![]() ![]() ![]() In the case of Munroe’s A Son of Satsuma, the main point is that while the novel is, indeed, set “with Perry in Japan” this setting is not articulated most significantly in the literal locating of its key plot events. This complementary approach depends upon an expanded definition of the concept of setting, and is intended to create room for the analysis not only of the textual significance of places, locations, and landscape descriptions, but also of the ways in which a text ‘writes space’-in other words, the way it affirms, challenges, or reconfigures non-specialist geographical knowledge. The reading of A Son of Satsuma offered in this paper is in this sense a case-study exploration of a larger theme, namely the development of an alternative angle of approach to the geography of the generic adventure story. In fact, once we abandon the conventional emphasis on the literal location of the plot events, A Son of Satsuma makes sound geographical sense as an adventure of US-Japan relations. If we take ‘setting’ in the conventional sense, to mean something like ‘the locations within which events take place,’ or ‘the spatio-temporal frame for narrative action,’ this is quite a problematic question: clearly, the setting of Munroe’s novel is much broader and more varied than ‘Japan at the time of the Perry expedition.’ The starting premise for this paper, however, is that the subtitle, With Perry in Japan, only appears to be misleading in the context of an overly-limiting definition of fictional setting. So in what sense can this story be read as an adventure “with Perry in Japan”? The action of the story can not even reliably be located in the 1850s, because, as Munroe admits in his preface, he has compressed twenty two years into a matter of months in order to include both the 1831 pirate attack on the merchantman Friendship in Sumatra and the 1853 arrival of the Perry expedition off Japan. Not only does most of the narrative take place without Perry, large parts of it are not even set in Japan. Then, the story is located in a series of maritime adventures all written by “the author of ‘The White Conqueror’ series, ‘In Pirate Waters,’ ‘Midshipman Stuart,’ ‘Brethren of the Coast,’ etc.” In this way, even before we turn the page to the author’s preface, it seems clear that we have dropped anchor in the fictional world of the adventure story, somewhere off the coast of Japan, sometime in the 1850s.Ī Son of Satsuma seems in this way ‘set,’ located, and contextualized before it even begins, its outlines, like those of the shoreline in the frontispiece, “plainly discernible.” But these hints at setting are, in one sense, quite misleading. First, the subtitle locates the coming action in the mid-1850s and in Asia-specifically, With Perry in Japan. The facing title page, offering its own broad view of what lies ahead, puts the reader in a similarly commanding position. ![]() ![]() The 1903 edition of Kirk Munroe’s novel A Son of Satsuma opens to a frontispiece showing a young sailor scanning the horizon from a ship’s rigging. SPACE, SETTING, AND THE ADVENTURE STORY: OR, WITH PERRY IN JAPAN Please refer to the published version if quoting or citing. This is a pre-publication version of the paper that appeared in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. ![]()
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