Modern Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  SENTA: I’m not like you—even though I reform, I’m no use to anybody. I thought that if I died it would be for the good of the world, and I felt like killing myself.

  SHIMAZO: Don’t be stupid. Value your life and live like a good man. Try to make an honest living, even if you have to open a little shop somewhere. That is sure to bring happiness to your dead parents. Don’t revert to your evil ways!

  SENTA: I renounce robbery. I will make offerings on the anniversaries of the deaths of my poor parents, to whom I have brought so much suffering all these years, even if I can only afford to give water.

  SHIMAZO: That will bring them greater joy than you can imagine. And do you completely give up the idea of breaking into Mochizuki’s house tonight?

  SENTA: Yes, I do.

  SHIMAZO: I am very relieved to hear your words.

  SENTA: I could have spared you much suffering if only I had seen the light earlier. Brother, forgive me.

  (He bows his head to the ground in apology.)

  SHIMAZO: Your apology shows you have become an honest man. I forgive you.

  SENTA: I wish I could go with you now to return what I took from Fukushimaya, but I haven’t five yen, much less five hundred. My only way of raising money is to accept the hundred yen Mochizuki offered me yesterday.

  SHIMAZO: Since it is Mochizuki’s wish, you should. Then, if you can sell this dagger for two hundred yen, it will make three hundred yen all told. That’s still two hundred yen short, of course.

  SENTA: Now that I’ve given up stealing, I haven’t the means of earning even one yen.

  MOCHIZUKI (appearing from behind the torii to the left): I will present you with the two hundred yen you need.

  SHIMAZO: Who are you?

  SENTA: Mochizuki!

  MOCHIZUKI: This is the first time I meet you, Shimazo. Let me present myself. I am Mochizuki. Yesterday I had the unexpected pleasure of speaking with Senta. This evening I happened to be passing through the grounds of the shrine on my way back home from business downtown. I heard whispering and wondered what was afoot. I’ve heard everything, and that’s why I’m offering you the two hundred yen.

  SHIMAZO: I don’t know about Senta, but I’ve never had the honor of meeting you and ...

  SENTA: For you to offer to give me so much money ...

  MOCHIZUKI: It is a slight token of gratitude to Shimazo.

  SHIMAZO: But why?

  MOCHIZUKI: If Senta had broken into my house tonight because of his old grudge, I might easily have been killed, or if lucky enough to escape with my life, suffered a severe wound. I escaped this danger because of Shimazo. I offer the money in gratitude.

  SHIMAZO: Then you really intend to give the two hundred yen?

  SENTA: I didn’t think you could be so merciful. If I had broken into your house tonight, I would certainly have ended up by having my head cut off.

  SHIMAZO: You see, bad actions never lead to useful results. When you do good, your need is answered. Now you have the money.

  MOCHIZUKI: I suppose you’ve heard all kinds of rumors about me, but the fact is that I also used to be a member of a desperate band of criminals. I know what you feel, and I am delighted that you both have abandoned the evil ways of that life.

  SENTA: May I presume on your most merciful nature to make another request? Would you please give me the hundred yen you offered me yesterday as quittance money?

  SHIMAZO: Please also buy this dagger. It is a very valuable one and well worth two hundred yen.

  MOCHIZUKI: I shall certainly give you the money I offered, Senta. And, Shimazo, since it is your wish, I’ll offer two hundred yen for the dagger.

  SHIMAZO: Your generosity will enable Senta to pay back in full the five hundred yen which he received as his share of the Fukushimaya robbery. I will go home to get the balance I owe Fukushimaya. We will return all of the thousand yen.

  SENTA: How amazing that we have been able to find so much money in one night!

  MOCHIZUKI: It is Heaven’s reward for your having given up crime.

  SHIMAZO: When we have returned the thousand yen to the long-suffering Fukushimaya ...

  SENTA: We will at once confess the robbery at the police station.

