The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō (review)

Concurrent with the flourishing of gender and women's studies on both sides of the Pacific over the last few decades, Higuchi Ichiyō's work continues to receive critical attention, especially in Japan where a diverse array of scholars have engaged her fiction. The Uses of Memory is a kind of dialogue with their work, which Van Compernolle takes as his point of entry. This is a well-conceived, self-reflexive study that situates itself in relation to this vigorous stream of Ichiyō criticism. At the same time, it employs selected critical protocols of recent years, "tuning" itself in relation to discourse analysis, dialogism, and gender studies in its engagement of Ichiyō's published fiction.

The book's approach is aptly expressed by two words in its title, memory and modernity, which are designed to address what Van Compernolle views as the impasse in Ichiyō scholarship. "Critical discourse . . . seems unable to think simultaneously about Ichiyō as an author with roots in the Japanese literary tradition and as a writer engaged with problems in modern society" (p. 5). The author weighs in on a longstanding tension within Japanese literary studies: to make sense of modern Japanese literature by referring to its premodern antecedents, or to view the former in relation to modern Western literary practices. To avoid reproducing dead-end debates along these lines, Van Compernolle, like many critics working today, makes modernity his touchstone for discussion of literature. Among recent considerations of modernity in the Japan field are Harry Harootunian's two volumes that revisit Walter Benjamin's work as a way to bring contemporaneity into historical understanding—expressed these days as studies of everyday life.¹ In such approaches, a teleological concern with "antecedents" is supplanted by attention to the rich fabric of everyday life and its important currents that inhabit and inform that moment as "discursive threads"; in this way, accommodation can be made of the historically anterior as well as of contemporary practices. Van Compernolle chooses the notion of intertextuality for a similar purpose, reading Ichiyō's texts as a conjuncture of pasts and presents. He also gestures to Edward Said's conceptions of the worldly text and Maeda Ai's work, which helped blur the distinctions that separated literary texts from other constituents of social and cultural history. His most explicit acknowledgment of debt is to Komori Yōichi, who learned from Maeda, Kamei Hideo, and others to wed social history to different components of literary texts—an approach that has become the standard in Japanese literary studies today. Though he also credits Seki Reiko's extensive forays into Ichiyō's work in a more muted way, one might argue that her imprint is even stronger in Van Compernolle's work as a whole—whether we think about its primary concerns (gender, social history, and the many discursive threads of Meiji life) or its general approach.

We have come to understand that the equation of Meiji literature to select figures who introduced Western and nonclassical literary conventions results in a highly reductive representation of the literature that flourished then, and much recent scholarship is designed to restore the incredible literary heterogeneity of those times. While in important ways it was true that "modernity was an ideology that forced the suppression of the premodern, the past, the passé, as something to be overcome" (pp. 9–10, quoting Harootunian), it has become clearer that Meiji life even in metropolitan areas followed the outlines of yesteryear far more than the latest trends, and Meiji writers like Ichiyō (or Ken'ysha writers) who relied upon longstanding literary traditions outnumbered those who disdained them. Modernity may be constituted by the very collision, contradiction, hybridity, and self-consciousness that arises from the new defining itself against the old, but in Meiji Japan this "contamination" was still rife with old things and practices. In affirming...