Collected Writings of J. Thomas Rimer 9780203494417, 0203597788, 0203494415, 1903350166

Citation preview

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

J.Thomas Rimer

Collected Writings of J.THOMAS RIMER The Collected Writings of Modern Western Scholars on Japan Vol. 11

Edition Synapse JAPAN LIBRARY

The Collected Writings of Modern Western Scholars on Japan, Vol. 11 COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER This co-edition first published by Japan Library and Edition Synapse, 2004 Japan Library is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” ISBN 0-203-49441-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-59778-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN (J.A.A.Stockwin) 1-903350-15-8 (Print Edition) (vol.10) (J.Thomas Rimer) 1-903350-16-6 (Print Edition) (vol.11) (Gordon Daniels) 1-903350-17-4 (Print Edition) (vol.12) Vols. 10–12 ISBN 1-903350-18-2 (Print Edition) (3-vols. Set) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers, except for the use of short extracts in criticism. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library Edition Synapse 2–7–6 Uchikanda Chiyoda-ku Tokyo 101, Japan ISBN (J.A.A.Stockwin) 4-901481-29-0 (Print Edition) (vol.10) (J.Thomas Rimer) 4-901481-31-2 (Print Edition) (vol.11) (Gordon Daniels) 4-901481-30-4 (Print Edition) (vol.12) Vols. 10–12 ISBN 4-901481-28-2 (Print Edition) (3 vols. Set)

ISBN 0-203-49441-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-59778-8 (Adobe eReader Format)

Contents

Introduction PART I:

1

WRITINGS ON NOH 1.

‘Taema’. A Noh play attributed to Zeami TRANSLATION & COMMENTARY

8

2.

What More do we Need to Know about the Nō?

18

3.

Kata as Part of a Larger Design in Japanese Culture

24

4.

The Background of Zeami’s Treatises

29

PART II: WRITINGS ON JAPANESE POETRY 5.

A Lyrical Impulse in Modern Japanese Prints and Poetry

36

6.

‘Ishikawa Jōzan’ in Shisendo, Hall of the Poetry Immortals

62

PART III: WRITINGS ON MORI ŌGAI 7.

The Historical Literature of Mori Ōgai

78

8.

Some Observations on Ōgai’s Work

87

9.

Mori Ōgai and Jean-Paul Sartre: Some Intersections of Biography, History and Literature

90

The Metamorphosis of Disguise: Ibsen, Soseki and Ōgai

96

10.

PART IV: JAPAN’S MODERN THEATRE 11.

Four Plays by Tanaka Chikao

104

12.

Modernization or Westernization: The Movement for a Modern Theatre before 1925

122

13.

An Interview with Yamazaki Masakazu

146

14.

Japanese Theatre in the World

162

15.

Chekhov and the Beginnings of Modern Japanese Theatre

188

16.

Shakespeare Meets the Buddha: Tsubouchi Shōyō, Osanai Kaoru and The Hermit

199

17.

The Longest Voyage of All: Pericles in Japan

207

v

18.

With a Nod to Chekhov: Strategies of Dream and Memory in the Dramas of Shimizu Kunio

214

PART V: JAPANESE LITERATURE 19.

Aware on the Seine: Shimazaki Tōson Reads Bashō

223

20.

The Tale of Genji as a Modern Novel

238

21.

Japanese Literature: Four Polarities

264

PART VI: CULTURAL CROSSROADS 22.

Kurata Hyakuzō and the Origins of Love and Understanding

282

23.

High Culture in the Showa Period

293

24.

Iwanami Shigeo’s Meiji Education: Encounters, Transmissions

302

PART VII: ART AND ARTISTRY 25.

Tokyo in Paris/Paris in Tokyo

312

26.

Teiten and After, 1919–1935; Encountering Blank Spaces: A Decade of War 1935– 1945; Postwar Developments: Absorption and Amalgamation, 1945–1968

361

27.

Kinoshita Mokutarō as Critic: Putting Meiji Art in Perspective

403

28.

Hegel in Tokyo: Ernest Fenellosa and His 1882 Lecture on the Truth of Art

410

Bibliography

420

Index

423

Introduction

I HAVE BEEN ASKED to provide an informal introduction to this collection of articles, translations, and essays I have prepared over the past several decades. In the case of those who follow academic pursuits, it seems to me, one is seldom asked to stop and reflect on the development of one’s own intellectual enthusiasms, and so I have undertaken this effort with a certain amount of reticence. Nevertheless, perhaps this brief account will be of some use, perhaps as a cautionary tale, if nothing else, for those who may share my interests in the topics I have begun to explore, and, more importantly, might like to develop some of them further. In observing the various ways in which the careers of my friends and colleagues in Japanese studies have developed, I realize that my first encounter with Japan, in the late 1950s, was a somewhat unusual one, and one which was to provide an unusual entry into this field of academic pursuit. My undergraduate studies were in English literature and theatre, and indeed, I was in England, on a fellowship from the British Council, beginning graduate studies at the University of London, when I received a long-distance call from my father, telling me that I had been drafted into the US Army. Although the Korean War hostilities were then over, the draft continued on for some time, and most of my college classmates also found themselves in some form of military service. After the usual vicissitudes of basic training, I found myself shipped off to Japan, a country about which I possessed no prior knowledge whatsoever. When I arrived in Tokyo, however, I found to my surprise that I was quickly able to pursue a number of prior interests. I now realize that I arrived there with my personal tastes pretty well formed. I loved literature, of course, and I had developed during my college years a strong interest in opera, other forms of serious music, and in the theatre. So it was something of a happy surprise, and a shock, to find that many Japanese apparently also shared these enthusiasms. On the first weekend I had free to myself, I went off (rather bravely, I realize in retrospect) and managed to visit a contemporary art exhibition, a kabuki performance, and a Schubert song recital by an eminent Japanese baritone of the time, Nakayama Teiichi. It was all rather overwhelming, and it was at that point, I believe, that my abiding interests in observing the mechanisms by which forms of culture move from one civilization to another were first born. That was the first weekend. The second let me much closer to what would become my abiding interest in aspects of traditional Japanese culture. A college friend of mine, Charles Robideau, who was then in the US Navy, managed to get to Japan a month before I arrived, and was already busy seeking out performances of traditional Japanese theatre. ‘Meet me at Ueno station,’ he told me on the telephone, ‘and I will take you to see something special.’ I managed to find my way to the spot he chose, and we piled into a taxi cab. I knew nothing, of course, of what he had in mind, but we eventually stopped in front of a small house in the nearby suburbs. Somehow my friend (who by now could speak a bit of Japanese, at least enough to get around) had managed to meet a rather eminent nō actor, and we were now in front of his home, which contained a private rehearsal stage. When we knocked, we learned that the master actor himself was out, but that his son,

2

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

a distinguished performer in his own right, was home and would be glad to see us. We soon found ourselves sitting together near the stage and, with the help of a French-Japanese dictionary, managed in a somewhat laborious fashion to learn something about the rudiments of the nō. The son told us that, like so many Japanese with artistic and intellectual interests, he had studied French, and so somehow it was with the help of that well-worn dictionary, to share our enthusiasms for the theatre. This was a heady expenence indeed, and one that would lead me to wish to know more, much more, about this long theatrical tradition. It was difficult to pursue these particular cultural enthusiasms much further, as I was to be stationed in Sapporo, in Hokkaido, far from the capital. It was therefore not until after my military service was finished that I was able to slowly deepen my understanding of the sometimes bewildering, often interlocking nature of postwar Japanese art and culture. As I came to know more of the context of developments in the country, and in particular the renewal and sense of a fresh beginning that came to writers, directors, actors, and artists after the difficult war years, some of the larger patterns began to emerge. One phenomenon that became increasingly clear to me was the fact that many important creative figures in the period were active in a number of areas, a fact not recognized as often as it should be in studies of modern and contemporary Japanese art and culture, which tend to confine the study of a particular writer, artist, or musician to one particular aspect of his or her work. It seemed to me, on reflection, that the fact that so many artists, actors, and writers worked in so many fields came about at least in part as a reflection of the affinity they felt to their European models and spiritual mentors. Many, if not most, of these figures considered themselves in many important ways to be intellectuals, responsible for developing a broader vision of Japanese society, who by choice happened to work in one or more artistic forms. Thus a writer like Mishima Yukio wrote fiction, theatre pieces, and social criticism; a theatre director like Senda Koreya acted, directed, commissioned plays, and wrote articles on a variety of social and political topics and themes. Haiku poets had political opinions, and avant-garde musicians marched in political demonstrations. It seems to me that sometimes those of us who study one of these protean postwar figures need to go beyond the received sense of boundaries within our own disciplines, defined in American academic intellectual structures, in order to fully grasp the precise extent of their contributions. Endō Shūsaku, for example, is best known in the West as a novelist, but was as well a playwright, essayist, and theatre director. I suppose that, when I was discharged from the army, my somewhat naive idealism would have led me to join something like the Peace Corps, had there been such an organization at that time. As it turned out, I took a job working for the US Information Agency, and was able to return to Japan, after a period of three years in Southeast Asia, first to study the Japanese language, and eventually to become the Director of the Kobe American Cultural Center for several years. It was during that time that I received still another stimulus, this time from a good friend, Sakamoto Katsuhiko, then as now a prominent historian of Meiji architecture, who was at that time living in Kobe. ‘You have so many interests,’ he told me, ‘but I think that, if you go on to do further studies concerning Japan, you should choose one field, and master that. Only after this first step can you branch out and successfully understand the nature of all those connections that you are now observing.’ My prior interest in British literature had not as yet led me to any keen appreciation of Japanese literature. Relatively little in the way of contemporary fiction had been yet translated into English, and it was only at that point in my linguistic development that I was coming to be able to read modern Japanese literature with at least some ease. His remarks, as it turned out, coincided with my trip to a second-hand bookstore, where I found an old (venerable seems too generous a word) translation of Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro, made by an earnest Japanese admirer in 1941. Reading through what seemed to me to suggest a kind of simulated Victorian prose, I realized that this was a superb masterpiece. Japanese literature was thus the area I believed I could explore with great profit and enthusiasm, given my own background, and, what is

INTRODUCTION

3

more, I felt that I was coming to possess the linguistic tools with which to do so. Eventually I began to undertake and publish a number of translation projects (most of which cannot be included here for reasons of space). These ranged from modern dramas and theatre criticism, to Zeami’s nō treatises and even classical Japanese waka poetry, in my collaboration with Jonathan Chaves on our version of the Heian period Poems to Sing (Wakan Rōeishū). All of these, particularly the nō treatises, posed challenges and difficulties. I realize in retrospect that, whatever the challenges, I undertook to render these diverse texts into English because I felt that they were of importance in my coming to grips with aspects of Japanese aesthetics and culture which interested me deeply. I have found, in my own case at least, that the process of working through these texts, and attempting to give them some sort of life in English, is for me one of the best ways to come closer to appreciating and understanding them. My wife Laurence and my father-in-law, Paul Mus, himself one of the greatest French scholars of Asia in the twentieth-century, encouraged me in this, telling me that, with the French, British, and American perspectives I might eventually bring to an examination of Japanese culture, I could surely find much that would be of interest to many. And so it was that, with the support and encouragement of my wife, I abandoned my fledgling diplomatic career and went to Columbia University, to study with Donald Keene, who has ever since served as my mentor, guide, and friend concerning so many aspects of Japan and Japanese culture. My entry into the academic field, therefore, was quite different from those who go directly from study to teaching. I came to a formal study of Japan after a rather prolonged exposure to the country on a working basis; I knew, if you like, what I was getting into. True enough, I had been quite impressionable when I was first sent there, but time had tempered and shaped my initial enthusiasms and sharpened my more naïve interests and perspectives. Those experiences in Japan gave me, in some ways, a more practical, if perhaps more plebian, means of access to Japanese life and culture, and helped determine as well certain directions in the kinds of research I would eventually undertake. When I began my teaching career in the mid-1960s, at Washington University in St. Louis, I embarked on my new career at a time when interest in Japan and Japanese literature was high, not only in academic circles, but with the general public as well. By this time, translations by Howard Hibbett and others of Tanizaki, the superb English version of Kokoro by Edwin McClellan, Keene’s Dazai and Edward Seidensticker’s Nagai Kafū had appeared and attracted a great deal of attention in a wide variety of literary circles. There was a sense of discovery that belonged to those years; we know much more now, yet just as the terrain has become more familiar, the sense of shock has become considerably muted. In developing my own interests, I came to possess two convictions, neither of them remarkable, but both important in shaping the nature of my interests. The first was simply that, if one were to study modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, one should know what the Japanese writers or artists did themselves. It was here that I realized that I had certain advantages. The pull of European models, particularly from France and Germany, on Japanese intellectuals and artists from the 1880s until at least the end of the 1960s was very powerful indeed. This kind of aesthetic dialogue was not one particularly familiar to many Americans, but because of my own personal background, my sympathies for such kinds of mutual understandings were already well-developed. I was astonished, during my army years, when I first came to know Japanese university students of roughly my own age, that they were enthusiastic, and knowledgeable, about such European thinkers and writers as Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, and, in the literary field, with Goethe, Flaubert, and, of course, Shakespeare. It was at this point that I realized that, in this area at least, my own undergraduate education had been somewhat provincial in nature. I have certainly never mastered European continental philosophy, but I did learn to study carefully the intellectual map of modern Japan and learn what I could of the reasons for the profound Japanese interest in these areas of inquiry.

4

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

The second conviction, a related one, surely, was my realization that, on one level at least, the example of America’s engagement with Europe during roughly the same period, the US model if you will, was of great value in helping me to understand the way in which the Japanese approached those connections for themselves. In the broadest sense, one can say without prejudice, I think, that from the civil war until the end of World War II and after, Amencans felt themselves somewhat on the periphery of world—that is, European—culture. From Henry James and Gertrude Stein through James Baldwin, American writers sought to live in London or Paris, seeking the kind of stimulation they believed they could not find at home, just in the way that such eminent Japanese wnters as Sōseki, Shimazaki Tōson, Mori Ōgai, and Nagai Kafū sought to place themselves in Europe, then the center of the kinds of movements that most deeply excited them; after all, John Singer Sargent’s European teacher of painting was the mentor of the Japanese oil painter Asai Chū as well. In other words, both Japan and United States, and during roughly the same period, looked to Europe for cultural inspiration. For the Japanese, of course, the gap was so much wider, given the far greater differences in language and cultural heritage. But my long-held sympathies for several generations of Americans seeking to learn how to tread the world stage gave me a similar respect for those Japanese who attempted to bridge the same gap. Their enthusiasms, and their pain, were not difficult to understand. It was perhaps for these reasons that, soon after the end of my graduate studies, I took up a sustained interest in the life and writings of Mori Ōgai, one of the great writers and intellectuals of the Meiji period. Sent to Germany for a period of four years as a medical officer, he returned to lead a double career, both as a writer and as a physician/ bureaucrat, rising eventually to become the Surgeon General of the Japanese army during the Russo-Japanese War and beyond. For those with more sentimental tastes, both in Japan and abroad, Ōgai’s writing can seem overly terse and ironic; for me, however, his continuing high reputation seems altogether justified, and his work provides unique insights into the stresses and strains of Japan’s ever more pressing rapprochement with the world at that time. In the years following, I translated a number of his stories and essays, wrote a short biography, and edited a collection of translations by a number of colleagues who share similar interests. I have just finished editing still another collection of translations by various scholars, which includes as well autobiographical essays, theatre criticism, essays on Japanese art, poetry, and other aspects of his prodigious creative impulses. This collection is scheduled to appear in 2004, from the University of Hawaii Press. The fact that my own translations of this writer do not appear in this present volume should not suggest in any way that my interests in Ōgai and his work are not central to my work; indeed, I have been writing and thinking about him for more than thirty years. And the subject remains fascinating, its implications inexhaustible. Those who may look through the contents of this volume will notice that over these decades I have written on what may seem to be a surprising number of subjects. The choices of those subjects I sought to explore, however, reflect precisely the nature of those ‘connections’ that my friend Mr Sakamoto told me might be made once I could confidently go beyond an extensive knowledge within my own home discipline. Many of these essays, too, have been written on the informal principle first explained to me many years ago by a dear friend of long standing, Mark Peattie, himself a distinguished writer on Japan, in his case, the Japanese navy and other subjects related to that country’s colonial and military history. Over the years, I have much enjoyed reading some of the books of his father, Donald Culross Peattie, who wrote with knowledge and enthusiasm on a bewildering number of subjects, from Audubon to villages in Provence. When I asked Mark about how his father could range so far afield, he told me: ‘My father’s idea was that if you want to read a book on a particular topic but can’t find one, then write it yourself.’

INTRODUCTION

5

When I began doing my own research and writing in the late 1960s, there was relatively little available in English concerning a number of significant aspects of modern Japanese culture, in particular the theatre and the visual arts. My longstanding interests in theatre carried me from the work of modern Japanese dramatists such as Kishida Kunio and Yamazaki Masakazu, later to become a collaborator and friend, backwards to the medieval nō, then eventually forwards again to the postwar avant-garde. Long a museumgoer in Japan, I wanted to attempt to sketch out a first rough history of the beginnings of modern Japanese art, a subject of great importance, yet even now little chronicled in Western languages. At this time, the European intellectual underpinnings of twentieth-century Japanese thought remained, with a few important exceptions such as the work of Robert Bellah, also remained more or less unexamined, a situation which led me, with the help of the Social Science Research Council, to hold a series of conferences to help open up this field a bit as well. It is a matter of considerable gratitude for me to see that, in the years that followed each of these tentative efforts on my part, additional and far more exacting research has been taken up by a variety of other scholars, just as I hoped it would be. Harry Hartoonian and his colleagues have done a great deal to explore the field of modern Japanese thought; more than a few younger scholars are now writing on modern Japanese art, and the number of translations and studies of modern Japanese theatre have grown considerably. Those early sketchmaps are now being filled in. By the same token, much has changed in academic life in those years since I began my various projects. The first development is the growing interest in literary and cultural theory, not only for literature but in virtually all aspects of the humanities, or, as its practitioners like to say, the ‘human sciences’. Practical by temperament and trained at a penod long before these developments took place, I, like many in my generation, have found certain difficulties in coming to terms with these particular enthusiasms. For me, the enduring attraction of a work of Japanese theatre, literature, or art lies in the particularity of individual accomplishment; the object continues to hold primacy for me over anything that might be said about it. A larger or more distant intellectual context into which that object can be placed is, for better or for worse, less compelling to me than the attraction of that specific object itself. It is, of course, too early to say what the ultimate fate of these new waves of literary and cultural theory will be, but they have certainly changed the way in which younger scholars, and their students, see and judge the world around them. In any case, there are certainly many younger scholars in Japanese studies who have learned to master these new methodologies and insights in order to make provocative and significant contributions without altogether discounting the works of art and literature they choose to examine. The second phenomenon is the ever growing power of popular culture, not only in Japan but around the world. These shifts in the cultural fabric require for any cogent analysis quite different strategies than the ones to which I am accustomed. Again, these fields of research are best left to younger enthusiasts. Nevertheless, Japan, it seems to me, does present a remarkable example of a national culture, again like many of those in Europe, which maintains, at least in terms of its older generations, a strong interest in what is now often termed ‘high culture’. Ambitious contemporary art, concert music, and new literature of ambition still maintain a powerful hold in Japan, as they do even now in, say, France or Germany. Again, it seems to me that the European comparisons are the closest and most fruitful for our understanding of postwar and contemporary Japan. All of these explorations I have undertaken have been of the greatest interest to me personally, and I remain convinced, as I hope that the best of these essays suggests, that there remains much more that can be profitably explored within these complex areas of Japanese culture, so often by necessity comparative in nature. And I hope to continue with these explorations myself It has long seemed to me, for example, that the modern theatre movement in Japan, shingeki, provided a remarkable mirror of the political and artistic

6

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

tensions in Japan for many decades. I hope to explore this in a projected biography the work and accomplishments of the famous director Senda Koreya, who began his career as an actor, then went on to open one of Japan’s most successful theatre companies, and to introduce the work and ideals of Brecht into Japan. It is my hope that, for as long as I am able, I may myself continue to observe, and to probe, the manylayered complexities of modern and contemporary Japanese culture. And if other, younger scholars can take up similar interests, I will feel myself amply repaid. J.Thomas Rimer A NOTE TO THE READER As these various chapters and articles come from a variety of publications, they have been edited in different ways by various editors, so that, for example, certain Japanese terms are romanized in differing ways, for such as nō and noh. No attempt has been made to reconcile these small discrepancies. A number of the sections of this book began as lectures, sometimes for a general audience, so occasionally information and citations are repeated more than once, since I found them useful to illustrate a particular point. Please be patient with these repetitions. In some of the essays dealing with the fine arts, plates could not be reproduced here for copyright reasons. They can be found, of course, in the original catalogues.

Part I Writings on Noh

First published in Monumenta Nipponica, Volume xxv, Numbers 3–4, 1970, pp. 431–55

1 Taema, a Noh play attributed to Zeami. TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY

THE NOH is still an unexplored world. In the first place, only the most dramatic plays, those which interest the devotees of the art today, survive in the repertory. Yet outside this group of two-hundred-odd plays, there are hundreds more.1 If all these plays are examined, not necessarily from the point of view of a striking theatrical or poetic effect in performance, but as artistic manifestations of medieval and specifically Buddhist sensibilities, then many texts overlooked today may be of considerable significance. At first glance, Taema may seem to lack the merits which have made the noh so attractive to the modern sensibility. First of all, there is hardly the pretext of any dramatic action. The purpose of the play, at least on the surface, seems merely to tell the story of the legend for which the temple of Taema is famous. Secondly, rather than providing the kind of probing in poetic terms of human emotion so familiar from plays like Sotoba Komachi, Kinuta, or Kiyotsune, much of the play seems concerned with statements of Buddhist doctrine, and difficult ones at that. It might of course be argued that the modern Japanese sensibility may find as many difficulties as the European or American in approaching such a play. In that regard it might be instructive to see one reaction to the play as recorded by the great Japanese critic of French literature, Kobayashi Hideo, which he wrote in 1942 and incorporated into his book Mujō to iu koto (The Thing Called Mutability), published in 1946. Following are a few extracts from a much longer essay: At the Umekawa noh theater I had seen the actor Manzaburō in Taema… A monk who chants prayers to Amida visits Taema temple. From an old nun who is visiting the temple at the same time for a Buddhist service, he learns the legend of the temple: in ancient times, the Princess Chūjō secluded herself in the mountains, and while absorbed in chanting prayers to Amida, she experienced the appearance of the real Amida Buddha himself. As the old nun tells the story, she changes into a manifestation of Kannon, who had once tutored the Princess. Then she disappears. Afterwards the Princess herself appears and dances. The forms of music, dance, and poetry used seemed minimal yet the music becomes a great shout, the dance seems to become a consummation of daily life, and the poetry swells to a great string of prayers. Experiencing this, I seemed to be constantly whispering to myself. ‘This is exactly right—how could anything possibly be added?’ In this simple and persistent stream of form and sound, I found myself more and more satisfied, more and more won over… The charm of the appearance of Princess Chūjō seemed to give movement to the whole stage. A flower, blooming from the mud of history. That thoughts on the life and death of men could take such

TAEMA, A NOH PLAY ATTRIBUTED TO ZEAMI

9

a pure and simple form! I suddenly felt I understood the reason why this form of art could ignore the progress of modern society. It was precisely because all could simply exist in the shade of that beautiful, doll-like shape. Because there was no way to climb inside that carefully-crafted mask. Zeami’s ‘secret flower’ of perfection has been well hidden. Very well indeed…. Yet this age is not so distant from us: I can say this because I can almost believe in its wholesomeness myself. In such a period, useless ideas did not run rampant. I think over in what terms Zeami conceived of Beauty. I feel sure he felt nothing doubtful about it. His ‘flower’ of Beauty appears …‘only after mastering all there is to master and after all mere devices have been exhausted: it is a Beauty which does not fade.’ Beauty like this ‘flower’ does not exist. Nowadays philosophers of aesthetics puzzle their heads over the ambiguity of Zeami’s ‘flower’. They are merely deluded. What Zeami is saying is that through the movements of the body the movements of human perception can also rectify themselves, that the movement of the body is a more subtle and profound thing than that of the mind. Any fool who would be worthless enough to imitate on his face the movements of his uneasy thoughts would do well to hide them beneath a mask. If Zeami were living today, he might wish to say something like this…2 I have thought to reproduce here a few sections from this evocative essay not because they help to explain the play but rather to show some of the thoughts concerning its presentation engendered in a man who, for all his devotion to French literature, was a Japanese and so responded to whatever portion of the totality of his culture Taema possesses. For the historical culture of which these plays are a manifestation is still a vital force. Part of this vitality comes from contact with a living tradition. We have even the physical presence of the temple itself: built in AD 682, it still stands in the low hills between Osaka and Nara, at the end of a long grove of trees. Part of the maala (and a more modern copy) are still there. Visiting the spot today, one might (as I did) find oneself asking more or less the same questions which the priest did. Of course, we do not go with his Buddhist convictions and would not understand the explanations even if we were given them. But this simple impetus to know what one is looking at has given Zeami, in this play, the pretext to create in poetic and theatrical terms a mystic experience, an unfolding of heaven before the spectator’s eyes. This impetus makes the play easy to enter into for the modern reader as well. I do not believe that this play was merely intended to convey the record of some pious superstition. Its author, whether Zeami or not, was a very cultivated man. While the elements from which the play has been constructed are very simple, they are used in a skilful and very satisfying way. We do not need to know the details of the Jōdō faith to feel the emotional reality of the kind of mystic experience we witness. Far from being unappealing to a modern reader, the spiritual depth and the literary beauties in the text can, hopefully even in an English translation, show, as Mr Kobayashi felt himself, that ‘…this age is not so distant from us.’ No translation of such a difficult text can be considered definitive in any sense. I am most grateful for all the suggestions and help given to me by Professor Donald Keene of Columbia University in the preparation of this translation, but the responsibility for the final translation is altogether mine. I have not included references to several Buddhist texts from which some of the lines in the play were taken. (Several of them are in some scholarly dispute.) My purpose here has merely been to show by illustrattion one type of play which, among many others, has yet to receive its proper attention. The text used is that found in the Tōkyoku taikan, v, Tokyo, 1930.

10

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Taema attributed to Zeami (Demon Play, fifth category)

Waki: A priest of the Jōdo (Pure Land) Sect Wakitsure: Two attendant priests Tsure: A girl, the manifestation of the Goddess of Mercy Shite: Part I: a nun, the manifestation of Amida Part II: the Princess Chūjō Kyōgen: A person from the vicinity (The Priest and his travelling companions enter.) Priests (together): Wonderful the gate Of the Wonderful Law: Let us follow the road it discloses. (The Priest faces the audience.) Priest: I am an itinerant priest of the Pure Land Sect. I have just finished a pilgrimage to the Three Shrines at Kumano and I am about to return home. From here I will take the Yamato road and stop on the way to visit Taema temple. Priests (together): On our homeward journey, before we knew it We have crossed the Ki Road Barrier. Here, by the Iwaka River of Mikumano, The spreading waves scatter sunlight; But night or day, Making no distinction We continue our journey. Futagami mountain, like the clouds Had seemed so far away Yet now we have arrived there. This is Taema Temple. We have reached the Taema Temple. (The Priest comes forward three or four steps, then returns to face the other priests, suggesting that their journey is finished.)(The Priest faces forward.) Priest: How quickly we have come. We have already arrived at the temple. Let us worship with tranquil hearts. Priests (together): Let us do so. (They go to the waki pillar and sit.)(An old Nun enters, leaning on a stick. She is preceded by a Girl, who steps at the first pine on the bridge. The Nun comes to the third pine and faces forward.) Nun: ‘Invoke the name of Buddha once And countless sins will quickly drop away.’ Girl: They tell us too, ‘The eighty thousand sacred teachings Are all summed up in Amida.’ Nun: Shakamuni guides us… Girl: Amida with a single mind Shows the way… Together: Let us never neglect To say with all our hearts, ‘I put my faith in Amida,’ Nun: And as we praise him All distinction between Buddha and ourselves

TAEMA, A NOH PLAY ATTRIBUTED TO ZEAMI

Will disappear… Girl: Only our voices will repeat ‘I put my faith in Amida.’ Nun: In that road which leads towards Cool purity We place our trust. (They come onto the stage. The Girl goes to the center, the Nun to the front of the name-saying seat.) Together: Lotus strands Unspotted by the filth From which they grew— How were they ever dyed In the five holy colors? (She faces forward.) Nun: How grateful we are! Many Buddhas have made their vows To save mankind. Each with his own special strength. But Amida, transcendent, Made a vow of compassion Extending even unto us, Deluded and distracted creatures. For us the Five Hindrances never vanish, Living in this dark night of clouds Never clearing Never knowing The moonlight of redemption; Yet He will guide us to the West: Calling to him Our courage thrives. Why should the short road to Heaven Have seemed so far? This sacred teaching Amida left behind For us who must wander lost In the confusions of a degenerate world. And if we fail to put our trust On this single saving voice of Amida, Then surely no other teaching is left for us For this thousand years, Latter days of the Law; Now That voice alone can help us. If we fail to gain salvation On this rare chance we have been granted, In what other world might we hope to find it? Opening our pinewood door At break of day we came To this holy place And will remain until the sun sets

11

12

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Adding our prayers to those of others.(The two exchange places. The Nun now comes to the center and the Girl stands between the shite pillar and the Facing Pillar. The Priest rises and faces the Nun.) Priest: Excuse me. I have something to ask you. Nun: What may we do for you? Priest: Is this not the temple of Taema? Nun: Yes, it is called both the temple of Taema and Taemaji. They say it is because the pond here is used to wash and purify the lotus threads it is called the Well of the Dye House, Somedono. Nun: Over there is Taema Temple. Girl: And here is Somedera. Nun: And this pond is the Well of Somedono, the Dye House, with its many colors. Together: Many are the well-known places, Many the occasions to contemplate the Buddha And to hear the Wonderful Law, But too profound for our comprehension: As a single strand of pure lotus Our cry rises from our united hearts, Amida save us! Priest: Truly what you tell me is a teaching of great virtue, the Great Teaching of Amida himself. But tell me about this flowering cherry tree. The blossoms are an unusual color. Is this a sacred tree, with some history to it? Girl: Truly you are perceptive and understand well. Nun: This is the cherry tree on which were hung and dried strands of lotus. And the flowers themselves responded. That is why the blossoms have taken on the color of the lotus. Priest: It is reasonable that this should happen. For it is true that trees, grasses, the land itself can attain Buddhahood, and so the souls of the flowers are tinged with this color, this perfume. Nun: Yes, flowers watered by the Buddha’s Law Grow into seed. Priest: And lotus strands, unspotted By the filth from which they grew Nun: Are washed and purified, Like the hearts of men; We hang strands in the sun Amidst crimson cherry blossoms To dry delusion from men’s hearts. Chorus: Lotuses hung on a weeping cherry tree, A brightness of brocade Woven of blossoms and clouds. At Taema, rifts in the clouds Make the blossoms sparkle Or leaves them overcast; They fall like snow from the sky; Green or red, A single breath of wind carries them away. As a single invocation of the Buddha’s name Will blow us too Westward with the autumn wind To the West And to salvation. (The Girl goes below the Chorus seat. The Priest remains forward.)

TAEMA, A NOH PLAY ATTRIBUTED TO ZEAMI

13

Priest: Now tell me something more about the story of the maala of Taema. (The Nun sits down on a stool in the center of the stage.) Chorus: The story of the Taema maala begins, I think, in the reign of the forty-seventh Emperor. The Minister of the Right, from Yokohagi, was named Lord Toyonari. Nun: His daughter was Princess Chūjō. She hid herself away in these mountains… Chorus: To recite aloud the Amida Sutra every day. But in the depths of her heart she vowed, ‘May Amida come in his living person to welcome me so that I might worship him.’ She wished for this with unfaltering devotion. Nun: And she vowed, ‘Unless he comes, as long as I live I will never leave this hut.’ She gave herself to rapt and undivided contemplation For prayers to Amida. This place was shaded by the mountains, And the wind blowing through these pines was cool. The intermittent trickling of a stream Made her all but forget the summer heat; The sound brought purity to her mind’s ear. Through the night, above her couch, Where she recited sutras and concentrated Her very being on the Buddha, The bright moon of Enlightenment Shone in her window. Suddenly, amidst this loneliness An old nun appeared and stood before her. Surprised, the Princess asked Whom she might be. The nun replied, ‘How foolish to ask who I am. I came because you called me.’ The Princess was even more amazed. ‘Whom could I have called? Here in these mountains, With no one to help me, I have lifted my voice Only to call on Amida, For Salvation, For nothing else.’ The nun replied, ‘That is my name. Your voice guided me here.’ The Princess, knowing now Her prayer had been answered. That Amida had appeared As a living being, Cried out, ‘It is the moment Of my welcome to Paradise!’ Tears of gratitude From the depths of her being Seemed almost to wilt her splendid robes.

14

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Chorus: Ah, this is an inspiring story Like a teaching from Buddha himself. How grateful I am to have heard it. Nun and girl (together): Tonight is the fifteenth day, The second month, The very midpoint of the Equinox. We have come here to perform A service of memorial. Chorus: You say that you have come to perform a service? How can that be? Nun and girl (together): Why should we hold anything back now? We are transformed beings from the past, A nun and a girl, Who appeared in your dream… And even as we speak these words Chorus: Light thrusts, Flowers fall, Miraculous odors everywhere, Voices of Music. ‘We are embarrassed before you, travellers. We must take our leave and return to the Peak of Two Ascensions, where the Holy Nun we told you of ascended. Futagami is what the world calls it.’ As she said this. The nun Climbed the slopes of the hill, Mounted the clouds, Rose again on purple clouds, Rose up To heaven. (The Nun goes to the edge of the shite pillar, faces forward, throws away her stick, and rises to her full height, to suggest her rising up in the clouds. She quietly leaves the stage, followed by the Girl.) (The Kyōgen comes to the name-saying seat.) Kyōgen: I am a man who lives in this neighborhood. I haven’t visited the Taema Temple recently, and today I thought I would pay a visit. (He sees the Priest.) Say, here is a priest I can’t say I remember ever having seen before. Where have you come from. Sir, and where are you going? How is it you have stopped here for rest? Priest: I am a pilgrim travelling around the country. Do you live near here? Kyōgen: Yes, I do. Priest: If so, would you kindly come closer here? I would like to ask you some questions. Kyōgen: Certainly. (He goes to the center of the stage and kneels.)What would you like to ask me about? Priest: My questions may seem surprising, but there must be many stories concerning this temple and the Princess Chūjō. If you know anything about them, please tell me. I would be very pleased to listen. Kyōgen: You certainly asked me a surprising question. You see, even people like myself who live in this place don’t know so much about such things. However, since you asked me this question the first time we met, it would not be proper of me to say that I knew nothing at all. I will try to tell you what I have heard. Priest: I am most grateful.

TAEMA, A NOH PLAY ATTRIBUTED TO ZEAMI

15

Kyōgen: First of all the lady called Princess Chūjō was the daughter of the Minister of the Right from Yokohagi, Lord Toyonari, who lived in the reign of Emperor Junnin. For certain reasons she was sent away and abandoned on Mt Hibari. Most people would find it hard to live in the mountains like that, but as she was a Buddha on Earth, she never complained and instead passed her days in the invocation of the Buddha’s name and in meditation. On one occasion her father Toyonari went out hunting and made his way to the Hibari mountains. He discovered there a beautiful lady, living in a brushwood hut she had built in a ravine. Lord Toyonari was quite surprised, for he supposed that no one could live in such a rough place. When he asked who she was, the lady replied, ‘I am the daughter of Lord Toyonari, but I was abandoned here, through the designs of my stepmother, in these deep mountains.’ When Lord Toyonari heard this, he was astonished; not even in his dreams had he imagined that such an outrage had happened. ‘But I am your father! Please forgive me for everything.’—He took her back to the capital at Nara, and he was already planning to have her installed as Empress.But the Princess had no taste for such affairs and thought only about enlightenment in the future world. She crept away from the capital and came to this temple. Here, she cut off her hair to become a nun. She prayed that she might worship Amida in his living form, and once she did indeed see him. She prayed to him, ‘Bestow some miracle for mankind in this degenerate age, which will lead them to enlightenment.~Amida gave his consent and he wove of lotus threads a splendid picture of the holy figures of Paradise in a maala he displayed and gave to the Princess Chūjō.When Amida dug a well in the temple garden and washed the lotus strands, it is said they were dyed in the five holy colors. Thus the temple is called the Dyeing Mansion and the well, the Dyeing Well. In particular, since the strands of lotus were dried on this cherry tree, the flowers themselves bloom in five colors.This is about all I know of the story. What might you have had in mind when you asked me about it? Priest: Indeed you were most kind to tell me the story. I was not asking for anything more than what you told me. But before your arrival, an old nun and a young girl came here. We talked together, and they explained the famous sights here. They kindly told me of the Taema maala much as you have just now. Then, the very instant when they revealed themselves to me as the manifestations of the nun and the girl of ancient times, come to me in a vision, I saw them ride away on a purple cloud, and they vanished. Kyōgen: What you have seen is truly a miracle! Without any doubt it is the Princess herself who has appeared! I feel sure that if you show greater faith, you will be shown a greater miracle. Priest: What an extraordinary event. I shall display even greater faith and perhaps I shall witness another miracle. Kyōgen: If there is any more I can do for you, please do not hesitate to ask. Priest: I shall rely on you. Thank you. Kyōgen: I am at your service. (He leaves.) Priest: As there are such miraculous events here, perhaps I shall witness another. Priests (together): Even before we can speak of it, How surprising! Wondrous music sounds, Light floods down, Boddhisatvas, Singing, dancing, Before our eyes. These sacred manifestations Wonderful, oh wonderful. (The shite, now in the manifestation of the Princess Chūjō, appears dressed in white robes and holding a sutra scroll. She comes onto the stage and goes to the jōza position.) Princess: Appearing to you in the midst of your dream

16

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

I am the spirit of Princess Chūjō. When I was in this dusty world I read every day the Pure Land sutras Never flagging in my devotion. Because my faith was so sincere I joined at last the blessed throngs In realms of magnificence and joy. I have sat beneath the Moon of True Enlightenment. Paradise is not far from here: I have given up for just a moment My eternal body To return to earth to tell you Of the joy of Buddha’s Law. Chorus: Wondrous Paradise! Magnificence, a vast unending world of sky dazzles the sight, lost in paths of clouds. Princess: The sound of the voice Of the turning wheel of the Wonderful Law fills the air to the vast edges of Paradise. (She faces the right.) Chorus: The heart, calm and quiet as the dawn Princess: Is guided on its cool path to Paradise by the light of Amida Chorus: And, impatient, dreads to see the passing of time. (She comes to the center.) Time waits for no man.(She comes forward and unrolls the sutra.) Take to your hearts the Pure Land sutras, The ultimate reality Of Amida, Take it to your hearts.(She pays obeisance to the scroll.) ‘All will rise to Paradise. None will be left behind.’(She reads it.) ‘For the sake of the world, Without exception, These sacred scriptures, So hard to understand, Are explained,’ Chorus: ‘Even so the Law is hard to understand.’ Princess: ‘Indeed the Law is very difficult.’ Chorus: ‘And so it is not difficult to believe?’ (She rolls up the sutra.) Princess: Yet if you have faith alone… (She goes to the Priest and presents him with the sutra.) Chorus: Yes faith, Holy faith. (The Priest takes the sutra and opens it.) Princess: ‘In His compassion comes help for your salvation.’ (She goes to the edge of the shite pillar.) Chorus: Keep your heart without confusion, Princess: Do not go astray, Chorus: Do not go astray, Princess: The strength of ten voices,

TAEMA, A NOH PLAY ATTRIBUTED TO ZEAMI

17

Chorus: Will rise from your one voice in prayer. Gracious Amida! (The Priest worships the sutra, rolls it up, and puts it back in the folds of his robe.)(A dance by the Princess, followed by a song and dance.) Princess: In the waning night the bell sounds. Chorus: In the waning night the bell sounds And the bell sounds echo With the voices crying ‘Praise to Amida!’ As we venerate the Buddha And hear his miraculous word, His holy truthful teaching Shines down to light the world: In all ten directions Mankind finds welcome from him As they travel In the boat of the True Law. The oars are used to moving water And yet In the time it takes to push away an oar The dream of this short night fades And dawn comes Faintly. NOTES 1. Taema, in a sense, may be considered as one of these. Although it does exist in a modern edition, it is seldom performed or commented on. 2. The essay ‘Taema’ can be found on pages 235–40 of vol. 42 of the Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū, Tokyo, 1945, which is devoted to Kobayashi Hideo.

First published in Asian Theatre Journal, Volume 9, Number 2, Fall 1992, pp. 215–23

2 What More Do We Need to Know About the Nō?

THE LAST FEW YEARS have seen a remarkable flowering, to adapt one of Zeami’s favorite words, of interest in the nō, much of which is reflected in new publications in English. Book-length studies such as Thomas Hare’s Zeami’s Style (1986) and Komparu Kunio’s The Noh Theater (1983) have contributed greatly to our understanding of the classical principles of this venerable art. In her Twelve Plays of the Nō and Kyōgen Theatres (1988) as well as in her various other translations and publications, Karen Brazell has continued to make the discipline of nō both more accessible and, in a sense, more awesome still, as one comes to comprehend the kind of physical and mental discipline necessary to master its traditions. Shimazaki Chifumi continues her multivolume series of helpful line-by-line translations of important nō texts, and, most recently, Janet Goff’s Noh Drama and ‘The Tale of Genji’ (1991) has brought us fifteen plays and a set of provocative essays to accompany them. Even in the esoteric field of nō music, a useful book by Tamba Akira, The Musical Structure of Nō, appeared in 1983. In terms of comparative studies, Mae Smethurst’s groundbreaking The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami (1989) explores in considerable depth and sophistication the often suggested but little explored comparisons between the nō and the classical Greek theatre. It will be a long time, I believe, before those of us interested in pursuing further research on the nō can properly absorb and appreciate the full significance of all that has been recently accomplished. Nevertheless, in terms of an art as old, as vital, and as rooted in its culture as the nō, it is clear as well that certain aspects central to our understanding still remain virtually unexamined. Some of these areas of study and research are difficult of access to those without special technical training. When, for example, Yamazaki Masakazu and I did our translations of Zeami’s treatises for our collection. On the Art of Nō Drama (1984), we omitted, and with considerable regret, English versions of the musical treatises, as neither of us were able to bridge the gap, either by knowledge or by intuition, between the meaning of Zeami’s medieval Japanese musical notations and our own modern understanding. As the nō is most often—and quite correctly, I think—termed an art of total theatre, and should be approached from various points of view. One of these, of course, is the literary, and it was from a literary perspective that Yamazaki and I prepared our translations of Zeami’s treatises.1 Other translations could be made stressing the performer’s point of view or, perhaps, emphasizing the implications of the Buddhist and Shintō ideas that surface from time to time in these intensely practical texts. As I worked on the translation, however, from the point of view of a student of literary and cultural history, I became aware of certain aspects of this remarkable art form that, as yet, surely still elude our true understanding. For nō can tell us much not only about itself but about the culture that created and then changed it. A good deal of Western scholarship on the nō has stressed the art of translation of classical texts and an increased level of appreciation for the art of performance. With this development of such basic connoisseurship, scholarly

WHAT MORE DO WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NŌ?

19

attention can now profitably extend as well into areas of intellectual and cultural history, with benefits to all sides. In searching for an analogy in Western art for the nō, the comparison is often made with opera, which, like the nō usually involves singing, dancing, acting, music, a chorus, and other similar techniques of presentational performance. However awkward certain aspects of such a comparison may be, I did find myself continuing to make it as I studied and restudied Zeami’s texts. For it then became apparent to me that our modern ideas of the nō are formed, both consciously and implicitly, on the kinds of performance we can see today. In both art forms, we tend to project backwards onto earlier centuries our own contemporary, and perforce limited, understandings. In the case of opera, for example, the kind of heroic, political opera so popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had by the early 1900s more or less disappeared from public consciousness; with the coming of Puccini and other composers interested in the musical portrayal of a more intimate psychology, the older repertory was redefined to exclude works which suggested a different aesthetic vision so as to privilege in turn those works closer to our modern concerns. Thus, for example, Verdi’s La Traviata remained popular, while performances of political and moral dramas like Don Carlo and The Sicilian Vespers virtually disappeared for many generations. Mozart’s late, magnificent La Clemenza di Tito remained unperformed for more than seventy-five years, and Les Troyens of Hector Berlioz, now considered by some as the finest heroic work of the nineteenth century, vanished altogether until this generation. The history of the art form was all too often conceptualized less in terms of how it actually developed than in terms of what later audiences were, in a real sense, permitted to know through contemporary performance about larger possibilities of the form. Justification was by performance. The same principle applies, I was intrigued to find, to the nō as well. Zeami talks about both ideas and specific plays, and a number of the performing texts he mentions are now quite unfamiliar to us. For all the remarkable benefits that accrue to having an authentic performing tradition to study and enjoy, we are missing nevertheless a certain understanding of the tradition in the larger perspective—to the extent that current ideas about the nō invariably color our view of past conceptions so often at variance with our own. To put the matter another way, we have, in a sense, domesticated the nō so that we can understand it. There are, I suspect, certain losses. I can think in particular of three areas in which, if research were undertaken, the power and singular accomplishments of the nō might be more clearly perceived and, I believe as well, more deeply appreciated. The first of these concerns the plays written by Zeami himself. Zeami Motokiyo, who was born in 1363 and died in 1443, has long been regarded as the greatest figure in the history of the development of the nō theatre. At one time, a high proportion of the more than two hundred plays that make up the modern repertory were attributed to him. Now, modern scholarship has reduced that number considerably. Extensive work has been done as well on the life of Zeami; the data included in the excellent biography provided in Thomas Hare’s book would scarcely have been available in this accessible form, even in Japanese, a generation or two ago. Both in terms of his life and his works, Zeami has been reduced from saint to human being. In the transformation, his genius seems all the more clear. Like Mozart, however, not all of Zeami’s works are currently performed. In his study, Hare has prepared a most useful list of Zeami’s plays, dividing them into four categories: works that are unquestionably authentic, those that surely appear to have been composed by Zeami, those by other authors that he revised, sometimes extensively, and finally those of uncertain authorship that might involve Zeami’s hand. If we juxtapose this list, in all categories, against a list of Zeami’s plays that exist in translation, it is apparent at once that scarcely a third of those texts are available. We have all of Shakespeare in French and German, all of Molière in English, and all of both in Japanese. How extraordinary, then, that the established oeuvre of

20

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

the greatest dramatist in the tradition of the nō perhaps in all of Japanese theatre, is yet to be made available in English or, indeed, in any European language. There are, of course, certain reasons for this state of affairs. Those plays not in the modern repertory are not always published in editions with the kinds of notes that Western scholars surely need to create informed translations. Some of the plays are incomplete. (Yet think of the excitement when a presumed scrap of Shakespeare turns up!) Nevertheless, there are a number of important works, central to Zeami’s aesthetic and still performed, that have never been rendered into English—plays such as Koi no omoni (The Burden of Love) or Hanagatami (The Flower Basket), plays that are considered to represent Zeami’s highest level of dramatic writing. There may be those who would argue that the plays must be read in the original to be properly understood, and in one sense I would hasten to agree. Yet, however exciting the experience for a native speaker of English to read a text in the original, there are few of us who can do so. And among those who can, it still remains the case that for many of us—and I do not hesitate to put myself into this category—it is often more productive to gain certain kinds of insights into the larger structures of the plays when problems of the inevitable close reading that classical Japanese requires can, at least temporarily, be put aside. Thus, a consistent, well-prepared set of translations of Zeami is a first requisite. What these translations would reveal, I believe, is Zeami’s allegiance to a spiritual world somewhat different from that now familiar from the Buddhist plays we know, dramas such as Aoi no Ue or Matsukaze, with their familiar and elegant Buddhist-inspired themes of karma and rebirth and the introspective melancholy felt over the pain of human existence. A number of important plays by Zeami that remain untranslated into English are those that deal not with Buddhist but with Shintō subject matter, plays as central to his dramaturgy as Akoya no matsu (The Pine at Akoya), Hakozaki (the tide refers to a Shintō shrine in Kyushu), Hōjōgawa (The River for the Hōjōe Ceremony), and Fujisan (Mount Fuji); the latter two are still performed in the modern repertory. It is clear from the treatises that such Shintō plays were highly popular; today, they may seem remote and formal. Yet without real familiarity with their texts, we cannot enter into one area of Zeami’s mental and spiritual world. The second agenda, then, on my list of what we need to know about the nō concerns the need for a closer study of Shintō as understood and practiced at Zeami’s time, as well as its complex relationship to Buddhism. One of the best methods for such a study, of course, might consist of an examination of the texts of those same plays, as well as those by some of Zeami’s contemporaries—well-known plays (many of them not as yet translated into English) such as Awaji by Zeami’s father Kan’ami (1333–1384) or Gendayū (set at the Ise Shrine) attributed to Kiami (c. 1350). William La Fleur, in his Karma of Words (1983), has given us a provocative vision of the functioning of Buddhism in the nō, we need as well a parallel and interlocking account of Shintō. Again, there may be reasons why such studies remain imperfectly realized, even in Japan. Yamazaki, for example, has suggested to me that postwar scholars in his country have tended to pay less attention to such material because of the nationalist sentiments aroused by the wartime links between Shintōist concepts and military ideals. At the least, there is no question but that the Shintō aspects of nō exist at a considerable remove from the concerns of our modern consciousness. The nō will become much stranger, much less well domesticated, when examined for what it can reveal about these presumably distant or archaic systems of belief. Yet unless we undertake some kind of examination of these underpinnings, our understanding of Zeami and his contemporaries will be as incomplete as our knowledge of Mozart without Idomeneo or Shakespeare without Coriolanus. Again, it seems to me, the surest place to begin is with an examination of the texts themselves in order to ascertain what attitudes, what assumptions, both explicit and implicit, are contained in them.

WHAT MORE DO WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NŌ?

21

Thirdly, we are very much in need of an adequate sketch map of what happened between the period of Zeami and our own century when we ourselves cannot actually observe and study modern performances and attitudes for ourselves. The nō has fulfilled a variety of social and artistic functions since the 1400s. A history of these relationships, sometimes subversive to the centers of power, sometimes tamed by them, would shed a powerful light on many aspects of both traditional and modern Japanese culture. Armed with such information, a number of apparently immutable conventions of the form will turn out to reflect later changes, shifting attitudes, and different social relationships. Some work in this area has, fortunately, already begun. Arthur Thornhill has undertaken a prodigious task: the study and translation of certain treatises on the nō by Komparu Zenchiku (1405–1470?), the son-inlaw of Zeami and, according to received opinion in Japan, the most profound of those in his period who wrote on the nō. Thornhill’s dissertation was written in 1985 and I can only hope that it will become available in book form before too long. Zenchiku’s writings represent the first stage of the development of an articulation of the nō as an implicitly religious drama, with both Buddhist and Shintō elements present. Later stages, however, have scarcely been sketched in. We have little information in any Western language, so far as I know, of such an important later medieval writer as Kanze Kojirō Nobumitsu (1435– 1516)— despite the fact that certain of his plays, such as Ataka (Yoshitsune and Benkei Crossing the Barrier; the basis of the celebrated kabuki play Kanjinchō), Momijigari (Maple Viewing), or Funa Benkei (Benkei in the Boat), are pillars of the standard repertory. Nobumitsu’s plays, at once more colorful and more complex than those of Zeami and his generation, were meant to appeal more directly to the common people, written as they were during the Ōnin War period, when the possibilities of high-level patronage were considerably reduced. Quite possibly this infusion of popular taste into the form of the nō inherited by Nobumitsu from earlier generations helped liberate this kind of drama from a rigid and incipient classic status. This more broadly conceived nō, in turn, served as an appropriate model for the kabuki in the later Tokugawa period. Nor is another important figure of the period, Zempō (1454–1532), the subject of any Western scholarly research known to me—despite the fact that his theoretical works and memoirs are of great interest and his plays, such as Arashiyama (a beautiful mountainous area in western Kyoto), Tōbōsaku (The Chinese Hermit Tung-fang So), and Ikkaku sennin (The Horned Hermit), are still admired and performed. The fascination of the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598) with the nō is well known and documented. Whatever their ultimate literary quality, a study of some of the plays he wrote about himself and his exploits would tell us much, both about him and about the adaptabilities of the nō form to encompass and dramatize contemporary events. Such a process was to become central, only a few decades later, in the work of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724), whose puppet plays often dramatized happenings well known to his audiences. Chikamatsu, as did all his generation of playwrights, took assumptions and techniques alike from the nō theatre, and the example of these Hideyoshi plays may provide a link as yet unexamined, at least in Western scholarship. Of all the possible subjects for research on the interactions between nō and society, none would be more fruitful, it seems to me, than to undertake an examination of how, and by what stages, the nō, still a popular form at the beginning of the Tokugawa period in 1600, became an official, ceremonial art. In this regard, much of what seems highly typical of the nō tradition turns out to represent developments during this later period. The five categories of the nō, for example, now often used to classify the plays (god play, warrior play, woman play, mad person play, modern play), were not established, at least in this precise form, in Zeami’s time. They appear rather to represent a crystallization of Tokugawa attitudes toward the nō after the form gained the official patronage of the shogunate. The slow pace of performance is certainly a product of this taming, this gentrification, as an entertainment worthy of support from the Tokugawa family. Indeed, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), who unified the country in 1600, celebrated his assumption to power in

22

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

1603 with a nō performance—surely the first time that these dramas, first written and performed two hundred years before (as Zeami would have put it, by ‘river beggars’), were used to inaugurate an auspicious political reign. The Tokugawa family not only supported the four troupes that traced their lineages back to the time of Zeami (the Kanze, Hōshō, Komparu, and Kongō troupes) but also supported the foundation of a new troupe, the Kita, by Shichidayū (1586–1653), who began his career as an amateur actor and, through the patronage of Ieyasu’s son Tokagawa Hidetada (1578–1632), rose to the heights, bringing his stunts, acrobatics, and other ‘vulgar additions,’ as his more austere contemporaries would have it, to enliven and enrich again this older form. High patronage is one part of the story; a burgeoning merchant class, with time and money to spend on lessons and printed texts, is another. By the middle of the 1600s, nō texts were printed and could be bought and studied as samples of a kind of higher culture now available to the lower classes. Parts of nō texts were even used in schools for reading and penmanship practice. The effect of such dissemination helped to solidify the repertory, the individual texts, and the relevant acting techniques, thus inadvertently pushing the nō closer toward classic status. An examination of how this process worked might well provide a striking general model of how ideas shift through various layers of Japanese society, both during the Tokugawa period and, by extension, today as well. Finally, in terms of social and cultural history, attention should certainly be given to the brief but virtual collapse of the nō with the fall of the shogunate and the beginning of the Meiji government in 1868. Their patrons gone and no popular audience as yet formed, many nō actors were forced to abandon their craft; it was not until the new government, seeking a state entertainment for foreign visitors on the elevated level of the opera some of them had been treated to in Europe, called a group of nō actors together for performances to be staged for such notables as General Grant, who surely gets at least a handhold in heaven for having encouraged the Japanese to maintain what he found a beautiful and moving theatrical tradition. At this time there were a number of important and eventually influential personalities, both artistically and bureaucratically, who encouraged a resurgence of the nō, and a study of the vicissitudes of these years could provide a remarkable paradigm of the effects of patronage on the ability of the society to encourage and sustain high culture. Any number of such provocative studies have been written in this country and in Europe concerning the development of Western theatre, music, and the visual arts, but none on nō even in Japan, so far as I am aware, using these vibrant historical examples. As is quite clear from this list of desiderata, there remain some large and exciting issues still to be addressed in helping us to come to an adequate understanding of this powerful dramatic form in all its implications, artistic, religious, social, even political. The more we come to know, I am convinced as well, the more central the nō will become to our understanding of the ways in which the high forms of Japanese art and culture can function, both inside and outside the flow of history. It would take many generations of scholars to begin to come to terms with all these diverse and complex matters—and should they do so, new and perhaps even more stimulating questions will emerge in turn. Surely all the effort would be worthwhile: after all, Zeami wrote that the nō gives peace and longevity, as it is a life-sustaining art. Now who are we, at this late date, to question his authority? NOTE 1. An interesting example of the challenges of the translation process came up while we were working together on this daunting project. Our method was as follows. First, I made a draft translation; then, at a later session, the two of us went over my drafts in order to make changes, additions, and corrections. During this process, there were two specific and important points on which we differed in our choice of interpretation and translation.

WHAT MORE DO WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NŌ?

23

One involved issues of religious content. Yamazaki was convinced that Zeami placed so many Buddhist terms in his text because they were fashionable in the literary circles of the time. In Yamazaki’s view, Zeami was no secret priest; he was a theatre person through and through. I was persuaded by his arguments. When our translation was reviewed, however, a number of scholars, often those in religious studies, said that we had not stressed sufficiently the spiritual elements in the text. Then, too, scholars and others in the performing arts said that the translation did not properly stress the performance elements. The point is, of course, that ours is only one version. A text as rich as this can be rendered into English from a number of legitimate perspectives. Ours was literary. The second issue involved the translation of Japanese terms. Our rendering of the Japanese term yūgen by the English word ‘grace,’ for example, was a choice that virtually everyone dislikes. Yamazaki maintained, and I do understand his logic, that when a Japanese reader studies the text, there is merely the one term provided. ‘Everyone in Japan knows the word yūgen, but he or she has to get its precise meaning from the context after reading a passage over and over. I want to put in an English word that will make the reader do the same thing; I don’t want to make the term mysterious, I want to use a perfectly ordinary word. Everyone knows the word “grace.” Let’s see what they do with it.’ Well, of course, they did not want to do anything with it. Readers wanted the term to remain mysterious. I remain uncertain as to whether or not it was wise to have taken the approach we chose, but we have certainly been taken to task for it.

REFERENCES Brazell, Karen. 1988. Twelve Plays of the Noh and Kyogen Theatres. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Papers. Goff, Janet. 1991. Noh Drama and ‘The Tale of Genji.’ Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hare, Thomas. 1986. Zeami’s Style. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Komparu, Kunio. 1983. The Noh Theatre: Principles and Perspectives. New York, Tokyo, and Kyoto: Weatherhill/ Tankosha. La Fleur, William. 1983. The Karma of Words. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Rimer, J.Thomas and Yamazaki Masakazu. 1984. On the Art of the Nō Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shimazaki, Chifumi. 1972, 1976, 1977, 1981, 1987. The Noh, Vols I, II, III. Tokyo: Hinoki Shoten. Smethurst, Mae. 1989. The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami: A Comparative Study of Greek Tragedy and Nō. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tamba Akira. 1983. The Musical Structure of Nō. Tokyo: Tokai University Press.

Originally delivered as a lecture in a series of presentations on kata at the Kyoto Conference on Japanese Studies, sponsored by the International Research Center for Japanese Studies and the Japan Foundation, held in Kyoto, Japan, in October 1994

3 Kata as Part of a Large Design in Japanese Culture

THE WORD KATA, so important in many aspects of Japanese art and culture, is a difficult word for which to find any single adequate equivalent in English. The word has been rendered variously ‘form,’ ‘style,’ ‘pattern,’ and other similar concepts. Many of these terms, as I hope to point out, can be found, in one way or the other, to be applicable to the nō. I might begin by expressing my gratification, as a great admirer of the nō theatre, over the fact that international studies of this great form of theatrical performance have increased considerably in depth and sophistication in recent years. The study of nō in the West began, not surprisingly, with translations of the most important of these highly poetic texts, and in the earlier part of the twentieth century, these versions were doubtless read as a kind of closet drama, the Japanese equivalent of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, texts written to be read but not staged. In the postwar period, however, increased attention began to be paid to nō as a performance art. The increased number of actual performances held in Europe and America created an intense interest in the means by which performances were mounted, and it was at this time that the significance of the kata, fixed structures used during nō performance, began to be understood outside of Japan. For those readers unable to consult Japanese-language descriptions of kata and their uses, a useful English translation of a book by Komparu Kunio, The Nō Theatre: Principles and Perspectives1 is now widely read by scholars and students. Komparu’s definition of kata is extremely helpful. He defines the term as ‘fixed-movement patterns.’ He identifies three varieties of these patterns: dramatic, dance-like, and descriptive. All in all, according to this definition, there are some 250 kata or movement patterns that are to be mastered by the nō chief actor, or shite. Only a limited number, he points out, are to be used in the performance of any one play. These are the building blocks the actor uses to construct his performance.2 I would like to discuss the use of these kata from the point of view of a foreign observer, and I would suggest in particular two areas of possible wider interest beyond the specifics of the nō theatre itself Before doing so, however, I might note one question that some have raised as to whether the concept of kata itself represents something which is uniquely Japanese. The answer would seem to be in the negative: certainly Komparu Kunio himself does not think so, as he indicates that the classical Western ballet can often be analyzed in the same terms. The first issue I would like to discuss is the question of kata and a larger sense of design and order. Kata, it seems to me, provides such a sense in terms of both both time and space. And it is precisely this sense of order, as I will explain below, that I believe does help to fix the intention, and the significance, of all theatrical activity.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

25

In this regard, it is useful to recall that the study of the theatre in terms of the semiotics of text and performance has gained increasing importance in both the United States and Europe in recent years. This study of what are sometimes termed ‘sign-systems’ in the theatre can shed some light both on kata in particular and on the art of nō in general. Among the concepts basic to this system of analysis, a performance can be taken as a total ‘system of meaning’, one in which various elements have been preencoded for the audience. In the modern European or American theatre, it is normally the director who is charged with setting these codes. In the nō, on the other hand, at least for most performances of the classic repertory staged during the past hundred years or so, this is largely accomplished by the dictates of a prior shared tradition. These theatrical ‘signs’, according to such traditions, seem to have at least two functions during any given performance. First of all, they should convey to the audience a series of messages that are clear in and of themselves. Secondly, the messages should be arranged in a hierarchy, so that matters of more central importance will be understood as such by the audience. A range needs to be established and maintained. Thus the audience ‘reads’ these signals and relates the parts to the larger whole of the concept being presented. In this regard, traditional Western acting styles, before the coming of the variety of modern and contemporary drama that emphasizes ‘interior motivation,’ became paramount, also made use of a series of such ‘codes’ and ‘signals’ provided to the audience. What is more, according to scholars who have examined such traditional European and Amencan techniques, a conscious duality between actor and role remained an important factor, one much appreciated by audiences. In other words, these traditional systems allowed the spectators to appreciate the performer as performer, exhibiting his or her own skill in the process of recreating elements of a shared vocabulary: In terms of body movement, this [form of theatre] encouraged the use of ‘picture acting,’ where emotional states were signified by gestural acting governed by clearly codified rules. In the melodrama Lady Audley’s Secret, the heroine’s final state of madness is announced by herself accompanied by wild laughter and a gesture to the temples to signify the madness in her head, followed by an on-stage death… There is no ‘psychology’ of madness; the state is announced and visually represented through gesture. Even in the great advocates of emotionalist or histrionic acting, like Sarah Bernhardt, acting styles revealed a recourse to technique and the representation of emotional states through gestural picture.3 Thus the audience, trained to ‘read the signs,’ can know through these conventions what the character is experiencing. And, since the audience is trained, it follows that, as they interpret these signs, they are in fact engaged in the crucial act of recognition. They have been able to successfully ‘receive’ the message because it has been encoded in a fashion that, through a reciprocal process, can make its meaning clear to them. This reciprocity is central to the success of the performance. In examining these comments on Western theatre, I recall certain statements make by Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443), whose treatises on the nō theatre articulate techniques that have remained important in the long history of this theatrical art. In his Three Elements in Composing a Play (Sandō), he speaks of this essential function of recognition. Although the context of his remarks is somewhat different, as he is speaking of the theme to be chosen for a play, the principle assumptions seem related:

26

KATA AS PART OF A LARGE DESIGN IN JAPANESE CULTURE

In the nō, there must be a scene in which the source of the play is clearly revealed. If the artistic interest of a play centers around a famous place or an historic sight, a well-known song or poem about the place should be chosen and included. This moment is the most crucial in the entire play.4 Again, since the audience knows at least some elements of the story being presented, the act of recognition is central to the artist’s success, whether it be terms of story line or of fixed physical movements to which specific meanings have been traditionally assigned. In stepping back from the immediate question of what techniques may be involved in the use of kata in the nō, in order to speak of the more generalized functions of such movement and repetition, there is much to be gained for an examination of techniques used in the visual arts generally. For this purpose, I would like to turn to some suggestive ideas that can be found in the writings of one of the great art scholars of the preceding century, E.H.Gombrich, whose 1984 study The Sense of Order: a Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art,5 which contains many striking insights. Although Gombrich focuses on architecture and the visual arts, much of what he says can be applied to the theatre, and indeed to the nō theatre as well. First of all, in analyzing the long history of the function of pattern and design in the visual arts, Gombrich makes two points which are in themselves quite in line with the kinds of semiotic analysis I mentioned above. The first concerns the function of repetition in human psychology. However we analyze the difference between the regular and the irregular, we must ultimately be able to account for the most basic fact of aesthetic experience, the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion. If monotony makes it difficult to attend, a surfeit of novelty will overload the system and cause us to give up.6 The second concerns the need for a sense of hierarchy. There is more involved here than a simple reflex mechanism. An organism can be interpreted as a complex team, a hierarchical structure of interacting forces, and this interaction could never be secured without some basic timing device, a sense of order. What distinguishes organized rhythms from the mechanical timing of the machine is their greater flexibility and adaptability. The hierarchies are so adjusted that the interaction can proceed at varying speeds without upsetting the desired results. Nature around us is throbbing with complex rhythms, and these rhythms serve the purpose of life.7 Thus, Gombrich and our contemporary writers on the semiotics of theatre seem to confirm the same general principles: the need for strategies of ritual rhythm, a patterning which the spectator has been trained to grasp and respond to. These prove to serve as deeply satisfying aspects of any successful artistic strategy. Such is the reciprocal relationship between kata and a necessary sense of order. In addition to such general principles, there is still another aspect of kata which deserves be examined, one which pertains to its historical dimensions. In addition to the functions of kata in terms of human psychology and the innate human aesthetic sense, the historical dimension by which changes manage to bring shifts and renewals, as well as losses, to these semiotic systems in the course of time. Little research has been done on this aspect of kata, yet there have been changes in performance practice, as well as in the nature of audience response, manifested slowly and subtly down through the centuries. Let me approach this issue by posing two issues. First of all, what did the spectator ‘know’ in each succeeding period? Those who have examined the theatre in terms of semiotics have, as I mentioned above, stressed their conviction that obviously no spectator is completely ‘innocent;’ we all bring some kind of foreknowledge, articulated or not, as we witness a theatrical performance. What are we, for example, in our times, programmed to ‘know,’ and in what way will this knowledge help or hinder our present attempts to experience the nō? By extension, as we

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

27

are limited by the assumptions and confines of our own time, we may well ask ourselves if it is indeed possible for us as spectators to gain the requisite knowledge within the our own contemporary frames of understanding, to successfully approach a nō performance. It seems to me that, for the nō in particular, this is particular an important matter today, since contemporary audiences, surely at least in part because of television, have become increasingly passive. How are we to learn to become more active in this system of reciprocal communication? The art of the nō, as Zeami so often pointed out, demands the continuous and active mental and spiritual participation of the audience. Now of course, those amateurs in Japan and elsewhere who study some aspect of the nō (dance, chanting, study of the texts, etc.) are indeed able to come closer to the purposes of the kata, as well as other important performance elements as well. In our times, is some formal study required for an adequate appreciation of the nō? After all, we need not be pianists to appreciate the beauties—or at least the outlines of the structure —of, say, a Beethoven sonata. Nor did audiences at Zeami’s time find it necessary to study the nō in order to appreciate what they saw. I have noted when attending Tokyo nō performances in recent years that there are many Japanese in the audience who follow the performances with text in hand. I have attempted to do this as well, since I very much appreciate the extraordinary literary elements that make up the tradition. Still, if the attention of the audience moves towards the verbal aspects of the performance, then the bodily movements of the actors, which, for Komparu Kunio in any case, constitute the chief means of communication in nō performance, will perforce receive less attention than they should. In this context, it may be worthwhile to ask what sort of ‘sign system’ we, as contemporary theatergoers, are in fact able to ‘read’ when we attend a performance. In terms of kata, certainly for many of us, the specificity of each individual gesture is gone. We do not know how to recognize the significance of each movement, at least in any precise way. Some kata, based on natural or everyday human gesture, and so recognizable as such, still retain for us some level of generalized effect, but those which are more abstract in nature constitute a vocabulary which in the aggregate can only constitute virtually a lost language. Insofar as our appreciation can therefore now only generalized at best, we must therefore heed one warning given by Gombrich. In discussing similar breakdowns in our own understandings of many heretofore central traditions in the visual arts, he remarks that in these postmodern times, our culture tends to blur ‘the distinctions between designs and signs, between the merely decorative and the symbolic.’8 Still, while Gombrich understands the constraints of history, he urges us to use history as a strategy ultimately to go still deeper. For his part, Gombrich is convinced that our persistent sense of the beauty and significance of the patterns we encounter in the course of our lives (and here I feel it is altogether appropriate to add the kata of the nō to his list of visual examples) surely signals the existence of still deeper layers in human consciousness, those which move beyond the limits of history. In discussing these possibilities, he turns to certain ideas put forth by the Swiss thinker Carl Gustav Jung: There is certainly something in Jung’s approach to symbolism as a ‘lost language’ which recalls the various earlier attempts to recover the esoteric wisdom of the mysterious past through the interpretation of symbolic motifs… Such is Jung’s doctrine of ‘archetypes,’ which is relevant to our present topic because it concerns the basic meanings Jung and his school attribute to certain simple geometric designs…9 Therefore, Gombrich concludes, our search for order, even if we must somehow make use of a ‘lost language,’ which we no longer much understand, can indeed continue on because of our basic drives to seek pattern and order, our condition as human beings. For Gombrich, ‘order can serve as a metaphor for order…

28

KATA AS PART OF A LARGE DESIGN IN JAPANESE CULTURE

what may be part of our psychological makeup is the disposition to accept degrees of order as potential metaphors of inner states.’10 Thus, our constant desire to seek for a means to perceive order at the most basic human level, may well provide us after all with the means— and even without the specifics of any intellectual ‘recognition’—to respond to those deep rhythms and organic repetitions so important, as it turns out, to the internal strategies construction and performance in the nō. Such natural and spontaneous responses can in turn, give a freshened sense of impetus to the following comments of Zeami, found in his Disciplines for Joy (Yūgaku shūdō fūken): Indeed, in the meritorious life-sustaining art of the nō, there are many elements in nature—flowers, birds, the wind, the moon—that adorn it. The world of nature is the vessel that gives birth to all things, alive and inert alike, in all the four seasons…to make all this multitude of things an adornment of our art, an actor must become one in spirit with the vessel of nature and achieve in the depths of his art of the nō an ease of spirit that can be compared to the boundlessness of nature itself…11 So then, if we as spectators can feel the power of this natural pull, perhaps we too can enter into some level of communication with these larger forces of nature, those forces which Zeami feels are central to his art. And indeed perhaps we can somehow sense them, even if, in Gombrich’s terms, we can no longer speak with any assurance that ‘lost language,’ the vocabulary of visual codes which most of us can no longer recognize with certainty. It seems to me, therefore, that a more sustained examination of the possible nature and functioning of this buried ‘language’ might help us to grow more conscious of precisely why the nō, this form of medieval Japanese theatre so different in both aim and method, from the kind of modern theatre we emulate today, can continue to draw us to it with such a gentle, yet persistent force. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Published by Weatherhill in 1983. The Original Japanese title is Nō e no izanai, published by Tankōsha in 1980. Most of Komparu’s comments on kata can be found on pp. 212–222. See Elaine Aston and George Savona, Theatre as Sign System (Routledge, 1991), p. 118. See J.Thomas Rimer and Masakazu Yamazaki, On the Art of the Nō (Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 150. Cornell University Press, 1979. Gombrich, p. 9. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 247. On the Art of the Nō, p. 119.

First published in J.Thomas Rimer, On the Art of Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. xvii–xxviii

4 The Background of Zeami’s Treatises

THE NŌ THEATER of Japan, one of the most remarkable performing traditions in world theater, was brought to its first and highest flowering by Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443). Zeami, building on the insights and experiences of his father Kan’ami, was able through his own skills and abilities to transform what had been essentially a country entertainment with strong ritual overtones into a superb total theatrical experience in which mime, dance, poetry, and song were combined so that each art could be transcended in order to produce for his audiences an experience of profundity and almost religious exhilaration. Zeami’s treatises, in which he discusses the principles of his art, remain unique documents in the history of the nō. They stand as crucial statements that can inform a modern reader, just as they were meant to inform Zeami’s professional colleagues, of the essential elements in the theatrical process as Zeami understood them. From our twentieth-century point of view, the treatises seem to serve two widely differing functions. On the one hand, Zeami’s notions of the interlocking functions of acting, music, and movement in the nō reveal a remarkably contemporary consciousness. Despite the poetic and often arcane language Zeami uses, a performer can still find much here that seems altogether appropriate to the craft of acting. My colleague, Mr. Yamazaki concentrates on this aspect of the treatises in his essay. On the other hand, the treatises tell us an enormous amount about the early development of the nō, a form of theater profoundly grounded in the specifics of medieval Japanese culture. My purpose here is to suggest enough of the historical background to provide a useful context for an understanding of Zeami’s concerns. Considering the stature of Zeami, a celebrity during his own lifetime, it seems remarkable that we know so little about him.1 He was a child performer in the troupe of his father Kan’ami (1333–1384). When he was a boy of twelve, his remarkable talents were first noticed by the Shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), as powerful a patron of the arts as he was a political figure. Zeami’s beauty both as a boy and as a performer attracted Yoshimitsu’s patronage, as well as the encouragement and support of Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–1388), a leading renga poet of the time. Zeami’s intellectual and artistic training was surely encouraged by such men in the court as these, for it is clear from the treatises that Zeami was a man well-versed in the details of literature, poetry, and philosophy. Normally, such matters would have been little known to an actor, since the social status of performers at this period was low indeed. Zeami’s father died when the young actor was only twenty-two, leaving him with the considerable responsibility of carrying on the tradition of his family troupe. Indeed, Zeami’s stated purpose in writing his first treatise, Teachings on Style and the Flower, was to record the experiences of his gifted father and to comment on his own observations as a performer who attempted to follow in that tradition. Zeami and his troupe evidently enjoyed the continuing patronage of Yoshimitsu until his death in 1408, but the Ashikaga successor, Yoshimitsu’s eldest son Yoshimochi (1386–1428) seems to have favored

30

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

another actor Zōami, a gifted performer in a rival dengaku troupe. Zeami admired Zōami and others of his contemporaries as well, and he learned from them, as the treatises make clear. Yoshimochi may have been indifferent to Zeami, but after the Shōgun’s death in 1428, when Zeami was sixty-six, Yoshimochi’s younger brother Yoshinori (1394–1441) took over the reigns of government. From this time on, Zeami and his family suffered real personal difficulties, in 1434, when Zeami was seventytwo, he was banished to the island of Sado, a remote area near Niigata, in th Japan Sea. Four years before, Zeami’s second son Motoyoshi (who wrote down the text of Zeami’s Reflections on Art) abandoned the acting profession and became a Buddhist priest. In 1432, Zeami’s older son Motomasa died, and there is some suggestion that he was murdered. On’ami (1398– 1467), a nephew of Zeami, was officially appointed head of Zeami’s family troupe by the Shōgunate when Motomasa died. The reasons for these terrible events have never been made clear, but it may have been Zeami’s opposition to On’ami, whom he considered an inferior artist, that caused his exile, and indeed Zeami did insist on passing his treatises on to his gifted sonin-law Komparu Zenchiku (1405–1468), refusing to give them to On’ami. Zenchiku himself became a playwright and a theoretician of the nō second in importance only to Zeami himself. Yoshinori was assassinated in 1441. Tradition has it that Zeami was pardoned and allowed to return to the mainland before his death in 1443. Few details concerning the end of his life are known, however, and inference and speculation often account for many important details of his career. In terms of Zeami’s artistic and intellectual attitudes, however, the treatises do tell us much about his convictions and enthusiasms. In that way, at least, the spirit of this remarkable artist can be known to us. Zeami, of course, never imagined that the works translated in this volume would ever be widely read. They were originally intended for a small circle of intimates and were written for the purpose of passing on matters of professional concern from one generation to the next. Zeami’s troupe, like the others performing at his time, was organized on an hereditary basis, and these treatises were written for those already initiated into the art. The idea of writing such secret treatises did not originate with Zeami. Such documents have always been important in Japanese culture, first perhaps in the esoteric sects of Buddhism, then in the realm of court poetry composition, where secret traditions for the writing of waka and renga were passed on through successive generations of the great court families, who jealously guarded their private treatises on the secrets of excellence in poetic composition.2 As far as modern scholarship has been able to ascertain, however, no such elaborate treatises on the art of the nō were written before Zeami’s time. Perhaps Zeami’s early training in poetry through his contacts with Yoshimoto and Yoshimitsu helped suggest to him the idea of composing such documents, and indeed the very existence of such treatises would doubtless help to dignify a profession that had heretofore seemed of little social account. In order to insure continued patronage, Zeami must surely have felt it necessary to consolidate what he learned from his father and to do all that he could to insure that his descendants might be as successful as possible, financially and artistically, in their endeavors. It is clear, however, from various remarks in the treatises, that these documents contained information that was not to be shared with other actors outside the family, or with the public, in any form. The secrets of the art were to be passed on privately, and the treatises shown only to those who were properly initiated. For that reason, the texts of these works were not available to the Japanese public until the twentieth century. After Zeami’s time, the nō continued as a theatrical form of great popularity, and by the seventeenth century, in the early Tokugawa period, the development of printing and the interest shown by a growing number of amateurs in the nō gave rise to the publication of certain play texts and a much bowdlerized version of portions of Teachings on Style and the Flower. The authentic texts by Zeami, however, remained in private hands until 1908, when a collection of the genuine treatises was discovered in

THE BACKGROUND OF ZEAMI’S TREATISES

31

a Tokyo secondhand bookstore. Purchased by a wealthy collector, they were edited by the writer Yoshida Tōgo and published in 1909 under the auspices of the Society for the Study of Nō Literature. These texts were collated with other versions that came to light, and the first set of definitive texts were published in the 1940s by a leading scholar of the nō, Nose Asaji, in his two-volume Zeami jūroku bushū (The Sixteen Treatises of Zeami). Since the war, another generation of meticulous Japanese scholarship has produced the now standard editions used in the preparation of these present translations. Certain pieces of information are missing, and some passages remain obscure, but we now have a fuller view of the critical writing of Zeami than would ever have been thought possible a few generations ago. The range of the nine treatises included in the present volume is sufficiently wide that the reader can observe the changes in Zeami’s own experience, from the early Teachings on Style and the Flower, in which he chronicles what he has learned from his father, to An Account of Zeami’s Reflections on Art, taken down by his son Motoyoshi in 1430. A close study of the texts can show how Zeami’s concepts developed as he gained experience. In the later treatises there seems an increasing predilection for searching out metaphysical explanations, often Buddhist in tone, for the kinds of practical insights that Zeami had learned both as a writer and as a performer. And, indeed, the treatises read more clearly and are more comprehensible as a whole than when read singly. Much that is unstated in one context is explained in another. Zeami conceived of the Way of the nō, as he sometimes put it, in a manner similar to that of the Way of the waka poet or the Buddhist adept. The Way (michi in Japanese) suggests commitment, constant practice, and a genuine humility on the part of the one who is sincere in seeking a true path toward enlightenment or excellence.3 It is not by accident that the word Path or Way occurs in the titles of several of Zeami’s treatises, and it is the concept that ties all of them together. For all the importance that Zeami places on the need for an inner concentration leading to a fixed goal, a modern reader will be struck again and again by Zeami’s fascination with the freedom of the process involved. Nō may have grown out of ritual and folk art, but Zeami brought to such traditional assumptions an opportunity for a new and profound originality through his commitment to pleasing his audience, a process that required a judicious use of the traditional and the unexpected. In this sense, the treatises show an almost revolutionary spirit at work. Zeami was willing to set aside canons of traditional taste when the occasion demanded it. In this regard, he goes beyond his mentors in the field of waka and renga. The important aesthetic concepts developed by Zeami in the course of these treatises could well form the basis for an extended study. In any case, he explains his ideas in such striking and poetic language that no lengthy preface is required here. At the least, however, it might be well to mention here several key terms as a signal to the reader that these concepts—which usually become more clear when all the treatises are read— are crucial to Zeami’s central patterns of thought. One is that of the Flower (hana), a symbol used by Zeami for the true beauty created by the actor’s performances in different ways throughout his career. By the use of this natural symbol, Zeami maintains a deep connection between the forces and movements of nature and the work of the committed actor, who in his art must attempt to recreate and symbolize those patterns and relationships. Then too, as Arthur Waley first suggested in his 1921 volume The Nō Plays of Japan, the idea of mystic transmission is involved in the concept of the Flower. The alternate title of the Fūshikaden (which we have rendered as Teachings on Style and the Flower) is the Kadensho, which might be literally translated as ‘The Book for the Transmission of the Flower,’ perhaps a reference to the mysterious transfer of thought from the Buddha to his disciple Kāśyapa, an incident mentioned in the treatises by Zeami himself. It is doubtless for this reason that Zeami often observes in the course of the treatises that some particular point cannot be explained in words alone but requires an intuitive understanding on the part of the actor.

32

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Another concept crucial to Zeami’s thought is that of a fundamental rhythm basic to the nō, and, as he points out on several occasions, to all of nature itself. Zeami categorizes this basic rhythmical movement as jo (introduction), ha (breaking), and kyū (rapid), a gradual increase of pace from slow to fast. Scholars have identified various sources for this concept that go back as far as the patternings for the bugaku dances imported into Japan from China in the Heian period (794–1185). Zeami, however, seems to have been the first to use such a rhythmic pattern as a metaphor for the deepest psychological movement inherent in a successful theatrical experience. Another powerful idea in Zeami’s treatises concerns the relationship of yūgen, which we have translated as Grace, with the concept of monomane, sometimes translated as imitation but rendered in our translation by the term Role Playing so as to avoid too strict a suggestion of Western mimesis. A number of the most striking passages in the treatises deal with a need to create in the spectators a sense of the beauty that lies behind and beyond the kind of surface portrayal possible through the creation by the actor of any mere outward verisimilitude of the character being portrayed. In addition to Zeami’s own concepts, these treatises also provide for the student of comparative theater history or of Japanese medieval culture an enormous amount of fascinating specific information, often presented in a vivid fashion, of artistic life during Zeami’s lifetime. Although it is true that methods of performing the nō established at that period still continue, the kind of stately experience usually offered today seems at some variance with the rough-and-tumble world described in the treatises. Zeami’s milieu involved constant competition, and he always remained anxious to make his troupe successful and to keep it so. He has praise for others, but he shows himself as well an astute critic of performers from rival groups; and, indeed, his comments are so shrewd that, although the particulars of the acting styles are no longer always clear to us, the general import of his remarks always remains precise and vivid. Four of the major troupes that perform today can trace their lineage back to the time of Zeami (see chart 1). The fifth troupe now performing, usually referred to as the Kita school, was formed in 1618 by a gifted amateur actor, Shichidayū (1586–1653), who received special patronage from the all-powerful Tokugawa family. From this time on, official support for the nō from the Tokugawa Shōguns helped remove this form of drama from the public scene and brought about as well a standardization, an increased emphasis on elegance, and a slower pace to performances. The nō that we witness today has been filtered through the Tokugawa process of gentrification, with both gains and losses. One important change during the early Tokugawa period involved the establishment of fixed dimensions for the nō stage. The treatises make clear, however, that actors during Zeami’s lifetime were quite prepared to perform in a variety of playing spaces; indeed, one test of their skill as performers concerned their abilities to adjust their movements and vocal production to a variety of environments. Evidently there was no regularized playing space during Zeami’s lifetime, or at least there is no information remaining that allows us to describe such a place with confidence. Figure 1 is a modern rendering of the kind of space used for performances in front of the Shōgun, and so might be considered as somewhat typical. The treatises also reveal that the method by which the plays were chosen for performance was somewhat at variance with the modern method of selecting a nō program. There is no mention in any of the treatises of the so-called Five Groups or Five Categories by which the nō are catalogued today, a grouping into plays concerning (1) gods, (2) warriors, (3) women, (4) mad persons, and (5) demons. The pace in this scheme moves from slow to fast, category 1 being the most sedate, and category 5 the most wild and volatile. Such a schematization was evidently imposed later, probably during the Tokugawa period.4 Zeami’s ideas were more flexible and less orthodox, in keeping with the importance he gave to the idea of novelty in his art. A modern reader will notice at once that the repertory of nō pieces performed during Zeami’s period was more varied and richer than what can be seen today. The modern repertory is chosen from a body of about

THE BACKGROUND OF ZEAMI’S TREATISES

33

Chart 1 Various Important Troupes Performing at Zeami’s Time

two hundred fifty plays, yet a reading of Zeami’s Reflections on Art shows that a number of important works performed at that time have not been retained in the repertory. Many of these plays still exist in manuscript, and some have been printed in large nō collections published in Japan early in this century. If all these texts could be located, a close reading of them and a collation of their themes would doubtless give us a very different, and a much more diverse, picture of the theater and of the mentality of Zeami’s time. Current scholarship indicates that there are in the present canon about fifty works that can fairly be attributed to Zeami. Some of these modern printed versions, however, are often simplified, even bowdlerized. In addition, there are sixteen or seventeen nō by Zeami that are not performed and for which texts are difficult to obtain. A few, of course, have been lost. Quite a few of Zeami’s plays have been translated into Western languages, but, as Zeami’s Reflections on Art makes clear, a number of those considered important during his lifetime remain quite unknown to modern Japanese or Western readers. Many of these submerged works deal with themes and figures from Shintō myth and legend, pointing to an aspect of ritual and belief that is much less visible in the better-known and often elegant plays based on Buddhist themes. The treatises suggest that the psychological attitudes of Zeami and his contemporaries, for all the affinities we may feel, show strong qualities that are foreign to a modern mentality, Japanese or Western. There remains something rich and strange about Zeami and his world. Working over the treatises, it has seemed to me that, whatever we gained in the centuries since his death, we have lost something as well—a quality perhaps best expressed in that awe Zeami felt before the processes of nature and art, an awe that for him was a necessary prelude to individual creation. If our translations can suggest in some fashion the importance of that awe to Zeami, and perhaps its potential value to us, then Mr. Yamazaki and I will be gratified indeed. NOTES 1. For a judicious and detailed treatment of Zeami’s life, see Thomas Hare’s introduction in his dissertation (not yet published), ‘Zeami’s Style: A Study of the “mugen” Noh Plays of Zeami Motokiyo,’ University of Michigan, 1981. Yamazaki Masakazu’s 1963 play Zeami is an attempt to dramatize many of those same facts. A translation is available in the volume Mask and Sword: Two Plays for the Contemporary Japanese Theatre by Yamazaki Masakazu (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1980).

34

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 1 The floorplan of a performing space used at the time of Zeami

2. See various entries in Brower and Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, for the development and transmission of poetic treatises. There is also a useful article on the subject of Komiya Toyotaka, ‘Nō to hiden,’ in Nogami Toyoichirō, ed., Nōgaku zensho (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1942–1944), 1, 275–315. 3. See Brower and Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, p. 257. For a full discussion of the concept of michi in medieval Japanese aesthetics, see Konishi Jin’ichi, Michi—chūsei no rinen (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1975). 4. Scholarly opinion differs as to how and when the various systems of classification for various types of nō came into being. For an extended discussion of the problem, see Kanai Kiyomitsu, Nō no kenkyū (Tokyo: Ōfusha, 1969), pp. 152–179.

Part II Writings on Japanese Poetry

First published in Asian Art, Volume II, Number 1, Winter 1989, pp. 29–55

5 A Lyrical Impulse in Modern Japanese Prints and Poetry

THE ARTS IN JAPAN are experiencing a period of rich creativity. In the contemporary theater, visual arts, literature, and music, Tokyo is a world center to be reckoned with. In forms ranging from fashion to film, the Japanese eye and sensibility are shaping current artistic vision. Japan is at once itself and thoroughly cosmopolitan. It has not always been so, however. Until the opening of Japan to the West in the 1850s, Japanese writers, artists, and intellectuals were able to glean only the barest outlines of developments in the Western arts, for the country had been effectively cut off from international contact since the 1630s. In 1868, as the result of a proclamation of the young Emperor Meiji, men and women went forth to study the rest of the world and soon brought back a surprisingly informed understanding of Western civilization, including the newest trends in the visual and literary arts. During the earlier periods in their history, of course, the Japanese had evolved a highly sophisticated artistic tradition, with China as the primary outside point of reference. By the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese influence was replaced by that of Europe. Japanese intellectuals often claimed that they constituted a young nation, one that had broken with its past to seek and assimilate a cosmopolitan and contemporary world sensibility. It was natural, perhaps, that many writers and artists pursued the new forms they found in Europe to manifest that aesthetic. Many gifted younger poets ceased writing seventeen-syllable haiku and adopted long lyric verse forms based on the French model. Japanese composers began to travel to Paris and Berlin to learn to write operas and string quartets. Many young Japanese painters took up the art of oil painting and were soon winning prizes in the French salon exhibitions. Was there to be anything left of the Japanese artistic tradition? Looking at the Japanese creative arts since 1900 from our vantage point late in this century, it certainly appears that, despite enthusiastic adoption of the international and modernist modes, the authentic Japanese sensibility has remained powerful. The vocabularies chosen may have shifted, but many of the unarticulated assumptions concerning the purposes and techniques of art remain, fortunately, firmly entrenched. There is perhaps no better place to observe this subtle continuity than in the field of modern Japanese prints, of which the Arthur M.Sackler Gallery has a particularly impressive collection. Many of these works are of the highest quality. They use an international means of expression, yet they are altogether Japanese. How did this transformation in visual style come about? One of the most fruitful avenues for observation of this metamorphosis can be found through juxtaposing the works of these print artists with the writings of many modern Japanese poets, whose new visions also brought about powerful changes in their artistic language. In both Eastern and Western culture, poetry and painting have long been considered sister arts. In Japan, one need only go back to the art of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), the greatest of the traditional haiku poets, to watch them at work together. Bashō was a fine artist and calligrapher who sometimes illustrated his own collections of poetry. His most famous work, published shortly after his death, Oku no hosomichi

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

37

Mizufune Rokushū, Poet Gare, 1960. Woodcut, ink and color on paper; 66.3×45 cm (26 ×17 in). Transfer from the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, s88.0041.

38

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

(Narrow Road to the Deep North), is one of the great classics of Japanese literature. It was later illustrated by Yosa Buson (1716–1783), another great haiku poet who wanted to express his admiration for the older master through his splendid visualizations of Bashō’s voyage to northern Japan.1 Mario Praz, in his Mellon lectures on the parallels between literature and the visual arts, finds in Western culture a similar relationship, implicit and explicit, between literature and the visual arts, which he traces back to ‘a comment, attributed by Plutarch to Simonides of Ceos, to the effect that painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture;’ ut pictura poesis. Praz explores the relationship through the literary and artistic works of the Italian Renaissance, through German art and literature, all the way to the futurists and other modern manifestations of art and literature in our century.2 Just as Praz is able to locate the same attitudes in both classic and modern culture, so we can observe similar phenomena in the case of Japan. Japanese poetry, receiving its own “shock of the modern” in the examples imported from the West, vastly altered and expanded its vocabulary and subject matter, just as did Japanese art, and for many of the same reasons. Their parallel development in turn allows the new range of modern Japanese poetry to shed considerable light on the shifting strategies of modern Japanese art. Not only do the arts of poetry and printmaking show certain resemblances, but poets and print-makers sometimes work together in the modern period just as they did in the past. The striking juxtapositions and brightly colored images in the 1960 woodcut Poet Gate by Mizufune Rokushū (born 1912), suggest, by title and image, the power of these implicit affinities (see page 52). Japanese who appreciate their own literature place the modern lyric high among the accomplishments of the century. By the early 1900s, a young generation of poets, exposed to Western, specifically French, poetry of the kind exemplified by the work of Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and in particular Charles Baudelaire, began their own experiments with a new poetic language entirely different from that used in the traditional seventeen-syllable haiku or thirty-one-syllable court tanka forms. The work of these poets, avantgarde in almost any terms, preceded the inception of symbolic and abstract art in Japan; indeed, their writing helped inspire those developments. Our Western perceptions of the working of this process in the Japanese context have been somewhat blurred, however, because of the problem of translation. A visual image conveys its meaning instantly; a text, particularly a poetic text, needs time and talent on the part of its translator, perhaps a succession of translators, to make something approximating its true self available in an alien tongue. The prints of, say, Onchi Kōshirō (1891–1955), the great printmaker who began experimenting with abstract images as early as 1915, have been known in this country and Europe for several generations (see Figure 5.1), but adequate translations of the work of the superb poet who inspired him, Hagiwara Sakutarō, have been available for less than a decade. As more and more modern Japanese poetry becomes obtainable in eloquent English, however, the common milieu and interlocking influences on the poets and the printmakers become all the more clear. Both art forms share a dedication to experimentation, often using elements, verbal or visual, outside the canons of the traditional Japanese arts. Images as common to modern art in Japan (and elsewhere) as, say, a complicated machine or the naked breast of a woman, could never have found their way into traditional Japanese poetry or painting. Even in the early years of this century, the urge to encompass new visual and verbal possibilities met with nervous reactions from a conservative public. Those who created modern prints and those who wrote poetry were freed, however, from the constraints imposed by expensive commissions. They were thus left (although sometimes facing financial jeopardy) to follow the paths of their own imaginations, relatively unencumbered by popular, and more often than not, conservative taste. Since this freedom of the spirit was perhaps first seen in poetry, it may be useful to cite a few examples by prewar poets whose work, which quickly attained classic status, helped establish new possibilities for lyric expression that were soon to be echoed in the visual arts, notably in the world of prints.

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

39

Figure 5.1 Onchi Kōshirō, Beauty of the Mirror, 1929. Woodcut, 32.5×25.5 cm (12×10 in). Private collection.

The foremost poet in this context is surely Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), whose poetry, combining fantasy, interiority, and a breathtaking new use of the vernacular language, gave his work pride of place among those writing in his generation. It is impossible in a short space to provide any full discussion of his accomplishments, but I will indicate some of the revolutionary qualities he brought to poetry that, in turn, were to find certain visual parallels in the art of the printmakers. The poems quoted here cannot be precisely dated, but they probably appeared at roughly the time of World War I. One element important to Hagiwara is fantasy, as shifting contours of the imagination seek new possibilities, many never to be realized. A short poem, ‘On a Trip’ treats the theme of unobtainable desire lightly but explicitly.

40

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Though I think I’d like to go to France, France is too far away; I would at least put on a new jacket and go on a carefree trip. When the train takes a mountain path I would lean on an aquamarine window and think, alone, of happy things on a May morning when eastern clouds gather leaving myself to my heart with fresh young grass flaring.3 The phrase ‘aquamarine window’ is an example of abstract and suggestive images that also surface in ‘An Impression of Early Summer.’ Because insect blood flows and seeps in and everything exhausts its semen this earth is bright, from a woman’s white fingers a gold coin slips down on my hand. The time is the beginning of May. Infant trees swim out onto the streets, chirping, buds grow out to flare. Look, the landscape has come, valiantly flowing; floating up distinctly m the blue sky it really clearly reflects people’s shadows.4 Here, the syntax begins to blur. Images, sometimes from nature, sometimes openly related to the mental state of the poet, are juxtaposed, without apparent reference to any narrative line. Freed from the most common elements of common sense, the psyche of the reader may play over the images and interpret them as a kind of collage. Another technique contributed by Hagiwara to the vocabulary of modern expression in Japan, and one that particularly revolutionized poetic possibilities, is repetition. That device, common enough in Western poetry, is virtually unusable in short forms like the haiku, but in the new, longer lyric forms, the casting up again and again of similar images gives the work a fresh power. Here is one of the opening poems, entitled ‘Bamboo;’ from Hagiwara’s most famous collection, Howling at the Moon, published in 1917. Repetition of image provides the poem with much of its peculiar energy. Something straight growing on the ground, something sharp, blue growing on the ground, piercing the frozen winter, in morning’s empty path where its green leaves glisten, shedding tears, shedding the tears, now repentance over, from above its shoulders,

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

41

blurred bamboo roots spreading, something sharp, blue, growing on the ground.5 When Howling at the Moon was published, it contained striking and somewhat abstract illustrations by two gifted young printmakers, Onchi himself and Tanaka Kyokichi (1892–1915), whose early death, before the actual publication of the book, cut short a brilliant career. In many ways, the illustrations matched in visual terms the poetic techniques employed by Hagiwara, producing images of an almost expressionist force. (Onchi’s portrait of Hagiwara, incidentally, done many years later, in 1943, remains one of his most famous works.) Such collaborations between poets and printmakers have continued to the present day. If Hagiwara found a way to explicate his inner world to his readers through forceful, often erotic, imagery, the great surrealist poet Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894–1982), who knew T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound and who wrote in French, Japanese, and English, perfected in his generation a new and suggestive lyricism. Nishiwaki removed objects from their usual contexts and juxtaposed them in fresh ways to allow them to resonate with new force. Here, in one of his simple poems, ‘Loquat’ (published in 1953), Nishiwaki has mixed extremely diverse images. The three words in the first line, for example, although seemingly unrelated to each other on the level of common sense, are so positioned as to suggest the possibility of subtle connections between them as intuited, then suggested, by the poet. Volcano portulaca ram Gauguin’s gamboge golden Flesh exquisite on a silver plate! In the shriveled Tahitian gourd In the forgotten gods’ dark blood I glimpse dangerous seeds The hands of a woman traveler With a bird’s eyes Peeling a fruit of the towering loquat Are unlimitedly white6 A response to this kind of suggestive, elusive poetry requires, first of all, recognition of its literary and historical references. The reader uninformed about Gauguin and his trip to Tahiti will miss one element of resonance in the poem. Required as well is an intuition that can go beyond specific images to some larger meaning. ‘Reading my poems,’ Nishiwaki once remarked, ‘is like looking through a hole in a hedge at the vast sky beyond.’ The same techniques can be seen in ‘Slope;’ published in 1964. When in a dent of the cliff white blossoms jut out on a devil’s walking stick with its swarms of thorns I walk down the narrow slope before a ruined pub. The cut rocks are moist.

42

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

The rotten smell of the bushes of the gods spurned and turned into plants by Jupiter powerfully stimulate the brain. The eternity that hides in the nervous system suffers a transparent thrill.7 Lyrical, self-aware, subtly crafted, the work of Nishiwaki laid out new possibilities for all kinds of creative artists. In a sense, much of the work done in poetry and the visual arts in the postwar period has been leavened through the example provided by this modern master. Whether artists or other writers read him or not is less important than the fact that Nishiwaki stretched the contours of possibility for artistic expression in his period. In this regard, his influence was as great in modern Japanese culture as was that of Eliot in Britain and the United States. Not everyone read and appreciated Eliot, but his example and his influence were and are everywhere. The work of Nishiwaki was particularly important for many because it bridged the difficult war years, when the Japanese art and literary worlds were again removed from the stimulus of European experiments. With the return of those contacts and a new sense of personal freedom in the late 1940s, Japanese artists and writers found themselves able to achieve innovative and ever more confident strategies of expression. Japanese poetry showed a tendency toward abstraction before this European influence was felt in Japanese printmaking. Nevertheless, in the early twentieth century, a new kind of Japanese printmaker emerged. Until the end of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), print-making was considered a commercial craft, often involving artisans who executed on wooden blocks the design of the master artist. By the turn of the century, however, a number of young artists with an interest in Western drawing and painting turned to the medium of prints, carving their own blocks and doing their own printing. In this way, their prints became as personalized as a painting or a piece of sculpture, and the art of the print was elevated. Onchi Kōshirō was the great innovator in this respect, working in both abstract and representational modes. A more typical, and highly gifted, artist was Yoshida Hiroshi (1876–1950), who began his career as a Western-style painter, pursuing a romantic and colorful mode based on his enthusiasm for French impressionist and postimpressionist art, that won him a considerable reputation. When he took up printmaking in midcareer, he created images that, in their elegance and sophistica-tion, earned both him and the modern print movement an enthusiastic following in Japan and abroad. His print Tateyama betsuzan (1926) shows his skill in combining abstract design and the texture of the woodblock surface itself with forms from nature (Figure 5.2). Yoshida’s cosmopolitan interests, which prompted him to travel throughout much of the world during his long career, can be sampled in his 1931 print Kailasa Temple, Ellora, a color woodcut of the famous Indian temple dedicated to the god Shiva (Figure 5.3). Both works suggest the high level of accomplishment attained before World War II by print-makers who incorporated new, international strategies and skills into their work. The sense of the material is strong, and the use of color and design shows the potential for the move toward abstraction that was to occur after the war. By the late 1940s, as Japan’s contacts with the West were renewed, a spirit of cosmopolitan experimentation burgeoned in all the arts. Poets, writers, and artists stretched themselves to encompass the new freedom of the postwar period. In both the literary and the visual arts, the movement to abstraction, begun and sustained by such earlier figures as the poet Nishiwaki and the printmaker Onchi, now continued to grow. Generally speaking, the older poets and artists, whose work had begun before or during the war,

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

43

Figure 5.2 Yoshida Hiroshi, Tateyama betsuzan, 1926. From the series Twelve Themes of the Japan Alps. Woodcut, ink and color on paper; 25.3×37.2 cm (9×14 in). Gift of Mr and Mrs Harold Horowitz, s88.0045.

remained in a kind of transitional mode, mixing abstraction and representation. A still younger generation, nurtured altogether in the postwar atmosphere, moved much further away from its predecessors. Printmakers experimented with new materials and methods. Acrylic colors, mezzotint, silkscreen, intaglio, and a variety of other techniques used seldom if at all during the more conservative prewar period now became more common, and they opened up new possibilities in both intensity of color and subtlety of line. The persistence of a relatively conservative mode in the postwar period can be seen in the prints of Sekino Jun’ichirō (born 1914). As a young man, Sekino worked with Onchi and his circle, and, like the earlier master, he took up and developed the art of portraiture employing the print medium. Just as Onchi made a portrait of his revered friend, the poet Hagiwara, so Sekino produced an admirable portrait of Onchi. Sekino is best appreciated, however, for his exploration of themes from nature. One of his most impressive and wellknown images, Six Jizō shows a judicious mixture of pattern, scene, and texture, all at the service of a basically realistic image (Figure 5.4). Jizō, incidentally, is the name given to one of the most loved and worshiped bodhisattvas in the Japanese Buddhist tradition. Statues of Jizō, seen as a savior of children, are found along roadsides or country pathways throughout Japan. Younger artists, however, began to respond more directly to the breaking up of images, in order to privilege texture, shape, and the power inherent in juxtaposition. One master of this style is Ikeda Masuo (born 1934) who, while active early in his career in a number of media, later turned his full energies to drawing and printmaking. His work seems to bring to fruition in visual terms the kinds of verbal possibilities first brought to Japanese poetry by Nishiwaki. Ikeda’s Gluttony, from his series The Seven Deadly Sins, created in 1973, shows his talent at its finest, combining literary reference and a mixture of realistic or fantastic images (Figure 5.5).

44

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 5.3 Yoshida Hiroshi, Kailasa Temple, Ellora, 1931. Woodcut, ink and color on paper; 37.3×24.5 cm (14×9 in). Gift of Mr and Mrs Harold Horowitz, s86.0571.

Ikeda has a strong interest in postwar poetry. In particular, he has shown an affinity for the work of another who mixes both abstract and realistic images, the poet Yoshioka Minoru (born 1919). Yoshioka, like so many of his generation, was first excited by his contact with modern French poetry and the work of

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

45

Figure 5.4 Sekino Jun’ichirō, Six Jizō, 127/128. Woodcut, ink on paper; 46×65.5 cm (18 ×25 in). Gift of Donna P.Saunders, s86.0521.

Japanese writers who developed their own work in this avant-garde style; he held Hagiwara and Nishiwaki in particularly high regard. Yoshioka’s prewar poetry was fairly conservative, often written in the traditional short forms, but after his war experiences on the Manchurian front, Yoshioka set out, as he once expressed it, to attempt to exorcise the experiences he had been forced to endure. Seeking a means to encompass these events in words, he turned to newer styles. Many of his poems bear titles that sound like names of pictures or prints—‘Still Life,’ ‘Landscape,’ ‘Illustration,’ ‘Nude Woman.’ The poems themselves provide rich bouquets of images, some abstract, some more directly from nature. The short poem ‘Pastorale,’ from his collection Monks, which contains poems written between 1956 and 1958, suggests something of Yoshioka’s tonality. Wheels fall innumerably From the palms of God Further, waves rise Play the flute Rain-wet blue blades of reeds The sheep expand and contract The path to an abandoned garden becomes invisible I wipe the inside of a lamp And turn the piling butterfly wings The dagger which did not come in time pierced the moon

46

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 5.5 Ikeda Masuo, Gluttony, 1973, 3/60. From a series of eight prints, The Seven Deadly Sins. Mezzotint and drypoint, ink on paper; 30×26.3 cm (11×10 in). Gift of Margot Paul Ernst in memory of Mr and Mrs Norman S.Paul, s87.1058

And petals incessantly overflowed8 As in the juxtapositions of Ikeda’s visual world, Yoshioka’s poem conveys meaning not through linear development but by the positioning of images side by side, thus allowing the growth of an intuitive sense in the reader’s mmd of more subtle, fleeting connections. Reading such a poem must always remain a highly personal experience, as each individual responds on the basis of his or her own character and life history. Indeed, successive readings may produce varying responses from the same reader. When Hiroaki Sato first translated a generous selection of Yoshioka’s verse into English, published as Lilac Garden by Chicago Review Press in 1976, Ikeda created the illustrations for the American edition. His skill at matching his visual images with Yoshioka’s aesthetic is clearly visible in his title illustration (Figure 5.6). Ikeda and Yoshioka might both be classified as intellectual artists. Their knowledge creates images and ideas that readers and viewers may be expected to recognize. Concealed in this aesthetic, however, are a certain playfulness and fantasy, qualities very much in evidence in postwar Japanese poetry. Tamura

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

47

Figure 5.6 Ikeda Masuo, Lilac Garden, 1976.

Ryūichi (born 1923), who learned of T.S.Eliot through Nishiwaki’s work and became an important member of the so-called Japanese Wasteland School of poets in the early postwar years, has, like Yoshioka, written somber poems on the horrors of war. But he has been capable as well of wit and charm, always captured with a striking elegance of language that is apparent even in translation. A long sequence entitled ‘A Study in Terror’ published in 1966, for example, includes this delightful fragment. 3

from the deer’s horn to the french horn from the blokfleute to the flute the histories of musical instruments belong to light and dark to the blank of the heart that is missing from Mozart to Debussy from the deer’s horn to the french horn from the blokfleute to the flute9 Here is Hagiwara’s repetition employed in a highly fanciful and wholly original way. This playful use of language and of history, naive and self-aware at the same time, represents a quality that informs the work of many contemporary printmakers, perhaps none as consistently as the artist Ijima Takao (born 1931). Ijima, who styles himself Ay-O, has made his luminescent rainbow colors well known and appreciated all over the world. In this series from his 1974 sequence, Then Mr. Ay-O Got Drunk by the Rainbow, the shapes shift back and forth, in and out, suggesting both the artist’s state of mind and the droll means he has chosen to achieve a theme and variations on his exuberant rainbow—a device that allows him to show off his vibrant sense of color juxtapositions (Figure 5.7). Ay-O’s travels abroad, notably to the United States, have put him in touch with pop art and many other recent international developments, but he is equally fascinated with the world of the traditional woodcut. He has created a series entitled, appropriately enough, Rainbow

48

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 5.7 Ay-O, Then Mr Ay-O Got Drunk by the Rainbow, 1974. From a twenty-print sequence. Lithograph, ink on paper; 28 3 21.6 cm (11 3 81/2 in). Gift of Margot Paul Ernst in memory of Mr and Mrs Norman S.Paul, s87.1018–21.

Hokusai, in which he makes visual references to the great nineteenth-century artist. The design of his wellknown print on sumo (Japanese wrestling) is consciously based on a print by the Tokugawa artist Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1864). Like Tamura, Ay-O and many others of his generation gleefully mix images and notions from the visual culture of Japan and the West alike, both past and present, appropriating them as necessary for the creation of their own visions. The artist Kitaoka Fumio (born 1918) studied art in Paris after World War II and began to adopt a similar kind of mixed style, using natural shapes to suggest their abstract potentials. A remarkable series of six large prints, created in 1984 and 1985, are perhaps his masterpieces and represent some of the finest contemporary works in the Sackler Gallery’s print collections (Figure 5.8). The six, in black and white, take their titles from nature: After the Ebb, Rock and Grass, Wave, Ice and Snow, Driftwood, and Stream. Each print pulls recognizable images from nature toward the realm of abstract design. The powerful lines and bold black and white shapes manifest both the power of nature and the challenge to the artist of the carving process itself, which preserves the integrity of the wood used for the block. This superb work could only

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

49

Figure 5.8 Kitaoka Fumio, six prints, 1984–85. Woodcuts, ink on paper; average dimensions: 199.9×48.9 cm (78¾×19¼ in). Gift of Mr and Mrs Fumio Kitaoka, S86.0525–30

have been created in the postwar international climate of the arts. By the same token, it could surely only have been conceived by a Japanese artist. Iwami Reika (born 1927), a highly accomplished printmaker and another student of both Onchi and Sekino, shows in her work the sense of craft and elegance with visual materials that Tamura achieves with words. She seldom relies on bright colors, allowing rather the textures and shapes to speak in a wholly natural fashion. She sometimes uses actual objects from nature, such as driftwood, pressing them to paper to create the subtle textures that make her works distinctive. Her Song of Water II, created in 1972, is a good example of her ability to combine craft and subtle sensibility (Figure 5.9). Funasaka Yoshisuke (born 1939) has become well known for his abiding interest in rendering one shape —the lemon—in work after work, a kind of idée fixe that has produced a remarkable set of variations in texture, color, size, and shape. The 1973 print in the Sackler Gallery, Lemons No. 339, suggests something of the range of his citrus enthusiasm (Figure 5.10). ‘I like the taste,’ he once remarked, ‘I like the smell, I like the color—it represents freshness.’10

50

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Lemons are not indigenous to Japan and were long regarded as an imported luxury, which gives them a special, elegant quality. They have figured in a similar context in modern Japanese poetry. Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), a highly gifted sculptor, essayist, and poet, studied as a young man in Paris and was much influenced by Auguste Rodin. He returned to Japan early in the century and married another gifted artist. His relationship with his wife Chieko was altogether happy until she began to show signs of mental derangement. Takamura was completely attached to her and helped take care of her until the end of her life. Her tragic death in 1938 is recorded a year later in Takamura’s remarkable poem, part of a series concerning Chieko that represents one of the great sequences in modern Japanese verse. The poem is entitled ‘Lemon Elegy.’ So intensely you have been waiting for lemon. In the sad, white, light deathbed you took that one lemon from my hand and bit it sharply with your bright teeth. A fragrance rose the color of topaz.

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

51

Figure 5.9 Iwami Reika, Song of Water II, 1972, 8/50. Woodcut, ink on paper; 25.3×42 cm (9×16½ in). Gift of Margot Paul Ernst in memory of Mr and Mrs Norman S.Paul, s87.1063

Those heavenly drops of juice flashed you back to sanity. Your eyes, blue and transparent, slightly smiled. You grasped my hand, how vigorous you were. There was a storm in your throat but just at the end Chieko found Chieko again, all life’s love into one moment fallen. And then once as once you did on a mountaintop, you let out a great sigh and with it your engine stopped. By the cherry blossoms in front of your photograph today, too, I will put a cool fresh lemon.11 Takamura’s poetry has been much admired since the 1920s, and his elegant, simple, and confessional style has been emulated by a number of contemporary poets seeking something closer to ordinary language than the modernist rigors of the Wasteland School mentioned above. Tanikawa Shuntarō (born 1931), for example, writes in a highly colloquial style that achieves a certain jauntiness within his unobtrusive aesthetic. (It is perhaps no surprise that he is widely known in Japan as the translator of Charles Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’) Here are lines from ‘Sounds,’ published in 1955 and dedicated to the American avant-garde musician John Cage. Tanikawa suggests the charm and flow of words and water alike, allowing his images to take on a larger, abstract quality through their motion. The sounds flow not wanting to become a river

52

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 5.10 Funasaka Yoshisuke, Lemons No. 339, 1973, 3/100. Woodcut, ink and color on paper; 48.7×38.4 cm (19×15 in). Gift of Donna P.Suunders, s86.0523

but before you know it the sounds are gone and there a river flows

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

53

The sounds at first tried to become a new river but too fast or too slow it wasn’t a river except even though clouds reflected in the river of sounds even though people looked back at it and ran along with it when trees budded on the river banks the river of sounds understood it had neither spring or fall but when the sounds forget what they become and flow, modesty and foolishness together, as if tired exposing themselves completely they somehow become a river12 The same ebb and flow can be found in the prints of Ida Shōichi (born 1941). Ida is similarly fascinated with the flow of his materials, moving colors and lines to create what he once termed the ‘surface in the between.’13 His 1966 print Pink Mama, with its amusing title, captures something of the perky insouciance that is so much a part of the postmodern scene in Tokyo, New York, and Paris (Figure 5.11). There is a similar mixture of recognizable shape and pure form, a similar feeling of the wit that comes from an abstracting of shapes, in the 1973 silk-screen print Soroban 305–6 of Sekine Yoshio (Figure 5.12). Sekine (born 1922) has long been fascinated by the shapes available to him in the Japanese soroban, a traditional abacus that can still give computerized calculators a run for their money. Like Funasaka with his lemons, Sekine has over the years created an astonishing series of themes and variations, taking this most common of objects from the Japanese milieu and ‘defamiliarizing’ it through changing colors, lines, timbres, and textures. The Sackler’s example is a particularly strong one. The work of these artists retains a connection between the discipline of their designs and objects in the visible world. However modulated by the artist’s skill and sensibility, there remain in these prints certain elements, strong or subtle, of muted realism. Much of the best contemporary work in Japanese prints, however, involves a further level of abstraction, in which the melding of shape, line, and texture remains without significant reference to any external object. This kind of patterning becomes the central focus of the artist’s strategy. These Japanese artists are reflecting worldwide currents in the visual arts, developments with which they find themselves altogether comfortable. The same trends can be seen in the most rigorous of contemporary Japanese poetry, in which images follow one another without surcease, without modulation. Perhaps the greatest poet practicing in this style since the death of Nishiwaki is Anzai Hitoshi (born 1919), whose stringent sensibilities have continued to develop the possibilities of high modernism in contemporary Japanese literature. In his work, the search for ordinary meaning—which parallels the seeking out of real objects within the conception of contemporary prints—tends to be replaced by a procession, perhaps a progression, of self-contained images that may suggest, but do not set out to articulate, a larger whole. Here is a typical poem, ‘Blinded City.’ It’s near a spitting image of Picasso Sucking the bones of some tongue-halibut, Sucking so hard that from the wrinkled profile The thick bald eyeballs jut.

54

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 5.11 Ida Shōichi, Pink Mama, 1966, artist’s proof. Silkscreen, color on paper; 66×52.5 cm (26 ×20 in). Gift of Margot Paul ernst in memory of Mr and Mrs Norman S. Paul, s87.1046

Some time or other precisely such a poster Was stripped from hotel-subways, roughly torn From wet street-walls. But where, the question itches, Where are the eyeballs gone? Those eyeballs, like a bison’s softly burning! When, for what purpose, were they ripped away From this sad capital, this zinc-roofed city, This foul flat-featured sky? There’s the blue skull of Nikolai Cathedral. Look, like a soul, that stinking river there Drools on and on. Only the eyeballs missing. And people everywhere Move hands like blind men’s hands, incessantly Combing their tree-leaved hair.14

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

55

Figure 5.12 Sekine Yoshio, Soroban 305–6, 1973, 40/50. Silkscreen, ink and color on paper; 45.5×33.2 cm (17 × 13 in). Gift of Margot Paul Ernst in Memory of Mr and Mrs Norman S. Paul, s87.1076.

Perhaps only the reference to Nikolai Cathedral, the huge church constructed in the traditional Russian Orthodox style that dominates its quarter of Tokyo, identifies the locale. The images are altogether personal to the poet; the reader simply comes in upon them. Their very opacity, their resistance to common sense, give them a hard power. Some of the same qualities can be seen even more clearly in Anzai’s long prose poem ‘May Song’ published in 1969, translated by Hiroaki Sato. The opening segment reads as follows: Day for life, so helpless, so shy. Balancing, we stand on the low gun-wale. Look: scintillating on the water, small rainbows. The sea’s sloe eyes. Caught in their serene look, a sinuous May island hurries. Near the breast of a reclining peninsula, sand glistens. Insignificant as a dimple, a red buoy. A distant cape where the midday hours stop. Above the cape, as if it touched something, a somersault of a bug, an airplane. The launch utters a shrill whistle shriek, snuggles its shoulder, and tosses a rope. My shoes are a little wet. Coming out of the sea in a soft wind, you are beautiful. A shop selling abalones and boiled eggs. An omnibus enjoying a respite, facing the sea obliquely. A man irritated for

56

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

something is by turns rapping on a window of the car and drinking soda from a bottle. A violet on a stone wall.15 Anzai’s commitment to the power of the specific images gives the prose poem a solemn and formal quality that suggests both a rigor and a certain ceremonial weight. Similar techniques in the visual arts have produced imaginative prints. Miyashita Tokio (born 1930), for example, who began his career as a student of Sekino Jun’ichirō, has created his own seascape in his 1975 etching Mail from the Sea (Figure 5.13). A superb colorist, he transmutes his shapes, some recognizable, some not, into a series of visual juxtapositions that possess ultimately a formal logic all their own. Some critics have compared the abstracting techniques of Miyashita to those of Joan Miró, the Spanish painter first associated with Pablo Picasso, then with the surrealists in Paris. Both employ shape and color in compositions that reveal remarkable and subtle balances placed to achieve a powerful formal harmony. More abstract still is the work of Tsubota Masahiko (born 1947), whose 1972 silkscreen Work captures a strength of line and mass that suggests at once a thoroughly contemporary sense of sculptural shape and, also, perhaps because of the stark juxtaposition of white and black, the power of bold Japanese calligraphy (Figure 5.14). The artist’s vocabulary is minimalist, leaving the force of the form he has created to push forward unimpeded toward the viewer. Finally, as a personal favorite, I would like to include the 1972 paper collage Untitled, by Takamatsu Jirō (born 1936), although no photograph can truly capture its complex three-dimensional textures (Figure 5.15). Takamatsu is perhaps best known as a sculptor, and his work, shown abroad as early as 1966, in Venice, then at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1971, won him an international following. Takamatsu has often noted his continued search for a means to express what he calls the natural ambiguity between ‘an image as a material object and the picture as a medium.’16 For Takamatsu, the medium, in this case paper, can serve as his means of expression, suggesting at once its commonplace origins as well as its new visual and tactile essence, which moves away from any literal understanding of paper as object. The tension between these two contrasting strategies creates a remarkable dynamism that gives much of Takamatsu’s work, in whatever medium, its special tension and energy. In modern as well as in traditional Japan, developments in one artistic form can be found reflected in another. Each supports the other into a shift of mode and technique. The enthusiasm shown in this century by cosmopolitan Japanese writers for using words in a new way that can draw the reader’s consciousness to the weight and suggestive power of language is mirrored and explored in the work of similarly gifted artists who seek a new freedom for the range of images available to them in creating a truly modern Japanese print. Here too, the Western parallels are of interest. Again, Mario Praz, speaking of the twentieth-century European movement in these directions, identifies important sources for that development, beginning with Alice in Wonderland. The demon of association, conjured up by Lewis Carroll for fun, has received from James Joyce the chrism of psychoanalytical science: the artist has delved into the night of dream psychology, revealing a phantasmal world that might have been one of the discarded alternatives at the beginning of things. But this is exactly what Picasso has done with forms in his escape from the accepted patterns of beauty. Behind the world of forms as it exists, just as behind the world of words with which we are familiar, there is an infinity of unrealized possibilities that God or nature, or whatever you like to call the supreme vital principle, has rejected.17

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

57

Figure 5.13 Miyashita Tokio, Mail from the Sea, 1975, 10/50. Etching and woodcut, ink and color on paper; 58×43.8 cm (22×17¼ in). Gift of Margot Ernst in memory of Mr and Mrs Norman S.Paul, S87.1071

These modern experiments in European art and literature do not always please Praz, who sees in them the tendency away from restraint and control. Still, he is forced to admit, ‘There are people who can be intensely moved by a geometric pattern of Malevich or Mondrian; Plato himself had acknowledged the

58

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 5.14 Tsubota Masahiko, Work, 1972, 10/20. Silkscreen, ink on paper; 49.7× 68.5 cm (19×27 in). Gift of Margot Paul Ernst in memory of Mr and Mrs Norman S.Paul, s87.1092

spell of pure geometric figures.’18 With the powerful abstract possibilities inherent in much traditional Asian art and calligraphy, the modern Japanese sensibility has perhaps fewer barriers to an enthusiasm for abstraction. The artistic success of poets and printmakers alike suggests that their experiments have been well received. Indeed, as the critic Barbara Rose has pointed out, Americans and others have long identified the power of abstraction as a fundamental characteristic of all Japanese art. ‘The vogue among the Abstract Expressionists’ she writes, ‘for black and white paintings points directly toward the influence of calligraphy, which consists of black writing on the white page.’ Such American artists as Franz Kline, she explains, ‘seeing images that condensed metaphor into pictorial imagery, adopted directly calligraphic forms.’19 Armed with this visual tradition and bolstered by changes in Europe and America, Japanese artists and writers (who also share the abstract writing symbols employed by calligraphers) revivify long-standing assumptions concerning the implicit emotional force contained in older literary and artistic methods. Added to these refreshed understandings is a new conception of the well-developed sense of craft and material inherent in so much traditional Japanese art and architecture. The innate insight of the possibilities for beauty in the unadorned now surfaces again. The love of the authenticity of plain and undecorated materials, seen, for example, in the use of unpainted wood in the construction of traditional Japanese buildings, a predilection that can be traced all the way back to the elegant simplicities of the fourth-century Ise Shrine, is now employed in new ways, this time with modern self-consciousness. In the case of Japanese prints, this tendency emerges in the attraction for showing the texture and grain of the wood used in making the print, so that the material employed becomes part of the design. In poetry, too, even the most traditional

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

59

Figure 5.15 Takamatsu Jirō, Untitled, 1972. College, black paper on paper; 49.6×75 cm (19×29½ in). Gift of Margot Paul Ernst in memory of Mr and Mrs Norman S. Paul, s87.1082

of images drawn from the world of haiku and other classical forms—Hagiwara’s bamboo, for example, or Nishiwaki’s traveler—can be used in new-and startling ways. The subject matter may be expanded, the point of view international. Beneath these changes, however, continues an implicit adherence to the qualities that have always made the Japanese visual and literary arts so distinctive: a sense of craft rooted in instinctive apprehension of the power, the wholeness, of nature itself. That intuition is beautifully expressed in another short work by the great modern Japanese poet Yoshioka Minoru. His poem, ‘Still Life’ (1955), like so many of the prints in the Sackler Gallery, reveals at once an international modernity and a Japanese lyricism based on a conviction of the centrality of the natural patterns and rhythms of life itself. Within the hard surface of night’s bowl Intensifying their bright colors The autumn fruits Apples, pears, grapes, and so forth Each as they pile Upon another Goes closer to sleep To one theme To great music Each core, reaching its own heart Deliberately reposes Around it circles

60

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

The time of rich putrefaction Now before the teeth of the dead Those fruits and their kind Which unlike stones do not strike Add to their weight And in the deep bowl Behind this semblance of night On occasion Hugely tilt20 NOTES 1. For an easily accessible text in English of Narrow Road to the Deep North, which includes many of Buson’s illustrations, see the translation by NobuyukiYuasa, published by Penguin Books in 1966. 2. Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts, Bollingen Series (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 4–5. 3. Hagiwara Sakutarō, ‘On a Trip’ trans. Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, in From the Country of Eight Islands (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1981), p. 475. Mr. Sato has done more than any other writer to make modern Japanese poetry accessible to Western readers. 4. Hagiwara Sakutarō, ‘An Impression of Early Summer,’ in ibid., p. 475. 5. Hagiwara Sakutarō, ‘Bamboo,’ in ibid., p. 475. 6. Nishiwaki Junzaburō, ‘Loquat,’ in ibid., p. 513. 7. Nishiwaki Junzaburō, ‘Slope;’ in ibid., p. 517. 8. Yoshioka Minoru, ‘Pastorale,’ in ibid., p. 585. 9. Tamura Ryūichi, from ‘A Study in Terror,’ in ibid., p. 60. 10. Frances Blakemore, Who’s Who in Modern Japanese Prints (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1975), p. 37. 11. Takamura Kōtarō, ‘Lemon Elegy,’ in From the Country of Eight Islands, p. 469. 12. Tanikawa Shuntarō, from ‘Sounds,’ in ibid., p. 564. 13. Donald Jenkins, Images of a Changing World: Japanese Prints of the Twentieth Century (Portland, Oreg.: Portland Art Museum, 1983), p. iii. 14. Anzai Hitoshi, ‘Blinded City,’ trans. Graeme Wilson and Atsumi Ikuko, in Three Contemporary Japanese Poets (London: London Magazine Editions, 1972), p. 22. 15. Anzai Hitoshi, from ‘May Song,’ in From the Country of Eight Islands, pp. 583–84. 16. See the entry in the Japan Foundation, ed., Art in Japan Today II, 1970–1983 (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 1984), pp. 180–83. 17. Praz, Mnemosyne, pp. 197–98. 18. Ibid., p. 215. 19. Barbara Rose, ‘Japanese Calligraphy and American Abstract Expressionism,’ in Words in Motion: Modern Japanese Calligraphy (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984), p. 39. 20. Yoshioka Minoru, ‘Still Life,’ in From the Country of Eight Islands, pp. 585–86.

A LYRICAL IMPULSE IN MODERN JAPANESE PRINTS AND POETRY

61

FURTHER READING Modern Japanese Prints Jenkins, Donald. Images of a Changing World: Japanese Prints of the Twentieth Century. Portland, Oreg.: Portland Art Museum, 1983.A catalogue to an important exhibition that contains extensive illustrations and good historical information on the best-known print-makers. Johnson, Margaret K., with Dale K.Hilton. Japanese Prints Today: Tradition with Innovation. Tokyo: Shufunotomo, 1980.Useful discussions of prominent contemporary artists, the various techniques used in creating prints, plus a gallery guide indicating where to buy prints in Tokyo. Smith, Lawrence. Contemporary Japanese Prints: Symbols of a Society in Transition. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.A companion to Smith’s historical volume, containing a wealth of information on contemporary prints and printmakers; beautifully illustrated. ——. The Japanese Print since 1900: Old Dreams and New Visions. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.Originally a catalogue; serves as a fine complement to Donald Jenkins’s Images of a Changing World, as the selection of artists and historical perspectives is somewhat different. Swinton, Elizabeth de Sabato. The Graphic Art of Onchi Kōshirō: Innovation and Tradition. New York and London: Garland, 1986.The best source of information on prewar prints, this excellent monograph supplies not only detailed information on Onchi himself, but also considerable insight into the development of the modern print movement.

Modern Japanese Poetry Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, Vol. 2: Poetry, Drama, Criticism. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.The most complete and evocative source for those wishing a narrative account of the history and development of modern Japanese poetry. Sato, Hiroaki, and Burton Watson, trans. From the Country of Eight Islands. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1981.The consistently most effective translations of modern Japanese poetry into English; includes a wide and representative range of fine modem writers.

Dictionaries and Bibliographies Abrams, Leslie E. The History and Practice of Japanese Printmaking: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of English Language Materials. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.Most entries in this useful book concern traditional woodblock prints; occasional references to catalogues, books, and articles concerning modern prints, sometimes found in obscure but excellent publications; includes articles in Japanese publications that provide English summaries. Blakemore, Frances. Who’s Who in Modern Japanese Prints. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1975.Entries, by artist, of the most prominent print-makers, with representative illustrations of their works and brief biographical details. Since printmakers, with the exception of artists of classic stature such as Onchi Kōshirō, have seldom received individual treatment in English-language articles or monographs, this book provides a modest but crucial introduction to the work of many important artists otherwise not described in English. Roberts, Laurence P. A Dictionary of Japanese Artists. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1976.A fine book, with good bibliographic references to Japanese sources; includes a certain number of the masters of the modern print. Tazawa, Yutaka, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Art. New York and Tokyo: Kodansha, in collaboration with the International Society for Educational Information, 1981.A highly useful volume on all aspects of Japanese art. Although the section devoted to printmaking is largely concerned with traditional masters, the modern artists included are given excellent and extended treatment.

