Modern Japanese Literature Read online

  WORKS BY DONALD KEENE

  Published by Grove Press

  Anthology of Chinese Literature, Vol. I: From Early Times to the 14th Century

  (with Cyril Birch, ed.)

  Anthology of Japanese Literature from the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century

  Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology

  MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE

  Modern

  JAPANESE LITERATURE

  an anthology

  compiled and edited by

  Donald Keene

  Copyright © 1956 by Grove Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  This volume is published in accordance with an arrangement between UNESCO and the Japanese government.

  Material from Wheat and Soldiers reprinted by permission of Rinehart & Company, Inc.

  Frontispiece by Nenjirō Inagaki. Reproduced by courtesy of Mikumo Wood-block Print Company, Kyoto, Japan.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Catalog Number 56-8439

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-5095-0

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  09 10 11 12 30 29 28 27 26

  TO TED AND FANNY DE BARY

  NOTE ON JAPANESE NAMES AND PRONUNCIATION

  Japanese names are given in this book in the Japanese order: that is, the surname precedes the personal name. Thus, in the name Natsume Sōseki, Natsume is the family name, Sōseki the personal name.

  The pronunciation of Japanese in transcription is very simple. The consonants are pronounced as in English (with g always hard), the vowels as in Italian. There are no silent letters. Thus, the name Mine is pronounced “mee-nay.” In general, long vowels have been indicated by macrons, but in some stories they have been omitted, as likely to seem pedanticisms.

  TRANSLATORS

  Sam Houston Brock

  Robert H. Brower

  Harold G. Henderson

  Howard Hibbett

  Glenn Hughes

  Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto

  Yozan T. Iwasaki

  Donald Keene

  Ivan Morris

  W. H. H. Norman

  Shio Sakanishi

  G. W. Sargent

  Edward Seidensticker

  Burton Watson

  Meredith Weatherby

  PREFACE

  It may come as a surprise to some readers that this volume, devoted to the Japanese literature of the last eighty or so years, should be as long as my Anthology of Japanese Literature, which covers more than a thousand years. The disproportion is largely to be explained in terms of the amount of literature which has poured from the printing presses in recent times. All the literature which survives from, say, the thirteenth century can hardly compare in bulk with what any single year now produces. But it is not only by mere numbers that modern Japanese literature earns the right to be heard; its quality is remarkably high, and compares with that written anywhere in the world.

  The choice of material for inclusion has been difficult to make. It is a commonplace of literary history that many works highly esteemed in their own day are subsequently doomed to oblivion. It also happens, though less frequently, that a book which passed almost unnoticed in its own time is later seen to be a treasure of the literature. These are the dangers which beset the compiler of anthologies of modern works, and I cannot hope to have escaped them altogether. I shall be very glad if no glaring injustices have been made. I have included very little solely for “historical” reasons. The novels of the 1890’s have suffered in particular as a result of this policy. Although they are still highly regarded by some Japanese critics, they seem unbearably mawkish today, as I think most people will agree who have read the existing translations of such works as Ozaki’s Golden Demon.1

  It is the custom of Japanese critics to divide the modern period into the reigns of the three Emperors: Meiji (1868-1912), Taishō (1912-1926), and Shōwa (since 1926). These distinctions have some meaning, as our use of “the twenties” or “the thirties” conjures up an era, but it has not been felt necessary to observe the lines of these demarcations in a book intended for Western readers.

  Few of the translations given here have ever before appeared in print. Most were made especially for this volume, and I wish to express my thanks to all the translators. I am particularly indebted to Edward Seidensticker for his willingness on repeated occasions to drop whatever else he was doing and turn out for this book a remarkably fine translation. Carolyn Kizer has kindly looked over my translations of modern poetry and offered many valuable pointers. Other help, at a time when I needed it badly, I have acknowledged, however inadequately, in the dedication.

  I am grateful to Kawabata Yasunari, President of the Japanese P.E.N. Club, for his kind intercession in obtaining permission to use works by living authors. Acknowledgments are also due to: International Publishers Co. for The Cannery Boat; the Japan Quarterly for The Mole; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publishers of Some Prefer Nettles, for permission to use other works by Tanizaki; W. H. H. Norman and the Hokuseido Press for Hell Screen; Glenn Hughes for The Madman on the Roof (from Three Modern Japanese Plays); New Directions for “Villon’s Wife”; and Rinehart & Co., Inc., for Earth and Soldiers (from Wheat and Soldiers).

