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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature
  • Cited by 2
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2016
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139245869
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139245869
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, Asian Literature, Asian Studies
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing and provides comprehensive coverage of women's literature as well as new popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.

Awards

Honourable Mention, 2017 PROSE Award for Single Volume Reference/Humanities and Social Sciences

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Contents

Page 3 of 4

Contents
  • 47 - Kanshibun in the late Edo period
    pp 465-470
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on the scripted elements of the noh plays. The plays of the time of the noted playwright Zeami and his pupils were more constrained in structure. The Okina sarugaku performance tradition shares some elements with that of noh plays, but there are fundamental differences between the two, for example in the structure of their masks and conventions of costume and dance. Sotoba Komachi and Jinen Koji by Kanami and Ukai by Saemon Goro of the Enami troupe may be taken as representative of the Heian period. Zeami's importance in the tradition of noh plays derives not so much from his fame as an actor in his lifetime, but rather from the fact that his style of play came to dominate the later repertoire. The content of his plays reflected the passion of Kyoto high society for the classical literature of the Heian court and the Heike monogatari.
  • 48 - Waka practice and poetics in the Edo period
    pp 471-478
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Zeami's collected theoretical writings, along with those of his son-in-law Komparu Zenchiku, form the primary corpus of nogakuron. Zeami's early treatises are driven by a tension between two contrasting ideals, yugen and monomane. The most prominent aesthetic ideal in Zeami's writings is hana, the Flower. Zeami is famous for his extensive treatment of jo-ha-kyu. Zeami wrote only one treatise on the art of playwriting, The Three Paths. For woman plays, the ideal protagonist roles are Heian court ladies. In an early treatise, Kabu zuinoki, Zenchiku reveals his deep fascination with waka. Zenchiku is best known for his original theoretical construct rokurin ichiro. The treatises of Zeami and Zenchiku provide invaluable insight into the formative years of noh drama. Zeami constantly strives to adjust his art to a level of refinement suitable for his audience. This is evidence of a medieval concern with the process of reception, with affective theory, due to the social nature of the era's dominant literary arts.
  • 49 - Literary thought in Confucian ancient learning and Kokugaku
    pp 479-487
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Kyogen is Japan's classical comic theater, and also Japan's oldest dialogue-based drama. The earliest precursors to kyogen plays are thought to be irreverent skits performed along with court dances in the Nara and Heian periods. From the early 1400s Zeami and other leaders of noh troupes brought kyogen performers under their organizational umbrella, and kyogen plays have been performed as comic interludes between noh plays from that time until today. The most popular play in the current repertory, Delicious Poison, is one of the few for which one can identify an original literary source. As in the noh drama, kyogen developed many conventions of staging. The kyogen repertory stands as medieval Japan's secular and playful counterpart to the harsh, formal social values intended to govern the lives of Japanese. The core of much kyogen humor is in parody, which deconstructs and inverts specific texts or social types and norms. Kyogen maintained its traditional repertory and functions through World War II.
  • 50 - Bunjin (literati) and early yomihon: Nankaku, Nankai, Buson, Gennai, Teishō, Ayatari, and Akinari
    pp 488-502
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The late medieval period was characterized by a remarkable florescence of the literary, visual, and performing arts. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the rise of a vast new genre of anonymous short fiction or otogizoshi. Both kowakamai and sekkyo, two independent oral genres with roots in early medieval preaching and storytelling, came to possess a recognizable repertoire of tales in the late medieval period. But in their transcribed and illustrated forms these stories are sometimes categorized as otogizoshi, and are thus included in major modern compendiums of all three narrative genres. There is likewise an overlap among sekkyo, kowakamai, otogizoshi, and the seventeenth-century ko-joruri puppet theater, the early plays of which tended to be based on earlier kowakamai, sekkyo, and other katari-mono compositions. By around the late seventeenth century, kowakamai was waning in the shadow of noh; likewise, sekkyo came to be influenced by joruri until it finally disappeared in the early eighteenth century as an independent theatrical form.
