The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature

VOLUME 1

MODERN ASIAN LITERATURE

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature

VOLUME 1:

FROM RESTORATION TO OCCUPATION, 1868–1945

Edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund toward the cost of publishing this book.

The volume editors and Columbia University Press wish to express their appreciation for the generous subvention grant given by the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University toward the cost of publishing this book.

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2005 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52164-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Columbia anthology of modern Japanese literature / edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel.

p. cm.—(Modern Asian literature)

Includes bibliographical references.

Contents: v. 1. From restoration to occupation, 1868–1945—

ISBN 0-231-11860-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Japanese literature—1868—Translations into English.

I. Rimer, J. Thomas. II. Gessel, Van C. III. Series.

PL782.E1C55 2005

895.6’4408—dc22

2004056206

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1. First Experiments

Fiction

Mori Ōgai

The Dancing Girl

San’yūtei Enchō

The Ghost Tale of the Peony Lantern

Tōkai Sanshi

Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women

Poetry

Spring Blossoms into Flower

Butterflies

Yuasa Hangetsu

Twelve Stones

Ueki Emori

Liberty Song

Ochiai Naobumi

Song of the Faithful Daughter Shiragiku

Shimazaki Tōson

The Fox’s Trick

First Love

Yosano Hiroshi

Victory Arches

Withered Lotus

Takeshima Hagoromo

The Maiden Called Love

2. Beginnings

Fiction

Futabatei Shimei

Drifting Clouds

Izumi Kyōka

The Holy Man of Mount Kōya

Kōda Rohan

The Icon of Liberty

Kunikida Doppo

Meat and Potatoes

Masamune Hakuchō

The Clay Doll

Mori Ōgai

The Boat on the River Takase

Nagai Kafū

The Mediterranean in Twilight

Ozaki Kōyō

The Gold Demon

Shimazaki Tōson

The Life of a Certain Woman

Tayama Katai

The Girl Watcher

Tokuda Shūsei

The Town’s Dance Hall

Tokutomi Roka

Ashes

Poetry in the International Style

Kodama Kagai

The Suicide of an Unemployed Person

The Setting Sun

Ishikawa Takuboku

Better than Crying

Do Not Get Up

A Spoonful of Cocoa

After Endless Discussions

Kawai Suimei

Snowflame

Living Voice

Kitahara Hakushū

Anesthesia of Red Flowers

Spider Lilies

Kiss

Yamamura Bochō

Ecstasy

Dance

Mandala

Takamura Kōtarō

Bear Fur

A Steak Platter

Kinoshita Mokutarō

Nagasaki Style

Gold Leaf Brandy

Yosano Akiko

Beloved, You Must Not Die

In the First Person

A Certain Country

From Paris on a Postcard

The Heart of a Thirtyish Woman

Poetry in Traditional Forms

Kanshi

Tanka and Haiku

Ishikawa Takuboku

Masaoka Shiki

Tanka

Haiku

Natsume Sōseki

Wakayama Bokusui

Yosano Akiko

The Dancing Girl

Spring Thaw

Essays

Natsume Sōseki

The Civilization of Modern-Day Japan

My Individualism

Yosano Akiko

An Open Letter

3. The Interwar Years

Fiction

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

The Nose

The Christ of Nanking

Arishima Takeo

The Clock that Does Not Move

Edogawa Ranpo

The Human Chair

Hori Tatsuo

The Wind Has Risen

Inagaki Taruho

One-Thousand-and-One-Second Stories

Itō Sei

A Department Store Called M

Kajii Motojirō

The Lemon

Kawabata Yasunari

The Dancing Girl of Izu

Kobayashi Takiji

The Fifteenth of March, 1928

Kuroshima Denji

A Flock of Circling Crows

Miyamoto Yuriko

A Sunless Morning

Origuchi Shinobu

Writings from the Dead

Shiga Naoya

The Diary of Claudius

The Paper Door

The Shopboy’s God

Takeda Rintarō

The Lot of Dire Misfortune

Tani Jōji

The Shanghaied Man

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

The Two Acolytes

Uno Kōji

Landscape with Withered Tree

Yokomitsu Riichi

Mount Hiei

Poetry in the International Style

Takamura Kōtarō

Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain

Hagiwara Sakutarō

On a Trip

Bamboo

Sickly Face at the Bottom of the Ground

The One Who’s in Love with Love

The Army

The Corpse of a Cat

Miyazawa Kenji

Spring & Asura

The Morning of the Last Farewell

November 3rd

Nishiwaki Junzaburō

Seven Poems from Ambarvalia

No Traveler Returns

Kitasono Katsue

Collection of White Poems

Vin du masque

Words

Two Poems

Almost Midwinter

Kitasono’s First Letter to Ezra Pound

Nakano Shigeharu

Imperial Hotel

Song

Paul Claudel

Train

The Rate of Exchange

Poetry in Traditional Forms

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Kitahara Hakushū

Mitsuhashi Takajo

Ogiwara Seisensui

Okamoto Kanoko

Ozaki Hōsai

Saitō Mokichi

Shaku Chōkū

Sugita Hisajo

Taneda Santōka

Yamaguchi Seishi

Drama

Kishida Kunio

The Swing

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

Okuni and Gohei

Essays

Kobayashi Hideo

Literature of the Lost Home

Satō Haruo

Discourse on ‘Elegance’

