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Atsuko Ueda, Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of “Literature” in Meiji Japan Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of “Literature” in Meiji Japan . Atsuko Ueda. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+237.

2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/659228

1545-6951

Deborah Shamoon,

Japanese History and Culture

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewAtsuko Ueda, Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of “Literature” in Meiji Japan Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of “Literature” in Meiji Japan. Atsuko Ueda. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+237.Deborah ShamoonDeborah ShamoonUniversity of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author University of Notre DamePDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the Meiji Period (1868–1912), when Japan ended nearly three hundred years of isolation and embraced Western culture in a bid to become a major political power, one way in which the nation sought to demonstrate mastery of Western culture was through the development of a national literature, particularly the novel, or shōsetsu. Japanese writers cast off centuries of native tradition and learned to write modern (meaning Western) novels, so conventional the story goes, by reading Tsubouchi Shōyō's critical work The Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui) (Tokyo, 1885). Donald Keene, in his seminal, comprehensive history of modern Japanese literature, writes, “The Essence of the Novel so greatly influenced writers of the day that Tsubouchi Shōyō has often been acclaimed as the founder of modern Japanese literature” (Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, 2 vols. [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984], 1:97). In Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment, Atsuko Ueda contests The Essence of the Novel 's place as the origin of modern Japanese literature. She is not the first to do so: she cites literary critics Maeda Ai, Kamei Hideo, Asukai Masamichi, and Peter Kornicki, who all question this rather simplistic claim and point out that it is only in retrospect that The Essence of the Novel was rediscovered by literary critics and given its originary status. Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment is, however, the first book-length work in English to give a rigorous examination of The Essence of the Novel 's place in literary history and to discuss how early Meiji writers created not just the (Western) novel but also the category of literature as an academic subject. She argues that The Essence of the Novel was a proscriptive text designed to exclude certain types of fiction used by political activists; however, its political stance is concealed both within the text and by successive writers and literary critics who designated it as the origin of modern Japanese literature.Ueda devotes the majority of her study to The Essence of the Novel 's attempt to create a politically neutral national literature. She begins with a detailed history and definition of the term shōsetsu and how Tsubouchi Shōyō positioned this word to align with his definition of the Western novel. The strength of Ueda's analysis lies in her critical reading of this term shōsetsu as a strategic move to exclude certain works from the canon of Japanese literature. Shōyō's choice of this term was not obvious, Ueda argues, but politically motivated. Japan has a long history of prose fiction narratives, dating back to the tenth century, and a large if shifting vocabulary to describe them: monogatari, haishi, hakuwa, and gesaku (roughly, tales, official histories, adaptations [loose translations from Chinese and later from European languages], and playful or vernacular writing). Ueda argues that Shōyō sets up a reductive genealogy with monogatari and gesaku at the core, first, in order to make a historically inaccurate but ideologically charged distinction between Chinese and Japanese style writing; and second, to set up gesaku, and particularly the author Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin, as an example of the “wrong” kind of premodern writing.Ueda shows how Shōyō sets up Bakin, and his overwhelmingly popular and influential work The Accounts of Eight Dogs (Satomi nansō hakkenden) (Edo, 1814–42), as an example of what was wrong with gesaku (vernacular fiction) in the 1870s and how the newly defined shōsetsu had to distinguish itself to be more like the European novel. Shōyō focused on this work not only because it was the most popular and influential work of late Edo and early Meiji but because it is similar to what we in the European tradition might term an epic romance or a moral allegory. Set in a mythical past, the sprawling, 106-volume tale recounts the exploits of eight warriors who each represent a Confucian virtue. Later critics have read Shōyō's criticism against Bakin as a call for realism, mimesis, and realistic psychological interiority, in contrast to Bakin's allegorical register. However, Ueda argues that Shōyō was more concerned with discrediting Hakkenden because of its use as a rallying point for the Freedom and People's Rights Movement ( Jiyū Minken Undō, or Jiyutō), a political movement that advocated for civil rights and a democratic government. Jiyutō activists in the 1870s used Hakkenden, as well as adaptations of novels about the French Revolution and contemporary politicized gesaku, as a means of informing and rallying supporters, often through reading aloud in groups (68). However, by 1885, when The Essence of the Novel was published, the movement was in decline, thanks in large part to institutional changes that ensured graduates of Tokyo University would have exclusive access to government jobs, shutting out not only the Jiyutō activists but