Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World

By Arthur M. Mitchell

Disruptions of Daily Life explores the mass media landscape of early twentieth century in order to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. Arthur Mitchell examines this literature against global realities through a modernist lens, studying an alternative modernism that challenges the Western European model.

Through broad surveys of discussions surrounding Japanese life in the 1920s, Mitchell locates and examines flourishing divergent ideologies of the early twentieth century such as gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. He unravels how the narrative and linguistic strategies of modernist texts interrogated the innocence of this language, disrupting their hold on people's imagined relationship to daily life. These modernist works often discursively displaced the authority of their own claims by inadvertently exposing the global epistemology of East vs. West. Mitchell's reading of these formalist texts expands modernism studies into a more translational dialogue by locating subversions within the local historical culture and allowing readers to make connections to the time and place in which the texts were written.

In highlighting the unbreakable link between literature and society, Disruptions of Daily Life reaffirms the value of modernist fiction and its ability to make us aware of how realities are constructed—and how those realities can be changed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501752926

Book preview

DISRUPTIONS OF DAILY LIFE

Japanese Literary Modernism in the World

Arthur M. Mitchell

CORNELL EAST ASIA SERIES

AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS     ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Shattering the Status Quo: Reading Modernism in the Early Twentieth Century

1. Fetishism of the West in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love

2. Subversions of Ethnicity in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Neo-Sensationist Writings

3. Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and the Narrative of the Present

4. Love and (Male) Subjectivity in Hirabayashi Taiko’s In the Charity Ward

Coda: Against the National Literary Narrative

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The finished book, complete with hard binding and glossy cover, has a way of concealing how arduous and at times tenuous the long enterprise has been. I want to acknowledge all those who have fueled my fire and guided my journey as well those who have offered the warmth of their help, support, and companionship along the way.

My gratitude goes first to Christopher Hill whose courses on history and literature expanded my literary and political imagination, introducing a historical consciousness and an ethical imperative to my literary readings. This book was inspired by his many teachings and would not have been possible without his genial guidance and sage counsel. I also owe more than I know to John Treat who taught me that scholarship is not just an intellectual enterprise but a self-search. He helped me learn to trust myself, have faith in my own instincts, and to have the courage to take big swings. In Japan, Toeda Hirokazu was unbelievably generous and unceasingly gracious with his time, his mentorship, and his friendship. I am eternally grateful.

I have been extremely fortunate to receive institutional support for my studies. The dissertation research from which this book emerged was conducted with grants from the Japan Foundation and the Yale University Council on East Asian Studies, and the final manuscript was completed while on a sabbatical leave supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Social Science Research Council, and Macalester College. The final phase of publication was aided by a Wallace Grant from Macalester College. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Waseda University for hosting many years of my research and in particular to the Waseda Central Library. Their archive of periodicals laid out in open stacks was my scholarly sandbox for several years and the kindness of their dedicated librarians were for countless months a daily encouragement.

Several people had a direct impact on this book. Seiji Lippit and William Gardner were there at the ground floor and their early guidance helped me chart my course and set sail. Their monographs on Japanese modernism paved the way for me to say everything I have said on the subject. Pericles Lewis believed in my work and gave me the confidence to take on such a big topic. Edward Kamens invited me into the field itself and gave me my foundation in Japanese literary analysis. I would like to thank Mai Shaikhanuar-Cota and Alexis Siemon, my editors at Cornell University Press, for their care and commitment to this manuscript, and Ross Yelsey, formerly at the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asia Institute, for recognizing the book and helping it take its first steps into the world of publication. I would also like to thank Paul Anderer for believing in my work and helping me get the publication process started. For their invaluable feedback on different sections of the book, I would like to thank Reiko Abe Auestad, David Blainey, Jim Dorsey, Aaron Gerow, Rivi Handler-Spitz, Reto Hofmann, Inoue Ken, Kate Nakai, Haruko Nakamura, Chelsea Scheider, Angela Yiu, and the anonymous readers for WEAI and CUP.

