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

by Неизвестный

  Ichigon hōdan shō was thought to be one of Yoshida Kenkō’s favorite books. One could easily insert this passage in the text of Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, fourteenth century) without damaging the quality of his text. Pity. Now, facing this text, I can think of only such trivial things. I can still feel that it is a fine example of treasured writing, but where did the beauty go that moved me so much? Perhaps it did not vanish. It may well still be in front of my eyes. What has vanished is perhaps not the beauty but the condition of my mind and body necessary to grasp such beauty. And I do not know how to regain it. Such childish questions push me into an endless labyrinth. Being pushed, I do not resist. For I cannot find anything dubious in that state we call the budding moment of aesthetics. I will, however, never reach the pedantic field of aesthetics.

  No, I wasn’t imagining things. I was just gazing at the green leaves glinting in the sun. I was looking at the way moss had grown on the stone wall. With absolute certainty, I traced each word, each line, which so clearly appeared in my mind. I wasn’t thinking of anything else. I wonder to what natural conditions my mental state corresponded so perfectly. No one knows. Not only is there no answer, that sort of questioning is already part of a joke. I am simply recollecting that a fulfilled time once existed—a time in which only the testimonies of my being alive overflowed, a time in which I could clearly discern each such testimony. Of course now I am not remembering it very well. But wasn’t I, then, remembering well? Remembering what? The Kamakura period [1185–1333]? Perhaps. It might be so.

  I used to think that it was truly difficult to escape from such ways of thinking as “a new perspective on history,” or “a new interpretation of history.” Equipped with what looked like various beguiling arts, they allured and tried to overpower me. Yet the more I looked at history, the more it began to appear as a certain immovable form. It appeared as something that cannot be easily shoved around by new interpretations. History is not such a frail thing to be so easily manhandled by new methodologies. When I understood that, history began to appear increasingly beautiful. One shouldn’t even consider the claim that in his old age, Mori Ōgai fell to the level of a mere historical researcher. Most likely, by beginning that immense historical research, Ōgai joined the spirit of history for the first time. I felt the same sort of thing when I read Kojikiden [Commentary on the Record of Ancient Matters]. Only that which rejects interpretation and stays confidently being itself is beautiful. This is the most powerful thought Motoori Norinaga [1730–1801] embraced. In our age where interpretations overflow, this is the thought most hidden from our sight. I began to think like this one day. On another day, a thought came to me suddenly. I remember talking to Mr. Kawabata Yasunari, who happened to be beside me. He merely smiled and did not reply to my following comment: “Living human beings are such a nuisance. Has anyone ever understood what people, including oneself, are thinking, going to say, going to do? Living people can hardly be appreciated like art works. Neither can they be a model object for a scientific observation. But think. Dead people are amazing. Why do they become so clear and solid? They truly possess a human form. Well then, can we say that living people are a kind of animal in the process of becoming human beings?”

  I liked the idea that we are a kind of animal, but I lost the thread of thought until now. Only dead people reside in history. Thus, only the most compelling aspects of human beings are manifested. Only the immovable, beautiful forms appear. We often say that everything recollected looks beautiful. But everyone has mistaken what that means. It’s not us who tend to beautify the past. It’s the past that mercifully prevents us from remembering useless things. Remembering saves us from being a kind of animal. Memorizing is not enough. We must recollect. The reason that the majority of historians remain as a kind of animal is because they fail to recollect the past with an empty heart. Their minds are too full of memorization.

  It is extremely difficult to recollect well. But it seems to me that that is the only truly effective way to escape from the following pale, sickly thought: history as time stretched from the past to the future like an elongated candy. (This, by the way, seems to me to be the largest illusion that modernity has wrought.) I believe that there is a chance to succeed. “This world is impermanent” is not a mere Buddhist teaching. That is a type of animal state in which every human being, in any age, is inevitably placed. We, moderns, do not understand the impermanence of things as well as the unknown young woman of the Kamakura period did. It is because we have lost sight of what is permanent.

