shinpan gendaishi e no kokoromi (An Attempt at Modern History, Revised Edition) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ), . . Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan, . . Mushanokoji Saneatsu, “‘Jiko no tame’ oyobi sonota ni tsuite” (Concerning “For the Self ” and Other Matters, ), in MSZ :. . Mushanokoji Saneatsu, Omedetaki hito (A Blessed Man), in MSZ :. . Odagiri Susumu,“Kaisetsu” (Commentary), in MSZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Shogakkan, ), . .This is not to say that actual experience abroad guarantees a genuine or an authentic experience of exteriority.Yet the sense of physical, visceral disjunction between Japan and Europe is reflected clearly in the writings of Natsume Soseki, Mori Ogai, and Nagai Kafu. Among the exceptions in Taisho literature is Arishima Takeo (–), whose experience of life in the United States formed the backdrop for his novel Labyrinths (Meiro, ). For a discussion of the heterogeneous topographies of Arishima’s fiction, see Paul Anderer, Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, ). My use of the word “phantasmatic” is informed by Panivong Norindr’s discussion of the term as the projection of desire as well as the “psychic process, the structuring action, which shapes and orders the subject’s life as a whole” (Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ], ). . Elaine Gerbert, “Space and Aesthetic Imagination in Some Taisho Writings,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, –, ed. Sharon A. Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, ), . . Some exceptions to Sofue’s argument can also be found. For example, Mushanokoji once wrote about the killing of Taiwanese at the hands of the Japanese military, expressing sympathy for the Taiwanese (“Taiwan no dojin no koto” [On the Natives of Taiwan, ] and “Taiwan no dojin wa” [The Natives of Taiwan, ], in MKZ :–). In Aru otoko,

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Notes

Mushanokoji describes the circumstances surrounding the composition of these short pieces:“At the time, he read in the marginalia of the newspaper that eight hundred Taiwanese natives had been executed and was absolutely infuriated. He wrote something and tried to get it published in the Asahi shinbun through [his connection with] Natsume Soseki.Yet the newspaper would not publish it” (MSZ :). . Murai Osamu, Nanto ideorogii no hassei (The Production of SouthernIslands Ideology) (Tokyo: Ota shuppan, ). See also Fujii’s analysis of Soseki’s Kokoro, which Fujii argues is marked by the exclusion of the question of Japanese imperialism: “While Kokoro ‘recognizes’ the ‘loss of history’ as an important part of Japan’s experience of modernity, it fails to connect the modern to Japanese nationhood, particularly as the former becomes manifest as expansionism on the Asian continent” (Complicit Fictions, ). . Mushanokoji Saneatsu, MSZ :. . Frantz Fanon described the different stages through which colonized intellectuals pass when negotiating their relationship to the dominant Western culture:“In the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power. His writings correspond point by point with those of his opposite numbers in the mother country. His inspiration is European and we can easily link up these works with definite trends in the literature of the mother country. This is the period of unqualified assimilation. We find in this literature coming from the colonies the Parnassians, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists” (The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington [New York: Grove Press, ], ). Japan, of course, was not formally colonized by the nations of the West, although the weight of European culture played a similarly dominant role in the formation of its modern culture. In this context Taisho literature can be seen as the culmination of the period of “unqualified assimilation.” .This crisis in literature can also be generalized as a feature of earlytwentieth-century modernism. Clement Greenberg, for example, analyzed modernism as a rebellion against “literature,” which for him was a generalized marker of “subject matter” that had dominated artistic production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. , ed. John O’Brian [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ], –). Even in literary movements, the novel was seen as the symbol of an outmoded form of cultural production (for European avant-gardists, the epitome of bourgeois culture) that had to be rejected.Thus André Breton,for example,dismissed the novel as an “inferior category” ( Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ], ). . On Tanizaki’s involvement in film, see Chiba Nobuo, Eiga to Tanizaki (Film and Tanizaki) (Tokyo: Seiabo, ).

Notes



. Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, “Shohin to shite no kindai shosetsu” (The Modern Novel as Commodity), in Bungaku riron no shomondai (Problematics of Literary Theory) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ), – [facsimile ed.: Kindai bungei hyoron sosho, vol.  (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, )]. . Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, “Seijiteki kachi to geijutsuteki kachi” (Political Value and Aesthetic Value, ), in Kindai bungaku hyoron taikei (Survey of Modern Literary Criticism), vol. , ed. Miyoshi Yukio and Sofue Shoji (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, ), –. .Tanizawa Eiichi,“Ero·guro·nansensu:‘café jidai,’ Umehara Hokumei nado” (Ero-guro-nonsense: The “Age of the Café,” Umehara Hokumei, etc.), in Showa no bungaku (Showa Literature), ed. Nihon bungaku kenkyu shiryo kankokai (Tokyo:Yuseido, ), –. . Harootunian, “Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taisho.” According to Pincus,“By late Meiji, the consolidation of an overbearing state that narrowly limited entry to the political sphere compelled private interest to seek expression in an autonomous and interiorized realm of subjectivity. From the perspective of the new Taisho intellectual, often disaffected from politics and the state, the Meiji ideal of bunmei, or civilization, had taken on the pejorative sense of crass materialism and dubious pragmatism” (Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan, ). . H. D. Harootunian, “Between Politics and Culture: Authority and the Ambiguities of Intellectual Choice in Imperial Japan,” in Japan in Crisis, ed. Silberman and Harootunian, –. . In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), Andreas Huyssen identified the question of mass culture and, more generally, what he refers to as “mass-mediated society,” as a central problematic in theories of European modernism. He sees an “anxiety of contamination” at work in the critical discourse of “high modernism,” which is manifested as a radical rejection of mass culture.This takes the form of the critique of a homogenizing and repressive “culture industry” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and the denigration of “kitsch” by Clement Greenberg. At the same time, Huyssen analyzes a “hidden dialectic” at work in the historical avant-garde movements, a reliance on the techniques of mass culture to define a utopian vision of an art integrated with everyday life, which is revealed in the writings of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. .Walter Benjamin,“The Author as Producer,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, ), . On the question of technique, Benjamin writes that “I have named a concept that makes literary products directly accessible to a social, and therefore a materialist analysis. At the same time, the concept of technique provides the dialectical starting point from which the unfruitful antithesis of form and content can be surpassed” ().



Notes

. Clement Greenberg,“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. O’Brian, :–. In this essay, Greenberg does not present an uncritical endorsement of the avant-garde, noting that despite its rebellion against the bourgeoisie, it had always maintained a tie to “an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold” (–). . Oya Soichi, for example, looking back on the culture of the early Showa period, wrote that “at that time, Japan had been more than halfcolonized” (“Ero-guro-nansensu jidai” [The Age of Ero-Guro-Nonsense], Bungei shunju [special issue], July , ). . Kojima Tsunehisa, ed., -nendai no Nihon: Daikyoko yori senso e (s Japan: From the Great Depression to the War) (Tokyo: Horitsu bunkasha, ), . . Peter Duus, “Introduction: Japan’s Informal Empire in China, –, an Overview,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, –, ed. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), xi–xxix. . Miriam Silverberg, “The Modern Girl as Militant,” in Recreating Japanese Women, –, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), . . See, for example, Siegfried Kracauer,“The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament:Weimar Essays, trans. and ed.Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –. . Unno Hiroshi, Modan toshi Tokyo: Nihon no -nendai (Modern City Tokyo: Japan’s s) (Tokyo: Chuko bunko, ), . . Miriam Silverberg,“Constructing a New Cultural History of Prewar Japan,” boundary  , no.  (): . . Nakamura Takafusa cites damage estimates of between . billion and  billion yen in “Depression, Recovery, and War, –,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. , ed. Peter Duus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . For an account of these events, see Yoshimura Akira, Kanto daishinsai (The Great Kanto Earthquake) (Tokyo: Bungei shunju ). In addition to the murder of Osugi, Ito, and their six-year-old nephew at the hands of Amakasu Masahiko, another high-profile incident involved the murder of thirteen socialist activists at the Kameido jail. . Uno Koji,“Shinsai bunsho” (On the Earthquake), in Uno Koji zenshu (The Complete Works of Uno Koji), vol.  (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, ), . .The impact of the earthquake on the city of Tokyo was examined by Edward C. Seidensticker in Tokyo Rising:The City Since the Great Earthquake (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –. .As noted earlier, the acceleration of urbanization had begun before

Notes



the earthquake, particularly during World War I.With the sudden rise in the demand for exports, Japan experienced an economic boom that speeded up its urbanization. From  to , for example, the population of Tokyo increased from . million to more than . million. See Yasaki Takeo, Nihon toshi no hatten katei (The Developmental Path of Japanese Cities) (Tokyo: Kobundo, ), . In  alone, the population of the city surged upward by more than  percent. See Tokyo hyakunenshi henshu iinkai, ed., Tokyo hyakunenshi (The Hundred-Year History of Tokyo), vol.  (Tokyo:Tokyoto: ), .This expansion in the city’s population was the result of immigration from both the countryside and the colonies. . The Tokyo Municipal Office issued a report in March  in which Horikiri Zenjiro, the mayor of Tokyo, proclaimed that “the reconstruction of Tokyo, the capital of Japan, has now come to its final completion.” . Fujitake Akira, “The Formation and Development of Mass Culture,” Developing Economies , no.  (): . See also Arase Yutaka,“Mass Communication Between the Two World Wars,” Developing Economies , no.  (), –. On the theoretical problems of considering mass culture during this period, see Silverberg,“Constructing a New Cultural History of Prewar Japan,” –. . Jinnai Hidenobu, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, trans. Kimiko Nishimura (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), . . Hirano Ken, Hirano Ken zenshu (The Complete Works of Hirano Ken), vol.  (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), –. . On the history of the avant-garde in Japan—which in effect began with Mori Ogai’s translation of the Futurist Manifesto—see Hosea Hirata, The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo: Modernism in Translation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ). .Yoshimura, Kanto daishinsai, –. .Tessa Morris-Suzuki,“Becoming Japanese: Imperial Expansion and Identity Crises in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities, ed. Minichiello, . . Oguma Eiji, “Nihonjin” no kyokai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Chosen shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undo made (The Borderlines of the “Japanese”: Okinawa,Ainu,Taiwan, Korea from Colonial Rule to the Reversion Movement) (Tokyo: Shinyosha, ). . Murai, Nanto ideorogii no hassei, –. . Akita Ujaku, Gaikotsu no buyo (Dance of Skeletons), in Shinko bungaku zenshu (Anthology of New Literature), vol.  (Tokyo: Heibonsha, ), –. . Ujaku wrote: “I believe that the expressionist style, which had emerged in Europe following the Great War, was accepted by the literary and dramatic circles of Japan following the earthquake because of certain



Notes

social similarities, in that Japanese capitalism, in the face of crisis, had turned violent” (quoted in Oyama Isao, Kindai Nihon gikyokushi [History of Modern Drama], vol.  [Tokyo: Kindai Nihon gikyokushi kankokai, ], ). .Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), –, –. According to Harootunian, “If Taisho culture possessed any meaning distinct from Meiji civilization, it is to be found in the development and triumph of that conception of private interest and atomized individuality which is at the heart of the liberal political and social creed” (“Introduction:A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taisho,”). . Kume Masao, “‘Watakushi’ shosetsu to ‘shinkyo’ shosetsu” (The “I”-Novel and “State-of-Mind” Novel), in Kindai hyoron shu , Nihon kindai bungaku taikei (Selected Modern Criticism , Survey of Modern Japan Literature), vol. , ed. Tanaka Yasutaka (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, ), . .The term honkaku shosetsu was introduced by Nakamura Murao in “Honkaku shosetsu to shinkyo shosetsu to” (The True Novel and the State-of-Mind Novel, ), in Kindai hyoron shu , ed. Tanaka. .There are some notable exceptions. See Ikuta Choko,“‘Nihon’ to ‘geijutsu’” (“Japan” and “Art”), in Kindai hyoron shu , ed.Tanaka, –. Ikuta writes that the attempt to “attach too much importance to [the Inovel] by recovering a tradition of taste unique to Japan is to sully the respect for both ‘Japan’ and ‘art’” (). Kobayashi Hideo also undermined the native mythology of the I-novel by tracing its origins to nineteenthcentury French literature in his essay “Watakushi shosetsu ron” (Discourse on the Fiction of the Self), in Literature of the Lost Home, ed. Anderer, –. . Uno Koji, for example, wrote that the I-novel “undoubtedly belongs to the bloodline of Matsuo Basho” (“Watakushi shosetsu shiken” [Personal View of the I-Novel], in Kindai hyoron shu , ed.Tanaka, ). . Kume,“‘Watakushi’ shosetsu to ‘shinkyo’ shosetsu,” –. .The description of the bundan as a marketplace is from Yokomitsu Riichi, “Kaisetsu ni kaete I” (In Place of an Afterword I), in Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zenshu (Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Yokomitsu Riichi), ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ),  (hereafter cited as TYRZ). . Kume,“‘Watakushi’ shosetsu to ‘shinkyo’ shosetsu,” . .Tayama Katai,“Rokotsu naru byosha” (Plain Description), in Kindai hyoron shu , Nihon kindai bungaku taikei (Selected Modern Criticism , Survey of Modern Japan Literature), vol. , ed. Kawazoe Kunimoto (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, ), –. .To this extent, there appears to be a parallel between this discourse of the I-novel and the rejection of mass culture that Huyssen analyzed in

Notes

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the “high modernism” in European and American discourse (After the Great Divide, –). . The literary historian Usui Yoshimi, for example, rejected Yokomitsu’s arguments with a surprising degree of vehemence:“The formalism of Yokomitsu and others, which they themselves called materialist, was infantile, sterile, improvised and nonsensical.The fact that this was the only thing to which they could attach their passion and confidence illustrates the true state of their literature during this period of transition. It is no exaggeration to say that there is absolutely nothing in the theory itself worth rereading today” (Kindai bungaku ronso [Modern Literary Debates] [Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ], ). This is also essentially Hirano Ken’s view, which is expressed in much milder language in “Keishikishugi bungaku ronso” (The Formalist Literary Debate), in Hirano Ken zenshu, :–. For a positive assessment of Yokomitsu’s formalism, see Komori Yoichi, Kozo to shite no katari (Narration as Structure) (Tokyo: Shinyosha, ), –. . Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke,“Bungaku no keishiki no mondai” (The Question of Literary Form, ), in Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke bungei hyoron zenshu (The Collected Literary Criticism of Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke), vol.  (Tokyo: Bunsendo shoten, ), –. . One could cite, for example, Kanbara Tai’s poem “Jidosha no rikido” (Dynamism of the Automobile, ), in which the poetic line is fragmented into a series of compounds of Chinese characters.A similar effect can be seen in the works of Hirato Renkichi, who is credited with starting the Futurist poetry movement in Japan. In his poem “Gangu” (Prayer Tool), he uses repetitions of the characters for city streets and people, in varying sizes to represent the city of Tokyo (Hirato Renkichi shishu [Selected Poems of Hirato Renkichi] [Tokyo: Shiika bungakukan, ], ). In perhaps his best-known poem,Takahashi Shinkichi used the character for plate as a pictorial object, stacking twentytwo on top of one another to represent the pile of dishes in a restaurant kitchen (Dadaisto Shinkichi no shi [The Poetry of Dadaist Shinkichi] [; reprint, Tokyo: Shiika bungakukan, ], ). The impact of these poetic practices can also be seen in Shinkankakuha writings. See, especially, Kon Toko’s short story “Gunkan” (Battleship), Bungei jidai, November . For an overview of avant-garde poetry in Japan, see Hirata, Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburo, –. . Quoted in Nakano Kaichi, Zen’ei shi undoshi no kenkyu (Research on the History of Avant-Garde Poetry Movements) (Tokyo: Shinseisha, ), . . Nakagawa Yoichi writes:“Shklovsky’s formalist theory runs too far in the direction of technique, and the philosophical underpinnings of his formalism are rather simplistic. It is a formalism that resembles the old art for art’s sake, and that is why he is attacked from time to time by Lunacharsky” (“Keishikishugi geijutsuron” [A Formalist Theory of Art],