For their conversation and invaluable friendship during these years, I would like to particularly thank, Will Bridges, John Graves, Kendall Heitzman, Shuntarō Kishikawa, Christine Marran, Mariko Naitō, Yasufumi Nakamori, Patrick Noonan, Marcos Ortega, Parker Smathers, Luciana Sanga, Brian Steininger, Ellen Tilton, Daniel Williams, Naoki Yamamoto, Shōichirō Yamashita, and the members of La Fondation. And for their essential encouragement and mentorship, or for simply providing a warm family table, I would like to thank, Barbara Bassous, Ernie Bassous, Steve Focios, Satoshi Hamaya, Rashed Judeh, Mutsuko McIlroy, Robert McIlroy, Masato Ogura, John Reinartz, Satoko Suzuki, and Michiko Yoshida. Finally, I want thank my parents, my sisters, Sono and Kano, and Ella for her love and her marvelous meals.

This book is very much about the vital importance of literary art. For feeding this faith in me I would like to thank James Shea, Tracy Dahlby, Ai Kudō, and Marie Focios.

I dedicate this book to my father, who taught me how to think and introduced me to the world.

Introduction

SHATTERING THE STATUS QUO: READING MODERNISM IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Disruptions of Daily Life explores the ability of formalist literary narratives to interrupt the sense of dailiness that we all inhabit. It traces and clarifies how certain types of narrative fiction can make us aware of the discursive structures that undergird the imaginative relationship we have to our social world, thereby displacing the hold these structures have on our lived realities. By confirming and elaborating how this function operated historically, as it worked for contemporary Japanese readers in the 1920s, I want to suggest that such works continue to serve this function for us in the present day. Focusing on a handful of texts—some major, some not yet widely known, some recognized as modernist literature and some not yet—by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko, I show how the potency of their formalist disruptions had everything to do with their deep interconnections with the social discourses operative within the media of that decade. Contrary to prevalent conceptions of high modernism as art-objects sequestered from the utilitarian language of capitalist society, modernist literature was highly enmeshed in the language of the mass print media, one of the major sources of social ideology since the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, it was through this nexus that modernist formalism attained its subversive edge.

This book arose from an inkling that the real-world significance of modernist literature was getting lost in the scholarly gap that emerged between textual hermeneutic approaches that focused purely on the craft of the material text and cultural studies approaches that focused exclusively on the historical and cultural circumstances of its production. The effectiveness of modernist fiction was rooted in the intersection between the two, in the representational distortions of historical culture. Readers can expect on the one hand close textual analyses of the works being treated here. But these close readings are performed in the context of a detailed and concrete history of social thought in 1920s Japan. In my approach to modernist fiction, the two vectors of textual analysis and historical study are not just contiguous but intimately interrelated. I read works deeply and formally for the ingenuity of their design and textual play while, at the same time, I locate the linguistic source of these representational strategies empirically within the print media of that time. As a result, the language of literature is understood not as purely linguistic signs, but simultaneously as linguistic signs embedded in and operative within late-Taishō and early-Shōwa society. The myriad social nuances and connotations of that language were, I argue, indeed the ultimate targets of modernism’s disruptive strategies. Though it has been well established that works of modernist literature are characterized by a reflexive awareness of the signifying operations of linguistic conventions, I show here how that reflexivity in fact applied to the language that circulated throughout the social institutions of modern Japanese society.

My approach shows how modernist works challenged the innocence of the language that pervaded the media of 1920s society, exposing its modes of meaning production and displacing the social ideologies it embodied. Such an approach reveals the way modernist defamiliarization was far from just an ambition toward transcendental aesthetics, but was in fact aimed at the broader social world, deployed to foment large-scale renovations of social perception. Modernist works were meant to incite social transformation. Hirabayashi Taiko declared that her literature was about far more than simply conquering the territory of the literary establishment. She regarded her works as a form of action toward the creation of a new culture for the oppressed class of women.¹ Yokomitsu Riichi believed that the new literary expression that he was developing held a necessary and fundamental relationship to the form of culture.² Kawabata was also convinced that new forms of literary expression would affect the very way in which people lived. The goal of his writing and that of his collaborators, he wrote, was nothing less than the eradication of the status quo of our own daily life and literature.³ In the pages that follow, I hope to demonstrate just how brazen and provocative these texts were, and remain.

