iv Japanese Contributions

Japanese scholarship on American literature covering 1997-98 is as impressive as ever, aptly representing American literary studies in this country at the close of the century. The centennial year of Faulkner's death occasioned, belatedly, the establishment of the William Faulkner Society of Japan; the English version of its journal Faulkner Studies is accessible as cybertext on the society's home page. The centennial year also saw two major books on Faulkner, and EigoS issued a special number on him (143), which was contributed to by 16 scholars. Contributions on Faulkner outnumbered those on other American writers, but scholarly interest in a wide range of American literary and cultural studies, including multicultural and postcolonial concerns, remains unabated. EigoS featured productive forums on ethnic literature—"Asian-American Writers" (143: 570-86) and "The Creole's Americas" (144: 2-29)—and on Toni Morrison's Paradise (144: 130-39). Books included two studies of 17th-century Puritan culture and literature and Takayuki Tatsumi's Kyoryu no America [A Dinosaur's America] (Chikuma Shinsho). These and other significant contributions more than contradict the supposed decline in popularity over the past decade of English/American studies in Japanese colleges and universities.

Because of limited space, this review remains selective, with a few exceptions for books by single authors and for collections of original essays devoted to specific topics and themes. Articles mentioned appear in the major journals—EigoS, SALit, and SELit. Unless otherwise indicated all books are published in Tokyo.

a. General and Topical Studies

The key work of this section is Taka-yuki Tatsumi's "Revolution in the History of American Novel," which was serialized in 24 installments in EigoS volumes 143-44, a project substantial enough to become a book. Tatsumi's argument echoes his favorite thesis, introduced in New Americanist Poetics (1996), that early American novels are an amalgam of various narrative genres; Tatsumi further develops this thesis in an examination of novels by William Hill Brown, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and George Lippard, then concludes with an intriguing reading of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997). Tatsumi's investigation is supported by a bibliography for each installment. This essay is an excellent study of early American novels and serves as a good overview of American literature in a post-CLHUS/CHAN decade.

Three other noteworthy general or topical studies are Masao Shi-mura's Shimpishugi to America Bungaku: Shizen/Kyosshin/Kyokan [Mysticism and American Literature: Nature/Void/Sympathy] (Kenkyusha); America Bungaku no Boken: Kukan no Sozoryoku [Adventures in American Literature: Space and American Writers ] (Sairyusha), ed. Kyoichi Harakawa; and Monogatari no Yurameki [American Narrative in the History of Consciousness ] (Nan'un-do), ed. Takayuki Tatsumi and Momoko Watanabe.

In Mysticism and American Literature Shimura chronologically examines American writers whose works connote diverse mystic experiences; what is defined by mysticism is evident in the book's cryptic subtitle "nature/void/sympathy," or as an OED definition goes, a "belief in the possibility of union with the Divine by means of ecstatic contemplation," in which state one's ego is completely absent. As Shimura explains, Mysticism and American Literature is a greatly overdue revisionist reading of Randall Stewart's classic study, American Literature and Christian Doctrine (1958). Shimura is thrilled to discover a variety of religious or pseudo-religious experiences that are interchangeable with animism, shamanism, Buddhist enlightenment, or ecological mysticism in American writers arbitrarily selected as objects of his exploration. The book's 18 short chapters take up, among others, Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, and Hawthorne. For example, Shimura compares Hilda in The Marble Faun with Japanese artist Irie Hako (1887-1948), who copied a religious painting at the Horyuji Temple, on the basis that that novel had become a "medium" of divine inspiration. Shimura's free-floating speculation continues with Twain's Jim and Huck, Sherwood Anderson's "Tandy," and Hemingway's Santiago and the marlin. Often Shimura's discussions sound strained, yet two chapters on William Goyen are convincing enough, a good introduction to this generally overlooked American writer. Shimura's expertise in Japanese literature and his reading in Buddhist and other religious texts support his cross-cultural speculations on American and Japanese writers: Emerson, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Beat and Native American poets, and Miyazawa Kenji. All in all, Mysticism and American Literature is a unique study of American writers and Japanese poets and their shared mystic experiences, sacred and profane.

