Modern Japanese Fiction by Year (2): 1905-1911, First Flourishing in Late Meiji
Thursday, July 27, 2017
We continue our survey of the Japanese Novel with Part Two - 1905-1912.
(Part One is here.)
In Part One we saw an early-Meiji-period Japan that was so busy modernizing and catching up with the West that there was almost no time to develop a new literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century the modern Japanese novel (with one or two exceptions) had hardly begun to grow beyond the naive political allegories and sentimental stories of the 1880s and 1890s. And when the sons of disenfranchised samurai turned to the study of literature, their texts were the same Japanese and Chinese classics that their fathers had used (resulting in the works of Koda Rohan - how interesting in themselves these are, this was not a truly modern literature). Language reform also was a process of several decades. It was not until the Meiji era was almost finished, that new authors would pioneer a new literature and address the change and transformation going on around them. The challenge was taken up around 1905 by two individualistic writers who had studied in Europe, Natsume Soseki and Mori Ogai, and to a lesser degree by two others, Shimazaki Toson and Tayama Katai, who started the fashion of Japanese Naturalism and the Shishosetsu. And at the very end of Meiji, other writers who would later be counted among the best of the century started their careers: Tanizaki, Shiga, Akutagawa.
1905
The first great decade of modern Japanese literature was the one which followed the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Japan had fulfilled its objective of becoming a leading nation in Asia by defeating both China and Russia, so the total devotion of the previous decades to the national mission was not anymore necessary. This trend had deep implications for the perception among the intelligentsia of what should be the role of the individual. Gradually there was a shift from the early Meiji conception of the link between personal success and prosperity of the nation and family, to an emphasis on more individual concerns. A new emphasis on inward directedness sanctioned the development of the autonomous self. It was now acceptable to explore psychological interiority, subjectivity and self-expression.
Natsume Soseki starts writing his "Swiftian" satirical novel Wagahai wa Neko de Aru (I Am a Cat), consisting of observations of the human world by a nameless cat. Soseki himself appears in thinly disguised form as Kushami Sensei (Master Sneeze), a teacher of English, and the book consists of the discussions this teacher has with his friends and colleagues, as observed by their feline visitor. The satire is directed at human foibles in general, but also more specifically at the late Meiji bureaucracy and blind admirers of the West among Japanese intellectuals. These shortcomings were all the more visible to Soseki, as a recent returnee from overseas. But there is more, as the book also abounds in philosophical discussions of literature and the arts. Soseki wrote the first chapter as a self-contained short story, but it proved so popular that he ended up writing a full novel (it is still possible to enjoy the first chapter of the novel as a self-contained short story). The "wagahai" in the title is a pompous word for "I" that is not in use anymore, but that establishes the humorous tone of the whole work as it just refers to a small cat. Wagahai wa neko de aru has retained its popularity. The novel was filmed several times, for example in 1936 by Yamamoto Kajiro with Fujiwara Kamatari, and in 1975 by Ichikawa Kon with Nakadai Tatsuya.
(Translation: I Am a Cat by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Tuttle Publishing)
Novelist, haiku-poet and scholar of English literature Natsume Soseki (real name: Natsume Kinnosuke; 1867-1917) was born in Tokyo and in 1893 graduated from the English Department of the Imperial University. He worked as a teacher at Matsuyama Middle School (where he associated with his friend, the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki) and elsewhere before being sent to London for study by the Japanese government. After his return to Japan he became a lecturer at Tokyo University. In 1905 he debuted as a writer with the satiric I Am a Cat, followed in 1906 by the humorous Botchan. In 1907 Soseki surprisingly resigned from this venerable faculty position to edit a literary column at the Asahi newspaper. During the period of his employment at the newspaper he wrote approximately one long novel a year, which was published as a serial. Soseki focused on psychological depictions of modern intellectuals in Japan after the breathtaking changes that had taken place since 1868, of brooding, neurological characters as appear in his greatest novels Sore kara, Mon and Kokoro. As the pioneer of modern Japanese psychological fiction, Soseki delved into the question of identity in the Meiji era and also concentrated on the problems of the individual in society. The clash between the group-oriented behavior of Japanese tradition and the individual action of the West is one of the intercultural frictions that in Soseki's fiction is faced at the level of the individual. His solution is ambivalent, as Soseki on the one hand is unwilling to completely abandon the essence of traditional Japanese behavior, but on the other hand also clearly perceives the benefits of individual freedom. Many of his fictional characters waver between social responsibility and individual freedom, and many are ruined when they are unable to find a balance between the two, drifting into torpor or even suicide. But Soseki realized that the choice for individual liberty also often meant the undertaking of acts of egotistical selfishness, and his novels abound in betrayals and egoistic rivalries (often in the form of love triangles). In the course of time Soseki would evolve from light to darkness, from social satire to his own philosophy of "sokuten kyoshi" (“Follow the will of heaven and obliterate the self”). In Japan, he is generally regard as the greatest writer of the 20th century and his novels are central to the canon. Soseki never joined any group, such as the Naturalists, but he had his own gathering of disciples who since 1906 met weekly on Thursdays in his home. His most famous disciple would be Akutagawa Ryunosuke; he also supported the Shirakaba group.
(Study: Natsume Soseki by Beongcheon Yu, Twayne Publishers 1969; Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki by Angela Yu, University of Hawaii Press, 1998; Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata, by Van C. Gessel, Kodansha)
1906
Natsume Soseki publishes Botchan (The Young Master), the story of an impetuous and comically naive young man who leaves his native Tokyo to become a middle school teacher in Matsuyama. Although the novel has a basis in Soseki's own life, it is not autobiographical but a fully fictionalized account. Soseki uses the innocent and optimistic Botchan to offset the pettiness, arrogance and slyness of the other teachers (who represent normal society). Botchan at all costs follows his own convictions. With his sense of justice and reckless but righteous nature he represented an ideal for young Japanese of his time. However, Botchan is also a study of individualism carried to the extreme - a mixture of juvenile stubbornness, intolerance and self-assertiveness. Botchan is probably the bestselling Japanese novel of all times. Like I am a Cat, Botchan can be compared to realistic European fiction in its method of description and element of social criticism. The hero is a living member of society and his thoughts and deeds are logically explainable. Botchan was filmed several times, for example in 1935 by Yamamoto Kajiro with Fujiwara Kamatari.
(Translation: Botchan by J. Cohn, Penguin Classics)
Natsume Soseki also writes Kusamakura (The Grass Pillow, also translated as "The Three-Cornered World"), a poetic "haiku-like" novel (as Soseki himself stated) that describes the weeks a painter spends at a remote hot spring hotel in Kyushu where he is the only guest. What keeps him tied to the place are the mysterious encounters he has with Nami, the daughter of the establishment, who has fled home from a broken marriage. Nami is self-willed, startling and enigmatic, her character foreshadows that of Mineko in Soseki's next novel, Sanshiro. The scene is set for a romantic entanglement, or so it seems, but nothing happens... "The novel flirts with plot as Nami flirts with the young man," as translator Meredith McKinney puts it in the introduction. We meet several local characters, such as a Zen priest and Nami's father who is a tea master, as well as the local barber and a porter. But Nami, through the highly dramatized images of herself she holds out to the narrator, is the still point around which this experimental novel moves. It is also a picture of life free of emotional entanglements, and the novel ends suitably when Nami catches a glimpse of her ex-husband and can not restrain a look of compassion. Ueda Makoto has remarked (in Modern Japanese Writers) that this work "can almost be called an essay on aesthetics written in novelistic form."
(Translation: Kasamukura by Meredith McKinney, Penguin Classics)
Shimazaki Toson writes Hakai (The Broken Commandment), the story of a young man, a teacher like Soseki's Botchan, who is a member of the outcast eta class (now called burakumin). His father has completely withdrawn from society, severing his ties with the eta community, and lives as a solitary herdsman in the mountains. It is therefore possible for his son to hide his background and lead a normal life. His father exacts the vow from him never to disclose his antecedents. The novel is the story of how the son consciously decides to break this vow. Because it brings up the social problem of the eta, this is perhaps the Japanese Naturalist novel that is closest to Western Naturalism. But it is also a story about personal emancipation. As the first large-scale realistic novel to be written after Futabatei's Ukigumo of 1886 (!), it was immediately recognized as a work of great importance. Hakai was filmed several times, most notably in 1948 by Kinoshita Keisuke with Ikebe Ryo and 1962 by Ichikawa Kon with Ichikawa Raizo.
(Translation: The Broken Commandment by Kenneth Strong, University of Tokyo Press)
Shimazaki Toson (Shimazaki Haruki; 1872-1943) was born in Magome in Nagano Prefecture, a post town along the Nakasendo highway. In the 1890s he made name as a Romantic poet, but later he became interested in Naturalist theories of description. After the success of his first Naturalist novel Hakai, Toson produced a series of semi-autobiographical novels exploring relationships in his extended family, such as in the novel Ie (The Family). His last novel, Yoake mae (Before the Dawn, 1929-1935) is a broad historical canvas about the impact of the economic and political developments in the Meiji-period on the Shimazaki family that had lived for generations in the mountains of Shinshu (Nagano). Toson's major novels are part of the canon.
(Study: The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Toson by Janet A. Walker, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011; The Dawn that Never Comes, Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism by Michael Bourdaghs, Columbia U.P.)
Japanese Naturalism. I use the term "Japanese Naturalism" for "Shizenshugi," because in Japan the Western term "Naturalism" has been applied in a different way from its original meaning. In the West, Naturalism was a movement that tried to demonstrate how social conditions, heredity and the environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It did so by depicting everyday reality, often in an objective or "scientific" way. The novels are often deterministic, i.e. the protagonist cannot escape from his hereditary predisposition. In contrast, Japanese Naturalism tends to be "realism with an admixture of subjectivity," in other words, a realistic and true (as opposed to fictional) description of the daily life of the author and his circle. Hakai was an exception, but the element of subjectivity was added the next year to the equation by Tayama Katai's Futon. After that, also Shimazaki Toson would start writing about himself, his family and friends, rather than about fictional characters. The Family (1910) traces the decline of his own house covering three generations, and New Life (1918) treats his own incestuous relationship with his niece.
The heyday of Japanese Naturalism fell between 1906 and 1910 - as a movement it was relatively short-lived. Important Naturalist authors, besides Toson and Katai (see below), are Tokuda Shusei, Masamune Hakucho, Chikamatsu Shuko and Iwano Homei. Most Naturalists stemmed from small landowning and samurai families in the provinces and as young men had come to Tokyo for study. Many of the Naturalists had been through a phase of Christianity in the 1890s. In fact, the Naturalists formed a new literary group, the most influential one after the disbanding of the Kenyusha. But unfortunately they produced little of lasting worth - except the novels by Toson and Katai, nothing of their work has remained in the canon.
1907
Tayama Katai (1872-1930) writes Futon (The Quilt), a novel about the unconsummated attraction a middle-aged writer feels for an idealistic female student, whose mentor he was and who lived in his house, described in sometimes embarrassing detail. The young woman was a modern intellectual and, instead of having any interest in her married teacher, became intimate with a student of her own age (taking her teacher's advice about individualism and romantic love seriously!). In the end the teacher has to do his duty by persuading her parents to allow her to marry the young man. The conclusion of the story created a shock: when the teacher realizes that his protégé has left his house forever, he takes out the bedding on which she used to sleep and "pressed his face to the quilt, filling his lungs with the odor of the woman he loved." The shock was all the more severe as the teacher in the story was clearly Katai, who related an episode from his own life. In other words, The Quilt was the undisguised confession by a well-known author. It gave a new, subjective direction to Japanese Naturalism, as mentioned above, and contributed to the future rise of the Shishosetsu (see below).