intellectuals associated with private universities, such as Ono Azusa and Fukuzawa Yukichi, who retaliated by proclaiming an “autonomy of knowledge” and declaring that overt political activism was “barbaric.” Ueda writes, “The realm of knowledge, then, becomes a domain where the agents can reinscribe themselves in the new institutional system with assumed neutrality to the political realm where they have already lost their battle” (89). This is the reason, according to Ueda, that Shōyō favors novels that turn inward to describe the interior life and romantic pursuits of the main character rather than offering a social critique. As evidence, she examines in detail Shōyō's novel The Characters of Modern Students (Tōsei shosei katagi) (Toyko, 1885) as an example of the concealment of politics. The main character, Sanji, attends a private school and suffers from his lowered social status that prevents him from attaining a well-paid bureaucratic job, but rather than exploring the social inequalities that inform his position, the novel focuses on his affair with a geisha. This love story, rather than a political or class struggle, creates his identity and interiority.Shōyō's distinction between Japanese fiction and hakuwa, or adaptations of Chinese fiction, derives, according to Ueda, from The Essence of the Novel 's role in a larger ideological shift taking place in early Meiji as Japan struggled to form its identity relative to both Europe and China. In the fourth chapter, Ueda discusses Japan's efforts to align itself with Western powers by purging Chinese influence from its own cultural traditions, creating a Japan-centric intellectual history and claiming rhetorical and intellectual superiority to China. This chapter does not fit as smoothly with the rest of the book. Although much has been written on this topic, Ueda does not mention the English-language scholarship, particularly Stefan Tanaka's Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), which makes the same argument. Furthermore, the chapter does not deal with Tsubouchi Shōyō or his writing directly, instead discussing in more detail the theory of the “autonomy of knowledge” based on essays by Ono and Fukuzawa, as well as newspaper articles and Komuro Shinsuke's political novel A Remarkable Story of Asianism: Dreams of Love (Koa kidan: Murenren) (Toyko, 1884). Although the topic of Japan's orientalizing view of China is fascinating and in need of further study, the link between this section and The Essence of the Novel needs to be strengthened.The final chapter explains how later critics constructed The Essence of the Novel as the origin of modern Japanese literature, a trend that first appeared after the Russo-Japanese War (1905), then again after the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923), fueled by the need to chart early Meiji as the beginning of Japan's modern period. As realism and mimesis were the dominant modes for writers, Shōyō's use of terms such as shajitsu (realism) gained more urgency and meaning, while the political context of the late 1880s receded from view. Ueda's most interesting point is how literary critics used The Essence of the Novel to create literature as a distinct academic discipline, separate from history and politics. She writes, “The modern shōsetsu is then discovered as ‘art’ that is associated with a certain apoliticality, whose defining characteristic was psychological realism of the socially isolated self ” (165). It is an intriguing account of how Japanese novelists and scholars constructed literary studies as a discrete field by further effacing the political stance of Shōyō's work.This is an important and groundbreaking study that should be of interest not only to specialists in Japanese modern literature but to scholars of literature generally. For specialists, the historically informed rereading of The Essence of the Novel brings an important debate to an English-speaking audience. Ueda also offers a detailed and well-researched analysis of several novels that have not been translated and are rarely discussed, such as The Characters of Modern Students. For nonspecialists, this is a fascinating case study of how the novel, which in a European context was a genre-defying style, becomes a genre-defining mode of writing in Japan and how a culture that has a nearly thousand-year tradition of fictional prose narratives encountered the Western novel and created literature as an academic subject. However, Ueda writes primarily for a specialist audience. Because she is making a detailed argument about the use of certain words (such as shōsetsu), the number of untranslated terms and titles is daunting, although there is a glossary. All titles are given in Japanese, with translations into English only appearing once per chapter. This was most likely not a personal choice by the author, and I believe it is a problem that extends far beyond this one book. The way one demonstrates mastery of the subject is to render all titles in Japanese and to render key terms in Japanese, but this can potentially alienate nonspecialist readers who might otherwise find many parallels and intersections with their own research, helping to bring the study of Japanese literature more prominently into literary studies generally. Furthermore, Ueda assumes the reader has basic knowledge of Japanese history and leaves implicit the most compelling overarching themes: How does a nation in the nineteenth century avoid colonization? How is national literature deployed as a nation-building tool? For the reader willing to read past the linguistic barrier, this is a compelling study of the creation of a national literature. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 4May 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659228 Views: 58Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 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