The Dragon Scroll by I.J. Parker (review)

This book impresses me as a homage to the Judge Dee novels by Robert van Gulik - transported to the Japan of the 11th century. Judge Dee has been transformed into Sugawara Akitada, aristocratic scholar-official and sleuth; Ma Joong has become Tora (his enforcer) and Lieutenant Hoong is Seimei (the elder advisor).

The problem is that Akitada is made out to be just such a staunch Confucianist as the Judge Dee of Van Gulik (who is already more Van Gulik than Chinese), and an opponent of Buddhism. That doesn't fit Japan, where a syncretist mixture of Buddhism with the indigenous kami creed (now called Shinto) was the dominant religion in the 11th century - with some admixture of Confucian elements such as filial piety, but none of the strict Confucianism represented here (that came only much later, in the 17th-19th century). The negative view of the Buddhist clergy as criminals is based on Van Gulik's first novel, The Chinese Bell Murders, but was completely alien to 11th c. Japan. Except for a short period when State Shinto was created in the early Meiji period (around 1870) Buddhism was never negatively viewed by the Japanese.

The material culture of the China described by Van Gulik (the 7th-9th c. Tang dynasty seen through the lens of the 14-17th c. Ming dynasty, so already quite complicated!) has become Heian Japan. For example, the aristocracy did sometimes drink tea, as described by Parker, but that was not tea brewed in a pot as she writes, it was brick tea that was ground into a powder and then stirred into a froth in a tea bowl using a whisk (like matcha). The wine house and restaurant culture described in the novels simple didn't exist in Heian Japan, and there were no multistory houses. And "wine" should of course be sake - drunk warm.

Women lived in their rooms and didn't show themselves to men, even not from behind screens - men had to sit outside on the veranda and could not enter (except sometimes secretly at night). Often aristocratic women didn't even speak directly to men, they had their maidservants convey their words. In the novel a sweet potato is offered to someone, but sweet potatoes (satsuma-imo) only came to Japan in the 17th century. Courts of law were not held inside a courtroom as in China, but the magistrate would sit on the floor of the raised building close to the veranda and face the criminals who had to kneel outside in the gravel of the inner courtyard (see for example Kurosawa's film "Rashomon").

I could continue like that, but that would be childish. I.J. Parker was not a Japanologist, but, until retirement, Associate Professor of English and Foreign Languages at Norfolk State University in Virginia. She was interested in Japanese literature and in the Judge Dee novels and that led to the present project, which comprises about 20 novels and several short story collections. That is quite an achievement. She did document herself and the mistakes I mention won't bother an average English reader. "The Dragon Scroll" is quite a lively tale and covers a lot of ground. The detection elements are not very strong, but the novel offers a nice historical panorama. I read it almost in one sitting. I think I'd like to try one of the later novels and see how the author has developed.

Modern Japanese Fiction by Year (10): The Years of Self-Confidence (1966-1972)

The years from 1966 to 1972 can be called the "years of renewed self-confidence."  Japan had earned the world's respect for the flawless organization of the 1964 Olympic Games. In 1970, America agreed to return Okinawa to Japan (effected in 1972). The economy continued to boom, and even the oil crisis of 1973 did not fundamentally change that. The early 1970s were a period of rapid economic growth.

In the literary sphere, a new generation of writers appeared on stage between 1966 and 1974, those born in the 1930s. These authors differed notably from their predecessors because of their move away from the overt social and political commentary (particularity as directed against the system that supported Japan's involvement in World War II) then common both in recent works of literature, and as a measure by which literature was measured. Because this new group of authors turned their gaze from society to the individual, looking inward, engaging the fears and fantasies of an urban population beset by a crisis of identity in a time of rapid economic growth, they were called "the introverted generation" (naiko no sedai). They pursued depth of psychological description. Young writers of this period found themselves alienated not only from the older generation, but also from the government and other sources of authority. Major authors of this "group" were Furui Yoshikichi, Goto Meisei, Abe Akira, and Oba Mineko (Kuroi Senji, Tomioka Taeko and Hino Keizo are also counted to the introverted generation, but they started writing  later).

The writers of the previous postwar generations write large, important novels in their maturity, such as Shi no toge (1960-1971) by Shimao Toshio, Fuji (1971) by Takeda Taijun, Reite senki (1971) by Ooka Shohei, Shi no shima (1969-1971) by Fukunaga Takehiko, and Seinen no wa (1971) by Noma Hiroshi, etc. But none of these novels has been translated.  

In 1968, Kawabata Yasunari received the Nobel prize in Literature. On a negative note, he died by his own hand in 1972, while Mishima Yukio had already committed seppuku in a violent incident in 1970.

Although important novels were written in this period (the last 3 volumes of Mishima's Sea of Fertility, Oe's The Silent Cry, Endo's Silence, Ariyoshi's The Doctor's Wife and The Twilight Years, Nosaka's stories American Hijiri and Grave of Fireflies), this was a relatively poor period, especially when we look at translations. Both the "Introverted Generation" and the previous "Third Generation of Postwar Writers" which had also turned inward and was now at its height as regards published works, have had difficulties appealing to foreign readers with their blandness. But also the output of novels seems to have been lower than before (and later) - literature may have had a hard time establishing itself in these years of pure economic growth and materialism.


1966
The Beatles perform at Budokan in Tokyo.

Cultural Revolution sweeps across China.

(1) The historical novel Chinmoku ("Silence") by Endo Shusaku wins the Tanizaki prize.
Historical novel based on the martyrdom of the 17th c. Portuguese Jesuit missionaries and their Japanese converts in the Nagasaki area. Endo deals with the contradictions in the faiths of the Orient and the Occident and questions the transplanting of Christianity to incompatible cultures. Rodrigues, a young Portuguese Jesuit, travels to Japan with another priest to assist the local Church and investigate what happened to his mentor, priest Ferreira, who is said to have renounced his faith. The two fratres arrive in Japan in 1638, where they discover that the Christians are being tracked down by security officers. The Christians are obliged to distance themselves from their faith by trampling on the image of Christ (fumie). Those who refuse are slowly tortured to death. Rodrigues and his colleague are eventually arrested by the authorities. They witness the gruesome persecution of the Japanese Christians by the governor of Nagasaki, Inoue Masashige. In the past, the priests themselves were tortured and obliged to distance themselves from their faith, but recently the local Christians are tortured to put pressure on the priests. All the priests have to do to stop the suffering of the Japanese Christians is to deny their faith. While in prison, Rodrigues constantly hears the groans and howls of the tortured Christians and asks himself whether it is selfish and merciless to make others suffer for Christ. When finally led to a fumie, in his imagination Christ speaks through the image, inviting him to trample. "It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross." Rodrigues puts his foot on the fumie. An official tells Rodrigues, "Father, it was not by us that you were defeated, but by this mudswamp, Japan." The book inspired feature film adaptations by Masahiro Shinoda (1971) and Martin Scorsese (2016).
[tr. William Johnston]


(2) Hanaoka Seishu no tsuma ("The Doctor's Wife") by Ariyoshi Sawako. 
Doctor Hanaoka Seishu (1760-1835) was the first in the world to operate a patient under a general anesthetic (in 1804), with techniques which go back to both Dutch and Chinese medicine. Ariyoshi studied his personal papers for her novel, but the famous doctor is not the main character in the book: that is firstly his wife Kae, and after that his mother Otsugi. The rivalry between these two women for his attention is central to the novel and propels the story forward. While he is still developing the powder called tsusensan (a herbal mixture also containing some poisonous elements) they compete for the "privilege" of being his first human subject to test it. The doctor pretends not to notice the rivalry but benefits greatly from it. Kae goes blind as a result. The novel, which received the Woman's Literature Prize of 1967, was filmed by Masumura Yasuzo, with Ichikawa Raizo, Wakao Ayako and Takamine Hideko.
[tr. Wakako Hironaka & Ann Siller Konstant]


(3) Sasamakura ("Pillow of Grass") by Maruya Saiichi.
A novel on the theme of rebellion against the group. Hamada Shokichi is a 45-old clerk at a private university, with a wife who is much younger. He receives a letter informing him that his former girlfriend Akiko has died. That evokes memories of the past: during the whole period of WWII, Hamada was on the run as a draft evader. In 1940, Hamada, the son of a doctor in Tokyo, escapes from Tokyo Station the day before he would have to enter military service. Originally from Higher Industrial School, he travels around Japan repairing radios. Later he meets a sand painter and learns that craft. This brings him to Sakaiminato in Tottori, where he meets a woman named Akiko. She is the daughter of a pawn shop in Uwajima, Shikoku, and Hamada is able to hide in the pawn shop until the war ends. The delayed consequences of Hamada's refusal to conform keep influencing his life twenty years later, in 1965. But this novel is not so much an antiwar novel as an attempt to understand the full implications of any sustained act of rebellion against the group as a total entity. The same theme is treated in more comic fashion in Maruya's next novel, Singular Rebellion published six years later, in 1972.
[tr. Dennis Keene]


1967
Museum of Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon Kindai Bungakukan) established in April in Komaba Park in Meguro, Tokyo.

