7
Chikamatsu Shuko: The Hero as Fool

Why should I have to earn a living by exposing my private life to the public eye? I have not yet sunk so low that I must prostitute myself in order to pay for my next meal.
Chikamatsu Shuko, "Yuki no hi"

To what depths has literary fashion sunk now that Chikamatsu Shuko's cheap, sordid tales are being printed five and ten times over? I pale at the very thought.
Akagi Kohei, "Yuto bungaku no bokumetsu"

Of the three writers singled out here for extended examination, only Shiga Naoya is widely read today. Shiga's works were anthologized several times during his career and finally in the definitive Iwanami edition shortly after his death. Chikamatsu Shuko and Kasai Zenzo are rather less well-known. Two definitive Kasai collections came out only recently, and Shuko's complete works have yet to appear. There is a mountain of Shiga criticism and a substantial if much smaller amount on Kasai. Shuko, however, was little studied until the last decade. Before then, even article-length essays on him were a rarity, and longer studies, with the exception of Masamune Hakucho's biographical memoir (Chikamatsu Shuko , 1950), nonexistent. Nagata Mikihiko's 1953 collection of essays (Bungo no sugao ) is perhaps more significant for its inclusion of a chapter on Shuko alongside such literary giants as Shimazaki Toson, Arishima Takeo, Mori Ogai, Izumi Kyoka, Tokuda Shusei, and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro than for the information it contains.

The decision in this book to focus on two relative unknowns along with Shiga instead of on more familiar writers like Toson or Shusei is based on the pervasive critical perception of all three—Shuko, Shiga, and Kasai—as particularly instrumental fig-

ures in the shishosetsu's development. No matter that actual practice may have differed significantly from the general critical perception: their image as the "purest" of the shishosetsu writers persists.

It is partly a matter of historical chance that their names inevitably appear in discussions of the form: their debuts as writers all coincided with the shishosetsu's rise in late Meiji-early Taisho. More important, it is a matter of how they present themselves as characters in their writings. If these three highly diverse authors can be said to have anything in common, it is in how they let their heroes' sensibilities totally dominate a story. "Naturalist" authors like Toson, Shusei, and Tayama Katai wrote stories that are every bit as autobiographical as those of the writers examined here, but their writings are generally populated with a varied cast of characters whose mere presence on the same stage helps counterbalance that of the author-hero. In Katai's Sei , for example, or Toson's Ie or Shusei's Kabi , there is an attempt to present what we would call a "milieu" (whether family or, less distinctly, "society" at large) that provides an external backdrop against which the hero's thoughts and actions are set. In the writings of Shuko, Shiga, and Kasai, however, we encounter a far more restricted world. In place of a "milieu" (shakai ) is a map of the hero's "mental state" (shinkyo ), fully legible only to those who read it as no more—and no less—than a record of the author's own perceptions. These records represent a culmination of the naturalists' desire to transcribe lived experience and the language's genius for grammatically assigning "truth" to experience related in the written reportive style, whether in the first or third person. Confession as perception was not primarily a means of exposing self or society but an end in itself, the raison d'être of the work. For these writers to have placed their experiences in some broader social context or other "novelistic" framework would have actually detracted from their authenticity.

Experience, Spontaneity, and Artistic Creation

We begin our examination of individual authors with Chikamatsu Shrike, in deference to the critical consensus that he was the first of the shishosetsu writers par excellence. The critic Hirano Ken, for example, calls Giwaku (Suspicion, 1913) modern Japanese litera-

ture's first "true" shishosetsu .^[1] Hirano might have picked an earlier text, but what matters here is his recognition of the Shuko hero's myopic preoccupation with private life. Giwaku , like Shuko's other shishosetsu , has no political or social or even familial backdrop; indeed, we hardly get a sense of the hero's own day-to-day existence other than his misguided passions. It is this narrative claustrophobia, however, this absence of any link to any palpable, external reality, that gives this text and so much of Shuko's writing its distinctive flavor. His love life is a shambles, the Shuko hero freely admits, but a shambles, at any rate, of his own making. He revels in his self-engendered doubts. Masamune Hakucho suggests that Giwaku represents in fictive form the skepticism—and self-conceit—of post-Russo-Japanese-War society first articulated in the criticism of Shimamura Hogetsu.^[2] The opening scene in which the hero spins out endless fantasies in the refuge of his bed has also been read as a metaphor for the alienation that characterized this period.^[3]

Although narrowly focused, Shuko's shishosetsu contain many brilliant tours de force that amply reward close study and bring certain features of the form into bold relief. The first feature is the author's depiction of what might be called an isolated (as opposed to an individuated) consciousness. The narrator-hero in Shuko's works is typically engrossed in narcissistic absorption, as we have noted; yet he is to the last an amorphous figure. Acting in a social vacuum, he does not change or develop in the way that a protagonist, however self-absorbed, does in fiction populated with several dearly drawn characters. It is as if he has scrupulously avoided, or simply never considered, the issue of personality. The major texts

[1] Geijutsu to jisseikatsu , 17. Giwaku is the masterpiece in Shuko's first major group of stories, known as the "Wakareta tsuma" (Estranged wife) cycle, in which the narrator-hero describes his attempts to locate his wife, who has vanished without a trace. In his second major group of stories, known as the "Kurokami" (Dark hair) cycle, the narrator tells a similar story, except that here a prostitute has replaced his wife. Both cycles are discussed below.

[2] Shizenshugi seisui ki , in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 12:316. (Hakucho alludes of course to Hogetsu's famous essay, "Kaigi to kokuhaku," discussed in Chapter 4.) See also Hakucho's discussion of Shuko in ibid., 310-12 and 335-37.

[3] Takemori Ten'yu, “Giwaku no sekai," 18. See the discussion of Giwaku below. Not that Shuko himself was an escapist. By all accounts he was extremely well versed in the politics of his time and tried his hand at writing stories that treated the social issues of his day. See Nakajima Kunihiko, "Kyakkan shosetsu e no yume."

seem ultimately to be less about human relationships than about a unilateral emotion: jealousy, in most cases, as experienced and expressed by the frenzied Shuko hero.^[4]

A second feature, also common to the shishosetsu in general, is the author's penchant for dwelling repeatedly on certain periods in his life while glossing over others that would seem to lend themselves just as readily to fictional retelling. A kind of artistic vision appears to govern the organizing—and perhaps the very perception—of experience. Shuko was not at all interested in presenting the whole of life. Indeed, what surprises one is not that he drew exclusively from his own life but that he drew so discriminately from it. His "confessions," one soon notices, are curiously selective and repetitive: in story after story, the hero chases blindly after an elusive love. Shuko's talent as a writer, however, lies in his ability to create the illusion that nothing else really matters. His self-revelations, far from being the scandalously haphazard record of debauchery that Akagi Kohei (1891-1949) and other moralists claimed, are in fact the product of a surprisingly contained and consistent vision of personal experience.

Such consistency, however, by no means yields a monolithic view of life, and this brings us to a third feature: Shuko's insistence on viewing his past through the ever-changing present. To be sure, we find in the Shuko oeuvre a number of unrelated personal episodes that have assumed an identical artistic reality: namely the hero as fool, abandoned in disgust by his beloved. Yet at the same time—and this is what makes Shuko the provocative, bewildering writer that he is—the reality of a single episode in his life sometimes proves to be more elusive and protean than life's continuum of unrelated experiences. Shuko approached his life as a critic approaches a text (although with varying degrees of rigorousness), finding new shades of meaning in an experience with each separate reading of it. He viewed his past as a book always in the writing, subject to constant scrutiny but yielding no definitive interpretation.

A native of Okayama Prefecture, Shuko first came to Tokyo in

[4] This is one reason why a Shuko story differs fundamentally from the typical western autobiographical novel or first-person narrative. In a text like Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf , for example, which is nearly as claustrophobic as any Shuko shishosetsu , Harry Hailer does interact significantly with other characters and emerges as a meticulously drawn figure with a highly complex emotional makeup.

his early twenties to attend classes at what was to become Waseda University with his lifelong friend and rival, Masamune Hakucho.^[5] Shuko's taste for amatory literature led him to the fiction of Ozaki Koyo, Izumi Kyoka, and Higuchi Ichiyo as well as the dramas of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724). Shuko repeatedly claims that he had every intention in his youth of becoming a political commentator, not a creative writer, and that he was an avid reader of Kokumin no tomo , the journal of cultural criticism, long before he opened the pages of Waseda bungaku , the principal organ of literary naturalism.^[6] He began his career writing columns and essays for newspapers and magazines, thanks to the good offices of Shimamura Hogetsu. He met Onuki Masu in 1902 and began living with her the following year for a total of six years. They never wed. He continued writing critical essays (the most well-known being a collection entitled Bundan mudabanashi , begun in 1908) and penned an occasional piece of fiction, but he was temperamentally incapable of holding down a stable job. In the summer of 1907 he opened a notions shop and had Masu run it. The shop closed in early 1909, and in August of the same year, Masu disappeared. No one knows exactly why she left Shuko; the "Estranged Wife" cycle suggests that his shiftlessness and infidelities taxed her patience to the breaking point.

Most of the dozen or so short stories that preceded Shuko's "Estranged Wife" cycle are either adaptations of stories he had read in English from European literature ("Sono hitori" [1908] is a virtual translation of a section from Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth ) or sketches of his home and family in Okayama and of his life with Masu.^[7] Autobiographical though these latter stories are, they differ notably from the cycles that would earn him his fame. In them, the Shuko persona usually adopts the pose of a bystander and is not

[5] The following biographical information is gleaned from the chronologies in NKBT 22:499-505, and MBZ 70:429-36. It is extremely difficult to judge how far to trust the chronologies beyond the publication dates of Shuko's texts, as compilers tend to rely heavily on the texts themselves for information—there being often no other sources available. According to Wada Kingo, all chronologies are based on one that Shuko himself compiled and appended to his anthology Koi kara ai e , but the latter offers almost no details about the author's life beyond his early twenties. Byosha no jidai , 226 n. 9. Hakucho's Chikamatsu Shuko is too anecdotal to be of much use as a research guide.

