Literary Genres in Flux: The Meiji State and the Politics of Novelistic Imagination

Lecture Information:
During the late 1880s and the early 1890s, Meiji Japan witnessed a series of major political changes headlined by the promulgation of the constitution, opening of the Diet, and the issuance of the Rescript on Education. Befitting such a political environment, the literary landscape of the period was in flux, as writers and intellectuals struggled to find suitable ways to provide imaginary support to their readers in navigating this turbulent period of transition. This talk examines some of these literary struggles — the detective stories, science fictions, and political novels of Kuroiwa Ruikō, Morita Shiken, Yano Ryūkei, and Hara Hōitsuan — against the backdrop of the conceptual understanding of the novel as articulated and promoted by Tsubouchi Shōyō and Futabatei Shimei, among others. In so doing, it considers how different literary genres competed against but also acted synergistically with one another and how they fed off other media forms such as newspaper editorials to negotiate for Japanese subjects the intrinsic contradictions underlying the formation of the Meiji state.

Lecturer Information:
Satoru Saito is an assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University, where he teaches modern Japanese literature, film, and popular culture. His manuscript “Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel” explores the constitutive role that the detective and his story played in the literary formations of modern Japan. A shorter version of the manuscript’s first chapter appeared earlier this year under the title “The Novel’s Other: Detective Fiction and the Literary Project of Tsubouchi Shōyō” in The Journal of Japanese Studies.