The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojirō by Stephen Dodd (review)

The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojirō. By Stephen Dodd. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2014. xii, 286 pages. $57.00.

Stephen Dodd’s The Youth of Things forces reflection on the state of Japanese literary studies in the English language, not because it is typical of work being done today or an exemplar for future scholarship, but because it highlights the difficulties, decisions, and positions that cultural scholarship in area studies must engage and overcome. Rather than presenting answers for a putatively riven field, the book modestly, sometimes clumsily, and at times elegantly attempts a tightrope walk over supposedly treacherous chasms between theory and literature, literary history and literary biography, poststructuralism and structuralism.

Early in this book, which is in part a monograph about the titular author’s career and literature and in part a series of translations of his writings, Dodd positions his work as a rare hybrid. It is vastly different from Dodd’s sprawling and penetrating argument about the modern longing for furusato in his previous book, Writing Home (Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). Citing Hoyt Long’s 2012 diagnosis (thru Seán Burke’s 1995 work) of a perceived receding of the importance of author-centered inquiry in literary criticism as an “anti-authorial bias” of literary study today, The Youth of Things focuses on a single author. The book proposes to situate itself within the current field of Japanese literary studies, which it describes as riven between broad, historical, discourse-oriented work and formalist work of a theoretical bent, leaving no place for good old-fashioned author-and-work study.

Is this supposition about the fading of the author/work study true? The number of books produced per year is too few and too random to indicate clear trends by year, but taken by decade, the division of books in literary studies reviewed in this journal since 1980 remains more or less constant between broad-based historical work (50–60 per cent) and single-author or single-work study (40–50 per cent).¹ What is remarkable in this trend in Japanese literary work is what is remarkable about Dodd’s book: it can be taken almost exclusively out of context from the study of other literatures. If the majority of literary work is historical in Japanese literary study, it is only just barely so, whereas in other fields of literary inquiry, the single-author study may be all but dead. Why has the single-author or single-work study been so resilient in Japan studies? Does it have to do with the perennial question of exoticism and essentialism? Does it result from a scholarly investment in maintaining an exceptional position for the discipline? Or is it a function of the continuing perception of a reading audience that is unfamiliar with the material?

To a large extent, Dodd attempts to split the divide he sees between historical discourse and biographical criticism (choosing “an intermediate path drawing on both approaches” [p. 137]) and makes rhetorical use of concepts from critical theory. Yet the structure of the book and its cursory engagement in historicism and theoretical inquiry belie its ultimate lean toward the biographical. For instance, though each of the loosely organized chapters purports to take on new theoretical concerns, Kajii’s illness becomes something of a prime motivator and ground for his work. This can be seen most prominently in the ever-present references to tuberculosis. In chapter 1 we learn that in addition to Kajii, two sisters, a brother, and a grandmother all suffered from it (p. 7); in chapter 2 we are told that drinking worsened his condition in 1926 and that this is reflected in his shift in literary tone that year (p. 60); in chapter 3, we see the city with “an especially high rate of TB” become the “ideal environment” for Kajii to forge “links between individual experience and wider social relations” (p. 102); and finally, predictably, in chapter 4 “the threat of TB pervades...