My study has outlined the nineteenth-century modernity of the Japanese novel as a coherent literary-historical space held together by a critical and narrative concern with ninjō. This concern was grounded in the notion that the novel is a problematic, if not licentious, genre because of its representation of ninjō, but also often in the attempt to assert its social, moral, and political value, often in contradiction with the depiction of licentious love and desire. A suspicion about the disruptive potential of ninjō had been inherent in traditional literary discourse, but only with the new centrality of the novel and its genealogy in the nineteenth century did this suspicion generate, to an unprecedented degree of intensity, narrative practices and critical scrutiny surrounding the social value and danger of literary writing. The genealogy of the licentious novel comprised early-modern Chinese vernacular works, early nineteenth-century ninjōbon and yomihon, as well as, influenced by these, Meiji critical and narrative experiments including Shōyō’s and Sōseki’s. To outline this genealogy, across the epistemological permutations of the early modern–modern divide, has been a major ambition of this study.
By the early twentieth century, however, the continuous literary-historical space of the nineteenth-century shōsetsu was waning. A broader configuration of interlocked discursive and literary transformations marked the demise of this space. As discussed, by the time the literary discourse of naturalism emerged, the novel’s depiction of erotic love and desire, even if dark, ugly, and “animalistic,” had become largely unproblematic and literally naturalized. The early twentieth century also witnessed, in close correlation with the establishment of naturalism as the main literary current, the emergence of a new discourse that posited Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui and its notion of the realist depiction of ninjō as the origin of modern Japanese literature.1 This discourse redefined Shōyō’s terms mosha and ninjō as belonging to a new mimetic psychological realism, focusing on the emotional interiority of the novel’s protagonists in the vein of nineteenth-century European works, and it saw Shōsetsu shinzui as the necessary theoretical precursor for the contemporary naturalist novel and its rhetoric of unadorned depiction even of ugly desire.2 This discourse already ignored the complex narrative and critical engagement with the licentiousness of ninjō and its realist depiction in Shōyō’s own works.
The canonization of Shōyō’s critical discourse as the origin of Japanese literary modernity also correlated with the decanonization of the novel’s earlier genre memory that was defined by Chinese vernacular fiction and the gesaku classics. In 1907, for instance, literary critic Ikuta Chōkō (1882–1936) noted the following:
Shōsetsu shinzui is truly a revolutionary in the world of the novel. This revolutionary’s outcry—the great outcry that urged the literary world of our nation to adopt a new and fresh intellectual trend—even awoke the slumber of our old-fashioned novelists. The silly didacticism [kanchōshugi] was finally vanquished in the eyes of the public and realist depiction valued; psychological description with human emotion as the main focus became the general trend. For the first time did the world of our novel have the chance to get in touch with nineteenth-century world literature, and the light of literary art [bungei] suddenly shone brightly. Seen at least from one angle, Shōsetsu shinzui’s realism was truly a manifesto of literary independence, and this manifesto’s message undoubtedly made the dividing wall between Meiji literature and the literature before Meiji even thicker.3
Ikuta not only presents Shōsetsu shinzui as the “revolutionary” origin of a modern literary order but also posits “silly didacticism,” an obvious reference to Bakin’s kanzen chōaku, as opposed to this order. Although Shōyō criticized Bakin’s writings for their exclusive focus on moral didacticism, Shōsetsu shinzui by no means declared kanzen chōaku as obsolete, but on the contrary highlighted its importance as one of the novel’s “indirect benefits.” A moral-didactic, “idealist” outlook still fundamentally defined Shōyō’s understanding of literary fiction. It was only with discourses like Ikuta’s in the early twentieth century that Bakin’s yomihon in particular were produced as the other of the literary modernity allegedly epitomized by Shōsetsu shinzui—as a premodernity defined by moralism that contradicted the novel’s modern focus on psychological interiority. On the other hand, with the naturalization of “dark” desire as the novel’s core in Japanese naturalist discourse, the notion of licentiousness in earlier ninjōbon discourse became obsolete. If a work like Tayama Katai’s Futon (The Quilt, 1907), often hailed as one of the masterworks of Japanese naturalist fiction, still upheld the earlier enlightenment dichotomy of chaste spiritual love and licentious desire, it did so mainly to ironically highlight the hypocrisy of chaste spirituality in the light of desire’s truth.4
This broader shift in the first decade of the twentieth century was interlocked with the demise of Sinitic literacy and learning, both classical and vernacular, as an active cultural field and, concurrently, the massive promotion of the vernacular genbun itchi style as a national language in the wake of Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Influenced by the writings of linguistic ideologues, the government had begun to actively implement the establishment of a standardized, national language, especially through new elementary-school curricula that increasingly privileged the genbun itchi style over traditional forms of literacy. By the 1920s, genbun itchi had become the dominant written language, not only in education but also in public discourse, including newspapers, general magazines, and literary writings, thus also defining the standard of vernacular Japanese as a national spoken language.5 As shown in chapter 1, traditional East Asian notions of literary writing had provided the ideological and intellectual basis for asserting the moral-didactic, social, and political value even of the shōsetsu—and for asserting the licentiousness of ninjō. This does not mean that assertions of the moral-didactic function of literature were absent from twentieth-century literary discourse. The proletarian literary movement of the 1920s and early 1930s invested great interest in the political mission of the novel, but this interest was defined by Marxist ideological concerns that were already divorced from the moral-didactic and civilizational parameters that had defined earlier discourse.
While the broader epistemological transformations in early twentieth-century Japan certainly warrant further scrutiny, my cursory overview of them here should suffice to highlight the historicity of the nineteenth-century Japanese novel and its literary space. The genealogy of the novel outlined in this study intrinsically belonged to the nineteenth century and its modernity (its variegated epistemological and discursive contexts), but it also relied on the continuity, from premodern discussions well into the early twentieth century, of the critical concern with licentious ninjō and the social-didactic function of literary writing. The nineteenth-century shōsetsu enacted the intensification, the complexification, even the culmination of this concern but, notably, also its ending. It is in this sense that its literary space, historiographically, was transitory and hybrid. It looked back to the past by intensifying and reconfiguring it, but it also, in terms of an ending, gave way to an incommensurable future. Its key category was emotion, not as the signifier for the psychological interiority of mimetic realism but as ninjō, the traditional concept that came to shape nineteenth-century narrative and critical discourse in new and complex ways.