  • 52 - Picture books: from akahon to kibyōshi and gōkan
    pp 510-522
  • View abstract

    Summary

    One of the most dramatic transformations in Japanese literary history was the transition from the medieval period to the early modern era, which gave birth to a whole new body of vernacular and Sinitic literature. Most of the high points of early modern literature, the Genroku era, the Horeki-Tenmei era, and the Bunka-Bunsei era, came before or after major Tokugawa shogunate reforms, when writers were relatively free and uncensored. Heian vernacular classics such as Hyakunin isshu, Kokinshu, The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji became basic reading for educated women in the Edo period, but these works, particularly the longer ones, were generally read in digest form, often with pictures, The early modern period produced few women writers in the field of vernacular fiction. Confucian virtues of filial piety and loyalty afforded the bakufu a basis for reinforcing the rules of social hierarchy and the institutions of inheritance.
  • 53 - The birth of kokkeibon (comic novellas)
    pp 523-531
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the context of premodern Japan, "printing" means woodblock printing, or xylography, a technology that originated in China in the seventh century. Woodblock printing was the norm throughout the Edo period, but in the second half of the sixteenth century typography reached Japan from two very different sources and enjoyed several decades of success. The simplicity of xylography made it possible for haikai enthusiasts to have their poems printed privately and thus the poems of many local groups in the provinces, and in particular of many women poets, have been preserved in print. Commercial publishing began in Kyoto in the early years of the seventeenth century and was dominated at least until the end of the century. By the 1660s the book trade had established itself in the three main cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, although for the seventeenth century many of the booksellers of Osaka and Edo were little more than branches or agents of Kyoto firms.
  • 54 - Ninjōbon and romances for women
    pp 532-538
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the issues of seventeenth-century literature, by examining its contents and features, and by reflecting on its legacy throughout the early modern period. It also discusses catalogues of Nyoraishi. Nyoraishi always conveys his message by making extensive intertextual use of Japanese classical works, Chinese texts, and Confucian works. As encountered in the 1670 book-trade catalogue, the category of washo comprises didactic literature that dispensed knowledge. Other categories created in the 1670 catalogue and developed through the Edo period are hanashibon and Japanese-language Buddhist texts known as kana hogo. The main aim of kana hogo is to popularize Buddhist knowledge. A final category that developed in the seventeenth century and was included in the 1685 catalogue is that of koshokubon and rakuji. A patchwork category that plays a central role in seventeenth-century Kamigata popular prose is that of the soshi. In the 1670 catalogue, this contains a high percentage of tales composed in the Muromachi period.
  • 55 - Development of the late yomihon: Santō Kyōden and Kyokutei Bakin
    pp 539-550
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Haikai as a popular genre fully came into its own in the Edo period, moving from a state of anonymity to a multifaceted genre that had a broad impact on many other cultural forms. Matsuo Basho, who participated in both the Teimon and the Danrin schools, became the most influential haikai poet of the late seventeenth century. Haikai was to evolve significantly after the passing of Basho and his school. One major successor was Yosa Buson, who moved to Edo and became a disciple of Hayano Hajin, a haikai poet who had established the Yahantei circle in Nihonbashi. In the early nineteenth century, after Buson and his successors had died, haikai continued to be popular. The most talented haikai poet of this age was Kobayashi Issa, whose main interest was in the contemporary and quotidian, and who focused on the hokku rather than on linked verse. Issa is considered a highly unorthodox haikai poet.
  • 56 - Introduction: nation building, literary culture, and language
    pp 553-571
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki were active on the literary scene during the decades-long first flowering of urban townsman culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns. Saikaku gradually cultivated a growing group of fellow poets and disciples who joined him in haikai composition. He edited five volumes of verses for publication, but his own verses appeared sporadically in the haikai collections of other Danrin poets. A posthumous publication in the category of books on love was titled Saikaku okimiyage, and represented the last collection of stories on what might be termed Saikaku's favorite and defining subject, sexual love. Kiseki's first foray into the genre of ukiyo-zoshi was a five-volume Hachimonjiya publication titled Keisei iro samisen. Kiseki's skillful use of sentimentality in his writings appealed to a broad readership in his day, and this quality allowed his works to exert on ongoing influence on Edo period letters.
