8
Shiga Naoya:
The Hero as Sage

Shiga Naoya's work is above all that of an author who has lived a most noble life. Noble? To live nobly is in the first place to live like a god. Perhaps Shiga's life is not to be likened to that of some incarnate deity. But the man has ... plainly led a pure, unblemished existence.
Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeiteki na

I read a certain story by the "grand old man" of letters. Once again it presented that stern countenance calculated to please his patronizing crowd. It was mighty insincere stuff. But this foolish, fawning crowd calls it "noble" and "fastidious," and the silliest among them reverently label it "aristocratic." ... We must be wary of those writers who are hailed as proudly aloof or principled or fastidious, for they are the crafty ones. To be "fastidious," after all, is to be selfish, stubborn, shrewd. "Fastidiousness" is utter vainglory; it is the desire to win at all costs. It is, if you will, a fascist mentality, which longs to enslave others.
Dazai Osamu, "Nyoze gamon"

What was there about Shiga Naoya's presence, his literary mystique, his sheer magnitude, that may have actually helped speed at least two other writers to their deaths? In 1927, when Shiga had reached the pinnacle of his career, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, at the end of his, wrote of Shiga in two posthumous essays in a tone suggesting that fierce envy lay at the root of his praise.^[1] Two

[1] In Haguruma , Akutagawa writes: "Stretched out on my bed, I began reading An'ya koro . Every phase of the hero's spiritual struggle moved me. What a fool I was compared to him, I thought, the tears streaming from my eyes" (Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu 9: 144-45). In Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeteki na , chapter 5, he notes in addition to the remarks contained in the epigraph above that Shiga is a realist who never relies on the imagination for his descriptions, that he infuses his realism with a poetic spirit grounded in the eastern aesthetic tradition, and that he, Akutagawa, has found this last quality beyond his own powers as a writer. Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu^[*] 9:12.

decades later, Shiga's still-considerable influence spurred Dazai Osamu to write of him, also in a posthumous essay, with an unmitigated bile that nevertheless failed to conceal his envy for an author turned into institution.^[2] Both Akutagawa and Dazai of course had other reasons for killing themselves, but one cannot help wondering if frustration at their inability to compete with this towering institution did not provide additional motivation for their suicides.

In our survey (in Chapter 3) of shishosetsu criticism since the 1920S, we traced the development of a literary standard that valorized the kind of writing Shiga in particular had mastered. We noted the concern with a writer's "sincerity" and "integrity" as manifested in the text's "realism." We also noted that the relationship between realism's "content" (i.e., the author's depiction of lived experience) and its "form" (i.e., his profession of sincerity) was a symbiotic and inseparable one. To say that confession in this context begat sincerity or that sincerity begat confession is to say no more than that content and form were mutually reinforcing, and mutually constraining, entities. Both confession as "content" and sincerity as "form" made special demands on writers who sought to exploit the shishosetsu . We have already seen that realism in the early twentieth-century Japanese context did not mean the depiction of a broad social canvas or even the amassing of a plethora of naturalistic detail but rather the meticulous recording of the author's own experience. The so-called "fidelity" of depiction that generates realism, we also observed, is ultimately a function of the writer's style—that is, of his facility with the mode of sincerity—and not of the referential or psychological truthfulness of the account, which the reader can never fully determine.

No writer better appreciated this fact than Shiga, who fully understood both the potential and the limitations of a literature of sincerity. Shiga's case is particularly impressive in that the technical brilliance on which his reputation for integrity was based was evident from the very beginning. It is no accident that modern Japanese literature's most highly lauded stylist (bunsho no kamisama ) was also its most highly lauded "realist" (shosetsu no kamisama ). Shiga's

[2] See "Nyoze gamon" (1948), in Dazai Osamu zenshu 10:296-326.

purpose as a shishosetsu writer was never the complete, unerring depiction of lived experience, but rather the authoritative demonstration of his moral integrity. The natural and inevitable result of this conscious decision to market his sincerity, however, was that the Shiga oeuvre would be limited in scope and the private man largely inaccessible to public scrutiny.

It is thus with Shiga's writings that we realize the immense difference between a personal and a semi-private literature and discover how voluble the former (to wit, the writings of Dazai) and how reticent the latter can be. Whereas the avowedly autobiographical work of many writers, particularly in the west, demonstrate that even a highly personal literature (in which an articulate narrator-hero eagerly expresses his feelings and dramatizes the significant events of his life) can easily communicate itself to a wide audience, Shiga's work sooner or later provokes the question: how private can an author make his fiction and still appeal to his readers? Indeed, how private can writing be and still even be called fiction? The availability of the shishosetsu's author-hero equation does not alone explain Shiga's interest in a private literature. We are puzzled not by the fact that Shiga dwells on personal experience (which is, after all, the domain of any shishosetsu or autobiographical writer), but by the fact that he says so little about himself in the process. In the Taisho bundan's heyday, when shosetsu and shishosetsu were practically synonymous among junbungaku writers, Shiga was the reigning deity of prose "fiction," a reputation he earned by writing stories that are for the most part so purely autobiographical that critics rely on them heavily when chronicling his biography. Yet as a character in his stories, the author is a surprisingly elusive figure. Shiga is genuinely inclined to record personal experience, yet loath to reveal it in any detail.

Shiga, then, is at once reticent about his own experience and unwilling to stray far from it; and one wonders, with Nakamura Mitsuo, whether Shiga did not choose the wrong career: "If Shiga cannot imagine his life to have been anything other than what it actually was, then here alone is his greatest single failing as a writer."^[3] Shiga's overriding preoccupation with his own literary persona, moreover, directs his attention away from other charac-

[3] Shiga Naoya ron , 14.

ters, and one can appreciate Nakamura's criticism, again with reference to Shiga, that a novelist without interest in other people is no novelist at all.^[4] Yet Nakamura readily admits (and here he concurs with the critical consensus) that Shiga is a crucial figure—perhaps the crucial figure—in modern Japanese letters. "Of all writers active in the Taisho period, none has made such a profound and vital impact on contemporary literature as Shiga. Not even the likes of [Mori] Ogai or [Natsume] Soseki compare with him in influence."^[5] Takeda Rintaro puts it even more succinctly: "Shiga Naoya is Japanese literature's heartland."^[6]

The precise nature of this influence, it should be added, is of as much interest as its scope. Even more than to matters of style and theme, Shiga's great contribution has been to defining the author's relationship to his writing. This ambivalent relationship, which reveals a contradictory urge to self-expression and anonymity (as the epigraph to Chapter 3 makes clear), must be clarified if we are to understand how Shiga's literature can be so candid and yet so taciturn.

Writing as a Moral Imperative

This seeming contradiction can be addressed by pausing to reconsider just what it meant to be a writer in early twentieth-century Japan. In Chapter 1 we noted the Confucian prejudice against fiction and the preference for such respected non fictional forms as biography, history, and memoirs, and we traced the residual effect of this prejudice into the modern era. One reason why the bundan congealed into a relatively like-minded group is that its members were viewed by society as outcasts and worse: mere entertainers on a level with vaudeville performers.

Shiga and most early twentieth-century authors were shaped by this view of fiction. One of the reasons for Shiga's celebrated breach

[4] Ibid., 13. Nakamura echoes (in a very negative way) the view of Kobayashi Hideo, who claims that the only fully drawn character in Shiga's entire oeuvre is Tokito Kensaku, the hero of An'ya koro , but that this fact does not in itself detract from Shiga's greatness as a writer. See "Shiga Naoya ron" (1938), in Shintei Kobayashi Hideo zenshu 4:112-14.

[5] Shiga Naoya ron , 5.

[6] Cited in ibid.

with his father was his decision to pursue a writing career. Shiga's father voiced a quite common sentiment: outrage that any son (but particularly the eldest, as Shiga was) born to a socially distinguished family would degrade himself by indulging in such a frivolous occupation. There is a memorable scene in Aru otoko, sono ane no shi (A certain man and the death of his sister, 1920) in which the father interrogates his son, the hero, about his plan to become a fiction writer (shosetsuka ). The hero replies in his defense that Takizawa Bakin 1767-1848), the Edo-period writer of yomihon whom the father admires, also wrote fiction and that he, who thinks little of Bakin, intends to become a fiction writer truly worthy of the name ("motto honto no shosetsuka ni naru no desu").^[7] The hero implies that his writing will not contain the implausible incidents and other "lies" that mar Bakin's works. Of course, Shiga was hardly alone in his predicament. Contemporaries like Arishima Takeo, a member along with Shiga of the "Shirakaba" group, Nagai Kafu, and Ozaki Kazuo (1899-1983), a Shiga protégé, met with similarly strong resistance from their families, and especially their fathers, when they revealed their desire to become writers^[8]

Since Shiga and others were nonetheless very serious about their work, it was incumbent on them to convince their readers (and perhaps even themselves in their moments of doubt) that they should not be dismissed as so many vaudeville raconteurs. The task was clear: to redefine the shosetsu writer's image in terms that commanded society's respect. Masao Miyoshi has argued that the Japanese typically measure personal worth by how closely one approximates the ideal of one's professional type: one strives to become the teacher, the craftsman, the fisherman.^[9] In Tokugawa Japan, the ideal writer was the scholar-sage—a man like Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) or Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725), who pondered the problems of correct living and correct government through the study of history. Their treatises are unabashedly didactic. Society looked to them for moral pronouncements just as naturally as it

[7] SNZ 2:439-40. Citations from this zenshu henceforth appear, where appropriate, in the body of the text.

[8] Ozaki recalls in his memoir Ano hi kono hi (1:14) that his father thought of only waka and Chinese poetry as worthy of the name literature and regarded the shosetsu in particular as beneath contempt.

[9] Accomplices of Silence , 78-79.

looked to craftsmen or fishermen for the specialized services they rendered.^[10] The obvious choice for the early twentieth-century shosetsu writer, then, living in a society still influenced by the Confucian ethic, was to adopt the role of the writer, which had until then been assumed by authors of histories, biographies, essays, and other prose forms esteemed by tradition. By linking himself to this tradition, the shosetsu writer appropriated for himself the moral legitimacy he otherwise lacked. To be sure, this modern-day "sage," in his incarnation as shosetsu writer, entertained a different goal from his predecessors': he dedicated himself to his own inner growth rather than to the state. (In this sense his outlook was probably closer to the Buddhist worldview and its concern with the isolated—as opposed to the socially integrated—man, as we noted in Chapter 4.) But he mined his personal experiences in much the same spirit of edification as his Confucianist predecessors did. In his role as moralizer and philosophizer, the shosetsu writer was less concerned with appealing to a wide audience than with earning society's respect. Indeed, vast popularity might have generated suspicions about his credentials as a member of the morally conscious literati. Writers with any pretensions to "seriousness" stood to gain only by projecting an image of themselves as ideals of their type.

Shiga was without a doubt the most successful of all twentieth-century writers at playing the author-sage. A great measure of his success lay in his ability to strip from his persona any qualities inappropriate to that role. It is important to understand that the role's principal requirement was seen as ethical, not artistic, in nature. It was not enough to be a facile stylist; the writer had to be, above all, a moral human being. Shiga himself articulated this credo in an unpublished manuscript, written early in his career, that downgrades the art of fiction and affirms the primacy of moral growth. "I was not born to write fiction [shosetsu ]. Fiction is a means and not an end .... I want to write about everyday life and by doing so to improve it. I shall develop into a better person, and my creative writing shall be a by-product of that development" (SNZ 9:528). That Shiga was aware of his mission as a new breed

[10] Joyce Ackroyd suggests that Arai Hakuseki viewed himself as a "latter-day sage" dedicated to the service of his rulers. See Told Round a Brushwood Fire , 26.

of shosetsu writer is further apparent in the choice of titles for his first important composition: "Hishosetsu, sobo" (Grandmother: a non-shosetsu , 1908), later published as "Aru asa" (One morning, 1918).^[11]

Shiga's writing, then, as a "by-product" of what was essentially a moral endeavor, naturally focuses on subjects befitting the image of a would-be sage who offers the text of his life as an example to the reader; for the question that has most occupied the early twentieth-century shosetsu writer as recorder of lived experience was simply, how to live. The reader, in turn, looked to a writer like Shiga for moral guidance that could be gleaned from the text. The shishosetsu was, of course, the ideal form for nurturing such a "recorder-witness" relationship. The ever-present narrator-hero becomes the sole unifying and ordering textual element in a story stripped of plot, character, and dramatic scene. A narrating persona who did not resemble the author would in fact be a contradiction in terms.

The author-sage's underlying rationale is epitomized by the phrase "Bun wa hito nari" (writing is the person), which is to say that the writer's character determines the quality of his literary output. Numerous critics, tempted to equate literary virtuosity with the high moral ground, have singled out Shiga in particular and marveled at the apparent propinquity of life and art, behavior and words. One critic, arguing with Shiga dearly in mind, puts it this way: "A healthy and vigorously moral voice pervades every text worthy of being deemed a classic."^[12]

We should not forget, however, that Shiga's "vigorously moral voice" is in the final analysis the product of a style of which Shiga was the undisputed master. That is why the above citation would seem to have the argument exactly backward: is not the writer's "morality" as textual expression more the product of the writing than its formative element? As consumers of that verbal product, readers become acquainted with the writer's character perforce en-

[11] Ikeuchi Teruo notes in a comparison of several early manuscripts that this story about the Shiga hero's quarrel with his grandmother marks a decisive turn away from earlier attempts at more conventionally fictional subjects having no direct relation to the author's private life. See "Naoya no riarizumu," 52.

[12] Yamamuro Shizuka, “An'ya koro o chushin ni," 344. Takada Mizuho offers a similar view: "The beauty of Shiga's life gave birth to the beauty of his writings; in this fact lies Shiga's success as an author" (Shiga Naoya , 37).

tirely through the printed page. That they accept Shiga's prose style with so little resistance is the most persuasive proof of all of Shiga's sensitivity to his medium. Here is how Shiga analyzes his own awareness, in a miscellany entitled "Seishucho" (1937):

Grammar is not a set of rules (aside from those governing the use of case-indicating particles). It is something more fundamental. To say that a sentence is ungrammatical does not mean that the writer has disregarded the rules but rather that he has disregarded his own pattern of thought. That is not right. I do not know the first thing about grammar, but I do try in my writing to be faithful to the way I think.

(SNZ 7:37)

In his shishosetsu , Shiga is indeed faithful to the way he—and any Japanese—"thinks," namely by presenting a recorder (as we have labeled him) who speaks grammatically and epistemologically only for himself (whether in first or third person) and who thus by his very utterance privileges his "presence" over the narrated events. It is this unrelenting sense of presence that provides the basis for Shiga's celebrated moral authority. Shiga's approach is hardly unique; it is, in fact, the shishosetsu's foundation (as we have already seen in the case of Chikamatsu Shuko). But few have made such effective use of the narrator as recorder of his thoughts and actions and as unblinking observer of his surroundings.

In offering his own life as an example for others, however, Shiga continually felt the need to excise those experiences that would tarnish the image of author-sage, or at the very least to present them in such a way as to lessen their impact—even at the expense of a good story. Rather than contradict his scrupulously conceived literary image, Shiga would generally lay down his pen—hence the impression one gets of an impenetrable core of privacy in much of his writing. Any shishosetsu writer, of course, has something to lose as a private citizen when he becomes overly zealous in penning his "confessions," but Shiga figured to lose his raison d'être as an author. The great attraction of Shiga's stories is the narrator-hero's display of candor and decorum. But this candor is a facade, a studied technique, as it perhaps must be in such an unspontaneous form of expression as writing. The author-sage is forced to steer his confessions between the Scylla of face-saving deceit, which if discovered might undermine the reader's trust, and the Charybdis of

a downgraded image resulting from some true but embarrassing revelation. Consequently, Shiga, far from presenting a comprehensive picture of "real life," edited lived experience so thoroughly that his work inevitably took on a shape utterly distinct from it. Indeed, because his concern with writing's impact on private life was stronger than his urge to write, it led at times to awkwardly told stories or even to complete silence. When faced with the choice of disrupting private life or interrupting his literary career, Shiga—reputedly the supreme chronicler of personal experience, the shishosetsu writer par excellence—almost invariably chose the latter.

