At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the
twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and
evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. An Age of Melodrama
examines four enormously popular novels from this period by
interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama
developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows
how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance
of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. It then
examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies
of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an
instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji
period generated a plethora of alternative family models that
explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a
modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed
the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes
in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of
gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses that
surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of
sensibility in Meiji culture.
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