  • 57 - Kanshibun in the Meiji period and beyond
    pp 572-577
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Since the fourteenth century, theater has been at the center of cultural life in Japan to an extent rare in the world. several Japanese theatrical traditions, noh, kyogen, bunraku, and kabuki, continue to the present as living lineages of actors passing on their skills from generation to generation, actors have maintained control over the interpretations of texts on the stage. kabuki and bunraku differ fundamentally in their origins and essence. Joruri was the inheritor of the long oral storytelling tradition of blind musicians that flourished after the Genji civil war. During the time of the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who wrote for both the bunraku and kabuki stages, it became standard to publish complete bunraku texts at the time of first performance with the name of the playwright as author. The theater was a vibrant aspect and stimulant of cultural life in the Edo period, one in which individuals from all walks of life participated through a variety of means.
  • 58 - Translated fiction, political fiction
    pp 578-582
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Joruri refers to the vocal art of dramatic narration. Since the Tokugawa period, joruri works have been grouped into ko-joruri and toryu-joruri, which begins in 1685 with Shusse Kagekiyo by the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Chikamatsu Monzaemon composed over one hundred plays for the puppet theater stage over four decades. Chikamatsu's exposure to kabuki dramaturgy profoundly affected his approach to playwriting and later greatly influenced his joruri composition. All of Chikamatsu's most celebrated joruri were composed after his return from the kabuki theater. Modern Japanese anthologies of his plays devote their annotation efforts exclusively to his late-period plays. The golden age of joruri, spanning the years from 1715 until 1751, opened with the first performance of Kokusenya kassen, which enjoyed an unprecedented seventeen-month run at the Takemoto theater. Finally, joruri evolved into a theatrical form that produced cultural artifacts that were immersed in and shared characteristics with the literary and visual cultures of Tokugawa Japan.
  • 59 - Newspaper serials in the late nineteenth century
    pp 583-587
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Kabuki developed along a very different trajectory in Edo, the administrative seat of the shogunate, and accounts of kabuki published there tried to present a distinctly local theatrical history. Tsuruya Nanboku IV, famous Edo playwright, produced hits during the financially unstable period when the traditions of Edo kabuki were starting to collapse. His humorous plays featured lower-class characters, murder, and ghosts, and incorporated special effects and motifs from side shows. Writers who came after Nanboku such as Segawa Joko III and Kawatake Mokuami moved away from the conventional sekai, drawing heavily on social drama taken from oral-storytelling. Narratives of nineteenth-century kabuki tend to center on Edo because, during the Meiji period what had existed as a local form came to be reinvented as a national theatrical tradition. The history of kabuki has been shaped by the modern canonization of Nanboku and Kawatake Mokuami, whose celebrity gives the impression that the nineteenth century was a highpoint of early modern kabuki.
  • 60 - Translation, vernacular style, and the Westernesque femme fatale in modern Japanese literature
    pp 588-597
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In terms of the history of kanshi composition the Edo period is appropriately divided into two parts, with the first ending around 1780, when kanshi poets start to show a significant level of concern with national affairs and with Japan's growing contacts with the outside world. At the same time, other relatively well established trends begin to intensify, notably an interest in writing about mundane matters and popular culture. In any event, during Ogyu Sorai's lifetime kanshi production increased steadily, partly through his school's efforts to promote and liberate the genre but also because of social and demographic changes occurring in Japanese society. Private occasional poetry, typically composed in solitude, makes up a large segment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century kanshi, remaining a staple well beyond the Edo period. The principle of harnessing kanshi for political ends, espoused by the Tokugawa regime in the early seventeenth century but eventually eclipsed, had returned ones that were unimaginable a generation before.
