by Ivan Morris
Modern
JAPANESE
SHORT STORIES
Twenty-Five Stories by
Japan’s Leading Writers
Edited by Ivan Morris
With a new foreword
by Seiji Lippit
Translations by Ivan Morris, Edward Seidensticker, George Saitō and Geoffrey Sargent
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Factual Notes
Foreword by Seiji Lippit
Introduction by Ivan Morris
UNDER RECONSTRUCTION by Ōgai Mori
ORDER OF THE WHITE PAULOWNIA by Shūsei Tokuda
HYDRANGEA by Kafū Nagai
SEIBEI’S GOURDS by Naoya Shiga
TATTOO by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
ON THE CONDUCT OF LORD TADANAO by Kan Kikuchi
THE CAMELLIA by Ton Satomi
BROTHER AND SISTER by Saisei Murō
THE HOUSE OF A SPANISH DOG by Haruo Satō
AUTUMN MOUNTAIN by Ryūnosuké Akutagawa
THE HANDSTAND by Mimei Ogawa
LETTER FOUND IN A CEMENT-BARREL by Yoshiki Hayama
THE CHARCOAL BUS by Masuji Ibusé
MACHINE by Riichi Yokomitsu
THE MOON ON THE WATER by Yasunari Kawabata
NIGHTINGALE by Einosuké Itō
MORNING MIST by Tatsuo Nagai
THE HATEFUL AGE by Fumio Niwa
DOWNTOWN by Fumiko Hayashi
A MAN’S LIFE by Taiko Hirabayashi
THE IDIOT by Ango Sakaguchi
SHOTGUN by Yasushi Inoué
TIGER-POET by Ton Nakajima
THE COURTESY CALL by Osamu Dazai
THE PRIEST AND HIS LOVE by Yukio Mishima
Selected Bibliography
Index of Authors
Index of Translators
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledgments are due to the Japan Quarterly for permission to use the translations of “Seibei’s Gourds” (there called “The Artist”), “Autumn Mountain,” “Tiger-Poet” (“The Wild Beast”), and “The Hateful Age”; to Today’s Japan for “Under Reconstruction,” “The Handstand” (“Wager in Midair”), and “The Courtesy Call” (“A Visitor”); to the Paris Review for “Tattoo” (“The Victim”); to United Asia for “The Moon on the Water”; to Grove Press for “Downtown” (“Tokyo”); and to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for permission to translate works by Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima.
FACTUAL NOTES
1. Well-known writers in Japan are often called by their personal names, especially after their deaths. Thus most people refer to Ōgai and Sōseki, although their respective surnames were Mori and Natsume.
2. Japanese vowels are pronounced as in Spanish or Italian, each being given approximately its full value. Consonants are much as in English, except that G is always hard. Macrons, used to indicate long Os and Us, have been omitted from such common place names as Tokyo and Kobe and from words like Shinto and Shogunate. Acute accents have occasionally been used in such words as Abé and saké that might otherwise be mispronounced.
3. The period names Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa are frequently used in the Introduction and in the notes on the authors. These refer to the reigns of the three modern emperors and have much the same significance in a literary discussion as do Victorian, Edwardian, and the like in English. The periods are: Meiji, 1868–1912; Taisho, 1912–1926; Showa, 1926 to 1989.
4. A rough indication of money equivalents may be helpful since prices, wages, etc., are frequently mentioned in the stories. One hundred sen equal one yen. By referring to the date of a story, the reader can determine the approximate money equivalent from the following table, which is based on the price of rice, the main staple commodity; the second figure in each pair shows the value of one yen in terms of 1958 prices: 1912=¥615.00; 1930=¥456.00; 1940=¥286.00; 1944=¥232.00; 1946=¥42.00; 1949=¥1.70; 1954=¥1.08.
FOREWORD
BY Seiji Lippit
THE SHORT STORY is a true cornerstone of modern Japanese literature. Reflecting both a voracious reading public as well as the dynamics of the literary marketplace in Japan, in which a plenitude of literary journals provide regular outlets for writers of fiction, the short story has played a prominent role in modern literary history. The nation’s most celebrated literary award, the Akutagawa Prize (itself named after a writer of mostly short stories), is given to short or medium-length fiction, and many of the great novelists count short works among their representative writings, some of them masterpieces of modern literature. Indeed, as Ivan Morris points out in the introduction to this volume, the Japanese word for novel, shōsetsu, encompasses both long- and short-form fiction, and there tends to be less a qualitative than a quantitative distinction made between them.
