Five Modern Japanese Novelists

by Donald Keene

  The title of the play is not explained, but it is the name of a celebrated nō drama, and the structure of “The Reed Cutter” is strikingly similar to that of the mugen, or “dream fantasy,” nō. But whatever influences the nō exerted, they are of relatively minor importance in a work that bears strong resemblances to others Tanizaki wrote at this time, in both the manner of narration—a monologue consisting of extremely long sentences—and the themes, some of which go back to Tanizaki’s earliest writings. The narrator worships Oyū-san, the beautiful, often cruel, woman he serves as a slave; this is an almost overly familiar theme in Tanizaki, and it is a mark of his narrative skill that he convinces us Oyū-san is worthy of such extravagant attention.

  The one story of the period that rivals “The Reed Cutter” in its brilliance is “A Portrait of Shunkin” (Shunkin shō, 1933). It was acclaimed as a classic when it was published, and this reputation has not wavered. Shunkin is a beautiful woman who teaches pupils to play the samisen. She takes sadistic pleasure in tormenting her senior disciple, Sasuke, who is absolutely devoted to her, despite this treatment. Shunkin is blind, but for Sasuke this only enhances her beauty. The climax of the story occurs when an unknown assailant disfigures Shunkin by pouring boiling water over her face. Acutely aware of the loss of her beauty, Shunkin refuses to allow anyone to look on her ravaged features. Sasuke always averts his glance, but he fears that one day he may accidentally see her face. To spare Shunkin this torture, he deliberately blinds himself by thrusting needles into his eyes. When he tells Shunkin that he also is blind, she reveals her affection for the first time, and he is blissfully happy.

  “A Portrait of Shunkin” is more dramatic than “The Reed Cutter,” and the characters are more convincing, but there is still much stylization. Tanizaki’s intent was quite the opposite of the usual kind of historical fiction. He wrote,

  My wish has been to avoid imparting any modern interpretation to the psychology of Japanese women of the feudal period but, instead, to describe them in such a way as to recreate what those long-ago women actually felt, in a manner that appeals to the emotions and understanding of modern readers.

  By maintaining this distance between the readers and the people of the work, Tanizaki kept intact the reserve and indirection that he felt to be an essential part of life in the Kansai region.

  Tanizaki’s most eloquent defense of the traditional aesthetics was presented in the essay “In Praise of Shadows” (In’ei raisan, 1933–1934). As the title indicates, he associated shadows (as opposed to the glare of electric illumination) with the old Japan, which he evoked with a nostalgia inconceivable in the Tanizaki of ten years earlier.

  In 1935 Tanizaki began, with many misgivings, a modern-language translation of The Tale of Genji. He was torn between his desire to re-create the work for modern readers incapable of understanding the original and his fear that he was unequal to the task. The translation appeared in twenty-six fascicles between 1939 and 1941. While working on the translation, Tanizaki wrote little else.

  The translation of an eleventh-century novel seemed to be quite uncontroversial, but Tanizaki was working during the national emergency of the war with China, and censorship was severe. The translation could not be published in its entirety because the chapters describing Genji’s relations with Fujitsubo, the consort of the old emperor, were considered to be disrespectful to the imperial household. It is paradoxical that the supreme glory of Japanese literature was expurgated by men who professed undeviating allegiance to Japanese ideals.

  In 1942 Tanizaki began to write his longest and probably best novel, The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki). The first episodes appeared in the monthly magazine Chūō kōron in January and March 1943, but in place of the next episode there was an editorial statement to the effect that further publication would not be in the national interest during the wartime emergency. Tanizaki continued to work on the novel, taking refuge from the wartime hysteria in the remote countryside. During the war years The Makioka Sisters was virtually all that he wrote. It is true that in 1942 he gave a radio talk celebrating the fall of Singapore, but his involvement in the war effort was minimal. He was able to survive without cooperating with the military because of his steady income from royalties. His hatred of the military went back to childhood days, and each new disaster of the war increased his bitterness.

