The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature

1

THE COLUMBIA COMPANION TO MODERN EAST ASIAN LITERATURE

The essays in this volume are meant to serve as a guide to those exploring the modern literatures of China, Japan, and Korea. As a guide, each entry aims to give a brief biography of its chosen author or a brief outline of its topic. The essays are designed to show how each author or movement fits into the general development of the modern literature of its respective country, as well as to suggest how significant works by individual authors or in specific movements reflect the larger concerns of the author’s work, the aims of the movement, or the trends of society at the time. Many of the essays present interpretations of works with which the Companion reader may find himself or herself agreeing or disagreeing. In either event, the aim is to suggest some critical perspectives that may deepen a reader’s understanding and appreciation of a given work.

Three to four essays by the respective associate editor and other scholars precede each geographical section. These longer thematic essays are designed to provide a historical overview, as well as to discuss several themes of overarching importance in the understanding of modern East Asian literature: nationalism, the invention of a modern literary language, and the institutions that supported and constrained the development of modern literature in Asia. In addition, some of the associate editors have chosen to discuss other themes pertinent to a fundamental understanding of modern literature in their respective countries. These include gender, sexuality, and the family; the debates over pure literature versus the literature of social engagement; and the role of specific literary genres in the artistic landscapes that they describe.

Following the thematic essays are the individual entries: more than fifty for Japan, more than forty for China, and almost thirty for Korea. Each entry is self-contained, and entries can be read in any sequence or order. Cross-referencing, marked by an asterisk (*), is designed to suggest some possible avenues for gaining a more synoptic view of the work, author, or movement. Writers or movements mentioned in the thematic essays will often be treated in more depth in a biographical entry. Authors or works mentioned in entries on specific movements may also have more detailed entries devoted to them. Authors and topics within each geographical section are arranged chronologically as much as possible. This means that if the entries of each section are read in order, they will give a detailed narrative of the changes and developments of modern literature in that country.

The names of all authors are given in the East Asian style, surname first, given name last, except when discussing authors who publish primarily in English or used an anglicized name (e.g., Eileen Chang). In the Japan section, authors are generally referred to by their pen names; those without are referred to by their family names (e.g., Natsume Sôseki is referred to as Sōseki, but Shiga Naoya is called Shiga). In the China section, authors are also generally referred to by their pen names and not their birth names. In the Korea section, the only authors for whom pen names are used are Kim Sowŏl (born Kim Chŏngshik), Yi Sang (born Kim Haegyŏng), and Kim Tongni (born Kim Shijong), who are commonly referred to as Sowŏl, Yi Sang, and Kim, respectively. Romanization is modified Hepburn for Japanese, Pinyin for Chinese, and McCune-Reischauer for Korean.

The field of modern East Asian literature is of course a vast one, and some kind of selection was obviously necessary. The general editor and associate editors consulted widely about which authors, works, and movements were most essential to an understanding of literature in modern East Asia. We have obviously focused on authors and works whose writings are available in English translation. But in several cases we have also tried to be ahead of the curve, giving information about authors whose importance is such that we know (or are relatively certain) that translations will be forthcoming in the near future. Each entry includes a brief biography of the author or life span of the movement. It will then typically include analysis of one or two key works. It is followed by a bibliography. In general, listed critical works are limited to those in English or those specifically cited in the entry itself. Principal works in translation are also given, though space prevents these lists from being exhaustive.

The editors have also tried to represent not only what is new and recent in the literatures themselves, but also what is new in the reading of those literatures. In other words, we have included a great number of younger literary scholars, asking them to provide their understandings and their interpretations of works and authors both classic and contemporary. For example, works by canonical authors such as *Lu Xun or *Natsume Sôseki are being opened up to new interpretations by scholars examining them from the viewpoint of feminist criticism or queer theory. We hope that in this way the Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature will make accessible new readings and new interpretations that are perhaps somewhat different from those found in earlier guides and histories. Thus, although for some readers the essays and entries will be introductory, we hope that even those already familiar with the works discussed will discover and be challenged by new interpretations. The Companion also aims to be a reference, providing important biographical and bibliographic information on modern East Asian authors and translations of their work.

In this context, there has been no way to avoid theory or to provide only practical criticism. As will be clear as one makes one’s way through the Companion as a whole, one of the crucial concerns of modern East Asian literature is precisely the definition of literature itself, and of the role of art in society. Although some readers may wish that even more space had been devoted to literary critics, we hope we have struck some sort of balance in emphasizing the importance of theory in the very definition of modern literature while at the same time fulfilling our mandate as a companion to general readers of literature in translation.

Additionally, the editors have taken the geographical rubric very seriously. Although the literatures of China, Japan, and Korea are each allotted their separate sections, we have constantly kept an eye open to those writers, works, and movements that transcend national boundaries. This includes, for example, Chinese authors who lived and wrote in Japan; Japanese authors who wrote in classical Chinese; and Korean authors who write in Japanese, whether under the colonial occupation or because they are now resident in Japan. The waves of modernization can be seen as reaching each of these countries in a staggered fashion, with eddies and backflows between them then complicating the picture further. We hope that the thematic essays and individual entries in this volume can give some sense of this dynamic interplay.

All the entries have been designed to provide the same kinds of basic information concerning their authors or movement, but the shape of each individual entry has been formed by the specific scholar writing it. Readers of the Companion, then, will be exposed to a wide variety of styles and concerns and will gain in this way some sense of the breadth of contemporary research on East Asian literature. And although we have attempted to include discussion of all the major genres—fiction, poetry, and theater—in each geographical section, their varying importance has inevitably been reflected in their relative emphasis.

Some readers may be disappointed that we have not been able to include certain authors, schools, or even genres. Some will disagree about the specific works chosen as representative or the space allotted to some writers or works rather than others. Such shortcomings are, alas, inevitable. Though the editors cast their nets as widely as possible and strove to be as inclusive and encyclopedic as possible, the vagaries that beset any long-term project have left their mark. The original associate editors for both China and Korea found it necessary to pass the torch after the initial stages of our work, and I am very grateful to both Kirk Denton and Bruce Fulton for taking over their responsibilities. I would especially like to thank Sharalyn Orbaugh, the associate editor for Japan, who stayed with the project through thick and thin. All the individual contributors deserve our thanks for finding time in their busy schedules to write entries that are not only informative but also often challenging. I am particularly grateful for their patience, as the project ground on for several years. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Masao Nakamura, Director of the Centre for Japanese Research, Institute of Asian Research, at the University of British Columbia. Finally, I would like to thank James Warren, executive editor for reference books of Columbia University Press, for originally suggesting this project to me and for his patience and encouragement over the years.

