Readers of novels in this world must see them with utmost precaution! Novels are like morphine: one must love them, but also fear them.
—TSUBOUCHI SHŌYŌ, IMOTOSE KAGAMI
In his seminal treatise of 1885–1886, Shōsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel), the literary critic, translator, and novelist Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) famously defined the fundamental objective of the novel thus: “The main focus of the novel is on ninjō [human emotion]. Social customs come next in importance.”1 This often-cited declaration has been read as the programmatic formulation of a new understanding of the novel, focusing on the emotional interiority of the modern private subject and the mimetic representation of social customs. Shōyō’s emphasis on human emotion—male-female love and desire—came to be seen as the discursive origin of the modern novel in Japan, for which the depiction of emotion was a major signifier. It is striking, however, that Shōyō, throughout his treatise, defines the key word ninjō in predominantly negative terms, such as vulgar passion (retsujō). The true novel (makoto no shōsetsu) that Shōyō envisions should didactically demonstrate how the protagonist fights his or her vulgar passion, for instance through reason.2 It is by depicting the plot of such a struggle that the novel, for Shōyō, can confer its social “benefits,” including the ability to elevate and civilize the readers’ feelings and thus free them from devastating passion. In seemingly paradoxical fashion, Shōyō highlights as the novel’s main focus an element—ninjō—that is immoral or, from the viewpoint of Meiji-period (1868–1912) enlightenment ideology, uncivilized. Only through the novel’s didactic framework, which lies in writing the struggle with and control of vulgar passion, can it contain the danger of ninjō and deploy its social, civilizational, and moral significance.
A bit more than twenty years after the publication of Shōsetsu shinzui, in 1907, Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) defined the literary genre of sketch prose (shaseibun) as one that would allow for more affective distance from the “human emotions” of the depicted fictional characters than the novel.3 Whereas the novelist, Sōseki argues, passionately cries with the emotions of his or her characters—their love, for instance—the sketcher, while not necessarily cold, is humorously detached from those emotions. In Sōseki’s famous analogy, the sketcher is like a parent who does not cry with his or her child but distantly, and gently, observes its tears. What brings together Shōyō’s and Sōseki’s literary projects is their common understanding of the novel as a genre focusing on ninjō as something problematic. Sōseki’s exploration of sketch prose precisely hinges on his interest in a type of narrative that still relates to ninjō like the novel but is less exposed to its potential dangers.
About seventy years prior to Sōseki’s reflection on sketch prose, in the mid-1830s, the popular author Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1843) defined the type of narrative fiction he called ninjōbon (books of human emotion) as one that would predominantly focus on ninjō—male-female love. Shunsui’s view of ninjō was positive because he claimed, in line with previous Edo-period (1600–1868) discussions, that an understanding of emotion, to be brought about by his writings, could promote empathy in his readers and allow for stronger social cohesion. However, contemporary discourses of which Shunsui was well aware also decried his writings as licentious because of their emphasis on ninjō. The critical view of Shunsui’s ninjōbon as licentious writing was the outcome of prior eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discussions of narrative fiction; at the same time, the label of licentiousness became attached to the novel more broadly, thus branding it for its problematic depiction of ninjō well across the Edo-Meiji divide. Shōyō’s equation, in Shōsetsu shinzui, of ninjō with vulgar passion must be seen in the context of this broader historical awareness of the novel’s licentiousness.
Licentious Fictions explores and historicizes the central significance of ninjō in the nineteenth-century Japanese novel, and in discourses surrounding it, from the Edo period to the Meiji period. Ninjō was an important key word in traditional criticism that, while literally meaning “human emotion,” was often used primarily in reference to amorous sentiment (love) and sexual desire. It was seen as a powerful moral agent that could reinforce the social order, by inspiring empathy, for example. At the same time, it became an object of mistrust as a force that could be dangerously excessive, to the point of breaking social and ethical norms. Most important, ninjō was seen as what literary writing was meant to represent and convey—and what made it potentially suspect. Traditional critical discussions defined poetry as a medium that could channel and represent unregulated emotions and desires. But beginning in the eighteenth century, a strong awareness of ninjō started to shape a broader spectrum of Japanese genres, including jōruri puppet plays and particularly narrative fiction. The exploration of love and desire also lay at the heart of the early-modern Chinese vernacular novel. This book argues that Edo-period narrative genres beginning in the early nineteenth century, especially ninjōbon and yomihon (books for reading), continued and extended this exploration. It also demonstrates how the Meiji novel, instead of superseding earlier discourses and narrative practices related to ninjō, complicated them, for instance by integrating them into the cultural and literary concepts brought about by Western texts and translation—concepts such as realism and passionate love. An important goal is to historicize the Meiji-period novel in its interconnection not only to modern Western models but also to early-modern (and premodern) critical views and narrative practices spurred by cultural anxieties about literary writing, emotion, and desire.
On the one hand, Licentious Fictions presents a discursive history. It examines the continuity of discourses on poetry and, starting in the mid-eighteenth century, the novel (shōsetsu) as textual media that were thought not only to represent emotion and desire but also to dangerously convey them to the reader—to “teach licentiousness and incite to desire” (kaiin dōyoku), as the often-repeated early-modern catchphrase had it. I contextualize the continuity of these discussions within broader shifting discursive and epistemological frameworks across the early modern–modern divide—from a Confucian ethical framework in the late Edo period, for example, to the dominant discourses of civilization and enlightenment in the early to mid-Meiji. The primary historiographical objective, however, is not to reassert epistemological divides as they are often identified with regard to the Edo-Meiji transition. Instead, I examine, across the sometimes radical permutations in the discursive, sociocultural, and literary environment of nineteenth-century Japan, the continuous concern with the novel as problematic and licentious because of the emotions that it contained and generated in readers.