(Translation and study: The Quilt and Other Stories by Kenneth G. Henshall, University of Tokyo Press; study in Indra Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore, Columbia).
Tayama Katai also writes "Shojobyo" ("The Girl Watcher" aka "Maidenitis")
A writer dissatisfied with his marriage falls into the voyeuristic habit of watching girls on trains and streetcars (these modern inventions indeed brought men and women in closer proximity than had been normal in the past) and becomes so enraptured that he tumbles out of a streetcar and dies. A tale of urban alienation.
(Translation in The Columbia Anthology I; The Quilt and Other Stories by Kenneth G. Henshall, University of Tokyo Press; interesting discussion in Tokyo in Transit by Alisa Freedman, Stanford University Press; study also in Indra Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore, Columbia).
Born in Gunma Prefecture, Tayama Katai (Tayama Rokuya; 1872-1930) was trained in the Kenyusha, but after the death of Koyo he switched from a highly romantic style to a more sober realism under the influence of French literature (Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers). The Quilt made his reputation and was followed by three autobiographical novels consisting of Life (1903), The Wife (1908) and Family Ties (1910), which treat of his family, he himself being the leading character. In The Quilt Katai established the confessional mode as typical for "Naturalist" Japanese fiction. Katai wrote on purpose in a flat and unadorned style which he called "heimen byosha," "flat description." Major novels as Futon and Inaka kyoshi (The Country Teacher, 1909) are part of the canon.
Tayama Katai's Futon is generally seen as the precursor of the shishosetsu (or watakushi-shosetsu), an important form of prose narrative in Japan (especially during the Taisho period) that purports to represent faithfully the ordinary experiences of the author. The term "shishosetsu" is often wrongly translated as "I-novel," which - although a literal rendering - is incorrect: shishosetsu do not have to be in the I-form and can very well be in the third person. But they have to be "true," so a form of autobiographical "confession." This is in fact the return of the traditional Confucian idea that fiction is suspect (and not high literature, that is why it is called "shosetsu," "small words") and that only writings which "sincerely" reflect true experiences are worth considering as literature. The Western idea that a fictional narrative can through its characters and plot be used to express a truth of a higher order, was foreign to Japanese culture. The shishosetsu is thus a single-voiced, self-referential and unmediated work of literature in which the protagonist can be assumed to be the author. It is close to autobiography, but is still fiction and should not be confused with a real autobiography in which a more balanced overview of a writer's life is expected. The shishosetsu picked out just a few elements, often of a confessional or "shameful" nature. The most important shishosetsu authors were Shiga Naoya, Chikamatsu Shuko and Kasai Zenzo; others are Uno Koji, Muro Saisei and Mushanokoji Saneatsu. The shishosetsu dominated Japanese literature until far in the 1920s, and in fact after. Later shishosetsu authors are Dazai Osamu, Dan Kazuo and Kawasaki Chotaro. A postwar example is the novel Confessions of a Mask by Mishima Yukio, but other writers from the 1960s are Shimao Toshio, Yakuoka Shotaro, Shono Junzo, Abe Akita, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Tomioka Taeko.
(see Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Fiction,, University of California Press, 1988; Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishosetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon, Harvard University Asia Center, 1996)
Onna Keizu (A Woman's Pedigree) by Izumi Kyoka. A story about the supremacy of love, in a more accessible style than usual for Kyoka and therefore one of his most popular stories (often filmed and brought to the stage). Hayase Chikara, a researcher of German literature, has secretly married Otsuta, a geisha who was intimate with his teacher, Sakai Shunzo. Taeko, the daughter of Sakai Shunzo, is sought in marriage by one Kono Eikichi, the scion of an important family from Shizuoka. The Kono family therefore probes the antecedents of Taeko and they also come to Hayase. Hayase gets angry at the high-handed attitude of the Kono family and sets out to obstruct the marriage. But that also means his secret marriage to Otsuta becomes public knowledge. When Sakai hears about their liaison, he effects a separation between Hayase and Otsuta. When Hayase next gets involved in a pickpocket incident, he also looses his job at the university. Onna keizu was filmed several times, for example in 1962 by Misumi Kenji with Ichikawa Raizo and Kogure Michiyo. There is no English translation.
1908
Sanshiro by Natsume Soseki. Sanshiro’s name consists of two figures: three and four, implying that he is 23 and 24 during the course of the story. He has been reared in Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu, in accordance with samurai values and is a total innocent in comparison with the sophisticated modern people of the capital. On his way to Tokyo, he meets a woman in the same train compartment who is interested in him, and when they are obliged to spend the night in Nagoya, she openly entices him. But the straitlaced young student firmly preserves his virginity and is called “chickenhearted” by the woman. This woman disappears from the story, but she will be replaced in Tokyo by the tantalizing Mineko, whose strange personality reminds Sanshiro of the woman he met on the train. Mineko is a member of the new enlightened class of intellectual Tokyo women – a sort of person he has never met before and therefore doesn’t know how to cope with. She leads Sanshiro on, though she is not seriously interested in him and eventually she marries another man. From his side, Sanshiro has been unable to express his true feelings to her. On the same train Sanshiro meets Professor Hirota, a 42-year old bachelor who, for all his cynical comments on modern society is surprisingly unworldly – he doesn’t even hold a teaching post. A fellow student of Sanshiro calls Hirota “the great darkness,” because he has read everything but doesn’t give off any light. Hirota recognizes the inevitability of change and modernization, but is dubious about Japan’s chances of surviving in the 20th c. Sanshiro falls under Hirota’s world-weary spell and is in danger of rejecting society. There is little drama in the book but as Sanshiro meets various events in Tokyo, he slowly begins to change, although he remains an unsophisticated youth who is no match for the cynical Hirota or Mineko, who refers to him as a “stray sheep.” But as a tale about a young man from the hinterland who is at first naively impressed by everything he sees in Tokyo, even the crowded trams (it takes some time before he dares ride them), and who is slow in loosing his old-fashioned morality, this is a genuinely moving book.
[Translation: Jay Rubin in Penguin Classics]
Yume juya (Ten Nights of Dreams) by Natsume Soseki
Soseki's most experimental work, ten sketches each containing a dream, an exploration of the author's subconsciousness. Some of the dreams are outright nightmares and others involve death and have an eerie quality. For example, in the third dream a horrible blind child rides on the shoulders of the author, directing him to a certain spot where, a hundred years ago, he has killed the child - who was his own. Yume juya offers a glimpse into the inner anxieties of Soseki, who on the one hand had to maintain the life of a public figure and gentleman, while on the other hand being fully aware of the brutal undercurrent of human behavior. One could also say that his major realistic themes such as the modernization of Japan and the suffocating power of the past are here powerfully expressed within a unique, fantastic framework. Yume juya was filmed in 2006 by a group of ten directors (each one tale), including Ichikawa Kon and Jisshoji Akio.
(Translation: Ten Nights of Dream by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Tuttle Publishing)
Nagai Kafu publishes Amerika Monogatari (Tales of America) and a year later Furansu Monogatari (Tales of France). In 1903 the 23-year old Nagai Kafu was sent by his businessman father to the United States for study. He would spend four happy years in the U.S. and one in France (the country where he as Francophile really wanted to go). On the West Coast, he wrote about the various types of Japanese living in the U.S.; in New York, in what is one of his best stories, "Ladies of the Night," he visited a high-class brothel - but he also wrote about low-class bars and Chinatown. Another excellent story is "Rude Awakening," about a Japanese branch manager who discovers that the American secretary he has hired is in fact a prostitute. Kafu also lived in Washington where he worked for the Japanese legation. Here he also started on the banking career his father demanded of him and after one year the bank obligingly transferred him to their branch in Lyon, so that Kafu finally could visit his beloved France! With his focus on French literature, Kafu's attitude was that of the flaneur, the uninvolved observer. The best story in the French collection is "Kumo" (The Cloud), about a Japanese diplomat in Paris; also interesting is "Tasogare no Chichukai" (The Mediterranean in Twilight), written on his way home from Europe to Japan and conjuring up his nostalgia, while also touching (like many of the stories do) on Kafu's heartfelt love for Western classical music. Both collections of tales established his reputation, identifying him as a distinctive writer in a new, aesthetic tradition. These stories foreshadow his later work, in which, amid an increasingly populist and tiresome present, he would compose elegiac tales about an earlier and elegant Japanese culture.
(Translation: American Stories by Mitsuko Iriye, Columbia University Press; "The Mediterranean in Twilight" from Furansu Monogatari in The Columbia Anthology I)
[Translated by Norma Moore Field, Louisiana State University Press]
Mori Ogai writes Wita sekusuarisu (Vita Sexualis), a satire on the obsession with sex of the Naturalists in the form of a sexual autobiography, from the young protagonist's first exposure to the erotic ukiyo-e woodcuts to his first encounter at age twenty with a professional courtesan. Ogai insisted that the sex instinct, strong as it was, must be considered as only one aspect of human life and not necessarily the most important. There are some interesting vignettes in this novel, which reflect the early Meiji-period: at school and in the dorms the protagonist carries a dagger to protect himself from the aggressive bisexuality of some of the sons of samurai (after all, in the Edo-period nanshoku was quite normal among samurai and priests). We also find him looking up dirty words in a German dictionary, apparently something of all times and all cultures, just as the watching of "dirty pictures" in the form of the shunga the boy "borrows" from his father. And he feels a strong attraction to a mature and voluptuous woman who lives next door. The book ends when the twenty-year old protagonist confesses to his publisher that he is still a virgin and then is taken to an oiran in the Yoshiwara for a quick fix. Although it contains nothing outrageous, the novel was banned by the censor and Ogai was personally reprimanded by the vice-minister of war. As his own high government position made it impossible to criticize this censorship openly, he did so in a story, Chinmoku no to (The Tower of Silence), about the tall towers on Malabar Hill in which the Parsis dispose of their dead - as a symbol for the way in which the Meiji government silenced people who wrote "dangerous books."
(Translation: Vita Sexualis by Kazuji Ninomiya and Sanford Goldstein, Tuttle Publishing)
Iwano Homei, one of the foremost Japanese Naturalists, writes "Tandeki" (Indulgence). "Indulgence" describes Homei's (here called "Tamura") summer in the countryside, where he had gone to write without being disturbed. His lodgings happen to be next to a restaurant where the geisha in residence, Kichiya, performs for customers. She has rather coarse features but gradually Tamura becomes attracted to her and soon they are lovers. But he is not the only one - he realizes his mistress will share herself with anyone, something which makes him shudder, but teaches him that indulgence is the essence of life. He presses Kichiya to become an actress and even sells the clothes of his wife (!) to buy her release from the geisha contract. But then she goes to Tokyo where another lover is waiting to marry her... and Tamura gives her up without regret in this totally unsentimental story. "Tandeki" could not have been written without the example of Tayama Katai's Futon. Homei's stories were so close to his own experiences that some people questioned - even in his own day - whether they should be called novels or diaries.
Iwano Homei (1873-1920) was born in the island of Awaji and studied in Tokyo at the Meiji Gakuin, a Christian college, where his interest in literature was stimulated by Shimazaki Toson. Besides being an important poet in the new style (shintaishi), Homei is also considered as one of the chief representatives of Japanese Naturalism. He also propounded his concept of Naturalism in various critical essays. His best know story is the above, Tandeki. There are no translations of his work.
