Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, edited by Richard Calichman and John Namjun Kim, has just been published. An exploration of one of the most interesting theorists working in Japanese cultural studies (and one of my own mentors), the volume contains new essays by scholars from a variety of fields–including yours truly. My own piece is a re-reading of Natsume S??seki’s 1908 novel Sanshir?? in relation to Sakai’s philosophical approaches to the questions of language and translation, as I trace the meandering paths of a number of stray sheep–both literal and figurative.

My own copy hasn’t shown up in the mail yet, so I can’t tell you a great deal about the other essays yet, other than that they are by some of the most interesting people I know. At $130 a pop, you might want to ask your rich uncle to buy the book for you, or perhaps borrow it from your local university library. But anyone with an interest in the theories of translation, subjectivity and nationalism will, I’m sure, find it a provocative and challenging read–much like the work of its subject, Naoki Sakai.

The publisher’s homepage on the book is here, and below is the table of contents.

Editors’ Introduction

Part I: Translation and its Effects

1. Novelistic Desire, Theoretical Attitude, and Translating Heteroglossia: Reading Natsume S??seki’s Sanshir?? with Naoki Sakai; Michael K. Bourdaghs
2. Deixis, Dislocation, and Suspense in Translation: Tawada Y??ko’s Bath; Brett de Bary
3. Politics as Translation: Naoki Sakai and the Critique of Hermeneutics; John Namjun Kim
4. The Biopolitics of Companion Species: Wartime Animation and Multi-Ethnic Nationalism; Thomas Lamarre
5. Translating the Image; Helen Petrovsky

Part II: Economies of Difference

6. For a Communist Ontology; William Haver
7. Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude; Sandro Mezzadra
8. Transition to a World Society: Naoki Sakai’s Work in the Context of Capital-Imperialism; Jon Solomon
9. Total War and Subjectivity: ‘Economic Ethics’ as a Trajectory toward Postwar; J. Victor Koschmann

Part III: The Modern West and its Outside

10. The Western Relation: The Politics of Humanism; Frédéric Neyrat
11. Modernization, Modernity, and Tradition: Sociological Theory’s Promissory Notes; Andreas Langenohl
12. Theologico-Political Militancy in Ignacio de Loyola’s Ejercicios espirituales; Alberto Moreiras
13. Interview with Naoki Sakai

In my reading recently I’ve been haunted by the devil.

For example, he shows up, albeit ambiguously, in Charles Baxter’s fine 2008 novel, The Soul Thief. The narrative, written with Baxter’s usual intelligence and style, traces the life on one “Nathaniel Mason,” as told in the first person–or, perhaps not. It might be that Nathaniel is dead and his place has been taken up by a psychopathic mimic, ala Norman Bates in the film Psycho, which is alluded to repeatedly (we even get a creepy motel scene at the end). Or perhaps Nathaniel is none other than Satan himself–another possibility deliberately raised. The first half of the book, detailing Mason’s younger days as a grad student in Buffalo, New York, is especially strong, as good as anything Baxter has written.

So I finish that novel and then in all innocence move on to Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960). Here, the central figure is Dougal Douglas (or, sometimes, Douglas Dougal), and again the narrative strongly suggests that the protagonist has more than a bit of devilry to him. He even invites people to touch the two bumps on his scalp where his horns were surgically removed. It’s a terrific comic yarn about the dark powers of the humanities to disrupt the social order. Douglas is a recent “Arts” graduate hired by an industrial firm in South London that fears it is falling behind the times in its failure to carry out “human research” on its employees. Once he arrives all hell breaks loose, literally: weddings fall apart at the altar, loyal workers start skipping shifts, and young men take to battling it out in the streets.

The Christian undertones are missing, but there is more devilry afoot in another work I’m reading just now, Okazaki Kyoko’s awarding-winning manga, Helter Skelter (serialized 1996, published in book form 2003). The heroine is a beautiful fashion idol who becomes increasingly cruel and cold to those around her as the surgery, drugs, and manipulation that artificially generate her desirability take an increasing toll on her person.

Greetings again from Tokyo, where we continue to melt in the heat and humidity.

At the party following our workshop on early postwar Japanese literary criticism at Waseda University last week, one of the graduate student participants asked the professors attending an interesting question: at what point in your career did you start feeling like you were an actual scholar (she used the Japanese phrase ????????????) as opposed to a mere student?

