Modern Japanese Fiction by Year (4): 1923-1932 - Modernism
1923
Tokyo Earthquake leaves 142,807 people dead.Death of Arishima Takeo (1878-1923).
In the mid-1920s, the Shinkankaku-ha (Neo-Perceptionalist school, also called "Neo-Sensualist" or "New Senses School"), a Modernist literary group, comes up. Among the 18 young writers who were members were Kawabata Yasunari, Yokomitsu Riichi and Hagiwara Sakutaro. From 1924 to 1927 they published the magazine Bungei Jidai. These writers aimed for an art-centered alternative to the drabness of confessional fiction of the Shishosetsu (as the Tanbi-ha had done) and also the politically oriented writings of the Proletarian Literature Movement. They were attracted by such European Modernist movements as Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and Dadaism and believed that the foregrounding of perception in the writing of literature would originate a new mode of Japanese literary expression. By 1928 they ceased to exist as a group.
Early short stories by Yokomitsu Riichi. Many of Yokomitsu's early works were autobiographical.
"Maketa Otto" (The Defeated Husband, 1924). A rewrite of a very early story from 1920, "Kanashima no daika" (The Price of Unhappiness). Based on a painful incident (while at Waseda) in which Yokomitsu discovered his girlfriend in bed with another man. In the story, the protagonist, distrusting his wife, is given confirmation of her infidelity when he discovers her in the arms of their lodger. He feels a curious relief. This story has been called "the first Shinkankaku work."
"Haru wa Basha ni notte" (Spring Riding in a Carriage, 1926). Based on a personal tragedy: Yokomitsu's young wife, Kimiko, died of consumption in 1926 at the age of only twenty. Although Yokomitsu wrote in a different style than the Naturalistic Shishosetsu authors, this story based on direct personal experience shows that Yokomitsu could not free himself from the Japanese worldview that only the Self is knowable (John Lewell, Modern Japanese Novelists, p 474). Though small in scale, this is a masterwork of modern Japanese literature.
"Hanazono ni shiso" (Ideas of a Flower Garden, 1927). Another story based on the death of his wife.
"Kikai" (Machine, 1930). A densely constructed narrative, about a worker in a nameplate factory who by mistake drinks acid. A nightmarish setting in a workplace full of corrosive smells, and a suggestion that some kind of mechanistic fate has invaded the life of the narrator. Close to stream-of-consciousness.
["Spring Riding in a Carriage" translated in The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories; "Machine" translated in Modern Japanese Stories by Ivan Morris]
Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947) was an innovative novelist who dominated the literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s. Yokomitsu was born in Fukushima Prefecture and studied at Waseda University. He started to write in the early 1920s and formed the Shinkankaku-ha, whose ideological spokesman he was. He wrote in a highly polished style, marked by careful attention to rhythm and symbolism that became known as the "Shinkankaku-style." From 1928-31, Yokomitsu wrote the novel Shanghai. In the early 1930s, he experimented with a different style, a sort of psychological monologues, as in Kikai (The Machine, 1930). Later he turned to a plainer prose style. In 1936 he visited Europe, which gave rise to a travel diary and the long, unfinished novel Ryoshu (A Traveler's Sadness, 1937-46). The major stories and novels by Yokomitsu belong to the margins of the canon, he has lost the central position he was accorded in the 1920s and 1930s.
Early short Stories by Ibuse Masuji:
"Sanshouo" (The Salamander, 1923/1929). Ibuse's first story originally appeared in a student magazine under the title "Yuhei" (Confinement), but was later reworked into "The Salamander." It is a brief, first-person account of a an unfortunate salamander who has ventured into an underwater cave, lingered too long, and grown too large to swim out. As he realizes his imprisonment is permanent, the salamander falls into a state of anxiety. This "work without hope" has also been called "a gentle satire on intellectual pretense."
"Yofuke to ume no hana" (Plum Blossom by Night, 1925). The narrator, an impoverished young man in Tokyo, steps out one night for a bite to eat. He feels not only hungry, but also vaguely upset. He is accosted by a drunk who forces a five-yen note upon him (then a considerable sum). For months after that, the narrator is periodically seized by the urge to find the drunk and return the money. A final hallucination shows that his obsession with the drunk man and his gift has grown larger and larger, although there may also be an element of self-mockery here.
"Koi" (Carp, 1926/1928). Written in the Shishosetsu mode. The narrator receives a gift of a white carp from his friend Aoki. The personal ritual of caring for the carp is the focus of the story. The narrator removes the carp from a pond belonging to Aoki's mistress after the latter's death, and places it in the larger pool on the Waseda University campus. He goes to watch it in summer and winter. The carp obviously is a symbol of life and regeneration.
"Yane no ue no Sawan (Savan on the roof, 1929). The narrator finds a wounded wild goose and becomes reluctant to part with it even after it has regained health. Finally Savan (as he calls the goose) unexpectedly escapes to join his flock in the wild.
"Kuchisuke no iru tanima" (Kuchisuke's Valley, 1929). A brilliant portrait of an elderly man living in the countryside. Kuchisuke is an old family retainer whom the narrator goes to visit in the mountains. The old man's valley has to be flooded as a result of the construction of a new dam, but he remains searching for a glimmer of hope amid the destruction. Ibuse's wry humor and psychologically sharp but sympathetic characterization of villagers, peasants, fishermen, and other "unchanging people" became a major characteristic of his style.