First published in J.Thomas Rimer et al, Shisendo: Hall of the Poetry Immortals, New York & Tokyo, Weatherhill, 1991, pp. 3–26

6 Ishikawa Jōzan

I I SUPPOSE that something of my own habits of mind is revealed in the fact that my first attraction to Ishikawa Jōzan started with a sentence or two I read about Kyoto. Many years ago, when I first began to read works of Japanese literature in translation, I found myself fascinated, as have been so many others, by the descriptions of an elegant traditional house in the old capital that serves as a setting for the peculiar events that transpire in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s short novel The Bridge of Dreams (1959). Among the objects that gave distinction to the garden of that house was a water mortar that sounded continuously. Even today, the sound of a water mortar echoes through the garden of the Hall of Poets, the home of the early Edo poet Ishikawa Jōzan in the northern suburbs of Kyoto. There, too, is displayed an explanatory text written in Chinese by Jōzan. I suppose the reason why we had a water mortar is that my grandfather went there, read the description and got the impulse to copy the device in his own house. It is said that Jōzan’s poem about not wishing to cross the Kamo River was written as a polite way of declining an invitation from the Emperor: Alas, I am ashamed to cross it— Though only a shallow stream It would mirror my wrinkled age. A rubbing of the poem hangs in the alcove in the Hall of Poets, and we had one at our house too.1 This was all that Tanizaki wrote about Jōzan. I found the clues intriguing. I knew nothing then about the art of calligraphy, and the fact that a work of calligraphy in a room could both suggest the personality of its creator and dignify its surroundings excited my curiosity. No book in my small library of studies on Japanese art included any mention of Ishikawa Jōzan. I dropped the whole matter, but my curiosity remained unfulfilled. My initial fascination was strongly renewed when, some fifteen years later, I was advised by a Japanese architect friend to visit the Shisendō, that ‘Hall of Poets,’ or, more properly, the ‘Hall of the Poetry Immortals’ mentioned in Tanizaki’s story ‘The house and garden were built by a wonderful eccentric poet and

ISHIKAWA JZAN

63

calligrapher named Ishikawa Jōzan,’ he told me. ‘It is one of the most private and perfect places in the whole city, and you must see it in order to get a sense of one whole side of elegant Japanese culture.’ Shisendō is certainly famous now. Busloads of curious schoolchildren tramp dutifully through its tiny rooms and perfectly proportioned garden spaces, displaying a disturbing energy that might well threaten the foundations of Versailles, let alone those of this series of slight, fragile pavilions built of straw and wood. A decade or more ago, however, such was not the case. Indeed, the Shisendō was not even listed in that Baedeker-by-any-other-name, the Japan Travel Bureau’s Official Guide to Japan, long familiar to all foreign travelers with an interest in Japanese culture, but had remained a special footnote, its details known only to the discerning few. After making a series of inquiries and riding, as I recall, an embarrassing number of streetcars and buses, I managed to reach the bottom of the hillside tucked away in the northeast corner of Kyoto where the building and its gardens stood in relative isolation. A walk up the hill brought the sight of a brushwood gate, which I ducked through. Soon, obligatory ticket and souvenir postcards in hand, I entered the refined world of Jōzan. It is impossible, of course, to know if the building and gardens remain precisely as they were when they were constructed around 1641, but they appear as if they might be the same. A small antechamber leads into a large, matted room open to the garden on three sides. Portraits of thirty-six classical Chinese poets admired by Jōzan are hung just under the ceiling of the room. The effect is both aristocratic and rustic. From the room, which serves as a kind of terrace, the eye can move out toward the small garden of oval and oblong plantings that drop cunningly down the hill to a screen of bushes and trees that allow the city below to appear, if at all, through a haze of green. Moss nestled on the hillsides is juxtaposed with tall grasses and flowering trees. Halfway down there is a pond and, beside it, a small detached pavilion. Looking back up at the house from that point you can see an elegant moon-viewing turret with a curved window that forms a kind of second story over the main room above. It can be said, I suppose, that the garden and the house, taken together, do not quite represent the art that conceals art, a quality that some Japanese gardens possess. The shapes, the juxtapositions are occasionally a bit too idiosyncratic, the space a little too small for the tricks of perspective to play themselves out in full. Yet my own perceptions, correct or not, made the Hall of the Poetry Immortals all the more endearing to me, for the total effect suggested a place and an image quite in consonance with the one 1 was beginning to form of the man himself. I have since made many trips to the Shisendō. Indeed, I go there every time I visit Kyoto. Some things have changed, of course. Parking spaces have been added. The colors on the postcards are brighter. There is even an automatic hundred-yen drink-dispensing machine (fruit juice, Coca-Cola, and beer, as I recall) not far from the entrance, to assuage the thirst of all of those who make the climb. Still, the atmosphere of the place remains as enchanting and as elusive as always. I have tried to learn something about the Shisendō and the man who built it. I have read what there is to know, but it is not enough. There is still a gap, a kind of pause in our modern understanding. Indeed, it has occurred to me that with our own cultural preferences for certain kinds of knowledge we may seek to know the wrong things about Jōzan; or if not wrong, at least irrelevant things. I can only feel my puzzlement and Jōzan’s indifference. Perhaps it is in making the attempt to come to terms with that elegant indifference that I, as a child of my own century, have been able to penetrate even a little into the world of that selfconsciously elevated, classical beauty that Jōzan chose for himself. Those masks he assumed, those cultural layers he gathered around his persona ultimately allow me to see only what Jōzan felt inclined to reveal and to share. It was only when, over the course of many visits, I became aware that Jōzan did wish to make manifest certain attitudes and accomplishments that were

64

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

important to him that I developed what might be described as a timid and rather peculiar gratitude that he allowed me, through a series of cultural mirrors, to look into what he had identified as the most important elements in his temperament and character. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that, in spite of the time, distance, and language that separate us, I can locate somewhere in myself a tacit correspondence with his spirit. Yet whatever that connection may be, it comes not from knowledge but from a slowly developing sense of affinity. II What, in the modern sense, do we know about Ishikawa Jōzan? Further, are these facts the kind of facts we truly wish to know or need to know? Modern Japanese scholars have attempted to construct a synthetic account of Jōzan’s long and eventful life. Written records have been painstakingly pieced together, family registers sifted through, memoirs of his contemporaries combed for relevant details. Though a reasonably complete picture of the man emerges, it gives us at best only shards and slivers of the historical presence. Such bits of information are often fascinating and they do help explain the nature of the cultural background out of which such a man sprang. For those reasons, the facts are worth reciting; indeed, facts and lacunas alike join to form an image. To a Western reader, Jōzan’s dates (1583–1672) reveal nothing special, but in Japan, that span of almost a hundred years is recognized as a period of vast political and cultural change. Jōzan was born into a world in which protracted civil wars consumed the energies of an entire generation. By the time of his death the country was united under the forces of the Tokugawa clan and had entered a long period of isolation, urbanization, and peace. Jōzan’s father and grandfather were well known and respected as brave warriors, men who had long served the cause of the Tokugawas. Jōzan’s grandfather died in battle when the boy was scarcely more than a baby, and his father was killed when Jōzan was still a young man of sixteen. Already skilled in the martial arts, he took his career in hand. At a time when military prowess was valued highest, Jōzan appeared to have great prospects, just as his father had predicted. Jōzan participated in the famous battle of Sekigahara in 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) managed to subjugate his rivals and then unite them under his rule. The victorious Ieyasu quickly built a centralized hegemony that developed certain characteristics of a modern nation-state in a relatively short period of time. Jōzan was praised for his nimble actions during the battle; and on one occasion, when he saved the life of a son of Ieyasu, he was publicly feted. It was probably during this period that he developed an interest in Zen Buddhism, as he attended lectures by eminent priests and scholars before favored retainers and family members of the Tokugawa clan. Little appears to have been recorded concerning Jōzan’s personal affairs in the next decade of his life. In 1612, when Jōzan was almost thirty, he was given an opportunity to serve as a personal retainer of one of leyasu’s sons, an extraordinary honor. Jōzan declined. Few would have refused such access to prestige and power. What was the reason for Jōzan’s refusal? This event suggests a shift of vision, and with it the search for a new state of being, that are recognizable as a watershed in Jōzan’s life. Jōzan’s inclination to retire could not, however, be immediately followed. Jōzan continued to serve the Tokugawas with considerable recognition for his brave participation in the so-called Summer Campaign of Osaka in 1615, when Ieyasu put down the last rebellious members of Hideyoshi’s faction. Jōzan’s restlessness remained evident, however. At one point, he left his service briefly, hoping to retire to the great Buddhist temple complex of Myōshinji in Kyoto. This angered Ieyasu, who placed him under house arrest. Eventually Jōzan was released from the shogun’s service. At thirty-three he became a man without a

ISHIKAWA JZAN

65

master, a rōnin. His wish realized, Jōzan retired to Myōshinji, though I have not been able to discover his precise status at the temple. There were certainly important cultural precedents for Jōzan’s action. Perhaps the most celebrated incident was the popular legend of the retirement of Kumagai Naozane (d. 1208), a great Minamoto general in the civil wars of 1185. Forced to kill Atsumori, a young and innocent warrior from the enemy forces, Kumagai renounced the horrors of war in order to do penance as a Buddhist monk. While the historical facts may be at variance with the legend, Kumagai proved a potent cultural symbol known to all as a powerfully tragic figure in literature and the theater. Among literary models, there are even more commanding examples from earlier eras. Saigyō (1118–90), one of the greatest poets in the history of Japanese literature, left his court position at the age of twenty-two to become a wandering monk and occasional recluse. Kamo no Chōmei (1153–1216), from a well-placed family in Kyoto, also retired from society, and in his celebrated diary the Hōjōki (A Record of My Hut), he expressed that sense of frailty and transience that is most often associated with the Buddhist literature and thought of the medieval period. There were other men who, like Jōzan, abandoned their feudal and military duties to find the time to write and think. One of them, Kinoshita Chōshōshi (1569–1649), later became a friend of Jōzan. In choosing to retire to Myōshinji, Jōzan decided to follow not the path of Buddhism or Japanese poetry but that of Chinese studies. According to written accounts, Jōzan threw himself into a study of the great classical Chinese anthology of literature, the Wen-hsüan. Compiled about 530, the Wen-hsüan was long a sourcebook for texts on a variety of subjects. Until this period in his life, Jōzan appears to have shown no particular proclivity for literature. Now with a new opportunity for spiritual development, Jōzan committed himself to the study and the absorption of these great classic texts. Though this first Kyoto period in Jōzan’s life was destined to be a short one, he made a number of famous friends who were to influence his thinking profoundly over the intervening years. One of them was the Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan (1583–1657). Razan was recognized during his lifetime as one of the great scholars of Chinese thought and literature. It is even possible that Jōzan met him earlier, since Razan had become an important figure in the entourage of Ieyasu as early as 1605. Razan introduced Jōzan to the Confucian scholar and philosopher Fujiwara no Seika (1561–1619), perhaps an even more significant figure, who also stirred Jōzan’s interests in the Chinese classics. The three often met to discuss literary and philosophical topics. It is difficult to grasp precisely the effect that the example and the enthusiasms of these men must have had on a man like Jōzan, raised as a Buddhist and imbued with the ethos of a warrior. It is evident from the poems Jōzan has left that he took little interest in the philosophical doctrines propounded by these learned men, but he was very taken with the cultural ideals from China they were attempting to introduce to wider circles in Japan. The idea of a cultivated gentleman living inside and outside society at the same time provided a perfect model for the life that Jōzan had been seeking. He took to these new possibilities with enormous enthusiasm and a dedication that eventually resulted in an ability to compose excellent verse in classical Chinese. Seika, reading one of Jōzan’s early efforts, is said to have remarked that ‘he will surely follow the Way of Poetry.’ Jōzan’s whole persona began to shift. Ieyasu had encouraged the adoption of Confucian doctrines as a means of organizing and controlling the nation. The cultural and literary ideas that filtered into Japan along with these doctrines brought a whole new sort of artistic and literary self-consciousness and sophistication into Japanese culture. Some of these ideas were brought to Japan by refugees from the Ming dynasty (1368-c. 1644). Well before the fall of the Ming, internal turmoil had caused a number of distinguished Chinese teachers, scholars, and intellectuals to flee to Japan rather than submit to the dictates of a new and foreign regime. The effect on Japanese intellectual life must have been something akin to the enormous change that came to American scientific,

66

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

intellectual, and artistic life when so many distinguished Europeans, from Einstein and Lévi-Strauss to Hans Hoffmann and Igor Stravinsky, arrived in the United States, fleeing the rise of Nazism. In the Japanese case, men like Razan and Seika, first disciples of some of these eminent Chinese, helped formulate and propagate visions of a new artistic and political order. Such cosmopolitan attitudes were not altogether new Indeed, Jōzan was now living in the same city where a shogun of many generations before, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), had done his utmost as a ruler, politician, and patron of the arts to place Japan in a larger East Asian cultural context. Yoshimitsu loved the Chinese arts, and it is highly appropriate that Jōzan is said to have written the following poem at Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion, one of Yoshimitsu’s great architectural legacies to the old capital and still one of the great sights of the city Jōzan was with Fujiwara no Seika and a group of friends viewing the moon. Lodging with the monks, we avoid the vulgar dust, on a tranquil night look up at autumn sky Winecup in hand, we sit on green moss; floating in a boat, pluck nunawa plants. The Golden Pavilion glitters in the water’s depths; jade dewdrops moisten the temple fields. How lucky that this moon, in a cloudless sky, should meet together with us here tonight.2 Jōzan admired Seika’s life of retreat, in and out of the world at once. His decision to do the same made Jōzan an early prototype of the cultivated gentleman in retirement, the wen-jen (Japanese, bunjin), often translated as ‘literati.’ The cultural attitudes of the literati influenced Japanese culture throughout the Tokugawa period and down to the beginning of this century, when the celebrated modern novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) still composed classical Chinese verse as a means of personal consolation. The bunjin adopted a kind of poetic eclecticism, freely associating forms and ideas in a way that contrasted sharply with the rigidities of official Tokugawa life. While class structure and social behavior were governed by the codes of Chinese neo-Confucianism, literati such as Jōzan chose another Chinese model for inspiration, one that transcended, or stepped aside from, the received pieties. The men who adopted the literati model demonstrated a self-consciousness concerning the purposes and techniques of the various arts they chose to practice. And that self-consciousness makes the painting, poetry, and prose they created surprisingly modern in spirit, once we have grasped their vocabulary. In spite of his choice, Jōzan was not able to remain immersed in a world of thoughtful pleasure, free of daily duties, for long. He learned within the year that his mother had fallen ill and he was forced to return to work again to support her. Eventually (some scholars think with the aid of Razan) he received a minor post as a retainer of the Asano clan, based in the area of Hiroshima and what now constitutes Wakayama Prefecture, south of Osaka. Jōzan continued in this post, which interested him so little, for twelve years. Nothing is recorded of his life during this long period, while the poet proved the depth of his Confucian filial piety toward his mother. The few poems written in classical Chinese that remain from that time reveal him already spiritually removed from human society Here is one written in 1628, entitled ‘Miscellaneous Poem Written While Ill.’ I live at a river bend,

ISHIKAWA JZAN

67

the place remote, cut off from dust and dirt. Fantastic rocks are planted midst shady trees; an artificial hill begets green moss. Beside my pillow-a three-foot sword; outside my window-a single flowering plum. Cultivating clumsiness here in this hut of thatch, softly intoning joy, oh how frequent is my joy! In other works composed during this time, Jōzan referred to the famous verse on chrysanthemums of T’ao Yüan-ming (365–427), the great Chinese poet who retired from the world to become a learned hermit. This gentleman of cultivated virtue had a hermit’s vocation unmatched in his time. In service or retirement, he avoided success and failure both; he was intelligent, wise and compassionate. Caressing a pine tree, he sang the praises of the landscape; cane in hand, he inspected the fields. And the fragrance of his love for a hedgeful of chrysanthemums has lingered in the air for a thousand years! With lute and books he drove off his old worries; poetry and wine helped him forget how poor his family was. When he became drunk, he finished with Heaven and Earth: how joyful his body, his shadow; his soul! Jōzan’s mother died in 1635, when the poet was over fifty. He was free. Jōzan immediately left his service with the Asano clan and returned to Kyoto, to his colleague Razan, and to the milieu he had so longed to enjoy. Jōzan went to the temple of Shōkokuji, where he began a lengthy period of reading and study It must have been a lonely time for him, but a transition from one mental state to another was crucial. Jōzan was not altogether isolated. He was already widely known as one of the ablest practitioners of Chinese verse in Kyoto. As a result, in 1636 the Tokugawa government asked him to take part in an exchange of verses with the official envoys from Korea, a duty he undertook. On such occasions, the medium of classical Chinese verse served something of the same function that Latin did in medieval Europe, linking cultures with different spoken vernaculars by the written word. We do not know how Jōzan supported himself in this period. Some have speculated that he continued to receive a small stipend from the Asano family for his years of faithful service, but this cannot be confirmed. In 1641, at age fifty-eight, Jōzan decided to build the Shisendō, the Hall of Poetry Immortals. He was already an old man for his time. To construct such a pavilion and garden in mid-seventeenth-century Kyoto was a remarkable gesture. Jōzan purposely removed himself from the society that was being constructed around him and aligned himself with the great Chinese and Japanese recluses whom he most admired. To insist, in those increasingly practical days, that the day-to-day life of a person should be one of the mind and spirit was a powerful ideological statement, and one that could have political overtones as well. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the affair was the self-consciousness with which Jōzan accomplished his aims. In becoming one of the first writers in the Tokugawa period to find beauty in withdrawal, Jōzan used the

68

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

mentality of the medieval period to breach a hole in the newly erected bulwark of Tokugawa-period thought, setting an example that was to inspire such later figures as the great haiku poet Matsuo Bashō (1644– 94), the Buddhist hermit, poet, and calligrapher Ryōkan (1757–1851), and the wandering religious poet Santōka (1882–1940). Jōzan joined a long parade of men who helped define and then extend the limits of their society by adopting alternative and often fanciiul modes of thought and behavior that served as models for their contemporaries and posterity. A suitable setting for withdrawal, meditation, and contemplation had to be created to cultivate such attitudes. Kamo no Chōmei, mentioned above, described the appropriate decor for the retreat of an elegant person who lived in retirement from the world. On the west, I have built a shelf for holy water, and inside the hut, along the west wall, I have installed an image of Amida. The light of the setting sun shines between its eyebrows. On the doors of the reliquary I have hung pictures of Fugen and Fudō. Above the sliding door that faces north I have built a little shelf on which I keep three or four black leather baskets that contain books of poetry and music and extracts from the sacred writings. Beside them stand a folding koto and a lute. Along the east I have spread long fern fronds and mats of straw which serve as my bed for the night. I have cut open a window in the eastern wall, and beneath it have made a desk. Near my pillow is a square brazier in which I burn brushwood. To the south of the hut I have staked out a small plot of land which I have enclosed with a rough fence and made into a garden. I grow many species of herbs there.3 Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350), another illustrious predecessor of Jōzan, suggested the usefulness of similarly simple arrangements in an entry in his Essays in Idleness. A house, I know; is but a temporary abode, but how delightful it is to find one that has harmonious proportions and a pleasant atmosphere. One feels somehow that even moonlight, when it shines into the quiet domicile of a person of taste, is more affecting than elsewhere. A house, though it may not be in the current fashion or elaborately decorated, will appeal to us by its unassuming beauty—a grove of trees with an indefinably ancient look; a garden where plants, growing of their own accord, have a special charm; a verandah and an open-work wooden fence of interesting construction; and a few personal effects left carelessly lying about, giving the place an air of having been lived in.4 Nothing remains of the Kyoto hideaways of Chōmei and Kenkō. Jōzan’s Shisendō, however, can help suggest something of what his predecessors admired. I have not been able to locate any useful details as to the manner in which Jōzan chose his site, nor have I been able to determine what kind of help he had in planning the gardens and the pavilions. More is known, however, about Jōzan’s remarkable decision to include the portraits of thirty-six Chinese poets in his central room. Jōzan’s reason for choosing thirty-six is not altogether clear, though that number is a significant grouping in the traditional Chinese psychology of numbers. In Japan, as early as the tenth century, the highly respected poet Fujiwara no Kintō (966–1041) assembled a famous anthology, now lost, of thirty-six Japanese poets, suggesting a tradition in Japan with which Jōzan may have been familiar. In choosing the names of the thirty-six Chinese poets to be included, a process that consumed half a year or more, Jōzan consulted with Razan. On the whole, their enthusiasms matched—with one exception. Razan urged Jōzan to include a portrait of Wang An-shih (1021–86), a noted poet and perhaps the most important Confucian scholar and statesman of his period. Jōzan stubbornly refused; Wang An-shih’s character was too suspect to

ISHIKAWA JZAN

69

allow his inclusion, no matter how fine his poetry In this judgment, Jōzan revealed a basic difference between himself and Razan. In the end Wang An-shih’s name was dropped from the list of candidates. Jōzan made no attempt to achieve historical accuracy in the wooden tablets with the portraits of the poets; instead they are iconographic and rather fanciful. Many of these poets were unknown to all but a few scholars of Chinese poetry. The atmosphere they created in the Shisendō must have been quite unusual—at once erudite and detached from the world, rarified and stimulating, marking the hall as a place where unconventional standards were upheld and high-minded virtues practiced. No other poet or writer has ever attempted anything that showed quite such an independence of mind and such daring. Jōzan in his retirement carried on the traditions of his illustrious literary predecessors, but there were important differences as well. Saigyō, Chōmei, and the others were to a great extent Buddhist recluses who sought to shed the joys and the cares of the mundane world and to seek out a higher level of spiritual truth. Jōzan, on the other hand, had abandoned his Buddhism along with his feudal loyalty when he quit the service of the Tokugawa family Now; as a professional recluse, living at peace in his self-created and selfsustaining environment, Jōzan set out to explore the world around him. He did so while maintaining a detachment that permitted him to live outside the strict confines of Tokugawa society. Jōzan’s poetry seldom reveals the world-weariness or the metaphysical yearning of the writings of his medieval predecessors; rather, he seemed to wish to construct a personal universe in this world as an alternative to his society In his writing, Jōzan used Chinese ideas, aesthetics, and poetic forms to express a range of sentiments that in his view lay beyond the received ideas of his time. Troubled by illness, poetic powers failing, youthful idealism—duller with the years. Lin Pu’s dwelling-no horse or carriage tracks; T’ao Ch’ien’s window-outside, the vast universe! With rare books to read, no unending nights; this quiet spot is deep within the mountains. My world is apart from the world of men: I don’t concern myself with their ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ It is not possible, of course, to know all the books and manuscripts that Jōzan may have admired or read. He certainly knew the history of Chinese poetry as well as any Japanese scholar of his time, and his occasional references to such figures as the legendary ancient mystic philosopher Chuang-tzu and to the writings of the Taoist adept T’ao Hung-ching (456–536) suggest a strong interest in the classical Chinese conceptions of mystic withdrawal. Living in seclusion, I brush off worldly dust: remote, secluded, I do not seek neighbors. Clear-sky moon, this night of austere solitude: I have no need of someone else to talk to. Living a hermit in the woods, enjoying nothing to do! My bramble gate of course is never opened. Serenely, in perpetual seclusion…. the dog barks, amazed that someone’s come to call.

70

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Nevertheless, Jōzan remained in Kyoto and in constant contact with his friends. His withdrawal was mental, perhaps ironic. Jōzan’s transfer of intellectual focus away from the older Buddhist conceptions of transience and decay to his present world made him a man of his time. Jōzan may have affected a rejection of society, but he had a fresh and lively interest in the life around him that was, in varying ways, reflected in the writings of most of the great masters of the early Tokugawa period. Ihara Saikaku in fiction and Chikamatsu Monzaemon in the theater both turned to contemporary society for subject matter. Matsuo Bashō, the greatest of the haiku poets, often created poems with a similar frame of reference. What seems unusual perhaps is that Jōzan chose to express himself in the medium of Chinese verse, or kanshi, as it is called in Japanese, rather than in the thirty-one-syllable waka or the seventeen-syllable haiku that Bashō was soon to elevate to a form of high art. The tradition of composing kanshi was no longer so strong in Japan at the time Jōzan began to write. His success in the form helped provide kanshi with an artistic cachet that restored it as a vital means of expression through to the generation of the novelist Natsume Sōseki, and even beyond. Writing verse in Chinese had been considered an important skill in the early Heian period, when the Chinese cultural example was particularly powerful. Medieval monks particularly of the Zen sect, wrote poetry in Chinese, usually referred to as ‘the poetry of five mountains’—a reference to the five great Zen monasteries in Kyoto and Kamakura. Yet by the time that Tokugawa leyasu had begun to suppress the power and prestige of the monasteries, largely for political reasons, the form was no longer a vital one. Jōzan had been introduced to this verse form through the Confucian enthusiasms of his friends, who led him directly to the sources of the great poetry written in previous Chinese dynasties. Jōzan’s work, therefore, does not resemble the classical Chinese poetry composed by Japanese predecessors. The breakdown of that earlier tradition in Japan allowed Jōzan a freer range of expression and experiment. Jōzan may have had contact with another gifted eccentric living in Kyoto, the monk Gensei (1623–88). No records confirming their acquaintance exist, but Gensei was another figure of great importance in the revival of Chinese verse. Among the various classical Chinese poets known and admired by Jōzan, he had several favorites. His choices, the best of the tradition, may seem unexceptional to modern readers: the recluse Tao Yūan-ming, mentioned earlier, and the two great T’ang poets Tu Fu (712–70) and Li Po (701–62). Tu Fu, of course, was Bashō’s revered favorite as well. Jōzan admired the writings of the Ming-dynasty poet Yuan Hung-tao (1568–1610), also a favorite of Gensei. Jōzan expressed ideas on the functions of poetry It should not be didactic, but a response to life. It is intensely personal and ultimately it cannot even be discussed with others. Jōzan lived as a partial recluse at the Shisendō for roughly thirty years. However pleasant his immediate surroundings, though, Jōzan tended to use his pavilion and garden only as a point of repair. He journeyed widely in and around Kyoto, writing poems about a number of sites he enjoyed. Here, for example, is a poem that he wrote when visiting the temple at Ishiyama, a popular spot northeast of Kyoto that commands a fine view of Lake Biwa and long served as a pilgrimage site. Lady Murasaki was supposed to have begun writing her great novel The Tale of Genji there. A VISIT TO ISHIYAMADERA

Outside the gates of this monastery we tie our little boat, climb high among the green mists and yellow leaves of autumn.

ISHIKAWA JZAN

71

A strip of mountain cloud sweeps off what’s left of rain; a water fall cuts through the cliff, plunging hundreds of feet to the lake. Soaring towers, twisting stone paths— truly habitation for immortals! Fantastic rocks and bizarre escarpments— hiding places for spirits! Here Lady Murasaki wielded her brush and wrote The Tale of Genji: was her store of love ever accepted as a volume in the Canon? Here is a poem written at one of Jōzan’s favorite sites during the spring season. FALLING CHERRY BLOSSOMS AT HIGASHIYAMA

Filling the ground—cherry blossoms, filling the eye—pink clouds; the blossoms have faded, spring grown old, I feel the passing of years. When the blossoms were at their peak, I did not come to visit: it’s not that the blossoms were unfaithful to me; I was unfaithful to them. Although these poems are descriptive, it is clear that they are also constructed to reflect the inner mental and spiritual state of the poet. The poetry is inward looking. Social and political events are not recorded there. Jōzan’s poetry, like his calligraphy, served as a means to reflect his growing sense of self-realization. During his years in Kyoto, Jōzan gained renown as a poet and as a calligrapher. The two, of course, have long been regarded as sister arts in China and Japan, so it is not surprising that Jōzan worked to become highly adept at both. Nor is it remarkable that he introduced, or, more properly, reintroduced, a distinctly Chinese style of calligraphy rather than working in the suppler, more ‘Japanese’ styles widely appreciated at his time. When Jōzan was seventy-one, Emperor Gokōmyō (r. 1643–54) learned of his calligraphic skills and praised Jōzan’s artistic abilities. At about the same time, the celebrated painter Kanō Tan’yū (1604–74) created a portrait of Jōzan, which still exists at the Shisendō. Jōzan composed a poem about himself and wrote it on the portrait. Nyoi in hand, leaning on an armrest,5 wearing dark robe and black cap. Silent is his noble visage; brilliant is his spirit. He communicates with the Creator and nurtures the Tao within. A stubborn old man now eighty years old,

72

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

a hermit of three-fold Yang. And who is this hermit, you may ask? The Mountain Man of the Thirty-Six! In his old age, Jōzan felt himself very much alone. Seika had died long before; Razan passed away in 1657. In 1663, Jōzan wrote the following. INSCRIBED ON MY TOMB

The old man is eighty-his years are running out! He gets his coffin ready, a hollow clay jar. Alone I stand in the midst of this limitless universe; my body will decompose inside a little hill. Now increasingly ill, feeling his isolation, Jōzan stayed more and more within his tiny domain, always trying to refuse interviews with the many visitors who continued to seek him out. In a poem reputed to be his last, Jōzan wrote as follows. LEANING ON MY CANE

Leaning on my cane within the woods— shrine trees soaring high all around. A dog barks at the heels of a beggar; an ox plows the field, a farmer behind. My life—the cold stream water; old, sick—sunset in the sky I’ve known to the full the joys of mist and cloud: ten years away from a century of life! Thus ended a life that had begun very differently. The warrior had become a scholar and a poet, the Buddhist had become a Confucian (at least of a freewheeling sort), and a man raised to cleave to the bonds of personal loyalty to a feudal master had found a life of freedom and detachment. For us, living in a very different time, this account of Jōzan’s life may seem incomplete. How did Jōzan earn his income? What kind of personal and emotional life did he have? Modern Japanese historians, seeking just this kind of information, have offered suggestions about Jōzan’s sexuality and broached the possibility that he received a portion of his income by acting as a spy for the Tokugawa government. Neither Jōzan nor his original chroniclers discussed or even hinted at such matters—which forces us to examine the relevance of our questions. Answered, or unanswered, they ultimately tell us more about our preoccupations than they do about Jōzan’s. After all, in the end, does not the poetry tell us all we truly wish to know? In a remarkable series of passages in his By Way of Sainte-Beuve, Marcel Proust wrote that a work of literature is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices… The implication [for many literary critics I is that there is something more superficial and empty in a writer’s authorship, something deeper and more contemplative in his private life… In fact, it is the secretion of one’s innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one gives to

ISHIKAWA JZAN

73

the public. What one bestows on private life—in conversation, however refined it may be—is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.6 If that is true, then the views Jōzan provides us of his inner life, refracted through the medium of classical Chinese verse, may well come closer to revealing the inner truth of the man than any biographical reconstructions. In Jōzan’s case, at any rate, I certainly believe it to be so. III Even an unpracticed eye can intuit the aesthetic synthesis that binds the visual elements of the Shisendō and its gardens together, however difficult those principles may be to articulate. In the same way, the personality of Jōzan seems fully integrated. Still, we may be led to appreciate him and what he stood for by any number of avenues: poetry, history, art, calligraphy, and philosophy all provide a means to approach him as a totality. Jōzan fascinates many Japanese because he was one of the first figures in the Tokugawa period to exhibit in his work and life the aesthetic virtue that came to be known as fūryū, a term later used in the work of Bashō, who, rather like Jōzan, partially retired from society to become a wanderer searching for aesthetic truth. The term fūryū is notoriously difficult to translate. Perhaps a few poems from Bashō’s travel diaries can capture the feeling more adequately than a definition. The first poetic venture I came across— The rice-planting songs Of the far north.7 To talk casually About an iris flower Is one of the pleasures Of the wandering journey8 Wild sparrows In a patch of yellow rape, Pretending to admire The flowers.9 Fūryū suggests withdrawal from the oversophisticated, ultimately shallow cares of urban life, a pause to search for a natural elegance found in closeness to things at hand and to a simpler, fresher environment. Those who wrote in the style of fūryū, on the other hand, were not literary naifs; Bashō, in particular, like Jōzan, was deeply inspired by his contacts with classical Chinese literature and made use of his enthusiasm and his profound sense of affinities with these sources in his writings. Here, for example, is an extremely famous passage from the writings of the classical Chinese philosopher Chuang Chou (369–286 BC), widely known and appreciated in Tokugawa Japan, from his work Chuang Tzu. Once Chang Chou dreamt that he was a butterfly He did not know that he had ever been anything but a butterfly and was content to hover from flower to flower. Suddenly he woke and found to his astonishment that he was Chuang Chou. But it was hard to be sure whether he was really Chou and

74

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

had only dreamt that he was a butterfly or was really a butterfly, and was only dreaming that he was Chou.10 Bashō's haiku homage to the Chinese philosopher communicates some of this spirit but in another, perhaps even more playful, mode expressing the fūryū mentality. Arise, arise, And be my friend, Dream-butterfly! Jōzan’s variation on the same text of Chuang Chou, though written in the form of a classical Chinese lyric, shows a spirit identical to that found in much of Bashō’s work; Jōzan shares his understanding of the need for withdrawal and simplicity. NIGHT RAIN—WORRYING ABOUT THE FLOWERS

I sigh on this rainy late spring night: the reds and whites that filled the forest are falling to the dust! Late at night, my soul in dream becomes a butterfly chasing each falling petal as it flutters to earth. The creation of an atmosphere of fūryū requires an awareness of the purposes and the limitations of art. It is perhaps this quality that interests me most. Jōzan’s consciousness of the ways in which different systems of ideas and aesthetics function allowed him to make deliberate choices. He chose Confucianism over Zen, and from the totality of the Confucian vision he selected an artistic posture rather than a moral stance. These choices were not made blindly or intuitively but openly and consciously, as he sought to make as close a match as possible between his sense of self and the modes of self-expression available. As a good retainer of the Tokugawa, Jōzan was expected to subjugate his personal needs to the higher goal of service to his lord. But Jōzan’s sense of himself could not be suppressed; and rather than attempt to do so, he chose to remove himself from society In solitude he assembled a collage of spiritual attitudes to nourish and sustain a style of life that suited his intuitive sense of identity This quality, it seems to me, makes Jōzan a very modern man, one who might find more sympathy in our century that in his own. While the materials Jōzan put to use as building blocks to assemble his psychological and artistic world—Chinese poetry, calligraphy, a hermitage with its gardens—may be exotic to us, the processes of selection and juxtaposition he used are familiar. In their own ways, Picasso, who used African masks to create new art forms; William Butler Yeats, who borrowed the medieval Japanese Noh play to create a contemporary poetic theater; and even Andy Warhol with his Campbell soup cans, used the same eclectic process. Each artist consciously adopted a ‘foreign’ model and made it his own; the art they created was articulated in a vocabulary that best suited their own temperament, personality, and intellect. Indeed, more often than not it is the personality of the artist alone that can hold these various disparate elements together. Jōzan enjoyed the challenge of juxtaposing his vision of a Chinese gentleman with that of a Tokugawa samurai to invent a composite image that served as an objectification of the many facets of his personality. In Japan. such a process has wide ramifications. Possession of the selfconsciousness and self-understanding required to successfully juxtapose various discrete elements, some at least potentially in conflict, has long been a method at which the Japanese excel. The self-awareness required is by no means limited to artistic endeavor. Within a decade or two of Japan’s official opening to the West in 1868, an ability borrow; to

ISHIKAWA JZAN

75

connect, and to juxtapose made the rapid development of public schools, railroads, and a modern army possible as well. Europeans and Americans were astonished at the rapidity with which, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese had successfully adapted their institutions to contemporary world developments—this time amalgamating Western rather than the traditionally employed Chinese conceptions. Japanese entrepreneurs and bureaucrats found it a relatively simple matter to choose from other nations and cultures whatever they felt might serve them in time of rapid change. Plurality of inspiration has long been seen as a virtue in Japanese culture, an attitude which has served it well. In this regard, Americans in this century, now increasingly committed to plurality ourselves, can sympathize with the process Jōzan chose to create his art and his environment. We do the same thing ourselves, often patching together from disparate sources our lives, our responses, our art, even our politics. Earlier phases of our own culture—and that of Japan as well—were far less eclectic, far more concentrated on a search for some set of transcendental virtues. Our modern plurality, and Jōzan’s, may well seem attractive and familiar, but there is the danger that such plurality can signify as well a lack of ultimate commitment, a shallow grounding in the real concerns of civilization. It is important, in the case of Japan, to remember that such poets as Saigyō and Ryōkan were able, by means of their religious convictions, to look far deeper into the human soul than Jōzan ever did. Accomplishment is ultimately related, of course, to individual talent. Still, the methods chosen also affect the results that can be obtained. Perhaps Jōzan’s long search through differing vocabularies of faith and artistic expression precluded scaling the heights. For better or for worse, we in our times are one with him, for we use the same means, searching without lasting commitment. Watching Jōzan assemble then discard one model after another in search of some objective correlative to his evolving self-understanding, we may be equally pleased and startled to discover at work in him a process that we know so well and practice so often in our own day. NOTES I have made use of a number of materials in Japanese to construct the life of Jōzan. By far the most useful account I discovered is a fairly recent one which takes into account a good deal of prior research. The book, by Tadao Narabayashi, is entitled Bunjin e no Shosha (Light on the Bunjin) and was published by Tankōsha (Kyoto) in 1975. In addition to a lengthy essay on Ishikawa Jōzan, the study deals with two other literati figures of Tokugawa Japan, Tanomura Chikuden (1777–1834), a well-known painter, and Yanagizawa Kien (1706–58), a stylish essayist and translator of Chinese literature. 1. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Seven Japanese Tales, translated by Howard Hibbett (New York: Knopf, 1963, reprinted Putnam, 1981), 101–2. 2. The translations of the Chinese poetry of Jōzan quoted in my essay were kindly provided by Jonathan Chaves. 3. For the full text of the Hōjōki, see Donald Keene, ed., Anthology of Japanese Literature, from the earliest era to the mid-nineteenth century (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 197–212. The present extract can be found on page 207. 4. Donald Keene, trans., Essays in Idleness, the Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 10. 5. A peculiarly shaped scepter held by Buddhist monks and recluses; the name means ‘as you like it.’ 6. Marcel Proust, By Way of Sainte-Beuve, translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), 76, 79. 7. Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), 107.

76

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

8. Ibid., 87. 9. Ibid., 62. 10. Arthur Waley, trans., Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 32.

Part III Writings on Mori Ōgai

First published in David Dilworth and J.Thomas Rimer (eds). The Historical Fiction of Mori Ōgai, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1977, pp. 1–11

7 The Historical Literature of Mori Ōgai: An Introduction

DESPITE a lasting reputation in Japan, Mori Ōgai has yet to achieve any satisfactory reception in the West. Natsume Sōseki, the only writer of Ōgai’s generation to share his stature, has been widely translated and admired, but Ōgai remains a shadowy figure, austere, even obscure.1 It often happens, of course, that the work of certain writers cannot be sufficiently understood outside their own cultures. Some towering figures never earn anything like their rightful reputation through translation. One thinks of the French playwright and poet Paul Claudel, whose Catholicism and expansive style have so far prevented any effective linguistic adaptations into an English-speaking, Protestant culture. Nevertheless, there is much in Ōgai that might well appeal to a Western reader. The nature of his mental world, unlike that of a number of his contemporaries, was overwhelmingly cosmopolitan; indeed, he spent a great deal of time throughout his career translating into Japanese such diverse writers as Goethe (Ōgai’s version of Faust is still the standard), Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hofmannsthal. In a very real sense the stories presented in this volume can be considered ‘translations’ by Ōgai of historical Japanese and Chinese materials into contemporary terms. Our difficulties in approaching his art may lie elsewhere. They may originate, for example, in the relatively narrow boundaries set down around the word ‘literature’ in the Anglo-American tradition. For the French, Pascal and Montaigne are literary figures. We might feel more comfortable calling them philosophers. The combination of personal introspection and abstract concepts found in their writings seems somehow outside the scope of our own decorums. They seem both too direct and too obscure. Men like Goethe and Voltaire were permitted sufficient scope within their literary traditions to expand easily from the world of narrative to the world of ideas in their writings. Ōgai, drawing on his own heritage in Chinese and Japanese, was able to do the same. His early training in the Confucian classics, reinforced by his later studies of German literature and culture, gave him a strong sense of the high importance of literature and of the possibility—indeed the necessity—of its use as a means to convey philosophical ideas. Ōgai’s work contains little that is ‘popular.’ His seriousness of purpose provides from the first a hurdle to those readers who turn to fiction, oriental or occidental, merely for pleasant entertainment. Nevertheless, these stories, read carefully, reveal a depth and precision of observation that goes far beyond the usual kind of romantic fantasy that so often constitutes ‘historical fiction” in the West. Our decision to translate a number of Mori Ōgai’s historical stories was made in the hope that, by putting the works into a form accessible to the English-speaking reader, we might induce him to share our conviction that there is much to be admired in Ōgai’s trenchant observations and deep understanding of human nature, even though the stories operate in a series of peculiar historical situations. Other, earlier

THE HISTORICAL LITERATURE OF MORI GAI: AN INTRODUCTION

79

works of Ōgai are somewhat simpler and more accessible, but surely the Japanese critics are correct when they single out the works of Ōgai’s later years as the very finest and most subtle he produced.2 Hasegawa Izumi, a leading Japanese scholar on Ōgai, writes of these later works that …here one sees Ōgai at his best as a writer, for every phase in his development as an artist and a man is reflected in them: the youth growing up within the fatally limited confines of modern Japanese society; the young man undergoing a thorough process of Westernization; and finally, the aging giant adopting a characteristically Oriental approach to life which is best described as the philosophy of resignation.3 Whether such praise is warranted the reader will ultimately have to decide for himself. Forming judgments on the basis of translated material is hazardous, of course, but if the brilliant precision and striking style of Ōgai’s prose cannot be adequately reproduced in English, at least the organization of his artistic material and the general thrust of his thought can be made available. In order to place the writing of Mori Ōgai’s final years in the context of his total work, some background on his earlier years is useful.4 Mori Ōgai’s life (he was born in 1862 and died in 1922) spanned one of the most tumultuous and exciting periods in the history of Japan. With the coming of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the country was opened to foreign influence after several centuries of enforced isolation during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868). In the literary world, as well as in the spheres of politics, economics, and military strategy, Japan was forced to respond with vigor to vast changes resulting from a fairly intense contact with Western ideas and concepts that were often totally at variance with traditional Japanese views. Ōgai was a major figure in the intellectual life of his time and was involved in some fashion in many of these confrontations. Mori Rintarō (Ōgai became his pen name) was the son of a doctor to the lord of the Tsuwano clan in the province of Shimane, a remote area on the Japan Sea. At the age of five he began his studies in the traditional fashion and was tutored in Mencius, Confucius, and some of the Japanese classics. His generation was perhaps the last to receive as a matter of course such classical training (roughly equivalent to Greek and Latin in the West). As a result, Ōgai and his contemporaries (Sōseki among them) were cosmopolitan in terms of their knowledge of Chinese literature, and in fact both Sōseki and Ōgai were more than adequate poets in classical Chinese. (Now, as a contemporary Japanese critic remarked, young writers in Japan cannot even read poetry in Chinese, to say nothing of composing it.) Ōgai, as a promising student, was sent by his clan to Tokyo to pursue his studies. There he lived in the house of the philosopher Nishi Amane (1829–1897). Nishi Amane was one of the first Japanese to leave his country for Europe. After studying at the University of Leyden, he had returned to Japan in 1865 and spent much of the rest of his career introducing Western ideas to Japan. Ōgai seems to have been much influenced by his contact with the older man, and he remained in the household while preparing for his entrance examinations to the medical school of Tokyo University. Later he repaid the Amane family for their kindness by writing the official biography of his host and mentor. Ōgai was an excellent student at the university. In particular, his proficiency in the German language was increased during his study with the German professors of medicine who had come to Japan to teach modern Western techniques when he was graduated, in 1881, his chief ambition was to go abroad. He joined the army medical corps at the age of twenty-two and shortly thereafter found himself in Germany, doing research for the Japanese government on advanced techniques of hygiene and military medicine. Ōgai’s activities in Germany and his discovery of European literature is a fascinating subject in itself. Here, suffice it to say that he read much of the best in Greek, German, and other classical and modern

80

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

literature. Then he began writing himself. When he returned to Japan four years later, in 1888, he found himself in the vanguard of the new literary movement. He commenced a double career that was to continue throughout almost all of his active life: military doctor and bureaucrat, and man of letters. Ōgai’s return to Japan brought him fact to face with the ambiguities, the confusions, and the disappointments of a nation undergoing a rapid and forced change of its political and social structures. Coupled with his own personal frustrations (his first marriage ended unhappily, and his battles with his army superiors fatigued him), the state of the national culture gradually led him to adopt a somewhat resigned and ironic attitude reflected in many of the works of his middle years. Ōgai’s greatest professional difficulty, perhaps, was occasioned by a dispute he had with the medical profession over the introduction of advanced Western medical techniques into Japan. Although Ōgai’s advanced views were vindicated, his superiors expressed their displeasure in 1899 by having him transferred away from Tokyo, where he was in the center of the cultural and intellectual life, to the town of Kokura in Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan. He was then thirty-seven years old. This period of ‘exile,’ as Ōgai called it, lasted for almost four years. Yet for all the dismal quality of his surroundings, he took advantage of the quiet and of the routine he had established to study, to seek out materials for future writings, and to marry again. When he was able to go back to Tokyo, in 1902, he returned as a mature artist and a committed professional doctor and military official. Shortly thereafter, he was made director of the Bureau of Medical Affairs for the War Ministry. Back in the midst of the literary world, Ōgai composed a number of his most celebrated essays and works of fiction, climaxed in 1909 by his satire on the Japanese Naturalist writers, Vita Sexualis.5 The book, which seems harmless enough today, was banned by the censors and Ōgai was reprimanded personally by the Vice-Minister of War. Ōgai was offended at the misunderstanding shown his book by the authorities and concerned that individual freedoms would be more and more suppressed. In 1910, the year following, the increasingly conservative government authorities arrested and executed the well-known and respected socialist, Kōtoku Shūsui, for his supposed connection with a plot to murder the emperor. The impact of this celebrated incident on the intellectuals was enormous: suddenly the price of progress and order seemed to require the curtailment of the very individuality and human dignity needed to form the basis of a progressive and modern society. Ōgai’s apprehensions and resentments, as well as his conflicting feelings toward the place of authority and freedom in society, are mirrored in several works he wrote at this time, notably in Chinkoku no tō [Tower of silence] and Shokudō [Dining room], both of which were written in 1910.6 Then came the death of the Emperor Meiji in 1912. Like others of his generation, Ōgai’s adult life had been spent under the reign of this man who seemed to symbolize all the progress Japan had been able to achieve, despite internal failings and certain dangers from external threats. The emperor’s death was inevitable, but as an older man himself (he was then fifty), it seemed to Ōgai that the necessary spirit of sacri\ fice and dedication that had been so much a part of his time was now somehow endangered. The death of the emperor was followed by the ritual suicide of General Nogi Maresuke,7 in fidelity to his leader. This manifestation of traditional morality was both thrilling and deeply troubling to the Japanese public; many writers tried to resolve the ambiguity of their own feelings, among them Natsume Sōseki, whose celebrated novel Kokoro uses Nogi’s death as a central symbol. Mori Ōgai himself began almost immediately after the emperor’s death to compose the story Okitsu Yagoemon no isho [The last testament of Okitsu Yagoemon], in which he attempted to re-create the psychology of Nogi in terms of a Tokugawa setting. Following this work, Ōgai began the composition of a number of stories on historical themes, a task that occupied him until his death in 1922. The fact that Ōgai chose historical subjects serves as no indication that he necessarily approved of the attitudes of the feudal past (against which he fought during his whole

THE HISTORICAL LITERATURE OF MORI GAI: AN INTRODUCTION

81

adult life), or that he preferred the old way of doing things to the new. Rather, the writing of these works seemed to serve as a means for him to deal with contemporary moral and philosophical problems from an artistic perspective congenial to him. If the characters and settings represented a vanished age, Ōgai’s choice of concerns in dealing with them was thoroughly contemporary. Indeed, during the time he was working on these stories, he was also engaged in publishing a series of highly respected translations of contemporary works by Strindberg, Ibsen, Rilke, and Schnitzler. Ōgai’s contributions to the development of intellectual life in the Japan of his time were enormous. In addition to his work as a writer, his translations introduced to the Japanese a number of important works of philosophy and literature, ranging from Heine and Goethe to Hofmannsthal. He was a noted innovator in the creation of a modern poetic style in Japan, and his early experiments in writing European-style drama helped to create a viable dramaturgy for the modern Japanese theatre. He was an extremely perceptive critic, and his writings on Japanese and foreign literature are still consulted and considered valuable. His role as a public figure, informal adviser to statesmen,8 and as a physician and student of Western medicine must also be mentioned. All aspects of Ōgai’s intellectual and spiritual life are reflected in varying degrees in his fiction, and nowhere more so than in his late works, composed when he was in full possession of his artistic facilities and in his full maturity as a man. Even limiting a consideration of Ōgai’s work to his historical stories, the amount of material to examine is considerable. There are, first of all, three extensive chronicles that, from their length and complexity, may be classed as historical novels: Shibue Chūsai (1916), Izawa Ranken (1916), and Hōjō Katei (1917). The three form something of a unit. In the three books, Ōgai examines the life of Shibue Chūsai, a leading physician and Confucian scholar in the late Tokugawa period, the career of his teacher Izawa Ranken, and, in the third, he reconstructs the biography of Ranken’s colleague, Hōjō Katei. The remaining works, most of which are translated in the two volumes, are usually divided into two categories by Japanese critics, the fictional pieces (rekishi shōsetsu) that deal with historical themes in an artistic and psychological way (volume 1) and the biographical narratives (shiden) that remain more closely related to the factual information unearthed on his characters by Ōgai (volume 2). Ōgai evolved a style appropriate to both genres, but to a Western reader the divisions between them may seem somewhat arbitrary, and many stories show the use of a considerable variety of subject matter and literary technique. Despite all this diversity, however, some generalizations may be useful as an introduction to the general reader in terms of what the stories are meant to represent and what Ōgai’s intentions were in writing them. Ōgai’s fidelity to history was certainly an important determinant in their composition. In ‘Suginohara Shina,’ written in 1916, Ōgai wrote that he abandoned a more elaborate treatment of the material he chose because of ‘…a lack of creative power and the habit of cherishing historical facts.’9 In ‘Tokō Tahei,’ written in 1917, he was even more explicit. Historians, seeing what I have written, will no doubt criticize me for my willfulness. Novelists, on the other hand, will laugh at my persistence. There is a Western proverb about sleeping between two beds. Looking at my own work, it seems that the proverb can be applied to me.10 In his desire to cherish the facts, was Ōgai, the trained scientific scholar, merely assembling data? Although Ōgai did not often choose to write about himself, his one essay touching on the aesthetics of his historical works, ‘Rekishi sono mama to rekishibanare’ [History as it is and history ignored] written in 1914, does contain a number of insights into his general artistic purposes.

82

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

In the essay, Ōgai confesses that even his friends debate about whether his use of historical figures permits his works to be called fiction. Ōgai counters by saying that he looks for the ‘natural’ in history, he respects it, and he is loathe to change it. After all, he continues, if people enjoy reading about life ‘as it is’ in modern naturalistic fiction, then they certainly ought to like reading about it as it was. Indeed, he concludes, it is precisely because he respects history that he is all the more bound by it. Then follows the most provocative insight he provides. Among my friends, there are those who say that while other writers treat their materials on the basis of emotion, I treat them on the basis of the intellect. Yet I hold this to be true of all my literary work, not merely of the stories based on historical characters. In general, I would say that my works are not ‘Dionysian’ but ‘Apollonian.’ I have never exerted the kind of effort required to make a story ‘Dionysian.’ And indeed, if I were able to expend a comparable effort, it would be in an effort to make my creation all the more contemplative.11 Ōgai’s reference to ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’ is, of course, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s celebrated essay of 1872, The Birth of Tragedy, in which the German philosopher characterized the Dionysian spirit as intoxication and rapture, dark and emotional, while the Apollonian is ‘…a discreet limitation, a freedom from all extravagant usages… sapient tranquillity.’12 Here, it seems, Ōgai provides a precise self-analysis. All the virtues of his style and thought: clarity, objectivity, intelligence, and selectivity are subsumed under his borrowed metaphor. Ōgai can be moved by history but not wish to change it, he can be what Nietzsche calls ‘…a new transfiguring light needed to catch and hold in life the stream of individual forms.’13 Coolness and objectivity characterize his attitudes in recreating the past. Given these attitudes toward his art, Ōgai’s concerns as a thinker and a writer emerge more clearly. As was suggested above, Ōgai experienced in his own lifetime the crisis of civilization in Japan: modern man had shed his feudal sense of community and his superstitions only to find them replaced by spiritual emptiness. The end of the Meiji period seemed to mark an end to that transition period. Even the death of General Nogi seemed a final gesture of the dying past. For Ōgai, the best way to pursue the future was to examine the past; by discovering and articulating the Japanese virtues that existed in the past, the problems of the present and the limitations and possibilities for the future became clearer. Ōgai drew his metaphysical sketches on the grandest possible scale. None of the stories deal with romantic love (although many of his earlier ones do), but rather with issues he found, at this time in his life, to be of more fundamental importance: loyalty, sincerity, intellectual honesty, independence of spirit, the nature of the spiritual temperament, and the abiding relationships between parents and children. The range of moral choice and action in the stories is perhaps limited by their historical settings, yet Ōgai’s selection of events and attitudes to portray reveals his altogether striking modern attitude of mind. In fact, Ōgai’s choices often lead him rather far from life ‘as it was.’ His concerns are for modern values, and indeed, it is precisely this creative gap between his material and his own mental outlook that gives the stories their remarkable moral power. Without being didactic in any way, the stories are idealistic. Ōgai has located the attitudes in history that have brought spiritual satisfaction to the men and women he portrays, and he holds them up as models for contemporary society, not as models in the conventional sense, but rather as reminders, as shadows cast across the confusions of the present. Perhaps Ōgai’s attitudes can be traced back to his early training in the Confucian classics, with their rational appeal to an ordered, restrained humanitarianism. By this definition, Ōgai can be included among the last generation of Confucian writers in Meiji Japan; yet on the other hand, his attitudes and perceptions

THE HISTORICAL LITERATURE OF MORI GAI: AN INTRODUCTION

83

were immeasurably broadened and rendered sophisticated through his long and intimate contact with late nineteenth-century European life and literature. As a result, the best of Ōgai’s work manifests both the moral power sanctioned in the Confucian tradition and a subtlety and finesse of style derived from the West, both fused into a harmonious whole. These historical stories seem well described in the remark of Stephen Ross that ‘…there is something particularly sublime about novels that not only succeed in purely literary terms but contain and develop ideas of great philosophic worth without destruction of literary values.’14 In order to create the kind of historical and moral context in which his concepts could exist in literary terms, Ōgai developed a number of literary techniques that constitute in many ways a new genre of writing. Again, although the variety of such techniques is considerable, a few generalizations can be made on the basis of the stories as a whole. One of Ōgai’s most important artistic principles is that of selection. The kinds of incidents about which he chose to write show the precision with which he wished to voice his concerns. Most of the stories deal with specific historical events about which at least some documentation exists. To be sure, some of the stories do draw their materials from legends: ‘Kanzan Jittoku,’ for example, is an account of Chinese Buddhist mystics, and ‘Sanshō dayū’ relates a series of miraculous happenings in medieval Japan. Yet, in all cases, the incidents, no matter how fanciful, have been carefully documented in Ōgai’s sources. The bulk of his stories deal with the Tokugawa period; within that period, Ōgai’s choices of material are most revealing. The temptation for most popular writers of historical fiction is to recreate the grand episodes and large figures of the past. Such an attitude is true in Japan as elsewhere: kabuki playwrights and novelists have usually turned to colorful and dramatic incidents for their inspiration. Ōgai, on the other hand, normally chooses as his main character an obscure person who may be close to a great man but who exhibits in his own private person some attitude or quality of mind Ōgai wishes to investigate. One may catch a glimpse of a great man of history through the more commonplace eyes of one of Ōgai’s characters, but most of his protagonists have been selected precisely because they are, in the very best sense of the word, ordinary. In the same fashion, the stories often take place in the generation before or after some great historical event. The event itself is not depicted, and the times in which the characters live are more often than not outwardly peaceful and normal. These seeming restrictions actually permit Ōgai to concentrate on his characters rather than on the historical events surrounding them. The relationships of Ōgai’s protagonists to others (wife, children, lord) or to abstract ideas (courage, fidelity, learning) are illustrated always in an appropriately specific fashion rather than thrown in relief against the vast forces of history. In the context of specific relationships, Ōgai’s characters bear full moral responsibility for their actions. Some Japanese critics have suggested that, because Ōgai’s creative powers were limited, he shied away from depicting dramatic historical events. Nevertheless, Ōgai’s desire to make his work ‘all the more contemplative’ dictated the means he used. In particular, Ōgai wrote a number of stories about the great feudal families in Kyushu, especially the Hosokawa family. Various generations of the family are dealt with in ‘Abe ichizoku,’ ‘Tokō Tahei,’ ‘Kuriyama Daizen,’ and ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho.’ Ōgai may well have collected the data for these works while living in Kokura during his ‘exile’; the stories are filled with a wealth of careful detail on the life and manners of the period, carefully and ingeniously presented. If the selection of an incident is one basic artistic technique at work in these stories, then another is Ōgai’s method of selection within the context of a single incident. A story like ‘Sahashi Jingorō,’ for example, is constructed by the same principles of organization that govern Japanese horizontal scrolls. Major scenes are painted in a very explicit fashion; and these scenes, as they unfold, are interspersed with bits of

84

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

connecting ‘narrative’ linking them together. In his major scenes, Ōgai provides an extraordinary amount of specific detail, subjecting his narrative to relentless documentation. Yet nothing is chosen at random, for each item Ōgai chooses to mention creates an effect contributing to his total conception. These scenes, in turn, are linked with episodes of historical background, quickly sketched. Another important technique of Ōgai is his personal assumption of the role of narrator. Ōgai the writer and the man is never far from his reader; he constantly comments, shapes the narrative before the reader’s eyes, speculates on the motives for the actions he is in the process of describing. The process may seem at first somewhat troubling, even occasionally didactic. Some of the reasons for the technique, of course, are inherent in the speculative, contemplative nature of the works Ōgai wished to create. Intellectual awareness requires objectivity, and aesthetic distance permits the reader to contemplate what he has read and generalize from it. Ōgai wants more than a personal, emotional response. Bertholt Brecht, in describing his celebrated ‘alienation effect,’ wrote that his object was ‘…not just to arouse moral objections to certain circumstances of life but to discover means for their elimination.’15 Ōgai, in his own way, is attempting a similar effort in his Apollonian meditation. The direct presentation to the reader of the working out of the author’s own mental processes was a style of writing quite new in Japan at that time. Katō Shūichi has written that in Ōgai’s late stories, …the form is original, almost a new genre, namely a ‘biography in progress,’ in which the author describes not only the life of the persons concerned but also the author’s own intellectual process of writing a biography—his sorrow for lost documents, his joy at others discovered, his reasoning about available materials, his imagination, his insight…16 Ōgai’s sense of objectivity is chiefly conveyed through the tone of his language, which is terse, brilliant, and precise. Ōgai’s style has always received unstinted praise from Japanese critics and writers. He has been admired by such diverse talents as Nagai Kafū and Mishima Yukio. Ōgai may have developed his ability to create his kind of lucid precise Japanese because, like his brilliant predecessor, the novelist Futabatei Shimei, he took an interest in the spoken language. Futabatei, a generation before Ōgai, had virtually created the modern literary language (classical Japanese having been considered unsuited for the composition of modern works) by making translations into a precise and flexible Japanese from stories of Turgenev. Futabatei knew spoken and written Russian well. Ōgai made the same use of his German. One often has the feeling there is not a word wasted in an Ōgai text; and although unfortunately the same cannot be said about the present translations, they have been made as faithful to the general tone of his language as the translators have been able. There are many reasons why these late stories of Ōgai may have a legitimate appeal, even in translation, to a modern reader. First of all, in terms of literary technique, the stories show considerable distinction. Ōgai’s ability to establish an effective relationship between author, reader, and the materials presented in the story provides the necessary means for him to accomplish his complex ends. These ends often concern human virtue. Writers have usually found vice more simple to portray (Chaucer said it was more exciting), but Ōgai’s historical stories provide some effective counterexamples. He never preaches. We are shown not merely virtue, but the beauty of virtue, manifested in a particular historical setting. Ōgai often chose the Tokugawa period, considered by many Japanese writers and intellectuals as the era of greatest personal repression in the history of their country; yet the choice is less a comment on Ōgai’s political beliefs than on his

THE HISTORICAL LITERATURE OF MORI GAI: AN INTRODUCTION

85

commitment to what he saw to be the eternal human spirit. Indeed the basic Confucian view of the world seems here vindicated: man is good and can improve himself.17 Secondly, the stories hold considerable interest because of the light they shed on Ōgai as a leading intellectual leader of the Meiji period. Many of the difficulties and enthusiasms of that time are mirrored in these works. A close examination of the stories shows that Ōgai, with his early Confucian training overlaid with his knowledge and experience gained in Germany, was firmly aware of the nature of the time in which he lived and of the spiritual ambiguities inherent in the modern situation. He looked back at history without regret and without romantic wistfulness. He did not call for a restoration of ancient virtues at the expense of the present. If we accept the paradigm of Roger Caillois that the traditional Asian psychology sees time as circular, the Western as linear,18 then Ōgai seems closer to the psychology of a European intellectual in his historical outlook. There is virtue in the past, and the future may be corrupt; but the configurations of the past cannot be recreated again. The question that seems to underlie each story would seem to be: If this was so, what is possible now? Lastly, many of Ōgai’s philosophical ideas, irrespective of his cultural background, are compelling. I should merely like to call attention to the fact that his treatment of the problem of human ego, and his understanding of the close and reciprocal relationship between self and self-sacrifice are as profound as those of any modern writer in the West. Lu Hsun, the most gifted man of letters in twentieth-century China, wrote an essay toward the end of his life in which he indicated the authors who had been influential in his own work. After listing Gogol and other Europeans he finished by saying, ‘…and of course the two Japanese, Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai.’19 Thanks to the work of Edwin McClellan and others, we are in a better position to understand Lu Hsun’s enthusiasm for Sōseki. If the present translations can help explain the addition of Mori Ōgai’s name, our labors will have been richly repaid. NOTES 1. Edwin McClellan, Two Japanese Novelists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. xi. 2. There are dissenters among Japanese literary historians, too, of course. As most of the stories are set in the Tokugawa period, Marxist critics, who see the period as ‘feudal’ in the pejorative sense of the word, are impatient with the ‘conservatism’ of Ōgai. These rather complicated issues are not recapitulated here, as they are not germane to the present discussion. 3. Hasegawa Izumi, ‘Mori Ōgai,’ Japan Quarterly (April 1963): 244. 4. The Hasegawa Izumi article, mentioned above, is probably the most thoughtful article on Ōgai in English. Among the many excellent works on Ōgai in Japanese perhaps Okazaki Yoshie’s book Ōgai to teinen [Ōgai and resignation] (Tokyo: Hōbunkan, 1969), is the most compelling. 5. Mori Ōgai, Vita Sexualis, trans, by Kazuji Ninomiya and Sanford Goldstein (Tokyo and Rutland, Vt.: Charles Tuttle Co., 1972). 6. Other writers reacted as strongly. Nagai Kafū, for example, wrote in his essay Fireworks that the incident caused him to abandon any attachments to the pernisciousness of the contemporary world. For a partial translation, see Edward Seidensticker’s Kafū the Scribbler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 46. 7. General Nogi (1849–1912) was one of the great generals and popular heroes of the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. 8. In particular, to Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), a prominent military leader and Privy Councillor of the Meiji period. For a few details on their relationship, see the Hasegawa article cited in note 3 above. 9. Mori Ōgai Zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1971), vol. 4, p. 45. 10. Ibid., p. 233.

86

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

11. Mori Ōgai Zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1971), vol. 7, pp. 105–106. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans, by Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 21. 13. Ibid., p. 145. 14. Stephen Ross, Literature as Philosophy (New York: Appleton, 1969), p. 12. 15. John Willett, ed., Brecht on Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 75. 16. Katō Shūichi, ‘Japanese Writers and Modernization,’ in Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization, edited by Marius Jansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 435. 17. Japanese critics often comment on Ōgai’s sense of resignation gained through his growing sense of disillusionment over aspects of his own life and career, as well as the shortcomings of Meiji Japan. But these last stories harbor attitudes far more penetrating in their observations of the human condition than those generated by emotional fatigue. 18. See Roger Caillois, ‘Circular Time, Rectilinear Time,’ Diogenes (Summer 1963): 1–13. 19. An English translation of Lu Hsun’s 1933 essay ‘How I Came to Write Stories’ is included in Selected Works of Lu Hsun, trans, by Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang, vol. 3 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959), pp. 229– 232.

First published in J.Thomas Rimer, Mori Ōgai, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1975, pp. 114–119

8 Some Observations on Ōgai’s Work

MORI ŌGAI, as this brief study hopefully has helped to show, deserves the reputation as a major figure it, twentieth-century cultural and artistic history that the Japanese have given him. Critical opinion there has stressed his resolution to grasp and disseminate Western ideas, especially in German literature and philosophy. Japanese scholars also credit him, along with Futabatei Shimei, with introducing Western modes of psychological expression into Japanese literature, and with successfully enlarging the scope of Japanese fiction to include intellectual and philosophical themes once reserved for poetry and essays. The themes of his stories, indeed, often deal either with Western subjects, such as the early German tales, or with themes seldom taken up in the traditional Japanese literature of artistic merit—the psychology of marital discord, for example, or the relationships between political and personal malaise. Even the historical stories treat their material in an analytical fashion altogether different from the way in which a Tokugawa writer of historical tales—Ueda Akinari, for example—might have done. Ōgai’s early exposure to the West and his scientific training are the reasons usually given for his detached and candid attitudes of mind. While this is surely true, a Western reader would have to comment as well that Ōgai, in both his early education and general temperament, belonged to the last generation of Japanese reared in the Tokugawa Confucian tradition of self-sacrifice, hard work, and dedication to duty. For Ōgai there was always a high moral purpose involved in the act of writing, and in the act of living. This sense of purpose propelled him into following his father in service through medicine. Many writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in that period of enormous social change, were physicians. Lu Hsun, the most respected writer of modern China, studied medicine in Japan at the turn of the century, then returned to China to educate his contemporaries. The brilliant Philippine novelist José Rizal studied medicine in Madrid in the 1880s. He returned to Manila to write a scathing denunciation of the Spanish colonial regime, in his novel Noli me tangere, then suffer martyrdom by execution. Chekhov, in Russia, continued to practice medicine and write of the changes in his society with a detachment not unlike that of Ōgai. These men, for various reasons, had a high sense of the moral possibilities of literature, and their work shows their ability to combine a certain objectivity of spirit with their private and honest human responses to their own society. The works of literature that resulted, although different in style in the case of each writer, all evoke a sense of high purpose. Certain resemblances in form might also be noted. In describing Chekhov, the critic V.S.Pritchett reminds us that ‘the mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind,’ and then goes on to say: Medicine, he said, was his wedded wife, and literature his mistress: he is very much the man who chases two hares at once, though medical experience enriched his writing. One also suspects that

88

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Chekhov’s worry about ‘purpose’ had a good deal to do with his inability to write a long novel; he could not sustain a philosophic plan.1 The relentlessness of the objective intellect and the pressure of events —these were what kept Chekhov from making the commitment to reserve for himself the mental and spiritual time for reflection necessary for lengthy artistic creation. The same situation held true for Lu Hsun and for Ōgai himself, who felt bound by reality, contemporary or historical, and thus never found it possible to create large artistic structures. In his late 1917 essay, ‘From my Ledger,’ Ōgai explained that his love for the facts of history was not something that came to him late in his career as some Japanese critics have suggested, but from his earliest responses to life; his training in science only reaffirmed these first attitudes of mind. Commenting on the denseness of his last biographies Ōgai concludes that ‘…the fact that I have moved toward the use of these spare genealogies may well lie in the momentum of scientific spirit behind the pursuit of such relationships in Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart.’2 Ōgai first wrote of Zola in 1892; twenty-five years later he had come to terms with one aspect of Zola’s own sense of the objective; yet Ōgai’s own Apollonian view of his literary craft, permitted him to move beyond documentation to the point where his works bear no resemblance to those of the French writer at all. Ōgai’s high sense of purpose as a writer also led him to assume other roles appropriate to the Confucian artistic and intellectual tradition. His translations pay homage to the great Western classics, just as deference had been paid to the Chinese writers until the generation before. Ōgai’s essay writing, his help in founding poetry magazines, and his work in the theater all were carried on, usually at a high cost of energy and mental leisure, because of his dedication to the truth of the future. His work however, for all its moral purpose, strikes at a far deeper level than that of mere ideology. His political stance (seldom directly expressed, sometimes changing) is at best an ambiguous clue to his real purposes. In this regard, Chekhov’s remarks might well have been made by Ōgai: It’s not conservatism I’m balancing off with liberalism—they are not at the heart of the matter as far as I am concerned—it’s the lies of my heroes with their truths…. You told me once my stories lack an element of protest, and that they have neither sympathies nor antipathies. But doesn’t the story protest against lying from start to finish? Isn’t that ideology?…a writer is a man bound by contract to his duty and his conscience.3 Above and beyond Ōgai’s significance in the context of Japanese literary history, his life and work have a peculiar fascination for the Western reader as well. On one level they provide a perfect case study in the realm of art and ideas for differentiating between Westernization and modernization in Japanese culture, as well as providing a means to examine a typical pattern among modern Japanese intellectuals of an early exposure to Western influence brought back and amalgamated into the totality of their grasp of their own culture. These problems in intellectual history are fascinating ones that have not yet been fully understood, let alone solved. Charles Baudelaire’s notes for an unfinished article entitled ‘Philosophic Art,’ written in the late 1850s, begins with the definition of pure art as ‘…the creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.’4 Yet less than a century later the Austrian Marxist critic T.W. Adorno was able to write persuasively concerning what he saw as the inevitable, irrevocable split in the modern consciousness between subject, one’s own subjective view of oneself, and object, the objective nature of the world and its forces to which the individual is subjected. Frederic Jameson, in writing of Adorno, says that ‘…the novel is always an attempt to reconcile the

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON GAI’S WORK

89

consciousness of the writer and reader with the world at large; so it is that the judgments we make on the great novelists fall not on them, but on the moment of history which they reflect and on which their structures pass sentence.’5 One need not accept the entire proposition to agree that the precarious balance between an inner view of reality and the ever more impersonal mechanisms of society is threatened by forces that seem bent on destroying the humane quality of wholeness that has been valued throughout time. For Adorno, there is a desperate courage involved in ‘imagining wholeness in a period that has no experience of it.’6 During Ōgai’s lifetime, Japan was fast losing that sense of wholeness. Examined from Adorno’s perspective, Ōgai tried at times to write of the objective world, sometimes of the individual psyche. In Youth he managed to maintain some balance between the two. In Destruction, he could no longer relate the two elements, and we are given the two fragments—pieces of the protagonist’s spiritual world and a satire on contemporary Japanese society. In Ōgai’s final historical and synthetic works, his courage to show wholeness, as Adorno would have it, called for superb artistic control and a tremendous outlay of moral energy. Ōgai is not an easy writer to read. To appreciate him on the literary level, one must know something of the traditions of Chinese, Japanese, and German literature, both in poetry and prose. To appreciate the import of the questions he poses, one must know German philosophy and Confucianism as well. To sense the power of his work, one must be willing to follow various elevents in his thought through form after form, work after work, as Ōgai moves toward the kind of synthesis he achieved in certain works of his last years. In the best of Ōgai’s works, style and content are really impossible to separate: one dictates the other. Precedents can be found, of course, for certain aspects of his writing, in Chinese historical models or in German nineteenth-century writers like Nietzsche, where the flow of ideas can carry a narrative along. Yet Ōgai’s works do not resemble his models, the rhythm of his sentences and the subtle juxtapositions of incident make the form and style he evolved uniquely his own. Any judgments on the artistic success of any given work must be made on the basis of rules peculiar to it, rules that must be gleaned from a close examination of, and a reflection on, that individual text. Ōgai was an artist and a philosopher; he was a fine writer because one set of sensibilities consistently refreshed and enriched the other. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

V.S.Pritchett, ‘Hearing from Chekhov,’ The New York Review of Books, June 28, 1973, p. 4. Mori Ōgai Zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1971) Vol. 7, p. 111. Anton Chekhov, quoted in Pritchett, p. 3. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Maine (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), p. 204. 5. Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 42. 6. Ibid., p. 38.

First published in Pilgrimages: Aspects of Japanese Literature and Culture, University of Hawaii Press, 1980, pp. 3–24

9 Mori Ōgai and Jean-Paul Sartre: Some Intersections of Biography, History and Literature

WHATEVER the genre involved, history, biography, or fiction, human beings, and their varied responses to the life that surrounds them, remain at the center. In that regard the second sentence of the preface of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Idiot de Ia famille (The Family Idiot), published in 1971 and his last major work, poses a crucial question for all three: ‘What, at this point in time, can we know about a man?’ Sartre then goes on. ‘It seemed to me that this question could only be answered by studying a specific case. What do we know, for example, about Gustave Flaubert?1 The question seems a straightforward one, but Sartre required more than a thousand pages to attempt an answer and the work remained unfinished at his death. Sartre was trying, in his attempt to articulate the connections between individual human consciousness and a larger historical understanding, to break the traditional literary barriers between the ways of ordering history and imagination, and his work stands as a much-celebrated example of a new and authentic methodology. Still, Sartre’s methods, while sophisticated, are not altogether new. As a scholar interested in Japanese literature, I was struck, in reading The Family Idiot, to see how closely the author’s strategies parallel those used by Mori Ōgai in his biographical reconstruction of the life of a Tokugawa-period doctor, Shibue Chūsai, written in 1916. Ōgai, like Sartre, wishes to reconstruct the life of a man who deeply interests him, and in doing so he creates methods of historical investigation and interpretation that bear a remarkable resemblance to those of his later French counterpart. Ōgai, of course, was a great writer in the modern Japanese tradition, and for many of my Japanese colleagues and friends, Shibue Chūsai is his masterpiece; but like Sartre’s study of Flaubert, it fits awkwardly if at all into the normal categories of literature, at least as defined and practiced in the English-speaking world. Reading Sartre, who is so much more explicit in explaining his methodologies, can be of some help in explicating Ōgai’s often unarticulated assumptions. One fact is clear at once, however. Each author, in searching out the life of another, finishes by telling an enormous amount about himself; and indeed this sort of autobiographical self-consciousness becomes, in both cases, a crucial part of the basic methodology involved. The hidden question that lies under Sartre’s question, ‘What do we know, for example, about Gustave Flaubert?’ thus becomes, ‘What can we know about ourselves?’ The fact that both authors came upon the same means of structuring their inquiries suggests, finally, nothing about mutual influences, but points up instead an inevitable congruence of technique achieved altogether independently by both writers in the course of two similar projects. What triggers this methodology? In both cases, it seems to me, it is the fact of the continuing presence of history itself. Each writer in his own way was committed to a sense of the individual as defined in terms of the historical moment with which he was inevitably engaged. Interestingly enough, both Sartre and Ōgai spent formative years in Germany, and both took a profound interest in the kind of continental philosophy to which they were exposed there. Both integrated into their own creative work the conviction, perhaps gained

MORI GAI AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

91

by that exposure, that any authentic consciousness that a man can achieve can only come from his sense of the historical flux in which he finds himself and in which he must make his own, personal way. Sartre, in working out his own methodologies to explicate this conviction, made use of certain Marxist concepts; Ōgai, several generations earlier, turned rather to Kant and Vaihinger. Both, however, came to the conviction that only a sense of history and of the movement of ideas, and ideologies, through history can lead a writer to a necessary level of self-consciousness. Such a consciousness, in turn, can allow the writer to find a means to assess the implications, the larger significance of the relativities of the particular subject he has chosen for investigation. Writers such as Sartre and Ōgai, in their maturity of self-understanding, attempted when writing of the past to envision the real nature of their own contemporary societies, but without relinquishing a sense of the limits of their own understanding, precisely because they too knew that they shared in the unspoken assumptions of their own period. In investigating their historical subjects, it thus becomes necessary for them to investigate themselves. Both Shibue Chūsai and The Family Idiot were written as case studies of figures who held a tremendous personal attraction to their respective authors. Both authors were in their full maturity when they took up their researches. Sartre was sixty-six when he published the first section of his text; Ōgai was fifty-four. Sartre’s manuscript remained unfinished at his death; Ōgai’s included 119 separate sections and remained virtually his longest work, apart from a few more strictly historical accounts written a few years later. Both works reveal as well an evolving point of view, since both authors, as they carried out their investigations, shaped and reshaped their responses to what they found as they proceeded. Their responses, their sense of the significance of the life they observed, grew and changed as their knowledge of their subject increased. Both studies are full of questions, and self-questioning. If these works were, in the ordinary sense of the word, written in the style considered appropriate to one of their components, if they were books of history, of fiction, or of biography, then the methodologies of historical investigation developed by both writers, in which the investigator continues to intrude into his material, seeking out the significance of his discoveries, questioning his readers, and himself, would exceed the accepted canon of stylistic possibilities. Both writers, however, express in their respective texts their conviction that these presumed intrusions represent in fact a crucial part of the process of composition and stand as an equally central element in the kind and quality of understanding each seeks, in his own way, from his readers. Another commonality between the two works involves a search on the part of both writers for a means to integrate themselves into their subject matter. They have chosen to write of men with whom they can feel a sense of personal identification, a crucial empathy; in one sense they wish to explicate a life that can illumine and justify their own, somewhat in the manner envisioned by the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) in his concept of verstehen (understanding), an intersubjective understanding between the writer and his subject matter.2 By seeking Self in Other, the projects chosen by these two writers possess a kind of obsessive significance for them, revealed in a flow from the subjective to the objective and back to the subjective that, allowing for differences of style, can be said to characterize both narratives. With this much by way of generality, a few remarks about the nature of each text are in order.3 In the case of Sartre, why did he choose Flaubert? His preface is both eloquent and specific. Sartre lists four reasons. First of all, sufficient documentation exists, in the form of letters, books, articles, and so forth for the purposes of an investigation. Secondly, he feels an intimate and rather complicated relationship with Flaubert. ‘In 1943, rereading his correspondence… I felt I had a score to settle with Flaubert and ought therefore to get to know him better.’4 Thirdly, for Sartre, man is never totally divorced from society, ‘never an individual; it would be more fitting to call him a universal singular.’5 One means to study the objective human being would therefore require the study of that person’s writing, where a deliberate attempt at

92

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

objectifica tion has been undertaken. An uncritical examination of the flux of the lived life itself cannot yield the same certitude of significance. Lastly, for Sartre, Flaubert is a crucial literary figure, ‘the creator of the modern novel, [who] stands at the crossroads of all our literary problems today.’6 This nineteenthcentury writer, then, has a relevance not only for Sartre but through him, as a modern man and a contemporary writer, to the present generation for whom he has composed his account. In making his study of Flaubert, Sartre differentiates between what he terms ‘concepts,’ abstract ideas that apparently lie outside the relativism of history and reveal a larger objectivity, and ‘notions,’ thoughts that ‘carry time within themselves’ and permit a special empathy between the subject under study and the writer. It is on the basis of an examination of such ‘notions’ that Sartre attempts to find correspondences between himself and Flaubert, for, he insists, before one can judge Flaubert, one must know him. Sartre assembles documents, letters, books, memoirs, and he reads, then rereads, slowly creating a close reciprocity between what represents for him the objective situation of culture and literature in France in the nineteenth century and Flaubert’s ‘subjective self,’ so that, as Sartre puts it in his preface, Flaubert, ‘summed up and for this real son universalized by his epoch, in turn resumes it by reproducing himself in it as singularity.’7 Mori Ōgai is less explicit, perhaps more modest in the complexity of his methodologies, which tend to develop in an organic fashion as he continues to move along through his developing narrative structure. Still, the congruence of purpose shown by both writers suggests that Sartre’s four reasons for having chosen Flaubert may serve as a useful tool to characterize Ōgai’s techniques. In the first place, Ōgai, like Sartre, is convinced that there is sufficient information available in the nineteenth-century Japanese documents to make the re-creation of such a life possible. Indeed, part of the considerable excitement in reading Shibue Chūsai comes from experiencing with Ōgai the thrill of the chase, as he seeks out the documents he needs, visiting temples, looking through old records, talking with the descendants of his protagonists, and so forth. Sometimes Ōgai’s intuitions as to where to find information prove false. Sometimes his forays produce facts that lead him to different conclusions than those he had first imagined. In this regard Sartre remains more passive, usually remaining in his study. We watch both writers sift through the evidence they find, but Ōgai makes the chronicle of his actual physical search for evidence an integral part of his methodology. Sartre speaks of a ‘score to settle with Flaubert,’ and as a writer finds a close identification, possibly a felt rivalry with his predecessor. Ōgai’s relationship with Chūsai is equally complex in that Chūsai was a doctor of traditional Japanese medicine; yet Ōgai, trained in Western medicine and by this point in his career the surgeon general of the Japanese Army, was less a rival than an observer, seeking out hidden parallels between his life and the life of another man whose learning and convictions were considerably different from his. Different, perhaps, but the relationship between Chūsai’s intellectual life, sense of place, and philosophical convictions are characterized in such a way by Ōgai that he could come to feel an attraction to ‘becoming Chūsai.’ Sartre’s conviction that a man may only be objectified in his writing, that reality lies in the documents left behind more than in the shifting fragments that constitute the lived life, is only partially echoed in the attitudes expressed by Ōgai. In the first place, Ōgai was not dealing with a protagonist who considered himself primarily a writer, although Chūsai did leave a certain amount of poetry and other material, and there were many other relevant documents about his literary interests to be perused as well. Still, the basic nature of the documents available for examination by Sartre and Ōgai differed greatly in some respects. The various strands woven into Ōgai’s narrative allow Chūsai’s persona to emerge in startling and complex detail, but he seldom turned up materials that permit the kind of view of the inner life that is afforded Sartre through his access to Flaubert. In some ways, too, Ōgai’s own personal convictions, doubtless developed from his Confucian heritage, may have sustained him in the view that human beings ultimately objectify

MORI GAI AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

93

themselves by what they do and by how, in the fullest sense, they treat others. These assumptions, plus the nature of the documentation available, gave Ōgai the challenge of reconstructing the complex social web of relationships in which Chūsai found himself. They provided Ōgai as well with the difficulty, which his art surmounts triumphantly, of recreating the emotional lives of his characters from a smaller and seemingly less rich cache of material, in terms of psychological content. Finally, just as Sartre found relevance in Flaubert for his own time, so Ōgai sought to find in Chūsai the hidden congruences that lurk below a seeming disruption between past and present in Japan; for Ōgai’s contemporaries, Chūsai and his generation inhabited a world whose artifacts, habitudes, and values now seemed to have vanished and so were somehow discredited. Others, like the writer Nagai Kafū, were to point out in their own fiction and essays the ramifications of this change in order to castigate the present; Ōgai, however, sought to identify the subtle connections that linked that past and his present together. From Ōgai’s point of view, any real and necessary understanding of the present was impossible to achieve without a consciousness of the past. A synthesis of an understanding of the past and the present, on the other hand, could help lead to a perspective of the future as it unfolds. Like Sartre, Ōgai, as he constructs his lengthy account of Chūsai, develops a methodology of empathy, entering so far inside his characters that he can begin to identify the unspoken assumptions and relationships that linked objective situations of Tokugawa society with the inner world of Chūsai, his remarkable family, and his friends. In answer to Sartre’s question, ‘What can we know about a man?’ Ōgai seeks to understand what we, in this century, can learn about a man who seemingly inhabited another world altogether. Ōgai’s search for an active empathy can be observed at the very opening of the book. The first chapter of Shibue Chūsai begins as follows: Thirty-seven years are as an instant With little talent I have extended my medical studies; Ruin or success in the world—I leave all to fate With a heart truly at peace, poverty and suffering have no meaning. This is a poem in which Shibue Chūsai expressed his deepest feelings. I imagine it must have been written in the second year of Tempō [1831]. Chūsai at that time was the physician in attendance on Tsugaru Yukitsugu, the lord of the castle at Hirosaki.8 Ōgai goes on at some length to analyze the private feelings that he finds hidden in Chūsai’s formal poem, written in classical Chinese, creating a whole subtext of emotions, autobiographical revelations, and social relationships. In doing so Ōgai begins to question the assumptions a reader at his time (and such a reader would be closer to our own than to those of Chūsai’s time) would bring to these four lines. Did Chūsai really mind being poor, muses Ōgai; what did it mean for a man like Chūsai to seek for the contentment of a life in balance, and what were the terms in which such contentment could or would be couched? What, in short, can we know of a man at this point in time, our point in time? As Ōgai’s text proceeds, he sifts the evidence, weighs each fact, ponders each discovery in terms of the implicit model of a spiritual and social totality that he continues to construct at the same time, using the individual facts he finds to posit a whole, moving back and forth from detail to larger consideration in a manner quite reminiscent of Sartre’s technique in The Family Idiot. In chapter 6 of Shibue Chūsai there is a passage of considerable beauty that helps suggest Ōgai’s whole methodology.

94

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Chūsai was a physician and a bureaucrat. He studied books of philosophy on various aspects of Confucianism, he read history, and he studied in the field of the arts as well, literature and poetry. In this regard we resemble each other very closely indeed. Still, one noticeable difference is that, putting aside the fact that we lived at different times, our lives have not had precisely the same value. No, in fact, I must admit there is one enormous difference. Although Chūsai was able to establish himself as a real student in philosophy and in art, I have not been able to escape from my own vague world of the dilettante. Looking at Chūsai, I can only feel a sense of shame. Chūsai was indeed a man who walked the same road that I have. Yet his stride represented something that I could never hope to imitate. He was vastly superior to me in every way. I owe him all my respect. Indeed, the extraordinary thing is that he walked not only all the great roads but came and went by the byways as well. Not only did he study Neo-Confucianism, but he amused himself with books of heraldry and old maps of Edo. If Chūsai had been my contemporary, our sleeves would surely have rubbed as we walked through those muddy lanes. An intimacy would have developed between us. And I would have come to love him.9 Without this empathy, this identification between the author and his material, the kind of synthesis Ōgai was attempting could never have been created. That identification in turn allowed Ōgai, as it did Sartre, to imagine situations, create dialogue, introduce family members, and reconstruct relationships, all in order to situate the object of his study in the daily emotional environment of Chūsai’s lived experience. In particular Ōgai lavished an enormous amount of care on his re-creation of Chūsai’s wife, Io, and her children; indeed, Chūsai’s wife may well represent the most remarkably moving and sympathetic character to emerge from all Ōgai’s historical writing, fictional or biographical.10 Ōgai is anxious as well to link the emotional lives of these persons to the kind of understanding available to his own generation, and he makes them intelligible by moving back and forth between the objective situations of history and the subjective human response to that history, in order to draw forth what was for him a compelling and general human truth. Ōgai’s favorite quotation from his much-loved Goethe suggests both his goal as a biographer of Chūsai and, by implication, the kind of methodology he was to create as he plunged deeper and deeper into the facts that he unearthed. ‘How may one come to know oneself? Never by contemplation, but only by action. Seek to do your duty, and you will know how it is with you. And what is your duty? The demands of the day.’ The examined life is thus closely related to the life in action. Both Ōgai’s treatment of Chūsai and Sartre’s treatment of Flaubert have caused a certain amount of consternation to both writers and critics in their respective countries. Both writers have been accused of composing texts that lie outside the appropriate genres they appear to have appropriated for themselves. Sartre has been criticized for writing a disguised autobiography; Ōgai has been accused of ‘retreating into history.’ Even the presumably more flexible American disciplinary canons available to social scientists and literary scholars are perhaps too limited to find an adequate means to situate these two works. Readers open to the ambiguity and the fullness of human experience, however, have continued to admire and read both books, since the basic question they both pose, ‘What, at this point in time, can we know about a man?’ transcends the sorts of closures usually considered appropriate to either social science or to literature. These mixtures of objective, historical, and subjective concerns suggest a special kind of authenticity capable of breaking open new areas of sensibility for their readers. Both Sartre and Ōgai are, it seems to me, attempting to bring their own respective witness to bear on the fundamental problem of how reality is to be perceived. The ‘projects’ of Flaubert and Chūsai, to borrow Sartre’s term, require that their respective authors go beyond history, literature, or the social sciences as narrowly conceived. It is clear from the texts of both The Family Idiot and Shibue Chūsai that, while their

MORI GAI AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

95

authors believe in the irreducibility of historical facts, they nevertheless refuse to be limited by them. In writing on the genesis of another historical work, Ōgai, discussing his interjection of imagination into the data he had available to him, wrote concerning an incident he created: ‘At least I would like to think it happened that way. If I were writing a novel, I could merely write that it was so and not waste words in the fashion I have…historians, seeing what I have written, will no doubt criticize me for my willfulness. Novelists, on the other hand, will laugh at my persistence.’11 Sartre for his part speaks of the fact that as ‘each piece of data is set in its place, [each] becomes a portion of the whole, which is constantly being created…a man is never an individual; it would be more fitting to call him a universal singular. Summed up and for this reason universalized by his epoch, he in turn resumes it by reproducing himself in it as singularity.’12 In the end the work of both Sartre and of Ōgai reveals that the attitudes and the subjective motivations of the writer and the researcher are crucial and irreducible. A self-awareness of such compositional motives both on the part of the writer and his reader can thus allow for a particular richness of speculation which carries its own special freight of human truth. It takes courage to see significance beyond what are usually termed ‘objective facts,’ and many writers would prefer not to try. Sartre and Ōgai, each in his own way, realized the efficacy, indeed the inevitability, of the fact that wise and fruitful analysis begins with self-analysis. They had the courage to reveal themselves as well as what they knew of their putative subjects. Many critics of both writers have made the mistake of attempting to reduce this daring methodology to a matter of the subjectivity of the author and the quality of his individual personality. Yet Sartre and Ōgai did not merely slip into solipsism, into writing about themselves. Rather they seized the possibilities of a rich reciprocity between themselves, as authors, with their chosen material. Neither put themselves above their subjects, but had the peculiar courage to face the men they chose to portray on the most personal and intimate level. That reciprocity in turn allowed their examinations of motive, fact, and speculation to transcend the historical differences between them as writers and their subject matter. That reciprocity, finally, gives a profoundly human dimension to their studies, for the reader too can come to grasp, while learning the limitations of what he might ever ‘know,’ much that is important about Flaubert, Ōgai, Sartre, and Chūsai. Reflecting mirrors? Perhaps, but the images are sharp, and such reflections may represent the only level of historical truth that we can genuinely come to possess. NOTES 1. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. ix. 2. See, for example, various entries in Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), for an explanation of this complex term. 3. In the case of Sartre the reader is particularly fortunate to have a wise guide to this difficult text in Sartre & Flaubert by Hazel Barnes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 4. Sartre, The Family Idiot, p. x. 5. Ibid., p. ix. 6. Ibid., p. x. 7. Ibid., p. ix. 8. Mori Ōgai zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1972), vol. 4, p. 46. 9. Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 52–53. 10. Since this writing, a meticulous and touching study of Io by Edwin McClellan has appeared, Woman in the Crested Kimono (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), which sheds light on the whole period. 11. Mori Ōgai zenshū, vol. 4, p. 233. 12. Sartre, The Family Idiot, p. ix.

First published in Amy Vladeck Heinrich (ed.), Currents in Japanese Culture, New York, Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 253–262

10 The Metamorphosis of Disguise: Isben, Sōseki and Ōgai

OVER THE YEARS, both Japanese and foreign scholars have speculated about the significance of the often complex personal relationships among modern Japanese writers. These connections sometimes determined their individual artistic trajectories and, more often than not, helped shape important developments in their personal lives as well. It has therefore always surprised me that the two figures now regarded as the literary masters of the Meiji period (1868–1911), Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) and Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), could be said to have remained virtually unacquainted. It is true that Ōgai was older by a few years and had gone to Europe a generation earlier than Sōseki did, but nevertheless the respective prominence of both men should surely, in the natural course of events, have put them together. Or so I supposed. A close reading of the evidence revealed a few traces of contact.1 Ōgai, answering a newspaper questionnaire in 1910, indicated that he had met Sōseki once or twice and that he admired what little of the author’s work he had then read. When the younger author died, Ōgai attended his funeral. For his part, Sōseki, who once described Ōgai’s writing as possessing a kind of ‘melancholy, ironic elegance,’ wrote briefly in 1916, just at the end of his own life, of his admiration for such historical stories of Ogai as Sakai jiken (The incident at Sakai, 1914) and Kuriyama Daizen (1915). Whether Sōseki knew about and had read Ōgai’s much-admired translations of European writers, he did not indicate; with Sōseki’s strong interest in English literature, however, he may not have been particularly attracted to the works by the German and Scandinavian authors whom Ōgai admired (Goethe, Hofmansthal, Andersen, and so on). In a letter written to a friend in 1909, Sōseki mentions that he regretted missing the opportunity to see in the autumn of that year the famous production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, translated by Ōgai, which inaugurated the celebrated activities of Japan’s first modern theater company, Osanai Kaoru’s Free Theatre. Sōseki goes on to say, however, that ‘I heard it was very interesting.’2 Physical proximity and extended personal contact represent one kind of shared knowledge. This opportunity the two men did not have or at least did not take pains to create. Although the two writers spent no significant moments together, they did carry on an important intellectual exchange through what Marcel Proust would have identified as their ‘real selves,’ that is, through the medium of their own writings. Here, the evidence is clear, indeed revelatory. Ōgai himself sought to touch the spirit of the younger novelist through an ingenious and touching strategy of literary impersonation. The implicit friendship between these two men found its expression in two novels. Each in its own way deals with the emotional circumstances surrounding the transmission of ideas from one artist, and so those of his generation, to the next.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

97

In 1908, Sōseki published his novel Sanshirō, which describes the life of a young man who leaves the countryside to go to Tokyo in order to study and make his way in the modern world. The narrative (now available in English in an accomplished translation by Jay Rubin), which provides a charming portrait of an appealing and diffident youth, was immediately popular. Despite its relative slightness and laconic style, readers apparently understood the book’s more serious overtones, which suggested the urgent need for spiritual independence felt by many young people in the later decades of the Meiji period. Ōgai certainly knew of, and read, the novel. At this point in his career, despite his time-consuming duties as surgeon general of the Japanese army, Ōgai was busy again writing fiction after a hiatus of many years. In Ōgai’s 1909 novel Vita Sexualis, the protagonist Kanai remarks that he has examined and admired the new novel by Sōseki. Sanshirō thus came to serve Ōgai as a model, foil, and spur, permitting him to create his own version of the interior life of a young man, which he published in serial form from March 1910 to August 1911 as Seinen (Youth).3 Both novels follow a similar trajectory: a young man comes to Tokyo, where slowly and painfully, he learns of the complexities and ambiguities of adult life. Intellectually, both protagonists come to know something of the complex, occasionally dispiriting, nature of the political, social, and moral issues facing the country at the end of the Meiji period. Both take their first steps toward emotional development and maturity in seeking to understand women and the nature of their hold on men. In this regard, the narratives parallel each other. In tonality, however, the two works remain somewhat different, to the extent that the casual reader may not think to compare them. This gap in percep tion suggests something about the two authors’ differing artistic attitudes and literary techniques. Nevertheless, it is clear that Youth represents among other things, Ōgai’s homage to Sōseki. Sanshirō begins a conversation between the two writers, and Youth continues and expands on it. Thus it is in this form of exchange, at least from Ōgai’s point of view, that the two writers can ‘meet’ and exchange ideas in print. More striking still, given the nature of both novels, is the fact that it was the eminent Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) who provided the connecting link for both. Apparently, Natsume Sōseki himself made no special study of Ibsen, insofar as I have been able to determine. Nevertheless, the great dramatist’s name was in the air and also on the page in a variety of Japanese translations. The work of the playwright and the power of his advanced ideas, particularly those concerning the role of women in society, had as powerful an effect among intellectuals in Tokyo as they did in London, Paris, or New York. In Sanshirō, Sōseki had already picked up the fashionable lingo: Minako, the lovely and free-spirited girl to whom the protagonist is attracted, is often referred to as an ‘Ibsen girl,’ and the playwright’s name turns up a number of times during the course of the novel. At one point, Sōseki even writes that England itself is not sufficiently ‘Ibsen conscious.’ Hirota, one of Sanshirō’s mentors, discusses the matter in a lightly ironic fashion suggesting as well that from Sōseki’s point of view, these European enthusiasms perhaps need not be taken too seriously. Look at England. Egoism and altruism have been in perfect balance there for centuries. That’s why it doesn’t move. That’s why it doesn’t progress. The English are a pitiful lot—they’ve got no Ibsen, no Nietzsche. They’re all puffed up like that, but look at them from the outside and you can see them hardening, turning into fossils.4 In the end, at least in terms of the tonality created by Sōseki for Sanshirō, Ibsen seems to be more of a passing fad than a point of philosophical repair. On the other hand, Ōgai was far more involved with Ibsen, as both an intellectual and a translator. Indeed, it was Ōgai who did more than almost anyone else to make the works of Ibsen available to Japanese

98

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF DISGUISE: ISBEN, SSEKI AND GAI

readers and theatergoers. He translated parts of Ibsen’s poetic Brand as early as 1903 and, after Osanai’s staging of his John Gabriel Borkman translation in 1909, went on to create effective Japanese versions of Ghosts in 1911 and A Doll’s House in 1913. Both Youth and Sanshirō share one concern, although as I mentioned earlier, the literary strategies that each author chose to articulate this concern differ greatly. The driving force behind both narratives is the need to explore the question of how new ideas can be transmitted from one generation to the next and how those ideas, linked to the human experience of the younger generation, can be transformed into true experiential knowledge. For Japan at this moment in its history, such matters were crucial, as one means after another was sought to allow the society to transform itself into a modern nation. Given the period in which Ōgai and Sōseki wrote, the use of the realistic novel was perhaps the inevitable choice as a literary vehicle. Ōgai chose Goethe as his model, and Sōseki sometimes looked to Meredith for literary strategies and techniques. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that Sōseki treats his material in an ironic, sometimes humorous fashion, and Ōgai was intent on revealing the passion with which the young (well, his young) attempt to seize on new ideas, particularly those concepts imported from abroad that would necessarily play a role in shaping their own lives. The student discussions in Youth may seem too heavily laden with intellectual freight to a modern reader, perhaps even naïve—but they represent a conscientious and often ingenious attempt by the novelist to document how the passions in one mind can find the means to influence another in the realm of ideas. Sōseki’s descriptions of that process are more indirect. At least, they remained indirect in his fiction. But Sōseki was well known as an essayist and speaker as well. A number of his lectures that appeared in print, such as ‘Watakushi no kōjinshugi’ (My Individualism, 1914) or ‘Gendai Nihon no kaika’ (The Civilization of Modern-Day Japan, 1911), represented, and still represent, powerful cultural statements that even now seem, in their artfully rambling way, to sum up the great moral and social issues that Japan faced in the modern period.5 It is in this role as lecturer that Ōgai chose to present his vision of Sōseki in Youth. Likewise, the transmission of ideas in this relatively direct fashion constitutes Ōgai’s chief strategy in his novels. Ideas are poured vigorously from one source after another into the head, and occasionally into the heart, of Jun’ichi, the protagonist. In an early section of the narrative, Jun’ichi is invited to attend a meeting at a kind of intellectuals’ club so that he can hear the speaker of the day, a certain Hirata Fuseki. It is here, too, that Jun’ichi meets Omura, an older student who soon becomes his mentor and friend. Together they listen to the lecture. Fuseki is, of course, Ōgai’s Sōseki. Fuseki’s demeanor as a speaker seems to match closely other descriptions that have been recorded of Sōseki as a public figure. ‘Fuseki moved his body toward the table in a listless manner. He waited a certain time for the conversations that continued here and there to die out, and then he slowly opened his mouth to speak. The tonality he chose was that of an ordinary conversation.’6 Ōgai has assigned to his speaker an unusual topic (for him). I’ve learned that all of you would like to have me say something about Ibsen. Actually, I’ve never thought very deeply about him. My knowledge concerning him is doubtless no greater than your own, I suspect. Still, it takes a lot of effort to listen to something you don’t know much about. But it is quite comfortable to sit and hear about something you already know. I think the refreshments have arrived, so please help yourselves and settle back. You’ve asked me to speak about Ibsen. Actually, I haven’t thought much about him. What I do know is perhaps the same as you know yourselves, it’s hard to listen to something you’re unfamiliar with.7

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

99

The rambling now takes focus. At first, Ibsen was Norway’s Small Ibsen, but after turning to social dramas, he became Europe’s Big Ibsen. However, when he was introduced to Japan, he again reverted to the Small Ibsen. No matter what arrives in Japan, it turns into something small. Even Nietzsche became small in our country. And so did Tolstoy. I remember something that Nietzsche once said. At that time, the earth became small, and then everything on earth became even smaller. The last race of human beings will be dancing with superb nimbleness and flexibility. ‘We’ve discovered real happiness,’ this last race will say, their eyes blinking. The Japanese import all kinds of -isms, and while they toy with these, Japanese eyes are perpetually blinking. Everything and anything is turned into small playthings fingered by the Japanese. So you don’t have to be altogether terrified if the ‘thing’ or ‘ism’ in question seems at first quite dreadful.8 This passage is striking in several senses. Ōgai has here captured something of Sōseki’s ironic manner in the rhetoric he employs, and his use of a shifting scale of size (and thus significance) between Europe and Japan is effectively polemical. Ōgai may also have borrowed this approach directly from Sōseki.9 In an early scene in Sanshirō, Sōseki’s protagonist meets on his first train ride to Tokyo an older man (who later befriends him) who tells him, ‘Remember, Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan, surely, is the inside of your head. Don’t ever surrender yourself- not to Japan, not to anything.’10 Nevertheless, Fuseki’s remarks about Ibsen were not likely to have come from the mouth of the historical Sōseki. Here Fuseki has metamorphosed back into Ōgai. The references, particularly those to Nietzsche, suggest a familiarity with these texts that belongs to Ōgai, through his extensive reading in German philosophy. If Sōseki knew these works as well, he certainly made no extended references to Nietzsche in this particularly mordant fashion in his own writings. Here, therefore, the reader is presented with a triple set of masks as complicated as any found in a medieval nō play. Through a sort of double impersonation, Ōgai is able to underscore and validate by European example the ideas he found in Sanshirō that so resonated with his own. Fuseki next discusses what he calls Ibsen’s ‘worldly self,’ which he locates in Peer Gynt, and then goes on to stress that Ibsen possessed other, more important elements in his character: Yet Ibsen was not merely that sort of person. In addition, he possessed a social self, and it was this aspect of himself that he really wished to present. It was this side of himself that he exhibited in Brand. Why was it that Ibsen wanted to take a rope and pull off the rotten fetters of convention? Having achieved his freedom, he had no intention of throwing himself into the mire. He wanted to cut through the wind with his strong wings; he wanted to fly high and far.11 Jun’ichi and the rest of the audience are spellbound as they hear these words. In Sanshirō, Sōseki had implicitly urged the young to expand their minds enough to encompass the world. Now a similar message, conveyed through Ibsen and Ōgai, has become both urgent and explicit. In Youth, Jun’ichi’s encounter with Ibsen, via Fuseki, becomes the driving force pushing him toward his quest for self-understanding. In his novel, Ōgai seems to have given Sōseki, by way of Fuseki, pride of place in the pantheon of those who might spur on the younger generation; it is he who has the public’s ear, he whose work can truly inspire. In fact, Ōgai has provided a fictional version of an occasion that never took place. Sōseki did give a celebrated public lecture on the role of the artist a year or so before Ōgai wrote Youth, and some Japanese

100

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF DISGUISE: ISBEN, SSEKI AND GAI

scholars of that period assumed that this occasion may have served as the pretext for this striking scene in Ogai’s novel. Perhaps it goes without saying that Sōseki did not speak about Ibsen on that occasion or, insofar as I can determine, on any other similar one. In the end, this speech is really Ōgai’s, put into the mouth of Sōseki/Fuseki. Here Ōgai uses a clever technique of multiple reinforcement, by means of masks behind which Ōgai can project his own voice, thereby reinforcing his deepest concerns.12 This multiple displacement is a trenchant example of Ogai’s ability to create a literary strategy he deems suitable for his literary and philosophical purposes. During the whole restless period of Ōgai’s creative life (until the resolution of his conflicting artistic impulses in his final phase that began several years later when he began to write successful stories in a historical mode), he sought one means after another by which to join his own sense of moral earnestness such a powerful component in all his works with persuasive new literary ideas and devices, many adapted from works he so admired by his European contemporaries. It also is clear that Ōgai had no intention of ‘deceiving’ his readers; much of his fiction in this period was written not to beguile but to inform. He had no wish to prevent his readers from recognizing the literary games and puzzles he was playing; indeed, recognizing these games was, in his eyes, part of the pleasure to be gained from reading his work. This kind of literary model has been, of course, far more common in continental Europe than it has been in the Anglo-American tradition. A writer like the critic-sometimes-turned-novelist George Steiner comes to mind as a suitable contemporary example. In his 1981 Portage of San Christobal, dealing with Hitler, or his 1993 Proofs and Three Parables, concerning the collapse of belief in Marxist doctrines in Eastern Europe, the power and tension of ideas—rather than plot or character —inform their pitch, tone, and emotional thrust. In literary texts constructed along these lines, intellectual understanding, rather than emotional response, is the privileged means to grasp the core, the totality of meaning in the work. Ōgai’s commitment to the importance of the life of the mind in the service of both self and nation (his writings swing from one pole to the other during these years) may, it has been sometimes argued, have derived from the moral earnestness of his Tokugawa Confucian heritage. It is certainly true that in Youth, Ōgai reveals his belief in the importance of dedication to self-understanding, both intellectual and emotional, to be harnessed in the pursuit of a higher truth. In that regard, even though Youth deals with Japan at the end of the first decade of this century, the novel stands—in terms of its philosophical underpinnings and its subterranean moral fervor—as a precursor by three or four years of those magisterial, probing, sometimes visionary works of fiction on larger historical subjects that came to the fore during the last decade of Ōgai’s writing career. Given the urgency and power of Ōgai’s moral convictions, it is not surprising that he himself appears so close to the surface of his writing. Though quite capable of creating characters that stand on their own in the works he composed during this period (Otama, for example, in Gan [Wild Geese], 1911, or the erratic, disturbing Setsuzō in the brilliant, unfinished Kaijin [Ashes], 1912), the kinds of characters Ōgai creates, who in their anguish seek to possess a true moral fire, most resemble the author himself. In some ways, this is not surprising, since Ōgai felt that he was to continue on this quest throughout his life. It was only with the composition of his historical stories, beginning with ‘Okitsu Yagoemon no isho’ (The Last Will and Testament of Okitsu Yagoemon) in 1912, that the search to represent a character capable of possessing a genuine moral fervor could be displaced from the author’s own persona to a historical subject. In the last phase of his work, Ōgai found himself freed from the weight of his own ego. But when removed, the masks in Youth still reveal only Ōgai himself. Many Japanese who admire Ōgai understand this aspect of his moral quest. The eminent Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) —himself a disciple of Natsume Sōseki—in remarks written in

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

101

1952 on Ōgai’s novel, captured a sense of the unusual nature of Ōgai’s moral and intellectual energy. For Watsuji, Ōgai’s Jun’ichi did not represent the image of any real or typical student but, rather, disclosed the interior world of Ōgai himself, both his powerful intellectual abilities and an inner force of character. Youth was being serialized in the journal Subaru when I was around twenty-one or twenty-two. I read the novel, fully aware that its subject matter dealt with my own generation. Yet there was no erudite youth such as the protagonist known to me among my acquaintances. Looking back, it seems clear to me now that for his novel, Ōgai used such effective materials as his mental state when he returned from Kokura to Tokyo, his study of the French language while living in Kokura, and his new interest in the literary arts of France. Therefore his protagonist, supposedly a man of our own age, possessed all the precocious emotional responses of a literary master well into his forties. For Watsuji, Jun’ichi and Ōgai are the same; Jun’ichi is a kind of literary holograph created in the mind of the writer himself. Nevertheless, it must be said that since Ōgai set out to picture a young man, the results did not seem unnatural, even though his protagonist did exhibit such responses. This fact stands as proof that when Ōgai himself was a young man, he possessed the same sorts of precocious responses himself.13 Ōgai’s desire to convince his readers of the necessity for an intellectually and spiritually committed life was the driving force behind the composition of Youth. In trying to achieve his literary purposes, however, Ōgai seemed aware that he needed to move beyond the model of himself in whatever way he could. Through his metamorphosis into the voices of Sōseki and Ibsen—both representing figures that Ōgai deeply admired—he attempted to add confirmation, resonance, and depth to his arguments. Should such a confluence be dismissed as a sort of ‘influence study’? To do so, I think, would be to miss much that is striking in Ōgai’s literary methods. For what he sets out to do in this passage, as well as in other, later sections of Youth, is to show how a set of ideas, mediated through a figure of respect, can ignite the thoughts and emotions of the young. Fuseki must interpret Ibsen for younger Japanese, just as Ōgai had to interpret them both for his readers. These are the techniques required for the passage of ideas from one mind to another and are precisely the technique that Ōgai set out to illustrate in his novel. As it has sometimes been said, if art is made up of prior artistic examples plus something of the artist’s own personal experience, then Ogai’s novel is one example of how this paradigm can be illustrated. In Youth, Ōgai set out to portray the intellectual and emotional environment in which ideas can be transmitted. In order to accomplish this, he made free use of his ‘friends of the spirit,’ Sōseki and Ibsen, in order to show how this could be done. In hindsight, at least, Ōgai’s literary effort would seem to be a gesture of artistic generosity. NOTES 1. In his meticulously researched article, ‘Mori Ōgai to Natsume Sōseki,’ Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō, November 1992, pp. 41–47, Yamazaki Kazuhide disclosed information concerning several occasions on which the two presumably did meet, mostly at meetings of haiku enthusiasts. Remarkably enough, both writers lived (at different periods) in the same Tokyo house, now reassembled in the outdoor Meijimura museum, near Nagoya. Ōgai lived there from 1890 to 1892, in the period just after his return from German)’; Sōseki lived in the house immediately after his return from London in 1903. Evidently, neither knew of the other writer’s period of residence there.

102

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF DISGUISE: ISBEN, SSEKI AND GAI

2. The letter, dated November 29, 1909, is reproduced in Sōseki zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1935), vol. 16, p. 762. 3. A recent complete English translation of Seinen by Sanford Goldstein and Shoichi Ono can be found in Mori Ōgai, Youth and Other Stories (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 373–517. 4. Natsume Sōseki, Sanshirō trans. Jay Rubin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), p. 123. 5. Good translations by Jay Rubin of these two lectures can be found in Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro: A Novel and Selected Essays (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1992). 6. Mori Ōgai, Seinen, Ogai zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1971), vol. 2, p. 23. 7. Ibid., pp. 23–24. 8. Ibid., p. 24. 9. Sōseki was not, in fact, the only writer and intellectual who, returning from Europe, sensed a diminishment in scale when back in Japan. The poet Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), for example, back from Paris in 1909, composed in the following year this mordant commentary: The Country of Netsuke

Cheekbones protruding, lips thick, eyes triangular, with a face like a netsuke carved by the master Sangorō blank, as if stripped of his soul not knowing himself, fidgety life-cheap vainglorious small & frigid, incredibly smug monkey-like, fox-like, flying-squirrel-like, mudskipper-like, minnow-like, gargoyle-like, chip-from-a-cup-like Japanese Takamura Kōtarō, in Hiroaki Sato, trans., A Brief History of Imbecility: Poetry and Prose of Takamura Kōtarō (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), p. 3. 10. Rubin, Sanshirō, p. 15. 11. Ōgai zenshū, p. 24. 12. In other works written during this period, Ōgai explains the use of this technique, notably in his 1909 one-act play kamen (Masks). Here the protagonist, a doctor, explains to his young student the need to achieve an effective exterior impersonation in order to find the means to express oneself while managing to carry on through all the vicissitudes of one’s life. 13. Watsuji Tetsurō, ‘Ōgai no omoide,’ in Watsuji Tetsurō zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1963), vol. 20, p. 460.

Part IV Japan’s Modern Theatre

First published in Monumenta Nipponica, Volume XXXI, Number 3, Autumn 1976, pp. 275–298

11 Four Plays by Tanaka Chikao

MORI ŌGAI (1862–1922), the earliest of the great modern Japanese writers to undergo the experience of living in Europe, was profoundly influenced by his contact with the intellectual and social life he found there. These same experiences, after his return, set up in Ōgai’s own mind a certain psychological distance between him and others of his generation. In his 1910 novel Seinen (‘Youth’) his protagonist, the aspiring young writer Jun’ichi, poses the question that has continued to dominate the intellectual and spiritual life of the nation ever since. ‘For what reason has the Self been liberated? What to do? That is the problem.’ Ōgai and certain others of his generation were first able to pose the question. Succeeding generations have lived it. This ‘malady of the soul’, as Ōgai termed it, produced in him the stimulus for much of his own best work, and many other writers of the highest reputation in Japan have since then, in one way or another, concerned themselves with their own versions of the same ‘malady’. Among those who write for the modern theatre, Tanaka Chikao (b. 1905) has perhaps more than any other relentlessly examined this question. Kenneth Burke writes that the poet will naturally tend to write about that which most deeply engrosses him—and nothing more deeply engrosses a man than his burdens.’1 Tanaka has lived with his own sense of burden, a loneliness caused by the loss of a spiritual tradition. Tanaka first gained a sense of loss from his observations of the society around him, and then, having grasped a sense of the spiritual difficulties of his time, manifested this understanding in his own artistic work. To continue with Kenneth Burke, ‘…the true locus of assertion [of the poet] is not in the disease but in the structural powers by which the poet encompasses it.’ Tanaka chose to develop and exert his structural powers on the modern Japanese theatre at a time, just after World War II, when the results of his efforts to express his deepest personal concerns coincided with a form of dramatic art that, because of its own short history, was in need of considerable development. By expanding the resources of the modern Japanese drama to create structures to suit the urgent needs of his ‘disease’, Tanaka managed to produce a number of plays that, as a body, form perhaps the most compelling statement of the modern Japanese spirit in that form. He has also, by his example, brought into possibility a dramaturgy able to deal with such questions in terms appropriate to the contemporary theatrical and intellectual milieu. If the writers of contemporary drama in Japan feel able to indulge their philosophical aspirations, they have been shown the way by the expanded dramaturgy made available to them by Tanaka. The structures he forced himself to create have enriched a generation. In some ways, the fact that Tanaka Chikao chose the theatre was something of an accident, at least in the beginning. He came from a rather cosmopolitan background, considering the time in which he was born. His father, like Mori Ōgai, studied medicine in Germany and was strongly influenced by his teacher at Tokyo University, the German physician Erwin Baelz, who was a major intellectual force on several

FOUR PLAYS BY TANAKA CHIKAO

105

generations of Japanese young men. Tanaka’s father eventually went to practice medicine in Nagasaki, and Tanaka grew up in the city that had one of the longest cosmopolitan traditions in Japan. The Portuguese missionaries had come there; the Dutch and Chinese had managed to maintain an influence there during the Tokugawa period when the rest of the country was isolated from the world. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, hundreds of families who had continued to practice hidden and private rituals of Christianity were then able to worship freely, and the presence of these people in Nagasaki gave a peculiar flavor, in speech and in attitude, to the psychology of the region. Like other intellectually-minded students of his time, Tanaka was interested in Western ideas, and he went to Tokyo as a university student to take up the study of French literature. In 1924, the year after his arrival, he attended opening performances at Osanai Kaoru’s Tsukiji Shōgekijō (‘Tsukiji Little Theatre’), the first professional acting company for modern drama in Japan.2 Excited by what he saw, he joined several small troupes with the vague idea of trying his hand at acting. Finally in 1927 he found a group that he thought might help him to understand the Western theatre, the Shingeki Kenkyūshō (‘New Theatre Research Institute’) begun by Kishida Kunio and his associates.3 Kishida himself had studied at the celebrated Vieux Colombier of Jacques Copeau in 1921 and 1922; his French was excellent and he had the best grasp of modern European dramaturgy of anyone in Japan at the time. Copying Copeau’s example, Kishida felt that such elements as acting (especially voice technique and stage movement), set design, and other aspects of the Western theatrical experience needed serious study before any satisfactory results could be obtained in Japan. Impressed by Kishida’s dedication, Tanaka joined the group and remained, during the short life of the Institute, its star pupil. At that time Tanaka had no particular ambition to be a dramatist but took an interest in all aspects of the theatre; and surely those unfocused enthusiasms gave him a breadth of practical experience that served him well at later stages in his career. Tanaka’s first literary influences, via Kishida, were French. He was much impressed by the plays of Charles Vildrac, a dramatist, now unperformed, whose works, especially Le pacqueboat Tenacity, produced by Copeau in 1920, are filled with poetic and evocative dialogue, a style highly influential in France at that time. Japanese traditional drama, through Kabuki, had sufficient examples of poetic and fanciful dialogue, but dramatists wishing to write in terms of modern psychology found those examples useless. A writer such as Vildrac, on the other hand, seemed to show a means to compose dialogue that, although realistic, could retain a philosophic suggestiveness. Tanaka has continued to acknowledge his debt to Vildrac,4 and although his own plays bear at best a passing resemblence to those poetic idylls of the common man in France after World War I, the lessons he absorbed from Vildrac were important. Tanaka remained good friends with Kishida after the demise of the Institute in 1929, and in the early 1930s, Kishida asked him for some contributions for a new magazine Gekisaku (‘Playwriting’). Tanaka complied with articles on problems of speech and dialogue on the modern stage, then followed by composing a play Ofukuro (a title that might be rendered as ‘Ma’ or ‘Mom’) to illustrate his ideas as to how to achieve natural speech on the stage. The play was a great success in printed form and was chosen for a stage production in the same year. Ofukuro, although a slight piece, showed a fluency of language most unusual for plays of the period (other than those by Kishida himself), and at twenty-eight, Tanaka found himself, almost by accident, a promising dramatist. Yet the promises were not fulfilled. Tanaka wrote a few other short experiments and directed several productions without producing anything of real importance in terms of theatrical craft. In 1934 he married Tsujimura Sumie, herself a writer of more popular drama. Until after the war she enjoyed a higher reputation as a writer than did her husband. Tanaka joined Kishida’s own theatre troupe, the Bungakuza

106

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

(‘Literary Theatre’) when it opened in 1938 and directed a number of plays for Kishida. Tanaka seemed little more than a gifted enthusiast for the theatre. The dark years of the war, when Tanaka was in his late thirties, appear to have wrought the enormous change in him that produced an outpouring of work that began in 1945 and still continues today. Tanaka has often been asked, first about his long silence as a dramatist, then about the great deepening of his art that followed. His answers, although uniformly reticent, nevertheless suggest certain forces in his inner life brought into tension by the war. Tanaka’s brother, a doctor like his father, was killed in the Philippines in 1943. In 1944, Tanaka left Tokyo, then under constant attack, and went to stay with his parents in Nagasaki. He eventually retired with them to the countryside and so escaped the atomic bomb blast that destroyed much of the city on 8 August 1945. Tanaka felt strongly the ironies involved in the destruction by the West of the very city that had come closest of any community in Japan in penetrating the essence of Western culture because of the adoption of Christianity by so many of its citizens. He also appeared to feel in this destruction the uselessness of everything his father’s generation had stood for. In a sense, Tanaka seemed to have rediscovered his own cultural and spiritual background just as it literally fell into ruins. Tanaka’s contemplation of those ruins and his attempt to search out some transcendental meaning beyond the emptiness he felt provided the stimulus for all his writing after this point. Since he knew the theatre as a métier, he naturally turned to the theatre as a means of expression, and his dramas might well be studied as a series of experiments to establish dramatic forms appropriate to his ideas. Some are more successful experiments than others, but all seem related to his central theme of spiritual malaise. The drama being written and produced in Japan, both just before and after the war, was influenced by a Marxist aesthetic and remarkably ill-suited to the kind of metaphysical theatre Tanaka felt a necessity to create. Tanaka’s own concerns, forcing themselves on that dramaturgy, transformed it. Tanaka has expressed those concerns most succinctly in an interview of 1970. Asked to comment on the major themes that inform the main body of his work, he replied as follows. Man’s ego is for him the absolute. He thinks that he alone is absolute. Yet there are obstacles to this belief. One is woman. To move to quite another realm, there is, in the case of Japan, the Emperor System. Yet on closer examination, the concept of man’s ego as absolute is certainly seen to be in error, isn’t it? Further reflection reveals the existence of some transcendent being beyond the ego. At such a point, the real meaning of ego becomes the consciousness of the providence of that being. What results is an acceptance, a belief in such a providence.5 Such is the personal side of Tanaka’s vision. Yet he insisted that the political implications of such a view of the world are equally important to understand. No separation of these two aspects of life, the personal and the public, can be possible, he stressed; indeed, for him, the greatest danger of all is a failure to see the intimate connections between them. If the concept of self is made to expand until the idea of the Divine is introduced, then ideas of another kind of divinity are introduced as well, those of the Emperor System. The Emperor System has been such a tremendous force in our country, for whatever reason; a comparison of Western religions, especially Christianity, with Japanese religious beliefs, which have always upheld the Emperor System, will easily point up the differences involved. In Tanaka’s view, a grasp of the connection between self and society is of the utmost importance.

FOUR PLAYS BY TANAKA CHIKAO

107

…such attitudes are common to the Asian mind and are especially prevalent in the typical Japanese spiritual attitudes, where the sense of seeking after salvation is closely allied with the warrior ethic. These ideas are prevalent; and underneath, linked to them, lurks a dangerous connection with the concept of an Emperor System. It is precisely my feeling of danger about those possible connections that I wish to make plain in my own work. Such is my motive.6 Tanaka’s sense of spiritual malaise, on both the individual and the social level, caused him to create in his dramas a complex world of danger in which his characters, searching for one kind of absolute after another, fall prey to their own limitations and their own misguided convictions. The plays provide no answers but are rather records of a search, artistic manifestations of an urgent sense of yearning. Tanaka places his searchers in a number of different areas of human concern, but the demands his characters place on themselves are always of enormous intensity. Tanaka’s own search for self-understanding was evidently a long one; he underwent an operation for temporary blindness in 1947, an event that, he indicated, had a profound effect on him and his view of the world. (The incident is perhaps reflected in his play Chidori, discussed below.) In 1952, his wife and children were baptized as Catholics. Tanaka, however, if the plays serve as any indication, continued his own lonely pursuit of a higher level of self-awareness, without an abdication to dogma of any sort. Tanaka was asked shortly after the war to help train young actors for the Haiyūza (‘Actor’s Theatre’) by Senda Koreya, the director of the troupe, who remembered his articles written before the war. While involved in this project, Tanaka began to compose short plays as an exercise for his students. In 1953, he wrote one of the last, and surely the best, a one-act play called Kyōiku. The play was given its first staging in the same year. The title might be translated as ‘Education’, but in the sense in which Flaubert employed the word in his novel Education Sentimentale. Indeed the play is very French in tone, perhaps showing a last influence from those early years spent with Kishida. The characters have French names and the play is filled with references to French culture, many of which require some indulgence on the part of a Western reader, since they are somewhat naive. Nevertheless this short play is absorbing and powerful in its dramatic thrust, as full of predatory voluptuousness as the lines of Baudelaire quoted by its young heroine Nellie at various points throughout the play. One of Tanaka’s major concerns in the play is that of stage language. He set himself the problem of finding a means to raise the level of the dialogue past that of ordinary conversation available to purely naturalistic characters. By having his heroine quote Baudelaire, he provides his audience with an intense poetic horizon toward which his own dialogue climbs steadily at the moments of greatest tension. His solutions, highly successful, manage to explode the structure of the well-made play while keeping enough of its framework to reassure his spectators that his characters are believable. The play is constructed of a series of interwoven conversations that form the ‘education’ of Nellie, providing successive layers of exhilaration, self-abasement, and abnegation. The ambiguousness, the very contradictions of the conversations, drive the drama forward. The play opens with a lengthy talk between Nellie and her father Roualt, who lives apart from his family and only visits them once a month. Nellie has up to now clung to her mother Hélène and seen her father as a wastrel, which he certainly is; Roualt, however, is suddenly angered by his daughter’s attitude and tells her that she is not his child. Her real father, he insists, was a friend of his named François, who fell in love with Hélène, married her, then died from pneumonia two months later. Before the marriage Roualt had courted her but without success; he even gave her a pearl necklace. But she never took any interest in him. After the death of François, however, Roualt took over the marriage to help bring up the child. But, he insists, he never had physical relations with Hélène. He describes their wedding night.

108

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

ROUALT: On our wedding night, I put your mother to bed, all by herself; I spoke in a soft voice, ever so soft, and my next word was ‘goodbye’, and I withdrew. I swear it. I never touched a hair of her head… At that time, your mother had a dream. I somehow seemed to see her spirit, flickering, wavering like a spring wind. NELLIE: A dream? What kind of dream? ROUALT: Your mother is a woman for whom a dream can be a tremendous experience. Women have this ability, you know…of dreams. Just as I said goodbye and was about to leave the room…. [with difficulty] suddenly two frail arms flung themselves around my neck. A long sigh, a touch of spring wind, seemed to warm my cheeks. [Nellie begins to pace about nervously.] ROUALT: It seemed to me that I had never heard a woman’s voice sound so beautiful…as though she were whispering my fate… [in a wounded voice], ‘Kiss my mouth, François! Kiss my breasts, François!’ NELLIE: François! ROUALT: The man your mother really loved. NELLIE: I would have killed her on the spot. My mother. ROUALT: You cannot kill a woman who is dreaming. It is then that a woman is at her most…deeply… beautiful. I put your mother back on her bed, just…just as François might have done. Then, saying nothing, I left the room. And I was filled with some sort of extraordinary happiness. Ah, the echoes of organ music…a pale angel, slightly flushed with living pink, wrapped in white wedding robes, reflecting the red, the green and yellow of the colored glass…the purity of white roses, blooming in the darkened chamber! That for once in my own life, however stained, I should have had the deep joy of a day like that…of such a terrible day as that.7 Nellie tries to grasp her father’s attitude, but he insists she can understand neither love nor loneliness. His secret revealed to advance his daughter’s ‘education’, Roualt now leaves the family for good. The next visitor is Pierre, a doctor in the hospital where Nellie works, who comes to visit the family. He is fond of Nellie and her mother, whom he describes as a ‘dark angel’. He offers Nellie an eighteenth-century plate with a painting of the Virgin Mary on it. He intends the plate to be a parting gift to Nellie: he realizes that he has become obsessed with her and wants to stop seeing her while he still has the will power to make the decision. Nellie has never thought of him in such terms, and their long conversation, which makes up the body of the play, marks the second stage in her ‘education’. Pierre forces her to take cognizance of her own passionate nature and to acknowledge a constant striving within herself to fulfill the reality of her feminine being. Nellie finally responds. NELLIE: There are those who seek some purity with an absolute conviction. Something beautiful, something unadulterated. And yet surprisingly enough, don’t you think there may be a chance that they can find that purity in the midst of ordinary happiness? Perhaps you, Pierre, have come on it by just such a devious path. PIERRE: Me? NELLIE: Men… What men pursue in women is no more than a phantom. The sooner you understand this, the better.8 Pierre tells Nellie to recognize her nature and to pursue it. PIERRE: Nellie, in the future I have no idea about the kind of happiness you will seek; but whatever it is, when you find it, take this plate, with this holy image on it, break it, and throw it away. Should

FOUR PLAYS BY TANAKA CHIKAO

109

you have mastered your happiness, though, I suppose there will be no time to bother about it… On the other hand, if you find yourself unhappy, it might well serve you as a reminder of the past. When you were young. When—even for a short time—you were able, through your own means, to bring happiness to one man. And remember. This plate is not to make you remember a man. It is to bring back a memory of yourself.9 The conversation between them continues, sometimes bitter, sometimes bantering, as they reveal one observation after another each has made on the human condition. They wound, heal each other in turn. Finally Pierre, who is married himself, muses on the nature of love. PIERRE: What is it to love? I’ve thought a lot about it these past two weeks…trying to understand my own feelings…even as a married man, I’ve had to think it through. I’ve tried to analyze the question. As you said just a moment ago, and you put it so well, in fact, what is purity? There must be such a thing. Somehow, there must be some way to extract its essence. Or is it in the class of things that seems somehow fickle and uncertain? A kind of phantom…it must be. NELLIE: I don’t know…and as for what we were saying before… PIERRE: And if purity can be found, then human beings can avoid hurting each other. NELLIE: I don’t know.10 Nellie is too strong-minded to reassure Pierre with any platitudes and only recognizes a lack of fulfillment in herself. The rising crescendo of their discussion stops with the return of Nellie’s mother. Pierre soon leaves. The conversation that follows between Hélène and her daughter marks the final and most suggestive portion of the drama. Nellie is now suspicious of her mother and asks her where she has been. ‘To church, to pray for you,’ Hélène replies. Nellie accuses her of praying for her lover instead and of revenging herself on Roualt, even to the extent of wearing every time her husband visits the pearl necklace Roualt said he gave her. Nellie now demands to know who her real father is. Hélène decides to reveal her version of the situation to Nellie ‘for her education’. What she tells Nellie is entirely different from what her daughter learned from Roualt; no ground of common truth is apparent at all. First, Hélène insists that François died, not of pneumonia, but of wounds received when pushed off a mountain pass under mysterious circumstances. Confronted with this information, Nellie of course does not know what to believe. She continues to demand to know the name of her real father. As the dialogue moves close to poetry, Hélène answers her. HÉLÈNE: [Rising, she goes to pray to the little statue of Mary in the niche. She speaks slowly, in a rapture impossible to express.] Ah, the echoes of the organ…wrapped in white robes! I looked up at the Holy Mother, holding her tiny child… I felt a great clemency. That night, above my wedding bed, an angel appeared to me, rending apart my flesh. And my soul rose up. NELLIE: A knife! A knife! [During Hélène’s monologue she has picked up a knife from a tray, but at the sound of her own words she lets it fall from her hand with a kind of relief. The sound of falling metal.] HÉLÈNE: The pain…the pain! Then, all the blood of my body burst like a flower from the wound. Just then I dreamed that my lost blood was blending with his blood…giving new life. That was my dream.11 Exhausted, Hélène caresses the pearl necklace as if it were her lover, ‘in a trance, on the edge of ecstasy, the voice permitted a lonely woman.’ Hélène retires, half lost to the outside world, and Nellie, exhausted, continues to read aloud mingled lines from Baudelaire’s ‘Le Léthé’.

110

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

A mon destin, désormais mon délice, J’obéirai comme un prédestiné; Martyr docile, innocent condamné, Dont la ferveur attise le supplice, Je sucerai, pour noyer ma rancoeur, Le népenthès et la bonne ciguë Aux bouts charmants de cette gorge aiguë Qui n’a jamais emprisonné de coeur.12 Suddenly Nellie falls into a prayer-like attitude and cries out ‘a purpose! …a purpose! …give me a purpose…’ Tanaka concludes his play with the comment, ‘Her brow seems somehow pierced, as though she were putting herself through great penances.’ If Hélène is an angel darkened by delusion, Nellie’s very yearning seems to hold the hope of salvation. Nothing in the play is resolved, but the dramatic tension created is powerful and genuine. Kyōiku was quite unlike anything written for the Japanese theatre up to that time. Tanaka successfully shifted his level of dialogue from long passages of ordinary conversation to considerable heights of figurative language and back again without damage to his basic dramatic illusion, and his dialogue manages to contain discussions of abstract and philosophical issues without giving any impression of stiffness. The emotional intensity of the play increases steadily until the tensions are released at the final curtain. By setting Kyōiku in France, however, Tanaka avoided the problem of spiritual issues cast in purely Japanese terms. But in 1959, he took up as an artistic subject his own past in Nagasaki, combined with his own present concerns, both spiritual and political, and wrote a full-length play of great force, Maria no Kubi (‘Mary’s Head’), a theatrical tour-de-force considered by a number of critics as the finest play written in Japan since the war. The play was given its first professional production in the same year. The combination of elements chosen by Tanaka combine perfectly: the emotional climate of despair engendered in Japan by the atomic bomb, the long tradition of secret Christian practices carried on there, and the political movements for world peace based in the city. Maria no Kubi seems one long crisis, a yearning for spiritual freedom. The play begins in the depths of the slums of postwar Nagasaki, in the world of gangsters and prostitutes, and concludes in a ruined church, destroyed by the bombing, on a high hill overlooking the city. This upward thrust provides the basic organizing principle of the play. Tanaka calls Maria no Kubi a drama of ‘thoughts in fantasy of Nagasaki’, and the structure and language of his play show an enormous expansion over his earlier works; Kyōiku itself seems, by contrast, much more a ‘well-made play’. The cast of characters is large. Groups of people are juxtaposed against each other; later, individual characters from each group combine for the last fantastic scene. The same loosened dramatic structure is paralelled in the dialogue. Scenes of realistic speech (in Nagasaki slang) are broken by spurts of poetry. In Kyōiku, Tanaka had experimented with poetry as a means to expand the text beyond a realistic framework by quoting Baudelaire; now he found within himself the ability to write his own poetry and to absorb the technique into the basic structure of his dramatic writing. The effect of this expanded language on the reader (and presumably on the spectator, according to accounts written of the play) provides a penetration in and out of the souls of his characters. By the end of the play Tanaka removes almost completely the outer layers. The final scene becomes a spiritual exchange, a prayer in unison, of the characters assembled together in the ruined church. Among these characters are Shika, a prostitute who is also a Christian and who bears on her face a keloid scar from the bomb. Another is Shinobu, a kind of poetess who sells black-market articles in the slums and

FOUR PLAYS BY TANAKA CHIKAO

111

carries a tiny knife in a wooden scabbard to protect herself. The yearning for spiritual truth felt by these two women is one central concern of the drama. Nellie in Kyōiku might be, psychologically speaking, a sketch for either, but both these women have considerably more theatrical allure than the young French girl. The first act, which takes place in the sordid market area of the city (shown in a multilayered setting), introduces most of the characters but leaves their relationships with each other tantalizingly unclear. Shika solicits customers, Shinobu recites her poetry and tries to sell the wretched objects she carries in her pedlar’s box. The continuing juxtaposition of minor characters produces an atmosphere of frenetic activity, without hope and without purpose. Even so, certain clues are provided. A policeman tells Shinobu that the ruined church on the hill may be pulled down rather than repaired: the building is half in ruin, the statues smashed, and bits of carved stone are being stolen as souvenirs. ‘Not a happy time for Jesus,’ he concludes, ‘even his statue has a keloid scar.’ Shinobu finds a man who admires her poetry, and she tells him that, if he finds beauty in what she has written, he must join her at the ruined church to pray, should there ever be a snowy night. He agrees, but reminds her that it almost never snows in Nagasaki. A young man, Yabari, runs in and out looking for a girl with a keloid scar (‘There are so many,’ he is told in response to his inquiries.) Two men visit Shika. One, with a wooden leg, leaves broken bits of statuary in her room. The second comes to hire her, but falls in love with her instead. While they talk, a group of prostitutes on the street below tease Shinobu, fight with her, tie her up, and throw her on the ground. They find the little knife and examine it jokingly. Shika and the man continue to talk. He suspects her of being a Christian, but she turns aside his questions. He finally asks her to marry him, but she laughs him away. The act closes with a poetic sequence in which Shinobu, exhausted from the beating she has received, expresses her sense of utter loneliness and degradation; she collapses, and the man with the wooden leg, coming down the steps from Shika’s room, picks her up and carries her gently off. Tanaka now combines these sordid pieces of his puzzle to show an image of these characters greatly different from first expectations. Act II takes place in a hospital. Yabari, the young man, turns out to be a patient there, in the last stages of recovery from an operation. He left his bed the night before to pursue one of the nurses with whom he was anxious to talk. That nurse turns out to be Shika, who works in the hospital during the day. She soon appears bringing his food on a tray. Their long conversation veers into poetry as their personalities converge, then draw apart. Tanaka here begins to move the drama firmly in the direction of the metaphysical. The particular emotional energy possessed by each character is well captured. A few lines may serve, even in translation, to suggest some of the techniques employed. SHIKA: Existence for you is everything. But you take no cognizance Of what comes before existence, what comes after. Is your life as destitute as that? YABARI: It should be so: Existence is action, The action of the whole self. Not just the head, as you would have it. SHIKA: My head, My ugly, distorted face; This is my purpose, my aim in glory, This is the mark of my freedom, my own holiness. In this is the reality of human existence.13

112

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Shika sees the human condition as one of sin; Yabari sees it as one intimately involved in politics, and for him, the cause is also a possible cure. Yabari finally tells Shika why he has been attracted to her. He wants to take her to America and exhibit her as a victim of the atomic bomb. The man with the wooden leg now arrives to tell Shika that the city authorities have decided to destroy the church. Yabari, drawn to some quality he cannot yet define in Shika, is jealous and suspicious of the man with the wooden leg, who merely replies to his questions by saying that he and Shika ‘are both believers.’ He leaves with the parting remark that it has turned cold and ‘…some snow may fall.’ The scene now changes to the operating room of the hospital where a gangster, Jingorō, has a bullet removed from his body. The doctor warns him that the incident will have to be reported; one of his henchmen hints that he tried to commit suicide. Shinobu enters, looking for Shika, and begins a long conversation with Jingorō. Their exchange is patterned almost like an operatic duet, blending ordinary conversation, lyrical outbursts, and hallucination. Jingorō begins by trying to persuade Shinobu to help him escape from the hospital by pretending to be his wife. She refuses. They talk on and he becomes delirious and has a vision, in which he mentions a knife. Shinobu now knows to whom she is speaking. Jingorō is the man who, ten years before, found her as a young girl in an air-raid shelter, fed her, and gave her the tiny knife for her mother’s diamond ring, which she exchanged as a keepsake to show her gratitude. Jingorō can only ask, at the moment of his death, ‘Is there nothing, then, to the meaning of life?’ In the end Shika, who has entered, grasps his hand and tells him, ‘It is what is ahead…far, far ahead,’ in which he must have faith. The larger meaning of the events portrayed in Act II suggests that a looking back from the present can become the first step out of the prison of the self, a step that in turn can permit a looking ahead, upwards toward a transcendental view of the most intense individual concern. Act III is a working out in dramatic terms of the political implications of the human condition in which Tanaka’s characters find themselves enmeshed. The act is principally a long conversation between Shinobu’s husband Momozono, an artist seriously ill with anemia, and Yabari, who comes to interview him in his cold and wretched surroundings as a possible victim of radiation poisoning. Momozono rebuffs all the young man’s attempts to help, insisting that his illness is not a result of the bomb and that political solutions are not worthy of the moral problems posed by the destruction of Nagasaki. (Such a position was surely a courageous one for Tanaka to have taken at that time.) The setting, the old barracks dormitory where the couple live, is filled with kites on which Momozono paints abstract designs; they will be used for kite races in the coming spring. This visual symbol of Momozono’s efforts to carry on a tradition in the fashion in which he is best able is an important aspect of the total effect created in this moving scene. As Yabari leaves, Momozono tells the young man that, as an artist, he must live out his life according to his own rules. MOMOZONO: My talents, as you might have said yourself, are limited. And yet, as a human being, I have another dream I want to pursue. That dream, my dream, must be quite different from yours. How can that dream be reflected in what I do, with my own abilities? It will be the pleasure of the little time left to me to find out.14 Shinobu returns. She carries their child. She tells her husband that she has seen Jingorō and received back the knife. SHINOBU: He gave it back. MOMOZONO: Ah. And did you take it? SHINOBU: I took it. MOMOZONO: Then you are free. SHINOBU: That is what I thought too. But it’s not true. MOMOZONO: And yet, to have achieved the thing you have wished for, and for so long…

FOUR PLAYS BY TANAKA CHIKAO

SHINOBU:

113

That man is dead. He died by his own hand, they say. Yet I killed him. I am the one. My sin, the very sin I was born with, killed him.15

Momozono knows that he too is dying. MOMOZONO: I don’t really understand myself. Why do I have to die? If I have a sin, it was in having a certain pride, and in making you, as my companion, share a poor life. That is about the size of it. Nothing more. The crime of any common, weak-spirited man. Why do we have this consciousness of ourselves? What good does it do us? And how pitiful that a man should be killed for something like sin…they talk like that. Everyone cries out at the horror of the atomic bomb. And yet a consciousness of that horror—what good does it do? The point is not to decide never to use such bombs in a war. The point is to decide never to go to war. In man is evil, there is sin in him. We cover it over with our talk of righteousness and freedom, hoping that the real distinctions between good and bad will disappear. And in all this there waves.16 is nothing for us to cling to…we are washed about by the Shinobu, listening in distress, looks up and sees that snow has begun to fall. The scene changes to a printing shop; snow can be seen pouring down outside the windows. The kind man who bought the book of Shinobu’s poems in the opening scene is helping to set type for a proclamation by the women of Nagasaki who seek to work for the peace of the world. Some voices read the text, others cry out in yearning. Church bells ring. ‘The snow is piling up, the snow…’ he muses, as the curtain falls. The brief and final Act IV takes place in the ruined church. The scene is an unreal phantasy. All the spiritual forces latent in the earlier scenes have been pushing the spectator toward this final metaphysical vision. The stage shows the ruined building, the statue of a saint with its shoulder gouged away, and, on a pile of broken building materials, the head of Mary, broken off in the bombing, which has been placed there. ‘Snow brushed off, the head has the air of resignation of a mother of the common people. One half of the face has been burned slightly black.’ In this ‘night of the falling snow’, Shika kneels alone, praying. She cries out that she has spent her life trying to bring revenge only on herself, and she asks Mary for help. Mary, in turn, asks that she be rejoined with the rest of her body, from which she has been separated for so long. Mary’s wish is to offer divine sustenance to all, her breasts are filled with holy milk. Shika and Mary both yearn for wholeness. Shinobu and the man with the wooden leg now enter, followed by the man who bought the poems and remembered his promise to join them. Shinobu and the man with the wooden leg now reveal their plan. Before the church is destroyed, they wish to remove the head and complete the statue, the rest of which they have already removed and hidden. They do this so that at some other time, in some future far ahead, Mary may again appear, whole. Shika prays: SHIKA: [Crossing herself.] Holy Mary, here, crossing ourselves, we know that we somehow have the right to pray to you. And you, Mary, we need you, you with your own keloid scar, you who must serve as eternal witness to the wind and flames of that day in August. We pray that we may take you to that hidden room and that you will keep alive the light in the endless night. The flames of our wretchedness burn. This is our prayer.17 The whole group tries to lift the head but it is too heavy. Shika faints in the effort. Mary bids them hurry. It is Shinobu who finally finds the strength to lift the head, just as another voice is heard outside (‘probably that of Yabari’, reads the stage direction). The final curtain falls.

114

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Maria no Kubi makes a powerful emotional effect. If the blackened face of Mary, along with the keloid scar of Shika, seem too theatrical as symbols, Tanaka’s effective use of the images cannot be denied. The fervor of the believers in the last act brings to mind, as it was surely intended to, those early Christians in Nagasaki who concealed their faith to escape oppression from without and to await some ‘future… some far, far future’ when they could manifest their belief again. In Tanaka’s vision, the faith, in the symbol of Mary’s head, is to be taken in pieces and preserved again from the oppression of politics, the human ego, and a pervasive sense of human failure. One need not accept Tanaka’s religious point of view any more than, say, Claudel’s, in order to admire his skill at dramatic construction and his craft in writing moving and poetically suggestive dialogue. Maria no Kubi is obviously a work of complexity in virtually every respect and, according to the testimony of those who first performed the play, the text gave the actors considerable difficulty. Neither the dialect nor the poetry was easy for them to recite, and the ambiguous and multi-layered conversations were not easy to interpret. The play was soon recognized as a masterpiece, however; the fact that Tanaka was working from within a Christian framework of ideas might conceivably have alienated his audiences, yet the choice of Nagasaki and the use of the atomic bomb issue brought to the fore problems of most intense general concern to everyone at the time. Tanaka’s next play, Chidori, written at almost the same time, and first staged in 1960, is almost as successful as Maria no Kubi in developing his theme of a thirst and yearning for love and spiritual peace. There are Christian elements in the play but, with one exception, they are far less visible than in Maria no Kubi. Chidori (‘Plover’) is the name of a young girl, and the subject of the play, on one level at least, is her own ‘education’; like Nellie, she learns who her parents were and comes to know the importance of the same ‘past and future’ so significant in the spiritual development of Shika. More important, however, is the character of Kōnoshin, the old man who is head of the Saida family, a stern caricature of a traditional Japanese father, ‘too pure, too strict, separated from everyone’. ‘If there is a Hell,’ one of the characters in the play remarks, ‘it is in that man’s heart.’ Maria no Kubi is constructed in the form of a prayer; Chidori is a festival, a fairy tale. Filled with music, the play ends with a long sequence of dancing at a village festival, during which Kōnoshin accepts his own past, and his own death, through the goodness of Chidori. The dialogue is more realistic than that of Maria no Kubi, but the dramatic structure also provides for fantasy. The scenes move back and forth from memory to the present. Dream sequences perform the same function as the poetic speeches that are scattered through the earlier plays, revealing Kōnoshin’s inner psychological state. The setting for the play is the house and garden of the Saida family; the details of the architecture and of the garden suggest a country family of considerable wealth now fallen on evil days. Kōnoshin’s major preoccupation, as it turns out, is to restore the family fortunes to what they were before World War II. On one side of the stage is a latticework door, now locked, marking the entrance to a mine that for many centuries served as a source of great wealth for the family. Act I begins as Kōnoshin, looking out over the quiet garden, remembers his experiences just at the end of the war. Much of the act is a series of dream-like scenes that show the spectator his reflections. He talks with his son Yūsaburō, killed in the war, who urges him to be kind to Chidori, at this time still a child, but Kōnoshin can only think of the glory of the family. He confides to his son, in his reverie, that he is convinced that the old mine contains radioactive ores that may restore the family fortunes. Kōnoshin is startled from his dreams by Genzō, a former landowner fallen on bad days, who has come to ask permission for Chidori to do her sword dance, at which she is already most accomplished, for the village summer festival. Kōnoshin suddenly slips into another dream from years before. His daughter Terumi and a young man, Mikage, appear in the mine. They are deeply in love and exchange their vows in a lyrical

FOUR PLAYS BY TANAKA CHIKAO

115

fashion that comes closer to the language of Maria no Kubi. Mikage is ready to go to her father for permission to marry. Kōnoshin suddenly enters, accuses the boy of stealing both the secrets of the mine and his daughter, and chases the boy into the depths of the mine. There follows the sound of falling rock and Kōnoshin reappears, saying that the boy is doubtless dead, but the audience sees him escape, clutching his left arm in pain. The vision ends and Kōnoshin is again watching Chidori dance. This time Chidori’s services for the festival are requested by Kishii, a kindly official, who reminds Kōnoshin that the festival will be attended by Occupation officials. Kōnoshin remains disdainful. Watching Chidori, Kishii is reminded of Kōnoshin’s daughter Terumi, who, he continues, disappeared under such strange circumstances. Some of the Occupation troops appear and there is a brief and rather amusing scene with the interpreter (actually Mikage, although he remains unrecognized.) Kōnoshin, left alone with his wife Rui, is troubled by memories of his daughter. He asks Rui how many children they really had. Bewildered by his question, Rui muses on the death of their son Yūsaburō as the act ends. The first act is a series of memories. The second act, which takes place ten years later, provides the real beginning of the drama. Kōnoshin, ever more embittered, feels that Chidori (now grown to adulthood) hates him, and his sense of guilt floods over him as he realizes that he is going blind. He calls for help to his wife Rui, who can only tell him that his own moral crimes have brought a curse on him and on his family. Rui begins to worry over who will manage the household; they decide to send a telegram to all three of the surviving children to bring them home for a family discussion on how to divide up the property. In his loneliness, Kōnoshin makes his first rapprochement with Chidori: the reality of his own approaching death has brought him that far. KŌNOSHIN: Chidori. Come over here for just a minute. I guess I must say goodbye to your face as well. [He stretches out his own hand.] Put out your hand. CHIDORI: Here is it. KŌNOSHIN: Take ahold of mine…good. Now look into my face. [He takes Chidori’s head in his two hands.] This face…it resem bles someone’s…hasn’t Rui ever said anything to you… that person’s face…you have no memory of it? And am I not to be loved? Could you not love me? CHIDORI: [Putting both her hands on Kōnoshin’s shoulders, in a low voice] Uncle. [Suddenly, with vehemence] Uncle! KŌNOSHIN: It’s all right, it’s all right. [Softly he encircles Chidori’s back with his arms.] Can you hear? The sound of blood in your veins…and the sound of mine…Chidori! [He strokes her hair with his hand.]18 Kōnoshin asks Chidori if she would like to meet her father. She finally replies that she wants to meet her mother. Rui stammers out that her mother is dead. Chidori merely replies that she knows where her mother is. The couple now realize that Chidori knows more about herself than they imagined. Their conversation is interrupted by Genzō, who rushes in to say that an engineer, looking for uranium, wants to meet Kōnoshin. The old man, in turn, realizes that the moment of truth he has waited for and feared has come. Before he goes off in pursuit of the engineer, Kōnoshin is told by Chidori that she knows where her mother has gone. She takes the key to the abandoned mine from the box where it is usually kept and conceals it. The sound of the music for the summer festival is heard as the curtain falls.

