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206 9 Writing the National Narrative: Changing Attitudes toward Nation-Building among Japanese Writers, 1900–1930 ROY STARRS When Japanese writers began to read and translate Western literature in the late nineteenth century, they encountered a very powerful vehicle of national narrative: the Western novel. Just as one of the main features of Western political history over the previous few centuries had been the rise of the modern nation-state, so an equally central feature of Western literary history had been the rise of the novel. These two phenomena were not merely parallel but symbiotic: each had contributed to the other’s growth. And this mutually enriching relationship reached its climax and apogee in the nineteenth century—at exactly the historical moment when Japan “reopened ” to the West. The nineteenth-century novel brought the full scope of national life alive to the imaginations of the newly literate peoples of Europe and America in a way possible to no other artistic form, and perhaps rivaled only by the newly emergent national newspapers—with which, by no coincidence, many novelists were associated and in which they often first published their novels. Nineteenth-century nationalism joined with the nineteenth-century novel to produce some impressive examples of what we might call the “national novel.” The paragon of them all was Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–1869), which is undoubtedly the greatest national narrative of the nineteenth century, not only a masterful novel in the usual sense of the term but a grand-scale epic celebrating the Russian people’s victory over the invading armies of Napoleon. Many Meiji Japanese recognized quite early this nation-building function of the Western novel and realized that, like the national flag and the national anthem, the national novel was one of the standard fixtures of the modern nation-state, even though it was a “cultural property” that could not be so easily assimilated. Spurred by the obvious disparity between Western and Japanese images and practices of fiction, the influential Meiji novelist and critic Tsubouchi Shòyò published his stirring call to arms, Shòsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel), in 1885, urging his fellow writers to improve the quality of their fiction so that “we may finally be able to surpass in quality the European novels. . . .” This was obviously an appeal to the nationalism and competitive spirit of Japanese writers, but their response over the following years was not so resoundingly nationalistic as might have been expected. Despite all the pressures on Meiji writers to contribute in their own way to the great nation-building project of the age, no Japanese Tolstoys arose to celebrate their nation’s heroic struggle against and ultimate victory over the nineteenth-century imperialist West, which had threatened to reduce the divine land to the status of a colony. Nothing approximating a Tolstoyan, epic treatment of the age appeared until Shimazaki Tòson’s Yoake mae (Before the Dawn), which, although written by a writer whose career began in the Meiji period, was written very much in retrospect, several decades after that period had ended. Also, as we shall see, Shimazaki’s view of Meiji nation-building as a human experience was more tragic than heroic. If, then, one were to regard the large-scale nineteenth-century Western novel as the only form of fiction capacious enough to serve as a national narrative, one would have to conclude that Meiji Japan, despite all its frenetic nation-building, produced no national narratives of any significant literary quality. But, of course, developments in the theory and practice of fiction, especially of the short story, since the nineteenth century have taught us the various ways in which fiction may take on metaphorical or symbolic overtones and thus encompass very large areas of meaning within even the smallest areas of text. Using this approach, even a short story can present a meaningful image of an entire nation or period. The best Meiji fiction writers took easily to the new approaches of symbolic fiction and thus were able to write their own style of what we might describe as national narrative on an intimate scale. Mori Ògai’s short story, “Fushinchû” (“Under Reconstruction,” 1910), is an excellent case in point. At first glance, it appears to present a slight if charming vignette from the love life of an upper-class Meiji gentleman, a government official. In a small hotel under reconstruction, he has a brief reencounter with a former lover, a German woman now touring...

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