  Only after the war had ended could Tanizaki publish The Makioka Sisters. This should not suggest that the work expresses opposition to the ideology of the militarists; it is completely unconcerned with any ideology. Rather, The Makioka Sisters was banned because it described with nostalgia the Japan of the past when people were preoccupied not with the sacred mission of Japan but with marriage arrangements, visits to sites famous for cherry blossoms, and the cultural differences between Tokyo and Osaka. The leisurely pace exasperated those who insisted on a positive, exhortatory literature suitable to the heroic temper of the times, but the relaxed atmosphere was precisely what appealed to readers bored or exhausted by daily appeals to patriotism.

  The Makioka Sisters was completed in 1948. It was awarded both the Mainichi and Asahi cultural prizes, and Tanizaki was invited to dine with the emperor. In November he received the Medal of Culture (Bunka kunshō). The diabolist of a quarter-century earlier who wished to have his bones interred in foreign soil had been awarded every honor the Japanese establishment could bestow.

  The narrative method of The Makioka Sisters is somewhat old-fashioned, but Tanizaki created a solid sense of reality that would be difficult to achieve with more adventurous techniques. He seemed intent on preserving for posterity the memory of Japan in the old days—not the Heian past or even the Japan of Tanizaki’s youth, but the mid-1930s, when it was still possible for some Japanese to lead civilized, even cosmopolitan, lives. Like a chronicler anxious to record every detail of a way of life that is threatened with destruction, Tanizaki names the establishments where his characters shop and the numbers of the buses they take. The world of the Kansai ten years earlier is by no means idealized, but to Japanese living in the drab surroundings of the war years, a visit to see the fireflies in the mountains must have seemed a pleasure belonging to another life.

  Many events in The Makioka Sisters can be verified by reference to Tanizaki’s biography, but the interest is definitely not the product of a narcissistic absorption with the central character, in the manner of an I novel. The figure most closely resembling Tanizaki is neither a portrait of the author nor even a pivotal character. The comparisons made between The Makioka Sisters and The Tale of Genji are intriguing, but it is hard to imagine Lady Murasaki’s novel without a Genji.

  Tanizaki’s next major work, The Mother of Captain Shigemoto (Shōshō Shigemoto no haha, 1949–1950), represented a return to the narrative style he had used in his antiquarian reconstructions of the past. The narration is often interrupted by the author’s reflections on the texts of Tendai Buddhism, as explained to him by a learned monk, or by speculations on the materials available to modern researchers in their study of the Heian court. It is almost as if Tanizaki was testing the limits to which he could push unnovelistic techniques in writing his work without losing the readers’ interest. Yet such is the magic of Tanizaki’s skill that even such interruptions contribute to the success of the novel.

  After completing The Mother of Captain Shigemoto, Tanizaki began a second translation of The Tale of Genji, simplifying the style and including everything that had been deleted by command of the censors. The final volume of the translation appeared in December 1954. It is hard for us not to regret the four years he spent on the task, imagining the original works he might otherwise have written, but Tanizaki felt compelled to pay this second tribute to the masterpiece of Japanese literature.

  It seemed to many readers that Tanizaki had concluded his career with this translation, but in January 1956 he electrified the public with the first installment of the novel The Key (Kagi) in Chūō kōron. That issue sold out immediately, and it was soon
the chief subject of discussion in literary circles. The attraction of the novel lay in its outspoken descriptions of the sexual activities of a fifty-five-year-old professor and his forty-seven-year-old wife. The single-mindedness of the professor, who is determined to have his fill of sex before impotence overtakes him and directs his libido toward his own wife, leads to disastrous consequences for his health, but he persists.

  Tanizaki’s method of narration in The Key consists of two diaries, one kept by the husband and the other by his wife. The device is brilliantly handled and is given an ironic twist by each one’s knowledge that the other is reading his or her diary. The work was praised in both Japan and Europe and America as unprecedented in its subject, but the absence of the themes found in Tanizaki’s other works—longing for the mother, worship of the cruel woman, and so on—suggests that it was not very deeply rooted.