The Author-Sage as Fictive Persona

Shiga wrote little of what we would unhesitatingly call "fiction." Despite some memorable successes,^[13] he is sometimes visibly uncomfortable making the attempt. That he would feel constrained by actual events when writing stories based on his own life is perhaps inevitable, but the concern with his image as author-sage is evident in his "imaginative" stories as well. The popular story "Kozo no kamisama" (The shop boy's patron saint) 1920) is one such example. In it, A, a young aristocrat and member of the House of Peers, treats the apprentice Senkichi to a meal of sushi and then disappears from the boy's life just as mysteriously as he appeared in it. The story revolves around a series of coincidences. A, who happens to see Senkichi fingering a piece of sushi he cannot afford to pay for at a stall, later chances to buy a set of scales at the very shop in which Senkichi is apprenticed. A takes the boy to a restaurant that is, again quite by chance, the same one Senkichi earlier overheard his superiors raving about. The impressionable boy begins to think of A as some kind of god.

In the story's final paragraph, the narrator, who has related events alternately from A's and Senkichi's points of view, confesses that he planned to conclude the story with yet another coincidence.

[13] "Kamisori" (The razor, 1910), "Seibei to hyotan" (Seibei and his gourds, 1913), and "Han no hanzai" (Han's crime, 1913) are the best-known examples and the most frequently translated of Shiga's stories into English—the result, at least in part, of western resistence to the shishosetsu .

We have already learned that A signed a fictitious name and address in the shop register out of a certain diffidence about his intent to treat the boy. The narrator now thinks of having the address match that of a small shrine.

This writer will lay down his pen. He had intended to conclude his story in the following way. The apprentice, hoping to learn his client's identity, finds out the man's name and address from the chief clerk. He decides to pay the man a visit. But he finds no house at the address, only a tiny shrine dedicated to the fox deity. The apprentice is stunned. Such was this writer's intent; but he thought that such an ending would be too cruel a trick to play on the apprentice and has decided to end the story here instead.

(SNZ 3:75)

Akutagawa Ryunosuke applauds Shiga for providing what is both a gloss on and an integral part of the story, and he compares the work's "perfect incompleteness" to a Rodin statue in which a figure emerges, only half chiseled, from the marble.^[14] Akutagawa's own penchant for surprise endings, however, seems to have blinded him to the coda's self-consciousness, which exhibits Shiga's deep ambivalence about the author's creative function. One senses the narrator's desire to deceive neither his characters nor his readers. But such a desire is ultimately self-defeating, for it requires the narrator to assume contradictory roles. What has been an aloof, near-omniscient narrator until the story's last paragraph suddenly demystifies himself becoming all too human and all too visible by admitting in effect that he, like A, can no longer go on performing in a godlike role and rig the story at will. After painstakingly fashioning the first two coincidences, he calls them both into question by wondering aloud about the need for a third. A narrator divided within himself cannot speak, and the story self-destructs.^[15]

The proposed ending, had the narrator gone ahead with it, would have in fact provided a witty finale, for it is a logical out-

[14] "Taisho kyu nen do bundan johan-ki kessan" (1920), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu 4:175.

[15] Shiga's narrator differs radically from those of, say, Thackeray or Fielding (e.g., in Tom Jones ), who also expound on how they plan to dispose of their heroes. Even though the latter appear to treat their characters like marionettes, reflection on the chance-ridden fates, future or past, of their characters never prevents them from carrying on with their stories. On the contrary, it brings home to them the dramatic potential of their own creative imaginations, a thought that never occurs to the narrator in "Kozo no kamisama."

growth of the story's developments. The narrator has prepared the reader for this last coincidence by a prior exploration of Senkichi's thoughts. In an earlier passage, the apprentice, having met with serendipitous good fortune, imagines his benefactor to possess superhuman powers:

Senkichi suspected that the client was someone very special. The man found out about that humiliating episode at the sushi stall, he had known what the clerks had been saying about the restaurant, and above all he had seen into Senkichi's heart and treated the boy to all the sushi he could eat. These were not the deeds of an ordinary mortal. Perhaps the man was a god. Or one of those Taoist Immortals. Or maybe even the fox deity incarnate. So Senkichi thought.

(SNZ 3:73)

The coincidence of a randomly jotted address turning out to be that of a shrine dedicated to the fox deity, then, would hardly have come as a total surprise to readers, and it would have provided Senkichi with the final "proof" that his patron was indeed a supernatural being. Yet the narrator abandons this idea as a "cruel trick" that he will not play on his character. He is finally more anxious about his own moral integrity than about his story's working as fiction.^[16]

Another drawback of the final authorial aside is that it fails to recognize the irony inherent in A's situation. This wealthy and privileged member of society, perceived by Senkichi as a demigod, actually suffers from low self-esteem, as we learn in several pas-

[16] Rather than question Shiga's ambivalence about the narrative form, however, critics have typically concerned themselves with the story's "humanism" and "realism." Endo Tasuku suggests that the narrator's paternalistic attitude toward Senkichi is evidence of Shiga's humanitarian character: the author's decision to remain silent prevents the young shop boy from receiving a potential "shock" (i.e., the discovery that A is indeed a god). He further argues that the decision to end the story where it does is a credit to Shiga's healthy sense of verisimilitude, for the introduction of a third "coincidence" would only dilute the story's "reality" (in Shindo Junko and Endo Tasuku, eds., Shiga Naoya shu 591 n. 251). Yet the awkwardness of Endo's position is evident as soon as one stops to consider what an optimal number of coincidences might actually be—an impossibility without also considering their function in a particular text. In "Kozo no kamisama," the first two coincidences surely take on their full import only with the third, which Shiga proposes and then dismisses. The awkwardness becomes even more apparent when, after commending Shiga for his narrative restraint, Endo then suggests that Shiga ought to have excised the concluding apology altogether (ibid). Endo admits, if only tacitly, that calling the story's realism needlessly into question here only serves to undermine it.

sages. He sympathizes with the apprentice when he first spies him walking away hungry from the sushi stall, but he lacks the élan to take him aside and treat him to dinner on the spot. Later, instead of feeling pleased with himself for taking the boy to a restaurant following their chance meeting, he questions his self-complacency and succumbs to a fit of melancholy, quite as if he had just committed a crime. Finally, he rebukes himself for being so rash as to treat the boy at all. To have this character, so lacking in self-confidence, enshrined as a deity is a marvelous irony and also symbolic of the utterly different worlds that the apprentice and the nobleman inhabit. The story's most crucial fault, then, lies not in its somehow "damaging" fictions but in its inability to capitalize on them. Even A's painfully realized self-knowledge can only partially redeem a story that the narrator has acknowledged to be a sham. By raising doubts about the story's conclusion, the narrator casts doubt on the narrative project itself in such a way that leaves him alone as the only authentic vestige.^[17]

Clearly, the image-conscious narrator is more at home in stories where he figures centrally from the start and competes with no other characters. Freed from the potentially awkward contrivances of plot, he records any personal experience that reveals himself in an appealing light. Shiga's celebrated honesty, then, is no ordinary candor. Spontaneity is sacrificed to "confessions" well calculated to service the myth of sincerity and at the same time limit the field of writing to a cautious form of autotherapy or catharsis that if successful leads, ironically, to silence. For Shiga, the writer's ideal state is one of emotional equilibrium in which writing itself finally becomes unnecessary. Writing is simply the means, like a dose of medicine, to bring about this state. One writes, therefore, only what is nec-

[17] This is not to suggest that all such doubts are destined to undermine fictional narrative. John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman , to take an example from recent English literature, is a noteworthy success in which the narrator con-dudes his tale with a multiple ending. Unlike Shiga's diffident narrator, who is an authorial second thought appearing from out of nowhere, Fowles's narrator, in the tradition of Fielding, is a well-developed personality with whom the reader has grown intimate from the novel's beginning. He is imperious, self-assertive, and never daunted into silence, even by apocalyptic musings about endings. He comments freely about his material throughout the text, and his equivocal ending is entirely in keeping with the novel as a whole. He is both omniscient and personal, a rare if not impossible combination in Japanese, given the tendency to link a "personal" narrator with a nontranscendent, non-"fabricated" narrating presence.

essary to achieve this equilibrium, and no more. Like an overdose, too much writing can adversely affect one's well-being.

The attraction of such an approach to writing, of course, is that its very reticence appears to be a sign of its integrity. Because the narrator makes so few concessions to his audience, it is easy for the reader to feel that he is witness to the author's private musings. Like the Tokugawa scholar-sage Arai Hakuseki, however, who "recalls the past not critically but emotionally,"^[18] Shiga relives past experience less to analyze than to justify his emotional state in that experience. Many of his stories, therefore, read like apologies, in which explanation gives way to rationalization. This method serves him well enough in stories like "Kinosaki nite" (At Kinosaki, 1917) and "Horibata no sumai" (Dwelling by the moat, 1925), which are the products of considerable temporal perspective. Difficulties arise, however, when the perspective collapses and the image of the author-sage is undermined by events that the author cannot fully digest.

Such is the case with the "Yamashina" cycle. In "Kozo no kamisama" we noted the authorial persona's attempt to establish his credibility at the expense of his fictional characters. In the "Yamashina" cycle, the narrator-hero does likewise, only this time at the expense of a character drawn from real life. The cycle, which records the author's affair and eventual breakup with a Kyoto geisha (Shiga made his home in the Kansai region for fifteen years beginning in 1923), was written and published in the following order: "Saji" (A trivial matter, 1925), "Yamashina no kioku" (Memories of Yamashina, 1926), "Chijo" (Blind passion, 1926), and "Banshu" (Late autumn, 1926). In terms of the cycle's chronology, however, "Saji" comes third, not first, and thus it appears when the cycle first came out in hardcover in 1927. This seemingly minor discrepancy is in fact crucial, as the rest of "Yamashina" might never even have been written had "Saji" not been published.

"Yamashina no kioku" describes an awkward scene in January 1925 between the hero and his wife upon his return from a liaison with the geisha. Having found out about the affair, his wife demands an immediate end to it, but he insists that his feelings for

[18] The characterization is Hani Goro's. Quoted in Ackroyd, Told Round a Brushwood Fire , 29.

the geisha will not diminish his affection for her. "Chijo" opens later in January with the hero still infatuated and unable to part with the geisha, but knowing full well that she is not really in love with him and actually feeling securer in that knowledge. Under pressure from his wife, he finally breaks off the affair and pays the geisha a solatium, although he does not feel in his heart that the affair is over. In "Saji," we learn that the hero is once again seeing the geisha. It is April. After telling his wife that he has an errand at the bank, he travels from his home in Nara to Kyoto only to learn that the geisha is in Nara herself with another client.

"Banshu" sums up the affair; in it we learn the circumstances under which "Saji" was written. It is now September, and the hero, entertaining his father visiting from Tokyo, cannot finish a manuscript in time to meet a deadline. His father is concerned that his visit has become an imposition, but the hero assures him that he has another manuscript that he can use in a pinch. In fact, the hero is troubled by the repercussions that this manuscript, if published, will be likely to cause, since it reveals that the affair he has supposedly sworn off (as we are told in "Chijo") is actually still in progress. Yielding to the pressure of the deadline, however, and not wanting to make his father feel any guiltier, he finally hands the manuscript over to his publisher. When he informs his wife that the story's contents are "unpleasant," she, no doubt recalling the episodes recorded later in "Yamashina no kioku" and "Chijo," makes a lighthearted reply about Water under the bridge. But "Saji" is about the present, and not the past as he has led his wife to believe. He has been seeing the geisha again since February. The hero must finally end the liaison for good when the wife hears about "Saji" two months later (in November) from a former live-in maid, who reads the story and sends her a letter inquiring about the affair!

All four stories are narrated in the "third person," with the hero identified throughout as "he" (kare ). The "he" is easily interchangeable with "I," however; the restricted use of kare , discussed in the previous chapter, applies here as well. The preface to the cycle's hardcover edition not surprisingly encourages a reading that links author and hero: "This is a record of events that already belong to the past. It is only proper that I refer to myself here as 'he'" (SNZ 3:613-14). But at the same time it attempts lamely to impose, by a

mere change of pronouns, a certain distance between the author and the hero as well. One might suppose that the third-person narration would allow the author to analyze more objectively the motives for his behavior; yet he is in fact so reticent that one wonders why he has chosen to reveal the incident in the first place. Shiga later. writes (in a commentary on his works titled "Zoku sosaku yodan" [1938]): "The subject of these stories is for me a most unusual one. I had no desire to deal with it straightforwardly and took an interest in it rather for the impact it had on my family life" (SNZ 8:22). AS it turns out, however, we learn nothing about the "impact" on the author's family life other than the wife's entirely predictable reaction to the affair: anger and jealous frustration couched in the most general terms.

A more convincing reason for the nature of the author's revelation is to be found in the circumstances of the cycle's publication. As we can see from Table 2 (which sets forth the three time periods pertinent to our discussion of the cycle), Shiga wrote "Saji" in May 1925, very soon after the described event, but did not publish it until September. There is no such gap between the writing and publication of the other three stories, however, because the affair had apparently ended by this time. Once "Saji" had gone into print and his wife had found out about it two months later (November 1925), there was nothing left to hide. Shiga wrote "Yamashina no kioku" the following month.

The question of art's fidelity to life in the "Yamashina" cycle need not concern us here; our observations will not be affected by the presence of any "distortions" or "embellishments." Our con-

cern is rather with how art doubles back on life—that is, how the author persuades the reader, by a variety of self-references, to associate the literary persona with the real-life man. In a text like the "Yamashina" cycle, moreover, where chronological time encroaches on story time, art actually dictates the course of private life rather than the other way around. This would not have been possible, of course, regardless of the cycle's "fidelity" to life, had not all parties involved—the author, his wife, and the former maid—acted on the assumption that the hero was indeed the author himself. Thus, the publication and subsequent discovery of "Saji" by the hero's wife caused the affair to end more quickly than it otherwise would have. Had the hero remained silent, he could have conceivably carried on his secret trysts until the affair broke off of its own accord. But having exploited his private life for the sake of his literary career, he was compelled to mend his ways. The literary ball bounced back into private life, forcing the hero to break off completely with the geisha.

Despite its excess of self-referentiality, the "Yamashina" cycle remains curiously opaque. Rather than shed light on the affair itself, it merely reveals the author's reason for writing about the affair in the first place. "Banshu" in particular is an all-out attempt at damage control, rationalizing the hero's indiscretion by ingeniously supplying a new context for interpreting it. He never intended to brag about a humdrum affair with a geisha, the hero explains, but merely to defer to his father, whom he did not wish to make uncomfortable by his inability to meet a deadline. If he has sacrificed his wife's feelings in the process, too, then that is the price to be paid for saving his father's face. Thus, by extricating himself from one moral responsibility (to his wife) by appealing to a higher one (to his father), he reasserts his role as moral arbiter even when he is guilty of philandering.

