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Remarks on the Study of Meiji Literature

1942; Sophia University; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2382709

1880-1390

Masanobu Oda,

Japanese History and Culture

It may be doubted whether students of Japanese literature sufficiently realize the immense change that occurred in Japanese letters with the Meiji Restoration. The present writer, born at the beginning of this century, can without exaggeration say of himself-and this is equally true of the greater part of his generationthat he can read any early Victorian writer with greater ease than the average work of a compatriot of his prior to the Restoration. To such an extent Japanese as a vehicle of literary expression has changed in the course of a few decades. It may well be asked whether there is a language in the world that within barely half a century has undergone a similar transformation. Nor is it the language alone; the very subject-matter of literature has passed through the same revolutionary phase. Yet while Japanologists have produced any amount of reliable studies on the rapid and radical changes of Meiji cultural life as a whole, they do not seem to have undertaken enough adequate research in the literature of the period. The valuable histories of Japanese literature by Aston, Florenz, Revon or Gundert unfortunately stop short at the modern period; other works by non-Japanese authors that deal with later literature are sometimes as inaccurate as to approach the ridiculous.1) However if the extraordinary phenomenon of a civilization which, while absorbing foreign cultural factors yet preserved in the main its originality, is to be fully understood, the literary evolution of the stormy latter half of the last century ought to be one of the first objects of interest. Especially at the present time, when in Japan a new phase of self-reflection and re-valuation has set in and the study of Meiji literature from being a pastime of the dilettanti has become a subject of serious research, the moment seems to have come for a new assessment of its import.ance by Japanologists at large. The specific character of Meiji literature may be understood from a glance on the 'Essence of the Novel'2) (Sh6setsu Shinzui zJ=RT7*f) by Tsubouchi Shoyo