by Неизвестный
Our goal for this anthology of modern Japanese literature thus has been to provide a broad and informed tasting from the rich feast that has been spread out for consumption over the last century and a quarter. More than half the contents of the anthology are from previously published sources such as earlier anthologies, small journals, and other venues; the remainder were specially commissioned for this collection or, occasionally, culled from previously unpublished sources. Our deepest thanks go to our skilled and committed translators, without whose heartfelt labors this preface would also be the afterword.
At Columbia University Press, we wish to thank Jennifer Crewe, our wonderfully supportive editorial director, and Margaret Yamashita and Irene Pavitt, wise and sensitive editors. We also wish to express our gratitude to Paula Locante at the University of Pittsburgh for invaluable assistance in assembling the manuscript; Dr. Mel Thorne and his able student staff in the Humanities Publication Center at Brigham Young University; Aaron P. Cooley, Phillip Shaw, and Michael Allred, students at Brigham Young University who helped with text input; and the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University for a generous publication subvention grant.
J. Thomas Rimer
Van C. Gessel
* * *
1. For this quotation in context, see Paul W. Kroll, “Recent Anthologies of Chinese Literature in Translation,” Journal of Asian Studies 61 (2002): 997.
2. Keene’s thorough and evocative treatment of the period can be found in his book by that title, World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-modern Era, 1600–1867 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Those wishing to read translated examples of works of literature from this period will enjoy Haruo Shirane’s Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
INTRODUCTION
J. THOMAS RIMER AND VAN C. GESSEL
The modern literature of Japan, like literature around the world, has been affected by both geography and politics. In the case of Japan, the trajectory began with the opening of the country in the mid-nineteenth century. While it is true that Japan, along with Thailand, was the only country in East Asia not colonized by the European powers, the Japanese government certainly felt the danger of possible incursions, beginning with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s “black ships” in 1853. Indeed, in its long history, Japan had never been occupied by any foreign power before the end of World War II. Yet, amid ongoing anxieties about the unequal treaties with Western nations that had forced open Japan’s doors, by the 1880s, Japan’s writers and artists began to take a profound interest in Western culture, particularly after being cut off for so long from outside stimulation and influence. That interest was fueled by curiosity and enthusiasm rather than by any urgent cultural or political necessity. Although European culture had long fascinated Japanese intellectuals, they were deprived of any contact other than the arrival in Japan of a relatively small number of documents and books, mostly in Dutch, until the official opening of the country in 1868. Some of the interest generated in Japan in the late nineteenth century was, of course, at least indirectly related to the political predominance of Europe in all phases of political, economic, and cultural life around the world. Even so, during this period, young Japanese writers were genuinely attracted to French, German, and British writing in the same way that American writers were.
A number of special circumstances also helped facilitate the rapid development of a new literature in Japan. To begin with, the literacy rate in Japan during this period was as high as or higher than that in America or Europe. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, a large urban population developed, most in Edo (now Tokyo), Kyoto, and Osaka, one with sophisticated tastes, intellectual curiosity, and an interest in the new and innovative. As this literacy expanded, the acknowledged classics of earlier Japanese literature—ranging from The Tale of Genji to court poetry and such works as the medieval Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkō—found more and more readers who defined their own sense of the cultural past and its value through literary means. During this pre–World War II period, literature past and present remained a privileged means of access to Japanese culture and Japanese self-understanding.
The works presented in this book that were written in the prewar period may be said to draw roughly on three sources. First are the Japanese classics themselves. Writers such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke recast older works in order to place greater emphasis on those psychological elements often only hinted at in the originals. His story “The Nose,” for example, written when Akutagawa was still a student, already reveals how tradition could be plumbed to produce new layers of significance attractive to modern readers. Eminent authors such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō reworked traditional materials in order to bring out heretofore hidden aspects of classical texts, often obsessive or sexual in nature, such as in his story “The Two Acolytes.” Hori Tatsuo, one of the most respected writers of the interwar years, was inspired by the classical monogatari tales of the Heian period (794–1185) to produce a new type of lyrical prose at once contemporary in psychology yet suggesting poetic sensibilities that owed much to classical precedents. The past thus revisited continued to exist in the present, and readers were prepared both to recognize the original and to appreciate the sophistication of these changes.
Despite the shift of interest in foreign literary traditions from Asia, and China in particular, to Europe, some influences remained, forming the second set of influences on Japan’s modern literature. By the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/1895, Chinese traditional fiction had begun to lose its hold on the Japanese reading public, but the example of Chinese poetry remained important for a longer period. The first generation of intellectuals in the Meiji period (1868–1912) studied classical Chinese in their formative years, just as our own grand-parents learned Greek or Latin, and they continued to admire the poetic accomplishments of the great Chinese poets. Meiji writers like Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki wrote poetry in classical Chinese (kanshi), and, indeed, this form gave Sōseki a means by which to express his most intimate thoughts. The insistence on personal moral rectitude, one of the legacies of the Confucian system of thought, helped undergird the high moral stance taken by many Meiji writers, qualities that continued to give them enormous stature.
