Can the Periphery Speak: The Self-Representation of Tokugawa Japan’s Periphery in Suzuki Bokushi’s Hokuetsu Seppu

Abstract

Suzuki Bokushi (1770–1842) was a peasant-entrepreneur, essayist and amateur haikai poet who lived in the Echigo province of Tokugawa period Japan, a region which gets the highest amount of snowfall in the world. Bokushi wrote about the people of his region, their customs, their lifestyle, their relationship with the natural world and the folklores of the region in a book entitled Hokuetsu Seppu (1837). This essay will examine the ways this book interrogated the dominant cultural discourse and offered new ways of thinking about centre and periphery, urban and rural. An analysis of the text and context of the book will show how ‘provinciality’ was deployed to question and de-centre prevailing cultural norms, and how a new aesthetic sense was developed that contrasted and questioned the urban sensibilities prevailing in the political centre. This essay will argue that Bokushi’s book articulates a significant critique of the urban-centric discourse of classical Japanese literature, while also offering an alternative rural aesthetic, thereby countering the hegemonic tendency to read the Japanese past through the lens of urban-centric literature. His writings are what Fredric Jameson would call a ‘nonhegemonic cultural voice’.