5
Harbingers (II): Katai, Homei

What struck me most [about these works] was the futility of imagination.
Tayama Katai, "Soshun"

The author does not understand others as he understands himself.... It is impossible for a writer to be purely objective, ... and by trying to be so he irresponsibly takes a position only God can take.
Iwano Homei^[*] , "Gendai shorai no shosetsuteki hasso o isshin suru boku no byosha ron"

Although the writings of Shimazaki Toson, Iwano Homei, Tokuda Shusei (1871-1943), and Tayama Katai among others can all be examined with regard to the "unmediated," experiential worldview articulated by Hogetsu's naturalist creed, it is primarily on Katai that we shall focus here; for whether or not he deserves his reputation as the shishosetsu's progenitor, his Futon (The quilt, 1907), more than any other single text, inspired a reading of the shosetsu that challenged its fictional autonomy and thereby set modern Japanese letters on a course that continues (as demonstrated by Yasuoka Shotaro's comments quoted in Chapter 1) to the present day. To be sure, this singular mode of reading did not develop spontaneously with the appearance of Katai's story. Indeed, it would have been impossible without the trend toward privatization of consciousness we noted in such writers as Tokoku, Doppo, and later, Hogetsu. Only after Futon , however, did it gain ascendancy.

It would be wrong of course to place responsibility (and with it, depending on one's critical camp, the praise or blame that accrues) for the shishosetsu's genesis on the shoulders of a single author, for to do so would be to underestimate both its significance and the

inevitability of its development. Other authors were pushing the shosetsu in the same direction as Katai was, and it is safe to say that the shishosetsu would have emerged with or without the appearance of Futon . (Later we shall review arguments that Futon was not the first "true" shishosetsu .) But the fact remains that no previous text was so thoroughly critiqued with regard to its fictionality—or lack thereof. As we shall discover, two major critical "schools"—one culminating in Nakamura Mitsuo's Fuzoku shosetsu ron (On the novel of manners, 1950), which argues that the unabashed confession in Futon began the shishosetsu tradition, and the other culminating in Hirano Ken's Geijutsu to jisseikatsu (Art and private life, 1958), which argues that Futon is a mixture of fact and fiction—both make fictionality the modern shosetsu's central issue and referentiality the touchstone of the critical act.

Katai as "Naturalist"

Futon is the story of Takenaka Tokio, a writer nearing middle age and married to a woman who is indifferent to his artistic strivings. He falls in love with Yoshiko, a young admirer whom he has taken into his home as a student, only to discover that she already has a boyfriend, Tanaka, who has abandoned his theological studies in Kyoto to be with her in Tokyo and become a writer. Shocked at the young couple's openness about their relationship and hurt that he himself is not the object of Yoshiko's affections, Tokio informs the girl's father of the affair, forcing Yoshiko to return to her home in the provinces. The story concludes with the frustrated Tokio alone upstairs in Yoshiko's now-deserted room, his face pressed against her bedding.

Nothing in its plot greatly distinguishes Futon from any number of Katai's earlier, equally lachrymose and melodramatic writings that describe the hero's infatuation with a "new breed" of young, educated woman, which shall be discussed presently. Indeed, Ka-tai, who wrote poetry and fanciful, sentimental stories for years before the publication of Futon , seemed an unlikely candidate as standard-bearer for a new movement. Of his encounter with European naturalism shortly after the turn of the century, through the writings of Maupassant, he wrote: "I felt as if I had been clubbed on the head. My beliefs were completely overturned....

I had formerly gazed only at the heavens, I wrote then in a brief essay. Of the earth I knew absolutely nothing. What a superficial idealist I was! From then on I wanted to be a child of the earth."^[1] The naturalist penchant for sordid themes and settings reveals itself as early as 1902 in a work entitled Juemon no saigo (The end of Juemon), the story of a physically deformed man whose string of arsons leads fellow villagers to lynch him; but it was not until 1904, the year after Ozaki Koyo died, and with him the authority of the Ken'yusha, that Katai issued his famous manifesto, "Rokotsu naru byosha," which combined Kosugi Tengai's critique of a gilded literature with a call for a new, unadorned style that described ordinary life.

Any intelligent person will agree that writing whose style does not match its content is less than worthless. And yet present-day stylists persist in using pretty phrases unsuitable to the ideas they express, stringing together one blatant lie after the next and calling it all "fine" and "elegant" writing. It hardly needs mentioning that the purpose of writing is communication. It is enough that the writer convey his meaning.... He should not have to agonize over how to arrange his phrases or color his words.... It is this bold, straightforward description—precisely the kind of writing stylists condemn as crude and incoherent—that I believe will become our literary world's lifeblood and moving force.... A commonplace style suits commonplace material; a blunt style suits blunt ideas. This is only natural.^[2]

Naturalism in Japan collectively depicts, with considerable depth and breadth, a world closer to the experience of the average Japanese than can be found in most previous Meiji literature; but the individual writer felt most comfortable with a style of presentation that allowed personal observation of one's immediate surroundings to speak only for itself, unanalyzed, rather than for society at large. Here is where Katai and his literary colleagues differed plainly from their French precursors, because the latter would not hesitate to generalize about the whole range of human experience. For a writer like Zola, universal truth always lay waiting to be grasped from specific circumstances and naturally propelled writing beyond the realm of personal experience. The spirit of inquiry was

[1] "Maruzen no nikai," in Tayama Katai zenshu , vol. 15, Tokyo no sanju nen , 565-66.

[2] KBHT 2:360-62.

turned outward, and observations of individual behavior were linked logically and necessarily to entire groups or classes of people: to wit, the coal miners in Germinal , the slum dwellers in L'assommoir , or the peasants in La terre , with whom the author was not even casually associated.

In one of his essays on naturalism, it is true, Zola speaks of the novelist's role as a stenographer who "forbids himself to judge or draw conclusions." Imagination no longer has a function in the novel, he claims; "Nature is all we need... we say everything: we no longer select, we do not idealize."^[3] Yet even this self-styled champion of "scientific" journalism keenly understood the role of a synthesizing narrative intelligence that readily gave the settings and characters in his best work a symbolic significance. The mines of Le Tartaret and the Paris slums fairly strain from the page, in a tropically dense language, to transcend their own time and place. "The truth," as Zola himself argues, "ascends in winged flight to the symbol."^[4] In his naturalist manifesto, "The Experimental Novel" (1880), Zola is supremely aware of fictions mediating force in representing (with a view to universalizing) the limited data of personal observation. Indeed, the "experiment" in his experimental novel sounds very much like the leaven of fiction giving prose its shape and direction. In answer to the "stupid reproach made against us naturalist writers ... that we wish to be merely photographers," Zola declares: "The idea of experiment carries with it the idea of modification. We begin certainly with true facts which are our indestructible base; but to show the mechanism of the facts, we have to produce and direct the phenomena; that is our part of invention and genius in the work."^[5] Maupassant is no more satisfied with the label of photographer. Only by transcending reality, he argues, can the writer describe it truthfully in fiction:

The realist, if he is an artist, will endeavor not to show us a commonplace photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it which shall be more complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is out of the question.... A choice

[3] "Naturalism in the Theater" (1880), in George J. Becker, ed., Documents of Modern Literary Realism , 207-9.

