Editorial Preface

The first novel I ever read in Japanese was Matsumoto Seichō’s 松本清張 Points and Lines (Ten to sen 点と線), a detective story by one of Japan’s finest practitioners of the genre.¹ It appealed both as a whodunit and because so much of the story hinged on the author’s well-placed faith in the to-the-minute accuracy of Japanese railway timetables, which I too had learned to count on. In retrospect, I can say confidently that I missed many details of the narrative as well as the nuances of Matsumoto’s social criticism, but the experience remains with me as a sort of capstone to my initial immersion in Japanese culture and language.

The first canonical early twentieth-century author I read in Japanese was Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 谷崎潤一郎, whose work is the subject of James Reichert’s contribution to this issue of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. I have read a number of Tanizaki’s novels over the years, but I have a particular regard for The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki 細雪), which I read over the course of a summer in Tokyo.² I picked it up with the thought, What better way to show off my command of the Japanese language than to read, with ostentatious nonchalance, a nine-hundred-page novel on a crowded commuter train? Happily, once I started reading it, my insecure exercise in performance art quickly gave way to deep engagement with Tanizaki’s rich and moving portrait of a family living in the shadow of oncoming war.

Much as I love to read novels, I am no literary scholar. I have, however, become a more astute reader of literature thanks to my experience editing HJAS, which brings me into daily contact with the scholarly craftsmanship of colleagues across the humanities and humanistic social sciences. In this issue, Thomas Kelly examines how the prominent Northern Song poet Su Shi 蘇軾 elevated ink making into a legitimate scholarly venture and thereby challenged the boundary between writing and handicraft. Ruth Yun-ju Chen looks at Southern Song medical formularies as an example of the history of knowledge management. The texts’ authors privileged expediency above all else in composing formulas for a variety of home remedies. James Reichert subjects one of Tanizaki’s most disturbing works, the historical novella Secret History of the Lord of Musashi (Bushūkō hiwa 武州公秘話), to a searching analysis, in which he demonstrates how Tanizaki’s use of allegory and irony parallels the logic of the fetish at the heart of the narrative. Finally, Stephen Bokenkamp looks at the doctrine of rebirth as an animal in early medieval Chinese Buddhist and Daoist texts; he shows how writers drew on genuine and apocryphal texts to make the doctrine socially and politically palatable to ruling elites.