The Place of Fiction in Japanese Literature

As we have seen, the starting point in much Japanese "fiction" has not been the construction of a hypothetical situation but the observation of an actual one. This modus operandi is hardly unique to the shishosetsu ; precedents can be found in such classical forms as the zuihitsu (discursive essay), kana nikki (poetic diary), haibun (haiku and prose), and kikobun (travel sketches), all of which are literary descriptions of lived experience. Even the stories and settings in an innovative and "fantastic" form like joruri are generally rooted in actual events or previous literary accounts. Both "contemporary" (sewamono ) and "period" (jidaimono ) pieces are based on a large but finite number of "worlds" (sekai ), well-known historical events or literary depictions with fixed casts of characters.^[23] The accepted practice was to work with material already familiar to audiences rather than fashion entirely imaginary characters or situations. Playwrights worked within these established frames of reference, fleshing out the action and characterization as they saw fit.^[24]

The radical transformation of the old literary language into something approaching the colloquial, the experiences of modernization and urban growth, and the influx of western thought, all of

[23] The Sekai komoku (late eighteenth century) lists some 150 "worlds" along with their historical or literary source and names of characters. See Barbara E. Thornbury, Sukeroku's Double Identity , 22-23.

[24] James R. Brandon notes, "Precisely because a world was already significant in legend or history, or in the case of sewamono through public scandal, it was considered appropriate for the stage" (Kabuki: Five Classic Plays , 25). The same is largely true of other theatrical forms, including No and Bunraku. Kato Shuichi argues that there is little in Kabuki of "the universal, the paradoxical or the abstract" and that the playwrights' lines concern specific characters and situations but "say nothing about human feelings in general or about the human condition" in the manner of a Shakespeare. The reason for this, he concludes, is that Edo-period townsmen were interested in "specific subjects, not universal considerations." The somewhat negative cast of Kato's argument aside, this concern with specificity over universality would seem to apply equally well to post-Edo fiction. See A History of Japanese Literature , vol. 2, The Years of Isolation , 201.

which preceded the shishosetsu's emergence, insured that the gap between classical and modern Japanese literature would be unbreachable in certain respects; yet we should not overlook the modern writers' attempts to come to terms, in various and subtle ways, with the classical forms. It was, of course, never simply a matter of incorporating the classical vocabulary or aesthetic. For more than a millennium, the language served as a repository of richly connotative images and associations shared by the literate community.^[25] With the demise of old Japanese after Ozaki Koyo (1867-1903), however, the familiar vocabulary of pivot words (kakekotoba ), prefaces (jo ), epithets (makura kotoba ), association words (engo ), and poetic place-names (uta makura ), which for many centuries had provided a context for meaning and had made such ostensibly "personal" genres as the zuihitsu and kana nikki both highly conventional and more accessible to their audience, died out rather suddenly with no comparable system of literary conventions readily available to take its place. By the turn of this century, Japanese writers were looking to naturalism and other European literary movements for inspiration; but the western tradition, itself the culmination of many centuries of independent development, could not be readily assimilated. Writers now faced the task of formulating a new poetic vocabulary and repository of associations on which to draw. Unable to rely any longer on the "worlds" and associations of classical literature or in any coherent way on an alien literary tradition, they began exploring the possibility of using their own lives as "world." Once the writer established his persona as a legitimate subject of literary discourse, he was working, as far as he and his audience were concerned, with familiar material and could allude to it in subsequent works in the knowledge that readers would be conversant with it. This "world" gained further legitimacy as its author gained a name; and personal experience, as presented in the work, became part of the public literary domain. Just as Sei Shonagon (fl. early eleventh century) challenged her readers in The Pillow Book to pit themselves along with her against the tradition of literary allusions, the early shishosetsu writer chal-

[25] The extraordinary richness of this repository is demonstrated by Mark Morris in "Sei Shonagon's Poetic Categories," 29.

lenged his readers to gain a similar fluency in the newer and narrower "tradition" of his recorded life. He sought in this way to validate his experience as a kind of history.

