Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  Shortly after his Essence of the Novel, Tsubouchi published the Character of Modern Students, a work intended to embody his artistic theories. It is not much of a book, and hardly distinguishes itself from the popular fiction which Tsubouchi so roundly condemned. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this novel is that the heroes are students (modeled on Tsubouchi’s friends) who speak a jargon heavily larded with English, and thus identify themselves as being “enlightened.”

  The first important novel of the new Japanese literature was The Drifting Cloud (1887-1889) by Futabatei Shimei. It is written almost entirely in the colloquial, which in itself was a great achievement. Undoubtedly Futabatei was influenced by Turgenev, some of whose stories he translated, but The Drifting Cloud is an original work and no mere imitation. The conversations capture with a marvelous exactness the speech of the day, and the character portrayals are brilliant. It is astonishing that within twenty years after the Meiji Restoration the imprint of the West had become so strong on Japanese society, and that any novelist caught up in the frantically rapid evolution of that society could have observed it with such detachment and humor. A new kind of hero made his appearance in Japanese fiction. Unlike the all-conquering soldiers and lovers we find in earlier writings, the leading character of The Drifting Cloud is timid before the woman he loves, loses his job, becomes the object of the laughter and contempt of everyone, and finally exasperates even the reader with his ineptitude. In one typical scene Bunzō (the hero), having been rebuffed by his sweetheart, lies on his bed, grief-stricken. But he is incapable even of keeping his thoughts on his sorrow—they wander to a consideration of the grain of the wood in the ceiling, from that subject to the remembrance of his physics teacher, a bearded foreigner, and then to a book which had once impressed him. Suddenly he recalls with a cry his lost love. We see in Bunzō a Japanese overwhelmed by the pushings of a world composed of people who have read Self-Help.

  Futabatei’s extraordinary novel did not sweep all before it. Another, more powerful group of authors continued older traditions while paying lip service to the new. Such works as Ozaki Kōyō’s Golden Demon (1897) combined a lushly poetic style with sentimental plots filled with the wildest improbabilities. Enormously popular in their own day, they have dated as The Drifting Cloud has not. One work in a more traditional vein which retains its vitality is Growing Up (1895) by the woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyō. This tale of children in the Yoshiwara, the licensed quarter of Tokyo, is closer in style to the seventeenth-century novel than to works of its own day, but the sharpness of its details and its descriptions still excites our admiration today.

  While the novel and the short story were making striking advances, the Japanese drama and poetry continued in much the same vein as before. In the case of the drama, the exigencies of the theatre were such that no great changes were immediately possible. The most that one could expect was an occasional Western touch, whether the striking of a clock or the appearance of a character in Western dress. Within the framework of the existing dramatic arts certain steps were taken to achieve greater historical accuracy in the presentations, sometimes with ludicrous results. In the 1890’s the Shimpa (or “New School”) drama gained public favor with plays based on such contemporary events as the Sino-Japanese War of 1894. Shimpa, however, relied more on dramatizations of novels than on original plays, and its greatest successes were with the Golden Demon and similarly melodramatic works. Some Western plays (including Shakespeare) were performed by Shimpa, but it was not until the foundation of new theatre movements after the Russo-Japanese War that Western dramas received serious productions.

  In poetry we find in the 1880’s and 1890’s numerous translations of European works, and in their wake Japanese poems on similar themes. The most successful of these poems, one step removed from the originals, was undoubtedly “The Song of the Autumn Wind” (1896) by Shimazaki Tōson. Although clearly derived from Shelley’s ode, it was graceful enough to survive in its own right as a Japanese poem, and indeed marked the beginning of modern poetry in the country. It begins:

  Softly the autumn wind has come,

  Rising from the western sea ...

  and has some rather striking verses:

  Scattering East and scattering West,

  Like priests of Brahma who taught the way,

  Tossed about by autumn winds,

  The leaves go fluttering down.

  A poem by another poet of the day startles us with its opening lines: “Oh, to be in Yamato, now that October’s there.” Such close imitations of European models amuse us, but it should be remembered that the only examples of new poetry which could inspire the Japanese were familiar European ones. If they had based their poetry movement on, say, Chinese verse, the results would seem less comic. Japanese translations were, in fact, the way that much European literature came to be known in China and elsewhere in eastern Asia.

  The speed of the development of the forms and themes of poetry during the 1890’s and 1900’s was astonishing. In 1896 Shimazaki delighted his contemporaries with his lines after Shelley; in 1909 Kitahara Hakushū began his “Secret Song of the Heretics” with:

  I believe in the heretical teachings of a degenerate age, the witchcraft of the Christian God ...

  and a few years later he wrote lines like this:

  My sorrow wears the thin flannel garb of one-sided love.