  It seemed once again as if Tanizaki had ended his distinguished career, this time with a remarkable best-seller, but he surprised his audience. In 1961 and 1962 he serialized Diary of a Mad Old Man (Fūten rōjin nikki). Although this novel did not create the sensation of The Key, it was artistically superior. This time, the theme was not love in middle age but love in old age. Diary of a Mad Old Man is a wonderfully comic work. Like many other great artists, Tanizaki ended his career with comedy. It is as if Tanizaki, still absorbed by the themes of his writings, now sees them at such a distance that they seem humorous. It is a captivating book, marred only by the weak ending: the logical ending, the death of the old man, was the one subject that Tanizaki could not treat with humor at this stage of his life.

  Perhaps what distinguished Tanizaki’s works most conspicuously from those of other major Japanese novelists of the twentieth century was his absorption with writing itself. His novels are not confessional, nor do they advocate any philosophy, either ethical or political, but they are superbly crafted by a master of style. No one would turn to Tanizaki for wisdom as to how a man should lead his life or for a penetrating analysis of the evils of modern society, but a reader seeking the special pleasure of literature and an echo in even Tanizaki’s most bizarre works of eternal human concerns could hardly find a superior writer.

  *Except where otherwise noted, all translations are mine and were published in my Dawn to the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

  *Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, “The Tattooer,” in Seven Japanese Tales, trans. Howard S. Hibbett (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 163.

  †Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Diary of a Mad Old Man, trans. Howard S. Hibbett (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 27.

  Kawabata Yasunari

  (1899–1972)

  I first met Kawabata Yasunari in 1953. He was only fifty-four, but he struck me as being very old and delicate, and photographs taken of him at the time, confirming this impression, suggest in their expression a deer frightened by a sudden flash of light. Yet I knew that he had another side. Far from being a recluse shut off from the harsh realities of the world, he had served since 1948 as the president of the Japanese PEN Club, a position that entailed not only skill and patience in maintaining peace at a time when political differences among the members divided the organization, but enduring hours of boredom at board meetings. He took this work seriously and regularly attended PEN Club meetings both in Japan and abroad, even though he did not understand any foreign language and simultaneous interpretation was not often available. Earlier in his career he had been active in publishing, and shortly before his death he campaigned vigorously for a candidate for the governor of the Tokyo Metropolitan District, riding from place to place aboard a sound truck. His last public activity was planning an international conference of scholars of Japan. This other side of Kawabata tends to be forgotten, especially by those who knew him and were accustomed to his long silences.

  Kawabata’s reputation in Japan, which went back to the 1920s and 1930s, was by 1968, the year in which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, fully established; but many Japanese expressed surprise that a writer who seemed to them to be so specially and even peculiarly Japanese could be understood and appreciated abroad. The first translation of Kawabata’s works into a European language seems to have been Oscar Benl’s German version of “The Izu Dancer” (Izu no odoriko), published in 1942. But Kawabata’s international reputation owes most to the fine translations by Edward Seidensticker, beginning with his version of the same story, published in 1955. Seidensticker’s translations of Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1956) and Thousand Cranes (Sembazuru, 1959) established Kawabata’s reputation abroad. Sales, however, were disappointing, and when Seidensticker submitted a sample translation of The Sound of the Mountain (Yama no oto), he was informed by his editor that the publisher had decided it wanted no more of Kawabata’s “effete” writings.

  The publisher’s attitude changed dramatically, however, with the announcement in October 1968 that Kawabata had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This was the first time since 1913, when Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the prize, that a writer from Asia had been honored. Probably the Swedish Academy did not know it, but 1968 had special significance to the Japanese. Just a hundred years earlier, in 1868, the Meiji Restoration had fundamentally changed both the culture of Japan and its position in the world. The award symbolically called attention to the emergence of Japanese literature as an equal among the literatures of the world, even though less than a hundred years earlier it had been completely unknown outside Japan.

