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

by J. Thomas Rimer

  Their joy was lit not by man’s will. Joy’s radiance originated in the reflection of nature. That’s why I call it the rapture of moonlight.

  They valued their feelings for beauty, truth, and goodness when those feelings were free from the rules made by human will. They enjoyed themselves for their freedom from the rules of human will and their liberation through the absorption into nature. As they loved nature, so they loved those works written with a sense of pleasure by others of like persuasion. They hailed a refinement free of overbearing will. To perceive it, a nose was seen to be needed, so they called that refinement a “scent.” There is a phrase “the mind’s eye.” I think it would be good to coin the phrase “the mind’s nose.” Both the people who coined the phrase “the mind’s eye” and those who used the word “scent” must, I believe, have been aware that the soul can achieve sensibility and sensibility can reach the soul. Those were the ancients.

  The serenity the followers of elegance ceaselessly pursued also denoted the time when they were liberated from the various commitments of human will that they saw as trivial, the time when man and nature were thus merged. How they disliked the overbearing quality of will! They did not necessarily dislike rich brocades. Nor did they necessarily hate magnificent buildings. They must have thought of these more as tedious. Not pleasure but grief is what they must have felt at the anguish that naturally accompanies the pleasure in these things. They lived with ease under low ceilings. Will was at its irreducible minimum in every way. Basically pleasure lovers, they disliked a total absence of people. They needed the arts, even in their plainest form. To drink other than springwater, they had man’s bitter tea. For talk beyond the beauties of nature they might seek friends of like form and like heart to themselves. Besides “a cup of wine, two or three good books, and a congenial friend,” didn’t they hold in their eyes and in their hearts “nature in its infinity”? What fruitful richness! But my colleagues who want to indulge in many worldly luxuries, are they satisfied to cut back and make do with what they have? Do they call that an act of will? Let me open the window for people who say so to show them the brightly shining winter moon, and they will shiver and say: “Master, isn’t elegance a trick contrived by a doctor or a priest to make a person catch a cold? . . . They’ll get the patent rights for that”—(a joke).

  The followers of elegance—the followers of true elegance—did they think of their lives as something extraordinary? If so, they would, by virtue of their human will, have had to fall into the worldliness they hated. I believe they remained firm in their inclinations. Just as at times the life forces dim and we think of elegance as a good thing, so indeed can man have an inborn disposition for elegance through the highest enjoyment of the minimum level of pleasure for the self at its own irreducible minimum. Elegance exists only for people like that. For example, if someone uses logic to construct the philosophy for a faith, he will not attain that faith if he lacks an active spirit in his beliefs. Likewise, if someone wills the minimum self, that person cannot know elegance unless he has the poetic sensibility of a man of elegance.

  This is what I say. Elegance—at least the elegance perfected by Bashō and others—in essence is the extreme intensification of sensibility. No matter how religious or philosophical it may be, it is thoroughly artistic. It is not achieved through religious will or through philosophical intellect. It comes from the same original womb that could conceive religion or philosophy. Thus, when our people chanced to develop this grand, new, limitless concept, it turned out naturally to be very religious and philosophical. That is obvious. When a man subjects himself entirely to nature and exerts no human will, plus or minus, he naturally dons a pantheistic philosophy and becomes a brother to all the other beauties of nature. However, those followers of elegance who were not in the least philosophical could not find themselves in the principles of pantheistic philosophy. They could merely express their feelings as a “companion of the beauties of nature”—an expression that surprised that most elegant Western literary man, Lafcadio Hearn.9 Because they were not clearly aware that they had achieved brotherhood—at least in the poetic realm—with all the things of nature, they could never have asserted emphatically their delight in the romantic mystery of “here I have arrived so soon at enlightenment,” a realization that would have come easily if they had been aware of their brotherhood in nature. Likewise, they could not have asserted the immortal religious pleasure of achieving eternity through merging the smallest shrunken extremity into the greatest infinity of nature, which they could otherwise have enjoyed. If they spoke in religious terms, it came out Buddhist. If they spoke by chance in philosophical terms, it came out Daoist. They did not seem to perceive any divergence from their own thinking. . . . As I said before, they did not at all deny life. They were not believers that “to do great things is to do nothing.” They just enjoyed life at the irreducible minimum. What tantalizes is that they always lived life at its minimum level. After all, we are the beloved children of nature. However self-indulgently they might have exerted their will, they would have remained the beloved children of nature. . . . If they had made that leap, there would have been no elegance now. . . .

