My Complex Feelings About Shōsetsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel)

Ever since it was published in the late Edo period, Kyokutei Bakin’s (Takizawa Bakin’s) Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (hereafter Hakkenden) has been widely read by people of all ages and genders.

A major turning point came in 1886 (Meiji 18), when Tsubouchi Shōyō, who at the time was president of Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo), published Shōsetsu Shinzui (The Essence of the Novel).

In this work, Shōyō advocated realism in fiction, arguing that “novels should focus on depicting human psychology.” At the same time, he went so far as to argue that didactic tales of rewarding good and punishing evil, such as Hakkenden, were outdated.

From that point onward, the foundations of the modern Japanese novel in the Meiji era—including Romanticism and Naturalism—are said to have taken root, while Hakkenden came to be regarded as old-fashioned and gradually ceased to be widely read.

As a fan of Hakkenden, I have complicated feelings about Shōsetsu Shinzui. On the one hand, I feel that it “laid the groundwork for Hakkenden to fall out of readership all the way to the present day.” 

On the other hand, there is also the view that “thanks to Shōyō, the course of the modern Japanese novel was established.”

At the heart of Shōyō’s view of humanity, I think, was the idea that

 “even good people have some worldly desires, and even bad people have some conscience.”

 That is probably why he regarded the Eight Dog Warriors as “monsters embodying the Eight Virtues” who “never suffer any inner conflict between their own interests and what is right.”

To digress slightly, I once wrote that the reason I dislike the TV drama and film Seven Secretaries is that its framework of “upper-class citizens = evil” and “lower-class citizens = good” is simply too blatant.

In Hakkenden, there are benevolent rulers such as the Satomi, but there are also villains of low social status. Put differently, “lower-class citizens also have some worldly desires, while upper-class citizens also have some conscience.”

Even if, as Akira Tachibana argues, Japan does have “upper-class citizens” and “lower-class citizens,” my own principle is probably this: “I follow the people and ideas I want to follow, and I discard the ones I want to discard.”

In fact, I follow many of the views expressed by Horiemon (Takafumi Horie), while I reject the views of Hiroko Ogiwara and Takurō Morinaga.

(In this respect, my thinking resembles that of Haruka Mizusawa, Kamen Rider Amazon Omega, in Kamen Rider Amazons.)

In any case, I believe that I want to “spread Hakkenden overseas as widely as I possibly can”—not so much as a moral textbook about good and evil, but as one element of Japanese culture.

The concepts I previously devised—

“The Eight Dog Warriors as Harem Protagonists” 

and

 “The Eight Dog Warriors as the Girls und Panzer Captains”

—were originally conceived as prototypes for that purpose. Recently, however, I have become quite attached to them. My true feeling is that I want that creator to write more about them, and I want them to become much better known outside Japan.

So what should I do to spread Hakkenden overseas and, ultimately, help make Japan a major tourism nation?