Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine writings by Abe Yoshishige and others to rethink zuihitsu of the time as a hybrid historical product that demonstrates emotional struggles through which they tried to accommodate the legacy of their traditional upbringing while confronting the challenges of the new age.

Paper long abstract:

A member of Sôseki's Thursday Club, Abe Yoshishige (1883-1966) belongs to the last generation of the Meiji/Taisho intellectuals who read Confucian classics as a child, and later received modern Western education in the higher schools and universities. He studied Kantian philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, also spending some time at Heidelburg University. With a mixed background typical among the intellectuals at the time, he pursued his career as philosopher and educator, and was very much a part of the Taisho kyôyô shugi milieu.

In his essay titled "The Sentiment with Which I Write Zuihitsu," he expresses his frustration that his love of zuihitsu has been interpreted by some critics as a sign of his neglect for his real work, which should be philosophy. And yet he argues that zuihitsu for him is an indispensable part of his intellectual life as it functions as his window onto the social world outside.

Zuihitsu, nikki and even shishôsetsu for many of these Meiji/Taishô intellectuals functioned as an arena to cultivate sensibility by coming to terms with their emotions in everyday life to become "better persons." Their mode of expression is often cognitively mixed in the sense that thought, emotion, affects, bodily responses, ethical reflections and imagination play together, constantly interpenetrating each other. With a focus on the mode of expression, this paper will argue that their literary endeavours represented a way of reconciling contradictory impulses in sensibility, which had been nurtured by widely different currents of Japanese and Western thoughts (Confucian sentiment, Western realism, the spirit of shasei, to mention a few) and examine how they played out in works by Abe and a few other examples such as Shiga Naoya.

This exercise should in turn provide an opportunity to rethink supposedly Japanese genres such as zuihitsu, shaseibun and shishôstsu as hybrid historical products of the time that tell us much about the internal tugs of war through which these authors tried to accommodate the legacy of their traditional upbringing while at the same time confronting the challenges of the new age.