[Translated by John Bester in Salamander and Other Stories, Kodansha International, except "Kuchisuke's Valley" which has been translated by John Whittier Treat in The Showa Antholohy 1, Kodansha International]
Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993) was born in Hiroshima Prefecture but lived for most of his life in Tokyo, where he studied literature at Waseda University. Ibuse wrote in a detached and often dry humorous tone and often found his themes in village life. He enlivened the tradition of the Shishosetsu but also wrote a series of novellas on historical themes as well as accounts of shipwrecked sailors. He built up a diversified yet solid reputation with novellas, historical tales, wartime diaries, and of course his major novel of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, Kuroi Ame (Black Rain, 1966). As John Lewell has written (Modern Japanese Novelists, p. 125): "The West has no writer directly comparable to Ibuse Masuji, for he writes essentially as an essayist who has extended his work into the realm of the novel."
[Study: Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire, The Literature of Ibuse Masuji, by John Whittier Treat, University of Washington Press]
Mystery stories by Edogawa Ranpo.
- "Nisen doka" (The Two-Sen Copper Coin, 1923) is this author's first detective story, published in the magazine Shin Seinen (New Youth), which thanks to Ranpo's contributions became the main venue for detective stories in the 1920s and 1930s. In this first Ranpo story figures a code, as in Poe's "The Golden Bug." But Ranpo was only inspired by the idea of using a code and borrowed nothing else, his story is wholly original. So is the code Ranpo introduces, based on the Japanese braille combined with the Buddhist invocation "Namu Amida Butsu." This first detective story by Ranpo contains an instance of ingenious ratiocination, but interestingly, at the end Ranpo reveals that the narrator has played a trick on his roommate, the would-be detective, so that the rug is pulled from under the reader's feet who is left with a hoax. In other words, from the very start Ranpo seems not very interested in writing "straight" detective stories in the style of his American and English contemporaries.
[The story has been masterfully translated by Jeffrey Angles in Modanizumu, Modernist Fiction from Japan, by William J. Tyler.]
"The Case of the Murder at D-Slope" ("D-zaka no satsujin jiken," 1925). The story in which Ranpo's serial detective, Akechi Kogoro, makes his first appearance, and for once a classical detective story. Interestingly, it is a very Japanese variant of the "locked room mystery." In the traditional Japanese house with its sliding doors and movable partitions, a locked room does not exist - there often are not even locks! But in a busy down-town neighborhood of Tokyo, people are always watching each other - this "mutual surveillance" creates in fact a virtual locked room. The beautiful wife of a second-hand book seller is found strangled in the living room behind the shop, but as various neighborhood people have been watching both the front and the back of the shop, it is impossible that a stranger has slipped in, so we have the equivalent of a "locked room." Akechi Kogoro is not the Western-suited dandy he would become later, but rather a poor student in traditional Japanese garb. Even in this classical story Ranpo could not desist from one of his favorite Ero-Guro elements: the murdered woman has died in the heat of a sadomasochistic game...
[This story has been translated by William Varteresian in The Early Cases of Akechi Kogoro, Kurodahan Press. Discussion in Purloined Letters, Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature 1868-1937 by Mark Silver (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008)].
- "Ningen Isu" (The Human Chair, 1925). One of Ranpo's most grotesquely erotic stories: a man hides in a Western armchair to enjoy the feeling of female bodies sitting on top of him. Yoshiko is a talented authoress who shuts herself up in her study to write every day after her husband has left for the Foreign Office. One morning, she receives a manuscript in which the "chair man" (who is a furniture maker) confesses his strange obsession, which finds its origin in his ugliness and the aversion women feel towards him. First he inhabits the hollow space inside an upholstered armchair he has made for the lobby of a Western-style hotel where he is "caressed" by many different female bottoms - mostly of foreign origin. Then the hotel closes and the chair is sold to a high-ranking official, who puts it in the study of his wife. The chair man develops a deep feeling of love for this purely Japanese woman, enjoying her gentleness of touch, while he lovingly cradles her on his knees - the reader can already see Yoshiko's shock coming, as she sits reading the manuscript in that very chair... but there is another twist at the end. This is not a detective story, but a pure Ero-Guro artifact in the mock confessional style of Tanizaki Junichiro.
(Translation included in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Tuttle Books).
- "Yaneura no Sanposha" (The Stalker in the Attic, 1925). In this masterful tale Ranpo combines Ero-Guro and detection elements. It is set in a newly built boarding house, where Goda Saburo - a young man bored with life, who seeks thrills by cross-dressing and going out in disguise like the protagonist in Tanizaki's "The Secret" - discovers that via the large Japanese-style built-in cupboard in his room, he has access to the unused attic which runs above all the rooms of the boarding house. He finds a new voyeuristic thrill by spying through cracks in the floor on his fellow boarders as a Peeping Tom. Also just for a thrill, he decides to murder a fellow boarder, Endo, who has the habit of sleeping with wide open mouth below one such a hole in the wooden ceiling. The method Goda uses is very ingenious, but he is no match for detective Akechi Kogoro.
(Translated by Seth Jacobowitz in The Edogawa Rampo Reader (Kurodahan Press 2008).)
"Imomushi" (The Caterpillar, 1929). The "caterpillar" is the symbol for Lieutenant Sunaga, a war veteran whose body has been terribly mutilated in battle: he has lost both legs and arms, and can neither hear nor speak. He has only his eyesight left. The lieutenant crawls through the room like a hideous insect, in nothing resembling the handsome man he once was. His wife, who has to nurse him, is filled with hatred for this ugly lump of flesh, but at the same time she is strangely attracted to it. She plays cruel games with her amputee husband, the stress and sexual frustration arouse her basest instincts, leading to further mutilation and ultimate disaster.
