Will Bridges's Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature is an important book. It is important first for the material the book explores, some of which is not well known, and to which Bridges adds new and arresting insights. This material includes work by such significant Japanese writers as Tanizaki Junichiro, Oe Kenzaburo, Nakagami Kenji, and Yamada Eimi, all of whom have engaged with race and Blackness (or, in Tanizaki's case, “shadows” of darkness) to a sometimes surprising degree. This engagement has affected and inspired their work and even their identities, both literary and societal. Playing in the Shadows allows us to see these well-known writers in a fresh and illuminating light.
Bridges's book also contains discussions of lesser known but extremely interesting material, especially a fascinating and revelatory chapter, “Genre Trouble,” in which he takes the notion of “genre” in a variety of media-spanning directions. In Bridges's argument, what he terms the “generic aspects” of Japanese literary Blackness become almost fungible. He begins the chapter asking whether there are “shared affinities that cut across the generic borders of . . . disparate texts” (p. 138). In Bridges's eyes, the answer is yes, and he uses this notion of shared affinities to provide a provocative examination of literary, artistic, and photographic engagements with African American society as seen in the “disparate texts” of Japanese writers, journalists, and photojournalists.
Bridges's willingness to go in new theoretical directions brings me to the second reason for the book's importance: his concern to engage with Blackness in different theoretical ways that go beyond his specific subject and that should arouse interest among scholars of literature and culture in general. Bridges's most salient argument is against the use of representation. He sees previous scholars’ enumeration of how Blackness is represented in Japanese culture as, “run[ning] the risk of emphasizing strategic essentialism and hermeneutic stability at the cost of reduction of the contradictory complexities of fictions of race” (p. 5). Bridges casts a sharply focused light on what he sees as the overuse of representation, developing a sustained argument in his introduction in which he cites previous work on Blackness in Japanese literature to show how a focus on representation can lead to simplistic stereotyping.
Bridges goes on to dig deeply and richly into the “contradictory complexities of fictions or race” throughout the rest of the book. We can see the fruitfulness of this approach exemplified in his chapter on Nakagami Kenji in which he spends less time on any specific works by Nakagami and more on examining Nakagami's unique use of language and how his writing is inflected and inspired by the rhythms of jazz. Bridges describes how Nakagami's writing “crosses linguistic borders and breaks the rules of Japanese signification” (p. 116) to create a literary language that supports and even embodies Nakagami's outsider identity.
Besides his argument against “representation,” Bridges uses another theoretical approach that I find particularly powerful, which is his notion of “haunting.” Interest in “haunting” and “hauntology” has become ubiquitous in academia to the point that one scholar identified a “spectral turn” across both the humanities and social sciences. Bridges, however, goes beyond the typical notion of haunting which usually focuses on some spectral past entity/civilization/being that still exerts influence on contemporary culture. Instead, he sees the history of Blackness that “haunts” Japanese culture as being “the history of postwar Japan and its racial thinking and this transpacific view of blackness is, in turn, also a chapter toward understanding a global history of blackness in its plentitude” (p. 222).
These are major claims—ambitious and exciting. Does the book sustain them? Certainly, although in a somewhat, perhaps necessarily, limited manner. I see Playing in the Shadows as an advance sortie challenging previous work on the role of Blackness in Japanese culture, rather than a full-scale assault. For example, despite decrying the oversimplification implicit in “representation,” toward the end of the book Bridges complicates his previous argument, commenting on the “uncanny” and “malleable” quality of “stereotypical depictions” (p. 223).
Bridges's argument shines a spotlight on a major and previously understudied aspect of postwar Japanese culture. But its very brilliance ironically forces other aspects of Japanese literature into the shadows. The most obvious of these is his exclusion of many significant postwar writers, such as Mishima Yukio, Murakami Ryu, Yoshimoto Banana, or Tawada Yoko. Although Bridges does use a quotation about the “age of . . . rap music” from Murakami Haruki several times, the author is otherwise unmentioned. The reason for these lacunae is presumably obvious: these writers do not engage with the “fictions of Race and Blackness” that are the book's central and important focus. But leaving out any mention at all of these writers, not to mention many others, not only gives a limited impression of postwar Japanese literature, it also avoids much of the cultural context in which Bridges's chosen figures worked and lived.
Related to this question of context is the fact that the writers with whom Bridges does deal are presented solely in their relation to Blackness and race. For example, Bridges includes a fascinating, indeed eye-opening, discussion of Oe Kenzaburo's deep intellectual and emotional participation in Black (and also African) culture. But reading this book one would not know and maybe not even guess that the author who wrote the extraordinary and controversial depiction of Blackness in “Prize Stock” also wrote the tragicomic exploration of mental illness and guilt that became “Aghwee the Sky Monster” or was capable of the burning political satire of “The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Our Tears Away.” Nor are we given a sense of the vast sea of other writers that nourishes Oe's fecundity. As Yasuko Claremont points out, in a single novel, Oe can refer to William Blake, William Butler Yeats, Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas Mann, Dante, Simone Weil, and George Kennan.
I mention Oe because I am most familiar with his work. At the same time, I must acknowledge that Bridges's examination of Oe and Blackness was so fascinating and persuasive that I am looking forward with excitement to presenting it to my students in my course on Oe this semester. Perhaps Bridges's limited focus is inevitable, given the depth and richness that he has brought to his subject. Playing in the Shadows blazes a trail of light through the shadows, opening up new and fascinating directions.