Adventures in American Literature is a collection of original essays with the leitmotif "space and the American literary imagination." Some 17 essays are grouped into four parts under "The Spirit of Place," "The City and the Frontier," "Landscape in Memory," and "Space in Fiction." As expected, Faulkner receives the most attention, with five essays dealing with this writer and his South. Bradstreet, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Twain each share their adventures with "space," physical and imaginary. Inclusion of the postmodernist Paul Auster, the Chinese-American Amy Tan, and the ecologist Edward Abbey in this discourse on American writers and spatial imagination gives a postcolonial and multicultural edge to the volume.

Edward Said's postcolonialist discourse has alerted literary critics to the rewriting/reading of American literature; Japanese contributions examined in this review are another illustration of the influence of this perspective. Tatsumi's "new Americanist poetics" continues in American Narrative in the History of Consciousness, a collection of 13 speculations engaged in rereading the Master American Narrative, each a tour de force in constructing this poetics. The first part, "Post-Puritan Imagination," discusses Anne Bradstreet, Hawthorne, and Melville; the second section, "Horizons of Feminist America," takes up Lydia Maria Child, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich; the third section, "Evolution of American Genres," presents the strategy of appropriation among the literary genres—poetry, drama, and short fiction; the final part, "American Narrative and Multiculturalism," examines Octavia Butler and Gayl Jones, William Styron, Paul Auster, and Irving Wallace. My only complaint with the absorbing discussions is that, exemplary as they are, many of them are no more than a recapitulation of the thesis expounded in Tatsumi's introductory ch?pter, "American Narrative's War of Independence" (pp. 9-25).

b. 17th-Century Literature

Several extraordinary book-length Japanese contributions on 17th-century literature appeared this year and last: Naoki Onishi's Nyuingulando no Shakai to Shukyo [Religion and Society in New England] (Sairyusha) and the same author's Pilugurim Fazazu to Iyu Shinwa [Pilgrim Fathers as the American Myth] (Kodansha Sosho). The first book, a valuable addition to our scholarship on the Puritans, is indispensable to any student of early colonial literature and to American literature in general. Onishi observes in his Afterword that reading Hawthorne or Melville without some knowledge of the "religion and social structure of the early colonies" inevitably leads to a misreading. His use of the Plutarchian method of comparison and contrast in examining Roger Williams, John Cotton, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitfield is evective for a just appreciation of these early theologians. The chapter on "Puritans and Indians" (pp. 41-62) overs Onishi's corrections of hastily drawn conclusions on the complex relationship between early colonists and Native Americans. The critic's reading of the scholarship of Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, Samuel Eliot Morison, and others is judicious, and his arguments are solidly documented. Onishi's plain, clear style makes Religion and Society in New England a delight to read.

The same author's Pilgrim Fathers as the American Myth, intended for both general readers and scholars, is a helpful guide. Like many other works discussed in this review, Pilgrim Fathers is a revisionist reading, in this instance of the first "national" holiday, Thanksgiving. The book overs an insider's view of American culture and cultural practice. Both books are visually illuminating; illustrations and photographs aid in our comprehending the sociocultural background of the texts.

Several articles on 17th-century and other early American writers deserve comment. Chikage Tanabe's "What Daughters Signify: A Study of Early American Sentimental Novels" (SALit 35: 3-16) is an excellent examination of the conflicts between fathers and daughters in early American sentimental novels—The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte Temple, and The Coquette. Takako Takeda's "Phillis Wheatley, a Black Woman Poet of the Republic" (EigoS 143: 588-92) resuscitates Wheatley's importance. Anne Bradstreet is the subject of Shinji Watanabe's chapter in Adventures in American Literature (pp. 230-51), and of Mitsushige Sato's in American Narrative in the History of Consciousness (pp. 29-46). Sato's contention is that Bradstreet appropriates Walter Raleigh's History of the World for "her narrative" of the New World.

c. 19th-Century Fiction and Poetry

No single book on Hawthorne and Melville came out during the current period, but articles and chapters on each of them were ubiquitous and are considered elsewhere. Significant books on other 19th-century writers are Michiko Iwata's Emily Dickinson o Yomu [Reading/Understanding Emily Dickinson] (Shichosha); Shoko Ito's Yomigaeru Thoreau: Neicharaitingu to America Shakai [Sauntering to the Inner Wilderness: Nature Writing and American Society] (Kashiwashobo); and Ima Huck Finn o Do Yomuka? [Huck Finn and Readers Today] (Kyoto: Shugakusha) by Masago Igawa et al.

