by Неизвестный
Did I dream of him because I
longed for him?
Had I known it to be a dream,
I should not have wished to
awaken.
In my dreams I go to him each
night without fail.
But my dreams are less than a
single glimpse in the waking.
These are by Ono no Komachi, the leading poetess of the Kokinshū, who sings of dreams, even, with a straightforward realism. But when we come to the following poems of the Empress Eifuku (1271–1342), from the late Kamakura and early Muromachi periods, somewhat later than the Shinkokinshū, we have a more subtle realism. It becomes a symbol of a delicately Japanese melancholy, and seems to me more modern:
Shining upon the bamboo thicket
where the sparrows twitter,
The sunlight takes on the color of
the autumn.
The hagi4 falls, the autumn
wind is piercing.
Upon the wall, the evening sun
disappears.
Dōgen, whose poem about the clear, cold snow I have quoted, and Myōe, who wrote of the winter moon as his companion, were of generally the Shinkokinshū period. Myōe exchanged poems with Saigyō and the two discussed poetry together. The following is from the biography of Myōe by his disciple Kikai:
Saigyō frequently came and talked of poetry. His own view of poetry, he said, was far from the ordinary. Cherry blossoms, the cuckoo, the moon, snow: confronted with all the varied forms of nature, his eyes and his ears were filled with emptiness. And were not the words that came forth true words? When he sang of the blossoms, the blossoms were not on his mind, when he sang of the moon he did not think of the moon. As the occasion presented itself, as the urge arose, he wrote poetry. The red rainbow across the sky was as the sky taking on color. The white sunlight was as the sky growing bright. Yet the empty sky, by its nature, was not something to become bright. It was not something to take on color. With a spirit like the empty sky he gave color to all the varied scenes, but not a trace remained. In such poetry was the Buddha, the manifestation of the ultimate truth.
Here we have the emptiness, the nothingness, of the Orient. My own works have been described as works of emptiness, but it is not to be taken for the nihilism of the West. The spiritual foundation would seem to be quite different. Dōgen entitled his poem about the seasons “Innate Reality,” and even as he sang of the beauty of the seasons he was deeply immersed in Zen.
NOTES
1. Buddhist memorial ser vices for the dead are held on the thirty-fifth day (as well as on a number of other fixed days) after a death.
1. Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922) was one of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration.
2. “Mistaken Judgment” was a rakugo vaudev ille skit.
1. Sophia Perovskaya (1853–1881) was a Rus sian revolutionary executed for her involvement in a plot against Czar Alexander II.
2. Quoted from Goethe’s Faust.
1. Mount Samat is on the way from Lingayaen Gulf to the Bataan Peninsula, the scene of an important engagement during the Japanese conquest of Luzon in 1942.
2. Suzuki Daisetzu (1870–1966) was a celebrated scholar and popularizer of Zen Buddhism.
3. New yen refers to the yen devalued by the American Occupation government in February 1946.
4. Kiso Yoshinaka was a valiant general of the Minamoto clan during the war between the Minamoto and the Taira clans. Kiso’s fate is described in The Tales of the Heike (Heike monogatari), chap. 9, sec. 4.
1. Kinoshita Junji used language for a specific purpose in this play. For the human characters he invented a type of universal country dialect, and for the crane/wife Tsu he used mainly standard Japanese. In per for mance, the part is played with no suggestion of a local accent.
It is impossible for a translator to invent a country dialect that would serve the whole English-speaking world. Accordingly, I have made the humans’ speech a slightly colloquial language, which actors could adapt to a countrified form to suit their audience. I have made Tsu speak correct English, which I hope could be preserved in performance, as she should be distinguished linguistically from the rest of the characters.— Trans.
1. By lunar reckoning.
2. By the Oriental way of counting. Sixty-seven or sixty-eight by the Western. A year or two should also be subtracted from Teishin’s age, and the count at Ryokan’s death.
3. Again, by Oriental count.
4. Lespedeza japonica.
Chapter 6
TOWARD A CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE, 1971 TO THE PRESENT
Chronologies can never be exact. This final period overlaps with that covered in chapter 5, which includes a number of authors who grew up during World War II and, at this time, began writing about their experiences in those years.
In the mid-1960s, however, new factors came into play on the Japanese political scene, just as they did around the world during that troubled decade. Both Japan’s efforts to renew the United States–Japan Security Treaty and the war in Vietnam caused significant social upheaval. Younger writers now found themselves alienated not only from the older generation but also from the Japanese government and other sources of authority. This alienation was portrayed best by the young dramatists of this period, like Kara Jūrō and Betsuyaku Minoru, some of whose works are included in this anthology. Their political and intellectual awareness also formed the impetus for much of the later work of Ōe Kenzaburō, who is the quintessential writer of this period and never wavered in his conviction of the importance of such concerns.
As Japan became more prosperous in the 1980s and early 1990s, some of these political and intellectual issues were muted. Then, as the Japanese economic situation became more precarious, two new kinds of writers emerged. The first has been termed an “introverted” generation, those who turned away from political events in order to examine themselves and the spiritual dimensions, or lack of them, of the contemporary world. Furui Yoshikichi fits this profile best, for in many ways, he upholds the traditions of high literature in an increasingly commercialized society.
The other group, of still younger writers, might be described as “cool.” They produced works that pay homage to the popular culture, much of it derived from Western sources. Of these writers, the internationally popular Murakami Haruki remains, to date, the most successful example. Using postmodern literary techniques, these writers seem to maintain that however important the heritage of a hundred years or more of modern Japanese literature may be, they prefer a style that fits their perceptions of the rhythms of their time. To some readers, the future of Japanese literature appears to lie with them. But other highly admired writers who are capable of great passion and commitment in their writing, such as Nakagami Kenji, suggest that the range of contemporary Japanese literature is much wider.
FICTION
FURUI YOSHIKICHI
Furui Yoshikichi (b. 1937) began his career as a professor of modern German literature, with a particular interest in such twentieth-century masters as Hermann Broch and Robert Musil. Then in 1970 he resigned his teaching position in order to devote himself entirely to his creative work, and since that time he has become well regarded among contemporary writers. Furui’s works show a seriousness of ambition and a somber poetry that allow the reader to enter the often subtle and mysterious psychological worlds he is able to conjure up. Furui’s story “Ravine” (Tani, 1980) is one of the best of his works that has been translated into English.
RAVINE (TANI)
Translated by Meredith McKinney
Deep in the mountains there is a voice, chanting holy sutras. Drawn by the sanctity of its timbre he wanders among the mountains, seeking, but the owner of the voice is nowhere to be found. When he returns half a year later, the voice is still faintly audible. This time he conducts a thorough search and discovers, at the bottom of a ravine, the meager whitened bones of a man who had hanged himself from the cliff by a hemp rope tied around his legs. A further three
years pass, and still the chanting has not ceased. Marveling, he this time carefully investigates the skeleton and discovers that the tongue inside the skull remains unrotted, and is even now continuing to chant with unwavering devotion.
Lying rolled in my sleeping bag in the darkness of the little hiker’s hut in the ravine, I recalled this old story of the uncanny voice that rose with the sound of the rushing water from the valley floor, a story I had heard in the classroom a good seventeen or eighteen years earlier and forgotten till that moment. It came back to me now, as a chill autumn rain came racing suddenly in from the mountain, beating at the branches of the forest, and shrouded the ravine where I lay in a sound that merged with the sound of the stream’s rushing, till it was as if the rain was pouring upward, out of the earth. And it seemed to me then that, from beneath the almost paralyzed quietness that lay wrapped at the heart of the water’s roar, the rich and lustrous weight of a chanting voice reverberated with an astonishing clarity. When I listened intently, there was in fact no single voice discernible. But now it seemed to me that the tumble of water noise in the ravine had instead begun to swell with the breaths of many different people.
This was not the first time I had been bedeviled by auditory hallucinations in the mountains. Once, for instance, at the end of autumn on a night wild with wind and rain, I had heard the midsummer song of a cicada. From deep in the forest there emerged that sharp and numbing shrill, and it echoed back also in layer upon layer from the opposite wall of the ravine. The more closely I listened, the clearer it sounded. It must have been caused by a sort of buzzing in the head due to extreme fatigue, but I could not distinguish it from the sounds of the outside world except for the fact that, when I tried raising my head, it abruptly ceased. I believed for a long time that this auditory hallucination was peculiar to myself. But in the hospital just before he died, Koike confided to me that he too had often been troubled by the cry of cicadas in the middle of the night when he was in the mountains. Nakamura also said he could remember such experiences. Though we three had frequently gone into the mountains together in our twenties, this was the first time this had ever been mentioned among us. . . .
Nakamura, lying next to me in his sleeping bag, moved restlessly from time to time and emitted something between a sigh and a groan. He had struck his lower back against a rock that day as we walked, and the pain was apparently still with him in sleep. It was mid-October; the traditional service of the forty-ninth day after death had now passed, and—in memory of the man who, until the morning he finally lost consciousness, had spoken constantly of our mountain walks together—we were performing what could be called a memorial climb for Koike. It had been five years since our last mountain trip together, when we were thirty, and for both of us the lack of any real exercise in the intervening years had caused drastic physical changes. Until that spring, Koike had also lamented his paunch whenever we met, but when I saw him again three months later he had grown thinner than he had been in his twenties. After fifty days of hospitalization he had finally died at the end of summer, his body parched dark with suffering, leaving behind a wife and two children of five and three. Stomach cancer had taken him at this early age.