Viewed within the glass case of literary aesthetics in which we often place them, modernist works carry the salubrious glow of linguistic virtuosity and high cultural achievement. But restored to the context of the social milieu in which they were generated, they reveal themselves to be rude, flippant, and outrageous, openly contemptuous of the visions and worldviews that society embraced. It is precisely this creative hostility, expressed through the renovation of linguistic and narrative norms, that I hope to recover. Doing so means uncovering ways these artistic works indeed undermined middle-class norms that made social life seem attractive, progressive, and virtuous. The texts I examine in these chapters were invested in objectifying, reifying, and displacing the social language that made lives seem staid, steady, and connected. They sought to disrupt the ideologies that made daily living appear seamless and comfortable. They did so however to expose the way such norms were bolstered by narrow, constrictive, and essentialist notions of gender, ethnicity, society, and nation, to reveal the way such norms were employed to discipline the minds and behaviors of Japanese citizens, and finally to provoke cognitive and sensational liberation from the supremacy of these norms.

Modernism, Media, and Daily Life

One of the central convictions underlying this book’s approach to modernism is that the division between literary language and social language is a myth engendered by literary criticism. The Russian Formalist critics first devised the bifurcation between poetic language, which foregrounds the sensual or material qualities of language, and communicative language, which prioritizes the conveyance of information and thus fulfills the utilitarian functions of capitalist society.⁴ Though modernism is often associated with precisely the type of art that eschews the communicative, and thereby critiques society through opposition to its linguistic norms, it is more accurate to say that it was modernist fiction that first exploited the absence of this distinction, or the inability to distinguish between literary and nonliterary language. This is the premise underlying Astradur Eysteinsson’s innovative formulation that modernism accrued its subversive function not through its opposition to communicative language but in its resistance to the communicative valence of that language. He writes:

Even if we understand the message to be focusing on itself, it is referring to its language as social reality. Once we have adopted this perspective, the aesthetics of the other slope of language acquires social significance and helps us approach the modernist enterprise. For this slope is not poetic language, it is the other of language in a more violent sense, since it resists the communicative-semiotic function of language.⁵

Modernist practice depended for the power of its critique on the inability, at least provisionally, to distinguish between the two types of language. Material language had to be read first as communicative language in order to achieve the traction of its negation. That is to say, modernism’s linguistic strategies work against the assumption and expectation that its language is communicative.

Such a formulation reveals a new way to conceive of aesthetic formalism in literature and its possibilities for social criticism. It also paves the way for a new understanding of modernism’s dialectical relationship with the communicative and semiotic norms of social language, opening up new avenues for studies of modernist fiction. Specifically, it allows us to trace the ways in which modernist narrative discourse is indeed steeped in the social language of bourgeois society—what Eysteinsson calls the language of social institutions, which include predominantly the family but also the political arena, official administrations, schools, churches, newspapers, and the judicial system.⁶ To locate and bring in, in a concrete way, the social language that Eysteinsson theoretically names, I analyze the language of the mass print media. Surveying articles in general-interest magazines such as Chūō kōron (The Central Review), Kaizō (Reconstruction), Fujin kōron (Lady’s Review), Shufu no tomo (The Housewife’s Companion), and Shinchō (New Tide), as well as major newspapers like the Tokyo Asahi, Ōsaka Asahi, and Yomiuri Shimbun, it examines the rhetoric surrounding key terms and topics such as seikatsu (生活, daily life), katei (家庭, home), kankaku (感覚, sensation), fukkō (復興, renaissance), ai (愛, love) and jinkaku (人格, character). It identifies the patterns of language that surrounded these terms and the ideological connotations they embodied.

I then show how the narrative discourse of modernist works was constituted by this language, how the texts had indeed assimilated these social discourses and provisionally affirmed the ideologies they expressed. In this sense, the texts of modernist works masqueraded as social texts, offered themselves to be read as communicative language. Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929–1930), for example, which appeared in installments in the front page of the evening edition of the Osaka Asahi newspaper, could have been consumed as a work of nonfiction journalism, focused as it was on the back alleys of the Asakusa district and the people that inhabited them. The installments were full of observations and commentary about events that had occurred not long before their date of publication and contained numerous references to the infrastructural reconstruction projects that had been ongoing in Asakusa since the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. The chapters reprised from newspaper articles the stastical analysis and descriptions of projects like the reconstruction of the much vaunted Kototoi Bridge. These articles had chronicled the steady linear progress of Tokyo’s infrastructural rebuilding after the earthquake and, taken together, established a narrative of recovery and transcendence from the earthquake’s destruction.