The "Yamashina" cycle is one of the few examples in Shiga's oeuvre where writing dictated the course of experience. Unlike Shuko, Kasai, and many other shishosetsu writers whose domestic lives were in constant turmoil, Shiga, who enjoyed a relatively stable existence, generally refrained from incriminating self-exposés in the interest of domestic tranquility. Yet that very refusal to sacrifice his private life to the exigencies of his writing career had the effect of stilling his pen. Shiga realized all too well that writing uninhib-

itedly about one's personal life meant to endanger its well-being. He rarely took that risk; hence the several periods of silence during his career. Further, because he does not take his readers fully into his confidence, Shiga presents us with a hero who, for all his seeming candor, assumes only a superficially private role. As long as that role is not contradicted, the reader easily succumbs to the illusion that he is indeed witnessing the author's most private self. Those rare occasions when (as in the "Yamashina" cycle) it is contradicted, however, serve to remind us of the gap between author and persona and of how one-dimensional the persona really is.

In Shiga's shishosetsu , then, the formal, public nuance of watakushi prevails. And because it does, conflict is depicted, even in the "Yamashina" cycle, in muted terms calculated to assuage the feelings of his characters' real-life counterparts (except, of course, those of his wife). That Shiga valued propriety above all and had little taste for portraying characters in an embarrassing or unfavorable light is made clear in an open letter ("Moderu no fufuku," published in Shirakaba in July 1913) protesting the way in which Satomi Ton, a friend and fellow Shirakaba member, used him as a model in Kimi to watakushi to (1913). In the letter, which he signs "Sakamoto," the name of the character modeled after himself, Shiga acknowledges the "truth" of what Satomi has written, but he questions his friend's fight to bring up incidents that, in his mind at least, have no place in the public arena.

What Sakamoto says and does in Kimi to watakushi to is by and large what I in fact said and did. I am not attacking you for any factual errors. I am simply puzzled by your desire to carry on over such trifles.... I just cannot understand what value there is in ... making people look bad on paper.

(SNZ 7: 133)

Satomi rebutted Shiga's argument (in "Moderu no fufuku ni tsuite," unpublished) with no little energy, but the installments of Kimi to watakushi to stopped appearing.^[19] Perhaps that is why Shiga never published his response ("'Moderu no fufuku ni tsuite' ni

[19] We know from Shiga's diary (SNZ 10:681, 9 July 1913) that Satomi did write the essay manuscript and show it to Shiga. Satomi elaborates on his views in a letter to Shiga postmarked 8 July 1913 (Shiga Naoya zenshu bekkan , 116-18) and declares that, having gotten the matter off his chest, he will not publish "Moderu no fufuku ni tsuite."

tsuite") to Satomi's rebuttal, which however gives us a clear picture of how he believed a shosetsu would be read.

You say that I have no right to complain about my role as model unless that complaint takes the form of a purely literary critique of Kimi to watakushi to as art. Well, I have news for you. The text will be read above all, I believe, for the facts it contains. If you ask me, its author has a bad habit of extracting from the truth only those facts that appeal to people's basest interests.

(SNZ 7: 689)

Shiga did have a point. Most of the Shirakaba readership, which numbered at this time only a few thousand, had a very good idea of who kimi and watakushi were. Yet he is not interested in having Satomi alter the "facts" in order to make the characters anonymous or otherwise universalize them. The solution he urges is far more radical: stop writing. The message in these two pieces is clear. Shishosetsu characters have real-life models, and it is therefore better to remain silent than write ill of someone. That Shiga practiced what he preached is apparent from a reading of Wakai , to which we now turn.

Wakai

Both the power and the limitations of Shiga's confessional rhetoric are revealed perhaps most plainly in the “Wakai trilogy" (Wakai sanbusaku ): Otsu Junkichi (Otsu Junkichi, 1912), Wakai (Reconciliation, 1917), and Aru otoko, sono ane no shi (A certain man and the death of his sister, 1920). It is united loosely by the theme of the hero's troubled relationship with his father. In Otsu Junkichi , the first-person narrator (a would-be writer) chronicles his ambivalent feelings toward his friend's sister, his special relationship with his grandmother, who raised him since he was an infant, and finally his unsuccessful attempt to marry a housemaid in the face of family opposition. The father remains in the background, although his presence is continually felt—most keenly when the narrator discovers that he was behind the maid's removal from the house. In Wakai the father again is very much in the background until the end. The first-person narrator merely informs the reader of a long estrangement without dwelling on the causes; his concern is rather with his own efforts to write about the estrangement. The recon-

ciliation, initiated by the narrator's ritualistic apology, comes so abruptly that reader is not wholly convinced by the claim that it will last. It is only with Aru otoko , narrated by the Shiga hero's younger brother, that the reader gains some insight into the nature of the conflict, although he is encouraged by its fictional veneer (obvious to anyone even casually acquainted with the oeuvre) to disregard the content as autobiographical truth. This attempt by an author to guide the reading of a text as fiction is a crucial issue to which we shall return below.

A few comments about the trilogy's other two narratives are in order before we begin our discussion of Wakai. Otsu Junkichi was the first Shiga story to be published in a large-circulation, general-interest magazine (as well as the first for which he, at age twenty-nine, received payment); nearly all Shiga's previous stories had appeared in the coterie magazine Shirakaba . Not only was it a daring story for its time, thematizing a young man's rebellion (albeit a largely fruitless one) against family oppression, it was instrumental in making available the Shiga style to a wide audience. Ozaki Kazuo, one of Shiga's first disciples, discovered the story in 1916 and later had this to say about it:

If I had not read Otsu Junkichi , I might never have become a writer.... It taught me that a shosetsu , which I had thought of only as an entertaining mixture of fact and fiction, need not be that at all, and that if one had a grievance against one's father, then one should be bold enough to air it.... The language also took me by surprise. I had never encountered its like before. It was as though nothing came between the reader and the events described.... Reading this and other of Shiga's stories, I found that language actually disappears when it performs its function flawlessly^[20]

Ozaki articulates here what has been suggested throughout this study: the shosetsu's mission is to tell the "truth" about lived experience. Ozaki further argues that Shiga's language is particularly qualified to tell the truth, because it can convey the author's message, unadulterated, through a supposedly transparent medium. The cult of sincerity has already firmly taken hold. Honda Shugo, comparing Otsu Junkichi with Soseki's Sore kara (And then , 1909), which also

[20] Ano hi kono hi 1:54. For an earlier, fuller version, see Ozaki, "Shiga Naoya no koto," 298-307.

treats a generational clash between father and son, concedes the novelistic superiority of the latter but claims that Shiga succeeds, especially in the story's second half, in removing the fictional "barriers" that separate reader and hero in Soseki's text. “Sore kara enlightens the reader with its culture and insight," Honda concludes, "but Otsu Junkichi is the story that moves him."^[21]

The suggestion here of course is that Shiga's transparent, "fiction-less" language of the heart comes through to the reader in a way that Soseki's rational, "fictional" language cannot. Honda never tells us just how he distinguishes between the two languages, but it is clear that the styles of the two texts differ in fundamental ways. There is an ill-defined relationship between the hero as actor and as observer in Otsu Junkichi that undercuts any analytical or ironic perspective. The letter to a friend that ends the story (dated 30 August 1907), while providing an outlet for the hero's pent-up rage against his father, offers no background whatsoever to the generational conflict. The hero gives us no assessment, moreover, of the intervening five years between the story time and the narrative present, which would appear to coincide with the year of publication (1912).^[22] The lack of clues about the hero's present attitude leads us to believe that the hero has some reason to suppress it, although such an argument of course makes little sense in the context of a "fictionalized" narrative.

Otsu Junkichi , then, the story that immortalized Shiga's "rebellion" against his father, contains in fact little more than a few angry words about an apparition that readers never come to know. Most of the hero's rebellious behavior is aimed at his grandmother, whom he "loves and yet cannot help despising" (SNZ 2:299) for being such a dominant force in his life. The text is important, however, if only because it introduces us to the conflicting emotions with which the Shiga hero struggles so mightily in Wakai .

A word also on Aru otoko , which is easily the most penetrating statement in the trilogy on what Shiga calls "the riddle that the

[21] "Jigazo sakka e no michi," 257.

[22] The only suggestion we get of any perspective being applied to past events is the use of the nonpast tense omou ("I think/believe") to conclude certain reflective passages (one sentence in part 1, section 1; the final paragraph in part 2, section 12; and a sentence near the beginning of the last section), but even these examples cannot be conclusively attributed to a dearly discernible narrative "present."

existence of a father poses to his son" (SNZ 2:446). Yet it has never been as highly regarded as the other two stories. Criticism of it invariably takes the form that one scholar voices when he acknowledges the narrator's disinterested appraisal of both the Shiga hero and his father but concludes that this very aloofness deprives the story of the poignancy and stark sense of reality so manifest in Wakai .^[23] Another scholar puts it even more succinctly: unlike Otsu Junkichi and Wakai, Aru otoko is "made up" (tsukurareta shosetsu ).^[24]

It is one thing for a literary scholar to conclude that a story is "made up," but Shiga has a way of letting even a casual reader know he has crossed the autobiographical line into the realm of "fabrication." He cues the reader, by fictionalization of the more obvious sort, to expect a retelling of the father-son conflict that, however incisive, cannot incriminate the real-life models.^[25] Once he has done so, he is then free to make his penetrating and sometimes devastating analysis of the conflict.

Shiga takes great pains to insure that the distance he imposes between subject and real-life model is plain for all to see. First, conscious perhaps that a mere switch from first- to third-person narrator will not sufficiently distance the hero, given the easy identification of kare with watakushi , he employs a separate first-person narrator (the hero Yoshiyuki's younger brother) to relate the story of his fictional alter ego. Second, he presents the hero in ways that often contradict previous portrayals. For example, Yoshiyuki in Aru otoko has an elder sister (and a brother-in-law who causes a scandal in his father's business), while the narrator-hero in Otsu Junkichi and Wakai has none. Yoshiyuki's mother dies when he is eight, while the narrator's mother in "Haha no shi to atarashii haha" (The death of my mother and my new mother, 1912) dies when the narrator is twelve. Yoshiyuki injures himself seriously when he falls out of a tree during an excursion to the country and recovers in Yugawara, a spa on the Pacific coast, while the narrator of "Kinosaki nite" (At Kinosaki, 1917) is injured when he is hit by

[23] Kuribayashi Hideo, in Fukuda Kiyoto and Kuribayashi Hideo, Shiga Naoya , 154. Most critics would no doubt agree with Sudo Matsuo's description of Wakai's characteristic feature: its "incomparable freshness." Shiga Naoya no bungaku , 165.

[24] Kono Toshiro, in notes to Shiga, Shiga Naoya , 480.

[25] Shiga says as much (in "Sosaku yodan," 1928) when he describes Aru otoko as a "mixture of fact [jijitsu ] and fiction [tsukurigoto ]," as opposed to Wakai , which he describes as "unembellished fact" (SNZ 8:14).

a train in Tokyo and recovers in Kinosaki, a spa on the Japan Sea coast. Yoshiyuki and his father never achieve a reconciliation, while the hero in Wakai does. The list goes on.

It is the author's hope, one suspects, that the reader, recognizing that many incidents in Aru otoko do not agree with what he knows about the Shiga hero from earlier, more "authentic" accounts, will not equate the relationship between father and son, as it is somewhat harshly depicted in this text, with the actual one between the real-life models. In particular, by composing a tragic conclusion that obviously contradicts the "facts" as they are recorded in Wakai , Shiga hints that the bitter confrontations leading up to the hero's permanent departure from home are also mere figments of the author. Whether or not they are in fact is beside the point. The hidden message of Aru otoko is that they are, and the reader is less inclined to ascribe even those segments that are not blatantly "false" (insofar as they do not contradict previous narratives) to specific events or circumstances in the author's life. "Fabrication" and the distance it imposes, it would seem, is indispensible for truly cogent character analysis in Shiga's autobiographical fiction. And yet, as Wakai's success makes abundantly clear, such analysis is not nearly as highly prized as the sense of authorial presence generated by the latter text.

Aru otoko is not without its limitations as a fictional text. A long parenthetical commentary that the narrator makes on one of his brother's letters is headed by a curious remark: "The author comments:" (sakusha iu [SNZ 2:500]). It is surely significant that the "speaker" here identifies himself not as the younger brother (ototo iu ) or as "this writer" (hissha iu ) but as "the author" and that he does so, moreover, in the plain, uninflected verb form, the only such use in the entire story. It is hard to believe that this self-conscious expression is a mere slip of the pen. Shiga had opportunities to make corrections when he anthologized the story, first serialized in a newspaper, in later editions of his writings. More likely, it is an example of Shiga's unwillingness to suppress completely his consciousness of the composition process in the interest of establishing an autonomous fictional time. Foregrounding the narrator's consciousness of writing rather than letting the drama unfold is of course a trademark of Shiga's and many other shisho-

setsu writers' prose. It is indeed one of the conventions that gives the shishosetsu its aura of authenticity. More than any event depicted in the fictive time frame, the simple refrain, "I now write," is the single most important statement that Shiga as author can make. This same attitude surely informs the ending of "Kozo no kamisama." At certain crucial points in Shiga's writing, then, narrative representation takes second place to the recorder's self-conscious presentation of himself in the process of writing. This consciousness is most fully realized in Wakai .

Although Wakai is considered a sequel to Otsu Junkichi , a ten-year hiatus separates the events described in the two works. The narrator in Wakai , moreover, writes of a reconciliation that has just taken place (and of certain events preceding it), whereas the narrator in Otsu Junkichi writes of an estrangement as it stood in the (apparently) distant past. We have noted the unexplained gap between the narrator as actor and the narrator as recorder in Otsu Junkichi ; in Wakai the two roles intertwine. We can only assume that the Otsu Junkichi narrator has actually become the writer he says he aspired to be; the Wakai narrator's professional status, meanwhile, is clear from the beginning. Indeed it soon becomes evident that the Wakai narrator has staked his writing career on the outcome of the events he describes. He is so obsessed with recording his relationship with his father that we cannot help viewing the reconciliation, which ends a decade-long rift, as a professional as much as a moral necessity.

Wakai chronicles four visits that the narrator-hero (also named Junkichi) makes from his home in Abiko, outside Tokyo, to his father's home in the city in 1917, from 32 July (the anniversary of his first daughter's death) to 30 August (the anniversary of his mother's death and the day of reconciliation). It concludes with his completion of a manuscript, inspired by recent events, in mid-September. This six- or seven-week period makes up the story's narrative time frame and it literally frames the story, occupying the first two and last six chapters. The intervening eight chapters, which bisect the four visits, chronicle incidents in previous years related to the hero's conflict with his father and his futile efforts to write about them, as well as the death of one infant daughter and birth of another. A third time frame, mentioned perfunctorily at

the very end, sets the manuscript's composition time during the first half of September; it thus overlaps the final two weeks of the story's first narrative frame.

We are obliged to dwell at first on certain shortcomings and inconsistencies in Wakai , but we must ultimately acknowledge the spell that it undeniably casts over its readers. In order to understand more fully Shiga's verbal sorcery, we shall look beyond the story's thematic content (which Masamune Hakucho describes with some justification as a sentimental tearjerker the likes of which might appear in any popular magazine^[26] ) to its singular mode of presentation. Nakamura Mitsuo has written that readers of Shiga can be divided into two groups: believers and nonbelievers.^[27] This is an apt description, however ironic in intent, of the hold Shiga's prose has over its admirers. Nakamura goes on to suggest that the "believers" engage in a simple act of faith when they recognize Shiga "the man" behind his writing, but we must emphasize that this faith springs from a clearly (although perhaps not readily) identifiable technique of presentation that we have referred to as his "invisible" style, without which no myth of authorial presence would arise.

