18—
The Spring of Youth
Soon after I entered the university I fell ill, first with pneumonia, then with moist pleurisy. Chemotherapy was not available at that time, and antibiotics had yet to be discovered. For a time my life hung in the balance, and during the ensuing recuperation period I listlessly spent my days in our rented house in Setagaya's Akatsutsumi area. During that time I realized how precious it was just to be alive, and things that might appear pitifully insignificant to others gave me irreplaceable joy. A simple cup of hot tea, the smell of paper from an old book, the sound of Mother and Sister talking downstairs, the melodies of a few familiar tunes, the clear bright rays of the sun on a wintry afternoon, the sensation of time serenely flowing by. At that time death meant nothing other than having such moments of joy snatched away from me. I looked at my skinny arms and legs, imagining how they would vanish without a trace in a conflagration, along with my consciousness of gazing at them. I began to abhor the very order of things that by its very nature was about to transform these visions into an inevitability. It was evil, unjust, and abominably irrational. I remembered the feverish nightmares in my childhood and the horror of near-suffocation as I was being sucked into the infinite depths of a gigantic whirlpool. I did not believe in any god; and even if there were one, I could not imagine he could be a god of justice. He might have created the world, but the world he created would soon go down in ruins. Perhaps we could be blessed with his grace, but grace was only bestowed in order to be taken away before long. That all forms of existence should reach their moment of death was the result of the world's internal structure, not the consequence of any external judgment. As long as a living thing exists, even though it might just be
a flower in the wilderness, not even the creator himself can justify having it trampled underfoot. To be sure, not all living beings are necessarily virtuous. But since it is impossible to measure the value of existence, however insignificant it may be, one who destroys can only be evil.
Just as I had done in my sickly childhood days, I spent my long recuperation reading. My interest had long since shifted from the galactic universe and stories about prehistoric times to encounters with fair maidens and adventures in love. I became interested in literature, captivated as I was by Chikamatsu's michiyuki episodes in his double-suicide plays and by the modern and contemporary novels since Meiji.[1] But this sort of literature failed to fully satisfy my sense of curiosity. Not only was I intrigued by the subtlety of human emotions, I also began to develop an interest in the intellectual dimensions of history and society as well. Yet science does not concern itself with matters of imagination that defy verification. Chikamatsu sings the alluring sentimentality of love-suicides, but his works are almost devoid of intellectual content. When neither science nor Chikamatsu could satisfy my curiosity, what lured me to fill the void was Western literature.
For the first time I began to realize that there was another kind of literature different from the type represented by Chikamatsu's sewamono , or his "contemporary plays," one dealing with the sensory, emotional, and intellectual dimensions of experience as a whole, from Pascal to Gide, from Racine to Proust. In those days, "Le Cimetière marin" and Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci in particular were my sacred scriptures. Yet, just as the majority of Christians are almost totally uninformed about the historical background of the Bible, I had never seen the Mediterranean and I knew little or nothing about the Italian Renaissance. My linguistic ability was so terribly deficient that had I not by chance got hold of Gustave Cohen's meticulous commentaries, I might have given up all hope of reading "Le Cimetière marin."[2] As for Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci , there was a translation by Nakajima Kenzo[*] and Sato[*] Masaaki.[3] While a translation of "Le
[1] For michiyuki , see note 9 below.
[2] As in Cohen's "Essai d'explication du Cimetière marin," Nouvelle Revue Française (February 1929), which compares the poem to "a classical tragedy, not in five acts, but in four, a lyrical and dramatic dialogue between the three actors of Greek tragedy" (Agnes Ethel MacKay, The Universal Self: A Study of Paul Valéry [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961], 172).
[3] Sato Masaaki (1905–75), a graduate of Tokyo University and professor ofFrench literature at Meiji University from 1949; besides translations, he wrote criticism on Baudelaire, Valéry, and Stendhal.