On the other hand and most important, this study closely analyzes narrative practices surrounding ninjō in the Japanese novel. These practices—involving, among other aspects, dynamics of plot and gendered representation—negotiate a fundamental ambivalence inherent in the novel. This ambivalence derives, for one, from the writers’ critical awareness of not only representing emotion and desire but also dangerously conveying them to the reader and thus potentially disrupting the social order. The other side of the novel’s ambivalence is its claim to moral, social, political, or (in the context of Meiji Japan) civilizational value—its ambition, for instance, to contain the licentiousness of ninjō. The ascription of social and political significance to literary writing, including narrative fiction, was traditionally reflected in notions of didacticism that sought to legitimate and, to a certain extent, elevate literature as moral teaching or as a medium that could “promote virtue and chastise vice” (kanzen chōaku). In the Meiji period, the social benefit of the novel, in turn, was largely defined by its ability to elevate society to civilization and progress. These didactic ascriptions contrasted and sometimes clashed with the novel’s perceived lowly entertainment value and, more fundamentally, with its awareness of being a genre representing and producing in the reader licentious emotions and desire. The ambiguity produced by the contrast between the novel’s licentiousness and ascribed didactic value was the motor for complex narrative practices surrounding the nature and value of the novel as literary writing that this book brings to light and disentangles.
Licentious Fictions describes the nineteenth century as a coherent literary and discursive space held together by an intensified critical and narrative awareness of emotion. The anxiety about the licentiousness of ninjō in literary writing was a traditional one, greatly predating the nineteenth century, but with the emergence of mass-produced popular genres—in particular yomihon and ninjōbon—in the early nineteenth century, the tension produced by the need to both represent licentious ninjō and assert the social-didactic value of literary fiction engendered narrative practices of an unprecedented complexity. This complexity continued to mark the Meiji novel, even within its new epistemological parameters. Japan’s nineteenth-century modernity was an intermediate and hybrid literary-historical space, where the traditional concern with ninjō and its licentiousness underwent an unparalleled intensification within the new medium of the novel, before these concerns were ultimately superseded in the early twentieth century. We must get away from narratives that have described the emergence of modern literature in Meiji Japan by a new emphasis on, or even the liberation of, emotion as the prerogative of modern interiority and its realist representation, defined against the alleged didacticism of premodern genres. Major narrative works across the Edo-Meiji divide were in fact both didactic and emotional, engaging with and negotiating in various ways the problematic character of emotion and desire.
NINJŌ AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY JAPANESE NOVEL
My use of the term “novel” closely follows the historical concept of shōsetsu (Ch. xiaoshuo) that, in the early nineteenth century, started to gain broader currency and defined an important literary continuity across the Edo-Meiji transition.4 The Chinese term xiaoshuo (literally, “small talk”), and the largely synonymous baishi (Jp. haishi, “unofficial or petty history”), was originally associated with the historiographical tradition. Popular gossip or the “small talk” on the streets was collected by low-ranking “petty officials” (Ch. baiguan, Jp. haikan) and compiled, for the ruler to peruse, into unofficial histories of a more private, fictional, and morally dubious nature than that of official history.5 This understanding of xiaoshuo as “petty” historiographical writing at the bottom of the genre hierarchy prevailed throughout the premodern period in China. But beginning in the seventeenth century, the term also came to increasingly refer to the long vernacular masterworks of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1911), including historical works like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi yanyi) and The Water Margin (Shuihuzhuan) or the erotic classic The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinpingmei).6 While constituting “lowly” fictional entertainment, these works had important literary, intellectual, and moral ambitions. It was in the context of the reception and study of these works and other vernacular and classical narrative Chinese texts in the eighteenth century that the concept of shōsetsu became more broadly disseminated in Japan. However, only with the emergence of the new genre of the yomihon, often written as adaptations of Ming-Qing vernacular works and culminating in Kyokutei Bakin’s (1767–1848) oeuvre in the early nineteenth century, did the term shōsetsu start to refer more specifically to Japanese fiction.7
The early nineteenth century in Japan witnessed a boom in new vernacular genres, subsumed under the label of gesaku (playful writing). The notion of gesaku, which originated in the eighteenth century, by the early nineteenth century comprised all varieties of popular, widely read, and often mass-produced Japanese fiction in various material and narrative formats, including yomihon, ninjōbon, kokkeibon (books of humor), and heavily illustrated genres such as kusazōshi (picture books) and gōkan (bound books). The term shōsetsu, however, came to refer almost exclusively to works of vernacular Chinese fiction and Japanese yomihon, especially those by Bakin, who was the unrivaled master of the genre. The latter stood out among all other gesaku genres by their stylistic sophistication, their extreme degree of literacy as adaptions of sometimes multiple Chinese works and sources (both classical and vernacular), and by a “serious” moral and didactic ambition best summarized by Bakin’s key slogan of “promoting virtue and chastising vice.”8 By modeling his yomihon on the long masterworks of Chinese vernacular fiction, Bakin firmly established the Japanese shōsetsu within the genealogy of the Chinese vernacular novel.
The tremendous impact of Bakin’s yomihon in defining the nature of shōsetsu in nineteenth-century Japan cannot be underestimated. There was a continuous sense of the canonicity and superior value of these works. Tsubouchi Shōyō, who avidly consumed all types of popular fiction as a youth, states in one of his memoirs how, as a young reader, he awoke to the great superiority of Bakin over all other authors of popular fiction.9 An important reason for the ascription of value to Bakin’s yomihon was certainly the inherent quality of the writing—the stylistic and thematic sophistication of his works—but of particular relevance was the great extent to which Bakin made moral didacticism, crystallized in the slogan kanzen chōaku, the major structural and thematic paradigm of his long novels. This didacticism is what Shōyō defined as Bakin’s writing of “idealist novels” (aidiaru noberu), and he also significantly notes that with Bakin the novel could, for the first time, be enjoyed by readers belonging to the “intellectual class.”10 Although Shōyō, in Shōsetsu shinzui, famously criticized Bakin’s yomihon for their one-sided didacticism, a strong admiration for Bakin’s “idealism” also continuously marked his project of the novel’s reform.
Another important, but hitherto little-discussed, aspect of Bakin’s novels was their strong awareness of ninjō—amorous emotion and erotic desire—that derived from the reception, in the early nineteenth century, of so-called licentious books (insho) from China. These were vernacular erotic novels like the Jinpingmei or scholar and beauty fiction (Ch. caizi jiaren xiaoshuo, Jp. saishi kajin shōsetsu) that foregrounded the devastating and titillating power of desire while also emphasizing, as especially the scholar and beauty genre did, virtuous chastity as desire’s equally titillating antipode. Bakin wrote adaptations of both the Jinpingmei and scholar and beauty novels, and his masterwork Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Eight dog chronicle of the Nansō Satomi clan, 1814–1842) engages in narrative practices that subtly negotiate the novel’s didactic idealism against the writing of desire or, more fundamentally, the novel’s desire-inspiring nature.