The shishosetsu writer was preoccupied with such a legitimizing project in the first place in part because of fiction's subordinate relationship to history in traditional Japanese letters. We have observed that any author's view of fiction is predicated on his notion of reality, which is itself a mutable entity; concepts of just what constitutes reality vary with the age, culture, and artistic temperament, as E. H. Gombrich, among others, makes clear.^[26] The common understanding in the west has been that literary fictions are very much a part of "reality"; fiction, no less than history, aims at a credible representation of the world. Far from being opposed to history, it offers a competing and basically similar strategy of representation. (Henry Fielding, after all, calls his great novel about a foundling a "history.") Many novels could pass for histories, and vice versa. Hayden White goes so far as to say: "Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of 'reality.'"^[27]

The difference between the two, then, is a very subtle one indeed. It certainly does not lie in the dubious notion that the historian "finds" his stories, whereas the fiction writer "invents" his. Such a notion obscures the extent not only to which "invention" plays a part in the historian's operations but also to which "discovery" can play a part in the fiction writer's operations. It is tempting to say that history deals with what actually happened (events already constituted) and hence with "truth," and fiction with what might have happened (events not already constituted) and hence with "untruth." Already constituted events, however, are by no means the historian's exclusive domain. They are a part of any "fictional" work as well. Likewise, events that exist "inside" the writ-

[26] See Art and Illusion , esp. 84-86, which discusses the triumph of an established artistic vocabulary over an unfamiliar "reality" or setting.

[27] Hayden White, "Fictions of Factual Representation," 122.

er's consciousness are not the exclusive domain of the fiction writer. In his Metahistory , Hayden White posits the fictive nature of historical reconstructions, which are generated necessarily by various contending modes (romance/metaphor, tragedy/metonymy, comedy/synecdoche, and satire/irony) of emplotment, and argues convincingly that no mode of conveyance of historical "fact" is neutral or definitive or inherently truer than any other. "Commitment to a particular form of knowledge," White concludes, "predetermines the kinds of generalizations one can make about the present world."^[28]

At the center of this view of historiography as an essentially poetic act lies the assumption that history, like fiction, is a form of narrative. Although White never specifically defines "narrative," it is clear that he uses the term to designate a verbal construct that is more complex than either a chronicle (a chronological, open-ended arrangement of data) or a story (a chronicle to which culminations and resolutions have been added) and utilizes a plot—that "provider of significance to mere chronicity" as Frank Kermode puts it.^[29] Unlike a simple story that is content with a chronological ordering (asking the question "What happened next?"), an emplotted narrative imposes an internal, nontemporal, overriding order on events (asking, "What is the point of it all?"). The aims of both novelist and historian are realized through this synchronic ordering process.

White takes both "chronicle" and "story" to be "primitive elements" in the historical (and by inference the fictional) account;^[30] but it is precisely within this "primitive" realm that much of Japanese history and fiction reside. Although narrative in the west, beginning with the Old Testament, has been informed by a dramatic poetic of emplotment that insists on a causal relationship between events,^[31] the traditional Japanese "narrative" (monogatari ) is informed by the highly conventionalized aesthetics of the native verse forms and the nondramatic historiography of Chinese chronicles.

In the absence of a highly representational mode, the influence

[28] Metahistory , 21.

[29] The Sense of an Ending , 56.

[30] Metahistory , 5.

