2
THE RISE OF A FORM
4
Harbingers (I): Tokoku, Doppo, Hogetsu
I have never troubled myself over stylistic matters, as form is not my object in writing.... Only by putting down precisely what you feel and expressing your thoughts frankly and without deception or decoration, no matter how awkward the attempt, can you create a genuine and appealing work of literature.
Kunikida Doppo, Byosho roku
I cannot now construct a viable philosophy. I would do better simply to disclose my doubts and uncertainty as they are. That would be telling the truth; saying anything more promises to be sheer invention.... Ours is indeed an age of confession. Perhaps we shall never go beyond it.
Shimamura Hogetsu, "Jo ni kaete"
Western writers at least since the Enlightenment, steeped in an intellectual tradition that has understood reality to be mediated by the human mind and therefore by the act of writing itself, have regarded imagination as very much a part of reality and fiction as fundamental to the production of literature. Indeed, as Hayden White notes in his discussion of narrative emplotment, imagination necessarily generates a particular reality, and the tropical forms or "modes" of romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire inevitably impose themselves fictively on the "free flow" of life. Early twentieth-century Japanese writers, however, hailed from an intellectual tradition that, as Maruyama Masao argues, denied that reality is mediated at all. They were far less willing to concede that writing necessitated a conscious patterning of experience and kept faith in the possibility of chronicling the free flow of life. Iwano Homei (1873-1920) speaks for many writers when he equates in all seri-
ousness (although with typically outrageous hyperbole) life anti literature at a level that he believes precludes fiction: "Now that the shosetsu is no longer a fabrication, our state of mind, whether we take up our pens to write or our chopsticks to eat, is one and the same."[1]
Writing is hardly the spontaneous physical act that Homei makes it out to be, however. It is both active and reflective, at once experience and the representation of experience. Eating has no parallel to this latter aspect of writing, and in this sense picking up one's chopsticks to eat is quite dissimilar to writing about the act. To be sure, the physical act of eating (or writing) needs no representation. But by writing about eating (or about writing, for that matter) one moves from experience to expression, which must be represented through another medium—that is, "mediated"—to be communicated. Yet Homei was not alone in thinking of writing as an unmediated act to which invention and fabrication were as foreign as feigning satiety was when sitting down hungrily to eat. Rather than examine fiction's role in literature, many writers denied that it played a role at all.
In order to appreciate fully the views of Homei and his contemporaries, we would do well to investigate more closely the literary and intellectual climate immediately preceding the rise of the shishosetsu . We shall find not only that the traditional bias against fiction as a vehicle for serious comment on life persisted into the twentieth century, but also that the elevation of the shosetsu into the realm of true literature, which did in fact occur, required its transformation from a "frivolous" form of nonliterary entertainment in the eyes of the writers themselves to a "serious" form of moral and philosophical inquiry in which fiction was deemed out of place. Although the choice of whom to single out for discussion is necessarily an arbitrary one, the careers of three writers in particular—Kitamura Tokoku (1868-94), Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908), and Shimamura Hogetsu (1871-1918)—were so bound to issues surrounding the purpose of literature as to reward even the brief study with which we must content ourselves here. Doppo
[1] From the preface to Tandeki (1909), Homei's first collection of prose fiction, in Homei zenshu 18:81.
wrote short stories; Tokoku and Hogetsu, essays—although we shall see that categorizing their work according to such generic classifications is itself problematic and one reason why the clear identification of one author's writing as "fiction" and another's as "nonfiction" can be difficult if not impossible. Our discussion of these three writers will provide a backdrop for a fourth writer, Tayama Katai (1872-1930), whose work, to be discussed in the following chapter, represents the culmination of the initial stage in the Japanese writer's interior focus. We shall then consider briefly how the early twentieth-century literary world's general intellectual climate provided such an amenable environment for the shishosetsu writer.
It is unquestionable that the three Meiji writers in the ensuing discussion contributed significantly to the inward turn literature took in the Taisho period. The Japanese writer's apparent focus on himself, however, should not be interpreted as the birth of "modern" consciousness or as an attempted validation of the "self," as is so commonly argued, without first delimiting the terms "modern" and "self" in such a way as to strip them of their culturally specific connotations.[2] In her synthesis of the Showa Japanese critical consensus that expression of the "modern self" (kindai jiga ) is the dynamo that drives the modern Japanese "novel," Janet Walker sees Japan becoming modern and the Japanese discovering themselves as individuals through contact with the west.[3] But modernity and selfhood are more properly characterized as historical processes emerging from a particular intellectual tradition than as commodities readily available for consumption, like so much technological hardware; they are not concepts that translate easily from one culture to another. If, as Walker claims, modernity in the west is the outgrowth of a socioeconomic system based on post-Renaissance secularism, positivism, capitalism, and individualism, and the middle-class individual is its cultural hero, and if, as she also claims, it was just this "happy coexistence of private ideals of
[2] Masao Miyoshi, in a recent essay, shows just how problematic the term "modern" is in the Japanese context. See "Against the Native Grain," 224-25. See also p. 232 for a discussion of the nature of "individuality" in Japan.
[3] The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism ; see esp. the introduction.
individualism with liberal economy and political systems"[4] that was absent in Meiji Japan, then where are we to observe the ideal of modern consciousness, so specifically defined, in Meiji thought?
Nowhere at all, according to Kenneth Strong, who writes in a seminal essay, "One wonders whether the emphasis on kindai jiga [modern self], particularly in the period that began the postwar rediscovery of Kitamura Tokoku, has not resulted in a somewhat distorted evaluation of the modern period."[5] Strong describes Shimazaki Toson's first novel, Hakai (The broken commandment, 1906), generally acclaimed the pioneering expression of the modern self, as "prophetic of the non -expression of the kindai jiga in most of modern fiction" 6 and sees in its principal character's much-described but never realized inner conflicts, in its sensitive feeling for nature, in its lack of any real dialogue between characters, and in its failure to embody its concerns as a unified, symbolic whole, the same introverted, reclusive tendencies that appear in the works of many later writers whose inability or unwillingness to achieve true fictions manifests a great deal more of "traditional Japanese ways of thinking and feeling ... than is sometimes assumed to be the case."[7]
Walker contends, meanwhile, that the western-educated writers of Meiji Japan concerned themselves, despite the inherent difficulties, with the discovery of the individual. She treats in this context Shimazaki Toson and three "forerunners" (Futabatei Shimei, Kitamura Tokoku, and Tayama Katai), all of whom she argues were "sympathetic to the ideal of individualism and creatively involved with it in their works."[8] Yet she curiously dismisses Natsume Soseki, perhaps the only Meiji or Taisho writer to comprehend fully the meaning of individualism in Japanese society, from her study, finding his attitude toward the self "at best ambivalent."[9] If she can make such a claim (which would seem to be a valid one) of Soseki, how much more it holds true for Toson, the focus of her study, or a writer like Shiga Naoya, whose most powerful works represent
[4] Ibid., 28.
[5] "Downgrading the 'Kindai Jiga,'" 407.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 408.
[8] Walker, The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period , ix.
[9] Ibid.
the very antithesis of individualism yet whom Walker characterizes as having been born (although scarcely a decade after Toson) in an age that already "assumed the validity of the self"![10]
For our purpose, then, modernity in the Japanese intellectual context takes on this paradoxical meaning: it is no more—and no less—than the institutionalized process by which Japanese continue to apply traditional (and specifically non-western) modes of thinking to contemporary social, economic, and political issues; selfhood, again paradoxically, is the state of separation from society ("premodern" or "modern") that Japanese can attain, although not without certain material and psychological risks. Whereas modernity and selfhood in the west are conceived of as two sides of the same coin, in Japan they stand for two quite diverse traditions: public versus private—or what Tetsuo Najita has characterized as the tradition of "bureaucratism" (kanryoshugi ), which was always considered central to the realization of political or social well-being, versus the less easily defined idealist tradition of impassioned "spiritualism" (ningensei; kokoro ), which aspired to enlightenment and to acts of self-sacrifice.[11] The inward turn taken by the writers we shall presently examine was therefore not an expression of "self-validation" in a "modern" society but rather a move, inspired only tangentially by western models, away from political and social integration promoted by Meiji bureaucratism and toward a quietist and separatist ideal of domestic exile that makes possible a peculiarly Japanese kind of selfhood: a nonparticipatory and nonconfrontational existence by which a Japanese, normally that most social of social animals, turns his back on society and loses himself in the aesthetic life and in nature.
Tokoku and the Privatization of Literature
The life of Kitamura Tokoku anticipated the transition made by intellectuals as a group from publicly to privately oriented careers. Ito Sei calls Tokoku the modern intelligentsia's charter member, in that, after a brief but heady period of cooperative involvement by
[10] Ibid., 283.
[11] Japan ; see chapter 1, esp. 2-7.
earlier intellectuals in the affairs of state, he was the first to recognize the intellectual's and literature's oppositional role in society.[12] "Oppositional" is probably too strong a word. H. D. Harootunian argues persuasively that the public-private transition was emblematic of a shift in people's concern in late Meiji and Taisho from "civilization" (i.e., the development of the state) to "culture" (i.e., the development of the person) and from socially motivated "education" to privately motivated "cultivation."[13] "Rather than offer either alternatives or opposition," writes Harootunian, "[Tokoku] defined with great detail and clarity the area of privatization (watakushigoto ) permitted by arrangement of authority" and provided "the means for writers and intellectuals to operate safely in the officially sanctioned space relating to 'private affairs.'"[14] Tokoku's essays offer an archetypal portrait of the litterateur acting in a non-participatory, nonconfrontational role vis-à-vis society, which we will find repeatedly portrayed in the early twentieth-century shosetsu and especially the shishosetsu .
Tokoku started out as an activist interested in citizens' movements, until fear of harsh government suppression—and disillusionment with the violent tactics of his colleagues—led him to take up his pen during the last half decade of his two-and-a-half-decade life. Realizing that naive forays into politics would be quickly subdued by the Meiji state's enormous power, Tokoku attempted to cordon off for himself a private realm that was beyond the reach of the state and answerable only to aesthetic and spiritual values.[15] In
[12] "Nihon kindai bungaku no shutai" (1946), reprinted in Kitamura Tokoku shu , 348.
[13] "Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taisho"; see esp. 15-18, where Harootunian contrasts the late Meiji and Taisho intellectual's "ethics of being" to the early and mid-Meiji intellectual's "morality of doing."
[14] "Between Politics and Culture," 138 and 154. This valuable essay sketches the conceptual evolution of the public and private realms in post-Restoration Japan and shows that they failed to intersect. The 1889 Constitution, the Imperial Rescript on Education, and the Civil Code all demonstrated, Harootunian argues, that "politics as a mediation between private and public not only had disappeared but, more importantly, had never existed in any form other than a vague promise. What started as a celebration of the political importance of individualism ended as the argument that 'unpoliticality,' the rejection of politics, was a necessary requirement to the preservation of individualism" (ibid., 112). The very limited literary precedents in the traditional canon for the expression of sociopolitical consciousness, moreover, no doubt encouraged easy acquiescence to the statist requirements of "unpoliticality."
[15] H. D. Harootunian comments, "If the relationship between private and public was in fact one of distance, if separation was the condition of the common existence, then it was virtually impossible for the self to reach out sympathetically to move others and to change the outer world" (ibid., 136).
Chapter 1 we observed Tokoku's useful distinction in the Edo period between the "refined" literature of the samurai class, which comprised morally edifying histories and treatises and served the goals of the central government, and the "vulgar" literature of the townspeople, which offered the breezy and anti-heroic "street talk" and "roadside gossip" of plebeian life. The Confucian view that true literature was nonfictional in content, moral in persuasion, and utilitarian in function, however, continued basically intact into Meiji times. Tokoku was impressed by the high place of belles lettres, particularly prose fiction, in nineteenth-century western literature, and he questioned, perhaps even more forcefully than Tsubouchi Shoyo did, the traditional hierarchy of literary forms that had supported the moral and political status quo for centuries. His mission, he believed, was to alter the prevailing view of literature as an institution serving public ends into a vision of literature as a purely personal concern, the value of which could not be reduced to its social utility.
And yet Tokoku made little impact on the literary hierarchy he attacked with such vehemence. In fact, he typically voiced his sympathy for commoner-oriented, "nonliterary" fiction through the (originally) samurai-oriented medium of nonfiction "literature." Other than three stories and a few long poems, he wrote nothing but essays and short, contemplative sketches (kanso ) in which he made direct appeals, in the traditional format, for his new and "private" literature. To be sure, he criticized the utilitarian view of writing advocated at the time by the great majority of critics and insisted that literature could be at once serious and very personal. For example, he attacked the critic Yamaji Aizan's (1864-1917) celebrated dictum that writing was a practical "enterprise" ("Bunsho, sunawachi jigyo nari"). Judging literature by such a utilitarian standard, Tokoku argued, was to lose sight of its true value, which lay in its support of the individual's spiritual growth and not its immediate social relevance.[16] Elsewhere he expressed profound disappointment in the traditional culture, which he believed denied the individual an inner life.[17] His disappointment did not prevent him, however, from choosing a solution for engaging in the
[16] "Jinsei ni aiwataru to wa nan no ii zo" (1893), in Kitamura Tokoku shu , 115.
[17] "Naibu seimei ron" (1893), in ibid., 143-44.
inner life that was actually sanctioned by tradition: namely, voluntary withdrawal from society. If the current political climate failed to recognize the individual's spiritual growth as a legitimate pursuit, then he would renounce politics altogether and embrace literature as a preserve for solitary meditation. The literature he embraced was not prose fiction, however. If his own literary output is a fair indication, the shosetsu played a small role indeed in the kind of literature he envisioned as championing the quest for personal artistic achievement. For Tokoku, literature was still as predominantly a moral enterprise as it was for his Tokugawa predecessors, although centered on the private rather than the public realm. His essays are exercises in self-exhortation.[18]
Adhering, then, to a view of literature as a fundamentally moral endeavor but finding at first little in tradition to support his pursuit of the inner life, Tokoku turned to Christianity and its promise of an autonomous, private realm. He was not alone in looking to the alien faith for the self-fulfillment unattainable in a public career, nor is it a coincidence that so many young Meiji writers were attracted to an essentially "inward, individualist and self-conscious kind of religion."[19] For Tokoku and others who could not identify with the Meiji government's statist goals, Christianity offered a set of positive values that justified their heretical posture toward society. They rejected the government's (and most of society's) equation of private interests with public values. Such commitment to personal priorities usually led to disassociation from the public sphere, but its reward was the freedom to explore a more autonomous, private realm.
Yet Tokoku's withdrawal from politics and society resulted only partially from the tenets of his adopted faith. It has been aptly noted that even though western religion occupied a disproportion-
[18] Francis Mathy, in his study of Tokoku, notes that Tokoku's first steps in the literary world were motivated by a resolve to influence society as a writer and by a determination to become another Victor Hugo—in short, they were motivated by the very didacticism he subsequently denounced in the Min'yusha and other writers. This motivation was to take other forms later in his career but it never disappeared completely. See Mathy, "Kitamura Tokoku: The Early Years,"[12] See also the other two parts of Mathy's important study, listed in the Bibliography.
[19] The characterization is Ian Watt's in The Rise of the Novel , 177. Other writers discussed in this study who were at one time drawn to the faith include Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki Toson, Iwano Homei, and Shiga Naoya.
ately prominent position among Meiji intellectuals, one must not "overestimate the influence of the particular tenets of Christianity as a faith, or even of its underlying view of man and his society, on important styles of modern Japanese consciousness—much less of the more deep-rooted creative sensibility."[20] Indeed, one finds numerous parallels in Tokoku's career to a pattern of aesthetic life, rooted in traditional culture, that was in many ways hostile to the notion of selfhood posited by Christianity. This pattern, although difficult to discern in terms of concrete, formative events in Tokoku's life, was, it seems fair to say, a guiding force in shaping his worldview and in situating the self in his aesthetic universe. The Japanese have of course lived and continue to live by values that have emphasized corporate or familial goals over personal ones. They have, however, tolerated a greater amount of freedom in the realm of the arts, which along with meditative activities is traditionally one area where an individual, normally integrated in a network of hierarchical relationships, can enjoy relative independence.[21] The social and even physical alienation that often attend a person's independence offer a compensatory spiritual autonomy that is attained, paradoxically, by submergence in the beauties and the inexorable changes of nature. The wanderer or hermit is a recurrent figure in the classical literature: Noin, Saigyo, Sogi, Basho, and the reclusive priests of Tsurezuregusa and Hojoki . He lives frequently by choice, occasionally by necessity, away from society and seeks in the natural world a diversion from human relations. He is typically depicted in isolation and in moments of contemplative awareness that establish his relationship to nature and to a reality that dwarfs the world of human concerns. Finally, he is often depicted as a "seeker of the Way" (gudosha ) after the fashion of Buddhist ascetics, and as one who sees his literary pursuits as a form of spiritual discipline.
There is no question that Tokoku identified with such a way of life, which is primarily Buddhist in its inspiration, despite his sometimes vitriolic indictment of Buddhism's pessimistic world-
[20] William Sibley, "Review Article: Tatsuo Arima, The Failure of Freedom, “ 260.
[21] The discussion here is indebted to the instructive analysis of Japanese society by Robert N. Bellah. See, for example, "Values and Social Change in Japanese Society"; "Continuity and Change in Japanese Society"; and Tokugawa Religion , esp. chap. 2 ("An Outline of Japanese Social Structure in the Tokugawa Period").
view in "Naibu seimei ron" and other essays. (Nor is it a coincidence that, of all the forms of western thought to which he was exposed, he was attracted most strongly to Emerson's transcendentalist philosophy of a self submerged in nature and an impersonal God.) Buddhism, with its doctrine of impermanence and self-denial, would seem to disregard just those "inward, individualist and self-conscious" qualities that are so central to the Christian view of man and society. Unlike Christianity, which aims at uniting an individual with his personal God, Buddhism aims at liberating him from the illusion of an autonomous self and releasing him from all worldly bonds. At a time when shusse —"advancement in the world"—became the slogan of a newly competitive and mobile society, Tokoku in effect called for a shusse in its original, Buddhist sense: a separation from the world, which opened the way, he claimed, to spiritual, if not political or social, fulfillment.[22] Tokoku's essays are filled with allusions to Saigyo (1118-90) and Basho (1644-94), the two most celebrated of the reclusive premodern poets, whose works are infused with a contemplative sensibility and a profoundly negative view of the self. Tokoku sensed an attraction to self-eradication in their works, moreover, which he believed could not be found in the western tradition. Pondering the reason why Basho wrote no verse commemorating a visit to the fabled bay of Matsushima during his journey to the far Northeast, for example, Tokoku concludes that the poet had reached an ecstatic state of selflessness in which personal expression had no place.[23]
One wonders whether the tenets of Buddhism, which have infused Japanese literature almost from its beginnings, do not challenge the validity of fiction as well as that of selfhood, despite the religion's receptivity to various allegorical "modes" with which to impress its doctrines on believers.[24] The author's urge to "play
[22] Earl Kinmouth makes this point in his The Self-made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought , 149.