[6] "Hakken ka sosaku ka" (1).

[7] See Endo Hideo, "Chikamatsu Shuko shoki sakuhin kenkyu"; and Kuribayashi Hideo, "Chikamatsu Shuko noto."

the central figure swept up in a vortex of passion that he is in later texts. This pose suggests a distaste for self-exposé that becomes apparent when we consider what episodes in his life that Shuko clearly chose to suppress. We learn of course of Masu's disappearance in the "Estranged Wife" cycle, but virtually nothing in these earlier texts of what brought the two together, why the two were never formally married, or what led to their separation. Shuko often reflects on these years in memoirs published over the following decades,^[8] yet curiously he offers no more than a glimpse of a period that surely formed the basic pattern of his adult emotional life.

Shuko has nonetheless acquired a reputation as the most blatantly confessional of the shishosetsu writers, a reputation founded on the apparent truth of even the most outlandish revelations, as confirmed by the author himself on numerous occasions. "There is no more definitive document with which to relate the truth of human existence," Shuko writes in the preface to his anthology Koi kara ai e , "than the record of one's own experience." It is founded also in Shuko's skepticism concerning the emplotted narrative, which was shared by shishosetsu writers who followed him:

My writings—at least those collected in this volume—contain no plot or staging. Critics frequently declare this lack to be the great defect of my work. But plot has its drawbacks: it forces the author to embellish the facts of his own life. True, an author cannot but be satisfied when his imaginative technique has succeeded in pleasing his audience, but I am of the school that frowns on letting plot or fabrication needlessly violate the truth of lived experience.... I have swallowed my shame and presented before the public eye these frivolous incidents in my life out of a respect for historical truth.^[9]

This preference for the shapelessness of lived experience over some transcendent, unifying structure has led, predictably, to charges that Shuko (and any writer with the same preference) had a poorly endowed imagination. If this means that his best work is based

[8] See, for example, "Koishikawa no ie" (1920) and "Kuseyama joshu (1928), in Shinsen Chikamatsu Shuko shu , 64-74 and 75-83. In the former piece, Shuko dramatizes the parting scene with his wife but informs the reader he will not go into the reasons for the separation. In the latter piece, he admits only to feeling the greatest nostalgia for those periods in his life when he suffered so many disappointments. Shuko writes in "Koi o enagara no shitsuren" (1908) that he is bothered by the knowledge that Masu had lived with another man before him, but he does not probe the matter at all in the "Estranged Wife" cycle.

[9] Quoted from a commentary by the author appended to Chikamatsu Shuko , Uno Koji , 641.

wholly on personal experience and that his numerous attempts at transcending the shishosetsu generally ended in failure, then these charges are quite correct. But such a view overlooks the most captivating quality of Shuko's writing, which the Shuko scholar Nakajima Kunihiko describes as a feeling of spontaneous and intense "interest" (kankyo )^[10] and which is responsible perhaps more than anything else for the extraordinary emotional claustrophobia that pervades Shuko's best work. "His heart was possessed by the woman he loved," writes Shuko of his hero in "Otoko kiyohime," a story in a third group of stories known as the "Osaka no yujo" (Osaka courtesan) cycle. "That he despised her at times and adored her at others made no difference; the obsession was itself more than enough reason for living. Nothing else in this world mattered to him. Nothing at all."^[11]

Here is perhaps the most important reason for Shuko's reputation as the last word in confession: the spontaneous interest that inspired the author to pen his self-exposes leads to his rejection of the technique of narrative distancing. Beginning with the "Estranged Wife" cycle, the narrator-hero indeed recounts like a man possessed the fiascos in his emotional life. No longer a casual bystander, he is caught up in a storm of passion and incapable of an ironic or critical perspective. No matter that Shuko typically wrote of an event months or years after the fact. He manages to close the gap between narrative present and story time in a way that suggests a man still at the height of frenzy.

All Shuko's best shishosetsu have this incomparable feel of spontaneity about them that is lacking in his attempts at more "orthodox" fiction. Once we believe, along with the hero of "Otoko kiyohime," that nothing matters other than his amorous obsessions, then we have succumbed to the illusion of a uniquely unmediated brand of self-exposé. For Nakajima Kunihiko, the Shuko shishosetsu as epitomized in "Otoko kiyohime" is a world of intense emotion presented to the reader in the raw, without the trappings of hindsight or verbal artifice, and both Shuko's greatness and his limitations as an artist spring from it.^[12] We must not forget, however, that this passion is expressed entirely through the medium of the

[10] "Kyakkan shosetsu e no yume," 48.

[11] Shinsen Chikamatsu Shuko shu , 241.

[12] "Kyakkan shosetsu e no yume," 48.

written word, in which the author's thoughts can only be, after Aldous Huxley, "second thoughts." is There is no way, in short, to determine conclusively that Shuko's emotions as revealed in his stories are ontologically somehow rawer and more spontaneous than those of other writers. But what is certain is that Shuko brings to a medium whose keynote is "unmediated" expression a vibrant if less-than-perfect style, which, by its very imperfection, actually bolsters the illusion of a direct conversion of emotion into language. We shall pay close attention to this process of conversion during the course of our study.

The "Estranged Wife" Cycle: Private Life as Literary Act

Shuko's first major work, the four-part "Estranged Wife" cycle (1910-15: Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami [A letter to my estranged wife]; Shujaku [Tenacious love]; Giwaku [Suspicion]; and Giwaku zokuhen [Suspicion, part 2]), revolves around the narrator-hero Yukioka's vain pursuit of his wife Osuma, who has abandoned him for another man.^[14] The cycle's story time runs from August 1909 to May 1911. Shuko relates events occurring anywhere from several months to several years prior to the telling, but the cycle reads as if those events have only just taken place. Two techniques help achieve a sense of immediacy. First, the epistolary style is used in all but the last story. The hero reports to his estranged wife in a manner suggesting that the events in question are still in progress. In real life, the outcome of Shuko's vain pursuits was no longer in doubt, but the Shuko hero remains in the dark. Letter after letter flows from the pen of a man who clings to the hope of

[13] In Kay Dick, Writers at Work , 157.

[14] Giwaku zokuhen was first published as Aichaku no nagori (Lingering attachment). Names of characters in the cycle vary with the story and with the edition. The narrator's wife in Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami is called Osuma or Oyuki. Osuma's lover Shinoda also goes by the name Kojima and Yoshida. See the table in NKBT 22:448; and Takemori, “Giwaku no sekai," 15-16 and 31 n. 3. Names tend to be variations and inversions of each other. Thus, the names Yukio ka and Oyuki in the "Wakareta tsuma" cycle. Osuma is the inverse of Masu, the name of Shuko's wife after whom the character is modeled. In a later cycle, Kasahara of Kyuren is called Tahara in Kyuren zokuhen , and so on—all of them manifestations of Shuko's obsession with repetition on a verbal as well as experiential level.

reunion with his wife. Second, narrative time moves backward, erasing the perspective that a telling distanced from the tale potentially generates. Shuko has no interest in coolly assessing events that have receded into a psychologically distant past. Instead, he locates the narrative present at the. height of the hero's emotional experience. His concern is clearly with process, not result.

Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami (April-July 1910; hereafter abbreviated as Wakareta tsuma ) covers the period from Osuma's disappearance in August 1909 to the end of November. The narrator-hero Yukioka reflects on his past life with Osuma and hopes for her quick return, despite rumors that she now lives with another man. He devotes most of the letter, however, to an account of his rivalry with one Osada (modeled after Masamune Hakucho) over a prostitute with whom he had become intimate in an attempt to overcome his loneliness. Shujaku (April 1913) continues the action from July 1910 to April 1911, describing it as if the hero were writing sometime in 1911 rather than in the year of publication.^[15] Yukioka learns that Osuma may be living with a university student who once shared the same tenement house with them. He then hears that she has become the mistress of a retired businessman. He also learns that Osuma vacationed in Nikko in the summer of 1910 with her beau, whoever he might be, and he determines to track them down. In Giwaku (October 1913), Yukioka travels to Nikko in May 1911, searches through several inn registers in hopes of unearthing a clue to Osuma's whereabouts, and finally locates the inn where she and her beau stayed. He discovers that the latter is indeed the young student, not the elderly patron as he has been led to believe, and regrets that he was so sanguine about Osuma's behavior when the student was living next door to them. Again he relates events as if he were writing soon after the fact. In Giwaku

[15] There is evidence that at least certain portions of the cycle's later stories were written much earlier than their actual publication, which would of course add to the sense of immediacy to the events related. For example, Endo Hideo cites an essay Shuko wrote apparently in reference to a sequel to Giwaku and suggests that Shuko must have written Giwaku zokuhen , or at least some version of it, before Giwaku , published two years earlier. See “Giwaku ton," 82. Nakajima Kunihiko argues that Shuko wrote a significant portion of Utsuriga (1915), a work related to the cycle, in the fall of 1910. See "Chikamatsu Shuko ni okeru sakuhin keiretsu no mondai," 14-15. Shuko's use of a "roving" narrative present, however, demonstrates his interest in immediacy as a technique above and beyond any commitment to emotional authenticity.

zokuhen (November 1915), the hero, writing a first-person narration this time and not a letter, traces Osuma and the student to Oka-yama and finds them after a search through the prefectural register. The story begins with an account of two chance meetings that Yukioka had on the same day with his former wife sometime in 1915. The narrative present gradually shifts back in time, however, to a period immediately following the visit to Okayama in May 1911.

