Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945 by Kerim Yasar (review)

One of my regular course offerings is a seminar on fascism and everydayness in modern Japan, and a consistent student favorite from among the assigned readings is Natsume Sōseki's novel Sanshirō. Initially appearing in serialized form from 1906 to 1908, Sanshirō is a masterful depiction of historical change and upheaval in turn-of-the-century Japan, told through the experiences of the titular character as he navigates some of the comingling temporalities that constituted Japan's "modern" moment. Sanshirō makes his way from rural Kyushu to the newly emergent metropolis of Tokyo, encountering modern everydayness at every turn in fleshly, embodied ways—indeed, through him Sōseki is able to depict, contemplate, and even critique the contingencies of modern life in ways that remind us why the author has become such a defining figure of this moment.

These material, corporeal emphases in Sōseki's narrative—its appeal to the senses—are a key part of what makes the work so compelling even a century after its initial serialization in the Asahi newspaper. Scholar and translator Jay Rubin points out that much of the journey on which Sōseki takes the reader in this work is visual: symbols, colors, careful depictions of the scene(ry) are arranged in a "flow of images" that is meant "precisely" to "manipulate the reactions of the reader."¹ But the visual is not the only element of significance. The sounding of bells, the clamor of the city, the thundering of trains all play critical roles in this work as well—something that my students regularly pick up on and are eager to learn more about.

In his insightful Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945, Kerim Yasar helps us make sense of the crucial sonic undercurrent that can be traced in Sōseki's work (and that of others) by reminding us that, while Sōseki had a well-documented aversion to disruptive sound (in other words, noise), the aural world was an integral, embedded experience in early modern Japan (as it is today), one from which we cannot simply turn away. It is thus hardly surprising that Sōseki should have appealed to sonic entities such as the train in his writerly intervention into the modern experience. What is surprising—and what Yasar aims to begin rectifying in this book—is the relative paucity of attention that has hitherto been paid to the aural in Japanese literary and historical studies. Insightful and informative, Electrified Voices opens up important new paths for thinking about cultural, social, and political praxes in modern Japan by considering these in terms of vocality and aurality, of musicality and bodily rhythms, and of some of the sonic technologies that attended and afforded the imagining of a nation.

The assertion that propels Yasar's narrative is deceptively straightforward: in the author's own words, the work aims to demonstrate the ways in which "sound occupies an important place in the economy of the human sensorium, one worthy of focused and sustained examination, nothing more and nothing less" (pp. 4–5). This rather modest claim, however, opens almost immediately onto a highly ambitious, complex, and multifaceted interrogation of the extensive and often mutually generative relationship between what we might call sonicity and modernity in Japan in the moments under discussion. The sonic, for Yasar, can (must) be situated at the center of cultural, social, and political practice in modern Japan. He reveals and amplifies histories that can ultimately be rendered audible only through this stance, and indeed, gestures toward a certain tyranny of the visual that must be dislodged as both a process and a product of the work that he undertakes. This "leveling and democratization of the senses" (p. 32) leads Yasar to interrogations of the aural aspects of nationalism; the intermixing of sound, subjectivity, and orientalism; the sonic compartmentalization of...