Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japanese Fiction 9780231887649

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OTHER WORLDS

Modem Asian Literature Series

Other Worlds ARISHIMA TAKEO AND THE BOUNDS OF MODERN JAPANESE FICTION

Paul Anderer

Columbia University

Press

New York

1984

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the generous support toward publication given them by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through a special grant, has also assisted the Press in publishing this volume. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Anderer, Paul. Other worlds. (Modern Asian literature series) Bibliography: p. Includes index. l . Arishima, Takeo, 1878-1923—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Title: Arishima Takeo and the bounds of modern Japanese fiction. III. Series. PL801.R5Z55 1984 895.6'34 84-12171 ISBN 0-231-05884-5

Columbia University Press New York Guildford, Surrey

Copyright © 1984 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

Clothbound editions of Columbia University Press books are Smyth-sewn and printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

FOR GEORGE ANDERER

Contents Preface

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter One:

Hokkaido

19

Chapter Two:

America

41

Chapter Three:

The City and the Sea

71

Notes

133

Bibliography

145

Index

149

Modem

Asian Literature

Series

Editorial Board Kathleen R. F. Burrill Barbara Stoler Miller Pierre Cachia Edward Seidensticker C. T. Hsia Marsha Wagner Donald Keene

Preface T H I S IS a study of space in the fiction of Arishima Takeo (1878-1923). It is concerned with the topography of his writing, with the construction of worlds which exist at the very bounds of Japanese literary experience. These distant "other worlds" are to be found in metaphors of longing and possibility which Arishima discovered, and I have critically explored. They signify areas of intense cultural conflict where we see that the exchange of literary ideas and influence between Japan and the West has not always been an innocent process. Western notions of love or freedom or the self, or of literary Utopias, may be no less complicating when abruptly transplanted into Japanese literary culture, than Eastern notions of quietism, of social conformity or the not-self, or of a concrete literature are when transplanted into our own. Real differences of a moral and an artistic nature are obscured in the mutual rush or the dilettantish amble toward the exotic. And exoticism, whether of an antiquarian or a futuristic kind, continues to color many foreign perceptions of traditional and modern Japan, as well as Japanese perceptions of their own past and of the West. Arishima's fiction may appear to anyone alien or strange, but it also represents, to my mind, a denial of the exotic. It forces us to encounter what is simply but crucially different about lit-

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PREFACE

erary cultures. In exceeding the bounds of customary Japanese literary experience (even by the standards of its own "experimental" twentieth century), and in betraying at every step the mental and aesthetic risk of such an attempt, Arishima's writing reminds us that any literature is relentlessly local and contingent, hemmed in, though also guided by artistic rules and cultural limits. Ultimately this fiction traces and makes visible that boundary which lies between any literature and life—what we variously desire and the diverse ways in which we actually live may be but dimly represented in the amplest or the most sincere, the most elegant or the most ambitious, of traditional or modernist writing. This is neither a biography nor a survey of all that Arishima wrote. The reader is referred to Kenneth Strong's long and lucid introduction to his translation of Arishima's best known work, Aru Onna (A Certain Woman, University of Tokyo Press, 1978), for much biographical and background detail. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in the text are my own, even where other admirable translations of the same material, such as Strong's, already exist. Since this is a largely interpretive and not a descriptive commentary, it seemed important that Arishima's language, in English, be kept consistent and clear. Throughout the text I have observed the Japanese practice af placing the family name before the given name; and for stylistic reasons, I have not marked the long vowel of two words which occur here with great frequency: Hokkaido and the name of the fictional character, Yoko. I began this study at Yale as a student of Edwin McClellan and developed much of my thinking about it at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where I worked with Eto Jun. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the generosity and counsel of these two teachers. Over several years I have argued out these ideas with Karatani Kojin, who has been a steady source of encouragement, and I have benefited as well from the discussion which the book provoked upon its Japanese publication (Ishitsu no Sekai, Tojusha, 1982). I have carried on related discussions with

PREFACE

xi

my colleagues and students at Columbia, and I am grateful for their patience and their help, as I am for the advice of my editor, David Diefendorf. To my wife, Mia, and to our sons, I owe the deepest thanks. The book is dedicated to my father, in memory.

Introduction I N T H E twenty-sixth chapter of Aru Onna (A Certain Woman, 1919), the heroine, driven into hiding by the scandal over her illicit love affair, is about to move in secret from one refuge to another. We encounter the following passage: The night was full of wind and rain, and the streets, usually crowded, were by now nearly empty. Stepping into the rikisha, Yoko glanced at the sky. The storm clouds seemed to possess an awesome power as they streaked through the gauzy light cast by the new moon. Her skin was assaulted by the cold. The very warmth of her rooms at the inn made Yoko all the more sensitive to the drenching gusts of wind which struck in waves against her skirt. The hood of the cab flapped wildly as the driver struggeled to fasten it over her. Yoko managed to peer out through a slit in the hood and saw the proprietress giving final instructions to the man. The proprietress herself seemed oblivious to the storm as she strayed beyond the sheltering umbrella held by the maid, her full, freshly arranged coiffure buffeted by the wind. As the driver was about to raise the shafts of the rikisha, the proprietress pressed some coins into his hand, and, turning, she bid farewell to Yoko. The cab pulled out into the darkness, pressing stub-

2

INTRODUCTION bornly ahead, pushing into the face of the wind which drove against the hood. At times the groaning, whipping gusts nearly paralyzed the driver's legs and brought him to a halt. Yoko's skin, warmed by the brazier these last several days, was cut by the cold which pierced through the thick woolen blanket covering her lap. Her thoughts turned to the parting conversation with the proprietress. Yoko reflected anew on the woman's remarks about Kurachi's wife—she had called her "blameless," hadn't she? No doubt, Yoko thought, I have been deceived all along. He never intended to part with his wife and his children. He seduced me on impulse, a mere whim born of the long and tedious voyage. Since then, all has been contrived to subjugate me. And as she reflected on the complexity of their love and the power of the feelings this love aroused within her, she came to see how defenseless she was. Her pride and pleasure—her very happiness in this fantasy fulfilled—now seemed to her but a sordid, misplaced satisfaction. She knew that he still took pleasure in her. But how long would this man, who still possessed a devoted wife and children, remain infatuated? Where, Yoko wondered, were her assurances? Like the wind that blew through the cab, Yoko's heart grew chill. She recognized in herself a soul cut off, in isolation. Joy and happiness had lost all meaning, and she seemed about to hurl herself toward agonies of the spirit she had never before experienced. Fate had tricked her, and nothing, it seemed, could now relieve this humiliation. . . . Suddenly the rikisha stopped. The driver let down the shafts. Her reverie broken, Yoko sighed deeply, as if in relief. The wind was still blowing fiercely. The driver used one foot to steady the swaying carriage, and, as he began to peel back the hood, a faint flicker of light penetrated what had been total darkness. Rain poured down. To her ears it sounded strangely like the roaring of a turbulent sea, or again, like the seething outpour of some calamity. Lighting from the cab, Yoko was caught by the wind, which threatened to blow her away. 1

INTRODUCTION

3

This is, to be sure, no recognizable locality. There is no mention of place or street names; no public signposts, no description of houses or parks or buildings. We are not even told in what direction the rikisha is heading. In context we know that Yoko has returned to Tokyo after a month at sea. And so the scene transpires in the city, but even with respect to its neighborhoods, there is nothing familiar about it. What dominates our impression of this scene, and others we will look at, is its turbulence and want of definition; not indefiniteness in the sense of ambiguity, but a wilful destruction of boundary lines, a deliberate immersion into what Conrad called "the destructive element." 2 The very metaphors used to tentatively fix the setting—"roaring of a turbulent sea"; "seething outpour of some calamity"—only remind us that in Arishima's fiction, the city can become the sea. Culture can be, and often is, reduced to chaos. And yet this turbulent geography, obviously sinister and threatening, is not something alien to the heroine. On the contrary, Yoko's feelings are native to the elements: "like the wind that blew through the cab, Yoko's heart grew chill." She is, as she calls herself elsewhere, "a prisoner of love," 3 and like the lovers, say, in Soseki's Mon (The Gate, 1910), hers is largely a sequestered environment. But unlike Sosuke and Oyone, whose isolation is virtually complete and serves as a protection from the dangers of the city, Yoko repeatedly is exposed to the city's assaults and becomes, as it were, intimate with its danger. The cold, we remember, "cuts" into her skin. The "groaning gusts" seem to blow not outside only, but inside and through her soul ("she seemed about to hurl herself toward agonies of the spirit she had never before experienced"). Her darkness of mind is, if anything, blacker than the night. And, of course, as the passage ends, we see Yoko taken by the wind and rain. Clearly realistic detail is overwhelmed in this nearly allegorical account of a dark night of the soul. Details which might give a more definite texture or social shape to the environment,

4

INTRODUCTION

or which would reflect common cultural concerns, are subordinated here and throughout Arishima's writing to the exploration of mental or "natural" phenomena. Here, at any rate, hairstyles are sacrificed to the storm. Conversation is virtually silenced by the interior monologue. The proprietress' instructions to the driver (which the reader does not "hear") and that man's subsequent feeble efforts to carry them out, seem confuted by the peremptory dictates of the wind. And Yoko's enemies, her absent lover and his wife, along with the proprietress as their presumptive go-between, appear as conspiratorial figures, in league with a duplicitous Fate. Reading Arishima, we sense that, like the heroine in the above passage, we are being swept away into another world. No doubt all fiction, to a greater or lesser degree, distances us from life, and we know, at least on reflection, that the fictional worlds we enter possess characteristics and dimensions unlike those of the real world left behind. And yet in the context of modern Japanese literature, which most typically offers us not a quest into the unknown, but an emotional journey through local "fact," the vaulting urgency and range of Arishima's fictional flights appear as a rare and perhaps unparalleled achievement. As readers, we are drawn into worlds which are demonstrably alien, and within such worlds characters and events assume new and at times startling configurations. Repeatedly Arishima uses the same kinds of territory to locate his stories, and so we see that surface differences between, say, Hokkaido and America, or between the city and the sea, give way to a common strangeness. All represent places in some sense foreign to naichi, the settled, culturally familiar "homeland"; all lie beyond that tradition of literary landscape which figures so prominently in the practice and critical appreciation of Japanese fiction. It is the transformed, indeed the transgressive, topos of Arishima's writing which is its most distinguishing feature. The search for Christian or socialist "influence," for the voices of Goethe or Tolstoy, Whitman or Kropotkin, in this writing seems a wholly secondary pursuit, and one which, in

INTRODUCTION

5

a n y case, m u s t b e carried o u t o n A r i s h i m a ' s o w n fictional terrain. For w h a t b e c o m e s a p p a r e n t , r e a d i n g A r i s h i m a in the context of J a p a n e s e literature, is that as a writer of fiction h e clearly w e n t his o w n w a y . T h r o u g h o u t the T a i s h o p e r i o d (1912-1926), d u r i n g w h i c h A r i s h i m a w a s principally active, political a n d aesthetic m a n i f e s t o e s w e r e rife, dramatically a n n o u n c i n g divis i o n in t h e society a n d calling for a v a r i e t y of " n e w literatures" to suit the c h a n g i n g times. T h e r e is a similarly febrile, a l m o s t i n c a n t a t o r y rhetoric a n d a Utopian m e s s a g e , c o m m o n to O s u g i S a k a e ' s w r i t i n g a b o u t a " p e o p l e ' s a r t " for Kindai Shiso ( M o d e m T h o u g h t ) ; to H i r a t s u k a R a i c h o in Seito (Blue Stocking), calling for t h e r e t u r n of a p r i m e v a l w o m a n w h o will b r i g h t e n a culture in eclipse; or to the v a r i o u s p r o g r e s s i v e orders w i s h e d for b y the editors of Tane Maku Hito (The S o w e r ) , Kaizo (Reconstruction) a n d Kaihd (Liberation). Even the reactionary Shirakaba (White Birch) m a g a z i n e a n d its s m u g creator, M u s h a n o k o j i S a n e a t s u , t r u m p e t s the o v e r t m e s s a g e of cultural pluralism a n d internationalism, p l a c i n g greater v a l u e o n V a n G o g h ' s suicide t h a n o n G e n e r a l N o g i ' s , a n d a s s i g n i n g a n international b i r t h r i g h t — j i n rui no ko, sekai no ko4—to t h o s e w h o a p p l y t h e m s e l v e s to the a p p r e c i a t i o n of R e n a i s s a n c e or P o s t i m p r e s s i o n i s t or Expressionist art, as w e l l as to the cultural treasures of Eastern antiquity. Y e t a s i d e f r o m the stridency a n d strain of m u c h T a i s h o rhetoric, it is o t h e r w i s e c o n s p i c u o u s for l e a v i n g the practice of fiction w r i t i n g in place a n d intact. For this period c o r r e s p o n d s as w e l l to t h e rise to d o m i n a n c e of watakushi shosetsu or shinkyo shosetsu ( p e r s o n a l fiction), that s h e l t e r e d a n d sheltering m o d e of discourse w i t h i n w h i c h the prose writer appropriates the role of t h e lyric p o e t , s t a y i n g close to the setting a n d to the occasion of a n e m o t i o n a l e v e n t a n d transcribing these e v e n t s w i t h s e e m i n g l y n o i d e o l o g i c a l a n d scant artistic intervention. Writing in 1923 (the y e a r , as it h a p p e n s , of A r i s h i m a ' s n o t o r i o u s lovesuicide), a n d b y w a y of a c o d i f y i n g g l o s s o n this k i n d of fiction, K u m e M a s a o s p o k e of a n " e n v i r o n m e n t of f e e l i n g ( s h i n k y o ) "

6

INTRODUCTION

which he regarded as essential to the composition of Japanese prose. It is within such environments, of personal impressions gathered about culturally refined and mostly domestic scenes, that Kume insisted we would find "the furusato [country home] of fiction, the place from which fiction originates, and the place to which it returns." 5 That Arishima neither begins nor ends in this furusato is crucial to my own understanding of his fiction. It is precisely its distance from such a "country home," its spatial dislocation—a deliberate, often violent, shift of fictional place—which sets Arishima's writing apart. The various charges and epithets directed against his work and his life: that he is un-Japanese (Nihon jin banare) and "foreign smelling" (batakusai),6 that his writing is grandly western and symphonic but leaves one wishing, as Akutagawa had it, "for the real thing" 7 —these and similar characterizations can have little to do with his religious and political conversions, to which, as I suggested, any number of his contemporaries were susceptible, nor again with the cosmopolitan reference or modern themes (the "new woman," the "disadvantaged laborer," etc.) which are again common to Naturalist and Shirakaba and proletarian literature alike. It is rather because, more than any writer of his time, Arishima sought to rival the prevailingly grounded, place-haunted nature of Japanese fiction, and to do this by upsetting the most basic expectation of a Japanese story: that it will take place in a known and familiar place. This is a radical affront, and we can better gauge how ambitious Arishima was in making it if we first understand the determining force and consistency of the Japanese fictional bounds he sought to transgress. No modern writer seems more antithetical to Arishima, in his scrupulous observance of literary boundaries, than the mature Tanizaki, who, again unlike Arishima, enjoys a high and fixed place in Japanese critical opinion. Readers may recall the scene in Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters in which Sachiko, the one

INTRODUCTION

7

sister on whom everyone relies, eats too much steak and is stricken with jaundice. At the advice of the family doctor, she takes to her bed, drinks only clam broth, and patiently suffers the muggy weather which precedes the June rains. Her daughter, Etsuko, enters the sick room, and we read: "What is that flower, Mother?" She pointed at the flower in the alcove. "A poppy." "I think you should take it away." "Why?" "Look at it. It sucks you up inside it." "I see what you mean." The child had a point. Sachiko herself had been feeling strangely oppressed by something in this sick room, and, without being able to say what it was, she could not help thinking that the cause was right before her eyes. Etsuko had put her finger on it. In the fields, the poppy was a pretty enough flower, but the single poppy in the alcove was somehow repulsive. You felt as though you were being sucked up inside it.8

It is a trivial passage, given the scope and complexity of this book, which follows a proud merchant family's decline and gradual displacement from provincial toward city life. But for Tanizaki, as we know, the trivial is like a fetish, and has a special significance: a poppy misplaced, a phone call unanswered, and we are reminded of what the narrator has said elsewhere about how "the merest trivialities determine a person's future." 9 In Sachiko's case, it is true, the poppy is removed, and, deciding against lilies, against anything natural at all, she has her husband write a poem, a "fresh, clean poem" we are told, and this she hangs in the alcove: A far off evening shower, on the Peak of Atago Soon it will be roiling over clear Cascade. 10

This substitution, this rearrangement of spatial detail, trivial in itself, makes a difference. On the following day the jaundice is gone, and Sachiko has recovered.

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INTRODUCTION

It would be convenient but incorrect to say that throughout this novel, Tanizaki takes disorderly details—facial blemishes and fevers, a flood in Kobe and a typhoon in Tokyo, an unmarried woman past her prime and a young, rebellious woman—and rearranges all of this for a pleasing or beautiful effect. Improbable as it seems, a well-placed poem may cure Sachiko's jaundice, but no manner of artfulness can conceal the spots of the aging sister, Yukiko. In The Makioka Sisters, which begins in an effort to arrange Yukiko's marriage, and proceeds from there to reveal a self-conscious concern to arrange everything, including the spatial details of an interior and an exterior landscape, until we regard the darkly glowing wooden floors of the old Ashiya home as the very medium through which these figures are apprehended along their dim and mostly hesitant passage—in such a novel, then, Yukiko's marriage remains problematic. The book ends, we notice, before her marriage is consummated. Sign of the old, she does not seem destined for a new life. On the train en route to the ceremony, she has diarrhea. And as a further bad omen, she is traveling toward Tokyo, where in this and in so many other modern Japanese novels, as I will have occasion to point out in a later chapter, nothing ever seems happily arranged or consummated. It is a measure of Tanizaki's integrity as a writer that he acknowledges and dramatically portrays situations in life which do not yield to arrangement. The fictional lives of the sisters often do not or cannot be made to conform to an aesthetic pattern. And yet Tanizaki, like many of the finest Japanese writers, subtly persuades us that any significant breach of artistic decorum is a mistake. Not freedom and possibility but loss and violation is signaled by it. Better the unremarkable but familiar garden behind the old provincial house, susceptible as it has always been in Japanese literature to aesthetic arrangement, than the grey sooty expansiveness of western Tokyo; better a life of domestic routine, adhering to traditional patterns of conduct, than one unregulated, as the youngest sister's is, subject to the vagaries of the market place, to romantic love and an unsanc-

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9

tioned pregnancy which ends, so tragically but with such telling metaphorical significance, in the child's death at birth. In the composition of even so casual an exchange as transpires between Sachiko and her daughter, we see that an awareness of literary bounds, a certain spatial decorum, is strongly present. It is such an awareness, here made personal and active in the style of Tanizaki, which determines the way Japanese fictional space is typically arranged, the lines by which a given scene is drawn and a sense of place emerges. In my own reading experience, these topographical borders and the space which they enclose are remarkably consistent, and since in so much Japanese fiction the setting conditions and often seems even to dominate character and narrative line, it seems important to consider how this setting is shaped and formed. What has become clear to me in reading Japanese fiction and criticism is that there is nothing haphazard or vague about these boundaries. It is rarely a question of "the country" or "the city" or "Nature" writ large. The Japanese fictional landscapes which recur in serious literature, which we come to anticipate and value, have common features: they are particular rural villages or urban neighborhoods or temple grounds—Ashiya, Asakusa, Kiyomizu; particular mountains and rivers—Yoshino, Daisen, Sumidagawa, place names often previously celebrated in Japanese poetry and prose, and which we recognize as semimetaphorical presences within a culturally domesticated homeland. In the post-Restoration period, of course, the issue appears more complicated. We notice certain movements beyond the homeland's borders, explorations of new and alien territory: the Meiji political novelists and their far-flung voyages toward models of enlightened conduct; Ogai's "Maihime" and Soseki's "Rondon to"; Yokomitsu's Shanghai as well as in the postwar period Mishima's myth-haunted expedition to Southeast Asia, Endo's spiritual journey to Nueva Espana and Rome, and Abe's allegorical, urban wastelands. These fictions and some others need to be acknowledged and accounted for, yet they seem anomalous, ranged against the sheer quantity of a more local,

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INTRODUCTION

personal fiction. It remains possible to say even today that Japanese fiction takes place within delimited borders, and when it does not it appears, like the poppy in Sachiko's sick room, out of place. The power of the literary tradition in this regard should not be underestimated. Contrary to a naive belief, the cosmopolitan, reform-minded literati of the late nineteenth century did not jettison the old literature, indeed it was hardly their intention to do so. 11 Modern Japanese literary history does not conform to a deconstructionist model—literary history seen not as a continuum but as a series of ruptures and discontinuities. Some modern Japanese writers have ignored and some have honored their literary past; few have really struggled against it, and in these struggles there seem to be no unambiguous victories. Instead, the record of fictional experiment in defiance of the tradition shows an initial daring followed by disillusionment and defeat: Arishima's heroine in Aru Onna, who leaves for the New World with such hope, returns to Tokyo a tainted woman, and there loses her mind; Mishima's adventure in Thailand yields by the end of the tetralogy not a new vision but a very old one, of silence and forgetfulness in the quiet of an almost medieval retreat; Endo's recent quest for faith leads of course to martyrdom, and the only figure fully conscious at the end is not Japanese at all but European; and Abe, with Arishima, the most consistent border transgressor of all, has turned from fiction to drama, as though even he found it difficult to sustain an earlier, more purely imaginative vision. That most modern Japanese fiction does not end quite so thoroughly disillusioned and defeated, preferring to represent the subtle, unrelenting, yet somehow tolerable pressures of everyday life, signals an awareness of literary limits which remains strong even in the face of western literary influence, and the desire, expressed by a few, to write a new literature. For now I want to reiterate that this sense of limits, these largely unspoken but widely practiced rules of conduct in one's choice of a fictional setting, are not modern at all but have deep roots in the past.

INTRODUCTION

11

The touchstone on this issue, as on so many issues concerning Japanese literature, is the Tale of Genji. It is possible, I suppose, to go back even further, to the earliest chronicles and gazeteers: the eighth-century Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and the Fudoki (Record of Natural Features), with their litanies and etymologies of ancient place names, and their implication that spiritual and even practical value resides in the physical features of the land; the headnotes to the poetry in the Manydshu and subsequent imperial poetic anthologies, which specify the context of an emotion, the lyric always associated with a particular occasion and setting; or the localizing, domestic nature of nikki bungaku (diary literature) as it evolved, a record kept, less to order events chronologically than to arrange and ultimately to define an intimate and knowable world. Still, it is in Murasaki's tale that the question of setting and landscape first becomes a self-conscious concern of the narrator. In the early "Broom Treee" chapter, there is a disquisition on the art of painting through which, it seems to me, Murasaki renders an aesthetic judgment that informs her own literary style, and her understanding of greater and lesser literary values: There are any number of masters in the academy. It is not easy to separate the good from the bad among those who work on the basic sketches. But let color be added. The painter of things no one ever sees, of paradises, of fish in angry seas, raging beasts in foreign lands, devils and demons—the painter abandons himself to his fancies and paints to terrify and astonish. What does it matter if the results seem remote from real life? It is not so with the things we know, mountains, streams, houses near and like our own. The soft unspoiled wooded hills must be painted layer on layer, the details added gently, quietly, to give a sense of affectionate familiarity. And the foreground too, the garden inside the walls, the arrangement of the stones and grasses and waters. It is here that the master has his own power. There are details a lesser painter cannot imitate. 1 2

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INTRODUCTION

The disposition voiced here, to describe what Murasaki calls "affectionate familiarity," to meander back and forth among personal, lyrical details, determines not only the plot of the Tale of Genji, but the future course of Japanese fiction. It is the reason why this tale is not a romance, as that term is understood in western literary criticism. For at the heart of a romance there is a quest which takes the hero away from his home and native land to settle a new world or to return eventually to the old one, but endowed with greater wisdom, an enlarged or simply an enraptured vision. This is as true, it seems to me, of ancient western narratives—The Odyssey or The Epic of Gilgamesh or The Aeneid, for example—as it is of modern, often more sinister quests—Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. This is not to say that in the Genji and in other Japanese fiction only benevolent or harmonious experience is described. We have only to think of the possession scenes and the hero's exile in Suma to realize that Murasaki's tale is not all "soft, unspoiled wooded hills" and fragrant, demure conduct. And in our own century we can point to a cycle of writing which Japanese critics have labeled "destructive," the work of Chikamatsu Shuko, Kamura Isota, Kasai Zenzo, Dazai Osamu, among others, where we encounter figures who, without ever straying far from the all too familiar, manage, through alcohol and an acute sense of betrayal and paranoia, to poison their own lives and the lives of those around them. There is nothing ethically or morally squeamish about Japanese fiction, only an insistence that what transpires in a story occur in a possible, knowable world, as Murasaki makes explicit in Genji's exchange with Tamakatsura: If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader's attention, he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are part of this world and no other. 1 3

There can be no quest within such a literary system; no reach for an alternative reality, a higher or simply some other world,

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discovered and revealed by a Utopian imagination. In Japanese literature, Exodus does not elicit dreams of a Promised Land. On the contrary, as we know from the poor, banished provincial figures in the Genji, and even more clearly from the depiction of exile endemic to medieval literature, exiles like the Heike, driven from the Capital and "shivering like tropical birds in a frozen clime," 1 4 there is no future but only, through the agency of a powerful nostalgia, a shimmering past. Beauty is often retrieved in medieval writing, but this is contingent on the discovery of some stable, tranquil setting—the hermitage Jakkoin, for example, deep in Ohara, that near replication of a Heian garden, where the Former Empress waits for death "on a velvety green carpet of moss." 1 5 Otherwise it is disorder and flux, "masterless boats drifting aimlessly with the wind and tide," 1 6 and in this condition, beyond the borders of the Capital, cut off altogether from a known and beloved homeland, beauty vanishes. As we read of the Heike in their flight from Dazaifu: Exposed to the sea breeze, their black brows and handsome faces lost their radiance. Gazing at the blue sea, they recalled their bygone grandeurs in the Capital. The jade green hangings over their scarlet bedchambers in former days were now replaced by reed hangings in crude cottages. In place of the fragrant smoke from their incense burners rose the briny flames from fishermen's driftwood. All these changes brought the ladies of the court infinite sorrow and endless tears. Eyebrows that had glistened grew dull from weeping. Beauty that had shone faded into nothing. 17

With the rise of a new audience and a genuinely popular fiction in the Tokugawa period, classical beauty of this kind ceased to be a primary literary value. Yet the preponderance of stories which possess sharply detailed settings, fiction as carefully circumscribed as the pleasure quarters at Yoshiwara and Shinmachi, reveals an enduring emphasis. In Saikaku and Sanba and Shunsui, exploration does take place: of the body and its erotic possibilities; of commerce, and the frenetic pace of the

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INTRODUCTION

burgeoning urban centers; of language and ways to strike quick bargains between high and low diction, dazzling parodistic wordplay which seems, if only for an instant, to dissolve the rigidities of the class system. And yet this exploration, even that of Saikaku's Koshoku Ichidai Onna (The Life of an Amorous Woman), which is especially ambitious in its representation of all levels of the society, remains an exploration of a given world, however boisterous or inconstant, and confirms the restrictiveness of it. Since the mid-nineteenth century, as is well known, Japan has been exposed and has exposed itself to contact with the West; it is a matter of record that this contact disturbed preexisting patterns of urban and rural life, and especially in the large cities, even more especially in Tokyo, numbers of people were daily confronted with an illusionary spectacle of the strange and the unknown, with a "showcase," 1 8 to use Henry D. Smith's word, for the display of Western gadgetry and designs. A n d yet in a move characteristic of and predicated on the tradition I have described, modern Japanese fiction has largely withdrawn from an imaginative exploration of this convulsive urban scene, rife with the signs of foreign influence, preferring to detail, with ever deepening psychological nuance, an inner world which, however turbulent, remains a certainty, a knowable world on which to focus. If in the 1890s Tokyo had seemed to Tokutomi Roka, as he recorded in his Omoide no Ki, " a Promised Land inspiring fugitive dreams of g l o r y , " 1 9 it remained a largely unexplored vacancy on the literary landscape, and would become in late Meiji and Taisho literature a city to excoriate and avoid, as Kafu repeatedly did in his elegant withdrawals to Tokyo's eastern districts, those remnants of Edo and an evocative past. Or it was a city to simply escape, as Tanizaki did, in literature and in life. This careful avoidance of the fast transforming, industrialized urban scene is symptomatic of an even more basic, one might say, ontological reluctance to divide reality between this world and another. 20 Japanese narrative movement follows no

INTRODUCTION

15

trajectory in the direction of the new and strange, but circles the often perplexing and dispiriting but ultimately fathomable contours of a world which requires no final suspension of disbelief—Uji, Matsushima, Muromachi dori, Fukugawa, literary places all, yet true and "present" in a way that the island of Calypso, Arcadia, Lilliput, Dostoevsky's Saint Petersburg, or Borges' labyrinths are not. A n d so what some readers regard, not always approvingly, as a modern Japanese prose style of withdrawal and retreat, seems less modern than a conditioned literary reflex. When Futabatei's Bunzo retires to his "upstair's room," he may well be striking an Oblomov-like pose, and be motivated by a complex, self-conscious psychology, but he is also a figure who recognizes and grudgingly accepts the spatial bounds dictated by the literary tradition. In his topographical study of Ukigumo (Floating Cloud, 1887), Maeda Ai observes: " A s the world 'downstairs' comes to be regarded as a 'signifying' space, bursting with enigmatic messages, the 'upstair's room' accrues significance as a shelter where a wounded identity, such as Bunzo's, might recover." 2 1 If there is no happy settlement for Bunzo with his relatives, no place for a person of his moral scruples in the venal world of commercial enterprises, neither is there confrontation with this situation, but rather an ambivalent withdrawal into solitude. This is a pattern followed by the Naturalists, beginning with the hero of Katai's Futon (The Quilt, 1907), w h o by degrees withdraws from the city outside to his study, and from there in fantasy and memory to the country home to which the young woman of his erotic dreams has herself fled. The betrayed hero of Chikamatsu Shuko's Giwaku (Suspicion, 19x1) is yet another country figure deceived by the city (his adulterous wife is a Tokyoite). He plots revenge wrapped in his bedding, and when he does leave his room it is to enter no less constrictive train compartments, which do take him away from the city but never directly to the object of his murderous search. A n d this curtailment, of fictional movement and of vision,

i6

INTRODUCTION

which socially conscious critics have decried, is not merely a reflection of the straightened circumstances of the country-born Naturalists in an alienating urban environment; Shiga Naoya, a writer of leisure and means, is no less eager to fictionally avoid the strangeness of the city, and to move out, as on a literary pilgrimage, toward resonant and comforting country places. In Wakai (The Reconciliation, 19x7), for example, much of the "action" takes place in Tokyo, and yet, except for an elaborate description of the cemetery in Aoyama, the city remains nearly invisible. It is to the rural setting of Abiko that the narrator withdraws to find meaning; this is where the ultimate reconciliation with his father will occur.

It is then at a point far from the center of Japanese literary experience that w e glimpse the space of Arishima's fictional activity. A n d while I hope that this study of boundaries and their transgression might at times clarify or provoke questions regarding orthodox or normative styles of Japanese writing, it is my prior concern to interpret Arishima, to see, so far as possible, what is integral and irreducible in his own work. Perhaps no single method is suited to this task, but for writing so willfully disruptive of expectation, it seems necessary to adjust the mode of critical discourse, and allow this disruptiveness to reveal itself. This is difficult if one adopts a descriptive or a narrative style, providing a literary-historical record of the work (early-middle-late; romantic-realist; Naturalist school, Shirakaba school, Proletarian school, etc.), or telling the "story" of Arishima's life, since such critical styles presume a coherence which the writing itself does not countenance. A s Edward Said has remarked: w h e n the modern literary critic begins to write, he cannot sustain himself at all well in a dynastic tradition. For not only is this tradition foreign to him by training and circumstance, but its repudiation is also the intention, the subject matter, and the method of most modern literature.

INTRODUCTION

17

He must therefore undertake his work with initiative. He, too, must seek a more suitable point of departure, a different topos, for his study. 22

Since Arishima's fiction is no accurate transcription or record of actual farms or villages, cities or ships, it seems mistaken to critically describe them as though they exist, much less attempt to find the "real" Arishima moving through any of them. All such places do exist in the geography of Arishima's desires, as varieties of moral wilderness, and bear no more than an allegorical relationship to the real world. This complicates our reading, to be sure, and though I believe any literary criticism should be intelligible and clear, it should not, for the sake of comfort or readability, dispel real complication. After he died, one eulogist speculated that an overdeveloped romanticism took Arishima's life. 23 This seems truer than most remarks about the suicide, and usefully reminds us, as does so much of Arishima's own writing, that we live in literature at our peril. If it is more difficult, it is also more responsible, to distinguish the signs of literature from the signs of life.