  MOCHIZUKI: I am sure that your sentence will be light.

  SENTA: If word of this appeared in the newspapers it would set a good example for thieves.

  SHIMAZO: We owe everything, without any doubt, to Mochizuki.

  MOCHIZUKI: I helped you because I too was once a thief.

  [The remaining lines of the play are in verse and declaimed.]

  SENTA: We who are now gathered here

  SHIMAZO: Are thieves, like rough waves that recoil

  SENTA: From the sands of the beach of crimes towards the open sea.

  MOCHIZUKI: Only to return with the tide to virtue itself.

  NARRATOR: They rejoice over their return to grace.

  Now is the immaculate hour before sunrise.

  (Music of flutes and drums to which is added the tinkle of a bell. All strike poses.)

  That music, at the Yasukuni Shrine,

  SHIMAZO: Means the cleansing rite of every day.

  SENTA: The cries of the cock chase away impurity

  SHIMAZO: Boldly in the hour before the dawn.

  MOCHIZUKI: The sky is clearing now.

  The dawn has come!

  (Fast beating of wooden clappers to signal the closing of the Kabuki curtain, and ringing of bell.)

  TRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENS

  MODERN POETRY IN CHINESE

  Many writers of the early Meiji period continued the scholarly tradition of writing poetry and prose in Chinese. The growth of interest in the West tended increasingly to lessen the popularity of classical Chinese studies, but it was Natsume Sōseki, a scholar of English literature, who wrote the most distinguished poetry in Chinese of any Japanese of recent times.

  •

  Niagara Falls

  The startled traveler wakes to the thunder by his pillow,

  Rises and climbs among old trees to the roaring brink.

  In the deep night, white all heaven and earth;

  The moon comes, parting the curtain of a million misty pearls.

  Narushima Ryūhoku (1837-1884)

  In the Army

  To fret at the time, to bewail the age—how pointless!

  More sense in howling at the moon or fashioning rhymes on flowers.

  Should anyone come to camp and ask for me today,

  Say that the General went to bed drunk and has not yet wakened.

  Fujita Koshirō (1842-1865)

  Song of Victory: The Battle of Port Arthur

  With the King’s million I struck the proud foe;

  From the plains drove upon the fort until the dead were piled in hills.

  With this shame must I now face their fathers:

  To our song of victory today, how many men return?

  General Nogi Maresuke (1849-1912)

  Self-derision

  With hateful eyes I wait withdrawal from the world,

  Lazy, with this doltish ignorance, to try its fame.

  Turning my back upon the days, I slander my contemporaries;

  I read old books to curse the ancients.

  With the talent of a donkey, a lagging roan,

  Head vacuous as the autumn locust’s shell,

  Abounding only in passion for the mists,

  I shall rate rivers, from my rude hut classify the hills.

  Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916)

  TRANSLATED BY BURTON WATSON

  THE ESSENCE OF THE NOVEL

  [Preface to Shōsetsu Shinzui, 1885] by Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859-1935)

  The Essence of the Novel was a work which exercised great influence during the early Meiji period. Tsubouchi defined in it the methods and purposes of the novel (as opposed to the tale or the romance) largely in terms of European, particularly English, examples. The preface, given here, is probably the most interesting part of the work for Western
readers; the rest of the book tends to be a reiteration of ideas familiar to us from Victorian works of literary criticism.

  •

  What a glorious tradition the novel can boast in Japan! We have from ancient times such works as The Tale of Genji, and in more recent centuries Saikaku and other novelists have won considerable fame with their writings. The novel has enjoyed an ever increasing popularity, and writers have eagerly turned out historical romances, humorous tales, or love stories, as their particular talents dictated. However, as the result of the upheavals which accompanied the Meiji Restoration, for a time the popular writers ceased their activity, and the novel itself consequently lost ground. It has only been recently that a revival has occurred. The time indeed seems propitious for the production of novels. Everywhere historical romances and tales are being published, one more unusual than the next. It has reached such a point that even newspapers and magazines are printing reworkings of the hackneyed old novels, and thanks to this trend, the number of novels being produced is now beyond all reckoning. There is a simply staggering production of books, all of them extremely bad.

