Modern Japanese Fiction by Year (8): 1956-1960 - The Years of Recovery
In 1956, the White Paper on the Economy declared an “end to the postwar period.” This meant that Japan had finally recovered from war devastation and regained the level of overall national wealth it had around 1935. In other words, economically the Japanese were finally back where they had been two decades earlier.
The late fifties were still a period of labor conflicts and political strife - about whether the security treaty with the U.S. would have to be renewed or not (the answer, in 1960, was "yes," but the protests against the renewal became the largest anti-government demonstration in postwar Japan) - but the first half of the sixties were the politically calmer years of the birth of the "economic miracle," of the start of the rather unthinking pursuit of economic gains. The second half of the fifties also saw the beginning of rebellious youth culture in Japan ("Taiyo-zoku"), as all over the world.
As a result of high growth, by the middle of the sixties most Japanese would consider themselves as "middle class;" the postwar poverty was for good a thing of the past. Still, the trauma from militarism and the loss of the war festered on and the question of identity remained an important one. The prewar identity had been replaced by the consumer society, new economic patterns, rise in the status of women, advance of the conjugal family, new education, unionization, pursuit of personal happiness and new religious freedom. Much of that was good, or even necessary, but was it enough, and hadn't much been lost as well?
As regards literature, this was a fecund time. After the "Third Postwar Generation," in the second half of the 1950s appeared various important new writers as Oe Kenzaburo, Kaiko Takeshi and Miura Tetsuo. Woman writers coming to prominence included Enchi Fumiko, Ariyoshi Sawako, Setouchi Harumi, Kurahashi Yumiko and Kono Taeko. The 1960s was the beginning of an era when woman writers became increasingly important.
The writers from the "three generations" that started in the postwar years were now at their best: Abe Kobo wrote The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another and The Ruined Map; Mishima Yukio published The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and After the Banquet; Inoue Yasushi The Roof Tile of Tempyo and Tun-huang; Endo Shusaku The Sea and Poison and Volcano.
The doyens of Japanese literature also continued writing strong works, such as The Key and Diary of a Mad Old Man by Tanizaki Junichiro (who would die in 1965); The House of Sleeping Beauties and The Old Capital by Kawabata Yasunari; and Black Rain, the seminal novel about the aftermath of the atomic bomb, by Ibuse Masuji.
"Popular" literature or genre literature also flourished. Dominant writers were: Matsumoto Seicho (detective and historical fiction), Shiba Ryotaro (historical fiction), Genji Keita (humorous stories about salarymen), and Hoshi Shinichi and Komatsu Sakyo (both science fiction).
1956
The 1956 White Paper on the Economy declares an “end to the postwar period.”
Japan becomes a member of the United Nations.
Prostitution Prevention Law passed.
Mizoguchi is a young man afflicted with a stutter, who from his youth on has been so obsessed with the beauty of the Golden Pavilion (possibly as a symbol for the whole of Japanese traditional culture) that he gradually - especially after the war has been lost and the Golden pavilion has survived unscathed - starts feeling the urge to destroy it. His character defect has made him jealous of beauty, he sees true beauty as something that overpowers and finally destroys. He is prodded on by his friend and "bad angel" Kashiwagi, a cynic, who has a club-foot, and likes to hold long "philosophical" digressions. It is as though the temple is shutting off Mizoguchi's access to the normal world. The Golden Pavilion in all its arrogance becomes his mortal enemy. And after Mizoguchi has finally set fire to the Pavilion, he feels properly relieved - instead of trying to commit suicide as the real arsonist did, he sits down on the hill above the temple and lights a cigarette, enjoying the view of the blaze. Japanese tradition fares badly in this novel. The tea ceremony, flower arrangement and garden viewing - and not to forget Zen Buddhism - provide occasions for acts of sadism, arson and treachery. Traditional symbols are deliberately contrasted with the ugliest of actions and placed in a world of perverted values. The abbot of the temple is caught by Mizoguchi when he secretly visits a geisha. At a tea ceremony, a woman who is taking leave of her lover who has been called into battle, offers him her breast milk in a traditional tea bowl. An American soldier walking in the garden of the Golden Pavilion with his pregnant Japanese girlfriend, tempts Mizoguchi into kicking her in the belly, so that she has a miscarriage. The novel, a study in evil, has therefore been called "an expression of postwar nihilism." But the novel can also be understood from Mishima's (anti-) aesthetics: the Golden Pavilion simply is too beautiful, it has to be robbed of its arrogance and power. Mizoguchi - and also Mishima - seems to feel that he will only become free through its destruction. Filmed in 1958 by Ichikawa Kon with Ichikawa Raizo.
