"Subterranean Fires" and the "Weeds" of Asian Modernity in Lu Xun, Yosano Akiko, and Oba Minako

It [the first edition of Leaves of Grass] is very close to primitive magma. It has appearance of a flow of lava which nothing could stop and which has remained formless. --Roger Asselineau [Yecao (Weeds) is] genuine poetry in embryo: images imbued with strong emotional intensity, flowing and stopping in darkly and oddly shaped lines, like molten metal failing to find a mold. --Tsi-an Hsia Three main pillars through which modernity reproduces itself in an East Asian context are modern nation, modern woman, and modern subjectivity. While none of these three categories are simply imported from West, they are nonetheless reactions to violent shifts in geopolitical tectonics. Just as modernity is often identified as a shock, an inversion, or a state of permanent crisis, one can also refer to it as a forced awakening. The awakening, extended metaphorically to encompass modern complex subjectivity, modern nation, and gender identity, is provoked in this way, and yet it is also internally generated at a level deep beneath surface, and provocation merely provides opportunity for its emergence. Short-story writer, essayist, critic, and literary theorist Lu Xun (1881-1936; also transcribed as Lu Hsun) is acknowledged as first Chinese author to write a modern-style novel thereby inaugurating modern Chinese literature and by extension modern subjectivity. He is almost invariably associated with China's modern as a nation. Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) was a Japanese poet and critic who developed a modern sensitivity in her poetry, and yet a kind of modern social consciousness that cannot be considered apart from idea of modern Asian woman. She can be regarded as an example of inner awakening, of eroticized sensuality combined with an toward social role of her gender. Oba Minako (b. 1933), on other hand, dramatizes in her fiction Japanese after nightmarish experience of World War II by linking it to her own experience of nomadic homelessness in Alaska. As a novelist belonging to post-World War II generation, she offers a retrospective view of process of Japanese modernization and to uprooted state of emancipated new woman. These three authors draw from same subterranean vein of Asian modernity, and their interconnections--from most literal to most abstract level--can be linked in notion of weeds. As there is much hidden under geopolitical surface of modernity, literary and artistic creation still offers a view from beneath toward modernity's inner landscape of emotions. In this essay these three Asian writers will cross time and space in order to exchange emotional charge of this multifaceted awakening to modern, which takes root in their very different respective contexts. Contemporary scholars of affect, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in discussing touching feeling, show that modernity is not disconnected from such emotional investment: the increasingly divergent physical scales ... that characterize relation between touch and vision in modern period result in understanding of texture that make it as apt to represent and fissures of as metonymic continuities. (1) What if Sedgwick's crises and fissures of meaning are considered within context of Asian modernity through split between a traditional society and an emerging modern one, inner split of feuding China and inner Asian split of Japanese aggression over China, cracks caused by Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1923 and trails of World War II, down to its almost unbridgeable abyss? Perhaps in pursuing these crises and fissures of meaning by means of these three writers we discover weeds as excess not of premodern nor simply modernity, but as a function of structure of inside/outside shifts and reversals in moments of breaking through of awakening, a function that exposes arbitrary boundaries of modernity. …

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