Reviewed by: The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction: Path Literature and an Interpretation of Buddhism by Michihiro Ama Charlotte Eubanks (bio) The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction: Path Literature and an Interpretation of Buddhism. By Michihiro Ama. State University of New York Press, 2021. xii, 342 pages. $95.00, cloth; $33.95, paper. Whereas his previous scholarship focused on the development of Shin Buddhism in North America, approaching it from the vantage of denominational history and, to an extent, ethnic studies, with The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction Michihiro Ama embarks in a new direction. He proposes to consider Buddhism not only as a fact of sectarian affiliation and identification but also as a matter of narrative and aesthetic construction. The book attempts to read the Meiji-era (1868–1912) development of confessional narratives by reform-minded Shin Buddhist figures and the near-simultaneous explosion of confessional narrative realism in the Japanese literary realm as interconnected phenomena. Ama suggests that the same social and cultural forces that shaped the confessional literary forms of now-canonical authors—such as Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Tayama Katai (1872–1930), and Shiga Naoya (1883–1971)—influenced the self-writing of religious reformers—such as Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903), Chikazumi Jōkan (1870–1941), and particularly Akegarasu Haya (1877–1954). Conversely, Ama also asserts that Buddhist narrative structures (the triad of "ground, path, and goal" [p. 2]) and practices fostering an aesthetic of seeing things "as they are" (ari no mama) can be discerned in the realist self-writing of all these men. The book begs the question, what is Buddhist literature? Or, to invert the terms, what is literary Buddhism? One range of answers, categorical and determinative in nature, might center proximity to institutional authority. In this view, a work's status as Buddhist literature might stem from biography (the author is a monastic, for instance), from genre (the work is a sutra or a collection of sermons), or from canonicity (the text is included in a fairly stable set of recognized works, such as the Tripitaka canon). A second range of answers, social and cultural in nature, would instead center questions of production and circulation. In this view, a work's claim to literary Buddhist status might be rooted in its regular inclusion (be it chanted, sung, read, or performed) in liturgical events, the context of its composition (for instance, a religious practice of composing one poem a day), or its intended audience (such as a short story published in a magazine marketed primarily to Buddhist lay believers). Then again, a third range of answers might center aesthetic qualities. Here, a work might be regarded as Buddhist literature if its contents deal with central Buddhist concepts (impermanence, for instance, [End Page 496] or nonattachment), if its narrative structure follows a nominally Buddhist trajectory (such as adopting temporal assumptions of karmically conditioned cyclical existence), or if its style seeks to enact Buddhist propositions about the nature of reality (resulting in a refusal to adopt a stable first-person voice, perhaps). Rather than adopt systematically any of the approaches I have outlined above, Ama's understanding of Buddhist literature, or "path literature" as he calls it, intermixes each of these potential definitions. On the one hand, Ama's study is part of a growing set of scholarship aimed at describing the modern lives of Buddhists, both clerical and lay believers, and analyzing the continuing influences and developments of Buddhism as a living religion in modern Japanese culture. In this sense, The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction can be read productively alongside recent scholarship on clerical marriage and the danka system of mandatory temple affiliation, insofar as the novels, short stories, and essays he examines contain numerous meditations on, and sometimes barbed critiques of, both practices. Ama's work also contributes to Anglophone scholarship on modern Pure Land and True Pure Land Buddhism by providing fairly extensive biographical information on several reformist leaders and Buddhist activists. On the other hand, The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction takes up Japanese literary scholars' long-standing interest in various forms of self-writing that accompanied and undergirded the emergence of European- influenced modes of novelistic literary realism. Here...
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May 12, 2023
Sarah Holland-Batt + 1
Open Access
