An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel (review)

The standard genealogy of modern Japanese literature focuses, not surprisingly, on the legitimate line that stretches from Tsubouchi Shōyō and Futabatei Shimei down to their present-day heirs. There might be some disagreement over who those current heirs are (Murakami Haruki? Yoshimoto Banana? Nakagami Kenji?), but the identity of the founding fathers arouses little controversy. Even critics who take aim at the established narratives of Japanese literary history tend to revisit the same seminal ancestors. The official family history, however, has always been troubled by the presence of a scandalous second lineage of potboiler novels. Worse, this bastard strain seems to have captured the public imagination much more fully than did works belonging to the true lineage. These illegitimate pieces thumbed their nose at the serious literary values that defined the canon, yet they sold in exponentially greater numbers, they birthed countless popular figures of speech and iconic images, and they reached the theatrical stage and silver screen much oftener than their canonical counterparts.

What should we make of these unsanctioned claimants? Recent scholarship has increasingly turned to this less-respectable branch of the family tree, reading its low-brow fiction alongside the works of the established lineage. Strides have been made toward adopting these questionable titles into the fringes of the canon, making room for them at family reunions. Ken Ito's fascinating new study partakes in this tendency, but goes even further: he argues that the foundational era of the modern Japanese novel was not so much the age of realism or romanticism but rather, as his title declares, an age of melodrama. Providing sophisticated, sometimes brilliant, readings of such enormously popular works as Ozaki Kōyō's Konjiki yasha (The Golden Demon, 1897–1903), Tokutomi Roka's Hototogisu (The Cuckoo, 1897–1898), Kikuchi Yūhō's Chikyōdai (Raised as Sisters, 1903), and Natsume Sōseki's Gubijinsō (The Poppy, 1907), Ito recenters our vision of late Meiji fiction.

As Ito notes, "melodrama" is not a keyword traditionally found in Japanese cultural history. But his study joins a rapidly growing body of English-language scholarship that uses this category productively to explore Japanese modernity. Ito defines melodrama not so much as a formal genre, but rather "as a mode of imagination or sensibility" (p. 5). As such, melodramatic works favor plots that invoke emotional excess and draw stark moral polarities in which absolute good confronts unambiguous evil. Following Peter Brooks, Ito argues that this mode tends to rise to prominence at moments of rapid social change, when established moral codes lose their force. Melodrama is one mechanism by which a society tries to cope with the anxieties and pressures of historical turmoil.

It is not surprising, then, that the tumultuous Meiji period would see a boom in melodramatic popular fiction. As Ito puts it, "The characters in these novels do not live in the same world as their parents—they grope their way toward new values, they struggle to assume gender, class, and occupational identities just now coming into being" (p. 10). In particular, the abolition of the rigid status system that characterized the Edo period, and its replacement by a capitalist system that stressed social mobility and unleashed intensified class conflict, provided fodder for melodramatic plots at the turn of the twentieth century. Money became the source of evil that threatened to topple all that was good.

But even as Meiji melodramatic fiction labored to delineate clear moral boundaries, it could never quite contain all of the contradictory forces set in motion by the irruption of modernity. Ito, adopting ideas originally developed by film scholars working on melodrama, carefully traces how each of the novels he explores is characterized by an inability finally to rein in all of the conflicting impulses that drive the narrative. He describes, for example, how passions "produced as much by ideological failure as by ideological...