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

Context matters. The historical, sociological, and mediated contexts for the content of culture have become important foci of study in recent years. In literary and cultural studies, this scholarly shift from structuralist and poststructuralist close readings to cultural materialist, new historicist, and new materialist approaches over the past three decades has rendered the historicization of cultural material paramount—witness not only the rise in the study of book history but also the shift from film to media and screen studies. In the field of Japanese studies as well, the trend is evident in work by a range of innovative scholars.¹ Sari Kawana draws on many of these insights and approaches to articulate a clear, compelling argument about the "use value" of modern literature and its place in a wider media ecology. The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan is a synthetic, unifying narrative of twentieth-century cultural production that provides nothing less than a phenomenology of modern Japanese literature—less a history or sociology of literature's everyday existence than a study of its everyday existence as an object in our world. Ultimately, the book continues the trend toward a general destabilizing of a specific canon, here by showing us the contingency of such canons upon the context of use and users, dependent as they are on generous authors, interested publishers, creative readers, curious literary tourists, and unexpected understandings of copyright.

Each chapter describes and explains aspects of the being of literature in modern Japan—the way literature exists in daily life. Chapter 1, "Mass-Produced Must-Haves: The 'Enpon' Boom, Cultural Inflation, and Advertising Battles," covers the cultivated spectacle around books, specifically in terms of the publishing practice of producing "complete series" (zenshū). In Kawana's explication, though kashihon'ya (lending libraries) had long fulfilled the wish to borrow books, and though publishers had cultivated readerly desire to own books from at least the Meiji period, only with the advent of mass culture in the early twentieth century did they succeed on a large scale with the launch of anthologies advertised as "complete." Paying significant homage to Edward Mack's work on the Kaizōsha collection and its famed "books for a bookshelf' marketing scheme, Kawana shows how the devastation of the 1923 earthquake, along with the rise of a new middle class and its concomitant demographic shift to urban apartment and/or small(er) home living, was deeply correlated with a desire for full bookshelves. The effect of "tireless advertising campaigns" by "publishers who connected the idea of book ownership with other political, intellectual, and cultural fantasies that were prevalent" ultimately explains why readers bought books that they neither needed nor could afford (p. 15), bringing the theme of "use value" to bear on the question of the series.

Chapter 2, "Reading Beyond the Lines: Young Readers and Wartime Reading Practices," assesses the afterlives of literature through an analysis of reading practices in wartime and the reception of the speculative fiction of Unno Jūza. Dissatisfied with the draconian depiction of the "dark valley" of wartime culture, Kawana illuminates the historical practice of a "repetitive and nostalgic reading" (p. 52) of extant volumes during that time of paper shortages and censorship, unveiling many richly creative reading experiences. She points out that even though literature in that period was stipulated to be "both entertaining and useful" (p. 81), "books were being bought and read even during the war, but often not for the reasons—the original 'uses'—that their producers (or their authorizers) envisioned" (p. 14). The chapter challenges the notion that "art and entertainment took a backseat to political utility" (p. 52), and its focus on the wartime popularity of Unno succeeds in showing how readers, particularly younger shōkokumin ("little national subjects"), could find a myriad of possibilities even within otherwise nationalistic discourses. In short, Kawana argues...