Mediating between the novel and traditional poetry: sketch prose (Shaseibun) and the representation of feelings in Turn-of-the-Century Japan

Abstract

The second half of the Meiji period (1868–1912) witnessed profound shifts in the formats of literary genres and in literary representation. One significant result was the rise of the novel (shôsetsu) as an important new genre. Discourses such as Tsubouchi Shôyô’s influential treatise Shôsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel, 1885–86) emphasized that the novel’s focus should be on domestic life and especially on private feelings such as love. This radically differed from the aesthetic format of the prestigious traditional poetic genres – such as Chinese and Japanese-style poetry (kanshi and waka) – where emotions (jô) were often not directly expressed but juxtaposed with tropes related to nature or landscape (kei). My presentation argues that literary transition in late Meiji didn’t consist in a clear-cut shift from one of these regimes of representing feelings (classical poetry) to the other (the novel) but was in fact more complex and hybrid. I focus on the genre of shaseibun (‘sketch prose’), which emerged around the turn-of-the-century and which – as I argue – hybridly mediated or negotiated between both representational regimes. Through a comparative reading of Masaoka Shiki’s essay ‘Jojibun’ (‘On Descriptive Prose,’ 1900) as well as Natsume Sôseki’s essay ‘Shaseibun’ (‘On Sketch Prose,’ 1907) and his ‘sketch’ experiment Kusamakura (The Grass Pillow, 1906), I show how shaseibun writing often self-consciously vacillated between a regime of indirect or detached poetic representation of feelings – for instance through the mediation of landscape evocation – and a more undiluted focus on emotions and desires, which gestured to the representational world of the novel.