Chapter One

Hokkaido PERHAPS BECAUSE Aru Onna— the best known of Arishima's fiction—is set in Tokyo and on a ship at sea, we might undervalue the presence of Hokkaido in much else that Arishima wrote. In fact, be it fishing village or farm, small town or the provincial capital of Sapporo, Hokkaido is the setting in more titles than any other fictional area. It appears in Arishima's earliest writing and in the latest.1 Indeed, the use of Hokkaido is not limited to any easily defined place or period in Arishima's work. And even when the setting changes, the scale and values which we identify with Hokkaido tend to inform these other narratives as well. The earliest name of this northern territory—Watari Shima (Island Across the Water)—suggests the cultural as well as the physical separation that has historically existed between Hokkaido and mainland Japan. 2 Writing in 1893, just three years before Arishima's own arrival, Nitobe Inazo, who knew Hokkaido at first hand, could ruefully observe: The northern islands of Japan vaguely called Yezo were for centuries a terra incognita among the people: all that was told about and unfortunately most readily accepted by them [the Japanese] was that the region was the abode of a barbarian folk known as the Ainu, and that it was a dreary waste of snow and ice, altogether unfit for inhabitation by a race of higher culture.3

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For almost a millennium, Hokkaido had represented a largely u n d e f i n e d a n d u n d e f e n d e d border of Japan, populated by subjugated or " u n d e s i r a b l e " peoples: the A i n u , a m o n g the earliest inhabitants of the J a p a n e s e islands, a people ethnically different f r o m the race which gained superiority and ruled from the south; trappers and traders, w h o m o v e d northward throughout the Heian period; and political prisoners w h o w e r e banished in significant numbers to the island in the thirteenth century. In the feudal period the A n d o clan and later the Matsumae exercised territorial control of the island, then called Ezo, 4 but it w a s not until the eighteenth century, w h e n it g r e w w a r y of R u s s i a n expansionist designs, that the central government began to p a y closer attention to its northern border and a s s u m e a direct role in its administration. It is perhaps worth noting that w h e n the bakufu took responsibility for Hokkaido in 1799 there w a s not a single complete m a p of its coastline. 5 The Restoration brought certain changes to E z o — r e n a m e d H o k k a i d o in 1869—as it became clear h o w valuable such a vast area of u n t a p p e d natural resources w o u l d be to a modernizing, capitalist e c o n o m y . A special division of government (Kaitakushi or Colonial Office) w a s created for the purpose of "reclaimi n g " the region. Plans w e r e d e v e l o p e d by successive district governors to o p e n land for farming, stimulate the lumber and maritime industries, and establish a provincial capital at Sapporo. Incentives w e r e provided for immigration: paid p a s s a g e to the island, a gift of agricultural equipment and seed, yearly b o n u s e s , a n d , significantly, a rice allotment. Yet Hokkaido seemed to d e f y extensive settlement. Nitobe points out that one probable reason w a s the reluctance of the Japanese farmer to settle w h e r e he could not grow familiar crops. A l t h o u g h the plains of H o k k a i d o w e r e adaptable to wheat culture, " t h e capacity to g r o w rice w a s almost the sole criterion of the utility of a given tract of l a n d . " 6 Moreover, there appears to have been reluctance to m o v e into an area k n o w n for its conspicuous n u m b e r of criminals and political exiles—in 1 8 7 1 , Hokkaido officially became the sole zone of deportation in J a p a n . 7

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21

Still, itinerant farmers f r o m more impoverished areas of Jap a n did migrate northward. Others a d d e d to the population: d i s p o s s e s s e d samurai, adventurers, vagrants, themselves the criminal borderline in a rigidly hierarchical society w h e r e social dispossession is perhaps the only capital sin. They came to a land which w a s without an established history, without too the stability of local customs and beliefs. T h e y m a y h a v e accepted H o k k a i d o for w h a t it did h a v e to give: a chance to stave off h u n g e r ; the f r e e d o m of anonymity. In a late essay addressed " T o M y Y o u n g Friends in the P r o v i n c e s " ( " C h i h o no Seinen S h o k u n n i , " 1 9 2 1 ) , Arishima confesses that he w a s something of a stranger to Hokkaido. " T h o u g h I studied agriculture in the provinces," he writes, " a n d spent m y student d a y s there, I w a s born in the city [i.e., Tokyo] and have in the main lived there. Y o u might say I've never really touched provincial l i f e . " 8 The self-deprecation here is characteristic of the later writings, reflective as they are of A r i s h i m a ' s confusion about w h e r e he really belongs. But this o n e obscures certain facts which underly much of the tortuous theory about social classes and crossroads of the soul, and which g o far in tracing the context wherein m u c h of the fiction transpires. Arishima first s a w Hokkaido as a y o u n g college student of eighteen, only recently graduated from Tokyo's prestigious Peer's School (Gakushuin), and last s a w it on a visit in 1922, less than a year before he took his life. 9 He attended Sapporo Nogakko bet w e e n 1896 and 1 9 0 1 . 1 0 It w a s at this College, during a time of intense spiritual turmoil, that Arishima converted to Christianity, entering the f a m o u s " F r e e C h u r c h " in 1 9 0 1 . Six years later, u p o n his return from abroad, Arishima w e n t back to Nogakko as an English instructor, and taught there for the better part of s e v e n years. All but the last year of his married life w a s spent in S a p p o r o , a n d his three sons w e r e born in this city. When he g a v e u p his teaching position and left Hokkaido in 1 9 1 4 , it w a s because his y o u n g w i f e w a s dying of tuberculosis and required treatment at a sanitorium on the mainland.

22

HOKKAIDO

It was in Hokkaido that Arishima first began to publish, contributing his first piece to Shirakaba in 1910. He also did sketches and oils in the Western style, and became the leader of a band of local artists who called themselves "The League of the Black L i l y . " 1 1 But his involvements were not all with books and art, Nogakko and his family. While still a student, Arishima began to teach at a night school founded as a charitable venture to aid the lower classes, the children of laborers, farmers, and fishermen who lived in Sapporo or in the regions outlying the provincial capital. Years later, while teaching at the College, Arishima also returned to work at this night school. From 1908, he actively took part in a socialist study group, and hosted weekly meetings at his home. 1 2 In addition, Arishima was the reluctant overseer of a sizeable tract of farmland to the south of Sapporo, at Karifuto, near Mount Niseko. His father, a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry, had purchased this land for his eldest son in 1897. It was Karifuto that occasioned many of the late polemical writings on the farm problem, as well as the ceaseless accusations Arishima directed at himself for his imagined complicity in the poverty and hardship of others. In 1922, he dramatically handed over the land at Karifuto to the tenants who worked it. It was to see this farm, now communalized, that Arishima made his last visit to Hokkaido. If we read the diary accounts coincident with the periods Arishima lived in the north, it becomes clear that these diverse activities brought Arishima no final peace or satisfaction. As a student there, he attempted suicide; as a teacher, he bought a revolver and was at least once perilously close to a second attempt. 13 Yet the record of his manifold contact with Hokkaido does suggest that he knew much more about this place than he would admit to his "young friends." If he did not actually live there as a farmer or a fisherman, at least he knew Hokkaido's open space and cultural desolation at first hand, and he knew a considerable number of people who were settlers in this wilderness, and saw their particular kind of hope or desperation.

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23

The record surely justifies a remark Arishima made elsewhere, w h e n he said that the region " w a s the birthplace of my true life." 1 4

Arishima seems to have penetrated Hokkaido's strangeness and frontier spirit, and, in the 1916 novella, Kain no Matsuei (The Descendents of Cain), we recognize themes which recur and identify the author's vision of this place. A glance at the title of this, his most famous Hokkaido fiction—and the piece which first brought Arishima recognition from the bundan— makes us suspect that a portrayal of normal working people at an actual farm may well be overshadowed in the attempt to allegorize the landscape, to single out some few people w h o inhabit it, and then to mythologize the extremity of their lives. We might look to the passage which ends the novella. Ninemon, the wanderer with a dark past, has been driven from a farming town where he had tried to settle. Like many of his fellow workers, he has been victim to the cruelties of nature and an abusive overseer. But unlike the others, Ninemon fights back, although for the most part his o w n victims are the workers themselves. Ninemon is uncommonly unfortunate, and it is usually in response to some personal catastrophe that he turns violent, bullying men and ravishing women until, finally, he is driven from their midst. The passage narrates the exodus of Ninemon and his long-suffering wife: That night, with sudden violence, the weather turned, and a terrible blizzard began. By morning, w h e n Ninemon awoke and looked out, the snow was already hip deep. The hut rattled as the wind w h i p p e d around it in shrill, piercing blasts. Whenever there was a moment of calm, a deathlike silence pressed upon the hearth. Ninemon wanted a drink, but there was not a drop to be had. Since awakening he had been strangely preoccupied, but now, as though the time had finally come, he arose purposefully and picked up the axe. He approached

HOKKAIDO his horse; the animal affectionately began to nuzzle him. Ninemon's face was totally expressionless as he stroked the horse gently between the eyes. Then, suddenly, his whole body seemed to shake as he raised and readied the weapon. With all his strength he delivered a crashing blow to the horse's temple. There was a nauseating thud as the horse, without a cry, sank to its forelegs, then collapsed on its side to the floor. Its hind legs twitched convulsively, while the opaque eyes stared piteously ahead. His wife had been rinsing clothes, but she turned and stared, horrified at the spectacle she now faced. "What an awful thing you've done . . . the poor creature . . . " "Quiet, or I'll kill you too . . . " He spoke as though he were threatening the witness to a murder. Abruptly, it seemed, the raging storm had quieted, and silence seized both of their hearts. Ninemon ordered his wife to strip the skin from the animal. A raw stench soon filled the hut. Only the skin of the face remained as the horse lay, stripped to the bone, on a pile of straw. White muscle and red tissue combined to form an eerie pattern. Ninemon rolled the skin, then tied it with rope at both ends. Still following his orders, the woman collected their belongings into two bundles. All the while she thought about their long, bitter life of wandering, and trembled on the brink of tears. Ninemon himself took up position at the very center of the hut and surveyed the room from end to end. In silence, now, they put on their snow shoes. As his wife started to hoist the smaller bundle to her back, Ninemon went over and helped her from behind. The woman's whole body shook as she began to cry. Strangely, her husband did not rebuke her. He lifted the other bundle to his back, placing the wrapped skin of the horse on top of it. Together, they gazed about the room a last time. The door was opened, and the snow blew in with such force that they had to avert their faces. Once outside, they found themselves waist-deep in a viscous mass of snow, like a pile of white mud. They had gone only a short distance when suddenly Ninemon told his wife to wait while

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25

he himself returned to the hut. Inside, he picked up a roll of straw rope. Placing one end in the fire of the hearth, he hastily carried the other to a corner of the room, then spread dry horse fodder all along the length of this fuse. The sky and the earth had become one. As the wind blew down, the piled snow seemed to dance up to meet it. The snow flew into the air faster than a shot arrow. The Satos' shanty and the trees in the area would suddenly appear before their eyes, only to vanish in the next instant. Half of their bodies were painted white as they pressed forward against the wind. Their faces turned red and lost all feeling, as numberless fine needles pricked at them. When the man and the woman came to the highway, they followed the snow route. Ninemon walked cautiously ahead, testing each step as he advanced, wary of falling into a pit of unpacked snow. The two proceeded slowly, tottering under the weight of their loads. When they passed the communal graveyard, the woman folded her hands and bowed her head. She raised one piercing cry of anguish, then tearfully walked on. When they had entered the village, they'd had a horse. And their child. Even these had been plundered and stolen away by nature. No longer were there any human dwellings in sight. Bent back by the swirling wind and snow, tree branches snapped off, striking the ground like spears. Indeed, the wind-whipped trees took on a tangled, maddened aspect, and looked like the dishevelled hair of a witch. Pressing ahead beneath their cruel burdens, the man and the woman moved slowly in the direction of Kutchan. They came upon a belt of fir trees. Everything else in the forest was stripped bare; only these fir retained their appearance of deep green melancholy. Their trunks seemed tall and straight enough to pierce the sky. The roaring of the angry wind seemed to cease as it moved among them. Small as insects, the man and the woman approached this forest, and, at last, were swallowed up within it. 15

Everything about this scene is calculated to shock the reader. The brevity of the sentences and the abrupt, disjunctive transitions between paragraphs, make us proceed psychologically

26

HOKKAIDO

as does Ninemon, one cautious step at a time. There is a startling, lurid expressionism about the colors and shapes in the setting (viscous white mud; white muscle and red flesh; deep green melancholy and a witch's aspect in the trees), which, together with the melodrama of the action, give a staged, histrionic quality to the narrative. Here and elsewhere in the story, Arishima uses the weather to keep the reader off balance. It is subject to violent daily changes, as we have seen in this passage, but the seasons also are marked by a variety of disasters. Winter blizzards give way to destructive spring rains. 16 The insects and blight of the summer are followed by more rain and the harvest of an already rotted crop. 17 And this atmosphere appears to have a profound and tragic impact on the course of human events. The child of the couple contracts dysentery and dies within days; the race, nearly won by Ninemon, is lost at the last moment in an accident which cripples the horse; and Ninemon's dream of one day owning land is cut short by his own uncontrollable violence. It is not guilt that makes Ninemon walk as if the earth might open under his feet, but a kind of creatural knowledge of the way this world is made. It is, we might say, a world which has no past, and so one which lacks the density of local customs and beliefs. The farm at Matsukawa is little more than "a flicker of light which made the surrounding nature appear all the more desolate." 1 8 The shanty where the couple lives is described as a lair; it made them "feel eerie, as though some wild beast were lurking inside." 1 9 Such description makes it seem as though no real settlement has come to this territory. The place names have no cultural resonance. Rather they sound like names borrowed from a foreign language—and many of them are. Without any mediating social or community structures, the people appear mercilessly exposed to the random violence of the natural world: "a cry of desperation broke from the mouths of these farmers before a Nature they could not resist." 20 In the early short story, "Genso" (Chimera, 1914), we see this idea again. The hallucinating narrator, an intellectual whose "ambition," we are told, has led him

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27

to this northern wilderness, warns us that "Nature must be fought as an e n e m y , " and offers us as evidence the destruction wrought by the "great flood of last year," when the river "in a frenzy" overflowed, drowning a farmer's son and laying waste to his land. 2 1 This perception of nature as antagonist or enemy is so alien to the Japanese literary tradition that on this point alone, Arishima must stand apart as an anomaly. An indigenous Japanese religious disposition, which sees the divine in particular mountains and streams, finds expression in the literary language whenever nature is described as being intimate and concrete and wholly in harmony with man. There is nothing abstract about this nature; on the contrary, it is made to seem almost tangible in the nearly ubiquitous recital of specially endowed place names—utamakura—which we find in Japanese literature. Brower and Miner have spoken of the "characteristic particularity of Japanese thought and expression" which we see in the sensory nature of Japanese nouns, noting further that "Japanese is one of the world's few poetic traditions in which even nouns of place have connotative, semimetaphorical significance." 2 2 And Burton Watson makes the following, related point: The poets of China, like their Japanese counterparts, are fond of working place names into their poems, both for the air of crisp reality they lend—this happened not "some place" or "any place" but at a place called Such-and-such— and for the dramatic or nostalgic overtones that such names carry. Also, because the ancient religions of both China and Japan embraced the worship of mountain and water deities, the mere recital of place names often constituted a kind of litany of gods, a fact which even the poets of later and more sophisticated ages never quite forgot." 2 3

The soil of the homeland, then, has been continually rhapsodized by Japanese writers, so that a special spiritual atmosphere adheres to this homeland, and distinguishes it from all that is foreign. There is an evocative passage near the close of

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Anya Koro (A Dark Night's Passing) by Shiga Naoya, a contemporary of Arishima's and a fellow member of the Shirakaba school, which is a fine modern example of this tendency. The hero of the book, disquieted about himself and his relations in the world, makes a final journey toward enlightenment. He looks toward nature and, faithful to the Japanese literary tradition, he projects his vision onto a space that takes shape because of the very concrete and familiar place names that surround it. Kensaku's " e p i p h a n y , " his moment of insight, coincides with the literal brightening of this scene: He must have slept for some time as he sat there, his elbows resting on his knees. When he opened his eyes again, the green around him had begun to show in the light of early dawn. The stars, though fewer now, were still there. The sky was soft blue—the color of kindness, he thought. The mist below had dispersed, and there were lights here and there in the villages at the foot of the mountain. He could see lights in Yonago too, and in Sakaiminato that lay on Yomigahama Point. The big light that went on and off was surely from the lighthouse at Mihonoseki. The bay, as still as a lake, remained in the shadow of the mountain, but the sea outside had already taken on a greyish hue. 24

W e see here the coming into being of what Mircea Eliade might call a "sacralized c o s m o s , " 2 5 a break in the homogeneity of space where something holy and light is separated from the truly outer darkness. But it is also holy ground in the sense that Yanagita Kunio once described: "people who have passed through life safely go to a place that is quiet and pure, far from the turmoil of this world, yet which we can actually see in the distance [italics m i n e ] . " 2 6 Kensaku looks down over a harmonious nature, and he is in turn blessed with a rounded, though limited, vision. It is hard to know if the light in this passage is more an illumination of the hero or the setting, being at once a celebration of consciousness and a celebration of this place to which dawn comes. What is clear is that we are not out in any unk n o w n , open field, much less in Nature writ large. W e are on

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an elevation looking down from Daisen onto a portion of the Japan Sea. And Shiga is even more specific—"lights in Yonago . . . and in Sakaiminato that lay on Yomigahama Point . . . the lighthouse at Mihonoseki"—as though to have the light spread over an unmarked or unfamiliar area would mean in substance a loss of light. Kensaku sees, the scenery lightens, because of the limits at work here. The author sanctifies a character whose vision is in important ways limited, and a geography whose limits are carefully circumscribed. We might say that nature, when perceived and described in some local context, inspires harmony for Japanese writers and readers alike, whereas the "abstract nature" of some unknown or foreign territory inevitably inspires fear. Ogasawara Masaru has speculated on how a pioneer to Hokkaido might have gauged the difference in spiritual atmospheres: Naichi [homeland] was not merely a word that signified a discreet geographical area—the Japanese mainland to the south of the Tsugaru Straits—but rather it was a vital symbol that measured a distance in spiritual topography. In other words, naichi meant home, native country, a place of unchanging configuration. It was the land of one's beloved, of affecting mountains and streams, of a history that spanned the generations; a land that could make one forget if only for an instant the bodily fear and uncertainty that was Hokkaido. Naichi reminded one of a harmony brimming with reassurance . . . the truth and poetry of a birthplace was there. Here, in Hokkaido, there was none of that. Here there was only a savage nature, not cultivated land. Here Nature was an object to be fought. Survival depended on its continual destruction. 27

When he writes about Hokkaido, then, Arishima seems to escape the hold of the literary tradition, and to write, not out of imitation, but out of desire. Along with other foreign territories we will look at, Hokkaido objectifies a feeling; namely, the desire to create some turbulent space beyond culture, a space

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charged with a wild, demonic energy, where new and wholly unexpected actions might take place. But there is a problem here, and one we everywhere encounter in Arishima's fiction. This open space, so alluring, is also deceptive. Hokkaido, as we have seen in Kain no Matsuei, is full of traps and unseen depths—one is simply not free to move about it. Ninemon is "swallowed" by the forest as he would be by prison walls. Again, the visionary in "Genso" describes his fondest fantasy: he is "hurled into" a "cool, dark, thick-walled prison" where one would be alone, able to do nothing, but where isolation would be rewarded with freedom. 28 It need hardly be said that the only fantasy here is the imagined freedom; the narrator is already imprisoned by the extravagance of his ambition to be a "solitary self" wandering freely beyond society. In Arishima's writing we detect a simultaneous attraction to and fear of the spacious unknown, and these two reactions, pulling in opposite directions, generate an imprisoning sense of place. And so it is not correct to see Arishima's fictional flights into Hokkaido as signaling an escape from Japanese culture and society, and an entry into the freedom of some "natural" or Utopian environment. Similarly, Arishima does not exactly escape from his identity or the "bourgeois mind" by abandoning the technique of the watakushi shosetsu (personal fiction) and by adopting narrators from other, lower classes (or another sex) to tell his stories. It is rather as Freud had it: "through flight one is delivered over to the very thing that one is fleeing from." 2 9 In the end, and often in spite of his own intentions, Arishima seems to exchange one kind of unfreedom for another. He throws off the chains of local fact and sensual experience (which Maruyama Masao has said "cling like leeches" to the Japanese writer 30 ), only to imprison himself in fantasy and abstraction. It is telling that at the end of Kain, the outcasts should be driven from the relative restrictions of Matsukawa farm into the total confinement of the forest. Hokkaido, then, signifies a cultural vacancy where danger

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lurks. There is no groundedness to this fictional territory. The initial image in Kain no Matsuei is that of "a lengthening shadow passing over the land." 3 1 Nor are there clearly defined social institutions. Language itself is undermined as Ninemon and his wife enter the story in "silence," indeed "like people who had forgotten language," 3 2 and such conversation as there is seems to come in spasms and dramatic gasps. In place of specific, localizing detail, Arishima gives us ponderous statements about the arrangement of the universe: "the sky and the earth had become one." The hero is less a human fact than a symbol, a figure "rough hewn, freshly cut from Nature." 33 He is, we might say, the embodiment of an Aristotelian premise, that the man who lives beyond community is either god or beast. In a word, we sense that the facts of the actual world are being displaced by myth. The historical weightlessness of the frontier and its inarticulate inhabitants are being used to represent something "essential" about the human condition. Roland Barthes has commented on this process: myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things; in it things lose the memory that they once were made. The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence. 34

To avoid a possible confusion, I should say at this point that when Arishima writes about Hokkaido and its inhabitants, he is doubtless trying to be true to the life he came to know there, and certain of his late essays, stressing the social responsibility of the writer, would seem to bear this out. 35 But Arishima was so infatuated with the unstable and the extreme that

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his fictional perception of society is one of a blank emptiness, ready to be filled with spiritual significance—realism endlessly giving way to allegory. At any rate, in Arishima's fiction, Hokkaido assumes an intentionally dramatic or rhetorical presence. There is nothing very literal about these downtrodden workers or the milieu in which they labor. Ninemon, for example, is a man of mystery, rootless, possessing only an itinerant past. Of course he is a desperately poor farm laborer and so a member of the lower class. But like Cain in the Bible, he is doomed to a wanderer's life, never settling in and coming to know the values of a given community. Since it is from his perspective largely that the story is being told, the farm at Matsukawa and the daily working conditions there are severely abstracted. Ninemon's criminality soon overtakes his laborer's status. In the end, we feel, he belongs not to the lower classes but to the lower depths. He is a sacrificial "victim," as is the young heroine of "Osue no Shi" (The Death of Osue, 1916), but the source of their problem is not local and concrete; it cannot be explained in economic terms. Osue's family, for example, has come upon "hard times," 36 but that is hardly the real subject of a short story in which five people die, three by poison; and one, the fourteen year old Osue, dies gruesomely, a suicide who swallows mercury because a wholly unreasonable sense of guilt demands that she suffer. Osue is a poor girl from a rural village (it is not named), but she is preeminently a sufferer, a victim to the cruelty of some larger-than-life force. In context, she is an example of how fate makes an already burdensome life unbearable, and of how right motives mean nothing when the wheel of destiny begins to turn. And the result is that life itself becomes unreal—"she lost control and fell into a delirium of tears," 3 7 through which she sees all the dead faces float up before her. The landscape around and outside Osue is eliminated, and we begin to see instead an inner landscape which reveals a brutalized and suicidal consciousness. Here, and elsewhere in the Hokkaido fiction, we map a ge-

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ography that is filled with "shabby towns" 3 8 and "forlorn streets"; 39 places where "the snow piles and dies a cold purple death," 4 0 or where "stark, denuded white birch branches are blown ceaselessly by the wind." 4 1 These and similar views of Hokkaido seem more nearly to be the discovered vistas of a discontented mind than to be the transcription of a palpable, commonly perceived reality. And it is here we begin to recognize how much "fiction" these Hokkaido stories contain. Arishima is projecting onto these scenes shapes in his own imagination which are strangely congruent with the danger and edge of this frontier. It is the inferiority of this geography which makes our passage through these fictions seem lurching and problematic. And so Hokkaido commits the reader to an uncertain journey, without conventional signposts—one cannot find these places, as Arishima portrays them, on any ordinary map.

It is in vain, then, that we look for a realistic settlement, or even an ideal, regenerated community, in Arishima's fiction. The deepest irony about Arishima, who informed himself carefully and consistently about social problems and who sought thereby to compensate for (what was for him) an embarrassing bourgeois identity, is that his fictional escapes in the direction of "greater realism," that is, in the direction of lower-class life, are transformed with tragic regularity into confrontations with loneliness, madness, and death. If in a given story the narrator is a bourgeois or an artist-intellectual, the "people" are usually perceived as "the masses, with whom he had no contact." 42 In the early short story "Hannichi" (Half-day, 1909), the people are further reduced to a bookish abstraction: "Aijima felt he was rubbing shoulders with characters from the Bible. It seemed as if he were looking into the faces which filled the Holy Book, fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes—Mary Magdalene and Zachariah." 4 3 We confuse Arishima's fiction with his criticism, and with aspects of his life, if we see in these Hokkaido stories a "youthful curiosity" in a frontier which inspires "freshness

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a n d f r e e d o m . " 4 4 Plainly t h e s e are the v a l u e s w h i c h the narrator of Umare Izuru Nayami (The A n g u i s h of Creation, 1918) w o u l d like to u p h o l d . T h i s f i g u r e , a disillusioned u r b a n writer in his m i d d l e y e a r s , s p e a k s rather h o p e f u l l y at the e n d of the novella a b o u t a s p r i n g w h i c h is to f o l l o w the h a r d s h i p s of the n o r t h e r n winter, " a righteous, p o w e r f u l , a n d eternal spring" 4 5 w h i c h will b r i g h t e n the d a y s of his y o u n g H o k k a i d o friend. But this e n d i n g is g r a t u i t o u s a n d s e n t i m e n t a l — t h e e x a g g e r a t e d description of spring should alone suggest as m u c h — a n d it distracts us from t h e real b u s i n e s s of the narrative, w h i c h is to c o n f r o n t w i n t e r a n d the possibility of d e a t h . W h a t I m e n t i o n e d a b o v e a b o u t H o k k a i d o ' s interior d i m e n sion is r e f l e c t e d in the structure of Umare Izuru Nayami, w h i c h is actually a story w i t h i n a story. It b e g i n s as a first-person acc o u n t of a w r i t e r ' s life, described as a " s m o l d e r i n g h e a p of rubb i s h , " 4 6 " f u l l of d o u b t a b o u t m y o w n s t r e n g t h , " a n d cluttered w i t h m e r e l y " p r o v i s i o n a l s a t i f a c t i o n . " 4 7 This f i g u r e lives in Tok y o b u t h a s c o m e u p to H o k k a i d o , w h e r e h e o n c e taught, to a t t e n d to s o m e f a r m matters. D u r i n g this visit to the north, h e a r r a n g e s to m e e t a f o r m e r s t u d e n t of his, a g i f t e d artist f r o m a p o o r f i s h e r m a n ' s family. T h e y o u n g m a n , w h o s e n a m e is K i m oto, a p p e a r s to b e all that the narrator is not: robust a n d virile, " a veritable g i a n t in a black o v e r c o a t , " 4 8 h e is t h o r o u g h l y familiar as a f i s h e r m a n w i t h t h e d a n g e r s a n d h e n c e the " m a t u r i n g p o w e r " 4 9 of the r u g g e d o u t d o o r s . But at this m e e t i n g , Kim o t o confesses h o w poverty a n d filial obligations, a n d the overall e x t r e m i t y of a f i s h e r m a n ' s life, h a v e f o r e s h o r t e n e d his d r e a m s of b e c o m i n g a n artist. S o m o v e d is h e b y this c o n f e s s i o n that after h e r e t u r n s to T o k y o , the narrator fabricates a story a b o u t K i m o t o ' s tension-filled existence. T h i s s e c o n d story is self-consciously fictitious, a n d the narrator m a k e s a n explicit a p o l o g y : " y o u will p e r h a p s f o r g i v e a literary m a n this w h i m s i c a l f l i g h t of the i m a g i n a t i o n . " 5 0 T h e narration n o w s w i t c h e s f r o m t h e first to the s e c o n d p e r s o n ( " y o u p i c k e d y o u r little sister o u t of the c r o w d of w o m e n a n d . . . " ; " i n the d e p t h s of y o u r heart y o u w e r e strangely calm . . . , "

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etc.). A n y semblance of the fisherman's having an independent life is hereafter lost. Kimoto is transformed into " y o u , " a n d w e c o m e to forget his n a m e . A t this point he b e c o m e s the narrator's double, a s h a d o w s u m m o n e d to reach into areas of experience seemingly denied to a writer from the middle class. T h e constant repetition of the second p e r s o n p r o n o u n is ambiguating; the dramatized " y o u " is less a fisherman than an estranged but immensely affecting part of the narrator's o w n mind. T h e following p a s s a g e s seem to illustrate at o n c e this d o u bling of character, a n d the central ambition of the whole narrative, which is, as I h a v e suggested, to create a dramatic setting for death. The first p a s s a g e c o m e s near the beginning of the novella, a n d describes the narrator; the second, coming tow a r d the end, is ostensibly a description of Kimoto. Cold. The manuscript was ice to the touch. Night came on swiftly. The large sheet of paper before me changed color, ash to slate and then to black. With a speed like that of someone casting down his eyes, the light of day turned into the night's darkness. People who do not know winter in Hokkaido, how its blackness advances before one is aware dusk has come, cannot imagine the light suddenly being warped, as it were, by the eerie sadness of this season. The wind, blowing down through the ridge of foothills on Mt. Niseko, aimed straight for the shelf of farmland, and caused the rather large, almost weightless particles of early winter snow to dart laterally across the ground. Like lost children of the fading day, the snow flew about violently, without reason, and mischievously seemed to prick the eye of the onlooker. At the moment the snow fell to earth, it piled and died a cold purple death. The silence was nearly absolute. Only the flakes which brushed the window made small, murmuring sounds. Anyone who saw this dance of white mutes would be reduced to tears. From an excess of sorrow I put down my pen and gazed out the window. And I thought of you. 51 Your mind was stung by a strange and chilling clarity, and you gazed out on a world which had lost all meaning,

HOKKAIDO an accumulating pile of cold, hard, pitiless objects. Desolation without bounds, and inside it only you continued to breathe, even as this desolation, which filled you with an unspeakable loneliness and dread, spread above and below and outward, endlessly, in every direction. The sound of the waves, the light of the stars, were like dream sensations, barely felt at the most distant periphery of your nerves. All phenomena lost connection, separated randomly, scattered and fell in disarray. Yet within this dissolution, your mind remained in a tension-state, ready to hurl itself downward toward Death. Your mind was like a sacred flame, tied to a weight and thrown down a deep well. The light grows brighter and more intense as it plunges ever deeper, but is destined to strike the cool waters of death, and be extinguished. Was it your mind, or the world, that was paralyzed? Over and over you warned yourself of the terror at the brink, and yet a part of you remained absurdly calm. As you now began to walk slowly toward the cliff-edge, you seemed not to notice the onrushing darkness and the increasing chill in the air. Below you, in the dark distance, appeared the rocky shore, from which rose up the faint echo of the waves. A single leap. Everything ended, all the doubt, all the anguish. "They'll think I went mad. . . . I wonder which will hit first, my head or my feet?" You think of yourself as though you were another while you stare unblinkingly down the side of the precipice. The paralysis reaches deeper still into your consciousness. The sound of the waves is fading—at moments, there is no sound at all. You seem drowsy, your eyelids start to drop. Steady . . . watch out. . . . It is as though all this is happening to another, as though your mind is about to fling your body over the edge. 52 A s a w h o l e , Umare Izuru Nayami represents an intensifying a w a r e n e s s of self, a n d , as should be apparent in the morbidity these passages, Arishima's valuation of this process is no less

