perspektywy kultury / perspectives on culture

Fascination With Otherness numer 19 (4/2017)

Matthew C. Strecher
Sophia University, Tokyo
[email protected]

East Meets West, then Gives

It Back: The Fate of Pure
Literature in a Global Age

AB STRACT

As part of the early Meiji (1868-1912) project of constructing a mod-

ern “subject” to populate the newly-fashioned, Western-style nation-
state, late nineteenth-century Japan’s literary artists enthusiastically
engaged in the exploration of the individual self. Borrowing as their
template the European realistic novel, they succeeded not only in es-
tablishing the modern shōsetsu, but an equally new language in which
to write such novels. Their work came to be known as junbungaku, or
“pure literature.” Written by, for, and about Japanese subjects, junbun-
gaku has come to be understood as a quintessentially Japanese mode
of artistic expression.
This began to change in 1979 with the début of contemporary nov-
elist Murakami Haruki. While engaging Western models in the for-
mation of his literary landscape, Murakami rejected the “by/for/about
Japanese” strictures of junbungaku, exploring a more global subject
grounded in a hybrid conception of that subject as both Eastern and
Western. Having thus encountered “the West,” Murakami then “gave
it back” as a new, hybrid type of fiction that eschews polarizing con-
cepts like “East” and “West,” emerging instead as a truly global form of
literature. While scorned by some traditionalists as the “death of jun-
bungaku,” Murakami’s work has also been heralded as a rebirth for se-
rious global literature.

K E Y W O R D S : subjectivity, junbungaku, shōsetsu, global literature

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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

STRESZCZENIE

Wschód spotyka Zachód, a później go oddaje: los „czystej literatury”

w erze globalnej

W ramach zamysłu stworzenia nowoczesnej „podmiotu”, który zalud-

ni odnowione w zachodnim stylu państwo, w okresie Meiji (1868-1912)
literaci japońscy entuzjastycznie rozpoczęli odkrywanie swojego oso-
bistego „ja”. Czerpiąc ze wzorca europejskiej powieści realistycznej,
zdołali nie tylko wykreować współczesne shōsetsu, ale i równie nowy
język, w którym powstawały takie powieści. Ich prace stały się znane
jako junbungaku lub „czysta literatura”. Pisana dla, przez i o Japoń-
czykach, junbungaku była odbierana jako ściśle japoński sposób wy-
razu artystycznego.
Ta tendencja zaczęła się zmieniać w 1979 r., wraz z debiutem
współczesnego powieściopisarza Harukiego Murakamiego. Tworząc
swój literacki krajobraz przy użyciu zachodnich modeli, Murakami
odrzucił strukturę junbungaku („przez/dla/o Japończykach”), odkry-
wając bardziej światowy podmiot, osadzony w hybrydowej koncepcji
podmiotu ze Wschodu i Zachodu jednocześnie. Murakami najpierw
spotkał „Zachód”, a następnie „oddał” go jako nową, hybrydową fik-
cję, która porzuca spolaryzowane idee „Wschodu” i „Zachodu” i uka-
zuje jako prawdziwie światowa forma literatury. Wyszydzane przez
niektórych tradycjonalistów jako „śmierć junbungaku”, dzieło Mura-
kamiego zostało jednocześnie ogłoszone odrodzeniem poważnej lite-
ratury światowej.

S Ł O WA K L U C Z O W E : podmiotowość, junbungaku, shōsetsu,

literatura światowa

Introduction
After a fifteen-year period of confusion and conflict following the two
visits to Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 and 1854, dur-
ing which the necessity of strengthening Japan’s ability to resist a possi-
ble invasion by the technologically more advanced Western powers was
at the core of discussion, Japan reformulated itself from a relatively iso-
lated and technologically backward feudal society into a modern, unified,
Western-style nation-state. This reformulation was accomplished through
the wholesale investigation and selective importation of Western thought
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Matthew C. Strecher – East Meets West, then Gives It Back: The Fate of Pure Literature in a Global Age

and technology. It is widely acknowledged that the beginning of the Meiji

period (1868-1912) was marked by intense “borrowing” of technological,
political, and cultural knowledge from the West. From a French-inspired
military (later German, after the latter’s victory in the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870) to a British-style constitutional monarchy, Japan set about
the wholesale invention of itself as a modern nation-state in the European
fashion (Pyle 1969; Duus 1976; Gordon 2003).
This was as true in the arts as it was in technology and political struc-
tures, but it is also true that Japanese art and literature in 1868 already
could boast long and thriving histories that surely did rival Western coun-
terparts. From screen painting to woodblock printing, ceramics and wood-
work, Japanese visual arts were much coveted by early Western visitors,
enjoying particular popularity with the French. 1 In literature, Japanese
poets had been developing and refining highly stylized poetic forms for
more than a thousand years, and dramatic modes such as Nō, Kabuki,
and Jōruri (better known today as Bunraku, or puppet theater) had a long
tradition, Nō having been established in the fifteenth century, Kabuki and
Jōruri in the seventeenth. While it is true that prose fiction was viewed as
a relatively vulgar form of writing, Japanese could look back much further
to the poem-tales (uta-monogatari) of the Heian period (793-1185), which
included the remarkable Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji, ca. 1010 A.D.)
and Makura no sōshi (Pillow Book, ca. 1002 A.D.), works that continue to
be read today.
So why did writers of the Meiji period feel the need to “import” W
­ estern
forms of writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century? Simply put,
the pre-Meiji Japanese literary tradition, while rich in abstract and styl-
ized forms of expression (particularly in its poetic forms), was not suit-
ably equipped to construct, describe, or express a modern political sub-
ject. It was not designed to express the individual in concrete terms, and it
lacked a colloquial linguistic form that would be recognizable to readers
who would become citizens in the new era. For these reasons, Japanese lit-
erature – including its language – needed to be re-invented in a complete-
ly new form.
In the pages that follow, we shall explore briefly how this re-invention
took place, how Japanese writers of the Meiji period imported Western lite­
rary forms, and established a new written language capable of ­expressing
the Japanese “subject.” We shall also see, however, that just a century later,
many of these established forms of literature were rejected in favor of nar-
rative forms and subjects that defied the very “Japaneseness” of ­the earlier

1 See, for instance, H. Tanaka, “Cézanne and ‘Japonisme’” in: Artibus et Historiae 22.44, 2001,
pp. 201-220.

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subject, opening the way for a less culturally specific, more “global” mode
of expression that has come to be adopted outside of Japan as well. In this
sense, I shall argue that the Japanese, having once imported literary forms
from the West, eventually exported a resilient and malleable new literary
trope that is, even now, being adopted in the West and various parts of Asia.

