1
Fictions and Fabrications

When it comes to fiction I can write nothing but lies; and because I so believe, I simply cannot be serious about it.
Fubatatei Shimei, "Watakushi wa kaigi-ha da"

I think that truly creative writing involves ... discovering something in yourself, not dreaming up some formally satisfying story.
Yasuoka Shotaro, "Gendai ni okeru watakushi shosetsu"

There is an unmistakable mystique about the shishosetsu , begotten by the special status it enjoys as a "truthful" account of its author, which has traditionally discouraged anything more than a cursory analysis of it as a literary artifact. Writing about the shishosetsu is not unlike pursuing a desert oasis only to watch it recede and finally disappear altogether as you approach it, or like peeling an onion, skin after skin, in a vain attempt to get at the "core"; there is something inherently elusive about the entire project. How is one to analyze a form that critics have debated for well over half a century but for which they have failed to come up with a workable definition? How does one go about isolating a form that is commonly thought to differ significantly from the shosetsu , yet has no clearly identifiable linguistic marks? And finally, how is one to describe in English a form the very name of which comprises two seemingly neutral but in fact highly problematical and quite untranslatable elements, shi (watakushi ) and shosetsu ? Raising such awkward questions at the commencement of a study perhaps bodes ill for its outcome, but it seems wisest to alert readers at the outset to the illusory nature of this most "realistic" (as Japanese critics would have it) of narrative modes.

The shishosetsu appears all the more illusory in translation. "I-novel" is an unfortunate misnomer for a form that differs fundamentally from the novel and contains no "I" in the sense we are accustomed to thinking of the word. Shosetsu , a Chinese compound with its own long etymological and cultural history, is the word chosen by the early-Meiji students of western literature to render "novel" into Japanese. From the beginning, however, its much broader meaning and scope defied the neat definition of "novel" that the students, in all good faith, originally assigned to it. In the first place, shosetsu refers to a prose fiction of any length. The distinction made in English between the novel and the short story is nonexistent, although the Japanese do classify texts as "short," "medium," or "long."^[1] In the second place, shosetsu can refer to texts that westerners ordinarily do not think of as fiction. Essays, sketches, memoirs, and other discursive and reflective pieces, which we would normally subsume under the rubric of nonfiction, very often fall under the category of shosetsu in Japanese.

shishosetsu is a loose approximation of the German Ich-Roman , after which it appears to have been named. The Ich-Roman is a full-length novel in which the narrator gives a first-person account of his experiences. This genre is hardly unique to German literature (which has examples from Werther to The Tin Drum ) or to western literature as a whole; modern Japanese literature, too, has its examples—Wagahai wa neko de aru (I am a cat, 1905-6) and Botchan (1906), both by Natsume Soseki, being among the earliest and best. Japanese readers would never think of calling these texts shishosetsu , however, because the narrators bear little or no resemblance to their author. Soseki is no alley cat, after all; nor is he a reckless, ne'er-do-well teacher in Shikoku like Botchan (although he did teach there once). The shishosetsu , moreover, need not have a first-person narrator at all. A story narrated in the third person may still be considered a shishosetsu if the hero is clearly modeled after the author.^[2]

[1] Tanpen, chuhen , and chohen , respectively. These forms have no distinguishing structural characteristics or absolute word count. Hirano Ken, for example, calls Chikamatsu Shuko's Ko no ai no tame ni a tanpen shosetsu in NKBD 2:382 but calls the same work a chuhen shosetsu in Ito Sei et al., eds., Shincho Nihon bungaku shojiten , 765.

[2] For a discussion of the Ich-Roman and the shishosetsu , see, for example, Sato Koichi, "Ihi-roman." For a comparison of the shishosetsu with the French roman personnel , which is no more closely related, see Shirai Koji, "Roman perusoneru ni tsuite."

The nature of the shi/watakushi in shishosetsu , however, invites further examination. Watakushi can hardly be translated other than as "I," but it most assuredly does not mean the same thing. Indeed, the single first-person pronoun nearly all languages employ is no more useful to Japanese than the word "snow" is to Eskimo; it is much too general to serve any purpose. Watakushi is actually one of a half dozen or so first-person pronominals that any one person commonly uses to refer to oneself, depending on the occasion (e.g., public or private) and on the relative social position of the listener and/or the referent. A man might use one pronominal (e.g., ore ) to refer to himself when speaking to family members or to close friends, another (e.g., boku ) when speaking to his peers at work, and still another (e.g., watashi ) when speaking to his boss. (A woman is generally limited to the use of watashi or watakushi in the standard dialect.)^[3] Each first-person pronominal has distinct nuances that greatly affect a writer's style. We shall see in Part 3 how Chikamatsu Shuko, for example, uses the relatively formal watashi to lend an air of solemn, matter-of-fact dignity to his zany accounts of depraved love; how Shiga Naoya uses jibun to distance himself from his experience and at the same time draw the reader into it; and how through Kasai Zenzo's kaleidoscopic usage of first-person pronominals we "see" one man's sense of self disperse before our eyes.

This remarkable variety extends to the second-and third-person pronominals as well, which if anything are even more numerous. The incidence of so many pronominals in the language speaks eloquently for a very protean notion of self, one that depends for its existence more on the person or situation with whom or with

[3] Watakushi , the most public and formal of the first-person pronominals currently in use, is a curious choice of labels for a form that presumes to describe the author's "private" life and thoughts. The original meaning of watakushi , to be sure, is "private" or "personal" as opposed to "public" or "communal" (whence such words, still in use, as watakushigoto ["private matter"] and watakushigokoro ["private emotions"]), but the watakushi in watakushi shosetsu is clearly an example of the pronominal usage, as is illustrated by the term once used alternately with watakushi shosetsu : “watakushi wa" shosetsu . (Wa is the topic-indicating particle.) See the entry on watakushi shosetsu in NKBD 4:539. As an alternative, Kasai Zenzo elected to call his shishosetsu jiko ("self") shosetsu , although this term, too, is problematic.

which one is associated at a given moment than on one's own unilaterally initiated thoughts and acts. We can think of a true pronoun as a sign of separate and autonomous presence, marking art indelible boundary between self and other. The existence of only one first-person pronoun in western languages like English makes that presence all the more inviolable. The abundance of first-, second-, and third-person pronominals in Japanese, however, each used in accordance with the speaker's social relationship with a specific hearer and referent, tends to undermine that sense of separate, autonomous presence and blur the boundary between self and other.^[4] In short, self-expression in Japanese is forever a contingent activity, dependent on the relationship between speaker and hearer and, by extension, between writer and audience. Shi/watakushi shosetsu becomes in this way a metonymy for what is in Japanese a continually variable communicative act. The narrator cannot even utter the word watakushi or boku or ore until he has posited a specific relationship with the narratee. The shishosetsu , then, is as much "we-novel" as "I-novel."