[4] Quoted in Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn , 327.

[5] Becker, Documents of Modern Literary Realism , 168.

must be made—and this is the first blow to the theory of "the whole truth." ...

"Truth" in such work consists in producing a complete illusion by following the common logic of facts and not by transcribing them pell-mell, as they succeed each other.

Whence I conclude that the higher order of Realists should rather call themselves Illusionists.^[6]

The notion that the writer's task was to transcend everyday life by a process of "modification" (as Zola put it) or "illusion" producing (as Maupassant put it) was precisely what Katai resisted most, conditioned as he was by a nonteleological narrative tradition, by an intellectual climate conducive to private musings, by a movement to rid the shosetsu of fabrication in order that it might take its place among the more prestigious literary forms, and perhaps by the language itself, which as we have observed so clearly privileges the narrator's consciousness in the written reportive style, whether first- or third-person. Like so many of his colleagues, Katai equated truth with the recording of events personally documented. In the wake of his success with Futon and the trilogy (Sei [Life], 1908; Tsuma [The wife], 1908-9; En [The bond], 1910) that followed, Ka-tai carried his views to their logical extreme. He took Ozaki Koyo posthumously to task for instructing his disciples to "write nothing that seems unnatural, even if it really happened, and write only about things that seem natural, even if they never really took place," and he turned the exhortation around: "Write about what really happened, even if it seems unnatural—precisely because it did happen. Write nothing that did not actually take place, however natural it may seem."^[7] Gone were the days, he was to write later, when one "read a novel as a novel"; the author who wrote only the "truth"—that is, what had actually happened to him or to those he knew—had no use for "fictionalization." Even the names of people one wrote about were better left unchanged.^[8] The author's preoccupation with demonstrable "fact" could naturally scandalize his models. But art had no ethics, Katai insisted. It was simply the "duplication of phenomena" (gensho no saigen ), and the artist was

[6] From the preface to Pierre et Jean (1888), trans. Clara Dell. Quoted in Philip Stevick, The Theory of the Novel , 397-98.

[7] Katai bunwa (1911), in Tayama Katai zenshu 15:180.

[8] Kindai no shosetsu (1923), in ibid. 17:309-10.

not to blame for revealing embarrassing truths, whether about himself or those he knew. A writer had but one task: to record his own experience faithfully.^[9] At issue was authenticity, not morality. The only artistic sin was fabrication. Reviewing a crop of contemporary stories, Katai wrote:

What struck me most was the futility of imagination. None of the stories spun from fantasy have any authority or any power to move the reader. Whenever I came across a fine passage in one of them, I had no difficulty surmising that here the author was not writing from imagination at all.... The ability to write the truth untainted by fabrication, no matter how slight—or should I say, to achieve a state of mind in which it becomes possible to write in such a way—this is the source from which a new literary spring shall well.^[10]

Katai did not and probably could not elaborate on what he meant by a "fine passage" or on how he could detect truth untainted by fabrication, but his clear preference for (perhaps it was a blind faith in) unmediated presentation over mediated representation reflected the prevailing view of his time.

Thus, as is the case with so many "influences," naturalism taught Katai only what he wanted to hear. It advocated the recording of "truth": what could be truer than the events and feelings one had witnessed and experienced oneself? It rejected narrative contrivance: what could be more "natural" than one's own life, plainly described? If "nature" was synonymous with personal experience (as he argued in an early essay),^[11] it followed that the writer's task was to observe himself. Writing, then, was an experiment in self-portraiture, and the author became his own hero.

Perhaps the most important fact concerning Katai's articulation of the relationship between Fife and art is the sheer number of writers who agreed with him. Katai, it turns out, spoke for a good many who professed to be his critics; despite the opposition to naturalism by other writers, the movement away from universalizing fictions to particularized reflections was a trait common to all: naturalist and antinaturalist, aesthetic and decadent, proletarian and neo-perceptionist. Satomi Ton (1888-1983), a major writer in

[9] Katai bunwa, in ibid. 15:184—85.

[10] "Takujogo" (c. 1911), in ibid. 15:335-36.

[11] "Sakusha no shukan" (1901). See Wada Kingo, "Kaisetsu," in Wada Kingo and Soma Tsuneo, eds., Tayama Katai shu , 29.

the Shirakaba school, which is commonly said to have arisen in reaction to the naturalist movement, notes just how little the various coterie labels have to do with styles of writing.

If one mentions the word "Shirakaba" people soon start on about its "confrontation" with naturalism, and one can't say that there wasn't one, but our differences with the naturalists arose mostly from questions of upbringing. We were aristocrats, whereas "naturalism" meant to us that crowd cooped up in lodgings around Waseda University; and being young, there didn't seem much chance of our getting along with them. But as far as literature was concerned I don't actually recall any real criticism as such being made.^[12]

Satomi rightly stresses that the distinction made between these groups of writers, naturalist and otherwise, is one of pedigree rather than literary predilection. Although critics could point with some justification to the naturalists' preoccupation with life's darker, seamier side, the naturalist label was more a value judgment than a literary one and came to stand for boorish provincialism in the eyes of the urbane natives of Tokyo.

Futon as Autobiography

Futon is by no means modern Japanese literature's first roman à clef. Mori Ogai's "Maihime" (1889), a story told in the first person about a Japanese student who loves and then leaves a German girl in Berlin, is based on the author's experience in Germany, although it differs somewhat from actual events.^[13] It was common knowledge that the protagonists in the Meiji period's two most popular books, Konjiki yasha (1897-1902) and Hototogisu (1898-99), had real-life models. But as Kimura Ki notes in his memoirs, no scandals resulted because no harm was done.^[14]

All that changed with the rise of naturalism. What distinguishes this body of writing from previous writings is not simply the high autobiographical content but also the portrayal of characters in a distinctly unfavorable light. Shimazaki Toson in particular found

[12] Nakano Yoshio, ed., Gendai no sakka 58-59. Quoted with slight modification from Dennis Keene's translation in Yokomitsu Riichi , 18.

