Plucking Chrysanthemums, by Matthew Fraleigh, and The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction, by William C. Hedberg, are both deeply engaged with the reading of Literary Sinitic texts in Japan. Fraleigh writes the biography of one of the most prominent poets and journalists of the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, Narushima Ryūhoku. Much of Ryūhoku's literary output was written in Literary Sinitic, and so, despite his celebrity during his lifetime, he was largely forgotten when the modern field of Japanese literature, which prioritized vernacular Japanese writings, coalesced in the late Meiji period. Hedberg traces the fate of the Chinese novel The Water Margin (Ch. Sui hu zhuan, Jp. Suikoden) in early modern and modern Japan. One of the most famous works of Chinese fiction, Water Margin enjoyed widespread popularity in both China and Japan, where it was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in accordance with the changing perspectives of its exegetes. Taken together, the studies prompt a reconsideration of the reading and readership of Literary Sinitic in early modern and modern Japan.

The initial target of both Fraleigh's and Hedberg's critiques is the conception of Japanese literature as works composed in vernacular Japanese, but neither author belabors this already well-documented problem. Studies deconstructing and historicizing the Japanese national literary canon have revealed it to be a product of the middle to late Meiji state.Footnote ¹ Though the Classical Chinese canon, as a literary context, was essential to the work of such early giants as Natsume Sōseki, Nagai Kafu, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Japanese literature as a scholarly field divorced itself from Literary Sinitic, and the contours of that division continue to haunt the conception of the field to the present.Footnote ² Both Fraleigh and Hedberg exorcise these specters and call for reform of existing academic attitudes toward what constitutes Japanese literature. However, to summarize either book as primarily a reevaluation of Japanese literature misses the most salient arguments of each. The rehabilitation of Literary Sinitic as Japanese literature is, rather, an orientation to which both authors exhort their readers, with later conclusions proffered to the reader willing to accept this basic premise. Furthermore, the two authors’ methods for advancing the study of Literary Sinitic traditions in early modern and modern Japan differ immensely.

The fundamental orienting framework employed by Hedberg is the “phenomenology of the work of art,” an idea borrowed from David Damrosch that emphasizes the circulation, translation, and reading of texts rather than the purported literary qualities of a canonical original text. The literary historian traces the production and reception of a literary work to delineate its nature and significance. For Hedberg, that work of art is the Chinese prose narrative Water Margin—or more properly, it is “Water Margins,” because Hedberg diachronically distinguishes successive versions of the text first in China and then in Japan. Hedberg's argument echoes Michael Emmerich's extension of Damrosch: new versions of canonical texts are more replacements than receptions of some original material.Footnote ³ And, as Hedberg expertly demonstrates, each new “Water Margin” had a distinct and significant impact on its readership, such that it is never enough to say that Author X was inspired by the Water Margin, but rather, we must say that they were in contact with Jin Shengtan's Fifth Book for Men of Genius: Shi Nai'an's “The Water Margin” (Diwu caizishu Shi Nai'an Shuihu zhuan) or The Loyal and Righteous Water Margin with Commentary by Mr. Li Zhouwu (Li Zhouwu xiansheng piping Zhongyi shuihu zhuan) (Hedberg, p. 60).

The language and bibliography of Water Margin make it especially apt for the phenomenological approach that Hedberg employs. Authorship of the text is disputed, as is the century in which it was produced, and it circulated in a variety of recensions in both China and Japan. As such, the work resists analysis that prioritizes an original, canonical text or authorial intention. Water Margin recounts the “gathering of 108 bandit-gallants in the Liangshan marshes of northeastern China” (Hedberg, p. 15), and its focus on nonstate actors living at the edge of civilization also reflects a distinctive anti-authority orientation. Its language includes more contemporary colloquialisms, a far cry from writing in Literary Sinitic that took the Confucian classics as the canonical form of written expression. Hedberg opens with this problem of Water Margin vocabulary and expression because it creates an especially pronounced issue for the Japanese reader. Trained in the Mencius, Thousand-Character Classic, and the Analects, the Japanese reader would encounter linguistic change during the nearly two millennia between early China and the Ming dynasty as a formidable hurdle. It is for this reason that Hedberg describes Water Margin as being inaccessible to the vast majority of Japanese readers, and he notes the wide number of reading aids and translations produced to help Japanese readers engage with this text. In the early modern period, Hedberg contextualizes Water Margin at the juncture between Tōwagaku, the Edo-period study of China, and Keigaku, the study of the classics, with the guides to reading Water Margin seeking specifically to cleave the former from the latter and create a new discursive space for the reading and glossing of Chinese texts. The differing approaches, documented by Hedberg, of Ogyū Sorai, Okajima Kanzan, and Suyama Nantō reveal an epistemological shift in eighteenth-century Japan that began to formulate China as a geographically and temporally bounded entity, rather than as the source of universal meanings ascribed it in classical studies. The importance of China as a cultural other to the formation of the modern nation-state is well established, but Hedberg's analysis moves the outset of this formation a century back in time.

