by Неизвестный
Historical romances and chanbara movies exert a profound influence over the masses. Although this peculiar phenomenon may not be long-lived, it cannot be argued that it will easily pass away. Its roots are quite strong. Some suggest that in a period of social collapse, when no definite or stabilizing ideas are in force, people have a renewed desire for sensual stimulation or excitement. Still, I do not feel this alone can explain the popularity of such fare. If that were the only reason, these popular entertainments would have no hope of such success. Far-fetched subjects and convoluted plots alone would not spark the interest of the masses, no matter how culturally naive they may be. I believe that the hearts of the masses are captured almost involuntarily along a slower but surer path. Their interest turns on the capacity of a film to make them unconsciously surrender to a stream of real emotions. This stream flows through our chanbara movies, though not through our gendaimono—movies about modern life.
I often go to the movies with my mother. Of course her preference is the period film, as she finds nothing of interest in gendaimono. Once I took her to see the Western film Morocco. It occurred to me that this was quite futile, but to my surprise she was greatly moved by it. She has since cultivated a taste for Western movies. Even my old mother, then, has been overwhelmed by the complications and confusions of our modem Japanese art forms and has turned away.
Morocco has been called a modern masterpiece, but its content is in fact quite shallow, and in this respect there are a number of our gendaimono that address more serious concerns. However, Morocco has a certain style that our films about modern life cannot match. It possesses a wholly captivating charm that leaves no room for discussion about its plot meaning this or that. And what is most lacking in our gendaimono, as well as in our current popular fiction, is just this inexplicable style. Were we to inquire why such entertainment, utterly lacking in such style, nevertheless has fans to see it or read it, we might find the reason is that the majority are satisfied simply with the plot. Being young, of an age when the world is seen through movies and life is known through fiction, this audience does not question whether a given work lets flow a stream of real emotions so compelling as to overpower a mere plot. Only when such youths reach maturity will the plot seem silly to them, and all but unconsciously will they begin to look for the kind of style that might conceal the silliness.
In film, this demand is presently met by period pieces or by Western movies; in literature, by popular renditions of historical adventure. The manners and mores that appear in chanbara movies and in magemono fiction already seem as distant and removed from us as the manners and mores depicted in Western films, Still, the psychology and emotional temperament expressed in such works seem perfectly in harmony with the social scenery of that time. And the expression of such human feelings, free of contradiction, possesses an unimaginably powerful charm and fascination. This style elicits a sense of intimacy, so that we feel closer to the Moroccan desert we have never seen than to the landscape of Ginza before our eyes.
Some speak of the modern world as one beset by a common, universal social crisis, although I can only feel that contemporary Japanese society is collapsing in a quite distinctive way. Obviously, our modern literature (for all practical purposes, we might substitute “Western” for “modern”) would never have emerged without the influence of the West. But what is crucial is that we have grown so accustomed to this Western influence that we can no longer distinguish what is under the force of this influence from what is not. Can we possibly imagine the profound emotion and wonder that Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo (Floating Cloud) or Mori Ōgai’s Sokkyō shijin (Improvisation) aroused in the youth of their day, we who came of literary age when translations were so numerous that they could not all be read? Can we fear that anything remains to be taken away, we who have lost a feel for what is characteristic of the country of our birth, who have lost our cultural singularity? Is it any consolation to think that those writers of a preceding generation, for whom the struggle between East and West figured crucially in their artistic activity, failed to lose what we have succeeded in losing?
It is a fact that ours is a literature of the lost home, that we are young people who have lost our youthful innocence. Yet we have something to redeem our loss. We have finally become able, without prejudice or distortion, to understand what is at the core of Western writing. With us Western literature has begun to be presented fairly and accurately. At this juncture, it is indeed pointless to call out for the “Japanese spirit” or the “Eastern spirit.” Look wherever we might, such things will not be found. Or what might be found would prove hardly worth the search. And so Mr. Tanizaki’s notion that we must “return to the classics” will not readily be embraced and passed on. It speaks simply to the fact that Tanizaki himself has chosen a certain path and matured in a certain direction. History seems always and inexorably to destroy tradition. And individuals, as they mature, seem always and inexorably to move toward its true discovery.
* * *
1. The Japanese translation can imply the possibility of failure: “Now we can live, can’t we?”
2. The village presumably is Karuizawa, a well-known resort popular with foreigners, about which Hori often wrote.
3. From “Requiem für eine Freundin,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), 73.
4. Ibid., 87.
1. Nora refers to the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, which has always been popular in Japan.
1. The text in Kobayashi’s Complete Works is identical to the original publication except for the last line, which was dropped. It reads: “With the passing of time, history reveals to the writer in clearer outline certain objective facts and presses on him a structure that he can in no way evade. And as the writer matures, his character becomes more and more concrete and distinctive and paradoxically becomes part of the content of the [historical] structure that presses on him.”
Chapter 4
THE WAR YEARS
With the beginning of the war in China in the 1930s, Japan was increasingly on a wartime footing, a situation that continued and intensified through the Pacific War until its conclusion in 1945. The effect on the intellectuals and writers of the period was considerable, with various outcomes. Some enthusiastically embraced the conflict and wrote positively about it. Others tried to describe the situation more objectively, and still others retreated into the past, avoiding any mention of the contemporary period at all.