[Translation included in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Tuttle Books); also translated by Michael Tangeman in Modanizumu, Modernist Fiction from Japan, by William J. Tyler.]
Edogawa Ranpo (real name Hirai Taro, 1894-1965; Ranpo is also spelled as "Rampo") is Japan's greatest pre-war writer of mystery stories. Instead of writing the type of puzzle mysteries that were popular in England and America, he choose to write in the genre of Ero-Guro-Nansensu or “Erotic, Grotesque Nonsense,” a Japanese cultural movement (allied with Japanese Modernism) that emphasized eroticism and decadence. We also find the association of the macabre with the erotic in the Japanese literature of the period: Edogawa Ranpo was inspired by the stories of Tanizaki Junichiro, who did write many of such erotically tinted, macabre stories in the first decades of the 20th century, starting with the famous "The Tattooer" from 1910. Hirai Taro was born into the family of an ex-samurai in Mie Prefecture and, after studying economics at Waseda University in Tokyo, had a string of odd jobs before settling down as author. Hirai wrote under the pen name Edogawa Ranpo, a conscious homage to Edgar Allan Poe. When Japan entered upon its several mid-century wars, society frowned on Ero-Guro and even detective novels, so Ranpo switched to writing adventure stories for boys, which he continued to do for many decades. After the war, Ranpo was in the first place active in the critical field, where he made a large contribution to establishing the mystery novel as an important literary genre.
Ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense), called Ero-Guro for short, was a Japanese cultural movement that emphasized eroticism and decadence. It expressed a self-consciously modern ethos challenging state ideology and imperialism. “Guro” refers to things that are malformed, unnatural or horrific. This interest in the deviant and bizarre came up in the 1920s, in a social atmosphere of nihilistic hedonism. But it has older roots in Japanese culture: it goes for example back to such 19th century ukiyo-e artists as Yoshitoshi, who depicted decapitations and other acts of violence, including bondage. There was also a similar streak of the macabre with sexual overtones in the Kabuki, as in the famous "horror" play Yotsuya Kaidan. This was also a time that popular media (movies, magazines) reached all classes, connecting the countryside to the city.
The literary magazine Bungei Shunju is founded by Kikuchi Kan; in a few years time it will grow to a readership of 180,000, an astonishing figure. Kikuchi Kan introduces the format of the zadankai, the round table discussion, Japan's distinctive contribution to journalism. The participants could talk casually with their compeers, and the readers preferred the relaxed manner of the zadankai to sustained arguments.
1924
Chijin no ai (Naomi aka A Fool's Love) by Tanizaki Junichiro. Naomi is a modern girl, a "moga," who defies the Japanese tradition by her dress and behavior. She bobs her hair, prefers Western clothes and tries to look like the Hollywood star Mary Pickford. She has something "Eurasian" about her and even her name, Naomi, is tantalizingly "Westernesque." Joji, an engineer in his thirties, decides to take the fifteen-year old bar hostess of obscure origins in his home and educate her, to mold her into his future "dream woman." Of course, the whole set-up is just a transaction for Naomi and she conquers Joji through a consciously calculated performance of Westerness. She continues to enslave Joji after he makes her his lover (becoming totally obsessed with her) - from a seemingly shy and naive young woman, Naomi transforms herself into a perfect monster, a sort of femme fatale who keeps the abjectly subservient Joji on a tight string, guaranteeing herself sexual freedom while Joji becomes totally enslaved. And all the while, Joji's problems are unending, he is so helplessly infatuated and so gullible that he even allows the giddily promiscuous Naomi to take a string of foreign lovers... Tanizaki meant this ironically and writes with subtle humor, to show the cultural confusion brought on by the West (while also indulging his own obsessions). But readers took it literally and "moga" began indeed modeling themselves after Naomi; the term "Naomism" later became a description for the "Roaring Twenties" in Japan. It was taken so seriously that the newspaper in which the novel was serialized decided to discontinue it as being harmful to public morals! The best film version is the one by Masumura Yasuzo from 1967.
[Translated as Naomi by Anthony Chambers, Vintage]
Kawabata Yasunari starts writing his Palm-of-the-Hand Stories ("Tenohira Shosetsu aka Tanagokoro no Shosetsu"). Kawabata experimented with the form in 1923, and the next year wrote the first batch of those short-short stories. He would keep writing them over the entire span of his career, but with an emphasis on the years 1924 to 1932. Palm of the Hand stories are modernist experiments, often like prose poems, and with a dream-like or nightmarish quality. Some are like truncated novels, others like longer works that have been compressed into one or two pages, and we also have short, haiku-like compositions. Kawabata published these early stories in Bungei Jidai, and the first collection came out as a book in 1926. Kawabata never wrote poetry, but composed instead these brief flashes of poetic prose, in which his classical consciousness was blended with Modernist techniques. Kawabata was well-read in European avant-garde fiction and his fondness for startling images and abrupt transitions should be linked to Modernism rather than solely the Japanese tradition (Kawabata also wrote the script for Kinugasa Teinosuke's experimental film Kurutta Ippeiji). In the same period, Kawabata also wrote several autobiographical stories, like "Kaiso no Meijin" (An Expert in Funerals, 1923) and "Jurokusai no nikki" (Diary of a Sixteen-year-old, 1925). Kawabata was orphaned at an early age and lived with his grandfather, his last near relative. The second story describes the death of the grandfather.
