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 however, was low: “An endless number of the most diverse novels and romances is now being produced in our country and the book-shelves groan under their weight; yet they all consist of mere foolishness.”

Tsubouchi blamed this on the lack of discrimination among readers and on the failure of writers themselves to cut loose from the late Tokugawa tradition of tedious didacticism. In the typical spirit of the Meiji intellectual, Tsubouchi declared that the solution lay in ‘modernizing’ Japanese literature. This involved, on the one hand, adopting the realistic approach of modern Western fiction. In particular Japanese writers should strive for psychological realism whereby they might faithfully reproduce the actual complex workings of men and women. According to Tsubouchi, the novelist’s task was not to apportion praise or blame, but to observe and describe the underlying passions that make human beings act as they do. Here we find an adumbration of the Naturalist approach that was to play so important a part in subsequent Japanese literature. At the same time, however, Tsubouchi stressed the aesthetic purpose of the novel. The function of the writer was not to teach or to expound approved moral sentiments, but to produce works of artistic merit which would serve to elevate the public taste.

Banal as many of Tsubouchi’s ideas may strike the present-day reader, their effect on Meiji literature was momentous. Indeed, the development of modern realistic fiction can be dated from the publication of The Essence of the Novel. After 1885 fantastic tales of jejune romances began to give place to accounts of real people living in contemporary society. Tsubouchi tried to put his own theories into practice in a novel with the inauspicious title of The Spirit of Present-day Students. His effort was singularly unsuccessful.

The first important work to reflect Tsubouchi’s theories was ‘The Drifting Cloud’ (Ukigumo), a novel by Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909) that appeared between 1887 and 1889. This