Two other stories are closely related to the cycle: "Yuki no hi" (A snowy day, March 1910) and Utsuriga (Lingering fragrance, June-July 1915; originally titled Keien [Bitter memories]). In "Yuki no hi," which reads as a prologue to the "Estranged wife" cycle, Yukioka and Osuma sit comfortably around the warm kotatsu (a physical manifestation of the hero's smoldering passion) and gaze out their room at the newly fallen snow.

Since it was so warm on retiring to bed, I thought we would be getting rain the next day, but I awoke the next morning to a world blanketed by silver. Flakes like goose down fell silently to the ground.

I feel very relaxed on such days. It is times like these that I feel fortunate to be without work. We closed the front gate and spent the day by ourselves, sitting face to face across the kotatsu . This was our conversation.^[16]

This passage provides us with our first glimpse of the Shuko hero's hermetically sealed emotional world. Content in his idleness and protected by a blanket of insulating snow, Yukioka literally closes the gate on the outside world and revels in his confinement.^[17]

Yukioka prods Osuma into talking about her past and derives a certain masochistic pleasure as she becomes carried away by memories. He hopes thereby to rekindle his waning interest in her,

[16] CSS , 7. All citations of Shuko's works are taken from this edition, except where otherwise noted; they are henceforth inserted in the main body of the text. This edition is used more out of convenience (it is the most comprehensive Shuko anthology now in print) than preference, as it is not always a reliable text. Shuko made considerable revisions of his work whenever it was published. (For an example of how extensive the textual variants of Wakareta tsuma alone are, see NKBT 22:441-43 n. 1.) The MBZ edition of Shuko's works is the more authoritative text, but it unfortunately contains only six stories (the "Estranged Wife" cycle plus "Yuki no hi" and Utsuriga ).

[17] The mood of confinement in "Yuki no hi" is explored in depth by lwagiri Keiichi. See "'Yuki no hi' no teiryu ni aru mono," esp. 81-83, 93.

since for him, jealousy is synonymous with passion. Yet he also fears the pain that it will bring. The conversation Yukioka has with his wife is akin to testy verbal fencing, and the couple's dialogue intersects only tangentially.^[18] Each time Yukioka seeks reassurance about his wife's fidelity, Osuma responds with yet another amorous episode from her past. In the end, Yukioka discovers that no amount of probing into Osuma's past will ignite the spark of jealous passion, and the "conversation" that was not a dialogue comes to a halt.

My heart no longer fluttered with emotion as it used to. Why? Has my love for her cooled? Or have formerly crude, wild passions simply mellowed into a genuine affection? I don't know the answer.

It was still snowing gently outside, and drifts were piling up. "We've had quite a talk, haven't we?" I said with a wide yawn. "How about some eel today?"

"I'd love some."

"I'll go order it," I said, and left the house.

(CSS , 15)

Thus the story ends, with innuendos of emotions as cool as the snow that envelops them. Although the reference to eel, a common erotic symbol in the popular culture, suggests that passion, like the coals under the kotatsu , still smolders unconsciously beneath the surface, the narrator, by leaving the house, breaks his confinement and with it the magical spell that has prevailed throughout.

"Yuki no hi" is typical of stories to follow in that the narrative present is completely at odds with the chronological "facts" of Shuko's life. The hero recounts his conversation with Osuma as if it has just taken place, although Masu has long since left Shuko. Even the author of some of the most demeaning "confessions" in modern Japanese literature feels it necessary to separate life from art. Thus, "Yuki no hi" adumbrates the couple's tumultuous past but is silent about the "sadness, misery, and ... jealousy" that the wife has apparently stirred in the husband. "And what of these things?" Yukioka asks rhetorically. "That is a story I shall not reveal here. In fact, I may never reveal it. It is something better left unsaid. Indeed, I ought never, never to talk about it!" Yukioka then offers a credo for all shishosetsu writers: "Why should I have to earn a living by

[18] See Nakajima Kunihiko, "Yuki no hi no genso," 40.

exposing my private life to the public eye? I have not yet sunk so low as to prostitute myself in order to pay for my next meal" (ibid., 10). To be sure, the shishosetsu writer does expose himself to a greater or lesser extent and earns his living thereby. But Shuko's maintenance of a temporal buffer between his life and work suggests a way for the writer to contain his confessions even as he professes to tell all.

Utsuriga , like Shujaku , is a sequel to Wakareta tsuma . Before we look at it, let us first examine the cycle's inaugural work, which was written in the precedent-setting epistolary style. Yukioka, the narrator-hero, begins as if he were indeed corresponding with his wife, with no thoughts of a wider audience:

My dear,

I suppose that I have no right to use so intimate a term as "my dear" [omae ], now that we have separated. And if what I hear is true—that you have long since remarried and are therefore impossible to win back—then perhaps I should not be writing you at all. Yet I feel that I must, and I cannot help addressing you as I always have. Please let me do so in this letter, at least. I'm afraid there will be trouble if people find out that I have written you—I wouldn't mind, but it might cause you some embarrassment. I needn't tell you, then, to burn or otherwise dispose of this letter after you've finished reading it. I understand that we are practically neighbors, that you live right here in Koishikawa Ward, although I don't know exactly where you're located or what you're doing. I'd like to bring you up to date on my life since your departure. Do hear me out. Much has happened in the seven months since I last saw you.

(CSS , 16)

The opening is nothing less than a manifesto. The hero announces to his ex-wife that he will use the intimate omae in the letter even though he no longer can face to face. He thereby creates the fiction of a relationship that has in fact already been nullified. Shuko begins his story only after firmly setting this fiction in place.^[19]

But the manifesto, and the fiction it embraces, is directed not simply at the writer's ex-wife. Insofar as the "letter" has been published in a magazine, omae loses its status as a private, single-person audience. The fiction of an intimate relationship, then, extends to the broader reading audience as well. We shall see that the

[19] This point is made by Shimada Akio in "Chikamatsu Shuko shiron," 16-17.

"Wakareta tsuma" cycle is in part the result of Shuko's struggle to produce an audience that can correctly read his work: who could be more qualified to interpret his writing than his companion of six years—or anyone who can imaginatively take her place?

Yet although Yukioka addresses his wife directly in Wakareta tsuma , the story as a whole maintains only the barest pretense of a letter. The second-person pronoun appears less and less frequently as the letter progresses, and in one section about two-thirds of the way through, the narrator actually refers to Osuma in the third person (CSS , 57-58). Here, in a bizarre narrative oversight (or is it a sleight of hand?), the letter's "discourse" melts into the fictional "story" right before our eyes—yet another indication of Shuko's awareness, however unconscious, of his larger audience. By the end, all trappings of an epistle have been dropped; there is not even the obligatory closing to complement the perfunctory greeting.

Insofar as the events in Wakareta tsuma are based on personal experience, Shuko could not have been oblivious to how his former wife might react to publications. And yet the "letter" cannot be, as is often claimed, so much literary bait to lure his wife back to him. It has been argued that the story has less artistic than utilitarian intent—that is, Shuko wrote it hoping that Masu would read it, take pity, and eventually return to him.^[20] The argument is based, however, on the story's sequels, which of course get us no closer to the "truth." Shujaku opens with the hero's explanation of why he wrote his first "letter": "I write you once again. Three years have passed since that first long letter.... I didn't write half of what I had intended, however.... I figured that, being the sensitive person you are, you'd take pity on me if I informed you of my plight" (CSS , 75-76). In the opening section of Giwaku , omitted from modern editions, Yukioka takes courage in his ex-wife's past promise to keep an eye on notices in newspaper literary columns and read his works even if they should separate. Yet the expectation of being read by a specific audience does not in itself necessitate writing in

[20] Wada Kingo, Byosha no jidai , 213-15. In an early (1913) essay on Shuko, cited by Wada, Ibukata Toshirô speculates that Shuko chose the title Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami in hopes that its appearance in Waseda bungaku or in advertisements for the magazine would Catch his estranged wife's eye. See "Bundan no suhinkusu," 151-52.

the epistle form.^[21] Far more likely, Shuko's aim in employing this form was the impact it would have on his primary reading audience—the bundan —which was all too familiar with Shuko's scandalous private life. Shuko was ultimately less concerned with having his ex-wife see the "letter" than in having his bundan audience believe that the story's narrator so wished. If such was the bundan's interpretation, then the "letter" was indeed a success.^[22] Had Shuko truly wished to be reunited with his wife, he would of course have written directly to her in care of her relatives. And even if he were confident that she would see the "letter" in Waseda bungaku , he could not have expected to woo her back with stories of his philandering!

That Shuko published, rather than mailed, his "letter," then, presupposed a wider audience, whose interest transcended the circumstances that generated the writing. As if to emphasize this point, the narrator in Shujaku refers to a letter he published three years earlier, in July 1910, which just happens to correspond to the final installment of Wakareta tsuma (CSS , 76). And to insure that his literary intentions are not lost on his readers, he concludes his letter on the following note: "I plan to write a shosetsu about us soon. I want to leave a permanent record of the bitter-sweet experiences of the past seven years" (CSS , 99). But clearly, Shuko has already done in the "letters" what the narrator hints he will do in some future story: restructure the past into fictional form. The most striking evidence for this is the gap he inserts between narrative and chronological present. Shuko's strategy throughout the cycle is to push the narrative present back in time toward the events in question in order to rob the hero of his hindsight. Reflection is anathema to passion, we quickly learn in Shuko's fiction.

The narrator of Wakareta tsuma , who begins his first installment in the April 1910 issue of Waseda bungaku , writes of events only as recent as November 1909 and in a manner, moreover, that suggests he has no knowledge of events beyond that time. The half-year blank between the fall of 1909 and the spring of 1910 is never filled in. (This period is covered by Utsuriga , which however was not

[21] This is the argument of Iwagiri Keiichi. See “Wakaretaru tsuma ni okuru tegami ron," 11.