  What did the followers of elegance do to achieve their ends? We can’t ask the ancients. The reasons that followers of elegance have gained eternal life—eternal insofar as man has moments when he is tired of life and has a disposition for grief in human society—lie in that profound sensibility uniting mind and body. They spent a lifetime to achieve so much. It was surely a faith they clung to without regret. But it was also willful. It took effort. If you say they were therefore people of will, that is no sound argument, just as it is not correct to say that if a famous painting is purchased with money, the painting’s true essence is money.

  Still, what did Bashō, the most important person to achieve this rare art, have to say about his own lot in life? As an experiment, let me quote the following and trust my readers to savor it:

  All this, however, does not mean that I am an avid lover of solitude who wishes to hide in the mountains once and for all. I am more like a sickly person who has retired from society after becoming a little weary of mixing with people. As I look back over the many years of my frivolous life, I remember at one time I coveted an official post with a tenure of land and at another time I was anxious to confine myself within the walls of a monastery. Yet I kept aimlessly wandering on . . . with no other talent or ability to resort to, I merely clung to that thin line. . . . (From the prose poem An Essay on the Unreal Dwelling)10

  Author’s postscript: For this uncompleted manuscript, I think it would be good to add some remarks on things like “Elegance and National Character,” “Elegance and the Decadent Arts,” “On the Civilizations of East and West,” “The Elegance of China, the Elegance of the West,” “Why from My View of Life Is Elegance of No Value?” I have not had the time, however, and I have expressed my feelings on the general topic from time to time already. Because I have written hastily on this topic, I may have been too verbose and repetitive while lacking in emphasis. I have explained as much as I could about the things that interested me, and I have condensed the four additional topics for now. When I have a chance, I may say more later.

  * * *

  1. The Japanese translation can imply the possibility of failure: “Now we can live, can’t we?”

  2. The village presumably is Karuizawa, a well-known resort popular with foreigners, about which Hori often wrote.

  3. From “Requiem für eine Freundin,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), 73.

  4. Ibid., 87.

  1. Shakespeare’s words are “foolishly, with undue secrecy.”

  1. Empire Founding Day (Kigensetsu), February 11, was established in 1872 as the anniversary of the legendary Emperor Jinmu’s accession to the throne in 660 B.C., which is said to have marked the beginning of the Japanese nation. After the Pacific War, it was abolished
and then, in 1966, reinstated as Nation Founding Day (Kenkoku kinen no hi).

  2. Koide Narashige (1887–1931), together with Nabei Katsuyuki (1888–1969) and several other Osaka painters, founded the Shinanobashi Western-Style Painting Institute in Osaka in 1924 to teach oil painting.

  3. Following his six-month trip to France and Germany in 1921/1922, Koide became a member of the Nikakai (Second Division Society), an association of Western-style artists established in 1914 by Umehara Ryūzaburō and Yasui Sōtarō in opposition to the conservative, governmentsponsored Bunten (Monbushō bijutsu tenrankai, or Ministry of Education Fine Arts Exhibit Society). Nikakai painters practiced the newer art styles of postimpressionism and fauvism. The Bunten had been created in 1907 when the Monbushō established a committee of artists to select paintings for its official exhibitions.

