The True History of the Nineteenth‐Century Japanese Novel

The year 1868, called the Meiji Restoration, or the restoration of imperial rule after several hundred years of rule by the samurai, or military class, marked a break from the past politically and socially, as the new rulers of Japan began to modernize the country along the lines of Western nations. Numerous critics hold the view that Japanese literature also underwent an abrupt break at the end of the Edo or Tokugawa period (1600-1867) and the start of the Meiji period (1868-1912), a break that supposedly separates premodern from modern, marking the end of the classical literary traditions and the beginning of a new kind of literature modeled on that of Western traditions. Here, Walker traces the history of the nineteenth-century Japanese novel.