  In 1964, four years before Kawabata was honored, the Agence–France Presse announced that Tanizaki Jun’ichirō had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Reporters flocked to Tanizaki’s house in Yugawara to ask his impressions, but (alas) it was a mistake, and by the time Japan’s turn at last came up in this geographically controlled competition, Tanizaki was dead. It is sad that this great novelist never received the prize, but Kawabata also deserved it richly.

  It may have been an accident that Kawabata, rather than Mishima Yukio, received the prize. Shortly before his death in 1961, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld read the translation of Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji, translated by Ivan Morris in 1958) and expressed great admiration in a letter to a member of the Nobel Prize committee. A recommendation from this source was not taken lightly. Again, in 1967, after I had unsuccessfully attempted to win the Formentor Prize for Mishima at an international gathering of publishers held in Tunis, a Swedish participant, a senior officer of the important publishing firm of Bonnier’s, consoling me, said that Mishima would soon receive a much more important prize. That could only have been the Nobel Prize.

  What prevented Mishima from obtaining the prize? In May 1970 I had dinner with friends in Copenhagen. Among the guests was a Danish novelist whom I had met at the time of the 1957 Tokyo PEN Congress. On the basis of the two or three weeks he spent in Japan on that occasion, he had acquired the reputation in Scandinavia of an authority on Japan. He was in a jovial mood that evening and confided to us proudly that it was because of him that Kawabata had won the Nobel Prize. He said that in his capacity as an expert in such matters, he had been asked by members of the Nobel Prize committee to give them the benefit of his opinions on contemporary Japanese literature; the committee seems to have decided that a Japanese would receive the award in 1968. Although the novelist had read very little Japanese literature, this did not inhibit his judgments. As I was vaguely aware from our previous meeting, he was extremely conservative in his political outlook, and this colored his opinions on other subjects. The recent turbulence in Japanese universities, widely reported in the foreign press, had made him extremely suspicious of all young Japanese, and when asked about Mishima, he reasoned that Mishima, being young, must be a leftist. He therefore spoke out strongly against Mishima, recommending instead Kawabata, whose age seemed to guarantee that he would not harbor radical political views. “And so,” he concluded, “I won the prize for Kawabata.”

  I have no way of telling whether or not he in fact influenced the commit
tee of the Swedish Academy, but a few clues suggest that his account may have been correct. Under the influence of the late Dag Hammarskjöld, the academy had been leaning strongly in favor of Mishima, as my informant in Tunis had indicated, but then, seemingly at the last moment, it changed its mind. Although (in accordance with regulations) three works by Kawabata were listed in support of his candidacy for the prize, comments were made on only two of them; nothing more than the name of the third, the novel The Old Capital (Koto), was given, suggesting that up until this moment, the committee members had favored Mishima and had therefore not bothered to read a third work by Kawabata, even though The Old Capital had been translated into German and Danish.

  I confess that at the time I was greatly disappointed that Mishima did not win the prize. In retrospect, one might even say that he killed himself because he had failed to receive the recognition he desired above anything else in the world. But one could also say that Kawabata killed himself because he did win the prize, a burden he found too heavy to bear. Even though I grieve over the deaths of these two great authors, I now believe that the Nobel committee, for whatever reasons, chose wisely, that Kawabata, more than Mishima and more even than Tanizaki, deserved to be the first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  When Ōe Kenzaburō in 1994 became the second Japanese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, he contrasted the literary tradition to which he belonged with that of Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima—authors who, he stated, had chosen to write “pure literature,” as opposed to the engaged writing practiced not only by himself but also by Ibuse Masuji (who wrote a novel about the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima), Ōoka Shōhei (who described in detail his experiences during the Pacific War), and Abe Kōbō (who wrote about such subjects as the alienation of the individual from society).