Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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most famous of the coterie magazines, Shirakaba (White Birch), departed from this pattern because its aristocratic contributors were able to fund an exceptionally long run of the magazine. Yet as ephemeral as more typical coterie magazines were, they offered publishing opportunities to untested writers and exposure to a literary community that was intensely engaged in mutual reading and mutual criticism. And since positive reception signaled induction into the bundan, coterie magazines provided a critical stepping-stone to career success. Because contributors, publishers, and readership were essentially identical, coterie magazines became a vehicle for producing the practices of mutual criticism and validation, as well as the inward gaze and collective narcissism that shaped the culture of the bundan.25
Common physical location in the capital was the third defining characteristic of the literary establishment. As Fowler points out, Tokyo was the home or adopted home of virtually all “pure literature” writers. The identification of the bundan with Tokyo was sustained by a number of factors. As we have seen, the educational ladder concentrated resources of higher learning and highbrow culture in Tokyo and funneled aspiring writers to the capital. Likewise, Tokyo was home to the major publishing firms as well as newspaper companies like the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, which employed establishment writers and published their novels in serial form. But synonymy with Tokyo also emerged from the centrality of personal connections within the literary establishment. The constitutive cultural practices of the bundan were based on mutual acquaintance and the intense intersociality of the local community of writers. This was true of not just the coterie journal but also the “I novels” and modes of literary critique that dominated literary form in the teens and twenties.
As many literary historians have pointed out, the Japanese inflection of naturalism was based on an unflinchingly honest and unsentimental depiction of everyday life through the thoughts and emotions of the artist.26 When applied by Tokyo writers, the celebrated literary technique of “sketching from life” yielded intimate, if thinly disguised, portraits of the artist, his friends, and their lives in the metropolis.27 As naturalism gave rise to the “I novel” form, fiction became part gossip and part confession, focusing in particular detail on romantic entanglements and sexual peccadilloes. These conditions of production also affected the practice of literary criticism, in which commentary on the merits of technique and form jostled for place with speculation about the identity of specific characters and reactions to the personal revelations contained in the text. Moreover, because of the exclusive nature of the bundan, much of what passed for literary criticism devolved into a kind of shoptalk whose meaning was readily apparent only to an insider. In other words, the self-referential nature of the bundan and its literary production reinforced its identification with the Tokyo locale. Tokyo’s position as a national capital elevated this intensely localized and inward-looking social formation—the Tokyo literati—to the apex of high cultural production. The privilege of cultural geography turned a local literature into a national canon and helped foster the misrecognition of the metropolis as the font of the modernist imagination.28
What did it mean for the Tokyo literati that most were born and raised outside the capital city? As literary historians have pointed out, such prominent naturalists as Kunikida Doppo, Tayama Katei, and Tokuda Shūsei were all provincial transplants, and the humanist “White Birch” school (Shirakabaha) was drawn from the ranks of the provincial aristocracy.29 With their enthusiasms for Tolstoy’s vision of a pastoral life and their romantic exultations of nature, these writers contributed to what Carol Gluck called the “rediscovery of the countryside” in the early twentieth century.30 The predilection for writing from life experience meant that a city like Kanazawa, which sent a parade of intellectual luminaries to the capital, served as the stage for many classic works of modern Japanese literature. The list of Kanazawa writers included Izumi Kyōka, disciple of Ozaki Kōyō and founding member of the bundan, who wrote lyrical melodramas with a touch of the gothic; Tokuda Shūsei, a naturalist whose fiction evocatively captured the lives of the urban lower-middle class; Murō Saisei, the influential naturalist poet; and Nakano Shigeharu, the celebrated poet of the proletarian literary movement.31
Though these artists became identified (by themselves and by others) as belonging to Tokyo, their provincial origins left conspicuous traces in their literary production. Thus it is possible to track a shift in subjectivity—their embrace of a metropolitan identity—through their writings. In a literature that was often autobiographical or loosely based on life experience, the Tokyo literati located themselves as men of the metropolis, but also in relation to an earlier, provincial identity. This came through with particular clarity in the way the bundan wrote about their old hometowns. As a focal point of their literary production, the “hometown” (kokyō) became the lens through which the bundan and their readers visualized the local city. Viewing it from the perspective of Tokyo and situating it in a particular relationship with the capital, they provided in fictional and poetic space a powerful symbolic rendering of places like Kanazawa that became integral to the ideology of the metropolis.
One example of this was the frequent emplotment of Kanazawa within the “ascension to Tokyo” (jōkyō) narrative. Izumi Kyōka set much of his fiction in Kanazawa, where he grew up the son of an engraver in the 1870s and 1880s, before moving to Tokyo at the age of seventeen to make his fortune as a writer. Kyōka’s writings drew extensively on his experiential knowledge of plebian Kanazawa, the realm of the artisan, the merchant, and the geisha that, in his youth, was still heavily flavored with the old-world traditions of the castle town.32 Like those of many writers, his plots reproduced his own migration to Tokyo and mapped Kanazawa onto a hierarchical cultural geography that situated the metropolis at the center. His first critical success, Noble Blood, Heroic Blood, portrayed a doomed love between a Kanazawa geisha and a student, who “ascends to Tokyo” to study law. This journey was made possible by the sacrifice of the geisha, trapped back in Kanazawa, who sends money to support his studies in Tokyo. Sustaining the flow of money proves an almost impossible task, and the geisha is finally driven to theft and murder in order to help the student realize his ambition. Fatefully, she is caught and tried, as it turns out, by her law student, now a distinguished prosecutor. Hewing to the principles of law he learned at the university, the prosecutor feels he must sentence her to death. But to acknowledge her sacrifice and the bond they shared, he commits suicide after her sentence is carried out.
Both the student and the geisha were stock characters in the fiction of late Meiji and Taishō Japan and were used, as in Kyōka’s story, to symbolize Japan’s future and its past. The student looked forward to his future and to Japan’s future; he had access to modern knowledge and was destined for wealth, status, and power. The geisha was shut out of this new world, trapped in a system of entertainment and sex work that harkened back to an earlier era. As in this story, the social encounter between the geisha and the student narrativized the clash between the old and new worlds, a clash that proved fateful for the geisha who was invariably left desolate or dying.33 The association of the geisha with Kanazawa and the student with Tokyo linked topos to temporality, turning province and metropolis into chronotopes and leaving Kanazawa behind the juggernaut of progress and out of a modernity concentrated in Tokyo.34 Moreover, just as the student needs the geisha’s support, at any cost, to succeed in his studies, the story implies that Kanazawa must be sacrificed to sustain knowledge production in Tokyo. In painting Kanazawa as provender for Tokyo, a way station to the metropolis, a place that existed only to function within the logic of jōkyō, such fictional spaces emplotted provincial cities as part of a cultural system trained toward the capital. They shored up the ideology of the metropolis.
Nakano Shigeharu, too, staged his writing in Kanazawa and deployed the jōkyō narrative. In one of his forays into fiction, Nakano structured the plot of Changing Song (Uta no wakare) around his own biography. At least in terms of geo-social mobility, this conformed to type: born to a landholding family in Fukui prefecture, Nakano attended a village elementary school, continued on to middle school in a nearby town, went to Kanazawa to attend Fourth High, and from there moved to Tokyo University. The first two parts of Changing Song were set in Kanazawa during his higher-school years. They depict student life in a provincial town as a rite of passage on the path to literary renown in the capital: early romantic attachments, the rivalries and comradeship of classmates—a story of youthful dreams and character formation.35