Nagai Kafu writes "The Fox," one of his best short stories. After returning from his long trip abroad, Kafu had written only about his travels. In this story based on a childhood memory he records the ambivalence he felt toward his authoritarian father and his feeling for his mother. In the end, the fate of the fox in this story brings all notions of human justice into question. It also is very nostalgic, as Kafu's subsequent work would be. At that time, in early Meiji, there were many empty residences that originally belonged to the retainers of the daimyo who had been forced to maintain a second residence in Edo. The father of the narrator has bought up a number of these and built a mansion with a large garden. This means one could still feel close to nature in Tokyo, all the more since a fox roams around killing the chicken in the mansion. The story ends with the desperate hunt for the fox and its death, which seems a gross injustice to the narrator. The story can be interpreted as a "ritual murder (by the father) directed against the archetypal maternal, lurking in the wooded low-lying area below the precipice in the garden," and also as a symbolic drama in which brooding memories stored up in an Edo space are eradicated by the utilitarianism and rationalism of Meiji "civilization and enlightenment." Typically for Kafu, the narrator has already begun to escape from the masculine world of "civilization and enlightenment" that encompassed the father, and has instead set out on his lifelong project of recovering concrete memories of an Edo space suffused with the maternal archetype (Maeda Ai).
[Translated by Lane Dunlop in Autumn Wind and other stories, Tuttle；study in "The Spirits of Abandoned Gardens: On Nagai Kafu's "The Fox"" in Text and the City, Essays on Japanese Modernity by Maeda Ai, edited by James A. Fujii, Duke U.P.]
1910
The literary coterie Shirakaba-ha (White Birch Group) is founded by Mushanokoji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya, Satomi Ton and others. It publishes the literary magazine Shirakaba, which existed from 1910 to 1923. Shirakaba-ha was a loose association of alumni of the prestigious Gakushuin Peer's School in Tokyo. Members (all from powerful and wealthy families, so the government turned a blind eye to their unconventional ideas) included writers, artists and literary critics. The group emphasized idealism, humanism and individualism, over the Naturalism that had been the dominant trend in Japanese literature since 1906. The Shirakaba-ha also promoted European art trends as Expressionism and Post-Impressionism in Japan. And they were interested in Japanese folk art, which had previously been disparaged by traditional art critics. Early members included Shiga Naoya (1883-1971), Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885-1976), Yanagi Soetsu (1889-1961), Satomi Ton (1888-1983) and Arishima Takeo (1878-1923).
The literature written by members of the group was typically of the shishosetsu genre, and was concerned with the life of individuals, often incorporating optimistic philosophy into their work. Some of these individuals came from wealthy families, and attempted to emulate Tolstoy in creating utopian agrarian communes in remote parts of Japan. Because of this positive philosophy, which was very different from that of the Japanese Naturalists, the shishosetsu as written by Shirakaba-ha members is sometimes also called "shinkyo shosetsu," ("state of mind novels"). The "shinkyo shosetsu" writer, like the novelist of other shishosetsu (which because of their strong negative tendency were called "novels of self-destruction"), believes in the ego as the primary subject matter, but where the latter represents the unredeemed self in crisis, the "shinkyo shosetsu" represents the serene and harmonious state of mind arrived at by the protagonist after he has come out victoriously from a life crisis. The novelist's object in writing is to cultivate his mind so as to attain perfect harmony - in this sense literature
is a way of life, a moral training. This is clearest and most beautifully exemplified in the writings of Shiga Naoya (see below).
[Study: Meeting the Sensei: The Role of the Master in Shirakaba Writers, by Maya Mortimer, Brill Leiden]
Shiga Naoya's first story, "Abashiri made" ("As Far As Abashiri"), is published in the Shirakaba magazine. As Donald Richie has said, "...many of Shiga's best pieces consist of a simple incident upon which is brought to bear an enormous weight. Disliking plot with its editorial falsifications, Shiga (like his admirer the film director Ozu Yasujiro) returns to the simple happening all its original meaning" (Japanese Literature Reviewed, p. 223). Shiga's stories are the archetypal shishosetsu, although it should be added that in several of his early stories we have (sometimes even ingenuous) plot in the form of ideal experience or imagination. But most stories are based on either observation or autobiography. Here are some examples from the early stories:
- "One Morning" (Aru asa, 1908): the simple story of a young man who has trouble getting out of bed one morning, leading to a psychological game of resentment and reconciliation between him and his grandmother. An early example of how Shiga takes the small, insignificant events of everyday life and turns them into a work of literary art. The story also "shows the conflict between the protagonist's needs as an individual and his needs as part of a social group," as Roy Starr writes - an important theme in Shiga's work (in An Artless Art, the Zen Aesthetics of Shiga Naoya, p. 20).
- "As Far As Abashiri" (Abashiri made, 1910): a description of the author's brief acquaintance with an impoverished young mother traveling with two fretful children to the northern end of Japan on a train.
- "The Razor" (Kamisori, 1910): an unsuspecting customer has his throat cut by a barber irritated by his vulgarity. A story built on excitement of feeling.
- "The Paper Door" (Fusuma, 1911): two unconnected families happen to sleep in rooms in an inn with only paper sliding doors in between their rooms. There is a small incident when one of the fusuma is briefly opened at night. The narrator interprets it rather self-servingly as "a gesture by the countrified maid of the family next door, to express her love for him."
- "Seibei and His Gourds" (Seibei to hyotan, 1912), a simple story about a boy who collects gourds, selecting them for their aesthetic beauty with an unerring eye. Finally, Seibei's father and teacher force him to stop collecting gourds, but Seibei maintains his aesthetic values in the face of philistine attacks. Perhaps Shiga's motivation for the story came from his unhappiness with his father who judged that literature was unsatisfactory as a vocation.
- "An Incident" (Dekigoto, 1913): we are inside a trolley, full of dozing passengers, when an incident happens: a small boy almost gets run over. The shocked passengers spontaneously make friends with each other. In the meantime, a butterfly observed inside the carriage by the protagonist has flown away. But nothing is meant symbolically here. A perfect story without the convenience of a plot.
- "Han's Crime" (Han no hanzai, 1913), the story of a Chinese juggler's impulsive wife-slaying. In the end, he is judged to be innocent.
[All stories, except "One Morning" translated in The Paper Door and Other Stories by Lane Dunlop, Tuttle]
Shiga Naoya (1883-1971) was born in Ishinomaki (Miyagi Pref.) and later lived in Tokyo, Kyoto and various other parts of Japan. He was a master stylist who excelled at the short story form. He was the son of a successful businessman and received his education at the prestigious Peer's School. Between 1906 and 1910 he studied English and Japanese Literature at Tokyo University. In 1910 he set up the journal Shirakaba, together with like-minded friends from the Peer's School, and the short pieces he published in this magazine helped him establish a reputation as a promising new writer. Besides about 60 short stories and novellas, Shiga Naoya is also famous for the novel Anya koro (A Dark Night's Passing), published between 1921 and 1937. Although he wrote in the shishosetsu form (of which he was probably the foremost practitioner), like other Shirakaba writers his work belongs to what has been called "shinkyo shosetsu" (state of mind novel), as in contrast to the negative and destructive shishosetsu, we find a harmonious and elevated state of mind acquired as a result of overcoming a crisis, and a great clarity of insight.
Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885-1976) was a novelist and playwright who went on to become a Tolstoyan humanist in his later years. From 1918 to 1926 he lived in an utopian commune which he founded in Kyushu. Mushanokoji was the son of a viscount and the most aristocratic among his friends at the Peer's School. He was the driving force the Shirakaba-ha or "White Bitch Society," a group that promoted cooperation between artists who had in common that they were opposed to the Naturalists. Mushanokoji is part of the canon with such novellas as Omedetaki hito and Yujo (Friendship). The difference in appreciation outside Japan is demonstrated by the fact that there are no modern translations of his work.
[Study: Meeting the Sensei, The Role of the Master in Shirakaba Writings, by Maya Mortimer, Brill Leiden]
Mon (The Gate) by Natsume Soseki is the portrait of a married couple, who for their transgression in the past have been ostracized from society, but who hold together with a sort of quiet love, in muted suffering. Sosuke and Oyone live in a sort of gentile poverty, Sosuke earns just enough as a low-ranking civil servant to make both ends meet. They rent a rather dark and cheerless house in Tokyo, and have no contact with family, no friends or acquaintances. Their solitary existence is wholly uneventful. You could almost say that they live as recluses in the big city, their gate always closed. This seclusion has been caused by a dark spot in their lives. When he was a promising student at Kyoto University, Sosuke had a good friend, Yasui. Sosuke has shamelessly betrayed this close friend by robbing him of his beautiful wife, causing a scandal in the university town - these were strict times in which students were supposed to be models of society - that ruins both their careers. Their joint betrayal of Yasui has left both Sosuke and Oyone with a feeling of guilt. Although Sosuke loves Oyone tenderly, he is increasingly tormented by the memory of his past behavior.... Sosuke eventually seeks salvation through Zen, by staying at Engakuji in Kamakura, but in vain. (see my post about this novel)
[Translation by William F. Sibley in New York Review Books (replacing the older translation by Francis Mathy in Tuttle Books)]
Tanizaki Junichiro writes "Shisei" (Tattoo / The Tattooer), the first short story written by this major 20th c. author. Set in the Tokugawa period, the story tells how a tattooer becomes enslaved by a beautiful young woman whom he selects originally to be the victim of his painful skill by inscribing a giant spider on her body. Seikichi finds a secret, sadistic pleasure in piercing the skin of his customers with his tattoo needles. His dream is to find a beautiful woman and to inscribe on her skin a tattoo imbued with his own cruel spirit. After searching for four years, he finally finds a young woman who not only has an immaculate white skin, but who also has a hidden, cruel streak. After the artist has tattooed the giant spider on her body, the woman's beauty takes on a demonic, compelling power, in which eroticism is combined with sado-masochism. She becomes the "femme fatale" he has always dreamed about, but he also becomes her first victim. The epitome of the later literary style of Tanizaki is revealed in this early story: the author's indulgence in sensual romanticism, his taste for the grotesque, his aspiration for feminine beauty, his admiration for sadistic women... It marked the birth of a new romantic literature in the form of modern decadence, by fusing "Edo taste" with Western Modernism. The femme-fatale is a theme repeated in many of Tanizaki's early works, including "Kirin" (1910), "Shonen" ("The Children", 1911), "Himitsu" ("The Secret," 1911), and "Akuma" ("Devil", 1912). "Shisei" was filmed in 1966 as Irezumi by Masumoto Yasuzo, with Wakao Ayako. Another (contemporary) adaptation was made in 2007 by Zeze Takahisa.
[Trans. Howard Hibbet, in Seven Japanese Stories, Vintage).
Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965) was a master storyteller and stylist whose novels have influenced numerous writers in Japan. He was born in Tokyo, but moved to the Kansai area after the Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1923. Tanizaki started his writing career with sensual and decadent short stories as "Shisei" (The Tattooer) in which a tattoo artist inscribes a giant, evil spider on the back of a beautiful woman - this gives her a demonic power of which the artist becomes the first victim, something he masochistically accepts. Other novels, as Naomi, reflect the rapid modernization of Japanese society in the tale of a dandy who tries to groom a cafe girl with English and music lessons and in his obsession puts up with all her whims and even infidelities. After relocating to Western Japan, Tanizaki's dandyism and fascination with the West were replaced with a renewed appreciation of classical Japanese culture, as is evidenced by the essay In Praise of Shadows. His renewed interest in classical Japanese literature culminated in his multiple translations into modern Japanese of the eleventh-century classic The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954 & 1965). He first lived in (still rather Western) Ashiya, where he wrote masterworks as Arrowroot, The Reed Cutter and A Portrait of Shunkin - all stories of men who find happiness in absolute devotion to haughty or unapproachable women. He also started on what would become his most famous novel, The Makioka Sisters, a realistic tale about the decline of a proud Kansai family, which he completed five years later after moving to Kyoto in 1948. Tanizaki had of course often visited Kyoto even when he lived in the Kanto and was quite familiar with the city. The Shimogamo of his last Kyoto address returns in the beautiful novella The Bridge of Dreams - which Tanizaki wrote three years after he had exchanged the cold Kyoto winters for the warmer climes of Atami. Tanizaki was shortlisted for the Nobel prize in literature, but died in 1965 before anything could come of that. He was buried in the Honenin temple in Kyoto.