[13] For a discussion of "Maihime," see Richard John Bowring, Mori Ogai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture , 47-55.

[14] Watakushi no bungaku kaiko roku , 101-2.

himself the target of criticism. The publication of one of his early stories was stopped by Yamaji Aizan, who notified the Ministry of Home Affairs that it treated the widow of Aizan's mentor, one Kimura Kumaji, with disrespect.^[15] "Namiki" (1907) caused a furor because of the uncomplimentary portraits of Toson's colleagues Baba Kocho and Togawa Shukotsu. Suisai gaka (1904), the story of an artist who discovers that his wife harbors a lingering affection for the man she loved before she married, was based on the author's own life. Toson used as his model, however, another couple, a painter and his wife, who promptly brought suit against him. This same story reappeared as an episode in a later text, Ie (1910-11), which describes Toson's early married life.^[16]

Shinsei (The new life), which chronicles Toson's affair with his niece Komako, caused the greatest scandal of all when it appeared in the pages of the Asahi newspaper from 1918 to 1919. Although a somewhat later work, it deserves mention here, for it shows the direction that the confessional element in Japanese naturalism was inevitably to take. Toson began writing long before he knew the outcome of the affair, in hope of ending it once and for all and severing relations (and their incumbent financial obligations) with his brother (Komako's father). The hero, who has recently lost his wife, becomes intimate with a niece who assists in the care of his children. He then abandons the pregnant niece and exiles himself to France, intending to abort the affair before it becomes public knowledge, only to continue it on his return to Japan two years later.

This much Toson himself knew when he first picked up his pen. He could not have known however what his story held in store for the rest of his life. He (and consequently his hero) finally decided to reveal the affair in the form of a newspaper serial, which resulted in his (and his hero's) being disowned by his brother and in his niece's hasty removal to Taiwan, then a Japanese colony, in disgrace. The ramifications of this scenario are unsettling, to say the least. Shinsei records not simply the affair itself but also its trans-

[15] Ibid.

[16] Toson did have his supporters. Kunikida Doppo argued that models from real life took on an existence of their own when they appeared in a work of art and that a painter, of all people, should have realized that fact. Recalled in Tayama Katai, Kindai no shosetsu , in Tayama Katai zenshu 17:313.

ferral from the private to public domain. In other words, the text's very appearance generated a new crisis in Toson's life, which Toson proceeded to record in Shinsei and which generated further crises, and so on, ad infinitum. Referentiality was turned on its head: even as "real-life" events changed the shosetsu's course, the shosetsu just as easily altered the course of "real life." It was one thing to write about a past affair; it was quite another to write about an affair in progress and in such a way that the progress report itself played a role in the outcome as great as, or greater than, the feelings of the participants. (This point will be brought home in our examination of a cycle of stories by Shiga Naoya in Chapter 8.)

Needless to say, Shinsei caused a sensation and gave Toson's sagging career a tremendous boost. Akutagawa Ryunosuke wrote, not without justification, that he had never before encountered so crafty a hypocrite as the hero of Shinsei .^[17] Komako, recalling much later the scandal that her uncle's writing had caused, said essentially the same thing, although in understandably more deferential terms.

I am afraid that I read [Shinsei ] merely as an apology by a man trying lamely to philosophize.... It tells the truth so far as it goes, yet leaves out episodes that could have incriminated its author.... Shinsei is a landmark in the author's growth as a thinker and as an artist, but for me it was only an ordeal, an unbearable photograph that, when exposed to public view, made it impossible for me to live the life of an ordinary woman.^[18]

As confession, Futon may have been surpassed by later examples, but in no previous writing is there such a clear correspondence in every detail between the text and the life. Like Tokio, Katai was a writer who had to make ends meet with a dull editorial job. Like Tokio, Katai had an uneducated wife and three children. Like Tokio, Katai took in a young female admirer who, after living for a month at his home, moved to his sister-in-law's house and enrolled at a nearby woman's school in Kojimachi Ward—and so on. The psychological parallels between hero and author are, of course,

[17] "Aru aho no issho," in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu 9:334.

[18] Hasegawa Komako, "Higeki no jiden," part 1, p. 285. For a more sanguine and artistic appraisal of Shinsei , see Janet A. Walker, The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism , esp. 239-43 and 269-82.

more problematic. The author himself suggests that they are indeed close in his memoir, Tokyo no sanju nen (My thirty years in Tokyo), published in 1917, ten years after Futon . In the chapter entitled "My Anna Mahr,"^[19] Katai claims that he wrote Futon knowing that it would destroy any potentially intimate rapport with his student yet hoping that it would establish his reputation as a major writer. "My Anna Mahr was at her parents' home in the provinces," he reminisces. "I had visited her there while traveling during the previous autumn, and her memory now was even more sharply etched in my mind. Should I write about her and abandon all hope for love? Or should I refrain from writing and await the chance for it to blossom?"^[20]

From the outset, critics dwelt on the text's lack of authorial distance,^[21] but in doing so lent it an air of notoriety that insured its popular success. Even ridicule was good publicity, and Katai soon capitalized on it, writing in quick succession a trilogy (Sei, Tsuma , and En ) based entirely on his domestic life. Other writers soon followed with accounts of their lives: Shimazaki Toson with Haru (Spring, 1908), Iwano Homei with Tandeki (Decadence, 1909), Chikamatsu Shuko with Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami (A letter to my estranged wife, 1910), and Tokuda Shusei with Kabi (Mildew, 1911). Masamune Hakucho argues that Katai's success in exploiting his private life was interpreted by other writers as a green light for self-exposé, a course that would not have occurred to them had Futon not met with such critical acclaim and notoriety.^[22]

This observation is no doubt true as far as it goes, but it is useful here to note the comments of Chikamatsu Shuko, who questioned,

[19] "Watakushi no Anna Maru." The title alludes to the principal female character in Gerhart Hauptmann's drama Einsame Menschen (Lonely lives, 1891), which is mentioned several times in Futon . See below.

[20] Tayama Katai zenshu 15:602. Katai recalls the response to Futon (owing to its apparently confessional nature, which he never denies) in a later essay entitled “Futon o kaita koro" (1925), in which he writes: "Critics made a terrific fuss when Futon first appeared. People sitting next to me at work shot furtive glances in my direction. One person sent me a letter announcing that he was breaking all ties with me" (quoted in Iwanaga Yutaka, Shizenshugi bungaku ni okeru kyoko no kanosei , 116).

