Modern Japanese Stories

471 Pages·1989·7.15 MB·English

by  Ivan Morris

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction : 9
MORI OGAI : Under Reconstruction : 35
TOKUDA SHUSEI : Order of the White Paulownia : 45
NAGAI KAFU : Hydrangea : 65
SHIGA NAOYA : Seibei's Gourds : 81
TANIZAKI JUNICHIRO : Tattoo : 90
KIKUCHI KAN : On the Conduct of Lord Tadanao : 101
SATOMITON : The Camellia : 138
MUR5 SAISEI : Brother and Sister : 144
SAT5 HARUO : The House of a Spanish Dog : 1 62
AKUTAGAWA RYUNOSUKE : "Autumn Mountain" : 173
OGAWA MIMEI : The Handstand : 185
HAYAMA YOSHIKI : Letter Found in a Cement-Barrel : 204
IBUSEMASUJI : The Charcoal Bus : 211
YOKOMITSU RHCHI : Machine : 223
KAWABATA YASUNARI : The Moon on the Water : 245
ITO EINOSUKE : Nightingale : 258
NAGAI TATSUO : Morning Mist : 302
NIWA FUMIO : The Hateful Age : 320
5
6 TABLE OF CONTENTS
HAYASHI FUMIKO : Downtown : 349
HIRABAYASHI TAIKO : A Man's Life : 365
SAKAGUCHI ANGO : The Idiot : 383
INOUEYASUSHI : Shotgun : 416
NAKAJIMA TON : Tiger-Poet : 452
DAZAI OSAMU : The Courtesy Call : 464
MISHIMA YUKIO : The Priest and His Love : 481
Selected Bibliography : 503
Index of Authors : 510
Index of Translators : 511
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENT s are due to the Japan Quarterly for permission to use the
translations of "Seibei's Gourds" (there called "The Artist"), "Autumn
Mountain," "Tiger-Poet" ("The Wild Beast"), and "The Hateful Age";
to Today's Japan for "Under Reconstruction," "The Handstand" ("Wager
in Midair"), and "The Courtesy Call" ("A Visitor"); to the Paris Review
for "Tattoo" ("The Victim"); to United Asia for "The Moon on the
Water"; to Grove Press for "Downtown" ("Tokyo"); and to Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., for permission to translate works by Tanizaki, Kawabata, and
Mishima.
FACTUAL NOTES
1. Japanese names are given in the usual Japanese order, with the family
name preceding the personal name. Well-known writers in Japan are often
called by their personal names, especially after their deaths. Thus most people
refer to Ogai and Soseki, although their respective surnames were Mori and
Natsume.
2. Japanese vowels are pronounced as in Spanish or Italian, each being given
approximately its full value. Consonants are much as in English, except that
g is always hard. Macrons, used to indicate long o s and us, have been omitted
from such common place names as Tokyo and Kobe and from words like
Shinto and Shogunate. Acute accents have occasionally been used in such
words as Abe and sake that might otherwise be mispronounced.
3. The period names Meiji, Taisho, and Showa are frequently used in the In-
troduction and in the notes on the authors. These refer to the reigns of the
three modern emperors and have much the same significance in a literary
discussion as do Victorian, Edwardian, and the like in English. The periods
are: Meiji, 1868-1912; Taisho, 1912-1926; Showa, 1926 to date.
4. A rough indication of money equivalents may be helpful since prices,
wages, etc., are frequently mentioned in the stories. One hundred sen equal
one yen. In terms of English and American currencies, since 1949 the value
of 1,000 yen has remained stable at approximately $2.80 or -£1. By referring
to the date of a story, the reader can determine the approximate money
equivalent from the following table, which is based on the price of rice, the
main staple commodity; the second figure in each pair shows the value of
one yen in terms of 1958 prices: 1912=¥615.00; 1930=¥456.00; 1940=
¥286.00; 1944=¥232.00; 1946=¥42.00; 1949=¥1.70; i954=¥i.o8.
INTRODUCTION
BY Ivan Morris
CONTEMPORARY literature in Japan, despite its re-
mote ancestry, may be regarded as a new literature, scarcely beyond
its formative stage. The Meiji Restoration, which ended two and
a half centuries of strictest seclusion, marked a departure in Japanese
writing, as it did in politics, education, and so many other fields. For
a general understanding of the modern Japanese novel or short story
it is hardly necessary to go back more than a century. The Japanese
language has undergone a continuous development since the earliest
times and to this extent modern fiction derives stylistically from clas-
sical and medieval writing. Even here, however, the Restoration had
an important effect by bringing the literary language closer to that of
ordinary speech. The major influences can be found among works
of foreign literature introduced into Japan after about i860 and among
certain important Japanese writers of the Meiji period.
This introduction cannot attempt to present a systematic history of
modern Japanese literature, but it may be worthwhile to indicate a
few general trends that can help the reader to view in context the
twenty-five stories presented here. A note concerning each of the
twenty-five authors and his place in modern Japanese writing has been
placed before his story.
The historical approach has many dangers. Too much concentration
on "social backgrounds," "literary influences," and "schools of writing"
may lead us to read the stories, not as independent works, but as rep-
resentatives of some particular period, and to regard their writers,
not as unique individuals having their own views of life and their
9
10 INTRODUCTION
characteristic methods of expression, but simply as members of certain
literary schools with established outlooks or programs.
When, however, we are faced with a writing as remote from most
Western readers as that of Japan, the historical approach can hardly be
avoided. As Mr. Angus Wilson has said: "To read the literature of a
civilization or age entirely or almost entirely unfamiliar emphasizes
one's unconscious dependence on historical background. To begin
with, the unfamiliar is likely immediately to present a number of
specious qualities—the 'quaint', the 'charming', the 'horrific'—which
are merely attempts to come to terms with a strange world on a
surface level. Greater familiarity always destroys the immediate im-
pressions."
* * *
In few countries is the dividing line that marks the beginning of
the "modern" period so clear as in Japan. What historians term the
Meiji Restoration was the result of interacting processes that had been
continuing for a very long time. When these processes finally reached