In East Asia, it was the vital tradition that each new dynasty or government made writing a history of its immediate predecessor one of its first priorities. I write at the end of the first full year of the twenty-first century, a fitting moment to assess the literature of what is essentially the twentieth century. And it is my hope that this Companion will provide an opportunity for a future editor in the latter half of this new century to compile a new Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century East Asian Literature, so as to see not only what is distinctive about their own, modern perspective but also what was distinctive about ours.

2

MODERN LITERATURE IN EAST ASIA: AN OVERVIEW

When speaking of, for instance, modern Japanese literature, many critics follow the current fashion of bracketing each of the constitutive words of the phrase or of putting them individually in quotation marks (modern Japanese literature) to indicate that each element of the term is under contestation and open to debate. In other words, the meanings of the very terms modern, Japanese, and literature are no longer taken to be self-evident, and any definition of them risks challenge from a number of quarters. To put together a companion, then, has become a daunting task—no matter how innocuous and even friendly the name of this genre may seem.

This state of affairs has not, of course, always been the case. Under the positivism of what is called modernization theory, all concerned were confident in the placement of the advent of each modern literature in East Asia: *Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui) of 1886; the May Fourth movement of 1919 for China; and 1917 in Korea, with the publication of *Yi Kwangsu’s novel Heartlessness (Mujŏng). In fact, it was the writers of the day whose voices were the loudest in declaring their difference and independence from previous old-fashioned and traditional writing.

One problem is that, unlike a term such as twentieth-century, the word modern has no stable meaning. The English word comes from the Latin modo, meaning just now. As such, what the term names immediately disappears upon its naming: now once uttered is already past, already then. Regardless of this philosophical conundrum, the term has been replaced in present-day parlance by the word contemporary (as in contemporary art). It is in the Renaissance—in English, the late 1500s—that the term modern takes on the sense of recent times in opposition to ancient and medieval. This last term means literally middle ages, and it clearly serves simply as a buffer between the Ancients (that is, the classical culture of the Greeks and Romans) and the rebirth of learning with the Moderns. Nonetheless, modern European history is usually taken to begin with the perfection of movable type by Gutenberg in about 1450 and the voyages of exploration that culminated in Columbus’s voyage of 1492. When we add to this list the effective use of gunpowder in warfare from the mid-fifteenth century, we have what some might argue were the key elements in the creation of the world as we know it, that is, the modern world: territorial expansionism, print capitalism, and the gun. Although it is undeniable that these elements were essential to the construction of the modern world, most scholars today would see the period from the Renaissance to the French and industrial revolutions as early modern, with modernity proper not beginning until the advent of industrialization and with it the rise of global capitalism and imperialism, as well as the bourgeoisie; in other words, from about the end of the eighteenth century.

Asia was, of course, very much part of the early modern world. After all, Columbus had stumbled upon America in his search for an alternate route to India. China and Japan were parts of the early system of global trade initiated by the Dutch, Portuguese, English, and Spanish, with wares produced in Asia specifically for export to Europe. When Japan closed its doors to all but the most limited trade with Europe in 1615, the cultures and technologies of Asia and Europe were not all that far apart, and European travelers to Asia had often been impressed by what they saw. Korea, for example, utilized movable metal-type printing presses as early as the thirteenth century, well before Gutenburg’s innovations.

Asia was confronted by a much-changed Europe in the early nineteenth century. The industrialized countries needed outlets for their products, and the international trade in tea, silk, and opium between England, India, and China meant that by the 1830s British India derived 5 to 10 percent of its total revenues from the opium trade with China (Fairbank and Reischauer 1989:273). The Opium Wars of 1839–42 amply demonstrated the military force with which the Western powers would insist on free trade. Ten years later, in 1853, the Americans under Commodore Perry arrived in Edo Bay in a steam-powered battleship to insist on the opening of trade ports.

The inability of the Manchu Qing dynasty and samurai Tokugawa military government to resist foreign pressure rang the death knell for both. In 1867, the last shogun returned power to the imperial family, in the person of the boy-emperor Meiji, and his advisors from the western domains. This early transformation allowed Japan to jump significantly ahead of its neighbors, who soon began to feel the effects of Japanese imperialism: in 1876 the Japanese wrested unequal trade treaties from the Korean kingdom, and in 1894 Japan declared war on China, defeating its fleet in 1895 and claiming Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands, and the Kwantung Peninsula of southern Manchuria as reparations. Japanese aggression greatly stimulated Chinese and Korean nationalism, and 1911 saw the fall of the Manchu dynasty—ironically, instigated by Chinese who had lived, studied, and plotted in Japan. No such irony was afforded to Korea, however, which in 1905 became a Japanese protectorate and was annexed outright in 1910.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, then, the East Asian world order was no more. While the fates of China, Japan, and Korea would differ significantly over the course of the twentieth century, their starting points were largely the same, and this similarity is one of the reasons for certain commonalities in their modern literatures.

The first similarity is that all three countries were what has been called diglossic, that is, operating in a more or less bilingual environment. The two languages, however, were not two modern vernacular languages—as they are, for example, in Canada with English and French. Rather, although each country had one (or more) modern spoken languages, all serious written communication was done in classical Chinese—a language that no one actually spoke. This use of written classical Chinese was linked to the major ideological foundation of all three cultures: Confucianism. Confucianism prescribed highly stratified class-based societies, with scholar-bureaucrats at the top and merchants at the bottom. Family structures were thoroughly patriarchal, and women typically had little access to education or political or economic power.

The genres of writing in Confucian cultures were also highly stratified, and their relative value or prestige was determined by their use to scholar-officials. Educated men read and wrote history and poetry—the two most canonical genres—as well as philosophy, essays, and commentaries. Vernacular fiction existed in all three cultures, but was officially despised as trivial. Writing of value was called wen/bun/mun (in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, respectively) and included such diverse genres as event-based historical narratives, lyrical poems, and expository memorials to the throne or head of government.

