Revolutionizing the Japanese Family: Miyamoto Yuriko's "The Family of Koiwai"

Miyamoto [Chujo] Yuriko's short story "The Family of Koiwai" ["Koiwai no ikka," 1934] presents a family as a revolutionary unit.¹ The piece is unusual in Japanese proletarian literature for locating revolutionary consciousness within a family; it is extraordinary for leaving no textual clues to contradict its assumption that the family is a natural site for the incubation of proletarian consciousness.² I stress its singularity because Japanese proletarian writers generally tended to treat the ie, a legally codified family structure, as an impediment to revolution, not least because of its place within the logic of capitalistic paternalism and imperialist discourse in the 1930s.³ Indeed, internationally, Marxists raised the question of the family only to dismiss it from consideration. Their consensus was that the family may have facilitated the development of bourgeois consciousness, thus supporting the bourgeois revolution, but it was necessarily limited by its immanent bourgeois moral order from being of any use in a proletarian struggle.⁴ Marx and Engels addressed the family only to dismiss it as a luxury of the bourgeoisie. They left little room for speculation about the family's potential for nurturing revolutionary proletarian consciousness.⁵

"The Family of Koiwai" is a story about a traditional extended family, represented by an aging father who gradually comes to realize why his first son, Tsutomu, would neglect his responsibilities to the household, the ie, and focus his energies on his poetry and publishing in a left-wing cultural organization. The ie is the mechanism that forges the consciousness, and although Tsutomu may long to neglect his ie responsibilities, the ie ends up being affirmed, not denied, through his activities and the activities of the other family members. The ie, in all its conservative splendor, becomes the matrix that transforms the family members' consciousness.

Whether one decides that Yuriko's⁶ co-optation of the ie is radical or not, confronting this story means confronting what Jerome McGann has called the "textual condition": stories are "embodied phenomena" that "always involve material negotiations."⁷ McGann calls attention to the limits of what we commonsensically call the "text" when he repeats James McLaverty's question, "If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre in Paris, then where is Hamlet?"⁸ Literary works exist as more than a single instance. In a serendipitous example, McGann tells us that texts, "like cells or thunderstorms (and unlike a triangle, or time)" are "empirical phenomena," thus "a theoretical study of them will necessarily be materialist in character"; at the same time, "texts—like revolutions and families, but unlike cells and thunderstorms—are social rather than natural phenomena," so McGann emphasizes that texts must be interpreted in social and historical context.⁹

The textual history of "The Family of Koiwai" invites us to think about reading literary works as a nexus of authorial, editorial, and social agencies. "The Family of Koiwai" was first published in January 1934 in Bungei with a dozen or so places excised with ellipses, or fuseji. It was published again half a dozen times during the war, in increasing degrees of censorial excision. When the war was over, Yuriko, claiming that the original, prepublication manuscript no longer existed, rewrote it and had it published several times, including it in Fuchiso (The Weathervane Plant) in 1947 and in her Selected Works (Senshu, 1948). When she died in 1951, the original manuscript surfaced and was used as the base text for the Complete Works (Zenshu, 1951) published that same year. Since then, all editors and translators of "The Family of Koiwai" follow suit in preferring the prepublication manuscript as the base text, and the rewritten postwar versions have all gone out of print. This article will refer to three textually distinct versions: the 1934 Bungei version, the 1947 Fuchiso version, and the 1979 Complete Works version. The fact that the story had different meanings in...