Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions: An Introduction

by J. Thomas Rimer

Overview

Thomas Rimer's book seeks to explain the background, structural principles, and development of pre-modem and modern Japanese fiction in a way that is comprehensive, methodical, and accessible to the general reader.

Originally published in 1978.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691609898
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #568
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Date of Birth:

1894

Date of Death:

1971

Read an Excerpt

Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions

An Introduction

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By J. Thomas Rimer

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06362-1

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I

SINCE the Second World War, an increasing number of translations have made available to the Western world an ever broader range of Japanese fiction, ranging from the early poem tales to the newest existentialist fashions of Abe Kobo. These translations find readers, and some have achieved lasting reputations. Still, the comments often made in the press or in reviews suggest a certain dissatisfaction felt by readers. The forms in which these narratives are cast — short story, novella, novel, reminiscence — seem familiar yet somehow malformed with respect to our expectations. We are attracted, yet disconcerted by what we find.

Or so the argument goes. Actually, such a statement of the problem suggests a proper answer. A certain amount of critical attention has been focused on the question of what Japanese fiction is not. More effort is needed to determine what the general principles of the traditions of that fiction might be. There are several obvious ways to pursue such a topic. One might, for example, examine the larger role of fiction in Japanese culture and society. Japanese fiction had an aristocratic beginning in the Heian court. In particular, the tonality given to narrative prose by Lady Murasaki and her The Tale of Genji created an aesthetic that can readily be traced all the way down to the postwar novels of Dazai, Kawabata, and Tanizaki. Another method might be to examine the readers of Japanese literature. Court attitudes and aristocratic self-images certainly conditioned the artistic milieu from which The Tale of Genji came; in the early twentieth century, writers of the stature of Natsume Soseki wrote their most sustained efforts for serial publication in newspapers. All such questions might be regarded as a way to study Japanese literature through its sociology. The information available through such analysis is immensely revealing and helps to give a sense of the limits of creativity in each successive social setting. Such critical procedures make it possible to use these works of literature as documents in cultural, intellectual, and philosophical history. Much modern Japanese literary criticism is of this variety, and some excellent Western scholarship has been written from a similar point of view. Among recent studies in English, one might mention The World of the Shining Prince (New York, 1964) by Ivan Morris, which attempts to recreate the social and spiritual milieu of Lady Murasaki and her generation. Another first-rate treatment of problems in Japanese literary history is Masao Miyoshi's Accomplices of Silence (Berkeley, 1974), a study of modern fiction in terms of its social and linguistic contexts.

The forms of Japanese fiction possess a literary history of their own, one that has given rise to a series of changing styles. Further, as contemporary Western criticism has been at pains to point out, style itself not only determines the content but is often synonymous with it. An analysis of style and content, and of the nature of the relationship between them, would seem to constitute the basis for an understanding of the purposes of Japanese fiction, or of any other. The task of providing any such analysis is a formidable one, and what follows is merely a modest attempt to suggest certain necessary directions of inquiry. My conviction, in sum, is that the great works of Japanese literature succeed brilliantly on their own terms. It is up to us to find out what those terms are.

II

In determining the necessary means to discuss the framework that sustains this literary structure, we may put forth two larger problems. Both have a bearing on every work examined here. The first is the problem of originality. Certainly originality remains the often unspoken yet ultimate criterion for the success of much contemporary Western art, music, and literature. A work is judged by the extent it can break away from what has come before. Some of the satisfactions found among Western readers of Japanese fiction in translation are due to the very fact that different traditions make a given work seem original in terms of Western sensibilities. Read in their proper context, however, the Japanese works are bound to make a different impression. Japan, like other cultures that bear the burdens of a long and complex history, seems to favor a more classically oriented literary tradition. Originality is highly valuable, but within certain limitations imposed by a developed and inherited taste. Certainly originality has never been the ultimate criterion in Japanese tradition. Western perceptions as to the nature of Japanese originality are sometimes muddled because of the reputation that Japan has earned during the earlier years of the century as a country of imitators. By such a definition, works of literature are sometimes dismissed as mere imitations of available models — The Tale of Genji is copied from Chinese works, Tanizaki from Edgar Allan Poe, and Dazai perhaps from Dostoevsky.

In terms of literary craftsmanship, however, such influences (and their extent is always less than might be supposed) are rather a sign of Japan's longstanding cosmopolitan attitude toward other civilizations. China, Japan's most powerful neighbor and culturally her greatest source of influence until the late nineteenth century, took little interest in literary and artistic traditions other than her own, but the Japanese, who never saw themselves as the center of world culture, always maintained a lively interest in the variety of experiences available to them. This fundamental attitude was as visible in the early Japanese chronicles as it was in the latter half of the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese missionaries came to Japan, and as it has been since the 1850s, when Japan began to open her doors to the West.