From Edo to Meiji

Having just made the critical turn from centralized feudalism, in which
hundreds of domains (han) enjoyed relative autonomy in governance, the
concept of a single, unified nation-state would have been somewhat alien
to most Japanese. The Meiji Restoration (ishin) was, in many ways, an ac-
tual revolution (kakumei) in the sense that it was an overthrow not only of
the Tokugawa shōgunate, but of virtually every aspect of pre-1868 every-
day life in Japan. Whereas individuals in the Edo period (1603-1868) were
apt to conceive of their identity locally, as belonging to a particular do-
main, under the rule of a particular domain lord (daimyō), the new Meiji
system was centered upon the central authority of the Emperor himself,
who was presented as the “father” of his nation, his subjects identified as
his “children” (Keene 2002, Gordon 2003). The formation of the individ-
ual subject was thus an essential step in the construction of the Western-
style nation-state Japan was to become, for how could one speak of an “im-
perial state” when the “imperial subject” did not yet exist in the minds of
the common people?
The concept of the national “subject” was by no means a clear one.
What were the duties of such a subject? What rights, if any, would he
have? This was to a great extent a political question, one pursued through
a variety of government decrees, most important of which had to do with
the establishment in 1872 of a centrally-controlled education system that
informed commoners of their duties to the nation and their emperor. As
Andrew Gordon (2003) writes, “schools were to encourage practical learn-
ing as well as independent thinking. By this means commoners would find
their own way to serve the state.” 2
But efforts to establish the Meiji subject did not stop with compulsory
education. Japan’s intellectuals – and especially, its young writers – quick-
ly took up the task not only of depicting the new Meiji citizen in fiction,
but also in determining both the language and the format in which this

2 Gordon, A., A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 67.

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Matthew C. Strecher – East Meets West, then Gives It Back: The Fate of Pure Literature in a Global Age

citizen would be expressed. This was by no means an easy task, for Japa-
nese literature up until the Meiji Restoration, and indeed for a brief period
after it, was dominated by heavily stylized poetic and dramatic forms; fic-
tion, as Janet Walker (1997) notes, was considered a vulgar mode of writ-
ing. It was only the relatively higher status of fictional forms in Western
literary canons that led Meiji literati to reconsider fiction as an acceptable
form.

Fiction in the period before contact with Western literature never had the
prestige enjoyed by, first, lyric poetry, and then lyric-based drama. It may
have taken an awareness of the greatness of the nineteenth-century Euro-
pean novel to convince the first shapers of a classical canon in the 1890s to
include Japanese classical fiction in their histories of Japanese literature. 3

Even so, there was a considerable gap between prose forms of the classical
era – the Heian period (793-1185), for instance – and the gesaku (“play-
ful”) prose forms that marked the Edo period. Donald Keene (1998) notes
of nineteenth-century gesaku writing that “the literary content, rarely more
than thrice-recast versions of old gesaku stories or Kabuki plays, could
hardly have engrossed any but the least discerning readers.” 4 Indeed, even
at its height – arguably, the late-seventeenth century writings of avowed
gesaku master Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693) – prose fiction of this sort was
marked by type-cast characters, and formulaic plot lines that led to readily
anticipated moral conclusions. They were entertaining, and wildly popu-
lar, but by modern standards required little creativity beyond the construc-
tion of variations on a theme. Seldom did gesaku writing deal with the
complexities of the individual self.

Developing the Subject through Literature

Two forces drove the development of literature – and the Japanese arts
in general – during the Meiji period: one was the perceived need to de-
velop art that would equal or surpass that produced in the West; the oth-
er, as stated above, was to construct and express a modern, individual
“­subject.” With regard to the first, as Christine Guth (1997) argues, “­[­t]­he

3 Walker, J. “Reflections on the Entrance of Fiction into the Meiji Literary Canon.” In Hardacre,
H. and Kern, A.L., editors, New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan. Leiden, New York, Köln:
Brill, 1997, p. 42.
4 Keene, D. Dawn to the West: Japanese literature in the modern era. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1998, p. 11.

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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

Meiji recontextualization of art, which was part of the effort to gain par-
ity vis-à-vis the West, sparked much dialogue among government officials
and their spokesmen, artists, critics, and collectors both within and out-
side of Japan” 5 (Guth 1997, 35), suggesting that the project of establishing
a “modern” artistic canon was not only politically motivated, but also that
it was to be a collaborative effort between artists and the Meiji State. In
the area of literature, and particularly the fiction genre, there was a drive
to posit “a new sort of subject, one that could view the world outside it as
an object and, by means of that power, criticize and reflect on the reality
of the day.” 6
“Reality” is the key word here, for in contrast to pre-Meiji literature,
which tended to utilize established plot structures and type-cast charac-
ters, as noted above, the modern Meiji novel was presented as a realistic
genre, and tended to focus on the individual, a concept that, until recently,
had been deemed not only unsuitable, but unseemly. 7 But if the early Mei-
ji era was marked by an implicit struggle between the old guard of gesaku
writers – men such as Kanagaki Robun (1829-1894) and Kubota Hikosaku
(1846-1898) – and the avant-garde work of writers influenced by transla-
tions of Western works, the struggle did not last for long; by 1885 Tsub-
ouchi Shōyō (1859-1935) had published his seminal text Shōsetsu shinzui
(1885; Essence of the novel), in which he outlined the basic parameters
for modern Japanese literature, and defined its most effective structure as
realistic long-prose narrative. The following year Futabatei Shimei (1864-
1909) began to write Ukigumo (1886-89; Drifting cloud), widely regarded
as Japan’s first modern novel, and a study in individual character. Ukigu-
mo explores not only a variety of characters in early Meiji, but more impor-
tantly their motivations for acting, their individual personalities, and thus
represents an early example of literature that establishes and explores the
nature of the self.
This was the origin of what would very shortly be termed junbungaku
(pure literature), a word coined in 1893 that corresponds, superficially at
least, to “serious literature” in English, or the French belles lettres. 8 For
purposes of this essay, however, it is important that junbungaku and its ori-
gins be closely tied to the inception of modern literature and the modern

5 Guth, C. “Some Reflections on the Formation of the Meiji Artistic Canon.” In Hardacre, H.
and Kern, A.L., editors, New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan. Leiden, New York, Köln,
Brill, p. 35.
6 Walker 1997, p. 43.
7 Keene 1998, p. 51.
8 The term junbungaku was first used by poet Kitamura Tōkoku (1868-1894) in his “Naibu sei-
mei-ron” (Theory of interiority) in 1893.

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Meiji subject because, as will be shown below, junbungaku as a practice

contributed significantly to the conception, growth, and maturation of the
modern Meiji subject upon whose shoulders the new Japanese State was
built.

In Other Words
One of the challenges facing those who would develop the new form of
literature known as the shōsetsu (commonly translated simply as “novel” 9)
was the lack of a written language that accurately reflected the speaking
patterns of the Japanese in the early Meiji period. Japanese writers at the
dawn of the Meiji period still wrote prose either in Chinese, or in a modi-
fied form of classical Japanese that bore little resemblance to the language
spoken on the streets of the new capital of Tokyo (Twine 1991, Orbaugh
2003). To understand this in Western terms, imagine that Lord Byron’s
language options, or Mark Twain’s, had been limited to either Latin or to
the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Efforts to rectify this situation led to several decades of linguistic experi-
mentation that came to be known collectively as the genbun itchi (concord-
ance of written and spoken language) movement, in which verbal inflec-
tions, vocabulary, and even spelling underwent a comprehensive overhaul,
while space was made in the language to import words from Western lan-
guages. By the turn of the twentieth century, a Japanese written language
had been developed that was versatile enough to express the complex ide-
as of the new Meiji society, while mirroring the modern vernacular being
used by the common people.
Lack of a modern written Japanese was a serious obstacle not only to
the construction of new modes of literature, but also to the expression and
intelligibility of the new Meiji “subject” who would be at the heart of those
narratives; how, for instance, was a middle-aged man supposed to recog-
nize himself in a literary character who spoke in antiquated language he
could barely understand? Would he recognize himself in these characters
and their speech patterns? Would those linguistic forms be able to sort out
the complex layers of hierarchy that marked Japanese society? As Orbaugh

9 The term is adopted from the Chinese xiao shuo, meaning “little story,” referring to prose fic-
tion written in the Chinese vernacular during the classical period. Ironically, the xiao shuo genre
seems to have favored fantastic or supernatural elements, in contrast with the Japanese redefi-
nition of the term as “realistic prose.” For more on the history of the xiao shuo (or hsiao-shuo),
see Mair, V. (ed.), The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University
Press), 2001. See also Orbaugh 2003, esp. p. 11.

