Editor's Introduction

By chance, each essay in this issue raises fresh ways to approach Japanese national language and "Japanese" cultural history. Hoyt J. Long's "(Il)legibility and Handwriting in Meiji Letters: A Media History," considers the dynamic relation of "hand-writing" and "type-writing." At its largest scope, his essay contests Friedrich Kittler's technological determinism with a thesis of Long's own called "intermedial history." His point is applicable to any national or international historical project seeking to grasp the temporality of technological transformation, and one hopes the essay will also find readers in general literary studies. The starting point, however, must include new media and a concept of the "newness of old media." Propinquity establishes temporality. The newness of the new and the newness of the old; both exist in the same moment. In his analysis of technologies (xylography, moveable type, pen writing, model letter syntax, etc.), Long's point is to consider new print media "first as a technical concern and second as a social-psychological one." Long gives a compelling example of how intermedial history works. Integrating government policy, textbooks, literary experiments, and technological changes, he demonstrates that graphesis—the epistemology of visual imaging—can clarify how a message "has to do with the range of mediums through which it is mediated" at any specific historical juncture.

Irena Hayter's "Figures of the Visual: Japanese Modernism, Technology, Vitalism" retools 1920s "new sensationism." Similarly to Long, Hayter proposes an analytical approach that she shows emerged in a historical conjuncture. The neosensationalist movement, she argues, is intermedial in two respects. First, the fractured modernist aesthetics established in neosensationism drew together new cinema and new fiction. But second, Hayter insists that key figures Kawabata Yasunari and Yokomitsu Riichi drew heavily on a countervailing tendency. Avant-gardism found its roots in Bergsonian vitalism. Expanding on Donald M. Lowe's pioneering work on the history of perception, Hayter sees vitalists pushing back against deracination and capitalist monetization of cultural life. Against Cartesianism, which they sought to bypass, critics, including Kawabata himself, pioneered a Japanese national tradition rooted in the German "aesthetics of empathy." This led in turn to a nativist preoccupation with "Eastern nondualism." As has proven to be the case in many such studies, European metaphysics lies at the bottom of nativist speculation about an Oriental way.

William H. Bridges's contribution, "In the Beginning: Blackness and the 1960s Creative Nonfiction of Ōe Kenzaburō," moves us to the 1960s and the tangled debt Ōe Kenzaburō's critical writing owes to Sartrean Marxist aesthetics. The signal point for Bridges is to critically distinguish between Ōe's concept of black literatures and literature written by brown-skinned writers. One is an aesthetic posture and the other is a sociological observation. Here we find continuity of Bridges' critical work with scholars Hoyt and Hayter. He, too, hopes to read literary representation "nonrepresentationally" yet in an extra-literary or historical framework. All three jettison the assumption that writing represents a static real. But they also demonstrate, each in a different moment and each forging a different philosophic or critical approach, the historical situatedness of literature. Literature is not a moment in intertextual play. Ōe, Bridges argues, requires attention to politics of identification. Ōe identified with James Baldwin. But, and this is the significant point, Ōe was not Baldwin or Baldwin-like. Even despite their phenotypical and cultural differences, Ōe drew on analogical logics to write about existentialist heroes and then, later, as he meditated on the Sartrean question of authenticity in his Sakebigoe, to advocate Black literature because it offers a pedagogy of the oppressed.

The remarkable essay, "Tanigawa Gan and the Poetics of the Origin," finds Gavin Walker addressing a question that previous essays left open. Where in politically engaged, avant-garde, or at the very least disruptive cultural technologies, can a critic working immanently find historical origins? Walker situates readers in the 1950s and 1960s Left avant-garde. He lays out the history Left factionalism inherited from its own prewar work and links Tanigawa's postwar philosophy to his heritage and his immediate moment. Walker begins at the question of...