  This holy reign of Meiji may well be said to have witnessed an absolutely unprecedented popularity of the novel in Japan. At the end of the Tokugawa period, it is true, such writers as Bakin and Tanehiko1 wrote a great many books which enjoyed immense popularity. Old and young, men and women, town dwellers and villagers alike, all eagerly pored over the historical romances. But this was still a far cry from approaching the present wild popularity of the novel. It should not be forgotten that during the early years of this century the reader, however extravagant he might be, purchased and read only the outstanding books. The inferior novels were, in the nature of things, overwhelmed by the good ones and, unable to enjoy public circulation, were doomed to perish in manuscript. Or, even supposing they managed somehow to get printed, most of them became food for bookworms and very rarely emerged from their obscurity. As a result, the variety and number of such works was understandably rather smaller than at present. Things are quite different today. Every novel or romance, however improbable a tale it may be, however vulgar a love story, whether a reworking, a retranslation, a republication, or a new work, regardless of its merits or quality, is certain to win the same popularity. Is this not extraordinary? Ours must indeed be called an era of unprecedented prosperity for the novel.

  There is certainly no dearth of those who fall under the heading of “writers of popular fiction,” but most of them are merely rehashers, and not a single one has distinguished himself as an author. The novels which have lately appeared have one and all been either reworkings of Bakin and Tanehiko or else fakes in the manner of Ikku and Shunzui. The writers of popular fiction seem to have taken as their guiding principle the dictum that the essence of the novel lies in the expression of the approved moral sentiments. They accordingly erect a framework of morality into which they attempt to force their plots. The scope of their works is basically so narrow that even when they are not deliberately trying to ape the old writers, they end up by unconsciously falling into the old ruts and the old ideas of their predecessors. How can we but deplore this?

  However, that things have come to such a pass is not to be blamed exclusively on the inferiority of the writers. Far from it—the indiscriminate readers throughout the country also must shoulder their share of the blame. It has long been the custom in Japan to consider the novel as an instrument of education, and it has frequently been proclaimed that the novel’s chief function is the castigation of vice and the encouragement of virtue. In actual practice, however, only stories of bloodthirsty cruelty or else of pornography are welcomed, and very few readers indeed even cast so much as a glance on works of a more serious nature. Moreover, since popular writers have no choice but to be devoid of self-respect and in all things slaves to public fancy and the lackeys of fashion, each one attempts to go to greater lengths than the last in pandering to the tastes of the time. They weave their brutal historical tales, string together their obscene romances, and yield to every passing vogue. Nevertheless they find it so difficult to abandon the pretext of “encouraging virtue” that they stop at nothing to squeeze in a moral, thereby distorting the emotion portrayed, falsifying the situations, and making the whole plot nonsensical. One awkwardness is piled on another until it becomes quite beyond any mature person to read the book with a straight face. The writers quite irresponsibly dash off their fiction without any conception of what the object of such literature should be. They continue to cling obstinately to their old, misguided practices. Is this not the height of the ridiculous? Or rather—is this not the height of the lamentable?

  I myself from childhood days have had a taste for fiction, and I used to read such works whenever I had the leisure. More than ten years of irreplaceable time went by in such pursuits, but they enabled me to acquire a considerable amount of knowledge about fiction old and new. Believing moreover that I have obtained a fair understanding of what the true object of fiction should be, I now make so bold as to display my theories to the world, aware as I am of their inadequacies. I hope that this book will help clear up the problems of readers and, at the same time, that it will be of service to authors, so that by dint of steady planning from now on for the improvement of our novels we may finally be able to surpass in quality the European novels, and permit our novels to take a glorious place along with painting, music, and poetry on the altar of the arts. I hope that the learned and gifted men who will read these pages will not be too severe on my inadequacies, but will instead grant their favor to what I have to say and to the spirit which infuses my words. Their careful and thoughtful consideration will be a source of joy not only to myself but to the whole literary world.