[22] The discussion here is indebted to Takahashi Hiromitsu, in his "'Wakareta tsuma' mono o megutte," 103.

published until 1915.) The blank is even longer in Shujaku , which, although published in April 1913, treats events only as recent as April 1911. Yukioka mentions at the story's beginning that three years have elapsed since he wrote his first letter; yet other internal evidence suggests that he is actually writing from the perspective of 1911 (for example, the narrator refers to 1910 as "last year" throughout). In the final paragraph, which is a self-conscious reference to the act of writing this "letter," the narrative present appears to return to 1913; yet we get from it no sense of perspective or knowledge that the passage of two years might be expected to bring. Significantly, Shuko dropped this paragraph when the story first appeared in book form.

The suppression of writing time in favor of a "roving" narrative present serves an important purpose: the hero comes across as a frenzied lover still blinded by his emotions rather than as a dispassionate observer. For Yukioka, Osuma's disappearance is a painfully fresh memory, not a historical event that has receded into the hazy past. In this and many other Shuko stories, the borderline between memory and present reality is blurred to the point of erasure. Remembering becomes an aggressive act of recreation that weaves past into present. When the hero in Shujaku , writing in 1913, learns in the spring of 1911 that Osuma ran off with another man a year earlier, this is his response:

I feel no bitterness toward the man. I would just like to find the house where you two are living. There you would be, gayly dressed and happily absorbed in your house work.... And once I had found you, I would gun you down with a single bullet. And that would be that. Day and night, I lie in bed, the covers pulled over my head, and conjure up the scene. There is a loud bang. Through the cloud of gunsmoke I see your body, collapsed in a frightful posture. I can actually smell the smoke beneath these covers.

(CSS , 99)

What appears to be spontaneous "confession" is in fact a highly complex portrayal of past events as if they were only just unfolding. Almost without our realizing it, the narrative present, which was clearly set in 1913 at the story's beginning, has shifted back two years. To the end, the narrator is in the dark about his former wife's whereabouts and her lover's identity, although the author was of course aware of both. In 1911, the narrative present for most

of the story, the hero discovers that his ex-wife may have been to Nikko with her lover and contemplates a visit there to search for dues. In 1913, the time of writing, Shuko had already been there himself and knew what curious developments ensued. But he was not about to let the reader in on them yet.

Shujaku is not by any stretch of the imagination one of Shuko's best stories, but it contains features more typical of Shuko's writing than the cycle's first text. For one, the remarkable roving narrative present is used here to great effect, as we have seen. The narrative flow appears to duplicate the hero's convoluted thoughts. Second, the motif of frenzied pursuit, which lies dormant in Wakareta tsuma , comes to the fore here.^[23] Third, the story serves as the cycle's main point of reference. Both Giwaku and Giwaku zokuhen contain so many allusions to Shujaku that they are in many ways incomprehensible without a prior reading of the earlier text. The "Estranged Wife" cycle is indeed just that: not a linear series but an entangled cycle of stories that reflect—and more often refract—each other several times over. True, Shuko attempted through revisions and editing (especially in Giwaku ) to give each of the last three texts in the cycle a measure of autonomy.^[24] Yet the stories are so intertwined, the events related in one story so central in importance to the next, that the impact of any single story is lessened considerably when not read together with the rest. The "Estranged Wife" cycle, although it lacks the polish of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet , is also in its own way a palimpsest: the hero's memories of events and people, which appear fleetingly and are then erased in one text, reappear dazzlingly etched in the next.

An example of this erasure and reetching is Shuko's presentation of Osuma's lover in Shujaku and Giwaku , which simultaneously reveals and conceals his identity. The hero in Shujaku reports, in the narrative "present" of 1913, that Osuma has run off with one Shinoda, a university student who lived with them in their rented house before Osuma's disappearance and whom Osuma befriended. Indeed, the narrator's very purpose in taking up his pen

[23] Takahashi Hiromitsu notes that in Wakareta tsuma the abandonment-and-pursuit motif is introduced in the relationship between the prostitute and a former lover. The motif shifts to the main characters in Shujaku and later stories. See "'Wakareta tsuma' mono o megutte," 16-17.

[24] Shuko revised both the beginning and ending of Giwaku no less than three times following its initial appearance. He also made several cuts when the stories first appeared in book form. See Takemori, “Giwaku no sekai," 10-16.

would seem to be none other than to vent his rage against the student. "Had I known then that you were hiding out with that Shinoda, I swear I'd have died" (CSS , 76), he exclaims. And yet, barely a quarter of the way into the story, we hear no more of her lover. After venting his rage, the narrator seems to lose all interest in his rival, becoming lost in memories that propel the narrative present backward. Action and narrative present intersect in May 1911, at which time the narrator is convinced that Osuma lives with an elderly patron, not a student. At the story's end, Yukioka appears no longer in possession of the knowledge that provoked him to write in the first place. In Giwaku , which picks up the action in May 1911, Yukioka searches through inn registers in Nikko for the name of Osuma, who vacationed there during the summer of 1910, and learns to his astonishment that her companion was indeed the student and not the mysterious elderly patron he had imagined. The hero's astonishment is fully conveyed, however, only by a reading of Shujaku , which sets the reader up for this curious twist.

Erasure of another sort occurs in Utsuriga , which describes Yukioka's affair with the prostitute with such single-mindedness that it is easy to forget the narrator's ostensible motive for penning this "letter" to his ex-wife: to win her back. We have noted that Utsuriga and Shujaku are sequels to Wakareta tsuma ; but whereas Shujaku is quite conscious of its status ("I write you once again. Three years have passed since that first long letter"), Utsuriga reads as a direct continuation of Wakareta tsuma , although it was published five years later. Indeed, its opening lines seem to flow right out of the earlier text:

And then I felt a lump growing in my throat, so large that I could choke. But I controlled my emotions and continued in as cheerful manner as possible to explain how I had come into possession of her sash. I acted out the story in front of them [Osada and another acquaintance], using falsetto and a woman's mannerisms.

I left Osada's room soon after that.

Once outside, the feeling of shame I had suppressed in my effort to feign unconcern surged through my chest, wrenching every rib on the way up.

Whereupon, tears of vexation and chagrin streamed down my face. They felt hot against my sunken cheeks, which were chafed by a chilly evening wind.

It is hard to believe that the last three paragraphs quoted above are in fact the beginning of a new story published five years after

the first paragraph.^[25] To say that Wakareta tsuma is "unfinished" or that Utsuriga commences practically in midsentence, however, while true as far as it goes, does not begin to describe Shuko's technique. Comparing the openings of Utsuriga and Shujaku , we see that Shuko viewed Wakareta tsuma as a textual fork in the road from which he could move in two different directions. When read in conjunction with Shujaku , Giwaku , and Giwaku zokuhen, Wakareta tsuma is the tale of a man suffering the loneliness of abandonment. The amicable questioning that Yukioka directs at acquaintances about his ex-wife turns in later stories into frenzied pursuit. When read in conjunction with Utsuriga , however, this same work becomes the prologue to a tale of fierce rivalry between two men for the affections of a prostitute. Each theme is introduced in Wakareta tsuma and then is suppressed in one or the other of the sequels. What is the cycle's first story about , then? Whatever the particular sequel in question chooses to bring up, we must conclude. We see this sort of erasing and doubling back taking place in Shuko's later stories as well. The "Dark Hair" cycle, for example, serves as another textual fork in the road that generates two sequels only tangentially related to each other. Perhaps we should not even call such works "sequels." Shuko is less interested in continuing a tale than amending it. Indeed, for Shuko, the tale is in the amending.

The Shuko hero's foolish pursuit of his ex-wife reaches the height of frenzy in Giwaku (1913), which Masamune Hakucho numbers among the classics of Meiji and Taisho literature.^[26] Unlike Wakareta tsuma and Shujaku , the epistle form is virtually abandoned except for the occasional use of the second person (omae ). The interjectory final particles (yo, ka, kai, da mono , etc.) that punctuate the narrative in the cycle's first two texts and posit a specific audience disappear entirely in Giwaku .^[27] This fact, combined with Shuko's decision in later editions to drop the introductory section that directly addresses omae , suggests a concerted effort to reconstitute his audience.

[25] The part of the citation that follows the end of Wakareta tsuma (CSS , 74) is taken from the original text of Utsuriga , first published as Keien in Shinshosetsu 20 (June 1915): 157. Later editions of Utsuriga begin with the final paragraph in the above citation ("Whereupon tears of vexation...").

[26] "Soho kessaku, Giwaku, “ in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 6:64.

[27] See Tazawa Motohisa, "Hoho no mosaku," 30.

We have already noted certain narrative ploys that underscore Shuko's consciousness of a dual readership, suggesting that Shuko sought an ideal audience that could correctly—perhaps the word is empathetically—interpret his work. The second-person singular omae , who by definition is intimate with the narrator, is of course the perfect choice of interpreters. Thus, we frequently encounter in both Wakareta tsuma and Shujaku phrases like "As you know ..." and "I don't have to tell you ..." as well as other narrative asides by which Shuko maintains the pretense of intimacy while introducing new information necessary to the telling of his story. Shuko must have realized, however, that appealing too strongly to a specific audience, even as a fictional ploy, ran the risk of alienating his wider audience. To note constantly that omae already knows this or that implies his general readership's ignorance; yet to limit the narration to what omae does not already know risks incomprehension.

Shuko's answer to this dilemma, perfected in Giwaku, is a unique method of presentation that offers a means of relating to his wider audience as insiders. Shuko rejects the idea of talking to his reader, even his intimate reader (omae ); he instead talks to himself—with a mind, perhaps, to being overheard. He refuses, moreover, to assume the pose of a narrator who has learned from his experience and then condescends to enlighten his readers. Rather, he treats even his own memories as events in the making. He is no more aware of their significance than we are.

