Japanese art from Meiji period on show at National Library, Canberra

Melodrama is ever present in these prints from Japanese novels popular at the turn of the last century.

Eisen Tomoika’s Oyagokoro (Parental Love) (1901).

When we think of reading in a general way, we probably imagine curling up in an armchair, on a sofa or in bed, and absorbing ourselves for hours in a novel. We know that skimming through newspaper columns, perusing a business report or even working through an academic tome are not the same thing. And sometimes, as adults, we can feel nostalgic when we see our children deep in a volume of Harry Potter while we are engaged in these less satisfying and ultimately sub-literary forms of textual intercourse.

The model of reading that we tend to take for granted, however, is a relatively modern one that belongs to the age of the novel, that is to say of the past two centuries or so. In classical Greece, for example, literature was still primarily experienced as oral performance, not only in public recitals and dramatic performances, but even in private dinner parties where guests took turns to recite poems and dramatic speeches they had memorised.

In that sense reading was more like a staging post between two oral occasions, a means to a performative end rather than an end in itself. Thus in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates finds the eponymous character walking out in the country and learning another friend’s speech by heart. As this implies, reading usually seems to have involved speaking the text aloud — contrary to the theory of speed-reading, which tells you that sub-vocalising is what holds you back from taking in a whole page in seconds.

There is a passage in Aristophanes’s Frogs that is sometimes thought to be the first attested reference to reading a text to oneself, silently and in much the way we imagine today. And it is often said that medieval monks developed the habit of silent reading so they wouldn’t annoy the other monks sitting near them in the library or scriptorium. But even so, when serious literature was still mainly poetry, reading aloud remained the natural way to enjoy it: it makes little sense to read Homer, Dante or Shakespeare silently.

It was the rise of the novel, an extended narration composed in prose, that led to a new way of reading, and the earliest important examples were Cervantes in Spain, the long French romances of the 17th century, and what is sometimes thought of as the first modern novel, La Princesse de Cleves (1678) by Madame de Lafayette, already prefiguring the new importance that female authors would have in this genre, compared to their scarcity in poetry.

The 18th century produced a number of important authors, including Fielding, Richardson and even Sterne — at this stage the novel seemed to be an English specialty — but then the golden age of the genre came in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with masterpieces in English, French, Russian and German, which still dominate the canon.

Keishu Takeuchi’s Beauty under the moon (Gekka no bijin) (1896).

This was also the period of the Industrial Revolution, however, and from a purely quantitative point of view, the great novels were eclipsed by the huge volume of commercial fiction of little or no literary merit — a category that still dominates the production of novels. Whereas great novels might open our eyes to our own experience, the commercial products merely fed the vapid fantasies of their consumers. This was in part the subject of one of the great novels of the time, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), the story of a woman whose life is ruined by the kitsch fancies she absorbs from cheap novels.

Novels have been known in Japan for a long time, the most famous of them being the Heian period classic The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), composed more than 1000 years ago by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Literacy, especially the high degree of literacy needed to read as sophisticated a piece of writing as Genji, must have been limited then to the aristocratic classes.

Literacy did spread in Japan from the 16th century, however, and seems to have become much more common in the later years of the Edo period, in the later 18th and the 19th centuries, thanks in part to the opening of a great many new schools. In the exhibition at the National Library, a beautiful print by Utamaro from about 1802 shows a young woman lying down, her head on a pillow, holding a book in a posture in which we recognise the silent absorption we associate with novel reading.

This was in a period when Western influence remained very limited, for apart from strictly regulated access for Dutch traders, Japan was largely closed to outside contact from the early 17th century. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, however, when the emperor took power back from the feudal shogunate and initiated the great period of Japan’s modernisation, popular literature changed, along with many other aspects of life in Japan. Modern printing presses were adopted, books were mass-produced on a much larger scale and, unlike the aristocratic and highly refined Genji, they addressed a new mass audience.

Although they were mass produced, these new books nonetheless included tipped-in colour frontispieces that were still made in the traditional Japanese way associated with the art of ukiyo-e: colour woodblock prints that involved separate blocks for the black outlines and for each layer of colour. One of the most comprehensive collections of these editions in the world was formed by Richard Clough (1921-2014), a professor who generously gave his collection to the National Library in several stages in the last years of his life.