[Oe Kenzabuto]

(1) Man'en gan'nen no futtoboru ("The Silent Cry," lit. "Football in the First Year of Man'en (1860)") by Oe Kenzaburo wins the Tanizaki Prize. It is a consolidation of all the author's themes. 
Like many of his earlier works, The Silent Cry has an unreal Arcadian setting, cut off from the rest of Japan and populated with grotesque characters. Two brothers, Takashi and Matsu, as well as Matsu's wife Natsu, return from Tokyo to the village of their childhood to negotiate the sale of some family property to “the Emperor of Supermarkets,” a Korean who came to Shikoku in WWII and since that time dominates the village. One of the brothers leads the local youth in a rebellion against “the Emperor,” while the other one tries to discover the secrets of his own family’s past. In Oe’s novel metropolitan Japan is selfish and violent, while rural Japan is disintegrating, populated by freaks such as Jin, “the fattest woman in Japan” and Gii, a draft-dodging hermit. Life in the countryside is characterized by suicides, drunkenness and sexual perversions. It is a world where all humanity has gone totally mad. Susan Napier has called this novel "perhaps his most successful effort to encapsulate Japanese history, society, and politics within a single tight narrative" (Escape from the Wasteland, p 196).
[tr. John Bester]


(2) In February, serialization starts of Honba ("Runaway Horses," but as the title refers to only one person, the protagonist Isao, it should be translated in the singular as "The Runaway Horse"), the second part of the tetralogy Hojo no Umi ("The Sea of Fertility") by Mishima Yukio. 
Set twenty years after Spring Snow, in the early 1930s (a period of right-wing agitation and frequent terrorist attacks by ultra-nationalists), this novel tells the story of young Iinuma Isao, a rightist reactionary. Inspired by the Shinpuren Revolt of 1876 (a xenophobic band of samurai violently opposed to the openness to foreign things and modernization of the Meiji government), Isao becomes the instigator of a plot to topple the zaibatsu that he feels have corrupted the country and betrayed "the will of the Emperor." He is assured of the army's assistance by the young Lieutenant Hori. Honda Shigekuni, the friend of Kiyoaki from Spring Snow, now a judge, sees a telltale birthmark under Isao's arm and realizes he must be the reincarnation of Kiyoaki, although he does not resemble him in appearance or ideals. The terrorist plot is betrayed and Isao is arrested; Honda decides to defend him as his lawyer and manages to obtain a lenient sentence. But as soon as Isao is released from prison, he kills one of the prime targets on the conspirator's list and then commits seppuku while gazing at the rising sun. The seppuku is described in gory details, all the more hair-raising considering Mishima's own death in the same style just a few year's later. Anyway, with its "crazy ideology of death" this is one of Mishima's most unpleasant books; and the detailed description of the ideology of the Shinpuren is simply boring. The idea that some young people who are prepared to kill others and die themselves for their ultra-nationalistic ideals are "pure" and to be admired, is fascism in its most despicable form.
[tr. Michael Gallagher]


(3) Two short stories by Nosaka Akiyuki about WWII and its aftermath win the Naoki prize.

- Hotaru no haka ("Grave of Fireflies")
A semi-autobiographical short story, based on Nosaka's experiences before, during, and after the firebombing of Kobe in 1945. One of his sisters died as the result of sickness, his adoptive father died during the firebombing proper, and his younger adoptive sister died of malnutrition in Fukui. It was written as a personal apology to that sister for her death. On September 21, 1945, a homeless fourteen-year-old boy named Seita dies in Sannomiya Station, in the heart of Kobe. On his person is a candy tin; when a station worker tosses it into a field, three tiny bone fragments roll out. They are the bones of his little sister, Setsuko, who died in a Nishinomiya bomb shelter on August 22nd. The story flashes back to the Kobe air raids of June 5th. The children's father, a lieutenant in the navy, is away from home, and their ailing mother is killed. With nowhere to go, Seita puts his little sister on his back and sets off for the home of distant relatives, but there they are treated cruelly and Setsuko does not want to stay. Seita decides that they will live by themselves in a dugout bomb shelter, but at his age it is impossible for him to obtain food. Setsuko dies, and with a bundle of charcoal, Seita cremates her body. A cloud of fireflies gathers around her ashes. Nosaka wrote the story to cope with the guilt he felt as a survivor. The story was adapted as a beautiful anime feature film by Takahata Isao of Studio Ghibli.
[tr. James Abrams in Japan Quarterly, 1978]

- Amerika hijiki ("American hijiki")
A humorous take on the cultural misunderstandings between Japan and America. The title goes back to the fact that American black tea, donated to the Japanese population by the American occupation army, was mistaken for "hijiki", black, stringy seaweed which is a staple of the Japanese kitchen. The protagonist, Toshio, has been a pimp as a young boy in the Occupation, but is unable to fully escape that mentality even as a grown man. When 20 years later he has to entertain an American, Mr Higgins, he organizes a private strip show for him to demonstrate that Japanese girls are best. Part of the show is also a "performance" by a Japanese man, who becomes so nervous because of the American in the audience that he is unable to do his job - showing that even 20 years after the lost war, according to Nosaka, the Japanese still felt an inferiority complex towards Americans. The bitter taste of "American hijiki" symbolizes the bitterness of the lost war and the occupation.
[tr. Jay Rubin in Contemporary Japanese Literature, 1977]


(4) Moetsukita chizu ("The Ruined Map") by Abe Kobo 
A novel concerned with the loss of man's individual identity in the labyrinths of a modern city. The protagonist, an unnamed detective, is hired by a beautiful, alcoholic woman to find her husband who has inexplicably disappeared. The detective is given a "ruined map" to help him during his search. Finally, the impossibility to find relevant clues leads the detective to an existential crisis - he feels his own identity blurring and in the end starts identifying himself with the lost man he is supposed to find - becoming lost himself.
[tr. E. Dale Saunders]


1968
University upheavals of 1968-69 begin. 

Kawabata Yasunari wins the Nobel prize in Literature. At the award ceremony in Stockholm, he gives the speech "Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself."

Mishima Yukio writes his essay about the cult of the body and body building, "Sun and Steel."

(1) Akatsuki no tera ("The Temple of Dawn," third part of the tetralogy Hojo no Umi, "The Sea of Fertility") by Mishima Yukio (serialization starts in September).
Honda Shigekuni, the lawyer from the previous two volumes, visits Thailand on a business trip in 1941 and encounters a young girl, Ying Chan, a Thai princess, whom he believes to be his school friend Kiyoaki's second reincarnation (she seems to remember her previous lives and answers questions correctly). The first half of the book is therefore set in Thailand and India (for which Mishima traveled to both countries), but reads unfortunately like a tourist brochure. It also contains a heavy and detailed presentation of the Buddhist themes of the cycle of reincarnation, for example in the form of the various religious texts studied by Honda, without any plot or character development. The second half of the book is very different. It is set eleven years later in Japan and the Thai princess is visiting Japan as a foreign student. The nostalgic and poetic tone of Spring Snow is now far to seek: instead, Mishima gives sardonic accounts of Japanese society after WWII, which he sees as totally corrupted. Honda's role as a high-minded judge and lawyer is also radically altered. He has become rich by his law practice and built a villa with swimming pool at the foot of Mt Fuji, where he receives guests. His role of observer has taken a turn for the worse: he has a peephole fixed in the wall of the guest room so that he can secretly spy on the love games of his visitors. The peephole is in so far functional that it enables him to confirm that the Thai princess has the mysterious birthmark, but it also reveals that she and a Japanese women (another guest) are lovers. Not long after, the princess goes back to Thailand. Fifteen years later Honda learns that she has died when she was 20 (so soon after her return), bitten by a cobra in her garden. It is rather unsatisfying that her death occurs offstage.
[tr. E. Dale Saunders & Cecilia Segawa Seigle]


(2) Oba Minako wins the 59th Akutagawa Prize for Sanbiki no kani ("Three Crabs")
Novella set in Alaska with an expatriate Japanese couple as protagonists. The author doesn't use the foreign atmosphere to create an exotic atmosphere but to create the sense of freedom, loneliness and homelessness that the characters feel. The story treats the sexual adventures of a housewife, a new theme in Japanese fiction at that time. It starts with sharp exchanges of dialogue between husband and wife, and later with their American friends at a party in their home. The couple seems to have an open marriage in which neither partner remains faithful to the other. Leaving a houseful of guests, the wife, Yuri, disappears for the evening to pick up a married stranger for a bout of casual sex. The title implies Yuri is not unlike the faceless crabs she saw at the seashore at the start of the story: creatures with no firm identity, yet able to blend into a new environment over a long period of time.
[tr. Yukiko Tanaka and Elizabeth Hanson in This Kind of Woman, 1982]


3. Clouds Above the Hill by Shiba Ryotaro, is a huge and ambitious novel about the Russo-Japanese War.
A historical epic centering on the careers of two ambitious brothers who work their way up from a rural backwater (Matsuyama, the capital of Ehime Pref on the island of Shikoku) to positions of eminence in the new post-1868 Meiji period. They are Akiyama Yoshifuru (1859-1930) and Akiyama Saneyuki (1868-1918) - both are real historical figures - , who will go on to play important roles in the Japanese Army and Navy, respectively. They manage to build up a Japanese military capable of holding its own against larger forces in the region, and that capability is then soon tested in the Russo-Japanese War. 

[Admiral Togo before the Battle of Tsushima]

Akiyama Yoshifuru became a general in the Imperial Japanese Army, and is considered the father of modern Japanese cavalry. Born to a poor samurai family in the Matsuyama domain, he attended the (forerunner of the) Imperial Japanese Army Academy) and Army Staff College, after which he was sent as a military attaché to France to study cavalry tactics and techniques. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, he led his troops in the Battle of Mukden against the Cossack cavalry divisions of the Imperial Russian Army. In 1916 Yoshifuru was promoted to full general. After retiring from active military service in 1923, he became head of a junior high school on his native Shikoku.