In keeping with the argument that different editions of the Water Margin constitute different texts, Hedberg devotes significant discussion to the contrast between the Li Zhouwu (1610) and Jin Shengtan (third preface 1641) versions. Strictly speaking, the 1637 Tenkai edition, Expanded, Collated, and Fully Illustrated Capital Edition of the Loyal and Righteous Chronicle of the Water Margin with a Forest of Commentary (Jingben zengbu xiaozheng quanxiang Zhongyi shuihu zhuan pinglin), is the oldest extant evidence of Water Margin in Japan. However, early modern Japanese readers primarily consumed either the Jin Shengtan version, which excised the second half of the Water Margin, in which the 108 bandit-gallants are pardoned for their crimes, and added an original ending in which they were executed in a dream, or the Li Zhouwu version, which cast the bandit-gallants as loyal and righteous figures of virtue forced to the outskirts in a reflection of the author's own indignation at their place in the world. The contrasting moral imperatives between the two editions set the stage for debates about moral and narrative imperatives in Japan. Hedberg addresses a variety of significant figures in this regard, including historian Seita Tansō, fiction writer Kyokutei Bakin, author and illustrator Santō Kyōden, and ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi. The variety of adaptations resulting from Japanese readings of “Water Margins” and their intertextual relationship with specific editions of the text spell out, in lucid detail, the shortcomings of an impact-response treatment of literary reception that depends on a canonical edition of an original text.

Hedberg's final two chapters shift the focus to the reception of Water Margin in modern Japan. With more than one dozen republications and retranslations between 1880 and 1915, Water Margin continued to serve as the locus for a debate on morality, but it now assumed the added functions of defining the role of literature, exemplifying the nature of fiction and the novel, and, in literature's capacity as an extension of civilization, characterizing the national ethos of China. In the hands of its exegetes, including literary critics such as Haga Yaichi and writers Mori Kainan, Mori Ōgai, Masaoka Shiki, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, among others, Water Margin was simultaneously the apotheosis of the rich and venerable Chinese literary tradition, a literary expression of admirable dynamism and vigor, and the example of a doomed national ethos predicated on amorality. Hedberg effectively highlights the differences in outlook and outright contradictory interpretations held by the many important readers and critics of Water Margin in Meiji and Taishō Japan while keeping the focus on how each of these understandings served to elevate Japanese self-perception.

Fraleigh's study is not organized around the phenomenology of a text, but the oeuvre of a single individual, the venerable Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–84). Ryūhoku wore many hats during his life, including tutor to the shogun, cavalry officer, and newspaperman, and he had an immense literary output. However, because the majority of his written work was composed in Sinitic, Ryūhoku was forgotten in the late Meiji period, when Japanese literature oriented itself around material written in the Japanese vernacular. Ryūhoku's presence as one of the foremost poets and social critics of the mid-Meiji was reestablished by literary historian Maeda Ai in his 1976 Narushima Ryūhoku. In a thorough reading of Ryūhoku that goes far beyond the standard collection of his writings, Fraleigh offers numerous corrections to Maeda's pioneering study and others that have followed. This biographical study demonstrates that for both Ryūhoku and his readers, and for Fraleigh as well, meaning is primarily constructed intertextually. Tao Yuanming is of particular importance for how Ryūhoku conceived of and expressed himself, but, as Fraleigh cautions early on, Tao Yuanming is himself a complex figure whose literary output had already been reshaped to serve a variety of ends.Footnote ⁴ Fraleigh convincingly demonstrates that Ryūhoku reinterpreted Tao Yuanming throughout the course of his life and ultimately posited a social position for himself that was neither the scholar-official shijin or the literati bunjin. Instead, Ryūhoku fashioned his journalistic activity into essential work in the service of the nation and Tao Yuanming into a social innovator. Over the course of Fraleigh's study, Ryūhoku also doubles as a case study for the manner in which the Literary Sinitic corpus was actively incorporated into literary production in Meiji Japan.