4. The War Years

Fiction

Dazai Osamu

December 8th

Ishikawa Tatsuzō

Soldiers Alive

Kajiyama Toshiyuki

The Clan Records

Nakajima Atsushi

The Ox Man

Ōoka Shōhei

Taken Captive

Ōta Yōko

Fireflies

Shimao Toshio

The Departure Never Came

Uno Chiyo

A Wife’s Letters

Poetry in the International Style

Takamura Kōtarō

The Elephant’s Piggy Bank

The Final Battle for the Ryūkyū Islands

Yoshida Issui

Swans

Kusano Shinpei

Mount Fuji

Oguma Hideo

Long, Long Autumn Nights

Poetry in Traditional Forms

Saitō Sanki

Toki Zenmaro

Evidence

Essays

Hagiwara Sakutarō

Return to Japan

Kobayashi Hideo

On Impermanence

Taima

Sakaguchi Ango

A Personal View of Japanese Culture

Bibliography

PREFACE

An anthology can look only backward. Even in the process of assembling and editing this collection, which has taken us several years, other, newer works of high merit have appeared, and older ones have asserted fresh claims to be included as well. For The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, we have attempted to assemble a series of works from the 1870s to the present. The issues at stake here, however, are complex. To many readers, the written word as a primary and privileged means to engage with the deep sense of self that comes from the act of reading, in a true spirit,¹ now seems to be in the process of being replaced by the culture of the electronic image. In contrast, most of what is contained in this anthology moves the reader backward from what might be termed a postmodern stance toward those decades before the rise of the electronic media. We have provided what we hope is a representative sample of works that convey, for their authors and their readers alike, the thoughts and feelings that only the culture of the printed word can offer.

We cannot say that no contemporary Japanese literature of scope and ambition is now being written and read. The newest works included here have been composed with a level of skill, sophistication, and purpose as appropriate to the current moment as any of the works were that came before them. Whatever the level of young people’s interest in Japanese manga (comics) and video games may be, literature, as opposed to simple entertainment, often remains the best way to grapple with the problems, and ironies, of the present generation in Japan. Indeed, we have assembled this anthology because we believe that it provides a relevant, resonant experience of Japanese culture not otherwise available.

The students and other readers who use this book will find a generous sampling of the literary corpus of Japan since the 1870s, Japan’s so-called modern period. The intellectual sketch map that this book provides needs to be absorbed before moving on to a higher engagement with the texts, theories, and multitudinous disciplinary readings that belong to Japanese (or any other) literature. Just as attempts to allow students to perform in a foreign language are doomed to failure unless they have been given a basic vocabulary and a sense of the grammar, so an intelligent study of literature requires that students have a body of texts to discuss.

Other anthologies of what is generally termed modern Japanese literature have preceded this one, and surely many others will follow. One difference, however, between this volume and some of the earlier collections is related to the evolving view of both Japanese and foreign scholars as to what constitutes literature. Many of the earlier collections sought, consciously or unconsciously, to privilege the long and elegant aesthetic traditions of Japan as they were transformed and manifested anew in modern works. For several generations, this view of Japanese literature prevailed and perhaps culminated in the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Kawabata Yasunari in 1968. By common consent, some of the greatest twentieth-century Japanese literary works can be categorized in this fashion. But many other kinds of writing, ranging from detective stories to political accounts—always valued by Japanese readers but neglected by translators in the early postwar decades—can now be sampled here.

In addition, our own definition of what constitutes literature extends beyond the prose fictional narrative. In this book, we also have included poetry, in both its traditional and its modern forms, as well as representative play texts and essays. But one shortcoming of this anthology—an inevitable one, in our view—is the absence of longer works of prose fiction, simply for reasons of space. It would be a serious misrepresentation of the period, however, if readers thought that some of the most significant writers of the past hundred years—Natsume Sōseki, Shiga Naoya, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Shimazaki Tōson, Mishima Yukio, Ōe Kenzaburō, and so many others—wrote only short pieces. In a few cases here, we provide excerpts from longer works as a way of calling attention to their importance, from both a literary and a historical point of view. The bibliography at the end of this volume lists a variety of the longer works that have been translated into English.

The items that we have chosen for this book reflect the convictions and enthusiasms of both of us as editors. We have attempted to chronicle a long native tradition’s encounter with and response to the newly introduced writings of Western nations. Japanese writers of the modern age—which begins with the opening of the country to the West in the late 1860s—were conscious of the weight of their own traditions. But they also were inspired by the different approaches to writing they discovered in Western literature, first made available to them at the end of the nineteenth century.

Consequently, the history of modern literature in Japan is largely the story of the interactions between the native tradition and the imported forms and styles, in every genre of writing. The Meiji period (1868–1912) was a time of grand experiment in literature, and since then the pendulum has swung back and forth as writers have tried to imitate what they saw in Western drama, fiction, and poetry or, alternatively, to hang on to what they regarded as the essence of their past.

For the two centuries preceding the opening of Japan to the West, native literary traditions had been developing inside the boundaries of what Donald Keene called a world within walls.² In the early seventeenth century, the new Tokugawa military regime sealed off the country to virtually all foreign interaction, prohibited Japanese citizens from leaving the islands, and wiped out the vestiges of the initial Western influence by expelling the Catholic missionaries and reconverting the swelling Japanese Christian population through brutal torture—all in the name of preserving domestic tranquillity and social stability. Although poetry, drama, and the prose narrative flourished early in the seclusion period—the haiku of Bashō, the new dramatic forms of kabuki and the puppet theater, and the detached, witty stories of Saikaku—by the mid-nineteenth century the literary pond, bereft of outlets and with all fresh streams dammed off, had become increasingly stagnant. It was, to paraphrase Bashō’s famous verse, time for a new frog to jump into the old pond.

The black ships of Commodore Matthew Perry that came steaming into Edo Bay in the summer of 1853 started in motion the ripple effect that stirred the waters of this isolated pond and opened new vistas to writers of every persuasion. One of the most influential intellectual imports in these early years was the literature of Europe and, later, of the United States. Over a hundred-year period, starting with the founding of the Meiji era in 1868, the Japanese literary scene became a kind of experimental laboratory in which many new ingredients were brought in from foreign suppliers—new notions of the self; theories of romanticism and naturalism, democracy and individual freedom, gender and social equality; the rights of the working class; modernism and postmodernism; an après guerre existentialism in tandem with a dedicated Marxist materialism—and each new ingredient was tested, reinvented, transformed, retested, and either ingested or disgorged. The resulting literary creations are at times amusing—particularly in the earlier periods—yet always instructive and usually of extraordinary quality.

