PREFACE

Although written in the early Shōwa period, Shimazaki Tōson’s Yoake mae (Before the Dawn, 1929–35) may be regarded as the longawaited ‘great Meiji novel’ in at least two important respects: on the one hand, it seems to approximate more successfully than earlier works of Japanese fiction the nineteenth-century Western ideal of the novel espoused by Meiji writers since Tsubouchi Shōyō; on the other hand, it presents a satisfying ‘national narrative’ of historical developments leading up to and following the central event of the Meiji period: the imperial restoration. And yet, when we look more closely at this massive and obviously important work, we find that it still retains some of the more ‘intimate’ features of that ‘peculiarly Japanese’ form of more or less autobiographical fiction which Tōson had spent most of his career writing: the shi-shōsetsu (literally, ‘I-novel’).

Given the argument recently in favour among scholars of Japanese literature that a strict distinction should be made between the Western novel and the Japanese shōsetsu, we might well ask: is Yoake mae ultimately a novel or a shōsetsu, or is it a unique hybrid of both? If both, do its novelistic elements and its shōsetsu elements work harmoniously together or are they in irreconcilable conflict? Finally, do our answers to these questions throw any light on the novel/shōsetsu argument or, indeed, do they threaten that argument with a reductio ab absurdum?

I. NATIONAL NARRATIVE IN MODERN JAPANESE FICTION PRIOR TO YOAKE MAE

When Japanese writers began to read and translate Western literature in the late nineteenth century, they encountered a very powerful vehicle of national narrative: the nineteenth-century Western novel. Just as one of the main features of Western political history over the previous few centuries had been the rise of the modern nation state, so an equally central feature of Western literary history had been the rise of the novel. These two phenomena were not merely parallel but symbiotic: each had contributed to the other's growth. And this mutually enriching relationship reached its climax and apogee in the nineteenth century – at exactly the historical moment when Japan ‘reopened’ to the West.