116

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

The third and final act brings all the diverse tensions of the play to final resolution. The long opening scene, which takes place on the night of the festival, is a discussion between Kōnoshin and the three grown children who have returned reluctantly to their family home. Tanaka’s sketches of the dissatisfied and weary trio are very well done, and their conversations, cutting and humorous by turn, reveal in full the image of Kōnoshin as an old-fashioned and overbearing father. Angered by their lack of sympathy, Kōnoshin finally vows that he will divide the property, then disown them. The whole group, exhausted, decides to rest and continue the discussion on the following day. Kōnoshin, left alone, wonders aloud if Chidori has found her father. He retires. Chidori enters, opens the lattice door and enters the cave. Mikage (who is, of course, the engineer who came to find K6noshin) sees her and follows her in. Chidori looks around in the darkness, finds her mother’s diary, and reads from it. As she does so, the voice of her dead mother is heard reciting from the book. TERUMI’S VOICE: I want to die! Thinking this, I go on living. That is because I love with a will as strong as death. Who? The self. [Chidori turns the page.] TERUMI’S VOICE: How fearful is blood. The Saida family crest is the mountain lilly. There is poison in the lilly And that very poison gives it life. How fearful. And yet, MIRAGE: How beautiful! For in loving another human being I wish to purify myself.19 Mikage interrupts Chidori and explains to her what really happened to her mother. He asks her to go away with him. She cannot. CHIDORI: Me? There is nothing that I want. The way things are now is fine for me. I love these fields, the village, the river, and those mountains. I love the earth, the wind where I was born. And Kōnoshin is my grandfather. [She smiles sweetly.]20 Chidori’s love for her home, for Kōnoshin, becomes the force that will resolve the tensions in those around her. Mikage now tells Chidori of a package that he received in the mail with a rosary inside, just at the time Chidori’s mother must have died. In the cave is a half-carved stone Buddha, holding a child in its arms. Chidori places the rosary around the neck of the crude statue and runs to join the dancers. In the midst of the dance, Kōnoshin, realizing now who Mikage is, begins to grapple with him despite the fact that, in his blindness, he can scarcely see him at all. As Kōnoshin tugs at Mikage’s hand, he only manages to pull off his white glove, the glove that hides the wound Mikage suffered because of Kōnoshin more than a decade before. Pulling on the glove, Kōnoshin loses his balance and falls to the ground. His fall saves him; he laughs and tells Mikage to explore the mountain at his leisure. ‘Come, celebrate the future!’ he tells the dancers. Chidori presses his hand to her cheek in a gesture of love and affection, then returns to the dance. Kōnoshin, suddenly exhausted, seems to be failing fast. His children surround him. He manages to tell them his last vision of serenity as the curtain falls, presumably on his death.

FOUR PLAYS BY TANAKA CHIKAO

KŌNOSHIN:

117

This is how it seemed to me: I saw Looking out sweetly from behind A few strands of water flowing down, A woman, a Buddha, A rosary around her neck, And I saw clearly That on her knees She hugged a child.21

The effectiveness of Chidori is less in its plot (in particular, the device of uranium in the mine seems unsuccessful) than in the changing emotional movement of Kōnoshin toward the almost silent Chidori. The rhythm of the play is determined by means of the music played in it: the folksong ‘Chidori’ is heard throughout, and the koto that Chidori’ s mother played is often heard during the dream sequences. Kōnoshin himself plays the shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. The preparations for the festival, which begin halfway through the play, are usually indicated by off-stage music; and the final reconciliation of Kōnoshin with his world takes place in the full thrust of the music and dance so long in preparation. The musical atmosphere helps to create and maintain the sense of a moral fairy tale that Tanaka wished for. And in such an atmosphere, neither Kōnoshin’s bitterness nor Chidori’s goodness seems out of place. The use of more purely Japanese subject matter (with the exception of the rosary incident) also appears to indicate Tanaka’s mastery of his materials; he no longer needed to locate his ego and his Transcendence in an exotic locale. Kōnoshin, surely the perfect example of a man who considers himself ‘absolute’, comes to know that Providence Tanaka spoke of, and in terms his audience might certainly understand. In the discussion of his artistic purposes quoted earlier, Tanaka mentioned the dangers that a thirst for the absolute might have in the context of the Japanese political milieu, especially as regards the Emperor System. Tanaka’s own dramatic works were moving closer to the Japanese situation, as the evolution from Kyōiku to Chidori indicates. In one of his more recent plays, Arai Hakuseki, written in 1968, Tanaka turned to Japanese history and the historical dimensions of the confrontation between Japanese and Christian thought. In so doing, he created another type of theatrical model. His choice of subject, the famous statesman and scholar Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), was a natural one, and in creating a theatrically effective version of Arai’s various confrontations, Tanaka used a number of dramatic devices reminiscent on the one hand of traditional Japanese theatre (masks and comic dancing, close to the traditional kyōgen farces that accompany Noh plays) and, on the other, of the Theatre of the Absurd. The play, which bears the subtitle ‘Helmet and Nobleman’s Hat—A Lesson in Social Studies’, is composed of a number of short scenes, none of them realistic: here Tanaka creates a sense of the metaphysical world in which his characters live, not by poetry or memory, but by abstraction. Since the play is one of ideas rather than of emotions, such techniques serve his purposes perfectly. An understanding of these purposes requires a considerable grasp of Japanese history, especially as Tanaka deviates from that history for his own artistic ends. Doubtless, Arai Hakuseki could never make its proper impact in translation, especially as Tanaka has created ingenious—and quite unique—mixtures of Tokugawa and modern vernacular speech as a verbal means of abstraction. Nevertheless, Arai Hakuseki may be in some ways his most effective contribution. In ‘Chapter One’ of the play (as an ‘Exercise in Social Studies’, the play is in three ‘Chapters’ rather than three acts), Arai Hakuseki, an old man, is sleeping in a hammock; he awakes from a dream of ‘men with no faces’ to tell his daughter that he wishes he could bring another kind of dream into reality. He is writing a

118

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

record of his own experiences, he tells her, for her own use in bringing up her children. The scene fades and the Social Studies Teacher reads from the finished diary as a means of teaching his class about the past. The mixture of old text and modern commentary is trenchant and witty. As the act continues, Tanaka seems to focus his attention on three challenges to the traditional Japanese view of the world. Each of these challenges is represented by one incident in the course of the play. Arai Hakuseki is required to render judgment on each of them. The first challenge represents the internal contradictions within the traditional ethical system itself; the incident involves conflicting Confucian principles concerning a murder. The second shows the difficulties of understanding foreign cultures; the incident concerns Korean envoys in Japan and the possible repatriation of Korean citizens. The third challenge is a confrontation with Christianity, in the person of the Italian priest Giovanni Battista Sidotti, who arrived in Japan in 1708. Government officials represented in the play tend to regard all three of these events in terms of custom and precedent and are presumably ‘faceless’; Arai Hakuseki sheds his own mask early in the play when he declares his determination to pursue any truth in order to serve his lord properly. Arai insists that he is a simple samurai who has studied Confucian philosophy, the Way of the Sages, as a samurai should. He refuses any other claims to special attention. For Tanaka, such dedication has given Arai an admirable independence of mind. ARAI: A real samurai has always been a part of the land from the beginning, no different from the farmer who plows himself, for what he eats. LADY WITH SHIELD: Ah, what is called a ‘rustic. ARAI: Exactly. In good weather, he plows. In bad weather, he studies. On occasion he would bend his bow and take the rust off his sword. In order to do his work, he might go naked in the heat; in the cold he ties his robes with a piece of frayed rope and wears straw sandals. What kind of ornament, what kind of cumbersome armor would he need? The real foundation for governing the country, the basis for tranquillity, lies with the farmers. There is nothing surprising in that. A samurai resembles a farmer in his conduct. He plows for what he eats and he needs no money. His style of life is simple, so that, except for rice and barley, he only needs to cultivate a bit of tea and beans. If he needs oil for his study lamp, he can exchange some of his rice.22 The latter part of the first section of the play continues the debate over the proper role of a samurai. Arai’s two adversaries (who represent tensions in his own mind) are the Lady with the Shield (military art, and the power of the Shogun) and the Lady with the Nobleman’s Hat (civilian rule and the Imperial Family). Both try to claim Arai for their own. Finally, as he tries to transcend the contradictions the two women propose (and the contradictions in the country at the time), Arai tells them he will wear the court robes and bear the armor ‘in his heart’. Only in this way, he concludes, can he take the proper moral stance. The Lady with the Shield cautions him, ‘If you only wear the armor in your heart, at so me point you will forget you have it on.’ The second ‘Chapter’ of the play presents the resolutions to the first two challenges. The issues are debated in a lively and ingenious fashion; in particular, the arrival of the Korean envoy and his long discussion with Arai over protocol point up with considerable theatrical skill the contradictions in traditional Japanese society that Tanaka wishes to illustrate. Arai’s solutions are always the most humane but to the others they seem too pragmatic, too practical and do not show enough respect for what has come before.

FOUR PLAYS BY TANAKA CHIKAO

119

‘Chapter Three’, however, is the most effective part of the play, giving us a long conversation between Arai and Sidotti. The Italian priest has come to teach Christianity and has no desire to influence Japan politically. The two have a long and often amusing discussion (helped at all the wrong places by an interpreter). As Arai leaves, Sidotti, himself a supremely honest man, shows that he has understand his Japanese interlocutor well. SIDOTTI: Shall I show you where that country is on the map? [He goes to his map and points out what is now Australia.] IMAMURA: But when Arai Hakuseki asked where that country is located, why didn’t you explain? SIDOTTI: When I met him, I realized that he was truly a remarkable person. If he were a man from my country, he would be the sort of person to accomplish prodigious things. INAMURA: Yes. Yes, of course. SIDOTTI: That country is not so very far from here. If a man like Arai Hakuseki decided to conquer that country, it would be an easy thing to do. If I were trying to explain how it might be done, and how one country might take over another, the result might well be the most frightful kind of war. In my religion, that is the greatest sin of all. Because of this, I did not explain it to him. Of course, you realize that this is all idle supposition. IMAMURA: I understand. He is not that kind of man at all.23 Arai must now decide on the penalty to be inflicted on Sidotti. Arai is sympathetic to him and admires his courage, faith, and bravery in coming to Japan; he decides that rather than executing him, as the law required, or putting him in prison, he should be sent back to Rome. Arai’s suggestions are spurned by his colleagues. Left alone, he realizes that he now only wishes to abandon his official position. The scene fades, and we again see Arai rocked in his hammock by a ‘faceless’ attendant. What we are shown at the end of the play is perhaps the content of that dream from which Arai awoke at the beginning. The attendant asks him if he is happy. Arai says he is not, and the man continues to question him. ATTENDANT: I always thought of you as a strong person. Did you lack self-confidence? ARAI: What foolishness. I never felt a loss of self-confidence, I had no self-doubts. In the first place, doubt is no qualification at all for a human being. It is something we are not permitted. ATTENDANT: But who is it that does not permit it? ARAI: Heaven…and oneself. ATTENDANT: In the end, though, you are a happy man. Do you speak ironically? ATTENDANT: No, not at all. You were the favored of Heaven. ARAI: Do you mean my luck was good? No, that’s not true. It was my own strength. Let me explain what I mean. Anyone who settles for his ‘reality’ becomes someone like you…a faceless creature. ATTENDANT: [Ironically] Well, I beg your pardon! ARAI: And that way he will never become a human being. He cannot. For there is an Extremity that chisels the forms, applies the colors. Find that Extremity, follow it, and, at that point, your real self is born. ATTENDANT: And does this Extremity really exist? ARAI: Yes. ATTENDANT: Really? ARAI: The laws of Heaven. Heaven’s will…

120

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

ATTENDANT: Ah. Yes… Heaven is what is at the top of the sky, isn’t it? But from here, our hands can’t reach it, Sir. ARAI: Well then, Loyalty. ATTENDANT: Even I know that much! ARAI: You know it. But do you follow it? ATTENDANT: Sorry again. Now the Emperor is part of Heaven but the Shogun is not, right? ARAI: Anyone knows that. ATTENDANT: Is that Fidelity too? ARAI: What do you mean? ATTENDANT: If the Emperor is the Son of Heaven, then the Shogun must be the Son of Earth. And so are you. That must be why you like geography. And history, and economics. And law. ARAI: Quiet! [Getting up] I am only a samurai. Just that. [Rather sadly] And that is fine…like that.24 The meaning of Arai’s search for himself is now clear. The Attendant vanishes. As the play ends, Arai sits quietly while pieces of armor hung in the air as symbols ‘stare down at him’. This summary hardly suggests the literary structures of Arai Hakuseki, but even this brief glimpse of the play can serve to indicate that Tanaka’s recurrent themes of a thirst for an absolute and enobling virtue are as clearly a part of Arai Hakuseki as of his earlier works. Lyricism is replaced by objective distance, but the singularity of purpose is the same. Apart from his expanded dramatic structures that permit the introduction of the metaphysical themes, Tanaka’s other important contribution to the modern Japanese theatre is in his masterful, rhythmic dialogue; in this regard he seems even more gifted than his teacher Kishida. Tanaka’s own comments on his experience are most pertinent. My father, with his Meiji education, knew Chinese [kambun] and he made me read the texts out aloud when I was a primary school student, even though I didn’t understand the meaning. As I loved to play, I found this very tiresome at the time. Looking back now, I am glad I had the experience. Reading in that fashion produces in you a sense of rhythm: consciousness and resilience. That sense of rhythm has remained behind in me, and I feel it has had some effect on the way I compose my own plays.25 Here a traditional influence has produced mastery in a modern and seemingly dissimilar technique. Another traditional influence that might be studied in this most ‘Western’ of modern playwrights is, by his own confession, that of Noh. Noh, with its thrust stage surrounded by spectators on three sides, and no curtain… If I had not seen such a theatre, that can freely transcend time and space, I do not think I could have broken through the existing concepts of the theatre to write the kind of plays I have during these past years. I first saw Noh before the war and the impression it made on me was enormous. The plays I have written since the war, in an attempt to pass beyond the limits of realism, have been possible because of the existence of such a stage.26 In many ways the abstract simplicity of Arai Hakuseki returns to this ‘starting point’. The expanded sense of space of Noh is part and parcel of all the plays discussed above.

FOUR PLAYS BY TANAKA CHIKAO

121

Tanaka’s work can be examined in terms of its ‘Japanese’ elements (such as those mentioned above), or of the Western influences brought to bear on his dramaturgy (Vildrac, for example, or Tanaka’s current favorites, O’Neill, Pirandello, and Lorca), or of the impact of Christianity on his thought. Yet the essential human conflicts that Tanaka feels, even though witnessed through a Christian perspective atypical of the majority of his countrymen, give his plays an intensity and a lyric force that make them satisfying, and on their own terms, to his own audiences and to a foreign reader as well. Tanaka is perhaps the first modern Japanese playwright about whom this can be said. NOTES 1. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, Vintage Books, New York, 1957, p. 16. 2. For further details of this company, see Brian Powell, ‘Japan’s First Modern Theater: The Tsukiji Shōgekijō and Its Company, 1924–26’, in MN, xxx:1 (1975), pp. 69–85. 3. For the life and work of Kishida Kunio, see J.Thomas Rimer, Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre, Princeton U.P., 1974. 4. ‘Gekisakka no Isu, #17: Tanaka Chikao’, in Higeki Kigeki, xi (November 1970), p. 28. 5. Ibid., p. 34. 6. Ibid., p. 34. 7. Tanaka Chikao, ‘Kyōiku’, in Nihon Gendai Bungaku Zenshū, vol. 103, Kōdansha, 1967, p. 12. 8. Ibid., p. 20. 9. Ibid., pp. 20–1. 10. Ibid., p. 24. 11. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 12. An English version is given in Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, tr. by William Aggeler; Academy Library Guild, Fresno, 1954, p. 115. 13. Nihon Gendai Bungaku Zenshū, vol. 103, p. 47. 14. Ibid., p. 62. 15. Ibid., p. 63. 16. Ibid., p. 64. 17. Ibid., p. 67. 18. Nihon Gendai Gikyoku Shū, Iwanami Bunko, 1963, i, pp. 220–1. 19. Ibid., p. 257. 20. Ibid., p. 264. 21. Ibid., p. 273. 22. Tenbō, November 1968, p. 196. 23. Ibid., pp. 224–5. 24. Ibid., pp. 228–9. 25. ‘Gekisakka no Isu, #17: Tanaka Chikao’, p. 31. 26. Ibid., p. 35.

First published in J.Thomas Rimer, Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre, Princeton University Press, 1974, pp. 7–55

12 Modernization or Westernization: The Movement for a Modern Theatre in Japan before 1925

WHAT WAS THE NATURE of the movement for a modern theatre in Japan? By 1925, Japan had several thoroughly professional playwrights who wrote works of considerable literary interest, dealing with concerns that would have seemed no less important to a European or an American audience than to a Japanese one. Yet the manner in which Japanese writers first came to take an interest in the theatre, and the problems they faced, suggest that their difficulties were more complex than any their European counterparts had encountered a generation or two before. A brief description of the early attempts made in Japan to alter the nature of the traditional theatre and elevate the function of the playwright will serve to indicate just how difficult these problems were. In the development of the modern theatre in Europe, the playwrights appeared first. Producing organizations grew up in response to the literary and theatrical challenges thrown down by the authors. It is true that these theatre companies, in turn, stimulated the development of still newer writers, but the fact remains that Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, and many others had written many of their plays, usually unproduced and often unpublished, before the advent of the theatre companies that put them on the stage. In Japan, however, the situation was quite different. The new theatrical organizations there were created in response to a desire on the part of many intellectuals for a new and a meaningful theatre in their country. The organizations were created before any Japanese playwrights of stature appeared. This reversal gave a very different emphasis to the New Theatre movement in Japan and presented it with a different set of problems. In 1868, when the Emperor Meiji began his reign and Japan opened its doors to the western nations, the contemporary Japanese theatre was best represented by the kabuki, one of the great forms of stage art which, although perhaps in a period of decline of the quality of plays then being written, was still a powerful force in popular culture and the dominant form of theatrical entertainment. Any extended discussion of the art of kabuki would be out of place here, but the following points should be kept in mind. The plays in the kabuki theatre were stylized to a far greater extent than in the traditional European theatre. It is true, of course, that the jidaimono (historical plays) were often based on famous historical incidents, and that the sewamono (domestic dramas) were dramatizations of recent incidents; but the manner in which the materials were ordered within the plays shows that the major effect aimed at was a theatricalization of emotion and action rather than any psychological analysis. Of course, if we say that the kabuki is an actor’s theatre, then we must recognize that Shakespeare’s theatre might be described in the same terms. But unlike Shakespeare’s, the kabuki plays were constructed so as to provide a series of emotional and scenic climaxes, designed as ends in themselves, that do not necessarily represent the inevitable results of the interactions of character and plot. Such a theatre is artistically effective on its own

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

123

terms, but the principles of dramaturgy involved are far removed from those that stimulated the movement for a modern theatre in Europe. Indeed the better works of even the early nineteenth-century European stage, albeit within a framework of convention, or even of cliche, do pay a certain amount of attention to psychological logic. Kinoshita Junji, one of the foremost of modern dramatists, has written on the differences between kabuki and the traditional European theatre in a precise and informative fashion. There is a great difference in the density of writing in the two forms. In the case of European drama, the speeches are usually written with an ample thread of logical psychology running through them. But in the case of kabuki, there are a great many leaps of a psychological and logical nature within the speeches. It is the art of the actor which creates a theatre where such leaps can give satisfaction. And any art that finds such elements essential will naturally be filled with the unexplainable and the surprising.1 For Kinoshita, there is a logic in Shakespeare which guides even the passages of greatest bravura, but in kabuki the spectator takes his pleasure in seeing a brilliant actor bridge the gaps. Indeed, kabuki is a theatre primarily for actors. The companies were often managed by actors, plays were written to suit their talents, then changed to suit their whims. (It should also be noted that the word ‘actor’ should be strictly understood, since men played the women’s roles, just as they did in Elizabethan England.) The function of the playwright under such circumstances was that of a craftsman, admittedly of the highest sort, who knew his company, his actors, and his audience. He would construct elaborate and exciting dramas to exploit all the prodigious resources available to the kabuki theatre. The last of the great traditional playwrights, Kawatake Mokuami (1816–1893), was active in 1868, but with him the great tradition of playwriting came to an end. The playwright’s view of his own work and its significance within the total ensemble was totally different from that of the modern literary playwright, or even of nineteenthcentury European playwrights like Scribe or Dumas who, for all their use of conventions, were very conscious of their important position in the triangle of author-director-actor.2 The following brief description of the organization of the writers in a traditional kabuki company will serve to explain the differences. There were four grades in the writing groups, with apprentices doing the odd jobs, to learn the theatre system. After this the apprentices were advanced to helping in the actual performance, prompting, moving properties, and helping actors. Next they were permitted to help with the writing, and did stage-management. The chief writer, having been given the plan for the new play by the actormanager and the promoter, worked out the plot and wrote the main parts, while the assistants filled in the rest, which was edited by the chief writer. At the first rehearsal, it was the chief writer’s duty to read the play to the entire company, and it was necessary for him to give as highly effective a reading as possible, so as to make sure that all understood his ideas. After this the cue-scripts were given to the actors, and rehearsals began, while the stage plans were given to the set constructors by the writer. The design of the programs, posters, signboards was also his responsibility.3 No modern playwright could conceive of working under such restrictions. True, the results might be as rich as a canvas of the school of Rubens (created by groups in the same way) but it should be no surprise that the results tended toward the pictorial and the decorative rather than the psychological or the spiritual.

124

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

The audience for these plays in 1868 was predominantly a city audience, of the merchant class. Others (samurai, and sometimes even the nobility) came out of curiosity, but the kabuki theatre, like the class that created and patronized it, had a rather bad name.4 Tanaka Chikao writes that for the elaborate New Year kabuki productions, ‘busy people saved their money to be able to go at least once. But such people were normally sufficiently troubled in their own lives by human and social problems that they surely wanted to avoid any representation of life as they lived it directly on the stage. A play was to represent a world, a beautiful world not of this one. In this sense, kabuki can be called a type of fantasy.’5 With the opening of Japan to the west, the pressures of conflicting civilizations were felt almost immediately, and the theatre began to reflect them. Beginning in about 1870, a variety of attempts were made to reform the theatre in order to make it more responsive to the social and spiritual realities of the time. First were those that strove to modernize the Japanese theatre by making it more contemporary, either in psychology or in subject matter. Second were those that, abandoning the traditional Japanese dramatic forms (specifically kabuki) altogether, made use of western dramaturgy to westernize the theatre and to create a new and contemporary Japanese drama. Modernization involved four distinct experiments between 1868 and 1925. THE MODERNIZATION OF KABUKI: HISTORY AS EDUCATION By the 1870s kabuki had ceased to be a contemporary theatre. Attempts had been made to incorporate foreign elements, even foreign actors, into the new plays, but the whole mechanism of the female impersonator and the special world of the thief, prostitute, and petit-bourgeois that gave the early nineteenth-century plays their special and very real flavor made the new concerns of the Meiji period too difficult to deal with. Kabuki actors and managers now began consciously to look back and seek out classic plays of the tradition written in periods of greatness. In a famous ceremony at the opening of a new theatre in 1872, Ichikawa Danjūrō IX (1838–1903), the greatest of the Meiji actors, made a speech dressed in white tie and tails rather than in traditional costume. ‘The theatre of recent years,’ he stated, ‘has drunk up filth and smelled of the coarse and the mean. It has disregarded the beautiful principle of rewarding good and chastizing evil. It has fallen into mannerisms and distortions and has been steadily flowing downhill…. I am deeply grieved by this fact and in consultation with my colleagues I have resolved to clean away the decay.’6 Danjūrō and his manager Morita Kan’ya proceeded to do so and they gave kabuki a new role: education and morality for a new Japan. Danjūrō’s reforms, such as they were, were centered on the so-called katsureki or living-history plays. In practice these plays represented only slight revisions of older texts. Until the Meiji period the kabuki theatre, always under the eye of the censor, had changed the dates and historical personages in the plays so as to avoid any overt suggestion of social criticism. Thus the traditional history plays were in one sense fantasies in historical settings. Danjūrō decided to reverse course. He studied old prints and drawings and had consultants who tried to help him represent famous historical incidents on the stage in as literal and accurate a manner as possible. Costumes, properties, and scenery were made to look authentic, and history plays were assigned to their proper eras.7 In addition, within restricted limits, Danjūrō tried to introduce a freer method of performance than had heretofore been permitted. He accomplished with a look what other actors had indicated with gestures. In one play he caused a sensation by closing the curtain as the two characters on stage merely nodded at each other, rather than showing the traditional final scene of bravura histrionics.

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

125

Danjūrō considered himself a realist, but the kind of changes he proposed, no matter how revolutionary, made no real change in the nature of the drama he was performing. Indeed, his new emphasis on realism could only be detrimental to a theatre like kabuki, founded as it was on fantasy, illusion, and spectacle. His idea to make drama a vehicle for morality and education was perhaps useful insofar as it stressed the fact that the drama could be a serious art form, for this conception would have to precede the development of any new drama of significance in Japan. Yet as Danjūrō learned, when he stressed the older virtues inherent in the plays he only made them seem more remote from a rapidly changing society. The experiment did not please his public, nor was it successful in artistic terms. He had moved too far away from his old audience and he had not been able to find a new one to appreciate his intentions. SHIMPA: NEW THEMES, OLD TREATMENT It was becoming clear that kabuki, because of both its old-fashioned Tokugawa morality and its stylization was not the suitable vessel into which to pour all the new and conflicting ideas and life styles of the Meiji period. In particular, kabuki, because of the censors, had been especially weak in its representation on the stage of the subject which most interested the Japanese in the 1870s and the 188os, politics. Political theatre has seldom, at least before the advent of Brecht, produced an artistically satisfying style of play, and the political propaganda skits or plays (sōshi no shibai) being presented at this time in Japan were without literary pretensions. The development of shimpa (literally, ‘new-style’ drama, as opposed to ‘old-style’ drama, or kabuki) is closely connected with the career of the playwright and producer Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911), a curious and rather ingenious man who had a diverse career. Kawakami had acted in some of the earlier political plays; he then took the style and changed it by dressing up his plays with realistic battle scenes, especially during the Sino-Japanese war. Fired by this success, in 1901 he made a voyage to Europe, Russia, and the United States with his wife Sadako, one of the first women to appear professionally on the stage in Japan, and eighteen others, introducing to the unsuspecting world plays with dubious titles such as The Warrior and the Geisha. Komiya indicated that the tour was ‘something of a national disgrace,’ but Kawakami viewed it as a great success.8 After his return, Kawakami was convinced that he must find some artistic means to deal with life in contemporary Japan and that he must use actresses rather than female impersonators for the purpose. Kawakami and the others who then proceeded to develop the shimpa like the kabuki sewamono used sensationalist level stories of contemporary life and dramatized them. The plays lost the political pretensions of the earlier sōshi no shibai. Actresses were used, but female impersonators were retained as well. Kawakami and his colleagues claimed that the style of shimpa was more realistic than that of kabuki, but Shimomura dismisses this aspect of the new drama as merely ‘the realism of train whisdes.’9 The emotional attitudes in the plays are not far removed from those in nineteenth-century kabuki, and the effect produced, despite an evolved acting style, was a cloying sentimentality. If kabuki can be said to have stopped being a contemporary theatre, emotionally speaking, in 1870, then shimpa might be said to have suffered the same fate by 1910. Shimpa troupes still exist today, and when occasionally a fine playwright creates a work for them, the results can be professionally satisfying. But from the point of view of modernizing the theatre, this second experiment was not a success.

126

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

SHINKOKUGEKI: EXCITEMENT FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC Shinkokugeki, or New National Theatre, was largely the creation of one man, Sawada Shōjirō (1892–1929). The name of the theatrical company was coined in 1917 and represents a later stage of experimentation than shimpa. Sawada himself was an actor of some note who had made a considerable reputation with his performance as Iokanaan in Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Through his participation in this and other productions, Sawada became convinced that the mass of contemporary Japanese audiences were being left behind, and he was determined to ‘lead from among his public, rather than remain ahead of it.’10 He set out to perform dramas, many of which he commissioned himself, designed to bridge the gap between kabuki and modern theatre, but in order to gain the favor of a large audience, he diluted his new plays with sword fights and spectacles; the playwrights who served him were subsidiary to the acrobats. After his death in 1929, the company attempted to add more modern pieces to the repertory, but the results remained close to shimpa in mentality. Although the company continues to perform for a certain public today, it can be said that Sawada’s catering to public taste produced little of artistic merit. All three of the movements described above came from within the commercial theatre itself, and they all failed. (Nor, in fact, did the professional companies in Europe provide the impetus for the modern drama.) The various experiments in Japan did, however, serve to indicate a dissatisfaction with the traditional theatre on the part of the actors, producers, and at least some of the audience. Shōyō: Active Evolution through Amateurs The fourth and final experiment to modernize the theatre before 1925 came from efforts made outside the milieu of the commercial theatre, as it had in Europe, and was based on the activities of the leading literary critic of the day, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935). Shōyō was a protean figure in the Japanese literary and theatrical world, who defined the nature of the western novel for the Japanese as early as 1885 in his Shōsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel). He wrote fiction, and he supported other important novelists like Futabatei Shimei in their efforts to create a distinctive style in modern Japanese literature. He translated the entire works of Shakespeare into Japanese and wrote several plays himself. His career has been well described elsewhere.11 Shōyō had a deep interest in modernizing the Japanese stage, evident both in his own playwriting experiments and in his sponsorship of a dramatic company. He was the most powerful and the most effective voice for modernization rather than out-and-out westernization, and his contribution to the modern Japanese theatre was enormous. SHŌYŌ’S PLAYS Shōyō was not satisfied with the katsureki experiments of Danjūrō. He did not, of course, foresee or expect the decline of kabuki; indeed he felt that the form, for all its possible faults, was the form of drama evolved by the Japanese over a long period and that it should continue to serve them well. As a literary critic, Shōyō's familiarity with the European masterpieces, especially Shakespeare’s, convinced him that what would infuse new life into kabuki was not the superficial historical accuracy of katsureki, but the gradual creation of a new repertory in which the psychological dimensions of the plays would be expanded. Although Shōyō did not consider himself primarily a playwright, he wrote two important experimental plays in which he tried to put into practice his ideas for reforming kabuki to give it the kind of contemporary appeal he thought necessary.

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

127

The first of these plays, Kiri no Hitoha (A Leaf of Paulownia) was written in 1884 when he was only twenty-five. He wrote it as a specific reply to those who wanted to do away with kabuki and its ‘excesses’ and so, Shōyō thought, destroy the Japanese theatre altogether. Kawatake has documented how Shōyō carefully studied Shakespeare and Chikamatsu, the great Tokugawa dramatist, for three years in preparation for the writing of this play.12 The play is in six acts and chronicles the latter days in the career of Katagiri Katsumoto (1556–1615), a famous warrior who served the ruler of Japan, Hid eyoshi Toyotomi, faithfully for many years until, after a complicated series of incidents, he was beguiled by Tokugawa Ieyasu into betraying his former master. Shōyō stated that his purpose in writing the play was to try to recreate the atmosphere of tragedy in Osaka castle at that time, and his complex play seems to fulfill his wishes amply. He took hints from Hamlet in his composition of certain scenes which, if not historically accurate, do evoke a good deal of atmosphere, even if the effect seems by modern standards a bit overwrought. The portrayal of Katagiri as a victim of circumstance rather than as an out-and-out villain was particularly novel. How the historical Katagiri died is not precisely known, but when the play appeared Shōyō was nevertheless criticized for the fact that in it Katagiri did not die for his supposed villainy. Shōyō replied to the criticism by saying that for a man in Katagiri’s position to live was worse than to die. A Leaf of Paulownia was published in serial form in successive issues of Waseda Bungaku (Waseda Literature) in 1894 and 1895. The play was well received in literary circles, but the professional actors for whom Shōyō had written it, in the hope of interesting them in his new style of drama, did not find it to their liking. It went unproduced until 1904, at which time it had a great critical and popular success. Shōyō was finally accepted, thirty years after the publication of his text, as a playwright of stature. More important than this early play, however, was his En no Gyōja (The Hermit), which he wrote, rewrote, and revised from 1914 until 1921. Several versions of the play were published during those years. Between the writing of A Leaf of Paulownia and The Hermit, Shōyō had discovered Ibsen. In a lecture in 1909 on Ibsen’s contribution to the world theatre, Shōyō lamented the fact that, although the Japanese had been able to create successful novels in the international style, the low level of the contemporary Japanese theatre represented the greatest shortcoming in all the Japanese arts. Japan, Shōyō insisted, lagged forty years behind the west and had not even been able to imitate, let alone create, western-style drama. Ibsen had led the modernization of the European stage and Ibsen must therefore be studied. The Hermit is a dramatic legend concerning the Buddhist monk and hermit En no Gyōja, his struggles with the animalistic divinity Hitokoto, and the failure of his disciple Hirotaru to follow his teachings because of his love for a woman. The play is highly poetic and has several powerful scenes, especially those between Hitokoto, who is held prisoner by En no Gyōja, and his mother Katsuragi. Shōyō is said to have written the play from a sense of deep emotion about his own life in the theatre. Kawatake has written13 that the play constitutes a kind of spiritual autobiography, with En no Gyōja as Shōyō himself and the actor Shimamura Hōgetsu (who deserted Shōyō’s theatre company, as described below) as the model for the ungrateful disciple. The first printed version of the play appeared in the August 1916 issue of the magazine Shinengei (New Theatre Arts) and, in a slightly revised form, was published as a book the following year.14 The play caused quite a sensation and so excited one Waseda University professor who was then studying comparative literature in Paris that he translated it into French. It was published there in 1920 and was the first modern play from Japan to be rendered into any western language. Although the play deals with characters and incidents shrouded in myth and legend, Shōyō, perhaps under the influence of Ibsen, gave full play to the psychological rather than the merely colorful aspects of the story, and the shifts of emotions and attitudes of the major characters during the course of the play seem

128

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

logical, even compelling. Shōyō had come a long way toward modernizing the Japanese drama while still keeping within the bounds and the forms familiar to his audience. Rather than using a modern social drama, like Ibsen, he used a traditional story in which to reflect his deepest anxieties and beliefs as a creative person. SH Y ’S THEATRE COMPANY Sh y was aware that, in addition to new plays, some kind of organization would be needed to mount them on the stage. As early as 1890, Shōyō, concerned about proper methods of elocution for spoken Japanese, formed a playreading group with some of his younger colleagues. He wrote plays, dance dramas, made translations, and directed his group in amateur productions. In 1905 he helped with the formation of the first theatre company for modern plays in Japan, the Bungei kyōkai (Literary Society). The society was to carry out a variety of activities, but the staging of plays soon became its most important project. Shōyō, realizing the difficulties of mounting plays in a new style, insisted that the primary purpose of the group should be the training of new actors and actresses. He felt that cultivated amateurs, properly trained, represented the best means to lift standards quickly to a desired level.15 Although Shōyō had no detailed information (perhaps none at all) on European institutions such as the schools of the Moscow Art Theatre, he knew that his actors needed practice in elocution, movement, and other techniques before they could present themselves to the public as representatives of the new drama. As he had no teachers for his school who had studied drama in Europe, with the exception of Hōgetsu, who had been a student in England and Germany, he worked slowly and simply, using his own good taste and common sense. As various testimonies indicate, the students and other teachers in his school were moved to tremendous efforts by the force of his personality and the range of his enthusiasms. By using women on the stage, Shōyō acknowledged the fact that old traditions he otherwise esteemed had to be abandoned when they impeded necessary change. By 1910, Shōyō had presented four performances of Hamlet (in his own translation) at the school, and in 1911 he staged a Japanese version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. These productions were so enthusiastically received that the management of the Imperial Theatre, the most modern and well-equipped theatre in Tokyo at the time, invited Shōyō’s company to appear there. The company also presented Hamlet and A Doll’s House in Osaka. At this point, the growing success of the company was disrupted by the romance between Hōgetsu and the leading actress of the troupe, Matsui Sumako. Shōyō eventually dismissed Hōgetsu, who went off with the actress to form a company of his own. These ruptures (surely mirrored in the plot of The Hermit) caused the dissolution of Shōyō's company in 1913, after a final presentation of Julius Caesar at the Imperial Theatre. Both in his playwriting and in the management of the Literary Society, Shōyō tried to make use of elements in the western theatre to modernize Japanese drama. He wished to work from what he knew toward the development of a natural and truly contemporary art of the theatre in his own country. On the whole, however, his methods were not to prevail. Instead, those who wished to westernize the drama in Japan, rather than to modernize the traditional theatre, began a series of activities which have dominated the Japanese theatre until today. The movement to westernize the theatre prior to 1925, rather than merely to modernize it, involved the efforts of writers, actors, and directors to reject mere entertainment (the only possible value they found in kabuki) for literature. For these men, the playwright was considered a serious artist and intellectual, whose

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

129

work demanded satisfactory performance on the stage. As more and more actors and writers travelled abroad, the impetus toward westernization grew greater and greater. Parallel to this movement was the work of a group of writers who tried to turn dramatic literature into political propaganda. The development of a leftist political theatre in Japan provided still another obstacle for the creation of dramatic literature before 1925. THE PLAYWRIGHT AS INTELLECTUAL Since the time of Shōyō’s The Essence of the Novel in 1885 and the work of such early novelists as Futabatei Shimei, a new genre of Japanese writer developed, close to his western counterpart, who regarded himself as a serious intellectual whose duty it was to observe society and himself with the greatest sincerity in order to write artistic works of merit. By 1900 Japan produced two of her finest modern novelists, Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai, and the list of first-class writing talents was to continue to grow longer as the necessary climate for serious art was created and sustained. Underneath the competing movements which Japanese literary historians dub Romanticism, Realism, Humanism, and the others, there was one point these writers held in common: a strong and unyielding sense of purpose. They took themselves very seriously indeed. Nakamura Mitsuo, a distinguished critic of modern Japanese literature, wrote ‘for them, the novel was not merely an artistic representation of human life. Rather, it was a means of searching for a new, true way of living. At the same time, it was a record of this search. This was a hazardous quest, for the sake of which the writers of the Meiji and the Taishō periods risked tragedy in their real lives. They had high, probably exaggerated expectations of the novel, and they dared to believe in them and to live them.’16 Most of the serious writers of the period concentrated their efforts on the novel or on the development of modern verse forms. Playwriting had not been an occupation for serious writers in Japan, and until they became aware of the work of Ibsen it had never occurred to them that the theatre might be a suitable medium for the expression of their ideas. As in Europe, Ibsen had a galvanic effect in Japan. Translations of An Enemy of the People and A Doll’s House made by a minor writer and poet named Takayasu Gekkō appeared in 1901. By the time of Ibsen’s death in 1906, however, a variety of writers in Japan were so excited about his work that the following year an Ibsen society was formed for the purpose of studying his plays and his ideas.17 Shōyo’s production of A Doll’s House, for all its probable imperfections, caused a great deal of attention. Kawatake says that Ibsen’s work is responsible for the New Theatre movement in Japan.18 Several writers, inspired by what they saw and read, tried to write directly in the Ibsen style. Prominent among them was Mayama Seika (1878–1948); his Daiichi ninsha (Man of First Rank) (1907) showed influences from John Gabriel Borkman, and his Umarezarishi naraba (If He Had Not Been Born) (1909) was inspired by Ghosts. Mamaya did not continue writing in the same style throughout his long career, but his later historical plays and those dramas written for performances by shimpa troupes show a continuing consciousness of social issues which may be a heritage from his early interest in Ibsen. Another writer who was attracted to Ibsen was Nakamura Kichizō (1877–1941) who tried to create in his play Bokushi no Ie (The Vicarage) (1909) a drama in the Ibsen style. Mori Ōgai was an early enthusiast of Ibsen, and his translations of Borkman, A Doll’s House and Ghosts were widely read and later performed on the stage. The kinds of philosophical and social messages contained in these plays were new to Japanese writers, and, in addition, the fact that Ibsen had chosen the theatre as the vehicle for the expression of his ideas gave them the impetus to attempt their own experiments in what was for them a new form. Playwriting, however, like the writing of fiction, has a long history and a necessary technique; thus it is not surprising that many of

130

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

these early works were too derivative or ill conceived. Still, there was excitement in the air, and for a time it seemed that the literary map of Japan was to include a whole new branch of dramatic literature. None of these writers were attracted to the traditional Japanese theatre. Their interest in the drama as a possible form of expression came entirely from their contact with great western writers who had also chosen the medium and not from any experience with the contemporary Japanese theatre. For these writers, as Tanaka Chikao has pointed out, the more they conceived of the theatre as a means to express their literary ideals, the less appeal they found in kabuki.19 Kubota Mantarō, a leading playwright of the 1920s and 1930s, wrote that ‘…among those in the literary movement who studied Ibsen and took an interest in the New Theatre movement, those young writers who seriously wanted a revolution in the theatre found kabuki completely beneath their consideration.’20 In addition, the good writers in Japan at this period, whatever their interest in social concerns, were creating a style of writing which was, if anything, highly emotional and personal. Although they were attracted by Ibsen’s strength of purpose and the mordant confrontations between his characters, their own best work was of a very different nature. Edwin McClellan calls this quality Impressionism and stresses that it is ‘by nature opposed to definition, to intellectual commitment…’ so that characters are ‘…seen in relation to each particular scene visible at a given moment, and not as fully rounded psychological entities who can be understood only when seen continuously within some intellectualized framework.’21 McClellan is speaking here of the writing of the novelist Shimazaki Tōson, but the concept of Impressionism (a term never used, so far as I know, by the Japanese critics) serves to explain the great preference among many of the best Japanese writers for a loose and emotional style of composition. To create the kind of tightly worked-out, reasoned, argumentative technique employed by Ibsen in his plays of social concern would have required a tremendous shift of taste and emphasis for these Japanese writers; in fact it would have required a deflection of the national genius. Writers who experimented with playwriting felt the drama to be merely another literary form, and they tended to write their plays for the page (where they had read their Ibsen) rather than for performance. This attitude was reinforced by that of the literary magazines. Editors took a great interest in drama and printed new plays as a genre of literature. Mori Ōgai, for example, was represented as early as 1910 in the Chūō kōron (Central Review) by his drama Ikutagawa (Ikuta River), a one-act play that retells the famous legend, found in the tenth-century Yamato monogatari and elsewhere, in which two suitors kill a swan at the Ikuta River. In 1915, Tanizaki Junichirō published in the same magazine his important play Hōjōji monogatari (A Tale of Hōjōji Temple). This play, which centers on the building of the temple by the powerful regent Fujiwara Michinaga, is a good example of Tanizaki’s early aesthetic theories worked out in dramatic terms. Such other well-known and respected writers as Arishima Takeo, Mushakōji Saneatsu, Nagata Hideo, Kikuchi Kan, Yamamoto Yūzō, Kume Masao, and Sato Haruo tried their hand at writing plays. Most of their work was experimental, and, except for Yamamoto and Kikuchi, none of them earned any great reputations as playwrights. Still, the idea of writing plays had become a common challenge. It seemed for a time that the pattern of development taken by the European drama was repeating itself in Japan. Plays were being written, and organizations to produce them were beginning to appear. Many hoped that literature and the professional theatre might join together to create a real New Theatre movement in Japan. Such an expectation was not to be met, or, at least, not in terms satisfactory to those writers who had looked forward to the possibility with such enthusiasm.

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

131

THE CREATION OF A WESTERN-STYLE PERFORMING TRADITION IN JAPAN Many small theatre companies were begun before 1925, but the major efforts to create a western-style tradition of stage production centered on the activities of Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928), one of the most colorful, talented, and volatile figures in the arts in modern Japan. The range of his interests and enthusiasms was tremendous, and it is he, and no other, who set the foundations for the development of the New Theatre movement in Japan.22 It was Osanai, in fact, who was credited with the creation of the word shingeki itself, when in 1913 he defined the western-style plays he was producing as ‘neither kabuki nor shimpa, but a New Theatre.’23 The phrase ‘New Theatre’ had cropped up here and there before, but it was Osanai who gave it life and currency. All accounts of Osanai seem to center ultimately on his tremendous vitality; this, plus his deep and sincere belief in the importance of dramatic art, made him the idol of the young intellectuals. Tanizaki, in writing of his tangled relations with Osanai, revealed a good deal about the director’s complex character. On first meeting Osanai, Tanizaki described him as ‘a beautiful young man with prodigious talents.’ (At that time Tanizaki was twenty-four and Osanai twenty-eight.) He first saw Osanai at the opening night of the Jiyūgekijō (Free Theatre), Osanai’s company which began performing in 1909. I had seen Osanai from my seat at the Yūrakuza when he made his speech at the opening of the first production of his Free Theatre, Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman…he was only twenty-eight then. Everyone’s career is affected in one way or the other by circumstances—character, health, or even luck—but each human being, at one time in his life, will have a period of his greatest flowering…. I suppose that it is not quite accurate of me to say that the career of Osanai, who fought hard for the theatre until his death, could be summed up in one blooming. And yet I believe that there were few times in his life like the one when, at the end of his twenty-eighth year, he was called before the footlights by a full house at the Yūrakuza. There was no way that I, a real youngster, a mere spectator in my orchestra seat, could have predicted the difficulties he would face, but I remember thinking that ‘…even Osanai has risen to the heights tonight. In any man’s life, these occasions do not repeat themselves.’24 Any judgment on the ultimate value of Osanai’s accomplishments as a theatre director must include the electric charge of his personality. Tanizaki’s fascination with him can be duplicated in the statements of a score of other writers and intellectuals. Osanai had many interests, but the two theatre companies he founded, the Free Theatre in 1909 and the Tsukiji Shōgekijō (The Tsukiji Little Theatre) in 1924, were events of the most fundamental importance, for they established the basis for modern professional theatre in Japan. The Free Theatre was a company formed by Osanai with the help of a close friend, Ichikawa Sadanji, a young kabuki actor. Osanai had heard of Antoine’s Théâtre Libre and wished to form a similar company to present experimental plays for a limited run and removed from any competition with the commercial theatre. Osanai had no theatre of his own and so leased the Yūrakuza, a small and well-equipped theatre in Tokyo, to produce three plays a year, with runs of two or three days. The company was later invited, as was the Literary Society, to perform at the Imperial Theatre. Osanai’s purposes in organizing the troupe seemed close to those of Antoine and the others. His statement that ‘…a movement for a new theatre must be built on the basis of a new movement in literature’25 suggested to his friends and well-wishers, at least in the beginning, that he might be able to make a contribution to the theatre in Japan similar to the Free Theatres in Europe. However, the means by which he worked out his plans proved harmful to the playwrights.

132

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

THE FREE THEATRE The Actors Osanai, like Antoine, wanted to borrow for his productions professional actors who wished in effect to ‘become amateurs’ by learning a new style. Ichikawa Sadanji played the leading role in Borkman on opening night (occasionally forgetting his lines, it is reported, because of inadequate rehearsal). As there were no professional actresses available, he used female impersonators from kabuki for the women’s roles. What a John Gabriel Borkrnan it must have been! Possibly because of his close association with Sadanji, Osanai continued to use kabuki actors right through to the last production of the Free Theatre in 1919, even though, as Kawatake remarks, he had come to realize that he would have done better to train young amateurs himself. Contemporary accounts suggest that the actors retained too much of the kabuki style in their performances, and that they could never learn to ‘serve the script’ properly. Osanai had the problem, at least until he made his trip to Europe in 1913, of creating productions of plays he had never seen on the stage in a style of acting concerning which he had no personal knowledge. The Repertory Osanai alternated productions of foreign plays with original Japanese dramas, a method that no doubt provided him with the best means of introducing the new experiments in European drama while encouraging Japanese playwrights. From the beginning, however, both Osanai and his audiences at the Free Theatre seemed to prefer the foreign plays. He provided a diet of Chekhov, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, and Gorky; it is small wonder that those Japanese dramatists who were learning to write in the new style were unable to compete in such exalted company. Tanizaki records his disappointment over the fact that Osanai turned down one of his plays, saying that he thereby lost the chance, as an author, to learn from seeing his play mounted on the stage.26 Still, Osanai did manage to stage a variety of works, among them plays by Ōgai (the Ikuta River mentioned above), Yoshii Isamu, Akita Ujaku, and others. In 1919, Osanai closed down the Free Theatre in order to have what he called a period of rest and study. THE TSUKIJI LITTLE THEATRE In 1923 a severe earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo, including all its important theatres. In 1924 Osanai, with the help of his disciple Hijikata Yoshi, who was independently wealthy, set about constructing a new and proper stage for himself. The building, located in the Tsukiji area of downtown Tokyo, had five hundred seats and excellent lighting and scenic equipment. Photographs taken of his productions show sets and lighting effects fully as sophisticated as those achieved in Europe during the same period. Itō Kisaku, the doyen of Japanese stage designers, began his professional career with Osanai. Osanai spoke of his new company as a ‘laboratory,’ in which various styles of productions were to be tested. He made it clear as well that his theatre was to exist not for the intellectuals but for ‘all the people.’ Osanai wrote that ‘we do not wish to stage our productions for those who lead comfortable lives. One must see plays the way one eats bread…. Just as bread should be made as cheap as possible, so must we make the results of our work as cheap as possible, for everyone to see.’27 Discouraged by his earlier experience with kabuki actors, he also decided to recruit amateurs, just as Shōyō had done for his Literary Society, and to use actresses. Many of the well-known prewar stage stars in Japan worked with Osanai’s company. Osanai’s intentions were never met, but a change of emphasis from the Free Theatre was clear.

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

133

The Repertory It was in his repertory work that Osanai made his biggest break with the policies of his earlier Free Theatre. Since the Tsukiji Little Theatre was to be a ‘laboratory,’ he decided that for the first several seasons, at least, he would produce only plays in translation and no Japanese plays at all. His decision, so disheartening to those writers who saw in his new company their only chance to see their own work mounted in a professional fashion, was justified, he said, because he found the plays made available to him, including his own,28 ‘uninteresting.’ When Osanai relinquished the role of encouraging playwrights and decided to concentrate on perfecting his own skill as a director and producer, there were no others to take up the task he had abandoned.29 The movement to create new and stage-worthy plays of literary value in Japan thus received a blow from which it had the greatest difficulty in recovering. The playwrights were at a loss as to how to proceed. In 1925 an impasse had been reached. JAPAN AND THE WORLD THEATRE MOVEMENT BEFORE 1925 Interest in the western theatre and drama brought with it a desire on the part of a growing number of writers, actors, and directors to make observations at first hand on the traditions and accomplishments of the European theatre. By 1925 a number of men influential in the New Theatre movement travelled abroad, and the ideas they brought back were of continuing importance in the further development of directing, acting, and playwriting in Japan. A certain number of figures who were prominent in the early stages of the New Theatre movement had been to Europe (Shimamura Hōgetsu, Shōyō’s disciple, and the playwright Nakanmra Kichizō, among others); they had gone as students and become interested in the theatre while abroad, and their observations had not been made on any organized basis. The first visit by a professional man of the New Theatre was made by Ichikawa Sadanji, Osanai’s partner at the Free Theatre, in 1906, three years before thepening of Osanai’s company. At the time he was having some difficulty with his acting career in kabuki, despite the fact that his father had been a well-known actor. He was invited by the writer and critic Matsue Shōyō to join him in Europe in order to learn something about developments in the western theatre and to add new elements to his art. ‘When Sadanji left for Europe he was twenty-six; Matsue, ten years his senior, looked after him like a brother and took him to see what he considered the most important theatrical events of the day.30 Sadanji’s first evening on European soil was spent making a visit to the Comédie Française to see a production of Victor Hugo’s Hernani, a play in which he had acted shortly before in a somewhat bowdlerized kabuki-style version. Sadanji never recovered from this first shock and seemed to remain in a continuous state of excited bewilderment as Matsue, who had a much better grasp of what might be accomplished for his protégé on the trip, took him to meet Sarah Bernhardt and to see productions of Molière and Tolstoy directed by Antoine. Leaving Paris they went to Venice, ‘about which Shakespeare wrote,’ Switzerland, ‘where William Tell came from,’ and finally Berlin, where Sadanji watched a production of Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening, an ironic analysis of sexual drives in the young, the meaning of which seems to have escaped him completely. He saw some of Gordon Craig’s stage designs in Berlin and a production of Shakespeare directed by Max Reinhardt in Vienna. Up until this time Sadanji had never seen any modern plays on the stage, although he had read Hugo, Shakespeare, and a few others in translation. Matsue then took Sadanji to England to see some productions of Shaw at the Royal Court Theatre (one of the groups which had succeeded Grein’s Independent Theatre) and arranged for him to take acting lessons for a month. Sadanji, with no knowledge of English, was badgered by Matsue into courses on elocution and

134

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

‘methods of expression.’ Sadanji later commented that these lessons had shown him how useless the dialogue in kabuki was for expressing the nuances of human emotion. As Toita remarks laconically, Sadanji ‘… formed the whole basis of his later art on what he had received in these lessons of less than twenty days.’31 Sadanji’s activities after he returned home are of considerable interest for kabuki;32 more important, his confused and enthusiastic reports on the European theatre helped give Osanai some inspiration for the specific methods he used to establish the Free Theatre. Osanai himself visited Europe from December 1912 to the summer of 1913. Unlike Sadanji, he himself had had the experience of several seasons of the Free Theatre behind him. In addition he had a good academic knowledge of the European theatre. A series of accurate and informed articles on such diverse subjects as Gordon Craig, Grein’s Independent Theatre, and the German Free Theatre, all published by Osanai before his trip, show that he was knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the latest developments on the continent. Osanai’s trip took him to Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, France, and England.33 He arrived at a period of extraordinary creativity in the European theatre and witnessed one brilliant achievement after another: the Moscow Art Theatre, Reinhardt’s Viennese productions, various German Free Theatres, including a famous repertory company in Hamburg, the acting school of the Swiss Jacques-Dalcroize in Leipzig, experimental French productions in Paris, and the various independent companies in London. Osanai was still a young man, in the flush of his first enthusiasms. Sugai34 mentions the fact that Osanai seemed utterly absorbed in the theatre and studied the particular productions he saw with great care, often returning to see them several times. By the time he reached Berlin, Kubo wrote,35 he was out of money and had to borrow from friends. Yet in his enthusiasm for the theatre, Osanai forgot to examine the civilization, history, and religion from which the European theatre had grown. His education was incomplete. The novelist Shimazaki Tōson was in Paris when Osanai visited the city, and an entry in Tōson’s diary about his meeting with Osanai conveys some of the director’s excitement. Osanai finally arrived in Paris much later than scheduled, full of various stories about his trip, and especially about the Moscow Art Theatre and the others to which his visits had taken him. His suitcases were stuffed with wigs for women and old men which he had bought in London. I accompanied him to the Paris Opéra while he regaled me with stories of how he saw Chekhov’s widow act on the stage and how impressed he had been with the Moscow Art Theatre.36 As Tōson indicates, Osanai’s chief discovery on his trip was the art of Stanislavsky and his ensemble methods. Osanai was particularly interested in the Russian director’s production of Gorky’s Lower Depths and used his own copious notes on it to recreate similar effects in a version of the play which he produced in Japan late in 1913. (He had previously directed the play in 1910.) Although Japan’s own New Theatre movement was just beginning (Osanai called his company ‘a kindergarten’ after his return), Osanai had unwittingly stumbled on a second stage of the development of the modern theatre in Europe. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and the others had already given the modern theatre its basic repertory, and men like Antoine, Graun, and Nemirovich-Danchenko had built up performing companies a generation before in order to realize these plays on the stage. It was on this firm base that the great directors—Reinhardt, Stanislavsky, Copeau, and the others—could build their own interpre tations. These men were the central figures in the productions they directed, but in the beginning the author, and not the director, was the most important figure. Osanai, who had learned from Sadanji only six years before what the function of a director might be, now decided that he wanted to follow his spiritual mentor Stanislavsky in creating and directing an ensemble of his own in Japan. There is no question that Osanai’s ambitions were laudably high-minded, but his decision was woefully out of step with any possible

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

135

development of a modern drama in Japan. Shimomura is surely correct when he writes that any movement for a new drama in Japan could be said to have begun only when new plays were being created,37 and Osanai’s undue concentration on what might be described as ‘the cult of the director’ produced a severe aberration in what had been up until then a shaky but not unnatural process of self-development for the drama in Japan. Osanai, like Sadanji, had learned something but not enough in Europe. And the mistake was often to be repeated. As the European theatre moved into new periods of experimentation, the Japanese visitors who followed Osanai were able to learn only a little of the whole spectrum of artistic activities they might have seen. Each came back with a little piece of the whole, and, in the small and financially restricted world of the Japanese New Theatre movement, the pieces seldom fitted together. The fever for a European experience continued to spread. Osanai was much taken by the Russian theatre, and the English, German, and French stages had their champions as well. England in fact claimed much of the professional career of one young playwright, Kōri Torahiko (1890– 1924), who spent eleven years of his short life there. Kōri’s was a precocious talent. His play Dōjōji (The Temple of Dōjō) was performed by Osanai’s Free Theatre when he was only twenty-two; emboldened by this early success, he set out for Germany with the hope of making a serious study of the modern drama but left the continent for England when war was declared in 1914. He remained there until 1924, composing and revising his plays, ‘writing in Japanese and translating, simultaneously, into English.’38 Kōri wrote several plays on Biblical subjects, but his self-proclaimed masterpiece was the play The Toils of Yoshitomo, written in 1922. The play is based on the complex incidents surrounding the Hōgen Insurrection of 1156, which pitted members of the same noble families against each other. The choice of events might have been a good one, but Kōri’s use of them is sentimental and historically inaccurate.39 The last scene transforms Yoshitomo’s father into a kind of male Madame Butterfly, grasping for the hand of his tiny grandchild Yoritomo as the curtain falls. Kōri’s plays bear all the marks of the melodramatic historical dramas typical of what was being written in Japan at the time and so may serve as a means for English-speaking readers to sample a style which is no longer kabuki nor yet modern. If the compromise seems an unhappy one, his English friends, at least, found Yoshitomo of sufficient interest to arrange performances at the Little Theatre of London, where it ran for three weeks in 1922. The play was directed by Edith Craig, Gordon Craig’s sister, and was also translated into German, Polish, and French. During his stay in England, Kōri was asked to lecture on the history and significance of the Japanese drama. The information he related is correct in the light of modern scholarship and was probably more detailed than anything else available in English at the time. Yet running through his lecture is a note of disdain for the old and a strong desire for the establishment of a new drama in Japan. Of nō he says for example, it is rather surprising that in their enthusiastic study most of the English scholars [Yeats and others] have overlooked the fact that nothing is so little original as nō poetry, which is mostly a patchwork of bits of old Chinese and Japanese poetry, with also a great deal added from the Buddhist scriptures… and all this poetry, which is mostly copied word by word and collected with rather little understanding, weighs down and crushes the essential core of the drama, resulting more often than not in an unhappy incoherence.40 Kōri concludes his account with the words that ‘…it is to be regretted that in the course of this long period of history, one fails to find one work of real art, rich and ripe with the fundamental pathos of humanity.’41

136

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

False as his views may seem, Kōri’s attitude is altogether representative of those who were determined to westernize their theatre so as to get as close as possible to their own contemporary definition of ‘the fundamental pathos of humanity.’ Kōri represents an extreme case, as he actually made his career abroad, but, with no important exception, all those who went abroad, beginning with Sadanji, saw the western drama as their only possible source of inspiration. The French theatre had several Japanese devotees, among them Iwata Toyoo (1893–1959), who studied in France from 1922 to 1925. Iwata made his voyage to France after the death of his mother; when he left Japan he had not yet firmly committed himself to a study of the theatre, but within a year after his arrival in Paris he had made up his mind to try to study the contemporary theatrical scene. His informal memoir, Shingeki to watakushi (My Experiences with the New Theatre), includes a kind of diary listing the important plays and actors he saw in France, and so chronicles the gradual deepening of his taste and understanding. Iwata says that his first year was a Russian one: Diaghilev ballets, Bakst settings, and opulent spectacles. The year was crowned for him by his visits to productions of the Moscow Art Theatre which visited Paris.42 (Iwata imagined himself to be the only other Japanese beside Osanai Kaoru to have seen the company and only after his return to Japan learned that Kishida Kunio had been in the same audience with him.) During the season of 1923, Iwata saw and came to respect the work of Georges Pitoëff,43 the Russian actor who, with his wife Ludmilla, staged a variety of first-rate avant-garde productions in Paris at this time. Pitoëff had been credited with bringing to Paris some of the ideals of the Moscow Art Theatre and in presenting to Parisian audiences plays ‘characterized by simplified and poetic abstractions tending to express the troubled inner landscape of human passions.’44 It was he who introduced the playwright Lenormand to Paris, staged plays by Gide and Jules Remains, and provided the opportunity for Parisian theatregoers to see a steady diet of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pirandello, and O’Neill. But Iwata came to revere the work of Jacques Copeau more than Pitoëff’s. Copeau, the foremost director in France at that time, is often held to be the greatest in the history of the modern theatre in any country. Beginning his famous dramatic company Le Vieux Colombier in 1913, he stripped away the remaining artifice and frippery from the French stage, continuing a process so well begun by Antoine, and established a repertory company of superbly trained actors45 who for a period often years (during which they made a visit to the United States during the First World War) devoted themselves to the finest and simplest possible presentations of new and classic plays. When Copeau returned to Paris at the end of the First World War, he remodeled his stage into a kind of permanent-unit set, flexible yet sufficiently evocative for any circumstance. Iwata (and Kishida) saw staged on it plays by Shakespeare, Molière, Musset, Beaumarchais, Chekhov, Gogol, and among the young French writers, Charles Vildrac, Émile Mazaud, Roné Benjamin, Roger Martin du Gard, Jules Romains, and even one by Cop eau himself, La maison natale (The House into Which We are Born). Iwata’s descriptions of the Copeau productions suggest that he had grasped Copeau’s methods and had penetrated into psychology behind Copeau’s idealism. Iwata went from an appreciation of Russian spectacle to a love for the simplest of all stages in a process which took him three years; when he heard in 1924 that Copeau planned to close his company, he found himself saying that it was time to go home. Before doing so, he made a trip to Germany, but found the productions of the plays of the German expressionist writers too heavy and old-fashioned for his taste. In his last year in Paris, Iwata saw other productions of plays by writers who would make the 1930s an important period in the history of the theatre—Pirandello, Jules Romains (especially his Doctor Knock), and Jean Cocteau. Iwata took careful notes on all the Paris productions he saw, worked on his French, and collected materials which he used in the dramatic criticism he wrote after his return to Japan. He also became

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

137

friends with the dramatist Charles Vildrac; shortly before Iwata left for Tokyo, the pair of them spent an evening despairing over the closing of Le Vieux Colombier. Of all the actors, writers, and directors who went abroad, Iwata remained the longest and developed perhaps the keenest sense of the real accomplishments of a foreign theatre. After his return to Japan, he wrote criticism, made translations, and was involved in a number of projects with Kishida Kunio. He also wrote a short play, a comedy-farce in one act called Higashi wa higashi (East is East),46 one of the treasures of the modern Japanese stage. The play tells of the troubles of a Chinese in medieval times who has drifted to Japan and taken a Japanese wife. The conflict of the two cultures is shown there in humorous and theatrically civilized terms. The First World War brought tremendous changes to the theatre in Europe. Copeau, Reinhardt, and Stanislavsky were still in their prime, but the Russian revolution had brought about in that country the rapid development of political theatre, especially in the work of Stanislavsky’s disciple and erstwhile rival V.S.Meyerhold (1874–1940). The postwar political confusion in Germany stimulated the work of the expressionist playwrights there, and by 1920 the worker’s theatrical experiments of Erwin Piscator (1893– 1966) were well under way. Young Japanese theatre students going to Russia and Germany in this period were much taken with these new methods, many of which had been created in direct opposition to the ideals of the prewar European theatre. This new group of travellers now introduced into Japan another view of the theatre that, clashing as it did with the ideas of Copeau, Stanislavsky, and the others, led to a decade or more of crippling doctrinal warfare in New Theatre circles. One of the first of these visitors to postwar Europe was Osanai’s colleague Hijikata Yoshi (1898–1959), whose chance viewing of one of Meyerhold’s productions in Moscow brought an early introduction of the Soviet director’s ideas and methods to the Tsukiji Little Theatre. Hijikata had taken an early interest in the theatre, forming a small company while he was still a student. He met Osanai in 1920 and, fired with his new friend’s enthusiasm for the theatre, decided to go to Europe for a ten-year period of study. He spent 1922 in Berlin, where he studied with a noted director and scenic artist of the period. Carl Heine. When Hijikata received word of the devastation caused by the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, he decided to return to Japan at once and donate the funds he had set aside for his own study to the building of a new theatre in Tokyo to be used exclusively for the production of modern plays. Hijikata had seen some Expressionist plays in Germany (Kaiser, Toller, and similar writers were having their plays widely produced there during Hijikata’s visit); he returned to Japan through Russia, and while he was in Moscow he happened to see Meyerhold’s production of The Earth in Turmoil, an adaption and ‘sovietization’ by Sergei Tretyakov of a French play, La nuit by the French Marxist poet Marcel Martinet.47 Hijikata was overwhelmed by what he saw. Meyerhold insisted not on psychology and naturalism, as did Stanislavsky, but on a vivid theatricalism, using aggressive declamation projected on screens to ‘teach’ the audience the meaning of the play; the scenery was a procession of real machines, the actors wore no makeup and used street clothes as costumes. Many of these ideas had been taken over from the German Expressionist writers48 (and Brecht among others would go on developing such methods in Germany), but Meyerhold’s brilliant success in relating Expressionist abstractions to political propaganda, as Braun points out, created a unique combination of glittering theatricality and a trenchant social message. When Hijikata returned to Tokyo he worked hard to promote the development of this style of acting and directing. He directed one of the plays in the opening program of the Tsukiji Little Theatre, an Expressionist work by Reinhard Goering, Seeschlacht (A Sea Battle). Hijikata’s rough and abstract methods of direction were quite at variance with those of his partner Osanai, who followed Stanislavsky. Hijikata later wrote that A Sea Battle was his ‘first protest against the decadence of the Japanese theatre of my time;

138

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

it was the beacon put out.’49 Hijikata had brought the conflict between the two Russian directors to Japan, but the conflict was now within the same theatrical company. In addition, Hijikata, like Meyerhold, tended to view any script as only a springboard for the director’s imagination. Again the function of the playwright was bypassed even before the Japanese writers were able to learn the essentials of their craft. German theatre had also had its exponents in Japan before 1925. Chief among them was Murayama Tomoyoshi (born 1901). Murayama had developed an early interest in theatre and painting. He withdrew from his undergraduate work in the philosophy department of Tokyo University in 1921 in order to go to Berlin, where he remained for two years to paint and observe productions of Expressionist theatre. Murayama was exposed to productions of the plays of such writers as Kaiser, Goering, Oscar Kokoschka (the painter was also a playwright at this time), and Stefan Zweig. The techniques used in these Expressionist plays were extremely subjective: ‘the faithful portrayal of reality and the pursuit of aesthetic values for their own sake were renounced for unrestrained “self-expression.” [In the plays,] grammar and syntax were ruthlessly overthrown, articles eliminated, sentences clipped, new words created. In some extreme instances, the dialogue was reduced to bare exclamations—the ecstatic cry was the ultimate mark of expressionist diction.’50 The early Expressionist movement was basically a spiritual one, but in the work of the young director Erwin Piscator (1893–1956), who began his celebrated Proletarian Theatre while Murayama was in Berlin, the German avant-garde theatre took a turn to the left that rivalled Meyerhold’s. Piscator took his actors direcdy to the workers, playing in beer halls and community centers; his success was so great that by 1925 he was offered the best stages in Germany for his experiments. His attitudes toward art and his antipathy toward the methods of a man like Stanislavsky are neatly summed up in a few phrases from his notebooks: ‘let us consciously create unfinished products. We don’t have the time to build formally. So many new thoughts push on to the light. Time is so precious that we cannot wait for the last refined purifications… what is most needed is the interim achievement.’51 Fired with new enthusiasm, Murayama returned to Tokyo in 1923.52 He wrote plays, painted, and edited an Expressionist art magazine. One of his first commissions was to do the sets and costumes for the 1924 production by the Tsukiji Little Theatre of Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, a story of a bank clerk who absconds with a large sum of money so as to make up in a single day for a life of misery and frustration. Murayama’s efforts were successful but he soon decided that a specifically Expressionist and leftist theatre group would have to be created in Japan. In carrying out Piscator’s ideas, Murayama, like Osanai, became a spokesman in Japan for the importance of the director even before the plays for his Expressionist repertory were created. In a period of thirteen years—from 1912, when Osanai went to Moscow, until 1924, when Iwata returned from Paris—articulate and determined spokesmen for nearly every significant movement in all modern European theatre had appeared in Japan. Some of these men, notably Iwata, remained a long time in Europe and came to know the foreign theatre well. But, significantly, the two most powerful men in the world of the practicing theatre, Osanai and Hijikata, remained abroad only a short time and did not penetrate very far into the real methods of their mentors. Significantly too, most of these men went to study the methods of production of these plays, not the writing of them. They skipped over the most important element. These extraordinarily various influences, created in half a dozen countries over fifty years, were now brought to bear at one time on a few financially insecure organizations. By 1925, Japan had been brought abreast of Europe in terms of knowledge. But the knowledge had been obtained quickly, and little of it had been put into practice.

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

139

FROM LITERATURE TO POLITICS The first current in the westernization of the Japanese theatre, in which literary values were predominant, centered on an emulation of the ideals of the European theatre before the First World War, of which the work of Jacques Copeau represented a final flowering. Now, however, a series of new writers with dramatic aspirations came to the fore in Japan. The Playrwright as a Member of the Vanguard The period after World War I brought to the fore in Japan a group of idealistic writers who had taken from their idol, Tolstoy, the conviction that men must develop a social conscience and take practical steps to bring about a concrete social realization of their ideas and beliefs. The most typical of these writers, almost a paradigm of the period, was Arishima Takeo (1878–1923),53 who, though not primarily a playwright himself, infused into the younger generation something of his enthusiasm and of his final sense of disillusionment as well. As a young man Arishima was a Christian but he later rejected religion and became a kind of neo-Socialist, in 1922 turning over his own extensive farm lands in Hokkaido to his tenants. Suddenly his creative energies ebbed away, and in 1923 he committed suicide over an affair with another man’s wife in an incident which, like the death of the novelist Akutagawa Ryūnosuke in 1927, was to make a great impression on the literary world of the time. Following World War I, Japan was presented with a series of difficult economic problems, and Japanese intellectuals who had come in contact with socialist and communist ideas now began working to establish organizations to spread these new ideas. In 1920, shortly before Arishima’s death, the Nihon Shakaishugi Dōmei (Japan Socialist League) was formed. Many writers participated. In 1921 the government forced the League to disband but by then Japan’s first important socialist literary magazine Tanemaku hito (The Sower) had begun publishing. Arishima, although he stated that he was ‘too deeply attached to his own background to accept the ideology of Marxism,’54 nevertheless had joined the League as an associate member and was a contributor to the magazine, which soon became a rallying point for a variety of distinguished writers and their younger colleagues. The editors declared that ‘we defend the truth of the Revolution for life,’55 and the proletarian cast of the magazine was soon quite apparent. Among the contributors to The Sower were three playwrights whose work owed its primary inspiration to the ideals of Arishima. They were Akita Ujaku (1883–1962), Fujimori Seikichi (born 1892), and Kaneko Yōbun (born 1894). Of the three Akita was the most important. Akita began his theatrical career as a member of the Ibsen society56 and Osanai presented one of his early plays at the Free Theatre in 1910. He joined the Japan Socialist League in 1920 and was a frequent contributor to The Sower. By 1920 Akita, a close friend of Arishima, had become strongly attracted to socialism. His play Kokkyō no yoru (Night at the Frontier) was first published in 1920, in the magazine Shinshōsetsu (New Fiction), and was staged the following year by a small experimental theatre group in Tokyo. The play, significantly enough set in Hokkaido, has been described as the ‘manifestation of a bad dream’ and tells a murky story about the problems of human feeling versus the dictates of a social philosophy; it includes masked men, dying mothers, and wailing children. Akita has written that the play was written to reflect his interests in socialism. When Arishima died in 1923, Akita, disappointed and depressed, became determined to show in his work the necessary relation between the life of the intellectual and the state of society itself.57 His next play, written in 1924, was entitled Gaikotsu no buyō (The Skeleton’s Dance) and was a fictional retelling of an infamous incident after the 1923 earthquake in Tokyo when a number of Korean laborers were murdered by frightened mobs of Japanese. In order to deal with such political subjects, Akita resorted in this and later

140

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

plays to Expressionist techniques he learned from the modern German theatre. Osanai, who was at this time becoming more aware of the artistic potential of such drama, produced some of Akita’s plays at the Tsukiji Little Theatre.58 Fujimori Seikichi was another playwright whose interests in the personality and doctrines of Arishima led him quickly into the proletarian camp. He too had joined the Japan Socialist League and wrote for The Sower. After Arishima’s death Fujimori wrote a play called Gisei (The Sacrifice) about Arishima’s suicide, but when the play was published in installments in the June and July 1926 issues of Kaizō (Reconstruction), the issues of the magazine were banned. Osanai was greatly impressed with the work and prepared a stage production at the Tsukiji Little Theatre, but this too was forbidden by the authorities the day before the opening. Kaneko Yōbun, like Akita and Fujimori, belonged to the same organizations and wrote a variety of stories and plays of socialist persuasion, among them a 1922 play, Sentakuya to shijin (The Laundryman and the Poet) of some distinction.59 In 1925 Yōbun became the editor of a new leftist magazine, Bungeisensen (Literary Battle Line), which replaced The Sower. Within a very short time, then, a group of authors appeared to challenge the literary canons both of the older playwrights and of other younger writers who wished to stress purely literary values in their works. The degree of militancy shown by these writers may be judged by the fact that all became members of a new organization formed in 1925, the Nihon Puroretaria Bungei Renmei (Japan Proletarian Literary Arts League). The founders of this organization were inspired by the 1924 Moscow Comintern meeting where the unification of proletarian writers around the world had been proposed. The purpose of the League was to unite all the leftist writers in Japan into support for a group movement. The League had a drama section headed by Sasaki Takamaru (born 1898), who was later to head several important leftist theatre troupes. By 1925, he had managed to organize these playwrights and to find methods to present their works on the stage. Akita and the others might be considered somewhat transitional figures in the development of the political drama in Japan, but several young writers who began their careers in the early 1920s gave considerable distinction to the movement for a proletarian theatre. The purely literary writers beginning their work in 1925, such as Kishida, were up against considerable competition. Many of the earlier political writers had received only indifferent schooling, but the younger Marxist playwrights were well educated at the best universities in Tokyo. Murayama Tomoyoshi, mentioned above, had also studied in Germany. Mafune Yutaka (born 1902) studied English literature at Waseda but left his studies in a crisis of personal despondency. By 1925 he was beginning to publish his first stories and plays. Kubo Sakae (1901–1958), who had been a friend of Murayama since student days, studied German literature at Tokyo University and began working with Hijikata at the Tsukiji Little Theatre. His work both as a biographer of Osanai and as a playwright make him the outstanding figure of his generation in the political theatre. Also to be mentioned is Miyoshi Jūrō (1902–1958), who after graduating from Waseda with a degree in English literature joined the Japan Proletarian Literary Arts League and began an active playwriting career. If Shōyō and the example of Ibsen had turned the playwrights into intellectuals by the time of the First World War, the postwar situation turned them into ideologues; for these men, the theatre would now state the truth, not explore it.60 Time would show them the difficulties of combining art and politics, and indeed there were no Brechts among them. But in 1925 most of the talented young playwrights in Japan seemed very far to the left.

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

141

The Creation of Political Theatre Troupes in Japan to 1925 In the early 1920s, a variety of small companies were created for the purpose of staging these plays. They all operated in great financial insecurity but most of them were able to continue because of the enthusiasm, indeed the passion, of their young members. Although Osanai was unwilling to produce Japanese plays of literary merit,61 these troupes were actually created in order to produce the propaganda plays of the young Japanese radical intelligentsia. One of the first of these small theatre troupes, and the most unusual of them, was the Nihon Rōdō Gekidan (Japan Labor Theatre), a small group begun around 1922 by Hirasawa Keishichi (1885–1923), a labor leader who became a writer. The company was based in Tokyo, and like similar groups used mostly amateur actors and sought an audience for its socialist skits and plays among factory workers. The group had a profound effect on certain members of the professional theatre. Akita Ujaku went to see the troupe perform. The spectators were all laborers. They cried out ‘yes!’ ‘that’s it!’ yelling as they watched the plays. The theatre became a frenzied crucible. Before we set out for the theatre, we thought that there would be little value in their work, but on the way back, we were completely bowled over by what we had seen. We talked on the streetcar coming back. ‘The way they go about the thing seems impossible. Imagine making playwrights and actors out of laborers!’62 Osanai himself was taken by Hijikata to see the troupe perform and found himself very enthusiastic. He had written of a theatre for the people: here, for the first time, he saw a real people’s theatre at work. The group lasted less than two years. In the aftermath of the Tokyo earthquake Hirasawa and several other imp ortant radicals were arrested and evidently murdered by the Tokyo police. The troupe collapsed, but its influence as a source of inspiration continued to remain strong. Akita Ujaku began his own small company, the Senkuza (Pioneer Theatre), in 1922. Performances were given to invited audiences on the second floor of a Shinjuku bakery, then later on the second floor of a Japanese-style storehouse, which gained the company its nickname of ‘The Storehouse Theatre.’ (The storehouse, and the troupe, were destroyed in the earthquake.) The repertory included some of Akita’s own work, short plays by Eugene O’Neill, and a one-act play by the then radical literary critic Hasegawa Nyozekan (born I875) entitled Ethyl Gasoline.63 Among the members of Akita’s group was Sasaki Takamaru, who later, in line with his work as head of the Drama Section of the Japan Proletarian Literary Arts League, managed to organize his own small company, the Torunkuza (The Trunk Theatre), which took its name from the fact that the actors packed all their properties quickly in a trunk so as to be able to travel easily. Although the troupe was to carry out the purposes of the League, its repertory was more humanist than overtly Marxist in the choice of plays, which included Ethyl Gasoline and plays by the noted writer Mushakōji Saneatsu, another associate of Arishima. The performances by the troupe have been described as ‘sham-Expressionist’ and rather amateur,64 but the actors were greatly spurred on by the enthusiasm of their worker audiences. The history of these early groups is complex and often obscure, but by 1925 Murayama Tomoyoshi and a group of his friends, including Kaneko Yōbun, Sasaki Takamaru, and Senda Koreya (today the dean of Japanese directors and actors), began a new group they called the Zen’eiza (Vanguard Theatre). A year later they were able to rent Osanai’s Tsukiji theatre building, where they presented a series of highly successful performances of the Soviet play Don Quixote Released by A.V. Lunacharsky.65 Murayama followed this play with a production of one of Piscator’s favorites, Upton Sinclair’s Prince Hagen, a satire on the financial world and an ironic retelling of the myths in Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

142

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Within a period of four or five years the rough enthusiasm witnessed by Akita had been combined with the dedication of the young professionals in the Vanguard Theatre to produce productions of political plays performed with skill and sophistication. The subsequent history of the various groups performing political plays is a tangled one that, in any case, kept them almost altogether apart from the work of the ordinary New Theatre groups that continued to stress literary and artistic ideals. Yet the strong inroads into the New Theatre movement made by the political theatre groups were so marked that the period of 1925 to 1940 (when the last of them was closed down by the government) was largely dominated by their activities. From the point of view of the Japanese playwrights, the irony inherent in the success of such groups was obvious. With a few exceptions (notably the two productions of Lunacharsky and Sinclair), the radical companies made use of Japanese plays. The radical companies now provided what Osanai did not: a place for Japanese writers (at least writers of a certain kind) to have their plays performed. In both the artistic and the political theatre, however, the directors, not the writers, were the central figures. Indeed, the authors who wrote for the political theatre companies wrote to order, rather like the kabuki playwrights fifty years before; this time, their instructions came from their own fixed political convictions and from the powerful directors, rather than from the star kabuki actors. But their plays read like circumscribed scenarios. The playwrights were again part of a larger machine. With the establishment of the Tsukiji Little Theatre in 1924, the age of the experimentation was over and professional theatre in Japan became possible for the first time. The two assumptions of the writers, actors, and directors could now be acted upon. First, every important figure in the New Theatre movement at this time stood unequivocally for the westernization of the Japanese theatre and opposed any attempt to reform or modernize its traditional forms. Shimpa and the experiments of Tsubouchi Shōyō were disregarded. This attitude was as strong among the proletarian writers and directors as it was among men like Osanai, Mori Ōgai, Tanizaki Junichirō, and the other literary playwrights. Second, the role of the playwright in the performing theatre had been subordinated to that of the director. In 1924, Japan received its first professional theatre with Osanai and its first young professional playwright trained in Europe with Kishida Kunio. The conflicts between them would throw all the difficulties of the New Theatre movement into high relief. NOTES 1. Quoted in Shimomura Masao, Shingeki (Tokyo, 1956), pp. 24–25. 2. This is not to suggest that vehicles for actors were not an important part of the western theatre. Take for example the following experience that Eugene O’Neill had as a student. Augustus Thomas, then the dean of American playwrights and the personification of all that was successful, admired—and hackneyed—on the Broadway stage, took over the class [at Harvard] for a guest lecture. Thomas, with lightning inventiveness and a glibness that revolted O’Neill, proceeded to define the method for writing a sure-fire Broadway success. ‘Suggest the name of the star,’ Thomas invited the class. (Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill [New York, 1962], pp. 270–271.) 3. Japanese National Commission for UNESCO, Theatre in Japan (Tokyo, 1963), p. 61. 4. These attitudes on the part of the samurai and the nobility carried on into the Meiji period. For example, a leading educator wrote in 1882 that jōruri puppet plays, also performed in the kabuki repertory ‘were truly the extreme in lewdness and obscenity …among samurai, such books were extremely despised, and a samurai of

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

143

good conduct would no more pick up such a book than he would a pile of rubbish.’ (Quoted in Donald Shively, ‘Nishimura Shigeki: A Confucian View of Modernization,’ in Marius Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization [Princeton, 1965], pp. 228–229.) In the novels of Natsume Sōseki and other respected authors of the Meiji period, characters represented as having good ‘modern’ educations often disdained the traditional theatre as vulgar and spiritually empty. Such views were less common by World War I, but were typical twenty years before and indeed were reinforced by the fact that the growing intelligentsia which grew up towards the end of the nineteenth century in Japan associated kabuki with the ‘feudal’ ways of the old regime. 5. Tanaka Chikao, ed., Gekibungaku (Tokyo, 1959), p. 13. 6. Komiya Toyotaka, Japanese Music and Drama in the Meiji Era (Tokyo, 1956), pp. 191–192. 7. Komiya reports an amusing incident that shows the sharpness of the public’s reaction to Danjūrō’s (to them) untoward changes in their favorite plays. ‘Danjūrō sometimes suffered for his realism. Often the whole troupe was dissatisfied with him. When in June 1881 he appeared at the Shintomiza in the revenge story of the Soga brothers, he played the younger brother to Sōjūrō’s elder brother. Danjūrō was dressed in full armor, while Sōjūrō was dressed in the traditional hitched-up trousers and was barefoot. A critic reported that “the younger brother was prepared for a fire, the elder for a flood.” Sōjūrō pleaded illness and appeared in only one performance.’ (Komiya, Meiji Drama, p. 202.) 8. Many Japanese at the time were very critical of Kawakami, since they felt that he and his wife were misrepresenting Japanese theatrical traditions. After all, there were at the time no professional actresses in Japan. Sadako had been a geisha and knew how to dance, but she could hardly be expected to represent in any fashion the art of kabuki. Nevertheless, the trip had an extraordinary impact in Europe. For the reaction there, see the lively account in Leonard Pronko, Theatre East and West (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 120–124. For Max Beerbohm’s enthusiastic praise of Sadako, whom he puts before Sarah Bernhardt, see his essay ‘Incomparables Compared’ in Around Theatres (New York, 1954), pp. 159–160. The only dissenting voice on the question of her talents was, oddly enough, that of Jacques Copeau, who told Kishida Kunio that ‘her way of doing things was all wrong.’ (See Kishida Kunio zenshū, ix, p. 55.) 9. Shimomura, Shingeki, p. 28. 10. UNESCO, Theatre in Japan, p. 192. 11. Notably in Ukigumo: Japan’s First Modern Novel by Marleigh Ryan. 12. See Kawatake Shigetoshi, Gaisetsu Nihon engekishi (Tokyo, 1966), p. 230. 13. See Kawatake Shigetoshi, Ningen Tsubouchi Shōyō (Tokyo, 1959), pp. 205–208. 14. The Hermit received its first stage performance in 1926 when it was chosen for performance by the Tsukiji shōgekijō (Tsukiji Little Theatre). This production was a cause célèbre in the theatre world, for reasons that do not affect any evaluation of Shōyō’s work. See below, pp. 70–71. 15. Komiya cites the fact that Shōyō ‘disliked the atmosphere of the professional theatres and considered it necessary to train amateurs, and amateurs as cultivated as he could find, if the cultural level of the theatre was to be improved.’ (See Komiya, Meiji Drama, p. 292.) Shōyō was a partisan of kabuki and indeed his translations of Shakespeare, though extremely gifted, were closer to the older style than to colloquial speech. Nevertheless he wished to find colleagues with well-educated minds open to change. 16. Nakamura Mitsuo, Modern Japanese Fiction (Tokyo, 1968), pp. 7–8. 17. For a discussion of this group, see Komiya, Meiji Drama, pp. 285–286. 18. See Kawatake, Engekishi, p. 395. 19. Tanaka Chikao, Gekibungaku, p. 15. 20. Quoted in Shimomura, Shingeki, p. 29. 21. Edwin McClellan, ‘The Impressionistic Tendency in Some Modern Japanese Writers,’ Chicago Review, xvii, #4, 1964, p. 48. 22. There are several full-length biographies of Osanai, the best of them by the playwright Kubo Sakae.

144

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

See Kawatake, Engekishi, p. 389, for a history of the word shingeki. Tanizaki Junichirō, Seishun monogatari (Tokyo, 1958), pp. 226–227. Quoted in Shimomura, Shingeki, p. 12. See Tanizaki, Seishun, p. 234. Osanai Kaoru, Osanai Kaoru engekiron zenshū (Tokyo, 1965), II, p. 298. In the early 1920s, Osanai had begun writing plays himself. In 1921 his one-act play Daiichi no seikai (The First World) was produced at the Imperial Theatre through the help of Ichikawa Sadanji. The play, about a man who cuts himself off from the ‘first world’ of society because of a lost love, is rather thin stuff. His next play, Musuko (The Son), written in 1922 and the request of a kabuki actor, was an adaptation of a short melodrama named Augustus in Search of a Father by a minor nineteenth-century English writer, Harold Chapin. One scene might be from kabuki itself: the son, a criminal fleeing from justice, meets his own father but fails to recognize him. Osanai’s own failures at playwriting may have caused his attitude of disdain toward the works of his contemporaries. Osanai did eventually produce some Japanese plays. These productions will be discussed in connection with Kishida in the following chapter. A rather complete and amusing account of this visit can be found in Toita Yasuji, Shingeki no hitobito (Tokyo, 1952), pp. 120–124. Toita, Hitobito, p. 125. See Komiya, Meiji Drama, pp. 250–253. Some of Sadanji’s reforms were hooted down by conservative kabuki audiences. For example, his attempt to use reserved seats, an idea he had picked up in Europe, caused a furor: on opening night, a gang of bullies forced him to retire from the theatre in disguise, and his adviser Matsue retired to a temple in nervous prostration. Kubo, Osanai has some details of the trip. See p. 77 et seq. Sugai Yukio, ‘Osanai kaishaku,’ Osanai engekiron zenshū, I, p. 502. Kubo, Osanai, p. 77. Quoted in Osanai engekiron zenshū, i, p. 502. Shimomura, Shingeki, p. 60. Kōri’s English style seems to resemble a pre-Shavian period of theatrical vocabulary. Without wishing to denigrate him unduly, the irreverent may chuckle over these lines taken at random from The Toils of Yoshitomo (page references from Kōri, The English Works, Tokyo, 1936). ‘Well may you curse the chance that blew my sail to the shore of Naniwa this dawn!’ (p. 219) ‘But Chihaya, with all your love, how much more would you grieve to think that when in days coming they are singing the heroic tales of Genji in the Hōgen years, my name alone should be silent upon their biwa strings?’ (p. 239) ‘The arrow has scarce grazed my brow, praised be Hachiman!’ (p. 230)

39. Kōri has Tameyoshi commit suicide to aid the cause of his son Yoshitomo. Actually, according to Sansom, he was killed by a minor officer of the clan. See A History of Japan to 1334, p. 256. 40. Kōri, The English Works, pp. 284–285. 41. Ibid., p. 298. 42. Iwata dates his decision to study the theatre seriously from his first visit to the Moscow Art Theatre. He recounts that he tried to find some good books on the modern theatre in French but was told that the best ones were written by English or American authors. He soon found himself, like so many other foreigners in Paris, looking through the shelves of Brentano’s Book Store. 43. In fact Iwata saw his first modern play at Pitoëff’s theatre shortly after his arrival in Paris. It was, of course, Gorky’s ubiquitous Lower Depths. 44. For a discussion of the achievements of Pitoëff, see Clark and Freedley, A History of Modern Drama (New York, 1947), p. 278.

MODERNIZATION OR WESTERNIZATION

145

45. Many of the most famous names in the modern French theatre were involved with the company: Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Suzanne Bing, Valentine Tessier, and others. 46. The play is also a linguistic tour de force, being written in the language of kyōgen, the farces that accompanied traditional productions of nō. 47. An account of the production can be found in Edward Braun, Meyerhold on Theatre (New York, 1969), pp. 187– 189. Hijikata so liked the play that he later directed a production of the French original for Osanai. 48. And something from kabuki. Like Stanislavsky, Meyerhold was fascinated with the Japanese theatre. His interest had been stimulated with the visit to Russia in 1901 of Kawakami’s troupe (see above), and he attempted to use what he took to be kabuki staging methods in a 1910 production of Molière’s Don Juan. His enthusiastic comments on the Japanese theatre (see Braun, Meyerhold, pp. 99–100) are misinformed in details of fact but seem to show that he had indeed caught much of the basic spirit of kabuki stylization. Hijikata himself was evidendy unaware of this interest on Meyerhold’s part and presumably never studied kabuki himself, as far as I have been able to ascertain. Hijikata’s accomplishments as a director of abstract and expressionistic plays might have been greater had he possessed the catholic taste of a Meyerhold. 49. Hijikata Yoshi, Enshutsusha no michi (Tokyo, 1969), p. 105. 50. H.F.Garten, Modern German Drama (NewYork, 102), p. 105. 51. Quoted in Maria Ley-Piscator, The Piscator Experiment (New York, 107), p. 74. 52. Murayama remained a partisan for Piscator’s methods and when Piscator published his book Political Theatre in 1929, Murayama translated it into Japanese. 53. For an account of Arishima’s life, see Nakamura, Japanese Fiction and John Morrison, Modern Japanese Fiction (Salt Lake City, 1955). One of Arishima’s plays in an English translation is included in Iwasaki and Hughes, New Plays from Old Japan (London, 1930). 54. Quoted in Morrison, Fiction, p. 163. 55. See G.T.Shea, Leftwing Literature in Japan (Tokyo, 1964), p. 75. 56. See above, p. 24. 57. See Shea, Leftwing Literature, p. 115. 58. It was Akita who accompanied Osanai on his second trip to Russia in 1927, shortly before the director’s sudden death. They were invited as state guests of the Soviet government. 59. According to Shea. For a description of the play see Leftwing Literature, p. 97. I have not been able to locate a copy of the text. 60. The appeal made by the Comintern was clear on the duties of a writer. ‘In the area of the one great class struggle which is being developed throughout the entire world, the person who is neutral no longer exists…for the true artist today, there is no other road to follow than to participate in the fight for the liberation of the proletariat.’ (Quoted in Shea, Leftwing Literature, p. 136.) 61. There is some evidence that toward the end of his life Osanai began to take some interest in Marxism and in political theatre (see Shimomura, Shingeki, p. 75). The Tsukiji Little Theatre presented more than its share of Expressionist and political plays, but they were almost always directed by Hijikata. Osanai remained true to his principle of creating an artistic theatre in his own productions. 62. Quoted in Ibaragi Tadashi, ‘kaishaku,’ Gendai Nihon gikyoku senshū, VIII, pp. 397–398. 63. Ethyl Gasoline is a melodrama of greed. A wealthy manufacturer refuses to stop the production of a lethal variety of gasoline because it is so profitable. His two children leave some in a bottle, hoping he will smell it, think of his own death, and leave his money to them. He does sniff the bottle but dies unrepentant before he has time to make a will. The play, a tentative exercise in the style of Sinclair Lewis, has a couple of effective scenes, in particular an exchange between the manufacturer and a ‘do-gooder’ who comes to reprimand him for his lack of social conscience. 64. Shimomura, Shingeki, p. 73. 65. Lunacharsky has not maintained his earlier high reputation, but at the beginning of the Soviet period he was regarded as an outstanding playwright with a strong humanistic outlook. Several of his plays, although not this one, have been published in English versions.

First published in J.Thomas Rimer, Mask and Sword: Two Plays for the Contemporary Japanese Theater by Yamazaki Masakazu, Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. 183–215

13 An Interview with Yamazaki Masakazu

WHILE SANETOMO was being produced in St. Louis in April 1976, 1 had occasion to talk at length with Mr. Yamazaki about his own career and about various aspects of the contemporary theater in Japan. His answers were always stimulating and highly informative. The text is included here as a source of additional information for readers interested in his work. A slightly different version appeared in the summer 1977 issue of The Denver Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 12. SOME PERSONAL DETAILS TR: Your own personal background is unusual, in that you spent your young years outside of Japan. Do you think that this early cosmopolitan experience gave you (like Thornton Wilder, for example) any special impetus toward literature and the theater? YM: I am still not certain what the influences may have been on my writing resulting from the fact that I spent my childhood in north-western China, in the area formerly called Manchuria. I lived there from the age of six to the age of twelve. Whatever those influences may have been, they were surely subconscious, for my full consciousness of the whole experience was certainly to come later. One thing I certainly can say, though, is that my appreciation of nature is not typically Japanese. I don’t particularly care for cherry blossoms; I feel more of a closeness for lilacs, and to poplar and elm trees. In 1963, when I first visited New England, I was delighted to find again such plants and trees, so familiar to me as a child. On the other hand, the experiences I underwent when Manchuria collapsed were fundamental in my own development. My whole view of life was profoundly changed. In terms of providing material for my own writing I became interested not, say, in portraying delicate psychological burdens within a family; rather, I was captivated by the idea of a theater in which a man’s fate could be thrust directly onto the stage of history. TR: When did you first begin to take an interest in the theater? Was this your first literary interest, or did you find yourself attracted to other aspects of literature first? How did your interest develop? YM: My first clear memory of my involvement with the theater remains that of the winter when I was twelve years old. My father was ill, on the verge of death. I sat at his pillow and read to him the works of Shakespeare in the Tsubouchi Shōyō translation. Manchuria had fallen. It was the period when both Nationalist and Communist troops were occupying the country. The streets were full of those dead from cold or starvation. Even in our own home only the stove in my father’s sick room could be kept burning. Under such circumstances this book of Shakespeare remained the only item of literature on

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

147

our bookshelves. With the sound of cannons booming in the distance, I watched my father’s face, from which tonsciousness seemed slowly to be fading even as I read to him. Coriolanus, Henry IV, The Tempest… I certainly didn’t understand every word that I read there. Yet my reading those plays aloud seemed somehow a suitable way to attack the miseries of reality through the strength that the words of Shakespeare’s strong imagination gave to me. TR: Did you take up the formal study of drama while a student? YM: After the death of my father I returned to Japan and lived in Kyoto during my high school and college years. During that time it seems to me that I consciously avoided having much to do with literature. I suppose my attitude was one common to young people: while I had a strong fascination with the movements of the human personality, I was easily fatigued by such complex difficulties, and the image of emotional turbulence was one I found distasteful. I felt the emotional element in the human personality might be abandoned and that the use of reason might suffice to solve our problems. At first I took an interest in the social sciences, then later I took up the study of philosophy with an emphasis on phenomenology. It then became clear to me that no escape might free one from the oppression of the emotions and that the only possibility for deliverance would be to find a way in which that emotion might be expressed in a certain artistic form, as R.G.Collingwood suggested. About the time I graduated from Kyoto University I found myself attracted again to literature. This time it was again to the drama that I gave my attention. I felt convinced at the time that, unlike the novel, the drama can portray men in their outward aspects; the undulations of interior subjective emotion are not immediately touched upon. I found myself altogether satisfied with a form of literature that can capture in outline an emotion made apparent through action. The first play I wrote was called Ite chō (Frozen Butterfly), in one act, with four characters. The dialogue continued unabated for more than two hours! The play was performed both in Kyoto and Kobe, but I suspect that actors and audience alike felt as much fatigue as pleasure in their participation. If nothing else, I certainly learned from this experience to allow enough time for the audience (to say nothing of the actors) to go and have a smoke or to use the rest-room! But of course I was only twenty-two and knew nothing of the actual conditions of the theater. Since that time, eight volumes of my long plays and two of my one-act plays have appeared, and my dramas have also been staged in Tokyo and elsewhere. THE ARTIST IN THE THEATER TR: How are your plays produced? YM: Ordinarily I begin to write a play on commission from a theater troupe. The demand for new dramas is always high, since ordinarily a play can only find an audience for somewhere between seven and fifteen performances. Ironically such circumstances cause the creation of more and more plays. Once I accept the commission and begin to plan my text, I consult fully with the producers, the director, and his other associates concerning the main themes and elements involved in my central conception. Once I begin to write, however, I take advice from no one, nor do I have many opportunities either during rehearsals or after the play has opened, to rewrite my text on the basis of the reactions of the actors or the audience. TR: Nevertheless, have you ever revised any of your plays after seeing them on the stage? YM: When I give my text to the actors it usually goes to a publishing house at the same time. I can’t manage to create two separate plays with one title at the same time! I can make changes in the text only after the first production of a play is long finished and I am lucky enough to anticipate a second

148

AN INTERVIEW WITH YAMAZAKI MAS AKAZU

and new production. Such changes were made, for example, when Zeami was produced in Italy seven years after its Tokyo production and when Sanetomo was given its American production four years after it was seen in Japan. In any case, no matter what my impressions may be when I see my plays staged, or whatever the reactions of my audiences might be, a certain amount of time must pass before I can obtain any objective view of my own work. TR: A number of your most successful plays involve elements drawn from Japanese (or in some cases Western) history. What draws you to the use of history? YM: For me, the plot and the mythos of a drama must always be separated. The plot serves to provide the framework of the play and in its construction must show originality, but the mythos, which provides the thematic material that the plot merely serves to explicate, must remain universal, transcending any merely personal level of understanding. The theater must create a dialogue between the stage and the spectators. In order for that conversation to develop in a rich and active way the topic, the ‘space’ in which that conversation begins, must represent something shared. The mythos provides precisely that communality. For that reason, too, myth, legend, history, or even some well-known contemporary incident can serve those purposes most effectively. For this reason I have often used for my own plays incidents taken either from European or Japanese history. I wrestle with an image ‘shared in common’; then, taking this image as my ground, my own personal vision can begin to manifest itself. Then again, the use of history as the basis for drama permits the author to maintain a necessary psychological distance from the world of his play while also helping him to create that world with a proper density, in neither too precise nor too abstract a fashion. To put it another way, if one writes without recourse to history, in an attempt to portray the contemporary world directly, one risks on the one hand the danger of losing oneself in the creation of endless detail concerning psychological reactions and attitudes or, on the other hand, the danger of creating merely some allegory based on a lifeless and abstract idea. TR: Do your audiences find such a use of history appealing? Can you assume they have the necessary background to follow the plays? YM: Unfortunately audiences in Japan are scarcely well-prepared for dramas based on historical subjects. Since the Second World War, the teaching of history in Japan has stressed a so-called ‘scientific’ approach to its subject matter with a resulting emphasis on economic and social analysis. The role of the individual act in history has been slighted. Most younger members of the audience have little knowledge of the more traditional historical facts a playwright might choose to use as a background for his conceptions. For example, fifteen years ago, when Zeami was first produced in Tokyo, there were university students who could not even decipher the names of the characters in the play—the names of those who founded the nō drama—written in the usual Chinese ideographs. In the middle of the 1960s, however, popular magazines began to show a renewed interest in history and the schools too began to make up for their former deficiencies. Educational television produced programs dealing with the biographies of historical individuals, and popular historical novels began to prevail. All of these were well-received by broad segments of the population. In a certain sense, then, conditions for a drama based on history have improved during the last ten years. Nevertheless, I always work to make the historical background of my plays as clear as possible. My play Sanetomo, for example, involves a theme that certainly demands a highly theatrical treatment. The play doubtless evolved into the form it finally took because the historical facts themselves could be simply and clearly explained. For all those reasons, it is my hope that these historical plays of mine, even though they deal with the Japanese past, may be easy to comprehend even by foreign

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

149

readers or spectators. Here is hopefully one example of the fact that, in the world of art, difficult conditions do not merely represent a hindrance to creation. TR: Whatever the setting or background of your plays, however, the philosophical concerns of your drama seem strikingly contemporary. YM: When I write a play or, for that matter, a literary essay of any sort, I certainly do not have any intention of stressing any formed set of philosophical principles. However I must say that I harbor strong doubts concerning the modern conception of the ego—that is to say, the concept of a fundamental element, continuous, unchanging. This modern view somehow supposes that an individual will, vis-à-vis another, always possess a sense of himself and, moreover, will continuously maintain a logical grasp of his own intellectual and emotional reactions. Such a view seems to presuppose that the requirements for human life remain consistent. Yet such a concept of the existence of the self (which parallels the concept of a unique God in a religion such as Christianity) can only be posited as a mode of human existence under certain, and rather exceptional circumstances. I find no necessary connection between a man’s consciousness of his subjective ‘being’ and some objective ‘ego’ with a substantial existence. Indeed the substance of this ‘ego,’ either in terms of feeling or of thought, only finds its reality when that individual manifests himself in the external world; and such a manifestation cannot take place without recourse to a connection with other human beings. More simply said, the ‘ego’ cannot merely exist within a human being, only when that individual is in contact with others. Such a fact makes the base for the ego a most unsteady one. For it is rare that others can correctly grasp the real motives of an individual. And it is rarer still for most human beings to possess a consistent understanding of what such an essential personality might be. Even if a second person can recognize the concept of a particular individual’s consistent human personality, he will form an image of that individual’s personality in terms of categories of ‘common sense’ and generally-accepted ideas, categories and ideas that have little connection with the everfluid and individual image that the individual has of himself. Yet insofar as an individual wishes to be true to himself, he must of necessity disregard the image the others conceive of him. He must rather manifest the image that seems true to him in each particular instant, thus destroying the ‘common sense’ understanding that the others have of him. In one sense it may be well that the ego represents merely the outcome of the curious and contradictory urges of the individual. It seems as if two conflicting human urges join together: the desire to find one’s existence as an organism that changes in each passing moment, and the hope to find some kind of eternal self. The sense of the ‘ego’ surely arises from this. Yet it is not permitted any living being to fix its existence permanently; there is only the fusing, the melting of the ‘stream of consciousness’ proposed by Bergson and James, a state that absolutely precludes any hope of eternalization. Nevertheless a belief that those contradictory impulses can somehow be unified has developed, particularly in the West, from the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. Today this belief is questioned in a variety of ways. More and more the incerti tude concerning any definition of human ‘identification’ is discussed more and more openly, more and more despairingly. For the individual this uneasiness, this incertitude represents the very basis of existence, in my view. Looking back over my past work it now seems clear to me that, without purposely setting out to do so, I have somehow reflected through the themes of my plays, from Zeami onwards, my lack of trust in this modern conception of the ego. Most of the major characters I have created do not believe in their own ideas or in their own social positions, nor do they feel that their past has fully determined their present. Nor do they hold any firm convictions concerning their own future hopes. Nevertheless, I worked hard, both in Sanetomo and in Zeami, to indicate my belief that such men are neither nihilistic

150

AN INTERVIEW WITH YAMAZAKI MAS AKAZU

nor cynical in their attitudes. For me, such men are by no means unique or exceptional. What seems unique, rather, remains the existence of those men who continue to hold a belief in the continuity of their own personalities, those men who remain the product of the influences of that special age that began with Descartes and ended with Stendhal. TR: Why do you find these concerns best expressed in the form of drama? YM: Let me give you one example. My play Sanetomo was written under the influence of Hamlet. Yet if we take Hamlet as a representative of seventeenth-century man, he certainly had no ‘ego’ in the modern sense of the word. Indeed he presents a most typical human image. If you search with care you can discover men like him who appear in countless plays written ever since the time of the Greeks. In that sense, then, I did not take the character of Hamlet as the ‘subject’ of my play; in fact you might say that the existence of such a personality remains the premise on which I have written all my plays. Of course such a human personality can be portrayed in any form of literature, but I think drama remains the most effective vehicle. First of all, because a drama is built on conversations, and secondly because the role of the actor also enters in. In a drama, dialogue replaces the words of a narrator in fiction; the speeches of no character can be taken as absolute. Whatever one character may say can be either contradicted, corrected, or sustained by the words of another. The impression is therefore easy to create: any real truth that exists must be relative. Again, one character may view the world in a particular fashion, but it will be viewed by others quite differently: thus the self-image or ego of that character may be controlled by means of such other views. During the course of a drama we can watch as a man tries, in front of the others, to construct his own self-image, and we can witness as well the difficulties, indeed the vanity, of such an effort. The actor, for his contribution, helps heighten the sensibilities of the audience so that they too can come to understand that the ego of the character represented on the stage is not merely flat, not merely an ‘essence.’ Certainly if a man who really resembled Hamlet saw even John Gielgud in the part, he would certainly feel that he was merely watching a performance on the stage and that this theatrical Hamlet could not represent the character in totality. Inside any man there exists the ‘he’ he plays himself and the ‘he’ actually played; in the drama, because of its very nature as an art form, this profound fact of human existence is rendered comprehensible. The playwright who remained most highly conscious of this function of the theater and who made the best use of it was, of course, Pirandello. TR: In writing plays that involve historical characters, men such as Zeami and Sanetomo, men whose lives and artistic works are well-known, do you attempt to stay close to the historical facts? Or, to put it another way, do you use these characters as pretexts for speculations on the meaning of the present as we understand it? To what extent is historical validity of interest to you? What kind of ‘aesthetic distance’ from the present can the use of such characters provide? YM: In dealing with historical subjects, I always try to interpret the facts. But I have never ventured to forge one! In both Zeami and Sanetomo, for instance, all the dates, the names of the characters portrayed, the episodes shown, and the artistic works quoted, are correct historically or, at least, as faithfully rendered as they can be in terms of our own present knowledge of the past. I create particular episodes in these plays within the limits imposed by the main lines of the established biography of the personality concerned. The views on aesthetics revealed by Zeami in the course of the play reflect quite precisely what he himself wrote concerning his theories on art and the role of the artist. For me, the use of such historical material has a particular benefit. It is not that I wish merely to take advantage of the freedom they permit my imagination. On the contrary, such materials provide me with a resistant framework to

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

151

challenge my imagination. In other words, I do not use the past as a means to speculate on the present. I try to use my contemporary sensibility to search out the meanings, the implications of the past. TR: Both Zeami and Sanetomo use artists as main characters. Are there not peculiar problems involved in creating art about art? Is there not a risk that, under such circumstances, the plays of Zeami and the poetry of Sanetomo may be reduced to mere ‘objects’ in the play and so lose their power? YM: The most fundamental problem, of course, lies in the impossibility of actually showing on the stage the scenes in which these artists demonstrate their own-creativity. It would take Zeami himself to permit my audience to witness a performance by ‘Zeami’ on stage. And it would make a farce out of my tragedy should I try to depict Sanetomo composing his poem while shaking his head and walking back and forth in his garden. In view of such difficulties, I am careful to avoid using artistic works as materials for my plays. Rather I try to take from such works the aesthetic and philosophic view of the world they provide. Such becomes my subject. In Western drama there is perhaps a certain parallel to offer in the dramaturgy of the classic French theater, in which, although the most overtly dramatic incidents—murders, suicides, love affairs—are not shown on stage, the fate of the men and women who inhabit these dramas is clearly represented. TR: Who are the dramatists who had been most influential on your own work? YM: The playwright who, both in his conception of man and in his theatrical manifestation of that conception, has influenced me most is Shakespeare. Among Japanese dramatists, surely Zeami: yet what I learned from him concerns the basic principles of the drama, particularly as regards his view of mankind that one finds concentrated there. In terms of particular techniques of playwriting, however, I have as yet learned little from the nō. Among the modern dramatists I admire most I must indicate Pirandello and Chekhov, but I have not borrowed consciously any theatrical techniques from their works. Pirandello taught me to hold the artistic point of view that ‘a play is a play, not a reflection of reality.’ Chekhov gave me an image of theatrical figures who, during the course of a drama, continue to search for themselves while all the while wearying of that same search. TR: What significance have you found, as a practicing playwright, in kabuki, nō, and bunraku? YM: I have never taken anything whatsoever from kabuki and bunraku. When I wrote Zeami, I borrowed several episodes from Zeami’s own plays, but nothing whatsoever of his dramatic style, for this style is closely allied to the style in which such drama is performed. To separate the two and to try to give life to such traditional forms of drama would be difficult indeed. Yet, in the future, such experiments might have some value. For example, in the nō, many plays are constructed in two parts. In the first part, for example, a warrior might appear in the manifestation of an old farmer. In the second part he will reveal his real form and recount his tragic experiences. In such a dramatic pattern one protagonist bears two identities, and the contrast between these two identities provides a powerful theatrical effectiveness. Such a form might well find some application in the contemporary theater. Nor is this protagonist with differing or multiple identities confined to the nō; similar characteristics can be found throughout the traditional Japanese theater. In kabuki and bunraku, for example, the protagonist often actually represents the apparition of a monster who, because of whatever circumstances may be involved, disguises himself with the name and the appearance of a man. Of course there are many examples of this phenomenon in Western theater as well. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, to choose an obvious example, the protagonist is disguised as another person. In Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, two personalities lie within the protagonist, that of ‘the great king’ and that of ‘the dishonored criminal.’ Such double personalities are invariably effective on the stage In fiction, too, there are such accounts, and on the most popular level, too, such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The pattern is surely one of universal application.

152

AN INTERVIEW WITH YAMAZAKI MAS AKAZU

In the case of the Japanese theater, however, this piling up of multiple personalities does not exist merely for the purposes of dramatic conflict; indeed, this piling up does not accompany such conflict but actually forms the central element in the drama. It seems to me that, theatrically speaking, such a mode of viewing the structure of character remains a unique feature of traditional Japanese drama, and one that might well be made use of in our contemporary theater. TR: Hopefully, Zeami and Sanetomo will give English-speaking readers some idea of the depth and range of your accomplishments as a playwright. What other of the plays that you have written would you like to see translated? Why? YM: There are many; but in particular I would like most to see translated my Oh, Heloise!, which I wrote in 1972. It seems to me that, since I dealt there with a Western legend, that of Abelard and Heloise, whatever might represent my ‘Japanese’ style or sensibility would be more conspicuous to a Western audience, separated from any ‘Japaneseness’ in the subject matter itself. TR: Your intellectual activities are far-ranging: you have written in the past few years on aesthetics, Mori Ōgai, contemporary American life, and half a dozen other subjects. Do you find these concerns divorced from your work in the theater, or do these concerns interact? YM: Comparatively speaking, American intellectuals pursue one specialty more deeply than do their Japanese counterparts. Japanese show broader interests and are obliged to work effectively within a wider sphere. The lives of Japanese intellectuals are excessively busy, and I cannot deny that the risk always remains, therefore, that the contents of their work will remain superficial. On the other hand, don’t you find a general tendency now for intellectuals all over the world to broaden their interests? Individual specialized intellectual methodologies are now being overturned. Certainly in the case of French intellectuals, such has been the tendency since early in the century, when men with diverse talents such as Malraux, Marcel, and Sartre chose central methodologies applicable to every aspect of their lives, methodologies that shaped each of their whole characters, both intellectually and emotionally. In my own case, my sensitivity to the theater, in the very broadest possible sense of the word, provided me with a set of attitudes that functions in somewhat the same fashion. When I write a literary essay, or a biography, I seldom choose a subject toward which I feel either highly sympathetic or for which I feel any antagonism. Perhaps I might say that I usually feel an ambivalence toward the object I study. I attempt to put aside any subjective emotions I may feel; I look rather for subjects that permit theatrically-effective dialogue. THE HISTORY OF THE MODERN THEATER IN JAPAN: A STATUS REPORT TR: Japanese critics and historians of the theater are always quick to point out how short the history of the New Theater Movement actually is. Yet after all, Antoine, who is usually given credit for the beginning of a real movement for a modern theater in Europe, only began his work in Paris twenty years or so before that of Osanai Kaoru in Japan. Why, then, did the movement take so long to get under way after Osanai’s first brilliant beginnings? YM: First of all, it is important to remember that Antoine’s idea of a modern theater found deep roots in the European tradition, especially in the French classical drama. Such basic principles of dramaturgy, such as the logical development of a theme, the rational construction of plot, and the importance of the psychological identity of the characters, even the presence of the proscenium stage, all of these were already prepared for Antoine. They formed his inheritance from the so-called ‘boulevard theater.’ None of this tradition was available either to Osanai or to his audience. For them, the introduction of a

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

153

modern theater did not mean an evolution. It represented a total dislocation of their theatrical sensibilities. In addition to such basic difficulties, the historical and sociological factors that prevented a healthy and a rapid development of a modem Japanese theater must be cited. First of all, the relative poverty of Japan during the last hundred years must be taken into consideration. Added to that is the vital importance of the kind of moralistic framework in terms of which those generations led their lives. Since the beginning of the Meiji Period [1868], Japan found herself in a most difficult international climate and was forced to industrialize with the greatest possible rapidity. All the funds available had to be used as capital for such projects. In the cultural sphere as well the most essential efforts went toward the building of schools, then for the development of the mass printing of books dealing with various new educational materials. Additional factors as well need to be cited. In the preceding Edo Period [1600–1868] literacy in Japan spread rapidly and broadly, and the population as a whole took great interest in books designed for school instruction. From the seventeenth century onwards, increasing numbers of schools for primary education were constructed in all parts of the country, and the printing of popular books for amusement purposes became an important business. The development of such national habits— pleasure in reading and finding value in the production of books as a cultural phenomenon —can be verified by observing that, in the early nineteenth century, popular national magazines were established. The development of the theater, however, stands in considerable contrast. Certainly the theater in the Edo period was quite active. Yet as an institution it never received public recognition and support. In France and England, for example, the Court publicly supported the theater as a place for entertainment. In the case of kabuki, however, there could be no question whatsoever of any connection with the Court; indeed, the theater was generally regarded as an extension of the Gay Quarters. Of course in Japan the Gay Quarters helped nourish literature and the arts. Kabuki was patronized by the samurai and the nobility as well as by the townspeople. But these patrons themselves saw this activity as a purely private pleasure. For in the brothel or in the theater as well, a samurai was respected not for his social position, since such activities had nothing to do with the public order. Here only the connoisseur of his pleasure was admired. In the West, the Court and the theater were connected together and belonged to the same world; public and private life were not opposed. In Japan, however, the ‘public’ court and the ‘private’ theater constructed quite different worlds for themselves. In the Meiji Period, however, the power of the public world increased tremendously. Efforts were made to mobilize all the resources that had previously gone into supporting all those ‘private’ worlds, resources now to be used in the construction of a politically modem state. Therefore the sphere of culture was also divided in two. That culture which had long been identified as ‘public’—what was seen as ‘serious’ culture—was given an enormous push Such culture was represented precisely by the kind of school education and by the habits of reading I mentioned a moment ago. But the development of the theater fell far behind. It must be emphasized that such a moralistic point of view represented not merely a political strategem on the part of the government but actually reflected as well the general sentiments of the population at that time. The view was widely held that the first duty of the nation was to make herself as strong as possible. There was no room for doubt that the theater represented a purely private pleasure. The movement to give the theater a connection with public culture and to make its efforts more ‘serious’ in nature was carried on at the same time, and as a part, of the movement to ‘improve the

154

AN INTERVIEW WITH YAMAZAKI MAS AKAZU

drama.’ In order to give the theater a proper public image a plan was carried out to invite the Emperor himself to witness a kabuki performance. And in order to make this new spectacle a more ‘serious’ one, dramas were written that remained quite faithful to historical fact. However, in the first instance the results obtained never permitted the theater to replace, or even to rival, the ‘seriousness’ of printed matter. As for the second, the new dramas created were merely boring to watch. By this time, reading had become the central fact of Japanese cultural life. The phenomenon still continues today. Leaving out the question of mass-circulation magazines, popular everywhere, Japan surely holds a special place among all the advanced nations of the world in terms of the quantity of printed material available. In any town you care to visit, look into a large bookstore on a busy street: you will find every evening huge piles of reading material piled about on the large counters, like food in a market. As an American reporter wrote recently in The NewYork Times Book Review, ‘they don’t sell greeting cards in Japanese book-stores.’ Needless to say, all kinds of light reading matter is sold, but the quantity of ‘serious’ books purchased is also high. About ten years ago, for example, a Japanese publishing firm began issuing a series of ‘great books of the world.’ More than four hundred thousand copies of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra were sold. Such a set of circumstances certainly has an effect on playwrights, even now. In my own case, my plays printed in book form usually sell in the neighborhood of ten thousand copies, yet usually not more than half that number ever see a given play of mine in the theater. Taking this situation as a background, the difficulties in the development of the New Theater Movement since the time of Osanai Kaoru [1881–1928] become easier to understand. For the real and fundamental opposition to the New Theater Movement came, not from an unfeeling government nor from the rapid development of a tasteless popular theater, but from the public’s fundamental longing for ‘serious’ culture and education. On this point, Antoine in France took the boulevard theater for his enemy, just as later Eugene O’Neill was to see the Broadway of his day as his real opponent. The situation was much different in Japan: the Western serious theater attacked popular entertainment, but the New Theater in Japan had to wage war on a whole complex of attitudes about what was ‘serious,’ attitudes held by the whole population. In order to confront such an implacable enemy the New Theater Movement was forced to arm itself with still another kind of ‘seriousness.’ From the beginning the movement sought to educate and to enlighten. Realism was stressed, and a preference for tragedy over comedy was established. At first such attitudes may show little accord with the sorts of ideas supported by the government. Yet, in terms of an educational goal leading to a modern way of life, certain resemblances become apparent. Later, in the Taishō Period [1912–1926], and after, the New Theater Movement was strengthened in its political proclivities. The adoption of Marxist ideology was surely inevitable. Now, however, it seems clear that without battling the very concept of ‘seriousness’ itself the theater could never hope to win the war against the habit of reading. For whatever the ‘serious’ message of the theater might be, political or apolitical, its means of delivering that message could hardly be more efficient than that provided by written matter. Even putting aside the intellectual contents of the printed page, the reader will always take the act of reading more seriously than he will that of watching a play in the theater. Sitting quietly, at night, with a book spread open on the desk under a lamp—even if the book is a novel —suggests an abstinence, a mood of contemplation far more strongly than does visiting a theater with family or friends. From this point of view, the New Theater challenged an enemy it might never conquer. Those in the world of the New Theater who fought that hopeless battle were thus made to feel all the more isolated and alone. They learned all the more to strengthen the moralistic attitudes they had already

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

155

taken. They tried to oppose the written word by making their dramas ‘intellectual,’ and they tried to oppose the ideals of education provided in the schools by insisting that society be cleansed. (As a related phenomenon, it might be mentioned that this ‘enlightening role’ assumed by the New Theater Movement has had its effect on the popular commercial theater as well. The Takarazuka Girl Review, surely the most banefully typical example of Japanese popular entertainment, officially calls its actresses ‘pupils.’) Eventually this high moral sense of the New Theater Movement, aided by a sense of isolation, began to move the theater not merely toward a position that supported a more perfect society but toward one that actually advocated political revolution. Marxism had a considerable effect on all aspects of life in the Taishō period, but nowhere were the results so pervasively felt as in the activities of the New Theater Movement. The blatant opposition of the movement to the morality of the establishment at that time was so much emphasized that, in artistic terms at least, the theater began to pursue a course fraught with danger. TR: The politically active theater that began in the late 1920s and continued until World War II did much to color the spirit of the theater then and its influence could still be felt after the war as well. In the eyes of most Japanese critics, this political theater made many positive contributions. What would your own evaluation be? YM: The greatest service rendered by the prewar political theater groups consisted in their formation of theatrical troupes to which the actors contributed funds, troupes that could manage to mount productions of plays not of a purely commercial nature. Even now the performers who earn money from films and television contribute a certain amount to their troupes for the presentation of artistically important plays. There are no actor’s unions. The performers, without fees, play the roles assigned and may even go around to sell tickets to the audience. All such activities represent the good side of that high moral stance taken by the New Theater Movement. I fear, however, that such attitudes may not persist indefinitely. JAPANESE THEATER NOW TR: To me, as a foreign observer, the New Theater in Japan seems quite an ‘intellectual’ theater. ‘Entertainment,’ even of the Broadway sort, is usually relegated to popular troupes with no ‘artistic’ pretensions. Is such a division of value? YM: Yes, the New Theater up until now has certainly been ‘intellectual’ and ‘earnest,’ for reasons I explained above. Even should this attitude change in the future, that change will be slow in coming. The reason for this is that the theater (and here I include the purely commercial theater as well) plays a relatively small role in the conception of entertainment held by the Japanese public. Japan has no Broadway, nothing like American musicals, with their tremendously broad appeal. Ordinarily, general Japanese adult habits of entertainment no longer involve taking the whole family out in the evening. ‘Entertainment’ means entertainment at home—reading a book or looking at television. These habits are reinforced in turn by current developments in urban construction patterns. City workers now live farther and farther from the center of the city. Once home, they find it an imposition to return again to the city in the evening. Those who support theater of any kind in Japan today are those who are likely to be very ‘serious’ persons themselves. They are those who oppose the usual customs of society, those who come to the theater despite any desire they might have simply to enjoy their leisure. A theater supported by such an audience, at least at this juncture, will for better or for worse go right on being ‘serious.’

156

AN INTERVIEW WITH YAMAZAKI MAS AKAZU

TR: Playwrighting is, of course, only one aspect in the totality of the theater, but in a ‘serious’ theater such as you describe it surely remains the central focus of the whole enterprise. Or so it seems to me. Thus the total value of a theatrical experience (if one might put it that way) is closely linked to the excellence of the drama being performed. Do you share my view? YM: You are quite right. And the tensions involved might be suggested by an example from the Japanese theater. In the 1960s many young actors and directors tried to wage war on what they called the superiority of literature over the theater. They attempted to create an improvisatory theater, with a great emphasis on the physical role of the actor, and on accidental happenings. Yet during the same period Shinchōsha, one of the leading publishing firms in Japan, began putting out a series of new dramas by playwrights and novelists, independent of any support from the theater troupes. TR: What prewar and postwar authors would you choose as representative in the development of a modem theater pf literary accomplishment? YM: Any examination of the history of the New Theater in Japan will begin with the names of two playwrights who wrote both modern dramas and Kabuki plays. They are Okamoto Kidō [1872–1939] and Mayama Seika [1878–1948]. Both tried to combine the theatricality of traditional forms with the rational structures of modern drama. There are many, of course, who wrote plays with no reference whatsoever to older Japanese theatrical forms. Of those active in the prewar years, three names in particular might be cited: Kishida Kunio [1890–1954], Kubo Sakae [1901–1958], and Morimoto Kaoru [1912–1946]. Kishida was much influenced by such French dramatists as Jules Renard and Porto-Riche; Kubo wrote using the techniques of Socialist Realism; Morimoto was first stimulated by his reading of Noel Coward. All succeeded in creating theatrical characters appropriate to their times. Among postwar writers, one might first mention three whose work has already appeared in translation, Kinoshita Junji [b. 1914; Yūzuru, Evening Crane], Mishima Yukio [1925–1970]; Sade kōshaku fujin, Madame de Sade], and Abe Kōbō [b. 1924; Tomodachi, Friends]. The most important playwright whose work remains untranslated is Tanaka Chikao (born 1905). Tanaka blends his traditional Japanese sensibilities with Catholic belief; he stands as a kind of Japanese Mauriac. He shows in his work a wide variety of theatrical experimentation. TR: Who are the younger writers whose work most bears watching? What plays in particular have impressed you? YM: There are many names I might mention. Here are two. Yashiro Seiichi, the youngest disciple of Kinoshita Junji, is widely appreciated for his subtle poetic style in dialogue and for the sophisticated means by which he handles his rather heavy psychological subjects. I am thinking in particular of his play Yoake ni kieta (The One Who Vanished in the Dawn). Betsuyaku Minoru, who belongs to the youngest generation, is usually regarded as one of the ‘underground’ playwrights. But as his first play Matchiuri no Shōjo (The Little Match Girl), eloquently testifies, he remains rather a poet of the theater, mixing humor and the grotesque. TR: Some critics have suggested that the new ‘underground’ theater in Japan has taken away the creative energy from the New Theater. Do you agree? YM: The greatest service performed by the so-called ‘underground’ theater has been in undermining the narrow concept of realism maintained until now by the New Theater movement. These performers, rather than creating a monotonous copy of the gestures of everyday life or merely acting out explanations of the current social situation, appeal directly to the spectators’ sense of theatrical possibility through their physical dynamism. Until now, realistic techniques have provided the strongest influence on our acting style; and I must admit as well that the techniques of non-realistic bodily expression available in such contemporary art forms as modem dance are as yet not well-

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

157

established in Japan. Therefore the emergence of this new and extravagant impromptu style has given quite a shock to the New Theater. As a result, some insist the underground theater has brought a revolution. But I do not believe the vital destiny of our modem theater has been truly changed. Why do I feel this way? In the first place, the obvious results suggested by such an impromptu acting still are easy to observe—a disregard for the dramatic text and a tendency to create an ‘antiliterary theater.’ Yet ironically, this improvisional art without a text slips easily into conventions of its own. Since the actor’s body and brain cannot take the time on the stage to respond deeply to a given situation, the performer is therefore compelled to respond with habitual clichés. At first glance, the results may seem expressive, fresh and accidental; yet actually such expressiveness tends merely to repeat itself, since the actor only uses himself as a model. I once had the opportunity to see the splendid New York production of Richard Shechner’s Dionysus 66. I found it the very best of its kind. And yet, the experience taught me an important lesson. In the play, there are many occasions when the various actors are called on to create improvised conversations. They exchange trivialities about their everyday affairs and so create a free and lively impres sion. By accident, however, I happened to see the play on the day of the funeral of Robert Kennedy. One of the actors suddenly remembered the assassination. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what did you do yesterday at Bob’s coffin?’ Suddenly the actors lost all their suppleness. They stiffened. An awkward silence followed for several seconds. I suddenly realized that all of that self-generated ‘ordinary’ conversation that seemed so fresh and natural was only possible as long as the actors were merely reacting to situations familiar to them, repeating their reactions by reflex. Faced with an unusual event— the murder of Robert Kennedy—the flow of their actions, codified by force of habit, was suddenly broken. The fact that they were really in a kind of stupor was suddenly clear. A situation such as the death of Robert Kennedy is momentous; no ordinary words or gestures can convey the emotional confusion that everyone feels. In order to absorb the situation, then manifest it in words that carry fresh power, a certain time is required for the very choice of these words. A playwright can create such words quietly, in his study, choosing phrases and gestures appropriate to the situation. There are no doubt many reasons why the test is important in the theatre, but surely the most vital of them involves the ability to remove the real action of the play from mere stimulation and response. Unlike the animals, man has the special ability to respond to a given stimulus with a deliberated reaction. The drama functions to compress this reflex-like process of deliberation. To put it another way, the drama does not merely serve to add ‘poetry’ ments of the actors but rather acts genuine human meaning of those to the physical move so as to concentrate the actions. DRAMA: LANGUAGE, LITERATURE TR: Are contemporary readers in Japan prepared to consider drama as literature? Because of the centrality of Shakespeare in our own English tradition, that assumption is strong in English-speaking countries. But will Japanese readers take a play as seriously as a poem or a novel? YM: Japanese readers certainly enjoy all kinds of reading matter and are quite prepared to read the text of a play as “literature.” A play that is produced commercially usually finds its way into print at the same time, usually in a magazine or, in some cases, as a separate book. As I mentioned a moment ago, Shinchōsha, one of the best-known firms publishing in the literary field, began issuing a modem Japanese drama series. So far, more than thirty-odd volumes have appeared. The most popular dramatists read in translation are Shakespeare and Chekhov, but dramatists from Sophocles to Pinter

158

AN INTERVIEW WITH YAMAZAKI MAS AKAZU

are widely appreciated. I also might add that it seems to me that as the contemporary novel has become increasingly complex, the complaint that dramas are hard to read is less and less meaningful. TR: Does not the Japanese spoken language pose special problems for the playwright? Spoken Japanese contains perhaps more homonyms than any other language in the world. A survey of world languages indicated that Japanese has a very low ‘mutual comprehensibility rate’; two speakers of Japanese may understand only, say 80% of what they say to each other, while for English the rate is something like 94%. YM: I certainly agree that the problem of the Japanese language—that is, of Japanese as a spoken language —is an important one. Yet I don’t think the most serious difficulties lie in the area of homonyms and resulting problems of mutual comprehensibility. I think that between Japanese the verbal context usually provides sufficient information for clarity. I don’t believe those difficulties are there. TR: Nevertheless, I can’t help but suspect that the use of dialogue involving the use of many words using Chinese compound characters may make difficulties for the auditor in the theater. Certainly I have heard formal addresses in Japan which, although they might be clear enough if the eye could see the written characters, remain ambiguous to the ear. And even on television newscasts one notices that written characters are often provided while the announcer speaks, presumably to avoid this sort of ambiguity. Let me choose a more specific example, a line early in the opening scene of Sanetomo. The line, which describes Sanetomo’s rank, sounds clear enough in English because many of the words are polysyllabic. ‘Great Manor Lord of Japan, General Warden. Third Kamakura Shōgun, Chief Commander of the Warriors. Lord Minamoto Sanetomo.’ Here is the line (romanized) in Japanese: ‘Nihon koku sōjitō sōshugo. Kamakura bakufu sandai no shōgun. Buke no tōryō, Minamoto Sanetomo.’ With the speed at which such a line must be pronounced, I wonder if such words as ‘sōjitō sōshugo’ or ‘tōryō’ can really be caught and properly digested in the theater. To the eye the meaning is clear, from the Chinese characters. But for the ear? I wonder. YM: I cannot deny that homonyms cause a great deal of trouble for the comprehensibility of spoken Japanese, if the playwright is careless. But such difficulties can be kept to a minimum. In the case you mention, for example, the word tōryō (a chief) is a word easily understood orally, through its frequent use in such expressions as daiku no tōryō (a chief carpenter). I must admit that both sōjitō and sōshugo may be a bit hard for, say, a high school graduate to understand. Yet even so the prefix sō- is quickly grasped through its use in such compounds as sōryō (the eldest son), sōdaishō (a leading general), or sōtō (the Fuhrer). In all cases, the suggestion is of something that is the leading, the greatest. Therefore, even if -jitō or -shugo should be difficult to comprehend for some of the audience, the association with sō- will help them to understand that Sanetomo is, in some sense, a leading personage in Japan at the time. TR: For you, then, where do the serious problems lie? TM: I believe that the real difficulties lie in the great difference in Japanese between the spoken and written languages. Unlike the European languages, and unlike Chinese the forces of grammatical control are rather weak in Japanese. Therefore if the proper verbal tension is not maintained in the course of a conversation, there is a real danger of linguistic slippage, even collapse. In ordinary daily conversation compound sentences have a tendency to collapse into simple sentences; and in compound sentences the relation between subjects and objects often become ambiguous, In a conversation between two

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

159

persons, they will, of course, have no trouble understanding each other. Yet a third party standing listening to them will have great difficulty in following what is said. And of course, in a play, the spectator represents this ‘third party.’ Even in a realistic play dialogue must be created which the spectator can understand. The actor, of course, must discipline himself so as to produce his words with the utmost clarity possible; yet even those words must be arranged with a grammatical precision that pushes them closer to the written language. And because there is such a great discrepancy between this language and the language of ordinary conversation, such stage language may well strike the auditors in the theater as ‘artificial’ or ‘affected.’ TR: Ironically, why is it that some of these same speeches that sound so “stilted,” at least to me, seem so reasonable and effective when translated into a Western language? TM: I think that when such speech or dialogue is translated into a Western language, the results are bound to sound more natural, since even ordinary conversation in Western languages is far closer to the written language than in Japanese. In my own case, I very much enjoy my plays when they are translated into other languages, and precisely because of this very problem. In a play, of course, there must always exist a certain contradiction between the style of the author’s literary text and the actuality of the spoken dialogue. TR: In your own view, what are the current developments in Japanese drama viewed as literature? Is the future a bright one? YM: I believe that the present situation in the theater—and its future problems—remain about the same both in Japan and in the West. Since the end of the Second World War the theater has shown an intense concern for problems of methodology and technique, ranging from the ‘theater of the absurd’ to the ‘anti-literary theater’ of the 1960s. Playwrights and directors alike have presented their productions as actual demonstrations of dramatic theory. Yet by the early 1970s this fever had passed and there seemed to be a general sense of a loss of direction. I hesitate to make any predictions, but I do think it is clear to many that the ‘theater of the absurd’ or the ‘anti-literary theater’ merely represents two possible approaches among many. When that point is finally grasped by everyone concerned then, I think, we will see a new age of drama beginning. TR: One last question on the subject of drama as literature. Do you believe that the Japanese who read drama as literature make any fundamentally differing evaluation of modern Japanese dramatists than do those who form their opinions from stage performances? Will a ‘literary’ evaluation of the history of the New Theater Movement differ in any essential way from a ‘theatrical’ evaluation? YM: There are variations, certainly. Yet in the end I think that there is no fundamental difference between these two means of evaluation. TR: To an American observer, at least, the custom of the Japanese theatrical troupe seems quite different from our own director-producer system. Indeed, it seems rather difficult to imagine all the advantages and disadvantages of a system so different from our own. YM: The greatest advantage of the company system lies in the fidelity and devotion of the actors: through their efforts, plays that are not merely commercial in nature can thus be produced. By the same token, the greatest danger of such a system lies in the possibility that the maintenance of such troupes may come to represent the only purpose of such efforts, thus creating in effect a sort of commercial theater troupe. TR: Again, to a foreign observer it seems that the relationship between the desire to introduce foreign drama and the wish to develop a genuine contemporary Japanese drama by producing new plays may produce some confusions or contradictions in the policies of the theater companies. At the least, it seems that the purposes are not quite the same. Does this dual function produce any contradictions?

