The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature ed. by Haruo Shirane, Tomi Suzuki and David Lurie (review)

Creating a literary history of the writings of a single author can be a daunting task, and one that can consume a significant portion of the career of a scholar; creating such a history for the literary output of a nation is a vastly more challenging undertaking, especially for a nation that has been producing literature for nearly two millennia. The simple act of defining what constitutes literature itself presents a conundrum, as does defining a starting point when the origins of that national literary corpus lie in orality rather than the written word. But this is the task that the editors of and contributors to The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature have set themselves, and it is a challenge to which they have magnificently risen.

The word literature can cover a staggering range of material, from poetry to governmental proclamations. It is the challenge of categorization to which the editors first turn, before presenting the eighty chapters which the sixty-seven contributors from around the world have prepared. The sheer organizational scope of the project is impressive, as is the tremendous scholastic depth of the material in those chapters. The arrangement is chronological, but within each section we find a diversity of voice, focus, and approach that permits an intelligent and illustrative survey of the myriad forms and themes of Japan’s literary realm, across the many ages and divisions that establish the canonical branches of its structures.

The editors begin their task of presenting their contributors’ chapters with a general introduction, which explains the process of the collection and justifies its scope. Here, we read a true understatement: “Japan has one of the richest and most complex literary traditions in the world, and defining and describing it is difficult” (1). Quite! But the editors do an admirable job of placing this literary history within an effective set of frames—those of the main periods familiar to every historian and scholar of Japan, from ancient times through the Heian, medieval, Tokugawa, and modern eras. This progression from era to era is most natural, of course, but it presents the benefit of allowing the reader to appreciate the continuities and innovations across time in the flow of literary ideas. Within each period, key literary forms dominate the tastes and conceptions of writers, readers, and scholars; the contributors to this volume demonstrate how these forms interact, influence, and transition into each other synchronically and diachronically to provide a rich tapestry of connections and patternings. The editors further address the fundamental questions of what constitutes “literature,” and, more pertinently, what constitutes Japanese literature. Although this has been a question since the earliest days, when scholars and poets often wrote in Chinese even after the development of the native Japanese kana syllabaries, it has become especially important in the modern period, in which writers in Japan may be using languages other than Japanese, and the ethnicities of those writers may be international. This particular set of issues receives special focus in the final section of the volume, covering the modern period, from 1868, the year of the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s full embracing of its position in a world of western industrial and colonial domination, to the present day. However, the questions of what constitutes literature and literariness run throughout the collection, and permit the editors and contributors to include genres as diverse as Chinese poetry, diaries, medieval and contemporary drama, serialized novels, warrior tales, Confucian and nationalistic philosophy, satire, translations of Western works, and even cinema.

One strength of this volume is its situation of literature firmly within the broader historical issues and contexts of the periods it covers—we receive a solid understanding of how literature, conceptions of literature, and of literariness interact and engage with other political, ideological, and intellectual trends and transformations, the better to see literature as an inextricable component...