Michihiro Ama's new book, The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction, reexamines canonical early twentieth-century Japanese literary writings together with contemporaneous religious fictions as autobiographical Buddhist “path literature.” He defines path literature as narratives that reflect their protagonists’ and authors’ spiritual itinerary grounded in the initial “realization and acceptance of suffering” and leading them to “self-realization, self-transformation, and Buddhist awakening” (p. 31). Straddling the disciplinary divide between literary and religious studies, the book seeks to uncover the Buddhist spiritual meaning underlying modern Japanese literary writings while showing how explicitly religious fictions, hitherto excluded from the canon of modern literature, engage with literary themes and concerns. By stressing the nature of modern literary texts as spiritual “personal fiction”—a term that purposely avoids the more common genre designation of “I-novel” (shishōsetsu) (p. 3)—the study proposes a new Buddhist reading of key notions of modern Japanese literary discourse, such as the practice of confession and the realist catchphrase of describing things “just as they are” (ari no mama). While aware of the fictionality of both religious and literary narratives, Ama acknowledges that an important methodological approach of his study is “biographical criticism,” which aims to show that the “characters’ paths also intersect with the authors’ paths and are framed by a particular Buddhist doctrine and ideology” (p. 215).

The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction consists of eight chapters plus an introduction, a conclusion, and two appendices of translations. Except for chapter 1, which provides background information on Buddhist doctrine and discusses relevant theoretical concepts such as “path literature” and “personal fiction,” all chapters focus on early twentieth-century writings by the canonical male literary authors Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Tayama Katai (1871–1930), and Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), as well as autobiographical narratives by contemporary religious figures. Chapter 2 starts out by connecting the biographies of Sōseki, Katai, and Shiga to these authors’ lifelong interest in Buddhism of various doctrines (Zen, Pure Land faith, etc.), all predicated on notions of ephemerality (death) and suffering. Chapter 3 offers a rereading of the realist concept of describing things “just as they are” through an analysis of “personal fiction” as a “self-reflective spiritual practice” (p. 61) aiming at an unmediated vision of reality as Buddhist truth. The literary narratives discussed here include Sōseki's Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa, 1915), Katai's Remaining Snow (Zansetsu, 1917–18), and Shiga's “At Kinosaki” (Kinosaki nite, 1917).Footnote ¹

The following two chapters then shift to a discussion of explicitly religious fictions penned by authors who were connected to the Shin sect of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism (jōdo shinshū). Chapter 4 analyzes confessional autobiographical writings by Shin Buddhist clerics, most notably Akegarasu Haya's (1877–1954) Before and after My Rebirth (Kōsei no zengo, 1920). Chapter 5 focuses on Matsuoka Yuzuru's (1891–1969) historical novel Guardians of the Dharma Castle (Hōjō o mamoru hitobito, 1923–26), which reflects the male protagonist's and author's struggles with the Shin Buddhist monastic order and its reform.

The book's final three chapters again move back to a discussion of novels by Sōseki, Katai, and Shiga, analyzing their representation of allegorical Buddhist words and symbols (chapter 6), mystical experiences (chapter 7), and Buddhist funerals (chapter 8). The works discussed in these chapters include Sōseki's The Three-Cornered World (Kusamakura, 1906) and The Gate (Mon, 1910); Katai's The Quilt (Futon, 1907); and Shiga's A Dark Night's Passing (An'ya kōro, 1921–37). The two appendices finally present translated excerpts from Akegarasu's and Matsuoka's previously discussed autobiographical works—narratives that stand out for their rich resonances with key concerns in contemporary Japanese literary narrative and discourse, including sexual desire, confessional subjectivity, and the intertextuality of European fiction (Tolstoy, Anatole France, etc.).

Although Ama's project of reading modern Japanese literary narratives alongside more explicitly religious fictional works through the lens of Buddhism is interesting and innovative, the book also suffers from shortcomings that sometimes make it hard to accept its claims. Particularly problematic, in my view, is its uncritical treatment of modern literary writings as essentially religious narratives. Chapter 6, for example, while acknowledging that the novels by Sōseki and Katai discussed here do not “explicitly articulate Buddhist worldviews” (p. 150), seeks to uncover allegorical “subtextual meanings” (p. 170) that would reveal the works’ spiritual agenda or “soteriological aspects” (p. 157). Ama finds these meanings attached to what he identifies as “Buddhist words and Buddhist symbols”: for instance, the Tokyo place-names Kirishitanzaka (literally, Christian Hill) and Gokurakusui (Fountain of the Pure Land) in the opening scene of Katai's novel The Quilt are read as allegorical pointers indicating the protagonist's “dissociation from Christianity and his descent toward the Buddhist themes of loneliness and impermanence” (p. 166) when he is seen as walking down the streets from the former place to the latter. To a reader who does not share Ama's methodology of religious “allegoresis” (p. 147), however, such a reading remains unconvincing.

Moreover, Ama explicates purportedly allegorical words in Sōseki's novels through the use of the same words in Buddhist sutras and premodern religious writings by such figures as Dōgen (1200–1253), as if all these texts belonged to the same historical, discursive, and epistemological sphere. If Buddhist salvation—or the “path” toward it—was indeed a major concern not only for their protagonists but also for Sōseki, Katai, and Shiga, one wonders why they did not write explicitly religious texts outright. What is the difference between literary and religious articulations in their treatment of religious elements and themes, especially in a context of modernity?

As many critics have noted, religious and Buddhist concerns indeed abound in modern Japanese literary writings—Sōseki's well-documented interest in Zen Buddhism is a case in point. I believe, however, that to more productively tease out the significance of these concerns, it is important to interrogate how religion stands in dialogue with the other epistemological paradigms that informed the production of modern Japanese literature, including in particular science and psychology.Footnote ² Sōseki's in-depth engagement with these fields of knowledge is again a case in point. Could it be that literature, more than any other textual practice, negotiates the contradictions between the various epistemologies and forces of modernity, thus rather complicating the “path” of spirituality (in Sōseki's case through irony and nostalgia) than uncritically promoting it?