Five Modern Japanese Novelists

by Donald Keene

  Ōe was not alone in this conviction. On several occasions when I have given a lecture in Japan on a subject such as the appreciation of Japanese literature in foreign countries, during the question period after the lecture somebody has asked me why foreigners translate only works that are redolent of kachō-fūgetsu (flowers, butterflies, the wind, and the moon), a term for the conventionally admired sights of nature found in traditional Japanese works of literature. It is obviously not true that only works characterized by flowers and butterflies have been translated, but I know what my interlocutor means. For so long, the appreciation of Japanese art in the West has been expressed in terms of the damnable adjective exquisite, which, in praising a work, reduces it to minuscule dimensions. Yes, the haiku is very short and by no means as powerful as an epic poem; yes, the most flawlessly executed netsuke does not compare with a masterpiece by Cellini, let alone an example of heroic sculpture; but a haiku that is no more than exquisite, a netsuke that, although charming, suggests nothing of larger dimension, is no more than a toy.

  For Japanese authors whose writings are intended to be political gestures, even the deliberate ugliness of a novel like Kawabata’s The Lake (Mizuumi) does not absolve it from the charge of being permeated with flowers and butterflies. These authors do not want to be praised for their flawless use of suggestion or their poetic evocations of nature; they refuse to embellish their works with such typically Japanese features lest they not be taken seriously. One can sympathize with their determination to transcend the particularity of being Japanese, but surely only the least sensitive reader would ever suppose that the novels of Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima were nothing more than exquisite.

  Kawabata suffers most from the demand that the writer be engagé. In an autobiographical account of 1934 he wrote,

  For me love, more than anything else, is my lifeline. But I have the feeling that I have never taken a woman’s hand in mine with romantic intentions. Some women may accuse me of lying, but it is my impression that this is not a mere figure of speech. And it is not only women I have never taken by the hand. I wonder if it isn’t true of life itself as far as I am concerned?

  When preparing to write the novel The Asakusa Crimson Gang (Asakusa kurenai dan), a work about a cheap and rather sordid entertainment quarter of Tokyo, Kawabata walked the streets of the tawdry neighborhood, notebook in hand, at all hours of the day and night, but as he later wrote,

  Although I spent the night in the park a number of times, all I did was walk. I never became acquainted with any of the young delinquents. I never addressed a word to the vagrants, either. I never set foot inside any of the cheap restaurants. I visited every one of the thirty-odd amusement houses, but took my notes from a seat in the audience and did not talk to the entertainers…. I never stood at the entrances to the flophouses around the park and never went into the cafés.

  Kawabata’s detachment, suggested by this passage, was such that after the Great Earthquake of 1923 he calmly wandered through the streets of Tokyo for weeks, inspecting the burned-out ruins and making mental notes of sights from which most people averted their eyes. But he was far from impassive. He wrote,

  I desire to go not to Europe or America but to the ruined countries of the Orient. I am in large measure the citizen of a ruined country. No sight of human beings has stirred my heart as much as the endless queues of earthquake victims, looking exactly like refugees…. Perhaps it is because I was an orphan with nowhere I could call home that I have never lost my taste for melancholic wanderings. I am always dreaming, though I never manage to forget myself in any dream. I am awake even as I dream, but I hide this with my taste for back streets.

  In November 1949, in his capacity as president of the Japanese PEN Club, Kawabata visited Hiroshima to inspect the damage caused by the atomic bomb. He seemed impassive before the terrible sights, and this impression of serene tranquillity with respect to everything except his own internal anguish was confirmed in the eyes of unfriendly observers when Kawabata spent time sightseeing in Kyoto on his return from Hiroshima. Kawabata later explained,

  I wondered if I was not guilty of a contradiction in having gone to see the sights and art of the old capital on my way back from the horrible ruins left by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima…. But I cannot think there was any contradiction. I am, after all, the same person. Perhaps Hiroshima and Kyoto are the two poles of Japan today. I have been examining two such disparate sights at the same time and would like to examine them even more carefully. It goes without saying that looking at old objects of art is not a hobby or a diversion. It is a matter of life and death.