  SAKAGUCHI ANGO

  Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955) began writing stories and novels in the 1930s and became famous in the early postwar years for his works classified as “decadent.” But he is probably most famous for his remarkable essay “A Personal View of Japanese Culture” (Nihon bunka shikan), published in 1942, excerpts of which are presented here. Like Kobayashi Hideo, Ango was driven during the war years to examine his own cultural past, but what he found was startlingly different from that described in an elegiac tone by Kobayashi.

  A PERSONAL VIEW OF JAPANESE CULTURE

  (NIHON BUNKA SHIKAN)

  Translated by James Dorsey

  Things “Japanese”

  I know next to nothing about traditional Japanese culture. I’ve never seen the Katsura Detached Palace, which Bruno Taut praised so highly, nor am I familiar with his precious Mochizuki Gyokusen, Ike Taiga, Tanomura Chikuden, or Tomioka Tessai. As for his Hata Zōroku and Chikugen Saishi, well, I’ve never even heard of them.1 For one thing, I’m not much of a tourist, so the towns and villages of our homeland, with all their varied local customs and landmarks, are a mystery to me. On top of that, I was born in what Taut called the most vulgar city in Japan, Niigata, and I adore the strip running from Ueno to Ginza and the neon lights, both of which he despised. I know none of the formalities of the tea ceremony, but I do know all about getting rip-roaring drunk. In my lonely home, I’ve never once given anything like the tokonoma a second thought. Still, I don’t believe that having lost sight of the glorious ancient culture of my homeland has impoverished my life as I’ve just described it. (I do, though, agonize over what it lacks in other respects.)

  Taut was once one of about ten guests hosted by a certain Japanese millionaire, an avid admirer of Chikuden. The host dismissed the maids, and he himself went back and forth between the tatami parlor and the storeroom, each time returning with a hanging scroll to display in the alcove before leaving once again to fetch the next. He took great delight in having the famous paintings please those assembled. The host then moved the group to another room, where he provided a tea ceremony followed by a formal banquet. Now, to claim that this lifestyle is spiritually rich because it “does not lose sight of the traditions of ancient culture” is absurd—the standards for the spiritual are so very low. This is not to say, though, that my lifestyle, which has lost sight of cultural traditions, is, for that reason, necessarily rich.

  During his visit to Japan, the French writer Jean Cocteau asked why the Japanese no longer wore kimono, and he lamented Japan’s forgetting the traditions of the motherland in its efforts to Westernize. . . .

  What, then, is “tradition”? What do we mean by the words “national character”? Is there some primary factor that determines national character, that makes the Japanese destined to invent and wear the kimono? In the tales of old we find that our ancestors’ desire for revenge was so strong that they would pose as beggars and leave no stone unturned as they hunted down their enemies.2 It has been only seventy or eighty years since the end of these “samurai,” but the stories seem like fairy tales to us now, and the Japanese of today can be counted among the least malicious peoples of the world. . . .

  The concepts of “tradition” and “national character” often mislead us in just this way. They imply that regardless of personality, an individual is driven by some innate urge to abide by certain customs and traditions. However, it does not stand to reason that simply because a practice
existed in Japan long ago, it is somehow innately Japanese. On the contrary, it is quite conceivable that customs followed in foreign countries and not in Japan are, in fact, better suited to the Japanese. Adopting such foreign customs would not be an act of imitation but, rather, one of discovery. Even in the arts, a field with the utmost respect for originality, the progression from imitation to discovery is a common occurrence, as we see in Goethe’s completing masterpieces of his own after having taken his cues from Shakespeare. Inspiration often has its roots in an imitative spirit and bears fruit in an original discovery.3

  So, then, what is the real significance of the “kimono”? Well, its existence means nothing more than that Japan encountered Western clothing a thousand years later than the rest of the world. The “kimono” exists simply because our craftsmanship was limited, and we were not exposed to an alternative technology that would have prompted the invention of something new. It is not the case that the scrawny build of the Japanese gave birth to the “kimono,” nor is it true that the “kimono” is the only garment that looks beautiful on the Japanese. It goes without saying that a brawny foreigner looks far grander in Japanese dress than we do. . . .

