Anachronism in Edo and Contemporary Japanese Literature
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NOW LONG AGO: ANACHRONISM IN EDO AND CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE LITERATURE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES (JAPANESE) MAY 2017 By Christopher S. Smith Dissertation Committee: Joel R. Cohn, Chairperson Robert N. Huey Julie A. Iezzi Ken K. Ito Nobuko M. Ochner Copyright © Christopher Smith All rights reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship Foundation for their generous support, as well as the National Institute for Japanese Literature (Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan) for kindly hosting me as a visiting researcher while working on this dissertation. iii ABSTRACT What is going on in a work a fiction when a samurai uses a cell phone? Anachronisms (things out of their time) such as this are certainly funny, and other anachronisms might be dismissed as mistakes on the part of the author. But are anachronisms really nothing more than errors or cheap comedic gags? This dissertation argues that anachronisms do important work on history, and explores this work that anachronisms perform in Japanese literature. Using theories of postmodern play, juxtaposition, and intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the diologic, Azuma Hiroki’s theory of the cultural database, and other postmodern theories, I examine anachronism as a literary phenomenon that playfully summons up discourses about the past and reconfigures them in new ways by superimposing them on the present. However, anachronisms are inherently reflexive and playful, and cannot convincingly rewrite the past. They call attention to the work they are doing on history, exposing the absurdity of their project. History, of course, is an important site of social and cultural meaning. It is used as a source of identity, as well as to legitimate power. Anachronism, then, is a way that literature can playfully and self-consciously destabilize sociopolitical narratives and structures based on that history without convincingly rewriting history in its own act of power. I examine the projects being undertaken with anachronism in several texts from the contemporary period (late Shōwa to the present) and the Edo period (1600-1868). The Edo period’s circumstances are very different from those of the contemporary period, and so Edo texts are situated in very different contexts, and are engaged in very different projects. However, the Edo period also saw the maturation of a highly developed textual society, mass printing, and high literacy. Perhaps because of these familiar conditions, anachronism is widely apparent in Edo literature and theatre. Therefore, this dissertation examines anachronism in the Edo period as a literary technique that counterfactually and reflexively juxtaposes past and present to do work on history, while remaining cognizant that the hermeneutics and politics of the Edo period which these anachronisms worked on differ greatly from the postmodern present. iv v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................................ iii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: ANACHRONISM IN MODERN TEXTS ........................................................................................ 27 2.1 – A Riot of Anachronism: History and power in Man’en gannen no futtobōru ................................ 27 2.2 – Gags with an agenda: anachronism in Tezuka Osamu’s Hi no tori ................................................ 52 2.3 – The past is everywhere: anachronism in contemporary popular culture ...................................... 75 2.3.1 – Seibā marionetto J ................................................................................................................... 78 2.3.2 – Naruto ..................................................................................................................................... 92 2.3.3 – Gintama ................................................................................................................................. 100 CHAPTER 3: ANACHRONISM IN EDO TEXT AND THEATRE ........................................................................ 116 3.1 – Postmodernism and History in the Edo Period ............................................................................ 116 3.2 - Playing with samurai: anachronism in Edo literature ................................................................... 133 3.2.1 – Ōmu-gaeshi bunbu no futamichi ........................................................................................... 137 3.2.2 – Daihi no senrokuhon ............................................................................................................. 141 3.2.3 – Nansō Satomi hakkenden ...................................................................................................... 144 3.3 – Acting out the past: Anachronism in Edo theatre ........................................................................ 163 3.3.1 – Metadramatic anachronism .................................................................................................. 165 3.3.2 – Sugawara denju tenarai kagami ........................................................................................... 169 3.3.3 – Sukeroku yukari no Edo-zakura ............................................................................................. 176 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................. 184 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................................... 191 vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The year is 1184. Minamoto no Yoshitsune 源義経 has been sent by his brother, Minamoto no Yoritomo 源頼朝, to drive the army of their erstwhile ally Kiso no Yoshinaka 木曾 義仲 out of Kyoto and kill him. Finally, Yoshinaka is defeated, and his head is taken to be presented to Yoshitsune at his camp. Yoshitsune inspects the head and, now that he is certain Yoshinaka is dead, must inform Yoritomo straight away. He picks up a phone proffered by a retainer. “Hello, Brother? Yoshinaka is dead.”1 At least, that is how it happens in Tezuka Osamu’s 手塚治虫 Hi no tori 火の鳥 (Phoenix, 1980). What are we to make of such a ridiculous anachronism? Anachronisms tend to be dismissed as mere errors, but while we can imagine authors erroneously believing, to name one infamous example, that Romans used stirrups, clearly Tezuka cannot have been under the mistaken impression that Yoshitsune possessed a telephone. What is clear, however, is that the anachronism is humorous. Precisely because it is so obviously out of place, the use of the telephone becomes a comic element. But what is this comic element doing in Tezuka’s relatively sober deconstruction of Japanese history? It should never be presumed that comedy is innocent. Anachronisms are an engagement with history. They literally inject the present into the past (or in some cases, the past into the present). In doing so they summon up multiple discourses about the past and the present—history, in other words—and overlay them in a manner that is preposterous yet undeniably appealing. What work are anachronisms doing (for they are indeed doing work) on the crucial battleground of history? To answer that, it is necessary to more carefully define and categorize anachronism itself. The example above is from a work published in 1980 (first published in serial form in the late 1970s). Yet anachronisms have been present in literature and culture more generally for 1 Tezuka Osamu, Hi no tori, vol. 8 (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1992), 134-5. All translations from Japanese sources are mine. “Moshimoshi, anija. Yoshinaka wa shinimashitaze.” 1 centuries, perhaps most famously in Shakespeare. It is unlikely that all of these anachronisms, situated as they are in very different sociopolitical contexts, are engaged in the same project. It is therefore necessary to classify anachronisms in order to refine our discussion of them. To begin, I should make it clear that not every anachronism is laden with meaning. Some anachronisms, like the Romans using stirrups mentioned above, really are simple errors, noticed neither by the author nor the readers (except perhaps the rare Roman history buff), and therefore failing to visibly summon discourses on past and present in the way that Yoshitsune using a telephone does. Note, however, that authorial attention (or intention) is not necessary for a fruitful anachronism: readers can very well pick up on an anachronism that an author mistakenly inserted. However, if readers remain unaware of the anachronism, it fails to function in a way that allows it to work on history. Of course the anachronism still exists in the text, and in a different context it may become significant (if, for example, the assertion that Rome was defeated by stirrups were to become widely known, future readers would be keenly aware of that anachronism, and it would evoke various historical discourses in them). Nevertheless, some anachronisms that appear in texts