  Kawabata said several times that he wanted to write a novel about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said that regardless of whether or not he ever wrote such a novel, the fact that he had come to want to write it gave him a feeling of being alive. He never wrote about the bombs, but the collection of art that he started to form after the war grew until it became a major holding. He once described how a small object of art—a hand sculpted by Rodin, a nō mask, or a tea bowl—could sustain him when he spent the night at his desk. For this deeply sensitive, deeply feeling, but sometimes inarticulate man, art was not only a consolation but another voice.

  During the course of his career, Kawabata wrote in different styles on different themes, but unlike Tanizaki, Mishima, and even Abe, he wrote no works of historical fiction, surprising for a man so committed to the Japanese tradition. Again, unlike Tanizaki and Mishima, he had served for a time as the spokesman for an avant-garde movement, and he did not abandon its techniques even at the end of his career. The seeming contradictions between Kawabata the eulogist of “beauty and sadness” (to use the title of one of his late works) and Kawabata the scenarist of the first avantgarde Japanese film or between Kawabata the preserver of Japanese tradition and Kawabata the explorer of ruined streets give his writings a complexity that made him a fit representative of modern Japanese literature and a worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize.

  Few modern Japanese writers have grown up under unhappier circumstances than Kawabata did. By the age of three, he had lost both his parents. Four years later his grandmother died, and two years after that his sister died, leaving him alone with his grandfather. Attending funerals became so routine a feature of his life that Mishima (at whose funeral Kawabata presided) called him sōshiki no meijin, the master of funerals. This name also was the title of one of his earliest published works (1923).

  The boy grew up at Minō, north of Osaka. I remember that Kawabata’s face lighted up with pleasure when I mentioned once that I had visited the waterfall in Minō Park; he said he used to pass it every day on the way to and from school. There cannot have been much pleasure on returning from school to the house he shared with his grandfather. Kawabata’s first work, “Diary of a Sixteen-Year-Old” (Jūroku sai no nikki), describes twelve days in May 1914, a week before the grandfather died. According to the afterword Kawabata wrote in 1925 when he first published the work, he had found the completely forgotten manuscript in an uncle’s storehouse. He wrote, “I confronted the honest emotions of a forgotten past. But the grandfather I had described was uglier than the grandfather of my memory. For ten years my mind had been constantly cleansing my grandfather’s image.”

  After a stylistic examination of the diary, some scholars opined that despite Kawabata’s insistence on its authenticity, it was probably composed in 1925. Perhaps the most convincing evidence to support their conclusion is that the style of the diary, unlike that of other examples of Kawabata’s juvenilia, is free from the stylistic flourishes one would expect from a bookish boy of fifteen. But regardless of the date of composition, it is an extraordinary evocation of the relations between a boy and his dying grandfather. The love—and the disgust—that the helpless invalid arouses in the boy is conveyed by the choice of details.

  Perhaps the best-known passage is one in which the boy returns home and finds that his grandfather, now blind and almost unable to mo
ve, has been waiting impatiently for him to return. The grandfather asks the boy to bring the urine glass and put his penis into it:

  I had no choice but to expose him and do what he asked, though it went against the grain.

  “Is it in? Is it all right? I’m starting now. All right?” Couldn’t he feel his own body?

  “Ahh, ahh, it hurts. Ohh. It hurts something terrible.” It hurt him to urinate. His breathing was so labored it sounded as if it might stop any minute, but there rose from the depths of the urine glass the sound of the pure water of a valley stream.

  “Ohh. It hurts.” The pain seemed more than he could bear. As I listened to his voice I felt the tears come to my eyes.

