Fate, Nature, and Literary Form: The Politics of the Tragic in Japanese Literature 9781644690697

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FATE, NATURE, AND LITERARY FORM The Politics of the Tragic in Japanese Literature

Studies in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History Series Editor Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary, University of London)

FATE, NATURE, AND LITERARY FORM The Politics of the Tragic in Japanese Literature

KINYA NISHI

Boston 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nishi, Kin’ya, 1968- author. Title: Fate, nature, and literary form : the politics of the tragic in Japanese literature / Kinya Nishi. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2020. | Series: Studies in comparative literatures and intellectual history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020003258 (print) | LCCN 2020003259 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644690680 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644690697 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Tragic, The, in literature. | Japanese literature—History and criticism. | Literary form—History—19th century. | Literary form— History—20th century. | Modernism (Literature)—Japan. Classification: LCC PL721.T68 N57 2020 (print) | LCC PL721.T68 (ebook) | DDC 895.609/162—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003258 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003259 Copyright © 2020 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-64469-068-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-64469-069-7 (adobe pdf) Book design by Kryon Publishing Services (P) Ltd. Cover design by Ivan Grave. Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon St. Brookline, MA 02446 [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Table of Contents Acknowledgements vi A Note on Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Names vii Preface viii Part One—The Historical Development of the Tragic in Japanese Literature Chapter 1: Approaching the Idea of Tragedy in the Non-West Chapter 2: Tragic Dramaturgy in Classical Japanese Theater A. Zeami B.  Chikamatsu Monzaemon Chapter 3: Tragic Individualism in Modern Japanese Fiction A.  Natsume Sōseki B.  Ōe Kenzaburō

3 14 14 24 34 34 43

Part Two—The Dialectics of Nature in Japanese Intellectual History Chapter 4: The Dilemma of Multicultural Aesthetics Chapter 5: Japanese Modernity and the Cultural Configuration of Nature A.  Naturalism and National Identity B.  From Protest to Conformism C.  The Return of the Mother in Postwar Criticism

55 65 67 76 84

Part Three—Social Crisis and Literary Form Chapter 6: Matsuo Basho¯’s Realism Chapter 7: Hiroshima and the Poetics of Death Chapter 8: Narrative after Fukushima

97 109 126

Bibliography 135 Index of Names 143 Index of Subjects 147

Acknowledgements

I

  am deeply indebted to Gerald Cipriani for his friendship and support over nearly two decades. Some chapters of this volume have developed from papers presented at open discussions that he organized and kindly invited me to. Galin Tihanov has been extremely generous in offering me invaluable advice full of fresh insights and expertise since my research leave in London from 2013 to 2014. To Reza Tavakol, a prominent cosmologist, I am above all grateful for many inspirational conversations that always gave me the sheer delight of thinking across boundaries between academic fields. I am especially grateful to David Miller for cordially inviting me to give a talk at Manchester Metropolitan University under the sponsorship of the Daiwa Foundation. Thanks are also due to publishers for allowing use of the following materials: Parts of chapters 1 and 6 appeared as “A Multicultural Approach to the Idea of Tragedy” in Culture and Dialogue 1, no. 1 (2011) and as “Basho as a Post-Pastoral Poet” in Culture and Dialogue 5, no. 1 (2017). An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared as “A Postmodern Hiroshima?: Trauma, History, and Poetic Language in Modern Japan” in Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 6, nos. 1–2 (2017). Writing a book in English while working for a Japanese university was an enormous challenge. All my colleagues at Konan University deserve my deepest gratitude for their continued support. Lastly, I would like to thank Emi Nishi for her encouragement while this book was being written.

A Note on Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Names

T

hroughout the running text, I have followed the East Asian convention in which the family name precedes the given name. This rule is reversed, however, in all bibliographical information, including that in footnotes, where the names are rendered in Western order. Also by convention, poets and writers are referred to by pseudonym rather than by family name, most notably in the cases of Sōseki and Bashō.

Preface

T

ragedy is a dramatization of human fate. Whether the word “tragic” is used to describe disastrous incidents in real life or refers to a group of theatrical pieces dramatizing the fatal calamity of the protagonist, it signals horrifying events such as despair, loss, and death. But as the tragic is a matter of dramatization, namely a matter concerning the representation of human experience through a particular structure, it invites the audience to reflect upon the meaning of past events by organizing them into a narrative plot. One of the many issues that Aristotle addresses in his Poetics is how a poet should stage what has happened to an individual in order to achieve a powerful tragic effect. “The plot,” Aristotle argues, “should be constructed in such a way that, even without seeing it, anyone who hears the events which occur shudders and feels pity at what happens.”1 And the concepts that he formulated—such as “mimesis,” “error,” and “katharsis”—have had great significant influence on both tragic theory and creative practice throughout European history. But one might immediately want to call into question the universal applicability of Aristotle’s account. In fact, one could contend, an understanding of the meaning of devastating experiences is heavily dependent upon social and historical context. And if this is true, each society should be entitled to have its own style of imagining human fate, which can be radically different from other cultural traditions. Indeed, there is a good deal of academic research based on this premise that explores minor cultural traditions of tragic art and their differences from Western tradition through a comparative method.2 Persuasive as such an approach may seem, this multiculturalist stance is not the direct inspiration for the present study. Of course, it would be out of the question to 1 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 22. 2 To take only one recent example, see Lourens Minnema, Tragic Views of the Human Condition: Cross-Cultural Comparisons between Views of Human Nature in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy and the Mahābharāta and Bhagavadgītā (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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propose the European model of tragic literature as the singular norm of this genre. Yet it would be equally inappropriate to stress the essence of a given non-European tradition as the fixed “other” of European civilization. I will base my argument, instead, on a broader sociopolitical definition of tragic art that regards the impact of cultural transformations as integral to the tragic understanding of human experience. Linking tragic literature with changing cultural conventions and social institutions offers the most feasible clarification of tragic art. It helps, among other things, to regard tragedy as a presentation of an experienced “gap” in a specific sociohistorical context. Jean-Pierre Vernant, one of the most celebrated theorists of tragic literature, claimed that the tragic sense is located in a “border zone” between the old and new meanings of human action. “The tragic turning point,” he writes, “occurs when a gap develops at the heart of the social experience.”3 According to Vernant, conditions for the creation of tragic literature are favorable when the size of this gap is neither too wide nor too narrow. It should be reasonably wide so that legal and political thought on the one hand and mythical and heroic traditions on the other oppose each other, but it should also be narrow enough to suggest that the conflict of values is still painful and so that the clash of interests can be framed in a consistent narrative. From this viewpoint, the massive social changes that occurred in ancient Greece between the time of Solon and Plutarch created a remarkably promising environment for nurturing tragic drama, which explains in part why this particular period was a high point in the history of tragic art. Raymond Williams is another influential theorist of tragic literature who emphasizes the conflict between old and new values in the historical setting of tragedy. Like Vernant, Williams considers the period of “historical transition” to be a particularly advantageous condition for tragic creation. The varieties of tragic experience, he argues, are “to be interpreted by reference to . . . changing conventions and institutions.”4 Each work of tragic literature, therefore, can be seen as an eloquent and sobering embodiment of the friction between the well-established beliefs of a culture and the moral convictions that the tragic protagonist deeply holds. This incompatibility between old and new codes of

3 4

Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 27. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006), 69.

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behavior inevitably puts the tragic hero(ine) in a position that has never been experienced in the society in question: [T]ragedy seems to occur, neither in periods of real stability, nor in periods of open and decisive conflict. Its most common historical setting is the period preceding the substantial breakdown and transformation of an important culture. Its condition is the real tension between old and new: between received beliefs, embodied in institutions and responses, and newly and vividly experienced contradictions and possibilities.5

If certain established beliefs are simultaneously still active and deeply questioned, Williams continues, “the common process of dramatizing and resolving disorders and sufferings is intensified to the level which can be most readily recognized as tragedy.”6 Given that each cultural tradition, at stages of historical transition, has its own ways of imagining the incongruity between the institutionalized worldview and newly acquired personal sense of reality, and that this incongruity drives a dramatist to conceive a powerful tragic plot, then it is reasonable to believe that cultural transformation is a constitutive dimension of the tragic itself which, in the West and the non-West alike, has prompted the progress of this genre since its earliest stage up until today. This approach to the tragic as a form of representing historical tensions will enable us to reevaluate the Western tradition of tragic drama as well as that in the non-West. To be sure, the literary form that has been elaborated within European tradition might not be the only possible way of putting the incongruity of values on stage. Yet it may well be one of the most sophisticated dramatic genres that the human race has invented, for the simple reason that an exceptionally complex and productive interaction between different social groups has emerged around the geographical area called Europe—or, more precisely, the Mediterranean. To admit this is not necessarily to succumb to Eurocentrism; it may well just acknowledge that the great tradition of tragic art can, at least partially, result from contingent factors such as geographical advantage rather than from the moral or cultural superiority of European civilization. It is in line with this focus upon cultural transformation inside tragic drama that I will analyze, in part one of this study, four texts of Japanese tragic literature—the nō play Semimaru, the jōruri play Sinjū Ten no Amijima, Sōseki’s 5 6

Ibid., 77–78. Ibid., 78.

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Kokoro, and Ōe Kenzaburō’s novels in the 1990s—from both the premodern tradition and the modern era. If we look at the general history of medieval and early modern Japanese literature, there is a rich tradition of storytelling that represents highborn heroes suffering calamitous falls. Although these stories may seem somewhat different from European tragic narratives, they still fit into the category of tragedy due to the fact that the suffering of the protagonists is framed as a historically specific tension of values. And in the case of modern Japanese literature since the late nineteenth century, when the nation set out on the path of comprehensive modernization, the tragic quality of much writing becomes even more readily intelligible.7 On the other hand, though, one may assert that virtually every work in the history of Japanese literature can be seen as more or less tragic because Japan’s history consists of a continual interplay of cultures which have constantly compelled the nation to struggle with conflicting human values. Indeed, the ideas that have had the most profound impact on Japanese culture have always been imported—mostly from Korea and China in ancient and medieval times, and from the West after modernization. Every time a new system of values or beliefs has arrived, people have experienced considerable difficulties in digesting its potency. As a result, from the earliest poetical and narrative works, such as Tales of Ise or The Tale of Genji, through modern novels and poems written by authors with Christian or Marxist commitments, there is hardly any literature which does not betray a sense of bewilderment at some incompatibility between old and new codes of conduct. Rather than attempting to offer an exhaustive account of the development of tragedy throughout Japanese history, then, I have selected only four texts and for two reasons. First, I intend to bring into focus moments of remarkable social transition in which “beliefs can be both active and deeply questioned,” as Williams would have put it. Each of the historical periods that produced the four tragic works discussed—the Muromachi period, the late Edo period, the early Meiji period, and our own epoch (that is, after 1995)—experienced seismic religious, economic, political, and social change, during which the various incongruities between conventional values and newly emergent 7

As the equivalent of the English word “tragedy,” modern Japanese has the word higeki, which is apparently translated from the Chinese word beiju. (In both Japanese and Chinese, the term is a compound of characters with the meaning of “sad” and “drama”) Like its European counterpart, the word higeki can be used to describe terrible events with devastating emotional power in real life, as well as to refer to classical theatrical work from Aeschylus through Brecht.

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individual worldview became remarkably sharp, and which in turn provided excellent historical conditions for tragic creation. More importantly, though, I should emphasize that my essential concern here is not only with a historical survey of the cultural phenomenon called tragedy, but with a more theoretical investigation into literary creation in relation to intellectual history, especially to the perception of human fate under shifting cultural conditions. Furthermore, the critical readings of the four quintessential tragic works will reveal that, throughout the history of Japanese literature, tragic events have been constantly understood in terms of a peculiar logic governing around the idea of “nature.” Repeatedly, the protagonist of a tragic narrative has to endure exile, suicide, or execution, as if they find it more “natural” to accept their own cruel fate rather than attempt to change reality. The intense beauty that the audience experiences in appreciating this “natural” submission to destiny has often been interpreted as a reflection of a central feature of Japanese aesthetics. Indeed, entrenched over millennia by Buddhism and Confucianism, such passive acceptance of savage fate may have shaped broader cultural conventions, and is still palpable in the modern literary tradition of naturalism. Not surprisingly, the great majority of writers have cherished this age-old formula, enabling a work to defuse the tension between old and new values and to strengthen the established mode of feeling. However, the four tragic texts I have selected also highlight historical discontinuity, as the artist opposes institutionalized “natural” modes of thinking by molding them into a convincing tragic conflict. It is relevant in this connection to note that an encounter between different cultures may not simply be random crossbreeding without any sense of direction. Williams’s account of tragedy suggests that periods of historical transition (which encourage the production of great tragic art) are not simply times of active cultural hybridization, but are fertile moments at which to search for moral ideals. As Aristotle argues, tragedy should be regarded not just as the representation of fall and disgrace, but the “mimesis of an action that is admirable, complete, and possesses magnitude.”8 Tragic drama thus depicts the action of a person who possesses a distinct morality, and who is destined to suffer precisely because of his or her ethical resolution. In other words, tragic protagonists often steel themselves to endure the torments of reality because they are able to look beyond their cultural group’s narrow standards of behavior. From this perspective, tragic drama is far from simply culture-bound: its significance 8 Aristotle, Poetics, 10.

Preface

lies in its ability to break down the boundaries of cultural difference in search of more comprehensive ideals. To conceive of tragedy as a collision between a particular cultural tradition and universal human ideals, however, would be unduly humanist. Such a perspective is apparently based on the outdated idea that a free individual is capable of conquering historical difficulties and demonstrating to the audience the real possibility of human emancipation. Indeed, one might argue that such an optimistic belief in human progress is exactly what tragic art is meant to disrupt. But it is crucial here to avoid the error of placing a creative work of imagination in a rigid dichotomy between universality and cultural diversity. Seen through in a proper historical lens, a tragic action motivated by comprehensive morality is to be regarded as a tentative venture, often merely a desperate attempt in times of cultural crisis. It would be reasonable to argue, therefore, that universal human values can supply the motivating force for the creation of a tragic plot, just because the hope of actually attaining said values is quite uncertain. Some of the recent debate on the theme of tragedy is intended as an intervention into an exaggerated pluralism inspired by the recent trend of cultural relativism or, more specifically, by postmodern theory. In the introduction to his formidable examination of the idea of tragedy, Terry Eagleton warns that “where tragedy is concerned, the question of universality cannot be sidestepped by a glib particularism.”9 Eagleton draws on the theory of Sebastiano Timpanaro to suggest that despite the left-historicist suspicion of universals, tragedies repeatedly deal with “love, aging, disease, fear of one’s own death and sorrow for the death of others, the brevity and frailty of human existence, the contrast between the weakness of humanity and the apparent infinity of the cosmos.”10 Even though there is a diffuse range of cultural styles in which human suffering is depicted, there are aspects of suffering that, according to Eagleton, “are also rooted in our species-being.” To the extent that these immutable human conditions are the vital components of tragic art, tragedy is particularly counter-relativist.11 A proper acknowledgement of this universal moment in tragic literature will spare us from the trouble of a simplistic attack on Eurocentrism. 9 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), xvi. 10 Ibid., xiii. 11 When Aristotle argued that poetry (unlike history) was “philosophical,” he had in mind that imaginative fiction “tends to express universals,” prompting the audience to reflect upon the most fundamental questions for every human being. See Aristotle, Poetics, 16.

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Indeed, once we stop eternalizing Japanese literary tradition as an exotic set of cultural practices, we will immediately recognize its obvious correspondence with European tradition. For example, the supposedly unique Japanese sense of nature seems to share with European literature “the tragedy of passive suffering,” which Williams perceived in European romanticism and naturalism.12 One could argue, by extension, that other non-European cultures may have gone through similar historical phases, which have been overlooked or overestimated due to the binary system of explanation in comparative method. Part of the purpose of my approach is therefore to open up a common ground for cultural dialogue beyond the scope of the conventional framework of comparative literature. It is surely tempting to portray a non-European literary tradition as “fundamentally different” from the European canon by expounding on aesthetic categories and notions that have been never used in Europe. In his rigorous study Don Juan East/West, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami offers detailed readings of premodern Japanese literary texts alongside Western models of love narrative in order to unmask the “myth,” “metaphysics,” and “disguised Eurocentrism” of Western comparative literature. But over the last two decades, while countless studies with similar ambitions have been published that interrogate the ideological use of universalism, many critics seem to have run to the opposite extreme. Now that notions of “diversity” and “difference” have founded a new critical orthodoxy around postmodern antifoundationalism, an admiration for non-Western cultural values that is itself stimulated by European deconstructionism looks very much ambiguous. With hindsight, then, it seems ironic that Yokota-Murakami’s argument sounds most incisive when he sounds least confident: [My book] was meant to be an attempt to compare conceptions of sexuality from which, so I presumed, both Don Juan and iro-otoko [that is, (Edo) the Japanese dandy] have sprung. Although I am now problematizing this kind of a universalist proposition, I have retained, in the title of this book, the sense of comparison (Western Don Juan and Eastern Don Juan) in order to show that I was, and still am, embedded in the paradigm that the above-mentioned epistemological break [namely, the rearrange-

12 On the “mechanical” treatment of human fate, Williams writes, “suffering is passive because man can only endure and can never really change his world.” Williams, Modern Tragedy, 94.

Preface ment of sexuality according to a Western model] involved, and that I can problematize it only from within, in an awkward, limited manner.13

As this perceptive comment suggests, it would be detrimental for a comparative reading to both place its own theoretical position simplistically outside the range of universal applicability and to credulously embrace a universalist creed that suppresses cultural diversity. A study of non-European cultural traditions needs, instead, a carefully balanced approach that is both inclusive and comprehensive. And such premise applies particularly to the analysis of tragic literature, which requires close attention both to the specific tension between a cultural tradition and a wider picture of human progress. All this helps us set out a more cogent reason why a multiculturalist stance cannot serve as the central guiding principle for this study. It is all the more important, as part of my concern is to illuminate contemporary controversies over cultural diversity by locating them in the theoretical framework of tragic conflict. Indeed, the theoretical dilemma between the despotic rule of universalism and the chaotic state of cultural relativism is one of the most demanding predicaments of our own time—and one to which our intellect is largely confined. This critical awareness sets the stage for the discussions in part two and part three, where I reconsider modern Japanese intellectual history and a series of creative literary practices. Part two is directly engaged with cross-examining the logic of culture in modern Japanese discourse. In many ways, though, it is a continuation of part one’s study of tragic art, since what I will examine in this section are the ways in which some key notions such as “culture,” “nature,” “nation,” the “past,” and the “female” are deployed to shape a particular sense of collective identity—an identity that thereby prompts people to respond (or conform) to the historical situation of their own time. One thing that is striking about the configuration of cultural identity in modern Japan is that the notion of culture has played two contrasting roles depending on historical circumstances. Once used as an icon of the healthy critique of a uniform standard in favor of plurality, the word “culture” was turned to a rather exclusive and oppressive symbol of the cult of national identity. But it is equally important to note that such a dramatic reversal in the implication of the idea of culture is, again, modeled on the logic of European romanticism that, in its hostility toward modern industries and 13 Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, Don Juan East/West: On the Problematics of Comparative Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 110.

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Enlightenment rationality, urges modern subjects to identify with organic communities that are closely united by natural bonds. The strong similarity between this ideological configuration of cultural identity as antirational (which eventually led the nation to fascism in the early twentieth century) on the one hand, and the characterization of Japanese cultural tradition as the “other” of European civilization on the other gives us another reason to pay critical attention to contemporary discursive practice. Such critical reconsideration is not an easy task, mainly because theoretical developments in the late twentieth century are still too deeply embedded in our ways of thinking to be analyzed objectively. There are dozens of excellent historical studies about the introduction of European thought in Meiji Japan, and also about the local discursive formation that followed, but scarcely any attention has been paid to the second, analogous historical process in the late twentieth century.14 To be sure, theoretical approaches developed in this latter period have made valuable contributions to contemporary theory as a whole, especially in terms of challenging the plausibility of an absolute ground. Nonetheless, as the major principle of the dominant frame of thought has shifted from “progress” to “diversity,” the stress on difference has become more and more dogmatic, showing a sinister resemblance, as some Marxist critics have been quick to point out,15 to the global market—where cultural commodities never attract attention without producing exotic flavor. Notably in contemporary Japan, where critics and scholars tend to lack a dialectical perspective, intellectuals seem remarkably uninformed about the fact that praise of “difference” can itself be a uniform standard. A recurrent theme in this study, accordingly, is how one should reassess the gains and losses of post-70s theory. As anti-universalist arguments rightly 14 This pattern of discursive formation can be easily grasped because, curiously enough, the process was apparently repeated. Modern Japanese literary and intellectual history followed this track over the period leading up to the Pacific War, and did so once more after the war from the late 1960s until today. In both cases, the discursive formation seemed to be driven by a collaboration between a domestic ideology (nationalistic drive) and a global “sea change” in the structure of thinking. 15 For critical interventions in English-speaking countries, see, to list only the major works, Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997); idem, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London; New York: Verso, 1998); Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989).

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noticed decades ago, it is humiliating for a cultural minority to be impelled to conform to a fixed standard decided by a dominant culture. But it is equally humiliating to be impelled to demonstrate only cultural differences, as if minor cultures are eternally out of touch with the historical progression of mankind. I have little doubt, then, that the reassessment of supposedly untenable ideas such as universality, rationality, solidarity, and so forth is imperative, not least in order to make dialogue between modernity and postmodernity productive again. If the critical undertakings that older liberals embarked upon half a century ago have been long abandoned, such visions ought to be taken up again. This is the reason why, in my readings of Japanese literature, I will intentionally try to make the most of seemingly “outdated” models of reading (proposed, in many cases, by Marxist theoreticians) rather than supporting more “nuanced” readings inspired by contemporary theories such as semiotics and post-structuralism. Once more, though, what matters is not discrediting the gains of pluralism, but striking the right balance between cultural pluralism and universal values. The same premise persists in part three, where I resume the exploration of Japanese literary history to examine the significant link between cultural practice and perceptions of historical reality. Three sections in this part turn to poetic works from different periods—Bashō’s haiku, realist war poems, and Ōe Kenzaburō’s latest piece—to explore the ways in which our reconsideration of Japanese cultural transformation fits into contemporary critical discourse, especially those theories which employ such key terms as the “pastoral,” “trauma,” and “narrative.” Again, my interpretations will add new layers to our study of tragedy, because even when these artists are not directly engaged in creating tragic narrative plots, they are manifestly struggling to fashion a new literary form, thereby challenging conventional ways of imagining historical reality as “destiny.” In my view, works created by great realist poets and novelists constitute an alternative to traditional naturalism, offering a new form of representation that depicts nature as a register of historical contradictions rather than as an unchanging background that corroborates seemingly timeless and harmonious human values. The book concludes with a brief remark describing how such ingenious literary creations can practically anticipate a new image of human relations to come. For those readers who expect to discover a unique sensibility in the Japanese tradition of tragic art that is completely different from the Western narrative tradition, this book will be a disappointment. The ambition of this book is, instead, to concentrate on cultural changes in non-Western traditions

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and focus on the contradictions during particular historical periods that have enabled men and women to strive towards human freedom in the future. Over a couple of decades, artistic traditions in the non-West that have searched for universal ideals have been generally underrated. This is partly because the acknowledgement of peripheral cultures has been predominantly promoted by an anti-essentialist impulse. Despite their good intentions, “critical” theorists have tended to take peripheral cultures out of historical context and label them an abstract “other.” Conservative critics in the West do not hold non-Western universalism in high regard either, since they dismiss it as a copy of European Enlightenment thought. Both of these misguided positions are based on the same presumption: that non-Western cultures have no experience of historical transformation. The non-West, they seem to contend, is eternally trapped by an unchanging cultural essence—an idea strikingly similar to the notion that man dwells in the domain of pristine nature. This study will show that Japanese cultural tradition is far from self-sufficient, and that it is still in the process of constant enlargement in terms of social norms, religious faith, sexual politics, and so on. This book will also encourage the view that every culture— marginal and dominant alike—contributes to the improvement of common human values through its own historical struggle. Only by providing a boldly dialectical perspective that regards historical development as a dynamic interaction between diversity and progress can one read the signs of such struggle in authentic literary productions, and interpret them as part of the universal search for truly human relationships.

Part One The Historical Development of the Tragic in Japanese Literature

CHAPTER 1

Approaching the Idea of Tragedy in the Non-West

O

n the opening page of The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner famously declares: All men are aware of tragedy in life. But tragedy as a form of drama is not universal. Oriental art knows violence, grief, and the stroke of natural or contrived disaster; the Japanese theatre is full of ferocity and ceremonial death. But that representation of personal suffering and heroism which we call tragic drama is distinctive of the Western tradition.1

The case for the uniqueness of Western tragic art which Steiner presents here stands in refreshing contrast with the relativist position widely shared by cultural critics today. What Steiner claims is that tragic art has shaped a fundamental aspect of Western civilization, and that this literary tradition is distinctively European. The implication is clear: even though other cultural traditions may have developed artistic representations of the tragic, they cannot match the Greco-Christian legacy of tragic drama. In a similar vein, Helen Gardner regards tragedy as “a European phenomenon.” “Other civilizations,” she remarks, “do not seem to have felt the urge to isolate the dark side for contemplation and to find meaning in the chances, changes and disasters of mortal life.”2 This exclusive acknowledgement of tragic depth in the European tradition, which was prevalent just half a century ago, would seem outrageous by the standards of twenty-first-century cultural criticism. Indeed, in an attempt to dispute this attitude, C. A. Gerstle points to premodern Japan and proposes that there is 1 2

George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 3. Helen Gardner, Religion and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 94.

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PART ONE    The Historical Development of the Tragic in Japanese Literature

an equally sophisticated theatrical tradition in Japanese classical literature. If regarded as a total theatrical experience, he argues, Japanese classical drama in kabuki and nō theater presents remarkably similar principles to those found in Greek tragedy.3 Gerstle also draws attention to the conflict between self and other in bunraku, and submits that there the choice between passion and duty in the plot is no less humanistic than in Western drama. To be sure, it is arguable that every cultural tradition has its own conception of human fate. The Chinese idea of ming, for example, can be interpreted as a reward for individual actions given by an inscrutable supernatural power. The Indian doctrine of karma concerns the idea of fate too, as it suggests that present and future conditions of life have a causal link with past behaviors, therefore an individual is personally responsible for their own destiny. One has good reason, then, to believe that each culture has its own version of tragic art.4 But the trouble is that it is extremely difficult to do justice to the unique quality of tragic experience in such a variety of cultural traditions. In verifying the authenticity of non-Western art, we often resort to the notions such as “freedom,” “justice,” and “suffering” which have been elaborated in Europe. Even if we introduce local conceptions and aesthetic vocabularies in order to discuss the non-European sense of beauty, the ability of a specific piece of art to invite its audience to reflect upon questions relevant for every human being has to be taken into consideration. Once we are aware of the inherent difficulty of acknowledging cultural diversity in tragic art, though, it is noticeable that apparently opposing groups of critics—conservative defenders of European canon and liberal authors in search of more inclusive models—express an uneasiness about the universality of tragic art. Thus, let us start by looking at the striking similarity between Steiner’s and Gerstle’s premises. As its title implies, Steiner’s book is an attempt to demonstrate that tragedy has already lost its power as a creative literary form because the historical conditions for producing tragic drama have long ceased to exist. Tragedy, for Steiner, is a literary genre that peaked in Europe only once in its history, blooming around the seventeenth century and then withering during the course of modernization. One reason for this decline is the deterioration of language itself: modern words, Steiner maintains, are no longer

3 C. Andrew Gerstle, “The Concept of Tragedy in Japanese Drama,” Japan Review 1 (1990). 4 For an account of the contrast between Greek and Indian views on punishment in tragic action, see Minnema, Tragic Views of the Human Condition, 354.

CHAPTER 1    Approaching the Idea of Tragedy in the Non-West

charged with the power of revelation, no longer prepared to assume the burden of meaning that Dante, Montaigne, and Shakespeare gave them. Another reason for the “death” of tragic literature in modernity, for Steiner, is that the combination of Hellenic and Christian values that underpins the Western tradition of tragic art disappeared in the prolonged process of enlightenment. Christianity and Marxism, especially, are seen as two sets of ideas that are, in Steiner’s view, essentially “anti-tragic.” Eternal justice and final repose in God are firmly ensured for a Christian believer, whereas real tragedy occurs only when a tormented hero can no longer believe in God’s forgiveness. Certainly, the Passion of Christ is an event of unutterable suffering, but it is also a positive in that it reveals the love of God for humanity. By the same token, despair amounts to a mortal sin in the doctrine of Marxism. The Marxist creed is “naively optimistic,” Steiner claims, with its belief that the power of human reason is capable of mastering the natural world and liberating humanity. Like Christianity, Maxism admits that there will be calamities on the way to the total liberation of mankind. Yet the gravest sin is for a communist to give up hope in eventual historical triumph. On these grounds, Steiner concludes that tragedy has long been extinct, and is no less difficult to achieve in Europe than in other parts of the world. It is worth noting here that his nostalgia for the golden age of tragic creation is shared by Gerstle. In his account of postwar Japanese theater, Gerstle highlights the fundamental difference between modern individualism in contemporary theater and deep-rooted local traditions: Modern Japan, like the modern West, finds traditional conventional formality . . . stifling. Ideas, social criticism, and individual expression are the modern sacred pillars. Actors in Japan, however, must see themselves in contrast with living traditional theatre, which has tended to be viewed as repressively feudal.5

This idea of long-established tradition as honorable but being overpowered by modern individualism is closely linked to an emphasis on the irrational in both Steiner’s and Gerstle’s argument. Indeed, Steiner’s remarks are often strikingly Nietzschean, particularly when he sounds as though enchanted by tragic literature’s “daemonic energies.” Likewise, Gerstle’s account of Japanese theater generally emphasizes the overwhelming power of tragic beauty to transcend 5

Gerstle, “The Concept of Tragedy in Japanese Drama,” 58.

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all human activity. Gerstle goes so far as to say that “Japanese drama, though grounded firmly in Buddhism, finds a sense of tragedy closer to Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy.”6 It is notable, however, that in recognizing the ability of tragedy to reveal the unalterable human condition, both Steiner and Gerstle seem to disconnect literary works from the sociohistorical context which produced them. In Steiner’s view, tragic art offers irrefutable proof that improvement in society is merely illusory. “Tragic drama,” he writes, “tells us that the spheres of reason, order, and justice are terribly limited and that no progress in our science or technical resources will enlarge their relevance.”7 Similarly, Gerstle’s account of the Japanese tradition of tragedy contains numerous references to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, thereby stressing tragic theater’s ritual aspect rather than as a social and historical institution. By reducing the aesthetic experience of tragedy to something merely formal, though, he trivializes the concrete ethical import of tragic art—namely, the struggle of an individual living under specific historical circumstances. In effect, Steiner’s and Gerstle’s general views are predicated on a contrast between the eternal beauty of tragic art and mundane, unsettling reality, a contrast that Raymond Williams identifies as deeply ideological in Modern Tragedy. In opposition to Steiner’s account, Williams ventures to link the concept of tragedy to actual historical experience. If Steiner’s and Gerstle’s conceptualization of tragedy is significantly influenced by a Nietzschean counter-Enlightenment stance, Williams’s inspiration comes out of Hegel’s idea of tragedy, which is centered on “a conflict of ethical substance.”8 Unlike Steiner, Williams insists that tragedy cannot be separated from the use of the word “tragedy” to describe terrifying events in everyday life. Nor does he allow that the historical conditions for creating great tragic drama have been lost. On the contrary, the experience of conflict between the universal ideals held by an individual and the forces that stand to destroy him/her has actually sharpened in the modern era. What happened at the beginning of modernity, then, was not the death of tragedy but its secularization and transformation into “liberal tragedy.” Artists surely faced tremendous difficulty in remolding their experiences into tragic art. As their protagonists became more and more individualist, justice was taken to be increasingly abstract, and tragic resolution 6 Ibid., 65. 7 Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, 8. 8 Williams, Modern Tragedy, 55.

CHAPTER 1    Approaching the Idea of Tragedy in the Non-West

more complicated and less satisfactory.9 Tragic heroes were transformed into tragic victims, and “tragic deadlock” turned into “tragic stalemate.”10 Even so, there have been successful dramatizations of the “permanent contradictions” in modern society, and each of these works has an important place in the history of modern tragedy. Hence the extraordinary range of Williams’s critical scrutiny: Ibsen and Strindberg; Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams; Pirandello, Beckett, and Brecht; and even prose works by Tolstoy, Pasternak, D. H. Lawrence, and Albert Camus. For Hegel, as well as for Marxist critics like Williams who developed Hegel’s ideas, the essence of tragedy is in the collision of “equally justified powers.”11 It may be useful here to note the distinction that Hegel made between three types of collision. The first and most apparent of all is the conflict between the ethical values of the sovereign state and the natural ethical life of the family. In Sophocles’s Antigone, for instance, Antigone honors the bond of kinship, while Creon asserts state power over all aspects of life. And in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, there is a similar conflict when Agamemnon’s position as king compels him to sacrifice his own daughter. Significantly, Hegel suggests that such conflict can be found in every epoch and in a variety of cultures, whereas the other two types of collision, the kind that occurs between conscious and unconscious acts, and the one that pits individual action against human fate, are supposed to be more peculiar to Greek tragedy. In each case, Hegel observes, the contradiction within these conflicts must be annulled at the conclusion of the tragic plot: However justified the tragic character and his aim, however necessary the tragic collision, the third thing required is the tragic resolution of this conflict. By this means eternal justice is exercised on individuals and their aims in the sense that it restores the substance and unity of ethical life with the downfall of the individual who has disturbed its peace.12

Greek tragic dramas thus eventually present the conflict between “one-sided justifications” cancelled out in “the inner, undisturbed harmony” of chorus.13 9 Ibid., 56. 10 Ibid., 182. 11 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. Thomas Malcolm Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2:1213. 12 Ibid., 2:1197. 13 Ibid., 2:1215.

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The opponents in the tragic collision are brought to reconciliation, while suffering and misfortune end up in “the satisfaction of spirit.” Notably, though, the structural balance that Hegel struck in his explanation of tragic solution tilts in favor of rationality, in marked contrast with Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, introduces his own polarity—but, departing from Hegel, Nietzsche identifies the collision as between the theoretical and the tragic. Ultimately, in his model tragedy reveals a strong antagonism towards science and knowledge in general: If the tragedy of the ancients was diverted from its course by the dialectical impulse towards knowledge and scientific optimism, we might conclude from this that there is a never-ending struggle between the theoretical and the tragic philosophies. And only after the scientific spirit has been taken to its limits, and has been forced by the demonstration of those limits to renounce its claim to universal validity, can we hope for a rebirth of tragedy.14

Tragic drama here illustrates not just conflict between willful action and justice, but the wholesale disorder and irrationality of human existence. Tragedy, in Nietzsche’s postulation, is “an Apollonian embodiment of Dionysiac insight and powers”15 that reveals the helplessness of reason in the face of relentless destiny. The diametrical opposition between Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s conceptualization of tragedy makes it difficult to establish a comprehensive theory of tragic experience. According to the one camp of theorists, the tragic plot revolves around the conflict or tension between the noble ideal and the historical reality that tragic protagonists have to struggle with. The other camp sees the fall of tragic protagonists as an indication that any hope held by a highminded individual is an illusion. If the Hegelian theory is built on a belief in human capacity, the proponents of Nietzsche’s theory think of the tragic as an image of the overpowering force of human fate. But one thing we should notice here is the fact that the counter-rationalist defense of tragedy only functions as a critique of the “universal validity” of reason, and thus in a sense parasitic on the rationalizing account. 14 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Michael Tanner and Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 1993), 82. 15 Cited in Williams, Modern Tragedy, 61.

