The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō (review)

In spite of the linguistic difficulties of her semiclassical prose, on the level of content Higuchi Ichiyō is surely one of Japan's most accessible writers. The heartfelt stories that Japan's first professional woman writer composed in her brief life of twenty-four years are short and affecting, with a directness that transcends the time and place of their initial publication in Meiji Japan. As evidence of her wide appeal, her portrait has graced the five-thousand-yen bill since 2004—an ironic fate for one who died in humble surroundings of acute pulmonary tuberculosis exacerbated by long years of hard work, poor food, and the emotional strain of heading the family household from the age of sixteen.

For years, Ichiyō (as she is fondly referred to) was known to English-language readers primarily through Edward Seidensticker's translation of "Takekurabe" (Growing Up) in Donald Keene's l956 Modern Japanese Literature (Grove Press). Then in 1981, the late Robert Danly brought to the Western reader eight more of her stories in translation and her biography in In The Shade of Spring Leaves (Yale University Press). Timothy Van Compernolle's book rests upon the foundation laid by Danly, to whose memory he dedicates the volume.

The Uses of Memory offers close readings of five of Ichiyō's best known and most often discussed stories: "Ōtsugomori" (On the Last Day of the Year, 1894), "Nigorie" (Troubled Waters, 1895), "Jūsan'ya" (The Thirteenth Night, 1895), "Takekurabe" (Child's Play, 1895-1896), and "Wakaremichi" (Separate Ways, 1896). All five are translated in Danly's book, in the same order, making it easy for the reader to refer back and forth between the stories and Van Compernolle's discussions. As the title suggests, the study seeks to show how Ichiyō reworked the literary tradition to critique modernity. The project can be described as a work of dialogical criticism insofar as the author engages much of the existing critical scholarship on Ichiyō and sheds light on her writings by juxtaposing them with echoes from the past and with the voices of writers and social commentators who were publishing at the time that she wrote.

In bringing to the fore Ichiyō's appropriation of traditional literary themes, tropes, and archetypes at the same time that he recaptures for the present-day reader the voices that constituted her social cultural milieu, the author attempts to resolve the seeming discrepancy between two different approaches to her opus. One is a scholarly tradition that has focused upon the premodern literary features of her language and style and ignored the modern dimension of her writing. The other is a more recent tendency to look at the modern themes in her works from feminist and historicist perspectives while overlooking her use of the literary past?—a use that Van Compernolle believes to be "the very center of Ichiyō's craft of fiction" (p. 5).

Chapter 1 sets out the problem of modernity, discussing the ideology of the modern in the writings of Kunikida Doppo, Tsubouchi Shōyō, and Futabatei Shimei and positioning Ichiyō's oeuvre as "an alternative path opened up for modern Japanese literature, a path that depends on ... the appropriation of the literary heritage in order to confront the present, with the consequent revision and renewal of the literary past in the process" (p. 15). A discussion of Ichiyō within an educational context is followed by an overview of the concept of modernity in Japan. The observation that "the narrator's ethnographic style of representing the environs of the Yoshiwara ... [may be] traced back to the reportage literature" of late Meiji-period journalists writing about the city slums (p. 18) is an example of the kind of dialogic approach that will be developed in greater detail in subsequent chapters, each of which analyzes one of Ichiyō's stories within the framework of literary memory...