Given the importance of short fiction to modern literature in Japan, it is not surprising that numerous fine anthologies of Japanese short stories have appeared in English over the years, including broad surveys as well as those more specialized by time period or theme. Modern Japanese Short Stories is among the earliest of s
uch collections, first appearing in print in 1962. Containing twenty-five stores originally published between 1910 and 1954, it was part of a flowering of Japanese literature in English translation in the 1950s and 60s, in which Morris himself played a key role. Translator of contemporary writings such as Shōhei Ōoka’s powerful novel of war Fires on the Plain (1957) and Yukio Mishima’s landmark Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959), Morris also brought such classics of the ancient Heian court as The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon (1961) to English readers. He also published a number of celebrated studies of Japanese literature and history, including The World of the Shining Prince (1964) and The Nobility of Failure (1975), while contributing, as a faculty member at Columbia University, to the development of Japanese literary and cultural studies as an academic discipline. The emergence of Japanese literature onto the global stage culminated in the 1968 awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to Yasunari Kawabata, who was himself involved in putting the present collection together.
Despite the profusion of subsequent anthologies, Modern Japanese Short Stories has stood the test of time. For generations, it has served as an introduction to Japanese literature for new readers (including not a few future scholars) of Japanese literature and culture, while veteran readers continue to find it a rich resource that bears rereading time and again. Several reasons can be cited for the book’s staying power. For one, the translations here are of uniformly high quality, including those by Morris—one of the best at his craft—and other distinguished translators such as Edward Seidensticker, translator of many of Kawabata’s novels as well as The Tale of Genji. Some of the works are exceptionally difficult to translate, as they rely heavily on the complexities and nuances of the author’s use of language, but the translators have rendered them into a consistently clear and unadorned style that has held up well over the years.
Another reason for the volume’s enduring appeal certainly lies in the manner in which the stories were selected. It would not have been difficult, perhaps, to choose only the most canonical works, or those that have unquestioningly left their mark on literary history. In fact, there are a good number of such stories here, such as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s “Tattoo” (1910), Haruo Satō’s “The House of a Spanish Dog” (1916), Riichi Yokomitsu’s “Machine” (1930), Ango Sakaguchi’s “The Idiot” (1946), and Fumiko Hayashi’s “Downtown” (1948), to name but a few. These are important works that form an excellent basis for any serious engagement with Japanese fiction. But there are also lesser-known pieces, some of them by prominent authors, others by those relatively neglected by literary history. Less likely to be found in other collections, they offer some fascinating discoveries. The book opens with Ōgai Mori’s “Under Reconstruction” (1910)—something of a coda to his better-known “Dancing Girl” of twenty years earlier—in which the title refers not only to the Western-style restaurant in Tokyo where the protagonist meets his German ex-lover, but also to the developing nation-state itself. Ryūnosuké Akutagawa is celebrated for stories such as “Rashōmon” (1915) and “In a Grove” (1922), but the somewhat more obscure work contained here, “Autumn Mountain” (1921), is a wonderful tale of a renowned Chinese painting that seems to exist mainly in the imagination. The “Courtesy Call” (1946) fully displays Osamu Dazai’s humor, one of the essential qualities of a writer better-known for chronicling his self-destructive proclivities in the postwar years.
There are also works by authors less likely to be familiar to English-language readers. For example, Einosuke Itō’s “Nightingale” (1938) is set in a rural police station, where local residents continuously bring in their various problems, ranging from the lighthearted (a nightingale for sale) to the deadly serious (a schoolgirl being sold to a factory for hard labor by her family). It is a virtuoso portrayal of the challenges of life in the countryside during a difficult historical period. Tatsuo Nagai’s “Morning Mist” (1950) is a fascinating and subtle depiction of the progressive collapse of everyday life during the war, filtered through the narrative of the declining years of a fastidious man, desperately attempting to cling to the order of his previous life.
Morris notes that he was responsible for selecting roughly half of the stories, while the rest were chosen by Kawabata and members of the Japanese National Commission for UNESCO. Kawabata was not only one of the leading writers of the day but was also a prominent figure in various literary institutions in Japan and, as mentioned earlier, a key figure in the reception of Japanese literature abroad. During his long writing career dating back to the 1920s, he had formed myriad associations in the literary world, working with and mentoring numerous writers, and his presence is strongly felt in the choice of works.
Overall, there is an interesting tension between the selection of stories and the editorial commentary running throughout the work. On the one hand, in his introduction, Morris presents a somewhat constricted narrative of modern Japanese literature, framed in terms of an opposition between naturalism and those writers who rebelled against it (a familiar schema in early Japanese criticism). For Morris, most of what is valuable about Japanese literature derives from the overcoming of both naturalism as well as the movements that either directly or indirectly flowed from it, such as the I-novel and proletarian literature. He is particularly dismissive of the latter, proclaiming it to be inherently limited and, moreover, out of step with a country that “remains predominantly conservative”—a statement belied by the political (and cultural) upheavals convulsing Japan precisely around the time Morris was writing.