[Studies: Chambers, Anthony Hood, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki's Fiction, Harvard U.P.; Gessel, Van C. Three Modern Novelists, Kodansha International; Ito, Ken Kenneth, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki's Fictional Worlds, Stanford U.P.]
Mori Ogai writes Seinen (Youth). In his creative work, Mori Ogai went through 4 phases: the three novellas as Maihime, written in a classical style but with a modern content; this was followed by a long period in which Mori Ogai was active (and very influential) as translator and critic, but published no new creative work; the second period from 1909 to 1912, in which Ogai wrote contemporary stories about his own experiences in a clear, modern style; the period from 1912 to 1916 in which Ogai concentrated on historical stories, often in a classical style; and the years from 1916 when Ogai wrote three biographies of doctors from the Edo period. Ogai was inspired by Natsume Soseki's Sanshiro when he wrote Seinen as his own novel of youthful discovery of the inner life. He was also inspired by the German "Bildungsroman," such as Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Ogai's protagonist, Koizumi Junichi, is, like Sanshiro, a young man coming from the provinces to Tokyo in order to experience the excitement of the big city. Ogai himself appears in the book in the guise of the writer Hirata Fuseki. With themes as self-recognition and resignation, Seinen is best read in conjunction with Vita Sexualis, another account of a young man coming to maturity, in the intellectual as well as emotional sense, as well is the slightly later The Wild Geese. Youth is a great source of information about the intellectual, social and artistic attitudes of around 1910. It is full of authentic atmosphere.
(Translation: Mori Ogai, Youth and Other Stories, ed. J. Thomas Rimer)
Ie (The Family) by Shimazaki Toson, a sprawling novel that describes the disintegration of the Koizumi and Hashimoto families over a twelve-year period. Central are the characters of Koizumi Sankichi, a writer who is a schoolteacher in a poor mountain village; his older sister Otane who has married into the Hashimoto family; and Oyuki, the wife of Sankichi. Nothing is going as it should: Oyuki seems to be corresponding with a former lover, and the traditional business of the Hashimoto family declines. Otane tries to hold things together, even as her husband runs away with a geisha. Sankichi moves his family to Tokyo. While he struggles as a novelist, his children die from undernourishment. Friction with his wife Oyuki increases as Sankichi is on the verge of an incestuous relationship with a niece. Shota, the son of Otane, tries to revive the family fortunes by playing the stock market, but he fails and he dies from tuberculosis. At the end of the novel, the exhausted Sankichi and Oyuki seem to have reached a quiet understanding with each other. The novel, which has been designated a masterpiece of Japanese Naturalism, is largely an autobiographical account of Toson's own life and many members of his family appear as characters.
(Translation: The Family by Cecilia Segawa Seigle, University of Tokyo Press)
Uta andon (A Song by Lantern Light) by Izumi Kyoka, two stories combined into one, about a young No actor who has been ostracized from his family because of his arrogance. The story ends in reconciliation. The reader must jump back and forth between two narratives, two sets of characters and two sites of narration until these merge near the end. The story also contains numerous references to Jippensha Ikku's famous novel Shank's Mare (Tokaido dochi hizakurige, 1802-1809), and especially the part where the two heroes become separated when traveling in the Ise area. It also makes use of the No play The Diver (Ama), in which the heroine sacrifices herself by diving deep into the sea. The structure can be said to anticipate cinematic collage. Boldly experimental, this is usually considered as Kyoka's masterwork. Filmed in 1943 by Naruse Mikio (with a changed, happy ending).
(Translation: In Light of Shadows by Charles Shiro Inouye)
Tono monogatari (Legends of Tono) by Yanagita Kunio. Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) was interested in both literature and folklore studies and Legends of Tono stands at the borderline of these two activities: it is excellent literature but also a precious record of peasant life in the rural Tono area. Many of the 119 short pieces are a sort of "sketches of memories," i.e. "remarkable and extraordinary experiences told in the first person." Although two fairy tales have been included as well, many of the records are not even stories, but flimsy pieces of things heard or seen. That makes the book all the more interesting as a real account of the world of Tono - both things seen and unseen... much space is taken up by the fear for the supernatural.
Chikamatsu Shuko writes Wakareta Tsuma ni Okuru Tegami (Letter to My Divorced Wife). A typical autobiographical shishosetsu describing the solitude and misery of the narrator, who has been left by his wife, despairing about the poverty and misery of their life together. This story has not been translated.
Chikamatsu Shuko (1876-1944) was born in Okayama and graduated from what is now Waseda University. He became a prominent writer of Shishosetsu in the Naturalist manner. Except the above title, famous works are Giwaku (Suspicion, 1913) and Kurokami (Black Hair, 1922).
1911
Mori Ogai starts serializing Gan (The Wild Goose), a story about the tentative attraction between a medical student, Okada, who must soon leave for Germany, and Otama, the beautiful young mistress of an unpleasant money-lender, Suezo. She has become the moneylender's mistress to alleviate the poverty of her aging father and has been set up by him in a small house on a quiet street. The student often passes her house on his daily walk, and they start noticing each other - he even kills a snake for her - but the dream is more on her side and in the end he leaves Tokyo before anything like a romance can develop. Although the narrative is introduced and closed by a friend of Okada, the point of view later shifts to Otama, focusing on her situation and showing how she develops a modern self-consciousness and learns to stand up against her patron. This nostalgic and lyrical story is also a historical recreation of the Tokyo of around 1880, which is described in detail: the daily routine of Okada's walks, the environs of the old Tokyo Imperial University, the lonely slope called Muenzaka where Otama lives. Ogai records the activity of the university students, their boardinghouse lives, and their browsing in secondhand bookshops. Beautifully filmed in 1953 by Toyoda Shiro with Takamine Hideko.
[Translated by Burton Watson, University of Michigan; older translation as The Wilde Geese by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, Tuttle]
Nagai Kafu writes Sumidagawa (The River Sumida), his most lyrical but also elegiac story, about a disappearing way of life. After his return from abroad, Kafu sought the remnants of his own culture in various corners of modern Tokyo. In Sumidagawa, he attempts to find the shadows of the past in the lives of such people as a female instructor of tokiwazu music, a professional haiku master, a geisha, and Kabuki actors. The tale starts and ends with episodes about haiku master Ragetsu; in between these chapters we find the affecting story of a boy named Chokichi, his nephew. Chokichi's mother, although a teacher of traditional music, wants her son to follow the new Meiji times and go to university. She sacrifices herself to pay for his school so that he can become a bureaucrat. Chokichi is however drawn to the Kabuki and its music, and wants to become a professional shamisen player. At the same time, he looses his girlfriend, Oito, as she has to become a geisha and suddenly has grown up and become too old for him (reminding us of the story Udekurabe by Higuchi Ichiyo). At the end of the story, despairing of ever finding happiness, Chokichi falls ill, having caught typhus. The ending is open, we don't know whether he will recover as his uncle fervently hopes. The most beautiful section is the opening of the story, a sort of michiyuki, in which Ragetsu travels from his house on the left bank of the Sumida to visit his sister and nephew, who live in Imado on the other bank. Impressive are also the descriptions of the changes brought by the seasons to the river scenery, which occur in every of the ten chapters. As usual in Japanese novels, the story is of less importance than the atmosphere Kafu is evoking. As Donald Keene says, "The river, the little houses on the embankment, the bridges, the groves of trees visible in the temple grounds across the river are as much 'persons' in the story as Chokichi, Oito, and the rest. [...] The characters are hardly more than sketched, and remain two-dimensional, but the composition, as in a beautifully executed ukiyo-e, is flawless, and the coloring exquisite." (Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, p. 423). Indeed, the story reminded me of the romantic Meiji-period ukiyo-e of Kobayashi Kiyochika.
(Translation: Kafu the Scribbler, The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafu by Edward Seidensticker, Stanford University Press)
Masamune Hakucho writes the Naturalist story "Doro ningyo" (The Clay Doll), a fictionalized account of the unhappy start of his own married life. After having met a number of prospective brides without being impressed by any one of them, Moriya Jukichi, the central figure, is talked into marrying a young woman from the provinces with a traditional upbringing for whom he feels no affection. In an apathetic state of mind he agrees, but is later mortified to have to share his life with a wife he can only regard as "a doll of clay." From her side, the wife has been schooled to expect that patience and devotion to her husband will eventually be rewarded, but she waits in vain for some sign of affection from him, as he spends most nights out of the house with other women. A sarcastic story that demonstrates the negative point of an arranged marriage.
(Translation in The Columbia Anthology I)
Masamune Hakucho (real name: Masamune Tadao; 1879-1962) was a novelist, playwright and critic from Okayama. After studying English as a missionary school, at age 17 he moved to Tokyo, where he entered the English course of what is now Waseda University (receiving lessons in Shakespeare from Tsubouchi Shoyo; in the new century, Waseda University also became the center of Japanese Naturalism). He was a follower of the Japanese Christian thinker Uchimura Kanzo and was baptized in 1897. Uchimura promoted a mild brand of New England Protestantism which appealed more as philosophy than as religion and which gave young writers a perspective from which to criticize the Meiji state. Hakucho lost his faith already a few years later, like the other writers who had embraced Christianity in the 1890s. The first story proclaiming Hakucho's emergence as a Naturalist writer was Jinai (Dust) from 1907, a story in which he captured the bleakness of the life of a proofreader in a newspaper office. This and other stories that followed, such as Doko e (Whither?) from 1908, were deeply pessimistic, even close to despair. Shisha seisha (The Dead and the Living, 1916) treats the breakdown of the family system through the selfishness of contemporary urban life. Later in life, Hakucho mainly wrote plays and criticism, including a authoritative history of the Naturalist movement in Japan. Akutagawa rated Hakucho as the "best of the Naturalists."
(Part One is here.)
In Part One we saw an early-Meiji-period Japan that was so busy modernizing and catching up with the West that there was almost no time to develop a new literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century the modern Japanese novel (with one or two exceptions) had hardly begun to grow beyond the naive political allegories and sentimental stories of the 1880s and 1890s. And when the sons of disenfranchised samurai turned to the study of literature, their texts were the same Japanese and Chinese classics that their fathers had used (resulting in the works of Koda Rohan - how interesting in themselves these are, this was not a truly modern literature). Language reform also was a process of several decades. It was not until the Meiji era was almost finished, that new authors would pioneer a new literature and address the change and transformation going on around them. The challenge was taken up around 1905 by two individualistic writers who had studied in Europe, Natsume Soseki and Mori Ogai, and to a lesser degree by two others, Shimazaki Toson and Tayama Katai, who started the fashion of Japanese Naturalism and the Shishosetsu. And at the very end of Meiji, other writers who would later be counted among the best of the century started their careers: Tanizaki, Shiga, Akutagawa.
1905
The first great decade of modern Japanese literature was the one which followed the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Japan had fulfilled its objective of becoming a leading nation in Asia by defeating both China and Russia, so the total devotion of the previous decades to the national mission was not anymore necessary. This trend had deep implications for the perception among the intelligentsia of what should be the role of the individual. Gradually there was a shift from the early Meiji conception of the link between personal success and prosperity of the nation and family, to an emphasis on more individual concerns. A new emphasis on inward directedness sanctioned the development of the autonomous self. It was now acceptable to explore psychological interiority, subjectivity and self-expression.
