3
Shishosetsu Criticism and the Myth of Sincerity

When one looks at the statue of Kannon adorning the Dream Hall in Horyuji Temple, the farthest thing from one's mind is the person who carved it. This is a special case, for the statue has taken on a completely separate existence from its producer. If I were able to produce literary text of equal caliber, I doubt that I would feel compelled to sign my name to it.
Shiga Naoya, Preface to the 1928 Gendai bungaku zenshu single-volume edition of his writings

If we forget that fictions are fictive we regress to myth.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

Thus far we have seen how a literary tradition of equating "serious" writing with nonfiction and a language well suited to the reportive style's epistemology have nurtured the belief in an author's "unmediated" presence in the text, especially in a text so clearly autobiographical as the shishosetsu . This belief has in turn prompted the shishosetsu admirers and detractors alike to appeal to a biographical "pre-text" in establishing the proper context for evaluation. In the eyes of the detractors, shishosetsu writers were unimaginative gossips whose stories' very intelligibility depended on a prior familiarity with details of their private lives. In the eyes of admirers, they were a special breed of artists whose candid confessions inspired a confidence between author and reader that did away with the need for fiction. These seemingly contradictory but in fact interlocking views have informed the shishosetsu from its emergence in the critical consciousness at the end of Taisho down to the present day.

Three major periods of critical debate concerning shishosetsu —the first in the mid-1920s, the second in the mid-1930s, and the third in the 1950s—will provide the focus of our discussion here.^[1] We should note that even the earliest criticism appeared when the shishosetsu's popularity and influence had already reached their zenith; nearly all texts by the writers analyzed in Part 3, for example, date back to the 1910s and early 1920s. But there is no question that the values that eventually surfaced in the form of criticism were in place from the shishosetsu's very beginnings. An examination of those values should tell us a great deal about a cultural product that was packaged from its inception as a "purer" and "sincerer" prose form than ordinary fiction, and by that measure somehow more uniquely Japanese.

The First Period: "Pure" Shishosetsu Versus "True" Novels

In 1924 Nakamura Murao (1886-1949), author, publisher, and critic, inaugurated the first period of critical debate with an essay championing what he called the "true novel" (honkaku shosetsu ) against the shinkyo shosetsu (a variant term for watakushi shosetsu / shishosetsu ). The true novel's principal concern, Nakamura writes, is the realistic depiction of characters in society. Since the author reveals his philosophy only parenthetically, by his characters' speech and actions, the reader's understanding of such a text does not depend on a familiarity with the author's private life. The shinkyo shosetsu's principal concern, by contrast, is the direct communication of lived experience. Since the author has no interest in creating characters or dramatic situations and it is just as important to know who is writing as it is what is being written about, the reader's understanding greatly depends on his knowledge of the author. The descriptive shorthand used in the shinkyo shosetsu makes the form resemble the haiku in its economy, to be sure; but economy is no virtue in fiction, Nakamura insists, and he offers Anna Karenina as the consummate example of what he looks for in

[1] Some critics alter this periodization slightly. For example, Katsuyama Isao divides the same three decades into four periods: the first in the mid-1920s, the second in the mid-1930s, the third during the Pacific War, and the fourth right after the war. See "Shoki watakushi shosetsu ron" (1953), in Taisho , watakushi shosetsu kenkyu , 187 n. 1.

a novel. Japan has no hope of producing a Tolstoy, because writers have become too bogged down in their private lives and because the critics have become voyeurs whose preoccupation with autobiographical truth has undermined the incentive to create imaginative fictions. In an atmosphere where curiosity about private life reigns supreme over concern for literary excellence, any writer's attempt at authoring true fiction is derided as "vulgar" literature.^[2]

Although we have used watakushi shosetsu / shishosetsu exclusively in our discussion, we should note here that the term shinkyo ("mental state") shosetsu has also had wide currency down to the present day. The terms are often used interchangeably. Kume Masao (1891-1952), for example, argues that the shinkyo shosetsu is a "purer" form of watakushi shosetsu (see below), but either term would be appropriate in Nakamura's essay. Some critics have worked out elaborate schemes for distinguishing one from the other. The predominant postwar view is that the watakushi shosetsu is a literature of crisis, to which writers turn in desperation and at the risk of disrupting their private lives, while the shinkyo shosetsu is a literature of harmony and salvation, through which writers find peace with themselves and their surroundings. The latter is commonly conceived as an even more evocative, discursive, and nondramatic presentation of experience than the former.^[3] A writer is usually regarded as the author of one form or the other, depending on his commitment either to unmitigated self-exposé or to more controlled confession. Hirano Ken (1907-78) offers the best-known exposition of this critical perspective in his opposition of the presumably "unabashed" writing of Chikamatsu Shuko and Kasai Zenzo to the more "guarded" prose of Shiga Naoya. The rationale for distinguishing between two varieties of confession lies, not surprisingly, in the pre-text of private life. Writers like Shuko and Kasai, their personal lives a shambles, had nothing to lose by their candor, Hirano argues, while those like Shiga, their domestic lives more or less intact, had everything to lose by letting their "confessions" get out of hand.^[4] This distinction is not really useful, since

[2] "Honkaku shosetsu to shinkyo shosetsu to."

[3] Howard Hibbett reflects this critical view, which ascribes a more resonant and elevated tone to the shinkyo shosetsu , when he calls it a "contemplative" (as opposed to a "confessional") novel. See "The Portrait of the Artist in Japanese Fiction," 348.

[4] See Geijutsu to jisseikatsu , 25-45 and passim. Hirano's view is shared by Honda Shugo, who likewise makes an explicit contrast between the "destructive" literature of Shuko and Kasai and the "constructive" literature of Shiga. See “Shirakaba" ha no bungaku , 125. Hirano's strict opposition between these two types of literature has been questioned by later critics. See, for example, Katsuyama, "Taishoki ni okeru watakushi shosetsu no keifu" (1966) in his Taisho , watakushi shosetsu kenkyu , 248-53. Few critics, however, question their own ability to ascertain the accuracy of an author's confessions by an examination of the life.

it is impossible to determine objectively just how much an author "reveals" of himself in his work. It is valid, however, with regard to the author's literary persona. Thus, the Shiga hero's "confessions" predictably conform to the persona of a morally conscientious author-sage, for example, while the Kasai hero's conform to that of a forever-victimized, ne'er-do-well artist. We shall examine these personae in detail in Part 3.

But now to continue our discussion of early critics. Nakamura is representative of those who believed that the shishosetsu (by which is meant either watakushi shosetsu or shinkyo shosetsu ), although a faithful record of "real-life" events, was inevitably inferior to the true novel as art because it was not informed by an overall conception that transcended the author's personal experience. He was supported by an even severer critic of the shishosetsu , Ikuta Choko (1882-1936), who insisted that the world's truly great authors, from Shakespeare to Saikaku, best expressed themselves through imaginative creation rather than documentary accounts of their private lives.^[5]

Support for the shishosetsu came first from a practitioner, Kume Masao. In perhaps the most widely quoted essay on the subject, Kume confides that as an author he has always felt more comfortable writing shishosetsu than "fiction" and that as a reader he has always placed his greatest trust in other shishosetsu writers. He then presents an argument that epitomizes the Japanese writer's skepticism of the fictional contract.