  4. Omizu-tori is a water-drawing ceremony conducted at the Nigatsudō Hall of the Tōdaiji temple in Nara on what is said to be, according to some traditions, the coldest day of the year. The rite involves taking water from the well in front of the hall and turning it into perfume by reciting incantations.

  5. The Kasuga Shrine (Kasuga taisha) is an important Shinto shrine founded in 709 by Fujiwara no Fuhito and patronized by the Fujiwara family. Erected to protect the new capital at Nara, it is located in Nara within a large estate.

  6. The White Horse Society (Hakubakai) was an art association devoted to the promotion of new Western-style painting and sculpture during the Meiji period. Founded in 1896 by Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924), it flourished until 1911 as the “new school” or “purple school” of Western-style painting (named after the light purple or blue shading favored in its paintings), in contrast to the “old school” or “resin school” (referring to the dark resinous shading of its paintings) of Western style painting represented by the Meiji Art Society.

  7. The Tokyo School of Fine Arts was founded in 1888 under the guidance of Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin) (1862–1913) and Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908) with government sponsorship. The goal of the school was to preserve and revive traditional Japanese painting, sculpture, and crafts. In 1896, as a result of popular demand from students who wished to study Western oil painting, a section for Western-style painting was added and quickly became more popular than the Japanese painting section. Koide Narashige first studied in the Japanese painting section after he had been denied admission to the Western painting section, and later transferred to the Western painting section.

  8. The Umehara style refers to the art of Umehara Ryūzaburō (1888–1986), an important Western-style artist of his day known for the vigorous brushwork and bold use of color that characterize his oil paintings. Umehara studied under Renoir during his stay in Europe (1908–1913); his work also was influenced by that of Roualt, Matisse, Gaugin, and the German expressionists.

  9. Both the Yumedono and the Nanendō are ancient octagonal halls. The Yumedono (Hall of Dreams) was erected in the Hōryūji temple complex in Nara in the early seventh century, and the Nanendō was built in the Kōfukuji temple complex in Nara in 813. According to legend, the Yumedono was erected over the ruins of the chapel in which Prince Shōtoku had a vision of a golden image that appeared in a dream to help him interpret a difficult passage in Buddhist scripture. Nō plays about this great patron of Buddhism are sometimes performed in the Yumedono.

  10. A photographic reproduction of this painting appears in Shūji Takashina and J. Thomas Rimer, with Gerald D. Bolas, Paris in Japan: The Japanese Encounter with European Painting (Tokyo and St. Louis: Japan Foundation and Washington University, 1987), 87.

  11. For a photographic reproduction of one of several still-life paintings of vegetables on a table that Koide painted in 1922, see Takashima and Rimer, Paris in Japan, 173.

  12. Photographic reproductions of Landscape with Withered Tree appear in Takashima and Rimer, Paris in Japan, 89; and in Miyagawa Torao, Modern Japanese Painting, an Art in Transition, trans. Toshizo Imai (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1967), 96.

  13. This is part of a famous haiku by Bashō: “On a withered branch a bird has settled / Nightfall in autumn.”

  14. Hotoke, or buddha, in accordance with the popular Japanese belief that the deceased becomes a buddha.

  1. Nora refers to the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, which has always been popular in Japan.

  1. The translator would like to acknowledge the help of Kagawa Hiroshi and Shintani Masahiro in preparing this translation.

  2. This prayer means something like “Save us, merciful Buddha” and, when said over a dead body, “Requiescat in pace.”

  1. The text in Kobayashi’s Complete Works is identical to the original publication except for the last line, which was dropped. It reads: “With the passing of time, history reveals to the writer in clearer outline certain objective facts and presses on him a structure that he can in no way evade. And as the writer matures, his character becomes more and more concrete and distinctive and paradoxically becomes part of the content of the [historical] structure that presses on him.”

  1. The Man’yōshū (Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves) is the oldest collection of Japanese poetry, compiled in the mid-eighth century but including poems written earlier.

