The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojiro

2. Modernism and Its Endings

36 2 Modernism and Its Endings Men, like poets, rush “into the middest,” in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. ~ Frank Kermode My exploration in the preceding chapter of the links between Kajii and Baudelaire had the aim of demonstrating that, notwithstanding Kajii’s unwillingness to identify with Yokomitsu’s modernist experimentations, a modernist lens helps clarify some of the motivations that drive Kajii’s literary efforts. A number of scholars have recently shown that modernism was central to the discursive environment in which Kajii was active. Seiji Lippit and Gregory Golley, for example, have sought to demonstrate, in different ways, an interconnectedness of literary developments with technological and social changes in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Meanwhile, William Tyler’s contribution has been to bring together a broad range of translated Japanese stories written between 1913 and 1938 that might in one way or another be designated as modernist.1 In this chapter I look further into the modernist impulses woven through Kajii’s texts, with the aim of shedding light on his articulation of the problem of beginnings and endings, of mortality, and of life and death. My focus, then, is quite narrow and specific, but it makes sense to begin by revisiting briefly some of the broader outlines of modernism that informed Kajii’s work. More than a single book would be required to survey the huge disparity among scholars of views about how modernism(s) should be defined. Chana Kronfeld has set out some of the unresolved questions that suggest 37 Modernism and Its Endings how, even in terms of a category, there is no consensus of views: “Is it a period, a trend, a style? Is it a literary, an artistic, a cultural, or a political phenomenon? Is modernism, ontologically speaking, a process or an essence?”2 Though the term itself was first coined by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) as the name for a new Spanish-American literary movement, it was soon appropriated to describe a wide set of cultural practices associated with Western society. Indeed, the extent to which modernism is conceptually applicable to cultures beyond the sphere of Europe andNorth Americaisaquestionthathasfueledveryproductiveintellectual debate in recent times, particularly in relation to postcolonial studies.3 It would be moving beyond the focus of this chapter to pursue that discussion further, except to note some comments by the historian Harry Harootunian that provide a useful way of imagining a specifically Japanese modernism rooted partly, at least, in its own native genealogy. Harootunian has argued that Japan’s modernity should not be seen as a kind of secondary version born in the shadow of the West. Rather, it emerged as part of a larger global process and is better viewed as a “coexisting or co-eval modernity, inasmuch as it shared the same historical temporality of modernity . . . found elsewhere in Europe and the United States.”4 The suggestion is a compelling one, not least because it offers an alternative to the hierarchical view that the West is the source and standard by which non-Western cultures must be judged. It is also useful, however, in raising the possibility that Japan’s modernism, too, should be understood as a phenomenon coeval with its counterparts elsewhere in the world. This is not, of course, to claim that Japanese modernism arose in glorious isolation. If Japan’s modernity was coeval with similar developments in the West, close ties with the outside world beginning in the Meiji period meant that Japan became increasingly integrated into modern global systems of power and domination that shaped relations between nations. Likewise, it might be best to think of Japanese modernism as emerging from a mixture of influences, both native and foreign, that informed the way certain Japanese writers came to engage with the modern world they inhabited. In speaking of the West, the geographer David Harvey touches on a central aspect of modernism in linking its emergence in the mid-­ nineteenth century to wide-scale migration of populations from the countryside to the city. The expanded urban environment and the dramatic flux and change that marked it provoked in modernism 38 Chapter Two “a fascination with technique, with speed and motion, with the machine and the factory...