Reality, Mediation, and the Fictional Contract

Creating a viably intimate narrative relationship is, however, fraught with contradictions and forces each writer to come to terms with the nature of writing. Insofar as the shishosetsu is a prose fiction, it can never be a completely personal communicative act; the narrator does not know the recipient of his discourse in the same way as, say, the writer of a letter. As Roland Barthes exuberantly claims: "Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.... As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively ... this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins."^[5]

[4] It is interesting to note in this connection that words like onore have been used historically as either a first-person or second-person pronominal, depending on context, while the modern reflexive pronominal jibun , depending on context, can signify the first, second, or third person.

[5] "The Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text , 142. (Emphasis in original.)

And yet, we find, the shishosetsu is weaned most reluctantly from its author. Or, to put it another way, the shishosetsu resists becoming "writing" in Barthes's sense and flaunts its "personalism" by encouraging the reader to disregard its textual boundaries and view "real" world and "fictional" world as an unbroken continuum. The question of an author's "presence" in the text has assumed great importance in Japanese letters, as it alone is believed capable of establishing the text's "authenticity" (that is, autobiographical purity or nonfictionality), the highest value attached to writing. We shall discover that in Japan the notion of what is "real" or "authentic" is traditionally limited to personal observation and experience, with the result that fiction, insofar as it deviates from what "actually" happens, connotes a "fabrication" inapplicable to reality rather than a plausible, equally valid version of it. A story written in 1920 by Uno Koji (1891-1961), which relates one man's affair with a country geisha, plays on this notion. The narrator-hero interrupts his account and addresses his readers:

I have mentioned that I am a writer. When Hitogokoro , which I had completed during my previous stay in Shimosuwa ... was published last January, it created something of a sensation there, small town that it is, because I modeled the character "Yumiko" after Yumeko. Surely any intelligent reader has noticed a peculiar development in much recent Japanese fiction, namely the appearance of a nebulous figure known only as "I." One reads nothing about his looks, much less about his behavior or his profession. What does one read, you ask? Merely a string of impressionistic musings. Soon you realize that the "I" is none other than the author himself; indeed, this is almost always the case. The "I," therefore, is a writer, and the reader never seems to question this curious convention whereby the author uses first-person narrative to point to himself. Now, even though there is nothing wrong with having the narrator double as the hero and the hero pose as a writer, it is regrettable that readers have come to equate him automatically with the author and think of all the story's incidents as actually having taken place. At any rate, because Hitogokoro is written in the first person, people believed everything in it to be true and assumed that I had based my character "Yumiko" on Yumeko—which was all right by me, but I'm afraid it caused Yumeko no little consternation I hurriedly sent her a letter of apology.^[6]

[6] Amaki yo no hanashi , in Uno Koji zenshu 2:442-43. First published in Chuokoron (Sept. 1920). Translations from the Japanese are original to this study, unless otherwise indicated.

This often-quoted passage may be the first literary reference to what only later became known as the shishosetsu , and it well illustrates the kind of osmotic relationship that exists between author and narrator-hero—the one seemingly flowing into the other through a very permeable text. Uno knew that his audience would immediately recognize the by-then familiar formula of author = narrator = hero. A careful reading of Uno's discursive aside, however, suggests that it is not a critique. What sounds at first like an ironic disclaimer turns out to be an apt description of this very story. Indeed, it seems calculated to collapse the distinction between real world and fictional world by enticing readers into believing that the author has recorded events from his own life rather than invented them. The narrator laments the "regrettable" equation that readers ordinarily make between author and literary persona, yet implies that he too is "none other than the author himself" by listing in rapid succession the many properties that he the narrator and Uno the author have in common: the same profession ("I have mentioned that I am a writer"), the same piece of writing (Hitogokoro , which appeared in the same magazine as this story), and the same personal life ("people ... assumed that I had based my character 'Yumiko' on Yumeko—which was all right by me “).^[7]

Much of this story's impact, then, derives from the conceit, which Uno simultaneously ridicules and exploits, that the real-life author and his literary persona are one and the same. This, we might think, is impossible. Uno the author exists independent of the literary medium; Uno the persona, because of it.^[8] And in fact

[7] Elsewhere the narrator engages in a game of name-dropping, presumably to establish himself further in the readers' minds as a historical personage rather than as an imaginary character. He chats with another guest at the inn where he is staying who claims the acquaintance of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, the famous author. "In that case, you must know Sato Haruo, too," he retorts, for he is aware, as no doubt are his readers, that Sato and Tanizaki were close friends. The guest quickly takes the hint and tells of his drinking acquaintance with Nagata Mikihiko, another of Tanizaki's literary friends. Ibid., 427.

[8] Distinctions between author, "implied" author, and narrator on the one hand and between reader, "implied" reader, and narratee on the other should be kept in mind when analyzing a highly reflexive form like the shishosetsu . See Seymour Chat-man, Story and Discourse , 147-51 and passim, for an account of the narrative process. See also Gérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse , esp. chap. 7 ("Frontiers of Narrative"), for an explication of narrative distinctions relevant to this study, as well as Narrative Discourse , by the same author. References in this study to shishosetsu writers, insofar as they are the "heroes" of their own texts (as suggested by William E Sibley in his The Shiga Hero ), will accordingly be to the literary personae as opposed to the extraliterary persons.

