Born into a scholarly family in Canton in 1873, Liang Qichao is by consensus one of the most influential reformist intellectuals in late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-
century China.35 Like all of his contemporary scholarly peers, the young Liang Qichao pursued traditional education based on the Confucian Classics and sought to pass the
imperial civil service examinations. But the encounter with Kang Youwei (1858-
1927), a towering reform-minded literatus, in 1890 definitively changed the course of Liang’s life. Enthralled by Kang’s erudition and innovative scholarship, Liang Qichao joined Kang’s renowned academy in the following year and immersed himself in its idiosyncratic pedagogy, based both upon an archaist revival of a long-dismissed Confucian school and newly translated Western knowledge. In the aftermath of the humiliating defeat of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-5), Kang Youwei and his now prominent disciple Liang Qichao led widespread reform movements, memorializing the emperor, establishing societies, and publishing newspapers. Their reformist attempts gained momentum as Kang was granted a formal audience by the Guangxu Emperor (r. 1875-1908) in 1898, resulting in a series of imperial decrees calling for institutional reforms, commonly known as the Hundred Day Reforms. This short-lived attempt was suppressed by the court’s conservative factions gathered around the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), and several of Kang’s students were captured and executed. In imminent danger, Liang Qichao was sailed in the
Japanese gunship Ōshima bound for Hiroshima and went into exile in Japan. It is said that he was offered by the ship’s captain a copy of Kajin no kigū, and was so impressed that he started translating it into Chinese while still on board. The translation, compiled with the aid of other Chinese intellectuals based in Japan and entitled Jiaren qiyu
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35 For a biographical account of Liang Qichao in English, see: Joseph Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the
(Chance Meetings with Beautiful Women), was serialized in Qing yi bao, the journal Liang edited. While he made a few fundraising trips to North America, Hawaii, and Australia to aid reform activities at home, Liang Qichao spent most of his exiled years in Japan, where he published a colossal number of articles, translations, and creative works, and edited four prominent journals, including one of the first Chinese-language literary
journals Xin xiaoshuo (New Fiction, 1902-6). Liang’s prolific literary work was
based on the conviction that a reform of the popular forms of literature, namely the novel, would be essential to materializing sociopolitical renovation in China. Liang finally repatriated in 1912, one year after the Republican Revolution (1911), which overthrew the Qing Dynasty.
The author of Kajin no kigū (hereafter abbreviated as “Chance Meetings”), Shiba Shirō was born in 1853, two decades before Liang Qichao, to a vassal family of Aizu
, a feudal domain in northeast Japan.36 During the course of the country’s radical sociopolitical transformations in the mid-nineteenth century, Shiba Shirō’s family, like many other elite samurai, chose to maintain loyalty to their feudal loads and the Tokugawa Shogunate, refusing to accept the legitimacy of the Meiji government
established at the 1868 Meiji Restoration. Their loyalism brought them great atrocities, as
the Boshin Civil War (1868-9), one of the series of civil wars waged by the new
government against forces allied with the demised Shogunate, devastated the domain of Aizu, killing many of Shiba’s relatives. This horrible experience at the tender age of fourteen and the adverse fates that followed it inscribed in the mind of this author a deep- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
36 For a biography of Shiba Shirō, see a memoire by his brother: Shiba Gorō, Aru Meijijin no kiroku:
seated mistrust of the Meiji government, which is expressed by the Japanese hero of the novel, who identifies himself as “a loyalist of the lost country.” Shiba Shirō, like his peers with samurai backgrounds, had received formal education in the Confucian Classics since his youth, until he received support from the Iwasaki family, an emerging industrial tycoon, to go to the United States. He spent almost six years in the country, studying business and finance, eventually obtaining one of the first five Bachelors of Finance to be conferred by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Soon after returning home in 1884, Shiba Shirō put together the first two volumes of the political novel Chance Meetings based on “random notes in Japanese, classical Chinese, and sometimes English” taken during his American years.37 The publication was an
immense success, encouraging Shiba to produce eight more sequel volumes by 1891.38
Chance Meetings is recognized as one of the representative works of the Meiji political
novel, which flourished in the context of the surge of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movements in the 1880s, mass political movements calling for democratic participation in the political process leading to the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution (1889) and the establishment of the Parliament (1890). Inspired by the nineteenth-century English political novel, the Meiji political novel engendered a crucial “public sphere” in print media amidst heavy governmental restrictions on public lectures and rallies during those political years. Shiba Shirō, then, published the novel’s last six volumes in 1897 after a six-year intermission, during which he was elected to the new Parliament.
