The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism

Michael Bourdaghs

Published by Columbia University Press 2003

The Dawn That Never Comes

Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism

Michael Bourdaghs

In the series Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

https://doi.org/10.7312/bour12980

Overview
Contents

About this book

A critical rethinking of theories of national imagination, The Dawn That Never Comes offers the most detailed reading to date in English of one of modern Japan's most influential poets and novelists. This book surveys the ideologies of national imagination at play in early-twentieth-century Japan, specifically in the work of Shimazaki Toson (1872–1943). Bourdaghs analyzes Toson's major works in detail, using them to demonstrate that the field of national imagination requires a complex interweaving of varied—and sometimes even contradictory—figures for imagining the national community.

A critical rethinking of theories of national imagination, The Dawn That Never Comes offers the most detailed reading to date in English of one of modern Japan's most influential poets and novelists, Shimazaki Toson (1872–1943). It also reveals how Toson's works influenced the production of a fluid, shifting form of national imagination that has characterized twentieth-century Japan.

Analyzing Toson's major works, Michael K. Bourdaghs demonstrates that the construction of national imagination requires a complex interweaving of varied—and sometimes contradictory—figures for imagining the national community. Many scholars have shown, for example, that modern hygiene has functioned in nationalist thought as a method of excluding foreign others as diseased. This study explores the multiple images of illness appearing in Toson's fiction to demonstrate that hygiene employs more than one model of pathology, and it reveals how this multiplicity functioned to produce the combinations of exclusion and assimilation required to sustain a sense of national community.

Others have argued that nationalism is inherently ambivalent and self-contradictory; Bourdaghs shows more concretely both how this is so and why it is necessary and provides, in the process, a new way of thinking about national imagination. Individual chapters take up such issues as modern medicine and the discourses of national health; ideologies of the family and its representation in modern literary works; the gendering of the canon of national literature; and the multiple forms of space and time that narratives of national history require.

Author / Editor information

Michael Bourdaghs teaches in the department of East Asian languages and cultures at UCLA. He is the translation editor of Kamei Hideo's Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature.

Reviews

Janet A. Walker, Rutgers University:
In its originality and theoretical sophistication it revolutionizes both the study of Toson and the study of Japanese nationalism.

Stephen Dodd, SOAS, University of London:
His insightful and informative book has deepened our understanding of a highly influential but sadly still neglected Japanese writer....That said, Bourdaghs has certainly opened my eyes to ways of reading Toson I had not considered before, and he is to be thanked for that.

Chia-Ning Chang:
Bourdaghs's study offers a fascinating interpretation of the major novels of an understudied but enormously interesting literary figure.

James A. Fujii:
a strikingly original work of remarkable erudition that is also a rigorous theoretical practice...a book that speaks widely to literary and cultural critics and is also a must read for scholars of nationalism and Japanese modernity.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter one. Toson, Literary History, and National Imagination Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Chapter two. The Disease of Nationalism, the Empire of Hygiene: The Broken Commandment as Hygiene Manual Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
Chapter three. Triangulating the Nation: Representing and Publishing The Family Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
Chapter four. Suicide and Childbirth in the I-Novel: “Women’s Literature” in Spring and New Life Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	114
Chapter five. The Times and Spaces of Nations:The Multiple Chronotopes of Before the Dawn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	154
Epilogue. The Most Japanese of Things Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 312

eBook

Published: October 18, 2003
ISBN: 9780231503419