  Rather than grieve, most Japanese today rejoice each time an old piece of their hometown is destroyed and a Western-style building springs up. We need new transportation facilities, we need elevators. More than traditional beauty or intrinsically Japanese forms, we need more convenience in our daily lives. The destruction of the temples in Kyoto or the Buddhist statues in Nara wouldn’t bother us in the least, but we’d be in real trouble if the streetcars stopped running. The only things that matter to us are “the necessities of life.” Even though the ancient culture may be destroyed, our day-to-day lives would not come to an end, and as long as these are intact, our uniqueness is assured. It is safeguarded by the fact that we would have lost neither the needs that belong to us alone nor the desires that spring from those needs. . . .

  . . . [T]here exists a gap greater than Taut ever imagined between his discovering Japan with all its traditional beauty and our actually being Japanese, though we may have lost sight of the traditions of Japan. In other words, whereas Taut had to discover Japan, we have no such need, for we are Japanese. Even though we may have lost sight of our ancient culture, surely we have not lost sight of Japan itself. “What is the essence of the Japanese spirit?” We, of all people, do not need to theorize that. Japan does not arise from some explication of its spirit, nor can something like the Japanese spirit be explained. If the everyday life of the Japanese is healthy, Japan itself is in good health. We yank trousers over our stubby bowlegs, deck ourselves out in Western clothes, waddle about, dance the jitterbug, toss out the tatami, and strike our affected poses amid tacky chairs and tables. That this appears completely absurd to the Western eye has no bearing on the fact that we ourselves are satisfied with the convenience of it all. There is a fundamental difference between their standpoint, from which they chuckle pitifully at us, and ours, from which we go on with our everyday lives. As long as our day-to-day lives are rooted in proper desires, their condescending smiles don’t mean a damn thing. They laugh because we look funny waddling along with our short bowlegs draped in trousers. That’s just fine. As long as we don’t obsess over that kind of thing but instead set our sights on more lofty goals, the last laugh might not be theirs after all.

  As I went so far as to confess a moment ago, I’ve never laid eyes on the Katsura Detached Palace, nor am I familiar with Sesshū, Sesson, Chikuden, Ike Taiga, Gyokusen, or Tessai. I know nothing about the Kanō school or Unkei.4 In spite of this, I’d like to try my hand at relating my own “Personal View of Japanese Culture.” You may think it odd that some guy would speak of Japanese culture when he knows nothing about the traditions of his homeland and is familiar instead with nothing but neon lights and jazz. Well, at the very least, there has been no need for me to “discover” Japanese culture.

  Vulgarity (Humans Love What Is Human)

  From the start of winter 1937 to the early summer of the next year, I lived in Kyoto.5 Since I had set out with no particular purpose in mind, I took along a half-written novel, a thousand sheets of manuscript paper, and nothing more— not even a towel or a toothbrush. I thought I’d look up Oki Kazuo, have him find me a place to stay, and, in my solitude, finish up the novel.6 Looking back on it now, I guess it was really just the solitude I was longing for. . . .

  For the three weeks it took me to find a room in Fushimi, I stayed in Oki’s second house in Saga. Although the skies over Kyoto proper might be clear, nearby Mount Atago attracts clouds, and there are snow flurries in the area daily.7 About sixty yards from Oki’s second house stands a bizarre shrine called Kurumazaki jinja. Even though it supposedly is dedicated to the memory of somebody-or-other Kiyohara, a scholar it seems, the real object of veneration is quite obviously the almighty yen.8 In a fenced-in area in front of the main building is a mountain of small, smooth stones—thousands of them. People offer their prayers by writing their names and dates of birth on these stones and then adding requests for cash. They then place their stone on the pile. Some stones include requests for fifty thousand yen; other pitiful stones ask for a measly thirty. Occasionally one finds a stone with very detailed accounting—a salary increase of so much plus periodic bonuses raised to such-and-such an amount. I picked up these stones one evening after the ceremonies marking the spring equinox, and I read them by the fading light of the shrine’s sacred fire. They were quite unsettling, these stones, especially to someone like me—on a journey and without a place to call home, battling a shaky sense of self-confidence and with nothing but a pen to support me. . . .