[23] "Matsushima ni oite Basho-o o yomu" (1892), in Kitamura Tokoku shu , 75. Basho did of course provide a lengthy prose description of Matsushima in Oku no hosomichi ; that Tokoku chose to disregard it is perhaps all the more revealing of the nature of his argument. Yet Basho's description, bristling with allusions to scenic spots in China that the poet himself had never seen, is not an especially personal passage to begin with.
[24] I use William LaFleur's rendering of hoben ; see The Karma of Words , 84-85. In the "Hotaru" chapter of The Tale of Genji , Genji lectures Tamakazura on literature and comments on the Buddhist sanction for using "lies" to uncover the truth. "Even in the writ which the Buddha drew from his noble heart are parables, devices for pointing obliquely at the truth" (Seidensticker translation, 438).
God" in the Judeo-Christian sense and create a separate, autonomous life would not seem to occur readily in a God-less culture (from the monotheistic viewpoint) that sees life as a cycle of rebirth and the world as an illusion and encourages passive acceptance in the face of this recognition. Buddhism's cyclical view of history (with its doctrines of transmigration and of nirvana as the ultimate release from it), moreover, can be contrasted with the Judeo-Christian teleological tradition, in which history by definition has an ultimate purpose, an overall design. Given this "emplotment" of history on a macrocosmic level, it is only natural that western writers would use the same strategy in their microcosmic "histories" of men—that is, novels. Tokoku and other Japanese writers and intellectuals who converted to Christianity were not so easily converted to this teleological worldview, which lends itself readily to the idea of emplotment, either in politics (in the form of activism) or in literature (in the form of narrative). Consciously or not, Tokoku was sympathetic to the Buddhist perspective, in which history (on the macrocosmic level) and literature (on the microcosmic level) become the chronicling of man's illusory attachments to life, doomed to be repeated throughout time. For him transcendence did not mean the salvation of a personal soul so much as it meant the escape from the vicissitudes of life.
Clearly, Buddhism is not the sole factor in the Japanese distrust of fiction any more than the Judeo-Christian tradition is the sole root of its broad acceptance in the west; and clearly, many cultural forces other than Buddhism have been at work in Japan, especially in its more recent history, when Buddhism's influence has undergone a considerable decline. (We have already seen, for example, the impact of Confucian thought on belles lettres in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan.) Yet Buddhist tenets, which provided the governing intellectual force during an entire millennium of medieval Japanese history, have unquestionably left recent Japanese consciousness more receptive to the belief that any attempt at creating a world according to the whim of imagination is just another illusory exercise. Buddhism no doubt also encouraged, along with Confucian-
ism, a didactic approach to literature that took authorial intention to be of primary importance in assigning meaning to a text. It therefore had little use for fictional texts that, because of their conscious "fabrications," seemed to conceal authorial intention and thereby undermine their own seriousness. The influence of both Buddhism and Confucianism may have waned in modern Japan., but the question of seriousness and sincerity of intent is one that., as we shall have ample occasion to see, remained foremost in the minds of early twentieth-century Japanese writers.[25]
Tokoku, then, despite his brief career and small literary output, set a powerful example for those writers who, disillusioned with Meiji society's utilitarian values and the Confucian emphasis on a didactic literature, reached into the pool of tradition for other values, primarily Buddhist in inspiration, that provided a rationale for their withdrawal from society and their embrace of the aesthetic instead of the political, the contemplative instead of the active, life. Significantly, Tokoku chose to present his case for the contemplative life by showcasing the narrating subject rather than suggesting by dramatic narrative a greater degree of character involvement with the outside world than he was prepared to acknowledge. He was no doubt comfortable with the narrative stance sanctioned by the classical tradition in both poetry (waka, haikai , etc.) and prose (kana nikki, zuihitsu , etc.). Tokoku's narrator, like those in classical literature and those that followed, defines with his own presence the scope and limits of the essay he narrates, since he is at once the meditating subject and the object of meditation. Tokoku's piece on Basho cited above, for example, is no expository disquisition on the haikai poet but a highly self-conscious discourse in which the narrator himself emerges as the essay's central figure. Each allusion to Basho's poetic journey to Matsushima is overlaid with an account of the narrator's own experience at the islet-studded bay. In "Issekikan" (1893), to take another example, Tokoku turns what might have been a speculative, metaphysical tract on nature and self into a concrete, experiential account. This last of his important essays is worth quoting at length.
[25] A number of scholars, most recently William LaFleur, make a forceful case for the persistence of the "medieval" episteme in "modern" Japan (see his The Karma of Words , esp. chap. 1)—all the more reason, surely, to measure carefully the weight of the "traditional" outlook on modern writers.
One evening I lie before my window at a seaside village. The autumn is deep, the weather fine; but all things, all forms oppress me, as if to laugh at my insincerity, mock my cringing ways, scorn the poverty of my words and wits and will. Why does nature pierce me thus to the quick? Who am I but a mere clod of earth that cannot hope to comprehend her?
The moon, late to rise, is still below the horizon. When I look up at the deep blue sky I see a canopy dotted with countless stars above my head. When I contemplate my own diminutive form and then my inner self, I am dismayed by the vast distance that separates me from nature. Immortality, imperishability: these are hers. Decline, decrepitude, disease, death: these are mine. I rise and leave the cottage.... Anguish is still knotted in my breast. I walk a short way and throw myself down finally in a deep thicket of autumn grasses. The shrill chirping of insects suddenly strikes my ears. A change comes over me. As I listen on, my heart grows lighter. What I thought to be anguish is not that at all. Look: those insects that seem to mourn the autumn—what is there for them to lament? If I take them to be mourning nature, then I too am sad; if I take them to be singing, then I too am bursting with song. Yet in another frame of mind, I see that there is no nature, no self—only myriad lanterns suspended in the vast firmament.
I stroll down to the water's edge. White-capped waves carry the echo of distant ages. Blue waters reflect the hue of eternity. I gaze with folded arms at the azure sky. I forget myself; time seems to slip from me like so many old rags.[26]
What are we to make of this memoir-essay, this lyric sketch, this modern-day zuihitsu , which strains any single generic label to the limit? It treats the abstractions of time and space yet situates the subject in a specific setting. It tells the "story" of a character who yearns to melt into the embrace of all-pervading nature. Its first-person narrator is the text's focus and yet remains himself out of focus, a permanent blur seemingly no amount of textual analysis can resolve. In its tone and mood, its perspective and specificity, this piece that is neither story nor essay nor hybrid contains the seed of what two decades later would develop into the shinkyo shosetsu , the sketch (one can scarcely even say chronicle) of the narrator's mental state that, as a variant of the shishosetsu form, was to take the Taisho literary world by storm. But to look forward in Japanese letters is commonly to look back as well. The strategy of depersonalizing one's emotions ("What I thought to be anguish is not
[26] Kitamura Tokoku shu , 222. About half the text is translated here. Francis Mathy includes a complete translation in "Kitamura Tokoku: Final Essays," 54-55.
that at all") recalls nothing so much as the pose struck by Basho in such famous verses as these:
Tsuka mo ugoke | Move, thou tomb! |
Waga naku koe wa | My wailing voice— |
Aki no kaze | Autumn wind. |
Uki ware o | O mountain thrush: |
sabishigarase yo | Turn the sadness I feel |
Kankodori | Into Loneliness. |
Perhaps most important, Tokoku's essay transmits a seriousness of intent that makes, however, little attempt at universalization; its urgent and even didactic tone, moreover, would resurface in the stories of later shosetsu writers. Here was a form that could be at once serious and personal. Posing as a self-conscious narrator-protagonist, furthermore, Tokoku the "critic" would encourage future "novelists" to adopt a similar pose and blur further the line between story and essay.
Once this form was thus denarrativized and defictionalized, the shosetsu practically merged with it to take its place in the family of "refined" literature. Tokoku's essay-sketch-memoir—in which there was room for little more than the narrator's own voice—was published a decade before naturalism appeared on the Japanese literary scene. The generation of writers following Tokoku (especially the "romantic" poets, including Tayama Katai and Shimazaki Toson, who later as "naturalists" turned to prose for their depictions of personal experience) discovered in it a form far better suited to the expression of the contemplative life they led than a more dramatic narrative form could possibly be. Inspired by the many poetic personae in the classical literature to meditative isolation and liberated from the priorities of public interest mandated by the Meiji Confucian ethic, their voice emerged after Tokoku to become a major literary presence, and the shishosetsu's raison d'être.
Doppo and the Personalization of Narrative
Kitamura Tokoku's call for a serious literature was overshadowed by that of Tsubouchi Shoyo, whose shosetsu shinzui (The essence of the novel, 1885-86) ostensibly rejects the didactic hermeneutics of
Edo-period letters in favor of nineteenth-century western "realism" (shajitsu ). But Shoyo's criticism was no more successful than Tokoku's in bringing fiction—insofar as it was equated with omniscient, emplotted narrative—into the realm of serious literature. Not only was he himself unable to create a literary work that successfully illustrated his theories; his most brilliant student, Futabatei Shimei, soon gave up his occupation as a full-time writer because of deep reservations about literature as a career and about fiction as a legitimate literary medium.
Shoyo insisted that a work's merit was based on psychological verisimilitude rather than on didactic intent and chastised the Edo-period writers who would defy all bounds of credibility to make a moralistic point; yet he considered fictional imagination an essential part of the novel's art, without which a work lacked coherence and direction. A novel, he argued, differed from a historical account or travelogue by virtue of its tightly controlled plot, which gave significance to all the characters and events it depicted. A novel that refused to articulate the relationship between events was not a novel at all but a queer piece of writing in which events were simply recorded as they occurred, one after another.[27]
Such queer pieces of writing, of course, flooded Japanese letters after the turn of the century. The naturalist critics in the early 1900s found Shoyo's attack against the overly contrived plotting in the Edo gesaku equally applicable to such mid-Meiji forms as the seiji shosetsu ("political fiction") and the katei shosetsu ("domestic fiction"), and in particular to the writings of the Ken'yusha school led by Ozaki Koyo. The Ken'yusha's hegemonic position in the literary world in the 1890s effectively squelched the kind of writing that Shoyo tried but failed to achieve and that Futabatei Shimei achieved but chose not to pursue. The naturalist movement grew up largely in reaction to what it saw as the Ken'yusha's maintenance of the "nonliterary," fictional strain of Edo-period literature, and it took Shoyo's call for "realism" to mean a rejection of the author's license to invent.
Flourishing during the years between the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) and the end of Meiji, the naturalists—a diverse group of writers with far more varied styles and sensibilities than their label
[27] Shoyo's remarks on fiction and plot can be found in the opening passage of the "Shikumi no hosoku" section of shosetsu shinzui , 43.
suggests[28] —developed a relatively unadorned and colloquial style and gave Japanese letters a body of landmark texts that exerted a profound influence on successive generations of writers. In their generally pessimistic portrayal of men and women who succumbed to the larger forces of heredity and environment, they clearly revealed their debt to writers like Zola and Maupassant. They were, moreover, fascinated by (although they never wholly identified with) the writer's role as dispassionate anatomist, dissecting the human animal and exposing it for all to see. The word "nature" had been practically a synonym for beauty during the previous millennium in Japanese literature, as the canon of classical poetry demonstrates, but in 1902 Kosugi Tengai (1865-1952) could write:
Nature is simply nature. It is neither good nor evil, beautiful nor ugly. The people of a certain time and place, grasping only a single aspect, merely label it as such.... The poet has no concern with the reader's emotional response. His only imperative is faithful depiction. A portrait painter, noting that his model's nose is too big, cannot, after all, plane the model's face. Likewise, the writer must not breathe a hint of subjectivity into his imagery.[29]
Despite this and other bold manifestos about "objective" description, "naturalism" in Japan was in fact domesticated by "subjectifying" experience, that is, presenting in the form of a plotless narrative (precisely that "queer" sort of writing against which Shoyo so vociferously inveighed) what the author himself knew from personal experience, usually from the viewpoint of his fictional alter ego. Naturalism's first great impact, predictably, was on writers who had begun their careers as romantic poets in the 1890s: Kunikida Doppo, Tayama Katai, Shimazaki Toson, and Iwano Homei, all of whom turned to prose when they found that they could adopt the same subjectified voice that had served them well in their verse. Not that they themselves saw their writing in these terms: on the contrary, they regarded it to the man as a revolutionary break with the past, through which they could comment critically on society. But the whole force of the movement, from its inception, was in the direction of collapsing the distance between
[28] Just how diverse is illustrated by William F. Sibley's essay "Naturalism in Japanese Literature," esp. 166-68.
[29] From the preface to Hayari uta , in KBHT 2:418.
the author and his protagonist and increasing it between the protagonist and the rest of society.
Kunikida Doppo was perhaps the first writer, naturalist or otherwise,[30] whose stories lent themselves to a positing of a close author-narrator or author-protagonist relationship. Like Tokoku, Doppo became interested in writing only after he had grown disillusioned with politics and discovered that the privatized realm of literature was one of the few that offered, within the limitations outlined above, a modicum of expressive freedom. He looked on his Ken'yusha rivals with distaste while reading enthusiastically the works of Wordsworth and Turgenev. What attracted Doppo to western literature was its personalized narrative voice in poetry and prose; this, he found wanting in the literature of his contemporaries. The Ken'yusha writers' greatest sin, he believed, was their lack of emotional involvement with their characters—the inevitable result of their concern for mass appeal at the cost of silencing their own thoughts and yearnings. Doppo regarded the Ken'yusha as a group of latter-day gesaku writers, mere "entertainers," and saw himself as an artist with rather more serious pretensions, writing to please only himself. Serious literature was not a showcase of stylistic brilliance, nor was it necessarily a "good read"; it was a medium through which the writer expressed matters closest to his heart. In a memoir recounting his literary career, he offers a keynote for the succeeding generation that would complete the task of privatization: "My stories are honest depictions of my own deepest feelings.... I want never to lose touch with those anguished moments when I first wrestled with life's questions and merely become immersed in art for art's sake. I shall always be prepared to submit a 'report on my study of life.'"[31]
Here again, as in the case of Tokoku, we are presented with a theory of writing that lays claim to its importance by de-
[30] Doppo claimed on many occasions that he did not belong to the naturalist "school." He identified closely with the movement and with writers like Toson and Katai, however, and conceded, in his posthumous Byosho roku (1908), that he might profitably be called a naturalist. See Kunikida Doppo zenshu 9:65.
[31] "Ware wa ika ni shite shosetsuka to narishi ka" (1907), in ibid. 1:498. Doppo did not believe that the author's feelings alone made a story or that a story had to be literally true to life to contain a kernel of artistic or philosophical truth. His narrators' strongly personal voices and close identification with their protagonists, however, give his writing an unmistakably intimate tone not found in works of the Ken'yusha school.
emphasizing the role of artifice. One becomes "immersed in art for art's sake," according to Doppo, only at the risk of losing touch with personal experience and the moral lessons to be derived therein. In one such "report" on his life, Doppo celebrates the mysteries of existence in a way that suggests that personal awareness is more important than wisdom gleaned from any external source. "I do not wish to penetrate the mysteries of the universe," his pensive hero remarks, "but simply to be moved by them.... I would become a great philosopher, but if my wish to be moved by these mysteries were not granted, then I could only look upon myself as a hypocrite and brand myself a liar."[32] Doppo's view of literature as a form of spiritual discipline given unmediated expression, then, unmistakably reveals the same sensibility that motivated Tokoku; and his rejection of a literature of entertainment is informed by an eminently moral vision worthy of the Confucian "Way" that has simply been turned inward.
Doppo's literary rise and the prominence of the naturalists in general in the years following the Russo-Japanese War was due largely to these writers' success in elevating prose fiction to a level of seriousness on a par with the traditionally respected genres of nonfiction prose and poetry. Doppo achieved this on the one hand by rejecting ornate style and on the other by injecting personalism into his works. For Doppo, these two aspects of writing were intimately related, as can be seen in his comments collected in Byosho roku:
I have never troubled myself over stylistic matters, as form is not my object in writing. I am simply concerned with how to express the thoughts that fill my breast. And so I have written some of my stories ... in an epistolary style, others ... in a quasi-lecture style, and still others ... in diary form or ... a hybrid of fiction and essay. I am not interested in the merits or demerits of a particular style. I seek only to convey my own true voice.... To take up your pen out of a desire to produce fine writing is to ignore your own true feelings and make it impossible to move others. Only by putting down precisely what you feel and expressing your thoughts frankly and without deception or decoration, no matter how awkward the attempt, can you create a genuine and appealing work of literature.... The task is simple: give vent to your emotions. If you do, then one work in ten at least is sure to be true literature.[33]
[32] "Gyuniku to jagaimo" (1901), in ibid. 2:384, 383.
[33] Ibid. 9:75-77. I am indebted to Jay Rubin's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, "Kunikida Doppo," 4-5, for alerting me to these passages.