The third inspiration on the development of Japanese literature during this period, and perhaps the easiest for Western readers to identify, is that of European writers. By the 1880s, a wide variety of European literature had come to be known in Japan, and in increasingly adept translations.
European literature arrived in a rather transhistorical fashion. Writers and readers discovered, at virtually the same time, Western authors from widely differing periods, from Shakespeare and Goethe to Chekhov and Meredith. This influx of sometimes contradictory literary models created diverse enthusiasms, and it took decades before these influences were absorbed and put to use. In the later Meiji period, this new climate of literary possibility was stimulated by the travel to Europe of writers who went on to become major literary figures in the prewar period. Mori Ōgai traveled to Germany, Natsume Sōseki to England, and Nagai Kafū to France. Indeed France, and Paris in particular, became the beacon to which writers and artists from many countries looked to stimulate their own imaginations. The list of important writers who visited or lived in Paris before World War II is a distinguished one: Takamura Kōtarō, Shimazaki Tōson, Yosano Akiko, Nishiwaki Junzaburō, and Kishida Kunio are among those whose work is included in the anthology.
Perhaps the greatest change in Japanese literature during this time was the development and adoption of new ways of examining society. In many ways, these new movements permitted for the first time the interjection of social criticism and political stances into the realm of literature. Such efforts would have been forbidden under the Tokugawa regime, but now, at least until the increase in government censorship in the late 1920s and after, a wide spectrum of political ideas, expressed i
n literary modes, found their way into print. Some of this material can be found in selections included here from Ishikawa Takuboku, Kuroshima Denji, Hagiwara Sakutarō, and Nakano Shigeharu, among others. An even wider circle of writers used their growing awareness of the ambiguities and inequalities of their social milieu to create narratives that suggest implicit, even explicit criticism of the society they were attempting to describe. A story such as Masamune Hakuchō’s “The Clay Doll,” for example, dealing as it does with the education of women, could never have been rendered with such poignancy in the preceding Tokugawa (Edo) period (1600–1867).
By the 1930s, before the Pacific War, much of the serious literature being written had achieved a linguistic fluidity and emotional resonance with contemporary Japanese society. And, as readers of the anthology will quickly recognize, most of the selections are serious, often earnest. Although humor would return after the Pacific War, given the social upheavals of the period, the devastating earthquake in Tokyo in 1923, and the advent of militarism in the 1930s, such seriousness is not surprising.
The selections we have chosen for this abbreviated anthology exemplify several sets of attitudes shared by writers and readers alike. First, many Japanese writers wanted to feel that they were indeed entering the stream of contemporary world literature, and by the 1920s and after, the works of some writers, beginning with Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, were already becoming known through translations. At the least, most of them were convinced that the standards by which they wished to measure themselves had expanded considerably. Second, fired by their interest in European literature, these writers hoped to convey to their readers some of their enthusiasm for the new possibilities of self-expression. And, in turn, those readers felt some urge to “catch up” with the newest trends in the West. Finally, by the time of World War I, at the end of the Meiji period, the first great generation of writers had created most of their significant and enduring work, thus enabling for the first time the existence of a genuine intellectual and artistic dialogue between the generations of Japanese writers; as a result, younger authors now began to write with an eye to the accomplishments of their predecessors, as well as to the European example. The shadows cast by Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai remained long and vibrant.
The Pacific War brought an end to many of these enthusiasms and intellectual commitments. In the six decades of literature that followed, Japan moved from a war-demolished wasteland to one of the world’s leading economic and political powers. Given this rapid and dramatic transformation, it should not be surprising to discover that Japanese literature similarly evolved and diversified, speeding through “movements” and styles and tones as frequently as Toyota or Honda vehicles sped through model changes.
At the end of the Pacific War in 1945, it was not the “black ships” of Perry but silver bombers that had leveled much of the defeated nation and prepared for the very first occupation of Japan and the only time that the country surrendered both its hegemony and its identity. Under the direction of General Douglas MacArthur, a complete reformation of Japanese social structures—however much such changes may have seemed later to harmonize with the will of the Japanese people themselves—was imposed with paternalistic zeal on a devastated enemy state.
Postwar German writers relentlessly revisited issues of communal guilt for Nazi atrocities, and the rejuvenation of the German psyche seems to have hinged on the people’s acceptance of responsibility. In contrast, the Japanese people shifted the blame for the catastrophically ill-thought war effort onto the shoulders of their nation’s military leaders. Whether this was a reflection of unchallenged political propaganda or an evasion of individual responsibility, very few literary works produced in the first years after the war placed the burden of guilt on the people themselves. After the emperor announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, the people were not sure whether the Japanese nation would survive. Millions of Japanese had perished during the long years of warfare, which had begun in China in the early 1930s. At the end of the Pacific War, more than a million Japanese troops were stationed overseas, throughout China and the South Pacific, and there was no indication of when they might, if ever, return to their homes and families—if, indeed, their homes and families had withstood the ravages of fire and atomic bombs. Japan in 1945 was teetering on the brink of collapse, humiliated and fearful that widespread retaliation by the occupying forces would destroy the remainder of their culture. But such was not to be the case.
