Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature (review)

Tomoko Aoyama's fascinating new book on the meanings and symbols of food in modern Japanese literature aims at debunking the myth, aptly summed up by Higuchi Kiyoyuki, that historically Japan possesses a "literature with no appetite."¹ The book is organized more thematically than chronologically, a feat that will please scholars and students who wish to look across time at various genres of literature. Reading Food is on its way to a gustatory revelation about the true seat of cuisine within the Japanese literary mindset.

Aoyama comes to our rescue early in her manifesto to remind us that reading food in modern Japanese literature "involves production, distribution, preparation, and consumption," among other elements (p. 2). She looks at how food is presented in texts but also at what it tells us about relations. Relationships surrounding food are, in Aoyama's opinion, a window on the historical soul of Japan. She makes the claim that "food abounds in modern Japanese literature" (p. 7). To be sure, drinking as a pastime was written about in copious volumes, but scholars seem to have paid less attention to the activity of eating in Japanese literature. Indeed, it is hard to recall a Japanese equivalent to the prevalence of eating in Chinese novels where it is a central part of the culture.

In a move to push her analysis away from the singular confines of plot and narrative summaries, the author includes diaries, which have a long history in Japan, under the rubric of literature. Aoyama examines Masaoka Shiki, a poet who lived during the Meiji era until the early 1900s. In testimony to his obsession with food, Masaoka recorded in excruciating detail in his diary his daily health regimen as well as what he ate, which was to be sure a very strange diet.

Male diarists were not the only scribes taking note of what they digested; those hungry within Japan's blossoming empire also made bold statements. Hayashi Fumiko's Hōrōki (Journal of a vagabond, 1928-30) listed the appetites of a healthy young woman. Hayashi was known to have said that the only two reasons for living were eating and writing. Aoyama suggests that Hayashi's frank depiction of her economically depressed straits offers a larger commentary on the social and political fissures rife within Japan's expanding imperial empire. Hayashi shared a common experience with the vast majority of Japanese: eager for empire yet not quite satiating their caloric fill. Hayashi was never a Marxist; what moves her is not ideology but hunger and independence. "There isn't any proletariat or bourgeoisie in my head. All I long for is a handful of white rice" (p. 27), she proclaims. One can almost read Aoyama's literary descriptions as a new historical trope for Japanese history—the overwhelming centrality of consumptive desires thwarted by hunger and malnutrition from 1868 to 1945, contrasted with Japan's overabundant yields and excessive consumption from the 1970s until today.

In chapter 2 Aoyama analyzes what she labels "down to earth writing," literature written in everyday language for life's sake rather than for poetry's sake. Nagatsuka Takashi's 1910 novel, Tsuchi (The earth), is a detailed study of day-to-day village life. As with Hayashi's self-referential novel, peasants in the story have barely enough to survive after they sell their crops and pay their rent. Such proletarian-leaning literature reminds one of the Chinese revolutionary author Mao Dun's "Chun can" (Spring silkworms, 1932), in which a family is driven into penury by the day-to-day sacrifices necessary to feed the voracious appetites of the small larvae that could potentially help them reap profits. J. Thomas Rimer's edited volume, Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese Cultural Encounters, 1868-1926 (Stanford University Press, 1995), touched on these issues. Should we see this as "food literature" or should it be classified in a different manner?

To her credit, Aoyama defines food widely in...