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notes, “the new language would have to be able to express the new, mod-
ern subjectivity that Meiji intellectuals wished to create. Would readers un-
derstand it, or would they be frustrated by their inability to read the nar-
rator’s and their own ‘position’ in the social web?” 10 What we see here is
that the gembun itchi movement was not merely a bid for a new mode of
literary expression, but an effort to establish the actual building materials
by which the new Meiji citizen-subject would be constructed in language,
and thus potentially a means by which the newly established “Japanese cit-
izen” could learn more about his or her position in society, and his or her
duties within that society.
Thus, one could argue that the fictitious subject who appeared in the
junbungaku of the early and mid-Meiji period fulfilled both a reflective and
a constitutive function: he or she was reflective of what authors saw on the
streets around them, and of course, what they saw in their own imagina-
tions; but the literary hero also provided a model for readers to follow, an
example of one individual confronting a series of dilemmas in the modern
era. There is, in other words, a strongly didactic aspect to Japanese litera-
ture from this period, and its principal educational goal was to show Meiji
readers by example how to be individuals, imperial subjects, and even Jap-
anese. This last was particularly important when we consider that Japan
was in the midst of an unprecedented period of importing things Western;
what more crucial time could there be imagined to assert what it was to
“be Japanese”?
In other words, junbungaku – and specifically, the Meiji shōsetsu – was
constructed as a form of writing by, for, and about Japanese people, and
one of its most crucial functions was to define for readers who they were as
Japanese. In addition to offering a new and exotic mode of literary enter-
tainment for readers, it served the wider national purpose of strengthen-
ing the newly formed Meiji state and its goal of constructing an educated,
obedient, and morally conscientious populace of citizen-subjects. 11

10 Orbaugh, S. “The Problem of the Modern Subject.” In Mostow, J., editor, The Columbia Com-
panion to Modern East Asian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 28.
11 Novels abound from this period that express, among other things, the tension between the tra-
ditional beliefs of the late Edo period and the demands of the new Meiji state. Ozaki Kōyō’s
(1868-1903) Konjiki yasha (1897; Gold-loving she-demon) deals with a conflict between oppor-
tunistic materialists and moral obligation; Natsume Sōseki’s Sorekara (1909; And then) and
Kōjin (1912; The wayfarer) both deal with men attempting to navigate the liminal space be-
tween old and new, though in the former the protagonist seeks to embrace the new, while in the
latter he rejects it; and Mori Ōgai’s Gan (1911-1913; Wild Goose) deals with a young medical
student who must choose between continuing his medical studies in Germany and indulging
in his romantic feelings for the hapless mistress of a moneylender.

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From Political Expedient to Pure Art

The success of these efforts is indicated by the fact that, by the second dec-
ade of the twentieth century, the aesthetic demands of junbungaku began
to supersede the perceived need to invent the modern subject and its re-
lationship to the State. By 1914 the Meiji state had grown strong enough
that celebrated novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) felt compelled to cri-
tique its power over the individual subject in a speech to the students at
the Gakushūin (Peers School) entitled “Watakushi no kojinshugi” (1914;
My individualism). 12 Novelists who also worked as translators, such as
Tayama Katai (1872-1930) and Mori Ōgai (1862-1922) had transplanted
the seeds of Naturalism and Romanticism into Japanese literature, and
a new generation of younger writers, including Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886-
1965), Kikuchi Kan (1888-1948), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927),
Satō Haruo (1892-1964), and future Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari
(1899-1972) were beginning to experiment in earnest with the concept of
literary art for its own sake.
It would be wrong, however, to suppose that junbungaku made a seam-
less and wholly spontaneous transition from being a tool for the strength-
ening of the Meiji state to what the French would term l’art pour l’art.
While there can be little question that writers of the early twentieth centu-
ry were concerned about producing literary art, particularly in the Taishō
(1912-1926) era, it is also true that the political functions of literature also
occupied an important role in writing of this period, particularly in the
so-called Proletarian writing of the late 1910s and early 1920s. How could
these apparently opposing concepts be reconciled? The matter was dis-
cussed in a series of lively literary debates (ronsō) that occurred between
1923 and 1935, and involved nearly the entire literary community. Begin-
ning as a reaction against the recent politicization of literature by Marxist
writers in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia, writers
and critics carefully stripped junbungaku bare of all political function, de-
claring that literary art must be for its own sake, without reference to polit-
ical or social realities; however, they retained the realism and introspection
that had marked serious Japanese writing from the start. The real winner
of the debates, arguably, was the so-called I-novel (watakushi shōsetsu or
shishōsetsu), a form of confessional writing developed in the early twentieth
century in which the writer lays bare his most personal thoughts, feelings,
and reactions to everyday minutiae, forming an intimate, dialogic connec-
tion of trust and disclosure with the reader (Fowler 1992, Keene 1998). By

12 A translation and introduction to this text by Jay Rubin is available in Monumenta Nipponica
34.1 (Spring 1979), pp. 21-48.

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the end of the debates, the I-novel was understood to be the quintessential
form of junbungaku (Hirano 1972, Strecher 1996). 13
It is significant that the I-novel should have emerged from the Proletar-
ian literature debates as the quintessential form of junbungaku, if only be-
cause it established, as perhaps no other form of literature could have done,
an intimate relationship between author and reader. Celebrated examples
of the genre include the aforementioned Tayama Katai’s Futon (1907; The
Quilt), 14 detailing Katai’s sexual obsession for a female writer who lived
in his home as an apprentice; and Shimazaki Tōson’s (1872-1943) Shin-
sei (1918-19; A New Life), about Tōson’s love affair with a niece, and his
subsequent flight from Japan after she becomes pregnant. However one
chooses to view such works – it would seem that readers were less than
sympathetic with Tōson’s embarrassment of his niece – there can be no
doubt that the relation of unadorned personal facts to the reader estab-
lished a sense of personal familiarity between author and audience. 15 That
is to say, the I-novel came to facilitate a sense of confidentiality between
author and reader, an intimate literary space in which the author might lay
bare his or her most private thoughts, feelings, sensations, and even trans-
gressions, quite as though the two participants in the reading-writing pro-
cess were close friends.
This is by no means to suggest that all confessional literature expressed
such sordid events. Indeed, one of the finest examples of confessional liter-
ature from my own reading experience is Shiga Naoya’s (1883-1971) short
story “Kinosaki nite” (1917; At Kinosaki), in which the narrator (Shiga
himself), meditating intellectually on the nature of death, carelessly tosses
a stone at a lizard sunning itself atop of rock in a stream; it is an unlucky
shot that kills the lizard, leading the narrator to reflect on how thought-
lessly he has deprived another living creature of its life. It is such minutiae
that mark confessional literature, and to a great extent pre-war junbungaku

13 The debates began with a brief essay by Arishima Takeo (1878-1923) entitled “Sengen hitot-
su” (1923; A declaration), in which Arishima questioned the true purposes of junbungaku. For
a thorough discussion of this text see Strecher, M., “Arishima Takeo’s ‘Sengen hitotsu’ and the
Origins of the Proletarian Literature Debate” in Gengo to Bunka No. 2 (Spring 2002). For more
on the development of the debate on pure literature, see Strecher, M., “Purely Mass or Massi-
vely Pure? The Division Between ‘Pure’ and ‘Mass’ Literature” in Monumenta Nipponica 51:3
(Autumn 1996), pp. 357-374. For a detailed rendering in Japanese, see Hirano Ken, “Junbun-
gaku to taishūbungaku” (Pure literature and mass literature) in Gunzō, Dec. 1961, pp. 154-
172; and Hirano Ken, Bungaku: Shōwa jūnen zengo (Literature: Around 1935; Tokyo: Bungei
Shunjūsha, 1972).
14 See especially Henshall, K., In Search of Nature: The Japanese Writer Tayama Katai (Leiden and
Boston: Global Oriental), 2013, pp. 107-123.
15 See Keene 1998, pp. 264-65.