But modernist works assimilated this language in order to ultimately subvert its ideological projections. Works like Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang did so by integrating this language into a narrative that undermined its communicative functions. The novel responds to the teleology of progress and completion embedded in this narrative through its fragmented narration, and through a narrative discourse that eschews any narrative arc. The structure of Kawabata’s narrative is anything but linear. It proceeds through fragmented vignettes of multiple characters and venues and features a plot that can only be pieced together in retrospect. The plot (once pieced together) concerns Yumiko’s assassination underneath the Kototoi Bridge of a man who raped her sister in the direct aftermath of the earthquake, suggesting that the trauma of that catastrophe cannot be so easily suppressed or supplanted. Overall, Kawabata’s modernist work exposes the repressive motivations of a linear narrative and its inability to account for the realities of present-day Asakusa.

As this example demonstrates, social discourse was more than the backdrop or context for the literary works. These works, moreover, did more than just reflect, satirize, or parody this language. Social discourse, and the ideologies they embodied, were the point of departure for these modernist texts, and was also the target of their aesthetically derived critiques. In each chapter I will delineate the contours of a specific discourse, identify its key terms, point out its characteristic forms of rhetoric, and make explicit the type of ideologies it expresses. Adopting Carol Gluck’s understanding that ideology does not march disembodied through time, but exists in a concrete and particular social history that has not only dates but also names and faces, this project traces the social ideologies of 1920s Japan through actual articles from mass magazines and their authors, articles that contributed to and in aggregate constituted the social ideologies of that decade.⁷ While I depend on historical scholarship for context, my focus is on the language that circulated in the mass media of the 1920s and examining its utilization, connotations, and social impact. In identifying, moreover, the nexus between social language and the narrative discourse of given modernist texts, the emphasis is not on simply finding word matches between novel and newspaper but rather more broadly on tracing the concurrence of rhetoric and the larger understandings of reality that this rhetoric conveyed, and ultimately how these understandings of reality are engaged. In Kawabata’s novel, for instance, the textual coincidence of infrastructural statistics found in the newspapers is an indication of the novel’s assimilation of a social discourse. But this coincidence would not signify much if it did not point to a conjunction, and ultimate antagonism, on the level of social ideology.

In tracing the contours of a social ideology through the language of specific articles, I do not mean to imply that their authors were self-regarded or even actual ideologues. Nor do I wish to establish, even implicitly, a hierarchy of texts wherein sophisticated literary narratives hover above simplistic media propaganda to complicate and subvert its language. The authors of mass media articles, moreover, are not treated here as strawmen to be torn down. To be sure, some of the commentary perused here constituted narrow viewpoints about society. But in many cases these articles offered insightful and discerning commentary on the topics of the day. In surveying these articles, I trace trends and patterns of language and rhetoric that run through them in the aggregate. As Gluck goes on to explain, even ostensibly ‘non-ideological’ sources help to situate the civic roles being urged on the people in the context of the rest of their social life, surrounding data of ideological consciousness with the ideas and values that continually competed, reinforced, and conflicted with them.⁸ In examining the primary sources of the 1920s, I look to limn the ideas and values that competed, reinforced, and conflicted with the each other in order to outline some of the reigning social ideologies of that decade. While this book brings a historical awareness to the language of literary texts, it also brings a literary awareness to the language of media texts, looking to their rhetorical structures, motifs, and metaphors to identify the social ideas that they engender.