Following the Romantic philology of Europeans (especially Germans) such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), the Japanese and Koreans would come to equate their modern national literature exclusively with their indigenous vernacular tongue. All three countries, including China, would eventually define modern literature as that written in a language closely approximating contemporary speech. Nonetheless, this process took considerable time, and in Japan, for instance, poetry written by Japanese in classical Chinese remained an important literary influence until about 1911. In fact, all the literary giants at the beginning of the modern era, such as *Mori Ōgai and *Natsume Sōseki, had been thoroughly trained in Chinese literature as boys and continued to write in classical Chinese throughout their lives. Modern Chinese writers such as *Lu Xun and *Yu Dafu continued to write poems in the classical Chinese language even as they wrote and promoted Western-style vernacular fiction. And *Mao Zedong wrote classical poems up until his death, even during the iconoclastic fervor of the Cultural Revolution.

The resilience of Chinese verse in essentially the classical language is perhaps less surprising when we realize that change and revolution in the literary landscape typically began with verse. Most revolutionary sentiments and new political ideals were first expressed in traditional Chinese verse, whether in China, Japan, or Korea. The political and literary intersection of these three emerging nations within the genre of poetry can be seen in the Japanese Mori Kainan’s (1863–1911) long poem in Chinese verse entitled Homeward Voyage: One Hundred Rhymes (Kishū hyaku’in, 1909). Kainan looked to the poetry of the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911) for models for his verse. His own major work was written during an ocean voyage, just as was the Chinese *Liang Qichao’s Record of Travel (Hanman lu, 1899). But whereas Liang’s voyage was from Yokohama (where he was living in political exile) to Honolulu, Kainan’s recorded the return to Japan of the body of Itō Hirobumi—the elder Meiji statesman—who had been assassinated while serving as Governor-General of Korea, recently annexed by Japan. Liang’s work used the expression poetry revolution (shijie geming—the latter word being what Lydia Liu has called a return graphic loan, that is, a word that existed in classical Chinese but was used by the Japanese to translate a foreign word—in this case, revolution—and then reintroduced into the modern Chinese language). In 1882 several Japanese writers had issued a book of new-form poems (shintai-shi), many of which were translations from European authors, and all of which were still heavily sinified in language. Korea, too, saw new-style poetry (shinch’e shi) with the publication in 1908 of Ch’oe Namsŏn’s From the Sea to the Youth (Hae egesŏ sonyŏn ege). Revolution in literature, then, started in all three countries with poetry.

Western culture in the nineteenth century no doubt appeared relatively monolithic: constitutional governments, the rhetoric of individualism, nationalism, and global capitalism. The Western genres of writing seemed an integral part of what made the American and European powers so irresistible. The European tradition had a very different way of classifying and valuing writing, and it had two categories that seemed incommensurable to those East Asian categories of writing: literature and the novel.

It was clear that literature was something different from wen/bun/mun, or what was also referred to simply as learning (xuewen/gakumon/hangmun). This difference was clearest from the fact that at the acme of the European hierarchy of literature sat a form of vernacular fiction—the novel—while in the East Asian system the top spot was held by poetry, and fiction was relegated to the very bottom, fit only for women and the morally suspect. In other words, the hierarchies of East Asian wen/bun/mun and European literature were the complete inverse of each other.

Fortunately for East Asian students of this new literature, European fiction was at this time at one of its more didactic stages. Some of the earliest novels to be translated into Japanese were Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844, translated as Shun’ōden, 1884) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers (1837, translated as Karyū shunwa, A Spring Tale of Flowers and Willow, 1879)—both fictional works by well-known statesmen who were using the novel form to promote their political agendas. Such translations led to the rise of what was later called the *political novel (seiji shōsetsu), many with ties to the People’s Rights movement. Political novels were also written in a highly sinified style, far from the Japanese vernacular, and included poems written in classical Chinese—a fact which made them very amenable to translation into Chinese, where they strongly influenced literary intellectuals such as Liang Qichao. In Japan, China, and Korea, then, the novel form was first employed primarily as a means of educating the newly formed public.

In fact, the Japanese word for novel, shōsetsu (literally, small talk—a term adopted from the premodern Chinese vernacular genre called xiaoshuo) was not established until after the heyday of the so-called political novel. The term appears most significantly in Tsubouchi Shōyō’s landmark The Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui) of 1885–86. Shôyô called for human emotions to be the principle theme of the novel. This focus stood in contrast not only with the political novels of the day, but also with the writing of the late Edo period, which Shôyô saw as either frivolous or moralistic.

Although Shōyō’s own strengths were in theory and translation (especially for the theater—his translations of Shakespeare remain the standards in the Japanese language), it was up to his student *Futabatei Shimei to produce what is recognized as Japan’s first modern novel, Drifting Clouds (Ukigumo) in 1887–89. The protagonist of the tale, Bunzō, is clearly an alienated modern, the superfluous hero of Russian authors such as Ivan Turgenev, who had a profound influence on Futabatei (Ryan 1965). The superfluous man also appears quite vividly in the writings of Yu Dafu, one of the founders of the romantic Creation Society, which was formed with other exiled Chinese writers in Japan in 1921.

It was around the same time as the publication of Floating Clouds that Women’s Education Journal (Jogaku zasshi), which had been at the forefront of promoting both Christian humanism and women’s education, took a decided literary turn, a trend that in 1893 would result in a break-away group starting the journal Literary World (Bungakukai), the organ of the Romantic movement in Japan.

Not until the 1890s do works of European realist fiction by Zola or Tolstoy appear in Japanese. One of the most important figures in introducing European thought, and especially German Romanticism, into Japan was Mori Ōgai, who had been sent to Germany by the Meiji government for four years to study medicine. His first work was the still-famous novella The Dancing Girl (Maihime) of 1890, based loosely on his own erotic experiences in Germany. Despite his success in this genre, Ōgai devoted most of his energies to criticism and translation, including the still-standard Japanese version of that harbinger of modernism, Goethe’s Faust. In fiction he was soon overshadowed by Natsume Sōseki, who gave up a prestigious post at Tokyo Imperial University to become the staff novelist of the daily Asahi newspaper. The model of Sōseki as a professional writer was impressive and inspiring to the young writers of Korea and China. And as in Europe in the nineteenth century with authors such as Dickens, the serialized newspaper novel became one of the principal venues of the new fiction.