[Tr. by Ivan Morris]
(2) Kagi (“The Key”) by Tanizaki Junichiro is a sardonic tale of an aging scholar who encourages his younger wife to take her daughter's fiancé as a lover, and then voyeuristically pores over her diary so that he can share in their amorous games by proxy.
In fact, both husband and wife write a diary and read each other's secrets. Shame and convention forbade a couple to talk about their sexual life; though voyeuristic, this round-about way was one possibility of communication. Of course, they pretend not to know each other's secrets. The "key" of the title refers to the key for the drawer where the husband keeps his diary, which he "hides" in a spot known to his wife. The husband starts giving his wife cognac in the evenings and when she gets sleepy, he undresses her and takes pictures of her body. For the first time, the husband can watch his wife to his heart's content, which makes him more excited than is good for him, for he has dangerously high hypertension. He has the photos developed by their daughter's fiancé, who as a result gets more interested in the mother than in the daughter. The charade stops when the professor suddenly dies from a stroke. The mother, daughter and her fiancé now set up a menage-a-trois. Filmed in 1959 by Ichikawa Kon with Kyo Machiko and Nakamura Ganjiro.
[tr. Howard Hibbett]
(3) Hyoheki ("The Ice Wall") by Inoue Yasushi
Another novel by Inoue Yasushi about contemporary affairs that has not been translated into English. It is based on a real-life mountaineering accident and the resulting scandal involving an important company’s controversial new product, nylon rope, but it is also an intense double love triangle. Two friends are in love with the same married woman. Both are enthusiastic mountaineers and when on New Year's Day they try to scale the difficult north side of the Hodaka, their nylon rope breaks and one friend falls to his death. Was it murder, suicide, or was the rope faulty?
[No English translation]
[1983 film poster]
Set in a poor mountain village, Narayama is a retelling of a folk tale in which an old woman is taken by her son deep into the mountains to die, according to ancient custom. The reason is the lack of food in the village, so that the population may not increase. Therefore the elderly are regularly subjected to euthanasia (in reality, such a cruel costume never existed in Japan). Central to the novel is the acceptance of fate dictated by the community, which is seen as something noble. Twice made into a feature film: first by Kinoshita Keisuke in 1958, and again by Imamura Shohei in 1983.
[No English translation]
(5) Bodaiju ("The Buddha Tree") by Niwa Fumio
Niwa Fumio, the son of a priest of New Pure Land Buddhism, was a popular author with 80 novels and 100 short story collections to his record. The novel The Buddha Tree uses his unhappy childhood at the family temple as a backdrop: when he was eight years old his mother (priests were allowed to marry!) eloped with a Kabuki actor, an event that greatly traumatized him. In the novel the story is elaborated fictionally. The Buddha Tree is in the first place interesting for the insight it allows in the daily ins and outs of a Buddhist temple and the relations between a temple and its parishioners. By the way, a famous short story by Niwa Fumio is "The Hateful Age" ("Iyagarase no nenrei," 1947), about a family terrorized by a senile grandmother, which has been translated in Modern Japanese Short Stories, An Anthology by Ivan Morris (ed.).
[tr. Kenneth Strong]
1957
"Onnazaka" or literally "women's slope" is the easier of two slopes leading to a shrine or temple: usually one way up is a steep staircase, while the other is a gentle slope. The novel is set in the Meiji-period. At only 16 years of age, Tomo, the daughter of a former low-ranking samurai, marries a high-ranking bureaucrat, Shirakawa Yukitomo, in Fukushima. Wives had little status at this point in Japanese history and were expected to think only of serving the family, the head of which, under the household system of the day, enjoyed absolute control over all matters of property, residence, marriage, and divorce. Yukitomo proves to be an exceedingly cruel and tyrannical husband even for such times. He forces Tomo not only to choose mistresses for him (!) but also to look after them under the same roof, and shows no qualms about taking any woman he desires, including the maids and his own daughter-in-law, for his own. Tomo buries her sorrow and emptiness deep inside, sacrificing herself for the sake of the family and enduring in the belief that she will one day reach the light at the end of the tunnel. Yet illness and death are all that await Tomo. She has waited all those years for nothing...
[tr. John Bester]
(2) Three short stories by Kaiko Takeshi
Kaiko Takeshi started publishing in 1953, but his breakthrough came with three stories he wrote in 1957:
- The 28th Akutagawa Prize is won by "Hadaka no osama" ("The Emperor's New Clothes"), a story critical of the pressures placed on school children by Japan's educational system.
[No translation]
- "Panniku" ("Panic") is a story about a dedicated forester in a rural prefecture of Japan, who struggles against government incompetence and corruption. Kaiko wrote the story as a satirical allegory comparing human beings to mice.