Akiyama Saneyuki would become famous as the planner of the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese war. Originally he wanted to study literature and he was a good friend from his childhood on of the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki. But his elder brother Yoshifuru ordered him to join the Naval Academy because of the economically severe condition of the Akiyama family. From June 1897 to December 1899, Saneyuki was sent to the United States as a naval attaché. He next served as instructor at the Navy War college and at the outbreak of the war with Russia in 1904 was promoted to Commander. After the war Saneyuki's career continued its upward movement to vice admiral, at which time he had to retire due to illness.

The third protagonist is Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), also from Matsuyama, who in his short life single-handedly brought the genres of haiku and tanka into modern age. I am glad about the presence of the poet Shiki in this novel, as he brings a softer and cultural note to the story. It is pity that he dies in the first pages of part 2 (of 4), but that is based on real life...

Shiki turned haiku into a legitimate literary genre and argued that haiku should be judged by the same yardstick that is used when measuring the value of other forms of literature - that was contrary to views held by prior haiku practitioners. His particular style rejected "the puns or fantasies often relied on by the old school" in favor of "realistic observation of nature". Like other Meiji period writers, Shiki was influenced by the dedication to realism in Western literature.

Shiki's achievements are all the more remarkable considering that he suffered from tuberculosis much of his life. In 1888 / 1889 he began coughing up blood and soon adopted the pen-name "Shiki" from the Japanese "hototogisu", the lesser cuckoo, as it was thought that this bird coughs blood as it sings. Shiki's early tuberculosis worsened after he went to China as a war correspondent in 1895. He returned to his home town Matsuyama and convalesced in the home of the famed novelist Natsume Soseki. During this time he took on disciples and promulgated a style of haiku that emphasized gaining inspiration from personal experiences of nature. In 1897 a member of his group established a haiku magazine which was called Hototogisu after Shiki's pen name - a magazine which today still is going strong.

In Tokyo Shiki worked as haiku editor for the newspaper Nippon. Bedridden by 1897, Shiki's disease worsened further around 1901. He developed Pott's disease and began using morphine as a painkiller. During this time Shiki wrote diaries and other autobiographical works, as Bokuju itteki, "A drop of ink," and Byosho rokushaku, "The 6 foot long sickbed." He died of tuberculosis in 1902 at age 34.

Clouds Above the Hill is like War and Peace by Tolstoy, a long novel about warfare with many authorial intrusions and historical essays. It often reads like a history book, even more so than Shiba Ryotaro's earlier Ryoma!: The Life of Sakamoto Ryoma Japanese Swordsman and Visionary. One could say that Meiji-Japan is the real protagonist - the novel is an exciting portrait of the involvement of three young men in the frenzied modernization and ascendancy of their country. It is Shiba's second best selling work in Japanese, with 14,750,000 copies sold. The translation is in 4 volumes.
[Phyllis Birnbaum (Editor), Julia Winters Carpenter (Translator), Paul McCarthy (Translator)]


1969
U.S. Apollo spacecraft puts first man on the moon. 

(1) Anshitsu ("The Dark Room") by Yoshiyuki Junnosuke (winner of the Tanizaki Prize).
The 44-year-old protagonist, Nakata Shuichi, has his life arranged in a way that suits him ideally. Unmarried since the death of his wife 20 years earlier, he has a number of woman friends always ready to have him drop in for the night. His relationship with these women is casual to the extreme. He avoids all responsibility and all emotional investment. If he misses emotional heights, he also misses emotional depths. However, things change... His woman friends disappear one after the other, due to marriage, or a stay abroad, etc. Left is only Natsue, a former prostitute. Restricted to one woman, he finds himself hovering on the edge of that hateful involvement which we might also call love. The "dark room" is the metaphor Yoshiyuki uses for that condition.
[tr. John Bester]


1970
Expo '70 opens in Osaka.

Automatic renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty.  

Hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 351 by the Japanese Communist League-Red Army Faction

Death of Mishima Yukio, by his own hand (1925-1970). Novelist Mishima Yukio leads his private ultra-nationalist group Tate no Kai in an attempt to provoke an uprising by Ground Self Defense Forces; failing, he commits ritual suicide.

[Mishima Yukio, 1970]

(1) Mishima Yukio writes Tennin gosui ("The Decay of the Angel," lit. "The Five Marks of an Angel's Decay"), thereby finishing his tetralogy The Sea of Fertility. He turns in the manuscript to his publisher on the morning of his seppuku.  
Set in the first half of the 1970s, when Honda Shigekuni is an old man. Honda adopts a teenage orphan, Yasunaga Toru, whom he believes to be his dead school friend Kiyoaki's third successive reincarnation. Toru himself is also convinced that a special destiny awaits him because of a mysterious birthmark under his arm. But surprisingly for a lawyer, Honda does not verify whether Toru was indeed born after the death of the Thai princess, and he remains in doubt whether Toru is a genuine incarnation or a false one. Honda gives Toru a good education, but the boy never shows any gratitude. He is calculating and deceitful and likes to humiliate Honda. The woman who was the lover of the Thai princess in the previous volume (and who is still a good friend of Honda) brutally analyzes Toru's character and tells him he is a fake and will lead a long and uneventful life. This shocks Toru so much that he takes poison, but it does not kill but blind him. He lives on, cared for by a crazy woman who bears his child, and shows the five signs of decay of an angel: the flowers about him are withered; he perspires freely; his body gives off a foul odor; his clothes are dirty; and he has lost his place in the world. Obviously, he was a false reincarnation - the spell has worked out. In the last pages of the novel, Honda visits Satoko, the lover of Kiyoaki, now aged like himself, in her nunnery in Nara. To his surprise she insists she has never heard of Kiyoaki and suggests Kiyoaki must be a figment of Honda's imagination! The whole machinery of reincarnation that Mishima had set up so laboriously in the previous volumes, especially in The Temple of Dawn, is hereby negated. The novel ends in Buddhist emptiness, if not Western nihilism: Honda gazes at the still and empty temple garden and realizes he has come to a place that has "no memories, nothing." Unreality is the ultimate truth of the world (if Mishima would have taken his own medicine, there would have been no reason for his suicide). Although the story in this fourth volume is not fully developed, as if Mishima wrote it in great haste, the final pages contain some of the most sublime passages he wrote.
[tr. Edward Seidensticker]


(2) Furui Yoshikichi wins the 64th Akutagawa Prize for the novella Yoko, the story of a sensitive young man's relationship with the title character, a beautiful young woman who is suffering from an apparently hereditary mental illness.
Through Yoko's vivid but distorted perceptions of the world, Furui highlights the process by which reality and identity are created. Above all, however, Yoko is a touching, if somewhat unusual, tale of a young couple's deepening love.
[tr. Donna George Storey in Child of Darkness, Michigan]

Furui Yoshikichi (1937 - 2020) was educated at the University of Tokyo where he majored in German Literature. He was especially interested in modern authors as Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, whose work he has translated into Japanese. He wroked as a professor of Gemrna literature at Kanazawa and Rikkyo universities before in 1970 deciding to devote himself exclusively to creative work. Furui creates subtle and mysterious psychological worlds, infused with a somber poetry. He is an exemplar of the "introverted generation." He has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary awards. Translations of his work include, besides the above mentioned Yoko, White-Haired Melody and Ravine.


1971
Revaluation of the yen depresses the Japanese economy. 

The first McDonald's outlet opens on the Ginza in Tokyo. 

Death of Shiga Naoya (1883-1971). Death of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971).

The ashes of Mishima Yukio are stolen from his tomb, but found back a few months later.

(1) Reite Senki ("The Battle for Leyte Island") is a historical war novel by Ooka Shohei.
The lengthy novel was based on exhaustive research and the compilation of an enormous amount of information over a period of many years. The novel faithfully details the personal and collective experience of battle, deprivation, and loss, and clarifies who and what was ultimately responsible for defeat. Ooka draws attention to the outstanding obligations owed to the war dead and suggests that they can be fulfilled by public confrontation, learning the lessons of defeat, and using them to rectify lingering social and political evils.

In 1944 Ooka had been drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, was given only three months of rudimentary training, and then sent to the front line at Mindoro Island in the Philippines, where he served as his battalion's communications technician until his battalion was routed and numerous men were killed. In January 1945, he was captured by American forces and sent to a prisoner of war camp on Leyte Island. Survival was very traumatic for Ooka, who was troubled that he, a middle-aged and, to his way of thinking, unworthy soldier, had survived when so many others had not. He suffered for many years from "survivor trauma" and it was only by writing Fires on the Plain (1951) and The Battle of Leyte Island that he came to terms with his own war experiences. As with all his writing, Ooka observes war critically from the perspective of a person who, despite ethical reservations, was forced to serve.
[No translation]


(2) Hakkodasan shi no hoko ("Death March on Mt Hakkoda") by Nitta Jiro.
A popular novel about a military training mission gone tragically wrong. 210 soldiers ascend Mount Hakkoda in the dead of winter and only eleven return. The training was undertaken in 1902 in preparation for the coming war against Russia - the expected combat in Siberia made severe winter exercises necessary. The disaster was due to a confused chain of command and the failure of the top to communicate with their staff. Nitta Jiro (1912–80), who was a trained meteorologist and often wrote about the mountains and the dangers of changing weather conditions, carefully researched the novel, throwing light an a disaster that had for many years had been a taboo topic. The novel was filmed in 1977.
[tr. James Westerhoven]


1972
Red Army faction incidents: 2 policemen are killed during the arrest, subsequent interrogations reveal 14 other murders committed by faction members in the course of internal disputes. 24 die in a Japanese Red Army attack on Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Okinawa returned to Japanese sovereignty by the U.S.

