Origins of Modern Japanese Literature.

• Author: O'Brien, James

This book, originally published as a series of essays between 1978 and 1980, attempts to undercut the standard account of the origins and development of modern Japanese fiction. According to that account, modern fiction in Japan derived from Western models and evolved in accord with an established pattern. In this Western-centered view of the subject, modern Japanese fiction inevitably followed a linear path towards "modernity" as defined by an imperialist culture.

Karatani sees modern Japanese fiction in an utterly different perspective. His strategy, which consists of applying a series of "inversions" or "reversals" to the standard view, can be breathtaking - but also mystifying for those of us whose acceptance of Foucault, Derrida, et al. is less than complete. Mired even yet in what M. H. Abrams has characterized as Oldreading, swayed too by Harold Bloom's dismissal of "the anti-humanistic plain dreariness of ... European criticism," I could be accused of a bias against Karatani's modus operandi.

In fact, I found many of his observations and judgments to be on the mark. At one point Karatani contrasts passages from two well-known works of the Meiji period, Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo and Mori Ogai's "Maihime." He then demonstrates his contention that the categorization of the first text as gen-bun-itchi and the second as bungo falsities the actual state of things - demonstrates it so easily, in fact, that one marvels at how the standard view ever could have gotten things so backward. In this instance Karatani's protest is put in specific terms; often, however, the author's inversions are asserted as ontological realities on the same level of generality as the views that are being called into question. Of the several remarks by Frederic Jameson in his enthusiastic foreword, which I eventually took as cautionary, one seems relevant to this problem. Critical texts such as Karatani's, Jameson writes, are "analogous to creative works themselves, insofar as they propose a scheme which it is the reader's task to construct and to project out onto the night sky of the mind's eye."

The presentation of this piece of literary criticism and scholarship in English involved two activities - the literal work of translation and the transposition of Karatani's observations into an explicitly organized vision of the sort that Japanese scholars usually shy away from. In addition to these two most basic tasks, a third might be considered for future work in this area. Surely most readers of this translation, including those specialists of Japanese literature who get to Japan only on occasion, would benefit from some insight into how native scholars interact as a community. From a vantage point subsequent to its composition by more than ten years, Karatani himself pointedly remarks that Origins of Modern Japanese Literature might have "outlived its purpose" and that "the various questions it raised are now being...