Modern Japanese Literature: Two Views of the Novel

by KENZO NAKAJIMA and EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER

ALTHOUGH Tokyo is, naturally, the literary center of Japan, one of the Meccas of modern Japanese literature is a small town called Magome, in a mountain valley some hundred and fifty miles west of the capital. It was there that the novelist Toson Shimazaki was born. At all times of the year, literary pilgrims come to Magome: groups of school children led by their teachers, or scholars who plan studies of Shimazaki.

Toson Shimazaki was born in 1872 and died in 1943. He went to Tokyo as a youth and joined the movement for a new literature inspired by increasing contact with the West. Influenced by Wordsworth’s poetry, he wrote romantic lyrics in his youth, but presently came under the spell of naturalism and became a prolific novelist. A monumental historical novel called Before the Dawn (Yoake Mae), which treats of Japanese society before the Meiji Restoration of 1867, is perhaps his masterpiece.

Why is Toson Shimazaki so admired in Japan? I think that the source of his appeal lies in one recurrent theme in his novels: the struggle against the family system that so tightly controlled our old Japanese society. For nearly a hundred years now, Japanese youth has been trying to liberate itself, and this drive for freedom became a principal theme in Japanese literature before the First World War. Shimazaki wrote more openly and honestly than any other author of his suffering under the family system, of his struggle to free himself from it, and his near defeat by it. As a result of these conflicts he felt a need to travel and left Japan twice to visit Europe and South America.

The Meiji Restoration brought an end to domination by the feudal Daimyos and introduced a period of rapid modernization. A great many authors were active between the Restoration and the First World War. Besides Shimazaki, those among them who are still widely read are Soseki Natsume, Doppo Kunikida, and Ogai Mori. All of them received thorough educations in the Chinese and Japanese classics, and all explored European literature. In size of audience, no other author can compare with Soseki Natsume. His most popular novel, and possibly the most widely read of modern Japanese novels, is Botchan, a humorous account of a young man who leaves Tokyo to teach in an isolated provincial city, and who has to do battle with unruly students and strait-laced teachers. The influence of Meredith and Dickens is to be recognized in Natsume’s work, but in his later years he penetrated more and more deeply into psychological analyses of ethics and love, and he has left behind a number of works which express most effectively the outlook of the Japanese intellectual before the First World War.

The Meiji Period ended with the death of the Emperor Meiji in 1912. Writers of the time from the end of the Meiji Period on into the years after the First World War, who are now dead, but whose books are still popular, include Takeo Arishima and Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Arishima divided his inherited farm land among his tenants, because he was sympathetic toward Communism, but as a member of the upper classes he found it impossible to devote himself to the movement. Akutagawa, on one of whose stories the film Rashomon is based, portrayed characters from the civil wars of our Middle Ages in a modern style.

The period between the two wars was a brilliant one, with talented authors and critics from an earlier day still productive and with most of today’s authors beginning their careers. It is difficult, however, to single out the main characteristics of the period. In the first place, it was an age of conflict and dissension. International modernism reflecting Western influences was tempered both by a growing nationalism and a Marxist literary movement. Most authors went through sharp personal crises and oscillations. They were liberals in the sense that they loved individual freedom, but many were led astray by the nationalism and militarism at home, or by the Fascism and Communism that were gaining strength abroad.

The few Communists were not the only ones who found themselves virtually outside the law. Liberals, too, were accused of dangerous thoughts, and sound, sensible professors were forced to resign and on occasion even prosecuted for “thought crimes.” Authors and critics who did not choose to surrender to the system had a choice of being arrested or remaining silent, or perhaps, in their despair, of turning to nihilism and decadence. A few thinkers and writers feigned intimacy with the nationalists and yet continued to urge a new humanism and a new morality. Positive resistance to the militarism of the day was impossible. The memory of this experience remains strong in the mind of every mature writer — an important factor to remember if one is to understand the undercurrent of uneasiness in contemporary Japanese letters. Writers have been afraid less of war itself than of the political repression which it brings. Though the political picture has now changed, this fear is quite as prevalent today among our intellectuals as it ever has been.