Paradoxically, Doppo's personalism did not undermine the didactic strain that had nurtured "serious" literature in the earlier tradition, but built on it. Doppo constructed the role of the poet-philosopher who was attuned to the "voice" of humanity. This moral teacher was in an ideal position to communicate his message to the rest of the world. The message was personal rather than political, but the existence of such a vehicle of expression helps explain why the political ambitions of Doppo, and Tokoku before him and most writers after him, were so easily displaced by literary ones, once the latter were reinstated as morally legitimate. In his study of Doppo, Jay Rubin notes that Doppo's stories, even when ineptly composed, always had a point. "He wrote only when he wanted to say something, never just to write. He read books for what they could teach him as an individual, never for what they could teach him about writing. He quotes Turgenev and Wordsworth at length in some of his stories because he wished to pass on what he has learned from them: not so much ways of writing as ways of seeing. Perhaps it was this, more than anything else, which Doppo gave to Japanese literature: a new kind of didacticism, a belief that literature could teach men about the world they live in."[34] To write such a literature, one needs no master but only to learn from one's own heart. In one of his attacks on the Ken'yusha, Doppo proclaims: "Literary art has no need for a master-disciple relationship. A writer's only master is the body of work that strikes a responsive chord in his breast. Do not seek a single master; seek many.... Literature is not an art that can be taught or learned; it must be developed using one's own strength."[35]
Doppo's diminutive stories attracted few readers and received little critical notice at first. In 1905, however, three years before Doppo's death, Masamune Hakucho, himself one of the three or four most important naturalist writers, published an essay on Doppo’s second short-story collection that may surpass in significance the stories he reviewed. It deserves quoting at length.
If one defines prose fiction [shosetsu ] as the objective and dispassionate depiction of character and milieu, then most of the stories in his collection are not fiction. One might better describe them as sketches
[34] Rubin, "Kunikida Doppo," 91-92; see also the discussion, 36-37.
[35] Kunikida Doppo zenshu 9:76.
or impressions, and the characters in them mere likenesses of the author himself.... The author lacks the kind of aesthetic distance needed for realistic description that even the mediocre artist has at his command when mechanically painting a landscape or portrait. He has a burning, poetic passion, and he seems compelled to unburden himself at all costs of his brooding thoughts on love, marriage, and life. Those who share his passion will read these stories with great interest; those who do not will think them rather tedious. He can hardly be expected to enjoy the popularity of a domestic-fiction writer.
The author has a clumsy narrative style—downright crude, in fact, if one judges "good writing" by the presence of embellishments and pretentiousness, by the way an author carries on about the sky or moon or about who laughed or cried, when such things actually do not matter to him in the slightest, or by the way he hides his true feelings and writes down only transparent fabrications. It is gratifying to encounter a writer who communicates his personal view of life with such great economy.[36]
Hakucho's remarks set a major critical precedent, because they posit an identity, never before so clearly articulated, between the author and his protagonist and with it the possibility of an "un-mediated" literature. It is perhaps the first piece of evidence we have of the defictionalized shosetsu being created in large measure by its mode of reading. The implications of such a reading, which evaluates a text more on the basis of its fidelity to the author's personal experience than on its internal coherence, are profound.[37] For Hakucho, Doppo's endearing subjectivity and clumsy style have the ring of truth. Sympathetic readers respond to the author's emotional integrity with a depth of feeling that the pulp writer, who hides his "true feelings" and puts down only "transparent fabrications," simply can not evoke. Literature's proper function, Hakucho insists, is to communicate the author's own private world rather than create an imaginary one. Because "fabrication" is by definition incompatible with the author's own experience, it does
[36] “Doppo shu o yomu" (1905), in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 6:24-25.
[37] Doppo frequently based his stories closely on "real life," but rarely without conscious alterations. In "Yoga sakuhin to jijitsu" (1907), he groups his stories in four categories: one in which both characters and plot are completely "imaginary," one in which the author uses some idea from an incident or character in real life, one in which incident and character from real life form the story's core, and one in which the author "faithfully" transcribes an incident from real life exactly as it had occurred (Kunikida Doppo zenshu 1:519-24)—and thus the significance of Hakucho's preoccupation with Doppo's stories as personal statements rather than as fictional texts.
not deserve an emotional investment on the reader's part. Writing thus shorn of aesthetic distance can of course be expected to attract few readers. This small audience, however, is precisely the elite segment that, seeing beyond the shosetsu's function as entertainment, will transform the traditionally "nonliterary" form into a bona fide literature of edification. The shosetsu's perceived importance is thus directly proportional to its nonfictionality. This is the lesson that Tayama Katai and others learned from Doppo. Shortly after Doppo's death, Katai wrote that without his colleague's influence, he would never have turned to literary confession.[38] We shall examine in detail the fruits of this influence in the following chapter.
Hogetsu and the Triumph of Introspection
While Doppo and other writers were experimenting with a more privatized style, Shimamura Hogetsu, a highly respected naturalist critic, provided a comprehensive intellectual rationale for their new approach to literature. As a student of aesthetics and the theater, Hogetsu spent three years at Oxford and Berlin before returning to a professor's chair at Waseda University in 1905 and assuming the editorship of the university's prestigious literary journal, Waseda bungaku , which became one of the naturalist movement's principal voices. At first, Hogetsu was wary of the movement's penchant for "truthful" description. He regarded naturalism in Japan as just a passing phase—necessary ground to be traversed on the way to the more rewarding field of symbolist literature—as had been the case in the European literary circles he had observed firsthand.[39] Art's ultimate goal was beauty, he argued, not truth (by which he meant the accurate observation of life); the latter had value only insofar as it led to the apprehension of the former.[40] Beauty was
[38] "Kunikida Doppo ron" (1908), in Kunikida Doppo zenshu 10:410.
[39] In one essay he writes, "I think naturalism is good thing.... It may have arrived here twenty years late, but ... if Japanese literature, which has so much ground to cover, can move even one step forward (and by that I mean to experience something new), then that is progress. In this sense, at least, novelty has its value" ("Futon gappyo" [1907], 430).
[40] "Shizenshugi no kachi" (1908), 209-10.
central to Hogetsu's conception of literature, because it inspired the writer to transcendence; art was not far from religion.
Hogetsu, however, eventually became caught up in the intellectual malaise that afflicted writers after the Russo-Japanese War, and he waxed less and less metaphysical in his later essays. His desire to see Japanese literature evolve after the European model gave way to a resigned acceptance of the strict taboos on sociopolitical statement in the Meiji state. Unlike painters, musicians, and other artists who received, on occasion, official government recognition and support,[41] writers were the frequent targets of censorship and other harassment. But even though this treatment further isolated them from the rest of society, it also nurtured among them a sense of solidarity and fierce pride. This camaraderie among writers, which united them (albeit entirely passively) against the politico-economic establishment, had become quite strong by late Meiji, when skepticism about the regime's political objectives was reaching new heights. The statist goal of early Meiji Japan—building a "rich, militarily powerful nation" (fukoku kyohei ) that could repel any external threat—had been achieved in large measure by the turn of the century and finally with demonstrable success in its hostilities with Russia. Thus, after 1905 the sense of imminent national crisis—the cornerstone on which the government had founded its program of rapid modernization—had dissipated considerably, and nation building was no longer the top priority it had been since the Restoration. The majority of the people had united in support of government efforts to strengthen the military and the economy, at least until the Russo-Japanese War. The Meiji period's final years, however, were characterized by the more open pursuit of private interests in the face of waning national priorities. Such concepts as independence and autonomy, which had heretofore been interpreted only in a national context, now took on new meaning on a personal level, although they remained somewhat ill defined. The critic Tokutomi Soho (1863-1957), an early advocate of civil liberties who later championed nationalism and expansionism, lamented shortly after war that the early Meiji values that
[41] In a panel discussion, Hirano Ken and Takami Jun note ways in which the Meiji government supported the fine arts, including the sponsorship of exhibits for painters and the establishment of a public university for musicians. See Hirano Ken, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Takami Jun, "Bundan," 141.
placed public interests over private had been overturned; people now valued personal prosperity over national strength.[42]
This awakening of private consciousness occurred at a time when opportunities for individual advancement in public life had been severely curtailed. The relative political and social mobility of the post-Restoration decades had lost momentum as the leadership in government and the bureaucracy consolidated its authority. By the end of the Russo-Japanese War, political opportunities had grown so limited that many young intellectuals were forced to abandon hopes for public careers.[43] The fast-rising careers in the academy and in government awaiting the small elite who graduated from a university in Tsubouchi Shoyo's day were no longer available to those reaching adulthood after the turn of the century, when sheer numbers, combined with fewer openings, sent the market value of educated youth tumbling.[44]
The forces that frustrated the political aspirations of many young intellectuals also curbed the outlets of creative thought. Having introduced a series of "peace preservation" laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which effectively controlled participation in the political process, the government kept a tight rein on literary activities to insure that the writer's political consciousness (in the few cases when it was expressed) did not stray from the national interest. Censorship was swift, severe, and sparing of no writer who offended, in the eyes of the bureaucrats, the sacrosanct sensibilities of public morality. Even a writer like Mori Ogai, whose "establishment" credentials were impeccable (he was an army doctor who rose to the rank of surgeon general), did not escape the censor's scrutiny. His Vita sexualis was banned within a
[42] "Fukuzatsu naru shakai" (1906), cited in Oka Yoshitake, "Nichiro senso-go ni okeru atarashii sedai no seicho," 2. Confronted with this diminishing nationalistic fervor and with a younger generation that seemed inclined more toward vague and romantic spiritual pursuits than toward its obligations to the state, Soho exhorted his readers to "love the nation, if you must love at all" ("Chiho no seinen ni kotauru sho" [1906], in ibid., 12).
[43] See Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan , 199-200.
[44] See Kinmouth, The Self-made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought , esp. 220-21. Kill-mouth contends (ibid., 228) that this explanation for the much-discussed "anguish" (hanmon ) of the age undermines Oka ("Nichiro senso-go ni okeru atarashii sedai no seicho") and others' argument that waning national priorities prompted the privatization of interests. The two theses, however, appear to be not antithetical but complementary explanations for what was both a political and an economic phenomenon.
month of its publication in July 1909, and he was warned soon after by a high government official not to sign his articles in the newspapers.[45] Finally, the trial in 1910 and subsequent execution of Kotoku Shusui and other radicals who had allegedly plotted the emperor's assassination demonstrated to intellectuals across the political spectrum the extent to which the government was willing to exercise its power in the interests of political and cultural domination.
In 1911, hoping to fend off any concerted reaction by writers, the government reestablished its national committee (Bungei Iinkai, originally organized in 1909) for the purpose of "fostering" literary activities, which meant of course discouraging any potentially subversive writing. H. D. Harootunian sees in this bureaucratization of literary taste not only the government's desire to inhibit writers from treating subjects of a social and political nature but also its continuing strategy of separating politics and culture and insuring that individualism as a concept would remain entirely nonpolitical in its ramifications.[46] By all indications, the strategy worked. Writers had long viewed individualism as something achieved not because of one's relationship with society and the state but only because of one's independence from them, and they were not about to alter this formula now. "I believe firmly that we should live in the world," writes the influential critic Takayama Chogyu ($871-1902) at the turn of the century, "but it should be remembered that the individual does not exist within state and society. State and society exist within the individual. We have to conduct our spiritual lives under these conditions."[47] Chogyu is proposing the tacit agreement that would be in force throughout the
[45] Richard John Bowring, Mori Ogai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture , 139.
[46] "Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taisho," 26. Jay Rubin, in his informative study, contends that at the end of the reestablished committee's brief tenure, the struggle between writers and the bureaucracy ended in a draw (see Injurious to Public Morals , esp. 9, 205-19). But if this is so, it is because the writers had already learned well the value of self-censorship, as we can see from the opinions of six major writers and critics on the uses of censorship collected in the January 1909 issue of Taiyo . Of the six, only one, Shimamura Hogetsu, comes out unequivocably against censorship in any form, although he limits his defense to what he calls "true literature," which he does not define. The response of Kosugi Tengai is more typical: writers should avoid getting involved in quarrels with government. See KBHT 3:397-406, esp. 404-5.
[47] Quoted in H. D. Harootunian, "Between Politics and Culture," 154.
first half of this century: if the state allows the artist the freedom in his private realm to lead an irregular life and hold unorthodox views concerning literature and philosophy, the artist will in turn abstain from criticism of the state and involvement in politics.[48] Chogyu's celebration of the privatized aesthetic life, in which "nothing was more important than the 'gratification of instinctive desires,'"[49] would provide the rationale for many shishosetsu writers in the second and third decades of this century and most especially for Shiga Naoya, who made a career of depicting, probably unconsciously, the private, instinctual man living in a political vacuum.
For all their caution, Chogyu's comments were among the less guarded political statements to be uttered by early twentieth-century intellectuals. The attitude of Nagai Kafu (1879-1959), when he heard about the Kotoku trial and its verdict in 1911, was far more typical:
Of all the public incidents I had witnessed or heard of, none had filled me with such loathing. I could not, as a man of letters, remain silent in this matter of principle. Had not the novelist Zola, pleading the truth in the Dreyfus case, had to flee his country? But I, along with the other writers of my land, said nothing.... I felt intensely ashamed of myself as a writer. I concluded that I could do no better than drag myself down to the level of the Tokugawa writer of frivolous and amatory fiction.[50]
Silence, however shameful, was preferable to jail or worse. To be sure, Kafu was one of the modern culture's most strident critics. Yet his was the voice of a man incensed by sheer bureaucratic ineptitude and by the loss of an irrecoverable tradition, not that of a guilt-ridden progressive lamenting his missed chance to serve humanity. As Edward Seidensticker notes, "It is one thing to complain about the dirt and clutter of Meiji Japan, but quite another to fight for social justice."[51] The latter option was in actual fact practically nonexistent. The way to the writer's development as an "individual," no matter how critical and discerning, lay in the renunciation of political involvement.
[48] Ibid., 152.
[49] Ibid., 149.
[50] "Hanabi" (1919), quoted in Edward Seidensticker, Kafu the Scribbler , 46.
[51] Ibid.
"Renunciation" is perhaps too strong to describe what was essentially a passive, apolitical stance. The writings of the naturalists show that they were intensely interested in society, but "society" as a much more circumscribed institution than that depicted by their French counterparts, as the titles of many works suggest: Ta-yama Katai's Sei (Life) and Tsuma (Wife), Mayama Seika's Minami Koizumi Mura (South Koizumi Village), Tokuda Shusei's Arajotai (New household), Masamune Hakucho's Ni kazoku (Two families), to name a few. For Japanese writers, the ie , or extended family, was society; what lay beyond it was quite literally out of their world. It was inevitable that one of those works would bear the title of Ie . Toson's ponderous work describes with great power the strictures that the ie , even when transplanted from the country to the more fluid urban scene, placed on the individual. An autocratic national government could hardly do more to restrict one's freedom of action and movement. The incestuous turn that personal relations took for the hero Sankichi and his niece seems an almost logical conclusion to a life so involuted, and to human relations so constricted, that the daily constitutional provides the only chance for solitude and freedom.
The fact remains, however, that the government did not rely on intellectual ennui and malaise or the traditional preoccupation with the ie for political acquiescence but sought aggressively to silence writers before they spoke. Given this intellectual climate, it is hardly remarkable that writers were less than enthusiastic about expressing their political views—if, indeed, they had any—or that their writings tend on the whole to focus on man in his isolation from, rather than his relationship to, society. The government's demonstration of force during the Kotoku trial provided just one more incentive for writers to steer clear of any incident that smacked of subversion—and "subversion" in the late Meiji and Taisho context meant virtually any written expression of political or social concern.[52] It was not worth risking one's artistic freedom,
[52] In the words of H. D. Harootunian: "Here, in this fin de siècle world of late Meiji and early Taisho, men discovered that what a European like [Thomas] Mann was to defend as a free choice ...—to act or not to act politically—was in Japan no choice at all. The situation was reversed, and to refuse to act politically was the precondition to freedom, individualism, art and culture, and the surest guarantee of their continuation.... This is perhaps one reason why such concepts as individualism, freedom and liberty could never lead to concrete political action.... To have turned outward in search of one's individuality would have risked conflict with public expectations and the state" ("Between Politics and Culture," 114-15, 123-24).
however circumscribed, to display too keen an interest in, let alone righteous indignation over, public affairs. (It was difficult enough for writers to combat the censors' charges, laughable nowadays, of prurience in many of their works.) These pressures compelled writers to treat subjects that from the government's perspective harbored no obvious "threat" to society. The least offensive literature was one in which, not surprisingly, broad social issues did not figure at all and the largest perimeter of human affairs was the writer's family circle or his literary coterie. Naturalism became a rallying point for the privatization of literature, and writers applied their powers of observation to the last realm in which they enjoyed even a limited autonomy: their personal lives.
Hogetsu, too, became attracted in time to this introspective enterprise. In a skeptical age like the present one, he argued, art no longer transcended life; it had become mired in life. And when the writer's sights were limited to personal experience, the result, inevitably, was a record of disillusionment. At first, Hogetsu insisted on an inviolate demarcation between life and art. In an essay assessing the "value" of naturalism, he argues that a writer's authorial stance and his personal behavior are of two entirely different dimensions.[53] He later exhorts his readers: "We desire to contemplate life through art. We do not wish, however, to act out our lives through it. If our aim is action, we do not turn to fiction or poetry; we turn to our hands and feet."[54] When the goal of art shifted in his eyes from transcendental "beauty" to experiential "truth," however, the demarcation seemed less defensible, and literature appeared destined to become an exercise in personal confession.
Hogetsu was quick to recognize Japanese naturalism's potential as a vehicle for confession in his critique of Futon (1907), which he called a "stark, utterly candid revelation of a man stripped naked."[55] In what is perhaps his most famous essay, which prefaces a collection of his writings on naturalism, he explores his own need
[53] "Shizenshugi no kachi" (1908), 213.
[54] "Kansho soku jinsei no tame nari" (1909), 247.