Bakin’s yomihon, however, were not seen as licentious books. This label came to refer to another genre that was of particular importance in a longer nineteenth-century perspective: the ninjōbon that were especially associated with their “founder,” Tamenaga Shunsui.11 Ninjōbon presented narratives of an often mildly erotic nature that focused on male-female amorous interactions involving pleasure-quarter courtesans and geisha.12 Like other genres of gesaku fiction, ninjōbon were more lowbrow than Bakin’s sophisticated historical novels, and Shunsui rarely refers to his writings as shōsetsu.13 However, I argue that ninjōbon must also be contextualized in the broader nineteenth-century reception of Chinese vernacular fiction—especially the chaste scholar and beauty genre—and Bakin’s novels. In his masterwork Shunshoku umegoyomi (Spring-Color Plum Calendar, 1832–33), Shunsui explicitly highlights the virtuous chastity of his courtesan heroines, emphasizing the didactic mission of his writing as kanzen chōaku. At the same time, surrounding discussions consistently condemned the ninjōbon as licentious for their representation of ninjō. This was tremendously important because such discussions were instrumental in the broader criticism, across the Edo-Meiji transition, of the shōsetsu as a problematic and dangerous genre.
The early to mid-nineteenth century in fact witnessed a broadening of the shōsetsu concept toward a wider array of vernacular Japanese genres, including ninjōbon. In 1849, Kimura Mokurō (1774–1856), a senior samurai official and friend and disciple of Bakin’s, wrote a treatise titled “Kokuji shōsetsu tsū” (A guide to the novel in native script) that offered a comprehensive chart of the shōsetsu as Mokurō understood it. In addition to classical Japanese works like The Tale of Genji, the chart subsumed under this generic label works of Ming-Qing vernacular fiction and, notably, all contemporary Japanese writings that belonged to gesaku, including yomihon, ninjōbon, and the heavily illustrated kusazōshi and gōkan.14 Mokurō’s chart was strictly hierarchical. An admirer of Bakin’s yomihon for their moral value and literary sophistication, Mokurō saw the ninjōbon in particular as the novel’s most dangerous and vulgar subfield, on the same level as reprehensible Chinese licentious works like the Jinpingmei. At the same time, his chart outlined the shōsetsu’s broader conceptual scope that would be of great relevance in a longer nineteenth-century perspective. Significantly, in Shōsetsu shinzui, Tsubouchi Shōyō largely adopted the historical and semantic range of the shōsetsu that had been delineated in Mokurō’s treatise. He also subsumed works of Western fiction under the conceptual umbrella of the shōsetsu. However, Shōyō’s exposure to the Western contemporary novel was extremely limited and largely restricted to works by specific English authors. These works had a strong similarity to genres of gesaku fiction, of which Shōyō was aware.15 In this fashion, Shōsetsu shinzui performed only a gradual—and not a radical—transformation of the shōsetsu concept in Japan.
Licentious Fictions relies on the genealogy of the shōsetsu from the eighteenth-century reception of specific vernacular Chinese works across the Edo-Meiji transition. In particular, I retrace the genealogy of the shōsetsu that revolved around discourses and narrative practices of ninjō, negotiating what I previously called the novel’s ambivalence: its critical awareness of inciting potentially licentious emotions in the reader, along with its claim to moral, social, and (in the Meiji period) civilizational value. In the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly yomihon and ninjōbon—and their paradigmatic authors Kyokutei Bakin and Tamenaga Shunsui, respectively—were of paramount importance in shaping the discourses and narrative practices surrounding ninjō that would have a great impact on notions of the novel in the Meiji period. As already discussed, yomihon and ninjōbon were antithetical genres that seemed to embody opposed qualities of the shōsetsu: the yomihon’s moral and didactic value and the ninjōbon’s desire-inducing licentiousness. Taken together, both genres defined the ambiguous range of the shōsetsu in nineteenth-century Japan, but they also, in different ways, negotiated the novel’s ambiguity within their own generic formats.
Important recent studies have provided a much more nuanced understanding of the new Meiji novel from a variety of analytical and thematic angles, and there is no doubt about the tremendous transformations—sociopolitical, ideological, stylistic—that Japanese writing underwent during the Meiji period, sometimes conceptualized as a moment of a radical epistemological break. My study, however, proposes a different model for the Edo-Meiji transition, highlighting the constitutive critical awareness of what could be called the gesaku classics—especially Bakin’s yomihon and Shunsui’s ninjōbon—for the reform of the novel in the mid-Meiji period. Specific gesaku works were canonized as paradigmatic for their respective subgenres in the early Meiji period. The “scholar of the West” (yōgakusha) and later journalist Fukuchi Ōchi (1841–1906), for example, identified as early as 1875 the following “four masterworks of the novel” (shidai kisho) in Japan that were all produced in the first half of the nineteenth century: Bakin’s Hakkenden for the yomihon, Shunsui’s Shunshoku umegoyomi for the ninjōbon, Ryūtei Tanehiko’s (1783–1842) Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (A Country Genji by a Commoner Murasaki, 1829–1842) for the bound picture books (gōkan), and Jippensha Ikku’s (1765–1831) Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (Travels on the Eastern Seaboard, 1802–1809) for the books of humor (kokkeibon).16 These works are still considered today as representative masterpieces, included in most anthologies and literary histories of late Edo-period gesaku literature. This in itself is an important demonstration of the longue durée historicity of the literary canon for certain works, which complicates assumptions about the canon as a simple modern construction.17
Even more important, the early canonization of these gesaku classics helps us see the Edo-Meiji transition in a new conceptual light. In Shōsetsu shinzui, Bakin’s Hakkenden and Shunsui’s Shunshoku umegoyomi are by far the most-cited literary references, not only in quantity but also in quality. Two conclusions must be drawn from this fact. First, more than any prior works, the early nineteenth-century gesaku classics—particularly Bakin’s yomihon and Shunsui’s ninjōbon—were references of primary importance for the newly emerging Meiji novel. There is a continuous literary space of the nineteenth-century Japanese novel. Second, it is legitimate to discard, at least for the purposes of this discussion, the many minor gesaku works and authors that proliferated, from the bakumatsu period well into Meiji times, in the shadow of the gesaku classics—authors and works that Shōyō, in Shōsetsu shinzui, dismisses as the “dregs of Bakin and Tanehiko.” Instead, I seek to make visible the important genealogy of the Japanese novel directly linking the gesaku classics to Shōyō’s reform or, to be more precise, to the early translations from Western fiction in the late 1870s and early 1880s. These works for the first time challenged the model of gesaku fiction and paved the way for Shōyō’s literary reform and the subsequent Meiji novel.
