Modernity

In interwar Japan a new kind of consciousness of modernity crystallized, around the scenes, rhythms, and sensations of big-city life, which spread to China some ten years later. This was the modern not of institutions or technologies but of the experience of life Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) had celebrated in Europe. The 1920s saw a wave of translations of modernist literature from the West, and formal experiments by Japanese writers. Successive literary schools contended against each other, virtually all of them taking individualism as a given, with aesthetics of existential fragmentation and a mixture of fascination and repulsion for the transient surfaces of metropolitan life. The one ingredient, important in the West, that was missing from this modernism—it would be true of the Chinese variant as well—was the European anguish at loss of religious faith. The solitude of humankind in a world without God was never a major theme of East Asian modernism.

The most influential of its currents in Japan was the New Sensationalism—associated with Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) and early Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972)—which Kawabata defined as "Expressionism in epistemology and Dadaism in formal expression" ("Shinshin sakka no shin keikō kaisetsu," 1924, An explanation on the new tendency among young writers). The New Sensationalism came to Shanghai in the late twenties and early thirties. Yokomitsu entitled his first full-length novel Shanghai. It was in these years that the term xiandai became ubiquitous in fashion magazines and avant-garde journals alike, and that—as in Japan—the idea of a specifically aesthetic modernism arrived, associated with the breaking of formal conventions and social taboos, erotic or otherwise.

In both cases, cosmopolitan influences were celebrated and even worshiped, but in general without the revolt against "philistinism" or the spirit of rebellion against the established order that marked much of Western modernism. Yokomitsu's sense of universal cosmopolitanism ended with his "melancholy journey" to Europe in 1936, where a pilgrimage turned into disillusion, and he subsequently "returned" to the nationalist course, reaching the same end, via a different path, as Fukuzawa decades earlier. But something of the same feel for the urban landscape was also shown by the Chinese leftist writer Mao Dun (1896–1981) in his novel Ziye (1933; Midnight), which covered a wide range of lurid scenes in Shanghai in a style not dissimilar to that of the New Sensationalists. Despite China's national crisis by the late thirties, the younger generation's fascination with modernism continued into the war years, especially in poetry, before fading away in the 1950s.