Although Shiga's brand of realism is founded on this distinctive "presence" and on a narrative that seemingly parallels the ebb and flow of life, we find in Wakai a number of curiously improbable events that might well have no place in a story that strictly conformed to the laws of verisimilitude: the hero's "conversation" with his dead grandfather during a visit to the family cemetery, the imagined reconciliation with his father described as part of an unfinished composition, and the hallucinatory sighting of his father hurrying away from the Tokyo house to avoid meeting him (just as he had once contemplated leaving his Kyoto house before his father made an unwelcome visit two years earlier). The impact of these unusual, even eerie, scenes would be greatly lessened were

[26] "Shiga Naoya to Kasai Zenzo" (1928), in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 6: 181. Few critics are of Hakucho's persuasion, however. More would seem to share the judgment of Eguchi Kan: "If anyone calls [Wakai ] a sentimental work, he should be pitied, for he fails to understand the beauty of human sincerity." Quoted in Fukuda and Kuribayashi, Shiga Naoya , 154.

[27] Shiga Naoya ron , 21.

they not grounded in the utter reality of the narrator's seemingly corporeal "presence" in the text.^[28]

Of the conflict itself, Wakai offers extensive yet guarded treatment. We get neither the hero's case against the father nor the father's against the hero, in contrast to, say, Kafka's Letter to His Father , in which we get both. The hero depicts the rift to the last as a clash of roles rather than personalities. Juxtaposed with two other episodes in which human will plays but a small role—the death of one daughter and the birth of the other—the rift becomes a kind of fait accompli, much like a natural catastrophe or an act of God, or simply part of the landscape. Shiga met with criticism early on for his failure to probe in any depth the breach between father and son.^[29] But he casts his work in a way that militates against an in-depth analysis of the breach. The hero is the Shiga persona, bound by the author's self-imposed rules of propriety and by the image delineated in previous texts, The author clearly feels a responsibility to that image and not to the full disclosure of his private life. The details of the discordant father-son relationship remain part of the impenetrable core behind the hero's facade of candor.

Yet a contradictory urge to tell all, which the hero continually suppresses, pervades Wakai . Again and again he counters this urge by deferring to a moral code, calculated to exhibit the author-sage's integrity and with it the rightness of the story itself, which effectively sabotages outright confession. We learn in the second chapter, for example, that the hero must turn in a manuscript to a certain magazine by 19 August for publication the following month. Although determined to write about his father, he finds the task far more difficult than he ever imagined.

I was on very bad terms with Father. This was a product in part, no doubt, of the complex tangle of emotions that divides any father and son, but I believed that my enmity arose from a fundamental discord

[28] Shiga's brilliance as a depicter of dreams, fantasies, and various psychological and physiological obsessions is well documented in William F. Sibley, The Shiga Hero . It has recently gained recognition among Japanese critics as well. See, for example, the chapter on Shiga ("'Shizen' to 'yume': Shiga Naoya ron") in Aeba Takao, Hihyo to hyogen , 75-112; and Takahashi Hideo, Shiga Naoya .

[29] Nakamura Mitsuo, for instance, argues that the reader of Shiga's works actually learns very little about Shiga. Shiga Naoya ron , 15.

between us. I did not hesitate to speak ill of him to others. I could not bring myself, however, to show my hostility on paper. I did not wish to give public vent to my private grudge. Not only would I then feel sorry for him, I feared that doing so would tarnish my writing.

(SNZ 2:327)

With less than a week left, the hero finally abandons his project and dashes off an "imaginary" story he planned to have published a month later in another magazine.

"I did not wish to give public vent to my private grudge." The narrator's message, repeated like a refrain a number of times in the story, is dear: writing from the "imagination" is easy; telling the "truth" is difficult. Shiga is betting, one feels, that the refrain requires no explanation, that the reader will be satisfied merely with the hero's "candid" admission of his inability to be completely candid about his personal affairs. To display sincerity while suppressing the story: Shiga observes this formula to the end.

In the next chapter, the hero recalls with chagrin the words of his father in reference to himself: "Never again will I shed a tear for that rogue, no matter what happens to him" (SNZ 2:334). He further recalls that "a certain attitude" he had adopted toward his father precipitated this grim remark and that he cannot blame his father for feeling the way he did. The hero gives the reader no further details; yet is it not this very reticence that underwrites Shiga's acclaimed "realism"? By implying that any further revelation will be extremely awkward, the narrator-hero makes the best possible case for his own honesty and for the story's authenticity. If his tale were indeed a mere invention, the reader might well reason, the hero could just as easily flaunt as hide such painful incidents, since, as fictions, they would lose their capacity to incriminate. In a literary culture that defined realism specifically in terms of authorial "presence" rather than in terms of verisimilitude, Shiga actually gained more credibility by making a show of reticence than he ever would have by making a "full" confession, which would in any event always run the risk of criticism for being incomplete.

Having used his "imagination" as a stopgap, the hero once again confronts the task of completing his previously abandoned manuscript in time for the next deadline, only a month later than the first. Once again he rejects the temptation to tell all and merely

comments on the dangers of making revelations not thoroughly pondered beforehand.

When writing about actual events, I was often sorely tempted to put down everything I could think of. All sorts of incidents would come to mind, and I would want to record every last one of them. All were in fact connected in some way with my subject. Yet ... I would inevitably encounter difficulties when trying to link them together and end up ... having to cut out most of what I had wished to write about. This was especially true when it came to writing about Father. I could not begin to chronicle all the bitter arguments we had had.

(SNZ 2:334)

This one brief passage would seem to overturn the thesis, argued by so many commentators, that Shiga's writings exemplify the unity of art and life. Indeed, as we shall later see, the unity of life and art for Shiga actually means the death of art. For what is the narrator saying here if not that the gap between them is in fact unbridgeable? The author-sage is nothing if not a disciplined editor who is alert to the dangers of his profession. Thus, he recognizes the futility of recording all that he has experienced and the necessity of arranging what is left after "cutting out" the rest. Shiga's sincerity under these circumstances can never mean "candor"; at most it implies a recognition of his own vagueness and is necessarily one step removed from the spontaneity we normally associate with the word. The author presents it to us as a locked vessel that contains however no secrets, only the enigma of itself.

At the middle of Wakai comes a well-known section in which the narrator considers his past attempts to write about his father. Its central position is no accident, one feels, for it marks a turning point in the hero's consciousness. It deserves quoting at length.

I don't know how many times in the last half dozen years I planned a story about the breach with Father, but the plans ended in failure every time.... I would always lose heart when I thought of the tragedy in real life that its publication would inevitably cause. I became especially distraught when I imagined the dark shadow it would cast on relations with Grandmother. When I was in Matsue three years ago, I composed a long narrative in hopes of keeping just such a tragedy from befalling me.... My object in writing down every unpleasant incident that could possibly occur between me and Father was to prevent them from actually happening.... In the cli-

mactic scene ... I imagined father and son coming to blows at last, and I pondered the matter of who would kill whom. But then, at the height of these imagined hostilities, an entirely different scene suddenly appeared before my eyes in which the two of them embraced each other and burst into tears....

I elected not to use this conclusion, however. It was not something to be decided on in advance. There was no telling how things would end until my writing; had actually progressed that far. How wonderful it would be, though, I thought, if things would really turn out that way by so writing.

... I commenced writing, but made little headway .... Still I could not help feeling that the denouement I had conjured up, almost unconsciously, would someday actually unfold between Father and myself. I thought it entirely possible for such a scene to occur at a time when relations between us had reached their lowest ebb. I could not be sure, of course. Yet even if there was no telling how things would end until I had reached that point myself, I believed that there dwelt in both Father and me something that could effect just such a complete turnabout. I said as much to my wife and to a friend.

(SNZ 2:366-68)

This incantatory passage foreshadows, of course, the final reconciliation. It also voices the narrator's extremely complex position on the relationship between life and art, which, as posited here, harbors an insoluble dilemma. The hero wishes to prevent unpleasant incidents from happening between him and his father by writing them down beforehand, as if to cast a salutary spell on their relations. This formula proves unworkable, however. When he actually puts pen to paper, he finds that he makes little headway. He rationalizes his decision not to resolve the conflict in advance by arguing that "there was no telling how things would end until my writing had actually progressed that far." But in fact he cannot complete the story that he claims only needs writing down to turn out as planned. Clearly, imagination is not enough. The hero must be guided by experience. He can only hope that the scene he conjured up three years earlier will one day take place; perhaps then he can write about it. Thus the subtle but unmistakable change of focus in the last paragraph. What he at first says about his story—that "there was no telling how things would end until my writing had actually progressed that far “—in fact holds true for his own life: "there was no telling how things would end until I had reached that point myself. “ He can neither write nor act, and he is left with telling others close to him about the imagined denouement, as if to pre-

vent it from dissipating completely. Having failed to turn art into life, he must wait for life to progress to the stage where it can someday serve his art.

Thwarted in his efforts to address the conflict in a fictional retelling, the hero later attempts to address it more directly in a letter to his father. The attempt is, however, doomed from the start, because his feelings are still too unstable to be pinned down by words. The failure to set down his all too volatile emotions on paper proves to be a blessing in disguise, however, since it prompts him to meet with his father face to face and to let emotions take him where they may. He is no longer bent on appealing to reason, as there are, he discovers, no "reasons," no natural explanation, for the rift.

The hero has already attempted to reason with his father some eighteen months or so earlier. Although this attempt presages in some ways the later, successful reconciliation (it features the same preliminaries, such as nervous instructions from his stepmother on how to behave, and the same somber exchange between the two principals), it ends in complete failure. Rationally speaking, he is not at fault and therefore has no reason to feel contrite, and he says so to his father, only to be promptly dismissed from the house. During his 30 August visit, he wisely airs his grievances to his stepmother in a kind of dress rehearsal before confronting his father. She asks him to put reason aside, to forget just this once who is to blame for the past and simply say that he is sorry. The hero resists at first, but then decides, as he did in the case of his aborted manuscript, that it is impossible to plan the outcome in advance. "Emotions have a momentum of their own," he tells his stepmother. "Who knows, I might find myself less hostile than I had anticipated" (SNZ 2:401).

Life has now indeed progressed to the stage where it can serve art: the hero having given up his attachment to reason, the long-awaited reconciliation can take place in all its formality and ceremony. And once it has transpired, his urge to finish the story begun in Matsue withers away. Now he must find something else to write about in time for the mid-September deadline. That "something else" turns out to be this very story, which he begins soon after.

We have noted the criticism Shiga received for avoiding any frank discussion of the breach. Shiga was by no means unaware of

the criticism and rebutted it on several occasions on the same moral grounds he used earlier against Satomi Ton. Defending Wakai in an essay entitled "Kuchibiru ga samui" (1922), he emphasizes that his purpose was to describe the joy of the reconciliation, rather than to dwell on unharmonious familial relations.

Wakai does not focus on a "theme"; it is the product of a more direct, immediate inspiration. That is its strength, and that is what appeals to readers.... The best thing about it is that simply recording the facts, without alteration or embellishment, has made it a work of art .... I noted more than once right in the story that I could not begin to chronicle the cause of the discord .... Do the critics simply not understand how I felt? They ask why I failed to explain the causes. I ask the critics: how was I able to depict the reconciliation so well without even mentioning them?

(SNZ 8:109-10; emphasis added)

Effective the story may be—but not because the author has somehow succeeded in "recording the facts, without alteration or embellishment." Shiga's essay overlooks entirely the narrator's function as editor, self-charged, as is pointed out in the story itself, with the responsibility of "cutting out" the many potentially embarrassing incidents he might have recorded indiscriminately.

In an unpublished manuscript, Shiga further denounces critics who regard his reticence as a defect:

How odd, I thought. They refuse to understand my silence about the causes of the estrangement even though they know that author and hero are one and the same person.

I realized only too well that, in chronicling the reconciliation, I would first have to suffer the pain of recording the estrangement. That was only logical. And yet I could not bring myself to write about its causes. I simply couldn't. So I wrote instead about the violence of the breach. And l think that the story succeeded on those terms.

(SNZ 9:538-39)

Even here, in a manuscript that never saw the light of print, Shiga is curiously reticent about his reticence. He regards the right to silence as natural and conceives of the writer and the reader of a shishosetsu as bound by a special contract. Shiga implies that the reader, recognizing the author-hero equation and dutifully respecting the feelings of those close to the author, should not ask the

latter to probe too deeply into personal matters that would only cause embarrassment to himself and his family.

The author who tells his readers to limit their expectations, however, is guilty of a double standard. He invites the reader into his world while leaving the door only half open, insisting that the reader identify with him uncritically. Of course, this is easier to do when, as is the case in Wakai , he elects not to question the moral position of either side in a dispute. It is no coincidence that the estrangement between father and son, presented without explanation in Wakai , is more akin to a motiveless act, resembling a natural calamity over which the hero has no control and for which he cannot be censured. Any concern about the characters' motivations is misguided, the author seems to reason, since those motivations were never subjected to any moral scrutiny in the first place. The author is interested only in the hero's reaction to events, and he employs the variety of strategies we have noted to lead the reader's interest in the same direction as his own.

Those who do not accept the recorder-witness contract as Shiga defines it will no doubt feel deprived of the human interaction that forms the core of fictional narrative in the west. And yet, even though it lacks any truly dramatic confrontation, Wakai has the power to move its readers, as many critics attest, when it describes an event that can indeed be thought of as a natural calamity: namely, the sudden and fatal illness of the hero's infant daughter, described in the work's fifth and sixth chapters. Masamune Hakucho notes that even Shiga, whose writing, he claims, normally exudes a certain dilettantism, manages to convey extreme tension when he stands at the crossroads of destiny and confronts so grave an event as the death of his child.^[30] We are reminded once again of the importance to literature of the Buddhist articulation of man's subordination to the forces of nature: the four "trials" of birth, aging, sickness, and death (sho-ro-byo-shi ). The question of character or personality or will would seem irrelevant to experience in which

[30] "Shiga Naoya to Kasai Zenzo," 182. Oe Kenzaburo notes the tendency to treat such impersonal crises in the postwar shishosetsu as well. The unfailing formula for moving an audience, he argues, is to present a featureless, nonindividualized narrator who confronts, in the context of his nondescript daily life, an unusual event (like death) that is nevertheless easily identified with by any reader. "Watakushi shosetsu ni tsuite," 196.

personal volition is of no account. This "digression," which one critic likens to the large, tumorlike growth commonly seen on cherry- or pine-tree trunks,^[31] makes a greater impact on the reader than the final reconciliation scene does. Here, because of their utter futility, personalized emotions are out of place, and in their stead is the more generalized pathos of the human condition. The same holds true for the tenth chapter, added when Wakai first appeared in book form, which describes the birth of the hero's second daughter. These segments succeed precisely because they treat events on which the conflict of character has no bearing, as it finally must on a confrontation between father and son. They succeed so well, in fact, that one is tempted to conclude that Wakai treats birth and death more significantly than it does the hero's celebrated rift.^[32]

The segments take on an unexpected importance, moreover, because the author has succumbed to the influence of traditional narrative. What might have been edited out in the interest of emplotment is here left to gather its own momentum, as if in defiance of an overall unity. The narrator chronicles the baby's illness with no hint of the outcome, with the result that the narrative "present" regresses to a period conterminous with the events themselves. The reader is inexorably drawn in. In chapter 6, the narrator informs readers that the child died before he actually describes her death, but the announcement, again in defiance of plot, seems intended expressly to defuse the tension that has built up during the course of the previous and by far the story's longest chapter.

Because the narrative denies readers a panoramic perspective and draws them into the time frame of "recollected" events in the eight middle chapters, one feels as if far more than a week has elapsed between the story time in chapter 2 (16 August) and that in chapter 11 (23 August). There is no particular sense of pastness about events in the presumably "retrospective" chapters or of presentness about the more recent events narrated in chronological order in chapters 1-2 and 11-16. The reader experiences crises as they are remembered, sharing the hero's emotional highs and lows

[31] Honda Shugo, “Wakai ron," 223.

