Works Reviewed: Arthur M. Mitchell Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 266 pages.
The power of modernist fiction, contends Arthur M. Mitchell, lies in its ability to “make us aware of the discursive structures that undergird the imaginative relationship we have to our social world.” The purpose of fiction, in other words, is less a flight of fancy than an act of questioning ~ holding up a mirror to reality to see where the cracks are. Our relationship to our social world is always-already conditioned by certain imaginative and ideological processes, and the role of modernist fiction, through the use of formalist literary narrative, was to interrupt the fluid sense of dailiness, and call into question what would otherwise be taken for granted.
One of the problems with holding up a mirror to reality to try and find where the cracks are is that the mirror itself may be dirty or damaged. With respect to contemporary literary theory, Mitchell identifies a “scholarly gap” between textual hermeneutic approaches and cultural studies approaches; what falls through the crack is modernist fiction’s “representational distortions of historical culture” which is where, according to him, the true effectiveness of this style of fiction is to be found. He is following a formulation of Astradur Eysteinnson to the effect that the subversive edge of modernism arises through resistance to the communicative valence of language, rather than through opposition to communicative language as such.
The distinction between resistance and opposition is a subtle one, and one which requires a careful reevaluation of the relationship between literary and quotidian language. Mitchell is not saying that they are the same thing, but he is very critical of any clear-cut divisions between these two registers of language which abstract literary language from social reality. The authors which he discusses all see themselves very much involved in the social reality of their time, even if there posture is primarily a critical one. The Daily Life of the title is a reference to a linguistic-ideological project whose contours can be gleaned through the language of various social institutions; a project which is challenged through the subversive writings of figures like Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabyashi Taiko.
As is usually the case with literary theory, Mitchell is interested not only in analyzing the patterns of the past, but also in establishing what relevance these patterns have for continued engagement with our social reality. Having identified 1920s Japan as a cultural arena heavily mediated by mass media, and drawing attention to the disruptive potential of certain types of formalist literary narrative, he can then go on to make that case that “modernist subversion, and its promise of liberation” remains relevant and urgent today.1 Literature allows one to think of what might have been, or to imagine what life might have been like, and therefore to recover “the fluidity of a historical moment’ when said historical moment had begun to ossify into an unexamined given.
Thus, modernist fiction, has a pedagogical function which is not limited to historical recovery, but also to an increased awareness of how the present is produced, that is, how the social imaginary of the present is constructed. It is important, I think, to note that while disruptiveness, as Mitchell describes it, is a transferable skill, it is a practice which has to operate on a specific social environment. There is no disruption in general, but only ever the specific acts of questioning the way language and media shapes our shared reality. The close reading of literary texts are therefore “performed in the context of a detailed and concrete history of social thought in 1920s Japan.”2
Understanding how narrative fiction can make us more aware of the discursive structures which shape how we imagine our social world requires at least a preliminary outline of what those structures are to begin with, particularly when we are talking about a period of time which is no longer contemporary. So, Mitchell offers a delineation of the genre to which the authors he examines are responding, the I-novel which emerged in the years following the Russo-Japanese war. The I-novel introduced a sense of earnestness, artlessness, self-reflection and emotional authenticity that were to become the bedrock of ‘serious’ Japanese literature at the time when literary modernism takes off. It is this genre that sets readers expectations for what passes as literature, and these expectations are the ones which will be mocked, subverted, and rebelled against by the modernists.
As Mitchell demonstrates the rhetorical strategies of these I-novels, and the kind of world which they imagine, are integrated within a broader discourse of social reform which will take off in a particularly powerful way in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake. These social reform efforts pick up particularly on language of daily life, character, and love. The Great Kantō Earthquake is, perhaps, the protagonist of Mitchell’s story; although the language of reform centred around daily quotidian existence was certainly present before the earthquake, that event precipitated a more intense focus on “self-reform, spiritual purity, and ethnic authenticity.”
The earthquake shook the self-confidence of Japan, and in its wake, with the reconstruction of Tokyo as the capital a “narrative of being reborn into a new self was projected onto the large-scale infrastructure project to rebuild the city into a new ideal imperial metropolis.” The works which Mitchell examines, thus, become the sort of literary aftershocks of the Great Kantō Earthquake. From Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love, to Yokomitsu Riichi’s urban fiction, to Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Akusa, and finally to Hirabayashi Taiko’s short story “In the Charity Ward,” each of the authors responds not only to the quake, but also to the media discourse that surrounds it.