[Translated by Lane Dunlop & J. Martin Holman as Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, Tuttle; more stories included in The Dancing Girl of Izu by J. Martin Holman, Counterpoint]
Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) was born in Osaka and spent most of his life in Tokyo and Kamakura. Kawabata was orphaned at an early age and raised in Ibaraki by his maternal grandfather. Afterwards, Kawabata studied at Tokyo Imperial University. In his youth Kawabata was a Modernist and, together with Yokomitsu Riichi, leader of the Neo-Perceptionist School and one of the founders of the magazine Bungei Jidai. Kawabata broke through as a writer with the novella, The Dancer of Izu, published in 1926. The novel Snow Country in 1937 secured Kawabata's position as one of the leading Japanese authors. Other major works followed after WWII: Thousand Cranes and The Sound of the Mountain (both 1949), followed by The Lake (1955), The House of Sleeping Beauties (1960) and The Old Capital (1962). In 1957, Kawabata was appointed chairman of the P.E.N. Club of Japan and at several international congresses he was instrumental in promoting the interest of Japanese writers. Kawabata was the first Japanese author to win the Nobel prize in Literature (1968). He died by his own hand in 1972.
Osaragi Jiro starts writing his Kurama Tengu series (1924-59), a historical adventure series which became immensely popular. Kurama Tengu is a freelance swordsman owing allegiance to none but himself. The stories are set in the last days of the Edo period, and show the hero fighting sometimes for the shogunate and sometimes for the imperial faction. There are several film versions, mostly from the 1930s and 1950s.
Osaragi Jiro (real name: Nojiri Kiyohiko, 1897-1973) was a popular writer, who like Edogawa Ranpo and Yoshikawa Eiji (see next post) excelled in Taishu Bungaku. Besides Kurama Tengu, he is famous for his "democratic" Chushingura version called Ako roshi (The Masterless Samurai of Ako, 1927-28). After the war Osaragi wrote the contemporary "serious" novels Kikyo (Homecoming, 1948) and Tabiji (The Journey, 1956).
1925
Peace Preservation Law - Universal Manhood Suffrage Law - First regular radio broadcasts begin by NHK.
"Remon" (Lemon) by Kajii Motojiro. This was Kajii's first story and it has remained his most famous. It describes the ennui of the narrator, a poor student, who roams around Kyoto. He buys a lemon in a neighborhood fruit store because it looks so beautifully yellow - it is an example of the artless art to which he himself aspires. Later he enters the Maruzen bookstore, one of his favorite haunts in the city. He piles up some art books and leaves the lemon, as a yellow bomb capable of exploding the temple of high culture, on top of the books. All Kajii's stories are brief, lyrical pieces, featuring a narrator who is a solitary figure. Other interesting stories by Kajii are "The Ascension of K" and "Feelings Atop a Cliff."
[All three stories translated by William Tyler and Stephen Filler in Modanizumu, Hawaii U.P.]
Kajii Motojiro (1901-1932) was born in Osaka to a merchant family and studied English literature at Tokyo University. He had to withdraw due to illness and died at age 31 from tuberculosis. He only twenty-odd stories before his untimely death. Recognition of his talent came only in the 1950s, when there was a sort of revival of his stories among young readers.
Arthur Waley publishes the first volume of his six-volume translation of The Tale of Genji.
1926
Death of Emperor Taisho; accession of Emperor Showa.
The publishing firm Kaizosha starts bringing out a 63-volume series of the "canon" of contemporary literature, for a very low price (one yen per volume) so that these books become available to everyone. 600,000 persons subscribed and other companies such as Iwanami Bunko followed suit by putting out similar series. Authors like Tanizaki made a fortune.
Izu no odoriko (The Dancing Girl of Izu) by Kawabata Yasunari. Kawabata was the "eternal traveler," and an important destination was the Izu Peninsula just south of Tokyo. The Dancing Girl of Izu, based on a visit to the area and published in two installments in 1926, made Kawabata famous. It tells of a melancholy high-school student, who, on a walking trip down the Izu Peninsula, makes friends with a group of wandering entertainers among whom the beautiful young dancer of the title. In the many film and TV versions that have been made of this story, it is always presented as purely a love story, but in fact it is more. One has to realize that wandering entertainers were seen as non-persons, they were ostracized from society and at the entrance to many villages there was a sign that they were not welcome. They were seen as ill, dirty and criminal. That is why the student when he sees the dancer immediately assumes that she can be bought. He even feels a sort of obligation to do that, as he wants to behave like a grown-up. But then, when he sees her bathing and realizes that physically she is still immature, he is relieved (later he will notice that these entertainers have in fact a high moral: the sister of the dancer doesn't even allow her to go to the cinema with the student). The dancer thus becomes an icon of female purity, typical for Kawabata's fiction. Although the student is in the first place attracted to the young dancer, he befriends the whole troupe of entertainers. Like them, as an orphan (as Kawabata was) he is a loner standing outside society. He is therefore happy that he is fully accepted as a friend by the wandering entertainers. This warm human feeling causes him to shed tears on the boat back to Tokyo.
[Translation by J. Martin Holman, Counterpoint; also in Columbia Anthology I; the older translation by Edward Seidensticker used to be incomplete (it was cut by a magazine editor), although a complete version now exists in The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories]
1927
Financial Crisis of 1927 - Japan's first subway line starts running between Asakusa station and Ueno station.
Death of Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927).