[32] Shiga himself seems to have realized the death episode's special nature. It appears as a separate story (constituting chapters 5 and 6 and the first paragraph of chapter 7 of Wakai ) entitled "Satoko no shi" (The death of Satoko) in a collection of stories and essays by Shirakaba writers, Shirakaba no sono .

with little anticipation of a final denouement. Although the reconciliation remains the high point in Wakai , it is finally but one of several climactic moments that punctuate the text. One event does not have priority over another in the way one might expect in a conventionally emplotted narrative. As one scholar suggests, the structure of Wakai recalls an uta monogatari , with its alternating prose passages providing a background for poems that vary the emotional intensity without necessarily leading the narrative anywhere.^[33]

We noted earlier in our discussion that Shiga purposefully casts Wakai in such a way as to defy an in-depth analysis of the breach. From the very beginning, the hero is at pains to demonstrate that no appeal to reason will resolve it, since it is itself rooted in wildly contradictory emotions that the hero is at a loss to grasp or describe—thus, the difficulties he encounters composing his long story and later writing to his father.

Once we understand this, queries about the father-son conflict as depicted in Wakai lose their relevance. It is precisely because the rift has no clearly definable causes that no premeditated action can bring about a reconciliation. Narrative fiction's inexorable logic of cause and effect is replaced in Wakai by juxtapositions of the rage and sympathy that the hero feels toward his father, the one seemingly inciting the other, throughout the text. That rift and reconciliation are rooted in the same tumultuous cluster of emotions, requiring no change of heart and therefore no atonement, is apparent from the hero's awareness of his own conciliatory feelings in the midst of his deepest anger. In the text's opening pages, before his first furtive visit to the Tokyo house on 31 July, the hero visits his daughter's grave in the family plot in nearby Aoyama. There, in the story's most intimate and startling scene, he "converses" with the spirit of his deceased grandfather, asking him whether he should visit the house to see his ailing grandmother. The encouraging answer that wells up in his heart surprises the hero both for its spontaneity and for its complete lack of reproach toward a man for whom the hero thought he felt only hatred. The confusion of emotions is also apparent from the altogether gruff manner in which the hero "apologizes" to his father in chapter 13. In his excitement he speaks as if out of anger, despite the promise to his stepmother

[33] Sudo Matsuo, Shiga Naoya no bungaku , esp. 166-67.

to behave civilly. Yet the tone is entirely natural, he insists. "Looking back on it, I believe that it was the only appropriate tone possible, given our relationship" (SNZ 2:403).

Shiga's seeming unwillingness to probe the conflict in depth paradoxically forced him to write what was surely a very different story than he had planned when first taking up his pen in early September, for it in fact focuses far more on the breach than on the reconciliation. In doing so, he has produced a form of writing similar to what we know in the west as a "self-begetting novel,"^[34] in which the writer's preoccupation with creating a story becomes itself the "story" one reads. Whether or not we wish to think of Wakai as a novel, there is no question of its affinity with a species of twentieth-century western fiction that treats its own production. The word "affinity" is used advisedly here, for the dissimilarities are perhaps more readily apparent than the similarities. (One has only to think of the divergent notions of self, time, space, and metaphysics in Wakai and., say, Nausea , to realize the vastly different fictive worlds that Junkichi and Roquentin inhabit.) Yet the bond unmistakably exists and is worthy of attention, as it will enable us to assign new meaning to the word "unique," which is so often attached to shishosetsu . The author struggling to write and thematizing his very struggle: a rather commonplace subject in recent decades. In 1917, however, it was not, in Japan or the west. Shiga experimented gingerly with the subject; it would be left to Kasai Zenzo to bring it to fruition.

Let us reconsider Wakai , then, with this "affinity" in mind. We recall that the work comprises three time frames. It is the third time frame, mentioned ever so casually a few lines from the end, that gives us pause. Why must the hero inform his readers that he decided to record the reconciliation and include the writing of it as part of the narrative? It is because, as he suggests in the long reflective passage in chapter 7 quoted above, his relationship with his father is inseparable from the writing about it.^[35] We have seen

[34] I borrow this felicitous label from Stephen G. Kellman's book of the same name, which traces the form from Proust to Beckett.

[35] My argument here is indebted to a suggestive commentary by Hiraoka Tokuyoshi. See his Meiro no shosetsu ron , esp. 246-53. Hiraoka compares the circular structure of Wakai to that of works by Proust, Sartre, and Butor—and to Shi no shima (1966-71), by Fukunaga Takehiko. Two other critics briefly note the thematic importance in Wakai of the writer trying to write. Ikeuchi Teruo ("Wakai ron") suggests that Wakai is the fulfillment of Natsume Soseki's wish (as recorded by Shiga) that Shiga, having failed to compose a work due for serialization in the Asahi , at least write about his inability to write. See also the chapter on Shiga in Saeki Shoichi, Nihon no "watakushi" o motomete , esp. 199.

that he cannot write at all about the rift without having achieved a reconciliation, yet he cannot achieve that reconciliation without having attempted to write about the rift. This dilemma of using art to solve the difficulties of life while at the same time waiting for life's experience to motivate his art can only be resolved by another paradox. The hero discovers, on the eve of reconciliation, that he can will neither the discord nor its resolution. He can only prepare himself mentally to accommodate both. The surprise ending to the rough draft described in chapter 7 materializes almost literally in chapter 13, not because he so designs it but because he finds himself at the mercy of both art and life. He cannot author his story according to a particular plan any more than he can live his life according to one. Indeed, success comes only when he forfeits the role of author and lets the writing—and events—take their own course. Writing, seemingly powerless to address the rift, becomes itself in due time the source of harmony. Thus, Wakai itself becomes as much the story of writing as it is the story of reconciliation.

Self, Nature, Art, and Beyond

With Wakai we realize that Shiga, for reasons of discretion and simply of temperament, had little interest in dramatic character interaction. And yet it is no less successful a text for that fact. Excepting such blatant attempts at fictionalization as Aru otoko, sono ane no shi , which allow him some freedom in analyzing human relations (although at the cost of forfeiting his hallmark of "sincerity"), Shiga typically dispenses with character analysis in favor of depopulating his stories, entirely. In fact, he seems to feel least constrained, psychologically and artistically, in settings inhabited only by himself, creatures of nature, and characters who appear, if at all, merely as part of the landscape. Only in such settings, virtually devoid of human society, does he seem truly at liberty to depict personal experience without compunction.

Such a strategy may be anathema to narrative fiction; yet it re-suited in an important part of the Shiga oeuvre: the shinkyo shosetsu , those (usually) brief sketches in which the author-sage explores his inner landscape in a setting virtually stripped of people and props. No celebration of self emerges from this most introspective of shishosetsu forms, however. Isolated from society, the hero accommodates himself to forces in nature that reduce to insignificance the autonomous, individuated ego. It is ironic yet revealing of the so-called "I-novel" that its acknowledged master should have arrived at such an enigmatic view of self.

"Horibata no sumai" (1925) is typical of the shinkyo shosetsu in that the hero appears on a nearly empty stage, engaging in only one very brief exchange with another character. The story describes an alley cat's raid on a neighbor's chicken coop and the cat's eventual capture and extermination. The narrator-hero sets the stage for solitary meditation in the very first sentence: "I lived alone one summer in Matsue" (SNZ 3:191). Exhausted by life in the city and by the constant dealings with people there, the hero resolves to lead an existence, at its most basic level, in the small provincial town of Matsue. Here his companions are "the insects and birds, the fish and the water, the grass and the sky—and, finally, other human beings" (SNZ 3:191). Over and above its depiction of a man who shuns active engagement with his surroundings, "Horibata no sumai" can be read as a metaphor for the Shiga hero's reluctance to become a dramatic character in his writing. The author-sage's brief encounter with the neighbor who owns the chicken coop is purely explanatory in function, a mere formal exchange. The chickens and their plight are at issue here, not the two people who converse.

An even purer example of the hero depicted in contemplative isolation is "Kinosaki nite" (At Kinosaki, 1917), which is in its own way a masterpiece. The story chronicles the author's three-week sojourn at a well-known spa on the Japan Sea coast after being hit by a train in Tokyo. During the course of his convalescence, the narrator-hero witnesses all varieties of death—natural, murderous, accidental—that affect the small creatures he happens to see: a bee outside his inn window, a rat in a stream, a water lizard sunning itself on a rock. He communes solely with the natural world, and all other human beings recede into the background.

Identifying to an extraordinary degree with the ego-denying forces of nature, he experiences something akin to total self-dissolution—not in any negative or nihilistic sense but in a very positive one, as several critics have noted, in which life is no longer opposed to death.^[36]

Reflecting on his accident while convalescing at Kinosaki, the hero faces an insoluble dilemma: how to cope with his mortality? If the occasion for a life-and-death struggle arises, should he yield to his new-found desire for self-extinction that results from a thoroughgoing identification with nature, or should he follow his animal instinct for self-preservation? The hero faces a dilemma of another sort as well: how to continue writing when recent experience has so wrenched him that he can no longer identify with his heroes' frames of mind? Thus he ponders, in addition to the future of his existence, the future of his attempts at narrative. Having written "Han no hanzai" (Han's crime, 1913), the story of a Chinese juggler's impulsive wife-slaying narrated from the juggler's point of view, he is now seized with the desire to write of the wife, dead and quiet in her grave, from the wife's point of view. "I would call the story 'The Murdered Wife of Han.' I never did write it, but the urge was there. I was dismayed to find, moreover, that my feelings had strayed very far from those of the hero of a long narrative I was writing" (SNZ 2:178).

The long narrative, of course, is Tokito Kensaku , the precursor of An'ya koro that Shiga finally abandoned, having found himself no longer in tune with his hero. It comes as no surprise, then, when we learn that Shiga's difficulty writing Tokito Kensaku in fact resulted in the first of several fallow periods, which finally ended three years later with the publication of this very story. Shiga at last regains momentum as a writer by avoiding the familial conflicts that had plagued him and by depicting himself in "Kinosaki nite" as a totally isolated being. When all conflict is erased, the hero is at liberty to engage in the pensive musings that are the shinkyo shosetsu's core. As in "Horibata no sumai," the hero sets the stage for solitary meditation in the very first sentence: "I ... traveled alone to Kinosaki Hot Spring to convalesce" (SNZ 2:175). He is absorbed in himself and his immediate surroundings, his sensibility the mea-

[36] See, for example, Sudo Matsuo, "Shiga bungaku no shizen, seimeiryoku," 99.

sure of all things. Only on such a deserted stage, free from external challenges, does the Shiga hero fulfill most completely the role of sage. In a story without dialogue, the hero is already halfway to the world of eternal silence.

"Kinosaki nite" has little of the self-righteous tone that often mars Shiga's first-person narratives, however. One does not get the feeling that the hero has tried to manipulate his material simply to bolster his image as a moral arbiter; on the contrary, he gains credibility by refusing to rationalize his situation. Having quelled the desire to demonstrate his moral authority, he devotes himself to a much profounder exploration of experience, and in doing so emerges as a far more sympathetic character. The author-sage, now a truly noble figure, attains this heightened consciousness with surprising ease in "Kinosaki nite." He attains it with difficulty, but with even greater effect, in Shiga's only extended narrative, An'ya koro .

The Shishosetsu as Novel

An'ya koro (A dark night's passing, 1921-37), whose hero Tokito Kensaku discovers that he is the product of his mother's and the victim of his wife's sexual indiscretion, has been variously described as a brilliant romance, as a youth's long and arduous but ultimately successful search for a mate, as one man's quest for happiness in the face of bitter experience and the humanization he undergoes in the process, and as the affirmation of a personal reality over the reality of the family or larger social order.^[37] These attempts to describe, as we might a conventional novel, what the text is "about" are misleading, however, for they imply the existence of a well-conceived plot to which all characters and events are related, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Both the author's inexperience at writing sustained narrative and the work's composition over a period of many years militate against the narrative consistency we expect in a novel, but there are other reasons as well. This "fictional" shishosetsu , as critics are wont to

[37] The characterizations are made, respectively, by Kobayashi Hideo, "Shiga Naoya ron," in Shintei Kobayashi Hideo zenshu 4: 114; Miyoshi Yukio, "Kako no 'watakushi,'" 147; Nakamura Mitsuo, Shiga Naoya ron , 116; and Edwin McClellan, in the preface to his translation of Shiga Naoya, A Dark Night's Passing , 10.

call it ("fictional" because a few events and characters have no counterparts in the author's own life, and shishosetsu because of the nonetheless complete identity of hero and author), is at bottom more shishosetsu than fiction in the novelistic sense, as we shall see below.

An'ya koro grew out of the author's speculation, during a self-imposed exile in western Japan in 1913, that he had been sired by his grandfather and not by his father, toward whom he had long felt great animosity (SNZ 8:18). But rather than universalize the hero's predicament through an exploration of the complex ramifications of illegitimacy and infidelity, Shiga insists on turning both text and hero in on themselves. The reader is lead through a series of claustrophobic emotional soundings by a narrator whose range of awareness is virtually coincident with his hero's; at the conclusion he still possesses no insights into the "themes" that superficially inform the text.

It is no wonder, then, that such a starkly self-centered work should have its detractors. Dazai Osamu, himself an egoist of no small proportions, is positively venomous in "Nyoze gamon":

A Dark Night's Passing : what an overblown title this book has! Shiga often accuses other writers of hamming it up, but he should know that he is as guilty as the next fellow. He really plays to the crowd here. This is a fine example of "stacking the cards" in your favor. Where is the Dark Night, anyway, in this insufferable song to the author's ego? What is there to commend in a style so awash in self-conceit? The hero catches a cold; the hero suffers an ear infection—is this the Dark Night? The book left me absolutely stupefied. A piece of juvenile literature this is, fit only for a composition class!^[38]

Dazai's description is not inaccurate. An'ya koro is indeed a narcissistic exercise brimming with elitism and adolescent conceit, as Nakamura Mitsuo has also argued in his important critical study of Shiga.^[39] And yet, for all its eccentricities, it remains a strangely powerful work, containing in its pages some of the most extraordinary and moving passages in all of literature. It is also, ironically, the greatest work of an author who will be remembered primarily

[38] Dazai Osamu zenshu 10:321.

[39] Shiga Naoya ron , esp. 148-52. Nakamura also writes: "[Shiga's] literature is essentially a young man's literature. It is founded on the dreams and fastidiousness and carnal melancholy of youth" (ibid., 184).

as a short-story writer. Miyoshi Yukio, whose critique of An'ya koro is much more thoroughgoing than Dazai's casual remarks, nevertheless manages to touch on what makes it a classic: “An'ya koro is a truly remarkable shishosetsu ... in which its hero's originality comes alive as its fictionality withers away. This is not an irony but a measure of its success. As a novel, it is riddled with contradictions, and yet by that very failure it has achieved its just reputation as a landmark text in modern Japanese literature."^[40]

Miyoshi, then, postulates an inversely proportional relationship, which Dazai understandably overlooks, between the text's fictionality and the vividness of the hero's presence. Dazai accuses Shiga of flagrant exhibitionism, but he never questions the propriety of Shiga's retreat from fictionality, as he is no less eager to produce stories that aim at collapsing the distinctions between author, narrator, and hero. Indeed, Dazai's remarks sound like the petulant grumblings of a writer unable to market his sincerity as successfully as Shiga did. Dazai's jealous wrath would have been mollified, one feels, not by the insertion of a greater distance between author and hero in An'ya koro but rather by a less blatant display of smug self-confidence, a quality with which Shiga was prodigiously, and Dazai poorly, endowed. The question of the hero's autonomy as a fictional character is never raised.

