Constructing Subjectivities: Autobiographies in Modern Japan (review)

Self-narratives have grown into a more and more prominent topic in a number of disciplines during the last two decades. In history, the social sciences, and literary studies, ego documents, as they are also sometimes termed, have been taken up as important sources in the context of new approaches. These approaches have, for instance, questioned the conventional wisdom that the development of individuality and autobiographical writing are closely related and that this is a typical European model.¹ Research on non-European self-narratives often took this as a starting point or standard according to which the sources were to be measured. Applied as a general paradigm, "individualism" limits discussions to shortcomings and delayed developments. The idea of an Occidental individual representing modernity and autobiography as its master narrative was also called into question by scholars who propagated multiple, or entangled, modernities and "provincialized" Europe, as well as by those scholars who have pried open the tight coupling of individuality and ego documents in their research.²

Japanese autobiographical texts, however, have so far been painfully understudied. Although sources are abundant and accessible, the systematic study of autobiography in Japan is an underdeveloped field. Autobiographical writing is regarded as a discursive genre and thus does not catch the interest of literary critics, and the literary genre of the so-called I-narrative or shishōsetsu may have overshadowed scholarly investment in the more general topic of self-narratives in Japanese.³ A few historians have addressed the topic in comprehensive fashion, and a number of recent studies are devoted to particular sociohistorical subjects.⁴ Noboru Tomonari's book, promising a more systematic study of autobiographies in modern Japan, comes as a highly welcome, timely, and deserving venture.

As he explains in his introduction, Tomonari studies autobiographies in modern Japan as a result of "the transformations in the Japanese economy and society that gave rise to the genre" (p. xi). While he maintains that the genre of autobiography is in itself an important object of study, it becomes clear from the beginning of his book that it is not concerned with generic reflections but with "the social and economic aspects of Japanese autobiographies" (p. xi). He intends to observe "how these texts have functioned in society, and in particular, how they have furthered or thwarted various economic and political agendas" (p. xv).

Tomonari consequently selects autobiographical texts that he identifies as demonstrating the close nexus of self-reflections and what he describes as social effects of these texts. He begins in his first chapter with autobiographies of two rural peasant entrepreneurs of the late Tokugawa period, Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) and Kawato Jindai (1807-72), interpreting them "in the context of a developing proto-industrial economy" (p. xv). The second chapter discusses autobiographies of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Shibusawa Eiichi, which form something of a canon of modern Japanese autobiographies in the late nineteenth century. Tomonari focuses in particular on the authors' economic activities. Chapter 3 is devoted to autobiographical texts of Japanese anarchists and socialists such as Ō sugi Sakae (1885-1923), Sakai Toshihiko (1870-1933), and Katayama Sen (1859-1933), but it also draws on fictional texts with autobiographical background by writers such as Arishima Takeo, Shiga Naoya, and Mushanokōji Saneatsu. Proceeding in time, chapter 4 discusses autobiographies by feminist activists from the 1950s who had all been active in prewar and postwar Japan, namely, Yamakawa Kikue (1890-1980), Ishigaki Ayako (1903-96), Oku Mumeo (1895-1997), and Kamichika Ichiko (1881-1981). He assesses their autobiographies as records of their activism as well as of what he describes as the powerful "trope of motherhood" (p. xvii), showing that "[s]uch texts may work simultaneously for and against the ideologies of identity which prevail" (p. 177).

Tomonari has absorbed an admirably large corpus of sources and research which he brings into play in his discussions of the texts. He has accessed and made accessible through his discussions fascinating material such as the reminiscences...