Modern Japanese Short Stories

by Ivan Morris

  The First World War was on the whole a material boon to Japan, and the outbreak of hostilities (in which Japan participated on the Allied side) possessed none of the disruptive significance that it did for English, French, or German literature. Far more important was the unrest subsequent to the end of the war. Inflation and economic dislocation produced considerable social turmoil, which combined with the repercussions of the Russian Revolution to stimulate left-wing and labor movements. A large part of the Japanese intelligentsia, including not a few writers, was affected by these developments and during the years following 1918 several of them participated directly or indirectly in the incipient tradeunion, socialist, and communist activities.

  The proletarian school of writing arose in 1920 (the year in which fierce riots broke out to protest soaring rice prices), and it attracted to its ranks a considerable number of vocal writers. Despite severe government repression, which started at the time of the great earthquake in 1923 and became intensified after the passing of the draconian Peace Preservation Law in 1925, proletarian writers continued to be active during the 1920s and the early part of the 1930s, exerting an extremely important influence on Japanese literature between the wars.

  Most of these proletarian writers took an active part in political and labor activities; indeed, their writing was often done in prison cells, where many of them spent a considerable portion of their lives.2 The characteristic work of the proletarian school was concerned with the sufferings of the exploited urban workers and seamen (also to a lesser extent of the peasantry) and with the supposed iniquities of the capitalists and of the repressive government that supported them. In many cases the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics hovers in the background as an adumbration of better days to come.

  Despite the many differences in approach between the proletarians and the naturalists, the two schools may be regarded as occupying analogous positions in the development of modern Japanese literature. In both cases literary style was considered to be secondary to content, and emotions were rejected in favor of a “scientific” treatment of reality. In both cases, also, this seemingly hardheaded, realistic approach frequently masked a fundamentally sentimental outlook. Many writers who did not actually belong to the proletarian school were influenced by its teachings (see biographical notes on Mimei Ogawa and Fumiko Hayashi). The concept that worthwhile modern literature must be concerned with the harsh realities of working-class life was widely held for many years.

  As in the case of the naturalist writers, the prestige of the proletarians served to provoke a reaction on the part of several young writers who set out to reaffirm the primacy of literary values (e.g., Riichi Yokomitsu, Yasunari Kawabata, and the so-called neo-perceptionists). Many of the important men who started to write in the late Taisho and early Showa periods were consciously rebelling against the influence of the “committed” left-wing authors. As a rule their work has survived far better than that of the proletarians, which by its very nature was bound to become hopelessly dated.

  The militarist period, inaugurated by the Manchurian Incident in 1931, saw the progressive suppression of thought and speech as the government regimented the country in the cause of right-wing nationalism and aggressive expansionism. During the 1930s a thorough-going police state grew up. Democracy and liberalism were rejected as foreign creeds unsuited to Japanese conditions; individualism was attacked as a manifestation of “egoism”; and all unorthodoxy was burked as constituting “dangerous thoughts.” Left-wing writers were harshly persecuted and those with liberal views frequently preferred to remain silent rather than to speak out their beliefs in the atmosphere of intolerance and jingoism that prevailed. It is pleasing to record that only a small number of reputable writers lent their talents to assisting the government in its propaganda efforts. Fanatic nationalism reached its height during the four years of the Pacific War. Thought control became more thorough than ever, and this, combined with a severe paper shortage, resulted in a tragic blank so far as real literature was concerned.

  Japan’s defeat in 1945 led to Allied occupation and to the loss of national independence for the first time in the country’s history. Paradoxically, its effect on many Japanese intellectuals was that of emancipation. Freedom of speech and thought was finally restored; unorthodoxy and radicalism received legal protection. No longer did the police have the power to suppress “suspicious” literary works or to arrest their authors for “thought crimes.” Occupation censorship, being directed mainly at journalism and political writing, had relatively little effect on fiction.

  The early postwar period was marked by a breakdown of the traditional values that had been systematically foisted on the country by the central government since the time of the Meiji Restoration. In their place the Occupation reformers attempted to instill a respect for the liberal democratic principles of the West. Democracy, however, was not something that could effectively be imposed from the outside like many of the more concrete Occupation reforms; despite the initial enthusiasm for demokurashii, especially among the youth, it was clear that considerable time would be needed before it became sufficiently implanted in people’s minds to take the place of official state nationalism as a guiding and inspiring force. Meanwhile the country was faced with what is frequently described as a spiritual vacuum. The staggering wartime losses and the prostration of defeat resulted in a period of economic chaos and political confusion.

  The years following 1945 saw an impetuous reaction to the many-sided suppressions of the militarist era. There was a release of pent-up intellectual energies and a general sense of license that inevitably affected the early postwar literature. One important aspect was freedom to treat the subject of sex. After years of caviling censorship, during which not only contemporary works but even some of the country’s great classics were bowdlerized or suppressed, writers were once more free to describe emotions and events that the militarists had frowned on as being decadent. As an inevitable result there was an outpouring of pornographic works. Yet serious authors were now able to write naturally, without concern over captious censorship.

  With the removal of restrictions, writers were free to criticize national military traditions, emperor worship, the family system—the entire structure, indeed, which nationalists had described as being “flawless like a golden chalice,” but which appeared to have brought the country to ruin. The breakdown of constituted authority and of old social traditions induced in many young writers a mood of thoroughgoing skepticism, which frequently took the form of nihilism, hedonism, irresponsibility, and despair.

  Shortly after the war there was a vogue (which continues until this day) for French existentialism, introduced to Japan through translations of Sartre and Camus. As so often happens in the case of Japanese importations, the content of existentialism was frequently oversimplified and misunderstood. Its main effect was to give certain writers a specious philosophical basis for their prevailing nihilistic mood.

  A number of the apure (apres-guerre) writers lived in a state of desperate disorder of a type that Rimbaud had made familiar at an earlier stage of European development. Alcohol, drugs, sexual promiscuity, nihilism, and thoughts of suicide played a large part in their lives and in their writing. To express the complexities and confusions of the new rootless age these writers attempted to break away from such literary tradition as existed and to create new and freer forms of literature. Apart from Osamu Dazai, however, few of them succeeded in producing works of much literary value; and Dazai, with his personal, “confessional” approach, was in many ways less of an innovator than is often imagined.3

  The year 1948, in which Osamu Dazai committed suicide, may be regarded as marking the end of the turbulent apure period in Japanese writing. The steady improvement of economic conditions, political stabilization under a succession of conservative governments, and the official resumption of national independence in 1952 led to a more normal and tranquil atmosphere; this inevitably had its effect on literature, even though ma
ny of the iconoclastic apure trends continued.

  A remarkably large number of the important Meiji-period writers were still alive. Many of them had been obliged to remain silent during the years of militarist repression, but after the war they once more became active. Their earlier works were republished and many of them continued to write novels and stories. It is a tribute to the longevity and energy of Japanese authors that so many of those who first made their names some forty years ago should still be alive and engaged in new work. Of those included in the present collection Kafū Nagai, Naoya Shiga, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Ton Satomi, Saisei Murō, Haruo Satō, and Mimei Ogawa were all flourishing at the end of 1958. Kafū Nagai died in 1959.

  The present literary scene is one of immense activity. Publishers and literary magazines abound, and the number of novels and stories published every year is overwhelming. With books extremely cheap (an average novel costs the equivalent of 80 cents, and only 20 cents in a paper-backed edition) and with the reading public large and alert, sales are vastly in excess of those before the war. The material rewards for literary success, therefore, are considerable, and some of the most substantial incomes in Japan are at present earned by popular writers.

  This situation is not without its dangers—dangers almost as great as those that beset the economically hard-pressed writers before the war. There is a considerable risk that “pure literature” (as it is rather primly termed in Japan) will still further lose audiences to commercial literature and to the so-called “middle novels,” which occupy a place somewhere between the artistic and the popular. In order to earn money, many of the best writers produce serial novels for newspapers and magazines of large circulation. Sometimes an author will be working on two or more serial novels at the same time, as well as turning out articles on assorted subjects from birth control to Japanese-American relations, giving lecture tours, and dashing off occasional stories to satisfy the requests of the numerous literary and semi-literary magazines. One popular novelist recently became so confused by the number of different things he was writing simultaneously that he inadvertently changed the name of the main character in the middle of one of his serial novels—an error that was not caught up in proof and which caused considerable bewilderment to his readers.

  For the successful Japanese writer “it never rains, it pours.” To remain successful he cannot afford to be long out of the public eye, and the artistic energy necessary to produce serious work is often dissipated by commercial demands. Such conditions are, of course, not limited to Japan, but the lack of solid tradition in modern Japanese literature adds to the danger. Fortunately the risk of total commercialization is recognized and deliberately resisted by a number of the better authors.

  Among those who oppose commercialism, though not for literary reasons, are the “committed” writers. In the present political scene this invariably means communist and near-communist writers. They are organized into two or three main groups; in these groups they energetically carry on the tradition of the prewar proletarian school and look on the writers of “pure literature” as escapists. The economic distress of the early postwar years, the discrediting of the old regime and all that it stood for, the moral vacuum left by defeat—these and other factors led many writers to join such groups. With improving material conditions the appeal of the extreme left has steady diminished—its period of greatest influence was in 1949—and the “committed” writers have been increasingly out of touch with the mood of the country, which remains predominantly conservative. The complete freedom of thought and expression since 1945 has not, so far, led the contemporary “committed” writers to produce fiction of any higher quality than that of the prewar proletarian writers, and their calls for a literature of social protest have had very little effect on postwar fiction. Their voices are heard more in the political than in the literary field; they frequently emerge as vocal opponents of conservative policy or as apologists for left-wing causes.

  The shi-shōsetsu tradition of semi-autobiographical “fiction” has survived into the postwar period, but it is no longer so widely followed as some decades ago. Most contemporary writers seem to be aware of the need for a wider approach than is usually manifested in the “I-novel” and the “I-story.” Nevertheless, the confessional, diary type of writing, in which everything is seen through the eyes of one lone, sensitive individual, continues to be far more popular in Japan than in the West.

  After 1945 the torrent of translations from foreign languages, which naturally subsided during the war, reached new heights. Novels, plays, short stories, and poems from almost every country in the world were translated and published for a public whose appetite had been whetted by the years of official xenophobia and isolation. The choice of books for translation was often indiscriminate, sometimes incomprehensible. Nevertheless, in the influx a large mass of worthwhile literature from the outside world has been made available.

  To what extent, then, is current Japanese literature influenced by that of the West? In the first place, it should be emphasized that on the whole the influence is not nearly so direct as is often assumed by Western readers. Japan has now had some seventy years in which to absorb the literary traditions of the West. European and American literature have come to be taken for granted, and works from the outside no longer carry the aura of the exotic and the startling that they had in the early days of importation. Even more important, Japanese writers now have their own great literary figures—Natsume Sōseki and Ōgai Mori, among others. They can look back with a sense of belonging to an indigenous, if recent, tradition. Although in many ways the Pacific War and its aftermath constituted a break with the past as great as or even greater than that provided by the Meiji Restoration, there was no rupture with native literary tradition such as occurred in the nineteenth century. Whereas the new Meiji writers tended to look entirely to the West for their models, the writers of the present day receive their influence both from the West and from their own writers of the past sixty years.

  Even in the early days of importation, literary influence in Japan rarely produced slavish imitation of certain specific European or American models. It was usually a much more indirect and complex process. As the young postwar writer Yukio Mishima has pointed out, Japanese novelists have usually assimilated only those elements of foreign literature that are in some way close to the recipient. This is more than ever true today when the Japanese writer has such an immense selection of world literature at his disposal.

  Although the most conspicuous influences have certainly come from Europe, it would be a mistake to discount the effect of Chinese and Japanese classical literature on certain modern writers. This classical influence is reflected in the imagery, the descriptions, the general mood, and sometimes the structural technique of many outstanding post-Meiji writers and their successors.4 One of the most interesting aspects of writers like Kafū Nagai, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and Yasunari Kawabata is precisely the way in which they succeeded in melding classical traditions with modern Western thought and technique.

  However, the fact remains that the modern Japanese novel and story are essentially Western forms; in so far as literary influence has played a part, most Japanese prose writers are indebted to modern Western literature far more than to their own country’s classical tradition. It is writers like Hugo, Poe, Whitman, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Hardy, Zola, Huysmans, Maupassant, Wilde, and D.H. Lawrence that have exercised influence rather than Murasaki Shikibu, Saikaku, Bakin, and the other famous prose writers of earlier centuries. The remark made in 1910 by Natsume Sōseki, one of the most important of the post-Meiji novelists, could well be uttered by the vast majority of modern Japanese prose writers: “What governs my mind at this moment, what will influence all my future work, is not, alas, the tradition of my ancestors, but, rather, thoughts brought over from across the sea, and by an alien race.”5 But if they were to make such a statement, few postwar writers would be inclined to include Sōseki’s expression of regret.

>   Japan is, of course, not the only country in which imported literature has exerted an influence, but the historical conditions of the Meiji period made this influence of primary importance. As Mr. Mishima (who, among the younger writers, is particularly conscious of his own country’s classical heritage) has said: “In most other countries there exists a strong literary tradition into which writers can assimilate whatever is imported. In Japan our literature does not rest on any such tradition. Although our talented writers have managed to utilize their abilities individually, there are very few of them who have managed to ground their works on secure tradition.”

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  In Japan, as in most other countries, the story or tale has an extremely long and varied history. Among the earliest collections that have come down to us (leaving aside ancient mythological collections where the literary motive is secondary) are those from the Heian period in which brief prose passages serve to provide the background for 31-syllable classical poems or to link a series of such poems by means of rudimentary plots. “The Tales of Isé” (ninth century) is the best-known example; “The Tales of Yamato” (tenth century) belongs to the same tradition. “The Tales of Tsutsumi Chūnagon” (which includes the charming and original fragment “The Lady Who Loved Insects,” beautifully translated by Arthur Waley) is a collection of ten stories with well-defined plots and considerable realism. The eleventh-century “Tales of Past and Present,” consisting of more than one thousand stories taken from Indian, Chinese, and Japanese history and folklore, represents a considerable advance in construction (though certainly not in artistry) over the lyrical tales of the early Heian period. Otogi-zōshi is the generic term for collections of popular stories, mostly simple fairy tales, that were in circulation during the Muromachi period (c. 1300–1600).

  In a more recent period the numerous collections of stories by Ihara Saikaku (1642–93) deal in a more or less realistic way with the lives of contemporary men and women, mostly members of the seventeenth-century townsman class. “Tales of the Moonlight and the Rain” (1776), a famous collection of nine ghost stories by Ueda Akinari, belongs to a tradition of supernatural tales that goes back to the eighth century. We should also take note of a common form that is to be found in much of Saikaku’s work and elsewhere. This consists of a collection of stories having a common thread or theme; a typical example is Saikaku’s “Reckonings That Carry Men Through the World” (Seken Munesanyo, 1693), which is a volume of twenty independent stories, all dealing with the torments that different groups of characters experience on the last day of the year, when all debts become due for payment.