Reviewed by: Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary by Michael P. Cronin Andrew Murakami-Smith Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary. By Michael P. Cronin. Harvard University Asia Center, 2017. 246 pages. Hardcover, $39.95/£28.95/ €36.00. A course I teach investigates the possibilities of an "Osaka tradition" within modern Japanese literature as an alternative to a Tokyo-centric narrative of Japanese literary history. No such tradition is recognized by Japanese literary critics and historians, but most Japanese would be able to name several "Osaka works" (Ōsaka mono), including those by well-known natives such as Oda Sakunosuke (1913–1947) and Tanabe Seiko (1928–) and by lesser-known authors like Uno Kōji (1891–1961) and Kamizukasa Shōken (1874–1947). Kamizukasa's Hamo no kawa (Skin of the Pike Conger Eel; 1914) was seen by both Oda and Uno as an early example of Ōsaka-mono in the modern era. The list could also include works by major names like Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), who was born in Osaka and raised nearby in what is now the city of Ibaraki, [End Page 297] and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886–1965), a Tokyo native who relocated to the Kansai area after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and set many of his subsequent works in and around Osaka. Thus an Osaka tradition would not constitute an independent stream or even a tributary to the mainstream of modern Japanese literature, but rather an alternative, decentering reading of the existing canon and tradition. This is precisely the kind of reading that Michael P. Cronin brilliantly carries out in Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary. The heterogeneity of the Osaka tradition alluded to above—writers major and minor, Osaka natives and non-natives—and its historical breadth, extending back to Chikamatsu and Saikaku in the Edo period and forward to the present day, preclude an exhaustive survey. In any case, since to postulate an Osaka tradition is to perform a decentering, genealogizing reading of Japanese literature, any treatment should avoid the temptation to tell a totalizing story. Cronin's analysis wisely centers on just four works by two authors, Tanizaki and Oda, in the period between the world wars, with a final main chapter on the postwar writer Yamasaki Toyoko and postwar film adaptations of Osaka literary works by these three and others. Cronin's purpose in focusing on the interwar period is to posit what he calls a "treasonous" Osaka—the possibility that the local, as manifested by Osaka, constituted a base of resistance to the Tokyo-centered national narrative of militarism and imperialism leading up to the Pacific War. The final chapter, however, pessimistically delineates the subsequent enervation of the local in an ever-more Tokyo-centric national, and global, system of consumer capitalism. The question of whether Osaka or any locality can continue to offer possibilities for resistance to Japan's current political, economic, and cultural centralization in Tokyo—and to the homogenizing and commodifying forces of global consumer capitalism—is left to other scholars. Cronin's introduction, titled "Osaka as an Idea," opens with an impressionistic depiction of what it means for an individual to live in a city: We know a city in manifold ways. We inhabit it as a collection of spaces: streets and alleys, waterfronts and canals, neighborhoods and squares. We traverse it as a set of itineraries: commutes, after-dinner strolls, convenience-store runs, and subway rides. We experience it, too, as a sensorium of voices and noises, tastes, smells, sights, and touches. We encounter it as a series of individuals who belong to populations and types characteristic of cities or of that particular city. Above all, we know a city as a set of practices that subsume these other knowledges as we catch a taxi or jaywalk or carry a police whistle or join a festival crowd. (p. 1) In this passage, Cronin paints a sensory panorama of city life, deftly conjuring the variegated panoply that makes any city interesting to experience or visit, and indeed to read about or to investigate through academic research. While his discussion then naturally moves to knowledge of a city "through...
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