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itself. More to the point, details such as these reveal to readers a close sense
of humanity on the part of the writer, onto which the reader may superim-
pose his own experiences, consider similar moments in her own life.
In broad terms, junbungaku prose up until the early years of the Second
World War may be understood as extremely realistic, confessional stories
exposing the most intimate thoughts and impressions of an author, ini-
tially as a means of positing the modern Japanese subject, but later for the
purpose of interrogating that subject – the author – in relentless detail. It
was, moreover, rendered in a deliberately constructed new form of written
Japanese that was initially meant to reflect accurately the speaking pat-
terns of modern Japanese, but that would itself gradually be refined into
an art form. Junbungaku was, by the start of the Second World War, delib-
erately a-political, socially disinterested, focused on the emotional state of
the writer, and expressed in well-crafted – “experimental” would not be an
overstatement – literary language.

Creating Models of the Contemporary Age

The re-politicization of traditional junbungaku occurred after the Second
World War ended in 1945, as many writers came to realize that the rupture
between literature and politics had rendered them voiceless during Japan’s
period of militarist expansionism throughout Asia and the Pacific. By the
late 1950s writers such as Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935), Abe Kōbō (1924-1993),
Oda Makoto (1932-2007) and Kaikō Takeshi (1930-1989) had risen to the
forefront of this latest rendition of junbungaku as socially and politically
activist literature. These novelists, among many others, carried with them
vivid memories of Japan’s wartime past, and spoke out in both fiction and
nonfiction against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (AMPO), the Vietnam
War, the continued U.S. occupation of Okinawa, and nuclear weapons. 16
Their work, broadly speaking, expressed the hopes and frustrations of re-
building Japan, but did so under the shadow of the political domination of
Japan by the United States. At the same time, like their prewar forebears,
writers of postwar junbungaku continued to demonstrate a penchant for
deep introspection, investigating their most minute thoughts and impres-
sions. From Abe’s explorations of identity in Tanin no kao (1968; Face of

16 For an excellent introduction in Japanese to the student movements of this period, see Taka-
gi M., Zengakuren to Zenkyōtō (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gendai Shinsho, 1985). For a treatment in
English, see Strecher, M., Dances With Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Muraka-
mi Haruki (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan Press, 2002), esp.
pp. 8-21.

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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

Another) to Ōe’s existentialist crisis in the semi-autobiographical Kojinteki

na taiken (1964; A Personal Matter) and Kaikō’s equally autobiographical
experiences as a war correspondent in Vietnam in Kagayakeru yami (1968;
Into A Black Sun), writers of this period, consciously or unconsciously,
brought a unique – and uniquely Japanese – perspective to their fictional
output that was grounded in the experience of being on the losing side of
a long and bitter war. More than the physical destruction of Japan’s cities,
or even the experience of being bombed or strafed, as Kaikō was, this was
a crisis of identity; when the Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito) announced to
his people on 1 January 1946 that he was not a deity but only a man, the
entire purpose of the past fifteen years of war and sacrifice and hardship,
all carried out in the name of the Emperor, became meaningless. As John
Nathan writes in his introduction to Ōe’s Teach Us to Outgrow Our Mad-
ness (1977):

In a single day, all the truth Ōe had ever learned was declared lies. He was
angry and he was humiliated, at himself for having believed and suffered,
and at the adults who had betrayed him. His anger resided; it was the so-
urce of the energy he first tapped when he became a writer. 17

Mishima Yukio (1925-1970), whose apparently conservative politics and

neo-romantic tendencies otherwise contrast quite starkly with Ōe, none-
theless expresses a similar sense of betrayal in his 1966 work Eirei no koe
(Voices of the Heroic Dead), in which the spirits of kamikaze pilots lament
the voluntary declaration of humanity by the emperor for whom they gave
their lives. 18
The point to be taken here is that writers of the Japanese postwar era,
which is sometimes declared “over” as of 1970, expressed a powerful ex-
perience that spoke quite specifically to Japanese readers who could relate
to the historical events that had given rise to that message, particularly the
war. 19 In many ways they continued to construct a new “subject,” as their
Meiji predecessors had done, and with an equal sense of urgency, for the
Second World War, for millions of Japanese, represented the negation of

17 Nathan, J., Introduction, in Ōe, K., Teach us to outgrow our madness. New York: Grove Press,
1977, p. xiv.
18 See Mishima Y., Eirei no koe. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1966.
19 Economically, the “postwar” is defined by the periods of immediate postwar reconstruction in
the late 1940s and 1950s, and economic “rapid growth” (kōdo seichō) in the 1960s; politically,
its end coincided with the end of meaningful political dissent with the ratification of the AMPO
Treaty in 1970. Culturally, the death by ritual suicide of Mishima Yukio on November 25, 1970
has been seen as the symbolic end of the postwar in Japan. See Strecher, M., Dances With Sheep;
see also Karatani, K., Shūen o megutte (Concerning endings). Tokyo: Fukutake Shobō, 1990.

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Matthew C. Strecher – East Meets West, then Gives It Back: The Fate of Pure Literature in a Global Age

everything they had grown up believing about themselves as a nation and

a race. As it fell to politicians to reconstruct the physical Japan, it fell to
writers of junbungaku to reconstruct Japan’s “soul,” to establish models by
which their readers could begin to understand themselves as Japanese in
a postwar world.
1994 Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō, perhaps the “purest” of these jun-
bungaku writers by virtue of the fact that he has doggedly held to his dense,
intellectual mode of expression for more than six decades despite a steady
decline in his readership, succinctly expresses the task of the writer in his
1989 defense of pure literature:

The role of literature – insofar as man is obviously a historical being – is to

create a model of a contemporary age which envelops past and future and
a human model that lives in that age. 20

Ōe’s underlying meaning here, I think, is that the postwar Japanese

writer’s duty is not merely to focus on his art (as prewar writers were wont
to do), happily ignoring those annoying and distracting events and trends
that occur around him, but rather to engage those trends intellectually,
to provide guidance and leadership for the reading public, pointing the
way toward a better Japanese society, better living through socially con-
scious and conscientious literature. It was both a familiar refrain and a bat-
tle cry, and would lead a great many postwar writers to engage in political
movements, to resist Japan’s uncritical alliance with the United States, to
speak out against the war in Vietnam, against nuclear weapons and nu-
clear power, to demand an end to the U.S. occupation of Okinawa (which
finally did end in 1972), to press for more rights for women and minorities
(Japanese of Korean descent, descendants of the burakumin, for instance),
and so on. In short, Japanese junbungaku, with few exceptions – Mishima
Yukio, Kaikō Takeshi, Ishihara Shintarō (b. 1932) – became largely a voice
for the Japanese liberal elite.
This did not mean, however, that writers were giving up on the artis-
tic demands of their craft. Quite the reverse, again borrowing from the
intellectual trends of the times, writers like Ōe, Abe, and the somewhat
younger Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992), worked hard to balance their intel-
lectual pursuits with new and innovative modes of literary expression. Ōe
and Nakagami succeeded in devising literary styles so complex as to rival
American novelist Thomas Pynchon’s (b. 1937) prose in the English lan-
guage (reflecting, perhaps, the complexity of the times, and of the subjects

20 Ōe K., “Japan’s Dual Identity: A Writer’s Dilemma” in Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian,
eds., Postmodernism and Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 193.