  The water had boiled, so I gave him some tea. Coarse tea. I had to prop him up for each sip he drank. The bony face, the white hair ravaged by baldness. The quivering hands of bones and skin. The Adam’s apple of his scrawny neck, bobbing up and down with each gulp. Three cups of tea.

  It is hard to believe that a boy who was much under the influence of old-fashioned literature could write so simply about the death of his closest relative. But some details, such as the hope he expressed that if he kept writing the diary until it reached a hundred pages his grandfather would recover, ring true.

  Kawabata’s first published story, “A View of the Yasukuni Festival” (Shōkonsai ikkei, 1921), was in a totally dissimilar mood. It is the story of a circus equestrienne and her friends, told in a Modernist manner. The conversations are fragmentary and sometimes cryptic; Kawabata deliberately made it difficult to read. As a story it is immature, but the jagged style in the manner of Paul Morand’s Ouvert la nuit (1922) attracted attention, and the author’s noninvolvement with the characters—typical not only of this Modernist style but also of Kawabata’s oeuvre—was praised as well.

  Kawabata’s most important work of this period was the story “The Izu Dancer” (Izu no odoriko, 1926), the work that not only brought him fame but remains the one for which he is most remembered even today, more than his novels. In order to shake off the depression of being jilted by a girl he had intended to marry, Kawabata went on a walking tour of the Izu Peninsula in the autumn of 1918. He fell in with a group of traveling entertainers and was touched by the readiness with which they accepted him. He was especially gratified to overhear several of the performers agree when discussing him that he was “nice”; he had convinced himself that no one had ever really liked him. It is hard to believe from the beauty of the face in photographs of Kawabata as an old man that when young he was almost grotesquely ugly. Being painfully aware of his ugliness, he also was relieved to discover that it did not bother the troupe.

  The narrator of “The Izu Dancer” is attracted to the girl who plays the drum. He thinks of asking her to spend the night in his room, but when by accident he sees her emerge naked from the steam of an outdoor hot spring, he realizes that she is still a child, despite her grownup clothes and way of arranging her hair. This discovery, far from disappointing him, frees him of constraint, and he happily accompanies the troupe to Shimoda, at the end of the Izu Peninsula, where they part. Aboard the ship that takes him back to Tokyo, he weeps, but not out of sadness.

  The popularity of “The Izu Dancer” has been attributed to its being a rare example in modern Japanese literature of the pure love of adolescents. Although the student hopes to sleep with the dancer, he is relieved, even purified, when he realizes that she is too young for lovemaking. She represents the romance of travel, rather than romance itself, and it is better that the ideal not be tarnished. Kawabata was attracted throughout his life to virginal, inviolable women. These were by no means the only women he described, but they seem to have represented for Kawabata the essence of beauty.

  Kawabata dismissed his Izu stories (including “The Izu Dancer”) as being no more than “traveler’s impressions.” This statement, made in 1934, reflected the extreme diffidence he always showed with respect to his works, but perhaps it was also his conviction. At the time he wrote “The Izu Dancer,” he was deeply involved with the New Sensationalists, a Modernist school. He insisted in articles he wrote for the movement that “newness” was all and expressed boredom with established patterns of expression:

  Our eyes burn with desire to know the unknown. Our mutual greetings are expressions of delight in being able to discuss whatever is new. If one man says, “Good morning,” and another responds, “Good morning,” it is boring. We are weary of literature unchanging as the sun that comes up from the east today exactly as it did yesterday. It is more interesting for one man to say, “The baby monkey walks along suspended from its mother’s belly,” and the other replies, “White herons really have long talons, don’t they?”

