Reviewed by: Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch Hoyt Long (bio) Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel. By Daniel Poch. Columbia University Press, 2020. xii, 290 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. "Novels are like morphine," says the narrator of Tsubouchi Shōyō's Shinmigaki: Imotose kagami (1885–86): "one must love them, but also fear them." They are loved as a window onto the highs and lows of human emotion, but [End Page 234] also feared for exposing these very depths and arousing our basest desires. This idea of fiction as a potent drug—a source of self-realization and blinding addiction—is the animating metaphor of Daniel Poch's Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel. The book adds to a growing body of research by Jonathan Zwicker, Atsuko Ueda, Robert Tuck, Brian Dowdle, and others that has revolutionized how we read across Japan's long nineteenth century by emphasizing continuities in cultural ideas and aesthetic forms rather than sharp epistemological breaks centered at the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. Poch's contribution to this revisionist history is to interrogate a dichotomy that has structured literary periodization across this divide—one between moral didacticism and enlightened reason on the one hand, and emotional realism and uncontrolled passion on the other. He reframes this dichotomy as the beating heart of Japanese prose fiction throughout the "continuous literary space" (p. 9) of the nineteenth century, and indeed as constitutive of this space. Licentious Fictions shows how major writers working in this space similarly wrestled with fiction's capacity to educate and titillate, and Poch uses this struggle to overturn normative characterizations of their stories as merely licentious or merely didactic. The imperatives to entertain and inform, it turns out, are complexly woven through them. The analogy of novels and fiction to morphine relies on a double vision that sees them as capable of civilizing and degrading social mores. Licentious Fictions sets out to sketch the discursive contours of this double vision, one that forced many nineteenth-century authors to "negotiate a fundamental ambivalence" between the intention to represent emotion for didactic purposes and the fear that doing so would backfire, disrupting the social order by exposing readers to base emotions and desires (p. 4). How does one administer the drug of literature without turning one's patients (readers) into addicts? Poch seeks to show how narrative strategies developed in response to this ambivalence, whose antecedents are found in Genji monogatari and Neoconfucian views of poetry, evolved with the rise and fall of popular genres and with Japan's shifting position in the world republic of letters. The result is a series of careful and deeply contextualized readings of both canonical and lesser-known works, from Tamenaga Shunsui's Shunshoku ume goyomi (1832–33) to Natsume Sōseki's Kusamakura (1906). In-between he examines Kyokutei Bakin's epic Hakkenden (1814–42), Niwa Jun'ichirō's translation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Ernest Maltravers (Karyū shunwa, 1878–79), and a number of Shōyō's early translations and works of original fiction from the 1880s. Each work is meticulously situated within larger conversations about literature's value as either didactic instrument or degrading entertainment. Poch is especially interested in how these conversations contend with the representation of ninjō, which he narrowly defines as "male-female love and desire," including sexual desire (p. 15). These conversations generate a fundamental [End Page 235] ambivalence that each author negotiates in his own way (the writers analyzed are all male), and through which Poch reads their narratives against the dominant generic grain. For Shunsui's Ume g oyomi, a masterwork of the ninjōbon genre known for its depictions of erotic encounters in the pleasure quarters, this means reframing it as a work that, at its ideological core, harbored a clear didactic intent. Specifically, it characterized a shift toward a "scholar and beauty paradigm" influenced by licentious fiction from China such as the Jingpingmei and newly invested in plots "dramatizing the chastity, faithfulness, and sincerity, often against adverse circumstances, of morally exemplary male and female protagonists in love" (p. 49). Umegoyomi naturally depicts the...
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Jun 26, 2022
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