Shuko's refusal to place reader and writer into two separate camps and his strategy of linking them to the same locus of consciousness helps explain why Giwaku begins where it does: at the end of the story, chronologically speaking, namely, the narrator's visit to Nikko in May 1911. Along with the narrator, we learn to our surprise that Shinoda is Osuma's lover. Along with the narrator we search "our" memory (specifically, our earlier reading of Shujaku ) for past evidence of deceit. Yukioka has before him "proof" of adultery in a Nikko inn register. Now he must resort to imagination to make sense out of it. True, his imagination has led him astray before. But in the absence of the culprits themselves, it is his only ally. Shinoda and Osuma appear frequently in Yukioka's recollections, but never once in the narrative present.

In short, all the action in Giwaku , except the initial Nikko epi-

sode, takes place in the narrator's mind. The narrator opens it up to his reader but makes no further concessions. As insiders, we are led to, but never guided through, Yukioka's composite realm of memory and illusion. The function of the opening paragraph takes on crucial significance, then, not as a delineator of time or place—for it is neither—but as a gateway to a world of pure imagination, an abstract world that, in the eyes of one critic,^[28] approaches legend and myth:

It was a depressing, disturbing spring. I conjured up vision after vision of your death at my hands. During the daytime, when it was too light and noisy to concentrate properly, I would burrow under my quilt and imagine your murder and my imprisonment, rewriting the scenario over and over again in my head. No matter where you had gone or whose wife you had become, I was determined to find you out. Day after day was taken up with these stifling thoughts. I did not know how else to spend my time.

(CSS , 100)

Initially, the hero muses from the vantage point of his cavelike quilt about the events of 1911 as if he were recalling experience in a discrete past. But he soon resorts to his familiar strategy of temporal regression. Rejecting the perspective afforded by a writing time two years after the events in question, he pushes the narrative present back to a time conterminous with that "depressing, disturbing spring" in 1911.^[29] A quarter of the way into the text, the two-year gap between initial writing time and story time has been erased. This is perhaps the work's greatest fiction. Shuko creates a world in which there is no fixed present: past, present, and future merge into a fluid continuum of emotion that, in the hero's mind, is real for all time.

Yukioka is elated when he discovers Osuma and Shinoda's names in the inn register, because they are the first "hard evidence" of an indiscretion. We might want to ask, what can he do with it, two years after the fact? Such questions, however, are made irrelevant by a technique that undermines the priority of recent

[28] Takemori, “Giwaku no sekai," 21.

[29] The time configuration in this and other texts in the cycle is easily established, since specific dates appear throughout. In the first page of Giwaku , for example, a police officer responds to the narrator's request to search for his missing wife thus: "Why are you asking us only now, in April 1911, to look for your wife, when she's been missing since the fall of 1909?" (CSS , 100).

perspective on past events. Returning to the Nikko episode in the story's last lines, Yukioka resolves on the train back to Tokyo to head for Okayama, hundreds of miles to the west, where he believes Shinoda and Osuma now to be living. The chase goes on. And as long as it does, the hero's passion continues unabated.

Yukioka's idealized passion is abruptly cooled when he actually finds Osuma. In Shujaku and Giwaku , Yukioka chases after figments with such zeal that emotions for a woman he no longer really loves overwhelm his present indifference toward her. When he finally locates his estranged wife in Giwaku zokuhen , the result can only be anticlimactic. He insists that he does not want to win Osuma back, but merely have his say in front of her and Shinoda.

When she saw me slide open the door and step before her, she went pale and let out a cry....

"Well, come on in," she said, composing herself at last.... "How on earth did you find this place? That Sakata [a middleman who urges Yukioka to part company with Osuma] must have told you. He's a rogue. I thought he'd let the cat out of the bag sooner or later. Please sit over here." She offered me a cushion.

"Sakata's no rogue," I said. "The person who used him is rogue. When you've done wrong, it gets out sooner or later."
Shinoda showed up early that morning. His house was on the very next block.

Even though they had been caught virtually red-handed, the two carried on as if nothing were out of the ordinary. They simply would not admit defeat. But I thought any further queries unnecessary.

(CSS , 279-80).

Osuma's spell on the hero is broken, now that he has seen her in the flesh. Her elusive image as the embodiment of Yukioka's passion is completely overshadowed by her mundane presence. Yukioka has no use for this reality: the two go their separate ways.

The love object in the "Wakareta tsuma" cycle, then, is ultimately a construct of the hero's frenzied imagination. Yukioka lives in a confined world of daydreams and illusion that can only be shattered, as they finally are, by an actual meeting. He revels in wild-goose chases. "Damnit! Where on earth did you run off to, anyway?" the narrator grumbles during the vain search for his wife in Shujaku . "Don't think for a moment I'll give up so easily. The longer you hide, the more I'll look. I've a mind to do nothing else!" (CSS , 91). Indeed, the narrator lives by his promise to "do nothing else" for the duration of the cycle. And since successful searches

and direct confrontations can yield only disillusionment, he actually feels more secure clutching at straws. Who but the Shuko hero would scorn a more direct method of locating his former wife in favor of searching the Nikko inn registers on the chance he might find a clue to her whereabouts two years before!

Even when the hero finds a clue, it only leads to another chase. Yet just as this tale is in the telling, not in the resolving, the hero's life is fulfilled in the searching, not in the finding. Far more important than Yukioka's eventual meeting with Osuma is his dream of seeing her again. And for the Shuko hero, sweet are the dreams that never come true.

Themes and Variations: The "Osaka Courtesan" Cycle

In the early years of Taisho, when he was still penning his "Estranged Wife" cycle, Shuko made an extended stay in the Kansai region, where he frequently engaged an Osaka prostitute. Several rendezvous in Osaka and at a nearby mountain spa, the woman's sudden disappearance and relocation in Taiwan as a businessman's mistress, and visits to the woman's sister in search of news, solace, and eventually affection, are recorded somewhat haphazardly in Shuko's next series of stories known as the "Osaka no yujo" (Osaka courtesan) cycle. After first appearing in five different magazines over a period of sixteen months (from December 1913 to April 1915), the cycle's seven stories were anthologized in book form roughly in the order of events: "Kurokami" (Dark hair), "Tsunokuni-ya" (Tsunokuni-ya [the name of the courtesan's house of assignation]), "Aokusa" (Green grass), "Nagare" (Drifting current), "Ada nasake" (Fleeting love), "Utsuroi" (A fading affair), and "Otoko kiyohime."

That this arrangement does not coincide with the original order of publication seems a minor point until one actually peruses the cycle from beginning to end. Even when read as a series, this odd collection of stories stubbornly refuses to congeal into an orderly narrative. Shuko made some revisions before publishing the anthologized version, but apparently not with the intent of unifying it as he did, quite conscientiously, in the case of the "Estranged Wife" cycle. There is a considerable difference in the amount of

narrative ground covered from story to story. Some, like "Kurokami" and "Ada nasake," present overviews of the affair; others, like "Aokusa" and "Nagare," only the briefest of episodes. Sections of several stories overlap, moreover, while the names of characters and places vary, contributing to a general feeling of untidiness.^[30] Narrative voice, too, appears to vary in several works. In "Utsuroi" the first-person narrator-hero tells his own story. In "Kurokami" and "Ada nasake" an anonymous narrator introduces the hero's first-person narration; the rest are third-person narrations.

Or are they? The question of narrative person is not the simple, straightforward one it appears to be in English. We noted in Chapter 1 that the sheer variety and number of pronominals in Japanese, the use of each dependent on the speaker's relationship with hearer and referent, make their function vastly different from the autonomous placeholders in western languages. In the latter, an "I" is an "I," a "he" a "he," in all utterances, spoken and narrated; not so, however, in the Japanese. The use of jibun as a subjective as well as a reflexive pronoun, moreover, as we noted in our discussion of Soseki's Mon and its English translation in Chapter 2, makes possible—indeed, inevitable—a blurring of boundaries between first and third person that is literally unthinkable in English.

Thus, what we might take ostensibly for third-person narration can on closer examination be identical to first-person narration. Only the presence of the hero's name or kare marks a passage positively as a "third-person" narration; yet these positive identifiers are often few and far between, since Japanese functions quite adequately without such English-language necessities as grammatical person and verb conjugation. Stories in the "Osaka Courtesan" cycle narrated in the "third person" often go for paragraphs without a single such identifier. The absence of such identifiers—combined with the language's natural inclination to the speaker/narrator's point of view—makes the stories read as if the narrating "I" and the acting "he" are one and the same.

So it is, for example, with "Otoko kiyohime" and the passage cited earlier about the Shuko hero's foolish passion. Here it is translated, as it must be, into straightforward third-person narration, with the appropriate place-marking pronouns and agreeing verbs:

[30] Nakajima Kunihiko examines the cycle's "untidiness" in "Tosui to ninshiki."

His heart was possessed by the woman he loved. That he despised her at times and adored her at others made no difference; the obsession was itself more than enough reason for living. Nothing else in this world mattered to him. Nothing at all.

But let us take a closer look at the passage itself.

Tatoi uramu ni mo seyo, shitau ni mo seyo, jibun wa ima suki na onna no koto o omoitsumete-iru. Omoitsumete-ireba koso, soko ni jibun ga ikite-iru shoko de aru. Sore o nozoite sekai no nanimono o motte kite mo issai jibun to wa mukankei de aru.^[31]

What we have translated as "he" is jibun , used here as a subjective case indicator. Read by itself, the passage is identical to a first-person narration. Indeed, given the language's aforementioned speaker/narrator orientation, it could be taken only as a first-person narration, and so it would seem at first glance in this very story. The most proximate references to a "third person" are those made to the hero, mentioned by name as "Kamo" one paragraph earlier, and to "he" (kare ) two paragraphs later. These markers are of course reminders enough that the narrated subject is being presented in the "third person"—but not enough to distinguish it conclusively from the narrating subject. Narrator and hero thus merge as easily in third-person as in first-person narration in the written reportive style, which is used throughout.