what will be argued here is that author and persona even in a shishosetsu are not fully interchangeable, because authorial "presence" must always be, in the final analysis, a product of representation. This is not to say that we can simply isolate persona and text from the author and his life, for they are all part of a literary and cultural field that determines in large measure how the reader regards—or indeed whether he has any interest at all in—such notions as "author," "intention," "text," and "fiction." To confuse persona with author, however, no matter how close the resemblance, is to confuse the telling with lived experience: the former is accessible to the reader in a way that the latter simply is not. Gerard Genette, in his study of narrative, reminds us, for example, that "even the references in Tristram Shandy to the situation of writing speak to the (fictive) act of Tristram and not the (real) one of Sterne; but in a more subtle and also more radical way, the narrator of Père Goriot 'is' not Balzac, even if here and there he expresses Balzac's opinions, for this author-narrator is someone who 'knows' the Vauquer boardinghouse, its landlady and its lodgers, whereas all Balzac himself does is imagine them; and in this sense, of course, the narrating situation of a fictional account is never reduced to its situation of writing."^[9]

The common practice in the Japanese literary establishment, or bundan , however, has been to reduce the narrating situation to its situation of writing. We shall see in Chapter 2 that the structure of the Japanese language provides some justification for this reduction, since the language's fundamental speaker orientation is most compatible—regardless of narrative person—with a limited point of view that is easily identified with the author's own.^[10] There is of course no dearth of examples in twentieth-century western literature that invite a similar practice (one recalls the writings of Gide, Miller, and Proust), but the emphasis on fictional autonomy has prevailed.^[11] The bundan , meanwhile, has historically believed lived

[9] Narrative Discourse , 214. (Emphasis in original.)

[10] Genette's strict distinction in Narrative Discourse , 185-89, between "point of view" (who sees?) and "voice" (who speaks?), therefore, is not entirely valid in the Japanese case. We will find that ambiguity of narrative voice is structurally built into the Japanese language. See the discussion in Chapter 2, below.

[11] Proust, for example, insists in Contre Sainte-Beuve that a literary text not be confounded with the life of its author and that in the text the writer creates a self distinct from his biographical one. See Stephen G. Kellman, The Self-begetting Novel , 17, 21.

experience to be more "authentic" than any literary version of it, and has read the shishosetsu in the confidently referential manner in which we read a biography or legal document, finding meaning in it only insofar as it sheds light on the author's private life. In this view, the shishosetsu narrator is less a storyteller than a spokesman who has eschewed fictionalization in favor of direct expression. Narrative is thus wholly subordinated to discourse.

A writer's notion of fiction is of course predicated on his concept of the "real." The Japanese view of history, the individual's place in society, the native literary tradition, and the language itself have all been instrumental in forming the concept of reality through which the early twentieth-century writer regarded his world and against which notions of fiction had to compete. As used here "fiction" suggests any plausible, alternative vision of "reality," rather than simply the "fantastic" or the "nonreal." John Fowles offers a credo for the fiction writer when he says, “We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. “^[12] The great tradition of realism that flourished in the nineteenth century attests to the essential compatibility in western culture between the "imagined" worlds one reads about in novels and the "real" world of personal experience. It is less important that an event has actually occurred than that it could have occurred, given the particular situation. Fictional world and phenomenal world are both based on the premise, underwritten by the post-Enlightenment secularization of culture, that "reality" is as much mediated by the human mind as it is an entity unto itself; it is a function of the very manner in which it is apprehended and then represented.^[13] Fictive imagination is just as much a part of this reality as actual experience, because both are products of mediation and are in this sense created.

Fowles's fictional credo, however, does not square with the Japanese perception that the unmediated presentation of lived experi-

[12] The French Lieutenant's Woman , 81. (Emphasis in original; the quotation appears in chapter 13.)

[13] We should note the important distinction between the "gentile" or historical, and the "sacred" or original, that Vico makes in his philosophy of a human history. See the concluding chapter of Edward W. Said's Beginnings , esp. 347-53, for an excellent introduction to Vico's thought and a discussion of the evolution of an intellectual environment conducive to narrative creativity.

ence is possible when "freed" of fictional elements. Maruyama Masao, in a highly suggestive discourse, attributes the dearth of fictional "imagination" in modern Japanese literature to a traditional social organization that can accommodate only experience that is directly perceived. Maruyama distinguishes between two kinds of reality, "mediated" and "immediate," and argues that the western intellectual tradition stresses the former while the Japanese tradition stresses the latter. Modern society is founded on "mediated" reality, that is, "fictions" of social organization that transcend direct and tangible interpersonal relationships (such as the lord-vassal contract) and see people as individuals capable of independent action. Westerners, very much at home since the Renaissance with abstractions to govern their legal, philosophical, and social lives, have applied them naturally to the literary realm as well. The term "fiction," then, can have very positive connotations in the west, for it means "to fashion" or "to invent" as well as simply "to imagine" or "to pretend." Such a view of fiction derives from a fundamental faith in "mediated" reality, a faith so great that it rates the product of intellectual activity higher than perceptual or "immediate" reality. Fiction is natural in a society that believes individual action to be a determining force in social behavior and the natural order. "It is precisely because the reality does not appear directly," says Maruyama, "but as a 'mediated reality' depending on the positive participation of the human spirit, that we can call it fiction."^[14]

In Japan, however, man's intellectual and spiritual side is neither differentiated nor independent from perceptual nature. Like medieval European society, Maruyama argues, Japanese society sees interpersonal relationships as static and irrevocable. It naturally follows that the social environment, which modern society recognizes as man-made, assumes for the Japanese the same kind of reality ("immediate" rather than "mediated") as the natural world. Human intercourse is conceived of in the same dimensions as birth, death, or the passing of the seasons. "When people view their society as a fait accompli, “ Maruyama suggests, "they don't just automatically start thinking in terms of fictions."^[15] The result is that the Japanese, who feel uncomfortable about fiction, try

[14] "From Carnal Literature to Carnal Politics," 251.

[15] Ibid., 255.

to push it in the direction of firsthand, perceptual experiences. Whereas the western view of fiction is rooted in a fundamental faith in mediated reality, unmediated "fact," in the Japanese view, becomes itself a kind of faith. Maruyama concludes that the notion of fiction as the intellectual construct of an individual mind is rooted in modernity, for it could not exist without the individual imagination freed from a predetermined social order. Fiction becomes "real," that is, a viable entity, only when one sees oneself as independent of the natural environment and views intellectual constructs not as useless abstractions but as thoroughly relevant to daily life.