Our goal for this anthology of modern Japanese literature thus has been to provide a broad and informed tasting from the rich feast that has been spread out for consumption over the last century and a quarter. More than half the contents of the anthology are from previously published sources such as earlier anthologies, small journals, and other venues; the remainder were specially commissioned for this collection or, occasionally, culled from previously unpublished sources. Our deepest thanks go to our skilled and committed translators, without whose heartfelt labors this preface would also be the afterword.

At Columbia University Press, we wish to thank Jennifer Crewe, our wonderfully supportive editorial director, and Margaret Yamashita and Irene Pavitt, wise and sensitive editors. We also wish to express our gratitude to Paula Locante at the University of Pittsburgh for invaluable assistance in assembling the manuscript; Dr. Mel Thorne and his able student staff in the Humanities Publication Center at Brigham Young University; Aaron P. Cooley, Phillip Shaw, and Michael Allred, students at Brigham Young University who helped with text input; and the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University for a generous publication subvention grant.

J. Thomas Rimer

Van C. Gessel

1. For this quotation in context, see Paul W. Kroll, Recent Anthologies of Chinese Literature in Translation, Journal of Asian Studies 61 (2002): 997.

2. Keene’s thorough and evocative treatment of the period can be found in his book by that title, World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-modern Era, 1600–1867 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Those wishing to read translated examples of works of literature from this period will enjoy Haruo Shirane’s Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

INTRODUCTION

J. THOMAS RIMER

The stories, essays, poems, and plays in volume 1 of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature can be read for a variety of purposes. Although we all ultimately read for pleasure, the word pleasure can be constructed from many different elements. Sometimes these elements are in consonance; sometimes they are in conflict. Our own response to a particular literary work can be conditioned by many factors, some of which remain dormant in our consciousness. Other works we have read previously, for example, help shape our expectations, and we implicitly compare what we are reading now with works we earlier admired, disliked, or remained indifferent to. Then, too, our own experiences outside literature influence even our most spontaneous responses. An American who has read, say, a story by Henry James or F. Scott Fitzgerald at the age of nineteen or twenty can quickly learn to appreciate the formal qualities of such a work. A rereading at fifty or sixty will necessarily prompt a comparison—perhaps unconscious but powerful nonetheless—between that same story and the reader’s now longer, richer life experience. He or she will judge the human truth in the story on a basis very different from that of a neophyte reader.

When reading literature created in another culture, such discrepancies grow greater. But the happy potential is always there: readers are challenged to reach beyond what they know, beyond the confines of their particular culture, in order to explore and eventually reach a different level of understanding. This, I believe, leads to a genuine, heightened satisfaction that goes beyond mere recognition. To achieve this, however, a sense of context is necessary, to help direct readers toward the concerns felt by Japanese readers and writers in order, as it were, to enter with some sophistication into the conversation between them. Accordingly, we have tried to provide here, as briefly as possible, some information about the authors, their reputations in Japan, and the ways in which their works can usefully be juxtaposed with one another.

Both geography and politics played important roles in creating the shifting cultural matrix in which the writers played out their creative lives between the 1880s and 1945, the period covered by volume 1 of this anthology. First of all, Japan, along with Thailand, was the only country in East Asia not colonized by the European powers. Indochina, Burma, India, the Philippines, India, and even parts of China were to one degree or another under the sway of Western nations. Certainly the Japanese government felt the danger of possible incursions, but Japan did not suffer the kind of forced entry of European culture experienced in a country like India. Indeed, during its long history, Japan was never occupied by any foreign power until the end of World War II.

Japan’s writers and artists nonetheless took a profound interest in Western culture, particularly after being cut off for so long from international influences, but that interest was fueled by curiosity and enthusiasm rather than by any urgent cultural or political necessity. Although European culture had long fascinated Japanese intellectuals, they were deprived of any contact other than the arrival in Japan of a relatively small number of documents and books, mostly in Dutch, until the opening of the country in 1868. Some of the interest generated in Japan in the late nineteenth century was, of course, at least indirectly related to the political predominance of Europe in all phases of political, economic, and cultural life around the world. Even so, during this same period young Japanese writers were genuinely attracted to French, German, and British writing in the same way that Americans were.

Why, we might ask, had Japanese creative artists by the 1890s turned away from Asian, specifically Chinese, sources of inspiration, which had served as models of emulation off and on for more than a thousand years? There doubtless were many reasons, among them the fact that China had by now lost its political hegemony in East Asia. But there surely were other compelling reasons as well. During this period, China’s Confucian heritage still remained a powerful force in shaping its, as well as Korea’s, literary and artistic output. In Japan, however, the situation was different. During much of the Tokugawa period (also known as the Edo period, 1600–1868), Japan was cut off from China, just as it was from the European countries, and Japanese literature had become increasingly secularized. Although powerful traces of both Confucian and Buddhist ideas remained in those works written before 1868, most literary efforts had become comparatively quite distant from the direct expression of any religious or didactic moral concerns. This more open stance permitted an easy, rapid, and unhindered flow of new ideas and concepts into the Japanese intellectual and artistic world.

A number of special circumstances also helped facilitate the rapid development of a new literature in Japan. To begin with, the literacy rate in Japan during this period was as high as or higher than that in America or Europe. From the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, a large urban population developed, mostly in Edo (now Tokyo), Kyoto, and Osaka, one with sophisticated tastes, intellectual curiosity, and an interest in the new and innovative. As this literacy expanded, the acknowledged classics of earlier Japanese literature—ranging from The Tale of Genji to court poetry and such works as the medieval Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkō—found more and more readers who defined their own sense of their cultural past and its values through literary means. During this pre–World War II period, literature past and present remained a privileged means of access to Japanese culture and Japanese self-understanding.

