Another Shanghai novel... And there has been a bit of a break again (the last one was back in September). This one, though, which is simply named after the city, is the first on my list to come from a Japanese perspective.

Written by Riichi Yokomitsu (1898-1947), it's another book with a complex history. It was originally published in seven instalments in the journal Kaizo, over an extraordinary length of time (1928-1931, with a big gap in the middle); then in 1932, what later became Chapter 32 was published as a short piece. A modified version appeared as a single volume in 1935.

Yokomitsu spent a month in Shanghai in 1927 or 1928 (sources vary), and the novel is set in 1925, particularly focusing on the turbulent events of May (a spiral of Chinese industrial unrest, nationalist protest, strikes, and repression). Christian Henriot provides a useful timeline here.

I read the Italian version. There is an English translation, but I couldn't find it as an e-book. The Italian translation (published in 2017) is by Costantino Pes, who also contributed a useful Afterword. Yokomitsu was new to me, but Pes points out that he was an important figure in Japanese literature in the 1900s, and was known in his lifetime as "the king of literature".

It turned out to be quite a difficult read, which is partly, I discovered, because of Yokomitsu's distinctive style. He subscribed to the Shinkankaku-ha, a movement variously translated as New Sensation School, New Sensibilities School, "neo-sensationism", "neo-sensualism", "neo-impressionism", or "neo-perceptionism". According to Nicole Liao, "Shanghai proved to be the perfect setting for Yokomitsu to test out the Neo-Sensation project, which aimed to strip away ideology and modern historical consciousness to achieve immediate apprehension of reality through the senses... Neo-Sensationism strove to create work that would do justice to the unprecedented changes taking place in modernity where speed, technology, urban space and capital converge to transform the nature of perception and subjectivity itself... Informed by the cinematic medium, Yokomitsu’s use of sensory perception actively undoes and subverts the ideological myths of the nation state and subjecthood in which Shanghai’s characters operate... Like film, time and space are fragmented and manipulated to 'activate' and defamiliarize the reader's sensations."


Shanghai, 2018

This style manifests itself in:

-- Vivid description, which makes for the effective creation of atmosphere (but, for those reading in other languages, often presents the hurdles of difficult vocabulary and/or unexpected ideas);

-- Incomplete sentences, like dabs of paint on an impressionist artwork;

-- A cinematographic quality, characterized by striking images, and a tendency to slide between first and third person, between internal and external focus.

A couple of examples:

-- "The river, swollen by the high tide, flowed backwards. A wave of motorboat bows, crowded, lights out. Rows of rudders. Mountains of unloaded goods. The black, chained legs of the pontoons. The weather station signal from the top of the tower indicated moderate winds. The spire of the maritime customs building was barely visible in the evening fog. The coolies were getting wet over the barrels stacked along the docks. Black, ragged sails moved, tilted, creaking at the mercy of the slow motion of the waves."

-- "The metal trimmings of a gilded sofa, the lumpy skin of ducks, the bright red of the arrowhead cut into pieces, the sheen of the verdant rows of sugarcane, women's shoes, metal bars at the window of an exchange office. Cabbages, mangoes, candles, beggars... In the street, crowded with things and people, Yamaguchi wondered where to go."

-- "Tired of dancing, a trained monkey looked at a banana peel on the canal. An old tooth-puller came out of the slums, having extracted a rotten tooth, and sitting on the side of a boat, began to lick a copper coin."

-- "Pushed into the recessed entrance of a shop, Sanki could see only a revolving window, opened horizontally above him. The rioting crowd was reflected, upside down, in its glass, as though on a seabed with no sky. Innumerable heads were positioned beneath shoulders, which in their turn were positioned beneath legs. They formed a strange canopy, suspended and on the verge of falling, swaying like seaweed that retreated and then advanced."

-- "They dragged the corpses into the alleys, out of the dark avenue. As they were dragged along, rigid as poles, the heads of the dead traced black lines on the asphalt with their blood-soaked hair, as if they were brushes."

It is definitely evocative, if occasionally weird to the point of grotesqueness... One of the characters, Yamaguchi, has a sideline trading bodies (the sale of one skeleton, exported to doctors overseas for medical research, is enough to maintain seven Russian lovers, he tells us). At one point, we're introduced to the cellar where the work is done. Corpses, worms, rats (which swarm up Yamaguchi, covering him as though with rat armour) -- it's the stuff of nightmares...



So, what is Shanghai about?

We have a cast of mainly Japanese characters. Sanki starts out as a bank clerk (but rapidly loses his job because he attempts to expose his boss's trickery); Koya is in the lumber business; Takashige, Koya's brother, is the foreman of a cotton mill; and Yamaguchi (he of the bodies) is an architect by profession. These men are all Japanese nationalists to a greater or lesser degree. Sanki finds himself thinking: "Each race here lives like a sucker of the motherland, extracting large amounts of local wealth... As long as he was in Shanghai, the space occupied by his body continued to remain a Japanese territory in motion."