The epicentre of the book, from my perspective, was the chapter on Kawabata Yasunari. Mitchell’s methodology of reading the novel in connection with the surrounding discourse of the newspapers of the time fits particularly well with the style of Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, which was not only published as a newspaper serial, but also mimicked the style and tone of the journalism of the day. The daily life of Mitchell’s title is folded in to the aesthetic project, such that he can say:
“Kawabata’s Scarlet Gang of Asakusa was a novel about many things: the Askusa neighourhood, the impoverished people that inhabited it, the troupe of kids that gathered on its bridges and in its alleys, the cabaret theaters, the earthquake, modern technologies, destitution, the past, and the future. But perhaps more than any of the rest it was a novel concerned with rendering the present; and the present as an all-consuming category.”3
What is of interest here, is that Kawabata’s technique seems opposed to that of his contemporary Yokomitsu Riichi, discussed in the previous chapter. In the introduction Mitchell has highlighted the social discourse of 1920s Japan as a discussion rooted in particular around an idea of seikatsu 生活 or daily life, which describes a concentrated effort to remake Japanese quotidian life in a way that is more consonant with the rest of the modern, industrialized world. Harry Harootunian describes this sense of the quotidian as a form of disquiet, or a violent interruption of tradition. The intense focus on the present moment eclipses the trajectory of the past as well as the expectations that had previously defined the future. The first novel which Mitchell examines, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love, begins to hint at the fetishistic character of this modernizing impulse with a quasi-pornographic parody of the I-novel. Yokomitsu Riichi, in his Neo-Sensationist writings focusses on the materiality of language itself thereby bringing into the foreground the contradictions and ambiguities present in a way which tacitly challenged the efforts of literary critics and social reformers to turn daily living into an aesthetic project. Kawabata, on the other hand, seems to accept this idea to the fullest extent, taking the novel-form and melding it into the fabric of the everyday news cycle.
What Kawabata is going for is a narrative experience of the present moment, and this particular chapter of Mitchell’s book illustrates this with a number of images of pages of the daily newspaper of that period. In fully accepting this conflation of art and life, however, Kawabata is able to provide a very different, and much more violent and contested origin story for the break with the past. In a key scene of the novel Yumiko, one of the protagonists, declares “I am a daughter of the earthquake.” Mitchell notes that, where the “social discourse of earthquake reconstruction completion depended on a statistical rigor that denied human memory and psychological complexity and a language of modernization that effaced the past.” The official narrative of imperial Japan was that this rebuilding and the associated rebirth of the spirit through reforms of daily life were part of a resilient national spirit. Kawabata’s narrative reframes the origin of this birth, it is not tied to a teleological project of nation-building, but rather to the chaotic eruption of the earthquake itself.
The final chapter looks at Hirabayashi Taiko’s “In the Charity Ward.” She is the sole female author and, Mitchell relates, the most socially outspoken and politically active of the authors which he looks at. Where his chapter on Kawabata Yasunari describes a “masculinist scopic regime” which associated aerial views of the city with notions of rationality and advancement” Hirabayashi will describe the experience of childbirth in visceral terms. The body at the mercy of the logic of science and of capitalist economy. Its language is tactile rather than visual. “In writing a feminine body that is criminalized, diseased, destitute, and forced to commit infanticide, Hirabayashi expresses the negative consequences that leaves no room for the feminine.”4 The language of reconstruction, daily life, and love, have another side, an underside which is ignored, kept hidden, forgotten. Bringing it into the light prompts a reevalution of the “way society can and should be formed.”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observed that the training of the imagination habitually fails with flag and altar.5 Nationalist projects harness particular events, and by foreclosing on the scope of the imagination, by clipping the wings of our collective interpretative powers events are harnessed for particular, and often very destructive and narrow political agendas. We saw this with the response to the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, for example, not only in the warmongering that followed, but also in the increasingly spectacular and entertainment-disaster focus of global media. One reporter I spoke with lost his job at the local newspaper because there was no appetite for local news, but only for the more exciting and catastrophic stories being put out by major news media.
In his Coda, Mitchell inveighs against the notion of a national literary narrative. The productive years of these modernist writers are, of course, followed by Japan’s descent into fascism, which puts into question the effectiveness of these writers to use their platforms to effectively subvert the authoritarian and misogynistic tendencies within their society? Mitchell pivots quickly to an insistence that it is important to regard the works on the basis of their individual merit, decoupling them from their authors in order to read them more intensively in relation to how they relate to the social discourse surrounding them, rather than simply trying to judge the political stance of a particular author.
I am sympathetic to this approach, although I do think that Mitchell could have spent a little more time developing the trajectory which led Yokomitsu, for example, to become much more conservative and nationalist in his later work. Mitchell’s contention is that modernist work still has a similar role to play, mutatis mutandis, in our cultural milieu which has its own “incarnations of daily life reform, the apprehension of natural disasters through national ideology, and the specter of the ‘East/West’ binary.”6 History, of course, does not repeat itself, but it does have certain rhymes, rhythms, and resonances. What I wonder is whether the cultural moment with the United States is still resonant with 1920s Japan, in terms of liberal social discourse, or if it has already passed further along the trajectory of a fascist apprehension of the political and social apparatuses. And, if it has, then does that change the way in which subversive texts function?
The Mourning Cloak 
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