I enjoyed listening to everyone’s responses. For me, I flashed back to 1994, when I was doing my dissertation research in Japan. I was interested in the connection between novelist Shimazaki Toson and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Toson owned a couple of books by or about Bergson, and when I visited the Toson Kinenkan museum in Magome, they were kind enough to let me examine his copies. When I opened one (the 1936 Japanese translation of Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion), I was shocked when a handwritten letter dropped out from between its pages. I wasn’t the only one to be surprised: the museum curator who was helping me nearly jumped out of her shoes.

It turned out to be nothing of major importance. A simple one-page note, it was from the book’s publisher and addressed to Toson, a cover letter sent along with the complimentary review copy of the volume. But until I came across it on my scholarly quest, no one even knew of the letter’s existence. In fact, probably the last hand to touch that letter before mine was that of Toson himself, who had tucked it away into the pages of the book (which I bet he never actually read) more than half a century before.

In sum, it was about as minor an archival discovery as there could be. Yet it was undeniably an archival discovery, one that I had made and one that seemed to verify my credentials as an actual scholar of literature–at least in my own mind.

I doubt I’ll turn up anything quite as interesting on this pass through Japan, but I’ll keep my eyes open.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin. Just about the perfect novel: funny, poignant, wise. Nabokov’s ability to make the English language dance at will is astonishing. The hero Pnin is a White Russian exile, an intellectual reared in the salt water of Europe now trying to survive in the mucky freshwater of 1950s American academia. It’s been years since I’ve fallen quite so deeply in love with a work of fiction.

Narita Ruichi and Iwasaski Minoru, Norma Field wa kataru: sengo bungaku kibo ???????????????????????????(2010). Part of the handy Iwanami Booklet series, in a compact 63 pages this provides an appealing portrait of the life and scholarship of my colleague, Norma Field. In a series of interviews with two of Japan’s leading intellectual historians, she talks about growing up the daughter of an American soldier and a Japanese woman in 1950s Japan, about her intellectual awakening in the 1960s and 70s, and about the ethics of scholarship in today’s tangled academy.

Alexander Saxton, The Great Midland (1948). A recently revived classic of late American proletarian literature, the story of Communist Party activists on the South Side of Chicago: railroad workers (both black and white), University of Chicago armchair radicals (both male and female), immigrants and their children. Reminiscent of early John Dos Passos, the narrative moves forward and backward through the history of the first half of the twentieth century as it depicts the friendships, jealousies, and confusions of a generation of American radicals.

Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989). West’s classic account of American pragmatism is driven by great passion and intelligence, and he makes a persuasive case for the relevance of James, Dewey, Peirce and their intellectual descendants in today’s world. But I’m also struck by the remarkable undercurrent of American exceptionalism that runs throughout his argument.

Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, a collection of English translations of Natsume Soseki’s writings on literary theory that I co-edited with Atsuko Ueda and Joseph Murphy, is now available in paperback for a mere $27.50. Such a deal!

The volume was originally published in hardcover last year. Public Radio International’s “The World” picked the book as one of its “International Reads for the Holidays,” and the journal Japanese Studies called it “an impressive work of remarkable erudition matched by the precision and lucidity with which the complexity of Soseki’s thought and of its context are presented….eminently readable, lively, and lucid.”

Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt….

Those of us who study Japanese culture and literature at the University of Chicago had an exciting year in 2009-2010. We’ve now posted video of some of the major events. Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo delivered this year’s Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture in March. Video of his speech, “A Novelist Re-Reads ‘Kaitokudo,'” in the original Japanese is available here, and the lecture with an English-language voiceover (done by yours truly at the event) is available here.

Our Japan@Chicago conference this year was held in late May and devoted to the topic of “Engaging Commodities: Crossing Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde in 1960s Japanese Film, Music, and Art.” The event included several specials guests, musicians who were active in the 1960s rock scene in Japan. They spoke about their experiences then, and they also brought along their guitars and played a few songs for us. These included Alan Merrill, who was active in Japan in the 1960s Group Sounds band The Lead, then as a solo artist signed to Watanabe Productions, and later in the early 1970s pioneering glam rock band Vodka Collins. Here is video of Alan performed his 1973 Vodka Collins hit, “Automatic Pilot.” Alan closed his impromptu set at the conference with a rendition of a song he wrote and first recorded in 1975 with his UK band The Arrows after leaving Japan: “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” (video here).