SINCE the surrender in 1945 our literature has been in a state of confusion, partly because readers no longer knew what older authors were thinking or what new authors stood for. Everything had to begin again, as it were, from scratch. Of the naturalist movement so strong at the turn of the century only Hakucho Masamune remained. Toson Shimazaki was dead, and so was Kan Kikuchi, who wrote artistic short stories in his youth and later became the author of a large number of popular novels and the publisher of a mass-circulation magazine. Kafu Nagai, who began his career in opposition to the nationalists, was still producing, as was Junichiro Tanizaki, who discarded a youthful sensualism to write a series of works uniquely successful in bringing a traditional sensibility to bear on modern life. There are a number of others whose achievements merit mention, but in a short summary I can only do justice to a few who are typical of some of the tendencies which interest me most.

In the fall of 1951 there appeared a novel, Loneli-ness in the Plaza (Hiroba no Kodoku), which captured the interest of the younger generation. The author, Yoshie Hotta, was born in 1918 and had something of a reputation, before the war, as a poet. The hero of his novel is a newspaper reporter. The Korean War has begun, and the busy reporter moves among swarms of peculiar individuals, some of whom seem to be Communists. The hero and his fellow reporters have opinions of their own, but they are careful not to be too open about them. They are haunted by a feeling that they are being spied upon. The front is near, and Japan may shortly be under fire again. The hero’s nerves are increasingly on edge, and he begins to long for a country free of political unrest. At this juncture an extremely suspect foreigner appears and offers him the money to go abroad. The reporter is afraid that if he accepts he will be watched and used the rest of his life, and in the end he burns the money. Japan is caught between two great forces, he feels, and is powerless to fight its way against the stream of international affairs. Overcome with loneliness, he walks in the night to the Palace Plaza in Tokyo and muses on these ideas.

The response aroused by Hotta’s novel was probably due less to its literary value than to the fact that it hit upon a spiritual problem which was troubling the younger generation. Postwar youth felt an unrest and a confusion quite different in nature from that which followed the First World War; Hotta’s work illustrates this uneasiness.

One of Hotta’s most interesting contemporaries, Osamu Dazai, born in 1909, is represented by a fine and characteristic story in this collection. Dazai, whose life has already become something of a literary myth — he might even be called a “Japanese Rimbaud ” — was a spokesman for the extreme pessimism which the tragedy of war produced in many Japanese. He published several novels denouncing hypocrisy, but finally was unable to stand up against the assaults of the age, and in 1948 committed suicide. His nihilism found a sympathetic audience among the young, and his death caused a great stir. Dazai’s nihilism grew out of despair over the sordidness of modern politics and society, and yet he attempted to express something of the beauty in humanity. Even those who do not share his view of life admit that it was a product of the age and not a purely personal negativism.

Around 1930 a young man named Shohei O-oka, fascinated with the French novelist Stendhal, translated his work into Japanese, and tried writing novels himself — without much success. He published one unfinished novel and presently was forgotten. When the Second World War began he was drafted and sent as a private to Mindoro in the Philippines. O-oka was taken prisoner, though he saw no active fighting, and at the end of the war he returned to Japan, unemployed. He had been simply one more foot soldier, but the war experience made the seeds that had been planted in his youth suddenly sprout. He wrote a novel called Journal of a War Prisoner (Furyoki), and, at a stroke, established a reputation.

Novelists younger than Hotta, O-oka, and Dazai, writers who may clearly be placed in the postwar generation, have without exception been influenced by the defeat. Their books are often dark, gloomy affairs. If they write of army life they find a sympathetic audience in those who have had similar experiences. Some, on the other hand — the novelist Yukio Mishima, for instance — have turned away from this darker world and sought instead to concentrate their powers of expression on the world of love.

Another interesting newcomer, Fumio Niwa, has adopted the device of turning the spotlight on a small phase of society in each of his works, without attempting to show postwar Japan in panorama. To take an example: esoteric cults have had a vogue in postwar Japan, and masses of new religions have sprung up, some of them, indeed, less religions than business enterprises. Niwa has produced a masterpiece of its kind. The Serpent and the Dove (Hebi to Hato), which studies the rise of one such sect. He has also written a novel called Carving Knife (Hacho), which describes the workings of a cooks’ guild since the war. These works are splendid treatments of certain corners of society, but society after all is more than new religions and cooks’ guilds.

There are a dozen other young writers whom I would like to single out for praise, but nothing is more tantalizing, I fear, than to list the names of authors whose books are not available in translation. So, instead, I can only try to suggest the “climate” in which they are working.