I cannot believe that art in the true sense of the word is the "creation" of someone else's life.... I see it rather as the "recreation" of a life, of an experience, that actually took place. To be sure, a Balzac can write a voluminous narrative like The Human Comedy and portray his usurers and aristocratic ladies so vividly that they seem to come alive. Yet I cannot but regard such a narrative as a fabrication, nor can I place in it the trust I do in even the most off-handed remark the author might make about, say, the difficulties he encountered

[5] "Nichijo seikatsu o hencho suru akukeiko" (1924).

writing his stories. The world has known a handful of great authors—true geniuses (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and in particular Flaubert)—who have been able to communicate something of themselves in their writing. The moment these authors express themselves through other characters, however, they distance themselves from their readers. Inevitably, embellishments and technical flourishes—convenient fictions, all—creep in. Their novels may be superior as entertainment, but they do not ring true to me. Once, during a lecture, I went so far as to say that Tolstoy's War and Peace , Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , and Flaubert's Madame Bovary were really no more than popular novels [tsuzoku shosetsu ]—first-rate examples of their kind, to be sure, but popular novels nonetheless. In the final analysis, they are mere fabrications—just so much entertainment.^[6]

For Kume, then, the shishosetsu is the purest of prose forms because it allows the author to express himself candidly without having to "fabricate" his thoughts in the guise of a novelistic character. Wary of the essential fictionality of represented consciousness, he yearns for a literature of "unmediated" experience told directly by the subject as opposed to one told through the "mediation" of an omniscient narrator. To a reader with Kume's sensibilities, Balzac's memoirs would have greater appeal than any of his novels (which, however brilliantly fashioned, were mere "fabrications"), because they brought the reader closer to Balzac the man. Kume appears to qualify his faith in unmediated experience when he later insists that the true shishosetsu is not "mere" autobiography or confession but "first and foremost a work of art." But art, in Kume's view, is a product of one's mental state. Only properly harmonized thoughts can generate an unerring depiction of self. The line Kume draws between art and nonart corresponds to the distinction he makes between the shinkyo shosetsu (a word that he claims to have coined) and the ordinary watakushi shosetsu .^[7] Kume argues that the shinkyo shosetsu is not simply a random account of personal experience (as he implies the watakushi shosetsu is) but a scrupulous self-portrait that can be drawn only when one has reached a suitably contemplative frame of mind. In Kume's view, then, art is a discipline, the

[6] "'Watakushi' shosetsu to 'shinkyo' shosetsu" (1925), 52-53.

[7] According to Kume, the word shinkyo was used in his haiku circle and referred to the poet's mental state during composition. (Some critics dispute his claim to be the first to use the term in connection with prose writing.) For a discussion of the origins of shinkyo shosetsu and watakushi shosetsu as critical terms, see Katsuyama Isao, "Shoki watakushi shosetsu ron," in Taisho , watakushi shosetsu kenkyu , 174-89.

shinkyo shosetsu a vehicle for meditation, and the writer his own audience.

Many critics, whether or not they subscribed to Kume's watakushi shosetsu / shinkyo shosetsu distinction, believed that the shishosetsu enabled the author, in the words of Uno Koji, to "plumb the depths of the self" in a way that the ordinary novel, fettered by its conventions of "fictionalization," could not.^[8] They also saw in the classical western poetics of plot, characterization, and dramatic scene a built-in artificiality that undermined the aims of sincerity, and argued that fiction was a crutch an author relied on only when he had exhausted his own life's experience or when he could not address his readers with complete candor. It followed that the best preparation for writing—itself no more than an unpretentious presentation of one's philosophy of life—was living. In this vein, Kikuchi Kan (1888-1948) insisted that a writer had to serve a rigorous apprenticeship to life before committing himself to art, which was a kind of "report card" of the life.^[9] He also insisted, in a remarkable statement linking art and morality, that individual character and literary style were inseparable:

It has long been the case that outstanding writers are also outstanding people.... Writing is a reflection of the entire person, and if the person's character is defective, so will be the reflection.... One improves one's writing by first improving one's character.... A writer will be successful as long as he describes his thoughts and feelings sincerely and faithfully—never mind how naive they may be. The worst possible thing is to imitate another's style and write about what one has never seen or felt.^[10]

[8] "'Watakushi shosetsu' shiken" (1925), 64. Uno singles out Kasai Zenzo as the form's most brilliant practitioner.

[9] See "Shosetsuka taran to suru seinen ni atou" (1922), in Kikuchi Kan zenshu 12:373-76. See also "Geijutsu to tenbun" (1920), in ibid., 29-32, and finally "Chikamatsu Shuko-shi no kinsaku" (1924), in ibid., 312, in which Kikuchi uses the term to describe Shuko's work Ko no ai no tame ni . Many critics continue to speak of the shishosetsu as the author's personal "report card." See, for example, Yamada Akio, "Watakushi shosetsu no mondai," 43. Both Kikuchi and Kume Masao eventually turned away 'from the shishosetsu : Kikuchi, because he believed that writing as a financially viable career depended on pleasing a mass audience (see, for example, his Han jijoden [1929-47], in Kikuchi Kan: tanpen sanju-san to Han jijoden , 490); and Kume, because he believed that one could write successfully only as an avocation, without the pressure of deadlines and editorial whims (see his "Junbungaku yogi setsu" [1935], 411-13). But their critical stance toward life and art remained unchanged.

[10] "Bun wa hito nari."

The assumption made by both sides in the debate, however—and here we see their common ground—was that fictionality was operative only in the author's "absence" from the text. A narrator-hero dearly modeled on the author was a sign to the shishosetsu's admirers and detractors alike that all experiences related in the text, being the author's own, belonged ipso facto outside the realm of fiction. There is no more telling evidence of their common ground than the comments of Nakamura Murao, the erstwhile shishosetsu critic. Ten years after he declared his preference for the "true" novel, he now confessed his partiality for "pure literature" (junbungaku , which, as many have noted, has been equated with the shishosetsu since the Taisho period)^[11] precisely in terms of the attitude toward fictionality we have discussed.

I regard the shishosetsu as the ultimate form of pure literature. It is surely the purest and the most candid of prose forms. In a conventional, objective novel [kyakkan shosetsu ], fiction [uso ] inevitably creeps in; it simply cannot be written otherwise. Tolstoy, Balzac, and Flaubert are revered as "gods" of the novel. All their work contains fiction.... The subjective passages, in which the author reveals himself directly, are much more real to me than the objective passages, in which fiction prevails. Anyone with a modicum of talent can write a novel. That is why a novel, no matter how deft or serious its fictionalizations, does not claim my respect or appeal to me as pure literature.^[12]

The notion of "pure literature" as the honest depiction of the author's own life, which might otherwise be "sullied" by incretions of fiction, was common throughout the bundan and continues to the present day.^[13] To claim, however, as we do here that Naka-

[11] See Katsuyama, "Shoki watakushi shosetsu ron," in Taisho , watakushi shosetsu kenkyu , 185. See also Oi Zetsu, "Watakushi shosetsu ron no seiritsu o me-gutte," 46-47, which links the equation specifically to Kume Masao's essay, discussed above.

