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:

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.