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 Timothy J. Van Compernolle Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 290. $65.00 hardcover, $64.99 e-book. An essay I read in graduate school—Peter Kornicki’s “The Survival of Tokugawa Fiction in the Meiji Period,” published forty years ago in this very journal—provided me with my first intimation that early modern Japanese literature was still popular in the modern era.1 It has taken the field considerable time to take seriously and to explore fully the implications of this survival, but the effort to find continuity amid change across the once unbridgeable Tokugawa–Meiji divide has now gained a great deal of traction. Daniel Poch’s Licentious Fictions, a bold, ambitious, and deeply researched monograph, takes a prominent place among these studies. Focusing on the historically specific discourse about ninjō 人情 (lit. human emotion; treated in the book as a form of desire), Poch’s book traces the “narrative practices surrounding ninjō” (p. 4) across a long nineteenth century, from the late Tokugawa era to the final decade of the Meiji period. Its focal points are the literary projects of Kyokutei Bakin 曲亭馬琴 (1767–1848), Tsubouchi Shōyō 坪内逍遥 (1859–1935), and Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916). The book details the need to unleash the representation of desire in fiction, as well as the urge to control its unruly aspects, with a didactic framework that legitimizes some expressions of desire while making others illicit. The specifics of these impulses differ depending on the writer and the historical era. Poch’s book is adept at handling the variability and historical specificity of these twin claims on fiction to unleash and control desires. It also convincingly reveals continuity across the entire century. Poch’s attention to historical specificity is evident in chapter 1, which presents a wide-ranging account of the “interlocked historical layers that informed the understanding of ninjō in the nineteenth-century Japanese novel” (p. 29). This historically specific discourse on desire was influenced by the import of vernacular Chinese fiction into [End Page 393] Japan during the early nineteenth century. The canonical example of ninjōbon 人情本, the genre named after ninjō, is Tamenaga Shunsui’s 為永春水 (1790–1844) Shunshoku umegoyomi 春色梅暦 (Spring-color plum calendar; 1832–1833), a long‐form demimonde fiction. As Poch shows, this text and the larger genre it represents played an outsized role in making ninjō almost synonymous with licentiousness in fiction. After this discussion is a chapter on Kyokutei Bakin and his enormous Nansō Satomi hakkenden 南総里見八犬伝 (Eight-dog chronicle of the Nansō Satomi clan; 1814–1842), a canonical example of the yomihon 読 本 (historical romance) genre. Poch shows that the message of kanzen chōaku 勧善懲悪 (reward virtue, punish vice), which is typically portrayed to be a dominating characteristic of Bakin’s fictional world, is merely the didactic framework that surrounds the discourse on ninjō. Bakin uses this framework to legitimize his own fictional project by ameliorating its inherited licentiousness. Poch’s intervention, which places desire at the heart of Bakin’s narrative practice, is thoroughly convincing. His compelling reassessment of one of the world’s longest works of narrative fiction is an achievement worthy of note. Part 2 consists of three compelling chapters. Chapter 3 is another wide-ranging historical account showing how the discourse on “Civilization and Enlightenment” (bunmei kaika 文明開化; p. 90) inflected inherited conceptions of desire. Poch quickly locates the central problem facing Meiji writers: “The ninjōbon, though disqualified as uncivilized, was the only genre well into Meiji that focused primarily on the representation of love and gender relations” (p. 91). Translated Western novels provided a way to go beyond inherited domestic genres, but Poch skillfully shows them to be in dialogue with domestic conceptions of desire. Chapters 4 and 5 respectively show Tsubouchi Shōyō’s effort to frame the inherited discourse on ninjō with Meiji civilizational ideals, in his famous treatise Shōsetsu shinzui 小説真髄 (The essence of the novel; 1885–1886), and the failure (or, at least, limitations) of this project in practice, in Tōsei shosei katagi 当世書生気質 (Characters of present-day students; 1885...