[tr. Charles Dunn, unavailable]
- "Kyojin to omocha" ("Giants and Toys") is set in the world of business advertising. Three confectionery companies are locked in cut-throat rivalry for a share of a market increasingly dominated by imported US candy. One of the companies turns a young woman with exceptionally bad teeth into a star for their campaign. A masterwork in the new genre of "business novels." Filmed in 1958 by Masumura Yasuzo.
[tr. Tamae K. Prindle in Made in Japan and Other Japanese "Business Novels"]
(3) Umi to Dokuyaku (“The Sea and Poison”) by Endo Shusaku, a novel about the problem of individual responsibility in wartime based on a true case, and also the work that helped Endo gain a national reputation.
Set largely in a Fukuoka hospital during WWII, this novel is concerned with medical experimentation carried out on downed American airmen. Medical intern Suguro undergoes a moral predicament when the Japanese military and his superiors force him to participate in the cruel vivisection of prisoners of war. The surgeon in charge refuses a narcotic to his American victim, declining to consider him as a patient. Suguro remains his whole life obsessed by feelings of horror, but is strangely unable to feel real guilt. Filmed in 1986 by Kumai Kei.
[tr. Michael Gallagher]
(4) Mishima Yukio writes Bitoku no yoromeki ("Virtue Falters"), his version of Radiguet's The Devil in the Flesh.
The story of a respectable married young woman's plunge into a yearlong affair with a bachelor the same age she once kissed, before her marriage, in a summer resort. Now that her husband's interest in her has waned, this one clumsy kiss from the past takes on a special importance. Setsuko seeks out the same man for an affair, from which they both derive great pleasure; but later she quietly withdraws, without any fuss, although the affair has forced her to have three abortions, one almost killing her. This is a good example of the "three-penny" novels Mishima wrote, just like for example Kawabata or Endo, as writers in Japan did not receive large royalties and were thus forced to keep writing profusely in various genres. The novel became a runaway bestseller and the expressions "virtue falters," as well as "yoromeku, to commit adultery" and "yoromeki fujin, adulterous lady," became popular. Radiguet, who died young, was one of Mishima's idols.
[No translation]
1958
The Kanmon Tunnel opens, connecting Honshu and Kyushu by road for the first time.
Typhoon Ida kills at least 1,269 in Honshu.
Construction of Tokyo Tower is completed.
(1) Early stories and short novel by Oe Kenzaburo, including the 29th Akutagawa prize winning "Prize Stock."
"Shisha no Ogori" ("Lavish are the Dead," 1957)
Oe's first story, containing in embryonic form many of the themes of his mature work. In this surreal tale, a young man (who like Oe himself is a student of French literature at Tokyo University), to earn a little extra money, takes on a job looking after dead bodies awaiting dissection, floating in a vast pool of preservative in the cellar of the university's Medical Faculty. The bodies which are still good have to be moved to a new pool. As he is engaged on this unpleasant job with another student, a young woman who appears to be pregnant, and an elderly caretaker, the student enters into mental conversations with the dead. At the end it appears there has been a mistake, and their disgusting work has been for nothing.
[tr. John Nathan]
"Shiiku" ("Prizestock" aka "The Catch", 1958). Akutagawa Prize.
About the friendship between a young village boy and a captured African-American pilot during WWII. But this is not a sentimental tale of a beautiful inter-cultural friendship: to the country boy, living in a remote part of Japan, the captured soldier who was shot down from the sky is something between a god and a pet animal. When the villagers come to deliver him to the authorities, the soldier takes the boy hostage. The townsfolk manage to kill the soldier, but in the process the father has to smash the hand of his son with a hatchet.
[tr. John Bester as “The Catch”; John Nathan as “Prizestock” in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness and also in The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories]
Memushi kouchi ("Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids," 1958)
This first novel is a masterful pastoral story about lost innocence, and about abandonment and betrayal. During WWII, a group of juvenile delinquents from a reformatory in Tokyo is evacuated to a remote village where they are shamefully abandoned by villagers who fear that the plague has broken out (there are piles of rotting animal corpses). When the villagers flee to a neighboring village, they barricade the boys in and leave them to their fate. The boys first show compassion to each other and outsiders (such as an abandoned Korean boy, a young girl abandoned in a warehouse and a deserter) but in the end they cannot evade the hopelessness of their situation. The girl dies of plague after being bitten by a dog, the narrator's brother runs away into the forest and the villagers eventually return and are furious with the state in which they find the village. They kill the deserter and threaten the boys with violence to keep silent about the actions of the villagers. Only the narrator refuses and is chased into the forest to an unknown fate.