[21] The view of Katagami Tengen (1884-1928), a naturalist critic, is typical: "The author seems unable to write except in a way that suggests a personal involvement in his material. He lacks objectivity and is incapable of universalizing his predicament. He attempts to observe himself, but with his face flush against the mirror" (KBHT 3:423). Tengen's review is one of several included in a survey of contemporary opinion under the title of “Futon gappyo," originally appearing in Waseda bungaku , Oct. 1907, the month following the publication of Futon . See KBHT 3:417-32.

[22] "Tayama Katai ron" (1932), in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 6:295.

at a time when critical consciousness of the shishosetsu was just emerging, what most believed to be the overriding influence of Futon in that form's development. Shuko tells us that it was not Katai's text but Futabatei Shimei's Heibon (Mediocrity, 1907), a brilliantly humorous meditation on mundane existence first serialized scarcely a month after Futon appeared, which inspired his own notoriously confessional Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami . He argues that Heibon's peerless colloquial style and first-person narration had an enormous influence on him and other writers and that Futabatei, not Katai, should be credited with originating Japanese naturalism and by extension the shishosetsu . Shuko had been a great admirer of writers like Ozaki Koyo and Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-96) and their mastery of the classical idiom, but Heibon awoke him to the vernacular's power as a literary instrument, and he determined to exploit Futabatei's style in his own fiction.^[23] This essay is of interest not simply because it challenges the established view of Futon as the shishosetsu's true precursor but because it downplays the role of confession. Autobiography is really not at issue, Shuko suggests. Futon's confessional content no doubt inspired writers like Shuko, despite his disclaimer; but Heibon provided them with the modus operandi to convey that content with the greatest impact.

But to return to Futon . Despite the many obvious parallels between the text and the life, it is by no means certain that the text transcribes the life with complete fidelity. What is significant for Japanese literature, however, is that both Katai's critics, who see no attempt at fictionalization, and his defenders, who do, have justified their positions with referential readings of the text that rely more or less completely on extratextual evidence. We shall benefit from an examination of both positions, since taken together they set the tenor of critical perceptions concerning not just Futon and the shishosetsu but modern Japanese literature as a whole.

Nakamura Mitsuo's views are representative of the former position. Nakamura sees in Futon the first clear breakdown in modern Japanese literature of the fictional contract, which resulted in a form rooted in imaginative bankruptcy. He lays the "blame" for the shishosetsu's inception squarely on Katai in a number of strident essays, most notably Fuzoku shosetsu ron , and argues that the form

[23] “Wakareta tsuma o kaita jidai no bungakuteki haikei," 15-18.

has never created life but only plagiarized it. "To reveal the secrets of one's personal life must indeed have required a certain courage," he remarks wryly of Katai and his imitators. "But they had the audacity to believe that simply by describing their personal experience they could automatically move their readers. They wrote of their private miseries without thinking to analyze or objectify them.... I do not doubt that literature is the art of portraying the writer's feelings to the reader. But only the shishosetsu is founded on the naive belief that so vulgar a portrayal would have any reader appeal."^[24] Nakamura subscribes to a kind of devil theory of literature in which the appearance of Katai's text single-handedly changed the course of Japanese naturalism at its headwater, transforming it from a promising stream of realistic fiction modeled after the classical European novel (as exemplified by Toson's Hakai ) into a wayward torrent of confessional autobiography. "A duel of sorts was fought between Hakai and Futon ," Nakamura concludes, "and in terms of influence wrought on literary contemporaries, Futon emerged the overwhelming victor.... Today it has reached the point where Hakai is itself judged in terms of literary standards established by Futon ."^[25]

Hirano Ken's views are representative of the latter position. According to Hirano, Futon is clearly a fictional text. But because it had aroused such a clamorous response, he argues, Katai later began thinking of it in purely autobiographical terms and thereby deceived even himself (into contemplating, for example, how his writing would affect the relationship with his "Anna Mahr" in Tokyo no sanju nen ), not to mention his readers, about its true character. Hirano examines Katai's relationship with the people on whom he modeled his characters—his wife, Okada Michiyo (the model for Yoshiko), Michiyo's parents, and Nagayo Shizuo (the model for Tanaka)—and argues on the basis of numerous documents that Katai consciously distorted the psychology of his teacher-pupil relationship with Okada Michiyo (while faithfully recording all its superficial aspects) and that the parties directly involved (namely, Katai's wife, Okada, and her parents) condoned

[24] "Watakushi shosetsu ni tsuite" (1935), in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshu 7:121-22.

[25] Fuzoku shosetsu ron , 29. Nakamura goes on to cite Satomi Ton, whose critique of Hakai written in 1948 parallels Katai's own, written twenty-five years earlier.

his creative license. He stresses that the association between Katai and Okada as teacher and pupil continued unbroken and with the blessings of Katai's wife and Okada's parents even after the story's publication. The only rational conclusion to be drawn, he reasons, is that the amorous innuendos in Futon have no grounding in reality. He goes on to cite an article published by Okada in 1915 stating that although the innuendos in Futon disturbed her, Katai's own morals were impeccable and that his portrayal of a jealous teacher lusting furtively after his pupil was a complete fabrication. Hirano concludes that the models in question could never have misconstrued Futon as a confession of adultery, even though many readers have.^[26]

In effect, both critics argue their positions using the same referential touchstone. The former condemns Katai for "copying" life, while the latter defends him for "fictionalizing" it. Nakamura and Hirano are not alone in making referential readings, however; the principals themselves do the same. We have noted Katai's allusion in Tokyo no sanju nen to his quandary over whether to conceal the "truth" about his feelings for his pupil or to unburden himself of it. Okada Michiyo, meanwhile, chides Katai for writing a fairy tale at her expense and doubts that she is in fact the model for Yoshiko. She accuses him of exercising "poetic license" in a manner calculated to scandalize all his models, when it was his task as a self-proclaimed naturalist to record experience as accurately as possible. She argues that Katai's motive for this distortion was to slander Nagayo and charges that Katai's defamatory characterization ruined Nagayo's fledgling literary career. Katai depicted Nagayo as a weasel while painting her in the most flattering manner imaginable; his reputation as a naturalist was so firmly established that readers (including, we are perhaps to assume, Nagayo's prospective contacts in the publishing world) were deceived by his gross misconstrual.^[27] These accusations are of special interest because they reveal the treachery of a literature that claims to deal only in "facts" and appeals to critics on a purely referential level.

[26] Geijutsu to jisseikatsu , 88-89. The article Hirano cites is entitled “Futon, En , oyobi watakushi" and originally appeared in the Sept. 1915 issue of Shincho under the name Nagayo Michiyo, since Okada had become the wife of Nagayo Shizuo ("Tanaka" in Futon ).

[27] “Futon, En , oyobi watakushi," 266.