Although Maruyama's analysis reveals a socioevolutionary slant that virtually equates post-Restoration Japan with pre-Enlightenment Europe, it articulates persuasively a "modern" society's need to employ fictions and a "premodern" society's absence of such a need. In a culture that views "reality" only as immediate experience of the natural world, literature not surprisingly becomes a chronicling or transcribing of that experience rather than an imaginative reconstruction of it. And in a culture that views human relations as a predetermined part of the natural order, a fictional form such as the novel, which thrives on fluidity in human relations, is clearly out of place. Traditional Japan was such a culture; so, to a considerable degree, were Meiji and Taisho Japan. And if one accepts Nakane Chie and others' arguments that the transformation in Japan from a preindustrial to an industrial society was not accompanied by the kind of radical change in social organization that occurred in the west,^[16] then it comes as no surprise that the novel's emphasis on individual autonomy and on serendipitous relationships is not to be found in abundance in the early twentieth-century shosetsu .

Yet it was precisely the rise of individual autonomy and serendipitous relationships, Ian Watt suggests, that paved the way for the development of modern fiction in the west. Like Maruyama, Watt argues that modernity is the product of an individual-centered world in which one is "responsible for his own scale of moral and social values." Not only did the rise of individualism weaken communal and traditional relationships, it fostered the

[16] See Nakane Chie, Japanese Society , esp. 7-8.

"stress on the importance of personal relationships which is so characteristic both of modern society and of the novel—such relationships may be seen as offering the individual a more conscious and selective pattern of social life to replace the more diffuse, and as it were involuntary, social cohesions which individualism had undermined."^[17]

Beginning with Montaigne and Rousseau, the self in western literature has continually been celebrated and probed. The driving force in "classical" fiction (whether autobiographical or not), from Tom Jones and Emma to Wilhelm Meister and Rudin , has been socialization through individuation, achieved by rigorous personal scrutiny and dynamic interpersonal relationships and leading to the protagonist's confrontation and integration with society. A character's sense of "self" is brought about by a strong awareness of, and interaction with, the "other." Even such antisocial acts as, say, Werther's or Madame Bovary's suicides are depicted as having been committed in despair by individuals who had been thoroughly engaged in their societies.^[18] The Japanese, however, have been less convinced of (we might even say they have been uninterested in) the self's tangibility or value, even after their massive exposure to western civilization in the Meiji period. The driving force in much of Japanese fiction, therefore, has been what might be called "naturalization" rather than socialization, achieved by a studied withdrawal from society and often leading to the hero's identification with nature.

The often-discussed "search for selfhood" (jiko tankyu ) in modern literature actually harks back to the traditional "pursuit of the

[17] The Rise of the Novel , 177.

[18] The goal of self-determination in the west may have proved increasingly elusive since the late nineteenth century, but the individual has remained, nonetheless, the point of reference. Despite volumes of criticism in Japan and the west to the contrary, however, all emphasizing the impact of western thought, modern Japanese fiction springs from a tradition that did not take the individuated self as its point of departure and against which, therefore, it could not react in expressions of fragmentation and alienation so familiar to us in modernist literature. It is true, of course, that many heroes in western fiction, beginning perhaps with Crime and Punishment and continuing with such works as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Stranger , have become less and less socialized and that alienation from one's society is a theme common to both twentieth-century western and Japanese fiction. The difference, however, is that alienation in western fiction still represents a deviation from the norm, whereas in Japanese fiction (such as the works of Shiga, discussed in Part 3) it can actually approach an ideal.

Way" (gudo ). Both are steeped in the Buddhist emphasis on liberation from the bonds of society and on yielding to life's inexorable cycle: the "four trials" of birth, aging, sickness, and death. The achievement of selfhood in the Japanese context, then, means in a very positive sense the loss of one's individuality. This is a recurrent theme in many shishosetsu but most conspicuously in those of Shiga Naoya, whose "Kinosaki nite" (At Kinosaki) and An'ya koro (A dark night's passing) are particularly powerful depictions of the authorial persona's communion with nature and of what the early twentieth-century philosopher Nishida Kitaro calls "emptying the self," achieved by the perceiving subject's identification with the object.^[19]

shishosetsu are saturated with the author's personal experiences, to be sure, but not with the aim of revealing a core of personality that is clearly defined in the process of socialization or self-analysis, as we might expect in western literature. It is ironic that the so-called "I-novel," treated by many Japanese critics as the showcase of the "modern self" (kindai jiga ), actually questions what it ostensibly champions.^[20] Indeed, the shishosetsu is less the vehicle for personal affirmation that critics frequently make it out to be than a theater where the hero acts out his ambivalence toward the self. The medieval scholar Nishida Masayoshi, one of the few to reexamine the shishosetsu from a non-Eurocentric perspective, sees little validity in claims for the shishosetsu as an expression of a burgeoning individuality appropriate to a "modernized" Japan; indeed, he is skeptical about the entire enterprise of reading into the shishosetsu the awakening of a western notion of selfhood.^[21] Takahashi Hideo, in his revisionist study, also urges that we revise our notions of the self in Japan. Rather than equate it with modern west-

[19] The Problem of Japanese Culture , 869.

[20] See Yasaki Dan, "Jiga no hatten ni okeru Nihonteki seikaku" (part of a longer work entitled Kindai jiga no Nihonteki keisei [1943]), for a sample of that thriving subgenre, the kindai jiga essay, which takes the "modern self" to be, in the words of Kenneth Strong, "the key to the vagaries of modern Japanese literature, or at least of modern Japanese fiction" ("Downgrading the 'Kindai Jiga,'" 407). (Emphasis in original.)