Late stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
The end of the Taisho period is accentuated by the suicide of Akutagawa in July 1927, which shocked the literary world. Many interpreted his death as the defeat of an intellectual, aestheticized literary practice disengaged from historical and social reality. In the last years of his life, Akutagawa moved from historical fiction and fiction treating various contemporary themes, to stories on personal themes. This was seen by critics as an embrace of the Shishosetsu and confessional fiction. However, as Seiji M. Lippit indicates in Topographies of Japanese Modernity (p. 44), Akutagawa's "plotless novel" in fact reflected a loss of faith in narrative and especially in the possibilities of self-expression and self-representation in literature" (making it a demonstration of Modernism).
- "Tenkibo" ("Death Register," 1926). A sad look back at three deceased family members: his insane mother, the elder sister he never knew and the father who gave him up as an infant. At the end Akutagawa suggests the difference between the living and the dead is only a very slight one, "like a shimmer of heat in the summer air."
- "Aru Aho no Issho" ("The Life of a Fool," 1927). A fragmentary text called "an autobiographical sketch," a mixture of diverse genres as autobiography, prose poem, short story, confessional novel etc. Consists of 51 brief, numbered and titled segments about significant episodes in Akutagawa's life. Not surprisingly, the story opens in a bookstore (Maruzen)...
- "Genkaku Sanbo" ("The Villa of the Black Crane," 1927). A fictional story about a selfish old man contemplating his miserable life and impending death in an isolated room surrounded by an alienated family. Full of biting irony.
- "Haguruma," ("Spinning Gears" aka "Cogwheels," 1927). The strongest of the autobiographical tales Akutagawa wrote in the years before his death - the reader almost feels he is pulled down the same dark hole as Akutagawa himself. The narrator is a novelist staying in a hotel in Tokyo to write stories. He takes long walks around the city, suffering from insomnia, and gradually loses his grip on reality. A whole life boils down to a few days of intense suffering, and finally inexhaustible paranoia.
- Kappa ("Kappa", 1927) is a short novel narrated by a psychiatric patient who speaks about his experiences in a country of Kappa - a satire of Japanese society. (Kappa are greenish, amphibious imps from yokai lore, roughly humanoid in form and about the size of a child, inhabiting ponds and rivers). The main characteristics of the Kappa society are materialism and nihilistic realism.
[Stories except "Genkaku sanbo," translated in Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, by Jay Rubin (Penguin Classics, 2006); except "Tenkibo", translated in Mandarins: Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, by Charles de Wolf (Archipelago Books, 2007); the novel Kappa has been translated by Geoffrey Bownas]
1928
On November 10 Hirohito is enthroned as Emperor of Japan (Showa Emperor).
Two excellent novels by Tanizaki Junichiro are published. Both are set in contemporary times in the Kansai.
- Manji ("Quicksand," 1928-1930).
A delicious novel, written in thriller-form, as the confession of a woman involved in a game of deceit and manipulation that reminded me of Liaisons dangereuses. Written after Tanizaki's move to the Kansai, this novel is conceived in the Osaka dialect and in a female voice (at that time, among the higher classes, very different from the Japanese used by men). We hear the voice of a cultured lady, widowed young, who in a monologue tells her story to a "Sensei," a writer, who could be Tanizaki himself. It is a story of lies, tricks and manipulation, where nobody is reliable. There are four persons involved and as their machinations resemble the shape of the Chinese character manji, a Buddhist symbol, that became the difficult to translate title of the novel. The married Sonoko confesses her infatuation with another young woman, Mitsuko, who is her fellow student at art school (Sonoko is still in her early twenties and also after marriage, in order to have something to do, continues with some light education). The principal of the school has rather cynically remarked that the face Sonoko has drawn of the deity Kannon Bosatsu does not resemble that of the model, but of Mitsuko, and thereby sets a reaction in motion that leads to a firm friendship between Sonoko and Mitsuko. Later Sonoko learns from Mitsuko that the principal had in fact been bribed to make this remark in order to discredit Mitsuko who wanted to get rid of a marriage proposal pushed by her family. And again later we learn that it was not a bribe, but that Mitsuko herself sent an anonymous postcard to the principal suggesting this relationship between Sonoko and herself to get rid of an unwanted suitor. In this way, we keep returning to the same incident seen from different points of view. Sonoko is a resourceful and pathological liar, who many times changes her statements. Later the novel will get even more complicated when Watanuki, Mitsuko's fiancé, joins the fray, and when Sonoko's husband himself falls in love with Mitsuko. This "ménage à quatre" ends with a double suicide, which itself is also a trick... but I will say no more, just enjoy this uniquely structured novel! A virtuoso display of plot and character control. The best film version is by Masumura Yasuzo with Wakao Ayako and Kishida Kyoko (1964).
[Translated by Howard Hibbett, Knopf]
- Tade kuu mushi ("Some Prefer Nettles," 1928-1929).
