Janet A. Walker

The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishosetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction

The shishosetsu is a Japanese form of autobiographical fiction that flourished during the first two decades of this century. Focusing on the works of Chikamatsu Shuko, Shiga Naoya, and Kasai Zenzo, Edward Fowler explores the complex and paradoxical nature of shishosetsu, and discusses its linguistic, literary and cultural contexts.

The Woman's Hand Gender and Theory in Japanese Women's Writing

This is a book of polemics. It reflects the dynamics of that social life which is built entirely on contradictions.... Such is our epoch. We have all grown up with it. We breathe it and live by it. How can we help being polemical if we want to be true to our period in the mode of the day? -Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography

The True History of the Nineteenth‐Century Japanese Novel*

ç 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2008/10601-0008

The Uniqueness of the Japanese Novel and Its Contribution to the Theory of the Novel

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The Japanese novel of the Meiji period and the ideal of individualism

Abstract The Japanese novel has been viewed either as derivative of the Western novel or as a uniquely indigenous form with little or no relationship to the Western novel. In this paper I view it as both a unique Japanese form and as part of a global current of subjective fiction linked to modernization and expressing the ideal of the modern self. As the representative Japanese form of the novel I choose the shishōsetsu (I-novel, fiction of the self), which emerged around 1907 and dominated Japanese critical discourse until the 1960s. In the paper I juxtapose the Japanese novel with three versions of the European novel with the goal of ascertaining the differences between the Japanese and the European novel and arriving at a sense of the unique features of the Japanese novel. These are the roman personnel of the Romantic period, the realist novel, and the modernist novel. The shishōsetsu turns out to demonstrate some similarities with the Romantic subjective novel and also with the modernist novel. an emphasis on subjectivity in the context of different stages of modernity. It thwarts the expectations of the European realist novel, the standard novel form during much of the twentieth century and the one to which it was most often compared, in its avoidance of a depiction of society, its lyricism, and its preference for subjectivity and sincerity. As a form insisting on a radical lyricism and subjectivity, it reflects Japans position as a modern nation that was simultaneously on the periphery in relation to Europe and part of the center of political power. It is a unique novel form which together with a body of theoretical writings provides an alternative form and theory of the novel.