We also were lucky enough to have three original members of the legendary Yokohama band The Golden Cups join us for a question-and-answer session: Eddie Ban (lead guitar), Louise Louis Kabe (bass), and Mamoru Manu (drums and vocals). At the end of the evening we had a jam session with Eddie Ban and Alan Merrill. They played three numbers together, including a sly Japanese-language version of “Sweet Home Chicago” (video here).

It was a terrific year, and we’re already planning some very interesting events for next year….

Foot fetishism in Asian literature goes back long before the twentieth century. I’ve just come across the following poem in praise of women’s feet by great Tang dynasty bard Li Po ???? (701-762). Shades of Naomi….

The Women of Yueh (1)

She is a southern girl of Chang-kan Town;
Her face is prettier than star or moon,
And white like frost her feet in sandals–
She does not wear the crow-head covers

(In these poems, Li Po records what he saw of the “southern” girls in Kiangsu and Chehkiang. These provinces were under the king of Yueh in the 5th and 6th centuries, B.C. Chang-kan is near the city of Nanking, and was at Li Po’s time inhabited by the lower class of people. The “crow-head covers” are a kind of shoes worn by upper-class women of the north. So named on account of their shape and very small size–small feet seem to have been already at a premium. “It is interesting,” remarks a native critic demurely, “to note Li Po’s admiration for a barefoot woman.”)

[Translation and notes by Shigeyoshi Obata, from his edited volume The Works of Li Po, The Chinese Poet (1935)]

(Image source)

Oe Kenzaburo, Suishi (Death by water, 2009). The latest novel by the Nobel laureate, this one partakes of his characteristic vein of imaginatively rewriting the reality of his own life into a mythic dreamscape. An aging novelist becomes involved with an experimental theater company who have been staging dramatizations of his work. They meet together at the novelist’s ancestral “home in the woods” in Shikoku where the novelist intends to at last complete a long-abandoned novel (Suishi shosetsu) on his father’s death, based on records that have been kept in a suitcase since his mother’s death ten years earlier. In doing so, he hopes to heal wounds opened by his earlier fictional version of his father’s demise, published as Mizukara waga namida o nuguitamau hi (The day he himself shall wipe my tears away, the title of a novella Oe actually published in 1972). The suitcase, however, turns out to be empty, leading to a bout of depression and new tensions within the novelist’s family. The theatrical company goes on to create a performance based on Natsume Soseki’s 1914 Kokoro, using the figure of Sensei in that novel to call into question the ethics of the protagonist. I’m now a little more than halfway through this complex meditation on death, literature, and history, and after Oe’s visit to Chicago last month, I keep hearing his voice in my head as I read the prose silently.

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1966). One of those classic studies I’ve somehow avoided reading up until now. I’ve been invited to write an article for a special journal issue in Japan on “the sense of ending” in modern literature, and this seemed a good place to start organizing my thoughts on the topic. Kermode explores the various ways we map our place in the world through our imaginations of what the end of history will look like and how this becomes a basic structural element in the literary and non-literary fictions that we live by.

Endo Toshiaki, The YMO Complex: Take Me to Techno’s Limit (2003). An intelligent interpretive survey of the postmodern music and semiotics of Yellow Magic Orchestra, the most important and popular Japanese rock band of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Sasaki Atsushi, Nippon no shiso (Japan’s thought, 2009). An engaging, personal survey of how the world of Japanese theory and criticism has transformed from the New Academic poststructuralism of the 1980s (represented by such figures as Asada Akira and Nakazawa Shin’ichi) to the contemporary world of anti-academic subcultural studies (e.g., Azuma Hiroki). Sasaki focuses not so much on the content of “thought” as on the shifting modes of its performance.

Greetings from Tokyo, where I arrived Friday for a short research trip. A few cherry blossoms hung on long enough for me to be able to enjoy them, though they are now fast disappearing from the landscape.

The newspapers here are reporting the death of the great novelist and playwright Inoue Hisashi. He was 75 and had been battling cancer for some time. Raised in an orphanage in Sendai, Inoue first attracted attention in the early 1970s with his brilliant, often funny and often sharply critical, fiction. He liked to employ nonstandard forms of writing: he invented, for example, a fictional language for his 1981 masterpiece Kirikirijin. From the 1980s his focus shifted to writing primarily for the stage. Just last year he staged a successful dramatization of the life and work of proletarian literature writer Kobayashi Takiji.