CHAPTER 1    Approaching the Idea of Tragedy in the Non-West

To be sure, if we look at recent cultural theory in general, it is striking that the counter-rationalist position has been far more responsive to non-European cultural traditions, as it largely considers “minor” cultures to be capable of dismantling the authority of Western values. Nonetheless, there are some problems in celebrating non-Western traditions for their power to discredit dominant Western rationalism. An obvious case can be made, for example, against the presumption that rationality is rooted in Europe, whereas non-Europe is the realm of non-rationality. Certainly, it is with a genuine concern for marginalized cultures that critics and historians have depicted non-Western traditions as viable alternatives to the troubled canon of Europe. Even so, such a simplistic critique of Western rationality often reinforces the stereotypical idea of the non-West that is strikingly flat and has no historical depth. As we have already discussed, Nietzsche’s theory has exerted an enormous impact on contemporary theory, propelling critics to offer a perspective that is alarmingly devoid of a sense of moral justice in a particular historical environment. Nietzschean critics are all in agreement that Hegel’s theory of tragedy, especially his notion of “eternal justice,” is far too optimistic.16 But we also have to remind ourselves that Hegel does not regard tragedy simply as a narrative with a happy ending. When he observes that tragedy affords a sense of reconciliation merely “by a glimpse of eternal justice,”17 the word “glimpse” seems to signal an emphasis on the uncertainty of justice. Even if tragic transgression is compensated for in the end by the establishment of a higher order, this can be interpreted as only one moment of the carefully constructed narrative plot in which a human agent is dragged to his or her downfall. If we turn now to the postwar debate about the Japanese tradition of storytelling, it is remarkable that a belief in historical progress has been undermined since the late 1960s, as critics and scholars have become suspicious of linear explanations of history that place the West at the center. As we will argue in chapter 5, cultural critics in the 1970s and 1980s took issue with allegedly Eurocentric ideologies, and pointed to premodern local cultural traditions that were assumed to be equivalent to, or even capable of surpassing, the dominant models of “rationalistic” Western modernity. In this discursive formation, Nietzschean theory of art offered a powerful inspiration for promoting the counter-rationalist case in favor of non-Western cultures.18 Presumably, we 16 See, for instance, Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 123–34. 17 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2:1198. 18 Seen in this light, Gerstle’s reevaluation of Japanese classical theater resonates with the

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should put this discursive transition in the wider context of global change in the perception of human history, in which the self-criticism of Western civilization penetrated the global academic and publishing industry. After this general trend was accepted among the non-Western intelligentsia, the critique of Western civilization appears to have become fundamentally ambiguous. Perhaps it is by recognizing this conundrum of cultural criticism that we can fully understand the significance of William’s conviction about the crucial relation between tragedy and the dynamic process of emancipation. His emphasis upon the link between tragic art and ordinary life can open up the possibility of establishing a cogent tragic theory which is required in our own time. In fact, tragic literature offers highly significant lessons in a present that is characterized by inequality, war, terrorism, climate change, and so forth, while critical inquiries into cultural phenomena seem incapable of offering a practical method to change reality. What is more, the dialectical approach of a Marxian sort proves itself to be “multicultural” in the true sense of the word, for it does not take tragic art out of the concrete cultural conditions of living human beings.19 Rather, tragedy illustrates how men and women in specific cultural contexts are destined to fight for social transformation even at the risk of their lives, in despair or resignation, or with a sense of absurdity. Each modernizing society is a fertile ground for tragedy’s critical imagination in which our values are measured and tested by the action we take, rather than by the cultural achievements of the past. The concept of modern tragedy thus makes us better equipped to reflect upon the way in which so-called “local aesthetics” develop out of their particular cultural contexts and acquire universality. In chapters 2 and 3, I will explore the Japanese tradition of tragic creation by taking up four case studies and giving detailed accounts of tragic works from classical drama and modern fiction. A good starting point for such a project, one might think, would be Heike monogatari (The tale of Heike—an epic tale of the 1185 civil war) which is often cited as the first and most graphic example of tragedy in the history of Japanese literature. It depicts the downfall of the proud Heike clan and evokes a deep sense of the transience of this world. However, the structure of the moral conflict in Heike monogatari that drives its protagonists to cultural nationalism prevalent in 1980s Japan. 19 Terry Eagleton may appear exclusive when he states that “much of the philosophical stage-setting [of Japanese traditional theater]. . . would seem different from Western tragedy,” but he doesn’t dismiss the possibility that Japan can develop a sense of tragedy that is commensurable with the Western context.

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calamity does not appear fully developed yet. This may be because, in spite of its powerful moral import, there is no authorial viwepoint to frame the human predicament into a coherent narrative.20 Or, perhaps more importantly, it may be that the individualism that is indispensable for tragic creation is stifled by an overwhelming sense of mutability deeply rooted in the religious sentiment of Buddhism and Shintoism. One could argue, indeed, that it was the internalization of the new Buddhism throughout the Middle Ages that caused a fundamental change to the mindset of Japanese people. According to the historian Ienaga Saburō, this massive change in worldview during the medieval period allowed artists to conceive of reality as “negative,”21 (namely, as the negation of some higher values) which may have paved the way for tragic representations of the gap between moral ideals and historical reality. Nō drama created by Zeami (1363–1443), for example, is characterized by defiance of authority, a quintessential quality for a protagonist destined to succumb to a tragic fate. For this reason, I select Zeami’s dramaturgy and its modern interpretations as the initial case and then move on to jōruri theater in the late Edo period. The tragic tensions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan are often regarded as merely private, since they are depicted in stories of passionate love. But again, as I will argue in interpreting the jōruri pieces of Chikamastu Monzaemon (1653–1724), a sense of protest was already developing in the confident individualism of rising urban bourgeoisie. As Ienaga Saburō notes, it was not until Japan embraced European modernity that tragic literature evolved into “a medium that confronted the human spirit . . . willing to persist at the risk of perishing, while providing a worldview founded on the confrontation between a man and a great power.”22 Some of the most fruitful products of this encounter are found in the writing of Natsume Sōseki (1967–16), which delineates the ethical dilemma of the modern self in a convincing manner for the first time. I read his masterpiece, Kokoro, in which the narrator’s undecidedness between a fascination with newly introduced 20 The authors of Heike monogatari are unknown, and for this reason the work is sometimes categorized as a folk epic. 21 Ienaga draws a parallel between the introduction of Kamakura Buddhism in Japan and the Western (or Greco-Hellenistic) introduction of Christian (or Hebraic) thought. See Saburō Ienaga, “Nihon shisōshi ni okeru hitei no ronri no hattatsu” (The development of the logic of negation in Japanese intellectual history), in Ienaga Saburō shū. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997), 1:8. 22 Saburō Ienaga, “Sarugakunō no shisōshiteki kōsatsu” (An inquiry into nō theater in terms of intellectual history), in Ienaga Saburō shū, 11:199.

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ideas and respect for traditional values is articulated in a highly sophisticated narrative technique. Nearly a century after Sōseki’s tragic work, a comprehensive vision of Japanese society within the context of globalization is far more difficult to grasp. As early as in the time of the economic miracle of the 1960s, a widespread political apathy discredited political activism, while the nation gradually lost interest in tragedy in real life. A reluctance to recognize social contradictions, and the need to confront them, was further prompted by postmodern consumerism. The sense of powerlessness and the fragmentation of reality is well captured by the popular novels written by Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana. However, these fictions can hardly be characterized as tragic. In Murakami’s stories, for instance, politically charged subjects, such as military conflict in the Middle East and the radical democratic movements in Japan throughout the 1960s, are present; but they are only mentioned to defuse the novels’ tensions, leaving the reader with a vague feeling of guilt and loneliness. Perhaps only in the potent, even idiosyncratic, imaginations of some of the best writers— Ōe Kenzaburō (1935–), for example—is the historical situation viewed as a whole.23 Ironically, though, the faithful representation of society by serious contemporary novelists is not accepted as truly Japanese literature, whereas the mainstream output of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Mishima Yukio, and Kawabata Yasunari still enjoys continued popularity, partly because of its traditional subjective aesthetics. But as we shall confirm repeatedly, a truly significant tragic creation can be produced when an individual recognition of historical reality and an acute sense of suffering is integrated.24 By drawing a straight line within the modern tradition of tragic writing from Sōseki to Ōe, one is compelled to consider the demise of liberal idealism in modern Japanese literature. Put in this wide context, Ōe seems to be carrying on the task of the group of humanist writers, critical historians, journalists, and scholars who worked hard, in the 1950s, to reexamine the Japanese modernization.25 Such an enterprise was itself an inheritance from Sōseki’s art, but these 23 In 1986, Ōe drew an important distinction between the new literary trend, including Murakami, and the pre-1970 literature, especially early postwar writing, which had a great impact on him. 24 It is often pointed out that Ōe’s integrity and his awareness of ordinary people’s predicament were sharpened particularly by two of his experiences: one very private and the other very public—as the father of a brain-damaged child and as a public intellectual sympathetic to the mass movement against the US-Japan military alliance. 25 This generation includes critical historians like Ishimota Shō (1912–86), Ienaga Saburō (1913–2002), and Inoue Kiyoshi (1913–2001), through political scientists Maruyama

CHAPTER 1    Approaching the Idea of Tragedy in the Non-West

figures’ cosmopolitan outlook, their genuine respect for neighboring nations and for the general public, their creative vigor, and their determination to create a better society—hardly any of which is present significantly in cultural discourse nowadays—have surely disappeared since the post-Marxist turn in the late 1960s. Perhaps, though, Williams would have argued that this bleak state of affairs is exactly what modern tragic literature should address. Since this crisis is felt on a global scale, the universal ideal of tragedy will inspire Asians, Africans, and all those people who acknowledge the necessity and difficulty of transforming human relations. The immense pity and fear we experience at news of everyday tragedies or at great tragic drama, then, can be a painful— but uplifting—reminder that we are all in the permanent and truly inclusive process of building a common society.

Masao (1914–96) and Hidaka Rokurō (1916–2018), the journalist Muno Takeji (1915– 2016), literary critics Sugiura Minpei (1913–2001), Terada Tōru (1915–95), and Odagiri Hideo (1916–2000), music critic Yoshida Hidekazu (1913–2012), philosophers Kuno Osamu (1910–99) and Noda Matao (1910–2004), psychologist Minami Hiroshi (1914– 2001), scholar in Japanese literature Saigō Nobutsuna (1916–2008), musicologist Watanabe Mamoru (1915–2007), novelist Noma Hiroshi (1915–91), and dramatist Kinoshita Junji (1914–2001), all of whom were born in the second decade of the twentieth century.

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CHAPTER 2

Tragic Dramaturgy in Classical Japanese Theater A. Zeami

A

mong some 2,000 works of nō drama, probably not a single one has been more politically controversial than Semimaru. The story presents its main figure, Semimaru, as a blind orphan abandoned by his father, Emperor Daigo, and shows his sister, Sakagami, as a deranged wanderer. This “disrespectful” depiction of the imperial family offended the state authorities of imperial Japan in the first half of the twentieth century, prompting them to ban the performance of the play during the Pacific War. In the aftermath of the war, while postwar Japan’s “imperial democracy” was hotly debated, the accusation against the play dropped but the drama was largely ignored. In the late 1970s, however, Semimaru suddenly started to attract renewed attention. Literary critics, historians, and cultural theorists produced numerous papers and essays arguing that Semimaru had a profound capacity to reveal the universal structure of human mythology. This apparent reversal of attitude to the same literary work deserves close examination, as it represents a significant shift in the frame of mind through which modern Japanese intellectuals tried to make sense of historical reality by means of tragic drama. Semimaru, especially in its performance, has a strikingly surreal quality. The drama opens with the blind prince Semimaru travelling on foot with his bearers. Asked about the purpose of their journey, a servant reveals that they are carrying out the emperor’s order to escort Prince Semimaru to the Osaka Mountains where they are to abandon the disabled prince. Horrified by his father’s cruel decree, Semimaru tries to persuade himself to believe in his father’s affection for him. Eventually, left alone in a straw hut, Semimaru plucks the strings of his lute. In the second part, his elder sister Sakagami enters, with

CHAPTER 2    Tragic Dramaturgy in Classical Japanese Theater

strange “upside-down hair” (which her name literally refers to) and in shabby clothes, indicating that she is out of her mind. She scolds the children who jeer at her, then wanders up to the hut when the noble sound of the lute catches her ear. She knows her younger brother’s playing. Semimaru and Sakagami recognize each other and sob in each other’s arms, grieving over their awful lot. Presently, Sakagami decides to leave and walks away to wander forever. In part, such a dreamlike plot can be explained in terms of the general sublimity of nō theater, often characterized by the term yūgen.1 One of the most enduring ideals of Japanese aesthetics, yūgen certainly gives depth to the nō dramaturgy. Indeed, the theatrical experience of audiences in nō theater, which includes not only text and mime but also choruses, music, dance, and masks, pertains to the emotional aspect of characters rather than their action and behavior. It is also conventional in nō theater that there are only a few characters, one of them quietly vanishing after showing intense emotion. But even by the standard of this unworldly dramaturgy, Semimaru is remarkable for its enigmatic stillness. An abstract sense of emptiness overwhelms the audience throughout this puzzlingly anti-cathartic drama, as if the story is set “outside space or time,”2 as a critic described it. Scholars have little doubt that this play was written by Zeami (1363– 1443), who is probably the most influential actor, playwright, and theorist in the history of nō drama.3 And it is also certain that the plot of Semimaru, as with many other nō plays, is a mixture of several classical tales. One possible source for the story is Konjaku monogatari shū (c.1100), in which Semimaru is imagined as a blind lute player living near the Osaka Pass. This version of the story recounts that Semimaru, as an imperial musician, taught two rare pieces for the lute to the grandson of Emperor Daigo (r. 897–930). Heike monogatari (from the thirteenth century) also mentions Semimaru, yet describes him not as a court musician but as the fourth son of the Emperor Daigo. As for the other unusual figure, Sakagami, information regarding the source is scant. It is safely assumed that she is Zeami’s invention, yet one critic cites a story about a son of

1 2 3

Yūgen is a term traditionally used to describe ideal beauty. Since its introduction by Fujiwara Shunzei (1114–1204), the term has changed its meaning, yet its basic overtones were mysterious and deep. Royall Tyler, Japanese Nō Dramas (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 15–17. Zeami mentions the play in his essay “Sarugaku dangi” (The conversation on nō) and makes it clear that he had staged it himself. See Zeami, “Sarugaku dangi” in Nihon koten bungaku taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1961), 65: 525.

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Emperor Kanmu (r. 781–806), who was expelled from court to live in seclusion after having suffered from a mysterious disease called sakagami.4 Zeami’s arrangement of these materials gives us the impression that he is trying to make the fate of two central figures extremely cruel and agonizing. Not only are the two tragic stories of imperial offspring combined, but the play also depicts Semimaru as blind from birth (unlike in the Konjaku story, which discloses that Semimaru lost his sight while serving at court); was abandoned by his father’s order (again, unlike original stories where Semimaru chooses to live in the mountains); and, furthermore, that Semimaru was abandoned twice—by his father and then by his sister. One possible reason for this amplification of torment is that Zeami made an attempt to intensify the tragic effect to the extreme. The more heightened the characters’ suffering is, the sharper its contrast to the idea of a happy imperial family, and thus the more pitiful and moving the effect that can be achieved.5 Kōsai Tsutomu’s historicist study of this play provides another interpretation of the contrast between grotesquely painful fate and glorious imperial life in the past. Kōsai relates it to a story from the Taiheiki chronicle (ca. 1370), in which a Buddhist monk, on his Dante-like journey through purgatory, encounters Emperor Daigo, now suffering his own cruel punishment. Kōsai argues that the underlying aim of the author of Taiheiki is to attack imperial rule in favor of religious (that is, Buddhist) rule. If this is true, Kōsai goes on, Semimaru may have been written with the same intention.6 From this point of view, Zeami is making a political point: even people of the highest rank cannot resist the law of fate. It may also explain the reason for Zeami’s not following Konjaku monogatari shū but, rather, Heike monogatari in depicting Semimaru as the son (as opposed to the grandson) of Emperor Daigo, whose reign was generally regarded in Zeami’s time as a golden age. Thus, Zeami’s design is interpreted as an endeavor to accentuate the sense of human destiny. In support of this reading, the historian Ienaga Saburō foregrounds the subversive implication of Semimaru by placing it in the wider historical context 4

See Kōichirō Shinoda, “Tennōsei to nihongo: Nōgaku semimaru o megutte” (The emperorsystem and Japanese language: an essay on the nō piece Semimaru), Gendai no me 12, no. 9 (1976): 64–65. 5 Some scholars argue that the Japanese literary tradition of rejecting the established values of the political “center” can be traced back to the second half of the twelfth century. See Michael F. Marra, The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), chapter 3. 6 Tsutomu Kōsai, “Semimaru” (Semimaru), in Nō yō shinkō: Zeami ni terasu (Tokyo: Hinoki Shobō, 1972), 170. The article was originally published in 1962.

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of the new Buddhist movement. Introduced and developed by such Kamakura Buddhists as Shinran (1173–1262) and Nichiren (1222–82), this movement had a radical impact upon the mindset of medieval Japan, and was still very much active in Zeami’s time. In Ienaga’s account, a unique strand of metaphysical principle, according to which the Buddhist worldview is higher than imperial rule, can be discerned both in the spiritual leaders of Kamakura Temples and the founders of nō theater.7 Indeed, the link between radical religious movements and Zeami’s artistic creation can also be verified by the fact that nationalist policy in twentieth-century Japan suppressed Kamakura Buddhist literature as a whole, perceiving it as a threat to imperialist ideology.8 In practice, modern Japanese governments exercised control over traditional culture well before the military regime came to power. As Ienaga’s extensive study on nō censorship demonstrates, some traditional literature had already been banned since the Meiji period (1868–1912) mostly on the grounds of its “obscenity.” Yet as the nation was dragged into imperial war, state intervention increased. Nō performers were forced to collaborate with the Japanese government by making official remarks in support of the war.9 The imperialist government during the interwar period also banned certain plays on the basis of their “dangerous thought”;10 they issued the order to modify classical plays that “affront the dignity of the imperial family,” and commissioned a number of plays (with such titles as Yasukuni Orphans and A Guerrilla War) to mobilize nationalist sentiment among the populace. Predictably, Semimaru was one of the first targets of this government censorship. A 1934 decree denounced the play as “disrespectful,” which sparked debate about the treatment of the imperial family in nō theater. Then, around 1940, nō actors were pressured to “spontaneously refrain from” performing certain plays, including Semimaru (and Ōharagokō, for example, in which the 7 Saburō Ienaga, “Sarugakunō no shisōshiteki kōsatsu,” in Ienaga Saburō shū (1998), 11:59. While Ienaga’s study highlights the unorthodox aspects of Kamakura priests, other historians point to the importance of the kenmitsu (exo-esoteric) system, in which religious sects collaborate with power blocs. For a concise survey of recent historical studies on Kamakura Buddhist thought, see William E. Deal and Brian Douglas Ruppert, A Cultural History of Japanese Buddhism (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 115. 8 Ienaga, “Sarugakunō no shisōshiteki kōsatsu,” 107. 9 A statement by Kanze Sakon reads: “[W]e must dedicate ourselves to the feeling of deep gratitude we have for the many people on the field of battle, and it is our wish that those on the home front realize our true duty.” See Eric C. Rath, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 226. 10 Ibid., 15–17.

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main characters disguise themselves as the imperial family, and Teika, which depicts the burning love of a princess). In fact, it was difficult by this time to perform any nō play that represented the emperor, since acting as the emperor was in itself regarded as blasphemous. One cannot be sure, of course, whether the government authorities were provoked by Zeami’s “radical” thought. Emperors, after all, are treated with due respect in his other plays. But Semimaru seems to have a capacity to challenge the conventional worldview at another level, too. It was indeed the “philosophical” implication of Semimaru that suddenly started to attract critics almost three decades after the war. In the 1970s, scholars of European literature started to show an unusual interest in this drama and to analyze it through the lenses of comparative literature and cultural theory. And it is striking how in these new interpretations Sakagami’s behavior and language came to receive more attention than those of Semimaru. Tashiro Keiichirō, for example, argues that Sakagami’s monologue just after her arrival provides a vital clue to the interpretation of the play.11 Her observation about human destiny, according to Tashiro, is prompted by the recognition of the paradoxical nature of reality: Very well, you children, what are you laughing at? You think it funny, do you, the way my hair grows straight up? Yes, I suppose my hair growing up that way is funny. But talk about things being upside down, you little guttersnipes laughing at me are worse than my hair. How intriguing! My hair and your laughter become so well the realm of all we see. The seeds of flowers, buried in the earth, rise to tip the branches of a thousand trees; the moon aloft, radiant in the heavens, sinks to the bottom of ten thousand waters. Which of these is the right way up? Which is really upside down? Born a princess, I fell among the common folk; my hair, bristling skyward, is crowned with stars and frost. Right way up, upside down, 11 Keiichirō Tashiro, Kagekiyo to semimaru: Kotengeinō no ningenzō (Kagekiyo and Semimaru: Human figures in classical arts) (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankō Kai, 1979), 61–75. The original paper was published in 1973.

CHAPTER 2    Tragic Dramaturgy in Classical Japanese Theater things straight and things backwards; both are here, plain to see: intriguing!12

Within the framework of orthodox interpretation, these lines exemplify the paradoxical sayings of Zen Buddhism, which were designed to jolt a practitioner into sudden enlightenment—satori.13 Indeed, Sakagami’s speech can be seen as a variation of a passage from Muchū mondō (1339), a work by the Zen master Musō Soseki (1276–1351). But Tashiro claims that the passage requires a closer reading, since it offers an insight that surmounts the Buddhist worldview. It is important, according to Tashiro, to discern in Sakagami’s speech the principle of jun gyaku ichijo (the oneness between “things straight” and “things backwards”), which Tashiro maintains is the fundamental theme of the play. In her appearance and cruel fate, Sakagami symbolizes an overturning of all traditional values, such as the necessity of a hierarchical social order. Her ominous utterance, then, turns out to contain deep insight into the destiny of every human being as well as the destiny of the socially outcast (like herself and Semimaru). For Tashiro, this logic entails an emancipatory potential, even though the “freedom gained through this logic is nothing but an absolute solitude and anarchy.”14 In fact, what Tashiro has in mind here is nothing less than a Nietzschean call for a “revaluation of values.”15 Almost as intense as the German’s philosophy in its attraction to nihilism, Semimaru is revealed as a metaphysical undertaking based upon a dramatic reversal of values. If Tashiro’s account has an existentialist flavor, then Shinoda Kōichirō’s study is structuralist, as he fully mobilizes linguistics to expose the underlying significance of the play.16 Shinoda investigates Sakagami’s monologue by connecting its paradoxical logic with various forms of inversion in this play: the inversion of social status (the protagonists’ fall from imperial family to lowly people); the reversal of roles (technically, Semimaru is not the main character, even though the title of the drama is his name); and sexual perversion (the 12 Royall Tyler’s translation, except for the word “intriguing” for which Tyler uses “fascinating.” 13 Susan Matisoff sums up this drama by saying “the play seems to have as its theme a Zen paradox.” See Susan Matisoff, The Legend of Semimaru, Blind Musician of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 96. 14 Tashiro, Kagekiyo to semimaru: Kotengeinō no ningenzō, 73. 15 Tashiro dedicated his essay on Semimaru to a scholar whose main interest is Nietzsche’s philosophy. 16 Shinoda, “Tennōsei to nihongo: nōgaku semimaru o megutte.”

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conversation between Sakagami and Semimaru just before they part sounds as if they were lovers rather than siblings, thereby subtly implying violation of the taboo against incest). Shinoda then proceeds to extend this code of inversion to a fundamental logic of cultural and social formation that underlies the system of Japanese kingship (tennōsei), which he claims has been sustained by a similarly paradoxical combination of despotic rule by force and the inviolable sacred image of the emperor. The same principle is also detectable, according to Shinoda, in everyday talk among Japanese people, since conversation in Japanese language shows the constant changes between social roles (which sometimes contradict each other), by managing the complex system of honorific expressions. Shinoda’s essay, in its turn, intrigued Yamaguchi Masao, an influential cultural anthropologist who produced a series of studies on Semimaru and its relation to Japanese mythology. Yet Yamaguchi’s main interest is not in interpreting this particular drama, but in uncovering “the cultural formation in the cosmos of folklore, which will lead us to find out the aesthetic-mythic dimension of Japanese kingship.”17 He relates the double representation of Semimaru/Sakagami to the double deities in Japanese mythology (Susanoo/ Yamatotakeru), enumerating several narrative features—such as abnormality, banishment, and sacred origin—that are found in both stories. This narrative type is then summed up by the term kishuryūritan (the tragic cycle from vagabondage to kingship and back to vagabondage), a cycle epitomized in texts as diverse as Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. According to Yamaguchi, this is a basic narrative structure—one in which the socially marginal play an essential role in maintaining the center’s vitality; and in Japan, it is through the same narrative formation that the kingship system “tacitly influences the imagination of Japanese people.”18 The critical analyses of Semimaru carried out from these various perspectives seemed to open up paths for the rediscovery of cultural tradition by way of fresh and broader approaches to literary criticism. With no outright official intervention from government, Shinoda and Yamaguchi appeared to enjoy liberty in examining politically controversial texts suppressed for a long time, exposing the hidden tragic power of Zeami’s work. Even so, these reading strategies had their own ideological implication and caused some concerns among 17 Masao Yamaguchi, “Tennōsei no shinsō kōzō” (The underlying structure of the emperor-system), in Tennōsei no bunkajinruigaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000). The article was originally published in 1976. 18 Yamaguchi, “Tennōsei no shinsō kōzō,” 78.

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critical historians. Indeed, what the structuralists actually did was transplant Semimaru from its actual historical setting and insert it into the timeless model of Japanese tradition. Scholars such as Ienaga and Tsuda Hideo responded to this trend, contending that the study of cultural history in terms of “underlying structure” failed to grasp historical change and, as a consequence, tended to neglect the innovative elements of human society.19 True, there is little attention to social change in Yamaguchi’s study, since his methodology deduces from nō stories an unchanging essence underlying Japanese institutions from the mythical era through to today’s yakuza movies—as though Japanese culture is a homogeneous entity whose nature has not altered from prehistorical times to the present. This dehistoricization of classical literary texts is profoundly political when viewed against the background of postwar intellectual history. As critical commentators such as Peter N. Dale are quick to point out, the 1970s in Japan were preoccupied with an extremely narcissistic image of traditional values. Japan’s emergence as a global power and the rapid growth of consumerism allowed the nation to turn inward, leading to the belief that its own culture should have a respectable, traditional quality forever distinct from other nations.20 The explorations of Semimaru, when examined from the perspective of cultural anthropology, perfectly satisfied this need, as it combined the national pride of modern Japan with the ahistorical realm of Japanese mythology.21 Nowhere is this ideology more striking than in discussions of the extremely sensitive issue of the monarchy. And the structuralist readings of Semimaru were particularly convenient in this context because, by rendering the political entity of the emperor a purely neutral mythological agent, structuralism could legitimize the postwar imperial system, which remains controversial in political debate to this very day. Despite their prestige as “liberal” intellectuals, or precisely because of this appearance, Shinoda and Yamaguchi managed to consolidate the national myth, which shows an uncanny resemblance to the imperialist myth formation during the war.

19 See Hideo Tsuda, “Rekishigaku no hōhōron o megutte” (On the methodology of historical studies), Rekishigakuhyōron 341, September (1978). 20 For extended critical analysis of the discussions on the Japanese uniqueness in this period, see Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986). 21 It is by no means coincidental that Ienaga, who sought to explore the political implications of the play in its original historical context, is one of the most critical historians to fight against nationalist sentiment in his examination of the history of World War Two.

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Although interpreted by innovative discourses, Semimaru, once a most dangerous literary work for nationalist propaganda, has been reborn as a major vehicle for nostalgic identification with cultural essence at a time of peace and prosperity. How curious this radical reversal and continuity of its political function, “how intriguing!” as Sakagami would exclaim. At first glance, structuralist approaches to classical literature seem cosmopolitan and hardly nationalistic, since they adopt sophisticated European methods to compare the narrative structure of old Japanese stories with those of other (mainly European) literary works. In retrospect, however, their preoccupation with traditional culture that is eternally distinct from other societies betrays a rather narrow analytical scope. As an antidote to a symbolic interpretation, though, one may propose an allegorical reading of Semimaru. As discussed in chapter 1, a number of theorists have pointed out that tragic masterpieces tend to be created in periods of transition. In light of this theory, it is not difficult to explain why Semimaru counts as one of the most powerful tragic works in the Japanese canon. As Ienaga points out, Semimaru is a product of the radical transformation of thought in the Kamakura period. If that is so, underlying the renewed interest in Semimaru is the intellectual turmoil into which modernizing Japan was thrown. Indeed, we could point to a remarkable resemblance between the agony of the protagonists of this play and the anguish of modern Japanese intellectuals. Yet this parallel should not be interpreted symbolically (as cultural anthropologists would want to do), but allegorically.22 One would be tempted, accordingly, to interpret the agony of Semimaru and Sakagami as allegories of postwar Japan. Was the wretched nation, once imbued with the notion that the whole state was a single family with a divine emperor at its center, not abandoned in total despair and under dreadful conditions in the wake of World War Two? Were the people mysteriously obedient and submissive as in Semimaru in their willingness to discharge their “father” from moral responsibility? Was Japan to witness the “forward/backward” logic embodied in the economic miracle in which the 22 Articulating the difference between symbol and allegory, Paul de Man writes: “Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.” See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 207. An allegorical reading, in other words, is capable of preserving the sense of historical change.

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people, emancipated by the paradoxical logic of fate, could wander the field of national mythology? Given the intensity of the work itself, the tragic beauty of Semimaru seems well capable of disrupting symbolic interpretation. Of course, this sort of radical allegorization would have been rejected most violently by the national pride of the 1970s. But in our critical reconsideration of the play, such an alternative reading is cogent, as it will prevent us from nostalgic identification with the ahistorical realm and place us back into the enriched historical process. Another stimulating way of reading the paradoxical nature of Semimaru is to suggest that nō theater was a new genre invented in order to serve a new social function. As Michael Marra points out, nō theater provided its patrons— military leaders—with a means of imagining their authority and power. What Zeami set out to do, then, was to transform the popular religious narrative of sarugaku into an artform for warriors. According to Marra, The staging of nō plays on their behalf provides [military leaders] . . . with a doubly enriched cultural capital: mastery over refined aristocratic expression as developed within court circles as well as the power of the marginalized other—the so-called ‘low culture’—that aristocrats feared and upon which temples built their symbolic authority.”23

But even more extraordinary is the actual historical process through which this story has survived. As nō was gradually ritualized by official institutions during and after the Tokugawa period,24 the Semimaru legend was kept alive not only in the theater, but also through rural sekkyō narrators. Sekkyō preachers (or sekkyōshi)25 had enjoyed social status during the Heian (794–1185) and Kamakura (1185–1333) periods, but the Sekkyōshi of the late Muromachi (1392–1573) and Tokugawa (1600–1868) periods were living at the very 23 Michael F. Marra, Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 56. 24 Nose Asaji stresses that nō actors after the shōgun Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s (1573–98) unification prompted the warrior class’s need for ritual. See Asaji Nose, Nōgaku genryū kō (A study of the origin of nō) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1938), 1224. Eric Rath maintains that the origin of ritual theater should be sought in the combined effort of government, aristocrats, and scholars in the Muromachi period (Rath, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art, chapter 7). In any case, nō theater seems to have become the unlikely place where the social contradictions experienced by ordinary people is represented. 25 Originally a religious service explaining sutra, sekkyō became a secular performance in Muromachi times.

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margin of society. These nomadic, traveling entertainers disturbed the control of Tokugawa bureaucratic governments, wandering along pilgrim routes and performing poignant tales. And the fact that they were licensed by the Semimaru shrine, and that their identification documents were issued by the Chikamatsu temple, might have prompted a young Tokugawa entertainer to choose the penname “Chikamatsu” Monzaemon out of reverence to Semimaru.26 No one knows for sure whether this is true, but neither can one dispute Chikamatsu’s strong interest in Semimaru legend, since he did take up this tale to create his own five-act version of Semimaru.27 Written in 1692, the performance of the play was a great success in Osaka. Though set in the Heian period, Chikamatsu’s Semimaru is a love story about Prince Semimaru with three women, focused on private emotion and composed in a tight structure. It is particularly significant that Chikamatsu boldly removed Buddhist moral implications, capturing the agony of enlightened idealists through a new interest in human passion. As it did for other writers, the Semimaru legend empowered Chikamatsu to explore the tragedy that hovers around the conflict between a new social order and an old morality. But it required him to invent the new genre of sewamono (domestic plays or contemporary-life plays), portraying the everyday matter of his own time of Edo, to fully develop tragic power. In the next section, we will turn to his mature work, one of the most intricate sewamono plays.

B. Chikamatsu Monzaemon With its skillful dramatization and well-integrated plot, Shinjū ten no amijima (The Love Suicide at Amijima) is widely regarded as the finest example of sewamono written by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725).28 The story is about the doomed love between a married paper store owner, Jihei, and the prostitute 26 This speculation was made by historian and ethnologist Ikeda Yasaburō and supported by Suwa Haruo. See Yasaburō Ikeda, “Chikamatsu Monzaemon no seiritsu” (The foundation of Chikamatsu Monzaemon), in Ikeda Yasaburō chosakushū, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1979), 322–23. Haruo Suwa, Chikamatsu kinsei jōruri no kenkyū (A study of early modern jōruri in Chikamatsu) (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1974), 506–507. 27 Chikamatsu’s version of Semimaru is translated into English by Matisoff in part two of her The Legend of Semimaru, Blind Musician of Japan. For a detailed discussion of Chikamatsu’s Semimaru, see chapter 4 of C. Andrew Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 28 Jōruri (puppet theatre) plays in early modern Japan were divided into two categories: jidaimono (historic plays) and sewamono (domestic plays or contemporary-life plays).

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Koharu. As is suggested in the title, the lovers, having no hope of becoming a couple in this life, commit a double suicide in the closing scene. And because the play deals with the problem of human suffering and destiny in a profound manner, Amijima is often seen as a masterpiece of Japanese tragic drama. In this section, I will analyze the substance of this play and locate it in the context of a cultural transition in which the sense of justice is transformed through the aesthetic experience of tragic art. Soon after the curious eyes of Europeans fell on Japanese culture for the first time in the late nineteenth century, Chikamatsu’s works became central to the debate over whether traditional Japanese drama deserves the name of tragic art. W. G. Aston, a British ambassador to Japan in the Meiji era and the author of A History of Japanese Literature (1898), referred to Chikamatsu as Japan’s Shakespeare and made a comparison between the two dramatists. Aston first pointed out the similarity between Chikamatsu and Shakespeare (for instance, the “nonclassical” nature of both dramatists, the close connection between comedy and tragedy in their plays, and the fullest command of exalted and demotic language). Apparently, though, Aston did not take this affinity completely seriously. He dropped the parallel in the end and arrived at a predictable conclusion: [I]t is really idle to compare Shakespeare with a writer whose portraiture of character is rudimentary, whose incidents are outrageously extravagant and improbable, whose philosophy of life is wholly wanting in originality and depths, and who is constantly introducing scenes brutal and revolting to a degree inconceivable to the Western mind.29

Nearly a century after this rather patronizing assessment, Thomas Rimer introduced Western readers to Shinjū ten no amijima, making a more approving observation. It is remarkable that Rimer attributes to this play the basic components of tragic plot that have been employed in traditional criticism in the West— protagonists striving for happiness in an inhuman society, yet having to perish. Chikamatsu . . . allows his play to reach a level of real tragic grandeur. The two lovers have now come to realize that, within the limitations of their lives as defined for them by the rigid structures of their own society, in 29 W. G. Aston, A History of Japanese Literature (New York: D. Appleton and company, 1899), 279.

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PART ONE    The Historical Development of the Tragic in Japanese Literature which a neo-Confucian sense of obligation played such an important part, they can find no possibility of happiness together on earth. Only in death might they escape society and find each other out of time.30

Many commentators who discern tragic values in Chikamatsu’s sewamono emphasize these social and ethical conflicts in which protagonists find themselves. Indeed, Chikamatsu wrote his plays in the Genroku era (ca. 1680 to the 1740s), when the townspeople were trying hard to adjust themselves to a new social order under the rapid expansion of the market economy. Chikamatsu’s dramas, and notably Shinjū ten no amijima, brilliantly capture the contradictions within this transforming society. But the way in which Chikamatsu represents the tragic fall of his protagonists, namely the way in which contradictions are resolved, seems significantly different from the European tradition. One needs to look closer at the plot, though, before exploring this difference. In the opening scene of the play, the audience—knowing that Jihei and Koharu will eventually commit love suicide—unexpectedly hears a secret conversation between Koharu and a samurai guest, in which Koharu discloses her reluctance to die with Jihei. Not noticing that Jihei is eavesdropping on their conversation from behind a paper screen, Koharu asks the samurai to visit her more often to minimize the chance of suicide. Furious at his lover’s betrayal, Jihei tries to stab Koharu through the paper screen, only to be caught by the samurai, who turns out to be his elder brother, Magoemon. Worried about Jihei’s disreputable life, Magoemon has come to visit Koharu with the intention of splitting the lovers up. Jihei promises never to visit the pleasure quarter, bitterly disappointed by Koharu’s untruthfulness. Act two is set in Jihei’s store, which his aunt and brother are visiting. They have heard the rumor that Koharu is going to be ransomed, and come to make sure that it was not by Jihei. Jihei denies this, saying that he has severed relations with her. Even so, once his relatives have left, he cannot help weeping in grievance. His wife, Osan, aware of Jihei’s distress, and also fearful that Koharu might commit suicide after getting ransomed by another man, reveals her own secret to Jihei: she wrote a letter to Koharu asking to give up her relationship with Jihei to save his life (which made Koharu pretend to reject Jihei in act one). Osan admires Koharu for her self-sacrifice and compassion with “a fellow woman,” and states that it is now her own turn to save Koharu’s life by helping 30 J. Thomas Rimer, A Reader’s Guide to Japanese Literature (Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International, 1988), 75 (my emphasis).