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pessimistic than that of, say, Soseki. Just as Hokkaido represents some "other world" where the traveler sees around him nothing familiar and so is assaulted by the discordance or at least the difference of a new milieu, so does Arishima's fictional journey toward the interior of the mind reveal hitherto unknown areas of division and conflict. And so the envisioned Hokkaido provides a sort of field for the exercise of undirected desire, its open space simply confirming or objectifying an inner emptiness, a sense of loss owing perhaps to the gradual breakdown of the Confucian order within which Arishima was raised. In the first passage quoted above we engage the narrator's consciousness of himself. It is evident that the setting is Hokkaido, somewhere near Mt. Niseko, on a night in winter. We are in the company of a writer who appears uncommonly agitated by this winter scene. There seems to be some presence, some personality, at work behind the gloom and distress generated by this passage. The light falls, and we are asked to imagine downcast eyes; the wind is like an arrow, "aimed straight for the shelf of farmland," and so the ridge of foothills becomes by association the propelling bow. The snowflakes are like "lost children," or again, "white mutes" who are overpowered and who die. Moreover, our consciousness of the rhetoric of this passage is intensified because at the beginning, with the manuscript, and at the end, with the pen, we are pointedly reminded that these are all the perceptions of a writer. What we see, then, is a landscape through the window of a writer's craft and mental disposition. And so when this figure puts his pen aside, we sense some rancorous admission of his limits—there is recognition, here, that he is separated from the life he wishes to describe. He desires some mediator to close the distance between art and life "out there" in the vital but dangerous scene beyond the window. Hence the final line: "and I thought of you." Kimoto becomes the figure meant to physically endure sensations and events which the narrator can only experience in his mind. He becomes a sort of agent sent out to

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discover new and dramatic possibilities in life, to actualize crises of a kind the bored, inactive narrator can only dream. The initial movement of the plot in Umare Izuru Nayami is forward and outward, in anticipation of a new identity and the exploration of new territory. 53 This is typical of the beginning of an Arishima story, where in the first several pages of the narrative a literal journey is either being planned or is undertaken. That these journeys are usually to faraway places, like Hokkaido, or that they are precipitated by some personal crisis, gives a certain quality of desperation to the hope that they succeed. We have already noticed the hyperbole which glosses the ending of Nayami, as though hope must be asserted even when circumstances lead one only to despair. For during the course of this novella we recognize that the figure of the fishermanartist has reached an impasse much like the one which originally stalled the writer. As long as he is fishing at sea amid "the high, cresting waves," 5 4 in short, living an actual, physical life, the "you" of this story is in possession of a life of value. But the instant he desires more, when he wishes not merely to live life but to search for some higher significance in it, the plot deviates from its hopeful course, and this figure begins to lose his grip on reality: you sit at the helm, eating a rice ball like all the other fishermen, and you talk with them. But soon, before you are even aware of it, you have distanced yourself from their conversation and fall into a silent revery. You begin to pursue your thoughts down through an interminable labyrinth. 55

At this point we suspect that the fisherman is no more than the disillusioned writer in disguise. The "you" who stands at the brink seems to know he is not really a fisherman, free to act under his own power ("you think of yourself as though you were another . . ."; "it is as though all this is happening to another . . . , " etc.). 56 This breakdown in the fisherman's sense of who he really is reflects the larger split in the persona of the

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narrator, a split which is emblematic of a new complexity which the writer brings to all aspects of the story. We find that the landscape too empties of people and a sense of externality, and begins to reflect instead the enclosure of a mind trapped by conflicting needs. The fishing community seems to vanish and is replaced by a barren allegorical wilderness which spreads out "endlessly in every direction." The mountain loses shape and full dimension, becoming all precipice and edge; the water of the sea becomes "the cool waters of death." Such changes occur so abruptly that we are left disbelieving, and begin to question the credibility of what is taking place. As readers we have been lured, like this mind wavering at the edge, to separate outselves from the body and the world of common sense, and to precariously ascend toward a world of pure spirit. Near the end of this story, then, we return as if to the beginning, when we saw the writer himself moving toward this higher spiritual world: I tried to make my work into something sacred. I sought to cast off my old skin, to lash out at my twisted heart. I wanted to exist in as holy, righteous, and clean a world as there could be, and to build the palace of my art there. 57

Like so much of Arishima's fiction, Nayami begins in discontent with the given world and with an inherited cultural identity. Through the middle of these stories we trace an attempt to occupy a new world and to define an ideal human type who is able to reconcile nature and culture and who can heal the modern division between body and mind. But, at the end, as in Nayami, we turn back in disillusionment to face the old world again, with a figure imprisoned by the paralyzing processes of his own mind. All the hope and idealistic energy is never actualized and, not finding an outlet in a Utopian settlement or even through a commonly shared faith in a society or world to come, it turns inside, against the dreamer, and mocks him with the display of a life wasted for the sake of a dream. Perhaps this is why Arishima returns so often to Hokkaido

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in his fiction: because it was the territory which first signified for him an unknown world where a questing mind could project its hope and desire. His near addiction to this metaphysical wilderness is reminiscent of a passage in Hawthorne, a writer not unknown to Arishima: But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime.58

All the turbulence and violent energy which Arishima invests in his vision of Hokkaido; his tendency to spiritualize the landscape and make everything that happens there seem fraught with an unearthly significance; his use of Hokkaido to illuminate perceived divisions, between nature and culture, rich and poor, worker and artist—all of this reveals the very structure of Arishima's imagination. This wild, forbidden frontier becomes an analogue for a region in Arishima's own mind which did not know or could not rest content with what was harmonious or ordinary and near to home. Hokkaido signifies no experienced actuality but a yearning for a merely possible world that informs Arishima's writing to the end. And even when, as we have seen, this desire for a possible world turns to despair when the possibility is denied, there is at the edges of Hokkaido's darkness a hard-won vision of the tragedy which can befall a questing life.

Chapter Two

America I T SHOULD be evident that although I speak of Arishima's fiction as existing in a possible world, beyond the cultural boundaries of Japan, it is not a function of pure feeling freed from the contingencies of literary convention. "Our entire social language," Paul de Man writes, "is an intricate system of rhetorical divices designed to escape from the direct expression of desires that are, in the fullest sense of the term, unnameable—not because they are ethically shameful, . . . but because unmediated expression is a philosophical impossibility." 1 As we see in his extravagant metaphors and in the drift toward allegory which mark his fictional settings, Arishima's rhetoric is only too visible. There is nothing culturally detached or "natural" about a discourse which has tree branches look like the disheveled hair of a witch and characters edge melodramatically toward the brink. The literariness of Arishima's writing is hardly if ever disguised. All of these homeless wanderers and poetic misfits, marked criminals and victims, lurching through a turbulent void, are not derived from experience only—or even from theory—but from a tradtion of writing about such things. In Northrop Frye's words: "Poetry can only be made out of other poems, novels out of other novels. Literature shapes itself, and is not shaped externally." 2 This is an extreme but helpful statement on the matter, and it echoes

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Eto Jun's remarks about the problematic origins and development of the modern Japanese prose style: "When a writer has a theory but no style, that is, when he has a 'content' but no living form, is he not like Futabatei or Shoyo, bound to taste bitter suffering?" 3 If there were no pre-existing tradition of Japanese writing suited to Arishima's rather anomalous designs, where then did he look for those models out of which his own fiction grew? And how much if any success could he have hoped for in grafting foreign models to the language of Japanese literature? For the decisive thematic pressures on Arishima's work appear to come from abroad. Arishima signals the direction when he has the heroine of Aru Onna look to America to "excite her imagination," 4 and America is the total setting for his only other long, completed narrative, Meiro (Labyrinth, 1917). The borders of this America like those of Hokkaido are traceable yet not literal; they always strain to include more, to mean more, than could reasonably be connoted by their names. Arishima's writing is sufficiently abstract to allow a certain overlap or substitution, and so if a short story is set on the Baltic Coast ("Kankan-mushi," 1906), or a series of plays in Palestine, we might justifiably regard them as spaces like America: thrilling, exotic, and likely to inspire excesses of every kind. In this discussion, then, America is used to signify what is distinctly foreign (not only beyond naichi but totally outside Japan) about the fictional geography, either by way of the setting itself, or by the apparent pressure of foreign literatures on the shape of Arishima's fictional discourse. As we saw in the composition of Hokkaido, Arishima's fiction begins in the construction of a desired "other world" that transcends the conventional world of local fact. Predictably, America functions as an alternative to the given, and, at the outset, it appears almost Utopian in its promise of a new life and fresh, unfettered feeling. "He put faith in his youth, and acted as he pleased," we are told of the student in Meiro, a sort of bedazzled Sanshiro dropped on the streets of Boston. "He

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was like a free young bird, skimming playfully over the American newspapers and magazines." 5 The emotion expressed here is exaggerated, improbable; in fact it seems based on sheer fantasy, as is Texas, say, in Tóson's Hakai (Broken Commandment, 1906). Arishima's America begins as the sign of pure escape, a kind of safety valve to be tapped when social constraints grow too extreme. In the following passage from Aru Onna, the heroine, like Tóson's Ushimatsu a marked social outcast, outlines still another landscape of hope to be found in the new world: America excited her imagination, and she wondered how she would be received. At the very least, Yoko thought, it would be curious to live in a society which could make no claims on her, having severed her ties to the narrow, oppressive world of her past. Crowds of foreigners, she knew, were not likely to intimidate her. She had poise and bearing, and western clothes were becoming to her, perhaps more becoming than Japanese. And she believed that America was a place where joy and sorrow would be woven into the texture of daily life. Surely too it was a place where a woman's charm, liberated from the bonds of conventionality, could reveal its latent power. 6

But this hope is nothing other than a preliminary gesture in Arishima's fiction; the light, as it were, by which we measure the intensity of the coming darkness. Whereas Tóson's book ends on a note of blind faith, Arishima's fiction knowingly begins with hope as a mere pretext to explore the much more volitile and interesting emotion of despair. America may be an alternative to the narrowness of Japan, but in the end it is no less oppressive. The quotidien claims of a nagging social reality are replaced by the menace of nature, indeed, a nature which appears as a Confucian vision of hell: Seen from off-shore, the spectacle of this northern city of Seattle, suffering under the winters's assault, was truly terrifying. An unbroken chain of snow-covered mountains

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AMERICA lined the far distance, and over it, banks of clouds lingered in the calm, winter sky. Suddenly these clouds whitened and broke off into jagged, chilling patterns. A hail storm was on its way, and this ominous white presence in the sky seemed on the verge of falling and sweeping away the earth. Below, in the coastal area, rows of American pine were so totally dark and green as to appear poisonous. In time one noticed varieties of deciduous trees, whose long sharp branches, completely shaken loose of leaves, pointed like needles into the sky. 7

What America really seems to excite is what Henry James called " t h e imagination of disaster," an imagination geared to penetrate the dark underside of human character, and to discover there a world thrown into disorder by the random urgencies of desire. Yoko projects onto the above scene the jagged lines of her inner world after she has broken moral law (which in the Neo-Confucian system is, of course, congruent with the laws of nature) and entered into a proscribed love affair. The consequence of this breach in the social order is intelligible then, not only with reference to the Christian cosmology of the Fall, but in terms of the system of Chu Hsi orthodoxy by which Arishima was raised: If in one's daily life the Principle of Heaven prevails, all things . . . will be in accord with Principle and nothing will be in disorder. If even one thing falls into disorder, the Principle of Heaven will vanish. 8

That violence and chaotic energy could rule the natural world and the human heart was, then, a latent possibility in Japanese thought and not something that was spontaneously generated upon contact with Christianity in the late nineteenth century. Still, there existed no tradition of fiction-writing to depict this taboo subject of a world thrown into disorder. Strange desires could surface in gesaku fiction, but their disruptive potential was largely disarmed and restricted to the licensed quarters. Even such restricted desire could have no place in a dis-

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course which tried at once to be fictional and moral, which not only sought to provide pleasure, but intended to represent the world and one's place in it. And so in the "enlightened" Meiji period, when certain Neo-Confucian rigidities seem to have been put aside, there continue to appear warnings against mental confusion and disorder: The Age of the Gods was the time when heaven and earth were created so it is reasonable that strange things should have happened then. . . . But there is no reason for strange things to occur once heaven and earth had been fixed in their proper places. . . . Generally speaking, someone who is fascinated by strange happenings . . . cannot be regarded as a man who is civilized and enlightened. In all matters, one must investigate thoroughly the principles of things which are not completely clear to one. There is a saying that "there are reasons that lie beyond reasoning" but this was first mouthed by someone who had not sufficiently investigated the principles of things. 9

But it is in this period, in the writings of Futabatei and Soseki (and, although he is somewhat younger, Arishima himself), that we encounter a cycle of fiction treating, in a sustained and serious way, a fictional world from which the Principle of Heaven had nearly vanished. It was writers such as these, whose early education trained them to look for clarity and rational structure in nature and in social relationships, who perceived with a despairing vision that the bounds of Japanese culture were breaking down. And it was they who struggled to forge a new discourse equal to the extremity they now faced. Yet even Futabatei and Soseki were more restrained than Arishima in their portrayal of individuals and a society lapsed from the old moral order. The ending of Kokoro reads as an elegy for a passing age, but it quietly asserts that certain values have survived the murderous selfishness of the modern ego. Sensei is for the adolescent what General Nogi is for him: a link to the past, a guide out of the morass of petty personal concerns toward a recognition of values worth dying for. Futaba-

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tei, similarly, uses a death experience to shock the hero of Heibon out of a selfish preoccupation with books and into an awareness that the tradition of social duty could actually nurture feeling, while the new education of the free individual often kills it off: I early fell into literature, and, always immersed in dream, rotted as a man, became slovenly and never grew earnest. That I am able to feel now that I have become a little earnest is all due to the poignant passions I felt at the time of my father's death—that is to say, it is his gift. 10

Both Soseki and Futabatei evidence a profound skepticism about the modern, imported conception of literature in which the writer no longer serves a larger life but really subverts it, reduces it to the limits of his own ego. This conception derives, of course, from Romanticism, and much western Romantic literature was, in fact, being translated and discussed and used to frame a new conception of literature in Meiji Japan. In words which curiously evoke the sentiments of Futabatei and Soseki, and which precisely explain Arishima's predicament, Frank Kermode speaks of the legacy of the Romantic conception as "the prison of modern form." It is, Kermode suggests, "the place where we accept the knowledge that our inherited ways of echoing the structure of the world have no concord with it, but only, and then under conditions of great difficulty, with the desires of our own minds." 1 1 Arishima appears everywhere sensible to the notion that ideas were potentially imprisoning, that the writer's lonely search for new worlds merely entrapped him in a thick-walled prison of his own desiring self. No less than Futabatei, Arishima recognized that literature can estrange one from actual life, even as it generates surrogate lives to serve the needs of an imperious imagination. "I have been poisoned by civilization," we read in Meiro, "and my life has been divided." 12 But this figure, living in America, is so completely immersed in dream and exces-

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sive desire, so totally obsessed with the world collapsing and at an apocalyptic end, that he is unable to retrieve even fragments of the eclipsed tradition in order to survive: Unconsciously, it seemed, he had walked toward the bank of the Charles, and now he stood there, staring blankly into the pitch black water. Mindlessly the river flowed on, lapping the small boats and the piling along the way. In the distance, streetcars criss-crossed the city, scattering pale sparks over the scene. There was no other movement. Nature was unprotesting, calm, in possession of its own strength. Only inside his head did the whole world heave in disorder. His lust and wicked thoughts shook the whole world. . . . before his eyes, a bewildering succession of loathsome spectacles appeared. He just stood there, immobile, not even feeling the mosquitoes at his head and hands, as these bizarre fantasies took possession of his mind. It seemed to him that what he saw was a vision of the end. He was tormented by these horrifying desires, and shuddered in his struggle with them. 13

Like the figure standing at the brink in Umare Izuru Nayami, who fears that all he sees before him may be no more than a projection of his own mind, this student sees the Boston cityscape as mere stage apparatus for the performance of some interior drama. The geography here is characteristic of Arishima; the perceived strangeness and unfamiliarity of the setting directs the narrative inside to trace its strange effects on the mind. And, in the context of Arishima's fiction, we cannot explain this disorder away by simply saying that it was America-inspired, that were this student back in Tokyo or in an apparently domestic locality, he would not have perceived reality in this way. For in Arishima's fiction, no matter where the "physical" location, there never really is a home, and this is perhaps the most disorderly and anomalous feature about it. Before long he realized that he was a wanderer without citizenship. 14

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Any dwelling seems only temporary; there is a volatility in this fiction which explodes houses—we recall the demolition work at the end of Kain no Matsuei. Nowhere do we find a furusato, no place which existed in childhood and lives on in memory, to which the characters are longing to return. It is this condition of homelessness, so central to the work of Arishima, that also figures importantly in the work we call romantic. As Arnold Hauser observes: Whenever the romantics describe their outlook on art and the world, the word or the idea of homelessness creeps into their sentences. . . . That is why they speak so much of wandering, wandering aimlessly and endlessly, of the "blue flower" which is unattainable and is to remain unattainable, of the solitude that one seeks and shuns, of the infinity which is nothing and everything. They suffer from their estrangement from the world, but they also accept it and desire it. 18

To be sure, Arishima is not the only Japanese writer of his time to articulate this theme. At the end of Sorekara, Daisuke is disowned and, boarding a streetcar, his mind blazes with the prospect of homelessness. And where the Ukigumo narrative ends, Bunzo threatens to leave the house of his relatives. The Naturalists, too, often strand their sullen heroes ambivalently between their rural birthplace and the big city to which they have come. But Arishima's characters appear even more radically detached. They do not even possess a landscape in the past which they can regard with nostalgia. And rather than merely face the grim prospect of life without a home, they orig-

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inate in a homeless predicament. Hokkaido and America (and, especially in Aru Onna, the city and the sea) are linked in being commonly strange. This condition of a lost home, of lost geographical boundaries, lies at the heart of what disorder there is in the modern Japanese narrative. Whether it derives from a radical redefinition of family relations, an actual uprooting from country to city life, or an irrepressible curiosity which turns the narrative in the direction of a foreign land, it is when the sense of a settled cultural space breaks down that new, but mostly dark and at times tragic, possibilities appear in Japanese fiction. Although this theme of homelessness is seen elsewhere in the literature of the late Meiji and Taisho periods, Arishima seems haunted by it in all that he does. A number of writers share an apprehension, for example, that western cultural influence has made strangers of them in their own country, but no one more than Arishima is willing to show himself obsessed with the Siren call of the West. Arishima's figures move through his fiction like sleepwalkers, in trances, reveries, and hallucinatory states of consciousness, as though another power has possessed them, and they turn up in strange, foreign places, like America, only to awake and find this "other p o w e r " is literature itself, and that their existence belongs to art and not to life.

Throughout the random reflections recorded in his diary, 1 9 Arishima gives evidence of a fear that literature is absorbing too much of his energy and time. Citing a letter Carlyle wrote to a friend, Arishima warns himself "that it is not by books alone, or by books chiefly, that a man becomes in all points a m a n . " 2 0 As he unpacks a rather eclectic collection of books upon his return from four years abroad, he observes: " W h a t a mess I have made. This is exactly the condition of my inner life. Properly speaking, I have no harbor to set my anchor. I am still in doubt and am but a poor and humble beggar after T r u t h . " 2 1 Elsewhere he notes the "pernicious influence" of the study of art

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from all countries and periods on modern artists, w h o have lost their o w n " f i r m g r o u n d , " and h a v e fallen into the "pit of artif i c e . " 2 2 N o r is Arishima u n a w a r e of the personal consequence of these distractions: " I w a n t to k n o w more of the real world . . . man cannot live on pen and ink after all." 2 3 "Beware y o u , " Arishima writes to himself, "lest y o u end y o u r life a mere bookworm."24 Yet e v e n as he registers anxiety about books and learning, he is a c k n o w l e d g i n g his indebtedness to them. He uses literary types as m o d e l s of conduct ( " R e m e m b e r Enoch A r d e n and be patient"), seeing in his o w n bride-to-be " n o t Cordelia but Desd e m o n a or O p h e l i a . " 2 5 U p o n reading Schiller's " D a s Lied v o n der G l o c k e , " he makes an apostrophe to the " g r e a t s o u l " of its author: " Y e s , y o u are noble, like a solitary rock, rooting fast and standing erect, [amid] the roaring w a v e of sham appearance." 2 6 A n d , after describing the " m e s s " of his library as a sign of his o w n cluttered mind, Arishima proceeds to hang a reproduction of Millet's Angelus over his bookshelf, and, over his writing desk, a sketch of y o u n g Goethe. 2 7 It is n o simple task, then, to trace Arishima's responses to cultural influence, res p o n s e s w h i c h range f r o m adoration to loathing and which are nothing if not complex. Here, briefly, I wish to do two things: first, to suggest the attitudes which Arishima brought to reading, and h o w these attitudes m a y h a v e been reshaped by w h a t he read; and second, to catalog, as it w e r e , the kinds of literature Arishima k n e w , a n d to record certain of his often baffling reactions to them. Arishima Takeo w a s born in T o k y o in 1878 and spent his earliest years there and in Y o k o h a m a , w h e r e his family m o v e d w h e n he w a s four. H e w a s the oldest of seven children. The A r i s h i m a s w e r e of the ex-samurai class, the father having been a retainer of l o w rank in the Shimazu clan of Satsuma, w h o s e fortunes rose rapidly after the Restoration and w h o , before retiring to a lucrative construction business, held a succession of high-level posts in the Finance Ministry. In a late reminiscence, Arishima wrote of his father: " t h o u g h he often appeared cool

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or indifferent on the surface, he was a man of frightening inner passion." 2 8 Certainly Arishima believed that his father exercised his will upon the household, and especially upon himself as eldest son: Toward myself, father's methods of education were especially heartless. From an early age I was forbidden to sit around idly in his presence. In the mornings—and even in winter—I awakened with the rising sun and was sent out to the yard to practice kendo and horsemanship. On returning from school mother would see to it that I read from the Analects and the Book of Filial Piety. I can recall being scolded to tears if I read half-heartedly or without comprehension. From the time I was six or seven, I spent much time in the company of foreigners. Father had said that henceforth Japanese must deal with foreigners, and that knowledge of a foreign language was a necessity. Thus the first school I entered was a foreign one. When I did finally enter a Japanese primary school, I was admitted to the intensive courses because I was so advanced. While growing up, I had virtually no freedom to attend plays or other forms of public entertainment—one cannot imagine such strictness today. Father had a saying about moral conduct: a man does not smile without cause, nor open his mouth without good reason. Needless to say, father did not subject his other children to a similarly severe and Spartan education. 2 9

There is further evidence that Arishima's maternal grandmother, a devout Jodo Shinshu believer who came to live with the family when the boy was ten, reinforced the serious and high-minded education of his earliest years. Even after Arishima began to board at the Peer's School, he would return home every weekend, at his grandmother's insistence, for religious instruction. She too forbade his reading secular literature, the novels and historical romances then popular. So fine a student was he, and so scrupulous in his personal conduct, that Arishima was asked to become tutor to the Crown Prince. Moreover, he appears to have maintained this proper public demeanor well

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into adulthood, remaining courteous even while advertising socalled "anarchistic" views. I to Sei has remarked on how great a variance there is between the mildness of Arishima's face in his photographs and the violence which denotes his fictional characters. 30 And Mushanokoji Saneatsu, writing at the time of Arishima's suicide, observes that Arishima always "thought too much," and that had he been more "reckless" in his personal life, he would perhaps have survived. 31 In his autobiographical reminiscences, written as an adult and well after his contacts with Hokkaido and America, Christianity and western literature, Arishima suggests that this strict upbringing thwarted his will and enforced a sense of enclosure. It is the son, we feel, no less than the father, who restrains a "frightening inner passion" in the interests of a proper public display. The affection Arishima at times expresses for his family is balanced against critical moments of ambivalence: as his father is dying in 1916, Arishima confesses to a longing for freedom which the death would fulfill; 32 at the deathbed of his grandmother, this woman who taught him the value of selfcontrol, he admits to erotic feelings for the attending nurse. 33 These are specific instances of an ambivalence which has been variously remarked upon, and which subtly point to a wider anxiety. Arishima was perhaps among the last of a generation born in the early years of Meiji for whom the new and imported culture was all the more problematic because of its vivid recollections of the ethical values of the old. As we have seen, Arishima's first contact with foreigners was sanctioned by a Confucian sense of public duty; the English language he first learns at a mission school in Yokohama represents no free passage to parts unknown, but the first line of defense for a threatened society. And so, behind the "new learning" stands an embattled system of educational and social values and a complicated emotional context. Arishima, although a Taisho writer, seems really a throwback or an outrider to the anxieties Kenneth Pyle ascribed to Meiji youth:

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53 the attempt to live according to new values—values not absorbed in childhood as part of the natural order of things, but learned later in life as part of a self-conscious search for appropriate new forms of behavior—often created deep anxieties. Many in the new generation, as a result, felt torn between the familiar, comfortable values of their childhood and the new, liberating values of their later education. 34

It s h o u l d b e n o t e d that for A r i s h i m a the first e x p o s u r e to w e s t e r n literature w a s to religious w r i t i n g s , primarily the Bible, a n d that t h e s e w e r e r e a d in a h i g h l y c h a r g e d , religious context. Like Y o s h i d a Shoin, Kitamura T o k o k u , and other ambitious Meiji intellectuals cut l o o s e f r o m their local obligations a n d in search of s o m e " g r e a t l e a d e r , " either political or religious, to w h o m t h e y m i g h t transfer their frustrated s e n s e of d u t y , A r i s h i m a s e e m s to look to foreign literature a n d to strange lands not really to a b a n d o n but to reorient the values of his y o u t h , to make them w o r k a b l e a n d vital in the c h a n g i n g reality of the p r e s e n t . In a d i a r y item d a t e d M a y 1 1 , 1901, the y e a r A r i s h i m a e n t e r e d the S a p p o r o Free C h u r c h as a C h r i s t i a n , the y e a r too he g r a d u a t e d from Sapporo Nogakko, w e find this passage copied from the b o o k Endeavors after the Christian Life, b y James Martineau: the severe prerogatives of an existence half-divine are ours . . . instead of slumbering at noon in Eden we must keep the midnight watch in Gethsemane. We, too, like our great leader, must be made perfect through suffering . . . the hour of exceeding sorrow will prepare the day of God-like strength. 35 T h i s s e e m s the k i n d of i d i o m that A r i s h i m a increasingly c a m e to h e a r a n d to r e a d o n his arrival, in 1896, to this a l r e a d y n o t o r i o u s " C h r i s t i a n C o l l e g e " at Japan's n o r t h e r n frontier. 3 6 H o n d a S h u g o h a s s u g g e s t e d that A r i s h i m a ' s p r o s e is i n d e b t e d to the oratory of Japanese-Christian p r a y e r - m e e t i n g s . 3 7 E v e r y -

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where in the fiction w e see how a language of extremes, the mentality of "Eden and Gethsemane," situates the hero precariously between salvation and destruction. Throughout Arishima's writing w e detect an assertion that the really "half-divine" among us are the sufferers. This language and perception, rooted in paradox, is one which Erich Auerbach has seen as central to the style of the Biblical narratives. Speaking of Adam, Jacob, and Joseph, and by implication of all the "cast-down" heroes of the Bible, Auerbach writes: But their greatness, rising out of humiliation, is almost superhuman and an image of God's greatness. The reader feels h o w the pendulum's swing is connected with the intensity of the personal history—precisely the most extreme circumstances, in which w e are immeasurably forsaken and in despair, or immeasurably joyous and exalted, give us, if w e survive them, a personal stamp which is recognized as the product of a rich existence, a rich development. 3 8

It may be for this reason that Arishima's fictional characters are all marked by some humiliating sign: because a proximity to the lower classes or to some outrageous sin is seen as the precondition for the kind of suffering which, in Martineau's phrase, "prepares the day of God-like strength." Behind Yoko in Aru Onna ("the woman of loose morals"), stands the figure of the "fallen w o m a n , " and Arishima actually wrote plays in which Delila ("Samuson to Deraira," 19x9) and Mary Magdalene ("Seisan," 1919) figure prominently in this role. Ninemon, the hero of Kairt no Matsuei, of course, is a literary descendant of another Biblical paradigm, but any homeless wanderer in Arishima—whether uprooted by criminality, poverty or ideas—belongs to the tribe of Cain. Such figures, we are made to feel, live more intensely; they seem to embody Arishima's o w n desire "to touch something very, very vital." 3 9 It is a desire such as this that Uchimura Kanzo admits to and acknowledges as part of his o w n commitment to Christianity:

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55 Heathenism I always consider as a tepid state of h u m a n existence;—it is neither very w a r m nor very cold. A lethargic life is a weak life. It feels pain less; hence rejoices less. De profundis is not of heathenism. W e need Christianity to intensify us; to swear fealty to our God, and enmity toward Devils. Not a butterfly-life, but an eagle-life; not the diminutive perfection of a pink rose, but the sturdy strength of an oak. Heathenism will do for our childhood, Christianity alone for m a n h o o d . The world is growing, and w e with the world. Christianity is getting to be a necessity with all of us. 4 0

It would be impertinent to imply, especially in the case of Uchimura, that the substance of his faith was purely a matter of words. But here, at any rate, I am concerned with what changes Arishima's conversion may have brought to his own discourse. It seems clear that the Japanese intellectuals' embrace of western literature and beliefs often had to fulfill conflicting needs. These authors often wished for a public voice, to write, as it were, "for the sake of the country," and yet they recognized that the old values, stressing harmonious relations in a static society, were now false to the spirit of the changing modern age. Uchimura's language here enacts a belief implicit in Arishima's fiction: that Christianity requires one to describe reality in the sharply alternating, dialectical style of the Scriptures. And, to conjecture broadly, both writers were attracted to this style because they perceived that a culture largely convulsed by foreign technology and ideas could now only inadequately be represented by a writing content to describe the comfortable and near to hand. The combined influence of his early Confucian training, and his reading of the Bible and religious tracts as a young adult, make Arishima similarly serious when he comes to approach secular literature. Despite the differences among writers such as Carlyle and Whitman, Tolstoy and Ibsen, it is the prophetic voice, the moral impulse, in their work which at least partially

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d r a w s A r i s h i m a ' s interest. Arishima seems to recognize in such w r i t e r s — h o w e v e r violent their attack on the existing social order—a w i s h to speak for and regenerate the society to which each belongs. For e v e n as he looked to literature as a replacem e n t for religion, and as a guide on w h a t he repeatedly calls " t h e long circuitous path to o n e s e l f , " Arishima also expected his writing to be public. In a Tolstoyan manner, he repeatedly a s k e d himself, " w h a t is it I should d o , " and only at the end of his life does he admit to a suspicion he had unconsciously built into his fiction—that as a writer he could " d o " nothing. The bright h o p e to find a n e w , prophetic idiom, like the hope to settle n e w fictional w o r l d s , ends in disillusionment and despair. The spacious fictional geographies fill with menacing s h a d o w s of death, and the artist, once thought to be a great, prophetic soul, becomes a practitioner of "self-deception," w h o s e life is rushing t o w a r d " t h e abyss of destruction." 4 1 It is not until 1903, w h e n Arishima leaves Japan for three years of study in America, that he becomes increasingly absorbed with w e s t e r n literature. A n d yet before m o v i n g on to s u r v e y this w o r k , I should briefly remark on Arishima's encounter with such writing at Nogakko, restricted though it w a s by the intensely religious atmosphere of the place. H o w e v e r sincere his original interest in agriculture may have been, A r i s h i m a ' s intellectual energies at the College appear chiefly directed to a study of literature and to history. 4 2 It w a s at Nogakko that he first read Carlyle—Sartor Resortus seems to h a v e been a k e y text in Nitobe's ethics course—and there too he w a s earliest e x p o s e d to Romantic poetry, especially to Byron and Shelley. Arishima w a s also reading large, synoptic surveys of w e s t e r n and w o r l d civilization by historians like Swinton, Buckle, Guizot, and M y e r . A n d he seems particularly d r a w n to the lives of saints and f a m o u s writers. A t one point he quotes Mazzini to the effect that " g r e a t men are the landmarks of humanity; they m e a s u r e its course along the past, and point out the path of the future—alike historian and p r o p h e t . " 4 3 In this vein, p e r h a p s , Arishima read the biographies of Francis of A s -

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sisi, Byron, and Schiller, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and the autobiographies of Franklin, Goethe, and Tolstoy. But it is with Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, which he reads in Tokyo within weeks of his departure for America (in September 1903), that Arishima encounters work which seems nearest to his o w n sensibility. Here, I feel, Arishima discovers a bias which will inform all of his own later writing: a final wish to have done with responsibility, and to succomb instead to a mad—and youthful—desire to destroy oneself. Lionel Trilling observes that this is precisely what Carlyle and others of his generation managed to avoid, even as they continued to read this famous book: But the Victorians discovered that they had work to do and the great thing about Werther w a s that he did not, which w a s presumably the case with the young Germans w h o were said to have emulated his suicide. The enlightened English view of the novel in the nineteenth century w a s that the emotions it set forth may have been appropriate to this time but, being childish things, were to be put away now that maturity had come. So Carlyle said, and he spoke with the authority of having told, in Sartor Resortus, the history of his o w n experience of disintegration, which, unlike Werther's, had been resisted and overcome. Werther's anguish was real and justified, Carlyle said, but "other years and higher culture" had brought its remedy. 4 4