China-Japan Joint Communique announces the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and the People's Republic of China.

Winter Olympics held in Sapporo, Hokkaido.

Death of Kawabata Yasunari, probably by his own hand (1899-1972).

(1) Mizukara waga namida wo nuguitamau hi ("The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away") by Oe Kenzaburo.
A novella which forms a critical response to Mishima's fanatical suicide and ideology, and at the same time Oe's definitive statement on the role of the emperor in Japanese society. The protagonist is a 35-year old writer who tries to deal with his past, which lies beneath the doom of events from WWII. He may or may not be dying of a serious illness, but anyhow has retreated to a hospital bed, where, donning green goggles, he dictates what he calls "a history of the age." Seated at the sickbed, the note-taker, who could be his wife or a nurse, writes down what the sick and dying man wants to leave as a will. His thoughts and attempts at remembering mainly focus on his father, an exponent of extreme emperor worship, and the mother, whose father has been put to death for high treason against the emperor - a shame from which her son ultimately cannot escape. The "history of the age" is the center of the story: the narrator's father's attempt, on the last day of the war, to lead an uprising to "save the emperor." This mad rebellion clearly echoes what Oe considered to be Mishima's distortion of Japanese values. The climax of the story of the insurrection is a grotesque parody of Mishima's bloody coup and his belief in the beauty of violence.
[tr. John Nathan, in the collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness]


(2) Kokotsu no hito ("The Twilight Years", lit. "Senile People") by Ariyoshi Sawako.
The difficulties of caring the sick or demented aged has become a rather common theme in today's Japan, but when Ariyoshi wrote this novel 50 years ago nobody saw the future coming. Another important theme of this novel is the role of women in Japan, as they were/are de facto expected to be caretakers of elderly parents or grandparents. The Tachibana are an ordinary family. Akiko lives with her husband Nobutoshi, her son Satoshi, her stepfather Shigezo and her stepmother. After the death of the last one, the physical and mental state of Shigezo quickly deteriorate - at the beginning of the book he is found in his underwear on a wintry street. Tachibana Akiko is a busy woman who not only takes care of the household, but also has a job outside the family. Her senile father-in-law means another domestic chore for her. When she turns to social services, no help is offered. On the contrary, she is blamed for not honoring the traditional Confucian precept of filial piety. She is forced to quit her job to take full-time care of the old man. Ariyoshi calls attention to the social difficulties encountered in particular by women, traditionally assigned to household chores and to assisting older members of families. In addition, through her meticulous descriptions of the personal (physical and psychological), family and social consequences of aging, the writer shows her readers the agonizing prospect of a painful end of life. When Ariyoshi wanted to donate the money she had earned with this book to financial support for care facilities for the elderly, she came into conflict with the tax administration which used to impose heavy taxes and limits on private donations. The rules regarding charitable donations have since been relaxed. Ariyoshi correctly anticipated the problems that Japan's rapidly aging society would cause. But the novel is not at all a dreary story - it is both funny and heart-warming.
[tr. Mildred Tahara]


(3) Tatta hitori no hanran ("A Singular Rebellion") by Muraya Saiichi, winner of the Tanizaki prize.
A comedy of manners which has not fared well in translation as the subdued humor of Muraya is difficult to translate. The narrator, Mabuchi Eisuke, is a middle-aged widower and employee of an electronics manufacturer, a job he has because, as a civil servant at Ministry of Economic Affairs, he refused a transfer to the Ministry of Defense. This seems something of a rebellion against authority, but in reality Mabuchi's motives are mixed. The story starts with Mabuchi marrying his much younger fashion model mistress, Yukari. This is a small rebellion, too, and the various confused situations which arise in their life together form the comic center of the novel. Even more so as Yukari brings her grandmother who has just been released from prison as she has (accidentally?) killed her estranged husband with a razor. The novel about small private rebellions is set against the background of the rebellious year of 1969 when rioting students seemed poised to overthrow society.
[tr. Dennis Keene]

Darkness in Summer by Kaiko Takeshi, is a touching novel about Vietnam,
Kaiko also wrote the reportage Into a Black Sun about that same war.


(4) "Momo" ("Peaches"), a short story by Abe Akira.
Born in Hiroshima, Akira Abe (1934-1989) studied around the same time as Oe Kenzaburo French literature at the University of Tokyo. After graduating in 1959, he worked as a television and radio director at TBS until he began his career as a professional writer in 1971. His literary career began in 1962 with the publication of The Children's Room (Kodomobeya), an emotional account of growing up with a mentally challenged older brother. Almost all of his stories are autobiographical and based on events from his own life and the lives of his family. Abe Akira is one of the representatives of the "Shishosetsu". His most important novel is Vacation for Eternity (Shirei no kyuka) from 1970, deals with the military's loss of authority in the post-war period, which particularly affected his father. Abe is also a master of short stories. Very little by Abe Akira has been translated into English.

The short story "Momo", "Peaches," has appeared in several anthologies. It is a tale in which the author questions his memory, which is the most fundamental source of his art as Shishosetsu novelist.
[tr. Jay Rubin in Contemporary Japanese Literature]

[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).]

[All photos public domain from Wikimedia Commons]

Modern Japanese Fiction by Year Index

Modern Japanese Fiction by Year (9): The Years of Fast Economic Growth (1961-1965)

The years 1961-1965 were characterized by a heedless pursuit of economic gains. It was the time of the "economic animals" working hard to get a better life. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that aspiration, but the world is more than only money. In fact, Japanese literature in the 1960s is plagued by the question of the identity of the Japanese, and there exists still a strong trauma from the militarism in the recent past, and the defeat in WWII. The end of the war brought the destruction of sociopolitical identity that had functioned for many decades. In its place came new education, a consumer society, new economic patterns, a rise in the status of women, the advance of the conjugal family, etc.

The highlight of this period were the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964, which showed the whole world that Japan was back - in a new democratic form.

The doyens of Japanese literature continued writing strong works, such as Diary of a Mad Old Man by Tanizaki; The Old Capital and Beauty and Sadness by Kawabata; and Black Rain by Ibuse.

The writers from the three generations who started their careers in the postwar years were now at their best: Abe Kobo with his masterpiece The Woman in the Dunes, and also The Face of Another; Oe Kenzaburo with his great novel A Personal Experience; Mishima with what many consider as his best work, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, as well as Spring Snow, the first volume of The Sea of Fertility.

New writers in this period are Mizukami (Minakami) Tsutomi who wrote fine and complex novellas, but also published important thrillers; Kono Taeko with her creepy short stories; and Nosaka Akiyuki with The Pornographers and Grave of Fireflies.

"Popular" literature or genre literature also flourished. New popular writers were: Matsumoto Seicho (detective and historical fiction), Shiba Ryotaro (historical fiction), Genji Keita (stories about salary-men), Hoshi Shinichi and Komatsu Sakyo (both science fiction).


1961
Shimanaka Incident: right-wing zealot tries to murder the publisher of the magazine Chuo Koron.

Death of Uno Koji (1891-1961).

(1) Mizukami Tsutomu writes three great novellas. 

- Gan no Tera ("The Temple of the Wild Geese," 1961) 
Mizukami used thriller techniques in this semi-autobiographical novel, set in a Kyoto temple called "the Temple of the Wild Geese" (a sub-temple of Zen temple Shokokuji) because a famous painter has decorated the sliding doors with these birds. The story centers on Jinen, a thirteen-year old novice with a mysterious background. The orphaned son of a beggar, he has a grotesquely formed head and is generally unhappy and ashamed of his past. The priest of the temple, Jikai, has taken an ex-geisha from Gion, Satoko, into the temple. In modern Japan, priests are allowed to marry, but playing around with a geisha is of course a sign of lewdness in a priest. On top of that, Jikai is a notorious tippler. The lonely Jinen develops a crush on Satoko, and she does not completely discourage his youthful fancy. The unlikely love triangle leads to a brutal climax - Jikai disappears. Has he really departed on a walking tour of penance, as Jinen says? A story with great psychological depth and written in a beautiful style. The Temple of the Wild Geese was filmed in 1962 by Kawashima Yuzo in vibrant black-and-white with Wakao Ayako as Satoko.
[tr. Dennis Washburn, Dalkey Archive Press]

- Gobancho Yugiriro ("The Yugiri Brothel at Gobancho," 1963) 
A young woman from a poor family in Fukui is sold to the Yugiri geisha house in Nishijin, Kyoto. A rich merchant wants to be her lover, but she is already in love with a local boy who has become a novice in the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Out of frustration he in the end sets fire to the priceless structure... After Mishima, the second novel to take up the theme of the arson of the Golden Pavilion. The Yugiri Brothel at Gobancho was filmed in 1963 by Tasaka Tomitaka.
[No English translation]

- Echizen take ningyo ("Bamboo Dolls of Echizen," 1963)
A young bamboo craftsman, Kisuke, takes his father's prostitute Tamae as a wife and insists on treating her as a mother - the two never become lovers. The story has weird Freudian overtones. Cared for by Tamae, Kisuke becomes a renowned craftsman, a maker of the bamboo dolls the region is famous for. Part folk tale and part social realism, set in the isolated rural scenery of Fukui Prefecture. Lots of local color, often of a primitive and ghostly nature. Bamboo Dolls of Echizen was filmed in 1963 by Yoshimura Kozaburo as a stylish melodrama.
[tr. Dennis Washburn, Dalkey Archive Press]

[Mizukami Tsutomu]

Mizukami (Minakami) Tsutomu (1919–2004) was born as the son of a shrine carpenter in the Wakasa region of Fukui Prefecture, on the Japan Sea coast above Kyoto. After staying as a novice in a Kyoto temple, in 1936 Mizukami entered Ritsumeikan University to study Japanese literature, but dropped out due to financial problems. He also studied with the author Uno Koji, but was unable to achieve success. Mizukami's breakthrough finally came in 1959 when he published a popular mystery, Mist and Shadow. It was detective fiction with a social theme, a genre initiated by Matsumoto Seicho. In 1961 Mizukami wrote The Fangs of the Sea in the same vein, a mystery novel about the Minamata Disease, which won him the Mystery Writers' Club Prize. His most enduring popular work in this genre was Straits of Hunger from 1963. Mizukami used the financial security provided by these mystery novels to return to pure literature. The Temple of the Geese (1962) was based on his own temple experiences and won him the prestigious Naoki Prize. The years of literary and social apprenticeship now paid off and several masterworks followed. His study of the 15th c. eccentric Zen-master Ikkyu was awarded the Tanizaki Prize in 1975. 


