Speculating on the impact of Westernization in modern Japan, these two books published in 2009, Leith Morton's The Alien Within and Christopher Bolton's Sublime Voices, present a stimulating in-depth study of the process by which Japanese national identity has been formed, questioned, and reinvented through encounters with the West, the foreign, and, overall, Japan's Other. In the past two decades, largely in reaction to postcolonialism and globalization, scholarly trends swiftly turned from Japan as a site of exotic indigenous culture to a Japan that has carefully generated discourses of national uniqueness by homogenizing ethnic diversities and inventing traditions. These two books seem to represent the outcome of this recent academic shift toward investigations of multiple voices within Japan.
In The Alien Within, Morton poses critical questions about “how modern Japanese writers discovered the foreign, the exotic, or even the alien within themselves” (p. 2), as well as how Japanese literary writings have absorbed the foreign into the “inside” of the cultural body through translation, adaptation, disbelief, absorption, and other forms of reconciliation. The texts discussed in the book cover more than a century of Japanese literature across multiple genres and regions, including Tsubouchi Shōyō's translation of Shakespeare; Yosano Akiko's poetry; Gothic literature by Tanizaki Junichirō, Izumi Kyōka, and Arishima Takeo; Ōshiro Tatsuhiro's Okinawan literature; and Murakami Haruki's journal of the Sydney Olympics. Whereas there have been many publications about images of the Other in Japan, ranging from depictions of foreigners in the mass media to monsters in folklore, this is probably the first English-language book to examine the verbal techniques of the foreign in such a wide selection of literary texts.
The research scope is as wide as what the exotic can signify, but the actual arguments in the book are carefully built on detailed observations of the style and rhetoric particular to each author and each text. Readers who are equipped with some knowledge of both Japanese language and modern novels may extract many ideas from Morton's discussion, but general readers will find the book challenging, not because of its complexity but because of its stress on stylistic analysis.
Whereas the generalization and wide coverage of texts across historical periods and literary genres can be a little alarming at times, Morton's critical perspective is broad and fully illustrated by concrete examples from close reading of texts. By building continuities among texts that have been compartmentalized in the institutional system of literary studies, Morton presents a refreshing view of literature as a locus where diverse discourses of the exotic intersect. The book does not provide a monolithic conclusion that binds the literary examples together—in Morton's approach, different texts evidence different modes of cultural incorporation, thereby presenting a new vision of Japanese literature as a process of hybrid negotiations.
With an exclusive focus on Abe Kōbō and his writings, Bolton's Sublime Voices investigates relationships of science and literature in Abe's novels, short stories, and essays. Especially drawing on the novels, such as Inter Ice Age 4, The Face of Another, The Woman in the Dunes, Secret Rendezvous, and The Ark Sakura, Bolton examines the writer's encounters with the new language of science and technology made available by the nation's abrupt immersion in the post–World War II world. In the process, the challenges of new epistemological frames of science undermined Japanese language and identity, which Bolton sees manifested in Abe's texts as the sublime, or “an aesthetic (and also intellectual, moral, or political) experience triggered by something incomparably larger or more powerful than ourselves” (p. 266). By closely looking at styles and metaphors created in the process of incorporating science into literature (and vice versa), Bolton portrays the ambivalent nature of scientific advance in Abe's works, thereby positioning Abe's literary legacy in the intermix of voices (or silences) and literary forms.
Originally planned and written as a dissertation, this book shows a certain degree of naiveté in not making the argument for choosing Abe Kōbō as the subject of the book, thus relying on the writer's status as a canonical author in both Japan and the West. Bolton does not extend his argument to larger issues, such as scientific fiction before and after Abe Kōbō, science fiction as a genre, or general social trends of postwar Japan that may have shaped Abe's philosophies. I was especially curious as to why Bolton uses the term “scientific fiction” for Abe, while science fiction, generally associated in Japan with prewar propaganda youth novels and postwar writers such as Komatsu Sakyō and Tsutsui Yasutaka, is largely left out of the book.
Because of the restricted focus, the audience may be limited, but the book will be welcomed and much appreciated by students and scholars with an interest in Abe Kōbō. This single-author approach simultaneously brings many advantages to Bolton's analysis and, without doubt, is a significant addition to scholarship that has regarded Abe as little more than a Japanese Kafka or the author of The Woman in the Dunes. Bolton's detailed examination of themes, language, and imageries in the text comfortably engages with ideas drawn from theories developed by prominent writers and critics, including Borges, Bakhtin, Jameson, and Karatani. Bolton's portrayals of Abe's mixed expressions of hope and fear toward the new vocabulary and principles of science will be deeply appreciated by anyone interested in modern science's impact on Japanese literary production.
One of the most attractive facets of both books is how they depart from conventional paradigms of “influence study,” or the critical method that finds literary advances of the West appropriated in quintessential Japanese literature. These two works neither treat Japan as disappearing poesies victimized by the colonial power of Westernization, nor fall into the simple dichotomy of Japan against the West. Both texts successfully present Japanese writers as intellectual individuals with their own agency who are engaged in intense negotiations with dynamic interactions across cultural boundaries. What stands out in Bolton's depiction of Abe, for example, is the artist's active commitment to examining the reinvention of language through the mixing of what are often assumed to be opposites, such as science and fantasy, the reasonable and the absurd, or technology of prediction and unpredictable disaster. In a similar manner, Morton's focus on textual formations of the concept of the foreign presents “identity” as contestations of discourses encompassing such conflicts as Okinawa and Japan, Gothic and modernity, and over all, the other and the self.
The approaches employed by Morton and Bolton leave us with methodological questions about which direction literary studies should/can be heading. Despite the opposite tendencies in their selection of primary texts—Bolton on Abe Kōbō and Morton on numerous texts produced over a century—both books apply similar strategies of microcosmic textual analysis framed by close reading and corresponding interpretation, which is a common critical method in the discipline of literature. In both works, however, it was difficult for me to draw a single conclusion beyond the fact that the Japanese literary writing, and accordingly the Japanese identity, is hybrid and heterogeneous. In a sense, the discussions of the literary texts are the meat of these books, consciously set against the ambitious enterprise, fraught with risk, of deploying literary criticism to elaborate on imperialism, modernity, and other grand-scale ideologies. The authors locate the value of literary studies in the art of textual analysis, and there is no doubt that the pleasure of reading these books resides in this point. At the same time, I detect a certain excess of restraint in the way they eschew engaging more extensively with larger sociohistorical paradigms that are quite validly used to contextualize textual analysis. Literary studies are facing a critical moment of reframing their “usefulness” in new contexts, while Japan, neither third world nor the exotic Other, needs new reasons to be the subject of study. Within this political double bind of Japanese literature, both Sublime Voices and The Alien Within explore new directions of literary studies.
