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.