  Kyoto-New York

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  KANAGAKI ROBUN: The Beefeater

  HATTORI BUSHŌ: The Western Peep Show

  KAWATAKE MOKUAMI: The Thieves

  Modern Poetry in Chinese

  TSUBOUCHI SHŌYŌ: The Essence of the Novel

  FUTABATEI SHIMEI: The Drifting Cloud

  HIGUCHI ICHIYŌ: Growing Up

  KUNIKIDA DOPPO: Old Gen

  Modern Haiku: I

  NATSUME SŌSEKI: Botchan

  SHIMAZAKI TŌSON: The Broken Commandment

  TAYAMA KATAI: One Soldier

  NAGAI KAFŪ: The River Sumida

  Modern Poetry: I

  Modern Waka

  ISHIKAWA TAKUBOKU: The Romaji Diary

  MORI ŌGAI: The Wild Goose

  IZUMI KYŌKA: A Tale of Three Who Were Blind

  NAKA KANSUKE: Sanctuary

  SHIGA NAOYA: Han’s Crime

  SHIGA NAOYA: At Kinosaki

  KIKUCHI KAN: The Madman on the Roof

  KUME MASAO: The Tiger

  AKUTAGAWA RYŪNOSUKE: Kesa and Moritō

  AKUTAGAWA RYŪNOSUKE: Hell Screen

  KOBAYASHI TAKIJI: The Cannery Boat

  YOKOMITSU RIICHI: Time

  HINO ASHIHEI: Earth and Soldiers

  KAWABATA YASUNARI: The Mole

  Modern Poetry: II

  Modern Haiku: II

  TANIZAKI JUNICHIRŌ: The Firefly Hunt

  TANIZAKI JUNICHIRŌ: The Mother of Captain Shigemoto

  DAZAI OSAMU: Villon’s Wife

  HAYASHI FUMIKO: Tokyo

  MISHIMA YUKIO: Omi

  Short Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  The transformation of Japan within the space of about
forty years from an obscure oriental monarchy to one of the great powers is accounted a miracle of the modern age. With the most rapid efforts Japan shook off the encumbering weight of a past of isolation and ignorance, and astonished the world by victory in a war with Russia and the winning of an equal alliance with England. Military successes and the development of industrial enterprises—and also the growth of scientific learning—made Japan the leader of eastern Asia.

  Many striking parallels may be drawn between the history and the literature of Japan during this period. In 1868, when the youthful Emperor Meiji assumed control of the government after six centuries of rule by military men, Japanese literature had dropped to one of its lowest levels. The popular authors of the time specialized in books of formless, almost meaningless gossip. The country, which had been turned in on itself during almost 250 years of isolation, seemed to have exhausted its own resources. The gaiety had left the gay quarters, the center of much of the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the rouged animation of anecdotes about the courtesans of the day was ugly and meretricious. And yet, within the same forty years that elapsed between the Meiji Restoration and the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese literature moved from idle quips directed at the oddities of the West to Symbolist poetry, from the thousandth-told tale of the gay young blade and the harlots to the complexities of the psychological novel.

  The military and commercial successes of Japan have been attributed by Western critics to the Japanese genius for imitation, and this very skill has been often considered a discredit, as if it were somehow more admirable to imitate badly. The literature and art of modern Japan have been open to similar attack by those who deplore any deviations from what they consider to be the “pure Japanese.” Such critics would condemn the writers and artists of today to expressing their anxieties about a world in disorder through the medium of exquisite poems on the cherry blossoms or monochrome sketches of pines and waterfalls. But, as the Japanese have discovered, the cleavage is impossible: the industrial plant, democracy, economics, Symbolist poetry, and abstract painting all go together, and are today an inseparable part of the lives of cultivated people in Japan as everywhere in the world.

  The acceptance of what we think of as Western traditions did not take place in Japan without a struggle. For a time (as in China) an attempt was made to maintain the principle of “Western techniques and Eastern spirit.” This meant that Japan should welcome Western machinery and other material benefits while retaining unaltered the customs and philosophy of the East. It might seem that it was a feasible dichotomy, that there was no reason why, say, a machine operator could not lead his life in accordance with Confucian principles. The fact was, however, that the industrialization of Japan tended to make the ideals of the family system impossible to fulfill. Even had the West offered nothing but technical knowledge, Japan would probably have had to abandon or modify seriously her traditional ways.

  During the twenty or so years that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Japanese were frantically occupied in learning about—imitating, if one will—the West. They built for themselves railway and telegraph systems, printed newspapers and photographs. Ordinary citizens became interested in political problems for the first time, and there was a movement to enable them to take a more active part in the government. A modern political and industrial state was taking shape, characteristically Japanese in many features of its composition, but modeled on similar institutions in the West. In literature the changes came more slowly. This is not surprising: it took a much greater knowledge of the West to write a good psychological novel than it did to run a railway. We find traces of the West scattered everywhere, of course. Even the conservative writers mentioned in their works the rickshaws, banks, newspapers, and other novelties of the time. The celebrated dramatist Kawatake Mokuami wrote a play about an English balloonist who dazzled the Japanese by descending from the sky over Tokyo, and a leading Kabuki actor was required to pronounce a speech written in English for the play. In a puppet drama of 1891 there is a love scene between a geisha and a foreigner, which is filled with scraps of English: “Wasureyō mono ka last year no spring, I no fine day Sumida no hana yori Paris London. ...” In the domain of translation from Western works, the Japanese moved from Self-Help by Samuel Smiles (a book which sold hundreds of thousands of copies) to the political novels of Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli, and eventually to Zola.