This point is brought home (if we may digress for a moment) in a story called Watakushi wa ikite kita (I have lived, 1923). Shuko's recounting of his first years in Tokyo is a "third-person" narration throughout. The hero (and only the hero) is identified as kare ; the watakushi in the title is nowhere to be found in the text. And yet there is no mistaking the link between the "he" and the "I"; for as we have noted, "third person" and "first person" are not the autonomous entities that they are in English and the other western languages. Indeed, as we learned in Chapter 2, the "pronoun" kare's extremely narrow range of usage results in a mode of narration in which third person and first person are for all intents and purposes intertwined. Regardless of the narrative "person," the hero's voice is, in the final analysis, the narrator's own. Whether a writer chooses kare or watakushi as his hero, he has committed him-

[31] Shinsen Chikamatsu Shuko shu , 241. (Emphasis added.)

self to the epistemology of that one character to the exclusion of all others. Not to do so is to jeopardize the credibility (or "authenticity," if you will) that is underwritten by the written reportive style.

But to return to the "Osaka Courtesan" cycle. Although it lacks the unique temporal regression that so distinguishes Giwaku and the rest of the "Estranged Wife" cycle, several stories contain marvelous depictions of the Shuko world. Perhaps the best is "Nagare." Onatsu arrives late at a spa west of Osaka, where Mashima, a writer, is vacationing, to find that Mashima has finished supper and taken to his bed, having despaired of her ever coming at all. In a scene laced with sexual innuendo, Mashima peels a banana and feeds it to Onatsu as he scolds her for her tardiness. Proper names are dropped: Mashima becomes Man (otoko ), the prostitute, Woman (onna ), throughout this and much of the extended bath scene that follows. The next morning, in a reversal of roles, the woman feeds her man roasted chestnuts. Such suggestive passages make an actual love scene redundant, and there is in fact none to be found in "Nagare." The story ends with the hero chanting passages from joruri —a fitting conclusion to a work that recalls a scene from an Edo-period "domestic" play. The hero blissfully inhabits (in a manner that recalls "Yuki no hi") a world sealed off from the realities of ransoms and rivalries with the woman's other clients.

The "Osaka Courtesan" cycle is unique in that it is the one major text that focuses on the Shuko hero's relationship with a woman at its height. Shuko wrote numerous stories following his "Estranged Wife" and prior to his "Dark Hair" cycles that depict, respectively, happier days with his wife and with the Kyoto courtesan,^[32] but they pale before the anguished tales of abandonment and blind pursuit that make up the twin monuments of his oeuvre.

The "Kyoto Courtesan" Cycle: Writing and Rewriting Lived Experience

As with the "Estranged Wife" cycle, the narrator's pursuit of an illusory relationship that nonetheless gives his life purpose is the

[32] "Kuseyama joshu" (1928) is an example of the former; Katsuragi-dayu (1916), of the latter.

theme of Shuko's next extended series of stories, known as the "Kyoto no yujo" (Kyoto courtesan) cycle. The most important of these is a group of stories referred to here as the "Kurokami" or "Dark Hair" cycle: Kurokami (Dark hair, 1922), Kyoran (Frenzy, 1922), and Shimo kouru yoi (Frosty evening, 1922), published together in book form in 1924. This group, which forms the second peak in the Shuko oeuvre after the "Estranged Wife" cycle, is actually the fourth of six groups of stories treating the author's relationship with a prostitute from Kyoto's Gion quarter. It, along with Futari no hitori mono (Two loners, 1923) and a two-work subcycle entitled Kyuren (Undying love, 1923) and Kyuren zokuhen (Undying love, part 2, 1924; originally entitled Kutsujoku [Humiliation]), form a loose trilogy that treats the relationship's decline.

Like the "Estranged Wife" cycle, the "Dark Hair" cycle presents chronologically distant events in the author's life as if they had only just unfolded. The narrator-hero, nameless throughout the cycle, tells the story of his obsessive and demeaning infatuation with Osono, who deftly eludes his advances while extracting every penny from his pocketbook. The hero has returned to Kyoto after a summer sojourn in the mountains to find that his beloved has vanished without a trace. He reminisces about three previous liaisons with her over a four-year period, and in particular the month he spent with her and her mother before his sojourn in the mountains. In a long recollective sequence (extending into Kyoran ), the time during which he lives in the woman's home becomes the narrative present. Once again the original present is suppressed in a move to collapse the distance between the hero as narrator and the hero as actor—and this is what makes Shuko's technique of temporal regression differ so markedly from the more or less clearly delineated reflections-as-reflections we call flashbacks.

Kyoran continues the narrator's reverie where Kurokami leaves off, practically in midparagraph, with the hero blissfully ensconced in Osono's secluded flat. His jealousy and suspicion are provoked, however, when he discovers that there are other men in Osono's life and that Osono has squandered all the money he sent her from Tokyo. The story suddenly returning to the original narrative present set at the beginning of Kurokami , the hero then locates the mother but finds her suddenly hostile. Her lawyer later accuses him of having badgered Osono into illness and finally into running away, and sends him off on a wild-goose chase after his beloved to

Yamashiro, south of Kyoto. In Shimo kouru yoi , the hero finally discovers Osono living in a Kyoto back alley near her old flat; she has never left the city.

As with the "Estranged Wife" cycle, one is above all impressed, indeed flabbergasted, by what can only be described as an extremely myopic point of view. And yet this cycle's brilliance lies precisely in the fact that it chronicles the hero's deception through his own gullible eyes without the benefit of a perspective generated by time. We have no way of interpreting the intentions of Osono or her mother other than by what can be deduced from their actions and from the hero's own interpretations, which we come to suspect are all too sanguine. The narrator is completely silent about how he has occupied himself when not with Osono during the years he has known her—which is most of the time, since he visits Kyoto from Tokyo only occasionally. He is just as silent about the inception—and outcome—of the affair. One somehow feels that Osono has always been the narrator's sole preoccupation and always will be. Even the demands of his profession are beneath mention—we know only that he is a writer—and he attends to them with the nearly involuntary movements more commonly associated with brushing one's teeth.

Also beneath mention is the nature of Osono's profession. The narrator states several times in Kurokami and Kyoran that he has denied himself the pleasure of a casual meeting with Osono in the gay quarter itself. His attitude toward her suggests that of a man toward his spouse, not a prostitute, and he is destined to be disillusioned. The ambiguity of his attitude is reflected in the dialogue. His use of three different terms of address (omae, kimi , and an'ta ) in one short conversation near the beginning of Kurokami , for example, graphically illustrates the relationship's instability (CSS , 194).

The hero's vain attempt to become a member of Osono's "family" finds a parallel in his efforts to assimilate himself into an exotic environment. Indeed, the powerful depiction of this nameless, rootless man's attempt to invade sacred territory is what makes the "Kurokami" cycle such a striking text.^[33] As an outsider, the hero is acutely conscious of the city's physical setting (the text is rich in

[33] The following discussion is indebted to Kono Kensuke, “Kurokami ron josetsu," esp. 286-96.

descriptive passages), its cuisine, its language (the prostitute's Kyoto lilt contrasts markedly with his crisp Tokyo speech), and finally, his beloved, the likes of whom he claims could exist nowhere but in Kyoto. That Osono is an extension of Kyoto itself is driven home in the scene in which she first appears, as she seemingly materializes from the hills surrounding the city.

We were to rendezvous near the Kodaiji Temple grounds, a short walk from the inn.... The hills behind the houses were covered with dark green pines and straight, light green bamboo. I walked toward the hills up a quiet, narrow lane to a teahouse in Makuzugahara where we were to meet, and waited for a while. Situated high above the Kamo River basin., the area afforded a fine view of the city. The pleasant winter sun cast its golden light on Mount Atago, which rose to the west through the deep blue afternoon mist. I walked on a bit but took care not to stray too far. Glancing back at the spot where I had previously stood, I could make out among the crowd of passersby a familiar figure gliding up the slope. It was she.

(CSS , 187)

At the city's center is the sacred space occupied by Osono and her mother: a tiny, secluded flat to which the hero gains brief access before his trip to the mountains. Thwarted at every turn in an attempt to have even so much as a chat with Osono, the hero is suddenly led late one misty, moonlit night by her mother through a labyrinth of back alleys to their home. Only after passing through a series of barriers—a gate, a low door, a narrow interior garden, yet another low door, a succession of dark rooms—does he at last reach his beloved's cozy apartment, which radiates light and warmth.

Returning from the mountains after the summer, however, the Shuko hero finds that he has been expelled from this sacred space and that indeed the space itself has been obliterated: Osono and her mother have moved out. From this point on (Kyoran , chapter 3), the hero devotes his energies to an attempt to penetrate what is now a completely closed-off world. Unable to find any trace of Osono in Kyoto, he relies on a dubious lead from the lawyer and searches for her in the hills south of the city. Osono is said to have been born at the foot of a holy mountain near Yamashiro and still to have relatives there. The hero redirects his sights toward this new sacred space, but lacking a guide, he has no hope for success.

Lost in the countryside and with snow starting to fall, he reconsiders his request to beg a ride further into the hills.

"Please get on," the driver said

My heart was warmed by the driver's kindness, but I could not bring myself to board the cart. One mountain range rose above another before me under the leaden sky. Why was it so difficult for me to forget about her, I wondered.
"Thanks, but I think I'll forego the ride after all."