Iwata's Reading/Understanding Emily Dickinson is a beautifully written love letter to the Belle of Amherst, which gives us another portrait of the poet; the author's opening monologue on Dickinson's deliberately chosen life of isolation reads like a postscript to his 1982 biography ?f Dickinson. The monograph presents sensitive new readings of 32 poems carefully selected and grouped under five headings—"poesy," "nature," "death," "prayer," and the "business of life"; Iwata's translations of the poems are in themselves poetic jewels. The book's intimate and tender tone is deceptive, because Reading/Understanding Emily Dickinson is well-documented scholarly work.

Ito's Sauntering to the Inner Wilderness: Nature Writing and American Society is one of the most noteworthy achievements of 1997-98. It culminates the author's involvement with Henry David Thoreau and is a happy harvest of her scholarly research, not only into Thoreau's writings, but also into American nature writing. Ito's expertise covers A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, and Cape Cod in ten chapters. That Thoreau is liberated from Puritan discourse and thereby separated from Emerson is among the shrewd observations scattered throughout the book; likewise, the chapters on "Thoreau and Charles Darwin" are the most informative discussion on this subject to date by a Japanese scholar. Ito's prose style is clear and graceful; the bibliography of American scholars old and new is thorough and comprehensive; and all previous Japanese scholarship on Thoreau is included.

The objective of her book, Ito claims, is to link Thoreau, the pioneer in nature writing, to Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, and Annie Dillard. Of special interest is the chapter on Dillard, regarded by Ito as our latter-day Thoreau, and her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as the 20th-century Walden. Sauntering to the Inner Wilderness does full justice to Thoreau, America's first self-conscious ecologist, and to his ecological imagination. Many interesting photographs support this voluminous critical work.

Huck Finn and Readers Today is a collection of original essays addressing Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in multicultural and postcolonial contexts. Nine essays take up mostly contemporary racial problems, either African or Native American. The first chapter (pp. 1-28), by Masago Igawa, deals with the newly discovered Twain manuscripts, which have triggered a reexamination of the established scholarly text. Igawa considers Twain's original intention to take Huck and Jim down the river to the Deep South, not up the Ohio to the Free States, as Twain's fixation with his Southern origins, which she concludes led Twain to his eventual alienation from and rejection of that heritage. Other essays examine the validity of the ending of Twain's novel, a never-ending critical controversy. The discussions in the collection provide a good survey of recent criticism on Huck Finn and Mark Twain for students and scholars. Also, Kazuhiko Goto's essay "On His Way to the Confession: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer " (SELit 75: 61-73) should be mentioned here.

Other articles on 19th-century writers are worth at least brief comment. Fumiko Iriko's "Mistress Prynne's Crime and Punishment: The Scarlet Letter and Class in Early Colonial Society" (SELit 74: 29-45) is an intelligent sociohistorical study of colonial New England, examining how Puritan theocracy administered a "just" punishment to "unjust" ovenders. Katsunori Takeuchi's "Moby-Dick as a Temple" (SELit 74: 133- 46) is a conscientious analysis of the spatial structure of Melville's masterpiece; that this structure corresponds to architectural features of medieval and Renaissance churches is supported by Melville's other writings as well as by Moby-Dick itself. In "What Did Mr. Lackobreath Lose?: The Dialectic of the Copy and the Original in Poe's Texts" (SALit 35: 19- 31) Bunei Kohara sees Mr. Lackobreath's paradoxical condition as the copy/original relationship, which is Poe's own. Hisayo Ogushi's "The Death of a Beautiful Man: Gender Anxiety in Lydia Maria Child's Philothea " (SALit 35: 35-51) is a persuasive feminist reading of Poe's slighted contemporary. Not least is Hiroshi Takayama's "Painting and James: In the Name of Mannerism" (EigoS 144: 400-403), one of the few articles on James to appear.

