The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by Неизвестный

HUSBAND: A hammock, you know, like a rocking cradle for adults.

  WIFE: In a palace?

  HUSBAND: Yes. But not your run-of-the-mill, fairy-tale type.

  (The sound of the outer gate opening)

  VOICE: Aren’t you ready yet?

  WIFE (hastily moving away from husband’s shoulder): See! You’re late again!

  HUSBAND (hastily buttoning his vest): I’m fine. I won’t be late. (In a loud voice.) You going after all? I was beginning to think you were taking the day off.

  VOICE: Anybody home? (The owner of the voice pokes his head into the room.)

  WIFE: Please! You mustn’t come in here!

  COLLEAGUE: You back from your trip already? Good morning, ma’am.

  WIFE: I told him he’d be late, but as you can see . . .

  HUSBAND: You’re just in time. Anyway, listen to the rest of the story. The palace was not your ordinary, fairy-tale type.

  WIFE (helping him on with his suit coat): Not there, a little higher.

  HUSBAND: Maybe the word “palace” is misleading. The point is everything about this place is designed for the people who live there.

  COLLEAGUE: Interesting. But do you think such a design is possible?

  HUSBAND: Of course it’s possible. Take the hammock, for instance. It’s completely unconventional. The swing, I mean, in other words . . .

  COLLEAGUE: What swing?

  HUSBAND: What?

  WIFE: Look at you, Mr. Katagiri, taking this all so seriously! (To Husband) That’s enough now.

  COLLEAGUE: What are you talking about?

  WIFE: A dream, his dream. You know, the usual . . . (She gives Husband his handkerchief, watch, and wallet.)

  COLLEAGUE: Oh, is that it?

  HUSBAND: But you’re a man who understands the fascination of dreams, even if you don’t seem to dream yourself.

  COLLEAGUE: Not me. By the way, ma’am . . .

  HUSBAND: Have you ever ridden on a swing?

  COLLEAGUE: Never. Actually, ma’am . . .

  HUSBAND: OK, OK. She’ll hear about it later. See, the dream I had last night went like this. . . . (Lighting a cigarette.) I’m sixteen or seventeen, when the world, you know, seems strangely lonely. . . . (Moving toward the door.) But when, without realizing it, you’re also most impressionable.

  They exit.

  COLLEAGUE: Actually, I’m in a bit of a bind.

  HUSBAND’S VOICE: Why should you be in a bind?

  Wife goes out into the entranceway.

  COLLEAGUE (not getting up, his words directed at husband but with wife in mind): No, you see, all of a sudden my father says he’s coming in from the country, and I don’t mind if he comes, of course, but . . .

  HUSBAND: Come on, come on, let’s go.

  COLLEAGUE: I’m coming. But I was wondering, ma’am, if just tonight . . .

  HUSBAND’S VOICE: Of course, of course. We’ll think of something. Come on. (He is apparently pulling at his colleague’s arm.) But first I want you to hear about my dream.

  COLLEAGUE (getting up, he also leaves): The thing is, ma’am.

  HUSBAND’S VOICE: OK, OK. It doesn’t have to concern her. Out you go, out you go.

  WIFE’S VOICE: Oh! (She is taken aback by something.) Hurry home!

  The sound of the gate closing. Wife returns and sits with her elbows on the rectangular brazier and her cheek on one hand. Alone now, a smile creeps over her face.

  HUSBAND’S VOICE (some distance away): I’m a boy of sixteen, see, and . . . the world . . . strangely. . . . Hey, where’re you going?

  COLLEAGUE’s voice: I’ve got to take a leak. Wait a minute.

  HUSBAND’S VOICE: Hurry up, somebody’s going to come.

  One of them starts whistling; the other joins in, and before long the sound of their off-key, intertwining melodies is heard.

  Curtain.

  ESSAY

  The notion of “literature” in Japan during the interwar years was practiced more in the continental European than the British or American mode. Literary essays were considered to be an important genre and were as widely read, discussed, and appreciated as were works of fiction, poetry, or drama.