The various works of literature in this volume of the anthology might be said to draw on roughly three sources. First are the Japanese classics themselves. Writers such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke reread older works in order to refashion them with a greater emphasis on psychological elements often only hinted at in the original. His story The Nose, included here, written when Akutagawa was still a student, already shows how tradition could be plumbed to produce new layers of significance attractive to modern readers. Older aesthetic concepts were reinterpreted in light of twentieth-century mentalities, as Satō Haruo shows in his analysis of the traditional poetic and artistic term elegance (fūryū). Eminent authors like Tanizaki Jun’ichirō reworked traditional materials to bring out heretofore hidden aspects of classical texts, often obsessive or sexual in nature, in such works as the story The Two Acolytes or his short play Okuni and Gohei. Hori Tatsuo, one of the most respected writers of the interwar years, was inspired by the classical monogatari tales of the Heian period (794–1185) to produce a new type of lyrical prose at once contemporary in psychology yet suggesting poetic sensibilities that owed much to classical precedents. The past thus revisited continued to exist in the present, and readers were prepared both to recognize the original and to appreciate the sophistication of these changes.

At least in the early decades of Meiji period, a second set of influences continued to come from Asia, particularly China. By the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/1895, Chinese fiction had lost its hold on the Japanese public (and, indeed, works by Japanese authors had begun to influence young Chinese writers, themselves anxious to break away from the old Confucian patterns). The example of Chinese poetry, however, remained important for a longer time. The first generation of Meiji intellectuals studied classical Chinese in their formative years, just as our own grandfathers studied Greek or Latin, and they continued to admire the poetic accomplishments of the great classical poets. Important Meiji writers like Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki wrote poetry in classical Chinese (kanshi), and, indeed, Sōseki’s works reveal his great technical skill in composing Chinese verse, which also gave him a means by which he could express his most intimate thoughts. The insistence on personal moral rectitude, one of the legacies of the Confucian system of thought, helped undergird the high moral stance of many Meiji writers, qualities that have continued to give them enormous stature in Japan even today.

The third influence on the development of literature during this period, and perhaps the easiest for Western readers to identify, is that of European letters. By the 1880s, a wide variety of European literature came to be known in Japan and in increasingly adept translations. Some Meiji authors, most notably Mori Ōgai, worked as translators. Their various enthusiasms opened up a whole new series of possibilities for Japanese writers and readers.

European literature arrived in a rather transhistorical fashion. Writers and readers discovered at nearly the same time a variety of Western authors from different periods, such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Chekhov, and Meredith. But this influx of sometimes contradictory literary models created diverse enthusiasms, and it took decades before these differing influences were absorbed and set to use.

In the later Meiji period, this new climate of literary possibility was stimulated by the travel to Europe of writers who went on to became major literary figures in the prewar period. Mori Ōgai traveled to Germany, Natsume Sōseki to England, and Nagai Kafū to France. Indeed, France, particularly Paris, became the beacon to which writers and artists from many countries looked for inspiration. The list of important Japanese writers who visited or lived in Paris is a distinguished one, and this anthology contains the works of many of them: Takamura Kōtarō, Shimazaki Tōson, Yosano Akiko, Yokomitsu Riichi, Nishiwaki Junzaburō, and Kishida Kunio, among others. Some of these encounters brought fresh literary moments to Japan, such as surrealism, but in all cases, new ways of expressing ideas and emotions were the result.

In some ways, perhaps the greatest change in Japanese literature during this time was the development and adoption of new ways of examining society. In many ways, these new movements permitted for the first time the interjection of social criticism and political stances into the realm of literature. During the Tokugawa period, such efforts would have been forbidden; but now, at least until the increase in government censorship in the late 1920s, a wide spectrum of political ideas expressed in literary modes found their way into print. One way to begin the study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japanese intellectual history is to read the poems, stories, and essays of those who familiar with the various systems of thought current in the larger world, from concepts of individual freedom through socialism, communism, and, eventually, in the later 1930s, the Japanese brand of fascism. Some of this material is illustrated in this anthology in the selections by Tōkai Sanshi, Ishikawa Takuboku, Kobayashi Takiji, Kuroshima Denji, and Hagiwara Sakutarō. Even more writers used their growing awareness of the ambiguities and inequalities of their social milieu to create narratives. A story like Masamune Hakuchō’s The Clay Doll, dealing as it does with the problems of the education of women, could never have been conceived of with such poignancy in the Tokugawa period. Even such powerful political events during the Meiji period as the revolt and death of the last samurai, Saigō Takamori, could now be depicted directly in a work like Tokutomi Roka’s Ashes.

All these shocks and stimulations to Japanese society reconfigured the arts and society. Already in the Tokugawa period, literature was divided between works intended for highly educated readers like the samurai, the intellectual elite, and the aristocrats. Such works often depended on precedents from Chinese literature, like the elegant and learned ghost stories of Ueda Akinari and, above all, the classic forms of poetry. Yet even then, these class lines had begun to blur as more and more members of the merchant class acquired both education and leisure. Now, however, these divisions started to shift again.

In 1868, when the country was opened to the West, haiku (seventeen-syllable verse) and waka (thirty-one-syllable verse) were being composed; new kabuki plays were widely performed; and tales in the traditional style were being written. These forms continued into the Meiji period, and in fact, they still can be found. Their practitioners span those who still produce traditional forms of poetry to those who create samurai dramas for film, television, and even animé. Writers like Kōda Rohan and Izumi Kyōka showed that masterpieces in these more traditional guises still were possible. In time, however, works written in the older styles and espousing more traditional attitudes remained to an increasing extent in the realm of popular literature, which had, and has, a wide circulation. This huge body of work invented its own traditions and continues today to entertain millions of readers. Here, too, some foreign models intruded, including detective stories, which developed a considerable following from the Meiji period onward. But these kinds of popular literature have not yet attracted the sustained attention of scholars either in Japan or elsewhere. Nonetheless, this anthology contains a few examples, including excerpts from what was arguably the most popular novel of the Meiji period, Ozaki Kōyō’s The Gold Demon; a story by Edogawa Ranpo, The Human Chair; and Tani Jōji’s The Shanghaied Man, all suggesting the readability and skill of these broadly popular writers.

