Chaos from order: Anarchy and anarchism in modern Japanese fiction, 1900--1930

Anarchism was an important social and political movement in prewar Japan, promoted by Kotoku Shusui in the first decade of the 20 th century and developed into a rich political and artistic philosophy by Osugi Sakae in the 1910s. Japanese anarchists saw industrial capitalism as the cause of intolerable conditions suffered by the working class, and sought the destruction of the capitalist system and of all external government, championing individualistic rebellion as the vehicle of revolution. Literary anarchism flourished during this same period in the form of essays, fiction, and poetry written by self-styled anarchists to promote the political philosophy of anarchism and to attempt to capture contemporary realities and promote revolutionary action.; This dissertation explores selected works of fiction by anarchists in order to trace the development of an anarchistic style. Chapter One identifies the main elements of literary anarchism as consisting of: journalistic-style realistic reporting on the lives of the poor; the reification of concepts like "nature" and "life" in a vitalistic philosophy celebrating the growth and evolution of individuals and society; the championing of violent, nihilistic rebellion; and radical individualism. Journalistic realism is shown to be derived from newspaper exposes of the living conditions of the underclass which were written from the 1880s onward, and the artistic portrayal of "vitalism" is shown to be influenced by early Japanese naturalistic fiction. The fiction of Kunikida Doppo applied the journalistic style to his portrayals of the lives of the poor, while the fiction of Tayama Katai and Shimazaki Toson extensively developed the themes of vitalism and nihilism.; Chapter Two discusses the creation of a truly anarchist literature through Osugi Sakae's formulation of an anarchistic artistic philosophy, which was put into practice by his colleagues such as Miyajima Sukeo. Miyajima and others welded the elements of journalism and Japanese naturalism to a firmly anarchist political stance, creating a dramatic new form of revolutionary literature.; Chapter Three discusses the development as well as the decline of anarchist literature through the late 1920s. Two important "proletarian" writers with heavily anarchist sympathies, Hirabayashi Taiko and Yamakawa Ryo, utilized realistic prose and anarchistic themes to deal with the conflicts which attended their lives as members of the anarchist and socialist movements. Hirabayashi, in particular, criticized the misogyny endemic to the allegedly egalitarian anarchist movement, while Yamakawa sought to retain individualism in the face of a Marxist dogmatism which demanded that the individual and art be subordinated to the purposes of the movement. Chapter Three also discusses the flourishing of anarchist avant-garde poetry by such writers as Hagiwara Kyojiro and Ono Tozaburo. Such poetry gave anarchist radicalism its most dramatic and original expression, but also revealed the fragmentation and decline of anarchism as a political movement due to internal conflicts and external persecution by the government.