The decade of the 1920s in Japan featured the emergence of a sense of contemporaneousness with the rest of the world, a consciousness of synchronicity with the modern that contributed to a cultural interest in the present and the now. By 1920, Japan’s colonial territories had grown considerably. In addition to Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea, it had just acquired the South Pacific Mandate in 1919. Japan’s support for the Allied Powers in World War I, moreover, earned it a seat at the League of Nations. It was also invited to the Washington Naval Conference, a post–World War I disarmament summit where it gained international recognition for its colonial territories in Manchuria and Mongolia. The consumer industries, mechanisms of mass production, and new financial institutions that developed in this decade occurred in what Harry Harootunian has described as a historical conjuncture with the rest of the industrializing world.⁹ Shared among modernizing cities around the globe was a new attention to the now and to the present as a hallmark of what would be understood as the modern experience or the experience of the everyday. Harootunian writes that everydayness is a form of disquiet, a moment suspended; it is a new present, a ‘historic situation’ that violently interrupted tradition and suspended the line and movement of the past. Thus, this notion of the everyday was both destructive and creative. It inaugurated a new awareness of and focus on the conditions of lived experience that marked not only a break from the past and all its expectations, but also the possibility to create new, yet-unrealized meanings within one’s practices.¹⁰

The cultural reification of the present was amplified by a major expansion of the print publication industry in the 1920s, which made available to a larger readership an abundance of relatively cheap books, magazines, and newspapers. The mass media institutions, which themselves symbolized the commodification of language, also became a means of disseminating talk about society and social change. There was an academic quality to the articles of the mass media of this time; they contained references to sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, and social critics. It was a vogue that reflected an excitement for new knowledge partly inspired by an influx of foreign ideas brought in through a proliferation of new translations. But it was also stimulated by a faith in the untapped potential of academic study and deductive experimentation. In the pages of general-interest magazines one could find pieces on Albert Einstein, articles referencing new German scholarship on child pedagogy, a commentary on the women’s suffrage movement, or an advertisement for Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Social commentary in the newspapers and magazines was pragmatic, thoughtful, and serviceable, but it also included a distinct strain of moralism or social prescription. It was marked by a heady, almost bombastic, optimism about the ability to change, shape, and reshape Japan. This attitude reflected an ethos of earnestness and ambition, seemingly shared throughout the entire middle class, toward developing and cultivating visions for the ideal self, society, and nation. Implicit, moreover, in such an attitude was the sureness that such visions could be realized. Not only could social formations and the individual role within those formations be altered, they could be altered through rhetorical persuasion, instruction, and inspiration. In this sense, the rhetoric of social commentary embodied the simultaneously destructive and creative ethos rooted in the culture of everydayness.

Indeed, the intersection between the idea of everydayness and the proliferation of mass media in the 1920s could be located in the nearly ubiquitous appearance of the term seikatsu (生活), which I here translate as daily life, in the pages of magazines and newspapers. It was a term that was abstract even as it pointed to concrete practices, allowing it to be utilized to demarcate a rather expansive range of issues as targets of reform, such as the self, the household, social customs, marital relations, and even love. One of its most explicit employments can be seen in the discourse of the daily life reform movement (seikatsu kaizen undō, 生活改善運動), a nationwide and government-endorsed effort of the early 1920s to change Japanese society to be more in line with Western nations by rationalizing and streamlining habits of consumption and daily practices within the home. The imagined goal was to achieve a cosmopolitan and humanistic life style of efficient ease and sophistication.

In examining the rhetoric of reform surrounding daily life one can see that it possessed a dual nature. On the one hand, it registered a contingency in the way life could be lived and livelihoods achieved, a sense of liberation from the traditional norms that governed the habits, routines, and purposes of living, including how one loved and what kind of person one should be. Yet this freedom was often modulated by a new set of prescriptions for the way one should live, prescriptions that came with their own forms of discipline. I use daily life to translate seikatsu in order to capture this very duality. On the one hand, the term exists as a concept of aesthetic and cultural criticism that identified the historical and artistic significance of individual actions. Henri LeFebvre used the term la vie quotidenne to identify a central feature of nineteenth century and early twentieth century French aesthetic awareness, which was the discovery of the marvelous in the realm of the quotidian, the plain, and the poor, in the humblest facts of everyday life.¹¹ Michel de Certeau, using his word le quotidien, recast the term as a sociological concept that demarcated a space of agency for the individual vis-à-vis the hegemonic ideologies of a given society. The term identified the capacity of individuals to practice daily activities in a way that did not conform to the way they were intended to be practiced, procedures that manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them.¹² On the other hand, daily life (seikatsu) refers to the ways that this term of contingency was employed in mass media discourses of the 1920s in Japan to articulate new visions of society but also prescriptions for how daily procedures should be practiced.

