Origins of Modern Japanese Literature.

Abstract

Since its publication in Japan ten years ago, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature has become a landmark book, playing a pivotal role in defining discussions of modernity in that country. Against a history of relative inattention on part of Western translators to modern Asian critical theory, this first English publication is sure to have a profound effect on current cultural criticism in West. It is both boldest critique of modern Japanese literary history to appear in post-war era and a major theoretical intervention, which calls into question idea of modernity that informs Western consciousness. In a sweeping reinterpretation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Karatani Kojin forces a reconsideration of very assumptions underlying our concepts of modernity. In his analysis, such familiar terms as origin, modern, literature, and state reveal themselves to be ideological constructs. Karatani weaves many separate strands into an argument that exposes what has been hidden in both Japanese and Western accounts of development of modern culture. Among these strands are: discovery of landscape in painting and literature and its relation to inwardness of individual consciousness; similar discovery in Japanese drama of naked face as another kind of landscape produced by interiority; challenge to dominance of Chinese characters in writing; emergence of confessional literature as an outgrowth of repression of sexuality and body; conversion of samurai class to Christianity; mythologizing of tuberculosis, cancer, and illness in general as a producer of meaning; and discovery of the child as an independent category of human being. A work that will be important beyond confines of literary studies, Karatani's analysis challenges basic Western presumptions of theoretical centrality and originality and disturbs binary opposition of West to its so-called other. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature should be read by all those with an interest in development of cultural concepts and in interrelating factors that have determined modernity.