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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

about which they wrote), while Abe combined literary imagination with
an impressive scientific background. Mishima carried out a sustained cam-
paign of expanding the Japanese vocabulary, challenging readers to figure
out his subtle nuances. And yet, throughout this period, Western philo-
sophical thought – the Modernist impulse, French existentialism and ab-
surdism, surrealism, magical realism – continued to make their presence
felt even within these thoroughly Japanese literary modes.
Western intellectual systems notwithstanding, it remains true that the
“model” of which Ōe writes, like its prewar counterparts, is generally con-
structed by, for, and about Japanese subjects, set predominantly within the
context of a culturally and historically specific “Japanese experience.” 21 To
look at Ōe’s own works, we notice two things: first, that the protagonists
are nearly always introspective intellectuals, closely modeled on Ōe him-
self; and second, that Ōe seldom leaves the reader in any doubt about what
his protagonist is thinking. The experience of reading Ōe is not unlike sit-
ting through a lecture, in which the author explains himself to us in pains-
taking detail. His model is extraordinarily well-crafted, clear, and precise.
This, once again, follows the long-standing tradition of junbungaku I have
outlined above. In this setting, the reader is a politely silent, respectful au-
dience member rather than a part of the conversation.
What I mean to suggest here is that Japanese “pure” literature, from
the Meiji period to the end of the postwar era, was dominated by a mono-
logic discourse on the part of the writer, who assumed a particular type of
reader, namely, one whose cultural, linguistic, historical, and social back-
ground was not markedly dissimilar to his own. In this sense one could
imagine a continuum, at one end of which would be a reader whose ex-
periences are virtually identical to the author, and who would intuitively
respond to that author’s text with an extremely high sense of familiarity
and affinity, and at the other end an “uninitiated reader” whose cultural,
linguistic, historical, and social background is completely different from
the author’s. In the absence of extensive training in Japanese language,
culture, history and social structures, such a reader is likely to find most
works of junbungaku – even translated into his own language – rather dif-
ficult to grasp.
This is, of course, true in any national literature, but one suspects that
the gap between what we might, following Wolfgang Iser (1980), term the

21 Naturally, there are important exceptions to this statement. Much of the science fiction and fan-
tasy literature by Abe Kōbō, from the short story collection Kabe (1951; The wall) to the better
known Daiyonkan pyōki (1959; Inter ice age 4) and Suna no onna (1962; Woman in the dunes)
is marked by non-cultural-specific settings and characters; some of Kurahashi Yumiko’s (1935-
2005) later works, such as Amanonkoku ōkan-ki (1986; Chronicle of the Amanon highway),
show a similar tendency.

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“ideal reader” of junbungaku and the “uninitiated reader” of such writing

is rather wider. Iser contrasts the “ideal reader” with the “implied read-
er,” the latter being a figure both real and imaginary, a generic reader who
is assumed to apprehend and “concretize” the text, bringing its potential
meaning to fruition through the act of reading/writing. The ideal read-
er, on the other hand, he presents as disadvantageous, if even possible,
since “he would have to share the intentions underlying [the] process”
by which the author re-codifies prevailing contemporary codes. In such
a case, “communication would be quite superfluous, for one only commu-
nicates that which is not already shared by reader and receiver.” 22
This might be true if we could determine exactly what “codes” are be-
ing transmitted by the author (and which ones matter to the reader), but
we are not necessarily speaking here of hidden messages in the text; this is
not about the mysterious or artistic meta-aspects of a text, but about its so-
cial and historical points of reference, its connections with the reality that
surrounds the author and give a sense of realism and actuality to his work.
It is about the depiction of experience, of culture. The “ideal ­reader,” or
something close to it, does in fact exist; it is someone whose general up-
bringing, whose cultural milieu, education, and linguistic background are
similar to the author’s. Such a reader may not be capable of discerning the
symbolic or metaphorical meanings in an Ōe Kenzaburō novel (nor, for
that matter, should we assume that Ōe himself is aware of them all), but he
will probably respond to the sense of hopeless despair that pervades Ōe’s
descriptions of the final day of the Second World War. He might well share
Ōe’s memories of shock and horror at hearing the emperor speak in a hu-
man voice.
Obviously, what I seek to describe here is less theoretical than com-
monsensical. We understand more clearly what we have experienced our-
selves, and thus expend less energy on what is commonplace and focus
more on what is unusual in the text. The “uninitiated reader” may experi-
ence pleasurably the exoticism of an unfamiliar culture, but for that very
reason will not possess the experiential background needed to gain imme-
diate access to the historical and cultural framework of the text – access
that is necessary in order to look beyond it to its more significant aspects.
As stated earlier, this is true of any reading situation, in any cultural or lin-
guistic setting.
And yet, one cannot help but imagine that the gap is greater in Japan
than in many other instances between “ideal” and “uninitiated” ­reader.
This is almost entirely the result of what we might term the “closed

22 Iser, W., The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 29.

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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

system” of Japanese culture. Seen both in terms of socialization and in

linguistic terms this is quite clear to anyone who has lived for very long
as a non-Japanese within the Japanese system. Education is rigorously
controlled by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sports
(Monbukagakushō, sometimes called MEXT for short), which insists
upon a largely uniform curriculum for all nine years of compulsory
education. Much of that education is focused on mastery of the Japanese
language – itself a closed system, containing an astonishing number of
“ritual expressions” – but it is also designed to train young Japanese to
navigate successfully the complexities of a thoroughly hierarchical society,
so that each graduate of the education system understands his place
and role within the structure. There is a very good reason Japanese are
hesitant to travel outside of Japan, particularly alone: they cannot predict
what specific social or linguistic situations they may encounter, and fear
they will not know the correct formulas with which to respond. Japanese
education – like the language – trains people to say the right thing at the
right time; it does not teach them to adapt and improvise.
To sum up, traditional Japanese “pure” literature is a mode of writ-
ing that was – and to some extent still is – intended to depict the Japa-
nese experience, for Japanese readers with the correct cultural, linguistic
and historical experience. It is meant to express the Japanese subject, tell
a uniquely Japanese story. And until the 1970s, this experience was as-
sumed by many to be not only impenetrable to non-Japanese readers, but
common to all Japanese, by virtue of their shared experience, a discourse
that came to be codified in the postwar era as the Nihonjinron, literally,
“theory of Japanese people.” As Sugimoto Yoshio (1999) argues,

At the core of the Nihonjinron discourse lies the notion of Japanese-

ness, a set of value orientations that the Japanese are supposed to share.
Nihonjinron advocates share the fundamental assumption that Japanese-
ness, which every single Japanese supposedly possesses, has existed inde-
finitely, that Japaneseness differs fundamentally from “westernness”, na-
mely western orientations, and determines all aspects of Japanese ways of
life. 23

What we also find in the Nihonjinron discourse, however, is a thin-

ly veiled reverse-Orientalist argument for the exoticism and uniqueness of
the Japanese race, language, and culture, grounded in a valorization of the
unusual or – dare one say it? – the inscrutable aspects of what it means to
be “Japanese.” Perhaps it was for this very reason that Kawabata Yasunari,

23 Sugimoto, Y., “Making Sense of Nihonjinron” in Thesis Eleven, No. 57 (May 1999), p. 82.

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Matthew C. Strecher – East Meets West, then Gives It Back: The Fate of Pure Literature in a Global Age

a thoroughly modern man, elected to receive the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1968 dressed in traditional Japanese robes and spoke in his acceptance
speech, as a de facto representative of his people, about a Japanese fondness
for understated beauty that he must have known would be difficult for non-
Japanese to understand. One suspects that this assumption, that non-Japa-
nese will never be able to “get it,” is not uncommon in Japanese purveyors of
junbungaku, and indeed may rank among its most important characteristics.