The foreign policy of China, Japan, and Korea during much of the preceding centuries had been isolationist, and even among the three neighbors themselves contact was extremely limited. This state of affairs changed dramatically with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, precipitated by a struggle between the two countries for control over Korea. The effect of Japan’s victory the following year was a tremendous upsurge in patriotism and cultural nationalism among victor and vanquished alike. Japanese poets such as Yosano Hiroshi and Masaoka Shiki called for traditional forms to be imbued with patriotism and martial bravery (see The Revival of Poetry in Traditional Forms). In China, leaders of the late Qing reform movement, such as Liang Qichao, also instituted a poetry revolution, which resulted in poems with a decided nationalist quality.

At the same time, Japan in the 1890s saw the rise of a Romantic movement, inspired by European writers such as Byron and Shelley. Byron’s influence is most clear in the writings of Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894), both in terms of form and in terms on the emphasis on love and the heroic individual. While the Romantic movement is often thought to have died with the demise of Literary World or with the advent of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, clearly the poetry of Yosano Akiko in the journal Morning Star (Myōjō), as well as her translations of classical Japanese works such as The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) by the great female author Murasaki Shikibu, may be counted as part of the movement. Nonetheless, by the turn of the century this emphasis on the individual was being pursued in the form of realism and naturalism, as modeled by authors such as Zola and Tolstoy. In fact, it may not be too much of an overstatement to claim that the history of the novel in East Asia throughout the first half of the twentieth century can be told through the varying reactions to French naturalism.

European naturalism was the literary movement that was to have the most widespread influence on the course of modern East Asian literature. The term naturalisme was coined by Émile Zola in 1868. Zola likened the job of a novelist to that of a scientist: realistic portrayals of events and characters were designed to demonstrate the determining characteristics of heredity or race, class, and milieu, or immediate environment. These three factors had been isolated by Hippolyte Taine in his History of English Literature, published in French in 1864. Taine’s famous triad of forces—race, milieu, and moment—ultimately rests on the first, which he defined as ‘the innate and hereditary dispositions’ of the race. These dispositions are modified over time by environmental factors (the milieu), which result in a typical character or temperament. The third force, moment, is usually interpreted as age or epoch but also includes the force of past or tradition; that is, the ‘momentum’ or cumulative effects of the interaction between race and milieu on a given ‘moment’ of time. Taine’s interests, however, were primarily psychological, in seeing the persistence of certain habits of mind common to the race expressed in their literature (Brownstein 1987:439).

While Taine’s approach may have been originally designed to explain the genius of the English people, transposed to Asia, it invited the use of literature to examine why the countries of the region had failed to modernize or had proved inferior to the conquering West. In other words, naturalist novels were meant to illustrate social Darwinism as propagated by such thinkers as Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). In Japan, naturalism (shizenshugi) combined with the previous Romantic emphasis on the self to create the shishōsetsu, or autobiographical novel (McClellan 1971), exemplified by the works of *Shimazaki Tōson and Tayama Katai (1871–1930). Writers such as these focused almost obsessively on revealing the dark and unsavory sides of their lives and personalities. In Japan the earliest example of naturalism may be the Chikuma River Sketches (written in 1899, but not published until 1913) by Shimazaki Tōson; its prototypical manifestation is usually taken to be The Quilt (Futon, 1907), by Tayama Katai. The naturalists believed that they served society by giving the unvarnished truth, and because their own thoughts and lives were the only area where they could be sure of having access to truth, the dominant genre of the movement became the so-called shishōsetsu, or *personal novel. Again, a similar approach can be seen in China with Yu Dafu, writing in the 1920s, who declared that literature is nothing but the autobiography of the author (although in the Chinese context this makes him a romantic rather than a naturalist). In Korea, the move to naturalism came a decade later, after the defeat of the independence movement of 1919 and in reaction to the overtly programmatic fiction of authors such as Yi Kwangsu. Writers such as Kim Tongin (1900–1951) founded their own Creation (Ch’angjo) journal, and portrayed the grim realities of life under Japanese occupation throughout the 1920s. (See Realism in Early Modern Fiction.)

Naturalism was very much a male genre. In Japan, the shishōsetsu came to be considered the benchmark of pure literature (junbungaku), as distinct from both Marxist-inspired proletarian literature and popular literature (taishū bungaku) aimed largely at women through the phenomenal growth in mass-market publications (Sakai 1987). In China popular literature gave rise to the so-called *Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies genre.

The 1920s also saw the coinage of terms for female-style literature (joryū bungaku in Japanese, nüxing wenxue or funü wenxue in Chinese) or female-style writer (joryū sakka in Japanese, yŏryu chakka in Korean). Although the emergence of female writers has often been seen as a distinctly modern phenomenon, recent scholarship has emphasized their roots in the early modern period. (See, for instance, Reconsidering the Origins of Modern Chinese Women’s Writing.)

Despite these similarities, by the end of the 1930s there would be a fundamental divergence of Chinese and Japanese modern literatures, defined chiefly by their differing responses to the historical successors of French naturalism, namely, realism and Marxist literature.

In China, while the May Fourth-period writers such as *Mao Dun promoted European-style naturalism and wrote novels that were influenced by it, there was also a strong reaction against naturalism, by modernists, romantics, and leftists. Instead, realism became the literary ideal that most writers shared, whatever their politics. Chinese critics generally distinguish between realism and naturalism, with the latter being associated with a kind of pessimistic biological determinism or superficial, photographic treatment of life, which fails to get to the heart or truth behind material reality. Naturalism in China is very different from what happened to it in the Japanese context, where the personal novel, often written in the first person, came to be seen as the essence of naturalism. In the Chinese context, a naturalist novel, by its very nature, should be written not in the first person but in the objective omniscient narrator style; it should treat not an individual, but society as a whole, through multiple characters from a variety of social backgrounds. What is called naturalism in Japan would, in the Chinese context, be called romanticism.