Kaname, a man from Tokyo whose marriage is failing, discovers the beauty of traditional Japan when his father-in-law, a widower, introduces him to the culture of Osaka via the Bunraku puppet theater. As his aesthetic taste changes, he begins to neglect his modern, enlightened wife and his Eurasian mistress, Louisa, and becomes fascinated by the traditional beauty of Ohisa, his father-in-law's inarticulate mistress from Kyoto. Ohisa is like a puppet trained to perform the refined and proper gestures of an earlier time, while tending to the needs of the father-in-law. This has been linked to Tanizaki's own conversion to the Japanese tradition, and his giving up of modern Westernesque "vampish" women in favor of wan but suggestive "traditional Japanese" women (of course, both types were based on Tanizaki's fantasy rather than on reality). There is also another autobiographical element in the novel as Tanizaki was on the verge of an amicable divorce from his own (first) wife, similar to Kaname in the novel. Kaname is relieved when his wife Misako takes a lover, but for some reason both husband and wife get stuck in this situation and neither takes any further action - their life together is quite comfortable. We also find several descriptions of places Tanizaki himself had recently discovered: such as the "rustic" puppet theater of the Island of Awaji. "Tade" is a bitter herb sometimes eaten with raw fish; the English title refers to the saying "Every worm to his taste; some prefer nettles," or: tastes differ.
[Translated by Edward Seidensticker, Tuttle]
Shanghai (1928-1931) by Yokomitsu Riichi, the author's first full-length novel.
A city novel centering on the story of a group of Japanese expatriates living in the International Settlement of Shanghai at the time of the May 30th Incident of 1925. The lives of the main characters play out against a historical backdrop of labor unrest and colonialist ambitions. Yokomitsu lived himself for a month in Shanghai and is successful in communicating the atmosphere of the festering city by incorporating striking visuality in a realistic mode. Shanghai is presented as both an ideological battleground and an exotic landscape where dreams of sexual and economic domination are nurtured. The New Sensationalist method has been stretched to apply to a single extended work - Donald Keene compares the novel to Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, with the same effect of emphasizing the alienness of the surroundings (Dawn to the West, p. 656).
[Translated by Dennis C. Washburn, Michigan U.P.]
1929
Shimazaki Toson starts serializing his greatest novel, Yoake mae ("Before the Dawn"), 1929-1935).
A novel on an ambitious scale, possessing both grandeur and a genuine sense of tragedy. Toson traces the life of his father, whom he calls Aoyama Hanzo in the novel, and depicts him as an idealist and dedicated reformer (a provincial loyalist) whose hopes are destroyed by the ugly realities of the Meiji restoration. Hanzo finally dies in bitter disillusionment. Set in Magome, a post station in the remote Kiso Valley (on the Nakasendo highway), the vast novel is an attempt to view the social and political upheavals of its time through the eyes of a contemporary. Yoake mae is a historical novel and not a Shishosetsu. It is written in an impersonal style and keeps its protagonist at a distance from the reader, also through the author's penchant for extreme understatement, but it has a tight structure and is a great introduction to Japan's turbulent 19th century.
[Translated by William E. Naff, Hawaii U.P.]
Kawabata writes his Modernistic masterpiece, Asakusa kurenaidan ("The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa").
Tokyo's Asakusa, today a nicely retro downtown area, in the 1920s was at the forefront of urban modernity. It was a vibrant entertainment district, with cinemas, theaters, bars and girly revues, full of raw energy. Kawabata captured its decadent allure in an experimental novel that was itself at the forefront of Modernity, composed of a mixture of diverse literary and nonliterary genres. The wandering narrator (Kawabata as a detached flaneur) uses unorthodox, kinetic literary techniques to show us Asakusa's hustle and bustle, with a cast of mostly female juvenile delinquents, such as Yumiko and her "Scarlet Gang." This novel was part of an ongoing exploration of Modernism during Kawabata's career, as William J. Tyler asserts in Modanizumu (p. 13). In his later work, Kawabata went on "to employ many of the Modernist techniques as detachment and distancing, randomness, a succession of images, and flaneur-like slumming." Tyler points at the fact that in regard to this last technique there is an interesting parallel between Kawabata's own Snow Country and Nagai Kafu's Strange Tale from East of the River - "namely, their mutual search for atypical beauty in unexpected places." (One could add that Kawabata also undertook such a search in The Dancer of Izu).
[Translated by Alisa Freedman, California U.P.]
Kani kosen ("The Factory Ship") by Kobayashi Takiji becomes the most famous proletarian novel of Japan.
Workers strike against brutal conditions aboard a factory ship fishing for crab and then canning the product in the Sea of Okhotsk. One incident after another shows the conditions of their exploitation under a sadistic manager - one ship is even allowed to sink as the insurance is worth more than the crew. The labor situation is called more hellish than The House of the Dead by Dostoevsky. Ironically, the men are happy when they see a navy destroyer, but the fierce response of the Imperial Navy toward their strike soon teaches them that the military marches hand in hand with capitalism. In 2008, this 80-year-old novella became a surprise bestseller in Japan (and was newly filmed as well as brought out in various manga versions) because young people with little prospects in the year of the economic crisis and resulting economic disparity identified with the crab ship workers - this was called the "Kanikosen Boom." The novella was filmed in 1953 by Yamamura So and in 2009 by Tanaka Hiroyuki.
[Translated by Frank Motofuji, Tokyo U.P. (together with The Absentee Landlord)]
Kobayashi Takiji (1903-33), born in Akita Prefecture, was the most famous writer in the Proletarian Literature Movement. After graduating from commercial education in Otaru, he worked as a bank clerk. In 1928, when leftists were rounded up throughout Japan, he wrote his first stories which were published in the proletarian journal Senki. He described the activities of the underground and the arrest and torture of its leaders. In 1929 followed The Factory Ship, the same year Fuzai jinushi (The Absentee Landlord), in which he exposed his own bank's role in the exploitation of farmers in Hokkaido. After being dismissed by the bank and going underground, in February 1933 he was arrested by undercover police. The same day he died as a result of torture during interrogation.
