Book reviews -- The Fiction of Tokuda Shusei and the Emergence of Japan's New Middle Class by Richard Torrance

THE FICTION OF TOKUDA SHUSEI AND THE EMERGENCE OF JAPAN'S NEW MIDDLE CLASS. By Richard Torrance. Seattle (Washington): University of Washington. 1994. xi, 268 pp. US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 0-295-97296-3.

THIS CRITICAL STUDY provides the first book-length treatment of the works and life of Japanese author Tokuda Shusei in English and also represents an attempt to salvage Shusei from relative obscurity even in Japan. Torrance's analysis situates Shusei's fiction in the cultural, economic, and political upheavals surrounding Japan's transition into the more open and increasingly capitalistic world of the Meiji era (1868-1912). The analysis is thus relevant not only for Japanese literary specialists but also for anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and those interested in a cultural understanding of economic behaviour. At the heart of Shusei's work is the concept of shomin, or commoner, culture. In contrast to the intelligentsia and wealthy elites, who were avid consumers of the West during Meiji, the commoner masses, products of...