[55] “Futon gappyo," 431.
for a more direct expression of personal sentiments and concludes that confession is the only appropriate literary form in the present age. In this essay he paints a bleak picture of the intellectual life, devoid of spiritual and moral underpinnings. He longs for something to believe in and curses an intellect that has produced only doubt. "I can hardly believe in my own philosophy of life, let alone someone else's," he laments. "My first impulse is to criticize. I can believe nothing, admire nothing. The true believer must certainly have peace of mind; but restless is the heart of a critic."[56] Hogetsu's next words, which reveal the anguish of a man who has lost his intellectual bearings, are hauntingly prophetic, for they, like none before, articulate the need of writers to make their private lives the focus of their literary attentions:
I cannot now construct a viable philosophy. I would do better simply to disclose my doubts and uncertainty as they are. That would be telling the truth; saying anything more promises to be sheer invention. When I look around me in this frame of mind, moreover, I cannot help believing that other seekers after life's meaning are in similar straits. Should that be the case, then we may be entering into an age of confession. Very well. Let us do away with falsehood. Let us dispense with decoration. Let us scrutinize ourselves and acknowledge frankly what we are. Is that not the most suitable credo for our times? In this sense, ours is indeed an age of confession. Perhaps we shall never go beyond it.[57]
In a sequel to the essay quoted above, Hogetsu argues that literature is better equipped than either philosophy or religion to reflect on life, the meaning of which lies in its very uncertainty. Because literature (and here he clearly means "naturalist" literature) faces squarely the skepticism of the age and refuses to rely on "invention," it provides, he concludes, the most persuasive description of reality. In it one can express one's doubts in a straightforward manner that rings truer than any metaphysics. Philosophy and religion are fated to explain the inexplicable, while literature—the depiction of the unfathomable reality that one sees all around and within oneself—acknowledges the inexplicable as life itself.[58]
[56] "Jo ni kaete jinseikanjo no shizenshugi o ronzu" (1909), 256-57. The collection Kindai bungei no kenkyu (1909) includes all the Hogetsu essays cited above.
[57] Ibid., 257.
[58] "Kaigi to kokuhaku" (1909), 274-82.
Hogetsu thus found meaning in the very skepticism that was undermining his beliefs. Rather than ignore the feelings of doubt that plagued him, he celebrated them. Masamune Hakucho saw in Hogetsu's matter-of-fact expressions of intellectual bewilderment the most representative statement of Japanese naturalism.[59] Yamazaki Masakazu, writing nearly thirty years later, reached a similar conclusion. The Russo-Japanese War brought to an end both the Meiji Restoration and the urgent sense of purpose that had mobilized the population for nearly four decades, he writes. Hogetsu's naturalism articulated the disorientation felt by intellectuals. It was not a positive approach or a method in itself but an expression of skepticism directed at all methods.[60]
Hogetsu's position was at the same time an eloquent defense of the traditional epistemology, which favored "immediate" over "mediated" reality. Since reality as perceived by others was no longer credible ("I can hardly believe in my own philosophy of life, let alone someone else's"), one was compelled to fall back on one's own perceptions, however limited, as the point of literary departure. The writer had no alternative but to rely on personal experience, the sum total of his introspective world. In an age of confession, Hogetsu seems to be saying, the "mediated" reality of creative imagination has no purpose. As long as literature is limited to the expression of an "unmediated" personal reality ("I would do better simply to disclose my doubts and uncertainty quite as they are. That would be telling the truth; saying anything more promises to be sheer invention"), there is no room for fictional constructs that posit worlds as real as, but other than, the world that is.
Hogetsu's reversion to what seemed an epistemologically secure realm of immediate, perceptual reality not only typifies the late-Meiji writer's stance,[61] it reveals a great intellectual debt to his native tradition. In asking literature to fill the shoes of philosophy
[59] Shizenshugi seisui ki (1948), in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 22:316. In a similar vein, Tayama Katai remarks that Hogetsu expressed more forcefully than anyone the spirit of the age. See Kindai no shosetsu (1923), in Tayama Katai zenshu 17:338.
[60] Fukigen no jidai (1976), 117-18.
[61] Other naturalists shared Hogetsu's views. In an age of disillusionment, argues Hasegawa Tenkei (1876-1940), when religion and metaphysical speculation have been debunked, tales spun from the author's imagination are as out of place as belief in a heaven and a hell. See "Genmetsu jidai no geijutsu" (1906).
and religion and in disassociating it from mediation and fabrication, Hogetsu shows remarkable consistency with premodern thinking about its nature and purpose. The old notion of two separate literary traditions—the nonfiction that is "literature" and the fiction that is not—was still very much alive in the minds of Hogetsu and the naturalists, as was the conviction that the shosetsu as serious literature must free itself of fabrication and become the un-mediated voice of its author.
5
Harbingers (II): Katai, Homei
What struck me most [about these works] was the futility of imagination.
Tayama Katai, "Soshun"
The author does not understand others as he understands himself.... It is impossible for a writer to be purely objective, ... and by trying to be so he irresponsibly takes a position only God can take.
Iwano Homei[*] , "Gendai shorai no shosetsuteki hasso o isshin suru boku no byosha ron"
Although the writings of Shimazaki Toson, Iwano Homei, Tokuda Shusei (1871-1943), and Tayama Katai among others can all be examined with regard to the "unmediated," experiential worldview articulated by Hogetsu's naturalist creed, it is primarily on Katai that we shall focus here; for whether or not he deserves his reputation as the shishosetsu's progenitor, his Futon (The quilt, 1907), more than any other single text, inspired a reading of the shosetsu that challenged its fictional autonomy and thereby set modern Japanese letters on a course that continues (as demonstrated by Yasuoka Shotaro's comments quoted in Chapter 1) to the present day. To be sure, this singular mode of reading did not develop spontaneously with the appearance of Katai's story. Indeed, it would have been impossible without the trend toward privatization of consciousness we noted in such writers as Tokoku, Doppo, and later, Hogetsu. Only after Futon , however, did it gain ascendancy.
It would be wrong of course to place responsibility (and with it, depending on one's critical camp, the praise or blame that accrues) for the shishosetsu's genesis on the shoulders of a single author, for to do so would be to underestimate both its significance and the
inevitability of its development. Other authors were pushing the shosetsu in the same direction as Katai was, and it is safe to say that the shishosetsu would have emerged with or without the appearance of Futon . (Later we shall review arguments that Futon was not the first "true" shishosetsu .) But the fact remains that no previous text was so thoroughly critiqued with regard to its fictionality—or lack thereof. As we shall discover, two major critical "schools"—one culminating in Nakamura Mitsuo's Fuzoku shosetsu ron (On the novel of manners, 1950), which argues that the unabashed confession in Futon began the shishosetsu tradition, and the other culminating in Hirano Ken's Geijutsu to jisseikatsu (Art and private life, 1958), which argues that Futon is a mixture of fact and fiction—both make fictionality the modern shosetsu's central issue and referentiality the touchstone of the critical act.
Katai as "Naturalist"
Futon is the story of Takenaka Tokio, a writer nearing middle age and married to a woman who is indifferent to his artistic strivings. He falls in love with Yoshiko, a young admirer whom he has taken into his home as a student, only to discover that she already has a boyfriend, Tanaka, who has abandoned his theological studies in Kyoto to be with her in Tokyo and become a writer. Shocked at the young couple's openness about their relationship and hurt that he himself is not the object of Yoshiko's affections, Tokio informs the girl's father of the affair, forcing Yoshiko to return to her home in the provinces. The story concludes with the frustrated Tokio alone upstairs in Yoshiko's now-deserted room, his face pressed against her bedding.
Nothing in its plot greatly distinguishes Futon from any number of Katai's earlier, equally lachrymose and melodramatic writings that describe the hero's infatuation with a "new breed" of young, educated woman, which shall be discussed presently. Indeed, Ka-tai, who wrote poetry and fanciful, sentimental stories for years before the publication of Futon , seemed an unlikely candidate as standard-bearer for a new movement. Of his encounter with European naturalism shortly after the turn of the century, through the writings of Maupassant, he wrote: "I felt as if I had been clubbed on the head. My beliefs were completely overturned....
I had formerly gazed only at the heavens, I wrote then in a brief essay. Of the earth I knew absolutely nothing. What a superficial idealist I was! From then on I wanted to be a child of the earth."[1] The naturalist penchant for sordid themes and settings reveals itself as early as 1902 in a work entitled Juemon no saigo (The end of Juemon), the story of a physically deformed man whose string of arsons leads fellow villagers to lynch him; but it was not until 1904, the year after Ozaki Koyo died, and with him the authority of the Ken'yusha, that Katai issued his famous manifesto, "Rokotsu naru byosha," which combined Kosugi Tengai's critique of a gilded literature with a call for a new, unadorned style that described ordinary life.
Any intelligent person will agree that writing whose style does not match its content is less than worthless. And yet present-day stylists persist in using pretty phrases unsuitable to the ideas they express, stringing together one blatant lie after the next and calling it all "fine" and "elegant" writing. It hardly needs mentioning that the purpose of writing is communication. It is enough that the writer convey his meaning.... He should not have to agonize over how to arrange his phrases or color his words.... It is this bold, straightforward description—precisely the kind of writing stylists condemn as crude and incoherent—that I believe will become our literary world's lifeblood and moving force.... A commonplace style suits commonplace material; a blunt style suits blunt ideas. This is only natural.[2]
Naturalism in Japan collectively depicts, with considerable depth and breadth, a world closer to the experience of the average Japanese than can be found in most previous Meiji literature; but the individual writer felt most comfortable with a style of presentation that allowed personal observation of one's immediate surroundings to speak only for itself, unanalyzed, rather than for society at large. Here is where Katai and his literary colleagues differed plainly from their French precursors, because the latter would not hesitate to generalize about the whole range of human experience. For a writer like Zola, universal truth always lay waiting to be grasped from specific circumstances and naturally propelled writing beyond the realm of personal experience. The spirit of inquiry was
[1] "Maruzen no nikai," in Tayama Katai zenshu , vol. 15, Tokyo no sanju nen , 565-66.
[2] KBHT 2:360-62.
turned outward, and observations of individual behavior were linked logically and necessarily to entire groups or classes of people: to wit, the coal miners in Germinal , the slum dwellers in L'assommoir , or the peasants in La terre , with whom the author was not even casually associated.
In one of his essays on naturalism, it is true, Zola speaks of the novelist's role as a stenographer who "forbids himself to judge or draw conclusions." Imagination no longer has a function in the novel, he claims; "Nature is all we need... we say everything: we no longer select, we do not idealize."[3] Yet even this self-styled champion of "scientific" journalism keenly understood the role of a synthesizing narrative intelligence that readily gave the settings and characters in his best work a symbolic significance. The mines of Le Tartaret and the Paris slums fairly strain from the page, in a tropically dense language, to transcend their own time and place. "The truth," as Zola himself argues, "ascends in winged flight to the symbol."[4] In his naturalist manifesto, "The Experimental Novel" (1880), Zola is supremely aware of fictions mediating force in representing (with a view to universalizing) the limited data of personal observation. Indeed, the "experiment" in his experimental novel sounds very much like the leaven of fiction giving prose its shape and direction. In answer to the "stupid reproach made against us naturalist writers ... that we wish to be merely photographers," Zola declares: "The idea of experiment carries with it the idea of modification. We begin certainly with true facts which are our indestructible base; but to show the mechanism of the facts, we have to produce and direct the phenomena; that is our part of invention and genius in the work."[5] Maupassant is no more satisfied with the label of photographer. Only by transcending reality, he argues, can the writer describe it truthfully in fiction:
The realist, if he is an artist, will endeavor not to show us a commonplace photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it which shall be more complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is out of the question.... A choice
[3] "Naturalism in the Theater" (1880), in George J. Becker, ed., Documents of Modern Literary Realism , 207-9.
[4] Quoted in Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn , 327.
[5] Becker, Documents of Modern Literary Realism , 168.
must be made—and this is the first blow to the theory of "the whole truth." ...
"Truth" in such work consists in producing a complete illusion by following the common logic of facts and not by transcribing them pell-mell, as they succeed each other.
Whence I conclude that the higher order of Realists should rather call themselves Illusionists.[6]
The notion that the writer's task was to transcend everyday life by a process of "modification" (as Zola put it) or "illusion" producing (as Maupassant put it) was precisely what Katai resisted most, conditioned as he was by a nonteleological narrative tradition, by an intellectual climate conducive to private musings, by a movement to rid the shosetsu of fabrication in order that it might take its place among the more prestigious literary forms, and perhaps by the language itself, which as we have observed so clearly privileges the narrator's consciousness in the written reportive style, whether first- or third-person. Like so many of his colleagues, Katai equated truth with the recording of events personally documented. In the wake of his success with Futon and the trilogy (Sei [Life], 1908; Tsuma [The wife], 1908-9; En [The bond], 1910) that followed, Ka-tai carried his views to their logical extreme. He took Ozaki Koyo posthumously to task for instructing his disciples to "write nothing that seems unnatural, even if it really happened, and write only about things that seem natural, even if they never really took place," and he turned the exhortation around: "Write about what really happened, even if it seems unnatural—precisely because it did happen. Write nothing that did not actually take place, however natural it may seem."[7] Gone were the days, he was to write later, when one "read a novel as a novel"; the author who wrote only the "truth"—that is, what had actually happened to him or to those he knew—had no use for "fictionalization." Even the names of people one wrote about were better left unchanged.[8] The author's preoccupation with demonstrable "fact" could naturally scandalize his models. But art had no ethics, Katai insisted. It was simply the "duplication of phenomena" (gensho no saigen ), and the artist was
[6] From the preface to Pierre et Jean (1888), trans. Clara Dell. Quoted in Philip Stevick, The Theory of the Novel , 397-98.
[7] Katai bunwa (1911), in Tayama Katai zenshu 15:180.
[8] Kindai no shosetsu (1923), in ibid. 17:309-10.
not to blame for revealing embarrassing truths, whether about himself or those he knew. A writer had but one task: to record his own experience faithfully.[9] At issue was authenticity, not morality. The only artistic sin was fabrication. Reviewing a crop of contemporary stories, Katai wrote:
What struck me most was the futility of imagination. None of the stories spun from fantasy have any authority or any power to move the reader. Whenever I came across a fine passage in one of them, I had no difficulty surmising that here the author was not writing from imagination at all.... The ability to write the truth untainted by fabrication, no matter how slight—or should I say, to achieve a state of mind in which it becomes possible to write in such a way—this is the source from which a new literary spring shall well.[10]
Katai did not and probably could not elaborate on what he meant by a "fine passage" or on how he could detect truth untainted by fabrication, but his clear preference for (perhaps it was a blind faith in) unmediated presentation over mediated representation reflected the prevailing view of his time.
Thus, as is the case with so many "influences," naturalism taught Katai only what he wanted to hear. It advocated the recording of "truth": what could be truer than the events and feelings one had witnessed and experienced oneself? It rejected narrative contrivance: what could be more "natural" than one's own life, plainly described? If "nature" was synonymous with personal experience (as he argued in an early essay),[11] it followed that the writer's task was to observe himself. Writing, then, was an experiment in self-portraiture, and the author became his own hero.
Perhaps the most important fact concerning Katai's articulation of the relationship between Fife and art is the sheer number of writers who agreed with him. Katai, it turns out, spoke for a good many who professed to be his critics; despite the opposition to naturalism by other writers, the movement away from universalizing fictions to particularized reflections was a trait common to all: naturalist and antinaturalist, aesthetic and decadent, proletarian and neo-perceptionist. Satomi Ton (1888-1983), a major writer in
[9] Katai bunwa, in ibid. 15:184—85.
[10] "Takujogo" (c. 1911), in ibid. 15:335-36.
[11] "Sakusha no shukan" (1901). See Wada Kingo, "Kaisetsu," in Wada Kingo and Soma Tsuneo, eds., Tayama Katai shu , 29.
the Shirakaba school, which is commonly said to have arisen in reaction to the naturalist movement, notes just how little the various coterie labels have to do with styles of writing.
If one mentions the word "Shirakaba" people soon start on about its "confrontation" with naturalism, and one can't say that there wasn't one, but our differences with the naturalists arose mostly from questions of upbringing. We were aristocrats, whereas "naturalism" meant to us that crowd cooped up in lodgings around Waseda University; and being young, there didn't seem much chance of our getting along with them. But as far as literature was concerned I don't actually recall any real criticism as such being made.[12]
Satomi rightly stresses that the distinction made between these groups of writers, naturalist and otherwise, is one of pedigree rather than literary predilection. Although critics could point with some justification to the naturalists' preoccupation with life's darker, seamier side, the naturalist label was more a value judgment than a literary one and came to stand for boorish provincialism in the eyes of the urbane natives of Tokyo.
Futon as Autobiography
Futon is by no means modern Japanese literature's first roman à clef. Mori Ogai's "Maihime" (1889), a story told in the first person about a Japanese student who loves and then leaves a German girl in Berlin, is based on the author's experience in Germany, although it differs somewhat from actual events.[13] It was common knowledge that the protagonists in the Meiji period's two most popular books, Konjiki yasha (1897-1902) and Hototogisu (1898-99), had real-life models. But as Kimura Ki notes in his memoirs, no scandals resulted because no harm was done.[14]
All that changed with the rise of naturalism. What distinguishes this body of writing from previous writings is not simply the high autobiographical content but also the portrayal of characters in a distinctly unfavorable light. Shimazaki Toson in particular found
[12] Nakano Yoshio, ed., Gendai no sakka 58-59. Quoted with slight modification from Dennis Keene's translation in Yokomitsu Riichi , 18.
[13] For a discussion of "Maihime," see Richard John Bowring, Mori Ogai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture , 47-55.
[14] Watakushi no bungaku kaiko roku , 101-2.
himself the target of criticism. The publication of one of his early stories was stopped by Yamaji Aizan, who notified the Ministry of Home Affairs that it treated the widow of Aizan's mentor, one Kimura Kumaji, with disrespect.[15] "Namiki" (1907) caused a furor because of the uncomplimentary portraits of Toson's colleagues Baba Kocho and Togawa Shukotsu. Suisai gaka (1904), the story of an artist who discovers that his wife harbors a lingering affection for the man she loved before she married, was based on the author's own life. Toson used as his model, however, another couple, a painter and his wife, who promptly brought suit against him. This same story reappeared as an episode in a later text, Ie (1910-11), which describes Toson's early married life.[16]
Shinsei (The new life), which chronicles Toson's affair with his niece Komako, caused the greatest scandal of all when it appeared in the pages of the Asahi newspaper from 1918 to 1919. Although a somewhat later work, it deserves mention here, for it shows the direction that the confessional element in Japanese naturalism was inevitably to take. Toson began writing long before he knew the outcome of the affair, in hope of ending it once and for all and severing relations (and their incumbent financial obligations) with his brother (Komako's father). The hero, who has recently lost his wife, becomes intimate with a niece who assists in the care of his children. He then abandons the pregnant niece and exiles himself to France, intending to abort the affair before it becomes public knowledge, only to continue it on his return to Japan two years later.