  • 61 - The rise of modern women’s literature
    pp 598-604
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The nineteenth century witnessed the peak, certainly in quantity and arguably in quality, of kanshi or Sinitic poetry and kanbun or Sinitic prose production in Japan. While these two terms, along with the collective kanshibun, it is worth bearing in mind a slight distinction between Anglophone and Japanese usage. A cognizance of the change is evident in the recollections of the scholar Hirose Tanso, whose Kangien academy in Kyushu trained thousands of disciples. The xingling theory's emphasis on individualistic expression that its exponents often turned their attention to their own everyday experiences rather than trying to project themselves into the poetic realms of their High Tang predecessors. Highly developed commercial publishing and the rise of kanshibun literacy had dramatically enlarged the audience for poetic anthology texts. In addition to the orthodox modes of kanshi and kanbun composition that flourished in late Edo, the era also saw the emergence of humorous genres that amused by willfully deviating from convention.
  • 62 - Melodrama, family romance, and the novel at the turn of the century
    pp 605-612
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The final two decades of the seventeenth century saw in the intellectual life of Japan two developments that would prove to have influence on waka poetry, first on its poetics but later also on its practice. These were Kokugaku and Kogaku. Waka had traditionally eschewed all diction of foreign derivation, and its poetics came to occupy pride of place in Kokugaku writing. Both Kamo no Mabuchi and his nominal disciple Motoori Norinaga were poets of some repute but today they are remembered for their theories. Waka poetry was practiced by many literati, polymaths accomplished in several arts who tended to look askance at popular culture and who remained aloof from coteries and schools. The final generation of Edo period waka poets may be represented by two whose works are still often cited and admired: O kuma Kotomichi and Tachibana Akemi, both of whose merchant-class origins bespeak the extent of liberation of the art from its aristocratic monopoly two centuries earlier.
  • 63 - Modern Japanese poetry to the 1910s
    pp 613-622
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the Tokugawa period, poetry played an important role in the ethical and political philosophies of many Confucians in the Ancient Learning or Kogaku movement, such as Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai, who sought to recover the original meaning of Confucian texts, which they believed had been distorted by later commentaries. Poetry played a similar role for many scholars of Kokugaku or nativism, such as Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga, who advocated a purely native Japanese culture freed from Confucianism and other foreign influences. Sorai linked empathy to a political ideal of decentralized feudalism, which he saw as characteristic of ancient China up until the Zhou dynasty, and contrasted with the centralized bureaucracies of the Qin dynasty and later. In his later works Mabuchi put forth a philosophy of Japanese cultural superiority in which he claimed that Japan originally possessed a spontaneous social harmony and unity with nature that were lacking in China.
  • 64 - Between the Western and the traditional: Mori Ōgai, Nagai Kafū, and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō
    pp 623-633
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The critical writings of Ogyu Sorai, one of the most original and influential early modern Japanese intellectuals, helped set the stage for the emergence of a bunjin consciousness. Another early Confucian advisor who attempted to embody bunjin ideals of aloof refinement in his life and work is Gion Nankai. Nankai's experience differs from Hattori Nankaku's in that Nankai did not resign but was punished for a certain infraction and kept under house arrest for ten years. Individuals who decided to step away from social engagement and follow a life devoted to literary and artistic endeavors, five stand out: Yosa Buson, Tsuga Teisho, Takebe Ayatari, Hiraga Gennai, and Ueda Akinari. All five share Nakamura Yukihiko's bunjin attributes of versatile creativity, eremitism, and aloof idealism, and all created works that continue to attract viewers today. Teisho's collections were identified by later writers as the earliest examples of what has subsequently become known as the yomihon, a specific genre of narrative fiction.
  • 65 - Natsume Sōseki and the theory and practice of literature
    pp 634-640
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Three relatively new genres, kyoshi, kyoka, and senryu, came to the fore in the latter half of the eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century, Japanese literati had naturalized the medium of Chinese poetry, adapting it to their own tastes and needs. Waka poets wrote kyoka, a parodic and popular form of the thirty-one syllable waka, as a form of amusement, in much the same way that Japanese kanshi poets composed kyoshi. Kyoka relied heavily on complex and witty wordplay and incorporated socially diverse content that broke the bounds of classical waka. The seventeen-syllable senryu became popular in the 1750s. Senryu covered a broad range of topics of interest to contemporary audiences, particularly in Edo, which had become a major metropolis by the mid eighteenth century. The fundamental differences between modern haiku and senryu can be traced to their historical origins. Haiku was originally the opening verse of a linked-verse sequence, and senryu was an offshoot of the added verse.