Okada is saying in effect that Katai, after having primed a gullible reading public over the years with platitudes about naturalism's mission to document personal experience, duped it into believing that he was writing the sordid truth, resulting in brisk sales for the author and embarrassment for his acquaintances.

Okada's interpretation lends support to Hirano's position that Futon is indeed a fictional account and not merely, as Nakamura would have it, a "plagiarism" of life. But it brings us no closer to an understanding of the work. By establishing her own experience as the criterion for judgment, Okada merely traded one literalist point of reference for another and quite naturally overlooked any artistic intent behind Katai's "distortions" of experience. Her interpretation does not take into account, for example, why Katai himself, in his incarnation as Tokio, emerges as the most pathetic of all the characters. Futon has two comic scenes in which Tokio, drowning his frustrations in drink, collapses first by his toilet and later in the muddy precincts of a Shinto shrine while on his way to visit Yoshiko. The irony is driven home when we see Tokio, who is busily comparing himself to numerous heroes in western literature, viewed through the eyes of other characters (his wife at the toilet, a passerby at the shrine): this would-be hero of his own romance, this master of the house and godlike (to Yoshiko) mentor, has fallen as low as he can fall. Okada's interpretation also fails to explain why Katai did not see fit to include, as an episode in Futon , his departure for the front as a correspondent covering the Russo-Japanese War, which had just broken out—why he makes it look as if domestic jealousies, rather than professional necessity, were the sole reason for Yoshiko/Okada's removal from Tokio/Katai's home after just one month.^[28] (This discrepancy of course does not disprove that domestic jealousies were in fact the "real" reason for Yoshiko's/Okada's removal but merely suggests that even a referential interpretation cannot accommodate all the "facts" surrounding such an incident.) It fails, moreover, to explain why Katai consistently depicted Tokio as a jealous spoiler destined to lose his happy if platonic relationship with Yoshiko by tattling on her to her parents and forcing her return to the country; for we know on the

[28] Katai left for China in March 1904, the same month that Okada left his home for his sister-in-law's residence, which was nearer Okada's school.

strength of more than a dozen letters written by Katai to Okada's parents that he was actually the young couple's most ardent supporter.^[29] Finally, it fails to explain why Katai so idealizes his heroine—a gesture that troubles even Okada herself.

Why indeed did Katai offer these "distorted" portraits, presenting his heroine in such a complimentary light and himself in such an uncomplimentary one? Clearly, the author's biography cannot provide the whole answer. Katai was doubtlessly guided by personal experience in writing Futon . But the question we must always ask is why he (or any author) wrote about one particular experience rather than another, and it is here that our knowledge of the author's life proves surprisingly unhelpful. We must turn instead to other texts and take note of the sensibility that pervades Katai's entire oeuvre. One of the trademarks of a Katai story is the presence of a blatantly sentimental hero of the narcissistic, brooding sort that one would expect to find in writings of a more romantic than naturalist cast. Futon , which along with Shimazaki Toson's Hakai is said to have ushered Japanese letters into the naturalist era, is no exception. Katai's shift of emphasis to what was "natural" (i.e., the realm of private life) as the only legitimate subject matter did not alter his predominantly romantic sensibility. What is significant is not that Futon is based so heavily on personal experience but that it conforms so closely to the same motif of forbidden love that informs his earlier, pre-"autobiographical" and pre-"naturalist" writings. Most critics, preoccupied with Futon as confession and unconcerned with how it fits into the context of Katai's oeuvre, have virtually overlooked that motif. In numerous Katai stories, a man beset with middle-age angst and disillusioned with domestic life yearns for a romantic attachment. Yoshiko is yet another incarnation of Katai's feminine ideal: a woman who is at once intellectually stimulating, emotionally supportive, and sexually attractive.

Katai himself hints at his heroine's ideal qualities when he refers to Yoshiko/Okada Michiyo as "my Anna Mahr" in his memoir

[29] "Katai Futon no moderu o meguru tegami," in Yoshida Seiichi, ed. Toson , Katai , 317-35. The letters were originally published in Chuokoron , June 1939, nine years after Katai's death. In them, Katai praises Okada for her conscientiousness and Nagayo for his intelligence and urges Okada's parents even after her return home that her marriage with Nagayo would be the happiest and most expedient solution.

Tokyo no sanju hen . Anna Mahr is the principal female character in Gerhart Hauptmann's drama Lonely Lives , to which Futon frequently alludes. Katai's text finds some of its inspiration in this drama of an intellectually and spiritually troubled man who gains no solace in family life or religion and who seeks understanding and companionship, in the face of his wife's and parents' obvious distress, from a young woman who rooms in his home. Here, too, is a story of forbidden love doomed to an unhappy end. Katai was not interested in all aspects of Hauptmann's play, however. Lonely Lives concerns the conflict between science and religion, and the struggle for values by a hero who rebels against the old morality yet is unable to construct a viable new code of personal ethics. Futon has no such intellectual pretensions, nor does it concern itself with the theme of existential loneliness that so pervasively informs Lonely Lives ; it focuses solely on the hero's infatuation with his student and on his efforts to save face when his love is not reciprocated. But even though Katai's emphasis may differ from Hauptmann's, his allusions to Lonely Lives themselves clearly bespeak a broader engagement than simply with personal experience and belie his own suggestion, cited above in Tokyo no sanju nen ("Should I write about her and abandon all hope for love?"), that he merely intended to document an incident in his life. Despite his theoretical insistence on the privileged status of lived experience, then, Katai's allusions to other literary texts can only be described as a conscious attempt to mediate that experience.

The Katai scholar Tosa Toru notes that Zola's Thérèse Raquin may well have been the inspiration for the notorious conclusion in Futon , in which the hero buries his face in his beloved's quilt. In chapter 9, Thérèse has just left Laurent: "He lay sprawling on his bed, sweating, flat on his stomach with his greasy face buried in the pillow where Thérèse's hair had been. He took the linen between his parched lips and inhaled its faint perfume, and there he remained, breathless and gasping."^[30] This passage bears more than a passing resemblance to the final scene in Futon : "Tokio drew [the bedding] out. The familiar smell of a woman's oil and sweat excited him beyond words. The velvet edging of the quilt was noticeably dirty, and Tokio pressed his face to it ... He spread out the mat-

[30] Thérèse Raquin , trans. L. W. Tancock, 82.

tress, lay the quilt out on it, and wept as he buried his face against the cold, stained, velvet edging."^[31] Tosa argues convincingly that the direct and copious tribute that Katai pays in Futon to such authors as Hauptmann, Turgenev, and Sudermann is mere window dressing and that Katai is curiously silent about his work's most critical literary source. He goes on to suggest that this calculated suppression led readers to believe that any of the hero's thoughts or actions not "footnoted" in other literary texts were to be interpreted as the author's own experience.^[32]

More important than any of these literary antecedents, however, are those in Katai's own oeuvre, most notably Onna kyoshi (The woman schoolteacher, 1903), published more than four years before Futon and more than a year before Katai had made the acquaintance of Okada Michiyo. An episode in Futon alludes to the earlier work and foreshadows the hero's abortive relationship with Yoshiko. Tokio, disillusioned with the wife he once loved and yearning for a more satisfactory mate, carries on a fantasy tryst with a beautiful young schoolteacher whom he sees occasionally on the way to his office.^[33]Onna kyoshi is an elaborate treatment of that fantasy. It is the story of a writer whose pastoral life and connubial bliss are shattered by the passion he develops for a young schoolteacher named Kuniko, who is not only beautiful and personable but also intellectually supportive in a way that his wife cannot be.