[12] "Junbungaku to shite no watakushi shosetsu," 5. The prejudicial view of literature not based on the author's own life as being somehow less "authentic" is noted nearly three decades later by a well-known writer of detective fiction, Matsumoto Seicho, who insists that his own literary intentions are serious despite criticisms that the "fictionality" in his work makes it less "real." See Hirano Ken and Matsumoto Seicho, "Watakushi shosetsu to honkaku shosetsu."

[13] For example, Isogai Hideo, a contemporary critic, describes the author Makino Shin'ichi in the following manner: "Makino began his literary career writing stories in the shishosetsu mode; but his was not a temperament that could bear the strain of unvarnished confession, and he gave his works a comic and fictional veneer “ (NKBD 3: 225c; emphasis added).

mura's statement is a particularly cogent articulation of the myth of sincerity is to address squarely the myth's power and to acknowledge its evolution from a cultural to a precritical, "natural" artifact. The myth of "pure literature" became the shishosetsu touchstone; perhaps even more important, it became the touchstone for critical judgment of all Japanese prose fiction, whether shishosetsu or not. "Pure literature" was an original site, a virgin territory that could be recovered only if purged of "objective" passages having nothing to do with lived experience. The latter, according to Nakamura and the vast majority of critics until quite recently, could be made available only in writing like the shishosetsu . Such reasoning would not have made sense to the mass audience, which had no inkling of the real-life author who produced stories for their consumption, but it held sway in the bundan as long as writing was seen as a vestige of the life that preceded the text.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), the famous short-story writer who was frequently criticized by the bundan for his forays into "nonpure" fiction, attempted to collapse the distinction between shishosetsu and true novel altogether by arguing that no art form was concerned with referential truth. Yet even he agreed that the shishosetsu was a "fictionless" writing.^[14] Tempted though we might be when reading a shishosetsu , however, to exclaim, along with Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965), "Aha! The man is writing about himself!" we need not jump to the conclusion that we are "reading a nonfiction piece" and "immediately lose patience with it."^[15] If we do, we only confuse the fictive product (however "true-to-life") with the producer whom we do not know and whose connections with the text are severed once pen leaves page.^[16]

[14] "'Watakushi' shosetsu shaken" (1925), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu 8:39-46. Akutagawa's statement is important nonetheless, for he suggests that a work's basis in fantasy or fact has no bearing on its artistic value. He uses an example from painting to illustrate his point. The physical "reality" of the Mount Koya monastery's Red Fudo , with flames rising from the deity's back, is not at issue, he argues, but rather the painting's overall design. Likewise, the shishosetsu's apparently faithful representation of life does not by itself make it superior as art. "Honest" representation may be a moral imperative, he concludes, but it is not an artistic one.

[15] Jozetsu roku (1927), in Tanizaki Jun'ichiro zenshu 20:72.

[16] Tanizaki himself took advantage of just this sort of confusion and enticed naive readers to equate fictive and real-life authors. He made enough independently confirmable referential asides in his Shunkinsho (1933), for example, to have sent some gullible critics scurrying to an Osaka cemetery in search of the heroine's nonexistent grave.

shishosetsu authors may lie or they may tell the truth about themselves. But unless we are prepared to privilege the biographical pre-text over the written text to the extent that we deprive the latter of any autonomy, we gain nothing from having distinguished "truth" from "falsehood." The act of writing, however confessional, actually liberates the writer, however unwillingly, from lived experience. Therefore, a text whose protagonist has a clearly recognizable model is no less autonomous than a text that has none. If any one shishosetsu text does not stand up on its own, it is simply because it exists in a discursive field where it is radically contiguous to other texts (not to the life it presumes to "represent"). Either way a text is condemned to independence from its author.

Thus, the anonymously produced statue of the Kannon goddess adorning the Horyuji Dream Hall, which Shiga Naoya gazes at so fondly in the epigraph to this chapter, is not a "special case" after all. Shiga, even by signing the texts he writes, paradoxically confirmed his biographical absence from them. The seeming overlap of author, narrator, and hero notwithstanding, the author's "presence" in a shishosetsu is, finally, an artistic illusion like perspective or coloring or shading: it may add a dimension of "realism" to a text (the kind that Taisho-period readers were particularly enamored of, to be sure), but it does not bring the text any closer to "reality." Nor should it; only by transcending life—by transforming experience and perception into the written word—can literature be free to represent it. Even Shiga, the shishosetsu author par excellence, was apparently aware of this theorem of fictionality and its corollary of the illusion of authorial presence.

The Second Period: Writer and Society

When the debate over the shishosetsu intensified a second time in the mid-1930s, attention shifted from fiction's place in literature to the citizen's place in society—a legacy of the proletarian movement's concern for social engagement. The shishosetsu came under attack by various groups, from the modernist school known as the Shinkankaku-ha (Neo-perceptionists) to the proletarian writers, for its extreme introspection and lack of social consciousness. In

his essay "Junsui shosetsu ron" (1935), Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947), the Shinkankaku-ha's leading member, urges writers to offer a broader vision of society than can be had in the autobiographical junbungaku ("pure literature"), yet to avoid the frivolity of popular fiction (tsuzoku shosetsu ). He borrows a term from André Gide and champions what he calls the "pure novel" (junsui shosetsu ), which combines the former's moral seriousness with the latter's structural cohesion. Only the pure novel, Yokomitsu maintains, can bring together these two divergent strains, which he argues are carryovers from the "autobiographical" diary (nikki ) and "imaginative" narrative (monogatari ) traditions, respectively.^[17]

Yokomitsu's advocacy of a new literary synthesis leads him to challenge the notion of "realism" prevailing in the bundan . For junbungaku writers, Yokomitsu claims, realism simply means the faithful chronicling of personal experience. Following in the nikki tradition, the author-narrator focuses exclusively on a single character—himself. Because Japanese "realism" has no place for sustained plot and character development, the typical junbungaku shosetsu is fragmented and short-winded. Junbungaku writers, Yokomitsu argues further, have misjudged the serious artistic intentions of the great nineteenth-century western "realists" like Balzac or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in whose works accident often plays a crucial role, because their narcissism has rendered them oblivious to anything outside their own immediate experience and consequently to the links between the particular and the universal. A great novelist skillfully orchestrates fortuitous occurrences in his characters' lives, he concludes, whereas the junbungaku writer, preoccupied with authenticity, seeks to eliminate them altogether.^[18]

Yokomitsu's answer to "pure literature's" limited narrative perspective and resultant particularity is a radically different, al-

[17] "Junsui shosetsu ron," 146—47. For additional commentary on this essay and its dubious debt to Gide, see Dennis Keene, Yokomitsu Riichi: Modernist , 181-83.

