Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Robert Tuck

Abstract

Reviewed by: Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Robert Tuck Satoko Shimazaki (bio) Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in NineteenthCentury Japan. By Robert Tuck. Columbia University Press, New York, 2018. xxxvi, 280 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. Robert Tuck's Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan is a well-researched exploration of the modern reformation, during the period from 1870 to 1900, of traditional poetic forms including kanshi (Sinitic poetry), haiku, and waka (classical Japanese [End Page 427] poetry) and of the notion of what Tuck calls the "national-poetic community" these forms' practitioners envisioned. In contrast to the conventional understanding of haiku as an inclusive "commoner literature" (heimin bungaku), or waka as a national form that could and indeed should be composed by all Japanese subjects, Tuck sets out a provocative view of Meiji poetic communities characterized by instability and exclusionism—the rejection of universal, national participation. Two key actors that figure in Tuck's discussion of each form are the newspaper Nippon, an important venue for composition and exchange, and Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), whose legacy and authority take shape, in Tuck's telling, not in his advocacy of shasei, or "sketching from life," for which he is most often credited in Meiji literary history, but through his active participation in all areas of Meiji poetic sociality. Idly Scribbling Rhymers approaches its subject matter in a roughly chronological order. The first chapter traces the development of kanshi in the nineteenth century by focusing primarily on lexicons in kanshi compositional manuals. Toward the end of the early modern period, kanshi composition spread dramatically owing to the development of a "textual infrastructure" for beginners. Tuck argues, however, that new lexicons in Meiji-period manuals targeted a much more limited social group: "the social parameters of kanshi practice become increasingly narrower, focused on and constructed around the concerns of those in Japan who belonged to the social, cultural, and economic stratum that could realistically aspire to a career in government" (p. 32). The world of Meiji kanshi was peopled both by long-term practitioners and by new poets drawn to its potential as an "aspirational genre," making it difficult to posit a national imaginary broadly shared by the form's adherents. Chapter 2 delves deeper into the elitism of Meiji kanshi as it is manifested in a hypermasculine discourse that made the poem an index of the character of the man who wrote it and of his purposefulness as a national subject. Tuck shows how a series of attacks by poets active in Nippon on the "fragrant-style" poem (Ch. xianglian ti, J. kōrentai)—a popular genre featuring images of sexualized female figures—engendered a new emphasis on kanshi as a performance of masculinity. Blending images of the scholar official (shidafu) and gender ideals of the warrior class, poets created a vigorous, masculine ideal best exemplified, perhaps, by poems Kokubu Seigai published in Nippon with public responses by the politician Soejima Taneomi. In the early modern period, kanshi had been oriented more toward the educated class than haiku and waka, but Idly Scribbling Rhymers reveals that the Meiji period witnessed a similar tendency toward segregation based in politics, gender, and class in these latter genres, as well. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the politically charged haiku reform movement of the [End Page 428] 1890s. Chapter 3 explores the openly partisan "topical haiku" (jiji haiku), published for the most part in Nippon and other newspapers, which helped transform haiku into a serious literary genre. Tuck suggests that the emphasis on haiku's "ideologically neutral focus on the natural world" (p. xxxiv) emerged only retrospectively, after Shiki had succeeded in solidifying the prestige of the form. Chapter 4 introduces discourse produced by Shiki and the Nippon Group as well as two competing poetic groups directly contesting the notion that haiku constituted a "commoner literature." This chapter offers a revisionist view of the haiku reform movement as a process and rhetoric centered more on elite identity and social distinction than on aesthetic questions. Finally, chapter 5 leads the reader through a careful reconsideration of modern waka and...