This much Toson himself knew when he first picked up his pen. He could not have known however what his story held in store for the rest of his life. He (and consequently his hero) finally decided to reveal the affair in the form of a newspaper serial, which resulted in his (and his hero's) being disowned by his brother and in his niece's hasty removal to Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, in disgrace. The ramifications of this scenario are unsettling, to say the least. Shinsei records not simply the affair itself but also its trans-
[15] Ibid.
[16] Toson did have his supporters. Kunikida Doppo argued that models from real life took on an existence of their own when they appeared in a work of art and that a painter, of all people, should have realized that fact. Recalled in Tayama Katai, Kindai no shosetsu , in Tayama Katai zenshu 17:313.
ferral from the private to public domain. In other words, the text's very appearance generated a new crisis in Toson's life, which Toson proceeded to record in Shinsei and which generated further crises, and so on, ad infinitum. Referentiality was turned on its head: even as "real-life" events changed the shosetsu's course, the shosetsu just as easily altered the course of "real life." It was one thing to write about a past affair; it was quite another to write about an affair in progress and in such a way that the progress report itself played a role in the outcome as great as, or greater than, the feelings of the participants. (This point will be brought home in our examination of a cycle of stories by Shiga Naoya in Chapter 8.)
Needless to say, Shinsei caused a sensation and gave Toson's sagging career a tremendous boost. Akutagawa Ryunosuke wrote, not without justification, that he had never before encountered so crafty a hypocrite as the hero of Shinsei .[17] Komako, recalling much later the scandal that her uncle's writing had caused, said essentially the same thing, although in understandably more deferential terms.
I am afraid that I read [Shinsei ] merely as an apology by a man trying lamely to philosophize.... It tells the truth so far as it goes, yet leaves out episodes that could have incriminated its author.... Shinsei is a landmark in the author's growth as a thinker and as an artist, but for me it was only an ordeal, an unbearable photograph that, when exposed to public view, made it impossible for me to live the life of an ordinary woman.[18]
As confession, Futon may have been surpassed by later examples, but in no previous writing is there such a clear correspondence in every detail between the text and the life. Like Tokio, Katai was a writer who had to make ends meet with a dull editorial job. Like Tokio, Katai had an uneducated wife and three children. Like Tokio, Katai took in a young female admirer who, after living for a month at his home, moved to his sister-in-law's house and enrolled at a nearby woman's school in Kojimachi Ward—and so on. The psychological parallels between hero and author are, of course,
[17] "Aru aho no issho," in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu 9:334.
[18] Hasegawa Komako, "Higeki no jiden," part 1, p. 285. For a more sanguine and artistic appraisal of Shinsei , see Janet A. Walker, The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism , esp. 239-43 and 269-82.
more problematic. The author himself suggests that they are indeed close in his memoir, Tokyo no sanju nen (My thirty years in Tokyo), published in 1917, ten years after Futon . In the chapter entitled "My Anna Mahr,"[19] Katai claims that he wrote Futon knowing that it would destroy any potentially intimate rapport with his student yet hoping that it would establish his reputation as a major writer. "My Anna Mahr was at her parents' home in the provinces," he reminisces. "I had visited her there while traveling during the previous autumn, and her memory now was even more sharply etched in my mind. Should I write about her and abandon all hope for love? Or should I refrain from writing and await the chance for it to blossom?"[20]
From the outset, critics dwelt on the text's lack of authorial distance,[21] but in doing so lent it an air of notoriety that insured its popular success. Even ridicule was good publicity, and Katai soon capitalized on it, writing in quick succession a trilogy (Sei, Tsuma , and En ) based entirely on his domestic life. Other writers soon followed with accounts of their lives: Shimazaki Toson with Haru (Spring, 1908), Iwano Homei with Tandeki (Decadence, 1909), Chikamatsu Shuko with Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami (A letter to my estranged wife, 1910), and Tokuda Shusei with Kabi (Mildew, 1911). Masamune Hakucho argues that Katai's success in exploiting his private life was interpreted by other writers as a green light for self-exposé, a course that would not have occurred to them had Futon not met with such critical acclaim and notoriety.[22]
This observation is no doubt true as far as it goes, but it is useful here to note the comments of Chikamatsu Shuko, who questioned,
[19] "Watakushi no Anna Maru." The title alludes to the principal female character in Gerhart Hauptmann's drama Einsame Menschen (Lonely lives, 1891), which is mentioned several times in Futon . See below.
[20] Tayama Katai zenshu 15:602. Katai recalls the response to Futon (owing to its apparently confessional nature, which he never denies) in a later essay entitled “Futon o kaita koro" (1925), in which he writes: "Critics made a terrific fuss when Futon first appeared. People sitting next to me at work shot furtive glances in my direction. One person sent me a letter announcing that he was breaking all ties with me" (quoted in Iwanaga Yutaka, Shizenshugi bungaku ni okeru kyoko no kanosei , 116).
[21] The view of Katagami Tengen (1884-1928), a naturalist critic, is typical: "The author seems unable to write except in a way that suggests a personal involvement in his material. He lacks objectivity and is incapable of universalizing his predicament. He attempts to observe himself, but with his face flush against the mirror" (KBHT 3:423). Tengen's review is one of several included in a survey of contemporary opinion under the title of “Futon gappyo," originally appearing in Waseda bungaku , Oct. 1907, the month following the publication of Futon . See KBHT 3:417-32.
[22] "Tayama Katai ron" (1932), in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 6:295.
at a time when critical consciousness of the shishosetsu was just emerging, what most believed to be the overriding influence of Futon in that form's development. Shuko tells us that it was not Katai's text but Futabatei Shimei's Heibon (Mediocrity, 1907), a brilliantly humorous meditation on mundane existence first serialized scarcely a month after Futon appeared, which inspired his own notoriously confessional Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami . He argues that Heibon's peerless colloquial style and first-person narration had an enormous influence on him and other writers and that Futabatei, not Katai, should be credited with originating Japanese naturalism and by extension the shishosetsu . Shuko had been a great admirer of writers like Ozaki Koyo and Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-96) and their mastery of the classical idiom, but Heibon awoke him to the vernacular's power as a literary instrument, and he determined to exploit Futabatei's style in his own fiction.[23] This essay is of interest not simply because it challenges the established view of Futon as the shishosetsu's true precursor but because it downplays the role of confession. Autobiography is really not at issue, Shuko suggests. Futon's confessional content no doubt inspired writers like Shuko, despite his disclaimer; but Heibon provided them with the modus operandi to convey that content with the greatest impact.
But to return to Futon . Despite the many obvious parallels between the text and the life, it is by no means certain that the text transcribes the life with complete fidelity. What is significant for Japanese literature, however, is that both Katai's critics, who see no attempt at fictionalization, and his defenders, who do, have justified their positions with referential readings of the text that rely more or less completely on extratextual evidence. We shall benefit from an examination of both positions, since taken together they set the tenor of critical perceptions concerning not just Futon and the shishosetsu but modern Japanese literature as a whole.
Nakamura Mitsuo's views are representative of the former position. Nakamura sees in Futon the first clear breakdown in modern Japanese literature of the fictional contract, which resulted in a form rooted in imaginative bankruptcy. He lays the "blame" for the shishosetsu's inception squarely on Katai in a number of strident essays, most notably Fuzoku shosetsu ron , and argues that the form
[23] “Wakareta tsuma o kaita jidai no bungakuteki haikei," 15-18.
has never created life but only plagiarized it. "To reveal the secrets of one's personal life must indeed have required a certain courage," he remarks wryly of Katai and his imitators. "But they had the audacity to believe that simply by describing their personal experience they could automatically move their readers. They wrote of their private miseries without thinking to analyze or objectify them.... I do not doubt that literature is the art of portraying the writer's feelings to the reader. But only the shishosetsu is founded on the naive belief that so vulgar a portrayal would have any reader appeal."[24] Nakamura subscribes to a kind of devil theory of literature in which the appearance of Katai's text single-handedly changed the course of Japanese naturalism at its headwater, transforming it from a promising stream of realistic fiction modeled after the classical European novel (as exemplified by Toson's Hakai ) into a wayward torrent of confessional autobiography. "A duel of sorts was fought between Hakai and Futon ," Nakamura concludes, "and in terms of influence wrought on literary contemporaries, Futon emerged the overwhelming victor.... Today it has reached the point where Hakai is itself judged in terms of literary standards established by Futon ."[25]
Hirano Ken's views are representative of the latter position. According to Hirano, Futon is clearly a fictional text. But because it had aroused such a clamorous response, he argues, Katai later began thinking of it in purely autobiographical terms and thereby deceived even himself (into contemplating, for example, how his writing would affect the relationship with his "Anna Mahr" in Tokyo no sanju nen ), not to mention his readers, about its true character. Hirano examines Katai's relationship with the people on whom he modeled his characters—his wife, Okada Michiyo (the model for Yoshiko), Michiyo's parents, and Nagayo Shizuo (the model for Tanaka)—and argues on the basis of numerous documents that Katai consciously distorted the psychology of his teacher-pupil relationship with Okada Michiyo (while faithfully recording all its superficial aspects) and that the parties directly involved (namely, Katai's wife, Okada, and her parents) condoned
[24] "Watakushi shosetsu ni tsuite" (1935), in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshu 7:121-22.
[25] Fuzoku shosetsu ron , 29. Nakamura goes on to cite Satomi Ton, whose critique of Hakai written in 1948 parallels Katai's own, written twenty-five years earlier.
his creative license. He stresses that the association between Katai and Okada as teacher and pupil continued unbroken and with the blessings of Katai's wife and Okada's parents even after the story's publication. The only rational conclusion to be drawn, he reasons, is that the amorous innuendos in Futon have no grounding in reality. He goes on to cite an article published by Okada in 1915 stating that although the innuendos in Futon disturbed her, Katai's own morals were impeccable and that his portrayal of a jealous teacher lusting furtively after his pupil was a complete fabrication. Hirano concludes that the models in question could never have misconstrued Futon as a confession of adultery, even though many readers have.[26]
In effect, both critics argue their positions using the same referential touchstone. The former condemns Katai for "copying" life, while the latter defends him for "fictionalizing" it. Nakamura and Hirano are not alone in making referential readings, however; the principals themselves do the same. We have noted Katai's allusion in Tokyo no sanju nen to his quandary over whether to conceal the "truth" about his feelings for his pupil or to unburden himself of it. Okada Michiyo, meanwhile, chides Katai for writing a fairy tale at her expense and doubts that she is in fact the model for Yoshiko. She accuses him of exercising "poetic license" in a manner calculated to scandalize all his models, when it was his task as a self-proclaimed naturalist to record experience as accurately as possible. She argues that Katai's motive for this distortion was to slander Nagayo and charges that Katai's defamatory characterization ruined Nagayo's fledgling literary career. Katai depicted Nagayo as a weasel while painting her in the most flattering manner imaginable; his reputation as a naturalist was so firmly established that readers (including, we are perhaps to assume, Nagayo's prospective contacts in the publishing world) were deceived by his gross misconstrual.[27] These accusations are of special interest because they reveal the treachery of a literature that claims to deal only in "facts" and appeals to critics on a purely referential level.
[26] Geijutsu to jisseikatsu , 88-89. The article Hirano cites is entitled “Futon, En , oyobi watakushi" and originally appeared in the Sept. 1915 issue of Shincho under the name Nagayo Michiyo, since Okada had become the wife of Nagayo Shizuo ("Tanaka" in Futon ).
[27] “Futon, En , oyobi watakushi," 266.
Okada is saying in effect that Katai, after having primed a gullible reading public over the years with platitudes about naturalism's mission to document personal experience, duped it into believing that he was writing the sordid truth, resulting in brisk sales for the author and embarrassment for his acquaintances.
Okada's interpretation lends support to Hirano's position that Futon is indeed a fictional account and not merely, as Nakamura would have it, a "plagiarism" of life. But it brings us no closer to an understanding of the work. By establishing her own experience as the criterion for judgment, Okada merely traded one literalist point of reference for another and quite naturally overlooked any artistic intent behind Katai's "distortions" of experience. Her interpretation does not take into account, for example, why Katai himself, in his incarnation as Tokio, emerges as the most pathetic of all the characters. Futon has two comic scenes in which Tokio, drowning his frustrations in drink, collapses first by his toilet and later in the muddy precincts of a Shinto shrine while on his way to visit Yoshiko. The irony is driven home when we see Tokio, who is busily comparing himself to numerous heroes in western literature, viewed through the eyes of other characters (his wife at the toilet, a passerby at the shrine): this would-be hero of his own romance, this master of the house and godlike (to Yoshiko) mentor, has fallen as low as he can fall. Okada's interpretation also fails to explain why Katai did not see fit to include, as an episode in Futon , his departure for the front as a correspondent covering the Russo-Japanese War, which had just broken out—why he makes it look as if domestic jealousies, rather than professional necessity, were the sole reason for Yoshiko/Okada's removal from Tokio/Katai's home after just one month.[28] (This discrepancy of course does not disprove that domestic jealousies were in fact the "real" reason for Yoshiko's/Okada's removal but merely suggests that even a referential interpretation cannot accommodate all the "facts" surrounding such an incident.) It fails, moreover, to explain why Katai consistently depicted Tokio as a jealous spoiler destined to lose his happy if platonic relationship with Yoshiko by tattling on her to her parents and forcing her return to the country; for we know on the
[28] Katai left for China in March 1904, the same month that Okada left his home for his sister-in-law's residence, which was nearer Okada's school.
strength of more than a dozen letters written by Katai to Okada's parents that he was actually the young couple's most ardent supporter.[29] Finally, it fails to explain why Katai so idealizes his heroine—a gesture that troubles even Okada herself.
Why indeed did Katai offer these "distorted" portraits, presenting his heroine in such a complimentary light and himself in such an uncomplimentary one? Clearly, the author's biography cannot provide the whole answer. Katai was doubtlessly guided by personal experience in writing Futon . But the question we must always ask is why he (or any author) wrote about one particular experience rather than another, and it is here that our knowledge of the author's life proves surprisingly unhelpful. We must turn instead to other texts and take note of the sensibility that pervades Katai's entire oeuvre. One of the trademarks of a Katai story is the presence of a blatantly sentimental hero of the narcissistic, brooding sort that one would expect to find in writings of a more romantic than naturalist cast. Futon , which along with Shimazaki Toson's Hakai is said to have ushered Japanese letters into the naturalist era, is no exception. Katai's shift of emphasis to what was "natural" (i.e., the realm of private life) as the only legitimate subject matter did not alter his predominantly romantic sensibility. What is significant is not that Futon is based so heavily on personal experience but that it conforms so closely to the same motif of forbidden love that informs his earlier, pre-"autobiographical" and pre-"naturalist" writings. Most critics, preoccupied with Futon as confession and unconcerned with how it fits into the context of Katai's oeuvre, have virtually overlooked that motif. In numerous Katai stories, a man beset with middle-age angst and disillusioned with domestic life yearns for a romantic attachment. Yoshiko is yet another incarnation of Katai's feminine ideal: a woman who is at once intellectually stimulating, emotionally supportive, and sexually attractive.
Katai himself hints at his heroine's ideal qualities when he refers to Yoshiko/Okada Michiyo as "my Anna Mahr" in his memoir
[29] "Katai Futon no moderu o meguru tegami," in Yoshida Seiichi, ed. Toson , Katai , 317-35. The letters were originally published in Chuokoron , June 1939, nine years after Katai's death. In them, Katai praises Okada for her conscientiousness and Nagayo for his intelligence and urges Okada's parents even after her return home that her marriage with Nagayo would be the happiest and most expedient solution.
Tokyo no sanju hen . Anna Mahr is the principal female character in Gerhart Hauptmann's drama Lonely Lives , to which Futon frequently alludes. Katai's text finds some of its inspiration in this drama of an intellectually and spiritually troubled man who gains no solace in family life or religion and who seeks understanding and companionship, in the face of his wife's and parents' obvious distress, from a young woman who rooms in his home. Here, too, is a story of forbidden love doomed to an unhappy end. Katai was not interested in all aspects of Hauptmann's play, however. Lonely Lives concerns the conflict between science and religion, and the struggle for values by a hero who rebels against the old morality yet is unable to construct a viable new code of personal ethics. Futon has no such intellectual pretensions, nor does it concern itself with the theme of existential loneliness that so pervasively informs Lonely Lives ; it focuses solely on the hero's infatuation with his student and on his efforts to save face when his love is not reciprocated. But even though Katai's emphasis may differ from Hauptmann's, his allusions to Lonely Lives themselves clearly bespeak a broader engagement than simply with personal experience and belie his own suggestion, cited above in Tokyo no sanju nen ("Should I write about her and abandon all hope for love?"), that he merely intended to document an incident in his life. Despite his theoretical insistence on the privileged status of lived experience, then, Katai's allusions to other literary texts can only be described as a conscious attempt to mediate that experience.
The Katai scholar Tosa Toru notes that Zola's Thérèse Raquin may well have been the inspiration for the notorious conclusion in Futon , in which the hero buries his face in his beloved's quilt. In chapter 9, Thérèse has just left Laurent: "He lay sprawling on his bed, sweating, flat on his stomach with his greasy face buried in the pillow where Thérèse's hair had been. He took the linen between his parched lips and inhaled its faint perfume, and there he remained, breathless and gasping."[30] This passage bears more than a passing resemblance to the final scene in Futon : "Tokio drew [the bedding] out. The familiar smell of a woman's oil and sweat excited him beyond words. The velvet edging of the quilt was noticeably dirty, and Tokio pressed his face to it ... He spread out the mat-
[30] Thérèse Raquin , trans. L. W. Tancock, 82.
tress, lay the quilt out on it, and wept as he buried his face against the cold, stained, velvet edging."[31] Tosa argues convincingly that the direct and copious tribute that Katai pays in Futon to such authors as Hauptmann, Turgenev, and Sudermann is mere window dressing and that Katai is curiously silent about his work's most critical literary source. He goes on to suggest that this calculated suppression led readers to believe that any of the hero's thoughts or actions not "footnoted" in other literary texts were to be interpreted as the author's own experience.[32]
More important than any of these literary antecedents, however, are those in Katai's own oeuvre, most notably Onna kyoshi (The woman schoolteacher, 1903), published more than four years before Futon and more than a year before Katai had made the acquaintance of Okada Michiyo. An episode in Futon alludes to the earlier work and foreshadows the hero's abortive relationship with Yoshiko. Tokio, disillusioned with the wife he once loved and yearning for a more satisfactory mate, carries on a fantasy tryst with a beautiful young schoolteacher whom he sees occasionally on the way to his office.[33]Onna kyoshi is an elaborate treatment of that fantasy. It is the story of a writer whose pastoral life and connubial bliss are shattered by the passion he develops for a young schoolteacher named Kuniko, who is not only beautiful and personable but also intellectually supportive in a way that his wife cannot be.