[tr. Paul St. John Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama]
[Study: Susan J. Napier, Escape from the Wasteland]
(2) Onnamen (“Masks,” lit. “Female Masks”) by Enchi Fumiko takes up the theme of spirit possession and jealousy explored in the Lady Rokujo section of The Tale of Genji to weave a complex tale of female revenge against men ("the archetypal woman is not only an object of man's eternal love, but can also be an object of man's eternal fear").
Two men, Ibuki (a young professor of Japanese literature) and Mikame (a psychiatrist) are both in love with Yasuko, a beautiful young widow with whom they have come into contact through their common interest in folklore studies. Yasuko’s late husband died on a climbing expedition and she still lives with his mother, the mysterious Togano Mieko. Neither Ibuki not Mikame is initially aware that the late husband had a twin sister, Harume, who has been brought up in secret by Mieko. Though attractive, Harume is severely retarded. Mieko has a hidden agenda, which is the continuation of the family bloodline through the impregnation of her mentally weak daughter. So Ibuki, who has initiated a passionate affair with Yasuko, is tricked into thinking that he is sharing his bed with Yasuko, while in reality Harume has been substituted for her…
[tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter]
[Jianzhen / Ganjin]
The “Tempyo” in the title is the name for an era (729-749) when Japan was engaged in her first attempt to acquire the culture of a more advanced civilization, the Tang empire of China. Why was it important to bring “Vinaya-master” Ganjin to Japan? Because the orthodox transmission of the Law in Buddhism is from master to disciple. That disciple, after passing several tests, is then officially ordinated on an ordination platform, where a certain number of officially ordinated elder priests has to be present. By bringing Ganjin with a number of his already ordained followers to Japan, the “orthodox transmission” of Buddhism was finally established on Japanese soil. The determination Ganjin demonstrated was most impressive. In the eleven years from 743 to 754, Ganjin attempted some six times to travel to Japan. Five times, he was thwarted by unfavorable weather conditions and government intervention (the Chinese at first did not want this important monk to leave). In 748, during the fifth attempt, his ship was blown so far off course that Ganjin landed on the southern island of Hainan. This journey alone, including the long trek back to Yangzhou, took a full three years and cost Ganjin his eyesight due to an infection. In 753 at long last an official Japanese embassy visited China, and Ganjin could travel with this group. They landed in Kyushu and in 754 arrived in the Japanese capital of Nara, where they were welcomed by the Emperor. A large ordination platform was built at Todaiji Temple and thus, finally, took place the orthodox transmission of Buddhism to Japan (Buddhism had trickled into Japan in the 6th century, and by the 8th c. had become a state religion). By the way, the "roof tile" of the title is a shibi, an end tile in the form of a mythical sea monster. This tile was sent from China to Japan and was installed on the roof of Toshodaiji (the temple founded by Ganjin and his disciples) as a symbol of the spread of Buddhism.
[tr. James T. Araki]
(4) Ten to Sen ("Points and Lines") by Matsumoto Seicho. That the double suicide of a young couple on a secluded beach in Kyushu is not what it seems, comes to light thanks to the painstakingly gathering of evidence by two police officers.
This detective novel was in three ways innovative: instead of the unrealistic mysteries by Yokomizo Seishi and others, this was a realistic police procedural; it was a "social mystery," i.e. the background of the crime was formed by social injustice and corruption (Matsumoto singlehandedly created this sub-genre which would have countless followers) and thirdly, it was also a "railway travel mystery," another important genre created by Matsumoto. Trains are a popular form of transport in Japan, more so perhaps then in other countries. The late 1950s were a time when Japan was getting on its feet again and people were starting to make holiday trips by rail. In Points and Lines, not only do the detectives travel a lot by train in the course of their job, the solution of the crime lies in a trick with the time table (by the way, something only possible in a country like Japan where all trains run exactly on time!). Points and Lines was filmed in 1958 with Takamine Mieko.
[tr. Makiko Yamamoto and Paul C. Blum]
(5) Kaei ("The Shade of Blossoms") by Ooka Shohei is a novel of manners set in the decadent, upscale Ginza bar and nightclub milieu of the 1950s.
This short novel (based on a real life model) depicts an aging and rather naive nightclub hostess’s struggle. The central character, Yoko, is already in her late thirties. She has worked as a nightclub hostess all her life, but unlike most of her colleagues has never managed to either hook a husband and start a new life, or find a sponsor who sets her up with her own bar or club. She's willful, and unwilling (and unable) to make the necessary compromises. With her looks diminishing, her situation looks ever bleaker. Ooka's setting has changed but not his recurring theme: his characters are still adrift and struggling for survival in an inhospitable "jungle." Filmed in 1961 by Kawashima Yuzo.
[tr. Dennis Washburn]
1959
Ise Bay Typhoon crosses central Honshu and leaves 5,000 dead.
Beginning of protests against the revision of the United States-Japan Security Treaty.