[21] "The code of the ‘watakushi ‘ in shishosetsu ," writes Nishida, "is the obliterating of self by confession. It would seem to have succeeded remarkably in enriching the writer's spiritual quest by aspiring ultimately to the kind of 'ego-shedding' [da-tsugasei ] that approaches the emancipating experience of the 'no-self' [muga ] of traditional Buddhism" (Watakushi shosetsu saihakken , 72).

ern society's individuated self, which has been largely weaned from nature and tradition, he concludes it is more properly conceived of as a premodern "element" of man that aspires to fusion with its surroundings. The shishosetsu's watakushi has brought new meaning to the "self," Takahashi argues, not by an assertion of individuality but by its reversion to selfless ness, as exhibited in the protagonist's return to the comforting embrace of nature, family, and tradition—to which we might add, in the case of those politically motivated writers in the 1930s who underwent ritual "conversion" (tenko ), the state.^[22]

In short, the diffuse, involuntary social cohesions of a strictly hierarchical society suggested by Maruyama were still very much intact in early twentieth-century Japan. The Japanese writer in the Taisho, let alone Tokugawa, period, never knew the range of selection and choice in human relations experienced by an individual in the England of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding that Watt describes. Contact with western culture, to be sure, awakened writers to the idea of individualism. Yet while individualism in the west suggests a dynamic (as opposed to regulated or tradition-bound) relationship between the self and the other, it came in Japan, because of the traditional equation of spiritual autonomy with aloofness from society, to imply just the opposite: a withdrawal into the world of nature and private experience. This notion of individualism as a form of isolated self-contemplation may have been the only avenue to spiritual independence in a society that placed severe constraints on interpersonal relations. The typical Japanese writer, moreover, aware of the limits of his intellectual and social liberties, may have seen in his private life the only area he could exploit with confidence. In a society generally hostile to nonconformist behavior, he discovered in confession a literary form that matched his conception of self: something fulfilled by unilateral and almost instinctive expression rather than by integration in a matrix of human relationships. He saw confession, moreover, as an embodiment of his uniqueness, insofar as it could be authored only by one person, namely, himself. The shishosetsu was eminently suited to this view of individualism. Its protagonist becomes an "individual," as it

[22] Genso to shite no "watakushi. “ See the introductory and concluding essays, esp. pp. 23-24 and 288-89.

were, by virtue of his monopolized point of view and, not infrequently, by his occupation of an otherwise empty stage.

The Place of Fiction in Japanese Literature

As we have seen, the starting point in much Japanese "fiction" has not been the construction of a hypothetical situation but the observation of an actual one. This modus operandi is hardly unique to the shishosetsu ; precedents can be found in such classical forms as the zuihitsu (discursive essay), kana nikki (poetic diary), haibun (haiku and prose), and kikobun (travel sketches), all of which are literary descriptions of lived experience. Even the stories and settings in an innovative and "fantastic" form like joruri are generally rooted in actual events or previous literary accounts. Both "contemporary" (sewamono ) and "period" (jidaimono ) pieces are based on a large but finite number of "worlds" (sekai ), well-known historical events or literary depictions with fixed casts of characters.^[23] The accepted practice was to work with material already familiar to audiences rather than fashion entirely imaginary characters or situations. Playwrights worked within these established frames of reference, fleshing out the action and characterization as they saw fit.^[24]

The radical transformation of the old literary language into something approaching the colloquial, the experiences of modernization and urban growth, and the influx of western thought, all of

[23] The Sekai komoku (late eighteenth century) lists some 150 "worlds" along with their historical or literary source and names of characters. See Barbara E. Thornbury, Sukeroku's Double Identity , 22-23.

[24] James R. Brandon notes, "Precisely because a world was already significant in legend or history, or in the case of sewamono through public scandal, it was considered appropriate for the stage" (Kabuki: Five Classic Plays , 25). The same is largely true of other theatrical forms, including No and Bunraku. Kato Shuichi argues that there is little in Kabuki of "the universal, the paradoxical or the abstract" and that the playwrights' lines concern specific characters and situations but "say nothing about human feelings in general or about the human condition" in the manner of a Shakespeare. The reason for this, he concludes, is that Edo-period townsmen were interested in "specific subjects, not universal considerations." The somewhat negative cast of Kato's argument aside, this concern with specificity over universality would seem to apply equally well to post-Edo fiction. See A History of Japanese Literature , vol. 2, The Years of Isolation , 201.

which preceded the shishosetsu's emergence, insured that the gap between classical and modern Japanese literature would be unbreachable in certain respects; yet we should not overlook the modern writers' attempts to come to terms, in various and subtle ways, with the classical forms. It was, of course, never simply a matter of incorporating the classical vocabulary or aesthetic. For more than a millennium, the language served as a repository of richly connotative images and associations shared by the literate community.^[25] With the demise of old Japanese after Ozaki Koyo (1867-1903), however, the familiar vocabulary of pivot words (kakekotoba ), prefaces (jo ), epithets (makura kotoba ), association words (engo ), and poetic place-names (uta makura ), which for many centuries had provided a context for meaning and had made such ostensibly "personal" genres as the zuihitsu and kana nikki both highly conventional and more accessible to their audience, died out rather suddenly with no comparable system of literary conventions readily available to take its place. By the turn of this century, Japanese writers were looking to naturalism and other European literary movements for inspiration; but the western tradition, itself the culmination of many centuries of independent development, could not be readily assimilated. Writers now faced the task of formulating a new poetic vocabulary and repository of associations on which to draw. Unable to rely any longer on the "worlds" and associations of classical literature or in any coherent way on an alien literary tradition, they began exploring the possibility of using their own lives as "world." Once the writer established his persona as a legitimate subject of literary discourse, he was working, as far as he and his audience were concerned, with familiar material and could allude to it in subsequent works in the knowledge that readers would be conversant with it. This "world" gained further legitimacy as its author gained a name; and personal experience, as presented in the work, became part of the public literary domain. Just as Sei Shonagon (fl. early eleventh century) challenged her readers in The Pillow Book to pit themselves along with her against the tradition of literary allusions, the early shishosetsu writer chal-

[25] The extraordinary richness of this repository is demonstrated by Mark Morris in "Sei Shonagon's Poetic Categories," 29.

lenged his readers to gain a similar fluency in the newer and narrower "tradition" of his recorded life. He sought in this way to validate his experience as a kind of history.