  2. The Kokinshū (Anthology of Old and New Japanese Poems) is a collection of court poetry compiled around 905 C.E.

  3. The Nara period was from 710 to 784.

  4. A figure of speech meaning “The difficulty is in the daring.” According to legend, when Columbus was told that “anyone can discover a continent,” he replied, “Try standing an egg on its end.” The questioner tried and could not. Columbus then stood his egg on end by cracking its base and said, “Anyone can do it, but the difficulty is in the daring.”

  5. Raphael von Koeber (1846–1923) was a German philosopher who taught at Tokyo University and called himself a transcendental pantheist.

  6. Yosa Buson (1716–1783) was a leading haiku poet.

  7. The “elegant wild fox,” as portrayed in the theater of kyōgen and kabuki.

  8. Shinchō (New Currents), a literary journal.

  9. Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was an American writer who moved to Japan and became well known there.

  10. Translation by Makoto Ueda, in his Matsuo Bashō (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1982), 120.

  Chapter 4

  THE WAR YEARS

  With the beginning of the war in China in the 1930s, Japan was increasingly on a wartime footing, a situation that continued and intensified through the Pacific War until its conclusion in 1945. The effect on the intellectuals and writers of the period was considerable, with various outcomes. Some enthusiastically embraced the conflict and wrote positively about it. Others tried to describe the situation more objectively, and still others retreated into the past, avoiding any mention of the contemporary period at all.

  This chapter of the anthology contains both writings published during the war years and some later contributions that deal directly with the war years. No dramas are included. The reason is that the increasingly conservative military government considered most of the drama companies dangerously left-wing, and—with the exception of Kishida Kunio’s troupe, the Literary Theater (Bungakuza), which was devoted to drama that might be considered purely “literary”—virtually all the other troupes presenting modern drama were closed down. Kabuki and nō continued to be performed, sometimes with the addition of new material on themes relevant to Japan’s war aims, but few new modern dramas were performed until after 1945.

  FICTION

  DAZAI OSAMU

  Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), the son of a wealthy family from northern Japan, flirted with Marxism as a student and became well known in the 1930s for his autobiographical stories, which often focused on his own introverted and decadent style of life. The two novels that he wrote after the war and before his suicide, The Setting Sun (Shayō) and No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku), are among the acknowledged classics of postwar Japanese literature.

  During
the war years, Dazai sometimes wrote about contemporary life but, unlike many of his contemporaries, never took any interest in glorifying the military. “December 8th” (Jūnigatsu yōka), written in 1942, reveals in some ways a buoyant tonality, almost cynical, one scarcely in keeping with the officially sanctioned attitudes of the period.

  DECEMBER 8TH (JŪNIGATSU YŌKA)

  Translated by Phyllis Lyons

  I must write my diary with special care today.1 I’ve got to leave some sort of record of how a housewife in an impoverished household spent the day: December 8, 1941. In a hundred years when they’re doing a grand celebration for the 2,700th anniversary of the founding of our nation, maybe this diary of mine will be discovered in a corner of a storehouse somewhere, and they’ll know that this is what a Japanese housewife was doing on this special day a hundred years ago, and it will serve as a little historical reference. That’s why, even if my writing style is not very good, at least I have to be careful not to write any lies. Anyway, having to write with such deep thoughts about the 2,700th anniversary of Founding Day is quite a job. But then, I must try not to be too stiff about it. My husband always criticizes my writing, whether it’s a letter or my diary or anything else. He says that all I do is make it serious, and it impresses people as being dull and slow. There’s no “sentiment” in it at all, and the sentences are not at all beautiful, he says. To be sure, since childhood I have been mostly concerned about doing things right and proper. It’s not that my soul is so serious but that I’m just stiff and awkward and never have been able to be innocent and lighthearted and easy with people. That’s why I always lose out. Maybe it’s because my emotions are too deep. Still, I really must think this over.