The Politics of “Storytelling”: Schemas of Time and Space in Japan's
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THE POLITICS OF “STORYTELLING”: SCHEMAS OF TIME AND SPACE IN JAPAN’S TRAVELING IMAGINATION OF SEMI-COLONIAL CHINA AND BEYOND, 1920s-1980s A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Junliang Huang August 2015 © 2015 Junliang Huang THE POLITICS OF “STORYTELLING”: SCHEMAS OF TIME AND SPACE IN JAPAN’S TRAVELING IMAGINATION OF SEMI-COLONIAL CHINA AND BEYOND, 1920s-1980s Junliang Huang, Ph. D. Cornell University 2015 Centered on the works of three Japanese writers, namely Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927), Hayashi Kyōko (1930- ), and Takeda Taijun (1912-1976), and with references to many other writers such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, and Takeuchi Yoshimi, in this dissertation I look into those narrative accounts for a changing pattern in their structure of storytelling about semi-colonial China. My project is in many ways indebted to but also fundamentally different from studies of Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges under semi- colonialism, in the sense that it is a subtle literary analysis organized around a theoretical problematic, rather than an effort for a comprehensive history. I highlight the politics of storytelling in our texts by examining the temporality and spatiality, narrative devices, linguistic politics, and so on in the writer’s storytelling. I take the literary texts discussed in this dissertation as always socially constructed, and as “narrative accounts” that consist of elements of figuration, rather than considering them as the unmediated reproduction of the historical “truth” about the writers or about the Chinese and Japanese societies they traveled/lived in and between. Chapter One is a careful examination of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s narrative of prewar China, entitled Travels in China. Chapter Two focuses on the politics of storytelling in Hayashi Kyōko’s autobiographical novel Michelle Lipstick (1980), read together with several other works of hers. Chapter Three is organized around discussions of three major works on China by Takeda, entitled Sima Qian (Shiba Sen, 1943), The Judgment (Shinpan, 1947), and Shanghai Firefly (Shanhai no hotaru, 1976), while referring to several of his essays written between those years as secondary materials. I reach two conclusions. First, I contend that there is an obvious shift in the ways that prewar and postwar Japanese writers construct the time and space of semi- colonial China in their works. And secondly, I hold that the allegorical meaning of storytelling lies in the space it opens up for literary critics and literary historians to access the relations between the writer, the narrator, and the surrounding social space, which, in my opinion, are the reality of the past that we have been trying to find in literature. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Junliang Huang was born and grew up in Mainland China. After receiving a MA degree in Translation Theory at ECNU in Shanghai, she earned her second MA degree in Modern Japanese Literature at the Ohio State University and entered the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University in 2009. She has been a Special Research Student at the University of Tokyo and a Non-resident Visiting Scholar at Ritsumeikan University during 2012 and 2013. iv To My Family v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The completion of this work has depended heavily on the guidance, encouragement, and patience of my graduate mentor and dissertation committee chair Brett de Bary, to whom I owe my first debt of thanks. Over the course of my years at Cornell, Brett has been extremely helpful in offering suggestions and incisive criticisms on my writing, and I have benefited consistently from her tireless and constructive advice, as well as all the exceptional meetings and discussions we had. Her mentorship and friendship supported me throughout this journey that sometimes seemed to be endless, guiding me from the start of my study in Grad School to the start of my career as a teacher and scholar. I am also grateful to the minor members of my committee—Naoki Sakai, Edward M. Gunn, and Katsuya Hirano. I owe a great intellectual debt not only to their stimulating classes but also to the discussions and exchanges we had in various occasions. Their friendship, advice, and personal support have made my years at Cornell much easier and more enjoyable. I would like to deeply thank Iwasaki Minoru, Komori Yōichi, Ikeuchi Yasuko, Rebecca Jennison, and many people in Japan who helped, supported, and encouraged me throughout my fieldwork there. They include: Narita Ryūichi, Toba Kōji, Tsuboi Hideto, Nishi Masahiko, Tsuchiya Shinobu, Yonetani Masafumi, Shimamura Teru, Watanabe Naoki, Kasai Hirotaka, Ko Youngran, Odawara Rin, Maja Vodopivec, Lin Shaoyang, Wang Zhongchen, Ren Yongsheng, Tan Ren’an, Wang Junwen, Murakami Katsunao, Murakami Yōko, Shin Jiyong, Sakasai Akito, Kim Younglong, Aibara Takuya, Matsubara Rika, and Hashizume Taiki. My thanks also go to the Japan Foundation who offered me a