Notes

in Nakagawa Yoichi zenshu [The Complete Works of Nakagawa Yoichi], vol.  [Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, ], ).Yokomitsu also refers to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in one of his essays on formalism. .While the Shirakaba movement is usually considered to have arisen as a reaction against Naturalist literature, Mushanokoji Saneatsu believed that one area in which he learned from Naturalism was the use of colloquial language to express his inner thoughts and emotions. In his autobiographical work Aru otoko (A Certain Man, –), Mushanokoji stated: “Yet he profited from Naturalism.The genbun itchi movement had given him the freedom to take up his pen. He was happy that he did not have to write falsehoods, that he did not have to write what he did not feel, and that he was able to write sentences which matched their content precisely, like a layer of skin” (MSZ, vol.  [Tokyo: Shogakkan, ], , quoted in Seko Katashi, Kindai Nihon bunshoshi [History of Modern Japanese Writing] [Tokyo: Hakuteisha, ], ). . Tayama Katai, “Kindai no shosetsu” (The Modern Novel), in Tayama Katai zenshu (The Complete Works of Tayama Katai), suppl. vol. (Tokyo: Bunsendo shoten, ), . . Sato Haruo,“Akutagawa o kokusu” (Mourning Akutagawa), in Sato Haruo zenshu (The Complete Works of Sato Haruo), vol.  (Tokyo: Kodansha, ), –. For a discussion of the relationship between genbun itchi and the I-novel, see Suzuki, Narrating the Self, –. . Uno,“Watakushi shosetsu shiken,” . . Kataoka Yoshikazu,“Gendai no bunsho” (Modern Writing), Kokugo to kokubungaku,April , –. See also Sato Haruo, Sato Haruo bungei hyoronshu (Tokyo: Soshisha, ), . . Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishosetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), . . Nakamura Murao, “Honkaku shosetsu to shinkyo shosetsu to,” . Compare Kume’s definition: “Clearly, the author himself appears directly, and narrates, speaks, and describes” (“‘Watakushi’ shosetsu to ‘shinkyo’ shosetsu,” ). .Yokomitsu clearly uses the Kenyusha as an emblem of non-genbun itchi writing, although some Kenyusha writers, notably Yamada Bimyo (–), were associated with genbun itchi experiments. .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Bungei jihyo ” (Literary Review ), in TYRZ :–. .Akutagawa Ryunosuke wrote:“Of course, it’s not that I don’t have the desire to ‘write as one speaks.’Yet, at the same time there is another side of me that wants to ‘speak as one writes.’As far as I know, Natsume Soseki was truly an author who spoke as he wrote. . . . As I said before, there are authors who write as they speak. But when will an author who speaks as he writes appear on this solitary Far Eastern island?” (“Bungeiteki na,

Notes



amari ni bungeiteki na” [Literary, All Too Literary], in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu [The Complete Works of Akutagawa Ryunosuke], vol.  [Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ], ). . Another form of resistance to genbun itchi can be found in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s essay “Gendai kogobun no ketten ni tsuite” (On the Defects of Contemporary Colloquial Writing, ). Tanizaki calls attention to the fact that kogobun does not actually represent contemporary Japanese speech—the sentence ending de aru, for example, is not typically used in everyday speech. Instead, Tanizaki calls for a type of writing that more accurately reflects Japanese speech, something on the order, he says, of Murasaki Shikibu’s style in The Tale of Genji. For a discussion of Tanizaki’s essay, see Suzuki, Narrating the Self, –. .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Naimen to gaimen ni tsuite” (On Interior and Exterior), in TYRZ :. .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Moji ni tsuite” (On Writing), in TYRZ :. .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Kakikata soshi jo” (Preface to A Book on Writing), in TYRZ, ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), . . Anderer, Other Worlds, . . Tamura Ryuichi, Kawazoe Noboru, and Isoda Koichi, “Tokyo bungaku no isseiki” (A Century of Tokyo Literature), Umi, April , . In his accounts of modernism in Europe, Raymond Williams examined the central role of the metropolis in the formation of a new consciousness of art: “The most important general element of the innovations in form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants. . . . Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices” (“The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism,” in Modernism/Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker [London1 Longman, ], –). . Kobayashi,“Literature of the Lost Home,” .

. Disintegrating Mechanisms of Subjectivity: Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s Last Writings . Aono Suekichi,“Akutagawa Ryunosuke shi ni kanren shite” (With Reference to Mr. Akutagawa Ryunosuke), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke kenkyu shiryo shusei (Compilation of Akutagawa Ryunosuke Research Materi-

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Notes

als), ed. Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi, vol.  (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, ),  (hereafter cited as ARKSS). . Miyamoto Kenji, “Haiboku no bungaku” (The Literature of Defeat), in ARKSS, ed. Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi, vol.  (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, ), –. . Howard Hibbett provides a cogent account of Akutagawa’s life and work, including an analysis of the impact of his suicide on the Japanese literary world. Hibbett writes that Akutagawa’s status in literary history has emerged as a combination of his writings and the aura surrounding the events of his personal life: “For Japanese readers, life, legend, and legacy have combined to elevate his painfully formed negative identity to the status of a negative ideal” (“Akutagawa Ryunosuke and the Negative Ideal,” in Personality in Japanese History, introduction and ed. Albert M. Craig and Donald H. Shively [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ], ). . Sato Haruo,“Akutagawa Ryunosuke ron” (On Akutagawa Ryunosuke), in Bungei dokuhon:Akutagawa Ryunosuke (Literary Reader:Akutagawa Ryunosuke) (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), . . Aono,“Akutagawa Ryunosuke shi ni kanren shite,” . . Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi, “Kaisetsu” (Commentary), in ARKSS :. See also Hirano Ken’s discussion of the impact of Akutagawa’s death and the attempt among some writers to “overcome” the anxiety that it represented in “Showa,” in Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshu, suppl. vol.  (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ), –. . Inoue Yoshio,“Akutagawa Ryunosuke to Shiga Naoya,” in ARKSS, ed. Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi, vol.  (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, ), . .The resonance of the concept of culture for Taisho intellectuals was analyzed by Minami Hiroshi, Taisho bunka (Taisho Culture) (Tokyo: Keiso shobo, ), –. . Aeba Takao, Kindai no kaitai (The Dissolution of Modernity) (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), .An analysis of Abe’s work and its place in Taisho intellectual discourse can be found in Stephen W. Kohl, “Abe Jiro and The Diary of Santaro,” in Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals During the Interwar Years, ed. J.Thomas Rimer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), –. . Beongcheon Yu, Akutagawa: An Introduction (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ), –. . Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (New York: Holt, ), . . Dennis Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, ), –. . A number of commentators have noted that the Japanese word shosetsu, used to translate “novel,” refers to a much wider range of writings than the English term does. Since, however, Akutagawa’s discussion

Notes

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of the shosetsu takes place in the context of European experiments with the genre of the novel and since the subject of his theory is a reconsideration of the formal requirements of this genre, I have chosen to translate shosetsu as “novel.” . Inoue,“Akutagawa Ryunosuke to Shiga Naoya,” . . Miyoshi Yukio,“Akutagawa Ryunosuke: Hito to bungaku” (Akutagawa Ryunosuke:His Life and Works),in Akutagawa Ryunosuke hikkei (Akutagawa Ryunosuke Manual), ed. Miyoshi Yukio (Tokyo: Gakutosha, ), . This view is exemplified by Nakamura Mitsuo’s statement that “Akutagawa, after fully displaying his talents as a precocious narrative writer, was confronted by the crisis in which he himself came to deny his own former works. Haguruma (Cogwheels), Aru aho no issho (The Life of a Certain Fool) and other works of his later years, are the painful monuments of a writer who, with no gift or desire of writing ‘I’ novels, came to surrender himself to the ‘I’ novel as the ideal literary form of the age” (Contemporary Japanese Fiction, – [Tokyo: Kokusai bunka shinkokai, ], ). . According to Oscar Wilde, “One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure” (“The Decay of Lying,” in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ], ). .Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro zenshu (The Complete Works of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro), vol.  (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, ), –. . Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Bary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), . . Boris Ejxenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method,” in Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), –. . Akutagawa Ryunosuke, “Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeiteki na” (Literary,All Too Literary), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu (The Complete Works of Akutagawa Ryunosuke), vol.  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ),  (hereafter cited as ARZ). . Saeki Shoichi, Monogatari geijutsu ron:Tanizaki,Akutagawa, Mishima (The Theory of monogatari Art: Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Mishima) (Tokyo: Chuko bunko, ), –. . Ibid., –. . Clement Greenberg,“Modernist Painting,” ArtsYearbook  (): . . Clement Greenberg,“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. , ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . André Gide, “Journal of ‘The Counterfeiters,’” trans. Justin O’Brien, in The Counterfeiters (New York:Vintage Books, ), . . Akutagawa’s awareness of the European avant-garde movements is also indicated by his remarks on expressionism and Dada in “Bungei



Notes

ippanron” (A General Theory of Literature), in ARZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ), . . Saeki, Monogatari geijutsu ron, –. . In ,Akutagawa wrote:“It is no doubt impossible for anyone to provide a concrete answer to the question of what kind of works one will write in the future. Unlike other forms of work, it is impossible to tackle the task of writing fiction with a set program. In the future, however, I plan to deploy fully my talent and erudition and write true novels, I-novels, historical fiction, novels of the pleasure quarter, haiku, poetry, waka, etc., etc., and if told about any other genre, I am willing to try my hand at anything” (“Fugawari na sakuhin niten ni tsuite” [On Two Eccentric Works], in ARZ, vol.  [Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ], –). . Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, . . Yoshida Seiichi, Akutagawa Ryunosuke (Tokyo: Shincho bunko, ), . The specific influence of Gulliver’s Travels is also clear in his work “A Fantastic Island” (Fushigi na shima, ). . Natsume Soseki, “Shaseibun” (Sketching), in Soseki zenshu (The Complete Works of Soseki), vol.  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ), –. For Karatani’s analysis of shaseibun, see Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, –. Karatani writes that for Soseki,“‘sketching’ meant the liberation of writing, the liberation of diverse genres” () and that it was “a deliberate and positive resistance to the novel” ().The extent of Akutagawa’s literary debt to his mentor Soseki (as opposed to Mori Ogai) has long been debated by scholars. Among those arguing for Soseki’s strong impact on Akutagawa is Yu, Akutagawa, –. . For an analysis of the scenario style and its impact on Akutagawa’s late work, see Kubota Masafumi, “Saigo no stairu” (The Last Style), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke hikkei, ed. Miyoshi, –. In addition,A.A. Gerow analyzed the influence of cinema in Akutagawa’s works “Kage” and “Yuwaku” and argued for the central role that the medium plays in Akutagawa’s writings in general. Gerow emphasized Akutagawa’s use of the cinematic medium to frame an image of a split between self and other existing in Akutagawa’s consciousness (“The Self Seen as Other: Akutagawa and Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly , no.  []: –). . The description is reminiscent of Tayama Katai’s account of Maruzen’s second floor: “The surging currents of nineteenth-century European thought, filtered through the second floor of Maruzen, were washing up on the shores of this solitary, Far Eastern island” (Tokyo no sanjunen [Thirty Years in Tokyo, ] [Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, ], ). . Isoda Koichi, “Akutagawa Ryunosuke ron: Taisho seishin no ichi danmen” (On Akutagawa Ryunosuke:An Aspect of the Taisho Spirit), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke , ed. Nihon bungaku kenkyu shiryo kankokai (Tokyo:Yuseido, ), –.

Notes



. Compare Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s analysis of the relationship between eating and speaking/writing in Kafka.They emphasize the disjunction between the two actions: one represents a “territorialization”; the other, a “deterritorialization”: “The mouth, tongue, and teeth find their primitive territoriality in food. In giving themselves over to the articulation of sounds, the mouth, tongue, and teeth deterritorialize. Thus, there is a certain disjunction between eating and speaking, and even more, despite all appearances, between eating and writing. . . . Disjunction between content and expression.To speak, and above all to write, is to fast. Kafka manifests a permanent obsession with food, and with that form of food par excellence, in other words, the animal or meat—an obsession with the mouth and with teeth and with large, unhealthy, or gold-capped teeth” (Kafka:Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ], –). . Akutagawa Ryunosuke,“Fugawari na sakuhin niten ni tsuite” (On Two Eccentric Works), in ARZ :–. .Akutagawa Ryunosuke to Saito Mokichi, March , , in ARZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ), . .Washburn reads the image of the cogwheels as a symbol of dehumanization, the failed result of Akutagawa’s attempt to overcome the multiple narrative perspectives that had been an essential element of his earlier writings: “The mechanistic image of the cogwheel, which he used just prior to his death to symbolize his personal dissociation, points up the potential loss of humanity that occurs when the emphasis on discontinuity as a means of defining the self leads instead to a disintegration or fragmentation of identity” (Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction, ). . See Akutagawa’s remarks on the figure of the doppelgänger in Japanese folklore in “Yanagita Kunio, Osatake Takeshi zadankai,” in ARZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ), . . Karatani Kojin, “The Discursive Space of Modern Japan,” trans. Seiji M. Lippit, boundary  , no.  (): . . Paul Anderer, Other Worlds:Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . . Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, ), –. . For an analysis of the influence of Hegelian idealism (via the ideas of Ernest Fenollosa) on Okakura, see F. G. Notehelfer,“On Idealism and Realism in the Thought of Okakura Tenshin,” Journal of Japanese Studies , no.  (): –. Karatani, for his part, argued against the notion of Hegelian influence on Okakura, writing that through the use of “advaitism,” Okakura tried to reject a dialectical conception of history: “Okakura sought historically for principles of unity internal to Asia. To this end he tried to overturn Hegel’s philosophy of history and art, trying not only to subvert Hegel’s Eurocentrism but to attack the concept of



Notes

dialectics itself. The notion of contradiction is crucial to Hegelian thought as that which gives rise to struggle and advances history. Okakura counterposed to this the philosophy of Advaita (non-dualism), which had its origins in Indian Buddhism.The Sanskrit term ‘Advaita’ signified the oneness of that which is manifold and contradictory. Okakura sought to transcend the universality of the West in a universality of the East” (Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, ). . Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East (Tokyo:Tuttle, ), –. . Ibid., . . Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea (New York: Dover, ), . . Karatani,“Discursive Space of Modern Japan,” . . Akutagawa Ryunosuke, “Kamigami no bisho” (The Smiles of the Gods), in ARZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ), –. In translating this passage, I consulted Tomoyoshi Genkawa and Bernard Susser’s translation of the story,“The Faint Smiles of the Gods,” in The Kyoto Collection: Stories from the Japanese (Osaka: Niheisha, ), –, reprinted in The Essential Akutagawa, ed. Seiji M. Lippit (New York: Marsilio, ), –. . Susan Napier writes that Akutagawa “thus forces his reader to ‘identify’ with the missionary vis-à-vis the foreign land of Japan. In this story it is Japan which is the alien rather than the Westerners” (The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature [London: Routledge, ], ). . Akutagawa Ryunosuke, “Butokai” (The Ball), in ARZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ), . . Ando Hiroshi, “‘Butokai’ ron” (On “The Ball”), Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyozai no kenkyu , no.  (): –. . Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), . . Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golfing (New York: Doubleday, ), . . Keene states that for Akutagawa, the Meiji period was as distant and exotic as the period of Christian missionaries:“The extreme adulation of the West of the early Meiji era had come to seem picturesque, and Akutagawa described it with almost the same sense of distance as in his accounts of sixteenth-century Nagasaki” (Dawn to the West, ). “The Husband of the Enlightenment” recounts a Meiji aristocrat’s attempt to put his ideals of “love” (ren’ai) into practice.The work opens in the present-day Ueno museum, at an exhibition of “early Meiji civilization.”The narrator remarks on the displays at the exhibition: “Tokyo Bay, inscribed with mica-like waves, steamships sporting various flags, the images of Western men and women walking the avenues, a row of Hiroshige-style pine trees at a Western house spreading their branches toward the sky— in both subject matter and technique, there was a blending of East and West [wayo setchu], a beautiful harmony specific to the art of early Meiji.

