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Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel by Timothy Van Compernolle

2020; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjs.2020.0069

1549-4721

Seth Jacobowitz,

Japanese History and Culture

Reviewed by: Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel by Timothy Van Compernolle Seth Jacobowitz (bio) Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel. By Timothy Van Compernolle. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2016. xvi, 246 pages. $39.95. Timothy Van Compernolle's Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel follows his previous monograph, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), as an in-depth examination of social ideals and literary style in the Meiji-era canon. Thematically it builds upon The Uses of Memory's final chapter, "Fantasies of Success," and once again draws a significant part of its methodology from Mikhail Bakhtin to present the [End Page 518] "chronotope" of the novel in the final decade of the Meiji era rooted in the individual's often frustrated desire for self-actualization and advancement within the new regime's capitalist and imperial systems. If this is essentially a bourgeois worldview representing itself under the guise of universalism, as the Russian formalists would surely be the first to note, it is nevertheless a foundational ideology of Japanese modernity that has continued to resonate from the heights of the Japanese empire into the era of defeat and postwar reconstruction, and is once more leading into the contemporary uncertainties of lost decades, declining populations, and smothered ambitions. For a study on ambition and mobility, Struggling Upward seems mostly content to color within the lines of prevailing trends in Japanology. The author is at his best engaging in close reading of canonical texts, somewhat less so when venturing forth into new historicist approaches that only offer limited engagement with the archives of popular literature and magazine culture, or the socioeconomic pressures that resulted in out-migration from the countryside. I commend him for borrowing the title of Horatio Alger Jr.'s Struggling Upward (1890) for his book rather than the less palatable alternative that secured Alger's literary reputation, his fourth novel, Ragged Dick (1867–68). There is, however, an unresolved tension between Van Compernolle's avowed interests in the serialized fiction of bootstrapping, self-made men that Alger made famous and the belles-lettristic texts granted the privileged position of superseding genre, while also strategically appropriating from it. I also find problematic the author's reconstruction of the Japanese "novel of success" (risshi shōsetsu) by locking it into the confines of a single decade at the expense of disclosing relations to expansionism within and outside the boundaries of the Japanese empire. The author's apparent affection for the chronotope of the late Meiji period is immediately registered in the architectural metaphor of Utagawa Kunimasa IV's woodblock print, "Ryounkaku kikai sugoroku" (Pavilion above the clouds, 1890), which appears on the cover. It is a depiction of the Twelve Story Tower in Asakusa that was a vivid symbol of Meiji modernity. As memorialized in works such as Kawabata Yasunari's Asakusa kureneidan (The scarlet gang of Asakusa, 1929–30), however, the tower broke in half during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and was thus transformed into a symbol of terrifying instability—one of many in Japan's Roaring Twenties. A detail from the print in the form of a sugoroku game board is reproduced on the first page as the book's sole illustration, which Van Compernolle uses to show how Meiji-era players could experience the vicissitudes of fortune at a roll of the dice. The mechanism of the game board tellingly accounts only for individualistic concerns, with none of the anarchist, socialist, or proletarian critiques that were similarly pushed to the periphery of the traditional canon. Van Compernolle accordingly sets an oddly recidivist tone when describing the origins of the modern Japanese novel that critics like Masao [End Page 519] Miyoshi would have seized upon in an instant. In the preface, he argues that the discourse of risshin shusse "played a major role in shaping the modern Japanese novel as it emerged in the 1870s by mimicking features of European fiction, then grew to encompass a set of wide-ranging themes, and reached maturity at the turn of the twentieth century" (p. xi). Although...