Contrary, then, to the " a d u l t " Victorian response, Arishima's o w n reaction to Werther gives evidence of a certain regression. Surely the youthful hero of Meiro sees in the Boston cityscape no substantial field of action, but rather an incubus for wild emotion, generating at the end a horrifying "nightmare" of "pessimism and despair." 4 5 And in his diary Arishima proves himself nearly obsessed with youth and recklessness, seemingly because he perceives in this "regression" a short cut to the " g r e a t n e s s " possessed by the Biblical figures and the famous men he had been reading about. 46 In a remarkable diary

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item dated A u g u s t i , 1903, Arishima, w h o had been reading Werther since early J u n e , discloses his feelings about the book: How much pathos. How much suffering. How many times was my handkerchief wet with tears. Indeed, this is a "Book of Lamentation" second only to the Bible . . . over and over have I read it, this must be the seventh or eighth time. But on no previous reading was I moved so deeply. Oh Werther, Werther, you are not of the phenomenal world. I drink down your intensity. Yes, you are full of errors. But your errors are divine. . . . Be proud, Werther, no man could commit your kind of sin, only God. 47 A n d to this Arishima a d d s a sort of prayer, which he writes in English. H e imagines Werther himself, standing before G o d , asking that his suicide be forgiven: Omnipotent Father! whom I know not, thou who was wont to fill my gloomy soul, why has thou forsaken me? Call back thy wanderer, speak comfort to my heart, my soul thirsts after thee, and cannot brook thy silence! Can a father be enraged with his son who suddenly enters his presence, hangs on his neck, and cries "Forgive me, dear father, for shortening] my journey and returning] before the appointed time! The world I found everywhere the same." 4 8 It w a s in a book like Young Werther that Arishima w o u l d have encountered a fictional world full of danger and edge, one equal to his o w n dark imaginings. In such writing, there is no salve for a C o n f u c i a n conscience desiring a world reconstructed; a n d n o concession, either, to Christian eschatology. Instead Werther offers the quick route to greatness: to die young as a victim of feelings, but before that, to revel in abnormality a n d to d e i f y the i n s a n e — " F o r I h a v e learned, in m y w a y , that all u n u s u a l people w h o h a v e accomplished something great or seemingly impossible have always been proclaimed to be drunk or m a d . " 4 9 The language of Young Werther, like that of the Bible, is o n e of extremes, but it denies the dialectical polar charge

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of the Bible. It is excessive in one direction only, " t h e compulsive telling over of defeat, darkness, despair, the eradication of clear outline and all degree, the world torn and scattered." 5 0 Moreover, as we have seen, Arishima acknowledges this one-sidedness. This is further illustrated in the three plays which Arishima later wrote based explicitly on stories taken from the Bible. It is interesting to see how each play is manipulated, the original story often misinterpreted, so that the final note is one of chaos and defeat. At the end of "Daikozui no m a e " (Before the Deluge), Noah's son is crying for his " e m p t y shell of a life" even as the world is inundated; in " S a m u s o n to Deraira" (Samson and Delila), we see at the end a world collapsing under "the curse of death which is heavier than the stones which now fell upon y o u " ; and in " S e i s a n " (The Lord's Supper), the witnesses to Christ's crucifixion are thrown into hysteria and madness as " t h e world turns black before their e y e s . " 5 1 And so in the shadow cast by his reading of Werther, the Bible becomes merely " A Book of Lamentations," and not also a book of joy. The Sorrows of Young Werther signals, then, a new departure in Arishima's own exploration of literature, and its relation to sensibility and to life. It is perhaps an odd coincidence that a reading of Werther should have overlapped Arishima's departure for America, and even more curious to observe how the " a r t " of this book conditions the very life he encounters there, and not only the fictional language Arishima will use to later write about America. We have already seen that Arishima seems to reinterpret the Bible in terms of his reading of Werther, but it is also possible that in America, he begins to emulate the role of the romantic hero, wandering homeless through a strange land. 5 2 Even as Werther envies the madman his "melancholy mind and the confusion of [his] s e n s e s , " 5 3 Arishima seeks out " m a d m e n , " working as an orderly for two traumatic summer months at the Friend's Asylum for the Insane, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. And as Werther cultivates his impossible love for Lotte, Arishima dotes on the unattainable Fanny, the twelveyear-old sister of his only friend at Haverford, a girl he calls

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" t h e f o n d e s t creation of m y d r e a m , " or again, " a creature w h o never breathed in the w o r l d . " 5 4 A n d to these complications, he piles on religious doubt, a burgeoning interest in socialism, and incessant reading w h i c h ranges f r o m Emerson to Karl K a u t s k y , Dante to S c h o p e n h a u e r , and s o m e w h a t more consistently includes Faust, Hamlet, and the w o r k of Ibsen, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Gorky. Indeed it often appears that Arishima's America experiences were a fulfillment of an Uchimura Kanzo prophecy. "Peace is the last thing w e can find in C h r i s t e n d o m , " Uchimura had written in 1895, going on to catalogue w h a t he did find: "turmoils, complexities, insane asylums, penitentiaries, poor h o u s e s . " 5 5 For e v e n though Uchimura w a s given to praise of w e s t e r n ideas for their capacity to " i n t e n s i f y " Japanese life, he a c k n o w l e d g e d the price one might p a y in the cost of personal peace, and y e a r n e d too " f o r the rest of the Morning Land, the quietude of the Lotus P o n d . " 5 6 Arishima, it would seem, struck no such spiritual balance; the older m a n ' s warning about "turmoils and complexities" is to be dramatized while Arishima is in America, and will g o on being dramatized, through Arishim a ' s obsession with foreign ideas, for the rest of his frantic life. That Arishima w a s a w a r e of a certain imbalance within himself and sought to regain equilibrium is amply documented in his responses to the w o r k of Walt Whitman. What Arishima tells u s in his n u m e r o u s criticisms, appreciations, and reminiscences suggests that over the course of a year in Boston, he discovered Walt Whitman, w h o s o m e h o w replaced religion as his guilding light, a n d o f f e r e d the disturbed traveler " a r e n e w e d sense of h o p e that I might return to m y s e l f . " 5 7 The diary for the year 1 9 0 4 - 5 is incomplete, and so w e rely on retrospective statements to describe, for instance, h o w Arishima's landlord, " i n a deeply m o v i n g and resonant v o i c e , " w o u l d after s u p p e r often read aloud from the poet's w o r k . According to these accounts, Arishima detected in Whitman a poet w h o heals division, a poet of reconciliation and h a r m o n y . Whitman's greatest

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achievement, Arishima writes in 1 9 1 3 , " i s the absolute fusion of nature a n d self and other p e o p l e . " 5 8 A s critic or commentator on the American poet, Arishima chooses to portray Whitm a n as a " l o a f e r " — o n e of a great m a n y roles Whitman poetically assigned to h i m s e l f — a n d Arishima means by this " a lazy m a n , a m a n w h o m a k e s n o promises or pledges, and w h o has no c r e e d . " 5 9 This critic's image of Whitman sees in the poet an innocent outdoorsman, a sort of creature before the Fall, a figure (unlike Werther or the y o u n g student in Meiro) w h o is " u n corrupted b y culture," w h o s e appeal is for " p o w e r f u l , uneducated persons," and w h o himself remains a "common m a n " even as he continues to write poems. " T h e l o a f e r , " Arishima notes, " a b a n d o n s all mediating mechanisms, and a l w a y s has direct human contact." 6 0 This is the poet whose " o w n solid self saved him time and time again from the phantom of idealism;" 6 1 whose " r o b u s t n e s s " rescues him from the "sick illusions and hallucinations and ill health which plagued his t i m e . " 6 2 In a w o r d , the Whitman of Arishima, the critic, is an "accomplished liver a n d not a poet o n l y . " 6 3 A n d , yielding to a confusion Whitman himself inspired ("Comerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man." 6 4 ), Arishima seems to look at the Leaves of Grass not as literature, but as an organic thing. We might say that this image of Whitman serves Arishim a ' s ideal conception of w h a t a writer should be, but that it little affected his o w n style of writing. A s a conscientious and able translator of Leaves of Grass, which he w o r k e d on throughout his writing career, Arishima quite possibly k n e w another Whitman, w h o came to exert a much more crucial influence on his fiction. A l o n g s i d e a poetical figure w h o " l e a n s and loafs at m y ease/ observing a spear of summer grass," 6 5 Arishima would h a v e also confronted the poet of " f o r b i d d e n v o i c e s " ; 6 6 the poet w h o s e w o r d s are w e a p o n s " f u l l of danger, full of death/ For I confront peace, security and all the settled l a w s to unsettle t h e m . " 6 7 A n d Whitman, though desiring much else besides, also echoes Werther's w i s h " t o storm along with the w a v e s . " 6 8

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In a poem such as this, we recognize the pace and the idiom of Meiro, whose hero passes through a succession of stormy, tear-soaked nights, and moves from one desperate and inexpressible emotion to another. If Whitman is a pioneer for Arishima, it is not only because he ventures into new and possible worlds, but because he is willing "to dash reckless and dangerous!/ To court destruction with taunts." 70 If he is the poet of real passion and earthy sex, he is also the romantic in love with love: To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me! To rise thither with my inebriate soul! To be lost if it must be so! To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom! With one brief hour of madness and joy. 71

This is the Whitman who Arishima most fundamentally understands. It is this kind of language, and the reckless situations it describes, which recur in Arishima's own fiction. To be sure, Whitman contains much more than the threat of danger and violence, but if he did not contain at least this much, Arishima would likely have passed him by. And what is said here of Whitman is equally true of Arishima's attraction to other western writing. It is Anna's madness and destruction, and not the world regenerated around Levin and Kitty, that draws Arishima, as a fiction writer, to Tolstoy.

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It is Professor Rubik and the ideal woman of his youth, climbing the mountain peaks only to fall and die in an avalanche, which finally makes him pause over Ibsen. Arishima's fictional spaces are similarly marked by the signs of trespass, of boundaries transgressed, of characters "lost in an ecstatic wish," 72 like Werther's, to hurl themselves down into the abyss which lies below them. It is the excessive which dazzles Arishima as he reads western literature, and blinds him to the many instances of ordinary life and quiet, enduring emotions which it also represents. Indeed, it is likely that Arishima's selective vision lets him see in Goethe only the author of Young Werther and not the man who in middle age writes: "He who wills great things must gird up his loins; only in limitation is mastery revealed, and law alone can give us freedom." 7 3

Strangeness, disorder, and the discovery of some "other world" are basic features of Arishima's fictional geography, which assumes shape as the projection of a questing—or discontented—mind. It is understandable then that Arishima would explore mental disorder as a fictional possibility. In fact, illness and a journey to some "other world" appear so regularly in this fiction that we come to imagine the two are related. This is perhaps most plainly seen in Meiro, where the setting is America and where the central impulse is to probe divisions in the mind. The narrative actually begins at a Philadelphia asylum for the insane, and ends somewhere in the darkness of Boston, the hero pacing hysterically before the casket of his friend, a social malcontent who has died of tuberculosis. No more than Hokkaido are these two American cities described mimetically; the multiplicity and diversity of Meiro is internal, and is not meant to represent the variousness and throb of urban life. These cityscapes, and the labyrinthine compartments from which they are made, seem to demarcate a mental boundary over which the hero has stepped, placing himself beyond normality. And this newly entered territory, by the degree of its strangeness,

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allegorically separates the hero from the actual world, and carries him by force toward a recognition of a real, but not readily perceived, dimension in space: I was separated by a great distance from my parents and brothers and sisters. An ocean and a whole continent lay between them and myself. But physical distance only accounts for one kind of separation. The land and the sea cannot be used to measure the distance between ideas. How melancholy a distance this is; a white, empty space beyond calculation. With all my strength did I try to signal how far separated I was from them, but my family did not notice the flag that I was waving. 7 4

With a canny though perhaps unintentional precision, Arishima directs us here to the center of his fictional activity: to these interstitial areas of a mind which knows itself to be divided, a mind subject to the disorder wrought by a conflict of cultural values. Repeatedly Arishima gives shape to that threatening space which opens up when one is cut loose from former habits of thought, and is mentally adrift, prior to any new settlement. America might represent a space fraught with possibility, but more typically in Arishima's work, it is also an emptiness where nothing comes together or coheres. For stability the hero of Meiro will snatch at books—Dante's Inferno, Buckley's Psychopathology, or Goethe and the Inner Life by one "Professor C"—but they prove to be so much flotsam in an unsteady sea. And the title of Meiro gives us still another metaphor for the geography of this and much more of Arishima's fiction: a labyrinth through which a lost mind wanders, grasping at ideas, like "love" or "the self," which in the end prove to possess no more than a fictional substance. As mentioned previously, the hero of Meiro claims that he has been "poisoned by civilization," his life divided, and so it is at once comprehensible and ironic that the novel should begin in confinement at an asylum, the place where civilization cares for its victims. The asylum is the first in a series of closed

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structures which together construct the labyrinth of this book. Its analogues are, for instance, the railway car to Massachusetts, the boudoir of Mrs. P, the research office at the University, and the shabby room where the hero's only friend is to die. Each of these share in that paradox which Masao Miyoshi has ascribed to the "upstairs room" in Ukigumo: "the paradox of claustrophobic one-room confinement and spatial and psychological indefiniteness." 75 Like the steam-heated berth which the heroine of Aru Onna occupies on her own passage to America, these rooms are designed to make one stuffy and perspire and show other obvious signs of pressure mounting beyond discomfort toward explosion. The first part of Meiro employs the conceit of a diary to detail certain events which occur between August 14 and September 5, in oppressive heat, at a mental institution near Philadelphia. The diary writer, w e understand, is a summer employee at the asylum, although he seems to identify rather too closely with the patients he is meant to nurse, and in fact analyzes his o w n predicament as though he were one of them: "It was all the work of youthful passion. Instead of loving a woman, I believed in G o d . " 7 6 He suggests here that his faith is somehow diseased, and reveals this more clearly when he goes on to explain how, by a curious process, he becomes trapped between piety and lust: Especially at those moments when I was conscious of drawing near to God, offering up my prayers in an ecstasy of thanksgiving, I would be attacked in the very next instant by the sharp-nailed devil of carnal desire, and my convictions would again be shattered. 77

It is, then, the sickness of his ideals, their capacity to multiply his sense of w h o he is, that renders ambiguous the hero's role as guardian of the insane. For example, he professes love for the young daughter of the director of the hospital (whose real name is Edith but w h o m he renames "Lilly" because this name is more suited to her character), yet when he searches for

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an adjective to describe his feelings for her, he strikes on "abnormal," 7 8 and elsewhere describes his love as a case of "putrid sentimentalism." 7 9 Under these circumstances, we are not surprised that this figure should identify with the captive patients, who are themselves suffering under civilization's restraints: From the wing where the really raving ones were kept locked up in their rooms, came the cries of men and women whose agitation intensified in the sweltering heat. Their cries were like a warning of some terrible fate to come, and they affected my timorous heart. 80

And yet the " I " of this diary account, who is not by clinical definition a patient, seems unable to escape his own prison house of large ideas. He speaks vaguely of "returning to myself," by which he means a return to a free and "primitive" state prior to civilization. But all the while he persists in his serious, even morbid reading, and continues to ponder problems like " t h e conflict between freedom and determinism." Even as he searches for a whole and unified life, he takes as his model Dr. Scott, a patient so terrorized by religious scruples that he hears the voice of the devil in the trees, telling him that his soul, "like that of Cain, has been cursed for all eternity." 8 1 And when, in early September, the hero is to return to school, Dr. Scott deliberately plants the seed of "predestination" in the young man's ear: " a single transgression will deprive you of peace forever." 8 2 As the diary section comes to a close, its author is on a train to Boston, where, as though in fulfillment of prophecy, he picks up a Philadelphia newspaper only to read that "in the absence of his nurse," the famous Dr. J. B. Scott of Gettysburg committed suicide by hanging. The rest of the narrative takes place in Boston, and is told in the third person, creating an illusion of objectivity which is patently false to the real design of this intensely subjective tale, in which everything is coded or rendered symbolic to suit the special purpose of the narrator. A (the protagonist and the au-

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thor of the preceeding diary) is a graduate student w h o boards at the home of a rather strange, leftist lawyer named P. He works after classes at the research office of the eminent Gothic art historian, Professor M. Lawyer P is estranged from his wife, a vamp w h o seduces the innocent yet susceptible A. This provides A with an outlet for his repressed "carnal desires," but it also afflicts his conscience, causing him to confess his sin to Mr. P, w h o in turn draws his revolver and dramatically evicts the audacious "yellow m o n k e y " from his house. Professor M has two daughters, Julia and Flora, each of w h o m at different points of the story fulfills ^4's equally strong desire for an "ideal l o v e , " and both of w h o m remain forever inaccessible to him. In addition to maintaining one illicit sexual relationship and two Platonic love affairs, A is inspired by a cynical Japanese socialist— K—to put down Max Weber and to take up a more active interest in political affairs. A follows this advice, and begins to attend clandestine strategy meetings in preparation for the coming class struggle. For his pains in this endeavor to confront social problems, A discovers, for instance, one old worker w h o looks like Victor Hugo, and, at a farm in the country, certain Polish immigrants, men "freshly cut from nature," in whom he sees " a new starting point for civilization." 8 3 Such complications move the narrative along at a frenetic pace. The only order seems to derive from the multiple allusions to fate, futility, darkness, and despair, which at least forewarn us that each of these desultory activities will end badly. The hero lurches from one book-inspired crisis to another, and without any apparent sense of crossover. As we see in his romantic involvements, the hero is aware that true love must be impossible—the true lover craves what he can never possess. And so A does not profess his love for Julia until after she tells A that her sister Flora loves him, thus making herself "unattainable." And it is only after this flirtatious girl has spurned his advances in a bitter and racist attack upon him that A admits he has been " m i s t a k e n " and instantly transfers his affection to Flora. All of this, we suspect, is calculated for melodra-

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matic effect: "If Julia reaches Flora before I do, there's no telling what she might say about me. I must see Flora before Julia does." And so, "like someone shipwrecked in search of a b e a c o n , " A stumbles from the research office where he had confronted Julia, and begins the race to Professor M ' s home, all the while reprimanding his inner self: "I was blind. I knew that it was Flora w h o I really wanted. And yet in spite of that. . . . Oh, I'm a fool. . . . I fell for Julia's charms. W h y am I so easily misled?"84 We can easily trivialize this book if we imagine its essential conflicts to take place between, say, socialism and capitalism, or between carnal desire and ideal love, supposing that one side of the conflict represents something natural and the other something cultural, hence repressive. Looked at in this way, there is really no conflict at all, since the Polish immigrants and Professor M , Mrs. P and Julia and Flora, not to mention the " i d e a s " these figures stand for, all exist on an equal level of abstraction. Rather, the essential conflict exists between all of these idealities and the more limited world of contingency and compromise from which they are all estranged. As A will remind himself at a m o m e n t of real insight: " Y o u r enemy is not Russia, as that old political fanatic said it was. K was wrong too, when he said it is the capitalist. No, the enemy is real life itself." 8 5 By the end of Meiro, all of A's ideals have either been corrupted or have vanished entirely. Before dying, the tubercular socialist K, w h o had himself been a Bungakkai-readmg romantic in his youth, invites the hero to take notice: " H e r e you see the great revolutionary at the end of the road. . . . you'll be here someday t o o . " 8 6 K, the rhetorical doer, dies unaccomplished, and in a similar way, A will come to see how much of his own life has been consumed by fiction. Indeed, throughout the story A had believed Mrs. P's tale that she was pregnant, told simply to keep him around for her convenience, but finally he discovers that Mrs. P is on her way to Florida with another lover, and that her " p r e g n a n c y , " which had so tormented him and complicated every aspect of his life, was a lie. /4's confusion at this

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point becomes constrictive, as he loses his capacity to discriminate between fiction and fact. There is a circularity in the plot line of Meiro, which delivers the hero over at the end to the kind of confinement he had known at the asylum; where nightmare and chimera ruled and wholly shaped the environment. "It was all nothing but a nightmare," A remarks, trying to console himself beside K's corpse. But then he adds: "what does that say about the mind of the man who dreamed it?" 8 7 One of the last landscapes we encounter in Meiro suggests that America, sign of freedom and the fresh start, has given way to an altogether different perception: "This vacant melancholy and pessimism of mind was like an old swamp. There was no heat and no light, only the process of its own stagnation." 88 It is the same sort of swamp ("viscous white mud") that surrounds Ninemon in Kain no Matsuei; the same paralytic state of mind which locks the narrator of Umare Izuru Nayami to the brink. As a purely figurative presence, America does not sustain, perhaps was not meant to sustain, the initial hope of its fictional inhabitants. Arishima's writing does manage to escape the bounds of Japan, but never establishes a Utopian alternative. The narrator of Arishima's fiction is always caught between the old world and the new, a "prisoner of the passage," in Michel Foucault's suggestive metaphor, a figure whose authentic "other world" exists only "in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him." 8 9 Indeed, this "other world" is the place where everything, the plainest of domestic facts, and the most far-flung of exotic dreams, is immersed in a romantic and destructive confusion.

Chapter Three

The City and the Sea T o THIS point we have seen how Arishima's desire for a new world projects his fiction beyond the everyday world of local fact. But it is also clear that the turbulence of this distant passage disturbs the course of the narrative, and that the new world is never successfully reached. And so it is an obsessive wandering in a void which defies purpose—the interstitial space between settlements—that Arishima's fiction repeatedly explores. Not the local cause of desire, nor its distant object, but the transforming power of desire itself lies at the center of these narratives: A strange and violent force, a power wholly unknown to her, was leading Yoko relentlessly beyond the range of even her fantasies. Humbly she followed, no matter where it led . . . and thus surrendering herself body and soul, to such an irresistable force, Yoko experienced a joy and serenity that was nearly trancelike, and she lost all will and capacity to discriminate. 1 Lost and confused, Yoko fell from the brink. The world she had been living in was suddenly transformed. 2

Everywhere Arishima's writing carries us toward such a "brink" or cliff edge, toward a metaphorical crossroads where one is

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made to see that life is full of divisions and hidden depths. But no book more than Aru Onna (A Certain Woman, 1919) quite so consciously traces the mind's downward fall into a vision of a split or multiplied reality. And none is so aware of the power of a fictional wish to alter and re-form one's perception of the world: Suddenly the purser's face, nightmarishly seductive, appeared before her, and Yoko thought that perhaps this bizarre adventure of the mind might in fact be very real. 3 Convulsions such as this occurred frequently. In their aftermath Yoko's face would darken, as she came to realize that beyond her seemingly actual life she possessed another life in a mysterious world. A n d often she discovered herself passing between these worlds at will. 4

From beginning to end, Aru Onna enacts what Georg Lukacs once called "the adventure of inferiority." 5 Indeed we recognize here "the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence." 6 The movement of Aru Onna seems sweeping and dramatic, but it is also essentially internal. Rejected by society, Yoko descends within herself to plot revenge, but she becomes lost there, in the entanglements of her mind, and seems unable to find the path back out to the external world. Moreover, in the topography of this narrative, Arishima underscores the primacy of the interior journey of his fictional heroine. For Yoko's authentic "other world" is neither America nor a safe refuge with her lover, but that disorder doubly represented by the labyrinthine city and the "ship imperiled" on the sea. It is a topography of passages which lead to no actual place, or which turn back on themselves—Yoko arrives at Seattle but never leaves the ship, returning to the city from which she had departed. Through the voice of this woman fallen into the turbulent void of her own consciousness, Arishima seems to articulate all that is constitutive to the structure of his fiction. No longer are his motives masked by a fisherman or a farmer, or even by a

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book-inspired youthful Romantic. Yoko shares Arishima's bourgeois, urban origins, and her vision remains clear in the midst of her most dangerous confusions. In Aru Onna Arishima appears to analyze—in fact, to actualize—the febrile imagination of a Taisho intellectual, whose desire to be anything but what he was led him finally to see the imprisoning circularity of that desire. In his last years, Arishima often spoke of "a long circuitous path back toward oneself." It was perhaps along such a path that he discovered the figure Satsuki Yoko, whose desperate and illimitable passion, like a corrosive, first burns away society and then turns inside, to burn through the mind.

Aru Onna was written in two parts. Arishima began a book called Aru Onna no Gurinpusu (Glimpses of a Woman) while he was teaching in Hokkaido, and published this work serially in sixteen issues of the magazine Shirakaba between 1911 and 1913. This narrative was later extensively revised, but the events described here, transpiring largely on a ship at sea, correspond to the first twenty-one chapters of Aru Onna. The second and longer section of the book, set in the city of Tokyo, was completed in the spring of 1919. After the deaths of his wife and father in 1916, Arishima had moved back to Tokyo with his three sons, although to finish this particular manuscript he secluded himself on the temple grounds of Enkakuji in Kamakura. There, within a single month, writing an average of eighteen pages a day, Arishima brought to near completion the book he now called simply Aru Onna7 When we consider that Arishima did not first publish until 1910, that until 1917 he was unrecognized as a writer of any stature, and that he died in 1923, it becomes apparent that the experience of writing this book figured centrally in his career. Since by any standard it is the most significant of Arishima's writing, I would like to provide an extended summary of it, so that topographical or architectural details, which may otherwise be overlooked, will instead be noticed, and my later analysis made more immediate. Aru Onna begins at Shinbashi Station on a September

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morning in 1901. One year later the narrative will end in the same city of Tokyo. The heroine is rushing to catch the dawn train to Yokohama, where she is to make arrangements for her imminent voyage to America. The departure whistle is blasting, gates and coach doors are threatening to close, attendants are scurrying through the mist-filled half-light of the station scene, and within this atmosphere of general agitation, Yoko struggles to maintain her composure. Indeed, she passes through this turmoil "like a confident actress on the stage of some comedy."8 A young man is waiting for the woman with tickets to board the train. His name is Kotô, and, as a close friend of Yoko's fiancé (whose name is Kimura and who is already in the United States), Kotô has agreed to assist the woman in her final preparations for the trip abroad. Actually it seems that Yoko requires little help from such a man; beside her figure of assurance and grace, Kotô appears inexperienced and immature. He has purchased second-class tickets for the train, which annoys Yoko, who is accustomed to traveling first-class. They enter the assigned compartment, where by a startling coincidence Yoko encounters the shabby figure of her former husband, the writer Kibe Kokyô. After an exchange of nervous glances, Yoko settles into a seat, and, in the first of several flash-back sequences, the narrative turns to trace something of this woman's past history. Satsuki Yoko is the eldest daughter of a prominent Tokyo physician. She is twenty-five when the book begins (although in another reference to her skills as an "actress," we are told she can make herself look either five years older or younger than she really is 9 ). The Satsuki name is well-known in society circles; Mrs. Satsuki is especially active, for a time serving as vicepresident of the Women's Christian Alliance. We are told little about Yoko's childhood, although there are early hints of willfulness and great expectations. Once, when a violin instructor comments that her playing is "accomplished, but lacking genius" (p. 1 1 ) , the little girl purposefully walks to the window

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of the practice room, and hurls her instrument to the ground. Y o k o attended A k a s a k a G a k u i n , w h e r e she recalls being treated "like an animal without g e n d e r " (p. 58). It is a Christian school, and the strict officials harshly enforce a code of prayer, and suppress any expression of feminine feeling. At the age of fourteen, Y o k o is caught embroidering an obi during her Bible class, and accused by the instructor of making the item for a man. The incident outrages the girl, w h o within the year, as if to give substance to the false accusation, takes as a lover a m a n ten years older than herself. If is suggested that Y o k o ' s affections are not constant; this man soon dies under strange circumstances, and suicide is suspected. The girl, w e are told, far from feeling remorse, has her "instincts" awakened, and feels "like a tiger w h o first tastes b l o o d " (p. 59). A n d so at nineteen, w h e n she meets and hastily marries the writer, Kibe K o k y o , Y o k o has already " b e e n l o v e d " by a n u m b e r of m e n , and is " a w o m a n w i s e b e y o n d her y e a r s " (p. 12). Kibe is twenty-five and a man of some r e n o w n , w h o covered the Sino-Japanese War as a n e w s p a p e r correspondent, and is w e l c o m e d back h o m e as a hero. We k n o w , too, that this hero p o s s e s s e s " a pale face and a trembling poet's v o i c e " (p. 12), and that Yoko's mother as well has taken an interest in him. In fact, the s u d d e n romance and equally s u d d e n marriage between Y o k o and Kibe seems really to have been brokered by the perceived jealousy and opposition of Y o k o ' s mother. The Satsuki family does not attend the marriage ceremony, w h i c h takes place at Kibe's boarding-house room. In winning this man, Y o k o is also victorious over her mother. But her defiance has come at a price; Y o k o seems a w a r e that her " l o v e " for Kibe is too "artistic," full of calculation and contrivance, and o w n s to a feeling that will repeat itself throughout the book: " s h e w a s beginning to lose herself in a pitfall of her o w n making" (p. 13). Within w e e k s of the marriage, the romance is dead. Y o k o comes to see " a n o t h e r s i d e " to Kibe, an " e f f e m i n a t e sensitivi t y " coupled to " f o u l sexual habits" and a will to " s u b j u g a t e " her. The w o m a n admits she has been deceived. It w a s a " p e r -

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version of nature," ever to have seen in this man a character similar to her own (pp. 14-15). After two months, Yoko leaves Kibe, who is driven nearly insane, we are told, in his efforts to track his wife down. Months later, at the Satsuki home in Tokyo, Yoko gives birth to a daughter whom Mrs. Satsuki refuses to touch, and who is sent out to be raised by a wet-nurse. The child is Kibe's, but as if she is now willing to accept the role fate has assigned to her, Yoko perversely claims that she had gotten pregnant by another man. The scandals of the Satsuki family are only beginning. The father is found out in an affair with a "slutty woman," and an account of his dalliance appears in print. With the full support of the Women's Christian Alliance, Mrs. Satsuki and her three daughters flee to Sendai to escape this corruption. The Satsuki women are to live in the provinces for three years. The mother resumes her social work—she becomes an important figure in the local chapter of the Red Cross—and moves in a circle of "philanthropists, artists, and believers" (p. 25). But then another scandal breaks: a newspaper executive is accused of simultaneously having "illicit intimacy" with both Mrs. Satsuki and her eldest daughter. We are given to believe that Yoko, at least, is falsely charged. A young Christian named Kimura works tirelessly to clear the names of both women, but can win society's support only for Mrs. Satsuki. When the newspaper does print a retraction, it absolves only the mother from involvement in the affair. Yoko alone remains tied to the scandal. Despite the partial retraction, the Satsuki name has become too notorious for this small provincial town. It is decided that the women will move back to Tokyo. Within a year of the reunion there, both Dr. and Mrs. Satsuki will die of separate illnesses. On her deathbed the mother exacts a promise from Yoko: that she will marry Kimura, the Christian who had helped them in Sendai and who has since come to Tokyo to ask for Yoko's hand. Marriage to Kimura represents Yoko's last chance to regain respectability and to re-enter society proper. It will allow Mrs. Satsuki to die without shame, and Yoko's two younger

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sisters to grow with nothing to diminish their future prospects. Yoko accedes to her mother's dying request, though she knows the marriage cannot restore her innocence, nor make her over into someone "lily-white" like so many of her relatives and friends. And so the woman whom Kotô encounters at Shinbashi Station is indeed a woman with a past. Yoko herself pictures this innocent young friend of her fiancé as a kind of detective come to find her out, and attributes to him the power to "see through" her (p. 10). As though to go along with and even complicate this game of detection, Yoko plots a certain dramatic scene that will show Kotô something of herself, while uncovering something hidden within his own nature. In a rare passage in this book, whose point of view adheres so closely to the heroine, we follow Kotô up the steps toward Yoko's room at the old and musty Yokohama inn where they are to stay the night. All day she has feigned illness. He has been out conducting her travel business, and has returned to report on his success: Kotô struggled with the ill-fitting shôji and, sliding it back, w a s about to rush headlong into her room, w h e n suddenly he froze in utter astonishment at w h a y lay before him. The mingling smells of perfume and makeup and wine pressed in on him with a sultry warmth. The light w a s so dim that the corners of the room were invisible, but Kotô could see the voluptuous clothing of the w o m a n strewn carelessly about. Other objects lay cluttering the floor: a hat, artificial flowers, a feather boa, small boxes and the like— indeed, there w a s scarcely room to step. To one side, before the alcove, Yoko began to stir in her bedding of embroidered gunnai quilts. Her alluring negligee w a s visible, and, as she lifted her head on one elbow, she looked like some European courtesan. Her face glowed scarlet from the hot bath and the wine, and she looked up at Kotô with large, mysterious eyes. Beside her pillow there w a s a champagne bottle, properly set in a bucket of ice, and coil-

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ing about the half-drained glass, the delicate purse and the olive-colored luggage, like a snake of fire, was a red sash— a band of light. Yoko's ringed, marblelike fingers seemed to play with the tips of this glowing snake (p. 30).