[18] "Junsui shosetsu ron," 144-45, 149-50. (One is reminded of Akutagawa's comment that "true-to-life" fiction contains far fewer coincidences than one probably encounters in one's own experience ["Shuju no kotoba," in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu 7:448].) Yokomitsu would no doubt have agreed with Georg Lukács, who wrote a year later in his classic comparison of Tolstoy and Zola that without chance all narration was dead and abstract and that the secret of representation lay in its elevation of chance to the inevitable. See "Narrate or Describe?" (1936), in Writer and Critic and Other Essays , 112.

though vaguely defined, point of view he calls the "fourth person," capable of seeing both the inner self and the world at large; he holds up Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma as a model for writers to emulate.^[19] "Fourth person" suggests that Yokomitsu realized the easy tendency of "third-person" narration to merge with first-person narration in Japanese and hoped to construct a narrative in which the distance between narrator and hero did not collapse. Yet this comprehensive narrative perspective, which directly challenged the epistemology that underlies Japanese realism and the pervasive mode of expression we have provisionally called the written reportive style, was never to gain much currency in the bundan . One reason, perhaps, is that Yokomitsu's proposed "synthesis" of two traditional forms (nikki and monogatari ) is of elements not as disparate as he makes them out to be. By contrasting the "autobiographical" nikki with the "imaginative" monogatari , Yokomitsu equates the latter with western fiction; yet we have already noted that both forms lack the teleological worldview that predominates in western narrative. Moreover, monogatari did not provide the precedent for omniscient-narrative overview that Yokomitsu was looking for. Japanese realism was not to be divorced so easily from the narrator-hero's perspective and voice.

Shortly after the appearance of Yokomitsu's essay, Kobayashi Hideo (1902-83) responded with "Watakushi shosetsu ron" (1935), a kind of postmortem on the shishosetsu , although he acknowledges in his famous conclusion: "The shishosetsu is dead, but have people vanquished the self? The shishosetsu will doubtlessly reappear in new forms, so long as Flaubert's celebrated formula, 'Madame Bovary—c'est moi,' lives on."^[20] He argues that the shishosetsu is rooted in Japanese naturalism and that Futon is its prototype, a view that has assumed the status of critical orthodoxy.^[21] He discounts any similarities between the shishosetsu and European personal fiction. Unlike the latter, which has its roots in the romantic movement inaugurated by Rousseau's Confessions and the subsequent flowering of self-awareness, the shishosetsu is a product of

[19] "Junsui shosetsu ron," 150, 154.

[20] "Watakushi shosetsu ron," 20l-2.

[21] Oi Zetsu, "Watakushi shosetsu ron no seiritsu o megutte," 43. Yoshida Sei'ichi offers a representative example of this view in "Watakushi shosetsu no mondai ni tsuite," 19.

the Japanese naturalist movement's faith in literature as nonfiction document. This faith, he notes, was crystallized in Kume Masao's 1925 essay that denounced several great nineteenth-century novels as "mere" fabrications. Kobayashi argues that Kume spoke for an entire generation of skeptics about the fictional enterprise.^[22]

Kobayashi's most penetrating remarks about the shishosetsu have to do with the relationship between self and society and how radically it differs in Japan and in the west. Kobayashi maintains that Japanese writers casually imported the idea of "self" from European literature without domesticating the social, intellectual, and scientific institutions on which it was based. The individual in modern European literature has always been situated in a broad social milieu. However much the romantics questioned the individual's place in society, they did not turn their backs on that society. Rousseau and his successors never sought refuge in depictions of private life for their own sakes; they confidently featured their self-portraits in sweeping canvases of society. Writers of personal fiction from Goethe to Gide were thoroughly assimilated into their communities and steeped in a tradition of individualism nurtured by what Kobayashi calls the "socialized self" (shakaika-shita watakushi ). Japanese writers, of course, lacked this tradition. And although fascinated with naturalism as a literary technique, they were incapable of truly appreciating, let alone transplanting, the positivistic philosophy from which it derived. "No writer, however great a genius he may be, can create singlehandedly a zeitgeist or social philosophy," writes Kobayashi; "... he can only articulate in his works a philosophy that already lives among the people."^[23] Unable to take root as a system of thought, then, the literary naturalism imported by Japanese writers yielded, inevitably, nothing more than technically brilliant depictions of the writers themselves living in studied isolation.

Kobayashi makes his point by contrasting the views of Flaubert and Shiga on the place of private life in art. Flaubert epitomizes for Kobayashi the European tradition of subordinating private life to artistic production. "The artist must conduct himself in such a way as to make later generations believe he never existed," he quotes

[22] "Watakushi shosetsu ron," 182.

[23] Ibid., 185.

Flaubert as saying. And further: "The only way to escape misery is to cloister oneself in art and completely disregard all else. I have no desire for wealth or love or passion. I have divorced myself irrevocably from my private life."^[24] This credo, argues Kobayashi, is antithetical to that of a shishosetsu writer like Shiga, whose desire to overcome crises in private life become both the motivation for and the motif in his writing. The notion that private life was off-limits to his creative career was no doubt behind Flaubert's yearning for anonymity. For Shiga, however, private life was the main arena of his art. Shiga recognized that a truly great work of art was, in the final analysis, independent of its author, as his remarks on the Kannon statue (which Kobayashi cites) make clear. Yet this recognition, Kobayashi suggests, did not translate into action. What are we to make of the long silence that followed those remarks? Shiga was able to gaze complacently at the statue at a time when he had already achieved personal contentment and had exhausted his store of creative material. Anonymity was no longer a choice; it was his destiny.^[25]

Shiga's case may have been extreme, but it was far from unique; sooner or later all shishosetsu writers faced this crisis of creativity. Having exhausted his private life as a creative resource, Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943), for example, turned to the writing of history, while Masamune Hakucho (1879-1962) turned to criticism. Still other writers turned to popular fiction, including Kume Masao, whose bold pronouncements a decade earlier had figured large in the first shishosetsu debates. Kume now argued (in "Junbungaku yogi setsu," 1935) that the shishosetsu could be pursued only as an avocation, that it was not worth sacrificing one's livelihood for, and that making such a sacrifice actually defeated the purpose of writing by destroying the elevated mental state one wished to write about. Kobayashi calls Kume's essay an example of wishful thinking by a writer unable to turn his own life into a work of art.^[26]

Kobayashi and Yokomitsu, then, were in general agreement over the baneful influence of junbungaku on Japanese letters. Both, however, were quick to pronounce the shishosetsu a failed form without

[24] Ibid., 186.

[25] Ibid., 186-87.