  KOBAYASHI HIDEO

  Some writers were known primarily for their work as essayists and literary critics, most prominent of whom was Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983). A man of vast learning, his essays covered everything from medieval Japanese art and literature to Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, and Mozart. Kobayashi’s “Literature of the Lost Home” (Kokyō o ushinatta bungaku, 1933) is one of his best-known early essays.

  LITERATURE OF THE LOST HOME (KOKYŌ O USHINATTA BUNGAKU)

  Translated by Paul Anderer

  It might be said that in Japan today a literature read by adults or by old people scarcely exists.1 Our politicians are taken to task for their lack of literary sophistication or for being oblivious to what is happening in the literary world, but does the blame not lie with the literati themselves? People are not necessarily cool or indifferent to literary matters. . . . Still, it is true that adult taste runs mostly toward the Chinese classics or else toward certain Japanese classics, though certainly not toward modern writing. Modern Japanese literature, especially what is known as “pure literature,” is read by young people, that is, by a certain “literary youth” between the ages of eighteen and thirty or, to stretch the point, by writers only or else aspiring writers. . . . Our so-called bundan is in fact a special world populated almost entirely by like-minded youth, and this situation has not changed since the days of Naturalism. Although a proletarian writer might be expected to have an interest in political institutions or in social conditions, once he becomes a member of the literary world and is absorbed in writing monthly review columns, his readership narrows to that limited sphere which is the focus of pure literature itself. Few can claim to have avid readers scattered widely throughout the population, among farmers and workers, for example. Of all our arts, literature alone is trapped inside this narrow and cramped universe. Of course, it is well known that Japanese music and painting, not to mention the theater, have always maintained a broad-based and devoted patronage. Popular literature, too, as if in compensation for having been exiled from the monthly reviews of the literati, seems to attract a circle of readers drawn from every sector of the society. Yet even here, the overwhelming majority of its fans are doubtless men and women under thirty. I am approaching fifty and can feel only sadness knowing that the likely readers of my work will be youth. And putting myself in the position of the adult reader, who claims there is nothing he can bear to read beyond the classics, I must acknowledge that our modern literature is somehow defective. For only that writing which one has leisurely perused by the hearth, which has offered consolation and a lifetime of untiring companionship—only such writing can be called true literature.

  As I was reading Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s essay “On Art” (in the April issue of Kaizō), I encountered the above passage and fell to brooding about it. I did not brood with any thought to refute Tanizaki or with any sense that I could resolve his dilemma. Mine was the useless brooding of a man, in Tanizaki’s words, “trapped inside a narrow and cramped universe,” and my feelings turned heavy and gloomy.

  Reading over both parts of the “On Art” series, it occurred to me that although Tanizaki’s style was measured, his conviction was intense. If in formal terms the writing seemed obscure, what the author wanted to say was nevertheless unmistakably clear. Such intense conviction and unequivocal opinion, were we to look for a counterpart, might be found in an address given at Kudan Nogaku Hall by George Bernard Shaw, whom Tanizaki himself has dubbed the “boyish grandpa”: “Ladies and gentlemen, humanity is hopeless! Many of those who are artists, however bad, declare that they cultivate art for the sake of humanity. This is not so. Let us leave to the Philistines of the outside world the pretense that everything they do for us is for the good of humanity.”

  Shaw’s words in themselves are of no special interest. In our day it is not at all s
trange that a writer’s passion would assume a certain peevish, perverse expression. Yet in the power and integrity of the sentiments Tanizaki himself expresses, which are founded on that author’s lifelong experience, something else is at work, something hard to fathom, which provokes in us readers a heavy, gloomy feeling. Tanizaki concludes his essay by remarking that “young people who laugh at my perversity will perhaps come around to my way of thinking when they reach my age.” Although at my present age I have yet to “come around,” I wonder: has Tanizaki said anything to invite my ridicule?