(2) Utsukushisa to kanashimi ("Beauty and Sadness") & Koto ("The Old Capital") are serialized by Kawabata Yasunari

- Utsukushisa to kanashimi ("Beauty and Sadness").
A complex melodrama that is in itself entertaining with elements as lust, jealousy and revenge, but which lacks the more quiet aesthetic of Kawabata best work. John Lewell has called it: "a complex melodrama exploring the idea that true beauty is always to be found in pathos, and vice versa." A novelist, Oki Toshio, who is getting on in years, goes to Kyoto to visit the woman, Ueno Otoko, who was his mistress a quarter of a century earlier. Ueno Otoko is now a famous painter and recluse, living with her female protégée and jealous lover, Sakami Keiko. Keiko states several times that she wants to avenge Otoko for Oki's abandonment (which has ruined Otoko's life, moreover the baby she had with Oki was still-born), and when Oki has returned to Kamakura she seduces him, and then turns her attention to his son, Taiichiro. The story coalesces into a climactic ending: a motor boat accident on lake Biwa. It is as if Kawabata wants to say that karma moves along parallel lines, and that actions are repeated endlessly. The novel was filmed in 1965 by Shinoda Masahiro.
[tr. Howard Hibbett]

- Koto ("The Old Capital")
Set in Kyoto, this novel sometimes reads like a tourist pamphlet for the ancient capital. Chieko, the adopted daughter of a kimono trader from Nishijin, discovers her lost twin sister, Naeko, who works in the cedar forests to the north of the city. She become so obsessed with this rediscovered twin sister, that the novel reads like a feminine love story. Chieko tries to have her boyfriend, Hideo, marry Naeko, but the twin sister believes Hideo's love is an illusion. From her side, Chieko has no intention of marrying Hideo. In the end, Naeko decides to return to the forest where she was brought up - a plantlike philosophy that is a relic of the past. The plot is delightfully inconclusive. Three film adaptations were made of this novel: by Nakamura Noboru (1963, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), by Ichikawa Kon (1980, the last movie in which actress Yamaguchi Momoe appeared her marriage) and by Saito Yuki (2016).
[tr. J. Martin Holman]


(3) Stories and a novel from the early 1960s by Mishima Yukio.

- Star (Suta, 1960)
Published shortly after Mishima had his first starring role in a film, "Star" tells the story of a popular young actor, disillusioned with fame, and the anxieties he feels over his career and public image. The film was Afraid to Die (1960) helmed by Masumura Yasuzo, and Mishima played a young gangster. It was hard work for Mishima as Masumura was unsatisfied with Mishima's acting skills, and demanded many retakes as a result. The story "Star" was relatively forgotten in Japan and overshadowed by Mishima's other works, but it is a quite interesting story, and what is says about "stars" is still relevant in this all-too-starry age.
[tr. Sam Beth]

- "Yukoku" ("Patriotism," 1961)
"Patriotism" stages Lieutenant Takeyama Shinji and his wife Reiko’s ritual suicide  following and attempted coup by an army unit on February 26, 1936. The couple’s demise, intended to solve a moral dilemma, is presented by the narrator as a praiseworthy example of dedication to Japan and the emperor. Mishima filmed it with himself in the role of the seppuku-committing lieutenant, as if it were a rehearsal for his own suicide in November 1970. All in all, a rather disgusting expression of Mishima's fascism and ridiculous ideology.
[tr. Geoffrey W. Sargent in Death in Midsummer]

- Mikumanomode ("Act of Worship," lit. "Pilgrimage to the Three Shrines of Kumano," 1965)
There are two central characters in this story: a famous professor of classical Japanese literature and himself a well-known poet, and his loyal housekeeper, who under his guidance dabbles in tanka poetry. Both are unattractive as persons: the professor is so solitary and outlandish that is dubbed Dr Weirdo; the housekeeper, a 45-year old widow, is lacking in feminine charm and very shy and submissive. When the professor makes a trip to the three Kumano shrines in southern Wakayama, he surprisingly takes the housekeeper along, the first time they have traveled together in their ten year long association. It installs some romantic notions in the mind of the admiring housekeeper who is secretly in love with the professor. The true motives of the professor to travel together are very different - they form the central puzzle of the story, and will be slowly ferreted out by the housekeeper. Why does he bury combs with a woman's name on them at each of the shrines? The description of their trip - Kumano with the Nachi waterfall is an ancient cult site that often figures in classical poetry - is skillfully interwoven with references to waka poetry from the past. One of the most accomplished stories Mishima wrote.
[tr. John Bester in Acts of Worship]

- Kemono no tawamure ("The Frolic of the Beasts", 1961)
Mishima wrote 34 novels, so it is not so strange that one has fallen below the radar, even in Japan. But in the case of "The Frolic of the Beasts," that is certainly undeserved as this short novel proves to be vintage Mishima. It is true literary fiction with overtones of the No theater and not one of the more easy novels Mishima also wrote in this period. Mishima has used elements from the classical No play "Motomezuka," about a young women who had two suitors, but could not make a choice between them and - being pulled from one to the other - in the end drowned herself, upon which both suitors also committed suicide. Besides being a variation of the plot of the No play, the faces of the protagonists in the novel are regularly compared to No masks. The love triangle involves the penniless student Koji, one of Mishima's hot-blooded young men (he reminded me of Saburo from Thirst for Love, or Yuichi from Forbidden Colors); the rich playboy and well-known literary critic Kusakado Ippei; and Ippei's beautiful but enigmatic wife Yuko. Koji wrongly thinks that because of her husband's philandering Yuko is a miserable, unhappy woman he has to save from her fate; and Yuko plays games with him without realizing how dangerous that is. Even when Koji attacks Ippei and turns him into a lifelong invalid, Yuko keeps up the friendship with him...
[tr. Andrew Clare]


(4) Sebuntin ("Seventeen") by Oe Kenzaburo is a novella about a lonely seventeen year old who is in the throes of becoming a right wing activist and assassin. 
In 1960 and 1961, there had been several murder attempts against politicians - including Japan's prime minister - by right wing zealots; the most notable among the successful ones was the stabbing to death of the chairman of the Socialist Party while he was engaged in a public debate on TV. The culprit, Yamaguchi Otoya, was a seventeen year old terrorist who hanged himself three weeks later in a juvenile penitentiary, after scribbling a right wing slogan on the wall of his cell. Oe modeled the protagonist of Seventeen on Yamaguchi, and drew details of the story with oppressive sordidness. As a result (and also because of a second novella, since withdrawn, in which he was even more outspoken), Oe himself became a target of right-wingers. Seventeen is in fact a hyperbolic caricature of a fanatic adolescent, who is at the same time battling his sexual urges with discomfort. The remarks in the story about the Nazi uniform and the Imperial Way Party serve as a prophetic blueprint for Mishima's last novels as Runaway Horses as well as his actual suicide - and a measured answer to Mishima's Patriotism.
[tr. Luk van Haute]


1962
Cuban missile crisis.

Death of popular historical novelist Yoshikawa Eiji (1892-1962). 

[Film poster The Woman in the Dunes]

(1) Suna no Onna ("The Woman in the Dunes") is the greatest novel by Abe Kobo
The Woman in the Dunes is a surrealistic and sometimes even absurdist novel that reminds one of Sartre and Beckett. A school teacher called Niki Junpei has taken a few days off to spend time on his hobby, collecting insects. For that purpose he visits a dune region in a remote part of Japan, far from Tokyo. Junpei passes through a village where some of the houses stand in deep sand pits. When he misses the last bus back to civilization, the locals suggest he stay the night in their village. They send him down a rope ladder into just such a sand pit. Here a young widow lives alone, battling with the sand that threatens to destroy her ramshackle dwelling. Every night she must dig away the sand that is hauled up by the villagers and then sold to the cities. If she stops digging, not only her house will be engulfed, but the sand will also threaten the other houses in the village. Junpei listens without interest to her story - he thinks it has nothing to do with him, after all he will be leaving the next morning. But when the next day dawns, he discovers that the rope ladder has been removed. He has been trapped. The villagers tell him he must help the widow, as she needs the strength of a man to battle the ever-encroaching sand. Junpei has been caught like an insect... The Woman in the Dunes is in all respects a perfect novel. The ideas, the setting, the story and the way it is told, the implications for the human condition, everything is in perfect balance. Expertly filmed by Teshigahara Hiroshi with Okada Eiji and Kishida Keiko, and music by Takemitsu Toru.
[tr. E. Dale Saunders]
 