Koto is not seduced, but the very sensuousness of the description suggests that the heroine has succeeded in her first objective: "Yoko could not resist using her charm to strip the manifold coverings from Koto's heart, to dig deep inside and expose the latent desire" (pp. 36-37). It is not my point here, in detailing the story of Aru Onna, to analyze a passage such as this one. But it should be said that as we move from one dramatic scene to another in this narrative full of apparent action and high moment, we are also moving into the consciousness of the heroine, and beyond her, into the mind of the narrator, a mind which seems to require the most extreme kinds of sensation in order to feel itself alive. Yoko passes the days remaining before the ship's departure in Tokyo. It is plain that after the deaths of the parents, the Satsuki household has been in decline. Mention is made of the greed of the relatives (Yoko will later refer to them as "that rapacious pack of low-lives" [p. 131]) who plunder the inheritance (p. 40). Some money is put aside for the education of the two younger sisters, but there is little to meet everyday expenses, and it is only Yoko's skill in management that has kept the three of them "stylishly poor." Aiko and Sadayo are to be left in the care of an aunt, and Yoko evidences concern about them, demanding that her adolescent sisters not be sent to Akasaka Gakuin, where her own experience had been so bitter. Nevertheless, Yoko's sense of responsibility goes little further. Of course her going abroad is dictated by circumstance, but Yoko sees nothing odd about leaving her house "in its final stage of dissolution," recalling that she has always felt estranged from those around her, "as though she were standing all alone, at the edge of a field which no one sees" (p. 42). And she has too a certain image to uphold. As a student, Yoko was a maverick,

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a girl whose "powerful individuality" attracted her classmates. She was idolized as a model of the new kind of woman portrayed in magazines like Kokumin Bungaku and Bungakkai, a bold, free-spirited woman capable of romantic love. Yoko seems dimly aware at this point that her destiny is somehow allied to this image, which has assumed a certain control over her life: Scornful of others and regarding herself with contempt, Yoko had unknowingly wandered d o w n strange paths, led on by some dark, unseen force, and in the end she began to run headlong. There w a s no one around to show her the w a y , no one to set her on the right path. A t times she thought she heard someone calling her to stop, but she knew at once that this w a s just a trick to lead her back to the old life of submission. A n d it w a s from this time that Yoko first thought that she should have been born in another country, where a woman could stand freely and walk side by side with a man (p. 42).

Scornful though she is of the society around her, Yoko does make one voluntary social call before her departure. She visits the Christian minister, Uchida, whom she has not seen in years. This man had shown a rare affection for Yoko as a young girl; the two would take quiet walks together, and once he told her that "besides God, you are my only traveling companion." But when Yoko married Kibe, Uchida is said to have raged like a "jealous, jilted lover" (p. 46). Since then, the two have not spoken. Yoko recalls that in their last conversation together Uchida talked a great deal about sin, and she wonders if she has come this time to be similarly chastised. At any event, Uchida refuses to see her. As Yoko leaves the house, she trips along the stone path, and remembers having tripped at the same place years before. She falls into a state of trance, her nose begins to bleed, and, taking out a mirror to straighten herself, she discovers it has broken in two. Images of her past float up to confound her sense of what is present, and her future seems blighted by the bad travel omen of the broken mirror. Yoko is suddenly gripped by a desire to see her daughter at least once

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before she leaves Japan. She begins to move in a daze toward the nurse's home, but when it is within sight, she stops. She is paralyzed by her reflection in a pond beside the house, a reflection, as she sees it, of " a person who has neither a past nor a future" (p. 53). That evening relatives and some of her mother's friends gather for the farewell dinner. Yoko is advised to set a good example for her sisters, and is congratulated again on her engagement to Kimura, who is sure to become "a first-rate businessman" and what is more, a patriot, who in amassing a great fortune will lead the country along God's chosen path. The company of these people is unpleasant for Yoko. As they are about to leave, and for one last time to pray over her, Yoko voices her disgust: "Really I must beg you not to waste your prayers on someone like myself" (p. 62). When they are gone, Yoko puts her sisters to bed. Then gazing forlornly out onto the empty streets, Yoko becomes dizzy, and again her nose begins to bleed. Chapter 9 begins on the deck of the ship; the transition here is abrupt, as will be the transition from ship back to land in chapter 22. Both ends of this voyage are mediated by a kind of dream sequence—in fact Yoko will describe her whole time at sea as passing "like a single uninterrupted dream" (p. 198). The very suddenness of these transitions seems to clarify our sense that the narrative is moving abruptly between worlds. On deck we encounter a near replication of the Shinbashi Station scene: here it is the bustle of sailors and the emotional congestion created by tearful well-wishers which test Yoko's composure. There is another parallel: by "coincidence" Yoko meets on the ship a figure out of her past, even as she had met Kibe in the second-class train compartment. And yet while Kibe was a verifiable part of her life, this man, who has no name, appears more like a spirit embodied to invade it: Just then she heard someone call out her name and felt a hand on her shoulder. Turning, she found herself facing a

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stranger. He was young and his eyes were bloodshot—he reeked of cheap liquor. Before Yoko had time to pull away, this stranger had a firm hold on her. "Don't you remember me, Yoko? You are my life. . . . my life" (p. 69). This figure screams like a m a d m a n as he is dragged a w a y by one of the ship's officers. Y o k o never will identify him, although she speculates that he m a y be one of those m a n y faceless m e n w h o h a v e p a s s e d in and out of her life. But n o w the stranger totally c o n s u m e s her interest. A s the ship m o v e s a w a y f r o m the pier, it is on this "crouching black speck of a drunkard" that her eyes focus "with fanatical intensity" (p. 72). Yoko can see nothing else on shore, yet she m a n a g e s to detect blood on the y o u n g man's arm. Wandering n o w through her thoughts "like a s l e e p w a l k e r , " the heroine is d r a w n back to the scene on the deck w h e n the stranger first assailed her. But then her vision reveals another figure: the tanned, broad-shouldered sailor w h o s a v e d her and dragged the stranger a w a y . S u d d e n l y Y o k o ' s reverie is broken, and she recognizes this sailor, standing beside her on the deck. His name is Kurachi, a n d he is the purser of the ship. Her image has become a reality, a n d Y o k o gazes at the man " a s E v e did on first seeing A d a m " (p. 75). S h e is clearly agitated by this encounter. Accustomed to control in her dealings with men, Yoko notices n o w that her nerves are "racing fiercely." E v e n w h e n she tries to escape to her cabin, it is the purser w h o courteously leads her b e l o w . Y o k o m u s t follow this broad-shouldered figure, smelling of cigars and fine liquor, d o w n the narrow corridor leading to her berth. Finally she takes r e f u g e inside: The room felt sodden to her—it had been raining all day—and the air seemed heavy, clotted with a steamy heat. A pungent smell, very western and characteristic of a steamship such as this, lingered. It was all quite oppressive. She could feel the perspiration ooze beneath her clothing and drip down her chest and back. As she filled the basin with water and began to lay out the narrow cot,

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she looked about the cluttered room, feeling smothered by the stifling accumulation of luggage and small boxes. She began to undo her sash (p. 79).

For three days Yoko secludes herself in this cabin. In almost continuous revery, she gazes out the porthole, and sees the phantoms of her past, images of her lost innocence and the sources of her shame, merge with the dense grey mists outside. At first this forced isolation seems therapeutic: "the blood in her veins felt thinner and circulated smoothly, aided perhaps by a certain power emanating from the sea, which seemed to flow to every part of her body and made her feel vital, eager to act." But a sense of enclosure soon reasserts itself, as this new-found vitality finds no outlet. The unused energy "seized her mind, where it was transformed into a kind of melancholy" (pp. 81-82). Yoko's thoughts increasingly darken. Vertigo controls her movements through the room. She wonders if she has not been "cursed by fate," diverted from the right path and mocked by a society that records her every wrong step: She realized she could rely on no one and so was forced to live on her instincts. A n d , as though for the first time, Yoko understood herself and her relations to the world around her. She saw that she was standing at the cliff-edge, alone, cut off from even those w h o once were closest to her. Only her engagement to Kimura kept Yoko from falling (p. 85).

After three days of confinement, Yoko decides to investigate the floating society of the ship. When she enters the dining room for the first time, all eyes turn to her. Yoko takes satisfaction in the "disturbance" her presence brings to the room. Invited to the captain's table, Yoko knows that even as the men speak of the Monroe Doctrine and other serious matters, they are really vying to impress her. She seems to be the only young woman aboard, although under the "icy stare" of the haughty matron, Mrs. Tagawa, Yoko detects a rival. As a respected friend

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of the Satsukis, Mrs. Tagawa had been asked to watch over Yoko's behavior en route. This woman is traveling with her husband, but takes obvious pleasure in being surrounded by so many men. Mrs. Tagawa will later tease Yoko with stories of how the purser, in particular, has been concerned for her welfare. Nevertheless, it is the younger woman with the dark past who becomes the center of attention. It is her bright conversation and stylish dress that provide "fresh stimuli" for the bored passengers and the crewmen alike. The heroine's depth and "complexity" allow her to appear by turns as an "elegant lady of reserve and refinement," a "youthful and urbane dilettante," or again as "an adventuress liberated from social conventions" (p. 109). Her appeal seems universal; even children, we are told, flock to Yoko. Only Mrs. Tagawa and her immediate circle of sycophants are hardened by jealousy against her. Yet the heroine herself remains bored. Despite the constant changes she notices in the sea and sky, Yoko is restless with the "dead stares" of the "unpoetic" passengers. Although the other travelers of her class find the sailors "audacious" and somewhat threatening, Yoko finds these men, and especially the purser, to be the most interesting people on board. Waiting for some event to occur and bring excitement into her life, Yoko realizes that she is preparing herself for some sort of danger. Once, she descends into the sailors' sleeping quarters to comfort an old man whose leg she had seen crushed in an accident on deck. The other passengers regard these quarters as being "more dangerous than the boiler room" (p. 118), and as Yoko enters, she is in fact assaulted by the "outrageous obscenities" of the leering men. Yoko also escapes her feelings of boredom in reverie. She describes this mental movement as a "precipitous fall into a mysterious world." Once, gazing beyond the deck rail at night, Yoko speaks of a "musical state of consciousness." She seems to hear a solemn chorus rise from the sea, and she loses herself to melancholy thoughts of death. But suddenly, again, the pur-

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ser passes into view, and the harmony of her revery turns to dissonance: Her eyes were opened wide, yet she remained in a trance. From the instant she became aware of the purser's presence, the sound of the w a v e s lost its sweet music and began to encircle the ship, and to beat against it in a crazed cacophony. Yoko dimly perceived that she w a s losing herself, that she no longer knew where she w a s , could no longer demarcate the borders of reality, (p. 104)

From this point Kurachi seems to occupy her thoughts, even though he gives her no encouragement, remaining strangely aloof, a figure of "insolent glances" and a "diabolic" expression. Yet beneath this surface manner, Yoko imagines the existence of quite another man: "she believed a fierce desire burned beneath that show of masculine indifference" (p. 106). On the tenth day at sea, the shadow of the Oregon coastline appears. Yoko begins to panic, as though the time to live adventurously were running out. We notice that her views of the land are uniformly bleak. She sees poison in the green of the Oregon pines (p. 181), and the coast itself appears to her either "filthy" (p. 117) or "monotonous" (p. 119). Despite her youthful longing to travel as a journalist to America, and her later informed belief that a woman like herself would be freer there, when Yoko actually sees land, she is miserable, "as if something blotted from her mind had suddenly appeared." Her past, in the figure of Kimura, is waiting there. And in desperation she tells herself: "No. No matter what might happen, I could not bear to live with Kimura. I'd rather return to Tokyo" (p. 117). Finally, when the voyage seems to Yoko nearly at an end, Kurachi shows his "other side." Through a wealthy young student named Oka, who has adopted Yoko as a kind of older sister, she learns that the purser has a "request" to make of her. It is early morning when Oka informs her of this. Indignant that the purser will not come himself to explain the nature of his

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request, Y o k o rushes d o w n the "dim, dark corridor" toward his room, and enters without knocking. Inside she realizes: "it is too late for any regrets." Defiantly, Yoko demands to know what Kurachi wishes of her, but she senses that the man sees through her motive in coming. H e r e y e s search the room. O n top of the dresser she sees a photograph, a picture of an attractive w o m a n , her hair arranged as though she had once been a geisha, and three small girls. Y o k o glares at the photograph, " a s if it w e r e her bitter e n e m y . " At the next moment Kurachi m o v e s toward her, and s h e is being embraced. The English w o r d " a s s a u l t " appears twice in this description of the first love scene, and there are further suggestions of violence. The purser's breath "strikes" Y o k o ' s cheeks like hail; " f l a m e s of d e s i r e " burn through the heroine's veins (pp. 1 2 5 - 2 6 ) . Yoko's first conscious thought is that the pleasure she craves is fraught with danger: " Y o k o could not help feeling that she w a s at the e d g e of a frightening abyss, that her instincts had d r a w n her there and that she w a s about to l e a p " (p. 129). She is likened to " a patient on m o r p h i n e " and is subject to strange sensations: she seems to feel colors inside her nerves. A n d Yoko acknowledges that this n e w adventure has multiplied her sense of reality. It confirms her apprehension that "she had been born at the w r o n g time, the w r o n g p l a c e , " and that there are other w o r l d s t o w a r d which she is m o v i n g recklessly. The events which follow the embrace in Kurachi's room are as jumbled a n d disorderly as the heroine's mental state. Time follows n o discernible sequence. Y o k o "loses her equilibrium" (p. 140), as a " w h i r l w i n d of p a s s i o n " (p. 138) s w e e p s through her mind. " C h a s m s " are said to o p e n u p between past and present. Y o k o seems haunted n o w b y the precarious position of the w o m a n in love. Her o w n past behavior appears to h a v e been safer. With Kibe a n d the others her love had been "calc u l a t i n g . " S h e had b e h a v e d "coolly, like a critic," aware that m a n is an e n e m y out to enslave a w o m a n . Y o k o ' s constant fear of being " s h a c k l e d " h a d m a d e her a "cruel s p i d e r " (p. 1 3 1 ) en-

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trapping all in her web. But now, with Kurachi, she has become the captured prey. And in this situation, her fear of abandonment turns her vision black. Yoko threatens suicide should the man in his nonchalance part with her. Returning to Kurachi's room, nearly hysterical, she reaches for the picture of his wife and children, and rips it to pieces. And when the purser finally confesses his love for her, a love he says he has felt since the boat left Yokohama, her feelings flash from one radical extreme to the other. Yoko is in "ecstasy" (p. 148). She "chews on" and "drinks d o w n " his long-awaited words, aware perhaps that she has lived up to the image she inspired in her classmates at Akasaka Gakuin. For once in her life, she is possessed by a grand passion. Meanwhile, Kimura is waiting anxiously in Seattle. When the ship docks, Mrs. Tagawa and the other passengers disembark, but Yoko remains on board. She and the purser, in collusion with the ship's doctor, have plotted a scheme: Yoko is to feign illness and to return to Tokyo. (It should be noted that the heroine claims that she has suffered real abdominal pain since leaving Yokohama.) Mrs. Tagawa, who has been enraged since she first "intuited" the illicit affair, knows the illness to be a ruse. Kurachi himself has always been discreet, but Yoko seems to flaunt her "new life" before the jealous matron. Tagawa is only too eager to publicize this scandal, and the first to learn of it is Yoko's fiance. But Kimura is undismayed. Day after day, as long as the ship remains in port, he visits Yoko and almost willingly subjects himself to abuse: Kimura was not a worldly man, not the sort clever enough to wash his hands of Yoko upon hearing such rumors about her. Gossip of this kind had been circulating since he first came to know her, yet Kimura always managed to dismiss it. "I am aware of the woman's faults and weaknesses," he would say. "I've known for some time about her illegitimate child, for instance. But as a Christian I must do all in my power to save Yoko. Just imagine such

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a woman should she reform her ways. What an ideal spouse she would make." . . . It was this saintly character of his, this provincial earnestness, that made Yoko despise the man. (p. 154)

As if Yoko's shabby treatment and Mrs. Tagawa's seamy tales were not enough, Kimura receives a letter from Koto, the young man whose eyes were opened at the Yokohama inn. Koto warns his friend: " A s you've often said, Yoko is a person of extraordinary gifts. But I wonder if she isn't also somehow deformed?" And then he adds a statement which seems to identify a guiding motive of the whole narrative: "I will be honest. I loathe her type, and yet am powerfully attracted to her. I must get to the heart of this contradiction" (p. 166). Yoko will claim that she is at times moved by Kimura's petitions and that, at any rate, his sincerity points up the meanness of her own "play-acting." But she is about to make the most momentous decision of her life, and Yoko clearly foresees the turmoil ahead in choosing passion over security. And she seems anxious to make some scapegoat pay now for the torment she fears she one day must endure. Consequently, Kimura's personal qualities are blurred. He comes to represent much more than he is: Yoko recalled a story she had heard about Cleopatra. Oppressed by fate, the Queen resolved to take her life, but before doing so summoned a number of servants and had them first become the victims of the snake. According to the legend, Cleopatra looked on unmoved as these innocents writhed in their death-agony. Yoko looked on Kimura in a similar way, and decided to avenge on him all the curses of her past. The tyranny of her mother, the pressure of her relatives, the watchfulness of society, the desires of men, the coyness of women, Yoko made Kimura stand for all of these—her enemies—and for him she calculated all the cruelties a woman's heart can devise. (P- ! 7 2 )

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So startling are the events which have suddenly redirected the course of her life, that Yoko feels as if she were in a " p l a y " (p. 184), or again, as though she were absorbed in some novel (p. 191). She admits to a certain loss of control. If Kimura is being treated like a pawn, so is her own fate being "callously manipulated by a large hand" (p. 185). Yoko acknowledges that she is a " w o m a n cursed from my birth," and seems conditioned to expect misfortune. What she demands of life, then, is not ease or happiness, but only consciousness. It is all a matter of vision: "seeing to the end, with eyes opened and unflinching, what God will do with someone like myself" (p. 186). The sequence tracing Yoko's ocean passage ends, as it began, with a kind of nightmare. O n the night before the ship is to leave Seattle and return to Japan, Yoko has a dream. It has been my purpose here only to recount, and not overly to interpret, the details of the story, but it should be said that this dream foreshadows the terror and abstraction which dominate the second half of the book. It is a dream about a killing. A s we see, the real victim is not the murdered man, but the murderess w h o must live with the guilt of her deed. Liberated from society, possessed of a grand passion, the heroine still is not free: Toward the middle of the night, Yoko had a horrible dream. The details were unclear, but she knew that she had killed someone, even though she had been warned not to kill. There was a man's grotesque face (one of the eyes w a s above the eyebrow), and dark blood was streaming d o w n it. The man was dead, that was obvious, yet in death he continued to grin in the most ghastly way. A n d then he spoke. There was almost laughter in his voice as he repeated the words: "Kimura. . . . Kimura. . . ." At first the voice was faint, but gradually it swelled, and the repetitions came faster, until the numberless repetitions of this name came to entangle and constrict Yoko. Desperately she tried to break free and escape, but she could not move. Her arms and legs were bound:

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With a start Yoko opened her eyes to the darkness and shivered in the cold evening air. The aftermath of this awful nightmare remained to pound fiercely in her chest. Quivering and feeling terrified, Yoko groped in the dark to reach and to touch her lover. She called to him in a trembling voice, but he would not be roused from his deep sleep. The eeriness of this night welled up all the more inside her, and now she began to shake the man, but to no avail (pp. 192-93). A s chapter 22 b e g i n s , the lovers are already in J a p a n . This s u d d e n relocation, m a d e w i t h o u t m e n t i o n of the return v o y a g e , is still a n o t h e r a n d p e r h a p s the most dramatic instance of

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the abruptness w h i c h characterizes the m o v e m e n t of the w h o l e narrative. The transition f r o m sea to land is mediated by a mini m u m of descriptive detail, and this seems to parallel the heroine's o w n sense that the distance she has covered is only partly real: " Y o k o looked on this long sea v o y a g e as though it w e r e a single, uninterrupted dream. A n d it also seemed to her that the m a r v e l o u s changes w r o u g h t during this long trip had actually affected another, not h e r s e l f " (p. 198). The couple has arrived in Y o k o h a m a — a month has p a s s e d since the ship's departure from this port city. Her relatives, Yoko believes, must already k n o w the reasons for her return. She calls Koto a n d asks him to m a k e reservations at the Sokakukan, a T o k y o inn operated by a friend of Kurachi. For a f e w d a y s the couple will remain in Y o k o h a m a , and it is here that Yoko, paging carelessly through a n e w s p a p e r in their shabby hotel room, discovers the following headline on the third p a g e of the Hosho Shinpd: G R E A T S C A N D A L A B O A R D V E S S E L OF M A J O R SHIPPING L I N E

Illicit L o v e b e t w e e n Purser and Female Passenger Former Wife of Kibe K o k y o Involved (pp. 2 0 2 - 3 ) The article d u l y notes that the w o m a n in this affair has once been divorced, and that she w a s engaged to be married in America. It blames the purser of the ship for his "irresponsibili t y " and d e m a n d s s o m e sign of " r e p e n t a n c e , " not only f r o m the illicit lovers, but f r o m the shipping c o m p a n y as well. For Y o k o , there can be n o doubt that Mrs. T a g a w a is behind all of this—the T a g a w a family has financial interests in the Hosho Shinpd. Y o k o has returned, then, to w h a t will p r o v e a more intense social hostility than she had ever encountered before. Walking aimlessly through the streets of Y o k o h a m a , Y o k o imagines that every passerby is staring at her and identifying her as the w o m a n of the article. The heroine w a l k s nervously n o w , no longer a " c o n f i d e n t actress on the stage of some come d y , " and she is desperate for a place to hide.

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It is early November w h e n the couple moves to their temporary refuge in Tokyo. The proprietress of the Sokakukan is an attractive geisha w h o has a wealthy patron. The proprietress is slightly older than Yoko, and over the years has been Kurachi's friend. Her urbanity and good sense quickly disarm Yoko's jealousy, and for a time the two women become quite close. Led to her rooms on the second floor, Yoko finds them tastefully appointed, fragrant and warm. From the street outside she hears the sound of stringed instruments and the patter of sandals, geisha passing to and from their assignments. For the first time in weeks Yoko has sufficient hot water to thoroughly wash her hair. Her rather stunning western clothes are put aside, and, at the proprietress' suggestion, Yoko adopts a quieter style of dress. Secure within this "healthy r e f u g e " (p. 210), protected also by her " n e w appearance," the heroine enjoys a rare, and short-lived, period of comfort. Nevertheless, w e are given to believe that Yoko's security is fragile, a matter of surface appearances, and that in any case it is only a part of what she desires. This becomes readily apparent w h e n she ventures out to visit her daughter. The nurse w h o cares for the girl is one of the f e w people w h o have not already turned against Yoko. To the heroine, the nurse and Sadako appear to be enjoying an idyllic domesticity, but she knows too that her o w n needs are too complicated to embrace such a life wholeheartedly: She thought of the tranquil life she might enjoy, living with the old w o m a n and her daughter. A life relaxed and gentle, wrapped in pure love, could not but appeal to Yoko. Especially w h e n she saw the two of them before her, living modestly and making no demands, Yoko's heart almost unconsciously inclined to be with them. Yet for all that, a single thought of her lover and instantly her heart would race. A n d she would then ask herself: what good is a peaceful life if one must live as though dead? What good is pure love if one must sacrifice extremes of feeling? Such interrogation aroused in Yoko powerful, irresistible feelings. Her heart w a s beset by two

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strange and contradictory impulses. She yearned for both tranquility and excitement . . . often she gave evidence of this duality in her nature. A t times she could be wholly overwhelmed by sentiment and break into tears. Other times she could be savagely cruel. Even she suspected that two persons might be dwelling inside her. Yoko w a s occasionally disquieted by this fact, although as often it served as a source of pride, (pp. 2 1 6 - 1 7 )

In a sense, the second half of Aru Onna examines the increasingly unequal struggle between these two "impulses" in the heroine. It is the growing dominance of Yoko's craving for "excitement" and radical sensations that nearly banishes tranquility—and any vestiges of society—from the fictional scene. Yoko's advice to her sisters, who have suffered the effects of the scandal at their boarding school, is simply to dismiss idle rumors and to "turn away from outsiders" (p. 223), as she herself has done. Later the heroine will permit the girls to enter that violent circle of life she has drawn around herself and Kurachi. Yet even her sisters seem like outsiders, and Yoko comes to realize that the power of love can be exclusionary: "The two of them, alone, were the whole world" (p. 238); "in the whole world, they alone existed" (p. 296). Increasingly the plot traces the inner turns of the heroine's agitated consciousness, and so it becomes more and more difficult to merely describe the "action" that transpires. Even Yoko's ongoing struggle to decisively win Kurachi away from his wife and children is told with close attention to the debilitating emotional effect of this struggle: Until she possessed incontestable proof that her lover wholly belonged to her, Yoko lived in torment night and day, scourged by the cruel power of love . . . and h o w , she came to wonder, had she lost all assurance and sense of herself? (p. 236)

At times, Yoko realizes that their relationship might suffocate in total isolation ("They could no longer live like hermits, feeding on air" [p. 260]), yet the lovers move from their

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r e f u g e at the S o k a k u k a n to another, which is even further rem o v e d f r o m contact with other people. This detached house, at the back of a rose garden, is s h r o u d e d by tall, dense cedars " w h i c h block out the s u n l i g h t , " and the m o v e there is made in an embarrassing and n e r v o u s secrecy (the scene is translated in the Introduction). But by this time Y o k o appears powerless to alter their situation: " S h e had become addicted to pleasure . . . anything less than ecstasy w a s hateful to h e r . " A s long as she remains attractive to her lover, Y o k o seems willing to be separated f r o m the w o r l d outside: Yoko snuggled against Kurachi and said, "Today let's play a game: 'Spy on the World.' It will be amusing, you'll see". . . . They were like captives on a desert island, or like prisoners confined behind high walls, for whom even the dullest scrap of business mail provides an unimaginable recreation. As they read such items, they heaped abuse on the hackneyed phrases and the formalities they encountered. (p. 254) Because of the physical isolation and the focus of narrative attention on states of mind, scarcely any " e v e n t s " take place. The p r e s s u r e of the reported scandal has led the shipping comp a n y to fire Kurachi. Too, Y o k o gains assurance that she will not be merely a kept mistress; for her sake Kurachi promises to leave his w i f e and children. A n d then there are Kimura's transoceanic entreaties and expressions of faith: No matter what mistakes you have made, I believe through the Lord Jesus that I have the forbearance to forgive and understand, (p. 269) I wait for some message from you like an announcement of salvation. It is as though I were reading a novel—I daydream and picture to myself how thankful and joyous I will be when it arrives, (p. 273) K i m u r a explains that he is prepared to share all of her sadness and pain, inspired as he is by T e d d y Roosevelt's notion of " t h e strenuous l i f e . " M o r e o v e r he recommends that Y o k o read Tolstoy's Resurrection, w h e r e she will come to see "that w e are all

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equally sinners before G o d . " Yoko's response to all of this is a petition for a monthly allowance. She knows of course that without a job it will be impossible for Kurachi to support them. Moreover, since her two sisters have come to live at the house, Kurachi has discreetly taken a room outside, but this only adds to their expenses. And so Yoko decides to bilk the naive Kimura. Somehow she knows that her duplicity is wrong, and even registers a certain surprise at how low she has fallen in her efforts to keep her love affair alive. Almost imperceptibly time passes—once, while walking through their neighborhood, the lovers see a Noh performance and only then realize it must be Sunday. Their separation from the day-to-day world is nearly complete, but this makes it all the more necessary for their private world to provide continuous excitement. And the mere pleasure of each other's company, or even love-making, does not seem to provide sufficient stimulation. Yoko, at least, must now imagine crises and invent scenarios which, however painful, provide unusual and powerful sensations: Nothing could separate her from Kurachi. A n y such parting would be followed, she knew, by her suicide. She would cling to him; the violence of her tenacity would have her sink teeth into his chest if need be. These melancholy thoughts baited her and drew her on and seemed inexhaustible. (p. 300)

From this point the narrative will court danger more or less openly. Looking for a new occupation, not an easy task for a man in his marked position, Kurachi becomes deeply involved in an international spy ring (his contact now is only with the extremes of society: diplomats in horse-drawn carriages or derelicts). Curiously, Yoko's apprehension about Kurachi's criminal involvement is overcome by a stronger feeling: but more compelling than fear w a s the desire to satisfy the cravings of her heart. If for her sake he should fall into depravity and disgrace, perhaps only then would her insati-

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able desire have proof of his love and be quieted. Only by instigating Kurachi to commit some extreme action, Yoko felt, could the bond between them grow stronger, (p. 301)

Indeed, Yoko derives an almost sexual satisfaction from this proximity to danger: ". . . she had made of Kurachi a branded criminal, and, aware that he was cut off from the outside world and normal society, Yoko was in ecstasy" (pp. 304-5). The heroine's arch fear is really that her desire will be betrayed, that life will become "mediocre," as the "white heat" fades from their relationship. And so she idealizes the experience on the ship, and as an actual escape from the daily round, initiates "love excursions" to a nearby seaside resort. Yoko knows that these escapes are not exactly natural; her desires are now being mediated by the contrivances of her mind: Pleasure was no longer simple: now it was followed by an unhealthy pain. This complexity drove her nearly to despair, and to defeat it, she had recourse to a number of unnatural stratagems by which she took leave of the present, to dwell in a simple, imaginary world of unalloyed pleasure, a world of the past and of illusion, (p. 330)

The "love adventures" continue, although Yoko's "paradisaic dissipations" are now being paid for with "a deathlike lassitude." These excesses, opening up new worlds of feeling and sensation, leave in their aftermath only a sense of emptiness, the " v o i d " or else "bottomless despair" (p. 320). There are physical changes in the heroine's appearance: purple lines appear around her eyes, her face becomes more angular and gaunt. Yoko must resort to elaborate makeup techniques to "restore" her former appearance. It is almost spring. Everywhere else there are indications of natural growth, of fullness and blossoming. Yoko's own sister Aiko, now sixteen, has become an attractive woman. But for the heroine there is only a foreshadowing of the dark road that lies before her: "for Yoko alone did the spring bring decay" (p. 330). This juxtaposition of springtime and decay suggests that

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there is something unnatural about the heroine—as Koto had put it, "something deformed." Yoko's attacks against society, which led to her isolation, have largely given way to her attack against nature itself—against normal bodily and mental processes—and this results in pain and personal destruction. From this point (roughly chapter 36) to the end, the narrative pursues Yoko's downward fall into diseases of both body and mind. Hysterical symptoms figure centrally in this account. The "tears of melancholia" and "convulsive movements" are the emotional analogue to the physical decay of the heroine. And there are only brief periods when these symptoms are arrested. Once, visiting Kamakura with her lover, Yoko stands by the shore and for a moment seems relieved of her misery. She recalls the thrill of her life at sea, a passion for which she would have welcomed a romantic death: "Oh how I long to be at sea again." " A n d what would that mean to you? What would you do then?" Kurachi's tone suggested that his own life at sea was now quite distant. "Just to set out to sea again. To suddenly and recklessly be blown by the wind, to rock with the great cresting waves. Often I imagine the ship imperiled, about to capsize, only to right itself and surge past the danger. Whenever I have such thoughts, my heart beats wildly, and I long to be at sea. I loathe being here. I find it unbearable." Saying this, Yoko stabbed the white sand with the tip of her parasol. "It was a cold night. I was standing, lost in thought, gazing over the rail. Then I noticed you coming toward me. You were with Oka, and there was a lamp in your hand. It is all so clear to me now. I remember hearing strange music, sounds one never hears on land. It was the music, the voices, of the sea. Those voices—what did they mean?" "Voices?" Kurachi faced Yoko, utterly bewildered. "The voices of the sea. As though they were beckoning. . . ." "You didn't really hear anything, you know."