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Jihei to redeem his lover. Osan offers her own clothes and suggests that Jihei pawn them for money, when her father bursts in, and finding Jihei leaving with Osan’s clothes, drags his daughter back home. Act three brings the lovers to their demise. Later that same night, Magoemon walks around the town with Jihei’s little boy, desperate to find his brother and dissuade him from committing suicide. But Jihei manages to evade them and meets Koharu. The lovers walk across the passage to Amijima, where they kill themselves in the belief that they will be reborn on the same lotus calyx in the Western Paradise. Chikamatu’s prowess as a playwright is evident in the play’s many dramaturgical devices. Especially impressive is the plot structure where there is no conversation between the main figures as true lovers until the concluding scene. In the final, supremely moving michiyuki passage, the lovers (in accordance with theatrical convention) walk to the place where they will commit suicide while looking back on their lives, touching on their feelings towards the familiar places and loved ones they are leaving behind, and lamenting the stifling social obligations that have afflicted them. Generally, the closing conversation of love suicide stories reaches its climax as the lovers avow that they are ready to devote their own lives to each other. But the final dialogue at Amijima is certainly richer than this. Particularly striking is Koharu’s mysteriously begging gesture toward death. Throughout the michiyuki scene, the figure of Koharu seems to symbolize their redemption in the afterlife, while Jihei is still drawn to this world. He tries hard to avoid looking in the direction of his own house since it inevitably reminds him of his children and wife, whereas Koharu encourages Jihei by speaking of the uplifting ideal of sacrifice (“If I may save mankind as I wish, I should like to protect prostitutes so that hereafter they will never commit suicide”). Koharu also presents a strangely dry, clear vision of death as the separation of body from soul when she insists that she and Jihei should choose different places to die lest the scene of their love suicide shocks Osan. Prompted by this suggestion, Jihei proposes leaving their bodies at symbolically different places and using different methods of killing themselves. He cuts his hair to resemble a Buddhist monk and, hurried by Koharu who has cut like a Buddhist nun, kills her and then himself, uttering a prayer: “Rebirth on the same lotus calyx. Praise Amida Buddha.” The marked difference between Jihei and Koharu raises the intriguing issue of gender stereotyping as masculinity represents reality and femininity symbolizes fatality and the afterlife. This binary also overlaps with the opposition between the Confucian ethics inculcated in official life and the Buddhist

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virtues that exist in common sentiment. In fact, although shinjū (love suicide) might be a dim reflection of the samurai tradition of hara-kiri, one should also be aware that shinjū is subtly different from hara-kiri in that double suicide was not a matter of obligation dictated by authority. It may be useful, also, to note that shinjū was a hugely fashionable social phenomenon in Osaka when Chikamatsu wrote Shinjū ten no amijima. It became so frequent that in 1722 officials prohibited the performance of theatrical plays on this theme. The authorities also tried to positively discourage people from double suicide “by imposing punishments on those who survived unsuccessful attempts” and “by heaping dishonor on the corpses of those who had been successful.”31 Seen in this light, love suicide was far from an action taken by an individual vis-à-vis the social norm, but a socially established mode of behavior often associated with a ritualized course of passage and the language of suicide notes. And the fact that love suicide is a “shared” action based on the consensus of two individuals provides us with a proper perspective for comparing this double suicide story with the Western tradition of tragic drama. For, if the sense of tragic despair is heightened by the absolute solitude of a protagonist, then the supposedly shared agony in the final michiyuki scene risks hampering the sublimity of the tragic ending. Can this be what Western readers tend to find “superficial” in the tragic endings of sewamono plays? It would be illuminating, at this point, to draw a parallel between Shinjū ten no amijima and double suicide stories in the European literary tradition. Let us take, for example, Antony and Cleopatra. There are striking similarities in the settings of the two plots: Jihei has abandoned his wife Osan for some years and spent too much money on Koharu, while Mark Antony has abandoned his wife Fulvia and lives in Alexandria with Cleopatra; the tragedy happens when Jihei has forgotten his duty as a shop owner and endangered his business, and Antony’s (and the triumvirate’s) hold on power is weakening in the Roman world. There is also a similarity in the use of contrasting domains in both plays. As Andrew Gerstle notes, these contrasts are gendered: Chikamatsu creates a sharp contrast between the paper store as a realm of (masculine) “social obligation and order” and the pleasure quarter as a (feminine) realm of “personal desire and freedom”; and Shakespeare provides a stark contrast between the

31 Shively’s introduction to Monzaemon Chikamatsu, The Love Suicide at Amijima (Shinjū ten no amijima): A Study of a Japanese Domestic Tragedy by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, trans. Donald H. Shively (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 25.

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Roman Empire as a sphere of (masculine) “discipline” and Egypt as a (feminine) sphere of “sensuousness.”32 Even so, if one looks more closely at the tragic endings of these two plays, one will notice a significant difference in the psychology of the final catharsis. The poignancy of the last scene in Amijima is based upon the lovers’ absolute trust in one another. Their desire is fulfilled in the mirror image of each other, which persists until the end of the play. This symmetry is something that is strikingly absent from Antony and Cleopatra, where the protagonists decide to kill themselves alone. Antony and then Cleopatra are in such despair that each, individually, chooses to commit suicide because they think they have lost everything, including their lover. The double suicide scene of Romeo and Juliet is another instance of this. Romeo kills himself because he believes that Juliet is dead. There is a deep sense of irony in this scene, since the audience is aware that Romeo would never have killed himself if he had known Juliet was alive. Such an irony is the last thing an audience would experience in the final michiyuki scene of a Chikamatsu drama. One could make the general point, then, that it is conventional in the Western tradition of tragedy that the determination of a tragic hero stands out sharply from his or her community.33 In Antigone, for example, tragedy sets in when the protagonist, in an attempt to appeal to universal justice, transcends the law of the community and thus gets punished. Antigone famously contrasts the eternal law of the gods with the laws of Creon, and rejects communal ethics by her own will: It wasn’t Zeus, not in the least, who made this proclamation—not me. Nor did that Justice, dwelling with the gods beneath the earth, ordain such laws for men. Nor did I think your edict had such force that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods, the great unwritten, unshakable traditions. (499–505)

32 Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu, 138. 33 A. C. Bradley affirms this view by writing that one “may speak of the tragic story as being concerned primarily with one person.” For this very reason, though, he regards both Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet as exceptional cases in Shakespearean tragic dramaturgy. See A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 25.

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It is evident that the solitude of the heroine is paramount here. As A. W. Schlegel comments: “to exhibit the determination and the deed of Antigone in their full glory, it was necessary that she should have no support and no dependence.”34 By contrast, Jihei and Koharu seem to remain in a collective ethics, absolutizing their shared creed of salvation in an opposition to the law of wider society. If so, shinjū as a communal behavior can be interpreted as practically replacing one form of social obedience with another. After all these considerations, one may conclude that what Jihei and Koharu epitomize in the tragic beauty of Shinjū ten no amijima seems almost the opposite of the role of the protagonists in Western tragic art who, as independent moral agents, strive to overcome a collective idea of justice for a higher level of justice. Perhaps, then, Aston was correct: because the conflict between individual morality and transcendental justice is integral to tragic beauty, the dramatic conclusion in double suicide stories does not deserve the name of tragic art. Indeed, one could further generalize this observation and assert that the endorsement of group ethics in the sublime image of self-sacrifice is a cultural tradition in Japanese aesthetics that repeatedly led the nation into disaster. The beauty of self-negation for the sake of loved ones was utilized, for instance, as propaganda to mobilize young soldiers during the war, most notably kamikaze pilots. The tradition may even have survived well into postwar literature, in Murakami Haruki’s novel Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando, for example, in which the main character candidly chooses to perish with his community, rather than trying to change the conditions of social injustice.35 Having said this, however, there are several ways to refute the charge of aesthetic fatalism in Japanese drama. For one thing, there are other types of tragic art in the European tradition, and this category easily accommodates Chikamatsu’s works. The tragic solution without transcendental moral justice can be found, for instance, in such works as Medea in which the heroine murders her family before becoming a goddess, and in the pointless sacrifice in Iphigenia in Aulis. At the end of these plays, an overwhelming sense of fatalism and futility reigns over the stage, while no uplifting message is there to encourage individual morality. Another, more effective, means for rejecting the charge that fatalism is at the heart of Japanese cultural tradition is to focus on Chikamatsu’s 34 August Wilhelm von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (London: Printed for Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1815), 128–30. Cited in Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy, 12. 35 An English translation of the novel is available: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, trans. Alfred Birnbaum (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1991).

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attempt to transform what Raymond Williams called the “structure of feeling.” In fact, an influential study of Chikamatsu’s oeuvre, Chikamatsu josetsu (1957) by Hirosue Tamotsu, offers us a valuable insight for detecting a marked shift in morality in the tragic compositions of Chikamatsu. Hirosue’s approach is remarkable for its use of Hegelian philosophy and Marxist social theory to reinterpret Japanese premodern literature. Ironically, though, it is his firm belief in human progress that made his approach unpopular in the final quarter of the twentieth century, especially during the Edo boom that discovered the uniqueness of local cultural traditions by rejecting a linear model of history. But one needs to remember that Hirosue, as someone who had witnessed the nationalist cult of classical Japanese literature during the imperial war, had good reason to be cautious about the worship of premodern tradition. One should also be mindful that Hirosue was averse to the other extreme in reading classical literature—that is, the denigration of the feudal aspects of Edo culture which was common among “radical” intellectuals. Instead, he intended to develop a well-balanced theoretical framework that would enable the reader of a literary text to comprehend its dramatic quality through attention to details and through the adoption of a proper historical perspective. Like many intellectuals who had experienced the dramatic transformation of society from the imperial war, to democratization, and then to its “reverse course,” Hirosue must have felt a profound difficulty in resolving inner contradictions between freedom and society. In a sense, then, Hirosue’s study parallels the protagonists of jōruri plays that shows Genroku townsmen battling against the new form of social alienation. It is no wonder that Hirosue regarded Shinjū ten no amijima as the highest point of what he calls sewa-higeki (domestic tragedy), striving to examine the contradictions within the story. One of the most relevant contributions of Hirosue’s study is his reformulation of standard concepts in interpreting Genroku tragedy, such as giri and ninjō. Giri and ninjō are probably the most valued notions for understanding the traditional ethical code in Japan. Giri is largely translated as “(public) duty,” yet it refers to any rational behavior prompted by the sense of social norm. Often defined as the opposite of giri, the word ninjō is usually translated as “human feelings” and refers to private passion or desire. Traditionally, critical commentaries on Chikamatsu’s plays have assumed that the main characters in sewamono tragedies are caught in a fundamental conflict between these two concepts. As we have seen, however, a simple binary between the public and the private is misleading in the case of sinjū plays, where the realm of private passion is covertly permeated by institutionalized behavior. In fact, Hirosue

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challenged this simplified distinction by exposing a historical tension within the public requirement of a society. Thus he replaces the polarity between giri and ninjō with the antithesis between giri no hiningensei (inhumanity generated by duty) and kane no hiningensei (inhumanity generated by money). According to this account, the official norm of giri must not be contrasted with a romanticized idea of ninjō, but should be measured against the exploitation of private desire in wanton consumerism, which is personified by a minor character called Tahei. Jihei’s moral dilemma derives from the conflict between these contradicting demands: his ethical view is conservative enough to revile Tahei, but his new sense of individualism as bourgeois townsman takes him away from the established norm based upon loyalty to family. This moral dilemma renders Jihei quite vulnerable to destiny, eventually driving him to tragic destruction. Under the scrutiny of Hirosue, accordingly, the idea of giri is revealed as a multifaceted concept. “Giri even had a potential,” Hirosue argues, “which under some circumstances could develop into a higher human morality as is evident in the duty as fellow women between Osan and Koharu in Shinjū ten no amijima.”36 Somewhat unexpectedly, it is this sense of public duty professed by Osan that indicates the emergence of a new ethics in this drama. From Jihei’s point of view, the figure of his wife Osan and the prostitute Koharu symbolize contrasting solutions to his inner contradiction: Osan, never giving in to her fate and desperately trying to live, seems to personify an ideal that is contrary to Koharu’s belief in salvation in the afterlife. At the pivotal moment in this tragedy, Osan confesses to Jihei that she wrote the letter in order to separate the lovers. Osan admits this for the reason that “it would be a dreadful crime” to keep it hidden. Her motivation for this deed, then, can be explained neither by giri nor ninjō because her solidarity with Koharu as a “fellow woman” goes beyond kinship or feudal relations. She is a new type of character in Chikamatsu’s imagination—one motivated not by group ethics but by an individual will. Naturally, Osan’s decision ends up being thwarted by the power of her father. But this is part of the reason why her conduct and agony as an individual glow with tragic beauty. Her tragedy, like Antigone’s, is caused by a refusal to bow to the conventional morality of a small group.37 36 Tamotsu Hirosue, Chikamatsu josetsu: Kinsei higeki no kenkyū (A preparatory study of Chikamatsu: Investigating early modern tragedy), in Hirosue Tamotsu chosakushū, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kage Shobō, 1999), 77. 37 G. B. Sansom perceives behind this opposition a Confucian/Buddhist dichotomy. See George Bailey Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 490.

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Perhaps Shinjū ten no amijima appears as a more cogent example of tragic art if we regard it as a tragedy that concerns three people rather than two: Amijima, as the tragedy of Jihei and Koharu, may have a politically perilous connotation, whereas Amijima as the tragedy of Osan bears a more universal potential. Scholars have mentioned the “paradox” of the title—“ten no ami” means both “retribution” and “salvation.”38 But Osan’s morality may shed a light on the historically specific paradox of ethical behavior, since universal human fellowship would have seemed to her both indispensable and impossible. And by successfully registering this historical tension in its protagonists, Amijima counts as an important contribution to the development of tragic art. This is not to say that a search for wider moral principle is the only source of tragic creation, but I suspect that such a universal moment has drawn little notice in the interpretation of traditional Japanese literature.39 To be sure, this tragic work is perhaps just one example of what Ienaga Saburō acknowledged as a critique of feudal ideology during the Tokugawa regime.40 Nor could Chikamatsu pursue this universal ideal in his later dramas. Nonetheless, Osan’s presence in Shinjū ten no amijima anticipates a larger vision of individuality, which the Japan of one-and-a half centuries later would embrace as the decisive influence of the West.

38 See, for example, Shively’s commentary in Chikamatsu, The Love Suicide at Amijima (Shinjū Ten No Amijima): A Study of a Japanese Domestic Tragedy by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 41; Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu, 137. 39 It is relevant, in this connection, to note that this nascent sense of a more comprehensive ethics is not merely found in the theatrical art of merchant culture. It can also be found, for example, in the moral theory of Chikamatsu’s contemporary Miyake Sekian (1665–1730). According to Tetsuo Najita, Miyake extracted the universalist implication of Mencius’ philosophy to comprehend the “humanistic substance” of every human being. Although merchants were at the bottom of the Tokugawa social hierarchy, they should not be precluded from acting “in accordance with the universalistic idea of ‘justice’ that Mencius idealized in terms of compassion and reason.” Seen in this light, the establishment of civil morality corresponds to what Shinjū ten no amijima achieved for the first time in the history of traditional Japanese theater. See Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō Merchant Academy of Osaka (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 91. 40 Saburō Ienaga, “Katana sasumi no nasakenasa: Ningyō jōruri no seijishisōshiteki kōsatsu” (Misery of sword-bearers: an inquiry into puppet theater in the history of political thought), in Ienaga Saburō shū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998), vol. 11, 260.

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Tragic Individualism in Modern Japanese Fiction A. Natsume So¯seki

N

atsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) encounter with the West during his threeyear sojourn in London was a misery. He suffered utter loneliness and a loss of confidence, and it was this traumatic sense of defeat that, after his return to Japan and becoming a novelist, spurred his mature reflection on the situation of his own native Japan in relation to European civilization. It is not just his perfect command of language and his narrative technique with its convincing depth of character psychology, but also his preoccupation with the human condition in a rapidly modernizing Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912) under the overwhelming influence of the West, that makes his works probe so compellingly into human nature. In fact, his chronic anxiety is in a stark contrast with writers from later generations. By the end of the Taishō period (1912– 26), Japan was cosmopolitan and consumerist, a nation absorbing every aspect of Western culture from classical Greek literature to Postimpressionist painting and Bergsonian philosophy. Academics who could afford to live in Europe were still a privileged few, but presumably they were less likely to be ashamed of the image of an “uncivilized” Japan. Once they returned home and set out to formulate the unique characteristics of their cultural tradition, the question of national identity would never torment them in such a serious manner as it did Sōseki during the final decade of his life. Kokoro, a novel that Sōseki wrote two years before his death, is not only the best known among his works but also arguably one of the most exquisite pieces of literature in the modern Japanese canon.1 Shelves of studies have been 1 There are various English translations of Kokoro. The most recent and widely available is Meredith McKinney’s. Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro, trans. Meredith McKinney (London:

CHAPTER 3    Tragic Individualism in Modern Japanese Fiction

brought out on this short novel since its first publication in 1914, and there seems little to add. In this section, though, I will reexamine a component of the novel which, in my view, deserves more attention: the “tragic” quality of Kokoro. The tragic aspect of this work has been left relatively untouched, in part due to general doubts as to whether the novel is a genre suitable for expressing tragic content. According to some scholars, the essence of tragedy is inseparable from theatricality, thus incompatible with narrative prose. But as we have already discussed in chapter 1, a convincing handling of human fate makes a novel fully tragic. Indeed, Kokoro can be seen as the first and the most forceful accomplishment of full-fledged tragic narrative in Japanese literary tradition. One could even suggest that Sōseki practically transformed the moral framework of Japanese people by giving shape to the contradiction of modern society in the tragic narrative of Kokoro. The story begins with a chance meeting between the narrator and an unnamed, married intellectual whom the narrator calls Sensei (a teacher). The narrator catches sight of Sensei accompanied by a Westerner at a seaside resort, and comes to know him personally. After they both return to Tokyo, the narrator frequently visits Sensei, holding him in great esteem and regarding him as his mentor. Sensei’s harsh self-criticism, and suspicion of humanity in general, puzzles the young narrator; but a conversation with Sensei’s wife convinces the narrator of some secret past in his mentor’s life that even his wife cannot see through. Part two is a kind of interlude, taking place in the rural hometown of the narrator—a very different place to metropolitan Tokyo. At the news of his father’s illness the narrator returns to his hometown, and tells his family about Sensei, but they only recommend him seeking the older man’s help in order to find employment. The narrator follows this advice by writing to Sensei to ask if he could recommend for any position, yet instead of replying, Sensei sends an extended letter recounting his life story. Having recognized, by scanning the letter, that it is virtually a suicide note, the narrator instantly slips out of his childhood home, leaving his father in his deathbed, and takes a night train to Tokyo. The long letter that he reads on the train comprises the whole of part three and takes up nearly half of the novel. The letter contains two anecdotes about Sensei’s early life. First, just after both of his parents died, Sensei as a young student was deceived by his uncle, who, initially appearing to be kind, took possession of his nephew’s rightful Penguin Books, 2010).

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inheritance. This experience made Sensei misanthropic, leaving lasting damage on his trust in humankind. Second, and far more importantly, Sensei failed to save a close childhood friend, whom he calls “K.” A son in a Buddhist temple, “K” was a man of extraordinary self-discipline and deep learning. Against his adoptive parents’ urge to become a medical doctor, “K” secretly pursued his goal of “developing the toughness of will” through the study of philosophy and religion. When his disobedience was discovered, “K”’s parents disowned him, and Sensei invited his friend to lodge for free with him. Sensei himself was lodging with the family of a widow of a military man and her daughter. Sensei called the widow Okusan (“a housewife”) and the daughter Ojōsan (“a young lady”). He soon noticed that Ojōsan had become close to “K”—before his friend unexpectedly revealed his love (his first love) for Ojōsan. Sensei, unable to tell “K” about his own love for Ojōsan, took advantage of “K”’s moral paralysis by advising him to control his passion, and covertly asked the landlady for permission to marry Ojōsan. “K” seemed to react calmly to the news of this engagement, yet a couple of days later he committed suicide, leaving a note in which he thanked Sensei, adding that “[I] should have died sooner.”2 Since then, Sensei has suffered an agonizing sense of guilt, without even being able to tell Ojōsan (now his wife) about his anguish. At the close of his letter, Sensei explains how he came to decide to commit suicide. He hints that he was inspired by General Nogi’s ritual suicide immediately after the Meiji emperor’s death, a suicide that took place after more than three decades of yearning to die in expiation for his failure in the Satsuma Rebellion (1877). Sensei writes that he is well aware that wishing to follow such a deed is an anachronistic gesture. Young people like the narrator will not understand this, but by telling the story of his life in an honest manner, he adds, he hopes to help them acknowledge the nature of human being. Sōseki adroitly configures the plot in which some mysteries—why Sensei regularly visited his friend’s graveyard, why he kept his past secret from his wife, and so forth—become resolved in the final section. But Sōseki is equally skilled in leaving many more questions unanswered. What, for example, was the real motive for “K”’s suicide: did he kill himself simply because of his thwarted love, or as a protest against Sensei, or because he lost confidence in his self-discipline; or, rather, to be consistent with his philosophical principle of self-control? Another question concerns the aim of the narrator’s rush to Tokyo: Is he going to reveal Sensei’s past to his wife? Is he going to follow his master into death? 2

Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro, trans. Meredith McKinney (London: Penguin, 2010), 217.

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Millions of words have been spent speculating about these questions, but by far the most intensely discussed issue has been the meaning of Sensei’s death. Readers and critics alike have thought about why an enlightened intellectual like Sensei would choose such an anachronistic way of dying as junshi (“to die with your lord”)?3 A quick answer would be that Sensei’s death encapsulates the failure of individualism in modernizing Japan. In this view, the lesson of this novel (portraying a confident member of the new Meiji elite who ends up killing himself in despair) is that modern individualism is doomed to founder in a culture that is immutably feudal. One may support this interpretation by considering the significance of the father figure in the late Meiji period. It is in fact striking that the whole narrative is haunted by the presence of the Meiji emperor. Throughout parts one and two, the narrator constantly compares his actual father and Sensei, and these two father figures metaphorically represent contrasting attitudes to the new spirit of the Meiji era: his father embodies old rural norms according to which one judges people by their financial power and social status, whereas Sensei represents a new moral integrity that makes him indifferent to social positions. The narrator’s father is gravely concerned about the emperor’s illness, while Sensei is apparently not anxious about such issues. Up to the very final pages, therefore, the reader is convinced that the young narrator is more sympathetic toward Sensei, and that this sympathy propels the young man to be present at his mentor’s death rather than his own father’s. Nonetheless, Sensei abruptly mentions the emperor’s death at the end of his letter. Even though Sensei says that he himself had almost forgotten the word junshi, his respect for General Nogi seems genuine. As a result, the contrast between the narrator’s father and mentor collapses, as the narrator’s optimistic reliance on Sensei’s integrity shatters. A “failed individualism” may offer a credible explanation for this sense of disenchantment. At the same time, though, “failed individualism” theory tends to undervalue the potential of lofty ideals. Sumie Okada, for instance, argues that Sensei’s “retrogression” to an age-old group mentality indicates the practical impossibility of being an individualist in modern Japan: It is so difficult to live by individualism in Japan, that even the Sensei, who lived seemingly as a committed individualist, had to return to groupism 3 For a comparative and interdisciplinary study of junshi in Meiji literature, see Doris G. Bargen, Suicidal Honor: General Nogi and the Writings of Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006).

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PART ONE    The Historical Development of the Tragic in Japanese Literature in the end, particularly after failing in his individualism by inducing the suicide of his friend “K.” . . . He does so by trying to identify himself both with the honorable death of the Meiji Emperor and with the obligatory suicides of General Nogi and his wife.4

Certainly, Sensei’s death stands for an impasse in the Meiji enlightenment. Yet this impasse can be effectively presented in literary imagination only in terms of the conflict between established social norms and noble idealism. And it is crucial in this regard that Sōseki acknowledges a special need to stress the high moral integrity necessary to write fiction. In 1910, Sōseki takes issue over the trivialization of enlightenment values in his short article “Literature and the Heroic.” What he tries to demonstrate in this article is that the disillusioning effect of naturalistic literature only makes sense when fictional characters’ craving for high-minded ideals is vividly depicted along with the failure of such striving. With hindsight, then, it is possible to detect here an ambition to write fiction in which a protagonist makes a genuine attempt to live up to his conviction. Perhaps Kokoro fulfills this ambition, thereby positioning the figure of Sensei as a truly tragic protagonist caught in an unresolved moral conflict afflicting modernizing Japan.5 Even with his creative ingenuity, however, Sōseki would not have been able to accomplish this ambition unless he lived through a period of revolutionary cultural transformation. As we have repeatedly confirmed in this study, the condition of tragic art “is the real tension between old and new: between received beliefs, embodied in institutions and responses, and newly and vividly experienced contradictions and possibilities.”6 That being the case, there is no doubt that Meiji Japan was a highly suitable environment for the creation of tragic art, and that Kokoro is a prime example of such tragic narrative. Indeed, modern individualism in Kokoro marks out Sensei for his personal integrity, 4 Sumie Okada, Japanese Writers and the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 20. 5 In an article published in 1907, Sōseki surmised that tragic heroism was unachievable in modern fiction. “There has never been a generation,” he argues, “so lacking in heroism as the present, nor a literature that promotes heroism so little as present-day literature does. It is also clear that in the present age not a single tragedy has appeared that arouses the feeling of sublimity. So the ideals of modern literature are not beauty, goodliness, or sublimity, but simply truth [or sincerity—makoto]” (Sōseki, “Bungei no tetsugakuteki kiso” The philosophical foundation of literature], 1907, cited in Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction, 168.) It is extraordinary, then, that after seven years of pursuing human conditions through imaginative literature Sōseki managed to create a truly tragic narrative. 6 Williams, Modern Tragedy, 54.

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while it is not firm enough to let him renounce his beliefs in the old values. What one ought to acknowledge about this novel, therefore, is not the defeat of individualism but a historical situation in which the wish for individualism comes up against its impossibility. But there is another reason for questioning the use of the “failed individualism” theory for reading Kokoro. Even if Sōseki is dismayed by the limit placed on modern individualism, he may have been affected by it in a significantly different way as his fictional character Sensei is. In order to clarify the interaction between Sensei’s disenchantment and Sōseki’s perception, then, it is useful to explore some lectures which the author gave to make sense of the historical situation of the late Meiji period. In his well-known public speech “The Enlightenment of Modern Japan” (1911), Sōseki made a distinction between naihatsuteki (spontaneous) cultures and gaihatsuteki (imported) cultures. According to Sōseki, the enlightenment that took place the Meiji era is very different to the Western Enlightenment because the former was not spontaneous but imported. And since modernization in Japan was a transplanted and imposed process, it was inevitably “superficial.”7 Indeed, around the time he delivered this speech, Sōseki had general misgivings about the Meiji government,8 and his outlook on the future of Japanese modernization was overshadowed by a deep pessimism. Presumably, this pessimistic view had been conceived during his stay in England, and developed into his belief that the cultural gap between the West and the East was unbridgeable. Three years after this speech, Sōseki gave another public lecture entitled “My individualism.” There he adopted a rather different standpoint, indicating his intense awareness of the changed historical environment. The acknowledgement of a fundamental distinction between the West and the East no longer disturbed the nation, but served as the ideological rhetoric to inculcate the uniqueness of traditional culture. The idea of cultural difference that Sōseki had emphasized three years before was now taken for granted, or overstressed for the sake of an increasingly rampant jingoism. On the other hand, individualism was regarded as a “Western” doctrine of egotism that was supposed 7 8

Sōseki Natsume, “Gendai nihon no kaika” (My individualism), in Natsume Sōseki zenshū vol. 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1966), 340. As Carol Gluck points out, such mistrust of “the authority” does not contradict the profound reverence toward the Meiji emperor, since “the emperor and the government were separately viewed by the people” in the late Meiji era. See Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 219–20.

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to contrast with the altruistic tolerance of the Japanese spirit. And it is such distrust of universal values in general that Sōseki protested by upholding his renewed commitment to the modern ideal of individualism. Underlying Sōseki’s shift in theoretical position was a drastic transformation of perspective in which the temporal dimension of human progress is given priority over spatial diversity. For the Sōseki of the “Enlightenment of Modern Japan,” the boundary between the West and the East was impossible to cross: Japanese modernization was lagging far behind European modernity. By the time he focused on individualism, however, Sōseki seemed to have fully elaborated the vision of dynamic universal progress, in which concepts originally derived from Europe are used in a local context to fulfill their true potential to transcend national boundaries: [T]he word individualism is often taken to be the antithesis of and to be inimical to nationalism. But it is not such an irrational and ambiguous thing. . . . Some people assert that Japan will not be able to survive without resorting to nationalism, and they seriously believe this. Moreover, a considerable number of people even claim that the country will vanish unless individualism is tramped down. However, such nonsense cannot be true. In fact, we are nationalists, internationalists and individualists at one and the same time.9

The nationalist-internationalist-individualist triplet opens up the possibility for contributing to cultural community by rejecting narrow partisanship. In this connection, individualism is far from a notion transplanted from external soil. Rather, it is an inspiration for Japanese people themselves, encouraging the nation to overcome insularity and attain true solidarity between independent persons: To put it in simple terms, [individualism] is the principle that eliminates a partisanship and bases itself solely on right or wrong. It is to refuse a partisan or factional action, never to seek a political or financial power.10

It is remarkable that Sōseki no longer cynically believes that the Japanese version of individualism is a “superficial” imitation of Western civilization. On 9 Sōseki Natsume, “Watakushi no kojinshugi” (My individualism), in Natsume Sōseki zenshū vol. 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1966), 459. 10 Ibid., 457.

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the contrary, his outlook brims with confidence, which implies that he has overcome his anxiety over cultural inferiority and is now able to articulate a high moral ideal by making a European concept his own.11 One only needs to pay closer attention to the title of “My individualism.” As Dennis Washburn points out, this “self-reflective title suggests that the essay’s aim is not just to define the concept of individualism but to define himself through that concept.”12 There is little double that this kind of theoretical elaboration must have stimulated Sōseki’s interest in creating fictional characters who are destined to fail after seeking moral independence. It is no coincidence, then, that “My individualism” was delivered in the same year as the publication of Kokoro, probably the most “tragic” of his works. Indeed, this has unsurprisingly prompted critics and scholars to read much of Sōseki’s predicament as a modern individual into Sensei’s demise: Sensei’s suicide then represents one answer to the predicament of perceptive intellectuals in a post-Meiji Japan. Kokoro thus depicts the seamy side of the same “self-reliance” which Sōseki extols in “The Enlightenment of Modern Japan” and “My individualism”; it shows both how difficult it is to achieve such independence in Japan and how it could even entail moral evil.13

11 Karatani Kōjin characterizes Sōseki’s position by distinguishing Sōseki from Uchimura Kanzō and Okakura Tenshin. In Karatani’s view, Sōseki’s position is distinct from Uchimura’s universal faith in Christianity, which ended up withdrawing from historical reality, and also from Okakura’s pan-Asianism, which was doomed to be exploited by imperialist ideology. Sōseki thus managed to develop a genuine critique of universality through which he stood apart from both West and East. Karatani remarks: “Sōseki, while refusing to recognize the universality of the West, never attempted to idealize the universality of Asia. In this sense Sōseki’s attitude may be described as ‘scientific’—it was neither the ‘poetic’ spirit of Okakura nor the ‘faith’ of Uchimura. Sōseki did not advocate anything positive. Rather, he continued to think from the unstable position of one who finds himself ‘between’ East and West, seeking refuge in neither pole of the opposition” (Kōjin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature [Durham: Duke University Press, 1993], 44.) Here Karatani’s argument seems to be built upon the anti-universalistic premise that taking no position at all (neither West nor East) is the most radical. In my view, though, Sōseki located the independent individual at a conflict between “collective” and “personal,” fully grasping this conflict as the fundamental point of reference that is relevant regardless of nationality. 12 Dennis C. Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 169. 13 Hisaaki Yamanouchi, The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 70.

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To be sure, Kokoro is in many ways a crystallization of Sōseki’s struggle to achieve moral purity in modernizing Japan. Nonetheless, Sōseki’s clear recognition of universalist ideals compels us to distinguish his outlook on life from that of Sensei. Arguably, by making Sensei kill himself in honor of Nogi and the Meiji emperor, Sōseki may have liberated himself from the spell of old moral principles. In other words, the creation of a tragic martyr could have prompted Sōseki as the author to overcome the fixed idea of cultural difference and spell out a principle of modern identity based upon a radically universal individualism. Still, one might claim that Kokoro may not be categorized as a tragedy in the strict sense of the term. The prime focus of the plot—Sensei’s death—seems to be far too opaque: the final demise might be triggered by his sense of guilt, by sheer self-disgust, by his disillusionment with the era, by his unconscious desire to identify with “K,” or even because of a joke his wife makes. What is more, Sensei’s attempt to kill himself seems less desperate than “K”’s, in the sense that Sensei has the young narrator as a reader to tell the whole story. His death, after all, is not depicted in the narrative, at least not in the dreadful details that “K”’s suicide was presented. At the same time, one could also claim that these multiple ambiguities render Kokoro all the more genuine as tragic art, giving it almost Shakespearean depth.14 Ethical values are rendered sublimely liberating, as they draw each protagonist—Sensei, “K,” and the narrator—towards cathartic destruction. For the first time in the history of Japanese literature, characters are equipped with full interiority, only to be finally defeated by the aspiration to be good. Viewed historically, Sōseki’s tragic individualism seems to be truly prophetic, since the individual conscience that supersedes collective ethics is something that is still rare in postwar Japan. With its power to capture the modern individuality at its deepest level, Kokoro is a monumental literary exploration into human being as fundamentally historical.

14 I am here referring to Shakespeare less as a universal standard of a “great” tragedian than as a dramatist who, exposed to the immense contradictions inherent to emerging modernity, managed to image the extraordinary complexity of fictional characters. From a different viewpoint, Karatani Kōjin writes that in Sōseki’s works “slippages appear which cannot be resolved into a synthesis, in the sense that as T. S. Eliot remarked, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a failure as a tragedy because it lacked an objective correlative.” See Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 184.

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B. Ōe Kenzaburo¯ Perhaps more than in any other modern state, contemporary writers in Japan tend to shy away from using religious terms to plumb human psychology. Of course, religious belief was a principal source of inspiration in classical Japanese literature from antiquity through the early modern period. Behind the spiritual profundity of poetry or the vivid observation of human fate in medieval tales and diaries were the living faith and religious sentiment through which people comprehended the natural world as well as human society. It was only in the process of rapid modernization—which meant relentless industrialization and Westernization—that Japan underwent a complete secularization, resulting in a remarkably non-religious society. A small minority of novelists and poets have drawn on religious canons in quest of spiritual value, and some accomplished authors such as Miyazawa Kenji and Endō Shūsaku actually based their creative practice upon their religious faith; however, they are the exception rather than the rule. It was a surprise, therefore, that Ōe Kenzaburō, a non-believer and one of the most outspoken advocates of enlightenment values, chose religious leaders as the central characters of his novels in the mid-1990s. The reader of his previous works had been familiar with Ōe’s deep meditation on the transcendent god, inspired by his close reading of literary texts by Dante, William Blake, T. S. Eliot, and Flannery O’Connor. But his trilogy Moeagaru midori no ki (The burning green tree, 1993–95) and the subsequent novel Chūgaeri (Somersault, 1999) placed the fate of a religious community at its center, telling the story of saviors and their followers who seek a new form of life in the community of faith but are inevitably dragged into calamity. It is possible to consider Ōe’s religious phase as a literary response to the social malaise of the 1990s. Due to the magnitude and persistence of social problems—spanning from aging to education, social inequality, immigration, and financial crisis—this period has gained the popular label of “the lost decade.”15 Not surprisingly, an increasing number of religious groups were founded in these years, and people tried to cope with their struggles by embracing religious faith. But as we will examine below, Ōe’s literary imagination did not only capture the hardship of those who suffered under the social problems, but detected the tensions underlying the troubles of contemporary Japan, which 15 The historian Andrew Gordon claims that “the lost decade” is a misleading term, since it caricatures and exaggerates the extent of loss or decline. See Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 308.

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could potentially lead to catastrophe. In fact, only a year after Ōe described such catastrophic ending in the concluding part of Moeagaru midori no ki, the religious sect Aum Shinrikyō conducted a terror attack on the Tokyo subway, killing fourteen citizens and injuring many more. Conceived and written in the years leading up to this shocking incident, Moeagaru midori no ki has often been regarded as prophetic of this terrifying event. Moeagaru midori no ki recounts the foundation, growth, and fall of a religious community in three parts.16 Like almost all of Ōe’s fiction, the novel can be read as part of a gigantic mythic saga set in the author’s native village in Shikoku. But unlike other stories, the novel does not seem semi-autobiographical at first, since it is narrated from the viewpoint of a “girl,” and the fictional character representing Ōe (normally an old intellectual) is initially absent. Instead, the novel begins as a middle-aged man called Gii arrives in the small village to conduct research on the area’s mythology. Carrying out a series of interviews with the matriarch of the community, Ōbā, Gii finds himself appointed as the inheritor of the secret knowledge of the mythology, and this appointment unexpectedly makes him an object of worship. Though not at all convinced that he is a savior, Gii sincerely attempts to heal the ill when villagers desperately ask him to do so. Gii soon attracts outsiders as well, building a core group that includes an American college student, a successful pianist, a journalist from Tokyo, and Gii’s own father. The community becomes a mass movement, even though Gii is still reluctant to acknowledge himself as a savior. After getting physically attacked by his former comrades in a radical student movement, however, Gii’s vision becomes clearer. The church now seems united in its commitment to care for the future generation. But as conflict within the community increases, and the militant faction grows uncontrollable, Gii decides to leave the community, which leads to his tragic demise. In an illuminating study of Moeagaru midori no ki, Susan Napier compares this trilogy with Mishima Yukio’s tetralogy Hōjō no umi (The sea of fertility, 1965–70). Napier argues that, although both authors recognized an absence of higher meaning in Japan, Ōe and Mishima offered contrasting prescriptions for society. According to Napier’s reading, the sublime beauty in Hōjō no umi 16 The three parts are titled, respectively, “Sukuinushi” ga nagurareru made (Until the “savior” is beaten up, 1993); Yureugoku-Bashirēshon (Vacillation, 1994); and Ōinaru hi ni (For the day of greatness, 1995). The title of the novel Moeagaru midori no ki comes from “Vacillation,” a 1932 poem by W. B. Yeats. Yeats’s poems have an important symbolic function throughout the novel.