(2) The two last novels by Tanizaki Junichiro, Futen rojin nikki ("The Diary of a Mad Old Man") & Daidokoro Taiheki ("The Maids")

- Futen rojin nikki ("The Diary of a Mad Old Man")
The fictional diary of Tokusuke, a 77-year old man whose health is rapidly failing, and one of Tanizaki's most delicious books. Tokusuke has the same health problems as Tanizaki and seems to be the author's alter ego also in other respects. His chief motivation for clinging to life is his secret erotic obsession with Atsuko, his young daughter-in-law who used to be a chorus girl. She is frivolous, acquisitive, and cruelly plays with the old man like a cat with a mouse. He enjoys these games and favors her with expensive presents over his wife and daughters - who are the only ones genuinely worried about his health. Tokusuke lusts after Satsuko's feet and when he catches a glimpse of her ankle, or is allowed to touch her briefly, his blood pressure goes through the roof. The finale of this short novel is superb. Tokusuke travels with Satsuko to Kyoto to select a tombstone for his future grave. Now in Buddhism there is a tradition of honoring the Buddha's footprints, images of his foot soles supposed to have been left by him on earth to purposefully mark his passage over a particular spot. A famous footprint stone stands in Yakushiji Temple in Nara. But Tokusuke wants to have an image of Satsuko's dainty foot on his grave, trampling on him in all eternity! Their time in Kyoto is spent making the right footprint and ordering the stone. We any moment expect the old man to drop dead because of all his strenuous efforts, but on the contrary, when he returns home he starts making plans to construct a swimming pool in the garden of his Western-style home so that he will have a prime view of Satsuko's legs when she is bathing...
[tr. Howard Hibbett]

- Daidokoro Taiheiki ("The Maids," lit. "The Chronicle of Great Peace of the Kitchen")
The Taiheiki is a famous 14th c. historical epic, and "daidokoro" means "kitchen." So we could paraphrase the title as "epic battles in the kitchen," an ironic title for reminiscences about the successive (young) maids who served in the Tanizaki home (here called Chikura Raikishi, but nobody is fooled). The book was first published in serialized form, and it feels more like a loose collection of scenes-from-a-life rather than a fully developed novel. It starts in 1937 and continues to the early 1960s, through the various houses where Tanizaki himself lived in those years. It is almost a sociological study that shows how the institution of "maids in the household" changed over time. The Tanizaki home teemed with young maids, especially in the pre-war years, and Tanizaki gives us individual character portraits and sometimes a bit of a story (some of the maids have interesting quirks), but the result is only mildly interesting from a literary point of view: a nicely laid-back series of anecdotes, but also a decidedly minor work. (In some reviews of the recent translation, it is compared to Tanizaki's magnum opus The Makioka Sisters, but that is rather misleading - the two books have nothing in common.)  
[tr. Michael P. Cronin]                                                                                                 


(3) Hideyoshi to Rikyu ("Hideyoshi and Rikyu") by Nogami Yaeko explores the mystery of the forced suicide of tea master Sen no Rikyu.
Nogami Yaeko almost became a hundred years of age and left an immense body of work, of which very little has been translated into English. Happily, that was not the fate of her greatest novel, published when she was 77, a historical tale focusing on the complex relationship between tea master Sen no Rikyu and 16th c. warlord and finally de facto ruler of Japan, Hideyoshi. Toyotomi Hideyoshi rose through the ranks from a common foot soldier to become the military ruler of Japan but struggled to win respect among the cultured nobility. Sen no Rikyu was a wealthy merchant from trade center Sakai, who not only had become the country's most accomplished tea master, but who also functioned as political advisor to Hideyoshi. Nogami contrasts Hideyoshi's love of ostentatious display with the ideals of simplicity and rusticity emphasized by Rikyu. The intertwined lives of these two iconic historical figures ended in disaster for one of them: as is well known, the tea master was forced to commit suicide. Nogami is very knowledgeable both about the tea ceremony and the No theater, adding to the interest of this historical novel. But above all it is a psychological portrait of two powerful men. Nogami's novel won the Woman's Literature Prize in 1964 and was beautifully adapted into the film Rikyu by Teshigahara Hiroshi.
[tr. by Mariko Nishi LaFleur and Morgan Beard]

Nogami Yaeko (1885-1985) wrote her first story in the Meiji period and was praised by Natsume Soseki. She developed from impressionistic realism to a plainer style used in her novels of social analysis. Her greatest work in that respect was the huge novel Meiro (Labyrinth, 1956), which describes the pre-war Marxist movement in inexhaustible detail. Influenced by 19th c. English literature, Nogami held enlightened, humanist views. She was married to a famous scholar of the No theater. Her last work was a long autobiographical novel Mori (The Forest, 1971). It is a pity so little has been translated of this "grand old lady" of modern Japanese literature.


(4) Ryoma ga yuku ("Ryoma Goes His Way") by Shiba Ryotaro starts being serialized (until 1966).
Originally serialized in the national newspaper Sankei Shinbun, this epic of the life and times of Sakamoto Ryoma is one of Shiba Ryotaro's most interesting novels. Sakamoto Ryoma - a low ranking samurai of the Tosa domain (now Kochi Prefecture) - is a historic figure who today is widely known as one of the main architects leading Japan into the 1868 Meiji Restoration. Shiba depicts the life of Sakamoto Ryoma on a large scale, as he played major roles in such events as the 1866 formation of a military alliance between the two powerful domains, Satsuma and Choshu, which led to the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the formation of the new Meiji government the next year. But more than that, Ryoma Goes His Way is a riveting and vivid story about the life of a brilliant young man in turbulent times. Ryoma realized that Japan was almost powerless in the face of the technology and well-developed industry of the Western powers, and he was convinced that it needed to adopt elements of Western culture to develop into a strong country. Although now considered as a romantic hero and great leader, Sakamoto Ryoma was not well known in Japan prior to the publication of Shiba's novel, which became a great bestseller and sold 21,250,000 copies. Ryoma has been heavily romanticized in Japanese popular culture, something which was helped by the fact that he died a tragic death at a very young age: in 1867 he was assassinated in Kyoto.
[tr. Paul McCarthy & Juliet Winters Carpenter]

Shiba Ryotaro (1923-1996) started writing historical novels after World War II. The pen name "Shiba" he selected is suggestive: it is the name of the famous Chinese historian Sima Qian, who lived 2,000 years ago. Shiba won the prestigious Naoki Prize for his 1959 novel, Fukuro no Shiro (Owl Castle). Better known are his long novels Ryoma ga Yuku ("Ryoma Goes His Way," translated as "Ryoma!"), about the life of  Sakamoto Ryoma, and Sakanoue no Kumo (“Clouds Above the Hill”), a novel centering on the war between Japan and Russia. Another series that won him fame were his travel essays, 1,146 installments in all, printed first in the Shukan Asahi magazine and then issued as a series of books called Kaido wo Yuku (“Going along the Highways”). These were made into a documentary series by NHK. In fact, many of Shiba's 500 books were filmed or made into TV dramas, especially the NHK historical “Taiga” dramas broadcast on Sunday evening. Even in his novels, many parts read like essays - the story leans on the historical sources and Shiba's interpretation of them. There is an interesting Shiba Ryotaro Museum in Osaka (see article on my website).


1963
Mitsui Miike Coal Mine disaster kills 458 by carbon monoxide explosion.

(1) Kono Taeko writes her creepy, early short stories, including Akutagawa Prize-winning "Kani" ("The Crabs").

- "Yojigari" ("Toddler Hunting," 1961)
The protagonist, a childless woman called Hayashi Akiko, loathes young girls, but is obsessed with young boys: she compulsively buys expensive clothes for strange boys. She has also masochistic fantasies about the boys being cruelly punished. The relation with her adult partner is based on sadomasochism as well. An extremely weird story in which motherhood is turned on its head.

- "Kani" ("The Crabs," 1963)
A story about a woman, Yuko, in a marriage based on SM. She suffers from tuberculosis and during the summer stays at the seaside to recover. There she is visited by her brother-in-law with his wife and little boy. Yuko's infatuation with her young nephew borders on perversion. She manages to keep him at her side by promising to find little crabs with red pincers "that the children like to play with," but they never find any.

- "Yoru wo yuku" ("Night Journey," 1963)
A married couple have invited their friends - a couple (there is a hint of partner switching here) - for dinner, but when they don't show up, they travel to their friend's house at night - a trip which becomes a bewitching journey into the forbidden.

- "Ari takaru" ("Ants Swarm," 1964)
A woman who might be pregnant idly imagines what it would be like to have a child. Where many women would be excited at the prospect, she’s rather less enthusiastic, and the ideas she reveals of how to raise the child, especially if it’s a girl, are disturbing to say the least. 

[All stories mentioned above included in Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories, tr. by Lucy North, New Directions]

[Kono Taeko]

Kono Taeko (1926-2015) was born in Osaka as the fourth of five children of a wholesale merchant. She was often ailing in her youth and at that time developed an interest in the works of Izumi Kyoka and Tanizaki Junichiro. After finishing her economics degree at Women's University in 1947, she decided to make a career for herself as a writer and she moved to Tokyo. There she joined a literary group led by Niwa Fumio, and threw herself into writing, at the same time working full-time. After nearly a decade of trying, during which she suffered several setbacks in her health, including two bouts of tuberculosis, in 1962 she was awarded Shinchosha's "Dojin zasshi" Award for her story "Yojigari." In 1963 her short story "Kani" won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. After this Kono began to produce a stream of remarkable short fiction. Since then she has published a book every year and won many literary prizes.