[31] See, for example, Erich Auerbach's analysis of Genesis as an emplotted narrative in Mimesis , chap. 1.

of a more self-consciously presentational mode on Japanese fiction has been enormous. The latter mode has played no small role in western literature as well—as the continuing interest in tropes, for example, demonstrates—but it has not had the sweeping impact, especially on prose, that it has had on Japanese literature. Whereas prose in the west, whether "history" or "fiction," has been inextricably tied to the emplotted narrative, the Japanese have been more at home with literary forms that tend to undermine or circumvent the narrative flow. The presentational mode infuses not only waka, haikai , and other poetic forms but also such prose forms as the "fictional tale" (tsukuri monogatari ), "poem tale" (uta monogatari ), "story of the 'floating world"' (ukiyo zoshi ), "poetic diary" (kana nikki ), and discursive essay (zuihitsu ), to. name the most prominent examples. In all these forms, imagery, polysemy, and canonical allusions do not simply counterpoint the action but may actually interrupt or even overwhelm it.^[32]

Although Japanese prose had by the early twentieth century lost not only the rhythm but the poetic vocabulary of the old literary language, it was by no means on a comfortable footing with the emplotted narrative still so prominent in western fiction. The difference, of course, is the cause of much consternation for western readers of the shosetsu who even today talk of its "inaccessibility," bemoan the "lack" of an ending, and ask what is the "point" of the story they have just read. The shosetsu , however, needs no overall plot signifier to enable its discourse. Getting there, for readers of the shosetsu , is not just half the fun; it is all the fun. In fact, there is no "there" or "here"—that is to say, no privileged event indicated by the emplotting narrative mechanism; the shosetsu narrative goes everywhere and nowhere.

The Chinese annalistic model for the writing of history also had a considerable influence on Japanese letters, including modern shosetsu . Beginning with Nihongi and the other "Six National Histories" (Rikkokushi , 720-902) and continuing with the hybrid "fictional histories" (rekishi monogatari ) written in the late Heian (794-

[32] The presentational and serial nature of Genji and other Heian monogatari is brilliantly analyzed in Richard Hideki Okada, "Unbound Texts." Of particular interest is his discussion of the tenseless character of old Japanese and the ambiguity of narrative voice in monogatari , a feature that survives in the modern shosetsu . See Chapter 2.

1192) and Kamakura (1192-2333) periods, Japanese texts take after the Chinese chronicle in their essentially descriptive rather than investigative bent and likewise make no attempt at synthesis or at establishing a hierarchy of significance. What mattered was that an event had actually occurred; having: occurred, it was dutifully recorded. Even more important, the continental tradition guided Japanese thinking as to what constituted history and ultimately what constituted literature. The Chinese regarded literature as a public institution that had as its purpose the maintenance of the Confucian orthodoxy, a political and social system of bureaucratic government entrusted to a class of highly literate civil servants who owed their place in the administrative ranks to their fluency in the four major categories of literature: histories and biographies, the classics and their commentaries, philosophy, and belles lettres.^[33] The last category included poetry but no prose; fiction was not included in scholarly discourse until the influx of western literary theory in the twentieth century. Traditional commentators who wrote on prose fiction at all quite naturally criticized it in terms of history, the highest form of literature and the only body of prose narrative that, because of its unquestioned respectability, could serve as a standard of comparison.^[34] Even during the heyday of Chinese prose fiction in the Ming (1368-1644) and Ch'ing (1644-1911) dynasties, most authors wrote anonymously and lived out their laves in obscurity—the price to pay for indulging in such a minor art.^[35]

The content of "literature," then, for all intents and purposes, was poetry and nonfiction prose. The former served as a vehicle of expression and the latter as the moral guideline for the literati class. The highest forms of literature were public and utilitarian in orientation and meant to aid in the art of government. The Japanese civil service, under the control of either the aristocratic or military classes, never became as dominant as its Chinese model, and we see both literature and history take on a less public face. Rekishi monogatari , for example, are more likely to describe an outing of

[33] Liu Wu-chi, An Introduction to Chinese Literature , 5.

[34] C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel , 14-15. Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shih chi (Records of the Grand Historian ) was the most frequently invoked historical text against which classical Chinese prose fictions were measured.

