Mount TBR #46

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene (editor)

In 1956, Grove Books published this collection, which gives an excellent overview of Japanese literature from the Meiji era to just after WWII. Donald Keene was the editor and translators include luminaries such Ivan Morris, Edward Seidensticker, Howard Hibbett, and Keene himself.

Kanagaki Robun’s “The Beefeater” exemplifies the wariness of Meiji era intellectuals about Westerners and Western ways. Traditional Japanese people were influenced by Buddhism which prohibited eating beef so Kanagaki Robun mocked the beefeaters in this story as reprehensible and corrupt.

Hattori Busho’s The Western Peep Show gives an incongruous feeling because it treats a gaudy Western product in ponderous Chinesey prose. It must have been a bear to translate, but I think it comes off believably.

               

Kawatake Mokuami’s The Thieves is the last act of a Kabuki play. Despite the tried and true theme of “virtue praised and vice castigated” this is interesting for its rarity value. How often do we read Kabuki plays?

               

Keene includes translations of belles lettres such as waka, haiku, modern poetry in Chinese, and critic Tsubouchi Shoyo’s essay The Essence of the Novel.

Included is a wonderful excerpt from Futabatei Shimei’s unfinished novel The Drifting Cloud. Described as Japan’s first modern novel, it follows the adventures of four characters. Bunzo is an immature 23-year-old who is canned from his cushy government job because he doesn’t kowtow to his bosses. His landlady Omasa castigates him for his job woes because she wanted her daughter Osei to marry him. Like a hapless neurotic in a Natsume Soseki novel, Bunzo wants Osei but does not do anything to attract her because he just wants her to fall into this lap. But he hates it when she seems to favor the dynamic Noboru, a hearty colleague of Bunzo.             

Combining slice of life proletarian themed and coming of age story is Higuchi Ichiyo’s Growing Up. A long story set in the late 1890s in Asakusa and the Yoshiwara, the main characters are teens growing up, gradually losing their liberty to the grind of the adult working class world.

Kunikida Doppo’s Old Gen is the saddest story I’ve read in a year that has included Chekhov. 'Old Gen, set in the countryside abutting on the sea, portrays the tragedy of a ferryman doomed to lose his family, both natural and adopted.

               

The excerpt from Natsume Soseki’s novel Botchan has our unlikely hero, the titular character who’s the narrator, taking his leave from his too-loyal maid and worshipper. He is hilariously clueless about other people, a narcissist for whom other people are just weird shadows. This classic novel ought to be read by anybody into Japan. So beloved was Soseki that he was pictured on the thousand-yen note for years and years.

               

Shimazaki Toson wrote the 1906 novel The Broken Commandment about a young teacher whose outcast father made him promise to keep his burakumin origins secret.The excerpt, a moving one, covers the teacher’s attendance at his father’s funeral back in the old hometown. Written in the naturalist style, it is both persuasive in tone (sadness) and vivid in setting. This makes the reader want to hunt up the entire novel.

Tayama Katai’s One Soldier is another example valuable for not only for its literary merit but its scarcity. Where else can read war stories, written from a different point of view, about a war faraway in time (the late 19^th century), place (Manchuria), and origins (The Russo-Japanese war)? It sums up the experience of the infantry soldier, “It hurts! It hurts! It hurts.”

Nagai Kafu’s The River Sumida is a novella that captures his characteristic elegiac tone. At first the usual sad sack protagonist put me off, thus reminding us the reader should be the right state of mind (e.g., openness, tolerance for ambiguity) for Nagai Kafu and Natsume Soseki. But I was eventually quite taken with the mood and theme. In very few pages considering the writer’s large ambition, Nagai Kafu shows changes in a teenager and in society itself. 

               

Ishikawa Takuboku, in The Romaji Diary, explores a writer’s introspection concerning his failure to create as an artist and his failure to fulfill the responsibilities of a wife, husband, and son. An interesting personal document, but I wonder if it’s really literature, given all the “poor poor pitiful me” stuff.

               

The Wild Goose is an excerpt from the novel of the same name by the very serious Mori Ogai. Bored with his sour wife and moneylending business, Suezo takes Otama as a mistress. Otama feels responsible for her aging widower father so her need for money to do so forces her into being a kept woman. This excerpt covers her painful realization that the neighborhood knows the situation and is scandalized.

Izumi Kyoka’s A Tale of Three Who Were Blind is a supernatural story written in a romantic and florid style. Again, for pure novelty, it’s worth reading as an example of a kind of tale popular in the Edo period, with elements of Chinese ghost stories and native Japanese puritanism. Very gothic, well worth reading for people wondering about the roots of Japanese horror stories.

               

Naka Kansuke’s Sanctuary is an excerpt from his well-regarded memoir of growing up in Meiji era Japan, The Silver Spoon. This author was known for his depictions of childhood.

