Japan's Frames of Meaning: A Hermeneutics Reader (review)

Faced with the mass of Japanese literature and its quite singular characteristics, many Western readers may well feel the need for a hermeneutic framework that will make it less opaque and remote. Such a framework cannot merely reproduce the concepts deployed by the literature itself and its traditional critics, for these concepts are themselves archaic. Modern approaches inspired by feminism or postmodernism, however exciting, will probably not take one very far into this literature either. What is needed is a set of categories that can engage the texts and their procedures in a constantly enlightening way, much as the categories developed in standard twentieth-century literary criticism served as a framework that lit up the canon of English literature. Western understandings of plot, character, irony, image, symbol, meter, prose style, motifs, structures, tragedy, elegy, and comedy seem universal and transparent when applied to Western literature, but they turn out to have a rather limited reach when applied to Japanese literature, which does not seem to conceive the task of engaging and entertaining its readers in quite the same way. The specific ways in which Japanese literature was produced with an eye to its popular audience, social niches, or political patrons and especially its intimate interaction with the other arts no doubt make of it quite a different kind of institution from English literature.

Michael F. Marra, a widely ranging scholar of Japanese literature and philosophy whose untimely death in early 2011 is a great loss for Japanology, has translated a set of essays that provide an indigenous framework for understanding not only Japanese literature, but Japanese thought and culture in general. The translated essays are organized into three sections, each beginning with an essay by Marra himself. His opening fifty-page essay on the relation between words and things in Japanese thought deals with the meaning of the words koto—a homonym that can mean either "word" (言) or "thing" (事)—mono, kotodama, makoto, mikoto, and kotowari, with ample illustration of their use in poetry. Thus a space of thought is mapped, along with its poetic correlatives. Marra debates interestingly with Edo-period thinkers such as Toda Mosui (1629-1706), Uejima Onitsura (1661-1738), Kamo no Mabuchi (1697-1769), Fujitani Mitsue (1768-1823), and Kagawa Kageki (1768-1843). This fascinating period belongs to modern times, yet how distant it is can be seen from the way the word makoto (真), with all its rich literary, political, ethical, and social overtones, was replaced in the 1880s by the abstract shinri (真理) as the word for "truth."

Watsuji Tetsurō's essay on koto, written in 1929, follows. Watsuji was a student of Martin Heidegger, and Marra regrets that Heidegger did not have access to this essay; it would have helped him in his exchange on the same theme with Tezuka Tomio, elaborately written up in Unterwegs zur Sprache, (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959). Watsuji discusses the linguistic and philosophical aspects of 'to be,' without reference to literature. Chewing on questions suggested by the Japanese language, such as "aru to iu koto wa dō iu koto de aru ka, lit. the thing that is said to be, what kind of thing is that?" (p. 87; bold in original), Watsuji attempts to do for Japanese what Western philosophy did with the Greek diction of being. It is hard to judge whether this is as fundamental for Japan as the theme of being was for the West. The third chapter is Omori Shōzō's 1973 essay on kotodama, which draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein to clarify the idea of the spiritual power of words. Unfortunately, this philosophical piece hardly engages with the texture of Japanese language, literature, or culture at all. Chapter 4, Fujitani Mitsue on makoto, written sometime after 1811, plunges us back into undiluted Edo discourse. Here, the problem of archaic opacity arises with notions such as hitaburugokoro, translated as "the heartless heart" (p. 137), and propositions such as "poetry is made only in the holy space of sainthood...