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The "I-novel" in the Context of Japanese Modernism
Modern Japanese literature, as Reiko Abe Auestad notes, "has been from the outset defined and evaluated in its relationship to mainstream Western literature,"1 as much of its distinctiveness borrows from European modernist philosophies and discursive practices. In particular is the I-novel, or shishôsetsu, which flourished considerably during the Taishô period (1912-26) and continues to form the metanarrative of Japanese literature and criticism up until today. This genre coincides with what Karatani Kojin sees as the "discovery of interiority" in Japanese literature, in which the self, or the exploration of it, forms the central theme.2 The paramount characteristic of the shishôsetsu is its exploitation of the alleged transparency of language to convey the author's "selF' directly; or, in Karatani Kojin's words, this literary mode conflates the "T who confesses and the subject of confession."3 Even opponents of this tradition, who criticize "the immaturity and the absence of the modern self in the Japanese novel," assume in the end "that the ultimate meaning of these texts resided in their 'origin,' the author's 'self.'"4 This notion of "self - autonomous and individual - is "part and parcel of all other sorts of 'modern' ideas suddenly being imported from Europe and America" during the Meiji period (1868- 1912).5
But self is a notoriously slippery signifier, and, as several scholars have demonstrated, the shishôsetsu is not always consistent in its claim, simply because this is impossible.6 As much as modern Japanese literature textually embodies the transparent self, it is also a self rent between increasing Westernization and stubborn adherence to a slowly vanishing Japanese identity, which results in a bifurcation that led critic Kobayashi Hideo, as early as 1933, to declare that "the fundamental feature of contemporary Japanese culture is a pervasive spirit of homelessness and loss."7 Kobayashi's ruing of this "unreal" world of Japan is linked to the "phantasmal quality of modernity [of which one effect is] the massive internalization of foreign culture, which has already advanced to the point that 'self and 'other' can no longer be effectively distinguished."8 Japanese modernism is reacting not only against outmoded cultural forms, but against a foreign culture, as well.9 Part of the inevitability of Japanese literature's importation of the "autonomous" self from Europe...