This chapter of the anthology contains both writings published during the war years and some later contributions that deal directly with the war years. No dramas are included. The reason is that the increasingly conservative military government considered most of the drama companies dangerously left-wing, and—with the exception of Kishida Kunio’s troupe, the Literary Theater (Bungakuza), which was devoted to drama that might be considered purely “literary”—virtually all the other troupes presenting modern drama were closed down. Kabuki and nō continued to be performed, sometimes with the addition of new material on themes relevant to Japan’s war aims, but few new modern dramas were performed until after 1945.
FICTION
DAZAI OSAMU
Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), the son of a wealthy family from northern Japan, flirted with Marxism as a student and became well known in the 1930s for his autobiographical stories, which often focused on his own introverted and decadent style of life. The two novels that he wrote after the war and before his suicide, The Setting Sun (Shayō) and No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku), are among the acknowledged classics of postwar Japanese literature.
During the war years, Dazai sometimes wrote about contemporary life but, unlike many of his contemporaries, never took any interest in glorifying the military. “December 8th” (Junigatsu yoka), written in 1942, reveals in some ways a buoyant tonality, almost cynical, one scarcely in keeping with the officially sanctioned attitudes of the period.
; DECEMBER 8TH (JŪNIGATSU YŌKA)
Translated by Phyllis Lyons
I must write my diary with special care today.1 I’ve got to leave some sort of record of how a housewife in an impoverished household spent the day: December 8, 1941. In a hundred years when they’re doing a grand celebration for the 2,700th anniversary of the founding of our nation, maybe this diary of mine will be discovered in a corner of a storehouse somewhere, and they’ll know that this is what a Japanese housewife was doing on this special day a hundred years ago, and it will serve as a little historical reference. That’s why, even if my writing style is not very good, at least I have to be careful not to write any lies. Anyway, having to write with such deep thoughts about the 2,700th anniversary of Founding Day is quite a job. But then, I must try not to be too stiff about it. My husband always criticizes my writing, whether it’s a letter or my diary or anything else. He says that all I do is make it serious, and it impresses people as being dull and slow. There’s no “sentiment” in it at all, and the sentences are not at all beautiful, he says. To be sure, since childhood I have been mostly concerned about doing things right and proper. It’s not that my soul is so serious but that I’m just stiff and awkward and never have been able to be innocent and lighthearted and easy with people. That’s why I always lose out. Maybe it’s because my emotions are too deep. Still, I really must think this over.
When I say “2,700 years since the founding,” there’s something I think of immediately. It’s just a stupid and silly thing, but the other day, my husband’s friend Mr. Iba came to visit for the first time in quite a while. I was in the next room, and I could hear them talking in the study. What they said made me burst out laughing.
“You know, I really have been worrying recently—when the 2,700th founding anniversary comes, do you think we should we refer to it as ‘twenty-seven hundredth’ or ‘two thousand, seven hundredth’? It’s definitely been bothering me. I’m really suffering over it. What about you—doesn’t it bother you?” Mr. Iba said.
“Hmmm,” my husband said, thinking seriously. “Now that you mention it, it does bother me a lot.”
“See what I mean?” said Mr. Iba, also sounding quite serious. “They all seem to be making it ‘twenty-seven hundred.’ That’s what they seem to be doing. But I’d rather see them do it ‘two thousand, seven hundred.’ Somehow, ‘twenty-seven hundred’ just doesn’t seem right. It’s kind of nasty, don’t you think? I mean, it’s not a telephone number, and I’d just like to see them do it right. Somehow or other, I’d like to hear it done as ‘two thousand seven hundred,’ don’t you think?” asked Mr. Iba in a truly worried tone of voice.
“But then,” my husband proposed in a horribly self-important tone, “in a hundred years from now, it may not be either of those ‘seven hundreds’—they may have come up with some totally different pronunciation. Say, ‘sivinty,’ or something like that. . . .”
That’s when I burst out laughing. How absolutely stupid! My husband is always perfectly serious when he says such ridiculous things to visitors. People with “sentiment” sure are strange. My husband makes his living by writing novels. He’s not very dedicated, and so he doesn’t bring in much of an income, just enough for us to get by from day to day. What kinds of things he writes, I can’t even imagine, because I do my best not to read the stories he writes. He’s apparently not very good.
Oh my, I am getting off the track. There’s no way I can write a record worthy to survive until the 2,700th Founding Day if I keep on with such stupid things. Let’s start again.
December 8th. Early in the morning, while I was still in bed already starting to get anxious about the morning’s preparations and nursing Sonoko (our daughter, born this past June), I could hear a news bulletin coming clearly from a radio somewhere.
“Announcement from the Department of the Army and Navy of the Imperial Forces: Today, the eighth, before dawn, the Imperial land and sea forces entered a state of war with American and British troops in the western Pacific Ocean.”
