Sketching Out the Critical Tradition:
Yanagita Kunio and the Reappraisal of Realism
While recent criticism has challenged
prevailing conceptions about the development of literary narrative(s) in Japan,
there has been little recognition of earlier dissenting voices. Much in the
way that the boundaries of bungaku have been determined retrospectively, so too has membership
in that apparent arbiter of literary style, the Meiji bundan. What was in fact an informal network of ever-changing
allegiances to compatriots, journals and literary trends has emerged as a
seemingly unified institution peopled by monumental figures (e.g. Shimazaki
Tôson) who ostensibly embody various stages of Japanese literature's
passage into the modern age.
Looking at literary journals, which contain the critical
and conversational writing that in many ways constitutes the formal record
of these fealties, provides not only a context for reexamining the contemporary
bundan understanding of narrativity,
but also exposes many diverse viewpoints that were subsequently overlooked.
One such marginalized perspective is expressed in Yanagita Kunio's earliest
essays, a group of short zuihitsu published in the literary journal Bunshô sekai between 1907 and 1909.
Critical discourse
generally discounts Yanagita's early membership in the bundan because of his later career as native ethnologist,
but these essays clearly reveal an insider both sensitive to the internal
workings of Meiji literary production and critical of conventional interpretations
of narrative realism. This presentation will explore how these essays bridge
the discursive gap between bungaku and Yanagita's minzokugaku, and how that connection, in turn, may help us
reassess the critical tradition that has defined the narrative space of modern
Japanese literature so narrowly.