Fraleigh begins his study by stressing the importance of Sinitic poetry and prose to learned individuals of the late Tokugawa and early Meiji eras. While the ultimate focus of the book is Ryūhoku's multifarious uses of Tao Yuanming and other texts and figures from the Literary Sinitic tradition, two important features of Fraleigh's opening warrant comment. First, Fraleigh's introduction to the formal features of Sinitic poetry adeptly summarizes, in only a few pages, the basic rules of end rhyme and the distribution of level and oblique tones. The brevity and clarity of these pages provides an excellent opportunity to introduce Sinitic poetry to undergraduate readers. But second, Fraleigh's motivation in providing this refresher, which uses one of Ryūhoku's poems composed with Tao Yuanming in mind, is to broach a discussion of what poems written in Literary Sinitic by Japanese poets should be called in English. As Ryūhoku's composition demonstrates, Japanese writers of Sinitic poetry incorporated features such as tone distribution that are only vaguely, if at all, present in Japanese. With this in mind, Fraleigh argues that there is no need to distinguish such poems as “Sino-Japanese” or “Chinese-style,” because such distinction does not exist in either Chinese or Japanese. In turn, Fraleigh reserves “Sino-Japanese” to refer to the glossing (Jp. kundoku) produced when a Sinitic text is rendered into the Japanese vernacular. Fraleigh carefully and precisely navigates the dissenting opinions on these points, but for the general reader, perhaps it is sufficient to say that terms such as “Sino-Japanese” and “Chinese-style” should be used only when the non-Chinese origin of a poem or work of prose is significant to its reading and interpretation.

Chapters 1–4 detail Ryūhoku's life before and during the 1868 Meiji Restoration. Descended from a long line of distinguished scholar-officials, Ryūhoku was definitively tied to the Tokugawa shogunate. His earliest extant poetic manuscripts, Kankei shōkō (Little manuscript composed by cold lamplight), contain 442 poems, though only 51 of them would be included in the posthumously published anthology of Ryūhoku's compositions. Fraleigh identifies two sets of conflicting impulses in his reading of the larger collection: the scholar versus the warrior, and the public official versus the privately oriented literati. Not only did Ryūhoku oscillate between, or rather simultaneously occupy, these respective poles of identity, but he did so by likening himself to a variety of figures and situations appearing in the Chinese canon. Most significantly, he expressed frustration at being able to achieve neither the political importance of Qu Yuan nor the disengagement of Tao Yuanming. In 1860, Ryūhoku completed the first volume of his best-known work, Ryūkyō shinshi (New chronicles of Yanagibashi), though it would not be commercially published until 1874, after the completion of its second volume. Fraleigh rehabilitates the first volume of this chronicle of the Yanagibashi pleasure district, demonstrating Ryūhoku's witty and insightful application of the Classical Chinese canon to discover literary merit in the vulgar and worldly. Whether it was this diversionary behavior, Ryūhoku's newfound appreciation for Western studies, or his blunt expression of opinion, Ryūhoku lost his post as tutor to the shogun in 1863 and was placed under house arrest. For Ryūhoku this was none other than the opportunity to reinvent himself as an urban recluse. Ryūhoku would go on to be appointed cavalry lieutenant and, resigning on January 3, 1868, return again, with some creative interpretation as Fraleigh notes, to seeing himself as the reclusive Tao Yuanming.