CHAPTER 3    Tragic Individualism in Modern Japanese Fiction

encompasses “a recovery of an idealized and elite Japanese past,” whereas Ōe’s fiction is an attempt to offer “a message of redemption within destruction” in opposition to Mishima’s “final vision of emptiness.”17 What Mishima’s work evokes is therefore “an invitation to despair,” while the appropriate remedy for Ōe is “a call to action.”18 Although such a confrontation between the two major authors is plausible and interesting, it seems to me that the target of Ōe’s radical imagination is not limited to Mishima’s personal credo, but more widely the entire structure of feeling prevalent in postwar Japan, of which Mishima’s “deceitful illusion” is only a part. Indeed, the lofty ideals that characterize Moeagaru midori no ki stand out clearly against the sense of weary cynicism prevalent after the high-speed-growth era. As is well known, Ōe inherited a strong belief in humanism and respect for democracy from the previous generation of postwar novelists like Ōoka Shōhei and Noma Hiroshi.19 In the particular case of Moeagaru midori no ki, the call for democratic activism is epitomized in Gii’s sermon, in which he draws on George Kennan’s antinuclear statement that equates the use of atomic bomb with “an insult to god”20: [W]e are fearful of developing such an insult to god. Sure, the object that each of us calls god may vary, but if we can call this “something that we do not want to throw an insult to” with the name of god, then we all stand in front of one god. For such a long time, our church had no clear definition of god. Now, perhaps, we acquire a definition of god at long last, which we can confirm with each other.21

Without offering a concrete description, Gii only hints at some higher existence that requires “respect,” “prayer,” and “action.” At the same time, though, this is a political program of nuclear disarmament, or a protest against the unfounded claim that “the nuclear plants in this nation could never possibly have disastrous 17 Susan J. Napier, “Ōe Kenzaburō and the Search for the Sublime at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan, ed. Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 24. 18 Ibid., 25. 19 Also, Ōe’s quest for the potential of life and hope in the midst of destruction seems to have been nurtured by a personal matter, namely the birth of his brain-damaged child in 1963 and subsequent life with him. See ibid., 26. 20 This is my translation of Ōe’s phrase “kami ni mukerareta bubetsu.” 21 Kenzaburō Ōe, Ōinaru hi ni (For the Day of Greatness), in Moeagaru Midori No Ki, Shinchō Bunko, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1998), 294. My translation.

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accident.”22 Indeed, the sermon encourages the church’s members to join protesters from outside and demonstrate to—miraculously—stop the power plant. Despite such an uplifting tone, however, neither religious redemption nor the call for action in the story can free people from the pain of contemporary life. In fact, the devotees’ final cry of “[R]ejoice!” is counterbalanced by the destruction of the protagonist, which gives the novel a distinctly tragic quality. Far from being a viable alternative, then, religious salvation in this fiction seems to illuminate the ambiguity of emancipatory ideals, by simultaneously exposing the hopes and limits of collective activism at the current situation of Japanese society. Ōe’s responsiveness to ambiguity can also be discerned with regard to place. In fact, according to Fredric Jameson, the narrative presentation of the rural village in Ōe’s novels makes him a “political regionalist.”23 Regionalists are distinct from nationalists in that they do not necessarily try to impose an illusion of homogeneity upon the land to promote a sense of imagined community, which is always the case with nationalist propaganda.24 Nationalists, in short, smooth out history and difference, while political regionalists are responsive to their texture and nuance. In spite of its mythic presentation of rural community, then, Ōe’s storytelling goes defiantly against the neo-nationalist vision of a closed traditional culture. Indeed, the ambiguity of local space in Ōe’s fiction is repeatedly exposed in his constant reconceptualization of an imagined place. The rural valley in Shikoku becomes an allegory of reality torn between eternally unchanging myth and historical change full of violence and dissent. On the one hand, this mythic topology provides a feeling of eternity. As an architect in the story comments on K’s literature: [E]very time someone who was born in this valley (in the wood of Shikoku) passes away, her/his soul rises from the root of a woodland tree toward the sky. . . . The wood has the power to help the people to return. In this way, “the place has its own power.” This passage leads K to conceive an 22 The attack on this false claim is reinforced in his next novel Chūgaeri. The fear about a nuclear accident, which is repeated in Chūgaeri as well, may be read as another example of Ōe’s “prediction,” one that anticipates the nuclear disaster just after the 2011 earthquake. For Ōe’s response to this incident, see chapter 8. 23 Fredric Jameson, “‘Madmen Like Kings’,” in The Modernist Papers (London; New York: Verso, 2007), 366. 24 I will pursue a detailed investigation into this point in part two.

CHAPTER 3    Tragic Individualism in Modern Japanese Fiction imagined mapping of “place of life and death,” consisting of departure-life and return-death.25

On the other hand, though, this revelation of the role of myth is lightly dismissed by K himself. In discussing the significance of the “power of place” for storytelling, K claims that the dynamic power of a place exceeds any local myth. Place, according to K’s account, stands outside myth, and exerts its own “power to engender stories” within historical change, so that narrative continues to revive itself by referring to external places. This tension between myth and reality can be seen as a product of Ōe’s attention to the historical moment within nature. In Moeagaru midori no ki, the wood reveals its past (traditionally, valleys inspire revolt against authority) as the power of the place affects central characters, nudging them into collective action. And as the characters have new experiences, traditional mythologies are given renewed interpretations. And equally notable is the fact that a seemingly pristine nature in Ōe’s fiction is always entangled with human labor: indeed, the wooded valley presents itself as something deeply embedded in modern industry and global economics. For instance, the church community acquires European techniques to set up industries in the village, and various critical observations of global politics are offered through the eyes of Gii’s father. Rather than dividing “external” place from “internal” community, Ōe builds up a multilayered history of a particular land, so that newly imagined narratives keep reinterpreting its local history against a broader background. In effect, this literary device is a critical intervention into the nationalist myth of land that stresses the continuity of cultural territory and its eternal separation from the outside. In terms of literary style, Ōe’s responsiveness to ambiguity is sharpened by his combination of local naturalism and radically realistic style. Traditionally, Japanese aesthetics has been based on a lyrical and contemplative attitude towards nature in which the sense of alienation is overcome through imaginary vision. This tradition, though, tends to exclude political antagonism from its predominantly “natural” representation of reality. Moeagaru midori no ki, however, is an implicit critique of this literary naturalism by way of its alienating prose: for example, the reader is constantly reminded that the narrative voice, as subdued and mature as Ōe himself, in reality belongs to a young “girl,” more precisely to a hermaphrodite.

25 Ōe, Ōinaru hi ni, 313.

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In his next novel Chūgaeri, Ōe presses his counter-naturalist prose further to the extreme. Notably, there are two narrators in the novel, from whose point of view the entire story is told, and this double-voiced narrative is only part of the radical pluralism that characterizes the text.26 Indeed, the diversity of its central figures in terms of social class, gender, and age surpasses all of Ōe’s previous works. Chūgaeri includes a painter in a homosexual relationship with a young man, a young girl who has a bad memory, former feminist activists, former student radicals, a middle-aged woman looking after her handicapped brother, and so forth.27 Each of these characters is in trouble or distress, which motivates them to search for salvation in religious life. Curiously enough, though, the religious guru, Patron, seems the most vulnerable among all the members of the community. He is physically and mentally devastated by his own religious meditations, and is unable to decipher the divine message without the help of his partner, Guide. Furthermore, he is traumatized by his experience as a religious leader: discovering that the militant faction of his movement was intent on bringing about “the end of the world” by way of the nuclear destruction of Tokyo, Patron tried to forestall the attack by publicly renouncing his own doctrine and proclaiming that he and Guide were charlatans who had never had any authentic visions and whose prophecies were little more than an elaborate hoax. Naturally, this scheme led the group to collapse and Patron and Guide “entered hell” where they remained for ten years until reemerging to found a new movement. The story of Chūgaeri traces the regeneration of the movement which leads the group to a tragic consequence, yet to a very different one from that in Moeagaru midori no ki. Once more, Ōe is less focused on theology/divinity than the fundamental problem of how men and women realize each other’s wellbeing by means of collective action. Thus, Jameson is right to consider Ōe’s work in the 1990s in “political”

26 The difference in voices is explained at the very end of the novel. Even by the standard of Ōe’s literary inventiveness, the radical pluralism of this technique is boldly ambitious, and it prompted some critics to conclude that this novel was a foundering. See, for example, Atsushi Koyano, Etō Jun to Ōe Kenzaburō: sengo nihon no seiji to bungaku (Etō Jun and Ōe Kenzaburō: Politics and literature in postwar Japan) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2015), 338. As we will see in the final chapter, the narrative voice in Ōe’s fiction is further disrupted after yet another catastrophe, the 2011 earthquake. 27 Another significant move which Ōe makes in Chūgaeri is an omission of any reference to high culture: no recitation of Yeats’ verse, no interpretation of Wagner’s opera, no musing over the texts of St. Augustine or Simone Weil. This, presumably, is meant to keep the focus on the relationships between ordinary, rather than privileged, citizens.

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rather than religious terms.28 To be sure, there seems to be even less substance in the creed of the church in Chūgaeri than that in Moeagaru midori no ki. The story is loosely linked with the Book of Jonah in the Old Testament in its faint mirroring of the relation between Ikuo and Patron with the confrontation between Jonah and God. That said, as tensions in the movement grow, Patron clarifies his vision in a sermon by quoting some passages from the New Testament: Ever since my Somersault, what I’ve been thinking about is something along the following lines, not exactly verbatim from the Bible, but something like this: As this world approaches its end, a savior must appear who will make one the two that stand opposed, destroying in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility, abolishing the law with its commandments and regulations. And I believe that such a savior will surely come. He will create in himself one new man out of the two, making peace, and in this one body reconcile both of them to God through the cross, putting to death their hostility. This, too, I believe, will come to pass.29

Patron is convinced of the vital importance of these two Biblical passages, hence his proposition to name the community “The Church of the New Man.”30 But despite his apparent determination, Patron remains characteristically equivocal after this revelation. His intention is just to be “one of many antichrists,” he says, not to reverse his Somersault.31 It is only towards the end of the novel, however, that the reader learns that what is at stake in the reestablishment of Patron’s church is nothing less than another plot of nuclear attack. One member of the radical faction looks back on how the previous plan of nuclear attack was prevented and states: Anyway, it was left to the experts on nuclear issues at the Izu Institute to figure out how to shake Japan and the Japanese people’s fixed ideas 28 Jameson does no use the term “political” in the ordinary sense of ideologies or parties or class struggle, but as “an ontological inquiry into the very possibility for biologically isolated human beings to form groups which can function as historical agencies.” See Jameson, “‘Madmen Like Kings’,” 361. 29 Kenzaburō Ōe, Somersault: A Novel, trans. Philip Gabriel (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 433–34. The two passages from the Bible are Ephesians 2:15 and 4:24. 30 Patron’s conviction comes from the fact that he came across the passages by sheer chance, and only later did he learn that they are the only two verses in the entire Bible where there is reference to “new man” in the Japanese translation. 31 Ibid., 463.

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PART ONE    The Historical Development of the Tragic in Japanese Literature about nuclear power by figuring out which nuclear plant they should target and what scale of accident they should cause. The radical faction’s plans weren’t just some pie in the sky idea but went as far as suggesting a complete destruction of all the nuclear power plants concentrated on the Japan Sea coast—in order to set off the end of the world.32

The “fixed idea” mentioned here is the assumption held by “the Japanese government and the power companies” that “such a large-scale accident in a power plant could never happen in Japan.”33 The radical faction never abandoned their opposition to this idea, and now appear to be ready for another terror attack. At this point, it dawns on the reader why Patron was hesitant after clarifying his ideal of “making into one.” It also explains why Ōe needed to write another novel after Moeagaru midori no ki: Chūgaeri is an attempt to put the earlier novel’s pluralist ideal to the test by imagining a full inclusiveness that could embrace the most vicious sect. In an interview in 2007, Ōe commented that he dealt with religion in Moeagaru midori no ki and Chūgaeri because there is no significant source of influential religious thought in contemporary Japan.34 According to his account, the absence of spiritual ties has provided young people with only secular ways to oppose political power. And the failure of radical student movements in the early 1970s was the unfortunate result of their struggle to create their own utopian community. Because young people were still searching for a spiritual as well as a political solution, he suggests, they might be attracted by a new religious cult and be dragged into a disastrous tragedy. In a sense, then, what Ōe shows in Moeagaru midori no ki and Chūgaeri is that the youth’s widespread hardship roots in silencing of political opposition in the 1960s. Famously, the postwar democratic movement that culminated in the 1960 peace treaty demonstration was effectively suppressed by the conservative government. This defeat meant that the Left had “lost hold of many of its most evocative issues” by the early 1970s and turned inward, as a perceptive historian observes.35 Retrospectively, in other words, the 1960s was the key 32 Ibid., 497. 33 Ibid., 497. 34 Mariko Ozaki, ed., Ōe Kenzaburō sakka jishin o kataru (Ōe Kenzaburō talks about himself) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2013), 261–62. 35 John Dower, “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems: External Policy and Internal Conflict,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 27.

CHAPTER 3    Tragic Individualism in Modern Japanese Fiction

period in which “citizens’ movements” or “residents’ movements” still looked hopeful; but they were gradually defused by economic growth and nationalistic rhetoric. What Ōe’s stories suggest is that at least part of the emancipatory vision of the progressive social movement in the 1960s presented a real opportunity for defiant protest against power and large corporations. Yet, the plots of Moeagaru midori no ki and Chūgaeri follow classic tragic form—namely, the demise of the protagonist. As this kind of ending implies, the ideal of credible collective action in prematurely democratic Japan lay in contradicting the complex nexus of old ideologies. Consequently, it is vital that neither Moeagaru midori no ki nor Chūgaeri endorse liberal values—a lack which indicates that postmodern attack on Ōe’s works is off the mark.36 Rather, these two novels should be regarded as tragic cross-examinations of both liberal ideals and political cynicism. In Ōe’s critical imagination, liberal humanist values come under rigorous scrutiny, while at the same time he rejects the irrational and violent impulses in modern society. One may contend that Ōe’s inclination toward plurality is incompatible with tragedy’s traditional emphasis on the hero’s singularity. As Jameson points out, Chūgaeri is full of doublings—or, as found in Beckett, “pseudo-couples.”37 Even the central figures of the novel are overdetermined by manifold twin relations, such as ones between Patron and Guide, Kizu and Ikuo, Patron and Morio, and so on. It is be crucial, though, to distinguish the multiple suicides at the end of Chūgaeri from the use of double suicide in Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s plays. Obviously, the solidarity that Ōe presents is the opposite of the feudal communal values that took centuries to accommodate human individuality. In fact, the church members in Ōe’s novel are thoroughly independent, as they are prepared to challenge authority and bring about social change through solidarity rather than blind discipleship. In this sense, Ōe’s tragic creation is a development of Natsume Sōseki’s attempt to encourage the independent mind. But it also adds a new dimension to the meaning of the tragic. If Chikamatsu’s tragedy embodies the impossibility of human liberation under feudal rule, and 36 If one pretends to have discarded the universality of humanist values altogether, it is fairly easy to point out the inconsistencies in Ōe’s position. John Whittier Treat, for example, gives the following comment on Ōe’s reflection on the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. “Ōe, typically, wants to have it both ways: he requires that the destruction of Hiroshima be seen as an event which forever altered humanity while he also requires that it preserve it.” See Whittier, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 251. In my view, however, it is the tension between the need and impossibility to preserve the humanity that is the point of genuine literary creation. 37 Jameson, “‘Madmen Like Kings’,” 363–64.

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Sōseki’s fiction captures the struggle of the individual in a rapidly modernizing society, Ōe’s tragic work is a product of his meditation over the difficulty of human salvation under mass democracy. Indeed, the formation of a new religious group is the most suitable motif for this attempt, because religious faith in contemporary Japan can illustrate a fundamental tension between the danger of fanaticism and the noble ideal of social unity. The catastrophic endings of both Moeagaru midori no ki and Chūgaeri are moving and convincing to us, because “active collectivity” is yet to be materialized in actual historical development. But the endings also work because Ōe paints a powerful image of the communal that we all long to see realized. What one can definitely see illuminated in Ōe’s new model of tragedy is the dynamics of cultural transformation, namely the integration of a sense of historical change and determined pluralism. Indeed, these two novels could be seen as Ōe’s sketch of the “multiplicity of universalisms” that Immanuel Wallerstein offers as an alternative to “European universalism.”38 Wallerstein claims that there is no guarantee that the human race will achieve this ideal, and that the first two to five decades of the twenty-first century will be a time of struggle to replace hierarchical inegalitarian universalism with what would look like “a network of universal universalisms.” Ōe’s “political regionalism” suggests that any particular place in space, put in the proper perspective of a total vision of historical progress, might have the potential to provide a motivating force for building such a network.

38 See Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: New Press, 2006), 84.

CHAPTER 4

The Dilemma of Multicultural Aesthetics

M

ost critics and scholars who intend to investigate the idea of modernity begin with a historical account of secularization in Europe. And so does Wang Hui. Drawing on Weber’s theory of the secularizing process of modern society, Wang argues that the seemingly neutral notion of the modern is deeply rooted in the local traditions of Europe. “The discourse on modernity,” he writes, “uses such universal concepts as rationality and subjective freedom, as well as its antireligious posture, to conceal its historical relationship with the Christian culture of Europe.”1 Wang casts doubt on the assumption that these concepts should be seen as a “universal” standard to measure the degree of development in different geographical areas. His attempt to evaluate Chinese modern discourse as “anti-modernity” thus fits into his scheme to introduce an alternative standard for measuring human progress. Up to this point, Wang’s explanation keeps to the usual conventions of contemporary pluralist arguments. What is innovative about his theorization is that, while retaining a skepticism towards Western civilization’s fondness for normativity, Wang is prepared to speak highly of such “progressive” social changes as the introduction of universal human rights and transformative social reform. Given the European origin of all these ideas, his account might seem inconsistent, but it is not: it indicates, instead, his exceptional skill at interpreting modernity through its historical contradictions, considering a specific historical condition as a synthesis of progress and diversity. Wang’s awareness of the ambiguity of modernity thus allows him to question the predominance of European values when respecting cultural difference, while at the same time 1

Hui Wang, “Weber and the Question of Chinese Modernity,” in The Politics of Imagining Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 266.

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stressing the significance of modern social reform when confronting oppressive local regimes. Strong belief in universal ideas has been debunked in recent critical discourse in defense of cultural diversity. Indeed, it is common in mainstream academic parlance to contrast the “universal” with the “cultural.” This binarism is based on the belief that universal validity implies a unified system of higher values that is supposedly exclusive or intolerant towards “minor” cultural traditions. This anti-universalist cause has now become a dogma. In the introduction to his discussion of the Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel describes “modish multiculturalism infused with postmodernism” as the latest challenge to Enlightenment principles and therefore a threat to modern society. In Israel’s words, “many Western intellectuals and local government policymakers argue that to attribute universal validity and superiority over other cultural traditions to core values forged in the Western Enlightenment smacks, whatever its pretensions to rational cogency, of Eurocentrism, elitism, and a lack of basic respect for the ‘other.’”2 While this widespread skepticism towards universal values is an intellectual orthodoxy, there are proponents of universalism who seek to cast a new light on enlightenment principles in opposition to the ideological use of cultural particularism. Immanuel Wallerstein, for instance, suggests that the central ideological struggle of the contemporary world can be properly characterized not as a conflict between universalism and particularism but as a conflict between “European universalism” and “universal universalism”—more precisely, as the replacement of the former with the latter.3 Of course, it is easy to discredit Wallerstein’s argument by insisting that such a claim would only end up endorsing another Eurocentric doctrine. But the point here is to distinguish between the universal/particular dynamic and the West/non-West dynamic. The former may not necessarily be the actual ideological polarity through which the West has expanded its power, but, because the universal/particular dynamic is indispensable for any form of reasoning (including anti-Eurocentric case), it can help us construct a framework through which the non-West and the West can achieve equality with one another.

2 Jonathan I. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), xvi. 3 According to Wallerstein, an alternative to European universalism is “a multiplicity of universalisms that would resemble a network of universal universalisms.” See Wallerstein, European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: New Press, 2006), 84.

CHAPTER 4    The Dilemma of Multicultural Aesthetics

What is problematic, then, is the common assumption that the non-West is a place of the cultural, whereas Europe is the locus of the universal. Whether one acknowledges the superiority of the European legacy or takes the more liberal stance of privileging cultural pluralism, one seems inevitably caught up in this fixed binary of universal Western civilization/other cultures. Only a handful of critics, such as Wang and Wallerstein, seem capable of responding properly to the contradictory nature of the idea of culture itself. In the view of these critical thinkers, universal values cannot be reduced to Western ideology and the notion of particularity is not a non-Western invention for establishing a cultural identity. Instead, Wang and Wallerstein see particularity as something that, in fact, has long been operative in the development of human liberty within Europe. As Sakai Naoki points out, “universalism and particularism reinforce and supplement each other.”4 Indeed, if universal values are not something we ought to invalidate as prejudiced rhetoric, but something we must make full use of in our attempts to render our perspective more participatory and collaborative, then the ideologies of both universalism and particularism should be investigated at the same time. In the history of mankind, the idea of the radical particularity of human existence has often served as a means of oppression as well as emancipation, just as homogeneous universal values have been repeatedly deployed to camouflage inequality as well as to free enslaved people. It is this rich interaction of universality and particularity that non-Western cultures can still learn from Europe. But the idea of culture entails another important aspect, namely the valorization of art. Indeed, it is the discipline of aesthetics that has played a pivotal role in relativizing the universal applicability of uniform standards in human culture. It is generally accepted that art theorists today have discarded the universally applicable definition of beauty that until recently has dominated aesthetics. Also, the multiculturalist cause has been championed by more and 4 Yet even Sakai sometimes seems to grasp universality as an ideological illusion of the West: “In short, the West must represent the moment of the universal under which particulars are subsumed. Indeed, the West is particular in itself, but it also constitutes the universal point of reference in relation to which others recognize themselves as particularities. And, in this regard, the West thinks itself to be ubiquitous” (Naoki Sakai, “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalim and Particularism,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian [Durham: Duke University Press, 1989], 95.) In this passage, Sakai himself makes the mistake of attacking the West for pretending to be ubiquitous despite being merely a particular entity. In reality, this mechanism of transcending particularity can be a precious (though not perfect) intellectual power that any human subject may adopt.

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more academics who have rewritten traditional European aesthetics’ “prejudices” by examining experiences of beauty in “minority” cultures; and have even suggested abandoning the term “art” itself, claiming that it has too many Western connotations.5 To be sure, the uniform conceptualization of aesthetic judgment, often alleged to be incorporated in transcendentalist philosophy or the doctrine of “disinterestedness,” would seem inappropriate when we take into account the varied cultural and social circumstances under which people have shaped their tastes.6 Nonetheless, we ought to pay equally careful attention to the fact that the skeptic’s view towards the uniformity of aesthetic formulation has its own social function in a particular historical context. The anti-universalist argument in the theory of beauty is two-hundred-years old, almost as old as the discipline of aesthetics itself. Arguably, it has its origin in romanticism’s reaction against the Enlightenment. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin describes the essential character of romanticism in terms of the replacement of the idea of truth as discovered with the idea of truth as created: Whatever the differences between the leading Romantic thinkers, . . . there runs through their writings a common notion . . . that truth is not an objective structure, independent of those who seek it, the hidden treasure waiting to be found, but is itself in all its guises created by the seeker.7

The romantics had a general mistrust of universal definitions because they saw the world not as something illuminated by applying objective, eternal, and unalterable principles, but as something that an individual brings about “as he creates works of art”—that is, through the concrete realization of his or her particular standpoint. It is precisely this constructivist position that not only promoted the romantic notion that poets and musicians are visionaries and prophets, but also endowed aesthetics (as an institutionalized discourse on the 5 See Kathleen Higgins, “Comparative Aesthetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 6 Kant’s theory of aesthetic pleasure is often accused of initiating a formalistic approach, yet in his text the universality of aesthetic judgment is not formulated as a principle. Also, Kant himself is aware that it opens up the same aporia as transcendental philosophy. On this point, see Roger Scruton, Kant (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 82–83. For a feminist disputation of the doctrine of disinterestedness, see Sarah Worth, “Feminist Aesthetics,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Nigel Gaut and Dominic Lopes (London: Routledge, 2001), 441. 7 Isaiah Berlin, The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 202.

CHAPTER 4    The Dilemma of Multicultural Aesthetics

human creative spirit) with such a significant role in refuting standardization in defense of human plurality.8 Once transplanted to non-European modernity, this romantic way of thinking serves to shape a “spontaneous” cultural identity, thereby changing Europe’s self-critique into an attack on Europe as the external authority. And central to this dialectical transition from a critique of Eurocentrism to a fullblown anti-European parochialism is the ambiguity of the notion of culture. As a weapon of protest against the homogenization of human lives, the concept of cultural difference draws due attention to the fact that the human race is not as uniform as Enlightenment reason assumes it to be. Despite the stress on diversity, however, this argument inevitably presupposes at the same stroke a homogeneous unity within a cultural community. Even though (or precisely because) the counter-hegemonic logic that favors vernacular cultural traditions is apparently compelling, anti-Enlightenment doctrines can be easily exploited within marginal groups as a way to coax its members into giving up their critical opposition. One has to bear in mind, therefore, that the idea of cultural diversity cannot serve the protest against universalism unless it risks itself oppressing members of minor groups. It is perhaps this double-edged quality of multiculturalism that gives a clue as to why romanticism later exhibited a “darker side.” In the political realm of romanticism, Berlin argues, “more sinister artists” began to destroy older society in order to create something new, showing little consideration for its costs. “It is this embodiment of the romantic ideal,” he argues, “that took more and more hysterical forms and in its extreme ended in violent irrationalism and Fascism.”9 Part of the reason that such extremism is hard to check lies in the difficulty of promoting the emancipatory cause of cultural difference without reinforcing narrower forms of particularism. Without an awareness of this dilemma, a society can end up simply replacing one form of oppressive discourse with another. All of this suggests that the counter-universalist critique of the Western civilization is the non-West’s application and internalization of the self-reflective element of Western modernity. Once the anti-Enlightenment formula is transplanted to a non-Western context, it is extremely hard not to be attracted to the view that local tradition is in the vanguard of overcoming modernity. But it is 8 Johann Gottfried Herder, often regarded as the founder of the idea of culture as a whole way of life, formed a template for this logic. For a fine account of Herder’s legacy in cultural theory, see Terry Eagleton, Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 75–86. 9 Berlin and Hardy, The Power of Ideas, 204.

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vital here to note the epistemological transformation that takes place in this discursive process: when the advantages of European modernization are put in question, the spatial axis (between the European and the non-European) tends to be given higher priority than the temporal axis (between different historical stages). This transition is sharply contrasted with the Enlightenment process which encourages individuals to seek spatial unity in order to move forward and away from social stagnation. One could even assume that it is the oscillation between these two modes of perception that has determined the way modern discourses have imagined their own historical roles. Although this discursive formula is perceptible across the globe, I shall now concentrate on Japan’s case as a telling example. As a nation located in the Far East and with non-white people, yet as the first industrialized modern state in Asia, Japan nurtured a cultural identity torn between a sense of inferiority towards the West and the confidence of a modern power. One of the most significant outcomes of this inner conflict was the dramatic ideological reversal that developed from doubts about Western hegemony and the resultant demand for Japanese cultural inclusiveness. This was followed by the denigration of universal principles in general and, finally, to the worship of traditional Japanese values and the legitimization of imperial aggression in the 30s and 40s: the “idealist” cause of building an Asian community known as the “Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Even the horrific experience of the Pacific War, however, did not teach the nation about the need to recognize ambivalence in the logic of cultural diversity. In the 1970s, the notoriously ideological debate over the uniqueness of Japanese culture (known as the nihonjinron discourse) set out to reconsider every aspect of cultural tradition from Shintoism, animism, Bushidō, and Zen Buddhism to language and the structure of the family. Academics and popular writers reinterpreted Japanese culture as radically different from other cultures. Given that most theories of this type have been discredited, it is almost incomprehensible that the stereotypes it revived have had a tremendous influence on both foreign and native ideas about Japanese cultural tradition. And it is astounding that these stereotypes did not start to break down until much later. But once more, Wang Hui’s account of Chinese postmodernity offers an illuminating insight for reconsidering what has happened in Japan since the 1970s. According to Wang’s historical analysis, real historical breaks are acknowledged if one places modern “revolutions” in perspective. This is the reason why he researches basic modern concepts, such as democracy, human rights, and social equality, which prominent Chinese intellectuals in the late Qin dynasty

CHAPTER 4    The Dilemma of Multicultural Aesthetics

were acutely aware of. For Wang, who trusts in the precious heritage of modernity, the point of critiquing Eurocentrism is not to entirely dismiss Western modernity as bogus universalism, but to call attention to the “internal contradictions” of the globalization driven by Europe. Thus he inscribes China’s entire historical development, including its anti-modernity movement, into the country’s long historical process of modernization, and reads the relativism of the 1990s onwards as a dialectical response to the 80s. Wang describes Chinese discourse throughout the 1980s as a phase of “depoliticization,” in which politicians and intellectuals across the board scrapped socialism as a failure. On the other hand, Wang takes little notice of the historical break of around 1989 on the grounds that since Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the south in the late 1970s China has consistently been trying to integrate its economy with the global market. Looked at from the perspective of historical continuity, then, postmodern discourse in 1990s China does not seem as radical as it once appeared to be: At the same time as it deconstructs all values, postmodernism jeers at the serious sociopolitical critical intent of the New Enlightenment intellectuals while ignoring the formative role of capitalist activity in modern life and neglecting consideration of the relationship between the capitalist activity and China’s socialist reforms.10

Wang’s observation of the ambiguous status of “radical” intellectuals helps us reconsider the general function of cultural criticism in the late twentieth century. For although postmodern discourse in the 1990s appeared “radical” in its mockery of modern liberal values, it was silent (if not blind) in regard to the most dominant social system—that is, the capitalist market—and in this sense was not critical at all. Indeed, Wang’s diagnosis of contemporary China is highly useful in placing in a proper historical context academic and critical discourse in Japan over the past thirty to forty years. It is broadly recognized that the Japan of the 1990s was markedly different from that of the 1980s.11 However, it is also important to note that the changes 10 Hui Wang, “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity,” in China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, ed. Theodore Huters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 170. 11 Andrew Gordon writes, for instance, that “the logic for dividing Japanese time as well as global time around 1990 . . . is compelling” (Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 308).

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that occurred in society did not affect the prevalent postmodern system of belief. Distrust of modern ideas, such as democracy and the value of party politics, was still dominant and brought about no sea change as profound as the one that took place in the early 1970s. The most powerful critical agenda remained “the end of master-narratives,” with more amplification. After Wang, then, we could redefine this long process as paralleling the “depoliticization” in China after the revolution. This explains the gradual departure from democratic party politics and socialist ideals in Japan in and after the 1980s. This broader perspective is also helpful in clarifying why “radical” theory in postmodern Japan did not stop cultural nationalism: “radicalism” mainly sought the total rejection of universals in favor of marginalized cultures, a stance which worked to shore up the nation state and capitalism. In Europe and America, Marxist critics were quick to show that postmodern theory share the logic of the global market. As they rightly observed, the abstract rejection of homogenization in cultural theory is complicit in the consumerist glorification of a (false) diversity that renders all different objects exchangeable in the global market.12 In Japan, where such dialectical perspectives have struggled to gain a purchase, the liberals’ fundamental distrust of universal ideals forged a secret bond with cultural parochialism. As a result, it has been a long time since Japanese cultural discourse became “dogmatically monistic about pluralism”13 and an oversimplified refutation of master-narratives itself became the dominant master-narrative. By the time the nihonjinron debate was over, the idea of culture had been deprived of its ambiguity, as it simply functioned as a sign of continuous and homogeneous community. An exemplary case of this inadequate use of the idea of cultural difference can be found in Fujiwara Masahiko’s book Kokka no hinkaku (The dignity of nation), which sold more than two and a half million copies and was one of the best-selling titles of 2006. In this book Fujiwara draws a stark contrast, in a manner characteristic of cultural nationalism, between Western logic and the aesthetic sense that is unique to Japanese tradition. He wraps up his argument as follows: I have proved the failure of rationality, and . . . sought its alternatives in our sensitivity and our sense of formality. We found our sensitivity for beauty 12 In this sense, as Paul Crowther remarks, contemporary aesthetic theories of cultural diversity are surely compatible with global market consumerism. See Paul Crowther, “Normativity, Not Cultural Theory: Aesthetics in the Age of Global Consumerism,” International Yearbook of Aesthetics 8 (2004). 13 Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 127.

CHAPTER 4    The Dilemma of Multicultural Aesthetics in such a notion as mono-no-aware; and we saw formality in our traditional sense of benevolence, sincerity, compassion, honor and justice which all derive from the spirit of Bushidō. For this reason, Japan is under an obligation to demonstrate to the world that our sense of formality and sentiment unique to the Japanese people are superior to such concepts as “freedom” or “equality.” These concepts are having a devastating effect upon our time, because, even if they pretend to be valid with the help of reasoning, their dogmas of “liberty,” of “equality,” or of “market economy” could not bring deep happiness to human beings, any more than the doctrine of communism could do so.14

Similarly, when the chief cabinet minister (then) Abe Shinzō tries to rouse nationalistic feeling in his book published in the same year as Fujiwara’s, he only has to play up the danger of Western-style universalization and argue that people are entitled to have their own cultural backgrounds and therefore that the standardized identity of “the global citizen” will leave the nation uninspired.15 As is characteristic of nationalist texts, Abe’s argument invites the nation to regard a respect for local cultural tradition as incompatible with a sense of global civil liberty. In his view, fostering universal values means a deplorable loss of cultural diversity, which people must firmly resist in defense of their own spontaneous ethnic creativity. The fact that it is fairly normal for each individual to be simultaneously part of many different groups (some of which are as large as humankind itself) escapes his attention; nor is it acknowledged that the imposition of an identity on a cultural community can be as oppressive for independent individuals as universal imperatives. Rather than fostering the illusion of a seamless bond between the individual and their cultural community, then, critics and theorists must highlight discrepancies in the self as such. These incongruities are registered in works of art as the problems that fictional characters confront—most dramatically in works of tragic art. But some writers also attempt to elucidate such incongruities in theoretical terms, encouraging the reader in the hard task of elaborating an understanding of selfhood against the background of cultural difference as perceived within a historical framework. When a nationalist author claimed 14 Masahiko Fujiwara, Kokka no hinkaku (The dignity of nation) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2005), 185. Mono-no-aware is a peculiarly Japanese response to the transience of beauty. 15 Shinzō Abe, Utsukushī kuni e (Towards a nation of beauty) (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2006), 92. It is highly suggestive that Abe’s book is titled Utsukushii kuni e, which can be translated as “Towards a nation of beauty” or “Towards an aesthetic nation.”

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that one must establish the self before learning the history and facts of the outside world, Ōe Kenzaburō responded: To possess the sense of individual self is certainly important, and most difficult to do, I must say. I have spent almost the whole of my literary life, more than forty years, with this sole aim in mind. And in the process of my struggle to establish the self, the most effective resource at hand has been the study on foreign cultures, civilizations and histories—along with the study on those of my own country.16

Ōe is right to suggest that a human being is always in the process of discovering their own unique character. Universality, for Ōe, is not something that comes as a threat from outside and that therefore should be detested as an invention of a foreign culture. Rather, it is something that gives the nation as well as the individual a powerful means to escape its insularity. More importantly, Ōe’s statement suggests that the whole process of “struggling to establish the self ” and the creativity of an artist converges in the concrete process of writing a literary text. This courageous Asian writer thus prompts us to seek for a new aesthetic that does not mitigate the incongruities, as the traditional aesthetics does, by offering an illusory reconciliation between the universal and the particular. Unfortunately, though, Ōe seems to be a lonely voice, a rare defiant spirit fighting against a formidable ideology that has developed a very complex and intricate rhetoric around the term “culture” in modern Japan. In the next chapter, we will explore the historical development of this idea of culture in detail.

16 Kenzaburō Ōe, Sakoku shitewa naranai (We must not seclude our country again) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2001), 321. My translation.

CHAPTER 5

Japanese Modernity and the Cultural Configuration of Nature

U

nlike many historians who employ the term “revolution” to emphasize the range and depth of social transformation during the early Meiji period, Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) was sparing with his use of this word. Certainly, by the time he published Things Japanese (1904), Japan was considerably different from its condition in 1873 when he arrived and was formally welcomed by samurai wearing swords. His vivid description of everyday life, including newspapers and pillar posts, telephone bells and railway stations, illustrates the astonishing speed with which the country was modernizing. Chamberlain openly admits that, because of Japan’s achievements in its wars against China and Russia, the assumed inferiority of the Far Eastern nations had been disproved, and that this was “the result of forty years of hard work on the part of a whole nation.”1 Nonetheless, there are certain areas in which he barely acknowledged significant change. He complains, for instance, that even Japan’s modern history textbooks made an attempt to revise records of the past in order to give the impression that the national spirit had been “unbroken for ages eternal.”2 Chamberlain’s contempt for such revisionism is a healthy one, yet his view of this naiveté in historical study as a typically “Oriental” flaw borders on racism against non-Western cultures in general:

1 Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan for the Use of Travellers and Others (Berkeley: Stone Bridge, 2007), 261. 2 Ibid., 262.

