The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism Stephen Dodd (bio) The Dawn that Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism. By Michael K. Bourdaghs. Columbia University Press, New York, 2003. x, 273 pages. $49.50. In this book, Michael Bourdaghs sets out to demonstrate that the novels of Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943) may be read as a key to exploring contending versions of Japanese nationalism that have been played out in the literary field since the late Meiji period. The story of how Tōson came to prominence [End Page 227] first as a romantic poet with his 1897 publication of Wakanashū(A collection of seedlings) is well known. Echoing the title of his own book, Bourdaghs hints that this romantic phase is a link between shifting concepts of national identity and Tōson's own emergence as a major literary figure of modern Japan: "The speakers in the poetry of Tōson figure the subject of national imagination as a being driven ceaselessly forward, spurred by the desire for a promised moment of awakening, a springtime of rejuvenation and rebirth—a dawn that by its very nature must never arrive" (p.12). In Tōson's major work Yoake mae (Before the dawn, 1929-35), the character Hanzō (loosely based on the experiences of Tōson's own father) was equally fired by the romantic spirit of Meiji, and his pathetic demise by the novel's end represents the bitter realization that the tantalizing promise of "dawn" would remain forever unattained. However, it is the very articulation of unfulfilled desire that lends shape, and significance, to the story's telling. Likewise, Bourdaghs's book presents Tōson's writing—and perhaps Tōson himself—as a kind of open text, susceptible to a variety of readings that never fully satisfy our desire to know, yet which, taken together, offer significant and compelling insights. While such an approach may lend itself to the danger of reducing Tōson to a mere smorgasbord of multiple readings, Bourdaghs locks his own investigations within the disciplining framework of the specific historical contexts in which these readings were constructed. In the process, his insightful and informative book has deepened our understanding of a highly influential but sadly still neglected Japanese writer. The book argues that Tōson's literature reveals how most of the energies of potentially more progressive, alternative views of what it meant to be Japanese had been appropriated and tamed by the late 1930s under the rubric of a more aggressive and exclusionary nationalistic discourse that had taken center stage. However, the author is at pains to point out that Tōson himself should not be categorized as a xenophobic, ultranationalistic writer (an exponent of what he calls "bad" nationalism): indeed, it is precisely his association with liberal and antielitist, cosmopolitan views ("good" nationalism) that makes him an excellent case study for a far more subtle interplay between literary text and social context. The point is well taken, and I am reminded of Alan Tansman's meditation on possible links between Shiga Naoya's writings and the emerging "fascist aesthetic" of the 1930s. Direct correlations between Shiga's literature and politics simply do not ring true, but the question that remains is the extent to which such sensitive writers may have "aesthetically seeded an atmosphere of fascism."1 Bourdaghs, too, concentrates on Tōson's intervention in a range of nationalistic discourses at this more complex and ambiguous level. [End Page 228] Though the book deals primarily with Tōson's novels, the introduction offers a useful recapitulation of his instrumental role as a poet, in particular the way a modern national identity was bound up with the search for a new poetic form. For example, we read that, compared to poets like Masaoka Shiki who argued for a masculine, patriotic style in keeping with the spirit of Meiji, Tōson's romantic contribution to the new poetry was decidedly more ambiguous and "unmasculine." Yet his very adoption of a "feminine" role replicates an earlier, long-standing tradition of males appropriating, and thereby asserting dominance over, the female literary voice. In this way...