Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch

Abstract

Reviewed by: Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch Brian Dowdle POCH, DANIEL Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 304 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $64.99 e-book. Daniel Poch’s significant Licentious Fictions is a wide-ranging critical history of ninjō: “human emotions.” Although ninjō includes a range of feelings, Poch focuses on it as code for “amorous emotion or love, often including sexual desire” (12). Due to its erotic connotations, ninjō was often seen by Japanese readers as problematic or “licentious.” This work follows recent scholarship on the long nineteenth century in Japan. Poch makes a meaningful contribution to suture this period into “a coherent literary and discursive space held together by an intensified critical and narrative awareness of emotion” (4). Since this work covers many of the same texts and issues, it can be seen as a companion to Jonathan Zwicker’s Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth Century Japan (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2006). Although Poch is constructing a nineteenth-century genealogy of the novel through the discourse of ninjō, he intentionally chooses to exclude authors from the 1850s to 1870s, writing, “it is legitimate to discard, at least for the purpose of this discussion, the many minor gesaku works and authors that proliferated, from the bakumatsu period well into Meiji times” (9–10). This removal of an entire generation who helped shape the term ninjō and wrote the very types of fiction he seeks to analyze creates a noticeable lacuna in the work. Poch’s genealogy of history actually stretches beyond the nineteenth century and provides a rich historical background, as can be seen in the two chapters of Part I, “Ninjō and the Early-Modern Novel.” The first, “From Ninjō to the Ninjōbon,” connects the mid-nineteenth-century genre of the ninjōbon to its Japanese and Chinese antecedent discourses on emotion in poetry and fiction. Poch defines the ninjōbon as “books of human emotion” that focus on “male-female love” (2). This focus differs from Jonathan Zwicker’s or Peter F. Kornicki’s view of the genre as sentimental [End Page 362] books, which were designed to bring the reader to tears. Weaving together numerous interpretive threads, Poch convincingly shows how, by the 1800s, works focusing on ninjō were “unstable” in their social position and reveals how such works were stuck between historical “legitimizing discourses that highlight their morality and didactic value” and “discursive devaluation [of the genre] as licentious” (58). Hence, Poch sees in the author Tamenaga Shunsui’s (1790–1843) writing the representation of “titillating licentiousness” as well as under-appreciated “moral-didactic ambitions” (58). Despite this ambiguity, by the 1880s, Poch argues the ninjōbon was taken as “a lowbrow narrative medium focusing on ninjō and therefore potentially dangerous” (58). Chapter Two, “Questioning the Idealist Novel,” turns to yomihon, an early-nineteenth century genre of historical fiction, which was seen as “inherently moral” with “a serious or idealist mission” (61). Poch, however, challenges this one-dimensional view of it as an “idealist novel,” identifying a similar nuanced ambiguity as found in the ninjōbon. He provides a compelling close reading of the yomihon’s representative author, Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848), and his magnum opus, Nansō satomi hakkenden (1814–1842), demonstrating how Bakin’s depiction of ninjō complicates this idealism. Both Bakin and Hakkenden are noted for their kanzen chōaku (promotion of good and chastisement of evil) as “both a plot paradigm” and the “novel’s moral ideology—a strict dichotomy of good and evil” (60). Poch’s contention is that “Bakin’s writing of ninjō blurs this seemingly unshakable dichotomy” (62). Poch reconsiders Bakin’s legacy by highlighting how his novels also “displayed a strong interest in ninjō” and he astutely asserts, “Bakin’s yomihon, in their writing of chaste romance, almost served as the ninjōbon for educated men” (65). This ultimately counters idealist readings of Bakin and the yomihon, because “Bakin did not reduce emotion and desire to the stabilizing moral poles of either virtue or vice; they belonged to the gray zones...