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  • The Observable Mundane: Vernacular Chinese and the Emergence of a Literary Discourse on Popular Narrative in Edo Japan by Emanuel Pastreich
  • Peter Flueckiger
The Observable Mundane: Vernacular Chinese and the Emergence of a Literary Discourse on Popular Narrative in Edo Japan. By Emanuel Pastreich . Seoul National University Press, 2011. 366 pages. Hardcover $75.00.

In The Observable Mundane, Emanuel Pastreich examines how Tokugawa writers' encoun­ter with vernacular Chinese caused them to reimagine China and the Chinese language, and more generally to conceive of language and culture in new ways. This exposure to ver­nacular Chinese came primarily in the form of fiction, but also in the form of contemporary spoken language, which Japanese increasingly had the opportunity to study at this time, often from Chinese émigrés who fled to Japan after the fall of the Ming dynasty.

Pastreich describes how the new vernacular narratives imported to Japan in the Tokugawa period "shifted away from the accepted images of China as an amorphous and idyllic realm of the ancient sages or as a setting for refined gatherings of literati and cognoscenti to share poetry and tea," instead offering Japanese readers images of such things as the "rampages of bandits, the cunning of prostitutes and the scheming of petty merchants" (p. 17). This was an alien world to Japanese readers, he notes, but also one that had similarities with new social developments in Japan, where "the urban environment found in Edo, Osaka and Kyoto in­creasingly resembled the environment depicted in novels brought over from China" (p. 45).

He explains how a philosophical justification for the study of the everyday was provided by the Confucian scholar Itō Jinsai (1627-1705), who rejected the Song Confucian view that the Confucian Way exists as an abstract and universal "principle" (li理, Jp. ri) and argued that "the concrete and immediate were crucial for the implementation of a moral order" (p. 165). This led him to "take the radical step of suggesting that the sentiments in the classics are exactly those found in popular songs and vernacular novels" (p. 166). Pastreich links Jinsai's affirmation of sentiment and the common to other phenomena of the culture of the Genroku period (1688-1704), such as the mixture of the ga (exalted) and the zoku (vulgar) in the haikai poetry of Matsuo Bashō. This connection of Jinsai's philosophy to Genroku culture is supported by Pastreich's description of how Jinsai's son Itō Baiu (1683-1745) gave serious scholarly treatment to the fiction of Ihara Saikaku, and how Hozumi Ikan (1692-1769), a student of Jinsai's son Itō Tōgai (1670-1736), did the same for the puppet theater of Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Pastreich shows how the study of Chinese vernacular narrative similarly developed as a field of systematic scholarly inquiry in eighteenth-century Japan, such as with Oka Hakku's (1692-1767) Shōsetsu seigen (Novels in Fine Words) and Sawada Issai's (1701-1782) Shōsetsu suigen (Novels in Refined Words), both of which combine an­notated collections of Chinese vernacular stories with prefaces that discuss the history and value of Chinese fiction.

In his discussion of Tokugawa discourse on vernacular language, Pastreich assigns a cen­tral role to another Confucian scholar, Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728), whose "approach to Chi­nese language combined the translation of Chinese texts into contemporary Japanese, the study of contemporary Chinese language, and the composition of prose and poems in clas­sical Chinese into a single regimen" (p. 146). Sorai provides a justification for the study of vernacular language in the preface to his Yakubunsentei (A Device for Translation), which Pastreich translates in an appendix to The Observable Mundane (this translation was originally [End Page 338] published as part of a journal article). Central to Sorai's argument in Yakubunsentei is that "Chinese must be understood as a foreign language and not as an elevated domestic discourse" (p. 146). This attitude is reflected in Sorai's rejection of kundoku for being a stilted and artificial form of language that at the same time gives Japanese readers a false sense of having understood the Chinese original. As an alternative to kundoku, Pastreich explains, for Sorai "a rendering...

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