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  • Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity
  • Paul Anderer (bio)
Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity. By Maeda Ai. Edited and with an introduction by James A. Fujii. Duke University Press, Durham, 2004. xv, 391 pages. $89.95, cloth; $24.95, paper.

By the late 1980s in Japan, death-of-literature announcements were de rigueur. If one hundred years of bungaku seinen solitude had sustained kindai bungaku, an emergent shōjo culture coolly signaled its demise. Literary taste, or what at times seemed little more than the self-absorbed obsessions of prewar aesthetes and postwar existentialists, was set aside once and for all by consumerist hype and a newfound fascination with the unbounded possibilities of cartoon-malleable sets and heroes. Haruki and Banana became brand names and so far outpaced a writer like ōe Kenzaburō that only the Nobel Prize would keep him in sight.

Maeda Ai, sadly, also died in 1987. To the end he practiced criticism and scholarship as if literature were still a vital subject of inquiry. Indeed, on the evidence of this volume, and the care of its editor and translators, Maeda seems more sorely missed than a literature to which he had devoted his scholarly lifetime. Surely he was one of the last Japanese scholars and critics whose work possessed weight and urgency, as though interrogations of literary form and structure had a groundedness in lived experience. If a novel were ruled by the regime of paranoia, by Maeda's reckoning, then the pathology must have had a habitation, at a moment in time, in a particular place (say, a ni-kai no geshuku in the late 1880s). That this time for Maeda was the nineteenth century, and the place Tokyo, in no way delimits but simply defines his abiding concerns.

As he emerges in James Fujii's penetrating introduction, Maeda was an intrepid explorer of the modern city, as well as of its literature, producing through a series of intricate and strangely interconnected studies a veritable map of Japanese literary culture since the 1800s. The map reveals a city under reconstruction, or metamorphosis. We are invited to see Maeda's writings as a palimpsest, where the tracery of Edo and its watery byways remain visible, if overlaid by the ambition of Meiji planners for Tokyo's expansion, requiring land, or landfill, to hold it up. Fujii rightly stresses how bound to Edo Maeda remained, to an older yet colorful and vibrant city culture, by virtue of his own early training in kinsei studies, if also because of an affection he never lost for a city of water.

The book's subtitle calls these "essays on Japanese modernity." This may be just descriptive, although it seems too a strategic move, intended to confront the conventional time line on the "modern"—that it began toward [End Page 160] the end of the nineteenth century and picked up speed across the twentieth—and to slide it deliberately back. Of the eleven essays selected and translated here, only three treat substantially Taisho or early Showa cultures. None deals directly with the second half of the twentieth century. Instead, the overwhelming majority circle around Meiji and pre-Meiji production—in practice, then, with the loop of a long nineteenth century. The editor's selections, always an issue in the translation of a first book meant somehow to represent a much larger body of work, respect Maeda's career-long interests and preferences, and in proportion to their appearance in the original.

One might agree with Fujii's argument that modernity embraces "visuality" as its defining constituent (p. 3), yet scan the essays assembled here and conclude that for Maeda, again, the modern is essentially a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Visual details are replete in his writings, devoted as they are to maps, drawings, and woodblock prints. But seldom does he mention, much less provide a sustained analysis of, film, or of photography for that matter, either as an aesthetic form possessing profound implications for the representation of space, or as a mode of mechanical reproduction. Even when he writes about the modernist 1920s, as in his famous treatment of Kawabata Yasunari's Asakusa kurenaidan, Maeda...

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