Death of Nagai Kafu (1879-1959).
(1) Tanizaki writes one of his most beautiful and ambiguous novellas, Yume no ukihashi ("The Bridge of Dreams").
In The Bridge of Dreams two of Tanizaki's major obsessions are perfectly united: the search for a lost traditional Japan and the search for a lost mother, who combines the maternal with the seductive. This is also what the title points at: the "(Floating) Bridge of Dreams" is the name of the final chapter of the Genji Monogatari, and here meant as a reference to the whole novel, which starts with the affair the protagonist has with his stepmother Fujitsubo. And the title is of course also a metaphor for the dreamlike quality of life and of the world of love. The story is set in the womb-like enclosed environment of a traditional house and garden where three people live: a father, his wife Chinu and their young son Tadasu. When Tadasu is only five years old, his mother dies. His father remarries and now something strange happens: the father has his new wife impersonate the deceased one. She has to take the same name, Chinu, wear the same type of clothes and allow Tadasu to sleep with her in the same way as he did with his own mother. She also plays the koto and practices calligraphy, like Tadasu's first mother. And so the idyllic life in the enclosed paradise garden continues even after the intrusion of death, the stepmother conflated with the real mother... But after the father dies, events take a strange twist...
[Tr. by Howard Hibbett in Seven Japanese Tales; studied in The Secret Window, Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki's Fiction by Anthony Hood Chambers]
(2) A new writer, Ariyoshi Sawako, writes her greatest novel, about three generations of women from the Wakayama countryside, Kinokawa ("The River Ki").
This is the story of three generations of women (Hana, Fumio and Hanako) of an important landholding family living from the late 19th to mid 20th century (in respectively the Meiji, Taisho and Showa periods) in the countryside outside Wakayama City on the River Ki. The novel explores their changing attitudes and expectations, showing how the position of women changed in the course of the 20th c. While Hana has all the accomplishments of a traditional Japanese wife - cultured, feminine, modest but also strong, working tirelessly behind the scenes to support her politician husband (and uttering no complaint when he takes a mistress) -, Fumio is coltish and inspired by feminism. Ahead of her time, she is convinced that men and women should be treated as equals. Different from her mother, whose marriage was arranged by her family, she picks her own (modern) businessman husband and spends much of her life stationed abroad with him. Her daughter Hanako is even further removed from the traditional heritage and sees Japan with the eyes of a foreigner, but her character is gentle. The women form in fact the backbone of the family, which is truly a matriarchy. There are interesting pieces of folklore in the novel, such as that "marrying to the family from the river downstream to upstream is no good and across the river is also bad because the water running in between severs the relationship." Hana also regularly visits Jisonin Temple in Kudoyama, dedicated to the 9th c. famous priest Kukai's mother and also to childbirth, where she always prays for a safe delivery when she herself or her daughters are pregnant. The book is filled with detailed and fascinating scenes which give a good impression of Japanese culture. Filmed in 1966 by Nakamura Noboru.
[tr. by Mildred Tahara]
In 1956 Ariyoshi made her literary debut with “Jiuta,” a story set in the world of traditional Japanese music. Ariyoshi became known as a prolific and talented novelist. She often raised crucial social problems and women's issues in her novels. Among her themes have been the problems faced by women in the traditional Japanese household (The River Ki, The Doctor's Wife), care for the elderly (The Twilight Years), and environmental pollution. She also wrote about traditional Japanese performing arts, such as in Izumo no Okuni ("The Kabuki Dancer," 1969). Ariyoshi achieved great popularity: many of her novels have also been adapted for the stage, the cinema, and television.
(3) Umibe no kokei ("A View by the Sea") by Yasuoka Shotaro is his masterwork, about a son visiting his dying mother in a mental institution.
The institution is located in beautiful scenery at the coast of Kochi Prefecture, and Shintaro has come with his father, Shinkichi, whom he rarely ever sees. They have been alerted by the hospital that the mother's condition is critical. Through flashbacks the domestic misery and friction among the family of three is filled in, something we already know from Yasuoka's short stories. The father was a veterinarian in the military (a job that filled the mother with shame), was sent to the front, made a POW and after he returned to Japan was unwilling to find a new job but kept growing tobacco and other stuff in his garden. All these ventures were a failure, which probably contributed to the mother's decline into premature senility. Yasuoka writes plainly and grimly in this relentlessly dour, ugly-detailed slice of family fiction. The son is emotionally blunted through the whole story, unable to cope with his mother's impending death, yet does all the right things without thinking about them, and then worries that he's making a bad impression on the other people around him.