Kono Taeko freely admitted the influence of Tanizaki on her stories. In his novels, Tanizaki explored the taboo of perverted desire, and similarly Kono’s female protagonists seethe with neuroses and masochistic sexual desires. The stories Kono wrote, however, are more shocking than anything Tanizaki ever penned because shocking motifs are combined with the detailed description of small incidents from everyday life - underneath the seemingly normal routines of daily life, one may find hidden desires for abnormal behavior. There is a strong sense that these desires arise because the characters are forced to live under psychologically oppressive cultural constraints; the heroines in her stories seem to feel that something is missing in their relationships with the world. Kono Taeko also established a reputation for herself as an acerbic essayist, a playwright and a literary critic. By the end of her life she was a leading presence in Japan's literary establishment, one of the first women writers to serve on the Akutagawa Literary Prize committee.


(2) Erogotoshitachi ("The Pornographers") by Nosaka Akiyuki.
The first novel by then 33-year old Nosaka Akiyuki, highly praised by Mishima Yukio and Yoshiyuki Junnosuke. The absurd antics of two down-at-heel pornographers active in the Osaka area are not only wonderful inventions but perfectly express the author's peculiar brand of warm-hearted cynicism. Subuyan considers it as his mission in life to provide all possible kinds of erotic enjoyment to the male half of the population, and various customs from the early 1960s such as blue film, Turkish baths, and erotic photography are woven into the work. The grotesque and obscene reality is spelled out with an underlying feeling of melancholy, but also fierce humor - and the idea of ​​eroticism is drawn ironically. On a more serious note Nosaka also includes reminisences by Subuyan of how his mother died in the Kobe air raid, elements based on Nosaka's own war experience (he lost his adoptive father in the raid). Imamura Shohei's 1966 free film adaptation is just as famous as the novel.
[tr. Michael Gallagher]

Nosaka Akiyuki (1930-2015) grew up in Kobe as one of the "generation of the ashes," like Oe Kenzaburo. He was not only active as a novelist, but also as singer, lyricist, and (since 1983) member of the House of Councillors. His wartime experiences which included the deaths of a sister from malnutrition and of his adoptive father from the 1945 bombing of Kobe, formed the material for his masterful short story Grave of the Fireflies. Grave of the Fireflies and American Hijiki won the Naoki Prize in 1967 - both these novellas are in my view far superior to The Pornographers.


(3) Setouchi Harumi writes "Natsu no owari" ("The End of Summer," published as full set in 1966), a series of linked short stories about the conflicting emotions of a woman breaking away from her bonds.
A collection of linked stories insipred by the writer's own adulterous affair. Tomoko, the lover of two men (one married), must summon the courage to free herself from the chains of conventional Japanese society, and find inner peace.
[tr. Janine Beichman with Alan Brender]

Setouchi Jakucho (Harumi, b. 1922) is a Japanese nun of the Tendai school of Buddhism and a writer. She was born in Tokushima to a family that dealt in religious goods. In 1943, at the age fo 21, while attending Tokyo Women's Christian University, she got married and gave birth to a girl the following year. After that, she accompanied her husband to Beijing. She returned to Japan in 1946, where she had an affair, which motivated her to leave her marriage and go to Tokyo to become a full-fledged novelist. Much of her work has been semi-autobiographical, while she also wrote biographical novels about famous feminists such as Ito Noe. In 1972 she became a Buddhist nun in the Tendai school of Buddhism, but continued her writing activity, now under the name Setouchi Jakucho. Setouchi's vernacular translation of The Tale of Genji was published in 1998. The translation is rather too free (more an adaptation) and not as good as those by Tanizaki Junichiro or Yasano Akiko, but all the same it became a best seller which sold 2.1 million copies.


(4) "Kataude" ("One Arm") by Kawabata Yasunari
An unsettling short story by Kawabata. A young woman removes her right arm and gives it to the narrator to keep for the night. He talks with it and caresses it, and then decides to replace his own arm with it. The "relationship" the man has with the detached arm serves as a portal into a landscape of memory and emotions. One of Kawabata's weirdest stories.
[tr. Edward Seidensticker in The House of Sleeping Beauties]


(5) Gogo no eiko ("The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea," lit. "A Tugboat in the Afternoon," with "eiko, tugboat" homonym with "eiko, glory") by Mishima Yukio.
An expression of Mishima's love of glorious heroes in uniform, be they sailors or soldiers, and also a tale that like Musil's Young Torless shows how susceptible young people can be to fascist thought. A sailor, on shore in Yokohama, falls in love with a young widow and is initially admired by that widow's son Noboru for his strong adventure tales. But the boy - who is a member of a group of precocious, but also fascistic and nihilistic boys - is disappointed when the sailor decides to marry his mother and start a peaceful life on land. The group, whose members have practiced by vivisecting a cat (a disgusting scene, in reality watched by Mishima to be able to vividly describe it), decide to kill him because to them he has lost his "purity," and one afternoon lure him to an isolated spot...The story is well told and has a strong focus. In contrast to Musil, Mishima is on the side of the ideology of the boy gang, or better, he uses the boy gang to give expression to his own ideology. The sailor must be punished by the boys because he gives up his "destiny" and "glory" and bows to convention. He is on the verge of becoming an ordinary husband and father, without heroism, and therefore deserves to die. But the punishment is also a form of love, as it protects the punished from himself.
[tr. John Nathan]


(6) Kiga Kaikyo ("Hunger Straits") by Mizukami Tsutomu is a dark thriller and Matsumoto Seicho-style critique of Japanese society.
The long novel consists of two interlocking stories, of a prostitute and a police detective, who are searching for the same fugitive. Three robbers escape with loot from a heist. During the escape, one of them kills both his comrades. Their dead bodies wash up on the shore after a maritime disaster, but a policeman, Yumisaka, becomes suspicious because they are not listed as passengers. The surviving robber Inukai is sheltered by a prostitute, Yae. In return, the robber gives her a large sum of money, and she is able to start a new life. Many years later, Yae sees the man who had given her the money in a newspaper article. She tries to thank him, but because he has now become a respectable citizen, living under a false name, he kills her so that his secret will be safe. Yumisaka, who was forced to resign from the police force because of his obsession with this case, is back chasing the murderer... Filmed in 1965 by Uchida Tomu, with Mikuni Rentaro, Hidari Sachiko and Takakura Ken.
[No translation]


1964
A seminal year. The Tokyo Olympics (the first Olympic Games held in an Asian city) and the start of operation of high-speed Shinkansen trains between Tokyo and Osaka reflect a society-wide sense that post-war reconstruction is over and that Japan has rejoined the international family of nations. Individuals born beginning around this date were often subsequently identified as "shinjinrui" (or "new people") because they had not experienced the suffering older generations had during WWII and the postwar period, but grew up in material plenty.

Diplomatic negotiations underway this year between South Korea and Japan result in a formal normalization of relations the following year.

(1) A novel and a story about the birth of a mentally challenged son by Oe Kenzaburo.

- Kojinteki na taiken ("A Personal Matter"), written when Oe was only 29,  is often considered as his best novel. 
The protagonist, only known by the nickname "Bird," is stuck in a dead-end job and stale marriage and unrealistically dreams of escape in the form of a trip to Africa. While his wife is in a hospital to give birth to their first child, he roams the city searching for maps of Africa. When the baby is born, the doctors tell him it suffers from brain hernia and even if it lives (for which an operation is necessary) it may never be normal. Facing a future trapped by a handicapped child, with only a vegetable life, Bird encourages the doctors to let it die by substituting sugar water for milk. He then disappears for four nightmarish guilt-ridden days into a cloud of alcohol and sex with his ex-girlfriend, the eccentric and freewheeling Himiko (who is running away from her own problem, the suicide of her husband). Bird builds up such a terrific hangover that he vomits in front of the class he is teaching and loses his cram-school job. Then the baby, the "two-headed monster," despite the sugar water proves to be fit enough for an operation. Bird refuses the operation and with Himiko's help takes the child out of the hospital and brings it to an abortionist in order to be killed. It is only at the last moment that he realizes he should take his responsibility in life and come to terms with having a mentally handicapped child. The novel is a tour de force, except that the positive ending feels "tacked on," it is too sudden (but true to form, Bird's motivation is a self-centered one, he does not express any empathy with the baby). Something I found rather strange about the novel is that the wife of Bird remains completely in the background - Bird never consults her about the life and death decision he has to make, although it is also her child. The character of Himiko has been called Oe's most successful female portrait, but as Susan Napier writes, from a Western feminist perspective much remains to be desired: Himiko's role is basically a submissive one, like an all-accepting "earth mother," sacrificing herself for the man's good (Escape from the Wasteland, p. 93). Although the subtext of the long love scenes in the novel is rather violent and anti-female, Mishima Yukio called them "the best in postwar fiction."
[tr. by John Nathan]

- "Sora no kaibutsu Agui" ("Aghwee the Sky Monster") appeared early in the same year as A Personal Matter and obviously represents the novel's alternative ending. 
But the story can stand by itself, and has an eerie sheen to it, rendered mostly in the lead character's schizophrenia and guilt from a planned infanticide. In the end, there is redemption, but it comes with a steep price.
[tr. John Nathan in Contemporary Japanese Literature]


(2) Nireke no hitobito ("The House of Nire") by Kita Morio is a comic novel relating he history of the Nire family from the end of WWI to the end of WWII.
A humerous novel about the history of the Nire family from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second. We meet the vain and selfish Nire Kiichiro, founder not only of the family mental hospital but of the family itself; and his children, adopted children, grandchildren, and any number of hangers-on, who form an interesting cast of weird characters. However, after the opening chapters full of delicious humor, when Kiichiro dies in the novel, the novel also dies, because there are no strong characters anymore. The story goes down in the gathering political storm that eventually leads to war and defeat.
[tr. Dennis Keene, 2 vols]


(3) Tanin no kao ("The Face of Another") by Abe Kobo
A psychological novel and study of alienation in monologue style dealing with the varied personalities and masks by which we live. An engineer, Okuyama, has his face severely burnt in a work-related accident. His wife is so repulsed by his disfigurement that she refuses to have sexual contact with him. In an effort to regain her affection, he asks another scientist to create a prosthetic, lifelike mask for him (but different from his original face). The scientist who has developed the mask cautions him that it may change his behavior and personality and even make him loose his sense of morality. And indeed, with a new face, the protagonist sees the world in a new way and to test the mask, he proceeds to seduce his estranged wife. In the end the question is whether the mask has taken ownership of the man or the man has taken ownership of the new face. A meditation on what a "face" is, in a country where Face is very important.  In 1966, adapted into a film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara.
[tr. E. Dale Saunders]


(4) Two Novellas by Tachihara Masaaki.