The shishosetsu writer was preoccupied with such a legitimizing project in the first place in part because of fiction's subordinate relationship to history in traditional Japanese letters. We have observed that any author's view of fiction is predicated on his notion of reality, which is itself a mutable entity; concepts of just what constitutes reality vary with the age, culture, and artistic temperament, as E. H. Gombrich, among others, makes clear.^[26] The common understanding in the west has been that literary fictions are very much a part of "reality"; fiction, no less than history, aims at a credible representation of the world. Far from being opposed to history, it offers a competing and basically similar strategy of representation. (Henry Fielding, after all, calls his great novel about a foundling a "history.") Many novels could pass for histories, and vice versa. Hayden White goes so far as to say: "Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of 'reality.'"^[27]

The difference between the two, then, is a very subtle one indeed. It certainly does not lie in the dubious notion that the historian "finds" his stories, whereas the fiction writer "invents" his. Such a notion obscures the extent not only to which "invention" plays a part in the historian's operations but also to which "discovery" can play a part in the fiction writer's operations. It is tempting to say that history deals with what actually happened (events already constituted) and hence with "truth," and fiction with what might have happened (events not already constituted) and hence with "untruth." Already constituted events, however, are by no means the historian's exclusive domain. They are a part of any "fictional" work as well. Likewise, events that exist "inside" the writ-

[26] See Art and Illusion , esp. 84-86, which discusses the triumph of an established artistic vocabulary over an unfamiliar "reality" or setting.

[27] Hayden White, "Fictions of Factual Representation," 122.

er's consciousness are not the exclusive domain of the fiction writer. In his Metahistory , Hayden White posits the fictive nature of historical reconstructions, which are generated necessarily by various contending modes (romance/metaphor, tragedy/metonymy, comedy/synecdoche, and satire/irony) of emplotment, and argues convincingly that no mode of conveyance of historical "fact" is neutral or definitive or inherently truer than any other. "Commitment to a particular form of knowledge," White concludes, "predetermines the kinds of generalizations one can make about the present world."^[28]

At the center of this view of historiography as an essentially poetic act lies the assumption that history, like fiction, is a form of narrative. Although White never specifically defines "narrative," it is clear that he uses the term to designate a verbal construct that is more complex than either a chronicle (a chronological, open-ended arrangement of data) or a story (a chronicle to which culminations and resolutions have been added) and utilizes a plot—that "provider of significance to mere chronicity" as Frank Kermode puts it.^[29] Unlike a simple story that is content with a chronological ordering (asking the question "What happened next?"), an emplotted narrative imposes an internal, nontemporal, overriding order on events (asking, "What is the point of it all?"). The aims of both novelist and historian are realized through this synchronic ordering process.

White takes both "chronicle" and "story" to be "primitive elements" in the historical (and by inference the fictional) account;^[30] but it is precisely within this "primitive" realm that much of Japanese history and fiction reside. Although narrative in the west, beginning with the Old Testament, has been informed by a dramatic poetic of emplotment that insists on a causal relationship between events,^[31] the traditional Japanese "narrative" (monogatari ) is informed by the highly conventionalized aesthetics of the native verse forms and the nondramatic historiography of Chinese chronicles.

In the absence of a highly representational mode, the influence

[28] Metahistory , 21.

[29] The Sense of an Ending , 56.

[30] Metahistory , 5.

[31] See, for example, Erich Auerbach's analysis of Genesis as an emplotted narrative in Mimesis , chap. 1.

of a more self-consciously presentational mode on Japanese fiction has been enormous. The latter mode has played no small role in western literature as well—as the continuing interest in tropes, for example, demonstrates—but it has not had the sweeping impact, especially on prose, that it has had on Japanese literature. Whereas prose in the west, whether "history" or "fiction," has been inextricably tied to the emplotted narrative, the Japanese have been more at home with literary forms that tend to undermine or circumvent the narrative flow. The presentational mode infuses not only waka, haikai , and other poetic forms but also such prose forms as the "fictional tale" (tsukuri monogatari ), "poem tale" (uta monogatari ), "story of the 'floating world"' (ukiyo zoshi ), "poetic diary" (kana nikki ), and discursive essay (zuihitsu ), to. name the most prominent examples. In all these forms, imagery, polysemy, and canonical allusions do not simply counterpoint the action but may actually interrupt or even overwhelm it.^[32]

Although Japanese prose had by the early twentieth century lost not only the rhythm but the poetic vocabulary of the old literary language, it was by no means on a comfortable footing with the emplotted narrative still so prominent in western fiction. The difference, of course, is the cause of much consternation for western readers of the shosetsu who even today talk of its "inaccessibility," bemoan the "lack" of an ending, and ask what is the "point" of the story they have just read. The shosetsu , however, needs no overall plot signifier to enable its discourse. Getting there, for readers of the shosetsu , is not just half the fun; it is all the fun. In fact, there is no "there" or "here"—that is to say, no privileged event indicated by the emplotting narrative mechanism; the shosetsu narrative goes everywhere and nowhere.

The Chinese annalistic model for the writing of history also had a considerable influence on Japanese letters, including modern shosetsu . Beginning with Nihongi and the other "Six National Histories" (Rikkokushi , 720-902) and continuing with the hybrid "fictional histories" (rekishi monogatari ) written in the late Heian (794-

[32] The presentational and serial nature of Genji and other Heian monogatari is brilliantly analyzed in Richard Hideki Okada, "Unbound Texts." Of particular interest is his discussion of the tenseless character of old Japanese and the ambiguity of narrative voice in monogatari , a feature that survives in the modern shosetsu . See Chapter 2.

1192) and Kamakura (1192-2333) periods, Japanese texts take after the Chinese chronicle in their essentially descriptive rather than investigative bent and likewise make no attempt at synthesis or at establishing a hierarchy of significance. What mattered was that an event had actually occurred; having: occurred, it was dutifully recorded. Even more important, the continental tradition guided Japanese thinking as to what constituted history and ultimately what constituted literature. The Chinese regarded literature as a public institution that had as its purpose the maintenance of the Confucian orthodoxy, a political and social system of bureaucratic government entrusted to a class of highly literate civil servants who owed their place in the administrative ranks to their fluency in the four major categories of literature: histories and biographies, the classics and their commentaries, philosophy, and belles lettres.^[33] The last category included poetry but no prose; fiction was not included in scholarly discourse until the influx of western literary theory in the twentieth century. Traditional commentators who wrote on prose fiction at all quite naturally criticized it in terms of history, the highest form of literature and the only body of prose narrative that, because of its unquestioned respectability, could serve as a standard of comparison.^[34] Even during the heyday of Chinese prose fiction in the Ming (1368-1644) and Ch'ing (1644-1911) dynasties, most authors wrote anonymously and lived out their laves in obscurity—the price to pay for indulging in such a minor art.^[35]

The content of "literature," then, for all intents and purposes, was poetry and nonfiction prose. The former served as a vehicle of expression and the latter as the moral guideline for the literati class. The highest forms of literature were public and utilitarian in orientation and meant to aid in the art of government. The Japanese civil service, under the control of either the aristocratic or military classes, never became as dominant as its Chinese model, and we see both literature and history take on a less public face. Rekishi monogatari , for example, are more likely to describe an outing of

[33] Liu Wu-chi, An Introduction to Chinese Literature , 5.

