Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature: A Critical Approach (review)

Coming from a remote island country, only recently thrust into the international circuit, and often perplexed as an "Other" in the West or in colonial Asia, the Japanese traveler of the Meiji or Taishō periods was assailed on every side by fresh, delicious sensations of the exotic and developed a keen sensitivity to differences. The present volume, comprising sixteen chapters by as many contributors, examines the complexities of this experience as reflected and enriched in twentieth-century Japanese writing.

Even as late as 1959, in Kyōko no ie, Mishima Yukio was able to present prosaic details of New York life as glowing with alien charm (as Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit relates). Just as Americans may still be able to exoticize the streets or villages of Japan, Mishima shows himself a master of reverse Orientalism as he foregrounds such American exotica as doors that open automatically. When sensation fails to offer the traveler such thrills, fantasy fills the gap. Thus, Natsume Sōseki, unhappy in London, calls up historical visions in the Tower, adopting a "doctrine of jikohon'i or 'on my own terms,' which can be seen as an intellectual gauntlet thrown down in the face of Western society" (Susan Napier, p. 46).

Dexterous use of literary sources sustains and enriches the fantasy of the alien land. Hijiya-Kirschnereit reveals how exoticism takes on an intertextual dimension when Mishima laces his stories with largely unnoticed allusions to Pater, Wilde, Mann, and Greek mythology, as well as drawing on an exotic trove of Chinese characters. Similarly, Satō Haruo, following a visit to Taiwan, his first trip abroad, blends Western and Chinese exoticism in his "Tale of the Fan" (1925), where he explicitly emulates Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" in a variation on the Chinese cliché of the deserted woman lamenting in a ghostly mansion (as Faye Kleeman argues).

Even sex became more exotic when seen through a Western prism. Ann Sherif presents the Japanese trial about Lady Chatterley's Lover as turning on "the aestheticization of sex" (p. 195) and "High Modernist assumptions that aesthetic response should encompass sexual response" (p. 203). It remains unclear whether the lawyers noted that "sex" here meant four-letter words and sodomy, or how much of the shock value, the "otherness," of Lawrence's breach of these taboos was transmitted to Japanese readers.

But the present volume is not just a collection of aesthetic delights. Within the paradise of fantasy the serpent of problematization lurked. Some of the fantasists themselves undertook deconstruction of their initial self-indulgent projections. When Nagai Kafū dismantles the popular Meiji image of America as the "sacred land of liberty," this, according to Rachael Hutchinson, is "part of a wider discourse of dissent and doubt circulating among intellectuals after the Russo-Japanese War" (p. 71). When Kafū portrays a Japanese, symbolically named Kunio, in masochistic thrall to an American woman, the fantasy has a multiple subversive impact. Napier points out that Sōseki's fantasies are "rudely rejected by his landlord who offers prosaic explanations for every seemingly uncanny event" and is "disillusioning on the subject of the mysterious woman" whom Sōseki has imagined to be a reincarnation of Lady Jane Grey (p. 45). In parallel, Satō's narrator, according to Kleeman, scotches the superstition and romanticism of his Taiwanese friend Segaimin, though of course the narrative indulges to the full the frisson these "naïve" attitudes allow.

Perhaps the most elaborate dialectic between fantasy and realism in twentieth-century literature is that pursued by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō in a long career. He began with fin-de-siècle decadence, blending it with a cult of Chinese exotica; then he indulged a fantasy of the West, derived from the movies; traditional Japan offered the basis for his later imaginations, which form a searching interrogation of the texture of Japanese psychology and cultural...