The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  J. Thomas Rimer

  Van C. Gessel

  * * *

  1. For this quotation in context, see Paul W. Kroll, “Recent Anthologies of Chinese Literature in Translation,” Journal of Asian Studies 61 (2002): 997.

  2. Keene’s thorough and evocative treatment of the period can be found in his book by that title, World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-modern Era, 1600–1867 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Those wishing to read translated examples of works of literature from this period will enjoy Haruo Shirane’s Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

  INTRODUCTION

  J. THOMAS RIMER

  The stories, essays, poems, and plays in volume 1 of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature can be read for a variety of purposes. Although we all ultimately “read for pleasure,” the word “pleasure” can be constructed from many different elements. Sometimes these elements are in consonance; sometimes they are in conflict. Our own response to a particular literary work can be conditioned by many factors, some of which remain dormant in our consciousness. Other works we have read previously, for example, help shape our expectations, and we implicitly compare what we are reading now with works we earlier admired, disliked, or remained indifferent to. Then, too, our own experiences outside literature influence even our most spontaneous responses. An American who has read, say, a story by Henry James or F. Scott Fitzgerald at the age of nineteen or twenty can quickly learn to appreciate the formal qualities of such a work. A rereading at fifty or sixty will necessarily prompt a comparison—perhaps unconscious but powerful nonetheless—between that same story and the reader’s now longer, richer life experience. He or she will judge the human truth in the story on a basis very different from that of a neophyte reader.

  When reading literature created in another culture, such discrepancies grow greater. But the happy potential is always there: readers are challenged to reach beyond what they know, beyond the confines of their particular culture, in order to explore and eventually reach a different level of understanding. This, I believe, leads to a genuine, heightened satisfaction that goes beyond mere recognition. To achieve this, however, a sense of context is necessary, to help direct readers toward the concerns felt by Japanese readers and writers in order, as it were, to enter with some sophistication into the conversation between them. Accordingly, we have tried to provide here, as briefly as possible, some information about the authors, their reputations in Japan, and the ways in which their works can usefully be juxtaposed with one another.

  Both geography and politics played important roles in creating the shifting cultural matrix in which the writers played out their creative lives between the 1880s and 1945, the period covered by volume 1 of this anthology. First of all, Japan, along with Thailand, was the only country in East Asia not colonized by the European powers. Indochina, Burma, India, the Philippines, India, and even parts of China were to one degree or another under the sway of Western nations. Certainly the Japanese government felt the danger of possible incursions, but Japan did not suffer the kind of forced entry of European culture experienced in a country like India. Indeed, during its long history, Japan was never occupied by any foreign power until the end of World War II.

  Japan’s writers and artists nonetheless took a profound interest in Western culture, particularly after being cut off for so long from international influences, but that interest was fueled by curiosity and enthusiasm rather than by any urgent cultural or political necessity. Although European culture had long fascinated Japanese intellectuals, they were deprived of any contact other than the arrival in Japan of a relatively small number of documents and books, mostly in Dutch, until the opening of the country in 1868. Some of the interest generated in Japan in the late nineteenth century was, of course, at least indirectly related to the political predominance of Europe in all phases of political, economic, and cultural life around the world. Even so, during this same period young Japanese writers were genuinely attracted to French, German, and British writing in the same way that Americans were.

  Why, we might ask, had Japanese creative artists by the 1890s turned away from Asian, specifically Chinese, sources of inspiration, which had served as models of emulation off and on for more than a thousand years? There doubtless were many reasons, among them the fact that China had by now lost its political hegemony in East Asia. But there surely were other compelling reasons as well. During this period, China’s Confucian heritage still remained a powerful force in shaping its, as well as Korea’s, literary and artistic output. In Japan, however, the situation was different. During much of the Tokugawa period (also known as the Edo period, 1600–1868), Japan was cut off from China, just as it was from the European countries, and Japanese literature had become increasingly secularized. Although powerful traces of both Confucian and Buddhist ideas remained in those works written before 1868, most literary efforts had become comparatively quite distant from the direct expression of any religious or didactic moral concerns. This more open stance permitted an easy, rapid, and unhindered flow of new ideas and concepts into the Japanese intellectual and artistic world.

  A number of special circumstances also helped facilitate the rapid development of a new literature in Japan. To begin with, the literacy rate in Japan during this period was as high as or higher than that in America or Europe. From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, a large urban population developed, mostly in Edo (now Tokyo), Kyoto, and Osaka, one with sophisticated tastes, intellectual curiosity, and an interest in the new and innovative. As this literacy expanded, the acknowledged classics of earlier Japanese literature—ranging from The Tale of Genji to court poetry and such works as the medieval Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkō—found more and more readers who defined their own sense of their cultural past and its values through literary means. During this pre–World War II period, literature past and present remained a privileged means of access to Japanese culture and Japanese self-understanding.

