The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age by Hoyt Long

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age by Hoyt Long Steven Ridgely (bio) The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age. By Hoyt Long. Columbia University Press, 2021. 368 pages. $95.00, cloth; $30.00, paper; $29.99, E-book. I suspect most of us working on modern Japan have, at some point, stared long and hard at Natsume Sōseki's fan-shaped F-F-F-F-F-F tapered grid from Bungakuron, with its demarcations of minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, and centuries and concluded that it would take centuries of our own emotional response (f) attending to various "impressions or ideas at the focal point of consciousness" (F) to figure out what on earth he really [End Page 471] meant by "F+f" or how that is supposed to help us understand how literature operates within a social and historical system. As useful as it is to have key sections of Sōseki's "theory of literature" available in English (thank you Atsuko Ueda, Joe Murphy, Michael Bourdaghs), perhaps I am not alone in my gratitude that Japan's most revered modern writer took the jeers of his students to heart and quit his job as a professor to write novels full time until his untimely death (at age 49!—Setouchi Jakuchō, who passed recently, lived more than twice as long). Hoyt Long mobilizes our various frustrations with digital humanities to approach Sōseki's relationship to quantifiable data as a launching point in his fascinating study on how to read the relationship between modern Japanese literature and the haunting rise of quantification as its context. In short, we might understand this as a claim that our current big data and moneyball moment did not arise with the Internet but is woven into a process coextensive with modernity itself, so if we want to understand literature (perhaps as the tip, or a mirroring of the tip, of the information economy's spear) to be operating in a relational system with the dominant logic of a social formation, then we stand to gain by tracking tension between literature and information in the texts and paratexts of literary production. All of this is combined in Long's work with various experiments with a digital humanities (DH) approach to answering our questions about literature's relationship to modern Japanese social structure through the use of quantifiable data and computation. It is important to note that Long maintains at least as much skepticism about the efficacy and pitfalls of this approach as most critics of DH, and that a good deal of the impetus driving this approach is coming from attempting to continue and extend the work not so much of Franco Moretti but of Raymond Williams, who sought to shore up cultural critique with solid empirical data but was frustrated by the lack of available information at sufficient scale to do so. While we now have the data to investigate many questions Williams wanted to pursue, the remaining barrier might be our lingering attachment to various critiques of science intruding on the turf of the humanities, or a caricatured depiction of poststructuralism as relativist (rather than relational). Long's book, The Value in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age, consists of seven chapters organized around the following topics: Uncertainty in Numbers, Facts and Difference, Archive and Sample, Genre and Repetition, Influence and Judgment, Discourse and Character, and Difference in Numbers. This is a study as much about "what we talk about when we talk about numbers" as it is about using quantitative methods to analyze or test assumptions about modern Japanese literature, as seen when Long points out the "quantitative fiction" of Sōseki's table charting out romantic versus realist fiction on a scale of thematic and expressive intensities with numerical values he assigns from 50 to 120 (p. 30). [End Page 472] Long's project is also a survey of twentieth-century efforts within Japan to utilize quantitative methods to analyze literary language, tracing these studies back to work by Hatano Kanji in the 1930s, Nakamura Akira in the 1950s, Yasumoto Biten and...