d. 20th-Century Fiction and Poetry

As mentioned, Faulkner enjoys the greatest critical attention, with two significant book-length studies: Hisao Tanaka's William Faulkner no Sekai: Jiko Zoshoku no Tapesutori [The Tapestry of Proliferation: The World of William Faulkner's Fiction] (Nan'un-do) and Noboru Yamashita's 1930 Nendai no Faulkner: Jidai no Ninshiki to Shosetsu no Kozo [Faulkner in the 1930s: The Decade and Faulkner's Fictional Structure] (Osaka: Kyoiku Tosho). Two other important works on 20th-century American writers are Edith Wharton no Sekai [Edith Wharton: Her Life and Work] (Yumi Press), ed. Keiko Beppu; and Koichi Nakamura's Robert Penn Warren: America Nambu Shosetsu no Tanoshimi [Robert Penn Warren: The Pleasure of Reading Southern American Novels] (Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten).

The Tapestry of Proliferation is a major addition to Japanese scholarship on Faulkner, which is already overwhelming. Tanaka's 550 solid pages are a culmination of his scholarly engagement with Faulkner over the past 30 years, stemming from his doctoral dissertation submitted to Hiroshima University and extensively revised for publication in book form. As the book's title suggests, Tanaka attempts to demonstrate a Kristevan intertextuality, or what the author terms "proliferation," in each of Faulkner's works—how Faulkner's entire canon gets created—from The Marble Faun to the Snopes Trilogy. It is an ambitious task, but the author succeeds in untangling Faulkner's tangled fictional world.

The first two chapters (and an introduction) deal with Faulkner's birth and early years, while each of the remaining chapters takes up groups of three novels in chronological order: Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying; Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!; Go Down, Moses, Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun; and the Snopes Trilogy. Tanaka's thesis is substantiated by his careful reading of the texts, his solid scholarship, and his professional sincerity. Notes, a detailed chronology, and a valuable bibliography of Faulkner scholarship, foreign and Japanese, take up some 80 pages. Still, the rigid chronology that Tanaka employs as the framework for his argument makes The Tapestryof Proliferation a curious combination of critical biography and Kristevan analysis.

In contrast to Tanaka's work, Faulkner in the 1930s is more modest, dealing only with Faulkner's novels written during the decade central to his career. The book consists of seven chapters, which take up in chronological order As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon, Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, and finally If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Yamashita's careful examination of individual novels clarifies intricate relationships between the decade's ideological currents and each work's "fictional structure." Each chapter concludes with its own summary, a helpful device for readers new to Faulkner.

Edith Wharton: Her Life and Work collects original essays on this important chronicler of American manners and customs. The book consists of ten chapters on Wharton's major novels as well as her travel sketches. A complete filmography is helpful to general readers of Wharton's novels, since visual representati?ns often highlight what is imbedded in the written texts. Despite recent critical appraisals of Wharton elsewhere, she is still relatively unknown in Japan; this study may change such unjustified critical neglect.

Nakamura's Robert Penn Warren in ten chapters introduces and examines Warren's writings in chronological order from Night Rider through All the King's Men to A Place to Come To. Nakamura's critique of Warren's biography of John Brown is of special interest, since Brown has been attracting attention in Japan with the publication of Russell Banks's The Cloud Splitter (1998). With the exception of All the King's Men and A Band of Angels, both of which have been translated, Warren the novelist, unlike Warren the poet/critic, has been slighted in Japan. All the more reason to welcome Nakamura's achievement, which he claims to be a byproduct of his editing Warren's works—The Complete Novels of Robert Penn Warren in 10 volumes (1998).

