Review of Keene, Donald, Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006Early Modern Japan Networ

Brecher, W. Puck

KnowledgeBank at OSU

EARLY MODERN JAPAN                                      2007   30     Keene, Donald Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan  by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841 Columbia University Press, New York, 2006  ©W. Puck Brecher, Washington University in St. Louis  Watanabe Kazan was persecuted as a traitor and died a martyr in exile, his failure to perform his du-ties as a samurai finally driving him to ritual suicide.  An accomplished Confucian scholar, painter, and rangaku (Dutch Studies) enthusiast, Kazan was a conservative whose moral sensibilities exemplified the socio-intellectual standards of the Tokugawa order.  He was also a free thinker, however, who did not hesitate to develop adversarial political views and artistic styles that incorporated controver-sial Western ideas.  In the end, his eclectic talents caused him to fall victim to the paranoia and moral ambivalence of his age, for though he was admired and trusted by his colleagues, few would step for-ward to expose the fraudulence of his persecution.  Donald Keene’s Frog in the Well is both a biogra-phy of Kazan and a commentary on this troubled time in Japanese history.  Keene’s is a familiar, fa-therly voice for most of us.  His narrative style here is fluid, comfortable, and asks the reader for a cer-tain complacence that one would expect from a Pen-guin publication but less so from the Columbia Uni-versity Press.  (The book’s striking, dark green print also prepares us to expect something distinct from this publisher’s usual fare.)  Readers may balk at Keene’s undisguised fondness for Kazan and his generous use of sensationalistic descriptors like “brilliant” and “unprecedented.”  They may find suspicious his tendency to interpret Kazan’s incon-sistencies—his anguish, failings, and even transgres-sions—as hallmarks of Confucian virtue and to high-light episodes that will reaffirm Kazan’s admirable qualities.  A lengthy account of his search for O-gin, mother of Miyake Tomonobu, the illegitimate and therefore “retired” son of the Tahara daimyo, for example, appears to offer less historical relevance than it does an appropriate context to recount Ka-zan’s gentleness, generosity, open-heartedness, and magnanimity.  If one, as a reader, does not submit to Keene’s anecdotal style and goes looking for theoretical complexity, in other words, the narrative is in peril of coming across as facile.  The research is not facile, however, substantiated as it is by diaries, letters, depositions, essays, poems, and paintings, but merely camouflaged by Keene’s skill in deliver-ing an enjoyable reading experience.  The book’s first two chapters form the historical backdrop for Kazan’s story.  The first revisits fun-damental information familiar to anyone who knows Japan: China’s impact on Japanese culture, the arri-val of the Europeans, the Tokugawa social order, and the emergence of rangaku, amounting to little more than a thin digest of Keene’s wonderful The Japa-nese Discovery of Europe: 1720-1830 (Stanford, 1969).  Titled “Japan in 1793,” Chapter Two is in-tended to historicize Kazan’s age but does so by jumping altogether too easily between disparate top-ics: from Matsudaira Sadanobu, to the imperial insti-tution, to Kazan’s painting, for instance.  This overly loose organization afflicts much of the book and often succeeds in rendering only a disorienting pastiche of Kazan’s world.  Surely in a biographical study of Watanabe Kazan it is puzzling to conclude a three-page discussion of Emperor Kôkaku by stating merely that Kazan never had any reason to be con-cerned with him (p. 39). Through the third and fourth chapters the reader becomes increasingly appreciative of Kazan’s im-portance as an innovative thinker and artist.  These sections make extensive use of Kazan’s early paint-ings and diaries to illustrate the development of a classic internal conflict between devotion to duty (giri) and human emotion (ninjô)—in his case the clash between energies required to perform domainal obligations and his passion to excel as a painter.  But it is to uncertain effect that Keene mixes discus-sions of art, politics, and rangaku so readily, as do-ing so casts Kazan’s art as unduly political, and at times causes these middle chapters to lose narrative coherence.  Art, rangaku, and politics pulled Kazan in opposing directions, causing him anguish and eventually triggering his persecution and death, but the quick transitions between them—as the shift from an interview with Dutch trading director Jo-hannes Niemann directly into an analysis of the ico-nography in Kazan’s paintings (p. 138)—produces an abrupt, disorienting effect.  Nonetheless, Keene is to be credited for injecting interdisciplinarity into biography, interpreting art history through political history in this case, and one hopes that his efforts to tie together the multiple threads of Kazan’s life will lay the groundwork for future cross-disciplinary ap-proaches to the field.   