  • 66 - A new era of women writers
    pp 641-647
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The book titled Mazu yonde Mikuni Kojoro was something fairly new: it was a gokan, the last in a series of genres combining pictures and prose that were produced in Edo from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. The genres, including akahon, kurohon, aohon, kibyoshi, and gokan, together fall under the general heading of kusa-zoshi. The category of kusa-zoshi comprises genres of fiction that were produced in Edo from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Kusa-zoshi always combined pictures and text on the same page, with the text appearing either at the top of the page, in some early akahon, or in the negative space in the pictures. Gokan occasionally included pictorial spreads with little or no writing on the one hand, or pages completely filled with writing on the other. The main texts in all forms of kusazo-shi would usually be printed in hiragana, so that the writing was legible even to the minimally educated.
  • 67 - Literary marketplace, politics, and history: 1900s–1940s
    pp 648-668
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The genre known as kokkeibon or comic novellas emerged in the aftermath of the Kansei Reforms. Before the reforms, the field of popular fiction had been dominated by two genres: the dialogue-based sharebon and the illustrated kibyoshi. Jippensha Ikku made his debut in popular fiction as a writer of kibyoshi under the patronage of the powerful publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo. Murataya Jirobe had organized an otoshi-banashi club in which Ikku had participated, collecting the comic tales presented at the meetings for publication in the form of hanashibon and kibyoshi. The dialogue between the protagonists that carries the story resembles the narrative technique found in sharebon, a genre in which Ikku had written extensively. Ikku drew his humorous content from a wide variety of sources, including kyogen plays and classic comic stories. The other major kokkeibon author was Shikitei Sanba. Sanba's first work in the genre was a collaboration with Santo Kyoden on a kokkeibon titled Kyogen kigo.
  • 68 - Canonization and popularization: anthologies and literary prizes
    pp 669-671
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The first genre in the long history of Japanese literature to be published commercially for a readership consisting primarily of commoner women, ninjobon became immensely popular. Tamenaga Shunsui stands at the center of this genre with such representative works as Shunshoku umegoyomi or Plum Calendar of Spring Colors, Shunshoku tatsumi no sono, and Harutsuge dori. This chapter discusses the story of Plum Calendar of Spring Colors. Women began entering the workforce, albeit in auxiliary roles, around the nineteenth century, implying a higher rate of literacy. Furthermore, as may be gathered from the growing popularity of kabuki, a new tendency prevailed whereby city women, endowed now with a surplus of both time and money, participated more actively in the various modes of public entertainment in cities. Reading Shunsui's ninjobon, everyone gain an understanding of just how different the concept of romance in Edo was in comparison to the authors own modern one.
  • 69 - Colonialism, translation, literature: Takahama Kyoshi’s passage to Korea
    pp 672-676
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter traces the formation and development of the late yomihon as a fictional form, focusing on Santo Kyoden's and Kyokutei Bakin's innovations and the relationship between the two authors. The haishi-mono or unofficial history style emerged in Edo in the wake of the Kansei Reforms, carried out under the direction of Matsudaira Sadanobu. After Santo Kyoden's attention-getting punishment for three of his sharebon, some early yomihon authors active in Edo incorporated discussions of the reforms in their work. The first unofficial history yomihon was Santo Kyoden's Chu shin suikoden, illustrated by Kitao Shigemasa. Kyoden's second yomihon was Asaka no numa, which was the product of a combination of prominent works from the Chinese and Japanese traditions. Bakin's first yomihon was Takao senjimon. Bakin has come to be regarded as the preeminent yomihon author, a firm grasp of the role Kyoden played in the genre, and of Bakin's relationship to him, is essential to an accurate understanding of late yomihon.