In general outline, Futon and Onna kyoshi are quite similar. In both, the hero is a married man nearing middle age who fears the prospect of an intellectually and emotionally bankrupt life[34] and seeks rejuvenation by contact with a young educated woman, an avid admirer who has requested his tutorial guidance. But the simi-
[31] The Quilt and Other Stories by Tayama Katai , trans. Kenneth G. Henshall, 96.
[32] "Futon no nioi," see esp. 119.
[33] Tayama Katai zenshu 1 :525-26.
[34] Katai actually uses the English phrase "lonely life" in Onna kyoshi , in what appears to be a reference to Hauptmann's play. Katai very likely had made his acquaintance with the play by this time through the English translation, which was first published in 1898. (The first Japanese translation was not made until 1922.) Shimazaki Toson wrote a letter to Katai in 1901 thanking him for lending his copy of "Kodoku shogai"—Toson's rendition, apparently, of the English title Lonely Lives (Toson zenshu 17:60). See the discussion in Ogata Akiko, “Futon zen'ya," 46. Katai wrote a critical essay on one of Hauptmann's plays (Die versunkene Glocke ) as early as 1903. See NKBD 4:362c.
larity does not stop there. The heroines have the same outgoing personalities and physical attributes; they are both described as fair-skinned with expressive features and as keepers of tidy rooms lined with books. Certain scenes and descriptive passages in the two works, moreover, are nearly identical. In both works the hero visits the heroine on a moonlit spring evening, notes the beauty of her makeup, and leaves her very late at night having barely controlled his emotions, she accompanying him partway home. In both the hero is about to dash off to see his beloved only to be detained by his wife, who suspects mischief. In both the hero imagines to himself that his pregnant wife dies in childbirth and leaves him free to pursue his forbidden love. (In Onna kyoshi , the wife actually does die, but too late for the hero to consummate his relationship with Kuniko.) In both, the hero lectures the young woman on literature, love, and feminism. And in both he presides over her departure at the end to distant lands (Yoshiko to her parents' home in western Japan, Kuniko to Taiwan), resigning their parting of ways to "fate." In short, not just in theme and overall tone but in the construction of scenes as well, the two works resemble each other strikingly.
These observations are hard to reconcile with Katai's own pronouncement on the composing of Futon : "I merely attempted to write down faithfully what I saw and heard and thought."[35] If Futon is indeed completely true to life, as it is widely presumed to be, with every character based on a recognizable model, while Onna kyoshi is purely imaginative, then it is certainly curious that the heroine in Futon should so closely resemble—in appearance, personality, speech, and gesture—the "fabricated" heroine in Onna kyoshi . We are witnesses either to a remarkable coincidence between "fact" and "fantasy" or, far more likely, to rather impressive evidence that Katai modeled Yoshiko as much on his own personal feminine ideal as on the young female student he took into his home one spring day in 1904. Private life, it turns out, does not have the only say in Katai's text. Rather, the vectors of experience and imagination intersect on the author's thematic graph of forbidden love.[36]
[35] "shosetsu saho," quoted in Hashimoto Yoshi, “Futon ni kansuru memo," 66. The discussion of the similarities between Onna kyoshi and Futon is indebted to this article.
[36] See Ogata Akiko, "Futon zen'ya," for yet other examples of texts featuring Katai's feminine ideal written in the years before Futon . In tracing the "transformation" of Katai's sentimental romanticism to naturalistic realism, Ogata notes the unchanging pattern of supportive, intellectually stimulating, "modern" female characters in Katai's writings.
It is of course hardly unusual for an author to treat the same theme more than once—or even with a repetitive obsession (as we shall witness especially in the works of Chikamatsu Shuko, in Part 3). Katai does vary his approach the second time around, however. Having already developed the theme of forbidden love as fully as he was able in Onna kyoshi , he burlesques it in his remake from "real life." That Katai is capable of poking fun at his hero, and himself, is evident in the short story "Shojo byo" (1907), which both recalls Onna kyoshi and anticipates Futon . "Shojo byo" is the story of a man approaching middle age whose continual gawking at schoolgirls riding on the train he takes to and from work causes him one day to fall absentmindedly right off the train to his death. In appearance (he is a very large, "animallike" man), circumstances (he works for a publishing firm), and family life (he lives with his wife and small children in Tokyo's Yoyogi district), the hero closely resembles the author. Like Katai, the hero is the literary world's laughingstock as the writer of saccharine love stories that are popular only with young female readers. Like Katai, he languishes at a boring editorial job.
In "Shojo byo," Katai carries self-parody to its comic extreme: the hero's literary pursuit of the ideal woman brings him only reproaches from his peers; and his pursuit in real life, a preposterous death. The parody in Futon is more tentative than in "Shojo byo,"[37] but its melodramatic scenes retain a comic tone. The narrator indulges his hero mightily, to be sure, but manages an occasional wink at him as well—as in the toilet and shrine scenes. Whereas the hero in Onna kyoshi appeals to lofty sentiments in justifying his love for the young schoolteacher, Tokio is preoccupied with his lust. Whereas the hero in Onna kyoshi loses ultimately to propriety, in the form of the schoolteacher's saintly concern for his wife, Tokio loses to the prurient desires of the former theology student, Tanaka. The latter work's frenzied tone, moreover, recalls nothing so much as an Edo-period joruri . Indeed, Futon smacks of a Chika-
[37] It is not so tentative, however, as to warrant the opinion of Nakamura Mitsuo, who writes, in an unfavorable comparison with Goethe's Werther and Constant's Adolphe , that Futon distinguishes itself only by its complete lack of authorial distance (Fuzoku shosetsu ron , 44).
matsu domestic play, with its thematic linchpin of giri-ninjo , in which the protagonist agonizes interminably over whether to follow the dictates of social and/or familial obligation or of personal sentiment—except that Katai's farce is an inversion. Here the hero ends up following the dictates of social obligation (as Yoshiko's protector and mentor, in deference to Yoshiko's parents) instead of sentiment (as her potential lover) as is the case in a Chikamatsu play. To the last, Tokio struggles gallantly but awkwardly to save appearances. After turning Yoshiko over to her parents, he can only fling himself on his beloved's old quilt in a spasm of secret self-pity.
Thus, despite arguments to the contrary, Futon does not distinguish itself by its portrayal of individualistic consciousness. An indulgent narrator charts a course for his hero that leads paradoxically to the repression, rather than the affirmation, of self. The elusive kindai jiga is nowhere to be found. Having squelched personal desire, Tokio ends up supporting the social order (by opting for his role as guardian over the one as lover) and thus insures his estrangement from Yoshiko. The scenes in which Tokio asserts himself even tentatively end significantly in parody, as if to nip that assertion in the bud. Tokio's most aggressive form of behavior is drunkenness, a socially safe form of self-expression that predictably leads him no closer to his secret love than the toilet or the muddy shrine grounds. He asserts himself only through repressive acts. In this sense, at least, his vain, furtive shedding of tears into Yoshiko's quilt after the final separation is a fitting conclusion to a tale of sublimation.
The aesthetic or ideological failings of Futon by no means her-aided an inauspicious beginning for the shishosetsu , because literary excellence was not the primary criterion for judgment. The story brought to itself an unprecedented degree of critical attention (it was the subject in just the first month after publication of no fewer than thirteen reviews in two major literary magazines), most of which catalogued, with various degrees of outrage, the correspondences between literature and private life. Far greater than its importance as a literary text, then, was Futon's role as catalyst; and it is here that its influence far exceeded that of Heibon , which Chikamatsu Shuko shrewdly and perhaps correctly labeled the shishosetsu's true precursor. In an age preoccupied with cultural privatiza-
tion and with a literature that privileged "philosophy" over style, Futon helped spawn a critical method that evaluated a text by how "faithfully" it depicted its author's life. In this sense, Futon is indeed the prototypical shishosetsu and the shishosetsu a distinct form, not because of any truly distinguishing characteristics but because readers attuned to the new literature, insisting on the referentiality of literary art, made the accurate description of the author's personal experience the supreme standard in their evaluations.
Katai and Homei: "Surface" Versus "Single-Dimensional" Description
Futon differs in one important respect from shishosetsu to follow: Katai's narrator accommodates several points of view. Although focusing primarily on Tokio, the narrator presents freely if briefly the thoughts of Yoshiko, Yoshiko's father, Tokio's wife, and even a curious neighbor. Katai never felt compelled to restrict narrative perspective to that of the protagonist. Rather than strive for a unified point of view in his later works, he moved in the other direction, with the stated goal of adopting no point of view at all. This was the substance of his famous "surface description" (heimen byosha ); and Futon , although by far his best-known work, might profitably be characterized as no more than a dry run for works like Sei and Inaka kyoshi (The country teacher, 1909), which more successfully exemplified his technique. In "Sei ni okeru kokoromi" (1908), Katai claims to follow in the footsteps of the Goncourt brothers by championing a style that allows the narrator to treat all events and characters with the same degree of studied aloofness. Katai argues that his purpose in writing Sei was to describe accurately and dispassionately what he saw and heard and to avoid all interpretation of events and characters. "By refraining from petty, subjective interpretation and from analyses of phenomena about which I had no direct understanding, and by presenting my material in unaltered [ari no mama ] form," he concludes, "I believed that my descriptions would actually come closer to the truth and would of themselves suggest the inner significance of things."[38]
[38] KBHT 3:450. Katai's alleged debt to the Goncourt brothers should be viewed as skeptically as that to Zola. Katai was no doubt familiar with the Goncourts' various pronouncements on the novelist's role as historian, including the following: "We passed through history to arrive at the novel.... On what basis does one write history? On the basis of documents. And the documents of the novel are life" (quoted in Richard B. Grant, The Goncourt Brothers , 30-31). But Katai apparently took no note of the Goncourts' concern with style and their awareness of the mediative powers of their form, which they argued could miraculously attract the reader's interest in "a human story that we know never took place" (ibid., 114). These self-styled clinicians of truth frequently acknowledged their aesthetic motivations: "Art for Art's sake, art which proves nothing, the music of ideas, the harmony of a sentence, that is our faith and our conscience" (ibid., 16). The Goncourts, then, never aspired to the "unaltered" transcription of life any more than Zola did.
In his effort to legitimize this narrative technique, Katai had important company. Shimazaki Toson's first autobiographical text, Haru (1908), was being serialized in another newspaper at the same time as Sei . Toson, whom Edwin McClellan argues was "as responsible as any single writer could be for the prevalence of the idea in Japan that the novel need not or should not be a creation of the dramatic imagination,"[39] also utilized in this and later writings an aloof narrator who makes little effort to probe his characters' minds. Katai was quick to recognize the similarity of their efforts and took note of Toson's achievement in “Sei ni okeru kokoromi." The same dispassionate style, carried if anything to an even greater extreme in the writings of Tokuda Shusei, prompted Natsume Soseki, for one, to describe it disparagingly as an endless stream of words with no direction, no informing idea, no life.[40]
Katai, too, had his critics, most notably Iwano Homei, who argued that Katai's failure to invest his works with a specific point of view deprived them of meaning and interest.[41] Homei championed what he called "single-dimensional description" (ichigen byosha ), arguing that it avoided the epistemological pitfalls of Katai's technique. "There is no life outside the self," he asserts in one of his first major critical statements, "and literature is the product of the
[39] "Toson and the Autobiographical Novel," 348.
[40] "Bundan no kono goro," in Soseki zenshu 16:723-25.
[41] Homei is an anomaly in Japanese letters. Although usually grouped with the naturalists, he was something of an outsider who relished his role as gadfly to the bundan . Like Mishima Yukio, he took as much, or more, pride in being a man of action as he did in being a man of letters. Confronted with failure at every turn in private life, from his business ventures to his relations with women, he celebrated his defeats in his writing, creating a hero who presided bellicosely over his own demise. After establishing his reputation as a fiction writer with Tandeki , which describes his liaison with a syphilitic geisha, he went on to produce a monumental, five-part account of his pursuit of wealth and love in Tokyo, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido (usually referred to as Homei gobusaku , 1910-18).
author's subjective tone or attitude.... A writer cannot hope to portray life conscientiously if he cuts himself off from his own subjectivity."[42] It is clear from the ironic dedication to Katai of his first anthology that Homei was conscious from the beginning of his polar position vis-à-vis the author of Futon , despite (by Homei's own admission) the latter's influence.[43] Nor was Homei alone in sensing this polarity. Major naturalist critics like Shimamura Hogetsu and Hasegawa Tenkei saw Homei and Katai as embodying two divergent trends in the naturalist movement. Tenkei, for example, contrasted Homei's passionate, "self-revelatory" (jiko kokuhaku ) style with Katai's aloof, "self-contemplative" (jiko seikan ) style and argued that Homei's was a throwback to the romantic period while Katai's represented naturalism's true path.[44]
While his critics were dwelling on degrees of emotional distance between author and hero, Homei was concerning himself with the mechanics of representation. In an essay entitled, with typical immodesty, "Gendai shorai no shosetsuteki hasso o isshin subeki boku no byosha ron" (My theory of writing, which will revolutionize thinking on the shosetsu , present and future, 1918), he articulates his position on narrative·
This is not a world in which we know everything about everyone else. All people and all things are actually reflections of our own minds We reign as sovereigns over our private worlds and we allow no rights to others.... This said, let us consider what it means to be a writer. The author does not understand others as he understands himself.... It is impossible for him to be purely objective ... and by trying to be so he irresponsibly takes a position only God can take.... I will use my subjectivity, not narrow-mindedly but to its fullest potential, to enter into the feelings of a single character, whether A or B or C. Just as we cannot know what another person thinks in real life, the author cannot know what B or C thinks if he has identified with the feelings of A. There is almost no one here or abroad who realizes this fact, except for myself and those who have fully digested my theory on this subject.[45]
[42] "Gendai shosetsu no byosha ho" (1911), in KBHT 3:366.
[43] See the preface to Homei's Tandeki (the anthology), in Homei zenshu 18: 78-81.
[44] "Jiko bunretsu to seikan" (1910), 207-9.
[45] KBHT 5:88-90. For discussions of this essay and its place in Homei's critical project, see Yoshida Seiichi, Shizenshugi no kenkyu 2:449-60; Wada Kingo, Byosha no jidai , esp. the chapters on Katai's "surface" and Homei's "single-dimensional" description, 103-72; and Noguchi Takehiko, Shosetsu no Nihongo , 197-210.
In this and other writings, Homei never insists that the author restrict his point of view to a character modeled after himself, only that he be consistent. It was the Taisho literary establishment that would go on to interpret Homei's definition of "single-dimensional description" in an even stricter sense than Homei himself had ever advocated: namely, that the author could do no better than to narrate lived experience from his own point of view.[46]
Yet Homei presents here something rather close to what would emerge as the mainstream junbungaku worldview (even though he portrays himself as the lone voice of reason in a critical wilder-ness-encouraged, to be sure, by a literary establishment that took him only half-seriously).[47] That is surely why he aroused the ire of junbungaku opponents. Ikuta Choko, for example, whose critique of the shishosetsu we noted in Chapter 3, argued that however much Homei's thesis held true for works of a confessional nature (diaries, travel essays, autobiographies, etc.), in which a single point of view was most convincing, it had no bearing on fictional works, which appropriately might have several protagonists and several points of view. The "best" method of representation, Ikuta concluded, was simply the one that best suited a particular writer.[48] The philosopher and critic Tsuchida Kyoson (1891-1934), continuing the attack, insisted that Homei was on extremely shaky epistemological ground when he argued that the author's perceptual world overlapped the protagonist's. Tsuchida's Kantian system divided the world into two categories of perception—the things, people, and other "objects" (taisho ) in nature that exist independent of each in-
[46] Homei stressed in many of his essays that the point of view need not be the author's own. Among his own writings, the group of stories published near the end of his life focusing on a character named Osei are examples of this. (See, for instance, Osei no shippai [1920], which chronicles the heroine's loss of her boardinghouse to a wily carpenter on whom she has naively relied to make improvements. [lwano Homei zenshu 8:387-488]) Homei also insists in the face of repeated attacks that the hero, even when modeled after the author, should not be equated with the author himself. See Wada, Byosha no jidai , 132 and 136, for extracts of his protestations, of which Wada himself seems skeptical. Noguchi Takehiko, meanwhile, argues that Homei was more successful than Katai or Toson at transforming his personae into autonomous characters. See shosetsu no Nihongo , 204-9.
[47] Ino Kenji, in his study of Meiji writers, notes that Chikamatsu Shuko aligned himself solidly with Homei against the likes of Hogetsu and Katai on the issue of narrative perspective and suggests that it was Shuko and not Katai who, as heir to Homei's narrative theory, fixed the shishosetsu's course. See Meiji no sakka , 401.
[48] "Iwano Homei shi no byosha ron" (1918), in KBHT 5:97-100.
dividual's apprehension of them as images, and "subjects" (naiyo ) in need of an "I" to see them—and he claimed that Homei made no distinction between the two.[49] Both reached the same conclusion: to argue as Homei did that "this is not a world in which we know everything about everyone else" and that "all people and all things are actually reflections of our own minds" was, in a literary context at least, the height of naïveté.[50]
Homei's "naïveté," however, was characteristic of a great many Taisho writers who, while making no pronouncements of their own, adhered to the tenets Homei set forth. Ikuta and Tsuchida's condemnations notwithstanding, Homei had an unerring sense for the mode of narrative presentation that would triumph in the Taisho era. In essence, he was championing what we identified in Chapter 2 as the written reportive style. Homei's critics correctly pointed out its constraints, but they underestimated the enormous power it held over the Taisho literary community. Homei's theory helped legitimize the shishosetsu's mode of presentation to the extent that it came to be regarded as "natural," and finally transparent.
