Abstract
Among the best-known works of Narushima Ryūhoku, who served in the late Tokugawa period as a Confucian scholar only to be reborn as a pioneering journalist after the collapse of the shogunate, is his travelogue Kōsei nichijō (Diary of a Journey to the West). This record of Ryūhoku's 1872-73 world tour was serialized a decade later in his literary journal, Kagetsu shinshi, and became an important literary model for subsequent overseas travelers including Mori Ōgai. Yet Ryūhoku also published at least nineteen domestic travelogues in the Chōya shinbun and Kagetsu shinshi, recording his journeys to Kyoto, Okayama, Shikoku, Atami, Ibaraki, and other locales. In this paper, I consider the significance that this diverse array of writings holds in Ryūhoku's oeuvre. I argue that the domestic travelogues serve not simply as excellent material for tracing Ryūhoku's evolving views of Japan, but that through these texts we can glimpse shifts in Ryūhoku's thinking about the nature and purpose of writing.
I first enumerate several of the characteristics of Ryūhoku's domestic travelogues, focusing specifically on the impact that the form and site of publication had on their textual style. As newspaper publication became the premise of the writing act, various changes were brought to bear on the content of the works as well. We see shifts, for example, in the perception of temporality, and an increasingly marked emphasis on contemporaneity. The contemporaneity that appeared in and was produced by these serialized travelogues extended to them certain novel features. In particular, the sense that the writer and reader of the travelogues shared in the same temporality altered the nature of the genre by giving it a new instrumentality and social engagement.