  Within the space of fifteen years the Japanese poets had leaped from Shelley to the French Symbolists, and it was not long before Dadaism, Surrealism, and all the other movements in French poetry had their Japanese admirers. There was a difference between these borrowings and the earlier imitations of the poetry, painting, and other arts of China. The Chinese poetry written by Japanese was generally a tissue of allusions to Chinese scenes and events, and only rarely betrayed its Japanese origins; the Dadaist or Surrealist poetry was almost always about Japan, or at least as much about Japan as anywhere. Imitation of Chinese models had bound the Japanese to rigid conventions which kept most poets from describing their own experiences. The imitation of French models, on the other hand, freed poets to explore parts of their experience and imagination which could never before have found expression in poetry. The poets did not always wear this freedom easily. Some of them spilled over into unbridled and perhaps meaningless fantasy; others became so cryptic that a poem of a single line requires pages of exegesis. What, for example, are we to make of this verse written in English, a stanza of a longer poem in the same vein?

  (well, go on!)

  qwiim qwick qwiim qwick

  qririm qririm qririm. ...

  qwiim qwick qwiim qwick

  qririm qririm qririm. ...

  (ah rain bow!)

  Granted that this stanza has a logic of its own and a compelling directness of expression, one might wish for a trifle more content.

  The poets who wrote in the more conservative waka and haiku forms also began to discover the new possibilities in expression. The waka reached modernity about thirty years ahead of the haiku, which proved the least flexible medium, but even the haiku caught up, as the following creations witness:

  Hitohachi no kigiku

  A bowl of yellow chrysanthemums.

  or:

  Hi e yamu

  I am sick with the sun.

  People have attempted to divine the meanings intended by the poets, but it remains a real question whether any such short poetic utterances can be called haiku. Liberation may sometimes be too complete.

  On the whole, modern Japanese drama and poetry have not been the equal of the novels, short stories, and other works of prose. There are some remarkable exceptions, but one cannot escape the feeling that the drama and poetry have yet to reach their full maturity. In the drama we find survivals of the old-fashioned plots beloved of the Kabuki audiences, and the modern theatre has been slow to catch on. Among the few modern plays which have won lasting popularity have been those by Kikuchi Kan, including The Madman on the Roof (1916), given in this
volume. More recently, the play Twilight Crane1 (1949) by Kinoshita Junji won acclaim for its skillful use of Japanese folklore. As yet, however, the number of playwrights is small and most audiences seem to prefer period pieces to works on contemporary subjects.

  The modern movement in poetry has been a greater success, in spite of the eccentricities detailed above. There is a personal and very moving quality in some of the more straightforward poetry, and the Japanese Surrealists at times rival their French masters. One must admit, however, that much of the modern poetry seems curiously lacking in substance. There is in particular an extraordinary dearth of intellectual interest. One finds the pangs of love, the praise of nature, and the battle cry of the workers, but of the poet’s concern with intellectual matters we find little trace. The gloom of The Wasteland pervades a considerable portion of modern Japanese poetry, but we search in vain for T. S. Eliot’s preoccupation with such subjects as ritual and religion, the poetry of the past, and the ways in which time alters all things. This poverty in Japanese poetry is not difficult to understand. The modern poets are by their own choice cut off from the heritage of Japanese (and Chinese) literature. No falling cherry blossoms or reddening maple leaves are permitted to grace their verses except ironically, and the rest of the repertory of images worn smooth by centuries of poets is considered too remote and dead to be of relevance. On the other hand, knowledge of Western poetry is not very profound either among poets or readers. A Japanese poet is unlikely to think of quoting Dante; if he did, the quotation as such would have little meaning to most readers. Japanese modern poetry tends thus to be bounded by the translatable parts of foreign poetry: the decadence of Rimbaud without his overtones, the gloom of T. S. Eliot without his sense of tradition, the fantasy of Max Jacob without his religion. There is little joy or hope in this poetry except in the “affirmative” writings from the left. The sorrow over the falling of the cherry blossoms is now sorrow over the crumbling walls of a bombed-out site; instead of soaking his sleeve with tears, the poet shouts his grief to the wind.

  That the poetry is prevailingly dark, traditionless, and nonintellectual does not mean that it lacks value. Within the limits the modern poets have set for themselves there is much beautifully conceived and sometimes hauntingly moving poetry. The poems of Hagiwara Sakutarō are perhaps the best of recent years. They seem the deepest felt, and, although clearly influenced by European examples, retain a feeling for the music and potentialities of the Japanese language. Hagiwara is also known as the first poet to have successfully composed in the colloquial.

  The changes in the drama and poetry which have only slowly been accomplished, or which must await the future for fruition, were realized in prose at the beginning of this century, thanks to the emergence of an extraordinary cluster of gifted writers. One specific event of importance in the achievement of maturity in the novel was the four years’ residence in Germany, from 1884 to 1888, of Mori Ōgai, the first major Japanese writer to have lived in Europe. Mori produced a volume of translations of German poetry in 1889, and in the following year published The Dancing Girl, the account of an unhappy attachment between a German dancer and a young Japanese. With this touching story the “romantic” movement in Japanese literature is considered to have begun; it is important in any case as the earliest work of the new literature to have been written by a man who had actually lived in Europe and knew at first-hand something of its emotional and spiritual life. The Dancing Girl was, in Mori’s words, an “Ich roman”—a story so closely based on personal experiences as to be a kind of dramatized diary. This type of autobiographical fiction was to occupy a disproportionately large place in modern Japanese literature.

