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.