Tokyo was reduced to rubble in the air raids. Now, ten years later, it gives the appearance of having recovered. Scattered about the city are the steel skeletons of new buildings. Except where a special attempt has been made to beautify it, however, the city is but a front that must seem rough indeed when compared with an old city like Kyoto. Tokyo has disappeared as an old city, and as a new city it suggests in its crudeness a town that has sprung up on an open waste during a gold rush. But Tokyo is a city with dreams of the future.

This transitional chaos is reflected in contemporary Japanese literature. Authors find themselves troubled by a restlessness and confusion like the incoherent jumble that is the architecture of the rebuilt cities. They are trying to find their way out; or, more accurately, they are trying to portray in literature the psychology of the contemporary Japanese who must live in this confusion.

It may not be a project of which authors would approve, but it would be of great interest to select appropriate parts of postwar novels, plays, and poems for a great anthology of a sort that has not yet been tried — an anthology that could probably tell almost all that there is to tell about life in Japan since the great upheaval of the war.

IT CAN only be with great reticence that a foreigner sets down his views on modern Japanese literature when an eminent Japanese critic has just covered the field. He knows that his own reading is not as wide as that critic’s, and he knows that he is not and cannot be so sensitive to matters of style, allusion, and connotation as one who grew up with the Japanese language. The foreigner’s justification for his rash venture must be something like this: the modern Japanese intellectual, however perceptive a critic he is, tends to be so dissatisfied with what is old-fashioned in his culture that he seems less interested in his literature as such than in attempts to change it, less interested in good authors than in good rebels.

So it is that he gives his first attention to the “naturalists,” those literary reformers who at the turn of the century thought they were bringing French naturalism to Japan. What they actually were bringing, it soon became clear, was a somewhat affected personal romanticism that expressed itself in autobiographic fiction. In any case, they stood at the head of what is called “the main stream” of modern Japanese literature. With a warning that it is an over-simplification, we may say that the main stream includes those writers of autobiographic and, later, of social fiction who wanted to westernize Japanese literature as soon as possible and who saw literature as a means of reforming society.

There is no doubt that the “naturalists” and their successors performed useful services. They made the Japanese writer of fiction look at the individual, a subject he had rather forgotten for some centuries. They helped revolutionize Japanese style, so that a writer like Naoya Shiga, who did his principal work during and after the First World War, was able to write his diary-like “short stories” in clear, brittle sentences that were quite new to Japanese literature.

The foreigner is likely to find that the Japanese novelists who interest him most are the novelists who have resisted the main stream. Soseki Natsume, one of the great figures in modern Japanese literature, may be put in the “old-fashioned” group, though he tends to defy classification. His novels are sometimes autobiographical, like those of the “naturalists,” and like them he frequently writes of the shackles imposed by the Japanese family system. He was, moreover, strongly influenced by the West, particularly by English literature. Indeed in his calm detachment from his novels he came nearer the traditional attitude of the European realist than did any of the eager “naturalists”; but it is precisely this fact (such is the confusion to which over-simplification must lead) that puts him outside the main stream. He knew that literature is not life, and he was artist enough to stand back from his work. In his last novels, pitiless analyses of human selfishness, he came through to something like Buddhist resignation and negation of the self.

Natsume died in 1916. At least three eminent living writers belong even more clearly in the conservative tradition: Kafu Nagai and Junichiro Tanizaki, who came into prominence in the decade before the First World War; and Yasunari Kawabata, a generation younger.

Kafu Nagai returned from America and Europe at about the time of the Russo-Japanese War, strongly under the influence of French literature. Nevertheless he rebelled against the “naturalism” that was sweeping the country, and soon turned back to explore the culture of the Edo Period, the two and a half centuries of peace which preceded the opening of Japan to the West. Finding his ties with the past in what survived of the old Tokyo merchant culture, he became the great novelist of Tokyo and, as the years passed, of its demimonde in particular. One senses in the dancing girls, the prostitutes, and the other dwellers on the edge of society with which he peoples his novels a projection of his own loneliness, a loneliness that has grown more intense with age. Today, a highly revered figure in Japanese letters, he lives alone and refuses to see other writers.

Like Natsume, Nagai is in some ways nearer French naturalism than are the “naturalists” whose influence he sought to reject. His sketches of Tokyo’s darker quarters have a stark authenticity that is quite lacking in the posings of the autobiographers. And yet a coating of gentle melancholy covers his novels, a nostalgia for the day when Tokyo thought itself the world. His attachment to the city is perhaps too close. The reader who does not know it as he does may find him parochial.

