JL 07 — Meiji Literature: Creating a Modern Written Voice

Meiji Literature: Creating a Modern Written Voice

Losing a job is painful enough. Watching a colleague keep his position because he knows how to please the right people makes it harder. In The Drifting Cloud (Ukigumo, 1887–1889), Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909) follows a young clerk whose humiliation is made worse by his difficulty expressing himself. What he feels and what he manages to say rarely come together easily. 

That gap gives us a useful starting point for Meiji literature. During Japan’s Meiji era (1868–1912), writers experimented with ways to bring conversation, private thought and everyday discomfort onto the page. The changes they made helped readers hear fictional people differently.

1. Writing in a Changing Japan

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 changed Japan’s political order. Expanding educational institutions, new communication networks and debates about the country’s future gave writers much to consider. The language they inherited offered several ways of responding.

The long history of Japanese literature included classical prose, poetry, theatrical writing and popular fiction. These traditions remained available to Meiji authors. Writers could borrow their rhythms, revise their conventions or try a different approach when an inherited form seemed ill suited to a scene.

The audiences developed through Edo print culture also belonged to this inheritance. Meiji writing grew from an existing world of books and readers even as the circumstances of reading changed.

One persistent difficulty concerned the distance between written Japanese and everyday speech. An author describing a contemporary household had to choose how its members would sound and how the narrator would speak about them. A polished literary voice might lend dignity to the scene. A narrator who sounds more conversational might help readers feel the discomfort in the scene.

Such choices helped determine whether readers observed a character from a distance or seemed to follow that person’s thoughts.

2. Genbun Itchi: Bringing Speech and Writing Closer

Genbun itchi, commonly translated as the unification of speech and writing, refers to efforts to bring written Japanese closer to spoken usage. The movement developed through experimentation across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

There was no single everyday voice for writers to adopt. Speech varied by region, occupation, gender and social relationship. Someone addressing a superior might use language quite different from the language used at home. A conversational style always involved choices about whose conversation would supply the model.

Even then, copying speech word for word would not necessarily produce convincing fiction. Actual conversations contain repetitions, unfinished sentences and references that make sense only to those present. The writer must choose which details let readers follow the conversation and still hear how the characters speak.

Narration presented another challenge. Dialogue could sound familiar while the sentences surrounding it remained formal. Bringing those registers closer allowed writers to move more freely between an outward exchange and a character’s unspoken response. The ease a later reader feels can conceal how much work went into creating it.

3. Shōyō and Futabatei: Making Motives Matter

Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) helped give the changing novel a critical direction. In The Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui, 1885–1886), he emphasized human feeling and behavior while challenging fiction governed by predetermined moral lessons.

His argument helped make room for literary realism that attended to mixed motives. A generous act might contain a hope of being admired. A refusal that seems based on principle may also reflect hurt pride. Fiction could spend time with these complications before asking readers to judge.

In Futabatei’s The Drifting Cloud, the contrast between Bunzō and Noboru makes this concern painfully ordinary. Bunzō loses his government position while Noboru remains employed. Their different ways of handling people also shape their relationships within the household where Bunzō lives.

Bunzō has feelings he cannot easily put into words. His hesitation gives the reader time to recognize his distress while also questioning his understanding of others. Sympathy does not require complete agreement with him.

This tension helps explain the novel’s importance. Its psychological attention and experiments with colloquial narration opened possibilities for Japanese fiction. We can recognize it as a pioneering modern novel while noticing where its experiments remain tentative or uneven.

4. Translation and the Search for a Sentence

Futabatei’s engagement with Russian literature brought the novelist’s concerns into the translator’s work. He had to consider how Japanese could convey voices formed within another language and society.

The difficulty extended beyond finding equivalents for unfamiliar words. A speaker’s education, social position or emotional state might be suggested by the manner of speaking. Choosing a Japanese register could alter the reader’s impression of that person.

Yuki Ishida’s research on Futabatei’s later translations examines these problems in relation to representations of mental distress. The study shows how language choices interacted with contemporary ideas about modern experience.

Seen this way, literary translation becomes a place where writers test what their own language can do. A foreign work presents practical problems: how to preserve a hesitation, distinguish one voice from another or let a sentence suggest more than its speaker understands.

English readers encounter another set of choices. A smooth English translation may make a passage feel effortless even when its Japanese phrasing was unfamiliar or experimental to its first readers. Reading across translations can make us more attentive to what that smoothness includes and what it leaves difficult to hear.

5. Ōgai and the Weight of a Formal Voice

Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) shows why the period cannot be explained through colloquial prose alone. His The Dancing Girl (Maihime, 1890) uses an elevated literary style to explore a Japanese man’s relationship with a German woman.