At the same time, however, the goal of the collection, Morris writes, was to be broadly inclusive, to showcase the great variety of styles and themes that constitute modern fiction in Japan. To this end, the twenty-five stories reflect “almost every main type of modern Japanese story,” including representative works of naturalism, proletarian literature, confessional fiction, historical fiction, and rural literature, alongside a healthy selection of works that might be called modernist or aestheticist. Naturally there are limits to this inclusivity, such as the paucity of works authored by women, hardly reflective of the contribution that women writers have made to modern literature. Yet overall, the principle of presenting a broad overview of literary styles is undeniably a source of strength for the collection.
Thus, despite the lack of enthusiasm toward naturalist and proletarian writings, we find outstanding examples of both in the collection (Shūsei Tokuda’s “Order of the White Paulownia” [1935] and Yoshiki Hayama’s “Letter Found in a Cement-Barrel” [1926]). Moreover, in juxtaposing such a wide range of different themes and styles, the collection ultimately underscores the impossibility of reducing literature to any strict category of aesthetic or ideological affiliation, as Morris was well aware. For example, Hayama’s story bears much in common with Yokomitsu’s modernist story “Machine,” despite the fact that their authors belonged to different ideological camps: both works, set in factories, engage the corrosion of individual will and consciousness within the accelerating industrialization of capitalist society. In Hayama’s work, the personal letter discovered in a barrel of cement recounts a tragic workplace accident and the literal transformation of a laborer’s body into a building block of industrial society, while “Machine” explores the mysterious death of a factory worker amidst grueling working conditions. Both stories incorporate aspects of the major literary currents of the time, including modernism, proletarian literature, and confessional fiction. Such examples of cross-fertilization of ideas, styles, and influences are on full display throughout the collection, which effectively showcases the dynamism of modern Japanese literature.
Seiji M. Lippit
INTRODUCTION
BY Ivan Morris
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE IN JAPAN, despite its remote ancestry, may be regarded as a new literature, scarcely beyond its formative stage. The Meiji Restoration, which ended two and a half centuries of strictest seclusion, marked a departure in Japanese writing, as it did in politics, education, and so many o
ther fields. For a general understanding of the modern Japanese novel or short story it is hardly necessary to go back more than a century. The Japanese language has undergone a continuous development since the earliest times and to this extent modern fiction derives stylistically from classical and medieval writing. Even here, however, the Restoration had an important effect by bringing the literary language closer to that of ordinary speech. The major influences can be found among works of foreign literature introduced into Japan after about 1860 and among certain important Japanese writers of the Meiji period.
This introduction cannot attempt to present a systematic history of modern Japanese literature, but it may be worthwhile to indicate a few general trends that can help the reader to view in context the twenty-five stories presented here. A note concerning each of the twenty-five authors and his place in modern Japanese writing has been placed before his story.
The historical approach has many dangers. Too much concentration on “social backgrounds,” “literary influences,” and “schools of writing” may lead us to read the stories, not as independent works, but as representatives of some particular period, and to regard their writers, not as unique individuals having their own views of life and their characteristic methods of expression, but simply as members of certain literary schools with established outlooks or programs.
When, however, we are faced with a writing as remote from most Western readers as that of Japan, the historical approach can hardly be avoided. As Mr. Angus Wilson has said: “To read the literature of a civilization or age entirely or almost entirely unfamiliar emphasizes one’s unconscious dependence on historical background. To begin with, the unfamiliar is likely immediately to present a number of specious qualities—the ‘quaint,’ the ‘charming,’ the ‘horrific’—which are merely attempts to come to terms with a strange world on a surface level. Greater familiarity always destroys the immediate impressions.”
* * *
In few countries is the dividing line that marks the beginning of the “modern” period so clear as in Japan. What historians term the Meiji Restoration was the result of interacting processes that had been continuing for a very long time. When these processes finally reached their culmination, the collapse of the old regime, which had given the country some two and a half centuries of peace and stability, occurred with remarkable speed. In 1867 the gradual stagnation and disintegration of the economic system, increasing pressure from foreign powers, and the revolt of four of the great clans combined with numerous other factors to bring about the downfall of the centralized feudal government that had been in the hands of a succession of military rulers belonging to the Tokugawa family. Political power was handed over in 1867 to the Emperor Meiji and his advisers. In the years that followed, every effort was made to abolish feudalism, especially in its political and economic aspects, and to turn Japan into a centralized nation-state on the European model. The political structure was completely reorganized and a capitalist economy rapidly developed with the impetus of a belated industrial revolution. In the effort to become “modern,” countless old customs, habits, and heritages were scrapped in a wave of cultural iconoclasm which at one stage went so far that there were serious proposals to replace the Japanese language by English and the native religions by Christianity.