Cimetière marin" had indeed been published, inaccuracies appeared in almost every other line. I checked out Valéry's writings from the Department of French Literature and started reading them; but of course I could not understand everything and in fact understood very little. This also became evident some years later, when a French friend of mine helped me read Eupalinos ou l'architecte . But what interested me then was not Valéry's specific ideas or works. It was the totality of his sensual and intellectual world and the structure of that totality—or perhaps I should say its style—that offered me a revelation. To me, Valéry was not merely a poet, an aesthetician, a critic, a scientist, or even a philosopher, for his works help define one's attitude toward the totality of these varied intellectual endeavors. My encounter with Valéry's writings was such an invaluable experience that it no longer mattered to me whether or not others chose to call them literature.
A number of friends—birds of the same feather, perhaps—used to get together at my home in Akatsutsumi. Yamazaki Kotaro[*] and Nakamura Shin'ichiro[*] , both French literature students, were doing a close reading of A la recherche du temps perdu and were trying to write their own novels. Fukunaga Takehiko must have already begun his translations of Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris . Kubota and Nakanishi, then attending the Law Faculty at Tokyo Imperial University, were engrossed in Mallarmé; and Harada Yoshito, a student in the Department of German Literature, was interested not only in German poetry and prose but also in the French symbolic poets.[4]
Although we indulged in idle talk most of the time, occasionally, as our Man'yoshu[*] reading circle at the Komaba dormitory had done, we
[4] Fukunaga Takehiko (1918–79), novelist, critic, translator, and a core member of the Matinée Poétique group founded in fall 1942 by Kato[*] , Nakamura Shin'ichiro, and Kubota Keisaku; though little known in the West, Fukunaga became a celebrated postwar novelist active from the 1950s to the early 1970s (Fudo[*] [Native earth, 1951], Bokyaku[*] no kawa [The river of lost memory, 1964], and Shi no shima [The island of death, 1966–71]) and wrote of his encounter with Baudelaire (Bodoreeru[*] no sekai [Kodansha[*] bungei bunko, 1989]). • Kubota Kaizo[*] (pseudonym Keisaku, 1920–), short story writer and member of the Matinée Poétique group, translated Camus's L'Etranger and L'Exil et le royaume as well as the works of Paul Eluard and Julien Green. • Nakanishi's full name was Nakanishi Tetsukichi. • Harada Yoshito (1918–60), translator and critic; see chapter 12, note 6.
read Duineser Elegien by relying on Angelloz's French translation and La Jeune Parque with the help of Alain's annotations.[5] Problems any one of us encountered individually did not lend themselves to easy resolutions, even when we put our heads together. But as our group met regularly under such pretexts, we soon became very close friends.
That was not all. Like the Japanese in the past who were inspired by Chinese poetry to produce their own Japanese-style "Chinese" poetry, those of us reading Western poetry contemplated composing our own "original poems in translation," so to speak. The majority of the Japanese in the past also did not read Chinese poetry as works composed in authentic Chinese; they treated it as a sort of poetry in Japanese by reading it according to Japanese kundoku style. Likewise, we did not try to read Western poetry as works in a Western language, but instead we tried to transliterate it into Japanese ourselves without relying on the translations by others. Fukunaga, for example, did not take pleasure in reading Les Fleurs du mal in its French original; rather he derived from it the inspiration to create his own poetry in Japanese. In Kubota's case, he might have recognized in the verses of Catullus and Ronsard reflections of Japanese love poems from the time of the Kokinshu[*] . Nakanishi was fond of the intellectual challenges posed by Mallarmé's sonnets, remarking that anything more simplistic than a world condensed in a poem was drab, like wine diluted with water.
Among those friends who were given to such fancies, Nakamura Shin'ichiro[*] was both pragmatic and very knowledgeable about poetry and poets. One after another he presented us with an array of concrete suggestions. Since all of us were composing poems that had no chance of being published, Nakamura came up with the idea of having private recitals among ourselves. In a playful mood, we called the first of our poetry recitals a matinée poétique . The same name served for the title of a poetry collection we published jointly after the war, and that was how it came to be known to the general public.[6]
[5] Alain's commentary on Valéry's work was dated 1936.
