Urban ambiguity: modernist descriptions in Kajii Motojirō

Abstract

This article examines early twentieth-century Japanese writer Kajii Motojirō’s short story ‘Remon’ (‘The Lemon,’ 1925) and explores the intersection of Kajii’s descriptions and an emerging urbanscape in Kyoto. Turn-of-the-century Kyoto undertook a massive scale of urbanization, remaking itself as a resurgent imperial capital. Instead of taking note of transformations of the scenery or the frenzies of new experiences, ‘Remon’ illustrates the narrator’s movement unintelligibly suspended in Kyoto’s back alleys. The repeated juxtaposing of different forms of representational media in the narrative also creates intermedial confusion, intensifying the sense of perceptual uncertainty. The article contends that reading the descriptions of ambiguous in-betweenness in the text reveals Kajii’s writerly engagement with the urbanization of Kyoto and leads us to a reevaluation of Kajii’s investment in literary modernism.

Keywords:

• Kajii Motojirō
• ‘Remon’ literary modernism
• intermediality
• Kyoto
• urbanization

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express her gratitude to Yanie Fécu, Takashi Miura, Megan Sarno, Douglas Slaymaker, Megan Steffen, and Ron Wilson for continued support and encouragement that they offered her at various stages of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this article I primarily draw on the original 1925 version published in literary coterie magazine Aozora (Blue sky) (Kajii 1925, 1–8) and consult with the 1966 reprint in Kajii Motojirō zenshū to identify what appear to be obvious typographical errors in the first publication (Kajii [1925] 1966a, 7–13). I have referred to and modified William Tyler’s 2008 translation ‘The Lemon’ from Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938 when quoting Kajii’s text in this article (Tyler 2008, 334–339). All other translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

2 The first collection had two volumes and came out from Tokyo-based publisher Roppō Shobō. The first volume contains forty short stories including ‘Remon,’ the second has six short stories, as well as essays, letters, and diaries. The Roppō Shobō version was a limited edition with five hundred copies printed for each volume, which indicates that it did not circulate widely to establish Kajii’s position beyond the literary community (Yodono and Nakatani 1966b, 590–591).

3 Suzuki Sadami indicates that later scholars’ ungrounded conflation of Kajii’s biography with his works—what Suzuki calls biographical-reductionism (sakka shishitsu kangen shugi)—prevented thorough formal analyses of Kajii’s writings and complicated the categorization of Kajii in Japanese literary history (Suzuki 2001, 566). One of the early examples of such reductionism can be found in Kobayashi Hideo’s 1932 essay entitled ‘Kajii Motojirō to Kamura Isota,’ in which Kobayashi locates Kajii’s own ‘inclination’ (shishitsu) toward ‘simplicity and unmediated-ness’ (tanjunsei ya shizensei) in ‘Remon’ (Kobayashi [1932] 1967, 323–330). There are at least three extensive biographical studies, so-called hyōden, on Kajii besides Suzuki’s Kajii Motojirō no sekai: Ōtani Kōichi’s Hyōden Kajii Motojirō (1978); Uchida Teruko’s Hyōden hyōron: Kajii Motojirō (1993); and Kashiwakura Yasuo’s Hyōden Kajii Motojirō: Miru koto, sore wa mō nanika na no da (2010). As Suzuki indicates, biographical studies are premised upon the proposition that the author is a singular convergence point of cultural production, thereby delimiting the analytical scope of what language sets in motion irrespective of authorial intentions.

4 ‘Remon’ was first adopted in a textbook compiled by publishing house Sanseidō in 1952 and began to appear more widely from 1965 onward in other publishers’ textbooks, such as those from Shūei Shuppan and Dai Nihon Tosho (Nishio 2017, 7).

5 Lippit here acknowledges the difficulty of defining modernism beyond such formal characteristics, as the notion covers a vast range of styles and practices that are not necessarily mutually coherent.

6 Tseng offers a comparison of populations between other major cities; the population of Kyoto in 1920 was 591,000, making it the fourth largest city in Japan at the time after Tokyo (2.17 million), Osaka (1.25 million), and Kobe (609,000) (Tseng 2018, 165).

7 Ito tracks the historical emergence of the term ‘Dai Kyoto’ in his work on modern Kyoto (Ito 2018, 5).

8 Other than these artists, Kajii also mentions writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), and August Strindberg (1849–1912), and composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), and Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) (Kajii 1966b, 5–129).

9 Besides Cézanne, Kajii enjoyed European avant-garde artists such as Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) (Suzuki 2011, 59).

10 The Arcades Project has a specific section of flâneur (Benjamin 1999, 416–55) but the theme of flânerie recurs throughout The Project. The essays collected in The Project were originally written between the 1920s and 1940.

11 As Komatsu details, Kyoto was one of the first locales in Japan that came in contact with motion pictures, successfully hosting the projections of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph in 1897. Following that Kyoto developed into a vital node for Japan’s film industry, as exemplified in the film production work of Makino Shōzō (1878–1929) (Komatsu 1996).

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Miyabi Goto

Miyabi Goto is assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on modern Japanese literature during and since the Meiji period. Email: [email protected]