A few years after Homei's death, Katai conceded in his memoir Kindai no shosetsu (shosetsu in the modern era) that Homei's "single-dimensional description" was, in principle, the ideal to which literature should aspire and that the truly great writers utilized just such a technique.[51] Such a concession on Katai's part was probably less a shift in his own position than an acknowledgment of the shishosetsu's dominance in the early 1920s. Given the popularity by this time of first-person narration and the critical insistence on the equation of author and hero, the Jamesian-style narrative that focused on a single character distinct from both author and narrator never became the dominant mode in Taisho letters. Even though Homei had some success (as did Tokuda Shusei and of course Natsume Soseki) in building a narrative around a character not modeled after himself, the Taisho literary establishment took far less interest in works to which the author-hero formula could not be applied.
[49] "Iwayuru ichigenteki byosha o ronzu" (1918), in ibid., 101-6.
[50] Ibid., 200, 101.
[51] In Tayama Katai zenshu 17:357.
6
The Bundan: Readers:, Writers, Critics
I really get the feeling that your reading ... is based on a knowledge of, and a sympathy for, the author's private life.
Chiba Kameo, in a roundtable discussion
I simply could not force myself to become more intimate with society merely in order to write stories that any young girl would then be able to understand.
Tayama Katai, in a roundtable discussion
The shishosetsu so dominated the Taisho literary world that the phrase "Taisho literature" (Taisho bungaku ) now connotes its heyday. This phenomenon was due in no small measure to the rise of the bundan . The existence of a literary subculture in which writers came to associate with one another more as social acquaintances than as artists and which encouraged gossip about one's peers, by word of mouth and ultimately in print, contributed immensely to the critical consciousness of the shishosetsu as being uniquely true to life and therefore the only shosetsu form of any importance in Taisho letters. Although it would be wrong to isolate the bundan as the shishosetsu's sole formative element when we have already linked several significant literary, linguistic, and intellectual factors to its inception, there is no doubt that it played a crucial role in legitimizing critical focus on the writer's life as much as on his writings. In such a climate, the writer freely assumed readers' familiarity with—and curiosity about—the details of his personal life, and publishers actively solicited stories that exploited this curiosity.
Although the bundan in its broadest sense includes any person or coterie active in the literary world, it is used here in its more restricted sense to include only those writers, critics, and publishers associated with what is commonly called junbungaku , or "pure"
(i.e., confessional or autobiographical) literature, as opposed to taishu bungaku , or "popular" literature. The distinction between "pure" and "popular" is almost certainly a carryover from the Edo-period dichotomy, noted in Chapter 1, between the nonfictional literature of edification and the fictional "nonliterature" of entertainment, bolstered by the naturalist school's stress on lived experience as the only legitimate source on which the author could draw. It was also intimately related, surely, to the values of a select as opposed to a mass audience.
The bundan , in the narrow usage considered here, was a product of three crucial trends that came together during the Taisho period: the literary journal's emergence as the "pure literature" writer's single most important medium, the popularity of shorter works, and a camaraderie among writers nurtured by physical proximity, social alienation, and contemporary journalistic demands. These trends were so pervasive and intimately related that they became self-perpetuating and often transcended their status as mere professional realities, with which an author had to cope in the process of writing a story, to become a central theme in a story. (We shall see this theme explored to its fullest extent in our discussion of Kasai Zenzo.) And since literary purity was measured in terms of how closely the author adhered to the details of his personal life, a writer had a good deal of motivation to model his characters after his acquaintances, for example, or to cite his previous stories (as Uno does in Amaki yo no hanashi , quoted in Chapter 1), or even to refer self-consciously to the very manuscript which he was then writing. These factors in turn provided the bundan audience, composed largely of writers and would-be writers, with a powerful incentive to read and criticize stories entirely on a referential level.
At the heart of the bundan's raison d'être is the junbungaku writer's elitist consciousness, born of common education (most writers went to universities, typically Tokyo or Waseda or Gakushuin, before launching their literary careers), geography (Tokyo, the hub of cultural activity, was the home or adopted home of virtually every junbungaku writer), and aloofness from a society that generally took a dim view of the writer's profession. Traditional social prejudice against the writer of "nonliterary" fiction (gesaku ) worked, as we have seen, against the early twentieth-century shosetsu writer as well. The authors of "pure literature" believed that their writing
was not "fiction" in the sense that popular literature was, since they, too, were imbued with this prejudice. But society as a whole (i.e., non-bundan society) was less inclined to distinguish one kind of writer from another. In an achievement-oriented world that paid special reverence to university graduates, who were expected to pursue socially useful careers, writers, with few exceptions, were second-class citizens. Mori Ogai earned respect as a man of letters largely because he had already distinguished himself in the medical profession. And Masamune Hakucho suggests that Natsume Soseki's reputation as a scholar helped sell his novels. (Soseki had been a lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University before joining the staff of the Tokyo newspaper Asahi in 1907 as editor of the newspaper's literary page.)[1] Hakucho and his naturalist colleagues, meanwhile, met with little commercial success, in part because their many stories set in the provinces did not appeal to an urban audience but also because of the traditional view of the "fiction" writer as an outsider or outcast.
Just what constitutes an "outsider" is of course in itself problematic, but it depends at the very least on the existence of an "insider." Kawakami Tetsutaro defines insiders as those established intellectuals who maintain the orthodox system of thought; he suggests that modern Japan has had no orthodox, traditional system (such as Neo-Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan) to which an intellectual could ally himself, and thus no true insiders. The most likely candidate for an "orthodox" system of thought in post-Restoration Japan, Kawakami argues, was the utilitarian philosophy, with its emphasis on success and service to the state. By this standard, at least, the man of letters—whose very act of writing, when not clearly utilitarian in intent, was considered antisocial in Meiji and Taisho Japan—was very much an "outsider."[2] This common view of the writer manifested itself even at the level of daily life. One writer reported to his friends in astonishment that he was willingly let a house even after he had defiantly announced his calling to the landlord—rare treatment then for one of his kind because of his low social and economic status.[3]
[1] Shizenshugi seisui ki , in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 11:308-9.
[2] Nihon no autosaida , 11-12 and 206-7.
[3] The writer was Hirotsu Kazuo. See Okubo Fusao, "Bundan ni tsuite," in Bunshi to bundan , 243. In the same book, Okubo notes the literati's growing social prestige and affluence since the war ("Bundan no sengo," 163-234).
The junbungaku writer's career revolved, at least at the beginning, around his coterie and its publication, known as a dojin (or donin ) zasshi , which catered to a small and homogeneous audience. Unlike contemporary coterie magazines, which often have a nationwide membership, the Taisho magazines were very exclusive and their memberships defined by mutual acquaintance and common purpose, a fact that resulted both in fast friendships and bitter infighting.[4] Kasai Zenzo, for example, published his earlier stories in one such coterie magazine, Kiseki , which he and his Waseda University colleagues put out monthly from September 1912 to May 1913. Kiseki was but one of several dozen dojin zasshi appearing at the time. Although most were quite short-lived, they made up the Taisho bundan's lifeblood. Shiga Naoya established his career by his many contributions to a dojin zasshi called Shirakaba , which was one of the most successful. The coterie magazines, edited and distributed by the contributors themselves, provided an ideal vehicle for the aspiring young author who lacked a name but possessed the boundless energy needed to publish a magazine on a shoestring budget. Coterie members were plagued by a lack of funds, and the attrition rate was high; a typical magazine lasted perhaps a dozen issues. Kiseki (1912-13), for example, had 9 issues; the first four and by far the most significant series of Shinshicho (1907-17) had anywhere from 6 to 11; Ningen (1919-22) had 24. There were exceptions to this law of evanescence, the most notable being Shirakaba . A total of 160 issues appeared from April 1910 to August 1923. Its longevity was due in large measure to its strong financial backing and to the contributing members' relative affluence.[5]
Printings of most dojin zasshi were in the very few hundreds, or less. Only a smattering of copies were sold at bookstores on consignment; the majority were distributed gratis to important literary figures in hopes of catching their attention.[6] The Kiseki group
[4] See Yamamoto Kenkichi, "Dojin zasshi hyo," 177-78, for a general description.
[5] Chikamatsu Shuko was the only writer discussed in Part 3 who never belonged to a coterie. He began his career as a critic, writing in newspapers like the Yomiuri , before starting to write fiction.
[6] Ibuse Masuji, in a conversation held on 1 March 1985, recalled that the strategy used to catch the influential critic's eye in his early dojin-zasshi days (late Taisho-early Showa) was to send the magazines by registered mail. See also Ibuse, "Dojin zasshi no koro," 222-24.
printed two hundred copies of their first issue and placed one hundred of these in bookstores like Kinokuniya on consignment sale. The twenty-eight copies that actually sold, however, are said to have been bought in twos and threes by the dojin zasshi members themselves in an effort to save appearances.[7] Again, the exception is Shirakaba , whose monthly circulation numbered in the thousands and peaked at well over ten thousand around 1920. Its broad appeal as a magazine of the arts helped insure the popularity of its major contributors: Arishima Takeo (1878-1923), Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885-1976), and Shiga Naoya.[8]
By the time a coterie magazine had folded, however, some of its contributors would have made enough of a name for themselves to be invited to write for the more prestigious literary and commercial magazines, which included Shinshosetsu (1889-1950, with interruptions), Chuokoron (1899-present), Shincho (1904-present), Kaiho (1919-33), and Kaizo (1919-55). Fully half of Kasai's fiction (roughly forty stories), for example, appeared in these five magazines; the rest is scattered in some thirty other periodicals. Perhaps a third of Shuko's nearly two hundred stories appeared in these same magazines, and a good many more in Bunsho sekai (1906-20), one of the naturalist movement's strongholds; Waseda bungaku (1891-present, with interruptions), one of the great university-supported magazines along with Keio University's Mita bungaku (1910-present, with interruptions); and Bungei shunju (1925-present), a well-known general-interest magazine, which began as a literary magazine. Shiga emerged as a major literary figure with the publication of Otsu Junkichi in Chuokoron in 1912, and he serialized his crowning achievement, An'ya koro (1921-37), in the pages of Kaizo .
Most readers of dojin zasshi and of all but the largest literary magazines were writers and would-be writers themselves, nearly all of whom lived in or near Tokyo. Precise figures are hard to come
[7] Kono Toshiro, “Kiseki kaisetsu," 13.
[8] See the entries in NKBD , vol. 5, on the various magazines in question. The information on Shirakaba circulations is gleaned from a personal correspondence (12 Feb. 1985) from Miyazaka Eiichi, the magazine's last editor.
by, but the circulation of a purely literary magazine like Shincho in early to mid-Taisho is thought to have ranged from three to five thousand. Magazines like Kaizo and Kaiho , which also catered to literary audiences, had circulations of around thirty to forty thousand in 1920. Only Chuokoron , far and away the largest general-interest magazine, could boast a circulation of over a hundred thousand at this time.[9]
This high concentration of writers in Tokyo bred familiarity on a social as well as a professional level. The major literary magazines, moreover, served as clearing houses of information and gossip about writers. They also served as forums: published interviews with writers and roundtable discussions between writers and critics provided an inexhaustible supply of literary grist. Writers, therefore, sharing not merely the pages of the same magazines but also frequently participating in the same roundtable discussions, were in constant contact with one another and held few secrets. Rare was the bundan critic, therefore, who failed to note the correspondences between a story and what he knew of its author. In the following panel-discussion excerpt, we see how the discussion of a short story ("Isan," 1924) quickly gravitates toward its author, Kasai Zenzo.
CHIBA KAMEO: | Why must one criticize the author's life as well as his writing? ... Can't one simply criticize the writing itself? |
NAKAMURA MURAO: | I didn't say I know anything about Kasai's private life. But after reading the story, I can see how he has woven the complex emotions of his life into every phrase. |
CHIBA: | I really get the feeling that your reading of Kasai is based on a knowledge of, and a sympathy for, the author's private life. |
SATOMI TON: | I think Nakamura's reading is merely based on what you yourself referred to as "common knowledge" that circulates around the bundan . |
[9] The figures are based on the following sources: Hirano Ken and Matsumoto Seicho, "Watakushi shosetsu to honkaku shosetsu," 133; Domeki Kyosaburo, Shinchosha hachiju nen shoshi , 14; Yokoyama Haruichi, Kaizo mokuji soran somokuji , 11; and Maeda Ai, Kindai dokusha no seiritsu , 173. See also Yokozeki Aizo, Watakushi no zakki cho , esp. 5-9, for further information on circulations and on the bundan in general.
NAKAMURA: | I read this story as an autonomous piece but got through it a sense of the author's character and way of life.... |
CHIBA: | Doesn't Nakamura get that sense because of what he already knows about Kasai through gossip or hearsay? |
KUME MASAO: | That's the question, isn't it![10] |
Nakamura Murao's claim that he read "Isan" as an autonomous text of fiction in effect goes unsubstantiated. Like nearly every critic of the age, he reads a text in such a way that knowledge of the author's private life becomes essential to its understanding. It follows, then, that Nakamura would say of Kasai, in another discussion: "What makes [Kasai's] stories interesting is the writer himself. They may not be so interesting to readers who don't know him, though."[11] Here again, private life is seen as the Ur-text of pure literature.
Although literary magazines reached their zenith in the mid-Taisho period, daily newspapers like the Tokyo Asahi and the Yomiuri were also an important medium for prose writers through the end of Meiji and early Taisho. One of their greatest contributions was serial publication. Many of the naturalist writers' longer works first appeared in the major dailies: Tayama Katai's Sei (Yomiuri , 1908), Tsuma (Nihon , 1908-9), and En (Mainichi shinpo , 1910); Shimazaki Toson's Haru (Tokyo Asahi , 1908), Ie , part 1 (Yomiuri , 1910), and Shinsei (Asahi , 1918-19); Tokuda Shusei's Kabi (Asahi , 1911) and Arakure (Yomiuri , 1915). (The Asahi also published all of Natsume Soseki's fiction from mid-1907 until his death in 1916.)
It is difficult to understand why newspapers would have an interest in publishing some of these authors (who, however important to literary history, had only a small following) unless we realize that the newspapers themselves did not enjoy anything close to the mass audience that they do today. Although all the major dailies now boast circulations in the many millions, they served a far more elite clientele until mid-Taisho or later, as Table 1 shows.
Papers like the Asahi, Tokyo nichi nichi, Jiji shinpo , and the Yomiuri appealed to a highly literate audience and devoted far greater space to literary matters than any of the major papers do today. Let us
[10] Kasai Zenzo zenshu bekkan , 410. Originally published in Shincho , Mar. 1924.
[11] Ibid., 408.
Table 1.Circulations of Major Tokyo Dailies | ||||||
Newspaper | 1905 | 1910 | 1915 | 1920 | 1925 | |
Yomiuri | 40,000 | 30,000 | 70,000 | 100,000 | 90,000 | |
(1874-) | ||||||
Tokyo nichi nichi | 30,000 | 70,000 | 230,000 | 350,000 | 600,000 | |
(1872-1943) | ||||||
Jiji shinpo | 60,000 | 40,000 | 70,000 | 100,000 | 350,000 | |
(1882-1936) | ||||||
Asahi | 100,000 | 110,000 | 130,000 | 250,000 | 420,000 | |
(1888-) | ||||||
Kokumin | 70,000 | 130,000 | 190,000 | 200,000 | 230,000 | |
(1890-1942) | ||||||
Yorozu choho | 160,000 | 150,000 | 100,000 | 120,000 | 90,000 | |
(1892-1940) | ||||||
Sources : Yamamoto Fumio, Nihon Shinbun hattatsu shi , 199-200, 290-92, and passim; Soma Motoi, Tonichi nanaju nen shi , 360; Yamamoto Taketoshi, Kindai Nihon no shinbun dokusha so , 410-12; Mori Masamichi, ed., Shinbun hanbai gaishi , 115; Shashi Hensan linkai, ed., Mainichi shinbun nanaju nen , passim; and Yomiuri Shinbun Hyaku Nen Shi Henshu linkai, ed., Yomiuri shinbun hyaku nen shi bessatsu , front foldout. See also the entries on the various papers in NKBD , vol. 5, and on shinbun shosetsu in NKBD 4:242-44. Some of the figures are rough estimates. Numbers are rounded off to the nearest 10,000. | ||||||
examine the one that devoted the most space to literature: the Yomiuri .[12] In early Taisho it, like most other papers, was only eight pages long. Page 1 of our randomly chosen 4 May 1914 issue is dominated by two serials, plus the daily editorial. Political and international news is relegated to page 2; local and cultural news, to page 7. Page 3 includes a travel essay and an installment of translated literature. Two critical essays appear on page 4 and two more on page 5, along with a long poem in the "new style." An installment of still another shosetsu appears on page 6, and of a historical tale told in the old kodan style on page 8. All this—plus the usual assortment of haiku, tanka, senryu, and reviews. In addition to publishing fiction and criticism by professional authors, the Yomiuri held competitions in various categories for aspiring writers. The paper advertised its first short-story competition during May 1914, and the prize-winning story appeared in the 8 June issue, complete
[12] See Ikegami Kenji, “Yomiuri shinbun to Tayama Katai," for an analysis of the importance of the Yomiuri as a literary organ in mid- to late Meiji.
with the judges' critiques in a format anticipating the Akutagawa and Naoki prizes begun by Bungei shunju in 1935.