[35] Liu, An Introduction to Chinese Literature 195, 228.

court ladies than a meeting of ministers. In the Edo period, however, the Tokugawa shogunate developed a deeply conservative political system that looked eagerly to the Chinese Neo-Confucian philosophy to legitimize its rule. Literature came to be regarded, officially at least, solely as a vehicle for propagating the dominant sociopolitical ethos. Indeed, literature was understood to be useful only insofar as it contributed to the Confucian worldview or "Way."^[36]

Literature that inspired the populace to socially correct behavior, then, clearly served a useful function in the Confucian scheme of things. In Tokugawa Japan, the writing of histories, biographies, and moral treatises was encouraged, while other forms were merely condoned. The poet Matsuo Basho's (1644-94) witty, self-deprecating assessment of haikai —"My art is like a fire in summer or a fan in winter; it serves people no purpose"^[37] —expresses, however ironically, the prevailing official bias against any forms of poetry except kanshi (poetry written in Chinese) and waka . The bias against prose fiction was even stronger and also reflected Chinese literary tastes. The word for prose fiction itself (shosetsu [hsiao-shuo in Chinese] originally meant "unofficial history" and referred to popular, loosely historical accounts written in the vernacular) is indicative of the low esteem in which it was held. Shosetsu might be translated literally as "small talk"; a shosetsuka was therefore someone who collected "street talk" and "roadside gossip" and committed them to writing.^[38] The Chinese expended great efforts preserving and handing down histories and the other categories of "refined" literature; the "vulgar" texts of prose fiction, however, were commonly ignored, lost, and even destroyed.^[39] The Han shu (History of the Former Han) lists in its catalogue of learning ten "sages" in descending order of importance—the Confucianist, Tao-

[36] The Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), adviser to the first Tokugawa shogun, writes: "Where there is the Way [do] there are letters [bun ].... They are different manifestations of the same principle.... Letters branch out from the great trunk of the Way. Since the branches are few, they are healthy and firm" (quoted in Hiraoka Toshio, Nihon kindai bungaku no shuppatsu , 13). Razan's concept of the nature of literature echoes the words of Emperor Wen of the Wei (A.D. 186-226): "Literature: a vital force in the ordering of the state" (quoted in Burton Watson, Early Chinese Literature , from the epigraph opposite the title page).

[37] Quoted from "Kyoroku ribetsu no kotoba," in Sugiura Sei'ichiro et al., eds., Basho bunshu , 205.

[38] Liu, An Introduction to Chinese Literature , 141.

[39] Watson, Early Chinese Literature , 4.

ist, Legalist, diviner, logician, Moist, diplomatist, eclectic, farmer, and finally "small-talk writer"—but quickly adds that only the first nine are worth mentioning.^[40]

The notion of what constituted literature in Tokugawa Japan is examined with remarkable insight by Kitamura Tokoku (1868-94), a noted poet, essayist, and critic. Tokoku posits two distinct strains in Tokugawa letters: "refined" nonfiction literature that commented seriously on life and "vulgar" nonliterary fiction that buriesqued life.^[41] Into the former category went the histories, biographies, and other erudite texts that appealed to the ruling samurai class, in which fiction had no place; into the latter, the witty picaresques and other "popular" narratives that appealed to commoners, in which fiction figured large. Tokoku's distinction is noteworthy, for it shows that Tokugawa literature had no lack of fiction. On the contrary, a great deal was being written in the form of gesaku , a generic term for such forms as the kibyoshi (illustrated "yellow-covered books"), sharebon ("sophisticated books" about the gay quarters), kokkeibon ("humorous books"), ninjobon ("amatory books"), and yomihon (didactic "reading books"). Its very name (literally, "playful composition"), however, suggested its "frivolous" and therefore nonliterary character. Gesaku were often authored (usually anonymously) by samurai intellectuals, but their primary audience was the lower classes, mainly townspeople.