[26] Ibid., 187-88.

coming to grips with its continued popularity. Like most writers and critics of the time, Kobayashi and Yokomitsu were influenced by their readings of European, and especially French, literature, which enjoyed tremendous prestige. (Yokomitsu goes so far as to say that Japanese writers knew more about Europe than Asia and that their own tradition was French and Russian literature.)^[27] A decidedly evolutionary view informed their thinking; they were confident that Japanese letters would follow in the path of, and eventually merge with, European literature, the unquestioned standard. To be sure, Yokomitsu perceptively linked junbungaku to the native tradition when he noted its similarities to the poetic diary; and Kobayashi described Japanese naturalism (and by extension the shishosetsu ) as more "feudal" (i.e., premodern) than "bourgeois" (i.e., modern and western)—an idea that shocked his contemporary audience, which had thought of it as having made a dean break with the past.^[28] Yet neither they nor their contemporaries seriously questioned the belief that Japanese literature ought to have developed along the lines of European "antecedents" and that any deviation was in fact a "distortion." Their literary evolutionism and corollary expectations about the self's relation to society blinded them to their own shrewd insights into the nature of Japanese naturalism and the shishosetsu .

Kobayashi in particular interpreted the shishosetsu in terms of the western literary aesthetics he had so thoroughly assimilated. He accused Japanese writers of adopting the trappings of European literature and placing them in a barren context, and he accused Japanese society of depriving writers of the means to relate to a world larger than their own immediate surroundings. Yet although he remained discouragingly silent, except for the one parenthetical remark noted above, about their native lineage, one can nonetheless surmise what he imagined those roots to be. In an essay on the medieval poet-priest Saigyo (one of a series of essays he wrote during the Pacific War addressing various topics and figures in classical literature), we find a remark that might qualify as an answer.

[27] "Junsui shosetsu ron," 153.

[28] "Watakushi shosetsu ron," 191. To Honda Shugo and his compatriots, Kobayashi's characterization came like a "bolt from the blue." See "Kaisetsu," in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshu 7:620.

Saigyo introduced afresh the concept of man's loneliness into the world of poetry. This theme permeates his verse. It might be said that loneliness was a treasure with which Saigyo was born. I think it no exaggeration to call his way of life as a priest and a recluse a mere expedient that served to preserve this treasure.^[29]

It seems safe to say that Kobayashi saw the shishosetsu writer in terms of the time-honored aesthetic recluse who engages in solitary contemplation at a distant remove from society. If we substitute "prose" for "poetry" and "writer" for "priest" in the passage above, we have a fair picture of the shishosetsu writer's situation some eight centuries after Saigyo. Kobayashi suggests that the only modern writers who were in a position to reflect seriously on the nature of the self in society were Mori Ogai (1862-1922) and Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). Authors of unusual learning, they understood fiction's ability (and Japanese naturalism's inability) to universalize experience. Neither cast his lot with the shishosetsu . The other writers, lacking fully "socialized selves," were left to seek a kind of "self-purification" achieved by recording one's mental state.^[30]

Yet purification was surely more than an aesthetic exercise; it was for the shishosetsu writer the staking out of a position vis-à-vis society as well. The isolated writer quite naturally wrote about the writer in isolation. He received no aesthetic or social encouragement to write of anyone else. That such a literature would appeal to readers may be surprising; yet the shishosetsu did in fact command a steady although by no means vast audience, as we shall see in Chapter 6. This "distortion" of European models flourished in spite of the continual pronouncements against it. That is why critics of this period regarded the shishosetsu as such a mystery; like a bumblebee, it seemed to have no business getting off the ground, yet it managed to buzz effortlessly about the bundan and beyond despite the efforts of the best critics to shoot it down. Many decried its lack of content. Kobayashi was particularly concerned about its preoccupation with "style." It was not enough that junbungaku writers had turned their private lives into open books; their obses-

[29] "Mujo to iu koto," in Shintei Kobayashi Hideo zenshu 8:35.

[30] "Watakushi shosetsu ron," 187-88.

sion with writing seemed to trivialize the content of their stories even further. Japanese naturalists, who took it as an article of faith that art imitated nature, always had before them something to write about, he argued. However much they struggled with their material, they never thought to publicize that struggle. The shishosetsu writers who followed in their wake, however, did just that. Circumstances forced them to produce stories whose subject matter was none other than the writing of those stories, and the presentation of reality became a more important theme than reality itself.^[31]

And yet this concern with "style," which Kobayashi so abhorred, may well be the saving grace of the shishosetsu writer's art. The content of daily life becomes far less "trivial" when it is problematized by its container—the "prison-house of language," to borrow Fredric Jameson's term. Efforts at sincerity of presentation are undermined time and again by the writer's own awareness of the sheer artifice of presentation, of the frame that shapes the "content" of his life. If a literary form like the shishosetsu does not even pretend to talk about society and if the aesthetics of isolation are its guiding force, then it makes little sense to censure it for being a "distortion" of the western novel, with which it has only a tenuous relationship. It is one thing for a Japanese author to read widely in an alien literature, but quite another to write in a manner that actually ignores the indigenous tradition's deeply held epistemological and linguistic assumptions. It does not seem at all strange that modern Japanese prose fiction (and the shishosetsu in particular), with a centuries-old history antedating all contact with the west, should have taken on an entirely different character from that of the novel. As long as confessional "content" remained the issue, however, the critics of Kobayashi's generation naturally judged the shishosetsu as inferior to its purported model, the western narrative.

[31] Ibid., 197-98.

The Third Period: Fugitives and Masqueraders

Nakamura Mitsuo (1911-) wrote even more disparagingly of the shishosetsu than Yokomitsu and Kobayashi did. With "Watakushi shosetsu ni tsuite" (1935) he inaugurated a career that was to culminate in such devastating critiques of modern Japanese literature as Fuzoku shosetsu ron (1950) and Shiga Naoya ron (1954). As with Yokomitsu and Kobayashi, Nakamura's strong background in French literature deeply colored his judgments of the native literature and particularly of the author's relationship to society. After reiterating Kobayashi's assessment of the individual in the west as a "socialized self," however, Nakamura carried his analysis of junbungaku one step further. "Unlike western romantics," he writes, “shishosetsu writers had no awareness of any confrontation between society and the individual. Indeed, they lacked the concept of 'society' altogether. Society for these writers was only those people who had a direct impact on their sensibilities: family, friends, lovers, etc."^[32]

This is a shrewd observation. Rather than argue, as Kobayashi did, that the Japanese writer possessed no "socialized self," Nakamura redefined society on a scale commensurate with the writer's consciousness, which extended to his immediate acquaintances ("family, friends, lovers") and not to some larger, more abstract system of institutions and relationships. His comment that personal experience in early twentieth-century Japan was felt to be a perfectly adequate mediator between the writer and this micro-society, moreover, underscores Maruyama Masao's theory of traditional social organization that we reviewed in Chapter 1.