“Yomiuri bundan" (page 4), a regular feature, always contained one or two essays, reviews, or travel pieces by well-known authors. Newspaper photos are still rare in this period (averaging only about one per page), yet one often finds a commemorative photograph of a gathering of writers at some restaurant or publishing house. But the most remarkable item on this page is a daily column called “Yomiuri sho" (Yomiuri notes), which kept readers up to date on recent and future publications as well as the activities of the nation's major writers. On 3 May 1914, for instance, we learn that a volume of essays by Shimamura Hogetsu has gone through the final proofs and now awaits publication by Shinchosha. On the sixth, we learn that a two-hundred-page manuscript by Iwano Homei will appear at long last in the June issue of Chuokoron . On the nineteenth, we learn that Shincho's May issue has been taken off the market by authorities, the victim of official censorship. On the twentieth, we learn that Hogetsu's above-mentioned volume of essays was published the previous day. Throughout the last week of May the column lists articles and stories (including Homei's) that have appeared in the major literary magazines' latest issues.[13]
The activities of Chikamatsu Shuko, already an established writer by this time, are faithfully reported. We learn that he will publish a short story entitled "Haru no yukue" in the June issue of Bunsho sekai (5 May). He leaves Nara, his first stop on a provincial tour, on the fourth for Dogo Spa in Shikoku (8 May) and later returns to his home in Bizen (Okayama) for a brief visit (18 May). On the nineteenth he moves to Kyoto and lodges at a boarding house (22 May). The column dutifully notes his address. Finally, on 5 June, Shuko boards the 9:00 A.M. express for Tokyo (7 June). Shuko himself reports on his travels in a number of articles appearing on the same literary page. In "Ryojin" (Dusty road, 18 May), he describes his journey from Tokyo to Nara, and in "Bunraku-za yori"
[13] Thanks to Professor Sasaki Yasuaki of Ibaragi University for introducing this fascinating column. A similar but less detailed column appears in Jiji shinpo ("Bungei shosoku") and also in the major literary magazines like Shinshosetsu , Shincho , Waseda bungaku , and Bunsho sekai , although the latter could not compete with the dailies for timeliness and comprehensiveness.
(From the Bunraku Theater, 8 June), he writes further about his sojourn in the Kansai area. Read together, “Yomiuri sho" and the articles provide thorough coverage of Shuko's movements. The latter, in the popular travelogue style, rewards the curiosity that the former has piqued.[14]
Since coverage of Shuko represents only a fraction of the total, it is easy to imagine from this sampling the tremendous reader interest in even the most peripheral literary matters. The writer lived the life of a celebrity, although on a much smaller and more intimate scale than the word implies today, and virtually any activity was considered "news." That his "personal" life (e.g., travels, boardinghouse addresses) was just as newsworthy as his "professional" life (e.g., writing, publication plans) reminds us once again of the general disinclination to distinguish between the two. In his readers' eyes (and no doubt in his own), the writer comported himself necessarily as writer in everything he did. Being an author was by definition a twenty-four-hour-a-day occupation—not simply a livelihood, but a way of life.
Ironically, it was when the newspapers began commanding truly sizable audiences (circulations of most major dailies had reached the hundreds of thousands by the end of Taisho) that their literary significance declined. As circulations increased, literary editors looked for authors with broader appeal, forcing junbungaku writers to turn to the literary magazine as their principal medium. "Forcing" may be the wrong word, given the bundan writer's elitist consciousness. There are stories of bundan literati who in some cases did not wish to appear even in the same magazine with a writer who was thought to have made concessions to "popular" tastes. Akutagawa Ryunosuke, for example, himself a victim throughout his career of critical attacks against his tendency to "invent" stories rather than tell the "truth" about his own life, once refused to have a story published in the same issue of Chuokoron with Muramatsu
[14] A passage in Shuko's Giwaku zokuhen (1913) gives us an idea of the monitoring function of this and similar columns. The story's narrator-hero is surprised to learn from a maid at the Nikko inn where he is lodging that his former wife, whom he has not seen in years, knew that he was in Nikko and had inquired about him when she arrived. "How did she know that I was here?" he muses. "She must have read about me in the newspapers. She obviously checks up on me every chance she gets" (CSS , 59).
Shofu (1889-1961), a very popular (and very lowbrow, in Akutagawa’s opinion) writer of historical fiction.[15]
One of the victims of this popularization of newspaper shosetsu was Tayama Katai. A pioneer along with Shimazaki Toson of a radically new kind of serialized fiction that seemed devoid of any concession to reader interest, Katai saw his own popularity decline as the literary audience of the expanding dailies grew more diffuse. His rationalization of his position is worthy of any bundan writer in its disdain for the nonliterati:
I had believed that if I only knew more about society as a whole, I could write stories with greater popular appeal. I tried, and I failed ... and I ultimately abandoned the attempt. I simply could not force myself to become more intimate with society merely in order to write stories that any young girl would then be able to understand. I feared that I would end up sacrificing my art in the attempt. And that frightened me.[16]
Beginning in late Taisho, Katai published an increasing number of his serialized shosetsu in the less high-powered provincial dailies.
Thus, the literary magazine became the Taisho junbungaku writer's mainstay. Fees were low, however, and even frequent publication in the more influential magazines did not provide a sufficient income, although it did enhance a writer's reputation. (Nakamura Murao writes in 1925 that a literary magazine like Shincho , with a circulation of barely ten thousand, could afford to pay a writer only seven or eight yen per page, while women's and entertainment magazines, with circulations in the hundreds of thousands, paid writers twenty to thirty yen per page.)[17]Kaizo editor Yokozeki Aizo recalls that "Kura no naka" (1919), for example, earned its author Uno Koji instant recognition and numerous solicitations from literary magazines but no appreciable change in living arrangements. Uno shared his quarters with another writer and usually had only enough money to buy a one- or two-day supply of rice at a time.[18] No early Taisho-period writer—not even the likes of Soseki or
[15] NKBD 4:476d.
[16] Tayama Katai et al., "Shincho gappyokai," 59.
[17] "Bungei zasshi no koto," in Bundan zuihitsu , 112.
[18] Watakushi no zakki cho , 8-9.
Toson—could afford his own home, aside from certain independently wealthy "Mita School" and "Shirakaba School" writers, who inherited theirs. (Tayama Katai, a rare exception, managed to build a small house in the suburbs in late Meiji.) Writing, even full-time writing, was not a money-making proposition. Since most writers had little to live on, they commonly took advances, and it was the policy of most literary magazines to offer them freely in order to encourage—or prod—writers into producing manuscripts.[19]
Nor could most writers count on book royalties to supplement their income by any substantial amount. A first printing often numbered in the mere hundreds of copies, and a famous author did well to sell at the very most one or two thousand copies in this period. Even Soseki's books sold only a few thousand copies in their initial years of printing.[20]
The best way to grasp the scale of the bookselling business in late-Meiji and Taisho Japan is to review the admittedly scanty data on sales of that period's most popular works. Hakai (1906), which catapulted Shimazaki Toson (then known only as a poet) into the ranks of leading fiction writers, met with extraordinary success. The first private printing of fifteen hundred copies sold out almost immediately, and within a year ten thousand copies had been sold. This not-enormous figure was virtually unprecedented for its time. We have already noted the sensation that Tayama Katai's Futon created. When it first appeared in book form (in a collection of Katai's stories entitled Katai shu , 1908), it went through seven printings in six months, which seems remarkable until one realizes that each printing after the first most likely numbered only in the hundreds.[21]
The data on Natsume Soseki's books are of considerable interest, because they bring home to us the limits of success that one could expect as a writer in the early to mid-Taisho period. Soseki was far
[19] Ibid. See also Nakamura Murao, Meiji Taisho no bungakusha , 47-48 and passim, for useful information on the bundan .
[20] Nakamura Mitsuo, "Taisho bungaku no seikaku," in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshu 7:503.
[21] The figures on printings are gleaned from Senurea Shigeki, Hon no hyaku hen shi , 123-28. Hototogisu (1898-99), the most widely read book of the Meiji period, sold just nine thousand copies in its first year but eventually sold a half-million copies over a twenty-five-year period. Konjiki yasha (1897-1903) also sold extremely well, but Senuma offers no concrete figures. See ibid., 77-84.
and away the most popular writer of his time; yet his books hardly made him a wealthy man. Matsuoka Yuzuru (1891-1969), Soseki's son-in-law and an author in his own right, compiled figures on most of Soseki's books and surmises that sales of all books during Soseki's own lifetime (from the publication of Wagahai wa neko de aru in 1905 to his death in 1916) totaled perhaps one hundred thousand copies, or roughly ten thousand a year, and that sales of his four most popular works—Neko, Botchan (1906), Kusamakura (1906), and Gubijinso (1908)—accounted for fully half the total.[22] The first printings of books for which reliable figures are available generally numbered only two to three thousand, and later printings only a few hundred. Sales did not pick up substantially until the appearance of popular editions late in the author's life; then they rose dramatically with his death.
Soseki could command higher royalties than most: 15 percent for the first printing (after the first 130 copies), 20 percent for the second through fifth printings and 30 percent thereafter. These terms, gleaned from a contract drawn up by Shun'yodo, Soseki's principal publisher, apply specifically to Uzurakago (1906), Soseki's second through fifth printings, and 30 percent thereafter. These terms, gleaned from a contract drawn up by Shun'yodo, Soseki's apparently good enough to arouse the jealousy of other writers. Nagata Mikihiko (1887-1964) recalls that Chikamatsu Shuko became infuriated when he learned that Soseki's share reached 31 percent. "I don't care how famous he is," he complained to Nagata, "that's highway robbery!"[24]
And yet, although the royalties attest to Soseki's popularity, they did not bring him great wealth. His annual salary from the Asahi was three thousand yen, but his contract with the newspaper forbade him publication in other periodicals. Royalties of perhaps another two thousand yen on book sales brought his income to a total of around five thousand yen.[25] This was by no means a large sum, compared to what could be made in other professions.
[22] Soseki no inzei cho , 11. See the tables on pp. 6-17.
[23] Ibid., 24-25. Matsuoka reports that Shun'yodo eased the terms in later years, reducing the number of first-printing copies and thereby increasing the chances for further printings and higher royalty shares.
[24] Bungo no sugao , 148-49.
[25] Matsuoka, Soseki no inzei cho , 26.
It was not until the beginning of Showa and the advent of the inexpensive enpon ("one-yen book") that junbungaku writers gained some degree of affluence. The appearance of these cheap anthologies, each featuring one or more writers and costing as much as a taxi ride (entaku ), greatly increased sales, readership, and writers' revenues. Kaizosha (the publisher of Kaizo ) launched the enpon phenomenon with Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshu (1926-29), a thirty-eight-volume collection of modern Japanese literature that sold 380,000 copies, an astronomical figure for the times. Twenty-five more volumes were soon added to the set. Shun'yodo, a rival publishing house, immediately followed suit with the fifty-volume Meiji Taisho bungaku zenshu (1927-32), which sold 100,000 copies. Shinchosha extended the enpon frontier to world literature, and its thirty-eight-volume Sekai bungaku zenshu (1927-30) sold a half-million copies. In all, some two hundred collections were published in the early years of Showa alone. Enpon -based revenues may have been the single most important factor in dissipating the elitist, guild consciousness of the bundan writer and in integrating him into commercial society. Having become a much more broadly based and businesslike institution, bundan no longer had quite the same connotations in Showa Japan.[26]
Despite the growing number of books, the shishosetsu author wrote few full-length stories, and his books were usually collections of previously published short stories. Although writers in the west have generally made their reputation on book-length fiction, the serious writer's career in Japan, especially in Taisho Japan, depended absolutely on publication of short fiction in the major literary magazines.[27] The typical junbungaku writer was a short-story writer: Kasai, of course, and Shuko (although the latter's stories were frequently of novella length), as well as more famous contemporaries like Shiga and Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Even a long-winded writer like Tokuda Shusei had earned a solid reputation as a short-story writer by mid-Taisho. "In our age," one critic laments
[26] Suzuki Haruo, "Enpon to bungaku zenshu." The sales figures are derived from Senuma, Hon no hyaku nen shi , 171-79; and Yokozeki, Watakushi no zakki cho , 6.
[27] See Nakamura Mitsuo, "Bungaku zasshi to zasshi bungaku," in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshu 7:366-67. Masamune Hakucho states flatly that he could not have written fiction had the magazine format not been available to him. "Watakushi shosetsu no miryoku," in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 7:378.
in a roundtable discussion (Shincho , March 1925), "most bundan- oriented criticism, since it appears in the monthly literary magazines, passes over full-length stories in complete silence."[28] Kasai Zenzo's condescending description in Funosha (1919) of long fiction well illustrates the bundan's belief that extended prose was by definition flaccid, unwieldy, and inartistic:
I'm going to do my darnedest to be more productive. And I'm going to try my hand at long fiction, too. There is nothing wrong with this homely, horse-faced creature. It is no freak. Its features are all in the right place; they simply aren't arranged in the most becoming manner. And if people let you get away with writing it, I don't see why I too shouldn't give it a try.[29]
Long stories or short, the editors of the major literary magazines did not sit idly and wait for manuscripts to trickle in. They actively solicited material from writers, with the result that they devoted more of their energies to enforcing deadlines than to providing stylistic guidelines.[30] In addition to offering advances on fees, editors often sent writers to a hot spring or mountain retreat in the hope that an out-of-the-way setting would be more conducive to creativity than the bustling city. This strategy frequently backfired, however, especially when tried on the likes of Kasai Zenzo. In an absorbing account of numerous Taisho-period authors, Yokozeki Aizo tells how he sent Kasai to a spa in the mountains of Shinshu in May 1919 to write a story (Funosha ) for his magazine. Kasai, however, proceeded to spend not only his advance but also his entire manuscript fee and more on drink and geisha, forcing the inn to hold him hostage until Kume Masao arrived with additional funds in the form of a second advance from another publishing house. Both writers then proceeded to spend the "ransom" money
[28] The critic is Kano Sakujiro (1885-1941), and the discussion can be found in KZZ, bekkan : 432.
[29] KZZ , 1:331.
[30] Yokozeki Aizo, Kaizo's first editor, recalls that the magazine could never get enough from certain writers and was constantly pressing them for manuscripts of any sort to satisfy a devoted readership. The most sought-after junbungaku writers in the magazine's early days (which is to say the early 1920s) were Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Mushanokoji Saneatsu, and two of the writers under study here, Shiga Naoya and Kasai Zenzo. (This information was gleaned from a conversation held on 20 February 1985 with the Kasai scholar Omori Sumio, who interviewed Yokozeki before his death.)
on more drink and geisha and had to be bailed out by yet another messenger. Kasai did not return to Tokyo until September. The example may be extreme, but it was apparently not unusual.[31] One of Kasai's stories ("Furo," 1921) describes a similar situation in which the writer travels to a seaside resort on borrowed money only to spend the entire sum and more before his creative juices begin to flow.
When an author had become fairly well established, it mattered little what he wrote; and thanks to the short-fiction format, he could satisfy a schedule-conscious editor with an open-ended story or a string of impressionistic musings, the full implications of which might be accessible only to those readers who, like members of a secret society, were already quite familiar with the author's previous work. Soma Taizo (1885-1952), for example, a member of the Kiseki group along with Kasai Zenzo, Hirotsu Kazuo (1891-1968), and Tanizaki Seiji (1890-1971), could write an "open letter" to a penniless, feckless friend who (he claimed) constantly grubbed money from him, knowing that his readers would recognize Kasai as the story's model, although the content is not so specific as to be obvious to the uninitiated.[32] Pressed by editors and the ever-present deadline, the Taisho-period junbungaku writer turned regularly to his own life for material, as it seemed the most readily accessible, with the knowledge that such material would pique his readers' interest—and elicit even more solicitations (and deadlines) from his editors. This journalistic pressure frequently induced him to make "confessions" he might not otherwise have penned and sometimes to commit bizarre acts that might not otherwise have occurred to him, in his desperate search for new material.
Once an author had fashioned a particular persona, however, he could alter it only at the risk of appearing to act out of character and perhaps offending or even losing his audience. In order to make his writing "true to life," then, he had to continue acting out the role dictated by this literary self-image. Tail began wagging
[31] Omoide no sakkatachi , 83-87.
[32] Omori Sumio, "Kazai Zenzo," 156. The story is "Rinjin" (1919), first published in Bunsho kurabu . It is rather easy to tell that the model is Kasai in such stories as "Ashizumo" (1929) and "Shichigatsu niju-ni nichi no yoru" (1932) by Kamura Isota (1897-1933), although the character is identified only by initials.
dog: persona now on occasion shaped the person in real life. Some writers succumbed to the illusion that they could solve their personal difficulties on the pages of their shishosetsu , and not a few came to rely on the form for its practical function as an open forum. But here always lay the seeds of destruction. Shishosetsu writers often discovered to their dismay that the solutions they had worked out on paper came back to haunt them in real life.
Few writers could bear such self-abuse; most turned to other projects, which gave them more narrative freedom or at the very least did not jeopardize their spiritual and even physical well-being. Some diversified in order to survive: Uno Koji, Kikuchi Kan, and Kume Masao, for example, ventured early and successfully into the realm of popular fiction. Yet there were others, Shimazaki Toson and Dazai Osamu (1909-48) among the most prominent, whose failures to keep their lives even one step ahead of their writing resulted in domestic tragedy and in death. These writers succumbed to the temptation inherent in a form bound intimately with private life: that of closing the temporal gap between experience and writing.
None of the three writers under study here went to quite such extremes, but neither were they particularly successful at diversifying their writing. Chikamatsu Shuko dwelt incessantly on a very few episodes in his life and found only late in his career a diversion in historical fiction. Shiga Naoya, who did not depend on the income from his writing for a living, simply stopped writing altogether for several long stretches in his career. And Kasai Zenzo, who was by far the most dependent, both financially and psychologically, on the form, perhaps luckily had his career cut short by consumption. All three nevertheless succeeded in coming to grips with the singular treachery of writing about oneself and at their best made their lives speak with extraordinary power.
The following chapters examine how these three writers coped with the contemporary journalistic realities we have discussed, in their struggle to transform experience into art. That struggle was rendered all the more complex by a growing awareness of their medium's treacherous nature. Their success depended largely on how adeptly they extricated themselves from the quicksand of referentiality, how shrewdly they exploited the myth of sincerity, and finally how well they learned the lesson of textuality: that the pro-
duction of literary art (including shishosetsu ), its grounding in "real life" notwithstanding, entails a mediative process that challenges the one bastion of "truth" that seems inviolable—lived experience. Such realizations rarely came easily and often came under duress. We shall look for flickers—sometimes flashes—of awareness in the seams, the folds, the fissures in their texts.