Decadent Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan

The past decade has witnessed a cross-disciplinary resurgence of various forms of radical theory. The work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri has sought to resuscitate elements of Marxism and communism, David Graeber has argued for an “anarchist anthropology,” while a recent publication by Sho Konishi makes a strong case for understanding Japanese modernity in terms of anarchist theory. This slim volume by Ikuho Amano adds to this list, by providing a new interpretation of Japanese “decadence” as a radical literary and cultural form.The focus of the study is the creative labor of twentieth-century Japanese Decadents, that is, an ongoing “narrative process” of experimentation by which they work to “manufacture their own microcosm of pleasure” (14). Amano argues that by interpreting labor in terms of pleasure rather than utility Japanese Decadents explicitly rejected the standard model of labor as found in a modern, capitalist economy. Decadent labor, in contrast to capitalist labor, avoids the “circuit of profit-making and the abstraction of human energy” (15)—it is, to borrow a term from Marx, living labor. Furthermore, connecting this principle of “general” or “libidinal” economy to the work of contemporary theorists such as Hardt and Negri, Georges Bataille and Jean-François Lyotard, Amano extends the concept of Decadent labor as a paradigm for contemporary readings of Japanese Decadence.Chapter 1, “Immature Decadents,” provides a critical analysis of two early works of Decadent literature, novellas with similar themes and both entitled Indulgences, authored by Oguri Fūyō (1875–1926) and Iwano Hōmei (1873–1920). Amano argues that despite sharing common themes of ennui and passivity with European fin-de-siècle Decadent literature, both of these late-Meiji works display a comparatively “immature” perspective on decadence, due to a “lack of foundation in individuality inasmuch as they are intertwined with a collectivism based on paternalism” (53).Chapter 2 provides a detailed discussion of the “naturalist aestheticism” of Morita Shohei's Sooty Smoke (1909), a text that extends the themes of the works discussed in the previous chapter, particularly in terms of a more “nuanced contemplation of psychological complexity” (57). Chapter 3 turns to a comparative analysis of two Decadent novels published in 1910, Nagai Kafū's Sneers and Ueda Bin's The Vortex. Here Amano introduces the theoretical structure of Bakhtin's heteroglossia to examine “the process through which the subject negotiates with multiple spectrums of ongoing cultural modernity” (79). This chapter succeeds in showing how the narrative methods of both these texts reveal their respective author's struggles with sensibility of being kich ōsha; that is, “returnees” from a sojourn in the West. She concludes by suggesting that, while both Sneers and The Vortex can be considered “Decadent” works, they might be more adequately described as evincing “dilettantism”: “a playful psychic game developed out of the languid feeling of being a latecomer to the Meiji Restoration” (101).Chapter 4 takes us out of the turmoil of the late Meiji period and into the succeeding Taishō period (1912–1926), more closely associated in popular imagination with a high point of Japanese cultural “modernity” (and “democracy”) but also with a sense of cultural malaise and “decadence.” Here again, two works are discussed: Satō Haruo's A Pastoral Spleen (1920) and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's A Fool's Love (1924). Here, Amano suggests, Japanese Decadent writers came into their own, due to being much better informed about European Decadent literature (particularly Baudelaire's notion of an “artificial paradise”) as well as having had a longer and deeper experience of the tensions inherent to Japanese modernity. Moreover, she argues, once again invoking the theoretical work of Hardt and Negri, in contrast to the situation of late Meiji, Taishō Decadents engage in a counter-discursive economic paradigm rooted in “self-fulfilling labor and an astute distribution of energy” (125).Chapter 5 moves to the immediate postwar period, looking at the work of two prominent writers associated with the so-called burai-ha, Sakaguchi Ango and Tamura Taijirō. After a brief analysis of Ango's influential manifesto On Decadence (1946), which exemplifies the postwar turn toward a more intentional, ideological, and somewhat anarchistic understanding of Decadence, she turns to the same author's novella The Idiot (1946). Here, as well as in Tamura's Gateway to the Flesh (1947), Amano explores “the ways in which the body constructs a foundation for postwar ontology and the presentation of the body itself as a medium building a new social subjectivity” (128). Having myself published on the Buddhist implications of Ango's theory of decadence, I found Amano's reading of The Idiot in the context of tantric Buddhism suggestive (132), if less than fully fleshed out.Chapter 6 engages with the work of Mishima Yukio, arguably Japan's greatest—certainly