Notes



This harmony has since been forever lost to our art. It has even disappeared from the Tokyo in which we live” (ARZ :). In this story,Akutagawa expresses a certain nostalgia for the Meiji period, in which there appears (retrospectively) to have been an authentic encounter with Western culture and a genuine transformation in the native culture. For Akutagawa, Meiji represents a process of transition and transformation, a period in which modern culture is in a state of becoming.As he looks at a print of two actors in Western and Japanese dress,Viscount Honda says: “It is as though that age that combined night and day, in which the city was neither Edo nor Tokyo, is floating up distinctly before my eyes” (:). Akutagawa was most interested in this in-between, transitional state in the formation of modern culture. . Aeba Takao, “Kaisetsu” (Commentary), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu, vol.  (Tokyo: Chikuma bunko, ), . . Kawakami Tetsutaro, Takeuchi Yoshimi, et al., Kindai no chokoku (Overcoming Modernity) (Tokyo: Fuzanbo, ), . . Yasuda Yojuro, “Futari no shijin” (Two Poets), in Nihon romanha (Japanese Romantic School), ed. Nihon bungaku kenkyu shiryo kankokai (Tokyo:Yuseido, ), . . See James Dorsey’s analysis of Kobayashi Hideo’s writings on Akutagawa and the impact of this engagement on the development of Kobayashi’s thought during this period in “An Intersection of Aesthetics and Ideology: Kobayashi Hideo, –” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, ), –. . For an analysis of the significance of “literature” for Hayashi Fusao, the first writer to call for a literary revival during this period, see Kevin Michael Doak, Dreams of Difference:The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), –. . In , Yamagishi Gaishi wrote: “Clearly, Akutagawa Ryunosuke brought his defeat to completion and constructed, for the first time in this country, a tombstone labeled ‘pure literature’” (“Akutagawa Ryunosuke no shi” [The Death of Akutagawa Ryunosuke], in ARKSS, ed. Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi, vol.  [Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, ], ). . Abe Tomoji (–), who asserted that his “Shuchiteki bungakuron” (Theory of Intellectual Literature, ) was written in part as a response to Akutagawa’s suicide, found a direct link between the collapse of an intellectual literature after Akutagawa’s death and the Romantics’ assertion of a literature based primarily on affect (Odagiri Hideo et al., Bungaku: Showa junendai o kiku [Literature: Interviews on the Showa s] [Tokyo: Keiso shobo, ], –). .Yamagishi,“Akutagawa Ryunosuke no shi,” . . Inoue,“Akutagawa Ryunosuke to Shiga Naoya,” .



Notes

. Topographies of Empire:Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai . For a discussion of the works based on this trip to Korea, see Dennis Keene, Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –. . Yokomitsu Riichi, “The Pale Captain,” in Love and Other Stories, trans. Dennis Keene (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, ), . I am grateful to Samuel Yamashita for calling my attention to the significance of the story’s ending. . Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, – (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), –. .Yokomitsu,“Pale Captain,” . . Ibid., . .Yokomitsu’s novel was originally published in serial form in the journal Kaizo, beginning with the November  issue.The segments were published with different titles, as if each were a separate short story: “Bathhouse and Bank” (Furo to ginko),“Legs and Justice” (Ashi to seigi), “The Question of the Rubbish Heap” (Hakidame no gimon),“Chronic Illness and Bullets” (Jibyo to dangan), and “Port Chapter” (Kaikosho). Each of the first five installments concluded with a note indicating that it was part of a “full-length novel” (aru chohen) that, at this point, still had no title.The fifth installment in December  was accompanied by an endnote stating that it marked the close of the first half of the novel.The second half, however, was never written. More than a year later,Yokomitsu published two concluding chapters—“Woman” (Fujin, January ) and “Prostitute” (Shunpu, November )—as well as a section entitled “Morning” (Gozen, June ), which was later placed in the middle of the novel. It was first published as a book in , under the title Shanghai (which was apparently imposed by the publisher), after Yokomitsu had made a number of revisions to the language and content of the novel. In particular, he rewrote sections of the work and moderated some of the more unconventional grammatical constructions and experimental style. Most significantly, portions of the dialogue of the main character, Sanki, were altered to make him less sympathetic to the Communists and less critical of the Japanese position. The  edition has value mainly as a testament to the end of Yokomitsu’s modernist project. While the  Kaizosha edition is the first coherent work published under the title Shanghai and will form the basis of my analysis, it should be read in close consultation with the original Kaizo installments, which provide the greatest insight into Yokomitsu’s original experiment. . Yokomitsu Riichi, “Pekin to Pari” (Peking and Paris), in Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zenshu (Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Yokomitsu Riichi), ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha,

Notes



),  (hereafter cited as TYRZ). See also “Seianji no hibun” (Epitaphs at Jing’an Temple), in TYRZ :.Akutagawa traveled throughout China for four months in  as a correspondent for the Osaka Mainichi shinbun, and his writings on China were published as Shina yuki (Record of My Travels in China) (Tokyo: Kaizosha, ). . Chiba Kameo,“Shinkankakuha no tanjo” (The Birth of New Sensationism), in Shinkankakuha no tanjo (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, ), –. On the formation of the group, see Inoue Ken, Yokomitsu Riichi: Hyoden to kenkyu (Yokomitsu Riichi: Critical Biography and Research) (Tokyo: Ofu, ), –. According to Inoue, Kon Toko (–) was among the most ardent of those wishing to “overturn” the bundan, whereas others among the group were somewhat more cautious.Takami Jun (–) noted the impact of the journal’s first issue on young readers, especially “How our eyes glittered as we took in hand that inaugural issue of Bungei jidai” (Showa bungaku seisuishi [The Rise and Fall of Showa Literature], vol.  [Tokyo: Bungei shunjusha, ], ; also cited in Inoue, Yokomitsu Riichi, ). .Yokomitsu Riichi, “Kankaku katsudo” (Sense Activity), Bungei jidai , no.  (): .The essay was later retitled “Shinkankakuron” and can be found in TYRZ :–. . Kawabata Yasunari,“Shinshin sakka no shinkeiko kaisetsu” (Analysis of New Writers’ New Trends), Bungei jidai , no.  (): –. .Yokomitsu Riichi, “Atama narabi ni hara” (Heads and Stomachs), Bungei jidai , no.  (): .The emphasis on the city is revealed in his repeated use of the word machi (city streets) in some of the key short stories of the mid-s:“Rude Streets” (Burei na machi, ),“The City Depths” (Machi no soko, ), and “Tunnel to the City” (Machi ni deru tonneru, ). In addition, his well-known work “The Expressionist Actor” (Hyogenha no yakusha, ) is largely an extended dialogue between an actor and his lover as they move continuously through the rapid traffic of the city streets. .Yokomitsu,“Kankaku katsudo,” –. .Yoshimoto Takaaki, Gengo ni totte bi to wa nanika (What Is Beauty for Language? ), vol 6 of Yoshimoto Takaaki zen chosakushu (The Complete Writings of Yoshimoto Takaaki) (Tokyo: Keiso shobo, ), . . A dictionary of “modern” words from  lists the following entry for “the age of speed”:“A reference to the contemporary age. Because the contemporary age values speed above all else” (Kojima Tokuya, Modan shinyogo jiten [Dictionary of New Modern Terms] [Tokyo: Hakuseisha,], ). . Kataoka Teppei,“Shinkankakuha wa kaku shucho su” (Manifesto of New Sensationism), Bungei jidai , no.  (): . See also Kataoka, “Todome no rifurein” (Clinching Refrain), Bungei jidai , no.  (): –. . Kataoka,“Shinkankakuha wa kaku shucho su,” .



Notes

.The general sense of unsettlement among Japanese intellectuals was analyzed by H. D. Harootunian in “Overcome by Modernity: Fantasizing Everyday Life and the Discourse on the Social in Interwar Japan,” Parallax, February , , –. See also Harootunian, “Figuring the Folk: History, Poetics, and Representation,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), –. .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Bungei jihyo ” (Literary Review ), in TYRZ :. .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Kaisetsu ni kaete”(In Place of an Afterword), in TYRZ :.As critics have pointed out, much of what Yokomitsu cites as the material embodiments of modern science had in fact been introduced into Japan before the earthquake.What Yokomitsu’s account in fact registers is the profound psychological impact that the event had on writers. Retrospectively, it was perceived to be the origin of the cultural and technological transformations of the s. .This status is emphasized in the opening line of the official proclamation of September , :“Tokyo, the capital of the empire, has been looked upon by the people as the centre of political and economic activities and the fountainhead of the cultural advancement of the nation” (quoted in Edward C. Seidensticker, Tokyo Rising:The City Since the Great Earthquake [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ], ). . Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, ), . . Akita Ujaku was one of the few writers to mention in his works the violence toward Koreans. See, for example, his expressionist play Dance of the Skeletons (Gaikotsu no buyo, ), in which a Korean youth is targeted by members of a jikeidan. As has been frequently pointed out, the literary response to this violence was, in general, extremely muted. The earthquake is certainly the subject of numerous memoirs, but it finds little expression in works of fiction. Furthermore, depictions of the mob violence were largely absent in any genre of writing.Akutagawa writes of being a member of his neighborhood jikeidan, a fact that Murai Osamu takes as emblematic of the problematic response of Taisho intellectuals to the aftermath of the earthquake (Nanto ideorogii no hassei [The Production of Southern-Islands Ideology] [Tokyo: Ota shuppan, ], –). . Fredric Jameson,“Modernism and Imperialism,” in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –. .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Machi no soko” (The City Depths), in TYRZ, ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), . . On the May  movement, see Nicolas Clifford, Spoilt Children of the Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the s (Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press, ), –. On the histor-

Notes



ical background of the novel and Yokomitsu’s depiction of these events, see Maeda Ai, Toshi kukan no naka no bungaku (Literature in the Space of the City), vol.  of Maeda Ai chosakushu (The Collected Writings of Maeda Ai) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ), –.Yokomitsu describes some of the central historical events in his novel, most notably the strike at the Naigai cotton mill that led to the shooting death of a Chinese worker, and the demonstration of May . Inoue writes that Yokomitsu gathered the details of these events from the brother of an acquaintance of Imataka’s (the model for Koya’s brother Takashige), who worked for a Japanese textile company in Shanghai (Yokomitsu Riichi, ). . Dennis Keene,“Yokomitsu Riichi and the Shinkankakuha” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, ), . . Muramatsu Shofu, Mato (Demonic City) (Tokyo: Konishi shoten, ), , quoted in Shanhai korekushon (Shanghai Collection), ed. Hirano Jun (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ), –. Similar images of Shanghai also circulated in the West, where, as Clifford writes, Shanghai was known as “the city of sin” (Spoilt Children of the Empire, ). . In January,Yokomitsu published the opening salvo of this debate, “Shinkankakuha to Komyunizumu bungaku” (New Sensationism and Communist Literature). It was a time when Yokomitsu’s group was in general disarray—after the collapse of Bungei jidai and Kataoka’s “conversion” (impelled in part by Akutagawa’s suicide) as well as those by some younger writers who had been associated with the group, including Takeda Rintaro. In fact,Yokomitsu told Nakajima Kenzo that if he had not left for Shanghai, he himself may have converted to Marxism (Inoue, Yokomitsu Riichi, ). As Yokomitsu notes in the  preface to the novel, his work was written during the peak of the Marxist movement’s prominence in the bundan.The formation of NAPF (Zen Nihon musansha geijutsu dantai kyogikai) in  represented a consolidation of the leftist movement from a variety of independent organizations into one comprehensive structure. See G. T. Shea, Leftwing Literature in Japan (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, ), –. Marxist critics were conspicuous in the review columns of journals and newspapers, and they exerted a powerful influence on young writers. Near the end of its run, Bungei jidai itself reflected the strong impact of proletarian literature, publishing works by Hayashi Fusao and Hayama Yoshiki, as well as a drama review written by Trotsky. See Hayashi Fusao,“Rogoku no gogatsusai” (May Day in Prison), Bungei jidai , no.  (): –; Hayama Yoshiki,“Darega koroshitaka?” (Who Killed Him?), Bungei jidai , nos.  and  (): –, –; and Leon Trotsky, “Furansu rodo kaikyu no ichi gikyoku” (A Play of the French Working Class), Bungei jidai , no.  (): –. . Mizushima Haruo, Kaizosha no jidai (The Age of Kaizosha) (Tokyo: Tosho shuppansha, ), .



