In this study, Rachel DiNitto argues forcefully for the literary significance of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971), an author whose reception was constrained by the destruction of the plates of his first book in the aftermath of the Great Kantô earthquake, by the straddling of genres and of the high–low cultural divide that his subsequent writing entailed, and by the contours of a postwar scholarly discourse that marginalized him in favor of writers who had more explicitly resisted the politics of militarist nationalism. DiNitto argues that Hyakken, a student of Natsume Sōseki and a peer of prominent writers such as Akutagawa Ryûnosuke, confronted modernity by “experimenting with critical language as he responded to the new material realities and the crisis of representation that rendered prewar everyday life fleeting and ephemeral” (p. 3).

Hyakken's approach in his prewar texts (the focus of this book) was to make “the familiar unfamiliar” and to return the reader “to a time when modernity still retained an aura and the possibility for transformation and critique” (p. 3). He first used these strategies in the collection of stories Realm of the Dead (1922) to show how modernity denied recourse to the past or the possibility of narrating experience (p. 22). He subsequently brought his method to bear in short stories such as “The Triumphant March into Port Arthur” (1925) and “Tokyo Diary” (1938), on the rising ideology of Japanese militarism, which sought to singularize subjectivity in the service of the nation by occluding the possibility of heterogeneous memories and experiences of modernization, urban space, and war.

Along the way, Hyakken developed an approach to writing zuihitsu, a lighter, popular, “essay-style, catch-all genre,” that intruded into the territory of the elite I-novel (p. 100), only to mock its seriousness and throw “a monkey wrench into the interpretive processes of author-subject identification” (p. 104). Yet when his popularity as a zuihitsu writer led to film adaptations of his work, Hyakken recoiled in disappointment and found himself “unwilling to relinquish his unique authorial voice” (p. 126). Ultimately, like his mentor Sōseki, Hyakken offered a critique that “is not unequivocal… . [His] embrace of modern life is an uneasy one, but he is even more uneasy with the illusory embrace of Japan's traditional past” (p. 190).

DiNitto's close textual readings and extensive contextualizations suggest numerous opportunities for further exploration. On Realm of the Dead, she writes that “Hyakken attempted to return to an older model of reading where he could control the relationship among author, reader, and text.” Her focus here is on Hyakken's typographic strategies, and she invokes Kôno Kensuke's reflections on the relationship of earlier readers with block-printed books as well as “the fetishistic attachment of young boys and aspiring writers to early printing sets” before the onset of mechanized mass production deprived such objects/texts of their auratic quality (pp. 72–73). Maeda Ai has examined the transformations that occurred in the Meiji era as people shifted from reading aloud as communal performance toward silent, privatized engagement with texts (see “Ondoku kara mokudoku e: kindai dokusha no seiritsu,” in Kindai dokusha no seiritsu [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993], 167–210). Hyakken may not have personally experienced this shift (the biographical information presented does not address this), but further consideration of the multisensory aspects of his relationship to words and text might have offered other insights into the question of aura at the heart of this study.

Certainly, visuality played an important role in Hyakken's work, as both Realm of the Dead and “The Triumphal March into Port Arthur” rely on screen effects and (in the latter text) “photographic subjectivity” (pp. 143–44) to convey the author's points about the impossibility of grasping a stable modernity and the artificial totality of nationalist narratives. But in her discussion of Hyakken's response to cinematic renditions of his work—he lamented screenwriters' failure “to capture the essence of his writing” and its consequent cheapening “by the transfer into these popular media” (p. 125)—DiNitto might have attended more fully to the implications of the translation of Hyakken's words into images and sound that fundamentally altered the nature of interaction between author and audience. DiNitto does refer to an essay, “Film and Imagination,” in which Hyakken wrote that he enjoyed silent films but disliked talkies because of the annoying difference between their sounds and those he imagined; yet here, the sounds in question are of water or cannon fire, not of spoken words.

Hyakken's work also calls for a sustained reading in terms of gender. DiNitto's discussion of this matter is sharpest when she shows how, in Realm of the Dead, “[t]hat which is feared is codified as female, particularly the silencing power of the modern everyday experience” (p. 74), but her treatment of zuihitsu could have addressed more explicitly the ways in which genre and gender interact. She quotes several Japanese critics, arbiters of “high” culture or “pure” literature, to demonstrate that the metaphors they used to describe the zuihitsu genre “imply a level of intimacy that verges on the inappropriate and even the sexual” (p. 99). Yet the apparently homosocial or homoerotic nature of this discourse is glossed over; it could have been analyzed productively in relation to the fact that Hyakken often chose to publish his zuihitsu in women's magazines such as Josei—which also published Tanizaki Jun'ichirô's Naomi, a paradigmatic example of the codification of modernity as female and debilitating. “The Triumphant March into Port Arthur” actually appeared alongside the final installment of Naomi. Regardless of whether he wrote this story with the intention of publishing it in a women's magazine, Hyakken used implicitly gendered imagery to question emerging paradigms of national subjectivity, for, faced with a film of military victory, the protagonist first identifies, while weeping (and he is not alone in this), with the images of unarmed, passive Russian prisoners of war.

DiNitto reads “The Triumphant March into Port Arthur” and “The War Museum” (1929) “against the cultural context of the 1930s [when they appeared in a reedited volume], purposely switching back and forth between the Russo-Japanese War, the 1920s, and the 1930s as well as between [Hyakken's] fiction and the discursive and material reality of Japan after the Manchurian Incident” (p. 137). As a historian, however, I find myself wondering about statements such as, “Hyakken reconstructs a personal and commercial memory of this decisive national battle in the context of a remilitarizing, imperially expanding Japanese empire,” if only because Hyakken composed “The Triumphant March” at a time when Japan's imperial army was at the nadir of its popularity at home (following the Siberian debacle), the Katô government was cutting military expenditures and force size, and the mainstream of the foreign policy establishment called for cooperating with the Anglo-American powers in China. Reading the re-edition is certainly an important, critically productive move, but it risks obscuring the original context within which Hyakken felt free enough to commit this text to paper (despite the recent passage, as DiNitto notes, of the Peace Preservation Law). In this regard, while DiNitto mentions in passing that Hyakken refused to join the wartime Japanese Literature Patriotic Association, some consideration of his writings from these years (two zuihitsu collections and one book of poems between 1942 and 1945) might have shed light on his further struggles with, or avoidance of, the totalizing forces of the time.

Ultimately, the reader comes away persuaded of the potential that Hyakken's methods offered for sustaining critical subjectivity in the face of the homogenizing forces of capitalism and militarism. DiNitto's study thus offers a valuable complement to existing studies of Japanese modernism, proletarian literature, and romantic nationalism, and introduces us to texts with which we will no doubt continue to grapple fruitfully.