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PART TWO    The Dialectics of Nature in Japanese Intellectual History A little reflection will show that such manipulations of history are likely to be the rule rather than the exception in Oriental countries. The love of truth for truth’s sake is not a general human characteristic, but one of the exceptional traits of the Modern European mind, developed slowly by many causes, chiefly by those habits of accuracy which physical science does so much to foster. The concern of ancient peoples and of Oriental peoples has always been, not so much truth as edification.3

In spite of Chamberlain’s admission that “the love of truth for truth’s sake” developed only “slowly” in Europe, and his positive comment that Japan’s attitude towards historical studies was undergoing a massive metamorphosis, this passage appears to be a blatant example of Eurocentrism, partly because of Chamberlain’s deep-seated belief that universal historical progress always evolves in the same direction. He proposes that Europe and the Orient are at different stages on an identical historical course, each striving to progress to a more advanced stage without discontinuity. For today’s readers, and especially “radical” pluralists, such a belief has long been discredited, and it would be much more reasonable to claim that each civilization has its own historical path to follow. Yet Chamberlain’s critique on historical study in Japan may be prophetic when one notes that Japan’s inclination to manipulate the past persisted until much later, and probably it does today. Chamberlain could be right to suppose that “the national character persists, manifesting no change in essentials.”4 His reservation about the “revolutionary” nature of Japanese modernization can also be justified by the fact that, admittedly, the social transformation of the early Meiji era can itself be called an “aristocratic revolution.” For although the Japanese urban bourgeoisie had already acquired power by the mid-nineteenth century, it was not these newly powerful classes but the members of the old elite class themselves that overturned the old regime. By carrying out what some historians call a “revolution from above,”5 the new elite gradually shaped the emerging national consciousness, firstly by absorbing all the manifestly useful elements of European civilization, and secondly by formulating a rhetoric of cultural tradition by contrasting it to the West.

3 Ibid., 262. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 62.

CHAPTER 5    Japanese Modernity and the Cultural Configuration of Nature

One thing that Chamberlain probably did not recognize is the extraordinary dynamic between European influences and local responses to them; for instance, that the deplorable manipulation of history can be promoted not solely by local authorities and by the nation’s geopolitical surrounding, but also by the introduction of the European manner of thinking as such. Indeed, a body of study in modern Japanese history has revealed that Japanese cultural identity is immensely indebted to European theories. As Michael Marra points out, even the “ expression ‘Japanese aesthetics’ . . . refers to a process of philosophical negotiation between Japanese thinkers and Western hermeneutical practices in the creation and development of images of Japan.”6 Despite such an origin, the discovery of aesthetic feeling peculiar to Japanese tradition is always regarded as result of indigenous, spontaneous development rather than a product of an imported form of reasoning. The key to understanding this reversal of perspective which is constitutive of shaping non-Western identity can be found in the complex interrelation between relevant notions like art, nature, nation, individual, and so forth, which comprise the concept of culture. This is the topic I intend to pursue in this chapter.

A. Naturalism and National Identity Raymond Williams once argued that words such as “culture,” “society,” “individual,” “class,” “art,” and “tragedy” are difficult to analyze critically, but that “the idea of nature makes them comparatively simple.”7 This is because, in his own terms, “the idea of nature contains an extraordinary amount of human history.”8 The Japanese notion of shizen (nature) registers equally complex changes in human experience, and reading the historical complexities of this notion is illuminating for understanding not only Japanese intellectual history, but also the modern formulation of shared identity in general. The first generation of modern Japanese intellectuals, namely those members of Meiji elite educated in the Edo period, took pleasure in their discovery of nature as the physical world, the object of scientific investigation and technological interventions into a domain that was exclusive of human beings. It is not hard to imagine the tremendous change that this discovery 6 Michael F. Marra, Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 2. 7 Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 2005), 67. 8 Ibid., 70.

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brought to the meaning of the word shizen, which had not been in daily use yet already had a long history with a religious or, if you like, metaphysical bearing. But only a couple of decades after shizen acquired its modern meaning as the object of scientific inquiry, the notion underwent another significant change. The second generation of Meiji intellectuals—most of whom were born in the 1860s and taught in the modern education system, and typically graduated from the newly established Tokyo Imperial University—perceived their own way of life as “exotic,” as something for which Western thought could not provide an accurate explanation. After returning from their state-sponsored studies in Europe, many of these intellectuals became college professors or writers, offering theoretical models for looking at their own cultural tradition through Westerners’ eyes. Their voices enjoyed wide popular support, as they helped to establish the cultural identity of Japan using the authority of modern, “international” knowledge. The importance of the notion of nature in this process of discursive formation cannot be overestimated. For, with the implication that nature is “untainted” by human civilization, it effectively crystallized the representation of indigenous culture as the opposite of Western modernity. Increasingly, the idea of nature fascinated Japanese people with its fresh image of a realm not contaminated by European modernity, as something that premodern Japan originally enjoyed but that was coming under threat from the introduction of Western science and technology. The ruthless pursuit of materialist values was thought to be the vice caused by Western individualism, whereas a more harmonious, nature-friendly attitude was approved of as “our own” model of life. On one level, this idea of nature as “pure” may have been an inheritance of an older, religious use of the term shizen. For example, the Kamakura Buddhist Shinran defined the word jinen (a premodern pronunciation of shizen) as follows: Ji means “of itself ” or “by itself.” As it is not due to the designing of man but to Nyorai’s vow . . . it is said that man is naturally or spontaneously (nen), led to the Pure Land. The devotee does not make any conscious self-designing efforts, for they are altogether ineffective to achieve the end. Jinen thus means that as one’s rebirth into the Pure Land is wholly due to the working of Nyorai’s vow power, it is for the devotee just to believe in Nyorai and let his vow work itself out.9 9

Shinran, “Jinen hōni,” in Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (London;

CHAPTER 5    Japanese Modernity and the Cultural Configuration of Nature

Modern cultural discourse took over this explanation of shizen as a spontaneous nature, as a symbol of indigenous culture untainted by hegemonic power. In fact, as I shall explain later, the polarity between Japanese tradition as “natural” and Western civilization as “artificial” has become a convention of Japanese neo-nationalist discourse. What differentiates the ideological uses of the idea of nature in modern Japan from those before modernization, though, is its close tie to the notion of “the past.” Because of the remarkable social change that occurred under the modernizing process, the conception of nature not only serves to evoke an urgent need to protect the disappearing past, but itself incorporates the endangered premodern values that distinguished their traditional community from the dominant civilization. The discourse on shizen thus provided the nation with a way to identify with a moral ideal higher than “defective” Western modernity. One of the earliest signs of modern cultural formation through the experience of nature is Shiga Shigetaka’s (1863–1927) book Nihon fūkei ron (A study of Japanese landscape, 1894). In this work, Shiga attempts to distinguish the beauty of the Japanese landscape from that in Europe, China, or Korea. Being a geographer by profession, he boasts an extensive knowledge of geography as well as expertise on the fauna and flora of the Japanese archipelago. The greater part of the book covers four factors that he claims are responsible for the beauty and distinctness of landscapes in Japan: (1) the different patterns of climate brought by the ocean currents circling the country; (2) the vapor in the air; (3) the volcanic mountains; and (4) the erosion of the coastline by the sea. Shiga cites many examples from classical literature to show that these elements contribute to shaping Japanese taste with regard to landscape and nature. It is striking, however, that Shiga occasionally deviates from his examination of objective facts to sing the praises of Japan’s cultural tradition. One might not object to his belief that the existence of a variety of pine species fostered the resilience of the Japanese character: beautiful traits in a local landscape may certainly cultivate the mind. But Shiga’s assessment of the historical conditions suitable for nurturing aesthetic taste is not always innocent. One might question, for instance, his insistence that “Mt. Fuji is the standard of excellent mountains all over the world,”10 or his implication that because “Britain has no volcano, the origin of civilizations,”11 the country’s landscape is mediocre. New York: Routledge, 2002), 133. 10 Shigetaka Shiga, Nihon fūkei ron (A study of Japanese landscape), (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 97–98. My translation. 11 Ibid., 174.

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In order to make sense of his enthusiasm, one has to bear in mind that Shiga was not just a scientist who studied European geography but a patriotic journalist from the Seikyōsha group that tried to define the kokusui (national essence) of Japan to preserve its distinctive national character. It is also important to remember that the turn of the century, when Japan fought and won two successful wars with China and Russia, was the historical moment at which patriotic loyalty was rapidly growing. Japan at the time was struggling to demonstrate its power and status in contemporary world history. Nihon fūkei ron, then—a brilliant study of landscape that reconciles Western scientific method and the Japanese local sense of place —was one of the earliest and most successful examples of the synthesis of nature and culture authorized by the Japanese themselves to establish a modern national identity. This discursive formation was made possible by virtue of the modification of Western thought, notably by the transfiguration of European naturalism into Japanese shizenshugi (naturalism). Shizenshugi is arguably the most influential movement in modern Japanese literary history, and left a lasting mark on later literature.12 Initially, the concept of naturalism was borrowed from French writers such as Flaubert and Zola. Modeled on its European predecessor, Japanese naturalism attempted to depict reality as truthfully as possible, in the same way natural science attempts to present the real world. Thus early shizenshugi writers, such as Kosugi Tengai (1865–1952), Oguri Fūyō (1875– 1926), and Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908), employed an objective, detached style, carefully documenting the historical background of narrative fictions. However, after the two most important works of the movement—namely Shimazaki Tōson’s (1872–1943) Hakai and Tayama Katai’s (1872–1930) Futon—were published in 1906, the focus of the movement shifted from objectivity to “naturalness.” The subject of fiction moved from the unhappy lives of people in lower strata of society to the problems of middle-class families, often shockingly capturing of the inner lives of protagonists. But the development of shizenshugi meant nothing less than reshaping the notion of “truth” in literature. When European naturalism was introduced along with realism, “truth” was understood as the correspondence between a perceiving subject and a perceived object—an approach again modeled on 12 The postwar critic Nakamura Mitsuo acknowledged the relevance of naturalism by stating that modern Japanese literature started with the emergence of shizenshugi literature. However, Nakamura also pointed out that the same movement would distort Japanese literature for decades to come. See Mitsuo Nakamura, “Hūzoku shōsetsu ron” (A study of the popular fiction), in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1972).

CHAPTER 5    Japanese Modernity and the Cultural Configuration of Nature

European natural science. As the naturalist movement expanded, though, “truth” became the commingling of subject and object, the transcendence of opposition between subject and object. This turn led to a deeper focus on fundamental reality than found in realistic depiction based on natural science. According to Sōma Gyofū (1883–1950) this accounts for the superiority of naturalism to realism: The truthful portrayal of nature and relentless depiction of human lives are the common feature of realism and naturalism. But whereas realism portrays them merely as objects of knowledge detached from the self, naturalism depicts everything as something fused with oneself. The status of amalgamation between subject and object, or unity between knowledge and emotion, is based on this fusion.13

The crucial term is fusion, which suggests that the power of shizenshugi literature lies in its ability to reveal the truth of human experience by overcoming the opposition between subject and object. Significantly, this shift in the meaning of nature from mere object to the harmonious relation between subject and object can be observed not merely within literary circles but in the wider critical and academic discourse of the late Meiji period. In fact, it became a general framework for reflecting on human nature. The philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), for instance, argues in his first book Zen no kenkyū (A Study of the good, 1911): In pure experience there is not yet a division of knowledge, emotion and will, no opposition between subject and object as if it were the single entity. The opposition between subject and object results from the requirements of our thought, thus is not yet the fact for the immediate experience. On the level of immediate experience there is only one fact, namely that of an independent autonomy. Neither a seeing subject, nor a seen object exists. As though we are entranced by a beautiful music, forgetting the distinction of things and self, feeling as if a sole powerful sound existed between heaven and earth, so what can be called real being is present before us in this moment.14 13 Gyofū Sōma, “Bungeijō shukyakuryōtai no yūgō” (Fusion of the subject and the object in literature), in Kindai bungaku hyōron taikei, ed. S. Yoshida and W. Kingo, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 1982), 61. My translation. 14 Kitarō Nishida, Zen no kenkyū (A study of the good), in Nishida Kitarō zenshū, vol. 1

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It is worth noting that this idealization of “immediate experience” presupposes an internalization of the natural world. In short, the turn of the twentieth century in Japan marked a historical moment at which critics and scholars in various fields set out to imagine an inner world where subject and object achieved perfect balance. The consequence of this internalization for literary creation is captured most clearly in Karatani Kōjin’s perceptive study Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Karatani argues that the “structure of interiority” was in place by the third decade of the Meiji period, and locates the moment of its establishment as the “discovery of landscape” in Kunikida Doppo’s story “Wasure enu hitobito” (Unforgettable people, 1898)15. The story revolves around the personal recollections of a scholar called Ōtsu. In a spoken account, Ōtsu portrays people whom he is unable to forget, such as friends, acquaintances and teachers. Curiously, though, his memoir includes an unnamed man of whom Ōtsu only catches a glimpse from a steamer, a tiny dot far away on the beach. This shows, according to Karatani, that those whom Ōtsu depicts are merely “people-as-landscapes,” perceived as unforgettable when aided by “a fundamental inversion.” The romantic tone with which Ōtsu expresses his compassion towards these people is remarkable: But more than anything else, images of these people I have described to you come streaming into my mind. No, I see not the people themselves. I see the figures in the background of a much larger scene. They are part of their surroundings, part of a moment. I remember these people and from deep within me the thought wells up: How am I different from anyone else? Part of the life we share is from heaven, and part of it is from the earth. All of us are returning, hand in hand, along the same eternal track, to that infinite heaven. And when this realization comes to me, I find myself in tears, for there is then in truth no Self, no Others. I am touched by memories of each and every one.16

In Karatani’s view, this passage reveals the link between landscape and an introverted, solitary situation. “It is only with the ‘inner man’,” Karatani writes, “who (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965), 59–60. My translation. 15 Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 22–25. 16 Doppo Kunikida, “Wasure enu hitobito” (Unforgettable people), trans. Jay Rubin, Monumenta Nipponica 27, no. 3 (1972): 199, cited in Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 25.

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appears to be indifferent to his external surroundings, that landscape is discovered. It is perceived by those who do not look ‘outside.’”17 The landscape, in other words, is an introverted representation of nature, discovered and institutionalized only through the lens of the Western eye.18 In the context of our investigation, it is also helpful to note that the distinction between self and other disappears in Kunikida. This marks, again, the historical point at which the imagined unity of subject and object, rather than the objective correspondence between the perceiving self and the external world, appeared to be a more authentic, “natural” truth to the Japanese for the first time. Significantly, though, this formative process of naturalism is masked once the aesthetic subject has been established, as if the subject appreciates the external reality through their own natural taste. As we have seen in Shiga’s argument, this “introverted representation of nature” can be easily connected to national identity. That said, there were intellectuals in the Meiji period who defied the prevailing rhetoric that combined the idea of nature with cultural nationalism. In contrast to Shiga’s book, Uchimura Kanzō’s (1861–1930) Chirigakukō (A reflection on geography, 1894), despite being published in the same year and dealing with a similar topic, is little known even in Japan. Uchimura is widely accepted as a great Christian leader and one of the most defiant figures in prewar imperial Japan. In 1891, when he refused to bow before the Imperial Rescript of Education at a ceremony and was accused of insulting the emperor, he demonstrated that his faith, unlike that of some other Meiji Christians, was not a mere badge of newly imported Western civilization. The basic agenda of Chirigakukō (Uchimura’s cherished project ever since he had enrolled in a theological school in the United States) was to explain the geographical features of each region and interpret the effect they had on the national cultural psyche. His account is strikingly different from Shiga’s, especially in that for Uchimura the natural world reflects divine providence, and thus should be interpreted as part of the historical process of realizing God’s will. In effect, Uchimura provides a grand teleological vision of world history, not unlike that of Hegel, but from an Asian perspective. His high-minded worldview as a Christian and his extensive knowledge of Western science would make Uchimura seem far more universalist than Shiga. 17 Ibid. Karatani also comments, later, that “the pattern of retreat to interiority and literature after political setback has been continuously repeated in the modern period. The trajectory I suggested . . . could also be seen in the 1970s” (ibid., 44). 18 It should be noted that Kunikida Doppo was a Christian believer.

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Nevertheless, his account of nature is no less patriotic. In fact, what he reads into natural surroundings is nothing less than Japan’s unique mission with regard to world history. He understands the positive contributions of both Western and Eastern civilization, yet claims that neither of them are perfect: “Splits and contentions come from Europe, whereas conformity and union come from China. Europe is accompanied by freedom and independence, while China breeds harmony and obedience. Western society consists in the contracts of individuals, whereas Eastern nations have been modeled on the solidarity of family.”19 What position, then, is Japan to take, he asks? “Japan is the mediator between the West and the East. . . . This is a mission which a great nation should be proud of.”20 Uchimura’s statement indicates that it was still not impossible for mid-Meiji intellectuals to connect interpretations of local nature with a more altruistic, if not universalist, ideal. In distinguishing narrow patriotism (of Shiga’s type) from his own patriotism, he writes: How foolish it is to consider that a global vision and philanthropism would hamper a self-respecting patriotism. If this were true, then a frog in the a would be the best patriot. . . . Genuine patriotism should mean to love your own nation on behalf of the universe. Only this sort of patriotism can benefit your country.21

It is arguable that Uchimura is a founder of the critical universalist tradition in Japan, inclined towards Enlightenment-inspired rather than romantic reflection, and was thus interested in privileging the natural environment over the human realm. But a healthy patriotism of his kind is gradually overpowered by xenophobic jingoism, as the idealistic cause of Japan’s task as a liberator was exploited to justify Japan’s colonial aggression in Asia. Although Uchimura, like his contemporaries Natsume Sōseki and Sun Yat-Sen in China, might have genuinely striven for Asian regionalism, his Enlightenment universalism and Japanese nationalism were increasingly hard to reconcile. Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941), another universalist dissident figure, was an intellectual with encyclopedic knowledge who introduced the notion of “ecology” into Japan half a century before it became fashionable. Interestingly, 19 Kanzō Uchimura, Chirigakukō (Reflections on geography), in Uchimura Kanzō zenshū, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982), 451. My translation. 20 Ibid., 464. My translation. 21 Ibid., 364–65. My translation.

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it was this ecological interest that made him skeptical about using nature as a symbol of national identity—that is, seeing nature as pathway to recovering “tradition.” For him, nature was under threat not simply because of the industrialization imposed from the outside onto Japan, but also because of the policies of the Japanese government itself. The government had taken administrative control over localities by demanding to set up shrines to enhance the national power of Shintoism for wartime mobilization. Having realized that the construction of shrines would devastate the natural environment, Minakata vehemently opposed this plan by democratic means such as petitions and writing newspaper articles.22 While Minakata was a patriot, as Shiga and Uchimura were, he also had a progressive vision of human beings, through which he observed the changing status of nature; and he put his ideas into practice as a citizen to preserve nature. Yet Minakata was not only an outspoken campaigner. He was also a man with a real feeling for the beauty of nature. He never saw the non-Western premodern condition as pristine, nor did he provide a simplistic contrast between the destructive effects of industrialization and local harmony with nature. From his work, which undermined the ideological link between Japan’s indigenous values and introverted naturalism, emerges an important lesson for the aesthetics of nature: namely, the need to avoid the trap of romanticizing the experience of nature. Notwithstanding the resistance mounted by Uchimura and Minakata, the discursive strategies for shaping a communal sense of natural beauty by virtue of its purity were further refined by the next generation of the modern Japanese elite, who grew up in a more cosmopolitan environment after the country’s triumph in the Russo-Japanese War, and for whom there was no urgent need to strive for international recognition of their homeland. Prominent intellectuals such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941), and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) devised ideas and images that successfully made sense of Japan’s cultural values, which were then sold to the Western world. This established many of today’s stereotypes about the “mysteries” of Japan.

22 The ethnologist Yanagita Kunio opposed this plan too, yet in a different way: Yanagita’s approach was more culturalist than political. As we shall see, this difference is crucial in the ideological development that follows.

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B. From Protest to Conformism In his introduction to Culture and Society, Raymond Williams argues that the development of the word “culture” around the turn of the nineteenth century is a response to the great changes of the time, and that it offers “a special kind of map” by which one can explore the nature of these changes. The “map” allows one to recognize a general pattern of shifts in the use of such key terms as “industry,” “democracy,” “class,” and “art.” This is the premise upon which Williams sets out to describe and analyze the complexity of the modern notion of culture and to give an account of its historical formation.23 Not surprisingly, one can detect a similar “pattern of change” in the context of Japanese modernity. As a matter of fact, despite its notorious ambiguity, the Japanese word bunka can be neatly translated into the English word “culture.” This is because the breadth of the idea—ranging from the arts and other such fields of creativity that mark out human civilization from barbarism, to a whole way of life, especially the lifestyle of a particular group of people—reflects that of its European counterpart.24 To be sure, “bunka” is a relatively new word (the term only came into use in the Meiji era when Japan opened itself to Western countries); but “bunka” is perhaps the single most important term in modern Japanese intellectual history.25 A major reason for this importance lies in the fact that the general pattern of change in the meaning of bunka registers a significant discursive transition—from universalism to anti-universalism— and this reversal of meaning has determined the zeitgeist of modern Japan. The following section is an attempt to trace this dynamic historical process that spans almost a century from the Meiji period to the late twentieth century.26 As is shown in the common usage of the phrase bunka no chigai (cultural difference), probably the most obvious connotation of the term “bunka” is the diversity of human practices. But this connotation is strikingly absent in the 23 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), xvii. 24 For a good account of the fundamental confusion regarding the concept of “culture,” see Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, “Culture as the Ideological Battleground of the Modern World-System,” in Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 158–62. 25 The Japanese word “bunka” consists of two Chinese characters: bun meaning letters, implying cultivation, and ka meaning change. Thus the compound only gives the impression of a development into a cultivated, advanced stage, not necessarily into variety. 26 For a full account, see part one of Kinya Nishi, Bunka no shisō (Culture as a system of thought) (Yokohama: Shumpūsha, 2012).

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first half of the Meiji era. The general optimism and belief in human progress, with which Japan started to modernize itself, is reflected in the use of the word “bunka” to signify the historical development that separates human civilization from savagery. A new epoch began when the two founding figures of modern Japanese cultural identity, Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō, invented the term in order to register difference and identity simultaneously. With their extensive knowledge of European philosophy and comparative method,27 they had a major impact upon theories (both home and abroad) elaborated to articulate the difference between Japanese and Western culture. It is truly remarkable that these two thinkers defined Japanese identity through a theory of art, the realm where the spirit of a nation appears in the purest form. An excellent interpreter of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Watsuji criticized the newly arrived naturalism for reducing artistic value to mere “details of fact.” Watsuji himself gives a definition of art in terms of “the depth of facts” and “the height, greatness, depth and perfection of an artist’s individual life.”28 This discovery of the internal world as authentic reality, rather than the external “reality” that consists of objective or rationalistic facts, is enormously important in modern Japanese intellectual history. Indeed, this rethinking of reality paved the way for disconnecting value judgments from universality, to reconnect them to the spirit of local traditions, and eventually led to the rhetoric of absolutizing the value system of a particular cultural community. In his influential book Fūdo (The climate, 1935), Watsuji tries to categorize human culture into three basic types according to people’s lives in relation to the climate: the East Asian “Monsoon” type, the West Asian “Desert” type, and the European “Pasture” type. Japan naturally belongs to the Monsoon type, although the Japanese character is clearly distinguished, according to Watsuji, from the Chinese character by the former’s “moist passion and aggressive detachment” that is nurtured by the occasional visit of typhoon. It is remarkable that in his explanation Watsuji frequently summons up the image of wind, which suggests he falls back on a cliché of identity formation by placing shapeless, fluid elasticity in opposition to solid rigidity. In his account of artistic creation, too, Watsuji delineates the essential feature of European tradition using such terms as “regularity,” “rationality,” “artificiality,” “symmetry,” 27 Kuki lived in Europe from 1922 to 1929 in order to study with renowned philosophers such as Heinrich Rickert, Henri Bergson, and Martin Heidegger. 28 Tetsurō Watsuji, Gūzō saikō (A renouncement of iconoclasm), in Watsuji Tetsurō zenshū, vol. 17 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962), 200.

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and “numerical relation,” whereas Japanese art is characterized as having an “infinitely complex” beauty and a “subtlety” which “a human being would never fathom in rationalistic terms.”29 The high priority of aesthetic experience was largely linked with the enterprise of marking off Japanese culture from the West. Kuki Shūzō brilliantly performs the task of establishing this link when he describes the unique character of Japanese aesthetics using Western concepts. Kuki depicts Japan’s cultural tradition in terms of “intuition” and “organic logic,” rather than (supposedly European) terms like “calculation” and “inorganic logic.” In his renowned analysis of the notion of the contingent in Gūzensei no mondai (The problem of contingency, 1929–35), he posits human destiny as a metaphysical representation of the contingent, only accessible by religious or artistic insight, and also as something inexplicable in terms of abstraction or demonstration.30 The supremacy of aesthetic experience over rationality is combined with the uniqueness of national character in Nihonteki seikaku ( Japanese characters, 1937), where he remarks that “in all Japanese art—from waka or haiku, through painting and architecture, to the tea ceremony and flower arrangement and garden design—the aim is the fusion of nature and art.”31 According to this account, harmony between nature and human beings is most likely to be achieved in Japanese artistic experience. In claiming that “human freedom and nature are experienced as fused with and dependent upon each other,” Kuki does not forget to add that “freedom” is “something that gushes out from oneself, not something brought about by petty astuteness,” the latter suggesting Western rationality. The cultural philosophy of Watsuji and Kuki thus predicated social unity on aesthetic judgment. It is important to note that these two eminent philosophers successfully promoted their vision of organic society at the precise moment that inequality in Japan was alarming radical intellectuals so much that they embraced socialism as the solution to the problem of industrial capitalism. Bunka in this context was a bulwark against social unrest, among other things the outbreak of revolution. In fact, it was the Marxist philosopher 29 Tetsurō Watsuji, Fūdo (The climate), in Watsuji Tetsurō zenshū vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962), 175–96. For a succinct overview of Watsuji’s theory of culture, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 56–59. 30 See Shūzō Kuki, Gūzensei no mondai (The problem of contingency), in Kuki Shūzō zenshū, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980–1982), 228–29. 31 Shūzō Kuki, “Nihonteki seikaku” ( Japanese characters), in Kuki Shūzō zenshū, vol. 3, 277.

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Tosaka Jun (1900–45) who rebuked Watsuji most sharply for his unhistorical take on climate in Fūdo. Watsuji’s theory, according to Tosaka, “is nothing other than nature interpreted through anthropology, or at least as an anthropological substitute for nature. In other words, the notion of nature is a vehicle for anthropologizing and subjectifying the nature.”32 If the human environment is viewed in this way (namely, only through the lens of human culture) then social activism that seeks a higher stage of human progress will, according to Tosaka, be discouraged.33 More importantly, however, such ideological discursive formation was in part an application of European model. The first generation of Kyoto School philosophers introduced the logic of idealism and dutifully took up the role that German thinkers from Kant through Fichte and Schelling, and finally to Hegel played a century before.34 And by the time Watsuji and Kuki constructed their theory of modern cultural identity the ideological need for “true values” was more pressing, due to the deep sense of crisis that was haunting European phenomenology.35 As Tosaka was well aware, “Watsuji discovered German philosophy from Husserl’s phenomenology to Heidegger’s ontology as the most powerful weapon to combat Marxism.”36 Likewise, Kuki’s broad knowledge of phenomenology was particularly useful for creating a sense of inner experience separated from social reality. Indeed, those modern Japanese scholars who wrote authoritative texts on the distinct national characters of Japanese people

32 Jun Tosaka, “Watsuji-hakase, fūdo, nippon” (Dr. Watsuji, fūdo, and Japan), in Tosaka Jun zenshū, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1967), 99. My translation. 33 It is hard to overlook here, again, the importance of the link between the notion of nature and that of culture. In fact, H. D. Harootunian discusses the “transmutation of nature into culture” in prewar minzokugaku (ethnology). Harootunian writes that “because culture represented natural and internalized values,” culture “precluded the necessity to act in the external world.” See Harry D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 434, 436. 34 By the late 1930s, Nishida Kitarō and his colleagues generally regarded bunka as a symbolic order in which harmony between nature and humanity could be restored. Nishida himself maintained in his 1937 speech that the Japanese climate was a result of the friendly relationship between nature and man, and that Japanese culture was therefore fundamentally different from other Asian cultures. See Kitarō Nishida, “Nihonbunka no mondai “ (The problem of Japanese culture), in Nishida Kitarō zenshū, 12:359. 35 Edmund Husserl famously spelt this point out in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1935). See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 36 Ibid., 97.

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were heavily influenced by the Western phenomenological movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Leslie Pincus points out, Kuki himself was committed to “the possibility of a primitive and unmediated connection between a subject and a cultural world” that phenomenology imagined as “‘given’ in all its primitive immediacy.”37 And significantly, the nationalist tendency of Kuki’s text mirrors that of his European predecessors: [In] what may be the most disturbing irony of all, this national passion, initially articulated as a resistance against the hegemonic thrust of Western civilization, would be recruited in defense of Japan’s own escalating imperialism in Asia. . . . These ironies are not, however, exclusive to Japan; rather, they were inscribed in aesthetic modernism . . . as one distinctive possibility. Aesthetic modernism discovered emancipatory potential in the modern but also condoned its most oppressive possibilities: imperialism, racialized nationalism, and mechanized warfare, to name a few.38

But it is also important to notice in this connection that exactly the same ambiguity between emancipation and oppression can be found in the notion of culture itself. If one looks at European intellectual history, it is evident that the idea of culture had an emancipatory dimension in the nineteenth-century romantic desire to include diverse traditions in the “mainstream” tradition, yet in many cases it only offered a surrogate reality instead of a call to change social conditions. Due to this nebulous character of bunka, it is not easy to set apart different stages of intellectual history in modern Japan; but the change in the concept’s function is dramatic. Whereas the idea of culture in the early Meiji was coterminous with “cultivation” in the sense of the historical advance to a civilized stage, Watsuji and Kuki used the ideal of bunka to problematize the universal applicability of European modernity and foreground the significance of local tradition. Having struck on this viable alternative to Western tradition, Watsuji and Kuki started to link their reflections on Japanese culture to the imperialist policy of the government. What they were less aware of was the double-edged quality of bunka. In their attempt to develop a new cultural philosophy, they simply 37 Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 169. 38 Ibid., 15–16.

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mobilized the concept of culture to create a sense of community rather than demand the inclusion of minorities. But it is Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), a prominent ethnologist, who pushed the discourse of bunka further to the extreme, namely using it to endorse cultural superiority. If Watsuji and Kuki formulated cultural identity in the general field of aesthetics, Yanagita theorized the particularity of Japanese identity through the concept of kurashi (a way of life)—that is, by focusing on ordinary people’s day-to-day experience. By drawing his concrete examples from local customs and old folk tales, Yanagita restored a sense of common culture for the populace at large, a culture which in his view invoked the veneration of local ancestors: If we make an inquiry, we find the trace of our ancestors’ lives not entirely buried. We have to admit that we share general similarities with those in the Eastern co-hemisphere, who are still uncultured. But we have long overcome the difficulties they are still in. Now, therefore, it is our duty to use our capacity in order to assist those latecomers.39

Yanagita’s patronizing compassion for “latecomers”—those people, in effect, whom Japan colonized—registers here the terminal point of a long process of discursive transformation which had begun half a century before as a humble wish for greater nation.40 When an enlightenment phase was resumed after the war, with a vigor only paralleled by that which took place during the Meiji “revolution,” all these nationalistic overtones around the term “bunka” appeared to have been cleared away. Nevertheless, the commitment to the new democracy and social reform could not prevent a nationalistic use of the notion of culture from reemerging. In fact, it did not take long before literary critics such as Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924–2012) and Etō Jun (1932–99) started to venerate traditional aesthetics as a domain of authenticity antithetic to external social reality. It is instructive indeed to follow how these critics changed their theoretical positions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Etō Jun’s early essays are remarkable for their affirmation of political engagement. According to his historical account, the suppression of Marxist 39 Kunio Yanagita, “Hi no mukashi” (Fire in the old days), in Yanagita Kuino shūvo, vol. 12 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1979), 275–76. My translation. 40 For a critical reexamination of Yanagita’s works, see chapter three of Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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literature in 1933 devastated the ability to capture the “cultural” and “human” in literature, and resulted in a romanticism that he denigrated for its quietism. Abruptly, though, Etō revised his position in “Sakka wa kōdō suru” (Writers take action, 1959) to insist that novelists ought to seek “true realism,” which meant a clarification of the “structure of reality” by “creating a vivid image.”41 The meaning of the word “politics” was completely altered in his statement that novelists should take “political” action through their work, not by participating in demonstrations, making posters, or giving talks on political issues. Similarly, Yoshimoto Takaaki dropped his early socio-scientific views while elaborating his notion of the people’s genzō (original image). According to Yoshimoto, postwar liberals, notably his archenemy Maruyama Masao, failed to grasp the original, “real” image of human being, which was impervious to rationalism. And it is this intense loathing of rationality that compelled Yoshimoto to search for the essence of human feelings by studying the logic of culture. Originally a poet in the Arechi group, Yoshimoto believed in poetic expression as a tool for identifying with the masses which, it is relevant to note, were delineated by the national border. In fact, he made repeated attempts throughout the 1960s to define the unique community of the Japanese nation by way of linguistics and the comparative study of ethnography, literature, and history.42 Etō’s and Yoshimoto’s hostility towards the social sciences, and especially Marxist doctrine, is reminiscent of the cultural philosophy prevalent during the war, with its ideological function of supplying an alternative to political action. Like Kuki’s and Watsuji’s cultural philosophy, Yoshimoto’s and Etō’s texts propounded a new, internalized vision of cultural community by maintaining the ideal of bunka. But just as the theory of Kuki or Watsuji was predominantly for the elite, and soon replaced by ethnological essays on the life of the masses, so was the literary theory of Etō and Yoshimoto still largely a coterie affair, soon to be replaced by theories of culture after 1970. Indeed, the nihonjinron discourse (debate over the uniqueness of Japanese culture) of the 1970s effectively popularized the clichés of national identity that Kuki and Watsuji originated—the image of a cultural tradition that is more flexible and spontaneous than the West’s rigid rationality. 41 Jun Etō, “Sakka wa kōdō suru” (Writers take action), in Etō Jun chosakushū, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1967), 33. 42 See, among other books, his Gengo ni totte bi towa nanika (The meaning of beauty for the language), in Yoshimoto Takaaki zenchosakushū, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō), 1–624; and Kyōdōgensōron (A study of collective illusion), in Yoshimoto Takaaki zenchosakushū (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō), vol. 11, 3–278.

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Yet the influence of neo-nationalism is discernible in a much wider area than the field usually identified by nihonjinron. According to Andrew Barshay, the introduction of a “supermodern” perspective around 1970 triggered a profound change in the way people perceived society as such. The sense of cultural “backwardness” was eventually replaced with the notion that “defined the vanguard . . . of a new, information- and relationally oriented system.”43 And perhaps the most influential cultural theory in postwar Japan that contributed to this admiration of backwardness is Jungian psychology. In fact, academic journalism exploring Jungian psychology flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, when it probed the unconscious structure of the Japanese nation with great popular success. The doyen of this trend, Kawai Hayao (1928–2007), took up hakoniwa (garden-box) therapy and traditional folk tales, seeing such cultural products as a privileged mode of access to the human psyche. His ingenuity, just as in the case of Kuki and Watsuji and Yanagita, resides in his skillful connection of scientific access to inner spirituality with its cultural limit drawn at the border with the West. Especially popular was his theory of the mother principle in the Japanese collective unconscious, which, as we will see in the next section, had a great impact on the fashioning of a homogeneous cultural identity through “scientific” procedure. But before moving on, it is worth reminding ourselves once more that the historical reversal from revolt to conformism through the notion of bunka can be placed in the context of the global process of continual oscillation between enlightenment and anti-enlightenment. After the surge of new theoretical schools in the late 1960s, cultural critics in most industrialized nations pointed out that history cannot be separated from geopolitics. This was the right approach, but such critics went so far as to regard all historiography as mere ideology, which is nothing more than a mirror image of the uniform historical view that undervalued cultural diversity. What one needs, then, is to acknowledge the fact that the tension between the universal and the culturally particular is itself part of yearning for progress. Perhaps no philosopher is more acutely aware of this tension than Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, culture is always ambivalent, containing both utopian and ideological characters at the same time. If one wishes to work on the idea of culture in a way that encompasses diverse traditions, it is paramount to recog-

43 Andrew E. Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions, Twentieth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 70.

