Critical theory invites us to relearn, or at least to question, what we thought we already knew, but its deployment is neither a panacea nor essential to complex understanding. Done poorly, theorization can entail little more than the artificial practice of matching any given subject to whatever existing theoretical structure seems vaguely analogous, and its outcomes can be as reductive and unsatisfying as the narratives it claims to overturn. In The Politics of Dialogic Imagination, Katsuya Hirano's surefooted application of critical theory to Edo period popular culture vaults past these hazards. The book's ambitious objective is not only to illuminate the dialogic relationship between early modern politics and popular culture but to theorize historical change “by outlining a general theory of the transformation in modes of subject formation” from the Tokugawa into the Meiji era (p. 9).
The book covers standard themes included in any cultural history of the period—e.g., power relations, status, ukiyo, and play—but also injects its topic with greater lexical depth. Parody, representational space, inbetweenness, chaos, grotesquerie, laughter, and the unproductive (idle) body, for instance, are discussed as political threats that ignored or contributed to the disintegration of high and low as structural means of control. Not only did the fluid relationship between politics and culture, which Hirano exposes as an evolving chess game of counterattacks, prove destabilizing, it entailed “a dialogical interaction of divergent voices and perspectives … that underlined contradictory realities that had become widely discernible” (p. 3).
The book's first two chapters focus less on popular cultural forms than on our patterns of apprehending them. I know of few studies whose early chapters provide so little historical context. Chikamatsu Monzaemon is introduced only as “a highly acclaimed popular playwright for ningyō jōruri” (p. 57) and Ihara Saikaku as merely “an Osaka merchant and a renowned popular writer” (p. 66). For this reason, newcomers and undergraduates looking for a general cultural history of the Edo period should look elsewhere. On the other hand, the book's grounding in Western critical theory places it squarely within the comfort zone of anyone with graduate training in cultural studies, and in this sense it may appeal to academically inclined nonspecialists seeking to engage with the history of Japanese pop culture for the first time. Here Hirano makes room for his own theoretical turf by invalidating studies whose approaches to his topic omit consideration of the feedback loop (dialogic relationship) between politics and culture. His theorization of popular culture as a political endeavor that challenges standing power relations requires that he distance himself from the shadow of Hegelian humanism, a paradigm that he views as the longstanding undoing of Marxist thought, modernization theory, and the host of other historical analyses that wrongly focus exclusively on conscious thought and action.
Chapters 3 and 4 foreground Hirano's own analyses of literary and visual texts, and the book benefits accordingly. Though he tends to analyze the bawdiest, most extreme visual and literary texts from the last century of the Edo period, rather than more commercially minded representative works, his discussions of how comic realism, the body, the grotesque, and the chaotic consciously and unconsciously reconfigured society are inspired and authoritative. Here a world of grotesquerie materializes, one produced and consumed through a dialogical process between social relations and politics, and at these moments the book is an impressive, satisfying read. The final chapter, on the Meiji period, provides considerable historical context before proceeding to challenge several historiographical theories for failing to acknowledge connections between Meiji nation-building and ideological struggles over the body as a locus of the state's efforts to craft a modern, moral interiority placed in service to the nation.
Hirano's deployment of (predominantly) twentieth-century Western theorists to Edo period popular culture helps illuminate the genres, motifs, styles, and aesthetics of that era but at times seems superfluous. In such cases it distracts from his own voice, which shines brightest when speaking for itself. Bakhtin's and Harpham's formulation of “grotesque” as “a zone of unstable or indeterminate signification” that effects “the paralysis of language” (p. 150), for example, adds little to Hirano's far more targeted discussion of the term's symbolic meaning in the Edo context. Occasionally the work's application of multiple incongruent theories also places it in danger of disagreeing with itself. Hirano's contention that literacy and publishing “helped eliminate the distinction between author and reader, literati strata and masses” (p. 74) is well taken but is contradicted by his use of Paul Ricoeur's definition of play as transformation. That definition requires that Hirano then proceed to deny the productive intermingling of literati and the masses and advance a claim for the fundamental separation of these cohorts.
Nonetheless, The Politics of Dialogic Imagination is replete with sharp, compelling analysis that provides an ongoing sense of exploration. Even readers fatigued with Edo pop culture, which has been studied exhaustively, will find Hirano's work rekindling their fascination with the topic. This book contains plenty of fresh articulations to ponder, and readers may not, and need not, agree with them. But many, I suspect, would rather spend time with a bold book that challenges received knowledge than with a timid one that does not. Those who read this one will find themselves edified.
