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  • Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature
  • Sarah Frederick (bio)
Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature. By Indra Levy. Columbia University Press, New York, 2006. ix, 330 pages. $40.00.

Sirens of the Western Shore takes a fresh and detailed look at the topic of vernacular style in Meiji literature with a focus on the roles of translation and female figures in the development of what came to be known as genbunitchi (reconciliation of speech and writing). The book’s three major sections look at the writings of Futabatei Shimei, the works of Tayama Katai, and [End Page 446] finally the performances of translated vernacular theater by Matsui Sumako. Shifting from the usual focus on self-expression and interiority (or the critique thereof) in the modern Meiji novel, Indra Levy delves into the role of acts of translation in the formation of modern Japanese literary style. “Westernesque woman” is Levy’s apt neologism that describes the figure, familiar to readers of modern Japanese literature, of a Japanese woman through whom is mediated the allure of the West—Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Naomi being the most obvious example. Here this figure is embodied in Ukigumo’s Osei, Futon’s Yoshiko, and the actress Matsui Sumako. Through them Levy explores the crucial role of female figures in Meiji writers’ navigation of their own exoticist experience of culture and language from “the Western shore” and the process by which they turned that experience into new forms of literary expression. The book joins recent work by Christine Marran and Tomiko Yoda to form an important new body of writings on gender and language in the creation of Japanese literature.

Those who have encountered analysis of genbun-itchi and Meiji naturalism largely through Karatani Kōjin will enjoy the ways Levy concretizes, and in the process extends and complicates, the accounts we see in his The Origins of Japanese Literature (translation edited by Brett de Bary [Duke University Press, 1993]). In particular, through her focus on the allure of the language of Western vernacular fiction and the role of its translation into Japanese in the nascent years of genbun-itchi style, the author makes an alternative criticism to Karatani’s of the notion of transparent self-expression in modern Japanese literature. Rather than relying on the notion that Christianity and a “system of confession” produced a constructed interiority that then was seen to be represented transparently through genbun-itchi, Levy focuses on how genbun-itchi always depended for its style on the attraction to translation of Western texts and on the act of translation itself. She shows that artists and critics at the time already had both anxiety and complex thinking about the tension between attempts to represent the spoken word and the fascination with text that the specter of foreign literature constituted. (Of interest here would be the new book by Hiroko Cockerill about Futabatei’s translations of Russian literature, Style and Narrative in Translations: The Contribution of Futabatei Shimei [St. Jerome Publishers, 2006]). Levy’s attention to the role of femme fatale–type characters as the performers of vernacular style and of cultural and linguistic translation within the worlds of novels by men such as Katai and Futabatei also complicates ongoing discussions about the question of the representation of interiority in language which Karatani highlighted.

This move to combine a discussion of genbun-itchi with one of gender is interesting in large part because of the always troubled claims to truth or nature that become attached to both categories and that, as Levy shows, were always being constructed through acts of translation and performance. [End Page 447] Meanwhile, the key role of gender and vernacular language in the construction of modern Japanese nationalism makes this all the more important. That such claims to nature or truth are unstable is not in and of itself surprising. But because Levy provides such specificity and detail in portraying how writers, performers, the critical establishment, and characters within Meiji fiction grappled with this interaction, whether they did so with acuity or blindness, her analysis...

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