Notes

.Yokomitsu’s biographer, Inoue Ken, writes that he was a financial contributor to the Communist Party and that he participated in Takeda Rintaro’s Marxist study group (Yokomitsu Riichi, ). See also Takeda Rintaro, “Yokomitsu Riichi ron” (On Yokomitsu Riichi), in Yokomitsu Riichi to Shinkankakuha (Yokomitsu Riichi and New Sensationism) (Tokyo: Yuseido, ), . In Yokomitsu wrote to his friend Fujisawa Takeo: “I have no choice but to surrender to Marxism” (Yokomitsu to Fujisawa, September , , TYRZ, ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  [Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ], ). As late as May , he wrote that “I consider myself a humanist Marxist” and, further, that “the attraction of Marxism only grows stronger” (Yokomitsu to Fujisawa, in TYRZ :). . Nozawa Toshitaka, “Shanhai to bungaku” (Shanghai and Literature), in Modan toshi to bungaku (The Modern City and Literature), ed. Tsukawa Masanori (Tokyo:Yosensha, ), . . Ibid., –. . Kaneko Mitsuharu, Dokurohai (Skull-cup) (Tokyo: Chuko bunko, ), . .Yokomitsu Riichi to Yokomitsu Chiyoko, April , , in TYRZ :. .Yokomitsu,“Seianji no hibun,” . .Akira Iriye, China and Japan in the Global Setting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . See also Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Informal Empire in China, – (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), . On the Japanese population in Shanghai, see Mark R. Peattie, “Japanese Treaty Port Settlements in China, –,” in Japanese Informal Empire in China, ed. Duus et al., . . Peter Duus,“Introduction,” in Japanese Informal Empire in China, ed. Duus et al., xi–xxix. . Shu-mei Shih, “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na’ou’s Urban Shanghai Landscape,” Journal of Asian Studies , no.  ():  (italics in original). .Yokomitsu Riichi to Yamamoto Sanehiko, June , , in TYRZ :. .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Furo to ginko,” Kaizo, November , . .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Shinakai” (The China Sea), in TYRZ :. . Maeda, Toshi kukan no naka no bungaku, . .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Shanhai jo” (Shanghai Preface), in TYRZ :. . Komori Yoichi, Kozo to shite no katari (Narration as Structure) (Tokyo: Shiyosha, ), . On the role of the body in constructing an image of modernity, see also Gregory Lyle Golley’s careful and sophisticated reading of Shanghai in “Voices in the Machine: Technology and Japanese Literary Modernism” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, ).

Notes



. Komori, Kozo to shite no katari,  (italics in original). . In general, the critics’ appraisals of this novel in relation to discourses of nationalism are split between positive and negative. Among positive appraisals, Naoki Sakai writes: “Yokomitsu’s novel Shanghai depicted the scenes of international mingling involving the behaviors of international capital and the mass movements, which, like a flood, swept away the system of separation.Yokomitsu attempted to outline an imagined political possibility by depicting the main characters of the novel as liberating themselves from the subjugation and subjection to an imperialist state and thereby constructing different relations with people in Shanghai” (Translation and Subjectivity:On “Japan”and Cultural Nationalism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ], ). Dennis Keene argues for a split between ideology and style:“One of the interesting oddities of the book lies in the fact that the conservative and traditional ideas it tries to put forward seem irrelevant to the still revolutionary prose and nihilistic stance of its hero” (Yokomitsu Riichi, ). Donald Keene writes that Yokomitsu’s novel does not spread the message of proletarian revolution “nor, for that matter, is it an apology for the Japanese capitalists who were exploiting Chinese workers” (Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era [New York: Holt, ], ). Odagiri Hideo evaluates the novel positively while also critiquing Yokomitsu’s turn toward new psychologism. He claims that if this novel had received a more positive reception from Marxist critics, as it deserved, the course of Showa literature might have been decisively altered (“Yokomitsu Riichi Shanhai no hyoka” [The Reception of Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai], in Odagiri Hideo chosakushu [Selected Writings of Odagiri Hideo], vol.  [Tokyo: Hosei daigaku shuppankyoku: ], –). . Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –. . Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). I have also benefited from Andrew Hewitt’s discussion of modernism and imperialism in Fascism and Modernism:Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), –. .Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanhai, in TYRZ, ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), . In several instances, I consulted Dennis Washburn’s translation of Yokomitsu’s work, published as Shanghai:A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, ).Yokomitsu’s style in Shanghai extends the type of writing that he employed in some of his earlier stories, such as “Seventh-Floor Movement” (Nanakai no undo), “Ambiguous Wind”



Notes

(Moro to shita kaze), “The City Depths” (Machi no soko), and “The Expressionist Actor” (Hyogenha no yakusha). . Chiba Nobuo,“Eiga to gengo no zen’ei” (The Avant-Garde in Film and Language), Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyozai no kenkyu , no.  (): . . Maeda, Toshi kukan no naka no bungaku, . .Yokomitsu to Yokomitsu Chiyoko, April , , . . Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, . . Sanki’s character is an extension of the mobile narrator of “The Expressionist Actor,” who “circles the same streets over and over again” (TYRZ :). .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Bungakuteki jittai ni tsuite” (On the Substance of Literature, ). His theory of modernity (and modern literature) as noise appears to reflect the influence of a specifically anarchist aesthetic. In the final issue of Bungei jidai, the anarchist poet Tsuboi Shigeji published “Yokomitsu Riichi-kun no morosei” (Yokomitsu Riichi’s Confusion), a reply to an article that Yokomitsu had written the previous month attacking the anarchist position on committed literature. In a section of the article subtitled “Anakizumu no morosei” (The Confusion of Anarchism), Yokomitsu criticized the anarchists’ rejection of the Communist Party while simultaneously asserting the “essential classless nature of literature” (“Bungei jihyo” [Literary Review], Bungei jidai , no.  []). In response, Tsuboi assailed Yokomitsu’s understanding of anarchism, as well as the role of politics in literature in general, noting that Yokomitsu’s belief that an essence of literature existed beyond class relations is itself a view rooted in a particular social class. Tsuboi labeled Yokomitsu a “Don Quixote” and explained the mission of anarchist literature as follows:“The literary theory of anarchism is not a theory of ‘the essence of literature’ but, rather, sets out from the point where literary activity is thrown into the fast current of an ever changing reality. For this reason, the question of ‘the Communist political party in literature’ can become the object of criticism from the perspective of anarchist literature.And in this sense, the negation of ‘the Communist political party in literature’ or, in extreme terms, the negation of ‘political party literature’ in general, is the basis of our theory of literature (“Yokomitsu Riichi-kun no morosei,” Bungei jidai , no.  []: ). According to Yamazaki Kuninori,Tsuboi’s attack had a powerful impact onYokomitsu’s view of literature.Yamazaki writes that “it was the essay that pulled Yokomitsu out from the aestheticist consciousness in which he was rigidly confined and in which he had guarded his own literature, giving him the perspective toward ‘politics, economics, and the masses’” (Yokomitsu Riichi ron [On Yokomitsu Riichi] [Tokyo: Hokuyosha, ], ). Indeed, it is one measure of the extent to which Yokomitsu took Tsuboi’s critique to heart that he completely rewrote the review for its republication in a collection of essays in .Whereas previously he had

Notes

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criticized the anarchist critique of party-affiliated literature, he now wrote that the anarchist literary movement was “the engine of a new spirit to eradicate the spirit of partisanship” from literature (“Jihyo ni saishite” [On the Occasion of My Literary Review], in TYRZ :). . Between the installments serialized in Kaizo and the  edition, significant changes were made in this scene.After Sanki’s debate with Qiulan, the original text contained the statement “By this point, Sanki could not help but respect her thinking,” which was removed in the  edition. In the original, Sanki also says to Qiulan: “I am grateful to you for saying that I am not Japanese. . . .Yet even though I am Japanese, I am not the kind of Japanese that you are concerned about” (“Hakidame no gimon,” Kaizo, June ,).In the  edition,the second sentence was changed to “But I don’t think the fact that I am Japanese is anything to be sad about” (TYRZ :). Sanki’s later statement that “of course, I’m not at all unhappy that you have chosen [to strike] at Japanese factories” (“Hakidame no gimon,” ) has been changed to “of course, I am unhappy that . . .” (TYRZ :), and the statement that “I sympathize with your attempts to stop the machines in our factories” (“Hakidame no gimon,” ) has been changed to read “I don’t know what to say about your attempts. . . .” (TYRZ :). Such changes can be found throughout the novel. In addition, many passages in the original installments were censored by the editors of Kaizo. Several years later,Yokomitsu further revised the text, and a “definitive edition” was published by Shomotsu tenbosha in .The tone of this version is even less experimental and more nationalistic. See Hosho Masao,“Henshu noto” (Editor’s Notes), in TYRZ :–. According to Kuritsubo Yoshiki, Shanghai is literally a “novel in motion,” and one of the difficulties of interpretation arises from the impossibility of identifying a stable, definitive text (Yokomitsu Riichi ron [Tokyo: Nagata shobo, ], ). .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Un ni tsuite” (On Luck), in TYRZ :. . Suga Hidemi, Tantei no kuritikku: Showa bungaku no rinkai (The Critic as Detective:The Limits of Showa Literature) (Tokyo: Shichosha, ), . . Yokomitsu Riichi, “Senso to heiwa” (War and Peace), in TYRZ :. . Mikhail Bakhtin writes:“Eating and drinking are one of the most significant manifestations of the grotesque body.The distinctive character of this body is its open, unfinished nature, its interaction with the world. These traits are most fully and concretely revealed in the act of eating; the body transgresses here its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world’s expense.The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most ancient, and most important objects of human thought and imagery. Here man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself ” (Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ], ).



Notes

. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror:An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, ),  (italics in original). . Judith Butler has extended this analysis into a more explicitly politicized context, examining in particular the ideological construction of gendered subjectivity and normative sexuality through abjection. She asserts that the formation of normative bodies through mechanisms of identification and desire (Oedipus) also produces a realm of bodies that are excluded from human agency, those that are presented as socially unrepresentable and unsymbolizable. For Butler, this realm of the abject is a necessary product (or waste product) of the construction of subjectivity. She writes that “these excluded sites come to bound the ‘human’ as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation” (Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” [New York: Routledge, ], ). The abject represents the limits of what can be symbolized or represented, yet it also always functions as a marker of any ideological system’s inherent instability, a lack or wound that can never entirely be covered up. . Peter Stallybrass and Allon White discuss the grotesque in the context of social class: “The bourgeois subject continuously defined and redefined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as ‘low’—as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating.Yet that very act of exclusion was constitutive of its identity. The low was internalized under the sign of negation and disgust” (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ], ). . Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London:Verso, ), .The quotation is a citation from Walter Benjamin. See also Homi K. Bhabha’s articulation of the role of the spaces of liminality and hybridity in the formation of national consciousness in “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, ), – . . Michael Bourdaghs,“Disease of Nationalism, Empire of Hygiene,” positions , no.  (): . . Oguma Eiji, “Nihonjin” no kyokai: Okinawa, Ainu, Taiwan, Chosen shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undo made (The Borderlines of the Japanese: Okinawa,Ainu,Taiwan, and Korea from Colonial Rule to the Reversion Movement) (Tokyo: Shinyosha, ). . Kristeva, Powers of Horror, . . Suga, Tantei no kuritikku, . . Komori, Kozo to shite no katari, . .Yokomitsu Riichi, “Kakikata soshi jo” (Preface to A Book on Writing), in TYRZ :.

Notes



. Mapping the Space of Mass Culture: Kawabata Yasunari’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa . In translating the title of Kawabata’s work, I follow Edward Seidensticker in Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . . Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), . . Mikhail Bakhtin writes that in carnival, the “familiar language of the marketplace became a reservoir in which various speech patterns excluded from official intercourse could freely accumulate” (Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ], ). . Miriam Silverberg, “Constructing a New Cultural History of Prewar Japan,” boundary  , no.  (): . Silverberg has also explored the political and social significance of mass culture, especially in relation to gender representations, in “The Modern Girl as Militant,” in Recreating Japanese Women, –, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), –, and “The Cafe Waitress Serving Modern Japan,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), –. . Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke,“Geijutsu ni okeru Reality ni tsuite” (On Reality in Art), in Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke bungei hyoron zenshu (The Collected Literary Criticism of Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke), vol.  (Tokyo: Bunsendo shoten, ),  (hereafter cited as HHBHZ). Similarly, Oya Soichi asserted that modernism marked the entrance of bourgeois culture into a period of decadence and that it “begins with the destruction of the traditional standard in every area of life” (Modan so to modan so [The Modern Class and Aspects of the Modern] [Tokyo: Taihokaku shobo, ], –). He also noted that “destruction is the necessary requirement for progress” (). . Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, “Gendai no bungaku wa doko e yuku” (The Direction of Contemporary Literature), in HHBHZ :. . Ibid., . .Writing on the future outlook for literature in , Oya claimed: “On the one hand, literature will be influenced by the other artistic forms at the pinnacle of machine civilization, such as cinema, radio, and television, while on the other hand, it will be led by the highly developed print capitalism and the proletarian journalism that stand in opposition to it. Literature itself is on the verge of revealing a new historical development” (Modan so to modan so, ). See also Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, “Television daigaku” (Television University), in HHBHZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Bunsendo shoten, ), –.