  The various works of literature in this volume of the anthology might be said to draw on roughly three sources. First are the Japanese classics themselves. Writers such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke reread older works in order to refashion them with a greater emphasis on psychological elements often only hinted at in the original. His story “The Nose,” included here, written when Akutagawa was still a student, already shows how tradition could be plumbed to produce new layers of significance attractive to modern readers. Older aesthetic concepts were reinterpreted in light of twentieth-century mentalities, as Satō Haruo shows in his analysis of the traditional poetic and artistic term “elegance” (fūryū). Eminent authors like Tanizaki Jun’ichirō reworked traditional materials to bring out heretofore hidden aspects of classical texts, often obsessive or sexual in nature, in such works as the story “The Two Acolytes” or his short play Okuni and Gohei. Hori Tatsuo, one of the most respected writers of the interwar years, was inspired by the classical monogatari tales of the Heian period (794–1185) to produce a new type of lyrical prose at once contemporary in psychology yet suggesting poetic sensibilities that owed much to classical precedents. The past thus revisited continued to exist in the present, and readers were prepared both to recognize the original and to appreciate the sophistication of these changes.

  At least in the early decades of Meiji period, a second set of influences continued to come from Asia, particularly China. By the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/1895, Chinese fiction had lost its hold on the Japanese public (and, indeed, works by Japanese authors had begun to influence young Chinese writers, themselves anxious to break away from the old Confucian patterns). The example of Chinese poetry, however, remained important for a longer time. The first generation of Meiji intellectuals studied classical Chinese in their formative years, just as our own grandfathers studied Greek or Latin, and they continued to admire the poetic accomplishments of the great classical poets. Important
Meiji writers like Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki wrote poetry in classical Chinese (kanshi), and, indeed, Sōseki’s works reveal his great technical skill in composing Chinese verse, which also gave him a means by which he could express his most intimate thoughts. The insistence on personal moral rectitude, one of the legacies of the Confucian system of thought, helped undergird the high moral stance of many Meiji writers, qualities that have continued to give them enormous stature in Japan even today.

  The third influence on the development of literature during this period, and perhaps the easiest for Western readers to identify, is that of European letters. By the 1880s, a wide variety of European literature came to be known in Japan and in increasingly adept translations. Some Meiji authors, most notably Mori Ōgai, worked as translators. Their various enthusiasms opened up a whole new series of possibilities for Japanese writers and readers.

  European literature arrived in a rather transhistorical fashion. Writers and readers discovered at nearly the same time a variety of Western authors from different periods, such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Chekhov, and Meredith. But this influx of sometimes contradictory literary models created diverse enthusiasms, and it took decades before these differing influences were absorbed and set to use.

  In the later Meiji period, this new climate of literary possibility was stimulated by the travel to Europe of writers who went on to became major literary figures in the prewar period. Mori Ōgai traveled to Germany, Natsume Sōseki to England, and Nagai Kafū to France. Indeed, France, particularly Paris, became the beacon to which writers and artists from many countries looked for inspiration. The list of important Japanese writers who visited or lived in Paris is a distinguished one, and this anthology contains the works of many of them: Takamura Kōtarō, Shimazaki Tōson, Yosano Akiko, Yokomitsu Riichi, Nishiwaki Junzaburō, and Kishida Kunio, among others. Some of these encounters brought fresh literary moments to Japan, such as surrealism, but in all cases, new ways of expressing ideas and emotions were the result.

  In some ways, perhaps the greatest change in Japanese literature during this time was the development and adoption of new ways of examining society. In many ways, these new movements permitted for the first time the interjection of social criticism and political stances into the realm of literature. During the Tokugawa period, such efforts would have been forbidden; but now, at least until the increase in government censorship in the late 1920s, a wide spectrum of political ideas expressed in literary modes found their way into print. One way to begin the study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japanese intellectual history is to read the poems, stories, and essays of those who familiar with the various systems of thought current in the larger world, from concepts of individual freedom through socialism, communism, and, eventually, in the later 1930s, the Japanese brand of fascism. Some of this material is illustrated in this anthology in the selections by Tōkai Sanshi, Ishikawa Takuboku, Kobayashi Takiji, Kuroshima Denji, and Hagiwara Sakutarō. Even more writers used their growing awareness of the ambiguities and inequalities of their social milieu to create narratives. A story like Masamune Hakuchō’s “The Clay Doll,” dealing as it does with the problems of the education of women, could never have been conceived of with such poignancy in the Tokugawa period. Even such powerful political events during the Meiji period as the revolt and death of the “last samurai,” Saigō Takamori, could now be depicted directly in a work like Tokutomi Roka’s “Ashes.”