their culmination, the collapse of the old regime, which had given the
country some two and a half centuries of peace and stability, occurred
with remarkable speed. In 1867 the gradual stagnation and disintegra-
tion of the economic system, increasing pressure from foreign powers,
and the revolt of four of the great clans combined with numerous
other factors to bring about the downfall of the centralized feudal
government that had been in the hands of a succession of military rulers
belonging to the Tokugawa family. Political power was handed over
in 1867 to the Emperor Meiji and his advisers. In the years that followed,
every effort was made to abolish feudalism, especially in its political
and economic aspects, and to turn Japan into a centralized nation-state
on the European model. The political structure was completely re-
organized and a capitalist economy rapidly developed with the im-
petus of a belated industrial revolution. In the effort to become "mod-
ern," countless old customs, habits, and heritages were scrapped in
a wave of cultural iconoclasm which at one stage went so far that there
were serious proposals to replace the Japanese language by English and
the native religions by Christianity.
Following 1868 every effort was made to adopt the techniques and
culture of the West. Japan, which for two hundred and fifty years had
11 INTRODUCTION
to a large extent been isolated from the main stream of Western de-
velopment, tried in the period of a few decades to absorb everything
from the outside that would turn her into a modern nineteenth-cen-
tury state; such a state might be able to deal with foreign nations on
a basis of equality and, above all, to avoid the fate that had overtaken
other materially backward Asian countries. By the last decade of the
century the Meiji oligarchy had succeeded in forging a modern military
establishment which enabled the country to defeat China in 1895 and,
one decade later, to win the war against Russia, thus establishing Japan
as one of the Great Powers.
The cumulative effect on the country's literature of all these im-
mense changes can hardly be overestimated. Nonetheless, the destruc-
tion of the old and the adoption of the new was not immediately re-
flected in Japanese writing. The original aim of the oligarchy was to
import the techniques of the West while preserving the Japanese
"spirit" intact. Chimerical as this ideal eventually proved to be, it caused
the emphasis to be placed at first on the material aspects of Western-
ization. There was a cultural lag of some fifteen years during which
literature continued on its course, relatively unaffected by Western
influences. This literature, it should be noted, had sunk to a remarkably
low level. The prose fiction of the late Tokugawa period was in a groove
of mediocrity, having largely lost the power and originality that animated
the work of the great prose writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, such as Saikaku, Kiseki, and Akinari. Frivolous tales about
courtesans, banal stories of licentiousness in the gay quarters, and prolix
works of a didactic nature were the stock-in-trade of the early nine-
teenth-century prose writers with only two or three notable excep-
tions.
Had late Tokugawa literature been more vigorous and creative, it
is possible that the literary impact of Western culture would have
proved to be less overwhelming. As it was, the introduction of European
culture resulted in a major break with the past that has no parallel in
any of the important literatures of the West.
Until about i860 the only foreign literary influences of importance
had come from China. For over two centuries, contacts with Europe
had by and large been limited to the small Dutch settlement off Naga-
saki; and there the focus was on trade rather than culture. Translations
12 INTRODUCTION
of European literature began in the i86o's, but it was not until 1878
that the first complete novel from the West was translated into Japa-
nese. As in the case of many of the early translations, the choice, Bulwer-
Lytton's "Ernest Maltravers,,, strikes one as peculiar. Practical in-
formation was at least as important a criterion as literary value in in-
troducing books from the West and one of the most successful of all
the early importations was Samuel Smiles' utilitarian tract, " Self-
Help." The novels of Disraeli, reflecting modern political processes,
were also given a strange degree of attention.
In the 1880's the trickle of Western works grew into a stream and,
by the end of the century, into a mighty torrent which is still con-
tinuing in the present day. Several of the most gifted writers of the
Meiji period devoted much of their energies to the translation of one
or more European authors; indeed, it was mainly through these trans-
lations that the reading public first became acquainted with the various
aspects of modern fiction. In many cases Japanese writers then tried
to produce the same type of novels in Japanese, with rather surprising
results. One Japanese author, for example, under the impact of "Crime
and Punishment," wrote a story about the life and tribulations of a
man belonging to the untouchable eta class. For even in these early
days of direct assimilation, European literary influence was rarely a
matter of straightforward imitation. Naive interpretation, and often
misunderstanding, of the models played a capital part in the process of
absorbing Western literature. As a modern Japanese critic, Mr. Yoshida
Kenichi, has pointed out, Tolstoy's "Resurrection" when first intro-
duced into Japan was considered to be merely a romantic tale of unhappy
love.
The main effect of the influx from the West was not so much to pro-
vide specific literary models as to encourage Japanese to break away
from sterile traditions and to describe in a more or less realistic way
the brave new world that they saw growing up about them. The year
1885 is generally regarded as a key date in the development of modern
Japanese fiction. That year saw the publication of "The Essence of the
Novel" (Shosetsu Shinzui) by Tsubouchi Shdyd (1859-1935). Not
only was this the first important critical work of the new era, but it was
the first serious theoretical study of the novel in Japan. During the
Tokugawa period, and indeed ever since the days of "The Tale of