In Japan, the rise of proletarian literature is dated to the publication of the journal The Sower (Tane maku hito) in 1921, though publication—banned periodically since its inception—was completely halted after the Kantō earthquake of 1923. The banner was taken up the following year by the Literary Front (Bungei Sensen), and in 1925 the Japan Proletarian Literary Front was born—the first of several such organizations.

Moving alongside the proletarian writers was another group, the shinkankakuha, sometimes translated as the Neo-Impressionists (Shea) or neosensualism (Prušek), but usually rendered as the New Sensationalists. Led by the writer Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) and including others such as *Kawabata Yasunari, the writing style of this group was heavily influenced by surrealism and dadaism. The self-appointed task of the group was to portray the new sensations of modernity, usually in the context of the cosmopolitan metropolis, with its frenetic pace and jazz rhythms—the consumer side of the newly mechanized age with its alienated factory workers. Though relations between the proletarian writers and the New Sensationalists were cordial through the mid-1920s, by 1929 the New Sensationalists had officially disbanded, but in fact they regrouped around the critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), eventually centered on the revived journal Literary World and became the orthodox line of antiproletarian bourgeois art (Shea 1964:195).

The late 1920s saw in Japan, China, and Korea a debate about literature, but the difference in the terms of those debates is revealing. In 1927, in Japan, *Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and *Tanizaki Jun’ichirō argued over the nature and importance of pure literature (junbungaku). The debate was between Akutagawa’s championing of personal truth of the sort promoted by the naturalists, over imaginative fiction driven by plot. (See The Debate over Pure Literature.) Akutagawa’s preference for plotless mimesis would encompass not only the writers of personal novels but also most proletarian writers. But whereas Akutagawa’s touchstone was truth, for the debate in China occurring at almost the same time, the keyword was revolution (geming). In 1925 Yu Dafu and the Creation Society had announced their conversion to Marxism, partly under the influence of literary movements in Japan. (See The Debate on Revolutionary Literature.) The terms of debate were precisely whether literature should be engaged in political issues or not. Interestingly, this debate placed May Fourth writers such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun on the reactionary side. In Korea as well 1925 saw the creation of the Korean Artist Proletarian Federation, which managed to survive under the Japanese occupation until 1935. (See Pure Literature versus the Literature of Engagement.) It is said that history is written by the victors, and this is no less true for literary history. The North American perspective in literary studies is predominantly bourgeois. It should not be surprising, then, that it is the period immediately after the suppression of politically engaged literature in Korea that is seen as a kind of golden age, as writers were forced by circumstances to concentrate their energies more on formal elements such as plot and character development, rather than a political message or action.

As Japan moved to a war footing after its 1931 invasion of Manchuria, the government carried out massive repression of all left-wing groups. Early in 1933 the police trapped and tortured to death Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933), author of The Factory Ship (Kani Kōsen), an event often taken to signal the end of the proletarian literature movement per se. Kobayashi’s death was followed just months later by the first official tenkō or conversion to official ideology and renunciation of Communism, made by two Communist Party leaders from jail.

In China, on the other hand, a group in Shanghai in the late 1920s and early 1930s picked up the banner of the Japanese New Sensationalists (xin ganjue pai, translated as New Sensationists in the Chinese context) and produced some of the first sustained modernist writing in Chinese. Yet here these writers found themselves caught between censorship from the Nationalist government on one hand, and criticism from Marxist writers on the other. With Japan’s declaration of war against China in 1937, the space for almost any kind of politically disengaged literature disappeared. In China, both Nationalists and Communists called for literature for national defense (guofang wenxue). In Japan, the genre of the personal novel transformed into jūgunki, or campaign accounts, often written by well-known authors sent by the Japanese government to observe the invading imperial forces. (See Wartime Fiction.) Even poetry was enlisted in the cause. (See The Revival of Poetry in Traditional Forms and Takamura Kōtarō.) In Korea, authors were forbidden for the duration of the war to publish in their own language.

Yet the very different results of the politicization of literature in China and Japan might be exemplified by the diverging trajectories of the female writers *Miyamoto Yuriko and *Ding Ling. Miyamoto devoted herself to the Japanese Communist Party. For this dedication she was repeatedly imprisoned during the war years. Although she published two novels after the end of World War II and completed her autobiographical trilogy, today only one of her short stories has been translated into English in its entirety. In contrast, Ding Ling embraced her image as a modern girl in 1920s Shanghai, publishing some of the first work in Chinese that portrayed female sexuality from a female perspective. Yet in the early 1930s she adopted the methods of social realist fiction. Her increased politicization resulted in her kidnapping and arrest by the Nationalist government (GMD, or Guomindang; also abbreviated KMT). Ding Ling managed to escape and make her way to the Communist headquarters in Yan’an. Her critiques of the elitism and gender disparities in Communist-controlled areas was one of the motivations for Mao’s *Yan’an Talks, where literature was placed firmly under the control of the Communist Party. Ding Ling seems to have accepted this pronouncement wholeheartedly and threw herself into literary production for the masses. With the establishment of the PRC in 1949 she enjoyed high positions in the cultural elite. Nonetheless, she was sent to the countryside for reeducation for twelve years—caught up in the Anti-Rightist Campaign after the short-lived *Hundred Flowers movement—only to be subsequently imprisoned for five more years during the Cultural Revolution. Yet even in the 1980s Ding Ling was a strong supporter of the party line and a vocal critic of bourgeois Western feminism. Ding Ling remains canonized as one of the major Chinese writers of the twentieth century, and no fewer than three book-length translations of her work have appeared in English.