[34] C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel , 14-15. Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shih chi (Records of the Grand Historian ) was the most frequently invoked historical text against which classical Chinese prose fictions were measured.

[35] Liu, An Introduction to Chinese Literature 195, 228.

court ladies than a meeting of ministers. In the Edo period, however, the Tokugawa shogunate developed a deeply conservative political system that looked eagerly to the Chinese Neo-Confucian philosophy to legitimize its rule. Literature came to be regarded, officially at least, solely as a vehicle for propagating the dominant sociopolitical ethos. Indeed, literature was understood to be useful only insofar as it contributed to the Confucian worldview or "Way."^[36]

Literature that inspired the populace to socially correct behavior, then, clearly served a useful function in the Confucian scheme of things. In Tokugawa Japan, the writing of histories, biographies, and moral treatises was encouraged, while other forms were merely condoned. The poet Matsuo Basho's (1644-94) witty, self-deprecating assessment of haikai —"My art is like a fire in summer or a fan in winter; it serves people no purpose"^[37] —expresses, however ironically, the prevailing official bias against any forms of poetry except kanshi (poetry written in Chinese) and waka . The bias against prose fiction was even stronger and also reflected Chinese literary tastes. The word for prose fiction itself (shosetsu [hsiao-shuo in Chinese] originally meant "unofficial history" and referred to popular, loosely historical accounts written in the vernacular) is indicative of the low esteem in which it was held. Shosetsu might be translated literally as "small talk"; a shosetsuka was therefore someone who collected "street talk" and "roadside gossip" and committed them to writing.^[38] The Chinese expended great efforts preserving and handing down histories and the other categories of "refined" literature; the "vulgar" texts of prose fiction, however, were commonly ignored, lost, and even destroyed.^[39] The Han shu (History of the Former Han) lists in its catalogue of learning ten "sages" in descending order of importance—the Confucianist, Tao-

[36] The Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), adviser to the first Tokugawa shogun, writes: "Where there is the Way [do] there are letters [bun ].... They are different manifestations of the same principle.... Letters branch out from the great trunk of the Way. Since the branches are few, they are healthy and firm" (quoted in Hiraoka Toshio, Nihon kindai bungaku no shuppatsu , 13). Razan's concept of the nature of literature echoes the words of Emperor Wen of the Wei (A.D. 186-226): "Literature: a vital force in the ordering of the state" (quoted in Burton Watson, Early Chinese Literature , from the epigraph opposite the title page).

[37] Quoted from "Kyoroku ribetsu no kotoba," in Sugiura Sei'ichiro et al., eds., Basho bunshu , 205.

[38] Liu, An Introduction to Chinese Literature , 141.

[39] Watson, Early Chinese Literature , 4.

ist, Legalist, diviner, logician, Moist, diplomatist, eclectic, farmer, and finally "small-talk writer"—but quickly adds that only the first nine are worth mentioning.^[40]

The notion of what constituted literature in Tokugawa Japan is examined with remarkable insight by Kitamura Tokoku (1868-94), a noted poet, essayist, and critic. Tokoku posits two distinct strains in Tokugawa letters: "refined" nonfiction literature that commented seriously on life and "vulgar" nonliterary fiction that buriesqued life.^[41] Into the former category went the histories, biographies, and other erudite texts that appealed to the ruling samurai class, in which fiction had no place; into the latter, the witty picaresques and other "popular" narratives that appealed to commoners, in which fiction figured large. Tokoku's distinction is noteworthy, for it shows that Tokugawa literature had no lack of fiction. On the contrary, a great deal was being written in the form of gesaku , a generic term for such forms as the kibyoshi (illustrated "yellow-covered books"), sharebon ("sophisticated books" about the gay quarters), kokkeibon ("humorous books"), ninjobon ("amatory books"), and yomihon (didactic "reading books"). Its very name (literally, "playful composition"), however, suggested its "frivolous" and therefore nonliterary character. Gesaku were often authored (usually anonymously) by samurai intellectuals, but their primary audience was the lower classes, mainly townspeople.

The idea that fiction and literature were entirely separate concerns—the former frivolous, the latter serious—continued into the Meiji period. It held true even for the man who made the first sustained attempt at writing in the colloquial idiom. Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909), author of Ukigumo (Drifting clouds, 1887-89), abandoned his effort at fiction writing for nearly two decades before trying again in 1906, only to abandon it for good a year later. Influ-

[40] Noguchi Takehiko, shosetsu no Nihongo , 10-11. That this low view of fiction has continued even into modern times is demonstrated by an influential essay by Chou Tso-jen, written in 1919, which argues for the superiority of the classical genres of prose and poetry over fiction and drama. See Hsia, The Classical Chinese Novel , 3-4.

[41] Nihon bungaku shi kotsu (also known by the subtitle of its only extant portion, Meiji bungaku kanken ), in Kitamura Tokoku shu , 124. My discussion of Tokoku is based largely on Hiraoka, Nihon kindai bungaku no shuppatsu , esp. the section entitled "Futatsu no bungaku," 7-24. See also H. D. Harootunian's stimulating article on Tokoku and Takayama Chogyu, "Between Politics and Culture."

enced as much by his samurai lineage and Tokugawa heritage as by his studies of western literature, Futabatei was very uncomfortable with the idea of a literary career, which he regarded as decidedly unprofessional. The contemporaneous success of the Ken'yusha, a school of writers that carried on the Edo gesaku tradition, no doubt increased his distaste for such a "frivolous" calling. In a late essay, he insists on the impossibility of writing fiction of any worth. "No matter how good one's technique," he argues, "one cannot write the truth. One may know the truth, but it inevitably becomes distorted when one speaks or writes of it.... When it comes to fiction [shosetsu ] I can write nothing but lies; and because I so believe, I simply cannot be serious about it."^[42] In the end, the only way he could be honest with himself was to quit the life of a writer and embark on a more respectable career in the bureaucracy. Futabatei continued his literary activities both as a translator of stories from the Russian (which won him his initial fame) and as a contributor of kansobun (short pieces that allow a writer to reflect on virtually any subject) to various journals, but he considered this part of his life an avocation.