Notes

. Hirano Ken, “Keishikishugi bungaku ronso” (The Formalist Literary Debate), in Hirano Ken zenshu (The Complete Works of Hirano Ken), vol.  (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), . . Kobayashi Hideo at one point compared Nakagawa’s theory of literary form with Marx’s analysis of the commodity form (“Ashiru to kame no ko” [Achilles and the Tortoise], in Kobayashi Hideo zenshu [The Complete Works of Kobayashi Hideo], vol.  [Tokyo: Shinchosha, ], –). .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Yuibutsuronteki bungakuron ni tsuite” (On the Materialist Theory of Literature), in Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zenshu (Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Yokomitsu Riichi), vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), . . Kawabata Yasunari,“Bungei jihyo” (Literary Review), in Kawabata Yasunari zenshu (The Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari), vol.  (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ),  (hereafter cited as KYZ). .Years later, Kawabata explained how he had perceived his relationship to the Bungei jidai group:“During the Bungei jidai period, I did try to press myself to be a New Sensationist.Yet I always had self-doubts as to whether I had a New Sensationist talent in the manner, for example, of Yokomitsu or Nakagawa Yoichi, or even Inagaki Taruho” (“Shinkankakuha” [The New Sensationists], in KYZ, vol.  [Tokyo: Shinchosha, ], ). . Kawabata Yasunari, Asakusa Kurenaidan (Scarlet Gang of Asakusa) (Tokyo: Senshinsha, ) [facsimile ed. (Tokyo: Kindai bungakukan, ), ] (hereafter cited as AK).The work, however, makes only this one mention of the script. . Kawabata Yasunari, “Asakusa Kurenaidan zokko yokoku” (Preview of the Sequel to Asakusa Kurenaidan), in KYZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), . On Kawabata’s use of montage, see Tsukimura Reiko, “Shuhojo kara mita Asakusa Kurenaidan” (Asakusa Kurenaidan Seen from the Perspective of Technique), in Jitsuzon no kasho, Kawabata Yasunari kenkyu sosho (The Semblance of Existence, Kawabata Yasunari Research Series), vol. , ed. Kawabata bungaku kenkyukai (Tokyo: Kyoiku shuppan sentaa, ), –. . Miriam Silverberg, “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity,” Journal of Asian Studies , no.  (): –. . Unno Hiroshi, Modan toshi Tokyo: Nihon no nijunendai (Modern City Tokyo: Japan’s s) (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, ), . . Kawabata Yasunari, “Asakusa Kurenaidan ni tsuite” (On Asakusa Kurenaidan), in KYZ :. . Kawabata,“Asakusa Kurenaidan zokko yokoku,” . . Ibid., . . Kawabata later wrote that his work “became an advertisement for the Casino Folies and brought about the flourishing of the Aquarium revue; it was even the origin of the age of the Asakusa revue. It made the

Notes



young star Umezono Ryuko famous. In any case, that Scarlet Gang of Asakusa created an ‘Asakusa boom’ at that time was an unforeseen effect of my work. Just as many young people read ‘The Dancing Girl of Izu’ and traveled over the Amagi Pass, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa drew many people to Asakusa” (“Asakusa Kurenaidan ni tsuite,”). .The Casino Folies opened as “Japan’s first revue theater” on July , , on the second floor of the Aquarium in Asakusa’s Fourth Ward but closed two months later from lack of business. It reopened at the end of November the same year (the event that Kawabata refers to in the first mention) and, by the end of the month, was enjoying great popularity, attributed to Kawabata’s “advertising,” as he referred to it. (There was also a rumor that the dancers dropped their drawers on Fridays.) The program included comic sketches and plays, song and dance routines—later they even performed a version of Asakusa Kurenaidan itself. Kawabata wrote the introduction to the collection of Casino Folies scripts (which included Shimaki Ryuzo’s version of Taiyo no nai machi). See Zako Jun, Enko wa itsumo modan datta (The “Enko” Were Always Modern) (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, ), –. On Kawabata’s relationship with the performers, see Mochizuki Yuko, “Kurenaidan no ano koro” (Around the Time of the Kurenaidan), in Asakusa, ed.Takami Jun (Tokyo: Shueisha, ), –. . Kawabata Yasunari, “Asakusa Kurenaidan no koto” (On Asakusa Kurenaidan), in KYZ :. . According to Walter Benjamin,“On the other hand, we recognize that with the full control of the middle class, which has the press as one of its most important instruments in fully developed capitalism, there emerges a form of communication which, no matter how far back its origin may lie, never before influenced the epic form in a decisive way. But now it does exert such an influence.And it turns out that it confronts storytelling as no less of a stranger than did the novel, but in a more menacing way, and that it also brings about a crisis in the novel.This new form of communication is information” (“The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, ], ). . Oya, Modan so to modan so, . . Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, “Shohin to shite no kindai shosetsu” (The Modern Novel as Commodity), in Bungaku riron no shomondai (Problematics of Literary Theory) (Tokyo: Chikura shobo, ), –) [facsimile ed.: Kindai bungei hyoron sosho, vol.  (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, )].Yoshiyuki Eisuke once boasted that the “aesthetic school” (geijutsuha) writers had succeeded in affixing a commodity value to literature (quoted in Kubota Masafumi, Showa bungaku shiron [On Showa Literary History] [Tokyo: Kodansha, ], –). . Kawabata, “Asakusa Kurenaidan zokko yokoku,” . Kawabata writes that he was able to use only about a tenth or even a twentieth of his notebooks.



Notes

. Soeda Azenbo, in fact, had written that there were no department stores there because Asakusa itself constituted a massive department store (Asakusa teiryuki [Record of Underground Asakusa] [Tokyo: Kindai seikatsusha, ], ). . Maeda Ai, Toshi kukan no naka no bungaku (Literature in the Space of the City), vol.  of Maeda Ai chosakushu (The Collected Writings of Maeda Ai) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ), . . Ozeki Kazuhiro, “Asakusa Kurenaidan aruiwa onna no Asakusa” (Asakusa Kurenaidan, or the Woman’s Asakusa), Genbun tonso  (): . . Chiba Nobuo, Eiga to Tanizaki (The Movies and Tanizaki) (Tokyo: Seiabo, ), . . Kawabata Yasunari, ”Kaizoshaban Kawabata Yasunari senshu atogaki” (Afterwords to the Kaizosha Edition of Selected Works by Kawabata Yasunari), in KYZ :. . Ireneusz Opacki,“Royal Genres,” in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Harlow, Eng.: Longman, ), . . The notion of modernism as disintegration of novel form is also seen in James Joyce’s Ulysses and André Gide’s The Counterfeiters. On the impact of Joyce, Kawabata wrote that “at one point I bought the original of Joyce and compared the translation with the original and even tried to copy it a little, but in the end there was no great influence” (“Sakka ni kiku” [Interview with an Author], in KYZ :). . See Ota Suzuko’s analysis of the two narrators in “Asakusa Kurenaidan no katari” (The Narration of Asakusa Kurenaidan), Gakuen, January , –. . Ibid., . . Hatori Kazuei, “Kawabata Yasunari ‘Asakusa-mono’ o megutte” (On Kawabata Yasunari’s Asakusa Works), Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyozai no kenkyu, August , . . Odagiri Susumu, for example, lists “The Dancing Girl of Izu,” together with Mushanokoji Saneatsu’s Yujo (Friendship) and Natsume Soseki’s Botchan, as one of the most widely read and loved works of modern Japanese literature (“Kaisetsu” [Commentary], in Mushanokoji Saneatsu zenshu [The Complete Works of Mushanokoji Saneatsu], vol.  [Tokyo: Shogakkan, ], ). Other works in the series include “Izu no kaeri” (The Return from Izu, ) and “Onsenba no koto” (Of the Hot Springs, ). . Kawabata Yasunari,“The Dancing Girl of Izu,” in The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories, trans. J. Martin Holman (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, ), . . As one example, see Ito Sei,“Kawabata Yasunari no geijutsu” (The Art of Kawabata Yasunari, ), in Ito Sei zenshu (The Complete Works of Ito Sei), vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo, ), –. . Hatori also points out that Kawabata’s Asakusa stories are specifically grounded in the actual locale, whereas his Izu stories make virtually

Notes

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no references to specific place-names (“Kawabata Yasunari ‘Asakusamono’ o megutte,” ). . Kinugasa Teinosuke, Waga eiga no seishun (My Cinematic Youth) (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, ), . .Vlada Petric, “A Page of Madness: A Neglected Masterpiece of the Silent Cinema,” Film Criticism , no.  (): –. See also James Peterson,“A War of Utter Rebellion: Kinugasa’s Page of Madness and the Japanese Avant-Garde of the s,” Cinema Journal , no.  (): –.The mixture of the objective (audience perspective) and the subjective (inmate’s perspective) is highlighted at the beginning of the film, as indicated by the opening lines of the screenplay:“Night.The roof of a mental hospital. A lightning rod. Downpour. Lightning. On a flowery stage a flowery dancer dances. In front of the stage steel bars appear. Jail cell bars. The flowery stage gradually changes into a sickroom at the mental hospital.The dancer’s flowery costume also gradually changes into the clothing of a madwoman. A crazed dancer dances crazily” (Kurutta ichipeiji, in KYZ, vol.  [Tokyo: Shinchosha, ], ). . Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), . .Viktor Shklovsky,“Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), . For an analysis of the distinction between storytelling and the modern novel, see also Benjamin:“What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature—the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella—is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it.This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.The novelist has isolated himself.The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others” (“The Storyteller,” ). . Kawabata Yasunari,“Yukiguni ni tsuite” (On Snow Country), in KYZ :. . Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ),  (italics in original). . Kawabata Yasunari,“Asakusa,” in KYZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), . . Kobayashi Hideo,“Fiction Studies, ,” in Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, –, ed. and trans. Paul Anderer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), .



Notes

. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing:Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ), –. . Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. . Kawabata Yasunari, “Boku no Asakusa chizu” (My Map of Asakusa), in KYZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), .This point is also made by Henry Smith, who compares Kawabata’s city to Kafu’s and notes that “Kawabata’s descriptions of the physical city ring with a sensuous appreciation of the hard, cutting qualities of the steel and concrete that identified reconstructed Tokyo, an aesthetic that echoes the imagery of sharpness in the Edokko-like bravura of the gang members themselves” (“Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought Until ,” Journal of Japanese Studies , no.  []: ). . Saida Masanori,“Sabetsu no shukuzu to shite no Asakusa” (Asakusa as Microcosm of Discrimination), Gendai no me, July , . . Paul Waley writes:“Asakusa now lay directly between the houses of the pleasure-loving citizens of Edo and the one place where they were officially allowed to indulge in one sort of pleasure” (Tokyo Now and Then [New York:Weatherhill, ], ). . Waley provides a cogent overview of the history of Asakusa: “Asakusa’s roots are planted in the extravagant, escapist, but dangerous soil of grudgingly licensed but barely tolerated entertainment in the Edo period” (ibid., ). . Quoted in ibid., . . Edward C. Seidensticker, Low City, High City (Tokyo:Tuttle, ), . . Hashizume Shinya,“Panoramakanko” (On the Panorama Hall), in Meiji no meikyu toshi (The Labyrinthine Cities of Meiji) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, ), –. . According to Walter Benjamin, “Before the movie had begun to create its public, pictures that were no longer immobile captivated an assembled audience in the so-called Kaiserpanorama. Here the public assembled before a screen into which stereoscopes were mounted, one to each beholder. By a mechanical process individual pictures appeared briefly before the stereoscopes, then made way for others” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ). Jonathan Crary discusses the significance of the panorama in the development of modern techniques of observation:“The circular or semicircular panorama painting clearly broke with the localized point of view of perspective painting or the camera obscura, allowing the spectator an ambulatory ubiquity. One was compelled at the least to turn one’s head (and eyes) to see the entire work” (Techniques of the Observer [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ], ).

Notes

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. Tamura Eitaro, Asakusa Yoshiwara Sumidagawa (Tokyo:Yuzankaku, ), . See also SatoTadao, Nihon eigashi (History of Japanese Cinema), vol.  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ), . . Hashizume Shinya, “Sezoku no to no tanjo” (The Birth of a Worldly Tower), in Meiji meikyu toshi, –. . Maeda Ai, “Akutagawa to Asakusa” (Akutagawa and Asakusa), in Shin bungei dokuhon:Akutagawa Ryunosuke (New Literary Reader:Akutagawa Ryunosuke) (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), –. On the definition of “phantasmagoria,” see Crary, Techniques of the Observer, –; and Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .This gesture is found, for example, in Uno Koji’s “Dreaming Room,” in which artificial structures appear as illusions of nature.The story revolves around the narrator’s placement of an apparatus in the middle of a secret room that projects images of people and of nature onto the walls—in effect, a type of miniaturized panorama. See Elaine Gerbert’s analysis of Uno’s story in “Space and Aesthetic Imagination in Some Taisho Writings,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, ed. Sharon A. Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, ), –. .Tanizaki Jun’ichiro,“The Secret,” trans.Anthony Hood Chambers, in New Leaves: Studies and Translations in Honor of Edward Seidensticker, ed. Aileen Gatten and Anthony Hood Chambers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, ), . . Edogawa Rampo, “The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture,” in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, trans. James B. Harris (Tokyo:Tuttle, ), . . See Maeda’s analysis of Akutagawa’s work in “Akutagawa to Asakusa.” Among other literary depictions of Asakusa, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Kojin (Mermaid, ), set during the age of “Asakusa opera,” is an important precursor to Kawabata’s work. Kawabata’s work itself had an impact on other writers, among them Hori Tatsuo (“Suizokukan” [The Aquarium]) and Takeda Rintaro (“Asakusa, All Too Asakusa-esque” and “Nihon sanmon opera” [Japanese Three-Penny Opera, ]). . Kawabata,“Odoriko to ikokujin no haha” (The Dancing Girl and Her Foreign Mother), in KYZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), . . Maeda, Toshi kukan no naka no bungaku, . In “Tokyo as an Idea,” Smith also links the novel to theater, noting that the characters of the work metamorphose “from one calling and guise to another in a manner reminiscent of Edo theatre” ().The concept of “performativity” is taken from Judith Butler’s account of the production and regulation of gendered subjectivity in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, ). For Butler, the “performance” of gendered subjectivity counters the conception of biological determinism, and at the same time takes place within the constraint of disciplining and regulatory norms.Thus



Notes

she writes that “performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject;this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject.This iterability implies that ‘performance’is not a singular ‘act’or event,but a ritualized production,a ritual reiterated under and through constraint,under and through the force of prohibition and taboo” (, italics in original). . Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, . .Timothy Brennan,“The National Longing for Form,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, ),  (italics in original). . See, for example, Hirotsu Kazuo, Dojidai no sakka tachi (My Contemporaries) (Tokyo: Iwanami bunko, ), . . As Donald Keene points out, several critics have also been fooled into thinking that Yumiko and Akiko represent two different characters (Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era [New York: Holt, ], ). . Siegfried Kracauer,“The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed.Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . . Ibid.,  (italics in original). . Ibid., . . Kawabata Yasunari,“Koji no kanjo” (Sentiments of an Orphan), in KYZ :, quoted in Suzuki Haruo, “Asakusa Kurenaidan,” in Kawabata Yasunari sakuhin kenkyu (Research on the Works of Kawabata Yasunari), ed. Hasegawa Izumi (Tokyo:Yagi shoten, ), . . The motif of the gender shift is also present in another story by Kawabata,“The Japanese Girl Anna” (Nihonjin Anna), a short work about a Russian performer in Asakusa named Anna (a character who also appears in Scarlet Gang of Asakusa). It describes a transformation not only in gender—Anna appears as a boy in the last scene—but in national identification as well. “I’m not Anna,” he says at the end of the story. “I’m Japanese” (AK, ). As mentioned earlier, Asakusa also serves as context for cross-dressing in Tanizaki’s “The Secret,” in which the transformation is also tied to a shift in cultural codes from the Western male dress to the Japanese women’s clothing and makeup. In these cases, then, gender is explicitly tied to national and cultural codes of subjectivity. The consciousness of Asakusa as an intersection between native and foreign culture, as well as between premodern and modern, may have provided the context for the use of this site to frame such narratives of gendered and cultural shifts. Another story set in Asakusa, Hori Tatsuo’s “The Aquarium” (Suizokukan), also revolves around the theme of cross-dressing. . Roy Starrs, Soundings in Time:The Fictive Art of Kawabata Yasunari (Richmond, Eng.: Curzon Press, Japan Library, ), .

