Kamei Hideo - Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature

Transformations of Sensibility

MICHIGAN MONOGRAPH SERIES IN JAPANESE STUDIES

NUMBER 40

CENTER FOR JAPANESE STUDIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Transformations of Sensibility

The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature

KAMEI HIDEO

Translation Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Bourdaghs

Center for Japanese Studies

The University of Michigan

Ann Arbor 2002

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

2002 The Regents of the University of Michigan

Published by the Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 202 S. Thayer St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kamei, Hideo, 1937

[Kansei no henkaku. English]

Transformations of sensibility : the phenomenology of Meiji literature / Kamei Hideo ; translation edited and with an introduction by Michael Bourdaghs.

p. cm.(Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies ; no. 40) Includes indexes.

ISBN 1-929280-12-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Japanese literature1868History and criticism. 2. Japanese literatureEdo period, 1600-1868History and criticism. I. Bourdaghs, Michael, 1961 II. Title. III. Series.

PL726.55 .K2613 2002

895.6090042dc21

2002072878

This book was set in Times New Roman.

This publication meets the ANSI/NISO Standards for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives (Z39.481992).

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-929280-12-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-472-03804-6 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-472-12747-4 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-472-90142-5 (open access)

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Contents

MICHAEL BOURDAGHS

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL BOURDAGHS

TRANSLATED BY BRETT DE BARY

TRANSLATED BY JOHN MERTZ

TRANSLATED BY LESLIE WINSTON

TRANSLATED BY AYAKO KANO

TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH ESSERTIER

TRANSLATED BY JOSHUA YOUNG

TRANSLATED BY LEWIS HARRINGTON

TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH MURPHY

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT STEEN AND MICHAEL BOURDAGHS

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL BOURDAGHS

TRANSLATED BY ANTONIA SAXON

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL BOURDAGHS

MICHAEL BOURDAGHS

The decade between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s saw a revolution in the study of modern Japanese literature. It is, first of all, within this context that Kamei Hideos work should be understood. A new generation of scholars arose in revolt against the largely positivistic methodologies that had dominated postwar scholarship, including author studies (sakkaron), studies of a single work (sakuhinron), and literary history (bungakushi). Works such as Maeda Ais The Establishment of the Modern Reader (Kindai dokusha no seiritsu, 1973), Noguchi Takehikos The Japanese Language in Fiction (Shsetsu no Nihongo, 1980), and Karatani Kjins Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Kindai Nihon bungaku no kigen, 1980), began the process of challenging orthodox interpretations, often introducing new methodologies in the process, including semiotics, narratology, structuralism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism.the problem, a problem of which Japanese modern literature and established literary studies were symptoms.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the intellectual ferment continued and in many ways the new scholarship carried the day. Among the influential works published were Asada Akiras Structure and Power (Kz to chikara, 1983), Komori Yichis Narrative as Structure (Kz toshite no katari, 1988) and Suga Hidemis The Birth of Japanese Modern Literature (Nihon kindai bungaku no tanj, 1995). Feminist criticism continued to flourish, including such important anthologies as On Mens Literature (Danry bungakuron, edited by Ueno Chizuko, Ogura Chikako, and Tomioka Taeko, 1992) and Modern Literature as Read by Women (Onna ga yomu kindai bungaku, edited by Egusa Mitsuko and Urushida Kazuyo, 1992). This period also saw the rise of a postcolonial New Historicism in the work of such scholars as Watanabe Naomi, Murai Osamu, and Kawamura Minato.

As he writes in his preface to this translation, Kamei Hideos work exists in an odd relationship to this revolution. It is certainly true that he helped pioneer this new wave of scholarship; yet it is also true that the road Kamei paved, while often parallel to the new scholarship, never quite intersected with it. The attention Kamei pays to the textual processes of subject formation, his assumption that subjectivity is a historical construct, and his use of the methodologies of close reading, semiotics and narratology all seem to ally Kamei with the young turks. Yet, on the other hand, many of the philosophical sources and historical assumptions that Kamei employs, especially his stance toward modernity, distinguish him from his contemporaries. Moreover, although he is critical of it, Kamei clearly places himself within the lineage of kokubungaku, of academic Japanese literary studies. Whereas his contemporaries largely positioned their critique as external to its object, in many senses Kameis work is an immanent critique. It is this unique position that provides both the excitement and the difficulty in reading Kameis highly original and provocative works.

In the present book, Kamei, like many of his contemporaries, explores the terrain of early-Meiji writing, which previous scholarship had all too often neglected.ties, possibilities that were subsequently lost with the rise to hegemony of the realistic novel. To recover these possibilities, he performs close readings of the expressions used in an astonishing variety of texts. Through these readings, Kamei describes the rise of new modes of sensibility, modes defined by particular forms of visual intentionality as well as by varying degrees of sensitivity to the tonal and rhythmic qualities of spoken language.

The production of these new sensibilities is largely the result of the emergence of a new kind of fictional narrator, what Kamei calls the immanent non-person narrator. This new narrator creates the possibility for new forms of self-consciousness, because its existence relativizes the sensibilities not only of the various characters who appear in a work, but also of the author who wrote that narrator into existence (and thereby underwent a splitting or doubling of his or her own self). Because literary texts objectify modes of sensibility, they render those modes visible to the subjects (authors, narrators, and readers) who perceive through themthose subjects become able to see the previously transparent lenses through which they view the world. The knowledge about sensibility thus gained empowers them to alter those modes of sensibility. For Kamei, modern literature is at its best moments a site for realizing new forms of self-consciousness and for the evolution of a new kind of ethicality, as it becomes possible to take responsibility for ones own sensibility.

Kamei begins with the opening chapters of Futabatei Shimeis Ukigumo (188789), long proclaimed Japans first modern novel, and through a close reading overturns much conventional wisdom. The distinct sensibility of the narrator of those early chapters comes neither from Russian literature nor from oral storytelling genres, Kamei argues, but rather from a genre of popular comic reportage written in a Japanified form of Chinese, the