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nize culture’s double character and regard it as something that evolves through its own inner contradiction.44

C. The Return of the Mother in Postwar Criticism In the previous section, I offered an account of how modern Japanese critics adopted the ideological position of cultural nationalism by obliterating the complexity of the notion of culture. I here want to extend my argument by exploring the way in which sexual politics was enmeshed with this construction of modern Japanese cultural identity. And to do so, I shall use a comparative framework. Curiously, as the postwar radical literary movement lost its impetus and was replaced with an inward-looking naturalism, the notion of motherhood was highly instrumental in reestablishing the sense of Japan’s cultural status vis-à-vis dominant European civilization. By comparing the “loss of motherhood” model in postwar Japanese criticism with the problematization of fatherhood in modern European literary criticism, I will look at the crucial difference between the representations of cultural crisis in modern Japanese naturalism and European modernism. Just after the end of the Allied occupation (1948–52), there was broad consensus among the progressive intelligentsia about the moral and political concerns that should be addressed in literary works. The democratic literature movement and Daiichiji sengo-ha (the first wave of postwar writers) derived its emphasis on realism from the Marxist literary theory that had been suppressed during the wartime. Indeed, most of the members of the democratic literature movement Shin-nihon bungakukai (Association of new Japanese literature) were writers who had supported the prewar proletarian literature movement. Founded in affiliation with the Japan Communist Party, the association was comprised of eminent novelists, such as Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79), Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951), Hirabayashi Taiko (1905–72), and Sata Ineko (1904–98), and the critics Kubokawa Tsurujirō (1903–74), Kurahara Korehito (1902–91), and Hanada Kiyoteru (1909–74). Yet there were some other authors, often categorized under the rubric of Daiichiji sengo-ha, who explored new modalities of expression inspired by European modernism 44 A tradition of Marxist criticism has performed such theoretical analysis by offering a coherent historical account of the transformation of the notion of culture in European context. See, for example, Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950; Terry Eagleton’s books The Idea of Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) and Culture and the Death of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

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while still retaining sympathy with Marxism’s moral commitment. This group consists of writers who experienced the battlefield—for instance, the novelists Noma Hiroshi (1915–91), Haniya Yutaka (1909–97), Takeda Taijun (1912– 76), Shiina Rinzō (1911–73), Umezaki Haruo (1915–65), and Ōoka Shōhei (1909–88)—as well as critics such as Ara Masahito (1913–79), Hirano Ken (1907–78), Honda Shūgo (1908–2001), Sasaki Kiichi (1914–93), and Odagiri Hideo (1916–2000). On the other hand, writers such as Mishima Yukio (1925–70), Hotta Yoshie (1918–98), Shimao Toshio (1917–86), Abe Kōbō (1924–93), sometimes also classified as Dainiji sengo-ha (the second wave of postwar writers), adopted European experimental modernism more wholeheartedly to create an original style of experimental fiction. In many ways, the sophistication of their writing reflected the confidence of the Japanese during the dramatic economic recovery, and paved the way for the next stage of cultural regeneration while showing an implicit desire to make a fresh start after country’s catastrophic defeat in the war. Indeed, it was not long before another literary trend emerged, whose sense of reality was based on a total repression of the historical past. It was the Daisanji sengo-ha (the third wave of postwar writers) that represented a Japan that felt no need to struggle with the horrifying memory and guilt of the war; concentrating instead upon the minutiae of daily life and the refinement of literary style. In effect, the writers in this group, including Yasuoka Shōtarō (1920–2013), Endō Shūsaku (1923–96), Yoshiyuki Jun’nosuke (1924–94), Kojima Nobuo (1915–2006), Shōno Junzō (1921–2009), Miura Shumon (1926–2017), and Sono Ayako (1931–), yielded to an impulse to return to the subjectivism of the prewar tradition of the “I-novel,” and turned once more from social concerns to personal experience. Perhaps no other critic regards the Daisanji sengo-ha writers more highly than Etō Jun. And it is worth noting that his admiration for this movement is closely linked to his identification of the “loss of motherhood” in modern Japanese literature. In his influential book Seijuku to sōshitsu (Maturity and loss, 1967), Etō considers Kojima Nobuo’s novel Hōyō kazoku (literally, A close family, 1964)45 as a prototypical story about damaged motherhood. Its protagonist, Tokiko, after an affair with an American soldier, starts to dominate her husband with perverse behavior. A mother-like quality seems utterly pointless 45 An English translation is available: Nobuo Kojima, Embracing Family, trans. Yukiko Tanaka (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).

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to her—she personifies “the negation of nature,” that is insatiable desire for the false happiness of modern life. According to Etō, this degradation is only one of the symptoms of modernization which are already present in writing from the late Meiji period. Novels written by Tanjizaki Jun’ichirō and Shiga Naoya, for example, already reveal the anxieties of women in a society where modernization is well under way. But motherhood in the prewar period, Etō observes, still remains in the “stable, circular system of agrarian culture,” whereas the rapid industrialization of postwar Japan completely ruins it. “Third Wave” novelists are capable of capturing this disaster, which attests to the success of the movement. More importantly, though, Etō takes up this changing sense of motherhood as the key to explaining why cultural traditions are in danger of extinction: [It] is the feminine, or maternal, agrarian culture that originally determined the foundation of Japanese society. As is obvious to anyone, . . . [modernization] and the defeat in the war, as well as the occupation by the United States, have highlighted the huge difference between modern industrial society (symbolized by America) and Japanese agrarian society.46

What is striking in Etō’s argument is that the disfigurement of the image of mother is perceived as the disruption of an imaginary identification with “nature,” as if the natural way of life had been disturbed by the imposition of an external power. From this perspective, the feminine was constantly suppressed in Japanese history, as the natural was incessantly threatened by the artificial. Indeed, Etō argues that Japan’s indigenous culture has been doubly endangered, because it was deformed in the premodern era by Confucian philosophy, and then deformed once again by the West’s monotheist worldview. These two gigantic “alien” influences, both of which have the same source in the ancient Eurasian principle of the father, are thus seen to be devastating for the national tradition. The fatal outcome of this disfigurement, according to Etō, is that Japan has neither a mother figure nor father figure. Despite such wild speculations, the “loss of the mother” idea was given wider credibility from the late 1960s through the 1970s among critics and scholars keen to provide “scientific” proof of the originality of Japanese cultural tradition. The most important of all the academics who tried to promote this 46 Jun Etō, Seijuku to sōshitsu: “Haha” no hōkai (Maturity and loss: The disintegration of “mother”), Kōdansha Bungei Bunko (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 112. My translation.

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model is the psychologist Kawai Hayao. Applying the Jungian theory of archetypes to a wide range of social issues, Kawai offers a grandiose vision of the national psychology. Today, our country is under the tight control of this archetypal “great mother.” One can assume that a given culture has been influenced by a particular archetype. . . . The culture of our nation has been, psychologically, under the powerful influence of the archetypal mother, while maintaining a balance by compensating it with paternal social institutions. When the defeat in the war destroyed the [prewar] patriarchy, the power of the mother became suddenly potent—because it was impossible, even for the United States, to kill the “great mother”—resulting in a huge number of school refusals.47 These days, people often lament that the role model of the father has been lost. As far as our nation is concerned, however, it has not been lost: it never existed.48

What we encounter here is a typical example of a discussion of cultural identity in which critics and scholars apply Western ideas in an attempt to define the unchanging essence of Japan’s national spirit diametrically opposed to Western rationality. Remarkably, it is clinical psychology—universalist inquiry into the inner life of individuals—that perfectly met the contradictory demands of this discussion. Another influential scientist mistrustful of the applicability of Western science, Kimura Bin (1931–), maintains that “various psychopathological phenomena may be differentiated in terms of some contingent conditions, namely depending on geographical-ethnic or historical-periodic cultural diversity.” Also, Sasaki Takatsugu (1938–) expresses his deep loathing of internationalism in the natural science, claiming that cultural specificity should be respected lest an interpretation slide into erroneous universality. Sasaki goes even so far as to flatly reject the general formulation of scientific method (identified with Western regularity) on the grounds that it is incapable of understanding the mind of the Japanese people.

47 The number of pupils who “refused” to go to school (at elementary and junior-high levels) due to stress or anxiety increased throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and it reached to around forty thousand in the 1980s. 48 Hayao Kawai, Kompurekkusu (The complex) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1971), 118. My translation.

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The conceptualization of Japanese culture as the realm of motherhood in contrast to Western patriarchy thus enjoyed huge popularity with its ability to induce the people to nostalgically identify with the past. In perceiving the West as “inhuman,” and the local as “organic,” such “scientific” accounts managed to purify the image of cultural identity, eliminating all trace of internal social contradictions. If one compares this mode of thinking with the philosophy of culture in prewar Japan, the parallel is too obvious to be missed. In fact, when the psychologist Doi Yoshio (1920–2009) titled his book Amae no kōzō (The structure of amae, 1971)49 after Kuki Shūzō’s celebrated Iki no kōzō (The structure of iki), he probably intended to provide a similar explanation of traditional culture in terms of state-of-the-art science. Arguing that amae (permissiveness) permeates the vocabulary for describing the primary emotions of Japanese people, Doi was in effect reenacting Kuki’s ideological role. Once this parallel is confirmed, then, it is easy to see that the “lost motherhood” theory is an imaginary shield against the realist perception of the historical situation. Take, for instance, Etō’s praise of Yasuoka Shōtarō’s Umibe no kōkei (A view by the sea, 1959)50 as an exemplary narrative about the disintegration of a close mother-child relationship. With its distinct narrative style, Umibe no kōkei gives a moving account of a mother’s death in an insane asylum. Notably, though, the detached and introverted voice effectively distracts the reader’s attention from the historical background of the misfortune—namely, the social turmoil during and after the Second World War. According to Etō’s reading, the feeling of loss among the fictional characters is far more significant than “official” history, such as the departure of the United States military or debates around the emperor system and democracy. The ideological theorizations of cultural tradition performed by Etō, Doi, and Kawai, which painted a picture of a harmonious society with the emperor at its core, was something desperately needed in the 1960s and 1970s Japan when social conflict and inequality were increasingly evident. Parliament was paralyzed by the security problem with the United States, and major industrialization was promoted at the cost of farmers’ and fishers’ lives. There were protests against the decision to preserve the emperor system as the symbol of the nation after the imperial war. Generally, the dysfunction and inhumanity of national policy—aggravated by the relentless pursuit of economic growth, state 49 Yoshio Doi, “Amae” no kōzō (The structure of amae) (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1971). 50 An English translation of this novel is available: Shōtarō Yasuoka, A View by the Sea, trans. Kären Wigen Lewis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

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bureaucracy, and by the military alliance with America—was far too obvious to overlook. From this perspective, the fact that these eminent scholars do not discuss the crisis of the father, which is no less evident in postwar fiction than the mother’s death, reveals itself to be highly ideological. It is useful, at this juncture, to turn to European literature and to examine the way in which a particular kind of modern fiction and critical discourse about it deals with the disintegration of fatherhood as well as that of motherhood. By juxtaposing the “lost mother” model in postwar Japan with the crisis of the father in the West, we will be able to illustrate the problematic of cultural formation in Japanese modernity. Patriarchy in the literary imagination is about a great deal more than just a kinship relation. As a metaphor of origins, safety, and authority, it can symbolize a sense of order, national unity, or the dominant power of the natural world as such. Remarkably, though, this implication of the father as peace and order has been gradually invalidated throughout the modern history of literature. And one of the most breathtaking achievements in modernist literature,51 which offers a fine example in which the father motif reveals the grave crises of selfhood in modernity, is James Joyce’s Ulysses. Several critical interpretations, notably feminist readings, of this modern classic have offered positive comments on Joyce’s challenge to paternal authority. Critics have drawn attention, for example, to Bloom’s readiness to cook breakfast for his wife, or to his belief in love and pacifism as opposed to the macho jingoism prevalent among his friends, or to his unconscious wish to know what it feels like to be other (cat, the blind, a woman). As for the other protagonist, Stephen, his distaste for domineering masculinity is more explicit, partly due to his preoccupation with the maternal. His devout mother has recently died, and on her deathbed she asked Stephen to pray for her, which he, as someone who has abandoned religion, stubbornly refused. This traumatic memory overshadows Stephen’s speech in the national library scene where he tries passionately to discredit the authority of fatherhood, claiming that “[f]atherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man,” thus “void, uncertain, 51 Here the term “modernist” refers to a wide range of experimental or avant-garde trends in the art of the early twentieth century. Modernism can be distinguished from modernization in the sense that modernization includes industrial, scientific, social, and political processes of innovation. Modernism responded to this upheaval in the realm of cultural praxis. Generally, great modernist classics register the chaotic disturbance of selfhood, on the one hand, while on the other they demand the impossible—that the reader, viewer, listener, etc., reconstitute a whole from fragments.

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and unlikely.”52 Readers recognize here his sense of guilt over what he did to his mother, which makes him compensate by defending and adoring maternal love. Simultaneously, Stephen’s argument also hints at an eclipse of paternal authority in the West in general, when he suggests that fatherhood is merely “a legal fiction” upon which the entire Christian tradition has been based, whereas amor matris is “the only true thing in life.”53 One can also consider the father-son relation in Ulysses as a preservation, rather than disruption, of the European literary tradition. The critic Harold Bloom argues that “Joyce wants to see himself as Shakespeare’s son,” therefore Joyce needed the plot of Prince and King Hamlet as well as the that of Telemachus and Odysseus: Joyce manages to compound Ulysses with Hamlet only by doubling: Poldy is both Ulysses and the ghost of Hamlet Senior, while Stephen is both Telemachus and young Hamlet, and Poldy and Stephen together form Shakespeare and Joyce.54

Bloom then argues that it is this “split” of double main characters that enables Joyce to absorb Shakespeare, a larger entity than any other figure in world culture. In a paradoxical manner, then, artists can thoroughly break with the authority of the past only when they have an imaginative “surrogate” father with whom they are ready to identify. This paradoxical integration of tradition, one could claim, has always been the enterprise of modernist artworks. Indeed, Ulysses is undoubtedly one of the most successful instances of this integration, as it combines the most somber death knell of fatherhood with its most convincing creation of a renewed symbolic order. Remarkably, one can acknowledge the persistence of this sort of ambiguous representation across Ulysses. As we read on this novel, we see Stephen’s somewhat sentimental anti-patriarchal stance gradually outshone by the less inward-looking personality of Bloom. It looks as if Joyce is trying to neutralize idealistic contemplation upon fatherhood with the corporeal presence of an actual father figure. Equally striking is the theme of androgyny throughout Ulysses, to which incisive critics have called attention in order to avoid an overemphasis on Joyce’s admiration of femininity. Declan Kiberd’s reading, for 52 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1992), 266. 53 Ibid., 266 54 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 385.

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example, is more interested in a rich conflation of gender difference than in the authorization of femininity. He concludes his analysis of the final soliloquy of Molly with this sensitive observation: “[I]t was the male in [Molly] who was charmed by the woman in [Bloom]. . . . [T]he couple’s tragedy is that they came so close to perfection without ever knowing it, just as they still share (without quite appreciating this) an entire cast of mind and imagination.”55 As Marxist readings of Ulysses have made clear, the dynamic and complex tension between disruption and recuperation in Joyce’s narrative mirrors the historically specific setting of Dublin in the early twentieth century. Dublin’s double status as a modern metropolis and backward colony can itself be seen as a metaphor for the contradictions inherent in a modern subject torn between the desire to understand whole meaning of the world and the grim recognition of the impossibility of achieving this aim. As Fredric Jameson writes, the British colonization of Ireland provided a historical setting where a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside the daily life and existential experience of the home country. . . . Such spatial disjunction has as its immediate consequence the inability to grasp the way the system functions as a whole.56

Seen in this light, modernist literature can be conceived as a desperate attempt to resolve social contradiction, even though the modernizing effect of the capitalist world system is so formidable that literary works can only reflexively perceive the trouble of modern society in their ambiguous representation.

55 Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009). It is equally relevant that the same sort of ambiguity can be discerned in relation to religion and national identity. Take, for instance, Joyce’s attack on Catholicism: His constant references to the Bible suggests that he pays tribute to the Christian God, above all to His creative power, whereas his relentless parody of Catholic rituals indicates a withering scorn for Christianity (the most striking example of this, of course, is the catechism style that drags the reader through the Ithaca chapter). A similar ambiguity can be pointed out in his opinion of nationalism. As critics have noted, the bitter satire of the Irish nationalist discourse in the Cyclops chapter demonstrates that a simplistic denunciation of established power (in this case the attack on British imperialism) could end up reproducing the brutality of dominant authority. 56 Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in The Modernist Papers (London: New York: Verso, 2007), 157.

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This attentiveness to ambiguity in the literary imagination of the Western tradition stands in a sharp contrast with the reckless disregard for ambiguity in postwar Japanese literature and cultural criticism. Like Ireland in the early twentieth century, Japan in the second half of the twentieth century was marked by multiple historical contradictions. As we have seen, though, the peaceful image of nature in modern Japan functions to obliterate such contradictions, offering an illusory solution rather than an inspiration for recognition and activism.57 And the maternal principle symbolizing national tradition plays a significant part in this discursive formation.58 In fact, the ideological glorification of women repeatedly smooths out actually existing social tensions in its harmonious image of national spirit. For instance, a 1943 document, produced by the state-sponsored Greater Japan Women’s Association for National Defense, states: “It is the mother, not the father, who is the true spiritual center of the household. The mother is the one who experiences the pain of childbirth and raises children. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that in fact the Japanese spirit is maintained and passed on by splendid mothers.”59 Even so, recent history shows that it is far from impossible to disrupt the imagery of cultural essence by effective political action, notably taken by women. An inspirational case in point is the Women’s International War Criminal Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, a public court that was held in The Hague on 4 December 2001. The tribunal aimed to honor all the women victimized by Japan’s military sex-slave system, “one of the greatest unacknowledged and unremedied injustices of the Second World War,” and it convicted high-ranking government officials, including the late Emperor Hirohito. Its grounds for the conviction of Hirohito were that he was ultimately 57 The difference might be better explained in terms of the writer’s ambiguous relation to language. As Jennifer Levine observes, “[f]or Joyce, and indeed for any Irish man, English was both familiar and foreign, always an acquired language. This complicated relationship allowed him a special insight into the fact that we are never at home in language, not even our mother tongue” ( Jennifer Levine, “Ulysses,” in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge [Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 129.) There is an interesting parallel, then, between Anglo-Irish literature and Japanese-Korean literature, which I will discuss in chapter 7. 58 In a contrasting manner, Edward Said offers the notional pair of “filiation”/“affiliation” to critically investigate the dynamic interaction between “a filial relationship held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority” and “the new affiliative relationship” that is more transpersonal. See Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 16–30. 59 Cited in Noriko J. Horiguchi, Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 27.

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responsible for the sex-slave policy as the leader of the country. Here, in a stunning manner, women’s activism revealed and rejected the myth of women-centered homogeneity and directly confronted the reality of male domination. To be sure, there is something tragic about those who join the fight against injustice from inside the suffocating atmosphere of contemporary Japan. As we discussed in part one, the immense difficulty of transforming society has been registered throughout the long tradition of tragic literature, which constitutes what we might call a counter-naturalist tradition. But there are a handful of serious artists who, in their struggle to radically remould literary form, give society a glimpse beyond their historical environment. In part three, we turn to these writers.

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CHAPTER 6

Matsuo Basho¯’s Realism

I

n his seminal essay, “The Discovery of Landscape,” Karatani Kōjin argues that, in the history of Japanese literature, the beauty of landscape was discovered for the first time at the turn of the twentieth century. In Karatani’s view, poets in the medieval court only looked at the natural world through the lens of classical literary convention, and early modern poets such as Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) and Yosa Buson (1716–83) still did not look at the landscape with their own eyes. It would simply be anachronistic, then, to assume that premodern poets had the sense of scenic beauty as we imagine it today. It was only after the introduction of European naturalism in the third decade of the Meiji period that Japanese literature developed a sense of landscape, and as this naturalism was gradually internalized in the minds of readers and critics, premodern writers like Ihara Saikaku (1642–93) began to appear as “realists.” Drawing on the extensive ethnographical research undertaken by Yanagita Kunio, Karatani writes: [T]here is not a single line of description in Bashō’s Oku no hosomichi (Narrow road to the deep north, 1694). Even what looks like description is not. If we can follow the subtle yet crucial distinction Yanagita has drawn here, we will be able to see both the process of the Japanese discovery of “landscape” and the literary “history” that paralleled that transformation of perception.1

The “transformation of perception” refers to the paradoxical process in which the historical narrative about the nation’s literary tradition, in fact the concept of kokubungaku (Japanese literature) itself, took root only after the introduction of 1 Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 21. The original Japanese version of the book was published in 1980.

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Western notion of literature. According to Karatani, this process of “inversion” is of such significance that one should abandon care for chronological sequence in the history of literature: “[It] is only by distorting this temporal sequence,” he argues, “that we can perceive the inversion we have repressed from our memories.”2 Certainly, the introduction of Western culture is undoubtedly a pivotal moment in the history of Japan. Yet we should also take notice of the fact that European civilization is not the only cause of “transformation” that has shaped the so-called Japanese sense of beauty up until today. Seen in a wider perspective, there have been several significant moments in Japanese cultural history where drastic changes have taken place in the way people see reality. For instance, as Karatani himself points out, the very first imperial poetry, in the eighth century, originated as a response to the impact of Chinese characters and literature in Chinese. What we ought to do, accordingly, is not try to determine the single biggest factor behind an individual cultural transformation, but to explain each transformation in the context of what Karatani calls “successive layers of inventions.”3 Unless one keeps in mind the accumulation of these premodern changes, one will end up reinforcing the simplistic idea of premodern native sensibility, a myth that Karatani himself tries to dissect. And I believe that Matsuo Bashō’s literary creation should be regarded not solely as a marginal shift, but as a key moment among multiple layers of development. Bashō’s opus indeed is a register of unresolved tensions between a new sensitivity to the natural world and his deep reverence for the classical tradition of the aesthetics of nature. It was in the wake of the Second World War that the literary critic Sugiura Mimpei complained about the major problems that arise when reading Bashō. Along with the excessive popularity of Bashō’s haiku and the consequent inability of people to appreciate his artistry, Sugiura also pointed to the fact that Bashō’s seemingly plain lyricism contains so many elements that it is extremely difficult to disentangle them: readers are much more likely to single out one element in order to grasp a “true” version of Bashō. A reading of his poignant depiction of an abandoned child, for example, could lead us to conjure up a familiar image of a modern humanist; alternatively, one might paint a portrait of a Zen master out of the commentary of his celebrated haiku about the frog

2 3

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 20.

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and the old pond; or it is even possible to make an imperialist figure out of Bashō, based on the simple fact that he once paid a visit to the Ise shrine.4 Half a century after Sugiura’s comments, we have an even wider range of options for interpreting Bashō’s haiku. Not only have rigorous academic studies in which comprehensive textual criticism has been conducted, but various comparative methods inspired by Western notions like “montage” and “dialogue” are available.5 Throughout this work of advancement and refinement in reading Bashō’s work, however, a basic premise of interpretation has been surprisingly consistent: Bashō’s art, it is said, encapsulates the aesthetic harmony between human beings and nature. This view can be endorsed by referring to Bashō’ himself, for instance in The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel: Saigyō in traditional poetry, Sōgi in linked verse, Sesshū in painting, Rikyū in tea ceremony, and indeed all who have achieved real excellence in any art, possess one thing in common, that is, a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature, throughout the four seasons of the year. Whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon. The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature.6

What this translated text fails to convey is that, in the original, Bashō does not use the word shizen, the single most common word in modern Japanese that stands for “nature.” The word he uses instead is zōka, a Taoist term totally 4 One of the most important Shintō shrines, Ise enshrines the ancestral gods of the imperial family. It has been a place of a cult worship since ancient times, and veneration of Ise was politically exploited during the Pacific War when every household was required to have a talisman issued by the shrine. 5 For a reading of Bashō’s poems in terms of “montage” and “dialogue,” see Minoru Horikiri, Hyōgen to shite no haikai (Haikai as a way of expression) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002). 6 Bashō Matsuo, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and Other Travel Sketches, ed. and trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 71–72. The great waka poet from the Heian period, Saigyō (1118–90) is, in Thomas Rimer’s terms, Bashō’s “spiritual mentor.” He and the leading renga (linked poetry) poet, Sōgi (1421–1502), are the epitomes of the traveler-poet. Sesshū Toyo (1420–1506) is an ink painter from the fifteenth century, and Sen no Rikyū (1522–91) is a tea master from the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1658–1700). It is interesting to note that Bashō is making an attempt to create a general theory of aesthetics encompassing different genres of literature, visual art, and tea ceremony.

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unfamiliar to the Japanese today. Zōka is the sum of things that exist in the universe, or the godly power that generates and moves this world. His terminology importantly suggests that Bashō does not regard nature simply as the undetermined environment surrounding human agents, but as a contained totality set in order by the ultimate power. One can even assume that nature in this meaning is opposed to the ordinary sense of wild nature; otherwise the sharp contrast of zōka and barbarous animality would be meaningless. It seems rather ironic, then, that critics claim that Bashō took up Chinese philosophy to construct his guiding principle of being one with nature.7 Would it be more appropriate to believe that Bashō’s intention was not only to grasp and study this sense of order, but also to reproduce it in his literary creation? And conclude, as Lee Young-gu does, that Bashō’s discovery of zōka as a “cosmic expression of the rhythm of nature” marked a “pivotal moment in the historical development of poetic methodology in Japan”?8 Of course, we should equally guard against another pitfall of interpretation, that is, overstressing the influence of religious and literary canons. Bashō’s poems are often associated with Zen Buddhism, which in its turn is supposed to unite humankind with unchanging nature. Indeed, many of his stanzas contain remnants of Buddhist inspiration, and it is well known that he visited numerous temples as a pilgrim in order to create poems, and that he held a profound reverence for the medieval priest-poet Saigyō. But one should not forget that Bashō’s attempt to transmute haiku into a genuine art form was made precisely when the medieval religious worldview was collapsing. An early modern citizen, Bashō seems to be trying to replace the old waka-style9 lyricism with the creative skill of describing objects that are stripped of religious meaning. As the critic Hirosue Tamotsu puts it, Bashō’s concept of nature uncovers “a renewed

7 Bashō’s use of the word zōka seems particularly striking when one thinks of the modest impact Taoism had throughout Japanese history. Although two of the Taoist classics, Sōshi (Chuang-tsu) and Rōshi (Lao-tsu), were of some importance, their influence is minimal in comparison to Confucianism. On the other hand, as Horikiri Minoru points out, the notion of zōka was developed in classic theories of painting. See Minoru Horikiri, “Zōka zuijunron no kichō” (The principle of follwing nature), in Hyōgen to site no haikai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002). 8 Young-gu Lee, “Bashō hairon ni okeru mono” (The poetic object in Basho’s theory of haiku), Nihon kenkyū 8 (1993). My translation. 9 Waka can be translated literally as Japanese poetry. In fact, it was the most dominant poetic form since Man’yō shū anthology (8th century), consisting of five lines (5-7-5-7-7 syllables).

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encounter with secular nature-reality unshackled from the medieval concept of nature.”10 Take, for instance, one of his most renowned verses: “Shizukasa ya Iwa ni Shimiiru Semi no Koe” In seclusion, silence. Shrilling into the mountain boulder, The cicada’s rasp.11

Although it might look as if the poem came spontaneously from a perfect tranquility of mind, a brief textual analysis will make it clear that Bashō tried many different wordings before finally choosing this version to maximize the effects of alliteration (shizukasa—shimiiru—semi) and assonance (shee / ee / nee-shee-mee-ee / mee) as well as the striking contrast between utter silence and the cicada’s shrill. 12 Or, in his less known and plainer verse: “Taka hitotsu Mitsukete Ureshi Iragozaki” What stroke of luck hawk spied above Irago promontory.13

it is reasonable to assume that while searching for a hawk at Iragozaki, Bashō had in mind Saigyō’s verse: 10 Tamotsu Hirosue, “Shi ni okeru niritsuhaihan” (Antinomies in poetry), in Hirosue Tamotsu chosakushū, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Kage Shobō, 1999), 16. Alternatively, the creative practice of haiku poets could be seen as the “Reformation” in Japanese literature. In fact, the sociologist Robert Bellah speaks about “a second Buddhist reformation” in Edo period, regarding Bashō and Issa (1763–1827) as the successors of Kamakura Buddhist reformers. See Robert N. Bellah, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 69–72. 11 The translation is by Earl Miner. See Earl Roy Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Nobuyuki Yuasa translates the same verse as: “In the utter silence / Of a temple, / A cicada’s voice alone / penetrates the rocks.” And Lucien Stryk’s three-line version is “How quiet / locus-shrill / pierces rock.” See Bashō Matsuo and Lucien Stryk, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). 12 Four other versions have been handed down: (1) “Yamadera ya Ishi ni Shimitsuku Semi no Koe”; (2) “Sabishisa no Iwa ni Shimikomu Semi no Koe”; (3) “Sabishisa ya Iwa ni Shimikomu Semi no Koe”; (4) “Shizukasa ya Iwa ni Shimitsuku Semi no Koe.” 13 This is Lucien Stryk’s translation. Nobuyuki Yuasa translates it as: “By a single stroke / Of luck, I saw / A solitary hawk circling / Above the promontory of Irago.”

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However, just because the traditional canon of waka kept inspiring Bashō’s imagination does not necessarily mean that he, as Karatani believes, was incapable of looking at the natural world with his own eyes. It is not difficult to see, by contrasting Saigyō’s and Bashō’s poem, that the tone of the original text was considerably changed. Saigyō’s poem subtly hints at the poet’s own regret and uncertainty by depicting the hesitant flight of the hawk, whereas Bashō seems much less retrospective in his gesture of pure joy at spotting a hawk, refusing an easy, sentimental identification with Saigyō’s melancholy. By and large, Bashō’s haiku is preoccupied with the present. As a result, the accent is usually not on ready access to the classics but on detachment: readers of his haiku are struck by an active imagination trying to reorganize the order of reality from its own historical position, which leaves us with a distinct impression of realism. This realism reveals a creative mind deepened by the discovery of a bafflingly huge world of nature and contingency. For Bashō, reality appears brimming with possibilities to work upon, and he manages to evoke this in his writing. As Ogata Tsutomu contends, Bashō’s creation is “an attempt to recapture the present moment by appreciating the mind of ancient people in the illusionistic journey through history”; readers of his haiku, then, detect in his expression a struggle “to replace his own life of living now with the temporal flow of eternity.”14 Karatani’s argument in the above-mentioned essay proves well founded: he rightly draws our attention to a paradox of naturalism that the artistic representation appears to be more “natural” even when the artist employs extremely involved techniques. Perhaps this paradox should be explained against the backdrop of the wider contradictory relationship between nature and human beings: on the one hand, nature is by definition antithetic to society (since nature is supposed to be “immediate” as opposed to the apparently artificial, objectified, and mediated world); and on the other, every characterization of nature can also be seen as a product of conceptualization, which is necessarily part of human cultivation. Understanding the paradoxes in perceiving the natural environment is crucial in interpreting Bashō’s poetry, and it is much 14 Tsutomu Ogata, Bashō / buson (Bashō/Buson) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000), 80–81.

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more helpful than simply projecting our craving for unity with nature onto his poems. In her book What is Nature?, Kate Soper argues that the central obstacle facing environmental awareness can be encapsulated in the confrontation between two very influential outlooks: ecology and cultural criticism.15 The need for a serious ethical or political response to ecological crisis has been felt across the globe for decades, but at the same time the semiotics of nature is alert to the fact that any discourse on the topic is mediated by cultural need and, therefore, has an ideological function. From the perspective of cultural critique, a seemingly innocent slogan against the destruction of the natural environment may prove to be a disguised pretext to serve human interests; ecology, however, would consider such cultural critique as a mere intellectual game, lacking in serious commitment to environmental activism. Each one of these positions—“nature-endorsing” and “nature-skeptical” as Soper categorizes them—appears simplistic from the viewpoint of the other.16 A similar sort of issue can be found in the aesthetics of natural beauty. One could regard our aesthetic experience of the natural environment as a useful means to raise ecological awareness; however, because the appreciation of natural beauty focuses exclusively on appearance, a deep satisfaction with a beautiful landscape does not necessarily make us protect the natural environment. Worse, it can even defeat our political commitment by diverting our attention away from unseen environmental damage.17 But from the artist’s viewpoint things might look somewhat different. Given the supposed immediacy of the experience of nature, an artist can feel betrayed and frustrated by the fixed images of nature dictated by artistic conventions. He/she is thereby encouraged to create a new means of articulating what human beings have never perceived before. If we take this transformative process into account, we may be allowed to look upon the creation of realistic technique not simply as a matter of being caught up in a difficulty of perceiving the natural world as it is, but in itself a practical attempt to deal with it by providing a clearer, more direct form of experience. 15 Kate Soper, What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 3–4. 16 Ibid., 34. 17 Adorno comments that the appreciation of natural beauty is not different from the appreciation of art. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 86.

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Realistic representation, then, is the product of the artist reshaping conventional idioms available at the time of creation. As Theodor Adorno observes, the relevance of great modern artists like Proust and Renoir can be expounded in the language of this capability to revolutionize the perception of nature. Adorno is keenly aware of the “total mediatedness”18 of the concept of nature through the social but, simultaneously, he proposes that the possibility of natural beauty can only be found in artworks. In typically dialectical style, Adorno claims that art is true to nature precisely because it does not depict the comforting beauty of nature. This is more than simply saying that the authenticity of natural beauty in art lies mainly in its form, rather than its content, of representation. What Adorno actually suggests is that an artistic representation of nature derives its power from negation: [T]he image [Bild] of nature survives because its complete negation in the artifact—negation that rescues this image—is necessarily blind to what exists beyond bourgeois society, beyond its labor and its commodities. Natural beauty remains the allegory of this “beyond” in spite of its mediation through social immanence.19

A representation of beautiful nature does not draw its power from its ability to speak eloquently about something that lies beyond human society. Quite the contrary, it is by negating such an ability, and by becoming “blind” (unable to present), that art gains authenticity. Accordingly, an artist manages to articulate an original way of looking at things only if he/she radically abandons domesticated images of nature, and by doing so offers a mere glimpse (an “allegory”) of the changed historical condition of human society. All this allows us to shed new light on the seemingly innocent poetics of Bashō’s haiku. To me, at least, there is little doubt that Adorno would have agreed that Bashō’s ingenious representation of nature derives from his ability to simultaneously negate and heighten poetic form, initiating more artificial yet at the same time freer artistic expression.20 Haiku originally emerged within an 18 Ibid., 88. 19 Ibid., 90. 20 Soper argues that the Frankfurt School critical theorists belonged to the tradition of romantic reaction to the high Enlightenment (Soper, What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, 30). As is evident in the critical comment by Adorno, however, the Frankfurt School’s attention focused, rather, on the dialectical tension between the Enlightenment and romanticism.

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urban tradition of the comic and parable that had been a negation of the lyricism in waka.21 And it is striking that Bashō tries to disavow the classic canon through the use of a new technique. Ornate poetical convention did not let the poet even contemplate using words like “frog,” “prostitute,” and so forth, which Bashō uses at will. His mastery of classical diction therefore never constrains him to compose in accordance with the tradition. Rather, as Hirosue observes, Bashō “transfigured the entire frame of reference through which Japanese literature had perceived the natural world, trying purposefully to create a self-contained non-reality.”22 At this point, though, we must beware yet another misleading premise: interpreting Bashō’s art as a radical revolt against ancient tradition. The conditions were not yet ripe for generating a completely new style of urban literature. The classical canon was certainly coming to a breaking point, but even Ihara Saikaku, with his enormous energy and genius, barely succeeded in creating a new prose. For Bashō himself, the possibility of creating a lyrical form in ordinary language was far from certain. By pointing out a tinge of powerlessness in Bashō’s remarks, Sugiura argues that “haiku as a genre is hardly compatible with revolutionary elements, for instance satire and disclosure.” Sugiura acknowledges, instead, an ambiguous quality in haiku which can account for its popularity among all social classes. It is exactly because haiku was deprived of radicalism, he argues, that its lyrical aspect appealed to the mentality of the time. And we detect, here again, a crucial impasse between the classical and the new in art. In Sugiura’s words, [Bashō’s] desire to gain popularity (which had made him estranged from the rise of aristocratic and warrior literature such as waka and renga) would inevitably push haiku as a genre back to the field of entertainment, since the social and literary environment of the day was still unstable. And in order to support haiku’s worth as literature, there was no option for Bashō but to rely upon the old tradition that he himself put an end to.23 21 The spirit of lyricism (uta) exemplifies the highest sophistication in traditional Japanese poetics. As we will discuss in the next chapter, some modern poets remain loyal to this ideal, while others confront or try to transform this canon. Almost all the masters of haiku, from its seventeenth-century originators Bashō and Buson, through modern poets like Masaoka Shiki, have regarded themselves as realists rather than lyric poets, separating themselves intentionally from the established classicism of waka tradition. 22 Hirosue, “Shi ni okeru niritsuhaihan,” 17. 23 Mimpei Sugiura, “Bashō shiron” (An essay on Bashō), in Shin kotenbungaku ron (Tokyo: Sōjusha, 1974), 207.

