Harvard East Asian Monographs, 403. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2017. xiii, 232 pp. US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-97518-7.
In Osaka Modern, Michael Cronin has provided a timely addition to the field of Japanese literary urban studies. Cronin provocatively argues that Osaka’s “recalcitrant” local identity constitutes a “treasonous” challenge to the homogenizing discourses of modern nationality that have emanated from, and concentrated on, Tokyo since the 1868 Meiji Restoration (7, 9). Weaving historical detail and literary theory into rich readings of cultural production set in the city during the 1920 to the 1950s, Cronin charts how writers and filmmakers “imagined Osaka as a distinctly local order—of space, language, everyday life, gender, and more—alternative to the national order” (3). Osaka’s fierce cultural independence, then, informs much more than humorous anecdotes about the differences between Osakans and Tokyoites. In the 1930 and 1940s, it inspired resistance to Tokyo’s imperialist and statist dogmas, and thereafter it animated local antipathy towards economic centralization.
Cronin builds his argument over five chapters, drawing case studies from the works of three writers who “fit awkwardly” into the Tokyo-based Japanese literary canon: Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, who famously relocated to Osaka following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated the capital region; and two household names in Osaka, Oda Sakunosuke and Yamasaki Toyoko (14).
Chapter 1 sets the stage for Osaka as treasonous through an extended reading of Tanizaki’s serial novel Manji (1928–1930), highlighting the concepts of narration and authenticity. As in each of the five chapters, Cronin provides a rich historical description to illustrate how Tanizaki’s work transgressed mainstream discourses. In this case, Cronin places Manji in the context of the genbunitchi movement that sought to standardize Japanese national language along with Tanizaki’s personal concerns about the movement’s negative impact on Japanese language. As Cronin argues, the strategic juxtaposition of local Osaka dialect and Tokyo-based national standard language (hyōjungo) subverted homogenizing discourses of modernity. The contest between Osaka dialect and the national standard, then, amounts to “a contest over the authority to narrate the local” (45).
Chapter 2 expands on the potential of locality to counter the national by introducing Oda Sakunosuke’s Meoto Zenzai (1940), read through themes of expenditure, gourmandise, and everyday life. Writing in the gloomy atmosphere of imperialist discourses demanding rational consumption, propriety, and increased productivity, Oda instead penned a story that follows a “bonbon” spendthrift heir who burns through his inheritance by indulging in vices, all the while undermining, with his ineptitude, his wife’s dogged efforts to make the family business succeed. Not only does the protagonist’s “alternative local masculinity” defy state demands for male physical discipline, the couple’s lack of children violates the state’s calls for sexual reproduction in the service of the empire. Oda uses the bonbon character, Cronin argues, to “reclaim an Osaka … resistant to the homogenization and centralization of culture under national imperialism” (78).
Chapter 3 articulates how imaginations of Osaka’s locality transgressed Japan’s imperial expansion through discussion of a second wartime story by Oda, Waga Machi (1942). At a time “when the nation had already subordinated localities and the empire was pursuing the subordination of nations” under the universalism of the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, Cronin writes, Oda emphasized the inexorable locality of Osaka to map a “distinctive cosmopolitanism that links city, nation, and empire” (81, 105). Identifying a number of flows between Osaka and the Philippines—two places transcended by the empire—Cronin argues that Oda crafted a protagonist who embodies an Osakan “local cosmopolitanism” in conflict with the universalism of imperialism (97).
Chapter 4 offers an innovative reading of Tanizaki’s Sasameyuki (published serially between 1943 and 1948), placing into juxtaposition Osaka and Tokyo, nostalgia and futurity. In the context of imperialist ideologies of production and reproduction, Tanizaki presented the characteristic Osaka bonbon figure as the embodiment of an “anachronistic masculinity” that obstructs the Makioka family’s attempts to adjust to imperial demands (108). In the end, Tanizaki once again juxtaposes Osaka and Tokyo. But this time, Cronin notes, Osaka fills the role of an “outmoded economic model” that steadfastly embraces its traditions in the face of the economic centralization and cultural homogenization of capitalist modernity (140).
Chapter 5 undertakes an extended deliberation of film adaptations of Osaka literature with analysis of several works set in the city, most notably Yamasaki Toyoko’s Noren (1957). Alterations between original literary source materials and their on-screen adaptations, Cronin points out, reveal how popular perceptions of Osaka changed in the national consciousness over time. Kawashima Yuzo’s 1958 adaptation of Noren, for example, updated the prewar temporal setting of the novel to the postwar, and refocused the narrative arc from one of Osaka’s economic subordination to Tokyo to one of romantic drama. Osaka’s submission to Tokyo’s prominence is taken for granted as a result. “The cumulative effect of these changes,” Cronin argues, “is to turn Yamasaki’s story into a narrative of national progress.”
Finally, the conclusion brings the analysis to the more recent present by introducing the 2011 film Purinsesu Toyotomi about a hidden cabal that has secretly ruled Japan from beneath the ruins of Osaka Castle since 1868. As Cronin writes, the success of the film “demonstrates both the persistent resonance and the shifting relevance of Osaka as ‘treason’” (182).
Each chapter is constructed around sections entwining synopses of the works in question, historical contextualization, textual analysis, and theoretical meditations. Sophisticated engagement with critical theorists Georges Bataille, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari will appeal to literary scholars. At the same time, those in urban studies will find two noteworthy contributions in Osaka Modern. First, Cronin adds his voice to a number of others calling for scholars to look outside Tokyo to decentre narratives of Japanese urbanism and urban culture. Second, Cronin usefully carries his analysis beyond the end of the war in 1945, proving the benefits of transcending a date that has all-too-often been treated as a breaking point in Japanese history.
With its blending of deep textual analysis, rich historical detail, and rigorous conceptual engagement, Osaka Modern is a model study for employing literary sources and cultural products to add texture to our understanding of urban culture and modern life in the city.
Tristan R. Grunow
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 163-165