- Takigi No ("Torchlight No", 1964)
A story about beauty in death. The protagonist, Masako, is drawn to her cousin Suntaro, because of her husband's unfaithfulness. The psychological change in Masako is described in detail and with stark realism. In addition, the experience of the beauty of the No and the lovers' double suicide are more minutely described.
[tr. Stephen W. Kohl]

- Kengasaki ("Cliff's edge", 1965)
A story about the problem of identity faced by a youth of mixed blood, set against the background of the Japanese defeat in WWII and the subsequent independence of Korea. Kenkichi opposes Taro's marriage to Shizuko, not because the two lovers are cousins, but because of Taro's Japanese and Korean background.
[tr. Stephen W. Kohl]

Tachihara Masaaki (1926-1980) was born in Korea and grew up studying the arts of medieval Japan, especially literature and the No theater, as well as traditional Japanese gardens. His family moved to Japan when he was four years old and he received a Japanese education, studying at Waseda University; in 1947 he became a naturalized Japanese. From 1950 he lived in Kamakura.

(5) Kinu to meisatsu ("Silk and Insight") is a novel by Mishima Yukio describing a strike of workers at a silk factory against the paternalistic owner, inspired by newspaper accounts. 
By contrasting a paternalistic Japanese-style owner of a textile company with a European-infatuated intellectual set to destroy him, Mishima attempts to depict "Japan's father figure," if not a sort of "emperor" figure. Komazawa Zenjiro, president of a silk factory at the shore of Lake Biwa, considers his employees as his sons and daughters and believes he protects them with fatherly benevolence, but he allows no privacy in the dormitories and forbids marriage between employees. In fact, his is an absolutist and dictatorial form of paternalism, and he sees a resultant strike in his factory as a form of unfilial insubordination. Mishima's sympathies are clearly with the old-fashioned style of Komazawa, so this novel is no Japanese Germinal. The result is a rather strange book, without a clear focus, and not surprisingly, this weak novel was not a favorite with critics or readers in Japan. John Nathan, who had just expertly translated A Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, refused to translate it, causing a rift with Mishima (Nathan would go on the translate several novels by Oe Kenzaburo, Mishima's rival), and the book had to wait many years for the present translation by Sato Hiroaki.
[tr. Sato Hiroaki]

(6) Kawabata Yasunari starts serialization of what would become his last (unfinished) novel, Tanpopo ("Dandelions"), about a young woman who is confined to an asylum with mental illness. 
Although strongly present in the family's collective memory, Ineko may in fact never have existed. Kawabata strings memory fragments together, including those of Ineko's father, an officer during WWII supposedly saved from suicide by a magical young woman - who gradually merges with his daughter Ineko...
[tr. Michael Emmerich, New Directions]


(7) Watakushi ga suteta onna ("The Girl I Left Behind") by Endo Shusaku finds the Christian writer in a sentimental and pious mood, somewhat like a Sunday school tale.
A good Samaritan story about a naive country girl, Mitsu, who is a Christian, and who after being used badly by a student whom she loves, falls into prostitution. The student will keep meeting her or hearing about her at crucial moments in his life as salaryman with a wife and family, arousing feelings of guilt. Mitsu in the meantime, has been misdiagnosed with leprosy, and afterwards stays on in the asylum as a caretaker, until a traffic accident rips her out of this life. The blurb on the book calls this "early Endo," but that is nonsense: when writing this novel, Endo had already written a masterwork as The Sea and Poison, and within a few years Silence would follow. In other words, he was at the height of his powers. Rather than being an unripe work, this is a case of "popular literature": just like Kawabata and Mishima, besides his serious work, Endo regularly wrote popular novels and this is an example of such an "easy" novel meant for a mass audience.
[tr. Mark Williams] 


1965
U.S. airplanes begin bombing North Vietnam.

Death of Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965). Death of Edogawa Ranpo (1894-1965). 

The Tanizaki Prize is established by the publishing company Chuo Koronsha to commemorate its 80th anniversary as a publisher. It is named in honor of Tanizaki Junichiro, who died this year. It is awarded annually to a full-length representative work of fiction or drama of the highest literary merit by a professional writer.

(1) Haru no yuki ("Spring Snow," first part of the tetralogy Hojo no Umi, "The Sea of Fertility") by Mishima Yukio starts being serialized. 
Mishima's tetralogy is rather uneven in quality; this first volume is by far the best of the four (and also among the best novels Mishima wrote). It is a romantic love story set in the early Taisho-period, in the by Mishima so much beloved nostalgic milieu of the aristocracy (which by 1965 did not exist anymore). Protagonists are a Hamlet-type of indecisiveness, Matsugae Kiyoaki, the son of a rising nouveau-riche family, and Ayakura Satoko, the daughter of an aristocratic family fallen on hard times. Honda Shigekuni, a school-friend of Kiyoaki's and the son of a judge, is the main witness to the novel's events. Kiyoaki is spoiled and willful and hates doing what people expect of him. In his mood swings, he alternately rejects and accepts Satoko's demure advances. But then the Ayakuras receive an offer from an imperial prince, something they may not refuse, and Satoko becomes engaged to be married into the imperial family. Only after the situation is beyond repair, does Kiyoaki's love flare up as never before. He begins an affair with Satoko with the help of his friend Honda, and Satoko eventually becomes pregnant. This means Kiyoaki has broken the taboo of violating an imperial princess, and thereby committed "lese-majeste." Satoko retires to a nunnery in Nara, and at age 20 Kiyoaki dies a "Liebestod" in front of the gate of the temple where she is locked up. But not to worry, for Mishima employs reincarnation to bring him back (in different form) in the next three volumes of the novel, an idea he based on an ancient Japanese tale, the Hamamatsu Chunagon Monogatari.
[tr. Michael Gallagher]


(2) Kuroi ame ("Black Rain") by Ibuse Masuji is an impressive novel about the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, based on diaries of survivors.
Japan is unfortunately a culture where all to often things are turned on their head and the victims (of an illness, a kidnapping, or here the A-bomb) may be ostracized by society. The novel shows how the atomic bombing of Hiroshima affects one family: that of a young woman, Yasuko, who lives with her aunt and uncle. The title refers to the rain that fell soon after the explosion and that was mixed with radioactive soot. Yasuko was caught in this rainfall, and her family is not only worried about her health, but also and in the first place how it may affect her socially and mentally - as unfortunately happens in Japanese society, survivors of the bomb were heavily discriminated against. Filmed in 1989 by Imamura Shohei.
[tr. John Bester]


(3) Hoyo kazoku ("Embracing Family") by Kojima Nobuo became the first winner of the newly created Tanizaki Prize.
A story about the breakdown of male authority in early 1960s Japan. Miwa Shunsuke is a university lecturer who lives with his wife Tokiko and their two children. When a young American soldier comes to stay with them to help the children with their English, and Tokiko commits adultery with the GI, the family starts to disintegrate. Communication between Shunsuke and Tokiko also breaks down. Efforts by Shunsuke to repair the rift, although well-intended, only serve to disgust his wife. Shunsuke next develops the plan to build a fully air-conditioned, concrete-and-glass "American-style" dream house in the suburbs from which to start anew, but while the house is under construction, Tokiko falls ill and eventually dies. The house itself falls apart. An effort by Shunsuke to remarry and to resuscitate his family is also unsuccessful...
[tr. by Yukiko Tanaka, Dalkey Archive Press]


(4) Ryugaku ("Foreign Studies") by Endo Shusaku.
Three linked narratives chart the gulf between East and West. Evoking provincial France in the post WWII years, 17th century Rome as well as Paris in the mid-1960s (by far the longest story), Endo conveys the strong sense of alienation felt by three Japanese students when encountering European culture. Far from broadening horizons, each challenge leads to a confrontation with the traveler's own culturally imposed limitations. Inspired by Endo's own experiences as a student in France in the early 1950s.
[tr. Mark Williams]


(5) Nanamiko monogatari ("A Tale of False Fortunes") by Enchi Fumiko
A historical novel with a complex, layered narrative structure, teeming with characters who manipulate each other for personal and political reasons. The tale purports to be a manuscript from the Heian period (794–1185) that describes the rival courts of the two consorts of Emperor Ichijo.
[tr. Roger K. Thomas]

 

[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); Japanese Literature Reviewed by Donald Richie (ICG MuseInc 2003).]

[Author photos public domain via Wikimedia Commons]