[6] According to Nakamura Shin'ichiro, Fukunaga Takehiko took the name from the poetry recitals of Jacques Copeau's troupe before their performance—an intentionally flamboyant term of tacit defiance at a time when people using foreign expressions were labeled, contemptuously, hikokumin —" people unfit to be called loyal Japanese nationals"; see Nakamura's Zoho[*] sengo bungaku no kaiso[*] (Reminiscences of postwar literature, rev. ed. [Chikuma shobo[*] , 1983]), 29–31 and his Ai to bi to bungaku: Waga kaiso (Love, beauty, and literature:my reminiscences [Iwanami shinsho, 1989]), 145; and his description of the group's activities in Zoho[*] , 28–34, or Donald Keene, Dawn to the West (New York: Henry Holt, 1984), 1006–14. • Machine Poetiku shishu[*] (The poetry collection of the Matinée Poétique group [Shinzenbi Sha, 1948]) was jointly published by Kato[*] , Nakamura, and Fukunaga.
Nakamura seemed to have an awareness of himself as a professional writer, or at least as a future professional writer. A professional distinguishes himself from the amateurs by the training he undergoes, and in order to receive adequate training, one has to establish certain ground rules in conducting one's work. In Chinese poetry, there were already elaborate rules governing tonal variations in diction, and even in haiku there were seasonal themes. Besides waka and haiku, Japanese poetry ought to have fixed forms to be determined not only by syllable or line counts. The best thing would be to have stipulations governing rhyme as well. This theory, advanced by Kuki Shuzo[*] earlier on, before the war, was convincing enough.[7] But Kuki's examples demonstrated only a part of such rhyming potentials. Nakamura argued that together we could explore the possibilities of rhymed verse in a broader context than what Kuki had attempted, and we became interested in this new experiment. After the war, when our poetry collection appeared in print, our critics contended that rhyming would not succeed in the case of Japanese; but compared to Kuki and Nakamura's theories, the basis of their argument was by far more superficial and naive. Neither Nakamura nor the rest of us were wrong in this respect.
The misfortune of the Matinée Poétique poets lies instead in the fact that our passions were consumed by the impossible task of employing contemporary Japanese as the raw material to approximate symbolic poetry, premised as it was on fin-de-siècle French. Since our focus in those days was not Kitahara Hakushu[*] but Mallarmé, the only way to look at our enterprise was as a disaster that had struck where it should have. After this was all over, when I saw how The Waste Land , written by that awesome American-born Englishman, had driven so many young poets
[7] Kuki Shuzo (1888–1941), philosopher, professor at Kyoto Imperial University from 1935 to 1941, and author of Iki no kozo[*] (The structure of iki , 1930); see Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo[*] and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and see Kuki's ideas about rhyming in "Nihonshi no oin[*] " (Rhyming in Japanese poetry), in Bungeiron (Treatise on art), published posthumously in 1941.
into a hopeless quandary, my mind often brought back memories of our own past. The issue from the outset was not rhyme but language. We thought we knew it all too well, but we most certainly did not.
By then, the war was encroaching on our doorsteps. Among my poet friends, Fukunaga ruined his health and soon ended up in a sanitarium for tuberculosis. Yamazaki left for Japanese-occupied French Indochina as an interpreter immediately after his graduation from the university. His destination was an ancient capital in central French Indochina where, he told us, there was a palace with an empress living in it. Even after the defeat, his return to Japan was delayed for a long time owing to suspicions over his alleged war crimes. Kubota was working in a bank and departed for its Shanghai branch office. He was married but left his wife behind in Tokyo. Harada and Nakanishi were drafted into the army. Harada soon became a trainee for the army cadre, and once he even appeared before us with his military sword.
"What a splendid soldier you make! You look just right for it!" Nakamura said.