               

Shiga Naoya’s 1913 story Han’s Crime calls to mind to mind the theme of ambiguity and the futility of ever knowing what really happened in a complex incident, similar to the theme of Rashomon by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. A psychologically acute story.

               

Shiga Naoya’s At Kinosaki is another probe into the psychological state of a man who stays in the country to recover from a traffic accident. He comes to the patient realization that death is just a natural part of life, not something to be feared but prepared for.

In Kikuchi Kan’s The Madman on the Roof, from 1916, all kinds of Japanese tensions make an appearance: ambivalent attitudes toward the cognitively disabled and ancient versus modern attitudes toward supernatural explanations. I grant a lot is packed into a short short story, but to me, Kan is overwrought.

               

Kume Masao’s The Tiger, I gather, is an example of the touching heart-warming story that made him popular in his time. I really liked the Asakusa setting, but the tone is blubbery.

The two stories in this collection by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Kesa and Morito, and Hell Screen, are fine examples of this great writer’s work. Both are grim and gloomy and macabre as all get-out. His writing is so intense and odd that a reader has to wonder if he really did inherit his mother’s mental disturbances and if writing relieved or released his personal devils.

Kobayashi Takiji’s The Cannery Boat is a grim story of proletarians exploited out of greed and sadism. As literature, it doesn’t work, but as document of how modernization and capitalist socio-economics has worked common people over not only Japan but just about everywhere, it works. In 1933, for his union activities, Kobayashi was yanked out of rally to unionize fishery workers, taken to Tsukiji Police Station, and tortured to death by the secret police.

Yokomitsu Riichi: Time. Powerfully written quest story filled with misery and suffused with Buddhist sense of life as suffering. Awful things happen to a group of stranded players as they escape paying a lodging bill, such that when you figure nothing could be worse, it gets worse.      

Hino Ashihei’s Earth and Soldiers an encouragement of the gratitude the reader should feel at the sacrifices of soldiers implementing Japan’s plan to convert China into a vast slave labor camp. As I’ve said above, where else are we going to read something so unusual? It also confirms us in our dark suspicion that some writers feel they have to put literature to dubious purposes, like persuading people aggressive war against a weak neighbor is a commendable thing.

Kawabata Yasunari’s The Mole refers neither to a spy nor to a burrowing animal but to, as readers familiar with Kawabata’s thing about skin will readily guess, the blemish or birthmark kind of mole. Sigh. Since 1980, I’ve read most of his novels and more short stories than I can count, and next to his themes of modernity vs. traditional, desire and regret, there’s always something about female skin. Always.

The Firefly Hunt is a pretty excerpt from Tanizaki Junichiro’s beautiful novel Sasameyuki a.k.a The Makioka Sisters. People seriously into Japan must find a comfy position with good light and enter the world of The Makioka Sisters.

Tanizaki Junichiro’s The Mother of Captain Shigemoto reminds us that Tanizaki had a macabre and decadent streak as wide as Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s. It takes place in Genji-era Kyoto, but its graveyards and corpses are a far cry from Murasaki’s pretty rooms and Niou’s ritzy palaces. It reminds us of the Zen/Stoic thing that such extremes naturally occur in the word. I sternly warn squeamish readers off, like Mr. Halloran warning Danny not to enter Room 237. But this is heady stuff:

Those who have not seen the truth are stirred to the deepest covetousness by that which seems of good quality, and their resentment is not small at the rag that seems the opposite; the fine and the base may change, but that from which arises the cycle of birth and rebirth is eternal. … How pitiful, how profitless are worldly illusions. One can but think that only the trivia of a dream cause men to look with dread on resting in the eternal.

Dazai Osamu: Villon’s Wife. Another exploration of artist as brute, along the lines of Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, Nabokhov’s Humbert Humbert, and lots of Japanese modernists.         

Hayashi Fumiko’s Tokyo . Again with Shitamachi and Asakusa as the setting, a WW2 widow struggles to not actually have to starve. A moving story.  She died too young at 47, in 1951.

Omi is an excerpt from Mishima Yukio’s gay novel Confessions of a Mask. Kochan narrates an incident in which his love object, the rugged Omi, senses that something is odd about the schoolboy adoration of the weakling Kochan. That Mishima could write like a barn afire in only his early twenties boggles the mind.

In conclusion, I urge readers to read short stories and give them their due. That is, read one and then do something that will space you out and give you room to think about it. Read one, do dishes, think about the story. Read one, get on the elliptical, think about the story. Read one, sit and do nothing but think about the story. Read one, watch grass grow, water evaporate, laundry spin, and think about the story. Note that worthwhile spacing out activities disengage you from screens. To paraphrase Manoush Zomorodi, you have to go through pain and discomfort and boredom to get to get to your imagination, your dreams, your mystery that’s only yours, that “whatever it is” which will help you fathom the story beyond what happened, beyond empathy, to what the story means to you.