Shorthand Transcription and the Meiji Political Novel

This paper offers an analysis of Yano Ryūkei’s political novel Sēbe Meishi Keikoku Bidan (Illustrious Statesman of Thebes, 1883–1884). This best-selling text, which was set in ancient Thebes and strove to represent the possibilities of political transformation espoused by the People’s Rights Movement, was also a striking demonstration of the possibilities of shorthand for re-conceptualizing the relations of political thought and literature. Yano employed a mixed style based on classical Japanese grammar, for which enlisted the participation of two shorthand reporters to transcribe the two volumes of the text. Although his novel was unable to become a template for the mainstream of modern Japanese, it is precisely here and in Yano’s later writings on language and script reform that the phonetic foundations of the Meiji episteme come more clearly into focus. Accordingly, it is my primary aim to explore Yano’s advocacy of shorthand and its contributions to the transformation of modern Japanese literature, language, and script. However, I also wish to gesture toward some of the broader shifts toward phonetics that spread to China and Korea by the 1890s that are indicative of a regional shift in the relationship to Chinese literacy.