Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of "Literature" in Meiji Japan (review)

Atsuko Ueda's Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment represents the most recent addition to the ongoing project of historicizing the concept of "literature" as it has been deployed in modern Japan. In particular, Ueda targets a cornerstone in the traditional narrative of the "origins" of modern Japanese literature: the idea that Tsubouchi Shōyō's Shōsetsu shinzui (1885–1886) laid the foundation for the subsequent development of modern Japanese fiction along the lines of modern Western psychological realism. She sets out to reveal the ideological underpinnings of this narrative by first separating Shōyō's text from anachronistic assumptions about "literature" and the "novel" that have been attached to it in hindsight, then resituating it within the specific confines of the politically charged discursive environment of 1880s Japan, and finally tracing the process by which the text became so deeply entrenched as the foundation for the concept of literature as an ontologically autonomous domain. There are two overarching arguments at work here, both implicit in the book's title. First, Ueda proposes that the modern concept of "literature" in Japan came into being through the simultaneous production and repression of the "political" as its opposite—a process that she identifies in both Shōsetsu shinzui itself and the literary histories that later invested it with originary status. Second, she makes the case that the literary historical depiction of Shōsetsu shinzui has concealed its anxious relationship to the domestic and global political conditions of its own day, from the revolutionary politics of the radical wing of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement to Japan's precarious position vis-à-vis Asia and the West.

Any critique runs the risk of inadvertently reinforcing, rather than deflating, the privileged status of the object it critiques. In this case, the danger is compounded by the fact that Ueda's study constitutes the first extended analysis of Shōsetsu shinzui in English-language scholarship. When the author asserts that "modern Japanese literary history has overemphasized the role of Shōsetsu shinzui in narrativizing the development of modern Japanese literature" (p. 7), the reader may find it difficult to repress the rejoinder, "So why devote an entire book to it?" But the reader's patience will be rewarded as the answer to this question gradually becomes clear: Ueda uses this privileged text as a lever to pry open certain areas of political and social discourse in 1880s Japan that the text itself attempted to hide from view. In this sense, it would perhaps have been more effective to frame the study as an inquiry into the discursive field of 1880s Japan and its relation to the "production of literature," rather than focusing the reader's attention so sharply on Shōsetsu shinzui from the outset.

Ueda sets out to revise our understanding of Shōsetsu shinzui by reading it along-side several trends of the 1880s that would perhaps seem unrelated were it not for her critical intervention: the literary-political discourse of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement; the call for "autonomy of knowledge" by educators and intellectuals in the private sector; Komuro Shinsuke's fictional narrative of "Asianization" in Kōa kidan: Murenren (1884) and Fukuzawa Yukichi's reverse call for "de Asianization" in "Datsu-a ron" (1885); and Japanese newspaper responses to the Imo Mutiny (1882), the Sino-Franco War (1884–1885), and the Kapsin Incident (1884). What connects these trends to each other and to Shōyō's most famous early works, according to Ueda, are a particular set of anxieties produced by Japan's precarious position vis-à-vis "Asia" and "the West." The essence of her argument appears to run as follows: Japan's desire to become part of the "West"—to be understood here as a regulative idea that is inherently impossible to realize—can only be fulfilled rhetorically. In this sense, all rhetorical efforts to establish equivalence with the West...