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  • The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature
  • Philip Gabriel (bio)
The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature. By Leith Morton. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2009. 257 pages. $56.00.

This excellent new study is, in the words of the author, a "series of case studies into how the notion of the alien has intruded into twentieth-century Japanese literature" (p. 5). More specifically, The Alien Within aims to examine how "notions of the alien and exotic have been 'naturalized' into Japanese writing over the past century or so" (p. 7), with a particular emphasis on how Japanese writers have "internalized the exotic through adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter" (p. 4). Morton's work thus goes beyond previous studies in English of Japan and Japanese literature that have dealt with the alien or exotic, such as The Walls Within, which deals with the Westerner as exotic, and extends the work that Morton and others began in the 2007 essay collection Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature.1 In the latter collection, Morton explored the work of the Okinawan writer Ō Tatsuhiro. In The Alien Within, he not only broadens his study of Ōshiro but provides insightful analyses of the works of a number of important figures in Japanese literature: Tsubouchi ShMyō, Yosano Akiko, Izumi Kyōka, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Arishima Takeo, and Murakami Haruki. The Alien Within thus ranges broadly, from the Meiji period to a work published in 2001, and covers a wide variety of genres, from early translations of Shakespeare to gothic novels, poetry, and travel writing. The strengths of this study are many, but three stand out: Morton introduces the work of writers who are less known in the West (Shōyō, Arishima, and Kyōka in particular, though the translations and studies by Charles Inouye have brought Kyōka more recognition recently); he explores lesser-known aspects of better-known writers (such as Yosano's writings on childbirth and Murakami's travel writing); but above all Morton, with the sensitivity of a poet and scholar of poetry, explores the nuances of original texts and reveals these writers as dynamically reworking their art over time, reacting creatively to both the Japanese literary tradition and their encounter with the Other of Western literature.

This last point is made most tellingly in the first chapter on Shōyō's translations of Shakespeare and the following two chapters on Yosano [End Page 359] Akiko's poetry. In examining Shōyō's translations of Shakespeare, Morton, using terms borrowed from James Brandon's three-part "division of Shakespearean adaptations" (pp. 11–12), explores how Shōyō's translations of Shakespearean drama and his approach to translation evolved over the decades of his career. Morton does a close reading of excerpts from Julius Caesar and Hamlet in three Shōyō translations, from 1884, 1913, and 1933, and concludes that while Shōyō's later translations created a "canonical Shakespeare," to use Brandon's term, that is, conveying "faithfully the foreignness of the originals," this was much less true of Shōyō's earlier translations, which are best seen as a "free or loose rendering; perhaps poetic adaptation would be a more apt description" (p. 32). Another intriguing aspect of Shōyō's early translation that Morton highlights is the political. Morton uses Nakamura Kan's 1986 study of Shōyō, for example, to argue that, in his 1884 translations of Shakespeare, Shōyō "expanded on the original text—turning the character of Brutus into a hero fighting for liberty and civil rights … in order to express support for the jiyūminken undō." Morton contends that in this way "the alien, democratized human that appears in Western thought at this time is thus brought home" (pp. 32–33).

Arguably, the small body of recent work in English on Akiko (Janine Beichman's Embracing the Firebird chief among them2) points to a renewed interest in Akiko's work abroad, and Morton's work here is a welcome addition to the study of this major figure. Morton divides his analysis into two chapters, the first dealing with Akiko's...

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