When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism (review)

In his much-loved story “Ginga testudō no yoru” (Night of the Milky Way railroad, 1933), poet and children’s author Miyazawa Kenji describes the heavens with a striking mixture of artistic imagination and scientific terminology. His child protagonist Giovanni, riding in a fantastic train across the stars, even reaches out the window to touch the “water” of the Milky Way galaxy (ginga, or “silver river” in Japanese) and observe it up close. “However,” Kenji writes, “when he looked more carefully, he saw that its beautiful water was more transparent than glass or hydrogen, and sometimes, as his eyes seemed to adjust, he saw that it was flowing silently with delicate shining purple waves glittering like a rainbow” (Golley’s translation, p. 198). Kenji’s description, attributing a waveform and elusively material quality to the “empty space” of the galaxy, bespeaks both a poetic imagination and the author’s serious engagement with contemporary chemistry and physics, stemming from his training in agricultural chemistry and deepened by his passionate reading of works such as Katayama Masao’s Kagaku honron (Fundamental issues in chemistry, 1915) and Charles Steinmetz’s Four Lectures on Relativity and Space (1923). In his fascinating new study When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism, Gregory Golley offers new perspectives on the ethical dimensions of twentieth-century literature by his rigorous consideration of both the art and the science of Kenji’s work, together with that of his fellow members of Japan’s modernist generation, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Yokomitsu Riichi.

Central to Golley’s argument is the assertion that modernist authors explored a “realist” view of a world that surpassed direct observation with the senses (hence the book’s title) but nevertheless could be taken to exist as a “real” world of phenomena outside the individual subject—and could be at least partially mapped or rendered through abstract representations. Such a definition of “realism,” which Golley ties to Japanese literary modernism, is clearly removed from the standard association of literary realism with the descriptive techniques of the nineteenth-century novel that are typically contrasted with the deformation, alienation, and radically warped or fragmented subjectivity associated with modernism. Golley, by contrast, grounds his definition of “realism” in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century science. In a far-ranging opening chapter, he outlines a new “realist” consensus emerging in twentieth-century physics and related disciplines, in reaction to a nineteenth-century radical empiricism exemplified by the “positivist” stance of physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1828–1916), who suggested that scientists could not trust in the existence of anything beyond the highly subjective experiences of their own senses. In Golley’s account, the positivist viewpoint is reflected in the Japanese literary world in the skepticism of linguistic abstraction and metaphysics expressed in Natsume Sōseki’s 1911 lecture “Gendai Nihon no kaika” (The civilization of modern Japan).

While the skeptical stance of positivism, together with its insights into perception and consciousness, effected a crucial stage in the development of science and philosophy, Golley writes, its ultimate denial of the existence of anything outside of perception and consciousness had to be overcome for a new twentieth-century science to take hold. In its place emerged scientific models such as quantum physics and relativity, suggesting ways of understanding the universe that went beyond what could solely be observed by the senses but which nevertheless offered a new purchase on a “reality” outside of the perceiving subject. For Golley, then, the “realism” of Japanese modernism lies in its affinity with an array of scientific theories and disciplines, including electrical field theory, ecology, quantum physics, and Einstein’s relativity, in mapping out possible relationships between the subject and a totality that lies beyond direct observation or the constraints of traditional “realist” depiction. “For Japanese modernists of the 1920s,” he writes, “external reality was understood neither...