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"But I did. That night I heard them. Of course I've never heard them since—the land is too shallow to contain them." "I lived many years at sea, yet I never heard the sounds you describe." "Perhaps your ears are not attuned to their music. I tell you I heard voices that night. It was extraordinary. I felt I should join them. . . . those voices, tens of millions of them, gathered in chorus at the ocean bottom, every faint note that rose echoing toward death" (pp. 340-41)

Despairingly now she realizes that her "grand passion" is a distant and perhaps unrecoverable dream. And as if to underscore her entrapment in a closed circle of decay and corruption, Yoko for a second time encounters Kibe, her former husband and the once famous writer who is now steadily on the decline. But at this chance meeting, she seems to recognize that their stations in life are now rather similar. He is not so much a harbinger of the fate which awaits her, as a mirror image of what she has become. Returning to Tokyo, the heroine's life becomes increasingly a matter of pain. Kurachi's business keeps him away from the house for longer periods of time, and when he is around, Yoko imagines that he is now interested in her sister, Aiko. The heroine has meanwhile been suffering intense abdominal pain. When she is examined, the doctor urges her to have an operation on her diseased uterus. But Yoko refuses treatment; she will not leave the house and allow Kurachi and Aiko to betray her. And she is of course still fearful that Kurachi will one day return to his wife. Quarreling now is almost constant, and Yoko's hysterical outbursts seem one means for her to cope with "pent-up anger." Once she inserts blades of grass beneath her nails. And in another startling scene, Yoko wanders through the streets of the city in a fear-inspired trance, searching for her vanished lover (pp. 362-69). Throughout the book, Yoko has spoken frequently of death, but here the narrative exhaustively probes the turns of a suicidal mind.

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Koto has been observing Yoko's degeneration at some distance. He remains of course loyal to his friend in America, and has repeatedly remonstrated with the heroine as regards her shameful treatment of Kimura. Throughout the book, he has figured as something of a gadfly to Yoko's conscience. Again at this late point in the story, and with a new tone of compassion for her sufferings, Koto appeals to the heroine to change her life, though he seems to know this may already be too late: I'll grant that social relations are not without difficulties. Especially in your case they seem quite complex. But must it be this way? You see, I believe that one should always act morally, out of some sense of virtue, doing what is within one's powers with a conscience clear as the sun . . . still, I realize that the age of conscience and virtue may already have passed, (pp. 383-84) Commenting on the harmful effects of Yoko's behavior on her sisters, Koto adds: "There comes a time in every person's life when confusion must cease, and things must be put in order" (p. 386). Yoko acknowledges that there is sense in what the young man says, but that it no longer applies to her. In Koto's very presence, she flies into a rage with her sisters and is especially harsh with the younger Sadayo. Immediately thereafter Sadayo takes to bed with a burning fever. She is diagnosed as having intestinal typhoid and is taken to the hospital. The sister's illness appears as a sign: "she was to be a sacrifice to Yoko's own cursed disease" (p. 392). The heroine becomes terrified that some sort of "divine retribution" has begun. There are now suggestions that she is willing to repent. Yoko decides to nurse her sister back to health. " 'It was my fault she came to the hospital,' Yoko thought, 'and now because of me she'll recover. Perhaps with this my life will be renewed' " (p. 412). Still, even this decent behavior, inspired by a sense of responsibility and conscience, only seems to exacerbate the heroine's own "disease." Nursing Sadayo day and night at the hospital, Yoko has of course left Aiko home alone with Kura-

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chi. The pain in her abdomen grows more and more severe. A n d perhaps most seriously, she seems to be losing her mental balance: For more than ten days now Yoko had nursed her sister, not once undoing her obi, unable to distinguish between day and night. Occasionally vertigo would overcome her. She was subject to weird hallucinations; once she saw her head detached from her body, floating about in the air. Her nerves were tense and tightly strung. All sounds and colors suffered radical distortion as they touched her senses, (p. 391)

In the grip of a succession of hysterical attacks, Yoko will assault visitors to the hospital, and once, the dying sister herself is attacked. The heroine speaks distantly of " e m p t y " or " u n speakable" worlds into which she has fallen. In this vacancy of mind, again she contemplates suicide, this time coolly cataloguing the methods available to her: the drug vial, the nurse's long hat pin, the girder in the washroom, the train whistle in the distance, the third story w i n d o w , even her obi (p. 421). Indeed, what w e know of the fictional setting is now almost wholly a function of Yoko's obsessions. At certain conscious moments Yoko sees the harsh reality of her decline, and even works to isolate a cause: " s h e should not have been born w h e n she was; she did not belong in Japan. Her pride made her feel that she w a s a queen, sent down by heaven, but at the wrong time and place" (p. 424). Finally the disease in Yoko's abdomen requires attention. Yoko submits to an operation, which she is told is usually routine. Since Sadayo remains hospitalized and close to death, Yoko chooses a "third class hospital," to save money for her sister's treatment. A s she rides there and for a last time passes through the Tokyo streets, Yoko sees her old family home. In the very next scene, she is inside one of the many sinister rooms which seem so central in the preparation of this woman's fall:

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The heroine waits for her operation. Meanwhile, Kurachi has had to flee the city, since the spy ring has been uncovered, and he is now wanted by the police. (The newspaper article which reports this scandal adds that the fugitive is a man with two kept mistresses.) Aiko will occasionally visit the hospital, but Yoko is mostly alone to think about the death she is sure awaits her: Slowly the moonlight intensified; in the street the lamps were lit. Across the roofs which spread before her eyes blew the smoke of kitchen fires, the fumes of mosquito smokers flowing like water and disappearing into the sky. Her room seemed surrounded by the clatter of sandals, horse-drawn carriages, steam whistles, and raucous mongering . . . as usual at this time of day, the light in her room was turned on. All w a s in order. A n d in this perfectly ordinary place, death was crawling toward her. (p. 434)

On the night before her surgery, Yoko dictates to the maid a number of farewell letters. To Kurachi she writes: "I love you unto death. But I know now, after seeing death, that we were wrong. You probably will not understand. I have no regrets. . . ." Similarly cryptic notes are intended for Kimura, Koto, Uchida, Kibe (finally telling him that he is the father of Sadako), and her two sisters. But on the morning of the operation, Yoko's feelings of resignation are gone. She rages as the attendants are about to take her away: " 'I want to live, to live. . . . murderers.' With all her strength Yoko resisted. She fought the doctor, the drugs, fate itself. Ceaselessly she struggled" (P- 449)-

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Initially the operation appears successful, and Yoko moves toward recovery. Then there is one last abrupt turn in the narrative—at the e n d there is the same high drama that marked the heroine's turbulent life. Yoko's death, we see, will be neither peaceful nor ordinary. In fact it will be the occasion for the most extreme feelings of her life: Three days had passed since the operation. Her condition w a s steadily improving when, on the third night, a violent change occurred. Erupting with the violent showers on a night that was to be beset by storms, fever and pain flashed agonizingly through her body. (p. 449)

Yoko longs to see Kurachi, though she knows this to be impossible. She is alone but for the maid w h o m she n o w orders to b u r n the farewell notes. Yoko wishes nothing of herself to survive her death. Only nature, in its o w n radical and threatening phase, seems companion to her now: "The lightning which streaked the sky outwardly embodied the pain she felt w i t h i n " (p. 450). There will be a few last thoughts of her daughter—should something h a p p e n to the nurse, she wonders, w h a t will become of Sadako? N o w that the letters are destroyed, Kibe may never learn that she is his child. Yoko thinks of Uchida, the Christian minister—perhaps he will care for Sadako, even as he once held affection for the child she herself once was. Unexpectedly Koto arrives at Yoko's bedside, and agrees to convey to the minister her urgent request for a final meeting. The storms of the night pass, and in the morning it is clear. But Uchida has not come, and, as Aru Onna ends, the heroine is still crying out in pain, "as if her soul were being strangled" (P- 453)Completed in 1919, Aru Onna brought Arishima no significant literary recognition. When he died by his own hand in 1923, he was p e r h a p s best k n o w n as a writer of good family w h o

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documented his sympathy for the disenfranchised in a series of essays, culminating with the famous "Sengen Hitotsu" (A Declaration, 1921), in which he augured the rise of a proletarian culture debarred to persons of privilege; and who committed a notorious love suicide with a married woman. Only after Arishima's death did Masamune Hakucho, an authoritative voice in literary circles at that time, single Aru Onna out for "its vision of both the public and the interior life that is both subtle and precise and altogether without parallel in Japanese writi n g . " 1 0 The extravagance of this praise, in stark contrast to the disdain or simple neglect generally accorded the book, was echoed again in the thirties by Ito Sei, who spoke of the novel as "unfolding with a grandeur and a sweep that is not to be found elsewhere in the novels of our country." 1 1 But it was not until the postwar period, when socially conscious critics such as Honda Shugo and Noma Hiroshi seemed to discover in Arishima's work a counterexample to the prevailingly autobiographical, self-reflective tendencies of modern fiction writing, that his literary "reputation" became more definite and recognizable.12 This reputation, which persists into the present, has hinged on the perception that Aru Onna, in particular, possesses the architectonics and broad social sympathies associated with nineteenth-century European realism (although most critics, including Honda, are quick to add that the book's second half is problematic in this regard); or that it fulfills the original call of the Naturalists for an "objective" literature, free from the nagging confessional concerns which Ishikawa Takuboku, among others, early recognized as underlying the practice of Naturalist fiction in Japan. 1 3 Ironically, even these sympathetic appraisals of Arishima's work, stressing the objective or social concerns of the book, tend to obscure Aru Onna's deepest message. For just as Christianity and socialism project a Utopian vision not of a world that is but of a world that will or should be, so does this work exist in a zone of possibility, from which we glimpse a world defined only by the limits of desire. If this is realism, it is "higher realism" of a Dostoevskian kind.

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Any reading of Aru Onna should, then, in some way account for that most central fact of any Arishima fiction: the almost obsessive wish to escape bourgeois life and to create a world that is otherwise. Aru Onna represents no quiet withdrawal from the given world, no scaling down or rearrangement of social complexities, such as w e regularly encounter in Japanese literature. Rather, society here is attacked; looking at the "departure d r e a m s , " we see that symbolically it is murdered. Yet having destroyed the bounds of conventional society, the heroine seems driven to destroy other borders within her own mind, which had enabled her to distinguish between fact and fantasy, pleasure and pain, and had allowed her to retain, in the midst of adversity and discontent, the equilibrium of a "confident actress" w h o could view life as a "comic stage." Here, as in Kain no Matsuei, the ground of the fiction seems to give way beneath the heroine, and the language of the b o o k — the repetition of words like "dizziness" (memai), "sleepwalki n g " (muyubyo), "hallucination" (genso), "hysteria" (hisuteri)— reinforces this sense of instability. The lurching, abrupt transitions between scenes further embody in the narrative structure itself the vertiginous mind of the heroine. Always the movement seems out of conscious control, off-balance, instigated neither by choice nor whim but by an obsession—the "dark unseen f o r c e , " or the "large h a n d , " which will eventually push Yoko " b e y o n d even the range of her fantasies." And the topography and architecture of the book is no less hallucinatory. The sea is mostly a darkness full of "cresting w a v e s " or the hypnotic voices of the deep; the ship, like the city itself, is a labyrinth of twisting corridors and pressure-filled rooms, full of erotic or destructive potential. In this atmosphere some outlet seems necessary but all egress is denied. And so the only possible movement is downward; the heroine's only freedom is to fall. Aru Onna traces the beginning of a romance, and its subsequent deconstruction. What is undertaken as a journey toward " a n environment proper to h e r s e l f " 1 4 ends in confusion and defeat, as we see that the heroine has merely been led "into

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a maze of her own m a k i n g . " 1 5 This is then a failed search for an ideal alternative to middle-class Japanese life—in literary terms, to customary modes of Japanese writing—but the book offers no accommodation with the ordinary. Finding no way to live "divinely above the w o r l d , " 1 6 the heroine will fall below it, and lose herself to demonic excess. Indeed the heroine becomes, as one character will call her, " a fallen a n g e l . " 1 7 Looking at the first half of Am Onna, the section which described Yoko's flight to the sea, the signs of the influence of European realism seem most apparent. Here there appears to be recognizable social conflict, and a great adventure is outlined: to break the hold of an oppressive past, escape Japan, and move toward the freedom of a larger environment. A basic opposition is established between this new woman of powerful feelings and a society of calculation and plan. At one level the plot seems to sanction the heroine's quest to defeat and go beyond such a society. Yoko successfully rebels against the repressive atmosphere at Akasaka Gakuin, at an early age becoming a "tigress" tasting the "blood" of many young men; she defeats her mother's jealous resistance to her love for Kibe, only to abandon a "conventional" marriage and walk out on her husband; she survives a series of scandals, and eludes the family's trap to have her marry respectably again; finally, after all these struggles, Yoko discovers a man willing, like herself, to live outside society for the sake of desire. And the geography of the book appears to mirror the scale of the heroine's actions and ambitions. The exhilirating movement from land to sea seems to confirm Yoko's often-repeated belief "that the life she had been living was wrong, that she belonged to another time, another p l a c e . " Indeed as the locus of the narrative moves away from Tokyo and the landscape expands to include the port of Yokohama, the sea itself, and the American Northwest, we imagine that a great, liberating distance has been covered; that we have moved from the narrowness of cultural conventions to the broad, rolling freedom of nature itself.

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But when we look closely at the structure of this book, even its "liberating" first half, it is apparent that this expansiveness is illusionary. The vast background panorama is a teasing, evocative fantasy. The real locus of the story is a stifling train compartment, or a shabby hotel room, or a cabin berth aboard a steamship full of labyrinthine corridors. At bottom, the topography of Aru Onna is constrictive, not unlike most modern Japanese fiction after Ukigumo, where the closeness of the physical surroundings parallels the narrative focus on the dissatisfied mind of a single character. But here there is no grudging admission of limits, or a capacity, such as Kunikida Doppo once expressed, to live with "dull, leaden pain." 1 8 Rather, Aru Onna is typical of Arishima's fiction in refusing limits even when they are patently present, in refusing anything less than extraordinary sensation. Themes of reconciliation and harmony, encountered so frequently elsewhere in the writings of Arishima's contemporaries, make no appearance in his own work. Ordinary feelings are unknown to Arishima's characters, who seem unable to accommodate themselves to a merely tolerable measure of disillusionment. For them it is always a matter of hot and cold, intense pleasure and intense pain. The narrowness of Arishima's interiors seem so much more oppressive because just beyond the window, through the porthole, lies a desirable open space. 19 There are, of course, moments in the book when Yoko breaks out of this painful confinement and finds a certain outlet. Already I have enumerated the heroine's victories over a restrictive society, culminating in her actual departure from Japan. Yet this escape is shot through with irony. In trying to defeat the artificiality of the social world, Yoko repeatedly has recourse to "artistry." Her love is, by her own admission, full of "contrivance"; she outdistances society by behaving "coolly, like a critic," and then finds Kimura, the agent of society, waiting on the other side. And she uses the instruments of Meiji civilization—the train and the steamship—to plan and execute her escape from it. In fact, the very urgency of the heroine's move-

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ments throughout the narrative seems to be modeled after these pressure-driven conveyances which figure so importantly from the outset. And so it becomes difficult to regard this urbane woman, "wise beyond her years," 20 whose own sophistication has bested the designs of her society, as being also or even primarily a woman of nature or of "instinct." Rather she seems driven by new cultural values which speed her on ahead of the old. Hers is a ruminating, scrutinizing consciousness; nowhere in the book does this heroine find a truly spontaneous release for her feelings of love or aggression. Always she is aware of some "unnatural stratagem" which mediates her desire, or of a bookinspired image which controls her actions. Indeed, the "action" characteristic of Aru Onna is really an outbreak of reverie or hysteria, that is, a deflection of instinctual energy. Significantly, such an outbreak often occurs on a moving conveyance, and closely replicates the movement of a machine: As the train pulled away from the station at Kawasaki, Yoko leaned against the guard rail at the back of the car and began to reflect on her life with Kibe. The scenery around her looked like a print from the familiar "Fifty-three Stages" series by Hokusai. Framing the pastel rice fields was a row of pine, and beyond, the light reflecting off the low-lying sea shone through the trees. The scene struck Yoko's gaze in flashing frames, punctuated as it was by the telegraph poles along the way. A swarm of red dragonflies, like sparks flying from flint, were buzzing all about and imprinted on her eyes an image of redness and disorder. 21

It is as though the pressure of modernity, signified both by the train and the vision of this "new woman," somehow seizes and distorts the objects of perception. This traditional landscape, celebrated in a wood-block print, is split apart by the speeding gaze of the heroine, who has already destroyed, in her divorce from Kibe, the traditional arrangement of marriage. In the foreground, then, is a disorder which prints itself on the

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heroine's eyes; the world she really sees and knows most intimately is red and burning almost from the start. Throughout the book, but especially at its critical transitional moments, when the setting shifts between the city and the sea, Yoko focuses on what are essentially the afterimages of her destructiveness, images of breakdown and collapse which seem to prefigure her own end: The ship distanced itself imperceptibly from the pier. Standing by the deck rail, Yoko looked back in disbelief. The people at the shore line, massed like swarms of black ants, seemed to shrink even as the middle distance of the harbor expanded. Her searching eye neither fell on the old wet nurse, lost somewhere in that spectacle of diminishing humanity, nor did it trace the contour of Yokohama, a city which always aroused her feelings. Rather she focused, with a fanatical intensity, on the crouching black speck of the drunkard. And echoing through the trickle of rain water that fell steadily from the edge of the canvas overhead, reaching her like signals flashed by the fluttering handkerchiefs on the pier, the cries of the young man reverberated: "Yoko, are you going to let me die like this. . . . are you going to let me die." 2 2

In Arishima's fictional geography, any sweeping, panoramic view of land or sea or of numbers of people, contracts and yields to a vision almost manic in its concentration. It is as though the power generated by the "fanatical intensity" of this vision, capable of transforming real people into "a swarm of black ants" and erasing the "contour" of all that is familiar, were required to propel the fiction into another world; in this instance, to clear Yoko from Japan and move into the offing. And yet we are given to understand that the heroine's unrelenting attack against the conventional, which she has sustained at least since her schoolgirl days, has never led—nor does it lead here—to any true liberation. The drunkard, who seems to stand for this whole "spectacle of diminishing humanity," or for any victim of Yoko's desire to be free, reaches out and met-

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aphorically takes hold of the woman just as she is about to escape. His accusation—"are you going to let me die like t h i s " — perhaps more powerfully than all of the scandals printed about her, penetrates this w o m a n ' s mind, becomes internalized as it were, and seems to punish her for whatever aggression she has directed against or merely felt toward society. It is right that the drunkard should have no real identity. His very namelessness allows him to represent, for example, the similarly dark and shabby figure of Yoko's former husband, Kibe Kokyo; or else the man w h o committed suicide when the fifteen-year-old " t i g r e s s " rejected him; or even the Christian minister, Uchida, w h o felt abandoned by Yoko at the time of her marriage. In a sense, the whole rejected world of middle-class life in post-Restoration Japan, its Platonic ideals and high expectations, has its resurrection here in the symbolic presence of the "crouching black s p e c k . " Moreover, the reverberations of this symbol carry out beyond the shore line to the sea. Echoing within the heroine's mind, this presence too has found a place on the ship. Until this point in the narrative, there is a certain "objectivity" about the details of character and setting. The early flashback sequences seem calculated to provide a personal history for the heroine, and allow us to visualize the upper- middle-class atmosphere in which she has been raised. To be sure, there are hints even here of the author's ultimate interest in the deeper, symbolic side of life. There is something obsessive about the frequency of scandals which afflict the Satsukis, and something extraordinary about the seduction scene, when Koto stumbles into a vision of Yoko transformed into a languorous "European courtesan." There are, too, certain omens, images of foreboding: the bell which tolls through the haze at Shinbashi Station, the heroine's fall along the path leading from the minister's home, her recurrent nosebleed, and the broken mirror. But on the whole, until she boards ship, Yoko remains a fictional character of remarkable self-possession, and the space through which she moves retains a measure of fictional density and believability. It is as though Yoko's every

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conflict with society—with her mother, Kibe Kokyo, a school official, or a violin instructor—only strengthens and defines her identity, gives shape to the environment, and enables the heroine to deal with a tangle of petty jealousies and hypocrisies, like a "confident actress" who can turn any situation to her advantage. Yoko is conscious that she has a public role to p l a y — as a middle-class woman, as an older sister, as a daughter acceding to her mother's dying request—but also manages to act out, for example, a private fantasy and behave "like a geisha," or like the sort of free-spirited woman portrayed in progressive literary magazines. Moreover, the heroine seems to thrive on the tension generated by this conflict between public and private roles, and appears even better able because of it to distinguish between her desires and the gross facts of "habitual life." 2 3 But w h e n this narrative proceeds, in a Romantic, Shellyean vein, to "de-familiarize" the world and to situate the heroine on a ship at sea, the lines which had structured personal identity as well as certain characteristics of urban bourgeois life, and which had given the reader some sense of what was internal and what existed substantially outside the heroine, begin to twist and break away. This loss of definition is not yet absolute, as it will be throughout much of the book's second half. Still, aboard ship, " p o s s e s s e d " now by the ghost of a society she has repeatedly wounded and, as it were, left to die, the heroine loses her balance—loses her ego—and begins to fall into the isolation of her deeper mind. It is important to notice that here and everywhere else in his writing, Arishima regards this isolating fall, into a grey, subconscious mental state, as a violent and terrifying event. We are quite far here from the sentiments of Shiga, Mushanokoji, or even Tanizaki, all near contemporaries of Arishima's and writers for w h o m these same shadows spreading over one's conscious mind—shadows which seem to render indistinct the never clearly drawn borders between oneself and the world outside—provide aesthetic and emotional satisfaction. Arishima has no praise for shadows; at any rate, they never bring

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his fictional figures any serenity or peace. In the dimness, framed by the " d e n s e mists" or the "smoke-filled" sky above the sea, the heroine is driven fanatically to search for light, but is instead drawn even deeper into the entangling darkness of her mind. The allegorical quality of the departure scene signals a significant departure within the narrative itself. Yoko's deck-rail vision suggests a movement away from the tedium of novelistic objectivity (the flashback or factual sequences are among the most flaccidly written in the whole book) toward the enchanted—or bewitched—territory of romance. Of course even here vestiges of the familiar remain; Mrs. Tagawa and the " u n poetic p a s s e n g e r s " keep the heroine marginally aware of certain unpleasant actualities. Yet from the initial moments on the ship until the very last, when the nightmare of Kimura's murder will " r e t u r n " Yoko to Japan, we understand that the space really traveled is not the sea at all but the radical range of the heroine's consciousness. In an important sense, the ocean passage, conceived of as a broad, expansive movement from one country to another, is incidental to the plot of Aru Onna. When actually seen, America is a " m o n o t o n y " which the heroine will reject; indeed, and it is of crucial significance, she never sets foot onto the n e w world. Rather, discovery occurs inside the ship, between the deck-rail and a pressure-filled cabin below deck, in the ascent and descent along winding stairs, corridors crowded at once with the " p h a n t o m s of the p a s t " and a broadshouldered object of desire. In fact the verticality of the ship might be seen as a metaphor of the mind. Here we begin to trace the layered, perplexing depth of self-consciousness. It is a further irony that Yoko's "fall" begins in an attempt to escape what she regards as the already fallen estate of the bourgeoisie, that class which has so lost touch with physicality and " t h e instinctual life" that, like the drunkard, it lives on dreams only to be devoured by them. Yoko's movements on the ship seem frantic and evasive, as though she were being pursued, and it is in this atmosphere that she discovers the

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purser, and conceives of the greatest of all her escapes: to fall into love. Doubtless we are meant to see something "instinctual" about the heroine's attraction to Kurachi, particularly if we recall that Arishima in much of his critical writing praised the "instinctual life," and was inclined to ascribe it to the lower classes, or to women or to Westerners, though not to educated, comfortably off Japanese men. We might imagine that the purser is to quell the disturbances of her mind (the encounter with the drunkard had left Yoko in a "trance," fearing herself to be "hysterical," moving " a s though she were another," or again, "like a sleepwalker" 2 4 ), and call the heroine back to her physical, passionate self. And yet we notice that Yoko's initial impressions of Kurachi are thoroughly idealistic. She looks upon him "as did Eve on first seeing A d a m , " that is to say, allegorically. The purser is not so much an actual man as the idea of a man, and in particular the idea of a man—rugged, large, skin smelling of liquor and cigars—who might be sexually stimulating to a woman. 2 5 He merely adds another, deeper dimension to her mental life. This purser, conjured out of a desire to break the deadlock of custom and habit, has potency primarily because he is a symbol of something so primitive, violent, and extraordinary that it can only exist as a level below consciousness: Like shooting shafts of flame that stripe a blackened chimney, the darting flashes of Yoko's reverie at last penetrated and illumined a cave of dark memories. And as she circled deeper within this awesome labyrinth, startling in its bottomless immensity, there, in the depth of the abyss appeared the figure of a man, dressed entirely in red, who radiated a blinding light. Suddenly the soothing sound of the waves, which had been echoing all the while in her consciousness, was silenced, and in its place she now heard the strident clanging of the ship's bell. To Yoko it sounded like the prow battering an ice flow. 26

Repeatedly the reveries and even the outward actions of the heroine draw her downward into regions well below con-

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scious thought, or into identifications with figures who, like the purser, seem "diabolic" or "insolent" (Arishima uses the English words), and within whom, she believes, a fierce "desire burns." 2 7 Kurachi at this point appears to conform to a universal literary type; as Tony Tanner observes: There are a large number of very important boat rides in the history of the novel; they figure prominently in the novel of adultery, as I shall have occasion to reiterate in different contexts. But the figure of the protective boatman is conspicuous by his absence. There may be boatmen, but they don't protect. And indeed, if the really dangerous waters are internal, it is hard to see how they could. 28

It would seem that if there is to be a true "rebirth" for the heroine, or entry into another world, it must be found at a level beneath her own class. And so even before she becomes Kurachi's lover, Yoko decides there is no future for her in America; marriage to Kimura would signify her submission to the conventions and ideals of the bourgeoisie, the very things she wishes to escape. Her real evasions, then, represent an effort to de-class herself, to become immersed in an environment of raw sensuality where the merely symbolic presence of the "figure in red" might emerge from her illusions and become an actual, physical part of her life. The heroine is only too willing to regard Kurachi as "like herself, a person born into the wrong circumstances," or else as a man who "was not meant to be a mere purser on a small ship." The lovers associate or are identified with either the aristocracy (Yoko as the "queen" sent down from heaven) or the lower classes. What they and hence the narrative avoid is the "normality" of the middle class, even as, in psychoanalytic terms, the narrative seems controlled by a "higher" superego, punishing the heroine for her lust and aggression, and by a "lower" id which supplies radical sensations; while the mediating, normalizing ego of the heroine vanishes by degrees. 29 And so Kurachi speaks in a "low," provincial dialect, not

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in the accents of an educated man. Similarly, the seamen speak to Yoko in a language she seems desperate to understand: During the course of this long voyage, Yoko became an object of conversation, the focus of gossip, not only among the first-class passengers and the officers of the ship, but among the lower-class sailors as well, over whom she came to exert a strange power. It was on the eighth day at sea that one sailor, an old man who had been working near the forecastle, got his leg entangled in the anchor chain. His bone was crushed in the mishap. Yoko saw all of this from the promenade deck, and, startled, she ran toward the man, reaching him even before the ship's doctor. The crumpled figure of the old sailor, writhing in pain, was taken below to the sailors' quarters. Drawn by curiosity, a large crowd followed, milling about the doorway which led below. Yet having come this far, even certain of the crew were hesitant to enter. It was as if inside secrets lurked of a sort no one knew anything about. Indeed, the crowd reacted as though the atmosphere here were more dangerous than the engine room's. The doorway itself appeared eerie and threatening . . . but her compassion for the old man was so powerful that Yoko gradually began her descent into the sailors' quarters. Inside, the gloomy, fetid air was choking, and in the shadows, from amidst a wriggling mass of bodies, she could hear thick, raspy mutterings. Suddenly the eyes of these sailors, grown used to the darkness, fixed on the figure of Yoko. In an instant a charge seemed to excite and circulate throughout the room, and the voices now pressed forcefully on Yoko and assailed her with outrageous obscenities.30 Again in Arishima's fiction we encounter the lower classes, and again their presence cannot be explained in purely social or economic terms. What Yoko uncovers within this "choking" atmosphere, cut off from the fresh air of normality, are not actual working men, with faces and personalities and a history of their own, but an expressive symbol—"a wriggling mass of bodies"—which appears more nearly to represent or objectify

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that part of the mind which Freud vividly described as "a chaos . . . a cauldron of seething excitement." 3 1 The " c o m p a s s i o n " which allegedly leads the heroine below is simply a pretext, and similar to the one she will soon use to enter the purser's bed. In fact her concern for the injured old man seems analogous to the narrator's own " c o n c e r n " for this woman of "passion and sensitivity," wounded by a cruel society: it masks a much more basic wish to touch something natural and vital. 3 2 The issues, the politics at work here, are basically sexual. When the heroine descends into the sailors' quarters, she is crossing class lines, but only so that she can enter a realm of heightened feeling. The " c h a r g e " which circulates about this room is revolutionary, yet in a special sense. It energizes a consciousness—ultimately the narrator's own—which fears it is losing touch with physical, biological life. The histrionic quality of this scene, like much of the melodrama in this narrative, seems calculated to overthrow or outdistance propriety and restraint, the voice of c o m m o n sense, and to create a new state of feeling, ruled by that formerly low and victimized creature which is desire itself. The vertical configuration of this passage might at least partially be explained by an advertisement Arishima wrote for Aru Onna at the time of its publication. " L e t us confront the ugly and the w i c k e d , " Arishima wrote, " a n d see if there is anything beneath. If there is nothing [beneath], then the possibility of human life must be d e n i e d . " 3 3 This statement is suggestive of an impulse common to Arishima's writing, which typically probes beneath the fragmentary sensual surface of existence for some unifying, generative principle. Yet it should also be noted that Arishima's "interpretive" impulse in this regard runs counter to a much more prevalent disposition among modern Japanese writers, identified by Edwin McClellan in writing about Toson's Ie: The House is therefore primarily a novel of description, where the author tries to describe and to express his emotions implicitly through detached observations of the surface scene. What Toson tries to do in The House is to keep

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the interpretive role of the novelist to the absolute minimum and to render the novel as free as possible from an imposed rational construct. The result is what Toson himself chose to call "impressionism." 3 4

It is axiomatic to Arishima that contrarities exist at the surface only; beneath the surface all are one. 3 5 To a considerable degree, his fiction might be regarded as an attempt to enact this belief, and to find some hidden corner of the world, or society, or an individual's heart, which if discovered promises to nourish more authentic relationships of every kind. But it is plain, reflecting on the violence and destruction endemic to this fiction, that Arishima found the merely surface reality, or " s h a m appearance" 3 6 as he contemptuously refers to it in his diary, a formidable boundary to break through and pass beyond. Moreover, and perhaps more crucially, the world fictionally discovered beyond or below ordinary, "habitual" life is always one of menace, possessing nothing whatsoever of unity or peace. Truly these underworlds, whether glimpsed in the seamen's quarters, Kurachi's cabin, or within the mind of the heroine, are spaces "eerie and threatening." At bottom Arishima wishes in Aru Onna to generate conflict, between classes, sexes, and rival parts of an individual spirit. The ship at sea (like Hokkaido or America in other of his fiction, or like the city to which the heroine will soon return), is the place where this conflict can be illuminated in its most essential terms, free of the qualifying, potentially harmonizing effects of life as it is lived in common, settled surroundings. The heroine is doomed, by the very plot of the book, to enter these places, even as she will enter an illicit love affair, which will not at all offer her the "rebirth" she once expected, but only a momentary flash of feeling, to be followed almost immediately by a fall into oblivion. Desire here is betrayed by a mind afflicted with accusatory "phantoms," an ill mind painfully aware of its own divisive processes: She felt like a patient suffering violent convulsions who receives an injection of morphine. The drug does not wholly

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alleviate the symptoms—though unconscious, the face of the patient continues to twist and grimace—but it does induce a fall into an eerie, twilight calm. Just so did Yoko's mind, agitated and exposed to relentless provocation, suddenly seem to fall into a stagnant abyss. This was not at all a matter of will; the d o w n w a r d plunge w a s out of her control. Her head felt feverish, clouded with a yellow haze, and at times a sort of flame, red or bluish in hue, would fire through her nerves. 3 7

Indeed the heroine, like other of Arishima's central characters, has been "poisoned by civilization." She is a patient and this is, in a sense, a hospital ship. She makes love with Kurachi as though it were a cure, but it is more like a drug, and disorienting, akin to the reveries and fits of hysteria which have plagued her throughout the voyage. The physical life she craves remains a distant and elusive fantasy, and in her obsessive search for it, her own life has been reduced to a fiction. As the voyage nears an end, Yoko herself regards all that has happened "as though she had been in a play" or again, as though she had read about it in a novel. At this point she is less a flesh and blood woman than a literary paradigm, a "European courtesan," or "Cleopatra," or " E v e , " a descendant then of a long line of femmes fatales, an object discovered by a fantastical imagination. We recall that the sequence at sea ends with a nightmare. The heroine dreams that she has killed Kimura, the fiancé she has rejected to heighten the drama of her private passion play. Likening herself to the Egyptian queen, Yoko had calculated for this righteous young innocent "all the cruelties a woman's heart can devise," and so avenged herself on all her enemies—("the tyranny of her mother, the pressure of her relatives, the watchfulness of society. . . . Yoko made Kimura stand for all of these . . ." [see above p. 87]). And yet in the dream a symbolic Kimura, we see, survives the violence. Like the "crouching black speck" of the young drunkard, it finds a way to enter the heroine's mind, there to exact its own revenge. Yoko sees a dead

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face, but one that smiles mischievously in death, and hears a voice which fills her mind (even as it expands to literally fill the printed page), a voice that "entangles and constricts." Yoko will try to rouse her lover from sleep, to be comforted and reminded that she has something substantial in reality to rely on, "but to no avail (see above, p. 89). This heroine, who has struggled so fiercely to destroy a network of numbing cultural values, to de-class herself and discover a more physical life, is handed over at the end of this voyage to a spectral world, chained by the very guilt over her wish to break away. At this point it is perfectly understandable why the plot should veer so abruptly, and the narrative turn back to Tokyo. For Yoko has no nature free from civilization. She is still the slave of morality and custom, a patient whose sense of reality is being eroded by visions she can no longer control, and it is to the source of her illness that Arishima means to go.