The exhibition is extensive and very well put together and researched: the framed prints are accompanied by much other material that makes their original context and their production easier to understand. There are numerous examples of the books and literary periodicals, open at their frontispieces, that were considerably larger than the format of the volumes, and so were fold-outs, designed to be looked at separately, unlike illustrations in the body of the text. There are also examples of the wooden blocks, and all of the tools used in the cutting, inking and pressing of the prints.

The stories of the novels seem to fall into two main categories, one of historical tales from the warlike centuries that followed the end of the Heian period, and the other of contemporary life. As the title of the exhibition implies, the stories are often melodramatic, and frequently involve themes of star-crossed love ending in the suicide of one or both of the main characters.

The interesting thing is that women made up most of the readership for these novels, and their stories accordingly emphasise the experience and the perspective of women, no doubt reflecting the frustrations of female life in an expanding world that still imposed many restrictions on the behaviour of a respectable wife. Time and again the stories evoke the female protagonist’s unrequited or forbidden love, her hopeless desire for a lover she cannot have, or her grief and mourning for one who has died.

The pictures too inevitably have a woman as their main figure and focal point, nearly always impassive, like a theatre mask, with only the subtlest hints of emotion. Often indeed, as in traditional Japanese masked theatre, in which the features cannot change, it is mainly through the angle of the head and the attitude of the body, or a conventional action such as biting on a handkerchief, that emotion is conveyed. There is something quintessentially Japanese in this evocation of passion contained, barely expressed visibly, and yet so intense as to lead easily to death or suicide.

Frequently, in a convention that anticipates later graphic work, the artist uses two separate panels to represent the woman and the events or dreams that preoccupy her. In one particularly pathetic and melodramatic case, a young woman is seen in a box floating above the scene of a burning house: she is about to run into the flames and die so that her mother can benefit from a life insurance policy — a story, incidentally that combines traditional Japanese motifs with others that reflect the new, westernised modernity.

Yakka no Koman (1892) by Seitei Watanabe.

Another example both of the female protagonist in a floating panel and of contemporary subjects, is the story of a young man who goes to America to make his fortune and returns to find his lover has married another man. She ends up killing herself, while he drinks himself to death. In the illustration, her ghost is seen gazing down on his figure, drunk and almost naked, presented in strikingly European style.

In a third work, it is the woman who occupies most of the composition, while the scene representing her preoccupations is smaller, as though in the background: she is sitting reading a newspaper report about the Russo-Japanese War, no doubt thinking of a husband or lover in the army, while on the top left we see Japanese soldiers during an assault on Russian positions, one struck by a bullet and reeling backwards.

In this picture the contrast between the woman’s representation in traditional dress and also within the styles and conventions of older ukiyo-e prints contrasts strikingly with the modern illustrative style of the military scene; but when we consider the other images more closely, we see this is nearly always the case. The female protagonist is generally shown as embedded in traditional Japanese culture, while the world around her, the men who cause her grief and the lives they lead, are all part of the disturbing new social realities.

This is why the particular pathos of these works is inseparable from the medium of the woodblock print. After World War I, there was a tendency to replace woodblock with lithograph, but as we can see from the one sample included at the end of the exhibition, the result is less satisfactory and quite different in mood and feeling.

Lithography is a much less subtle medium than colour woodblock, with its transparent washes of colour and multiple overlaid hues. It is also one that speaks of the modern industrial world, the urban environment and the disposable imagery of the press. All of its inherent associations are alien to the mysterious, refined, intense yet constrained ethos of traditional Japan.

The exhibition ends, interestingly, with a contemporary print by a Scottish practitioner of Japanese colour woodblock, Paul Binnie. Its subject is a Japanese woman from about 1900 opening one of these novels, and looking at the fold-out frontispiece before reading the book. The work is elegant, appealing and impressive in its technical mastery, and yet it too somehow remains alien to the most intimate spirit of Japanese culture: it lacks that unique combination of spontaneity and convention, of passion and claustrophobia.

Melodrama in Meiji Japan

National Library of Australia, Canberra, to
August 27