Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature (review)

In a welcome addition to the growing number of theme-based studies of modern Japanese literature, Stephen Dodd takes up the topic of literary representation of the furusato, what he calls the native place, in fiction published between the mid-Meiji and early Showa period. The theme is a particularly fascinating one since none of the four major authors discussed—Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki Tōson, Satō Haruo, and Shiga Naoya—presents the native place as merely an idyllic site to which the weary urban writer turns for replenishment. Indeed, the beauty of Dodd's study lies in its emphasis on the dynamic relationship that exists between these authors' urban experiences and their creative remembering of the past. In each case, it is the city that mediates, to varying degrees, the authors' representation of home.

The strongest parts of Dodd's book show how each of these writers' depictions of the native place connects with the broad range of contemporary social, intellectual, economic, and technological discourses. Dodd also incorporates ideas on spatiality by later critics such as Maeda Ai, Isoda Kōichi, Marilyn Ivy, Jennifer Robertson, Harry Harootunian, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, and Henri Lefebvre. While mindful of the danger inherent in too easily associating writers with the age in which they live, Dodd nonetheless argues that these writers' fiction indirectly contributes to the general debate on Japan's emerging national identity in the prewar period. As provocative a tie as this is, given the wholly different experiences and literary styles of the rather disparate group of writers Dodd considers, the link between literature and national identity remains tenuous.

Furusato, a word that denotes "home," connotes far more. This home is generally associated with rural areas, distant from the city; moreover, it evokes in individuals nostalgia for a simpler life, usually that experienced in childhood. Each of the writers Dodd examines identifies himself with a unique furusato, but in all cases home proves to be more metaphorical than real. In fact, Tōson is the only author who depicts his actual furusato in his writing. Dodd argues that the authors' depictions of native place are not simply reminiscences of lost childhood; they are attempts to find compensatory sites through which to imaginatively integrate themselves into the environment. Thus, Dodd writes:

The furusato corresponds less to an external locality that may (or may not) exist in reality than to an amorphous phenomenon subject to shifting developments over time. Although it sometimes overlaps with a specific physical location, its broader significance in modern Japanese literature is as a mythical construction through and against which radical alternatives to prevalent ideas about what constitutes modern Japan have been played out.

(p. 3)

It is the writers' imaginative construction of a largely metaphorical furusato that Dodd emphasizes throughout his study.

Dodd's overview of furusato in premodern literature at the start of the book is helpful not only for the context it provides, but also for pointing to the artificial divides that result from rigid historical periodization. He segues to the modern era by discussing the earliest generation of modern authors of native place literature, giving particular attention to Miyazaki Koshoshi, whose best-selling Kisei (Returning home, 1890) was the first work to eulogize the furusato. Though Miyazaki's work was popular, according to Dodd, it depicted a simple urban/rural dichotomy in which the city's ugliness contrasts sharply with the beauty of the countryside. In their literature, Doppo, Tōson, Satō, and Shiga move beyond this naïve division, offering readers a far more complex portrait of the tensions that underlie descriptions of landscape. For example, in chapter one Dodd shows how Kunikida Doppo's writing reflects the author's desire for a more stable literary native place that would replace the furusato he never fully experienced as a result of frequent moves. Dodd concurs with Karatani Kōjin that Doppo...