With that, I abandoned my search and retraced my steps. When I reached the long wooden bridge across the Kizu River, a cold, snowy wind swirled up from the water and knifed across my face.

(CSS , 246)

The hero is in the end utterly unsuccessful in his attempts to possess Osono. His ideal is by no means tarnished by such failure, however; if anything, it glistens all the more brilliantly when just out of reach. And if it is the chase (obviously futile to more discerning eyes), not the conquest, that inspires the hero's passion, so is it the desire to relate, rather than resolve, his affair that prompts the narrator to take up his pen. As actor, the hero lives only for love; as writer, the narrator revels in telling a story, shorn of perspective, of blind pursuit.

And telling it again. Shortly after publishing his "Dark Hair" cycle, Shuko wrote Kyuren and Kyuren zokuhen , a two-story sequel that advances the "Dark Hair" narrative a few months. The "Kyuren" cycle is no ordinary sequel, however, in that it primarily amends and recasts rather than supplements the previous cycle. In the case of Kyuren , which interlaces Kyoran , a woof woven into the warp, the overlap is virtually complete. At times it comes dangerously dose to being a rehash as well, but it merits our attention nonetheless for the insights it offers into Shuko's narrative technique. Indeed, in dealing with this cycle, there is much to be said for the kind of approach that Gérard Genette calls a "paradigmatic reading," in which thematic rather than narrative consistency prevails in an author's corpus and in which "the text begins with the duplication of the text."^[34]

[34] Figures of Literary Discourse, 168. Genette applies this reading to Stendahl, author of an oeuvre that, compared with the self-contained narratives of Balzac, is "fragmented, elliptical, repetitive, yet infinite, or at least indefinite" (p. 165).

The "Kyuren" cycle presents a familiar story in a radically different format. The keynote in Kyuren is the hero's gradual, painful enlightenment, in contrast with his unchanging gullibility in Kyoran . It is not simply that a third-person narrator replaces the first-person narrator-hero; the temporal regression common to both the "Estranged Wife" and "Dark Hair" cycles completely disappears. Writing with a clear awareness of his hero's follies, moreover, the "Kyuren" narrator sees the hero less as a victim of his passion for Oryu (Osono in the "Dark Hair" cycle) than as the deliberate target of her associates' con game.

There is also a significant overlap between two other texts, Futari no hitori mono and Shimo kouru yoi . We immediately recognize the Shuko hero in Tahara, a writer hopelessly in love with a Gion prostitute. After summarizing certain events detailed in the "Dark Hair" cycle, Futari no hitori mono describes Tahara's eventual discovery of Oryu and his bitter arguments with her now-inhospitable mother. The actual outcome of Tahara's maneuverings seems even of less concern than in earlier stories, however, because of the presence of a second protagonist: Tahara's friend Tsuruoka, a journalist with socialist leanings who is constantly tailed by the police. After Tahara finally gains a foothold into Oryu's house, the narrative inexplicably drops the subject and tells us no more.

Perhaps Shuko's awareness that the "same" lived experience could generate different tellings (as we have noted specifically in the "sequels" to the "Dark Hair" cycle)^[35] arose from his previous discovery that "different" experiences could in turn generate essentially the same tale. The most memorable texts in the Shuko oeuvre are nearly all informed by the now-familiar motif of the hapless lover awaiting or chasing vainly after his beloved. Even though the "Estranged Wife" and "Dark Hair" cycles are based on experiences separated by nearly a decade, their similarities are particularly striking. Both Osuma and Osono are idealized figures who remain tantalizingly out of the hero's reach. Both disappear without warning. Both have protectors (Osuma's sister and

[35] Narrative "amendation" of a sort occurs in texts published around the time of the "Estranged Wife" cycle as well. See, for example, "Sono ato," which overlaps Giwaku zokuhen almost completely and can be regarded as a draft of the latter, except that it lacks the intensity derived in the "Estranged Wife" cycle from the compression of temporally discrete events into virtually the same psychological continuum.

brother-in-law, and Osono's mother) who frustrate the hero's every effort to regain contact. The Shuko hero travels far and wide in search of clues to his beloved's whereabouts: to Nikko and Okayama in the "Estranged Wife" cycle and to Yamashiro in the "Dark Hair" cycle. In both, the hero vies with a shadowy figure for his beloved's affections: a student in the former, and a businessman in the latter. The "Osaka Courtesan" cycle also follows essentially the same pattern, sometimes so closely that one experiences a sense of déjà vu. A scene in "Nagare," for example, in which the hero morosely takes to bed after an interminable wait for his beloved, anticipates a similar scene in Kurokami and at the same time recalls scenes in Shujaku and Giwaku , in which the hero entertains murderous thoughts of his former wife while burrowed under his quilt.

It is tempting to attribute such parallels to coincidence: as a shishosetsu writer, the author drew from his own life and thus from a limited pool of experience. Yet even a single life is vastly complex, and similar experiences can always be presented in vastly different ways. In an essay on his "Dark Hair" cycle, Shuko expresses amazement that the same fate (of being abandoned by his beloved) would visit him twice in a lifetime. At the same time, he makes it clear that he has not left to chance the technique that describes that fate. "In Giwaku I establish as the fictional present the hero's search through the inns of Nikko and then go back in time, writing about the past as if events had only just taken place. I do the same in Kurokami and Kyoran ."^[36]

The sheer number of thematic parallels in Shuko's major texts, accentuated by the similarity of narrative presentation, suggests as strongly as anything that art has followed art as much as it has followed life, that the author has detected a pattern in his experience and amplified it to a level of significance far beyond that in his actual day-to-day affairs. It is this pattern, more than each episode's autobiographical veracity, that gives meaning to these parallels; its presence, moreover, belies the simple author-hero equation that shishosetsu readers tend to make, because it calls for a perspective on the part of the author that is not available to the narrator-hero in texts like Giwaku and Kyoran . It should not surprise us, therefore, to learn that Shuko did not pen his most satisfactory accounts

[36] “Kyoran gakuyabanashi," in Yomiuri shinbun , 4 Apr. 1922, p. 7.

of his life until the events on which they were based had long since taken on the patina of history. Only when events had passed from the realm of action to that of reflection was he free to plumb his experience with all the frenzy he could muster. In real life, Shuko was usually one relationship ahead of his fiction. At the time he was writing in Giwaku about his frantic search through the inns of Nikko, for example, Shuko was already involved with the woman in his "Osaka Courtesan" cycle; when writing in Kyoran about his wild-goose chase through the snowy countryside of Yamashiro, he was contemplating marriage to a Tokyo masseuse.^[37] The broader perspective afforded the author by elapsed time allowed him to choose all the more rigorously those details that conformed to his masochistic vision of a fool's love.

Shuko as "Novelist"

We have thus far considered the major cycles in a generally positive light, stressing Shuko's ability to "see" the diversity of lived experience within a consistently idealized vision. This vision is maintained in his next series of stories as well, the "Ko no ai" (Doting parent) cycle, beginning with Ko no ai no tame ni (For the love of his child, 1924), in which the object of the hero's demeaning adoration merely shifts from an elusive beloved to two sickly daughters, whom he fathered in his late forties.

We must not, however, overlook the fact that Shuko's experiments' in narrative replay, specifically in Futari no hitori mono and the "Kyuren" cycle, harbored contradictions that ultimately called the very medium in which he worked into question. In the first place, while a "rereading" of episodes in the author's life could provide new insights through a changed perspective, it could just

[37] See Hirano Ken, "Sakuhin to sakka," 424-25. Nakajima Kunihiko has since challenged Hirano's link between Shuko's establishment of a new relationship and his writing about a past one. He argues convincingly that Shuko did not need time for emotional recovery so much as time for artistic inspiration and that he found it, in the case of his "Estranged Wife" cycle, in the works of Arthur Schnitzler (through Mori Ogai's translations). He concludes that even in Shuko's case art imitates art more than life. See "Kyakkan shosetsu e no yume," 47-48; and “Shujaku , Giwaku o sasaeru mono," 166-7. Yet the fact remains that Shuko consistently wrote his best work months and even years after the incidents in question had taken place—by which time Shuko was indeed involved with another woman.

as easily result in an excessive milking of material. Futari no hitori mono, Kyuren , and Kyuren zokuhen are clearly derivative texts. In the second—and far more important—place, the later texts suffer from a loss of what might be called a narrative identity. Shuko attempted not simply to reinterpret experience when he wrote his sequels to the "Kurokami" cycle but dearly also to grasp it in terms that transcended the shishosetsu's epistemological limitations. In short, he attempted to recast the Japanese narrative form into one that would have greater narrative autonomy and would accommodate, in the manner of a western-language novel, several points of view. In Kyuren , for example, the partially omniscient narrator frees us from the Kyoran hero's myopic perspective and, by anticipating events before they develop, generates ironies not to be found in the earlier story. Yet these seemingly requisite conditions for a successful narrative in fact produce an inferior story. Presented by a narrator who ventures tentatively into omniscience, Kyuren loses the gripping authenticity of Kyoran . In Futari no hitori mono the trend is even more pronounced. The tunnel-visioned, first-person narration of the "Dark Hair" cycle gives way to a self-consciously omniscient narrative that adopts the point of view of each of the two main characters. Yet the reader's sympathies are never fully engaged in either of them.

In Futari no hitori mono especially, Shuko seems to be battling with the Japanese language itself. Alert as we have become and as any bundan reader would be to the shishosetsu narrator's use of the written reportive style to present himself as a personal authenticator of experience, we want to ask: how does the omniscient narrator know what he knows, and by what authority? The linguistic and epistemological distance that such a narrator places between himself and his principal characters inevitably drives a wedge between narrator and reader as well; for we as readers, observing the grammatical signs (discussed in Chapter 2) that link narrating and acting consciousness, sense that the narrative has shifted from a "sincere" (because epistemologically immanent) recounting to an "insincere" (because epistemologically transcendent) fabrication. By revealing information about the hero's situation that the hero himself does not know, the narrator, in this reading, trivializes the latter's perceptions and discredits the narrative itself as an authentic account.