The identification of this tension between the two valences of this term in Japanese history, a tension between a philosophical term that points to the culturally contingent practices of people in history and a discursive term operative within the social language of the Japanese mass media, has spurred a host of groundbreaking and innovative studies in the field of Japanese history. Barbara Sato has used the social and cultural history of the commodificaiton of the everyday to construct a new women’s history. Her work traces the development of new images of the feminine in the media of the 1920s, but these media ideals serve as counterpoints, against which she identifies and elaborates the many variations of female identity that were constructed by historical women as they engaged in unique ways with these images and ideals.¹³ Jordan Sand’s history of household architecture and domestic culture in prewar Japan arrives at many of its insights by delineating the dynamic between beliefs concerning Japanese home and society and the way these ideologies were consumed and absorbed by a populace that was in fact very different from the way it was projected by those ideologies. In her history of prewar popular culture, Miriam Silverberg sought to illuminate the modern practices of the 1920s and 1930s by focusing on their representations in the mass media . . .¹⁴ While tracing the contours of mass media images and popular thought, Silverberg uses these models to distinguish and describe the consumer who was endowed with the agency to create their own meanings through the control they had over their own participation in those popular notions.¹⁵

The present volume’s analysis of modernist literature has been made possible by the identification of these new dimensions of historical analysis. I, too, rely on the tracing of media discourses to lay out a fine-grained social history against which the negations of modernist literary practice are conceived. In pitting modernist texts against strands of social discourses with specific dates, names, and faces, moreover, I articulate modernist critique in a way that is concrete, specific, and local. For instance, surveys of mass media language reveal the way the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake did not just inflict infrastructural damage on the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama but also called into question the entire country’s self-image as a progressive advanced nation. Consequently, the exhortations for social reform in the early 1920s became more radical in the wake of the earthquake, advocating the need to return to a more spiritually pure subjectivity, one that was immersed in ethnically based forms of perception. Yokomitsu’s modernist writings, often regarded as purely academic engagements with linguistic signification, were explicitly aimed at undermining this social discourse, which posited ethnic purity as the basis for a successful urban renaissance in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake. Yokomitsu’s elaboration of alternate phenomenologies rooted in the urban space was a direct challenge to the cultural essentialism that emerged in mass media articles beginning in 1923 as part of this new rhetoric of reform.

But more than just utilizing this tension, embedded in the term daily life, of discursive ideology versus contingent individual practice to delineate a more socio-historically grounded version of modernist subversion, I ultimately demonstrate how modernist works themselves targeted and exposed this inherent contradiction. In each chapter, I follow the way daily life and related terms that originally indicated the newfound freedoms of a historical period defined by new consumer choices, family formations, and domestic roles, would ultimately become marshalled within prescriptions to recast and reinforce a sense of social totality. I then show how modernist texts take daily life, and all of its discursive manifestations, and reverse this transformation, disrupt it by reverting it and restoring it back to its original denotation of the contingency that is definitive of the experience of modernity. Tanizaki’s 1924 novel, A Fool’s Love, for example, assimilates the language of the daily life reform movement in the context of a love relationship between two people who seek to lead the progressive and efficient lifestyle that that discourse promulgated. As the couple’s relationship, however, is revealed to be based in sadomasochism, the language of daily life reform that fueled their relationship is revealed to be based in the imperatives of social discipline and the logic of fetishism toward the West. Thus, I am not just interested in demarcating a new history of Japanese modernism in relationship to social media but in demonstrating the dynamic way modernism operated within history as a disruptive practice.¹⁶

Examining modernism in this way offers the possibility of capturing a different sense of history; that is, not a historical account but a sense of history as it might have been experienced. By exploring literary negations of historical media discourses, it presents history not as a time and place in the past but as a living process. Examining the way modernist texts upended ideological language permits us to render a historical time through an elaboration of the array of practices available at the given time—practices that were subject to multiple competing social narratives but were nonetheless completely subject to none of them. Thus, recovering the social critique of modernism through the terms of daily life amounts to recovering the fluidity of a historical moment. Ultimately, Harootunian understands everydayness not just as a phenomenon of history but as a methodology for writing history: What has been absent in the practice of history devoted to reconstructing the past of a present is the present, what is given as the historical present and how it shows itself.¹⁷ I show how modernist fiction, as a literary strategy working to effect social change, did so most often by exposing the radical potential of the present.