Nakamura summed up his argument fifteen years later in a sweeping critique of modern Japanese literature, Fuzoku shosetsu ron . This work differs markedly from the period's other major essays on shishosetsu in its relentlessly critical tone. Nakamura singles out 1906-7 as a watershed in modern Japanese literature, when a "duel" took place between Toson's Hakai (1906) and Katai's Futon (1907). The literary "revolution" sparked by the former's broad social awareness was nipped in the bud, he argues, by a second revo-

[32] Nakamura Mitsuo zenshu 7:134.

lution sparked by the latter's claustrophobic self-consciousness.^[33] Now the naturalists and their followers were exempted from modern literature's most difficult task, which was to write about oneself and one's life in universal terms. Futon's success changed the course not just of the naturalist movement but of all twentieth-century Japanese letters. "Most of the Taisho period's best works ... were written in a style imitative of Futon ," he writes. "This is most unfortunate when we consider its innumerable defects and shortcomings."^[34]

An obvious difficulty with Nakamura's analysis lies in his acknowledgment of good works, and even masterpieces, in a form he argues has no redeeming qualities. It is a paradox he never quite resolves, because his assumptions have inevitably generated a set of literary guidelines that modern Japanese letters simply do not meet. Even as he redefines the perimeters of "society" in accordance with the writer's marginalized existence, he cannot bring himself to abandon the social vision and narrative perspective offered by the classical western novel. Although he repeatedly notes the early twentieth-century Japanese writers' great attraction to western literature, it is finally Nakamura himself who succumbs most completely. By western standards, Japanese naturalism, not surprisingly, is inferior to the European model. Nakamura never questions the motives, which he doubtlessly considers reasonable, of Japanese writers who try to assimilate the western view of literature. Assimilating this particular aspect of western culture is just one more way of competing at all levels with a hegemonic power. Nakamura speaks to this idea very bluntly in an essay he wrote two years earlier.

Foreign influence has a characteristically great impact on the literature of second- or third-rate nations. It would not, however, result in an endless succession of schools or movements in a first-rate nation—that is, one with a first-rate literature. I think that it would be profitable to compare literary circles in Japan with those in such second- or perhaps third-rate nations as Romania or Poland. The latter are susceptible to any new literary trend that develops in Paris. I am sure that this is the case. In this regard, modern Japanese literature has little to brag about. Many Japanese, I know, believe that their

[33] Fuzoku shosetsu ron , 29-31. See also the discussion below, 113-14.

[34] Fuzoku shosetsu ron , 53.

own literature is not worth studying at all and that they would be better-off reading translated literature.^[35]

The political implications of this statement, written just three years after Japan's defeat at the hands of the Allied Powers, are unmistakable. A nation's literature is only as viable and as reputable as its global position, as can be seen in Nakamura's equation of a first-rate literature with a first-rate power. Nakamura is quite naturally at a loss how to assess a literature that appears to be subordinated to the hegemonic culture but is in fact anything but derivative.

Another difficulty with the analysis lies in its exaggerated assessment of Futon as the turning point in Japanese letters. Katai's narrative indeed helped spark the "revolution" in literary confession of which Nakamura speaks. But it provided, at most, the trigger, not the powder. When we note Futon's marked similarities to Katai's previous writings and its differences from the shishosetsu that followed (as we shall do in Chapter 5), we can only conclude that the work was not in fact a radical break with, but rather a stage in, the process of development in the Japanese narrative that took place over a significant period of time. If anything, Futon was as much a result as it was the cause of this narrative development, which we have already traced to the Edo-period literary tradition. This is not to deny the importance of Katai's particular achievement or to minimize the influence—perhaps it would be more correct to say the overwhelming presence—of a narrative form legitimized by (in the eyes of the Japanese) a superior culture. It is only to remind ourselves that these "revolutionary" developments actually grew out of the literary tradition.

Ito Sei (2905-69) thought carefully and productively about the shishosetsu as a species of narrative quite disparate from the novel. His shosetsu no hoho (1948) is probably the most comprehensive study of modern narrative written in Japan up to that time. Like Nakamura, he acknowledges the great prestige of western literature. In his preface, Ito provides readers with a list of "required readings," of which nearly half the titles are European.^[36] But his recognition of the indigenous narrative tradition is apparent as well

[35] "Kindai Nihon bungaku," in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshu 7:415-16.

[36] shosetsu no hoho , 9-10. Included, incidentally, in these "European" texts are two stories by Poe.

in his inclusion of texts from the premodern canon (from Genji monogatari to Koshoku ichidai onna ) and in his discussion of the modern Japanese narrative against the background of its premodern predecessors. Ito argues that it makes much better sense to talk about the stories of an author like Masamune Hakucho, for example, who writes about the literary company he keeps, in terms of Tsurezuregusa or Hojoki than in terms of western narrative.^[37]

Ito thus connects the shishosetsu with certain premodern forms and opposes them all to the western novel, arguing that comparison with the latter can only be counterproductive. He emphasizes, moreover, as no one did previously, the role that a small homogeneous audience played in the shishosetsu's development, spotlighting the peculiar literary economy known as the bundan . Regarded as social outcasts and usually living in poverty, bundan writers had little opportunity to experience the world outside their immediate surroundings. And so they wrote, inevitably, about themselves, their peers, their sordid affairs, their hand-to-mouth existence, and their struggles to meet publisher's deadlines, because this was the only life they knew. Since the audience consisted mostly of their own peers, such things as character depiction and plot were as unnecessary as introductions at a club. Poverty may have cramped the imagination, but the limited narrative scope also turned out to be a blessing, Ito argues: it eliminated the need for fictionalization and allowed writers to focus on what they considered to be the most pressing issue, which was not how to write but rather, as reclusive rebels unconcerned with social convention, how to live.

Ito's argument builds on the assumption that the self and the personal voice to which it gives rise are the primary concerns of modern literature, whether Japanese or western. The two literatures differ, Ito suggests, in the way the authors present their "selves." Paradoxically, it is the more modern society that places greater constraints on self-expression. European writers, unwilling to subject their private lives to public scrutiny, resort to fiction because it provides the facade they need to function in society. Japanese writers, on the other hand, excluded by their professions from respectable society, have nothing to fear from confession because they have no social position to lose in the attempt.^[38]

[37] Ibid., 15-16.

[38] Ibid; see esp. 55-56, 106-7.

"Masqueraders" (kamen shinshi , literally, "gentlemen in masquerade") and "fugitives" (tobo dorei , literally, "runaway slaves") are the picturesque terms Ito coined in a contemporaneous essay to describe these two groups of writers. In this essay, which summarizes many of the arguments in shosetsu no hoho , Ito poses several important questions. What is it about fiction (shosetsu ) that moves Japanese readers, and how does western fiction differ from it? Is fiction's essence in its structure or its philosophical content? And what is fiction's role in the two cultures? He argues that the shosetsu , as a "report" of the writer's life, moves the reader to the degree that it is able to depict that life unerringly. One cannot have one's "philosophy" and fictionalize it, too, Ito seems to be saying. Bundan writers may be social outcasts, but they are also part of a respected literary tradition that idolizes the writer—a Saigyo or a Kamo no Chomei or a Basho—who rejects society and the material world.^[39]

Whereas Nakamura measures the shosetsu against the standard of the European novel and argues that it comes up short, Ito argues that it is by no means inferior just because it moves away from fictional narrative and toward essay and autobiography. The shosetsu , he insists, is an ideal medium for intimate expression that would suffer from too much attention to structure. The only way to write successfully in such a medium is to live, as a morally free person in an otherwise restrictive society, with a mind to documenting one's life as faithfully as one can.