Notes

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. Kawabata Yasunari,“Izu no odoriko” (The Dancing Girl of Izu), in KYZ :, , , . In “Bungakuteki jijoden” (Literary Autobiography), Kawabata writes:“Asakusa, rather than Ginza, the slums, rather than neighborhoods of the rich, the crowd of factory girls at a tobacco plant, rather than schoolgirls, are more lyrical to me. I am drawn to unclean beauty” (KYZ :). . Okaniwa Noboru, Sei no yugami ni utsuru mono (That Which Appears in the Distortion of Sex) (Tokyo:Aohyo shobo, ), –. I am grateful to Indra Levy for this reference. . Matsui Toru,“Furosha no rekishi to ari no machi” (The History of the Homeless and the City of Ants), in Asakusa, ed.Takami, –. See also Shiomi Senichiro, Shiryo Asakusa Danzaemon (Asakusa Danzaemon Materials) (Tokyo: Hihyosha, ). . Kawabata Yasunari, “Asakusa no shimai” (Sisters of Asakusa), in KYZ, vol.  (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), , quoted in Okaniwa, Sei no yugami ni utsuru mono, . . Kawabata Yasunari,“Asakusa katsudogai” (Asakusa Film District), in KYZ : . . Kawabata Yasunari,“Asakusa matsuri” (Asakusa Festival), in Asakusa Kurenaidan / Asakusa matsuri (Tokyo: Kodansha, ), . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . .The version published in  did not open immediately with the border tunnel scene; rather, it occurs after a few paragraphs. . Keene, Dawn to the West, –.

. Negations of Genre: Hayashi Fumiko’s Nomadic Writing . Kobayashi Hideo surveyed the organization of the contemporary literary world according to different critical discourses, or “ideological designs,” including Marxism, New Sensationism, aestheticism, and popular fiction.The theme of the essay reflects the growing fragmentation and expansion of the literary marketplace during the s, as well as the increasingly important role of criticism in shaping the consumption and reception of literary production. In this context, “Multiple Designs” is presented as a questioning of any external or artificial divisions of literature. It is, in other words, a self-reflective critique of the role of criticism. Kobayashi works through each of the different discourses, expressing his skepticism of any claim to account for literary practice through an entirely ideological framework. His essay ends with the following ironic statement:“It was not at all my intention to belittle those designs by suggesting some alternative. It is just that not having too much faith in any one design, I have tried to believe equally in all of them” (“Multiple

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Notes

Designs,” in Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, –, ed. and trans. Paul Anderer [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ], ). . Paul Anderer, Introduction to Literature of the Lost Home, . For example, Kobayashi writes that Baudelaire’s criticism is similar to his poetry. In Baudelaire’s criticism, Kobayashi sees “only his dreams that have taken the form of an unparalleled passion.This is justifiably called criticism; it could as well be called a soliloquy. Some have tried variously to separate criticism and self-consciousness. But the magical power of Baudelaire’s criticism derives from his awareness that to write criticism is to make oneself conscious.To say that the subject of criticism is the self and the other is to say there is but a single subject, not two. For is not criticism finally the skeptical narration of our dreams?” (). For this reason, Kobayashi has been seen, by Eto Jun and others, as Japan’s first self-conscious literary critic, one who helped articulate the validity and value of literary criticism as a form of cultural practice. He does so, paradoxically, by undermining its borders, by questioning the distinction between literary and critical practice. .André Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York:Vintage Books, ), . . In “Multiple Designs,” Kobayashi criticizes the New Sensationist writers, perceiving them as a “sign of the debilitation of literature” devoid of any ideas (Literature of the Lost Home, ). . The title Horoki has been translated variously as Vagabond’s Tale, Vagabond’s Song, and Diary of a Vagabond. Here I follow Miriam Silverberg in using Tales of Wandering to retain the important sense of horo (“The Modern Girl as Militant,” in Recreating Japanese Women, –, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ], ). For a complete translation of the first volume of Hayashi’s work, see “Diary of a Vagabond,” trans. Joan E. Ericson, in Ericson, Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, ), –. . In , Ogata Akiko noted that although Tales of Wandering is considered one of Hayashi’s representative works (together with Drifting Clouds [Ukigumo]), the basic textual research on the work had yet to be undertaken (“Kaisetsu” [Commentary], in Kindai joryu bungaku [Modern Women’s Literature], ed. Nihon bungaku kenkyu shiryo kankokai [Tokyo: Yuseido ], ). .Takami Jun, Showa bungaku seisuishi (The Rise and Fall of Showa Literature), vol.  (Tokyo: Bungei shunju, ), . . Ogata Akiko,“Horoki kaisetsu,” in Sakka no jiden : Hayashi Fumiko (Author’s Autobiographies : Hayashi Fumiko), ed. Ogata Akiko (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentaa, ), . . Takenishi Hiroko, “Hayashi Fumiko shu kaisetsu”(Commentary on Selected Works of Hayashi Fumiko), in Kindai joryu bungaku, .

Notes

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. See also Hirano Ken’s discussion of Showa literature in Showa bungakushi (History of Showa Literature), vol.  of Hirano Ken zenshu (The Complete Works of Hirano Ken) (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), –. . Tales of Wandering always existed at the fringes of institutionalized proletarian literature. Hayashi herself, even though she was arrested as a Communist sympathizer in the early s, was not a member of the party or of any of the literary or artistic institutions/groups associated with the Marxist literary movement. According to Hirabayashi Taiko, Hayashi had always tried to distance herself from organized politics. Her introduction to politicized literary practice had been mediated by the anarchist poets with whom she associated soon after her arrival in Tokyo, including Hagiwara Kyojiro, Tsuboi Shigeji, and Tsuji Jun. Hirabayashi writes that this general atmosphere of anarchism was an important context that allowed Hayashi to find her voice as a poet, allowing her an outlet to express her general feelings of frustration with society. Hirabayashi notes that Hayashi disliked the anarchist ideology but that her encounter with this group fixed the direction of her life, nurturing her sense of lonely resistance that she had always held inside her. It helped give voice to her own spirit of rebellion and give her confidence in her poetic abilities. . In Theory of Literature, René Wellek and Austin Warren define the broad conception of genre as follows: “Genre should be conceived, we think, as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (specific metre or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose—more crudely, subject and audience)” (quoted in Vincent B. Leitch,“[De]Coding [Generic] Discourse,” Genre , no.  []: ). On literature as the genre of genre, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute:The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, ). . Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, ), . . On questions of gender and genre, see Mary Eagleton,“Genre and Gender,” in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Harlow, Eng.: Longman, ), –. For a response to Derrida’s essay, see Mary Jacobus, “The Law of/and Gender,” Diacritics  (): –. . Ericson, Be a Woman, –. . Ibid., . . Nakamura Mitsuo, “Hayashi Fumiko ron” (On Hayashi Fumiko), in Kindai joryu bungaku, . . Noriko Mizuta discusses the significance of wandering and the “institution of womanhood” in Hayashi’s writings:“The heroines of both Vagabond’s Song and Drifting Clouds are dislocated women, and their drifting signifies that they do not follow the publicly acknowledged roles of women—as wife and mother—within the socially and legally guaranteed

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Notes

space of women: the home” (“In Search of a Lost Paradise,” in The Woman’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing, ed. Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A.Walker [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ], ). Also see Mizuta Noriko and Iwabuchi Hiroko, “Hayashi Fumiko no miryoku” (The Appeal of Hayashi Fumiko), Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kansho , no.  (): –. . Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, ),  (italics in original). . Quoted in Mori Eiichi, Hayashi Fumiko no keisei (The Formation of Hayashi Fumiko) (Tokyo:Yuseido, ), . . Ogata Akiko, Nyonin geijutsu no sekai (The World of Nyonin geijutsu) (Tokyo: Domesu shuppan, ), . Ogata notes, however, that after the appearance of her travelogue “Yukai naru chizu” (A Pleasurable Map) in , Hayashi abruptly stopped writing for the journal.The information on the publication history relies in part on Ogata,“Horoki kaisetsu.” . Hirabayashi Taiko, Hayashi Fumiko (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), , –. . Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –. . Ericson, Be a Woman, ; Nakagawa Shigemi, Katarikakeru kioku (Speakable Memories) (Tokyo: Ozawa shoten, ), –. Nakagawa cites a round-table discussion in a special issue of Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kansho (December ) in which women writers are excluded from the realm of the I-novel. He also notes that Tales of Wandering was one of only three texts written by women that was listed in an appendix to the issue. . On the role of “mood” in Shiga Naoya, see Karatani Kojin, “Watakushi shosetsu no ryogisei” (The Duality of the I-Novel), in Imi to iu yamai (The Illness Called Meaning) (Tokyo: Kodansha, ). . Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishosetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), . .Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), –. . Susanna Fessler, Wandering Heart:The Work and Method of Hayashi Fumiko (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), –. . Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, ), . . In its most radical form, the I-novel also problematized the limits of a work of fiction. The writings of, say, Uno Koji’s “mountain” series are fragments of a larger narrative that is never completed because it is the narrative of the author’s life, the end of which cannot be represented in writing. In its most conventional aspect, the I-novel also retains the concept of an external and authoritative referent, a life that is knowable, representable through language, and grasped in its immediacy.This is, accord-

Notes

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ing to Tomi Suzuki, a function of the idea of the I-novel. It can also be seen in the ideology of “colloquial language.” . Lejeune, On Autobiography, . Compare Fowler’s statement that the I-novel maintains “no distinction between the narrated and the narrating subject” (Rhetoric of Confession, ). . Ericson notes that for the Kaizosha edition, Hayashi removed many of the references to her own name that had existed in the original publication (Be a Woman, ). . Derrida,“Law of Genre,” –. . Stephen Bretzius,“Synchronic Theory and Absolutism: Et tu, Brute? De Man’s Wartime Writings,” in Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism, ed.Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ),  (italics in original). . In this context, see also Homi K. Bhabha’s discussion of subjectivity existing in the space between the “narrator” and the “narrated”:“The subject is graspable only in the passage between telling/told, between ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else,’ and in this double scene the very condition of cultural knowledge is the alienation of the subject” (“DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha [London: Routledge, ], ). . Jonathan Culler, “Deconstruction and the Lyric,” in Deconstruction Is/in America:A New Sense of the Political, ed.Ansel Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, ), . Culler attributes this formulation to Northrop Frye. . Hayashi Fumiko, Horoki (Tokyo: Kaizosha, ) [facsimile ed. (Tokyo: Nihon kindai bungakukan, ), –]. .Jacobus,“Law of/and Gender,”–;Leitch,“(De)Coding (Generic) Discourse,” . . Akutagawa Ryunosuke, “Bungei ippanron” (A General Theory of Literature), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu (The Complete Works of Akutagawa Ryunosuke), vol.  (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ), . .Tayama Katai,“The Quilt,” in The Quilt and Other Stories by Tayama Katai, trans. Kenneth G. Henshall (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, ), –. . Maeda Ai, Toshi kukan no naka no bungaku (Literature in the Space of the City), vol.  of Maeda Ai chosakushu (The Collected Writings of Maeda Ai) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, ). . Karatani Kojin wrote that the impact of Katai’s The Quilt was based not only on the fact that it dealt with sexual desire but, more important, that it represents a certain type of sexuality generated by repression. Following Michel Foucault’s analysis of the history of sexuality, Karatani decided that the demand to repress sexuality (a demand mediated by the impact of Christianity) necessitated a “surveillance” of one’s own desire, which became the basis for the demarcation of interiority (Origins of

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Notes

Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Bary [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ], –). In this sense, the interiority of confessional fiction is the product of a certain repression. . The storehouse image is used in Uno’s first major work, “In the Storehouse” (Kura no naka, ). The work was originally entitled “In the Quilt” (Futon no naka) and can perhaps be read as parody of Katai’s work. The story behind the writing of the work and the change in the title are discussed by Hirotsu Kazuo, “‘Kura no naka’ monogatari” (The Story of “In the Storehouse”), in Dojidai no sakka tachi (My Contemporaries) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, ), –. In Uno’s story, the pawn shop’s storehouse, which contains the narrator’s old articles of clothing, is presented as a repository of his past. It contains mnemonic traces attached to each piece of clothing, which the narrator reviews one by one. . Silverberg,“Modern Girl as Militant,” , and “The Cafe Waitress Serving Modern Japan,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), . . Silverberg,“Modern Girl as Militant,” . . Hayashi writes that “by now I’m terrified of wandering from man to man” (Horoki, ), quoted in Hirabayashi, Hayashi Fumiko, . . Mary Pickford also is the reference point for Tanizaki’s Naomi. . In this context, see Traise Yamamoto’s analysis of nisei women’s autobiographies as an attempt to negotiate the gap between an externally imposed subjectivity and an internal sense of self:“Already aware of the disjunction between how she sees herself and how she is seen, the Japanese American autobiographer must also come to terms with the necessary disjunction between the ‘I’ who writes and the ‘I’ who is written about.These two selves continually negotiate between themselves across the generic limitations of the autobiographical form, a form traditionally neither defined by marginalized subjects nor defined with them in mind” (Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ], –). . According to Hirabayashi, the model for this character was Tanabe Wakao, a shingeki actor who had worked with Matsui Sumako’s Geijutsu theatrical group (Hayashi Fumiko, ). Hayashi writes that Tanabe introduced her to many poets. . Eagleton,“Gender and Genre,” ; Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –. .This is a point developed by Elaine Gerbert in “Space and Aesthetic Imagination in Some Taisho Writings,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, –, ed. Sharon A. Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, ), –. . Margit Nagy,“Middle-Class Working Women During the Interwar

Notes

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Years,” in Recreating Japanese Women, ed. Bernstein, –. Nagy writes that in the s, economic need and increased opportunities led more and more women into the workforce, also leading to growing anxiety among social commentators about the stability of families and the changing roles of women. . Nishikawa Yuko, Kashiya to mochi-ie no bungakushi (The Literary History of Rented Homes and a Home of One’s Own) (Tokyo: Sanseido, ). . Hayashi’s depiction of city space is similar to that found in New Sensationist writers. On Yokomitsu’s influence on Hayashi’s writing, see Fessler, Wandering Heart, –. . Hayashi Fumiko, Zoku horoki (Tokyo: Kaizosha, ) [facsimile ed. (Tokyo:Yumani shobo, ), ]. . Hirabayashi, Hayashi Fumiko, . . Nakazawa Kei, “Kaisetsu: Taishu no seiyo” (The West of the Masses), in Hayashi Fumiko, Seihin no sho,Yaneura no isu (The Book of Honorable Poverty,The Chair in the Attic) (Tokyo: Kodansha, ), . . Silverberg,“Cafe Waitress Serving Modern Japan,” . . Ibid.,  (italics in original). . Quoted in Takenishi Hiroko, “Nihon bungaku zenshu Hayashi Fumiko Shu kaisetsu” (Commentary on Selected Writings of Hayashi Fumiko), in Kindai joryu bungaku, . . Hayashi later wrote that reading Tales of Wandering was like “looking at the vomit of my youth” (quoted in Takami, Showa bungaku seisuishi, :).