  All these shocks and stimulations to Japanese society reconfigured the arts and society. Already in the Tokugawa period, literature was divided between works intended for highly educated readers like the samurai, the intellectual elite, and the aristocrats. Such works often depended on precedents from Chinese literature, like the elegant and learned ghost stories of Ueda Akinari and, above all, the classic forms of poetry. Yet even then, these class lines had begun to blur as more and more members of the merchant class acquired both education and leisure. Now, however, these divisions started to shift again.

  In 1868, when the country was opened to the West, haiku (seventeen-syllable verse) and waka (thirty-one-syllable verse) were being composed; new kabuki plays were widely performed; and tales in the traditional style were being written. These forms continued into the Meiji period, and in fact, they still can be found. Their practitioners span those who still produce traditional forms of poetry to those who create samurai dramas for film, television, and even animé. Writers like Kōda Rohan and Izumi Kyōka showed that masterpieces in these more traditional guises still were possible. In time, however, works written in the older styles and espousing more traditional attitudes remained to an increasing extent in the realm of popular literature, which had, and has, a wide circulation. This huge body of work invented its own traditions and continues today to entertain millions of readers. Here, too, some foreign models intruded, including detective stories, which developed a considerable following from the Meiji period onward. But these kinds of popular literature have not yet attracted the sustained attention of scholars either in Japan or elsewhere. Nonetheless, this anthology contains a few examples, including excerpts from what was arguably the most popular novel of the Meiji period, Ozaki Kōyō’s The Gold Demon; a story by Edogawa Ranpo, “The Human Chair”; and Tani Jōji’s “The Shanghaied Man,” all suggesting the readability and skill of these broadly popular writers.

  The main legacy of modern Japanese literature during this period can be said to have derived from those writers who attempted to forge, sometimes quite self-consciously, new forms of writing incorporating both the older traditions and the new European influences. At first, such writers addressed only small audiences, but in later decades, their work moved into the center of Japan’s literary map.

  In the 1930s, before the Pacific War, much of the serious literature being written had achieved a linguistic fluidity and emotional resonance in keeping with contemporary Japanese society. Europe remained the most important international influence. With the exception of a few writers—for instance, Edgar Allan Poe (via France and Baudelaire) and Walt Whitman—American literature was not really discovered until after the end of World War II, and its shadows can be seen better in volume 2 of this anthology. At the same time, Asian influences on Japanese literature all but disappeared.

  It will become clear to the readers of this anthology that most of the selections are serious, often earnest. Given the social upheavals of this period, the devastating earthquake in Tokyo in 1923, and the advent of militarism in the 1930s, this seriousness is not surprising. The gentle humor found in the traditional haiku or the wry social commentaries of Ihara Saikaku have left few traces here. Although humor returned after the war, on the whole the writers during this earlier period were forced to look at life in times so full of uncertain social and political change that there apparently seemed little space for laughter.

  Second, owing to the sustained interest by Japanese writers of every generation in European literature, the charge is sometimes made that many of them merely copied—in style, subject matter, or both—the European authors whom they admired. This is an intriguing issue, but the Japanese works cannot simply be dismissed as indirect responses to quasi-colonial pressures.

  In Tokugawa culture, the hallowed concept of “copying the master” has usually meant—certainly in the visual arts—an effort to master a technique by making a close copy of a work already judged to be worthy. These views continued to prevail. For example, Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928), one of the first great theater directors in modern Japan, wrote about the need for his actors performing Chekhov to try to copy as closely as possible the gestures, inflections, and physical stance of the Russian actors he had seen performing in Moscow. Only in this way, he believed, could actors truly internalize this new foreign style so that it eventually could become natural to them. These attitudes are no longer prevalent in postwar Japan, except perhaps in the area of nō and kabuki actor training or in such traditional arts as flower arranging and the tea ceremo
ny. Still, this kind of discipline is familiar to us in the West as well: when learning to play the piano, serious pianists in every country know the need of, say, practicing scales and learning the easier works of Bach and Mozart.

  From this vantage point, the selections we have chosen for this anthology exemplify several sets of attitudes. First, many Japanese writers wanted to feel that they were entering the stream of contemporary world literature; the works of some, beginning with Tokutomi Roka, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and Kobayashi Takiji, were even then being read abroad in translation. At the least, most of them were convinced that the standards by which they wished to measure themselves had expanded considerably. Second, fired by their interest in European literature, these writers wished to convey to their readers some of their enthusiasm for the new possibilities of self-expression. And in turn, those readers felt some urge to “catch up” with the newest trends in the West.

  In Japan, purely internal shifts and developments affected the literature as well. By the time of World War I, the first great generation of Meiji writers had created most of their most significant and enduring work, enabling a true intellectual and artistic dialogue between generations of modern Japanese writers. Many authors now began to write with an eye to the work of their predecessors as well as to that in Europe. The shadows cast by Sōseki or Ōgai were long and vibrant indeed. As a not surprising result, these later writers created works of considerable sophistication and delicacy.