Ito's assessment of the shosetsu is a valid one. But his faith in the importance of content ("philosophy") over form ("structure") leads him inevitably into the trap we identified earlier as the myth of sincerity. "The Japanese have no use for masks," Ito states flatly. "Fiction is rubbish—good only for writers who would dress up in coattails for the evening. Fugitives need not stand on ceremony. They can dazzle their readers with the slightest handiwork. But they must take great care not to overdo it lest they be labeled phonies and ostracized by their peers."^[40]

[39] "Tobo dorei to kamen shinshi" (1948), in Ito Sei zenshu 16:286-91; see esp. 287-88.

[40] Ibid., 291. See also shosetsu no hoho , 71. In Literature and Sincerity , Henri Peyre provides a useful corrective to Ito's argument that the western writer is necessarily less sincere because he has determined (as in Stendahl's case, to take one of Peyre's examples) that "only in fiction could he reach truth" (190). Although this felt need for fiction may confirm Ito's characterization of western writers, it does not change the fact that the concept of sincerity and the struggle to give it form in literature has occupied countless writers in the last two centuries and given birth to what Peyre calls the "personal novel." See ibid., 161-202.

The Mirage of Authenticity

As Ito sees it, then, bundan writers in effect consigned fiction to the dustbin of literature and opted for a less structured, autobiographical medium. Yet we still want to know how such a move could make their writing sincere. In an essay in Writing Degree Zero on narrative presentation, Roland Barthes identifies the preterite and third person (to which we might add Banfield's represented speech and thought) as the signposts of fiction in the classical western narrative. Together they "are nothing but the fateful gesture with which the writer draws attention to the mask which he is wearing."^[41] There is no escaping the mask, because language itself points to it. "The third person, like the preterite ... supplies its consumers with the security born of a credible fabrication which is yet constantly held up as false."^[42]

Although Ito and others argue that the shosetsu's all-important philosophical "content" determines its "sincere," "structureless" form, Masao Miyoshi's commentary on the shosetsu in light of Barthes's analysis seems closer to the truth:

It is the reverse of the novel: rather than a "credible fabrication which is yet constantly held up as false," the shosetsu is an incredible fabrication that is nonetheless constantly held up as truthful. Art is hidden, while honesty and sincerity are displayed. Distance is removed, while immediacy is ostensive.... The shosetsu is thus an art that refuses to acknowledge art.^[43]

In short, narrative intimacy is itself an ideologically motivated form and in no way subordinated to content. Form is naturally suppressed in a culture that privileges sincerity over design, experience over word. It has not disappeared, however, only assumed

[41] "Writing and the Novel," 40.

[42] Ibid., 35. Although he does not elaborate, Barthes implies that first-person narration is just as much of a fabrication as third-person narration, when he notes the ability of the former to confer on the narrative the "spurious naturalness of taking the reader into its confidence (such is the guileful air of some stories by Gide)" (ibid).

[43] "Against the Native Grain," 233. See also Miyoshi's account of the western narrative form and the Japanese alternative, 231-33.

the guise of style. As a verbal construct, "sincerity" in the shosetsu , no less than design, is part of a rhetorical rather than a referential field.

This distinction is easily demonstrated by considering the criterion used to judge sincerity. We saw in Chapter 1 the Japanese writer's struggle to transcend his calling and achieve a moral legitimacy by offering his life (however derelict) as an example to his community of readers. The stakes of appearing sincere were therefore very high, and it is no wonder that a great many writers and a vast number of readers conceived of the shosetsu in Ito's terms: the choice was indeed between fiction and philosophy, between "how to write" and "how to live." It goes without saying that the writer who most successfully understood (dare one say "exploited"?) the myth of sincerity became the object of deification. Shiga Naoya's nickname, shosetsu no kamisama ("the god of the shosetsu "), is, then, no gratuitious label but the ultimate signifier of this mythical hierarchy. Criticism of Shiga (and by extension any less successful would-be recorder of "truth") necessarily centers on the touchstone of emotional honesty. In the words of Honda Shugo (1908-), for example, a principal defender of the myth:

The shosetsu of Shiga Naoya contain no false notes [uso , literally, "lies"].... There is not a single false note in the author's feelings toward his characters or toward nature. Instead of "no false notes," I could just as easily say "no idle phrases" or "no empty rhetoric." ... To put it more positively: each and every Shiga sentence harbors profound emotion and a powerful sense of authenticity.^[44]

Honda's statement is significant less as a critique of Shiga than as an implied ideal for Japanese literature, in which the authentic transcription of the author's feelings becomes the paramount aim of writing, and the correct identification of (perhaps even communion with) those feelings becomes the chief task of the reader/critic. But just what does this lack of deception really mean? Is the emotion in question felt at the time of writing or at the time of the incident about which the author writes? Honda argues in favor of the former; but to argue either way is in effect to acknowledge the mediation involved in any "authentic" transcription.

[44] “Shirakaba" ha no bungaku (1954), 155.

This leads to an even more awkward question. How do we know that Shiga or any author is not "lying"? That is, how exactly are we to judge the authenticity of the author's feelings? Clearly, we must engage in an act of faith and believe that the author is telling the truth. The critic's only recourse in determining the author's credibility, other than relying on documentation that is never fully verifiable, is to appeal to the author's style. Thus Honda's sonorous refrain: "No false notes." In that style, Honda suggests, is a leanness and a ruthlessness necessary and appropriate for honest self-scrutiny. In short, it is a style that says, "I mean business." This surely is what Honda means when he argues that Shiga's writing contains no idle phrases or empty rhetoric. But style itself is rhetoric, the literary equivalent of acting, the concealed art without which the honesty and sincerity could not be "revealed." It turns out, then, that form is indeed the key to content. For what is sincerity in literature but the donning of a verbally well-wrought mask, the masterful display of honest emotion? In the words of Benjamin Crémieux: "Is not the greatest artist also the greatest imposter , the most capable of giving form to whatever imaginary reality, of bestowing upon it, through expressing it, a soul and an appearance of truth which others than the creator will accept?"^[45] That a writer like Shiga really does sound more sincere than others, then, is a tribute not to his honesty but to his mastery of the rhetoric (the intimate voice, ellipses, allusions, etc.) of authenticity.