The main legacy of modern Japanese literature during this period can be said to have derived from those writers who attempted to forge, sometimes quite self-consciously, new forms of writing incorporating both the older traditions and the new European influences. At first, such writers addressed only small audiences, but in later decades, their work moved into the center of Japan’s literary map.

In the 1930s, before the Pacific War, much of the serious literature being written had achieved a linguistic fluidity and emotional resonance in keeping with contemporary Japanese society. Europe remained the most important international influence. With the exception of a few writers—for instance, Edgar Allan Poe (via France and Baudelaire) and Walt Whitman—American literature was not really discovered until after the end of World War II, and its shadows can be seen better in volume 2 of this anthology. At the same time, Asian influences on Japanese literature all but disappeared.

It will become clear to the readers of this anthology that most of the selections are serious, often earnest. Given the social upheavals of this period, the devastating earthquake in Tokyo in 1923, and the advent of militarism in the 1930s, this seriousness is not surprising. The gentle humor found in the traditional haiku or the wry social commentaries of Ihara Saikaku have left few traces here. Although humor returned after the war, on the whole the writers during this earlier period were forced to look at life in times so full of uncertain social and political change that there apparently seemed little space for laughter.

Second, owing to the sustained interest by Japanese writers of every generation in European literature, the charge is sometimes made that many of them merely copied—in style, subject matter, or both—the European authors whom they admired. This is an intriguing issue, but the Japanese works cannot simply be dismissed as indirect responses to quasi-colonial pressures.

In Tokugawa culture, the hallowed concept of copying the master has usually meant—certainly in the visual arts—an effort to master a technique by making a close copy of a work already judged to be worthy. These views continued to prevail. For example, Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928), one of the first great theater directors in modern Japan, wrote about the need for his actors performing Chekhov to try to copy as closely as possible the gestures, inflections, and physical stance of the Russian actors he had seen performing in Moscow. Only in this way, he believed, could actors truly internalize this new foreign style so that it eventually could become natural to them. These attitudes are no longer prevalent in postwar Japan, except perhaps in the area of nō and kabuki actor training or in such traditional arts as flower arranging and the tea ceremony. Still, this kind of discipline is familiar to us in the West as well: when learning to play the piano, serious pianists in every country know the need of, say, practicing scales and learning the easier works of Bach and Mozart.

From this vantage point, the selections we have chosen for this anthology exemplify several sets of attitudes. First, many Japanese writers wanted to feel that they were entering the stream of contemporary world literature; the works of some, beginning with Tokutomi Roka, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and Kobayashi Takiji, were even then being read abroad in translation. At the least, most of them were convinced that the standards by which they wished to measure themselves had expanded considerably. Second, fired by their interest in European literature, these writers wished to convey to their readers some of their enthusiasm for the new possibilities of self-expression. And in turn, those readers felt some urge to catch up with the newest trends in the West.

In Japan, purely internal shifts and developments affected the literature as well. By the time of World War I, the first great generation of Meiji writers had created most of their most significant and enduring work, enabling a true intellectual and artistic dialogue between generations of modern Japanese writers. Many authors now began to write with an eye to the work of their predecessors as well as to that in Europe. The shadows cast by Sōseki or Ōgai were long and vibrant indeed. As a not surprising result, these later writers created works of considerable sophistication and delicacy.

Finally, a note on language is needed, a reminder that the readers of this anthology must experience these writers in translation. Translation is always a complex issue. Even with the best of efforts, literary language is invariably smoothed over and flattened out in translation; and when the languages are as different as Japanese and English, the forbearance required is all the greater. Moreover, in the period covered in this volume, there existed above and beyond matters of individual style the larger issue of a shift from the increasingly retrograde Tokugawa language to a more fluid modern Japanese, far closer in its written form to the spoken vernacular than what had existed before in Japanese literature. For example, readers who enjoy Ōgai’s The Dancing Girl in an up-to-date and highly readable English version will not be aware of the discrepancies—indeed, the visible strains—among the vocabulary, grammar, and general tonality of the older written language available to Ōgai and the utterly modern sentiments that he tried—with remarkable success—to express. Kōda Rohan’s literary language is still filled with vocabulary, references, and stylistic devices familiar from Tokugawa literature, while the excerpt from Futabatei Shimei’s Drifting Clouds reveals in the original a courageous attempt to express contemporary thoughts and feelings in a new vernacular language. Even the twentieth-century poems written in the traditional forms of waka and haiku reveal intriguing experiments with the Japanese language that cannot be rendered with any fluency or accuracy in translation. Thus one of the major revolutions in the earlier modern Japanese literature can only be commented on but not directly experienced here.

By the 1920s, a modern literary language had been satisfactorily created and domesticated. These changes, which took place over a few decades, were, generally speaking, arguably as great as those in written English from Chaucer to Hemingway, a process that took many centuries. This also is a part of the story that this anthology would like to tell.

Chapter 1

FIRST EXPERIMENTS

With the influx of new ideas and new literary forms from Europe and America, the landscape of Japanese literature quickly began to change. By the beginning of the twentieth century, these shifts had become obvious as the concerns of writers and readers increasingly reflected the massive alterations in the political, cultural, and spiritual nature of Japan as a nation.

In the artistically complex last decades of the nineteenth century, a number of issues important to the creation of a truly contemporary prose literature were addressed. Some of these changes could be seen in the accomplishments of young writers who, using their own experiences, recorded their personal intellectual and emotional reactions to the life they observed around them. Some made more use of the literary conventions available to them, and others, because of their particular experiences, were forced to find fresh means of self-expression. In this chapter, some of the prose works exemplify some of these changes.

With its traditions stretching back a thousand years or more, Japanese poetry was slower to change, but the impact of the longer forms of European and American verse eventually led to the development of a new and experimental style of Japanese verse.