The end of World War II brought profound changes to all three countries: Japan experienced atomic bombing and military occupation, China established the PRC, and Korea gained its independence, only to find itself partitioned after the Korean War. All the events are thoroughly reflected in the literatures of the period. In China, as we have seen, a doctrinaire version of socialist realism—*revolutionary romanticism combined with revolutionary realism—was brutally enforced. In Japan the atomic bombings gave their name to a whole genre of *Atomic Bomb Fiction and Poetry. Male writers seemed to focus on the threat to their masculinity that both defeat in war and the American occupation represented, while women writers focused on the daily struggle of survival for their families and themselves. (See Occupation Period Fiction.) The period also saw the rise of a kind of decadence: some writers were specifically linked to the so-called Decadent School (Burai-ha), such as *Dazai Osamu and *Sakaguchi Ango, but the general tendency—a dissipation focused on the redlight districts combined with a certain nostalgia for the sex trade of the Edo period—can be seen in writers such as Ishikawa Jun and *Nagai Kafū as well. In South Korea, the results of the Korean War led both to what is called *The Literature of Territorial Division as well as to identifying writers in terms of whether they went north (*"The Wŏlbuk Authors") or came south.

The 1960s were marked by the Japanese economic miracle and the acceptance of Japan as a part of the West. This acceptance might be symbolized by the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to Kawabata Yasunari in 1968. In contrast, China became internationally isolated during the decade of the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. Taiwan prospered in much the same way as Japan, but the strict authoritarianism of the GMD dampened literary activity. Political repression also marked Korea during this period, after far more positive initial signals: in 1960 student demonstrators precipitated Syngman Rhee’s (Xi Sŭng-man) fall from power. He was replaced, however, by Major General Park Chung Hee in a military coup, which initiated a series of military juntas that lasted until 1987.

The second half of the twentieth century proved to be every bit as tumultuous in East Asia as had been the first half. China saw its international isolation end with President Richard Nixon’s visit to that country in 1971. Mao’s death in 1976 paved the way for economic moderates such as Deng Xiaoping. The limits of such moderation were revealed, however, in the Tiananmen Incident of 1989. This brutal repression by the government did not derail, however, the repatriation of Hong Kong in 1997. The new millennium sees the still officially socialist economy joining the World Trade Organization. In Taiwan, gradual liberalization after the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975 has led ultimately to the election of a Taiwanese president whose proindependence stance has exacerbated tensions with the mainland. In Korea, opposition forces finally managed to unite under Kim Dae-jung.

The second half of the twentieth century also saw five trends consistently appear in the literature of all areas of East Asia: the preponderance of women writers; the insistent exploration of sexuality and eroticism (less evident in the literature of Korea)—often of the most transgressive sort; formal experimentation in metafiction and postmodern narrative techniques such as magical realism; a general blurring of the distinction between literature and pop culture, fueled by relentless commodification and globalization; and, finally, a focusing on the diasporic experience, leading on one hand to the continued questioning of national identity, and on the other to tremendous cross-fertilization and mutation, as writers write national literature not only in the language of that nation but also in international vernaculars such as English.

Bibliography

Brownstein, Michael C. "From Kokugaku to Kokubungaku: Canon-Formation in the Meiji Period." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, no. 2 (1987): 435–460.

Fairbank, John K., and Edwin O. Reischauer. China: Tradition and Transformation. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

Jelinek, Miriam. Yokomitsu Riichi. In Jaroslav Prušek and Zbigniew Slupski, eds., Dictionary of Oriental Literatures: East Asia. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974.

Kitamura Takiji. "The Factory Ship" and "The Absentee Landlord." Trans. Frank Motofuji. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973.

Liu, Lydia H. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

McClellan, Edwin. Tōson and the Autobiographical Novel. In Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, 347–378. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Prušek, Jaroslav, and Zbigniew Slupski. Dictionary of Oriental Literatures: East Asia. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974.

Rowley, G. G. Yosano Akiko and the Tale of Genji. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2000.

Ryan, Marleigh Grayer. Japan’s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.

Sakai, Cécile. Histoire de la littérature populaire Japonaise: Faits et perspectives (1900–1980). Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1987.

Shea, George Tyson. Leftwing Literature in Japan: A Brief History of the Proletarian Literary Movement. Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 1964.

PART II

Japan

SHARALYN ORBAUGH, ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Thematic Essays

3

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

It is a historical commonplace that Japan was completely isolated for nearly 250 years before U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry forced the shogun’s government to reopen to trade, diplomatic contact, and cultural communication with the West. Although this is not fully accurate, it is undeniable that Japan’s contacts with the Western world at least were remarkably restricted until Perry’s successful mission in 1853. Shortly after the arrival of Perry’s ships, a quick coup and brief civil war returned the country to imperial rule, ending more than five hundred years of military control. The return to imperial rule happened in 1868, the year considered to be the dividing line between modernity and premodernity in Japan. Until the death in 1912 of this emperor, whose reign-name, Meiji, meant enlightened rule, Japan went through a period of intensive, thoroughgoing, self-conscious modernization, attempting to catch up as quickly as possible with the other nation-states of the modern world (which at the time meant exclusively the Anglo-European world). Having seen what the Western colonizing powers were doing to Qing-dynasty China, which, while large and culturally powerful, was not modernized, the leaders of the Japanese government realized clearly what was at stake. Because Japan no longer had the option of remaining apart in its isolation, the only choices were to join the elite group of modernized nations or to accept the abuses of unequal treaties, trade pressure, and perhaps even colonization.

As we know, Japan did achieve the elite status of full modernity by the end of Meiji’s reign in 1912, if we define modernity in terms of cutting-edge technology, science, and medicine; an industrial (as opposed to agrarian) economy; an extensive transportation and communications infrastructure; the construction of imposing buildings for diplomatic and cultural events; and so on. All of these were, of course, hallmarks of Anglo-European modernity, as were colonial and military aggression. Japan was the first Asian nation to successfully incorporate those elements of modernity as well. The Meiji period saw two victorious wars: against China in 1894–95 and against Russia in 1904–5. From these Japan gained its first colonial possessions: Taiwan (Formosa) in 1895, and Korea in 1910, when it was formally annexed as a colony.

