A literature for the people: A study of the jidai shosetsu in Taisho and early Showa Japan

During the early twentieth-century, the genre of popular literature ( taishu bungaku) evolved in tandem with the development of Japan's mass print industry. One of the most popular sub-genres subsumed under the rubric of taishu bungaku was historical fiction ( jidai shosetsu), which typically incorporated conventions borrowed from the popular arts of the Edo era (1600--1868). Jidai shosetsu serialized in newspapers and magazines during the Taisho (1912--26) and early Showa (1926--89) periods often incorporated the formulaic plots and stock characters found in kabuki, yomihon and the oral narratives (kodan) of the vaudeville hall. Popular audiences, faced with the economic instability, social unrest and a rising tide of Westernism, drew comfort from the sense of tradition they discerned in the conventional morality of historical fiction. They turned to jidai shosetsu to escape the challenges of modern life.; Japanese literary scholars including Matsumura Tomomi, Tsurumi Shunsuke and Ozaki Hotsuki suggest that the popularity of jidai shosetsu derives in part from the popular writer's understanding of the hardships experienced by his readers and his ability to incorporate within the formulas of jidai shosetsu elements which address the people's need to express repressed feelings. I argue that the jidai shosetsu writer's efforts to appeal to a contemporary mass audience result in the backward projection of his consciousness of his own milieu onto the past. The popular historical novelist camouflages his treatment of contemporary themes by employing settings, people and conventions from the past. In support of this hypothesis, I offer an overview of the historical development of jidai shosetsu concentrating on the role of the mass readership in influencing the development of jidai shosetsu's vernacular style and contemporary content. This overview includes an examination of two progenitors of the popular historical novel, sokki-kodan (kodan transcriptions) and Tachikawa bunko. Finally, I make a close reading of specific jidai shosetsu written between 1913 and 1939, with exegesis grounded in the social context within which the novels were produced. My analysis includes translated excerpts and plot synopses of selected works by three important popular historical novelists: Nakazato Kaizan (1885--1944), Osaragi Jiro (1897--1973) and Yoshikawa Eiji (1892--1962).