In the late 1870s and 1880s, ninjō became a key concept in discourses of the novel’s reform. These were partly triggered by new Western translations, in particular the highly acclaimed novel Karyū shunwa (Spring tale of flowers and willows, 1878–1879), the abridged translation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (1803–1873) novel Ernest Maltravers (1837) and its sequel Alice (1838). Translations like Karyū shunwa provided a new model for the representation of ninjō where passion (translated as jō)—a new Meiji term for sexualized love and desire, also used in reference to ninjōbon—could be integrated into a narrative that emphasized the moral and civilized control of passion and desire. This new type of narrative reflected Meiji civilizational and enlightenment concerns that aimed at the suppression of unenlightened practices, including the type of licentious love associated with the ninjōbon, but it also gestured back to the moral didacticism of Bakin’s yomihon. New translations like Karyū shunwa allowed for the representation of a new type of male protagonist, who was subject to licentious ninjōbon passion but could also subject this passion to civilized and moral control, for instance by integrating it into a monogamous marriage. New Western notions of sexualized passion and married love, predicated on the control of passion, were translated into a narrative format that combined elements of the ninjōbon and yomihon while responding to new Meiji enlightenment parameters.
Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui needs to be contextualized in the new literary space opened up by translations like Karyū shunwa that allowed for the discursive and narrative reconfiguration of ninjōbon and yomihon elements. I examine Shōyō’s reform discourse and his novels produced during the 1880s in great detail because his literary project not only synthesized the earlier gesaku tradition but also shaped the subsequent Meiji novel, which became defined primarily in reference to its representation of ninjō. In this sense, Shōyō’s project of literary reform lies at the heart of the nineteenth-century space of the Japanese novel. In Shōsetsu shinzui, Shōyō defined the (male) protagonist of the reformed novel as subject to “vulgar passion,” which Meiji discourses associated with the licentious ninjōbon. But he also integrated Bakin’s didacticism into his discussion of ninjō by postulating the novel’s protagonist as a good person (zennin) able to control passion through enlightened reason. Shōyō thus conceived of the novel as a moral-didactic and civilizing agent that could divert readers from their own uncivilized passions.
Shōyō’s own novels written in the late 1880s, however, dramatize in various ways how the realist depiction (mosha) of ninjō “as it is” (ari no mama) in Japan was not reconcilable with the novel’s moral-didactic and civilizing ambition—what Shōyō called, in reference to Bakin, its idealism. Shōyō’s novels engaged in complex narrative practices—dynamics of plot and gender—that again brought to the fore the traditional anxiety about the novel as a medium representing uncontrollable lust. Shōyō’s new notion of realism here significantly came to stand for the depiction of ninjō “as it is,” mirroring the licentious reality of Japanese emotions and social customs (setai fūzoku)—an anxiety that was inherent in contemporary civilizational discourse and overlapped with the more traditional concern about the licentiousness of the novel. Shōyō’s novels deconstruct the criticism of Shōsetsu shinzui, highlighting the difficulty of integrating the novel’s realist representation of ninjō with an assertion of its moral and civilizational value. It is no surprise, then, that Shōyō ultimately abandoned the novel and its reform.
In the wake of Shōyō’s demise as a novelist, critical discussions continued to denounce the novel for its depiction of licentious passion and for failing to promote moral and social ideals. At the same time, the critical notion of the realist depiction of ninjō became constitutive of the new Meiji novel in the wake of Shōyō’s reform. Ninjō also became identified as the privileged content of the new notion of literature (bungaku). Beginning in the late 1890s, critical discussions—for example, in the context of Japanese naturalism (shizenshugi)—promoted an increasingly unproblematic understanding of literature as imaginative writing focusing on emotion and erotic passion while moral-didactic and civilizational anxieties regarding the licentiousness of ninjō seemed to recede into the background. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Natsume Sōseki again self-reflexively questioned various genres—sketch prose, poetry, the novel—as literary media representing, expressing, or conveying emotion. One of the fundamental intellectual movements in Sōseki’s literary and theoretical project was to problematize and critically deconstruct ninjō as the affective core of the novel and literature more broadly. Sōseki’s literary writing and theory thus still belonged to the broader nineteenth-century space of the Japanese novel that revolved around ninjō as a licentious, or at least inherently problematic, aspect of the novel and literary writing. Licentious Fictions delineates this space and the complexity of the literary projects—Bakin’s, Shōyō’s, or Sōseki’s—it engendered over time and across the Edo-Meiji transition.
EMOTION, LITERATURE, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY MODERNITY
A key word in this study is the Japanese historical term ninjō or, synonymously, jō (emotion) as well as cognates of it such as jōyoku (erotic desire). In her recent work on the history of emotion, Barbara Rosenwein has emphasized the analytical importance of what she calls emotion words.18 These are words used in the historical record to denote specific emotions and shared by historical groups of users, which she labels “emotional communities.” While a historical concept, ninjō probably does not exactly match Rosenwein’s definition, because the term mostly did not denote a specific emotion but was an umbrella term subsuming various emotions and erotic desire. One of the earliest historical definitions of ninjō is probably the following excerpt from the Chinese Record of Rites (Liji), which had been compiled by the first century AD: “What are the human emotions [Ch. renqing, Jp. ninjō]? They are joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and desire [Ch. yu, Jp. yoku]. These seven feelings belong to men without their learning them.”19 This definition remained highly influential over the centuries in China and Japan, often quoted as a set phrase. In many historical discussions, however, jō or ninjō became, explicitly or implicitly, reduced semantically to the meaning of amorous emotion or love, often including sexual desire. It was through this semantic reduction that the term became most controversial in historical discourses and narratives, and it is with this narrower meaning that I am primarily concerned.
