Disruptions of Daily Life

Reviewed by: Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World by Arthur M. Mitchell Ken K. Ito (bio) Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World. By Arthur M. Mitchell. Cornell University Press, 2020. viii, 266 pages. $55.00, cloth; $35.99, E-book. In Arthur Mitchell's new book, the strategic restriction of focus produces both dividends and drawbacks, with far greater weight on the former. The study approaches Japanese modernism of the 1920s through a small selection of works: a novel by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, two stories and a manifesto by Yokomitsu Ri'ichi, a novel by Kawabata Yasunari, and a single story by Hiraba ya shi Taiko. For its theoretical touchstone, it turns to Astradur Eysteinsson's The Concept of Modernism. To show how modernist fiction disrupts established social discourses, it chooses the seikatsu kaizen undō , or the "daily life reform movement," that unfolded in the mass media of the Taisho and early Showa periods. And for a prior literature subverted by modernism, it fastens on the shishōsetsu , or I-novel, represented by a single story, Shiga Naoya's "Wakai" (Reconciliation, 1917). The overall argument is that modernism's ideological and formal challenges disrupted the conjoined discursive fields of the I-novel and the "daily life reform movement." Within this framework, the study examines texts based on Eysteinsson's approach, which views "modernism as an attempt to interrupt the modernity that we live and understand as a social, if not 'normal,' way of life. Such norms are not least buttressed by the various channels and media of communication, and this is where the interruptive practices of modernism appear in their most significant and characteristic forms." 1 Eysteinsson's work, however, largely consists of metacriticism and stops short of developing these ideas through close readings of modernist texts. Mitchell's book is an attempt to do just this, with Japanese modernism of the 1920s as a case study. Through deep archival research, Mitchell lays out the discourses of "daily life" (seikatsu) and the "daily life reform movement" in the Japanese media of the 1920s. Through his readings, he shows how his fictional texts refract, subvert, and (re)present these discourses. The results are fresh and compelling. Chapter 1, "The Fetishism of the West in Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's A Fool's Love," is mistitled: Mitchell's argument is that the narrator of Chijin no ai (A fool's love, 1924) fetishizes and perverts the concept of "daily life," [End Page 238] rather than the idea of the "West." Mitchell shows how "daily life" first took shape as the imagined functional content of the newer model of family called the katei, which emphasized the synchronic relationship of the married couple and their children, against the diachronic model of the ie. The "daily life reform movement" produced a steady stream of social discourse on a "more enlightened and universal lifestyle" (p. 77), a new domesticity extolling rational consumption within marriages built on free will and mutual understanding. The immersion of the novel's narrator in this discourse is evident throughout, beginning with his pronouncement that he yearned for the "simple life." Mitchell argues persuasively that the narrator subverts not so much middle-class morality per se, but its social discourse: The tension between Jōji's playfully erotic desire and the language of middle-class social reform used to convey it is key to understanding the novel's scandalous nature—an outrageousness that should be traced not through its elusive sexual content but through its ubiquitous subversion of social language. (p. 87) Although Chijin no ai is a novel frequently studied by critics both Japanese and Western, Mitchell here drives home an important facet of its ideological thrust. I am less convinced, however, by the argument that the "narrative discourse of the I-novel was in fact complicit with the broad discourse of social reform" (p. 55) and that thus the work's subversion of the I-novel goes hand in glove with its undermining of social language. While it is true that Jōji claims to be engaging in an honest confession while indulging in masturbatory memories (a contradictory practice that bares the rhetorical

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