EARLY MODERN JAPAN                                      2007   31 In spite of their oddly loose organization, the book’s middle and later chapters are engaging and effectively consolidate the various dimensions of Kazan’s persona.  Considering that Kazan has re-ceived more attention as a political figure than as an artist, the experience of discovering his artistic inno-vations proves especially fascinating.  Keene culls from Kazan’s writings the seminal events of the lat-ter’s life, and his practiced, elegant prose weaves them into absorbing plots that are handsomely com-plemented by thirty-eight illustrations, all but a few in color.  Though it is regrettably tempting to find fault with this narrative style, ultimately it compro-mises the book’s reliability only at the rare instances when it sacrifices complexity, as when it inhibits Keene from exploring the intriguing contradictions that float to the surface of Kazan’s writings.  The fact that Kazan was both a staunch Confucian and an artist attracted to a bunjin ethos rooted in heretical schools of thought, for instance, poses an interesting paradox that is left unexplored.  In a letter to his disciple Tsubaki Chinzan (1801-1854), Kazan out-lines his preference for realism in landscape painting and decries the abstractions popular among contem-porary works of that genre, which he compares to the “heresy” (itan) of Laozi and Zhuangzi (p. 207).  This otherwise unremarkable statement in support of aesthetic orthodoxy stands in interesting contrast to Kazan’s explicit and implicit reverential allusions to Zhuangzi in his letters (p. 205), paintings (p. 215), and poems (p. 218).  Allowing this inconsistency to pass without comment conveys a misleading view of Kazan’s intellectual loyalties and a false impression about the reception of Daoism in the Tokugawa pe-riod, and within the bunjin arts in particular.  Keene’s explanation of the bunjin tradition in East Asia (pp. 199-202)—a discussion that would have been helpful early in the book rather than near the end—also overlooks Daoist influences entirely.   Minor qualms aside, the book is substantive and its strengths outshine its deficiencies.  Particularly welcome is its analysis of Kazan’s extraordinary paintings, which have not received due attention outside the field of art history.  Keene brings Ka-zan’s art within reach of non-specialists, for whom a two-paragraph analysis of a given work’s stylistic and historical significance is enough.  Here he re-lies predominantly on Japanese scholarship, which is comprehensive but has been hindered by a compul-sion to interpret and explain history in terms of a modernization that unfolds in a linear pattern through causal events.  Traces of this are detectable in Keene’s diction: words like “individualist” and “reformer” suggesting interpretations that view Ka-zan as driving Japanese history toward moderniza-tion.  Though a recurring subtext throughout the book, the notion of Kazan as a modernizer and prophet of kaikoku is not openly articulated until the final pages, and Keene is careful to do so only through the voices of other Kazan scholars.  Wisely refusing to add his own voice to this fray, Keene’s purpose remains refreshingly simple: to recover the life and art of an extraordinary man misunderstood by his contemporaries and persecuted for his fore-sight.   Frog in the Well is a narrative hagiography with a storybook style that will soar or suffer depending on how the reader receives it.  Critical readers will find Keene’s devotion to an overly tidy, seamless storyline uncomfortably conjectural.  More forgiv-ing audiences will be content to discover and be moved by Kazan’s accomplishments and failures.  In the end, nearly all will share an appreciation of the project as an excavation of a compelling histori-cal figure.  Kazan’s independence and curiosity in Dutch Studies enabled him to make important inno-vations in painting, to see his world in ways that were incomprehensible to his contemporaries, and to become one of the singular competent voices within his domain’s leadership.  The conflict between his loyalties, judgments, and personal convictions also makes him a fine lens through which to view the contradictions of late Tokugawa society and politics.  It is gratifying to see that academic publishing still has a place for narrative biographical studies that deliver a lively, memorable reading experience to a broad audience, for while this charming book will not change our view of late Tokugawa history, it will certainly bring that history to life.   

Keene, Donald, Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841

https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/1811/31654/1/8_Brecher_07.pdf

Keene, Donald, Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

KnowledgeBank at OSU