I outline in detail the discursive history of ninjō in chapter 1; suffice it to note here that the term continuously served as a key word in discourses on literary writing. Of particular significance, a critical consciousness of ninjō is inherent in nineteenth-century Japanese narrative writings. Note Bakin’s conscious use of the term jōyoku in the context of his writing of sexual desire, Shunsui’s dramatization of love as exemplification of his key concept of ninjō, or Shōyō’s and Sōseki’s critical awareness of ninjō in conceiving of their narrative plots. These authors, who dramatized ninjō as part of their narratives, were at the same time often the critics who reflected on the significance of emotion and desire in the novel. Nineteenth-century Japanese novels, in their plots and narrative representations of gender and sexuality, engaged with the parameters of literary discourse, sometimes exceeding and complicating them in various ways. In this respect, the textual practices surrounding ninjō I describe differ from melodrama or sentimentalism. In his seminal study, Peter Brooks has defined melodrama as a “mode of excess” characterized by “high emotionalism”—that is, the staging of strong emotions, often produced by stark moral conflicts and excessive to the extent of producing cathartic effects in viewers of plays or readers of books.20 The textual practices I describe, however, do not elicit excessive emotions or tears—another important motif in melodrama—from readers, protagonists, or even authors. Instead, they reflect the novel as an ethically and socially problematic genre focusing on love and desire. A major portion of my textual analysis precisely examines how novelistic texts critically—even intellectually—negotiate their writing of problematic feelings and desires against their self-assertion of moral, social, cultural, and civilizational value.
A theoretical objective here is to reexamine and complicate historical narratives that have emphasized the significance of emotion—including love and desire—for the history of modernity, in Japan and globally. The following discussion engages with two major theoretical paradigms that have influenced the way emotion has been conceptualized for the context of Japanese modernity but that have also problematically obscured a critical awareness of the discourses and narrative practices connected to ninjō.
One important paradigm that I critique is the history of the “civilizing process,” in line with Norbert Elias’s (1897–1990) study originally published in German in 1939 (The Civilizing Process; Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation). Elias conceptualizes the history of modernity as a civilizing process that leads to the increasing restraint and control of emotions and their expression, especially those emotions deemed “uncivilized,” including aggressiveness and sexual desire.21 For Japan, especially the work of cultural historian Saeki Junko, while not explicitly engaging with Elias, has yielded comparable insights. In her seminal study “Iro” to “ai” no hikaku bunkashi (A comparative cultural history of “lust” and “love,” 1998), Saeki argues that the promotion of a new Western model of chaste, spiritual, and Christian love (ren’ai) in Meiji Japan led to the discursive devaluation and, ultimately, the demise of early-modern or premodern Japanese notions and practices epitomized by the terms iro, koi, and nasake—all denoting an erotic and often elegant type of romance. Saeki’s point is that Meiji authors often negotiated between the ideality of a new standard of spiritual, chaste love based on Western translation and the tenacity of prior conceptions and practices of erotic love inscribed in their aesthetic sensibilities. The general history of modernity that she outlines, however, is one of an increasing restraint of cultural practices of erotic love and desire.22
Saeki’s well-documented analysis is thought-provoking, but it does not entirely avoid the romanticizing narrative of the premodern or early-modern age as one of sexual diversity and freedom, eclipsed by the civilizing and disciplining impulses of (Western) modernity. According to Saeki, iro, before it became devalued as pure physical lust in Meiji discourses, was synonymous with the premodern cultural practices surrounding irogonomi—the elegant pursuit of erotic romance—or the aesthetic universe of the pleasure quarter in the Edo period.23 Iro thus principally belonged to the realm of what Foucault, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Histoire de la sexualité, 1976), labeled ars erotica and, in a surprising gesture of orientalism, restricted to the non-Western civilizations and the West’s premodern antecedents. Only Western modernity could produce discursive regimes of scientia sexualis focused on the production of knowledge and discipline instead of pleasure. (Foucault of course later complicated his historical vision by turning the focus of inquiry to the multilayered disciplinary discourses on sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome.) For the context of Japan, Gregory Pflugfelder has provided an important corrective in precisely highlighting the “disciplinary” nature of Edo-period practices of male-male love (nanshoku), thus complicating the prevalent image of these practices as primarily concerned with the production of pleasure.24 As my study demonstrates, moreover, early-modern narrative genres in Japan were greatly invested in the didactic containment of amorous desire and emotion. Note, for instance, the obsessive interest in chastity and virginity in Chinese scholar and beauty fiction, which was important for the production of the early nineteenth-century yomihon and ninjōbon interest in chaste virtue and, as its flip side, licentious desire. Shunsui’s ninjōbon, although often seen as the epitome of the world of iro, in fact carefully avoided the depiction of obscenity, promoting chastity as virtuous restraint, especially for women. While I do not deny the importance and reality of sophisticated erotic cultures in the Edo period, I intentionally do not frame this study around concepts like iro or Kuki Shūzō’s (1888–1941) iki (erotic elegance).25 These notions, highlighting the production of pleasure as a cultural practice, conceal the prevalent anxiety about and attempts to control licentious desire in the novel. This anxiety and the ambiguous tension between the representation and didactic containment of emotions and desire came to the fore primarily in narrative practices focused on ninjō.
The Meiji period, as Saeki argues, certainly witnessed, in the context of its civilization and enlightenment ideology, the emergence of new discourses of chaste spiritual love that relegated sexual desire—derogatively labeled by Shōyō as vulgar passion—to the unenlightened past and the ninjōbon tradition. However, amorous feeling and desire, as epitomized by the traditional ninjō concept, continued to be an integral part of the Meiji novel and even merged with the new Western notion of passion. The novel continued to be seen as problematic and licentious because of its representation of passion. Meiji discourses and narratives, while couched in the new idiom and sociocultural concerns of civilization and enlightenment, were not necessarily more disciplinary and restrictive than Edo discourses, but they continuously engaged, in critical or didactic fashion, with the novel’s licentiousness.