Many of these tensions were reflected in early postwar literature, the period from 1945 to roughly 1970. The predominant image of prewar literature, the controlling male who is so central to the self-narrated, autobiographical “fictions” known as shi-shōsetsu, was forever shattered by the experiences of war and defeat. Indeed, Japan’s military loss is depicted as “humanity lost,” which is also the literal meaning of the title of Dazai Osamu’s novel Ningen shikkaku (1948, trans. 1957 by Donald Keene as No Longer Human), which was published shortly before the author committed suicide. The death of the male persona is ubiquitous, whereas women are presented as survivors who continue to live, with scarcely any hope, because there is no other choice available to them.
In the first decade or so after 1945, many writers, including Noma Hiroshi and Yasuoka Shōtarō, depicted the utter desolation of the Japanese landscape, both physical and spiritual. Other writers of Yasuoka’s generation replaced the “lost father” with a forgiving maternal character who accepts the weaknesses of their protagonists and shields them from punishment. This theme peaked in the writings of a renowned Japanese Christian author, Endō Shūsaku. Endō published one of the most acclaimed postwar novels in 1966: Silence (Chinmoku, trans. 1969). Set in the era of Christian persecution in the early seventeenth century in Japan, it is a moving meditation on the meaning of faith in a brutal world, a theme that resonated even among Endō’s Marxist literary rivals. At this time, the female voice also resurfaced, in part because Japanese women no longer had to look to their absent or absent-minded fathers and husbands for validation. The first female author to take a place in the male-dominated literary establishment was Enchi Fumiko, whose work exhibits both an attachment to the classical poetic dream-world of The Tale of Genji and (partly because of a desperately unhappy marriage) an almost sadistic yearning to even the score against men by holding them accountable for the centuries of oppressive behavior toward women. Older writers, too, who had come to prominence before the Pacific War, now began to write and publish again. Translations also began to appear more widely than before, and English, French, and German versions of works by such writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and younger writers such as Abe Kobo and Mishima Yukio helped create something of a “golden age” in the internationalization of Japanese literature and helped Kawabata win the first Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to a Japanese author. In the 1960s, as Japan began to accelerate toward its subsequent “economic miracle,” several more women authors made their debuts. Ariyoshi Sawako, a gifted storyteller with a large popular following, created a significant stir in Japanese society with the publication of her novel Kōkotsu no hito (literally, A Man in Rapture, 1972, trans. in 1984 as The Twilight Years). Dealing with a working mother who is forced by convention to care for her husband’s demented father until his death, the novel sparked a debate in the Japanese Diet over the nation’s lagging preparations to provide government-sponsored care for a rapidly graying society. The book sold more copies than did any other novel published in Japan since the Meiji Restoration. Other women who found their artistic voices during this period include Kanai Mieko and Kōno Taeko.
The pronounced differences between Japanese literature of the 1970s and that being produced at the beginning of the twenty-first century are evident if one compares the titles of the acceptance speeches of the only two Japanese writers who have, to date, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kawabata Yasunari entitled his 1968 speech “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself” (Utsuk
ushii Nihon no watashi).1 When Ōe Kenzaburō received the award in 1995, he acknowledged his predecessor in the title of his speech, “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself ” (Aimai na Nihon no watashi),2 in which he described the shift in Japanese society from an “exotic” Asian civilization to a highly cosmopolitan, Westernized Asian culture. Both acceptance speeches are included in this anthology.
The ambiguity that Ōe highlights in contemporary Japanese writing takes many forms. Contemporary writers seldom look back to the classical roots of their nation’s literature; indeed, the powerful sense of place and the concerns with Japanese identity have virtually disappeared from current writing, which shares much more with the literature of other advanced industrialized nations than with earlier Japanese works. Mishima Yukio, who gave the tetralogy he completed just before his sensational disembowelment the ironic title The Sea of Fertility (Hōjō no umi, 1966–1972, trans. 1972–1975), comparing what he saw as the arid emptiness of contemporary Japan to the waterless “sea” on the moon, vividly described the writing of his colleague Abe Kōbō as lacking the “high humidity content” of previous Japanese authors. Increasingly, writers such as Kaikō Takeshi, Nakagami Kenji, Tawada Yōko, and Ogawa Yōko depict Japan more frequently than ever before from the outside—whether from the perspective they have gained living abroad or from positions as “outcasts” in contemporary society.
As this volume goes to press, the most popular Japanese writer both in his homeland and overseas is Murakami Haruki, whose stories have regularly appeared in such publications as the New Yorker. It is too early to determine whether Murakami and some of the kindred spirits among his contemporaries will sustain an enduring reputation. The uneasy, confused worlds they examine through postmodern lenses may accurately describe the widespread malaise of contemporary international society and the yearning for creative, imaginative escapes from the mundane. But by and large, their prose styles—like the people and places they depict—lack the aesthetic beauty and flavor (the “humidity”?) found in the works of early writers. It remains certain, however, that readers will continue to turn to literature for similar reasons: to be introduced to new worlds, to move outside themselves and gain perspectives not their own, and to become—in even the most limited sense—like the god described by C. S. Lewis in Perelandra as one who “can think of all, and all different.”3
