The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan

Chapter 1. Strange Interpretations

CHAPTER 1 Strange Interpretations Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light. —Groucho Marx Periodically, circumstances seem to produce, as Nelson Wu describes Ming China, a “perfect breeding ground for eccentrics.”1 At these rare moments strangeness bursts forth to energize and reform mainstream culture. Kinsei kijinden (Eccentrics of recent times, 1790), the first biographical compilation of eccentrics (kijin) published in Japan, marks just such a moment.2 But can the literary impact and dazzling commercial success of this work be attributed to certain social or cultural conditions describable as a “perfect breeding ground for eccentrics?” If so, what were the conditions that generated this ethos of eccentricity and what distinguished these kijin from the isolated cases of strangeness and genius common to all historical eras? Moreover, how was this strange onslaught tolerated over the course of decades and centuries? This extraordinary moment in Japan’s late eighteenth century has been noted by a multitude of writers. It has been called “the beginnings of decisive change” and “a new age [that was] restless, curious, and receptive.”3 Some go on to posit how this historical moment changed the course of Tokugawa thought: how Dutch studies (rangaku) rose to replace China as a repository of knowledge and how Japan rediscovered itself as a repository of spirituality. Others identify it as the first moment in which the Tokugawa government (bakufu), recognizing cultural production as a means of controlling public knowledge, successfully utilized historiography, science, and 4 Contexts of Strangeness the arts to forge a consolidated national culture.4 These extraordinary developments in thought, knowledge, and politics were joined by sudden innovative interventions in the cultural field. Late eighteenth-century painting, for example, materialized as “a singular era . . . that witnessed an unprecedented diversity in individual artistic expression. At no time prior . . . did such a remarkable group of artists emerge in Japan.”5 Historians have called this proliferation of eccentricity a “flourishing,” a “new orthodoxy” wherein the term kijin became a “fashionable literary catchword” that triggered a “new wave of publishing [kijinden].”6 This explosive convergence of fresh intellectual and cultural energies thus marked a disjuncture in how the nation’s most idiosyncratic individuals positioned themselves vis-à-vis state and society. It also forged a conspicuous eccentric presence that was tolerated, even embraced, by the mainstream.7 Such were the historical conditions—an “era of eccentrics and eccentricities”; a “golden age of Japanese eccentrics”—from which outsiders and oddballs assumed a new position within Tokugawa society.8 Aesthetic strangeness during the last century of the Edo period was a society-wide phenomenon buoyed and driven by urbanization, economic growth, intellectual diversity, growing literacy, the expansion of print media, and mounting disillusionment with the Tokugawa state. Though ki (extraordinary , marvelous, original, eccentric), the principal signifier of aesthetic eccentricity during this period, was originally expounded as a metaphysical endowment, it was soon swept up in these developments and deployed by biographersandpublishersseekingtocapitalizeontheterm’scachet.Eccentric behavior and literary representations of eccentricity thus emerged as parallel phenomena that together would turn strangeness into a cultural sensation. This study examines aesthetic eccentricity as an emergent feature of identity formation during this new age and traces its trajectory throughout the Edo period (1600–1868). It limits discussion of this timeless phenomenon to a fixed historical era, not to suggest that aesthetic strangeness magically materialized under the Tokugawa or that it was eradicated along with the Tokugawa in 1868, but because broadening its historical scope to include preceding and succeeding events would require introducing new sets of complex historical problems that merit full-length studies in their own right. Rather, the study chooses to focus on a single pivotal era, maintaining that forms of aesthetic strangeness ascendant in the Edo period can be fully addressed within the context of that period alone. Its purpose is Strange Interpretations 5 to identify certain strains of patterned nonconformity and to discern how they eventually acquired the currency to redefine the cultural landscape. Aesthetic eccentricity refers not only to deviant cultural forms—mainly within the visual arts—but also to subjectivities that privilege individuality, emotion, and intuition over conventional behavior. It tends toward egocentrism and often conveys a subject’s desire for detachment from occupational responsibilities, ideological constraints, or commercial pressures. In Japanese, as in English, the term “eccentricity” is deployed so broadly to signify such sprawling, convoluted phenomena as to present problems of definition and contextualization. It cannot be meaningfully...