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.