160

AN INTERVIEW WITH YAMAZAKI MAS AKAZU

YM: The selection of plays to be presented always presents a problem: all over the world the same few famous plays are mounted again and again. I don’t think, however, that the Japanese troupes show any difference in their policies for selecting Japanese and Western plays for production. Such a distinction does not now represent an important one; rather, it indicates differences in the tastes of the writers and directors of the various troupes involved. TR: How do theater companies recognize and encourage young playwrights? Does such encouragement represent the surest way for a young playwright to become known? Are there other ways? YM: The theater companies play a role, certainly, but the importance of the drama magazines must not be overlooked either. There are three such magazines, plus some literary magazines as well, that provide opportunities for young playwrights to publish their work. Such publication in turn gives these young writers more opportunities to attract the attention of the theater troupes. One magazine gives a yearly drama prize, named after Kishida Kunio, to the best new playwright of the year. That prize often guarantees his future. TR: It seems to me that revivals of earlier modem Japanese plays are relatively rare. How do Japanese audiences learn about their own New Theater tradition? In New York, for example, we can usually see productions of Wilder, O’Neill, early Williams, etc., to say nothing of the classics—Shakespeare, Chekhov, etc. TM: It is true that revivals of older modern Japanese plays are few. The New Theater Movement has used its energies to move forward, to renew itself; any desire to assess past experience has therefore been weakened. The New Theater movement sees its real traditions in the Western classics: the plays of Shakespeare, Molière, and Chekhov are revived constantly in Japan. On one side are those Western classics; on the other, the classical nō and kabuki. The New Theater does not think in terms of creating ‘classics.’ TR: But it is just at this point that I hope you might for a moment abandon your role as a practicing playwright to look at the situation from your point of view as a literary critic. It seems to me that there has been a certain failure, on the part of the New Theater Movement, to identify and study those modern Japanese dramatic texts which might, if nothing else, serve as models and examples for, say, the proper writing of dialogue (such a difficult business, as we discussed earlier), construction of plot, and so forth. And this is to say nothing of the plays that capture the whole intellectual and emotional thrust of a generation, the place a play like Otto to yobareru Nihonjin (A Japanese Called Otto) of Kinoshita Junji seems to me to occupy, for example. I myself cannot help but feel that as long as the New Theater continues to look for its inspiration to foreign models, it will not escape a certain artificiality. Surely, from a literary point of view in any case, there now exists a body of drama written since about 1900 from which one may select and identify works of real artistic merit. Should not the theater troupes take the lead in identifying and reviving such works? YM: I agree with you one hundred per cent. I have nothing to add to what you have said, and indeed, as a man of the theater myself, I feel an obligation to take some initiatives in that direction. TR: Well then, in your role as literary critic what eight or ten plays might you choose that best represent the tradition, plays that might even be revived and give pleasure now? YM: Here are a few suggestions, for a start: Kishida Kunio: Chiroru no aki (Autumn in the Tyrols), Kami fūsen (Paper Balloon), Sawa-shi no futari musume (Mr. Sawa’s Two Daughters) Kinoshita Junji Yūzuru (Twilight Crane), A Japanese Named Otto; Tanaka Chikao, Kyōiku (Education), Maria no kubi (The Head of the Madonna), Hizen fukoki (A Description of Hizen) Mishima Yukio, Modern nō drama. TR: A few questions about audiences. Do they tend to see only the work of one company 1 or do they watch the efforts of various troupes? To what extent do devotees of the modern theater attend nō and

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

161

kabuki performances as well? And have audiences learned to enjoy themselves at the theater, or do they still regard the experience of watching a modern drama as a ‘learning’ experience? YM: It certainly used to be the case that the New Theater productions were largely supported by audiences recruited from various organizations—labor unions, social organizations, and so forth. Since the 1960s, however, the power of such groups has weakened. Audiences that support only one troupe have dwindled, and audiences that only attend productions of the modern theater have shrunk as well. Recently, for example, there was a tremendously successful production of Macbeth given in Tokyo. In that production, Lady Macbeth was played by Bandō Tamasaburō, a well-known actor of female roles from kabuki. Certainly our present conception of the ‘New Theater’ will not vanish overnight, but I think that as various elements evolve the movement will grow increasingly diversified and that, at the same time, our formerly narrow ‘moral spirit’ will be broadened as well. Certainly the ‘New Theater’ will continue to be a serious one; but at least this ‘seriousness’ will come more and more to reflect the sympathies and excitement felt by its audiences.

First published in Samuel Leiter (ed.) Japanese Theater in the World, The Japan Foundation et al., 1997, pp. 25–31

14 Japanese Theater in the World

THEATER, related as it is to the human response to the universe on every level, may well be less confined by geographical or national boundaries than many other forms of art. Skill and conviction on the part of performers, as well as a natural curiosity on the part of at least some audiences, allow for the transcendence of many barriers. This is certainly true in the case of Japan, whose geography, at least until the coming of convenient air travel in the postwar period, placed it at a daunting remove from the continent of Asia as well as from Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, the influences of Japanese theater have become increasingly profound on diverse stages around the world. I nearly periods, from the beginning of Japanese civilization until the Middle Ages, it was the Japanese theater which received diverse influences from the continent of Asia. In our time, the wheel has come full circle: Japanese theater, classical and contemporaiy alike, has become a notable influence on the work of adventuresome theater practitioners around the world, from Paris and New York to Beijing. It is true, of course, that the earliest contacts with China and Korea, which constituted virtually the entire civilized world as perceived by the Japanese in those early centuries, were sporadic. Travel was difficult at best, and periodic internal political dislocations within China made consistent patterns of travel and influence difficult to maintain. While written sources are scarce, it seems clear, for example, that many of the theatrical ceremonies practiced at the court during the T’ang dynasty (618–907) were known to the Japanese. They thereby influenced the proto-theatrical ceremonies and entertainments created during the period in which Nara served as the early capital (740–786), and also had an impact in the Heian period (790– 1190) as well, when the court in Kyoto set the patterns. From the descriptions of the elegant court dances and other ceremonies recorded in such 11th-century literary works as Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji, c. 1025) and Makura no Sōshi (The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, c. 1010), it is apparent that continental influences were warmly welcomed. The sections of this catalogue dedicated to the early forms of Japanese theater make these influences and inspirations clear. The fall of the T’ang Dynasty cut off possibilities of travel for Japanese and Chinese alike and, after the final successful repulsion in 1281 of the Mongols who, having conquered China, attempted to invade Japan, further developments of the Japanese theater were largely confined within her national borders. From the 1500s on, however, the coming of the West brought an increasingly complex set of relationships between Japanese theater and the theater of the European world. The United States, too, had her place in this multilayered exchange, but this relationship was not to achieve any lasting significance until the postwar years. For 400 years, from roughly 1550 to 1950, it was the European/Japanese dialogue which did most to enlarge the vision of both sides as to the nature and potential significance of the theater.

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

163

The coming of the great Catholic missionary St Francis Xavier (1506–1552) to southernmost Japan in 1549 brought the first systematic confrontation of sophisticated Europeans with Japanese culture. Curious and often enthusiastic about the Japanese arts, these early European visitors left written accounts that are often surprisingly observant. And while it is true that those first European spectators of the Japanese theater unconsciously maintained a sense of the innate superiority of their own traditions, they were nevertheless able to record what they experienced with discrimination. One of the first references to the Japanese theater occurs in the writings of the Portuguese missionary Luis Frois (1532–1597). Concerning the nō, for example, he remarks as follows. In our theaters the masks cover the chin starting from the beard downward, the Japanese ones are so small that an actor who appears in a woman’s role has his beard always protruding from below. Among us polyphonic music is sonorous and pleasant; since all sing together in one single voice in falsetto, Japanese music is the most horrible imaginable. Among us the music of the gentry usually sounds more pleasant than that of the commoners; the music of the Japanese gentry is unendurable for us, while that of their sailors is pleasant.1 So successful were these missionary efforts that a leading Jesuit father, aided by a Christian feudal lord (daimyō) of Kyūshū, in southern Japan, sent a delegation of four young Japanese boys (aged 12 or 13) to the courts of Philip II of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII. The mission left Japan in 1582 and returned in 1590. The young men and their entourage had a tremendous effect on those who saw them in Spain and Italy. In particular, they were given a spectacular reception in Venice, where they witnessed a number of theatrical and musical events. They went on to Padua, then Vicenza, where a plaque shows them in attendance at the famous Teatro Olimpico, the great Palladian structure that was so influential in the development of European theater.2 The visit of this group created both a lively sympathy and a considerable curiosity about the Japanese arts and culture among Europeans. Had events not turned so precipitously against the Christians in the early 1600s, exchanges, including cultural exchanges, would surely have begun. By the end of the 1630s, however, the country was closed off, Christianity prohibited, and foreign influences severely curbed. This first period of flowering, however, did leave traces in a series of dramas written by Jesuit playwrights during the next two centuries. Widely performed at Jesuit schools in Europe, usually in Latin, these dramas used music, dancing, drama, even fencing, in order to exalt the Christian ideals shown by the Japanese, often those who accepted martyrdom for their belief in Jesus. Some of the plays, indeed, had happy endings. Accounts suggest that the plays drew on Western, rather than on Japanese dramaturgical principles, but these dramas, widely performed, helped keep the subject of Japan and Japanese culture alive for 200 years.3 The closing of Japan again reduced to a minimum both the opportunity for Westerners to learn about the traditional Japanese performing arts or for the Japanese to learn about the developments of the postRenaissance tradition in Europe. True, there did remain a Dutch outpost in Nagasaki, but the writings left by these merchants and others do not indicate that they were able to witness any theatrical perform ances. It was in 1853 with the opening of Japan by the American Commodore Perry, that significant contacts were renewed with the Western world. And, as in 1585, the Japanese caused a sensation wherever they went. The poet Walt Whitman, observing the first Japanese delegation to the United States in 1860, one of the first official visits by the Japanese abroad after a period of more than 200 years, wrote with enthusiasm and wonderment of these new people who seemed exotic strangers stepping into the Western world.

164

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.1 Photograph of section of scroll showing Europeans viewing early kabuki. Early 17th c. Color on silk [original], 36.7×1550 cm [original]. Important Art Object [original] The Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya. A portion of a scroll painting depicting an early performance of the kind of dance play that eventually became kabuki. Two Europeans stand at the rear watching the spectacle. Note that one of the actresses wears a rosary, reflecting the fashion for things European at the time.

Over the Western sea, hither from Niphon come, Courteous, the swart-cheek’d two-sworded envoys, Leaning back in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive Ride to-day through Manhattan.4 From this time onwards, the complexity and richness of the connections between East and West grew ever greater. China, too, would develop brief but important connections with modern Japanese theater in the years prior to World War I, but in the period from the 1880s to World War II, the European-Japanese link remained the most important.5 With Japan now opened to commerce, education, even missionary activity again, more and more visitors flooded into the country in the I 870s and afterwards. Generally speaking, the Americans then living in Japan remained for business or other practical interests, and there were relatively few persons of culture among them, with the obvious exception of the writer Lafcadio Hearn, who wrote widely on Japanese life and culture with such skill that much of his work remains evocative even today. Some Americans, however, made real contributions, sometimes even involuntarily. For example, in the confusions of post-restoration politics, such classical forms as the nō theater, which had been patronized for several centuries by the now discredited shogunate, had difficulty in finding subsidies needed to sustain their troupes. A group of actors assembled for a special performance prepared for General Ulysses S. Grant, who toured Japan in 1879, so impressed this unlikely aesthete that his praises eventually led to timely government assistance. European theater groups also made trips to Japan and provided entertainment both for the foreign population and for those Japanese who wished to attend. Interest in Shakespeare was apparently high among both groups from the first contact, but, according to the British scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain, resident in Japan in the late 19th century, opera (a form which, after all, comes closest to Japan’s conception of ‘total theater’) found little immediate sympathy: Oh! The effect upon the Japanese audience! When once they had recovered from the first shock of surprise, they were seized with a wild fit of hilarity at the high notes of the prima donna, who was

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

165

Figure 14.2a, b Two photographs of Sada Yacco. Photographer: Atelier Zander & Labisch, Berlin, a) Photograph of Sada Yacco pasted on cardboard. Signature on cardboard, ‘Sada Yacco’, 1901. 20.2× 11 cm; cardboard size 23.9×12 cm. b) Photograph of Sada Yacco, her husband Kawakami, her son Otojirō, and Loïe Fuller, 1901 or 1902. 22.8× 22.6 cm. Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany. These photographs were taken in Berlin during the tour through the United States and Europe by the entrepreneur, actor, and producer Kawakami Otojirō. His wife, Sada Yacco, a former geisha, did not originally intend to perform but merely assumed she would accompany her husband. Eventually, when she acted in simplified versions of traditional Japanese plays, she became an international star virtually overnight. One of her ardent admirers, the famed American dancer Loïe Fuller, is pictured in the second photograph.

really not at all bad. The people laughed at the absurdities of European singing till their sides shook, and the tears rolled down their cheeks; and they stuffed their sleeves into their mouths, as we might our pocket-handkerchiefs, in the vain endeavor to contain themselves.6

166

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.3 ‘Guest Performance’, Sada Yacco, 0. Kawakami, with the Ensemble of the Imperial Court Theatre in Tokio consisting of real Japanese’, 1901. Paper, 31.5×22.6 cm. Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany. The program features two perennial favorites performed by Kawakami’s troupe on tour. ‘The Geisha and the Knight’ and ‘Kesa’ might be considered, at best, vague adaptions of classical Japanese plays. Nevertheless, American and European audiences loved these dramas (which Japanese found embarrassing) and believed them to be authentic. There was no ‘Imperial Court Theatre’ in Tokyo at this time, but Kawakami, ever the masterful publicist, did not hesitate to find a way to add luster to his group’s international reputation.

In this case, of course, increased familiarity by no means came to breed contempt, tickets for performances of opera, particularly as sung by Western troupes at wildly inflated prices, remain one of the most highly sought-out luxuries in contemporary Japanese life. If Westerners visiting Japan were fascinated by Japanese theater, visits by Japanese artists to the Western world during the period brought even greater excitement to European and American audiences. Those visiting Japan were, on the whole, not specialists of drama, music, or dance, and the observations, however sincerely offered, remained those of interested amateurs. By the time that Japanese performers came to the United States and Europe, however, audiences, critics, and theater practitioners were increasingly prepared to greet them. Then too, as Kishi Tetsuo writes in his essay on the modern theater of Japan, the influences of Western spoken drama were being felt in Japan itself. There are doubtless two reasons for this initial enthusiasm for Japanese theater in the West. In the first place, the artistic side of Japan had become widely known through the export of traditional woodblock prints, which had caught the eye of such diverse artists as Whistler, Degas, Manet, and Van Gogh. Their enthusiasm in turn validated the Japanese sense of space, color, and line, all of which can be said to show a certain consonance with the use of color, space, and movement in the classical Japanese theater. Secondly, Japan soon found its representation in Western works written for the European and American stages. Such works as Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, written in 1885, and The Geisha of Sidney Jones, a ‘Japanese musical play’ written in 1896, became enduringly popular not only in English-speaking countries but in France, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere, where they were regularly performed down to the time of World War II. In these productions, and dozens like them, Japan was, of course, ‘represented’ on stage by foreign performers, virtually none of whom had any first hand experience of the culture at all, so that during this period the Japanese themselves seemed denied the possibilities of any direct self-

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

167

Figure 14.5 Headdress for costume worn by Genia Guszalwisca in ‘The Geisha’ at Berlin’s Deutsches Volkstheater, 1929. Tin, painted in gold, textile rose at each end. 31×37×3 cm. Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany. ‘The Geisha,’ written by the British theater composer Sidney Jones, was one of many musicals that sought an exoticism in the ‘mysterious Japan’ first chronicled by writers like Lafcadio Hearn as well as by painters such as Manet, Degas and Van Gogh, who helped create the romance of Japonisme. The operetta, first staged in London in 1896, soon became popular in the United States and all over Europe, its fame lasting through the 1930s. This Berlin production of 1929 was, according to contemporary accounts, one of the finest and most elaborate ever presented.

Figure 14.6 Photograph of Genia Guszalwisca in ‘The Geisha’. Photographer: Atelier Lotte Jacobi, Berlin, 1929. Paper, 11.9×8.9 cm. Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany. A photograph of Genia Guszalwisca in the title role of this celebrated production directed by Hans Winge.

expression. With the extraordinary visit to America and Europe, in 1889 and 1900, of the troupe of Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911) and his wife Kawakami Sadayakko (1872–1946), known in the West as Sada Yacco, Sadayacco, or Sadayakko (used hereafter), however, all that was to change. By the 1880s, Japanese artists and intellectuals had become increasingly interested in the Western theater. Kabuki, the popular theater of the Tokugawa period, now seemed unwieldy as a vehicle for the expression of current concerns, particularly in the political realm. Among those who first attempted political drama during this period was the actor and theater entrepreneur Kawakami Otojirō, after a number of

168

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.7 Photograph of Max Pallenberg as Koko in ‘The Mikado’. Photographer: Atelier Willinger, Berlin, 1927. Paper, 16×21 cm. Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany. Since its first production in London in 1885, Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado’ has remained the most popular of the light stage entertainments based (however loosely) on Japanese themes. Gilbert and Sullivan has always been performed in England and the United States. This photograph serves as a reminder of the popularity of ‘The Mikado,’ even in translation. The star Max Pallenberg played Koko in this 1927 production at Berlin’s Grosses Schauspielhaus.

professional vicissitudes, he decided to recoup some of his losses by embarking on an American and European tour. Gathering up a little band of eighteen performers, all male (as was still the custom), as well as his wife, Sadayakko, an elegant former geisha, he headed first for the United States, where the group began performing on the West Coast before moving on to Chicago, Boston, and New York. According to some accounts, Sadayakko herself had not intended to perform but was drafted to take part when one of the female impersonators fell ill.7 The troupe staged a number of short plays based (some Japanese spectators considered them debased) on kabuki and other traditional texts. Met at first with indifferent success, the group began to find enthusiastic audiences in Boston and was tremendously successful in New York, so much so that the Japanese consul invited the group to perform in Washington for President McKinley and other distinguished guests. Some accounts posit a meeting between Kawakami and that great figure in the British theater, Sir Henry Irving himself, who was performing in New York with Ellen Terry. The encounter supposedly spurred Kawakami on to create his own adaption into Japanese of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Buoyed by these successes the group moved on to London, where they performed, among other places, at Buckingham Palace for the Prince of Wales. By this time, it was clear that the reason for the extraordinary success of the troupe was because of the performances of Sadayakko. Without training in acting for the theater, she used her dancing skills and winsome personality to create a stage persona that overwhelmed contemporary audiences. Sadayakko and the troupe scored their most extraordinary success in Paris, where they began performing in July of 1900 for the World Exposition. Part of her achievement, undoubtedly, came from Sadayakko’s encounter with the American dancer Loië Fuller (1862–1928), herself something of an anomaly. Fuller, born in Fullersburg, Illinois, began as an actress in vaudeville but eventually turned herself into a dancer

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

169

Figure 14.8 Drames d’amour by Okamoto Kidō, 1929. Paper, 19.1×12.7×2 cm. J.Thomas Rimer. This first edition, published by Librairie Stock in Paris in 1929, contains French-language versions of three plays by Okamoto Kidō, an important Meiji dramatist who wrote modern kabuki plays in a new, psychological style. Although a few modern plays in English translation were published in Japan during the 1920s, this is one of the very first collections to be published directly in Europe. One of the dramas, ‘A Tale of Shuzenji,’ is often regarded as the author’s masterpiece.

who, by manipulating lights and wearing flowing, diaphanous robes, created a whole new visual vocabulary. By the end of the century, she was the toast of Paris. She had a theater in which to present innovative works at the World Exposition. When she heard about Sadayakko’s performances, she went to see for herself and invited the troupe to perform. The reviews were extraordinary. Sadayakko was compared to Duse and other great actresses of the period, and her praises were sung by many of the greatest artists and intellectuals of the day, among them Rodin, Gide, and Antoine, whose Théâtre Libre did so much to bring contemporary drama to France. Once the Paris performances were concluded, Fuller organized a contract for the troupe that took them to find equal success in Brussels, Berlin, Leipzig, Rome, Milan, Venice, Vienna, Moscow, and elsewhere. Such diverse European artists as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Vsevolod Meyerhold fell under her sway. Isadora Duncan, another great dancer of the period, was so entranced by what she saw that she followed Sadayakko to Berlin in order to observe additional performances. The young Picasso did a drawing of Sadayakko. One account suggests that Puccini consulted her during her visit to Italy concerning details of Japanese life that found their way into his 1904 Madama Butterfly, which was to succeed Iris, Mascagni’s once-popular opera of 1898, much loved by Caruso, as the representative ‘Japanese’ musical work. The triumph was, apparently, total. Cultural reflections and counter-reflections, however, reveal shadows as well as light, and this first encounter had its detractors as well. For many Japanese, observing this first attempt at an East-West theatrical dialogue, popular and merely sensational dramas such as The Geisha and the Knight—the greatest success of the troupe—seemed vulgar and hardly worthy of Japan’s greatest traditions. Americans and Europeans, however, were watching the troupe through their own eyes, and with their own predilections. For them, Kawakami’s troupe brought something more authentically Japanese than had ever been available to them before, and they took away with them both a sense of respect and a larger curiosity for Japanese theater. Kawakami, on his side, gained much as well. He brought back to Japan a passion for Shakespeare, whose works began to be used, and indeed still continue to be employed, as a means to fuel the

170

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.9 Illustrations by Edmund Dulac in Four Plays for Dancers by William Butler Yeats, 1921. Paper, 20. 3×14×2 cm. Hillman Library, The University of Pittsburgh. In 1916, William Butler Yeats, inspired by his reading of a series of translations of nō plays made by Ernest Fenollosa and revised by the American poet Ezra Pound, decided to write a series of dramas making use of certain elements he found compatible with his perception of the medieval Japanese style. Reproductions of the striking costume sketches by the gifted artist and illustrator Edmund Dulac for the first of these palys, ‘At the Hawk’s Well,’ are included in Four Plays for Dancers, published in New York by The Macmillan Company in 1921.

development of modern and avantgarde theater in Japan. Sadayakko’s performances increased the possibilities for actresses to perform on the stage, at least in Tokyo, and, indeed, Sadayakko in later years founded the first school for professional actresses in Japan. Concerning the reception of Japanese theater in Europe during this period, however, one point in particular should be noted. Each Western theater artist observing Kawakami’s repertory tended to view these productions in terms of his or her Western artistic specialty. For dancers such as Duncan and Fuller, Sadayakko was a dancer, for others, she appeared an actress. Playwrights tended to react to these productions as though they were basically spoken drama, rather than, as was apparently the case, theatrical creations which included mime and possibly some modest acrobatics in order to represent, however modestly, the kind of ‘total theater’ possible in nō and kabuki. Thus at this time the Japanese ideal was most often awkwardly cast into pre-existing European and American artistic forms. Some drew on this material for operas, some for ballets, some for spoken dramas. The kind of synthesis posited by the great Japanese traditions would long continue to elude Western artists. True, after his encounter with Sadayakko, Meyerhold made a translation from German into Russian of one act of a well-known scene from kabuki and bunraku, ‘Terakoya’ (‘The Village School,’ part of Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami [Sugawara and the

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

171

Figure 14.10a-c Three costume sketches for Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly’, a) No. 29: women’s chorus, Act I; b) No. 33: women’s chorus. Act II; c) No. 53: costume details. Early 20th c. Gouache on paper, 25.4×39.4 cm. Metropolitan Opera Archives, New York. Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly,’ which had its disastrous premiére in 1904, soon became a worldwide success in a revised version, and has remained a staple of the operatic repertory ever since. The firm of Ricordi, which published Puccini’s music, received many requests from opera companies for help in costuming and other production details of what was then highly unusual Japanese material. These three sketches are among those made to assist designers to create an ‘authentic’ staging of the opera, set in the southern port of Nagasaki at the end of the 19th century.

Secrets of Calligraphy]), and Max Reinhardt incorporated in a few of his Berlin productions certain techniques (including the hanamichi runway, brought to New York for his 1912 production of Sumurun) from Japanese stagecraft suggested to him by his gifted designer Emil Orlik, who had lived in Japan for two years at the beginning of the century. The revolving stage was an even earlier technological import from Japan, being introduced in Munich in 1896. Perhaps the most consistent response to Japanese theater was that maintained by the Soviet film maker Sergei Eisenstein, whose excited response to a visit of a kabuki troupe to Moscow and Leningrad in 1928 inspired him, by his own account, to create ‘symphonic images’ in his films. Many distinguished writers found inspiration in the texts of Japanese theater, insofar as they could learn about them through translation. In Ireland, for example, William Butler Yeats, wearying of the kind of realistic theater prevalent in his period, began to compose a series of nō-inspired dramas, beginning with At the Hawk’s Well, first staged in 1916. The plays often deal with Irish mythology, just as nō often deals with

172

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.11a, b Photographs of two stage settings for ‘Iris’. Photographers: a) Byron, New York and b) White Studio, 1915. Paper, 22.9×33cm. Metropolitan Opera Archives, New York. Pietro Mascagni first became famous for his early 1890 opera ‘Cavalleria’ Rusticana,’ his only work to remain in constant performance today. His ‘Japanese’ opera ‘Iris,’ premièred in 1898. After its first production at the Metropolitan Opera, it was considered a great success and receives an occasional mounting even today. The music is certainly more successful than the melodramatic libretto by Luigi Illica (one of Puccini’s librerrists for ‘Madama Butterfly’), which curiously contains characters named for Japanese cities, including the villain, Kyoto (baritone), and the protagonist, Osaka (tenor).

similar subjects from Japan’s past. Yeats came to the Japanese example through a remarkable series of coincidences. Ezra Pound, the young American poet, had been asked to revise the unpublished translations of nō made some years before by Ernest Fenollosa, the American enthusiast for Japanese culture who had lived in Japan for more than a decade at the end of the 19th century. He showed them in turn to Yeats, who, now reinforced in his wish to create a truly poetic style of drama, began to fashion his text, but without any precise idea of how such a play might be realized on the stage. An encounter with Michio Ito, a young Japanese dancer who came to Europe to study with the Swiss Emil Jacques Dalcroze, founder of eurhythmics, permitted the first production. Ito, incidentally, went on to earn fame as a choreographer in New York and Hollywood; his reputation dimmed only because of the atmosphere in the United States during World War II.8

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

173

Figure 14.12 Box cover for CD recording of ‘Iris’, 1989. Paper, 15.2×14×3.8cm. J.Thomas Rimer. A modern recording of the Mascagni opera, conducted by Giuseppe Patané and starring such vocal luminaries as Ilona Tokody, Placido Domingo and Juan Pons, helped restore the attention of music lovers to Mascagni’s lyrical score.

Others were drawn to kabuki. The poet John Masefield, a disciple of Yeats and eventually poet-laureate of England, became friends in about 1910 with Laurence Binyon, one of the great early scholars of Asian art, who worked at the British Museum. Encouraged by Binyon’s enthusiasm, Masefield, who, like Yeats, was also trying out his abilities as a dramatist, decided to adapt the 18th-century drama of the 47 loyal samurai (Kanadehon Chūshingura [Chūshingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers]) for the contemporary stage: ‘I had known the story of the Ronin for many years,’ Masefield wrote, and his adaption, entitled The Faithful, was first presented in 1914 by the Birmingham Repertory Theater, and had subsequent, and successful, productions in London and New York.9 Masefield’s play has its modest attractions, but it is fascinating to note that he found himself compelled to add lengthy and specific psychological justifications for the actions of his characters. In the original, Asano, as the lord of his fief, must be avenged; no questions are asked, at least in the text itself. In Masefield’s version, revenge is possible because the lord has initially been shown to the audience as a good and kind man. The shift of vision shows how far apart the two worlds still remained. As translations improved, Western visions of the nature and accomplishments of the Japanese theater broadened. In this regard, no one made a greater contribution during this period than Arthur Waley, whose elegant recreations, found in his The Nō Plays of Japan, first published in 1921, and still widely read and admired, showed for the first time the deeper beauty of the texts he chose to render into English. Waley’s collection was soon translated in turn into German. In 1930, Bertolt Brecht, fascinated by what he considered a dramatic structure capable of use as a means of moral persuasion, wrote with composer Kurt Weill Der Jasager (The Yes-Sayer), an opera for schools that, although relatively simple to perform musically and dramatically, remains, after The Threepenny Opera, one of their most mordant and lively works. Although the Buddhist piety of the original text (the nō play Tanikō) is here replaced with Communist dialectics, Brecht’s use of the nō structure, and Weill’s and his understanding that music as well as text were required in order to create a more powerful resonance were altogether successful. All of these writers learned about Japan from a distance. Indeed, Arthur Waley never left London. However, one of the greatest drama tists and poets of the prewar period (although his reputation has not fully carried into the English-speaking world), Paul Claudel, makes use of Japan in his work with an authority denied to the others, since he served as the French ambassador to Japan from 1921 to 1927. Long fascinated by Japanese art and aesthetics since a trip to Japan early in the century, Claudel wrote famous essays on nō, bunraku, and kabuki,10 and used many of the insights he gained from watching such performances in his own dramatic works, perhaps nowhere more notably than in his mammoth epic drama

174

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 1.13a, b, 1.14 Three photographs of the Weill-Brecht opera ‘Der Jasager’. Berlin premiere, 1930, New York premiére, 1933. Paper, 1.13a) 19.1×22.9cm; b) 12.7 ×16.5cm; 1.14) 16.5×24.1 cm. Courtesy of the Weill-Lenya Research Center, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, New York. In 1930, Bertolt Brecht, having read a German translation made from Arthur Waley’s English renderings of medieval Japanese nō published in 1921, decided to write his own drama in this abbreviated style, which Kurt Weill set to music. The title, which might be roughly translated as ‘The One Who Says Yes,’ was written to be performed by high school students as what Brecht called a ‘learning piece.’ The instrumentation and vocal parts are simple, but the work is musically and dramatically compelling, as might be expected from the composers of ‘The Threepenny Opera’ and ‘Mahagony.’

Le Soulier de Satin (The Satin Slipper), most of which he wrote while living in Tokyo. An enormously long and difficult play to stage, Claudel’s intransigent masterpiece gained world renown when Jean-Louis

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

175

Figure 14.15 Cover painting by Yama Moto on LP recording of ‘Der Jasager’. Music by Kurt Weill, text by Bertolt Brecht. Original recording, 1955; this reissue 1966. Paper, 30.5×30.5 cm. J.Thomas Rimer. The first recording of ‘Der Jasager’ was made in Dusseldorf in 1955 under the supervision of Lotte Lenya, the widow of Kurt Weill. The recording has been reissued several times, including a CD version in 1989.

Barrault, himself long an admirer of classical Japanese theater, staged and restaged it in the postwar period. The play is divided into four ‘Days,’ a vast structure that itself recalls a lengthy kabuki play, and is set in the 1600s. In the Fourth Day, there is a particularly striking exchange between Don Rodrigo, the protagonist, and his Japanese colleague, the artist Daibutsu. Their conversation reveals Claudel’s sharp and ironic understanding of the political implications of those first encounters between Europe and Japan. THE JAPANESE: Was it with cannon-balls that you reckoned to show your sympathy? DON RODRIGO: One uses what one has, and I have never been free with flowers or fondling. You were too well-off in your little dry hole in the middle of the ocean, in your little tight-shut garden taking your tea in little sips out of little cups. It worries me to see people well off, it’s immoral, I itched to butt into the middle of your ceremonial.

176

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.16a-c Three sketches by Rolf Christiansen for a production of Mishima Yukio’s ‘Three Modern No Plays’, 1958. 32.5×50 cm. Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, Germany. The celebrated postwar novelist Mishima Yukio is also highly respected in Japan as a playwright, and many of his works have been produced abroad, thanks to translations by Donald Keene, which have often served as the basis for further adaptions in German, French, and other European languages. These stage designs, created for a 1958 production in Kiel directed by Wolfgang Blum, show designs for ‘The Damask Drum’ and two others of Mishima’s evocative one-act adaptions of these medieval Japanese dramas. A photograph of a Japanese production of modern nō by Mishima can be found in Section VIII.

THE JAPANESE: Whether you liked it or not you had to spend some time with us learning repose and stability.11

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

177

Figure 14.18 Poster for Munakata’s ‘Nō Hamlet’ at Tokyo’s National Nō Theater, 1985. Paper, 60× 40 cm. Munakata Kuniyoshi.

In the period prior to World War II, it was perhaps Claudel most of all who, through his long residency in Japan and his attraction to traditional Japanese culture (and, perhaps, despite his militant Catholic sympathies), managed to absorb the traditions of the Japanese theater and best bend them to his own creative use. The coming of World War II broke the active connections between Europe, the United States, and Japan, and they were not to be renewed until the late 1950s. Once renewed, the sense of contact, and of a shared theatrical vocabulary, grew enormously. Perhaps the main change that occurred involved the emergence of the United States, both as an influence on Japanese theater, and as a conduit through which Japanese ideas reached Europe and elsewhere. In the years prior to World War II, the main axis had been between Japan and Europe. That was now to change. Some have attributed the upsurge of American interest in Japan, and thus in Japanese culture and the arts, to the Allied Occupation of Japan, when a multitude of American soldiers and civilians lived all over the country, many for protracted periods. Most, as it turned out, came away with a continuing fascination for the country. Several of the best postwar books on Japanese theater, in fact, were written by Americans who had served in the armed forces during the Occupation. Perhaps the first crucial event in the postwar period that helped to develop this nascent American interest in Japanese theater was the initial tour of kabuki to the United States in 1960.12 In this gesture of cultural reconciliation, the Japanese promoters were initially nervous that, despite the fact that the greatest actors of the generation were to appear, this classical theater would be misunderstood and found to be merely stilted or feudalistic. They need not have worried. The American audience was ready for the kabuki. Every seat was sold and the troupe could easily have played another month. The reviews were almost entirely enthusiastic and upon those occasions when they were not, respectful. And the same people kept coming again and again: Garbo was ones another was Anne Bancroft, another was Irene Worth. There were others too, not famous, but faces one would recognize in the intermissions or after the performances, someone who had been there before. The audience was intelligent and completely receptive. After the first performance of Dōjō-ji the

178

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.22 Poster for Bergman production of ‘Madame de Sade’, 1989. Paper, 99.1×69.9 cm. Gift of the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm. Another work by the novelist and playwright Mishima Yukio which found favor abroad is his play ‘Madame de Sade,’ which was given a brilliant production in 1989, directed by the famed film director Ingmar Bergman for the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm. This mounting, revived several times, was also seen in the United States, to considerable acclaim.

applause thundered as it never does at the Kabuki-za. Utaemon stood in front of the curtain, almost bewildered, then he stepped forward, smiled, and took bow after bow.13 This postwar American fascination with Japanese theater, once ignited, has continued ever since.13 Now, for the first time, Western musicians became actively interested in the Japanese example. A number of composers, among them Lou Harrison and Harry Partch, attempted to make use of Japanese elements in their own work. The most notable among these experiments was Curlew River, composed by the great British composer Benjamin Britten in 1964. While on a trip to Japan in 1956, Britten was so drawn into the world of nō that he had his librettist William Plomer recast the play Sumidagawa (The River Sumida) as a medieval Christian legend. The opera retains some of the characteristics of the nō (the protagonist is masked, all performers are male), but he replaced the original Japanese choral passages, redolent of Buddhist music, with Gregorian chant, used with brilliance to underscore the heartbreaking discovery by a madwoman of the grave of her dead child. Interest in Japanese theater has also found its way into more popular forms of theater. Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, for example, uses Japanese theatrical devices and certain Japanese musical motifs in creating a sometimes comic, sometimes somber retelling of how America came to Japan in the 19th century. This theater work, since its first New York production in 1976, has gone on, particularly in Great Britain, to receive productions that have firmly established it as a modern masterpiece of musical theater. The world of dance also now became involved with Japan. Perhaps the first work of substance to be produced in the United States was the ballet ‘Bugaku,’ choreographed in 1962 by George Balanchine. In his attempt to recast his vision of the ancient court dances of Japan into a contemporary work, Balanchine was much aided by his choice of a musical score by the brilliant young Mayuzumi Toshirō, who recast the

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

179

Figure 14.23 Rose. Puppet used by Lee Breuer in his Mabou Mines production ‘An Epidog’. Designed and built by Julie Archer, 1995. Fabric, wood, paper, pulp, 8.9×2.5×6.4 cm. Mabou Mines. Lee Breuer, one of the most innovative figures in contemporary avant-garde theatre, was a founding member of the Mabou Mines Company in 1970 and has been associated with a variety of avant-garde productions at LaMama in New York. Long fascinated by Japanese theater, and in particular the puppets of bunraku, he asked Julie Archer to create the puppet Rose, which has appeared in a variety of productions.

Figure 14.24 Photograph from ‘Woman in the Dunes’, 1996. Paper, Sara O’Connor, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. Highly successful bilingual productions of Japanese plays have become more common in recent years. In this 1996 dramatization of Abe Kōbō’s novel Woman in the Dunes, staged by the Omsk State Drama Theatre in Russia, the director, Vladimir Petrov, chose a Russian actor, Michael Klounev, for the protagonist and a Japanese actress, Araki Kazuko, for the mysterious ‘woman,’ with each speaking in their respective languages. The stage designer, Matsushita Ryō, was also from Japan.

sounds and rhythms of these ancient musical forms for modern symphonic instruments. Mayuzumi went on to write other influential scores, including his music for the Maurice Béjart ballet of 1986 entitled ‘Kabuki,’ produced with the Tokyo Ballet, Japan’s best-known company. Béjart, then based in Belgium, had long been a central figure in postwar European dance, and it was on that basis that he was chosen to work with the Tokyo Ballet, which early on had received Soviet training but now sought European expertise as well. Mayuzumi, who also composed the opera Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion) in 1976 for Berlin (revived by

180

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.25 & 14.26 Posters for two productions of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ Pacific Overtures, 1976 and 1984 (© Faver). Paper, 35.6×55.9 cm. Japan Society, Inc. In 1976, the composer Stephen Sondheim and the writer John Weidman created a striking musical and dramatic version of the coming to Japan of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, an event usually considered to have been instrumental in opening Japan up to foreign influences after some two hundred years of seclusion. In the view of these two gifted men, the cultural trauma caused by this event has never really stopped. ‘Pacific Overtures’ has also been popular in England, where it has been given several important productions.

the New York City Center in 1995), along with Miki Minoru, who wrote the highly successful opera Jōruri for the St. Louis Opera Theater in 1985, often mix both Japanese and Western instruments together in their scores, producing a sound that continues to hold its appeal for Western audiences. Virtually unknown in Western performing circles before World War II, Japanese theater music is now becoming at least somewhat familiar in Western opera and dance circles. It is perhaps not surprising that Mayuzumi chose a novel of Mishima Yukio as the basis for his opera, for the appearance of this writer, who may be said to have dominated Western perceptions of Japanese literature during the entire postwar period, was himself active as a playwright. The series of one act modern nō plays he wrote, beginning in 1950, combined the elegance and ritualistic qualities of that tradition with fresh and piercing erotic and psychological insights. The plays have gone on to a variety of productions throughout Europe and America, often in Donald Keene’s beautiful English translations. Mishima’s other plays, superficially less exotic and more resolutely Western in form, have been slower to achieve translations and productions, but his Sado Kōshaku Fujin (Madame de Sade) of 1965, again thanks to an eloquent translation into English by Donald Keene, came to the attention of the Swedish director Ingmar

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

181

Figure 14.27 Photograph from the original production of Steven Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’. Photographer: Carol Rosegg, 1976. 20.3×25.4 cm. Carol Rosegg. A striking scene from ‘Pacific Overtures’ showing Commodore Perry at the bow of his ship. His pose is redolent of the mie (climax poses), in the traditional kabuki theater.

Bergman, whose brilliant production of the play by the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm has been seen on two recent occasions in New York. Other widely-translated postwar writers, among them Abe Kōbō and Endo Shūsaku, have also had their dramatic works staged abroad. Abe’s Tomodachi (Friends), a chilling, macabre rejection of traditional Japanese family ‘togetherness,’ written in 1967, has intrigued audiences, and a recent dramatization of Endo’s Chinmoku (Silence), his gripping 1966 novel dealing with the apostasy of a Christian priest in Japan living in hiding during the Christian proscriptions of the 17th century, has been a recent success in both Japan and the United States. Regional theaters, in particular the Milwaukee Repertory Company, have been particularly active in promoting these kinds of cultural experiments, which have helped to construct a base for a greater appreciation of modern Japanese theater. Perhaps most significant in creating a mutual vocabulary of understanding is that more and more Japanese artists and performers have been working directly in the West. The actor Oida Katsuhiro (known as Yoshi Oida outside of Japan), for example, has been an important performer in the company of the British director Peter Brook, who, like the French director Ariane Mnouchkine and American directors such as Robert Wilson, Lee Breuer, Anne Bogart, Julie Taymor, and Peter Sellars, continues to take a profound interest in the techniques of the classical Japanese theater. Oida, seen in such celebrated productions of Brook’s as The Conference of the Birds in 1975 and The Mahabharata of 1985, has brought the rigor of traditional Japanese theater training to his colleagues in the company, thereby contributing to the ongoing experiments of Brook. Among Japanese directors active in Europe and the United States, Suzuki Tadashi, with his powerful techniques of acting that require a virtual remaking of the actors’ bodies, combined with his own search for texts that speak universally, has created projects such as The Trojan Women (loosely based on the original of

182

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.28 Record cover for original cast recording of ‘Pacific Overtures’, 1976. 30.5×30.5 cm. J.Thomas Rimer.

Euripides), first presented in 1974 and revised often since. Suzuki’s productions have helped redefine the nature of contemporary international avant-garde theater. Ninagawa Yukio, like Suzuki active in the politicized avant-garde theater in his earlier years, has created for himself a powerful reputation in the West as well as in Japan through his productions of such classics as Macbeth, The Tempest, and Medea. Theater designers, too, such as Asakura Setsu, despite busy careers in Japan, have been asked to create stage environments all over the world. Asakura, who often uses sophisticated electronic and lighting effects, has done work ranging from intimate stage areas, such as her work in St. Louis for Jōruri, to large-scale assignments, such as her settings for Munich and Nagoya productions of the Richard Strauss opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) in 1993. Such opportunities give these complex cultural connections a natural chance to expand even further. This production of the Strauss opera was staged by one of the most highly regarded contemporary kabuki actors, Ichikawa Ennosuke III. While in Germany, Ennosuke took the occasion to attend performances of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival. Much taken with the celebrated stage settings for this production by the Austrian designer Hans Schavernoch, Ennosuke in turn invited the Austrian designer to do the settings for his 1992 so-called ‘super kabuki’ production of Satomi Hakkenden (Satomi and the Eight Dogs), adapted from the celebrated 19th-century Japanese novel of the same name by Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848). What thus began as mutually remote glimpses from both Japan and the West of geographically and culturally differing theatrical traditions has turned into a virtual flood of mutually supportive activity. The differences in those traditions, once considered a liability, now constitute points of intense stimulation. Japanese theater is certainly with us in today’s world. And who knows where it will now take us, and in doing so, thereby continue to transform itself yet again? NOTES 1. Quoted in Eppstein (1993), 148. This article provides a useful summary of the shifting attitudes of Europeans from the 16th down to the 20th century. 2. A lively fictional account of this journey can be found in the novel The Samurai by Endō Shūsaku (1984).

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

183

Figure 14.29 Costume sketch by Annena Stubbs for the Ferryman in the production of ‘Curlew River’ by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, 1986. Color on paper, 57.2×38.1 cm. Cohn Graham. The British composer Benjamin Britten, when visiting Japan in 1956, became intrigued by what he found to be the strangeness and unique beauty of the nō theater. He later asked his collaborator William Plomer to adapt the text of the nō play Britten had particularly admired —‘The River Sumida’—into the text for a one-act opera. Britten’s version, set in medieval England, uses Christian plainsong to replace the original nō chanting in order to create a work that, while deeply indebted to the beauty of medieval Japanese theater, is altogether authentic and one of the most moving works by this master stage composer. 3. A good deal of fascinating research on this intriguing topic has been undertaken by Professor Margaret Dietrich and Father Thomas Immoos, but much of their work has not yet been published. See, though, Immoos (1963). A more recent English-language account of these plays is Takenaka Masahiro (1995), which also includes translations by Charles Burnett of two important examples of these dramatic texts. 4. Whitman (1982), 383. 5. Young Chinese intellectuals, studying in Tokyo in the early years of the 20th century prior to Sun Yat-sen’s revolution of 1911, were inspired by successful Japanese experiments in creating a modern spoken drama. They formed a group they called the Spring Wind Society and began to translate and perform plays in colloquial Chinese, with the help of their Japanese colleagues. This subject is one of great interest but is as yet to be fully explored by any scholar writing in English. There are a few pages on the subject in Dolby (1976). 6. Chamberlain (1890), 446. 7. Details concerning the trip and the performances vary considerably. Among the more reliable English-language sources is the article by Chiba (1992). See also the thoughtful essay by Salz (1993). For a detailed account of the French sections of the tour, see Kei (1986). 8. The story of how Yeats wrote his play has often been told, and the details are truly fascinating. Among the best of these accounts are those of Sekine and Murray (1990), and Caldwell (1977) 9. Masefield does not state precisely how he came to know the play, which was not then available in an accurate translation. Doubtless he used the somewhat bowdlerized English account by Dickins (1880), which enjoyed considerable popularity in England and America. 10. Translations of some of these essays can be found in Claudel (1972). 11. These lines come from the translation of the play by O’Connor (1937).

184

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.30a-d Four puppets used in Miki Minoru’s opera ‘Jōruri’, 1985. Wood, wire, cloth, with wooden stands; a) 73.7×50.8 cm; b) 43.2×27.9 cm; c) 81.3×45.7 cm; d) 53.3×30.5 cm. Courtesy of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. For its 10th anniversary season, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis commissioned Miki Minoru, a leading contemporary Japanese composer, to compose a new opera especially for the company. Miki, who had already written several successful operatic scores, teamed up with the noted opera director Cohn Graham, who wrote the libretto, to create a moving and evocative evening. The story, which concerns a doomed pair of lovers, draws on conventions of both kabuki and bunraku. The company later toured the production to Japan, with great success. 12. Actually, a company calling itself a kabuki troupe had toured America in 1955. This was the so-called ‘Azuma Kabuki,’ a group of geisha and male dancers who performed traditional dances in kabuki style. Among the

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

185

Figure 14.31 Souvenir programme for the 10th anniversary season of the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Featuring designs for the premiére of the Miki Minoru opera ‘Joruri;’ cover by Walter Cooper, 1985. Paper, 28.6×21.6×3.2 cm. J.Thomas Rimer. dancers was the present kabuki star, Nakamura Tomijōrō V, whose mother was the troupe leader. 13. These and other delightful and insightful comments by Donald Richie on this tour are found in the ‘Postscript’ section of the book of translations by Richie and Watanabe (1963).

186

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 14.33a-b a) Drawing by Asakura Setsu for the stage setting of ‘The Woman without a Shadow’, b) Photographs of the production, a) 1993k color on paper; 103× 73 cm; b) Photographer: © Anne Kirchbach a) Asakura Setsu; b) Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Germany. In 1993, Asakura Setsu was asked to design the settings for a spectacular production in Munich of the 19199 Richard Strauss opera ‘The Woman without a Shadow’ (Die Frau ohne Schatten). Set in a mythical country, a Japanese miseen-sc~ne was used. Costumes were by Mohri Tomio, and the production was directed by Ichikawa Ennosuke, the 1.31 famed ‘super -kabuki’ performer, mentioned elsewhere in this section in connection with his production of ‘Satomi and the Eight Dogs.’ The Strauss production was later taken to Nagoya to inaugurate the new opera house there, and remains in the repertory of the Bavarian State Opera.

JAPANESE THEATER IN THE WORLD

187

Figure 14.34 Costume by Mohri Toshio for ‘The Woman Without a Shadow’, 1993. Cloth. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Germany

First published in J.Thomas Rimer (ed.), Culture and Identity: Japanese intellectuals during the interwar years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 81–94

15 Chekhov and the Beginnings of Modern Japanese Theater, 1910–1928

THE MARRIAGE between Japanese and Chekhovian sensibilities seemed virtually consummated and altogether natural by the 1940s. In Japan at the turn of the century any mention of the Russian writer had seemed exotic and suggested an intellectual adventure; by 1947, Osamu Dazai, in his novel The Setting Sun, had his heroine, Kazuko, address a letter to her prospective lover, Uehara Jirō, using the initials MC, My Chekhov, not to provide an arcane reference but as a point of repair that his readers would recognize at once. At the end of 1945, when performers from various modern theatre companies banded together, their forces having often been cruelly dispersed by the government during the war years, there was no question but that the play to produce at the Yūrakuza was The Cherry Orchard. The affinities had defined themselves quite naturally. Yet, as Hanna Scolnicov has reminded us, ‘Chekhov did not believe that non-Russian audiences could possibly understand the full meaning of the estate in The Cherry Orchard; so worried was he about his plays being misunderstood in foreign tongues that he regretted not being able to prevent their translation and production abroad.’1 Understood or misunderstood, rightly or wrongly, certain elements of theme and dramaturgy that make up Chekhov’s vision quickly domesticated themselves in Japan. The affinity can be explained in a number of ways, including the philosophical. For a performed text, however, the problems may involve serious dislocations and anxieties, because they involve an audience’s reception not only of a new kind of text but of a developing code of movement, gesture, and mise-en-scène altogether unfamiliar when a work by Chekhov, A Proposal of Marriage, was first seen on the Tokyo stage in 1910, several months after the first professional production of any Western play, Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. Rather than metaphysically examining Chekhov’s dramas as recast in their Japanese context, I wish to look at some of the historical and intellectual currents in late Meiji and early Taishō Japan that made Chekhov, as writer, dramatist, and cultural mentor, a central figure to those artists and intellectuals who appreciated his work and used his accomplishments to help define the scope of their own ambitions for a truly modern Japanese theatre. Understood or misunderstood, Chekhov’s art inspired writers and artists around the world during the same decades. In the end, perhaps the affinity of Japanese writers and artists with Chekhov is less remarkable than the particulars of the fascination they felt and the means by which their enthusiasms, transmuted into the work of creating a contemporary theatre, took root in contemporary Japanese culture.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

189

CHEKHOV AS A WRITER Generally speaking, Chekhov’s work was read in Japanese translation, and his fiction was known and appreciated in Japan before his dramas. Some of his shorter literary pieces were available as early as 1903; by 1907, when a group of translations by Senuma Kayō appeared in book form, such an important novelist and poet as Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) found himself considerably moved by what he experienced.2 I read recently with much interest Madame Senuma Kayō’s translation of ‘A Collection of Chekhov’s Masterpieces,’ and Yoshida Hako’s translation of ‘Fate.’ Ward No. 6 and other stories powerfully convey the demoralization of an intelligent person in the face of reality. In reading this, one feels as if one has reached the end of the road. ‘Fate,’ also by Chekhov, is a fine work, too, but in a different sense from Ward No. 6. It strikes the reader with mortal agony…. What one notices in reading Chekhov is the indescribable humor running through his works. And I find particularly interesting the people portrayed by Russian writers—for example, the characters who make such reasonable, matterof-fact remarks and then immediately revile themselves as stupid.3 Between 1919 and 1928, the Shinchōsha company sponsored a series of translations by Akita Toshihiko and others that encompassed most of the major works of Chekhov. These volumes were widely read and quite influential. The critic Nakano Yoshio, in a 1955 study entitled Gendai sakka ron (A Discussion of Modern Writers), cites the examples of a number of writers who indicated the profound influence that Chekhov’s writing had on their own artistic development, among them such diverse and important figures as Takami Jun (1907–65), the Marxist Shiina Rinzō (1911–73), the humanist writer Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962), the revered novelist Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), and the Nobel Prize-winning writer Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972).4 The growth in sophistication of the new theatre movement (shingeki) came about in tandem with the discovery, then the domestication, of such plays as Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Seagull, and, most important of all, The Cherry Orchard. As might be expected, the stages of understanding were interlayered and multiple. First came the translations and only later a desire to find a semiotic system of vocal projection and stage movement that could make the plays viable in a new form of Japanese theatre. Means to realize that desire adequately remained elusive. The director Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928), about whom I will have a good deal to say, pointed out ruefully that his performers found difficulties in making the translated dialogue echo Chekhov’s original and subtle intentions. Even in the 1950s drama critics reviewing postwar Chekhov productions by such famous troupes as the Haiyūza, Mingei, and Kumo often commented that brightness in vocal projection betrayed the essential Chekhovian melancholia. When the gulf between the page and the stage lessened yet remained large, audiences and critics alike blamed the productions. The texts of the plays themselves were felt to be altogether understandable. TRANSLATIONS Modern drama conceived as a reading experience inspired the first translations of Chekhov and other famous Western dramatists into Japanese. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, skillful translations were available of much of the work of the two dramatists who, with Chekhov, had such an influence on the development of the modern Japanese theatre: Shakespeare and Ibsen. Translations of works by playwrights as different as Strindberg and Molière also became available, so that the range of accomplishment of Western theatre since the Renaissance came to be known and appreciated among the intelligentsia. Drama texts in the original languages still remained difficult of access. In the case of Ibsen,

190

CHEKHOV AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN JAPANESE THEATER, 1910–1928

the great Meiji writer and intellectual Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) made some of the earliest (and extremely accomplished) translations from the German, rather than from the original Norwegian. Osanai Kaoru himself, who prepared a translation of Chekhov’s Proposal of Marriage for a 1910 production, doubtless worked from a German or English translation of the original, for he knew no Russian. Of the early translators evidently only Senuma Kayō, who did a translation of The Cherry Orchard in 1913, was able to use a Russian text. With the coming of a generation of scholars who knew both Russian and the history of Russian literature, however, the quality and quantity of the translations increased enormously. In the Taishō period there were four major translators of Chekhov’s dramas into Japanese. Some versions were originally prepared for productions by Osanai and others, then published; some were originally meant for the reader and the printed page. The four translators were all widely known and respected in Japanese artistic and intellectual circles. A few sentences about each may suggest something of the milieu in which they worked. Kusuyama Masao (1884–1950), who was well known as a writer of children’s books and active in the newspaper world, was a highly regarded associate of Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), the premier literary critic and drama historian of the day, whose brilliant translations of the complete Shakespeare canon helped create the basis both for a reform of traditional kabuki and for a new modern Japanese theatre, the dramaturgy of which emphasized psychological inwardness. Kusuyama prepared several translations for Osanai; perhaps his most enduring was his 1925 rendering of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1908 drama, The Bluebird, one of the greatest successes of Osanai’s directing career. Kumazawa Mataroku (1899–1971) was an expert on Gorky. Although he graduated from the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages in 1923 and was considered a young man of extraordinary talent, he chose to return to his home province, where he held a professorship at Nagoya University. Fluent translator though he was, he did less for Osanai than the others. Yonekawa Masao (1891–1965) taught Russian at the Military Staff College in Tokyo and at Waseda University. Best known as a gifted translator of Dostoevsky, he did work on the Chekhov texts that was also highly regarded. Nakamura Hakuyō (1890–1974) was a close associate of Yonekawa. He graduated from the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages and helped edit a well-known journal of Russian literature. In the late 1920s he was commissioned to translate a number of Chekhov’s major texts into Japanese for a series published by the Tokyo firm of Kinseidō, a project that took him a number of years to complete. Those who could translate adeptly from the original Russian were perhaps few in number, but their language and literary skills were sufficient to permit multiple translations of the major plays, often as part of larger publishing projects. The Cherry Orchard was translated three times (by Kusuyama in 1920, Yonekawa in 1923, and Nakamura in 1927). The Three Sisters was put into Japanese twice (by Yonekawa in 1923 and Nakamura in 1927). Uncle Vanya received less attention—it was translated once (by Kusuyama in 1920)—although it attracted the attention of a gifted translator in the early Shōwa period, Takakura Teru (1891–1986), whose version was published in 1929. The Seagull, like The Cherry Orchard, existed in three translations (by Kusuyama in 1920, Nakamura in 1920, and Yonekawa in 1923).5 PRODUCTIONS Early Japanese readers’ responses to Chekhov’s plays were apparently as varied as those of Russian readers. Some found the texts basically humorous; some (reproducing the disagreements between Chekhov and Stanislavsky) found tragic dimensions. The problem for many revolved around the need to incorporate the larger social world of prerevolutionary Russia into a fuller understanding of the texts. This challenge

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

191

could be met only by stage productions, and however shaky the machinery for mounting them, the need for such stagings was felt to be great. Osanai Kaoru remains the central figure for the development of Chekhov productions during the late Meiji and Taishō periods. Indeed, not only did Osanai place Chekhov on the Japanese stage, but he used the works of Chekhov, as he did those of Ibsen, to create model productions that he hoped to be worthy of the great Western dramas that he admired. Osanai’s interest in Chekhov evidently began in the armchair. When he was twenty-six, he produced an early translation (doubtless from a German translation of the original) of ‘The Duel,’ first published in serial form in the Yomiuri shimbun. The same year, 1907, he and other young writers anxious to study the works of Henrik Ibsen formed a group called the Ibsen Society, which held its first meeting in February. Those attending had a formative influence on Japanese intellectual and artistic life for several generations: the anthropologist Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), the novelist Masamune Hakuchō, the poet Kambara Ariake (1876–1952), and the novelist and dramatist Akita Ujaku (1883–1962). The novelist Tayama Katai (1871–1930) remembers the first meeting of the Ibsen Society. We were still young in those days. Osanai was a fresh-faced young man who still had to make a name for himself, and he cut a figure when he turned up in his splash-pattern haori and hakama… The discussion grew heated when we came to The Wild Duck. We argued whether it was a good thing to come out openly with what one had to say, and whether it was good or bad to disrupt a quiet life of compromise. ‘I just don’t know where Ibsen’s sympathies lie in this work,’ said Yanagita. ‘It does seem at this point as if he was aware of something very wrong.’ We also argued heatedly about the new ideology. Everyone gave their own personal views, and it was very informative as we had all studied various magazines and critical works and often came up with very useful material. Osanai was particularly informed on drama and brought lots of photographs of Western actors playing roles from Ibsen’s works.6 Masamune Hakuchō remembers Osanai’s growing interest in Chekhov. At one meeting of the Ibsen Society, Osanai talked of a brief Chekhov tale that he had just finished reading, ‘The Oyster.’ In the story a young man is treated to a feast of oysters; as he has never been given them before, he does not know how to eat them and so consumes them shells and all. Such was an outline of the piece. We all found a fresh feeling here, and we listened carefully to Osanai, who was a great raconteur. Then began our discussions of The Cherry Orchard. It seemed that, in the final scene, when the sound of the falling cherry trees can be heard as the curtain falls, there was for us a kind of reverberation that seemed somehow in tune with the Asian sensibility.7 Osanai, in an essay on Chekhov that he wrote at approximately the same time, entitled ‘Chekhov’s Medical Examination,’ describes the qualities he himself found so powerful in the work of the Russian author. In his examinations, Chekhov recounts the sort of things that most people take no notice of. Thus, at first, anyone who reads him is likely to think, ‘Could there be anything more foolish than this?’ Yet if you pay careful attention to what he has to say, you will slowly be drawn in, so that in the end you cannot fail to take him seriously. And if in that serious manner you listen carefully to the results of his medical examination, you will be frightened indeed, for he is so outspoken in terms of our own illnesses. You will not find yourself cured. Indeed, you may feel as though to die would be the best

192

CHEKHOV AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN JAPANESE THEATER, 1910–1928

solution. From humor to solemnity, from solemnity to pathos, from pathos to a profound weariness with the world—such changes make up the usual atmosphere in his medical cabinet. According to his explanations, humanity is sick. And we are patients who are difficult to cure. Indeed, human beings all over the world are patients who cannot be cured. Yet does that mean that the author is the only doctor who can effect a cure? Not at all; after all, he is one of the patients himself. He is the first to say so.8 Fired with enthusiasm for the Western theatre, Osanai joined with his friend the kabuki actor Ichikawa Sadanji II to form the Jiyū Gekijō (Free Theatre), a company that began performances two years later, in November 1909.9 The first production was of an Ibsen play in a translation by Mori Ōgai, John Gabriel Borkman. The second production of the troupe, in May 1910, involved the staging of three short plays, an original piece by Mori Ōgai entitled Ikutagawa (The Ikuta River), the Frank Wedekind play Der Kammernsänger (translated into English as The Heart of a Tenor), and Chekhov’s Proposal of Marriage, in Osanai’s translation. In 1912 Osanai decided to postpone further stage productions in order to travel to Europe and Russia to observe modern theatre presentations at first hand. This second phase of his developing interests in the modern theatre took him, among other places, to Moscow, where his attachment to the Moscow Art Theatre in general and the work of Chekhov in particular grew more powerful. The actress Higashiyama Chieko (1890–1980), later to star in several Chekhov productions for Osanai, was then a housewife living in Moscow with her diplomat husband. In an interview conducted much later in her life, she told of the extraordinary energy that Osanai showed during his visit to Russia. We received a call from the consul general’s saying that Osanai was in Moscow and that we should come to dinner…. Osanai told me [at that dinner] that he had come to study the work of the Moscow Art Theatre. I knew very little about all this at the time., but my husband had heard of the work of Osanai and Sadanji in Tokyo. While in Moscow, Osanai saw virtually none of the Japanese living there; he spent every day at the theatre. As the company performed in repertory, there was a different play to see each night, as well as matinees on Sundays. Osanai was permitted to observe the rehearsals, from which he learned a great deal. He didn’t know much about the Russian language, but he did know German, so he was able to make himself understood. He was invited to a year-end party at the home of Stanislavsky. Osanai told us that all the company was assembled there and that although he was a foreigner, he was treated just as nicely as though he had been part of the company. He was absolutely thrilled…. During the two weeks that he spent in Moscow, Osanai took detailed notes on all the performances that he saw. Then he was off to Berlin.10 Osanai returned to Moscow on the way back to Tokyo after visiting Scandinavia, Germany, France, and England; on that later occasion he stayed with Higashiyama and her husband, and the three quickly became good friends. In Paris, Osanai met the distinguished novelist Shimazaki Tōson, who was living there. Tōson’s diary records that Osanai’s energies never flagged. Osanai finally arrived in Paris much later than scheduled, full of various stories about his trip, and especially about the Moscow Art Theatre and the other theatres to which his visits had taken him. His suitcases were stuffed with wigs for women and old men, which he had bought in London. When I

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

193

accompanied him to the Paris Opera, he regaled me with stories of how he saw Chekhov’s widow act on the stage and how impressed he had been with the Moscow Art Theatre.11 Osanai spent the next several years conducting a variety of theatrical experiments, but it is clear that he was thinking about developing a theatre company along the lines of the Moscow model. Finally, in 1924, Osanai opened his technically well-equipped Tsukiji Little Theatre, which during its short span of life established a model for the modern theatre in Japan and, in Osanai’s words, served as a ‘laboratory’ to provide training for a whole generation of actors, directors, scenic designers, and others.12 In this epoch-making effort, Chekhov’s work and spirit loomed large; indeed, in Osanai’s view, it was from Chekhov and other Russians that his performers and his audiences alike could learn the true nature of the modern theatre. Most of the important theatrical works of Chekhov were presented at the Tsukiji theatre, with the apparent exception of Ivanov and The Seagull. The productions are listed here: 1924 1925

1926 1927

Swan Song, translated by Asari Tsuruo; revived in 1925 The Bear, translated by Yonekawa Masao; revived in 1927 The Cherry Orchard, translated by Yonekawa, with an extended run; revived in 1929 A Proposal of Marriage, translated by Osanai The Three Sisters, translated by Yonekawa Uncle Vanya, translated by Yonekawa; revived in 1928 Smoking Is Bad for You, translated by Kumazawa Mataroku A Tragic Role, translated by Kumazawa The Anniversary, translated by Kumazawa13

All of these plays were popular, but none more so than The Cherry Orchard, indeed, said Higashiyama Chieko in the interview, her precise memories about the play were confused because she had seen it staged in Japan so many times and acted the role of Madame Ranyevskaia so often. Chekhov was by now becoming satisfactorily domesticated on the Japanese stage. His rhythms of speech and the bittersweet observations of his characters had become a comprehensible code for the expression of a modern Japanese psychology. An important question remains, however: Why did the generation of Osanai and the next generation feel such an affinity with the mental and spiritual world of Chekhov? He was world famous and represented something fresh and new on the Japanese intellectual scene, but his work had a deeper appeal. Again, The Cherry Orchard provides convenient access to the issues involved. Osanai himself, in his original mounting of the piece in 1925, wanted to represent the play ‘authentically’—to use his word. He was convinced that the play should not seem Japanese in any way. For him, correct outer appearances were all important. He describes in one essay his own understanding of the Moscow Art Theatre production. Stanislavsky begins by creating an atmosphere that surrounds the characters in the drama; then he takes hold of the actors and attempts to call forth from them each individual creative illusion. Such is the only personal path that he found useful. He tried every sort of mise-en-scène, from the singing of birds to the howling of a dog; indeed, he used so many sound effects in his staging that Chekhov evidently lodged a protest, even though he himself was fond of such things.

194

CHEKHOV AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN JAPANESE THEATER, 1910–1928

Osanai set out to use the basic principles laid down by the great Russian director: ‘Thus I first created an atmosphere for this production using in virtually every particular the forms adapted by the Moscow Art Theatre. Why is this? Because, at this time, I cannot find a more coherent method with which to mount this play on the stage.’ But he found himself adapting Stanislavsky’s principles to his own particular situation. First, create the atmosphere. Indeed, I set out to do this when directing the play. But I did not use what I learned from Stanislavsky; rather, I did so in terms that I had conceived myself. In directing the play, my first thought was that however short a speech given on the stage might be, nothing whatsoever should be imposed on the actor from the outside. The lines spoken in the production of the play must be created individually and spontaneously by actors who have completely immersed themselves in the characters they play. Thus, in the cadences of each word and sentence, in the ordering of each gesture and movement, nothing whatsoever that is carried out has no meaning in and of itself.14 When reviving the play in 1929, just before the end of his life, Osanai looked back on his mistakes in the first production, which came about, he thought, because the performers remained too Japanese in their psychological responses. I must say that in both the original production and in the revival that I prepared for the Tsukiji Little Theatre, I was dissatisfied with the outer appearance of the characters. To tell the truth, my actors found it very difficult to move away from the Japanese conception of a serf’s child. This is not, however, because the actors cannot comprehend the Russian situation. Rather, it is because our research into Chekhov remains insufficient. I stress this point unceasingly.15 Osanai thus began his own effort to domesticate Chekhov with a determination to re-create as faithful a copy as possible within the context of his own civilization. In this, he was unwittingly following a Japanese proclivity that began as early as the Buddhist monk Kūkai’s visit to China early in the ninth century.16 Once the transmission had occurred, once the copy was truly complete, then and only then could useful adaptations be made. These attitudes, established early in the history of Japanese culture, have persisted, recognized or unrecognized, into the modern period. Shimazaki Tōson found himself commenting on the issue while living in Paris before World War I. What is a copy? Here in Paris there are many copies of things made in Asia. Whatever could be collected from all over the world has been brought here and copied to make life richer. Annam, India, Egypt, all these civilizations are copied a great deal. Yet these countries do not themselves have the strength to copy. Indeed, multiplicity is no cause for grief when choosing a model. The source of concern is rather that the strength to copy will be unequal to the task. If the will to copy is not resolute enough, if the copy is indifferent or halfhearted, then the real thing that is being copied can never truly become one’s own.17 By the end of the Taishō period, then, the Chekhovian model had been created, it might be argued, but the process of domestication was not fully achieved for another decade or more. To visualize the trajectory of integration, we must look to later accounts of Chekhov in Japan.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

195

By the end of World War II Japanese affinities with Chekhov had become more fully understood and articulated. The prominent director Senda Koreya (born in 1904), one of the foremost figures in the postwar Japanese theatre, wrote an essay in conjunction with his 1951 production of The Cherry Orchard in which these affinities are clearly expressed. If one were to choose the two most superb playwrights in the history of world theatre, they could only be Shakespeare and Chekhov. They represent crucial turning points in the history of drama. Shakespeare discovered in his dramas that Man=the Individual. This vision then ran its course; it was now Chekhov’s part to express the idea that Man=the Group. In his dramas there are no protagonists. From the beginning his conception has always remained the group. The basic subject of his dramas is society, a universal portrait of the situation within the life of a social collectivity.18 From Senda’s point of view, context and, by extension, a sense of ensemble represented the key points needed to understand the Russian playwright. Senda’s views may have developed out of his own Marxist proclivities; nevertheless, his attitudes lie closer than, say, Stanislavsky’s to a number of assumptions that lie deep in the history of the Japanese theatre: those convictions (so evident in nō and kabuki) that drama can serve as a communal and social rite, a rite that does not consider as necessary for the success of any given drama the delineation of individual personality. From this perspective, Chekhov may well be, in the Japanese context, a more comfortable dramatist than Shakespeare, for in the Russian model, personality and action can appear submerged within a larger context. In his plays, individual performers (as in nō and kabuki) have parts of great interest, but in Chekhov, thought and reverie need not always lead to action. The great postwar dramatist in the modern style, Kinoshita Junji, has written of kabuki that the plays serve the actors because they allow for a certain creative manipulation. In European drama the speeches are usually written with an ample thread of logical psychology running through them. But in kabuki there are a great many leaps of a psychological and logical nature within the speeches. It is the art of the actor that creates a theatre where such leaps can give satisfaction. And any art for which such elements are essential will naturally be filled with the unexplainable and the surprising.19 Chekhov is certainly not kabuki; but the text of a play like The Cherry Orchard, it might be argued, lies closer to the kind of text described by Kinoshita than to any Hamlet or Hernani. Chekhov’s text gives the actor responsibility for filling in the gaps to make the larger context clear, and it was perhaps for that reason that Osanai, committed to a proper transmission of the art, felt that no speeches could be thrown away. Too much work had to be accomplished during every moment of the performance. In a 1969 study, Kotoba-ningen-dorama (Words-Humanity-Drama), the contemporary critic Nakamura Yūjirō observes that Chekhov’s premises for comedy differ altogether from those familiar in the West from the time of the Greeks down to the nineteenth century. For Nakamura, those alternative principles reach their fulfillment in The Cherry Orchard. He sees the play as a model, indeed, a crucial precursor, of ‘antitheatre,’ or theatre of the absurd, begun after the war by such Western dramatists as Beckett and Ionesco and, I might add, in Japan by such central theatrical figures as Abe Kōbō, Betsuyaku Minoru, and Shimizu Kunio, all of whom wrote plays that privilege ritual, abstract language, and social criticism. In the traditional theatre, Nakamura stresses, the existing world is assumed to possess meaning; thus, action and confrontation proceed from dialogue, which itself has significance. Words in this new ‘nonsense theatre’ do not, however, confirm the existence of meaning but rather a void of meaning. These plays are ‘about’ a lack

196

CHEKHOV AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN JAPANESE THEATER, 1910–1928

of meaning. In a play like The Cherry Orchard, whatever the talk of poetic realism, a label often used to define Chekhov’s dramaturgy, the words employed in the various speeches actually have to be understood by the audience to have lost their real sense and significance in the context of modern life and so have become, for the author, comic. A playwright like Beckett, Nakamura insists, learned much from Chekhov, whose work he finds referred to obliquely in Waiting for Godot. In the works of Chekhov and Beckett alike, characters do not talk to each other but past each other. They do not, cannot, listen.20 Such a later Japanese view of Chekhov helps indicate that the centrality of the suggestive has proven a powerful link with so much that is consonant with the deepest layers of Japanese cultural and aesthetic response. In one sense, Nakamura’s view of Chekhov helps describe the function of dialogue in the traditional nō theatre, where action is remembered and little is said on stage to advance the action; reverie and desire, often the desire for salvation of one kind or another, provide the core of the dramatic image pursued in the course of the play. Kabuki audiences often knew the plots of plays before they arrived at the theatre; their pleasure came in seeing how the dramatist caught or changed the social and spiritual atmosphere of an incident and, by extension, how the performer might manifest layers of feeling on the stage. Interestingly enough, Osanai himself may have been coming closer to an understanding of these powerful affinities just at the end of his career. Osanai’s long-time colleague Ichikawa Sadanji had accepted an invitation to tour the Soviet Union with a company of kabuki actors, the first time that this traditional form had been seen in a more or less intact form outside Japan. Osanai himself was back from a 1927 trip to the Soviet Union as a state visitor, having observed the changes in the theatre since the coming of the Soviet government. Although Osanai was not, because of illness, directly involved in Sadanji’s trip, he did help him with some of the arrangements and was mightily pleased with the tremendous success of the visit, which inspired and influenced many Soviet artists, including the film director Sergei Eisenstein.21 Osanai now became interested in using certain elements of the traditional Japanese theatre in his own work, a pattern that was to be repeated, for example, when a contemporary director like Suzuki Tadashi, inspired by a nō performance in Paris, came to a new understanding of the power of the traditional Japanese theatre and went on to use certain traditional techniques in his own avant-garde work.22 After Osanai returned to Japan, he gave a public lecture on the future of the Japanese theatre in which he looked beyond the first phase of affinity, in this case the importation of wholly Western models. Osanai was already planning to produce a modern adaptation of the 1715 play Kokusenya kassen (The Battles of Coxinga) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725), the greatest of the playwrights working in the medium of the puppet theatre (and whose works provided staples for the repertory of kabuki actors as well). Such a scheme represented a whole new phase in Osanai’s thinking, for he had heretofore insisted that his Tsukiji Little Theater be a laboratory for learning the basics of the Western theatre. Some of Osanai’s observations in his lengthy lecture are pertinent here, including his growing conviction that for better or for worse kabuki did somehow best represent the accomplishments of the Japanese theatre up to that time. In that Osanai himself had discouraged Japanese shingeki playwrights by refusing to produce any original Japanese dramas, it is not surprising that no new body of great dramatic literature had yet emerged. Osanai found kabuki old-fashioned. He was happy to acknowledge its beauty of form, but he had considerable reservation about its beauty of content. He was aware that there were elements of social protest against the Tokugawa class system in kabuki and remained surprised at the fascination and empathy of Western audiences who came in contact with the spirit of self-sacrifice revealed in many Japanese dramas. Osanai understood the symbiosis of stage and audience that constituted such a crucial aspect of kabuki’s appeal. One reason why the stylization and dramaturgy of kabuki was no longer effective, Osanai insisted, was that the audience had changed. His remarks on the subject are shrewd and to the point.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

197

Contemporary audiences, especially those who attend the theatre in Tokyo, look at the theatre in a different way than did the enthusiasts of the Tokugawa period; now audiences are far too diverse. Their eyes are no longer trained to appreciate kabuki traditions. Thus they are realists. And as such, they seek a theatre that shows these realities.23 Modern audiences, at least those who wish to find a genuine affinity between their own life and what they see on the stage (a quality possessed by kabuki in its heyday), seek out the kind of drama that they can relate to directly. Osanai had previously held that only a Western model could sustain such connections; now, apparently, he was willing to discover elements in the traditional Japanese theatre that might provide access. The Japanese theatrical arts have been splendid from their beginning onward in terms of the traditions they fostered. The traditions have been enriched by nō, by kabuki, by the bunraku puppet plays; various elements have been joined together, in disharmony and harmony alike, and we must now pick what we can. We will certainly not reject kabuki out of hand. Nor will we be afraid to touch kabuki because it represents some sort of national treasure; rather, we will make use of it, and boldly.24 With remarkable prescience, Osanai envisions a contemporary drama that might encompass elements from both traditional and modem Japanese drama. One artistic task for the Japanese drama of the future will be to continue the traditional work of the kabuki; however, from the point of view of the living theatre, it will be necessary to create a theatrical synthesis of the various performing arts developed within Japanese culture over so many hundreds of years. We must pick from them only what we can make good use of and, combining all of this together, make of the results something new, whatever we may wish to call it. Indeed, it does not matter what name it may be given. We can find a name for it afterward. At the least, we will be able to create a new form of national theatre. We must create a national drama in which we can take pride throughout the world.25 Osanai, perhaps because of his newly strengthened convictions concerning the value of Japanese culture gained by his travels outside Japan, appears ready to look beyond the accepted understanding of the essential differences between traditional and modern drama and to examine the possibilities of bringing back into the modern Japanese theatre certain dramatic, poetic, and formal qualities in the traditional theatre already discovered by such important figures in Western theatre as William Butler Yeats and Paul Claudel and discovered three years later, in 1931, by the Marxist Bertolt Brecht (whose work eventually inspired many left-wing theatrical experiments in Japan). Had Osanai lived longer, his powerful sponsorship of dramatic experiment in Japan might well have produced a prewar version of the kind of synthetic theatre that has developed in Japan only since the 1960s. Osanai’s championship of Chekhov and his understanding, both implicit and explicit, of The Cherry Orchard and other mature works by the Russian dramatist, helped him to pass intuitively through a necessary stage of infatuation with Western models (admittedly of the highest quality). The Chekhovian model helped Osanai toward a deeper understanding of the dynamics and accomplishments of his own culture. Chekhov’s work thus served as a vital hinge between Eastern and Western dramaturgies, permitting the unfamiliar to become familiar because of implicit affinities that were not specifically articulated until forty years or so later after the war. In the end, Osanai did not merely misread Chekhov to make use of him. He

198

CHEKHOV AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN JAPANESE THEATER, 1910–1928

domesticated him by appropriating him, and that appropriation raised Osanai’s creative self-understanding. Before his untimely death in 1928, he began to see the possibilities of synthesis. The trajectory of cultural interchange was, in this instance, a success. NOTES 1. See Hanna Scolnicov, ‘Introduction,’ in Scolnicov and Peter Holland, eds., The Play Out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1. 2. Senuma Kayō (1877–1915) was an unusual and compelling figure. A graduate of the women’s seminary associated with Nikolai Cathedral in Tokyo, she married a promising novelist and became a disciple of Ōzaki Kōyō (1867–1903), one of the most popular writers of fiction in the Meiji period. She visited Russia twice. 3. Peter Berton, Paul F.Langer, and George O.Totten, eds., The Russian Impact on Japanese Literature and Social Thought (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1981), 57. 4. For a summary of Nakano’s observations see Asahi Suehiro, Watakushi no Cheehofu (Tokyo: Shinkyo Shuppansha, 1974), 18–19. 5. Hon’yaku bungaku mokuroku (Tokyo: National Diet Library, 1959). 6. Tayama Katai, Thirty Years in Tokyo, trans. Kenneth G.Henshall (Leiden: Brill, 19878), 228. 7. Mizushima Haruki, Osanai Kaoru to Tsukiji Shōgekijō (Tokyo: Machida Shoten, 1954), 8. The first translation of The Cherry Orchard into Japanese was presumably that of Senuma Kayō, not published until 1913. The group may have used either a German or an English version, but to the best of my knowledge none of the group knew Russian. 8. Osanai Kaoru, ‘Cheehofu no shinsatsu,’ in Osanai Kaoru zenshū (Tokyo: Nozekawa Shoten, 1975), 8:161. 9. The formation of this important company is documented in my Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 27–31. See also Chapter 6. 10. Toita Yasuji, Taidan Nihon shingeki shi (Tokyo: Seiabo, 1961), 141–43. 11. Osanai engekiron zenshū (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1965), 1:502. 12. For the development of the company see my Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre, 42–48; and Brian Powell, ‘Japan’s First Modern Theatre: The Tsukiji Shōgekijō and Its Company,’ Monumenta Nipponica (Spring 1985): 69–85. 13. These data are compiled from Sugai Yukio, Shingeki: Sono butai to rekishi (Tokyo: Kyūryūdō, 1963). 14. Osanai Kaoru, ‘Sakura no en no enshutsusha to shite,’ in Osanai engekiron zenshū, 2:279–80. 15. Osanai, ‘Rosuke ni naru koto,’ in Gekironshū, 2:284. 16. Kūkai’s report on the particular logic of his Chinese abbot and master concerning his charge to transmit the Buddhist scriptures within Japan is one place to see an early version of this pattern. ‘Hasten back to your country, offer these to the court, and spread the teachings throughout your country to increase the happiness of the people …your task is to transmit [the teachings] to Japan.’ Donald Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature (N.Y.: Grove Press, 1955), 63–66. 17. Tōsen zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1967), 8:399. 18. Senda Koreya, Senda Koreya engekiron shū (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1980), 2:162. 19. Shimamura Masao, Shingeki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1956), 24–25. 20. Nakamura Yūjirō, Kotoba-ningen-dorama (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1969), 134–42. 21. For some of Eisenstein’s reactions to kabuki and its influence on his own work in the cinema see E.T.Kirby, ed., Total Theatre, An Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1969), 178–87. 22. Suzuki’s encounter with the nō in Paris makes fascinating reading. For his own account see Suzuki Tadashi, The Way of Acting (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1986), 69–72. 23. See Osanai, ‘Nihon engeki no shōrai,’ in Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shōbō, 1956), 17:131. 24. Ibid., 136. 25. Ibid., 137.

First published in Kyoto Conference on Japanese Studies 1994, Tokyo and Kyoto, the International Research Center for Japanese Studies and the Japan Foundation, 1997, Vol. II, pp. 284–293

16 Shakespeare Meets the Buddha: Tsubouchi Shōyō, Osanai Kaoru and The Hermit

THE TRAJECTORIES of significant encounters between cultures create their own dimensions in time and space. The means by which practical knowledge is transmitted, or imposed, quite often speaks to relationships of nationhood and political power. In the case of the arts, however, the logics of attraction, adaption, and rejection, are more complex. In that regard, there are certain trenchant similarities between Japan and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In both countries, artists felt themselves on the periphery of the creative forces then centered in Europe. Both attempted to select, adapt, and adopt, European models for domestic use. The range of appropriations, from the style of French Impressionism in painting to Ibsenesque models in drama and Brahmsian orchestration in music, served both cultures well as strategies to develop forms of high culture considered to be sufficiently authentic by their indigenous audiences. Such absorption and amalgamation occurs in disparate stages, until at last the foreign source appears domesticated. In the United States, this closure was generally accomplished by the early decades of this century, when, for example, a painter like Marsden Hartley had absorbed his European influences and reached a level of personal creativity, or a composer like Howard Hanson began writing works of distinction which incorporated European musical styles and techniques without being subsumed by them. And Ibsen, it might be said, begot Eugene O’Neill. But he was his own man. In the cases of Japan, however, the length of time needed for this trajectory was longer, since the art forms chosen for adoption involved differed so substantially from the earlier traditions that a palpable gap in both technical skills and public understanding had to be closed, or at least satisfactorily bridged. Such was not an easy task. Some critics have suggested that a satisfactory closure was not obtained until after the end of the Pacific War in the early 1950s. Nevertheless, the history of these experiments can certainly be judged successful; modern Japan, in terms of its high culture at least, has long been at ease with itself. In following the path of these various trajectories in Japan, however, it is also clear that some were more quickly accomplished than others. The links between European and Japanese fiction, for example, were relatively quickly made, so that even before the turn of the century psychologically-oriented fiction of high quality was already written by a writer such as Mori Ōgai, and his younger colleague Natsume Sōseki was to follow immediately after. Western-style painting, because of the need for training in a foreign medium took longer; still, Kuroda Seiki, fresh from his studies in Paris, was showing his version of French academic Impressionism in Japan before 1895. In the case of music and theatre, however, the process of comprehension and assimilation took much longer. For in these arts, it is not merely a question of writing a drama or a string quartet. There must be performers capable of realizing these works for the public: Thus,

200

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

these two forms of Europeanized culture, however much audiences may have been prepared to appreciate them, were understandably the slowest to develop. In this present essay, I would like to examine that period in late Taishō and early Shōwa when a modern Japanese theatre was still in the process of formation, of creation. In this undertaking, two central personalities, Tsubouchi Shōyō and Osanai Kaoru, command our attention. Early in the century, they began by taking opposing points of view concerning the best way to develop an authentic modern theatre for Japan. Yet by 1926. the two were prepared to work together in order to create a production that was to be at once modern and Japanese. This collaboration, in many ways, represented the beginning of a new level of accomplishment. And if the ultimate significance of this partnership only seems crucial through hindsight, the importance of their working together was not lost on the consciousness of the two artists concerned. Both were remarkable men, and whatever the social and cultural forces involved during the confusions of the decade that preceded this collaboration, full cognizance must be taken of their own dedication and skill. The first, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), has be come known to some extent in the West because of his important early theoretical writings on the nature of literature and his prodigious translations of the complete works of Shakespeare, which are still held up as models, even if now rather old-fashioned in style, of literary and rhetorical excellence. Shōyō’s contributions as a writer of fiction and his accomplishments as a dramatist and a scholar of comparative theatre, however, are less well-appreciated abroad, possibly because none of this work has been translated. His erudition, wide capabilities, and common sense, however, did much to make Western-style spoken drama in Japanese a possibility during the first decades of this century. The second of these men, Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) was a generation younger. During his youth, the possibilities of exposure to contemporary European intellectual movements was considerably greater than when Shōyō was a young man; Osanai, who took himself very seriously, was determined to establish in Tokyo the same kind of theatre, with the same kinds of repertory—Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov—that already existed in other important capitals around the world. While Shōyō worked slowly, and with students and amateurs, in order to feel his way towards a suitable means to present spoken drama on the stage, Osanai, impatient and impetuous, issued his manifestos and opened his famous Free Theatre (modeled after Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris) in 1909, using professional performers. In one sense it was a rash undertaking, but many who loved the theatre said that Osanai’s opening production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, translated into Japanese by Mori Ōgai, in November of 1909 represented one of the great cultural events of the entire Meiji period. At this period in their lives, the two had little if anything to do with each other in any professional way, for they had chosen opposite strategies for creating an authentic contemporary Japanese theatre. Osanai was the radical intellectual; Shōyō seemingly the careful scholar. Thus it is true that the production in 1926 by Osanai’s new company, the Tsukiji Shōgekijo (Tsukiji Little Theatre), founded two years before in 1924, of Shōyō’s play En no Gyōja (The Hermit), first published in 1916, but as yet unstaged, represented the next crucial event in the creation of a modern and authentically Japanese theatre. It was this effort that brought together in a working relationship these two figures who, in one way or another, had been working at cross purposes for virtually two decades. Shōyō had formed his own theatre company in 1905, which he called the Bungei Kyōkai (Literary Society). His idea of reforming the modern Japanese theatre, quite different from Osanai’s more intellectual and flamboyant approach, was based on his conviction that the best way to proceed would be to combine elements from the traditional Japanese theatre, and from kabuki in particular, with the kinds of psychological elements Shōyō had discovered in his study of Shakespeare. Indeed, some of Shōyō’s first attempts at writing drama, such as Kiri no hitoha (A Leaf of Polownia), written in 1894–5, were in many ways psychologized kabuki dramas, in which the main performers were given soliloquies and dialogue in

SHAKESPEARE MEETS THE BUDDHA

201

which they could express the kind of inner feelings seldom expressed in kabuki texts. Shōyō knew that the majority of theatre audiences at the turn of the century remained relatively loyal to kabuki, and he felt that reform, not revolution, was the way to proceed. This was very different from Osanai’s insistence on the fact that Chekhov and Ibsen should serve as models for the new dramaturgy. Osanai worked hard to create an environment for an advanced, spoken theatre, and he felt that he had reached a major goal when, in 1924, a year after the Tokyo earthquake (which, incidentally, had destroyed most of the adequate performing spaces in the city), he was able to establish his Tsukiji Little Theatre, at that time the most beautifully equipped stage facility in Japan. In his early experiments, Osanai had used professional male kabuki actors, rather than male and female amateurs as did Shōyō, in his earlier productions. A trip to Europe and Russia in 1912, however, where he saw the work of many of the great theatre companies of the world, including the Moscow Art Theatre, led him to the conviction that Japan still did not possess the performers capable of successfully presenting modern theatre on the stage. Therefore, for him, the Tsukiji Little Theatre was to serve as a training laboratory for actors, directors, designers, and others. In order to learn the rules of Western-style theatre, Osanai decreed that the work of the company should be entirely dedicated to staging Western plays in Japanese translation, for only in this way, he was convinced, could appropriate acting and production techniques be learned. Therefore the Tokyo public was given a strict diet of European avant-garde theatre. In 1926, however, Osanai changed his mind. He decided that it was time for the company to attempt a modern Japanese play. For this event, he chose Shōyō’s The Hermit. Osanai’s sudden homage to his older contemporary, and, to some extent, his former rival, did, as will be clear, show a certain logic. What is more, the production of the play was sufficiently successful to permit a revival a year later, in 1927. A reading of Shōyō’s actual playtext suggests some of the reasons for Osanai’s choice. In fact, Shōyō did bring quite a number of ‘new’ elements, written, as it was, for performance as a spoken play in the context of an emerging modern Japanese theatre. The subject of the text deals with a legend surrounding the quasilegendary saint quite important in the early history of Buddhism in Japan, En no Gyōja (fl. 700). The stage picture presented of this shadowy figure, as conceived by the playwright, is reminiscent of Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest; it is not so surprising, perhaps, that Shōyō published his own translation into Japanese of this Shakespeare work in 1915, the year before he published his first version of The Hermit, and so had worked closely with that text a year before. Along with Shakespearean magic, and perhaps more importantly, elements of the Nietzschean ‘superman’ were layered in as well, no doubt by way of the one European author whom both Osanai and Shōyō consistently admired, Henrik Ibsen. For his part, Osanai went out of his way to choose this play over other more obvious and possibly more glamorous possibilities by such up-and-coming younger playwrights as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Kishida Kunio, and others. In doing so, Osanai was criticized for turning away from the dramatic talents of the new generation, but he insisted on the importance of this particular first choice. Although Osanai never fully justified his convictions in print, the reasons, on the basis of the evidence of the production itself, may well have involved the fact that Osanai, as his views matured and shifted, was in fact beginning to pull back from his extreme position concerning the importance of using the Western theatre as the sole model for developing an authentic modern Japanese theatre. Indeed, it appears that he was beginning to see in the classical traditions of Japan certain techniques which, if properly adapted, might promise to create a certain Japanese authenticity for modern drama. It seems to me therefore, as I will attempt to sketch below, that this production of The Hermit was undertaken to verify for Osanai a certain stage in his rediscovery of his own culture, his own national dramatic heritage.

202

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Others, of course, before and after Osanai, have made the same discovery of the staying powers of their own artistic heritage. The young oil painter Kawabata Ryūshi (1885–1966), on a trip to Boston in 1913, was so astonished at observing the skillful painting techniques visible in one of the great works of classical Japanese painting, the Scroll of the Heiji Wars, in the Boston Museum, that he decided to return to Japan and take up painting in the modern Japanese (Nihonga) style. The great philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889– 1960), not long after writing an important study of Kierkegaard, went on a trip to Nara and Kyoto in an attempt to discover the nature of Japanese culture, from which, as a modern person, he had previously felt only detachment. The results of his voyage of discovery and self-discovery, Koji junrei (Pilgrimages to Ancient Temples), published in 1919, chronicles with great poignancy his learning about his own cultural and spiritual past. And in the postwar period, Suzuki Tadashi, the famous director, has written that it was only when he watched his colleague Kanze Hisao dance in Paris that he came to realize the beauty of the traditional noh theatre. In many ways, Osanai had embarked, possibly because of his own voyage to Europe, on the same quest for self and cultural discovery. In statements made concerning his preparation for this production, Osanai stressed that the play could be ‘new’ and ‘Japanese’ at the same time. In the trajectory of Osanai’s thought The Hermit represented a crucial step which had a value above and beyond the simple text itself. True enough, the play possessed many new elements which owed their existence to European examples. But other aspects of the play derive from older Japanese traditions. Both were of the greatest interest to Osanai. To characterize Shōyō’s play quickly is not a simple matter. Certainly, for a reader in the 1990s, the play seems rhetorically overblown and so far from contemporary sensibilities, be they foreign or Japanese. In its time, however, the play, which pulls together so many disparate elements with real rhythm and drive, did represent both an experiment and a real accomplishment. The narrative threads connecting the various incidents in the drama together were apparently pieced together from various bits and pieces of information concerning En no Gyōja and his period which Shōyō had compiled from various sources, then combined together. Shōyō was careful to term the result a ‘dramatic legend,’ rather than a play. As translation of the play is not available in English,1 a summary of the chief events which take place will facilitate the comments that follow. Shōyō revised the text on several occasions before Osanai chose it for production. The now ‘standard’ version, chosen for the production, is in three acts. There are basically two sets of characters. The first group ostensibly represents the virtuous and heroic, and includes the Hermit himself, in his fifties, his two attendants Zenki and his wife Genki, his mother, and the problematic character of Hitotaru, in his late twenties, who identifies himself as the Hermit’s main disciple. The Hermit’s enemies, who form the second group, consist of the mysterious figure Hitokotonushi, half-man, halfbull, in his thirties, and his mother, the evil goddess Katsuragi. The play is set in the valley near Mt. Katsuragi in the ancient province of Yamato, not far from presentday Nara. It was there, that according to certain legends that Shōyō unearthed, En no Gyōja, through his mystic powers, had been able to cause the demons who opposed him to build a bridge of rock in order to link two inaccessible areas deep in the mountains. In Act I, we learn that the Hermit, by his subjugation of Hitokotonushi, has made the countryside liveable for the peasants who abide there. En no Gyōja has weakened his adversary and has confined him in this valley. En has temporarily left the territory, however, and Hitokotonushi’s mother, by feeding him live fetuses for their blood, is managing to bring back her son’s strength. We next learn that the Hermit’s disciple Hitotaru has fallen into a nearby river; he is brought on stage in a palanquin. The farming family who lives there, loyal to the Hermit and his disciple, promise to make every attempt to heal him. It turns out, however, when the details of his adventure become clear, that the disciple

SHAKESPEARE MEETS THE BUDDHA

203

has brought these dangers on himself. Disregarding the orders of the Hermit, he entered the forbidden valley, thinking that he had developed sufficient powers to ‘control nature itself.’ There he confronted the monster, and, in fleeing, had fallen. Now, he believes himself cursed. Storms break out as Act I concludes. In Act II, the evil goddess Katsuragi herself appears. She has learned that Hitotaru is acting as if possessed and has a high fever. The villagers and farmers, however, appreciate the sermons he has been giving and believe that he has the ability to eventually replace the Hermit when, eventually, he will leave for good. Now the son of Katsuragi, the monster Hitokotonushi himself appears. He makes clear his anger at having been subjugated to a mere mortal man, and an old one at that. He tells his mother that rather than remaining in this state of subjugation, he would prefer to die; yet, since he is no mere human being, he does not have the ability to do away with himself. Above all, he says, he wishes ‘liberty from my state of being.’ His mother replies with a similarly operatic speech, railing at human beings, those ‘insects of the globe’ who have the pretension to attempt to pacify the awesome forces of nature for their own mundane purposes. It is not her son but the Hermit who must die, she decides. In Act III, a number of these themes—the force of nature, the role of men in a larger world, the way in which nature and natural forces are personalized, the natural order of beings, andso forth—are brought into sharp and dramatic focus. En no Gyōja has now returned to the valley. Unfortunate rumors have been spread about him: he is accused of using evil incantations, and he is said to be working against the benevolence of the Emperor and the Imperial Family himself. The first of several climactic scenes follows. As the Hermit meditates, Hitotaru pleads for his master’s forgiveness. He tells En no Gyōja that he himself has had a vision, in which he has learned the presence of another doctrine for humanity, one less austere than Gyōja’s. It is one in which mankind can without discomfort combine both their animal and spiritual natures. Such should be the ‘easiest way’ in troubled times. Indeed, Hitotaru insists, ‘the animal nature can be taken as the basis for the divine.’ Gyōja rejects such heresy in a forthright manner. Zenki, the Hermit’s faithful servant, how arrives to tell his master that Katsuragi, the evil goddess, has apparently appeared in the valley herself. She will stand as the temptress for En no Gyōja. Before this encounter can take place, however, Hitotaru himself must face his own temptation, in the form of a girl from the village who has followed him into the mountains. She pleads with him to marry her and to become a farmer like the others. ‘Give up your striving, which can lead nowhere,’ she pleads, for after all, she insists, the hermit is only an old dried-up stick. Suddenly a beautiful and mysterious woman appears. She attempts to seduce the Hermit, telling him that Buddhism represents an evil force, since its doctrines decree that women are inferior and impure. En continues to mediate through her perorations; when he touches her, she recoils. En no Gyōja then makes a series of long, poetic speeches about the need to seek for the inner self, to abandon that self which is related to the world and its vain attachments. Suddenly, the Hermit hurls down the Buddhist image he has been worshipping. Asking the surrounding rocks themselves to transform themselves into protecting deities, he creates a vision of Zao Gongen, that ferocious aspect of Buddha which destroys all evil. A huge storm arises; En no Gyōja vanishes and only clouds remain among the mountains as the final curtain falls. As a drama the text shows a number of provocative aspects. The Hermit, in terms of a literary exercise, could well be studied and reflected upon for a number of reasons. In the first place, Shōyō’s skill in stage diction and poetic sensibilities have created within the parameters of modern spoken Japanese a language of impressive depth and grandeur. In this regard, the fantastic plot seems altogether appropriate when articulated with a vocabulary and rhetoric so suitable to a ‘dramatic legend.’ Secondly, Shōyō’s attempts to

204

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

recast these ancient legends in a fashion that can interest, even move modern Japanese audiences, represents an effective appropriation of traditional culture not unlike that undertaken by such a writer as Watsuji Tetsurō, whose Pilgrimages to Ancient Temples was mentioned above. Finally, the use of Western dramatic materials to aid in the construction of the narrative and the contours of the characters is both obvious and intriguing. Prospero with all his magic certainly appears here, joined by Wagner’s Parsifal in his climactic confrontation scene with the sorceress Kundry. And Nietzsche’s Zarathrustra remains close at hand as well. A number of Japanese critics and commentators have interested themselves as well in the fact that certain events portrayed in the text resemble important difficulties in Shōyō’s own life at the time. In this context, the play is, more than anything else, a disguised autobiography. In 1913, the writer and actor Shimamura Hōgetsu, Shōyō’s chief disciple in his theatre company the Literary Society carried on an astonishing love affair with the leading actress of the troupe, Matsui Sumako. They left Shōyō’s troupe to found one of their own; Shōyō, deeply discouraged, disbanded his troupe and further productions of any plays. Indeed, these painful events, and his sense of distress at being ‘betrayed’ by his chief disciple, marked the end of a whole phase in Shōyō’s long career. When the play was first published three years later in 1916, these parallels between the events of this incident and the central conflict between the Hermit and his disciple Hitotaru were widely remarked on. Shōyō, however, insisted that any such analysis was incorrect. Perhaps, it has later been suggested, if The Hermit has a direct connection to the years in which it was written, and rewritten, by its author, this congruence lies with Shōyō’s sense of the difficulties of maintaining the standards necessary to create ‘high art’ at a time when compromise was everywhere, inevitable. Whatever Shōyō’s ultimate motivations may have been, the fact that he continued to work and rework the text for several years, even with no prospects of a production in view, surely serves to indicate the importance of the work to him at that time. At the time when Osanai announced the choice of this play as his first production of a Japanese drama at the Tsukiji Little Theatre, he felt it necessary to answer to a certain extent the kinds of criticism he was receiving. In three related articles he wrote concerning the production,2 he hints at several reasons. First of all, Osanai evidently found the text eloquent and stageworthy; secondly, he was taken with the way in which the author had recast traditional Japanese cultural and religious themes by means of a contemporary psychological slant. Lastly, the play allowed for striking stage opportunities. Osanai defended his choice by saying that a production of The Hermit could show his audiences that there could be many kinds of real Japanese drama, not just the familiar kabuki. Shōyō’s play, he felt, could allow him to make use of material that concerned Japanese tradition, but in new ways. First of all, [I believe], we must war with these old ‘traditions.’ We must work towards destroying the old forms, so that we can make a new, a free art which truly belongs to us in our time. Such was one of the reasons that I produced only foreign plays during the past two seasons. Here, now, is an example of what I have been standing for: our separation from kabuki. We do not give in to tradition. No dancing, but movement. No singing, but speaking.3 Perhaps, he concludes, he has given too radical a staging to Shōyō’s play, but he considered it a splendid vehicle to exhibit a new vision of Japanese modern theatre. Despite his disclaimers, therefore, The Hermit sent Osanai on his path towards a reconciliation with the Japanese tradition. In 1928, Osanai was invited to the Soviet Union, along with another writer of leftist sympathies, Akita Ujaku (1883–1962) and a scholar of Russian literature and translator of Chekhov, Yonekawa Masao (1891– 1965), as guests of the state, to observe theatrical innovations put in place since the establishment of the

SHAKESPEARE MEETS THE BUDDHA

205

Soviet government a decade earlier. Whatever specific effect that visit may have had upon him, he returned to Tokyo with an explicit desire to use elements from the traditional Japanese theatre in his productions. Soon after his return, Osanai gave a celebrated lecture entitled ‘The Future of the Japanese Theatre.’ He prepared this talk during the time in which he was preparing, of all things, a production for the Tsukiji Little Theatre of Chikamatsu’s classic jōruri drama of 1715, The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusenya kassen), and undertaking even more unusual than his production of The Hermit. The lecture spanned a number of topics. Specifically, in terms of the value of the traditional Japanese theatre. Osanai freely admits that, in one way or the other, kabuki did best represent the accomplishments of the Japanese theatre until his generation’s time. While he saw kabuki as old-fashioned, he admitted to its true beauty of form. He remained convinced, however, that this form was not directly usable for audiences in interwar Japan. From the point of view of contemporary audiences, and especially for those who attend the theatre in Tokyo, they look on their experiences in a different fashion from the kabuki enthusiasts of the Tokugawa period. Now, audiences are too diverse. They no longer possess eyes trained to appreciate the niceties of the kabuki tradition. Thus they are ‘realists.’ And, since they are such, they seek an audience that can show them these realities.4 In other words, audiences have now come to seek out dramas that relate most directly to their own lives. Nevertheless, Osanai admitted, there might indeed be some way to establish a useful synthesis. As concerns the Japanese drama of the future, one artistic task will be to continue on with the traditional work of kabuki. However, from the point of view of the living theatre, it will be necessary to create a theatrical synthesis of our various performing arts that have been developed within Japanese culture for so many hundreds of years. We must pick up from them only what can be made good use of, and, combining all this together, make of the results something new—whatever we may wish to call it. Indeed, it does not matter what name it may be given. We can find a name for it afterwards. At the least, we will be able to create a new form of national theatre. We must create a national drama in which we can take pride.5 Here, then, is a projection of the next step towards synthesis which Osanai was preparing to take. His attempts to refine his strategies for mounting a traditional Japanese play were to be somewhat curtailed, however. Osanai did prepare a fresh script closer to the modern vernacular for his actors, but he was not able to direct the production. When Osanai made this address, he was already suffering from serious illness, and his death less than a year later brought his various important experiments to an end. Still, the shift in Osanai’s attitudes, from a first embrace of Western models to a final, more reasoned and synthetic vision, suggests a trajectory familiar in the case histories of many important Japanese artistic figures in the earlier years of this century. With Osanai’s death, his company broke up into disparate parts, and many of his artists, who were of progressive political sympathies, were forced to stop working. Some were even arrested. It was not until 1949, twenty years later, that successful experiments to combine Japanese themes with a sophisticated use of psychologically-adept dialogue, were carried out by the playwright Kinoshita Junji, who in his 1949 Yūzuru (Evening Crane) and other works achieved a new and striking synthesis involving just the kinds of elements first hinted at by Osanai himself towards the end of his own career.

206

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Japanese modern theatre is quite at home with itself now, and indeed, many elements of Japanese theatre, particularly in the area of the avantgarde, have entered into the patterns of contemporary world theatrical performance. If Shōyō’s and Osanai’s contributions to this process could only be fleeting and partial, they nevertheless represented a crucial step in closing the gap, so strongly felt at his time, between the glamour of the imported model and the reinvention of familiar tradition. NOTES 1. Although there is no English translation, there exits a translation in French, published in 1920 by the Société Littéraire de France. The translation was prepared during a voyage to France by a younger college of Shōyō’s at Waseda University, Takamatsu Yoshio, a professor of comparative literature, who was in Paris to study French literary texts. Takamatsu deeply admired Shōyō’s accomplishments, and wanted to make the text of The Hermit available to his French colleagues. 2. These articles are contained in his Osanai Kaoru engekiron zenshū (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1965), pp. 266–276. 3. See Osanai, ‘En no Gyōja no Daichiya o oete,’ Osanai Kaoru Engekiron zenshū (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1965), p. 271. 4. See Osanai, ‘Nih on engeki no shōrai,’ in Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1956), Vol. 17, p. 131. 5. Ibid., p. 137.

First published in David Skeele (ed.), Pericles: Critical Essays, New York & London, Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000, pp. 339–348

17 The Longest Voyage of All: Shakespeare’s Pericles in Japan

Now THAT JAPANESE productions of major Shakespearean plays, notably by the directors Ninagawa Yukio and Suzuki Tadashi, have been widely seen and well received in such major theatrical centers as London, New York, and Edinburgh, the general public in the West has at last become aware of at least the outlines of the fact that, indeed, there exists a viable tradition of Shakespeare production in Japan. And, given this sustained interest among Japanese audiences, it is perhaps not so surprising that, in fact, a certain number of heretofore underappreciated plays such as Pericles have found stagings, and something of a public, in Japan. The focus of my observations here is on the first representation of Pericles, in October 1976, directed by Anzai Hitoshi, well known in Japan both as a scholar of Shakespeare and as an active figure in the contemporary theater. In some ways, the significance of such a production is perhaps helpful in showing us (who, as native speakers of English, often appear to feel that we have inherited without any crucial cultural slippages the canon of Britain’s greatest playwright) that Shakespeare remains a potent worldwide phenomenon, moving easily beyond the language bamer. By the same token, when Pericles’ frail vessel does manage to reach those Far Eastern shores, such a voyage will inevitably be accompanied by inevitable transformations. It is something of a commonplace these days to say that ‘the past is a foreign country.’ In that case, Pericles in Japan is a foreign object twice removed, both in time and in cultural space. In one regard, an examination of this production may serve in some sense to provide a record of some scattered notes on cross-cultural understandings and opportunities. This much, at least, will become clear in what follows. More remarkably, however, this production had, it seems to me, some real importance for the development of Shakespearean production, and indeed of an understanding of the significance of Shakespearean drama within the context of the continuing Japanese domestication of Shakespeare. In order to explain this particular aspect of the production, some background information may be necessary. Those readers who are already familiar with this terrain are urged to skip through the next few pages, but for those unfamiliar with the earlier phases of the growth of Shakespearean productions on the modern Japanese stage, this brief outline may be of some interest. In the first place, it should be noted that Japan, shortly after the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600 (the period from 1600 to 1868 is therefore usually referred to as the Tokugawa period), cut off ties with virtually all of the rest of the world, remaining in this hennit state (at least in terms of Western theater) until the latter part of the nineteenth century. After the opening of the country in 1868, however, Japanese began to travel again to Europe and the United States after a hiatus of virtually three hundred years. Scholars believe that a delegation of Japanese visitors to the Pope in Rome heard Palestrina sung in 1585; when their descendants could finally return in the 1870s, it was Mozart and Brahms that would first catch their

208

THE LONGEST VOYAGE OF ALL

attention. Much of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and so many other developments crucial to the cultural and artistic construction of the modern European mentality had passed Japan by. Now, there was much, perhaps too much, to grasp, discover, recover. The trajectory of these Japanese visitors to Europe in the late nineteenth century (ranging from diplomats to students, technicians, and politicians) produced a bewildering variety of new enthusiasms in the artistic realm. The two most important, however, were certainly European concert music, especially Mozart and the Romantics, and the works of Shakespeare. Both produced swift and authentic responses among the Japanese. There are doubtless fashionable arguments to be made about cultural imperialism, particularly at this time when political imperialism was an ominous and central fact in East Asian life. In the end, however, I would have to classify these two particular developments as national love affairs. In both cases, however, there lay beyond first enthusiasms a difficult issue that had to be faced. It is one thing to appreciate these two performance arts; it is quite another to find the fortitude, and the resources, to develop within one’s own culture the skills necessary to create indigenous groups capable of playing these scores in a concert hall or acting such texts on the stage. It was not until the 1930s that a generation of competent professional musical and theatrical ensembles could be created and sustained that were genuinely capable of adequately representing such works in performance. And, given the difficulties involved, that is little time indeed. In the most general sense, the early development of Shakespearean productions, from the first experiments at the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s, after the end of the war, involved finding a means to domesticate these texts, so distant in both time and space, so that the Japanese public might understand, and then truly come to truly appreciate them. The first necessary step, of course, was to translate the texts of the Shakespearean canon into Japanese. This prodigious task was first successfully undertaken by one of the most remarkably gifted of modern Japanese writers, critics, teachers, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), who, over the course of several decades, rendered all the plays, including of course Pericles, into Japanese. Although Shōyō himself never left Japan, his prodigious skills both in the English language and in scholarly acumen allowed him to use his natural affinities for the classic Tokugawa period kabuki in order to find the kind of poetic and inflated language needed to locate at least a rough parallel with Shakespearean rhetoric. It is doubtless because of this affinity for the classic Japanese stage that Shōyō’s translations now sound overly complex and oldfashioned. But in the prewar years, that very quality of language helped validate the translated texts for Japanese readers, many of whose allegiances still lay with kabuki. By the turn of the century, Shōyō also began to stage scenes from such works as Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and other plays, experimenting with his translations and using his university students to play the roles. Shōyō’s use of amateurs was virtually required at this early stage, since there were as yet no professional actresses available. As in productions in England during Shakespeare’s own lifetime, female roles in kabuki (the only source of professional performers at the time) were performed by men. Other experiments were conducted early in the century by such gifted men as Osanai Kaoru (1881– 1928), who began the first professional repertory theater in Japan and, by the 1920s, had begun to train and use professional actresses. A friend and sometime colleague of Shōyō, Osanai had a consuming interest in creating a truly contemporary theater in Japan. His dramatic models, like Shōyō’s, were Ibsen, Chekhov, and of course Shakespeare. For both these men, and for many gifted directors and others who followed them, Shakespeare was perceived as the central Western ‘modern’ dramatist; his works were to provide new perspectives for a context in which a truly modern Japanese theater might develop. By the 1930s, much had been accomplished. The war brought a temporary hiatus to these creative activities, but by the 1950s, a truly successful and authentic form of modern Japanese theater had indeed emerged.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

209

Was this perception of Shakespeare as a modem playwright a brilliant error that produced nevertheless culturally useful results? From a Japanese point of view, the tactic was virtually an inevitable one. This is because the canon of Shakespeare, like the dramas of Ibsen and Chekhov, represented in the Japanese view the highest levels of attainment in a spoken theater, in which spoken dialogue might replace and so encapsulate all those lyrical elements of song, music, dance, and mime so important to the art of the classical Japanese theater, the medieval nō, and, more important in this context, Tokugawa-period kabuki. For many Japanese intellectuals at the turn of the century, and indeed up until the coming of the war closed down the theaters in the late 1930s, the theater had now become, and for virtually the first time in Japanese history, a place where not only emotions could be expressed but where the clash of ideas could be presented as well. It is therefore not so surprising that many, although by no means all, of the interwar Japanese playwrights used their words to advance political causes, often leftist ones. Orthodox shingeki, or New Theatre, was therefore looked on by the general public as an intellectual endeavor, tinged with Marxism and usually critical of Japanese traditions. In terms of acting styles and stagecraft, on the other hand, most of the influential shingeki practitioners during the interwar period felt that the best way to create an authentic Japanese modern theater was to strive to internalize acting and vocal techniques by a close and respectful imitation of Western models. Again, it took a generation or more of training before these methods could be internalized, but, by the 1950s, there were a significant number of performers who were completely at home with the requisite techniques needed to present realistic theater on the stage. In the 1960s, the Japanese theater, however, was now to enter a new phase, one that was to involve a rich period of experimentation. Much of this change was brought about through the pressure of politics, in particular because of protests both by students and the general public to the war in Vietnam and the renewal of the security treaty between Japan and the United States. In this volatile context, orthodox shingeki, with its ‘classical’ Marxist methods of analysis, began to lose favor; protest theater productions sprang up in tent theater, coffee shops, and other heretofore unlikely spots. The energies released through such turmoil led to a new search for Dionysian elements that led such men as Suzuki Tadashi and others to incorporate theatrical strategies of performance taken, often seemingly snatched, from the mystical and lyrical elements long a part of traditional Japanese theater. To paraphrase the words of the eminent scholar of postwar Japanese theater, David Goodman, the gods descended again into the world of the theater; long banished by the rational strategies of shingeki, they began to reappear in new and startling guises.1 In this context, it might be said that Shakespeare began to serve two new functions within the compass of modern Japanese theater productions. The first involved productions staged by politically avantgarde directors, who, when the political struggles began to wane at the end of the 1960s, wished to move beyond the specifics of the contemporary Japanese political and cultural scene in order to seek out again the kind of ‘universality’ that first attracted their grandfather’s generation to Shakespeare. Japan’s relationship to the rest of the world had changed drastically, and in some ways tragically, since those first encounters at the end of the nineteenth century. Now, that same relationship, ever more important, needed in some fashion to be examined afresh. The directors Suzuki Tadashi and Ninagawa Yukio, mentioned earlier, began their work in the protest theater of the 1960s; in the 1970s, 1980s, and after, they were both to stage important versions of such plays as Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest, using a combination of modern translations or adaptions and at least some element of Japanese traditional costume. The second function served by productions of Shakespeare during this period involved the work of a burgeoning number of excellent productions presented on a smaller scale, in which actors and directors, who now maintained both an attachment to the original texts and a desire to experiment with a freedom from

210

THE LONGEST VOYAGE OF ALL

the kind of close imitation of Western models that had for so long been a hallmark of traditional shingeki productions. These groups, because of their experimental nature, were conceived to operate within a smaller compass of activity. Less expense pennitted more freedom. This kind of ‘chamber theatre’ therefore became increasingly popular among Japanese theatergoers. Among these experimental groups the troupe En (which might be translated as ‘Circle’), founded in 1976, staged, and continues to stage, a variety of artistically important productions. When the company was formed, the group planned their repertory on the basis of three ideals that they felt it necessary to pursue in the context of Japanese theater at that time. They hoped, first of all, to stage Western classical plays, such as those by Shakespeare, Racine, and others. Second, they planned to mount contemporary Japanese dramas in which spoken dialogue remained central, in particular the works of Betsuyaku Minoru (born 1937), arguably the finest of contemporary Japanese dramatists. Third, they wanted to produce modern Western classics, Ibsen, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Anouilh, and others. In sum, the group’s ideals seem to have constituted a fresh version of the best and most progressive elements found in the earlier pattern of shingeki, in which Japanese and Western dramas could be seen in creative juxtaposition. Thus, Pericles now became a possibility. Chosen by Anzai Hitoshi, it was the both the first production by the En troupe of a Shakespearean play and the first production of the play in Japan. Anzai told me that, although by this point in time he had a considerable background as a Shakespeare scholar, the production represented his initial attempt as a director to mount one of the canon on the stage. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know enough to be afraid.’ The production, coming when it did, appeared at a crucial stage in the development of postwar Japanese theater. The production was a success; yet above and beyond that fact, the representation of this text on the stage coincided with the birth of new possibilities in a growing vision of what might constitute an authentic relationship between contemporary Japanese theater and the theater of the world. Pericles provides an excellent test case, providing, as it does, an opportunity to explore the range of those possibilities, and by extension, of the vitality that even such a hitherto obscure text might play in the culture of our own times. Although I was not able to see the production myself, Anzai’s description of several strategies employed in his staging sheds light on a shift in values, both in terms of interpretation and staging, that this production helped to represent. The first issue was one of translation. In 1967, a Japanese text of Pericles existed in the Tsubouchi Shōyō translation achieved almost fifty years before, in 1927. In that earlier version, the links with kabuki rhetoric seem clear. Anzai retranslated the text himself, using a kind of modern theater language that, although purposefully maintaining a certain archaic quality Anzai felt appropriate to conveying the atmosphere redolent in the text, was smooth and playable to a contemporary audience. Second was the issue of physicality. Many previous productions of Shakespeare by professional shingeki troupes might be roughly characterized as almost ruthlessly text-centered. Anzai still remained true to the text, although a modest amount of cuts were made, but he encouraged his performers to take part in physical improvisation exercises. He attempted thereby to introduce an element of physicality into the production appropriate both to this particular play, which involves so much strenuous physical action, and, Anzai felt, to a proper staging of Shakespeare in general. Third, perhaps most importantly, Anzai wished to take full cognizance of the mythical world within which the play moved. He hoped in this production, he told me, to open up his audiences, until now so used to seeing Shakespeare as a modern playwright, to the archaic elements that in fact provide Pericles with such a remarkable atmosphere. This reverse focus, this seeking out of the mysterious, the unassimilated in

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

211

Shakespeare, marks, as I hope to suggest later, a new stage in the domestication, and a truer assimilation, of Shakespeare in Japan. Finally, allied with this sense of the archaic, Anzai hoped to emphasize the elements of ritual that he found in the text, working toward what he saw as a grand rite of renewal and reconciliation in the final scene of the play. As a director, Anzai sought to discover the appropriate means by which to manifest these ideas and observations in the actual staging of the drama. Many, as he described them, were ingenious and quite appropriate to his purposes. First of all, Anzai set the play on shipboard. A thrust stage became a ship, with its prow pointed toward the back of the stage. The crew and passengers sat along the two sides of the ship, serving as an extension of the audience, and a lantern hung overhead swayed as though the ship were moving through the water. Gower’s story thus becomes a tale told to entertain those on shipboard. Second, Anzai double and triple cast the play, so that one performer played a number of roles. Some of the reasons for this were practical, since the play has an enormous cast of characters, yet other reasons for the choice lay in the fact that, as the same performer appeared and reappeared in different superficial guises, the mythic underpinnings of the play could become increasingly evident to the audience. Finally, Anzai made every effort to shape the scenes so that the grand ritual at the end of the drama would seem not only moving but virtually inevitable. Anzai’s account of the play and his treatment of the text gave me a very different sense of the possibilities inherent in the text. Certainly one key to the success of the production lay in the director’s forthright attempt to take seriously what might be defined as the mythical archetypes that inhabit the world of the play. Certainly, I had learned from my own limited experience in seeing Pericles on the stage, the dangers of minimalizing these elements risked collapsing the central structure. When I saw the 1991 production of Pericles at the Public Theatre in New York, directed by Michael Greif, I found the director’s use of pastiche, in which each scene was played in a different style and with different visual elements (quaint medieval cutouts for the tournament in act 2, Los Angeles-style clothes and sunglasses for the brothel scene in act 4), to be brilliantly effective from moment to moment; yet, in the end, this ‘deconstructed’ strategy was deeply damaging to the cumulative effect of the play. The night in which I saw the performance, many in the audience tittered at the reunion between Pericles (played by Campbell Scott) and his wife Thaisa. Anzai resolutely sought the deeper, unifying archetypes that lie within Shakespeare’s original conception. How was Anzai able to accomplish without undue difficulty the creation on the stage of a sense of a natural relationship between individual actions and the larger purposes of existence that the play proposes to explicate? An important clue to an answer, it seems to me as a foreign observer, lies in the relationship between the play and its Japanese audiences. For it seems to me apparent that a drama such as Pericles shows certain important resonances with traditional Japanese theater and culture, even if they remain merely implicit for contemporary theatergoers. While it is certainly true, as I indicated earlier, that Japanese audiences for modern theater (and so for Shakespeare) are ‘Westernized,’ they remain, culturally and spiritually speaking, less than a century away from these older social, religious, and theatrical conventions that continued to hold sway in the always popular kabuki down to early 1900s and beyond. In many ways, the links that bind contemporary Japanese to these older visions of society have never been fully broken, and it is perhaps simpler for them to enter into the kind of worldview on the basis of which Pericles has been constructed than it may be for a Western audience, for whom indeed even the Renaissance is now a foreign country. The kinds of religious overtones and mythical coincidences that can be found in Pericles may be far from Chekhov and Ibsen, but they are close and comfortable to the entire gamut of classical Japanese drama.

212

THE LONGEST VOYAGE OF ALL

Anzai himself mentioned to me the fact that, in one sense, the voyage of Pericles might be seen as an extended michiyuki, or ‘travel scene.’ This Japanese literary device, which combines such a multitude of religious and artistic elements, has been much employed not only in the theater, where ‘scenes of travel’ are ritualized in the nō and often provide a linking lyrical element between two dramatic acts in a longer kabuki play, such as in Chūshingura but in the great Japanese literary texts as well, from early sequences of thirtyone-syllable waka court poetry to the famous and much-beloved haiku travel diary of Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, published at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Ideas of travel are most often linked to concepts of pilgrimage, either Buddhist or Shintō. Michiyuki scenes often involve transformations and metamorphosis; a character turns from animal to human, layman to priest. Therefore, it seems to me, the voyage of Pericles, in the eyes of even a contemporary Japanese audience, possesses by its very nature the potential for natural development. As I mentioned earlier, the 1960s returned to the Japanese contemporary and avant-garde theater the elements of mystery, religious insight, and the irrational long banished by the supposedly ‘rationality’ of shingeki. And so, it seems to me, while audiences in, say, 1950, might not have been predisposed to appreciate a play like Pericles, those in the latter part of the 1960s had already been prepared to allow themselves to be guided beyond both the rational and the realistic. In that regard, this production of Pericles appeared at exactly the right time. For this ‘despised’ play, surprisingly enough, allowed audiences to feel that Shakespeare was still once again ‘our contemporary.’ In such a context, certain scenes, which often cause difficulty in modem productions in this country, can play with great ease in Japan. Take, for example, the scene in act 3 of Pericles when the saintly physician Cenmon brings back to life and health Thaisa, the wife of Pericles, who has been lost at sea in a floating coffin. In an article by Maggie Kramm, ‘The Hero Nobody Knows,’ published in the June 1992 issue of American Theatre, she quotes the actor Charles Janaz, who played the ‘young Pericles’ in the DATE Minneapolis Guthrie Theatre Lab production, who indicated that in order to ‘manifest’ this scene on stage in such a fashion that might make it palatable to a contemporary American audience, the director decided to dress Cerimon as a sort of mad Dr. Frankenstein. In the Japanese production, no such strategy was necessary. In the extraordinary eleventh-century novel by Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, often compared in its sophistication of language and subtlety of emotional expression to the work of Marcel Proust, one of the most celebrated incidents occurs in one of the later chapters in the last section of the book, in which the lovely young maiden Ukifune, drowned in the river Uji, is found and brought back to life and health by a saintly Buddhist priest. Such a scene as this, which occurs in what can be described as the central work in classical Japanese culture, therefore makes a somewhat similar scene in Shakespeare easy enough for a contemporary Japanese audience to accept, even if they do not consciously ‘remember’ the incident in The Tale of Genji. Ukifune has passed into the storehouse of national cultural memory, and Thaisa, by extension, can comfortably become her spiritual cousin. In conclusion, then, I would like to repeat my earlier observation that Shakespeare continues to be regarded as a modern playwright in Japan. In the first phase of his acceptance, it was his rationality and clear delineation of the power of individual character that attracted audiences; now, on another level, those very archaic elements that sometimes trouble modern audiences in this country can on occasion help, because of similar elements long familiar in the Japanese classical theater tradition now in use again, to make Shakespeare ‘modern’ in still another mode. The resurgence of the significance of these older elements can, in turn, help domesticate his work still further. Of course it continues to be true that what most Japanese find ‘modern’ in the work of Shakespeare is the liberation of the individual. It is thus no wonder that in Tokyo, as doubtless in London, Paris, or New York,

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

213

Hamlet is still the most prized play of all. Whatever the fascinating resemblances between the central works of Shakespeare and those of the kabuki theater, for example, Japanese critical opinion would doubtless hold that Shakespeare is ‘modern’ in that his plays are more unified, and that, indeed, they illustrate how the spiritual state of a Lear or a Macbeth is ‘advanced’ in the course of the drama structure in a fashion less often made explicit in, say, traditional kabuki, where the nature of any one of the characters involved is often (as in Western opera, which, like kabuki employs music, song, and dance) established largely as a given. Contemporary Japanese audiences may be familiar with the traditional concept of michyuki, but they may still be inclined to give pride of place to Shakespeare, in which the trajectories followed by his characters reveal both outward and inward change. For these reasons, and for so many others, the ‘wretched plays’ of Shakespeare, perhaps even more than some of the more ‘modern’ works in the canon, can perhaps come to establish a hold on the Japanese public during this ‘second level’ of domestication. In the particular case of Pericles, it might be argued, the special excitement of the play is that the central thrust of the drama turns a michiyuki into a true pilgrimage, as Pericles seeks, even through despair, for enlightenment, and reconciliation. That resonating theme, for a modern Japanese audience, can in turn lead them, as spectators, toward the realm of the sacred, to the spot where such classical forms as nō have always taken them. Yet the medieval language of the nō is too remote to have a direct effect on most untrained contemporary audiences. A newly minted translation of Pericles, on the other hand, can perform something of the same function with striking freshness. In conclusion, it might be said that Anzai’s 1976 production of Pericles came at exactly the right moment in time, for it helped define the beginnings of a virtual explosion of Shakespearean production in Japan. Similar smaller troupes have now staged every one of Shakespeare’s plays. This rising tide of activity culminated several years ago with the construction of the Tokyo Globe Theatre, where now, on virtually any night of the year, productions of Shakespeare by troupes from Japan, and from all over the world, continue to find willing and demonstrative audiences, anxious to deepen their understanding of a playwright whom they are increasingly happy to claim as their own. NOTES 1. See various entries in his Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s: The Return of the Gods (Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe Inc., 1988).

First published in Stanca Scholz-Cionca & Samuel L.Leiter (eds), Japanese Theatre and the International Stage, Leiden, Brill, 2001, pp. 299–311

18 With a Nod to Chekhov: Strategies of Dream and Memory in the Dramas of Shimizu Kunio

IT APPEARS THAT, at least in the United States, even after virtually a hundred years of relentless attempts by the avant-garde to change the nature of theatrical presentation, realism and the ‘Stanislayski system’ still predominate, and the appeal of Chekhov continues unabated. As I write this essay in 1998, for example, New York has recently seen a production of The Seagull in a translation by Tom Stoppard, Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave presented a highly touted evening of cenes from various Chekhov plays, and a new biography of the playwright by Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov, A Life has been widely reviewed. The videocassette of the 1994 film Vanya on 42nd Street has been issued and the film is already developing a cult following. What may be surprising to Western audiences who do not know the contemporary Japanese theatre, however, is that, from the turn of the century onwards, Chekhov has possessed a similar appeal for Japanese audiences. Since the discovery of his plays by young Japanese intellectuals at that time, a conviction that there was ‘something oriental’ about Chekhov quickly developed, and that sense of a felt affinity has never lessened.1 The Cherry Orchard in particular soon became and long remained a virtual staple of the shingeki (modern theatre) repertory. This situation continued on until, in the 1960s, the eruption of the student protest movement, first against the renewal of the Security Treaty with the United States, then against the Vietnam war, spawned a whole new set of dramatists with their own contemporary and specifically Japanese concerns. In one sense, this was the period in which the modern Japanese spoken drama really came of age. Despite a wide-ranging series of experiments by such important theatre figures as Suzuki Tadashi and Ōta Shōgo, an older appreciation of ‘literary values’ did not vanish altogether from the theatrical scene during those years. Some avant-garde writers and directors turned to kabuki and other classical forms for renewed inspiration; others looked at contemporary writers around the world with whom they felt in sympathy, such as Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. Art is most often made of art, after all, and in every culture and period, young playwrights usually learn from each other, and copy from their masters. Of the panoply of brilliant playwrights whose activities developed in this climate, among them Satoh Makoto, Betsuyaku Minoru, Kara Jūrō, and Terayama Shūji, I have chosen here to discuss the work of Shimizu Kunio because of the particular literary resonance and psychological power I continue to find in his texts. Shimizu (born in 1936) remains a very prolific playwright. His ‘collected works’ in four volumes contain fortythree plays. Some of his works, notably his 1977 drama Gakuya (The Dressing Room),2 have become virtual classics of the postwar theatre. As I will explain in more detail below, Shimizu’s texts are strikingly metatheatrical, since he often uses the metaphor of theatre in order to advance his thematic concerns. And he draws openly on the work of others—Shakespeare, Pushkin, Dylan Thomas, Rilke, the modern Japanese

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

215

poet Miyazawa Kenji, and, most of all, Chekhov, in order to enhance his dramatic strategies. Words thus remain at the core of Shimizu’s art. In this, he shows something in common, for example, with the playwright Betsuyaku Minoru, born in 1937, a year later, although Shimizu is as ‘romantic’ and rhetorically flamboyant as Betsuyaku is austere and Beckett-like. Both, however, tend to place the spoken word and verbal self-expression through dialogue at the center of their respective dramatic concerns. Of the postwar Japanese dramatists using ‘absurdist’ or other ‘advanced’ styles, only Abe Kōbō (1924–1993), Shimizu’s senior by a decade, gives the text such a centrality; and indeed, Shimizu has written that Abe has served both as an example and an influence for him. Shimizu began his career as a left-wing writer, when he found himself caught up in the demonstrations of the late 1950s and 1960s, although he later wrote that he mostly ‘went along’ with his classmates and understood relatively little of the political issues at stake.3 He began writing as an undergraduate; his first play was composed in 1958. Many of his early efforts were staged by student groups, and Ninagawa Yukio, later famous m Japan, Europe, and the United States for his elaborate productions of Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, directed many of these first efforts. In these early plays, Shimizu, when expressing his political beliefs and concerns, approached them seemingly through the use of myth and hyperbole, so that the plays can take on a wider, if more muted relevance. Indeed, it is perhaps this very muted quality that makes them more universal, effective even when removed from their immediate political and cultural context. I would like to focus on three of Shimizu’s most representative plays, two of which are not as yet available in English translation. These works, which span twenty-five years of his career, show, despite their varying length, subject matter, and dramatic structures, a number of surprising continuities. The first is Bokura ga Hijō no Taiga o Kudaru Toki (When We Go Down that Heartless River), hereafter River, which premiered in 1972 and won the prestigious Kishida Drama Prize in the same year. The play is an extended metaphor dealing with the situation surrounding the purges within a faction of the Rengō Sekigun (United Red Army) which caused such turmoil in Japan during these years.4 The second, Hi no yō ni Samishii Ane ga Ite (An Older Sister, Burning like a Flame), hereafter Older Sister, written in 1978, is often considered his most ‘representative’ play and deals with a protagonist forced to confront his past.5 The third, Yume Sarite, Orufe (The Dream Vanishes, Orpheus), hereafter Orpheus, first staged in 1986, represents an ambitious attempt to recreate in theatrical terms a dream-like portrait of the complex, often contradictory personality of Kita Ikki (1884–1937), the ultra-nationalist who was tried and executed for his supposed complicity in the infamous February 1936 right wing military coup d’état. On the surface, the subject matter of these plays appears to be quite different, yet what remains of great interest to the contemporary viewer or reader are those subtle bonds which bind them together. Once those become clear, both the skill with which Shimizu pursues his literary strategies, his obsessions if you will, become increasingly clear and significant. These themes involve, in varying degrees, the following concerns, many of them with a real relevance in many contemporary societies other than Japan. Some of these concerns I hope to outline below in a limited fashion are thematic, some artistic in nature. And, in a number of them, traces of Chekhov’s dramaturgy can be found. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE FAMILY The core of the dramatic tension Shimizu creates in each of these plays can most often be located between siblings and their parents. Husbands, wives, and lovers may find their place in the dramatic scheme, but they are secondary warriors in the battles constantly underway. And however ironic or comic these plays

216

WITH A NOD TO CHEKHOV

may appear to be at one point or another in their dramatic trajectories, these battles invariably end in death, sometimes because of sexual elements most often merely hinted at. In River the central relationship in this long one-act play is a triangular one among three characters, the Older Brother, the Younger Brother, and their Father. Although the play is basically about politics, not sex, certain connections between these two realms of human response are nevertheless suggested. The play is set in a public toilet, used for homosexual liaisons, and the scene in which the brothers dance together is implicitly erotic. In the gripping scene that concludes the drama, the younger brother is killed, then strapped on his brother’s back. In Older Sister, the Actor, driven to mental distraction by the strange powers exerted on him by the woman who identifies herself as his Older Sister, finishes by strangling his wife, after the suggestion is made that a child has been born to brother and sister through an incestuous relationship. Finally, in Orpheus, the Kita Ikki figure is murdered, leaving his beloved sister standing beside his dead body. Again, the theme of incest lurks just below the surface of the text, which reveals in scene after scene a dangerous and ambiguous closeness between siblings. For Shimizu, these family relationships appear to be central, and potentially poisonous, to each of his central characters. THE CITY VS. THE COUNTRY A major motif in Shimizu, this tension is of course a central concern for Chekhov as well: one need only think of the three sisters in the play by that same name and their continual yearning for Moscow. In the Japanese context, however, many writers and playwrights since the beginning of the century have continued to feel a nostalgia for the countryside, which seems for them to represent a ‘purer’ Japan, uncorrupted by the power of politics and the temptations of urban life. Shimizu, like Chekhov, prefers the challenge of the city. For him, the countryside is not so much boring and vapid as quite simply dangerous, filled with the palpable power of the kind of dark interpersonal relationships that, since they cannot be altered, can only be quelled by fleeing from them. The countryside thus becomes a sort of extended metaphor for all that we flee from in our own lives, all that we cannot face. Some of these concerns are hinted at in River, but they are filly developed in the succeeding two plays. I have no particular interest in biographical criticism in and of itself, but it is doubtless worth noting that Shinuzu himself was brought up during the difficult war years in northern Japan, in a poor and relatively remote area of Niigata Prefecture, and that his father was a policeman. It is the psychic and experiential knowledge gained from these experience, Shimizu has hinted, that has provided him with the kind of dark and ingrown images that inhabit so much of his work. THE RELATION BETWEEN THE DEAD AND THE LIVING The most famous example of this relationship is doubtless visible in Gakuya, but such devices are often central to Shimizu’s dramaturgy. Shimizu has written that, although he enjoyed watching performances of the classical Japanese nō theatre, in which ghosts so often appear, he has not consciously borrowed anything from this medieval form. Nevertheless, it is obvious that, just as the characters of those who are dead can ‘inhabit’ a living character in the nō, in Shimizu’s work we often find that within a stage character there lurks the ‘real’ and often quite different character he wishes to portray. Personalities often shift from one character to another in the course of the drama.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

217

In River, for example, at the climax of the play, shortly after the Older Brother has murdered his Younger Brother the poet (an action that represents, surely, the purges within the United Red Army Faction), the spirit of the Younger Brother comes back to haunt him. OLDER BROTHER: (having pushed away his Father, suddenly begins speaking with the voice of the Younger Brother) When was it? I don’t remember very well… I was waiting for someone… And I was so nervous…and you told me that I was a fool and a coward… you remember, don’t you, brother? [he reverts to himself) Yeah, I do remember. I remember, [reverting to the Younger Brother again] And you were so cruel to me then, and I was so nervous that I had to pee in my pants, and you wanted to throw me into the river. Even though you knew that I couldn’t swim…and yet, I wanted to laugh. Force myself to laugh…and do you understand why? Because I didn’t want you to abandon me [he switches back to the Older Brother] Shut up now. I didn’t abandon you. And that’s why we are together now, isn’t it? [returning to the Younger Brother] Now I understand. I understand that you didn’t want to abandon me. But we were waiting for someone, weren’t we?6 This macabre double-identity scene demands an actor of talent. And whether one wishes to take the view that the spirit of the dead Younger Brother, the poet, is ‘inhabiting’ or ‘possessing’ his Older Brother, as in a nō play, or whether the scene should rather be pictured as a kind of dramatic illustration of a growing schizophrenia on the part of the Older Brother, the results are gripping and highly theatrical. In Older Sister, the case of ‘possession’ becomes much more central. The protagonist, an Actor, becomes weary of performing in Shakespeare’s Othello, and takes his wife, at her urging, back to his home village for a first visit since his childhood. As the play progresses, he moves in and out of Shakespeare’s character until, at the conclusion of the play, buffeted about by the strange power which those in the village apparently have over him, he collapses his personal life and his role together, strangling his wife. Others in the village, too, shift their personalities, sometimes their sexes, in order to create for the Actor (and so for the audience) an increasingly blurred image of the village and the Actor’s relationship to a past that he has apparently suppressed, presumably in an attempt to maintain his psychological well-being. In this context, Orpheus the most elaborate of these attempts by Shimizu to create an effective metatheatre, in which acting and role-playing assume a dominant role in the playwright’s dramatic strategy. Indeed, the use of these techniques is so elaborate that the play is perhaps more puzzling than it should be. Certainly when I saw the original production in Tokyo, I found the narrative, which folds back in on itself at several crucial junctures, very hard to follow. Orpheus is set in the northern area of Niigata Prefecture, that region in which both Kita Ikki and the playwright were brought up. Kita Ikki (1883–1937) was throughout his life a complex and mysterious figure, who, according to standard accounts, began as a socialist, then eventually became a somewhat unusual variety of right-wing nationalist. Eventually he was accused (perhaps wrongly) of having been implicated in the infamous attempted coup d’ stat by a faction of young right-wing Army officers in Feb. 2, 1936. The officers, who had hoped to do away with Japan’s modern democracy and restore the country to direct imperial rule, were turned over for trial by the express wish of Emperor Hirohito. Kita Ikki was executed in 1937. Rumors persisted, however, that he had escaped and was living in China or elsewhere. Many of his followers persisted in believing this, and so came to assign him a kind of semi-divine status. Shimizu, with his left-wing proclivities, shows in this play no particular sympathy for Kita Ikki himself, but rather probes the lives of his followers at a time shortly after his death. Shimizu’s main fascination is with the need to play-act on the part of these followers; thus, the rightist dream bears at best only a

218

WITH A NOD TO CHEKHOV

dangerous connection to actual reality. In this regard, this later play has a political edge closer to River (where another political dream has split off from reality) than to Sister, where such themes are muted. The dark dream of the countryside broached in Sister continues here, however, for, in Shimizu’s view, it is just in such a ‘deformed atmosphere’ that a man such as Kita Ikki could develop. Shimizu has conceived Orpheus as a sort of layered dream/flashback. The play begins with a long speech of by son of one of the main characters, Nakahara Motokazu, a policeman and a childhood friend of Kita Ikki. NAKAHARA’S SON: ‘Hidden in the folds of this overcoat, as though they were our own black flag, the village seems concealed as though vanishing in the colors of sunrise…’ These are very romantic words. They must be part of some poetic verse. Actually, these words were written in my father’s notebook, while he was still alive. Of course, he didn’t write them. There’s no mistake there. He just copied the words that someone else had written. My late father used to like to take down memos. Was it because he was a policeman, do you suppose, or because he had once as a youth been devoted to literature? This phrase was written like a memo on the page. And with it, he wrote two other things. One was ‘burning horse.’ And the other was ‘Kita Ikki.’ That’s right, and it certainly is a riddle. I too have the bad habit of writing things down. I have been investigating as thoroughly as possible everything I can about these three phrases, and I have gone around as well to seek out my father’s old friends, in order to dig up some of those old episodes in which he was involved. And as a result, I have been able to piece together a kind of drama, which I plan to show you today.7 The son goes on to explain that, in the 1920s, a beautiful amusement park had been built in the area, but that, in the late 1930s, it burned and was never rebuilt. ‘Only the charred and blackened horses from the carousel now stand exposed to the wind and rain,’ Nakahara’s son tells the audience. Such is the prologue. The son now informs the audience that in the incidents that follow he will play the role of his own father. So the strange layering of memory and dream begins. Kita Ikki himself apparently never actually appears in the play, which begins two years after his death, but his surrogate, Katsuragi Ikki, who runs a school for young people, sometimes behaves as though he were Kita Ikki himself. The emotional center of the play revolves around the ambiguous relationship between Katsuragi and his younger sister Gin. Katsuragi is a womanizer, and Gin attempts to protect him. Yet their own relationship is so lyrical, so close, that there is a suggestion, as in Older Sister, of incest as well. The two have spoken a ‘private language’ they created since their childhood together, and they share the dream of a life of freedom in China and Mongolia, which resembles the area where some of the Kita Ikki’s followers believed he went after escaping execution. Gin, in her late thirties, is a film actress, and this career allows Shimizu to introduce a number of striking meta-theatrical elements into the text. At one point she tells a friend that she can ‘play any part,’ from a society lady to a prostitute, and that she will do anything, play any role, in order to protect her brother. As the narrative progresses, one highly theatrical scene after another is juxtaposed. In them the truth is refracted, not literally, as in the mirrors employed in Older Sister, but in the responses of those who attempt to understand the motivations of this remarkable pair. And although the political motifs are never explicitly stated, Shimizu seems to be aiming at contrasting the romantic, sometimes nihilistic attitudes of the two with the stolid, highly conservative views and feelings of those who live around them. At the end of the play, the burning of the carousel is reenacted, and the conflagration seems to suggest by extension the destruction of older Japanese values that helped lead the country into war. The play closes, as it opened,

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

219

with a speech by the son of Ikki’s friend Nakahara, in which he repeats again the poetic text that he found in his father’s notebooks. In the course of the drama, most of the characters role play and, occasionally, ‘inhabit’ each other’s bodies. As I suggested above, the complications introduced are such that Orpheus remains somewhat opaque in the thrust of its details. Nevertheless, Shimizu has succeeded in a striking attempt to relate the politics of the external political sphere to the inner world of his characters. In the end, Shimizu seems to be asking his audiences to consider the nature of truth. What is truth? What is a lie? Can we even perceive the distinction ourselves, either on a personal or on a political, national level? Orpheus is a very ambitious play indeed. What techniques does Shimizu employ to flesh out these themes? LYRICISM. THE USE OF REPEATED IMAGES Juxtaposing these three plays together, it is striking to observe how certain images appear and disappear. They seem to possess for the audience/reader, and always in different circumstances, a particular ability to engender a certain poetic weight and resonance in the scenes involved. The idea of a ‘public garden,’ for example, where people can come together, as a community, to enjoy their leisure and each other, is first broached in River, in a striking scene where the two brothers, unagining such felicitous circumstances, dance together. Older Sister contains a variant on this image, when the Actor and the Older Sister talk about the joy they felt as children when they could watch the traveling circuses that used to visit northern Japan when they were children. In Orpheus, the stage itself now represents the ruins of just such a pleasure garden. Other images, roses, mirrors, stains on the ceiling, can also be found in all three plays. Each assigns them a different emotional freight, but a sense of continuity remains. LITERARY APPROPRIATION AND THE LYRIC MOMENT Shimizu often employs literary quotation, most often from Western drama and poetry, to extend the power of the scenes he creates. He lards these quotations into his texts, often at crucial moments, in a fashion that seems to suggest his desire to validate the emotions of his characters through these borrowed sources. In River, for example, the Poet quotes his own lines, a device which serves to set the strategy for the use of quotations in the later plays. In Older Sister and Orpheus, there are no writers or poets in the cast of characters. Those who inhabit these dramas must therefore quote others. Older Sister, of course, makes primary use of Shakespeare’s Othello. Dozens of lines are quoted in the course of the role-playing undertaken in the course of the narrative by the Actor and his wife. There are also suggestions of Chekhov and, on one occasion, a striking quotation from a poem by the British poet Dylan Thomas. Orpheus makes use of Pushkin and, most importantly of Chekhov. In any early scene. Gin tells her brother about a small role she played in a recent commercial film. GIN: Come to think of it, I did have some rather pretentious speeches in one film that I was in. For the first time, and in a long time. You probably know that poem by Pushkin about the hangover. Somehow or other it came into the dialogue. The heroine of the film was one of those spinster ladies. I played a classmate of hers from school. She liked to drink and was always more or less inebriated. And there was some sort of lesbian angle too. In one scene, it was evening, and I was supposed to be drunk too, and I recited part of the poem to her.