I should note here that my study investigates primarily the critical significance of ninjō as male-female love and desire. Male-male love (nanshoku) was certainly an important practice described in the Edo-period textual record that came under restrictions in the sociopolitical context of Meiji Japan, often described as increasingly heteronormative. Recent important scholarship has investigated how the Meiji novel produced narrative strategies that marginalized, suppressed, or redirected the representation of male-male love and male homosocial desire.26 However, while not suppressed, representations of male-male love were also highly contextualized and by no means ubiquitous in pre-Meiji literary texts. This book relies on the observation that major late Edo-period narrative genres with a strong impact on the Meiji novel, in particular Shunsui’s ninjōbon and Bakin’s yomihon, were concerned mainly with male-female love and desire.27 There is a significant continuity of heteronormative—or, if this term is ahistorical for the period prior to Meiji, predominantly male-female—narrative representations and practices related to ninjō in the novel throughout the nineteenth century. The demarcation between heteronormativity and nanshoku culture therefore appears to have been not only historical, mirroring an increasing suppression of male-male desire brought about by Meiji modernity, but also, especially prior to Meiji, highly contingent on textual genre and sociocultural context.28
The second major historical narrative of modernity that I seek to complicate revolves around the notion of modern literature as an inherently emotionalized and interiorized textual practice. A classical formulation of this influential paradigm for the context of western Europe was provided by Jürgen Habermas in his epoch-making study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 1962). Habermas’s work retraces the emergence of the modern private subject as an active and articulate agent in what he calls the public sphere, a discursive space of rational exchange on political and economic interests. For Habermas, the development of the modern (predominantly male) subject as an active agent in the public sphere correlated with—in fact was not possible without—the concurrent development of his private subjectivity, an inner emotionalized realm that relied on the new intimacy of the married couple, the home, and the family. This realm, in Habermas’s model, finds expression in modern literature, whose modernity derives from its serving as the privileged medium of representation for the private subjectivity and emotionality of the inner—but at the same time necessarily public—modern subject.29
Narratives of Japanese modernity have similarly stressed, although not necessarily in connection to Habermas, the intricate relationship of modern literature, emotion, and the emergence of the modern private (and inner) subject. An important case in point are the seminal essays, titled Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū (Studies in the history of Japanese political thought), written by the political philosopher Maruyama Masao (1914–1996) in the early 1940s, predating Habermas’s work. Maruyama’s ultimate interest lies in what he identifies as the beginnings of a modern “public” (and potentially democratic) political awareness in eighteenth-century Japan, especially in the writings of eminent Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728). In correlation to the new public discourse, however, Maruyama also highlights the emergence of a new private domain in Japanese writings, focused on ninjō. What Maruyama has in view are eighteenth-century Confucian and so-called nativist (kokugaku) writings on classical poetry that evaluated ninjō as poetic core content much more positively than earlier (especially neo-Confucian) discussions, which viewed emotion as the origin of social turmoil and evil.30 In these eighteenth-century Japanese texts, Maruyama sees a protomodern liberation of literature (bungei) as the medium of expression of a new, emotionalized private subjectivity. This liberation remained protomodern insofar as it was not yet complete, still retaining remnants of premodern Confucian morality that had to be overcome while also containing the seeds for a modern order.
In his recent study on eighteenth-century Japanese discussions on poetry and emotion, Peter Flueckiger provides a helpful critical reevaluation of Maruyama’s approach. He shows that these discussions, rather than liberating a new private sphere of literature, continue to be motivated by Confucian moral concerns about the management of community and the social order. Flueckiger argues that eighteenth-century Confucian thinkers continued to view ninjō in moral and political terms as a means to bring about social cohesion—like Ogyū Sorai, who saw an important function of poetry in its potential to provide the ruler with knowledge of his subjects’ emotions that could aid his government. Flueckiger rejects the validity of modernization narratives, like Maruyama’s, that postulate the emergence of literature as an independent cultural field, liberated from the shackles of Confucian morality and focused on the emotions of the private subject. Instead, he sees eighteenth-century discussions on poetry and ninjō as part of a “series of reconfigurations of the relationship between emotions and the social order” that ultimately does not exceed the meaning structure of traditional Confucian moral and political discourse.31
Flueckiger offers a helpful historicization of the significance of ninjō in eighteenth-century scholarly discussions of poetry. However, the question remains: how to conceptualize the continuous importance of ninjō in the nineteenth century and particularly in the context of narrative fiction. Meiji discussions, including Shōyō’s important emphasis on ninjō as the main focus of the novel, lent themselves much more convincingly to narratives of a liberation of emotionality as the private inner sphere of the modern subject. Such narratives are not entirely unjustified, as Shōyō’s views were indeed informed by new notions of interiority and psychology derived from Western sources. At least since the early twentieth century, literary scholarship in Japan relied on Shōyō’s notion of the novel’s “realist depiction” of ninjō to define the nature of modern literature as a psychological realism centered on the representation of the inner and private self. Precisely for this reason, discourses from the turn of the century started to produce Shōsetsu shinzui as the origin of modern Japanese literature.32 From the 1920s well into the postwar period, moreover, Marxist criticism posited Shōsetsu shinzui as the historical starting point of a literature concerned with the representation of capitalist bourgeois interiority and individualism. In a 1930 essay, for example, Marxist critic Senuma Shigeki (1904–1988) argued that modern literature (kindai bungaku), defined by psychological realism (shinri mosha), had emerged in Japan with Shōsetsu shinzui. He notes that this new type of literature, “having destroyed the shackles of [Confucian] feudalism, relied on the development of the capitalist economic structures newly fostered by the modern bourgeoisie. Its worldview was shaped by the conceptual forms of individualism, liberalism, and subjectivism.”33
However, Shōyō’s interest in the novel’s realist representation of ninjō, rather than aiming to create a literature of the psychological and bourgeois individual, was closely linked to moral, civilizational, and political concerns. As we saw, Shōyō claims that the novel’s protagonist who controls his vulgar passion is a good person—a seemingly trivial statement that, however, leads to complex narrative practices, in Shōyō’s own novels, surrounding the morality of the protagonist subject to licentious passion. These narrative practices derived from Shōyō’s awareness of Bakin’s didacticism as well as of contemporary enlightenment concerns regarding the regulation of uncivilized emotions and social practices. These concerns were also intimately tied to the civilizational ambitions of contemporary political discourse, connected in particular to the Constitutional Reform Party (Rikken Kaishintō).