By the early twentieth century, the original sense of shosetsu had been largely supplemented, if not superseded, by the western concept of the novel that Tsubouchi Shoyo (1859-1935), author, translator, critic, and student of English literature, first grafted onto the Chinese word when he published his famous interpretation of European literature (shosetsu shinzui ; The essence of the novel, 1885-86). And yet, the west's literary impact notwithstanding, the word shosetsu could not be stripped so quickly of its two-thousand-year-old connotations. As Noguchi Takehiko suggests, such connotations explain not only why Edo-period writers, with a mixture of shame and defiant pride, would use the derogatory term haishi shosetsu ("trivial history and small talk") to refer to their literary productions but also why the term sakka ("artist"; literally, "maker of things") is looked on even today with more favor than shosetsuka in identifying someone as a writer.^[43]

Early twentieth-century writers, then, could not help feeling ambivalent toward their literary heritage. To wear the label of sho-

[42] "Watakushi wa kaigi-ha da," in Futabatei Shimei zenshu 5:230-31.

[43] shosetsu no Nihongo , 12.

setsuka was to acknowledge the vulgarity of one's calling. The Confucian tradition had disenfranchised shosetsu from any of the legitimate categories of literature. Moreover, the new European model was still not so well established that it could counter the prejudice that shosetsu , unlike the classics or histories, did not tell the "truth," that is to say, a referential truth that pointed to some external reality outside the text and gained its significance from that reality. A few, like Noguchi, argue that it was the destiny of the shosetsu as fiction, aided by the positive western conception, to transcend the limits of referentiality imposed by the dominant culture and to present its own kind of truth, a reality that exists nowhere but in language.^[44] Pressures on the shosetsu and on its cultural context, however, worked both ways. To the same extent that its verbal energy as a fictive text tended to propel the modern shosetsu beyond referentiality, the modern shosetsuka , in hopes of gaining respect for his work, tried to contain it within the referential framework of traditionally accepted prose forms and thereby elevate it to the level of "true" ("refined" as opposed to "vulgar") literature. Thus, the legitimizing rationale for the shosetsu as fiction was soon countered by a movement to free the shosetsu of fiction altogether. Out of this movement came the shishosetsu .

The concern about telling "lies" is still very much alive today. Witness the following sentiments, delivered to a lecture audience in 1971, by the contemporary shishosetsu author Yasuoka Shotaro (1920-):

In a shishosetsu you write, somewhat tediously, about your own life and nothing else. A shishosetsu has ... no shape, no form, no style. It has none of these—and yet in writing about that ordinary, everyday life ... a person's unique individuality manages to surface. "Everyone has his quirks," as the saying goes ... but it's very difficult to discover those quirks for oneself.... Still there are those fleeting moments when you become detached and see yourself for what you really are ... just as clearly as if your eyeball were attached to the wall over there. I think that truly creative writing involves that kind of searching for and discovering something in yourself, not dreaming up some formally satisfying story. Anyway, that's how I got started. It took me about half a year to write my first story, a mere thirty pages long. I'm in no position to judge its worth, but writing has made me understand—how shall I put it?—the value of life. Or,

[44] Ibid., 20.

to put it another way, I feel that by writing I'm continually able to affirm my existence.^[45]

Yasuoka is speaking in an age of high democratic capitalism beyond the postwar era, at a time when the sociocultural constraints on "mediated" expression to which Maruyama Masao alluded might be presumed no longer operative. And yet there is no sign, if these words are any indication, that the privileging of lived experience has waned. Its appeal lies on one level in its patently narcissistic value as a kind of literary graffiti that affirms the scribbler's existence. Even more important for Yasuoka are its revelatory powers, its ability to plumb the "truth" about the writer and about life in a way that no "formally satisfying" fictional work can. A story is naturally formless if it follows life, naturally "unique" if it accurately describes its author, whose life is by definition one of a kind. For Yasuoka, then, true originality lies not in the possible but in the actual, not in imagining but in living. Any attempt to stray from lived experience is bound to result in mimicry and fabrication, which in this scheme are seen in opposition to originality. In a move that effectively challenges the western conception of the fictional enterprise, he tells of his efforts to "invent" an original, formally convincing prose fiction—the product, he claims, of a pure flight of imagination—only to discover that a virtually identical story already existed in the rakugo (comic monologue) repertoire.^[46] For Yasuoka, the lesson is clear: no such duplication is possible if a writer draws solely from his own life. Fabrication can only lead one away from the truth of lived experience.

There is still another kind of appeal, however, which Yasuoka only hints at, namely, the voyeurism inherent in reading what one knows to be a record of experience and not invention, a record not so valuable for what it says in itself as for whom it says it of. It may be impossible for the writer to see himself, as Yasuoka argues, except during a few fleeting moments of heightened awareness; but he is always in view of the reader, who is constant witness to the author's "quirks." The shishosetsu may have no shape or form, but it does have a peculiar "style," contrary to Yasuoka's assertion, which is none other than its reputed absence of style. The shishose-

[45] "Gendai ni okeru watakushi shosetsu," 34.

[46] Ibid., 33-34.

tsu's whole raison d'être rests on the powerful illusion of its textual transparency—its sincerity—which lets the reader view the author's experience "unmediated" by forms, shapes, structures, or other "trappings" of fiction. Again and again we shall encounter the belief, articulated here with such conviction by Yasuoka, that the shishosetsu lets the reader view through the window of its "transparent" language the private goings-on in the author's glass house in a way simply not possible through the mediated language of fiction.

One of our central concerns, of course, is just how "transparent" the language of the shishosetsu really is. We may not notice that the glass in this window on life is tinted or warped or even there until it is opened, rolled down, or otherwise exposed. How, if at all, does it differ from the language of fiction? And if it does not, then what makes readers and writers believe nonetheless in a difference, as if literary will took precedence over linguistic evidence? We shall grapple with these questions in the following two chapters.