In general outline, Futon and Onna kyoshi are quite similar. In both, the hero is a married man nearing middle age who fears the prospect of an intellectually and emotionally bankrupt life^[34] and seeks rejuvenation by contact with a young educated woman, an avid admirer who has requested his tutorial guidance. But the simi-

[31] The Quilt and Other Stories by Tayama Katai , trans. Kenneth G. Henshall, 96.

[32] "Futon no nioi," see esp. 119.

[33] Tayama Katai zenshu 1 :525-26.

[34] Katai actually uses the English phrase "lonely life" in Onna kyoshi , in what appears to be a reference to Hauptmann's play. Katai very likely had made his acquaintance with the play by this time through the English translation, which was first published in 1898. (The first Japanese translation was not made until 1922.) Shimazaki Toson wrote a letter to Katai in 1901 thanking him for lending his copy of "Kodoku shogai"—Toson's rendition, apparently, of the English title Lonely Lives (Toson zenshu 17:60). See the discussion in Ogata Akiko, “Futon zen'ya," 46. Katai wrote a critical essay on one of Hauptmann's plays (Die versunkene Glocke ) as early as 1903. See NKBD 4:362c.

larity does not stop there. The heroines have the same outgoing personalities and physical attributes; they are both described as fair-skinned with expressive features and as keepers of tidy rooms lined with books. Certain scenes and descriptive passages in the two works, moreover, are nearly identical. In both works the hero visits the heroine on a moonlit spring evening, notes the beauty of her makeup, and leaves her very late at night having barely controlled his emotions, she accompanying him partway home. In both the hero is about to dash off to see his beloved only to be detained by his wife, who suspects mischief. In both the hero imagines to himself that his pregnant wife dies in childbirth and leaves him free to pursue his forbidden love. (In Onna kyoshi , the wife actually does die, but too late for the hero to consummate his relationship with Kuniko.) In both, the hero lectures the young woman on literature, love, and feminism. And in both he presides over her departure at the end to distant lands (Yoshiko to her parents' home in western Japan, Kuniko to Taiwan), resigning their parting of ways to "fate." In short, not just in theme and overall tone but in the construction of scenes as well, the two works resemble each other strikingly.

These observations are hard to reconcile with Katai's own pronouncement on the composing of Futon : "I merely attempted to write down faithfully what I saw and heard and thought."^[35] If Futon is indeed completely true to life, as it is widely presumed to be, with every character based on a recognizable model, while Onna kyoshi is purely imaginative, then it is certainly curious that the heroine in Futon should so closely resemble—in appearance, personality, speech, and gesture—the "fabricated" heroine in Onna kyoshi . We are witnesses either to a remarkable coincidence between "fact" and "fantasy" or, far more likely, to rather impressive evidence that Katai modeled Yoshiko as much on his own personal feminine ideal as on the young female student he took into his home one spring day in 1904. Private life, it turns out, does not have the only say in Katai's text. Rather, the vectors of experience and imagination intersect on the author's thematic graph of forbidden love.^[36]

[35] "shosetsu saho," quoted in Hashimoto Yoshi, “Futon ni kansuru memo," 66. The discussion of the similarities between Onna kyoshi and Futon is indebted to this article.

[36] See Ogata Akiko, "Futon zen'ya," for yet other examples of texts featuring Katai's feminine ideal written in the years before Futon . In tracing the "transformation" of Katai's sentimental romanticism to naturalistic realism, Ogata notes the unchanging pattern of supportive, intellectually stimulating, "modern" female characters in Katai's writings.

It is of course hardly unusual for an author to treat the same theme more than once—or even with a repetitive obsession (as we shall witness especially in the works of Chikamatsu Shuko, in Part 3). Katai does vary his approach the second time around, however. Having already developed the theme of forbidden love as fully as he was able in Onna kyoshi , he burlesques it in his remake from "real life." That Katai is capable of poking fun at his hero, and himself, is evident in the short story "Shojo byo" (1907), which both recalls Onna kyoshi and anticipates Futon . "Shojo byo" is the story of a man approaching middle age whose continual gawking at schoolgirls riding on the train he takes to and from work causes him one day to fall absentmindedly right off the train to his death. In appearance (he is a very large, "animallike" man), circumstances (he works for a publishing firm), and family life (he lives with his wife and small children in Tokyo's Yoyogi district), the hero closely resembles the author. Like Katai, the hero is the literary world's laughingstock as the writer of saccharine love stories that are popular only with young female readers. Like Katai, he languishes at a boring editorial job.

In "Shojo byo," Katai carries self-parody to its comic extreme: the hero's literary pursuit of the ideal woman brings him only reproaches from his peers; and his pursuit in real life, a preposterous death. The parody in Futon is more tentative than in "Shojo byo,"^[37] but its melodramatic scenes retain a comic tone. The narrator indulges his hero mightily, to be sure, but manages an occasional wink at him as well—as in the toilet and shrine scenes. Whereas the hero in Onna kyoshi appeals to lofty sentiments in justifying his love for the young schoolteacher, Tokio is preoccupied with his lust. Whereas the hero in Onna kyoshi loses ultimately to propriety, in the form of the schoolteacher's saintly concern for his wife, Tokio loses to the prurient desires of the former theology student, Tanaka. The latter work's frenzied tone, moreover, recalls nothing so much as an Edo-period joruri . Indeed, Futon smacks of a Chika-

[37] It is not so tentative, however, as to warrant the opinion of Nakamura Mitsuo, who writes, in an unfavorable comparison with Goethe's Werther and Constant's Adolphe , that Futon distinguishes itself only by its complete lack of authorial distance (Fuzoku shosetsu ron , 44).

matsu domestic play, with its thematic linchpin of giri-ninjo , in which the protagonist agonizes interminably over whether to follow the dictates of social and/or familial obligation or of personal sentiment—except that Katai's farce is an inversion. Here the hero ends up following the dictates of social obligation (as Yoshiko's protector and mentor, in deference to Yoshiko's parents) instead of sentiment (as her potential lover) as is the case in a Chikamatsu play. To the last, Tokio struggles gallantly but awkwardly to save appearances. After turning Yoshiko over to her parents, he can only fling himself on his beloved's old quilt in a spasm of secret self-pity.

