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Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (review)

transformation of Japan’s cultural and intellectual life and its simultaneous engagement with the traditionalist impulse that sought to “nativize” the Western borrowings. In its treatment of Tōson’s work as an amalgam of autobiography and bunmeiron (culture critique), The Kiso Road complements Michael Bourdaghs’s penetrating critical study, The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism (Columbia University Press, 2003). At its core, The Kiso Road explores the complex and often conflicting rootedness of family in Tōson’s literature, and how this concern relates to the familistic, kazoku kokka ideology of the Japanese imperial state and the problematic interface with its citizen-subjects. In other words, Naff presents this literature as a multifaceted, extensive personal chronicle—rich in detail, specificity, and carefully wrought episodes. But the figure of the author is presented as a man in full, whose life and work are seen as having achieved an unparalleled integrity and coherence. I should note as well Naff ’s citation of, and commentary upon, the community of Tōson scholars, with certain figures emerging as exemplary in their own right—for instance, Itō Kazuo, Senuma Shigeki, and Yoshida Seiichi. In thus allying himself with this scholarly “old guard,” whose work he valorizes and, in effect, emulates, Naff can be faulted for overlooking more recent critical and interpretive avenues. In conclusion, I applaud the University of Hawai‘i Press for its support of this worthwhile project and its production of such a handsome volume. And I wish to express a personal debt of gratitude to William Naff for this superb scholarly study—thorough, eminently sensible, lucid, balanced, and deeply learned. The Kiso Road has substantially benefited my own Tōson-related research, and it can only enrich the work of colleagues and our larger understanding and appreciation of Japan’s modern literature. A scholar evidently drawn to monumental works, Naff was nearing completion, at the time of his death, of A Wisp of Cloud, his translation of the eight-volume Saka no ue no kumo (Bungei shunjū, 1968–1972), a masterful historical novel by the great novelist Shiba Ryōtarō (1923–1996). One can only hope that this sprawling account of the Meiji wars of empire as told through the intertwined lives of three key participants will find a readership in English.