220

WITH A NOD TO CHEKHOV

The mirth, now dead, that once was madly bubbling, Like fumes of last night’s cups is vaguely troubling; Not so the griefs that to those years belong: Like wine, I find, with age they grow more strong. My path is bleak-before me stretch my morrows: A tossing sea, foreboding toil and sorrows. And yet I do not wish to die, be sure: I want to live-think, suffer, and endure.8 Once cited, lines from this poem are constantly re-quoted in later scenes, serving as a device to map the entire dramatic edifice. Most important is Shimizu’s use of Chekhov, and in particular of his Three Sisters, another play which, as was noted earlier, is set in the country yet concerns the pull of the city. In a flashback scene, set at the time when Gin was still a young girl, she rushes in to announce to her friends that she is ‘in love with Vershinin,’9 echoing the scene in Three Sisters when Masha rushes in to recite the line. In the Chekhov original, Vershinin is a married man, with a neurotic wife, and something of a poet, who often visits the three sisters and reminds them, among other things, of just how pointless and provincial their lives have become. In Shimizu’s scene, Gin goes on to say how she and her brother often recite the dialogue between Masha and Vershinin together, because they admire the Chekhov text so much. Gin then recites some of these lines in a laughing way, and their significance is now absorbed into the fabric of Shimizu’s play in such a fashion that these lines from Chekhov later help shape the trajectory of other highly emotional scenes. If Shimizu’s characters must play-act, then they need the requisite speeches with which to do so. According to my reading of these texts, however, Shimizu has no difficulties in composing eloquent and provocative lines of his own. Rather, he seems to link the emotions and outcries of his characters to universal situations, their complex emotional states to similar ones evoked by other writers at other times. Shimizu, in any case, certainly does not model his characters on those of other writers. Gin is no Masha, and the Wife does not resemble Desdemona. The references seem rather to suggest a potential universality beyond the often idiosyncratic yet authentic individuality of Shimizu’s own characters. Modern Japanese theatre began under the stimulus of Ibsen, Shakespeare, then Chekhov. Shimizu still believes in the power that these great Western dramatists possess. In the case of Chekhov, Shimizu seems to show deep sympathies for the Russian author’s unique combination of gentle humor and a powerful sense of yearning. Still, there are vast differences as well as occasional similarities between Chekhov and Shimizu. Chekhov’s characters often seem listless; they cannot summon the energy and common sense necessary to bring change into their lives. Shimizu’s characters, on the other hand, show considerable vital energy, suffering rather from the weight of those binding shrouds of society within which they feel themselves smothering. Shimizu’s characters do not sink into apathy. They often strike out, yet often without an adequate or objective understanding of the situations in which they find themselves. Shimizu’s main characters thus most often die; Chekhov’s usually remain alive, and keep on waiting, but without apparent hope. In conclusion, one might draw back from the specifics of these three plays by Shimizu in order to ask what they may tell us about the nature and the limitations of the contemporary Japanese theatre. They can certainly reveal to us, first of all, that the art of the word is not yet dead. Shimizu is loquacious, a lyric writer, who weaves his words in a fashion altogether different from the cornucopia of puns and verbal tricks

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

221

found in the texts of his younger contemporary, the popular playwright Noda Hideki, whose work, Shimizu once remarked in an interview, he couldn’t really understand at all. Shimizu’s work certainly shows a tremendous seriousness of social purpose, an ambition which, at least through his generation, constituted one of the major purposes assigned to the modern theatre movement in Japan. Life remains altogether real and earnest for Shimizu. His plays serve to remind us that action must be taken, but with this vision comes his warning that, trapped as we are within our own dreams and obsessions, we may well have trouble in knowing just what it is that we should do for others, or for ourselves. Indeed, we may risk finishing by doing harm to ourselves instead. Altogether, this is a striking message indeed. In various places in his own writings, Shimizu has indicated his admi ration for Chekhov, of course, as well as Pirandello, and Tennessee Williams.10 As an American, I can see in these plays some of Blanche DuBois, living a lie as she does, and, in some of Shimizu ‘s extravagant dramatic constructions, certain homages to a play like Camino Real. Still, whatever his building blocks, Shimizu seems altogether himself, and his plays reveal a resolute sense of the political that is more difficult to discover in Williams. Shimizu can certainly stand on his own. Finally, one might ask if these plays are still effective when taken out of the political and cultural context in which Shimizu created them. It is hard for me to respond personally, since I do happen to know something of that context. Nevertheless, Shimizu’s strong theatrical images and considerable literary flair suggest that these plays might well find an appeal outside of Japan. So far, among postwar Japanese dramas, only certain of Abe Kōbō’s and Mishima Yukio’s plays have found a foreign audience. Shimizu, equally extravagant, and now considerably more relevant, remains another possibility well worth exploring. NOTES 1. For an account of the introduction of Chekhov’s dramas into Japan, see my essay, ‘Chekhov and the Beginnings of Modern Japanese Theatre, 1910–1928,’ in J.Thomas Rimer, ed., A Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese Cultural Encounters 1868–1926 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 80–94. 2. For a translation of The Dressing Room and two other of Shimizu’s plays, plus an excellent introduction to his work, see Robert Rolf and John Gillespie, Alternative Japanese Drama: Ten Plays (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992). 3. There is an excellent account of Shimizu’s life, writing and views on the theatre in Robert Rolf, ‘Out of the Sixties, Shimizu Kunio and Betsuyaku Minoru,’ Journal of the Yokohama National University, Sec. II, No. 35 (October 1988): 77–114. 4. The most balanced account of this incident in English is by Patricia G.Steinhoff, ‘Death by Defeatism and Other Fables: The Social Dynamics of the Rengō Sekigun Purge,’ in Takie Lebra, ed., Japanese Social Organization (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 195–224. 5. My translation of the play, as well as an introduction, can be found in Asian Theatre Journal, 16:1 (Spring 1999): 1–59. 6. See Shimizu Kunio Zen Shigoto 1958–1980 (Complete Works of Shimizu Kunjo 1958–1980) (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1992), Vol. 1, 55. 7. See Shimizu Kunio Zen Shigoto 1981–1991 (Tokyo: Kawade Shōbo, 1992), Vol. 2, 121. 8. See Shigoto 1981–1991, pp. 129–30. The poem by Pushkin, entitled ‘Elegy,’ is translated by Babette Deutsch and is taken from Avrahm Yarmolinsky, The Poems, Prose & Plays of Pushkin, Modern Library (New York: Random House, 1936), 72. 9. Ibid., 152. 10. Tennessee Williams has stated that all of his plays were written for his older sister, who lived in a mental institution and whose spirit haunted the playwright throughout his adult life. An argument might be made that this psychic pattern is reflected in the construction of Older Sister.

Part V Japanese Literature

First published in J.Thomas Rimer, Pilgrimages: Aspects of Japanese Literature and Culture, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988, pp. 3–24

19 Aware on the Seine: Shimazaki T son Reads Bash

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand. Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley, Ozymandias AMERICANS, perhaps better than any others, ought to have a sympathy, and so perhaps an understanding, of the profound attraction that one culture can feel for another. American culture has been molded by the dialectic of our continuing relationship with the development of European civilization, and much of our developing and changing self-image has come from our own sense of a response to the Other, a model to be emulated or discarded but never altogether ignored. We are less aware, perhaps, of the profound relationship that Japanese artists and intellectuals have felt with France. The fascination that the French felt for Japan, particularly for her arts, in the latter part of the nineteenth century has been well documented, but relatively little has been written about the continuing excitement that the French intellectual, social, and artistic model has supplied for Japan since roughly the same period. A list of the important writers and intellectuals from the interwar period will show at once how powerful these affinities were to become: Yokomitsu Riichi the novelist, Nishiwaki Junzaburō the poet, Saeki Yūzō and half a dozen other important artists, Kuki Shūzō the philosopher, and many others spent much of their professional and creative lives trying to place in the

224

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

context of their own evolving sense of Japanese civilization the lessons they felt that they had learned through the French experience. Yet what was the nature of those lessons? Any narrow examination of influences, in any very literal sense of the word, would seem to suggest that at least in the best cases the results of the encounter between these two artistic and intellectual worlds cannot simply be described in terms of copying or imitation. Here too the comparison between the American and the Japanese reactions to Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are worth noting. Many Americans felt, in the manner of a Henry James, that they wanted to add to their personal integrity (and so perhaps to their national identity) a sense of history and culture that their own immediate environment seemed unable to provide. Most Japanese intellectuals, however, went to Europe with at least a nascent sense of the fact that they represented a civilization with its own culture and traditions; they were not going to Europe for culture but as people of culture seeking to know the world. There are many points in the history of these growing cultural connections at which a reader can observe the growth of these attitudes and distinctions among the Japanese who went to France. One of them is certainly to be found in the observations of the novelist Nagai Kafū, whose visit to France from 1907 through 1908 (after a five-year period in the United States) helped form not only his own view of the way in which French and Japanese cultures functioned but, through his writings, helped establish him both as something of an apostle of French culture and as a powerful critic of what he saw to be the shortcomings in the development of his own country. Kafū felt strongly that a traditional sense of wholeness was being eaten away by a lack of self-conscious appreciation for the real virtues of Japanese civilization. Kafū’s attitudes have been well explored in an elegant and eloquent book by Edward Seidensticker, Kafū the Scribbler,1 and so do not need to be repeated here. But the example of Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), a figure perhaps even more revered, and read, in his own day and since than Kafū, can provide another alternative and revealing model of the way in which a perceived natural cultural affinity on the part of one gifted Japanese novelist came to work itself out in the course of an actual visit. Tōson’s trip and his responses as he recorded them came to serve later generations as partial models of what the appropriate Japanese responses might be. Later writers, such as Yokomitsu, quoted Tōson’s writings on France in their own. Tōson’s responses allowed him to become an inadvertent role model, a guide for those who would follow. Tōson, of course, did not create this interest in France any more than did Kafū, and it is not my goal here to trace the development of the attraction from its very beginnings. By the time of Tōson’s generation, it seemed a safe assumption that France was a country of high civilization, a bunmeikoku, and that a visit there would provide a sensitive visitor with a higher and broader sense of the meaning of human experience and Japan’s own place in human history. Looking over what Tdson wrote during and subsequent to his trip concerning his French years suggests a number of means by which his experience can be evaluated. From the vantage point of our present generation, it would seem that the most useful attitudes his writings reveal cluster about three areas: the stance of the artist, the view that an artist should take of his own work, and the meaning that art should have for an artist. To all these concerns Tōson speaks eloquently, often poignantly. Before explicating the general thrust of these attitudes, however, it should be pointed out that Tōson had himself inherited a number of cultural assumptions about the arts and their functioning from the long classical tradition in which he was educated. Tōson’s own writings indicate his debt to these conceptions. Perhaps the best place to find an eloquent summation of these older attitudes is in certain statements made to his students by the great poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694). Bashō’s aesthetic represents in many ways the summation of traditional insights into the functioning of the creative process as it relates to poetic language. Then too,

AWARE ON THE SEINE: SHIMAZAKI TSON READS BASH

225

Tōson himself, as will be clear later, was, like so many of his fellow writers and artists, a great admirer of Bashō, regarding him as the outstanding writer of haiku poetry during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868). Bashō, of course, had many things to say about the nature of art and the artist, but three convictions he expressed are especially evocative in terms of Tōson’s own experience. The first of them has to do with what might be termed a kind of poetic empathy: the artist must seek his inspiration in the life he finds around him, in objects and incidents which he can witness himself and with which he can find some sort of artistic identification. What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing on our everlasting self which is poetry.2 A close observation of nature can allow the kind of intimate identification and spiritual consonance that can give birth to the possibility of a creative act. Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo…. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and yourself are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.3 Combined with this grounding in the specificity of nature is another attitude valued by Bashō, a sort of transcendental yearning for some quality of experience that lies outside the everyday experience of life, a quality that can bring closer a distant and intuited sense of some larger emotional, even philosophical reality. This quality might be described as a kind of longing (akogare in Japanese) on a spiritual level. This sense of yearning pushes the artist toward the impulse to seek something beyond his own immediate and familiar responses to life. This yearning is related in turn to the classical literary virtue of aware, a Japanese term difficult to translate directly but which might be described as a deep sensitivity to the world that can permit the writer to grasp the fundamental power and deep significance of life, felt as a truly personal response to an incident, perhaps a trifling one, from his or her daily life. It was surely a sense of the central need for developing these instincts in himself that led Bashō to become a wanderer. In his Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, based on his travels of 1687 and 1688, Bashō came as close as he was ever to do in writing a paragraph of spiritual autobiography, and his statements are couched in just such terms. In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a windswept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business… yet indeed ever since it began to write poetry it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind or another…the fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry and therefore hangs onto it more or less blindly.4 The poetic vocation thus includes a yearning, one which can easily translate itself into spatial terms, as Bashō explicates so clearly in the famous opening paragraph of his Narrow Road to the Deep North. Days and months are the travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse across the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every

226

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

minute of their lives travelling. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind —filled with a strong desire to wander.5 Seeking for enlightenment beyond the immediate milieu of one’s prior personal experience goes back in turn to such eminent cultural models as the Buddhist poet Saigyō (1118–1190), who abandoned the life of the court for that of the wandering poet-recluse, and he too has his antecedents in such powerful if shadowy literary figures as the priest Nōin (c. 1000). The connections between displacement and enlightenment were established early in Japanese culture and it is therefore not surprising that such models would continue to resonate in the modern period. Seeking another level of experience often provided as well the possibility of using another culture as a point of reference. For Bashō, of course, that point of reference was China. In case after case, Bashō is able to reveal his emotional and artistic individuality through references to Chinese literature, particularly to the poetry of the great T’ang poet Tu Fu, or to the geography of the famous scenes in China that had inspired her writers and poets. Beauty in Japan was often traditionally defined in the shadow of such Chinese standards although Bashō was never able to witness such scenes himself. Indeed, the attitudes of akogare, until the present century, were often based on an unarticulated assumption that the object of adoration would not be experienced, but only imagined. If Bashō remained at home, Tōson lived in another time and it was possible for him to go to France. Unlike many of his compatriots in the field of the arts and literature, however, Tōson made the journey not as a student but as a mature artist; he went less to learn than to observe, less to seek an opening out than to find an escape from a difficult personal emotional situation in which he found himself at home. Tōson left for France in 1913 and remained until 1915, and so witnessed both the richness of the end of the prewar period and the difficulties of France under wartime conditions. However complicated Tōson’s personal life and interior state of mind may have been at the time of his departure, there was no question but that France was a goal that he consciously sought. When asked why he had chosen Paris, he quoted in his writings a statement he had read to the effect that ‘Paris is the capital of the arts, the fountainhead of culture, the center of fashion, and the hub of elegant behavior.’ For him there could be no other choice. Tōson wrote three books about his French experience, and the reader can gain a good grasp of the meaning of France to Tōson by examining and juxtaposing these texts together. They divide up in a most arresting way Tōson’s various concerns. The first of them, Paris dayori (News from Paris), is a series of articles and other communications collected together and published in book form in 1915. These pieces might be considered as representing the intellectual side of Tōson’s visit. Étranger; a reworking of much of this material, published in 1922, puts more of an emphasis on social relationships and personal speculations. Finally Tōson’s novel Shinsei (New Life), published in 1919, represents his artistic treatment of the trip and its emotional implications for him as an artist. These texts must be juxtaposed because in none of them does Tōson explore all three aspects of his response. Indeed, his division of the material is reminiscent of the courtiers in the Heian period who wrote their matter-of-fact diaries in classical Chinese and their more personal, introspective thoughts in the classical form of thirty-one-syllable waka poetry. This psychological split was carried on in the modern period too, for example, in the writing of a novelist like Mori Ōgai, whose diaries written during his stay in Germany chronicle in the driest and most unemotional way most of his encounters, while his fictionalized pieces show with great skill his emotional involvements and spiritual perplexities. Unusual as this split may appear in terms of Western analogues, writers in the Japanese tradition seem comfortable with such division. Indeed, in the case of Yokomitsu Riichi and his visit to France, his novel Ryoshū (The Sadness of Travel), mentioned above, often sinks under the very weight of trying to mix his personal, intellectual, and social concerns.

AWARE ON THE SEINE: SHIMAZAKI TSON READS BASH

227

News from Paris shows to what extent Tōson was able to penetrate into French life. He describes various French and Japanese he was able to meet, discusses the sightseeing possibilities he came to enjoy with his Baedeker’s guide, and chronicles his admiration for such French writers as Flaubert and Maupassant. Like so many tourists before and after, he finds himself frustrated at the problems he encounters in speaking French, and seeks out a tutor to help him learn to communicate. He visits the theatre and the opera, and goes to concerts with his visiting colleague Osanai Kaoru, who has just returned from a visit to Moscow to attend performances at the Moscow Art Theatre. Osanai, several years before, had opened his famous Free Theatre in Tokyo and was the intellectual and artistic force behind the movement for a modern theatre in Japan; Thson was thus conversant with, and sympathetic toward, the best and newest artistic trends in France. That much is clear as well from the conversations he reports with various Japanese painters he knew while in France. Tōson experienced the best of what was happening, and seemed to take genuine pleasure from all he saw and heard. In the course of his artistic and intellectual investigations, Tōson poses and then takes up a number of questions that he felt were of intellectual importance to him and to other Japanese as well. Four of them may be mentioned here. The first concerned the image of Japan that he found prevalent in France, and, by implication, in Europe generally. My friend was told by a Russian colleague that ‘Russia herself was only comprehended in Europe after her arts were understood.’ Japan is only known in the world because of her victory in the RussoJapanese War: such was the sole boast made by so many of our countrymen, and we who come to Europe are still haunted by that ghost. The fact that we too are made of flesh and blood, that we too live, love, and die, is not truly understood here. We have not as yet truly joined our hands together.6 In a series of remarks scattered throughout the volume, Tōson develops his conviction that the best, perhaps the only way to penetrate another culture is through her arts. As a traveller in a foreign land, I have come to realize again and again the supreme value of the arts. I am deeply convinced that if two disparate peoples wish to understand each other, really wish to grasp each other’s point of view, there is no straighter, no surer road than through the arts.7 A third related issue about which Tdson shows concern involves the question of the attitude that Japan should take toward the West in terms of her own development as a civilization. Tōson finds that these questions concern many of the Japanese he meets, and he paraphrases their remarks, often with striking effect. A professor from Tokyo University, for example, tells him: I don’t see how we can be satisfied with the simplistic attitude that Japan at this time need expend her efforts only to surpass European civilization. It is not possible for us to become Europeans. If we are not convinced that Japan has her own unique culture, a culture that is different from that of Europe, then our own authenticity simply vanishes away.8 An artist tells him: The Japanese are too quick to take on and adapt other models. When Chinese culture was introduced into Japan, we tried to hurry to the level of the Chinese; now, in the case of European culture, we rush to attempt the same thing. This seems to represent some sort of national trait. And we often seem

228

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

capable of no more than that. For just these reasons we adopted Chinese characters, so ill suited for our own language, and we haven’t been able to escape them since. Why are we in such a hurry to adopt these other models? Why didn’t we develop a system of writing more appropriate to our own language?9 The artist proposes no answer to his rhetorical question, but Tōson, in a later passage, goes on to suggest a response that is both thoughtful and moving. What is a copy? Here in Paris there are many copies of things that have been made in Asia. Whatever could be collected from all over the world has been brought here, and copied, in order to make life richer and more abundant. Annam, India, Egypt, all these civilizations are copied a great deal. Yet these countries do not have the strength themselves to copy. Indeed, multiplicity is no cause for grief when choosing a model. The source of concern is rather that the strength to copy will be unequal to the task. If that strength is not resolute enough, if the copy is indifferent, or halfhearted, then the real thing that is being copied can never truly become one’s own.10 Here, it would seem, is a first echo in Tōson of Bashō’s conviction, mentioned above, that ‘if the object and yourself are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.’ This attitude, which has served as a literary virtue in traditional Japan, now seems, at least to some of Tōson’s colleagues, to pose a series of difficulties (some at least attributable to the Modernist movement everywhere), but Tōson remains resolute in his conviction that art can only be created through a process of identification and internalization. Finally, Tōson takes great delight in his discovery that the French, when they talk of Impressionism in art and music, are actually in touch with many vital principles that in fact make up the great Japanese traditions. In this sense Tōson reverses the discoveries made two decades or more before by French artists who sensed affinities with Japan through her woodblock prints and other artifacts. Tōson finds in the concert hall that he somehow possesses an immediate and gratifying grasp of the music of Debussy, which still was such a puzzlement to many of his French contemporaries. He comments: Perhaps from early times our artists have been somehow equipped with a powerful ability to create a kind of Impressionism. We have all been born with a taste for such Impressionism… I am certainly not suggesting that there is in fact any connection between the exoticism of contemporary Western music and our own; still, I must say that, as I am listening to Debussy, I somehow feel that I might be listening to one of our own nagauta artists. Therefore, just as some old waka or haiku written long ago may actually still move us, so some ancient classic popular ballad can still entice our spirits. Is there no modern musician who can save Japanese music from mere entertainers, that old music that can convey to us the sights of those who harbored and loved the very laments of the insects in the fall?11 Making the cultural rounds in Paris, Tōson visited many museums and developed a continuing interest in French art, particularly that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His favorite was Cézanne, then coming to be so appreciated in France after a period of neglect, and he shared most of his contemporaries’ attraction to Rodin. The appeal of certain other artists escaped him, and he found himself particularly puzzled over the attraction others felt to Delacroix and Puvis de Chavannes. Tōson travelled all over the city, and his sense of the beauty of his surroundings was conveyed through his appreciative and astute remarks concerning the city planning evident in the arrangement of the Paris streets, and in particular the

AWARE ON THE SEINE: SHIMAZAKI TSON READS BASH

229

skillful use of garden spaces in urban design. Concerning this point he made a number of evocative comparisons between the role of gardens in France and in Japan. In the midst of all this objective observation and appreciation of his surroundings, Tōson allowed a certain unsettling subjectivity to emerge, containing elements that had more to do with his inner state of mind; it was clear that he felt somehow cut off, that his life was shrinking in its potential. He had hoped to seek and find some kind of rebirth in France, and the period was proving an unexpectedly difficult one for him. These concerns are considerably more evident in Étranger, in which he discusses his personal relationships with those he had come to know in Paris, particularly his Japanese friends. Concerning them, and himself, his speculations become considerably more personal than in News from Paris. I realize now that I have passed a year here, I, who came to this far place in order to forget everything. Did I, in fact, come to this land about which I knew nothing in order to separate myself from my own country; or did I come here in order to discover my own country? I can no longer make the distinction. I know I could not have lived one day without Japan.12 Musing on the nature of travel and its psychological significance for the traveller, Tōson reflects on the significance to him of his relatively quiet existence in Paris. Among the travellers I have observed, my colleagues who travel in foreign countries seem to move about a great deal. There seem few indeed who, like me, have not changed their lodgings or who have stayed for a long time in one place. My whole method of travel differs from that of these others; for one reason, I thought to live near an agreeable teacher of French. In the end I wanted to make a trip with the same mental attitude that I have when I travel in my own country. I wished to have no special sensation of travelling in a foreign country.13 Tōson speculates on his family; he is haunted by the reality of separation. The reader of Étranger moves closer to Tōson the man, and the confusion of soul that he openly chronicles is truly touching. A strange vision entered into my dreams. Since coming to France, I have seldom been possessed by such a dream. It was a day in May; the weather seemed uncertain, as though it were slipping back from spring. The cold rain I saw ran off the young leaves sprouting on the platanes. I found myself exhausted from a long trip and had been stretched out since the afternoon on my bed. Suddenly I was walking in the grounds of an ancient temple in the country Within those grounds there was a small building that could be rented out, an arrangement not to be found among the churches in Paris. With a sense of profound surprise I found myself walking on the soil of my own land, and after such a long time; and then I was suddenly surrounded by children. Surprisingly enough they were French children. One pushed his way over to peer closely at my face. Another followed behind me in amazement. Why such a sense of wonder? Because I was walking about in Japanese clothes. Because they had caught a glimpse, for the first time, of a custom that was purely Japanese. When I awoke, I found myself, of course, in a hotel, here in this far-off land. At the end of this voyage of almost three years, such was the dream that I had. Things from my country, things from here in France, seemed inexplicably intermixed, and a feeling of confusion that came over me did not easily depart, even long after I awakened. Somehow, Japan seemed further and further from me.14

230

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

These sorts of emotional states are best and most evocatively described in the novel A New Life, in which they become the focus of the structure of the entire voyage of the protagonist, Kishimoto. The book is an account of faith and renewal, and religious imagery plays an important part in the linguistic strategies of the text. These emotional layers as revealed in Kishimoto’s interior monologues indicate that indeed A New Life is a roman à clef; Tōson is Kishimoto, and his novel reveals, and, as some contemporary critics felt, in unseemly detail, one set of reasons for Tōson’s desire to travel abroad—in order to escape from a sentimental and sexual relationship with his niece, who became pregnant with his child. However close to the events in Tōson’s life the novel may be, it certainly reads to our generation as an authentic work of art, in which the emotional trajectory of travel as loss and renewal is rendered with dignity and intensity. The seriousness of the journey for Kishimoto is suggested early in the book, when he comes to realize that his voyage, begun as an escape, inevitably becomes a journey to an as yet cloudy destination. Kishimoto had made a decision that the trip was unavoidable; but although he had merely thought to remove himself from a difficult situation, he now found himself making a comparison with the religious convert for whom one feels compassion, the one who throws everything away, who ‘abandons the burning house.’15 He soon comes to realize, however, that travel is a crucial part of the process by which one comes to recognize oneself as a stranger, the first of a series of long steps that will lead to self-renewal. Kishimoto realized not only that he was a traveller, but that he was a foreigner as well. He remembered the unconscious naturalness with which he had walked the streets of Tokyo, like a fish from the sea content with his habitat; there, when he saw the rare visitor from another country, he would think to himself, ‘There goes a foreigner.’ Now the situation was reversed. It was not merely his own consciousness that his hair was of a different color, as was the color of his skin, but that the contours of his face were different, that the very irises of his eyes were another shade. Everyone who met him stared at him intently. To be put in such a position of constantly being observed made him nervous each time he ventured out.16 Kishimoto begins to lose his sense of time and his sharp response to the exterior world. ‘Everyone on a trip is involved in suffering,’ he tells himself, and begins, during his wanderings in Paris and later in the countryside around the city, to seek out some means of repentance and renewal. At this stage of his pilgrimage, Kishimoto learns that travel can bring rebirth as well, the ‘new life’ that he has been seeking. His new level of consciousness is created in a central passage that describes his reactions to the beauty of the countryside of France. Kishimoto walked through a field of growing vegetables behind the farm-house. He continued along a narrow path that ran through the middle, looking at the fruit trees planted on both sides. It was a spot, like the pasture, where he usually came for a rest, where he would often pick a peach off a branch to enjoy its taste, where he could walk about with the smell of the earth in his nostrils. The end of October had already arrived. The branches hung low with pale French pears; now, touched with crimson, the ripe fruits, blown by the wind, felt like stones before his feet. One side of the field lay beside a narrow path, and the other side followed along the edge of a kitchen garden that belonged to a neighboring farmhouse, with its red tiled roof. He could hear the farmers walking along in their wooden clogs; on the other side, he heard the sound of a hoe digging in the garden; and all the while he walked, smelling the odors of the freshly ripened fruit. It was as though he could absorb into his body the very life of these ripening trees.

AWARE ON THE SEINE: SHIMAZAKI TSON READS BASH

231

The autumn in the haute Seine brought to life a new, a softer spirit in Kishimoto. His love of life, dead all these many months, suddenly came back to him. And with the birth of this new spirit, it was as though he could suddenly face again all the sin that had been living for so long inside him.17 Kishimoto can now return to Paris, and ultimately to Japan, with a sense of renewal; and what he comes to identify as a movement toward his own salvation now permits him to turn to his niece and attempt to move her along the same trajectory. His moment of truth produces a double movement. A New Life thus chronicles Tōson’s response to his trip on an emotional level. Yet even in such an emotional and introspective work of fiction, Tōson’s artistic responses, and surely on some level certain unconscious aspects of his most personal emotional responses as well, were colored by literary models he had absorbed previously, or assimilated during his visit to France. A look at all three of the books that he wrote identifies these models, and Tōson’s reactions to them, quite clearly. The first of them was specifically French, the story of Abelard and Heloise. Tōson mentions these two doomed twelfth-century lovers again and again, and in A New Life they assume an almost archetypal status. Tōson mentions his reading of the François Villon ‘Ballad of Dead Ladies,’ in the famous translation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and how much he had been moved by the sections on the pair. Where’s Heloise, the learned nun, For whose sake Abeillard, I ween, Lost manhood and put priesthood on? (From Love he won such dule and teen!) And where, I pray you, is the Queen Who willed that Buridan should steer Sewed in a sack’s mouth down the Seine… But where are the snows of yester-year? Tōson transfers to Kishimoto his attraction to the poem and to the legend; in a striking scene, Kishimoto leads a Japanese colleague to the Père Lachaise cemetery to see the graves of the doomed lovers. We finally found ourselves standing before an old pavilion. Inside were the graves of Heloise and Abelard. The statues of the two, in a sleeping position, were resting there. And their names were carved on the mossy stone. When we went closer, it looked like a lovers’ double grave, yet such was not the case. How surprising it was to see both figures, sleeping, laid out with their pillows side by side. One of my friends said, ‘Just what you might expect—France is really the country of love!’ Yet only in a Catholic country might one find such an old-fashioned tomb as this. Many have visited the site. And many men and women have cut their names on the metal fence surrounding the tomb. When it comes to such things, Japan and the West are the same. Everyone, everywhere, would like to resemble those two.18 Later, Kishimoto reflects again on the lovers. He thought of them…sleeping together in the old, blackened tomb. The two served as a symbol of the world of profound rapture. They represented the very shape of the unfathomable trust between man and woman. Kishimoto, unlike his friend, had not laughed at the grave. Thinking of the figures, he said to himself that the story represented a kind of fairy tale. A fairy tale, yes; but no life is as

232

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

barren as life without fairy tales. And when he realized that the others did not share his enthusiasm, he came to the realization that he himself was a traveller who had walked in this same world. And when he understood this, he felt very lonely.19 When Kishimoto returns to Japan, he tells his niece the story of the two lovers. After she hears the story there is a pause, and she responds gravely, in deceptively simple words. ‘I see. Those who are not faithful to death are quickly brought to destruction. Those who can maintain themselves for so long, like those two… that is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?’20 This profound response begins the second cycle of the book, the regeneration and rebirth of the spiritual health of Kishimoto’s niece. The French literary model has proved universal. Tōson’s second literary model is not a Frenchman but a Japanese, and a man less known to Western historians than he might be. Kurimoto Joun (1822–1897), a retainer to the shogun, was in fact in France when the shogunate collapsed and Emperor Meiji took over the reins of power in 1868. Kurimoto wrote down his shrewd and often surprisingly disinterested responses to life in France during his stay in Paris; Tōson, reading these documents in the same city half a century later, was struck by the penetrating intellectual and moral fortitude of his predecessor, and he thus felt a legacy from an older Japan which he perceived could help him maintain his own sense of spiritual mission and his own self-respect. In this sense, Tōson’s attitudes might be said to resemble those of Mori Ōgai, who, as he did his own historical research into certain figures of the late Tokugawa period, notably the doctor Shibue Chūsai, came to forge his own strong psychological links to that earlier time. In both men the power of historical imagination produced a freshening of artistic creativity. Ōgai himself produced a number of historical works dealing with the Tokugawa period, while Tōson went on to write his masterpiece Yoakemae (Before the Dawn), which deals with the coming of the Meiji Restoration to a country official’s family modelled to a great extent on his own. It seems clear that, without the stimulus of the trip to France and without his sense of being both a stranger and a Japanese, Tōson might never have undertaken the composition of his great novel. Tōson’s third literary point of reference, and perhaps his most important one, is more unusual still, for it was the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō. Tōson read a great deal of Bashō during his visit to France, and the spirit of that archetypal wanderer pervades the tonality of the entire voyage. Here are a few random samplings of Tōson’s references to Bashō during Tōson’s years in France. Evening came, evening…when I thought to go into the streets and mix with humanity, coming and going. I stopped and sat down at a cafe. A vision came to me of Bashō, a man who passed his whole life as a vagabond. And I suddenly came to realize that I must pursue the vocation of my trip with all the vigor possible.21 I began my voyage with the works of Bashō in my suitcase. In my rooms here, I have found in reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North a surprising strength and suggestiveness, and not only because of Bashō’s complexity of language. I found I could make a comparison between his experiences and my own. Bashō’s works are imbued with a profound sense of transience; there is in them a sense of dwelling in unreality. And from this atmosphere in turn comes a sadness, and a manifestation of the sense of the devout. Were my feelings of transience, while I lived in Tokyo, manifested to the bustling world in such a way?22

AWARE ON THE SEINE: SHIMAZAKI TSON READS BASH

233

I often went to the window of my room, with my book of Bashō in my hand, and in this spot, cool and breezy in the summer, I would read. The stone buildings of the Porte Royale sent in sudden sensations of heat, and I sensed always that the nights were short. Sitting alone at my window, I murmured again and again that haiku of Bashō: The moon is in the sky Yet it is as though someone were absent— Summer at Suma beach. …In it, I tasted the hardship of living as a traveller, and I felt the profound emptiness contained in that little poem.23 Bashō thus came to serve as the most evocative and personal of the role models adopted by Tōson on his trip, providing him with a path to artistic insight, spiritual comfort, and a glimmer of meaning concerning the process of voyage, of pilgrimage, through which Tōson was moving himself. It was through Bashō that Tōson came to realize that his trip to France held the possibility of spiritual giowth, that a voyage had indeed the potential to become a pilgrimage, psychologically speaking, even if the setting were artistic and secular rather than specifically religious. And indeed, Tōson’s own commitment to a kind of transcendental aesthetic is, transposed, not so distant from those commitments of Bashō, as described at the beginning of this essay. Bashō’s empathy, his seeking of the roots of art in his immediate surroundings, now finds a reflection in Tōson’s casting of A New Life in the form of a personal confession, in which virtually all the text reflects the interior responses to an immediate environment as called up in the memory of the narrator, Kishimoto, and explicated in the first person. Allowing for the differences in personal temperament and style of the two authors, and for the changed literary expectations on the part of readers, there are a number of striking resemblances in the artistic strategies employed by both men in constructing a literary narrative from their own lived experience. Bashō’s own sense of yearning, of akogare, for something beyond the confines of ordinary life and which found its reflection in travel is mirrored in Tōson’s sense of alienation from his own culture and from his own sullied sense of self. The climate of the age in which the two writers lived, of course, was profoundly different. There is little of Bashō’s personal life, in the ordinary social sense, and certainly nothing of his sexual life revealed in his travel diaries; and because of the way in which the poet has constructed his narrative of self-discovery, the questions never arise in a reader’s mind, since Bashō has placed his diaries on a level of poetic discourse where such matters are not considered. In Tōson’s time, however, the genres had become blurred: showing a depth of sincerity now required personal confession in realms that, until the coming of the influences of the Western novel to Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, had never properly been considered the province of high art, but rather of entertainment. There are no immortal souls in Saikaku. Lastly, Bashō’s China has been replaced by Tōson’s France. A reader of Tōson’s books on France, however, will pick up the continuance of a peculiar resemblance in the attitude of the two writers, despite the difference in their personal situations. Bashō, after all, was never able to see China, but could only imagine it; thus his citing of Chinese poetic models and geographical examples combines with his attitudes of yearning for something outside of his own realm of immediate understanding to create a special poignancy. By the twentieth century, however it had become possible to visit the land of one’s dreams, and this is precisely what Tōson did. Yet even during his stay, when he was in physical contact with this land of culture he wished to investigate, he still maintained a yearning for a France that he could not precisely

234

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

locate, a country of the heart that did not yield itself up to mere geography. It is perhaps this quality, more than any other, which makes it possible to suggest that Tōson was on a pilgrimage rather than a tour, and that the end of that pilgrimage was personal renewal and a heightened sense of self. France therefore became the means to an end. The sense of loneliness Tōson felt, and the sense of profound beauty and sadness around him, so akin to that traditional literary virtue of aware, were provided him by the dislocation of his voyage. What he sought was a basis to re-create and to make whole emotions that he had felt before his departure. Victor Turner’s model for a pilgrimage seems to me to be helpful in tracing the path, psychologically speaking, that Tōson followed.24 In Turner’s paradigm the pilgrim leaves the specific social structure with which he is familiar, achieves by various kinds of displacement a ‘liminal experience’ that provides him with a perception of larger truths, then is reintegrated into his society. Specifically, the three conditions that Turner cites as necessary for a genuine spiritual experience would seem to be met by Tōson’s own witness, as expressed in his writings concerning the trip to France. The first of these involves the pilgrim’s own attitude about his role on the trip. A pilgrim sees himself as an actor, performing a rite; and he must feel estranged from his ordinary sense of self. Tōson’s description of Kishimoto’s first morning in France reveals a number of these characteristics in an artless but striking way. At the door of the church a young nun walked close to Kishimoto. She held out what seemed to him, having come all the way from the other side of the globe, a kind of utensil into which contributions might be solicited. She was French. There was a beggar, sitting on the church steps. He too was French. Kishimoto climbed up higher to a stone ledge. In a corner sat an old woman selling rosaries made from wooden beads, white and purple, that would no doubt delight the country girls who came there. And this old woman was French too. Kishimoto entered and looked up at the main ceiling of the building. Above the high stone walls were hung tablets with drawings of ships, given no doubt as offerings, prayers for good fortune by the seamen of the district. He was led by a guide back, further into the interior of the church. He was shown a golden statue of the Virgin Mary, bathed in soft light from the stained glass windows; and he saw the old, worn organ. The guide too was French. Kishimoto suddenly realized that he was totally among strangers.25 The sense of strangeness, of being out of one’s own skin, as it were, is simply but effectively conveyed; and the fact that Kishimoto had his first sense of acting out an unfamiliar scenario in a church helps underline the potential spiritual dimensions of the quest that is to follow. Turner’s second condition for a genuine pilgrimage experience involves a displacement of site; the pilgrim must give up his or her usual surroundings and travel to an unfamiliar spot, most often in the country, away from the distractions and cross-purposes of an urban environment. Kishimoto’s pilgrimage has its early stages in Paris, where he comes to realize the depth of his own distance from Japan, but he achieves a sense of peace and renewal in the countryside, in the passage quoted above, when he walks among the pear trees in the countryside. For Turner, a true pilgrim must experience his sense of a larger purpose to life on an occasion when he can feel the passage of a ‘symbolic time,’ when events seem measured not by the clock but by their importance, a time in which the most seemingly insignificant event can reveal an emotional nuance of signal importance to the pilgrim. It would seem to me that, insofar as a literary text, which must be consciously constructed, can reflect a natural mental state, Tōson’s recreation in Kishimoto of his own rebirth and conversion during his wanderings in the haute Seine as described in the same passage reveals quite well the symbolic weight of every moment, in which the simplest things of nature—the fruit, the roofs

AWARE ON THE SEINE: SHIMAZAKI TSON READS BASH

235

of the houses, the wind—seem to loom as powerful emotional archetypes in his own spiritual landscape, so that walking through them takes on a significance that goes far beyond the time involved. And if, as Turner maintains, the ‘liminal experience’ of the pilgrim allows him to gain a sense of peace with himself, of being one with all in communitas, in a state that, in Turner’s words, ‘releases the pilgrim from role playing and its guilts,’ then Tōson, in his guise as Kishimoto, is accurate in using the word ‘reborn’ to describe his own spiritual state. In this sense, Tōson remains close to Bashō, who maintained that ‘what is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty.’ If Tōson can be placed in the long line of Japanese artistic pilgrims seeking grace and understanding through this particular line of displacement, then, it might be asked in conclusion, to what extent was Tōson exceptional? Or, to put the question in another way, what did the experience of France contribute to his growth as a writer, an artist, a human being? France and French culture certainly did contribute something to the growth of his intellectual and artistic understanding, as his writings indicate. By the same token, however, these same writings make clear that France was a means, not an end, the way by which rebirth and a sense of renewal might be achieved. What is more, France and French culture seemed a uniquely effective environment to foster such a means, not only for Tōson but for dozens of painters, poets, novelists, and intellectuals since before the turn of the century. Why should this be? Some would analyze the importance of France in terms of influences absorbed, the number of books translated, French painters taken on as teachers, and so forth. I would hazard a guess, however, that, if Tōson can serve as a useful model of the French experience for the modern Japanese, as he certainly did, then the narrow question of influences ultimately has comparatively little to do with the insights gained, and the artistic successes achieved, by the best of the Japanese who travelled to Paris and elsewhere. Rather, France, perhaps uniquely among other countries in the world, was able to provide in and of itself the kind of cultural setting, and the kind of cultural assumptions, that could permit the hope of pilgrimage and renewal for these Japanese writers and artists. As the process was one in which an artist searched to find the means to come to terms with himself, French poetry, painting, and ideas might provide the means by which this happened; but more important, it seems to me, was the fact that France provided an environment in which art, the pilgrimage of art, was itself a respected venture. Tōson grew as a writer and a man less because of the intellectual stimulus gained from his exposure to the newest currents in French artistic and intellectual life (although he enjoyed and profited from these exchanges) than from a heightened sense of himself gained from reading a writer like Bashō. Indeed, his accommodation to Western art had considerable limits; yet only the French experience could allow him to compose his novel of rebirth. French society provided three conditions, all of them crucial to Tōson and his contemporaries. Most important of them was a confidence, shared among artists, intelligentsia, and the general educated public, in the importance of the arts; and unlike the self-conscious and sometimes self-serving attitudes toward the arts prevalent in this country, the simple assumption of the centrality of the arts to culture in France, a conviction that needed no justification, went far to making Paris the capital of the arts, attracting not only the Japanese, but Americans, British, Romanians, Spaniards, Indonesians, indeed all who were interested in the arts and wanted to participate in their creation. Allied to this was an implicit democracy; the traditions of the arts, and the possibility of success in mastering them, were open to all. Artists, writers, and composers working in Paris were not alone in their ability to recognize and champion creative work of high merit, whatever its origins; French audiences were able to do the same. Fujita Tsuguji might sell his paintings, Gershwin might study with Ravel, Bakst might produce his superb ballet stage designs, all in Paris. Allied to this as well was a third assumption, that of the avant-garde; Paris was a place to come to renew and then create, not merely to follow older traditions. A painter no longer needed to be steeped in the

236

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

traditions of French art from Poussin to Ingres and Delacroix in order to reach high achievement; a poet might draw on Hugo, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, but the new works could be as different as those of an Aragon or a Rilke. Many Japanese writers, artists, and painters were able to plunge themselves into this heady milieu. Some had difficulties, particularly because they felt they had so much to learn that they could not go beyond the status quo in order to participate in the milieu of an avant-garde that could in turn offer them the possibility of real success in European terms. Some succeeded brilliantly at infusing new ideas into the realm of Japanese arts and ideas. One needs only to think of the philosopher and aesthetician Kuki Shūzō (1888– 1941), who was in Germany, then France from 1922 to 1929, and who returned to Japan to introduce contemporary European philosophy, including an early version of existentialism, and write such influential and still stimulating works as Iki no kōzō (The Structure of the Chic), an extraordinary evocation of the arts of the Tokugawa period. There is as well the example of the poet Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894–1982), a friend of Pound and Eliot, who wrote poetry in French and English, a ‘beggar for Europe’ by his own confession, who returned to Japan to introduce surrealism, compose a superb body of modernist verse, and translate Eliot’s Four Quartets. And a dozen others. The impact of France on the evolution of Japanese artistic and intellectual life between the wars was certainly as powerful as that brought about in the United States by the arrival of so many Europeans escaping the growth of Hitlerism in Germany; one difference might be the fact that Americans tended to receive passively the arrival of the Brechts, Stravinskys, Adornos, and LéviStrausses, while Japanese intellectuals and artists were always willing to go to France, if they could, to actively seek out their mentors. The best of these ‘travellers from an antique land’ succeeded in their own spiritual voyages because, like Shelley’s traveller, they believed that art in the largest sense was the only force beyond decay in their cultural and often personal lives, and because they were intent, like Tōson, on maintaining their own integrity while they learned to interpret and reinterpret what they already understood in terms of something European they had come to admire. That special integrity, of course, bears a close and moving resemblance to makoto, the ancient virtue of sincerity, that has always played such a crucial role in Japanese art, and in Japanese life. The convictions of those travellers were thus reinforced by their French experience, and the best of the work they created pays homage both to their place of origin and those regions through which they journeyed in search of themselves. NOTES 1. Edward Seidensticker, Kafū the Scribbler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965). 2. Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (Baltimore: Penguin Classics, 1966), p. 28. 3. Ibid., p. 33. 4. Ibid., p. 71. 5. Ibid., p. 97. 6. Tōsen zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1967), vol. 6, Paris dayori (News from Paris), p. 246. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 299. 9. Ibid., p. 309. 10. Ibid., p. 399. 11. Ibid., p. 304. 12. Tōson zenshū, vol. 8, Étranger (Stranger), p. 287. 13. Ibid., p. 363. 14. Ibid., p. 429.

AWARE ON THE SEINE: SHIMAZAKI TSON READS BASH

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

237

Shimazaki Tōson, Shinsei (A New Life), 2 vols (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966–1967). Ibid., vol. 1, p. 129. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 205–206. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 186. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 256. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 139. Paris dayori, p. 441. Ibid., p. 448. Étranger, p. 441. The basic explication of Turner’s concepts can be found in his Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). For a helpful explanation of these ideas with particular reference to Japan, see William LaFleur, ‘Points of Departure: Comments on Religious Pilgrimage in Sri Lanka and Japan,’ Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (February 1979): 271–281. 25. Shinsei, vol. 1, p. 121.

First published in J.Thomas Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 200–244

20 The Tale of Genji as a Modern Novel

NOTHING prepares us for a masterpiece. All the other novels so far discussed in this study were created, consciously or unconsciously, under the shade of this great tree, The Tale of Genji. Lady Murasaki’s novel made possible, very early in the long Japanese tradition, a degree of psychological introspection and a concern for aesthetic and, by implication, philosophical truths that set high standards for Japanese narrative. Indeed, some critics have suggested that the long and sophisticated history of Japanese fiction owes its very existence to the presence of a text of this quality, created toward the very beginnings. Traditions, of course, may exist only to be broken; yet even at moments of greatest change in the Japanese cultural and literary scene, Lady Murasaki’s novel reasserts itself. Tsubouchi Shōyō, for example, in his 1885 literary manifesto The Essence of the Novel, cited the values of Genji as consonant with the values of nineteenth-century English literature. The Tale of Genji became a work of world literature when the remarkable complete translation by Arthur Waley first became available in 1935. Edward Seidensticker, Ivan Morris, Earl Miner, and others have pointed out the discrepancies and omissions in Waley’s English text and have warned readers of the problems of translating a book written in Heian Japanese into far more flexible modern English. Nevertheless, Waley’s enormous achievements permit a foreign reader a full and satisfying view of the greatest monument of Japanese letters. And, as a means of showing the significance of that monument, it seems best to discuss it here, toward the end of this book, so that certain literary preoccupations and techniques now familiar to the reader can be reexamined in the context of Lady Murasaki’s masterpiece. Many years ago Donald Keene suggested the affinities between Genji and Marcel Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past. Certainly the affinities exist. Yet it seems unnecessary to praise (or dismiss) Lady Murasaki as an ancient oriental Proust; the discrepancies in time, language, and literary tradition are too great to permit many concrete comparisons. Genji is unique, and any comparisons made must begin from that assumption. The sudden appearance in Hejan Japan of The Tale of Genji seems almost as startling in terms of the history of Japanese literature as it does in terms of world literature. No work of fiction of this quality, or of this appeal to the modern sensibility, existed anywhere else in the world at that time; and nothing very much like it existed in Japan either. On first examination, Genji seems to have sprung from nowhere. A closer examination shows at once, however, that Lady Murasaki’s work had a considerable number of precedents; and, indeed, an examination of those precedents confirms the prodigality of Lady Murasaki’s accomplishments. A Western reader who begins Genji with no background in Japanese literature may not always distinguish which sensibilities are unique to Lady Murasaki and which belong to her tradition.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

239

First of all, much of the literary subject matter of the novel draws on themes known to the author and her original readers, whose responses were thus at least partially anticipated. A wide variety of citations might be provided. In terms of plot, for example, a paradigm for the general events that take place in the last book of Genji is provided in a well-known poem credited to Takahashi Mushimaro (early Nara period) in the Manyōshū, concerning the legend of Unai, mentioned in several poems in that collection. The long poem begins as follows: The Maiden Unai of Ashinoya, From her half-grown eighth year, Until her loose-hung hair was done up, Dwelt in safe seclusion, Unseen by neighbouring folk. Then many wooers gathered round, Eager to see this lovely girl; But two among them, Chinu and Unai, Vied with each other for her smile. They met, grasping their sword-hilts, And with their quivers and bows of spindle-wood Slung from their shoulders; Each swearing in hot rivalry To plunge through flood and fire. Helpless she sought her mother: ‘When I see their deadly strife Because of simple me, How can I marry him I love? I will wait in Yomi, the Nether World.’ So telling of her secret love for one She killed herself in grief.1 In Genji, the young girl Ukifune, raised in seclusion, is pursued by two courtiers, Kaoru and Niou. She too decides to kill herself. Lady Murasaki’s treatment of the theme is infinitely more complex than what is suggested by the simple poem. But a model had been provided her. There are precedents too for the settings often employed by Lady Murasaki. The importance of Suma, the site of Genji’s exile, has been discussed elsewhere. She chose to set the last books of the novel at Uji, a lovely area now a suburb of Kyoto but in the Heian period a remote and wild area. Uji too had certain literary associations by Lady Murasaki’s time. Kakimoto Hitomaro’s poem in the Manyōshū concerning the Uji river suggests some of the thematic concerns Lady Murasaki will later take up in her narrative: The waves lingering about the fish-weir stakes In the Uji, the river of eighty clans of warriors— Whither they are drifting away Who knows?2 Ukifune, attempting to drown herself, drifts away, and, until the end of the novel, few of the other characters in the novel realize what has happened to her. Another well-known poem in the Manyōshū by the

240

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

priest Manzei (early Nara period) is commonly associated with Uji and suggests even more forcefully the themes to be taken up in Lady Murasaki’s novel: To what shall I liken this life? It is like a boat, Which, unmoored at morn, Drops out of sight And leaves no trace behind.3 Uji is thus already a ‘place with a history’ by the Heian period. Lady Murasaki integrates that history with her own concerns to produce the most evocative portions of her long narrative. She is able to take the literary conventions of her day, even those stale from repetition, and breathe new life into them. One of these customs involved the inevitable poetic comparison between the beauties of spring and autumn. Again, the Manyōshū contains the paradigm: When the Emperor Tenji commanded Fujiwara Kamatari, Prime Minister, to judge between the luxuriance of the blossoms on the spring hills and the glory of the tinted leaves on the autumn hills, Princess Nukada decided the question with this poem. When loosened from the winter’s bonds, The spring appears, The birds that were silent Come out and sing, The flowers that were prisoned Come out and bloom; But the hills are so rank with trees We cannot seek the flowers, And the flowers are so tangled with weeds We cannot take them in our hands. But when on the autumn hill-side We see the foliage, We prize the yellow leaves. Taking them in our hands, We sigh over the green ones, Leaving them on the branches; Ah, that is my only regret— For me, the autumn hills!4 Such ‘judgments’ or ‘contests’ were part of the Heian social scene, and poets vied with each other in writing evocative comparisons of the two seasons. Often the results were merely formal or, worse, hackneyed. Lady Murasaki, however, has Genji, speaking to a consort of the Emperor, express his feelings on the subject in such a fresh and thoughtful way that the whole subject becomes possible again: ‘And when all these weighty matters are off my hands,’ said Genji at last, ‘I hope I shall have a little time left for things which I really enjoy— flowers, autumn leaves, the sky, all those day-today

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

241

changes and wonders that a single year brings forth; that is what I look forward to. Forests of flowering trees in spring, the open country in autumn… Which do you prefer? It is of course useless to argue on such a subject, as has so often been done. It is a question of temperament. Each person is born with ‘his season’ and is bound to prefer it. No one, you may be sure, has ever yet succeeded in convincing anyone else on such a subject. In China it has always been the springtime with its ‘broidery of flowers’ that has won the highest praise; here however the brooding melancholy of autumn seems always to have moved our poets more deeply. For my own part I find it impossible to reach a decision; for much as I enjoy the music of birds and the beauty of flowers, I confess I seldom remember at what season I have seen a particular flower, heard this or that bird sing. But in this I am to blame; for even within the narrow compass of my own walls, I might well have learnt what sights and sounds distinguish each season of the year, having as you see not only provided for the springtime by a profusion of flowering trees, but also planted in my garden many varieties of autumn grass and shrub, brought in, root and all, from the countryside. Why, I have even carried hither whole tribes of insects that were wasting their shrill song in the solitude of lanes and fields. All this I did that I might be able to enjoy these things in the company of my friends, among whom you are one. Pray tell me then, to which season do you find that your preference inclines?’5 Lady Murasaki’s modes of thought and speculation also belong to her time. Modern readers have been struck with her preoccupation with time and the changes it brings (in this regard her work does bear some comparisons with Proust), yet she was by no means the first to take up such subject matter in literature. The poem of Ariwara no Narihira, quoted several times previously, suggests precisely such a concern. Indeed the whole cluster of attitudes concerning transience, death, and beauty that go into a definition of mono no aware were the common property of Lady Murasaki’s generation. Yoshida Kenkō, writing of such attitudes about three hundred years later, sums up the whole tradition: Were we to live on forever—were the dews of Adashino never to vanish, the smoke on Toribeyama never to fade away—then indeed would men not feel the pity of things. Truly the beauty of life is its uncertainty. Of all living things, none lives so long as man. Consider how the ephemera awaits the fall of evening, and the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. Even a year of life lived peacefully seems long and happy beyond compare; but for such as never weary of this world and are loath to die, a thousand years pass away like the dream of a single night. What shall it avail a man to drag out till he becomes decrepit and unsightly a life which some day needs must end? Long life brings many shames. At most before his fortieth year is full, it is seemly for a man to die…6 Aware (here translated as ‘the pity of things’) arises from the self-consciousness of transience. Lady Murasaki expresses the theme with every nuance at her command in the text of Genji. But she did not create that theme herself; rather, she refined and harmonized a sensibility shared with her readers from the beginning. Lady Murasaki’s real accomplishments thus lie in a slightly different sphere, one uniquely appropriate for literature. Anyone who has read even a small portion of the novel realizes that she is a beguiling, often brilliant, storyteller. She creates dozens of intriguing characters, some in quick sketches, some in full portrait; and she manages to involve many of them in narrative complexities that never fail to pull the reader on and on.

242

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

Most astonishing of all is Lady Murasaki’s skill in creating an evocation of reality for the reader through her observations, in exquisite detail, of the subjective responses of her characters; and those responses in turn alter and redefine the reader’s perception of that reality. Such a concentration on the inner life gives her novel a curiously contemporary tone. However strange the appurtenances of the society in which her characters live, they quickly reveal their humanity at this inner level. The reader is soon one with them. Lady Murasaki’s ability to create this inner world is obvious from the very beginning of the novel. The second chapter of Genji is largely devoted to a celebrated scene in which Genji’s companions discuss the nature of women. One, the young man Uji no Kami, tells of an entan glement he suffered through. At one point, he recalls, the girl he admired suddenly vanished: ‘The fact that she had till now sent no poem or conciliatory message seemed to show some hardening of heart, and had already disquieted me. Now I began to fear that her accursed suspiciousness and jealousy had but been a stratagem to make me grow weary of her, and though I could recall no further proof of this I fell into great despair. And to show her that, though we no longer met, I still thought of her and planned for her, I got her some stuff for a dress, choosing a most delightful and unusual shade of colour, and a material that I knew she would be glad to have. “For after all,” I thought, “she cannot want to put me altogether out of her head.” When I informed her of this purchase she did not rebuff me nor make any attempt to hide from me, but to all my questions she answered quietly and composedly, without any sign that she was ashamed of herself.’7 The passage shows Lady Murasaki’s skill in creating a character who possesses a full self-awareness not only of his partner’s attitudes but of his own as well. Such acute observation concerning the workings of psychology no doubt seem unexceptional to a contemporary Western reader. One must remind oneself that the text dates from the eleventh century. Lady Murasaki’s interest in focusing on the inner lives of her characters is nowhere better observed than in the long and rich relationship between Genji and Murasaki, his principal consort. Here is a passage in which Genji tells Murasaki (who cannot bear him any children) that he has fathered a descendant by another woman: ‘I had far rather that this had not happened. It is all the more irritating because I have for so long been hoping that you would have a child; and that, now that the child has come, it should be someone else’s is very provoking. It is only a girl, you know, which really makes it rather a different matter. It would perhaps have been better from every point of view if I had left things as they were, but this new complication makes that quite impossible. I think, indeed, of sending for the child. I hope that when it arrives you will not feel ill-disposed towards it.’ She flushed: ‘That is just the sort of thing you always used to say,’ she answered. ‘It seems to me to show a very strange state of mind. Of course I ought to put up with it, but there are certain things which I do not see how I can be expected to get used to…’ ‘Softly, softly,’ he answered, laughing at her unwonted asperity, ‘who is asking you to get used to anything? I will tell you what you are doing. You are inventing all sorts of feelings for me such as I have never really had at all, and then getting cross with me for having them. That is not a very amiable proceeding, is it?’ And having gone on in this strain for some time, he became quite cheerful.8 Genji’s playful analysis of Murasaki’s wounded feelings serves several purposes, including that of blunting her wrath or disappointment: again, Lady Murasaki concentrates on the inner layers of personality in order

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

243

to produce for the reader examples of self-awareness. Characters possessed with this facility can articulate their own feelings in a remarkably sophisticated way. Lady Murasaki’s powers of observation often remind a Western reader of certain elements in the art of Jane Austen: both possess, for example, a keen eye for the often incongruously imagined demands of society on the individual. Here is one amusing example: To no Chujo (Genji’s confidant and closest friend) goes to visit his mother after his sudden rise in court: Only two days later To no Chujo came to his mother’s rooms again. The princess was extremely flattered and pleased; it was seldom that he honoured her with two visits in such rapid succession. Before receiving him she had her hair set to rights and sent for her best gown; for though he was her own child he had become so important that she never felt quite sure of herself in his presence, and was as anxious to make a good impression as if he had been a complete stranger.9 Image and self-image remain a central concern throughout the entire novel. Genji, at one point, asks Murasaki for just such an account of herself. They are preparing to distribute clothing to various persons at the palace in time for the spring entertainments. Murasaki questions Genji’s methods of making his choices: ‘…If I may make a suggestion, would it not be better to think whether the stuffs will suit the complexions of their recipient rather than whether they look nice in the box?’ ‘I know just why you said that,’ Genji laughed. ‘You want me to launch out into a discussion of each lady’s personal charms, in order that you may know in what light she appears to me. I am going to turn the tables. You shall have your own whichever of my stuffs you like, and by your choice I shall know how you regard yourself.’ ‘I have not the least idea of what I look like,’ she answered, blushing slightly, ‘after all, I am the last person in the world to consult upon the subject. One never sees oneself except in the mirror…’10 Lady Murasaki’s powers of observation and her skill in setting them down permit her the widest possible range of subject matter within the purview of the inner world of her characters. Indeed, the reader of Genji, surrounded by the rich emotional universe she has provided for him, may have some initial difficulties in persuading himself precisely what the narrowly defined purposes of the novel might be. There seem so many possibilities. The text, which runs over eleven hundred closely packed pages in the one-volume edition of Waley’s translation, is obviously planned on an enormous scale, and its structure is organic. Themes and characters appear and disappear, swept along by the movements of time, which moves all before it. Genji, unlike some lengthy masterpieces of the twentieth century (one thinks of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, or, for that matter, of Proust), was not planned in such a way that every detail of its structure and design can be referred back to some central, tightly organized conception in the mind of the author. In fact, time in Lady Murasaki’s novel flows precisely like a river, occasionally picking up bits of extraneous, even irrelevant, information, which the author was not always at great pains to remove. Judgments on the meaning of particular aspects of the work are more safely made from a close and repeated reading of the entire text, rather than from a careful analysis of any single passage. To give the simplest example: the setting of the story itself undergoes a considerable metamorphosis. The novel begins in the abstract: ‘At the court of an Emperor (he lived it matters not when), there was….’ The name of the country, presumably Japan, is not mentioned at all. By the fourth chapter, however, Lady Murasaki abandons this arrangement and provides more specific information:

244

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

The nun’s cell was in a chapel built against the wall of a wooden house. It was a desolate spot, but the chapel itself was very beautiful. The light of the visitor’s torches flickered through the open door. In the inner room there was no sound but that of a woman weeping by herself; in the outer room were several priests talking together (or was it praying?) in hushed voices. In the neighbouring temples vespers were over and there was absolute stillness; only towards the Kiyomizu were lights visible and many figures seemed to throng the hillside.11 Kiyomizu temple, one of the great attractions in Kyoto during the Heian period (and ever since), was constructed in 805. (The temple also plays an important part in Mori Ōgai’s ‘Sanshō the Steward.’) Lady Murasaki now places her novel in space and, more roughly, in time. By the time the bulk of the novel is completed, she grows even more specific, identifying both herself and her supposed informants in the text: What here follows was told me by some of the still surviving gentlewomen of Tamakatsura’s household. I myself was inclined to regard much of it as mere gossip, particularly where it concerned Genji’s descendants, with whom they can have had very little contact. My informants however were indignant at the idea that Genji’s or Murasaki’s women must necessarily know better than they. ‘If anyone gets things wrong,’ they said, ‘it is far more likely to be Genji’s people, who are all so old that their memories are beginning to fail.’ For my part I have made no effort to decide the question, but simply put things down as I was told.12 The Tale of Genji is a unified work (unlike many novels in the Chinese tradition), and it seems to have grown naturally from Lady Murasaki’s pen in the fullness of time. An appreciation of that fullness, whatever small inconsistencies may have been permitted, must lie at the beginning of the reader’s coming to terms with the larger purposes of the novel. Before we discuss the possible nature of those purposes, it might be well to sketch the main outlines of the story, which spans three generations. Prince Genji is the son of the Emperor, although not by his principal consort. The major part of the narrative begins when Genji is already a young adult. His best friend is the courtier To no Chujo, and Genji marries his sister, Princess Aoi; ironically this is the only unsatisfactory relationship sustained by Genji, whose grace and wide range of human sympathies help him reach a closeness of spiritual (and often physical) understanding with the many women who inhabit the novel. Genji’s adventures encompass the first two thirds of the text. His first love is Fujitsubo, his legal stepmother and consort of the Emperor. Yet her niece Murasaki, the daughter of Fujitsubo’s brother, becomes the main object of his affections after the death of his wife, Princess Aoi, who dies after giving birth to Genji’s son Yugiri. Genji is intimate with a number of other women, among them the imperious Lady Rokujo, the mysterious Yugao (actually the mistress of his friend To no Chujo), and the Lady of Akashi. Genji has a child by the Lady of Akashi. When the girl is grown, she marries the young Emperor. Their son, Niou, Genji’s grandson, helps carry the story into the third generation. Genji is also, later in life, officially betrothed to Nyosan, an imperial princess. Nyosan, however, deceives him with Kashiwagi, the son of To no Chujo. A child, Kaoru, is born to Nyosan as a result of this illicit affair. Niou and Kaoru both show some resemblance to Genji, but neither shows his extraordinary certainty and wholeness of spirit. After Genji’s death, the novel traces the activities of these two young men, concentrating on their affairs with three remarkable sisters who live with their father in seclusion at Uji. The triple portraits of these three women, Agemaki, Kozeri, and above all Ukifune, are at the center of the final sections.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

245

The details of the plot of the novel are endlessly—and fascinatingly— complex. The materials used by Lady Murasaki can be analyzed in any number of ways, but must always be considered in terms of the totality of her conception. Events that occur early in Genji do not reveal their full significance until much later in the narrative, when incidents and the emotional states they engender repeat and reinforce each other. Many readers of the novel unfortunately form their impressions of the whole work from reading merely the first book, itself called ‘The Tale of Genji.’ Thus they carry away a largely erroneous view of the work as a while. The emotional center of the novel may well lie in Book Four, entitled ‘Blue Trousers.’ ‘Blue Trousers’ chronicles the death of Murasaki and gives the reader a last glimpse of Genji before his own death. Time, disappointment, and death hover in the atmosphere in this long section of the novel and prepare the reader for the imperfect and neurotic world that will follow in the last two books. The very first book in the novel, ‘The Tale of Genji,’ deals with death as well: the romantic Yugao dies mysteriously, and Lady Aoi’s death in childbirth is one of the more harrowing scenes in the entire novel. Nevertheless the optimism and animal vigor of youth sustain Genji, and the reader, through those early trials. By the time of Genji’s death, he is sadder and wiser. Book Four shows the mature characters coping with the realities of their lives, admitting frustrations, insecurities, defeats. The glamor of youth has gone, and the honor and compassion developed in middle age are revealed to provide the only satisfactory means to face up to the inevitable compromises that must be made. Genji now merely wants to ‘finish life without disaster.’ Lady Murasaki gives his age as forty, just that period chosen by Yoshida Kenkō (on the basis of this novel, perhaps, one might speculate) as the time when ‘it is seemly for a man to die.’ All the fatigues of middle age supply the narrative material for this portion of the novel. The reader sees illness in the declining Murasaki, observes madness in the behavior of Makibashira, the wife of Higekuro. Friends quarrel, and Genji for a time loses his closeness with To no Chujo. An unhappy marriage is chronicled in the Linfortunate experience of Tamakatsura, the daughter of Yugao and To no Chujo. Both Murasaki and Genji feel a sense of their own impending deaths; resignation and melancholy replace energy and laughter. And Genji himself is deceived in love by Nyosan, who has an affair with Kashiwagi. Lady Murasaki’s views of these unpleasant realities again surprise us, containing as they do a powerfully evocative sense of the emotional exhaustion brought on by human frailty. In particular, Murasaki’s fears, the movements of her mind as she surveys her situation, are portrayed in a fashion familiar from postnineteenth-century literary techniques, where the attempt is made to record the sense of the flow of impressions and emotions rather than merely to delineate their logic. On one occasion she muses on the fact that Genji is required to accept the young Nyosan as his official wife: After all, she thought to herself afterwards, the care of this girl was a duty that he could not possibly have avoided. It had fallen on him as it were from the sky, and to be cross with him for accepting it would be ridiculous. If Nyosan had been some girl that he had taken a fancy to or gone out of his way to befriend, the case would have been different. But it was perfectly true that this step had been imposed upon him; and Murasaki was determined to show the world that she was not going to lose her head. But she knew that once people take a dislike to one, it does not make much difference how one behaves… For example, her stepmother had even held her responsible for Makibashira’s fall; it was Murasaki’s jealousy (so this woman asserted) that had forced Genji to plant Tamakatsura in Higekuro’s way! No doubt her tortuous imagination would not fail to supply equally complicated slanders in the present case. For, though generous and longsuffering, Murasaki was capable of making judgments that were by no means devoid of sharpness. And now, though as yet all was well, there came back to her again and again the thought that perhaps the dreaded turning-point had come. His

246

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

confidence, his devotion, the whole sovereignty in his affections that had been so long her pride, would begin to slip away from her…13 The reader now feels in Murasaki a growing sense of apprehension, reinforcing all her moments of incertitude that have come before. Genji’s closeness to Murasaki is not in any doubt, yet in her state of fatigue she cannot accept his most genuine protestations. Genji tries to reassure her: ‘It is only with people such as you, whom I have known all their lives, that I am really happy. But you know all this quite well, and there is no use in my repeating it. About Princess Nyosan—of course it was tiresome for you that I was obliged to have her here, but since she came, I have grown even fonder of you than before; a change you would have noticed quickly enough, if it had been my affection towards someone else that was on the increase! However, you are very observant, and I cannot believe you are not perfectly well aware….’ ‘I cannot explain it,’ she said. ‘I know that to any outside person I must appear the happiest of women—fortunate indeed far above my deserts. But inwardly I am wretched…. Every day.’14 Genji himself, who eventually loses his contact with Tamakatsura, whose presence always served to remind him of his first great love, her mother Yugao, can blame only himself for his own wretchedness: He could not for an instant stop thinking about her, and soon fell into a condition of absentmindedness and melancholy that was observed by all who met him. It is said that whatever happens to us is ruled by our conduct in previous existences, or, as others would express it, by Fate. But it seemed to Genji that for the miseries into which he constantly found himself plunged, no other person or power could possibly be held responsible. They sprang from his own excessive susceptibility, and from no other cause whatever. He longed to write to her; but it seemed impossible, now that she was in the hands of the grim, unbending Higekuro, to address to her the small humours and absurdities of which their correspondence was usually composed.15 The very sensibility that has earned Genji the sobriquet of ‘The Shining One’ now brings him only pain and difficulty. Nevertheless, he and Murasaki manage to cope with their own destinies; in fact, they approach them with poise, dignity, and a gentle (and greatly attractive) resignation. The younger generation has no such tact, no such maturity. The contrast is strongly made in the last two books of the novel, but the lines are firmly set down even in ‘Blue Trousers.’ Yugiri, Genji’s son, is attracted to Princess Ochiba, and he behaves toward her in a brutal manner that Genji himself would have found simply inconceivable: ‘It is useless for me to think of returning,’ Yugiri said to Ochiba in an offhand manner, ‘and I may as well wait here as anywhere else. I hope this will not disturb you. When the chaplain leaves your mother’s room, I shall join him.’ Never before had he behaved in this impertinent manner. The only effective answer to his insolence would have been to seek shelter in her mother’s rooms. But such a course seemed under the circumstances too extreme, and she sat motionless in her chair, wondering what would come next. Nor had she long to wait. For a few minutes afterwards a gentlewoman came with a message, and Yugiri, upon some excuse or other, accompanied her behind the curtains. The fog was now so thick, even inside the house, that despite the lamp it was almost dark. In sudden terror she made for a sliding-door at the back of the room. Dark though it was, he darted unerringly upon her tracks, and was just in time to seize the train of her dress before she closed the door. She shook

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

247

herself free; but there was no bolt or catch on her side, and holding the door to, she stood trembling like water.16 Book Four seems the central focus for many of the complex themes of the novel. There are at least three of them. All are suggested in the early sections of the novel, find explicit statement and example in Book Four, and reach final development in Books Five and Six. The first of Lady Murasaki’s grand themes involves an examination of the real meaning in human life of the passage of time. The author and her audience shared modes of thinking that found a centrality of human concern in precisely these questions. The classic definitions of aware, that literary virtue so much bound up with the Heian period, owes much to Lady Murasaki’s treatment and development of that term. She treats the conception organically, or perhaps one might say musically. Her readers were quite familiar with the theme. The concerns of Lady Murasaki are ‘givens.’ We ‘know’ them in the way we quickly come to know the theme of a movement in a Haydn symphony. The fascination for the reader comes rather in witnessing how that theme is treated, ‘orchestrated,’ recapitulated, so that the full grandeur, the greater implications, of that theme can be experienced. Thoughts and actions alike reveal their meaning through the passage of time. In Genji, events presented in one context, for one set of artistic purposes, are later shown to possess different, larger implications. (This device too is familiar from Proust.) Genji’s early affair with the ill-fated Yugao, for example, takes on a whole new set of overtones when, late in his own life, he adopts her daughter Tamakatsura. Through his knowledge of the daughter, Genji comes to a higher consciousness of the nature of the attraction he originally felt for Yugao, feelings that in turn increase the tenderness he now feels for the young woman. At first, he keeps his emotions to himself, but eventually he tells Tamakatsura what he knows about her mother: ‘…how well I remember the conversation in the course of which your father first told me how your mother had carried you away, and of his long search for you both. It doesnotseemlongago…’ And he told her more than he had ever done before about the rainy night’s conversation and his own first meeting with Yugao. ‘Gladly would I show the world this Child-flower’s beauty, did I not fear that men would ask me where stands the hedge on which it grew.” The truth is, he loved your mother so dearly that I cannot bear the thought of telling him the whole miserable story. That is why I have kept you hidden away like a chrysalis in a cocoon. I know I ought not to have delayed…. He paused, and she answered with the verse: ‘Who cares to question whence was first transplanted a Child-flower that from the peasant’s tattered hedge was hither brought?’ Her eyes filled with tears as in a scarcely audible voice she whispered this reply.17 The subsequent entanglements of plot concerning Tamakatsura and her relations with Genji and the others are too complex to explicate in detail here. Yugao has not been mentioned for hundreds of pages,18 but by means of the new ‘orchestration’ of the theme introduced again halfway through the novel, the full significance of Genji’s experience with her becomes apparent. Further, Genji’s romantic attachments have an importance for the narrative beyond the protagonist himself, for they serve as paradigms for the final tragic encounters between the three daughters of Prince Hachi with Kaoru and Niou. In these later sections of the novel, however, these variations are often treated ironically. The passage of time often signals loss. The death of Genji and the dwindling of the spiritual and aesthetic world inhabited by the third generation of characters in the novel represent merely the most explicit

248

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

example of this theme. The novel begins, like the young Genji, boldly. Relatively little self-reflection concerning time intrudes in the narrative. The first significant hint of such a concern in the consciousness of the major characters comes in Book Three, when Murasaki realizes that time may sweep away Genji’s own affection for her: Murasaki knew that she must be prepared for the worst. It was not easy for her to face what she now believed to threaten her. For years past she had held, beyond challenge or doubt, the first place in Genji’s affections —had been the center of all his plans and contrivings. To see herself ousted by a stranger from a place which long use had taught her to regard as her own by inalienable right—such was the ordeal for which she now began silently to prepare herself. He would not, of course, abandon her altogether; of that she was sure. But the very fact that they had for so many years lived together on terms of daily intimacy and shared so many trifling experiences made her, she felt, in a way less interesting to him. So she speculated, sometimes thinking that all was indeed lost, sometimes that the whole thing was her fancy and nothing whatever was amiss.19 This consciousness of the passing of time forces Murasaki to take cognizance as well of her own vulnerability. Her feminine reaction is matched not many lines later by Genji’s masculine response to his own developing consciousness of a similar vulnerability in himself. He comes to this state of mind during a visit to a sister of the Emperor: As he had promised to appear at a much earlier hour Princess Nyogo had by now quite given up expecting him, and, much put about by this untimely visit, she bade her people send the porter to the western gate. The man made his appearance a moment later, looking wretchedly pinched and cold as he hastened through the snow with the key in his hand. Unfortunately the lock would not work, and when he went back to look for help no other manservant could anywhere be found. ‘It’s very rusty,’ said the old porter dolefully, fumbling all the while with the lock that grated with an unpleasant sound but would not turn. ‘There’s nothing else wrong with it, but it’s terribly rusty. No one uses this gate now.’ The words, ordinary enough in themselves, filled Genji with an unaccountable depression. How swiftly the locks rust, the hinges grow stiff on doors that close behind us! ‘I am more than thirty,’ he thought; and it seemed to him impossible to go on doing things just as though they would last…as though people would remember…. ‘And yet,’ he said to himself, ‘I know that even at this moment the sight of something very beautiful, were it only some common flower or tree, might in an instant make life again seem full of meaning and reality.’20 The passage of time signals the removal of friends, affections, activities. Genji seeks the possibility of transcending time through beauty, yet, as Lady Murasaki is at pains to show elsewhere in the novel, beauty can serve as a solace, never as a solution. This too is a lesson that Genji will come to learn later. As he grows older, he becomes more and more convinced of the finality of time. Eventually he grows openly nostalgic. A party with the Emperor Suzaku described in Book Three is a particularly telling moment for him. Suzaku reminds Genji of the Feast of Flowers when Genji, as a young man, danced so brilliantly and won the hearts of all; …Suzaku, remembering that famous Feast of Flowers years ago, said to Genji with a sigh: ‘What wonderful days those were! We shall not see their like again.’ There were indeed many incidents

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

249

belonging to that time which even now Genji looked back upon with considerable emotion, and when the dance was over, he handed the wine bowl to Suzaku, reciting as he did so: ‘Spring comes, and still the sweet birds warble as of old; but altered and bereft are they that sit beneath the blossoming tree.’21 Genji feels bereft because he has come to understand that, for him, the past will not and cannot be repeated. These and similar ‘orchestrations’ on the theme of the passage of time first reach the level of explicit statement in ‘Blue Trousers.’ By this point in the narrative, the weight of the past is heavy on all the major characters: Genji, Murasaki, and all who surround them. To no Chujo in particular feels a permanent sense of disappointment and loss. Resignation is possible for him, but it is hard to bear. Awareness cannot remove the pain: Genji was meanwhile recalling the day when he had been To no Chujo’s partner in the Dance of the Blue Waves, and plucking a chrysanthemum he addressed to him the poem: ‘Though like this flower you have as time goes by put on a deeper hue, do you recall a day when in the autumn wind your sleeve flapped close to mine?’ Yes, then indeed (thought To no Chujo) they were partners, and there was little to choose between them in rank and prospects. But now, despite the very important position he held, he knew well enough that, compared with Genji, he was in popular estimation a very insignificant person indeed. ‘Not to a flower shall I compare thee, who hidest amid the pomp of regal clouds, but to a star that shines out of an air stiller and clearer than our own.’ Such was To no Chujo’s answer. By now the evening wind was stirring among the red leaves that lay heaped upon the courtyard floor, weaving them into patterns of brown and red.22 As a means to produce this degree of self-awareness on the part of her major characters, Lady Murasaki sets up patterns of thought, reaction, and behavior in each. They follow their own habits of mind unwittingly at first, then become increasingly conscious of their own attitudes as they grow older. A real cognizance on the part of the major characters of their own nature usually marks the final stage in their maturity. To no Chujo gains this consciousness when he visits his daughter, Lady Kumoi, and her husband Yugiri, Genji’s son by Princess Aoi: At this moment To no Chujo, drawn hither by the beauty of the autumn leaves, came into the garden for a while on his way back from the Palace. The house, full once more of movement and life, looked (thought To no Chujo) just as he had known it on many an autumn day in his parents’ lifetime, and as he wandered from one familiar spot to another it affected him strangely to find those whom he had recently thought of as mere children playing the part of dignified masters and possessors amid the scenes where he himself had once submitted to his elders’ rule. Yugiri too seemed slightly embarrassed by the situation; he blushed noticeably when giving orders, and his manner was oddly subdued.23 To no Chujo’s sense of displacement is powerful but small in comparison with that of Genji, who suffers through the affair of Nyosan and To no Chujo’s son Kashiwagi. Genji’s greatest consciousness of the ravages of time come when, having intercepted a letter, he confronts Nyosan with the evidence of her infidelity: ‘It does not in the least surprise me that you should feel as you do. For one thing, novelties are inevitably more interesting, and you have known me since you were a child. But the real trouble is that

250

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

I am too old for you. It is true. I am hideously old. Indeed, what in the world could be more natural than that an infant like you should desire to escape from me? I only make one condition. So long as your father is alive we must keep up the pretence, tiresome old person though you may find me, that I am still your husband. Afterwards you may do as you like. But I cannot bear that Suzaku should know what has in reality been the end of this wonderful marriage of ours, upon which he built all his hopes. It is not at all likely that he will live much longer. If you do not wish to add to his sufferings, please let us for the present have no more episodes of this kind.’24 Suddenly, Genji confronts his own past: But as he said the words he caught in his own voice a familiar intonation. How often, years ago, those responsible for his upbringing had adopted just this tone, and how dreary, how contemptible he had thought their self-righteous homilies. ‘Boring old man!’ That was what she must be thinking, and in sudden shame he relapsed into a complete silence, during which he drew her writing-case towards him, carefully mixed the ink and arranged the paper. Nyosan was by now sobbing bitterly, and her hand shook so much that at first she was unable to write. How very differently must her pen have flowed, Genji mused, when she sat down to answer the letter he had found under her cushion…25 Genji’s remorse makes him melancholy, but he is able to summon sufficient courage to take stock of himself and to grasp the realities of his situation; indeed, Lady Murasaki seems to suggest, his acquiescence to the passage of time permits him the only victories possible. Genji’s realization that the familiar patterns of his existence must be altered thus stands in sharp contrast to Kaoru, who, in the last books of the novel, is wedded to his own neurotic pattern of responses to life. Kaoru can escape from nothing. This observation is consciously made, not by Kaoru himself (who would doubtless be incapable of making it) but by Kozeri, one of the three daughters of Prince Hachi with whom he falls in love: Kozeri knew well enough that Kaoru had chosen today for his visit because he counted on Niou having to stay late at the Palace. However he seemed to be in a good mood and said nothing that one could possibly object to, though even today there was perceptible in all his conversation a vague background of the usual tragic description. It was difficult to believe that, as he constantly asserted, time had done nothing to reconcile him to his loss. Human beings, Kozeri felt, were not so constituted, and she sometimes felt that his melancholy was becoming a mere matter of habit—was due simply to an inability ever to relinquish, in her presence, the attitude that he had taken up at the start.26 Self-knowledge tempers regrets over the passing of time and provides the wise with the only sure means of remaining at peace with themselves and in harmony with others. The theme, expounded subtly by Lady Murasaki in the early portions of the novel, swells in importance until, at the close, the symphony is overwhelming. A second theme in The Tale of Genji that modern readers will identify at once as they read and study the text is the quest for self-identification. The characters devote themselves to that most contemporary of psychological questions, ‘Who am I?’ In Lady Murasaki’s view, the question seems best approached (although not fully answered) by examining the role of love as a means to self-definition. Those who have not read the novel carefully may make the mistake of thinking that the burden of her arguments rests in the realm of physical love, in the amours of Genji. The actual text shows something considerably different. Sexual love certainly plays a part, of course, in her concerns, but the span of Lady Murasaki’s imagination

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

251

is enormous. All human relationships—friendly affection, love for children, relations between brother and sister, social friendships, every aspect of possible human connection and affection—make their contribution, forming an organic whole in which the totality often serves to illumine and underscore any one of its particular parts. The urgent necessity for such a quest leading to self-definition is emphasized early in the novel, when the Emperor secretly sends the boy Genji to have his fortune told by a visiting Korean magician: At this time some Koreans came to Court and among them a fortune-teller. Hearing this, the Emperor did not send for them to come to the Palace, because of the law against the admission of foreigners which was made by the Emperor Uda. But in strict secrecy he sent the Prince to the Strangers’ quarters. He went under the escort of the Secretary of the Right, who was to introduce him as his own son. The fortune-teller was astonished by the boy’s lineaments and expressed his surprise by continually nodding his head: ‘He has the marks of one who might become a Father of the State, and if this were his fate, he would not stop short at any lesser degree than that of Mighty King and Emperor of all the land. But when I look again—I see that confusion and sorrow would attend his reign. But should he become a Great Officer of State and Councillor of the Realm I see no happy issue, for he would be defying those kingly signs of which I spoke before.’27 Genji’s future is immediately shown to be unclear; whatever role he chooses, or has chosen for him, may lead to grief. His personality is not warped by the ambiguity of his status; he knows who his parents are (unlike Kaoru) and he finds certainty in his happy relations with his peers. Nevertheless Genji is always conscious of his unusual status. Lady Murasaki uses Genji’s career to illustrate two aspects of love that help define her protagonist’s own sense of self. The first is her development of the conception that a human being always seeks in his amorous life the same configurations by which he defines the sentiment. As those configurations may manifest themselves in a variety of partners, a person may fall in one with one person after another. Yet what he seeks remains always the same. Kiritsubo, the Emperor’s consort, and Genji’s real mother, dies at an early age, grief-stricken because of her ill-treatment at court. The Emperor then marries Fujitsubo, who becomes Genji’s stepmother. As a young man, Genji falls in love with her. This ambiguous relationship is doomed, of course; yet the importance of this central metaphor on love becomes apparent when Genji comes to know the young Murasaki, the daughter of Fujitsubo’s brother. Genji understands the depth of his love for Murasaki at precisely the moment he recognizes her resemblance to Fujitsubo: How beautiful she was! And, now that it was possible to compare them on equal terms, how like in every minutest detail of pose and expression to the girl at home! Particularly in the carriage of her head and the way her hair grew there was the same singular charm. For years Murasaki had served to keep Lady Fujitsubo, to some extent at any rate, out of his thoughts. But now that he saw how astonishingly the one resembled the other he fancied that all the while Murasaki had but served as a substitute or eidolon of the lady who had denied him her love. Both had the same pride, the same reticence. For a moment he wondered whether, if they were side by side, he should be able to tell them apart. How absurd! Probably indeed, he said to himself, the whole idea of their resemblance was a mere fancy; Fujitsubo had for so many years filled all his thoughts. It was natural that such an idea should come to him. Unable to contain himself any longer, he slipped out of his hiding-place and gently crept between her curtains-of-state, until he was near enough to touch the train of her cloak.28

252

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

Variations on this pattern are repeated throughout the novel, and nowhere more telling than in a series of incidents between Yugiri (Genji’s son by Princess Aoi) and Murasaki herself. Yugiri bears approximately the same relationship to Murasaki that Genji does to Fujitsubo, and, like his father, he too falls in love with his stepmother. Yugiri himself has some vague unarticulated sense of this attraction, but he shies away from it: Yugiri was well-born, handsome, and, in a subdued way, very agreeable in his manners. The gentlewomen of the household took no small interest in him, but he remained somewhat of a mystery to them. With Murasaki he had few dealings and was indeed barely acquainted with her. Why it was that he held aloof from her he would have been at a loss to explain. Was it that some dim instinct warned him against a repetition of his father’s disastrous entanglements?29 The chord is fully struck, with all its terrible overtones, when Yugiri later catches a glimpse of Murasaki and is overcome with the physical presence of her beauty: Morning after morning Murasaki too saw the dew roughly snatched from leaf and flower. She was sitting thus one day on watch at her window while Genji played with the little princess in a neighboring room. It happened that Yugiri had occasion to come across from the eastern wing. When he reached the door at the end of the passage he noticed that the great double-doors leading into Murasaki’s room were half-open. Without thinking what he was doing, he paused and looked in. Numerous ladies-in-waiting were passing to and fro just inside, and had he made any sound they would have looked up, seen him and necessarily supposed that he had stationed himself there on purpose to spy upon those within. He saw nothing for it but to stand dead still. Even indoors the wind was so violent that the screens would not stand up. Those which usually surrounded the high dais were folded and stacked against the wall. There, in full view of anyone who came along the corridor, reclined a lady whose notable dignity of mien and bearing would alone have sufficed to betray her identity. This could be none other than Murasaki. Her beauty flashed upon him as at dawn the blossom of the red flowering cherry flames out of the mist upon the traveller’s still sleepy eye. It was wafted towards him, suddenly imbued him, as though a strong perfume had been dashed against his face. She was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen.30 The pattern is repeated, but not precisely; Genji’s actual relations with his stepmother are far more intimate, and far more disastrous, than anything Yugiri might have contemplated. No suggestion of a relationship is ever broached, let alone consummated, and indeed Yugiri never gives way to his feelings until Murasaki’s death: The daylight was still feeble, and he could see very little. But at that moment Genji himself held up the great lamp, bringing it so close to the couch that Yugiri suddenly saw her in all her loveliness. ‘And why should he not see her?’ thought Genji, who knew that Yugiri was peeping. But in a moment he covered his eyes with his sleeve. ‘It is almost worse to see her now, while she is still unchanged,’ he said. ‘One thinks that she will speak, move….’ Yugiri brushed away the tears that kept on dimming his eyes. Her hair lay spread across the pillows, loose, but not tangled or disorderly, in a great mass, against which in the strong lamplight her face shone with a dazzling whiteness. Never, thought Genji, had her beauty seemed so flawless as now, when the eye could rest on it undistracted by any ripple of sound or motion. Yugiri gazed astounded. His spirit seemed to leave him, to float through space and

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

253

hover near her, as though it were he that was the ghost, and this the lovely body he had chosen for his habitation.31 Father and son are thus drawn together in a moment of unspoken communion. A second aspect of love connected with the character of Genji involves his predilection for acting the role of a father-figure to various young women. Genji, as Earl Miner has pointed out,32 has produced enough children to remain credible but not so many as to overcomplicate the plot of the novel; actually, he has fewer children than any other father described in the text. The role of the father bears a certain rela tionship to that of lover, as Kawabata points out with such tact and skill in The Sound of the Mountain, and Lady Murasaki as well plays on this ambiguity with telling effect. Genji’s first experience as a surrogate father involves Murasaki, who, when she grows up, actually becomes his consort. Both their roles then change accordingly. Halfway through the novel, Genji befriends Tamakatsura, the daughter of Yugao, his early passion. The danger of the same ambiguity, the same metamorphosis now arises. No one recognizes the pattern more clearly than does Murasaki herself: ‘But you surely cannot mean that I shall betray her confidence?’ asked Genji indignantly. ‘You forget,’ Murasaki replied, ‘that I was once in very much the same position myself. You had made up your mind to treat me as a daughter; but, unless I am much mistaken, there were times when you did not carry out this resolution very successfully….’ ‘How clever everyone is!’ thought Genji, much put out at the facility with which his inmost thoughts were read. But he hastened to rejoin: ‘If I were in love with Tamakatsura, she would presumably become aware of the fact quite as quickly as you would.’ He was too much annoyed to continue the conversation; however, he admitted to himself in private that when people come to a conclusion of this kind, it is hardly ever far from the mark. But surely, after all, he could judge better than she. And Murasaki, he reflected, was not judging the case on its merits, but merely assuming, in the light of past experience, that events were about to take a certain course….33 Later still, Genji is asked by the Emperor Suzaku to play the role of father and protector to his daughter Nyosan by officially adopting her as his wife. In this instance, as has been noted above, things turn out worst of all: Genji carries out his father’s role with greater correctness, and Nyosan betrays him. Obviously marriage customs during the Heian period made ambiguous situations such as these more likely than they would be in a modern society. Nevertheless Lady Murasaki pursues such themes with a full knowledge of their artistic and philosophical possibilities. Genji’s kindness and understanding require appropriate recipients; his beauty of character, and his own sense of himself, require him to play the role of Pygmalion from time to time. In Kaoru, Lady Murasaki recreates certain aspects of Genji’s character, and certain patterns in his behavior. For Kaoru, the ambiguities of his life are harsher and more destructive to him. Although Genji’s social position had been ambiguous, he at least knew who his parents were. Kaoru does not. He is ‘officially’ considered to be Genji’s son, but the reader knows he is the illicit offspring of the liaison between Nyosan and Kashiwagi. Genji attempts to come to know himself. Kaoru cannot, and his life is marked by the weight of this ambiguity concerning his origins. And Genji’s treatment of him as a child could not conceal the ambiguous attitude of the older man towards the boy. Indeed, Genji himself indulges in fantasy:

254

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

The little boy was asleep in his nurse’s quarters; but presently he was waked, and crawling into the room made straight for Genji and grabbed at his sleeve. He was dressed in a little shirt of white floss, over which was a red coat with a Chinese pattern finely worked upon it. The skirts of this garment were remarkably long and trailed behind him in the quaintest way; but it was (as usual with children of that age) quite open at the front, showing his little limbs, white ands smooth as a fresh-stripped willow wand. There was certainly something in his smile and the shape of his brow that recalled Kashiwagi. But where had the child got his remarkably good looks? Not from his father, who was passable in appearance, but could not possibly have been called handsome. To Nyosan, curiously enough, he could see no resemblance. Indeed the expression that chiefly gave character to the boy’s face (or so Genji contrived to fancy) was not at all unlike his own.34 The ambiguity becomes a permanent part of Kaoru’s character, and his loneliness and uncertitude, appealing as they are in various ways, give suspicious and egotistical aspects to his personality that, for all the roundness they contribute to Lady Murasaki’s portrait, remain, as intended, less than appealing. Kaoru’s own consciousness of his troubled state is best revealed in a conversation he has with Ben no Kimi, the wise and kindly servant who looks after Agemaki and her sisters. Kaoru is deeply in love with Agemaki and he attempts to define for Ben no Kimi (and for himself) the precise quality of the affection he feels: ‘It is not however love in the ordinary sense of the word for which I ask. What I long so passionately for and have never been able to find is someone to whom I could speak freely and openly about whatever came into my head, however trivial or however secret and intimate the thing might be—it comes perhaps of never having had brothers and sisters or anyone with whom I stood on that sort of footing. I have been terribly lonely—all my sorrows, joys, enthusiasms have been locked up inside me, and if at the present moment my greatest craving is simply for someoneto share my life with, to talk to, to be near—is that so very unnatural?’35 Sharing, however, comes hardest of all virtues for Kaoru. Even at the end of the novel the reader is by no means certain that he has been able to break out of his self-imposed prison of doubt and suspicion to any degree sufficient to permit him to give himself to anyone. Life seems for Kaoru, as for most of the others in the final books, a ‘bridge of dreams’ that cannot actually be crossed. Like Genji, Kaoru loves several women in the course of searching for the woman who corresponds to his deepest desires. (Again, Lady Murasaki varies the theme: Kaoru loves three sisters, a particular adventure that never befell Genji.) Yet just as Kaoru never really knew his parents, he never really finds his love. Lady Murasaki provides Niou, his closest companion, with certain attributes missing in Kaoru. Together they share a friendship not unlike that of Genji and To no Chujo. Niou is the other side of Kaoru: he is bold, handsome, and passionate. He shows the faults of impetuosity, jealousy. He is, indeed, the only male character in the novel who exhibits those traits. Niou loves Kozeri. On one occasion, suspicious of her relationship with Kaoru, he determines to find out the truth: At moments when Niou found himself alone in her rooms he made a hasty search for such documents in likely boxes and drawers; but he found nothing but the briefest and most matter-of-fact communications left lying about or stuck into things in a way that showed them not to have been regarded as of the slightest consequence. But even this was not enough to allay his suspicions. It was obvious, after the perfume incident, that love-letters must exist, even if a superficial search had failed

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

255

to reveal them. That Kaoru should fall in love with her he had already decided to be inevitable. And why should she resist his advances? They were very well suited to one another. Niou was working himself up into a frenzy of jealousy. He spent all day at the Nijo-in, but wrote no less than three times to the New Palace…36 At best, Niou and Kaoru represent certain aspects of the splendid wholeness that was Genji. ‘Genji was dead,’ writes Lady Murasaki at the beginning of Book Five, ‘and there was no one to take his place.’ The one who feels this lack of wholeness the most keenly is Ukifune, who loves both Kaoru and Niou; indeed she unwittingly loves what Genji represents, but that love must remain ‘a bridge of dreams’ as well, since such a man no longer exists. No wonder that, torn between Kaoru’s sensitiveness and the terrible power of Niou s passion, she, like the Maiden Unai in the Manyōshū poem, tries to drown herself. (And again, Lady Murasaki does a variation on that paradigm by having her remain alive.) The third theme of importance in the novel manifests Lady Murasaki’s convictions concerning the central importance of a developed sensibility. Sensibility, that exceptional openness to emotional impressions possessed by Genji, Murasaki, and certain other important characters in the novel, makes possible a comprehension of the conflicting evidence that life presents. For Lady Murasaki, only the possession of a cultivated sensibility permits the grasp of the often hidden consonance between emotion and idea, between what one feels and one grasps intellectually. Thus, for the author, the cultivation and the discipline of such a sensibility remain the highest goal of all. All the major characters in the novel undergo such a process of refinement. In a larger sense, too, the novel is meant to serve as a means to help bring about the development of such a sensibility in its readers. Such an emphasis on sensibility brings the world of the novel closer to our contemporary conceptions of the self. Yet, although the mechanisms of introspection Lady Murasaki delineates are familiar, the mental world inhabited by her characters remains considerably different from our own. We rapidly sense the appositeness of the reactions of her characers; their thoughts often need explication. In this regard, it may be useful to mention several conceptions common to Buddhist belief in the Heian period that Lady Murasaki shared with her contemporaries.37 One concerns the concept of mappō, ‘the latter days of the law.’ The general sense of decline, and the elements of decadence that were thought to attend the coming of the period (calculated to be roughly during Lady Murasaki’s lifetime and afterwards), were familiar to her contemporaries through numerous references in the Lotus Sutra and other Buddhist religious documents studied in Heian times. The future seemed to offer only gloom and decay. Some scholars have seen the dark and broken atmosphere that pervades the final third of The Tale of Genji as evidence of Lady Murasaki’s conviction that the high point of her civilization had passed. A second belief common to the period centered on karma or reincarnation. In its crudest, folklike form, such a concept suggested a belief in a rebirth in a next life, higher or lower on the scale of creation depending on the merits one has acquired during one’s present lifetime. Such a view seems simplistic at best to a modern reader; Lady Murasaki, too, was at pains to take a much more sophisticated view of the doctrine. Nevertheless the conception provides her with numerous opportunities for scenes of self-scrutiny for many important characters in the novel. Most often, a conviction in the efficacy of karma creates sentiments of remorse. In one particularly telling scene, for example, Genji’s stepmother feels herself prey to a terrible guilt over her illicit relationship with Genji, a union that resulted in the birth of a child (later to reign as the Emperor Ryozen): The Lady Abbess too was at this time in great distress. The sin of the Heir Apparent’s birth was a constant weight upon her heart. She felt that she had up to the present escaped more lightly than her

256

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

karma in any degree warranted and that a day of disastrous reckoning might still be at hand. For years she had been so terrified lest her secret should become known that she had treated Genji with exaggerated indifference, convinced that if by any sign or look she betrayed her partiality for him their attachment would at once become common knowledge at Court. She called to mind countless occasions when, longing for his sympathy and love, she had turned coldly away. The result of all her precautions did indeed seem to be that, in a world where everything that anyone knows sooner or later gets repeated, this particular secret had, so far as she could judge by the demeanour of those with whom she came in contact, remained absolutely undivulged. But the effort had cost her very dear, and she now remembered with pity and remorse the harshness which this successful policy had involved.38 Even Genji, late in his life, feels the weight of his karma when Nyosan gives birth to Kaoru, his ‘official’ son, but, of course, fathered by Kashiwagi: At the first ray of morning sunlight a child was born. It was hard indeed for Genji to receive this news, and to be told too that the child was a boy, with all the paternal pride and thankfulness that the occasion (if he were not to betray his secret) so urgently demanded. As things were, he was certainly glad that it was a boy; for with a girl’s upbringing he would have been expected to take much more trouble, whereas a boy can be left to his own devices. But should the child, when it grew up, show a striking resemblance to Kashiwagi, this would be far more likely to attract notice in a boy than in a girl. With how strange an appropriateness had he been punished for the crime that never ceased to haunt his conscience!39 As Ivan Morris has pointed out, many Japanese commentators have found in this atmosphere of retribution the major theme of the novel, and, by the same token, he is surely correct when he comments further that ‘it is surely an oversimplification of The Tale of Genji to imagine that its purpose is to expound any particular theory or moral.’40 Certainly Lady Murasaki finds an importance in the religious sensibility. For her, the cultivation of that sensibility, rather than the intellectual apprehension of sophisticated Buddhist doctrine, represents, in human and literary terms at least, the higher level of accomplishment. A desire for introspection, and the emotional state engendered by such a desire, most often evoke religious sentiments in the novel. And, always, the nature of the attitude with which one approaches the religious experience is crucial. Early in the narrative, Lady Murasaki provides a passage that serves to illustrate the range of Genji’s sympathies with the religious ideal. At this juncture, he is recovering from the shock of the death of his young wife, Princess Aoi: Genji gathered about him a number of doctors famous for their understanding of the Holy Law and made them dispute in his presence. Yet even in the midst of scenes such as these, calculated to impress him in the highest degree with the futility of all earthly desires, one figure from the fleeting world of men still rose up importunately before him and haunted every prayer. One day at dawn by the light of a sinking moon the priests of the temple were making the morning offering of fresh leaves and flowers before an image that stood near by. He could hear the clink of the silver flower-trays as they scattered chrysanthemum and maple leaves of many hues around the Buddha’s feet. It seemed to him then that the life these people led was worth while, not merely as a means to salvation but for its own pleasantness and beauty.41

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

257

Art and beauty play a central role in religion and justify its practices to those with sufficient sensibility to be attracted to its larger purposes. Art can inform the instinct for religion just as it can inform the instinct for life itself. And art serves other purposes as well: it disciplines the sensibility and reinforces it in the search for selfdefinition. Art, especially the art of literature, is chosen by Lady Murasaki as a means to permit a number of characters in the novel to grasp the significance of their own lives, and the meaning of their own relationships with others. Tamakatsura, for example, uncertain about her own future, examines the complex etiquette of her situation by reading novels: However kind her father might be, it was impossible that he should take more trouble about her than Prince Genji was doing; indeed, To no Chujo, not having once set eyes on her since she was a mere infant, might well have ceased to take any interest in her whatever. She had lately been reading a number of old romances and had come across many accounts of cases very similar to her own. She began to see that it was a delicate matter for a child to force itself upon the attention of a parent who had done his best to forget that it existed, and she abandoned all idea of taking the business into her own hands.42 Murasaki too attempts to find solace and meaning in her reading of fiction: On the nights when Genji was away, Murasaki used to make her women read to her. She thus became acquainted with many of the old-fashioned romances, and she noticed that the heroes of these stories, however light-minded, faithless, or even vicious as they might be, were invariably represented as in the end settling down to one steady and undivided attachment. If this were true to life, then Genji was, as he himself so often said, very differently constituted indeed from the generality of mankind. Never, she was convinced, never as long as he lived would his affections cease to wander in whatever direction his insatiable curiosity dictated. Say what he might, wish what he might, the future would be just what the past had been.43 A genuine sensibility intuits the real nature of things and has the capacity to perceive, if only fleetingly, the grandeur and the sadness of life itself. Such a sensibility comes from a participation in, and an observation of, the movements of everyday life as manifested in time, as well as from the study of art and the contemplation of the religious ideal. All such activities of the spirit represent elements in a necessary training. Selfawareness on the part of an individual that he possesses such a sensibility, rather than any particular set of convictions he may hold, represents Lady Murasaki’s highest ideal. This sensibility concerning sensibility, to put it another way, represents in psychological terms the quality of mono no aware, that highest literary virtue in the traditional canon of taste. The ultimate grandeur of Genji’s personality can be explicated in terms of mono no aware. His grasp of the beauty, and of the sadness, of life in all its refulgence, makes him the pinnacle of Lady Murasaki’s, and the reader’s, admiration. From this perspective, all of his adventures and amours can be seen for what they are: devices on the part of the author to permit differing aspects of Genji’s understanding and compassion to show themselves. In every truly important way, Genji is a deeply good man. He is loyal to everyone he knows, kind even to those who spite him, and anxious to help all those with whom he comes in contact. He too, like Koremori in The Tale of the Heike, feels the pull of retirement from the world, but, unlike Koremori, he remains in the world for the sake of others. (In this regard, Kaoru’s views on the subject serve almost as a parody of Genji’s.) Genji, in fact, acts out in a secular fashion the role of a Boddhisatva, one

258

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

who, in Mahāyāna Buddhism, turns away from his own salvation in order to help all others to attain the same goal. To suggest that the character of Genji may be intended to serve in some fashion as a religious symbol may seem startling to a modern reader, and that reaction in itself testifies to the psychological skill with which Lady Murasaki has constructed her narrative. The text of the novel, in any case, certainly suggests that Genji’s significance to those around him was enormous: In the country at large Genji’s loss was felt and lamented at every turn. The spectacle of life lost all its glamour; it seemed as though a sudden darkness had spread over the whole world. Of the depression which reigned at his two palaces it is needless to speak; and here another loss— that of Murasaki— weighed constantly on the minds of those who were left behind, and of the two bereavements was indeed perhaps felt the more keenly. For she had died very young, and her memory, like the flowers whose blossoming is shortest, was the more highly prized.44 The significance of Genji’s death, lightly touched on here, is explained in a more explicit fashion by Kaoru, who is, of course, also more personal in his statements concerning the meaning of Genji’s death: ‘Genji’s death,’ he said to Ben no Kimi presently, ‘happening when I was a mere child made—now that I think in looking back on it—a disastrous impression on me. I grew up feeling that nothing was stable, nothing worthwhile, and though in course of time I have risen to a fairly high position in the state and have even managed to win for myself a certain degree of celebrity, these things mean nothing to me. I would much rather have spent my time in some such quiet place as this. And now Prince Hachi’s death has made it less possible for me than ever to seek satisfaction in the ordinary pleasures of the world.’45 Genji’s compassion, stability, and energy disappear now from the world of the novel, and, with that disappearance, the horizon darkens forever. At one point in the latter sections of the novel, the death of Genji is directly compared to the death of Buddha, and his loss is seen to be, in its way, almost as great. Kobai, Kashiwagi’s brother, makes the comparison to the Daughter of Prince Sochi: ‘Not that I ever knew Genji very well; enough however to realize what must be the feelings of those to whom his death was a real and intimate loss.’ Kobai stood silent for a while, and then, as though glad to busy himself with something that would help him to shake off a train of melancholy reflections, he helped the boy to pluck a spray of blossom and get ready to go off to Court. ‘Perhaps after all,’ Kobai added, “Niou will one day surprise us as Ananda surprised the Assembly. I do not want to bore him, but for the sake of old remembrances I will write a word or two for you to take with the flowers…’46 Ananda, a disciple of Buddha, was an imposing figure at the First Assembly held after Buddha’s death. Niou, Kobai suggests in the comparison, may rise to the occasion in a similar fashion, but so far he has not done so. Despite hints of Lady Murasaki’s boddhisatva concept, the novel is a masterpiece of narrative fiction, not remotely a religious tract. Still, the author’s concern for the truths of religious insight and the meaning of that insight on the developing personalities of her characters give The Tale of Genji a profundity denied any wholly secular work.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

259

Such are some of the themes with which Lady Murasaki invests her vast and evocative novel. A full analysis of the complex literary means she has used in its construction would require explications beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, a few general principles can be set down as an aid in approaching such a lengthy and demanding text. First, taking The Tale of Genji as a whole, the reader cannot fail to be struck by the skill with which the author has imposed a careftilly wrought symmetry on the novel’s pattern of shifting densities. The novel begins with only a few characters. Gradually, more and more are added, so that the middle books are thick with the doings of a dozen or more major characters and countless minor ones. At the death of Genji, the world begins to shrink again. In the last books, as in the first, only a few personages are presented, who manage to live on with difficulty, in the shadows cast by all the activity that has come before. Such an overall design resembles that employed in the early Japanese narrative scroll paintings, involving the same principles of motion, harmony, and time. A narrative scroll, as it is unrolled, slowly fills and quickens with life, then tapers off at the end. As with these scroll paintings, increased movement in time permits Lady Murasaki to introduce a wider and still wider variety of personalities. The center portions of The Tale of Genji find room to include a number of charming vignettes, many of the same sort that make the scroll paintings themselves so vivid. Some of these characters are comic: the crusty old governor of Akashi, the governor of Hitachi, Ukifune’s boorish stepfather, or the outrageous Lady of Omi, an illegitimate child of To no Chujo. The humorous characters, in particular, are often included at the expense of the provincials and the lower classes, yet even the broadest sketches are carried out within the bounds of decorum and good taste. Lady Murasaki’s world seems replete. Yet not complete in itself. The scroll painters often suggested the presence of vague and evocative scenes (a glimpse of mountains through an open doorway, figures in a distant forest) beyond the area circumscribed by their central conception. A similar sensation of opening out exists in The Tale of Genji, in narrative terms. The author includes a certain number of additional characters who inhabit still different worlds from the one she presents in her novel. Often the attitudes of these characters are crucial in motivating the central personages of Genji; yet the reader is given only the briefest glimpse of them. Their very remoteness serves as a useful technique to create a sense of a still larger universe, in which the world inhabited by the major characters plays only a part. Genji’s deep attachments to Asagao and to Lady Rokujo, for example, are dwelt upon throughout the novel, yet the reader sees little of them. Like Genji, the reader is kept in a state of restless suspense concerning these unrealized relationships. Lady Rokujo’s hauteur, so important in establishing the tone of certain early sequences in the novel, is mirrored later by the attitudes of the icy First Princess, of whom the reader is given only the briefest glimpse. Through such devices, the psychological world inhabited by the characters in the novel takes on a movement, a shifting perspective, consonant with that found in the great works of narrative visual art created during the same period. Other general principles of structure—Lady Murasaki’s organic, symphonic technique, and her systems of parallels in the emotional responses of the various generations of her characters—have been discussed above in other contexts. Such a pattern of repetition and variation is not merely visible in the configurations of the characters she has created. Incidents too are repeated. Two different characters find themselves in the same circumstances. Each reacts differently. One encounter helps define the nature of the other. The effect is not unlike the reciprocity between the two juxtaposed images that make up a well-wrought haiku. One small example may suffice to suggest the technique. Early in the novel Genji, passionately in love with the mysterious Yugao, remains with her throughout the night. She lives in a rather ordinary quarter of the capital and his pride of possession is matched by his sense of wonder and surprise at the new and plebian world he discovers outside the confines of his decorous and ceremonious life at the palace. For Genji, all of life, even this experience, is an adventure:

260

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

What a queer place to be lying in! thought Genji, as he gazed round the garret, so different from any room he had ever known before. It must be almost day. In the neighboring houses people were beginning to stir, and there was an uncouth sound of peasant voices: ‘Eh! How cold it is! I can’t believe we shall do much with the crops this year.’ ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen about my carrying-trade,’ said another; ‘things look very bad.’ Then (banging on the wall of another house), ‘Wake up neighbour. Time to start. Did he hear, d’you think?’ and they rose and went off each to the wretched task by which he earned his bread. All this clatter and bustle going on so near her made the lady very uncomfortable, and indeed so dainty and fastidious a person must often in this miserable lodging have suffered things which would make her long to sink through the floor. But however painful, disagreeable, or provoking were the things that happened, she gave no sign of noticing them. That, being herself so shrinking and delicate in her ways, she could yet endure without a murmur the exasperating banging and bumping that was going on in every direction, aroused his admiration, and he felt that this was much nicer of her than if she had shuddered with horror at each sound. But now, louder than thunder, came the noise of the threshing-mills, seeming to near that they could hardly believe it did not come from out of the pillow itself. Genji thought his ears would burst.47 Toward the end of the novel, the introspective Kaoru also finds himself spending the night in a dilapidated house in the capital, talking with Ukifune. He too awakes to the sounds of early morning: It was beginning to grow light, but it seemed that in this part of the town the dawn was heralded, not by the crowing of cocks, but by the raucous voices of pedlars crying their wares—if indeed that was what they were doing, for the noises they made were entirely unintelligible. There seemed to be whole tribes of them. He looked out. There was something ghostly about them as, seen against the grey morning sky, they struggled along with strange packages piled high on their heads. Apart from everything else the unfamiliarity of the whole experience fascinated him. Presently he heard the watchman unlock the gates and go off.48 Kaoru and Genji undergo the same experience, yet Kaoru’s gentler response is quite in consonance with his own reflective nature. Genji is distracted by the energy of the moment; Kaoru, distant, uses that moment for reflection on what he sees. The pattern is repeated, the mood changed. Each incident is made appropriate for the character involved; each scene in turn helps build up the reader’s impressions of the nature of the character experiencing it. Such natural reciprocity of character and incident (to repeat Henry James’s phrase) remains a fundamental technique employed in the novel. Such a reciprocity is also echoed in the exquisite care with which Lady Murasaki has matched the emotional responses of her characters with the settings in which those characters find themselves. The curious and modest dwelling of Yugao, the mysterious house amidst the thickets, the palace at Uji, the country dwellings at Akashi, are rendered with a palpable atmosphere that reinforces the moods and characters of their inhabitants. Some of Lady Murasaki’s reinforcements naturally involve cultural overtones that are bound to escape Western readers. An elaborate analysis might be made, for example, of the consonance between the hours of the day, or of the changing seasons, and of the emotional colorations traditionally assigned them, as revealed in the shifting emotional states of her characters. Nagai Kafū’s highly developed sense of the literary possibilities of the intimate bond between mood and setting may well find its locus classicus in The Tale of Genji. Similar examples are numerous, and any careful reader of the text will begin to pick them up almost immediately.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

261

Symbols, often symbolic objects, also play an important role in unifying the text. The repeated appearance of such objects in Genji, like the snakes in The Setting Sun or the caged birds in A Portrait of Shunkin, creates a powerful cumulative effect. One telling example concerns the nademono (literally, ‘rubbing objects’), sacred images that, after use in purification rites, are thrown into a stream. The first mention of nademono in the text occurs in a playful way. Later, mention of these objects takes on an increasingly ominous significance. Kaoru is the first to mention the term. In the last book of the novel, ‘The Bridge of Dreams,’ he goes in search of Ukifune. He suspects that her sister Kozeri knows her whereabouts: …with tears in his eyes, yet half in jest, Kaoru recited a poem in which he wondered whether, just as the touch of the nademono cleanses the worshipper of his sin, so the mere presence of Ukifune at his side might not relieve him of his pain. But in her answer Kozeri reminded him that, after its use, the nademono is thrown into the stream—‘when hands enough have soiled it.’ ‘You will I am sure forgive my pointing out that the allusion was not very happily chosen.’49 The exchange seems to have little significance at that moment, other than perhaps to show Kozeri’s coolness of temperament and Kaoru’s slightly overwrought condition. Later, however, this brief conversation comes to take on powerful implications. Ukifune, hearing of the swiftness of the river flowing by her home, decides to drown herself. She has grown close to Kaoru; she feels herself soiled from her contact with Niou. Unwittingly she acts out the poetic exchange between Kaoru and her sister Kozeri. For his part, Kaoru comes to take cognizance of the power of the same image. After her disappearance, Kaoru thinks Ukifune to be dead. He reflects bitterly on the ultimate significance of his attachment to her. ‘Yes, it was by his doing that she had died, as surely as though he had cast her with his own hands into that hated stream.’50 Such variations on a motif, spaced throughout relevant sequences of the narrative, constitute a rhythm of great power. Whatever the techniques employed by Lady Murasaki in constructing her novel, she invariably applies them with a graceful deftness. The reader seldom feels himself manipulated; rather, he finds himself exploring with ever greater wonder a world the author has prepared for him to enter. Arthur Waley, in his Introduction to Book ii of his translation of Genji, characterizes the virtues of Lady Murasaki’s style as ‘elegance, symmetry, and restraint,’ an apt description that helps suggest in turn the discretion with which she has assembled her literary materials. Ragged ends, the structures underneath, are almost never visible, certainly not in Waley’s recreation, in any case. A close analysis of The Tale of Genji will yield many details of structure that will give ever greater pleasure to a careful reader. In the end, however, the chief profit to be gained from the novel doubtless lies in the experience of reading, rereading, and contemplating the psychological portraits Lady Murasaki has created. Her evocative sense of the mysteries of time and of its relationship to a growth toward self-identity are firmly and happily rooted in her depiction of dozens of personages, delineated with a simply extraordinary finesse, each with the profundity of a unique psychological world made comprehensible to the reader. The portraits are rendered so credible that the vast differences between the characters’ social and even philosophical outlook and our own quickly recede. We are left with a powerful underlying image of the realities of life, in all its possibilities, disappointments, and, certainly, its tragedies. One might speculate at length on the fact that no major character in the novel obtains what he or she desires. Genji achieves no high position, nor fathers any children whom he can fully admire. Murasaki, worse still, can give birth to no children at all, thus failing in her most important function to him. The failures of Kaoru and Niou have been remarked on above. Yugao dies as a young woman. Tamakatsura falls victim to an unhappy marriage, Kashiwagi dies after the illicit relationship that destroys him and Princess Nyosan. Agemaki, Kozeri, and

262

THE TALE OF GENJI AS A MODERN NOVEL

Ukifune all suffer terribly as their own temperaments, personalities, and inadequacies are placed at the mercy of Karou and Niou. The list is endless. Lady Murasaki goes on to suggest, however, levels of understanding beyond these individual tragedies. She dwells rather on the possibility of freeing the personality, through the cultivation of a sensibility able to accept and transcend individual pain. In this respect, The Tale of Genji is both the oldest Japanese novel and the newest. Most of the themes, techniques, and insights found in the novels and stories discussed elsewhere in this study can be found somewhere in this vast novel. And, however much we understand and enjoy those other works, we are always surprised and delighted to return to The Tale of Genji again and to find it, the more we come to know of the Japanese literary heritage, all the more evocative, all the more profound. Nothing prepares us for a masterpiece. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

The Manyōshū, tr. by Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai (New York, 1969), p. 224. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 237. Ibid., p. 10. Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, tr. by Arthur Waley (London, 1957), pp. 380–381. 1 have, incidentally, observed Waley’s spellings of the names of all the characters in the novel, even though some of his versions do not follow the standard procedures for romanization. From Yoshida Kenkō, ‘Essays in Idleness,’ tr. by G.B.Sansom, in Donald Keene, ed., Anthology of Japanese Lirerature (New York, 1955), p. 232. Genji, p. 30. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., p. 412. Ibid., p. 463. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 766. Ibid., p. 624. Ibid., p. 651. Ibid., p. 586. Ibid., p. 705. Ibid., pp. 512–513. One critical theory concerning the composition of The Tale of Genji suggests that the sections of the novel dealing with Tamakatsura were later added to the original text, either by Lady Murasaki herself or by another writer. Such an allegation is difficult to prove and, in any case, does not vitally effect the point I hope to suggest above. The placement of these sections on Tamakatsura are highly effective, whoever may have arranged them. Ibid., pp. 388–389. Ibid., p. 390. Ibid., p. 427. Ibid., p. 613. Ibid., p. 611. Ibid., p. 674. Ibid. Ibid., p. 971. Ibid., pp. 15–16. Ibid., p. 205.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

263

Ibid., p. 421. Ibid., p. 528. Ibid., p. 732. See Earl Miner, ‘Some Thematic and Structural Features of the Genji’ Monogatari,’ Monumenta Nipponica xxiv, 1–2 (1969), p. 8. Genji, p. 488. Ibid., p. 694. Ibid., p. 843. Ibid., p. 931. For a more detailed consideration of these questions, see Chapter IV of Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince (New York, 1964). Genji, p. 243. Ibid., p. 682. Morris, Shining Prince, p. 41. Genji, p. 208. Ibid., p. 487. Ibid., p. 653. Ibid., p. 751. Ibid., p. 829. Ibid., p. 762. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 990. Ibid., p. 972. Ibid., p. 1060.

