The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature (review)

Leith Morton's sensitively argued and informative monograph seeks to demonstrate the various ways in which the cultural and psychological force of the "alien" as an idea is revealed in literary practices. The book is organized as a series of "case studies"—readings of the stylistics and themes of selected works of modern Japanese literature. Morton tries to make this wide-ranging endeavor manageable and coherent by deemphasizing the social and political factors that shaped the discourse on modern aesthetics in favor of close, formalist readings: in his introduction he explicitly distances himself from the approach of scholars such as Komori Yōichi. This method of analysis occasionally dehistoricizes the works under discussion, thus making "alien" as an analytical construct rather inchoate at points. Nonetheless, Morton's use of this construct is very productive, opening up a range of works to fresh interpretation, illustrating how rhetorical techniques achieve specific affects, and providing a clear picture of how discursive formations evolve and function over time within different literary cultures of modern Japan.

The term "alien," which Morton occasionally links with notions of the exotic or foreign, is not presented as a simple equivalent to the concept of "the Other," and for that reason it usefully extends broader discussions on the effects of cultural borrowing that have been the focus of a number of recently published works, most notably Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature (Routledge, 2007), a collection of essays edited by Mark Williams and Rachael Hutchinson. Although Representing the Other presents many viewpoints, the individual contributions all deal with questions of personal and social identity, and all are largely informed by a fascinating interplay between the theories of the Other articulated by Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault. The Alien Within is not quite so unified, its conscious foregrounding of individual texts giving Morton's readings a less intense theoretical focus—a quality that is reflected in the book's unusual organization. Nevertheless, the volume is deeply researched. Indeed, its approach owes much to the scholarship of Marina Warner, and Morton scrupulously situates his own research within a framework created by references to a large number of theorists and scholars of the alien.

The opening chapter provides an illuminating discussion of the evolution of Tsubouchi Shōyō's translations of Shakespeare. The impact of the foreign in general may seem more immediate and obvious in the products of technology, or in urban planning, or in the visual arts and architecture, or in fashion, but Morton helps to ground his study by beginning with an examination of the alien as a factor in the development of modern literary stylistics rather than as a thematic element. Several recent studies have dealt with translation as a dynamic force for creating cultural hybridity—a condition that profoundly affects understandings of identity, subjectivity, and ethical values—but their approach has been more general, treating translation as a category of cultural production. Morton instead traces concrete developments in Shōyō's translation style, showing how Shōyō initially rendered Shakespeare's English in a localized, jōruri-inflected Japanese that was immediately familiar to a mid-Meiji readership before adopting a more naturalist, or analog, style in the first decade of the twentieth century. Morton then presents examples from Shōyō's mid-Taishō translations that reveal how he eventually settled into a style that attempted to replicate the theatrical performance qualities of Elizabethan English. The idea of the alien is somewhat attenuated in the process of this analysis, but within the broader context of Morton's argument, it not only provides a starting point from which the reader can begin to get a more complete sense of Shōyō's achievement as a literary translator, but also demonstrates how the alien quality of foreign words, coupled with the desire to capture and preserve that quality in one's native tongue, fundamentally transformed literary practices and tastes.

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