Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 387. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor], 2015. xii, 299 pp. (Illustrations.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-08841-2.
In this wide-ranging and fascinating study, Seth Jacobowitz provides an insightful perspective on the formative period of modern Japanese literature in the Meiji era (1868–1912). Here writing technology can be interpreted in two ways: in reference to the technologies employed in creating and disseminating written works, and in reference to technology as an explicit or implicit object of written discourse. Jacobowitz explores them both, connecting them to each other and contextualizing them within the broader trends in technology, politics, culture, and intellectual dialogue with the West that marked this transformative period of Japanese history. This is, in other words, a study of media history, going well beyond the confines of a traditional literary study. Jacobowitz’s theoretical approach relies on the methodological framework of the twentieth-century German scholar Friedrich Kittler, who was interested in the ways that discourse networks—technological systems for recording and transmitting information—affect everything from the arts to cultural and political institutions.
Consisting of ten chapters with an introduction, the book is divided thematically into four sections. The sections are arranged in a logical and temporal sequence that “demonstrate[s] how a multiplicity of globally synchronic media concepts, practices, and processes were assembled in the Meiji” and led to the new style of literary realism that came to dominate Japanese literature in the early twentieth century (12).
Part 1, “Discourse Networks of Meiji Japan,” explores the emerging new technologies that rapidly transformed the archipelago’s physical and psychological landscape, including standardization of weights and measures, the institution of modern postal and telegraphic systems of communication, and the development of the railroad. Along with these new technologies came a new level of state control and censorship of information pathways. Jacobowitz shows, through a carefully curated review of visual and literary media, how these societal changes radically transformed conceptions of time, space, nation, and language, and how this “epistemic break” in turn began to drive changes in artistic style and genre.
Part 2, “Scripting National Language,” traces the language standardization and reform movement of the nineteenth century, including debates over the ideal relationship between written language and ordinary speech. Jacobowitz focuses on issues of script reform with a special emphasis on phonography, the direct representation of speech sounds in writing. In a modernizing country whose inherited writing system provided a multitude of ways to intermix Chinese-derived logographic kanji with phonographic kana, the question of phonetization loomed large in these debates. Jacobowitz energizes this discussion with a detailed investigation of the development of Japanese shorthand notation, and the promise it held for some intellectuals of embodying a writing system so transparent that it might represent speech as it really is—to the point of effacing its own role as an intermediary. He puts forward the intriguing claim that “unification of speech and writing”—that is, the shift from a classical written language that was formally very different from speech to a written language that closely approximated the linguistic structures of the vernacular—emerged from “experimentation with both conventional and newly invented phonetic scripts” (97).
Part 3, “Writing Things Down Just as They Are,” is in many ways the heart of the book. In its two chapters, Jacobowitz shows how the desire to accurately capture colloquial orality in writing (whether in theatre, public lecture, or other modes of oral discourse) coalesced with the maturation of shorthand transcription to create a kind of “verbal photography” that could revivify for readers the immediacy of spoken performance. It is in Jacobowitz’s captivating discussion of the transcription and publication of the ghost story The Peony Lantern, adapted from an electrifying stage performance by the rakugo master Sanyūtei Enchō in the early 1880s, that Jacobowitz brings to prominence a crucial aspect of the development of modern Japanese literature. Published versions of The Peony Lantern and other works appeared in the “unified style,” what we would now recognize as something akin to modern standard written Japanese, a vernacularized written language represented in a mix of kanji and kana scripts. But this written form was an editorial revision of the original transcriptions, made in real time, in Japanese shorthand. And it is the use of shorthand, according to Jacobowitz, that is the crucial link missing from most historical accounts: the “ground-breaking development” that led, esthetically and intellectually, to “new modes of realism and naturalism, which … were written in the unified style and which produced such epistemic ruptures as the ‘discovery’ of interiority, landscape, and so on” (195). The shorthand transcribers Wakabayashi Kanzō and Sakai Shōzō are key figures in this resurfaced history.
Part 4, “The Limits of Realism,” demonstrates, through close readings of Masaoka Shiki’s poetry and Natsume Sōseki’s I Am a Cat, how the intellectual and technological trends detailed in the first three parts propelled the development of a new literary style in the early twentieth century. At the same time, Jacobowitz shows us how these works recognized, and commented upon, the limitations of literary realism and the ability of written language to reproduce spoken language.
The brief summary just given fails to do justice to the breadth of topics and materials synthesized into this study, and their skillful integration into its overarching themes. To take just one example, Jacobowitz repeatedly demonstrates the inter-relationship of Japanese and Western developments in the realms of script and language reform, literary theory, and discourse technologies. From the provocative title of the section “Mori Arinori and the Anglophone Roots of Modern Japanese” (101) to the surprising revelation that the Japanese educator and government functionary Isawa Shūji was invited by Alexander Graham Bell to test his newly invented telephone, “making Japanese only the second language after English to be spoken over the wires” (154), we are reminded again and again of the “extensive relations … between Anglophone and Japanese media history, language, and script reform” (259).
While Jacobowitz’s book is grounded in the terminological and theoretical apparatus of literary and cultural studies, its breadth of scope and clarity of style, as well as the inherent interest of so much of its subject matter, make it an accessible and valuable work for anyone interested in the historical development of modernity in Meiji-era Japan. It should also be stated that the book is handsomely set and generously illustrated with many truly remarkable prints that bring alive Jacobowitz’s descriptions.
Zev Handel
University of Washington, Seattle, USA