“Love” and (Male) Subjectivity in Hirabayashi Taiko’s “In the Charity Ward”

This chapter traces the discourses of international feminism in the 1920s, specifically the way critics and intellectuals, inspired by European writings on sexology and women's emancipation, promoted the notion of a rational self-willed subjectivity, encapsulated in the term “character,” as the basis for conceiving the sameness between men and women. Hirabayashi Taiko's 1927 short story, “In the Charity Ward,” also has an important link to the earthquake, but the narrative more directly engages liberal feminist discourses surrounding women and maternity. Hirabayashi's writing also occasions a larger interrogation of the assumptions of gender, class, and nation that have undergirded all texts treated in the previous chapters. Hirabayashi directly roots out the male-gendered foundations of narration that writers like Tanizaki and Kawabata sought to displace but could not fully challenge. In this way, she is able to much more radically challenge the ideologies of love, character, and daily life that both writers repudiated. Hirabayashi's text, moreover, constituted a feminist intervention in Yokomitsu's attempt to render a disruptive phenomenology, pushing his project of new sensations further to mount a more trenchant subversion of the phallogocentric frameworks of knowledge and experience.

Subversions of Ethnicity in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Neo-Sensationist Writings

This chapter examines Yokomitsu Riichi's urban fiction, as well as his modernist treatise, in the context of the rhetoric of urban renewal that emerged in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake. The earthquake, which precipitated a crisis in the ideology of progress that had fueled national modernization for the previous several decades, inflected the fervor over-consumption practices promoted in the language of daily life reform to focus much more intensively on the self and the spirit. Yokomitsu responded to this through his “Neo-Sensationist” (shinkankaku) literature. His essay of that title strategically employs Kantian phenomenology to complicate and subvert essentialist phenomenological models and expose the ideologies of ethnic purity they implied. His urban fiction employed perceptually disorienting language to narrate the experience of protagonists who become cognitively estranged from their environments. In this way, his fiction directly disputed the ethnic essentialism that was chauvinistically being posited as the foundation for a new imperial urban renaissance.

Shattering the Status Quo: Reading Modernism in the Early Twentieth Century

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how literary modernism operated in Japan, looking at the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. Contrary to prevalent conceptions of high modernism as art-objects sequestered from the utilitarian language of capitalist society, modernist literature was highly enmeshed in the language of the mass print media, one of the major sources of social ideology since the beginning of the twentieth century. The works of the four Japanese authors disrupt the ideologies that made daily living appear seamless and comfortable. They did so to expose the way such norms were bolstered by narrow, constrictive, and essentialist notions of gender, ethnicity, society, and nation; to reveal the way such norms were employed to discipline the minds and behaviors of Japanese citizens; and finally to provoke cognitive and sensational liberation from the supremacy of these norms. The chapter then considers the emergence and establishment of the I-novel genre in Japanese literary history, as well as the phenomenon of modanizumu.

Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and the Narrative of the Present

This chapter investigates the engagement of Kawabata Yasunari's novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa with the language of earthquake reconstruction as it reached a climax in the late 1920s. In the latter half of the decade, the major Japanese newspapers sought to track the progress of post-earthquake reconstruction efforts through a language of science and objectivity. These reports collectively announced and anticipated the finalization of these efforts in the spring of 1930 when municipal and national government bureaus had planned an extravagant festival to celebrate the successful renovation of the “imperial city.” The serialization of Kawabata's novel spanned the time period both before and after this festival with a suggestive hiatus during the few months in which the festival actually took place. The novel assimilated the language of this mass media reportage, reproducing statistical analyses and even reprising some of the exact language being used to describe the new bridges and parks. But the story is rendered through a kaleidoscopic narrative that shuffles and reshuffles a bric-a-brac of details and events into momentary patterns of coherence. Ultimately, Kawabata's novel subverts national attempts to suppress the traumas of the recent past, insisting on an alternate way of narrating the psychology of the city.

Against the National Literary Narrative

This chapter explains how the modernist works treated in the previous chapters can be juxtaposed in their response to the formation of gender and narration in the modern novel. It demonstrates how modernist fiction can and should be extracted from the nationally inscribed literary histories, or in fact how the works themselves contain the seeds of these narratives' deconstruction. National literary histories exaggerate the power of the literary works while simultaneously circumscribing their literary value within the chronologies of history. At work in the elaboration of national literature is a forgetfulness of how and why modernist works were so perverse. Recovering the radically disruptive essence of modernist fiction by delineating its contortions of social ideology allows us to activate anew its critical capacity and bring it to bear upon our own daily lives.

Fetishism of the West in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love

This chapter discusses Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's A Fool's Love, which was written in 1924 after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. The work responds to the rhetoric of social reform of the early 1920s that led up to that watershed event. Collectively referred to as daily life reform (seikatsu kaizen), these high-minded reform initiatives sought to discipline citizens, particularly women, to align their daily habits of consumption within the home with the interests of the state. The language of these reform efforts sublimated national geopolitical ambitions into consumer fantasies of efficient and sophisticated “Western style” living, as well as ideals of “love,” marriage, and “moral character.” Tanizaki's novel features a middle-class narrator who tells the story of how he fell in love with a young café waitress and divulges the details of their married daily life together. Thus, while the narrator's fantasy life is cloaked in the language of progressive reform, the actual life he describes turns out to be based in sadomasochistic pleasure and fetishistic desire. The chapter shows how the novel in this way subverts the language of daily life reform that was ubiquitous in the magazines and newspapers of the the late 1910s and early 1920s, exposing the contradictions of the ideologies embodied in that rhetoric.