Shōyō’s critical interest in ninjō thus certainly does not belong anymore to what Flueckiger calls, with regard to the eighteenth-century writings he examines, a “series of reconfigurations of the relationship between emotions and normative conceptions of the social order” within Confucian literary discourse. Unlike pre-1868 discussions, Shōyō’s ideological agenda was closely tied to Meiji civilizational and enlightenment concerns. To conceptualize the difference between the parameters of Shōyō’s discourse and earlier Confucian discussions, Haiyan Lee’s historiographical approach in Revolution of the Heart (2007) can provide a helpful comparative model. In this study of the iterations of “love” in early twentieth-century Chinese culture and literature, Lee identifies what she calls, in reference to Raymond Williams’s term, “structures of feeling.” Lee’s (and Williams’s) use of the term is similar to Foucault’s “episteme”—the overarching discursive configuration structuring the production of knowledge (discourses) in a given historical period—but a structure of feeling also differs from Foucault’s term in that it more strongly relates to lived and “felt” everyday life experience (for instance, the experience of love) than to knowledge and thought. Lee differentiates between what she calls a “Confucian structure of feeling” in early-modern China until the early twentieth century and an “enlightenment structure of feeling” after the May Fourth period.34 She argues that the representation of love in these different structures of feeling serves their dominant ideological and discursive concerns—the Confucian moral order (virtue) in the former and the enlightenment ideology of freedom and individualism in the latter. Indeed, as Lee remarks, “discourses of sentiment are not merely representations or expressions of inner emotions, but articulatory practices that participate in (re)defining the social order and (re)producing forms of self and sociality. Emotion talk is never about emotion pure and simple, but is always about something else, namely, identity, morality, gender, authority, power, and community.”35 Lee’s approach has great merit in that it provides an alternative to the common modernization narrative that defined emotion as the prerogative of the new inner subject and literature as the representation or expression of this emotionality.36 It also offers a historiographical model that takes into account the continuous relevance of emotion across the early modern–modern divide. It would in fact be possible to conceptualize Shōyō’s critical and literary project within an “enlightenment structure of feeling”—or, in the Japanese context, perhaps more accurately a “civilizational structure”—that invests great (also political) interest in the civilizing regulation of emotions and desires.
My approach, however, differs from Lee’s (and Flueckiger’s) in that I do not see the role of emotion and literature primarily in (re)producing and (re)defining normative structures of feeling—Confucian morality or enlightenment values. Instead, I retrace how Japanese discourses and narrative practices constantly engaged with the social and moral instability of literature deriving from its representation of licentious ninjō. Major narratives across the Edo–Meiji divide dramatize ninjō as a force that dangerously exceeds the attempt to contain it didactically, thus destabilizing the social legitimacy of the novel. The continuous negotiation of this instability underlies the discursive and narrative production of the novel throughout the nineteenth century in Japan. My historiographical approach, moreover, emphasizes continuity, fluidity, and hybridity. I acknowledge the heuristic value in differentiating between epistemological configurations or structures of feeling, which is certainly helpful in conceptualizing the sometimes radical permutations in textual practices surrounding ninjō as well. At the same time, I highlight the continuous awareness, in the Meiji period, of earlier critical discussions and genres—particularly ninjōbon and yomihon, but also Chinese vernacular works like the erotic Jinpingmei and premodern discussions, which all revolved around the ethically subversive quality of ninjō.
Licentious Fictions thus contributes to the revision of narratives of modernity that saw the significance of emotion in the liberation of literature from a didactic paradigm. But the increasing importance of ninjō in eighteenth- and particularly nineteenth-century Japan—across the Edo-Meiji transition—is an undeniable fact that necessarily brings back the question of modernity. I therefore conceive of a specifically nineteenth-century literary modernity in Japan that relied on a continuous intensified awareness of emotion.37 Underlying this interest were sociopolitical factors belonging to modernity in the broadest sense: urbanization, socioeconomic change, anxieties about social fragmentation, or an increasingly capitalist economy as well as, especially for the purpose of this study, the emergence of the novel as a mass-produced and mass-circulated textual medium that relied on an increasingly broad group of sufficiently educated readers as consumers.38 I do not intend to establish a simplistic connection of cause and consequence between these admittedly broad factors of socioeconomic modernity on the one hand and discourses on ninjō and the novel in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan on the other. But I believe that these factors underlay the production of the Japanese novel and contributed to the intensified anxieties surrounding its representation of disruptive emotions and desires. Anxieties about licentious ninjō in literary writing certainly predated the nineteenth century, but with the emergence of the novel as a mass-produced medium, they reached an unprecedented degree of intensity, producing variegated discourses and increasingly complex narrative practices in novelistic texts. My concept of the nineteenth-century modernity of the Japanese novel therefore relies not on epistemological shifts but, more fluidly and hybridly, on the appropriation and intensification—but, in this fashion, also the profound reconfiguration—of the traditional consciousness of literary writing and emotion as licentious and disruptive. This specifically nineteenth-century modernity was inherently transitory, though, given its erasure in the early twentieth century. To map its literary space and historiography is the project of this book.
OVERVIEW
Part 1 (chapters 1–2) retraces premodern and early-modern discourses and narrative practices of the novel. Chapter 1 starts by examining the discursive tradition in China and Japan that defined literary writing as expressive of ninjō. It covers traditional discourses on poetry but also the new spectrum of genres that, in the eighteenth century, came to be discussed in reference to ninjō: works like The Tale of Genji and especially the vernacular Chinese novel. I also examine the so-called cult of qing in late imperial China and its reception in Japan. “Cult of qing” refers to the great proliferation of writings about love and desire in late imperial Chinese culture that influenced works of vernacular fiction. While the intellectual discussions associated with the Chinese “cult” found relatively little resonance in Japan, vernacular works like the Jinpingmei and chaste scholar and beauty fiction were indeed received. I argue that the reception of these novels in Japan produced a specifically nineteenth-century aesthetic of ninjō representation highlighting virtuous chastity and faithfulness (often in women), but also evil desire and licentiousness. This aesthetic was particularly productive in the early nineteenth-century yomihon and ninjōbon. The chapter finally discusses the genesis of the ninjōbon and Tamenaga Shunsui’s Shunshoku umegoyomi, which soon came to be seen as the paradigmatic masterwork of the genre. While Shunsui emphasized the chastity and faithfulness particularly of his heroines, surrounding critical discussions—what I call ninjōbon discourse—well into the Meiji period viewed the ninjōbon and the novel more broadly as licentious.