Of all the forms of literary expression in this anthology, drama was the slowest to change, since no performers in the early years of the Meiji period were capable of articulating spoken dialogue. Kabuki still remained the norm throughout the nineteenth century, with the first experiments coming later. Some examples can be found in later chapters of this anthology.

FICTION

MORI ŌGAI

Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) exemplifies the nascent cosmopolitan strain in early Meiji Japanese literature. The son of a physician who practiced traditional medicine, Ōgai belonged to the first generation of students to study Western medical methods with German professors living in Tokyo. The Japanese army then sent Ōgai to Germany to study continental hygiene, and he remained there from 1884 to 1888.

Ōgai thus had a greater and more personal exposure to literature and the arts as found in Germany than he did from any previous detailed knowledge of the Japanese tradition. His attempts to describe his emotional experiences during these years abroad, most notably in The Dancing Girl (Maihime, 1890), owe much to Goethe and the later continental writers he had come to admire. Indeed, this early work brought a new dimension to the literary expression of personal emotions in Japanese literature. (An example of Ōgai’s later work appears in chapter 2 of this anthology.)

THE DANCING GIRL (MAIHIME)

Translated by Richard Bowring

They have finished loading the coal, and the tables here in the second-class saloon stand in silence. Even the bright glare from the electric lights seems wasted, for tonight the group of card players who usually gather here of an evening are staying in a hotel, and I am left alone on board.

It is now five years since the hopes I cherished for so long were fulfilled and I received orders to go to Europe. When I arrived here in the port of Saigon, I was struck by the strangeness of everything I saw and heard. I wonder how many thousands of words I wrote every day as I jotted down random thoughts in my travel diary. It was published in a newspaper at the time and was highly praised, but now I shudder to think how any sensitive person must have reacted to my childish ideas and my presumptuous rhetoric. I even recorded details of the common flora and fauna, the geology, and the local customs as if they were rarities. Now, on my way home, the notebooks that I bought intending to use for a diary remain untouched. Could it be that while studying in Germany I developed a kind of nil admirari attitude? No, there is another reason.

Returning to Japan, I feel a very different person from when I set out. Not only do I still feel dissatisfied with my studies, but I have also learned how sad this transient life can be. I am now aware of the fallibility of human emotions, but in particular I realize what a fickle heart I have myself. To whom could I possibly show a record of fleeting impressions that might well be right one day and wrong the next? Perhaps this is why my diary was never written. No, there is another reason.

Twenty days or more have passed since we left Brindisi. Usually it is the custom at sea to while away the cares of travel even in the company of utter strangers, but I have shut myself up in my cabin under the pretext of feeling somewhat indisposed. I seldom speak to my fellow travelers, for I am tormented by a hidden remorse.

At first this pain was a mere wisp of cloud that brushed against my heart, hiding the mountain scenery of Switzerland and dulling my interest in Italy’s ancient ruins. Then gradually I grew weary of life and weary of myself and suffered the most heartrending anguish. Now, remorse has settled in the depths of my heart, the merest shadow. And yet with everything I read and see, it causes me renewed pain, evoking feelings of extreme nostalgia, like a form reflected in a mirror or the echo of a voice.

How can I ever rid myself of such remorse? If it were of a different nature, I could perhaps soothe my feelings by expressing them in poetry. But it is so deeply engraved upon my heart that I fear this is impossible. And yet as there is no one here this evening and it will be some while before the cabin boy comes to turn off the light, I think I will try to record the outline of my story here.

Thanks to a very strict education at home since childhood, my studies lacked nothing, despite the fact that I lost my father at an early age. When I studied at the school in my former fief and in the preparatory course for the university in Tokyo and later in the Faculty of Law, the name Ōta Toyotarō was always at the top of the list. Thus, no doubt, I brought some comfort to my mother, who had found in me, her only child, the strength to go through life. At nineteen I received my degree and was praised for having achieved greater honor than had any other student since the founding of the university. I joined a government department and spent three pleasant years in Tokyo with my mother, whom I called up from the country. Being especially high in the estimation of the head of my department, I was then given orders to travel to Europe and study matters connected with my particular section. Stirred by the thought that I now had the opportunity to make my name and raise my family fortunes, I was not unduly sorry to leave even my mother, although she was over fifty. So it was that I left home far behind and arrived in Berlin.

I had the vague hope of accomplishing great feats and was used to working hard under pressure. But suddenly here I was, standing in the middle of this most modern of European capitals. My eyes were dazzled by its brilliance; my mind was dazed by the riot of color. To translate Unter den Linden as under the Bodhi tree would suggest a quiet secluded spot. But just come and see the groups of men and women sauntering along the pavements that line each side of that great thoroughfare as it runs, straight as a die, through the city. It was still in the days when Wilhelm I would come to his window and gaze down upon his capital. The tall, broad-shouldered officers in their colorful dress uniform, and the attractive girls, their hair made up in the Parisian style, were everywhere a delight to the eye. Carriages ran silently on asphalt roads. Just visible in the clear sky between the towering buildings were fountains cascading with the sound of heavy rain. Looking into the distance, one could see the statue of the goddess on the victory column. She seemed to be floating halfway to heaven from the midst of the green trees on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate. All these myriad sights were gathered so close at hand that it was quite bewildering for the newcomer, but I had promised myself that I would not be impressed by such captivating scenes of beauty, and I continually closed my mind to these external objects that bore in on me.

The Prussian officials were all happy to welcome me when I pulled on the bell rope, asked for an interview, and handed over my open letter of introduction, explaining to them why I had come. They promised to tell me whatever I wished to know once formal application had been received from the Legation. I was fortunate enough to have learned both French and German at home, and no sooner was I introduced than they asked where and when I had learned to speak so well.