Murakami Haruki and the “Death”

of Japanese Literature
One might say that history intervened in the postwar rendition of jun-
bungaku, as the various causes that gave strength and life to the voices of
protest in the 1960s, one by one, went by the wayside. The U.S.-Japan Se-
curity Treaty that offered a focal point for writers and students alike was
renewed behind closed doors in 1970, Okinawa reverted to Japanese sover-
eignty in 1972, the Vietnam War ended in 1975, and while nuclear weap-
ons and power continued – and continue even now – to be a serious issue
in Japanese political discourse, activism after 1970 fell off sharply as it be-
came increasingly clear that political protests, whether in the streets or in
print, were simply not achieving discernible results.
In the area of writing, the general atmosphere of malaise surely affected
what sorts of new writers emerged in the latter half of the 1970s. In 1976,
Murakami Ryū (b. 1952) won the Akutagawa Prize for his short novel Ka-
girinaku tōmei ni chikai burū (1976; Almost transparent blue), a text that
expressed the combined nostalgia and frustration of young students who
watched the protests of the 1960s collapse so suddenly in 1970, a motif he
returned to in 1987 with 69, dealing with youth culture in the year 1969.
Perhaps more important for the current discussion, however, was the 1979
début of Murakami Haruki with the even shorter novel, Kaze no uta o kike
(1979; Hear the wind sing), which won the Gunzō Prize for new writers
and, like Ryū’s maiden work, reads as an effort to make sense of what hap-
pened to the sense of hope and excitement that marked the late 1960s.
What makes Murakami’s emergence important to this discussion is
not that he wrote about the death of the 1960s, but rather how he wrote
about this. Consciously and deliberately eschewing the tropes, particularly
the written style, of junbungaku, Murakami Haruki began his career with
a meandering, occasionally touching story of youthful confusion in a lan-
guage that was light and simplistic, a very far cry from the painstakingly-
wrought, densely powerful prose of his literary predecessors.
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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

But Murakami’s writing style is more than just the product of his de-
termination to break with the practices of junbungaku; it was also, argu-
ably, the result of his generation’s fascination and admiration – what the
Japanese call akogare – of Western culture in general, and during that pe-
riod, American culture in particular. Born in the early postwar, Murakami
Haruki reached teenage in the early 1960s amidst the period of economic
“rapid growth” (kōdo seichō) when Japan’s industrial might was becom-
ing a very real factor in the world economy. Unlike those just ten years
older than himself, Murakami had no memories of American bombs rain-
ing down on Japanese cities, of hardship and survival. As a child he never
went hungry, never worried about where he would sleep. Growing up in
the Kōbe area, for Murakami’s generation American soldiers were neither
“invaders” nor “occupiers;” they were simply there.
The point here is that Murakami’s generation, unlike those that pre-
ceded it, was capable of confronting “America” in a manner reminiscent
of how early Meiji reformers looked at “the West:” as the key to some-
thing new and exotic. If the AMPO Treaty represented for older Japanese
(those of Ōe’s generation, for instance) the subjugation of Japan’s mor-
al and political sovereignty, for Japanese of Murakami’s age, “America”
was something presented through the new medium of television as clean,
wholesome, and above all, comfortable. It was what Japanese saw in the
imported reruns of I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver: an enduringly tidy,
prosperous, predominantly white, middle-class society in which everyone
drove their own cars, owned their own spacious homes, and had leisure
time to spend with their children at the end of the day. In short, for Jap-
anese of this period “America” was a reified image that represented the
“good life,” and it was highly attractive.
There is no way of knowing to what extent Murakami was exposed – or
responded – to these manufactured and neatly sterilized images of America
in the early 1960s as, along with millions of other Japanese middle school
students, he began his formal study of English. What we do know, from
the author’s own accounts, is that during this formative period of his life he
spent a considerable portion of his free time and pocket money on second-
hand books in English, forcing himself to build his command of that lan-
guage by reading the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, Raymond
Chandler, Truman Capote, and others in their original forms rather than
in translation. In so doing, Murakami must have encountered an “America”
not presented in popular television re-runs; a nation of deep racial and so-
cial divisions, of sexual inequality, of homophobia, of alcoholism and drug
addiction, of pedophilia and political fear. This was the real America.
Why, one may wonder, did Murakami not turn away from this disturb-
ing image of “America” that he found in his extracurricular reading? Was
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it, perhaps, because despite its many flaws, this was a more genuine Amer-
ica than he had been shown to this point? Even as many Japanese found
themselves increasingly drawn to the sense of akogare that surrounded
America at this time, Murakami may have been attracted to the very flaws
that this akogare took pains to ignore.
We see this attraction to the more genuine America, I would argue,
in Murakami’s early fascination with American jazz music. When not
spending his pocket money on used paperback novels, he was purchasing
battered vinyl recordings of Miles Davis, Julian “Cannonball” Adderly, Bill
Evans and Thelonius Monk. Murakami listened to everything, from big
band to bebop to “acid” jazz. Perhaps it appealed to his slightly off-cent-
er tastes; jazz is structured, even mathematical, yet also irregular, never
quite predictable, and always difficult to analyze or define. No two jazz
performances are alike, and no two performers play a given tune the same
way. Jazz is an enigma; asked once to define it, Louis Armstrong famously
quipped, “man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.” But anyone who has
played jazz knows that it flows, maybe more than any other kind of music,
straight from the soul, from the darkest places in the psyche. There is no
room for pretense, for “faking it,” or for copying. We play what we feel be-
cause, when we don’t, everyone knows. Jazz is uniquely suited to express
pain, joy, angst, loss. It may have been the only music, at least in those
days, capable of expressing the true reality of “America.”

Deconstructing “Pure Literature”

One suspects that Murakami’s fascination with jazz was – and remains –
a strong influence on how he tells his stories. He has claimed in numerous
interviews that he does not plan his stories, but permits them to develop
organically on their own. His method is not so much “stream-of-con-
sciousness” as “improvisation,” like a jazz performance. In a recent book
of essays, in fact, Murakami likens his work to that of a musician: “when
I’m writing a novel, I have not so much the sensation of ‘writing sentences’
as of ‘performing a piece of music.’” 24
A willingness to approach the act of writing from a new direction seems
to have been present from the beginning, and is once again tied closely to
Murakami’s relationship with the English language, a tool that permitted
him, as a new writer, to see the world he wanted to portray through new

