Japans First Modern Novel: Ukigumo
Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds), published in 1887-1889, is generally credited as Japan's first modern novel. It follows Bunzō, a minor bureaucrat in love with his cousin Osei, as he navigates the humiliations of the Meiji civil service and the new vocabulary of Western-influenced romance. The prose is deliberately awkward, which was itself the modern gesture.Columbia University Press's edition carries the apparatus of a scholarly text: notes, introduction, and the original Japanese title on the cover. It treats its subject as literature and history at once, and it belongs with readers who do not mind an introduction longer than the feeling it describes, so long as the awkwardness is the point and the modern gesture still feels a little unfinished.