Natsume Soseki starts writing his "Swiftian" satirical novel Wagahai wa Neko de Aru (I Am a Cat), consisting of observations of the human world by a nameless cat. Soseki himself appears in thinly disguised form as Kushami Sensei (Master Sneeze), a teacher of English, and the book consists of the discussions this teacher has with his friends and colleagues, as observed by their feline visitor. The satire is directed at human foibles in general, but also more specifically at the late Meiji bureaucracy and blind admirers of the West among Japanese intellectuals. These shortcomings were all the more visible to Soseki, as a recent returnee from overseas. But there is more, as the book also abounds in philosophical discussions of literature and the arts. Soseki wrote the first chapter as a self-contained short story, but it proved so popular that he ended up writing a full novel (it is still possible to enjoy the first chapter of the novel as a self-contained short story). The "wagahai" in the title is a pompous word for "I" that is not in use anymore, but that establishes the humorous tone of the whole work as it just refers to a small cat. Wagahai wa neko de aru has retained its popularity. The novel was filmed several times, for example in 1936 by Yamamoto Kajiro with Fujiwara Kamatari, and in 1975 by Ichikawa Kon with Nakadai Tatsuya.
(Translation: I Am a Cat by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Tuttle Publishing)
Novelist, haiku-poet and scholar of English literature Natsume Soseki (real name: Natsume Kinnosuke; 1867-1917) was born in Tokyo and in 1893 graduated from the English Department of the Imperial University. He worked as a teacher at Matsuyama Middle School (where he associated with his friend, the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki) and elsewhere before being sent to London for study by the Japanese government. After his return to Japan he became a lecturer at Tokyo University. In 1905 he debuted as a writer with the satiric I Am a Cat, followed in 1906 by the humorous Botchan. In 1907 Soseki surprisingly resigned from this venerable faculty position to edit a literary column at the Asahi newspaper. During the period of his employment at the newspaper he wrote approximately one long novel a year, which was published as a serial. Soseki focused on psychological depictions of modern intellectuals in Japan after the breathtaking changes that had taken place since 1868, of brooding, neurological characters as appear in his greatest novels Sore kara, Mon and Kokoro. As the pioneer of modern Japanese psychological fiction, Soseki delved into the question of identity in the Meiji era and also concentrated on the problems of the individual in society. The clash between the group-oriented behavior of Japanese tradition and the individual action of the West is one of the intercultural frictions that in Soseki's fiction is faced at the level of the individual. His solution is ambivalent, as Soseki on the one hand is unwilling to completely abandon the essence of traditional Japanese behavior, but on the other hand also clearly perceives the benefits of individual freedom. Many of his fictional characters waver between social responsibility and individual freedom, and many are ruined when they are unable to find a balance between the two, drifting into torpor or even suicide. But Soseki realized that the choice for individual liberty also often meant the undertaking of acts of egotistical selfishness, and his novels abound in betrayals and egoistic rivalries (often in the form of love triangles). In the course of time Soseki would evolve from light to darkness, from social satire to his own philosophy of "sokuten kyoshi" (“Follow the will of heaven and obliterate the self”). In Japan, he is generally regard as the greatest writer of the 20th century and his novels are central to the canon. Soseki never joined any group, such as the Naturalists, but he had his own gathering of disciples who since 1906 met weekly on Thursdays in his home. His most famous disciple would be Akutagawa Ryunosuke; he also supported the Shirakaba group.
(Study: Natsume Soseki by Beongcheon Yu, Twayne Publishers 1969; Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki by Angela Yu, University of Hawaii Press, 1998; Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata, by Van C. Gessel, Kodansha)
1906
Natsume Soseki publishes Botchan (The Young Master), the story of an impetuous and comically naive young man who leaves his native Tokyo to become a middle school teacher in Matsuyama. Although the novel has a basis in Soseki's own life, it is not autobiographical but a fully fictionalized account. Soseki uses the innocent and optimistic Botchan to offset the pettiness, arrogance and slyness of the other teachers (who represent normal society). Botchan at all costs follows his own convictions. With his sense of justice and reckless but righteous nature he represented an ideal for young Japanese of his time. However, Botchan is also a study of individualism carried to the extreme - a mixture of juvenile stubbornness, intolerance and self-assertiveness. Botchan is probably the bestselling Japanese novel of all times. Like I am a Cat, Botchan can be compared to realistic European fiction in its method of description and element of social criticism. The hero is a living member of society and his thoughts and deeds are logically explainable. Botchan was filmed several times, for example in 1935 by Yamamoto Kajiro with Fujiwara Kamatari.
(Translation: Botchan by J. Cohn, Penguin Classics)
Natsume Soseki also writes Kusamakura (The Grass Pillow, also translated as "The Three-Cornered World"), a poetic "haiku-like" novel (as Soseki himself stated) that describes the weeks a painter spends at a remote hot spring hotel in Kyushu where he is the only guest. What keeps him tied to the place are the mysterious encounters he has with Nami, the daughter of the establishment, who has fled home from a broken marriage. Nami is self-willed, startling and enigmatic, her character foreshadows that of Mineko in Soseki's next novel, Sanshiro. The scene is set for a romantic entanglement, or so it seems, but nothing happens... "The novel flirts with plot as Nami flirts with the young man," as translator Meredith McKinney puts it in the introduction. We meet several local characters, such as a Zen priest and Nami's father who is a tea master, as well as the local barber and a porter. But Nami, through the highly dramatized images of herself she holds out to the narrator, is the still point around which this experimental novel moves. It is also a picture of life free of emotional entanglements, and the novel ends suitably when Nami catches a glimpse of her ex-husband and can not restrain a look of compassion. Ueda Makoto has remarked (in Modern Japanese Writers) that this work "can almost be called an essay on aesthetics written in novelistic form."
(Translation: Kasamukura by Meredith McKinney, Penguin Classics)
Shimazaki Toson writes Hakai (The Broken Commandment), the story of a young man, a teacher like Soseki's Botchan, who is a member of the outcast eta class (now called burakumin). His father has completely withdrawn from society, severing his ties with the eta community, and lives as a solitary herdsman in the mountains. It is therefore possible for his son to hide his background and lead a normal life. His father exacts the vow from him never to disclose his antecedents. The novel is the story of how the son consciously decides to break this vow. Because it brings up the social problem of the eta, this is perhaps the Japanese Naturalist novel that is closest to Western Naturalism. But it is also a story about personal emancipation. As the first large-scale realistic novel to be written after Futabatei's Ukigumo of 1886 (!), it was immediately recognized as a work of great importance. Hakai was filmed several times, most notably in 1948 by Kinoshita Keisuke with Ikebe Ryo and 1962 by Ichikawa Kon with Ichikawa Raizo.
(Translation: The Broken Commandment by Kenneth Strong, University of Tokyo Press)
Shimazaki Toson (Shimazaki Haruki; 1872-1943) was born in Magome in Nagano Prefecture, a post town along the Nakasendo highway. In the 1890s he made name as a Romantic poet, but later he became interested in Naturalist theories of description. After the success of his first Naturalist novel Hakai, Toson produced a series of semi-autobiographical novels exploring relationships in his extended family, such as in the novel Ie (The Family). His last novel, Yoake mae (Before the Dawn, 1929-1935) is a broad historical canvas about the impact of the economic and political developments in the Meiji-period on the Shimazaki family that had lived for generations in the mountains of Shinshu (Nagano). Toson's major novels are part of the canon.
(Study: The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Toson by Janet A. Walker, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011; The Dawn that Never Comes, Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism by Michael Bourdaghs, Columbia U.P.)
Japanese Naturalism. I use the term "Japanese Naturalism" for "Shizenshugi," because in Japan the Western term "Naturalism" has been applied in a different way from its original meaning. In the West, Naturalism was a movement that tried to demonstrate how social conditions, heredity and the environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It did so by depicting everyday reality, often in an objective or "scientific" way. The novels are often deterministic, i.e. the protagonist cannot escape from his hereditary predisposition. In contrast, Japanese Naturalism tends to be "realism with an admixture of subjectivity," in other words, a realistic and true (as opposed to fictional) description of the daily life of the author and his circle. Hakai was an exception, but the element of subjectivity was added the next year to the equation by Tayama Katai's Futon. After that, also Shimazaki Toson would start writing about himself, his family and friends, rather than about fictional characters. The Family (1910) traces the decline of his own house covering three generations, and New Life (1918) treats his own incestuous relationship with his niece.
The heyday of Japanese Naturalism fell between 1906 and 1910 - as a movement it was relatively short-lived. Important Naturalist authors, besides Toson and Katai (see below), are Tokuda Shusei, Masamune Hakucho, Chikamatsu Shuko and Iwano Homei. Most Naturalists stemmed from small landowning and samurai families in the provinces and as young men had come to Tokyo for study. Many of the Naturalists had been through a phase of Christianity in the 1890s. In fact, the Naturalists formed a new literary group, the most influential one after the disbanding of the Kenyusha. But unfortunately they produced little of lasting worth - except the novels by Toson and Katai, nothing of their work has remained in the canon.
1907
Tayama Katai (1872-1930) writes Futon (The Quilt), a novel about the unconsummated attraction a middle-aged writer feels for an idealistic female student, whose mentor he was and who lived in his house, described in sometimes embarrassing detail. The young woman was a modern intellectual and, instead of having any interest in her married teacher, became intimate with a student of her own age (taking her teacher's advice about individualism and romantic love seriously!). In the end the teacher has to do his duty by persuading her parents to allow her to marry the young man. The conclusion of the story created a shock: when the teacher realizes that his protégé has left his house forever, he takes out the bedding on which she used to sleep and "pressed his face to the quilt, filling his lungs with the odor of the woman he loved." The shock was all the more severe as the teacher in the story was clearly Katai, who related an episode from his own life. In other words, The Quilt was the undisguised confession by a well-known author. It gave a new, subjective direction to Japanese Naturalism, as mentioned above, and contributed to the future rise of the Shishosetsu (see below).
(Translation and study: The Quilt and Other Stories by Kenneth G. Henshall, University of Tokyo Press; study in Indra Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore, Columbia).
Tayama Katai also writes "Shojobyo" ("The Girl Watcher" aka "Maidenitis")
A writer dissatisfied with his marriage falls into the voyeuristic habit of watching girls on trains and streetcars (these modern inventions indeed brought men and women in closer proximity than had been normal in the past) and becomes so enraptured that he tumbles out of a streetcar and dies. A tale of urban alienation.
(Translation in The Columbia Anthology I; The Quilt and Other Stories by Kenneth G. Henshall, University of Tokyo Press; interesting discussion in Tokyo in Transit by Alisa Freedman, Stanford University Press; study also in Indra Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore, Columbia).
Born in Gunma Prefecture, Tayama Katai (Tayama Rokuya; 1872-1930) was trained in the Kenyusha, but after the death of Koyo he switched from a highly romantic style to a more sober realism under the influence of French literature (Maupassant, the Goncourt brothers). The Quilt made his reputation and was followed by three autobiographical novels consisting of Life (1903), The Wife (1908) and Family Ties (1910), which treat of his family, he himself being the leading character. In The Quilt Katai established the confessional mode as typical for "Naturalist" Japanese fiction. Katai wrote on purpose in a flat and unadorned style which he called "heimen byosha," "flat description." Major novels as Futon and Inaka kyoshi (The Country Teacher, 1909) are part of the canon.