It is always more than an intimation in Arishima that the quest for another world is dangerous, even suicidal. I am inclined to say that this primarily reflects a literary, stylistic apprehension; that within a tradition which has typically embraced the given world as a sufficient reality, and never developed an epic form of literature,38 Arishima was likely, even bound, to reveal anxiety over his use of the Japanese language to sustain an allegorical journey. In certain late, meditative essays, Arishima does in fact give voice to a fear that words "betray," that language possesses a "life of its o w n " which "rebels" against the intentions of even the most purposeful of writers. 39 Yet surely there is an extraliterary dimension to this fear, one rooted in experience, feeling, and perception. It is fear for a life, really, which in its radical discontent with the ordinary arrangement of things has used illusions to transform the world, but in so doing has lost the capacity to discriminate between fiction and fact. It is a fear, then, that life has been emptied out,

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consumed by fiction; that the world, denied its concreteness and density, no longer has intelligible borders and is impossible now to pass beyond. Indeed for Arishima, as for his beloved heroine, space is, as Georges Poulet once described it, an "infinite and cavernous distance, behind which all hope of reality has withdrawn, where desire projects itself forward, but which it cannot fly over." 4 0 The city to which Yoko returns is precisely this "cavernous distance," discovered and rediscovered throughout Arishima's writing. It is a place of shadow, and objects which recede endlessly behind them, leaving desire with nothing to feed on but itself. Even Kurachi, the primary love object, is to disappear. A n d as the book turns against its Utopian initiative, and converts the search for a "love adventure" into a tale of secretive evasions and deceit, w e watch as the heroine, physically and mentally, wastes away, consumed not so much by solitude or lust, as by the power of the imagination, which craves extraordinary, heightened sensations, and will stop at nothing to satisfy its demands. Perhaps more knowingly than any Japanese writer of his time, Arishima explored and exposed the horror of an imagination which knows no limits; the essential emptiness of a life overcome by self-generated and self-referring fictions. There are numerous instances in Arishima's writing which dramatically detail this horror, but none more authentically than this passage, taken from chapter 39, w h e n the heroine pursues her lost love through a ghost city of betraying spaces and unrelenting doom: Night had come and Kurachi, she knew, would not be in his room. Yoko fell into a reverie; she was seized by a series of fantasies that left her dizzy, and, oblivious to the world outside herself, she rushed from the house. So distracted was she that she could not tell if the sky were clear or cloud-filled, or feel if it were hot or cold. In a daze she had walked some distance down the hill behind her house, only dimly conscious of certain obstacles in her path, of

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winged insects flying furiously about, when suddenly a strange thought assailed her: she had not bathed for several days . . . she was not clean—she could not leave behind an ugly corpse. Turning, she headed back toward the house. She entered and, fearful of being discovered, crept toward the bathroom. The water in the tub was already cool. Her sisters had evidently bathed some time ago. Two damp towels hung from the bamboo rod. Yoko pictured her sisters asleep, yet there were other, darker imaginings which more completely possessed her mind. She washed, dressed, and hurriedly left. Her destination was Kurachi's rooming house. As she drew near to it, Yoko saw a woman of slight stature leaving by the front gate. The streetlamps were dim; all was cast in shadow and silhouette. She could not be certain, but somehow Yoko took the woman to be the proprietress. She could feel the blood rush to her head. Yoko's pace quickened, and she realized that she was now in pursuit of the woman. Not more than a half a block separated them. Each moment seemed to shorten the distance, and, with the woman now standing directly beneath a light, Yoko knew she had not been mistaken. "Well then," she said to herself, "The proprietress has been deceiving me all along. What a fool I have been in trusting her. All that grand talk about being 'responsible' and 'fair', that feigned anguish over being caught in the middle. . . . I was praising her while she lied to me. . . ." These thoughts gripped Yoko and left her reeling in terror and humiliation. She felt she would collapse there on the street. But in the next instant, tottering unsteadily, she again took aim on the woman, and broke into a run. Up ahead a rikisha was standing at the curb, and the proprietress was stepping into it. Yoko did not call out, afraid to break the silence. She was only yards away when the car began to pull away, biting noisily into the gravel path. Panting, near exhaustion, Yoko rushed in one last effort to overtake the rikisha. But the empty space between gradually widened, and Yoko soon discovered herself alone, shrouded in the melancholy darkness of the cedar grove.

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THE CITY AND THE SEA Yoko returned to the place where the proprietress had entered the cab. She might have taken up the pursuit, but no other rikisha was in sight. Yoko stood in a daze, her eyes fixed on the black street below, as though a message of some kind were inscribed there. "It was the proprietress," she thought, "I am sure of it. The hair, the figure, those mincing steps. . . . He lied when he said he was going on a trip; he's in there right now. The proprietress is his agent. He's using her to get his wife back. It all makes sense. He's known that woman for years; and she is after all the mother of his children. It also explains why he's grown indifferent toward me. Yes, it's all very clear. I don't really fault him either—only that he was not open with me. . . . His lying about it, that I find excessive. If he'd told me openly, I would have resigned myself to a separation. Now that is out of the question. All this lying and deceit—what contempt they must have for me. Perhaps they even conspire to show me pity. I can see it now, that oh-so-faithful wife of his, tears streaming down her virtuous cheeks, begging him to pity 'poor Yoko,' pleading with him to forget herself, to think of herself as 'already dead' . . . no, I can't bear it. I could not tolerate their sympathy and kind words. Tonight I'll show them what kind of woman I really am. . . . " Yoko stumbled like a drunkard as she turned to leave the place. Arriving at the rooming house, she was out of breath and could hardly utter a sound. The maids looked at Yoko as though she were a mad woman, and, taking no account of her uncommonly tense expression, they seemed to withdraw into hiding. Their behavior went unnoticed by Yoko. A weird smile played about her lips. As she passed in front of the desk clerk, she purposefully bowed her head and, proceeding in this fashion, began unsteadily to mount the stairs. When she came to Kurachi's room, she was aware of a voice in distress and was startled to find it was herself, tearful and sobbing. "Tonight," she thought, "this very moment, I'll be destroyed, my love will die." Fiercely she threw open the door. To her astonishment no one was about. The room was

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tidy from end to end; even Kurachi's smell was gone from the air. Yoko's eyes circled the room. Having cried herself out, she began n o w unwittingly to s h u d d e r a n d heave a n d seemed on the verge of falling. She believed he would be here a n d would not accept the fact that he was not. Her illusions only grew stronger, a n d presently she was seized by a marvelous fantasy that Kurachi had actually been in the room but h a d vanished into air on her entry. Totally lost in fantasy, her hair and dress in disarray, Yoko sat and stared blankly ahead. All was silent; indeed, the place was quiet as a m o u n tain retreat. Nevertheless, strange black s h a d o w s flew disturbingly into Yoko's vision. Initially they were merely annoying, and Yoko made no effort to resist or identify them, but soon they came to plague her, a n d she n o w began frantically to p u r s u e a n d drive them away. But no matter h o w she tried, these irksome black shadows remained before her eyes. In time her very fear of them momentarily cleared her mind; she shivered as though cold. Instantly the diverse sounds of the rooming house, the noise a n d bustle of the neighborhood beyond the window, reached Yoko's ears. The black s h a d o w s suddenly grew smaller and backed off into a circular dance around the light. Looking like someone returned to earth after a glimpse of the divine, Yoko sat upright a n d began to wonder: Where did reality end; w h e n did the fantasy begin? She had left the house—that much was certain. On the road she stopped, changed direction, a n d returned for a bath . . . but why? There was no reason to d o anything that foolish . . . two d a m p towels h u n g from the bamboo rod (at this m o m e n t Yoko put her h a n d s to her face, then examined the back of her hands. It was evident she h a d bathed) . . . to this point things were clear. Then she was back on the street a n d in pursuit of the proprietress . . . p e r h a p s the fantasy began then? After all, what she had taken to be black s h a d o w s were really only moths; might the proprietress have been a specter conjured out of bitterness of heart? But no, then he too might be a shadow a n d that is impossible—he was here. . . . A n d so Yoko remained lost in the entanglements of

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T H E CITY AND THE SEA her mind. She did not know with any certainty what had brought her to his room. But now she stopped trying to puzzle things out and rang the bell for the clerk. " C h a s e these moths out of the room, won't you? By the way, was another woman here tonight? It would have been some time ago . . . a woman about thirty—she wears her hair quite full. . . . " " N o , I've seen no one like that, m a d a m . " The clerk looked warily at Yoko. "But just a minute, about an hour ago, I did see someone leave. . . . " "It was the woman who manages the Sokakukan, wasn't it?" Yoko's manner was relaxed and confident, thinking she had solved her puzzle. " N o , it wasn't the proprietress," the clerk replied, unexpectedly emphatic in his denial. "Well then, who was it?" "All I can say is that she was a visitor to another of our guests. It's not our policy to reveal names. . . . " Yoko realized the futility of this conversation and sent the clerk away. No one, she thought, could be trusted. Even the clerk was part of the conspiracy and was feigning ignorance to protect the others. Life itself seemed wicked and detestable, and worse, unreal, a tissue of lies. Suddenly Yoko glimpsed what had brought her so far this night. Slowly she uncovered her true purpose. All had conspired to trip her up. Everyone had abandoned her, and, in solitude and suffering, she had lost faith and was now about to vanish from a world of nihilistic illusions. Nothing held her to such a world. The causes of her pleasure and her sadness, the sources of her grief, all these were insubstantial as foam on the sea. Who could tell if Kurachi would cry over her corpse—was he not himself the shadow of an illusion? . . . it was as though Yoko had awakened from a deep sleep. Her heart had become infinitely transparent to her, and she recognized its purposes edging toward death. There was not a tear in her eye. Her expression was utterly composed, her vision strangely clarified, as she gazed about the room. At last she rose, like a somnambulist, and from the closet removed Kurachi's bedding

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and spread it out in the middle of the floor. For a time she sat quietly on top of it, and tried to close her eyes. Then she rose again, expressionless, and went to the closet. Thus she began her search for Kurachi's pistol. Finally, inside a drawer, she found it, hidden under a clutter of papers, letters, and several photographs. Appearing strangely detached, Yoko picked up the gun. She held it down and away from her body, like some object to be feared, but she was in fact not at all frightened by the weapon. Again she sat atop the bedding and rested the gun in her lap. She fingered it and stared. Finally she raised it, aimed it at her heart, and cocked the trigger. "Click. . . ." There was a staccato sound, and the barrel revolved. At the same instant Yoko's entire body was jolted as by an electric charge. Her heart, however, remained tranquil as clear water. Yoko replaced the gun in her lap and gazed fixedly on it. At once Yoko perceived, though obscurely, that she had something left to do, some task to perform. Like a sleepwalker again she stood, and, as though in submission to an ineluctable command, she returned to the closet and opened the drawer. Carefully she examined one photograph after another. Even to herself this behavior seemed odd, and she was suspicious about what she might do next. At last Yoko discovered the picture of a woman in her hand. Long and hard she stared at it. As she did so, her heart began to quietly recover and to move under its own strength; the process seemed to Yoko like the return of an afflicted mind to sanity. She looked at the picture and wondered what was to be done. "I must die," she thought, and yet she was obliged to identify the photograph in her hand. "It is his wife," she thought, finally working toward a solution. "Yes, it's a picture of his wife when she was young. Quite beautiful—no doubt he is attracted to her . . . he said as much once: "I still think of her from time to time" . . . but why should this photo be here? Really it has no place . . . unless, of course, it is more to him than a re-

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T H E CITY A N D THE SEA minder. Perhaps she anxiously awaits her husband's return? She is alive and waiting for him . . . is she too an illusion? No, she lives, she is alive. Can I die knowing that? . . . if I'm not careful, I'll lose myself to illusion, and be the source of their peace and happiness. . . . " Like someone emerging, as if by accident, from out of the valley of death, her analysis of this photo brought an expression of genial bewilderment to Yoko's face, but as she stood there, still poring intently over the photograph, her features again became fraught with anxiety, until suddenly she was leaping wildly about, in the grip of an inconsolable jealousy and rage, and, grinding her teeth between screams of anger, she bit into one edge of the photo. Ferociously she mutilated the picture, then fell heavily atop the bedding. Her eerie, plaintive cries, like an animal howling, were unaccompanied by tears. By the time the flustered clerk arrived, Yoko had already achieved a certain control. The revolver had been hidden under the bed, and she had assumed a meek and vulnerable aspect; tears were in her eyes now as she sobbed. The clerk was beside himself and, as if to camouflage his own confusion, said, "Did you have a nightmare—you were screaming something awful, you know. That's why I burst in on you like this. . . . " " O h , yes, those moths, they frightened me terribly and gave me nightmares. . . . I asked you to get rid of them. . . . " With such nonsense she appeased the man. Her tears soon stopped and she wiped her eyes. Convulsions like this one would be repeated. In their aftermath Yoko's face would darken, as she came to realize that beyond her seemingly actual life she possessed another life in a mysterious world. And often she discovered herself passing between these worlds at will. . . . Observers, like her sisters, could do nothing but fearfully watch Yoko's violent behavior. Kurachi warned Aiko to keep sharp-edged tools and knives beyond her reach. 4 1

No less than the sea is this city scene one of strangeness and apocalyptic meanings; there are "messages" inscribed on

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these black streets. The city looms darkly in the background, like the void in an expressionist drawing: to frame and dramatize the specters which haunt an agitated mind. We might recall in this context that the coterie magazine Shirakaba, to which Arishima contributed m u c h of his writing, is well k n o w n for h a v i n g introduced the J a p a n e s e public to varieties of western art, especially the paintings of the French Impressionists and Postimpressionists. It is often overlooked, h o w e v e r , that a n u m b e r of issues w e r e devoted to Expressionism, highlighting artists such as Edvard Munch, Max Klinger, and Gustave Klimt. It should be apparent, f r o m w h a t has already been said of visual atmosphere in Arishima, that it more closely mirrors the obsessional qualities of these Expressionists than the luminous subtleties of the French painters. Similar, then, to other of Arishima's distant frontiers, Tok y o offers none of the security of a settled cultural space. To the contrary, it represents a place of transience and disorder— " a seething outpour of s o m e calamity" (see above, p. 2 ) — w h o s e visual dimensions are hallucinatory, transformed in response to w h a t e v e r s h a d o w takes possession of the heroine's consciousness. This vision of the city as calamity will dominate the top o g r a p h y over the course of the book, but it is a vision latent in the v e r y opening scene at Shinbashi Station, w h e r e w e encounter all the pressure and nervous exhilaration of an urban, mechanized culture, and the need it inspires for incessant m o v e m e n t and psychological flight. More willingly than most J a p a n e s e writers, w h o s e perception of a twentieth-century Tok y o is similarly of a calamitous, intrusive presence, within which or b e y o n d which—in a m u s t y rented room in an older neighborhood rich with E d o associations, on an excursion to one's country h o m e or to an outlying temple or to an evocative place in n a t u r e — s o m e f o r m of shelter or r e f u g e must be f o u n d , Arishima exposes his heroine (and of course the reader) to the full impact of the city's strangeness and edge. Prodded by repeated scandals and disease, the heroine is compelled to move through this threatening urban space.

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In Arishima's work, Tokyo need not be delimited and scaled down, as it usually is in Naturalist and Shirakaba writing, where the city is evoked as a cemetery or a backyard garden, a side street or a bar—Tokyo, in short, as a transplanted village. These more prevalent representations of the city are predicated on what Isoda Koichi has called "the provincialization of the city" by modern writers, 42 or on what Eto Jun has described as the "provincial nihilism" of the modern Japanese prose style, "which glorifies material objects and justifies inertia." 43 What such criticism grudgingly acknowledges is the power of a literary system, grounded on the local and rhetorically familiar, to endure even in the present. For except in Aru Onna, or in certain other popular or genre fictions (Soseki's detective novel, Higan Sugi Made, for example), Tokyo remains a largely unseen or unexplored literary presence. In Edward Seidensticker's words, "One can with no exaggeration say that Edo had its literature and Tokyo does not." 4 4 And this is so despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of modern writers have lived in the city, and since autobiographical or personal fiction has been the prevailing mode, have necessarily used the city as the setting for much of their writing. Arishima's Utopian intentions here set him apart; he requires a vision of the city stripped of its provincial defenses. There are no neighborhoods for his heroine to hide within. On the contrary, she is repeatedly exposed to the disruptive charge of a culture in transformation, and becomes, in the imbalance of her own psychology, one with the careening city. Lost, then, on these empty streets, and deprived of a real object to love, the woman's passion turns against herself and lacerates her like one of the knives Kurachi warns should be kept out of her reach. On the ship the external world had been cut away by the power of this forbidden love. But surrounded by a Tokyo of illusionary presences, the heroine's own demonized inner landscape is revealed, the collapsing borders of a feverish imagination. Frequently in Arishima's writing, there emerges the notion

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that love and art, both projects of desire, are inwardly akin. Both activities, in A r i s h i m a ' s w o r d s , " l e a d one to enter other exist e n c e s , " 4 5 and mutually inspire " a radical detachment from the daily r o u n d . " 4 6 There are as well premonitions that " l o v e can be a cruel, corrupting f o r c e , " 4 7 or again that it is " n o t a gentle but a violent, merciless p o w e r . " 4 8 When w e reflect on the destructive tendencies lurking e v e r y w h e r e in Arishima's fiction, it is apparent that in this respect as well art can be like love, a " m e r c i l e s s " activity. If it is love, for example, which motivates the exhaustive analysis of this fallen w o m a n , it is of a special, ghoulish kind. Arishima's words hardly "glisten and rustle" for the heroine, as the Whitman epigraph w o u l d h a v e u s believe. 4 9 Instead they cut into this w o m a n , dissect her, and with this process comes the recognition that the real w o m a n has been reduced to a d e a d object; that life has been sacrificed to art. Excessive themes and Gothic situations are common in Arishima, but the short story, " J i k k e n s h i t s u " (The Laboratory, 1 9 1 7 ) , is p e r h a p s the most macabre piece he ever wrote. The title itself recalls Izumi K y o k a ' s " G e k a s h i t s u " ; if Arishima had antecedents in the m o d e r n Japanese tradition, they w e r e likely the writers of kannen shosetsu and hisan shosetsu in the 1890s, Kyoka himself, Kawakami Bizan, and Hirotsu Ryuro. At any rate, the theme here reflects their preoccupation with physical and mental deformities. "Jikkenshitsu" is, narrowly speaking, a study of necrophilia, but it offers as well a ruthless if s o m e w h a t disguised portrait of the artist, and is for this reason deserving of attention. A pathologist, w e read, is to perform an autopsy on the corpse of his w i f e , w h o died the previous day. H e w i s h e s to p r o v e that the cause of death w a s tuberculosis, and not the disease alleged by the director of the hospital. The action takes place in a " m u s t y l a b o r a t o r y , " 5 0 and in the presence of the brotherin-law, w h o intends to see that his sister's b o d y is not wholly desecrated b y the w o r k of the pathologist, w h o m he seems to regard as something of a monster. A s the instruments are readied, the attending nurses break into hysterical tears. With

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no trace of emotion, the physician makes the first cut. Dark blood, we are told, spills over to stain the white uniforms. Continuing to probe, the pathologist becomes frenzied, in the power now of a "sadism before which nothing is sacred. A "hot flame of desire" 51 burns within him. His nerves are strained to the breaking point, and he begins to hear inner voices question him: are you mad . . . will you commit even this kind of violence? The results of the autopsy rule in the pathologist's favor, but he seems uninterested in them. Released from the high moment and tension of the actual procedure, he falls into reverie. He reflects on his life and concludes that it is devoid of real experience; it has been devoted to work, to experiments only. The laboratory room appears to the pathologist now as an "arid plain," or a "waste," 52 a place of emptiness and death. Moreover he admits that only self-deception allowed him to see this room in any other way. Gazing out the window, the pathologist notices leaves dancing in the light, but this simply aggravates his awareness of all that his life has missed. In "depression and despair," 53 he draws four test tubes from his frock. They contain the examined tissue of his wife. As the story ends, the pathologist is in tears, pressing the four vials to his forehead. In a sense Am Onna retells this story, although with greater seriousness and complexity. For if Yoko is the object of an artistic experiment to probe the depths of the human mind, it is also she who, with the same slashing frenzy of the pathologist at work, performs this operation, and remains conscious throughout it. Indeed, even as her heart is "ripped and torn by dark doubts and irrepressible misgivings," 54 when she recognizes that desire has made her a "prisoner of love," her ultimate demand is always consciousness: "seeing clearly to the end, with eyes open and unflinching, what God will do with someone like myself" (see above, p. 88). At the center of the book's consciousness there is moral and aesthetic understanding: that the idea of love, alone and apart from a real lover, can distort

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and ultimately destroy life in its fulness and diversity; that the fiction which dares to deny the bounds of inherited cultural signs, and is born aloft by the power of the imagination into another world, risks falling into a recognition that obsessions sustained and too violently believed in paralyze the mind and reduce it to "an arid plain, a waste." 5 5 A s we follow, then, the tragic fall of this exceptional woman, we simultaneously track the heights, and, in Arishima's case, inescapable depths of the writer's consciousness. The requirements of her love, which at the outset led her "divinely above the world," are equally those of the imagination: "There are no limits to my love," she thought. "I must climb ever higher, using my strength and instinctual energy to fly wildly past all obstacles. So long as I possess such energy, I cannot sit about idly, and gaze on something common. I must reach for the extraordinary. . . ." These demands took possession of Yoko's mind. 56

Her desires are the narrator's own, what he wishes his art to accomplish: She was engulfed in a universe on fire. The desires of her pitifully burning body wholly blackened her heart. Was this heaven or hell? All she knew for certain was the destructive force of this ecstasy roaring out of control, obliterating all that existed in the world beyond its fiery center. . . . 57

And when, confined by the vast emptiness of the city ("like captives on a desert island . . ." [see above, p. 93]), the heroine sees that by laying waste to the external world she has destroyed as well the bounds which gave shape and integrity to her inner life, w e see the entrapment of the writer w h o has destroyed tradition and set out on a new path, only to become lost along the way: Yoko was in a bizarre maze of her o w n making and had grown addicted to illusions which left her spirit reeling and paralyzed her consciousness. Waking from these

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A l w a y s t h e o t h e r w o r l d , w h e t h e r g l i m p s e d in H o k k a i d o or A m e r i c a , the city or the sea, lies t o w a r d " d e a t h ' s b o u n d a r y , " a n d b e y o n d . In trances, d r i v e n by visions of b r e a k d o w n a n d d e c a y , t h e figures of A r i s h i m a ' s fiction m a r c h inexorably to the brink. B a n i s h e d f r o m the physicality of life, t h e y survive o n s e n s a t i o n s i n d u c e d by the m i n d , a n d are, like the writer himself, c o m p e l l e d to m o v e f r o m o n e e x c e s s to a n o t h e r , or risk a c e s s a t i o n of feeling. W h a t is at risk, t h e n , is a l w a y s a m e n t a l life, a n d w h e n t h e s e figures fall into a paralysis of mind, it signals a w r i t e r ' s d e a t h , the fall of the imagination: Even as she spoke, Yoko's own voice was obscured by the reverberations of her sister's selfish pouting. She felt as though her blood vessels were bursting, that black blood was gushing up to her head. Sadayo's face, tripled and quadrupled, swam before her eyes. Soon Yoko had fallen into a dark trance; everything, all shapes and colors and voices, seemed paralyzed. " N o , you're hurting me. . . . Sister, no, stop it, stop. . . . " "Yoko, no, you mustn't. . . . " Faintly, like sounds coming from a distant place, Yoko heard the voices of Sadayo and Kurachi, though she could not distinguish one from the other. She sensed that someone was enacting some violence on Sadayo, that some force demanded her sister's death. Soon Yoko realized that she herself was overcome with the urge to kill. But in this blackness where nothing was defined, something resisted her; she felt constricted by a power of unworldly strength. Then, from within this chaos itself, she seemed to glimpse her ten nails, sharp as needles, digging into Kurachi's throat, twisting and cutting into his skin as they struggled. This too seemed like a dream. Faintly, again in the distance, Yoko heard a strange, unearthly music. But pain suddenly gripped her chest, and she seemed about to vomit. In the next instant she had

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fallen headlong into a horrifying darkness of mind where there was nothing: no voices, no light, no energy of any kind. 59

Arishima was, by any reckoning, a troubled writer. For this h e need not be praised as yet another Romantic victim, nor blamed for his encounter and perduring involvement with western ideas and ways of writing, as though authentic Japanese literature in this century must deny or mask the signs of foreign influence. If he was indeed a martyr to ideas, it was perhaps an unavoidable fate, since as Soseki repeatedly observed, there is n o golden age in the past to which a thoughtful modern writer can naively return. It was Arishima's predicament and his achievement to have glimpsed the hallucinatory contours of his divided culture, dreaming at once of power in a n e w world order, and of withdrawal to the mythic stillness of an ancestral h o m e . Better prepared by the literary tradition to detail the latter, nostalgic vision, much Japanese fiction, in the n a m e of realism or sincerity or truthfulness, has created a calming illusion that if difficulties exist in modern Japan they do not threaten the cultural order but are personal and escapable, in alcohol or in memory or in art itself. A book like Aru Onna, to the contrary, offers no escape—even madness brings the heroine n o release from pain. This is fiction impelled by the accelerating, transforming pressure of an increasingly complex urban environment, of an embattled culture, troubled about its own proper voice. Arishima was driven toward his other worlds by a reality that appeared and disappeared all around him.

Notes Introduction 1. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshü 4, pp. 240-41. 2. Conrad, Lord Jim, p. 214. 3. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshü 4, p. 244. 4. Honda, Shirakaba ha no Bungaku, pp. 28-29. The publication dates of the other Taishö magazines are as follows: Kindai Shisö (19x2-1914); Seitö (1911-1916); Kaizö (1919-1955); Kaihö (1919-1923); Tane Maku Hito (1921-1923). 5. Kume, "Watakushi Shösetsu to Shinkyö Shösetsu," Kindai Bungaku Hydro n Taikei, p. 57. 6. Yasukawa, Arishima Takeo Ron, p. 456. 7. Yamada, Arishima Takeo: Shisei to Kiseki, p. 4. 8. Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, pp. 93-94. 9. Ibid., p. 415. 10. Ibid., p. 94. 1 1 . For a detailed look at how Tsubouchi Shöyö, in particular, worked to preserve Edo literature in his modern scheme of literary classification, see his writings in the well-known debate with Mori Ögai, "Botsuri sö Ronsö," Kindai Bungaku Hyöron Taikei, vol. 1 , pp. 152-226. 12. Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, p. 27. 13. Ibid., p. 437. 14. The Tale of the Heike, p. 507. 15. Ibid., p. 767. 16. Ibid., p. 682. 17. Ibid., p. 474. 18. Smith, "Tokyo as an Idea," journal of Japanese Studies, p. 53. 19. Tokutomi, Footprints in the Snow (Omoide no Ki), p. 107. 20. In a statement applicable to Japanese thinkers as well, Andrew Plaks

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remarks: "The point is not that the Chinese thinkers are more naturally practical or this-worldly than their Western counterparts, but rather that they do not regard the distinction between the physical and the metaphysical aspects of existence as of absolute ontological significance. They are either both real or they are both illusory, but in any event they are commensurable." (Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber, p. 109.) 21. Maeda, Toshi Kukan no Naka no Bungaku, p. 262. 22. Said, Beginnings, p. 13. 23. Anonymous, "Arishima Takeo Shi no Shi," Josei Kaizo, p. 157.

Chapter One: Hokkaido 1 . Hokkaido figures as the primary locus in all of the following: "Hannichi" (1909); " A n Incident" (1914); "Genso" (1914); "Osue no Shi" (1916); "Gasu" (1916); Kain no Matsuei (1917); Umare Izuru Nayami (1918); Seiza (1922); " H o n e " (1923); " O y a k o " (1923). 2. Enomoto, Hokkaido no Rekishi, p.4. 3. Nitobe, The Imperial Agricultural College of Japan, p. 1 . 4. Harrison, Japan's Northern Frontier, pp. 4-5. 5. Ibid., p. 26. 6. Nitobe, The Imperial Agricultural College of japan, p. 6. 7. Takakura and Seki, Hokkaido no Fudo to Rekishi, p. 152. 8. Arishima, "Chiho no Seinen Shokun ni," Zenshu 8, p. 598. 9. The standard biography is Yasukawa Sadao, Arishima Takeo Ron (Zohohan), Meiji Shoin, 1978. to. In 1872, Kuroda Kiyotaka, then under secretary in the special office (Kaitakushi) created by the Meiji government to "reclaim" Hokkaido, proposed the establishment of an agricultural college in that region. After a temporary residence in Tokyo, the school was moved to Sapporo in 1875 and given the name "Sapporo Nogakko" (Sapporo College of Agriculture). In the following year, William Clark, an American and president of the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, was invited to the school as an advisor. Clark was in Sapporo only eight months, but his impact on the school, and on the territory at large, was profound. His largest influence seems not to have been practical at all, but religious. Unlike a number of foreigners who later were to staff the faculty at Nogakko, Clark was not a missionary. But he was a pious man, and out of a prayer group that he formed—"The Covenant of Believers in Jesus"—came the graduates who in 1882 founded the Sapporo Dokuritsu Kyokai or Free Church. Two of the most famous Japanese Christians, Uchimura Kanzo and Nitobe Inazo, were graduates of Nogakko and founding members of the Free Church. Nitobe, who had an American wife, was a friend of Arishima's family, and when the youth arrived in Sapporo, he lived for a year with the Nitobe family. Arishima's relationship with Uchimura was somewhat less personal. He first knew

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Uchimura as a writer, although he did seek the older man's counsel before he was to become a Free Church member and also at the time he was planning a journey to America, and, in 1 9 1 1 , when he formally withdrew from the Free Church. After the suicide in 1923, Uchimura wrote a harsh article condemning Arishima "as one of the worst of men, someone who had the faith but lost it." (See "Kokumin yo Ryöshin o Yobiokose," Fujin Sekai, September 1923.) 1 1 . Yasukawa, Arishima Takeo Ron, p. 101. 12. Ibid., p. 100. 13. Arishima, Zenshü 7, p. 367; Zenshü 1 1 , p. 386. 14. Senuma, "Ryügaku Zengo no Arishima Takeo," Bungaku, p. 61. 15. Arishima, Kain no Matsuei, Zenshü 3, pp. 125-28. 16. Ibid., p. 105. 17. Ibid., p. m . 18. Ibid., p. 88. 19. Ibid., p. 93. 20. Ibid., p. 1 1 6 . 21. Arishima, " G e n s ö , " Zenshü 2, p. 295. 22. Brower and Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, pp. 6, 15. 23. Watson, Chinese Lyricism, p. 128. 24. Shiga, A Dark Night's Passing, p. 401. 25. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 21. 26. Yanagita, About our Ancestors, p. 148. 27. Ogasawara, Hokkaido no Bungaku, pp. 10, 1 1 . 28. Arishima, " G e n s ö , " Zenshü 2, p. 297. 29. Freud, Delusion and Dream, p. 63. 30. Maruyama, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, p. 251. 3 1 . Arishima, Kain no Matsuei, Zenshü 3, p. 87. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 124. 34. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 142. 35. See, for example, "Seishi o Yonde Kurata Shi ni" (Zenshü 9, p. 91); "Shinkyü Geijutsu no Köshö" (91p. 276); "Geijutsu Kyöiku Shikan" (9: p. 396); "Yuki Tsumareru Bourgeois" (9: p. 425). Of course the most famous essay documenting Arishima's awareness of social, especially class issues, is the 1921 "Sengen Hitotsu" (9: p. 5). 36. Arishima, "Osue no Shi," Zenshü 2, p. 253. 37. Ibid., p. 268. 38. Arishima, " G e n s ö , " Zenshü 2, p. 294. 39. Arishima, "Hannichi," Zenshü 2, p. 14. 40. Arishima, Umare huru Nayami, Zenshü 3, p. 402. 41. Arishima, Kain no Matsuei, Zenshü 3, p. 96. 42. Arishima, " G e n s ö , " Zenshü 2, p. 295. 43. Arishima, "Hannichi," Zenshü 2, p. 14.