I could hear it strong and clear, piercing like a shaft of light into the total darkness of my tightly shuttered room. Two times, it was clearly repeated. As I lay there perfectly still, my sense of being changed absolutely. It was like being hit by a strong blast of light, making my body transparent. Or like receiving the breath of the Holy Ghost and feeling a single cold flower petal lodge in my breast. Japan, too, after this morning, was a changed Japan.
I started to call out to my husband, who was in the next room, to let him know what had happened, but right away he answered back, “I know, I know.” His tone of voice was harsh; he certainly seemed to be tense himself. He always stayed in bed until late in the morning; it was amazing for him to have awakened so early on this particular morning. They say that artists have strong intuitions; it might be that he’d had a premonition. It rather impressed me. But then he went on to say something so awful, it canceled it out.
“Where is the western Pacific? San Francisco, huh?”
I was disgusted; my husband had absolutely no sense of geography. There have been times when I have even wondered whether he knew the difference between west and east. Until just the other day, he apparently thought that the South Pole was the hottest place on earth and that the North Pole was the coldest. When I heard him confess that, I even began to doubt his character. Last year he went to Sado Island, and when he was telling me stories about it, he said that when he looked out from the boat and saw the island shape of Sado, he even thought it was Manchuria—really, everything is mixed up. And this man had managed to get into the university. It just disgusted me.
“The western Pacific must be the part that’s near Japan, don’t you think?” I said.
He sounded quite out of sorts as he answered, “Do you suppose?” After some contemplation: “Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of it. Doesn’t that seem wrong—to have America in the east, and Japan in the west? They call Japan ‘the land of the rising sun,’ and it’s also called ‘the Orient.’ So that can’t be right. It feels really uncomfortable to say that Japan isn’t the Orient. Don’t you think that there’s some way to have Japan east and America west?”
Everything he said was peculiar. My husband’s patriotism somehow goes to extremes. The other day, he said that no matter how tough those foreigners acted, they probably wouldn’t even dare taste this salted fish-guts conserve, whereas we can eat any Western food at all; and he seemed to take some weird pride in that.
I paid no attention to my husband’s peculiar mutterings but quickly got up and opened the storm shutters. A beautiful day. But I could feel the cold keenly. The diapers I’d hung out last night to dry under the eaves were frozen, and frost covered the garden. The camellia was blooming valiantly. Everything was quiet— even though at this very moment in the Pacific Ocean, war had started. I felt dazed. It sank into my very body just how blessed the Japanese nation was.
I went out to the well to wash my face, and then as I got involved in washing Sonoko’s diapers, the wife next door came out, too. We exchanged our morning greetings, and then I began to talk about the war: “Well, things are going to be tough for you from here on.”
The woman had become the leader of our neighborhood assistance group just the other day, and she was probably thinking about that when she said, “No, there’s nothing I can do.” She sounded ashamed, and it made me feel a bit awkward.
I mean, it’s not that my neighbor wasn’t thinking about the war; it’s probably instead that she was feeling under pressure of the heavy responsibility as head of the assistance group. Somehow I felt I’d done something wrong to her. Really, from here on it’s probably going to be hard for the assistance head. It’s different from practice drills—if we really do get air raids, her responsibility as leader will be enormous. I might end up having to put Sonoko on my back and evacuate to the countryside. And that would mean that my husband would probably stay behind alone, taking care of the house. But he’s so incapable of doing anything
that I feel quite depressed. He might be utterly useless. Really—even though I keep telling him to, he hasn’t even made any preparations. Not his national emergency clothing, not anything. If anything does happen, he’d be lost for sure. He’s a lazy person, and so if I were quietly to get all his clothes together and lay them out for him, he probably would notice them—Huh! Look at this stuff!—and put them on with a feeling of relief in his heart. But his size is extra large, so even if I did go out and buy ready-mades, they probably wouldn’t fit. It’s a problem.
So—this morning my husband gets up around seven and finishes his breakfast quickly and then immediately turns to his work. Apparently he has a lot of small pieces to do this month. While he was having breakfast, without thinking I asked him, “Do you think Japan really will be OK?”
“We’re all right—don’t you think that’s why they did it? We’re sure to win,” he answered smugly. The things my husband says are always lies, and utterly beside the point, but anyway, this time at least, I deeply wanted to believe absolutely his serious words.
As I cleared up the kitchen, I thought about various things. Different eye color, hair color—is that enough to arouse this much hostility? I want to smash them to pieces. When China was the other side, it felt totally different. Really—I thought of those cruel, beastly American soldiers meandering all over our dear, beautiful Japanese soil, and the very thought was unbearable. If you dare even set foot on our sacred soil, your feet will rot off, for sure. You’re not qualified to be here. Oh, our pure soldiers of Japan—you’ve got to beat them all to a pulp. From here on, as things get scarce, even in our homes we’ll probably have quite a hard time of it. But don’t worry about us. We don’t mind. You’ll never hear us saying how much we hate it all. You won’t find us pitying ourselves and whining about how horrid it is to be born at a time like this. Instead, I even feel that being born into this world gives us a reason for living. I think it’s great that we were born into such a world. Oh, how I’d like to really talk to someone about the war—well, we really did it, it’s finally got going, stuff like that.