"Don't be sarcastic! You don't even know how I feel," said Harada.
Even in my eyes, Harada's military uniform certainly looked fitting. Nakanishi, on the other hand, did not volunteer to become a cadre trainee. For a while his family did receive his letters from the army barracks; but before long, he wrote that he would be transferred by ship to the south. That was the last they heard from him. After the war Harada eventually returned to Japan, but Nakanishi did not. The ones who had not been drafted stayed behind in Tokyo, Nakamura at the French department, and myself at the university hospital.
Around that time one of Nakamura's relatives, the owner of an ironworks factory, was living in the city of Kawaguchi in Saitama Prefecture. Before his only son departed for the front, he held a send-off party at his house, inviting many young men of his son's age. Nakamura asked me to go along, and so I did. This metal-casting town, under subcontract from the military supplies industry, was bustling with activity. Around Kawaguchi alone its blast furnaces turned the dark night sky into a bright red despite the blackout restrictions. While sake was becoming a scarce commodity in Tokyo, it flowed freely at that party, and many of the young men there either got drunk or vomited from drinking too much. I suppose everyone there realized that he himself would be sent to the front before long and that Japan's defeat was drawing near.
"I'm going to survive, you'll see," a young man with a pale complexion and unsteady steps spoke to me, but I did not know who he was. "I'm going to join the army all right, but I'll do whatever it takes to survive. What good would it do if I die? And for what purpose? Tell me, for what? When you die, everything is finished. I'll be damned if I do." Another young man mumbled to me with a smile as if the matter did not concern him personally, "When do you think it's all going to end? I can still stay at the university for another six months. But I guess it won't end that soon. Well, I've been thinking of doing all the things I wanted to do during this time . . . Six months seems a long time, but once it's over, I guess you'll know how short it really is."
My own draft order might arrive the next day or it might not come at all. In any case, nothing was more oppressive than having to mix with these young draftees and listen to their moaning. The owner of the ironworks factory, however, did not mention anything about his son's departure for the front or about the war. Instead, he talked about songs performed at no[*] plays. He said that he and his old high school classmates such as Abe Yoshishige and Nogami Toyoichiro[*] were going to invite masters from various schools to perform at the No[*] Theater at Tokyo's Suidobashi[*] , and he asked me to come too.[8]
After watching the bunraku play on the day the war began, I had, for a while, abandoned the habit of going to the theater. But after the invitation from the owner of the Kawaguchi ironworks factory, I started going from time to time to the No Theater in Suidobashi. Because of blackout regulations, the windows at the theater were heavily draped with black curtains, but inside a different world was at work. There, the beating of the drums and the sharp, piercing notes of the flute reverberating throughout the theater built up my anticipation for a figure from a distant world to appear at the end of the bridgeway. And again, the drums beat and the flute resounded. Just when I thought my heightened sense
[8] Abe Yoshishige (1883–1966), critic, philosopher, and essayist; a scholar of Kant and Spinoza and a translator of Nietzsche and Merezhkovsky, Abe was a major intellectual figure of the Taisho[*] philosophical generation and was minister of education under the Shidehara cabinet in 1946. • Nogami Toyoichiro (1883–1950), a disciple of Natsume Soseki[*] , scholar of English literature, and later the president of Hosei[*] University, who studied no music and its theories in the latter part of his life; his works include No[*] : Kenkyu[*] to hakken (The study and discovery of no , 1930) and studies on Zeami and Kan'ami, along with edited no treatises and a six-volume collection of no music (Yokyoku[*] zenshu[*] , 1935–36). His wife was the eminent novelist Nogami Yaeko.
