Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young

vividly clear, an integral part of the memory of youth in a provincial town was the sense of proximity to nature. The force of nature that infused Kanazawa mesmerized Nakano’s protagonist in Changing Song, Kataguchi Yasukichi. “The town of Kanazawa was for Kataguchi Yasukichi a place of mystery. It had two rivers, the Saigawa and Asanokawa, which ran almost parallel. There were hills beyond the outer banks of the rivers and between the two rivers rose another hill. To Yasukichi it seemed as if the entire city was languidly dozing, draped across these two rivers and these three hills.”³⁶ Nakano was not alone in his penchant for lyrical natural description; the Tokyo literati laced their works set in Kanazawa with sketches of its hilly surrounds and its rivers, as well as with evocations of the snowbound winter landscape, as in Tokuda Shūsei’s fictionalized autobiography, The Snow in My Old Hometown (Furusato no yuki).³⁷ By minimizing the built environment of the city and focusing on natural landscape, such scenic descriptions framed the provincial town as an extension of the countryside. While the big city never slept, Tokyo writers portrayed the localities held frozen in place by the overwhelming force of nature; Nakano stressed the somnambulant effect this imparted to a provincial city like Kanazawa.

      Likewise Murō Saisei (1889–1962) infused his work with natural imagery and scenic descriptions of the country town. Though Saisei is better known for his poetry, he also produced a good selection of fiction, largely set in Kanazawa. His novel Sexual Awakening (Sei ni mezameru koro) based on the loves of a boyhood friend, offers one example. Against the backdrop of higher-school life, this was a coming-of-age story that recounted the youthful moment when the protagonist discovered both sexual love and his desire for literature. Much as he did in his poetry, Saisei used natural imagery to convey the protagonist’s state of mind, here to capture the pure, fresh quality of youth and the physicality of a boy on the cusp of manhood.³⁸ In the following passage, Saisei relays the thoughts of the protagonist as he sets out from his lodging house to walk around the town with no particular object in mind.

      I set out aimlessly.

      The border of mountains glittered intensely in the sun, reflecting on the deep drifts of icy snow that piled up like heaps of shavings after hail had fallen two or three times. The ripe heads of grass on the riverbank now trembled against the bleak landscape, unable to stand against the harsh wind of late fall that scoured them to sharp points. Anyone who grew up in the North Country knows the feeling of being suffocated by the stifling monotony of the landscape just before winter comes, when it seems to creep into your very soul and makes you dull and numb with cold.³⁹

      The striking predilection for landscape rather than cityscape in Saisei’s descriptions of Kanazawa conveyed the impression that life in this countrified city was lived closer to nature. Denuded of its built environment, Kanazawa became a place where the moods, the passions, the sensations of the seasons could be felt in all their intensity; its people, defined by the force of nature, were not truly urban. The effect of such literary devices was to subsume cities such as Kanazawa into a vast rural countryside that constituted Tokyo’s Other, dissolving the differences between urban and rural into a monolithic chihō of the metropolitan imagination.

      Moreover, scenic descriptions such as this invariably depicted a Kanazawa of an earlier moment, a time when the writer, now established in Tokyo, was a youth. In the literary spaces of the Tokyo literati, the provincial city became a memoryscape—the mountains Tokuda Shūsei used to climb, the cafes Nakano Shigeharu used to visit, the riverbanks along which Murō Saisei used to tramp. These descriptions provided a snapshot of youth that cast the hometown in the warm afterglow of nostalgia.⁴⁰ Critics of Saisei often note the elegiac quality of his writing, the sense of longing for a lost childhood. Certainly this was the effect of his first novel, the autobiographical Childhood (Yōnen jidai) published in 1919.⁴¹ Melancholy longing for a childhood far away in space and time also suffused his poetry, as in The Time of Cicadas.

      Somewhere or other

      Sheee—the cicadas are singing.

      Is it already the season for cicadas?

      A boy runs over the hot summer sand

      Hoping to catch some cicadas—

      Where has he gone today?

      In the sadness of summer

      How short its life is!

      Far beyond the streets of the capital

      Beyond the sky and the roofs

      Sheee—the cicadas are singing.⁴²

      The poem captures the sentiments of a man, now living in the metropolis, as he recalls a childhood moment in a country town. Hearing the sound of the cicada he is brought back to his boyhood, when the summer saw him running across the sand.

      This kind of literature-as-recollection represented the provincial city through the ideologically saturated metaphor of “hometown.” As such, it offers a classic example of the way the hometown metaphor operated to produce the center-periphery effect. From their perches in Tokyo, the bundan situated the provincial town at a physical and temporal remove from the metropolis. Paired as Tokyo’s Other, the provincial city was lodged within a nest of binaries: the adult contrasted with the boy, the present with the past, civilization with nature. In this way “the literature of a lost home,” as critic Kobayashi Hideo characterized it in his 1933 essay, stereotyped the provincial city as childish and unsophisticated, a world of an earlier age and a simpler time. Indeed, such literature narrated the transformation of a Murō Saisei or Nakano Shigeharu from provincial intellectuals to Tokyo literati, tracing this shift in subjectivity. Their embrace of Tokyo required the distancing and marginalizing of the local city. As they assumed their new identity, they minimized the power and vitality of provincial culture and what it had meant to their own intellectual formation.

      If they were complicit in its production, the Tokyo literati were also powerfully affected by the ideology of the metropolis, which acted to reproduce the conditions of its own production as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. At an institutional level, it aggravated the concentration of resources in the capital; on a personal level it shaped career and life decisions. Sometimes Tokyo-centrism could exercise a fateful and tragic power, as in the case of Shimada Seijirō. Another famous literary figure from Kanazawa and the author of the best-selling novel The Earth (Chijō, 1919), Shimada was arguably Japan’s first literary celebrity. He emerged at a critical moment in the publishing industry, on the eve of the conversion to mass production. A printing of ten thousand copies of the second installment of Shimada’s four-volume book sold out in two days, an unprecedented feat in publishing history that opened the doors to the mass marketing of high literature.⁴³ This triumph owed its success to clever manipulation of the ideologically charged symbols of “the hometown” and “the capital.” Shimada’s success was wrapped up in a compelling personal narrative—heavily promoted by his literary backers—about a literary novice, plucked from the obscurity of a country town, who become an overnight publishing phenomenon.

      The publishing giant Satō Giryū (1878–1951) engineered Shimada’s extraordinary burst onto the literary stage. Founder of the influential magazines Shinchō and Bunshō kurabu, and president of the publishing house Shinchōsha, Satō played the role of kingmaker in the world of pure literature and wielded enormous power in directing literary fashion in Tokyo. In the teens Satō pioneered the library format in Japanese publishing, inaugurating a string of special series on foreign literature, philosophy in translation, and modern Japanese literature. With this hugely successful initiative, he made the publishing firm of Shinchōsha synonymous with highbrow literary production and the gold standard of western translations. Moreover, by making the works of the bundan widely available to a national audience, Shinchōsha presaged the era of the zenshū (collected works), the enbon (one-yen book), and other strategies to market high culture to the masses in the 1920s. In 1917 Satō established a series called “New Writers” that quickly became a passport to bundan status.⁴⁴ As he began to exhaust the ranks of young Tokyo writers in his search for fresh talent, Satō hit upon the scheme of publishing a complete unknown. To fulfill this role, Satō plucked promising young writers out of nowhere—or at least a place that could stand in for nowhere in the eyes of the Tokyo literati. He enlisted the help of