Novel Japan: Spaces of Nationhood in Early Meiji Narrative, 1870-88 (review)

The National Diet Library's holdings of Meiji publications, now available on microfilm, testify to the flood of fictional prose literature published during the first 20 years of the Meiji period. Some of it consisted of the fictional repertoire of the first half of the nineteenth century, now reprinted in movable type, but there was much that was new, from comic and satirical works to fictions centered on the world of students at the burgeoning educational institutions of Meiji Japan. Only a tiny handful are reprinted in collections such as Meiji bungaku zenshū and Kindai Nihon bungaku taikei, and for the most part they are not even mentioned in literary histories. Nevertheless, they are extraordinarily revealing of the horizons of fiction writing in the Meiji period and of the ways those who had grown up on the fiction of the Edo period responded to the political and social changes happening around them.

John Pierre Mertz deserves praise for having turned his attention toward some of these works in order to see what they can tell us about the changing nature of narrative in the early Meiji period and about how the newly constructed sense of Japanese nationhood is articulated in fictional contexts. He offers close examinations of Kanagaki Robun's Aguranabe and Seiyō dōchū hizakurige, some of the satires of Mantei Ōga, several novels presenting fictionalized accounts of sensational contemporary crimes, some of the many political novels, and other works. Since they are mostly by no means easy to read and none of them has been translated into English, Mertz provides summaries and explanations sufficient to enable readers to follow his points without difficulty. He succeeds admirably in establishing that these works, especially the political novels, are worth taking seriously and, more important, that the emergence of "literary modernity" in Meiji Japan was far less straightforward than is suggested by the linear narrative we are usually presented with. If you have never heard of Mantei Ōga, Mertz will convince you that he is an important manifestation of resistance to the cultural prejudices of assimilators like Fukuzawa Yukichi.

Given the adventurous, if not pioneering, spirit of this book, it is a great pity that it suffers from some serious shortcomings. The first is apparent both from the punning title and the opening words of the preface, in which Mertz claims that, in the first two decades of the Meiji period, "narrative literature in Japan underwent transformations more extreme than at any other time in history." This is the premise of Mertz's work but it is nowhere tested or questioned. In other words, like so many before him, he starts out by accepting the improbable thesis that the Meiji Restoration worked changes on prose narrative such as to justify dividing Meiji literature off from what came before it.

This leads to the second shortcoming. Mertz cites extensively the writings of Asukai Masamichi, Maeda Ai, Ochi Haruo, and Okitsu Kaname (although Okitsu's two most important works do not appear in the bibliography); they are for the most part informed by extensive knowledge of the prose literature of the Edo period, as indeed any study of early Meiji writing must be. Unfortunately, however, it is all too evident that Mertz enjoys much less familiarity with pre-Meiji writing. This is most obvious in his ubiquitous and unquestioning use of the outmoded term gesaku to refer to the prose fiction of the Edo period. Had he consulted Nakamura Yukihiko's classic study Gesakuron (1966), he would have had a better appreciation of the baggage carried by this term and the reasons it is now shunned as too intrinsically pejorative to be of any value.

By defining in this way pre-Meiji fiction as gesaku and something distinct from the Meiji works he considers, the assumed gulf between the two is given an unreliable rhetorical justification. Why unreliable? Because Mertz makes statements about what he...