The Journal of Japanese Studies

Abstract:

Kōda Rohan (1867–1947) is considered an "antimodern" novelist who spurned experiments in the 1880s to forge a literature of realism in a vernacular register (genbun itchi). I argue, to the contrary, that Rohan sought a modern prose that could effect realism in a nonvernacular register, gazoku setchūtai. In his novel Fūryūbutsu (The bodhisattva of elegance, 1889), Rohan requests the aid of a "genbun itchi practitioner" to frame his gazoku realism as working across the unstable literary categories of interiority and exteriority whose emergence had been facilitated by vernacular prose in portions of Futabatei Shimei's (1864–1909) novel Ukigumo (Drifting clouds, 1887–89).