of anticipation was finally about to be answered with the rise of the curtain, it came down before I knew it. That incredible figure did not make his appearance on the stage; instead his full presence suddenly emerged right before our eyes beside a pine tree next to the bridgeway. From there Umewaka Manzaburo[*] began to intone in his superb, gravelly voice, trembling with subtle evocativeness. Even though it was difficult to comprehend what he was vocalizing, I was immediately drawn into another world in which draft orders, food coupons, and national uniforms had all disappeared. Neither did bushido[*] , Hagakure , and even the samisen and the michiyuki scenes have any part to play in this world. Instead, there were only men and women suffering alone in hell for having loved or killed. Since hell is not a social issue, one shite alone would suffice.[9] And since everyone, regardless of personality, is capable of love and hate, I suppose that's why the shite wears a mask. By simply shading his eyes with one hand or taking a small step in his white tabi socks, an awesome no[*] actor could immediately transform the stage into the white sands of Suma washed by the waves or turn it into the village of Fukakusa, where the plumes of eulalia grass swayed in the autumn wind. No wonder there was no need for any stage prop except a polished floor and the front view of a single pine tree.
During the war, what I discovered at Suidobashi's[*] No[*] Theater was not no itself but what "drama" ultimately meant. By that, I do not necessarily have only Zeami's world in mind.[10] I discovered how absolutely exquisite an actor's human voice could be, how one slight movement could represent a thousand words, how pregnant the sense of anticipation and how intense and compact the element of time could become in-
[9] Michiyuki , literally "traveling on the road," is a widely used dramatic convention in gigaku, no , and kyogen[*] plays and enacts a journey to a certain destination, with accompanying music; in the puppet theater its most celebrated expression probably began with Chikamatsu Monzaemon's sewa-joruri[*] plays such as Sonezaki shinju[*] (The love suicides at Sonezaki, 1703), in which the lovers' last journey evokes the most poignant moment of their tragedy. Besides the michiyuki of ill-fated lovers, there are also those of parents and children and masters and servants. • Shite is the principal role in a no play.
[10] Zeami Motokiyo (1363?–1443?) of the Kanze school of no wrote many of the 240 plays still performed today as well as more than 20 treatises, some highly sophisticated, on his aesthetic ideals about no performance, including yugen[*] and ran'i . Kato[*] later wrote an important essay on the dramatist entitled "Zeami no senjutsu mata wa Nogakuron[*] " (Zeami's strategy or a discussion of no ), now in Showa[*] bungaku zenshu[*] (Shogakukan[*] , 1989), 28:643–58.
side the theater. There and then I stood witness to the ultimate potential of an optimum performance as it manifested itself in the realm of art. My experience, no doubt, was only accidental. But this accident aside, the fact that I am Japanese had no relevance. Where a man was born and where he grew up—that is to say where he first started—are what determine his nationality, not his final destination. As a matter of fact, later in my life I had the opportunity to see first-rate performances in theaters in most parts of the world; but that was only after I had heard Umewaka Manzaburo's[*] chanting and witnessed Kongo[*] Iwao's dancing, certainly not the reverse.[11]
One after another, my friends went to war, and none of them came back before it ended. There was only one exception. He was called into military service and went to China, developed an illness there, and was discharged soon after he was sent back to Japan for hospitalization. Before being drafted, he used to live in Urawa with his elder sister, studied philosophy at Tokyo University, and discreetly tried his hand at writing poetry.[12] In the summer he would go to Shinshu[*] . Looked at from afar, he could be mistaken for an old man because of the way he strolled down the Nakasendo[*] in the evening wearing a casual kimono with a cane in hand. A soft-spoken man of few words, he had very high standards when it came to creative writing. He would dismiss mine with a laugh, saying, "The stuff you people wrote is not worthy of reading." His sister, an instructor of civil law at a private university, was a cheerful, openhearted, and brilliant woman. She loved talking and laughing, and when we found ourselves in an argument, I was no match for her sharp mind. Both the brother and the sister condemned militarism, firmly convinced that the militarists were simply digging their own graves in starting a war with Britain and the United States. After the brother was called into military service, the sister continued to receive his letters, and I am sure she could read much more between the lines. It was not difficult to imagine how brutal life in the army would be for him. However, I did not ask her for details. What I did hear quite unexpectedly one day was the news that he had been sent back to a Japanese hospital due to his illness and was soon discharged and returned to his Urawa home. In appearance, he seemed to have changed very little from the time we last met before his departure.