Moreover, such a lively interest in other cultures — or more specifically for the present purposes, in other literary styles and systems of aesthetic and philosophic ideas — must certainly come as no surprise to those who know anything of the history of the European intellectual traditions. No one finds unnatural the enormous impact of Goethe and Shakespeare on all of European culture; Sartre seems no less an important figure for having been stimulated by Kierkegaard and Heidegger. In the European tradition, cosmopolitanism is assumed to be a positive virtue. Japanese literary culture behaves no differently, but the distances are greater and the traditions further apart. The borrowings therefore often seem more apparent and the eclecticism more striking, even when the results are altogether successful. Exchanges bring riches: what we admire in our own literary tradition we can scarcely condemn in another.

In addition, we must realize the added difficulties imposed on our understanding by such a literary tradition. Quite simply, one must know more. In particular, Japanese modern writers who draw on three pasts at once (European, Japanese, and Chinese) make any simple judgments on their work difficult to render; indeed, the untutored Western reader may not even be aware of the challenges set, the rules of the game. In particular, structural elements that often seem completely missing often turn out to be operating most effectively, but in terms defined by canons of taste and tradition wholly unfamiliar to us. Until some understanding of that tradition can be achieved, individual works of Japanese literature, for the Western reader, must be made to stand, frail and perilously alone, in a fashion never anticipated by their original authors or readers.

The second preliminary problem that might be raised concerns the ever-changing relationship between the past and the present for each individual author. For the Japanese, the past performs an endlessly complicated function. In the first place, the past never served them as a monolithic tradition, a cultural carpet rolling down through the ages, to provide a kind of homogeneous blanket covering the warts and idiosyncratic bumps of each succeeding age. The changes that have come to Japan in modern times are well known and enormous, but the changes Buddhism brought to early Japanese culture, or those brought about as a result of the social restructuring of the country during the medieval period, were in some ways just as profound. The question, in literary terms, of what to do with the past was just as important then as it is now. Further, the literary past was usually perceived not as a burden but as a precious thread of continuity and sophistication in a world that all too often seemed full of upheaval and continuous, ominous change. The Japanese literary tradition, and the psychological and stylistic attitudes it fostered, retained a kind of dialectical energy that has provided vitality for almost a thousand years.

Of course every civilization retains its literary past in some fashion, even if only as a stereotype ripe for destruction and ridicule. Writers who feel empty and bereft are usually those who have no sufficient tradition behind them, as Hawthorne once insisted. In Japan, the literary past always plays some active function, even if an unconscious one, in the composition of fiction. An attempt to define the functioning of that past provides one major theme of this study.

With these remarks as a preface, a Western reader, faced with the range of Japanese fiction now available to him in English, might well go on to pose a number of additional questions. The first area of concern involves the relationship of fiction to reality. Long accustomed to holding up as a criterion the "willing suspension of disbelief" in making judgments on the efficacy of a work of fiction, the Western reader here faces a new set of conventions that define that relationship. Not only is the relationship between fiction and reality of a somewhat different nature in the Japanese tradition; the ultimate sense of reality itself, as perceived by the various writers discussed in the present study, can in no way be defined in the same terms as our own. The Japanese sense of the continuity of personality in time, the relationship of the individual to others, and of the individual to nature, stands at a considerable distance from our Western experience. Many Japanese writers have been found disappointing by Western critics who find the narratives shapeless, without climax. The Japanese response might well be (although I must confess I have never seen it so succinctly formulated) that reality is indeed shapeless and that Japanese literary conventions are thus closer to ultimate truth than are our own. In any case, the Japanese literary mechanisms for apprehending reality permit the creation of works that, read carefully, possess the ability to shake us loose from our usual preconceptions.

A related question concerns the relation of language to narrative. Perhaps the fact that the Western novel is bound up in conveying our own perceptions of "reality" has imposed the standards of prose on the linguistic structures of our fiction; and, indeed, writers who move toward a use of heightened prose or poetry (Hesse, Rilke, on occasion Gide) in an attempt to produce "poetic" novels have done so, to some extent, at their peril, for such hybrid genres have not always received the modern reader's full sanction. The Japanese novel, on the other hand, draws on poetry as much as on prose for its literary mechanisms and for its language, and our expectations must be altered accordingly.

Still another issue involves the nature of causality in the Japanese tradition. Our notion of cause and effect goes back, no doubt, to Aristotle; by the nineteenth century, causality, in its artistic aspects, was such a central conception in fiction that Henry James could declare "What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the determination of character?" Gide may have struck a glancing blow at this central concept with his acte gratuite, but the close reciprocal relationship between character and action is still of crucial importance in Western fiction. One's first response on reading Japanese fiction is that this relationship, whatever its ultimate nature, is certainly more loosely perceived in the literary mechanisms involved. Determining the qualities and limitations of the nature of this causality will help considerably in explaining the ranges of artistic sensibility found appropriate to narrative in the Japanese tradition.