[tr. Karen Wigen]
[Mogao Caves, Dunhuang]
The Mogao Caves, as they are officially called, form a system of 492 temples 25 km SE of the center of Dunhuang, an oasis strategically located at a religious and cultural crossroads on the Silk Road, in Gansu province, China. The network of caves, which were developed from the 4th to the 14th c., contains countless valuable large and small Buddhist statues and frescoes. In addition, in 1900 an incredible hoard of Buddhist sutras and other manuscripts including literary works was accidentally discovered here by an itinerant Daoist monk. The thousands of documents had been concealed in a cave for more than 900 years. Inoue, who also wrote other stories about Chinese Central Asia, such as “Lou-lan,” speculates in Tonko on the reasons for the hiding of such treasures. His protagonist is a young Chinese, whose failure to take the important state exam that will qualify him as a high government official leads to a chance encounter that draws him farther and farther into the wild and contested lands west of the Chinese Empire. Here he distinguishes himself in battle, finds love, and ultimately devotes himself to the strange task of depositing the scrolls in the caves where, many centuries later, they will be rediscovered. An enthralling historical reconstruction, which took the author five years of research, written in a sober, factual and impersonal style, devoid of any interpretive descriptions (as the earlier The Roof Tile of Tempyo).
[tr. by Jean Oda Moy, New York Review Books]
(5) Abe Kobo writes a literary novel which borrows elements of both a thriller and SF novel, Daiyon kanpyoki ("Inter Ice Age 4").
Professor Katsumi has developed an advanced computer that can predict future events. Unknown to him, his colleagues have used that computer to predict the future and found that it foresees a time when global warming will cause the seas to rise and cover the land - in order to survive, humans will have to become "aquans," after biologically mutating and developing gills so that they can live under water. The conspirators therefore are secretly breeding mammals that can live under water; this also includes obtaining human fetuses for their experiments. Dr Katsumi discovers that his own wife has had an abortion and that the fetus has fallen into the hands of the scientific conspiracy. There is a strong feeling of paranoia in the novel as the computer has produced a simulacrum of the professor which acts as his enemy. The computer has predicted that Dr Katsumi will betray the conspiracy upon discovering it, so his life is in danger. Will it be a consolation to him that his son will live on as an aquan? Written in a cool scientific style with lengthy arguments and little plot development, as would be Abe's style also in the 1960s and later.
[tr. E. Dale Saunders]
(6) Endo Shusaku writes one of his most popular novels, Obakasan ("Wonderful Fool"), a story about a kind, innocent and naive Frenchman, who in spite of his unusual behavior changes everyone he meets for the better.
Gaston Bonaparte, the “wonderful fool,” is a Christ-like figure who comes to postwar Tokyo on a sudden visit to his old pen pal Takamori. He possesses an overpowering and completely self-sacrificing love of people and animals and while he stays with Takamori and his sister Tomoe (acting as ineffectual guardian angels) he wanders alone into Tokyo and befriends a variety of "undesirables," including stray dogs, prostitutes and even a hardened killer (ironically named “Endo”). The contact with the killer is central to the novel: can Gaston, who trusts everybody, prevent the killer who trusts no-one from committing another murder? The finale of the novel takes literally place in a swamp, Endo's habitual comparison for Japan and its ambiguity. This is Endo writing in a popular style: though amusing, the book is also a bit childish and simplistic.
[tr. Francis Mathy]
(7) Mishima Yukio writes Kyoko no ie ("Kyoko's House"), his first large, non-serialized (kakioroshi) novel, which however becomes a critical failure.
The interconnected stories of four young men who represent various aspects of the author's personality and experiences. His athletic side appears as a boxer, his artistic side as a painter, his narcissistic, performing side as an actor and his cautious, calculating side as a businessman. Fukui Shunkichi, the student boxer, embodies the thought-erasing physicality of sports Mishima idealized and later takes up right-wing politics. Japanese-style painter Yamagata Natsuo is an aesthete who for a while becomes interested in mysticism. The aspiring actor Funaki Osamu takes up body-building to transform his scrawny body and becomes involved in a sado-masochistic relationship which ends in double suicide. Salaryman Sugimoto Seiichiro, living in New York - which allowed Mishima to use experiences from his visit to the U.S. - has a secretive, nihilistic side and goes through the motions of living a normal life while practicing "absolute contempt for reality," as he believes that the world is bound to perish. The only connection between these men is that they sometimes meet in the house of Kyoko, a woman modeled on an acquaintance of Mishima who keeps a sort of "salon." The four men were meant to stand for a whole generation, but that doesn't succeed for they are all too much like Mishima himself. Mishima poured enormous effort and talent into this book so he was all the more shocked by its failure. Still, the themes are very typical for Mishima and his ideology and it is regrettable that the book has never been translated.
[No English translation]
1960
Second United States-Japan Security Treaty signed. Demonstrators against ratification of the treaty besiege the National Diet Building in what became the largest anti-government demonstration in postwar Japan.
