The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio by Melek Ortabasi (review)

The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio. By Melek Ortabasi. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2014. xiv, 329 pages. $49.95.

The humanities are again in a state of crisis. As in previous times, the crisis is refracted through anxieties about the way(s) we read. Should we read distantly or closely? Diagnose deep symptoms or stay closer to the surface? Focus on linguistic content or material context? Arguments for or against these methods readily expand into deeper questions about the very status of humanistic critique and inquiry in the academy—questions which can feel especially pressing with the impact of new digital archives or in the face of political attacks on the practical relevancy of the humanities. In her new book, The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio, Melek Ortabasi draws us into this larger debate by raising questions about the nature of reading, and the production of humanistic knowledge more broadly, in the context of the long, multidisciplinary career of Yanagita Kunio.

While Yanagita is often remembered as the founder of folklore studies (minzokugaku), Ortabasi aims to show us that he was much more and that scholarship has tended to short-circuit the critical potential of his work. To restore that potential, she argues, we need ways of reading Yanagita’s texts that highlight their dynamic interaction with the discursive processes that produced Japanese culture. To see his texts not as the mere documentation of those processes but as historically contingent and unstable allows them to “inform broader transnational and interdisciplinary debates on modernity, subjectivity, and nationhood” (p. 215). In essence, Ortabasi’s book aims to provide a critical reevaluation of Yanagita by situating his texts within the shifting disciplinary locations through which his ideas took shape.

For Ortabasi, this reevaluation begins with the problem of reading. How we think about the critical value of Yanagita’s prodigious output has everything to do with the way we read it. Ortabasi proposes a break with past scholarship by calling on the metaphors of “surface reading” and “translation.” Past assessments of Yanagita “have gravitated toward a deconstruction of his texts, treating them as natural though not particularly desirable symptoms of larger historical, political, and cultural trends” (p. 8). In contrast to this “hermeneutics of suspicion”—a term coined by Paul Ricoeur and recently deployed in important critiques of symptomatic reading by Rita Felski, Stephen Best, and Sharon Marcus—Ortabasi proposes to focus on what Yanagita’s writing does do, or potentially does, rather than on what it may be hiding or lacking as the trace of ideological influence. In this way, she holds certain concretized ideological readings of Yanagita at a remove so that he might be read as complicating those ideologies, not simply complicit with them. Here, “translation” enters the picture as a metaphor that reinforces a reading of his work as open ended and processual. Ortabasi insists that we think of Yanagita as a translator who “saw his job to be the production of faithful and current interpretations for others of a cultural history they could not (yet) identify or read themselves” (p. 11). This grants him a greater degree of historical agency while recognizing his role as a mediator who, like any translator, works through ideology and not above it. Ortabasi puts particular pressure on this agentive aspect since the acts of cultural translation that form the basis of her five chapters are meant to demonstrate instances of ideological resistance and critique on the part of Yanagita. These instances variously take place in the fields of literature, travel writing, folklore scholarship, dialect studies, and children’s education.

In each of her five chapters, Ortabasi promises a “close rereading of selected major works” that connects them to “the larger flow of Yanagita’s own scholarly thought as well as to the disciplinary debates in which they initially participated” (p. 19). On the one hand, this approach results in insightful and refreshing interpretations of both classic and lesser-known works. On the...