Reviewed by: Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary by Michael P. Cronin Scott O'Bryan (bio) Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary. By Michael P. Cronin. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2017. xiv 232 pages. $39.95. Not far into Michael P. Cronin's Osaka Modern: The City in the Japanese Imaginary, I suddenly saw the book in striking (if at first seemingly unlikely) conversation with Michelangelo Antonioni's film of 1961, La Notte (The night), a movie pregnant with similar questions of urban space and economic power—and the place of stories to mediate our understandings of them both—put to us by Cronin. At a critical moment in Antonioni's movie, a Milanese novelist frets to an "industrialist" about the possibly "outdated" nature of the work of a writer, enviously declaring that "industrialists have the advantage of constructing [their] 'stories' using real people, real houses, real cities." "The rhythm of life today," the novelist continues, "is in your hands."1 Cronin's Osaka Modern would argue, however, from a different urban- and national-historical context that the literary crisis of doubt of Antonioni's novelist, coming even as it did in the high age of modernist optimism about science, industry, and infrastructural technology, dramatically understated the continued power of ideals and images to construct cities by their own means, channeling our bodily experiences of them and erecting the cultural superstructures of meaning we attach to the shifting rhythms of their economic and political characters. Cronin's book is an engaging and persuasive analysis of the ways in which modern cultural production in the mid-twentieth-century years from the 1920s through the end of the 1950s shaped Osaka, reminding us that our understanding of cities comes in "manifold" (p. 1)—and not always merely material—ways. As appropriately suggested in its title, this book is in its own way a work of urban history, an important one with sharp insights into the oscillating relations in Osaka between power, memory, and image that should be read with relish by scholars working in the history of cities from other [End Page 502] material, social, legal, or environmental perspectives. It is at the same time a sensitive and satisfying critical analysis of popular-cultural forms. The book methodically lays bare the way these worked through a kind of cartography of language, orthography, and narrative to map imagined spatial relations in the Japanese nation-state, in which Osaka was routinely made to serve as the necessary urban Other to Tokyo as universal, national metropole. Cronin takes as his subjects the fiction of three writers who pointedly reflected on Osaka and Osaka-ness: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake an urban émigré, as it were, from Tokyo to Kansai; Oda Sakunosuke, the most locally beloved Osakan writer of fiction; and Yamasaki Toyoko, also a native of Osaka. Compared to the canonical statuses of the other two, Yamasaki has received little scholarly attention. Her novels of the 1950s were bestsellers, frequently adapted for film, and, Cronin argues, key shapers of the city in postwar popular imagination. In five chapters, each training attention on an individual work by one of these three, Cronin moves us through richly explored close readings that relate the themes and meta-languages of the novels at frequent turns to extratextual networks of cultural production, from such other written works in Osaka's past as Chikamatsu's Shinjū ten no Amijima (Love suicides at Amijima), to radio, stand-up comedy, television, and cinema. Given its economic and cultural prominence from early modern centuries through the beginning of the Showa period and then its eventual "subordination" to the industrial and administrative might of Tokyo and to the centralizing logics of militarization, Osaka is, Cronin suggests, "a privileged site for examining the tension between the idea of the city and that of the nation" (p. 7). Cronin's discoveries are multifold, but his purpose throughout is to identify the literary and cinematic operations by which Osaka is localized, subjected to "containment" within a configured national space that itself requires the creation of marginalities (geographical, gendered, racial and ethnic, linguistic) for its own assumed transcendence to be...
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Feb 1, 2019
Nancy L Segal 
Open Access