First published in J.Thomas Rimer and Keiko McDonald, Teaching Guide for Japanese Literature on Film, The Japan Society N.Y., 1989

21 Japanese Literature: Four Polarities

I. INTRODUCTION ‘IF YOU WANT to understand Japanese business practices’ a distinguished Australian expert told a group of midwestern business executives several years ago, ‘skip all those fashionable books about how their corporations work. Read some haiku, some modern Japanese novels, The Tale of Genji. You have to learn who your colleagues are who live across the Pacific.’ I was very struck with these words, because I too have always felt that literature can provide us with the opportunity for a unique glimpse into the life, indeed into the soul, of another nation. Good literature, which can cast light into the interior world of the civilization in which and for which it was created, can give those of us who live in another culture a special point of access. Some of the terrain that defines this inner world will, in the case of Japan, be fairly familiar, as we and the Japanese, particularly in the modern period, share many assumptions in common. Some of what we will find in this tradition will be startling and strange. All of it will be useful, in the best sense of the word. How often, in our ordinary lives, do we find ourselves somehow inarticulate, unable to express in any authentic degree the realities of the ebb and flow of our own emotions, our deepest convictions? How much harder still is it to convey those feelings across cultures? Literature provides a specially privileged means to effect that exchange. The works of fiction, drama and poetry that make up the Japanese tradition, whether taken from the classic canon, the best achievements of the modern period, or from the fascinating experiments of the avant-garde, have the capacity to combine pleasure with understanding. II. FOUR POLARITIES Japanese literature, like Japanese culture itself, has a long history. For most of us in the English-speaking world, Shakespeare forms the basis for our understanding of what literature can accomplish, setting the measure against which both later and earlier writing is judged. He was a Renaissance writer; fewer readers go back to Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales dates from about 1400. My own exposure in high school to a modernized version of the earliest text in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, Beowulf left me bewildered by this glimpse into a mental world so entirely different, utterly foreign. That ancient chronicle was written in the eighth century and often strikes modern readers as rather crude and clumsy. From the vantage point of our

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

265

own literary history then, it seems remarkable that the tradition of Japanese literature had already produced by that time the first, and some would say greatest, anthology of Japanese poetry, The Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves (Man’yōshū), still read and enjoyed today. Most Western readers begin their exposure to Japanese literature by reading works from the modern period, usually novels. Yet the first successful Japanese experiments in writing fiction in such Western modes took place in the 1880s. The experiment to Westernize the traditional forms of Japanese literature is thus only a century old. Behind ihis hundred years of constant sometimes restless innovation, lie a thousand years of literary achievement, in which ideas and ideals of literature became firmly rooted in the minds and spirits of many, many generations of writers and readers alike. One way to understand modern Japanese literature is to grasp something of the traditions out of which it comes. Many of these older and unspoken assumptions guide, at least implicitly, the composition of contemporary drama, prose and poetry even today. During the thousand years or more that make up this long parade of precedent, various important changes and developments occurred. New attitudes and fresh possibilities began to emerge as traditional Japanese culture and society changed. Indeed, literature can often serve as a kind of repository for the history of the culture in which it was created, as layer after layer of response to changing historical and social circumstances usually leave their marks on these works of the creative imagination. In Japan, the tradition was always changing. One way to understand its nature, and the power of its example, is to observe the record of how those changes occurred. There are four sets of tensions or polarities, it seems to me, that provide Japanese literature with its unique qualities. They are important in the traditional literature, and they remain visible today. Sometimes the movement within one set of those polarities occurred very slowly. Sometimes the shifts came rapidly. Doubtless, these four sets of contrasting attitudes can be found in various other literary traditions around the world. Nevertheless, the convergence, the interlocking of these four sets of polarities helps make Japanese literature particularly rich and evocative. ONE: INTERIOR/EXTERIOR Here, prose fiction provides a particularly rich example. In some works of literature, the thrust is towards the interior, psychological and spiritual world of the characters portrayed. Others move outwards to stress a chronicle of the passage of external events with which the characters are involved. In the Western novel, many readers would agree that until the middle of the nineteenth century, outward events more often than not .took pride of place over interior responses. The exciting plot lines that make such classic nineteenthcentury novels as Les Misérables of Victor Hugo, Great Expectations of Charles Dickens, or the The Moonstone of Wilkie Collins so vivid as reading experiences provide their energy, their very pulse. The fascinating characters that people such books often interest us primarily because of what they do, and what is done to them. The same is true of popular fiction, and television, even today. With the coming to the fore a hundred years or so ago of such writers as Flaubert in France, Turgenev in Russia, and Henry James in the United States, these polarities began to shift towards the interior psychology of the characters: who they were and what they thought about themselves began to take precedence over any actions that they did or did not carry out. This shift from exterior to interior has been, in broad outline, a fairly recent development in the Western traditions of prose fiction. On the other hand, the Japanese tradition, remarkably enough, appears to have begun the other way around. Early works that purport to tell a story, such as the Tosa Diary (Tosa Nikki) of 935 AD, or the tenth century Tales of Ise (Ise Monogatari), nevertheless gave pride of place to the interior feelings and responses

266

JAPANESE LITERATURE: FOUR POLARITIES

of their respective narrators or characters. Here, for example, is a brief section from the Tosa Diary, which tells the story of a woman who accompanies the party of the Governor of Tosa (the traditional name for modern Kochi Prefecture), on the island of Shikoku, when he returns to Kyoto, the capital: As this was being said, we rowed until we came to a place called Ishizu, which had lovely pine groves. The shoreline stretched out in the distance, and we continued along it to the coast of Suniyoshi. Someone made a poem. Now that I see them, I have come to understand myself Ages-old the pines And green upon the Sumi Inlet, But I before ‘hem while with years.1 Here is a brief section from Tales of Ise, which relates an emotional response to a love affair: Once a very young man and a young girl fell in love, but since both were afraid of their parents, they concealed their relationship and finally broke it off altogether. Some years later the man sent the girl this poem— perhaps because one of them wanted to revive the old affair. There is, I suppose, no one Who would still remember, Now that years have passed And each has gone His own way2 Such combinations of narrated event and interior response give these works a remarkably modern effect. However exotic the settings, the emotions felt make these ancient texts approachable even now. Nowhere is this pleasure more evident than in reading the greatest of all the Japanese classic narratives, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), written in the eleventh century, a work often compared in the sophistication of its interiority to the French writer Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In both, the ability of these respective authors to conjure up the kinds of interior monologues by which the various characters respond to the vicissitudes of their own lives has long been recognized as literary art of the highest sort. Remarkably enough, Lady Murasaki created her chronicle of life in the Heian court some nine hundred years before Proust set out to capture turn-of-the-century Paris. In both, the sweep of the narrative and the emotional trajectories revealed in the ebb and flow of the thoughts expressed by the characters portrayed make a powerful effect on the reader. Here, by way of example, is a passage from Genji in which Prince Genji, the protagonist, finds a vulnerability within himself to the passage of time. The translation is by Arthur Waley: As he had promised to appear at a much earlier hour, Princess Nyogo had by now quite given up expecting him, and, much put out about this untimely visit, she bade her people send the porter to the western gate. The man made his appearance a moment later, looking wretchedly pinched and cold as he hastened through the snow with the key in his hand. Unfortunately the lock would not work, and when he went back to look for help no other manservant could anywhere be found. ‘It’s very rusty,’

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

267

said the old porter dolefully, fumbling all the while with the lock that grated with an unpleasant sound but would not turn. ‘There’s nothing else wrong with it, but it’s terribly rusty. No one uses that gate now.’ The words, ordinary enough in themselves, filled Genji with an unaccountable depression. How swiftly the locks rust, the hinges grow stiff on the doors that close behind us! ‘I am more than thirty,’ he thought; and it seemed to him impossible to go on doing things just as though they would last, as though people would remember… ‘And yet,’ he said to himself ‘I know that even at this moment the sight of something very beautiful, were it only some common flower or tree, might in an instant make life again seem full of meaning and reality’.3 With such a formidable model, subsequent Japanese narrative continued to privilege interior feelings over external events. As Japan entered the modern world, and social and political concerns came to occupy many writers, the polarity began to shift swiftly towards that of an exterior chronicle. Yet even so, in many of the great classics of the twentieth century, from Yasunari Kawabata’s 1947 Snow Country (Yukiguni) and Junichirō Tanizaki’s 1948 The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki) to Naoya Shiga’s 1937 A Dark Night’s Passing (Anya Koro) and Yukio Mishima’s 1956 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji), the emphasis continues to remain on the sometimes restless interor feelings of the central characters. The strength of this inward thrust of narrative over the centuries remains one crucial constant in the Japanese tradition. TWO: POETRY/PROSE Why did this emphasis on interiority develop as it did? A major reason surely lies in the centrality of poetry in the Japanese literary tradition. Most of us have been exposed to 17-syllable haiku verse, but these represent relatively new blossoms on the very old and venerable tree of Japanese poetry. The earliest and most treasured examples of early Japanese literature remain poetry rather than prose or drama. The lyric response to life that such poetry captures reveals an intimacy that appears to modern readers as highly personal. Again, the Western tradition sends us back to the poetry of Shakespeare, which often involves grand rhetoric, the expression of powerful personalities, and the clash of wills. Early Japanese poetry, on the other hand, while sometimes created in the social environment of the court for public purposes, was, rhetorically speaking, most often couched in terms of a personal and lyrical response to nature. The way in which this situation came about goes far to explain the development of the persistent strain of lyricism in all of Japanese literature. The movement back and forth between the polarities of poetry and prose created a kind of reciprocal influence on both. Japanese poetry began to take on certain narrative functions, while prose began to develop certain lyrical qualities. The development of this central poetic tradition tells much about certain assumptions prevalent in Japanese culture as well. In a very general way, it can be said that Japanese literature, at least in its written form, became possible because of the Chinese model. In the fourth and fifth centuries AD, for example, Japan might have been defined in our contemporary parlance as a ‘third world countly.’ That, certainly, is how the occasional Chinese visitors of the period looked on Japan, finding the inhabitants somewhat mysterious and, of course, illiterate. From that period onwards, increased exposure to China, either directly or through the Korean peninsula, brought Japan a new religion, Buddhism, and an ability to compose written texts for the first time, using the medium of Chinese characters. As those of us who study Japanese today are all too well aware, the ultimate linguistic marriage between these two quite dissimilar languages was very awkward. This amalgamation required various stages. By the seventh and eighth centuries, however, many of those in court society had actually learned to express themselves with eloquence in two languages. The first was classical

268

JAPANESE LITERATURE: FOUR POLARITIES

Chinese, which was used, predominantly by men, for a variety of public and ceremonial functions in somewhat the same manner in which medieval European monks used Latin. The second involved written composition in native Japanese, for which a written syllabary had now been developed, a kind of phonetic alphabet in which the spoken Japanese could be transcribed. Learning Chinese was difficult and time-consuming, but native phonetics were easily mastered, a phenomenon that opened up the possibilities of litera;y expression to men and women alike. There developed as well a sense that the world of abstract ideas might best be expressed in Chinese, but the realm of authentic feeling required the use of Japanese. The oldest document with any literary material included is the Record of Ancient Matters (Kojiki) dated 712. The collection is a compilation of ancient legends and historical facts, often dealing with the consolidation of the imperial dynasty. Among these shards and pieces of myth and history comes the beginning of Japanese poetly. The first ‘poem’ in the language, in fact, was put in the mouth of a godlike hero from Shintō mythology, Susano-o: When this great deity first built the palace of Suga, clouds rose from there. So he sang a song. The song: Eightfold fence of Izumo where eight clouds rise, I make an eightfold fence to surround my wife, That eightfold fence!4 This is hardly a profound poetic utterance by any standards, and in fact this little verse is scarcely intelligible out of context. Yet the poem and its prose introduction provide a first rude sample of the dialectical relationship that was to drive the development of both prose and poetry down to this century and beyond. The god’s poem was composed of 31 syllables which can be broken down into a pattern of 5–7–5–7–7. This brief form came to be referred to as a waka (Japanese poem) or tanka (short poem). Both terms were doubtless coined in order to distinguish the form from Chinese poetry, which was widely read and appreciated in the Japanese court. Chinese poetry could be composed in long forms. Therefore, the waka form was defined as being both Japanese and brief. This is not to say that longer poetry was never written in early Japan. The most successful experiments were included in The Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves. Some of the longer poems by such great early poets as Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (fl.680–700) and Otomo Yakamochi (718–785) are of great beauty and power. On the whole, however, such early forms were not retained. By the time of the compilation of the next great anthology of traditional Japanese poetry, the Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (Kokinshū) around 905, the short waka form had come to predominate. Some of the reasons for this were surely linguistic. The regular metrics and easy availability of rhyme in Japanese, for example, provided few opportunities for any sustained interest in the kinds of rhetorical devices available in, say, English or Chinese. Then, too, an intriguing sort of democracy of poetic possibilities was developing. Members of the court, men and women alike, were expected to possess the capacity to compose poetry as a social skill. A relatively simple form, such as the waka, was thus extremely suitable. The importance of poetry of this sort is crucial. Prose can provide the context in which these brief lyrical statements can be fully understood. Even in that simple poem by Susano-o, prose sentences introduce the 31 syllable utterance and so prepare the reader to understand what follows. In the Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern, a sense of context is constantly provided, either by ordering poems into a sequence within a

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

269

general subject (spring, love, cherry blossoms, and the like) or by providing prose ‘frames’ that give crucial information. Take, for example, the following: On gazing at the moon in China I gaze across the endless plains of sky can that moon be the one that comes from the rim of Mount Mikasa in Kasuga This story is told of this poem: Long ago, Abe no Nakamaro was sent by the Mikado to China to study. For many years he was unable to return, but, when at last he was to accompany an imperial envoy back, the Chinese held a farewell banquet at a place by the sea called Mei. It is said that this poem was composed when night ftll and the moon rose bewitchingly.5 Try reading the poem by itself. The meaning is not altogether clear. The prose and the poetry must be read and understood together. The poem ‘justifies’ the background provided through the prose explanation. In more popular traditional Japanese literature, medieval tales for example, prose became the ascendant of these two contrasting elements, while in more highly refined forms, poetry retained its pride of place, in virtually all forms, an emotional climax called forth the resources of poetry. Poetry provided the vehicle for the expression of the greatest truths of the human condition. Those truths, in turn, were those that could be given lyrical utterance: introspective, personal, spontaneous reactions to the world of nature and of the interior self. This principle can be seen in a striking fashion in the medieval Noh drama, that early and highly sophisticated form of Japanese theatre that was to form the model for all subsequent forms of dramatic expression. The form is highly poetic and provides a unique synthesis of mime, chanting, music, dancing, acting and other related arts in order to create what has been called in this century a ‘total theatre.’ At the heart of many of those plays lies a famous waka poem, often one already known to the audience from a previous familiar source. The events of the play and the characters who meet or re-enact them are woven around this poem like layers of an onion. As the drama begins, a secondary character, often a traveling priest or monk, is, like the audience, at the outer layer. Then, one layer after another is stripped away until, at the moment of highest tension, the actual poem is recited. The complete Noh play thus provides not only Shakespeare’s clash of incident and personality but rather a crucial context that can justify the implicit emotional power of the poem. Such a structure of discovery, when the reader or spectator begins on the outside and works his or her way towards the central concern of the writer is a powerful one that, in various forms, continues in many great works of modern literature. Soseki Natsume’s great 1914 novel Kokoro, for example, begins with a student who comes to know an older man he refers to as sensei, the Japanese word for ‘teacher.’ The sensei becomes the young man’s mentor. The student—and the reader—eventually penetrates various layers to the core of the older man’s life, and in the end, that core, in the form of a long suicide note, becomes known. That note, like the classical poem in the Noh, reveals the depth of the inner truth. In the case of a writer like Yasunari Kawabata, too, his lyric juxtapositions of exterior vision and interior sentiment produce similar effects. Some Japanese critics have suggested, for example, that the novel Snow Country is in fact constructed like a Noh play in prose, in which the reader is led closer and closer to the

270

JAPANESE LITERATURE: FOUR POLARITIES

elusive personality of the geisha Komako. Then, too, the construction of his 1954 Sound of the Mountain (Yama no Oto) resembles that of a haiku journal. This close relationship between poetry and prose is nowhere more fully realized than in the travel diaries of the great haiku poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), considered by many Japanese to represent the highest accomplishment of traditional Japanese literature. In particular, his posthumously published diary The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi) is read by most high school students in Japan, and the poet’s tracks through the remote regions of northern Japan are still followed by many contemporary Japanese as a literary pilgrimage. Bashō developed the haiku form (17 syllables in a 5–7–5 sequence) from a popular pastime into a vehicle able to express an astounding variety of emotions, ranging from wry humor to powerful statements on the human condition. Bashō’s masterful prose is so finely wrought that in many passages it approaches the language of poetry itself. Such refined nuance is particularly difficult to translate. Yet even in English, the beautiful reciprocity of supple prose and elegant poetry is apparent: At last I reached my native village in the beginning of September, but I could not find a single trace of the herbs my mother used to grow in front of her room. The herbs must have been completely bitten away by the frost. Nothing remained the same in my native village. Even the faces of my brothers had changed, with wrinkles and white hair, and we simply rejoiced to see each other alive. My eldest brother took out a small amulet bag, and said to me as he opened it, ‘See your mother’s frosty hairs. You are like Urashima, whose hair turned white upon his opening a miracle box.’ After remaining in tears for afew moments, I wrote: Should I hold them in my band They will disappear In the warmth of my tears, Icy strings of frost.6 This movement in and out of lyric insights forms the pattern of movement in much Japanese prose. Modern readers, for example, regard the hilarious stories of Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) on the foibles of city life in the Tokugawa period as ‘novels.’ Yet these tales involve many of the same literary devices and techniques developed in the world of haiku. The great theatrical masterpieces of the same period, such as the drama of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724) move powerfully from prose to poetry in their climactic scenes. In the 1720 The Love Suicides at Amijima (Shinju Ten no Amijima), which forms the basis for the film Double Suicide, the early scenes are full of the slang and banter of ordinary Osaka city life. Through his narrator and his poetic language, however, Chikamatsu is able to lift the level of his vision to tragic grandeur. A particularly striking example of this modulation between poetry and prose can be observed in Kawabata’s novel Snow Country, where narrative scenes alternate with moments of poetic insight that can propel the psychological and spiritual aspects of the story along. Here is one example. Toward the end of the story, Shimamura, who has lingered in the mountains with Komako, the geisha, has a sudden vision of her: He leaned against the brazier, provided against the coming of the snowy season, and thought how unlikely it was that he would come again once he had left. The innkeeper had lent him an old Kyoto teakettle, skillfully inlaid in silver with flowers and birds, and from, it came the sound of wind in the pines. He could make out two pine breezes, as a matter of fact, a near one and afar one. Just beyond the far breeze he heard faintly the tinkling of a bell. He put his ear to the kettle and listened. Far away, where the bell tinkled on, he suddenly saw Komako’s feet, tripping in time with the bell. He drew back. It was time to leave.7

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

271

An image, not an idea, precipitates the action. Poetry, supported by prose, can reveal its own kind of truth. That truth often prevails. Even in the most Westernized fiction, where prose is firmly in the ascendant, there are moments when introspection and lyric insights take command, leading the reader to the author’s highest level of vision. Novels like Kōbō Abe’s 1964 The Face of Another (Tanin no Kao), an existentialist fable on modern identity, or Kenzaburo Oe’s 1967 The Silent Cry (Man’en Gannen no Futtoboru) with its revolutionary politics, reveal mingled in their complex plots moments of introspection and wonder that make such novels, for Western readers, stories that reveal poetic, even mystic, resonances. Through them, indeed, we can intuit their peculiar power over us. THREE: ARISTOCRATIC/POPULAR A third polarity or duality so important to the Japanese literary tradition occurs between aristocratic and popular attitudes and traditions. In one way, the history of Japanese culture, very broadly defined, reveals increasingly popular encroachments in all forms of expression on an early set of aristocratic ideals. In the Heian period, virtually all cultural manifestations, from Buddhism to art, architecture and poetry, were centered in the court aristocracy. With the destruction of the court’s hegemony during and after the disastrous civil wars at the end of the Heian period, those values began to spread through ever-greater segments of society. The functioning of the relationship between these aristocratic and popular traditions is certainly, from an American point of view, highly unusual and significant. One great literary work in which this process can be observed is the colorful and moving The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari), composed during the medieval period when the military clans were on the rise after the court’s power was eclipsed in those first wars between two powerful families, the Minamoto and the Taira (the term ‘Heike,’ incidentally, is the pronunciation of the two characters ‘Taira family’). This lengthy chronicle, as complex in its way as The Tale of Genji, comes as close to an epic as any work in Japanese literature, since it began as a text to be recited and gradually developed many variants. The version usually read now is taken from that performed by a celebrated intinerant performer named Kakiuchi in 1371. What a prodigious feat to have remembered a text of this length and complexity! The Tale of the Heike makes absorbing, often thrilling reading. Many of the stories recounted there formed the basics for many later works of all varieties, particularly for dramas in the Noh and Kabuki repertories. Indeed, Yoshitsune (1159–1189), the young Minamoto general glorified in various incidents in the Heike, became, soon after his death, the grand romantic hero of medieval Japan, as the incidents in the Heike made clear. These incidents were adapted again and again in later periods. Some of the stories recorded in the Heike show quite clearly the way in which values moved from court to commoner, city to country. Members of the Taira clan, which served the court in the capital itself, represent in a sense the villains of the story because of their political plottings. There are many incidents recounted of attempts to overthrow their despotic power. Yet they are unequivocally admired by their rural enemies, the Minamoto clan, for the beauty of their courtly ways. That such aristocratic values found spontaneous and universal acceptance seems culturally remarkable. I can think of few other instances in other cultures where those involved in fighting their battles have admired their enemies so much. In one famous scene, the rustic warrior Kumagai, who has taken the young prince Atsumori captive, finds the boy’s flute and muses to himself: He must have been one of the people I heard making music inside the stronghold just before dawn. There are tens of thousands of riders in our eastern armies, but I am sure none of them has brought a flute to the battlefield. These court nobles are refined men!8

272

JAPANESE LITERATURE: FOUR POLARITIES

Forced to kill the boy, Kumagai, horrified by the war, gives up his prestigious position and becomes a Buddhist monk. Modern observers of Japanese culture often remark on its holistic nature, on the power of the shared, often implicit cultural values that can transcend class and educational level. These same characteristics can be seen in the Heike, as I have pointed out. There are at least two factors that make these shared assumptions possible, and they constitute as well the reasons why the Heike, even in translation, can provide such a gripping experience for readers even today. The first is an attitude that the past is better than the present. In the Heike, there is a sustained element of an elegiac, nostalgic vision of the past, the great past of the Heian court, when life was fuller, better than the present. The ‘golden age’ had passed. Just as the Romans often looked back to the great period of the Greeks, so the medieval and later Japanese looked back to the Heian period as a great moment in their civilization, one that might never come again. The second element that bound the culture together was a wide-spread sense, which followed the spread of a more popular Buddhism in medieval Japan, that the world was basically a place of sorrow, a temporary illusion to be replaced by the ultimate reality of a Nirvana. In the earliest period of Japanese history, the attitudes of the traditional ‘Way of the Gods’ making up the Shinto religion put greatest emphasis on the vitality and purity of one’s own present life. Death represented pollution and decay. Now, six centuries or so later, these values were reversed. In this attitude of pessimism lurked a strange sort of equality. None, high or low, could escape the baleful conditions of life on this earth. After all, even the power of the court itself had been virtually destroyed in the disastrous 1185 civil wars. Nothing was certain. It was no wonder that all classes of Japanese society seemed united in their respect for what had been, in objective fact, an extremely selective and aristocratic past. This pessimism, in turn, allowed for a more realistic assessment of life, socially as well as spiritually, than had been possible in the Heian period, which, in court circles at least, showed a tendency to self-glorification. That respect continued on through vast social changes. In the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), the culture of the townsmen became a predominant force. Life now began to center on the pleasures and opportunities of this life. Social classes were legislated. Although the merchants were put at the bottom of the ladder by the ruling Shogunate, they nevertheless began to amass the kind of wealth, and the leisure that went with it, that made the growth of the arts possible. Japanese literature during the period also tended to develop along class lines, particularly in the theatre, where puppet Bunraku plays and the Kabuki theatre became the sorts of entertainment aimed at, and paid for, by the merchant classes. Yet even there, the heros and heroines of those dramas were often drawn from austere Noh dramas, many of those based on incidents in The Tale of Genji or The Tale of the Heike. The leisure time of these merchant audiences was sometimes spent incorporating the aristocratic arts into their busy and far more plebeian lives. To do so was, at least in part, to elevate their social status, to incorporate values from the past into the present. In fiction as well, classical references remained an important starting point. Those who read, for example, Saikaku’s 1686 The Life of an Amorous Woman (Koshoku Ichidai Onna) in the delightful yet scholarly translation of Ivan Morris will find that many of the copious notes accompanying the text explain the often aristocratic cultural baggage Saikaku considered appropriate for his readers to carry around with them. The same was true for haiku poetry, which became so important to the period. Bashō paid consistent homage to his sources from the early, high traditions. The past, then, aristocratic and in some ways austere, and the artistic and cultural lessons to be learned from it, continued to form and shape the expectations of writers and readers alike. It may thus come as no surprise that Kawabata, in accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, could stress the influence on him as a modern man of the Japanese classics, indicating that he had read the Heian classics as a child and that The Tale of Genji has been a profound influence on his own writing. The other great novelist of this

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

273

interwar period, Junichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965), spent a couple of years rendering the Genji into modern Japanese and paid his own homage twice, once in his novel, The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki), written largely during the war as an evocation of the peaceful time that existed a generation before, and once in his erotic and disquieting set of variations on a theme in his cunningly created 1959 short story ‘The Bridge of Dreams’ (‘Yume no Ukihashi’). The movement between these polarities of aristocratic and popular cultural attitudes has, in one sense, provided a means toward a refinement in popular sensibilities. This shift has been accomplished by the aid of the classics which made it possible for the older sensiblities to inform and render more sophisticated those of a new generation. When, for example, the gauche and shy Kazuko, the heroine of Osamu Dazai’s 1947 nihilistic novel The Setting Sun (Shayō), is forced to go to work as a kind of occasional day laborer towards the end of the war, she is given kind treatment by a lieutenant in an incident that eerily resembles the encounter between a similarly shy and introspective woman with a gentle courtier in the famous Heian diary, the Sarashina Nikki, (called in its English translation As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams). Eerie indeed, until Dazai openly mentions the diary itself a few pages later. In every civilization, art is as often made of older art as much as it is of life. Given the nature of the Japanese heritage, it is no wonder that such introspective and understated themes and values have tended to prevail in so many works of serious literature in all periods. FOUR: FICTION/FACT Truth may be stranger than fiction, as the expression goes. In the Japanese tradition, at any rate, real facts have often been privileged over works created entirely out of the imagination. From early on in the tradition, for example, what we now call narrative fiction was frowned upon in certain circles as useless, even dangerous lies. Part of the reason for such a prejudice may have to do with certain attitudes prevalent in the Chinese literary tradition that influenced Japanese literature so profoundly in its formative stages. For the Chinese of the classical period, poetry and the essay represented the art of the gentleman; stories and tales were worthy only of the marketplace. There were many reasons for such attitudes in China, some of them involving the distance between the classical and spoken languages, some due to certain Confucian pieties. Suffice to say that when the Japanese unwittingly absorbed some of these prejudices, they did so without a full understanding of the Chinese background. Indeed, had they absorbed those attitudes more fully, there might well have been no Tale of Genji for us to read. Fiction, however, had its powerful defenders. One of the best places to see these tensions at work is in the text of Genji itself. It is clear from the conversations among the various characters in the novel that many in the Heian court read fictional narratives with great enthusiasm. A number of titles of stories and tales are mentioned in these discussions; now lost, they were obviously once staples. In a long and celebrated discussion over the merits of fiction, Prince Genji himself defends the art of the imagination. The conversation he holds with his ward Tamakatsura is far too long to reproduce here, but the following extract is telling: He smiled and went on: ‘But I have a theory of my own a bout what this art of the novel is, and hou’ it came into being. To begin with, it does not simply consist in the author’s telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he had passed through himself but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart. Again and again something in his own life or in that

274

JAPANESE LITERATURE: FOUR POLARITIES

around him will seem to the writer so important that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, he feels, when men do not know about it.’ (Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, p. 501) So Genji defends art over nature. Some later writers in the Buddhist tradition attempted to defend fictional narrative as a kind of ‘accommodation’ (hōben), in which the story was created as a kind of sweetener to make the moral lesson of the writer easier for the reader to swallow. This line of argument is not unfamiliar in the English tradition. After all, Chaucer made use of the same principles in The Canterbury Tales. Nevertheless, this ongoing tension between the polarities of fiction and fact often provided writers with the inclination to use factual characters and incidents as a basis for their stories, perhaps as an unconscious means of grounding, validating their own art. The further development of these assumptions is particularly important in the Tokugawa period. Stories and plays began to be wedded ever more firmly to a basis in fact. There were, it seems to me, two sorts or varieties of ‘facts’ that those writers chose for this self-validating process. The first of them involved the use of actual contemporary incidents as a basis for works of the creative imagination. To take a particularly obvious example, Chikamatsu, in writing his plays on domestic themes, took his often sensational plots and characters from what we might now define as ‘local news events,’ often vying with rival playwrights in order to dramatize the sensational material as quickly as possible. Like rival accounts of the Watergate revelations rushed to press, Tokugawa playwrights transformed scandals into dramatic form with the utmost speed possible, artificially re-arranging events in order to excite and titillate their audiences. However overwrought the resulting dramas, the audiences knew that the outline of the story itself, based on the facts, was accurate. In a play like The Love Suicides at Amijima, for example, Chikamatsu actually conducted interviews in order to obtain certain details correctly. As the filmed version of Love Suicides makes clear, however, the story possesses another level of significance for spectators in our time, who may find themselves more involved in the symbolic and mythical qualities inherent in the story. This grounding in actual fact, however, should not suggest that Chikamatsu and his contemporaries were writing what we might call in modern terms realistic drama. Rather, the realistic elements allowed the writer to use his own imagination in order to develop the story’s psychological and religious elements that the headlines, as it were, left out. Chikamatsu’s question to himself is not what happened—that was a given —but how and why it happened. Every aspect of his literary and dramatic skill was marshalled in order to create the kind of drama that, as he once put it, ‘lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal.’9 In a similar fashion, the comic tales of Saikaku, as I mentioned earlier, grew from a close observation of the details of everyday life, combined with a sense of the foibles of his own contemporaries from many walks of life. Saikaku, as a comic artist, adopts, like Chikamatsu, the art of the ‘slender margin,’ but his distancing techniques stress the amusing and ironic, producing a smile rather than a tear. Without a firm base in the observed details of ordinary life, however, there would be little means to create that distance. The second sort of ‘facts’ in which writers tended to ground their art is at once more subtle and complex, the ‘facts’ of history itself. As I mentioned previously, the use of historical figures in imaginary situations goes back at least as far as The Tale of the Heike. By the Tokugawa period, the practice had become firmly entrenched indeed. However fanciful the treatment given to historical characters represented on the stage, for example, that they once actually existed gave their utterances and postures credibility to audiences. In fact, in Chikamatsu’s times, his historical dramas, in which he chose protagonists from Japanese and Chinese history, were far more popular than his domestic dramas of contemporary life. His play. The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusenya Kassen), written in 1715, was one of the most popular dramas written in the

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

275

history of Japanese theatre. Donald Keene, who has translated the text, quotes scholarly estimates that over 240,000 persons, a high percentage of the population of the city of Osaka, witnessed the play. On some occasions, history was used to mask contemporary concerns, particularly in areas of political sensitivity where potential Shogunate censorship was involved. The most famous of all traditional dramas, The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon Chūshingura), provides a prime example of this process. Written in 1748, almost half a century after the sensational political scandal that threatened to bring down the whole regime, the three playwrights who composed this lengthy drama in eleven acts moved the action backwards by four centuries. The sensational actions portrayed on stage were thus given a double sanction, the first from a relative fidelity to the occurrences that took place at the time of the original 1703 vendetta, the second from the authority of the historical trappings, which turned incident into myth. There exist many kinds of history, including literary history. The existence of old texts became in itself a principle for artistic validation, and a re-rendering of these older materials provided access to still another sort of ‘truth.’ The effectiveness of this principle can easily be seen in the travel diaries of the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō, mentioned earlier. Basho travelled in the footsteps of the great poets and writers he most respected and loved. Perhaps the greatest work written in the literary/historical vein is the collection Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu Monogatari), published in 1776, the work of that consummate storyteller Ueda Akinari. Each of the nine stories in the collection deals with some aspect of the supernatural. Written in an elegant style, the work shows another aspect of Akinari’s brilliant and fanciful imagination. The tales have continued to resonate ever since. Lafcadio Hearn, the American writer resident in Japan towards the end of the nineteenth century, loved the stories and adapted some of them in his own work. The great film director Kenji Mizoguchi used elements from several of them in his 1953 homage to Akinari entitled Ugetsu. Akinari, however, is always careful, perhaps puzzlingly so to the modern reader, to document his sources. He is able to indulge in composing these works of peculiar poetic fancy he seems to be saying, because his renditions are actually retelling ‘facts,’ old Japanese and Chinese tales. In retelling them, he remains faithful to their ‘truth’ just as Chikamatsu was faithful to the outlines of the life of an historical figure like Coxinga or the other heroes he chose for his dramas. Like Chikamatsu, Akinari’s own stories often make use of their antecedents as only the slightest of pretexts, depending fully on the workings of his own imagination. Still, that anchor in history, literal or literary, remained a vital principle. With the opening of Japan, and the beginnings of a new society, the felt need to relate the realm of the imagination to the truth of contemporary or historical events continued to be important. The great modern novelist Tōson Shimazaki (1878–1943), for example, composed his lengthy masterpiece Before the Dawn (Yoakemae, 1929–35) on the basis of his close study of the lives of his father and his friends in order to document the enormous changes that had come to Japan during the end of the Tokugawa period and the opening of the country. Ōgai Mori (1862–1922), another giant of the period, wrote several novels on Meiji life, such as his 1915 Wild Geese (Gan), then went on to compose toward the end of his life a number of remarkable evocations of actual personalities in earlier periods of Japanese history, using the distance between the lives of his characters and his own in order to establish his own ‘thin line between the real and the unreal.’ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) a brilliant teller of Poe-like stories often took for his sources medieval tales, including the well-known ‘Rashō Gate’ (‘Rashōmon’), which along with his ‘Yabu no naka’ formed the basis for the famous 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa. In the postwar period, prominent writers such as Yukio Mishima used both contemporary events, such as the burning of a treasured Kyoto temple by a crazed acolyte in his 1956 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji), or political scandal in After the Banquet (Utage no Ato, 1960). He also incorporated historical figures and events into his work, ranging from the family of the Marquis de Sade of eighteenth-century

276

JAPANESE LITERATURE: FOUR POLARITIES

France in his 1965 play Madame de Sade (Sado Kōshaku Fujin) to the Japanese political figures of the 1880s in his celebrated play Rokumeikan (1957). The word, incidentally, is the name of a building, sometimes translated as ‘Deer Horn Hall,’ built to give parties for foreign dignitaries during the period. (The play is as yet untranslated.) Mishima uses such facts, but merely to ground his evocations of his own highly personal and idiosyncratic vision. In one contemporary masterpiece, Kenzaburō Ōe’s 1967 The Silent Cry, the author illustrates the psychic power that the validation of history can provide for the lives of his characters. Takashi, the younger brother, brilliant, peculiar, and a revolutionary himself, continually attempts to measure himself and his success against the life of his own grandfather, who had evidently led an uprising in the same rural village just before the beginning of the Meiji period. Takashi’s own self-understanding, and self-forgiveness, is always measured, sometimes tragically, against this precedent, and it becomes his burden, his quest to seek out the precise nature of those historical facts. A work like Masuji Ibuse’s 1966 Black Rain (Kuroi Ame) deals with one of the most heart-rending facts of our century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, yet in his novel too, introspection renders the facts sufficiently palatable to permit the creation of a work of art. For Western readers, this reciprocity of fiction and fact can be quite helpful in providing an important sense of authenticity, if you will, for what we read ourselves. The grounding of literary works in the specifics of society and history can provide us in turn with a necessary and useful background for entering the unusual worlds that are the property of the best Japanese writers. III. JAPANESE LITERATURE: LANGUAGE AS FORM So intensely you had been waiting for lemon, In the sad, white, light deathbed you took that one lemon from my hand and bit it sharply with your bright teeth. A fragrance rose the color of topaz. Those heavenly drops of juice flashed you back to sanity. Your eyes, blue and transparent, slightly smiled. You grasped my hand, how vigorous you were. There was a storm in your throat but just at the end Chieko found Chieko again, all life’s love into one moment fallen. And then once as once you did on a mountaintop, you let out a great sigh and with it your engine stopped. By the cherry blossoms in front of your photograph today, too, I will put a cool fresh lemon.

(Sato and Watson, From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry, p. 469) So wrote one of the great modern poets of Japan, Kōtarō Takamura (1883–1956). This poem, entitled ‘Lemon Elegy,’ describes the death of his beloved wife in 1938. In Hiroaki Sato’s eloquent translation, the

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

277

poem is as moving in its new English dress as in the original. Emotions such as these are familiar to us from our own lives and our own traditions of self-expression. In this centuty, Japan, her writers included, has become an enthusiastic participant in world culture. Takamura, himself the son of a sculptor, went to study art in New York and Paris, fell under the spell of Rodin, and returned to Japan in 1909 to lead the avantgarde movement in the visual arts. For some, the blending of cultures was difficult to achieve. Sōseki Natsume, perhaps the finest writer of the modern period, whose novels range from the amusing 1906 Botchan to powerful critiques on a modernizing Japan, such as his 1910 And Then (Sorekara) to the bleak and penetrating Kokoro, mentioned above, lived in London from 1900 to 1903, where he learned, as he later wrote, of the pain of being a Japanese in an alien world. Other writers of the period, such as Tōson Shimazaki, felt the same difficulties and a similar pain of separation from the past. In the postwar period, Japanese and Western cultures began to draw even closer together. By now, such writers as Mishima and Kōbō Abe have earned a wide and loyal readership around the world. The growing ascendancy of popular culture has placed the contemporary Japanese arts, including literature, in the center of what is becoming an international marketplace. This phenomenon is new, however. If Japanese culture and literature have been part of our consciousness for a few decades, the preceding thousand years of culture require for us, as for many young Japanese who have grown up in the new world of popular culture, a certain amount of transposition. Both in language and literary form, the differences are greater. Take, for example, the case of the literary language employed at various periods in Japan’s long history. Until the example of Western literature became known in Japan, a kind of literary language was used which, although quite beautiful and effective on its own terms, was not intended to be responsive to ordinary speech. In fact, ordinary spoken Japanese was seldom written down as such. This situation, of course, prevails in every literary tradition. You need only pick up a copy of a supposedly ‘realistic’ novel by Henry James, say, The Portrait of a Lady, and read out loud a page or so of the conversations to realize that the author actually employs a highly stylized syntax and vocabulary. Still, their words are quite recognizable in terms of our contemporary speech patterns. Modern Japanese fiction is now as close to the rhythms and patterns of the spoken language as is the literary language of our own tradition. The older literary language, however, with its high rhetorical devices, is now particularly hard to comprehend when spoken, since there is not sufficient time for the listener to reflect on its complex overtones of meaning. I was rather startled several years ago at a performance in Tokyo of an eighteenth-century Kabuki play to notice that a high proportion of the audience wore rented transistor headsets. A delegation from Hawaii? ‘No,’ I was told by an usher, ‘these are regular patrons, listening not in English or French but in modern Japanese, so they can follow the plot.’ Works written in still earlier periods cause greater problems. My first introduction to Japanese classical literature, in the late 1950s, came in the form of an elegant Arthur Waley translation of Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, given to me by an elderly Japanese couple who had themselves lived in London and wanted to share with me their enthusiasm for that masterpiece. Greatly touched, I told them how much more they must have enjoyed reading it in the original. ‘Oh certainly not!’ they replied, ‘We can’t read a word of it! Mr. Waley has always been our guide.’ Anyone who has some knowlege of modern Japanese knows, looking at the bewildering original, exactly what they meant. I mention the difficulties of the classical language as a reminder that, when we read in translation, we are perforce making do with an adaptation. Reading modern Japanese literature in English may, on the whole, require no more of a transposition, a danger, than reading French or Russian literature in English. Nuances are inevitably lost, values occasionally shifted, but the same sense of the original, with a good translator,

278

JAPANESE LITERATURE: FOUR POLARITIES

can be conveyed. Reading works from the classical tradition in translation smooths them out and so risks making them, in a sense, falsely familiar. The transpositions required remove, inevitably, something rich and strange from our experience. Transformations figure as well in matters of literary form. Although, as I indicated before, modern Japanese literature tends to employ genres used and appreciated around the world, some of the older classics are composed in forms that make them excitingly different from those in use in our Western tradition. Take, for example, The Tale of Genji. I have avoided using the word ‘novel’ to describe it, because the associations we have with our English term are at some variance with the term employed in the title monogatari, ‘telling of something.’ Actually, the word ‘tale,’ employed by the translators, is perhaps a better, if far from perfect, English equivalent. True enough, certain features of the monogatari form remind us of our own traditions of the novel, but the differences themselves are also revealing. Indeed, a criticism made of the Waley version is that, in making his translation he used a model implicit in his mind of the modern Western psychological novel, thereby perhaps heightening certain passages to an unrealistic degree. Another traditional Japanese literary form that puzzles and intrigues modern readers is the literary diary, or nikki. Some of the most evocative works written in the Heian period and later are composed in this form. The Tosa Diary and As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams were mentioned earlier, and there are a half-dozen others of equal accomplishment available now in English. Perhaps most famous of all is An Account of My Hut (Hojoki) by Kamo no Chōmei (1153–1216), which has long come to constitute a fundamental statement on Buddhist aesthetics. It is read in every school today, and most Japanese will recognize, if nothing else, some of its beautiful opening phrases: The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration…which will be first to go, the master or his dwelling? One might just as well ask this of the dew on the morning glory. The dew may fall and the flower remain—remain, only to be withered by the morning sun. The flower may fade before the dew evaporates, but though it does not evaporate, it waits not the evening. (Keene, An Anthology of Japanese Literature, from the Earliest Era to the Mid-nineteenth Century, pp. 197–198) Most of these literary diaries are cast as first person narratives, and the modern reader therefore may usually assume one of two things. On one hand, it may appear that they are ‘true,’ that is, that the events described in them actually occurred, and that the diary serves as a kind of report. On the other hand, the reader may decide that the texts are fiction, like a novel written in the first person. Actually, neither response accurately portrays the quality of the originals, which usually shift between fact and fantasy, art and life. Such forms open up new modes of expression if we, as readers, do not flatten them out by imposing too firmly our own preconceptions. In the theatre too, we tend, however inadvertently, to impose implicitly our modern standards on a bewildering variety of dramatic forms. In our own Western tradition, we use the word ‘drama’ or ‘play’ to define, at least loosely, works ranging from King Lear to Death of a Salesman. In a sense we can do this, since the development of our tradition has been more or less continuous. By extension, it is easy enough to refer to works for the stage written by Kōbō Abe or Minoru Betsuyaku, another contemporary Japanese playwright whose works have been translated, as ‘plays,’ because in their dramaturgy they partake of the basic assumptions of Western traditions that took root in Japan since the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov were first imported and performed at the beginning of this century. Yet to describe works of the traditional repertory of Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki as ‘plays’ or ‘dramas,’ however, is to impose Western categories on very different traditions. All three, indeed, might best be compared very

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

279

loosely to Western opera librettos, since mime, dance and music are, in various ways, as important to the total spectacle as the text itself. Reading a Chikamatsu puppet play in translation may give us something of the same experience we might have in reading a Western play text. In translation, however, it is all too easy to forget that, in actual performance, one male chanter, using a slim musical accompaniment, must perform all parts, imitating the voices of the characters, and then provide linking narration as well. The remarkable puppets follow his lead, not the other way around. Reading the text is an experience rather far removed from the effect intended for the original. As more and more translations of Japanese literature become available, the possibilites to increase our sense of these older traditions allows for expanding creative possibilites on our own side. Earlier in this century, writers as diverse as William Butler Yeats, Bertolt Brecht and Paul Claudel composed new kinds of dramas based on their under standing of the medieval Noh theatre, learned from translation. Indeed, in the case of Claudel, he was directly influenced by seeing Noh plays staged in Japan between 1921 and 1926, during the period he served as the French Ambassador to Japan. By now, virtually every American elementary and junior high school student has a chance to try composing haiku. The forms of Japanese literature, however they may vary from our own ideas of genre, can open up new horizons. IV. RESONANCES The three films that make up the video portion of this module are of high quality. They are both visually effective renderings of three outstanding works of Japanese literature and effective films in their own right. These films represent another kind of translation of the original works. The language, Japanese, may remain the same, but there have been shifts in period, medium and vision. Double Suicide, for example, is a contemporary retelling, a reunderstanding if you will, of an original work of dramatic art now three centuries old. The social conditions, the nature of the relations between the sexes, even the sense of the possibilities for a personal destiny were far different in 1720, when Chikamatsu’s play was written, than in 1969, when the film was produced. Here, an older art has provided the inspiration for new art. The director Masahiro Shinoda and his actors have penetrated into the vanished world of Tokugawa Japan using their own contemporary sensibilities, producing a visual and emotional experience that, in its own and very different way, can be as compelling, even as shocking, as the original must have been. Shirō Toyoda’s 1957 Snow Country, on the other hand, represents another kind of transformation. Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, for all its superb visual presence, is structured in terms of certain shifting moments of consciousness and self-understanding portrayed in his characters. These moments chronicle the shifts in the mentality of Shimamura, the protaganist, as he moves closer and closer to understanding the geisha Komako’s reality and to an understanding of the real nature of her beauty, a beauty that gains its very depth in being destined to be wasted and forgotten. Such interior states of mind cannot, as it were, have their photographs taken. Viewing the film provides, among other things, a fine chance to watch one artist translate the work of another into a new reality. The film of Snow Country pays homage to the novel, but it is at the same time an independent artistic creation. Kōbō Abe’s The Face of Another draws on such popular forms as the detective story, into which the author gleefully throws his existential hand grenade. The novel is a particualarly apt source for a film. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1966 version is both gripping in terms of plot maneuvers and highly suggestive in terms of the larger philosophical meanings suggested by the original. Nevertheless, the film has its own integrity. One need not have read the novel to be fascinated by the images and ideas it presents.

280

JAPANESE LITERATURE: FOUR POLARITIES

These three films have been chosen to illustrate three aspects of the Japanese literary tradition: the classic background, with Double Suicide, the modern accomplishments of literature, with Snow Country, and, with The Face of Another, something in the range of comtemporary possibilities. They show us as well, I believe, that Japanese literature, new or old, classic or modern, still sends down deep roots into Japanese character and society. In the best sense of the word, these films instruct as well as entertain, instruct because they entertain. NOTES 1. Ki no Tsurayuki, The Tosa Diary (Tosa Nikki), translated and introduced by Earl Miner in Japanese Poetic Diaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 83. Reprinted with permission. 2. Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan (Ise Monogatari) translated by Helen Craig McCullough and published by the Stanford University Press, 1968, p. 129. Reprinted with permission. 3. From The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) by Lady Murasaki, translated by Arthur Waley and published by Unwin Hyman Ltd., and Houghton Mifflin Company in 1935, p. 390. Reprinted with permission. 4. Excerpts from From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry translated and edited by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson. Copyright © 1981 by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a Division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc. 5. Laurel Rasplica Rodd, translator, Kokinshū: A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern. Copyright © 1984 by Princeton University Press. Selection, p. 164, reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press. 6. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Oku no no Hosomichi) by Bashō, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa (London: Penguin Classics, 1966), p. 55. Copyright © Nubuyuki Yuasa, 1966. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. The prose beginning explains the poem; the poem justifies the prose. The marriage is complete, unique. 7. Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country (Yukiguni), translated by Edward G. Seidensticker (NewYork: Alfred A.Knopf, Inc. © 1955), p. 155), p. 155. Reprinted with permission. 8. The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari) translated by Helen Craig McCullough and published by the Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 317. Reprinted with permission. 9. Cited by Hozumi Ikan, ‘Chikamatsu on the Art of the Puppet Stage,’ in Donald Keene, ed., An Anthology of Japanese Literature, from the Earliest Era to the Mid-nineteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1955), p. 389. Reprinted with permission.

Part VI Cultural Crossroads

First published in Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 22–36.

22 Kurata Hyakuzō and The Origins of Love and Understanding

IN MORI ŌGAI’S 1910 novel Seinen (Youth), Jun’ichi, the protagonist, writes moodily in his diary, ‘… what to do? That is the problem. For what purpose has the self been liberated? That is the problem.’1 Ōgai was attempting to record the feelings of the young would-be intellectuals of his time, and certainly in this novel, at least, he did so with remarkable precision, if the writings of the much younger Kurata Hyakuzō (1891–1943) can be taken as a sample. Kurata’s essays, begun when he was a student in the First Higher School in 1912, were first collected in the 1917 volume Ai to ninshiki to no shuppatsu (The origins of love and understanding), then reissued in 1921 with several additional items added. As a number of critics have pointed out, Kurata’s book became a kind of Bible for young people, who found in it remarkable resonances of their own concerns. Indeed, Kurata’s work helped them articulate to themselves their own sense of being and gave them, presumably, a method for coming to terms with their own adolescent feelings. These essays were written early in Kurata’s own career and mirror a phase in his own personal development. His later turn to religion (already clear in the final essays of Origins), and then to patriotism before and during the Second World War, is of interest for other reasons, but his contribution to the development and indeed validation of a new sense of self among young educated Japanese represents his major contribution as a writer for the younger generation at the time of World War I. Kurata’s main concepts, and his own emotional responses to the ideas he expounds, are set out chiefly in the long essays written during 1912 and 1913, when he was still a student and before his various illnesses caused him to drop out of the First Higher School. By the end of this period, humanistic and often specifically Christian concerns begin to loom larger, questions posed earlier now begin to be answered, another rhetoric emerges, and the book loses some of the force of its opening thrust. The example of Kurata’s finding a religious solution to his metaphysical and youthful anguish was doubtless a powerful one to a certain number of his readers, but his particular resolution was no more than one way through the thickets of doubt. Few others were to embrace it specifically. In the first essay in the collection, ‘Longing’ (1912), Kurata, who writes in the form of a letter to a friend, reminds his correspondent how necessary it is to examine life with the utmost seriousness. He contends, in turn, that such seriousness must bring with it a real sense of loneliness. Unlike Ōgai, however (whom he occasionally quotes), Kurata does not wish to remain a bystander; he does not wish to give up on life but rather wants to find something on which to fix the yearning, the human longing he feels within him. For Kurata, life must have a significance, and it must be led with the highest regard for the demands of the inner life.

KURATA HYAKUZ AND THE ORIGINS OF LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING

283

It is clear after reading even the opening pages of this first essay, written when Kurata was twenty-one, that he exhibits a real vocation for the sacred, at that point still unarticulated within himself. It was one that he came to discover, or at least to describe, some three years later. In the opening essays, however, his vocabulary is couched in that of romantic philosophy, with a heavy emphasis on terms borrowed from German idealism and neo-Kantianism. By this time, such men as Raphael von Koeber (1848–1923) had been teaching German philosophy at Tokyo University for twenty years, and translations into Japanese of a wide variety of nineteenth-century German materials were available. As Donald Roden has pointed out, this kind of material had already reached the level of the higher schools, and Kurata was thus writing for an audience that was relatively familiar with the vocabulary of Western philosophy. Kurata’s sense of vocation produced as well a set of attitudes that give his existential anguish a special sense of urgency. It is clear from his first essay that his purpose is not merely to raise the ‘great questions of life’ (‘What is youth?’ ‘What is truth?’ ‘What is friendship?’ ‘What is love?’ ‘What is desire?’ ‘What is faith?’) but to develop a plan of action and a point of reference so that he might set out to solve those questions in terms of the conduct of his own personal struggle. At this juncture, Kurata chooses philosophy as the highest and most appropriate means by which he hopes to come to grips with his inner life. In choosing European philosophy, Kurata does not seek to comprehend it in an academic mode. He examines philosophy not for its possible contribution to the history of ideas but as a living force that may hold the secrets for which he searches, if he can adopt the appro priate emotional attitudes. Kurata’s desire for an emotional commitment to a set of intellectual ideas may now appear naive, but there remains something appealing, and courageous as well, in his ardent search for the truth. He insists that philosophy is the highest form of study. The discipline provides him with the only sufficiently powerful point of reference available to him; after all, he says, the purpose of philosophy is to raise just the kind of questions that are so important to Kurata himself. Kurata cites a number of philosophers and writers in the book (indeed, one can index to some extent his changing ideas with the works of Western writers whom he selects to quote or paraphrase), but at this point in his thinking he is drawn to Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea. He had either read this work in its entirety or learned of it through a summary in Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Philosophy, a well-used text for philosophy in Japan. Kurata’s attraction to William James is also fairly clear, but this may have come about through his contact with the eminent Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), described below. In James, in any case, Kurata found justification for his conviction, again perhaps strengthened by his contact with Nishida, that human experience rather than abstract thought must produce in the individual a state of wisdom and enlightenment. He was also much affected by his reading of the works of the Japanese novelist Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908), himself a Christian at one point in his career, whose elegiac and anguished stories of Meiji youth must have served as both a stimulus and an objective correlative to Kurata’s growing and painful sense of his own self. Like Doppo, Kurata insisted on the primacy of ‘metaphysical desires’ over ‘mere pleasure,’ and Kurata’s expressed sense of wonder and shock at the magnitude of the universe surely echoes the crucial remark of Doppo’s protagonist in that remarkable short story ‘Meat and Potatoes,’ written in 1901, some ten years earlier. Faith by itself can never suffice. I wish for the mystery of man and the universe to plague me to the point, in fact, where without faith I could never know a moment’s peace…if only I could shake off this frost and free myself from the pressure of wornout custom. I wish that I could stand on my own two feet and preserve my capacity to be surprised.2

284

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

‘I cling to ideas like mountains,’ Kurata writes, and he goes on to extend the natural simile by indicating that the first barrier that he anti perhaps his readers must overcome is that of nature, which seems altogether indifferent to human concerns. For Kurata, nature acknowledges man’s being but laughs at his will. Again, the importance of Schopenhauer as a source of inspiration and consolidation for Kurata is clear when he goes on to stress his belief that in order to connect ourselves with the temporal world, we must use our will to pull ourselves up and away from our acceptance of mere passive experience. Here, Kurata’s intellectual understanding of his sources and his own instincts reinforce each other. What quality is necessary to bring about the activation of the individual will? Understanding, or cognition, is the crucial state of mind, a mental quality that, along with love (which is added in a later essay), becomes for Kurata the basis for all spiritual growth in the soul. Once we have reached a state of cognition and self-awareness, Kurata writes, we are then prepared to take the crucial step of relating our own inner world to the outer temporal world in which we live. It then becomes possible to open up to life and to nature. How does one reach the level of cognition? Perhaps, says Kurata, by means of loneliness, which can put us on a painful, slow path that forces us toward self-understanding. Yet, he concludes, there are further barriers, even should a level of self-awareness or cognition be reached. For cognition may itself lead to egotism, a state of soul that itself forms a well-constructed barrier to thwart any efforts expended in order to know oneself and the world, the kind of knowledge that is meant to herald the arrival at a state of goodness and altruism. ‘Longing’ sets out the urgent need for a plan and lays down some of the groundwork necessary to search out a requisite process to achieve self-understanding. The second essay, ‘The Cognitive Effort of Life,’ written later the same year, deepens the concept of the power and importance of cognition and chronicles in a much more complete form than the preceding essay Kurata’s spiritual debt to Nishida. We are alive. And when we look into ourselves, we can observe for ourselves things of such import that an outpouring of tears could well result. The shadows of all the myriad things of this universe weave themselves into our senses. All the impulses that lie hidden in our inner life are thus set moving, creating in us consciousness, emotions, volition. And so it is that life itself, the substance of which lies concealed within us, begins to differentiate and develop, and our own interior experiences grow more complicated day by day. This complex inner life tries of its own accord to make itself complete. This force moves inside, going beyond the ordinary means of expression, to stir us up from within. Needless to say, two means to express this interior life are represented by art and philosophy. Art attempts, in a realistic and partial manner, to reveal interior experience, while philosophy, in the form of general conceptions, tries to express this experience as a whole. What comes as a result of this is a projection of the inner life, a reflection of the self, and the aim which has been accomplished is the creation of the self-consciousness of one’s own existence, (p. 306) Still it would be a mistake, Kurata continues, to say that life is only made up of sentiment; in fact, it is a mixture of knowledge and sentiment, and the two cannot be separated. The world of sentiment and feeling may be pursued through art, but the seeker must pursue as well the more difficult course of searching out the important role of the intelligence for true inner life. All of this must be undertaken so as to escape from the fragmentary nature of everyday life; all efforts must be made to achieve a whole being than can transcend our normally broken state of being. Art and philosophy alike are required. It was at this point in his thinking that Kurata, in despair, happened upon Nishida’s Zen no kenkyū (A study of good), published in 1911.

KURATA HYAKUZ AND THE ORIGINS OF LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING

285

I was truly suffering. I no longer knew why I should find it a worthwhile thing to live. I merely went on existing in the vague, like some idiot frog. Because of these disturbances within me, it was no longer possible for me to go to school. II wandered vaguely about outside. I let my feet guide me as I walked around silently, then returned home. Such was the easiest way for me to go on living. It was altogether impossible for me to study or to do anything. One day, as I was loitering about with no object in view, I stopped into a bookstore on my way home, where I bought a book, bound in pale, dark colors. The author’s name was quite unknown to me, but the title of the book somehow possessed some power to console me. The book was A Study of Good. I began to read the preface in a desultory sort of fashion. After a bit, my eyes were transfixed by the words I found on the page. Experience does not exist because of the individual; the individual exists because of experience. On the basis of the idea of that experience, and not on individual human difference, it is possible to escape from the theories of the ego. How sharp and vivid those words that were written there! A way of escaping from the self had been found! The words seemed to make a powerful print on my retina. I wondered if the palpitations of my heart would stop. I felt myself filled with the kind of quiet seriousness that constitutes neither joy nor sadness, and I could find no means to continue on with my reading. I closed the book and sat quietly before my desk. A tear trailed down my cheek, (p. 321) In Nishida, Kurata insists, he found a description of a real wholeness of which he could at that point only catch a glimpse by means of his own tortured and unsystematic reflections. Nishida therefore provided Kurata not only with a point of reference, but with a possible plan of how to proceed as well. The essay continues with a reading of Nishida through the eyes of Kurata, who wrestles both with the difficult text and with his own convictions. The results often tell as much or more about Kurata’s mental state as they do about his rather selective view of Nishida’s concerns, but these pages make particularly intense reading as Kurata, half explicating, half confessing, searches for a means to understand himself through his confrontation with the thought of a powerful philosopher. For Kurata, the basic value of Nishida’s work lay in the emphasis the philosopher places on the value of pure experience as a means to work toward both understanding and moral goodness. Nishida assumes a genuine moral grandeur based on the importance he places on experience as opposed to mere conceptualization. Although Nishida appreciates the value of cognition, which can become a crucial tool to help the mind in its attempt to synthesize experience, he does not abandon his belief in the power of intuition, which itself grows out of ‘pure experience.’ On the other hand, writes Kurata, Nishida is no ‘mere pragmatist,’ for he understands the power and truth of the classical Japanese virtue of mono no aware, that deep sense of the sadness and mutability of life. For Kurata, therefore, Nishida’s writing might best be defined as an ‘aesthetics of cognition.’ But, Kurata continues, there is still more to Nishida than that. Man ‘burns with a desire to be good,’ and thus Nishida’s work might also be read as a study of ethics, since man’s powers of cognition and selfunderstanding can give him freedom from the ultimate bonds of the external world. Such a consciousness represents the highest level to which mankind can aspire, since we can use this consciousness to escape the ‘tyranny of the instant.’ In Kurata’s view, religion and a sense of awe before the divine represent the true end of Nishida’s thinking. Thus, as one reads his philosophy, one can feel the greatness of his soul.

286

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Kurata’s third essay, ‘Finding Oneself in the Opposite Sex,’ continues along with many of the themes first explicated in the opening two essays but adds to them the second element required as equipment for life, that of love. In this essay, written a year later, in 1913, Kurata begins for the first time to reflect back on his own experience, suggesting that he has now reached a higher state of self-understanding. His ability to engage in such reflection, he indicates, confirms his conviction that the individual’s interior life must be at the base of all human wisdom and endeavor. By the same token, he insists, concern with the self must eventually be replaced by and transmuted into concern for others. One can come to know one’s own existence, he writes, but how can one truly imagine the existence of others? This essay might be best described as an attempt to sketch out an escape route from the kind of egotism that Kurata felt represented such a danger; for him, intellectual life alone cannot bring progress unless it is combined with and informed by human experience. In this regard, he concludes, a ‘psychological truth’ can hold as much truth as an ‘intellectual truth.’ His close reading of Nishida, Kurata says, permits him to discover the idea of love, particularly in terms of its power to go beyond the range of any individual human consciousness. At the end of chapter 2 of A Study of Good, Nishida wrote that ‘pure experience can transcend the individual.’ Kurata quotes Nishida’s text: Thus, although it may sound extremely strange, we can say that because experience knows time, space, and the individual, it is above time, space, and the individual; it is not that since there is the individual there is experience, but rather that since there is experience there is the individual. Individual experience is nothing more than one particular small area delimited from within experience.3 This kind of thinking seems to confirm for Kurata the existence of a kind of transcendental ground with which human destiny seeks an intimate relationship. Both love and conscious understanding therefore represent the means by which the individual can go through the various stages in a process. Love, in particular, provides the means to come to terms with the human beings who live around us, so that we can experience life and learn from it. Still, Kurata reflects, self-knowledge is hard won and can only come through the pain of personal experience. Kurata describes how, even as he experienced these thoughts, he made a pilgrimage to Mount Tsukuba, north of Tokyo, where, in his despair, he brooded over the difficulties of finding a means by which he might entrust himself to nature and pondered over his doubts as to whether or not he might ever find a means to come to terms with another human being, particularly with a woman. After the trip, he found himself slipping back into his old ways; he had still to find a way to avoid the purely intellectual. What could give him the necessary inner strength? God? Friendship? Woman? All these concepts now seemed tangled up in his mind. At this point, the concept of God seemed the most difficult for Kurata to come to terms with. ‘In fact,’ he writes, ‘it was harder to believe in God’s love than in God himself.’ The problem of learning to understand women was difficult for him as well. He found himself suspicious of them, and yet he knew that his view was colored by his own egotism. More than anything else, Kurata confesses that he found himself worried about the relentless conventionality of women, the fact that they doubtless could not share the grandeur of his own feelings. ‘I did not want tradition, but a blending of souls,’ he writes, quite sure at the same time that he would be laughed at for his ridiculously high ideals. Kurata, chronicling his own feelings, finds that, as a means to solve his spiritual crisis, he seemed to find himself ready to make an idol of life, perhaps ready to fall ‘into superstition and live a myth as a means to sustain himself.’ Love, then, came to seem to him not a pleasure, but a burning demand, and in the midst of

KURATA HYAKUZ AND THE ORIGINS OF LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING

287

such love, a religious yearning, the need for a ‘bitter pilgrimage,’ emerged. Now he realized that what he sought was a person for whom he was ready to die. Yet how was he to find a partner with the same degree of commitment? Reflecting on the suicide of General Nogi the year before, Kurata analyzes the event less as a traditional act in terms of Japanese society than as a natural religious act growing out of love; the general ‘could not bear to live.’ These thoughts in turn lead him to reflections of the state of loneliness that is man’s lot. The word ‘loneliness’ is one that has become familiar to our ears. Yet I think there lies concealed within this word a profound meaning. Thus I do not appreciate the fact that we tend to use that word lightly. Before we put the word ‘loneliness’ on our lips we must reflect on the extent to which we can truly love another. In what way have we truly been able to touch the soul of another, in what way have we been able to unstop the mouth of our own soul, with the idea of accepting another’s? It is on such things that we must reflect. To tell the truth, at this time, I am not lonely. I have no desire to flee from the souls of others. How I have wanted to thrust into myself, to the depth, and to tremble with this mystery. I want to adore my beloved to such a degree that the sweat will pour from me, so much that I could die. I want to know the shame of loving someone so much that I might fear death itself, (p. 326) So it was that Kurata came to feel an ambition to realize a true love that could permit ‘a great strength to well up’ in him. ‘Truly, love is life. And I want to expand every effort for that life. I will pursue such love for the rest of my life. But the heights of love, not the easy kind.’ Although the essay is written in a confessional form, Kurata makes relatively few references to the external details of his personal life at the time. Still, it is clear that the kind of psychological fever chart his essays represent was indeed mirrored in his own experience; in that regard, Kurata had reason to maintain that thought and cognition did grow out of human experience and so must represent the most valuable and authentic access to genuine abstract thought. During his days at the First Higher School, when these essays were written, Kurata had suffered a series of serious illnesses, fallen in love, and been rejected by the young woman he had chosen to idolize. He had also managed to call on Nishida Kitarō in Kyoto. Shortly after the young woman who did not respond to his advances returned home and married, Kurata contracted a severe case of tuberculosis and was forced to retire from school in 1913. The combination of the two events caused him to plunge into a period of quiet reflection and study, during which he lived a somewhat hermit-like existence in the countryside near Hiroshima. Although he was able to visit a protestant Bible study group on a fairly regular basis during those months, by the end of 1914 his condition had so degenerated that he had to be hospitalized. By the time Kurata was twenty-four, he had set down in the five opening essays of the book his general principles for a plan of life. For him, the search would now devolve on the area of religion. As early as the 1913 essay ‘The Road of One Who Has Lost Love,’ Kurata asked himself the question, ‘How am I to sustain my belief in my path: By love? By work? By faith?’ He had come to the conclusion that no purely private suffering was possible for him, and that, as ‘love is the highest function of consciousness, and will its clearest expression,’ he must dedicate himself to a search for God. The twelve short essays that conclude the collection, written from 1915 to 1920, range over a wide variety of subjects, and show the results of Kurata’s reading, in particular his emphasis on the religious humanism of Strindberg, Tolstoi, and Dostoevski, as well as a deepening interest in the writings of Nietzsche. Once the decision to embrace God is taken, Kurata’s rhetoric changes, the scope of his questioning narrows, and the tonality of his prose begins to suggest a combination of the evangelical and the condescending.

288

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

These essays, even within the humanist Christian framework developed by Kurata, do nevertheless go on to refine and reexamine the premises and intuitions that give the earlier seminal essays their force. Kurata attempts to separate the concept of selfless love from the egotism of the lover; he sees that the disinterested love of neighbor, exemplified by the sacrifice of Christ, rather than the egotistical love of husband for wife or parent for child, must become one’s goal. As Nishida himself understood, Kurata insists, one must go beyond the individual in oneself to locate the universal. The reading of literature, he adds, might provide a way to lead one to a greater understanding of this vital principle. For Kurata, the naturalists were wrong in their failure to understand the need to put goodness before mere beauty; by simply accepting that everything that exists can be put into art, they lost the power of the moral distance that can be found in great writers like Blake and Nietzsche, who, although they do not deny what has been created, can use their genuine humanity to pass judgment on what is evil. His reading of the New Testament too, on the evidence of a few sentences in the essays, seems to have led him to see certain parallels between the Christian experience and that of Shinran (1173–1262), the priest who founded the Amidist sect of Buddhism. Shinran, Kurata writes, ‘is a man who knows how to cry out to God.’ This interest in the famous saint eventually led Kurata to compose his drama Shukke to sono deshi (The priest and his disciples) (1917), written only to be read but later staged in 1919. This play, doubtless Kurata’s most popular work after The Origins of Love and Understanding, brought him fame not only in Japan but abroad as well, when the play was translated into English by Glen W.Shaw and published in 1922. By 1921, when the second and more complete edition of Origins was published, Kurata, then thirty-one, could look back on the development of his thought and life as reflected in his essays, written over a ten-year period, in order to place them in perspective. There remains in his new preface something of a pedantic tonality, but he is remarkably successful in explicating the way in which his essays had already been understood by his younger contemporaries. This book is a collection of virtually all my thoughts and my essays set down until this point. For me, the appearance of this book has two meanings. The first is that it serves as a memorial to my own youth; the second is that it serves as a gift to the hearts of those young people who will come after me. For me, it seems that the end of my youth has arrived. Thus I have decided to bury the ‘youth’ of my young years, and, without reference to my actual age, live from now on in a spirit of ‘eternal youthfulness.’ On the occasion when one decides to bid farewell to one’s youth, one must find oneself completely absorbed in boundless and deep emotions. One feels a powerful reluctance to part with one’s youth. And it is very difficult as well to repress a sensation of thankfulness. Truly, one’s youth was a time of great earnestness, of purity, and, furthermore, of bravery. A time filled with suffering and severe trials. And yet, as one reflects back, it seems that in the midst of those sufferings and those trials, one has been able to open up a road that will permit a proper life; progress has been made in finding a way that can lead the human soul forward, (p. 293) This brief summary of Kurata’s book may help to suggest the kind of concerns that he, and others like him, felt in the early Taishō period. Kurata’s chronicling of his own plunge inward toward a spiritual journey provided in published form some general route markers for many in the generations that followed him. Indeed, by indicating that the need to follow such a path was the highest duty that a man could undertake, Kurata validated the feelings of others who also found themselves troubled and unsure of their own purposes in an increasingly complex society. The question might be raised as to whether any objective conditions, beyond the nature of Kurata’s own temperament, caused him to spend so much effort on plumbing what he took to be the depths of his own

KURATA HYAKUZ AND THE ORIGINS OF LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING

289

soul. He certainly did possess within himself in great measure the spiritual raw materials, as it were, to do so. But without the heritage of German philosophy and of earlier Meiji writings by such important writers as Kunikida Doppo and Kitamura Tōkoku, it is unlikely that Kurata would have been able to find either the requisite forms of thought or the appropriate vocabulary in which to couch his speculations. Even a cursory look at A Study of Good by his mentor Nishida Kitarō reveals an enormous and genuine assimilation of both concepts and examples of Western art, philosophy, and literature by this first, and perhaps greatest, master of modern Japanese philosophy. Through the example of Nishida, Kurata was able to assimilate this kind of vocabulary and, indeed, to express himself in a more natural fashion. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the efforts of Koeber and others had resulted in the creation of a core of highly educated students, many turned intellectuals and writers, whose absorption with continental European thought had naturalized those terms of reference in Japan. By 1915, for example, a group of respected writers and thinkers, among them Natsume Sōseki, the Kantian expert Kuwaki Gen’yoku, Nishida Kitarō, Abe Jirō, and Tanabe Hajime, edited a twelve-volume set of essays and translations of philosophy published by Iwanami that easily found a wide readership. The contents were mostly made up of Kantian and neo-Kantian material, and the fact that these modes of thought were widely enough accepted to permit a large readership suggests to what extent these terms of reference had become familiar to those with a university education. Some of the editors of the series were older men of distinction, such as Sōseki, but the importance of younger writers is clear as well. Abe was thirty-two; Tanabe was only thirty; and Abe Yoshishige, who later wrote important works on the history of Western philosophy, was also thirty-two. A majority of these men had studied philosophy at Tokyo University, and their mutual enthusiasm and further study helped to make these texts available to a larger public. Kurata himself, born in 1891, was only twenty-four when the series appeared, yet his use of European literary and philosophic terminology seems fully as assured as that of any of those who contributed to the series. Still, there was one crucial difference between the essays in the monumental collection described above and the kind of writing that can be found in Kurata’s work. The Iwanami collection might be described as an academic one, albeit of the most significant sort. The writers and editors set out to explain contemporary and near-contemporary currents of European thought, but they themselves did not necessarily become personally or emotionally involved with the texts. Kurata, on the other hand, plunged inside his European texts with the same kind of intensity that Bashō urged his haiku poet friends to plunge into nature; Kurata had the idea that he must ‘lose himself’ in order to find a deep level of truth beyond his individual concerns. In the end, the most striking literary fact about The Origins of Love and Understanding doubtless remains not its contents but the confessional style in which it is written. The major essays in the collection use two modes, the letter and the first person confession. A number of the early sections are couched in the style of letters sent to friends. Later research by Japanese scholars has indicated that indeed some of these essays did begin as personal letters that Kurata later expanded into literary documents. Such comparisons shed light on the processes of Kurata’s compositional technique and are thus of some interest in terms of his biography. More germane to matters here, however, is the fact that he seems to have couched his arguments in that form because, as so many other Japanese writers in the period had discovered, the epistolary form brought with it the possibility of producing a powerful confessionary thrust less easily managed in the more regular third-person narrative style. One of the greatest of the epistolary works of the period, of course, is Natsume Sōseki’s 1912 novel Kokoro, where, in the long letter that makes up the bulk of the novel, the protagonist finds himself able to explain his feelings through the means of a letter. Given the strictures of ordinary Japanese conversation, Sōseki doubtless would have found it difficult to use a third-person narrative mode to do the same. But there are also earlier letters in Sōseki novels, notably The Wayfarer, and there are celebrated uses of the form as well by other important contemporary writers, as in

290

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Chikamatsu Shūkō’s novel, A Lesson to My Divorced Wife, written in 1910, or in Friendship, written in 1919 by Mushakōji Saneatsu. Again, this confessional style is related to the larger problems of the ‘I’ novel and the whole relationship between literal truth and emotional authenticity that the form of the ‘I’ novel raises.4 A discussion of those problems would take us too far from the matters at hand, but it can be pointed out in any case that the first essays in Kurata’s collection read very much as though they are passages from a confessional novel. He doubtless chose the form unconsciously as the surest way to validate his documentation of the flow of his emotions. One certainly can read the early essays as though they were fiction; or, conversely, they might be seen as fiction so successfully composed that they seem to represent fact. Kurata always provides an emotional environment that can allow him to demonstrate the inevitability of the reciprocal development of his intellectual ideas and his emotional attitudes. A few passages at random will indicate his general implicit methodology. I am a pitiful, woeful insect. Like a stray dog, I loiter about, with no fixed and peaceful place of abode. Tangled as 1 am in desolation, grief, agony, and desire, all contained within me, I sometimes sigh and think that I am unique and alone in the whole universe. Now I feel sprouting in my heart a ghastly disgust with the world. Those feelings have taken the form of a bleakness, a desolation that appears in the midst of my consciousness, menacing me, ridiculing me. (p. 307) Just as, for example, a pure white flower might suddenly open itself in a vast field at dawn, so, when we first realize that we have escaped from convention and tradition into a genuine life of our own, it is as though a glittering bright hght surrounds us. One’s eyes are stretched at the miracles in all things. Light has dawned on the long night of life. From now on, one must truly strive to live. So thinking, we set our hearts to dancing, step out with our shoulders held high. So it is that we set out to follow along this great road of life, with bravery, seeking a sense of completion. There has never been a time when one has had such a powerful sense of consciousness of oneself, (p. 317) I have no wish to cry out over the pain I feel, nor to seek any sympathy. That is not how I should respond at this time. That is because, at this moment, I stand in a particularly unworthy position in relation to life itself. Now is the time when I must be resolute. Wretched, my spiritual life crushed, and my anxiety over the collapse of the body which must support it—my life from inside and outside as well presses on to the point of danger. Indeed, is this not the time when I must try to save myself: Yet what is it that I should achieve? ‘In serving life, remain absolutely faithful!’ So I close my eyes to the depths of the chill, the urgency in the complexities of all things in my life, and I cry out. And when I cry out, I find that what rules the innermost depths of my heart is a deep moral consciousness. This is a feeling of the sort of duty that transcends any promise, one that faces the reality of life itself. This is not the kind of duty that arises in response to the will toward any particular purpose. Rather, this is a feeling of duty that contains an imperative within itself. From the first time I felt that I had come to find myself in agreement with Kant and his moral imperative, and I am struck with his profound understanding. At this time when my being is threatened by danger, and I hear the sounds of crumbling and destruction within me, what gives me a sense of perseverance and strength of support is nothing other than this feeling of a duty toward life itself, (p. 334) In many pages of the book confession transcends its function as mode and comes to represent virtually the purpose of the passages involved. In this regard, Kurata, like many of his contemporaries, followed the dictum of the writer and actor Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871–1918), who said that literature must bear witness

KURATA HYAKUZ AND THE ORIGINS OF LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING

291

to the age: ‘Eschew falsehood, forget ostentation, and behold acutely the realities of your own situation. Having beheld, then confess them earnestly.’5 And yet, for Kurata there was one crucial difference. He bore witness to his own interior life, yet he made almost no references whatsoever to the political and social situation in which he found himself. Thus if one characteristic of this early phase of the Taishō discovery of the self lies in confession, another seems to be a blocking out of social concern, at least in any analytic sense. True, in Kurata’s case, he makes constant reference, especially in his later Christian-humanist essays, to the need to love one’s neighbor. Yet even here, his motives lie in his apparent conviction that such attitudes represent a kind of therapeutic technique to repair the ravages of egotism to the soul, rather than a means to redress civil inequalities. Commenting on a later edition of The Origins of Love and Understanding, published in 1936, Kurata added a few paragraphs to his original preface, pointing out that some of his critics had found him ‘deficient in social character’ and without any understanding of the materialist basis of society. He replied that before a human can grasp the nature of society, he must know himself, and this knowledge, he maintained, came from the twin poles of love and consciousness. Out of such a metaphysics of life, connections with others could develop. The process, however, could not be reversed. Indeed, he concluded, did not the development of his own thought bear this out? There is no question that the ultimate impact of the book on his contemporaries lay not in Kurata’s eventual humanist and religious solutions but in the example he provided of the need for an authentic self-examination, which he created so forcefully in the opening sections of the book. Another quality of Kurata’s thinking and one that seems symptomatic of Taishō culture is its cosmopolitan character. Kurata’s own reading, insofar as it is revealed in his citations, was more in Western sources than in Japanese ones, and there is little to indicate on the basis of internal citations that Kurata’s book is by a Japanese. The very word ‘Japan’ seldom appears, and almost never in a political context. The one political reference he makes to Japan in fact is quite critical: Kurata views the bellicose attitude of Japan toward China as a kind of national neurosis of desire paralleling the egotism of the individual. The feelings of a cat who plays with a mouse before eating it resemble closely the feelings of a man with a woman whom he seeks to violate. And this consciousness of subjugation serves as a stimulant for sexual desire. When I see a snake eating a frog, my desire is aroused. To give an extreme example, reading an article in the newspaper concerning the fact that Japan menaces China brings on desire. There is an inevitable connection between these things, (p. 375) This emphasis on the centrality of the interior life of the individual suggests another assumption on the part of Kurata that, although never explicitly explicated, seems apparent from a close reading of the text. Kurata posits his ideas on the basis of an assumption that all men are at least potentially equal and have access to the same possibility of finding the significance of their own inner lives. One can say, of course, that the book, however widely read and admired, found its way only into the hands of the intelligentsia and does not represent any particularly democratic statement. Such may indeed be the history of its text and its readership; nevertheless, Kurata felt that his own responses to the human situation were universal, and the abstractions he takes from European philosophy provide him with the support for this assumption. The question for him always remains as follows: Once any individual becomes conscious of his own existential state, what plan of action must he undertake? Here, in Kurata’s thinking, one’s highest duty to oneself will inevitably lead to contemplation, a reading of philosophy, and eventually, just as he was convinced he saw in Nishida, the development of a religious understanding. In this regard, Kurata takes the emotions and responses of his youthful readers as significant and serious. Some of Kurata’s attitudes may have been refined and developed through his reading of such humanist Christian writers as Tolstoi, but in the early

292

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

essays they seem to spring naturally, from his own deepest convictions. For Kurata, therefore, the experience of literature is secondary to the experience of life. A related assumption that a reading of the text reveals is Kurata’s conviction that human knowledge is by nature experiential. Philosophic or religious doctrine is not merely something to be accepted or mastered intellectually, but a challenge to be judged, examined, and perhaps embraced on the basis of the development, and the suffering, found in one’s own individual interior life. Intellectual ‘truth,’ then, must always be tested against the real truth of one’s own personal experience. Life therefore informs art (and ethics), and not the other way around. Religion, literature, and philosophy become crucial means to instruct the soul in its own development and are without any separate, ultimate value as abstract ends in themselves. There is a genuine sense of vocation in Kurata’s formulations, and an emotional force that remains compelling. In the earlier Meiji period, older ideas of Confucian duty were turned toward the strengthening of society and the nation. Now the same high-mindedness was to turn inward, and onto the individual. Kurata’s sense of commitment, and his shifts in consciousness undertaken in his attempt to describe his inner state of being, show qualities that would surely have appealed to the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who is often praised in laudatory terms throughout the essays. Had Bergson, with his own emphasis on the movements of time and intuition, known Kurata’s work, he might well have appreciated the way in which his Japanese admirer found the courage to cut himself loose from the traditional verities of Japanese ethical and moral belief, in order to allow himself to float, at whatever psychological cost, toward the open sea of the twentieth century. NOTES All citations from The Origins of Love and Understanding are taken from Abe Jirō, Kurata Hyakuzō, vol. 74 of Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1956). 1. Mori Ōgai, Seinen, in Mori Ōgai zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1971), 2:35. 2. Kunikida Doppo, ‘Meat and Potatoes,’ in Maurice Schneps and Alvin I.Coox, eds., The Japanese Image, trans. Leon Zolbrod (Tokyo and Philadelphia: Orient/West, 1966), pp. 187–88. 3. Nishida Kitarō, A Study of Good, trans. V.H.Vigilielmo (Tokyo: Japanese National Commission for UNESCO, 1960), p. 19. 4. See, for example, an extended treatment of these issues in Edward Fowler’s study. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shitshōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 5. Quoted in Nakamura Mitsuo, Modern Japanese Fiction 1868–1926 (Tokyo: Japan Cultural Society, 1968), p. 2.

First published in Dœdalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Science, Volume 119, November 3, Summer 1990, pp. 267–278

23 High Culture in the Showa Period

THE DOMINANT foreign model for Japanese aesthetics in the Showa era was European, both avantgarde and traditional. Japanese arts remained strong, but their significance fluctuated greatly as the nation experienced periods of nationalism, war, and defeat. In the current era of economic renewal, the threat to a distinctive Japanese culture is not Western dominance per se but international pop aesthetics and commercialism. In some ways the Showa period, which began in 1926, may seem an arbitrary moment at which to begin an examination of the development of Japanese ideas, ideals, and institutions. In the realm that might be defined as ‘high culture,’ however, the beginning of this period of sixty-odd years does provide a propitious moment. By the beginning of Showa, most if not all of the cultural institutions common to a modern society were in place and prepared to function in terms of a public that had already shown both an enthusiasm and an increasing knowledge concerning the worlds of ideas, arts, and letters. In one sense, the record of accomplishments in high culture during the Showa period serves as a chronicle of how these institutions, and the men and women who used them, came to function together. I In 1868, Emperor Meiji opened his nation from its long period of seclusion and instructed the young generation of his country to go forth and learn from the world. The Japanese society he addressed, however, possessed a high level of artistic and scholarly culture, and one that had already come to include a considerable intellectual momentum toward Western learning. Nevertheless, the free play of Japanese intellectual and artistic life was cordoned off by a social structure established during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) that, because of sharply defined social categories, limited both expectations and artistic techniques in a different fashion for each social group. By the 1920s, however, through extraordinary efforts in both public and, increasingly, private sectors of society, institutions had been created capable of responding to the interests of a new and far more broadly based public that, because of the new and comparatively democratic educational system that had been created toward the end of the nineteenth century, was to develop wider and more general cultural interests than had ever been possible in the preceding period. In the field of the visual arts, for example, the Tokyo National Museum, first established as early as 1882, was fully reorganized in its present extensive scale in 1928. The Kyoto National Museum was opened in 1897. The government-sponsored contemporary Japanese art exhibitions, usually referred to as Bunten, were begun in 1907 and by five or six years later were attracting upward of 160,000 viewers each year.

294

HIGH CULTURE IN THE SHOWA PERIOD

The best Japanese universities, which were often based on the German model, provided instruction in a variety of intellectual fields at an often surprisingly sophisticated level, in particular, the centrality given the humanities in the German intellectual world during this period continued to provide a powerful influence in the Japanese milieu. Graduates of the best Japanese universities were reading, as a matter of course, Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, and other of the German philosophical masters. By the 1920s, distinguished young Japanese intellectuals were able to find mentors directly in Europe. Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), for example, whose work Fūdo (Climate), published in 1935, still stands as a monument in modern Japanese intellectual history, went to Germany to study philosophy. The cultural Marxist Miki Kyōshi (1897–1945), a few years later, repeated the same process. Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941), one of the great modern writers on Japanese aesthetics, studied with Rickert and Heidegger in Germany and, while in France, shared a youthful friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Nor were these intellectual encounters restricted to a small group of elite specialists. Through the efforts of such shrewd publishers as Iwanami Shigeo (1881–1946), good translations of Western philosophy and literature were made widely available at reasonable prices, and they sold well. A hunger for contemporary European thought assured the rapid availability of such works in Japanese versions, which often saw print in Tokyo even before they were translated into English. National newspapers, notably the Asahi, disseminated popular articles on such material, often commissioned from leading Japanese intellectuals, novelists, and social critics. Such commentaries quickly became a common feature of the urban intellectual landscape. Even the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, as devastating in its way to the capital as were to be the firebombings of 1945, had a certain positive effect on the internationalization of the city. Many old sections of the city were destroyed, allowing for the construction by the beginning of Showa of new and up-to-date cultural facilities, among them the Tsukiji Little Theatre, where the newest stage and lighting equipment allowed for the rapid development of modern and avant-garde stage productions. From that time on, there developed in the Showa period a curve of deepening interest in the development of the sort of Japanese high culture that was to be, at least to some extent, created in consonance with the ideals of contemporary Europe. Such a development is not surprising. In the areas of high culture, Japan, like France, has always been at her best when at her most cosmopolitan. In a sense, the war period, those years from the late 1930s through the American Occupation in the late 1940s, the decade that, spiritually as well as in every other way, was to break the Showa period in two, subdued the steady growth of that culture but did not stop it. While it is true that close ties with Europe were to some extent cut off during this time, the momentum already created was such that little permanent damage was done to those connections; indeed, the energies pent up during that decade spilled out in 1946 in a burst of literary and artistic creativity. From the perspective of forty years later, the war seems at most an interruption in the steady development of high culture. The recent ascendancy of commercial popular culture in Japan has had, in my opinion, a far stronger inhibiting effect on the high culture in that country than the darkness of the war years. II Effective mechanisms to create, sustain, and make available an authentic high culture, even when linked to profound convictions on the part of the intelligentsia and a large public of the need for such a culture, cannot in and of themselves guarantee the quality of the results. The history of high culture in modern Japan shows a number of stresses and strains that indicate the difficult, sometimes intractable, challenges that were to be undertaken. These matters are extremely complex; I will try to sketch out three issues that strike me as suggestive of the larger problems involved.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

295

Culture on the European Model In the first place, as a whole generation or two of creative personalities continued to pay homage to Western, international ideals, there was bound to develop a sense of constraint among those participating. The psychic distance, in both form and ideal, between Western imported ideas and the older traditional ideologies and methodologies was often simply too great to permit the development of the sort of flexible atti tudes adequate to undertake all the shifts involved. In fact, this distance helped to create a curious kind of dual track of cultural production. Therefore, for example, avant-garde poets wrote in a sort of free-verse form that opened up remarkably evocative verbal possibilities; yet in the shade of their accomplishments, other writers continued to compose thirty-one-syllable traditional waka and seventeen-syllable haiku poems. By the first years of this century, young Japanese painters had already absorbed the styles created by impressionist and postimpressionist European painters and were creating their own authentic pictures in consonance with developments in France and elsewhere; yet others had developed a so-called Nihonga style of painting that kept stubbornly closer to older Japanese ideals. These two sets of writers and artists tended to work separately, although some so-called Western-style painters and writers occasionally dabbled in these more traditional forms. On the whole, however, in terms of perceived attitudes, the arts and literature created in the Western mode retained pride of place for the Japanese intelligentsia. There was during much of the Showa period, and to some extent there still is, a double creative track in the high culture of Japan. Thus, rather than a generalized vision of a modern Japanese high culture, the parameters of which would be more or less generally agreed upon, there appear, at least from our Western point of view, to have existed instead a series of overlapping convictions, as well as overlapping audiences, that only in the aggregate can be said to constitute the domain of high culture in Showa Japan. It would appear that artistic forms and techniques may achieve a high state of development within such a loose linkage, but the artistic and intellectual content expressed in those forms, particularly in terms of their social and political implications, was not to be embedded as firmly as it might most usefully have been. Tighter connections were not pursued. High culture did not always bite deep enough into the realities of the society that created it. The method of absorbing ideas of Western culture revealed certain patterns already deeply engraved in Japanese historical behavior. In previous periods, the models adapted from international culture had largely been Chinese. Borrowing took on roughly the following sequence: the Japanese, often at great personal risk, sometimes on their own, sometimes sponsored by an organization (the Japanese ruling house, or the Buddhist hierarchy), went to China to learn new ideas and techniques. Such persons usually then returned to Japan to serve as privileged and prestigious advocates of a new cultural point of view which they promulgated, one which would slowly be understood, accepted, and assimilated. Sometimes the process was quickly accomplished; sometimes it took many decades. So it was that Buddhist learning and the texts of the sacred Sutras themselves came to Japan, and so it was that T’ang dynasty poetry and Sung dynasty ink painting came to enter the Japanese artistic canon. By such methods of transmission, new cultural possibilities entered Japan at a pace slow enough to stimulate without throwing the indigenous culture off balance. In the modern period, however, a number of new factors altered the relatively smooth functioning of these methods of transmission. Some of these changes caused severe problems of assimilation. By the time Japanese and European culture came into meaningful proximity at the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese found themselves face to face not merely, as in the case of China, with another imposing high cultural tradition itself strong and stable, but with a European high culture, that, while confident in the midnineteenth century, would soon give pride of place to a restless avant-garde bent on altering, if not destroying, those traditional European conceptions. The Japanese, in other words, came to learn from the West just at a time when, in some areas at least, their new partners were trying to rid themselves of the very

296

HIGH CULTURE IN THE SHOWA PERIOD

received opinions and traditions that the Japanese, newcomers to the circle, were of necessity still trying to do their best to understand and assimilate. In some areas, of course, such rapid changes caused, at least in the long view, relatively few problems. A number of outstanding young Japanese novelists and poets, for example, were quick to experiment, and successfully, along the lines laid down by the European writers, artists, and intellectuals they came to so much admire. In fact, the Showa writers of fiction, in the aggregate, represent the greatest flowering of literary talent since the time of Lady Muraski and The Tale of Genji in the eleventh-century Heian period. In the great universities, developing trends in such important fields as continental philosophy could be studied by young Japanese who had begun at the end of the nineteenth century with Kant and Hegel and moved even by the beginning of Showa to a study of Marx, Von Hartmann, then Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger. In those areas of high cultural production that require a tradition of specific tactile skills, however, such as in painting or sculpture, the necessary time required to learn and master new techniques caused more complex difficulties. Nowhere was this problem more evident than in the area of Western-style painting. Japanese artists traveling to Paris and elsewhere were still learning the requisite skills through the kind of academic training now scoffed at by their advanced European contemporaries. Japanese painters, like their American colleagues, were turning out extremely respectable works of art in the sort of conservative style available to them, just at a time when the Picassos and Kandinskys set out to destroy the very assumptions on which such training rested. The same problem was faced by Japanese composers who sought out the requisite technical training in Europe only to find that their mentors in the musical academies there were often as bewil dered as they by the work of the Bartoks, Stravinskys, and Schoenbergs. It was really not until the 1960s that a truly sufficient understanding of the freewheeling, often nihilistic attitudes that had become a part of high culture in Europe were to be fully and comfortably integrated into the Japanese mentality. The fact of the war, of course, helped delay the date of that presumably fruitful level of assimilation; by the same token, the war helped create a generation of new mentalities more open to the kind of spiritual emptiness that Europeans had come to identify after their own terrible experiences in World War I, thirty years before. In sum, it would seem that, in the musical and visual arts at least, it is impossible to learn a tradition while destroying it at the same time; a basis for sympathy must be established before it can be questioned. No one but a rare genius indeed could be expected to take on successfully such a double burden. It was only when these new Western traditions were firmly internalized and respected in Japan that an authentic avantgarde could come into being. The creation of a viable internationalized modern tradition in Japanese poetry, for example, provided a sufficient context for the reception in Japan of the astonishingly effective surrealist poetry of Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894–1982), who because of his linguistic skills and deep interest in European literature, could sojourn in Europe in the 1920s and come to create his works in a kind of free, internationalist mode that he, at least, could take for granted. To put the problem another way, it would seem that not only the ideas and ideals of Western culture but the creative context had to be imported as well into Japan. This is surely one reason that a prodigious translation industry developed, that theatre companies devoted to presenting Western drama were created, and that symphony orchestras were established by the early years of Showa. Indeed, it is a remarkable — and from a Western point of view, a sobering—thought that the first full-length recording of a work now as popular as Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was made, not in Berlin or Vienna, but in Tokyo in 1930 by Parlophone, using a Japanese conductor and a Japanese soprano (both trained in Europe), as well as a Japanese orchestra. It is difficult to create such effective institutions, but possible; and indeed, in matters of artistic execution, they can be brought to a high degree of perfection. Perhaps that fact is miracle enough. Still, the existence of such musicians does not suggest, by the same token, that a Japanese composer of

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

297

Mahler’s talents will inevitably appear as well. The means may well need to precede the ends, but they cannot replace them. Then too, there is still an additional problem related to issues of international cultural attitudes. Even if a Japanese Mahler should appear, problems of authenticity in the creative aspects of modern high culture as perceived in the West would have made the acceptance around the world of a Japanese Stravinsky, Matisse, or T.S.Eliot most problematic during these interwar years, perhaps even later. The difficulties inherent in maintaining a Japanese point of view while making use of artistic or intellectual stances and techniques developed in the West have posed and continue to pose delicate problems of judgment. In the field of art, for example, a painter like Fujita Tsuguji (1886–1968), well known and patronized in France and elsewhere as a member of the École de Paris has always been regarded by the Japanese modern-art establishment as a bit of a renegade, one who simply sold out by adopting Western values for his own ends. The Japanese much prefer the paintings of his older contemporary Umehara Ryūzaburō (1888–1986), until his death long the doyen of the art establishment. Umehara maintained close and productive ties with France, but, for his viewers in Tokyo and elsewhere, his essential Japaneseness has never been in doubt. Foreign enthusiasts for modern Japanese art, however, have consistently chosen Fujita. In the context of traditional Japan, Chinese artists and intellectuals were able to see or read very little concerning what had become of their traditions when they were borrowed by those to whom Japan was simply a small, far-off island country. In this century, on the other hand, quick scrutiny from all sides and at all times makes any slow, deliberate artistic and intellectual development increasingly problematic. It is one thing, say, for a contemporary French playwright to take an avant-garde stand vis-‡-vis the work of his own contemporaries; it is a difficult and far more ambiguous task for a Japanese playwright who, by imposed self-definition is responding to the developments centered in another culture, to proceed qurckly while still remaining authentically himself. Again, certain fields of scholarly inquiry and literary expression had had more time to develop smoothly. Ironically, one reason for this relatively healthy maturation may lie in the fact that, because of the awesome language barrier involved, most of such work is kept away, except on an occasional and fragmentary basis, from immediate comparison with any putative European models. The Japanese language remains the one wall as yet unbreached in our century, which has seen so many others fall in Japan. In fields of high cultural expression such as the visual arts, theatre, and music, however, where the impact can be far more immediate, those working in such forms may well feel themselves too quickly exposed to European, and often Eurocentric, standards. The Past in the Present However internationally centered the high culture of the Showa period was intended to be in the minds of many of its creators, two problems soon arose that were, and to some degree still remain, difficult to resolve. Both are related to earlier attitudes of mind inherited from a nexus of traditional Japanese values. The first of these problems involves the relationship between high culture and more broadly based cultural attitudes in the population at large. In one sense, this relationship involves the relation between culture and politics, but the shifting context of popular attitudes during the Showa period makes any simple or definitive explanation of these issues elusive. Perhaps a brief comment on the nature of the interconnections, or lack of them, between high cultural attitudes and political power might serve, however, as one means to examine the question briefly. In the prewar period, writers and intellectuals, at least through the 1920s, felt that their sometimes close alliances to the highly educated men who often held important positions in the various government bureaucracies, the press, and the Foreign Office, should provide a context in which more universalist ideas could develop, and perhaps gain hegemony. With the rise of the

298

HIGH CULTURE IN THE SHOWA PERIOD

military in the 1930s, however, which brought to power a group of men who tended to come from rural areas and be less well educated, less worldly, and more spontaneous in their expression of traditional Japanese values, the presumed persuasive power of a high and Westernized culture in guiding Japan’s practical destinies was revealed as impotent; indeed, the force of unhappy political events spawned a whole new grouping of intellectuals who often committed themselves to new nationalistic ideals. In this onslaught of ideas that at first may have appeared reactionary to many, it was only the Marxist intellectuals in the universities and in certain artistic circles who retained the sufficient psychological power to resist. Ironically, in the postwar period many of those same Marxist intellectuals, seen in the late 1940s with some justification as heroic figures, were eventually revealed as too rigid in their own beliefs to appeal to any majority of the Japanese public in the face of the economic advances that followed that last great internal political upheaval in the Showa period, the widespread demonstrations against the renewal of Japan’s security treaty with the United States in the 1960s. In terms of wielding any real political influence, proponents of high culture were forced to learn, then relearn, their limitations. In terms of artistic form as well, long-held assumptions about the etiquette of possibilities (and concomitant limitations) appropriate within the accepted Japanese canons of artistic creation placed certain implicit limitations on the creation of any authentic art or literature sensitive to the need to articulate directly social and political relationships in modern Japan. The very greatness of the older aesthetic traditions, long assumed in the culture, made these patterns, which so often privileged lyric introspection, very difficult to break, submerged as they were at a deep level of consciousness in writers, artists, and readers alike, whatever the shifting nature of the surface, or of the fashionable modes of contemporary expression. After all, the greatest early documents of Japanese literary expression, which go back to the sixth century and before, were poetic, creating lyric impulses binding poet and reader together, often through a shared symbolic use of nature images. This deep lyrical mode of exchange, and of understanding, later metamorphosed into prose in a work such as the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, continued into the modern period to inform structure, style, and content even in such new forms as the modern novel. The masteries of Tanizaki Junichirō and Kawabata Yasunari probe the poetic and erotic depths of the relationships portrayed with a high poetry of narrative skill, but in such a linguistic and emotional landscape, there remained little room for ruminations on politics and history. Even in such a powerful novel of war as Ōoka Shōhei’s Nobi (Fires on the Plain), the inward, lyrical thrust informs the mental constructs of the narrator. It is perhaps only in the forms furthest removed from those traditions that trenchant political and social commentary could find adequate means of expression, notably in the shingeki (Modern Theatre) movement. Shingeki dramatists seized altogether foreign models, beginning early in the century with Ibsen and Chekhov. This theatre produced in both its prewar and its postwar phases a succession of gifted playwrights who, however differing in their political persuasions and stylistic affinities, were able to bear witness to the dangers and complexities of the times in which they lived. Often their personal points of view drew on outside, universalistic value systems, notably Marxism and Christianity, which were able to provide a more universal and critical framework with which to construct such critiques. By the same token, such frameworks were perceived as somehow ‘foreign’ by many readers and spectators. Geography Those who inhabited the world of high Japanese culture have remained relatively unsuccessful in addressing themselves to questions of cultural and political geography. In the earlier years of Showa, the Japanese may have dreamt of Europe, but they conducted their most meaningful foreign relations, and sometimes very badly, in Asia. From the time that the Chinese lost to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, the

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

299

advocates for an internationalized cultural matrix turned from China, so long a model of excellence, to embrace the West. Thus, on the whole, the Japanese artistic and intellectual world did little during the interwar years to come to terms with any necessary understanding of the progressively darkening relationships in which the Japanese nation found itself involved during its Asian wars, which by the broadest definition might be said to have begun with the annexation of Korea in 1910 and certainly were paramount in shaping the nation’s destiny by the 1930s. In some ways, that vacuum of sympathy and understanding for Asia still exists. While some writers of the postwar period, such as the novelist Takeda Taijun, have attempted to address and assess the ambiguous role of Japan in Asia during the earlier years of Showa, a truly rigorous examination and a genuine understanding of these complex attitudes by Japanese intellectuals remain incomplete. All the wounds inflicted on Japan’s Asian neighbors have therefore yet to heal in a satisfactory manner. The proponents of high culture in Japan may well have stressed the possibility of a Japanese culture able to function in a larger contemporary world, but not perhaps in the whole world. Indeed, it might well be argued that even the United States did not enter the Japanese framework of high culture in any meaningful way until the Occupation in 1945 made this rapprochement inevitable. Even then, it has been the more popular elements of American culture that have continued to find an appeal, rather than the accomplishments of American high culture. Films, not Faulkner, cartoons and not Jackson Pollack, continue to fascinate the larger Japanese public. Europe remains the focus, and the classical ideas (of Goethe, Stendhal, Mozart, down to Sartre) remain important in the Japanese pantheon; most cultivated Japanese know little if anything about, say, Henry James, Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams, or John Dewey. It is perfectly true, by the same token, that America in her own cultural past has always turned to Europe. The fact that, in the past, both civilizations have been attracted to Europe, and for many of the same reasons, suggests certain congruences of aspiration running parallel in both societies that have not on the whole been much commented upon by the Japanese intellectual establishment. III The accomplishments of high culture in the Showa period—and they have been many—have in the end played a central part in leading Japanese society through the complex political, social, and moral vicissitudes of this sixty-four year period. Some of the ways in which high culture has played out this role have been unexpected. Japanese intellectuals educated to appreciate and occasionally to appropriate Western methodologies and points of view had by the beginning of the Showa period begun to look at their own culture from a cosmopolitan point of view. The writing of a succession of novelists such as Tanizaki Juniichirō, Dazai Osamu, and Ōe Kenzaburō shows the nature of a sort of modern self-awareness that can capture authentic assumptions that lie behind much of modern Japanese intellectual, indeed spiritual, life. Couched in an idiom relatively approachable for Western readers, such modern works of high culture can also function as points of access for outsiders seeking to understand Japan. Such works were, of course, never written for such a purpose, but they provide articulate examples of the shifting distances that govern the borders of Japanese and Western cultural suppositions. Indeed, by the 1960s, both artistic and intellectual works were being produced in Japan that bore powerful witness to the ways in which the West and Japan had come to develop a vocabulary in common (although I would be the first to agree that much more is needed on the side of the West to bring a sense of mutuality to the exchange). Yamazaki Masakazu, for example, in such powerful theatrical works as Zeami (1963) or Sanetomo shuppan (1973) chooses for his protagonists Hamlet-like figures who are perceived as such by his audiences, which have by now assimilated the work of the greatest English playwright into their culture just

300

HIGH CULTURE IN THE SHOWA PERIOD

as we have into ours. A perceived ambiguity and emptiness of modern life have produced such figures as the playwrights Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee in the West, Abe Kōbō and Betsuyaku Minoru in Japan; and if there appears to be a certain generic resemblance between the work of all four, that fact has more to do with the commonality of contemporary sensibilities than it does with matters of superficial literary or intellectual influence. Indeed, in the arts at least, a number of significant projects in recent years have been openly cross-cultural. Miki Minoru, one of Japan’s most stimulating younger composers, has written operas, using both Western and Japanese modes and musical instruments, that have been performed with real success both in and out of Japan. Suzuki Tadashi, arguably the greatest director in contemporary Japanese theatre circles, has found genuine success with his troupe in his American and European performances; indeed, so many foreign actors have worked with him that in 1987, Suzuki was able to create, and in his own wholly authentic style, a version of King Lear with an all-American cast, which evoked a highly successful response in both Japan and the United States. Thus, the promise of a kind of authentic cultural amalgamation with the rest of the world that sparked so many hopes at the beginning of the Showa era is, in a few areas at least, coming to fruition. What are the problems that Japanese high culture must face now, and in the future? Ironically, the problem is a transcultural one as well, one common to the United States, Europe, and Japan. It is the overwhelming pressure from an internationalized popular culture that is establishing a new hegemony. Even in a country like Japan, with old and aristocratic traditions, the onslaught is a powerful one: comic books now replace the inexpensive paperback editions of Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Hegel, and Flaubert read and devoured by earlier generations of Japanese students. It is not altogether clear how those who believe in the high traditions of modern Japanese culture will frame new attitudes capable of coping with these rampant energies. There is a sense in Tokyo, as in New York, London, Berlin, and Paris, that an era has come to an end. Still, loyalties and commitments have always been strong in Japanese culture, and those who respect and love her modern accomplishments—be they in music, the fine arts, literature, or in intellectual life in general—will undoubtedly remain loyal. Nevertheless, the next generations, those brought up out of Showa, may develop other enthusiasms that could finally break ties to the past that still give Japanese modern culture a resonance of continuity. Whether that sense of conti nuity will ultimately come to be identified as a last peculiarity of the Showa period must await the assessments of other generations on both sides of the Pacific. FURTHER READINGS I have provided no endnotes in this article, since, despite the copious information available in Japanese, there exist as yet few systematic studies in English of the kind of modern Japanese cultural history sketched here, with the exception of the concluding sections of H.Paul Varley’s Japanese Culture, A Short History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1974). Donald Keene’s sympathetic and complex Dawn to the West, Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984) gives a nuanced account of the development of fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism. Those wishing information on the development of modern Japanese art may seek, for the prewar period, the volume Modern Currents in Japanese Art, by Michiaki Kawakita, in the Heibonsha Series (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1974) and the catalogue for the exhibition Paris in Japan (St. Louis: Washington University and the Japan Foundation, 1987), which concentrates on painting in the Western style. Postwar currents are sketched in another Heibonsha volume, Japanese Art in World Perspective, by Toru Terada (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1976). Vol. 6 of the new Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) contains a probing analysis of modern Japanese intellectual attitudes, including a discussion of

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

301

Watsuji Tetsurō. There is virtually nothing available on modern Japanese concert and operatic music. The only book-length treatment of modern Japanese theatre, which concentrates on the prewar period, is my own Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre: Kishida Kunio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). Anthologies of translations of postwar plays may also prove helpful, in particular those of Ted Takaya, Modern Japanese Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) and David Goodman, Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.Sharpe, 1988) and After Apocalypse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). All three contain useful and provocative essays on the development of postwar Japanese theatre. The two plays by Yamazaki Masakazu are available in Mask and Sword (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

First published in Helen Hardacre and Adam L.Kern (eds). New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 136–150

24 Iwanami Shigeo’s Meiji Education: Encounters, Transmissions

IN CURRENT intellectual discourse, a strong interest in contemporary theory often shapes the manner in which historical and cultural events are examined. Yet however satisfying such a sustained level of synthesis and generality may appear to be, such forms of analysis—and so critical judgment—perforce set aside the stubborn and limited nature of individual facts. And such facts are particularly important to keep in mind when analyzing the complex issues, so important in the Meiji period, which concern the transmissions of ideas from one culture to another, and from one national sensibility to another. Unfortunately for the theoretical strategists, it would appear that the idiosyncracies of personality, chance encounter, and shifting intellectual enthusiasms on the part of the diverse players in these complicated cultural dramas remain such that too great a level of generalization brings risks of misinterpretation. At the least it should be said that in the last part of the previous century, in Japan as elsewhere, it is necessary to look at the individual personalities of those who helped create the culture which was in turn passed on to the next generation. In this instance, I would like to suggest the central importance of those figures responsible for moving texts across cultures by making available translations, adaptions, and secondary studies of Western cultural documents. In this context, the possibilities of obtaining cultural knowledge during this period came to depend on precisely these kinds of personal, often idiosyncratic, decisions. For example, in the case of prewar Japan, if no one had studied, translated, or published, say, the writings of Kant and Hegel, then the thought of these important European thinkers would not have entered, as it did, into the intellectual discourse of the period. My focus in this brief essay is on the early life, at the end of the Meiji period, of one of the most significant publishers of twentieth-century Japan, Iwanami Shigeo (1881–1946), who did perhaps more than any other to bring the classic and modern texts of Western culture to the Japanese public during his long and productive life. Iwanami’s career and accomplishments were unusual because of his strong cultural— even spiritual—motivations, particularly when compared to the standards of his more commercially-minded counterparts in Tokyo. It is of some interest to note that there were similar contemporary figures like him working in other cultures at roughly the same period. One thinks immediately of Alfred Knopf (1892–1984) in the United States, France’s Gaston Gallimard (1881–1975) with his paperbound versions of great world classics, or of Germany’s Kurt Wolff (1887–1963), who performed similar functions, first in Europe, then in America. The ideals and accomplishments of these men, as their dates of birth make clear, might well be compared in terms of certain parallel developments in their respective cultures during the same period, which include significant alterations in educational systems, economic methods of organization, and other social and historical changes. Then too, these men resembled each other to some extent in terms of personal

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

303

character. All received what might be termed elite educations, yet the values they inherited, examined, and ultimate ly internalized were redolent with a sense of universal obligation. Still, in the case of Iwanami, the specifics of his life and development complicate (perhaps happily) any simple level of comparison and generalization. Certain similarities between the cultures and politics of France, Japan, Germany, and the United States during the formative years of these four men can be sketched, but the differences remain specific and intractable. Thus, the best place to begin is by providing some of those specifics concerning Iwanami himself. Iwanami is chronologically the youngest of the ‘four characters in search of modernity,’ and he personifies in his convictions and enthusiasms a significant shift as felt by his generation in their sense of Japan as a nation and of her changing place in the world. To put these matters in the simplest terms, those who came before—that first generation of Japanese thinkers and intellectuals who had already reached at least young adulthood at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration—had their sense of self and society formed as a matter of course during their adolescence, at a time when traditional Japanese values, even though they might later come to be questioned or modified in the course of their adult lives, could never simply be set aside. Iwanami’s adolescence, however, places him in a ‘middle generation.’ His education, which sometimes included direct contact with foreign teachers, pushed him and his contemporaries far closer to a cosmopolitan view of the world. These new enthusiasms in turn gave him a conviction of the need to share with others the ideas and new possibilities of understanding that had so moved him personally. Thus, if we are to speak of a certain real ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the Taishō and prewar Showa eras, it must be with a recognition of the fact that such individual figures as Iwanami, through his publishing house, supplied much of the material which came to shape the contours of the intellectual dialogue during those important years. Iwanami’s career, spanning as it did more than four decades, reveals a number of striking facets and developments. Here, I would like to center my observations on Iwanami’s education during Meiji. For it was in late Meiji that his personal values were clearly established. These values would turn out to be, while in some ways an extension of those of the preceding generation, ultimately quite different in character. In order to understand the drives and enthusiasms of the best of the first generation who came into contact with the West, one need search no further than Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901). However forwardlooking, even iconoclastic, a figure Fukuzawa may have been (if we use his Autobiography as evidence), he was nevertheless brought up within a received context of traditional values and ethics. Thus, Fukuzawa shows, whatever his conscious opinions on those traditions might eventually become, a truly Confucian commitment to hard work, study, and moral probity in both the public and private spheres, as well as a real desire to help his nation. Fukuzawa’s travels in Europe began even before the fall of the shogunate opened up new horizons to him, and he shared those horizons as he best understood them with his readers. Still, his prior intellectual formation remained as a source of emotional and moral balance, providing him with a series of assumptions shared by his generation. His writings show a formidable grasp of the need to understand foreign societies (as he was able to do). Still, the intellectual structuies which provided him with his strategies for analysis seem, on the basis of his writings at least, relatively firm and secure. Therefore, it might be said that while Fukuzawa studied the West, such encounters took place during the trajectory of his adult intellectual life. He did not, in the full sense of the word, encounter the West; to the extent that it can be said that he did, that encounter was basically a mature one, intellectual rather than emotional in nature. Iwanami, born more than ten years after the beginning of Meiji, in 1881, was subject as a boy (certainly as an adolescent) to a largely different set of stresses. His personal encounters with these new ideas, which took place during his formative years, while filled with the potential for the acceptance of new cultural possibilities, were also, he was to come to feel, the source for an intense spiritual anguish as well.

304

IWANAMI SHIGEO’S MEIJI EDUCATION: ENCOUNTERS, TRANSMISSIONS

Iwanami, therefore, may be regarded as a good sample of the kind of intellectual fostered by the climate of late Meiji. In terms of his formative years, we are fortunate to have the excellent 1947 biography Iwanami Shigeo den (A Biography of Iwanami Shigeo) by his fellow student and later colleague and confidant Abe Yoshishige (1883–1966). Abe, like Iwanami a disciple of the great Meiji novelist Natsume Sōseki, was a student of philosophy and did much to introduce central aspects of Kantian thought into Japan. Later he was to teach in Korea. After the Pacific War, he became briefly Minister of Education in the Shidehara Cabinet and eventually took on the presidency of Gakushūin University in 1947. In the course of composing the biography, Abe spoke with many who knew and worked with Iwanami at various times in the publisher’s career, and his account, while not attempting in any way to deconstruct the genuine admiration he felt for his subject, represents far more than mere hagiography. Abe seems in sonic ways to have understood that Iwanami’s early personal struggles belonged to his whole generation, and since he couches his observations in such a wider context, Abe helps provide a portrait not only of Iwanami but of the tensions and challenges of the times through which both of them lived. The specifics of Iwanami’s early years present a slow but inevitable trajectory toward the kind of cosmopolitan vision that was to sustain him throughout his adult career. Iwanami, like the celebrated novelist Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), some ten years his senior, was born in a small farming village in Nagano Prefecture. His father was a village official and was indeed subject to the kind of wrenching changes that Tōson pictured so powerfully in his long novel Before the Dawn. Iwanami apparently admired his father, but his mother Uta remained a central influence in his life; indeed, Abe’s portrait of her shows a woman with the same high ideals and sense of Confucian virtue as those of lo, the wife in Shibue Chūsai, Mori Ōgai’s masterful 1916 historical account of the life of a Tokugawa doctor who lived from 1805 to 1858. lo lived in Edo, and Uta in a remote mountain village, but it is easy to locate in the conduct of their daily lives the normative forces of traditional Japanese cultural values. Perhaps the greatest gift his mother gave him, lwanami was to insist, was her determination to push him through the local school system. He remembered her as ‘more courageous than any man’. In 1896, when Iwanami was still in his mid-teens, his father died. For him, this was the first crisis which he felt ‘set him apart’ from others in his village milieu. Given the financial hardships which now came to the family, it would have been likely that he would have gone to work immediately, but his mother, despite extraordinary financial hardships, insisted that he continue with his studies. Three years later, in 1899, he made his first voyage out of his restricted environment as a member of a village committee, going both to Ise and then all the way to Kyushu. This was his first glimpse of the outer world, and he reported his surprise on seeing, for the first time, foreign visitors to Japan. In the same year, Iwanami was able to leave his village and go to Tokyo for further education at a middle school, an opportunity not available to him in his local area. Everyone in his family disapproved of this step, though his mother remained an ardent supporter of the young man’s desire to improve himself, and despite the additional financial handicaps that this decision were to cause her, she persevered. Abe had some difficulties in gaining entrance to these classes, as his education in the countryside had, perforce, been somewhat spotty. Nevertheless, he persevered, and was able to enter the First Higher School in 1901, a crucial time in the development of that important institution.2 THE FIRST PHASE OF IWANAMI’S EDUCATION: SEEKING SELF-MASTERY Iwanami was now twenty. He had managed to make an enormous personal transition. It was to be in these new surroundings that his real encounters would begin, and that fresh and powerful influences on him would occur.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

305

In terms of Iwanami’s own sense of self, the first and perhaps most significant opportunity presented by his years at the First Higher School was to meet contemporaries of like mind and enthusiasm. Whatever the frivolities of student life, the basic atmosphere at the First Higher School was intensely serious. Among the many brilliant students whom Iwanami met, two of his classmates—Abe Jirō (1883–1959), later to become a writer and philosopher of some note, and Abe Voshishige— were to become his closest companions. The three banded together and began to discuss their search for self-understanding. For all of them, the Confucian verities were now to be called into question; they saw themselves as potential citizens of the woild, seeking a new grasp on the great issues of life that lay beyond the confines of the vision of the world as understood and accepted by their parents’ generation. The three soon came to focus their enthusiasms on the writings of two contemporary Japanese intellectual figures who, for them, represented crucial new dimensions in the Japanese understanding of the world and the place of the individual within it. Both served as harbingers of Western ideas which must now somehow be put to use in the context of contemporary Japanese intellectual and spiritual life. The first of them was Takayama Chogyū, born in 1871, only a decade before Iwanami, and alieady a powerful figure in Japanese intellectual and artistic circles. Chogyū was a romantic figure who himself appeared to internalize the psychic stresses and strains that he found, for example, in his beloved Werther of Goethe, which he adapted into Japanese and published in 1891, making the book, and so its author, famous in Japan. Chogyū’s writings on behalf of the work of Nietzsche, and his adoption of some of the German philosopher’s ideas in his own famous essay of 1901, ‘On the Aesthetic Life,’ made him a potent influence among the young intelligentsia. He was to die a year later from a lung hemorrhage, thus becoming a romantic, even tragic, figure to young Japanese intellectuals. In his essay ‘On the Aesthetic Life,’ widely read and appreciated at the time, Chogyū attempted to break away from any remaining Confucian strictures in order to admit the primacy of natural instinct. In the face of these forces, he insisted that received knowledge could hold no authority: ‘Knowledge,’ he wrote, ‘is merely an accumulation of questions; as soon as one is resolved, another takes its place.’ The aesthetic life, on the other hand, is entirely different. Its value is absolute, it is intrinsic. It depends on nothing. It is contained by nothing. It lies beyond the boundaries of reason. It exists where spiritual peace and harmony reside. It is where the genius that guides the development of the universe, with its life-sustaining power, is found. Outside of this, where could the highest happiness of life be found? Morality and knowledge function to regulate this happiness, to curb its development.3 Values, Chogyū insisted, were to be sought by the individual, not merely accepted from society. ‘Money alone does not make one rich,’ he decreed, ‘nor does power make one noble. It is only the one who can recognize within himself the kingdom within his own mind who can speak of the aesthetic life.’4 Such a view poses opportunities, but for many in Iwanami’s generation, such challenges were hard to meet. Too much, perhaps, was being asked of the individual personality. The second figure whose works were read, studied, and debated by Iwanami and the two Abes was Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930), the great Meiji Protestant. Uchimura remained a towering figure on the Japanese cultural and intellectual landscape during and even after his lifetime. His name was widely known to all, and for a variety of reasons. While a student himself, Uchimura had been converted to Christianity along with his friend, the future author and diplomat Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933). After his return from a sojourn at Amherst College in the 1880s, Uchimura became a celebrated figure because of his refusal, in 1891, to bow to a picture of the emperor during a ceremony at the First Higher School, where he was teaching. This most celebrated case of

306

IWANAMI SHIGEO’S MEIJI EDUCATION: ENCOUNTERS, TRANSMISSIONS

lèse majesté during the entire Meiji period indicated with sobering clarity the vast differences between the universalist ideals of the small educated elite and the increasingly conservative and statist assumptions of the government bureaucrats. A renowned writer and pacifist, Uchimura would oppose the Russo-Japanese War and eventually begin his own religious group, the Mumyōkai (a term sometimes translated as ‘NonChurch Christianity’). His journal on the Bible was widely read in more progressive circles. Uchimura’s intellectual understanding and sympathies were wide and deep. John Howes has described him as one who ‘made the Christian faith compatible with those brought up within the Confucian system.’5 Here, therefore, was a figure who was facing bravely and directly the challenges involved in moving from one set of mentalities to another—precisely those difficulties that Iwanami and his friends were coming to realize were to become the challenge for their own generation. In 1903, the year after Chogyū’s sudden death, Iwanami was to face what he once later termed his ‘year of anguish.’ The year was a difficult one not only for lwanami but for many of his fellow-students, as it began with the celebrated suicide at the Kegon waterfall in Nikko, north of Tokyo, of a brilliant student of the First Higher School, Fujimura Misao. In his suicide note, the young man wrote the following: Ensconced in the vastness of space and time, I, with my meager body, have tried to fathom the enormity of this universe. But what authority can be attributed to Horatio’s philosophy? There is, after all, only one word for truth: ‘incomprehensible.’6 Suicide certainly played a part in traditional Japanese culture, but those who took their own lives (as, for example, in the celebrated puppet and kabuki play Chūshingura) did so in recompense for some public misdeed, real or perceived. By Fujimura’s day, it had become Shakespeare, not Confucius, whom the victim cited. The reason for suicide seemed to be fear of the vastness of the unfathomable universe, rather than reverence for the traditional social system too well understood by the transgressor prepared to die. The novelist Mori Ōgai, in his 1910 novel Youth (that fascinating work that represents his attempt to capture something of the angst of young people during this period) has his protagonist write in his journal a phrase that codifies the questions that so many were asking: ‘Now that the self has been liberated, for what is it to be used?’ Or, to put the matter in other terms, how can the sense of idealism now liberated in the young come to function with any effectiveness in the real world? These were not academic questions for Iwanami, but burning personal issues. He suddenly withdrew from school and retired to Lake Nojiri (already a well-known Christian missionary haunt) in the mountains of his own Nagano Prefecture. His purpose, he said, was to meditate. By his own account, the two works that he used as a basis for his cogitations were a collection of writings by Uchimura and a translation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1879 A Confession, that celebrated book in which the Russian author tried to penetrate beyond all social facades in order to grasp the true nature of Christianity and, by extension, to define his own human responsibilities. The text of Tolstoy’s work apparently framed for Iwanami the issues he felt to be of paramount importance at that moment in his life: …something very strange started to happen to me. At first I began experiencing moments of bewilderment; my life would come to a standstill, as if I did not know how to live or what to do, and I felt lost and fell into despair. But they passed and I continued to live as before. Then these moments of bewilderment started to occur more frequently, always taking the same form. On these occasions, when life came to a standstill, the same questions always arose: ‘Why? What comes next?’7

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

307

Probing his own psyche, Tolstoy attempts to find the reasons for these changes in his attitudes toward life and himself: My question, the one that brought me to the point of suicide when I was 50 years old, was a most simple one that lies in the soul of every person, from a silly child to a wise old man. It is the question without which life is impossible, as I had learnt from experience. It is this: what will come of what I do today or tomorrow? What will come of my entire life? Expressed another way the question can be put like this: why do I live? Why do I wish for anything, or do anything? Or expressed another way: is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?8 A Confession charts Tolstoy’s wandering through a maze of despair until he comes to realize, through his knowledge of simple and unpretentious people, that a true faith in God lies at the base of their acceptance of life. At a crucial juncture in the essay, Tolstoy exclaims as follows: ‘Live in search of God and there will be no life without God!’ And more powerfully than ever before everything within and around me came to light, and that light has not deserted me since.9 Iwanami, apparently, was examining his own version of the same dilemma. Various interpretations might be given as to the significance and depth of this encounter with himself that Iwanami was to experience during his sojourn of several weeks in the mountains. On one level, it appears that he felt an urgent existential need to close the seemingly yawning gap between his inherited values and the new and troubling ideas that his Tokyo education had placed before him. It seems clear that he needed to examine, and ultimately confront, the crisis that he was facing; these moments were not merely to constitute a period for reflection and study. The books he took with him suggest that he sought the companionship of writers who mirrored his own feelings. He did not wish to be intellectually educated or entertained. That his feelings showed a sentimental, perhaps still adolescent, side can be inferred from his taking along some of the sentimental novels of a popular writer of the day, Kusamura Hokusui (1876–1950). Iwanami’s mother, fearing that her son might himself be contemplating suicide, managed to visit him at the lake. Whatever the details of that particular encounter between mother and son, this visit seems to have marked a beginning of the young man s return to a more normal state of mind. Abe Yoshishige, who was given access to certain of Iwanami’s private diaries, remarks in his biography that at this time it seems clear from the entries that Iwanami was ‘in dread of death.’ As for Iwanami himself, he later indicated that the insight he gained from this withdrawal, and one he credits to Uchimura, was a new and firm conviction that ‘a man has no humanity without faith.’ So ended the first phase of Iwanami’s personal and spiritual education. THE SECOND PHASE OF IWANAMI’S EDUCATION: A ROLE IN THE WORLD Iwanami returned to Tokyo, after his lonely sojourn, finished his school work, then managed to enter Tokyo Imperial University in 1904 in the status of a special student. His excellent academic progress allowed him to regularize his position fairly quickly. Given the new impetus toward self-understanding in his life, it is perhaps not surprising that he decided to learn German and to major in philosophy. He sought rooming accommodations with a family in the Kanda section of Tokyo, where he met the family’s daughter and his bride-to-be, Akaishi Yoshi, whom he married in 1906. In Iwanami’s own view, two encounters made during

308

IWANAMI SHIGEO’S MEIJI EDUCATION: ENCOUNTERS, TRANSMISSIONS

these university years were to remain significant moments not only in his development as a student but for his inner life. The first of these was his meeting with his hero from his days in the First Higher School, Uchimura Kanzō. Iwanami, managing to find the courage to seek out the great man, then decided to visit Uchimura’s famous Bible classes. Fascinated, he attended them for over a year. Among his fellow participants, who therefore became his acquaintances, was Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928), who five years later would found the first professional, modern drama company in Japan, the Jiyū Gekijō (Free Theater) dedicated to presenting the work of Ibsen and other contemporary European dramatists for the first time in Tokyo. Another was Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), who eventually was to become arguably the leading novelist of the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods. Both Osanai and Shiga were also themselves students at Tokyo University during this period. The charisma of Uchimura, and the authenticity of certain of his Christian concerns, were of central importance to this sensitive and often introspective generation. Curiously enough, however, the issue of the Christian context in late Meiji intellectual life remains a topic still to be taken up in any requisite depth in Western-language studies of this period. Iwanami’s second personal encounter was with a foreign scholar, another who had a powerful effect on a whole generation of students. Raphael von Koeber (1848–1923) was born in Russia. His first love was music, which he pursued at the Moscow Conservatory of Music, from which he was graduated in 1872. Later in the decade, von Koeber went to Germany to study philosophy, where he earned a doctorate with his study of Schopenhauer. During this period, he met the influential German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), whose most significant work, The Philosophy of The Unconsious (published in 1869), was made famous in Japan during the Meiji period in the writings of Mori Ōgai and others. Von Hartmann had been consulted concerning a recommendation for the appointment of a teacher of German philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, and he urged von Koeber to accept, which he did. Von Koeber taught philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, and pursued his interests in music at the Tokyo Academy of Music, from 1893 to 1914. His preparations to return home were delayed by the beginning of World War I, and he decided to retire in Japan, remaining in Yokohama for several years before his eventual return to Europe not long before his death. Von Koeber was renowned both for his learning and for his high moral character. The list of a generation of students who looked on him as their intellectual and spiritual mentor is a long one indeed. Here Iwanami takes his place with such luminaries as Natsume Sōseki, the philosophers Watsuji Tetsurō, Kuki Shūzō, and Abe Jirō, among others. This kind of close relationship with a foreign teacher was something which Iwanami, when living in Nagano as a boy, could scarcely have imagined. Such close and serious intellectual contact between Europeans and Japanese students marks a new phase in the growing cosmopolitanism of the country’s elite. These encounters produced powerful results in Iwanami’s formation as a person. True enough, the influences wrought upon him by these two men were to some extent indirect. Iwanami did not become a Christian, nor did he become a professional philosopher. Still, these experiences reshaped the nature of his own convictions and ambitions. Abe Yoshishige notes in the biography that, as a result of his university years, Iwanami made a deep personal commitment to know and understand the world, not merely Japan; and what was more, he committed himself as well to making an attempt to try to help others to understand it as well. In 1908, just at the time of his graduation, Iwanami’s mother died. She had heretofore been the great force in his life. She had seen him through the difficult years of his social and intellectual formation. He was distraught, but nevertheless prepared to make a life for himself. And whatever the practicalities of that life would be, Iwanami confided to his diary, he was convinced that ‘one must learn to live without deceit.’

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

309

Perhaps it is not so surprising then, that in 1909, Iwanami took up work as a teacher at the Kanda Girl’s High School in Tokyo. Still inspired by the beliefs of that hero from his First Higher School days, Leo Tolstoy, Iwanami was convinced that women should receive a proper education. And he kept up his strong intellectual interests, establishing with Abe Yoshishige and others a virtual weekly salon for intellectual discussions in his home. In 1913, Iwanami decided that his real ambition was to open a bookstore, with a particular idea of publishing, and so making available, books of intellectual worth available to students and others who sought such material. In order to realize his ambition, he resigned his teaching position, certainly a risky step to take given his lack of financial resources. Iwanami also decided somehow to find the financial means to publish manuscripts that he felt were of value. Because of Iwanami’s contacts with von Koeber and others, he had met and become friendly with Natsume Sōseki, who decided to entrust the manuscript of his latest novel, Kokoro, to this young man, so full of ambition and good will. The rest, in terms of Iwanami’s publishing career, was history. After Sōseki’s death in 1916, Iwanami set out to publish his complete works, and their continued (and continuing) success provided his firm with the necessary financial basis to permit the undertaking of a variety of publishing projects. Iwanami went on to commission translations and publish the work of most of the great European thinkers and writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Kant and Hegel, to Marx and the great modern European scientists. What is more, Iwanami was determined that many of these books should be made available in editions sufficiently inexpensive that they could be purchased by students and others who most needed them. Thus, he launched a paperback series, not unlike our famous ‘Modern Library,’ which fulfilled many of the same functions in the United States during those same decades. When the novelist Kawabata Yasunari, a generation or so later, was to speak in mock-disparagement of the dangers of ‘Iwanami culture’ for the Japanese artistic sensibility, he was paying homage to the ubiquitous nature of Iwanami’s contributions to a growing Japanese store of world knowledge, a trend which continues to this day. The details of those years, and those accomplishments, of Iwanami and his celebrated publishing house lie outside the parameters of this essay. Yet without the formative experiences, and the shocks and challenges Iwanami faced, it seems doubtful that he would have become the man who would eventually set out with such resolution to accomplish what he did. There are doubtless a number of ways in which Iwanami’s motives and ambitions might be examined. Nevertheless, it does seem that on a deep personal level the trajectory of his personal education created in him a sense of commitment to provide for others, and to place in their hands at the most reasonable expense possible, those materials that might hopefully provide for each of them in their own way some means to achieve the kind of life-transforming encounters which had transformed Iwanami himself from a village youngster to the committed and thoughtful cosmopolitan figure that he had become. So, by force of belief and example, Iwanami was to provide the intellectual underpinning needed for Japan, after such a long period of isolation, to move ever more quickly to rejoin the world. Formed by such late Meiji mentalities, Iwanami was an important man at a crucial time. NOTES 1. The book was commissioned by Iwanami’s family after his death in 1946 and published by the Iwanami firm in 1957. The biographical information on Iwanami’s career contained in this essay is largely taken from the chapters on his early life, pp. 3–109.

310

IWANAMI SHIGEO’S MEIJI EDUCATION: ENCOUNTERS, TRANSMISSIONS

2. For a number of trenchant details on the milieu in which Iwanami found himself, see Donald Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). This study provides remarkable insight into what now might be termed the youth culture of that time. 3. For the Japanese text, see Nihon gendai bubgaku zenshū, vol. 8 (Kōdansha, 1967), 289. 4. Ibid., 290. 5. See his entry for Uchimura in The Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, vol. 8 (1983), 124. 6. For the full text and useful background on this incident, see Roden, School-days, 165–173. 7. This translation is taken from Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings, trans. Jane Kentish (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 28. 8. Ibid., 34–35. 9. Ibid., 65.

Part VII Art and Artistry

First published in Shūji Takashina et al., Paris in Japan: The Japanese Encounter with European Painting, Tokyo, The Japan Foundation, 1987, pp. 33–79

25 Tokyo in Paris/Paris in Tokyo

PROLOGUE. THE CONTEXT FOR JAPANESE INTEREST IN WESTERN ART BY THE LATE nineteenth century, Paris had become the center of the artistic world. Artists from the Americas, the rest of Europe, and from many parts of Asia were flocking to live, observe, study and create in an atmosphere of intellectual exhilaration and aesthetic accomplishment. The sense that by living in Paris they were at the center of the excitement, part of an artistic society within a society, helped sustain several generations in their quest for a new and authentic means of artistic expression. The interchange between Paris and Berlin, Vienna, London, and New York have been much studied and commented upon, and more recently the travels of Scandinavian, eastern European, and Russian artists to Paris have come to be documented as well. The exhibition, however, sets out to explore the equally evocative links between Paris and Japan in that formative period from 1890 to 1930 when the traditions of modern Japanese art were being established. Japonisme, the effect of Japanese art on the French, is a well-known phenomenon, but the reciprocal and equally important effect of French art on the Japanese is the story that this exhibit will, at least in part, reveal. What follows here is a general sketch of the artistic activities of this period that focus on the significance of the French experience, and the French example, in the development of modern Japanese art. There were other European influences as well during the period; in particular, some Japanese artists were inspired by the example of German, English, and Spanish painters. The main focus of artistic relationships from 1890 to 1930, however, was that established between Paris and Tokyo. In order to create a context for understanding the significance of this link, a number of topics are dealt with here in order to provide some overall sense of the complexities, both in the world of art and in the larger cultural aspects of Japanese society. It is our hope to raise here a number of provocative questions and issues, even if, at this stage of research on the period, they cannot all be responded to fully. In order to help readers new to the subject of modern Japanese art, certain points are raised in differing contexts, which accounts for some occasional repetitions. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century the traditions and techniques of older Japanese art were consonant with those originally inspired by the Chinese model. Centuries of interplay between Chinese ideals and Japanese sensibilities created the great traditions of Japanese painting which encompass many modes. By the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), these possibilities ranged from works drawing on predominantly Japanese styles, such as screens by Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716) (Figure 25.1), to the literati

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

313

Figure 25.1 Ogata Kōrin, Iris, early eighteenth-century. Folding screen, colors on paper, each panel 151.2×360.7 cm/ 59½×142 in. Nezu Art Museum, Tokyo.

painting (bunjinga) of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (Figure 25.2), which reassembled elements of classical Chinese painting according to Japanese sensibilities of color, line, and subject matter. In the development of these traditional Japanese styles and techniques, a significant element of selfconsciousness was present. Individual artists had as a part of their artistic and philosophical grounding the skills needed to assess, and therefore manipulate, both Japanese and Chinese painting styles of any period. It is this quality of self-awareness, this implicit understanding of art as conscious creation, as a theme and variations, that gives so much of traditional Japanese painting that quality that might be defined as a controlled and highly creative eclecticism. Indeed, it might be noted that the developments in Western art in our own century, with its own restless reworking of styles, has allowed the modern public in Europe and America to appreciate these virtues in traditional Japanese art, as viewers have become increasingly familiar with the various elements that go to make up the Chinese and Japanese vocabulary of style. However powerful the influence of Chinese painting had been on the traditional arts of Japan, knowledge and appreciation of Western art began with the coming of the Europeans, many of them Catholic missionaries, in the 1500s to create what has been dubbed ‘Japan’s Christian century.’ The Europeans brought with them objects and art works that were avidly studied by Japanese artists and patrons. Certain maps and other works painted by the Japanese at that time in imitation of Western styles, although scarely of the highest level of accomplishment, show the existence of a lively curiosity and a satisfactory grasp of new and fundamental Western techniques, such as shading and perspective (Figure 25.3). These tentative experiments might well have become traditions in their own right had not the Tokugawa Shogunate, shortly after consolidating its power in 1600, decided for political reasons to virtually cut off all contact between Japan and the nations of Europe. Only the protestant Dutch were permitted to continue their trade with the Japanese through the southern port of Nagasaki. They were seldom allowed to travel to the great cities of Kyoto, the imperial capital, Osaka, the center of merchant culture, or Edo (now Tokyo), the administrative capital of the Shogunate. It was through the tiny aperture of Nagasaki, itself a distant and provincial milieu for the Japanese, that information on all subjects Western, including Western art, was permitted to filter into Japan. Japanese curiosity about Western art, however, continued to produce a series of remarkable and sometimes aesthetically accomplished exper iments using Western artistic techniques as a means of recording the sights of the physical world, a desire that in itself reflects the burgeoning of a scientific spirit. Western art came to be seen, from the limited amount of evidence available, as an effective means to record

314

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.2 Yosa Buson, Black Kites and Crows, 1778–1783. Hanging pair of scrolls, ink and colors on paper, 133. 3×54.4 cm/52 ×21½ in. Private collection.

the realities of the physical world, both in terms of space, through the use of perspective, and the choice of subject matter. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such artists as Shiba Kōkan (1747– 1818) (Figure 25.4), Aōdō Denzen (1748–1822) (Figure 25.5), and Watanabe Kazan (1793–1841) (Figure 25.6), had not only produced accomplished works, based on what they were able to learn, but had managed to stimulate curiosity in artistic circles generally about the vocabulary of Western art. On the whole, it might be said that those artists used what they knew about Western art in the same way their predecessors employed elements in Chinese art. In both cases these imported styles were mixed and blended with elements in the Japanese tradition so as to produce a synthesis that manifested, through juxtaposition and combination, the power of their own individual artistic personalities. In 1868, the Emperor Meiji took the political power from a defeated Shogunate and, in a reversal of the long traditional policy, opened the country directly to outside influences. The famous ‘Charter Oath’ of 1868 exhorted the nation’s youth: ‘Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.’ Within a few years, Japanese were abroad studying everything from police management and banking systems to Western hygiene and railroad design. There were some among them, of course, who also went to study art and literature. It was the work of that first generation which, taking Japan out of her isolation, was able to set the stage for the initial period of creativity in the arts that was to materialize before the turn of the century. Relatively few, of course, could make the expensive, lengthy, and difficult trip to Europe. Many, however, endeavored to learn what they could, even if they had to remain in Japan. Fortunately for those interested in Western-style painting, certain opportunities soon became available in Tokyo. As in other areas of intellectual and scientific life at the time, the government made the decision to bring to Japan foreign teachers who would work directly with large numbers of students, drawn from around the country.

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

315

Figure 25.3 Anonymous, Foreign Princes on Horseback, about 1590. Detail of four-panel screen, colors on paper, 166. 2×468 cm/65½ ×184¼ in. Kobe Municipal Museum of Nanban Art, Kobe.

Figure 25.4 Shiba Kōkan, Shichirigahama, 1798. Colors on paper, 49.5×71.2cm/19½×28 in.

Given the pragmatic atmosphere of the day, it may seem remarkable that precious funds were provided for training in such an obscure discipline as oil painting, but at that time, the Meiji officials chose to regard Western art as a ‘scientific’ discipline that the Japanese, like the Americans and the Europeans, should possess in order to make possible an accurate rendering of space and form. In that spirit, an official art school, the Technical Art School, was opened in 1876. The first artist imported to teach painting came from Italy. Antonio Fontanesi (1818–1882) was a highly respected painter in Europe during the period, known primarily for his Barbizon-style rustic landscapes, often painted with thick pigments in dark and romantic tones (Figure 25.7). Fontanesi had been appointed professor of landscape painting at the Turin Academy some years before his arrival in Japan, so he was already a practiced teacher of theory and technique. His students found him a charismatic figure. Fontanesi only remained in Japan for two years, when he had to return to Italy because of illness. Fontanesi’s time in Japan was short, but he brought the traditions of nineteenth century realistic European painting to his eager and often gifted students, many of whom in turn conveyed to their own younger disciples what they had learned from their revered Italian master. Some Japanese at the time, notably the enormously gifted Takahashi Yuichi (1828–1894) (Figure 25.8) had learned to master the art of oil painting from books and lithographs. Now such young men as Asai Chū and Yamamoto Hōsui (1850–1906) could learn directly such important Western techniques as mixing oil colors, perspective, modeling, and other fundamentals never part of traditional Japanese art training. The very accomplishments of these young artists, however, crystallized a number of basic problems that every Japanese painter—indeed any creative person in Japan during the period—would have to face in some fashion or other. The fundamental questions they found themselves posing were: what should be the relationship between the ideas provided them by their Tokugawa background and the example of the new

316

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.5 Aōdō Denzen, Outside Edo Castle, undated. Colors on paper, 35×68 cm/13¾×26¾ in. Tokyo University of Fine Arts, Tokyo.

knowledge gamed from Europe? What should and could be retained of the older habits and heretofore accepted traditions? In the field of art, Japanese painters had long combined customary perceptions and techniques in a synthetic vocabulary capable of a wide range of expressiveness. In the decade of the 1880s, Western painting seemed to have so little in common with these oriental traditions that no expressive amalgam seemed appropriate, even possible. Moreover, there were ideological implications involved as well. In 1864, Sakuma Shōzan (1811–1864), a retainer to an important feudal lord and a supporter of the internationalization of Japan at a time when the Shogun’s policy was one of strong isolation, coined the telling phrase, ‘Eastern ethics and Western science,’ voicing thereby the hope that one half of the equation need not unduly influence the other. A number of historians have viewed the history of Japan since 1868 as a test of the possibilities and dangers inherent in Shōzan’s celebrated and often-repeated dictum. Could Western methods be absorbed, leaving the indigenous value system, the native soul untouched? For some in the world of the arts, the adoption of Western artistic values and techniques amounted to an abdication of a great tradition. The introduction of Western painting, so different in its methods and aims from the traditional canons of taste and value, served in turn as a stimulus to bring about a counter-reaction, a new definition and a renewed appreciation of older Japanese ideals and methods. Caution against abandoning the great traditions was expressed by such an important figure as Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913), who, along with his American colleague Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), warned that a true contemporary Japanese art should carry on earlier traditions, mixing with them only the most sympathetic elements from the Western example. Okakura, who with Fenollosa helped build the great collections now housed in the Boston Museum, spoke both as a modern man and as a Japanese patriot. The art that he and his disciples fostered at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts drew on classical Japanese examples, often using water soluble pigments rather than oils. This style of modern painting ‘in the Japanese style,’ now referred to as Nihonga, has been adopted by a number of artists much revered in Japan, notably Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958) (Figure 25.9). These methods have not, however, at least in the eyes of most foreign students of modern Japanese art, produced a tradition capable of sustaining admiration outside of Japan. Like the traditional haiku and waka poetry written since the 1880s, Nihonga seems all too often turned in on itself, settling for the sentimental rather than risking bold innovation. Still, the Nihonga style remained, and still remains, a viable alternative to the path of a wholesale adoption of Western techniques. A number of painters in this

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

317

Figure 25.6 Watanabe Kazan, Portrait of Ichikawa Beian, 1837. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk, 129.5×59 cm/ 51×23¼ in. Agency for Cultural Affairs, Tokyo.

exhibition, notably Kishida Ryūsei, Koide Narashige, and Yorozu Tetsugorō, experimented with such traditional styles of painting at one time or other in their careers as a means to search out the contrasting facets of their developing artistic personalities. As in so many areas of cultural activity in Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the government played a seminal role in initially fostering the study of Western art. Such support was crucial for both the teaching and the public presentation of new Japanese art, both at home and abroad. What is more, the directions and limitations of that assistance helped establish a climate of official opinion and set in motion as well the development of a resistance to those opinions. In effect, and through no conscious set of decisions on the part of the bureaucrats concerned, these government-sponsored art projects, as in France, came to provide support for basically conservative forces in terms of Western styles that were encouraged and propagated. The individuals and groups working independently of government support were on the whole more adventuresome and creative. The pattern of French official patronage in the nineteenth century was thus to repeat itself several decades later in Japan. Still, without such support in the first place, Western painting and sculpture might never have been taught systematically until decades later. The activities of the Japanese government in the Meiji period were visible in three distinct areas. The first involved the teaching of the techniques of painting. As was mentioned above, an official school was first set up in 1876, attached to the Imperial College of Technology (Figure 25.10). It was here that Fontanesi taught his pupils. This experiment, however, although judged a success in some quarters, was terminated in 1883, partially for want of properly trained faculty. In 1887, the Tokyo School of Fine Arts was opened, under the

318

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.7 Antonio Fontanesi, Tranquility, 1860. Oil on canvas, 82×120 cm/32¼× 47¼ in. Municipal Museum of Modern Art, Turin.

Figure 25.8 Takahashi Yuichi, Salmon, 1877. Oil on paper, 135 ×44.5 cm/53 ×17½ in. Tokyo University of Fine Arts, Tokyo.

guidance of Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenollosa. As the philosophy of the school stressed the bolstering of traditional techniques, Western-style painting was provided no support until, as a result of continuing pressures from those students who wished to study the medium of oil painting, a section for Western painting was finally established nine years later in 1896. The Western Painting Section provided a focus for students from all over Japan and soon had so many applicants that a gifted young painter like Koide

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

319

Figure 25.9 Yokoyama Taikan, Cherries at Night, 1929. Six-panel screen, colors on paper, each panel 177.5×375 cm/ 69 ×147 in. Ōkura Cultural Foundation, Tokyo.

Figure 25.10 An early photograph of the Technical Art School, Tokyo.

Narashige had to console himself with entry into the Japanese Painting Section while waiting for entry into the more popular Western department. Many of the finest painters during the period, from Kuroda Seiki and Kume Keiichirō to Yasui Sōtarō and Umehara Ryūzaburō, provided instruction there at one time or another, and a significant number of the most accomplished painters in Japan during these decades had at least some training at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Secondly, the government set up a system for exhibiting contemporary Japanese art in Tokyo and elsewhere in the country. The yearly Ministry of Education Art Exhibition, the Monbushō bijutsu tenrankai, shortened in popular reference to Bunten, was inaugurated in 1907. The effort was popular from the beginning. The initial exhibition attracted almost 44,000 people, and by 1912, the number had risen to over 160,000. Bunten has continued on, weathering a number of changes in name, size, and purpose, down to the present day. The Bunten functioned somewhat along the lines of the French Salon, upon which it was partially modeled. Pictures were submitted each year to a group of judges appointed by the government, a large number of selected pictures were hung, and prizes were awarded. In the first year of the exhibition, for example, a total of eighty-three paintings in the Western style were chosen for display from 329 submissions, while eighty-nine out of 635 Nihonga were hung. Success in such a national exhibition meant favorable publicity and considerable attention from a growing urban public eager to learn about contemporary art. The exhibition brought needed public attention to Western-style art, a great deal of genuine excitement to those who actually saw the pictures, and, occasionally, the advent of a scandal that could generate even

320

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

more publicity. Many private methods of exhibiting art were to develop as well, including the concept, so novel to American visitors in Japan, of art exhibits in department stores, but the government’s Bunten provided the first and most influential model. Thirdly, officials in the government became convinced that the vitality of art, as an artifact of culture, could indeed serve as an index to the health and progress of the nation. One important way that Japan could demonstrate the force of her modernizing thrust was to participate in the international fairs that served in much of the period as a potent means to illustrate the progress of various nations around the world.1 In terms of international recognition, Japan, unlike China, was little known and appreciated in the West before the Meiji Restoration of 1868; her long seclusion had rendered her mysterious and remote. The Shogunate in its final days had provided matenals for a small exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair of 1867, which included some woodblock prints by then-contemporary artists in the traditional styles. These and later exhibits of prints, such as those shown at the 1873 Universal Exposition in Vienna, did much to stimulate interest in the ‘exoticism’ of Japanese art; as late as 1876, the Japanese pavilion at the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia showed the traditional work of ink painters and craftsmen like Shibata Zeshin (1807–1891) (Figure 25.11), whose drawings of landscapes and other traditional subjects suggested nothing of the growing interest among young Japanese concerning Western art. By the time of the famous 1893 World Columbian Exposition held in Chicago, however, Japanese officials began to make more strenuous efforts to show the world something of modernizing Japan, providing information and exhibits on railway lines, telegraph systems, and schools. The arts, however, continued to present a reflection of traditional values. The Japanese pavilion was constructed in a fashion to illustrate the building techniques used in various periods of Japanese architecture, and few new paintings or works of sculpture were shown, none in Western style. The Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900, however, provided Japanese Western-style painters with their first real opportunity to have their works shown officially abroad. By then, some Japanese painters, such as Kuroda Seiki, were already known in France, and more and more young Japanese painters resident in Paris were attempting to win a place in the Salon. French interest in Japanese traditional art often extended to friendly curiosity about contemporary Japanese attempts to paint in the European style, and the time seemed ripe for a display of what the Japanese government committee took to be representative of the best work then being done by their artists. Paintings by Kume, Kuroda, Okada, Fujishima, and Asai Chū were included, as well as works by some thirty-odd others. The Japanese artists were thrilled to be displayed in Paris, and they seemed content enough with the friendly reception their work received. The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis provided the next significant forum for the display of a modernizing Japanese state. The Japanese pavilion was planned so that the public might be convinced of the reality of the new Japan, to show how well she had adjusted her politics, economy, and military structures to the needs of modern life. In the sections that dealt with art. Western-style oil paintings were shown as in Paris, among them works by Okada Saburōsuke and a dozen others; and although some commentators bemoaned the fact that the Japanese were becoming less exotic, the Japanese organizers felt that these contemporary works of art could enhance the image set forth by the government of a nation abreast of world developments, cultural and political. The Japanese government, like many others, continued to use the mechanism of the international exposition to show her progress. By the time of World War I, however, alternate channels of information made this special and expensive vehicle less useful. Still, many Japanese painters had their first important foreign exposure on such occasions. Umehara, Arishima Ikuma, Yamashita Shintarō, and Yasui, among others, were doubtless given their first American showings in the Japanese pavilion at the 1939 New York

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

321

Figure 25.11 Shibata Zeshin, Plank Road in the Mountains, 1877. Colors on panel, 38.5×51 cm/15 × 20 in.

