Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan (review)

Jonathan Zwicker’s examination of the “literature of tears” in late Edo and Meiji Japan proposes a long nineteenth century for Japanese literature that begins with the rise of a sentimental aesthetic in fiction and ends with the exhaustion of its social utility. Through close readings and statistical analysis of the market for fiction, Zwicker carries out an extended critique of both the orthodox historiography of Meiji literature and recent interventions in order to propose a new chronology and pattern of development for modern fiction. Practices of the Sentimental Imagination deserves debate for its provocative arguments and its methodological innovations, which open new if incompletely realized possibilities for research.

The long nineteenth century Zwicker sketches begins with a rift between the “prose of wit” and the “prose of sentiment” in the 1770s and 1780s, “a great sentimental divide that marks the birth of a nineteenth-century aesthetic” (p. 71). Zwicker argues that the rise of the sentimental aesthetic reveals the emergence of a new social imaginary, and so the history of tears in the literature of this period “is also, to a large extent, the history of nineteenth-century Japan” (p. 90). In Zwicker’s view, this social imaginary, which concerns itself with the rising power of money in Japanese society, comes to an end with the ideological “settlement” of the late Meiji period. The sentimental aesthetic too comes to an end, replaced by one preoccupied with betrayal. Zwicker illustrates the operations of the new aesthetic and its gradual transformation through extended readings of two tearjerkers from the beginning of the period, Tanishi Kin’gyo’s Keiseikai tora no maki (1778) and Tamenaga Shunsui’s Shunshoku umegoyomi (1832–33), contrasted with two from its close, Ozaki Kōyō’s Konjiki yasha (ser. 1896–1902) and Tokutomi Roka’s Hototogisu (ser. 1898–99). Sentimental narratives at both ends of the century examine the power of money through stories of lovers torn apart by conflicts between money and love, Zwicker says; at both ends such narratives sketch the reestablishment of social stability through the sorrowful death of a heroine, on whose exclusion from society the reestablished order is founded. Early in the century, however, sundered lovers reconcile before the heroine’s death, while late in the century her death blocks the realization of love, as “settlement” has blocked the realization of political possibilities imaginable earlier in the Meiji period.

Zwicker considers the formal qualities of sentimental fiction, particularly the way it privileges sorrowful compromise over idealism by showing the end of love in death, to be “typically novelistic” (p. 85). The rise of a novelistic aesthetic in Japan, Zwicker holds, was part of a “great centralization” encompassing most of the world in which the novel emerged as the dominant form of fiction (p. 148). The late Edo encounter with vernacular Chinese fiction, however, was more important than the frequently discussed Meiji-period encounter with the fiction of Europe. The impact of Chinese works on Japanese fiction, as seen in translations, adaptations, and unacknowledged borrowing, was remarkably similar to the later impact of European works but affected Japanese literature more fundamentally. The privileged position given by scholars of modern literature to the European encounter is the consequence of broad ignorance of the cultural field of early modern Japan, Zwicker charges. Equally important in the rise of a sentimental aesthetic, in Zwicker’s view, were material changes in the social life of literature that resulted in a reorganization of the cultural field. The author traces two aspects of the reorganization, “the growing role played by the book in social and cultural life” and “the growing significance of the novel within the cultural world of the book” (p. 91). Through statistical analysis of the holdings of lending libraries, he argues that these libraries, succeeded in the Meiji period by newspaper serialization and reading rooms, allowed fiction to gain an...