Thus, despite arguments to the contrary, Futon does not distinguish itself by its portrayal of individualistic consciousness. An indulgent narrator charts a course for his hero that leads paradoxically to the repression, rather than the affirmation, of self. The elusive kindai jiga is nowhere to be found. Having squelched personal desire, Tokio ends up supporting the social order (by opting for his role as guardian over the one as lover) and thus insures his estrangement from Yoshiko. The scenes in which Tokio asserts himself even tentatively end significantly in parody, as if to nip that assertion in the bud. Tokio's most aggressive form of behavior is drunkenness, a socially safe form of self-expression that predictably leads him no closer to his secret love than the toilet or the muddy shrine grounds. He asserts himself only through repressive acts. In this sense, at least, his vain, furtive shedding of tears into Yoshiko's quilt after the final separation is a fitting conclusion to a tale of sublimation.

The aesthetic or ideological failings of Futon by no means her-aided an inauspicious beginning for the shishosetsu , because literary excellence was not the primary criterion for judgment. The story brought to itself an unprecedented degree of critical attention (it was the subject in just the first month after publication of no fewer than thirteen reviews in two major literary magazines), most of which catalogued, with various degrees of outrage, the correspondences between literature and private life. Far greater than its importance as a literary text, then, was Futon's role as catalyst; and it is here that its influence far exceeded that of Heibon , which Chikamatsu Shuko shrewdly and perhaps correctly labeled the shishosetsu's true precursor. In an age preoccupied with cultural privatiza-

tion and with a literature that privileged "philosophy" over style, Futon helped spawn a critical method that evaluated a text by how "faithfully" it depicted its author's life. In this sense, Futon is indeed the prototypical shishosetsu and the shishosetsu a distinct form, not because of any truly distinguishing characteristics but because readers attuned to the new literature, insisting on the referentiality of literary art, made the accurate description of the author's personal experience the supreme standard in their evaluations.

Katai and Homei: "Surface" Versus "Single-Dimensional" Description

Futon differs in one important respect from shishosetsu to follow: Katai's narrator accommodates several points of view. Although focusing primarily on Tokio, the narrator presents freely if briefly the thoughts of Yoshiko, Yoshiko's father, Tokio's wife, and even a curious neighbor. Katai never felt compelled to restrict narrative perspective to that of the protagonist. Rather than strive for a unified point of view in his later works, he moved in the other direction, with the stated goal of adopting no point of view at all. This was the substance of his famous "surface description" (heimen byosha ); and Futon , although by far his best-known work, might profitably be characterized as no more than a dry run for works like Sei and Inaka kyoshi (The country teacher, 1909), which more successfully exemplified his technique. In "Sei ni okeru kokoromi" (1908), Katai claims to follow in the footsteps of the Goncourt brothers by championing a style that allows the narrator to treat all events and characters with the same degree of studied aloofness. Katai argues that his purpose in writing Sei was to describe accurately and dispassionately what he saw and heard and to avoid all interpretation of events and characters. "By refraining from petty, subjective interpretation and from analyses of phenomena about which I had no direct understanding, and by presenting my material in unaltered [ari no mama ] form," he concludes, "I believed that my descriptions would actually come closer to the truth and would of themselves suggest the inner significance of things."^[38]

[38] KBHT 3:450. Katai's alleged debt to the Goncourt brothers should be viewed as skeptically as that to Zola. Katai was no doubt familiar with the Goncourts' various pronouncements on the novelist's role as historian, including the following: "We passed through history to arrive at the novel.... On what basis does one write history? On the basis of documents. And the documents of the novel are life" (quoted in Richard B. Grant, The Goncourt Brothers , 30-31). But Katai apparently took no note of the Goncourts' concern with style and their awareness of the mediative powers of their form, which they argued could miraculously attract the reader's interest in "a human story that we know never took place" (ibid., 114). These self-styled clinicians of truth frequently acknowledged their aesthetic motivations: "Art for Art's sake, art which proves nothing, the music of ideas, the harmony of a sentence, that is our faith and our conscience" (ibid., 16). The Goncourts, then, never aspired to the "unaltered" transcription of life any more than Zola did.

In his effort to legitimize this narrative technique, Katai had important company. Shimazaki Toson's first autobiographical text, Haru (1908), was being serialized in another newspaper at the same time as Sei . Toson, whom Edwin McClellan argues was "as responsible as any single writer could be for the prevalence of the idea in Japan that the novel need not or should not be a creation of the dramatic imagination,"^[39] also utilized in this and later writings an aloof narrator who makes little effort to probe his characters' minds. Katai was quick to recognize the similarity of their efforts and took note of Toson's achievement in “Sei ni okeru kokoromi." The same dispassionate style, carried if anything to an even greater extreme in the writings of Tokuda Shusei, prompted Natsume Soseki, for one, to describe it disparagingly as an endless stream of words with no direction, no informing idea, no life.^[40]

Katai, too, had his critics, most notably Iwano Homei, who argued that Katai's failure to invest his works with a specific point of view deprived them of meaning and interest.^[41] Homei championed what he called "single-dimensional description" (ichigen byosha ), arguing that it avoided the epistemological pitfalls of Katai's technique. "There is no life outside the self," he asserts in one of his first major critical statements, "and literature is the product of the

[39] "Toson and the Autobiographical Novel," 348.

[40] "Bundan no kono goro," in Soseki zenshu 16:723-25.

