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  • An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel
  • Stephen Dodd (bio)
An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel. By Ken K. Ito. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2008. xiii, 310 pages. $55.00.

Ken Ito's first monograph, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki's Fictional Worlds (Stanford University Press, 1991), firmly established him as a scholar of Meiji and Taisho fiction with not only considerable skills in literary close readings but also sharp sensitivities to an author's broader social and cultural context. Since then, he has published a range of articles in journals as well as chapters in edited books; his study on narrative form, "Writing Time in Sōseki's Kokoro," in Studies in Modern Japanese Literature1 stands out as a particularly insightful essay. His new book, An Age of Melodrama, takes up the melodramatic mode as a means to link four different novels into the complex social and cultural milieu of "turn of the century" Japan, a period corresponding to the last decade and a half of the Meiji era. The novels in question are Ozaki Kōyō's Konjiki yasha (The golden demon, 1897–1903), Tokutomi Roka's Hototogisu (The cuckoo, 1898–99), Kikuchi Yūhō's Chikyōdai (Raised as sisters, 1903), and Natsume Sōseki's Gubujinsō (The poppy, 1907). The book throughout displays a quality of scholarship that [End Page 355] confirms Ito has lost none of his meticulous attention to historicizing detail and in-depth textual analysis.

In his introduction, Ito draws from the work of other critics (but primarily Peter Brooks) to set out in general terms how melodrama might serve as a useful key to interpret these Japanese novels. If the Meiji period was a time that witnessed the "destruction of an established social status system and the arrival of uncontrolled social mobility," then the melodramatic mode, with its often excessively simple portrayals of moral dualism, articulated a compensatory "desire for moral certitude" (p. 3). However, the value of Ito's study is not merely in his sketching of melodrama's exaggerations—its "sentiment, cheap sensationalism, exaggerated coincidences" (p. 4)—but in his contention that melodrama can be seen to point to real social tensions and conflicts, albeit in heightened form. He explores these tensions specifically through discourses relating to family, gender, and social hierarchies that were in a considerable state of flux in the late Meiji period.

A good example of these contradictions can be found in the chapter on Hototogisu. The story addresses the dramatic effect of tuberculosis on the lives of many Japanese in the late nineteenth century. Namiko and Takeo are deeply in love, get married, and move into Takeo's family home. But when Namiko begins to fall ill, Takeo's mother fears the whole household will suffer. While Takeo is away fighting in the Sino-Japanese War, she forces her daughter-in-law to divorce, and Namiko suffers a lonely, pathetic end. For Ito, this story is best understood as an ideological conflict between alternative family systems. The mother is aligned with the ie system, with its strong emphasis on seniority and patriarchal authority over the will of any individual. In contrast, the mutual affection between the young couple particularly at the beginning of the novel hints at a newly emerging kind of familial relationship (katei), which promises greater equality between the sexes. In the end, the ie wins out, but in the process of describing this struggle, Ito suggests how such melodramatic fiction throws up the possibility of alternative forms of human relationships, or what he calls "fictive families." Ito goes further by drawing on Edward Said's concept of filiation and affiliation to suggest that a new familial relationship has emerged between Takeo and Namiko's father at the story's end, when they form a close "father/son" relationship. Ironically, this new and alternative bonding amounts, in the end, to a reconfirmation of pre-existing patriarchal authority.

The chapter on Konjiki yasha examines, among other things, how conflicting ideologies about family also engendered new understandings of love. The novel's plot...

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