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70 3 Space and Aesthetic Imagination in Some Taishò Writings ELAINE GERBERT In his article, “Disciplinizing Native Knowledge and Producing Place,” Harry Harootunian discusses the ways in which urbanization and industrialization led some intellectuals to reinstate the importance of local place in the formation of Japanese identity. To affirm the common identity of all Japanese at a time when applications of instrumental reason together with capitalism, individualism, and competition were creating divisions between city and country, and social conflict and disharmony, Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), for example, emphasized the “timeless history of folkic life,” rooted in rural Japan, as the essential unifying reality transcending differences of social class and function. Local place, reduced to a site of economic production in the writings of socialist thinkers and, later, novelists of the proletarian literature movement, was visualized as the repository of ancestral spirit and, hence, as a place of worship by Yanagita and Origuchi Shinobu (1887–1953). Native place was reconstructed as the “locus of authentic identity,” the basis of a common heritage shared by all Japanese. Paul Anderer addresses the issue of cultural identity, space, and a sense of place from the perspective of Japanese literature in the introductory chapter of his book, Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction. In analyzing the uniqueness of Arishima’s alien spatial imaginary, located in the region outside the known and culturally familiar “homeland” (naichi), Anderer discusses the prevailing sense of specific geographic place and bounded space that has characterized Japanese literature from early times and that continues to characterize it in the present. This “prevailingly, place-haunted nature of Japanese fiction” (An- derer 1984, 6) continued very much intact throughout the Taishò period, a time of great cultural ferment and literary influence from abroad. It was especially conspicuous in the “rise to dominance of watakushi shòsetsu or shinkyò shòsetsu (personal fiction),” the genre whose place-centered quality writer and critic Kume Masao (1891–1952) underlined in a famous statement in which he likened the shishòsetsu to the furusato (country home) of Japanese literature (Kume 1973, 57). This essay aims at furthering this discussion by exploring other visualizations of cultural space in Taishò literature. Whereas Arishima and writers cited by Anderer looked to spaces beyond the familiar bounded space of the naichi in their encounters with foreign culture,1 Uno Kòji (1891–1961), Satò Haruo (1892–1964), and Tanizaki Jun’ichirò (1886–1965), three authors closely associated with the flourishing of cosmopolitan modernist literature during Taishò, used bounded, enclosed spaces to facilitate a meeting with and an assimilation of that which was strange and unfamiliar (i.e., Western culture). Circumscribed spaces in the early works of these writers offer not so much opportunities for rediscovering familiar traditions as opportunities for discovering and experiencing new perceptions fed by foreign culture. Circumscribed space functions as an enabling factor in the pursuit of literary fantasy inspired by the exotic, foreign Other. The spatial imaginary in writings by Satò and Uno published after Taishò changes dramatically and, significantly, in a way that resonates with Yanagita Kunio’s emphasis on local place and the continuity of communal consciousness. In their later works, the enclosed spaces of earlier literary experimentations disappear, as these writers write about life experienced in specific geographic and historic locations. In Uno’s writing the rediscovery of the open space of the Yamato countryside is accompanied by a renewed interest in communitarian bounds transcending class differences, and in a kind of “spontaneous, unreflective, and collective” (Harootunian 1990, 106) behavior predating rational applications of instrumental reason of the kind associated with the modern nation state. Satò’s writing points to a rediscovery of ethnic and historical identity situated in actual geographic spaces. Akutagawa Ryûnosuke (1892–1927), reputed for his knowledge of Western literature, and Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933), a leading representative of the proletarian literature movement, are two among other writers who should not be omitted in this discussion, were it only for the at times sharp contrast they provide in their treatment of space, which by itself affords a more insightful view of the aesthetics of Uno, Satò, and Tanizaki, and of the cultural and political history of Taishò. The idea that alien culture should be received in special, circumscribed spaces, insulated from the rest of the society, was familiar enough by Taishò. Examples of this tendency to quarter foreign culture in a way that made it available on a selective, manageable basis, were seen in the...

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