Japan Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in 2012, and to Cornell University and the Ohio State University for the years of financial support they provided me at all levels. I have benefited greatly from the discussions, exchanges, and collaborations with my teachers, colleagues, and friends at Cornell University, the Ohio State University, East China Normal University and beyond over the years. Special thanks go to Ding Xiang Warner, Nick Admussen, Keith Taylor, Robin McNeal, Petrus Liu, Naomi Larson, Misako Terashima Chapman, Robert Sukle, Janice Kanemitsu, Pedro Erber, Gavin Walker, Joshua Young, Daniel McKee, Jeffrey DuBois, Masuda Hajimu, Deokhyo Choi, Kinjo Masaki, Wang Yuanchong, Wah Guan Lim, Clarence I-Zhuen Lee, the late William Tyler, Noda Mari, Richard Torrance, Kirk Denton, Charles Quinn, Shirley Quinn, Bao Weihong, Rebecca Karl, Bruce Rusk, Gao Ning, and Zhao Wei. Lastly, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my family, for their love, support, encouragement, patience, and faith that accompanied me through this otherwise lonely journey. Thank you for always being there for me. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Note on Translations viii Introduction 1 1 Travel and the Construction of Race in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Travels in China (Shina Yūki) 24 2 Through the Lens of the “Other”: Hayashi Kyōko’s Storytelling of the Shanghai Alley-Community 92 3 The World as a Spatial Continuity over Time: Takeda Taijun and the Postwar Discourse of the Defeat of Japan 160 Epilogue 226 Bibliography 229 vii NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS Throughout this dissertation, all translations from materials written in Japanese and Chinese are mine, unless otherwise indicated. For the transliteration of Japanese language, I use the Modified Hepburn system, with the macron indicating a long vowel, i.e. metsubō. Terms in Japanese, in particular proper nouns or place names that have an established usage in English, i.e., Tokyo, are not modified with diacritics. For the transliteration of Chinese language, I use the Hanyu Pinyin system. viii Introduction On November 26, 2013, I visited the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon kindai bungakukan) at Komaba, Tokyo. I was hoping to see the Takeda Taijun Collection that includes many hand-written notes and manuscripts of the postwar Japanese writer Takeda Taijun (1912-1976) that have never been published. Among the material donated to the museum by Takeda’s bereaved family a few years ago, I understood that there was a diary kept while he was living in Shanghai from the summer of 1944 until February 1946. During this period, Takeda worked for the China-Japan Cultural Association (Chūnichi bunka kyōkai, or Zhongri wenhua xiehui) and after the end of the Pacific War as a freelance letter-writer (daishoya) in the accommodations for Japanese residents in the Hongkew (Hongkou) District of Shanghai until he was repatriated to Japan. The diary was considered by the Takeda scholar Kawanishi Masaaki to have contained the source material for the writer’s last piece Shanghai Firefly (Shanhai no hotaru, 1976),1 a work that I analyze in the last chapter of this dissertation. In addition to my interest in confirming the connection between the diary and Shanghai Firefly, I was instinctively curious to know what exactly Takeda experienced in the Shanghai international settlement right before and after Japan’s defeat. However, it turned out that Kawanishi was one of the few lucky people who were able to read this diary. When I arrived at the archive, I learned that it had been withdrawn by Takeda’s family because they worried that some of the content might be “inappropriate” to publicize. Just as Takeda chose to write an autobiographical novel rather than publish this diary when he was alive, his family’s donation and withdrawal of the diary reveals the ongoing 1 Kawanishi Masaaki, Takeda Taijun den [The Biography of Takeda Taijun] (Kōdansha, 2005), 482. 1 dilemma faced by many Japanese who had personal experience of China during the Sino- Japanese war, whether voluntarily or not. On the one hand, they are compelled by an internal drive to give testimony of the inhumane conduct of Japanese imperialism in its neighboring countries during World War II and to recount their individual suffering caused by it. Postwar writers such as Takeda Taijun, Ōoka Shōhei, Hotta Yoshie, and Noma Hiroshi, among many others, could not stay silent about their experience of the battlefield in the gaichi (Japan’s overseas territory). Works that were published immediately after the defeat of Japan, such as Takeda’s The Judgment (Shinpan, 1947), Hotta’s The Stateless One (Sokoku sōshitsu, 1948-50), Ōoka’s Fires on the Plain (Nobi, 1951), and Noma’s Zone of Emptiness (Shinkū chitai, 1952) are all vivid accounts of that history, in which their critique of Japanese imperialism is profoundly rooted. Kawanishi even holds that Takeda could not have been able to continue writing had he not confessed about the killing in the battlefield.2 On the other, however, their confession is simultaneously a charge that points to themselves because they were undeniably part of it.