A number of articles on 20th-century writers and poets appeared in SELit, SALit, and EigoS, many of them in English. As mentioned, EigoS issued a special number on Faulkner, with a forum participated in by 16 of the foremost Japanese Faulkner scholars, led by Kenzaburo Ohashi's "Faulkner's Century" (143: 414-17); the book places Faulkner not only in American literary history but in a global cultural context. Two essays published in SALit are Kumiko Sato's "Excrement of Signification: The Woman, the Black, and Light in August " in English (34: 1-23), and Naomi Saho's "Cold-War Ideology and Requiem for a Nun: Faulkner, Subject, and Institution" (34: 25-39).

Faulkner's contemporaries, Hemingway and Fitzgerald—together, they form a favorite trio among Japanese scholars—are the subject of Ai Ogasawara's feminist critique, "Matricidal Desire: The 1920s and The Sun Also Rises " (SALit 35: 75-88), and Takaki Hiraishi's " 'They Are Careless People'—Rereading The Great Gatsby " (EigoS 143: 14-16, 71- 73). Ogasawara argues that Hemingway's matrophobia and matricidal desire are shared by people of the Jazz Age, and that they find their outlet in denunciation of Victorian matriarchs. Hiraishi's relentless reexamination of the most widely read Fitzgerald novel ends in a merciless disparagement of its flaws and careless writing; Hiraishi out-Herods Herod, as it were, finding more problems than those already pointed out by Matthew J. Bruccoli or Thomas Pendleton.

Faulkner's heritage is visible in contemporary Southern literature. Flannery O'Connor is the subject of two articles: Kanae Uchiyama's "The Role of the Body: Reconstructing the Subject in Flannery O'Connor's Works" in English (SALit 35: 125-40) and Ichiro Inoue's "A Plaster Figure of a Negro vs. O'Connor's 'The Artificial Nigger' " (EigoS 144:141-44). Three other essays on 20th-century poets deserve mention: Akitoshi Nagahata's "Erect or Not: Re-reading the Sweeney Poems, 1920 " (SELit 75: 31-41); Masahiko Abe's "Knowing and Unknowing in Wallace Stevens's 'The Comedian as the Letter C' " in English (SALit 35: 55-74); and Chiaki Sekiguchi's "Collage Logic: Marianne Moore's Quotation Technique" also in English (SALit 35: 91-108).

e. American Literature Since the 1960s

Hisao Kanaseki's posthumously published American Gendaishi o Yomu [Essays on Contemporary American Poetry] (Shichosha) is a collection of his essays that appeared in journals and literary magazines; it is especially valuable as an overview of contemporary American poetry. The first section is devoted to ?uch modernists as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Mina Loy. Kanaseki's discussion of Loy and her poems, "Mina Loy, Another Modernist" (pp. 92-127), is illuminating and informative, the longest in the book. The second section focuses on the poets of the Beat Generation, Kenneth Rexroth, Bob Dylan, and Gary Snyder, with all of whom Kanaseki was acquainted; the pieces, or more properly anecdotes, on Snyder are perceptive scholarly observations and critiques. Kanaseki first introduced the oral tradition of Native American poetry to Japanese readers with excellent translations; the third section includes essays and translated poems of Black Elk, N. Scott Momaday, Lance Henson, Simon Ortiz, James Welch, and Leslie Marmon Silko, a valuable updating of that area of scholarship. Short essays in the final section survey the contemporary American literary and art scenes; remarks on Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, John Cage and music, and John Ashbery and painting reflect Kanaseki's lifelong love avair with modernist and avant-garde arts and artists. EigoS 's mini-forum on contemporary American poetry (143: 254- 56v.) presents interesting discussions of "the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets," as well as Stein and Wittgenstein and Robert Bly, which should be read with Kanaseki's Essays on Contemporary American Poetry.

To compensate for the scarcity of book-length studies, many articles on contemporary writers and poets are distributed through the collections and anthologies under consideration in this review. Naoko Fuwa Thornton's "Voices and Aphasia in Eudora Welty's 'The Demonstrators' " in the English number of SELit (74: 69-82) is a readable discussion of Southern literature; Thornton argues for the significance of Welty's hitherto neglected story and its message that "aphasia is imposed on one not only by others but by oneself," proposing that Welty has found the writer's ultimate language.

