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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature
  • Cited by 2
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2016
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139245869
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139245869
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, Asian Literature, Asian Studies
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing and provides comprehensive coverage of women's literature as well as new popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.

Awards

Honourable Mention, 2017 PROSE Award for Single Volume Reference/Humanities and Social Sciences

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Contents

Page 4 of 4

Contents
  • 76 - Women’s fiction in the postwar era
    pp 737-747
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Meiji Restoration of 1868 inspired a variety of social, political, and religious reforms. Women were a major target of reform. Prose fiction by women writers in the modern period is acknowledged to have begun with Miyake Kaho and her 1888 novella Warbler in the Grove. Most women writers of the Meiji period grounded their fiction in their own personal realm. Few had the imaginative vision of Kimura Akebono and most were hesitant to peer beyond the confines of their own experience. Wakamatsu Shizuko is remembered for Shokoshi, her translation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy. Shizuko's translation is important not only for introducing readers to literature for children, but also for forging a path to genbun-itchi or a modern literary vernacular. From feminist orator to cloistered daughter, Meiji women writers hailed from diverse backgrounds and made their mark in an impressive assortment of genres and styles: romantic poetry, political essays, kabuki dramas, novellas, and stories.
  • 77 - The emergence of girls’ manga and girls’ culture
    pp 748-752
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Meiji melodramatic novels achieved unmatched social penetration by riding the wave of Meiji print capitalism. This chapter discusses the two major novels: First, Konjiki yasha, the blockbuster novel by Ozaki Koyo that stands as the definitive example of the form, appeared in the Yomiuri shinbun between 1897 and 1902. Second, Onna keizu, by Izumi Kyoka, was carried by Yamato shinbun in 1908. The family constituted the thematic center of Meiji melodramatic fiction for specific historical reasons. At the turn of the twentieth century, immense ideological forces were focused on the family, which the Meiji state and its propagandists sought to employ as an instrument for social stability amidst the disruptions of modernity. Japanese scholars have had difficulty positioning melodramatic fiction within modern literary history. The powerful presence of melodramatic fiction at the turn of the twentieth century and the audience it continued to hold in adapted forms call for a better accounting of its historical position.
  • 78 - Modern Japanese literature from Okinawa
    pp 753-755
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Shintaishisho was the first anthology of Western poems in translation. Though heavily censured by the leading literati of the day, the anthology literally created a new age of Japanese poetry, and younger readers ardently embraced its appearance. The first major poet to appear in the wake of Omokage was Shimazaki Toson. His first collection Wakanashu broke new ground in new-style poetry. His poems, full of youthful pathos and sensuality, are an exquisite mixture of traditional waka suaveness and fresh "modern" sensibilities. Ueda Bin's Kaicho-on, the most important collection of translated poems in modern Japan, appeared in 1905. In contrast to earlier collections containing chiefly British, American, and German poems, Kaicho-on featured a considerable number of the latest French and Belgian poets of the Parnassian and Symbolist schools. Japanese poems have been mostly written in free verse since the 1910s. There is a sense, however, that Japanese poetry will never break completely free from the spell of seven-and-five-syllable units.
  • 79 - Postwar Zainichi writings: politics, language, and identity
    pp 756-759
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Mori Ogai was one of the foremost figures conversant in Western literary thought, and occupied the seat of leadership in the circles with which he associated. The journal Subaru offered Ogai an opportunity to come to the literary scene. Nagai Kafu made the first entry in his extended diary Danchotei nichijo, which he would continue until his death. Kafu, having spent five years in America and Europe and possessing an awareness of the interrelationship between Western civilization and its historical tradition, had worked toward a rediscovery of Edo. Tanizaki Junichiro's writing in the twentieth century, incorporating vestiges of a classical world, demonstrated similarity to Kafu's in its critical appraisal of contemporary civilization. Tanizaki's best project was a modern translation of the eleventh-century The Tale of Genji, though the massive undertaking would not be completed until the end of World War II, when the author restored passages that had been considered slanderous to the imperial house during wartime.
  • 80 - Contemporary Japanese fiction
    pp 760-767
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Natsume Soseki has intrigued scholars and readers for more than a century. He created an indisputably modern literature while appropriating techniques and practices that predated modernity. Soseki's Bungakuron represents an attempt to produce a scientific theory of world literature, valid for all places and all times. Soseki's use of quantitative language to define literature allowed him to break with previously dominant discourses of literature. In 1910 Soseki published Mon, the first trilogy. Higan sugi made, published after a nearly fatal bout with stomach ulcers, opens the second trilogy with another self-consciously experimental work. Kokoro, Soseki's best-known novel in the West, completes the second trilogy. In 1915 Soseki published the autobiographical Michikusa. The major turning point in Soseki's reception came in the 1970s and 80s, when a new generation of critics published influential new interpretations that again transformed Soseki. No longer the hero of the modernization of Japanese literature, he was now celebrated as the great critic of Japanese modernity.
  • Bibliography of English secondary sources and translations
    pp 768-820
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the final years of the Meiji era, women confronted a host of restrictions imposed by the newly constructed "family system", yet the profound social transformations in education, urbanization, and even the organization of work and home, created new terrains for women as both readers and authors. Tamura Toshiko published a succession of stories: Ikichi in the feminist journal Seito, followed by Seigon and Onna sakusha. Over the course of the interwar period, a new generation of women writers achieved considerable popularity and notoriety, with readership sufficient to support their literary careers that, for many, continued in the decades following the Pacific War. Despite increasingly strict scrutiny from censors from the early 1930s, women writers continued to probe the inherent inequalities of sexual politics. Sata Ineko's Crimson depicts an unhappy, unstable marriage that highlighted the limits of shared political convictions. Sata had achieved initial recognition through her autobiographical account of exploited child labor in Kyarameru kojo kara.

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