Tayama Katai's Futon is generally seen as the precursor of the shishosetsu (or watakushi-shosetsu), an important form of prose narrative in Japan (especially during the Taisho period) that purports to represent faithfully the ordinary experiences of the author. The term "shishosetsu" is often wrongly translated as "I-novel," which - although a literal rendering - is incorrect: shishosetsu do not have to be in the I-form and can very well be in the third person. But they have to be "true," so a form of autobiographical "confession." This is in fact the return of the traditional Confucian idea that fiction is suspect (and not high literature, that is why it is called "shosetsu," "small words") and that only writings which "sincerely" reflect true experiences are worth considering as literature. The Western idea that a fictional narrative can through its characters and plot be used to express a truth of a higher order, was foreign to Japanese culture. The shishosetsu is thus a single-voiced, self-referential and unmediated work of literature in which the protagonist can be assumed to be the author. It is close to autobiography, but is still fiction and should not be confused with a real autobiography in which a more balanced overview of a writer's life is expected. The shishosetsu picked out just a few elements, often of a confessional or "shameful" nature. The most important shishosetsu authors were Shiga Naoya, Chikamatsu Shuko and Kasai Zenzo; others are Uno Koji, Muro Saisei and Mushanokoji Saneatsu. The shishosetsu dominated Japanese literature until far in the 1920s, and in fact after. Later shishosetsu authors are Dazai Osamu, Dan Kazuo and Kawasaki Chotaro. A postwar example is the novel Confessions of a Mask by Mishima Yukio, but other writers from the 1960s are Shimao Toshio, Yakuoka Shotaro, Shono Junzo, Abe Akita, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Tomioka Taeko.
(see Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Fiction,, University of California Press, 1988; Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishosetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon, Harvard University Asia Center, 1996)
Onna Keizu (A Woman's Pedigree) by Izumi Kyoka. A story about the supremacy of love, in a more accessible style than usual for Kyoka and therefore one of his most popular stories (often filmed and brought to the stage). Hayase Chikara, a researcher of German literature, has secretly married Otsuta, a geisha who was intimate with his teacher, Sakai Shunzo. Taeko, the daughter of Sakai Shunzo, is sought in marriage by one Kono Eikichi, the scion of an important family from Shizuoka. The Kono family therefore probes the antecedents of Taeko and they also come to Hayase. Hayase gets angry at the high-handed attitude of the Kono family and sets out to obstruct the marriage. But that also means his secret marriage to Otsuta becomes public knowledge. When Sakai hears about their liaison, he effects a separation between Hayase and Otsuta. When Hayase next gets involved in a pickpocket incident, he also looses his job at the university. Onna keizu was filmed several times, for example in 1962 by Misumi Kenji with Ichikawa Raizo and Kogure Michiyo. There is no English translation.
1908
Sanshiro by Natsume Soseki. Sanshiro’s name consists of two figures: three and four, implying that he is 23 and 24 during the course of the story. He has been reared in Kumamoto, on the southern island of Kyushu, in accordance with samurai values and is a total innocent in comparison with the sophisticated modern people of the capital. On his way to Tokyo, he meets a woman in the same train compartment who is interested in him, and when they are obliged to spend the night in Nagoya, she openly entices him. But the straitlaced young student firmly preserves his virginity and is called “chickenhearted” by the woman. This woman disappears from the story, but she will be replaced in Tokyo by the tantalizing Mineko, whose strange personality reminds Sanshiro of the woman he met on the train. Mineko is a member of the new enlightened class of intellectual Tokyo women – a sort of person he has never met before and therefore doesn’t know how to cope with. She leads Sanshiro on, though she is not seriously interested in him and eventually she marries another man. From his side, Sanshiro has been unable to express his true feelings to her. On the same train Sanshiro meets Professor Hirota, a 42-year old bachelor who, for all his cynical comments on modern society is surprisingly unworldly – he doesn’t even hold a teaching post. A fellow student of Sanshiro calls Hirota “the great darkness,” because he has read everything but doesn’t give off any light. Hirota recognizes the inevitability of change and modernization, but is dubious about Japan’s chances of surviving in the 20th c. Sanshiro falls under Hirota’s world-weary spell and is in danger of rejecting society. There is little drama in the book but as Sanshiro meets various events in Tokyo, he slowly begins to change, although he remains an unsophisticated youth who is no match for the cynical Hirota or Mineko, who refers to him as a “stray sheep.” But as a tale about a young man from the hinterland who is at first naively impressed by everything he sees in Tokyo, even the crowded trams (it takes some time before he dares ride them), and who is slow in loosing his old-fashioned morality, this is a genuinely moving book.
[Translation: Jay Rubin in Penguin Classics]
Yume juya (Ten Nights of Dreams) by Natsume Soseki
Soseki's most experimental work, ten sketches each containing a dream, an exploration of the author's subconsciousness. Some of the dreams are outright nightmares and others involve death and have an eerie quality. For example, in the third dream a horrible blind child rides on the shoulders of the author, directing him to a certain spot where, a hundred years ago, he has killed the child - who was his own. Yume juya offers a glimpse into the inner anxieties of Soseki, who on the one hand had to maintain the life of a public figure and gentleman, while on the other hand being fully aware of the brutal undercurrent of human behavior. One could also say that his major realistic themes such as the modernization of Japan and the suffocating power of the past are here powerfully expressed within a unique, fantastic framework. Yume juya was filmed in 2006 by a group of ten directors (each one tale), including Ichikawa Kon and Jisshoji Akio.
(Translation: Ten Nights of Dream by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Tuttle Publishing)
Nagai Kafu publishes Amerika Monogatari (Tales of America) and a year later Furansu Monogatari (Tales of France). In 1903 the 23-year old Nagai Kafu was sent by his businessman father to the United States for study. He would spend four happy years in the U.S. and one in France (the country where he as Francophile really wanted to go). On the West Coast, he wrote about the various types of Japanese living in the U.S.; in New York, in what is one of his best stories, "Ladies of the Night," he visited a high-class brothel - but he also wrote about low-class bars and Chinatown. Another excellent story is "Rude Awakening," about a Japanese branch manager who discovers that the American secretary he has hired is in fact a prostitute. Kafu also lived in Washington where he worked for the Japanese legation. Here he also started on the banking career his father demanded of him and after one year the bank obligingly transferred him to their branch in Lyon, so that Kafu finally could visit his beloved France! With his focus on French literature, Kafu's attitude was that of the flaneur, the uninvolved observer. The best story in the French collection is "Kumo" (The Cloud), about a Japanese diplomat in Paris; also interesting is "Tasogare no Chichukai" (The Mediterranean in Twilight), written on his way home from Europe to Japan and conjuring up his nostalgia, while also touching (like many of the stories do) on Kafu's heartfelt love for Western classical music. Both collections of tales established his reputation, identifying him as a distinctive writer in a new, aesthetic tradition. These stories foreshadow his later work, in which, amid an increasingly populist and tiresome present, he would compose elegiac tales about an earlier and elegant Japanese culture.
(Translation: American Stories by Mitsuko Iriye, Columbia University Press; "The Mediterranean in Twilight" from Furansu Monogatari in The Columbia Anthology I)
1909
Sore kara (And Then) by Natsume Soseki. Together with the earlier Sanshiro and the later Mon, Sore kara has been seen as part of a trilogy. That doesn't mean these novels continue one and the same story, but rather that they describe similar protagonists at different stages of their lives: Sanshiro as a naive young man, Daisuke in Sore kara as a grown-up who experiences an existential crisis, and Sosuke in Mon as a man at an older age who has been ostracized by society. All three heroes are "black sheep," in his trilogy Soseki has delineated their decline. The alienated Daisuke is 30 years old and clearly sees the conflict between old and new in modern Japan - yet he is paralyzed by his inability to find new values. He recognizes that the world of feudal Japan has been swept away by modernization but that nothing has been created to take its place. Modern society therefore, as it precludes meaningful action, imposes inactivity upon him. But circumstances bring on an existential crisis and force him out of his indolence. Some years before, he has allowed his best friend, Hiraoka, to marry Michiyo, the woman he himself loved (and still loves). He only realizes his mistake when, for business reasons, his father presses him to marry someone else. What shall he do? He can try to win back Michiyo, but she has a heart condition... The book ends with his possible madness, tormented by the guilty conscience that he has to make amends to the woman he wronged - this all in a frenzied description that could not have been bettered by the French existentialists of many decades later. Soseki's darkest, but also his finest novel. Sore kara was filmed in 1985 by Morita Yoshimitsu with Matsuda Yusaku, and this, too, is a very good film.[Translated by Norma Moore Field, Louisiana State University Press]
Mori Ogai writes Wita sekusuarisu (Vita Sexualis), a satire on the obsession with sex of the Naturalists in the form of a sexual autobiography, from the young protagonist's first exposure to the erotic ukiyo-e woodcuts to his first encounter at age twenty with a professional courtesan. Ogai insisted that the sex instinct, strong as it was, must be considered as only one aspect of human life and not necessarily the most important. There are some interesting vignettes in this novel, which reflect the early Meiji-period: at school and in the dorms the protagonist carries a dagger to protect himself from the aggressive bisexuality of some of the sons of samurai (after all, in the Edo-period nanshoku was quite normal among samurai and priests). We also find him looking up dirty words in a German dictionary, apparently something of all times and all cultures, just as the watching of "dirty pictures" in the form of the shunga the boy "borrows" from his father. And he feels a strong attraction to a mature and voluptuous woman who lives next door. The book ends when the twenty-year old protagonist confesses to his publisher that he is still a virgin and then is taken to an oiran in the Yoshiwara for a quick fix. Although it contains nothing outrageous, the novel was banned by the censor and Ogai was personally reprimanded by the vice-minister of war. As his own high government position made it impossible to criticize this censorship openly, he did so in a story, Chinmoku no to (The Tower of Silence), about the tall towers on Malabar Hill in which the Parsis dispose of their dead - as a symbol for the way in which the Meiji government silenced people who wrote "dangerous books."
(Translation: Vita Sexualis by Kazuji Ninomiya and Sanford Goldstein, Tuttle Publishing)
Iwano Homei, one of the foremost Japanese Naturalists, writes "Tandeki" (Indulgence). "Indulgence" describes Homei's (here called "Tamura") summer in the countryside, where he had gone to write without being disturbed. His lodgings happen to be next to a restaurant where the geisha in residence, Kichiya, performs for customers. She has rather coarse features but gradually Tamura becomes attracted to her and soon they are lovers. But he is not the only one - he realizes his mistress will share herself with anyone, something which makes him shudder, but teaches him that indulgence is the essence of life. He presses Kichiya to become an actress and even sells the clothes of his wife (!) to buy her release from the geisha contract. But then she goes to Tokyo where another lover is waiting to marry her... and Tamura gives her up without regret in this totally unsentimental story. "Tandeki" could not have been written without the example of Tayama Katai's Futon. Homei's stories were so close to his own experiences that some people questioned - even in his own day - whether they should be called novels or diaries.
Iwano Homei (1873-1920) was born in the island of Awaji and studied in Tokyo at the Meiji Gakuin, a Christian college, where his interest in literature was stimulated by Shimazaki Toson. Besides being an important poet in the new style (shintaishi), Homei is also considered as one of the chief representatives of Japanese Naturalism. He also propounded his concept of Naturalism in various critical essays. His best know story is the above, Tandeki. There are no translations of his work.
