The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan: Histories and Cultures of the Book by Sari Kawana (review)

In reviewing Sari Kawana's impressively researched and thoroughly argued monograph, The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan, a particular word used by Walter Benjamin comes to mind: Fortleben. In his influential essay "The Task of the Translator," Benjamin suggests that translation indicates that works of art have "reached the stage of their continuing life [Fortleben]."¹ Benjamin sees translation as a transformation, but one that is part of the continual evolution of a work of art. The Fortleben of a text can take it into other media and other forms just as it can take it into other languages. Translation is, after all, merely one form of adaptation. Though she does not use the word, Kawana's book focuses on the way different actors—including authors themselves, publishers, and readers—participate in and contribute to the Fortleben of Japanese literature.

Kawana builds on the work of recent scholars on the history of books and media in Japan studies. Whereas much of the existing scholarship is centered on the production and canonization of literature, as is apparent in the title of Edward Mack's seminal study Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature, Kawana is focusing on its uses. In other words, Kawana is not necessarily interested in how works come into existence but rather what people do with literature once it is produced. As she puts it, "These creative agents are not simply appropriating the original story to their own benefit; rather, they are enhancing it by imbuing it with new uses and future potentials" (p. 12). These "creative agents" and the uses they find in literature are the focus of Kawana's book.

Kawana explores how use value might work beyond codifying a canon of literary value. One example of this is the way she treats the enpon boom (one-yen-per-book subscription plans) of the late 1920s, the subject of chapter 1. Mack discusses enpon as transforming Japanese literature into "not only a national but also an imperial culture"; in other words, Mack shows what the enpon boom did to Japanese literature.² Kawana explores the ways in which people—advertisers, publishers, and readers—mobilized the newly transformed Japanese literature toward generating revenue and cultural capital. She builds on Mack's work and that of Nagamine Shigetoshi to show how advertising agencies worked in conjunction with publishers to emphasize the use of literature in self-cultivation and the necessity of owning the volumes themselves as physical markers of the cultured life. Advertising allowed Kaizōsha and other publishers to find new uses for literature that had already been published and to transform it into both cash for the companies and authors and cultural capital for the readers. As Kawana shows, advertising not only told readers that these books added to their cultural capital but, by so doing, also made Japanese literature itself into something used to create cultural capital.

Kawana leaves advertising and publishing companies and focuses on readers themselves in her chapter on reading in wartime Japan, an excellent example of reader-based scholarship. She mines archives and memoirs to show how readers could find alternative value in adventure stories despite nationalistic and militaristic overtones. In particular, she uses responses to Unno Jūza's science fiction to argue that readers gleaned more complicated meanings from Unno's texts than their overtly propagandistic tones might imply. Some readers even gleaned antiauthoritarian messages from the stories. This chapter is a worthwhile contribution to the sparse scholarship looking at the literary production of wartime Japan and the science fiction of the era. Kawana argues against assumptions that "art took a backseat to political utility" or that audiences could only "indulge their literary tastes in works that made it past the censors" (p. 52). Rather, she shows that, despite censorship, people found literary works to read and took their own meanings from those works...