I had already obtained official permission to enter Berlin University, and so I enrolled to study politics whenever my duties might permit. After one or two months, when the official preliminaries had been carried out and my investigations were making good progress, I sent off a report on the most urgent matters, and the rest I wrote down in a number of notebooks, As far as the university was concerned, there was no chance of providing special courses for would-be politicians, as I had naively hoped. I was irresolute for a while, but then, deciding to attend two or three law lectures, I paid the fee and went to listen.

Some three years passed in this way like a dream. But there is always a time when, come what may, one’s true nature reveals itself. I had obeyed my father’s dying words and had done what my mother had taught me. From the beginning I had studied willingly, proud to hear myself praised as an infant prodigy, and later I had labored unremittingly in the happy knowledge that my department head was pleased with my excellent work. But all that time I had been a mere passive, mechanical being with no real awareness of myself. Now, however, at the age of twenty-five, perhaps because I had been exposed to the liberal ways of the university for some time, there grew within me a kind of uneasiness; it seemed as if my real self, which had been lying dormant deep down, was gradually appearing on the surface and threatening my former assumed self. I realized that I would be happy neither as a high-flying politician nor as a lawyer reciting statutes by heart and pronouncing sentence.

My mother, I thought to myself, had tried to make me into a walking dictionary, and my department head had tried to turn me into an incarnation of the law. The former I might just be able to stand, but the latter was out of the question. Up to then I had answered him with scrupulous care even in quite trifling matters, but from that time on, I often argued in my reports that one should not be bothered with petty legal details. Once a person grasped the spirit of the law, I grandly said, everything would solve itself. In the university I abandoned the law lectures and became more interested in history and literature; eventually I moved into the world of the arts.

My department head had obviously tried to turn me into a machine that could be manipulated as he desired. He could hardly have been very pleased with someone who entertained such independent ideas and held such unusual views. I was in a precarious situation. If that were all, however, it would not have been enough to under mine my position. But among the students studying in Berlin at the time was an influential group with whom I did not see eye to eye. They were only suspicious of me at first, but then they began to slander me. They may have had good reason.

Attributing the fact that I neither drank nor played billiards with them to apparent stubbornness and self-restraint on my part, they ridiculed and envied me. But this was because they did not know me. How could anyone else know the reason for my behavior when I did not know it myself ? I felt like the leaves of the silk-tree which shrink and shy away when they are touched. I felt as unsure of myself as a young girl. Ever since my youth I had followed the advice of my elders and kept to the path of learning and obedience. If I had succeeded, it was not through being courageous. I might have seemed capable of arduous study, but I had deceived not only myself but others too. I had simply followed a path that I was made to follow. The fact that external matters did not disturb me was not because I had the courage to reject them or ignore them, but rather because I was afraid and tied myself hand and foot. Before I left home I was convinced I was a man of talent. I believed deeply in my own powers of endurance. Yes, but even that was short-lived. I felt quite the hero until the ship left Yokohama, but then I found myself weeping uncontrollably. I thought it strange at the time, but it was my true nature showing through. Perhaps it had been with me from birth, or perhaps it came about because my father died and I was brought up by my mother.

The ridicule of the students was only to be expected, but it was stupid of them to be jealous of such a weak and pitiful mind.

I used to see women sitting in the cafés soliciting for custom; their faces were heavily made up and their clothes were gaudy. But I never had the courage to go and approach them. Nor did I have the nerve to join with those men about town, with their tall hats, their pince-nez, and that aristocratic nasal accent so peculiar to Prussians. Not having the heart for such things, I found I could not mix with my more lively fellow countrymen, and because of this barrier between us, they bore a grudge against me. Then they started telling tales, and thus I was accused of crimes I had not committed and had to put up with so much hardship in so short a time.

One evening I sauntered through the Tiergarten and then walked down Unter den Linden. On the way back to my lodgings in Monbijoustrasse, I came in front of the old church in Klosterstrasse. How many times, I wonder, had I passed through that sea of lights, entered this gloomy passage, and stood enraptured, gazing at the three-hundred-year-old church that lay set back from the road. Opposite it stood some houses with the washing hanging out to dry on poles on the roofs, and a bar where an old Jew with long whiskers was standing idly by the door; there was also a tenement house with one flight of steps running directly to the upper rooms and another leading down to the home of a blacksmith who lived in the cellar.

Just as I was walking past I noticed a young girl sobbing against the closed door of the church. She must have been about sixteen or seventeen. Her light golden hair flowed down from under the scarf around her head, and her dress was spotlessly clean. Surprised by my footsteps, she turned around. Only a poet could really do her justice. Her eyes were blue and clear but filled with a wistful sadness. They were shaded by long eyelashes which half hid her tears. Why was it that in one glance over her shoulder she pierced the defenses of my heart?

Perhaps it was because of some profound grief that she was standing there in tears oblivious to all else. The coward in me was overcome by compassion and sympathy, and without thinking I went to her side.

Why are you crying? I asked. Perhaps because I am a stranger here I may be able to help you all the more. I was astounded by my audacity.

Startled, she stared into my sallow face, but she must have seen my sincerity from my expression.

You look a kind sort of person, she sobbed. Not cruel like him or my mother!

Her tears had stopped for a moment, but now they overflowed again and ran down her lovely cheeks.

Help me! You must help me from having to lose all sense of shame. My mother beat me because I did not agree to his proposal. My father has just died, and we have to bury him tomorrow. But we don’t have a penny in the house.

She dissolved into tears again. I gazed at her as she hung her head and trembled.

If I am to take you home, you must calm down, I said. Don’t let everyone hear you. We’re out in the street.

She had inadvertently laid her head on my shoulder while I was speaking. Suddenly she looked up and, giving me the same startled glance as before, she fled from me in shame.

She walked quickly, as if unwilling for people to see her, and I followed. Through a large door across the road from the church was a flight of worn stone steps. Up these steps on the third floor was a door so small that one needed to bend down to enter. The girl pulled on the twisted end of a rusty piece of wire.

Who’s there? came a hoarse voice from inside.

It’s Elise. I’m back.