Later in the year, the chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, while on live TV, is assassinated by a right-wing youth.
The Akutagawa Prizes this year go to Kita Morio for Yoru to kiri no sumi de ("In The Corner Of Night And Fog") and to Miura Tetsuo for Shinobugawa ("Shame in the Blood").
(1) Shimao Toshio starts writing stories in the long, linked series Shi no toge ("The Sting of Death," 1960-76).
A series of twelve linked short stories published in different literary magazines between 1960 and 1976 (and in 1977 combined and published as a single novel) about the relationship between the author Shimao Toshio and his wife Miho, who suffered from neurasthenia. It was her husband's unfaithfulness which drove Miho over the edge, so that she became prone to repeated nervous breakdowns and monomaniacal rampages. Toshio's apologies don't help and he loses his ability to write. Finally, he understands the full magnitude of the sin he has committed against his wife. He then tries to devote his life to saving her. He starts to live with her at the mental hospital, something which was seen as very unusual showing "deep love." The title of the work is taken from the biblical saying, "The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law." (Corinthians I, 15:16). In 1956, Shimao converted to Catholicism. The present novel was adapted as a film in 1990 by Oguri Kohei with Matsuzaka Keiko in the role of the wife Miho. This novel is considered as a masterpiece of Japan's postwar literature.
[The Sting of Death and Other Stories, trans. Kathryn Sparling, Michigan Papers in Japanese Studies, University of Michigan Press, 1985]
[Study: J. Philip Gabriel, Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature, University of Hawaii Press, 1999]
(2) Nemureru bijo ("House of the Sleeping Beauties") by Kawabata Yasunari combines several of the author's favorite themes: virginity, old age, death and eroticism.
An elderly man, Eguchi (67), discovers a rather special house at the invitation of a friend. It welcomes old people, who suffer from Testosterone Deficiency Syndrome, and allows them to spend the night with pure, virginal young girls, drugged enough so that nothing can wake them up. The customers are not allowed to touch the girls in any way. Eguchi is presented with a different girl each time he visits the house because of the short notice of his visits. Each girl is different and the descriptions of his actions are mixed with the dreams that he has sleeping besides the girls. Death is ever-present: the girls, who are like beautiful corpses, become a sort of memento mori for the older man. During the five nights thus spent, Eguchi reflects on his life, his loves, the death that awaits him and the decrepitude and dishonor that old age constitutes for a man.
The novella ends with the death of one of the girls. On the fith night Eguchi sleeps with two girls, a white-skinned one and a dark-skinned one. When he awakes from his dreams and reflections, he notices that the dark-skinned girl has become cold and dead. Eguchi is shocked, afraid that he perhaps has killed her in his sleep. The proprietress of the inn deals calmly with the incident. She doesn't even call a doctor, but hands Eguchi a sleeping pill with the remark that he still has another girl. The sound of the car carrying the dead girl away slowly fades.
Won the Mainichi Cultural prize. P.S. The plot of Gabriel García Márquez's novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores is ostensibly inspired by the House of the Sleeping Beauties.
[tr. Edward Seidensticker]
(3) Utage no ato ("After the Banquet"), a novel about politics based on an actual occurrence, by Mishima Yukio led to a court case for "violation of privacy."
The politician Arita Hachiro sued Mishima, claiming the novel violated his privacy. The Tokyo District Court found in favor of Arita on 28 September 1964, Japan's first judicial recognition of the right to privacy. The case became famous as the "After the Banquet case" (Utage no Ato Saiban). The protagonists of the novel are an elegant political figure in his sixties, former cabinet minister Noguchi Yuken, and Fukuzawa Kazu, proprietress of the upscale Japanese-style Setsugoan restaurant, who is in her mid-fifties, a woman with a man's resolution and a woman's reckless enthusiasm. Although mismatched (he has a foreign intellectual coolness, she is a Mishima-type Japanese romantic) they marry and Kazu throws herself full of vigor into the election campaign of Noguchi. Unwittingly, she also finances some illegal election activities and the campaign (for which Kazu has mortgaged her restaurant) ends in disaster, as does the marriage. Kazu, a woman of the flesh, of passion, and of unbridled fancy, has been called Mishima's best female portrait. Like so much in Mishima's work her marriage to Noguchi is also a partnership in death, for it was Kazu's dream to be buried in the family grave of the Noguchis.
{tr. Donald Keene]
[The Sakurajima volcano in Kagoshima]
(4) Kazan ("Volcano") by Endo Shusaku
There are many volcanoes in Japan, but Akadake, as the volcano in Endo's novel is called, is not one of them. It is a fictional mountain, but is seems to have been based on Mt Sakurajima, the large volcano looming up above the city of Kagoshima in southern Kyushu. Kyushu is also the island where, in the 16th century, Christianity first flourished in Japan.