Another area of exploration might be that of coherence, or total effect. Tightly structured Western fiction often makes its impact, and sets in motion its deepest reverberations, through the architectural structure of its various parts. Again, our contemporary sense of reality makes us more appreciative of the Japanese looser structure; we tend to prize the Poussin sketch over the formal painting, and, as Charles Rosen has pointed out, Flaubert's real art may now seem to lie in his letters rather than in his novels. Nevertheless, the literary structures in Japanese fiction are assembled in strikingly different ways, and the coherence they are marshalled to suggest is of a different order than that to which Western readers are accustomed.

All of these concerns might be summed up as cautionary in nature — a desire to remove false expectations for Western readers. Yet one can hope for more than that: only by approaching these works of Japanese fiction with the proper expectations can their humor, lyricism, and philosophical profundity be perceived. An analysis of their literary structures may be a most helpful way to create the proper expectations.

III

If the role of creating proper expectations is one normally assigned to literary criticism, then one might next discuss the accomplishments of Japanese traditions of criticism. As in Europe, criticism has played a part in the Japanese literary tradition since its beginnings, and a study that could provide even a modest outline of the history of Japanese literary criticism would make a book far longer than this one. No such attempt is provided here, but a few remarks on the concerns of Japanese criticism might be useful at this point.

If we look briefly at what might be termed traditional literary criticism in Japan — that is, from the earliest periods through the incursions of the West in the 1850s and after — we find that one prominent fact stands out. The highest genre of literature was poetry, and most critical attention was focused on this form. What Japanese criticism on fiction existed (and there was a certain amount at all times, especially concerning The Tale of Genji) tended to define and make use of critical terms borrowed from the poetic vocabulary. One genre was defined in terms of another.

A closer look at the tradition suggest that two basic types of criticism maintained an ascendancy. One was didactic and moral, often with a heavy religious cast, Confucian, Buddhist, or Shinto. Like much of what the good Christian bishops have told us down through the centuries about Western literature, most of these homilies can now be put aside. A second type of criticism dealt more closely with the problems of art and might be termed a kind of technical criticism. A modern reader will find this older criticism quite practical in nature and often surprisingly contemporary in feeling. In the Heian period (794–1185), which saw the creation of Genji, Tales of Ise, and several great anthologies of 31-syllable waka poetry, the critics were the poets. The whole aristocratic class wrote poetry. Literary criticism was written by practicing poets for practicing poets. Questions as to the worth of literature, or debates over the relative worth of literature in relation to history or philosophy, were seldom pursued, since the aristocratic class shared the same assumptions about the fundamental importance of poetry. Criticism stressed such questions as the choice of proper means to suggest allusive effect, or the creation of techniques permitting the inclusion of a poetic reference without giving a newer poem too great a literary burden.

The patterns and expectations of literary criticism were laid down in such a fashion for an aristocratic audience. Later, even when that society began to change, the earlier canons of taste and the limitations set on the functions of literary criticism continued to prevail. Adaptations, however, were made for each successive audience. Indeed, the simplest way to grasp the general nature of the changes and developments in Japanese literary criticism is to observe for whom the criticism was being composed. In the Heian period, the poet-critics mostly wrote for each other, but in the long period from 1185, after the disastrous civil wars that virtually destroyed the political power of the court, down to 1600, when the country was reunified under the Tokugawa Shogunate, several new factors became important. A new warrior class arose. Fighting men who had spent their lives far from Kyoto, the capital, they took the political power from the court and felt they needed to adopt the high culture of their predecessors as well. Now the court poets had others to whom to teach literature besides themselves, and the new military rulers proved to be, on the whole, avid students and generous patrons. Social status, of course, remained all important. Even such a fine poet as Kamo no Chomei (1153–1216) could complain that his work was not properly appreciated because of his inferior social status.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Preface, pg. vii
• Contents, pg. xi
• I. Introduction, pg. 1
• II. Tanizaki Junichirō: The Past as Homage A Portrait of Shunkin and The Bridge of Dreams, pg. 22
• III. Natsume Sōseki: The Past as Style Kusamakura, pg. 38
• IV. Antecedents: The Tale, the Diary, the monogatari, the Essay, pg. 62
• V. Source Books I: Tales of Ise, The Tale of Genji, pg. 82
• VI. Source Books II: The Tale of the Heike and the nō Drama, pg. 97
• VII. Ueda Akinari: The Past as Art Tales of Moonlight and Rain, pg. 123
• VIII. Nagai Kafū and Mori Ōgai: The Past versus the Present The River Sumida and Sanshō the Steward, pg. 138
• IX. Kawabata Yasunari: Eastern Approaches Snow Country, pg. 162
• X. Dazai Osamu: The Death of the Past The Setting Sun, pg. 182
• XI. The Tale of Genji as a Modern Novel, pg. 200
• XII. Tradition and Contemporary Consciousness: Ibuse, Endō, Kaiko, Abe, pg. 245
• XIII. A Few Final Remarks, pg. 271
• Appendix I: Taketori monogatari, pg. 275
• Appendix II: A Brief Bibliography for Further Reading, pg. 307
• Index, pg. 311