  The other titan of Meiji literature, whose name is usually linked with Mori’s, was Natsume Sōseki. Natsume began his career as a scholar of English literature, and from 1900 to 1903 studied in England. In 1905 he published his first work of fiction, I Am a Cat. In the following years he produced a series of novels which were enthusiastically acclaimed in his day and even now retain their popularity. His early works, such as Botchan (1906), are filled with light, satirical touches; but Natsume’s tone darkened as he turned to subjects of increasingly philosophical content. His novels deserve a larger place in this anthology, but unfortunately their reflective tone and rather deliberate pace do not permit extracts to be made successfully from the later works.2 Suffice it to say that in the years since his death Natsume’s popularity has never wavered, and his books are still finding new readers today.

  The appearance of Natsume on the scene would in itself have represented a major event in Japanese literature, but by an unusual set of circumstances the whole of the literary world burst into an almost unprecedented period of creativity during the years 1905-1915. This was the decade when some writers, like Mori Ōgai and Shimazaki Tōson, who had previously enjoyed a measure of fame, produced their best works; when others, like Natsume Sōseki and the poet Ishikawa Takuboku, wrote all of their literary production; and when still others, like Nagai Kafū and Tanizaki Junichiro, began their long, distinguished careers. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 undoubtedly was at least indirectly responsible; the victory may well have given the Japanese the confidence to produce great literature. Be that as it may, there is an almost bewildering profusion of talent in this decade. The next three decades were not to produce more than a fraction of the number of new writers of importance as appeared between the years 1905 and 1915.

  The termination of the Russo-Japanese War may be said, in political terms, to have heralded the coming of age of Japan after its period of apprenticeship to the West. Japan had arrived among the powers, and her literature now began to win itself a place in the attention of the world. That the war had in some sense crystallized the new literary movement in Japan does not mean that the writers of the time were jingoists exulting over the victory. On the contrary, even those men whose hearts had leaped at initial reports of Japanese successes were disillusioned by the time the war was over. Tayama Katai’s One Soldier (1908) suggests the mingled feelings the war aroused in the minds of sensitive writers.

  Japanese chroniclers of the literary history of the modern period divide the various authors into a large number of schools—neo-Realist, Naturalist, Sensualist, etc.—and these schools in turn are splintered into subsections, denoting influences and associations. Such categories are of little concern to Western readers and need hardly bother us here. We should, however, note the immense ferment of activity in many directions. The passion for European literature continued, but to it was added a growing interest in the old Japan. Nagai Kafū published in 1909, the year after his return from five years’ stay in the United States and France, The River Sumida, an exquisitely fashioned elegy for the vanishing Tokyo of the past. Nagai was influenced by French examples, but in subtle ways that might easily escape notice. Japanese literature was passing from a period when European works were slavishly imitated to one when an awareness and receptivity to them was not permitted to blot out the native heritage.

  The conflict between the claims of East and West is particularly apparent in the works of Tanizaki Junichirō. His early productions dealt mainly with themes which might have been suggested by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, and are marked by strong overtones of sadism and masochism. This period reached its height with A Fool’s Love (1924), the story of a man who is so fascinated by a coarse, European-looking waitress that he tolerates her repeated cruelties. Even in this work, however, there is implied a condemnation of the excessive worship paid to Western things. In the next major novel, Some Prefer Nettles (1928),3 the hero is drawn both to an Eurasian prostitute and to a Kyoto beauty. Each stands for a world, and we sense that it is Japan which will win. The later novels of Tanizaki expand this conservative aspect of his work. Many of them deal with events of Japanese history of the recent or distant past. The Thin Snow (1944-1947), perhaps Tanizaki’s masterpiece, tells of the Japan of the years immediately before the Pacific War, but contains many sugge
stions of The Tale of Genji, a work which Tanizaki has translated into modern Japanese.

  Another writer who first gained celebrity in the ten years after the Russo-Japanese War was Shiga Naoya. His works, probably more than those of any other modern author, have exercised a commanding influence over the Japanese literature of today. He did not invent the “I novel,” as we have seen, but his success with this genre led many other writers to seek to salvage bits worthy of preservation from the incidents of their lives. This absorption with the petty details of their own lives may represent an attempt on the part of Japanese writers to create individuality for themselves. I am tempted to link this literary tendency with the extraordinary craze for the camera in Japan. The desire to preserve the memory of a meeting or celebration with a commemorative photograph is, after all, not so different from the intent of many “I novels.” In both cases it is assumed that the faithful portrayal of an individual makes for individuality, but, as some of the lesser imitators of Shiga Naoya have demonstrated, this is not necessarily the case.

  Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, who also published his first works during the decade after the Russo-Japanese War, was able to create true individuality in his novels without intruding himself. In 1915 Rashōmon appeared, a work whose brilliant, rather unhealthy style has magnetized readers ever since. Rashōmon, like many others of Akutagawa’s works, germinated from a story in one of the old collections. To the framework of events of an ancient tale Akutagawa added modern psychological insights and the glitter of his style. Towards the latter part of his career Akutagawa also wrote some autobiographical fiction, and it too is touched with the morbid glow of his more objective writings.