  It is easy to see why the Japanese eagerly devoted themselves to study of the working of the steam engine or the pump, or even to the practical information contained in Self-Help, but it is interesting that they turned so quickly to Western literature. The first complete translation of a Western novel was that of Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers in 1878. This innocuous story belies the vaguely pornographic overtones of its Japanese title, “A Spring Tale of Flowers and Willows.” The title may have been initially necessary to sell the book, but what made it so great a success with the Japanese was the revelation that the men of the West had a tender side to their sternly practical lives. The emphasis on the material superiority of the West had been so insistent that the more spiritual aspects of Western life, even when revealed in so etiolated a fashion as we might expect from the pen of Bulwer-Lytton, came as a great surprise to most Japanese. The political background of the novel also offered Japanese writers fresh ideas as to what they might put into their own works.

  One should not overlook the role of Christian missionaries in arousing among Japanese an interest in the literature of the West. The Christian religion had been prohibited in Japan during the early seventeenth century, and rigorous measures had been adopted to prevent its recrudescence. In 1873, under foreign pressure, the ban was lifted, and the influence of Christianity rapidly spread to all parts of the country. Some men were led, as Christian concern with their fellows began to occupy them, to a kind of socialism. Others felt a new sense of individuality and the desire to express it. The hymns which the Christian converts sang were of importance both in the introduction of Western music and in the beginnings of the new poetry. The Bible was the first Western book known to many Japanese, and its words convinced them that there was more to the West than mere “techniques.”

  It goes without saying, however, that unless the Japanese had felt a need to create a new literature no amount of foreign influence would have mattered. There was no reason why the books of chatter about the denizens of the licensed quarters could not have continued to dominate the literary scene. What the foreign examples did was to afford the Japanese the means of expressing their new ideas and their consciousness of being men of the enlightened Meiji era. This was not by any means the first time that Japanese had felt dissatisfied with the prevailingly low level of the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century. The poet Ōkuma Kotomichi (1798-1868) had declared himself proud to be a man of his times, and scorned to write, as most poets did, in the old-fashioned diction of a thousand years before. But despite his protests, Ōkuma’s poems are written in the traditional waka form, and delightful though they are, do not strike us as being in any sense revolutionary. A poem in thirty-one syllables can be exquisite, it can be moving, but it obviously can never be a full exposition of a poet’s thoughts or attempt to deal with subjects in which the intellect as well as the heart is involved. Some Japanese had tried to escape from the limitations of the waka by writing Chinese poems and prose—the only foreign literature known in Japan before the opening of the country—but, with some brilliant exceptions, their compositions were less explorations of the possibilities of the medium than cold and sterile repetitions of alien imagery.

  When the poets of the 1880’s felt a need to express their emotions in terms more suitable to their age than the traditional forms permitted, they had access to a new idiom. The first collection of English and American poems in translation was published in 1882. The choice of poems was not inspired, but with Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” Gray’s “Elegy,” some Longfellow, and
even a few morsels of Shakespeare to build on, the Japanese were soon expressing in very varied terms their reactions to life in the brave new world of the Meiji era. That their early attempts were not masterpieces need surprise no one. Everything had to be learned afresh, for the old traditions were more of a hindrance than a help. Interestingly enough, it was not until much later that Japanese poets discovered that the complexities of modern life—or, at any rate, some of them—could be treated in the waka and haiku as well.

  The Essence of the Novel (1885) by Tsubouchi Shōyō is one of the first important critical works of the time. Tsubouchi was a student of English literature, and what he read of the aesthetic principles on which it is founded convinced him that great changes must take place in the writing of Japanese fiction. The preface to the book threw a challenge in the faces of Japanese authors and readers alike: the sorry state of Japanese literature was no less the fault of readers who buy the sensational, pornographic fiction than of the men who wrote the books. Tsubouchi’s challenge was, as a matter of fact, more impressive than either the full statement of his views or the original works he later wrote. His critical opinions were for the most part those of foreign writers, and applied by him to Japanese works. For example, Tsubouchi rejected the didactic novel, represented in Japan by such writers as Bakin, in favor of the artistic novel, the beauty of which is its own excuse for being. Quotations from Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, and a variety of other nineteenth-century giants buttressed his arguments. Sometimes he was caught in a dilemma, as when he had to deal with artistic novels of amorous content. Tsubouchi wrote, “The Frenchman Dumas wrote some extremely cruel works, and some romantic tales of illicit unions, but he never stooped to lascivious description of the mysteries of the bedchamber, such as are common in Japanese vulgar works. There is no objection to his novels being read aloud before the entire family.”