'Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari' and the transformation of Japanese literature in early Meiji: A dialogical perspective

This dissertation seeks to overturn previous models of literary production in early Meiji Japan that were based on identifying aspects of realism in Japanese prose works. I replace a tendency to privledge works that conform to standards of nineteenth-century Western prose fiction with criteria based on Joan Peters' interpretation of feminist narratology and its combination of Linda Hutcheon's theory of metafiction and Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva's theories of dialogism. I propose that rather than a concern for identifying a dividing line between premodern and modern literature in Meiji, what is more relevant is the investigation of shifts in the nature of the reader's relationship to texts. I use theories of dialogism which have supplanted standards of empirical realism in many analyses of the development of the novel in the West to uncover the process of a transformation in both text and reading that facilitated new ways of negotiating the increased range of discourses circulating during the early Meiji period. To do so, I focus on Kanagaki Robun's (1829-94) Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari (The Story of the She-devil Takahashi Oden, 1879), analyzing it as a serially published gokan (bound picture books) gesaku (vernacular playful writing) text which is representative of shifts within the dokufumono (poison woman) popular fiction genre. I argue against other interpretations of Takahashi Oden that have either identified the text as transitional due to the increased presence of realistic elements or have deemphasized or overlooked its dialogical properties. I propose that traditional parodic gesaku devices and fictional modes in Takahashi Oden allow a dialogical interchange between key anterior discourses that are present at the level of text. This interchange expands the range of interpretive possibilities available to the reader beyond that which had been possible in previous gesaku works. I thus posit that the dokufumono, as represented by Takahashi Oden, produced a reorientation of interpretive authority in the reader prior to the period when writers began consciously to pattern their works on Western models.