24 Murakami H., Shokugyō to shite no shōsetsuka (The professional novelist). Tokyo: Switch Libra-
ry, 2015, p. 49.

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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

eyes. This grew at least in part from his initial attempt to produce a novel,
an attempt he admits was unsuccessful. “So I figured, ‘well, this is prob-
ably about right,’ and I spent months writing it out, but when I read over
what I’d written, it wasn’t all that interesting, even to me.” 25 This, howev-
er, led to a more important realization: “There’s no way I can write a good
novel. So why not throw aside all my preconceived notions of what a good
novel is, of what literature is, and freely write whatever I feel, whatever
floats into my head?” 26
Murakami goes on in the same essay to describe how he developed his
rather unorthodox style of writing by producing his first chapter in Eng-
lish. Limited command of English forced him to adopt relatively simple
sentence structures which, when translated back into Japanese, became
the prototype for the Murakami style. This written style, straightforward
and clear, yet devoid of decoration, of artistic sense, and above all, lacking
any pretense at seriousness for its own sake, was the very antithesis of what
postwar junbungaku had come to be and, whether Murakami intended it
or not, posed a serious challenge to the primacy of the junbungaku model
for literature.
At the same time, we see – or ought to see – a return to origins here
as well, for modern Japanese literature, as we have noted, began with the
invention of the shōsetsu form, and the concurrent creation, almost from
nothing, of the modern Japanese written language. That language was re-
fined from Meiji through the early Shōwa era. If, as I have argued above,
Murakami Haruki’s plainstyle prose, termed mukokuseki (“nationality-
less”) by some critics, 27 takes its stylistic inspiration from a foreign lan-
guage, and its methodological approach – improvisation – from jazz mu-
sic, then what remains of the essential quality of “Japaneseness” that has
traditionally grounded junbungaku? In fact, Murakami’s version of fic-
tion, perhaps without meaning to do so, effectively deconstructed precise-
ly those literary models that were so carefully developed in the postwar.
In other words, writers and critics from Ōe Kenzaburō to Maruyama
Masao and Kuroko Kazuo who have viewed Murakami Haruki as the
“death of ‘pure literature’ in Japan” are quite right. He is. But let us be
quite clear on one point: the “death of ‘pure literature’ in Japan” is not
necessarily a bad thing. In fact, one could argue that it was inevitable, and
is potentially a very good thing, and for three very good reasons.

25 Murakami 2015, p. 44.

26 Murakami 2015, p. 45.
27 See Kim, Y., “Kankoku ni okeru Murakami Haruki no juyō to sono kontekusuto” (Murakami
Haruki’s reception and its context in South Korea). In Fujii, S., ed., Higashi Ajia ga yomu Mu-
rakami Haruki (Murakami Haruki as read in East Asia). Tokyo: Wakakusa Shobō.

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Matthew C. Strecher – East Meets West, then Gives It Back: The Fate of Pure Literature in a Global Age

First, it is important to remain cognizant of the fact that “pure litera-

ture,” despite its grounding in Western models imported during the Meiji
period, was always intended as a wholly Japanese mode of writing, intend-
ed for Japanese readers, meant to construct Japanese models of subjectiv-
ity, to express, indeed, something essential about being Japanese. As noted
earlier, this was part of a much larger project to produce a well-defined
Japanese “citizen-subject” who was the equal of any modern European
individual, but who was also quite unique as a subject of the divine Meiji
emperor. What began as a geopolitical necessity – the need to transform an
isolated, vulnerable island nation into a strong, modern nation-state – was
eventually fetishized into such forms as “state Shintō” (with the unique,
divine Japanese emperor at its center) in the prewar, and as we have seen
above, Nihonjinron in the postwar. In other words, the conception of Japa-
nese uniqueness served as a subterranean wellspring that fed the two dis-
tinct ponds: Nihonjinron, and junbungaku.
There are good reasons to suppose that the idea of Japanese “unique-
ness,” whether it is used to ground junbungaku or the Nihonjinron per-
spective or both, is at once outdated, and yet likely to remain a part of
our discussions of Japanese culture for some time to come. The concept
is outdated because, quite simply, while Japan remains an island nation,
it is in no sense of the word “isolated,” and it was Japan’s relative isola-
tion from the rest of the world prior to Meiji, like a “lost world,” that gave
rise to the idea that Japan’s culture and bloodline had remained undilut-
ed for millennia. But even had this been true (which is highly unlikely),
such “isolation” surely ceased to a large extent with the advent of Meiji,
and completely in the postwar era. Again, this is not theoretical but simply
common sense. Like all post-industrialized societies, Japan is connected to
the world through the most modern means of communications and trans-
portation. More Japanese than ever before in history have traveled abroad,
and nearly every Japanese carries or has access to the technology necessary
to explore the outside world, at least in virtual form. Young Japanese today
know more about the world outside of Japan than any generation that has
ever lived. The same works in reverse; Japan is no longer a mysterious land
about which little is known, but a major player in the global economy. Mil-
lions of non-Japanese have visited, and thousands reside here.
This, however, may be precisely what keeps the Nihonjinron con-
cept alive, even fueling new nationalist movements in the early twenty-
first century. We have only to look at those moments when Japan was in
its most “cosmopolitan” phases, when external influences were at their
strongest – early Meiji, the “Taishō democracy” of the 1920s, the arrival
of television at the end of the 1950s, and of the Internet in the 1980s – to
note that these eras led to powerful movements to preserve and protect
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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

“native” culture, to distinguish clearly between what is Japanese and

what is not.
A second reason that traditional junbungaku may have run its course
is that the Japanese people themselves are not the homogeneous, unified
body of people they are so often portrayed to be. Like Japan’s isolation, this
is a myth perpetuated by those who would radically reduce the world to
“Japanese vs. non-Japanese” or, more bluntly, to “us vs. them,” an econo-
my in which “them” does not fare too well. Certainly the “homogeneity”
of the Japanese is central to the Nihonjinron theory, the idea being that all
Japanese, sharing blood, education, and language, think and behave more
or less the same way. That “homogeneity” is also, in some sense, central
to the idea of “human models” that become the focal point of junbun-
gaku, and the ability of readers to recognize themselves in those models.
But such an expectation, though perhaps a possibility up until the end of
the Second World War, and perhaps even into the postwar, has surely and
steadily been eroded by increased contact with the outside world, and the
resulting influence on the individual. Today (if ever!), it would be a serious
error to imagine that “all Japanese” think or feel the same way about much
of anything. Like other people in the world, today’s Japanese are products
of their interests and experiences, and with the world at their fingertips via
computers, tablets and smart phones, those interests and experiences are
virtually infinite.
Third, questions of “identity” and “subjectivity” – the principal rea-
sons for the development of “pure literature” in the first place – have
changed considerably even since the postwar period. One might argue,
in fact, that today’s Japanese is both better and worse equipped to ad-
dress the question of self-identity; better equipped, because he has so
many choices available to him – he may choose to be a company man,
a rebel, a musician, an athlete, a nerd, or some combination of these. But
precisely because there are so many choices, an infinite variety, he may
find his identity difficult to pin down. This is not limited to Japanese
youth, of course; one has only to note discussions of gender confusion
among today’s teenagers worldwide to realize that their increased variety
of choices is a mixed blessing.
The point to be drawn from this is that the audience or readership of
Japanese literature today is far too diverse to be served by strictly-defined
“models” provided by Japan’s intellectual elites. Ōe Kenzaburō’s “model
of the contemporary human” will work for a number of readers, but will
be incomprehensible to many others.