. A Phantasmatic Return:Yokomitsu Riichi’s Melancholic Nationalism . Hagiwara Sakutaro, “Nihon e no kaiki” (The Return to Japan), in Showa hihyo taikei (Survey of Showa Criticism), vol. , ed. Muramatsu Takeshi (Tokyo: Bancho shobo, ), . . Ibid., . . Ibid., –. I am grateful to Michael Bourdaghs for his insight into the role of irony in the functioning of ideology. . Kevin Michael Doak, Dreams of Difference:The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), . . Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). H. D. Harootunian makes a strong argument for the coextensiveness of modernism and fascism in Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), which appeared as I was completing this book. In his analysis of Yokomitsu, Gregory Golley



Notes

also argues for continuity between the Yokomitsu of the s and s: “Despite his self-proclaimed stylistic ‘conversion’ (tenko) in , the work Yokomitsu produced during that decade, even his involvement with the reactionary ‘cultural renaissance’ (bungei fukko), represents not a transformation, but a fulfillment of a vision that was already operating, however, subtly, in the pseudo-scientific ruminations of the late s” (“Voices in the Machine:Technology and Japanese Literary Modernism” [Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, ], ). . Ryoshu literally means “the melancholy of travel.” In translating the title as Melancholy Journey, I follow Chia-ning Chang in his translation of Kato Shuichi’s A Sheep’s Song:A Writer’s Reminiscences of Japan and the World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), . . Odagiri Hideo,“Bungaku ni okeru senso sekinin no tsuikyu” (The Pursuit of War Responsibility in Literature), Shin Nihon bungaku , no.  (): –. For an analysis of the postwar discussion of war responsibility, see Victor Koschmann, “Victimization and the Writerly Subject: Writers’War Responsibility in Early Postwar Japan,” Tamkang Review , nos. – (): –. In his autobiography, Kato recounts an episode in which a group of students at the First Higher School in Tokyo invited Yokomitsu to give a talk at the campus in Komaba and then fiercely attacked his discourse on the conflict between East and West and the need to return to the tradition of Japanese literature (Sheep’s Song, –). . On Hayashi’s activity as a war correspondent, see Susanna Fessler, Wandering Heart:The Work and Method of Hayashi Fumiko (Albany:State University of New York Press, ), –; and Nakagawa Shigemi, Katarikakeru kioku (Speakable Memories) (Tokyo:Ozawa shoten,),–. . Writing in memory of Kataoka Teppei, Yokomitsu Riichi once noted that the writer, who died in , was an archetypal figure of Showa literary history: “A founder of the New Sensationist movement, the discoverer of the sensibility of speed, his shift to an activist of dialectical materialism, then a further conversion to a longing for tradition, and to the building of bridges to China.Who else, among the literary figures of the past twenty years, has embodied all of these things in one person?” (“Tenkeijin no shi” [The Death of a Representative Man], in Teihon Yokomitsu Riichi zenshu [Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Yokomitsu Riichi], ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  [Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ],  (hereafter cited as TYRZ ). . For a chilling account of Kobayashi’s murder, see Hashizume Ken, Takiji gyakusatsu (The Slaying of Takiji) (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ). . Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, “Kyodo hikoku doshi ni tsuguru sho” (Joint Statement Offered to Our Fellow Accused), in Showa hihyo taikei (Survey of Showa Criticism), vol. , ed. Muramatsu Takeshi (Tokyo: Bancho shobo, ), –; the text was published in the July  issue of Bungei shunju.

Notes



. Ibid., . . In an essay published in February , Kobayashi Takiji criticized Hayashi Fusao’s novel Youths (Seinen, ) as containing reactionary elements in failing to grasp the political significance of the Meiji Restoration and in positing a realm of “ideals” transcending class (“Uyoku-teki henko no shomondai” [The Problematics of Right-Wing Tendencies], in Showa hihyo taikei :). . On the latter point, see Nakamura Mitsuo,“Tenko sakkaron” (On Writers’ Conversions), in Showa hihyo taikei :–. Nakamura notes the irony that proletarian writers, who had tried more than anyone else to shatter the tradition of the I-novel, were resorting to this confessional form. . Nakajima Eijiro,“Roman-ka no kino” (The Function of Romanticization), Nihon romanha, March ,  (italics in original). . Quoted in Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Kindai no chokoku” (Overcoming Modernity), in Kawakami Tetsutaro, Takeuchi Yoshimi, et al., Kindai no chokoku (Tokyo: Fuzanbo, ), .Takeuchi stated that how one evaluates the role of Bungakukai largely determined one’s view of Showa literature. .Takami Jun, Showa bungaku seisuishi (The Rise and Fall of Showa Literature) (Tokyo: Bungei shunjusha, ), –.Takami quotes Takeda Rintaro’s statement in  that the reason that Bungakukai was founded was as “a rallying of writers against the dark and heavy black clouds that had descended on us following the Manchurian incident” (). At the same time, he notes the view of Nakano Shigeharu and Odagiri Hideo, who saw the journal as a literary reaction against the left and a consolidation of the power of the literary establishment that left no room for resistance (–). Nakano himself was asked to join the group but refused. .Takeuchi,“Kindai no chokoku,” . . Yokomitsu Riichi, “Junsui shosetsu ron” (Theory of the Pure Novel), in TYRZ, ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), –. . Ibid., . See also Doak, Dreams of Difference, . . Miki Kiyoshi,“Fuan no shiso to sono chokoku” (The Discourse of Anxiety and Its Overcoming), in Showa hihyo taikei :. . Kobayashi Hideo,“The Anxiety of Modern Literature,” in Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, –, ed. and trans. Paul Anderer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), . . Ibid. . On the rhetoric of hijoji, see Eizawa Koji, “Dai-To-A kyoeiken” no shiso (The Ideology of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere) (Tokyo: Kodansha, ), –.According to Eizawa, it was particularly after the so-called May  incident, the attempted right-wing coup led by a group of naval officers, that the discourse of crisis first circulated widely ().



Notes

. Miki,“Fuan no shiso to sono chokoku,” . . Ibid., . . For an overview of the impact of psychoanalysis in Japan, see Sone Hiroyoshi, “Furoito no shokai to eikyo: Shinshinrishugi seiritsu no haikei” (The Introduction and Influence of Freud:The Context for the Establishment of New Psychologism), in Showa bungaku no shomondai (The Problematics of Showa Literature), ed. Showa bungaku kenkyukai (Tokyo: Kazama shoin, ), –. . Edogawa Rampo,“J.A. Symonds no hisokanaru jonetsu” (The Secret Passion of J. A. Symonds), Seishinbunseki , nos. , , ,  (): –, –, –, –. .Translations of Proust’s Swann’s Way began appearing in the journal Bungaku (Literature) in late , and in September , Ito, together with Nagamatsu Sadamu and Tsujino Hisanori, began to publish a translation of Ulysses in the journal Shi: Genjitsu (Poetry: Reality), an offshoot of Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics). . Yokomitsu Riichi, “Machine,” trans. Edward C. Seidensticker, in Modern Japanese Stories, ed. Ivan Morris (Tokyo:Tuttle, ), . . Yokomitsu Riichi et al., “Yokomitsu Riichi to daigakusei no zadankai” (A Discussion Between Yokomitsu Riichi and College Students), in TYRZ, ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), . . For example, the following statement by Nakai Masakazu, quoted by Leslie Pincus, can almost be read as a gloss on Yokomitsu’s story. In regard to contemporary society, Nakai writes that “a general and comprehensive concept of existence is absorbed into an immense mechanism no longer accessible to representational synthesis in the mind of a single individual” (Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ], ). . Kawabata Yasunari,“Kugatsu sakuhinhyo” (Review of September’s Works), in Kawabata Yasunari zenshu (The Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari), vol.  (Tokyo: Shinchosha, ), . . Inoue Ken, Yokomitsu Riichi: Hyoden to kenkyu (Yokomitsu Riichi: Critical Biography and Research) (Tokyo: Ofu, ), . . Odagiri Hideo, Odagiri Hideo chosakushu (Selected Writings of Odagiri Hideo), vol.  (Tokyo: Hosei daigaku shuppankyoku, ), –. . The notion of a “peripheral modernism” and the effects of the transplantation of a critique of modernity to the non-West (where modernity itself is associated with the West), is explored by Pincus in her analysis of Kuki Shuzo—another of Heidegger’s Japanese students (Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan, ). .Yasuda Yojuro,“Nihon no hashi” (The Bridges of Japan), in Showa hihyo taikei :. For an extended analysis of this essay, see Alan Tansman,

Notes



“Bridges to Nowhere:Yasuda Yojuro’s Language of Violence and Desire,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies , no.  (): –. . Doak, Dreams of Difference, xl. . Inoue, Yokomitsu Riichi, . . Ibid., . .Yokomitsu Riichi, Oshu kiko (European Travelogue), in TYRZ :. .Yokomitsu wrote:“My second dispatch,‘Paris of Disappointment,’ apparently caused an uproar among Japanese here, but this was not a title that I chose myself. My dispatch was not aimed at describing Paris itself but, rather, at observing honestly the transformations of my psychology, of an individual natural man thrown into this high-class city” (ibid., ). .Yokomitsu Riichi to Yokomitsu Chiyoko,April , , in TYRZ, ed. Hosho Masao et al., vol.  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ), . . Odagiri Hiroko, Yokomitsu Riichi: Hikaku bunkateki kenkyu (Yokomitsu Riichi:A Study in Comparative Cultures) (Tokyo: Nansosha, ), . .Yokomitsu Riichi,“Ryoshu dai-ippen koki” (Afterword to the First Volume of Melancholy Journey), in TYRZ :. .The analysis here is based on Yokomitsu Riichi, Ryoshu, in TYRZ, ed. Hosho Masao et al., vols.  and  (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, ). . Ban Etsu, Yokomitsu Riichi bungaku no seisei (The Formation of Yokomitsu Riichi’s Literature) (Tokyo: Ofu, ), . . Inamura Hiroshi, “Yokomitsu Riichi: Karuchaa shokku no byori” (Yokomitsu Riichi: The Pathology of Culture Shock), in Nihon kindai bungaku kenkyu taisei:Yokomitsu Riichi (Compilation of Research on Modern Japanese Literature:Yokomitsu Riichi), ed. Kamiya Tadataka (Tokyo: Kokusho kankokai, ), –. . William Haver notes: “The historicization which is the work of mourning depends, if it is to be undertaken at all, upon what in the Freudian vocabulary would be called ‘reality testing,’ the witnessing and verification that the corpse is in fact (and in its facticity) nothing but dead meat, the material, abject residue of a cathected object” (The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ], ). . Sigmund Freud,“Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol.  (London: Hogarth Press, ), . . Ibid.,  (italics in original). See also Haver’s discussion of mourning and melancholia in Body of This Death, esp. –. . Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography,Transference,Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, ), . . Quoted in Hanada Toshinori, “Yokomitsu Riichi no senso to heiwa” (Yokomitsu Riichi’s War and Peace), Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyozai no kenkyu , no.  (): .



Notes

.Yokomitsu also writes he had always been told that his own grandfather was a childhood friend of Fukuzawa’s and that his father had come to Tokyo to call on Fukuzawa, only to find that he was abroad (“Koizumi Shinzo, Nisshin senso to Shina jihen o yonde” [Reading Koizumi Shinzo’s Japan-China War and the China Incident], in TYRZ :). . In Gendai bungaku ni arawareta chishikijin no shozo (A Portrait of Intellectuals Appearing in Contemporary Literature, ), Kamei Katsuichiro wrote of Melancholy Journey:“Contemporary Japanese intellectuals are, of course, strangers with regard to the West. But with regard to their own country as well, they are already a type of étranger” (Kamei Katsuichiro zenshu [The Complete Works of Kamei Katsuichiro], vol.  [Tokyo Kodansha, ], ). . Doak, Dreams of Difference, xviii. . H. D. Harootunian,“Overcome by Modernity: Fantasizing Everyday Life and the Discourse on the Social in Interwar Japan,” Parallax, February , , . .This reflects Yokomitsu’s own experience. In Oshu kiko, he wrote: “Three hours until Manzhouli. I got into bed but could not fall asleep. I am looking forward to the way Japan appears to me” (TYRZ :). . Kamiya Tadataka, Yokomitsu Riichi-ron (On Yokomitsu Riichi) (Tokyo: Sobunsha, ), . . In the section of the work written after the war, the title of Tono’s speech was changed to “The New Order” (Shinchitsujo). . For example, his defense of ancient Shinto is based on the fact that it had discovered the principles of mathematics before the West was civilized. In one symbolic scene in a Tokyo garden,Yashiro is reminded of a Monet painting he had seen in Paris:“At the time he had thought it was a landscape he had seen somewhere in Japan, but now in contrast he found himself thinking that it was a landscape he had seen somewhere in Paris” (TYRZ :). . Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), , . . Shimomura Torataro, “Kindai no chokoku no hoko” (The Direction of the Overcoming of Modernity), in Kawakami, Takeuchi, et al., Kindai no chokoku, . . Doak writes, for example, of Yasuda’s attempt to ascribe a “worldiness” to the Japanese Romantics: “The purpose of the Japan Romantic School, he repeats, is to attain the heights of cosmopolitanism (sekaisei) through the construction of a genealogy of Japanese culture” (Dreams of Difference, ).

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Index

Abe Jiro, ,  Abe Tomoji, n abjection, –, –, , n. See also Yokomitsu Riichi: Shanghai: abjection in Adorno,Theodor, n Aeba Takao, , –,  Akita Ujaku, , –n, n Akutagawa Ryunosuke, , ; and aestheticism, ; and the avant-garde, –n; and concept of literature, –, –; and consciousness of modernity, , , ; and cosmopolitanism, , , –, –, ; and cultural identity, , –; and film, , n; and imitation, , ; impact of death of, –, ; and I-novel, –, –, n; and intellectualism, –, ; and language, , , –, n; and madness, –, , ; and modernism, , , , ; overcoming of, , ; and plotless novel, , , –, ; and technology, –, –; use of multiple genres by, –, n works:“Asakusa Park” (Asakusa

koen), , , ;“The Ball” (Butokai), –; Cogwheels (Haguruma), , , –, , ;“The Death of a Believer” (Hokyonin no shi), , ; “The Enlightenment Murder” (Kaika no satsujin), , ; A Fool’s Life (Aru aho no issho), , , –, , , , , ; “General Theory of Literature” (Bungei ippanron), ; “The Husband of the Enlightenment” (Kaika no otto), , –n; Kappa, –, ; “The Legend of St. Christopher” (Kirishitohoro shoninden), ;“Literary, All Too Literary” (Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeiteki na), , , –, –, ;“The Smiles of the Gods” (Kamigami no bisho), , –, , ;“Temptation” (Yuwaku), ,  Althusser, Louis, – Anderer, Paul, , , n, n Anderson, Benedict, n Ando Hiroshi,  anxiety, discourse of, , –,  Aono Suekichi, 



