Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity (review)

"Why profess Japanese literature?" (p. xiii). After the critique of Orientalism and with the ongoing dismantling of the humanities within the contemporary university system, the question could not be timelier. How should we define not only the object of our study but our own relationship to it? What might literature tell us about modern Japan—and about ourselves? Dennis Washburn outlines a coherent, erudite response to these problems, though ultimately the ethical and political—that is to say, theoretical—framework of his answer leaves unresolved some of the most important issues these urgent questions raise.

The author describes this volume as a continuation of his earlier study, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction (Yale University Press, 1995). Like its predecessor, the present work takes up a good-sized swath of the Japanese literary canon and fashions it into an interpretation that centers on several big ideas: ethics, identity, and translation, as the title tips us off, but also aesthetics, autonomy, hybridity, modernity, and authenticity. While the earlier book's reach extended across a millennium, the current volume restricts its scope to what seems by comparison a mere 200 years. Moreover, Washburn focuses primarily on one limited segment within that span: of the six novelists (all male) given individual chapters here, five belong mostly or wholly to the twentieth century. In other words, this book tackles the modern period and primarily the problem of "a deeply rooted anxiety about the effects of a divided ethical consciousness" (p. 29) that is said to characterize modern Japanese literature. That consciousness is internally split because it attempts to ground its values paradoxically both in the universal autonomy of the individual and in the particular authenticity of a national cultural tradition.

Taking this apparent contradiction as his starting point, Washburn surveys a number of prominent figures from Japanese literary history. His chapter on Mishima Yukio represents a major achievement: it manages to make critical sense of an often perplexing figure without reducing him either to foolish caricature or to Orientalist fantasy. Mishima is generally presented here not so much as the product of a specific cultural tradition, as the paragon of Japaneseness, but rather as a symptom of modernity and the instabilities inherent in all modern societies. Likewise, the chapter on eighteenth-century writer Ueda Akinari makes a worthy contribution to an ongoing reevaluation of this important iconoclast from the kokugaku lineage. Washburn unpacks the relationship in Akinari's ghost stories between "his acceptance of the authority of the past, which assumed the existence of a pure, authentic ethical consciousness, and his assertion of the autonomy of literary practice" (p. 39). The reading of Yokomitsu Riichi's Shanhai (Shanghai), a work Washburn himself has translated to great acclaim, makes sense of that sprawling novel in terms of the conflicting perspectives of personal and national identity embedded within its narrative, all situated in an explosive imperial setting where the political stakes of a new, visually oriented mode of representation become all too obvious.

In other chapters, however, the framework used here leads to less persuasive analyses. Washburn declares his desire to bring out "the daring" of Natsume Sōseki's fiction, a quality found in the author's "willingness to experiment" and the "hybridity" of his style (p. 72). But the resulting interpretation of the 1908 novel Sanshirō as a "parodic reflection and critique of the Meiji discourse on the ethics of identity" (p. 73), one that works by combining traits of realism and melodrama and that depicts "the interior development, especially the moral education of the main character" (p. 106), seems to blunt the more radical claims that Sōseki's fiction makes on us today—at least in the eyes of this reviewer. Washburn reads Mori ōgai's Seinen (Youth) as a creative and specifically Japanese translation of the Bildungsroman genre, one that equates "the search for identity with...