Poets, Paragons, and Literary Politics: Sugawara no Michizane in Imperial Japan
Robert Tuck examines the Meiji reception of the Heian scholar and poet Sugawara no Michizane (845–903) to outline the development of several influential modern narratives of Sino-Japanese literary relations. Beginning with the views of Michizane held by Edo-period Confucian scholars, he proceeds to cover key debates among Meiji scholars concerning Michizane as an icon of imperial loyalty and as a kanshi poet of “utmost sincerity” (shisei). In the 1890s literary scholars attacked all Heian kanshi writing as insincere and formalistic, but from 1902, the one-thousandth anniversary of Michizane’s death, other scholars made Michizane the focus of a new narrative in which Japan overcame the linguistic obstacles of literary Chinese and domesticated kanshi. By analyzing Meiji scholars’ discourse on Michizane, Tuck reveals the cultural and ideological currents that continue to influence narratives of Sino-Japanese literary history to the present day.
“Plus ça Change …”
Katō Shūichi's new history of Japanese literature will be completed with the publication of its second volume, promised by the publisher for 1980, and advertised as “tak[ing] the story from the end of the Muromachi period … to the present day”). Whatever critical response ultimately greets the project, no one is likely to complain that the author tried to keep us in the dark about the theoretical assumptions, much less the analytical approach, that he means to bring to bear upon his subject. Indeed, the entire long introduction (pp. 1–26) with which the first volume of Katō's history begins is an exposition of the author's working hypotheses, under five main subheadings. We are told that “[b]y tracing these factors and seeing how they interrelate, a clear picture of the structure of Japanese literature emerges and it becomes possible to present an orderly account of the history of that literature …” (p. 1). After giving this remarkably clear statement of his analytic work-plan, the author at once plunges into his main task, in chapters on “The Age of the Manyōshū,” “The Age of the Genji monogatari and the Konjaku monogatari,” and “The Age of Nō and Kyōgen.”
Suicidal Honor: General Nogi and the Writings of Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki
On September 13, 1912, the day of Emperor Meiji's funeral, General Nogi Maresuke committed ritual suicide by seppuku (disembowelment). The revered military hero's wife joined in his act of junshi ("following one's lord into death"). The violence of their double suicide shocked the nation. Doris Bargen, in the first half of her book, demonstrates that the deeper significance of Nogi's action must be sought in his personal history, enmeshed as it was in the tumultuous politics of the Meiji period. In the second half of "Suicidal Honor", Bargen turns to the extraordinary influence of the Nogis' deaths on two of Japan's greatest writers, Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki. Ogai's historical fiction is a profound meditation on the significance of ritual suicide in a time of historical transition. The protagonist of Kokoro, Soseki's masterpiece, refers to the general's junshi before taking his own life. Scholars routinely mention this reference, but Bargen demonstrates the ways in which Soseki's agonized response to Nogi's suicide structures the entire novel. By exploring the historical and literary legacies of Nogi, Ogai, and Soseki from an interdisciplinary perspective, "Suicidal Honor" illuminates Japan's prolonged and painful transition from the idealized heroic world of samurai culture to the mundane anxieties of modernity.