[41] Homei is an anomaly in Japanese letters. Although usually grouped with the naturalists, he was something of an outsider who relished his role as gadfly to the bundan . Like Mishima Yukio, he took as much, or more, pride in being a man of action as he did in being a man of letters. Confronted with failure at every turn in private life, from his business ventures to his relations with women, he celebrated his defeats in his writing, creating a hero who presided bellicosely over his own demise. After establishing his reputation as a fiction writer with Tandeki , which describes his liaison with a syphilitic geisha, he went on to produce a monumental, five-part account of his pursuit of wealth and love in Tokyo, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido (usually referred to as Homei gobusaku , 1910-18).

author's subjective tone or attitude.... A writer cannot hope to portray life conscientiously if he cuts himself off from his own subjectivity."^[42] It is clear from the ironic dedication to Katai of his first anthology that Homei was conscious from the beginning of his polar position vis-à-vis the author of Futon , despite (by Homei's own admission) the latter's influence.^[43] Nor was Homei alone in sensing this polarity. Major naturalist critics like Shimamura Hogetsu and Hasegawa Tenkei saw Homei and Katai as embodying two divergent trends in the naturalist movement. Tenkei, for example, contrasted Homei's passionate, "self-revelatory" (jiko kokuhaku ) style with Katai's aloof, "self-contemplative" (jiko seikan ) style and argued that Homei's was a throwback to the romantic period while Katai's represented naturalism's true path.^[44]

While his critics were dwelling on degrees of emotional distance between author and hero, Homei was concerning himself with the mechanics of representation. In an essay entitled, with typical immodesty, "Gendai shorai no shosetsuteki hasso o isshin subeki boku no byosha ron" (My theory of writing, which will revolutionize thinking on the shosetsu , present and future, 1918), he articulates his position on narrative·

This is not a world in which we know everything about everyone else. All people and all things are actually reflections of our own minds We reign as sovereigns over our private worlds and we allow no rights to others.... This said, let us consider what it means to be a writer. The author does not understand others as he understands himself.... It is impossible for him to be purely objective ... and by trying to be so he irresponsibly takes a position only God can take.... I will use my subjectivity, not narrow-mindedly but to its fullest potential, to enter into the feelings of a single character, whether A or B or C. Just as we cannot know what another person thinks in real life, the author cannot know what B or C thinks if he has identified with the feelings of A. There is almost no one here or abroad who realizes this fact, except for myself and those who have fully digested my theory on this subject.^[45]

[42] "Gendai shosetsu no byosha ho" (1911), in KBHT 3:366.

[43] See the preface to Homei's Tandeki (the anthology), in Homei zenshu 18: 78-81.

[44] "Jiko bunretsu to seikan" (1910), 207-9.

[45] KBHT 5:88-90. For discussions of this essay and its place in Homei's critical project, see Yoshida Seiichi, Shizenshugi no kenkyu 2:449-60; Wada Kingo, Byosha no jidai , esp. the chapters on Katai's "surface" and Homei's "single-dimensional" description, 103-72; and Noguchi Takehiko, Shosetsu no Nihongo , 197-210.

In this and other writings, Homei never insists that the author restrict his point of view to a character modeled after himself, only that he be consistent. It was the Taisho literary establishment that would go on to interpret Homei's definition of "single-dimensional description" in an even stricter sense than Homei himself had ever advocated: namely, that the author could do no better than to narrate lived experience from his own point of view.^[46]

Yet Homei presents here something rather close to what would emerge as the mainstream junbungaku worldview (even though he portrays himself as the lone voice of reason in a critical wilder-ness-encouraged, to be sure, by a literary establishment that took him only half-seriously).^[47] That is surely why he aroused the ire of junbungaku opponents. Ikuta Choko, for example, whose critique of the shishosetsu we noted in Chapter 3, argued that however much Homei's thesis held true for works of a confessional nature (diaries, travel essays, autobiographies, etc.), in which a single point of view was most convincing, it had no bearing on fictional works, which appropriately might have several protagonists and several points of view. The "best" method of representation, Ikuta concluded, was simply the one that best suited a particular writer.^[48] The philosopher and critic Tsuchida Kyoson (1891-1934), continuing the attack, insisted that Homei was on extremely shaky epistemological ground when he argued that the author's perceptual world overlapped the protagonist's. Tsuchida's Kantian system divided the world into two categories of perception—the things, people, and other "objects" (taisho ) in nature that exist independent of each in-

[46] Homei stressed in many of his essays that the point of view need not be the author's own. Among his own writings, the group of stories published near the end of his life focusing on a character named Osei are examples of this. (See, for instance, Osei no shippai [1920], which chronicles the heroine's loss of her boardinghouse to a wily carpenter on whom she has naively relied to make improvements. [lwano Homei zenshu 8:387-488]) Homei also insists in the face of repeated attacks that the hero, even when modeled after the author, should not be equated with the author himself. See Wada, Byosha no jidai , 132 and 136, for extracts of his protestations, of which Wada himself seems skeptical. Noguchi Takehiko, meanwhile, argues that Homei was more successful than Katai or Toson at transforming his personae into autonomous characters. See shosetsu no Nihongo , 204-9.

[47] Ino Kenji, in his study of Meiji writers, notes that Chikamatsu Shuko aligned himself solidly with Homei against the likes of Hogetsu and Katai on the issue of narrative perspective and suggests that it was Shuko and not Katai who, as heir to Homei's narrative theory, fixed the shishosetsu's course. See Meiji no sakka , 401.

[48] "Iwano Homei shi no byosha ron" (1918), in KBHT 5:97-100.

dividual's apprehension of them as images, and "subjects" (naiyo ) in need of an "I" to see them—and he claimed that Homei made no distinction between the two.^[49] Both reached the same conclusion: to argue as Homei did that "this is not a world in which we know everything about everyone else" and that "all people and all things are actually reflections of our own minds" was, in a literary context at least, the height of naïveté.^[50]

Homei's "naïveté," however, was characteristic of a great many Taisho writers who, while making no pronouncements of their own, adhered to the tenets Homei set forth. Ikuta and Tsuchida's condemnations notwithstanding, Homei had an unerring sense for the mode of narrative presentation that would triumph in the Taisho era. In essence, he was championing what we identified in Chapter 2 as the written reportive style. Homei's critics correctly pointed out its constraints, but they underestimated the enormous power it held over the Taisho literary community. Homei's theory helped legitimize the shishosetsu's mode of presentation to the extent that it came to be regarded as "natural," and finally transparent.

A few years after Homei's death, Katai conceded in his memoir Kindai no shosetsu (shosetsu in the modern era) that Homei's "single-dimensional description" was, in principle, the ideal to which literature should aspire and that the truly great writers utilized just such a technique.^[51] Such a concession on Katai's part was probably less a shift in his own position than an acknowledgment of the shishosetsu's dominance in the early 1920s. Given the popularity by this time of first-person narration and the critical insistence on the equation of author and hero, the Jamesian-style narrative that focused on a single character distinct from both author and narrator never became the dominant mode in Taisho letters. Even though Homei had some success (as did Tokuda Shusei and of course Natsume Soseki) in building a narrative around a character not modeled after himself, the Taisho literary establishment took far less interest in works to which the author-hero formula could not be applied.

[49] "Iwayuru ichigenteki byosha o ronzu" (1918), in ibid., 101-6.

[50] Ibid., 200, 101.

[51] In Tayama Katai zenshu 17:357.