Koto no Oni ("The Demon of the Desert Isle," 1929-30) by Edogawa Ranpo. Called one of "the most deliberately, bizarrely outre of Ranpo's works" (Mark Silver), a hybrid between a murder mystery, adventure tale and science fiction, about a desert isle presided over by a hunchback and a sort of Japanese Dr. Moreau, who wants to "rid Japan of healthy people and fill it with freaks." His project is to abduct children, stunt their growth in tight-fitting boxes, and surgically graft foreign body parts unto them, even animal fur... This story formed the (loose) inspiration for the film Horrors of Malformed Men (Kyofu Kikei Ningen, 1969) by Ishii Teruo.
[This story has not yet been translated. Discussion in Purloined Letters, Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature 1868-1937 by Mark Silver (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008)].
1930
Showa Depression begins (1930-35) - Prime Minister Hamaguchi deadly wounded at Tokyo Station by a right-wing radical.
Death of Tayama Katai (1872-1930).
Bungei fukko ("Revival of the Arts and Letters") movement (until about 1935; also called Shinko geijutsu ha, "New Art School").
A revival or renaissance in Japanese literature when long-established writers such as Shimazaki Toson and Nagai Kafu published after a long silence, and the first generation of writers from the Showa period made their debut. Other participants in this group which was characterized by urbanity and a fascination with the erotic and grotesque (ero-guro-nanusensu), were Kawabata Yasunari and Ibuse Masuji. Writers began seriously to experiment with narrative construction (take Tanizaki's playful deconstruction of narrative authority in Portrait of Shunkin [1933], or Nagai Kafu's sauntering novel-within-the-novel in Strange Tale from East of the River [1937]). Other experimentalists were for example Okamoto Kanoko [see under 1937], Kajii Motojiro, Uno Chiyo [see under 1935], Edogawa Ranpo and Yumeno Kyusaku [see under 1935]. Collectively, these writers belong to a major movement called Modernism. Innovation within Japanese literary circles was cut short by the outbreak of the war in China in 1937, after which literature came under government control, which from 1942 grew increasingly strict.
Hayashi Fumiko writes her immensely popular, semi-autobiographical first novel Horoki ("Diary of a Vagabond").
Based on a diary Hayashi kept from 1922-28, the novel describes with absolute frankness her relations with various men as well as her struggles to earn money. In her poverty her basic aim was simply to eat and write. Her love of life helps her conquer her misery. Blurs in a Modernist way the distinction between poetic and prosaic language. The novel won the hearts of readers and became a sensation - people felt sympathetic for Hayashi's plight as the Recession had just set in, making everyone insecure. The novel sold 600,000 copies and made Hayashi's reputation as a writer. A hard worker, in the next 21 years she would write more than 270 books. Her premature death at age 48 in 1951 may have been brought about by overwork. Even after she was well-off, she continued writing at a frantic pace, as if she dreaded to fall into poverty again. Horoki was filmed in 1962 by Naruse Mikio with Takamine Hideko as Hayashi.
[Translated by Joan Ericson in Be A Woman (Hawai'i U.P., 1997)].
Hayashi Fumiko (1903 - 1951) was a popular novelist and poet. The child of itinerant peddlers who roamed around Western Japan, her childhood was marked by rootlessness and poverty. She had to do factory work for her own tuition when she went to high school and in fact, until she was 30 years of age, only knew poverty. In 1922 she went to Tokyo, where she worked as a waitress, a shop girl and in a toy factory. She lived a Bohemian existence with several men before settling down into marriage with the painter Tezuka Rokubin. Many of her works revolve around themes of free spirited women and troubled relationships. Although the characters in her early work are always living in poor circumstances, contrary to many of her contemporaries she was not interested in leftist politics. While Hayashi's early works were all based on her personal experiences, from the mid-thirties she started writing stories and novels that are free from autobiographical models. The first such story was "The Oyster" from 1935. Now a full-fledged author, she poured out a constant stream of novels and stories, essays and articles, poems and travelogues. In 1941, she had her own comfortable house in traditional style built in Kami-Ochiai in the Shinjuku Ward and lived there until her death. It has now been converted into the Hayashi Fumiko Memorial Hall and is open to the public.
[Study: Wandering Heart, The Work and Method of Hayashi Fumiko, by Susanna Fessler, SUNY; Be A Woman by Joan Ericson (Hawai'i U.P., 1997)]
1931
March Incident: a planned coup by rightist army officers and civilians is aborted. Also in the October Incident leaders of a planned military coup are arrested - Liutiaogou Incident: conquest of Manchuria by the Japanese Guangdong Army begins (1931-33).
Yoshino kuzu ("Arrowroot") by Tanizaki Junichiro. The narrator, a writer, is interested in the history and legends of Yoshino and its Later Southern Court as he wants to write a novel about this topic. Tsumura, a friend from Osaka who has relatives in the Yoshino area, entices him to a joint visit to the the area in the beautiful autumn season. It is revealed that Tsumura is on a quest of his own: his deceased mother came from the Yoshino area (the village of Kuzu), she was sold by her poor family into prostitution in Osaka, but redeemed by Tsumura's father. Because of this situation, Tsumura has never had contact with his relatives in Yoshino, and he now seeks them out, and also looks for memories of his mother. He finds her native village deep in the mountains and decides to marry a remote relative of hers who lives there. The writer is less successful: the legends he finds about the Later Southern Court are so little reliable, that he gives up his project of the historical novel. But instead, he has found the much more beautiful story of Tsumura (and has been reminded of a visit to Yoshino long ago with his mother). The novella is not only filled with historical lore, but also various Kabuki and No plays, for example about the theme of a mother fox who left her human child behind. This novella received high praise as metafiction in the postwar period. Kuzu, Japanese arrowroot, is used in the Japanese kitchen (mainly as starch), and Yoshino is traditionally a major production area. However, Kuzu-starch doesn't play a role in the novel; paper, another product of Yoshino, does, as it is made in the village of Tsumura's family (which happens to be called Kuzu, but written with different kanji). This paper is however nor made from kuzu, but from kozo, that is, the paper mulberry.