Volcano is a novel about the trials of old age. The two aged protagonists are Suda Jinpei, who is just retired from his position as section chief at the local Weather Bureau, and Durand, an unfrocked French Catholic priest. The fates of both men are linked by the volcano. Suda has for his whole life studied the volcano and believes it is dormant, reason why he advises a tycoon to build a luxury hotel on its slope. Durand, sick and bitter, is convinced that Akadake will erupt and that a tide of lava will sweep away the new Christian retreat being built on the mountain by a rival priest.
Suda suffers a stroke, and while in hospital believes that his family wants him to die. He feels sympathy for the volcano which is also dying. Durand contemplates the problem of Christianity and Japan and comes to the conclusion that Christianity is alien to the Japanese character. To him Akadake is a symbol of evil that will erupt and annihilate the fragile faith of the local Christian community.
[tr. Richard A. Schuchert]
(5) Shinobugawa ("Shame in the Blood") by Miura Tetsuo
describes the pure love of an impoverished couple brought together by
their tragic pasts.
This semi-autobiographical set of linked short stories is considered as one of
the finest love stories in modern Japanese literature.
Shinobugawa tells the charming tale of the narrator, known only as "I," a
student at a university in Tokyo, and Shino, a young woman who works at
a restaurant, Shinobugawa, near his dormitory. The narrator, the
youngest of six children, has seen two of his brothers run away and two
sisters commit suicide, while his remaining sister is physically
disabled. Tormented by fears that his family's blood is "cursed," he
nonetheless decides to affirm life and take responsibility for his
family.
[Translated by Andrew Driver, Counterpoint]
(6) "Parutai" ("Partei") by Kurahashi Yumiko is a satire on young intellectuals who identify strongly with Communist ideology.
As title Kurahashi uses the German word for "(political) Party." Another word that frequent crops up in the story is the French honte, shame. The narrator is enthusiastically invited by her lover to join the Communist Party, although she herself is not really interested. After all, joining the Party means relinquishing one's personal life and subordinating to the Party's principles. The narrator dislikes the heavy atmosphere of the building in which the party members meet and work, and is "irritated by the unpleasant odor from the lower part of the body that is produced when human beings live in a group." Her lover explains the procedures necessary to join the Party, among which the most important one is to provide one's "life history." That life history has to show the personal past in such a way that joining the party appears as an inevitability. It takes the narrator a lot of time and trouble to write a simple chronological account. But after it has been accepted, she immediately decides to withdraw from the Party. "To me it seemed like a kind of religious organization, developing as it did from a body of commandments and secret rituals."
[tr. by Yukiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Hanson in This Kind of Woman]
Kurahashi Yumiko (1935-2005) was the first generation to be
educated in the new "equal opportunity" system for boys and girls after
WWII. She was born in Kochi Prefecture and studied French
literature at Meiji University in Tokyo. She made a brilliant literary
debut with "Partei" in 1960. She was inspired by such writers as Kafka,
Camus and Sartre. Her work was experimental and antirealist, questioning
prevailing societal norms regarding sexual relations, violence, and
social order. Her antinovels employed pastiche, parody, and other
elements typical of postmodernist writing. Despite health
problems, in 1966 she went to study at the University of Iowa in the
U.S., where she spent about a year with a Fulbright scholarship. In 1969
Kurahashi published the dystopian novel Adventures of Sumiyakisto Q (Sumiyakisuto Q no boken). Her Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults (Otona no tame no zankoku dowa)
became her most popular work during her lifetime. In 1987 she was
awarded the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature for her massive
anti-utopian work Journey to Amanon (Amanonkoku okanki).
Kurahashi was of the same generation as Oe Kenzaburo and like him born
on the island of Shikoku, and both studied French literature and were
interested in Sartre.
(7) Yoru to kiri no sumi de ("In the Corner of Night and Fog") by Kita Morio takes its name from "Nacht und Nebel," the Nazi campaign to eliminate Jews, the mentally ill and other minorities.
The novel concerns the moral quandary of staff at a German mental hospital during the final years of WWII. Faced with demands from the SS that the most severely ill patients be segregated for transportation to a special camp, where it is obvious that they will be eliminated, the more morally conscious of the doctors make desperate efforts to protect the patients without outwardly defying the authorities. A parallel theme is the personal tragedy of a young Japanese researcher affiliated with the mental hospital, whose own schizophrenia has been triggered by the disappearance of his half-Jewish wife.
[No English translation]
[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).]
[Photo Kinkakuji: own work. All other photos and author portraits public domain via Wikimedia Commons]