On the female cast-list, we have Osugi, who starts out working at a Japanese bathhouse, but loses her job, and ends up as a sex worker; Miyako, a taxi-dancer, adeptly juggling her cosmopolitan list of clients; Olga, the archetypal down-on-her-luck Russian emigree; and Fang Qiulan, a Chinese communist. The men may have their struggles, but the women are particularly unfortunate. They have few choices; they can be literally bought and sold; and the rape that happens in the early part of the book is left unpunished.

The anxious Sanki is the one who holds everyone together. He has not been back to Japan for 10 years. Worn out by his cheating boss, and disappointed in love (he carried a torch for Koya's sister, Kyoko, but didn't say anything, and she married someone else), he is reminiscent of Kokoro, especially as Sanki has become a little death-obsessed, thinking up ways to commit suicide, and regularly joking about it...

Through the eyes of these characters we explore not only the problems of unrequited affections (no-one seems to quite end up loving the right person), but also the tense political and commercial situation of the era. Shanghai is a microcosm of the power struggles of the 1920s. There are the rival powers (Great Britain, America, Germany, Japan); there are the oppressed powers (China, India); there is the spent power (Russia). Nationalist ideas contend with pan-Asianism (and also, of course, with imperialism). We see the germ of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: "Japanese militarism," explains one character, "is an extraordinary weapon to save the East from the white danger. What else would there be? Look at China, look at India, look at Siam, look at Persia. To accept our militarism -- this is an axiom for the East." Capitalism confronts communism. And overlying all this is a racial conflict: "The next great world war, therefore, will no longer be of an economic nature. It will be a war among races."

All of this, of course, lends itself perfectly to Yokomitsu's style. His visuality combines with a harsh realism to present "a disturbing picture of a city in turmoil. The result is a brilliant evocation of Shanghai as a gritty ideological battleground where dreams of sexual and economic domination are nurtured."



Henriot maps both the physical geography of Yokomitsu's Shanghai, and the conceptual world where the protagonists spend their time. He describes how the author specifically locates the novel in Shanghai, but also anonymises the city, eliminating specific names: "Yokomitsu’s figures are somehow floating in a real city made unreal by the erasure of time and space. It contributes to the atmosphere of uncertainty, detachment, and despair that overwhelms Yokomitsu’s Shanghai."

Historically, Henriot maintains, there are many elements that are dubious. Examples are the Fang Qiulan character (factory worker, taxi-dancer, and CCP activist) and her location (she is "both socially and spatially a most unlikely character"); the location of the Turkish bath ("an unlikely configuration where the social part of the equation contradicts the spatial one"); and Koya's experiences fleeing the rioters ("an itinerary that hardly makes sense", leaving us "dumbfounded by the geography of the escape").

But Shanghai the city is for Yokomitsu a symbol. And he does not hesitate to emphasize its filth and grime. Light is represented by streets and rivers; darkness by alleys and canals. There is frequent reference to light-reducing elements such as mist, fog, steam, or smoke. Everywhere there is pork, grease, rubbish... There is opium; there is excrement. All of which leads the reader to wonder whether Yokomitsu is not practising a strange form of Orientalism in his portrayal.

Liu Jianhui feels he definitely was: "In the century from the 1840s through the 1930s, Shanghai played many different roles for Japan and the Japanese. Although these roles were complex and cannot easily be summarized, in a word one might say that it served as an immense, external 'other' continually relativizing Japan as a state and Japanese as individuals."

Frederik Green agrees. Japan was peculiarly positioned at that point, he explains. It was both the object of Western Orientalist discourse, and the creator of its own power discourse with regard to the rest of Asia. So there is indeed plenty of "othering". The Chinese parts of Shanghai are described as backward, chaotic, and decaying. The opposite pole -- cleanliness -- is symbolized by the Turkish bath, run and staffed by Japanese. But Yokomitsu doesn't make things entirely straightforward. Fang Qiulan, for example, both exemplifies the sexualized Orient trope (luring Sanki with her beauty), and subverts it (as she carries significant agency).



Pes comments on Yokomitsu's own ambiguity in the midst of all this. The Qiulan character, for instance, serves to reveal both the author's opposition and his fascination -- symbolizing his ambivalent attitude towards Marxism at that point. And although Yokomitsu ended up inclined towards Japanese nationalism, this novel suggests an ideological position that is not yet totally defined. The sense of fatherland expressed by Yokomitsu is anything but simplistic and triumphal. Japan is presented as a country with limited material resources, and not very protective of its citizens abroad. Japan is "dynamic and yet weak, Asiaphile and yet exploitative of Asia, an alternative to the West, yet in fact its ally".

I wouldn't say I exactly enjoyed this novel (I didn't really like any of the characters; I found the Orientalism a bit off-putting; and the language made it hard work), but it definitely ticks the boxes for informative, atmospheric, and memorable.