However, the pedagogical implications of studying modernism in this way are not limited to historical recovery. By reperforming the disruption of the ideological hold media discourses have on the way individuals imagine their relationships to social reality, modernism has the power to impact the reader’s lived reality by bringing them closer to an awareness of how the social imaginary is constructed. Modernist fiction demands that we remain aware of the way language masquerades as natural and organic. By drawing attention to the way meanings are produced through language, modernism made readers less naïve about the ideologies of nationalism, ethnic privilege, and progress—ideologies that became prevalent in 1920s Japan. To the extent that such ideologies continue to hobble our thinking about history, society, and culture today, modernist strategies still hold a place of particular importance. One might argue that, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we remain inundated by a more varied but similar type of media language that continues to make claims on our reality and on our devotions. The need for modernist subversion, and its promise of liberation, remains in this sense as urgent today as ever.

Modernism and the I-Novel

Any accurate recognition of the way literary modernism operated in Japan requires an understanding of the I-novel genre. If literary modernism has been understood to consist of textual strategies that defied readerly expectations, in Japan it was off of the readerly expectations established by the genre of the I-novel—its narrative form as well as its language—that modernism pivoted. A type of récit narrative influenced by French Naturalism, the I-novel emerged in the years following the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and had become standardized as the manifestation of serious or pure literature in Japan by the 1920s. Modernism in Japan emerged in open defiance of this literary genre. Tanizaki coyly described A Fool’s Love as a type of ‘I-novel,’ hinting at the way his novel distorted that genre.¹⁸ Yokomitsu declared that he rebelled against the persistent former style called naturalism, around which clung old sentiments,¹⁹ while Kawabata explained that the breakthrough in our daily lives and art that he and his fellow modernists sought necessitated a breakdown in the literary establishment itself.²⁰ Hirabayashi Taiko inveighed against the Romanticism of the Bluestocking writers of the 1910s, demanding a literature of ideas and action to replace their literature of shouts for freedom and chiefly emotional revolt.²¹ A brief analysis of a representative I-novel will help to make these assertions more concrete while also providing a counterpoint to the various modernist practices treated in this book.

For this purpose I turn to the 1917 novella Reconciliation (Wakai, 和解) by Shiga Naoya, who was credited with reforming, refining, and defining the prose of the I-novel. Shiga’s novella, which was seemingly a self-reflective description of Shiga’s own life, is a first-person narrative of a writer who attempts to write and publish an account of his troubles with his father. Throughout the work, the writer in the story repeatedly fails to complete his work, which he titles The Dreamer (musōka, 夢想家), because of his conflicting and unresolved feelings about his father. As the title reconciliation suggests, the work depicts the ultimate resolution of this emotional and somewhat intangible feud between the narrator and his father. Though some reasons for the rift are hinted at—miscommunication, slights to pride, perceived indignities—no specific cause is ever given. This lack of a concrete obstacle, and thus a conceivable solution, is suggestive of the nature of the problem. Rather than a conflict of interests to be rectified, the problem assumes the form of inharmonious and unpleasant feelings (fuwa, 不和; fuyukai,不愉快) that ripple through the narrator’s life, affecting his mood, his health, and his relationship with his wife and family. These feelings obstruct his ability, for instance, to see his beloved ailing grandmother, who lives in the same house as his father. At one point, even the death of an infant is attributed to this tacit enmity.

The novella begins with the mention of this dead infant and, in terse and direct sentences, dramatizes the way the narrator’s hostility toward his father keeps the family from coming together.

This July 21st would be the one-year anniversary of the death of my first child, who was born last year and died fifty-six days later. It was to visit the grave that I made the trip for the first time