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 19th 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.