  I don’t imagine the stones represented particularly deep or powerful sentiments or emotions, and yet I remember them all as if it were yesterday. Conversely, though day after day I toured the temples in Saga and Arashiyama as the snow settled on the bamboo groves, and though I meandered beyond Mount Kiyotaki and the cemeteries of Mount Ogurayama, I found it all—even the Tenryūji and Daikakuji temples—unpleasantly cold and lifeless. I don’t remember a thing about them today.9

  Directly behind Kurumazaki Shrine was an old shack, run-down but with a name that inspired confidence: the Arashiyama Theater. It was surrounded by nothing but fields with a few houses scattered among them. At dusk an empty oxcart would trundle along the road by the theater, a drunk farmer asleep in the back as the ox found its own way home. When I first arrived in Kyoto, a taxi driver and I trudged through the area looking for Oki’s second home. Posters for the Arashiyama Theater were hanging on the telephone poles, advertising Nekohachi of the Byōyūken and promising fifty sacks of rice if he proved to be an imposter. He wasn’t, of course, because the Nekohachi known in Tokyo was the Nekohachi of the Edoya.10

  Needless to say, I wasted no time in going to see the Byōyūken Nekohachi. He was fabulous. . . . These traveling performers would usually perform for a day or, at most, do a three-day run. Not all of them were rowdy brawlers; Nekohachi was, in fact, an exception. I would attend every time the performers changed or even go to see the same performance two or three times in some extreme cases. I remember the farmers from a mountain village in Fukui Prefecture who would only put together a show and go on the road during the slow winter months. They did some comedy routines, some skits, and a magic act, every last one of which was too terrible for words. The entire troupe was pitiful, with just one experienced old-timer doing his best to keep up morale while simultaneously mortified over their clumsy performances. The troupe did have a pretty girl of about eighteen, and she seemed to be their only draw. During the day they drummed up business by parading her through the area, more fields than houses, with just a single chaperone. And they used her in the comedy routines, put her in the skits, and had her dance, trying to get her on stage at every possible opportunity. This only made it worse, though, as she still needed a lot of practice. I went back on the second day of their run. There were only fifteen or sixteen people in the a
udience that night, so the troupe canceled their third date in order to move on to the next town. Passing behind the theater late that night after the show on my way for a bowl of hot noodles, I saw they had the Wooden door ajar and were loading the gear onto a large wagon. The head of the troupe was there grilling some sardines by the side of the road.

  Just over the Togetsukyō Bridge in Arashiyama stands a string of tea houses. The area is teeming with people in the spring, when the tour buses stop here for lunch, and the places plug along even through the winter. While out for a walk one night, Oki and I decided to stop for a drink but went door-to-door without finding a light burning or any sign of life. Apparently customers don’t just wander in randomly on a winter’s night. At long last we did find a place. Because they didn’t have a fire burning in the tea house itself, the gentle, forty-something owner and her nineteen-year-old maid led us into the family room out back, where we drank our saké while, warming ourselves by a single hibachi. The maid, it turns out, had once been a dancer with an animal act, and all of a sudden she launched into a description of the Arashiyama Theater. I knew about the theater’s only toilet—it was perpetually drenched in urine, and the stench was unbearable. Before I could take care of my business, I would have to tortuously pick my way through where the damage was least, and even so, at times I’d be wading through an ocean of urine just to make my way to the piss pot. Since we in the audience were stuck with a toilet like this, it wasn’t hard to imagine the filth backstage in the changing rooms. “Can you imagine how disgusting it was?” the exdancer suddenly blurted out, a real edge to her voice. She spoke very candidly about her experience: the hardest thing about being in the act, she said, was being forced to drink soy sauce in the winter. Every time she was about to go on the stage nude, they forced her to toss back a glass, since it would supposedly keep her warm. Apparently that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.