  • 71 - From empire to nation: the spatial imaginary of the 1920s to early 1950s
    pp 682-691
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This introduction focuses on the long three decades, from the early 1870s to the turn of the century, paying particular attention to major developments in media, journalism, the educational system, literacy, and practices of writing and reading in the larger sociopolitical context. Toward the end of 1873, a group of leading scholars and intellectuals, who played important roles in Meiji nation building as government officials, and who shared similar concerns with Fukuzawa Yukichi. The oligarchic government aggressively promoted a policy of "developing national prosperity and military strength" after leading members of the early Meiji government came back from an eighteen-month embassy to the United States and Europe, where they witnessed first-hand the modern system of industrial capitalism and its infrastructure. From the early 1900s, after Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the phonocentric ideology of the national language emerged as the core of systematic national language policy, in which the differences between the spoken and written languages were ideologically suppressed.
  • 72 - Japanese literature and cinema from the 1910s to the 1950s
    pp 692-701
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Sinitic genres flourished in the Meiji period with unprecedented splendor, giving kanshibun a ubiquity it had never had before. A tremendous expansion of kanshi or Sinitic poetry composition had taken place in late Edo which facilitated the acquisition of literacy and compositional proficiency in Literary Sinitic. Narushima Ryuhoku embarked upon a career as a journalist after losing his post in the Restoration. He had served the previous regime as shogunal tutor and compiler of historical chronicles while also making a name for himself as a poet and chronicler of urban culture. The figure who was central to the best stage of Meiji kanshi, Mori Kainan, reflected this increased level of interaction with Qing poets. While Qing dynasty poems had received some attention from earlier Japanese figures, both Kainan and his father Shunto produced anthologies that made Qing poems more familiar and accessible. In the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, kanshi became a less feature of the literary scene.
  • 73 - Modern drama
    pp 702-710
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Meiji Japan may be described, in both instrumental and metaphorical senses, as a translation culture. Almost all the oligarchy's policies aimed at modernizing the state were dependent to some degree on the translation of Western political, legal, and technological knowledge. It was politically advantageous for modernizers to disparage the Tokugawa period as frivolous and backward, and even conservative intellectuals saw popular forms of pre-Meiji literature and storytelling as old-fashioned. The hybridity of the political novel is apparent in two of the popular and influential works: Setchu bai by Suehiro Tetcho, which is marked by the intrusions of political dialogues into a love-romance narrative; and Kajin no kigu by Shiba Shiro, a romance centered around stories about the struggle for freedom and national independence. The important achievement of translations and political fiction was in taking advantage of new media to establish the novel as the artistic medium of modern culture that represented the sensibilities of an emerging middle-class readership.
  • 74 - Modern poetry: 1910s to the postwar period
    pp 711-718
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Japan's first daily newspaper, Yokohama Daily, was founded on 1871 under the Gregorian calender, and soon others such as Tokyo Daily, and Post-Dispatch Newspaper followed suit. These newspapers were characterized by their kanbun-style language and their focus on economy and business that matched their target audience of entrepreneurs and intellectuals. By the end of the 1870s, the serialized "reports" called tsuzuki-mono had established themselves as the favorite reading material of newspaper subscribers, stimulating the sales of koshinbun at a time when the newspaper industry as a whole was undergoing rapid expansion due to two contemporary developments: the Seinan War and the Freedom and People's Rights movement. The emergence of the detective story in the late 1880s appeared to be a perfect marriage between content and form within the literary landscape of the time. The late 1890s was a period when major ideological frameworks of the Japanese family were being constructed and propagated in conjunction with the Meiji Civil Code.
  • 75 - Trends in postwar literature, 1945–1970s
    pp 719-736
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The history of modern Japanese literature begins with translation in more than one sense. The Meiji era was characterized by calls for reform in virtually every arena of Japanese life; language and women were especially prominent targets for change. Futabatei Shimei was the first to attempt translating modern Western fiction into vernacular Japanese, and one of the first to try composing original fiction in vernacular Japanese. In translating vernacular Russian fiction, Futabatei abandoned the preexisting styles of kanbun-kundoku, instead seeking to forge a new style that would convey the form, content, and vernacular nature of the original texts. Osei is a talker and natural-born mimic, whereas Bunzo is a thinker who sees everything in terms of written texts. The ever-widening gap between the two, when read as the failed betrothal of speech and writing, emerges as a powerful metanarrative on the essential dilemmas of vernacularization in modern Japanese literature.

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