Description and point of view in the modern Japanese novel: Iwano Hōmei’s theoretical discourse
Description and point of view in the modern Japanese novel: Iwano Hōmei’s theoretical discourse

Summary/Abstract: This three-part paper is based on the panel of the same title presented at the conference “Japan: Premodern, Modern and Contemporary” on the 9th of September, 2015, where the authors discussed how the issues of description and point of view in the novel were treated by Japanese naturalist novelists including Tayama Katai and Iwano Hōmei. In the naturalists’ discourse, description was always linked to the problem of the establishment of realism. Katai, one of the most representative naturalists, proposed the concept of “plane description”, where the writer distances himself from the object and describes it objectively. On the other hand, Hōmei criticized this concept and advocated “monistic description.” Nakamura’s paper summarizes the main points of Hōmei’s theory of monistic description as they were presented for the first time in “My Theory of Description, Which Changes Definitively the Idea of Novel in the Present and the Future”. It tries to clarify the main points of the theory of monistic description based on Hōmei’s process of theorizing it, and on the revisions to his novels that he made at the same time. Kubo’s paper tries to grasp the features of Japanese naturalists’ description from the viewpoint of the contemporary literary theory in the West. Comparing the writings of Tayama Katai, and those of Iwano Hōmei, Kubo reveals that the Japanese naturalists’ conception of description is characterized by subjectivism, and that Hōmei not only developed the subjectivity of Japanese naturalists into a problem of “point of view”, but also had been influenced by French symbolism. Kawada’s paper considers Hōmei’s “monistic description” as pertaining to the problem of the “point of view” in contemporary narrative theories in the West, and, by focusing on a comparison with Henry James, points out that their similarity in novelistic method results from their common ideal of the novel. It also examines two different theoretical formulations of the point of view in novels, namely Gérard Genette’s and Mieke Bal’s, in relation to Hōmei’s arguments.

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