The fiction of Tokuda Shūsei, and the emergence of Japan's new middle class

Description:

In this stimulating study, Richard Torrance provides the first book-length English-language analysis of the life and works of the eminent Japanese writer Tokuda Shusei (1872-1943). Literary description and analysis, biography, and historical narrative are interwoven to produce not only a literary study of distinction but documentation of the social restructuring that began in the late Meiji period. Shusei believed that literature should speak for the powerless and represent common experience - a belief forged by a number of oppositional political and literary movements, such as the movements for People's Rights in the 1870s, realism in the 1880s, naturalism in the first decade of the twentieth century, and social realism in the 1920s and 1930s. Torrance demonstrates that Shusei's concept of shomin (common) culture is the key to understanding his mature works. This shomin culture differed from that of the Edo period and was a product of massive urban migration at the turn of the century. The term came to be used for a class position that contrasted with various elites and took on cultural connotations absent from other terms for "the masses." It suggests popular art forms (such as Ozaki Koyo's novels, magic lantern shows, and the yose and other forms of popular theater), as well as popular eating places, shitamachi (artisan and merchant) neighborhoods, and hundreds of associations that stand in contrast to Japanese high culture and especially to the high culture of the West, which in the Meiji period was appreciated only by the wealthy and the intelligentsia.

subjects: Criticism and interpretation,  Middle class in literature,  Japanese literature, history and criticism

People: Shūsei Tokuda (1872-1943)