Several elements of modernization had been in place before the beginning of the Meiji period. The centralization of government had been accomplished with the city of Edo as the shogunal capital; the daimyō (feudal lords of each domain) were required to spend half their time in Edo, and their families were forced to reside there permanently. Reliable channels of communication and commerce had been thus established between the seat of central government and all the outlying regions. Urbanization, too, was well advanced in the Edo period. Besides Edo itself (which later became the city we know as Tokyo), there were numerous cities of some size and importance; in Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto in particular, urbanization was accompanied by the rise of a vibrant popular culture. Print culture—another hallmark of modernity—was at the center of pre-Meiji popular culture: woodblock print pictures and lavishly illustrated woodblock printed books were extremely popular and widely available. Lending libraries gave access to those who could not afford to purchase books. Japan also had a remarkably high literacy rate during the Edo period, even though there was no nationwide system of education. Children of daimyō families (usually only boys, but occasionally girls as well) were taught in special domain schools or by tutors, in a system that emphasized a traditional neo-Confucian Chinese education. But many city children and rural children of other classes had access to at least a little education at tera koya (private temple schools). Because of all of these factors—communication and transportation routes linking center and periphery, urban culture, print culture, and literacy—the Meiji attempts at modernization went relatively smoothly and quickly.

Japanese literature, too, underwent an intensive and self-conscious process of modernization during the Meiji period. In the first decades after the opening of the country Japanese missions were sent to the various countries of Europe and North America to conduct firsthand observations of the political and social structures of these modern nations. Besides bringing back information about education, hygiene, constitutional government, military organization, and so on, these missions also introduced to Japan information about Western philosophy, religion, and literature. With this new stimulus added to more than a thousand years of indigenous literary tradition, from the 1870s on Japan experienced a literary renaissance that may be said to have culminated—at least in terms of international recognition—a century later in 1968 with the naming of *Kawabata Yasunari as the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Since the end of World War II there has been a steady production of translations of Japanese literary works into English. Currently, writers such as *Murakami Haruki and *Shimada Masahiko publish short stories in The New Yorker and other major magazines, and international pop icons such as *Yoshimoto Banana sell millions of translated copies of their novels among young adults around the world.

The one-hundred-year path to a literature of international stature was not smooth, however. The introduction of the developing scientific disciplines of the nineteenth century, such as Darwinian evolution and physical anthropology, revealed that in the new scientifically verified hierarchies of race and gender, Japan had already been allotted an inferior status: oriental, and feminine vis-à-vis the white nations of the Anglo-European world. (See Nation and Nationalism, and Gender, Family, and Sexuality.) In many areas of life the opening of the country to ideas from the primarily Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman philosophical/religious traditions of the West raised new questions about the meaning of subjectivity, nation, and nationalism and brought about modern definitions of family, gender, sex, and sexuality. These will be addressed in the following sections.

—Sharalyn Orbaugh

4

THE PROBLEM OF THE MODERN SUBJECT

One of the great problems facing Meiji reformers was the recognition that the concept of modern selfhood or subjectivity—later termed kindai jiga (modern self) or shutaisei (subjectivity)—that appeared to be current in the advanced nations of the West was radically different from that in Japan. The post-Enlightenment (male) subject in England, North America, and most of Western Europe was envisioned as rational, monolithic (not changing identities according to context), and, after the eighteenth-century revolutions in France and the United States, defined by accomplishment rather than birth, repository of the highest form of state sovereignty in a secularized and democratic political system. Japan under the shogunate was, on the contrary, still structured according to the rigid neo-Confucian-based feudal system of four classes: warriors/scholars (shogun, daimyō, samurai), farmers, artisans, and tradespeople. Traditional Chinese neo-Confucianism had made no provision for people outside these categories, but it is crucial to note that in Japan there was a category above all these—the imperial household and the court aristocracy—and a category below, of hinin (literally nonpeople, outcasts), made up of various groups such as itinerant performers and the traditional untouchable caste of Japan, the burakumin. Social status, occupation, location of domicile, and identity was, with few exceptions, fixed for life, whichever category one was born into.

From as early as 1869 and continuing through 1884, laws were enacted abolishing the feudal class system and constructing a new, drastically simplified and more democratic social hierarchy. The kuge (court aristocracy) and the highest-level daimyō became the kazoku (members of the peerage). Higher-ranking samurai became the shizoku (former warrior class). Lower ranking samurai, together with farmers, artisans, and tradespeople, were all combined into a single class: heimin (commoners). The situation of the former hinin (non-people) was more complicated: in 1869 they were redesignated senmin (the lowly). In 1871 this structure was modified, and the senmin were redesignated shin-heimin (new commoners)—a category meant to raise them to equality with all other nonpeer Japanese, but which in fact allowed for continued discrimination against them because the prefix shin (new) distinguished them from all the other heimin (Kawauchi 1990:146). The emperor remained in a class of his own, and was, in fact, during the Meiji and subsequent prewar eras, actually raised to the status of a deity. (After 1914 an individual’s class was no longer formally registered, and in 1947 the occupation government abolished the designations shizoku and kazoku. Even today, however, families are well aware of their class ancestry, and discrimination still exists against those of hinin/burakumin lineage; see Kawauchi 1990.)

With this Meiji-period change in legal status, commoners were allowed to take surnames for the first time and to choose their occupations and domiciles, and they were given universal access to (elementary) education. As the new conceptualization of modern subjectivity began to take hold, the slogan risshin shusse (advancing in the world through individual effort) became the watchword of the day.

As early as 1874 a movement to establish an elected, representative government was active: the Jiyū Minken Undō (Freedom and People’s Rights Movement). This attempt to replicate the politically sovereign subjectivity of the freeborn European male inspired a number of the Meiji period’s most influential writers, translators, critics, and educators. Although the movement was perceived as antigovernment by Meiji rulers and was partially suppressed through censorship and restrictions on assembly, its goals were achieved at least in part when the 1890 constitution established the Imperial Diet, a bicameral legislature whose House of Representatives was elected through limited male suffrage (universal male suffrage after 1925). However, the power of the House of Representatives, though roughly equal to that of the House of Peers, was limited by the existence of several political bodies with overriding legislative powers: the cabinet, the privy council, and the emperor, among others.

GENBUN’ITCHI

It is one thing to legislate changes in the status of the subject, and another to change people’s conceptualization and enactment of a new, modern kind of subjectivity. Clearly one of the most important sites through which identity is both understood and enacted is language. The Japanese attempts to create a vernacular written language that could express this new subjectivity were self-conscious and intensive from around 1880 to 1920, by which time writers and journalists were using the new language confidently.