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To appreciate the relevance of such a compromise is to realize that Bashō tried to isolate himself from urban trends as well as from an outmoded way of looking at nature. In Earl Miner’s words, the enormous difficulty that he had to deal with was “not to err in the direction either of the affirmative purity of waka or renga, or in the other of the jocular lowness of kyōka and the later senryū.”24 In the discussion below, we will consider the implication of such a balancing act in the wider perspective of world literature. One of the most useful ways to elucidate Bashō’s art in its relation to the “natural” is to reconsider it in the light of recent discussions about the pastoral. Famously, pastoral literature is often about shepherds’ lives or romantic Arcadia. In the history of European literature, the tradition originated with Theocritus (ca. 310–ca. 250 BC) and was developed by Virgil (70–19 BC) before becoming a convention.25 It is relevant to point out here that the concept of the pastoral has always been part of city culture, in the sense that peasants and laborers depicted in harmony with nature represent an ideal existence for townspeople. As Soper observes, “the real feelings of the rural workers are refused or repressed through an idealization of their condition as one that is freed from alienation.”26 In a similar vein, William Empson argues that pastoral literature is not simply poems about shepherds’ lives, but anything “about the people but not by or for” them.27 Recent studies have accordingly complicated the notion of the pastoral. Terry Gifford draws on Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City, to identify three different strains in the Western tradition of pastoral literature: (1) the pastoral, namely an idealization of nature originating in the Idylls of Theocritus; (2) the anti-pastoral in modern fiction; and finally (3) the post-pastoral, best described as “works that successfully suggest a collapse of the human/nature divide while being aware of the problems involved.”28 Yet as Gifford himself is 24 Earl Roy Miner, Hiroko Odagiri, and Robert E. Morrell, The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 67. Kyōka is a waka with a humorous cast of language. Similarly, senryū can be seen as a witty, popularized version of haiku. 25 For the early development of pastoral literature, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), chapter 10. 26 Soper, What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, 187. 27 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions Pub. Corp., 1974), 6. 28 Terry Gifford, “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. Louise Hutchings Westling (Cambridge: Cambridge

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aware, the border between the three categories is not quite clear. The anti-pastoral “was embedded within the most complex pastoral” from the very beginning; nor do the two represent historical stages. Likewise, the notion of post-pastoral can also refer to a work in any time period. According to Gifford’s account, therefore, one can apply the notion of the post-pastoral to many different works which can be characterized as “‘reaching beyond’ the limitations of pastoral while being recognizably in the pastoral tradition.”29 Bashō’s poems do not depict shepherds and Arcadia, yet do seem to involve some pastoral elements, especially in his apparent yearning for peace in nature. In fact, readings of Bashō’s haiku as icons of man’s aesthetic harmony with nature display a tendency to pastoralize his art. But because of the above-mentioned desire on his part to negate the established image of nature, it is more fitting to see his literary endeavor as one that prefigures the modern tradition of the post-pastoral. As we have seen, what is crucial in Bashō’s poetics is his ability to steer a middle course between conventional style and contemporary idioms, in an attempt to register a renewed sense of experienced nature. And this duality is vital for post-pastoral literary creation which is capable of problematizing both the representation of nature and its implications. Particularly significant in this regard is the change that takes place in Bashō’s aesthetics. It is commonly assumed that Bashō’s aesthetics are at first witty and urbane, and then, by the time he writes his travel diaries in his forties, deepen into fueki-ryūkō. This famous notion, which is often regarded as lying at the root of his late work, is a compound of the word fueki (immutability) and ryūkō (the ephemeral or the fashionable). It is perhaps not coincidental that this oxymoronic combination of the eternal and the transient caught Bashō’s interest while he set out on a journey. Unfortunately, Bashō’s passion for travel is too often romanticized, as if it was part of his wish to be one with nature. Yet it is vital to note the productive tension within his pilgrimage to famous sites in the countryside. Bashō’s travel diaries mark the historically specific ambivalence between a confident new culture and its decline, and this ambivalence had never been felt so palpably until Bashō’s time. On the one hand, he tried to seek poetical sources in provinces remote from the city, probably inspired by the tradition of the “aesthetic recluse.”30 On the other hand, though, he effectively rejected pastoral convenUniversity Press, 2014), 26. 29 Ibid.; see also chapter six of the same author’s Pastoral (Oxford: Routledge, 1999). 30 In the history of classical Japanese literature, almost all authors who managed to write about their own immediate experiences were in seclusion (like Kamo no Chōmei), or on a

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tions. And this ambivalence, after Bashō’s time, would be lost very quickly. As Sugiura rightly observes, the stagnation and decline of literature after Bashō can be explained by the loss of mobility, namely by general inability to journey between town and villages.31 The post-pastoral tension in Bashō’s creative practice is extremely important for us in various ways. Above all, it offers an insight into the problem of the persistent pastoralism of our time that is founded on a fixed spatial dichotomy (country and city) and a fixed temporal dichotomy (past and present). The problem with these oppositions is often clear in the stereotypical distinction between European and Asian aesthetics. Excessive emphasis is placed on cultural differences, thereby ignoring the changing role of pastoral in non-Western literature. As Karen Thornber suggests, however, a nostalgic cult of simplicity in Asian literature is entirely unwarranted.32 If we turn our eyes to contemporary Japan of our own time, we find a nation accustomed to an eerie landscape. It looks delightful to everyone’s eyes, with plenty of green leaves and so forth, yet there is an uncanny emptiness there. The film footage of the evacuated area around the Fukushima nuclear plant that exploded after the horrifying earthquake in 2011, symbolizes the discrepancy within the Japanese response to nature: the conflict between our pastoral response nurtured by a cultural tradition such as paintings and poems, and our sense of living in a society that has no room for anything other than its incomprehensible web of human interests. Bashō’s post-pastoral poetry offers a promising vision of nature by confronting and registering a tension that will never be entirely resolved. I believe that great realist works of art are capable of allowing us a glimpse—only a glimpse—into the human future where this tension could be resolved. Perhaps, then, Bashō’s haiku invites us to read the contradiction of our time—the peaceful appearance of nuclear disaster—as a challenge to bring about a new aesthetics of nature.

constant journey (like the wandering poet Saigyō). 31 See Sugiura, “Bashō shiron,” 212. 32 Karen Thornber casts doubt on the popular assumption that environmental degradation in East Asian countries began with the modernization process. She points, instead, to the “disjuncture” between reverence for nature and the long histories of transforming environments. See Karen Thornber, “Environmental Crisis and East Asian Literatures: Uncertain Presents and Futures,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. Louise Hutchings Westling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

CHAPTER 7

Hiroshima and the Poetics of Death

I

t has become something of a commonplace to draw a parallel between Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the two place names that will forever be remembered as symbols of the catastrophe that was the twentieth-century. We often invoke the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Nazi Holocaust, indeed, as the worst moments that human civilization has ever witnessed. Grim analyses of human nature made by Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi have been cited in equally grim contemplations on the horrendous atrocity of the atomic bombings. As critics have pointed out, however, there are differences between the two atrocities. First, the murder of the Jews by Nazi Germany was the culmination of a decade of persecution, whereas the atomic attack befell civilians in Hiroshima so suddenly that survivors were unable to understand what had happened. The “logic” of the Final Solution was detestable; yet, given its “consistency,” it offered writers material for thinking about human evil. Hiroshima, however, when the bomb, with an explosive power equivalent to thirteen kilotons of TNT,1 was dropped on a city of approximately 350,000 inhabitants, everyone within a kilometer died instantly.2 Those who were “fortunate” enough to survive the initial effects were exposed to piles of corpses and countless injured. The survivors of the atomic bombings, or hibakusha as they are called in Japanese, were literally “immersed in death,” as R. J. Lifton put it in his pioneering inquiry into 1 The bomb dropped on Nagasaki had greater explosive power (equivalent to twenty-two kilotons of TNT), yet it caused less damage because of the difference in the height at the point of explosion as well as in the physical features of the land. 2 By 1950, the death toll had risen to some fifty percent of the entire population of the city. The number of people who died due to direct exposure to the atomic bombs had risen by 1950 to 200,000 in Hiroshima and 140,000 in Nagasaki.

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the psychological impact of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima.3 For months, or even years, they had no reliable knowledge of what had caused the calamity, let alone about how to treat the fatal diseases prevalent among them. This is partly because the General Headquarters (GHQ) of the Allies issued an order right after the war banning the press from releasing any information about the bombings—to suppress anti-US sentiment.4 That the victims of the atomic bombing had to endure unnecessary suffering in the interest of the United States reminds us of a more significant difference between Hiroshima and Auschwitz: the atomic bombings were carried out by the victor of the war. The monstrosity that was Nazi Germany was extinguished with the end of the war, and as a result the Holocaust could be seen as an aberrant episode in European history. However, the atrocities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were authorized and perpetrated in the name of rational judgement. The use of the atomic bomb was, and still is, held by many to be a just act, a necessary means of ending the evil of militarist imperial Japan. It is not my intention here to enter further into this argument. I am concerned, rather, with pointing out that the enormous complexity of victimhood and justification is key for understanding the traumatic effect of the Pacific War on Japanese culture and thought in the second half of the twentieth century. The dissimilarities between Hiroshima and Auschwitz have prompted some critics to maintain that the atomic attacks heralded the arrival of a new era. John Whittier Treat, in his thorough and energetic survey of atomic bomb literature, suggests that the significance of Hiroshima in actuality exceeds that of Auschwitz. Because of the gigantic destructive power of the atomic bombings, and because of their entanglement with Cold War politics, Hiroshima and Nagasaki “lie outside the reason of the Second World War.”5 And it is remarkable that Treat consequently explains the meaning of atomic attack in terms of postmodernity: In a sense Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a grotesque performance—a “dramatic finale,” in the words of one historian—put on for the benefit of audiences in Tokyo and Moscow, as postmodern in its meaning as Nazi 3 Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life; Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967), 19–30. 4 John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Ōta Yōko’s renowned memoir City of Corpses were allowed to be published only after the press code was lifted with the end of the occupation in 1952. 5 John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15.

CHAPTER 7    Hiroshima and the Poetics of Death camps were terrifyingly modern. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the initiation of a new phase of human history that we are still only beginning to inhabit, much less comprehend.6

This “new phase of human history,” in Treat’s account, is marked by its unprecedented sense of absurdity and the incomprehensibility felt by survivors. It is no wonder, then, that the writers of so-called atomic bomb literature, especially those who survived the experience of bombing, have struggled so much to put their traumatic experience into words. Literary studies on victim writers such as Ōta Yōko (1903–63) and Hara Tamiki (1905–51) must therefore be responsive to this incomprehensibility; yet, according to Treat, the hardship of survivors has often been misrepresented by an outmoded approach—psychology. Psychological theory is especially inadequate for the analysis of literary texts since its premise is skewed by what might be called a diagnostic stance. Even R. J. Lifton’s groundbreaking work, for Treat, tends to see victim authors simply as impaired subjects rather than creative writers. The testimonial accounts in novels or memoirs are scrutinized by Lifton to identify symptoms of mental disorders such as “guilt over survival priority” or “psychic closing-off ” that block victim writers from fictionalizing their experiences.7 In contrast with this kind of scientific approach, Treat’s enquiry gives due attention to artistic quality in the writing of victim authors. What looks like an accurate record of an appalling reality is “inevitably caught up in the exercise of rhetoric” so that the extraordinary power of testimonial works such as Natsu no hana (Summer flowers, 1947) by Hara Tamiki marks a “triumph of fiction over fact.”8 From this perspective, a literary work presents itself as a locus from which a higher truth is transmitted to its audience in concrete form. It follows, then, that what Ōta Yōko discloses with a new narrative device —such as the aesthetic distance heightened by extremely unreliable narration—in her third major book Han ningen (Half-human, 1954) is less the mental or emotional handicap of an atomic bomb victim than the madness of the post-nuclear world as such.9 Despite his emphasis on the significance of form, however, Treat seems highly skeptical about the general principle of aesthetic judgement. And it is this deep skepticism about the universal applicability of value judgement that 6 Ibid., emphasis added. 7 See Lifton, Death in Life; Survivors of Hiroshima, 7, 31–56. 8 Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, 151. 9 Ibid., 223–226.

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is an integral part of his postmodern creed. Treat makes it clear in his mission statement that he wishes to “replace . . . evaluative criticism with ones that might lead to more mindful readings of ourselves as citizens in the postmodern, post-Hiroshima world.”10 What he implies is that, facing the incomprehensible nature of human experience described in atomic bomb literature, any conventional standard of aesthetic judgement is ineffective. But once the validity of aesthetic evaluation per se is called into question, what is the point of making a distinction between Hara or Ōta (supposedly capable of revealing the meaning of “a new phase of human history”) from the numerous poems and works of fiction written by hibakusha? Perhaps Treat’s enterprise is a contradictory one, since he needs to pay tribute to the aesthetic quality of atomic bomb literature by distinguishing its unique achievement from mere factual record, while discrediting the established standard of aesthetic judgement to do justice to the singular nature of a victim’s experience. But with the benefit of hindsight, we are aware that postmodern theory generally discounted this tension between value judgment and singularity in aesthetic experience.11 Rather than exploring this potentially meaningful tension, postmodernism simply overemphasized the unique power of artistic experience which alone can reveal the true meaning of reality. One of the striking and disturbing results of this simplification is a forged association between aesthetic judgement and moral judgement. In some cases, an interest in the autonomy of art has been even superseded by the moral requirement to approve or disapprove the politics or ethics of an author. In the critical discourse about atomic bomb art, a form of fetishization of suffering has featured as one of the most convenient topics for promoting this tendency. Art historian Wakaguwa Midori, for instance, declares that a drawing of a bombed site depicted by a Hiroshima civilian is superior to the paintings of the same subject by professional artists. In Wakaguwa’s view, the hardship of survivors has acquired a “human meaning” that has equipped them to get the better of professional artists. She writes: [T]he images, burnt on the eyes and minds of victims, became crystallized and compressed over years into an essence, then enhanced to a symbolic and universal message. The perceived images provided themselves with 10 Ibid., xiv. 11 For a searching critique of postmodern thought in general, see Eagleton’s The Illusions of Postmodernism and After Theory.

CHAPTER 7    Hiroshima and the Poetics of Death a human meaning, thereby exceeding even the documentation of reality. This brutal subject matter then acquired beauty by virtue of the message that had been condensed in the minds of those who would create the paintings, that is, by virtue of their message of peace. It is this message behind the image that has made it beautiful. The human message, for this reason, is vital to what we call art.12

In this passage the verbal response to works of art becomes a sort of ritual in which the spectator acknowledges the solemn fact of suffering, yet with no authority to pronounce judgement on the quality of the artwork. Certainly, a growing interest over the last couple of decades in the painful memory of the Second World War has helped to draw attention to works created by unknown or nonprofessional artists who have had traumatic experiences in the past. However, the excessive formality of postmodern discourse seem to have compromised the aesthetic meaning of historical experience that is indexed in a particular expression. A formalistic stress on the singularity of experience has in fact cast a sinister shadow on any literary criticism that addresses social or political issues more directly. A body of criticism has advocated for the “unrepresentable” dimension of literary experience in order—rightly— to reject uncritical, often ideological, assumptions; but more often than not, such critical arguments are far too abstract to preserve any link to the historical specificity of art. Let us now have a brief look, as a useful example, at Sakai Naoki’s interpretation of death in the poetry of the Arechi group. Many of the Arechi poets13 had traumatic memories of fighting as soldiers during wartime, though unlike the majority of Hiroshima or Nagasaki victim writers, they were dedicated modernists, predominantly concerned with experiment and avant-gardism (hence the title of their journal Arechi, a translation of the title of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land”).14 According to Sakai, 12 Midori Wakaguwa, “Mitamono no chikara” (The power of the witnessed view), in Kyūnin no kataru sensō to ningen, ed. Masaaki Miyake and Midori Wakaguwa (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1991), 320. My translation. 13 The main figures of the group were Ayukawa Nobuo (1920–86), Tamura Ryūichi (1923–96), Kitamura Tarō (1922–92), Kuroda Saburō (1919–80), Miyoshi Toyoichirō (1920–92), Nakagiri Masao (1919–83), and Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924–2012). 14 As I will argue below, the avant-gardism of the Arechi group served a fairly conservative function in the history of modern Japanese literature. In this regard, Terry Eagleton’s verdict on T. S. Eliot is applicable to the Arechi poets: “His scandalous avant-garde techniques were deployed for the most arrière-garde ends; they wrenched apart routine consciousness so as to revive in the reader a sense of common identity in the blood and guts.” Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory:

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integral to Arechi poetics is a total rejection of the fantasy of death that the modern nation state has imposed in order to integrate its subjects. For example, the Arechi poets often pretended to speak from the position of the dead, as exemplified in the recurring assertion that “I am dead.”15 Also, among the many bizarre features of their poetry is the continual shift of enunciative position. An obvious example is Tamura Ryūichi’s poem “Senkyūhyakuyonjūnendai— natsu” (The 1940s—summer) “ore wa mada ikite iru shinda no wa ore no keiken na no da” “ore no heya wa tozasarete iru shikashi ore no kioku no isu to ore no gen-ei no mado o anata wa hitei dekiya shinai” ... wareware wa wareware no shinda keiken o maisō suru wareware wa wareware no fushō shita gen-ei no sosei o yumemiru ... watashi wa kore ijō kizutsuku koto wa naideshō nazenara kizutsukukoto tada sono tame ni watashi no sonzai wa atta no dakara ... (“I [ore] am still alive It is my experience that died” “My room is locked up. But how can you deny a chair of my memory and a window of my illusion” ... We [wareware] bury our own dead experience. We dream of the resurrection of our own wounded illusion. ... I [watashi] will not be wounded anymore because I have existed solely for the sake of being wounded)16

An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 36. 15 Sakai claims that “the statement ‘I am dead’ seems to permeate the works by Arechi poets.” Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 178. 16 This translation is by Sakai Naoki. See ibid., 186.

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Rather than appealing to death as “the privileged moment” of human subjectivity, this kind of “schizophrenic” text—to use Sakai’s term—resists the system of representation that represses the actual experience of individuals. The Arechi group’s attempt to dismantle this system through a formal intervention in language, Sakai argues, can therefore be seen as a subversion of the established narrative of Japanese history, since history is always written by historians who are necessarily survivors—those who have muted and buried the historical experience of the dead. The task of poets is “the incorporation of death into poetic texts, not as an object of representation but as a structure or as a limit.”17 Even though Sakai criticizes the image of death as “the privileged moment,” it is somewhat doubtful whether his own interpretation can actually avoid the fate of reproducing the same sort of image. In trying to differentiate the heroic achievement of the Arechi poetics from the ideological use of language, Sakai celebrates the former as a cultural practice that “succeeded in embodying the essential negativity,” and thus a practice that successfully represents the unrepresentable. There seems to be little doubt, then, that he, in trying to offer a corrective to the national fetishization of death, ends up replacing one death fetish for another, more abstract, one.18 I have sketched out some critical readings of texts that sought to reframe Japanese war literature in postmodernist terms. As we have seen, their emphasis on the incomprehensible (or unrepresentable) quality of wartime experience seems to have become dogma, turning our eyes away from the actual historical substance of literary texts rather than making us face it. We have to ask, then, how it is possible to establish a meaningful link between traumatic memory and a convincing reading of literary works as uniquely constructed artefacts. Though it may sound surprising, Freud’s late cultural theory, especially his final and most controversial text Moses and Monotheism, offers useful insights. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud famously argues that Moses in the biblical narrative is in fact a fusion of two distinct persons, an Egyptian who liberated the Jewish people from slavery and a Midianite priest who founded a new reli-

17 Ibid., 184. 18 It is certainly appropriate for the Arechi poets, as Sakai’s interpretation shows, to foster an acute awareness that “there is always an unsurpassable gap between an experience as one lived through it and its account as it is narrated and memorized” (ibid., 178). But my point is that such an adequate warning easily turns itself into a distrust of communicative language in general, with the exception of poetic language.

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gion at Kadesh.19 Although there had been plenty of similar arguments before Freud, his contention was taken as an offense and created a major scandal. But some critics have argued that the greatness of this book resides exactly in the polemical stance of its author. Edward Said, for instance, expresses his deep admiration for Freud’s readiness to establish the unpleasant truth that Jewish identity does not begin with itself but with other identities such as Egyptian or Arabian. In Said’s words: [B]old is Freud’s profound exemplification of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity—for him, this was the Jewish identity—there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, identity.20

The abiding importance of Moses and Monotheism is its courageous revelation of a flaw within the logic of cultural identity, the heroic act of dismantling the idea of communal identity itself. Oddly enough, though, one can draw a completely opposite conclusion from the candor of Freud’s inquiry. In fact, the American philosopher Richard Bernstein, although he is as favorable to Freud’s vision as Said, maintains that Freud proudly identified with the legacy of Jewishness. In his close reading of the section titled “Der Fortschritt der Geistligkeit” (The Advance in Intellectuality, also translated as The Progress of Spirituality), Bernstein discusses Freud’s belief in the ideal of ethical perfection that is at the origin of Judaism and that has enabled the Jews to survive centuries of persecution. In this account, what 19 Freud’s account goes as follows. The pharaoh Amenhotep IV in the fourteenth century BC. established a monotheistic religion for the first time in human history, but his religion was rapidly undone and the Egyptians reverted to their old gods. The Egyptian Moses, being a fervent follower of this religion of Amenhotep IV, became the leader of an oppressed Semitic tribe then living in Egypt, brought them out of bondage, and created a nation with a highly spiritual monotheism. Yet the Hebrews, unable to bear the severe demands of this new faith, murdered their leader and repressed the memory of this bloody act. Some decades (or even centuries?) later, when the Israelites forged an alliance with other Semitic tribes in Midian, a priest also called Moses became their leader, founding a nation with a god called Yahweh. The old monotheism reemerged to endow the new Yahweh religion with its universal and spiritual qualities, and over a period of centuries the two individuals named Moses were fused into one legendary figure. See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, , trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Vintage, 2001), 23:59–66. 20 Edward W. Said and Jacqueline Rose, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), 53–54.

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distinguishes Freud from other Jewish intellectuals in his time is that Freud, far from placing a limit on his own cultural identity, “never hesitated in identifying himself as a Jew.”21 Moses and Monotheism, therefore, might be meant as either a renunciation of Jewish identity or as a celebration of the superiority of Jewishness. But I would suggest regarding Freud’s ambiguity itself as the crucial part of his insight, since it is his discovery of a double origin in Judaism that seems to have liberated him from the contradictions of cultural identity. As a Jew living in the 1930s Europe, Freud had a good reason to fight anti-Semitism and defend Jewish cultural tradition. Even so, a glorification of Jewishness could have undermined his insistence on the scientific nature of psychoanalysis. It seems to me, then, that only by inscribing a dual, “tainted” source into the core of the history of Jewish people was it possible for him to accommodate his internal conflicts, reconciling his skepticism about and reverence with his cultural identity. But the implication of Freud’s apparent uncertainty could be even wider, for one may generalize his view to make the case that a duality of cultural origin could actually strengthen, rather than weaken, a universal ethics. In the recent controversy over Japan’s pacifist constitution, the significance of the ambiguousness of origins in psychoanalytic theory inspired some critics to repudiate narrow culturalism and call for a universal ethics by invoking Freud himself. According to Karatani Kōjin, the unconscious potency of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution (which renounces the use of military power) can be explained in terms of its ambiguous origin. A series of conservative governments have tried to amend the Constitution on the grounds that it was imposed by the Allied forces during the occupation period after the Pacific war. Karatani calls upon a passage from Freud’s paper on masochism, in which “a cultural suppression of the instincts” is discussed, and argues that it is actually the renunciation of aggressive instinct that creates the ethical sense and not the other way around. Paying particular attention to Freud’s statement that the initial prohibition is always “forced by external power,” Karatani remarks that it is precisely because “Article 9 was not made by the people’s voluntary agreement, but enforced by the external powers” that pacifist idealism has taken root all the more deeply.22 This is not to say that the ethical sense of Japanese people only originated at the end of the Second World War, but that the establishment of the pacifism 21 Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 86. 22 Kōjin Karatani, “A Japanese Utopia,” in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2016), 179.

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of the Constitution marks one of the most significant stages in the “advance in intellectuality” in Japanese history. Indeed, given that an “impure” origin of ethical order consolidates the universal sense of moral obligation, it may well be true that Article 9 will be more enduring than the nation realizes. One should remember also that Freud’s perception of the origin of morality underwent a significant change around 1920, along with a shift in his view of the meaning of death in relation to human temporality. In the aftermath of the First World War, Freud still considered the notion of death only from the viewpoint of isolated human desire. In “Thoughts on War and Death” (written around 1915), the primary focus of his investigation is on “an unmistakable tendency to put death on one side, to eliminate it from life.”23 Death is simply something to be repressed, he observes, insofar as our unconscious knows “nothing that is negative,” driving us to behave as though we are immortal. But with Beyond Pleasure Principle (published in 1920), Freud moves his focus onto what he terms the “death drive,” adding a new dimension to his thinking on death. In this book, there is a famous example in which a person, after witnessing an accident, develops “traumatic neuroses.” Interestingly, Freud cites this example again in Moses and Monotheism at the pivotal moment when he attempts to link the traumatic experience of individuals to the collective memory of the ancient Jews.24 In Freud’s account, it is significant that the Jewish people only managed to establish a new religion some decades after witnessing the traumatic event of murdering their own leader. This time lag is tremendously important for my argument, too, since it signifies a possibility that the advance in intellectuality 23 Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 14:289. 24 Moses and Monotheism is, in part, a continuation of a series of papers that Freud wrote, beginning in the 1920s, to express his enlightened criticism of religion. Based on an analogy between individual and group psychology, he repeatedly argued that just as obsessive neurosis could be treated by making the patient recognize the traumatic past that had caused the difficulty, religious faith could be “cured” by recognizing a traumatic event that the human race experienced at an early historical stage. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud claims that if we clarify the survival of “memory-traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with people as we do with an individual neurotic” (Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, 100). Nonetheless, the proud identification with Jewish identity in Moses and Monotheism is clearly at odds with this idea of religion as a disease. In fact, in discussing the great achievement of Hebrew tradition, Freud appears enchanted by the emergence of a new communal ethic that, because of its weighty moral requirements, could surpass the ordinary moral code. Freud’s interpretation of religion as both illusion and progress seems to reflect the ambiguous meaning of a traumatic event (as both devastating cause of mental distress and the origin of universal ethics).

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coincided with the formation of a sense of obligation to relate oneself to the future as someone who has survived a traumatic event. As Cathy Caruth points out, the fact that the witness of the accident “gets away: apparently unharmed” plays a crucial role here. “[G]etting away” means “non-experiencing,”25 which compels the survivor to pass on the event to posterity. This sense of moral responsibility is itself perceived as something incomprehensible, as if it has been given by chance. As Caruth suggests, the Jewish belief that they were “chosen” by God may have been an offshoot of this emerging sense of moral obligation to pass on the message within historical continuity: If monotheism for Freud is an “awakening,” it is not simply a return of the past, but of the fact of having survived it, a survival that, in the figure of the new Jewish god, appears not as an act chosen by the Jews, but as the incomprehensible fact of being chosen for a future that remains, in its promise, yet to be understood. Chosenness is thus not simply a fact of the past but the experience of being shot into a future that is not entirely one’s own. The belated experience of trauma in Jewish monotheism suggests that history is not only the passing on of a crisis but also the passing on of a survival that can only be possessed within a history larger than any single individual or any single generation.26

Caruth’s interpretation of Freud helps us understand trauma as a full scheme of temporality rather than simply a response to a devastating past event. If the representation of traumatic experience is conditioned by the “incomprehensible fact” of “being chosen for the future,” then R. J. Lifton would probably like to explain this “incomprehensible sense” as a symptom, in terms of a survivor’s sense of “secret historical truth”;27 yet the point of Freud’s argument is that what is at stake here is not just the pathology of particular individuals but the advancement of the human race. The narrative of suffering ought to be interpreted in this accumulated sense of history. There are some different levels on which we can make use of Freud’s insight into trauma, history, and death to read postwar Japanese literature. First, Freud’s solution (or non-solution) to the dilemma of cultural origin draws our atten25 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 71. 26 Ibid., 71. 27 See Lifton, Death in Life; Survivors of Hiroshima, 404.

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tion to those novelists and poets who managed to retain an ambiguous relation to cultural tradition. An illustrative example is the Korean-Japanese poet Kim Sijong (1929–). Kim was born in Wonsan, a North Korean town in what was then a Japanese colony, and was a bright student who loved Japanese lyrical poems. As the war ended, he became a fervent patriot fighting for Korean democracy, but his involvement in political activism forced him into exile in Japan, where he has lived to this day. Ironically, though, it was his encounter with the Japanese poet Ono Tōzaburō’s (1903–96) Shiron (A theory of poetry, 1947) that inspired him to be a poet. Ono was a poet and critic who, during the war, developed a conscious critique of the most tenacious characteristic of Japanese classical literature, namely uta or lyricism. Ono’s constructive critique of lyricism had a decisive impact on Kim because it enabled him to keep writing in the Japanese language without surrendering to the canon of Japanese literature. The transfiguration of the dominant canon of lyricism means that Kim can confront the complexity of his cultural identity. This is much more effective than writing in the Korean language, which was thrust upon him as the “national language” when the war abruptly ended in 1945.28 It is no surprise that his realistic, lyrical sensibility coexists with comical sketches or metaphysical solidness; Kim simultaneously accepts and rejects the canon, in a manner that is reminiscent of Freud’s ambivalence towards his own cultural background. It may not be coincidental, then, that the representation of death in Kim’s poetry echoes the temporal structure that we discovered in Freud’s explanation of traumatic subjects. Whereas the Arechi poets were preoccupied with transcending death in an isolating, dehistoricizing manner, Kim’s poems remind the reader that there is still a great deal to reveal about death in the current political environment. A traumatic encounter with the dead is anchored in a specific historic moment, and the narrator and audience become obliged to pass on its singular meaning. A good example of this from his early collection Chiheisen (Horizon, 1955) is the poem titled “For the Death of Saitō Kinsaku.” The poem was inspired by an actual incident that has still not been solved today. On his way home, a businessman named Saitō saw workers, including foreigners, on a railway, which turned out to be a plot to cause a train accident, apparently to discredit the powerful trade union of railway workers. A couple of days later, 28 In a lecture delivered in 1971, Kim remarked that instead of discarding Japanese language, he wished to use it “as the most effective weapon against the Japanese.” See Sijong Kim, “Chōsenjin no ningen toshite no hukugen” (The human restoration of Korean people) in “Zainichi” no hazamade (In the middle of Korean Japanese), (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001), 231.

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Saitō was required to report to the military office, but, struck by fear, he ran away, only to be found dead in a ditch in Yokohama. In the poem, rather than speaking from the position of the dead Saitō, the narrator directly addresses Saitō, with the effect of broaching the chilling possibility of communication: Ditch in the midsummer, lukewarm it was, spuming with bubble filling your mouth and your eyes and your nose and your ears. Dead, all your life was in the mud. ... O Saitō, silent, voiceless Kinsaku, I will beg you to the end of this land. From your eyes, if I remove the mud, Bright stars of 16 August could come out. Out of your mouth, if I take off the mud, The names of tall workmen Could come out.29.

Kim’s realistic depiction of the dead displays his resistance to the disabling lack of solidarity with them,30 whereas the modernist representation of death (and its postmodern reading) tends to wipe out the specific meaning of suffering in a historical context. One may explain this contrast against the background of the history of modern Japanese literature. In postwar Japan, the modernist movement 29 Sijong Kim, “Saitō Kinsaku no shi ni” (For the death of Saitō Kinsaku), in Gen-ya no shi (Tokyo: Rippū Shobō, 1991), 618–21. My translation. 30 A similar example can be taken from Kwangju Fragments (1983), an enraged response to the Kwangju rebellion of 1980, in which Korean troops massacred thousands of peaceful protesters. The poems in this collection are emotionally powerful yet eerily formal, full of interdiction, and often with ominous predictions and addresses to the dead. Here again, the impossibility of identifying with the dead is interwoven with a craving for justice: “No one shall see / The freedom, because it was buried by the whole nation. / The picture in the eyes of a corpse shall never be known. / Is the day coming? / Is that the day when you went? / Are we having the day to know what the day was?” “Kono fukai sora no soko o” (At the bottom of this deep sky), in Gen-ya no shi (Tokyo: Rippū Shobō, 1991), 65–68. My translation.

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(including the Arechi group) was arguably a response to the radical socialist movement during the occupation period. This was a time when the United States introduced Red Purge policy in occupied Japan. When the policy ended in 1951 militarist individuals were once again allowed to engage in public life. Alarmed by such an ideological intervention, progressive intellectuals founded a new literary society (Shin-Nihon Bungakukai) and held debates to probe the social and political factors responsible for the war. But once the occupation was over, poets and novelists, jaded by the high-minded statements of communist critics, adopted aspects of European modernism in order to refresh their writing, the sophistication of which helped them to separate themselves from radical politics as well as from the decadent literature of the immediate postwar period in Japan.31 Even so, some important authors, such as the novelists Ōoka Shōhei (1909–88) and Noma Hiroshi (1915–91), and the poet Kim Sijong, kept exploring realism. The most respected atomic bomb poet in Hiroshima, Tōge Sankichi (1917–53), in perhaps the most important example of atomic bombing writing, gives special importance on the themes of the future and human solidarity: Chichi o kaese. Haha o kaese. Toshiyori o kaese. Kodomo o kaese. Watashi o kaese. Watashi ni tsunagaru ningen o kaese. Ningen no, ningen no yo no aru kagiri kuzurenu heiwa o heiwa o kaese.32 31 It is significant that the Arechi group did not perceive the introduction of postwar democracy as a historic turning point, putting far more stress on artistic achievement as the true manifestation of social change. For the Arechi poets, the birth of a new country sounded like an empty slogan, since the past was effectively integrated into the state after the war. For this reason, they required a fundamental change in “national consciousness,” and called for the creation of a poetic setting based on the fiction of historical discontinuity: “We must take the lives of our beloved ones / This is the only road to the revival of the dead / We must go on this road.” Ryūichi Tamura, “Yonsen no hi to yoru” (Four hundred days and nights), in Tamura Ryūichi zenshū (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2010). My translation. 32 Sankichi Tōge, “Genbaku shishū, jo” (Prelude to the colleted poems on atomic bombings),

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The following is a standard English translation of this poem: Give back my father, give back my mother, Give grandpa back, grandma back, Give our sons and daughters back! Give me back myself, give mankind back, Give each back to each other! So long as this life lasts, Give peace back to us, Peace that will never end!33

In a chapter devoted to Tōge, R. J. Lifton detected in this poem a desire for the “restoration of the past.”34 But the impression that the narrating voice is only looking back at the past is a result of an inaccurate translation. What the poem achieves is, in fact, the opposite: it turns our gaze to the future. Because there is no distinction in Japanese between singular and plural, and because there is no definite article in the language, the opening word “chichi” can refer to “my” father or “your” father, or fathers in general. Readers may sense in the first sentence a state of mourning for one’s lost father, but as the poem progresses, and by the time they come to the word “toshiyori”—which is a rather neutral term denoting “old people,” but never used to address one’s own grandparents—they realize that the entire statement may be a collective demand rather than the wailing of a victim. This subtle but telling expansion of the narrator’s voice reaches completion in the final stanza where the narrator reclaims the ideal of a peace that will not wither as long as the human race survives. The above translation (and Lifton’s comment) ignores this call for justice in a better future, by reducing the phrase “ningen no yo” (the human world) to “this life”— that is, no more than the narrator’s life. Another important feature of the final stanza is its repetition of the two words “peace” and “human,” as if the narrator is either putting a stress, or contemplating, or perhaps even faltering. Thus, my alternative translation of the final part is: And give us back a peace a peace that shall not collapse

in Tōge Sankichi sakuhinshū, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1975), 161. 33 Lifton, Death in Life; Survivors of Hiroshima, 441. 34 Ibid..

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Realist poems of Kim’s and Tōge’s kind may seem too plain to be modernist. In verse, as well as in prose, realist representation became increasingly unpopular from the 1960s on,36 and was replaced by a more experimental modernist technique that in turn invigorated newly imported critical discourse after 1970. Nonetheless, it seems more and more evident to me that this transition was accompanied by the confinement of a traumatic memory within an isolated event in a frozen moment. In contrast, a literary imagination trying to be loyal to the historical substance of traumatic experience, in the words of Cathy Caruth commenting on Freudian theory, “extends beyond the confines of the individual psyche.”37 This remark takes us back to the point I touched on at the beginning of this chapter: that our memory is still affected by an vast web of victimhood and justification with regard to the twentieth-century’s wars. Our memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is connected with Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, and perhaps with the wars in Vietnam and Korean. The list may well continue to include the entire course of modern history. It would thus be appropriate to let these testimonial voices from Hiroshima make us vigilant to the endless intricacy of traumatic experience, rather than to single out any one case of atrocity to give us an illusion that social conflict in society can be resolved in aesthetic experience. On the contrary, while a significant aesthetic experience will intimate that we have not yet overcome antagonism at this moment of history, it may invite us to envisage a day when the suffering of the traumatic past will be fully revealed: the day when society 35 John Whittier Treat’s translation, though inevitably adding some articles and pronouns, is much more accurate: “Give me back my father. Give me back my mother. / Give me back the old people. / Give me back the children. / Give me back myself. And all those people / Joined to me, give them back. / Give me back mankind. / Give me peace. / A peace that will not shatter / As long as man, man is in the world.” Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, 172. 36 By the mid-1960s, works of art had lost any substantial social function (or, at least, that their function had radically altered). Direct representations of the misery during the war, such as testimonial writing from Hiroshima, was given lower status than the sophisticated narrative techniques seen in such works as Ibuse Masuji’s Black Rain (1965). The conservative critic Etō Jun, who celebrated the serenity of Black Rain, once commented that “true realism” resided in clarifying the structure of reality rather than collecting mere facts—a statement that perfectly sums up the reshaping of artistic truth that took place the 1950s. See Etō, “Sakka wa kōdō suru” (Writers take action), in Etō Jun chosakushū, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1967), 58. 37 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, 67.

