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.