Sirens of the Western Shore

The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature

Indra Levy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780231510745
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Indra Levy introduces a new archetype in the study of modern Japanese literature: the "Westernesque femme fatale," an alluring figure who is ethnically Japanese but evokes the West in her physical appearance, lifestyle, behavior, and, most important, her use of language. She played conspicuous roles in landmark works of modern Japanese fiction and theater.

Levy traces the lineage of the Westernesque femme fatale from her first appearance in the vernacularist fiction of the late 1880s to her development in Naturalist fiction of the mid-1900s and, finally, to her spectacular embodiment by the modern Japanese actress in the early 1910s with the advent of Naturalist theater. In all cases the Westernesque femme fatale both attracts and confounds the self-consciously modern male intellectual through a convention-defying use of language.

What does this sirenlike figure reveal about the central concerns of modern Japanese literature? Levy proposes that the Westernesque femme fatale be viewed as the hallmark of an intertextual exoticism that prizes the strange beauty of modern Western writing.

By illuminating the exoticist impulses that gave rise to this archetype, Levy offers a new understanding of the relationships between vernacular style and translation, original and imitation, and writing and performance within a cross-cultural context. A seamless blend of narrative, performance, translation, and gender studies, this work will have a profound impact on the critical discourse on this formative period of modern Japanese literature.

[ Part 1 ]

FOREIGN LETTERS, THE VERNACULAR, AND MEIJI SCHOOLGIRLS

Roses bloom on heads, live people become pictures; in such a world, how pathetic that writing alone should have its cheeks crammed full of stiff, mold-sprouting gobbledygook, or a mouth dripping with drool from learning to speak with an immature tongue. Once I realized that this must be a matter for the union of speech and writing, I could hardly wait to seize the moment, with the winds of civilization and the fever of reform surging nigh all at once …

—Futabatei Shimei, preface to Ukigumo

With a strategically ironic use of the poetic Japanese style’s economic elegance, Futabatei Shimei summed up his impetus for writing a novel in the vernacular. Here, meaning is compacted into a series of striking images: roses blooming on heads and live people becoming pictures refer to women ornamenting their hair with roses and socialites posing for tableaux vivants, while the stiff, mildewed gibberish and inarticulate wordings that plague the “mouth” of writing refer to the inherited Chinese and Japanese styles, respectively. These images serve as both a critique of the status quo and a promise for the future. First, the oblique language by which they conjure up the dramatic changes taking place in Meiji Japan eloquently evokes the disjunction between the inherited literary language and the state of contemporary society. As the influx of Western material culture rapidly changes the face of society, Futabatei suggests, it is only fit that writing too should be reformed according to the Western model. Clearly, the use of oral imagery reinforces the notion that this reform will give writing the easily consumable quality of speech. And, finally, the allusions to the Westernesque in women’s fashion serve as a subtle yet tantalizing suggestion of what Futabatei’s new style will be capable of bringing to Japanese fiction.

Indeed, what places Futabatei Shimei at the beginning of this study is the fact that he created the prototype for the Westernesque femme fatale in Osei, the heroine of Ukigumo. The presence of this particular female type in Japan’s first modern novel is not an entirely fortuitous coincidence. Although there is little evidence to suggest that the persistent reappearance of the Westernesque femme fatale in landmark works of modern Japanese literature can be explained as the conscious appropriation, emulation, or parody of Ukigumo, when Futabatei’s first novel is read in the light of these later landmarks it is possible to discern a distinct pattern of relations between new literary media and the erotic-exotic valorization of the Westernesque woman in modern Japanese literature.¹ Regardless of the degree to which Ukigumo may or may not have directly affected later writers, we can confidently say that Futabatei Shimei was the first to discover the Westernesque femme fatale as the figure par excellence for manifesting the complex hybridity of modern Japan. What led to this discovery, and what resulted from it?