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Matthew C. Strecher – East Meets West, then Gives It Back: The Fate of Pure Literature in a Global Age

Enter the “Empty Narrative”

This is no longer the age of “literary models,” but rather what I would like
to call, for want of a better term, “literary absence.” “Models,” as a produc-
er of junbungaku might conceive of them, are ready-made entities whose
beliefs are well established and are presented, fully formed, to the reader.
Ōe’s own characters – his models – are largely based on himself, on his
experiences, as might be expected. They are, in fact, meticulously drawn,
brilliantly-wrought models that may be analyzed by readers in great de-
tail, closely studied by the reader or scholar possessing the skill to pen-
etrate their depths. This is the traditional model of how literature works,
and while one credits Ōe with having developed an innovative and excit-
ing new model in his fiction, one must also note that his conceptualization
of literature as a whole, its methods and its purposes, is of the Old School.
His fiction appeals and makes sense to those equipped with the right ex-
periences and education to recognize and analyze his models. It is likely
to be less accessible to younger readers, however, who may not see enough
of themselves in that model to form meaningful comparisons. For such
readers, the task of bridging the gap between novelist and reader – of con-
structing a real-world application of Ōe’s model, in other words – becomes
a Sisyphean one, for the gap can never truly be closed.
A “literary absence,” on the other hand, centers not on a specific
“­model” character but rather on an absence, or an outline – something
like an Everyman – who could be any of us, but does not remain so, be-
cause the reader fills in the “absence” with a presence that looks, sounds,
and thinks, by a shocking stroke of coincidence, exactly like the reader.
Even more important than the mirror-like character/absence, howev-
er, is the dual-layered narrative into which he is (or we are) placed, one in
which the surface narrative is utterly bizarre, while a deeper, parallel nar-
rative describes circumstances so commonplace that nearly any reader can
relate to them. In the so-called “Rat Trilogy,” for instance, the surface nar-
rative describes mythic journeys, talking pinball machines, all-empower-
ing sheep, and the resurrection of the dead; the deeper narrative is about
a man dealing with lost youth, missing friends, and crushing nostalgia.
It is an odd juxtapositioning of narrative – one fantastic, the other com-
monplace – and they represent a clash not merely of style, but of ontology.
This is the mingling of the real and the unreal, matter and anti-matter,
being and nothingness, and the two at once attract and repel one anoth-
er. Interestingly, while Murakami’s surface (fantastic) narrative comes to
a recognizable denoument, its parallel, everyday narrative remains un-
finished, open-ended, reflecting the everyday reality in which we live.
Most interesting of all, as these two narratives – one complete, the other
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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

incomplete – intertwine with one another, a third narrative space opens

between the two, an empty space in which the reader, taking cues from
the bracketing dual narratives, constructs a third narrative, unique to that
reader. If we think of the two parallel narratives as a kind of latticework,
or even the lines of a three-dimensional sketch, we can easily imagine the
reader filling in the colors and textures to complete the narrative picture on
a more personal, three-dimensional level.
To posit the “empty narrative” is not without risk; if the central space of
the narrative is empty, as suggested in the above diagram, is it not also then
meaningless? Not necessarily. The fantastic and commonplace narratives
provided by Murakami contain a vast array of potential meanings, of signs
and symbols, intentional and accidental that lend themselves to potential
narratives that might grow, ivy-like, upon the latticework. These mean-
ings, like the narratives themselves, are sketched, and must be filled in by
the reader. In this fashion, Murakami constructs a narrative mode that ac-
tually succeeds in bridging the gap between author and reader, or rather,
that eliminates the need to bridge the gap at all, for once the story has been
sent out into the world in search of a reader, Murakami simply fades into
the background, no longer relevant save as a quiet, vestigial voice.

An Indistinct Image of “the West”

As we have seen, Murakami used his unorthodox perspective on the West –
specifically, his image of “America” – to develop his approach to the act of
writing, and from there constructed a new mode of literature that is neither
“Eastern” nor “Western,” but rather a hybrid that might be described as
“West filtered through East.” Looking at the long history of modern Japa-
nese literature, then, we may say the circle has now closed upon itself. Hav-
ing encountered the West in the Meiji era, Japanese writers imported the
tropes of Western literature in order to construct a uniquely Japanese litera-
ture that essentially excluded the non-Japanese Other; Murakami, on the
other hand, having encountered the West, developed his nationality-less
“empty narrative” (which by its nature contains no fixed cultural ground-
ing) and promptly unleashed it back upon the West. We might say that Mu-
rakami encountered the West, and then gave it back, not as a rejection, but as
a transfiguration of the West, one that is re-exported for consumption.
This phenomenon is not limited to the writing of Murakami Haru-
ki, nor even to the field of literature. One need only consider how ani-
mator and writer Miyazaki Hayao (b. 1941) has influenced the industry
standards of Walt Disney Studios and Pixar; or how Murakami Takashi
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Matthew C. Strecher – East Meets West, then Gives It Back: The Fate of Pure Literature in a Global Age

(b. 1962), following his exposure to “simulationism” in New York City in

the mid-1990s, would later export his own so-called “superflat” technique
into the Western art scene. Like Murakami Haruki, both of these artists
encountered Western technology and aesthetics, reconfigured them, and
exported them back to the West. Today Miyazaki is regarded by some as
the greatest animator who ever lived, while Murakami Takashi’s designs
appear on Louis Vuitton merchandise, album covers for major American
musical artists, and of course, in his own works of contemporary art.
And what has Murakami contributed to Western literature? This is
not easy to gauge accurately, but numerous American and British authors,
from Richard Powers to Ruth Ozeki, David Mitchell to recent Nobel lau-
reate Kazuo Ishiguro, acknowledge interest in his work. Nor are his influ-
ences limited to the West; in fact, one might be more justified in speaking
of the opaque, wispy image of “the West” that Murakami shares with oth-
er writers in Asia, from South Korea’s Yun Dae-yon to China’s Wei Hui
and Annie Baobei. Murakami’s internationally acclaimed Sekai no owari
to hādo-boirudo wandārando (1985; Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End
of the World) inspired Chinese rock musician Lin Di to name his band
“Cold Fairyland” after the Chinese translation of the novel’s title. Simply
put, Murakami has constructed a liminal space, albeit a reified one – “the
West” – which like his own works is an “empty narrative” into which each
writer, whatever his or her cultural background, may fill in the details,
constructing new realities from the outline found in fictional structures
pioneered by Murakami Haruki.
More than his influences on Western or Asian writers, however, one
might argue that we gain more from considering what Murakami has done
for – or to – the idea of junbungaku in and out of Japan. Simply put, he has
transformed junbungaku, from an insular, “closed system” of writing by, for,
and about Japanese, and created an opening through which a more glob-
al version of junbungaku becomes possible. From this perspective it may be
only fair to ask, did Murakami really give back the West? Or did he merely
open the system that has, until recently, kept “West” and “East” distinct from
one another? We might argue, rather, that Murakami has deconstructed
firm definitions of “Japaneseness” as they emerged from the debates on Ni-
honjinron, as well as grounding longstanding definitions of junbungaku; at
the same time, he has deconstructed conceptual perceptions of “the West,”
even as these were developed to oppose and yet, paradoxically, to define that
very “Japaneseness” that grounds Nihonjinron and junbungaku.
Murakami accomplished all this, as I have sought to demonstrate, not
through theoretical or philosophical interrogation, but simply by creating
narratives that were so open-ended, so thoroughly malleable, that nearly
any reader could access them and rewrite them in her or his own image.
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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

To suggest a twenty-first century metaphor, in a world of Microsoft Win-

dows and Apple-Macintosh computers, Murakami has constructed the lit-
erary equivalent of Linux, an operating system that is free, open-source,
and most important, may be reconfigured by anyone with the ability and
willingness to develop their own unique system, tailor-made for their own
needs and interests.
Junbungaku will probably never be the same after Murakami Haruki.
He has altered the model, to return to Ōe Kenzaburō’s expression. But
in the age of global economics, global trade, global communications, and
even global studies, is it not about time that literature, too, had a global
model? This is not the end of junbungaku, but a new departure for a global
“pure literature.”

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 perspektywy kultury (nr 19) Fascination With Otherness

Matthew C. Strecher – Professor of Japanese Literature and Chair

of Liberal Arts at Sophia University in Tokyo. He specializes in con-
temporary literature and genre studies, and is recognized as a leading
expert on Murakami Haruki. His major publications include Dan-
ces with sheep: The quest for identity in the fiction of Murakami Haruki
(2002), Haruki Murakami’s The wind-up bird chronicle: A reader’s guide
(2002), and The forbidden worlds of Haruki Murakami (2014).

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