World’s Fair, and the prestige of inclusion in such an international show was significant in Japan in terms of the domestic career of any artist. At the same time, however, the activities of the government stimulated independent responses, and, on occasion, counter movements. In the area of teaching, for example, a number of painters set up their own studios, painting and teaching privately. Kuroda himself, who at a later point in his career did teach at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, established in 1894 his own atelier, the Tenshin dōjō (which might be paraphrased to mean, appropriately enough, ‘a seminary for the intuitive understanding of nature’) where he worked with a number of talented students, including Fujishima Takeji. Asai Chū, after returning from Europe, preferred to teach in Kyoto, where he organized a private art academy. Koide Narashige worked with private students in Osaka. By the 1920s, the growing interest in various styles and possibilities made the relatively narrow curriculum of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts seem old-fashioned in somewhat the same way that the ateliers of the academic painters and the studios of the École des Beaux-Arts had come to seem out of date in France a generation or more before. A parallel situation existed with the government-sponsored art exhibits. With the influx of contemporary ideas new to Japan that came in from Paris between 1905 and 1910 as Umehara and others returned to Tokyo, younger painters began to group themselves together in order to create associations that could support their enthusiasms. A bewildering array of these organizations rose up only to disappear. Many of the prominent artists showed their work in the government-sponsored exhibitions as well, but these private groups, which will be discussed in detail later in this essay, provided the kind of spiritual and occasional financial support that eschewed the tastes of official government sponsors. In an usually unarticulated but significant way, then, these various government activities performed an important function in the development of a genuine tradition of modern painting in Japan. By serving as a source of training, power, and prestige, the government established a status quo against which newer artists could profitably react. By 1910, the existence of a conservative ‘school’ of skillfully executed Western-style oil painting centering around the Tokyo School of Fine Arts began to provide the same kind of foil for adventuresome younger Japanese artists that the École des Beaux-Arts had provided in France for young French painters in the later nineteenth century. This dialectic of movement and counter movement not only spurred on the development of modern Japanese painting but made it possible for artists to react and

322

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

respond to new artistic challenges even without making the costly trip to France. Without the settled traditions of an accomplished Asai Chū or Kuroda Seiki against which to rebel, however implicitly, it would be hard to imagine the independent accomplishment of artists like Yorozu Tetsugorō or Kishida Ryūsei. I. PAINTING IN THE CONTEXT OF FRANCE AND JAPAN: 1890–1930 The general sharp contagion of Paris…youth in the air, and a multitudinous newness, for ever reviving, the diffusion of a hundred talents, ingenuities, and experiments…. —Henry James, The Tragic Muse (1890) If you ask of what the artistic life consists, the answer is not difficult to give. The artist creates his own group, apart from society, and neglects everything else. From morning to night, he does nothing but look at art, hear about art, talk about art, as though art were all the life he knew. You might think that this could be done in London or New York, but it cannot be…for the best artistic minds, Paris alone has the right feel, the proper atmosphere. —Iwamura Tōru, Parii no bijutsu gakusei (The Art Students of Paris), 1902 By the close of the nineteenth century, most countries in Europe, indeed most countries around the world, regarded Paris as the center of civilization and the arts, particularly in the visual arts and literature. Not everyone approved of that dominance; in the United States, for example, Edith Wharton and Henry James may have applauded the fact, but Mark Twain made fun of the whole affair in his Innocents Abroad. Still, all acknowledged it. Germans, Austrians, Czechs, and Spaniards found themselves as attracted as was the Russian Turgenev, and, in later generations, such diverse figures as Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, and Heitor Villa-Lobos would be. The same attraction held true for the Japanese. France began to attract a number of the most gifted writers and artists from the 1880s onwards. The great novelist Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) went to France in 1913 and remained for five years, using his experience there as the basis for his classic novel Shinsei (New Life), in which his protagonist comes to a new vision of himself through his contact with France. Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894–1982), one of the most revered of modern Japanese poets, who knew Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot and who composed poetry in French, English, and Japanese, wrote that as a young man he was a ‘beggar for Europe’ and sought out Paris as his spiritual home. Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), arguably the most accomplished novelist of his generation, wrote his most ambitious and philosophical work Ryoshū (The Sadness of Travel) based on his troubled interior life during the time he spent in France in the 1930s. Through the works of similar artists in virtually every country, the general educated public around the world began to partake of the ‘myth of Paris,’ and to make the assumption, implicit in the myth, that only the atmosphere, values, and training available in Paris could support and sustain the real creative work of the artist. In the case of Japan, the writer who possibly did more to create and sustain the ‘myth of Paris’ than any other was the novelist Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), one of the most gifted writers of his generation to go abroad. Kafū went to the United States for several years, then managed to get to France, his real goal, for only a short time, from 1907 to 1908. He tried to experience as much as possible, visiting galleries, going to concerts, travelling into the countryside, and making notes for cultural comparisons with Japan. On his return to Tokyo, he published his Furansu monogatari (Tales of France), in which he fictionalized his various encounters with the French and French culture. He wrote as well a number of essays and other short

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

323

pieces in which he used his knowledge of the accomplishments of French civilization as a standard, a measuring rod to point out the shortcomings of his own. In Kafū's view, there was a wholeness, a comprehensiveness to French civilization that could give resonance to the simplest activities of daily life; and while Japan might have possessed a similar wholeness up until the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868, he felt that her rush to amalgamate Eastern and Western experiences had brought spiritual poverty to the fabric of daily life. Kafū often used the example of art or architecture to provide his most trenchant examples. In a 1910 novel, his protagonist explains the pattern. The first suspicion of this new mood came one day when he was walking through Shiba Park. He could see nothing in the bronze statue of Count Gōtō that struck him in any way beautiful, but asleep behind it, solitary and forgotten, lay the mortuary shrines of the Shoguns. He stepped into the grounds and his astonishment grew. The memory had quite faded of days when his parents had brought him to this same park to see the cherry blossoms, and the surprise, as he found in a corner of the vulgar, ugly, accursed city a place reserved for art, was as if he had unearthed Pompeii …the design, in sum, was to raise to the highest possible intensity the sense of reverence and worshipfulness. It succeeded magnificently, the place was a masterpiece. As he sought to compare the complex with Parisian buildings he had believed to be the supreme aesthetic experiences of his life, he felt that the Shiba mausoleum, whether their superior or not, was in no way their inferior. Just as the acute angles of Gothic arch itecture communicated perfectly the spirit of the people who had created it, he thought in the intensity of his delight, so the rectangular lines of this shrine and the richness of its colors gave perfect expression to the proud and lonely and aloofly aristocratic bent of the East….2 Kafū went on to become a highly original novelist and a brilliant translator into Japanese of such great French poets as Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Baudelaire. Through the influence of Kafū and others like him, the stature of the arts in France rose higher and higher among an increasingly educated and curious Japanese public. All of this enthusiasm brought results. An increasing number of Japanese now wanted to experience France for themselves. The trip, first by ship, usually from Yokohama through the Suez Canal to Marseilles, then to Paris by train was slow and, for most Japanese at the period, prohibitively expensive. The psychic costs were high as well. T6son and other travellers at the time wrote eloquently of their sense of loneliness and isolation in Paris. Most found difficulties in learning to speak French with fluency, and Tōson in particular seems to have been made uncomfortable, understandably, when he was stared at, or identified as a Chinese. Nevertheless, a trip to France was the premier intellectual and spiritual adventure of the period. Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), the most gifted poet of his generation, wrote wryly in one of his celebrated poems: I wish I could go to France, But France is too far away; I will go at least on a wayward journey In a new suit And when the train climbs a mountain path I will dream of pleasant things, this and that….3 Painters in particular were much encouraged by the high success, both in France and in Japan, of Kuroda Seiki, who had indeed mastered the French language, met important painters in Paris, and found his work admired there. They were informed as well by the example of Iwamura Tōru (1870–1917) who went to France

324

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

during the same period in order to study painting and art history, met Kuroda, and published in 1902 his account The Art Students of Paris, which enjoyed wide circulation. In the book, Iwamura, who had worked at the Académic Julian, described the teachers, how the students worked, and the kind of free society in which these young people lived, both idealistic and raucous, a vie de bohème calculated to excite and cajole his readers. The kind of environment Iwamura suggested seemed, in the context of the constraints of Japanese society, irresistably attractive. Iwamura did not fail to point out that Japanese art students would need to find a better means to develop their skills in speaking French in order to mix with their continental colleagues, but by the same token he made it clear that, in the atmosphere of Paris, talent, not nationality, provided the means of entry and the road to ultimate success. He and his contemporaries could in principle join in that society; and they should be able to accomplish their own goals, since they could share the values of their European friends. The gifted poet and translator Ueda Bin (1874–1916), in France from 1908 to 1912, amplified Iwamura’s convictions. Japan was to have a new age of creativity, brought about through her contact with European culture. Ours is a time that encompasses the pains of a new birth, and so for that very reason it is a period of great confusion. On the surface it seems dfficult to know what to do. Yet is there no way to overcome that feeling? Our time is special, because we can criticize, we can overthrow the rules and standards established by former generations. To borrow the words of the German philosophers, ours is a time when we can recast the old means of expression. For those old ways of expression are useless to us. And what is useless is detrimental. It is we who now must rewrite, recast those old attitudes, in the arts, in morality, in the customs that have come down to us, even in terms of philosophical discourse.4 The intellectual and artistic community in Japan took this challenge seriously and was quick to provide encouragement to Japanese painters, who, after all, seemed to visualize the new in a fashion clear to anyone who saw their work. Natsume Sōseki (1867–1917), the premier novelist and one of the most perceptive critics of his day, wrote articles on contemporary Japanese art and artists, and, during the years from 1909 to 1912, published a column on the arts in the leading newspaper of the day, the Asahi Shinbun. Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), another great writer of the period, had lived in Germany; his continuing interest in European aesthetic theory made him a powerful exponent in Tokyo for the values and ideals of new movements in art, theatre, and literature. Perhaps the most diligent of the intellectuals in this regard was Soseki’s younger colleague Kinoshita Mokutarō (1885–1945). Like Ōgai, Kinoshita’s formal training was in the field of medicine, but his cultural interests were wide and he wrote perceptively of topics ranging from the theatre and literary criticism to painting and aesthetics. Kinoshita wrote a number of highly influential articles and reviews, and his stature as a distinguished man of culture lent considerable weight to his enthusiasms. He soon became aware of the fact that the Japanese public had no intellectual and historical framework on which to base their judgements concerning the Western-style paintings created in Japan. His translation into Japanese of a well-respected work on nineteenth-century French art written in 1901 by the German scholar Richard Muther, Ein Jahrhundert Französischer Malerei (A Hundred Years of French Painting), published in Tokyo in 1919, was Kinoshita’s contribution towards creating a proper context of understanding. Others took up the torch. By 1910 there were a number of groups expressing their enthusiasm for a Western art movement in Japan. Some members of these groups were themselves artists returned from France. Others were men of letters who found themselves inspired by what they took to be the heroic role of the European artist in his society, and therefore viewed such figures as Cézanne and van Gogh as the sort of

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

325

paragons that would be needed in Japan if she were to develop her own authentically modern culture. The most important of these groups was doubtless the Shirakaba (White Birch Society), whose members virtually dominated the arts and literature during the second decade of the century. The Society was particularly important because of the journal that its members sponsored and published. The first issue appeared in April 1910 and publication was only terminated in 1923 when the devastating earthquake in Tokyo destroyed the magazine’s printing facilities. The journal demonstrated a remarkable and sustained interest in European culture. Article after article on the great European writers, musicians, and artists appeared. Many younger Japanese have written that their first contact with the names of such figures as Beethoven, Rodin, and Tolstoy came from this magazine, which enjoyed a nationwide circulation. The journal included reproductions of art works, sometimes in color, which provided, in the phrase of André Malraux, ‘museums without walls’ for a whole generation with no direct access to such masterpieces without a visit to Europe. Among the most important articles published in the journal were those written by modern Japanese artists on the European art that inspired them. Arishima Ikuma wrote a particularly influential piece in 1910 describing his excitement at seeing the work of Cézanne in the famous 1907 retrospective. During the time I was in Japan, and in fact even after I came to Europe, I heard and thought virtually nothing about Cézanne. After I became a student in Paris, I visited many museums, particularly the Musée du Luxembourg, where I practically memorized the Impressionist paintings hung in the small room where the Caillebotte bequest was displayed. Even then I only came across two small samples of Cézanne’s work. I probably thought, like all those who had read their Baedekers, that his efforts were no more than some sort of childish scribbling. In the fall of 1907, however, the Salon d’automne included a retrospective of his work, over two hundred works of art, displayed in two galleries. It was then for the first time that my eyes were opened, that my soul was moved, and that I learned of a new way in which the great garden of art might be cultivated. And I also found myself in the tide of change concerning the popular appreciation of his work.5 Arishima provided in his article, for the first time in Japanese, a clear outline of Cézanne’s life and accomplishments. He reminded his readers that Cézanne was difficult for much of the French public as well, because of the newness of his vision. Arishima went on to suggest that even though the Japanese public might not as yet know the history of Western art in depth, they could find in Cézanne’s work a ‘world element,’ as he put it, that could transcend a particular culture and so speak directly to any true believer in art, whatever his or her particular background. Arishima’s own dictums on Cézanne indicate a good deal about the ardor of the Japanese for European art during this period, and something as well about the way in which more traditional Japanese attitudes concerning the role of the artist remained latent but alive even in the face of these modern enthusiasms. ‘Most of all,’ Arishima wrote, ‘We must admire Cézanne’s eye, which has the freshness of a child’s, and his purity of heart.’ The artist’s sincerity, the nobility of his intentions, had always been put forth as cardinal virtues in traditional Japanese artistic canons. Arishima thus began to lay the foundation for a new cult stressing the importance of the painter’s motivation. Other artists too used the journal as a forum for their enthusiasms. Umehara Ryūzaburō wrote on Renoir, Kishida Ryūsei on the art of the future, and the sculptor and great poet Takamura Kōtarō (1883– 1956) published there an account he had written in 1908, during his stay in Paris, in which he described the effect on him of the art of Matisse:

326

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.12 Hōsun, August 1909 (front cover).

Charm, lightness, freshness, sensations that change just as soon as you think you have grasped them. Painting with a clear palette of color!6 There were other influential journals too, some of them more specialized, that published reviews, articles on Western painters, discussions of questions of aesthetics, and interviews with Japanese artists. Read together, such magazines and journals as Hōsun (‘An Inch Square’) (Figure 25.12), Mizue (literally, ‘Watercolor,’ but in fact a review of all the visual arts (Figure 25.13), Chūō bijutsu (Central Review of Art) (Figure 25.14), Bijutsu shinpō (Art News) (Figure 25.15), Seikatsu to geijitsu (Arts and Life), and a halfdozen others provide a fulsome guide to the various new movements in the arts of the period. Newspapers and large circulation magazines, too, saw contemporary art as a national cultural asset and helped publicize, and indeed sponsor, art exhibitions both in Tokyo and elsewhere. Many of these writers and artists identified two tasks they saw as linked and intertwined in terms of the public they attempted to reach, educate, and hopefully inspire. The first, that of promoting the work of Japanese artists, was not so difficult, but the second, that of showing real European works of art to the public, proved much more difficult. Before the turn of the century, some contemporary painting had been seen, albeit briefly, in Tokyo, notably in 1890, when the Japanese art dealer and friend of the brothers Goncourt, Hayashi Tadamasa (1853–1906), then resident in Paris, arranged for a showing at the Third National Industrial Fair of works by Degas, Rousseau, Millet, Daubigny, and others. Such a brief glimpse, however, could not provide any sustained basis either for study by artists or understanding by the public. Most European art, classic or contemporary, was only known in photographic reproduction. As more and more Japanese artists went to Europe, however, it became clear to them that reproductions could inspire but not truly educate the eye. The White Birch Society in particular tried to organize an exhibit of Western art in 1921, with the idea of encouraging interest in creating a public museum, and indeed the group had previously attempted to mount public showings of Western art using reproductons. With advice from the British potter Bernard Leach, then in Japan, by purchasing a few items, and by drawing on the generosity of some private lenders, they hoped to show a Cézanne, a Dürer etching, some sketches of Puvis de Chavannes, an oil of van Gogh, some small Rodin sculptures, and a number of other

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

327

Figure 25.13 Mizue, July 1905 (front cover).

Figure 25.14 Chūō bijutsu, October 1915 (front cover).

important items. Despite their various negotiations, however, the project never came to fulfillment. When the earthquake struck in 1923, the group’s resources were annihilated and their experiments finished. Around this time, however, other possibilities for seeing Western art in Japan became apparent. As fascination with Western art spread, so did an interest in collecting Western works. By the 1920s, collections of artistic merit were beginning to be assembled. The first among them was the so-called Matsukata collection, assembled for Matsukata Kōjirō (1869–1950), a prominent figure in government and financial circles. Among those who helped him was Frank William Brangwyn (1869–1956). Brangwyn had studied with William Morris and became well known both in England and on the continent as a highly accomplished painter and etcher. Matsukata so admired Brangwyn’s work that he bought over seventy

328

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.15 Bijutsu shinpō, May 1911 (front cover).

paintings and, after meeting the artist, engaged him to prepare plans and drawings for Matsukata’s dream, a museum of Western art he hoped to build in Tokyo (Figure 25.16). The coming of the depression, unfortunately, destroyed Matsukata’s hope. In the early 1920s, some of the paintings Matsukata collected were brought to Japan and shown in Tokyo. (His collection was eventually presented to the Japanese government in 1959 and now forms the basis of the collections of the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo’s Ueno Park).7 In 1921 Ōhara Magosaburō (1880–1943), a wealthy businessman living in the city of Kurashiki, west of Osaka, first put his collection of French art on view, allowing the public to study at leisure works by Matisse, Renoir, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, Monet, Marquet, and Cézanne. Ōhara eventually built a museum in Kurashiki to house the paintings, where they have been on public display since the 1930s. The French themselves were also helpful in encouraging Japanese aspirations to see original European works of art. Excited by this interest, Paul Claudel (1888–1955), the famous poet and dramatist who arrived in Tokyo as France’s ambassador to Japan in 1921, helped arrange in that year an exhibition held in Tokyo that displayed works by a number of modern French masters, including Cézanne, Renoir, Signac, Bonnard, Denis, Vlaminck, Rodin, and Bourdelle, among others. By the mid-twenties, then, it had become possible for both the public and the artists alike to come in contact with real European works of art, both classic and contemporary. ‘It might somehow be possible,’ Asai Chū had once written to his brother, ‘to catch up after all.’ Now a guide and some standards had been established. The flowering of styles and talents that took place in Japan during the period from 1910 to 1930 was of course only possible, ultimately, because of the real talents of the artists at work during the time. Still, those men were able to develop their talents because the generations before them had learned the skills, and prepared the environment, for the experiments of those two decades. The exhibitions of Western art, the articles, the translations, the travellers’ accounts, all confirmed the greatness of the European tradition as well as the prominence of the French school since the middle of the nineteenth century. For a Japanese artist working in the second decade of this century, the French example and French standards provided the ultimate point of repair. The French example provided many ideas and buttressed many convictions among the Japanese artists of the period. First among them was the fact that the teaching of painting could be made available to the public, through government support. In this regard, the École des Beaux-Arts and the official French Salons served as particularly important examples. Many of the training mechanisms developed in Paris— methodical sketching, advancement from drawing to painting, student exhibitions, and promotions to official status, were emulated when the curriculum of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts was established. That school, like the École des Beaux-Arts, trained students in the rules, so that they could then, if they chose, break them.

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

329

Figure 25.16 F.W.Brangwyn’s drawing for Matsukata Kōjirō’s proposed museum of Western art in Tokyo, c. 1920.

Without these institutions, a progressive movement in Japan, such as that seen between 1910 and 1930, would be hard to imagine. In nineteenth-century France, the École des Beaux-Arts served as a model for smaller, private studios, where painters, some rejected by the official school, some with more progressive ideas, could learn their craft in a freer and less bureaucratic atmosphere. These schools and ateliers were open to all, and it was through this means that most of the Japanese painters who managed to get to France were able to develop their basic skills. On the whole, Japanese students worked with well-known, able, and conservative French painters. Such connections were perhaps inevitable. Progressive painters whom the Japanese came to admire— Degas, Monet, van Gogh—seldom if ever took students. Cézanne, who after 1907 became the idol of many Japanese artists, was still alive when the first generation of Japanese painters arrived in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s, but he lived most of every year in Provence as a recluse and his work was unknown to them, as to all but a few enthusiasts even in France. Aside from Umehara Ryūzaburō, who worked with Renoir, virtually all the Japanese painters could only learn from those French artists whose careers involved more teaching than independent creation. In, say, 1890, when divergences between traditional and avantgarde art were not so great, the pupils were well-enough served by their teachers; by the time of World War I, however, after the advent of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, virtually every instructor available seemed conservative. The situation created a particularly poignant situation for those Japanese painters who were still in the process of learning the technical skills their craft required. Some Japanese painters, despairing the formal instruction available to them in France, felt compelled to work altogether on their own. Most of the painters included in this exhibition who went to France studied with four teachers, all of them well-versed in the academic French tradition: Raphaël Collin, Jean-Paul Laurens, Fernand Cormon, and Carolus-Duran. The first, Raphaël Collin (1850–1916), was famous as a painter of nudes in a delicate, airy style that owed something to his relationship with certain of the Impressionist painters (see Takashina, Figure 2). By 1873, he had begun to win prizes in the Salon; before long he was receiving commissions to do large-scale murals for public buildings in Paris, among them an allegory on poetry for the Hotel de Ville, the ceiling for the Théatre de l’Odéon (replaced in recent years by a new Chagall commission), and a ceiling for the Opéra Comique. In 1902 he was made a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. For some years before this, Cohn had taken on private students. After he accepted Kuroda Seiki as a student in 1886, the young Japanese painter began to encourage other of his countrymen, providing Collin with a number of gifted Japanese students until his death in 1916.

330

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.17 Jean-Paul Laurens, Austrian Officers before the Body of General Marceau, 1877. Oil on canvas, 210×300 cm/82¾×18 in. Private collection.

Figure 25.18 Fernand Cormon, Return from the Chase, 1882. Oil on canvas, 150×200 cm/59×78¾ in. Museum of Fine Arts, Carcassonne.

Through Kuroda’s introduction, Okada Saburōsuke, Kume Keiichirō, Yamashita Shintarō, and a number of others worked with the French master. By Collin’s death during World War I, however, his style had come to be regarded as old-fashioned, and his great public reputation throughout Europe quickly faded. Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921) taught fewer Japanese students but was a more successful artist than Collin and one of the most gifted painters of historical subjects in his period (Figure 25.17). A man with a strong personality and a tenacious spirit, Laurens had difficulties establishing himself in Paris, but by 1869 he had won a prize in the Salon, and a first prize there in 1872. By 1878, he was accorded a first retrospective. From 1898 to 1918, Laurens taught painting at the Académic Julian, where his twice-weekly visits to examine the work of his students became the stuff of legend among his admirers. Among his Japanese students were Kanokogi Takeshirō, Mitsutani Kunishirō, and, finally, Yasui Sōtarō. Yasui, who arrived in 1907, began working with Laurens, but was so impressed by the Cézanne retrospective that he abandoned his interest in academic training. Later Yasui was to define the 1907 Cézanne retrospective as heralding the end of one era and the beginning of another. Fernand Cormon (1845–1924), like Laurens, painted historical subjects but he chose to attempt canvases that focused on evoking an imaginary archaic past, producing works that conveyed what might be described as a kind of poetic anthropology (Figure 25.18). His skill and energy were rewarded by important commissions, among them one of the ceilings of the Petit Palais. He was a highly respected teacher and numbered among his pupils such famous artists as Toulouse-Lautrec and, briefly, Matisse. In 1898, he replaced the well-respected painter Gustave Moreau as Professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. Fujishima Takeji worked with him there in 1905.

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

Figure 25.19 Carolus-Duran, Portrait of Mme. Feydeau, 1897. Oil on canvas, 190.5×127.8 cm/75×50 Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

331

in. National

It was thanks to the help of Cormon that Fujishima was also able to work in Italy with the director of the French Academy in Rome, Charles Emile Augustus Carolus-Duran (1837–1917), one of the great portrait painters of his period. Carolus-Duran admired such Spanish painters as Velazquez, and many of his students, including the American painter John Singer Sargent, reveal the influence of that enthusiasm (Figure 25.19). Painters like Arishima Ikuma and Fujishima learned much from Carolus-Duran, and in particular, the landscapes and portraits that Fujishima produced during his two years with the French master in Italy are among his most felicitous compositions. Schools, academies, and teachers were an important element in the training of Japanese artists, but for many, the exposure to the great works of art in the museums of Paris remained the most important influence on their work. Virtually every Japanese painter coming to Paris before 1900 was prepared, intellectually and psychologically, to look at and study only contemporary painting, particularly the pictures displayed at the Musée du Luxembourg, which functioned since the mid-nineteenth century until 1939 (when its collections were incorporated into those of the Musée d’Art Moderne) as a museum of contemporary French and European painting. The pictures hung there were chosen by juries for purchase by the French government, and so represented more the established view than that of the avant-garde; still, fine representative works by both French and foreign artists could easily be seen there, and many young Japanese painters such as Umehara Ryūzaburō and Asai Chū worked at the museum, studying and copying the paintings they found in these galleries. A number of Japanese artists have written of their difficulties in developing first a knowledge, then a sympathy, for the diversity of styles that go to make up the long traditions of Western art. Umehara wrote that, while he found an immediate attraction to the work of Renoir, ‘other paintings I saw at the same time, with the exception of those by Cézanne, Degas, and two or three of the Impressionists, seemed to me of no

332

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

significance; some struck me as altogether unpleasant. It was considerably later that I came to appreciate the works of art I found hanging in the Louvre.’ Indeed, it was Renoir himself who stimulated in his Japanese pupil the desire to know more of older Western art. ‘He singled out Titian and Velazquez for special praise,’ Umehara wrote, who remembered as well Renoir’s excitement at seeing the Titian portrait of Ariosto during a visit to the National Gallery in London. ‘Ah, the beauty of those rich swellings in the robes,’ Renoir told Umehara, continuing, ‘and did you see the Holbein portrait of Queen Christina…and those beautiful rows of trees by Hobbema!’8 The 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris provided the Japanese artists living in or visiting Paris at the time, such as Okada and Asai Chū, a special opportunity to learn something of the history of French nineteenth-century art because of an important retrospective assembled for the fair. On the whole, however, Japanese painters visiting France sought out the contemporary. Of those painters who went to France, a number of them left Paris and the ateliers of their teachers in order to work directly from nature. Kuroda Seiki and Asai Chū made Grez-sur-Loing, near Paris, well known to those who saw their work, and Saeki Yūzō created a number of his most effective experiments in various spots in the Ile-de-France and Normandy. Fujishima ranged widest of all; through his contacts with the French Academy in Rome, he was able to create a number of his most striking paintings in Rome, Pompeii, Venice and elsewhere in Italy. In sum, it might be said that the role of the Parisian teacher and the Japanese student was considerably altered between the 1880s, when the first students arrived, and the end of World War I. As the academic styles available in France fell increasingly into disrepute on the continent, the Japanese artists, like all the other younger painters in Paris, by about 1915 were thrown on their own resources, with little tradition to fall back upon. The situation was to continue on for several decades. As new waves of artists returned to Japan from Europe, each brought a new source of stimulus and a new layer of dilemma, both for the artists and for the art-loving public in Tokyo and elsewhere. By 1915, Kuroda’s work was regarded virtually as old-fashioned among progressive circles in Tokyo, just as that of his mentor Collin had come to be seen in Paris. Time, and shifting styles, moved too quickly to permit any sense of equilibrium. II. LEARNING TO BE A PAINTER By the turn of the century it was possible for young Japanese to learn in Japan the basic skills of Western painting. A number of artists who had studied in Europe, notably Asai Chū and Kuroda Seiki, were giving lessons and had opened private ateliers both in Tokyo and in the Kyoto-Osaka area. Most important of all were classes given at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, which, since making Western-style oil painting a part of the curriculum in 1896, provided several generations of aspiring artists talented enough to pass the entrance examination with the skills required to master the basic techniques involved. The sequence of courses offered was an amalgam based on the experiences of Kuroda and Kume Keiichirō, who had studied in Europe and examined various academies and schools in Paris before setting up their own private atelier in Tokyo after the pair returned from France in 1893. The resulting course of study was both thorough and rigorous, in the traditional academic mould. In the first year, students learned to sketch from plaster models. In the second year of instruction, they sketched living models using charcoal. In the third year, students were shown the techniques of using oil paints and made copies of other works. It was only in the fourth and final year that they were allowed to proceed with their own original work. Kuroda’s private students followed him to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts when the new course was opened in 1896, so that the Western Painting Section became almost immediately a thriving institution.

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

333

Many, if not most, of the painters who were to assume major roles in the development of Japanese modern art attended this school. Most learned the basis of their craft during those years; their own personal responses as artists to this academic tradition, more often than not, matured later in their careers. Student paintings, often the obligatory self-portraits by many of the artists in this exhibition, still remain and can illustrate this early phase in their careers. A number of these works reveal skill and talent, but, as might be expected, comparatively few show many elements of the kind of personal style that most artists would show in their mature work. In this regard, the traditional master-disciple relationship that involved learning by copying, so much a part of the teaching of art in Japan for so many centuries, still continued on in this new guise of a Western academy. Beginners spent considerable time copying the works and techniques of their masters, until the time when they might begin, perhaps at first unwittingly, to introduce into the system they had already internalized certain individual qualities expressive of their particular personalities. In the case of Western-style painting, the technical knowledge of sketching, design, and the use of oil pigments was new and only available to beginners through the teaching of those who had learned their skills in Europe, at first hand. It was no wonder that students copied carefully. There was no tradition at large to which to turn for knowledge. Some students, however, eventually came to realize the nature of the complex interplay between the assumptions taught in class and the evidence of their own eyes. While studying at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, for example, Koide Narashige was often told by his teacher Kuroda that ‘the shadows cast by objects, because of the nature or the lines of light involved, appear purple.’ Unable to locate any such color with his own eyes, Koide felt Kuroda’s statement represented not an observed truth but merely a subtle artistic and technical convention, so that, as the younger painter put it, ‘I may have to paint something I cannot see. I came to realize that I was being asked to paint purple shadows in a fashion that I could not myself visualize.’ On the whole, however, such independent eyes were likely to develop later, after the experience of the academy, and often out of the country, in France. As time went on, and alternative techniques and styles became available to young artists in Japan with the return of such painters from France as Umehara, Yasui, and Sakamoto Hanjirō, the precepts of the academy were challenged almost as soon as they were put in place. Iwamura Tōru celebrated the freedom of artistic inquiry he found in Paris as early as 1902, and by 1910, the kinds of work shown by the younger painters back from France seemed to prove his point. Even a painter like Kuroda, at the height of his career, began to risk looking old-fashioned as an artist and out of date as a teacher. The traditional relationship of master and pupil, both in Europe and in Japan, seemed to be breaking down rapidly. The level of art instruction in Japan, reinforced by basic training in drawing and sketching in the secondary schools, slowly began to assure an acceptance of artistic expression consonant with more realistic Western modes of expression. In terms of subject matter, Western-style landscape, still lifes, seascapes, and scenes of city life found echoes and sanctions, in terms of the subjects considered appropriate in traditional Japanese art. Portraiture, although not an active genre in earlier centuries, did possess a certain lineage in the older traditions, which now could be adapted. Much more problematic were two categories of subject matter that, although of central importance before World War I in European academic painting, found little sympathetic response among Japanese artists. The first of these was history painting. Nineteenth-century French and other European art was filled with examples of vast, complex works, based either on ancient history and mythology, such as those created by artists like Gustave Moreau or Puvis de Chavannes, or actual events in European history, a speciality of such artists as Carolus-Duran or Ernest Meissonier. Towards the end of the century, the earlier generation of Japanese Western-style painters, having observed such conti nental models, made some attempt to treat similar types of subjects in Japanese terms. Yet efforts to show ancient mythological themes concerning the

334

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.20 Nakamura Fusetsu, Founding of the Nation, 1907. Oil on canvas, 157.5× 215.5 cm/62×84 in.

origins of Japan taken from the Kojiki chronicles, or historical themes from the much loved medieval tale of the 1185 civil wars between the great clans of Japan, Tales of the Heike, proved generally unappealing to the public (Figure 25.20). One problem may have been that traditional styles of Japanese painting did not generally encompass such subject matter; and even when historical subjects were involved, the approach used in ink or scroll painting tended toward the anecdotal or lyrical rather than the purely historical. Ancient shintō myth in particular had developed very little in the way of a fixed imagery or iconography to provide examples of figures visualized anthropomorphically. Trying to picture them at the end of the nineteenth century seemed to reduce their mythic and sacred status to that of actors in some historical pageant, in which modern men and women adorned themselves in arbitrarily borrowed plumage. Then too, the kinds of historical encounters and clashes between cultures that produced a tradition of historical painting in Europe, the battles chronicled by Velazquez, Rubens, and David, did not take place in Japan, which with its long, isolated history could offer little in the way of overwhelming historical grandeur. It is no wonder that Japanese viewing early attempts at historical painting by Kuroda and others often took them to be some form of realistic genre painting, rather than as instructive historical works. The difference inherent in fostering the development of historical styles in the modern tradition can easily be seen in the series of commissions made for the 1926 Memorial Picture Gallery for the Emperor Meiji, begun after his death in 1912 in the Outer Gardens of the Meiji Shrine, to house paintings illustrating famous incidents in the life of the ruler who modernized Japan. Forty artists in the modern Japanese or Nihonga style were involved, as well as an equal number in the Western style, among them five artists represented in the present exhibition, Fujishima, Mitsutani, Kanayama, Yamashita, and Kanokogi (Figures 25.21, 25.22). As visitors to the Gallery will quickly realize, the lack of tradition for depicting the military and ceremonial subject matter made artistic success difficult. Ironically, the Nihonga artists, drawing on the medieval scroll traditions, were able to render their commissions more persuasively than did the Western-style painters, whose attempts centered on capturing mood, personality, and setting (Figure 25.23). Equally problematic for Japanese artists at the end of the nineteenth century was the representation of the nude human figure. The work of such later artists as Okada, Saburōsuke, Koide Narashige, or Maeta Kanji shows how diverse their respective skills had become in representing the undraped female body, yet even by the 1920s the possibility of painting such subject matter was a relatively new one. In the West, the painting of nude figures doubtless had its roots in the anthropomorphic sculpture of Greece and Rome, but the

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

335

Figure 25.21 Yamashita Shintarō, Poetry Party at the Imperial Palace, 1926. Oil on canvas, 273×242 cm/107½×95¼ in. Memorial Picture Gallery, Meiji Outer Shrine, Tokyo.

Figure 25.22 Kanokogi Takeshirō, The Battle of Mukden, 1926. Oil on canvas, 273×212 cm/107½ ×83½ in. Memorial Picture Gallery, Meiji Outer Shrine, Tokyo.

human body, male or female, as an object of artistic veneration had never been part of the Japanese aesthetic. Traditionally, when figures were sculpted or painted they were idealized, as in statues of Buddha, or at least generalized within the context of the figure being represented, as in portraits of Buddhist monks or court poets. In virtually all cases, they were clothed. When Kuroda went to Paris in 1884, he apprenticed himself to a wholly different set of artistic principles. The student sketches of nude figures he and his generation produced often show a wonderful skill and a high degree of finish, but the young artists who created them did not consider them as works of art but as exercises (Figures 25.24, 25.25, 25.26). Certainly the Japanese public at that time would not have considered them as finished works in any sense. After returning to Japan in 1893, Kuroda displayed his

336

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.23 Morimura Gitō (1871–1938), The Emperor Viewing the Rice Harvest, 1926. Colors on paper, 300×270 cm/118 ×106 in. Memorial Picture Gallery, Meiji Outer Shrine, Tokyo.

Figure 25.24 Yasui Sōtarō, Untitled sketch, c. 1907–10. Chalk on paper, 62.5×48 cm/24 ×18 of Fine Arts, Tokyo.

in. Tokyo University

prize-winning painting Morning Toilette and caused an enormous uproar (Figure 25.27). Some critics found it pornographic, some found it unbecoming, some found it daring. Few found it beautiful. The debates in print over the propriety, artistic and moral, of representing the naked body continued on and off for some years (Figure 25.28). By the second decade of the century, the concept of the female nude had become domesticated as a possible subject, at least in the kind of lyrical, academic, and slightly arcadian guise that a painter like Okada could provide. Yet harsher experiments, such as Yorozu’s’s Nude with a Parasol (Cat. 76) or his experimental Cubist figure studies, continued to shock the Japanese public. Changes in Western art were forcing an acknowledgement of new categories for potential beauty. The Japanese public, art lovers

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

337

Figure 25.25 Kuroda Seiki, Untitled sketch, 1889. Chalk on paper, 62.5×47 cm/24 ×18½ in. Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, Tokyo.

Figure 25.26 Kume Keiichirō, Untitled sketch, 1887. Chalk on paper, 62×47.5 cm/24 ×18¾ in. Kume Museum of Art, Tokyo.

and intellectuals alike, often found themselves affronted by such shifting definitions. Western audiences, too, found themselves shocked by changes in Europe. But there were certain differences. A Picasso cubist nude might offend the bourgeoise, but the lineage of such subject matter itself stretched back from Manet to Ingres, Goya, Rubens, indeed all the way to Botticelli, and ultimately to antiquity. Picasso and Matisse were doing variations, admittedly sometimes shocking ones, on a revered theme. In Japan, there were no such reassuring precedents. For an artist to learn more and to grow beyond the confines of the academy, a trip to France seemed inevitable. Yet not everyone could afford to go. Some, to move beyond their training, left the cities for the countryside. Yorozu Tetsugorō, for example, abandoned Tokyo and withdrew to the north of Japan, where, after a series of restless experiments, he succeeded in creating a personal version of Cubism. Kishida Ryūsei followed somewhat the same pattern when he created his remarkable still lifes that show his homage to Dürer and other older German Renaissance masters he had discovered through reproductions. Kishida’s work was all done in Japan, yet even he felt the call of France and attempted, toward the end of his life, to

338

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

raise the funds needed to make the long and expensive trip. Even in the case of those artists who did not go to Europe, their artistic development would be hard to posit without the continuous stimulus of European art that arrived in Japan, either as reproductions or for increasingly frequent exhibitions. The European influence was exerted indirectly as well through the work of those Japanese painters who had made the trip to France and were now exhibiting their work back in Tokyo. For the painters, some of the reasons for going to Paris were practical, some were spiritual. For an artist like Kanokogi, who himself made three trips to France, training in Western technique was crucial. He wrote that he felt that his generation should sacrifice itself for the sake of those to follow. In his view, fifteen years of effort would be needed to assimilate styles and attitudes concerning Western art. Others expressed a more poetic vision. Possibly the most eloquent verbal exponent of the French experience was the poet and sculptor Takamura Kōtarō, who although he did little painting, managed through his poetry and essays to serve as an artistic spokesman for his generation. Takamura spent only a brief time in Paris, in 1908, where he had a decisive encounter with the work of Rodin. His experience was an intense one. A well-known poem concerning his response to Paris runs in part: Notre-Dame, Notre-Dame, rock-like, mountain-like, eagle-like, crouching-lion-like cathedral, reef sunk in vast air, square pillar of Paris, sealed by the blinding splatters of rain, taking the slapping wind head-on, O soaring in front, Notre-Dame de Paris, it’s me, looking up at you. It’s that Japanese. My heart trembles now that I see you. Looking at your form like a tragedy, a young man from a far distant country is moved. Not knowing for what reason, my heart pounds in unison with the screams in the air, resounds as if terrified.9 For Takamura, Paris gave him the opportunity, both as an individual and as a Japanese, to participate in the creation of a new internationalized Japanese art and literature. He was to write eloquently of these matters after his return to Tokyo in 1909. His essays, often bristling with new and foreign terms—motiv, persönlichkeit, eigenheit—dazzled and excited his readers when they appeared in the Shirakaba magazine and elsewhere. Perhaps the most influential of all his essays, ‘The Green Sun,’ appeared in 1910, in which he raised the crucial question that was to trouble artists of his generation and after: What is, what should be, ‘Japanese’ about modern Japanese painting? For Takamura, the artist’s individual self was crucial. Nationality, he was convinced, was of no ultimate consequence in terms of any enduring artistic achievement. I was born as a Japanese; and as a fish cannot leave the water to make his life, I will always be a Japanese, whether I acknowledge that fact to myself or not. And, by the same token, just as a fish has no consciousness that it is wet with water, there are times when I take no notice of the fact that I am Japanese. In fact, those moments predominate. In ordinary social dealings, of course, I am quite conscious of the fact that I am Japanese. When I am involved in nature, however, 1 take little

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

339

Figure 25.27 Kuroda Seiki, Morning Toilette, 1893. Oil on canvas, 178.5×98 cm/70¼×38 in. Destroyed by fire during World War II.

cognizance of the fact. And indeed, when I am conscious of myself at all, it is within my own personal sphere. When my own sense of self is submerged in the object of my attention, there is no reason for such thoughts to occur to me.10 For Takamura, creativity must spring from a unique and personal relationship with the physical world. At such times, I never think of Japan. I proceed without hesitation, in terms of what I think and feel. Seen later, perhaps the work I have created may have something ‘Japanese’ about it, for all I know. Or then again, perhaps not. To me, as an artist, it makes no diference at all.11

340

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.28 An 1895 caricature of Japanese spectators viewing Kuroda’s Morning Toilette by the French artist and satirist Georges Bigot, resident in Japan when the work was first publicly exhibited.

Figure 25.29 Fujita Tsuguji, The Virgin Mary, 1966. Fresco. Chapel of Our Lady of Peace, Reims.

Takamura considered the individual inner creative impulse all important; for him it represented the basic temperament of the artist. The kind of ‘realistic local color’ sought by artists such as Kuroda, Takamura insisted, risked being applied from the outside and did not spring from the authentic personality of the artist. For Takamura, a Japanese artist who purposefully seeks native local color ignores his unique individual potential. ‘A Japanese artist is Japanese, and what he creates will be Japanese,’ Takamura insisted, just as Gauguin’s pictures of the South Seas are altogether French. What is more, Takamura continued, the spectator, while not creating the work of art, will instinctively respond to that authenticity conveyed by the artist. What is sought is not ‘exotic’ or ‘representative’ in terms of Japan, but that which is genuine. If another man paints a picture of a green sun, I have no intention to say that I will deny him. For it may be that I will see it that way myself. Nor can I merely continue on, missing the value of the painting just because ‘the sun is green.’ For the quality of the work will not depend on whether the

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

341

Figure 25.30 Umehara Ryūzaburō, Peking, 1942. Oil on canvas, 88.5×72.5 cm/34 ×28½ in. The National Museum of Modern Art.

sun depicted is either green or red. What I wish to experience, to savor, as I said before, is the flavor of work in which the sun is green.12 Takamura Kōtarō’s manifesto did much to define, then glorify, the idea of the individual artist, whose skills were used in order to best express his interior, instinctive responses to his subject matter. Other artists were to pick up this romantic concept as well. ‘I never think what others may see in my work,’ Yorozu wrote at one point, ‘I only paint in terms of what I feel myself.’ Freed from tradition, and stimulated by Western example, young artists could now seek themselves. Such attitudes developed important intellectual support in Japan. Certainly the writers and artists who contributed to the Shirakaba magazine and other artistic periodicals espoused such attitudes. A Western artist like the famed potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979), who during his intermittent stays in Japan from 1909 to 1920 had become a friend and confidant of Kishida Ryūsei, expressed the same hopes, stressing the possibility of personal development that might come from the encounter with Western art. It is always a matter of curiosity to nine Europeans out often that the Japanese should be influenced by European aesthetics, and it is an additional surprise that the most modern work has the greatest influence. Japanese thought is chiefly engaged with problems that have arisen from recent intercourse with the West. New ideas from Europe strike root very easily—so much so that the present movement has been accepted sooner and more rapidly in Japan than in America. A few square apples of Cézanne’s; the flames of van Gogh; strange Tahitian women by Gauguin; together with magazine articles were sufficient to sow the seed. Artists were first attracted and certain of them, before long, formed the Société du Fusain for the encouragement of such art in Tokyo, and have recently been holding their second exhibition. It contained many superficial works but some which showed real insight, notably pictures by Mr. Ryūsei Kishida.13

342

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

The view of the artist as independent creator was also prevalent in the foreign books that young Japanese artists most enjoyed reading. According to Leach and others at the time, for example, a book by the English critic and journalist Charles Lewis Hind, The Post Impressionists , written in 1911, provided a particularly powerful appeal, and Hind’s convictions gave support and nourishment to a group of artists struggling to express, and in a still partially unfamiliar idiom, what they took to be themselves. Like Takamura Kōtarō, Hind insisted that individual expression, not worldly success, must always represent the hallmark of the true artistic spirit. We are all too apt to regard art as a sort of solemn affair of wealth and connoisseurship, much too portentous to be part of humble daily life. We suffer not only from tyranny of exhibitions, but also from the tyranny of the masterpiece. Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin were disdainful of exhibitions and masterpieces. They expressed themselves on canvas, and when they had said all they had to say, sometimes they left their canvasses in the fields, or tossed them into a corner of the studio. They painted for themselves, not for exhibition. They lived to paint, not to exhibit.14 The artist’s experience, the energy with which he approaches his task, conveys his authenticity to his viewers. Art is but an episode of life. The artist’s ife is but a part of the whole. To be effective he must express himself. Having expressed himself his business ends. He has thrown his piece of creation into the pond of Time. The ever-widening ripples and circles are his communication to us, the diary of his adventures. We read the diary. We are comforted, stimulated, consoled, edified, helped to live according to the degree of life-force in the diary, and the idea behind it.15 Along with a thirst for what Hind called the need for a ‘synthesis in the soul of man and in the substance of things,’ however, came the need for Japanese artists to enter into their own conversations with the Western art of the past, to engage in a dialogue with previous generations of artists who created the European tradition. In this regard, a striking paradox developed. Those Japanese artists who went to France and apprenticed themselves to the master painters they encountered there did manage to learn something of that tradition. Yet many of them, in taking on the weight of those historical precedents, found their own developing individuality subsumed. For every Fujishima, who could remain creative and himself within the stimulus provided him by the beaux-arts tradition, there were many like Okada, Yamashita, and countless other less gifted painters who never were able to rise above producing smooth, even sentimental versions of the traditions they had so painstakingly studied, to which they added from time to time what Takamura would have sardonically called the requisite ‘local color.’ Artists who did not travel to Europe, however, and who could only learn of Western art from a distance, as Prof. McCallum points out in his essay, had a special opportunity. More or less divorced from an accurate understanding of European historical and artistic relationships as they had developed, they often found themselves engaged in a naive yet powerful encounter with certain European artists who moved them personally. Many of these artists represented older European traditions, yet they seemed fresh and provocative to the eyes of the Japanese. Nakamura Tsune, for example, when he discovered Rembrandt in reproduction, had relatively little sense of the Dutch artist’s place in the history of Western art. His response was powerful and genuine. Kishida Ryūsei’s encounters with reproductions of Western art in the Shirakaba magazine and elsewhere brought him an enormous sense of excitement, so that he found himself in a continuous state of inspiration.

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

343

We were so thrilled that we almost wept; rather than sensing the art in its period, we came to look on what we saw as virtually a model…. I would talk together excitedly with my friends. For me, who had not had such opportunities before, the experience was as strong as though I had been given a second birth.16 Much of the finest painting done in the second and third decades of the century was inspired by the visceral stimulation gained from seeing reproductions of Western art, not from any real knowledge about its history. It would be safe to say that few if any of the artists in the present exhibition possessed the kind of disciplined understanding of Western art history expected of European, or even of American artists of the period, who, in such institutions as the École des Beaux-Arts, were required to pass an examination on the history of European art in order to enter. Often, conflicting inspirations can be seen from picture to picture as the more imaginative artists wrestled with creating styles in which they could realize themselves in the fashion that a Takamura Kōtarō had demanded. Sometimes the restlessness was powerful and moving, sometimes awkward, even disturbing. III. THE PUBLIC AND A GROWING KNOWLEDGE OF ART: SCHOLARS AND JOURNALISTS If artists found difficulty in constructing a mental historical framework to inform their perceptions of Western painting, the Japanese art-loving public had an equal if not greater difficulty in doing so. The intelligentsia, of course, had the same access to reproductions of European art as did the artists themselves, and a steady progression of exhibitions of the work of contemporary Japanese artists newly returned from Europe helped to develop the public’s sensibilities. Then too, by the 1920s, a certain number of useful, indeed important, exhibitions of Western modern art were held in Tokyo and elsewhere. Still, there were no large public museums for Western art even in the major cities, and with the floundering of the Matsukata fortune at the end of the 1920s, plans for a national museum of Western art had to be scrapped. Only the Ōhara collections in Kurashiki, rather difficult to visit even from Osaka, provided a group of Western works of high value that were permanently on display from 1930 onwards. The wholesale importation of Western art for the Japanese public was not to occur until after World War II. The true connoisseur’s eye, therefore, could only be developed in Europe. A profound appreciation of Western art might be a goal for many, but resources to turn aspiration into knowledge were scarce. Those writers and intellectuals who were able to travel, however, wrote accounts of their personal responses to what they saw, so transmitting their enthusiasm to the reading public. Many of these writers were not trained at all in Western art. The eminent novelist Shimazaki Tōson wrote enthusiastically of the ferment in the arts and literature in Paris just before World War I, but sprinkled among his observations are candid admissions that the meaning and significance of much that was new partially escaped him. Nevertheless, his enthusiasms, given his cultural pedigree, helped spread a high level of interest among the Japanese reading public for all that was new in France. Litterateurs and cultural philosophers such as Abe Jirō (1863–1959) and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) also wrote of their European travels, in which their observations on art and architecture helped them to come to grips with the significance of Japan’s cultural past in its relation to a rapidly changing present. Watsuji, for example, was able through his knowledge of Western art to make provocative comparisons between the cultures of Europe and Japan.

344

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

I found myself in front of the Tōshōdaiji temple in Nara [established in 759 AD] and spent a few minutes of happy contemplation. A clump of pine trees surrounding the temple gave me an ineffable feeling of intimacy. Between the pine-grove and this monument of ancient architecture there is certainly an affinity both intimate and ineffable. I do not think a piece of Western architecture, of whatever kind or style, would match so well with the sentiments aroused at the sight of the pine-grove. To encircle the Parthenon with a clump of pine trees would be unthinkable. Nor can we,, by the furthest stretch of the imagination, conceive that a Gothic cathedral would in any way match with the gently sloping curves of these graceful pine branches. Such buildings have to be contemplated in conjunction with the towns and cities, forests and fields of their respective lands…just as do our Buddhist temples have something intimately connected with and inseparable from the characteristic features of our native shores. If there are to be found some traces of the Northern forest in Gothic architecture, can we not say with equally good reason that there are in our Buddhist temples some traces of the Japanese pine and cypress forests?17 Watsuji’s generation was virtually the first that could make such comparisons on a firsthand basis, and his words carried both appeal and authority. In this context. Western art provided the educated Japanese public a stimulus for a move toward cultural self-definition. By the 1930s, for example, powerful cultural critics such as Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) were writing with superb insight on such European figures as Cézanne and van Gogh in a broad and vivid manner. The art scholar Yashiro Yukio (1890–1975), a friend and colleague of Bernard Berenson, by 1925 had produced a world-famous monograph on Botticelli. These books, and many others like them, were widely read and appreciated by the general Japanese public. On the whole, Japanese scholarship on Western art between the two world wars helped fix an historical and stylistic chronology in the minds of serious readers and students. Few scholars, on the other hand, wrote for the general public on contemporary or avant-garde art, either European or Japanese. This area was seen rather as the province of the journalists. As a result, there remains virtually nothing in the way of any synthetic analysis of modern Japanese art between the wars. In many ways, this lack is not surprising. The teaching of art history in the universities in Japan was based, as in many other countries, on the German model, which tended to stress classical principles rather than modern trends. In Japan, the teaching of art history moved in two parallel courses, which sometimes intertwined. The first of these involved the study of aesthetics as a field in philosophy. Translations of writings on Western aesthetics were made as early as the 1870s, and by 1899, the novelist Mori Ōgai had made known to Japanese readers important works by the neo-Kantian philosopher Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), which did much to lay the ground for the teaching and development of aesthetic theory in Japanese academic circles. Later scholars went on to translate and teach important texts by such central figures in the history of aesthetics as Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Theodor Lipps. Japanese professors and students of aesthetics, however, were mostly concerned with attempting to construct systems that could accommodate the cultural facts of their own classical tradition. Thus their connections with the actual progress of modern Japanese art were indirect and slight. The training their discipline provided, however, did help to raise a number of questions about the function of art in society and the relationship between art and ideas that, through the more general writings contributed by the Japanese academic world to the press and popular magazines, helped inform the public about the possibilities of art as a means of informing life. The second involved the study of the history of the evolving styles of Western art, in the sense of art history as now generally understood. The first lectures on the aesthetics of Western art history were doubtless those given by the American Ernest Fenollosa in 1881 at Tokyo University. Fenollosa, with his

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

345

philosophical background in Hegel and Spencer, helped suggest the kind of international philosophical framework by which to interpret Western art as well as traditional Japanese and Chinese art, an area of inquiry which came to dominate Fenollosa’s own distinguished career and concluded with his curatorship at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The German philosopher Raphael von Koeber (1848–1923), who made such a profound contribution to the teaching of philosophy and aesthetics during his long sojourn at Tokyo University from 1893 until virtually the end of his life, introduced in his lectures a number of specific examples of Western art from various periods. It was not until 1919, when Sawaki Yomokichi began his classes at Tokyo University, however, that any systematic attempt at teaching the history of art objects, as distinct from general aesthetic theory, was undertaken. Sawaki was a specialist of Greek sculpture, and his introduction of the writings of the German critic Heinrich Wöfflin, still widely considered important methodological texts, provided a particularly vital contribution. Dan Inō, who replaced him in 1923, had done graduate work at Harvard, as well as in London and Lyons, and brought a wide range of interests to his teaching, ranging from the art of Greece and Rome to Gothic architecture, the Italian renaissance, and nineteenth-century painting. But it was not until the mid-1930s that students could work with a teacher such as Kojima Kikuo, who combined his studies of general history and theory with the practical understanding he had gained as an editor of Shirakaba magazine twenty years before. It was with the placement of scholars like these in such an influential academic milieu as Tokyo University that the study of Western art could begin to integrate itself to some extent with contemporary creative Japanese concerns. During virtually the whole period before the end of World War II, however, the public for art worked more from intuition, sharpened by journalistic accounts, than from any body of assimilated knowledge. That their interest remained as intense and as sustained as it did, tells much both about the depth of artistic inclinations in Japanese culture generally and the powerful pull of Western art and culture. IV. THE JAPANESE EXPERIENCE IN FRANCE In one sense, the experiences of Japanese artists in France during the period were as various as the temperaments of the individual painters themselves. Most went first to learn their craft, then to put themselves in the capital of the arts, to transcend their own provincialism. The contemporary cultural critic Kato Shūichi has remarked that many artists went, and still go, to Paris ‘…to escape the “village” that is the world of art in Tokyo. “In Paris,” one artist told me, “it’s ability that counts. However famous a man, nobody bothers about him unless he’s turning out good stuff. That’s the only way to produce really good work.”’18 Most of the painters envisioned their stay in Paris as a period of training. They looked on the work they produced there as experimental. When they returned to Japan, most would go on to develop and adapt their still-evolving styles to suit the tastes of the Japanese public with which, however tacitly, they were engaged in a continuing dialogue concerning the nature of the modern artistic experience. Most painters therefore found their time in France well spent. A few, particularly by the 1920s and after, felt, like Koide Narashige, that they had little to learn from Europe, since French academic models had themselves become discredited. There are two ways, however, in which the experiences of these painters might be categorized, thereby revealing certain implications. The first might be organized according to generations, not in terms of the actual ages of the artists involved, but rather with regard to the time of their French experience. The second might be characterized according to paradigms of responses to the French experience. In terms of generation, the first group, beginning with Kuroda and ending with Fujishima, found itself at the end of the nineteenth century still closely linked with elements of the French academic tradition and so tended to

346

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

evaluate the Paris experience in terms of training in subject matter, style, and technique. As precursors, they consciously attempted to bring back to Japan a codified body of skills that could be transmitted to younger Japanese, who in turn could be taught to ‘compete’ with Western artists, based on mutually accepted perceptions of international standards. In this phase, the contributions of the individual artists and their own developing talents were regulated by the academic framework of their studies, which supplied uniform standards applicable to all. It is not therefore suprising that, given the abilities of a number of these artists, they should win the approbation of their French colleagues, both in the Salon (as did Kuroda), or within those groups designed to function in some consonance with the philosophy of the academy, such as JeanPaul Lauren’s Académic Julian, which awarded prizes to Kanokogi, Yasui, and others during the early years of the century. A second generation of painters, beginning with Sakamoto, Yasui, and Umehara, from early in the century until the advent of World War I, experienced both the sense of excitement and of dislocation as new styles of French painting began to challenge, replace, and eventually destroy previously agreed-upon academic standards. Japanese painters inevitably found themselves becoming somewhat more experimental. Some, like Umehara, were lucky enough to attach themselves to masters like Renoir, who encouraged the individual aspects of his talent. Virtually all of these Japanese painters reacted with shock, surprise, and delight to the newly-visible work of the Post-Impressionists. In that regard, the 1907 Cézanne retrospective was as powerful an impetus to Japanese painters as it was to younger French artists. Those in this second generation, most of whom returned to Japan by 1914, because of the coming of the war, regarded the French experience as one of expanding possibilities rather than of codified rules. The freshness and sense of individual personality shown in the pictures brought back from France by Yasui, Sakamoto, and Umehara had as profound an effect on Japanese taste as the work of their mentors—Renoir, van Gogh, and Cézanne— had on the still conservative French public. Members of a third generation, however, found it necessary to respond to a more complex environment when they arrived in France after World War I. All commonality had seemingly disappeared, to be replaced by a welter of conflicting artistic styles and philosophical obligations, some now as much political as aesthetic. This period was the most difficult for the Japanese artists. Styles were changing so rapidly that it no longer seemed possible for an artist to place himself in a learning role in order to find his way towards mastering any given set of techniques. Now he was to create his own style, and found himself sometimes compelled to change it from picture to picture. The fecundity of a Picasso or a Matisse made them cruel models for a generation of artists who were still, as a group, grappling with their attempt to understand the Western tradition, and just at the time when contemporary European artists were in full rebellion against it. Japanese artists at this stage were still seeking models which they could safely emulate as learning devices. Thus, while the work of the Japanese painters during this period is remarkably varied, and often quite accomplished, the paintings of individual artists reveal that, spiritually if not literally, they were still approaching their work as a craft, a series of lessons to be learned, from whatever European painter they chose to regard as a possible mentor. A certain amount of their painting thus seems to function as a kind of cultural mirror, reflecting the predilections of their chosen Western model. Saeki Yūzō thus shows resemblances to Vlaminck and Utrillo, Maeta Kanji echoes elements in André Derain, and Yorozu Tetsugorō, whose European travels were only in his head, tried to assimilate the concepts of the Cubists. Earlier painters like Kuroda had managed to make individual statements that were acknowledged within the European tradition. Now, the burden of proof concerning artistic authenticity and individuality was placed squarely on the shoulders of the individual artists. For newcomers to the game, it was an extremely difficult challenge.

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

347

Figure 25.31 Umehara Ryūzaburō, Venice, 1959. Oil on canvas, 61×50 cm/24×19¾ in.

In addition to the generational analysis, there is a second means to categorize the responses of these Japanese artists, one that involves the nature and extent of their personal involvement with France. On one end was the possibility of assimilation; on the other, rejection. Most of those artists who went to France responded somewhere in between these two polarities, often in complex ways only half-understood or articulated, even to themselves. At one extreme is situated a figure like Fujita Tsuguji, the only Japanese painter of the period to earn his major, and considerable, reputation in France. Soon after his arrival in Paris in 1913, Fujita found both a personal and artistic niche, one that he never really abandoned, despite the fact that he spent the war years back in Japan. The best of Fujita’s works are looked on as belonging in the École de Paris and were, for the most part, painted in and remain in France. Baptized a Catholic late in life, he died after decorating a chapel in Reims (Figure 25.29). In a sense, Fujita became an emblem for the open, cosmopolitan side of French culture, which beckons and sustains men of talent. For this assimilation he paid a correspondingly high price in Japanese art circles, where Fujita has often been regarded as a kind of artistic opportunist who, in abandoning his own culture, lost his personal integrity. The fact that few. other Japanese painters from the period are known in France itself is perhaps less a commentary on their talents than on the fact that such painters as Fujishima, Yasui, and Sakamoto, to mention only three, saw themselves as altogether Japanese. For them, as for most of the others, a career in any country other than Japan would have probably been unthinkable. Midway on the continuum are the painters, doubtless best exemplified by Umehara, who were able to bridge both worlds through the quality of their talents and personalities, moving back and forth between the cultures in a largely self-invigorating way. Umehara, more than any other figure in his generation living in Japan, continued warm and close contacts in France, largely through the agency of his mentor Renoir and his family. He continued to travel back and forth between Europe and the Far East, seeking and incorporating a wide variety of stylistic influences that made him able to paint with equal skill and panache a scene in Peking (Figure 25.30) and a canal in Venice (Figure 25.31). He usually succeeded m combining a

348

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.32 Poster advertising the seventh exhibition of the Sōdosha, 1919.

Japanese sense of color and design with a genial variety of subject matter. Umehara never saw himself as French, but he believed in, and lived out, his version of cultural synthesis. At the other extreme were those crushed by the tensions they felt between the worlds they found themselves forced to bridge. Of all the artists shown in the present exhibition, no one gives greater testimony to this anguish than SaekiYūzō, who committed suicide in Paris in 1928. Saeki came to France in 1924, like so many other gifted young painters, with an idea of liberating his talents, the next appropriate stage after his academic training in Tokyo with Fujishima, himself a distinguished representative of the established academic style of painting as taught in Japan. It became clear to Saeki after his arrival in Paris, however, that the older virtues as taught at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts no longer applied. For Saeki, the moment of truth came in the summer of 1924 when a painter he much admired, Maurice de Vlaminck, looking at the young Japanese painter’s work, told him that in order to develop his own talents, he must abandon all the academic styles that he had been taught in order to truly find his own unique voice. Saeki took up the challenge, and abandoned the idea of learning from others. He attempted to pull everything from within himself and virtually exhausted himself in the process. To locate the self and to cast it up on the canvas without any cultural supports proved an effort that eventually consumed him. The works he painted reveal that journey toward self-destruction, and the best of them chronicle his battle with astonishing poignancy. Saeki is admired in Japan, often for extra-artistic reasons. He is seen as a handsome and romantic figure. The message he bore, that of the struggle between disparate cultures, implicit in so many of the works produced in the arts during the period, was brought to the surface in his struggle toward authenticity. For many, the death of Saeki was seen as a requiem for the agonies of a generation. These artists, then, caught on one side within the confines of the training given them in Japan before going to France, and on the other side with an expanding and changing vision of the nature of contempo rary European art, faced a peculiar challenge. Their accomplishments, and their limitations, may ultimately be a result of their individual talents, but the circumstances in which each found himself were shared, and difficult for all. Few other artists living outside the European orbit even dared the attempt at all.

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

349

Figure 25.33 Poster advertising the first exhibition of the Shun’yōkai, 1923.

V. BACK HOME AGAIN: THE PAINTERS IN THEIR LARGER CAREERS With the exception of Fujita, the experience in France was most often a relatively brief one for the artists in the present show. For the majority of them, it was an opportunity that came relatively early in their careers. To the extent that they made a success of that learning experience in Paris, they found on return a need to adjust their skills, expectations, even the strategies used to develop their maturing talents, to the realities of Japan, in terms of society, environment, and reward. Many, especially those who returned to Japan from Europe with advanced stylistic commitments, found this period of adjustment an awkward, painful and a sometimes surprisingly protracted one. For some, questions as basic as the climate came to the fore. Umehara and others complained that the moist atmosphere of Japan softened the contrasts in the natural shapes they had learned to paint in the clear light of France, rendering their palettes inaccurate. Others complained that the best paints, brushes, and other materials were not available to them, or could only be found at prices so high they could not afford them. Some felt a sense of visual stagnation. Yasui Sōtarō later wrote that after his return, he continued to feel a sense of malaise and artistic uncertainty for virtually a decade. Many, outside of the heady atmosphere of Paris, questioned their own talent. It was not, however, that the metropolitan areas of Japan, notably Tokyo and Kyoto, did not provide support to these returning artists. Most of them were given ‘homecoming exhibitions’ under a variety of sponsors, to show off the new skills they had acquired in Europe. The public enjoyed seeing these shows, not only as a means to evaluate recognized talent but as a way to find out something of the newest developments in Europe, presumably mirrored in the work of those just returned. This kind of exhibition might offer one kind of success, but having one s work seen continuously was quite another. Indeed, launching a real career was a complex undertaking altogether. The first step was to

350

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

have one’s work shown under friendly circumstances. The yearly government-sponsored exhibition put on by the Ministry of Education, the Bunten, functioned as a kind of Salon open to most. Reorganized in 1919 as Teiten (the Imperial Art Academy Exhibition), it has continued on until the present under the current name Nitten (Japan Art Exhibition). Bunten represented the largest, best publicized, and most professionally attractive opportunity, since the greatest number of potential patrons, private and public, were likely to see the show. If Bunten had the virtues of its largely French model, however, it also possessed some of its precursor’s faults. Many of the more progressive painters found the Bunten judges far too conservative and academic. Success in the exhibition did bring a level of public prestige that helped with commissions, teaching opportunities, and patronage. But for many, such success, when it came, seemed purchased at too high a cost in terms of a sacrifice in stylistic experimentation. Still, Bunten did bring important benefits to the world of contemporary art. The very importance of the exhibition, which invariably drew huge crowds, helped create a need for higher standards of journalism concerning art. Editors of newspapers and magazines, those burgeoning organs of the new mass media that were to transform the possibilities of learning about the visual arts, were anxious to report on new artistic developments. A painter who succeeded in the Bunten thus became a part of a whole cultural system. On the other hand, independent artists could also use elements in that same cultural system to show a wider range of their work. The novelist Natsume Sōseki, whose occasional newspaper pieces on modern Japanese painting remain particularly evocative, stressed in 1912 the need for a Tokyo salon des refusés. If a Japanese Cézanne were to appear, Sōseki felt, some mechanism must be in place to provide him with the chance to be seen. From the turn of the century onwards, a whole plethora of small sponsoring groups sprang up, often for brief periods, which had for their purpose the creation of a series of occasions when the work of various like-minded artists might be viewed. As journals and newspapers continued to write about these exhibitions, and so publicize the groups and their artists, some semblance of a public for new and as yet uncertified art began to grow. Many of the artists in the present exhibition helped found such independent organizations. In retrospect, a number of these groups appear to have been very important historically, but during their often brief and fitful lifetimes, they must have served as frail vessels indeed. Kuroda, along with Kume, Fujishima, Okada, and others, formed the first important such group, the Hakubakai (White Horse Society) in order to plan for more comprehensive exhibitions of Western-style oil painting. From 1896 until its dissolution in 1911, the group introduced to the public many of the works now regarded as the most representative successes of Meiji Western-style painting. In the brief span of the Fusainkai (The Sketching Society), from 1912 to 1913, Kishida Ryūsei, SaitōYori, Yorozu Tetsugorō, and thirty-odd others managed to assemble the first PostImpressionist group of Japanese artists, who, in the face of conservative disapproval, managed to mount two exhibitions that helped introduce to the Japanese public examples of a fresher Japanese painting more in consonance with the newest developments in France. Others followed. In 1914, a collection of younger painters, among them Arishima,Yamashita,Yasui, and Umehara, decided to create an organization they termed the Nikakai (Second Division Group) to oppose the Bunten. The group began holding a series of exhibitions in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. With some modifications, the group still continues on today. In 1915, Kishida decided to gather around him a group of like-minded artists to found the Sōdosha (Grass and Earth Society) (Figure 25.32) which managed to present yearly exhibitions until 1922, when Kishida decided to participate in another group, the Shun’yōkai (Spring Season Society) (Figure 25.33) which attempted to go beyond manifestos, ideologies, and fixed styles in order to create a free and open association of painters. Kishida was joined by Morita Tsunetomo, Umehara, Yorozu, and a half-dozen others. In 1926, SaekiYūzō, and several others founded the 1930 kai (1930 Society) (Figure 25.34), choosing their name in honor of the coming hundreth anniversary of the generation of French painters they much admired, the so-called French

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

351

Figure 25.34 Photograph of members of the 1930 kai taken on the occasion of their first group exhibition in 1926. From left, Saeki Yūzō, Kojima Zentarō, Satomi Katsuzō, Kinoshita Takanori, Maeta Kanji.

Figure 25.35 Photograph of the interior of Kuroda Seiki’s Japanese-style house. Western-style paintings are of necessity hung above the sliding doors, virtually out of sight.

‘School of 1830,’ in particular Corot and Millet. The society was formed as a means to show their own work and that of others, so startlingly different from the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by now familiar to the Japanese public. Some of these many groups were able to adapt themselves to changing circumstances and continued on into the post-World War II period. Some died out quickly. Some issued manifestos, while others saw their function to serve more as fraternal groups in support of fellow artists. All of these groups tried to forge some kind of useful connection between the artist and his possible public. The avant-garde playwright and artist Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–1977), who undertook his studies not in France but in Weimar Germany, began a campaign after his return to Tokyo in 1923, and with some success, to place paintings in cafes, coffee houses, and small local galleries, ‘where the people could see them.’ Seeing the pictures was one thing; buying them was another. Few Japanese homes of the period had Western-style walls on which oil paintings could be comfortably hung (Figure 25.35). Some wealthy Japanese had begun to add Western-style rooms to their traditional homes, but relatively few of them collected art, and among those who did, expensive imported works took pride of place. The government

352

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.36 AN illustration by Koide Narashige for ‘Husband and Wife,’ a work by MurōSaisei published in 1926.

Figure 25.37 Yoruzu Tetsugorō, Riverside District, undated. Colors on paper, 77.0×34.4 cm/30¼×13 Educational Committee, Iwate Prefecture.

in. Iwate

bought a certain amount of art for use in public buildings, embassies, and the like, but the works chosen, as might be expected, were by conservative and academic painters. By the 1950s, private Japanese collectors were buying Japanese art of the prewar period with increasing discrimination, and at rapidly escalating prices, but in 1915 or 1930 there were few patrons with the space, or the eye, to keep these Japanese artists financially independent. Oil painting did not therefore gain significance for the public as a collectable commodity; it remained something which at its best could be spiritual and moving, but which was to be observed, not possessed. Many painters after their return to Japan turned to teaching as a means of support. Some, such as Asai, Yasui, and Koide, opened their own studios. There they were able to train others while they made a reasonable livelihood. Some of the best painters in the earlier years of the century, Fujishima and Kuroda, for example, felt comfortable teaching at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but by the 1920s, many of the

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

353

Figure 25.38 Tani Bunchō, Landscape, 1793. Colors on silk, 66.5×28.0 cm/26 ×11 in. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo.

younger artists, even if they were lucky enough to gain admission in order to undergo their training there, did not wish to work as mature artists in an atmosphere they felt confining. A certain number of painters continued doggedly to support themselves as artists, even though the financial difficulties involved were tremendous. Many, such as Yorozu, Sakamoto, Nakamura, and Kishida, spent time working far from Tokyo as they wrestled with the development of their own vision. A few, like Umehara, had both commercial success and some independent wealth. But with the exception of Fujita, who lived and sold his pictures in France, few of these artists, even though they may have been the object of wide admiration at some point in their lifetimes, could support themselves altogether through their art. Artists often assumed other related careers, which were helpful to them not only financially but psychologically Some functioned as journalists, writing about art exhibitions in Tokyo and elsewhere, or on new developments in European art and related, more general topics. A certain number spent time as commercial illustrators. During the career of Asai Chū, for example, it was still possible to do drawings for newspapers on current events, such as the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars. In later decades, however, photography had effectively replaced the function of the artist-journalist, so others turned to book and magazine illustration. Most successful in this category among the artists represented in the present exhibition was Koide Narashige, whose drawings for the work of such prominent writers as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) and Murō Saisei (1889–1962) were particularly successful (Figure 25.36). In fact, the prominent novelist Uno Kōji (1891–1961) was so struck by the power of a painting by Koide, Landscape with Dead Trees (see McCallum, Figure 56), that he used the image as a kind of motif in one of his most successful novels, to which he gave the same title. Despite the diversity of artistic commitment made by the Japanese artists, virtually all of them would have agreed, as their writings make clear, that the French experience taught them one essential thing: the need for an inner, personal integrity. By the 1920s, training and self expression had moved from the exterior

354

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.39 Uragami Gyokudō, Frozen Clouds Sifting Powdered Snow, c. 1810. Hanging scroll, colors on paper, 133. 2 ×56.6 cm/52½×22¼ in. Private collection.

to the interior. Thus even those who did not visit France or Europe learned the same, often painful, lessons. This search for that inner integrity of purpose made many of the artists extremely high-minded. After all, they had been forced to sacrifice much, both psychologically and financially, to undertake their chosen careers. A number of painters, having studied and absorbed modern European styles, later looked back at the traditional Japanese arts with a new and sharpened eye, incorporating elements that seemed potentially expressive within the purview of their own vision. Some of Yorozu’s work (Figure 25.37) shows his fascination with such Tokugawa literati painters as Tani Bunchō (1769–1840) (Figure 25.38) and Uragami Gyokudō (1745–1820) (Figure 25.39). Asai (Figure 25.40) and Kishida (Figure 25.41) made similar attempts to use the art of the Tokugawa period. Umehara studied the work of such traditional artists as Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716) (Figure 25.41) and Tomioka Tessai (1836–1924) as a means of absorbing their congenial sense of design. Much of this work was intended to be private and experimental, representing attempts by thoroughly modern artists to explore their own cultural past in a new way. Of all the artists in the present exhibition, however, perhaps none labored so long or so carefully to reach a real synthesis of styles as Sakamoto Hanjirō, who withdrew from the Tokyo art world shortly after his return from France in 1921. On the southern island of Kyushu he spent his long and quiet career in an attempt to use the techniques he had mastered in Europe to manifest the individual and the essential Japanese spirit he felt within himself. For many Western viewers, a first experience with the paintings of Sakamoto may suggest a statement of the problem rather than its solution. They often reveal abstract forms and pale colors that may seem at first glance lacking in definition and theatricality. For many Japanese, however, Sakamoto’s succeeded best of all in amalgamating his French experience into his life-long experience as a Japanese artist. Those who admire Sakamoto’s work feel that, for him, the excitement of a new tradition was successfully absorbed, then distilled, into an art at once tactile and spiritual.

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

355

Figure 25.40 Asai Chū, Landscape, 1897. Scroll, colors on silk, 117.8×53.3 cm/46 ×21 in.

Figure 25.41 Kishida Ryūsei, Eggplant, 1924. Scroll, colors on paper, 35.8×26.8 cm/14¼×10½ in.

VI. JAPANESE VALUES AND MODERN JAPANESE ART Virtually all of the assumptions on which Japanese culture had been based were called into question during the period from 1890 to 1930. Some of those assumptions underwent radical shifts, and in some areas, notably political, some dangerous dislocations. Having removed themselves from the Chinese cultural orbit, the Japanese found that the establishment of new European perspectives cut not only ties with mainland Asia but with much of the Japanese past. Some merely found the past outmoded, while others tried to reformulate elements from past Japanese experience to make them more modern, and thus implicitly more closely oriented toward Western values. This movement back and forth from the past to the present applied in virtually every field of conceptual and practical endeavor, from politics and military strategy to scientific inquiry, literature and philosophy. In the case of the arts, this struggle was often seen as a brave one between different and conflicting patterns of allegiance. Stepping back from the accomplishments of the individual artists presented in Paris in Japan, certain issues emerge in terms of the developing internationalization of modern art. These issues in turn suggest a

356

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 25.42 Koga Harue, The Sea, 1930. Oil on canvas, 128.5×160.5 cm/50 ×63¼ in. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Figure 25.43 Fukuzawa Ichirō, The Good Cook, 1930. Oil on canvas, 81.6×115.6 cm/32¼×45½ in. The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura.

framework within which to judge what Paris could at best have provided for these men, and, possibly, what it could not. The first of these issues centers on problems of assimilation and creativity. In terms of our contemporary perceptions of achievement in art, the authentic individual statement has come to stand for the only true hallmark of success. To simplify and so perhaps to parody our contemporary sensibility, a painter’s potential genius must seem to lie in his diference from others. Such attitudes may seem self-evident today, yet not only would such assumptions concerning the nature of art have been virtually unintelligible in the late Tokugawa artistic circles of early nineteenth-century Japan, but they would have been questioned as well, say, in the same period in France, when painters there were still expected to master a specific set of technical skills and attitudes about the purpose of art. That painterly skills could be taught and objective standards applied were assumptions known in both cultures. When Japanese artists began to work in the Western mode in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they did so in a Parisian climate that still paid homage to transpersonal European standards. Once a painter like Kuroda, for example, had mastered these skills, he was as ‘acceptable’ an artist in the academic tradition as a French painter, since both were competing for favorable judgement in terms of the same criteria. Assimilation could still be rewarded. After the arrival in Japan of more modern Western values in artistic creation, however, a kind of individualism was called for that posed a peculiarly difficult test for the Japanese painters, who, a mere two or three decades after Western techniques and ideas on art had been introduced, were now being asked to rebel against them. In this regard, Japanese painters had a more difficult

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

357

task to face than, say, the American painters of the same generation, since they were already a part of the European tradition. Those Americans who wished to rebel knew, as it were, who the enemy was. For the Japanese, their necessary course of action seemed far less certain. Whatever the nature of the individual accomplishments of the artists included in this exhibition, the changes in attitude from men like Asai and Kuroda to the generations of Fujita and Maeta show an enormous expansion in the understanding of the art of Europe, past and present. As a group, these artists reveal in their work a genuine attempt to come to terms both with the nature of their own talent and with that larger world in which they found themselves. Kuroda had created a modern tradition of Western-style painting within Japanese culture itself; by the time of Saeki and Yorozu, only fifteen or twenty years later, a certain number of artists felt confident enough to go beyond it. Once a dialogue could take place, not only exclusively between France and Japan, but within Japan itself, then creative energies could be generated. Looking at the art of this period in terms of our contemporary concern for high individual differentiation may, therefore, cloud over the nature of the real success obtained—that of establishing, both in terms of individual artistic growth and audience receptivity, the basis for further creativity. Without this achievement, the postwar development of contemporary art in Japan as part of an international milieu would be unthinkable. Without the record of individual achievement from 1890 to the onset of World War II, younger artists in later decades would have found themselves lacking the kinds of role models who, even if their earlier accomplishments may have been only tacitly acknowledged, could provide a positive concept for the variety of roles that a modern artist can play. The paradigm of the artist of one generation serving as a role model for artists in the succeeding generation was perhaps the most tenacious psychological legacy left to the modern period by traditional Japanese art. There, the master-disciple relationship had always served most effectively as a means to pass on traditional skills from one generation to the next. In the context of the avant-garde, however, the disciple was in effect forbidden to copy the master s work in and of itself. What the younger artist could still copy, however, was his master’s attitude, his stance vis-à-vis his art and society. So it was, perhaps, that the best of the prewar artists came to be looked on as cultural heroes, both to younger painters and to the public at large. They were romantic figures who seemed in their careers to encapsulate strategies for maintaining their cultural force outside the confines of a polite middle-class society that could aptly be characterized as a Japanese version of the Victorian bourgeois. In Europe, the idea of the creative artist as a person outside society, a romantic rebel, was championed by the time of Baudelaire. Indeed, in the West, the popular nineteenth-century ideal of the romantic artist-as-Bohemian-hero still seems attractive and plausible enough. In particular, the example of Cézanne made a profound impression on the crucial generation of young Japanese painters that took spiritual sustenance from the trenchant example of this particular artist who, in their view, retreated from society in order to carry on a struggle with his own creative potential. The critical difference, and one that seems to have gone largely unperceived in Japan during this period, was the fact that Cézanne was struggling against established ways of ‘seeing’ in order to put down what he saw himself. The Japanese painters, on the whole, had already set aside the ways of ‘seeing’ inherent in their older art altogether. In this sense, all of Western art came to serve as their avant-garde. Thus, when the European traditions began to crumble, they faced not a struggle against an older vision but a void. For many Japanese the angst of this creative struggle was perceived in and of itself as an act of merit. These attitudes were reinforced by a whole panoply of writers and intellectuals. Arishma Takeo, (1878– 1923), for example, one of the leading novelists of the period and the older brother of Arishima Ikuma, created as his protagonist in his celebrated 1918 novel Umareizuru nayami (The Agony of Coming into the World) a young man who struggles against the terrible difficulty of his life in a crude Hokkaido fishing village as he tries to become an artist. When the narrator of the story first sees the sketches and oils brought to him by the aspiring painter, he professes himself astounded:

358

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

It is true, they showed that you had not yet gone through any disciplined artistic training, and they were quite immature in technique. But some mysterious power seemed to be stored up in them, and this struck me the very instant that I glanced at them. I could not repress an irresistible impulse to take my eyes off them and have another look at you.19 The quick identification between perhaps imperfect works of art and an artist ennobled by the quality of his struggle demonstrates Arishima’s own impulse to merge intention with accomplishment. That process suggests one of the real dangers that the Japanese public faced, and, to a real extent, still faces in their desire to judge the value of a work of art by the intentions of the artist. However inevitable those attitudes may be, given the cultural matrix in which they developed, they have possibly rendered a disservice to the creation of a greater understanding of the real accomplishments of the Japanese painters in this present exhibition. Perhaps the brunt of popular displeasure has been born by Fujita, who through his painterly skills and personality was able to propel himself into a prominent place in the École de Paris. For many Japanese, Fujita was seen as an opportunist, who appropriated techniques, ‘tricks’ if you like, from the traditional Japanese arts—(flat surfaces, black outlines, juxtaposed textures)—to achieve an inferior goal, that of worldly success. Thus, the argument goes, Fujita was not avant-garde enough; he accepted, rather than rejected, the society around him. Saeki Yūzō, on the other hand, remains for the Japanese a figure of heroic proportions because he suffered from the dislocations he experienced between the two cultures. He lost his life trying to synthesize styles (and cultures) through the kind of internal struggle that a painter like Fujita was seen to have set out to sidestep altogether. For a Western viewer, unburdened by such cultural and biographical background, both painters show creative and expressive strengths. Without recourse to romantic legend, we may be able to judge these painters in a more ‘objective,’ perhaps harsher light than the Japanese. We may not wish to adopt the same cultural assumptions that the Japanese have made, yet Paris in Japan can, one hopes, point out just how conditioned by cultural contexts our own responses to art may remain. Although in the largest perspective the painters in this exhibition can be seen as precursors to contemporary Japanese artists now at work within the international style, it must be noted that there came a certain break in the development of modern Japanese tradition in the mid-1930s, when the rise to power of the militaristic government inhibited the development of any avant-garde. The imposition of a nationalistic and traditionalist spirit on art circles, as on all areas of Japanese intellectual and cultural life, dampened free and adventuresome spirits. Any art with leftist political or proletarian leanings was specifically suppressed. New Cubist and Surrealist experiments, cut off from a free exchange with Europe, suffocated for lack of support. Younger painters experienced greater difficulties travelling to Europe, while many already in France and elsewhere were forced home. Older painters, such as Sakamoto Hanjirō, either remained in relative obscurity, or found themselves facing the necessity to take up themes of ‘national significance,’ employing styles deemed ‘appropriate’ to the patriotic nation-state. Japan is an island country, and no refugee routes were available. Artists had either to concur, unwillingly or willingly, as Fujita evidently did during his temporary residence in the late 1930s and 40s, or to retire to teaching and the freedom of a private atelier. VII. SOME FINAL REMARKS We who see the work of these Japanese painters from the vantage point of the 1980s may find a number of opportunities to gain a new appreciation of the dynamics of the fascinating Tokyo/Paris connection during

TOKYO IN PARIS/PARIS IN TOKYO

359

those years. To observe the Japanese sensibility experienced through the medium of Western oil painting may help us revise our understanding of Japanese culture at large. These early twentieth-century works, however similar to European painting in general technique and subject matter they may be, demonstrate that the Japanese painters of this period developed a set of attitudes about the role and goals of painting that are at least as different from their composite European models as those of, say, the American Impressionists. At the same time, the issues raised by the work of these artists for contemporary viewers are complex. The present exhibition, which can only serve as an introduction to the subject, cannot provide sufficient data to come to terms with all the questions that a thoughtful student of the subject might raise. One of the most pertinent of these issues lies in the difficulties encountered in attempting to locate, in this period when Western modalities had already been adopted, the distinction between individual talents and Japanese sensibility. Whatever the range of personal expressions involved, there may remain certain qualities held in common that, to our eyes, set these works off from those of their European mentors. Careful and continued observation of modern Japanese art may reveal the elements of a perhaps unarticulated yet powerful national sensibility, based on centuries of accumulated visual memories, that surface in some fashion in these pictures. In some way, their most appealing qualities may lie less in the area of individual statement than in a recasting of Japanese conceptions of time, light, space, surface, pattern, distance, color and design, into a new Western medium, one already familiar to us. To locate and appreciate a national sensibility in a category of painting that Westerners want to judge in terms of a fashionable demand for individual statement requires an adjustment of preconceptions. Such an effort will be worthwhile, however, if it can help the real beauty of these works to emerge. The question of national sensibility may also help to explain why certain trends in European art—Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, Dadaism, among others, seem to have been less attractive to the Japanese than Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. After all, those two styles remained for many decades the preferred point of access to Western art not only for the educated Japanese public but for many of the artists themselves. Further, those European styles show a reciprocal exchange with Japanese art through the importation into France of woodblock prints and Japanese objets d’art. There was, in other words, a natural congruence of taste between the two cultures; each borrowed from the other in this particular phase of their respective artistic development. It might be possible also to argue that the traditional Japanese love of design, color, and pattern made the appeal of Cubism and other later developments less intrinsically appealing. There were, of course, a number of important Japanese experiments with Cubism, Surrealism, and socially-conscious proletarian art. The later and somewhat fitful experiments in more avant-garde forms need to be studied, observed, and judged in the contexts established by the painters under study here. The fact that later expenments with advanced European styles remained tentative, however, suggests that, even discounting the effect of the dour atmosphere created by the military in the 1930s, those particular movements lacked sufficient resonances within Japanese cultural sensibility. Distinguished artists such as Koga Harue (1895– 1933) and Fukuzawa Ichirō (b. 1898), who created works in such genres (Figures 25.42, 25.43), represent individual talents that lie somewhat outside the mainstream of modern Japanese art. Finally, it should be said that many of the questions raised by the development of modern painting in Japan remain to be fully addressed in Japan itself. The kind of data necessary to come to a fuller understanding of what might be termed the sociology of modern Japanese art is only now being systematically collected. The powerful prestige of Western art for both Japanese scholars and the Japanese public has meant that until recently, fewer studies have been undertaken concerning the way in which the work done by Japanese artists early in the century was received in Japanese society. Biographies of individual artists, usually portrayed as cultural heroes, often appear, but a serious examination of the

360

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

documents of the period, for example, is just now beginning. The word ‘hero,’ too, suggests another problem so far largely ignored. Why were there no women painters? Or, if there were, why have their reputations not been sustained? Now that the Japanese art world itself has begun to examine this justly-admired national heritage in the spirit of friendly objectivity, it will become more possible to create a full-fledged appraisal of what has been accomplished. For the visual record of those years shows that, in our century, cultures have had the ability, at their best, to grow together yet retain their own authenticity. NOTES 1. For useful information on Japanese participation at such international expositions, see the essay by Neil Harris, ‘All the World a Melting Pot? Japan at American Fairs, 1876–1904’ in Akira Iriye, ed. Mutual Images, Essays in American-Japanese Relations (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975). 2. Quoted in Edward Seidensticker, Kafū the Scribbler (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 19. 3. For a translation of the full poem, see Ichiro Kōno and Rikutaro Fukuda, An Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1957), p. 20. 4. Ueda Bin, quoted in Noda Utarō, Nihon tanbiha no tanjō (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1975), p. 10. 5. Arishima Ikuma, Hitotsu no yogen (Tokyo: Keishōsha, 1979), pp. 18–19. 6. Takamura Kōtarō, ‘Garon, Henri Matisse,’ Takamura Kōtarō zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1957–8), Vol. 17, p. 201. 7. For additional details, see various entries in Haru Matsukata Reischauer, Samurai and Silk (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986). 8. Umehara Ryūzaburō, Runowaru no tsuioku (Tokyo: Yōtokusha, 1944), p. 33. 9. For the complete text of the poem, see Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, ed., From the Country of Eight Islands (New York: Doubleday, 1981), pp. 464–467. 10. Takamura Kōtarō, Geijutsuronshū (Tokyo: Iwanami bunko, 1982), p. 81. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 82. 13. The quotation is taken from Bernard Leach, Between East and West: Memoirs, Portraits and Essays (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1978), p. 123. 14. Charles Lewis Hind, The Post Impressionists (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 27–28. 15. Ibid., p. 6. 16. Cited in Azuma Tamaki, Shirakabaha to kindai bijutsu (Tokyo: Azuma shuppan, 1980), p. 26. 17. Watsuji Tetsurō, tr. Geoffrey Bownas, Climate and Culture (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1961), pp. 212–213. 18. Kato Shūichi, Form, Style, and Tradition: Reflections on Japanese Art and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 32–33. 19. Arishima Takeo, tr. Fujita Seiji, The Agony of Coming into the World (Tokyo: Hokuseio Press, 1955), p. 3.

First published in Ellen P.Conant et al, Nihonga. Transcending the Past: Japanese-style Painting, 1868– 1968. St Louis Art Museum, 1995, pp. 44–74

26 ‘Teiten’ and After, 1919–1935; Encountering Blank Spaces: A Decade of War, 1935–1945; Postwar Developments: Absorptions and Amalgamation, 1945–1968

THE PERIOD of sixteen years that followed the establishment of the annual exhibition Teiten in 1919 was one rich in new and often successful experiments. In many ways, the Nihonga created from this point in the Taishō period to the beginnings of the war period in the mid-1930s shows a special confidence and richness unparalleled during any other time in its history. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ‘TEITEN’ Artists, patrons, and the public in general looked to national institutions to lift the creative standards of modern Japanese art, and the reconfiguration of the Bunten (The Ministry of Education Art Exhibition; Monbusō bijutsu tenrankai) seemed to offer great hope. Yet in hindsight it would appear that, despite enthusiastic efforts to renovate the national exhibition program and to rename the yearly exhibition the Exhibition of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (Teikoku Bijutsu-in tenrankai), or ‘Teiten’ the renovated system came to reveal the same limitations as before. The most creative and experimental work of this period was generally produced by artists often indifferent, even hostile, to the government system. This is not to deny that the earlier system of Bunten, which began in 1907, had not done much to improve the situation of artists. By awarding prizes and providing wide exposure of the work of contemporary artists, the Bunten helped solidify the position of younger painters who lacked the support and patronage their teachers could have supplied had they been trained in private juku. Instead they were trained in the art schools of Tokyo and Kyoto. Ironically, the very fact that contemporary artists were now seeking appropriate roles to play in a changing society raised the stakes, and the significance of the Bunten exhibitions was such that a demand for change, particularly from younger artists, seemed inevitable. The complaints were generally of two kinds. The first involved seemingly inevitable issues of favoritism among the judges who, it was charged by some, tended to support their own colleagues and students. The second, related to the first, concerned factional and generational issues. Too many of the judges were older, and their loyalties remained with styles and ideals of painting that, even within the contours of Nihonga, seemed to stand for what was retrograde and mediocre.1 Such figures, the younger generation seemed to believe, offered no usable artistic models and provided no true leadership. In 1918, under the aegis of Education Minister Nakahashi Tokugorō (1861–1934), a group was set up to reorganize the existing system. Ministry of Education officials put in charge of this crucial advisory board one of the great intellectuals and writers of the period, Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) who, since his years in Germany from 1884–1888, had maintained a considerable interest in the visual arts, and in particular with the development of yōga. In his earlier years, Ōgai had been a participant in the debates over the aspirations

362

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

for the role of art and artists in his generation. Ōgai was still widely respected, but he was now an old man, ill and virtually at the end of his career. It could not be expected, therefore, that any outpouring of new ideas would occur from such a source. Many of the older Nihonga artists who had previously advised the government on the original organization of the Bunten system were now dead. Those who continued on with the Teiten reorganization were all older, established artists, often quite conservative in nature. Yamamoto Shunkyo and Kawai Gyokudō were in their late forties, Kobori Tomoto (1864–1931) and Takeuchi Seihō were in their midfifties, and Imao Keinen (1845–1924), already active before the beginning of the Meiji period, was in his seventies. More serious was the continued abstention from this structure by two powerful and popular painters, Yokoyama Taikan and Shimomura Kanzan, whose allegiance to the Reorganized Japan Art Institute (Saikō Nihon Bijutsu-in) remained firm. They declined all overtures to join the new group and, with their refusal, the idea of an all-encompassing structure died a rapid death. True, Tomioka Tessai had been newly recruited and had agreed to participate. Now considered the last of the great nanga painters, Tessai was a brilliant artist and a highly respected, if somewhat erratic, figure. But, in his eighties, he was even older than Imao Keinen, and too independent a spirit to force a change in the group’s conservative proclivities. In the crucial matter of selecting judges for the Teiten exhibitions, however, some younger painters of prominence were chosen. This development helped to some extent to expand the scope of artistic vision. Among those selected were Kikuchi Keigetsu, Kaburaki Kiyokata, and Hashimoto Kansetsu. All were in their forties at the time. If not among the most progressive and innovative artists of their generation, they were nevertheless accomplished and widely respected. There were useful results, then, in this reorganization of the yearly system of national exhibitions. Some younger painters began to win awards, and the public continued to follow the activities of the Teiten competitions with enthusiasm. Nevertheless, it seems clear that during this time, the public tended to prefer the work of artists shown by private groups. The prior Bunten polarities prevailed: the government exhibitions continued to represent the official mainstream, while the more restless and, by later common consensus, more accomplished artists continued alone or in small groups formed for mutual support. In this artistic and social context, the Nihonga artists of this period, far more than their contemporaries in yōga, found it necessary to work under the strain of a multiple yoke which involved the balance of three functions. These might be described as political (in terms of government exhibitions); cultural, to the general public (who saw their work exhibited); and the personal, an artistry limited, as always, by the restraints placed on them by the desires and interests of their patrons. Creativity, even in the later years of the ebullient Taishō period, had to be defined within these shifting limits. Some artists emphasized one function over the others, but none could escape all three completely. As a result, an examination of the work of even the finest younger artists of this period—Kawabata Ryūshi, Maeda Seison, or Tsuchida Bakusen— can show a bewildering difference in the styles and strategies chosen to create a work suitable for one or the other of these three sometimes disparate categories. Seison’s large historical canvases, for example, seem to inhabit an artistic world different from his intimate sketches and ink drawings. In an essay looking back on his career, written late in his life, Seison wrote: I love the writing brush, not merely because I am a Nihonga artist, but because I am fascinated by the kinds of lines that a brush can make. You cannot force the brush; it must respond naturally, so that the appropriate ‘touch’ will emerge in and of itself. If anything is forced, the cadence will be destroyed and something false will enter in.2

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

363

Figure 26.1 Maeda Seison, 1885–1977. Yoritomo in the Cave (Dōkutsu no Yoritomo), 1929. Two-panel screen: color on silk; 190.9×278.7 cm. The Ōkura Shūkokan Museum, Tokyo.

It is surely true that this aesthetic informs much of his best work, yet these observations seem to have little to do with the kind of heavy and portentous technique visible in his well-known 1929 painting of the medieval warrior Yoritomo, created in a large two-panel screen format (Figure 26.1). This painting was chosen as an ‘official’ work to be sent abroad to Rome in 1930. The activities of the government exhibitions in particular were closely linked with the art academies. Many of the judges and others associated with these yearly exhibitions were also active as teachers. In Kyoto, both Takeuchi Seihō and Yamamoto Shunkyo held teaching posts until the end of their careers. Two other Teiten-related artists who taught at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō) were Kawai Gyokudō and Matsuoka Eikyū (1881–1938). Although only represented in this exhibition by a scroll painted by a group of painters. Scenes from Modern Life (Plate 135), Eikyū was a figure of some interest in his period. His famous painting of 1925, The Pond at Ikaho (Figure 26.2), is often considered his most representative work. Eikyū was one of a group of brilliant brothers, chief among them Yanagida Kunio (1875–1962), arguably the greatest modern Japanese anthropologist, and a towering intellectual figure in this century. The other two, Inoue Michiyasu (1866– 1941), a student of ancient Japanese texts, and Matsuoka Shizuo (1878–1936), a linguist, also made formidable contributions to modern Japanese intellectual life. Eikyū’s work was sometimes stimulated by his brothers’ enthusiasms, and he was often considered the most ‘intellectual’ among his generation of Nihonga painters. Eikyū’s art, which owed a certain allegiance to the Yamato-e tradition, is now no longer considered to be of the first rank, but his work as a teacher helped train many artists who became prominent in the postwar years. Yet like Eikyū, these men represent a conservative and academic strain that was nurtured by their teacher and informed by the spirit of the Teiten ideals. By the time of the first of the Teiten exhibitions in 1919, the mechanisms, opportunities, and corresponding restraints that would drive (and also contain) the energies of a new generation of painters were in place. And the old polarities continued. THE MECHANISMS OF THE WORLD OF ART Public interest in contemporary art (whether Nihonga or yōga) continued to thrive since the first Bunten in 1907. By the end of the Taishō period in 1926, it had grown still more. An article written in the Tokyo Asahi newspaper noted that over seventy modern art exhibitions had been held in Tokyo during that year, ranging from the government-sponsored exhibition to private exhibitions and displays in galleries and department stores. Exposure in these private milieus allowed for a more personal, and often more adventuresome, selection of works by artists. From today’s vantage point, these exhibitions sometimes displayed works of more lasting merit than might be found in the larger official salon exhibitions. Such exposure was particularly useful to younger artists whose work, still modestly priced, might attract potential patrons.

364

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.2 Matsuoka Eikyū, 1881–1938. The Pond at Ikaho (Ikaho no numa), 1925. Hanging scroll: color on silk; 201. 8×131.3 cm. Art Museum, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

Public exhibitions during this period often performed a second function for the thousands who saw them, for they made available the art of the past, heretofore often inaccessible to the general public. Before the founding of museums in Tokyo, Nara, and Kyoto in 1872, 1895, and 1897, people with an interest in the visual arts, with the exception of wealthy connoisseurs, had few occasions to train their eyes in the styles and aesthetics of classical Japanese and Chinese art. With the exception of the sculpture and paintings that could be occasionally seen in Buddhist temples, much of the nation’s artistic heritage was in private hands and rarely shown. It was only in the first decades of this century that the Japanese national museums began to assemble representative collections and make them available to the general public. By the Taishō period both museums and department stores, seeking to play a larger cultural role, began mounting exhibitions that ranged from collections of the classic masterpieces of China and Japan to the contemporary art of Japan, Asia, and Europe. It suddenly seemed as if the whole artistic heritage of mankind was on rotating display in an exciting, even bewildering mélange of styles, periods, and cultures. If the public was overwhelmed with this sudden revelation of richness, the same was true for Japanese artists of the period. Many of them now saw the classic masterpieces of their own culture for the first time. True, the older generation of painters who had served as teachers for this younger generation often possessed small personal collections of classical Japanese, and occasionally Chinese, paintings which they would take out for their students to copy. Few, however, owned the representative pieces of high quality that were beginning to be seen in permanent museum collections and in temporary exhibitions. Taishō exhibitions not only helped develop the public’s collective eye but gave Nihonga artists a new impetus to experiment with the styles of the past. Classical art, in this atmosphere, often helped stimulate the latest artistic fashions. From the 1907 Bunten exhibition onwards, the distinctions between Nihonga and yōga were explicitly maintained, with entries in the two categories shown in different spaces. Newspapers inevitably began to assign two critics, one for Nihonga, one for yōga, to cover the important national exhibitions, reinforcing the distinctions in the public’s consciousness. At the end of the Meiji period, it was still possible for the

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

365

Figure 26.3 Maeda Seison, 1885–1977. The Great Imperial Thanksgiving Rite (Daijōsai), 1926. Color on paper; 300×270 cm. Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, Outer Garden, Meiji Shrine, Tokyo.

distinguished novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) to write a lengthy article discussing all the entries in the 1912 Bunten. Just a few years later, there were few, if any, of the ever more ‘specialized’ critics who. would care, even dare, to try. This strict distinction can perhaps be nowhere better observed than in the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, completed in 1926, which contains eighty mural-size paintings commemorating events during the life of the Meiji Emperor. There is a clear division in their display: forty of the paintings are Nihonga, forty yōga. Given the myth-making urges behind the project, it might be argued that, in visual terms at least, the Nihonga painters were quite adept at sustaining the myth of Meiji. Despite the dangers inherent in making such large-scale works, Maeda Seison’s The Great Imperial Thanksgiving Rite (Figure 26.3), with its bold design and elegant simplicity, or the perspective and coloring used in Dōmoto Inshō’s His Majesty at Lessons (Figure 26.4), appear equally striking, both in composition and execution, to works by two of the leading yōga painters of the time, The Battle of the Japan Sea by Nakamura Fusetsu (1866–1943) (Figure 26.5) or The Emperor at Tokyo Imperial University by Fujishima Takeji (1867–1943) (Figure 26.6). In this instance, the techniques of Nihonga were able to meet a demand to educate the public to the power and prestige of the state, the nation, and its history. The growing depth and sophistication of the public audience for art during this period seems clear, but documenting the phenomenon is difficult, since careful studies of the journalism of the time have yet to be made, even in Japan. The sheer amount of material available suggests that such a study would prove a daunting task. The 1926 Asahi newspaper survey reported that fifty art magazines, covering every conceivable field, were functioning and in print that year (Figure 26.7). Journalism surely provided the chief means to inform public taste. Yet how much did the critics themselves know? When art journalism, along with the publication of specialized art magazines, began around the turn of the century, the proper qualifications needed for a critic to address and educate the general public were debated heatedly. Some insisted that the informed critic should be a scholar. Others felt that the ideal critic should be an artist himself, who could truly grasp the significance of the creative process. Still another view proposed that the most useful critics should possess a broad cultural and social view of Japan and her evolving place in the world which could allow works of art to be considered in a meaningful context. Through the end of the Meiji period and into Taishō, many important young writers and critics possessed a variety of artistic enthusiasms and could provide larger contexts. Given their strong interests in European art, however, many of these young intellectuals preferred to write about Western art and its relationship to

366

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.4 Dōmoto Inshō, 1891–1975. His Majesty at Lessons (Tennō no goshūgaku), 1926. Color on paper; 300×270 cm. Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, Outer Garden, Meiji Shrine, Tokyo.

contemporary yōga. The critics who wrote about Nihonga tended to come from more scholarly backgrounds. The critic Taki Seiichi (1873–1945), for example, the oldest son of the nanga painter Taki Katei (1830–1901), had studied at Tokyo Imperial University and later taught at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. He became one of the leading writers on Japanese art for his generation. Critics such as Taki, who strongly invested in the values of traditional Japanese art, were more cautious in outlook than many of the writers on yōga, whose eyes and minds were challenged by constant exposure to new and sometimes contradictory ideas from abroad. NIHONGA IN THE CULTURE OF INTERWAR JAPAN The complex issue of what kind of relationship works of art should bear to the society they are created in is a complicated one in any society. Authentic art, in and of itself, is not a form of journalism; nevertheless, works of art, embedded in the culture of their origin, can provide complex messages concerning their eras. Even Nihonga, which often seemed to hold itself aloof from contemporary concerns (and that, of course, is

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

367

Figure 26.5 Nakamura Fusetsu, 1866–1943. The Battle of the Japan Sea (Nichi-Ro-eki Nihonkai kaisen), 1926. Oil on canvas; 300×270 cm. Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, Outer Garden, Meiji Shrine, Tokyo.

Figure 26.6 Fujishima Takeji, 1867–1943. The Emperor at Tokyo Imperial University (Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku gyōkō), 1926. Oil on canvas; 300×270 cm. Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, Outer Garden, Meiji Shrine, Tokyo.

a message in itself), came to agitate and sometimes inspire those who chose to remain in even the most placid of waters, like ripples on a pond. In the largest of those concentric circles lay important changes in the cultural environment of the country, and of Tokyo in particular. The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, in which 100,000 people died and much of the city was destroyed, brought in its wake many crucial changes. The photographs of the widespread devastation were almost as shocking as those taken some twenty years later which showed the destruction of the city at the end of the Pacific War. Incidents that occurred in the earthquake and its aftermath were recorded by Nihonga artists as well. Katayama Nanpū in his 1925 Handscroll of the Great Earthquake (Figure 26.8) illustrated some of the destruction he witnessed at the time. Many of Tokyo’s structures that had survived from the Edo period were destroyed by the earthquake and the fires that resulted. The city’s Tokugawa past was destroyed. When it was rebuilt, it was as a modern national capital. Its architecture, its transportation system, and the character of its public spaces were all new. Allied to this was a change in the public mentality. Despite the temporary setback of the earthquake, the rapid development of mass culture—opportunities for financial advancement and a lively curiosity about contemporary Western culture, ranging from the fine arts and concert music to films and popular dance steps

368

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.7 Cover of the art magazine, Bi no Kuni (The Land of Beauty). This cover of the July 1933 issue is illustrated by Araki Jippo (1872–1944), the Nihonga painter and adopted son of Araki Kanpo.

Figure 26.8 Katayama Nanpū, 1887–1980. The Scroll of the Great Earthquake (Daishinsai emaki), 1925. Three handscrolls: ink and color on paper; 46.5×714.5 cm; 46.5×774 cm; 46.5×663 cm. Private collection.

—transformed within a few years the mentality of the capital. Some of this new confidence and new insouciance can be seen in Scenes from Modern Life (Plate 135), mentioned above, in which the classic scroll format was used to show the newest of Japanese passions: golf. In artistic circles, the impetus of the European example and, increasingly, of the European avant-garde, continued to make itself felt on Japanese artists. For yōga artists, such attention was expected, as they were attempting to emulate tendencies in European art. Yet a number of Nihonga artists too began to take a lively interest in the broader intellectual currents of the time. In that regard, perhaps the most powerful model, and in some ways the most incisive challenge, came from the sculptor and poet Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), whose essays on the role of art and the artist found a wide readership. Kōtarō was the son of Takamura Kōun (1852–1934), a talented sculptor who began his career as a traditional Tokugawa artisan and finished as an ‘artist’ in the modern sense of the word. Fascinated by photographs he had seen of the work of Rodin, the young Kōtarō went to America and Europe to develop his talents. In Paris in 1908 and 1909, he was deeply moved by his experiences of European art and returned home the very model of a young, vital intellectual and artist. As early as 1910, Kōtarō wrote an extremely influential essay which he entitled ‘A Green Sun.’ Here, and in his later writings, Kōtarō stressed three artistic tasks he felt must be addressed by the artists of his generation, whatever their persuasion. The first was the need to find an authentic means of individual expression. The second concerned the necessity to

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

369

recognize the implications involved in the status of a ‘Japanese artist,’ in which he emphatically rejected the belief that a Japanese artist can merely create ‘local color’ in order to discharge this obligation. The third was his conviction that an artist must always have the courage to experiment. Many of the younger Nihonga painters who read Kōtarō’s essays and grasped the purport of his message were struck and challenged by it. The call for each artist to seek an individual vision had been sounded, and few could remain deaf to the call. The absorption of new intellectual and cultural ideas from Europe and America brought with it, just as Kōtarō had pointed out, a new impetus to define the meaning and significance of Japanese culture. Several of the most important figures among the younger generation of writers, now familiar with Western values and frames of reference, turned to survey the sensibilities of their own national past. In 1919 there appeared arguably the most significant and influential Japanese-language travel book of this century, Pilgrimages to Ancient Temples (Koji junrei) by Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960). Watsuji, who was a youthful disciple of the novelist Natsume Sōseki, went on to become the leading philosopher of Japan in the inter-war and early postwar years. In his late twenties Watsuji decided to physically explore the heritage of his own culture. He visited sites in Kyoto and then the more ancient temples in and around the city of Nara, which had been the capital of Japan in the eighth century. In his eloquent account of discovery (still inexplicably untranslated into any Western language), Watsuji described the sites he chose, some famous, some relatively obscure, then examined his personal response to them in terms of a contemporary sensibility. His observations were often comparative in nature, since he was already familiar with European art and cultural history. In its richness this influential book possessed a complex significance. Watsuji’s basic methodology (seek out, observe, then chart the authenticity of one’s own response) provided a model for engagement not only with European culture but with what often seemed to have become the ‘foreign culture’ of Japan’s own past. Traditionally, the arts had sought to portray the inner essence of the visible world. Watsuji validated his sense of necessity to go and observe nature and history directly. These lessons were not lost on the painters of Nihonga. A related sensibility can be found in the work of Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), whose fiction and writings on art earned him the epithet ‘the God of Japanese literature.’ In his greatest work, the long novel A Dark Night’s Passing (An’ya kōro), mostly written during the 1920s, the protagonist Kensaku begins his adult life as a modern, rootless, rather narcissistic intellectual who slowly finds himself drawn to the traditional Buddhist arts of Kyoto. Towards the end of the novel, he eventually makes a kind of metaphysical pilgrimage into the deep mountains overlooking the Japan Sea in order to escape and transcend the pain of his empty modern ‘self.’ Figures like Watsuji and Shiga reveal a yearning for values, often traditional values, that could provide some guidance to a culture felt by many to be in a confusing state of transition. In this regard, their strategies overlapped with the role Nihonga painters assigned themselves. In the visual arts, there was no group of artists who faced this need to develop a balance between preservation and experimentation with more acuity than did the younger generation of Nihonga painters. And, indeed, the larger accomplishments of the movement came to depend on the way in which this sometimes precarious balance might be maintained. INCREASING EUROPEAN CONTACTS With the coming of World War I, artistic contacts between Japan and Europe were severely, if temporarily, curtailed. By 1919, however, a renewed association with Europe, which itself entered a period of extraordinary artistic activity during the next decades, did much to breathe new life into the contemporary

370

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.9 Paul Claudel (1868–1955) as Consul General in Frankfurt, 1912.

creative conscience of Japanese artists in every field. Japanese artists, including Nihonga painters, began to travel abroad, more Europeans with artistic interests began to come to Japan, and exhibitions of contemporary Nihonga were sent abroad. Of all those Europeans who visited Japan during the 1920s, probably no one took a greater interest in promoting the work of Nihonga painters than the French poet Paul Claudel (1868–1955) (Figure 26.9). One of France’s great modern intellectual figures, and one of her most ardently Catholic writers, Claudel served as Ambassador to Japan, where he spent much of his time from 1921 through 1927. Claudel had travelled widely in the Far East earlier in his career. A first visit to Japan in 1898 produced in him a powerful conviction of the importance of the symbolic role of nature in the traditional Japanese arts. When he returned in 1921, he began expanding that initial understanding and developed a strong interest in both traditional Japanese painting and contemporary Nihonga. His enthusiasm for Japanese painting led Claudel to travel to Kyoto, where he made friends with some of the most distinguished Nihonga painters of the period. He became particularly close to Tomita Keisen, whom he asked to provide illustrations for a series of poems he was composing about Saint Geneviève, patron saint of the city of Paris. A luxurious edition of texts and illustrations was printed in Tokyo in 1923. The Kyoto painters arranged for Claudel to view the private collections and works of art sequestered in the storehouses of Buddhist temples. Claudel’s journal entries for his visits to Kyoto are filled with notations about his meetings with such artists as Yamamoto Shunkyo, Takeuchi Seihō, and Yokoyama Taikan. With them he discussed the fundamental principles of Japanese art. The results of these discussions helped inform the composition of such works as his play The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de satin) of 1929, generally considered one of the greatest French metaphysical plays of the century. It contains various scenes and characters based on Claudel’s Japanese experiences, as well as some discussion on the special properties of the Japanese arts. It was thanks at least in part to Claudel that some of the masters of modern Nihonga had their works shown in France through a large exhibition mounted in Paris in 1922. Serge Elisséeff (1889–1975), a Russian emigré scholar of Japan then living in Paris (and later to teach Japanese at Harvard), wrote a book, La Peinture contemporaine au Japon, published by Boccard in Paris in 1923. This set of essays, the first study to be written in the West, was intended to take the place of an exhibition catalogue, which was never

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

371

Figure 26.10 Cover of La Peinture contemporaine au Japon (1923).

Figure 26.11 Installation view of Esposizione d’Arte Giapponese, Rome, 1930.

published. The book reveals the wide range of work accomplished by painters active in the Taishō period, some since forgotten (Figure 26.10). Other exhibitions followed. An important exhibition of 177 paintings by eighty painters was sent to Rome in 1930, under the sponsorship of Ōkura Kishichirō, whose father had made his fortune in mining and engineering projects and begun his own private art collection (presently housed in the Ōkura Shūkokan Museum on the grounds of the Ōkura Hotel in central Tokyo). The exhibition centered on the work of three of the most important artists of the period: Yokoyama Taikan, Kawai Gyokudō, and Takeuchi Seihō (Figure 26.11). Excited by the space available in the elegant exhibition hall, Yokoyama Taikan helped supervise the installation of a Japanese room, complete with traditional fittings and tatami mats. Taikan’s Spring in Rome, 1930 (Plate 147) is a souvenir of that visit.

372

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.12 Ono Chikkyō (second from left) and Tsuchida Bakusen (second from right) at the Kyoto Station, departing for their European trip, 1921.

NIHONGA ARTISTS AS TRAVELLERS An increasing ability to travel, both within Asia and to the West, allied with an increasing curiosity on the part of younger artists, led interwar painters to go abroad during the more formative stages of their careers. In one sense, these voyages were built on the understood importance of the earlier travels by Takeuchi Seihō, who had visited Europe in 1900; Shimomura Kanzan, who had been to England in 1903, where he became interested in the techniques of European watercolor; and Yamamoto Shunkyo, whose Snow in the Rockies, 1905 (Plate 44) shows the techniques of Nihonga applied to American scenery. Other artists visited India, China, and Korea. Such a colorful work as Imamura Shikō’s Woman Drawing Water, Men Herding Ox, 1914 (Plate 146) brought new colors and a fascination with the romance of a culture such as India’s to the Japanese public. Most of these earlier trips were undertaken during the maturity of the artists; indeed, they were often possible because of the artists’ relative fame. In the interwar period, however, such travels more often occurred while the artists were younger. Their early encounters with European art—which, on the whole they could not see in Japan, other than in reproduction—often led to an increased assimilation of fresh ideas. Here, as so often, the Kyoto painters took the lead. Takeuchi Seihō, remembering the significance of his own trip to Europe two decades before, encouraged a number of his disciples, among them Tsuchida Bakusen, Ono Chikkyō, and Irie Hakō, to visit Europe. Through the essays of Takamura Kōtarō and articles on famous Western painters in the magazine Shirakaba (White Birch, founded in 1910), which was instrumental in introducing current developments in European art to Japan, Chikkyō became increasingly fascinated by what he termed ‘the force of the fast tempo of modern Western art.’ ‘In terms both of artistic fragrance and graphic freshness,’ he wrote, we were struck with Cézanne’s reality, the sensualism of Renoir, Rousseau’s openheartedness, the ardor of Van Gogh, and the wild roughness of Gauguin.’3 Now, they could go to Europe and see for themselves. The group travelled together, moving broadly through France, Italy, and England in the early 1920s (Figure 26.12). Bakusen was most taken with Gauguin and other French painters, while Hakō reserved his ultimate admiration for the Italian primitives whose work he believed contained both a monumentality and a use of flat surface related to his own developing aesthetic. Bakusen’s Renoir’s Garden (Plate 149) and Hakō’s Green Grove (Plate 148) show the results of their travel. In 1922, the important Tokyo painters Kobayashi Kokei and Maeda Seison made a similar trip (Figure 26.13). Seison, inspired by the example of his mentor Imamura Shikō, had already made a visit to Asia. His Handscroll of Korea (Plate 145), created as the result of his visit there in 1915, was one of his early successes. Both painters showed eclectic and broad interest in European art and culture, as the two Kokei paintings, both entitled Laundry Place (Plates 151 and 152) make clear. For Kokei in particular, however, his travel to Europe brought him a new regard for classical Asian art. Kokei and Seison were commissioned to copy the

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

373

Figure 26.13 Kobayashi Kokei and his colleagues in Egypt, 1922.

famous painting attributed to Gu Kaizhi (c.344-c.406), Admonitions of the Instructress, one of the treasures of the British Museum (Figure 26.14). The careful execution of their task took several months. The experience helped reinforce Kokei’s interest in the classical Chinese and Japanese subject matter that was so important in the works of his mature period. During the interwar period, the expense and difficulties of travel forced many painters to rely on reproductions for their knowledge of Western art. Hayami Gyoshū, for example, first learned about Western painting through such means. His study of a book on the sixteenth-century German painter Hans Holbein helped strengthen his growing friendship with another Japanese admirer of Holbein, the eminent yōga painter Kishida Ryūsei (1891–1929). Ryūsei soon shared with Gyoshū his appreciation, developed through books and reproductions, of such earlier European artists as Albrecht Dürer and Jan van Eyck. Ryūsei himself produced a series of striking still-lifes that show his indebtedness to those European masters (Figure 26.15). The results of Gyoshū’s new enthusiasms can be seen in Autumn Eggplants and Black Teabowl and Teacup and Fruit (Plates 104 and 105), both from 1921. They suggest the spare and linear qualities associated with these European painters. Kawabata Ryūshi’s trip to the United States, on the other hand, represented the climactic artistic encounter in his life. Ryūshi had begun his career as a yōga painter. He began to work as a newspaper illustrator in 1908, and became interested in Nihonga techniques due to his colleague on the newspaper, the painter Hirafuku Hyakusui. In 1913, Ryūshi went to San Francisco and later visited New York, where he wished to see some of Rodin’s sculptures. He next made his way to Boston in order to visit Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which had a superior collection of Western art. Unbeknownst to Ryūshi, the collections of classical Japanese art assembled by Ernest Fenollosa (1853– 1908). William S.Bigelow (1850–1926), and Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913), had been given to the Boston museum and were by then partially installed. Confronted with his own artistic heritage, the young Japanese artist was overwhelmed (Figure 26.16). In order to study Western art while in Japan, I made every attempt to absorb the modern movements with all the diligence and energy I could muster. And for that reason, I had for a long period of time paid no attention whatsoever to the classical art of Japan or to the traditions of Asian art. Indeed, my

374

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.14 Attributed to Gu Kaizhi, c.344-c.406. Admonitions of the Instructress, Six Dynasties Period. Handscroll: color on silk; 24.8×350 cm. British Museum, London.

Figure 26.15 Kishida Ryūsei, 1891–1929. Still-Life: Three Red Apples, a Teacup, a Tin Bottle, and a Spoon (Seibutsu: Akai ringo san-ko, chawan, buriki kan, saji), 1920. Oil on canvas; 36.5×44 cm. Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki.

point of view was as one who was not even Japanese. And so it was that only after leaving my own culture, when I caught a glimpse of the art bequeathed to us by our predecessors, that I came to respond with admiration, and in just the same fashion that a Western viewer might, to the beauties of Japanese art. And when I took consciousness in turn of the fact that I myself was from the nation that had created such splendid art, I soon felt something welling up in my heart…. As I looked at the Scrolls of Events of the Heiji Period, I came, without explicitly acknowledging the fact, to embrace this ‘Japan.’4 The encounter in Boston turned Ryūshi’s attention towards becoming a pracfitioner of the art of Nihonga. He was never to turn back. THE ART OF NIHONGA IN INTERWAR JAPAN: INNOVATION WITHIN TRADITION Even a cursory glance at Nihonga paintings of the interwar period reveals at once the existence of a range of work quite different in subject matter, style, and aesthetic effect from the art created in the preceding Meiji period. We begin with a generalization that is based to some extent on the comments made by the artists of the interwar period themselves, as well as upon the evidence of the works of art. The Nihonga created in this

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

375

Figure 26.16 Artist unknown. Detail from Scrolls of Events in the Heiji Period (Heiji monogatari emaki), 13th century. Handscroll: ink and color on paper; height 41.3 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fenollosa-Weld Collection.

period seems to have sustained two sometimes overlapping yet ultimately contradictory ideals: the preservation of tradition and the need for experimentation. The attitude of the Meiji Nihonga painters, particularly as codified in the views of such influential artists as Yokoyama Taikan and Yasuda Yukihiko in the Reorganized Japan Art Institute, served to encourage a firmly traditional emphasis on the aesthetics of Nihonga. Indeed, by 1920, the directors of the Institute removed the category of yōga from its exhibitions altogether. The greatest of the artists of a more classical temperament, such as Hayami Gyoshū, consistently maintained a desire to bring together the best ideals of the traditional and contemporary periods. But in its least creative phase, this emphasis on the past risked producing a moribund orthodoxy that could move Nikonga, in subject matter, ideals, and technique, ever further away from the concerns and aspirations of a rapidly changing culture. One form of preservation lay in the continued use of traditional themes and subject matter, which the painters knew many of their viewers would take pleasure in recognizing. One hallowed example is the Eight Views of Ōmi (Ōmi hakkei), a selection of eight views of Lake Biwa. Since the beginning of the sixteenth century these eight views had been a standard theme in ink painting. The theme itself was a Japanese variation on the work of the eleventh-century Northern Song Dynasty painter Song Di, who chose eight scenes to paint in the area of Hunan Province to create the precedent of the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang. Both Chinese and Japanese conceits depict similar subjects: windy days, sunsets, returning sailboats, evening temple bells, and other similarly poetic topics. These themes were much used in both painting and poetry in the Tokugawa period. Imamura Shikō’s Eight Views of Ōmi, 1912 (Plate 128) presented viewers with a mixture of old and new. True, the subject was fixed. But Shikō did not create his paintings by copying the views (often imagi nary) painted by traditional masters. As did many modern artists, Shikō sketched directly from nature. He actually visited Lake Biwa in 1912, made sketches of the actual spots identified in the series, and only then set out to create these fresh and striking works. In 1918, Yokoyama Taikan, in a variation on the same theme, created his Handscroll of Nio-no-ura (Plate 115), the ancient name for Lake Biwa. Here the identity of the subject matter has slightly shifted but, as Steven Owyoung has pointed out in his remarks on the painting, the techniques employed to create the scene pay homage to the painters of China’s Song Dynasty.

376

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

The same subject matter was taken up still again in 1926 by Shimomura Kanzan in his Eight Views of Ōmi (Plate 127). In many ways, the later work by Kanzan is the most conservative of the three, both in the choice of subject matter and in the artist’s admittedly prodigious technique used to suggest older traditional Japanese and Chinese styles. Yet compared to Shikō’s experiments, the work risks seeming retrograde for its time. A second means of preserving tradition involved a renewed intellectual interest by painters in repossessing the older traditions of Chinese and Japanese painting. As noted above, younger painters brought up in an atmosphere of rapidly increasing cultural diversity felt, as did Kobayashi Kokei in London or Kawabata Ryūshi in Boston, that their encounters with actual examples of East Asian masterworks helped lead them into an intellectual study of the art and customs of their own classical art. They were anxious to rediscover the traditions of ancient painting in the same fashion that the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, mentioned above, attempted to repossess the epochs of Nara and ancient Kyoto through his visits there. Study, even intellectual understanding, does not necessarily produce a lively, living work of art. The result may constitute no more than an antiquarian rerendering. Perhaps nowhere in this exhibition can the challenges and difficulties of this attempt to repossess the past be better observed than in the 1933 painting by Kikuchi Keigetsu, Blackened Teeth (Plate 82). Here the artist has shown his exhaustive knowledge of ancient customs and artistic technique in the style of the painting, which harks back to the hakubyō (literally, ‘white drawing’) techniques employed in the Nara period, thus predating even the venerable Yamato-e tradition. The artist has chosen all the appropriate details for the costume, posture, and other elements he has chosen for rendering the figure. Whether this knowledge marshalled by the artist contributes to the beauty and effectiveness of the work, however, may well occasion discussion for viewers in the 1990s, when few Japanese art lovers possess the kind of knowledge that can provide for the pleasures of recognition. Parallel to a fascination with the classical arts there developed an interest shown by a number of painters in classical Japanese literature. By the turn of the century, the canon of Japanese classics for modern readers had been firmly fixed. Various popular editions, with necessary annotations, were issued by a succession of publishers. These texts often provided inspiration for independent works of art. Two of the most famous Japanese texts found interpreters among Nihonga painters. The first of them, the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Taketori monogatari), dates from the ninth or tenth century. Its authorship is uncertain, but it is usually regarded as the oldest surviving work of fiction in the Japanese language. Kobayashi Kokei, enchanted by the visual possibilities of the charming and fanciful tale, used it as the basis for two sets of scrolls. In his Shipwreck (Plate 52), Kokei shows one of the princess’s suitors in a perilous sea, searching for a magic jewel. Maeda Seison’s 1918 Handscroll of Koremori at Mount Kōya (Plate 53) is based on a tragic incident in the greatest of the medieval Japanese literary classics, Tale of the Heike, which recounts in fictionalized and heightened form important historical incidents in the disastrous twelfth-century civil wars that destroyed the political power of the court in Kyoto. The text, which inspired numerous other works of fiction, theater (Noh plays in particular), and works of art, contains a number of scenes of high tragedy. None is more moving than the escape from the capital by Taira no Koremori (1158–1184), the upright grandson of the evil villain of the tale, Taira no Kiyomori (1118–1181). The story, well known to virtually any Japanese reader, takes on a new resonance in this strikingly bold work, which Seison based on his own travels through the mountainous countryside near Mount Kōya. A number of experiments enlivened and revitalized the Nihonga of this period. For viewers outside of Japan, coming upon these works in the 1990s for the first time and unfamiliar with the shifting idioms of

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

377

twentieth-century Japanese art, the nature and effectiveness of these attempts at renewal and renovation may not at first be apparent. For Japanese viewers and connoisseurs familiar with these traditions, however, images of older paintings can be conjured up, even if unconsciously, to stand in juxtaposition with these newer works. Indeed, these newer paintings may well require the presence, in the mind’s eve at least, of art created in the older traditions, precisely in order to show off their new and experimental qualities. In that sense, appreciation of Nihonga, indeed perhaps of any art, requires memory and intelligence as well as the skills of the ‘naked eye’ alone (if indeed that platonic possibility can even be said to exist). Response involves recognition and comparison. Many of these experiments involve a growing presence of the real world and contemporary culture into the traditions of artistic representation. One of the most obvious of these is the introduction of new subject matter. The tendency, still strong in Meiji painting, to favor traditional themes finally started to yield. By the time of the Teiten exhibitions, beginning in 1919, contemporary genre scenes of a sort seldom seen in earlier painting began to proliferate. Dōmoto Inshō’s Hill, 1924 (Plate 121) portrayed an unprepossessing neighborhood in Kyoto with the charm of a painting and the accuracy of a photograph. The artist has found room in his conception for all sorts of persons and objects, from the humblest to the most fanciful. Ikeda Yōson’s Osaka in Snow (Plate 122), painted four years later in 1928, captures with even greater skill the tonality of a modern urban landscape. The muted, gentle snow may provide an element of nature familiar from more traditional Japanese painting, but the city portrayed is wholly of this century. Another category of subject matter that grew during this period was portraits taken from life. Portraiture has a long and often distinguished history in traditional Japanese art, but the idea of using a live model (or a photograph) is a fairly recent development which began in earnest only in the nineteenth century. By 1910 and after, portraits ‘drawn from life’ were increasingly appreciated. In 1916, Yasuda Yukihiko created his lively Portrait of Imamura Shikō (Plate 87), commissioned for a memorial exhibition held after the artist’s death that same year. His subject deceased, Yukihiko worked from a photograph. Tamaki Suekazu, in his 1926 portrait of an assistant in a dry-goods shop (Plate 88), depicted his model directly, with striking results. Kaburaki Kiyokata was faced with still another problem in creating his Portrait of San’yūtei Enchō (Plate 86). Although he knew the famous storyteller well when the artist himself was a child, he had to recreate the portrait from memories virtually three decades old. Whatever Kiyokata’s sources, the picture suggests a particular person and occasion with great skill. Finally, just as the rediscovery of classical Japanese literature provided the subject matter for a number of Nihonga painters, striking illustrations for modern novels and other literary texts were created by a number of artists in this period. Kaburaki Kiyokata made a specialty of illustrating the work of the novelist Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) (Plate 136); and Maeda Seison, while still a young artist, did newspaper illustrations for the works of two novelists popular at the time, Oguri Fūyō (1875–1926) and Tokuda Shūsei (1871– 1943). Along with new subject matter, there was an attempt to create new techniques of expression, among them a certain lightening of the palette, which may bear witness to an interest on the part of a number of Nihonga painters in European watercolor. There was a fresh use of color and of shadow as well. Both of these changes probably find their sources in responses to Western conceptions of space and light by Nihonga artists of the 1920s and 1930s. Another striking development in this period, and one which would reach its fruition in the postwar years, was a tendency towards abstraction. The kind of simplification towards essential forms of moving water found in Tsuji Kakō’s Calm Waves, c.1920 (Plate 118) may owe some elements in its conception to the traditional Rinpa style. But a painting such as Fukuda Heihachirō’s Ripples, painted twelve years later in 1932 (Plate 120), has moved those watery shapes into still another visual context. Heihachirō’s sense of

378

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

abstraction seems to pay homage to modern European strategies of representing space and light. It remains, even today, a striking and original conception. Such, then, is the range of challenge and accomplishment during the years 1919–1935. If more traditional values were upheld in the yearly Teiten exhibitions, Nihonga artists found themselves freer than before to pursue more personal options in smaller groups or in personal exhibitions. Yet, on the whole, judged in terms of the entire hundred years of the movement, those who successfully managed to break free from what they perceived as the restraints imposed by the government’s official salon are the artists most appreciated today. It is particularly striking that probably the three greatest Tokyo painters of the period, Maeda Seison, Kawabata Ryūshi, and Hayami Gyoshū, did not come from artistic families, were not trained at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and had strong interests in Western painting. Indeed, it was the sense among both painters and a segment of the public alike that the Teiten, like the Bunten before it, had failed to develop the best artists of the period, which led to still another attempted change in 1935. ENCOUNTERING BLANK SPACES: A DECADE OF WAR, 1935–1945 By the mid-1930s, the cultural climate in Japan began to darken as the escalating war with China continued and military pressures on the civilian government began to exert an ever greater influence on the cultural life of the nation. The country was soon to enter that period many Japanese have referred to as the ‘dark valley’ of the war years, from which it would not emerge until 1945. Social and political difficulties of those years were not relegated to the colonies or other Asian countries in which the Japanese military forces were becoming increasingly involved. A number of army officers stationed within the country were growing more and more impatient with what they took to be the weakness and corruption of civilian politics. In an attempted coup d’état on February 26, 1936, a group of young officers attacked some high officials in their homes, killing the Finance Minister and other prominent dignitaries. They insisted their acts were carried out ‘in the name of the emperor.’ The emperor himself, when he learned of the incident, insisted that the men be brought to trial. The incident—so brilliantly described by Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) in his 1969 novel, Runaway Horses (Honba)—was symptomatic both of the ascendancy of a dangerously romantic militarism and of the emotional fatigue of the liberal intellectuals, who had previously set a tone of openness in which the country had flourished culturally and artistically for several decades. A similar sense of fatigue seemed to spring up in artistic and intellectual circles as well. In the early 1920s, avant-garde poets like the Surrealist Nishiwaki Junzaburō (1894–1982), yōga painters such as Saeki Yūzō (1898–1928), or Nihonga painters such as Tsuchida Bakusen, were stimulated and excited by living, working, and travelling in Europe. By 1936, however, when Japan’s leading modernist writer Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) went to Paris, London, and Berlin, he recorded in his widely admired but unfinished novel, The Sadness of Travel (Ryoshū), an ominous sense of intellectual exhaustion and a longing to return to what seemed the more comfortable milieu of Japanese culture. His attitudes were typical of those who, during the war years, would talk of the need in Japan to ‘overcome the modern.’ On the long train ride back to Japan through the Soviet Union, the protagonist of the novel, whose name is Yashiro, remarks that he knows that he has been given the leisure time on this long trip to sort out his thoughts concerning his European experience, yet he can only experience wave after wave of a terrible listlessness: things were ‘jangling around in his head,’ he felt, and he could ‘find no space in which to think about his experiences.’ These phrases anticipate remarks written in 1946 by the critic Suzuki Osamu, who said of Japanese painters during the war that they ‘encountered blank spaces,’ such as might be found in medieval Zen paintings

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

379

which, as inhabitants of the modern age, they were unable to fill in: in Suzuki’s words, the wartime painters could only ‘impose one blank upon another.’5 If the cultural and spiritual world within which art could be created was narrowing, so were the social and government structures that were needed to support it. In 1935, Matsuda Genji (1875–1936), the Education Minister, took the lead (as had his predecessor in 1919, Nakahashi Tokugorō) in still another attempt to reorganize the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (Teikoku Bijutsu-in) and the Teiten exhibitions. The reasons in 1935 were not dissimilar from those put forth in 1919. Matsuda and his colleagues sought to establish an overarching government-affiliated organization, one with authority to ‘collect together men of talent,’ as one spokesperson put it. Art and the nation were to be as one. Such was the attempt, and again the efforts failed. Some of the best talent remained outside the government-sponsored exhibitions, and it was difficult to woo such independent and financially successful artists as Maeda Seison and Kawabata Ryūshi into a conservative, umbrella organization. Before any of these plans could be carried out completely, Matsuda himself died suddenly in 1936, and the political situation, typified by the February 26 attempted coup, increasingly deteriorated. The situation continued more or less as before. The Teiten exhibition, now renamed the Shin-Bunten (New Bunten) remained conservative in the aesthetic proclivities of its judges, and the smaller independent groups continued to provide outlets for many of the younger and more adventuresome Nihonga painters. Some of these artists shown in the current exhibition—Iwahashi Eien, Fukuda Toyoshirō, and others— were to develop substantial postwar careers. Only the coming hostilities could force a closer union of art and national politics. There was no question on the part of important Japanese government officials that the visual arts could and should be enlisted as a cultural arm of national policy These attitudes proved important in the area of foreign policy as well. The kind of cultural exchange so favored by many nations in the postwar period had an effective predecessor in a large exhibition of Japanese classical art sent to Berlin in 1939, as a result of a treaty for cultural exchange signed by the two countries the previous year. On the German side. Göring served as Chief of the Sponsoring Committee and Ribbentrop as President of the Committee of Honor. Some 125 works by such great artists as Sesshū (1420–1506), Sesson (1504–1589?), Ogata Kōrin (1658– 1716), Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795), and Kanō Motonobu (1476–1559) were sent to Berlin on this occasion. Photographs still exist of Hitler and his entourage dutifully examining the grandeurs of classical Japanese art. Beginning in the late 1930s, at a time of continuing hostilities in China, contemporary art, both yōga and Nihonga, increasingly came under the control of the government. The Army and Navy began to recruit artists to travel to war zones to create ‘campaign record paintings’ (sakusen kiroku-ga) to chronicle the progress of the war. With the promulgation of the National Mobilization Act in 1938, government officials found a new means of exercising more obvious controls to focus the efforts of artists and intellectuals on what military and government officials considered the tasks facing the nation, now on a wartime footing. In the realm of painting, independent exhibition groups were quickly consolidated under new titles, such as the Federation of Art Organizations (Bijutsu Dantai Renmei), founded in 1940; the Japan Painters’ Patriotic Society (Nihon Gaka Hōkokukai), established in March of 1942; and other similar groups. These activities culminated in the establishment of the Japan Art Patriotic Society (Nihon Bijutsu Hōkokukai), set up by the Ministry of Education in May of 1943. Towards the end of the war, in 1944, the government closed down all painting exhibitions, including the Shin-Bunten (New Bunten) exhibition, replacing it with a special exhibition of war paintings. Any natural relationships between artwork and audience were thereby destroyed. And by the early months of 1945, frequent air raids made even those exhibitions impossible. Not only were opportunities for the display of new art reduced and controlled, but the government also regulated the distribution of art supplies, some imported from China. Shortages and government control

380

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

caused the publication of art magazines to subside. In July of 1941, the government forced a consolidation of the 38 magazines then being published into eight; by 1944, only one magazine was permitted to publish all activities concerned with the visual arts. In their efforts to control the production of art in terms of state objectives, the government attempted, and in some cases with success, to enlist the help of senior painters, just as they did with writers, artists, and intellectuals in every field. Hoping to win them over to the military’s vision of a ‘holy war,’ government officials could then use the older painters’ prestige to help legitimize the military’s war policies. In the field of Nihonga, that role was played by the venerable Yokoyama Taikan, who by the late 1930s had become the elder statesman of the movement, at least in the eyes of many artists and officials in the Tokyo area. Taikan gave money from the sale of his works to the military forces, as did the beloved Kyoto painter Uemura Shōen. In 1943, Taikan himself became the chairman of the Japan Art Patriotic Society During the war years, both yōga and Nihonga painters contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways. Some sold their pictures to raise funds for the military. Some, under government sponsorship, continued to create pictorial records of the war. Such a practice of close cooperation, of course, was by no means limited to Japan. In Britain, for example, such painters as Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland were appointed as official war artists to record the situation of the nation at war. In Japan, as elsewhere, artists and the public alike reasonably saw these efforts as patriotic gestures taken to aid the nation. With the end of the war in 1945, all of these assumptions and activities came quickly to a halt. The prestige and reputations of those who had participated were damaged, certainly among some portion of the public interested in art. The time had come, it was widely felt, to assess the damages and, when necessary, to lay blame. That process was begun even before the end of 1945. Some fifty years later, no final conclusions have yet been reached concerning many of these matters, since much of the art created during the war years has been destroyed, confiscated, or hidden away. There are, however, certain general observations to be made. Paintings in this exhibition by the older generation of artists still active in the wartime period reveal little direct reflection of the stresses and challenges of those times. The late works of Murakami Kagaku, who died in 1939, such as his Arhat (Plate 74) or Pine Trees on a Rocky Mountain (Plate 123), confirm the fact of his withdrawal from art circles since the late 1920s, when his work began to take on an increasingly contemplative and otherworldly character. The Monkey, c.1940 (Plate 99) of Hashimoto Kamsetsu, who died in 1945, owes more to the painter’s long allegiance to themes in classical Chinese art than to any desire to render aspects of the contemporary world. Some have interpreted one of Takeuchi Seihō’s final works, Spring Snow (Plate 101), painted shortly before his death in 1942, as a kind of mournful farewell to the art and society which he knew; but whatever the ultimate meaning of this remarkably moving work, its symbols bear no overt relation to the politics of the day. Uemura Shōen’s Late Autumn, 1943 (Plate 84), on the other hand, reveals a subtle change in emphasis in her work. Shōen’s Taishō and early Shōwa paintings most often portray elegant women, sometimes from the demimonde. In this wartime painting of 1943, however, she has created in an appropriately subdued style the image of a woman carrying out a domestic chore. Such subject matter is certainly more in keeping with the austerity of the war years. Some younger writers and artists became, as one of them put it, ‘internal exiles,’ who purposefully abandoned their creative work and took up other careers in order to survive. Others, especially after the heavy bombings of the cities commenced, moved to the countryside to farm and await the end. The visual evidence of the art from this period that can be located and examined even now does not permit any facile judgments, moral or artistic. There have certainly been no claims that the period produced, either in yōga or in Nihonga, any war art to be judged on the standards of such European masters as Goya or Delacroix, to say nothing of Picasso, although there seems to be a growing opinion in Japan that certain

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

381

works of the yōga painter Fujita Tsuguji (1886–1968) reveal considerable artistic accomplishment. Even so, by what standards, and from what viewpoint, are such accomplishments to be measured? Many of the debates at the end of the war were caught up in attempting to define what the role of such painting turned out to have been, or should have been. For some, war paintings of the period might be regarded as a sort of artistic journalism. In such a context, some writers have felt, a case might be made that such art should be regarded as morally ‘neutral.’ For others, it seemed best to judge war art according to the canons and criteria of history painting, since many of these works do depict the history of the times. One of the reasons for these often awkward and disparate attitudes and judgments may well have been caused by the fact that, in the long history of Japanese art, little had been developed before modern times in the way of any strong visual traditions for recording the travails of war. True, there are Heian scrolls depicting the outbreak of fighting, such as the Heiji scroll at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which so excited the imagination of Kawabata Ryūshi. And there have been depictions of warriors when scenes from the Tale of the Heike or other war chronicles were used as subject matter. On the whole, however, there was little available in terms of models and precedents before the modern period. In the Meiji period, however, painters and artists, particularly before the ascendancy of war photography, did travel with the Japanese military during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 and, to a lesser extent, during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. These efforts produced a good deal of popular art, from wood-block prints to accomplished ‘on the spot’ sketches and even paintings (mostly yōga). Still, little was intended to be enduring. There are, of course, examples of Meiji Nihonga which take up war themes, such as Kubota Beisen’s Battles by Land and Sea (Plate 28), but the generally perceived decorative qualities of Nihonga were evidently deemed then, as in the later Pacific War, relatively unsuitable for depicting the sometimes gruesome, and often moving, evocations of combat managed by Fujita. Nihonga artists shied away from the direct depiction of such carnage not, as some Japanese critics have remarked, because they were in principle against the brutality of war, but rather because they believed that they possessed few pictorial strategies with which to come to grips with such subject matter. A few examples will show the range of what was attempted within the parameters of Nihonga. Although Yasuda Yukihiko’s depiction of one of the great heroes of the war, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku (1884– 1943), appears to be a typical modern Nihonga portrait, it might be considered a war painting as well (Figure 26.17). The strong central figure portrayed and the number of specific details in the background, unlike the quiescent figures and spare backgrounds often found in the genre, make clear to the viewer that the Admiral is on a battle ship and is taking active command of the situation. Even more vigorous scenes reveal a certain stately poise. Kawabata Ryūshi, one of the most distinguished and independent-minded painters of the period, did in fact produce a certain number of war paintings, but they are often fantastic or allegorical in nature, such as his Gods of Torpedoes, 1944 (Figure 26.18). Fukuda Toyoshirō’s evocative scrolls of the Malaysia campaign (Plate 138), which reveal his skill in using this venerable format for such unusual subject matter, seem more rooted in the traditions of landscape painting than in the more commonly understood conceptions of war art. Another well-known work of the period by the Kyoto artist Yamaguchi Kayō (1899–1984) depicts a landing strip for Japanese planes on the Arafura Sea, that body of water which lies between Indonesia and Australia (Figure 26.19). Yet the flat and decorative treatment given the airplane and the figures below suggests little of the heat and struggle of battle. It reveals instead something of those same techniques used by Kayō in the creation of his beautiful and decorative paintings of animals, a talent he shared with his teacher, Nishimura Goun (Plate 98). Often paintings on historical subjects, such as Kikuchi Keigetsu’s Welcoming the Imperial Carriage, 1943 (Plate 139), seem on the surface to have little to do with the war and are only intended to reflect the

382

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.17 Yasuda Yukihiko, 1884–978. A Portrait of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku (Yamamoto Isoroku Gensui zō), 1944. Hanging scroll: color on silk; 248.5×124.5 cm. Art Museum, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

Figure 26.18 Kawabata Ryūshi, 1885–1966. Gods of Torpedoes (Suiraijin), 1944. Originally four-panel screen: color on paper; 243×485 cm. Ryūshi Memorial Art Museum of Ōta-ku, Tokyo.

contemporary situation indirectly. Nevertheless, those viewing the picture could easily identify the kneeling samurai as Kusunoki Masashige (d.1336), long considered the paragon of loyalty to the imperial institution and the subject of a number of Keigetsu’s works created during these years. Masashige here pays homage to the emperor, who remains invisible. The message of the virtue of absolute loyalty is powerfully conveyed, even though presented in a muted and refracted fashion. By the end of 1945, the war was over, and the urban areas of Japan were in ruins. Many of the Nihonga artists felt discredited and chagrined over their earlier enthusiasms. Many attempted simply to put the time behind them, yet their very silence was a cause of further resentment by others. Moving artistic expressions of mourning, sadness, and regret over war and destruction can be found in the works of both Nihonga and yōga painters from those early postwar years. Perhaps the best known of these artists in this country is

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

383

Figure 26.19 Yamaguchi Kayō, 1899–1984. Landing Strip for Sea planes on the Arafura Sea (Arafurakai no suijōki kichi), 1943.

