ABSTRACT
Writing in memory of his friend Kataoka Teppei, Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947) once noted that the writer, who had died in 1944, represented an archetypal figure of Showa literary history. ‘A founder of the New Sensationist movement and the discoverer of the sensibility of speed, he converted to dialectical materialism, then further converted to a longing for tradition and to the building of bridges with China’, Yokomitsu wrote. ‘Who else, among the literary figures of the past twenty years, has embodied all of these things in one person?’2 As Inoue Ken has pointed out, however, Yokomitsu himself might also fit his own description as an archetypal figure of this period.3 Together with Kataoka, Yokomitsu had been one of the leading members of the New Sensationists (shinkankakuha), the central movement of modernist fiction in 1920s Japan. His writings of this period were characterised by formal experimentation and by an emphasis on representations of urban space and various phenomena of modern culture. Yet by the mid-1930s, and especially with the publication of his final, unfinished, novel Ryoshu (Melancholy journey)—which began in 1937 and continued throughout the war years-he became known as an exemplary figure of the ‘return’ to Japanese tradition and the withdrawal into a discourse of cultural essentialism. Yokomitsu was active in his support for the war effort, for which he was denounced in the post-war period, most prominently in an article written by Odagiri Hideo which appeared in the journal Shin Nihon bungaku (New Japanese literature) in 1946.4
In this sense, Yokomitsu can be seen as embodying a certain significant line of transformation in Japanese literature from the 1920s through the war years, a shift from an engagement with modernism to the articulation of a nationalist aesthetic. As Yokomitsu himself indicated, other similar exam ples may also be found in the
literature of this period-including, to varying degrees, those of Hagiwara Sakutaro, Kawabata Yasunari and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro. Yet Yokomitsu’s novel Melancholy Journey is of particular significance in that its subject is the very experience of what Yokomitsu referred to as an ideological conversion (tenko). This essay, in turn, will seek to trace the dynamics of this transformation through an examination of Shanhai (Shanghai, 1928-32) and Melancholy Journey, his first and last novels, which are also representative of his early and late writings. In particular, it aims to identify the moments of both continuity and rupture between the two periods of Yokomitsu’s career; although there is a sense in which this relationship may indeed be characterised as an ideological conversion, Yokomitsu’s nationalist project cannot simply be explained as a rejection of his earlier engagement with modernism. Rather, it represents an attempt to work through and overcome the sense of a crisis in national subjectivity that had already been articulated in the earlier writings.
