The subsequent story of the protagonists’ fights against the imperialist powers progresses as news about their adventures reaches Sanshi, who alone remains in Philadelphia, worrying about the fates of his three friends. Betraying the promise of reunion, the friends meanwhile left for Europe. The story is thus narrated from Sanshi’s perspective, and readers are whereby invited into the world imagined by the Japanese protagonist, who believes the modern relevance of the traditional values and aspires for creating a new political agency based thereupon to resist imperialism.
The Chinese literary historian C. T. Hsia, while critiquing Liang Qichao’s literary thought, has claimed that Shiba Shirō’s novel is “unreadable by modern standards.”57 In fact, in order to experience its imagined world and enjoy the thrill and suspense of the narrative, one needs to have significant knowledge of traditional Chinese literature, a different prerequisite from the “modern standards.” Chance Meetings and its Chinese translation expect their readers to be familiar, for example, with late-imperial narrative literature, if not Shakespeare; Cao Zhi’s well-known poems, if not Dante; and the
Confucian Classics, if not Homer or the Bible. This novel, therefore, is admittedly almost “unreadable” today. But in late-nineteenth-century East Asia, it gained significant
popularity when first published in Japan, and could even convince a reader from the neighboring country to translate it; and through the brilliant translation, it could also be circulated transnationally.58
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57 C.T. Hsia, “Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as Advocates of New Fiction,” p.235.
58 The Chinese translation of Chance Meetings with Beautiful Women was later reprinted in a book format,
The news that reaches Sanshi, however, is mostly bad. Challenges are mounting and misfortune befalling; only the memories of that serendipitous gathering at Valley Forge can sustain Sanshi’s imagination and hope for the realization of a world free of imperialism. It is one of those adverse moments that Sanshi happens to meet Kōren at the grave of Fanny Parnell, the Irish nationalist, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kōren, who has just come back from Europe, tells Sanshi that the two other friends, Yūran and Hankei, went missing in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, but delighted at the fortuitous re-encounter, she invites Sanshi to the house in Valley Forge. The two friends engage in an all-night conversation and another round of poetry exchange, hoping to reenact that joyful banquet. On the following morning, however, Sanshi still suffers from lingering angst, and tells his roommates about what happened the previous night:
Last night, I was tired of reading, and so I was watching the moon alone. I suddenly wanted to come down from the building and wander in the garden. Then, my legs took me to a recess of the mountains, while I was quietly reciting, wondering about the existence of the heavenly Way, and pondering upon human life and death. The more I thought, the more I lost myself. I became enraptured as if in a dream. I can’t remember where I went or what I did any more. This must be what the Japanese would call ‘fox possession.’59
The reunion with Kōren reminded Sanshi of that authentic time of an imaginary return to the cultural homeland in the depths of Valley Forge, secluded from the alienating reality; but that delightful re-encounter can now only be recalled and reported as a confused illusion, implying that the moral determination and the aesthetic delight he had shared with the multinational friends might have been a mere fancy, without any significance or efficacy, once he left that utopian space. This decisive detail allegorizes a fundamental
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question of translation for the turn-of-the-century East Asian literature, the question of whether the traditional cultural values that structuralize Shiba Shirō’s narrative and Liang Qichao’s translation have relevance outside their serendipitous translational relationship underpinned by the East Asian literary tradition, in the broader field of modern world literature. Sanshi in this utterance fails in this broader translation. Depressed, he is suspected if “he has finally gotten a nervous breakdown.”60
Sanshi nevertheless wishes to “devote [himself] to the nation and society far more than any ordinary person”; and he finally returns to Japan with “the ambition to travel around Eastern countries and spread his ideas,” so that the global anti-imperialist battles can continue.61 But just as he is about to undertake his program, Sanshi abandons his political will and agrees to become an official for the Japanese government. The novel’s last six volumes describe the official inspection trip to Europe and the Middle East in which Sanshi takes part. Though Sanshi still tries to put in practice traditional cultural values, he now represents a nation-state; his ambition to smash Western imperialism is represented as the goal to be achieved by strengthening the sovereignty of the state of Japan. The “universal” cultural values are now appropriated by a particular nation whose power on the international stage is to prove the relevance of those values in the modern world. As the hero’s subjectivity is thus identified with a nation-state and embedded in the modern dialectics of the universal and the particular, Shiba Shirō’s eccentric
imagination shrinks: the epic fight between the transnational solidarity of virtue and the
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60 Shiba Shirō, Kajin no kigū, p.279. Qing yi bao 18, reprint, vol.3, p.1173. 61 Shiba Shirō, Kajin no kigū, p.437-8. Qing yi bao 28, reprint, vol.4, p.1849.
modern politics of power is replaced with the realpolitik of modern international relations, struggle for existence among nation-states.
When the inspection trip reaches Egypt, Sanshi happens to encounter the Spanish
heroine Yūran, whom he believed to have been drowned in the shipwreck. Though
pleased at the chance meeting, they do not engage in an emotional conversation any more, nor do they exchange a single poem. Sanshi soon thereafter leaves Yūran, stating, “I would be able to rescue you and go to Europe together, if only I were not bound by an order from the government. It is indeed a pity and regrettable.” On the pretext of an official appointment, Sanshi thus breaks with his friend, simply expecting help to come from the remnant forces of the Carlist Party or Cuba.62 Their unsympathetic attitudes are symbolic of the disappearance of imagination and idealism from the story. Indeed, the narrative’s utopian temporality, which staged one “chance meeting” after another, constantly deferring the realization of a better society and just world order toward an ideal future, is now replaced with a linear time that simply traces the itinerary of the official trip. Those readers who appreciated the poetic language and were inspired by the characters’ moral integrity in the novel’s first ten volumes should then be disappointed at the loss of aesthetic taste and moral emotion in its last six. It was right after this dramatic turning point of Shiba Shirō’s narrative that the Chinese translator decided to stop
serializing the translation in Qing yi bao. In fact, without its unique sense of suspense or provocative imagination, the last volumes of Chance Meetings are tedious and
monotonous, and probably too much so to be serialized in a periodical journal. Liang Qichao’s decision to interrupt the serialization, which must have been made ultimately
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 62 Shiba Shirō, Kajin no kigū, p.566.
due to concerns of the entertainment quality required from serialized fiction, is indicative of the politics of imaginationthat was at stake in the literary endeavors of Shiba Shirō
and Liang Qichao. By means of fictional imagination, these turn-of-the-century East Asian writers conjured up old cultural values to envision a radical future that would replace the existing modern world order, the world order that had brought about imperialism; they sought to create a new political agency that would practice those traditional values in the modern world. That agency, embodied by the solidarity of the multinational heroes and heroines, was fundamentally a transnational one; but once the novel attributed it to a particular nation and embedded its working in the international struggles for hegemony, the novel’s politics of imagination was suspended.