Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. x, 194 pp. (Figures.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-4001-3.
Rebecca Suter’s Holy Ghosts: The Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction revisits the interpretive trope of Jesuit missions and their influence during the Warring States Period (1567–1603) and the early Edo Period (1603–1868) as the Christian Century, first expounded by C.R. Boxer in The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (1951) and refined into an explanatory tool for anti-Christian discourse and official institutions and ideology by George Elison in Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (1973). The author repurposes the trope to examine how writers and other cultural producers of modern Japanese fiction employed specific notions of Christianity from that period as a way of registering contemporary anxiety about Japan’s unstable cultural identity. Her two chief topics are the short stories on Christianity, or Kirishitan mono, written by famous prewar writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke between 1916 and 1926, and books, manga, video games, and so forth from the postwar period (1945–) on the largely Christian peasant uprising in 1637 and 1638 known as the Shimabara Rebellion. She employs Judith Butler’s idea of “mimetic incorporation,” as presented in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), to explain how representation of foreigners in these works amounted to a constitution of the Japanese self through the projection of the European, Christian Others.
The book is divided into three main parts. In chapter 1, “Contexts,” Suter takes up Elison’s argument that official anti-Christian sentiments played a major role in how Edo Period authorities legitimated their rule and constructed the social order. She also locates the basis for her claims about “the Christian [C]entury in modern Japanese fiction as a metaphor for the cultural negotiations of the Meiji (1868–1912) and postwar periods” in Ideology and Christianity in Japan(2009), in which Kiri Paramore asserts the existence of continuities between Edo and Meiji Period anti-Christian discourse (26). She differentiates herself from these elite-focused approaches by drawing on Higashibaba Ikuo’s Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice(2001) to explain how Christian symbols became associated with sacredness and magic through the processes of local adaptation and syncretization. However, she neither addresses the debate about the usefulness of the trope of the Christian Century nor explains precisely what she considers her own historiographic intervention within this trope to be, focusing instead solely on the trope as an organizing principle in modern Japanese fiction.
In part 2, Suter situates Akutagawa’s Kirishitan mono and other prewar fiction within Meiji Period and Taishō Period (1912–1926) efforts to modernize. Noting the conflicting calls for Westernization and a return to Japanese values, she argues that Christianity provided the Japanese people with “an alternative model for Japanese cultural negotiations with its European Other, which helped critically appraise, and possibly transcend” the numerous binaries based on East/West (42). She employs this concept to explain how by setting his stories in the distant past, Akutagawa upset the spiritual/scientific dichotomy, portraying Christian practices as magical, and traditional Japanese medicine as rationally, scientifically oriented. She also discusses the issue of communist apostasy, or tenkō, in the wake of government crackdowns in the 1920s and 1930s by analyzing Akutagawa’s stories on Christian martyrs and apostates. For Suter, such stories constituted one of the ways in which the seemingly disengaged Akutagawa made political commentary, “propos[ing] a creative appropriation of recantation as a radical alternative” to disengagement or direct social commitment (76).
Suter’s more ambitious inquiries come in part 3, when she discusses postwar fiction on the leader of the Shimabara Rebellion, Amakusa Shirō. Accounts of the rebellion attribute to him numerous miracles and feats of black magic, depending on whether or not authors were sympathetic to the Kirishitan. The resulting ambiguity proved a bountiful source of creative potential, as authors wrote about his divine and/or demonic resurrection. Yamada Fūtarō’s Makai tenshō (Demonic Resurrection, 1967) provides a particularly critical view of Christianity through an inversion similar to Akutagawa’s, “presenting the Kirishitan as both hypersexual and sexist” (124). Suter tracks this ambiguity through various adaptations of Makai tenshō and other works like the video game series Samurai Spirits (1993–2010), which portray Shirō with ambiguous gender and other characteristics that blur numerous dichotomies, together making him simultaneously “foreign and native, male and female, and good and evil” (137). Suter also locates the shift towards more positive evaluations of Shirō and Christianity as coming from new spiritual movements after the Aum Shinrikyō gas attacks on the Tokyo subways in 1995, citing the time-displaced, female, heroic Shirō of Amakusa 1637 (2001–2006), among others.
Suter makes a good case for the usefulness of the Christian Century as a literary and cultural analytic frame for understanding modern Japanese fiction. Her choice of topics also lets her make a rather clear chronology of the shifting concerns about cultural negotiation; the Kirishitan monodeal with issues of prewar modernization/Westernization, while the Shimabara Rebellion stories deal with the postwar myth of the ethnically and culturally homogenous Japan through the hybrid Amakusa Shirō. Yet it is almost too simple a narrative, as though there were no stories about Shimabara before the war, and there were no other subjects for stories about Christianity. Suter’s book would have been richer if she had situated these two topics within the larger context and trends of contemporary Japanese Christianity.
The book also lacks cohesion, such that the Kirishitan mono and Shimabara Rebellion stories seem entirely unrelated, and Suter’s narrative feels artificial. Her unclear historiographic intervention is similarly indicative of the book’s generally loose argumentative structure. She introduces Marilyn Ivy’s arguments from Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan(1995) in chapter 4 and in the conclusion to discuss how the ontological category of Japan can only exist in relation to the West, in this case specifically Christianity. Her work is clearly heavily influenced by Ivy’s, notably through frequent use of the concept of phantasms of premodernity, which must exist in order for modernity to constitute itself. A greater, more open theoretical reliance on Ivy might have made Holy Ghosts a more sustained engagement with issues of Japanese cultural identity with bolder conclusions about the significance of Japan’s cultural anxiety.
Nonetheless, Holy Ghosts is an interesting foray into a syncretic analysis of different mediums of culture on the popular topic of Christianity in Japan. It helps fill the massive gap in scholarship on manga and anime, and it seeks to provide some answers as to the contemporary matters of cultural hybridity with a historical legacy. Although it might fall short of all its promises, Rebecca Suter’s ambitious project is a step in the right direction.
Alexander Kaplan-Reyes
Columbia University, New York, USA
pp. 671-674