Honda and others argue that the test of any shishosetsu lies in the recognizability of its author. In fact, the author is "recognizable" only through a style made familiar from previous texts. The role played by sibling texts as a guide to reading an author, therefore, is a crucial one, and those who overlook its significance are all but forced to scavenge the author's private life in order to supplement a given text. (This matter will be addressed more substantively in Part 3 and especially in the chapter on Kasai.) Ito Sei clearly has an inkling of the problem when he writes:

[The shishosetsu ] was written with the expectation that the reader would know the hero's (that is to say, the author's) personal history without explanations of his circumstances and position. The hero in

[45] Quoted in Peyre, Literature and Sincerity , 336. (Emphasis added.)

such a text is therefore a virtual nonentity, so superficially is he described.... The reader had to glean what information he could about the hero's personality and circumstances from gossip about the author current in literary circles, or be familiar with the hero from previous texts that reported on the author's private life .^[46]

Ito, however, ignores the ramifications of his own insight: namely, that the reader need not rely on the finally inaccessible life. The oeuvre is enough. Regular readers of literary magazines, as we shall see in our discussion of the bundan in Chapter 6, would have no trouble piecing together the "lives" of the authors about which they read.

It is not just the writer, then, who must master the rhetoric and assume a role: the reader, too, must cast himself in a very specific relationship with the text. The shishosetsu's style demands it. We need not go as far as Walter J. Ong's claim, although it is probably a valid one, that the writer's audience is always a fiction to understand that the relationship between writer and audience is founded on rarely articulated but nonetheless concrete assumptions about the text and the world that must be accepted in order for communication to take place. Regardless of how seemingly intimate the narrative voice or how casual the allusions, the author does not, cannot, know his readers. He has to "make his readers up," as Ong puts it, "fictionalize them."^[47] Narrative intimacy—or narrative distancing, for that matter—is part of the fictionalization. Although it may surprise shishosetsu readers to learn that they are not the only audience intimately addressed or expected to possess background information, there is no question that Ong's observations concerning the Hemingway narrator in the opening passage of A Farewell to Arms are applicable to our study.

The reader—every reader—is being cast in the role of a close companion of the writer.... It is one reason why the writer is tightlipped. Description as such would bore a boon companion. What description there is comes in the guise of pointing, in verbal gestures, recalling humdrum, familiar details.... The reader here has a well-marked role assigned him. He is a companion-in-arms, somewhat later become a confidant. It is a flattering role.... Hemingway's exclusion of indefinite in favor of definite articles signals the

[46] shosetsu no hoho , 66. (Emphasis added.)

[47] "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," 11.

reader that he is from the first on familiar ground. He shares the author's familiarity with the subject matter. The reader must pretend he has known much of it before.^[48]

This argument recalls Ito Sei's on the bundan readership, with one important exception: Ong's emphasizes the pretense involved in the act of writing and reading. Sincerity has a new twist here: it is the product of style, not its generator.

The myth of sincerity develops to its logical conclusion in Hirano Ken's Geijutsu to jisseikatsu (1958), an exploration of the links between the modern Japanese writer's life and art. The discussion quickly gravitates toward the shishosetsu , which provides the subject matter for the work's major theoretical essay, "Watakushi shosetsu no niritsu haihan." We noted at the beginning of this chapter Hirano's characterization of the watakushi shosetsu as the literature of destruction and of the shinkyo shosetsu as the literature of harmony and salvation, a characterization generally supported by Hirano's contemporaries, including Ito Sei. Hirano's aim is to cast Japanese writers in two broad types: those who accommodate, and those who turn their backs on, the obligations of private life. Hirano suggests that the shishosetsu writer's art is by its very nature stimulated by crisis and stifled by tranquillity, anchored as it is to the vicissitudes of lived experience. Shinkyo shosetsu writers, therefore, whose twin goals of domestic harmony and candid expression harbor an insoluble contradiction, are faced sooner or later with the choice of betraying either their families or their profession. Accommodators that they are, they usually choose the latter course.^[49] No such contradiction exists for watakushi shosetsu writers, on the other hand, because they have already forfeited domestic tranquillity in order to chronicle lives that are often bent on destruction. Ostracized and poverty-stricken, their raison d'être lies entirely in their utter truthfulness as artists?

Hirano sees "sincerity" (and its companion ideals of "candor" and "truthfulness"), then, as the only positive, if ultimately undefinable, quality of writers who would mine their own lives for any material whatever the cost. The result of this reification is an in-

[48] Ibid., 13.

[49] Geijutsu to jisseikatsu , 29-37.

[50] Ibid., 36-37.

fiated and exalted signifier curiously drained of meaning, a capricious looking glass reflecting nothing but the authenticity of its own persuasion. The French poet Luc Estang's wry characterization is apt: "Sincerity is to itself its own mirror. In literature, we find only reflected sincerities."^[51] But Hirano, like Honda and Ito before him, is apparently satisfied with tautology, asking no more than that sincerity be sincere.

The myth of sincerity is founded, as we have seen, on the illusion of authorial presence. Japanese critics have expended enormous efforts buttressing the myth, perhaps because they have feared to ask whether the shishosetsu would still contain anything of value should the author in fact be inaccessible. To remove sincerity (and by extension authorial intention) from the text would be to deprive it, a record of otherwise "trivial" events, of its most important "content" and thus of any interest.

We have also seen that sincerity is not an ethical goal to which the artist aspires but a strategy of discourse, motivated by the desire of writers to legitimize or at least strengthen their position within the bundan and vis-à-vis society and governed by the shishosetsu form itself. Arguing that the author is "absent" from the work, therefore, far from denying the referential world to which shishosetsu writers constantly allude, actually helps us recognize a highly complex negotiation between art and life that a reified notion of sincerity fails to suggest. For, once we grasp sincerity as an ideology rather than as a vague, ultimately inaccessible emotion, we can understand how it controls the mode of literary production. Candor becomes a commodity that writers have no choice but to produce and critics no choice but to appraise.

The critical posture toward the shishosetsu during the period we have reviewed, from the mid-1920s through the 1950s, has remained essentially unchanged and continues to dominate present-day thinking. Critics of all .persuasions, including those most skeptical of the shishosetsu writer's art (from Akutagawa Ryunosuke to Nakamura Mitsuo), have unfailingly acknowledged the value of the shishosetsu as confession of a different order from other literatures and have thus actually contributed to the form's mystique. For that reason the shishosetsu , despite all attacks, has occupied a

[51] Invitation à la poésie . Quoted in Peyre, Literature and Sincerity , 328.

critical sanctuary in which a variety of powerfully nostalgic and ethnocentric emotions concerning the form's "purity," "Japaneseness," and philosophical "honesty" are heavily invested.

That some writers would rebel against this ideology was perhaps inevitable. What is surprising is how early in the shishosetsu's history the rebellion occurred; parody was common almost from the start. Yet the norm of sincerity was so pervasive that its deifiers generally failed to recognize the parody in other writers' texts. Members of the supposedly close-knit bundan would typically contrast their own productions, which they regarded as art, with the "bald" confessions of their peers. That they were able to question the absolute priority of experience over writing in their own work at least (as we shall see in Part 3), is justification enough for us to challenge the shishosetsu's claim to uniqueness in world literature (and the corollary claim of its unintelligibility to outsiders), even as we situate the form more precisely in its specific linguistic and cultural environment—ever mindful that particularity is no synonym for sacred exclusivity.