Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 41-42, 2004

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 331-334

Hideo Kamei, Transformations of Sensibility. The phenomenology of Meiji literature. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002; lxxii+300 pp.; ISBN: 1929280122 (hbk.); LC call no.: PL726.55 .K2613

Despite its bulkiness (twelve chapters translated by numerous Japanologists), Kamei’s Transformations of Sensibility does not digress from a consistent thesis argument: the early modern narrative fiction in Japan should be read as a repository of heterogeneous consciousness that eloquently mirrors the in-flux social conditions of Meiji period (1886-1912). This exhaustive study covers a wide range of writers from the epoch including Futabatei Shimei, a so-called first modern novelist of the country, to the idiosyncratic aesthete Izumi Kyōka, and, further, the pioneers that brought about the European mannerism, Mori Ōgai and Natume Sōseki, the naturalist writer Kunikida Doppo, and many others. Tracing the transformation of sensibilities in Meiji narrative (kansei), Kamei’s reading of modern Japanese fiction ostensibly refutes the positivistic understanding of Japan’s modernity and modernization as the logical result caused exclusively by the paradigm shift in its social order. [end page 331] Likewise, what concerns Kamei in the realm of literature is the domination of the structuralist and formalist criticism that tends to undermine human consciousness, which cannot be translated in manifest spoken utterances. Nativist scholars of Japanese literature (kokubungakusha) tend to attribute an emergence of modern literary discourse largely to a single, monumental movement: Japanese litteratis’ adaptation of unification of spoken and written language (genbun-itch). It is undeniable that such a paradigm shift in the phonocentric conception of language fueled further modernization in writings. Alongside, various studies have suggested that the Western notion of literature and literary forms imported in the mid nineteenth-century changed Japanese perception of expression through language – one of the most apparent reformations was the creation of narrative division among characters’ enunciation, for instance by the introduction of commas and periods into written texts.

Kamei’s book is an uproar against such plausible explanations, which attributes the modern consciousness largely to historical circumstances and extra-textual or formalistic conditions. His investigation, therefore, centers on the internal materiality of language. The institution of literary forms certainly preconditions the modern writing, and Kamei is highly aware of it. Nonetheless, his uneasiness stems from the fact that the formalist interpretation could neglect a wide spectrum of human sensibilities embedded in the text while molding them into a theoretical frame. In one sense, the book is a project to rescue the dynamics of consciousness from an assumptive framework of modernization or westernization. The book reflects also his anxiety for the dominance of master narrative that constructs Japan’s (literary) history. To fill the gap, his phenomenological narratology explores the ineffable sensibility translated into visible language. Such an oxymoronic project implicitly castigates conventional Japanese approaches to the study of literature, which places a great emphasis on monolithic author studies, studies of a single work as an independent entity, and literary history based on periodization. As the editor and one of the translators, Michael Bourdaghs rightly puts it, Kamei’s contribution amounts to the “immanent critique of modernity” (viii). Commensurate with the idea, Kamei departs from the simplistic presupposition that Meiji, the age of civilization and enlightenment (bunmeikaika) and colloquial (genbun itch) style, is the driving force behind the artificial necessity of creating a new literature. Instead, he traces the transformation of modern narrative “within” the actual formulation of sentences in literature and based on the materiality of language that includes, for example, musicality and visual efficacy.

Whereas each chapter is organized in the form of a monographic case study, the author’s foundational interest remains nearly intact, that is the [end page 332] recognition of a “non-unified self-consciousness.” To empower this underrepresented subject, Kamei repeatedly reminds the reader that up until the early Meiji period, Japanese narrative tended to be indiscriminate of borderlines between the author, the first, second or third person, while the difference between the perceiving subject and the perceived object were virtually nonexistent. As narrative had consolidated each division over decades, the ambiguity in enunciation gradually faded away; the mission of the book partly lies in the careful retention of this changes. To illustrate the successive stages for changes, Kamei often expounds on narrative styles of the Edo period, as a point of reference. For example, he interprets the infusion of kanbun (writings only in Chinese characters) prose into the later writings as an instance where the emergence of the “split subject” was unmistakably foreshadowed. Kanbun, which used to be favored by the warrior class, accommodates hierarchical sensibilities. Therefore, he goes on to reason that, to fully capture subtlety in characters’ emotion and feeling, the reader needs to pay meticulous attention not only to the honorific or humble tonality expressed in auxiliary verbs but also to actions which trigger a certain hierarchical human relation. According to Kamei, the emergence of the “split subject” in such a story as Yano Ryūkei’s An Illustrious Tale of Statesmanship marks the author’s desire to overthrow a rigid social hierarchy. In the early Meiji prose, a clear “individual” voice is still unrecognizable; nonetheless, the amorphousness of the subjective register offers Kamei a unique ground to explore sensibilities.

One of the striking discoveries he makes is linked directly to the materiality of language. He states that the “corporeality” of characters in the late Meiji is replaced by “abstraction,” a notion that reflects the author’s point of view. Once again the reader is helped substantially by Bourdaghs’ inspiring introduction. He proposes that Kamei’s consciousness model is highly analogous to Merleau-Ponty’s departure from the Cartesian subjectivity (xvii). While the subject of “in-itself” objectifies the external world and thereby creates an impasse, the “for-itself” subject (or intersubjectivity) is geared toward an openness that coexists with the external. It is paradoxical that a character’s internal voice derived from the vision of the external world helps concretize a form of self-consciousness. However, this mode of existence is unmistakably prevalent in Kamei’s theoretical underpinnings. To the same extent, he denies the conventional assumption by the reader that a narrator speaks through “a unified subjectivity.” In contrast to Kamei’s examples, even Wayne C. Booth’s unreliable narrator speaks only for its own sake in spite of a schizophrenic guise. Nonetheless, for the in-flux Meiji subject, the reader needs to be susceptible of one single voice imbued with multiple layers of sensibilities. Similarly, the author [end page 333] underlines that Bakhtinean dialogism has nothing to do with the cases he examines. In contrast to the Bakhtinean reading of Dostoevsky as “the breakdown of a previously established self-consciousness” (Bourdaghs 111), Kamei contends that, in the wake of modern Japanese literature, the characters in Futabatei Shimei, Tsubouchi Shōyō, and Higuchi Ichiyō’s fiction are yet to invent a solid “I-subject.”

Although originally published in 1983, Kamei’s book has still engaged with academic debates on narrative not only in Japan but also among Japanologists in the United States, as it mirrors the formalist/structuralist obsession with “forms” as a priori condition for reading. Japan’s naturalism and the I-novel are also incommensurate to Kamei’s theory, for they regard language an expedient device to reproduce reality in faith; the result is a descriptive literary chart of heterogeneous sensibilities. For him, language is an automaton that does not simply reproduce reality; it actually constructs its own reality.

The book’s success owes a lot to the editorial brilliance. Bourdagh’s contained introduction and notes greatly facilitate the reader’s understanding of Kamei’s argument. In addition, Bourdaghs’s criticism of the author is fair enough: Kamei opts to “arrang[e]” the heterogeneity of Meiji literature into a dialectical narrative and subsume various genres into a single ground, and thereby does not escape from homogenizing the Japanese language (xv). It surprisingly warns his self-contradictory pitfall: his theoretical stance fails to acknowledge a process of acculturation within the development of modern Japanese narrative. In fact, the book is full of literary jargons from Japanese sources that oftentimes aggravatingly hamper our seamless reading. Even if so, the book is a significant achievement, which undoubtedly fills a hiatus between history and, to borrow the author’s words, the “un-collated history.”

Ikuho Amano

Pennsylvania State University