most infamous—postwar novelist. In particular, Amano analyzes Mishima's last major work, the Sea of Fertility (1965–1970), arguing that the tetralogy “renders the idea of a life force and upholds the decadence of fictionality in a world upheld by rationality” (146). Amano locates Mishima at the end of a “genealogy” of Decadence extending from the fin-de-siècle European writers (especially Gabriele D'Annunzio) through the anthropological work of Malinowski and Mauss and down to Georges Bataille's theory of eroticism and a nonutilitarian “general economy” (159).Finally, Chapter 7 brings us up to the present, via a careful reading of Shimada Masahiko's Decadent Sisters (2005). Amano argues that the Shimada presents a different take on the idea of decadence by situating it as a possibility within a theory of “living labor” (174), exploring the ways that the “excess” of decadence can be put to use within a capitalist framework. Here the author is at her interpretive best, mainly because she provides a critical and finely textured analysis of the implications of “decadence” in Shimada's work on its own terms, that is, without relying overmuch on theory. In fact, one of the few criticisms I have of Decadent Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan is the tendency for the author to get bogged down in theory. While her use of various Western theorists is generally astute, it is sometimes hard to follow the connections, which are not always adequately spelled out. For instance, in the same section connecting Ango's work to tantric Buddhist metaphysics, we find quick references to Eliade, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Deleuze, soon followed by brief excursions into the work of Cixous and Foucault.While brief, the conclusion does a fine job summarizing the book's primary aims and arguments, highlighting the distinctive character of Decadent literature in twentieth-century Japan; in particular, the fact that, unlike in the case of Europe, decadence in Japan was a kind of “speech act” that provided Japanese writers with “a socio-cultural platform from which a new subjectivity could be born” (177). Moreover, despite (or because of) their explicit challenge to moral conventions, Japanese Decadent writers often took on a constructive, social role, which Amano explicates in terms of Bataille's theory of a “subversive economy” rooted in “unconditional expenditure.”Overall, Amano's argument with regard to the place and implications of labor (as a reaction, in large part, to the “practical learning” [jitsugaku] promoted by Fukuzawa Yukichi and the Meiji oligarchs) is persuasive, though I feel as though it may have been strengthened by acknowledgment of the obvious connections between Japanese Decadence and the burgeoning anarchist movement. Also, while it may be a quibble, I have some reservations with the author's general definition of decadence as a concept that “designates a given historical moment as an age of decay vis-à-vis an irretrievable past as the golden age” (1). Yes, decadence is certainly always about decline, but surely a significant number of Decadent “moderns” such as Huysmans (and Sakaguchi Ango) were less interested in retrieving some mythical past as they were in critiquing the present—as the author herself will later argue. Perhaps that is what the author implies by the term “irretrievable” past, but this definition still leaves a sense of Romantic “longing” that is quite foreign to many modern Decadents, who were generally neither “nostalgic” nor “pessimistic” (think Oscar Wilde). This is not to suggest that Decadents are necessarily “progressive,” just that they are not always—I would suggest rarely—“conservative.” Having said that, Amano is quite right to suggest that decadence is best understood not an “objective fact” but rather as an “epistemological device” (1), and one that was put to abundant use by Japanese artists, intellectuals (and others) in the first half of the twentieth-century.The writing is somewhat dense, and the book contains a number of minor errors: for example, dates given for Ippen Shōnin (?–972) are off by several centuries (1234–1289); likely the author is confusing Ippen with the earlier itinerant Amidist Kūya (903–972) (3); Kōtoku Shūsui was executed in early 1911, not 1910 (7); Havelock Ellis (not Haverlock) (31); absinthe, not absente (46); “despairing” should be “disparaging” (95); Jātaka is not a single “tale” but rather a loose series of stories regarding the Buddha's previous lives (139).Despite these minor flaws, Decadent Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan: Spectacles of Idle Labor is highly recommended to those interested in Japanese modernity, twentieth-century literature, and radical theory. It provides a useful genealogy of Japanese literary decadence and makes a strong case for an innovative reading of decadence along lines of “living labor.”

Aesthetics · Art · Decadence · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Novella · Pleasure · Sociology · Decadence, Literature, and Society · History · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction