Editor in Japan

by HAROLD STRAUSS

1

BEFORE going to Japan, I had been in touch with many writers, publishers, and newspapermen in Japan. I thought I was pretty well oriented, only to discover that my Japanese friends had recommended either the least characteristically Japanese or the most superficially topical novels, on the assumption that these 1 could understand. I was saved from this patronizing — and quite false—notion by another trait of the Japanese: their wonderful idea of a proper conversation.

Serious conversations with writers are neither casual nor spontaneous nor hurried. An appointment must be made, the subject set and thought about. No less than five or six hours must be allowed. The setting must be arranged, the atmosphere created. Friends, disciples, and experts in the other arts may drift in and out, but they never snap the thread of the conversation. The writer’s wife constantly servos, and if she is an emancipated, woman or a former geisha, as she often is, she will sometimes join in the talk. Once a beautiful girl with a curious half-reserved, halfassured manner and, obviously, a special position in the household sat with us for a while—not to talk but to enhance the serenily of the moment by her bearing and her beauty.

At first there are formal, routine questions that must be asked and answered. After two or three hours one thinks one has exhausted the possibilities of conversation among strangers. A few long, awkward silences will have occurred, and one starts to make excuses for leaving. Just then a special dish is brought. There is a new painting to be looked at. or perhaps an unusual view of the garden. Suddenly one finds oneself seated again, relaxed, talking as if to a lifelong friend. And in this last hour or two of talk one comes to subtler, deeper meanings.

After a score of such conversations, not all equally rewarding of course, I began to discern five different schools of Japanese writing. First, the classical writers who paint “floating” word pictures against a background of transience and change, pursuing lyrical beauty, symbolists all. Their novels have little architecture; they may be said to illustrate the indeterminntoness of human existence. They neither entertain nor inform, but induce a mood of harmony with the natural universe, the Tao.

Second, the very popular novelists who entertain the least well educated classes with melodramatic historical novels.

Third, the young ideologues who devote themselves to expressions of despair, either Marxist or nihilistic. Their slogan is rationalism, and in Japan to be rational is to be skeptical, therefore unbelieving and nihilistic. The movie Pashomon, which illustrates the impossibility of abstract justice, is considered nihilistic; but today the nihilists are all existentialists and neutralists, full of undigested Western influences.

Fourth, the popular writers who take chaos for granted and deal with it humorously. Their favorite characters are opportunists, men of deftness and acumen, such as black-market operators and corrupt bureaucrats. They make no attempt to “clarify human feelings,” the express purpose of the classicists; but they often command a keen satirie wit.

Fifth, a large and distinguished group of liberal humanists. They are familiar with the classical tradition but not confined by it. They regard human life as too indeterminate to use neat, conclusive plots, but they are more worldly than the classicists. Some of them would rate as eminent scholars anywhere in the world.

One of the first novelists I met was Shoohei Ooka, a relatively young man whose model is Stendhal. He came to see me at the Press Club, which still resembles an army billet, although the lobby is roomy and comfortable. The personalities of Japanese change when they enter the club. They do not. talk freely; self-consciously they try to adopt American mannerisms.

Ooka brought with him keniehi Yoshida, the son of the Prime Minister; and also his publisher, Mr. Shimanaka, the head of Chuo Koron, one of the most distinguished houses in Japan. Ooka is a rather small, round-faced man with a quick glance. He was wearing a neat dark suit and had that carefully cultivated air of quiet self-possession, suggesting inner repose and serenity, one often finds in well-known Japanese. By contrast his young publisher seemed nervous, an impression no doubt magnified by his thin, sensitive face.

Yoshida was quite different. His Cambridge education has a top dressing of Bloomsbury mannerisms. He was much taller than the others and markedly plump. He had a heavy shock of black hair which he permitted to straggle a bit. He wore a loose, baggy blue serge suit and kept a handkerchief in his coat sleeve. The others sat upright and stiff against the pull of the leather easy chairs, but Yoshida tossed one leg over an arm and lounged comfortably throughout our talk. He had a highpitched voice and an effeminate giggle which made it hard to take him seriously.

But serious he was—so serious that he had broken entirely with his father for the sake ot the Bohemian life he chose to lead as a minor man of letters. He had settled in the literary and artistic colony of Kamakura, thirty miles from Tokyo, and made his living at the well-paid job of translating into Japanese. Japanese translators share in the royalties and can make handsome sums. Mark Gayn’s .Japan Diary, believed by the Japanese to reveal SCAB scandals, sold 530,000 copies, and must have netted its translator something on the Order of $35,000. The least a translator makes is $200, but even that is not so bad in a country in which the annual base pay of railroad workers is $444.

2

YOSHIDA pointed out how strongly Ooka had been influenced by French literature, and I asked the novelist how tins began. He told me that he first read Paul Morand when he was in high school, in 1923, a year he remembers very well because of the great earthquake and fire in Tokyo. “I was taking a French literature course, but quite apart from it. we students would read Radiguel, who was also very popular, Philippe Soupault, and Gide. I wrote my college thesis on Gide. When I began to do postgraduate work, I turned against Gides decadence and looked for a more robust influence. I found it in Stendhal, whose works I translated.”

I asked Ooka. when he began writing his own books, and he sighed and said that the cumulating hatred of the West and then the war itself had intervened. “We younger writers who were influenced by Furopean literature could write very little in the late thirlies. Then I was drafted and saw a good deal of fighting in Malaya and the Philippines, where I was finally captured. 1 was really free to write for the first time when I was repatriated after the war, and so it turned out that my first novel, Faryo-ki, dealt with my experiences as a prisoner.”

He said that the book was instantly successful because it was in the main Japanese tradition of the shi-shoosetsu, or confessional novel, an interesting remark from a man who admires Stendhal’s psychological objectivity. There is a tendency in Japan to confuse frankness and sincerity with objectivity and naturalism, so that not only the confessional novel but the shnikyoo-shoosetsu, or mental life novel — hardly a novel at all, but a day-to-day record of impressions, dreams, reactions, feelings, and clioies vues—is called “naturalistic.”

“ F nryo-ki also succeeded,” Ooka said, “because I have a deep hatred for military people, and therefore I understand the psychology of the common soldier. I’ve always been a lone wolf. 1 took very badly to military life or to any organized activity.”

This gave me an opportunity to ask about literary cliques, and Ooka replied that most writers had French intellectual ties, and that they developed personal ties primarily for the sale of their books. Literary groups operate almost like guilds, protecting their members and finding opportunities for publication. With such sponsorship it is fairly easy to be published. Printing costs are low, and publishers break even on the sale of about 2000 copies. But there as here, publication and success are two different things, Ooka complained of the “jackpot system,” in which some books sell very well and others of equal merit very poorly. I assured him that Japan was not unique in that respect.

This led to a discussion of what made books sell in Japan, and Ooka said that the influence of reviewers and critics is severely limited, and the influence of publishers and booksellers nonexistent. “The public prides itself on choosing its own books. A man of taste would be ashamed to rely on the judgment of others.”He stared at me solemnly for a moment and added, “We would not think of having book clubs choose our reading for us!”

But all is not perfect in literary Japan, he said. The public worships famous names and prefers their weakest books to better books by unknown writers. Newspaper and magazine editors play the public’s game, making it very hard for new writers. “You, on the other hand,” he said somewhat accusingly, “are always looking for novelty.”

He volunteered that he thought Faulkner and Hemingway better than any living Japanese or French novelists. “The best of everything is now in the U.S. or in the U.S.S.R.,” he added wryly, a remark I was to hear often and which made me wonder where judgment ends and the worship of power begins. “As for novels, the best are being written in English. I think that now. if I had to be educated over again, I would study English literature. I learned a great deal of objectivity from Stendhal and Zola, but I would have learned still more from English and American novelists.

3

THERE were many other interviews between that and the one with Jiro Osaragi; but none so Western as the first, and none so Japanese as the last. By the kind of books they wrote, I became able to guess the kind of houses novelists lived in, the clothes they wore, whether their manners would be Western or Japanese, and even what kind of food would be served.

There was Tatsuzoo Ishikawa, a fighting liberal of forty-eight, who stands halfway between the two schools most under Western influence, the young ideologues and the old humanists. I set out for his house on a cool, sunny day. If is difficult to toll much about Japanese neighborhoods, since fine houses are apt to be next to shanties; the world is kept beyond the garden anyway by high walls. But hills are a sure sign of mansions at the crest, and as I climbed and climbed from Kohonbutsu station, I began to suspect lhat Ishikawa’s literary labors had not gone unrewarded.

The classicists and the popular historical novelists, who must have their illusionary gardens and their paintings and their spacious rush-matted rooms, would not dream of living in a stucco Tudor villa, as Ishikawa, a modernist, does. I felt flattered because a sign on the door read, Mr. Ishikawa meets visitors only on Tuesday afternoons.” It was a Saturday morning. After removing my shoes, I was ushered upstairs to a snug, sunlit study filled with a divan, two overstaffed chairs, and piles of books standing in all corners.

Ishikawa showed up soon, bluff and friendly, in shirt sleeves, looking as if he had just come from a round of golf, to which he is devoted. He is big, rather heavy-set, with strong features. In blunt words, he accused the older writers of disdaining politics, and the younger writers of being coarse and unskillful. “Young writers must broaden the scope of the Japanese novel, must take it out of the delicate private worlds in which it has lived. But they must not kill the basic tradition of Japanese literature, which is humanistic and sensitive to mood and feelings. And I think it will not die, even if it is now only faintly visible in their work.”

The longer I talked to this man in his Western home, the more I sensed his Japanese roots. He wrote his documentary, controversial novels only because politics haunted his reluctant consciousness. “The world crisis has invaded literature, and cannot be dealt with in the confessional novel,” he declared vehemently. But what he really wanted most, were it possible, was to live simply, in harmony with nature, free of the pressure of politics and malarial things. “Nature has been kind to Japan,” he said, “and our poetry and our art are never without reference to it. That is why even the poorest home has a small garden; and why even the richest Japanese dream of a simple teahouse, adorned with one flower, rather than of a grand place filled with material splendors.”

Actually such a mode of living, simple at first glance, is one of the most luxurious in the world. It does not require much steel or wood or glass; but it requires space and quiet, two things hard to come by in Japan. And it requires time; one cannot hurry things in a Japanese house.

Such a house is his Yasunari Kawabata’s. He is one of the great men of Japanese letters, a classicist who will not change bis own way of writing, although he is very tolerant of the youngsters. His sumptuous house in Kamakura is often filled with writers. He is a wiry, agile, steady man of fiftythree who looks considerably older. He has grayish hair, a sallow complexion, and very disorderly teeth. But he has an electrifying smile.

We sat on the floor of his o-zashiki (parlor) on either side of a low lacquer table, gazing out at the rain-swept garden. There was no touch of the West in the room except a gas fire that kept it unusually warm. A parade of food and drink began to move across the lacquer table, and never stopped during the hours we talked. First broiled fish of various kinds, then lobster and a kind of fish dumpling; then beer, then black tea with sugar, then .sushi (finely filleted raw fish wrapped around cold seasoned rice balls), one of the best dishes in the world. And then bitter green tea. An immaculate white woolly fox terrier played in the corridor. Mrs. Kawabata, a very cultured woman, talked occasionally as she served us. Kawabata has one of the most exquisite collections of traditional charcoal-ink paintings in Japan, and our hours of talk were punctuated by the unrolling and rerolling of fine scrolls.

My visit to Osaragi was conducted and regulated — that is the only word — in an even more traditional manner, for his heart lies in the past. When previously I had gone to see him, in 1946, he had welcomed me in a Western-style living room piled high with books, prints, and painlings rescued from who knows what ruins. In a little island of space at the center we looked at some colored reproductions of No play masks so perfect that all their stylized, fragile beauty was preserved. Then Mrs. Osaragi, an attractive woman whose considerable Parisian chic she somewhat diminished by padding around in stockinged feet, came to invite us to a feast in an adjoining Japancse-style room.

When I returned this winter it was raining heavily and the main street, which was being rebuilt, was a sea of mud. The first landmark I remembered was the public bath that marks the turn up Osaragi’s lane. Two hundred yards up the lane I came to a high yellow wall with a large thatch-roofed gate, in which was set a small wicket gate about four feet high, with a nine-inch threshold. It was not easy to step through, and perhaps, like the miniature entrances to teahouses, these ancient wickets were designed to compel warriors to unbuckle their long swords before entering.