The idea that fiction and literature were entirely separate concerns—the former frivolous, the latter serious—continued into the Meiji period. It held true even for the man who made the first sustained attempt at writing in the colloquial idiom. Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909), author of Ukigumo (Drifting clouds, 1887-89), abandoned his effort at fiction writing for nearly two decades before trying again in 1906, only to abandon it for good a year later. Influ-

[40] Noguchi Takehiko, shosetsu no Nihongo , 10-11. That this low view of fiction has continued even into modern times is demonstrated by an influential essay by Chou Tso-jen, written in 1919, which argues for the superiority of the classical genres of prose and poetry over fiction and drama. See Hsia, The Classical Chinese Novel , 3-4.

[41] Nihon bungaku shi kotsu (also known by the subtitle of its only extant portion, Meiji bungaku kanken ), in Kitamura Tokoku shu , 124. My discussion of Tokoku is based largely on Hiraoka, Nihon kindai bungaku no shuppatsu , esp. the section entitled "Futatsu no bungaku," 7-24. See also H. D. Harootunian's stimulating article on Tokoku and Takayama Chogyu, "Between Politics and Culture."

enced as much by his samurai lineage and Tokugawa heritage as by his studies of western literature, Futabatei was very uncomfortable with the idea of a literary career, which he regarded as decidedly unprofessional. The contemporaneous success of the Ken'yusha, a school of writers that carried on the Edo gesaku tradition, no doubt increased his distaste for such a "frivolous" calling. In a late essay, he insists on the impossibility of writing fiction of any worth. "No matter how good one's technique," he argues, "one cannot write the truth. One may know the truth, but it inevitably becomes distorted when one speaks or writes of it.... When it comes to fiction [shosetsu ] I can write nothing but lies; and because I so believe, I simply cannot be serious about it."^[42] In the end, the only way he could be honest with himself was to quit the life of a writer and embark on a more respectable career in the bureaucracy. Futabatei continued his literary activities both as a translator of stories from the Russian (which won him his initial fame) and as a contributor of kansobun (short pieces that allow a writer to reflect on virtually any subject) to various journals, but he considered this part of his life an avocation.

By the early twentieth century, the original sense of shosetsu had been largely supplemented, if not superseded, by the western concept of the novel that Tsubouchi Shoyo (1859-1935), author, translator, critic, and student of English literature, first grafted onto the Chinese word when he published his famous interpretation of European literature (shosetsu shinzui ; The essence of the novel, 1885-86). And yet, the west's literary impact notwithstanding, the word shosetsu could not be stripped so quickly of its two-thousand-year-old connotations. As Noguchi Takehiko suggests, such connotations explain not only why Edo-period writers, with a mixture of shame and defiant pride, would use the derogatory term haishi shosetsu ("trivial history and small talk") to refer to their literary productions but also why the term sakka ("artist"; literally, "maker of things") is looked on even today with more favor than shosetsuka in identifying someone as a writer.^[43]

Early twentieth-century writers, then, could not help feeling ambivalent toward their literary heritage. To wear the label of sho-

[42] "Watakushi wa kaigi-ha da," in Futabatei Shimei zenshu 5:230-31.

[43] shosetsu no Nihongo , 12.

setsuka was to acknowledge the vulgarity of one's calling. The Confucian tradition had disenfranchised shosetsu from any of the legitimate categories of literature. Moreover, the new European model was still not so well established that it could counter the prejudice that shosetsu , unlike the classics or histories, did not tell the "truth," that is to say, a referential truth that pointed to some external reality outside the text and gained its significance from that reality. A few, like Noguchi, argue that it was the destiny of the shosetsu as fiction, aided by the positive western conception, to transcend the limits of referentiality imposed by the dominant culture and to present its own kind of truth, a reality that exists nowhere but in language.^[44] Pressures on the shosetsu and on its cultural context, however, worked both ways. To the same extent that its verbal energy as a fictive text tended to propel the modern shosetsu beyond referentiality, the modern shosetsuka , in hopes of gaining respect for his work, tried to contain it within the referential framework of traditionally accepted prose forms and thereby elevate it to the level of "true" ("refined" as opposed to "vulgar") literature. Thus, the legitimizing rationale for the shosetsu as fiction was soon countered by a movement to free the shosetsu of fiction altogether. Out of this movement came the shishosetsu .