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changes itself to transcend the historical entanglements that repress the voices of the dead. Let me conclude this chapter with Adorno’s uncharacteristically hesitant but superbly messianic meditation on the significance of suffering in works of art: Nor is it possible to sketch the form of art in a changed society. In comparison with past art and the art of the present it will probably again be something else; but it would be preferable that some fine day art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form has its substance. This suffering is the human content that unfreedom counterfeits as positivity. . . . But then what would art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering?38

38 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 337–38.

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Narrative after Fukushima

O

ver the last couple of decades, the concept of narrative has given rise to some of the most exciting work in contemporary cultural theory. One can, of course, define the word “narrative” as an account of a sequence of connected events; but narrative is much more. Narrative studies now encompass literary criticism, history, philosophy, and psychology; and the notion of narrative is often regarded as key to understanding the complexity of human experience, especially experiences of time and memory. Lived experience has to be structured in accordance with some kind of narrative configuration in order to be a meaningful at all. One can even claim that the self as such comes into being only in the process of telling its life story, since narrative enables us to restructure our temporal perception into normal sense of reality.1 What has become increasingly obvious in recent narrative theory, though, is the difficulty of making experience coherent. Many people have problems in providing a proper account of their experience due to the persistence of traumatic memories. Narrative therapists try to help such people recover by offering “alternative narratives” that “more fully incorporate” the client’s life events within a “more coherent and more powerful narrative.”2 Yet philosophers and literary critics do not necessarily consider narrative incoherence as a problem. Instead, they see it as valuable for exploring the convoluted relationship between the self and its experience of time. In one of the most influential works of narrative theory, Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur investigates this puzzling relation through what he calls the “three-way conversation” between history, literary criticism, and phenomenology. In an early stage of this inquiry, where he treats Augustine’s famous discussion of time, 1 Michele L. Crossley, Introducing Narrative Psychology: Self, Trauma, and the Construction of Meaning (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 50. 2 Donald Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 179.

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Ricoeur contends that not only is there no pure phenomenology of time in Augustine, but that “perhaps there never will be one” in any thinker.3 The term “pure phenomenology of time” designates here an intuitive apprehension of the structure of temporality, which, according to Ricoeur, is inevitably “aporetic” (cognitively perplexing). To respond to this challenge, he sets out to compare different forms of narrative configuration, notably fiction and historiography, and to clarify whether, and how, they resolve the aporia of time. It becomes clear that historical narrative and fictional narrative have distinct ways of filling “the split [faille]”4 opened up by reflection on human temporality. Whereas historical narrative tends to conceal the discordance between the time of the world and lived time, fictional narrative can explore the paradox of time—in what Ricoeur calls its “discordant concordance.”5 As examples of the literary works useful for the study of temporality, Ricoeur takes up three great modernist novels: Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. According to Ricoeur, these novels illustrate three different literary responses to “discordant concordance”; and it is significant that all of them are products of the early twentieth century, a period when the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger strived to overcome the theoretical aporias of human temporality. What the contemporaneity of these literary and philosophical projects means for Ricoeur is that the discoveries of phenomenology at the turn of the twentieth century only radicalized the difficulties,6 while novelists could provide a better means to deal with the same difficulties. Ricoeur’s belief in the priority of literature over reflection is shared by Fredric Jameson, who wrote an extended article on Time and Narrative in an attempt to place this gigantic project in the even wider context of critical social theory. In Jameson’s view, all phenomenological analyses “end up in desperate aporias that replay the subject-object opposition endlessly without reaching a conclusion.”7 It is only in the process of reading literature, then, that we get “a glimpse at time that cannot prolong itself into the philosophical concept.”8 Yet 3 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen Blamey, and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1:6, 83. 4 Ibid., 3:129. 5 Ibid., 3:140. 6 Ibid., 3:139. 7 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London; New York: Verso, 2009), 480. 8 Ibid., 532.

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at the same time, Jameson is apparently concerned with Ricoeur’s “humanist” approach,9 which Jameson believes could limit the philosopher’s scope to the mere investigation of “individual time,” namely of the individual consciousness of temporality. Being unable to address the multiplicity of temporality, Ricoeur eventually refuses “to theorize any agency on the level of the collective.”10 Jameson’s own “methodological key” to overcoming the limit of theoretical reflection resides in the idea of the “intersection” of different temporalities. What one should draw from Ricoeur’s reading of modernist literature is the recognition that: those traces [of time] . . . can be identified and registered only at the intersections of several distinct temporalities. Even within the most subjective reduction of temporal experience, the thing itself only becomes visible at moments of temporal coexistence, of simultaneity, of the contemporaneity without the coalescence of several distinct subjectivities at once.11

In earlier, theoretically minded criticism, the coexistence of distinct subjectivities in novels is read as mobilizing multiple points of view—a modernist technique. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, for instance, draws attention to the significance of the intersection of multiple perspectives in Mrs Dalloway. Despite not focusing on the multitemporal components of the novel, Auerbach writes about Woolf ’s “design of a close approach to genuine, objective reality by means of numerous individuals (and at various times).”12 Ricoeur seems fully aware of the philosophical implication of this literary strategy when he observes that “the major contribution of fiction to philosophy lies in the exploration of the nonlinear features of phenomenological time.”13 Still, his understanding of literary form is significantly different from that of Jameson. In trying to consider the way in which modernist novels reveal the aporia of time, 9 This inclination, according to Jameson, is manifest in Ricoeur’s famous statement “[T]ime becomes human to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.” See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:52. 10 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 501. 11 Ibid., 531. 12 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 536. For Auerbach, though, Woolf only exposes the real personality of Mrs Ramsay (wirkliche Mrs. Rumsay), and not the reality of her society. 13 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3:132.

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Ricoeur introduces the Greek term eidos (form, essence, species, etc.), arguing that despite the variety of literary expression, “every eidos is revealed as an invariant.”14 But Jameson is very much suspicious of this idea of artistic form as in permanent (“invariant”) opposition to the aporia of time. He stresses instead the persistence of the aporia by pointing to the discontinuity between different historical moments to which the artist is required to respond. As the history of art clearly shows, an established artistic form may no longer fit a historical situation, and has to be replaced with a new way of representing the reality. The use of multiple perspectives in modernist writing is convincing at the beginning of the twentieth century, not because it answers an abstract philosophical question, but because it confronts us with a particular state of contradiction between personal and collective sense of reality at a particular time in history. This subtle but important difference in the theorization of these two thinkers can be further explored by contrasting Ricoeur’s account of modernist novels as “novels of time” with Jameson’s view that these novels are “novels of history.”15 For Jameson, history is not part of the configured terrain of reality, but something that constitutes and generates the aporia of time in every given instance. As a Marxist critic, Jameson regards the human subject as inextricably embedded in historical contradictions so that even the power of the literary imagination cannot see beyond its moment and disclose the eidos of reality. In fact, discussing Ricoeur’s use of the term “aporia,” Jameson betrays his disappointment with the philosopher’s unwillingness to employ the word “contradiction,”16 effectively accusing him of neglecting the rich tradition of materialist accounts of history. It is this recognition of insoluble contradiction that enables Jameson to acknowledge the fundamental importance of the intersection of different perspectives in general. It is not simply helpful for thinking about temporality: it can also be useful in conceiving the figuration through which we can grasp reality as it evolves in time. According to Jameson, philosophy traditionally tried to define time as movement, number, and space, but these are mere figurations and nothing more than a representational illusion. But “the intersection 14 Ibid., 3:139. Ricoeur continues: “The paradox in the case of time is that the same analysis reveals an aporia and conceals its aporetic character under the ideal type of its resolution, which is brought to light, as the eidos governing the analysis, only through imaginative variations on the very theme of aporia.” 15 Jameson claims that historical time does not belong either to existential or objective time, but is “a third kind of time” in its own right ( Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 483–84). 16 Ibid., 487.

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of all three . . . allows us to triangulate the ‘reality’ of time and temporality beyond any specific finite representation of figuration. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that figuration is itself this intersection between several incommensurable representations.”17 To show how the intersection of several perspectives makes history appear in the context of contemporary Japanese literature, let us now turn to Ōe Kenzaburō’s latest novel Bannen yōshiki shū: in reito sutairu (A collection of late styles: in late style, 2013). In this work, Ōe manages to offer a convincing vision of the human individual disturbed and fragmented by the shock of historical reality,18 while simultaneously offering a glimpse of shared temporality as a means to overcome social divisions. The story is about a family’s disturbance after the 2011 earthquake in eastern Japan. The central character, Chōkō Kogito, is an old writer living in Tokyo who is profoundly distressed by the nuclear accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Without a clear storyline, the text describes how Kogito takes care of his family while trying to enlighten people through political activism against the nuclear plant. It is fairly obvious that Kogito is modeled on Ōe himself, but this composition cannot be categorized either as a reportage or even as an I-novel. Only a quick glance at the experimental aspect of the piece would suffice to reject this superficial resemblance. The novel is composed of vignettes of family conversations, private letters, and pamphlets, so that various personal opinions, old memories, and future prospects are juxtaposed with each other. In this technique, which is unusual for Ōe’s writing, one can identify various feelings such as confusion, bewilderment, humorous observation, and satirical selfexamination. The narrative style is remarkably self-referential. For example, three women (namely Kogito’s wife, sister, and daughter) make critical comments on Kogito’s professional writing career, and debate whether he is justified in utilizing their family experience. Fictional figures from Ōe’s previous works join the group of examiners, and at one point they even denounce Kogito for the death of a character in his story. Even so, Ōe’s interlaced temporal perspectives seem very different from, say, the complex intersections of the memories of Peter Walsh, Septimus 17 Ibid., 497. 18 Jameson relates multitemporality in modern literature to postmodern aesthetics which embraces “dispersal and multiplicity” ( Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 532). But Ōe’s writing is different from such postmodern techniques in that his fiction, although boldly employing deconstructive tactics, never inclines towards anti-essentialism, which is a characteristic of postmodernism.

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Warren Smith, and others in Mrs Dalloway. This dissimilarity can be explained partially in terms of the moral import of Ōe’s novel, notably in the protagonist’s explicit political commitment. A determination to confront injustice and hardship in contemporary Japan is inscribed, for instance, in Kogito’s opposition to nuclear energy or in indirect references to US-Japan relations. One can consider these traits distinctly realist—a general quality of Ōe’s fiction writing. But the specific case of Bannen yōshiki shū subtly contradicts this realism with its bold experimentation. What is crucial here is the fact that the formal procedure as such appears to be a response to the horror of the Fukushima nuclear accident. Even the radical obliteration of a central viewpoint can be read as a form of self-criticism, a reaction to the devastating accident—an accident which might have been avoided if public intellectuals like the author had more vigorously spoken out against the government’s nuclear policy. What characterizes this novel, then, is a productive tension between formalism and realism rather than abstract experimentalism. Another aspect that differentiates this work from modernist novels is its emphasis upon the sense of connection between individuals, especially intergenerational relations, which provides a visionary anticipation of the unknown. Bannen yōshiki shū ends with a long poem composed by himself, which is another first in Ōe’s fiction.19 The poem revolves around Kogito’s (and probably Ōe’s) memory as a little boy of what his schoolmaster said on the day Japan surrendered in World War Two: “It will not be possible for us to start living again!”20 These words have haunted the boy for decades. After seventy years of musing on his mother’s dismissive remark on the phrase, Kogito suddenly feels sure about the lesson he draws from it. As he concludes the poem, Ōe expands on the schoolmaster’s phrase to address the next generation: Inside myself the words of my mother become, for the first time, hardly a mystery. As an old man, I desire to say to the little ones “it will not be possible to start living again for me. Nonetheless it will be possible for us.”21 19 Ōe made a similar, but more modest attempt in his Sayōnara, watashi no hon yo! (Good-bye, my book!, 2005) which ends with a three-line quotation from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. 20 Kenzaburō Ōe, Bannen yōshiki shū: In reito sutairu (A collection of late styles: In Late Style) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2013), 326. My translation. 21 Ibid., 331. My translation.

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The message is plain: the human individual may not survive the violent future, but, as a collective force, mankind has a chance. The final emphasis on human trust is poignant because it comes after a long, gloomy prediction about the coming seven decades. Ōe’s commitment to the deep trouble ahead is, at least in part, a quality of the “late work” of great artists, which Edward Said describes in On Late Style as full of “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction,”22 even “catastrophe.”23 But a strangely uplifting hope is also unmistakable in Ōe. As discussed in chapter 3, in the 1990s Ōe adopted the motif of group formation in religious cults to recount the tragic fate of human solidarity under mass democracy. Twenty years on, society’s prospects seem hardly brighter. Ōe has continued his search for techniques integrated with morality; and, surprisingly, he still manages to capture the contradictions of Japanese society by boldly innovating in his work. However, always at the center of his art is the primacy of history. In this sense, Ōe’s practice parallels Jameson’s theoretical investigations: both writers continue to reflect on what has happened to subjectivity since the period of high modernism and the emergence of phenomenology. The latter, as the study of the essence of consciousness, is massively broadened in Ricoeur’s analysis of narrative and human temporality; and then it is further developed in Jameson’s theory of fiction, which seeks to capture the traces of historical contradiction that characterize the self ’s relationship to society. Similarly, Ōe is widening the horizon of modernist technique in Japanese by equipping it with a collective dimension in a renewed historical context. In the course of part three I have shown that great artists—Bashō, a number of postwar realist poets, and Ōe Kenzaburō—all refuse to resolve, in poetic imagination, the mounting contradictions that appear during times of social change. As I conclude this study, it is appropriate to reframe this refusal in terms of my overall theme—namely, tragic creation. In their attempts to mold a new sense of reality into artistic form, the artists I have discussed discard a fixed stock of ideas drawn from the past and face up to social conflict. Their heroic struggle reminds us of the fate of those tragic protagonists who are compelled to endure the worst events in order to reach previously unknown heights of morality. In a sense, however, poets, playwrights, and readers are slightly more fortunate than 22 Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 7. The subtitle of Bannen yōshiki shū, “In Late Style,” is a modification of this last work by Said, who was Ōe’s longtime friend. 23 Ibid., 13.

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tragic figures, since they have a chance to survive by thinking about the meanings of tragedy that have crossed cultures and been passed from generation to generation. We need not, and should not, believe that we are destined for death in isolation. This is why we must consider great art not as a part of an expression of the timeless essence of particular culture, but as part of a historical forward movement that will lead to a more inclusive relationship. Once the entire breadth of culture is acknowledged to be a state of constant transformation, one immediately sees that it demands an equally expansive historical model of interpretation. The key question regarding cultural history, then, is how an individual sensibility is capable of giving artistic shape to a new cultural formation that potentially contains the seeds of a collective future. This is no easy question to answer because, as Raymond Williams argues, the attempt to develop a common culture requires “achieving diversity without creating separation.”24 Moreover, because this process is open-ended, “culture, essentially, is unplannable.”25 Defending the “radical” Williams against the “conservative” T. S. Eliot, Terry Eagleton argues that culture is essentially unfathomable for individuals living in modern society: Unlike Eliot, Williams links the social unconscious to the fact that a culture is always a work in progress. If it can never be dredged fully to consciousness, it is partly because it is never complete. The unconscious of a culture is thus among other things an effect of its historicity. It is the future that we cannot know, not simply the concealed subtext of our contemporary thought and action; and for this reason we can never be sure which cultural strains in the present will prove fruitful, and which will turn out to be culs-de-sac.26

While the “whole of the social system forming the whole culture” is not available for an individual living in the society,27 some cultural production, notably powerful tragic drama, can be seen as an allegory of this unfathomability. Indeed, in a number of fine works of tragedy, the future becomes tangible as a form of expectation that is suspended between the perception of harsh reality and the aspiration for a better future. 24 Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950, 334. 25 Ibid., 335. 26 Eagleton, Culture, 93. 27 In Williams’s words, “[the] whole of the social system forming the whole culture will not be available, or conscious as a whole, to any individual or group living within it” (ibid., 238).

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Williams ends his Modern Tragedy with a discussion on the phrase “the word to posterity” in Brecht’s poem “An die Nachgeborenen.” Williams’s final words are bleak but not pessimistic: it seems that Williams is heartened by “the children of the struggle” who “live in new ways and with new feelings, and who, including the revolution in their ordinary living, answer death and suffering with a human voice.”28 It may not be entirely coincidental, then, that our final example of a literary text was Ōe’s poem, which also gives an extremely dismal prediction before holding out faint hope in a “word to posterity.” This correspondence, I believe, offers us confirmation that human emancipation can only emerge through a realistic perception of history, which, like a convincing tragic plot, grasps the possibility of individual action in the point between despair and hope.

28 Williams, Modern Tragedy, 241.

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Index of Names A

Abe, Kōbō, 85 Abe, Shinzō, 63 Adorno, Theodor, 83, 103–4, 125 Aeschylus, xin7 Agamemnon, 7 Anderson, Perry, xvin15 Ara, Masahito, 85 Aristotle, viii, xii–xiii Aston, W. G., 25, 30 A History of Japanese Literature, 25 Auerbach, Erich Mimesis, 128 Augustine, Saint, 48n27, 126–27 Ayukawa, Nobuo, 113n13

B

Barshay, Andrew, 83 Bashō. See Matsuo, Bashō Beckett, Samuel, 27, 51 Bellah, Robert, 101n10 Bergson, Henri, 34, 77n27 Berlin, Isaiah, 58–59 Bernstein, Richard, 116–17 Blake, William, 43 Bloom, Harold, 89–91 Bradley, A. C., 29n33 Brecht, Bertolt, xin7, 7 An die Nachgeborenen, 134 Buson. See Yosa, Buson

C

Callinicos, Alex, xvin15 Camus, Albert, 7 Caruth, Cathy, 119, 124 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 65–67 Chuang-tsu, 100n7 Chikamatsu, Monzaemon, 24–33, 51 Sinjū ten no amijima, x, 24–26, 28, 30–33 Crowther, Paul, 62n12

Curtius, Ernst Robert, 106n25

D

Emperor Daigo, 12–16 Dale, Peter N., 21 Dante, Alighieri, 5, 16, 43 de Man, Paul, 22n22 Deng, Xiaoping, 61 Doi, Yoshio Amae no kōzō, 88 Dower, John, 50n35

E

Eagleton, Terry, xiii, xvin15, 10n19, 59n8, 62n13, 84n44, 112–13, 133 Eliot, T.S., 42n14, 43, 113, 131n19, 133 Empson, William, 106 Endō, Shūsaku, 43, 85 Etō, Jun, 48n26, 81–82, 85–86, 88, 124n36 “Sakka wa kōdō suru,” 82, 124n36 Seijuku to sōshitsu, 85–86 Euripides Iphigenia in Aulis, 30 Medea, 30

F

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 79 Freud, Sigmund, 115–20, 124 Beyond Pleasure Principle, 118 Moses and Monotheism, 115–18 “Thoughts on War and Death,” 118 Fujiwara, Masahiko, 62–63 Kokka no hinkaku, 62 Fujiwara, Shunzei, 15n1

G

Gardner, Helen, 3 Gerstle, C. Andrew, 1–6, 9n18, 28–29, 33n38 Gifford, Terry, 106–7 Gluck, Carol, 39n8

144

Index of Names Gordon, Andrew, 43n15, 50n35, 61n11, 66n5

H

Hanada, Kiyoteru, 84 Haniya, Yutaka, 85 Hara, Tamiki, 111–12 Natsu no hana, 111 Hardy, Thomas The Mayor of Casterbridge, 20 Harootunian, Harry. D., 57n4, 79n33 Harvey, David, xvin15 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4–9, 31, 73, 79 Heidegger, Martin, 77, 79, 127 Heike monogatari, 8–11, 13–16 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 59n8 Hersey, John, 110n4 Hidaka, Rokurō, 13n25 Hirabayashi, Taiko, 84 Hirano, Ken, 85 Emperor Hirohito, 92 Hirosue, Tamotsu, 31–32, 100–1, 105 Honda, Shūgo, 85 Horikiri, Minoru, 99–100 Hotta, Yoshie, 85 Husserl, Edmund, 79, 127

I

Ibsen, Henrik, 7 Ibuse, Masuji Black Rain, 124n36 Ienaga, Saburō, 9–12, 16–17, 21–22, 33 Ihara, Saikaku, 97, 105 Ikeda, Yasaburō, 24n26 Inoue, Kiyoshi, 12n25 Ishimota, Shō, 12n25 Israel, Jonathan, 56 Ivy, Marilyn, 81n40

J

Jameson, Fredric, 91, 127–30, 132 Joyce, James, 89–92 Ulysses, 89–91

K

Kamo no Chōmei, 107n30 Emperor Kanmu, 16 Kant, Immanuel, 58n6, 79 Kanze, Sakon, 17n9 Karatani, Kōjin, 31–32, 72–73, 97–98, 102, 117 Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, 72 Kawabata, Yasunari, 12

Kawai, Hayao, 83, 87–88 Kennan, George, 45 Kiberd, Declan, 90–91 Kierkegaard, Søren, 77 Kim, Sijong, 120–22, 124 Kimura, Bin, 87 Kinoshita, Junji, 13n25 Kitamura, Tarō, 113n13 Kojima, Nobuo, 85 Hōyō kazoku, 85 Konjaku monogatari shū, 16, 85 Kōsai, Tsutomu, 16 Kosugi, Tengai, 70 Koyano, Atsushi, 48n26 Kubokawa, Tsurujirō, 84 Kuki, Shūzō, 75, 77–83 Gūzensei no mondai, 78 Iki no kōzō, 88 Nihonteki seikaku, 78 Kunikida, Doppo, 70, 72–73 “Wasure enu hitobito,” 72 Kuno, Osamu, 13n25 Kurahara, Korehito, 84 Kuroda, Saburō, 113n13

L

Lao-tsu, 100 Lawrence, D. H., 7 Lee, Young-gu, 100 Levi, Primo, 109 Levine, Jennifer, 92n57 Lifton, Robert Jay, 109–11, 119, 123

M

Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain, 127 Marra, Michael F., 23, 67 Maruyama, Masao, 12n25, 82 Masaoka, Shiki, 105n21 Matisoff, Susan, 19n13, 24n27 Matsuo, Bashō, 97–108 Oku no hosomichi, 97 The Record of a Travel-worn Satchel, 99 Miller, Arthur, 7 Minakata, Kumagusu, 74–75 Minami, Hiroshi, 13n25 Miner, Earl Roy, 101n11, 106 Minnema, Lourens, viiin2, 4n4 Mishima, Yukio, 12, 44–45, 85 Hōjō no umi, 44–45 Miura, Shumon, 85 Miyake, Sekian, 33n39

Index of Names Miyamoto, Yuriko, 84 Miyazawa, Kenji, 43 Miyoshi, Toyoichirō, 113n13 Montaigne, Michel de, 5 Muno, Takeji, 13n25 Murakami, Haruki, 12 Sekai no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando, 30 Musō, Soseki, 19

N

Najita, Tetsuo, 33n39 Nakagiri, Masao, 113n13 Nakamura, Mitsuo, 70n12 Nakano, Shigeharu, 84 Napier, Susan, 44–45 Natsume, Sōseki, x–xi, 9–12, 34–42, 51–52, 74 “The Enlightenment of Modern Japan,” 39, 41 Kokoro, x, 11, 34–39, 41–42 “Literature and the Heroic,” 38 “My individualism,” 39–41 Nichiren, 17 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 3–6, 6–9, 19, 77 Nishida, Kitarō, 71, 79n34 “Nihonbunka no mondai,” 79n34 Zen no kenkyū, 71 Noda, Matao, 13n25 Nogi, Maresuke, 36–38, 42 Noma, Hiroshi, 13n25, 45, 85, 122 Nose, Asaji, 23n24

O

O’Connor, Flannery, 43 Odagiri, Hideo, 13n25, 85 Ōe, Kenzaburō, xi, xvii, 12, 43–52, 64, 130–32 Bannen yōshiki shū: in reito sutairu, 130–31 Chūgaeri, 43, 46n22, 48–32 Moeagaru midori no ki, 43–45, 47–52 Ogata, Tsutomu, 102 Oguri, Fūyō, 70 Okada, Sumie, 37–38 Okakura, Tenshin, 41n11 O’Neill, Eugene, 7 Ono, Tōzaburō, 120 Ōoka, Shōhei, 45, 85, 122 Ōta, Yōko, 110–12 Han ningen, 111

P

Pasternak, Boris, 7

Pincus, Leslie, 80 Pirandello, Luigi, 7 Plutarch, ix Proust, Marcel, 104 Remembrance of Things Past, 127

R

Rath, Eric, 17n9, 23n24 Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 104 Ricoeur, Paul, 126–29, 132 Time and Narrative, 126–28 Rimer, Thomas, 25–26, 99n6

S

Said, Edward W., 92n58, 116 On Late Style, 132 Saigō, Nobutsuna, 13n25 Saigyō, 99–102, 108n30 Sakai, Naoki, 57, 113–15 Saikaku. See Ihara, Saikaku Sansom, George Bailey, 32n37 Sasaki, Kiichi, 85 Sasaki, Takatsugu, 87 Sata, Ineko, 84 Schelling, F. W. J., 79 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 30 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 6, 8, 77 Scruton, Roger, 58n6 Sen no Rikyū, 99 Sesshū Tōyō, 99 Shakespeare, William, 5, 25, 28, 42n14, 90 Antony and Cleopatra, 28–29 Hamlet, 29n33, 42, 90 King Lear, 29n33 Romeo and Juliet, 29 Shiga, Naoya, 86 Shiga, Shigetaka, 68–69, 73–75 Nihon fūkei ron, 69–70 Shiina, Rinzō, 85 Shimao, Toshio, 85 Shimazaki, Tōson, 70 Hakai, 70 Shinoda, Kōichirō, 18n4, 19–21 Shinran, 17, 68 Shively, Donald, 28n31, 33n38 Shōno, Junzō, 85 Sōgi, 99 Solon, ix Sōma, Gyofū, 71 Sono, Ayako, 85 Soper, Kate, 103–4, 106 Sophocles

145

146

Index of Names Antigone, 7, 29–30, 52 The King Oedipus, 20 Sōseki. See Natsume, Sōseki Steiner, George, 1–6 The Death of Tragedy, 1 Strindberg, August, 7 Stryk, Lucien, 101 Sugiura, Mimpei, 13n25, 98–99, 105, 108 Sun,Yat-Sen, 74 Suwa, Haruo, 24n26

T

Taiheiki, 16 Takeda, Taijun, 85 The Tale of Genji, xi Tales of Ise, xi Tamura, Ryūichi, 113–14 Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō, 12, 75 Tashiro, Keiichirō, 18–19 Tayama, Katai Futon, 70 Terada, Tōru, 13n25 Theocritus, 106 Thornber, Karen, 108 Timpanaro, Sebastiano, xiii Tōge, Sankichi, 122–23 Tolstoy, Leo, 7 Tosaka, Jun, 79 Treat, John Whittier, 51n36, 110–12, 124n35 Tsuda, Hideo, 21 Tyler, Royall, 15n2, 19n12

W

Wagner, Wilhelm Richard, 48n27 Wakaguwa, Midori, 112–13 Wallace, Jennifer, 9n16, 30n34 Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice, 52, 56–57, 76n24 Wang, Hui, 55, 57, 60–62 Washburn, Dennis, 38n5, 41 Watanabe, Mamoru, 13n25 Watsuji, Tetsurō, 75, 77–83 Fūdo, 77–79 Gūzō saikō, 77n28 Weber, Max, 55 Weil, Simone, 48n27 Wiesel, Elie, 109 Williams, Raymond, ix–xii, xiv, 4–8, 13, 31, 67, 106, 133–34 The Country and the City, 106 Culture and Society, 76 Modern Tragedy, xivn12, 4–7, 134 Williams, Tennessee, 7 Woolf, Virginia, 128 Mrs Dalloway, 127–28, 131

Y

Uchimura, Kanzō, 41n11, 73–75 Chirigakukō, 73–74 Umezaki, Haruo, 85

Yamaguchi, Masao, 20–21 Yamanouchi, Hisaaki, 41n13 Yanagita, Kunio, 75n22, 81, 83, 97 Yasuoka, Shōtarō, 85 Umibe no kōkei, 88 Yeats, W. B., 44n16, 48n27 Yokota-Murakami, Takayuki, xiv–xv Yosa, Buson, 97 Yoshida, Hidekazu, 13n25, 71n13 Yoshimoto, Banana, 12 Yoshimoto, Takaaki, 81–82, 113n13 Gengo ni totte bi towa nanika, 82n42 Yoshiyuki, Jun’nosuke, 85

V

Z

U

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, ix Virgil, 106

Zeami, 11, 12–24 Semimaru, 12–24

Index of Subjects

Index of Subjects aesthetics, aesthetic, xii, xiv, 4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25, 30, 47, 57–58, 62–64, 67, 69, 73, 75, 78, 80–81, 98–99, 103, 107–8, 111–13, 124–25, 130n18 allegory, 22–23, 46, 104, 133 ambiguity, ambiguous, xiv, 10, 40, 42, 46–47, 55, 59, 61–62, 76, 80, 90–92, 105, 117–18, 120 androgyny, 90 anthropology, anthropologist, 20–22, 79 anti-pastoral, 106–7 anti-Semitism, 117 atomic bomb, 45, 51n36, 109–12, 122 bunka (culture), 76–83 Buddhism, Buddhist, xii, 6, 11, 16–17, 19, 24, 27, 32n37, 36, 60, 68, 100–1 Bushidō, 60, 63 capitalism, capitalist, 61–62, 78, 91 China, Chinese, xi, 4, 55, 60–62, 65, 69–70, 74, 76–77, 98, 100 Christianity, Christian, xi, 3, 5, 11n21, 41n11, 55, 73, 90–91 colonialism, 74 Daiichiji sengo-ha (the first wave of the postwar writers), 84 Dainiji sengo-ha (the second wave of the postwar writers), 85 Daisanji sengo-ha (the third wave of the postwar writers), 85–86 death, xiii, 3, 3–6, 26–27, 34–38, 42, 47, 49, 88–90, 109, 113–15, 118–21, 130, 133–34 democracy, 12, 14, 31, 45, 50–52, 60, 62, 75–76, 81, 84, 88, 120, 122n31, 132 diversity, xiii–xvi, xviii, 4, 20, 40, 48, 55–56, 59–60, 62–63, 76, 80, 83, 87, 133 ecology, 74–75, 103 Edo period (Tokugawa period), xi, xiv, 11, 23–24, 31, 33, 67, 101n10 eidos, 129

enlightenment, xvi, xviii, 3–6, 19, 24, 37–41, 43, 56, 58–61, 74, 81, 83, 104n20, 118n24, 130 fate, viii, xii, xivn12, 4, 5–8, 11, 16, 19, 23, 32, 35, 43, 115, 132 fatherhood, 84, 89–90 feminism, 48, 58n6, 89 the First World War (World War One), 118 fueki-ryūkō, 107 fūkei, see landscape gender, 27–28, 47–48, 91 giri/ninjō, 31–32 God, 5, 29–30, 43, 45, 49, 73, 91n55, 99–100, 116n19, 119 haiku, xvii, 78, 98–102, 104–8 hara-kiri, 28 hermaphrodite, 47 history, viii, ix–xviii, 2–12, 12–17, 21–24, 31–33, 39, 41–43, 46–47, 49–50, 52, 55, 57–58, 60–61, 63–70, 72–74, 76–77, 79–89, 91–93, 97–98, 100, 102, 104, 106–8, 110–13, 115–22, 124–27, 129–30, 132–34 homogeneity, 21, 46, 57, 59, 62, 83, 93 idealism, 12, 24, 38, 60, 74, 79, 90, 117 identity, xv–xvi, 22n22, 34, 42, 57, 59–60, 63, 67–68, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81–84, 87–88, 91n55, 113n14, 116–18, 120 ideology, xiv, xvi, 6, 9, 17, 20–21, 33, 39, 41n11, 49n28, 51, 56–57, 60, 64, 69, 75–76, 79, 82–84, 88–89, 92, 103, 113, 115, 122 imperialism, 17, 21, 41n11, 80, 91,99 industrialization, 43, 75, 86, 88 I-novel, 85, 130 iro-otoko (Edo Japanese dandy), xiv jinen, 68 jōruri (puppet theater), x, 11, 24n28, 31, 33n40 jun gyaku ichijo, 19 junshi, 37

147

148

Index of Subjects kabuki, 4 kishuryūritan, 20 Kamakura period, 11n21, 17, 22–23, 68, 101n10 kokusui (national essence), 70 kyōka, 106 landscape, 69–70, 72–73, 97, 103, 108 lyricism, 47, 98, 100, 105, 120. See also uta market, xvi, 26, 51–63 Marxism, Marxist, xi, xvi–xvii, 5, 7, 10, 13, 31, 62, 78–79, 81–85, 91, 129 Meiji period, xi, xvi, 17, 25, 34, 36–39, 41–42, 65–68, 71–74, 76–77, 80–81, 86, 97 minzokugaku (ethnology), 79n33 modernization, xi, 4, 10, 12, 22, 34, 37–40, 42–43, 52, 60–61, 65–66, 69, 77, 86, 89n51, 91, 108n32 modernism, 80, 84–85, 89–91, 113, 121–22, 124, 127–29, 131–32 modernity, xi–xii, xv–xvii, 2–7, 7–14, 17, 21–22, 24, 34–35, 37–43, 47, 51, 55–57, 59–62, 64–70, 72–73, 75–77, 79–80, 83–86, 89, 91–92, 97–100, 104–7, 111, 113–14, 121, 124, 130n18, 133 mono-no-aware, 63 monotheism, monotheist, 86, 115–19 mother, motherhood, 83–93, 123–24, 131 multiculturalism, multicultural, viii, xv, 10, 55–57, 59 Muromachi period, xi, 23 narrative, ix, xi, xiv, xvii, 9, 9–12, 20, 22–23, 34–35, 37–38, 42, 46–48, 62, 70, 88, 91, 97, 111, 115, 119, 124n36, 126–28, 130, 132 nationalism, xvin14, 8n18, 17, 21–22, 31, 40, 46–47, 51, 62–63, 69, 73–74, 80–81, 83–84, 87, 91n55 naturalism, xii, xiv, xvii, 38, 47–48, 67–77, 84, 93, 97, 102. See also shizenshugi nihonjinron, 60, 62, 82–83 nō (nō theater), x, 4, 11, 12–18, 21, 23 the non-West, x, xiv, xvii–xviii, 3–4, 7–10, 56–57, 59, 65, 67, 75, 108 the Orient, Oriental, 3, 65–66 pastoral, xvii, 106–8 patriarchy, 87–90 phenomenology, 79–80, 126–27, 132 pluralism, xiii, xvii, 48, 50, 52, 55, 57, 62, 66 postmodernism, postmodern, postmodernist, xvi–xvii, 56–57, 60–62, 112, 115, 130n18 post-pastoral, 106–8 post-structuralism, xvii progress, x, xiii, xv–xviii, 6, 9, 31, 40, 51–52, 55, 66, 75, 77, 79, 83–84, 116, 118n24, 122–23, 133

Qin dynasty, 60–61 rationality, xvi–xvii, 5, 6–9, 31, 40, 51, 55–56, 59, 62, 77–78, 82, 87, 110 realism, xvii, 47, 70–71, 82, 84, 88, 97, 102–5, 108, 120–22, 124, 131–32, 134 renga, 99n6, 105–6 revolution, revolutionary, 38, 60, 62, 65–66, 78, 81, 104–5 romanticism, xiv–xv, 32, 58–59, 72, 74–75, 80, 82, 104n20, 106–7 the Second World War (World War Two, the Pacific War), xvin14, 14, 21–22, 60, 88, 92, 98–99, 110, 113, 117, 131 sekkyōshi, 23 senryū, 106 sewamono, 24, 26, 28, 31 shinjū, 24–26, 28, 30–33 Shintoism, Shintoist, 11, 60, 75, 99n4 shizen (nature), 67–71, 99 shizenshugi, 70–71. See also naturalism socialism, socialist, 61–62, 78, 122 Taishō period, 34 Taoism, Taoist, 99–100 temporality, 40, 60, 98, 102, 108, 118–20, 126–30, 132 tennōsei, 18n4, 19–20 tradition, viii–xviii, 1–6, 7–10, 12, 13–17, 19–22, 25–26, 28–31, 33–35, 39, 46–47, 51, 55–56, 58–60, 62–64, 66–69, 74–75, 77–78, 80–86, 88, 90, 92–93, 97–99, 102, 104–8, 117–18, 120, 129 tragedy, tragic, vi, viii–xv, xvii, 1–14, 16, 20, 22–26, 28–35, 38, 41–42, 45–46, 48, 50–52, 63, 67, 91, 93, 132–34 trauma, traumatic, xvii, 34, 48, 89, 110–11, 113, 115, 118–20, 124, 126 travel diary, 107 truth, 38n5, 58, 66, 70–73, 111, 116, 119, 124n36 universalism, xiv–xviii, 4, 10, 33n39, 41–42, 51–52, 56–59, 61, 63–64, 73–74, 76–77, 87 uta, 105n21, 120. See also lyricism waka ( Japanese poetry), 78, 99n6, 100, 102, 105–6 the West, viii, x–xi, xiv–xv, xvii–xviii, 1–5, 7–11, 25, 27–30, 33–35, 39–41, 43, 55–63, 65–70, 73–78, 80, 82–83, 86–90, 92, 98–99, 106, 108 yūgen, 15 zen, 19, 60, 98, 100 zōka, 99–100