Text and the City

Maeda Ai (1931–1987) was a renowned Japanese literary and cultural critic. He taught at Rikkyo University. His many books include the three-volume The Space of Tokyo 1868-1930 (1986), The World of Higuchi Ichiyo (1978), Meiji as Phantasm (1978), and The Creation of the Modern Reader (1973).James A. Fujii is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative.James A. Fujii is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative.

• Acknowledgments viiForeword: A Walker in the City: Maeda Ai and the Mapping of Urban Space / Harry Harootunian xiIntroduction: Refiguring the Modern: Maeda Ai and the City / James A Fujii 1LIGHT CITY, DARK CITY: VISUALIZING THE MODERN 1. Utopia of the Prisonhouse: A Reading of In Darkest Tokyo / Seiji M. Lippit and James A. Fujii 212. The Panorama of Enlightenment / Henry D. Smith II 653. The Spirits of Abandoned Gardens: On Nagai Kafu’s “The Fox” / William F. Sibley 91PLAY, SPACE, AND MASS CULTURE 4. Their Time as Children: A Study of Higuchi Ichiyo’s Growing Up (Takekurabe) / Edward Fowler 1095. Asakusa as Theater Kawabata Yasunari’s The Crimson Gang of Asakusa / Edward Fowler 1456. The Development of Popular Fiction in the Late Taisho Era: Increasing Readership of Women’s Magazines / Rebecca Copeland 163TEXT, SPACE, VISUALITY 7. From Communal Performance to Solitary Reading: The Rise of the Modern Japanese Reader / James A. Fujii 2238. Modern Literature and the World of Printing / Richard Okada 255CROSSING BOUNDARIES IN URBAN SPACE 9. Ryuhoku in Paris / Matthew Fraleigh 27510. Berlin 1888: Mori Ogai’s “Dancing Girl” / Leslie Pincus 29511. In the Recesses of the High City: On Soseki’s Gate / William F. Sibley 329Afterword / Wiliam F. Sibley 351Contributors 375Index 377

“Despite lamentably premature death of Maeda Ai in 1987, his works have left an incontrovertible mark on the study of early modern and modern Japanese literature. Adopting liberally from phenomenological hermeneutics, cultural anthropology, structural semiotics and marxist literary studies, Maeda invented new ways of inquiring into the historicity of ‘literature’ and articulated the scope of literary studies to other domains in the human and social sciences, thereby leading a number of young scholars of Japan in the United States in the direction of what would be generally recognized as ‘cultural studies.’ In the fields of trans-Pacific Japanese studies, it is no exaggeration to say that Maeda accomplished something comparable to what Raymond Williams did in the English-speaking world.”-Naoki Sakai, Cornell University