Inoue was also a prominent public intellectual. He lent his voice and pen to a number of worthy causes–most notably the efforts to save Article 9, the no-war clause of the Japanese constitution. On that note, the Yomiuri newspaper is by coincidence also reporting on one of Inoue’s most important legacies. Given the newspaper’s strong bias toward changing Article 9, its coverage of the issue has to be taken with a grain or two of salt. But today’s Daily Yomiuri describes what seems to be a significant change over the past year in Japanese public opinion on the issue:

Thirty-two percent of people surveyed felt Article 9–the constitutional clause renouncing the right to wage war–should be amended as it hampers the country’s ability to deal with related issues because of how the article is interpreted. This number, too, was lower than 38 percent in last year’s survey.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of respondents said related issues–such as the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces on international peacekeeping operations–should be dealt with through the conventional interpretation of Article 9. In the previous survey, 33 percent felt this way.

The big story, in other words, is a large shift in public sentiment toward keeping Article 9 in its present form. Last year 52% supported and 36% opposed constitutional revision, while this year the figures were 43% and 42% respectively. Of course, the headline to the Daily Yomiuri story chooses a different angle: “Poll: Public split over amending Constitution / Over 70% think govt should discuss issue.” (The headline on the original Japanese-language version of the article does a better job of conveying the story, I think).

Of the nine prominent intellectuals who in 2004 launched the citizens’ movement to save Article 9, only six are still with us today. But as the story above shows, their efforts are bearing fruit. I’ll resist the temptation here to use the cherry blossom metaphor, although it seems quite apt.

In his lecture at the University of Chicago last month, Oe Kenzaburo noted that there are now more than 700 local chapters affiliated with the movement across Japan. To paraphrase another playwright, the good Inoue Hisashi did lives on after him. Rest in peace.

Good morning from Philadelphia, where I arrived late last night to attend the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting. I perhaps should say that I’ve “returned” to Philadelphia, since I was here on Monday and Tuesday for the NCC-3D conference, a large gathering of librarians, scholars and others who are concerned with the state of Japanese library resources in North America. As always happens when I get together with librarians and other information science people, I was impressed with the knowledge, passion, and commitment they bring to their professions. It was also exciting to learn about new developments in the field–the progress, for example, of the digitization project at Japan’s National Diet Library.

The other thing that became clear to me at the event, as it has at every recent scholarly event I’ve been to, is how much pressure everyone is facing in this time of slashed budgets, rising costs, and uncertainty about the future. These are challenging times for people who care about scholarship in North America–and in East Asia, too.

Yesterday, I was up at Princeton participating in the Workshop on Postwar Literary Criticism, the initial event in an exciting new collaborative research project that brings together faculty and students from the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and Waseda University. On the morning panel, Toeda Hirokazu (Waseda) presented some very intriguing ideas about how we should bring in the issue of censorship when we rethink literary criticism from early postwar Japan. He’s one of the editors of a new series of books that collects Occupation-period censorship records, and in his talk he showed us some remarkable instances of the conditions under which Japanese writers and editors functioned in the late 1940s.

Sakakibara Richi (Waseda) spoke on the 1946-7 “Politics and Literature” debate among leftist and Marxist critics, noting the implicit rise through the course of the debate of a series of shared concepts and keywords among participants who seemingly agreed about nothing. She also traced through how those same concepts and keywords meant something very different for the participants in the debate from what they mean today. I spoke about the same “Politics and Literature” debate as an early instance of Cold War culture, situating the works of such Japanese critics as Hirano Ken, Ara Masahito, and Nakano Shigeharu alongside that of some of their contemporaries in North America. In the afternoon, we had some excellent suggestions for the papers and projects from two discussants, Victor Koschmann (Cornell) and Richard Calichman (City University of New York). Then we had another terrific session in which graduate students from the three schools presented their thoughts about how to translate and annotate texts from early postwar literary criticism in ways that will address a variety of different kinds of readers.

The joint research project is off to an exciting start. We’ll bring the group together again for another workshop in Tokyo at Waseda this summer and then wrap things up with a formal international conference at Chicago next year. It’s the sort of project that makes you feel hopeful for the future, despite all the bad news about budgets that plague academic life in both Japan and North America these days.

The agenda for today is to carry out some sightseeing in Philadelphia with my daughter and to catch a panel at AAS tonight. Tomorrow morning I’ll visit another panel or two, visit the publishers’ exhibition hall to say hello to some editors I work with, and we’ll be on a plane back to Chicago tomorrow afternoon.

Finally, say “happy birthday” to one of my childhood heroes. I’m going to have check out that new DVD set….