Precisely that question, on the other hand, informs Miyoshi's essay, which lengthily catalogs the contradictions making An'ya koro a failure as a novel. The catalog is worth reviewing, along with other commentaries; for the exact nature of the "failure" will help us determine the ways in which the modern Japanese shosetsu differs from what we would unhesitatingly label a novel, a comparison Miyoshi suggests but does not articulate in any detail.

An'ya koro is characterized by an identification between author and hero that is virtually total. It is not so much the text's personalism that undermines its fictionality, however, as its peculiar narrative stance. Shiga's admission that he modeled his hero after himself

[40] "Kako no 'watakushi,'" 154. One indication of An'ya koro's enormous reputation is a poll appearing in Bungei 9 (June 1952): 16-69. Of twenty-four writers and critics asked to name the five best and/or most important works in Japanese fiction written since the turn of the century, fourteen included it in their lists. Toson's Yoake mae (chosen by six writers), Tanizaki's Sasameyuki (four), and Soseki's Meian (three) finished a distant second, third, and fourth.

is couched in terms any novelist might use: "The hero Kensaku is myself. [An'ya koro ] depicts him doing what I would do, or what I would want to do, or what I have actually done, under the circumstances" (SNZ 8:20). But few can be as guilty of such complete confusion between author and hero as Shiga is in part 3, chapter 5, which describes the hero's anxiety about how the circumstances of his birth might affect the courtship of his future bride:

It occurred to Kensaku that one way of telling the other party about himself was to write a long autobiographical story. But the project came to a stop after he had published the prologue entitled "The Hero's Reminiscences." He decided not to show them even this short piece, so afraid was he of seeming to be inviting their sentimental pity.

(SNZ 5:312)^[41]

This curious passage makes little sense at first reading. We learn nothing more here about this "long autobiographical story" than the title of its prologue. Its contents are not revealed. We do not find out when or where the prologue was published or the title of the work as a whole or anything else to suggest that Kensaku had actually written a story of this description. There is in fact no other textual information to verify the existence of such a story—none, that is, save the An'ya koro text itself. Nakano Shigeharu, in an extended critique of An'ya koro , puts it this way:

People will puzzle over this passage—and then again, maybe they will not.... They apparently read the phrase "he had published the prologue entitled 'The Hero's Reminiscences'" and link it to An'ya koro itself without giving the matter another thought. An'ya koro , after all, has a "prologue entitled 'The Hero's Reminiscences.'" The prologue to the "long autobiographical story," then, is the prologue to An'ya koro .^[42]

[41] Shiga Naoya, A Dark Night's Passing , 222. McClellan's translation, on which I have relied exclusively for my citations from An'ya koro , actually reads: "It occurred to Kensaku that one way of telling the other party about himself was to write an autobiographical story. But the project came to a stop after he had written the preface entitled 'The Hero's Reminiscences'" (emphases added). However, the original clearly indicates that the story in question was a full-length narrative (chohen shosetsu ) and that the prologue was not only written but saw the light of print (kakagerareta ). These are important distinctions in view of the following argument. Further, McClellan's choice of the word "preface" in the above passage and "Prologue" for An'ya koro's opening section appears to be an attempt to transform this self-reflexive passage into something more readily assimilable as fiction to a western audience.

[42] “An'ya koro zodan" (1944), 548.

In other words, the prologue authored by Shiga Naoya meets all the specifications for the one allegedly authored by Tokito Kensaku, with the result that the reader is encouraged to view the prologue's "I" as synonymous with both the narrated "he" and the narrating "I" of the main text. As Nakano notes, the reader was in effect reading An'ya koro as a text by Shiga and by its hero, Tokito Kensaku.

This identification of author with hero is of a very different order than of, say, Flaubert with his celebrated heroine ("Madame Bo-vary—c'est moi"). Nakano emphasizes that Shiga did not become Kensaku—that is, make an emotional investment in a character he could identify with; rather, he made Kensaku over into himself , mindless of the implications for the text as an autonomous narrative. "It is understandable that some critics would mistake the hero for his author in this particular text," Nakano writes. "The text itself is written and structured so as to create just such confusion."^[43]

Shiga alerts the reader to the author-hero equation at the very beginning. The first chapter opens with Kensaku's reflections on a story just published by a cohort named Sakaguchi that describes a man's affair with his housemaid, which Kensaku believes to be based on Sakaguchi's own experience. Kensaku, exercising the Shiga hero's now-familiar prerogative as moral arbiter, finds the author Sakaguchi and his hero equally guilty of indiscretion: "[Kensaku] could have forgiven the facts if he had been allowed to feel some sympathy for the protagonist; but the flippancy, the superciliousness of the protagonist (and of Sakaguchi ) left no room for such sympathy" (SNZ 5:20; trans., 26; emphasis added).

Kensaku's analysis of Sakaguchi's story is a primer for the reading of any shishosetsu (including, of course, An'ya koro ), for it at once defines and problematizes the relationship of author to hero. The author is completely accessible through the text, we are made to understand. Once this convention is accepted, hero and author—the former being the equivalent and not simply a creation of the latter—become interchangeable; thus, Kensaku cannot talk about Sakaguchi's protagonist without talking about Sakaguchi himself, and vice versa. Because Kensaku's equation applies not only to his adversary in An'ya koro but also to the author himself, Shiga can

[43] Ibid., 551.

think of a prologue to a text he wrote himself as part of the text, a creation of its hero.

Just as conspicuous as the symbiosis of author and hero in An'ya koro is the tenuousness of plot. This derives, no doubt, from the telosless epistemology in the Japanese literary and intellectual tradition, which regarded life as an experience without goal or denouement. But another factor, namely, the circumstances of its composition, is also at work. Twenty-five of the twenty-six installments of An'ya koro were published over the seven-year period from 1921 to 1928, with the final installment (part 4, chapters 16-20) appearing nine years later. Although an extended composition time need not change the basic plan of a fictional narrative—one thinks, for example, of À la recherche or Finnegans Wake —it has an unquestionable impact on a shishosetsu , as we noted in the case of Shimazaki Toson's Shinsei in Chapter 5. Embedded in fictional time, a novel easily takes on the quality of a seamless narrative regardless of interruptions in the actual composition. We read it as a unified, monolithic artifact, playing the fictional time scheme against the conventional, temporal organization of the referential world we call chronological time. We read a shishosetsu , however, in a quite different way, for it is very much a product of the writing time—that is, the period or process of textual production and its temporal relationship to the events recorded . Any shishosetsu , but in particular one written over a long period, is shaped by the events it describes as much as it gives shape to them. This can be true even of shorter works when events are coincident with the time of writing, as we observed in the case of the "Yamashina" cycle. The composition process's potential for becoming a source of narrative disruption, along with the system of solicitations and deadlines that pressure many writers to rely on (usually) recent experience for textual production, is a principal reason for the form's brevity. In the face of narrative disintegration, short-windedness becomes a mechanism of textual self-defense.

When An'ya koro first appeared in the pages of Kaizo, readers were conditioned to regard each installment by this writer, famed for his short stories, as a separate unit. They were not able to examine the installments together as a whole until 1937, sixteen years after the initial publication. Nakano Shigeharu recalls that the individual installments gave the impression of finished stories in the

magazine, but they did not give one of completion when they appeared together between the covers of a book.^[44] Nakamura Mitsuo likens An'ya koro to a loose set of exquisitely formed pearls that were never strung together into a necklace.^[45] Shiga himself had originally thought of writing a series of short stories and later arranging them into a longer narrative. Such was the rationale, he later recalls, behind publishing the prologue and the final chapter of part 2 as separate pieces (SNZ 8:19). The discontinuities and inconsistencies between episodes and especially between the first and second halves^[46] are legion. The animosity of the hero toward his father and the mystery of his birth, for example, which figure so prominently in the first half, fade into insignificance in the second. Although there are no appreciable gaps in fictional time, the numerous interruptions in publication, especially of the second half, have attenuated the work's thematic and psychological unity, as Miyoshi, Nakano, and a host of other critics have observed.^[47]

Perhaps the main reason for this discontinuity is the existence of the unfinished manuscript Tokito Kensaku , which we know from Shiga's own words provided the author with a working draft of An'ya koro's first half (SNZ 8:19). Shiga's initial difficulties with Tokito Kensaku were rooted in his reluctance, which we noted in our discussion of Wakai , to express fully the ill feelings he harbored against his father, even though those feelings had played a central role in his writing career. His dilemma as an author could be re-

[44] Ibid., 539. The first half of An'ya koro appeared in hardcover as early as 1922 and is generally more familiar to readers than the second half.

[45] Shiga Naoya ton, 89. An'ya koro might also be compared to an emakimono , or picture scroll, in which there is not one but several points of interest that appear and then disappear from view as the scroll is unrolled and rerolled. Each scene and each small, faceless figure in the landscape is important in establishing the mood of the whole without necessarily being related dynamically to other scenes and figures. Linearity in such a scroll, and in texts like An'ya koro , is necessitated by the physical arrangement of scenes/words on the paper/page, but it is not structurally supported by a series of causal relationships.

[46] An'ya koro is presently divided into four parts, but it was originally divided into two halves (parts 1 and 2, and parts 3 and 4). Most critical discussions treat An'ya koro as a two-part text.

[47] See Miyoshi Yukio, "Kako no 'watakushi,'" esp. 98-105; Nakano Shigeharu, “An'ya koro zodan," 550 and passim; and Hirano Ken, “An'ya koro ron," a chapter in Hirano Ken zenshu , vol. 4, Bungaku: Showa junen zengo , 236-64, esp. 254-57. See also Akiyama Shun, "Shiga Naoya no 'watakushi' ni tsuite." Akiyama argues that the first half, a tale of "frustrated existence," and the second half, a tale of "fulfillment," are practically unlinkable and that the many interruptions in writing the second half reveal that Shiga himself was aware of the difficulties in linking them.

solved in only one of three ways: he could throw caution to the winds and write about the matter that concerned him most, regardless of the repercussions in private life; he could ignore it and write about something else; or he could stop writing altogether until the matter had resolved itself in such a way that he could resume his career without compunction.

Shiga chose the last, and the result was a silence spanning the years 1914-17. Interruptions in Shiga's writing career sometimes affected the content and even the very existence of a story, as in the case of "Kinosaki nite." Had Shiga successfully completed Tokito Kensaku , he might very well have inserted the incidents "about the bee's death and about the rat that had its neck run through with a bamboo skewer and was then thrown into the stream" that he had witnessed at a Japan Sea spa into the section of this story set on the Inland Sea, as his diary tells us he once planned (SNZ 10: 721). It was his failure to do so (despite the appeals of Natsume Soseki, on whose literary page in the Asahi the story was to have been serialized after Kokoro in 1914) that made it possible for Shiga's famous meditation on death to take form as a separate story, ending the three-year hiatus. The appearance of the bee, the rat, and the water lizard episodes in a context other than the one Shiga had originally intended signaled the ultimate dismantling of Tokito Kensaku . Then, less than half a year later, came the celebrated reconciliation. The "fundamental discord" between father and son having been resolved in private life, Shiga no longer felt the need to deal with it in his professional life. The father-son relationship as a universal question had never interested him; it was enough that his own predicament be resolved. And once he had written what was to be his most thorough account of the relationship with his father in Aru otoko, sono ane no shi (1920), which is itself a product of several earlier manuscripts that were probably related to Tokito Kensaku , he "completely lost interest," as he put it, "in themes that had concerned me up to then" (SNZ 8:18).^[48]

It is thus surely no coincidence that the rift between father and son even in An'ya koro's first half is depicted only in a most understated way. The real-life clash of wills is transformed into a kind of

[48] An'ya koro manuscripts nos. 2, 14, 33 (6:28-33, 248-50, 359) all contain material used in Aru otoko . See "Koki," in SNZ 6:373, 404, 425.

natural catastrophe beyond the control of either party: the hero is the illegitimate child of his supposed grandfather. This tragedy, seemingly ordained by fate, effectively neutralizes the hostility of both parties by removing all the blame. The fiction of the hero's birth, as presented in An'ya koro , serves to absolve both father and son of any responsibility for their mutual hatred. And since even these remnants of violent emotion, along with the general atmosphere of discord, are a legacy of the prereconciliation Tokito Kensaku manuscript, they virtually disappear in the second hall which has no antecedent text and was of course begun after the reconciliation.^[49]

The hero's attitude toward his father is only one of several problems of discontinuity for which the text seemingly offers no adequate solutions. It is odd, for example, that Shiga would let an earache (the same one that Dazai Osamu satirizes with such venom) determine his hero's movement from Onomichi to Tokyo and even odder that he should dwell at such length on the operation to clear the ear of fluid, until one realizes that Shiga himself suffered an earache while in Onomichi, which forced his return to Tokyo for treatment. The makings of dramatic narrative are here: Kensaku is on the verge of ending his solitary life at Onomichi and proposing to Oei, his maid and grandfather's former mistress. But here, too, because Shiga did not become Kensaku but instead made Kensaku over into himself he restricts Kensaku's perimeter of actions. And so Kensaku, rather than take destiny into his own hands once he has resolved to propose to Oei, merely tells himself lamely that "even if his ear had not given him trouble, he would probably have not stayed in Onomichi much longer" (SNZ 5:217; trans., 158).

Although it is of course hardly unusual for a writer to incorporate his personal life into, or even to make it the exclusive subject of, his work, few writers have done it so seemingly without regard for an overall narrative plan. Shiga appears reluctant to edit out any impressionable personal experience coincident with the hero's actions, regardless of its relevance to the text as a whole. Thus the inclusion of many extraneous scenes throughout An'ya koro , such as the extended description of Kensaku's train journey from Onomichi back to Tokyo in part 2, his visit to a Kyoto museum in

[49] Miyoshi Yukio, "Kako no 'watakushi,'" 80-81. Nakamura Mitsuo makes similar observations in his chapter on An'ya koro in Shiga Naoya ron .

part 3 and to a temple on the way to Mount Daisen in part 4, and the rather tedious episode in part 1 of Kensaku's vain attempt to nab his sister's would-be suitor. They are examples of the "finished stories," as Nakano calls them, which end up detracting from the completed text. As with the earache episode, the best explanation for their presence in the text is their chance occurrence in the author's life, as we know through Shiga's diary.^[50]

Shiga attaches little importance to Kensaku's supporting cast. Characters like Oei, Kensaku's brother Nobuyuki, and Kensaku's grandfather lack the substance to interact with the hero in any significant way. True, these characters have no real-life antecedents: Oei and Nobuyuki are entirely imaginary figures and Shiga was at pains to create a character who bore no resemblance to his real grandfather, for whom he felt great respect (SNZ 8:19). But Shiga also fails to bring to life even characters that are clearly modeled on his own acquaintances. They flit across the pages like clouds scudding across the sky. The use of initials for several characters, moreover, seems to confirm Shiga's lack of deep interest in anyone but his hero.

Even Naoko, the most important person in Kensaku's life, is overshadowed by the introspective hero until the curious passage at the end, which views Kensaku from her point of view (see below). The nature of the hero's relationship with Naoko is presaged in Kensaku's first glimpses of his future bride. Unseen by her, Kensaku spies Naoko working gaily in a house facing the street in Kyoto where he takes his morning walks. It is not until much later, when he has already asked his friend Ishimoto to act as go-between and proposed marriage that he exchanges his first words with her. He sees Naoko's seduction by her cousin not as a marital problem that concerns them both but as a fiddle he poses to himself in isolation. It is the "emotional reverberations caused by Naoko's indiscretion," as Miyoshi Yukio puts it, rather than the affair itself, that are at issue for Kensaku.^[51] Kensaku's reflections, as transmitted by a narrator whose sensibility overlaps his hero's, extend no further than his own mental state. Nowhere is this fact demonstrated more

[50] Endo Tasuku makes note of this in his annotations of the An'ya koro text. See Shindo Junko and Endo Tasuku, eds., Shiga Naoya shu , 232 n. 8.

