"Kanbunmyaku": The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature by Mareshi Saitō (review)

Ever since it was first published in 2007, Saitō Mareshi's Kanbunmyaku to kindai Nihon: Mō hitotsu no kotoba no sekai (NHK Shuppan) has attracted attention for its persuasively original take on language change in nineteenth-century Japan and the pervasive impact of kanbun on the Japanese language, and it has often been cited in Western scholarship. But why undertake an English-language translation of it? A clue lies in the title of this English publication: Although his text was originally aimed at Japanese readers, Saitō became aware of its wider significance when it was published first in Korean in 2010 and then in Chinese in 2020. In the English edition's title, kanbun is rendered "Literary Sinitic," a term that was first espoused by the sinologist Victor Mair and that, in the editors' words, "deliberately highlights its relevance to transregional questions of literary culture in what might be called the Sinographic Cosmopolis" (p. xviii). Thus, the editors are positioning this book within a discourse stimulated by Sheldon Pollock's pathbreaking work, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (University of California Press, 2006), which tackled the shifting tensions between cosmopolitan languages like Sanskrit, Latin, and what is conventionally called literary Chinese on the one hand and local vernaculars on the other.

The editors of the English translation, then, are seeking to give Saitō's text traction in the debates prompted by Pollock's book. What is it about kanbunmyaku—translated in the book under review as "Literary Sinitic Context" and capitalized thus throughout—that encourages such an approach? As he makes clear at the outset, Saitō is more concerned with large historical flows than with the customary, but heuristically unexciting, division between kanbun (a term, let us remind ourselves, that was only invented in the Meiji period) and wabun (i.e., Japanese written in kana, with or without kanji). To drive this point home, he considers the use of kanji by bōsōzoku bikers and the adoption of kanbun expressions in the speeches of pompous politicians and, until 2005, in the language of legal statutes. Saitō is also anxious to remind his readers that Japan's encounter with literary Sinitic was by no means unique in East Asia, for in Korea, the Tangut Empire, and Vietnam, too, the encounter with literary Sinitic stimulated the emergence of vernacular scripts in the same way that it led in Japan to the development of kana. In other words, Saitō engages in his book with the concept of the "sinographic cultural sphere" (kanji bunkaken), and it is this that justifies the editors' decision to see the book as a kind of East Asian response to Pollock's arguments. Readers who wonder if Saitō himself was happy with that will be reassured to learn that he traveled to Vancouver twice in order to cooperate with the preparation of this translation.

Saitō's focus is not simply literary Sinitic as a written language but also the familiarity with the Chinese classics that proficiency in the language required and presupposed. He argues that the famous "ban on heterodoxy" (Kansei Igaku no Kin) that was applied to the shogunal academy in the late eighteenth century had a decisive effect on the institutionalization of Zhu Xi orthodoxy and the creation of a literary Sinitic curriculum. Those who underwent a literary Sinitic education were unavoidably steeped in Chinese history and the classics, as is clear from the reminiscences of Fukuzawa Yukichi or the kanshi (literary Sinitic poetry) of Natsume Sōseki roughly one century later. Saitō gives particular attention to Rai San'yō's Nihon gaishi (Unofficial History of Japan), which became a best seller around the middle of the nineteenth century. A history of the samurai domination of Japan from the Muromachi up...