| Narrative, with lyric, is universally present in literary cultures, but in each place narrative has its particular history, and that history may be described as the local association of narrative literature with other literary kinds.;In Japan the normative literary book has been a work of narrative with embedded lyric, or a collection of lyrics provided a narrative-like framework. When works of Japanese "drama" at last join the literary canon, contemporaneous criticism records their reception as lyric with narrative, and this seems a natural result of centuries of esteem for the ordinary lyric/narrative co-operation.;Thus it is seen that Japanese narrative has no historical connection to a distinctive theory of the literary kind known as drama, and is not usefully analyzed or evaluated according to the assumptions handed down from a tradition of literary criticism in which the dramatic kind is taken as standard.;The start of the "modernization" of Japanese literature is here understood as discovery of a valued dramatic theory, together with the implications of such a theory for the history of narrative literature, and by these new lights the "re-cognition" of Japanese literary history. In specific, the Meiji program required abolition of the rhetorical mode definitive of vocal lyric and narrative, and its replacement by a mimetic or representational understanding of the relationships among author, world, and audience.;In Europe, where drama has been the most valued (because most "knowing") kind of literature, a need to make prose narrative look like a version of drama has culminated in the novel, a literary form historically unique to Europe.;In Osaka, however, the so-called modernization of Japanese literary culture has been viewed as just one more imposition inflicted from distant, culturally irrelevant Tokyo. The narrative writings of Oda Sakunosuke of Osaka (1913-1947) might be known, then, not as dramatically inspirited "novels," but as modern survivals of a history of prose narrative whose characteristics are best understood as evidence of the ancient and esteemed co-operation of narrative with lyric in rhetorical function. |