[51] "Kako no 'watakushi,'" 123.

forcefully than in a scene in part 4, chapter so, following the episode in which Kensaku, in a "reflex action," pushes his wife Naoko off a train moving slowly away from the station as she tries to step aboard. Later, husband and wife sit alone, face to face. Never before in the work do we encounter such an opportunity for dramatic revelation of character. But when Naoko pressures Kensaku to explain his irrational act, he replies tersely:

What you have to understand is that, for me, everything is my problem, mine alone, to solve.... It's an egotistic way of looking at things, but given my nature, it may also be the most practical for me. You don't have a place in it, I know.

(SNZ 5: 514; trans., 356)

Here is perhaps the most startling in a text filled with startling illustrations of a character so completely absorbed in his own sensibility that he interacts only very awkwardly with his fellow human beings. No one, not even his wife, has a "place" in his way of looking at things.

Despite such attenuated plotting and characterization, we must not overlook the fact that An'ya koro does possess a certain continuity, as evidenced in the prologue that serves as an overture for the entire narrative and in the numerous foreshadowings of later events. The depiction of Oei in the prologue as a sensual being adumbrates Kensaku's later sexual attraction to her. The mysterious rejection by a prospective bride's family of Kensaku's marriage proposal hints at a blot in the hero's past. The soaring airplane, the object of admiration at the beginning, becomes a symbol of disillusionment at the end of An'ya koro . Kensaku's interest early on in the theatrical confessions of "Omasa the Viper" and in the geisha Eihana's stubborn silence is later linked to his wife's confessions of adultery. The nameless mountain in Hoki casually mentioned during Kensaku's trip to Shikoku in part 2 turns out to be Daisen, on whose slopes he attains a kind of spiritual release in part 4. Ishimoto, a friend of Kensaku's briefly introduced in part 1, chapter 3, reappears in part 3, chapter 5, as the go-between who arranges Kensaku's marriage with Naoko. The seeds of Naoko's adultery—a lewd game called "turtle-snapping turtle" she played with her cousin Kaname in her youth—are metaphorically planted in the very beginning of Kensaku's marriage discussions (part 3, chapter

5), which are held at a restaurant that specializes in, of all things, snapping turtle cuisine. But surely the most impressive evidence of topical continuity are the striking rites of passage in part 2, chapter 1, and part 4, chapter 19. Aboard a steamer bound for Onomichi—and on the slopes of Mount Daisen years later, in the hero's and in the author's life—Kensaku feels himself being absorbed into nature. The imagery in the two scenes, which is unmistakably parallel yet effectively contrasted, signals a crucial transformation in the hero's consciousness. Both episode_s commence with the hero's physical debilitation: a spell of seasickness on board ship and a much more serious bout of food poisoning just before the mountain climb. Kensaku compares the steamer to "an enormous, silent monster" and the mountain to "the back of some huge beast" (SNZ 5:154, 579; trans., 114, 401). Most significantly, he yields completely to nature's embrace on the mountain slope, whereas before, aboard the steamer, he resisted the feelings of being "swallowed up by the great darkness surrounding him" (SNZ 5:154; trans., 115). These and other foreshadowings suggest an overall narrative plan, however loose, that was carried out in spite of the sixteen years it took to complete the text and serves to bind the seemingly "unlinkable" two halves.^[52]

Shiga's own insistence in "Zoku sosaku yodan" (SNZ 8:22) that he did not deviate greatly from his initial conception is borne out by an outline (included in the collection of draft manuscripts and documents relating to An'ya koro in SNZ , vol. 6) that introduces many episodes that figure prominently in the text: the hero's wrestling match with his "father," his infatuation with his "grandfather's" mistress, his marriage, his journey to Onomichi and efforts to write, his discovery of the secret of his origins, the direction of his attention away from his father to his wife and children, his wife's adultery, his trip to Mount Daisen, his fight for his life at the story's end (SNZ 6:558-59). True, the final product diverges in

[52] The characterization is Akiyama Shun's. See n. 47. Hiraoka Tokuyoshi is one of the few commentators who stresses the works continuity. See “An'ya koro no sakusha," in Shiga Naoya zenshu geppo , no. 12:5-6. He cautions elsewhere, however, that the several "epiphanies" (he borrows the term employed by Saeki [Nihon no "watakushi" o motomete , 209-16] to describe a Joyce-like aspect of Shiga's fiction) dotting the text with memorable instants lack the Joycean resonances that light up an entire text. Bungaku no doki , 59. Takahashi Hideo also contests the dualistic interpretations of the two halves in his Shiga Naoya .

places from the outline. Kensaku marries a woman from a well-to-do provincial family rather than one from a boardinghouse family. He learns the truth about his birth from his brother Nobuyuki rather than his grandfather's former mistress. His last illness is the result of food poisoning rather than an accidental fall. And An'ya koro ends with his life hanging in the balance rather than with his eventual recovery. Several key motifs are missing as well, as Kono Toshiro, editor of the draft manuscripts, notes. There is no mention of the hero's cohort in dissipation, Sakaguchi, or of the physical and spiritual exhaustion that accompanies his life of debauchery, although both play important roles in the text's first half.^[53] Yet it is precisely those unexpected gaps that make this outline so remarkable. Kono Toshiro dates it sometime between late 1918 and early 1920, or roughly contemporary with the two independently published stories that were later incorporated into An'ya koro : "Aware na otoko" (A man to be pitied, April 1919) and "Kensaku no tsuioku" (Kensaku's reminiscences, January 1920).^[54] This means that even though the vast majority of the unpublished material treats incidents (particularly Kensaku's life of dissipation and his sojourn in Onomichi) that appear in the first half of An'ya koro and only the last three unpublished pieces (nos. 34-36) treat incidents appearing in the second half, Shiga clearly knew the direction his story would take long before he published its first installment.

Reading the draft manuscripts as a whole, however, one is left with an overriding impression of the author's uncertainty about the text's composition. Several manuscripts are little more than false starts. It is not simply a problem of the author's treating a great many sporadic (and at the manuscript stage, seemingly unrelated) incidents. He is clearly unsure of how to present his story. Interspersed with manuscripts written in third-person narration are those with a first-person narrator-hero (watakushi ), as well as a first-person narrator (jibun ) who chronicles the story of an acquaintance identified either by name or simply as "he" (kare ). The problem of continuity or narrative unity would seem, then, to revolve less around thematic content, as so many critics have suggested, than

[53] "Koki," in SNZ 6:426.

[54] Ibid. Kuribayashi Hideo dates the outline even earlier, from 1917 or 1918. See “An'ya koro soko no kento," 135

around the mode of presentation. And it is surely this mode, far more than any mere similarities between author and hero, that invites people to read the text as a shishosetsu despite its several clearly identifiable "fictions."

We have already touched on one crucial problem in presentation that bears further examination: the episode in part 3, chapter 5, describing Kensaku's publication of a first-person prologue ("Shujinko no tsuioku" [The hero's reminiscences]) to "a long autobiographical story" that we take to be none other than An'ya koro itself. Shiga published the prologue, we also noted, as an independent story one year prior to its inclusion in An'ya koro —except that as a short story it is a third person narrative entitled “Kensaku no tsuioku" (Kensaku's reminiscences). That is, what was written about Kensaku in the short story becomes Kensaku's own writing in the prologue to An'ya koro . But here we encounter yet another problem. The hero in the prologue can no longer be Kensaku, because it is Kensaku himself, we are told in part 3, chapter 5, who authors the prologue and creates a character who reminisces at the beginning of An'ya koro about that memorable series of events occurring in the hero's distant childhood. Just who is writing what? the reader wants to know. A piece composed by Kensaku has somehow been incorporated into a third-person narration. Does Kensaku exist separately from the narrator, or is he one and the same person?

Shiga apparently agonized over his very point in the manuscript stage—thus, his many experiments with both first- and third-person narration. His decision to dismantle Tokito Kensaku seems to have been motivated, perhaps even more than by the reconciliation with his father, by a desire to apply a new, more distant perspective to his material.^[55] In draft manuscripts nos. 21 and 29-32, for example, he attempts to separate narrator and hero by making the former an acquaintance of the hero (already dead in nos. 29-30) who chronicles the latter's life. Shiga ultimately felt too constricted by this approach, however. Using this format to distance himself from his hero, he was forced to describe his hero only from

[55] Such is the argument of Hiraoka Tokuyoshi, “An'ya koro no sakusha." This incisive article, tucked away in an otherwise nondescript collection of memoirs that commonly make up the geppo genre, has been the springboard for much of the argument on An'ya koro .

the outside. The narrator could read what the hero had written, but not chronicle his day-to-day thoughts. So great a distance was, in the end, unworkable for a writer like Shiga.

Faced with the contradictory desires of creating an autonomous hero and representing his own mental state, Shiga arrived at a compromise commonly elected by shishosetsu writers. As in the "Yamashina" cycle, he simply transformed the narrating "I" (watakushi ) into a narrated "he" (kare ), thus "objectifying" his hero without, however, granting him the true autonomy found in a conventional third-person narrative. How was this possible? The answer lies in the character of the Japanese language, analyzed in Chapters 1 and 2 and again in the discussion of Shuko in Chapter 7. One cannot narrate the experience of another person in Japanese without fictionalizing or "lying"—that is, without assuming a pose of omniscience that allows access to the minds of others. Telling the "truth" is in effect telling only of one's own direct experience. What we have called the "written reportive style" differentiates between the relating of one's own and the surmising of another's experience by grammatical distinctions based on this epistemology. True, the narrating "I" as authorial persona is itself a kind of fiction, as we observed in Chapter 3, but no less powerful as a benchmark of authenticity. For a narrator to describe a character other than himself and still use the markers of direct knowledge (e.g., pure adjectives and verbs instead of adjectival and verbal suffixes like -rashii and -garu ) found in the written reportive style means either that he adopt the pose of omniscience and forfeit all claims to personally authenticated truth or that he present an authorial persona clearly understood as such by the reader. The shishosetsu writer, needless to say, consistently chooses the latter alternative. Thus, he has nothing to lose in the way of authenticity by narrating in the third person. When the conventions of the written reportive style are observed, a kare shosetsu is in the end identical to a watakushi shosetsu . The first-person / third-person distinction being negligible in Japanese, Shiga has no need to "become" his protagonist in order to describe the workings of his mind after the manner of Flaubert; he simply makes the latter over into himself, as Nakano Shigeharu suggests.

Nowhere is this interchangeability more clearly demonstrated than in the curious passage in part 3, chapter 5. The prologue itself, as mentioned earlier, was originally published separately as a third-

person narrative? Shiga could have avoided altogether the overlap of authors (Shiga/Kensaku) and the resulting circularity had he retained the prologue in its original form, since "Kensaku's Reminiscences" would then not need to be identified strictly with "The Hero's Reminiscences" in part 3, chapter 5. What, then, motivated Shiga to make the switch in narrative person? His aim, it seems clear, was to lend his fiction an otherwise impossible authenticity. The hero's first-person voice in the prologue reverberates throughout the entire text. Even after the narrative switches from the first-person watakushi to the third-person kare in the main text, the hero continues to monopolize the point of view, and his sensibility infuses the narrative consciousness. We cannot see around him.^[57]

Shiga's apparent slip in part 3, chapter 5, then, actually reveals his narrative intent: to lend a fictional character the authenticity of his own consciousness. So absorbed is Shiga in his hero that his own consciousness at the time of writing seems to displace that of Kensaku and determine Kensaku's actions and thinking, even when they contradict the work's internal fictive design. To say that Shiga is his own hero is to express all too inadequately the radical nature of this profoundly antirepresentational act. Skeptical of the power of language to represent another world, he refuses to invest his

[56] Other than the transformation of kare into watakushi , the prologue appears virtually unchanged from its original form, with only a few minor revisions, all of a semantical and not a grammatical nature, except for one change of tense. (The prologue does not include the last section of "Kensaku's Reminiscences," which describes a frog-killing expedition.) Compare "Kensaku no tsuioku" in 5:604-11 with the textual revisions to the original magazine version of "Shujinko no tsuioku," in "Koki," in SNZ 5:648-49. The parenthetical note originally prefacing "Kensaku no tsuikoku" ("Tokito Kensaku was the illegitimate child of his mother and grandfather. But he did not learn this until he had reached his mid-twenties" [ibid. 5:604].) is deleted in the prologue.

[57] One important exception to this monopoly of point of view will be discussed presently. McClellan's translation makes it appear as if the narrating consciousness is more independent of its hero than it actually is. In trans., 43, to take one of several examples, the narrator states flatly that Ishimoto “was only being polite" with respect to Kensaku's request that he attend a geisha party, when in fact the original says, "Ishimoto wa ... amari kyomi wa nai-rashikatta “ (SNZ 5:45). In trans., 93, the narrator notes, "[Kensaku] did not know it , but his face still looked cross," whereas the original makes no such assertion of knowledge about the hero: "Kensaku wa ... mada okotta yo na kao o shite-ita" (SNZ 5:121). In the prologue, McClellan has the first-person narrator make the kind of judgment about another's feelings that Japanese grammar will not allow. His translation of "Chichi wa itsu ni nai aiso-rashii koto o watakushi ni itta" (SNZ 5:12) is a much more direct: "[Father] spoke to me kindly “ (trans., 20). (Emphases added.)

hero with a discrete set of emotions generated by the text itself. Shiga's insistence in this way on the equivalence of, rather than the mere correspondence between, author and hero practically eliminates the fictional autonomy of the text's time-space continuum; at the same time, however, it presents a powerfully persuasive world of higher authenticity, namely, the narrator's own consciousness. Hiraoka Tokuyoshi puts it this way: "It is precisely because the authorial persona is half 'third person' [kare ] and half 'first person' [ji-bun ] that Shiga is able to pass off part of the autobiographical story that his hero Kensaku writes as the prologue to his own text. This became possible, of course, only after he transformed the story 'Kensaku's Reminiscences' into a first-person narration."^[58]

This merging of the author and hero's consciousness, which becomes explicit in part 3, chapter 5, is common in the shishosetsu and already familiar to readers of Shiga in such works as Wakai . Needless to say, it breaks the rules of conventional, "realistic" fiction. The author who breaks them must therefore ask himself, just where does his narrator fit in the narrative? "In order to see all," Hiraoka argues, "the writer must focus on himself as writer. To do so, however, is to tread the thin line between ... art and artifice. That Shiga succeeded was due to his discovery in Tokito Kensaku of a protagonist who enacted the role of both 'other' [kare ] and 'self' [jibun ] and yet who was neither a completely third-person 'he' or first-person 'I.'"^[59]

So preoccupied is the An'ya koro narrator with the hero's sensibility to the exclusion of all others, so blatantly does this shosetsu call itself into question as a novel, that the western reader is led to reconsider altogether his strategy of classification. Merely to say, however, that An'ya koro differs radically from the fictional norm is, in the words of Kobayashi Hideo, like telling an elephant that its nose is too long—too long, that is, if one is comparing it with, say, a lion's.^[60] We must, in other words, refrain from using the conventional novel as a standard of measurement if we are to understand the text's enduring place in modern Japanese literature.

[58] “An'ya koro no sakusha," in Zenshu geppo , no. 13:5.

[59] Ibid., 7.

[60] "Shiga Naoya" (1929), in Shintei Kobayashi Hideo zenshu 4:16. Kobayashi satirizes those who would compare Shiga with Chekov. Miyoshi Yukio borrows the comparison in his discussion of An'ya koro . See "Kako no 'watakushi,'" 128.