Chapter 2 discusses Kyokutei Bakin’s Nansō Satomi hakkenden, the undisputed masterwork of the yomihon genre. Bakin’s yomihon greatly differed from the ninjōbon by their much higher degree of literary sophistication, their focus on martial themes, and their thoroughly sustained ethical discourse that bespoke the genre’s moral-didactic ambitions. My reading, however, highlights the great relevance of emotion and desire in Hakkenden, which derived from Bakin’s awareness of Chinese vernacular works like the Jinpingmei and scholar and beauty fiction. As in that genre, Bakin often predicates virtue on the absence or control of amorous emotion, but his text also dramatizes how virtuous figures are ambiguously receptive to desire. Hakkenden’s narrative critically engages with the problematic ambiguity of literary fiction as a textual medium that promotes moral-didactic ends while representing desire and generating it in the reader.
Part 2 (chapters 3–5) moves to the early to mid-Meiji period, where ninjō became a key concept in the discourses and narrative practices related to literary reform. Chapter 3, after reviewing new Meiji discussions on gender, sexuality, and love, offers an in-depth reading of an important, though little-studied, novel: Karyū shunwa, the translation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers and its sequel, Alice. I argue that this novel was foundational in producing the literary space for 1880s novelistic reform, allowing for the integration of the representation of passion—a new Meiji term discursively associated with the ninjōbon—into a narrative that emphasized the control of passion, thus responding to both moral-didactic and new enlightenment (civilizational) concerns. Relying on a new bildungsroman format, Karyū shunwa stages a new type of masculinity that is subject to licentious passion but also able to subject this passion to civilized and moral control. The control of passion, moreover, connects to the new narrative themes of advancement through hard study and work (risshin shusse) as well as democratic political activity within the contemporary People’s Rights Movement (Jiyū Minken Undō)—themes that transposed the exemplarity of yomihon masculinity into Meiji enlightenment discourse. I close this chapter with a discussion of Kikutei Kōsui’s (1855–1942) novel Seiro nikki (Diary of getting on in the world, 1884), a rewriting of Karyū shunwa into a Japanese novel. This novel, more unambiguously than Karyū shunwa, combined the representation of erotic passion and its control with the new themes of risshin shusse and democratic activity.
Chapter 4 argues that Tsubouchi Shōyō’s project of the novel’s reform was closely connected to the new literary space produced in Japan by the translation Karyū shunwa. Shōyō’s project initially developed out of his reception and translation of a highly limited body of English novels, primarily by Bulwer-Lytton and Walter Scott (1771–1832), in the wake of Karyū shunwa’s publication. These Western works allowed Shōyō to conceive of a new type of novel focusing on ninjō that critically engaged with previous Japanese genres, particularly Shunsui’s ninjōbon and Bakin’s yomihon. In Shōsetsu shinzui, Shōyō appropriates Bakin’s moral-didactic discourse within his conceptualization of ninjō, thus integrating the representation of vulgar passion associated with the ninjōbon into a framework of the control of passion through reason. The chapter finally stresses the significance of Shōyō’s model of literary reform within broader political and social discourse in the late 1880s and early 1890s, including the ideology of the Constitutional Reform Party. Shōyō’s model most immediately resonated with Reform Party–inflected authors of political fiction, whose agenda was invested in what could be called the civilizational politics of ninjō.
Chapter 5 investigates Shōyō’s own novels from the mid to late 1880s, including famous works like Tōsei shosei katagi (Characters of present-day students, 1885–1886) but also texts still largely unexamined. I argue that Shōyō’s novels dramatize an aporia between the realist depiction of ninjō and what he calls idealism—the depiction of “good people”—a term referring to the moral didacticism of Bakin’s yomihon but also an enlightened masculinity predicated on the control of uncivilized passion. Unlike Shōsetsu shinzui’s criticism, Shōyō’s novels increasingly deconstruct such an ideal masculinity, revealing doubts about the civilized reality of Japan but also bringing back the traditional anxiety about the novel as a medium generating licentious desire in readers. The aporia between realism and idealism triggered Shōyō’s ultimate abandonment of the novel. It also dramatized the novel’s continuous instability—its inability to reconcile the representation of emotion with normative conceptions of the social order.
Part 3 (chapter 6) moves to the late Meiji period and in particular Natsume Sōseki’s literary project, which I recontextualize within the literary space of the Japanese novel shaped by Shōyō’s reform and newly emerging notions of literature (bungaku). Despite Shōyō’s ultimate suspicion and abandonment of the “novel of human emotion and social customs” (ninjō setai shōsetsu), ninjō, in explicit reference to Shōyō’s discourse, became the key word in discussions of the Japanese novel beginning in the 1890s.39 This chapter starts by retracing the development of the Meiji novel in the wake of Shōyō’s reform as well as of discourses that produced an increasingly naturalized understanding of literature grounded in the representation of emotion, primarily love and desire. I then examine how Sōseki explored so-called shaseibun and various poetic genres as emotionally detached literary media, thus questioning the contemporary novel and discourse on literature. This deconstructive exploration also complemented his theory of literature as a radical reinvestigation of literary emotionality. I thus resituate Sōseki’s literary and critical project within the nineteenth-century literary space that continuously dramatized a suspicion of ninjō.
The epilogue briefly outlines the factors that led to the gradual demise, around the turn of the century, of the continuous genre memory that problematized the novel’s writing of ninjō. It demonstrates how fundamental parameters of this memory—including social-didactic legitimation discourses of literary writing and the suspicion of ninjō’s licentiousness—were waning in the early twentieth century. This discussion historically delimits the nineteenth-century modernity of discourses and narrative practices of ninjō in the novel.