Topographies of Japanese Modernism

By Seiji M. Lippit

What happens when a critique of modernity -- a "revolt against the traditions of the Western world" -- is situated within a non-European context, where the concept of the modern has been inevitably tied to the image of the West?

Seiji M. Lippit o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jul 24, 2012
• ISBN: 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

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Copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50068-5

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 0–231–12530–5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 0–231–12531–3 (pbk : alk. paper)

1. Japanese fiction—Taishō period, 1912–1926—History and criticism.

2. Japanese fiction—Shōwa period, 1926–1989—History and criticism.

3. Modernism (Literature)—Japan. I. Title.

PL747.6.L56   2002

895.6′34409112—dc21         2001047826

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

To my parents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Fissures of Japanese Modernity

1.  Disintegrating Mechanisms of Subjectivity: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Last Writings

2.  Topographies of Empire: Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai

3.  Mapping the Space of Mass Culture: Kawabata Yasunari’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa

4.  Negations of Genre: Hayashi Fumiko’s Nomadic Writing

5.  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 Kōjin 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.

A Fulbright/IIE dissertation research grant allowed me to conduct research in Tokyo from 1993 to 1995. 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 Hōsei University Library, the National Diet Library, and the Nihon kindai bungakukan in Tokyo for their assistance.

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as The Disintegrating Machinery of the Modern: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Late Writings in the Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 1 (1999): 27–50. A version of chapter 5 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.

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 kokyō. 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 (Kokyō o ushinatta bungaku, 1933), literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) 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 literature—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 (1930). 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 disturbance 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 1920s to the 1930s. 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 late-nineteenth- 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 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 1920s and early 1930s, 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 non-European 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 Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), and Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951), that delineate certain key aspects of modernist fiction in the 1920s and early 1930s. Nearly all the works considered (with the notable exception of Yokomitsu’s Melancholy Journey) were first published between 1927 and 1932, the early years of the Shōwa period (1926–1989). The works of these writers are linked through their experimentation with literary form and, especially, through their rejection of the linguistic and narrative foundations 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 1920s.

This study also links the disintegration of literary form to the representation of space within modernist fiction. Against the dominant topographies of Taishō-period (1912–1926) 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 (1868–1912) 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 Shōwa period that are seen as the basis for Japanese modernist fiction.

Taishō 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 Kōjin 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 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 1942 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 Shōyō (1859–1935) in his Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui, 1885–1886). 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 Kakuzō (1862–1913), 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 Lacoue-Labarthe 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 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 (1864–1909) translations of Turgenev, by Mori Ōgai’s (1862–1922) 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, 1887–1889) 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 Bashō (1644–1694) could be analyzed in terms of the faithful depiction of nature, or the works of Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) could be interpreted as a form of realism.²¹

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 (1871–1908) work Musashino (1898), 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 to Yuri 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 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 Taishō 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 (1904–1905) 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 writings, manifested especially in the genre theorized as the I-novel (watakushi shōsetsu) in the 1920s. 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 (1871–1930) The Quilt (Futon, 1907).²⁹

In certain key writings of the Taishō period, however, the representation of interiority is situated in a new ideological context, what has been at times referred to as Taishō 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 Taishō 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 Junzō (1904–1980) refers to as the kyōyō-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’ichirō (1886–1965), as well as the philosophical writings of Abe Jirō (1883–1959).

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 Sōseki (1867–1916) and Mori Ōgai.³¹ This general discursive context is encapsulated in the claim by the novelist Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976) that to an extent that those older than we are cannot understand, we have become children of the world.³² Mushanokōji 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 Taishō represents a stage at which 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 Taishō 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 1910, two events that helped form the historical context for Taishō literature. In 1905, Natsume Sōseki 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. Sōseki 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 Sōseki’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 Mushanokōji and other Shirakaba writers, was thus organized around an underlying contradiction. When put into practice in Mushanokōji’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 Taishō culturalism as the context for Kuki Shūzō’s (1888–1941) 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 adherents to withdraw into an expanded and enriched realm of interiority while distancing themselves from more immediate and more material social realities.³⁷ For Mushanokōji, 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, 1911), describes the narrator’s obsession with a young woman named Tsuru. The novel, based on certain episodes in Mushanokōji’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 Mushanokōji’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 (Yūjō, 1919), perhaps Mushanokōji’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 Ōmiya, the narrator’s friend and rival. Sugiko remains in Tokyo while Ōmiya 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 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 Taishō literature had never themselves traveled to either Europe or America, in contrast to key figures