Unbolting Melville's Japan

Unbolting Melville’s Japan A. ROBERT LEE Nihon University, Tokyo But books on Japan are scarce; or were so a few months ago. Locked in the archives of the Jesuit mission rooms; hidden under the unfamiliar language of Holland or Russia; buried beneath the dust of the library of the East India Company; and burrowing deep on the shelves of the largest libraries, might be found the only extant annals of the Japanese. “Japan,” Putnam’s Magazine 1.3 (March 1853) S pecial Issue editors, reasonably enough, rarely clamber up the Leviathan mast-head for a full tour d’horizon. But having been invited by John Bryant to guest-edit an issue on Melville and Japan derived from papers delivered at the “Melville and the Pacific” conference at Maui in June, 2003, I hope I can be forgiven for feeling a touch above the water-line, and that of the Atlantic as much as the Pacific. For at hand are six essays reflective of Melville’s connection to Japan—five by Japanese scholars, one by an American in residence—with three poems by an American scholar, once a resident in Japan; and the whole under the editorial midwifery of a “Brit” Americanist and longtime Melvillean, a gaijin academic, resident this past decade at Tokyo’s largest university. Given his sea travels, not to mention the celebrated energy of his “diving,” it can hardly surprise that Melville would be drawn to the imaginative if not actual “unbolting”—to adapt his own term in Moby-Dick—of a Japan, an East, so elusively sealed, as it seemed, from the West of his own time. With the exception of one contribution which takes on Native American figuration in The Confidence-Man, the essays gathered here give due recognition. They look, respectively, to Melville’s place—be it historical, shrewdly prophetic, symbolist-mythic, or even prone to orientalist obfuscation—in the western envisioning of Japan and Asian culture at large, and to his Japanese reception in the post-Meiji literary-cultural order. It was Carl Van Doren who observed in the Bookman for April 1924 “[Melville] writes with the energy of a man who is tirelessly alert.” An interest in the world as multicultural, and whether far or near, takes on quite special force in this respect. C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 7 A . R O B E R T L E E Melville may well look down from his own present mast-head with a certain unexpectedness at Leviathan’s airing of a “Japanese” direction of interest in his work. But for the writer who spoke in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” of truth’s need for “plenty of sea-room” one hopes it would not be without wry interest given his own Atlantic and Pacific venturings, whether England, the twice-over visits to Europe, the Holy Land and Egypt, or the iconic “Latin” Americas of Rio, Cape Horn and Lima and the island stopovers that saw him in the Marquesas, Tahiti, Maui and Oahu and the Galápagos. Melville’s itineraries have long become the factual lore, not to say exhilarating prompts to enquiry, behind so much of his fiction and poetry as, in slightly different manner, have the “logs” posthumously published as his 1849-50 Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent and 1856-7 Journal Up The Straits. He belongs, from this perspective, to a select band of vintage writerjourneyers : Cooper or Twain of his fellow Americans; Homer, Dante, or Cervantes of classic tradition, and Conrad or Stevenson of the moderns. Anything but irrelevantly for present purposes the roster can also include Japan’s Matsuo Basho as the master of seventeenth-century haiku (more accurately haikai no renga or poem-cycle) and of so “double” a travel-work as Okuno Hosomichi or The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1702). In shared spirit with this authorship, not to mention Goethe and the British romantics, or...