Figure 26.20 Maruki Iri, b.1901. Red Plums (Kōbai), 1967. Two-panel screen: color on paper; 182 ×182 cm. Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels Foundation.

Maruki Iri (b. 1901), who has become internationally famous for Nihonga paintings that he and his wife made as a record of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, such as Red Plums, 1967 (Figure 26.20) Despite such powerful visual evidence, however, it appears that there developed in these postwar years no effective means to carry out a dialogue between the various segments of Japanese society over the ultimate significance of the war for the nation. Many individuals have continued to speak out, yet in the end it has remained difficult for Japanese society as a whole to articulate, discuss, and so come to terms with the complex feelings involved in those years of war, then defeat.6 Given this situation, it is not surprising that even fifty years later relatively little has been done to understand and evaluate the works of Japanese artists during this difficult time. In the environment of the early postwar years, the future for the rebirth of an authentic and contemporary Nihonga seemed bleak. The postwar resuscitation of the form, therefore, stands as one of the most remarkable periods in the hundred years of its history.

384

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

POSTWAR DEVELOPMENTS: ABSORPTION AND AMALGAMATION, 1945–1968 The end of the Pacific War virtually brought the arts to a halt. Kyoto was physically unharmed by the bombings, but Tokyo was reduced to rubble. Many of the painters moved to the country to avoid the destruction around them. Public spaces for the display of art had all but disappeared, and wealthy patrons, many of them industrialists, had lost their fortunes and, in some cases, their respectability. Nevertheless, those institutions involved with the visual arts were reconstituted with amazing speed. By the fall of 1945, officials of the Ministry of Education prepared to reorganize the government-sponsored exhibition Shin-Bunten. Under the Occupation, the exhibition was again renamed as the Japan Art Exhibition (Nihon bijutsu tenrankai), commonly known as ‘Nitten.’ Its first exhibition was held in March of 1946, displaying a total of 134 Nihonga pictures, as well as 288 yōga. Many of the works, it has been remarked, must have been painted quietly and privately during the war. Most were on traditional themes.7 Nitten was intended to continue the role of upholding the ‘traditional beauty’ of the Japanese arts. In the early postwar period, these exhibitions did provide an opportunity for the display of important works by such respected Nihonga artists as Kaburaki Kiyokata, Itō Shinsui (1898–1972), and others. The Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsu-in), which still claimed Yokoyama Taikan as a distinguished member, reactivated its programs in 1946 in order to ‘soothe the hearts of the people, so weary from the fighting, and to introduce to those from abroad stationed here in the Occupation an opportunity to experience the essence of Japanese art,’ according to a Ministry of Education directive to the organization.8 To this end, the Tokyo National Museum and other spaces were speedily repaired and reopened. Private groups also recornmenced their activities with surprising speed. The Seiryū-sha of Kawabata Ryūshi, for example, held its first important exhibition in October of 1945. Ryūshi himself contributed work to the exhibition. As Japan faced the challenges of rebuilding her culture in almost every sphere of activity, however, an ever sharper rift divided the more traditional Nihonga artists, many of whom had known considerable success in the prewar years, and a younger generation of painters, some of whom subscribed to an entirely new set of principles and expectations. The polarities between the traditionalism of the mainstream Nihonga establishment and a desire for experimentation on the part of younger Nihonga artists became all the more obvious. Pressures for reform, both from Nihonga and yōga painters, were so great that in 1958, Nitten was reconstituted as a private entity. This was the most important change since the government-sponsored exhibition was first instituted as Bunten in 1907. A cultural map of the range of Nihonga painting created in the period from the end of the war until 1968 suggests three areas of creativity. Sometimes the three stood apart from each other; sometimes they overlapped. These three involved the older generation, a relatively conventional younger generation, and a younger avant-garde. THE OLDER GENERATION Many of the important prewar Nihonga artists were still alive and active in the early postwar years. Their work ensured continuities and contributed to the stability of the resuscitated national organizations. By the same token, however, their conservative views often brought them discredit, at least in the eyes of some of the public. Many people felt that the forms of visual art to which these painters subscribed had lent support and validation to the military authorities during the fifteen-year-long war period. Among the most popular and respected painters whose careers had been closely linked to the government art organizations was Yokoyama Taikan who, nearing eighty, was still painting. His younger colleague Kobayashi Kokei, now in his early sixties, was appointed to teach at the Tokyo National University of Fine

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

385

Arts and Music (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, formerly Tokyo School of Fine Arts), and Yasuda Yukihiko, another associate of Taikan from the days of Okakura Tenshin’s original Japan Art Institute, was an active painter at age 61. The kind of art these artists were producing, marked now not only as conservative but, in some eyes, politically tainted as well, could not easily call forth enthusiastic support from younger artists or members of the public. However, other more independent artists from the prewar era showed impressive new energies. Two in particular, Kawabata Ryūshi and Maeda Seison, may be said to have achieved their respective periods of greatest creativity. Kawabata Ryūshi was sixty at the end of the war and would paint actively until his death in 1966. Just before the end of hostilities, Ryūshi abandoned the war pictures on which he had been working and left his house in Tokyo, which was destroyed in the bombing, although parts of his atelier were saved. He soon returned to the art world, however, both as a painter and as the patron spirit of his group, the Seiryū-sha, where he helped train such prominent postwar artists as Yokoyama Misao. Ryūshi’s own postwar work shows an even greater flexibility and daring. Ryūshi’s subject matter during this period was chosen more and more from motifs associated with the classical past. He travelled around Japan in an effort to locate the spiritual roots of the Japanese aesthetic tradition, and produced such works as Ama no hashidate, 1960 (Figure 26.21), in which he portrayed the poetic amalgamation of water, sand dunes, and sea in a beautiful area northwest of Kyoto. A celebrated spot, whose name can be translated as ‘the floating bridge of heaven,’ it was a subject for art at least as far back as the celebrated ink paintings of Sesshū (1420–1506). In linking himself to these great traditions, Ryūshi created one of his most striking masterpieces. But, since his composition concentrates on the sand dunes rather than a panoramic view of the mountains behind, an element so important in traditional treatments of this landscape, his view is a striking one. Two of Ryūshi’s most successful series of works created during this period resulted from lengthy pilgrimages he made. The first of them began in 1950 with a series of visits to the 88 Buddhist temples on the large island of Shikoku, that part of Japan that lies south of the Osaka-Kobe area. These visits produced a series of remarkably fresh and arresting views of the Japanese countryside, sights which, the artist later wrote, he had never before witnessed. One of these is his Shikoku Pilgrimage: Twenty-Eighth Stop, Dainichiji Temple on Mount Hōkai, 1951 (Plate 124a). In the following year, Ryūshi began a series of trips to follow in the path of the famous haiku poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), whose 1689 trip to the north of Japan was immortalized in his poetic diary, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi), one of the greatest classics of Japanese literature and culture. Ryūshi wrote about his retracing of Bashō’s poetic pilgrimage: I went in the same seasons, pursued the same itinerary, saw the same sights of nature that he would have seen, the same products of each region, the same historical relics, and I felt the same human sympathies. With this as my object, I was happy in attempting my sketches, which I used as material for later finished works.9 Both Dream, 1951 (Plate 64) and Yōmei Gate, 1955 (Figure 26.22) illustrate Ryūshi’s response to these travels. The need to seek out clean roots in Japan’s cultural past seems to have driven many artists and writers who had attained their first artistic maturity in the inter-war years. Such a ‘nostalgia for origins’ seems symptomatic of the spiritual battles being fought by a mature generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals who were facing the shocking changes of the early postwar period.

386

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.21 Kawabata Ryūshi, 1885–1966. Ama no hashidate (Tenkyō zu), 1960. Framed: color on paper; 242.4×151. 5 cm. The National Theatre, Tokyo.

Figure 26.22 Kawabata Ryūshi, 1885–1966. Yōmei Gate (Yōmeimon), 1955. Framed: color on paper; 104× 85 cm. Ryūshi Memorial Art Museum of Ota-ku, Tokyo.

Maeda Seison revealed a new vitality in his postwar work that continued until shortly before his death in 1977. Seison was appointed to teach at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1951, where he served for eight years, bringing by all accounts a fresh spirit to the academic courses offered in the techniques of Nihonga. Seison, like Ryūshi, also returned to important sites of traditional Japanese culture. He visited the ancient capital of Nara, where he witnessed the annual March ‘water drawing ceremonies,’ dating back to the eighth century, at the famous Nigatsudō or ‘Second Month Temple’ that sits on a beautiful site on the hills overlooking the city. This encounter produced a striking series of works, among them Water Drawing Ceremony, 1959 (Plate 63). Seison travelled to China as well, as part of a diplomatic

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

387

Figure 26.23 Maeda Saison, 1885–1977. RedWall: The Altar of Heaven (Akai kabe: Tendan), 1960. Panel: color on paper; 64.5×74.5 cm. Private collection.

attempt to reopen relations between Japan and her former enemy in 1960. The artist’s visit produced a number of important paintings, especially Red Wall: The Altar of Heaven (Figure 26.23). A YOUNGER TRADITIONAL GENERATION By the end of the Occupation in 1952, Japan had begun to regain a certain financial stability. More people were becoming interested in the arts, both as an avenue of personal cultivation and as a means to measure the meaning and significance of Japanese culture in a new and peaceful context. Attendance swelled at local and national exhibitions, and books and magazines dedicated to the visual arts proliferated. However, in the area of Nihonga, a greater interest in the visual arts did not produce an increased openness to advanced styles of art. The public at large, which had not experienced, accepted, or internalized the kind of visual shock registered by viewers in the West when faced with the work of Matisse, Picasso, Fauvists, Cubists, and Surrealists, remained quite content to enjoy styles of painting that seemed old-fashioned by the postwar period. The Nitten exhibitions provided privileged space for such works. Many relatively conservative artists, some of them extremely accomplished, had no wish to move into the avant-garde. Rather, they preferred to create painting redolent, as they saw it, with the kind of authentic, traditional Japanese beauty that had long been the ideal for the Nihonga movement. Portrait painting continued as an important genre in the postwar period. No painter at this time was more gifted than Itō Shinsui (1898–1972). Shinsui’s paintings of beautiful women, his wood-block prints, and his skillful portraits were regarded highly during his lifetime and after. In a portrait of his teacher Kaburaki Kiyokata (Figure 26.24), Shinsui places on the master’s table a volume of writings by Izumi Kyōka (1873– 1939), Kiyokata’s favorite author for whom he often provided colorful and adept illustrations (Plate 136). Another postwar painter noted for his portraits, Hashimoto Meiji (1904–1991), studied with Matsuoka Eikyū at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō). His portrait of the Kabuki actor Nakamura Utaemon VI (b.1917) shows his strong sense of line, for which he became celebrated (Figure 26.25). His articulated use of pattern and flat surfaces creates a composition in which background and figure exhibit a close reciprocal relationship. The Kyoto painter Uda Tekison (1896–1980), who studied with Kikuchi Keigetsu, was known for his evocative paintings of traditional Kyoto scenes. His 1957 painting of the magnificent Kiyomizudera temple in the eastern hills of Kyoto (Figure 26.26) provides a typical example of meticulous craftsmanship combined with a poetic sensibility. Another student of Matsuoka Eikyū, Yamaguchi Hōshun (1893–1971), was active in the Nitten exhibitions in the early postwar period. Many of his still-life paintings, with their

388

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.24 Itō Shinsui, 1898–1972. My Teacher Kiyokata (Kiyokata sensei), 1951. Hanging scroll: color on paper; 101×89.5 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Figure 26.25 Hashimoto Meij, 1904–1991. The Kabuki Actor Utaemon VI (Rokusei Utaemon), 1955. Framed: color on paper; 141.6×111.6 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

attractive colors and charming subject matter, such as his Flowers on the Chair, 1949 (Figure 26.27), owe much in their flat treatment of space and poised design to traditional Nihonga techniques. There is also a middle group of postwar Nihonga artists, more expenmental in technique, and often more probing in conception than the conservative artists mentioned above. Perhaps it is not surprising that, for the general public, such painters remain among the most generally popular of postwar Nihonga painters. Higashiyama Kaii’s Road, 1950 (Plate 153) and Takayama Tatsuo’s Hilltop, 1957 (Plate 158) use scenes from nature as their subject matter, but move beyond specific details to a kind of stylized simplification that lends a certain monumentality to their efforts. Hirayama Ikuo, in his Establishing the Diamond Mind, 1963 (Plate 170) applies some of the same techniques to his deep and consistent interest in religious subject matter. Sugiyama Yasushi, in his 1960 composition Heat (Plate 159), moves even closer to the abstraction that was already so central to the emerging avant-garde. The level of skill shown by these artists is high, and their work, as well as that of many others of their generation, has earned them appreciative audiences among those interested in Nihonga. Their work can, on its own terms, be aesthetically satisfying, often evocative. For them, altogether breaking open the

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

389

Figure 26.26 Uda Tekison, 1896–1980. Kyomizudera Temple (Kiyomizudera), 1957. Framed color on paper; 90×120 cm. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

Figure 26.27 Yamaguchi Hōshun, 1893–1971. Flowers on the Chair (Tōjō no hana), 1949. Framed: color on paper; 112×73 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

parameters of Nihonga was never a strong imperative. Much of the younger generation, however, took a different view. THE AVANT-GARDE GENERATION For most younger artists (and for at least some of the public interested in art), Nihonga was now viewed with chagrin if not with outright suspicion. In the eyes of these younger artists and critics, the traditional art forms offered no suitable techniques that would permit the urgent realities of contemporary life to be reflected. They set out, indeed, to attack the traditional values that seemed to be intertwined with the politics and policies of the wartime period. For them, postwar Japanese culture needed a new basis for creation, a renewed spirit altogether. Kawabata Ryōshi and Maeda Seison attempted to return to the more distant cultural past and thereby seek out sources of authenticity in Japanese culture. But these younger artists were

390

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

sure they could no longer retrace those steps. The realities of contemporary life, for painters attempting to eke out a living in the urban ruins, now seemed at a far remove from what was increasingly perceived as an aristocratic, decorative, and irrelevant form of painting aimed not at the present but looking toward the sometimes dubious values of the past. The younger generation of painters was arriving at the conclusion that Japanese perceptions of reality were now substantially Westernized. The Nihonga painter Takayama Tatsuo, in his thirties at the end of the war, later articulated with eloquence the sense of virtual schizophrenia felt by the artists of his generation. When I thought of the situation brought about in Japan because of our defeat in the war, I felt very strongly that the path taken so long by Nihonga can only collide with the lives we live now. For example, when I went into an exhibition of Nihonga, then came back out on the street, I felt within myself that sense of collision, and a sense of deep gloom.10 For such painters as these, it was imperative that new points of contact with contemporary life be sought, then strengthened. In the earlier postwar period, the younger artists felt a new burst of idealism as well as a need to put themselves back in touch with a larger artistic world. For all practical purposes, they had been cut off since the mid-1930s from any chance to participate in or even observe the newer developments in European and American art. In that regard, they felt the same urges that propelled the yōga painters of the same generation. Given the relative poverty of the country after the war, however, travel to Europe and the United States was prohibitively expensive and restricted by the government so as not to exhaust precious foreign currency reserves. Relatively few artists before 1968 were able to make the kind of trips that some artists had made in the 1920s and 1930s. Books and materials were more widely available, however, and exhibitions of foreign art, from retrospectives of Matisse and Picasso to the contemporary art of France and the United States, helped fill the gap. One way or another, these artists were anxious to abandon what some had termed ‘a dangerous Japanese provincialism.’ These enthusiasms produced organizations of younger painters that in the early postwar years helped sustain them spiritually and provided them with useful venues for the exhibition of their works. Two of these organizations, established during the American Occupation, were to prove of lasting significance in the development of postwar Nihonga. The Creative Art (Sōzō Bijutsu) group, founded in 1948, included Nihonga artists from both the Tokyo and Kyoto areas, among them two painters represented in the present exhibition, Yamamoto Kyūjin and Fukuda Toyoshirō. In the manifesto for the group, the artists declared themselves allied to ‘a creativeness in Nihonga which will be based on a spirit of an authentic internationalism.’ The fervor of the group can be sensed in the tone of Toyoshirō’s remarks during that turbulent period. I am sick and tired of the emptiness of the pictures that have been painted up until now. We may speak of ‘the spirit of tradition,’ or ‘the special characteristics of our national character,’ but if there is no real proof of such things in actual reality, then they have no meaning whatsoever. If artists who possess a real intensity do not press forward, there can never be a birth of a new art…. The kind of spirit we imagine involves no yearning for an invisible past or something metaphysical; rather, we must work tirelessly for the diffusion of a truly contemporary human spirit. This is a spirit that has been forced to achieve the automobile, the airplane, the atomic age itself. It is our own contemporary spirit.11

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

391

Also in 1948, young Nihonga artists in Kyoto formed the Panreal Art Association (Panriaru Bijutsu Kyōkai), an even more radical group. Their manifesto stressed the need to ‘forget the small-room mentality’ of the traditional Nihonga painters; a truly contemporary creative intelligence must be used in order to observe society ‘with burning eyes.’ Along with the need to manifest a fresh point of view, they called for the need to break down the master-disciple guildlike structures that had sustained Nihonga in order to ‘give birth to a truly free art.’ Mikami Makoto, whose Work 64, 5 (Plate 168) is included in this exhibition, was a founding member of the group. Although these organizations did not, in and of themselves, replace the structures that still governed the public world of Nihonga, they did force some changes. Many of the young painters who joined the Creative Art group had been associated in one fashion or another with the Nitten exhibition system. By 1958, just a decade later, many artists and critics considered the Nitten sufficiently improved and ‘democratized’ when it was reorganized under private sponsorship, and it became possible for much more heterodox forms of painting to be displayed. In a real sense, these small, forward-looking groups had affected the status quo. Looking from a broad perspective on the painting from the end of the war through 1968, it would seem that much of the enduring work can best be understood in terms of an urge on the part of many painters to integrate into the specific form of Nihonga a larger vision encompassing tendencies in world art of the period. Within this general framework, two responses can be identified. The first concerns the attempt by many painters to absorb in a creative way the insights of modern Western masters into their postwar art. Many postwar artists studied (more often than not from reproductions) with new appreciation and intensity the work of the modern European masters, such as Matisse, Picasso, and Cézanne, as well as Bonnard, Rousseau, and other famous artists. These painters had inspired the work of the yōga painters decades before; now they were to influence the realm of Nihonga as well. In one sense, these postwar artists were continuing with the same kind of experiments undertaken by the more progressive interwar Nihonga painters, who had gone abroad themselves to find enlightenment and inspiration in the work of European artists. However, what had been for the earlier generation an adventure was for these postwar artists a virtual necessity. A second and related response involved the development of an interest in international contemporary art. This impetus, however, came from a new direction and produced a genuinely new and artistically effective channel for authentic development: it had to do with the potentials of abstraction. European abstract art, in the work of such prewar masters as Mondrian, was known to some extent in Japan during the interwar years. In Nihonga, a tendency to exploit the use of abstraction for decorative purposes can be seen in certain prewar and postwar works of Fukuda Heihachirō, such as Ripples, 1932 (Plate 120) and Rain, 1953 (Plate 154). However, the great impetus of European abstract art came to Japan, and eventually to the Nihonga artists themselves, in the 1950s and early 1960s, notably through the powerful influence of Art Informel and its chief advocate, Michel Tapié (1909–1987). The American Abstract Expressionists also influenced postwar Japanese art, but at a slightly later period, probably first through Tapié’s own interest in the work of such artists as Sam Francis, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Tobey. Given the admiration the Japanese had held for French art since the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that in the postwar period they would come to seek an understanding of contemporary art through the medium of France and French contemporary culture. So it became Tapié who first brought these ideas of abstract art before the younger postwar artists; and although he was to have the greatest influence in yōga, his appreciation of the work of certain Nihonga artists, notably Dōmoto Inshō, attracted many Nihonga painters to his ideas as well. Tapié came to his enthusiasms through a route related culturally to certain political issues that, interestingly enough, concerned both postwar French and Japanese artists alike. Dismayed by the problems of the war

392

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

and the collaboration of some French with the Germans, Tapié and his colleagues found the status quo of French culture both suspicious and artistically bankrupt. He looked at the recent past in France in much the same way that many postwar Japanese painters regarded their country’s activities in the Pacific War. To clear the slate, then, Tapié wrote in 1952, all art must be done away with in which ‘all the classical criteria were still in play.’12 As a way out of such an impasse, Tapié and his colleagues vowed to work for an art which must, in his words, ‘be charged with the most dynamic, dionysiac power, a kind of living matter in a permanent state of magical ferment.’13 Two conditions were necessary to achieve such a pure and authentically new art, so that it might be separated from its decadent predecessors. The first required that the artist have the courage to maintain a true individualism. Such a call for individual action was very much in consonance with the ideals proposed by the Creative Art group and the Panreal Art Association; indeed, Tapié’s impatience with the artistic situation in France paralleled closely Toyoshirō’s observations on early postwar Japan. It is little wonder that the impact of Tapié became so important to the Japanese art world, since progressive figures in France and Japan alike were seeking a way out of what they felt was a compromised past. Tapié began his visits to Japan as early as 1957. In 1962 he wrote, in conjunction with the Japanese cultural historian Haga Tōru, the first important European art book dedicated to avant-garde Japanese art, which included discussions of both yōga and Nihonga artists. In particular, Tapié praised the use of abstraction which, for him, constituted a central element in the traditions of Japanese art. To begin with, the Oriental is far ahead of us in the practice of abstraction in general, both in his philosophy and in the ‘reading’ of his art…. The Oriental has the advantage of being familiar with certain essential means of artistic expression which the Occidental arts are assimilating so little, so slowly, with an unconsciousness which is often less than elementary—I am referring to lyrical graphism and qualitative space.14 The effect of Tapié’s attitudes on the work of the Japanese avant-garde was profound. It represented both a call for Japan to enter the international postwar art scene, and a challenge for Japanese artists to re-evaluate their own traditions. The point has often been made that by the 1880s and after, many Japanese artists beginning to study yōga felt a natural attraction to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting in France. Doubtless the reason that this elegant and decorative French art found in them ready sympathies was because the work of Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, and others in turn owed something to their enthusiasm for traditional Japanese art. Japanese painters, because of their own heritage, were already familtar, at least implicitly, with the aesthetic principles of their own traditions. In looking at such French painting, therefore, Japanese artists found not only something new, but to their delight they found something that they could recognize as well, consciously or unconsciously. It seems apparent that another variation within the same process was at work in the postwar period. French artists moved to abstraction at least in part, if Tapié is to be believed, as a means to put down their own realistic tradition. The Nihonga artists, now that certain elements in their own tradition had been sanctified by a highly respected contemporary French observer (and one with the right avant-garde credentials), could look again at the past classical tradition with new eyes. The technique of abstraction as a means to break out of what many younger Nihonga painters felt to be the empty ‘decorative lyricism’ of the past could be put to many uses, and its influences can be seen in many of the most vital works in postwar art. The ‘limitless void of space’ favored in traditional ink painting was revived, and the muddling of colors together to render ambiguous the sense of space; collage; and the

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

393

Figure 26.28 Dōmoto Inshō, 1891–1975. Perfect Freedom (Muge), 1958. Framed: color on paper; 160× 130 cm. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

simplifications and deformations of natural shapes to break down common-sense perspectives were employed. Some of these techniques can be seen in the works of Iwahashi Eien, such as Wall, 1955 (Plate 162). Artists also experimented with incorporating new materials directly into their work in order to give the painting surface itself a tactile, dimensional texture. It is not surprising that Michel Tapié appreciated the work of the Nihonga painter Dōmoto Inshō, since by the time the French artist arrived in Japan, Inshō was already experimenting successfully with abstract elements, as in his well-known Perfect Freedom, 1958 (Figure 26.28). Mikami Makoto’s Work 64, 5 (Plate 168) includes among its materials wood and cork, and exists in a universe that on first glance seems virtually removed from the earlier traditions of Nihonga. Repeated viewing of this and other of Mikami’s works, such as Temple, 1952 (Figure 26.29) or Kaleidoscopic Sutra Map of Pressure Points, 1967 (Figure 26.30), however, reveal important connections of craft, skill in design, and color that may comfortably link such works with their more traditional predecessors. Another well-respected Kyoto Nihonga painter who used abstraction is Iwata Shigeyoshi (b.1935). Like Mikami, he also uses various natural materials in his paintings. His 1960 Work (Figure 26.31) includes wood and hemp. Nomura Kō (1927–1991), a member of the Panreal Art Association, mixed textures and shapes in his Fragment No. 5 (Figure 26.32) in order to create virtual trompe l’œil effects. Shimomura Ryōnosuke, in Bird Acalanãtha, 1965 (Plate 169), has been able to create three-dimensional effects through the use of paper mixed with pigments. Finally, the work of two artists, both highly regarded in Japan, constitutes the centerpiece of the last section of the exhibition. Both are strong individualists, in Tapié’s terms, and in both cases, their work transcends the artistic and cultural limitations that continued to be imposed by the established Nihonga circles of the time. Yokoyama Misao, born in 1920 and already dead in 1973, was always, some might say, an outsider. Born in the relatively remote northern prefecture of Niigata, Yokoyama is doubtless the most important painter affiliated with the Seiryū-sha group led by Kawabata Ryūshi, perhaps the most independent-minded of the interwar Nihonga painters. Yokoyama was drafted into the Japanese army and spent his war years in China; captured and sent by the Soviets to Siberia, he did not return to Japan until 1950, when he was already thirty. By 1956, he had created such a strong and assured work as his River (Plate 165).

394

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.29 Mikami Makoto, 1919–1972. Temple (Jiin), 1962. Paper, corrugated cardboard, pigment; 117.4×123.5 cm. Izumi Gallery.

Yokoyama’s powerful creations soon won him awards, and he was able to make a trip to the United States in 1961. Wall Street, 1962 (Plate 166) provides a striking evocation of that visit. His works grew more creative and stronger, although he found his energies much diminished after severe heart trouble in 1966. Yokoyama chose for his subjects the visual realities of the contemporary world. No birds and flowers, no delicate evocations of nature or lovely women here: rather we are shown a blast furnace, a factory. In scale and treatment alike, his works reveal an epic quality, even those based on his growing interest in the use of ink in scenes inspired by classical Chinese precedents, such as Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, 1963 (Plate 167). Yokoyama was typical of his time in pursuing the ideal, first learned from his mentor Ryūshi, of seeking to interest a large and diverse public in the art of Nihonga. In his best work, Yokoyama embodies the force and independence of mind sought by certain younger Nihonga artists of the postwar period. His independence was purchased at a price, however; never a friend of the world of the salon, he was reputed to have faced financial difficulties and sometimes created inferior art of a commercial sort merely to support himself. But in his forceful, often abstract forms, he showed the power that Nihonga could still possess.

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

395

Figure 26.30 Mikami Makoto, 1919–1972. Kaleidoscopic Sutra Map of Pressure Points (Keiraku mangekyō), 1967. Framed: color on paper; 130×91.5 cm. Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art.

Figure 26.31 Iwata Shigeyoshi, b.1933. Work, 1963. Framed: oil, canvas, board, cloth; 130×162 cm.

Because of his health problems, Yokoyama’s career was already coming to an end in 1968, the year the second of these two enormously gifted postwar painters, Kayama Matazō, painted his evocative screen entitled Star Festival (Plate 171). Kayama is still an active painter, and his continuing quest for fresh forms of expression within the parameters of Nihonga has taken him into new strategies of expression, and to the techniques of ink painting in particular, as his Waves in the Moonlight, 1979 (Figure 26.33) makes evident. Given his prodigious output, it is still too early to evaluate the ultimate significance and influence of his career; yet even by 1968, when he was little more than forty, Kayama was already considered one of the most gifted artists in Japan. Nor, perhaps, is it surprising that Kayama was a good friend of Yokoyama Misao. At one difficult point in Yokoyama’s career, Kayama helped the older artist find an important teaching job. Unlike Yokoyama, who began his study of art after an upbringing in the provinces, Kayama was born in Kyoto, the son of a Nishijin clothing designer and the grandson of a Kyoto Kanō school painter. His aesthetic credentials are impeccable. Kayama went to Tokyo to study Nihonga at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and, like Yokoyama, had his studies interrupted by the war. He was able to return to his classes in 1946, however, and graduated in 1949. Aware of the activities of the Creative Art group, Kayama decided to study with one of its founders, the dynamic painter Yamamoto Kyūjin. Kayama became a full member of the group (by this time now merged with yet another organization) in 1959.

396

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Figure 26.32 Nomura Kō, 1927–1991. Fragment No. 5 (Danpen No. 5), 1960. Board, slate, cement; 185.5× 124.5 cm. Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

Figure 26.33 Kayama Matazō, b.1927. Waves in the Moonlight (Gekkō hatō), 1979. Four-panel screen: ink on paper; 162×261 cm. Private collection.

Kayama’s early work soon attracted wide attention. His sources were eclectic, his technique sophisticated, his self-confidence apparent. Concerning his well-known painting Winter, 1957 (Figure 26.34), for example, the painter remarked that ‘I have always been fond of winter landscape, and here I tried to capture the effect of the cold and clear winter atmosphere. At the time I was very much taken with the work of Bruegel. I began by painting a larger group of wolves in the lower left-hand corner, but I remained unsatisfied with the result, so I went to a great deal of trouble in order to remove three or four of them.’15 Kayama’s interest in the classical arts, perhaps fueled by his upbringing in Kyoto, focused in the late 1950s and 1960s on new techniques borrowed from Rinpa, which can be observed in Star Festival. These abstracting and decorative tendencies marked many of the works he created before 1968. He defined his use of this stylization in terms of its decorative possibilities that ‘enable the artist to thoroughly sublimate the

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

397

Figure 26.34 Kayama Matazō], b.1927. Winter (Fuyu), 1957. Framed: color on paper, 128.5×1192 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

subject matter’ in order to seek out a still deeper essence. Kayama has been a prolific artist and a highly successful one. His travels around the world have provided him with new subject matter, and he has sometimes represented the Japanese government in official art exchanges. An official trip to China in 1987 produced his renderings of some of China’s most famous sites. The art of these two independent spirits, Kayama and Yokoyama, reveals little in the way of quickly visible congruences in style or subject matter. Yokoyama’s brush is broad, sometimes purposefully crude, while Kayama reveals a consistent delicacy of touch that speaks for a finely tuned sense of craftsmanship closer to the traditional Nihonga sensibilities. Yokoyama uses dramatic flat surfaces, enhanced by the power of color; Kayama often shows himself a master of line. Nevertheless, both use the power and suggestiveness of abstraction in ways that mark them as exemplars for the fresh experimentation which marks the years 1945–1968. In many ways, they define the new range of possibilities for postwar Nihonga, the latest flowering in a tradition now over a century old. AFTER 1968 It is difficult to characterize the twenty-odd years of Nihonga painting which have followed the hundred years encompassed in this study. As yet, no overview of the recent period has been attempted by Japanese writers and critics and, in the forest of journalistic writing on this body of recent work, it would be disingenuous for a foreign observer to suggest that any consistent body of opinion has emerged. Such established painters as Kayama Matazō continue on, and there are, of course, younger talents in the field. Still, one cannot help escape the conclusion that, in the larger trajectories of modern Japanese art, Nihonga, like conventional yōga, now occupies a more modest place than previously in terms of significant creativity. This situation doubtless has arisen at least in part because contemporary Japanese art plays a role in the art of the world. Japanese artists, like their American and European counterparts, show their work abroad, often live abroad for extended periods. They find their colleagues and develop their enthusiasms in a world

398

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

context. Perhaps, therefore, it is inevitable that Nihonga will play a less significant role in contemporary Japan. The classical traditions to which the movement has always paid homage have by now been amalgamated into the work of not only such celebrated Japanese oil painters as Okada Kenzō (1902–1982), but of Western artists too, from Mark Tobey and Franz Kline down to the present. In that sense at least, one mission of Nihonga has been accomplished. Finally, it should be remarked that Japanese yōga painters whose ideals remain wedded to a representational style face similar issues. Like the Nihonga painters, they continue to create works which please a specific and often wealthy segment of the public, just as do more conventional painters in every country. And indeed, as recent exhibitions in Japan have made clear, the differences in subject matter, style, and aesthetic aim between contemporary Nihonga and yōga have shrunk considerably. By the 1990s, it has indeed become possible to define Nihonga, as many contemporary Japanese-language dictionaries do, simply in terms of the traditionally Japanese materials (pigments, brushes, etc.) used to create works of art. The split of aesthetic values between East and West that began in 1868 now seems well on the way to being resolved. SOME FINAL OBSERVATIONS This survey of a hundred years of Nihonga can only begin to suggest the aesthetic, political, and social aspects of this important movement in modern Japanese art. The account has been arranged as a history because, however unique or self-contained the work of some of these individual artists may appear to be, the paintings they created and the attitudes they held toward their own accomplishments and their place in society remain intimately connected to the overwhelming social and political changes that occurred in Japanese society during these hundred years. The details of those connections—the formation of artistic groups and institutions; the shifting relationships between politics, bureaucracy, and the work of individual artists; and the introduction of new ideas from Western art—are, of course, of great interest in and of themselves. Much about the trajectory of this experience reveals a pattern which is doubtless applicable to other cultures, particulady during that period in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries when Americans borrowed so much, in technique and ideals alike, from European art. In the space available here, however, it has only been possible to skim the surface of these complex interrelationships and their consequences. It is our hope, at least, that we have raised some of the more important questions that might be posed concerning the shifting significance of Nihonga in a modernizing Japan. Looking at this hundred years of activity, there are several larger issues involved which merit some comment. These are offered not in terms of positing any precise conclusions, but rather as a means to suggest further meditation on the nature and function of the visual arts in a dynamic modern society. A SENSE OF CLOSURE One issue concerns that of closure. As the visual evidence indicates, in 1868 the art that would by the turn of the century be referred to as Nihonga represented the response from artists trained in the nineteenth century to their own classical tradition. By 1964, when a painting like Work 64, 5 of Mikami Makoto (Plate 168) was created and accepted as part of the tradition, the art of Nihonga was beginning to merge with world currents of postwar art. Developments within Nihonga in the last 25-odd years suggest that, at least for the more adventuresome artists, the tendency to amalgamation continues. Can it really be said, then, that the history of Nihonga as a dynamic force in modern Japanese artistic culture is now more or less complete?

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

399

Can future painters in the Nihonga tradition offer nothing more to contemporary Japanese art than skillful technique? A visual chronology of the works in the present exhibition provides a reflection of the mental structures through which the Japanese have perceived themselves and their society. Those structures have become increasingly Westernized; and indeed, the values of society shifted and moved at a speed more rapid than any adjustments to the aesthetic values held by these painters could accommodate. During this period of a hundred years, most Japanese yōga painters went directly to European models for their techniques and their inspirations. As this exhibition reveals, however, Nihonga painters eventually did the same, even if in a more refracted fashion. Cézanne, Gauguin, then, after the war, Dubuffet and Picasso in his later phases may have served as the spiritual heroes of the yōga artists, but the works of these major European painters were eventually studied and scrutinized just as carefully by the Nihonga painters. Amalgamating such an alien artistic vocabulary, and so quickly, into the Japanese tradition has added a certain intuitive flavor of struggle, and occasionally of awkward compromise, to the work of many Nihonga artists. This synthesis was by no means an easy one to achieve. Nevertheless, by the 1970s and after, that amalgamation seemed close to completion. THE ROLE OF SOCIETY AND INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY Whatever their personal predilections, artists do not, cannot, function altogether outside their times. And if their work is to be known and appreciated by others, they must depend on some system of support. For the art of Nihonga, the burden of government patronage, which often was seen as one means to establish some form of ‘national art,’ now seems in retrospect to have been a heavy one to bear. In many ways, the social and political systems in which the works of these individual artists have been imbedded have sometimes risked blunting or deflecting the creative potential of many gifted painters. Some Japanese observers feel that the maintenance of these traditional systems and attitudes into the final years of this century has in balance been harmful. The well-known art and cultural critic Haryū Ichirō, writing in 1994, stated this position in sharp relief. What has sustained the concept of Nihonga down to the present day is the patronage of important and powerful people, wealthy public figures, and fashionable families, as well as the market itself, which is manipulated using much larger amounts of money than are available for Western-style painting and sculpture, plus such elements as the teacher-student relationships of the private ateliers and other remnants of the apprentice system. All of these relate to conditions which remain outside the realm of art itself.16 Such traditional structures for the arts in Japanese culture have not been retained only for Nihonga. Many of the classical arts, in particular the tea ceremony, the teaching of calligraphy, the study of Noh singing and dancing by amateurs, and the flower arranging schools maintain some or many of these traditional structures. What sets Nihonga apart, however, and what constitutes its special difficulty, is the fact that the chief strategies used to keep alive these classical Japanese arts involve maintaining and preserving appropriate traditions, and occasionally allowing for certain modest innovations by acknowledged masters. In the case of Nihonga, however, authentic elements of newness and change had come to be anticipated by the public since roughly the middle of the Meiji period. Nihonga was thus challenged to be at once a traditional and a contemporary art. Such a balance, precarious at best, became increasingly difficult to

400

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

sustain. It may be an impossible task to maintain the great traditions while at the same time attempting to reflect the actual world in which the artists, and the nation, were living. It is worth recalling at this point that no system officially created or set up by any culture can ensure artistic excellence. Such a system may help support the careers of artists and may occasionally give them access to circles of power and prestige. Yet if their work does not find sustained, independent public interest, their reputations will eventually fade, much like the reputations of so many painters who contributed to the Paris Salon in the nineteenth century. ART AND THE ESSENCE OF BEING JAPANESE One of the burdens placed on these artists, as the very term Nihonga— ‘Japanese’ painting—suggests, is that they were somehow charged with the task of representing some element in their work which should be considered irreducibly ‘Japanese.’ The arts have long been privileged in Japan as a means of conveying national sensibilities. They have been considered precious repositories, within which can be found the core of an ‘authentic’ national character, presumably inviolate from changes that over the centuries have in fact become inevitable. Since the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868, those alterations have been specifically characterized as having come from abroad. In recent decades, as Japanese sensibilities and values have come to resemble those found throughout much of the contemporary world, the fear remains, even grows in some quarters, that the powerful even if somehow undefined essence of the very nationhood of Japan herself is somehow being forced to dissipate itself, and is possibly in danger of vanishing altogether. The artists working in the medium of Nihonga have therefore often implicitly assigned themselves the task of intuiting, and rendering visible, these elusive ‘basic principles’ of Japanese culture. Of what might such principles consist? The contemporary scholar of Nihonga, Iwasaki Yoshikazu has on the basis of his long research suggested on the Nihonga movement one useful point of approach.17 For Iwasaki, the chief characteristic of Western painting and, by extension, Japanese Western-style yōga lies in the fact that the post-Renaissance tradition in Western art has been focused on the observation of visual realities. On the other hand, the classical Chinese and Japanese traditions have concentrated on an ‘essentialization,’ which moves beyond any surface reality in order to locate the essence, most often felt to be a metaphysical essence, of the subject being rendered. By this logic, a Western painter might show us the way a tree looks. A traditional Japanese painter would select elements in the configuration of a real tree in order to show the essence of tree-ness that perforce lies below, beyond the surface reality. Therefore, Iwasaki emphasizes, Western (and Western-style Japanese) painters concentrate on seeing, while Nihonga artists focus on feeling. Intuition, rather than observation, thus remains in his view the authentic central concern for painters in the Nihonga tradition. The problem in our present period, Iwasaki goes on to suggest, may lie in the fact that our contemporary mentality, whether Japanese, American, or European, is increasingly shaped by scientific attitudes that privilege observation. In such a context, the kind of ‘essentialization’ practiced by many Nihonga painters risks being perceived as merely an attempt to create feelings of nostalgia. So traditional a vision, in this view, cannot seem to contribute to an artistic creation that is sufficiently responsive to our modern consciousness. Even an appeal to the beauties of nature, such a central subject for Nihonga painters during the hundred-year period of discussion, while seemingly ‘apolitical,’ actually risks becoming in and of itself a political statement. This is simply because the appeal to nature has often been consciously adopted as a means to convey a whole complex of concepts concerning the uniqueness of Japanese culture, ranging from

‘TEITEN’ AND AFTER, 1919–1935

401

ideas of purity and cleanliness to an untoward belief in the benevolence of the forces of nature within mankind, and, indeed, of the imperial institution itself. Nevertheless, in a larger perspective, these concerns can be muted when the best works of the finest painters in this tradition are examined. In so many of the paintings of such artists as Hishida Shunsō, Imamura Shikō, Takeuchi Seihō, Kawabata Ryūshi, Maeda Seison, or Yokoyama Misao, any sensitive contemporary viewer. Western or Japanese, can be persuaded by the forces of artistic imagination to look beyond the often elegant surfaces in order to locate some quality of essential beauty which, the exemplars of the Japanese tradition have always insisted, can only be glimpsed lurking beyond the literalism of the picture plane itself. The hundred years of the Nihonga movement have shown a number of complex, sometimes puzzling vicissitudes and compromises. Yet these too represent a microcosm of the larger problems faced by Japanese culture during this period. In that sense, whatever the role the leaders of the movement may have chosen for Nihonga to play, this art has in the end held a mirror up to the certain ideals, and to frustrations, compromises, and even fears of a rapidly evolving society. That function alone has given the movement a real significance. What is more, the visual beauty of the best of the works created in the Nihonga movement move far beyond the confines of the particular time and place of their creation. They are capable of truly touching and inspiring us now. NOTES Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. 1. Tsuchida Bakusen wrote a letter to a patron in February 1914, which begins, ‘Bunten is an organization that reveals a real vulgarity. The works exhibited there deserve no better than to be destroyed,’ and goes on to list his various dissatisfactions with the official system. Portions of Bakusen’s letter appear in Kawakita Michiaki and Takashina Shūji, Kindai Nihon kaiga-shi (The History of Modern Japanese Painting), (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron-sha, 1988): 260–61. 2. Quoted in Higashiyama Kaii, ed., Ga (Painting), (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1984): 32. 3. Quoted in Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai no ayumi I: Dai 1-kai-ten kara dai 3-kai-ten (The History of the Association for the Creation of National Painting 1: From the First to Third Exhibitions), exh. cat. (Kasaoka: Chikkyō Art Museum, 1983): 86. 4. Quoted in Kawabata Ryūshi: Ryūshi to Seiryū-sha (Ryūshi and Seiryū-sha), Kindai no bijutsu (Modern Art), vol. 34 (May 1976): 25. 5. Quoted in Nakamura Giichi, Zoku Nihon kindai bijutsu ronsō-shi (The History of Art Debates in Modern Japan, Part 2), (Tokyo: Kyūryūdō, 1982): 262–63. 6. Those interested in learning something of the depth, complexity, and ambiguity of Japanese attitudes toward the war will enjoy reading the novel by the British novelist of Japanese descent, Kazuo Ishiguro, entitled An Artist of the Floating World, first published in 1986. By dealing with the feelings of a painter, Ishiguro has recreated a powerful sense of the emotional tenor of those times. 7. See Kawakita Michiaki and Takashina Shiiji, Kindai Nihon kaiga shi (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron-sha, 1979). Dealing with all aspects of modern Japanese art, this book provides an invaluable summary of many trends and events in the art world of the entire modern period. 8. Quoted in Takeda Michitarō, Zoku Nihon Bijutsu-in-shi (The History of the Japan Art Institute, 2), (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron-sha, 1967): 2. 9. Quoted in Kawabata Ryūshi: Ryūshi to Seirya-sha (Ryūshi and Seiryū-sha), Kindai no bijutsu (Modern Art), vol. 34 (May 1976): 69.

402

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

10. Quoted in Iwasaki Yoshikazu, ‘Gendai bijutsu to shite no Nihonga’ (Nihonga As Contemporary Art) in Gendai Nihonga ten (Contemporary Nihonga Exhibition), exh. cat. (Tokyo: Nihon Keizei Shinbun-sha, 1990): n.p. 11. Quoted in Iwasaki Yoshikazu, ‘Shōwa Nihonga no zentai-zō’ (The Overview of Sh wa Nihonga) in Sh wa no Nihonga 100-sen (100 Selected Nihonga Paintings of the Shōwa Era), (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun-sha, 1991): 233. 12. Michel Tapié, Un art autre (Paris: Giraud, 1952); trans. in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992): 620. 13. Quoted in Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism, 1945–55, exh. cat. (London: The Tate Gallery, 1993): 212. 14. Michel Tapié and Haga Tōru, Avant-Garde Art in Japan (New York: Abrams, 1962), n.p. 15. Quoted in ‘Shuppin mokuroku’ (Catalogue) in Kayama Matazō, exh. cat. (Nagoya: Chūnichi Shinbunsha, 1992): 101. 16. Haryū Ichirō, ‘Nihonga no chūshō oboegaki’ (Memorandum on Abstraction in Nihonga) in Nihonga no chūshō: Sono Nihon-teki tokushoku (Abstraction in Nihonga: Reconsideration of Its Japanese Features), exh. cat. (Tokyo: O Art Museum, 1994): 4. 17. See Iwasaki Yoshikazu, ‘ Shōwa Nihonga no zentai-z ’ (The Overview of Sh wa Nihonga) in Sh wa no Nihonga 100-sen (100 Nihonga Paintings of the Shōwa Era), (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun-sha, 1991): 239–41.

First published in Modern Japanese Art and the West (International Symposium, Tokyo, November 1988), by Meiji Bijitsu Gakai, pp. 281–292

27 Kinoshita Mokutarō as Critic: Putting Meiji Art in Context

LOOKING AT the phenomenon of late Meiji and early Taishō art from a broad perspective, an outside observer like myself cannot but be astonished by the rapid growth of a genuine popular interest in Westernstyle visual arts. The Meiji period, of course, was the time when a voracious curiousity, and an often overwhelming admiration, for Western arts, literature, and ideas helped transform the aesthetic presuppositions of Japanese intellectuals, artists, and the public at large. Still, in order to be understood and appreciated, new cultural products must be made widely available. In that regard, as might be expected, a new venacular literature was the quickest to show such transformations. After all, in the case of fiction or poetry, the reader is only separated from the writer by a printing press and a publisher. When a public audience is involved, however, the process requires the creation of institutions capable of providing a place, and a context, in which new kinds of arts can be appreciated. The slow and often painful development of the New Theatre Movement shows how difficult it was during this period to make manifest in stage productions the new ideals of the theatre inspired by European example. In the case of Western painting, which also requires a public, the rapid acceptance and growing interest on the part of a larger audience developed with remarkable swiftness. The various sorts of cultural institutions needed to create and sustain such a public— museums, exhibitions, magazines, catalogues, lively discussions among critics—developed relatively slowly during the nineteenth century in Europe, yet similar institutions were created, and appreciated, with lightning rapidity in Japan during the middle and later years of Meiji. By the turn of the century, many important elements in the apparatus were in place and in use. In order to understand the achievements, and some of the limita tions, of the art created in Japan at this period, it is necessary, I believe, to know something about the predispositions of the public that set out to appreciate it. This public faced a task far more complex than its counterpart in Europe, or the United States, since the styles and the artistic assumptions behind the new Western-style art they saw were new to them. In that regard, the role of the art critic as an informing agent was particularly important. In Japan at this period, writing on Western art was regarded as a serious matter, and many of the leading writers and intellectuals of the period attempted to introduce a variety of European ideas on the visual arts and to show as well in their writings, by way of personal example, what kind of cultural perspectives were needed in order to appreciate these new forms of expression. The novelists Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai, for example, wrote with eloquence and understanding on the subject, as did a number of others such as the poet Ueda Bin and the sculptor and poet Takamura Kōtarō. In that regard, the decade from about 1905 to 1915 was an extremely important one, for it was about that time that a flood of new ideas from Europe helped to bring about the development of a healthy reciprocal relationship between artist and public. A base for teaching and learning the techniques of creating Western-

404

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

style painting had already been established when Kuroda Seiki began his professorship at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1896. Younger painters of great talent, with newer ideas than his, such as Umehara Ryūzaburō and Yasui Sōtarō, were, by the end of this period, to return from Europe and provide alternative visions of Western-style contemporary painting. Now, new and often conflicting ideas were to make discussion and creative dissent possible, just as the shift of styles in Europe had made possible an artistic revolution, moving from Impressionism to Cubism in a couple of decades. It was in these crucial years that the young Kinoshita Mokutarō (1885–1945) began his career as an art critic. Remembered now chiefly as a fine poet and playwright, Mokutarō’s lifelong interest in art first thrust him into prominence in his midtwenties, when his articles, translations, and other activities took on considerable importance. The congruence of Mokutarō’s own talents with a need among an ever larger public for information and guidance, coupled with the production of work of ever higher quality by Japanese painters, made these moments in late Meiji crucial in the development of a deeper public understanding. Read in retrospect, Mokutarō’s critical writings show a balance, a wisdom, and a personal sensibility that rank him as perhaps the most observant critic of this period. His work provides not only a reasoned chronicle of his time but suggests many of the underlying complexities and tensions involved in adopting new and alien cultural forms. Mokutarō does not answer all the questions we can in hindsight pose about the development of the visual arts during the period, but his work helps map out the field for further study. Kinoshita Mokutarō’s own artistic and intellectual inclinations made him turn naturally to develop an enthusiasm for the visual arts. Gifted as a child in drawing, he came to Tokyo in 1903, at the age of nineteen, in order to enter the First Higher School, where he was able to put himself in touch with many who were interested in the techniques of Western-style painting. Mokutarō took lessons in the medium of watercolor from Miyake Kokki (1874–1954), a gifted artist who helped perfect the medium in Japan. Miyake himself had studied briefly in America and Europe, and thus Mokutarō found himself in touch with an artist who was himself in the vanguard of those who had taken up this new profession. Mokutarō showed real skill and hoped perhaps to take up painting as a career but was forbidden to do so by his conservative family, who insisted on a more practical career. Frustrated, he began to put his energies into reading literature and soon perfected his ability to read and speak German. Like Mori Ōgai, soon to become his mentor, Mokutarō developed an enormous love for the work and life of the German poet Goethe; from Mokutarō’s exposure to his Italian Voyages, he came to realize that Goethe, although a man with great scientific interests, also maintained a profound artistic sensibility. Here was a model to follow, and, as he expressed it, Mokutarō took courage from his German master.1 In 1906, Mokutarō entered Tokyo Imperial University, eventually enrolling, again like Mori Ōgai, in the medical program rather than in German literature, another desire forbidden to him by his family. In 1908, in the university library, Mokutarō made the next discovery that would set him on the path to becoming an art critic. On this occasion it was a book on nineteenth-century European art by the German critic Richard Muther (1860–1909). Muther, much respected in his time in German-speaking countries, did his early research on the German portrait painter Anton Graff (1736–1813), then went to teach art history in Munich. He wrote a series of books, ranging from studies of medieval and renaissance German art to English painting, Rembrandt, and the 19th century traditions of France, through the Impressionists. Mokutarō was much taken with what he felt to be the German author’s erudition, enthusiasm, and objectivity. Mokutarō retained his belief in the value of Muther’s work. In 1919, he published his translation of one of Muther’s studies, A Hundred Years of French Painting (Ein Jahrhundert Französischer Malerei), written in 1901, thus providing one of the first texts available in Japan that put Western art in a properly detailed historical context. For many, viewers and painters alike, Western painting meant contemporary, or at most, late nineteenth-century French painting. From the beginning, Mokutarō was able to take a larger view. In the

KINISHITA MOKUTAR AS CRITIC: PUTTING MEIJI ART IN CONTEXT

405

preface to the translation, Mokutarō wrote that he learned from Mori Ōgai in literature and from the work of Kuroda Seiki in painting something of the new Western mentalities in art, and that, for him, reading Muther’s work gave him confidence in developing the range of his own personal responses to Western art. It seems clear that this displacement in Mokutarō of his original impetus toward a personal artistic creativity led him to come to understand the importance of the viewer in the total artistic process. He saw with clarity the need for a more genuine and sympathetic understanding on the part of the public for the aims and intentions of contemporary Japanese artists. Mokutarō was able to sense the need for an implicit link between aesthetic appreciation and general cultural education. For him, learning the context of art was to be a crucial corrective for a public which, until now, had been forced to examine any given painting or piece of sculpture without the benefit of any larger frame of reference. Mokutarō saw himself as a member, indeed an enlightened member, of this newly developing audience. While still a student, he set out to teach himself what he felt he needed to know in order to appreciate, then evaluate, the Western-style painting that he saw being created by his contemporaries in Japan. This understanding he wished to pass along. It might be added as well that this grounding in Western values allowed Mokutarō to examine certain facets of traditional Japanese art with eves newly trained in European perspectives. His rediscovery of the woodblock print artist Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915) in 1913, for example, helped restore that artist’s reputation as a superb visual chronicler of early Meiji life.2 Mokutarō’s own vision had expanded. He came to develop a truly modern, cosmopolitan eye. This personal development of Mokutarō’s visual, aesthetic, and intellectual sensibilities came at a time when a greater number of public exhibitions of Western-style art in Tokyo and elsewhere had begun to make the work of contemporary Japanese painters increasingly available to larger and larger urban audiences. There were a number of galleries that had begun to hold small exhibitions, and such institutions as the Ministry of Education’s national yearly exhibition, usually referred to as Bunten, drew huge crowds in Tokyo. In 1909, when Mokutarō began his important series of critical articles, the exhibition attracted over 60,000 spectators; by 1912, the number had increased to over 181,000. There was an increasing need for responsible public commentary, and Mokutarō developed his own personal project of creating a context for art by writing and publishing in a variety of journals and newspapers a series of remarkably skillful articles dealing with these exhibitions. At the beginning of the Meiji period, there had been little public awareness of the nature of Western-style art and virtually no general access to examples created either in Japan or abroad. Forty-odd years later, the importance of Western-style art in cultural life was taken for granted. Perhaps Mokutarō’s early impulse to work as a critic came from his first contacts with Mori Ōgai, whom the younger writer revered. Ōgai, Mokutarō’s senior by more than twenty years, and by now perhaps the most distinguished member of the older generation of writers and critics who took up the banners for Western culture, was by 1909 involved in editing and publishing the journal Subaru (The Pleaides), and it was in that highly respected journal that Mokutarō published some of his most important early poetry and theatre texts. Mokutarō shared many attitudes with Ōgai, including a common enthusiasm for German culture. The influence of the older man on the younger critic’s thinking was doubtless profound, as it was to be on a writer such as Nagai Kafū as well. A year later, in 1910, Mokutarō began publishing articles in the famous magazine of the arts and literature, Shirakaba (White Birch). A network was now created for writers and readers alike to share their enthusiasms. In an article written, for Subaru in 1909, Mokutarō stated with considerable eloquence his basic stance. In the opening section of the article, he makes two points he feels are necessary for him, as a critic, to articulate and, by implication, for those who read his critiques and look at works of art themselves to understand. First of all, writes Mokutarō, those who look at art must uncover their own unspoken

406

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

assumptions behind their presumably spontaneous opinions. Self-knowledge, self-awareness are critical. What seems to be a natural response is always conditioned. This remained a crucial point for Mokutarō, who, two years later in the art journal Bijutsu shimpō (News of Art), wrote that ‘few can distinguish between appreciation and criticism. An impulse for both tends to surface at the same time. Most people boast to themselves that they possess a critical spirit,’ but appreciation and criticism stem from two different aspects of our understanding. They may overlap, but they are not the same.’3 Secondly, Mokutarō writes, he does not view art from a technical point of view. Such matters as design, color, and compositional technique can be analyzed in a methodical fashion, but these are matters for the classroom, not the art gallery. Rather, he insists, he wishes to observe for himself what the artist wishes to express and to discover as well how much of this wish is successfully manifested in the realized work itself. In this attitude, Mokutarō prefigures his own encounter with the writings of Wassily Kandinsky he was to discover for himself a year later. In the Russian painter’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, written in 1912, for example, Kandinsky insists that ‘…what belongs to the spirit of the future can only be realized in feeling, and to this feeling the talent of the artist is the only road. Theory is the lamp which sheds light on the petrified ideas of yesterday and of the more distant past.’4 Thirdly, Mokutarō stresses, modern art is now international. The same enthusiasms and same interests are shared in Europe and in Japan. Therefore, a true congruence of values must provide the basis for further appreciation and understanding. Unexceptional as these points may seem to us at the end of the twentieth century, they represented a considerable leap in sophistication compared to the attitudes held by most writers and critics of art at the end of the Meiji period. Mokutarō’s remarks signal a turning point from a period of learning and absorption to a period in which individual creativity was to become a real possibility. As a lover of art, Mokutarō continues, he seeks above all to gain from the contemplation of works of art a sense of the interior life of the artist; he wants to see in the work how the artist reacts to the world in which he finds himself, and how he is nourished by that contact. Such a desire for reciprocal understanding, he continues, may exist naturally in the European milieu, but in Japan, artists have a special mission. They can no longer serve merely as superior craftsmen. Visual artists are among those leading Japan into the area of world culture; therefore they have additional duties towards the public. Artists in this generation must serve as teachers, ready to lead the public to a new level of understanding. Artists, therefore, must show in their work a freshness which goes beyond the kind of predictions their audiences might venture to make.5 Finally, Mokutarō points out, painters in his generation have a particularly difficult challenge. They have only one line of instruction available to them, that which descends from Kuroda Seiki’s understanding of French Academic Impressionism. They have no ateliers, no galleries, no informed public. If other models might become more widely available to them, Mokutarō concludes, citing the examples of Courbet and Rodin, young artists might gain a sense of larger possibilities. Such are the premises on which Mokutarō will base the series of articles he was to write as part of his own self-education during the final years of Meiji and the early years of the Taishō period. Making his own assumptions explicit, Mokutarō begins to write about the work of Japanese artists who ought to set the standards, and he often chooses to comment on those who have been to Europe and who thus are responsible for bringing the newest ideas to the Japanese public. In an article written in 1910 for the Yomiuri Shimbun, for example, Mokutarō writes a particularly trenchant series of comments on the work of Fujishima Takeji (1867–1943). Fujishima, who began his career in the middle years of Meiji, was chosen by Kuroda Seiki to be his colleague as a teacher of Western painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. With Kuroda’s encouragement, Fujishima went to Europe in 1905, as a fully mature artist. He eventually worked at the French Academy in Rome under Charles

KINISHITA MOKUTAR AS CRITIC: PUTTING MEIJI ART IN CONTEXT

407

E.A.Carolus-Duran, a highly popular and respected portrait painter and teacher, among whose better-known students was the American painter John Singer Sargent. Mokutarō saw Fujishima’s work that he presented to the Japanese public on his return from Europe. In these latest works, Fujishima’s fascination with a quality of light gained from painting directly out of doors created a whole new vision of nature, one quite different from that of a painter like Kuroda, whose work was now understood to be increasingly conservative. Mokutarō praised the decorative aspects of Fujishima’s painting and admired what he termed the mysterious elegance that his canvases could conjure up. ‘This European touch of the brush,’ he wrote, ‘this beautiful coloring, so satisfying to the eve: surely no Japanese, painter has ever accomplished so much before.’6 In 1913, Mokutarō was first exposed to the work of Umehara Ryūzaburō (1888–1986), who studied with Renoir and brought other, newer values into Japanese painting with his return to Tokyo. Umehara, of course, went on to become the doyen of modern Western-style painters, but in 1913, his work looked strange indeed to many who saw it, Mokutarō among them. He was forthright enough, in an aritcle written for Bijutsu shimpō, to say so. ‘At first,’ he wrote, ‘I didn’t quite understand what I was looking at. Eventually, though, I began to see that a truly new spirit was involved.’7 Looking at Umehara, in turn, forces on Mokutarō the reflection that an artist like Umehara truly paints for himself, without implicitly attempting to suit the standards set by such official exhibitions as the Bunten. What kinds of structures, he goes on to ponder, can foster the crucial need for individuality in contemporary art? Of all the encounters Mokutarō had at this period with Japanese painters, it is perhaps his shifting and progressively favorable opinions of the work of Kishida Ryūsei (1891–1929) that best indicate Mokutarō's own increasing growth and understanding of the artistic process. In a series of related articles he began publishing in February of 1913 in the journal Bijutsu shimpō entitled ‘A Tendency Away from Naturalism in Western Art,’ Mokutarō charted the means by which he attempted to come to terms with the enormous shifts in thinking that were sweeping through the avant-garde in Europe. As always, however, Mokutarō framed his opinions in terms of his observations on the work of the Japanese painters he could examine. In this case, his energies were concentrated on the work of the Fusainkai (The Sketching Society) and their leader the young painter Kishida Ryūsei. Kishida is now unquestionably regarded as one of the greatest of modern Japanese painters, but at this time, his work was relatively unknown and its future directions still uncharted. Mokutarō only knew what he saw, and what he read, since Kishida had already written a certain amount concerning both the aims of the Society and of his own work. Mokutarō found Kishida by far the best of his group; ‘the images the artist creates,’ he observes, ‘have passed through his consciousness before being created; his work is not “artless,” as is that of his colleagues.’8 Kishida worked with a concept in mind. By the same token, however, Mokutarō found a certain spirit of calculation, a willed cleverness about Kishida’s work that he found somehow ill-spirited. It was certainly new, however. ‘Kishida’s views are personal,’ Mokutarō wrote, ‘not objective, practical not theoretical, less spatial than temporal, not historical but personal.’9 Mokutarō, however, was not altogether satisfied with his first impressions. He realized himself that an objective viewer must bring other qualities of sympathy to an appreciation of such painting. After all, he. commented, the nature of artistic consciousness, in the West at least, is evolving very quickly. Only a few years before, he observed, he had himself been swept off his feet by the beauties of Impressionism as he learned of the movement from reading Muther; that seemed the only kind of true art there was. Now, those same ideas, that recently seemed so new, were to lose their hold. Monet now replaces Manet; Van Gogh and Cézanne move relentlessly into the interior psyche, pointing to a new psychology and a new, perhaps higher purpose for art itself.

408

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

In his search for an understanding of these changes, Mokutarō, like many of his contemporaries, depended for his understanding of an art he had only seen in reproduction on the enthusiastic comments by Charles Lewis Hind, whose 1911 book The Post Impressionists had an extraordinary influence in Japan during these years. The fact that Hind stressed the importance of expressiveness over formal ideals of technical excellence was to prove a particular source of inspiration to younger Japanese painters. In the work of Kishida, Mokutarō located some of the same religious fervor that Hind felt he had located in the work of the contemporary European masters he so admired, such as Matisse, Cézanne, and Van Gogh. In seeking for himself the basis for an explanation for these changes, however, Mokutarō sought further than the writings of Hind and Muther. He read with great care the original German text of the powerful credo of Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911. Here, he felt, might lie the explanation for the kinds of spiritual developments that could be witnessed, in their own way, in a Kishida as well as in certain painters in Europe. The final version of Mokutarō’s essay-article contames a lengthy and judicious summary of Kandinsky’s powerful essay. Mokutarō conveys succinctly Kandinsky’s emphasis on the rhythmic power of color and form, which can provide a means to lift art away from what Kandinsky calls the ‘how’ of art (‘by what method are these material objects to be reproduced?’) to the what of art, ‘that internal truth which only art can divine, which only art can express by those means of expression which are hers alone.’10 Mokutarō does not merely translate Kandinsky’s text but selects from it and comments on it as he proceeds. As Mokutarō works through the text, a new sense of conviction seems apparent in Mokutarō’s own attitudes. He too becomes convinced that, as Kandinsky puts it, art can come to exist for wholly new purposes. In this new context, Mokutarō concludes, ‘art can be said to be created not for the sake of others, not for the sake of art itself but for the sake of the self. Yet even to say ‘for the sake of the self’ is to speak in terms of a comparative concept. Such art has a life of its own; it is not created for any other purpose.’11 Once Mokutarō has placed his sympathies with the kind of spiritual view of art as propoundeded by a Kandinsky, he is able to return to Kishida’s work and view it from another perspective. In April of the same year, in an article written for the journal Geijutsu (Art), Mokutarō acknowledges that, until now, he had only achieved a confused impression of Kishida’s art. If, however, a work of art can be seen as a point of mediation between the artist and nature itself, then, since any given work of art forms one part of its creator’s spiritual life, Kishida’s work can be seen to take on a new significance. Insofar as Kishida, indeed, has been able to shed the ideas and concepts of his predecessors, his work can begin to show an authenticity which belongs to him alone. Indeed, remarks Mokutarō, his painting almost becomes a necessity. His work is not merely created as might be paintings done by a well-educated painter in response or reaction to an established set of ideas, or in the guise of something “naïve” or primitive.’ In Kishida’s case, Mokutarō is now convinced, the painter has developed a serious, perhaps sacred strategy in order to express the spiritual truth which fills and and overheims the soul of the true artist. Kishida and Mokutarō alike were young men, each at the start of their careers, when this encounter took place. Both were to find a variety of paths in their artistic and intellectual lives before their respective creative lives were to end. But this congruence of attitudes and talents at the very end of the Meiji period shows how many common assumptions had already been established, predilections that were to sustain the Western painting movement during several decades to come. They are all evident in Mokutarō’s attitudes, which he shared in turn with his public. Many of them became the basis for future discourse on many central facets of modern Japanese art. The first is that Japan is part of the world. Mokutarō is by no means surprised that a painter like Kishida could develop in Japan, for, in his view, his country’s own spiritual and intellectual climate is already closely tied to that of Europe. There is nothing of the cultural particularist in Mokutarō; Japan’s great challenge is to become aware of these linkages, and to act upon them. Allied to this is the conviction of a

KINISHITA MOKUTAR AS CRITIC: PUTTING MEIJI ART IN CONTEXT

409

need for a strong sense of self-awareness, both on the part of the artist and of the audience that loves art and looks to it for a source of insight. Indeed, for Mokutarō, this quality of self-awareness stands as the hallmark of all modern consciousness. Connected in turn to this self-awareness is the need on the part of spectators for context; art must not be looked at blindly, innocently, but with some understanding of the permutations of the traditions out of which have developed an authentic contemporary art. Since, in terms of Japanese Western-style painting, that tradition was created abroad, in Europe, then those Japanese who attempt to look with discernment at this new art must learn to absorb that context. The process involves the acquisition of knowledge, which must be blended in turn with an aesthetic response. Finally, in his essays on Kishida and Kandinsky, Mokutarō suggests, as he believed from the beginning, that the role of the artist is not simply to please his audience. An artist like Kishida (who, after all, never went to Europe) is unconcerned with expressing what he has learned intellectually about the play of contemporary styles of painting; the period of infusion signalled by the return of a Kuroda Seiki is now over. The basic idiom has been transplanted and absorbed; now painting can become, indeed must become, not an end in itself but a means to express the artist’s own authenticity. Those who view such truly new pictures may need a knowledge of the European traditions of art so as to better approach these works, which may at first appear unfamiliar to them, but they must learn as well to respond to what is beautiful, what is true. At this stage, art is not a technique but a means of spiritual cultivation. High ideals, a brave tenacity to accomplish what is difficult, and the kind of sincerity that Shimamura Hōgetsu said was to be required in his famous dictum: ‘abandon falsehood, forget ostentation, and behold the realities of your own situation. Having beheld them, confess them candidly.’ These convictions reached Meiji literature early; but by the end of those turbulent years, thanks in part to such writers as Kinoshita Mokutarō, they were firmly implanted in the world of painting as well. NOTES 1. These and other additional details on Mokutarō’s life and career can be found in the study by Noda Utarō, Kinoshita Mokutarō no shōgai to geijutsu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1980). 2. A recent publication by Henry Smith, Kiyochika, Artist of Meiji Japan (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1988) chronicles this encounter in some detail. 3. Bijutsu shimpō, November 17, 1911, in Kinoshita Mokutarō zenshū, (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1981), Vol. 7. p. 411. 4. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H.Sadler, New York: Dover Publications, 1977, p. 12. 5. Again, the parallels with Kandinsky are striking. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, for example, the Russian painter writes as follows: The inner need [of the artist] is built up of three mystical elements: (1) every artist, as a creator, has something in him which calls for expression (this is the element of personality). (2) Every artist, as child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age (this is the element of style)—dictated by the period and the particular country to which the artist belongs (it is doubtful how long the latter distinction will continue to exist.) (3) Every artist, as a servant of art, has to help the cause of art (this is the element of pure artistry, which is constant in all ages and among all nationalities.) (ibid., pp. 33–34). 6. Zenshū, vol. 7. p. 228. 7. Zenshū, vol. 8, p. 190. 8. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 91. 9. Ibid., p. 94. 10. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 9. 11. Zenshū, Vol. 8, p. 124.

First published in Michael F.Marra (ed.), Japanese Hermeneutics: Current debates on aesthetics and interpretation, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002, pp. 97–108

28 Hegel in Tokyo: Ernest Fenellosa and his 1882 Lecture on the Truth of Art

FROM A VANTAGE POINT at the dawn of a new century, the larger contours of the development of a modern Japanese art, which began more than a hundred years ago, now seem possible to discern. Certainly from the 1890s on, with the beginning of instruction at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō) in 1889 and the development of various exhibition systems, the creation of museums, and the establishment of other art-related groups and organizations, the ebb and flow of various forces—artistic, political, and cultural—were at last to find a framework to repair to or rebel against. Indeed, such a tentative framework might have been established more than a decade earlier, in 1876, with the establishment of the Technical Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō). Yet during that period between the closing of that school in 1883 and the opening of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, the significance of the shifting movements of artists, patrons, and the nascent public, all of which were to help set the direction for a number of crucial activities during the next decades, remains hard to grasp with any certainty. All those who have studied this fascinating period, however in conflict their convictions may be concerning the significance of the actual events that took place, agree on one thing: the need to evaluate the role played during these years by the American teacher and art enthusiast Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908). The eminent contemporary Japanese critic Karatani Kōjin has summed up Fenollosa’s career as follows: A graduate of Harvard, Fenollosa arrived in Japan in 1878 to assume a teaching post in political economy at Tokyo Imperial University. An aesthete by nature, Fenollosa became absorbed by classical Japanese art and grew convinced that the East held something that could transcend Western modernism. He considered Oriental and Japanese art to be supe rior to Western art (particularly the then-popular trend of realist painting) and undertook a project of periodizing and recategorizing Japanese art history. His student, Okakura Kakuzō (1862–1913), (more commonly known as Tenshin), who was proficient in English, assisted Fenollosa with this project and joined his campaign to revive traditional styles.1 Fenollosa remained in Japan until 1890 (although he was to return on two later occasions), and the significance, for good or ill, of his various activities has been interpreted in differing fashions by his various admirers and detractors. All seem agreed, however, that nothing during his career remains more significant than the talk he gave in Tokyo in May 1882 to an influential group of politicians and others interested in art named the Ryūchikai (roughly, the ‘Dragon Pond Society’). Published in Japanese translation in November of that year under the auspices of the society, Fenollosa’s Bijutsu Shinsetsu, which might be rendered in English as ‘An Explanation of the Truth of Art,’ was widely circulated and quoted. In his recent and

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

411

provocative history of modernist Asian art, the British scholar John Clark cites the lecture specifically and indicates that ‘the most significant Euramerican intervention in the construction of a nontraditional art in Asia occurred in Japan with Ernest Fenollosa and the US collectors to whom he recommended purchases in the 1880s.’2 Bijutsu Shinsetsu, therefore, appears to serve as an important nodal point in the development of a new consciousness concerning art and aesthetics in Meiji Japan. Along with the works related to aesthetics written at roughly the same period by the Japanese philosopher Nishi Amane (1829–1897), Fenollosa’s contribution, at least to his hagiographers, seems central to a nascent debate concerning the nature of the beautiful. Whatever the reputation of the lecture, however, suitable judgments, at least for foreign observers, have been difficult to make because the English original has been lost. Heretofore, no complete translated version into English of the Japanese text has been made available. The remarks that follow in this essay are based on my initial observations of this text, which I have recently translated—or, perhaps it is best to say, attempted to translate—into English. Reading and studying the document is a fascinating experience and one that, as I will point out shortly, doubtless raises more questions than it answers. I Before explaining the context of the document and speculating on the possible reasons for its significance and influence, let me provide a brief account of the contents. This description must be brief, as the text itself is quite long (forty-one double-spaced pages in English), and to present all the requisite details would require more space than is available here. The lecture is roughly divided into an introduction and three long sections, which I will attempt to describe briefly. In general, one might point out that Fenollosa’s lecture is organized carefully, even a bit pedantically. In his introductory section, Fenollosa asserts that his remarks are firmly based on ‘scientific principles’ (no doubt echoing Spencer, so popular at the time) and are conceived with the premise (perhaps a degraded Hegelian one) that in the life of art, as indeed of civilizations in general (just as in individual human lives), there is a ‘childhood,’ a period of mature flourishing, and an inevitable decay. Given this principle, Fenollosa continues, it is perhaps not surprising that both European painting and Japanese painting are presently in a period of decline. He also indicates that his examples will be drawn from a variety of sources, among them music, lyric poetry, painting, sculpture, the dance, and so forth. In that sense, although the lecture is concerned mainly with the art of painting, it also shifts occasionally into the realm of a more general aesthetic theory. The first long section of the lecture is dedicated to an outline of the nature of art itself. Fenollosa is firm in his wish to refute false ideas concerning any definition of the entity of art. Some persons, he points out, believe that art is something that is skillfully done, but this concept is false; a shoemaker or keeper of financial records may do superb work, but the results do not constitute art. Others believe that art can be defined as something that can move us and bring us pleasure, but, he insists, the argument really goes the other way around: It is only when the work of art in and of itself is excellent that we can feel a sense of pleasure. The sense of pleasure does not create the art. Finally, Fenollosa refutes the idea that art gains its value from imitating nature; if that were so, he concludes, then photographs, even of unpleasant things, would constitute art. Then too, he reminds his audience, there are many things not found in nature, such as the abstractions of music or the painting of a mythical animal such as a dragon, that can certainly be understood as art. To understand the nature of art, Fenollosa continues, we must seek beyond external appearance, for ‘the character of a work of art lies within the object,’ chiefly in the nature of the connections within the work

412

HEGEL IN TOKYO

itself. His analogy is with the human body: Each organ is separate and distinct, but the life force of the human being connects everything together and gives beauty to the whole. Another is the circle: If any area of the circle is not perfect, then the whole design fails. It is our intuitive sense of these implicit connections that constitutes the True and the Beautiful. Indeed, he continues, a work of art, as it becomes more beautiful through time, reveals that, in Hegelian terms, it is capable of manifesting the Idea; and, because artists are capable of this high calling, they deserve status in society far above that of any mere artisan for they can reveal to us a level of perfection that we cannot divine for ourselves. The second long section of the lecture concerns the techniques of the visual arts, in which Fenollosa shows, by using a variety of examples, how the artist intuirs the Idea and attempts to render it in various artistic forms, with a different balance of form and subject suitable for each. He describes, based on ideas first suggested earlier, that unity in a work of art gives a sense of beauty, which of course constitutes in turn one element of the Idea. Unity remains a crucial principle and involves the relationship between central and subsidiary elements. When they are arranged and related to each other in proper order, then Beauty, Goodness, and Unity become possible. Fenollosa then goes on to discuss the eight qualities necessary for the existence of Unity and Beauty in a painting. He suggests the following principles and gives examples for each: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Unity of line Unity of shading Unity of color Beauty of line Beauty of shading Beauty of color Unity of subject Beauty of subject

In addition, he points out two further qualities required for, in these terms, a successful work of art: force of subject, which allows the Idea to emerge through the power of invention and is not subject to the contrivances of mediocre artists, and force of execution, which requires that all eight of the characteristics he lists are brought into play spontaneously and intuitively. His example, unlikely but somehow effective, is that of the sumo wrestler. Given these general principles, which are universally true, Fenollosa continues, we may then compare Eastern and Western painting. He finds several differences, among them the following: 1. Western painting attempts to represent objects realistically in nature, but painting is now in a phase of decadence, and artists resort increasingly to mere ‘tricks.’ 2. Western painting uses shading, Japanese painting does not; thus, foreigners tend to scoff at Japanese painting (and presumably Chinese painting as well) because they are unfamiliar with these conventions. 3. Japanese painters use outline in a different fashion from Western painters, who, in their belief that actual nature shows no ‘outlines,’ cannot appreciate the beauty of Eastern techniques. 4. Western pigments are thick; Eastern pigments are thin. One has no greater inherent value than the other, however; choosing the example of pitch, Fenollosa says that music written at a higher pitch is not automatically ‘better’ than that composed at a lower pitch. For Fenollosa, in the end, the techniques of Japanese painting are preferable to those of Western painting because they allow the artist to manifest the Idea more clearly. He predicts that Western artists will begin to

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

413

borrow these techniques and use them themselves, citing ‘a certain English artist’ (whom his annotator takes to be Whistler) as a first example. The final section of the lecture takes up quite a different set of topics and deals with Fenollosa’s vision of the practical issues facing the Japanese contemporary arts in general, and painting in particular, at this moment in time. If, he begins, Japanese painting is truly superior, why is it that so few paintings are exported for sale abroad? One reason is that Japanese artists do not yet understand the kinds of painting that Western art lovers, at their own stage of development in the appreciation of Japanese art, might like to purchase and own. Little study has been done concerning this crucial area, Fenollosa reminds his audience, and in his view, only one firm in Nagoya has taken an active role in determining the nature and extent of the potential foreign market. New plans and methods must be created, so that the energies of this generation of Japanese artists can be dedicated to conceptualizing a truly new and authentic Japanese art. As this task is undertaken, Fenollosa insists that one style of Japanese art, developed in the Tokugawa period and still highly popular, is unsuitable and must be set aside. This is the so-called literati art, or bunjinga. This section of the lecture, in which Fenollosa denigrates this style of painting, contains his only intemperate remarks, and, given the generally bland tonality of the lecture, they seem quite startling. His stated reason for his strong dislike of this style of painting is that its impetus is literary and does not grow organically from the principles inherent in the visual arts; therefore, he says, ‘this would be like judging a painting in terms of music.’ This style of painting, for Fenollosa, shows no proper relationship or Unity, which must be composed of those appropriate interior connections between central and subsidiary elements. Thus, a painting by such an artist as Ike no Taiga resembles ‘a jumble of noodles,’ and Buson’s work is no better. These observations in turn give rise to Fenollosa’s explications of the problem of the rise of great masters who manifest the Idea for their generation but then are merely copied by their followers, who lack true creative inspiration. Michelangelo is one such artist in the West; Li Lung-mian and Mu Ch’i in China occupy the same role, and in Japan the greatness of the work of such figures as Sesshū, Kanō Motonobu, and Maruyama Ōkyo are not repeated in the imitations that follow. Now it is time, he insists, to move forward to create a new and vibrant art that can capture the Idea of this new age. To progress along these lines, Fenollosa concludes, three issues must be addressed. The first of them concerns the establishment of an official art school. Later Fenollosa was to help create the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but in this earlier stage of his thinking, he saw more dangers than useful possibilities in such a scheme. In the case of Western art, he notes, history shows that the creation of such schools has not automatically produced great artists. In addition, there is a danger should one style of ‘official art’ be accepted in such a school and so dominate the world of art because the Idea may manifest itself in many styles. There is also the problem that, if trained in this European-style system, Japanese artists will not receive the kind of lengthy nurturing they now receive in a traditional Japanese atelier situation but must continue to work and be forced to experiment on their own after finishing their early training. This observation in turn leads Fenollosa to discuss the necessity to develop regular subsidies for artists, providing them with the kind of financial support that will allow them to train and develop themselves so that they can create the kind of new art that must come forth. New kinds of homes are now being built in Japan, Fenollosa points out, and indeed the emperor’s palace in Tokyo, now to be rebuilt after a fire in 1873, should be decorated by young artists of vision. If you men of influence become excited by such prospects,’ he tells his audience, then the general public will follow after. Finally, Fenollosa makes a few trenchant comments on the need to create a public for art and suggests that the demand for art by a larger public will encourage the artists to do their best work. He suggests that a national art association should be established to set up proper exhibition space, sponsor exhibitions, and

414

HEGEL IN TOKYO

help draw the public into discussions of the significance of art and its role in the life of the culture, an act that will in and of itself help develop and improve the general level of public taste. II Such, in brief outline, are the contents of the text of Fenollosa’s famous contribution. Being able to decipher the text itself is helpful in explicating certain questions, of course, but in turn stimulates many others. Most of them, of course, I cannot answer with any certainty, but raising them may allow me to identify some important issues. At the least we can better appreciate the range of scholarship and informed judgment that will be needed to lay out the first reliable sketch map capable of showing us the origins of modern Japanese art. My questions expand outward from my encounter with the actual text itself. 1. Whose text is it? As I mentioned earlier, we do not have Fenollosa’s original English-language text3 but only the translation into Japanese attributed to Omori Itchū (1844–1908) and published by the society. Omori himself was a man of considerable interest for our understanding of the arts in the Meiji period, but I have so far been able to find out relatively little about him, other than that he visited the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876 (and so presumably knew some English), was a member of the society, and had a strong interest in the development of the industrial arts, about which he wrote on a number of occasions. Much of his career was devoted to their progress and development in Japan. The text of Fenollosa’s talk, in Ōmori’s version, is filled with flowery idioms and classical literary expressions and is occasionally obscure in meaning even to modern commentators.4 Most of Fenollosa’s remaining writings in English show a much more laconic and clear means of expression. We have no way of knowing to what extent the Japanese version was intended to ‘improve’ on the English original, either in style or perhaps even in content, but a significant gap is certain. In this context, making my translation (back) into English is particularly problematic. The general meaning of the text is usually clear, but rendering it sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, from early Meiji Japanese into contemporary English has been, at least for me, a difficult task, and I can certainly understand why, despite the fame of the text, there has been no previous attempt to make such a translation, as far as I know. 2. How do the ideas in the text reflect on Fenollosa’s own development of his understandings about Japanese art? Fenollosa arrived in Japan in 1878; now, barely five years later, he is cited in the printed preface to his lecture as an ‘eminent expert’ on Japanese art. How much had he actually come to know at the time, and where did he obtain his information? It is easy to forget that there was as yet no written, synthetic history of Japanese art in any language for him to consult; a first compilation was prepared in connection with the opening of the Paris World’s Fair of 1900. He certainly had learned enough to exhibit in his talk a command of the general flow of historical developments, mentioning in an appropriate context such important artistic schools and artists as Sesshū (1420–1506), Kōrin (1658–1716), the Tosa School, Muromachi ink painting, Kanō Mononobu, Kano Tanyū (1602–1674), Ike no Taiga (1723–1776), Yosa Buson (1716–1783), and Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795). His Western and Chinese references are necessarily fewer, but he is able to provide some useful comparative examples when they serve his purposes. Nevertheless, the reader, however impressed with Fenollosa’s ability to absorb new and alien information, cannot help but wonder to what extent he was expressing his own convictions, which could scarcely be based on his own considered study of actual works of art, and how much he was rather voicing the enthusiasms and prejudices of his Japanese mentors, whomever in this case they might be.6 3. What convictions did his listeners and readers already hold about the nature of art? It is difficult to posit with accuracy what may have been the precise views of the nature of art held by Fenollosa’s Japanese contemporaries, who as yet knew little or nothing of Western aesthetic theory. Indeed, the term in Japanese

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

415

for ‘art’ itself (bijutsu) was coined during the early Meiji period. There were, of course, painting treatises concerning both Japanese and Chinese art composed during the preceding Tokugawa period and even earlier, but on the whole these documents were not meant for any wide distribution to what we might now term a ‘general public.’ Those who absorbed Fenollosa’s remarks were neither artists nor scholars but most often collectors and connoisseurs, to whom the concept of any such abstract statements would have surely seemed unfamiliar. Christine Guth’s shrewd and informed discussion of how the development of a personalized, socialized connoisseurship was ‘the mark of a cultivated gentleman’ probably comes closest to characterizing the attitudes of these men because, as she remarks, ‘the advent of the new Meiji regime altered neither the importance traditionally attributed to self-cultivation nor the ways in which it was demonstrated.’7 4. To whom was Fenollosa useful? One aspect of the larger scenario of the talk concerns the uses to which it was to be put. Because the Dragon Pond Society issued the talk in printed form, then worked to carry out at least certain aspects of the recommendations made by Fenollosa, some knowledge of the dynamics of this particular group with their American ‘expert’ is particularly crucial. To the extent that I have been able to consult Japanese sources, however, the group still remains something of a phantom. A full membership list, for example, would help explain the close ties between business, government, and the arts that the group evidently set out to foster.8 Several of the members who have been identified were very powerful indeed. Sano Tsunetami (1823–1902) was a member of the Japanese delegation to the Vienna Exposition in 1873, in which Japan participated, and went on to found the Japanese Red Cross. Kawase Hideji (sometimes read as Hideharu) (1841–1907) was among the first Japanese, according to Uyeno Naoteru,9 with an interest in the arts to visit England, where he learned from the director of the Kensington Museum of the importance of establishing collections of art for the public. Kuki Ryūichi (1852–1931), who became minister to the United States in 1884, was to be for several generations a powerful figure in Meiji cultural circles.10 It appears that few if any actual artists belonged to the society before 1883, the year after Fenollosa’s lecture, which suggests that Fenollosa had found himself addressing a group resembling more a modern board of powerful museum trustees than an assemblage of men of high cultiva tion and artistic knowledge. The realities of this situation may be suggested by Fenollosa’s having left the group two years later to help in the formation of a new group, the Kangakai (Painting Appreciation Society), with Kawase as president. The new group attempted to carry out some of the suggestions made in Bijutsu Shinsetsu. The society exhibited works of art in private collections, sponsored lectures (often by Fenollosa) on art history, and provided what was termed expert advice on the authenticity of individual works of art. 5. What is the intellectual level and value of Fenollosa’s lecture? Whatever its fame, the text of the lecture, read over a hundred years later, does not seem particularly profound or insightful. The opening sections can serve at best as only a very general, reductionist version of the grand Hegelian scheme as revealed both in his own Aesthetics (which first appeared in 1835) and elsewhere in his voluminous writings. Even a passing glance at the sections on ‘Painting’ in the Aesthetics11 reveals a rich and detailed knowledge of classical and European art on every page; in such a context, Fenollosa’s explanations seem virtually barren of equally trenchant examples. It is in fact not clear as to whether Fenollosa himself ever read Hegel, either in the original German or in English translation; it is most likely, according to the data provided in the study of Fenollosa by Lawrence Chisolm,12 that Fenollosa depended on such nineteenthcentury accounts of Hegel as could be found in such works as Charles Carroll Everett’s The Science of Thought: A System of Logic (1869). As yet, I have not been able to consult the volumes that Chisolm cites; they are now difficult to obtain, but some clues to Fenollosa’s level of knowledge can doubtless be found in them.

416

HEGEL IN TOKYO

Nevertheless, to dismiss the lecture as Hegel once or twice removed and Fenollosa an idiot savant would clearly be wide of the mark. In the first place, Bijutsu Shinsetsu began as a spoken lecture, through an interpreter, and even in such limiting circumstances, Fenollosa does manage to convey a considerable amount of information and in a fashion that would be relatively clear to his listeners and eventually his readers. An explication of the subtleties of continental nineteenth-century philosophy was scarcely called for with an audience who, as yet, knew nothing of Plato and Aristotle, nor of Descartes and Kant. Indeed, it seems to me that Fenollosa’s relative success derives from his ability to gauge the level of knowledge (as well as of the prejudices and enthusiasms) of his audience. He presents his ideas in an enthusiastic, systematic, and logical fashion. He makes references to Chinese and Japanese, as well as to Western art, so that his listeners (and readers) might more quickly understand his conviction that Japanese art and culture can (in some sort of loose Hegelian fashion) fit into a larger world scheme, itself in transition. Perhaps most important, he suggests in his methodology, and indeed in his general stance, that a useful kind of art criticism and art history can be created, independent of those traditional writings in support of particular styles (a phrase that might describe certain earlier Japanese treatises on the art of painting) or, in the case of Chinese art, those often general and mystic statements relating art to philosophy and religion. Whatever the ultimate merits of Fenollosa’s arguments, the very fact of his transmission of such Western expectations, concepts, and traditions of aesthetics into the emerging dialogues concerning the nature of art during this period in Japan was of enormous value. He knew enough about Japan to judge his audience and enough about Western art to make his points. In that limited context, then, I believe that Bijutsu Shinsetsu must be judged a success. 6. Looking back, what events did the lecture help bring about? It is always difficult to judge the power of the word in the context of historical developments. Many were to cite this lecture as an inspiration; it may have served that purpose, or it may have served for some as a convenient pretext. Nevertheless, the lecture does seem to have provided at the least a point of convergence for a number of disparate energies in the art world of the time. As mentioned previously, some of the ideas were to be realized in the structure and activities of the Painting Appreciation Society, and the concept of a national art training school for painters went through a complex metamorphosis that resulted in the founding of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts less than a decade later. Fenollosa’s urgings that the Japanese learn more about late nineteenth-century Western tastes in Japanese art may well have led to a strengthening of the Ryūchikai’s ties with Siegfried Bing and his associates in Paris, by then the acknowledged art capital of the world.13 As we learn more of the period, it seems less and less likely that Fenollosa actually instituted these various trends, but his lecture certainly helped put some of these issues into focus. 7. Looking back, as a contemporary American observer of modern Japanese art, what is the significance of Fenollosa’s lecture? More than a hundred years later, and with the pleasures and responsibilities of hindsight, the presence of Fenollosa in Tokyo and of his famous lecture suggest other layers of significance as well. In one sense, Bijutsu Shinsetsu, depending on the importance one gives to it, might be seen as an early example gai-atsu, outward pressure for change, a strategy sometimes even welcomed by the Japanese themselves as a means of making changes that would be difficult to achieve from within the internal structure itself. If such is the case, then Fenollosa is, at the least, a distinguished early member of a considerable band of foreign observers who over the decades have insisted that Japan take one particular course or another. Almost thirty years later, the great Japanese writer and intellectual Natsume Sōseki recognized the necessity, perhaps even the inevitability, of such a process:

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

417

So, then, the question facing us is this: How does the civilization of modern-day Japan differ from civilization in general as I have been describing it? Simply stated. Western civilization (that is, civilization in general) is internally motivated, whereas Japan’s civilization is externally motivated. Something that is ‘internally motivated’ develops naturally from within, as a flower opens, the bursting of the buds followed by the outward turning of the petals. Something that is ‘externally motivated’ when it is forced to assume a certain form as the result of pressure applied from the outside…. We were a country that had [until the coming of the West) developed according to our own internal motivation. But then we suddenly lost our ability to be self-centered and were confronted by a situation in which we could not survive unless we began taking orders from the external force that was pushing us around at will. Nor was this by any means a temporary situation. The year is Meiji 44 after all: We’ve been bracing ourselves for close to fifty years. And not only have we been pushed and shoved along from that day to this, but unless we continue to be pushed along for years to come— perhaps forever—Japan will not be able to survive as Japan. What else can we call ourselves but externally motivated?14 Then too, there is another level of cultural conflict and concern to which Fenollosa’s lecture bears witness. Fenollosa urged that the traditions of Japanese art be renewed, revivified, in order that a new Idea come into being. Such an admonishment, at his time, was by no means foolish, and indeed he was doubtless correct in his prediction that a greater East-West exchange would come to take place in the techniques and values in the visual arts. However, to borrow again Sōseki’s insights, Japan retained the impression that the West, in its ideas as well as its guns, was forced on her. The necessary processes of change were too abrupt, too brutal, to provide for a course of natural development. Japanese culture was to reveal unusual disruptions in the development of her cultural forms ever since Meiji, and only now do these rifts seem to be healing over. Indeed, I know of no other culture that, because of the often insuperable difficulties in making such changes, was left with a legacy of ‘doubled’ art forms. In the theater, kabuki, which had been a contemporary form of theater, was by the turn of the twentieth century turned into a classic form of expression in contradistinction to shingeki, the modern spoken theater, based entirely on European models. In poetry, traditional haiku and even waka continued on but vied for attention with poetry composed in modern, Western forms. Western painting (yōga) would soon develop into a European style of painting that coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with the modernized form of traditional Japanese painting, which not so long after Fenollosa’s arrival began to be called Nihonga. Only modern Japanese fiction seemed to develop without this split, but even in this case, the modern Japanese novel—which, as the Meiji critic Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871–1918) once wrote, should ‘confess the truth’—was set up in opposition to the Tokugawa novels of the kind of high romance that can be found in the accomplished writings of Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848) a few generations before and in popular fiction ever since. Thus, the urgency and painful difficulties of change revealed themselves in the very fabric of the culture. Finally, one might note that there are certain similarities between nineteenth-century Japan and nineteenth-century America, similarities that indeed help inform us both of the contributions and the necessary limitations of a man such as Ernest Fenollosa. This insight is not my own but comes rather from my discussions over a long period of time with such scholars as Ellen Conant, Haga Tōru, Takashina Shūji, and more recently Murakata Akiko, all four of whom have concerned themselves with such matters for many years. The similarities arise from both countries’ feeling that they were on the periphery of world culture, which was situated in Europe; for the visual arts, particularly in France; and for the world of ideas, particularly in Germany. Japan had undergone the traumas of the Meiji Restoration, just as America had endured the Civil War. Both civilizations were now seeking to align themselves with what was newest and

418

HEGEL IN TOKYO

best in Europe. Fenollosa’s grasp of, say, Hegel’s philosophy was perhaps no more profound than the Meiji translator and writer Tsubouchi Shōyō’s early knowledge of Shakespeare, but in this case the American served as an enthusiastic, even if imperfect, vessel capable of bringing a whole new and larger set of concerns and hopes to his Japanese colleagues. Indeed, it might even be posited that, in his implicit understanding of his nation’s implicit commonality with Japan and his genuine enthusiasm for Japanese culture as he perceived it, Fenollosa presented a more persuasive account of his enthusiasm for Hegel than a properly trained German intellectual of the period might have done, if the accounts of Mori Ōgai (1862– 1922), another of the great Meiji writers and intellectuals, can be believed; for in his experience in the 1880s, the Germans merely appeared to look down on the Japanese as backward and had no interest in learning about their culture.15 There are many in Japan who doubtless know the answer to at least some of these questions. I myself, at this stage, can only pose them. Examining the significance of Bijitsu Shinsetsu is a little like translating it. The immediate details are sometimes vague and confusing, but the general meaning is clear and the larger significance of the greatest interest. I would hope now that those with greater skill and knowledge than I can explicate that difficult middle ground between the specifics and any larger, useful generalizations. But then, that is always the hardest part, and in this case, it is one yet to be accomplished on either side of the Pacific. NOTES 1. See Karatani Kōjin, ‘Japan as Museum: Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenollosa,’ in Alexei Munroe, ed., Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 33. 2. See John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), p. 76. 3. Thanks to the valiant efforts of Murakata Akiko of Kyoto University, a reconstruction exists of the notes used for Fenollosa’s lecture, assembled from his papers, which are available at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. For her rigorous analysis of the reconstructed texts, see Eibunkanhyōron 49 (December 1983), issued by the Kyōikubu of Kyoto University. These notes, however, are only brief sketches and confirm the general outlines of the lecture but not every aspect of the contents. 4. Indeed, it would have been impossible for me to prepare my draft translation without the aid of the annotated edition of the text included in Bijitsu, edited by Aoki Shigeru, volume 17 Shihon Kindai Shisō Taikei, published by Iwanami Shoten in 1989. Even the annotator acknowledges that there are a number of ambiguous phrases, sentences, and references, some of which attributable to the fluctuating state of Meiji-written Japanese in the early years of the modern period. In this regard, Ellen Conant has been helpful in interpreting certain aspects of the text. 5. For an account of the composition of the first history of Japanese art, see various articles in Modern Japanese Art and the West (Tokyo: Meiji Bijutsu Gakkai, 1992), esp. pp. 257–271. 6. Christine M.E.Guth’s comments are precise and insightful: ‘That Fenollosa crossed paths with so many collectors and dealers is evidence that the market for traditional art was also active by the time he began collecting. Clearly, Fenollosa, far from teaching the Japanese people to know their own art, as Mary Fenollosa would later claim in her introduction to Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, was totally dependent on Japanese dealers and connoisseurs for both his information and his acquisitions.’ See her Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 113. 7. See ibid., p. 31. 8. The most detailed account of the Ryūchikai in English is by Satō Dōshin in Ellen Conant et al., Nihonga: Transcending the Past, Japanese-Style Painting, 1868–1968 (St. Louis, Mo.: St. Louis Art Museum and the Japan Foundation, 1995), pp. 78–79. 9. See Uyeno Naoteru, Japanese Arts and Crafts in the Meiji Era (Tokyo: Tokyo Bunko 1958), p. 16.

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

419

10. Kuki’s relations with Fenollosa’s colleague Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913) and his son Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941), later to become a famous Japanese philosopher, are of the greatest interest but lie outside the scope of this chapter. 11. I found most helpful T.M.Knox’s translation, published as Hegel’s Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); for the sections on painting, see vol. 2, pp. 797–887. 12. See various entries in Lawrence W.Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), esp. p. 26. 13. For details concerning these Paris connections, see the Satō Dōshin article mentioned in note 8. Also of general interest are Gabriel Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing (New York: Harry N.Abrams, 1986), and Elisa Evett, The Critical Reception of Japanese Art in Late 19th Century Europe (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982). 14. A translation by Jay Rubin of the full text of Sōseki’s lecture ‘The Civilization of Modern Japan’ can be found in Kokoro and Selected Essays (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1992). The passage cited can be found on pp. 272– 273. 15. For an account of this important dispute with the German geologist Edmund Naumann, resident in Japan from 1875 to 1885, see Richard Bowring, Mori Ōgai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 16–20.

Selected Bibliography

Items are listed in chronological order from 1974 to 2003. Future Publications scheduled to appear after 2003 are not listed. BOOKS OR SECTIONS OF BOOKS Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre: Kishida Kunio. Princeton University Press, 1974. Mori Ōgai. Twayne, 1974. Guide to Japanese Poetry [with Robert Morrell]. G.K.Hall, 1976. Mori Ōgai. The Incident at Sakai and Other Stories [with David Dilworth]. University of Hawaii Press, 1977 [paperback edition 1991]. Mori Ōgai. Saiki Doi and Other Stories [with David Dilworth]. University of Hawaii Press, 1977 [paperback edition 1991]. Traditions in Modern Japanese Fiction: An Introduction. Princeton University Press, 1978. Mask and Sword: Two Plays for the Contemporary Japanese Theatre By Yamazaki Masakazu. Columbia University Press, 1980. On the Art of the Nō Drama: the Major Treatises of Zeami [with Yamazaki Masakazu]. Princeton University Press, 1984. The Way of Acting: the Theatre Writings of Tadashi Suzuki [translator]. Theatre Communications Group, 1986. Multiple Meanings: the Written Word in Japan—Past, Present, and Future [editor and contributor]. The Library of Congress, 1986. Paris in Japan [co-editor and contributor], the Japan Foundation and Washington University in St. Louis, 1987. Pilgrimages: Aspects of Japanese Literature and Culture. University of Hawaii Press, 1988. A Reader’s Guide to Japanese Literature. Kodansha International, 1988 revised edition, 1999. Japanese Literature on Film [text essay] The Japan Society, N.Y. 1989. Culture and Identity [editor and contributor]. Princeton University Press, 1990. Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan [with Ernestine Schlant]. Johns Hopkins Press, 1991. Shisendō, Hall of the Poetry Immortals [editor and contributor] Weatherhill, 1991. Mori Ōgai: Youth and Other Stories [editor and contributor] University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Nihonga: Transcending the Past [co-editor and contributor], the St. Louis Art Museum and the Japan Foundation, 1995. Kyoto Encounters. Weatherhill, 1995. A Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese Cultural Encounters, 1868–1929 [editor and contributor]. Stanford University Press, 1995. The Blue-eyed Tarōkaja: Writings of Donald Keene [editor]. Columbia University Press, 1997. Japanese Theatre in the World [co-editor and contributor], the Japan Foundation and the Japan Society, 1997. Nara Encounters [with Keiko McDonald]. Weatherhill, 1997. Poems to Sing: the Wakan Rōeishû [with Jonathan Chaves]. Columbia University Press, 1997. Senda Akihiko, The Voyage of Modern Japanese Theatre [translator] University of Hawaii Press, 1997. War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920–1960 [with Marlene Mayo and Eleanor Kerkham]. University of Hawaii Press, 2001. A Song Like No Other: an Anthology of Writings by Mori Ōgai [editor and contributor]. University of Hawaii Press, 2003.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

421

ARTICLES,TRANSLATIONS, ESSAYS, ETC. ‘Taema, Translation and Commentary on a nō Play,’ Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. XXV, Nos. 3–4, 1978. ‘Three Poems by Nishiwaki Junzaburō,’ TriQuarterly, fall 1974. ‘Four Plays by Tanaka Chikao,’ Monumenta Nipponica Vol. XXXI, No. 3, Autumn 1976. Introduction to From the Country of Eight Islands, poetry translated by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, Doubleday, 1981. ‘Three Stories by Mori Ōgai,’ in Thomas Swann and Kinya Tsuruta, ed., Approaches to the Modern Japanese Short Story, Waseda University Press, 1982. ‘A Lyrical Impulse in Modern Japanese Prints and Poetry,’ Asian Art, Vol. II, Number 1, Winter 1989. Kishida Kunio, A Diary of Fallen Leaves [with David Goodman] in David Goodman, ed., Five Plays of Kishida Kunio, Cornell Asia Series, 1989. A chapter on the modern art of Japan and China in Norma Broudy, ed., World Impressionism: the International Movement 1860–1920, Abrams, 1990. ‘High Culture in the Shōwa Period,’ Daedalus, Fall, 1990, later republished in Carol Gluck and Stephen R.Graubard, ed., Shōwa: the Japan of Hirohito, W. W.Norton, 1992. ‘What More Do We need to Know about the Nō?’ Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 9, Number 2, Fall 1992. ‘Forward,’ in Robert Rolf and John K.Gillespie, Alternative Japanese Drama, University of Hawaii Press, 1992. ‘Kinoshita Mokutarō as Critic: Putting Meiji Art in Context,’ Modern Japanese Art and the West, Meiji Bijutsu Gakkai, 1992. Two articles on Kunisada in Kunisada’s World, ed. Sebastian Izzard, the Japan Society and the Ukiyo-e Society of America, 1993. ‘Fragmented Mirrors: Reflections on Japan’s Early Modern Wars in Japanese Literature,’ Asian Art, Vol. VI, 1, Winter 1993. Introduction to Francis B.Tenny, tr., The Sick Rose: a Pastoral Elegy by Satō Haruo, University of Hawaii Press, 1994. ‘Film and the Visual Arts in Japan: an Introduction,’ in Linda Ehrlich and David Desser, etc., Cinematic Landscapes, University of Texas Press, 1994. ‘The Metamorphosis of Disguise: Ibsen, Sōseki, and Ôgai,’ in Amy V.Heinrich, ed., Currents in Japanese Culture: Translations and Transformations, Columbia University Press, 1997. ‘Iwanami Shigeo’s Meiji Education: Encounters, Transmissions,’ in Helen Hardacre ed., New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, Brill, 1997. ‘Contemporary Audiences and the Pilgrimage to nō,’ in James R.Brandon, ed., Nō and Kyōgen in the Contemporary World, University of Hawaii Press, 1997. ‘Introduction’ in Shojo Honda, ed., Pre-Meiji Works in the Library of Congress: Japanese Performing Arts and Reference Books, Library of Congress, 1997. ‘Shakespeare Meets the Buddha: Tsubouchi Shōyō and The Hermit,’ in Kyoto Conference on Japanese Studies 1994, International Research Center for Japanese Studies and the Japan Foundation, 1997, Vol. II. ‘Nō in okeru kata,’ in Kyoto Conference on Japanese Studies 1994, Vol. IV [see above]. Translation and Introduction to the play of Shimizu Kunio, Older Sister Burning Like a Flame,’ Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 16, Number 1, Spring 1999 (with Dennis Kennedy) ‘Koreya Senda and Political Shakespeare,’ in Takashi Sasayama, et.al, ed., Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, Cambridge University Press, 1998. ‘A Note on The Lower Depths of Akira Kurosawa,’ Postscript, Vol. 20 #1, Fall 2000. ‘The Longest Voyage of All: Pericles in Japan,’ in David Skeele, ed., Pericles: Critical Essays, Garland, 2000. Yokouchi Kensuke, The Emperor of La Macha’s Clothes [translation] in Japan Playwrights Association, ed., Half a Century of Japanese Theatre, Vol. III, Kinokuniya 2001. ‘With a nod to Chekhov: Strategies of Dream and Memory in the dramas of Shimizu Kunio,’ in Stanca Scholz-Cionca and Samuel Leiter ed., Japanese Theatre and the International Stage, Brill 2001. ‘Hegel in Tokyo: Ernest Fenollosa and his 1882 Lecture on the Truth of Art,’ in Michael F.Marra, ed., Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, University of Hawaii Press, 2002.

422

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

‘Indirect Connections: France in the Japanese Theatre 1945–1965,’ in Douglas Slaymaker ed., Confluences: Postwar Japan and France, University of Michigan Japanese Studies, 2002. ‘Introduction,’ in Brenda Jordan et.al., ed., Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets: Talent and Training in Japanese Painting, University of Hawaii Press, 2003. Tsubouchi Shōyō, A Sinking Moon over the Lonely Castle Where the Cuckoo Cries [translation] in James Brandon and Samuel E.Leiter, eds., Kabuki Plays on Stage, Vol. 5, University of Hawaii Press, 2003. ‘Introduction,’ Donald Richie, Japanese Literature Reviewed, ICG Muse, 2003.

Name Index

Ashikaga Yoshimitsu 40, 41, 86 Austen, Jane 315 Ay-O see Ijima Takao

A NOTE TO THE READER As these various articles and chapters have appeared in a variety of publications, which were originally edited in a variety of formats, spellings and order of names etc. may appear differently from chapter to chapter. In this Index, however, I have used the usual format for Japanese names of family name first, personal name second. In the case of Russian and Chinese names, I have retained the various romanization systems chosen by the original editors.

Baelz, Erwin 138 Bakst, Léon 180, 307 Balanchine, George 236 Bancroft, Anne 234 Bandō Tamasaburō 213 Barrault, Jean-Louis 232 Bartok, Bela 387 Bashō see Matsuo Bashō Baudelaire, Charles 54, 115, 142, 145, 423 Beaumarchais 181 Beckett, Samuel 252, 279, 392 Beethoven 425 Benjamin, René 181 Béjart, Maurice 236 Bergman, Ingmar 236 Berenson, Bernhard 447 Bergson, Henri 198, 381 Berlioz, Hector 24 Bernhardt, Sarah 177 Betsuyaku Minoru 208, 252, 272, 279, 362 Bigelow, William S. 485 Bing, Siegfried 541 Binyon, Laurence 230 Blake, William 375 Bogart, Anne 238 Bonnard, Pierre 507 Botticelli, Sandro 439, 447 Bourdelle, Antoine 429 Brahms, Johannes 269 Brangwyn, Frank Wm. 428 Brecht, Bertolt 110, 183, 230, 254, 308, 362 Breuer, Lee 238 Britten, Benjamin 234

Abe Jirō 377, 398, 403, 446 Abe Kōbō 207, 236, 252, 279, 288, 351, 360, 362, 363, 392 Abe Yoshishige 377, 397, 396, 403, 404 Adams, Henry 391 Adorno, T.W. 115, 116, 308 Akaishi Yoshi 402 Akita Toshihiko 243 Akita Ujaku 175, 185, 186, 188, 246, 265 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke 185, 358 Albee, Edward 392 Anouilh, Jean 272 Andersen, Hans Christian 126 Antoine, André 174, 177, 178, 203, 205, 224 Anzai Hitoshi [theatre director] 268–277 Anzai Hitoshi [poet] 71, 73 Aōdō Denzen 412 Aragon, Louis 308 Arai Hakuseki 155, 157 Arishima Ikuma 420, 425, 432, 456 Arishima Takeo 173, 185, 186, 464 Aristotle 540 Ariwara no Narihira 313 Asai Chū 414, 419, 420, 421, 429, 432, 433, 434, 458, 460, 462 Asakura Setsu 240 423

424

NAME INDEX

Buson see Yosa Buson

Duse, Eleanore 224

Carolus-Duran, C.E.A. 430, 432, 435, 526 Caruso, Enrico 224 Cézanne, Paul 298, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431, 433, 447, 450, 463, 483, 507, 516, 528 Chamberlain, Basil Hall 220 Chagall, Marc 430 Chaucer 110, 343, 355 Chekhov, Anton 114, 115, 178, 181, 201, 209, 212, 213, 242–56, 259, 270, 271, 275, 278, 286, 287, 288, 362, 390, Chikamatsu Monzaemon 91, 253, 265, 350, 356, 357, 362, 363 Chikamatsu Shūkō 378 Chuang Chou 91, 95 Claudel, Paul 101, 151, 232, 254, 362, 428, 480 Cocteau, Jean 181 Collin, Raphaël 430, 433 Collins, Wilkie 344 Confucius 103, 400 Copeau, Jacques 138, 139, 178, 181, 182 Cormon, Fernand 430, 431, 432 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille 456 Courbet, Gustav 526 Coward, Noel 207 Craig, Edith 180 Craig, Gordon 177, 180

Eisenstein, Sergei 226, 253 Einstein, Albert 86 Eliot, T.S. 57, 58, 64, 308, 387, 422 Elisséeff, Serge 481 En no Gyōja 260, 262 Endō Shūsaku 236 Everett, Charles Carroll 540

Dan Inō 448 Daubigny, Charles-François 427 David, Jacques-Louis 436 Dazai Osamu 242, 354, 391 Debussy, Claude 298 Degas, Edgar 222, 427, 430, 433 Delacroix, Eugène 298, 308, 494 Denis, Maurice 428, 429 Derain, André 451 Descartes 199, 540 Dewy, John 391 Diaghilev, Serge 180 Dickens, Charles 344 Dilthey, Wilhelm 119, 447 Dōmoto Inshō 474, 508, 510 Dostoevsky, Feodor 245, 375, 392 Dubuffet, Jean 516 Dumas, Alexandre 163 Duncan, Isadora 224, 226 Dürer, Albrecht 427, 439, 484

Faulkner, William 391 Fenollosa, Ernest 228, 416, 417, 418, 485, 532–544 Flaubert, Gustav 117–125, 141, 344 Fontanesi, Antonio 414 Francis, Sam 507 Frois, Luis 216 Fujimori Seikichi 185, 186 Fujimura Misao 400 Fujishima Takeji 419, 420, 431, 432, 433, 437, 445, 449, 452, 455, 458, 475, 526 Fujita Tsuguji 307, 388, 451, 452, 458, 462, 464, 494, 495 Fujiwara Kintō 90 Fujiwara Seika 85, 86, 93 Fukuda Heihachirō 490, 507 Fukuda Toyoshirō 492, 496, 506, 508 Fukuzawa Ichirō 466 Fukuzawa Yukichi 396 Fuller, Loië 224, 226 Funasaka Yoshiyuke 67, 70 Futabatei Shimei 110, 113, 167, 170 Gallimard, Gaston 395 Garbo, Greta 234 Gauguin, Paul 57, 443, 483, 516 Gensei 92 Gershwin, George 307 Gide, André 181, 224 Gielgud, John 200 Gilbert and Sullivan 222 Goering, Reinhard 183 Goethe 101, 105, 126, 391, 398, 523 Gogol, N.V. 111, 181 Gōkōmyō, Emperor 93 Gombrich, E.H. 34, 35, 36, 37 Goncourt brothers 427 Göring, Hermann 492 Gorky, Maxim 178, 245 Goya Y Lucientes, Franciso José de 439, 494 Graff, Anton 523

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Grant, Ulysses S. 29, 220 Greif, Michael 274 Grein, J.T. 177 Gu Kaizhi 484 Haga Tōru 508 Hagiwara Sakutarō 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 63, 64, 77 Hanson, Howard 257 Harrison, Lou 234 Hartley, Marsden 257 Hartmann, Eduard von 386, 403, 447 Haryū Ichirō 516 Hasegawa Nyozekan 158 Hashimoto Kansetsu 471 Hashimoto Meiji 503 Hashimoto Kansetsu 493 Hauptmann, Gerhart 175 Hayami Gyoshū 484, 486, 490 Hayashi Razan 85, 90, 93 Hayashi Tadamasa 427 Haydn, Joseph 320 Hearn, Lafcadio 220, 357 Heidegger, Martin 383, 386 Hegel 383, 386, 392, 394, 404, 447, 448, 540, 543 Heine, Carl 182 Heine, Heinrich 105 Higashiyama Chieko 248, 249 Higashiyama Kaii 504 Hijikata Yoshi 175, 182, 184 Hirafuku Hyakusui 485 Hind, Charles Lewis 444, 528 Hirasawa Keishichi 188 Hirayama Ikuo 504 Hishida Shunshō 519 Hitler, Adolf 492 Hoffmann, Hans 86 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 101, 105, 126, 224 Holbein, Hans 433, 484 Hugo, Victor 177, 308, 344 Husserl, Edmund 386 Ibsen, Henrik 101, 105, 128, 131, 161, 168, 171, 178, 181, 187, 242, 244, 246, 247, 257, 259, 260, 270, 271, 272, 275, 287, 362, 390, 402 Ibuse Masuji 358 Ichikawa Ennosuke III 240 Ichikawa Kanjūrō IX 164 Ichikawa Sadanji 174, 176, 180, 247, 253 Ida Shōichi 70

Ihara Saikaku 91, 350, 353 Ijima Takao (Ay-O) 64 Ikeda Masuo 62, 63 Ike no Taiga 536, 538 Ikeda Yōson 489 Imamura Shikō 482, 483, 486, 487, 489, 519 Imao Keinen 470 Ingres, J.A.D. 308, 439 Ionesco, Eugène 252, 279 Inoue Michiyasu 472 Irving, Sir Henry 224 Irie Hakō 482, 483 Ishikawa Jōzan 81–98 Itō Kisaku 175 Itō Michio 230 Itō Shinsui 498, 502 Iwahashi Eien 492, 509 Iwami Reika 66 Iwamura Tōru 423, 424, 435 Iwanami Shigeo 377, 383, 394–405 Iwasaki Yoshikazu 518 Iwata Shigeyoshi 510 Iwata Toyoo 180–182 Izumi Kyōka 502 Jacques-Dalcroze, Émile 178, 230 James, Henry 292, 337, 344, 360, 391, 421 James, William 198, 369 Janaz, Charles 276 Jones, Sidney 222 Joyce, James 315 Jung, Carl Gustav 37 Kaburaki Kiyokata 471, 489, 498, 502 Kaiser, Georg 182, 183, 184 Kakinomoto Hitomaro 311, 348 Kakiuchi 352 Kambara Arikae 246 Kamo no Chōmei 85, 89, 190, 361 Kan’ami 26, 39 Kanayama Heizō 437 Kandinsky, Wassily 386, 525, 528, 529, 530 Kaneko Yōbun 185, 186, 189 Kanō Motonobu 492, 536 Kanō Tan’yū 93, 538 Kanokogi Takeshirō 431, 437, 440, 450 Kant, Emmanuel 118, 383, 386, 394, 404, 540 Kanze Hisao 261 Kanze Kojirō Nobumitsu 27

425

426

NAME INDEX

Kara Jūrō 279 Karatani Kōjin 532 Katagiri Katsumoto 167, 168 Katayama Nampū 477 Kawabata Ryūshi 261, 471, 485, 487, 490, 491, 494, 496, 498, 499, 500, 501, 505, 511, 512, 519 Kawabata Yasunari 243, 328, 346, 349, 350, 354, 363, 390, 404 Kawai Gyokudō 470, 472, 481 Kawakami Otojirō 165, 223, 224, 226 Kawase Hideji [Hidetaru] 539 Kawatake Mokuami 163 Kayama Matazō 512, 513, 514 Kiami 26 Kierkegaard, S_ren 386 Kikuchi Kan 173 Kikuchi Keigetsu 471, 487, 497, 503 Kinoshita Chōchōshi 85 Kinoshita Junji 162, 207, 208, 213, 251, 266 Kinoshita Mokutarō 424, 521–531 Kishida Kunio 138, 181, 182, 190, 207, 212, 213, 161 Kishida Ryūsei 416, 421, 426, 439, 443, 445, 456, 458, 460, 484, 527, 529, 530 Kita Ikki 280, 281, 283 Kitaoka Fumio 65 Kitamura Tōkoku 376 Kline, Franz 77, 514 Knopf, Alfred 395 Kobayashi Hideo 11, 447 Kobayashi Kiyochika 524 Kobayashi Kokei 483, 484, 487, 488, 499 Kobori Tomoto 470 Koeber, Raphael von 368, 376, 402, 403, 448 Koga Harue 466 Koide Narashige 416, 417, 420, 435, 437, 449, 458 Kojima Kikuo 448 Kokoshka, Oscar 183 Komparu Kunio 32, 33, 36 Komparu Zenchiku 27, 40 Kōri Torahiko 179, 180 Kōrin see Ogata Kōrin Kōtoku Shūsui 104 Kubo Sakae 178, 187, 207 Kubota Beisen 495 Kubota Mantarō 172 Kūkai 250 Kuki Ryūchi 539 Kuki Shūzō 292, 308, 383, 403 Kume Keiichirō 418, 419, 430, 434, 455

Kume Masao 173 Kumagai Naozane 85 Kumazawa Mataroku 245 Kunikida Doppo 369, 376 Kurimoto Joun 302, 303 Kurata Hyakuzō 367–381 Kuroda Seiki 258, 418, 419, 420, 421, 423, 430, 433, 434, 435, 438, 443, 449, 451, 455, 458, 462, 522, 526, 527 Kurosawa Akira 358 Kusamura Hokusui 401 Kusayama Masao 245 Kusunoki Masahige 497 Kuwaki Gen’yoku 377 Lady Murasaki see Murasaki Shikibu Laruens, Jean-Paul 430, 431, 450 Leach, Bernard 427, 443 Lenormand, Henri-René 181 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 80, 308 Li Po 92 Lipps, Theodor 447 Lu Hsun 111, 113, 114 Lunacharsky, A.V. 189 Maeda Seison 471, 474, 483, 484, 488, 489, 490, 491, 501, 502, 505, 519 Maeta Kanji 437, 451, 462 Maeterlinck, Maurice 175, 245 Mafune Yutaka 187 Mahler, Gustav 387 Malevich, Kasimir 76 Mallarmé, Stéphane 308, 423 Malraux, André 202, 425 Manet, Édouard 439, 509, 528 Mann, Thomas 315 Manzei 311 Marcel, Gabriel 202 Marquet, Pierre-Albert 428 Martin du Gard, Roger 181 Martinet, Marcel 183 Maruki Iri 497 Maruyama O¯kyo 492, 536, 538 Marx, Karl 386, 404 Masamune Hakuchō 243, 246 Mascagni, Pietro 224 Masefield, John 230 Masuda Genji 491 Matisse, Henri 387, 426, 428, 430, 431, 439, 450, 506, 507, 528

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Matsue Shōyō 177 Matsui Sumako 170, 264 Matsukata Kōjirō 428, 446 Matsuo Bashō 53, 88, 91, 92, 96, 275, 293, 295, 297, 303– 4, 349, 354, 377, 501 Matsuoka Eikyū 472, 503 Matsuoka Shizuo 472 Mauriac, François 208 Mayama Seika 171, 207 Mayuzumi Toshirō 236 Mazaud, Émile 181 Meiji, Emperor 104, 162, 382 Meissonier, Ernest 435 Mencius 103 Meyerhold, V.S. 182, 183, 224, 226 Michelangelo 536 Mikami Makoto 510, 516 Miki Kyōshi 383 Miki Minoru 236, 392 Milton, John 32 Millet, Jean François 427, 456 Minamoto Yoshitsune 352 Miró, Joan 73 Mishima Yukio 110, 207, 213, 236, 288, 346, 358, 360, 490 Mitsutani Kunishirō 431, 437 Miyake Kokki 523 Miyashita Tokio 73 Miyazawa Kenji 279 Miyoshi Jūrō 187 Mizoguchi Kenji 357 Mizufune Rokushū 52, 54 Mnouchkine, Ariane 238 Molière 25, 177, 181, 213, 244 Mondrian, Piet 507 Monet, Claude 428, 430, 509, 528 Montaigne 101 Moreau, Gustave 431, 435 Moore, Henry 493 Mori Ōgai 101–112, 113–116, 117–125, 126–134, 138, 171, 172, 189, 202, 244, 247, 258, 259, 303, 316, 358, 367, 397, 400, 403, 424, 447, 470, 522, 523, 524, 525, 543 Morimoto Kaoru 207 Morita Kan’ya 164 Morita Tsunetomo 456 Morris, William 428 Motomasa 40 Motoyoshi 40

427

Mozart 24, 27, 269, 391 Murakami Kagaku 493 Murasaki Shikibu 92, 216, 276, 309–341, 342, 345, 386 Murayama Tomoyoshi 183, 187, 189, 457 Murō Saisei 458 Mushakōji Saneatsu 173, 188, 378 Musset, Alfred de 181 Muther, Richard 425, 523 Nagai Kafū 110, 121, 292, 293, 338, 422, 423, 525 Nakahara Tokugorō 470, 491 Nakamura Fusetsu 475 Nakamura Hakuyō 245 Nakamura Kichizō 171, 176 Nakamura Tsune 445, 458 Nakamura Utaemon VI 234, 503 Nakano Yoshio 243 Natsume Sōseki 87, 91, 101, 103, 105, 111, 126–34, 171, 258, 349, 359, 377, 378, 404, 424, 455, 474, 479, 522, 542 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir 178 Nietzsche, Friedrich 107, 116, 130, 205, 260, 264, 375, 383, 398 NijōYoshitomo 40, 41 Ninagawa Yukio 238, 268, 272, 279 Nishi Amane 103, 533 Nishida Kitarō 369, 370, 371, 372, 374, 375, 376, 377 Nishimura Goun 497 Nishiwaki Junzaburō 57, 60, 62, 63, 71, 77, 292, 308, 387, 422, 491 Nitobe Inazō 399 Nobumitsu 28 Nogi Maresuke 105, 107, 373 Nōin 295 Nomura Kō 510 Ōe Kenzaburō 351, 358, 391 Ogata Kōrin 410, 460, 492, 538 Oguri Fūyō 489 Ōhara Magosaburō 428, 446 Oida Yoshi [Katsuhiko] 238 Okada Kenzō 514 Okada Saburōsuke 419, 420, 430, 433, 437, 438, 445, 455 Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzō) 416, 417, 485, 499 Okamoto Kidō 207 Ōkura Kishichirō 481 Ōmori Ktchū 538 On’ami 40 Onchi Kōshirō 54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 66

428

NAME INDEX

O’Neill, Eugene 181, 188, 205, 212, 257 Ono Chikkyō 482, 483 Ōoka Shōhei 390 Orlik, Emil 226 Osanai Kaoru 127, 138, 173–76, 181, 184, 186, 187, 203, 205, 244, 246, 247, 254, 255, 257–68, 296, 402 Ōta Shōgō 279 Ōtomo Yakamochi 348 Palestrina, Giovanni 269 Partch, Harry 234 Pascal, Blaise 101 Perry, Matthew, Commodore 218 Picasso, Pablo 73, 76, 97, 224, 386, 430, 439, 450, 494, 506, 507, 516 Pinter, Harold 209 Pirandello, Luigi 181, 200, 201, 288 Piscator, Erwin 182, 184 Pitoëff, Georges 181 Plato 76, 540 Plomer, William 234 Pollock, Jackson 391, 507 Porto-Riche, Georges de 207 Pound, Ezra 57, 28, 422 Poussin, Nicholas 308 Praz, Mario 53, 76 Proust, Marcel 94, 127, 276, 309, 316, 320, 345 Puccini, Giacomo 224 Puskin, Alekandr 279, 286 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 298, 427, 435 Redgrave, Lynn 278 Redgrave, Vanessa 278 Reinhardt, Max 177, 178, 182, 226 Rembrandt 445 Renard, Jules 207 Renoir, Pierre Auguste 426, 428, 429, 430, 433, 450, 483 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 492 Rickert, Heinrich 383 Rilke, Rainer Maria 105, 279, 308, 421 Rimbaud, Arthur 54 Rizal, José 114 Rodin, Auguste 224, 298, 425, 429, 485, 526 Romains, Jules 181 Rossetti, Dane Gabriel 301 Rousseau, Theodore 427, 483, 507 Rubens, Peter Paul 436, 439 Ryōkan 88, 97

Saeki Yūzō 292, 433, 451, 452, 453, 456, 463, 464, 491 Saigyō 85, 90, 97, 294 SaitōYori 455 Sakamoto Hanjirō 435, 450, 452, 458, 460, 461, 465 Sakuma Shōzan 415 Sano Tsunetami 539 Santōka 89 Sartre, Jean-Paul 117–125, 202, 383, 391 Sasaki Takamaru 187, 188, 189 Satō Haruo 173 Sargent, John Singer 432, 526 Sawada Shōjirō 166 Satoh Makoto 279 Sawaki Yokokichi 448 Schavernoch, Hans 240 Schoenberg, Arnold 387 Scribe, Eugène 163 Sei Shōnagon 216 Senuma Kayō 243, 244 Shakespeare 25, 27, 162, 177, 181, 195, 201, 209, 212, 213, 220, 224, 226, 244, 260, 268–77, 279, 282, 286, 287, 343, 346, 349, 400, 543 Schechner, Richard 208 Schnitzler, Arthur 105 Schopenhauer, Arthur 369 Schulz, Charles 70 Scott, Campbell 274 Sekine Yoshio 70 Sekino Jun’ichirō 61, 66, 73 Senda Koreya 141, 189, 251 Sesshū 492, 536, 538 Sesson 492 Shiba Kōkan 412 Shiga Naoya 243, 346, 402, 479 Shaw, George Bernard 161, 177 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 291 Shichidayū 29, 44 Shiina Rinzō 243 Shibata Zeshin 419 Shimamura Hōgetsu 168, 169, 170, 176, 179, 264, 379, 530, 542 Shimazaki Tōson 172, 178, 243, 248, 250, 291–308, 358, 360, 397, 422, 423, 446 Shimizu Kunio 252, 278–88 Shimomura Kanzan 470, 482, 487 Shimomura Ryōnosuke 510–11 Shinoda Masahiro 363 Shinran 375 Sidotti Giovanni Battista 156, 157

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF J.THOMAS RIMER

Signac, Paul 429 Sinclair, Upton 189 Sondheim, Stephen 234 Song Di 486 Sophocles 201, 209 Spencer, Herbert 448 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 178, 179, 182, 184, 246, 248, 250 Stein, Gertrude 421 Steiner, George 132 Stendhal 199, 391 Stoppard, Tom 278 Strauss, Richard 240 Stravinsky, Igor 86, 308, 387 Strindberg, August 101, 105, 161, 178, 244, 259, 375 Sadayacco [Sadako] [Sadayakko] 165, 223, 224, 226 Sugiyama Yasushi 504 Sutherland, Graham 493 Suzuki Osamu 491 Suzuki Tadashi 238, 253, 261, 268, 271, 272, 279, 392 Taira Atsumori 85 Taira Kiyomori 488 Taira Koremori 488 Takahashi Mutsumaro 310 Takahashi Yuichi 414 Takamatsu Jirō 74, 75 Takami Jun 243 Takamura Kōtarō 68, 69, 359, 426, 440, 442, 443, 444, 445, 478, 482, 522 Takamura Kōun 478 Takayama Chogyū 398 Takayama Tatsuo 504, 505 Takeda Taijun 390 Takeuchi Seihō 470, 472, 480, 481, 482, 494, 519 Taki Katei 476 Taki Seiichi 476 Takizawa Bakin 240, 542 Tamaki Suekazu 489 Tamura Ryūichi 64 Tanabe Hajime 377 Tanaka Chikao 137–160, 163, 172, 207, 213 Tanaka Kyokichi 57 Tani Bunchō 460 Tanikawa Shuntarō 70 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō 81, 173, 174, 175, 189, 261, 346, 384, 390, 391, 458 T’ao Hung-ching 91 T’ao Yüan-ming 87, 92

429

Tapié, Michel 507, 508, 510 Taymor, Julie 238 Tayama Katai 246 Terayama Shūji 279 Terry, Ellen 224 Teshigahara Hiroshi 364 Thomas, Dylan 279, 286 Titian 433 Tobey, Mark 507, 514 Tokuda Shūsei 489 Tokugawa Hidetada 29 Tokugawa Ieyasu 28, 84, 85, 167 Toller, Ernst 182 Tolstoy, Leo 177, 181, 185, 375, 380, 392, 400, 401, 404, 425 Tomioka Tessai 460, 470 Tomita Keisen 480 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 431 Toyoda Shirō 363 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 28, 84, 167 Tretyakov, Sergei 183 Tsubota Masahiko 73 Tsubouchi Shōyō 167, 176, 187, 189, 195, 245, 257–67, 273, 309, 543 Tsuji Kakō 490 Tsuchida Bakusen 471, 482, 483, 491 Tsujimura Sumie 139 Tu Fu 92 Turgenev, Ivan 110, 344, Turner, Victor 305, 306 Twain, Mark 421 Uchimura Kanzō 399, 402 Uda Tekison 503 Ueda Akinari 113, 357 Ueda Bin 424, 522 Umehara Ryūzaburō 388, 418, 420, 426, 430, 432, 433, 435, 450, 452, 456, 458, 460, 522, 527 Uemura Shōen 493, 494 Ujo Kōji 458 Uragami Gyokudō 460 Utaemon see Nakamura Utaemon VI Utagawa Kunisada 64 Utrillo 451 Vaihinger, Hans 118 Van Eyck, Jan 484 Van Gogh, Vincent 222, 425, 430, 447, 450, 483, 509, 528

430

NAME INDEX

Velàzquez 432, 433, 436 Verdi, Giuseppe 24 Verlaine, Paul 54, 308, 423 Vildrac, Charles 139, 181, 182 Vlaminck, Maurice 429, 451m 453 Voltaire 101 Villa-Lobos, Heitor 421 Waley, Arthur 43, 230, 309, 339, 345, 360, 361 Wang An-shih 90 Warhol, Andy 97 Watanabe Kazan 412 Watsuji Tetsurō 132, 261, 264, 383, 403, 446, 478, 487 Wharton, Edith 421 Wedekind, Frank 177, 247 Weill, Kurt 230 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 222 Whitman, Walt 218 Wilde, Oscar 166 Wilder, Thornton 194, 212 Williams, Tennessee 212, 272, 268 Williams, William Carlos 391 Wilson, Robert 238 Windelband, Wilhelm 369 Wöfflin, Heinrich 448 Wolff, Kurt 395 Worth, Irene 234 Xavier, St. Francis 216 Yamaguchi Hōshun 503 Yamaguchi Kayō 496, 497 Yamamoto Hōsui 414 Yamamoto Kyūjin 513 Yamamoto Shunkyo 470, 472, 480, 482 Yamamoto Yūzō 173 Yamashita Shintarō 420, 430, 437, 445, 456 Yamazaki Masakazu 23, 27, 47, 194–214, 392 Yanagita Kunio 246, 472 Yashiro Seiichi 208 Yashiro Yukio 447 Yasuda Yukihiko 486, 489, 495, 499 Yasui Sōtarō 418, 420, 431, 435, 450, 452, 456, 458, 522 Yeats, William Butler 97, 228, 254, 362 Yokomitsu Riichi 292, 296, 422, 491 Yokoyama Misao 500, 511, 512, 513, 514, 519 Yokoyama Taikan 416, 470, 480, 481, 486, 487, 493, 498, 499 Yonekawa Masao 245, 265

Yorozu Tetsugorō 416, 421, 438, 443, 451, 455, 458, 460, 463 Yosa Buson 53, 536, 538 Yoshida Hiroshi 58, 59 Yoshida Kenkō 89, 313, 318 Yoshida Tōgo 41 Yoshii Isamu 175 Yoshimochi 40 Yoshinori 40 Yoshioka Minoru 62, 63, 77 Yuan Hung-tao 92 Zeami Motokiyo 11, 12, 23, 24, 25, 28, 34, 37, 39–47, 201 Zempō 28