Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture.

AuthorKitagawa, Tomoko L.
PositionBook review

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. By SETH JACOBOWITZ. Harvard East Asian Monographs, vol. 387. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. Pp. xii + 299. S39.95.

Shortly after cell phones became a commodity, a new type of novel, keitai shosetsu (short-length fiction written for handheld devices), emerged in Japan. It created a new literary genre in cyberspace, expanding what literature can offer to the contemporary wireless society. In more recent years, many writers have begun to publish their books in a digital format and to market their work online. Living in the digital age, we are constantly witnessing the ways literature updates itself to fit into the interactive spaces that various media create.

This book, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan, pays attention to an analogous moment of literary transition inflicted by technological development. It takes us back to the early nineteenth century and places us at the intersection of verbal, literal, and visual cultures, which resulted in the birth of modern Japanese literature. The author, Seth Jacobowitz, beautifully demonstrates the process of the unification of speech and writing (genbun itchi) from the angle of media history, and successfully highlights the importance of transcriptive realism (shajitsu shugi) in the making of modern Japanese literary style. The most striking feature of this work is its importance to various fields outside of Japanese literature. For example, Jacobowitz explains the influence of the national postal service and the telegraph on the national language in part I. Similar to a recent work by Vanessa Ogle entitled The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (Harvard Univ. Press, 2015), which observes the relationship between technological advancements and the standardization of time, Jacobowitz surveys the development of technology and the standardization of language in Japan in contrast to other nations in Europe. This part in particular will interest scholars of the history of science and technology who are investigating both tangible and intangible impacts of technological developments on society.

The discussion of the influence of the national postal service on the existing writing culture contributes to the conversation in the well-developed scholarship on world literature. In English-speaking countries, the practice of letter-writing played a crucial...

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