Even in the preface quoted above we find an important clue as to what connects the Westernesque woman to modern Japanese literary media: the rise of the modern vernacular in Japanese literature is simultaneously conceived as a new turn toward the West and as a return to the native body of spoken Japanese. Thus the vernacularization of Japanese literary style known as genbun-itchi—in spite of its literal meaning as the “reconciliation of spoken and written language”—cannot be fully grasped as an ideology of returning to the native tongue. As Futabatei’s preface hints and as his own literary career confirms, the successful deployment of a new vernacular literature could only be achieved by means of translating Western vernacular literatures. Although the vernacular style is often discussed in terms of its transparency, it is also, particularly at its inception, characterized by the opaque traces of the foreign. In other words, as a literary style, genbun-itchi began as an uneasy coalescence of the native body of speech with the exotic textuality of foreign letters.

The narrative of Ukigumo, constructed as Futabatei’s attempt to portray the “contemporary state of the nation,” can also be read as a dramatization of this linguistic dilemma. The basic story of Ukigumo is a fairly simply one: the protagonist, Utsumi Bunzō, falls in love with his cousin Sonoda Osei, who in turn seems to shift her affections toward Honda Noboru, Bunzō’s former and infinitely more successful colleague in the prestigious government bureaucracy. Described as a natural-born mimic, Osei has a distinct facility for picking up on new trends and an equal tendency to discard them as soon as something newer comes along. Bunzō, by contrast, is characterized by an unswerving adherence to his own ideals, making him almost completely incapable of adapting to his surroundings. Within the terms of the novel, Osei is a talker, while Bunzō is a thinker—or, more precisely, someone who sees everything in terms of written texts. The ever widening gap between the two, when read as the failed betrothal of speech and writing, emerges as a powerful metanarrative on literary media, one that reveals a great deal more about the essential dilemmas of vernacularization than the expository discourse on genbun-itchi.

Moreover, as emblematic representatives of Meiji Japan, Osei and Bunzō reflect two poles in the modern Japanese relation to the West: the freely chosen adoption of Westernisms as a means of fashionable self-ornamentation (Osei), on the one hand, and the paralyzing internalization of Westernisms as fixed textual realities (Bunzō), on the other. Futabatei’s narrative, which spares neither of these positions from critical analysis, manifests a direct concern with the painfully parodic relationship between Japan and the West. As noted in the introduction, the problematic raised by this relationship was central to literary production itself, and Futabatei’s work as both novelist and translator proposed two different approaches for negotiating it. As a prelude to our reading of Ukigumo in chapter 2, chapter 1 examines the relationship between literary translation, vernacularization, and composition in Futabatei’s work and in his time.

[ 1 ]

Translation as Origin and the Originality of Translation

The history of modern Japanese literature begins with translation in more than one sense. First, we have the translation of the nineteenth-century European concept of “literature” into the Chinese compound bungaku—not a neologism in itself, but the investment of a completely new meaning in an old and fairly recondite term. Tracing as far back as The Analects, the word bungaku

originally referred to the study of written documents, and its meaning later evolved to include the study of rhetoric and the Confucian classics. It was not until the early Meiji period that it came to signify “literature” in the nineteenth-century European sense, as a category of the arts that included poetry, drama, and fiction. This reorganization of knowledge marks a watershed in the social history of fiction, raising the novel from its lowly status as frivolous entertainment to the high culture of civilized nations.¹ In tandem with the introduction of this new concept, the Meiji period ushered in an era of translations from Western languages that would have a decisive impact on all forms of Japanese literary production.

The onset of the Meiji era saw Kanagaki Robun, a professionally trained writer of the popular fiction of the Edo period known as gesaku, struggling to keep up with the rapid changes of “enlightenment and civilization.” Robun’s combination of formal training as a gesaku writer and lack of training in foreign languages was to become a serious handicap in the new literary (or, rather, newly literary) world of the Meiji period. Seiyō dōchū hizakurige (1870–76) and Aguranabe (1871–73), two of Robun’s final efforts to maintain his old trade, duly reflect Meiji Japan’s signature turn toward the West. The former tells a comic tale of two Yokohama merchants who travel to the West; the latter comprises a series of vignettes about the patrons of a beef restaurant in Tokyo. Although Robun studied up for the composition of these works by reading Fukuzawa Yukichi’s best-selling accounts of contemporary conditions in Europe, his formal training had only prepared him to project the profound new changes taking place through the irretrievably outdated lenses of gesaku language. It was a flippant comic language that could not resist reducing the West to a series of dajare puns:

fall/Prussia rain/America

Yuki no purosha mo sate amerika mo basha de kayōte

go/England smitten/Portugal

ingirisu. Boku wa kore hodo horutogaru. Kimi wa itsu de mo

reject/France? duty/Greece once/India lay/Turkey

furansu ka. Ukiyo no girisha to tada indo, toko o toruko no

a little/Egypt coquettish/China

hitotsu yogi. Ejiputo kochira e irashanse. Shinashina to

?/Russia

torisugari. Roshia no mieru koi no michi …²

In this indomitable effort to assimilate Western place names to the language of gesaku, most of the double entendres (indicated in italics above) stretch homophonic associations far beyond their usual limits. Here is the closest approximation I could manage in English (it may help to imagine Groucho Marx giving a private geography lesson to an attractive young woman):

Snow may Prussiapitate and American on rain, but I shall be travelEngland by carriage. These days I am in Port-du-gal. Will you never Francy me? Hinduty to the floating world, just once she aGreece Turkish me for a night. Please come a teeniE-gyptian in my direction. Sino-ously cuddling up, Russian down the path of amour …

While this almost intoxicated, nonsensical flippancy might have provided a welcome palliative for the merchant classes within the staid Tokugawa hierarchical system, the sobering effects of the social upheaval occasioned by the threat of Western hegemony proved less conducive to the enjoyment of pure verbal play.

The end of the self-proclaimed gesaku was undoubtedly hastened by the work of literary translation. In 1877 (Meiji 10) Niwa Jun’ichirō published his epoch-making translation of Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers—a novel that, though certainly not in itself of great literary merit, offered the reader a compelling story and a more intimate sense, however fictional, of the daily lives and sensibilities of Westerners. A sensation in its time, Niwa’s Karyū shunwa (A spring tale of flowers and willows) set an important standard for novel writing in Japanese for the remainder of the Meiji teens. According to Itō Sei, one of the most important contributing factors to the popularity of Karyū shunwa was that Niwa wrote it in kanbun-kuzushi, a Japanese permutation of literary Chinese.³ While Robun was working in the gesaku language of commoners, Niwa wrote in the language of the educated elite. His translation of a modern English novel into literary Chinese helped to establish a new audience for the genre.

The flood of political novels and translations written in kanbunkuzushi that followed in the wake of Niwa’s Karyū shunwa provide ample evidence of its wide-ranging impact. (Even Tsubouchi Shōyō’s translation of Sir Walter Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor into the rhythmic Japanese style of gabuntai, published three years later, follows the precedent set by Niwa in its Chinese title of Shunpū jōwa.) This is the second sense in which the history of modern Japanese literature began with translation. As one commentator remarks, “For the Japanese novel, the period from the publication of Karyū shunwa in Meiji 10 to that of Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo in Meiji 20 brought forth so many translations as to suggest a dearth of compositional power in Japanese literary circles at the time.”⁴ Clearly, the popularity of Chinese diction and written style in the Meiji teens was not the manifestation of some Japanese preoccupation with China, but rather with a particular style of translating the civilization and enlightenment of the “West” that marked its exotic prestige by means of the semiforeign lingua franca of Chinese.⁵ Indeed, the entire vocabulary of “Western civilization” was translated into Chinese compounds (kango), from bunmei (civilization) and bungaku to sokuhatsu (the simplified coiffure of the Western-style bun) and butōkai (dance ball). As the preferred language of translation, Chinese surely facilitated the acquisition of new social customs, technologies of learning, and the profound reorganization of knowledge by which Japan sought entrance into the exclusive and powerful club of modern nations. Yet, within the context of the novel itself, the transformative potential of kanbun translation was substantially limited to the sphere of narrative content.

First let us examine the language of fiction established in Niwa’s Karyū shunwa. In his commentary on this work, Kimura Ki selects the following passages for comparison:

[Ernest Maltravers]

“You work at the factories, I suppose?” he said.

“I do,...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Foreign Letters, the Vernacular, and Meiji Schoolgirls
• Part 2: Tayama Katai and the Siren of Vernacular Letters
• Part 3: Staging the New Woman: The Spectacular Embodiment of “Nature” in Translation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index