  Kawabata’s most experimental work in the vein of the New Sensationalists was “Crystal Fantasies” (Suishō gensō), published in 1931 but never completed. In this work Kawabata practiced the stream-of-consciousness techniques that the Japanese Modernists associated with Joyce. Years later he revealed that he not only had read the Japanese translation of Ulysses but also had bought a copy of the English text and compared the two. The influence of Joyce, though not lasting, was considerable. In “Crystal Fantasies” Kawabata indicates with parentheses the unspoken reflections of the characters, and the long paragraphs apparently reflect influence from Proust, directly or through his friend the novelist Yokomitsu Riichi. Although this work is unlike anything Kawabata wrote later in his career, the imagery and even the language are curiously consistent. Here is the beginning of one of the parenthetical streams of thought:

  The boy who made the doctor smile was really nice. The consultation room of her father, a gynecologist. The white enamel of the operating table. A great big frog with its belly turned up. The door of the consultation room. The white enamel of the doorknob. In the room with a door with a white enamel knob there is a secret. I feel it even now. The enamel washbasin. About to touch her hand to the white enamel doorknob, she inadvertently hesitates. The room has doors, any number of them, going every which way. White curtains. One morning, while on the excursion of our girls’ school, I saw a classmate washing her face from a white enamel basin, and suddenly I felt I wanted to love her like a man.

  The inspiration for these seemingly random associations is given a few lines later when the name Sigmund Freud is mentioned. The woman whose stream of consciousness is being reported has not had a child—to the disappointment of herself and her husband—and her reflections on reproduction later on are occasioned by the fact that her male dog is serving the female dog owned by another woman. The title of the story, “Crystal Fantasies,” is a reference to a crystal ball that a fortune-teller uses to see the past and the future. Kawabata’s failure to complete this work was typical of him. Many of his stories were never completed; others had chapters added or subtracted before Kawabata decided they had reached their final form.

  Perhaps the form he found it easiest to employ was the short-short story. Between 1921 and 1972 Kawabata wrote 146, calling them tanagokoro no shōsetsu (stories that fit into the palm of one’s hand). Every form is represented, ranging from the O. Henry story with a trick ending to the most fragmentary evocations. The best succeed in creating an unforgettable atmosphere in a few sentences, like crystallizations of the themes in his novels. Kawabata’s last work, written just before he committed suicide, was the reduction to the length of a “palm of the hand” of his novel Snow Country (Yukiguni).

  Kawabata, who for years had led an extremely private life, began in 1933 to take a more active part in the literary world. To his surprise, he was appointed in 1934 to the Literary Discussion Group (Bungei kondan kai), organized by a former head of the Public Security Division of the Home Ministry. Kawabata’s appointment to the group signified that the authorities considered him “safe.” The ultimate purpose of the group was to control literary production by instituting cooperation between the government and certain writers, but on the surface it appeared to represent a serious attempt to promote a
“renaissance” of Japanese literature.

  In 1937 Kawabata’s novel Snow Country received a prize from the Literary Discussion Group. By this time, the repressive nature of the government’s intentions with respect to literature should have been clear, but Kawabata did not decline the prize. At the very least, he may not have been aware that he was being used; but at the same time, he continued to publish articles insisting on the importance of freedom of speech and even of a spirit of rebelliousness. Kawabata wrote, “Without a rebellion against conventional morality there can be no ‘pure literature.’” His detachment was a fundamental part of himself, but when he spoke on issues affecting writers, he was liberal.

  Kawabata’s writings during the 1930s were in no sense nationalistic, nor were they aimed at ingratiating himself with the military. On occasion, the censors deleted words or phrases in his works, but on the whole he was able to write as he pleased without worrying about their reactions. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when proletarian critics dominated literary criticism, Kawabata never openly denied the value of leftist writings, though he was clearly unsympathetic to their manner. Less than ten years later he was associating with the right-wing leaders of the “literary renaissance,” but he himself had changed very little, and when the Literary Discussion Group decided not to award its prize to Shimaki Kensaku because he had earlier opposed “national polity,” Kawabata protested, saying it was quite beyond the capacity of the awards committee to ascertain whether any pro-Marxist tendencies still lurked in the depths of Shimaki’s heart.