When the Meiji government took power, the situation of the written language was one of the most fundamental problems confronting it. To put it simply, the language used in written texts bore less resemblance to the spoken Japanese of the time than Latin does to French. In contrast, the nations of Europe had for centuries moved gradually from a strict division between written language (Latin) and the various vernacular Romance or Germanic languages. By the nineteenth century, therefore, the modern nations of Europe had several centuries of language modernization behind them.

In Japan in 1868 the official written language of government remained a form of classical Chinese, bearing no relation to spoken Japanese. In addition, there were three other major written languages, each used for a specific purpose; none was close to the contemporary vernacular. For a country contemplating modernization, this situation posed several problems. In order to catch up to the technological, military, and economic superiority of Western nations it would be necessary to mobilize all of Japan’s best minds and to have an educated citizenry to carry out the new systems. Although Japan was in the fortunate position of possessing a populace with an unusually high literacy rate (higher than any of its Asian neighbors, for example, and higher even than the nations of Europe), the functional extent of that literacy was limited by the multiple and unnecessarily complex forms of written language. Many literate people could read only the simplest of the four written languages, inscribed in the simplest form of orthography (Unger 1996:24–35). Moreover, literacy in Japan was achieved at a higher educational cost in terms of time and effort than in a country in which the spoken and written languages were more similar.

In attempting to implement overall modernization, as Nanette Twine explains, language modernization ought to be one of the very first tasks tackled, since upon its successful implementation depends the greater efficiency of such other vital adjuncts of social transformation as education and communications. Nonetheless, the idea of language reform was, at first vigorously resisted…. The notion struck at the roots of the contemporary intellectual view of writing not primarily as a servant of man but as an artistic and intellectual show-case, and as the province of the upper class (1991:8). Despite the growing recognition that a democratization of subjectivity was crucial to modernization, many members of the Meiji government—classically educated scions of upper-class families—found it difficult to give up this elitist view of language.

The four written languages in common use ranged from kanbun (classical Chinese) for official documents, using only Chinese characters and based on Chinese grammar, to wabun (classical Japanese), using a mix of characters and kana (the Japanese syllabaries) and based on classical Japanese grammar and vocabulary. The others were combinations or hybrids of these two basic styles (see Twine 1991:17 for details). Whichever style was used, there was little or no punctuation supplied to aid comprehension. Moreover, there were approximately ten thousand Chinese characters in use at the beginning of the Meiji period, in contrast with the 1,945 necessary today to read a newspaper (Twine 1991:17).

Language reform was clearly necessary in three areas: replacing classical grammatical and lexical elements with a colloquial style based on the current grammar and vocabulary of the spoken language; choosing one of Japan’s many spoken dialects to serve as the standard for the new written language; and reducing the number of Chinese characters in use, standardizing and simplifying their orthography, and adding a standardized system of punctuation (Twine 1991:9). Recognizing the complexity of these reformist tasks and their ideological consequences, the newly appointed minister of education, Mori Arinori, suggested the wholesale adoption of an already modernized language, English (Twine 1991:82; Gottlieb 1995:5). The suggestion was met with ridicule.

It was primarily among translators and writers of fiction that the new written language, often called genbun’itchi (unification of the spoken and written language) was developed. Early pioneers in the development of genbun’itchi include *Tsubouchi Shōyō, noted translator of Shakespeare; *Futabatei Shimei, translator of Turgenev and author of Japan’s first modern novel; Wakamatsu Shizuko, the translator of Little Lord Fauntleroy (see Meiji Women Writers), among other important works; and the members of the *Ken’yūsha group. Through the efforts of these men and women the problems involved in developing a modern vernacular were slowly worked out.

Some of the aforementioned problems were readily solved through simple arbitrary decisions: the Tokyo-area Yamanote spoken dialect was chosen as the standard on which the written language should be based, and a standard system of punctuation introduced. But other issues were more complicated. Language modernization could not be separated from fundamental political, epistemological, and philosophical issues. For example, a number of the key concepts of modern Western languages simply did not exist in Japanese. Translators attempting to bring modern European texts to a Japanese audience could not solve this problem simply by introducing a new lexical item. In Japan there was no concept, and thus no word, for century. Japanese dating systems were cyclical, based on imperial reigns. This human-centered, constantly resettable method of counting time was in strict contrast to the Gregorian calendar with its relentless unidirectional movement away from the center marked by Christ toward a distant end. The cultural preference to count in multiples of ten, too, differs from the Japanese historical norm. (Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar and the twenty-four-hour day in 1873.) Translators put forward several possibilities for century before a compound word, made up of two Chinese characters, was adopted: seiki.

Similarly, the word kiss posed problems for the early Meiji translators. The translator of Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers resorted to licking the mouth in his attempt to render kiss in 1879 (Keene 1984, 1:66–67). This is not to suggest that kissing had never taken place in Japan; pornographic woodblock prints show the biting and sucking of tongues, if not full mouth-to-mouth contact. There were words to describe this. But the kissing behavior that Japanese readers found in European art and literature—with all the cultural, social, and religious baggage it carried concerning notions of gender, intimacy, and romance—was not adequately described by any existing Japanese words. Eventually kissu, a transliteration of the English word, became standard.

Borrowings in the form of transliterations were a significant feature of Japan’s language modernization. Words for important concepts were adopted from various languages: part-time work, for example, became arubaito, after the German Arbeit. This willingness to introduce loanwords from other languages gave Japanese a useful flexibility, a way of increasing lexical items quickly and efficiently. In contrast, this practice was virtually nonexistent in Chinese, which made language modernization in China, particularly in technical and scientific areas, far more cumbersome as new words had to be created out of existing elements of language—each of which carried inescapable traditional cultural connotations.

Most important, however, the new language would have to be able to express the new, modern subjectivity that Meiji intellectuals wished to create, based at least partly on the individual, autonomous, apparently objective and neutral subjectivity featured in Anglo-European novels, newspapers, legal systems, and so on.

In most modern European languages it is possible to form a sentence that is apparently neutral—independent of its context, and independent of a specific pair of interlocutors. Newspapers, for example, make use of such sentences, as do many third-person narrators in fiction. Such a possibility was necessary for producing writing in the modern vernacular that was universally legible, and universally applicable. Literary people who had begun translating Western literatures into Japanese could see that