In their ambition to capture “real life,” Japanese painters, poets, novelists and photographers of the nineteenth century collaborated in ways seldom explored by their European contemporaries. This course offers learners the chance to encounter and appreciate behavior, moral standards and some of the material conditions surrounding Japanese artists in the nineteenth century, in order to renew our assumptions about what artistic “realism” is and what it meant.
Learners will walk away with a clear understanding of how society and the individual were conceived of and represented in early modern Japan. Unlike contemporary western art forms, which acknowledge their common debt as “sister arts” but remain divided by genre and discourse, Japanese visual and literary culture tended to combine, producing literary texts inspired by visual images, and visual images which would then be inscribed with poems and prose. Noticing and being able to interpret this indivisibility of visual/literary cultures is essential in understanding the social and psychological values embedded within the beauty of Japanese art.
從本節課中
The Literary Photograph II
Our final module traces the trajectory of the literary photograph from the end of the long nineteenth century into Japan’s modern era. Photographic images of the human figure in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan were often accompanied by literary writing inscribed either on the image itself, or on its reverse side. Modern novelists sometimes published photographs with short poems as captions. We will wrap up our course with a summary of how visual and written modes of representation colluded, and combined to produce powerful documents of social and psychological actuality.
(Former Affiliation) Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo (Current Affiliation) Director-General, National Institute of Japanese Literature
The short tour that we've taken in the previous lessons through the image
at the beginning of the 20th century,
during the Russo-Japanese War in picture postcards and
others sorts of images in Japan, show us that some things haven't changed.
The synergy between the written word and the image, the connection,
the desire and almost sort of compulsion to write or
inscribe upon the human countenance or face, or picture itself.
Some other things though have changed.
The media itself, the universal postal system, military mail,
the fact that images, especially of women, were being sent,
hundreds and perhaps thousands per day to the warfront and
exchanged there among men at the front and so forth.
The relationship between the correspondence, what was actually written
on the image and the image themselves, you find a separation, a loosening or
a weakening of what we have called the synergy,
the interdependence of the word, and the image.
The image which is spun out of words, and the dependence of words on image
which we find in all sorts of discourses in Japan
before the Meiji Restoration, and even in the decades shortly thereafter.
Our last lesson, I'd like to concentrate on fiction.
Fictional modes, the modern novel.
How photographs especially photographs about people.
We call them portrait photographs or photographs which portray people,
how they come to be used within, viewed within, or
contextualized within the fictional text.
In our last lesson, we took at look at Nagai Kafū,
his young years when he was still studying and thinking that he might perhaps,
like his father, join the banking industry and become an industrialist perhaps.
After he came back from Europe,
he decided that he was going to throw all of that away and
dedicate himself to literature, which he did until he passed away in the 1950s.
Nagai Kafū before the war wrote one novel which is especially well-read today.
It's been turned into a movie as well and it's one of his representative works.
Also, in the first private edition of it,
he uses a number of photographs which he took himself of the stage,
of the area in Tokyo where the novel was staged.
And I want to, for
our last, final look at the relationship between the word and the image
in the 19th century in Japan, although we we're in the 20th century here.
I do want to take a look at this novel, Strange Tale from East of the River.
What we have in front of us here is the private edition of 1937 of the novel.
Nagai Kafū wrote this story of
Ōe, a novelist who is having trouble finishing up a novel.
He traveled across the Sumida River, which is referred to
as the river in the title as the way I've translated it here,
to the other side of the bank, where there's a sort of brothel district,
a very, very small, shady sort of brothel district, which is fascinating to him,
because the way that the women who work there and who lived there,
reminds him of how sexual male/female relationships,
especially in the so-called demimonde, or the brothel districts,
the recreational districts of pre-earthquake,
the earthquake having occurred in Tokyo in 1923,
the pre-earthquake sort of remnants of the Edo period.
The author, as well as the protagonist, the novelist Ōe,
visits this very, very small area across the town, and relaxes there,
enjoys spending time with these women who were living very,
very sort of transient, unstable lives, but
who according to the protagonist at least, commit themselves,
dedicate themselves to their work, to their lives there.
The protagonist Ōe finds among these women sort of a way of life,
a way of looking at life, which is daring, independent,
and reminds him very much of the old Edo, so-called feudal,
or early modern ways that courtesans and prostitutes,
the whole sort of demimonde, rich culture of urban Japan,
how it's been lost along with
so many other aspects of culture during the militarization and
during the sort of industrialization of the early 20th century.
So, anyway, he visits this brothel, this area here,
to satisfy himself, to meet someone, but
also to deliver a sort of paean to lost culture in Japan as well.
In the months that Nagai Kafu was writing this novel,
the Japanese Imperial Army had invaded the Asian continent.
The war was on.
There was a great deal of censorship occurring within
the country itself, and in newspapers.
Not just official censorship, but self censorship.
In other words, newspapers and other journalistic media would sort
of predict what was safe to publish and not so.
Nagai Kafu was promised a place in one of the major newspapers
in Japan in order to serialize his novel.
He wrote it all and handed it over to them, but the newspaper sat on it.
They wouldn't republish it.
So he got very very frustrated and
decided that he would have to use his own money too create a private edition
of it to hand out to his friends in Ginza and all kinds of other sort of
interesting areas in the city where he would often socialize and so forth.
So he created what we're looking at right now.
The first private edition of this novel said to have been maybe a hundred or
so copies of it.
Here's the frontispiece to the novel.
We see in white letters the characters for the title.
It's a night scene, there's a window here with a light on, and beneath it
there are three buckets, probably filled with water in case a fire occurs.
Of course all of the buildings are sort of ratchety sort of two-story
wooden buildings.
It's a sort of slum area, which is populated almost entirely
by women who are waiting each night for men to cross the river, take sort
of a tram into the area and visit them and then go back before the morning.
But anyway, sort of shows the very sort of shady aspects of this area itself.
Robert Campbell(Former Affiliation) Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