A forum on Asian American writers (EigoS 143: 570-86) participated in by five specialists is a good indication of postcolonial concerns, or as they say, of "the yellow power," not "peril." Two additional essays on Asian American writers worth mentioning here are Toshi Ishihara's "Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest: Nature's Text as Pilgrimage" in English (SALit 34: 59-79) and Masami Usui's "A Conflict with Tsunami in Juliet S. Kono's Poetry" also in English (SALit 35: 157- 74). As these articles reveal, the once popular Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin have been replaced by Japanese sansei, Korean Americans, or other hybrid Asian American writers. EigoS's special feature on Toni Morrison's Paradise also belongs here; discussions by Ikuko Fujihira, Michiko Yoshida, and Yoshiko Okoso over insightful readings of the last of Morrison's trilogy of novels (144: 130-34v.).

Masami Yuki's "Narrating the Invisible Landscape: Terry Tempest Williams's Erotic Correspondence to Nature" in English (SALit 34: 79- 97) is another index of the diverse Japanese interest in American literature. Nature writing is now a prominent American genre in Japan, and Yuki's article is a supplement to chapters in Ito's Sauntering to the InnerWilderness and Kenichi Noda's discussion of Edward Abbey in Adventures in American Literature. In addition, such postmodern writers as Paul Auster, William Gibson, and Steve Erickson receive substantial critical attention among Japanese scholars. Takayoshi Ishiwari's "The Economy of Figures: Agency, the Body, and DeLillo's White Noise" in English (SALit 35: 141-56) is a promising sign of this developing interest.

f. American and Cultural Studies

To round off this condensed survey, a few remarks have been ?eserved for three important achievements concerned with American cultural studies: Koji Oi's America Denki Ron [A Study of American Biographies] (Eichosha); America Eizobungaku ni Miru Shosu Minzoku [Representation of Minority Groups in American Films] (Osaka: Kyoiku Tosho), ed. Malamud Society of Japan; and Takayuki Tatsumi's A Dinosaur's America.

Oi's Study of American Biographies is a natural development of this prolific critic's explorations in American writings other than fiction, drama, or poetry. An avid reader of journals, letters, and autobiographies and biographies, Oi attempts to fathom the so-called "national character" that makes the United States and American culture what they are. Among the works Oi illuminates are Horatio Alger's Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Lee Masters's Lincoln: The Man, Warren's John Brown, and Constance Rourke's Davy Crockett. Limited space slights Oi's absorbing discussions of the more than double-edged subject/object relationship between the biographer and the subject. A Study of American Biographies is supported by solid scholarship and extensive reading in peripheral materials.

A multicultural society such as one finds in the United States today might best be represented in popular culture by means of mass media and multimedia—cybertexts, TV dramas, and films—rather than in literary texts. In this age, reading visual texts such as photography, documentary films, and movies has become an essential part of the process of interpreting culture. Representation of Minority Groups in American Films presents perceptive readings of minority groups and individuals and their ethnic and cultural heritages represented in selected films. To give a sample inventory: The Pawnbroker, Fiddler on the Roof, Schindler's List; Mississippi Burning, The Color Purple, The Joy Luck Club, The Last of the Mohicans, and Dances with Wolves.

The key words—"a dinosaur," "America," and "literature"—as well as various combinations of these terms explain the contents of Tatsumi's ADinosaur's America. It is a highly charged exploration of American popular culture and a serious scholarly investigation of a national obsession with the biblical Leviathan/whale/dinosaur. Tatsumi argues how the happy coincidence of Darwinian discourse in On the Origin of Species and the archaeological discovery of a fossil dinosaur in the mid-19th-century stimulated the American literary imagination to spawn a series of "dinosaur-fictions," from Poe, Melville, and Twain to Ray Bradbury and Mark Jacobson. Tatsumi's voracious reading in scientific materials as well as in literary texts and films generates free-floating speculative thinking, which may cause vertigo. Some may disagree with Tatsumi's often nebulous speculations, but A Dinosaur's America is a serious exploration of the American megalomaniac imagination. The best way to enjoy this study is to exercise what Coleridge calls "a willing suspension of disbelief." Tatsumi's slim but highly charged exploration is a reservoir of wonders.