Junichiro Tanizaki was Nagai’s discovery. It was praise by Nagai, a few years his senior, that first won Tanizaki a name in the literary world. Both authors rebelled against the “naturalism” of the day, and both presently came, each in his own way, to rebel against the Occident. Tanizaki, a native of Tokyo, moved to the Kansai (the KyotoOsaka-Kobe district) when the earthquake of 1923 destroyed Tokyo. In that more conservative section of the country he discovered the Japanese past, and his work since has been an attempt to preserve something of it in literature and to warn his countrymen against too thoughtless a rejection of it. His most recent long novel, Sasame Yuki (an almost untranslatable expression that refers to snow falling in very fine flakes), is a slow and loving re-creation of the Osaka merchant culture in its last days. It was written during the war, which destroyed the last remains of the old city, and in its careful detachment from the problems of the day it makes one think of a calm Japanese garden just before a typhoon descends on it.

Soseki Natsume is deeply Oriental in his intellectual attitudes. Tanizaki is perhaps even more deeply Oriental, or more peculiarly Japanese, in his rejection of the intellect. He is interested in delicate surfaces and in rituals that establish communion with the past. He seldom allows an idea to trouble his novels. When one of his characters is overcome with grief or anger or rebellion, Tanizaki describes how that character comports himself, and is rather chary of suggesting what may lie beyond. He is like those classical Japanese artists who, while absorbing its line and color, were indifferent to the intellectualism of Chinese painting.

Yasunari Kawabata, unlike the others, was never intoxicated with the West. A lonely childhood and an early fondness for the Japanese classics formed what the Japanese, recognizing its uniqueness, call “Kawabata literature.” His traditionalism resisted not so much the “naturalists” but the “proletarians” who threatened to take over Japanese literature after the First World War. Kawabata’s story The Izu Dancer, in this collection, may suggest something of the lyrical vein that runs through his major work.

Kawabata is at his best when he is writing of women. Like Tanizaki, he is indifferent to the problems of the day. Tanizaki’s characters, however, move in a society which, while it may be dead or dying, at least accords them a sense of identity. Kawabata’s characters, on the other hand, are alone: dying women, discarded women, guiltridden women (the Izu dancer, a near outcast, is one of the more fortunate ones). They live on the edge of hopelessness, and yet in Kawabata’s hands they take on a fragile beauty that seems to give them a reason for being. Tanizaki’s world is the world of the classic painter’s scroll, its bright surfaces tempered somewhat by the author’s knowledge that he is perhaps the last Japanese with the ability and desire to write of that world. But Kawabata tells us what has happened to the world of the classic poet’s epigrammatic Haiku: he gives us quick glimpses of beauty and with them a chilling suggestion that emptiness lies beyond.

Japanese literature since the surrender of 1945 has seemed to be in a state of confusion. It is hard to say whether the reader is responsible for it or the writer. Should we blame the shock of a lost war or simply the inevitable distortions that come from being too near a great social upheaval? Perhaps one generalization — with a warning that it may be based on insufficient knowledge — will suggest something of the general nature of the postwar novel: the authors who seem to me to show the most promise are those who have not forgotten what a novel really is. There has been far too strong a tendency since the war to confound the novel with the political pamphlet on the one hand and the critical essay on the other. An unfortunate distinction between the “individual” and the “social” seems to have led to the view that the “social” (and most young Japanese are determined to be “social” as that word stands in opposition to “nonsocial” or “antisocial”) must preclude the private, so that a social novel is trivial and flippant when it deals with the personal and the private. The result is that the novel becomes a political tract. Or, in the hands of a nonpolitical author who makes the same error and forgets that a novel is about people, it becomes an elaborate exposition of the thesis that Japanese should write like Stendhal.

Perhaps the two postwar authors who show the most promise are Taijun Takeda and Yukio Mishima. Takeda, now in his forties, is a student of Chinese literature who only recently took to writing novels. He has a wonderful talent for characterization and has possibly come nearer than any other novelist to capturing something of the clutter and ferment of postwar Japanese intellectual life. Unfortunately he has little sense of form; his works tend to wander, leaving loose threads behind them. Mishima, in his late twenties, has so far written mostly of homosexuality, which seems to be for him a symbol of a more general cultural malady. If anyone in the postwar generation belongs to what I call the “conservative resistance,” it is Mishima. The Japanese classics have influenced his style, and like his seniors from Natsume on he has not forgotten that it is dangerous to make the novel a call to action, political or literary.