Contesting the Novel's Essence: Human Emotion and the Aporia of Representation in Tsubouchi Shōyō's Literary Reform, 1885–90

Abstract

In The Essence of the Novel (1885–86), his seminal treatise on the reform of fiction in Meiji Japan, Tsubouchi Shōyō famously defined the depiction of “human emotion” (ninjō)—in the sense of male-female love—as the essence of the novel. Narratives of literary history until recently have discussed this definition in terms of a paradigmatic shift toward modernity, a new emphasis on the individual and the private and the demise of early modern views of literary fiction as moral, political, and didactic. My presentation, however, seeks to complicate this view and to rehistoricize Shōyō’s notion of “human emotion.” In particular, I argue that “human emotion” constitutes a complex discursive site renegotiating late Edo-period literary formats—especially the romantic-erotic ninjōbon (“books of human emotion”) and the heroic-didactic yomihon (“books for reading”)—while integrating new enlightenment concerns about gender, sexuality, and romantic passion. I discuss two of Shōyō’s contemporary novels, Characters of Present-Day Students (1885–86) and Mirror of Marriage (1886). These novels stage plots of failure that dramatize the difficulty to synthesize the writing of unenlightened erotic desire, reminiscent of the ninjōbon, with what Shōyō calls “idealism”—a term he associates with the yomihon’s didacticism but also with discourses of enlightenment and civilization that emphasized the control of desire and passion. By reflecting this failure of synthesis and aporia of representation, my presentation sheds new light on “human emotion”—including desire and sexual passion—as the contested “essence” of the novel in the literary-historical span of the early modern-Meiji transition.