The narrator, Ōta Toyotarō, looks back on experiences in Berlin where affection becomes entangled with career and obligation. His account raises a question that remains uncomfortable: how does someone tell the story of a decision that caused another person harm?

One way to approach the story is to listen to the authority of its formal voice. Toyotarō can arrange his experiences into an eloquent account. As readers, we can still wonder whether that eloquence brings us closer to his responsibility or helps him manage its appearance.

The distinction matters to the history of Meiji prose. Older literary resources could carry contemporary anxieties. A formal sentence could make a narrator’s self-explanation as revealing as a conversational sentence made a character’s embarrassment.

6. Sōseki: Listening to the Narrator

Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) makes the personality of a voice especially easy to hear. In I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa Neko de Aru, 1905–1906), an unnamed cat observes a teacher’s household and its visitors.

The Japanese title already contains a joke. Its grand first-person expression gives an ordinary animal a self-important manner. Before we know much about the cat, we have heard something of its opinion of itself.

That manner shapes the pleasure of reading. The cat confidently judges human behavior while giving us plenty of reasons to laugh at its own self-importance. We listen to its observations and judge the observer at the same time.

Sōseki’s Botchan (1906) offers a different experience through a young teacher’s account of life away from Tokyo. His outspoken opinions keep the story moving. They also encourage us to consider what his certainty allows him to see and what it may prevent him from understanding.

These voices are memorable because their phrasing does more than report events. It gives us someone to listen to, agree with, doubt and occasionally laugh at. The reader’s relationship with the narrator becomes part of the story.

7. From Spoken Performance to Print

A voice on the page also depends on the means used to record and circulate it. Seth Jacobowitz’s Writing Technology in Meiji Japan (2015) examines literary change alongside communication networks, shorthand and other media practices.

His account gives particular attention to shorthand transcriptions of rakugo, a form of oral storytelling. These printed versions offered examples of how the rhythms of a performance could be represented in writing.

The connection helps explain why prose history extends beyond individual authors. Performers, recorders, publishers and readers all participated in the movement of language between speech and print. What looked like a natural speaking voice could emerge through several stages of work.

Standardization brought another difficulty. A widely accepted written style could make communication easier while giving particular forms of speech greater authority. Regional and social differences did not disappear because one style became familiar in print. Behind the search for accessible prose remained the question of whose language readers would learn to regard as ordinary.

8. Reading Meiji Voices Today

A useful way to read Meiji fiction is to notice moments when a narrator’s voice changes our judgment. Does a polished explanation leave someone else’s suffering at a distance? Does a blunt statement tell us as much about the speaker as it does about the event?

Futabatei’s hesitant clerk, Ōgai’s retrospective narrator and Sōseki’s opinionated cat invite different answers. Their voices make humiliation, responsibility and vanity perceptible in different ways.

The period’s experiments remain close to experiences we recognize. People still rehearse conversations they cannot bring themselves to begin. They explain decisions more neatly afterward than they understood them at the time. Meiji writers developed new ways to reveal these gaps between feeling and expression. Much of the life in their prose comes from allowing the uncertainty to remain.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What period does Meiji literature cover?

Meiji literature refers to writing produced in Japan between 1868 and 1912. Literary changes crossed these dates, so they identify a historical period rather than a complete break in writing styles.

Does genbun itchi mean copying everyday speech?

No. Writers selected and adapted features of speech to create readable prose. Narration still required choices about rhythm, register and perspective.

Why is The Drifting Cloud important?

Its experiments with colloquial narration and psychological representation helped establish new possibilities for Japanese fiction. It is widely regarded as a pioneering modern Japanese novel.

Did all Meiji writers adopt colloquial prose?

No. Ōgai’s The Dancing Girl explores contemporary conflicts through an elevated literary style. Different approaches continued to coexist.

Where should I begin reading?

Try Botchan for a direct and energetic narrator. Compare it with The Dancing Girl or the opening of I Am a Cat to hear how narrative voices differ.

References

1. Futabatei, Shimei, Japan’s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei, trans. and critical commentary by Marleigh Grayer Ryan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).

2. Ishida, Yuki, ‘The Season of the Literature of Madness: Futabatei Shimei, Literary Translation and the “Modern” in the Post-Russo–Japanese War Period’, Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, 22 (2022), pp. 36–47.

3. Jacobowitz, Seth, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015).

4. Karatani, Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, translation edited by Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

5. Keene, Donald, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

6. Natsume, Sōseki, I Am a Cat, trans. Aiko Itō and Graeme Wilson (Boston, MA: Tuttle Publishing, 2002).

7. Tada, Kurahito, ‘The Man Who Lost His Words: Mori Ogai’s Maihime’, Modern Japanese Literary Studies, 105 (2021), pp. 1–15.