[Translated by Anthony Chambers, Vintage]
Tsuyu no atosaki ("During the Rains") by Nagai Kafu. An evocative description of Tokyo, from the Ginza in the 1930s, when the backstreets were full of so-called "cafés," which were actually bars whose unpaid waitresses made a living from unlicensed prostitution. In those years, café girls had replaced the geisha. During the Rains focuses on one of these waitresses, Kimie, who, vigorous, sloppy, amiable, manipulative and lascivious, reduces all male characters into mere shades. Kimie works in the café "Don Juan" at the Ginza; she has a lover/sponsor, the 36-year-old Kiyooka, but also several other men with whom she regularly spends the night in seedy Japanese hotels, such as the car dealer Yata and the elderly "lecher" Matsuzaki, an ex-bureaucrat. Kiyooka is jealous and spies on Kimie, to know who her other "friends" are and is wondering whether he will keep her or not; he somehow wants to take revenge on her. Kiyooka's wife Tsuruko knows about his dallying with geisha and waitresses, and is thinking about leaving him. A beautiful chapter is when Tsuruko visits her father in law, a retired professor of Chinese, who now lives as a sort of recluse in Tokyo's western suburbs. Kimie spends the night with Kawashima, the previous patron of a geisha-friend, who has just been released from prison. The next morning she finds a thank-you note, saying that thanks to her, he has put off his suicide for one night. This novel marvelously brings the twenty-year-old waitress/prostitute Kimie to life, as well as the buzzing café life on the Ginza, which of course was wiped away by the war.
[Translated by Lane Dunlop in During the Rains and Flowers in the Shade, Stanford U.P.]
Moju ("The Blind Beast") by Edogawa Ranpo. Pure Ero-Guro: a deranged, blind sculptor captures a singer and imprisons her in a labyrinth of giant sculptured body parts, before killing and dismembering her and scattering her limbs, head and torso all over Tokyo. But far from being satisfied, the blind killer continues on his sexually-charged spree of amputation and decapitation, all with one purpose: an exhibition of human sculptures which are a bit too life-like for comfort... This story was used as the inspiration for Moju: The Blind Beast, a great cult film made in 1969 by Masumura Yasuzo.
[Translated by Anthony Whyte (Shinbaku Books, 2009]
1932
Sakuradamon Incident: assassination attempt against the Showa Emperor by a Korean activist - Guangdong Army establishes the state of Manchukuo, with the last Qing Emperor Puyi as head of state - May 15 Incident: Premier Inukai assassinated during an attempted coup by young naval officers - Shirokiya Department Store Fire (Dec. 16)
Death of Kajii Motojiro (1901-1932).
Ashikari ("The Reed Cutter") by Tanizaki Junichiro.
One fine evening, the narrator who lives in the Kobe area, decides to visit the Minase Shrine near Oyamazaki, between Osaka and Kyoto at the confluence of the Katsura, Kizu and Uji rivers. This area is historically famous as being the location of the Detached Palace of Emperor Gotoba in the late 12th c. Musing upon old poems and passages of history, the narrator eventually finds himself sipping sake among the reeds of a sandbar in the river, while enjoying the view of the full moon. Then a voice rings out: he meets a man who tells him how he used to come here every year with his father when he was a small boy. The father would stop at the hedge surrounding a large mansion and peep through it (a reminder of such behavior in Genji Monogatari, where this is called kaimami) to watch the annual moon-viewing party of the beautiful Lady Oyu. The story continues: when he was older, the boy heard the story of Oyu (who looks like a traditional beauty from the Heian period) from his father. The father happened to meet the twenty-two-year-old Oyu in the theater; it was love at first sight, but Oyu was already a widow, and as she had a son, her husband's family did not allow her to remarry. Oyu's sister Oshizu thereupon offered to help: she would marry her sister's lover but in name only, so that the sister and her husband could be together in a ménage-à-trois. Thus they lived happily until Oyu's son died, and she was married off by her family to another man - therefore the peeping into the moonlit garden. The mysterious woman has become a lasting obsession - and who is the mother of the man who tells this story to the author: Oyu or Oshizu? Filmed in 1951 by Mizoguchi Kenji as Oyusama.
[Translated by Anthony H. Chambers, Knopf]
[Reference works used: Dawn to the West by Donald Keene (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984); Modern Japanese Novelists, A Biographical Dictionary by John Lewell (New York, Tokyo and London: Kodansha International, 1993); Narrating the Self, Fictions of Japanese Modernity by Tomi Suzuki (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Oe and Beyond, Fiction in Contemporary Japan, ed. by Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); Origins of Modern Japanese Literature by Karatani Kojin (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993); The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, 2 vols, ed. by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 and 2007); The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature by Susan J. Napier (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Writers & Society in Modern Japan by Irena Powell (New York, Tokyo and London: Kodansha International, 1983).]