Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel by Daniel Poch (review)

Abstract

An essay I read in graduate school—Peter Kornicki’s “The Survival of Tokugawa Fiction in the Meiji Period,” published forty years ago in this very journal—provided me with my first intimation that early modern Japanese literature was still popular in the modern era.1 It has taken the field considerable time to take seriously and to explore fully the implications of this survival, but the effort to find continuity amid change across the once unbridgeable Tokugawa–Meiji divide has now gained a great deal of traction. Daniel Poch’s Licentious Fictions, a bold, ambitious, and deeply researched monograph, takes a prominent place among these studies. Focusing on the historically specific discourse about ninjō 人情 (lit. human emotion; treated in the book as a form of desire), Poch’s book traces the “narrative practices surrounding ninjō” (p. 4) across a long nineteenth century, from the late Tokugawa era to the final decade of the Meiji period. Its focal points are the literary projects of Kyokutei Bakin 曲亭馬琴 (1767–1848), Tsubouchi Shōyō 坪内逍遥 (1859–1935), and Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867–1916). The book details the need to unleash the representation of desire in fiction, as well as the urge to control its unruly aspects, with a didactic framework that legitimizes some expressions of desire while making others illicit. The specifics of these impulses differ depending on the writer and the historical era. Poch’s book is adept at handling the variability and historical specificity of these twin claims on fiction to unleash and control desires. It also convincingly reveals continuity across the entire century. Poch’s attention to historical specificity is evident in chapter 1, which presents a wide-ranging account of the “interlocked historical layers that informed the understanding of ninjō in the nineteenthcentury Japanese novel” (p. 29). This historically specific discourse on desire was influenced by the import of vernacular Chinese fiction into