  Whenever someone refers to me as an Edokko, I grimace. This is because a rather considerable distance separates what others mean by this expression and what I take it to mean. Most people of my generation who were born in Tokyo know very well how bizarre it is to claim this city as a birthplace. Recourse to an expression like Edokko is wholly unsuitable. People like myself feel their situation will not be understood by outsiders. Even among those born in Tokyo, there is a sense of difficulty in expressing one’s feelings to anyone even slightly older.

  I have neither thought of myself as an Edokko, nor do I possess what are known as “Edo tastes,” although perhaps unconsciously I harbor traces of an Edokko temperament. This is fine with me. I have never lamented the situation. Still, I have never lived without even stranger feelings of incomprehension. “Born in Tokyo”: I cannot fathom what that really means. Mine is an unsettled feeling that I have no home. It should be recognized that this is not in the least a romantic feeling, although it may be harder to see that there is nothing realistic about it.

  Once I was traveling from Kyoto with Takii Kosaku. As our train emerged from one tunnel, the mountain roads suddenly flashing into sight, he gazed up and heaved a deep sigh. I was struck by this. Listening to him then describe the fullness of his heart, how gazing upon such mountain roads a stream of childhood memories came welling up within him, I keenly felt that the “country” exists beyond my comprehension. It is not so much that I do not know the country as I do not understand the notion of a “birthplace,” or a “first home,” or a “second home”—indeed, what home of any kind in fact is. Where there is no memory, there is no home. If a person does not possess powerful memories, created from an accumulation of hard and fast images that a hard and fast environment provides, he will not know that sense of well-being which brims over in the word kokyō. No matter where I search within myself for such a feeling, I do not find it. Looking back, I see that from an early age my feelings were distorted by an endless series of changes occurring too fast. Never was there sufficient time to nurture the sources of a powerful and enduring memory, attached to the concrete and the particular. I had memories, but they possessed no actuality, no substance. I even felt they were somehow unreal.

  Putting aside this rather exaggerated example, we all on occasion recall something our mother might have told us about her own childhood. Just a simple story, nothing special or inspiring, and yet for that very reason a strong and unwavering sentiment courses through it. A story of such commonplace memories contains the precondition for fiction. And so I am envious, because no matter how I try, this is something I cannot replicate. Without embellishment, or if that sounds too crass, without a device allowing a subjective response—a point of view or a critical perspective—I feel my memories would have no unifying structure, even as I realize that however necessary, the use of such devices is somehow unnatural.

  Once it occurred to me that mine was a spirit without a home, I found evidence for it everywhere. It is especially instructive to record certain extreme experiences. I enjoy walking and often go off to the mountains, being someone who takes pleasure in remote, even dangerous, places. Of late I have come to realize how odd such behavior is. To go off for inspiration to the beauty of Nature may seem to be a perfectly natural activity, but on reflection we must admit that it is just another manifestation of our quotidian intellectual unease. It is not at all a matter as straightforward and reasonable and innocent as “loving nature.” I have grown increasingly skeptical about the existence of anything concrete and actual behind my being moved by the beauty of Nature. Looking closer, I see much in common between intoxication by the beauty of a mountain and intoxication by the beauty of an abstract idea. I feel as though I am looking upon two aspects of a spirit that has lost its home. Consequently, I am not heartened by the recent craze for mountain climbing. And I feel all the more uneasy as the number of afflicted climbers rises each year.

  On reflection, I know that my life has been lacking in concrete substance. I do not easily recognize within myself or in the world around me people whose feet are planted firmly on the ground or who have the features of social beings. I can more easily recognize the face of that abstraction called the “city person,” who might have been born anywhere, than a Tokyoite born in the city of Tokyo. No doubt a meditation on the various components of this abstraction may produce a certain type of literature, although it will be deficient in real substance. The spirit in exhaustion takes flight from society and is moved by the curiously abstract longing to commingle with Nature. It may well be that a world of actual substance is to be found in the beauty of Nature isolated from society, yet there is no reason to believe any real writing will come of it.