Index

Arishima Takeo, n Asakusa, , , , –; and discrimination, –. See also Kawabata Yasunari: Scarlet Gang of Asakusa autobiography, –, , n Bakhtin, Mikhail, –, –, , –, n Basho. See Matsuo Basho Bathrick, David, n Benjamin,Walter, , , , , n, n, n, n Bhabha, Homi, n, n, n Bourdaghs, Michael, , n Brennan,Timothy, , n Breton, André, n Bretzius, Stephen,  Buck-Morss, Susan,  Bungakukai (journal), –,  bungei fukko. See literary revival Bungei jidai (journal), , – Bungei sensen (journal),  Butler, Judith, , , n, –n Casino Folies, , , , –n, n Cézanne, Paul, ,  Chang, Chia-ning, n Chiba Kameo, – Chiba Nobuo, , n Chikamatsu Shuko, , , – city: experience of, , ; and imperialism, ; representation of, , , , , –, , –, –, –, , –. See also Asakusa; Shanghai; Tokyo Clifford, Nicolas, n, n colonialism, n; consciousness

of, –; discourses of, . See also semicolonialism conversion (tenko), –, n cosmopolitanism, –, , –, , –, , –, . See also Akutagawa Ryunosuke: and cosmopolitanism Crary, Jonathan, n, n Culler, Jonathan, n Dada, ,  de Man, Paul, ,  Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, , , n Derrida, Jacques, , –, ,  Doak, Kevin, , , , n, n Doppo. See Kunikida Doppo Dorsey, James, n Duus, Peter, , , n Eagleton, Mary, n earthquake. See Great Kanto Earthquake Edogawa Rampo, –,  Einstein, Albert,  Eizawa Koji, n empire: Japan’s acquisition of, , , –, , ; representations of, , , , , , . See also imperialism; subjectivity: and empire Ericson, Joan, , n, n Eto Jun, n Eysteinsson, Astradur, n Fanon, Frantz, n February  incident, – Fessler, Susanna, , n, n formalism, –, , , , , –

Index

Foucault, Michel, , n Fowler, Edward, , , n Frankfurt Institute for Social Research,  Freud, Sigmund, , . See also psychoanalysis Fujii, James, , n Fujitake Akira,  Fukuzawa Yukichi,  Funahashi Seiichi,  Futabatei Shimei, ,  genbun itchi, , , –, , n, n, n gender. See subjectivity: and gender genre, , –, . See also Hayashi Fumiko: Tales of Wandering: and genre Gerbert, Elaine, , n, n Gerow, A. A., n Giacometti, Alberto,  Gide, André, –, –, , ,  Golley, Gregory, n, –n Gonda Yasunosuke,  Great Kanto Earthquake, , –, –, , , –, n Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,  Greenberg, Clement, –, –, n, n, n Hagiwara Kyojiro, , n Hagiwara Sakutaro, –,  Harootunian, H. D., , –, , , n, n Hashizume Ken, n Hatori Kazuei, , –n Haver,William, n, n Hayama Michiko,  Hayashi Fumiko, ; childhood of,



, ; and Nyonin geijutsu, n; wartime activity of, , n Tales of Wandering (Horoki), , , ; and autobiography, –, ; cafés in, –; and class, –, ; commodification of the body in, , –; and concept of home (kokyo), , –, ; domesticity in, , –; and gender, , –, –; and genre, , –, ; and Inovel, , , –, ; and New Sensationism, n; poetry in, –, –; popularity of, –, ; and proletarian literature, , , n; prostitution in, , –, –, ; publication history of, , n; representations of city space in, –, –, ; and subjectivity, –, , –,  Hayashi Fusao, –, n Heidegger, Martin, – Hewitt, Andrew, n, n Hibbett, Howard, n Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, , , –, ,  Hirabayashi Taiko, , , , , n, n Hirano Ken, –, , , , n Hirata, Hosea, n Hirato Renkichi, , n Hirotsu Kazuo, n Hori Tatsuo, n, n Horkheimer, Max, n Huyssen, Andreas, n, n, –n, n ideology, –



Index

Ihara Saikaku,  Ikuta Choko, n Imperial Treason incident,  imperialism, –, , , , , –, , , , . See also empire Inoue Ken, n, n Inoue Yoshio,  I-novel (watakushi shosetsu), , –, , , , –, –, , n, -n interiority, –, , , , –, , , – Irigaray, Luce, n Isoda Koichi, ,  Ito Noe,  Ito Sei, n Ivy, Marilyn, ,  Jacobus, Mary, n Jameson, Fredric, – Japanese modernism. See modernism, Japanese Japanese Romanticism (Nihon Romanha), , , , ,  Jinnai Hidenobu,  junbungaku. See pure literature Kafu. See Nagai Kafu Kamei Katsuichiro, , , n Kamiya Tadataka,  Kanbara Tai, , n Kandinsky,Wassily, ,  Kaneko Mitsuharu,  Karaki Junzo, – Karatani Kojin, –, , , , , n, n, n, –n Kataoka Teppei, , n, n, n Katsumoto Seiichiro, ,  Katusha, – Kawabata Yasunari, ; Asakusa sto-

ries of, , –; childhood of, , ; and discrimination, –; and formalism, ; Izu stories of, –, ; and New Sensationism, , , n; palm-of-the-hand stories of,  Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (Asakusa Kurenaidan), , ; and carnival, –; and commodification of literature, ; as map, –; and mass culture, , –, ; mixture of genres in, , –, –, ; narrative form of, –; as newspaper novel, –; and performance, , , n; proper names in, –; representation of Asakusa in, , , , , –, –, ; representation of the city in, –, ; representation of the female body in, –, –; representation of modernity in, –; synopsis of, – other works: Asakusa Festival (Asakusa matsuri), , –; “Crystal Fantasy” (Suisho genso), ;“The Dancing Girl and Her Foreign Mother” (Odoriko to ikokujin no haha), ;“The Dancing Girl of Izu” (Izu no odoriko), –, , , ;“The Japanese Girl Anna” (Nihonjin Anna), n; A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeiji), –, , –, n;“Sentiments of an Orphan” (Koji no kanjo), ;“Sisters of Asakusa” (Asakusa no shimai), –; Snow Country (Yukiguni), , , 

Index

Kawakami Tetsutaro,  Keene, Dennis, , n, n Keene, Donald, , n, n, n Kenyusha, , n Kikuchi Kan,  Kinugasa Teinosuke, – Kobayashi Hideo, , ; on experience of the city, ; on Yokomitsu Riichi,  WORKS:“The Anxiety of Modern Literature” (Gendai bungaku no fuan), –;“Discourse on Fiction of the Self ” (Watakushi shosetsu ron), –, , n;“Literature of the Lost Home” (Kokyo o ushinatta bungaku), –, –, , , , , , , , , n, n;“Multiple Designs” (Samazama naru isho),–, n, n, n Kobayashi Takiji, , n, n Kohl, Stephen, n Komori Yoichi, –, , , n Kon Toko, n Kon Wajiro,  Korea: annexation of, , –, ; independence movement in,  Koreans: attacks on, , , –, , n; representations of, –,  Kracauer, Siegfried, – Kristeva, Julia, –,  Kuki Shuzo, , , n Kume Masao, –, , , n Kunikida Doppo,  Kurahara Korehito,  Lacan, Jacques, 



Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy, –, n, n Larsen, Neil, , n, n Lejeune, Philippe, ,  Levy, Indra, n literary revival (bungei fukko), – literature, concept of, –, , –, , , , . See also Akutagawa Ryunosuke: and concept of literature Loti, Pierre,  Lotman,Yuri,  Maeda Ai, , –, , , ,  Malevich, Kasimir,  Manchurian incident,  Marxism, , . See also modernism, Japanese: and Marxism Marxist literature. See proletarian literature mass culture, , –, , –, , – Matisse, Henri,  Matsui Toru,  Matsuo Basho, ,  May  movement, , , , , , –n Miki Kiyoshi, – Minami Hiroshi, n Miyamoto Kenji, – Mizuta, Noriko, -n modernism, ; definitions of, –, , , –n, n, n; and imperialism, –; non-Western, , , n, n modernism, Japanese, –; and the city, , n; dissolution of the novel in, , –, , , –, , –, , –; and European avant-



Index

modernism, Japanese (continued ) garde, , , , ; and European modernism, –; and experience of cultural dislocation, –, , –, , , ; and Marxism, , ; and mass culture, –, ; and “return to Japan,” , , –; and technology,  modernity, , –, , ; Japanese experience of, –, –, –, , –, , , , ; and literature, –, , –, –, ; as phantasmagoria, , ; transcendence of, –, –, , –n; outside the West, , n Mondrian, Piet,  Mori Ogai, , , n Morocco (film),  Morris-Suzuki,Tessa,  mourning. See Yokomitsu Riichi: Melancholy Journey: mourning in Murai Osamu, , , n Muramatsu Shofu, ,  Mushanokoji Saneatsu, –, , , , –n, –n, n Nabeyama Sadachika,  Nagai Kafu, , n Nagy, Margit, –n Nakagawa Shigemi, n Nakagawa Yoichi, , , n Nakai Masakazu, n Nakajima Eijiro,  Nakamura Mitsuo, , , , , n, n Nakamura Murao,  Nakazawa Kei,  Napier, Susan, , n nation, –, , , , –,

–; consciousness of, , , –, –, –, , –, , n, n, n. See also subjectivity: and nation nationalism, , , , , , , , , . See also Yokomitsu Riichi: and nationalism Natsume Soseki, , –, , , n, n, n Naturalism, , n New Sensationism (Shinkankakuha), , , –, , , , , –, , n Nietzsche, Friedrich, – Nihon Romanha. See Japanese Romanticism Nii Itaru,  Nishikawa Yuko,  Norindr, Panivong, n Notehelfer, F. G., n novel, , , –, , , –, , –, , –, –, , n, n, – n Nozawa Toshitaka,  Nyonin geijutsu (journal), ,  Odagiri Hideo, , n Odagiri Susumu, n Ogai. See Mori Ogai Ogata Akiko, , n, n Oguma Eiji, ,  Okakura Kakuzo, , , , , , –n Okamoto Ippei,  Okamoto Kanoko,  Okamoto Taro,  Okaniwa Noboru,  Opacki, Ireneusz,  orientalism, ,  Osugi Sakae, 

Index

Ota Saburo,  Ota Suzuko, – “Overcoming Modernity” conference, , , , , –n. See also modernity: transcendence of Oya Soichi, , , n, n, n Ozeki Kazuhiro,  Peterson, James, n Petric,Vlada,  Pincus, Leslie, , , , n, n, n, n proletarian literature, , , , , , , – Proust, Marcel,  psychoanalysis, , –, n. See also Freud, Sigmund pure literature (junbungaku), , , ,  Renan, Ernest, n Renard, Jules,  Rokumeikan, – Royama Masamichi,  Russo-Japanese War, , , ,  Saeki Shoichi, ,  Saida Masanori, – Saikaku. See Ihara Saikaku Saito Mokichi,  Sakai, Naoki, , n Sano Manabu,  Sato Haruo, –, ,  Satomi Ton,  Saussure, Ferdinand de, n Seidensticker, Edward, , n Sekiguchi Yasuyoshi,  semicolonialism, ,  Shanghai, , –; International Settlement in, , , , , , . See also Yokomitsu Riichi: Shanghai



Shell, Marc,  Shiga Naoya, , , ,  Shih, Shu-mei, ,  Shimamura Ryuzo,  Shinkankakuha. See New Sensationism Shirakaba (journal), ,  Shirakabaha (White Birch school), –, , , n Shirane, Haruo, –n Shklovsky,Viktor, ,  Silverberg, Miriam, , , , –, –, n, n Smith, Henry, n, n Soeda Azenbo, , , n Sofue Shoji, – Soseki. See Natsume Soseki space: of empire, ; literary representation of, , –, , , , –, , ; of nation, , , . See also city speed, aesthetic of,  Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, n Starrs, Roy,  subjectivity, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , –, ; and abjection, –, –, , –n; and capital, , , ; and cosmopolitanism, , , –, , , , ; and empire, , ; and gender, –, , –, –, , –n, n, n; and ideology, –, n; and language, , , –, ; and narration, n; and nation, , , , , –, , , –, , ,  Suga Hidemi, –,  Suzuki Sadami,  Suzuki,Tomi, –, , n, n, n, n



Index

Taisho cosmopolitanism. See cosmopolitanism Taisho literature, , –, , –, , , , , , , , , , , n Takahashi Shinkichi, , n Takami Jun, n Takeda Rintaro, –, n Takenishi Hiroko,  Takeuchi Yoshimi, , n Tamamura Zennosuke,  Tane maku hito (journal), ,  Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, , n, n; debate of, with Akutagawa Ryunosuke, , – works: Naomi (Chijin no ai), , , ;“The Secret” (Himitsu), , n Tansman, Alan, -n Tayama Katai, , , , –, n tenko. See conversion Tokunaga Sunao,  Tokyo: changes in, –, n; experience of, , , ; representation of, , , , , , , , , n, n. See also Asakusa; city Tsuboi Shigeji, , n, n Tsubouchi Shoyo,  Tsuji Jun, n Tsukimura Reiko, n Tzara,Tristan,  Ulysses (James Joyce), , n Unno Hiroshi, –,  Uno Koji, , , –, , , n, n urban space. See city Usui Yoshimi, n Valéry, Paul, , 

Waley, Paul, n, n Washburn, Dennis, –, n, n watakushi shosetsu. See I-novel Wellek, René, and Austin Warren, n White Birch school. See Shirakabaha Wilde, Oscar, , n Williams, Raymond, –, –n, n women’s writing, ,  Yamagishi Gaishi, , n Yamamoto,Traise, n Yamamoto Masahide,  Yamamoto Sanehiko,  Yamashita, Samuel, n Yamazaki Kuninori, n Yanagita Kunio,  Yasuda Yojuro, ,  Yokomitsu Riichi, ; and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, ; childhood of, , ; conversion of, , ; and empire, , ; father of, –, n; and formalism, –, , , –; journey of, to Europe, –, n; and Marxism, , n, n; and nationalism, , , , , , ; shift in writing style of, –, –, –; theme of selfconsciousness in, –,  Melancholy Journey (Ryoshu), , –, , , ; ancient Shinto in, –, n; Asia in, –; background of, , –; and imperialism, ; and Japanese Romanticism, , ; Manchuria in, –; melancholy in, –; mourning in, , –; and nationalism, , , , ;

Index

phantasm of the West in, ; plot of, –; portrayal of Europe in, –, ; publication of, –; representation of affect in, , , –; and “return to Japan,” , , –; sense of exile in, –, ; and Shanghai, –, –,  Shanghai (Shanhai), , , –, , ; abjection in, , , , , –, , ; depictions of Chinese in, , –; and economy, , , –, , ; fragmentation of consciousness in, , –, –; and the grotesque –; and Japanese imperialism, , , , , ; and Japanese modernity, , ; nationalism in, –, –, ; political discourses in, , , –; publication history



of, n; representations of the body in, , –, –, –, , , –; representation of the city in, , –, , –, –; revisions of, n; style of, ; synopsis of,  other works:“The City Depths” (Machi no soko), , –; European Travelogue (Oshu kiko), , n; “Heads and Stomachs” (Atama narabi ni hara), ;“Machine” (Kikai), , , –;“The Pale Captain” (Aoi tai-i), –, , , ;“Theory of the Pure Novel” (Junsui shosetsu ron), –, – Yoshida Seiichi,  Yoshimoto Takaaki,  Yoshimura Akira, , n Yoshiyuki Eisuke, n Yu, Beongcheon, n, n