The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio.

Buccitelli, Anthony Bak

The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio. By Melek Ortabasi. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Pp. xiv + 329, list of figures, acknowledgments, abbreviations, introduction, notes, bibliography, index.

Casting a long shadow in folklore studies in Japan, as well as numerous other countries, Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) has often been the subject of historiographic studies in both Japanese and English. Yet, as Melek Ortabasi observes in the introduction to The Undiscovered Country, these accounts have tended to filter their understanding of Yanagita's works through certain reductive positions. Some, especially those that grew out of the Post-War scholarship on Yanagita in Japan, approach the study of his works primarily through his notoriety as an ideological maverick who "even during his lifetime ... was regarded as an eccentric, domineering crackpot almost as often as he was labelled a brilliant, versatile iconoclast" (4). Others, by contrast, beginning with the English-language scholarship following Ronald Morse's 1974 doctoral research and extending into later Japanese language works, "have gravitated toward a deconstruction of his text, treating them as natural though not particularly desirable symptoms of larger historical, political, and cultural trends" (8). This "Jamesonian stance," the author observes, tended to read Yanagita's texts "against the grain, thus 'disclosing the absent cause that structures the text's inclusions and exclusions ... [and] restoring] to the surface the deep history that the text represses.'" Not necessarily wholly rejecting either position, Ortabasi instead envisions this book as "part of a new category of scholarship on Yanagita that continues to examine his significance in the political/cultural discourse on nation and modernity in Japan, but by shifting to a focus on what his writing does do" (9). The intervention Ortabasi offers, in other words, is to "privlege both the historical context and the materiality of [Yanagita's] texts," rather than seeking to submerge these texts into a reading of either the author or the socio-politics of late 19th and early 20th century Japan (9-10).

Despite its basic aim to intervene in the scholarly analysis of the works of Yanagita, The Undiscovered Country is one of those rare academic works that is successfully able to produce both a deep analysis of a limited group of materials and a much broader set of critiques that resonate well beyond the study's subject. In particular, Ortabasi's exploration of "translation" as "both a literal practice and an extended metaphor," offers readers a fascinating analytical lens through which to approach both the ethnographic process and the works of ethnographic scholars more broadly. To begin with, it illuminates Yanagita's efforts to "look outside mainstream domestic discourse, or the metaphorical target culture, 'eschew[ing] fluency for a more heterogeneous mix of discourses' in his texts by showcasing archaic and obscure localisms to write his version of the Japanese cultural narrative" (12). Yet, while this approach has often been critiqued for its connections with Japanese nationalism, Yanagita's methodology also unintentionally "repeatedly expose[d] the constructedness of cultural identity, thus undermining his own quest to repair the fissures he perceived in the national body" (13). Finally, Ortabasi argues "[n]ew approaches have much to gain by judging Yanagita's writing on its ability to reinterpret and resist more powerful cultural discourses, rather than how it conforms to them" (19).

Each of the work's five chapters picks up this exploration of the process of translation in Yanagita's works, focusing on different aspects of the meaning of this term and how it played out in different periods of his scholarship. In the first chapter, one of the best argued sections of the work, Ortabasi examines Yanagita's translation of orality, that central concept in 20th century folkloristics, in the context of his well-known Tales of Tono (1910). Although long considered the founding text of folkloristics in Japan, Ortabasi notes (following Marilyn Ivy) that this interpretation only emerged after the text was republished in an expanded edition in 1935, once folk studies had already come into its own, largely through Yanagita's efforts. Instead of reading the text as the opening salvo in the battle to create folk studies, Ortabasi argues that it should instead be considered in relation to the contemporary literary movements, of which Yanagita was an important, if sometimes erstwhile, part. For instance, Ortabasi argues that Yanagita's conscious choice to adopt the neoclassical bungo style of language in this text was not nostalgic rejection of the more popular vernacular style associated with modernist naturalism. Rather, it was a rejection of the privileging of the internalized and psychologized subject in modernist literature, in favor of a view of consciousness as "something socially, even communally, constructed." This socially constructed consciousness was only accessible, in Yanagita's view, through an "unironic and frank depiction of people who recognize their ties to each other and to the landscape" (41, 46). As such, by setting up his text with a reader-directed yet personified narrator who can guide the reader through this socially-constructed landscape rather than filter it through his own internal perspective, Yanagita, as translator rather than author or observer, offers a "model for modern subjectivity ... a modern analog of the storyteller, who weaves the narrative to link traveler with villager, individual with community" (54).

Working both thematically and in loose chronological order, Ortabasi's remaining chapters apply the concept of translation developed in the beginning of the book to examine a variety of other aspects of Yanagita's work. These include, in chapter two, his reinterpretation of pre-modern genres of travel literature as translation to bring forth "the awareness of the foreign within the self" (97) and, in chapter three, his attempts to develop a methodology for folk studies as interpretive "self-translation." In chapter four, Ortabasi deftly outlines Yanagita's rejection of the standardization of Japanese in favor of dialect speech that did not "spring fully formed from the heads of scholars but would emerge over time through a communal process of self-aware play and experimentation with language" (169). In doing so, Yanagita argued, this language could better "translate" the diverse experience of meaning in everyday living into speech. In the fifth chapter, Ortabasi addresses the ways in which Yanagita attempted to apply his radical critique of modern subjectivity and his formulation of folk studies methods to break down the existing disciplinary approaches in school textbooks and create a more accessible and open-ended textual pedagogy.

Like the works it studies, Ortabasi's book is a densely layered and deeply erudite affair. Though clearly written and not overly laden with technical discussions, it is not a text that could be easily approached by students or non-academic readers. It is, however, a book that should be read widely in the fields of literary studies, translation studies, and folkloristics. The richly theorized interpretive work presented here, in the context of the works of a single, if extraordinary, scholar, offers a stimulating reappraisal of the possible relations between the ethnographer and the ethnographic text, as well as an intriguing view of the nature of modern subjectivity.

Anthony Bak Buccitelli

Pennsylvannia State Harrisburg