Among the many results of the 19th-century "opening" of Japan to the West was a truly massive internalization of foreign culture, one which is now so advanced that concepts such as "self" and "other" can no longer be effectively distinguished and the boundaries of "Japanese" culture have been enlarged to the point of obliteration. As critic Hideo Kobayashi said as early as 1933, Japanese have "become so used to the reception of Western influence that we no longer can identify it as Western influence."
A result has been the common experience of seeing native culture as somehow exotic; the former "self" has become the present "other." The Japan Travel Bureau advertises trips to Kyoto as a kind of time travel, the home town is billed as some alien utopia ("Tora-san Land"), and the modern Japanese becomes, in U.S. historian Miriam Silverberg's memorable phrase, "a Westerner who is not Western."
There is nothing drastic in all this. It is through such patterns that culture moves itself along. At the same time, however, prior assumptions are broken down, and new ones have to be made. At present, the concept of some mutual exclusivity between things Japanese and things not Japanese has all but disappeared. Just last weekend, at the summer festival in Ueno, I saw young women wearing black leather, stiletto-heeled pumps with their traditional yukata, a sight that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.
Nor is Japan alone in experiencing such redefinitions. All cultures are forever refashioning this "modern self" that attempts to account for both the past and the present, making some kind of bridge, no matter how rickety. In the process, the perceived distinction between things national and things foreign lessens, and with this -- as literary critic Kojin Karatani pointed out a decade ago -- the balance between subject and object is also altered.
In the West, an example of such a cultural shift is to be seen in the mass of aesthetic manifestations now subsumed under the rubric of "modernism." In "Topographies of Japanese Modernism," U.S. academic Seiji Lippit writes that in literature these 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 fiction alone there are such modernist texts as those of Andre Gide, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Robert Musil, such novels as James Joyce's "Ulysses," Alfred Doblin's "Berlin Alexanderplatz," and Andrei Bely's "Petersburg," and much else -- all reflecting fragmentation, dissolution and, at the same time, an often fruitful shifting of the lines of identify. It is usually the "foreign" influence that nudges modernism into motion. Without the Chinese example the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound would be changed, without the Japanese example (haiku) the montage theory of film director Sergei Eisenstein would be different.
Modernism as a cultural force entered Japan early -- as soon as writers had need for it. Proust began appearing in Japanese translation in 1929 and a rendering of Joyce's "Ulysses" was serialized from 1930. But even before this, many Japanese authors, dissatisfied with the only techniques historically available to them -- old-fashioned Edo examples, the later novels of "naturalism" and the new political exemplar, Marxism -- had begun modest "modernist" experiments.
Lippit has here brilliantly charted the modernist movement in Japanese fiction and accounted for its antecedents, its later influence, and the enormous and varied vitality of its products. He does this by noting the explosion of different forms of mass culture in the late 1910s through the 1920s, and by tracing the rapid and extensive politicization of literary practice that raised important questions about literature's status in society.
He first examines the later writings of Ryunosuke Akutagawa and the collapse of a universalized conception of literature. He then turn turns to Riichi Yokomitsu and his 1928 novel "Shanghai," before going on to explore Yasunari Kawabata's "The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa," a 1930 novel that is one of Japanese modernism's most perfect examples. He then turns to Fumiko Hayashi's "Tales of Wandering," a work not usually found in Japanese renderings of its own modernist canon. He provocatively ends his study by considering the fate of modernist literary practice in an atmosphere of increasing ultranationalism, turning to the late works of Yokomitsu, texts that both question and ratify, and make one think of wartime Pound in Italy.
Among these insights, of major interest to the reader (at least to this reader) is the masterly exegesis of Kawabata's "The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa." One reason for this is the way in which the novel reflects modernist concerns; another is the fact that it is the only major Japanese modernist novel not yet available to the foreign reader (a complete translation by Alisa Freedman is, however, now at the University of California Press and will be published next year). Here is a dazzling modernist work that questions our fictional assumptions, captures the impact of the new, and enlarges the perimeters we permit "ourselves."
As critic Hideo Kobayashi himself discovered: "History seems always and inexorably to destroy tradition. And as individuals mature, they seem always and inexorably to move toward its true discovery."
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