What, then, is the standard to which we can appeal for an informed assessment? How can we characterize the text in a way that accounts for its extraordinary power? Nearly every commentator has pointed to Shiga's inimitable ability to project his presence on paper. Miyoshi Yukio argues that An'ya koro "works" because it succeeds, as any good shishosetsu does, in communicating the quintessential individuality of its author-hero.^[61] Nakano Shigeharu argues that the great attraction of the An'ya koro text lies in the author's fastidious concern with his persona.^[62] Nakamura Mitsuo, however, attributes Shiga's appeal to his invention, or at least perfection, of a contentless self: a transparent hero with virtually no distinguishing traits of his own, who gives the reader the illusion that he has actually come in contact with the real author.^[63] No matter that Kensaku is a mere "bundle of sensations" living in a hermetic world; it is his virtue that he is utterly reliant on the reader's knowledge of his creator for any specificity of character. The contentless hero becomes a fitting vessel for the author/narrator's presence.^[64]

This does not mean, of course, that the reader comes face to face with the author. Yet it is in the nature of Japanese narrative in the written reportive style that the reader identifies with the narrator's voice (whether expressed through the first-person watakushi or third-person kare ) and no other; for it speaks with a directness that allows for no transindividual consciousness. This characteristic is common to first-person narration in any language. But it is common to "third-person" narration as well in Japanese, for as we have seen, the deployment of kare in a shosetsu does not itself result in an autonomous third-person narrative. The con-

[61] "Kako no 'watakushi,'" 129.

[62] “An'ya koro zodan," 560. One of the decorum-conscious author's techniques, Nakano suggests, is his use of euphemisms in describing the less savory actions of his hero. For example, he employs a phrase like "Shintai dake wa, kare wa masu masu hoto no fukami e otoshite itta no de aru" ("With every passing day, his self-indulgence became more intense"; SNZ 5:133; trans., 101) for what simply means "Kensaku visited the brothels even more frequently."

[63] Shiga Naoya ron , 20—22; 137ff.

[64] Ibid., 90. Saeki Shoichi emphasizes that the very refusal of a shishosetsu writer like Shiga to invest his hero with a plenitude of presence makes it possible for a reader to identify all the more closely with the character in the belief that he is the same authorial persona he has known all along. See Nihon no "watakushi" o motomete , 5-25, esp. 10-11.

tentless kare is actually the watakushi in a disguise every reader recognizes.

The penultimate chapter marks the fruition of Shiga's first-person / third-person collation. The Shiga hero loses his "self" on the slopes of Mount Daisen, holy to the Tendai school. It is here, Hiraoka con-dudes, that Kensaku ultimately attains to a transcendent, person-less (in both ontological and grammatical senses, we might add) world where the hero's consciousness is absorbed into nature's vastness.^[65] As if to emphasize this melting into the void, the author deletes the hero's name during nearly the entire lengthy passage at the end of part 4, chapter 19, which describes the state of blissful rest on the mountain slope, and instead punctuates the narrative with an occasional kare .^[66] Kensaku literally disappears during that fleeting, eternal moment of meditation at daybreak. The name reappears only when Kensaku returns to himself at chapter's end and descends the mountain at the beginning of chapter 20.

But what a different character he has become! In An'ya koro's final chapter, we can see for the first time around the hero—that is, view him from a perspective other than the hero's own. In fact, we see the gravely ill Kensaku, delirious from the food poisoning that afflicted him on Mount Daisen, through the eyes of each character appearing in the chapter: Oyoshi and her mother the priest's wife, the doctor, and finally Naoko. Here, at the very end, An'ya koro sheds its shishosetsu skin and emerges as the kind of "realistic" narrative we are accustomed to as readers of western fiction. The authorial persona whom we have come to know so intimately as the Shiga hero fades away and is superseded by a group of characters, with Naoko as the central figure, that comport themselves like characters in a conventional novel. We are party for the first time to information beyond the hero's ken and to conversations out of his earshot. The hero, at the threshold of death, yields his monopolistic point of view to a suddenly omniscient narrator intent on transforming his shosetsu into a novel.

[65] “An'ya koro no sakusha," in Zenshu geppo , no. 13:7.

[66] The passage begins:" ... finding a suitable resting place in the grass, he sat down with the mountain at his back." (SNZ 5:578; trans., 400.) McClellan appears to attach particular importance to this fact, for his translation duplicates Shiga's usage of the proper name in this section even though it varies considerably elsewhere.

With Kensaku no longer at the core of narrative consciousness, An'ya koro begins to operate in a radically new way.^[67] Is the hero's sudden exit from center stage simply a fluke? All indications are that it is not. Shiga makes no definitive statement about the reasons behind the abrupt change of narrative focus, but certain peripheral evidence is too suggestive to ignore.

First, there is the rebuttal ("Nakamura Shin'ichiro-kun no gimon ni tsuite" [1948]) to a critique of An'ya koro's finale, in which Shiga emphasizes that the shift in narrative perspective was no accident and not even unique, referring to the earlier description of Naoko's indiscretion in part 4, chapter 5.^[68] He then mounts an attack on those who would scruple over narrative method.

Fastidious readers may think it odd that the hero suddenly disappears from the scene, but such people are surely in the minority. I think that the general reader, going through the work rapidly, would not be bothered by the passage. It is in any event the product of a calculated risk and not of carelessness. I was fully conscious of what I was doing. I found that this approach best suited my purposes, but I was also motivated by the desire to take a certain risk.

(SNZ 8:159)

[67] The hero's displacement from the narrative center, and his metamorphosis from actor to acted upon, is nicely realized by the scene that concludes part 4, in which he finds himself in Woman's hands as he lies before Naoko, his hand in her lap. This contrasts vividly with the scene that concludes part 2, in which he literally takes Woman in his hands as he fondles a prostitute's "round, heavy breast" (SNZ 5:275; trans., 197).

[68] Part 4, chap. 5, and part 4, chap. 20, differ substantially in at least one sense, however. The final chapter is an attempt at truly omniscient narrative that adopts several points of view; whereas part 4, chap. 5, which appears in English as omniscient narrative, is best interpreted as hearsay reported through Naoko. (The English translation sometimes moves away from Naoko's point of view, but the original never wavers. For example, the sentence "Kaname suffered from extreme stiffness around the neck and shoulders, and complained constantly about it" [trans., 256] is a rendering of "Kaname wa kata ya kubi no hageshii kori de, hidoku kurushigatteita “ [SNZ 5:482]; emphasis added.) This is Shiga's not altogether felicitous solution to the problem of how to transmit a great deal of information, to which Kensaku has become privy, in a conciser form than dialogue. Evidence for such an interpretation is supplied by a section of the original text (coming between part 4, chap. 5, and part 4, chap. 6) that was deleted when the complete An'ya koro came out in book form. The section begins: "Kensaku did not of course hear the story precisely as given here" ("Kensaku wa mochiron, kono hanashi o sono mama kiita no de wa nakkata ga") and continues with Kensaku addressing Naoko: "You have done what you should by telling me about the incident" ("Omae wa sore o uchiaketa to iu tokoro de, suru koto wa sunda no da" [SNZ 6:614; emphasis added]). The overall impression received from reading this chapter and the one that follows is one of Kensaku remembering what Naoko has told him about the incident. He has internalized her point of view, and that is why he so boldly announces later, part 4, chap. 10, that "everything is my problem, mine alone, to solve."

Shiga never discloses the exact nature of this "risk." But his opinion that the litterateur would stumble over a passage to which the general reader would not give a second thought suggests that he attempted to create a new, truly novelistic, narrative voice even at the risk of distancing himself from his hero's sensibility, which any critic attuned to the world of junbungaku aesthetics would be loath to accept. That he made the attempt at all is remarkable, considering what he must have thought to be the limitations of the language, as we can surmise from an essay published two years prior to the one quoted above.

Scarcely six months after Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers, when people were suffering from starvation, disease, and economic collapse in addition to the agony of defeat, Shiga wrote, in an essay entitled "Kokugo mondai," of still another crisis he believed that the people faced. It was one that, although seemingly not as pressing, could prove to be the most perilous of all: the state of the Japanese language.

Although we may not be sensitive to the fact (since we are accustomed to our own language from childhood), there is in my opinion no language more imperfect or inconvenient than Japanese. Considering how much the language has impeded the nation's cultural advancement, I believe that we should deal at once with the onerous problems it poses.

(SNZ 7:339)

Shiga goes on to recount the plan by Mori Arinori, the Meiji government's first minister of education, to adopt English as Japan's national language, and he argues in essence that Japan would have been spared the tragedy of war had Mori's plan been carried out. He then suggests that the time is ripe to adopt French, known for its logical clarity, as the national language, in the same pragmatic spirit that the Japanese showed when they adopted the metric system of weights and measures.

Shiga's belief that the adoption of English in the Meiji period would have resulted in a more civilized and less bellicose nation is laughable, to be sure. It is hard to take seriously (especially in today's economic climate) Shiga's attack on the language as being an impediment to advancement. Japanese may be "imperfect" in that it is constantly undergoing change to meet new conditions, but it is inherently no less perfect than any other language. Yet it will

also not do merely to discount the essay as so many cranky remarks uttered in a period of lost national pride or as wholly representative of the stream of tirades against the language and culture that gushed forth at war's end, as some critics suggest.^[69] Indeed, if we read this foray into cultural criticism in light of Shiga's calling as a writer of fiction, the words "imperfect" and "inconvenient" take on new meaning.^[70] For what was Shiga, as the would-be producer of an omniscient but still "authentic" narrative, to call a language if not imperfect, if that language sounds unnatural when it attempts to incorporate more than a single point of view? And what, if not inconvenient, if that single point of view must merge with the narrator's own? Shiga may have shared his countrymen's postwar frustration when he penned his critique against the native tongue. But his frustration would also seem to stem from a creative malaise. Having exploited the language's genius as fully as any author, was he not perhaps looking wistfully to new horizons that he had glimpsed through translations from western literature?^[71] To become an author with all the power that the word implies; to be the mover of his hero, and not be bound by him—was this not the "risk" that Shiga took, the bold experiment he embarked on when penning An'ya koro's last chapter?

[69] Nakamura Mitsuo, for example, suggests the attack is a sign that Shiga's growth as an artist has stopped. See Shiga Naoya ron , 9 Kinda'ichi Haruhiko opens his well-known book, Nihongo , with a defense of the Japanese language against Shiga's attack. Suzuki Takao refutes Shiga's essay in the first chapter of his Tozasareta gengo and insists that the problem of "imperfection" lies in Shiga's imperfect use of the language and not in the language itself (25-26).

[70] For a dissenting interpretation, see Roy Andrew Miller, Japan's Modern Myth , 109-15. Miller's book, which shows how the Japanese have placed the language at the center of their cultural identity, correctly debunks the notion that any single language is unique by noting that all languages, by their very existence, are "unique" in some way; but it dwells rather excessively on the masochistic pleasure he claims Japanese take in the difficulty, oddity, and "illogicality" of their language. We have noted throughout, meanwhile, not the ontological uniqueness of Japanese but rather certain features that distinguish it in particular from western languages, in the belief that uniqueness and particularity are not the same thing and that the latter can be studied profitably without conceding the former.

[71] The question of how a western language translates into Japanese, important though it is, is too complex to go into here. Suffice it to say that it requires a radical transformation, as suggested in our discussion of the Japanese-to-English translation of Mon in Chapter 2. To the extent that its omniscient voice prevails in the translation and is not assimilated into the Japanese epistemology, however, a western novel inevitably comes off as a gross "fabrication," as Kume Masao and others have suggested apropos of Balzac, Tolstoy, et al.

This experiment, however, triggers the text's final crisis. Kensaku's critical illness embroils the narrative itself in a life-and-death struggle for survival and eventually deals it a mortal blow. The narrator's particularized voice, wedded to the written reportive style, finally cannot survive, or transcend, the hero's consciousness. When An'ya koro closes with Naoko's silent soliloquy—the first and last uttered by any character other than Kensaku—what we hear is an uncharacteristic, sexually neutral language that sounds uncannily like Kensaku's own speech: "Naoko wa 'tasukaru ni shiro, tasukaranu ni shiro, tonikaku, jibun wa kono hito o hanarezu, doko made mo kono hito ni tsuite iku no da' to iu yo na koto o shikiri ni omoitsuzuketa" ("[Naoko] kept on thinking, 'Whether he lives or not, I shall never leave him, I shall go wherever he goes'" [SNZ 5: 589-90; trans., 408]).^[72] It is as though Kensaku's soul has taken flight and migrated to the body of Naoko. Or, on second thought, are those words not more appropriately spoken by the narrator of his hero? For when the former parts from the latter, it means the end of them both.^[73]

Shiga's narrative experiment signaled not only the end of An'ya koro but for all intents and purposes the end of his writing career. His last three and a half decades, by all accounts, were spent living out contentedly his hyphenated role of author-sage. It was a role more securely played in private life than on paper and one that he played with apparent ease. For Shiga's goal in writing, as Hiraoka Tokuyoshi observes, was always a more satisfactory personal life.^[74] Writing, in other words, was a means, not an end—a form of auto-therapy, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, that led to a

[72] The only commentator to make note of Naoko's decidedly nonfeminine language is Donald Keene. See Dawn to the West 1:467.

[73] There was of course a more "practical" reason for the text's completion: a plea from Shiga's publisher to finish writing in time for its inclusion in a newly edited zenshu . Thus the appearance of the final and longest (part 4, chaps. 16-20) installment in Kaizo (Apr. 1937), after a nine-year hiatus. Such pressure (to say nothing of the fact that the work was already quite long) no doubt encouraged Shiga to end his narrative where he did, but that alone does not explain the motivation for his narrative experimentation—unless , knowing that he had to finish writing soon, Shiga did not feel obliged to extend his novelistic project. At any rate, it would have been impossible for him to pursue this project and still remain true to the traditional linguistic and narrative rules governing the production of "authentic" fiction in Japanese.

[74] “An'ya koro no sakusha," in Zenshu geppo , no. 13:6.

fulfilled silence. Dazai's inference in "Nyoze gamon" that Shiga had not written anything significant for two decades (excepting, we would protest, the final chapters of An'ya koro ) is correct;^[75] but such is hardly grounds for condemnation, since Shiga had passed on to a new stage: from writing to living. Shiga was always more interested in attaining peace with himself than in searching at all costs for the meaning of "self." This very limited and concrete notion of selfhood—true to the traditional epistemology and the product of a particularized narrative voice—is of course what characterizes the shishosetsu in general and so much of Japanese literature. Shiga saw his task as one of resolving the contradiction within himself as observer and as actor, as writer and as private man. "The part of me that observes is completely divorced from the part that acts," Shiga writes angrily in a short piece included in the collection of An'ya koro manuscripts. "I must make myself whole. I must hold onto something, something very basic, something that will form a world all my own.... Without it I cannot confront existence, cannot survive. I must find it. But I don't know how. I will go to the mountains and think" (SNZ 6:60-61).

The logical conclusion of this train of thought is that literature is subordinate to life, that the goal is to be a content person, not a prolific writer. If we accept Shiga's motive for writing—to bring an emotional crisis to conscious light and liberate oneself from its burden—then we can see that this is precisely the goal that Shiga pursued. One might argue that this is the reason all writers write; but few writers have recognized, as Shiga did, its ramifications: if realized, it leads the writer to silence. For Shiga, literature was useful only insofar as it fulfilled a particular need in his life; once the need was met, he could discard his art as he would an outgrown pair of shoes. For Shiga, silence in the end signified a healthy reintegration into life. Granted, he was a fastidious stylist, intensely concerned with imagery and tone and profoundly aware of the genius—and the limitations—of his language. But looking at matters in the above light, perhaps we can say that his ultimate aim as author-sage was to do what most private citizens do, and that is not to write at all.

[75] Dazai Osamu zenshu 10:325.