Nagai Kafu writes "The Fox," one of his best short stories. After returning from his long trip abroad, Kafu had written only about his travels. In this story based on a childhood memory he records the ambivalence he felt toward his authoritarian father and his feeling for his mother. In the end, the fate of the fox in this story brings all notions of human justice into question. It also is very nostalgic, as Kafu's subsequent work would be. At that time, in early Meiji, there were many empty residences that originally belonged to the retainers of the daimyo who had been forced to maintain a second residence in Edo. The father of the narrator has bought up a number of these and built a mansion with a large garden. This means one could still feel close to nature in Tokyo, all the more since a fox roams around killing the chicken in the mansion. The story ends with the desperate hunt for the fox and its death, which seems a gross injustice to the narrator. The story can be interpreted as a "ritual murder (by the father) directed against the archetypal maternal, lurking in the wooded low-lying area below the precipice in the garden," and also as a symbolic drama in which brooding memories stored up in an Edo space are eradicated by the utilitarianism and rationalism of Meiji "civilization and enlightenment." Typically for Kafu, the narrator has already begun to escape from the masculine world of "civilization and enlightenment" that encompassed the father, and has instead set out on his lifelong project of recovering concrete memories of an Edo space suffused with the maternal archetype (Maeda Ai).
[Translated by Lane Dunlop in Autumn Wind and other stories, Tuttle；study in "The Spirits of Abandoned Gardens: On Nagai Kafu's "The Fox"" in Text and the City, Essays on Japanese Modernity by Maeda Ai, edited by James A. Fujii, Duke U.P.]
1910
The literary coterie Shirakaba-ha (White Birch Group) is founded by Mushanokoji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya, Satomi Ton and others. It publishes the literary magazine Shirakaba, which existed from 1910 to 1923. Shirakaba-ha was a loose association of alumni of the prestigious Gakushuin Peer's School in Tokyo. Members (all from powerful and wealthy families, so the government turned a blind eye to their unconventional ideas) included writers, artists and literary critics. The group emphasized idealism, humanism and individualism, over the Naturalism that had been the dominant trend in Japanese literature since 1906. The Shirakaba-ha also promoted European art trends as Expressionism and Post-Impressionism in Japan. And they were interested in Japanese folk art, which had previously been disparaged by traditional art critics. Early members included Shiga Naoya (1883-1971), Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885-1976), Yanagi Soetsu (1889-1961), Satomi Ton (1888-1983) and Arishima Takeo (1878-1923).
The literature written by members of the group was typically of the shishosetsu genre, and was concerned with the life of individuals, often incorporating optimistic philosophy into their work. Some of these individuals came from wealthy families, and attempted to emulate Tolstoy in creating utopian agrarian communes in remote parts of Japan. Because of this positive philosophy, which was very different from that of the Japanese Naturalists, the shishosetsu as written by Shirakaba-ha members is sometimes also called "shinkyo shosetsu," ("state of mind novels"). The "shinkyo shosetsu" writer, like the novelist of other shishosetsu (which because of their strong negative tendency were called "novels of self-destruction"), believes in the ego as the primary subject matter, but where the latter represents the unredeemed self in crisis, the "shinkyo shosetsu" represents the serene and harmonious state of mind arrived at by the protagonist after he has come out victoriously from a life crisis. The novelist's object in writing is to cultivate his mind so as to attain perfect harmony - in this sense literature
is a way of life, a moral training. This is clearest and most beautifully exemplified in the writings of Shiga Naoya (see below).
[Study: Meeting the Sensei: The Role of the Master in Shirakaba Writers, by Maya Mortimer, Brill Leiden]
Shiga Naoya's first story, "Abashiri made" ("As Far As Abashiri"), is published in the Shirakaba magazine. As Donald Richie has said, "...many of Shiga's best pieces consist of a simple incident upon which is brought to bear an enormous weight. Disliking plot with its editorial falsifications, Shiga (like his admirer the film director Ozu Yasujiro) returns to the simple happening all its original meaning" (Japanese Literature Reviewed, p. 223). Shiga's stories are the archetypal shishosetsu, although it should be added that in several of his early stories we have (sometimes even ingenuous) plot in the form of ideal experience or imagination. But most stories are based on either observation or autobiography. Here are some examples from the early stories:
- "One Morning" (Aru asa, 1908): the simple story of a young man who has trouble getting out of bed one morning, leading to a psychological game of resentment and reconciliation between him and his grandmother. An early example of how Shiga takes the small, insignificant events of everyday life and turns them into a work of literary art. The story also "shows the conflict between the protagonist's needs as an individual and his needs as part of a social group," as Roy Starr writes - an important theme in Shiga's work (in An Artless Art, the Zen Aesthetics of Shiga Naoya, p. 20).
- "As Far As Abashiri" (Abashiri made, 1910): a description of the author's brief acquaintance with an impoverished young mother traveling with two fretful children to the northern end of Japan on a train.
- "The Razor" (Kamisori, 1910): an unsuspecting customer has his throat cut by a barber irritated by his vulgarity. A story built on excitement of feeling.
- "The Paper Door" (Fusuma, 1911): two unconnected families happen to sleep in rooms in an inn with only paper sliding doors in between their rooms. There is a small incident when one of the fusuma is briefly opened at night. The narrator interprets it rather self-servingly as "a gesture by the countrified maid of the family next door, to express her love for him."
- "Seibei and His Gourds" (Seibei to hyotan, 1912), a simple story about a boy who collects gourds, selecting them for their aesthetic beauty with an unerring eye. Finally, Seibei's father and teacher force him to stop collecting gourds, but Seibei maintains his aesthetic values in the face of philistine attacks. Perhaps Shiga's motivation for the story came from his unhappiness with his father who judged that literature was unsatisfactory as a vocation.
- "An Incident" (Dekigoto, 1913): we are inside a trolley, full of dozing passengers, when an incident happens: a small boy almost gets run over. The shocked passengers spontaneously make friends with each other. In the meantime, a butterfly observed inside the carriage by the protagonist has flown away. But nothing is meant symbolically here. A perfect story without the convenience of a plot.
- "Han's Crime" (Han no hanzai, 1913), the story of a Chinese juggler's impulsive wife-slaying. In the end, he is judged to be innocent.
[All stories, except "One Morning" translated in The Paper Door and Other Stories by Lane Dunlop, Tuttle]
Shiga Naoya (1883-1971) was born in Ishinomaki (Miyagi Pref.) and later lived in Tokyo, Kyoto and various other parts of Japan. He was a master stylist who excelled at the short story form. He was the son of a successful businessman and received his education at the prestigious Peer's School. Between 1906 and 1910 he studied English and Japanese Literature at Tokyo University. In 1910 he set up the journal Shirakaba, together with like-minded friends from the Peer's School, and the short pieces he published in this magazine helped him establish a reputation as a promising new writer. Besides about 60 short stories and novellas, Shiga Naoya is also famous for the novel Anya koro (A Dark Night's Passing), published between 1921 and 1937. Although he wrote in the shishosetsu form (of which he was probably the foremost practitioner), like other Shirakaba writers his work belongs to what has been called "shinkyo shosetsu" (state of mind novel), as in contrast to the negative and destructive shishosetsu, we find a harmonious and elevated state of mind acquired as a result of overcoming a crisis, and a great clarity of insight.
[Study: An Artless Art, the Zen Aesthetics of Shiga Naoya, by Roy Starrs, Curzon Press]
Mushanokoji Saneatsu writes Omedetaki hito (An Innocent). The hero, who has fallen in love with Tsuru, a young woman in his neighborhood, is time and again rejected by her, but he keeps proposing as each time he is able to convince himself that she didn't mean it. This self-delusion continues when he hears she has married another man, for now he tells himself that she must have been pressed into doing so. With a sort of childish innocence, the hero keeps optimistically believing in the future. Mushanokoji has been said to have added the essential element of self-confidence to the shishosetsu. Most Western critics see Mushanokoji's literature as too simplistic and naive, but in Japan he is highly appreciated for his primitive vitality. I remember Japanese fellow students mentioning him as their favorite author when I studied in Kyoto in the early 1980s.Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885-1976) was a novelist and playwright who went on to become a Tolstoyan humanist in his later years. From 1918 to 1926 he lived in an utopian commune which he founded in Kyushu. Mushanokoji was the son of a viscount and the most aristocratic among his friends at the Peer's School. He was the driving force the Shirakaba-ha or "White Bitch Society," a group that promoted cooperation between artists who had in common that they were opposed to the Naturalists. Mushanokoji is part of the canon with such novellas as Omedetaki hito and Yujo (Friendship). The difference in appreciation outside Japan is demonstrated by the fact that there are no modern translations of his work.
[Study: Meeting the Sensei, The Role of the Master in Shirakaba Writings, by Maya Mortimer, Brill Leiden]
Mon (The Gate) by Natsume Soseki is the portrait of a married couple, who for their transgression in the past have been ostracized from society, but who hold together with a sort of quiet love, in muted suffering. Sosuke and Oyone live in a sort of gentile poverty, Sosuke earns just enough as a low-ranking civil servant to make both ends meet. They rent a rather dark and cheerless house in Tokyo, and have no contact with family, no friends or acquaintances. Their solitary existence is wholly uneventful. You could almost say that they live as recluses in the big city, their gate always closed. This seclusion has been caused by a dark spot in their lives. When he was a promising student at Kyoto University, Sosuke had a good friend, Yasui. Sosuke has shamelessly betrayed this close friend by robbing him of his beautiful wife, causing a scandal in the university town - these were strict times in which students were supposed to be models of society - that ruins both their careers. Their joint betrayal of Yasui has left both Sosuke and Oyone with a feeling of guilt. Although Sosuke loves Oyone tenderly, he is increasingly tormented by the memory of his past behavior.... Sosuke eventually seeks salvation through Zen, by staying at Engakuji in Kamakura, but in vain. (see my post about this novel)
[Translation by William F. Sibley in New York Review Books (replacing the older translation by Francis Mathy in Tuttle Books)]
Tanizaki Junichiro writes "Shisei" (Tattoo / The Tattooer), the first short story written by this major 20th c. author. Set in the Tokugawa period, the story tells how a tattooer becomes enslaved by a beautiful young woman whom he selects originally to be the victim of his painful skill by inscribing a giant spider on her body. Seikichi finds a secret, sadistic pleasure in piercing the skin of his customers with his tattoo needles. His dream is to find a beautiful woman and to inscribe on her skin a tattoo imbued with his own cruel spirit. After searching for four years, he finally finds a young woman who not only has an immaculate white skin, but who also has a hidden, cruel streak. After the artist has tattooed the giant spider on her body, the woman's beauty takes on a demonic, compelling power, in which eroticism is combined with sado-masochism. She becomes the "femme fatale" he has always dreamed about, but he also becomes her first victim. The epitome of the later literary style of Tanizaki is revealed in this early story: the author's indulgence in sensual romanticism, his taste for the grotesque, his aspiration for feminine beauty, his admiration for sadistic women... It marked the birth of a new romantic literature in the form of modern decadence, by fusing "Edo taste" with Western Modernism. The femme-fatale is a theme repeated in many of Tanizaki's early works, including "Kirin" (1910), "Shonen" ("The Children", 1911), "Himitsu" ("The Secret," 1911), and "Akuma" ("Devil", 1912). "Shisei" was filmed in 1966 as Irezumi by Masumoto Yasuzo, with Wakao Ayako. Another (contemporary) adaptation was made in 2007 by Zeze Takahisa.
[Trans. Howard Hibbet, in Seven Japanese Stories, Vintage).
Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965) was a master storyteller and stylist whose novels have influenced numerous writers in Japan. He was born in Tokyo, but moved to the Kansai area after the Great Tokyo Earthquake in 1923. Tanizaki started his writing career with sensual and decadent short stories as "Shisei" (The Tattooer) in which a tattoo artist inscribes a giant, evil spider on the back of a beautiful woman - this gives her a demonic power of which the artist becomes the first victim, something he masochistically accepts. Other novels, as Naomi, reflect the rapid modernization of Japanese society in the tale of a dandy who tries to groom a cafe girl with English and music lessons and in his obsession puts up with all her whims and even infidelities. After relocating to Western Japan, Tanizaki's dandyism and fascination with the West were replaced with a renewed appreciation of classical Japanese culture, as is evidenced by the essay In Praise of Shadows. His renewed interest in classical Japanese literature culminated in his multiple translations into modern Japanese of the eleventh-century classic The Tale of Genji (1941, 1954 & 1965). He first lived in (still rather Western) Ashiya, where he wrote masterworks as Arrowroot, The Reed Cutter and A Portrait of Shunkin - all stories of men who find happiness in absolute devotion to haughty or unapproachable women. He also started on what would become his most famous novel, The Makioka Sisters, a realistic tale about the decline of a proud Kansai family, which he completed five years later after moving to Kyoto in 1948. Tanizaki had of course often visited Kyoto even when he lived in the Kanto and was quite familiar with the city. The Shimogamo of his last Kyoto address returns in the beautiful novella The Bridge of Dreams - which Tanizaki wrote three years after he had exchanged the cold Kyoto winters for the warmer climes of Atami. Tanizaki was shortlisted for the Nobel prize in literature, but died in 1965 before anything could come of that. He was buried in the Honenin temple in Kyoto.
[Studies: Chambers, Anthony Hood, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki's Fiction, Harvard U.P.; Gessel, Van C. Three Modern Novelists, Kodansha International; Ito, Ken Kenneth, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki's Fictional Worlds, Stanford U.P.]
Mori Ogai writes Seinen (Youth). In his creative work, Mori Ogai went through 4 phases: the three novellas as Maihime, written in a classical style but with a modern content; this was followed by a long period in which Mori Ogai was active (and very influential) as translator and critic, but published no new creative work; the second period from 1909 to 1912, in which Ogai wrote contemporary stories about his own experiences in a clear, modern style; the period from 1912 to 1916 in which Ogai concentrated on historical stories, often in a classical style; and the years from 1916 when Ogai wrote three biographies of doctors from the Edo period. Ogai was inspired by Natsume Soseki's Sanshiro when he wrote Seinen as his own novel of youthful discovery of the inner life. He was also inspired by the German "Bildungsroman," such as Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Ogai's protagonist, Koizumi Junichi, is, like Sanshiro, a young man coming from the provinces to Tokyo in order to experience the excitement of the big city. Ogai himself appears in the book in the guise of the writer Hirata Fuseki. With themes as self-recognition and resignation, Seinen is best read in conjunction with Vita Sexualis, another account of a young man coming to maturity, in the intellectual as well as emotional sense, as well is the slightly later The Wild Geese. Youth is a great source of information about the intellectual, social and artistic attitudes of around 1910. It is full of authentic atmosphere.
(Translation: Mori Ogai, Youth and Other Stories, ed. J. Thomas Rimer)
Ie (The Family) by Shimazaki Toson, a sprawling novel that describes the disintegration of the Koizumi and Hashimoto families over a twelve-year period. Central are the characters of Koizumi Sankichi, a writer who is a schoolteacher in a poor mountain village; his older sister Otane who has married into the Hashimoto family; and Oyuki, the wife of Sankichi. Nothing is going as it should: Oyuki seems to be corresponding with a former lover, and the traditional business of the Hashimoto family declines. Otane tries to hold things together, even as her husband runs away with a geisha. Sankichi moves his family to Tokyo. While he struggles as a novelist, his children die from undernourishment. Friction with his wife Oyuki increases as Sankichi is on the verge of an incestuous relationship with a niece. Shota, the son of Otane, tries to revive the family fortunes by playing the stock market, but he fails and he dies from tuberculosis. At the end of the novel, the exhausted Sankichi and Oyuki seem to have reached a quiet understanding with each other. The novel, which has been designated a masterpiece of Japanese Naturalism, is largely an autobiographical account of Toson's own life and many members of his family appear as characters.
(Translation: The Family by Cecilia Segawa Seigle, University of Tokyo Press)
Uta andon (A Song by Lantern Light) by Izumi Kyoka, two stories combined into one, about a young No actor who has been ostracized from his family because of his arrogance. The story ends in reconciliation. The reader must jump back and forth between two narratives, two sets of characters and two sites of narration until these merge near the end. The story also contains numerous references to Jippensha Ikku's famous novel Shank's Mare (Tokaido dochi hizakurige, 1802-1809), and especially the part where the two heroes become separated when traveling in the Ise area. It also makes use of the No play The Diver (Ama), in which the heroine sacrifices herself by diving deep into the sea. The structure can be said to anticipate cinematic collage. Boldly experimental, this is usually considered as Kyoka's masterwork. Filmed in 1943 by Naruse Mikio (with a changed, happy ending).
(Translation: In Light of Shadows by Charles Shiro Inouye)
Tono monogatari (Legends of Tono) by Yanagita Kunio. Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) was interested in both literature and folklore studies and Legends of Tono stands at the borderline of these two activities: it is excellent literature but also a precious record of peasant life in the rural Tono area. Many of the 119 short pieces are a sort of "sketches of memories," i.e. "remarkable and extraordinary experiences told in the first person." Although two fairy tales have been included as well, many of the records are not even stories, but flimsy pieces of things heard or seen. That makes the book all the more interesting as a real account of the world of Tono - both things seen and unseen... much space is taken up by the fear for the supernatural.
(see my post about this book)
[Translated by Ronald A. Morse, Lexington Books]Chikamatsu Shuko writes Wakareta Tsuma ni Okuru Tegami (Letter to My Divorced Wife). A typical autobiographical shishosetsu describing the solitude and misery of the narrator, who has been left by his wife, despairing about the poverty and misery of their life together. This story has not been translated.
Chikamatsu Shuko (1876-1944) was born in Okayama and graduated from what is now Waseda University. He became a prominent writer of Shishosetsu in the Naturalist manner. Except the above title, famous works are Giwaku (Suspicion, 1913) and Kurokami (Black Hair, 1922).
1911
Mori Ogai starts serializing Gan (The Wild Goose), a story about the tentative attraction between a medical student, Okada, who must soon leave for Germany, and Otama, the beautiful young mistress of an unpleasant money-lender, Suezo. She has become the moneylender's mistress to alleviate the poverty of her aging father and has been set up by him in a small house on a quiet street. The student often passes her house on his daily walk, and they start noticing each other - he even kills a snake for her - but the dream is more on her side and in the end he leaves Tokyo before anything like a romance can develop. Although the narrative is introduced and closed by a friend of Okada, the point of view later shifts to Otama, focusing on her situation and showing how she develops a modern self-consciousness and learns to stand up against her patron. This nostalgic and lyrical story is also a historical recreation of the Tokyo of around 1880, which is described in detail: the daily routine of Okada's walks, the environs of the old Tokyo Imperial University, the lonely slope called Muenzaka where Otama lives. Ogai records the activity of the university students, their boardinghouse lives, and their browsing in secondhand bookshops. Beautifully filmed in 1953 by Toyoda Shiro with Takamine Hideko.
[Translated by Burton Watson, University of Michigan; older translation as The Wilde Geese by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, Tuttle]
Nagai Kafu writes Sumidagawa (The River Sumida), his most lyrical but also elegiac story, about a disappearing way of life. After his return from abroad, Kafu sought the remnants of his own culture in various corners of modern Tokyo. In Sumidagawa, he attempts to find the shadows of the past in the lives of such people as a female instructor of tokiwazu music, a professional haiku master, a geisha, and Kabuki actors. The tale starts and ends with episodes about haiku master Ragetsu; in between these chapters we find the affecting story of a boy named Chokichi, his nephew. Chokichi's mother, although a teacher of traditional music, wants her son to follow the new Meiji times and go to university. She sacrifices herself to pay for his school so that he can become a bureaucrat. Chokichi is however drawn to the Kabuki and its music, and wants to become a professional shamisen player. At the same time, he looses his girlfriend, Oito, as she has to become a geisha and suddenly has grown up and become too old for him (reminding us of the story Udekurabe by Higuchi Ichiyo). At the end of the story, despairing of ever finding happiness, Chokichi falls ill, having caught typhus. The ending is open, we don't know whether he will recover as his uncle fervently hopes. The most beautiful section is the opening of the story, a sort of michiyuki, in which Ragetsu travels from his house on the left bank of the Sumida to visit his sister and nephew, who live in Imado on the other bank. Impressive are also the descriptions of the changes brought by the seasons to the river scenery, which occur in every of the ten chapters. As usual in Japanese novels, the story is of less importance than the atmosphere Kafu is evoking. As Donald Keene says, "The river, the little houses on the embankment, the bridges, the groves of trees visible in the temple grounds across the river are as much 'persons' in the story as Chokichi, Oito, and the rest. [...] The characters are hardly more than sketched, and remain two-dimensional, but the composition, as in a beautifully executed ukiyo-e, is flawless, and the coloring exquisite." (Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, p. 423). Indeed, the story reminded me of the romantic Meiji-period ukiyo-e of Kobayashi Kiyochika.
(Translation: Kafu the Scribbler, The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafu by Edward Seidensticker, Stanford University Press)
Masamune Hakucho writes the Naturalist story "Doro ningyo" (The Clay Doll), a fictionalized account of the unhappy start of his own married life. After having met a number of prospective brides without being impressed by any one of them, Moriya Jukichi, the central figure, is talked into marrying a young woman from the provinces with a traditional upbringing for whom he feels no affection. In an apathetic state of mind he agrees, but is later mortified to have to share his life with a wife he can only regard as "a doll of clay." From her side, the wife has been schooled to expect that patience and devotion to her husband will eventually be rewarded, but she waits in vain for some sign of affection from him, as he spends most nights out of the house with other women. A sarcastic story that demonstrates the negative point of an arranged marriage.
(Translation in The Columbia Anthology I)
Masamune Hakucho (real name: Masamune Tadao; 1879-1962) was a novelist, playwright and critic from Okayama. After studying English as a missionary school, at age 17 he moved to Tokyo, where he entered the English course of what is now Waseda University (receiving lessons in Shakespeare from Tsubouchi Shoyo; in the new century, Waseda University also became the center of Japanese Naturalism). He was a follower of the Japanese Christian thinker Uchimura Kanzo and was baptized in 1897. Uchimura promoted a mild brand of New England Protestantism which appealed more as philosophy than as religion and which gave young writers a perspective from which to criticize the Meiji state. Hakucho lost his faith already a few years later, like the other writers who had embraced Christianity in the 1890s. The first story proclaiming Hakucho's emergence as a Naturalist writer was Jinai (Dust) from 1907, a story in which he captured the bleakness of the life of a proofreader in a newspaper office. This and other stories that followed, such as Doko e (Whither?) from 1908, were deeply pessimistic, even close to despair. Shisha seisha (The Dead and the Living, 1916) treats the breakdown of the family system through the selfishness of contemporary urban life. Later in life, Hakucho mainly wrote plays and criticism, including a authoritative history of the Naturalist movement in Japan. Akutagawa rated Hakucho as the "best of the Naturalists."
Part One (1885-1905) - Part Two (1905-1912) - Part Three (1912-1926) -
[Reference works used: Dawn to the West by Donald Keene (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984); Modern Japanese Novelists, A Biographical Dictionary by John Lewell (New York, Tokyo and London: Kodansha International, 1993); Narrating the Self, Fictions of Japanese Modernity by Tomi Suzuki (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Oe and Beyond, Fiction in Contemporary Japan, ed. by Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); Origins of Modern Japanese Literature by Karatani Kojin (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993); The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, 2 vols, ed. by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 and 2007); The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature by Susan J. Napier (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Writers & Society in Modern Japan by Irena Powell (New York, Tokyo and London: Kodansha International, 1983).]