The last half of Fraleigh's study tracks the second half of Ryūhoku's life as he travels the world and, upon returning to Japan, pursues his career as a journalist. Fraleigh reconstructs Ryūhoku's domestic journeys, rise to the presidency of the Chōya shinbun newspaper, and later journey to Paris to demonstrate, in contrast with Maeda's characterization of Ryūhoku after the Restoration, that Ryūhoku was not only not a “useless man,” but that his travels abroad were motivated by his interest in the press. Ryūhoku continued issuing hilarious satirical critiques of the Meiji government, still written in Literary Sinitic and still drawing on references from the Classical Chinese canon, despite the passage of laws restricting the press from criticizing the state in 1875. The degree to which Ryūhoku's critique of the laws matches that of Wang Xizhi's famous “Preface to the ‘Orchid Pavilion Poems,’” captured fully in Fraleigh's translation, is striking in its demonstration of Ryūhoku's skill, continuing unabated from his youth, of playfully misquoting and adapting the Sinitic tradition to devasting effect. Ryūhoku's continued attacks landed him in prison. Upon his release, he convened a wake for the Japanese newspaper industry, facetiously chastising it one year after its death for stirring up dissension. In his final years, Ryūhoku's production only increased. Indeed, he facetiously published his own obituary claiming death from overwork as he pressed for representative government and the creation of a constitution. As Fraleigh argues, this political engagement represented a new identity for Ryūhoku that was neither public official nor private literati, and it demonstrated the importance of Literary Sinitic, as a written register for the newspaper, in creating a public consciousness. In keeping with earlier invocations, Ryūhoku again converted Tao Yuanming into a figure of innovation that echoed his appointed role as a member of both the press and the public.

Both Hedberg and Fraleigh convincingly demonstrate the importance of thinking beyond vernacular Japanese when assessing Japanese literature, and in their treatment of literary corpuses, the two studies complement each other. Fraleigh demonstrates that Ryūhoku treated the Sinitic corpus as a kind of repository, transforming its contents based on his need to make incisive commentary, parallel meanings, and witty critique. It also served as a medium for self-expression and self-realization. Hedberg shows that Water Margin was itself in flux and made to serve a variety of different functions. But at this point, the biggest disjunct between the two studies emerges: their characterizations of how Japanese intellectuals engaged with the Sinitic corpus. Hedberg describes Water Margin as being inaccessible to the general Japanese reader, and the impact of both Chinese commentary and Japanese reading aids is plainly evinced. However, Fraleigh repeatedly demonstrates Ryūhoku's comfort with the Literary Sinitic corpus and the widespread appeal of Ryūhoku's writing to his newspaper followers. In the same vein, Fraleigh's use of “Sinitic poetry” as opposed to “Sino-Japanese poetry,” and so on, stresses the familiarity that the author identifies as omnipresent in Ryūhoku's oeuvre. Was Literary Sinitic otherworldly, or were Japanese writers and their readers at home in this register?Footnote ⁵

Of course, this question has no singular answer, as familiarity is a matter of degree. But it does gesture toward a more important question about the degree to which Damrosch's and Emmerich's visions of “World Literature” are applicable to the context of Literary Sinitic. Damrosch and Emmerich are operating primarily in the realm of translation studies, in a paradigm that regards texts as inaccessible without the intervention of the translator; Emmerich calls it “the (unknown and unknowable) original.”Footnote ⁶ Clearly, Water Margin was characterized by otherness for many Japanese readers who relied on translations and commentaries to familiarize it. But for Ryūhoku, who himself aided the publication of a Meiji edition of Jin Shengtan's Water Margin, this otherness seems ill fitting.Footnote ⁷ Ryūhoku repeatedly imagined himself as Tao Yuanming during the course of his life; the Literary Sinitic corpus cannot have been too unfamiliar, and Ryūhoku's allusions to this canon were understood and appreciated by his newspaper readership. And Hedberg's conclusion that there is not really any “original” Water Margin resounds equally well with Fraleigh's premise that there was no singular figure of Tao Yuanming, even before Ryūhoku began incorporating and interpreting his writing. This conclusion is not dependent on translation, or at least on linguistic translation. As Karen Emmerich, also working from the perspective of translation studies, has observed, “originals,” whether premodern or modern, are created by consensus of editors, publishers, typesetters, and authors, and this point applies whether the work is translated from one language into another or not.Footnote ⁸

Whether the idea of Japanese literature will actually change to be more inclusive of the Literary Sinitic tradition, an aspiration posited by both Hedberg and Fraleigh, remains to be seen. Asian studies, as a field, continues to struggle with how best to conceptualize its constituent areas beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, especially in the practical realms of organizational schema and job postings. We can only hope that discursive interventions in the model of Fraleigh and Hedberg continue to multiply and prompt deeper consideration about how to incorporate them into the structure of the contemporary academy.