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37 Shiba Shirō’s preface to Chance Meetings with Beautiful Women, in Shiba Shirō, Kajin no kigū, p.5. 38 For the reception of Chance Meetings with Beautiful Women at the time of the original publication, see:
Maeda Ai, “Meiji rekishi bungaku no genzō”; Sakaki Atsuko, “Kajin no Kigū: The Meiji Political Novel and the Boundaries of Literature.”
The full-length novel Chance Meetings is the story of expatriated heroes and heroines from Japan, China, Spain, and Ireland who encounter each other in Philadelphia and forge solidarity in their struggles against imperialist powers crippling their native societies. The Japanese hero, named Tōkai Sanshi after the author’s own nom de plume, is from the Aizu domain; the Chinese character, Hankei, is a loyalist of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in the original; the Spanish heroine, Yūran (likely Yolanda), is the daughter of a general of the legitimist Carlist Party; and the Irish female character, Kōren (likely Coleen), is a nationalist activist resisting British imperialism. Into their fictional
adventures, the embroidered biographies of several anti-imperialist figures such as Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803), Ahmed Orabi (1841-1911), and Fanny Parnell (1848- 82) are also interwoven. In the world of the novel, these multinational characters,
fictional and historical, embody a unified identity: cultural exemplarity. The novel’s protagonists practice traditional morality epitomized by the Confucian virtues, and improvise Chinese poems and exchange them to communicate moral and political emotions to each other; they venture to create a solidarity based upon the traditional cultural values in order to realize a new political subjectivity that could overturn Western imperialism and bring about a more just order in the modern world. But their great
enterprise is met by powerful adversaries and misfortune, and its success only dreamed of at the moments of “change meetings” scattered throughout the long story, which
produces suspense and a kind of utopian aspiration, the characteristic charms of this work.
Chance Meetings is written entirely in a Japanese pre-vernacular prose style
approximately forty classical Chinese poems recited by the characters. This prose style, which was established in early Meiji, derived from a method used by premodern Japanese literati to read classical Chinese according to their native pronunciation and grammar; it was widely adopted in a variety of Meiji publications, from newspapers and translations of Western texts to official documents and laws. Shiba Shirō and his contemporaries first employed this style to produce the modern novel in the 1880s. Reflecting the educational background of the late-nineteenth-century Japanese intellectuals, this prose style retains many characteristics of classical Chinese writing in terms of vocabulary, grammar, rhetoric, and “topos.”39 Shiba Shirō’s writing, in fact, makes a plethora of allusions to the Confucian Classics and other canonical Chinese texts, including the Analects and
Mencius; Shijing (The Classic of Poetry) and Chuci (The Song of the Chu), the pinnacles of classic Chinese poetry; the great sixth-century anthology Wen xuan (Selection of Refined Writings); and the late-imperial narrative literature, particularly its
“scholar and beauty” (caizi jiaren ) romance subgenre. The published text,
moreover, contains numerous prefaces, postfaces, and marginal commentaries by the
hands of the Japanese practitioners of Chinese verse and prose (kan shi bun ) of
the time; many of those paratexts are directly written in classical Chinese.40
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39 The concept of “topos” is adapted from Chapter Five of Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and
the Latin Middle Ages.
40 Shiba Shirō and his peers used this antiquarian prose style (kanbun kundoku tai) to create a modern
literature in Japan. Japanese writing in this style, then, inspired Liang Qichao to later advocate for the “prose revolution” (wenjie geming ) and practice what was dubbed the “new style” (xin wenti
), in which Liang produced creative writings extensively in the first years of the twentieth century. As the literary landscapes shifted toward vernacular styles in both countries, the pre-vernacular styles in which Shiba Shirō and Liang Qichao created became targets of criticism, eventually vanishing from the literary scenes.