Literature as Life-Form: Media and Modernism in the Literary Theory of Ōkuma Nobuyuki

Literature is not an immortal writ carved in an eternal face of stone, but a life-form generated and developing together with the reader. Therefore, it is something that dies.¹

A heightened awareness of the mediated qualities of print literature shaped prewar Japanese modernism, as did creative attention to the connection between print and such rival media as film and radio. While many writers, artists, and critics of the 1920s and 1930s explored the print medium’s new possibilities and its relationship to rival media, the literary theory of economist, tanka poet, and critic Ōkuma Nobuyuki (1893–1977) offers a particularly striking articulation of these concerns. In Bungei no Nihonteki keitai (The Japanese Morphology of Literary Art, 1937), the last of three books of literary theory, Ōkuma stressed the necessity of inserting the reader or media consumer into critical discourse and examined what he called sonzai keishiki , the “formal existence” or media gestalt of print literature, film, and radio; he also emphasized the new theoretical perspectives to be gained by comparative studies of various media.² Through his keen attention to the aspects of mediation and reception in literature, Ōkuma left a body of criticism that still offers stimulating perspectives on twentieth-century culture, raising issues regarding the nature of literature and media that assume a fresh relevance amid today’s changing media landscape.

Moving between printed literature, film, and radio, Ōkuma stressed the need for a reevaluation of literature that responds to its evolving media context. “The character (honshitsu ) of things,” he wrote,

is determined by what other things they are compared with; the character of something old itself will change with the appearance of something new. I would like to emphasize that an “absolute essential character” of things (zettai no honshitsu ) does not exist. The character of literature changes according to what it is juxtaposed with or compared against.³

By using the term sonzai keishiki, or “formal existence,” Ōkuma sought not only to define the intrinsic formal qualities of works in a given medium within this intermedial context, but to address the entire set of conditions of production and reception through which the medium comes to life as “social production.” With his focus on the social aspects of production and reception, he rejected the notion of literature as a landscape of immortal monuments or masterpieces. Instead, he insisted that literature is “something that dies” and directed his attention towards the ephemeral form of the newspaper-serialized novel (shinbun shōsetsu ).

In its attention to the rise of mass media and their profound effects on conceptions and practices of art and literature, Ōkuma’s critical theory calls to mind the contemporaneous writings of such Frankfurt School theorists as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. On the other hand, in its focus on the temporality and contextually specific manifestations of the literary work and on the physically and mentally embodied process of reading, Ōkuma’s criticism parallels the pioneering phenomenological literary theory of Roman Ingarden, which also took shape in the 1930s. However, although Ōkuma and his peers among Japanese literary critics of the 1920s and 1930s were steeped in many of the same philosophical sources as the Frankfurt and (to a lesser extent) the phenomenological schools, there does not appear to be much direct influence between them. Therefore, while I will occasionally note significant parallels with European or American literary theory of the time or later, I will concentrate primarily on outlining Ōkuma’s criticism itself and on explicating its relation to Japanese literary and critical trends of the same period.

The aim of this article, then, is to introduce Ōkuma’s literary theory and to offer some preliminary observations regarding his position within the context of prewar Japanese critical and creative discourse. Following a brief synopsis of Ōkuma’s career as economist, poet, and critic, I will provide an overview of the literary situation to which he responded in his critical writing, including the expansion of the print industry, the increasing attention to rival media within the literary world, and the appearance of modernist and proletarian literary...