Thinking about it now, I realized that from our earliest plans for this memorial climb we were swept along on a strange wave of elation at being the survivors of our companion’s death. It was almost as if the chill breath of our dead friend were brushing against us. There was an excited lift to our step; we seemed both physically and mentally to regain our youth, and we were somehow entranced with the sense that we, at least, could still climb mountains. We had met up whenever we could in the midst of our heavy work schedules and briskly accomplished the task of planning the trip, each privately fearing that his physical strength might not be up to it, and somewhat ashamed at the precipitate and unrealistic nature of the decision, given that we were men in our mid-thirties, each with a family; and now here we were actually in the mountains, with a climbing schedule such as we used to set ourselves in our twenties, and an equivalent weight of equipment on our backs. The previous day, the first day of the walk, we had indeed felt the effects of our lack of physical training. We had exhausted our fund of energy simply in carrying the rucksacks from the foot of the mountain up the ravine as far as this hut, so that on our arrival it was all we could do to prepare and eat the evening meal, and we rolled into our sleeping bags leaving the dirty plates to lie as they were on the earth floor, laughingly agreeing together over a cup of saké that after all we needn’t feel we had to go all the way to the summit tomorrow if this present exhaustion were still with us in the morning. But in the morning we had woken refreshed and had been impatient to be off as we ate breakfast and cleared up. Slinging a light knapsack over our shoulders, we began to climb through the sweet morning scent of the conifer forest, at first gingerly testing our strength, then gradually growing almost ecstatic at how wonderfully firmly we were walking, each familiar motion and each new mountain view bringing back memories for us, until after four hours of drunkenly joyous climbing we found ourselves effortlessly arriving at the summit.
On the way back down, the threat of rain in the sky hastened our steps, and when we reached a rock scree, Nakamura suddenly lost his footing. His foot slipped only slightly on the loose rocks, but he tipped over backward and didn’t try to twist around to save himself from falling; instead he continued to slide down a good fifteen feet, his astonished eyes fixed on my face till finally he rolled over onto his side and came to a halt, striking his lower back against a rock with a dull thud. It wasn’t a particularly dangerous situation, but it gave me a rather nasty feeling to see Nakamura, who was usually a man of more than average agility, so suddenly passive and unresisting.
“It’s not that I was taken by surprise,” he explained in bewilderment when he had scrambled back up to where I waited, “it’s just that, purely and simply, my body didn’t try to save itself.”
When night came the ravine suddenly grew chill and a cold rain came rushing incessantly downstream off the mountain we had climbed that day. Night in the ravine differed from the experience of night on a flat plain: even inside the hut, hearing did not function so much horizontally as vertically. One moment the stream’s sound would be heard echoing upward into the sky and the next instant something would shift so that it seemed now instead to be pouring down from above. The wind carried in the swelling sea song of the conifer forest up on the ridge, came beating down on the corrugated iron roof of the hut, and passed on into the ravine beyond, and then in a kind of reverse wave the sound of creaking branches came thrusting back up from the path of the wind. Only the weight of the darkness sank ever more intensely. Finally the rain squall swept everything to oneness within its roar, passed over, and was gone, and now in the sudden silence that pierced to the very quick of the skull, one’s own consciousness seemed like a tiny yellow light shining meaninglessly in the huge depths of the mountain darkness.
When we had cleared up after the evening meal and sat warming ourselves by the embers, drinking whiskey and dreamily breathing in the fragrant smoke, Nakamura complained that his lower back hurt. We had a joking exchange about it. At our age backache was merely a humorous complaint. The talk turned naturally to the question of our sexuality now that we were reaching middle age. We were in the midst of some licentious talk on the subject when Nakamura suddenly stretched his back and winced, then grinned through the wince. Taking the fact that the fire had died as our cue, we spread our sleeping bags side by side on the wooden platform and lay down, pulling the hoods up over our heads so that only our faces were exposed to the now rapidly chilling air, and spoke for a while of the dead Koike. Our talk became somewhat oppressive.
“The worst thing about going to see him in the hospital was that he kept wanting to touch my body,” Nakamura murmured, already drowsy. “He’d suddenly stare at my arm or my chest while I was talking, and then his thin hand would come sliding out toward it. And he’d just keep touching it, w
ith a kind of envious expression. That would have been back during those hot summer days. . . .”
The conversation had grown rather grim, and we stopped talking. The same thing had happened to me many times with Koike. It wasn’t so much that he envied our health as that he marveled at it. He would fix his eyes on me intently, as though staring at something incomprehensible—something he couldn’t believe without touching it. Finding myself gazed at thus, sometimes stroked by his thin weak hand, I had constantly to fight down an almost unconquerable sense of idiot arrogance at my own survival, a sheer joy at the fact that I wasn’t in Koike’s place. Nor was that my greatest unkindness toward Koike.
“I’m putting it out,” I said to Nakamura, and blew out the candle. The hut was immediately soaked deep in the sounds of the ravine. The faint light that still hung even in the darkness of this night now slowly spread a gray swathe across the floor from the small window, making the plates and water bottles and rucksacks stand out blackly around our bed. Whenever Nakamura twisted his back and groaned, I teased him with a low chuckle, and he laughed grimly back. After some time of this, Nakamura suddenly lifted his head from the sleeping bag and turned an intrepid face toward the door.