The concern about telling "lies" is still very much alive today. Witness the following sentiments, delivered to a lecture audience in 1971, by the contemporary shishosetsu author Yasuoka Shotaro (1920-):

In a shishosetsu you write, somewhat tediously, about your own life and nothing else. A shishosetsu has ... no shape, no form, no style. It has none of these—and yet in writing about that ordinary, everyday life ... a person's unique individuality manages to surface. "Everyone has his quirks," as the saying goes ... but it's very difficult to discover those quirks for oneself.... Still there are those fleeting moments when you become detached and see yourself for what you really are ... just as clearly as if your eyeball were attached to the wall over there. I think that truly creative writing involves that kind of searching for and discovering something in yourself, not dreaming up some formally satisfying story. Anyway, that's how I got started. It took me about half a year to write my first story, a mere thirty pages long. I'm in no position to judge its worth, but writing has made me understand—how shall I put it?—the value of life. Or,

[44] Ibid., 20.

to put it another way, I feel that by writing I'm continually able to affirm my existence.^[45]

Yasuoka is speaking in an age of high democratic capitalism beyond the postwar era, at a time when the sociocultural constraints on "mediated" expression to which Maruyama Masao alluded might be presumed no longer operative. And yet there is no sign, if these words are any indication, that the privileging of lived experience has waned. Its appeal lies on one level in its patently narcissistic value as a kind of literary graffiti that affirms the scribbler's existence. Even more important for Yasuoka are its revelatory powers, its ability to plumb the "truth" about the writer and about life in a way that no "formally satisfying" fictional work can. A story is naturally formless if it follows life, naturally "unique" if it accurately describes its author, whose life is by definition one of a kind. For Yasuoka, then, true originality lies not in the possible but in the actual, not in imagining but in living. Any attempt to stray from lived experience is bound to result in mimicry and fabrication, which in this scheme are seen in opposition to originality. In a move that effectively challenges the western conception of the fictional enterprise, he tells of his efforts to "invent" an original, formally convincing prose fiction—the product, he claims, of a pure flight of imagination—only to discover that a virtually identical story already existed in the rakugo (comic monologue) repertoire.^[46] For Yasuoka, the lesson is clear: no such duplication is possible if a writer draws solely from his own life. Fabrication can only lead one away from the truth of lived experience.

There is still another kind of appeal, however, which Yasuoka only hints at, namely, the voyeurism inherent in reading what one knows to be a record of experience and not invention, a record not so valuable for what it says in itself as for whom it says it of. It may be impossible for the writer to see himself, as Yasuoka argues, except during a few fleeting moments of heightened awareness; but he is always in view of the reader, who is constant witness to the author's "quirks." The shishosetsu may have no shape or form, but it does have a peculiar "style," contrary to Yasuoka's assertion, which is none other than its reputed absence of style. The shishose-

[45] "Gendai ni okeru watakushi shosetsu," 34.

[46] Ibid., 33-34.

tsu's whole raison d'être rests on the powerful illusion of its textual transparency—its sincerity—which lets the reader view the author's experience "unmediated" by forms, shapes, structures, or other "trappings" of fiction. Again and again we shall encounter the belief, articulated here with such conviction by Yasuoka, that the shishosetsu lets the reader view through the window of its "transparent" language the private goings-on in the author's glass house in a way simply not possible through the mediated language of fiction.

One of our central concerns, of course, is just how "transparent" the language of the shishosetsu really is. We may not notice that the glass in this window on life is tinted or warped or even there until it is opened, rolled down, or otherwise exposed. How, if at all, does it differ from the language of fiction? And if it does not, then what makes readers and writers believe nonetheless in a difference, as if literary will took precedence over linguistic evidence? We shall grapple with these questions in the following two chapters.