Petitessen, Pretiosen: Die Prosaminiatur in Japan um 1910 (review)

This book is about a Japanese literary form that is not well known and, to my knowledge, has not been theorized extensively in Japanese or in any other language: the shôhin, or what the author, Agnes Fink-von Hoff, calls the prose miniature. She argues that this small form, whose length was, on the average, “4–6 manuscript pages (1,600–2,400 characters)” (p. 159), coalesced as a literary genre around 1910 and flourished for only a few years thereafter. These short prose miniatures were Petitessen, or trifles, but, unlike a number of small literary genres in Japanese literary history, whose value was also “small,” these little texts, the author suggests from her title, were also “precious things” (Pretiosen). In her introduction and nine rich chapters Fink-von Hoff presents an exhaustive analysis of the shôhin, testing whether it can be defined as a literary genre, placing the form in its literary context, and speculating on its function in the literary system of the early twentieth century.

Following an introduction in which she gives an overview of the origins and various definitions of the term shôhin, in chapter 1 Fink-von Hoff argues that “around 1910 the concept shôhin was used by Japanese authors deliberately” as a name designating an “independent text” that was “of relative brevity” and “carried its own signature” (p. 40). To give examples of shôhin, in the 122-page second chapter she describes and analyzes what was “probably the most comprehensive and varied anthology of shôhin of that time” (p. 41): the 1909 anthology Shôhin bunpan (Model Prose Miniatures). The ninth chapter incorporates translations of the thirty shôhin that appeared in this anthology, which also included theoretical essays on the genre; Fink-von Hoff refers to these texts to make her arguments. These thirty brief shôhin, each by a different author and ranging from a paragraph to two pages or so in small print, are by nine well-known writers of the day—Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki Tôson, Natsume Sôseki, Kanbara Ariake, Chikamatsu Shûkô, Nagai Kafû, Osanai Kaoru, Takahama Kyoshi, and Tayama Katai—as well as a number of lesser-known figures. The texts range across literary movements, including Naturalism and the so-called Yoyû-ha (Leisure School), and their authors are associated with different genres or modes: Kanbara Ariake and Takahama Kyoshi with poetry, Osanai Kaoru with drama, and the rest with fiction.

After a detailed examination of the themes, stylistic and linguistic features, and narrative procedures of the thirty examples, Fink-von Hoff concludes that the shôhin form can be close in intent to the sketch, the short story, the prose-poem, or the essay. She also identifies a number of aspects that seem to make it a genre: its shortness, which is linked to its concentration on one event; its tendency toward the self-representation of the author; its limiting of the experience delineated to that of the author (to the exclusion of fictive elements and the broader sociopolitical context); its preference for the at-the-time relatively new genbun-itchi (unification of spoken and written word) style; its suggestion of a mood; and its depiction of topics linked to modernity. Fink-von Hoff isolates in all authors of the shôhin she analyzes a striving for “the three factors brevity, complexity/thickness, and suggestivity” (p. 163). In chapter 3 she analyzes the various theoretical attempts made from 1909–1910, by various critics, including the editor of the 1909 Shôhin bunpan, Mizuno Yôshû, to argue for the existence of the shôhin as a literary genre. It was only around 1910 that critics attempted to arrive at specific definitions of the form, some stressing the necessity for spontaneity of emotion and others arguing for the need for a careful depiction of sense impressions, but many stressing that the goal of the shôhin was to move the reader through the author’s...