  In his essay, Mr. Tanizaki referred to a “literature that will find a home for the spirit.” Of course, for me, this is not a mere literary issue, since it is not at all clear that I have any real and actual home.

  The other day, rereading Dostoevsky’s Raw Youth in the Yonekawa Masao translation, I was struck by several things that had not occurred to me when I first read this book. In particular, I sensed the importance of the title chosen by the author. Illuminating the world seen by a single youth through the language of a single youth, the author revealed all the attributes of youth in general: its beauty and ugliness, hypersensitivity and insensibility, madness and passion and absurdity; in short, its authentic shape. I was left with an almost unbearably strong feeling that it is incorrect to call young people “youth.” They are, rather, a species of animal that must be called by some other name. It struck me, too, that Dostoevsky’s youth is no stranger—a youth whose mind is in turmoil because of Western ideas and who, in the midst of this intellectual agitation, has utterly lost his home. How very closely he resembles us. Indeed, I repeatedly ran into scenes that made me feel the author was describing me, that he had me firmly in his grasp.

  “Our so-called bundan is in fact a special world populated almost entirely by like-minded literary youth,” Tanizaki writes, “and this situation has not changed since the days of Naturalism.” However, the role of youth in literature seems to me to have grown steadily more blatant. In the days of Naturalism, issues of social order or social chaos were not so clearly pressing as they are today. As a consequence, we are overwhelmed and prone to sacrifice our reflective spirit for the sake of dreams about the future, our ideas for the sake of action, our feelings for the sake of ideas, facts for the sake of theories, the ordinary for the sake of adventure. In short, we might say that as society has assumed a youthful character, it has cheapened the value of a mature spirit. It is then perfectly natural that the bundan, too, should become increasingly a special world of youth, although this is not reason enough to question the value of the literature it produces. Still, I believe that formerly literature brought as many benefits to society as it induced any evil. Given our situation today, I can only feel that the evil, by degrees, is spreading.

  It cannot be claimed that mature adults necessarily have no interest in literature about youth. For example, The Sorrows of Young Werther is a type of “youth writing,” yet it has been able to attract great numbers of people. It is not, then, just a matter of recent Japanese literature being literature by and for youth. Rather, ours is a youth literature that has lost its youth. And whatever its intentions may have been, in practice is it not the distinctive trait of such literature to be fundamentally conceptual and abstract, and, at least since turn-of-the-
century Naturalism, to come more and more to lack a taste for reality? Of course, we should not always overlook literary motives or intentions and regard only practice or results. But it is in the practice of such “youth writing” that we are able to discover not only these current, vigorously debated issues regarding society and economics but also the peculiar context and inevitable fate of the literary youth of our nation, who feel the urgent sway of Western models and influence and who have lost a sense of tradition.

  Popular writers have emerged recently to attack the narrowness of “artful” literary fiction, proclaiming its demise. However, these popular novels also exhibit a spectacle unique to our country. The readership of our literary fiction may be young, but it takes a certain literary sophistication to understand such work, and there are a number of very fine books that could not be fully appreciated were they to be read by adults, sophisticated only in worldly affairs. Of course, I cannot imagine mature adults reading the alternative: modern popular fiction. Adults are not about to read a story, however interestingly written, about what they already know and that reveals no further discoveries. And so they turn to historical romances, magemono. Surely it is not so elsewhere, but in our country conditions are such that most popular writing relies not on contemporary incidents but on historical tales for its contact with an audience of adult readers.

  This becomes all the clearer if we turn to film. From the outset, our film masterpieces were done in the old style, on historical themes. The fine actors and directors all tended in that direction. In comparison to literature, film is a far more immediate artistic medium, and so one need hardly argue the point that the average fan would likely wish his masterpieces to be based on contemporary events. In Japan a contrary situation exists, although we must admit that if not for Japanese films, we would not recognize so clearly the true strangeness of our cultural condition.