  TRANSLATED BY DONALD KEENE

  THE DRIFTING CLOUD

  [Ukigumo, II,7. 1888] by Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909)

  The Drifting Cloud, written 1887-1889, is the first modern Japanese novel both in subject matter and style: it deals mainly with young Japanese educated under the new “enlightenment,” and it is written in a colloquial style very close to the actual conversation of the time. The chief character—he can hardly be called the hero—is Utsumi Bunzō, a hapless young man who loses his job in the Civil Service because he does not toady to his superiors. His aunt Omasa, in whose house he lives, at first wishes to marry her daughter Osei to him, but when he loses his job she shows him only contempt. Osei, a superficially “enlightened” girl, proud of her education and Western ideas, turns from Bunzō to the aggressive sycophant Honda Noboru, the up-and-coming Meiji bureaucrat par excellence. The novel is full of vivid and amusing scenes which depict life in the eighties in Japan with a sharpness that borders at times perhaps on caricature. We can only regret that this unprecedented novel was never completed. The following excerpt occurs at a point where Oset is beginning to be won by the blandishments of Noboru.

  •

  Sunday was a brilliantly clear day, the likes of which they had not seen in a long while. The wind was gentle and not a particle of dust stirred. It was the second of November, the beginning of the “month of chrysanthemums” according to the old calendar, and ideal weather for pleasure seekers.

  The members of the household had been busy since morning with preparations for the excursion to view the chrysanthemums. Osei fretted so over the fit of her finery that she quite got on Omasa’s nerves. The hairdresser’s tardiness in arriving, which precipitated another crisis, was naturally enough blamed on the maid. Finally, in rapid succession, a teapot passed down from remote antiquity acquired a harelip with which it had not been born, an earthenware mortar firmly placed on a shelf ran away all by itself, and, just when everything was in a state of the extremest confusion, an unfortunate visitor, one notorious as a long stayer, appeared. They attempted to lay as much emphasis as they could on the words “We’re leaving in just a few minutes for Dangosaka,” but these had no more effect than the remedies of the most arrant quack. The visitor settled down with utter
self-possession to a lengthy chat, with an air of being permanently installed. What a dreadful nuisance! Nevertheless they did as duty required, and the danger passed more easily than expected. Hardly had the visitor left—which eventually did occur—than the hairdresser arrived. The preparations for the excursion were duly completed and by eleven the household had at length calmed down. Occasionally one even heard loud peals of laughter.

  Bunzō, the man of misfortune and woe, had nothing about him of chrysanthemum-viewing. If we could compare Noboru to the cherry blossoms in the pride of their springtime flowering, Bunzō resembled, rather, a withered cattail in the shade. He had decided that if there was nothing he could do to oppose the excursion, he would at least not let himself be humiliated by it. He chose to let circumstances take their course and give himself the airs of a martyr. The day before yesterday when Noboru invited him along, he had resolved to refuse outright. Since then, he had maintained a detached calm which suggested that whether people were excited or not was a matter of as little concern to him as the neighbor’s colic. But he was inwardly not quite equal to this feigned tranquillity. Everything he saw or heard, always with the same expression of serene pleasure on his face, of the others’ excitement served to remind him again of his happiness of yesterday, and he sighed, his spirits damp as the sky in May. Which was not very enjoyable.

  No, it was not enjoyable. When yesterday Osei asked Bunzō if he were going, he had replied that he was not. To which she had said in the coolest possible tone, “Oh, really?”—which was not enjoyable. Bunzō felt that if she wanted him to go she should have coaxed him. And if he remained obstinate and still would not go, she should have said something like, “Unless I can go with you, I won’t go at all.”