The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction, and: Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji (review)
The two volumes under review, although markedly different in their respective critical approaches, together reflect the growing sophistication of research in the field of modern Japanese literature. Edward Fowler's groundbreaking study of the shishosetsu, a problematic and much-debated form of autobiographical fiction that dominated the TaishD (1912-1926) literary scene, signals the coming-of-age of a narratological approach to Japanese literary texts. Fowler's study consists of three sections, the first two serving as the theoretical and cultural-historical framework and the third exploring the work of representative authors. Fowler seeks to demonstrate that the shishosetsu, despite its relatively brief heyday and limited readership, occupies the very heartland of modern Japanese fiction. In his view, intrinsic features of Japanese language and culture (and here Buddhism and Confucianism figure prominendy) have combined to foster a literary tradition in which putatively authentic accounts of personal experience came to acquire a privileged status, while the art(ifice) of fiction, insofar as it was perceived as such, was denigrated on account of its inferior truth value. This tradition, of which shishosetsu is a recent manifestation, has elevated "sincerity" and "genuineness" at the expense of "mere" storytelling. As a consequence, an author's life became in effect a meta-text, the ultimate referent for any judgment of one's writing. Deriving in part from a collective literary self-examination by young writers at the turn of the twentieth century, the shishosetsu emerged as a conventionalized form of highly subjective, largely confessional narrative in which the boundary between author, narrator, and protagonist is attenuated in the extreme. In the course of exposing the curious opacity and emptiness of what purports to be the