The garden was narrow, luxurious, and full of slender, shivering young bamboo trees; but it was raining too hard to see much of it. A servant directed me from the main entrance around the outside walls to the semidetached teahouse. I knew that Osaragi deliberately chose the teahouse for the beginning of our talk because it would summon a mood of quiet, repose, and trust. I crawled through the small sliding door into another world, and was motioned by another servant to the cushion of honor in front of the unpeeled sapling that was the lintel post. I was served tea and left alone a little while to compose myself after my journey. Custom required me not to rise when Osaragi finally came, in full kimono, a dress that dignifies any man.

Osaragi, now fifty-six, had been in the vanguard of change in his youth. His outlook is broader than that of most older writers, for he majored in political science and French law and literature at Tokyo Imperial University. But, he said, that was a long time ago, and unlike the contemporary imitators, he did not try to write “French novels.” He used nothing from France he could not digest. “It is dangerous to ape style,” he said. “Nor can a way of thinking be imported intact. But it can be useful to study foreign literature if you absorb its ideas. Even then, over the long run, one should accept only those ideas that really fit into Japanese culture. In Japan there is no abstract philosophy or religious dogma. We are unable to acquire thought as such.” And he went on to speak of a life guided by feelings as characteristically Japanese. “But all the young people today are in too much of a hurry either to write well or to read well.”

For three years, at the insistence of his father, who was a shipping company official troubled by government red tape and wanted someone on his side in the bureaucratic nest, Osaragi worked in the Treaty Bureau of the Foreign Office. Officials were not. allowed to publish anything under their own names; so when, in 1924, he could no longer repress the urge to write, he had to find a pen name. Since he lives near the Great Buddha of Kamakura, he chose Osaragi, which is a variant reading of the characters for Great Buddha; and as a first name, Jiro, meaning “second son” or “next to.”

His fine library is still located in the house in which we were; but because he has acquired eighteen cats and innumerable relatives, he has bought another large house near by. Evidently he has flourished. Although there are five or six novels of which he is really proud, written with a delicate humanism and contrasting old ways with the new (his recurrent theme), he has also published many popular historical potboilers, filled with blood and heroism and death, out of which he makes a great deal of money.

He mentioned no figures, but a typical novel by a writer of his standing is first commissioned by a newspaper. When the novelist has completed 20 out of some 200 installments, it begins to run, and he is chained to the hungry presses for six or eight months. For the serial he is paid between $4000 and $5000. Then the novel appears in book form, and if it sells 100,000 copies, as is quite likely, he receives $5500 more. From a reprint edition he nets about $2000. Then it may be dramatized or made into a movie, for which he is paid from $1000 to $3000. These sums go a lot farther in Japan than here.

Because of the eighteen cats, Osaragi serves no food in the old house. We went a short way through the rain to the new one, a superb example of Japanese elegance. The large living room, bare except for a beautiful low table, a brazier, a charcoal-ink painting of a duck with a flower arrangement below it, faces a garden containing a sweeping lawn, a huge old pine tree, a stone lantern, and many broadleaf evergreens, of which one kind, sazanka, was still in full white flower in late November,

I met Mrs. Osaragi again. Now, as if guarding a small island of resistance to the tide of change, she was in kimono; like many other Japanese, since 1946 she has gotten a little fat. We had finished talking about Japanese literalure and Osaragi’s own work, and the conversation became more general. There was a great deal of food and different kinds of drinks. Innumerable people drifted in and out of the room, including an art dealer, evidently an old friend, who talked long and brilliantly about the significance (and price) of the charcoal-ink painting on the wall. Mrs. Osaragi, who had once been a geisha, sat down with us to nibble at delicacies. This prompted some gentle joshing about her “boldness,” and Osaragi, with evident affection, boasted that long before the war, when women had not yet been emancipated by MacArthur, he used to take her with him on sprees in the guy quarters of Tokyo.

We talked on and on for hours. That morning I had been to the Northwest Airlines’ office for my ticket home, and I already felt the sadness of departure. Perhaps it was that. Or perhaps it was because I felt immensely drawn to these people that I was loath to leave. Finally I called a taxi to catch the last, brightly lit, efficient train back to Tokyo. It was a little thing, but I remember that the driver refused a fare from anyone who had visited the master.