Book Review

Abstract

In The Uses of Literature in Modern Japan, her last book before her unfortunate passing in 2020, Sari Kawana tackles an impressive breadth of materials to prove how, in the context of twentieth-century Japan, modern literature and its promotion, circulation and reception were always already a transmedial enterprise. Kawana seems most concerned with literature’s continuous influence in the twenty-first century, and through her meticulous, careful – but at the same time, creative – readings, she argues compellingly that literature does and will remain relevant even in the current era. The sense of crisis for literature’s perceived diminishing ‘use value’ is, for Kawana, too pessimistic, because the same argument had already appeared in late nineteenth-century Japan as the phenomenon of media mix became visible, and yet literature remained ‘useful’ as time went by. Although the term ‘media mix’ was coined in the 1960s, the phenomenon itself emerged much earlier, Kawana writes, even dating back to the Edo Period (124). The key to maintaining literature’s ‘value’ in twentiethcentury Japan was precisely to embrace the synergy of media mix and the creativity of adaptations of literary works. In five chapters Kawana studies a range of cross-pollinations between modern Japanese literature and different media genres in the twentieth century. She starts with the enpon boom in the 1920s, when many Japanese publishers competed to produce multi-volume literary series sold at one yen per volume. Through rampant advertising campaigns in newspapers, these mass-market series, often bearing the name of zensh u (‘complete collection’), became musthave commodities for individuals and families to own in order to participate in an emerging nationalist discourse on citizenship and modernity. But if publishers wanted to evoke an appeal of ‘modern citizen’ through marketing tactics, their customers, i.e. the readers, too have their own reading practices, as Kawana moves on to demonstrate with two book series published during the Second World War: Sh onen kurabu and Sh onen sekai. Situating in a sensitive period when censorship and ideological control loomed over the publishing industry, both series provided young readers at the time gateways to ‘timeless’ literary gems from before the war. Studying some of the memoirs and autobiographies of young readers, Kawana contends that those young minds often developed their own thoughts, responses and personal tastes amidst a time when everything they were allowed to read was approved by grown-ups. This notion of individual and creative response