[11] Kongo Iwao (1886–1951) was the head of the Kongo school of professional no[*] actors and noted for his study of no masks and costumes.
[12] Urawa is a city in the southeastern part of Saitama Prefecture.
"All things considered, I'm glad you are all right. It must have been a difficult time for you," I said emotionally.
"It was not a matter of having a difficult time. Let's not talk about it. I don't want to think about it anymore," he said simply.
I did not know what had happened to him in China. To this day, I still do not, and I suppose I never will. But the man who returned from China was not the same man who went there. After a long while, it became increasingly clear even to me.
But Nakanishi died. The killing of a man who had wanted so much to live was something I could never accept in the course of the Pacific War as a whole. Of course Nakanishi was not the only person who wanted to live. But he was my friend. Compared with a friend's life, what could possibly be the worth of all the islands in the Pacific? I saw the oilspilt ocean to the south, and I could picture the sun and blue sky he might have last seen with his eyes. In his last moment, perhaps his little sister's face floated across his mind, or perhaps it was his mother's, or the woman he might have loved, the work he might have accomplished, the poem he might have read, the music he might have heard. His life was just beginning, and he wanted so much to go on living! He did not volunteer his own death, nor did he choose to die because he was "deceived."[13] Ultimately, it was the same political authority—the one that had failed to deceive him—that drove him to his death with brute force. When I learned of his death, I was momentarily stunned, but when I became myself again, what I felt was not sadness but an irrepressible surge of anger. Even if I could condone everything else about the Pacific War, I could not condone Nakanishi's death. What had caused it was an irredeemable crime, and crime has to pay.
As time passed I found myself constantly haunted by another thought, the thought that there was no good reason why I should survive and Nakanishi should die. When we used to gather at his house and read Duineser Elegien , we shared our passions and hatreds, our appreciation and contempt for the same things. Likewise, we were ignorant of the world and both of us knew it. We believed our lives would last forever, and so we never thought it necessary to decide at that moment what we wanted to do in the future. We only felt within ourselves the need to be alive, hence our aspiration for life. If only our aspiration had not been so brutally shattered. This thought frequently crossed my mind after Naka-
[13] That is, by the Japanese government's war propaganda.
nishi's death. If he had come back alive against all incredible odds, I wondered how he would have reacted toward the authority that had threatened to drive him to his death. If he had survived instead of me, what would he have wished to do? There is no doubt in my mind that the saying "To strike at injustice in the name of Heaven" is a meaningless statement. First, nobody knows what the will of Heaven might be. Second, even if we did know, nobody could properly claim to be acting in the name of Heaven. And yet one could infer what the fervent desires of a friend might be, and though one may not have the right to implement them on his behalf, it is certainly plausible to feel a nebulous and yet powerful temptation to do so. Later in life, when circumstances made me want to retreat and maintain my silence like a docile, harmless lamb, my mind would always bring back memories of Nakanishi.
When he was a higher school student, Nakanishi drafted a piece to satirize the trends of the time. I tried to have it published in the student newspaper. After the chief of the literary column had seen the galley proofs, he called me to his presence and asked me to delete the parts he considered "improper." "I tell you, if you publish this, the military police are going to come, and I'm not going to take any responsibility," was the way he put it. I explained to him that the parts in question were not "improper"; they were just a roundabout way of saying something already on everybody's mind. But the chief repeated his argument about the military police and refused to compromise, and Nakanishi, on his part, refused to have the passages deleted. In order to have the paper published, our only alternative was to take out the entire piece. Another article by Nakanishi appeared in the paper's next issue. This time the author did not sign his name as Nakanishi but as "Soramata Kakuzo[*] ."[14]
[14] Phonetically, Nakanishi's pseudonym means something like "Just you wait and see! I will write again!"