Thus it is that Shuko's most myopic presentations (texts like Giwaku and Kyoran )—because they so successfully replicate a personally authenticated telling—make the most powerful impressions on the reader. Shuko was doubtlessly aware of his achievement. Yet he spent a great deal of creative energy attempting to overturn the shishosetsu's restrictive epistemology. Throughout his career, he repeatedly announced his intention to transcend personal experience and write "true novels" (honkaku shosetsu ) that dealt objectively with the lives of others.^[38] Nakajima Kunihiko, commenting on that intention, suggests that Shuko was not equipped with the narrative skills needed to produce truly well-crafted and autonomous verbal artifacts? Yet no less a writer than Akutagawa Ryunosuke thought highly of Shuko's honkaku shosetsu . He singles out Shuko's "Rin o nonde shinda hito" (Suicide by phosphorous poisoning, 1926) for special mention. It is the story of a man who, unhappily married to a member of the pariah burakumin , bungles his affair with a mistress he has installed in his home to tutor his children. Despairing of his situation, he finally kills himself. The work cannot in fact be counted among Shuko's best, but it is easy to see what attracted Akutagawa's attention. The story's omniscient narrator reveals the consciousness of the three main characters in turn: the man, his mistress, and his wife. Because the narrator engages the reader's sympathies in all three characters (more successfully, it might be added, than in Futari no hitori mono ) by relating events from diverse points of view, one is not sure until the end who will actually commit suicide; all have their pressing reasons. Indeed, Shuko very likely entitled his work "... shinda hito" ("person who died") rather than" ... shinda otoko" ("man who died") precisely in order to keep the reader in the dark.

In defense of "Rin o nonde shinda hito," Akutagawa cautions against judging honkaku shosetsu by the standard of the shishosetsu . Nothing can compare with the latter as a vehicle for confession, he allows, but its superiority in just this one respect should not lead

[38] In the preface to a single-volume anthology entitled Keien (1915), Shuko writes, "I have no intention of spending my entire career detailing the follies of my love life.... I wish to write about the broad social scene after the manner of Zola." Shuko expresses a similar wish in "Honrai no negai" (1926).

[39] "Kyakkan shosetsu e no yume," 58.

critics to reject the honkaku shosetsu out of hand? "Should not," Akutagawa writes; but reject it (or at least view it suspiciously) the bundan did. Although critics of the time did not spell it out in so many words, what bothered them, as we can deduce from our examination in Chapter 3 of the mode of reading literature in the Taisho period, was the question we asked shortly before: how does the narrator in a text like "Rin o nonde shinda hito" know what he knows, and by what authority? And if that knowledge does not derive from lived experience, how can he convey it with the same degree of authenticity as one whose knowledge does? The answer is that he cannot. The mechanics of the Japanese language, reinforced by a long cultural tradition that has associated a transcendent epistemology with fabrication and ultimately with "nonliterature," simply will not let him. That is why Shuko's shishosetsu , above and beyond any actual defects in his other fiction, have had the greater appeal, his several pronouncements about honkaku shosetsu notwithstanding. Autobiographical "fact" is not at issue here; the crucial equation is between the narrator, not the author, and his hero. Shuko succeeded in utilizing the genius of the language to project the narrator-hero's consciousness as if it were the author's very own, knowing that the reader would interpret it in no other way.

Shuko learned well his lesson from Futabatei's Heibon : that the hero who speaks in Japanese directly to his audience speaks most persuasively. In his Bundan sanju nen (My thirty years in the bundan , 1931), Shuko recalls a conversation he had with Futabatei about literature and truth. Art, according to Futabatei, is mere fabrication, and life too important to be transformed capriciously into a pack of lies. But if you must write at all, Futabatei then admonished, then at least write as if you are telling a truth that you have personally lived—which is to say from your own limited perspective and not from the privileged perspective of an omniscient observer.^[41]

[40] "Chikamatsu-san no honkaku shosetsu" (1926), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu 8:165-67.

[41] P. 197. Sawa Toyohiko is perhaps the only Japanese scholar to note Futabatei's influence on Shuko. See “Wakaretaru tsuma to sono hen'yo," 42-43. Futabatei's words of course represent a major change from the narrative philosophy that guided him in the writing of Ukigumo . Indeed, we can see in Ukigumo, Sono omokage , and Heibon a transition from a narrative form approaching (although never equivalent to) that of the western novel to the epistemologically immanent mode that would only later be termed shishosetsu .

Futabatei published Heibon soon after this interview; we have already noted its impact on Shuko in Chapter 5. Elsewhere, Shuko elaborates on how he himself wrestled with the problem of narrative presentation in the "Dark Hair" cycle:

Once I had decided to write a self-exposé, I confronted the question of whether to narrate it in the third person or first person. During a discussion with Tokuda Shusei and Kume Masao about the problem, Shusei recommended the former and Kume the latter. I myself felt that using a third-person narration for such brazen confessions would only blunt the overall effect. I told Kume later ... that I would employ a first-person narration, as I believed it the more convincing conveyor of my true feelings.... I have often expressed to younger colleagues my desire in recent years to distance myself and write coolly objective stories in third-person narration, and my utter distaste for recording the painful experiences of private life. Yet I ended up doing just that, once again, in Kurokami and Kyoran .^[42]

We can see that Shuko's narrative strategy here is essentially identical to the one that informs his "Estranged Wife" cycle. In both cases, he opts for the nontranscendent consciousness available with first-person narration. "I may choose of course to write what I observe or imagine someone else to be doing," Shuko writes early in his career, "but art is by its very nature concrete and therefore tied irrevocably to one's own perceptions.... The more closely a story is linked to those perceptions, the greater its power."^[43]

Yet even more important, this strategy informs such "third-person" narratives as the stories in the "Osaka Courtesan" cycle, where the acting "he" merges with the narrating "I." In stories like "Otoko kiyohime" (and most strikingly in Watashi wa ikite kita ), the third-person narrator is in every sense an extension of the hero, never straying from the latter's epistemological realm. Of course, Shuko's narrative method is hardly unique. Shiga Naoya also makes effective use of a nonautonomous third-person narrator in An'ya koro (A dark night's passing), as we shall observe in the following chapter. Shuko's stories simply demonstrate that the hero in an "I-novel" is neither an autonomous "I" nor "he" but rather a

[42] “Kyoran gakuyabanashi," in Yomiuri shinbun , 2 and 4 Apr. 1922, pp. 7 and 7, respectively.

[43] "Omotta mama."

discerning, personless (in the grammatical sense) eye that perceives the world through the narrator's senses.

Although Shuko wrote prolifically in several other forms, including honkaku shosetsu , criticism, historical fiction, and travel essays, we have focused primarily on his shishosetsu because his success in that form, combined with the difficulties he had creating a viable narrative voice for his other fiction, have provided us with insights into his overall technique and its import for modern Japanese literature. This technique, which matched perfectly the traditional epistemology, provided a modus operandi for scores of writers to follow. Among them were writers like Shiga Naoya, with a finer, more carefully crafted style, and like Kasai Zenzo, with a greater commitment to the shishosetsu form, but none with a clearer awareness of the stakes involved in choosing one narrative form—and its supporting epistemology—over another.

Not that Shuko was a deep thinker. Yet neither can he simply be dismissed as the raving degenerate that Akagi Kohei and others would make him out to be. Although Shuko very likely pursued in real life every foolish escapade he describes in his work, too facile an equation between life and art can only blind us to Shuko's purpose as a writer. Masamune Hakucho writes that Shuko wanted to create love stories after Ozaki Koyo or Chikamatsu Monzaemon; that he was a frustrated Chubei or Jihei searching for his Umekawa or Koharu but finally unable to find her.^[44] Perhaps. But his failure in real life was not necessarily detrimental to his literary project. On the contrary, it provided a vision radically different from the fulfilled if tragic loves of Umekawa and Chubei or Koharu and Jihei in Chikamatsu's dramas. "Looking back on my life," Shuko writes in a "retrospective" essay in 1910, near the beginning of his career as a fiction writer, "I see that I have achieved no memorable successes. Indeed, the more I reflect, the more painful experiences I can recall. And yet for one like me who does not entertain any ambitions for the future either, there is no other pleasure in life than recollecting past failures and savoring the excruciating ecstasy of suffering."^[45] Already Shuko has discovered the keynote of his literature, fashioned from emotions recalled in barely contained

[44] Chikamatsu Shuko , in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 4:521.

[45] "Bungei hyaku homen."

hysteria and centering on a lost and never-to-be regained ideal. "Even though he [this 'he' that is synonymous with 'I'] was starved for feminine affections," the Shuko narrator writes three years later of his hero in "Otoko kiyohime," "he/I had no interest in seeking out a flesh-and-blood woman and becoming intimate with her. He/ I had grown weary of real women; he/I preferred the women of his/my dreams. Recalling past associations and giving him/myself over to the exciting memories was far more pleasant, he/I found, than burdening him/myself with an actual relationship."^[46]

The women in his life understandably wearied of his irresponsible ways and abandoned him; but Shuko fashioned out of them a coy siren destined to elude for all time his heroes' grasp. We have seen how he rewrote the events in his own life in a way that conformed to his ideal vision. However eccentric in real life, he remained faithful to his literary aesthetic. And if we end up admiring the work more than the real-life man, are we not in fact paying Shuko the ultimate tribute as an artist?

[46] Shinsen Chikamatsu Shuko shu , 232-33.