She had hardly finished speaking when the door was roughly pulled open by an old woman. Although her hair was graying and her brow clearly showed the traces of poverty and suffering, it was not an evil face. She was wearing an old dress of some wool and cotton material and had on some dirty slippers. When Elise pointed to me and went inside, the old woman slammed the door in my face as if she had been waiting impatiently.

I stood there vacantly for a while. Then, by the light of an oil lamp, I noticed a name painted on the door in lacquer: Ernst Weigert, and below, Tailor. I presumed it was the name of the girl’s dead father. Inside I heard voices raised as if in argument, then all was quiet again. The door was reopened, and the old woman, apologizing profusely for such impolite behavior, invited me in.

The door opened into the kitchen. On the right was a low window with spotlessly clean linen curtains. On the left was a roughly built brick stove. The door of the room facing me was half open, and I saw inside a bed covered with a white sheet. The dead man must have been lying there. She opened a door next to the stove and led me to an attic; it faced onto the street and had no real ceiling. The beams sloping down from the corners of the roof to the window were covered with paper, and below that, where there was only room enough to stoop, was a bed. On the table in the middle of the room was spread a beautiful woolen cloth on which were arranged two books, a photograph album, and a vase with a bunch of flowers. They seemed somehow too expensive for the place. Standing shyly beside the table was the girl.

She was exceedingly attractive. In the lamplight her pallid face had a faint blush, and the slender beauty of her hands and feet seemed hardly to belong to the daughter of a poor family. She waited until the old woman had left the room and then spoke. She had a slight accent.

It was thoughtless of me to lead you here. Please forgive me. But you looked so very kind. You won’t despise me, will you? I suppose you don’t know Schaumberg, the man we were relying on for my father’s funeral tomorrow. He’s the manager at the Viktoria Theater. I have been working for him for two years so I thought he was bound to help us; but he took advantage of our misfortune and tried to force me to do what he wished. You must help. I promise to pay you back from the little I earn, even if I have to go hungry. If not, then my mother says . . .

She burst into tears and stood there trembling. There was an irresistible appeal in her eyes as she gazed up at me. Did she know the effect her eyes had on me, or was it unintentional?

I had two or three silver marks in my pocket, but that would probably not have been enough. So I took off my watch and laid it on the table.

This will help you for the time being, I said. Tell the pawnbroker’s man if he calls on Ōta at 3 Monbijoustrasse, I’ll redeem it.

The girl looked startled but grateful. As I put out my hand to say good-bye, she raised it to her lips and covered it with tears.

Alas, what evil fate brought her to my lodgings to thank me? She looked so beautiful there standing by the window where I used to sit reading all day long surrounded by the works of Schopenhauer and Schiller. From that time on our relationship gradually deepened. When my countrymen got to know, they immediately assumed that I was seeking my pleasures in the company of dancing gifts. But it was as yet nothing more than a foolish trifling affair.

One of my fellow countrymen—I will not give his name, but he was known as a mischief maker—reported to my department head that I was frequenting theaters and seeking the company of actresses. My superior was in any case resentful that I was neglecting my proper studies, and so he eventually told the legation to abolish my post and terminate my employment. The minister at the legation passed this order on, advising me that they would pay the fare if I returned home immediately but that I could expect no official help if I decided to stay on. I asked for one week’s grace, and it was while I was thus worrying what to do that I received two letters which brought me the most intense pain I think I have ever suffered. They had both been sent at almost the same time, but one was written by my mother and the other by a friend telling me of her death, the death of the mother who was so dear to me. I cannot bear to repeat here what she wrote. Tears prevent my pen from writing more.

The relationship between Elise and myself had in fact been more innocent than had appeared to others. Her father had been poor and her education had been meager. At the age of fifteen she had answered an advertisement by a dancing master and had learned that disreputable trade. When she had finished the course, she went to the Viktoria Theater and was now the second dancer of the group. But the life of a dancer is precarious. As the writer Hackländer has said, they are today’s slaves, tied by a poor wage and driven hard with rehearsals in the daytime and performances at night.

In the theater dressing room they can make up and dress themselves in beautiful clothes; but outside they often do not have enough clothes or food for themselves, and life is very hard for those who have to support their parents or families. It was said that as a result, it was rare for them not to fall into the lowest of all professions.

That Elise had escaped this fate was due partly to her modest nature and partly to her father’s careful protection. Ever since a child, she had in fact liked reading, but all she could lay her hands on were poor novels of the type lent by the circulating libraries, known by their cry of "Colportage." After meeting me, she began to read the books I lent her, and gradually her tastes improved and she lost her accent. Soon the mistakes in her letters to me became fewer. And so there had grown up between us a kind of pupil–teacher relationship. When she heard of my untimely dismissal, she went pale. I concealed the fact that it was connected with her, but she asked me not to tell her mother. She was afraid that if her mother knew I had lost financial support for my studies, she would want nothing more to do with me.

There is no need to describe it in detail here, but it was about this time that my feeling for her suddenly changed to one of love and the bond between us deepened. The most important decision of my life lay before me. It was a time of real crisis. Some perhaps may wonder and criticize my behavior, but my affection for Elise had been strong ever since our first meeting, and now I could read in her expression sympathy for my misfortune and sadness at the prospect of parting. The way she stood there, a picture of loveliness, her hair hanging loose—I was distraught by so much suffering and powerless in the face of such enchantment.

The day I had arranged to meet the minister approached. Fate was pressing. If I returned home like this, I should have failed in my studies and bear a disgraced name. I would never be able to reestablish myself. But on the other hand, if I stayed, I could not see any way of obtaining funds to support my studies.

At this point, my friend Aizawa Kenkichi, with whom I am now traveling home, came to my aid. He was private secretary to Count Amakata in Tokyo, and he saw the report of my dismissal in the Official Gazette. He persuaded the editor of a certain newspaper to make me their foreign correspondent so I could stay in Berlin and send back reports on various topics