This work, based on many years' research, is a very exciting introduction to the new interpretations of Yanagita Kunio that have emerged on the basis of the new Yanagita Kunio Zenshū 柳田国男全集, an expanded collection of Yanagita's work organized chronologically. The three words in the subtitle of the book, “text,” “translation” and “modernity,” skillfully represent the points crystallized in Yanagita's own methods of investigation. As a specialist in the work of this great scholar myself, I feel that the main title is difficult to translate into appropriate Japanese, especially since the interpretation of the word “country” is debatable. “Sokoku 祖国,” meaning motherland, is obviously inadequate, whereas “Kokudo 国土,” concerning a nation state and “Kyōdo 郷土,” connoting the region of a person's birth, would both present a difficult choice to the translator. For the present, “Kuni 国” is perhaps acceptable, even though this term still sounds like a national organization in modernizing Japan rather than indigenous living space in a broader sense.
Why did Ortabasi highlight the texts rather than the author? For the reason that within the sphere of human communication, the movement or the force mediated by words is more significant than the static position of ideas or the contents of thought in one's mind. She writes, “I argue that the continuing fascination surrounding Yanagita's work is rooted precisely in the individual texts: in other words, in the way they express their ideas, rather than in the ideas themselves” (p. 2). Hence, she claims that “a rigorous focus on the materiality of his texts” is required. Yanagita's fertile and multiphasic texts themselves yield insightful perspectives. They are relevant to a wider range of disciplinary and methodological issues than has previously been acknowledged. In other words, Yanagita's heterogeneous texts “highlight the radical potential of translation as a method of resistance to the homogenizing national narrative of Japan's early and mid-twentieth century” (ibid.).
The core of the originality of this book is that Ortabasi comprehends Yanagita Kunio as a brilliant “translator,” rather than following previous appraisals of him as a cultural nationalist or a political modernist, a conspiring colonialist, or a converted poet.
Chapter 1 discusses the possibilities of modern literature by focusing on the famous work Tōno Monogatari 遠野物語 (Tales of Tōno). Ortabasi examines Yanagita's theoretical idea of “truth” (jijitsu 事実) in the texts of small magazines of this period, and discusses the critical difference between Yanagita's text and the “naturalism (shizenshugi 自然主義)” that was dominant in the contemporary “I novel (shishōsetsu 私小説).” The Tales of Tōno is rediscovered as an original creation of revised modern narratives. Her discussion of the phrase “Hito no na wa wasuretaredo 人の名は忘れたれど ([I] have forgotten the person's name)” involves the insightful suggestion of “the idea of shared selfhood” in the texts of Yanagita's narration, which is clearly “an alternative” modernity against the individual private self being produced by the dominant literary stream in those days.
Chapter 2 examines concepts of travel and landscape in modern Japan. Travelling is recognized as reading local scenery as texts, making it possible for us to consider the travelogue to be popular literature. While modern travellers graduated from the conventional formula of “bibun 美文” and began to observe and describe “landscape as cultural history” (p. 81), the people of the time were circumscribed by the “rail-centric view” and the “hegemony of the established tourist attraction” (p. 77). Ortabasi asserts that “the modern separation of self from landscape is, for Yanagita, both a curse and a responsibility” (p. 81). At this point translation will function as a method of resistance by an “observant traveler.”
The keyword of Chapter 3 is “self-translation” or “self-reflection.” Here, Ortabasi focuses her attention on the act of naming. We have to recall the fact that almost all the Japanese names of sciences were coined after the Meiji Restoration, including major concept words such as “tetsugaku 哲学” for philosophy and “shinri 心理” for mentality. Ortabasi observes that “any act of naming is translation,” and asserts that Yanagita “chose to fight the battle for self-definition on truly international linguistic ground” (p. 102) as a kind of world literature, envisioning “the well-organized national folklore movement as anticolonial: self-driven, self-defined” (p. 107). Her close examination of the relationship between the subject and the object reminds me of Mita Munesuke's brilliant analysis of the subject in Yanagita's historical work Meiji Taishō shi sesō hen 明治大正史世相篇.
Ortabasi's inquiry into the problem of standard Japanese and dialect in Chapter 4 leads us to the theme of “translating everyday experience,” which is full of tastes and emotions. Originally, every language has the power of a double-bind for “while it provides the means of self-expression, it also imposes limits on it and barriers to it” (p. 134). Furthermore, the modernization of Japanese communication or speech was composed of the apparent dual system, consisting of the standard Japanese in official administration and the intimate local dialect in everyday life. Although both the forms of language place the double bind on self-expression, the linguistic policy and reform of modern bureaucracy will sometimes conceal the rich and self-regulating mode of communal communication by dialect. For this reason, “Yanagita nevertheless has no choice but to search within translation for a way out of this double bind” (p. 174) in modern Japanese.
In Chapter 5, the reader learns of the many books for children written by Yanagita at the time of World War II. Ortabasi closely examines the works Hi no mukashi 火の昔 (A history of fire), Mura no sugata 村のすがた (Village forms) and Mura to gakudō 村と学童 (Village and schoolchildren), and discusses Yanagita's suggestion that “knowledge production is a cooperative activity” (p. 201) of translating everyday experience and becoming the author of communal language.
Yanagita's sophisticated texts may be “a process of becoming” rather than “a finished product,” because they reject narrative closure and avoid a direct sense of resolution. Ortabasi succeeds in portraying the movement or possibility of unfinished Yanagita's work by figuring his uneven texts as “translations” between two modernities, namely the observed object as a modernizing culture in Japanese society, and the building of the subject who rewrites the practical method of modernization.
Finally I would like to add a small comment on the appealing word “translation.” We sometimes figure the function of “translation” as setting a simple “equal sign” between two expressions, described by an unknown word of the foreign or former language and by another well-known word of the native and contemporary tongue. However, this direct image of translating as copying is misleading.
Firstly, every language has its own paradigm (closed framework of knowledge); therefore, the configuration of an equation of identity between the words of different paradigms is impossible. At best, the conditional equation (hōteishiki 方程式) with an unknown variable to solve might be set up (but this image of variables and the metaphorical usage of numerical formulae is not so popular).
Secondly, translating is essentially rewriting, naming, transforming, distorting, interpreting and creating the force of wording. It is not to carry the fixed meaning of the proposition but to transmit the actual movement of imagination. Hence, the practice of translating requires researchers to investigate the network of words and word configurations that is proper to their own language and custom.
For example, we have to recognize that the word “translate” in English has its own network of significance and its own layers of implication, which are subtly but essentially different from the Japanese meanings of “honyaku 翻訳.” While English and Japanese share the main sense of “rendering in another language” or “putting into simpler terms or paraphrasing” and a biological new layer of “copying the DNA information and formulating amino acids and the protein of next generation,” the Japanese word “honyaku” never implies the ecclesiastical meaning of “transferring a bishop to other cathedra” or the theological idea of “conveying to heaven without death.”
The subtle difference between “culture” and “bunka 文化” is another instance. The word “culture” in English has a close relationship to the implication of firm belief in “cult,” “occult” or the exclusiveness of “colonialism,” but the word “bunka” in Japanese does not suggest any kind of extreme position per se. As a result, Japanese readers sometimes fail to notice an exclusive side of culture. The translator recalls not only clearly perceived sense in both languages but also the margin of the meanings, and rewrites or remixes the performance of sentences. In a sense, the translator has to be a historian or a sociologist, in the sense that Yanagita, with his profound knowledge, was a historical sociologist.
I recommend this book to every researcher interested in Yanagita's work, as a good entry into the new interpretation of Yanagita Kunio.