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44. Arishima, "Livingston Den no J o , " Zenshu 7, p. 363. 45. Arishima, Umare Izuru Nayami, Zenshu 3, p. 464. 46. Ibid., p. 401. 47. Ibid., p. 407. 48. Ibid., p. 412. 49. Ibid., p. 418. 50. Ibid., p. 447. 51. Ibid., pp. 401-2. 52. Ibid., pp. 460-61. 53. Perhaps the best example of a "forward-looking" narrative in all of Arishima's work is the late, unfinished Seiza (Constellation, 1922). Japanese critics, notably Honda Shugo, have seen in Seiza a novel of youthful hope and possibility, an instance of that rare phenomenon known as "realism" which seems to elude the grasp of most Japanese writers, even those who harbor Arishima's kind of socialist beliefs. Indeed, Hokkaido is a brigher and broader, less "mind-controlled" place in Seiza. There is a variousness and breadth in this work, no doubt enhanced by Arishima's use of multiple points of view, which we do not find elsewhere in his fiction. Yet even here, there are motifs which we recognize in the other Hokkaido fictions: examples of physical and mental suffering; hysterical characters who hear "inner voices"; visions of a Nature that is "distant and disconnected," a sky "black in its indifference." It does not seem wholly unreasonable to assume that, had Arishima lived to complete this massive fictional experiment, the landscape would have increasingly contracted as the focus on fewer and fewer characters became more intense. Where the narrative breaks off, we see an image of what I have in mind: "the air inside the car grew rank and fetid, and the light from the oil lamp, reacting to every shock and jolt along the way, flared up and faded by turns." (Seiza, Zenshu 5, p. 358.) 54. Arishima, Umare Izuru Nayami, Zenshu 3, p. 426. 55. Ibid., p. 425. 56. Ibid., p. 461. 57. Arishima, Umare Izuru Nayami, Zenshu 3, p. 401. It should be mentioned that Kimoto is still alive at the end. A lucky blast from the whistle at a nearby fish processing plant returns this character, rather dubiously 1 must say, to the "real world" and the real, though exaggerated, ending of the novella. 58. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, p. 76.

Chapter Two: America 1. 2. 3. 4.

de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 9. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 97. Eto, "Realism no Genryu," p. 218. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, p. 88.

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5. Arishima, Meiro, Z e n s h ü 3, p. 272. 6. Arishima, Aru Onna, Z e n s h ü 4, p. 88. 7. Ibid., p. 1 8 1 . 8. M a r u y a m a , Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, p. 29. 9. Ibid., p. 183. 10. Futabatei, Mediocrity (Heibon), p. 194. 1 1 . K e r m o d e , The Sense of an Ending, p. 1 7 3 . 1 2 . Arishima, Meiro, Z e n s h ü 3, p. 219. 1 3 . Ibid., p. 243. 1 4 . Ibid., p. 326. 1 5 . Arishima, Aru Onna, Z e n s h ü 4, p. 424. 16. Arishima, Umare huru Nayami, Z e n s h ü 3, p. 437. 1 7 . Arishima, " U n m e i no Uttae e , " Z e n s h ü 5, p. 548. 18. H a u s e r , Social History of Art, vol. 3, p. 175. 19. This diary, or Kansöroku, w a s begun at Sapporo in Arpil 1897, and breaks off in September 1922, about a year before Arishima's death. Substantial and important sections of this diary w e r e written originally in English. 20. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 10, p. 1 1 6 . 2 1 . Arishima, Z e n s h ü 1 1 , p. 1 7 3 . 22. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 1 2 , p. 55. 23. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 1 1 , p. 193. 24. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 1 1 , p. 198. 25. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 1 2 , p. 24. 26. Arishima, Z e n s h ü i o , p. 5 1 7 . 27. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 1 1 , p. 174. 28. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 7, p. 186. 29. Ibid., p. 189. 30. Itö, " A r i s h i m a T a k e o , " Z e n s h ü 3, p. 301. 3 1 . Mushanoköji, " T a k e o San no S h i , " Kaizö, p. 1 1 1 . 32. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 1 2 , p. 194. 33. Arishima, " L i v i n g s t o n Den no J o , " Z e n s h ü 7, p. 368. 34. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan, p. 1 1 8 . 35. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 10, p. 197. 36. S e n u m a Shigeki notes that in the early 1880s the G o v e r n m e n t threate n e d to abolish Nögakkö because of its g r o w i n g reputation as a "Christian Coll e g e . " (See " N i r e no J u i n , " Bungei, N o v e m b e r 1953, p. 243.) 37. See H o n d a , Shirakaba-ha no Bungaku, p. 200. 38. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 1 5 . 39. Arishima, Z e n s h ü 1 2 , p. 7. In context Arishima is contemplating his o w n suicide. T h e item is dated J u n e 25, 1908. O n M a y 3, Arishima had bought a revolver. " I s suicide sinful in itself," he asks himself on the 25th, and answers, " N o . " " T o neglect one's duty and commit suicide—one cannot help being cursed as a c o w a r d . " Then he adds: " I w a n t to touch something very, very vital."

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8

NOTES

40. Uchimura, How 1 Became a Christian, pp. 166-67. 41. Arishima, "Bunka no Matsuro," Zenshu 9, p. 152. 42. See "Livingston Den no J o , " Zenshu 7, p. 364. In this rather brief autobiography, covering the years between his arrival at Sapporo Nogakko and death of his wife and father (roughly then between 1896 and 19x6), Arishima records Nitobe's puzzlement when told that the young man's real academic interest lies in literature and history. "Well then," Nitobe is reported to have said, "you've come to the wrong place." 43. Arishima, Zenshu 10, p. 257. 44. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 48. 45. Arishima, Zenshu 3, p. 351. 46. It was Carlyle himself who, in Sign of the Times, claimed that "in all senses we worship and follow after Power." Ironically, it was he who likely contributed to Arishima's own "hero-complex." "You must become great and perfect," Arishima writes in his diary upon returning from abroad. "Don't [be] content to reach the level of your petty surroundings. The world is watching you, so you must look into the world with wide-open eyes. In the end I will be great. To be great is to serve the world best." (February 21, 1908). And again: "Pluck your spirit and be sure to make yourself famous. Famous for what? Famous for anything." (March 23, 1908). Zenshu 1 1 , pp. 186, 198. 47. Arishima, Zenshu 10, p. 413. 48. Ibid. 49. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 58. 50. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 57. 51. Arishima, Zenshu 5, pp. 56, 104, 168-69. 52. Briefly, here is Arishima's itinerary, which reflects the extent of his wandering. He arrived by boat in Seattle in September 1903, and took a train across the United States to Philadelphia, where he studied at Haverford College, taking a master's degree in history. In the fall of 1904, he left for Boston, where he spent a year as a nonmatriculated student at Harvard. In the following year he moved again, this time to the Washington area, where he would read, voraciously it seems, at the Library of Congress. After three full years in America, Arishima boarded ship again in September 1906 and went to Italy, where he met his brother, Ikuma, who was studying art in Naples. They traveled together through Europe for several months. Arishima returned to Japan, after three and a half years abroad, in April 1907. 53. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 1 2 1 . 54. If there remains any doubt as to the impact of Goethe's book, let us look at the following passages. Here is Werther, dreaming of Lotte: "Last night— I tremble to confess it—I held her in my arms, close to my breast, and covered her love-murmuring lips with endless kisses; my eyes sank into the intoxication of hers. Dear God!" (Werther, p. 135). And here is Arishima, dreaming of Fanny: " I feel your hands around my neck, I feel your lips on my lips. I feel

NOTES

139

your heart beating against mine . . . Fanny! Embrace me! So, so, and tight! Oh! God knows what!" (Zenshü 1 1 , p. 3). 55. Uchimura, How I Became a Christian, p. 91. 56. Ibid. 57. Arishima, "Walt Whitman no Ichidanmen," Zenshü 7, p. 46. 58. Ibid., p. 52. 59. Arishima, "Walt Whitman," Zenshü 6, p. 438. 60. Arishima, "Whitman ni tsuite," Zenshü 8, pp. 534-35. 61. Arishima, "Walt Whitman," Zenshü 6, p. 445. 62. Arishima, "Whitman ni tsuite," Zenshü 8, p. 562. 63. Arishima, "Walt Whitman," Zenshü 6, p. 447. 64. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, p. 391. 65. Ibid., p. 24. 66. Ibid., p. 44. 67. Ibid., p. 254. 68. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 133. 69. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, p. 206. 70. Ibid., p. 89. 71. Ibid. 72. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 133. 73. Goethe, from the foreword to The Sorrows of Young Werther, p. xi. 74. Arishima, Meiro, Zenshü 3, p. 228. 75. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, p. 30. 76. Arishima, Meiro, Zenshü 3, p. 208. 77. Ibid., p. 209. 78. Ibid., p. 214. 79. Ibid., p. 220. 80. Ibid., p. 207. 81. Ibid., p. 222. 82. Ibid., p. 232. 83. Ibid., p. 341. 84. Ibid., p. 292. 85. Ibid., p. 327. 86. Ibid., p. 346. 87. Ibid., p. 351. 88. Ibid., p. 352. 89. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 1 1 .

Chapter Three: The City and the Sea 1 . Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshü 4, p. 1 2 1 . 2. Ibid., p. 133. 3. Ibid., p. 104.

140

NOTES

4. Ibid., p. 369. 5. Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 89. 6. Ibid. 7. Arishima took a room at Engakuji from March 31 until April 21. On arriving there, he notes in his diary: "my brain is cleared . . . as I do not read any newspapers, I feel as if I am transferred from earth to heaven." Day after day he reports working "awfully hard"; his maximum output on a single day runs to thirty pages, although he admits: "[I] found that my energy almost expires [after] writing that much." On the night of the nineteenth, Arishima writes: "perusal of manuscript, not very satisfied." Two days later he adds: "This is the last night of my stay . . . wrote about eighteen pages per day. The result [is] not very bad. But could not finish." At this point he leaves Kamakura for a scheduled series of lectures. The circuit leads him to Kyoto where he completes the book on May 23. 8. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, p. 9. 9. Ibid., p. 48. 10. Masamune, "Arishima Takeo no Aru Onna," Zenshu 6, p. 90. 1 1 . Ito, "Arishima Takeo," Zenshu 3, p. 304. 12. See Honda Shugo's "Arishima Takeo Ron," in his Shirakaba ha no Bungaku (Shinchosha, i960); also Noma Hiroshi, "Arishima Takeo" (1958), Zenshu 17, p. 146. 13. Ishikawa, "Jidai Heisoku no Genjo," Kindai Bungaku Hydron Taikei, vol. 3, pp. 332-4114. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, p. 129. 15. Ibid., p. 431. 16. Ibid., p. 304. 17. Ibid., p. 328. 18. Doppo, "Unmei Ronja," in Gendai Nihon Bungaku Taikei, vol. 1 1 , p. 93. 19. This "space" shares characteristics with other, western novels of forbidden love. See Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: "Whether there is a genuine outside becomes a problem in the nineteenth century, when it comes to seeni that the apparent outside is an illusion, a space already socialized in one way or another. This may then precipitate a hopeless quest for an area outside the outside" (p. 23). 20. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, p. 12. 21. Ibid., p. 21. 22. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, p. 72. 23. In his well-known essay on love, "Oshiminaku Ai wa Ubau" (Love Relentlessly Steals, 1919), Arishima posits three basic categories of existence: the habitual life, the intellectual, and the instinctual. It is the power of love, Arishima will claim, that transports the individual first beyond habit, then beyond intellect, into a "radical play space" (an expression he borrows from the Swedish feminist, Ellen Key) of the instincts. Here it may be helpful to note

NOTES

141

that Arishima was prone to think of life, and art, in terms of such paradigms, and that they appear in his fiction, if only to break down or to be parodied there. See Zenshu 8, pp. 126-216. 24. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, pp. 74-75. 25. Arishima read Havelock Ellis's Psychology of Sex in 1916, mentioning then that the book would be helpful in the planned revision of Aru Onna no Gurinpusu. In Ellis, Arishima might have noticed, for example, the following passage: "Many women who may be considered normal are sexually excitable (occasionally even to the point of orgasm) by special odors, as of the general body odor of a beloved man (sometimes when blended with that of tobacco) or of leather (which is ultimately a skin odor) and are sometimes overcome by a sudden almost hallucinatory recollection of the body odor of a lover." (Ellis, Psychology of Sex, p. 48.) 26. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, p. 103. 27. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, pp. 105-6. 28. Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, p. 173. 29. For an illuminating discussion of these issues, see Karatani Kojin's essay, "Kaikyu ni tsuite" in Marx: Sono Kanosei no Chushin, p. 155. 30. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, pp. 1 1 8 - 9 . 31. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, p. 37. 32. In September 1906, Arishima left America after three years of study there, and boarded a steamship bound for Naples on the first leg of his homeward journey. Six months later he boarded ship again, arriving at Kobe in April 1907. Certain of Arishima's preoccupations while at sea are perhaps worth mentioning. Immediately related to our discussion here are notes Arishima made, in English, about class structure on the ship. "The first class passengers are the aristocrats." (Arishima had paid $90.00 for a first class ticket, noting that the trip was likely to mark the end of his "high life.") "Music, swell dinners, and meaningless chat . . . [they] have no definite aim in their travel. They go where pleasure leads them." On the second class he writes: "They live in the rear of the ship . . . they know the tonnage and speed of the ship, . . . their talk is not vain, but full of practical interest and calculation. They behave independently. Their ambition is to be first class passengers someday." And then there is the third class: "They are chaos. They hate order because they know that order is mechanism, and in mechanism there is little display of instinctual sentiment. They have no cares about tomorrow, they are like the lilies of the field. They are not idealists. They may not have beautiful dreams, but they have life of life [sic]. . . . What an ease and naturalness." (Diary, September 3, Zenshu 2, pp. 8-9.) 33. 34. 35. 36.

Arishima, Zenshu 7, p. 383. McClellan, Two Japanese Novelists, p. 101. See for example, "Naibu Seikatsu no Genzo," Zenshu 7, pp. 88-89. Arishima, Zenshu 10, pp. 517, 538.

142

NOTES

37. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, p. 127. 38. By epic I mean the generic source of a quest-romance. Andrew Plaks has pointed to the "nonappearance" of epic in the Chinese literary tradition. In the main these remarks seem applicable to the Japanese situation as well: "Since within this vision the given universe is seen as a self-contained world, inherently complete if not perfect, such that movement in any given direction has no particular significance, the journey or quest topos of such importance in Western allegory is relegated to a minor position in the Chinese tradition, a fact that perhaps goes a long way to explain the nonappearance of epic in that literature. Significantly, even in the examples of allegorical journeys that do occur, the main emphasis is more on horizontal breadth than vertical depth of experience." (Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber, p. 110.) 39. See for example, "Oshiminaku Ai wa Ubau," Zenshu 8, pp. 129-30; also " A i ni tsuite," Zenshu 9, p. 331. 40. Poulet, The Interior Distance, p. 1 5 1 . 41. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, pp. 362-69. 42. Isoda, Shiso to shite no Tokyo, p. 16. In this context, see also Okuno, Bungaku ni okeru Genfukei. 43. Eto, Sakka wa Kodd Suru, Chosakushu 5, p. 43. 44. Seidensticker, Low City, High City, p. 250. 45. Arishima, " A i ni tsuite," Zenshu 9, p. 349. 46. Arishima, "Oinaru Kenzensei e , " Zenshu 7, p. 212. 47. Arishima, " A i ni tsuite," Zenshu 9, p. 354. 48. Arishima, "Oshiminaku Ai wa Ubau," Zenshu 8, p. 183. 49. The epigraph is from Whitman's "To A Common Prostitute": Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you And the leaves to rustle for you, do my words Refuse to glisten and rustle for you. 50. Arishima, "Jikkenshitsu," Zenshu 3, p. 1 5 1 . 5 1 . Ibid., p. 160. 52. Ibid., p. 168. 53. Ibid., p. 170. 54. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshu 4, p. 244. 55. For a related discussion on the spatial orientation of a post-romantic sensibility, see Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 46: "It is possible to lose one's way in the distance, to be waylaid in the world of action to the point of criminal transgression, but the kind of peril associated with the fragility of the artist's mind can only occur when the level of existence undergoes a radical change. . . . The phenomenology of distances, which befits the behavior of the man of action, is replaced by a phenomenology of heights and depths."

NOTES

56. 57. 58. 59.

Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshü 4, pp. 303-4. Ibid., p. 301. Arishima, Aru Onna, Zenshü 4, p. 431. Ibid., pp. 4 1 6 - 1 7 .

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Index

Abe Köbö, 9-10 Aeneid, 12 Ainu, 19-20 Akutagawa Ryünosuke, 6 Allegory, 3, 17, 23, 39, 41, 64, 110-11, 1 1 7 , 1421138 America, 4, 42-47, 59, 65-66, 69, 71 Arishima Ikuma, 1381152 Arishima Takeo, 19-23, 50-52, 137:139, 1381142, 1152 "Ai ni tsuite," 127, 142:139 Aru Onna, x, 1, 10, 19, 42-43, 49, 54, 65, 73-101 (summary), 101-31 (interpretation) Aru Onna no Gurinpusu, 73, 1 4 1 ^ 5 "Bunka no Matsuro," 56 "Chihö no Seinen Shokun ni," 21 "Daiközui no Mae," 59 "Geijutsu Kyöiku Shikan," 1 3 5 ^ 5 "Gensö," 26, 30 "Hannichi," 33 "Jikkenshitsu," 127-28 Kain no Matsuei, 23-33, 54/ 69, 103 "Livingston Den no Jo," 1 3 8 ^ 2 Meiro, 42, 46-47, 52, 62-69 "Oinaru Kenzensei e , " 127

"Oshiminaku Ai wa Ubau," 109, I40n23 "Osue no Shi," 32 "Samuson to Deraira," 54, 59 "Seisan," 54, 59 "Seishi o Yonde Kurata Shi ni," i35n35 Seiza, 1361153 "Sengen Hitotsu," 102, 1 3 5 ^ 5 "Shinkyü Geijutsu no Köshö," 135n35

Umare Izuru Nayami, 34-39, 47, 69, i36n57 "Unmei no Uttae e," 48 "Yuki Tsumareru Bourgeois," i35r>35 Asakusa, 9 Ashiya, 9 Auerbach, Erich, 54 Bakufu, 20 Barthes, Roland, 31 Bible, 32-33, 53-55, 59 Borges, Jorge Luis, 15 Brower, Robert and Earl Miner, 27 Bungakkai, 79

INDEX

150 Burroughs, William: Naked Lunch, 1 2 Byron, Lord George, 56-57 Carlyle, Thomas, 49, 55-57, 1381146 Chikamatsu Shükö, 12; " G i w a k u , " 15 Christianity, 2 1 , 44, 53-55, 58 Clark, William, i34nio Confucianism, 37, 43-45, 52, 55, 58 Conrad, Joseph, 3; Heart of Darkness, 12 Daisen, 9 Dante, 60 Dazai Osamu, 1 2 de Man, Paul, 41, 1 4 2 ^ 5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 15, 60, 102 Edo, 14, 125 Eliade, Mircea, 28 Ellis, Havelock, 141 n25 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 60 Endo Shüsaku, 9-10 Engakuji, i4on7 Epic of Gilgamesh, 1 2 Etö Jun, 42, 126 Expressionism, 125 Ezo, 20

Hamlet, 60 Hauser, Arnold, 48 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 40 Hiratsuka Raicho, 5 Hirotsu Ryuro, 127 Hokkaido, 19-40, 1 3 4 m , m o , 1 3 6 ^ 3 Home (Homeland), 4, 6, 27, 29, 47-49 Honda Shugo, 53, 102, 1 3 6 ^ 3 Hugo, Victor, 67 Ibsen, Henrik, 55, 63 Ishikawa Takuboku, 102 Isoda Koichi, 126 Ito Sei, 52, 102 Izumi Kyoka, 127 James, Henry, 44 Jodo Shinshu, 51

Foucault, Michel, 69 Freud, Sigmund, 30, 1 1 4 Friend's Asylum, 59 Frye, Northrop, 41 Fudoki, 11 Furusato, see Home (Homeland) Futabatei Shimei, 42, 45; Heibon, 46; Ukigumo, 15, 48, 65, 105

Kaihd, i33n4 Kaitakushi, 20 Kaizo, i33n4 Kamakura, i4on7 Kamura Isota, 1 2 Kansdroku, I37ni9 Karatani Kojin, I4in29 Kasai Zenzo, 12 Kautsky, Karl, 60 Kawakami Bizan, 127 Kermode, Frank, 46 Key, Ellen, 1 4 0 ^ 3 Kindai Shiso, I33n4 Kitamura Tokoku, 53 Kiyomizu, 9 Kobe, i 4 i n 3 2 Kojiki, 11

Gakushüin, 2 1 , 51 Gesaku, 44 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 4, 63; Sorrows of Young Werther, 57-59, 1 3 8 ^ 4 Gorky, Maxim, 60

Kokumin Bungaku, Kropotkin, Peter, Kume Masao, 5 Kunikida Doppo, Kuroda Kiyotaka, Kyoto, i4on7

79 4 105 i34nio

INDEX Lukacs, Georg, 72 McClellan,, Edwin, 1 1 4 Maeda Ai, 15 Manydshu, 1 1 Martineau, James, 53-54 Maruyama Masao, 30 Masamune Hakucho, 102 Meiji, 9-10, 14, 42, 52-53, 105 Mishima Yukio, 9-10 Miyoshi Masao, 65 Moby Dick, 1 2 Mori Ogai: "Maihime," 9 Murasaki Shikibu: Tale of Genji, 1 1 - 1 3 Mushanokoji Saneatsu, 5, 52, 109 Nagai Kafu, 14 Naichi, see Home (Homeland) Natsume Soseki, 37, 1 3 1 ; Higan Sugi Made, 126; Kokoro, 45; Mon, 3; "Rondon to," 9; Sorekara, 48 Naturalism, 6, 15-16, 102, 126 Nikki bungaku, 1 1 Nitobe Inazo, 19, 20, 1 3 4 M 0 Nogi, General, 5, 45 Noma Hiroshi, 102 Odyssey, 1 2 Ogasawara Masaru, 29 Okuno Takeo, 1 4 2 ^ 2 Osugi Sakae, 5 Plaks, Andrew, i33n20, 1 4 2 ^ 8 Poulet, Georges, 1 1 8 Proletarian literature, 6 Pyle, Kenneth, 52 Realism, 33, 102 Romanticism, 17, 46, 48, 69, 109, 1 3 1

151 Samba, 13 Sapporo, 19, 21-22; Kokuritsu Kyokai (Free Church), 2 1 , 53, i34nio; Nogakko (School of Agriculture), 21, 53, 56, i34nio, I38n42 Satsuma, 50 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 50, 57 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 60 Seidensticker, Edward, 126 Seito, i33n4 Senuma Shigeki, 1 3 7 ^ 6 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 56, 109 Shiga Naoya, 16, 109; Anya Koro, 2829; Wakai, 16 Shimazaki Toson: Hakai, 43; Ie, 1 1 4 Shinmachi, 1 3 Shirakaba, 6, 22, 73, 125-26 Shunsui, 13 Strong, Kenneth, x Sumidagawa, 9 Taisho, 5, 14, 73 Tale of the Heike, 1 3 Tane Maku Hito, 133114 Tanizaki Junichiro, 14, 109; Makioka Sisters, 6-10 Tanner, Tony, 1 1 2 , i4oni9 Tayama Katai: Futon, 15 Tokutomi Roka: Omoide no Ki, 14 Tokyo, 3, 8, 10, 14-16, 19, 73, 77, 80, 108, 1 1 7 , 124-26 Tolstoy, Leo, 4, 55, 62; Resurrection, 93 Trilling, Lionel, 57 Tsubouchi Shoyo, 42, 1 3 3 m l Turgenev, Ivan, 60 Uchimura Kanzo, 54-55, 60, i34nio Utamakura, 27 Utopia, 13, 30, 69, 102, 1 1 8 , 126

Said, Edward, 16 Saikaku, 13; Koshoku Ichidai Onna, 14

Van Gogh, Vincent, 5

152

INDEX

Watakushi shösetsu (personal fiction), 5, 30 Watson, Burton, 27 Weber, Max, 67 West, the, ix, 5, 14, 49, 56, 60 Whitman, Walt, 4, 55, I42n38

60-62,

Yanagita Kunio, 28 Y a s u k a w a Sadao, I34n9 Yokohama, 50, 52 Yokomitsu Riichi: Shanghai, 9 Yoshida Shöin, 53 Yoshino, 9 Yoshiwara, 13

Translations from the Oriental Classics

Major Plays of Chikamatsu, tr. Donald Keene Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu, tr. Donald Keene. Paperback text edition. Records of the Grand Historian of China, translated from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, tr. Burton Watson, 2 vols. Instructions for Practical Living and Other Néo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-ming, tr. Wing-tsit Chan Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, tr. Burton Watson, paperback ed. only The Mahäbhärata, tr. Chakravarthi V. Narasimhan. Also in paperback ed. The Manyöshü, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkökai edition Su Tung-p'o: Selections from a Sung Dynasty Poet, tr. Burton Watson. Also in paperback ed. Bhartrihari: Poems, tr. Barbara Stoler Miller. Also in paperback ed. Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsiin Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu, tr. Burton Watson. Also in separate paperback eds. The Awakening of Faith, attributed to Asvaghosha, tr. Yoshito S. Hakeda. A l s o in paperback ed. Reflections on Things at Hand: The Neo-Confucian Anthology, comp. C h u Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien, tr. Wing-tsit Chan The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, tr. Philip B. Yampolsky. Also in paperback ed. Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkö, tr. Donald Keene. Also in paperback ed.

1961 1961 1963 1964 1965 1954 1965 1967 1967 1967 1967 1967 1967

The Pillow Book of Sei Shönagon, tr. Ivan Morris, 2 vols. Two Plays of Ancient India: The Little Clay Cart and the Minister's Seal, tr. J. A. B. van Buitenen The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, tr. Burton Watson The Romance of the Western Chamber (Hsi Hsiang chi), tr. S. I. Hsiung. Also in paperback ed. The Manyöshü, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkökai edition. Paperback text edition. Records of the Historian: Chapters from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien. Paperback text edition, tr. Burton Watson Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the Tang Poet Han-shan, tr. Burton Watson. Also in paperback ed. Twenty Plays of the Nö Theatre, ed. Donald Keene. Also in paperback ed. Chüshingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers, tr. Donald Keene. Also in paperback ed. The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, tr. Philip B. Yampolsky Chinese Rhyme-Prose, tr. Burton Watson. Also in paperback ed. Kükai: Major Works, tr. Yoshito S. Hakeda The Old Man Who Does as He Pleases: Selections from the Poetry and Prose of Lu Yu, tr. Burton Watson The Lion's Roar of Queen Srimälä, tr. Alex & Hideko Wayman Courtier and Commoner in Ancient China: Selections from the History of The Former Han by Pan Ku, tr. Burton Watson. Also in paperback ed. Japanese Literature in Chinese, Vol. I: Poetry and Prose in Chinese by Japanese Writers of the Early Period, tr. Burton Watson Japanese Literature in Chinese, Vol. II: Poetry and Prose in Chinese by Japanese Writers of the Later Period, tr. Burton Watson Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma, tr. Leon Hurvitz. Also in paperback ed. Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva's Gitagovinda, tr. Barbara Staler Miller. Also in paperback ed. Cloth ed. includes critical text of the Sanskrit. Ryökan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan, tr. Burton Watson Calming the Mind and Discerning the Real: From the Lam rim chen mo of Tson-kha-pa, tr. Alex Wayman The Hermit and the Love-Thief: Sanskrit Poems of Bhartrihari and Bilhana, tr. Barbara Stoler Miller

1967 1968 1968 1968 1969 1969 1970 1970 1971 1971 1971 1972 1973 1974

1974 1975 1976 1976

1977 1977 1978 1978

The Lute: Kao Ming's P'i-p'a chi, tr. Jean Mulligan. Also in paperback ed. A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns: Jinnö Shötöki of Kitabatake Chikafusa, tr. H. Paul Varley Among the Flowers: The Hua-chien chi, tr. Lois Fusek Grass Hill: Poems and Prose by the Japanese Monk Gensei, tr. Burton Watson. Doctors, Diviners, and Magicians of Ancient China: Biographies of Fangshih, tr. Kenneth J. DeWoskin. Also in paperback ed. Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kälidäsa, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller. Also in paperback ed. The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From early Times to the Thirteenth Century, tr. and ed. Burton Watson Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Songs of Classical Tamil, tr. A. K. Ramanujan. Also in paperback ed.

1980 1980 1982 1983 1983 1984 1984

1984

Studies in Oriental Culture 1. The Önin War: History of Its Origins and Background with a Selective Translation of the Chronicle of Önin, by H. Paul Varley 2. Chinese Government in Ming Times: Seven Studies, ed. Charles O. Hücker 3. The Actors' Analects (Yakusha Rongo), ed. and tr. by Charles J. Dunn and Bunzö Torigoe 4. Self and Society in Ming Thought, by Wm. Theodore de Bary and the Conference on Ming Thought. Also in paperback ed. 5. A History of Islamic Philosophy, by Majid Fakhry 6. Phantasies of a Love Thief: The Caurapancäsikä Attributed to Bilhana, by Barbara Stoler Miller 7. Iqbal: Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan, ed. Hafeez Malik 8. The Golden Tradition: An Anthology of Urdu Poetry, by Ahmed Ali. Also in paperback ed. 9. Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yiian China, by John W. Dardess 10. The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, by Wm. Theodore de Bary

1967 1969 1969

1970 1970 1971 1971 1973 1973

and the Conference on Seventeenth-Century Chinese Thought. Also in paperback ed. 11. To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming, by Julia Ching 12. Gods, Priests, and Warriors: The Bhrgus of the Mahabharata, by Robert P. Goldman 13. Mei Yao-ch'en and the Development of Early Sung Poetry, by Jonathan Chaves 14. The Legend of Semimaru, Blind Musician of Japan, by Susan Matisoff Sir Syyid Ahmad Khan and Muslim Modernization in India and Pakistan, by Hafeez Malik 16. The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India, by Gail Minault 17. The World of K'ung Shang-jen: A Man of Letters in Early Ch'ing China, by Richard Strassberg 18. The Lotus Boat: The Origins of Chinese Tz'u Poetry in Tang Popular Culture, by Marsha L. Wagner

1975 1976 1977 1976 1977

15.

Companions to Asian

1980 1982 1983 1984

Studies

Approaches to the Oriental Classics, ed. W m . Theodore de Bary Early Chinese Literature, by Burton Watson. Also in paperback ed. Approaches to Asian Civilizations, ed. W m . Theodore de Bary and

1959 1962

Ainslie T. Embree The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction, by C . T. Hsia. A l s o in paperback ed. Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century, tr. Burton Watson. Also in paperback ed. A Syllabus of Indian Civilization, by Leonard A . Gordon and Barbara Stoler Miller Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories, ed. C . T. Hsia and Joseph S. M.

1964

Lau. A l s o in paperback ed. A Syllabus of Chinese Civilization, by J. Mason Gentzler, 2d ed. A Syllabus of Japanese Civilization, by H. Paul Varley, 2d ed. An Introduction to Chinese Civilization, ed. John Meskill, with the

1971 1972 1972

assistance of J. Mason Gentzler An Introduction to Japanese Civilization,

1973 1974

ed. Arthur E. Tiedemann

1968 1971 1971

A Guide to Oriental Classics, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Ainslie T. Embree, 2d ed. Also in paperback ed. Ukifune: Love in The Tale of Genji, ed. Andrew Pekarik

1975 1982

Introduction to Oriental Civilizations Wm. Theodore de Bary, Editor Sources of Japanese Tradition 1958 Sources of Indian Tradition 1958 Sources of Chinese Tradition i960

Paperback ed., 2 vols. Paperback ed., 2 vols. Paperback ed., 2 vols.

1964 1964 1964

Neo-Confucian Studies Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-ming, tr. Wing-tsit Chan Reflections on Things at Hand: The Neo-Confucian Anthology, comp. Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien, tr. Wing-tsit Chan Self and Society in Ming Thought, by Wm. Theodore de Bary and the Conference on Ming Thought. Also in paperback ed. The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, by Wm. Theodore de Bary and the Conference on Seventeenth-Century Chinese Thought. Also in paperback ed. Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo Confucianism and Practical Learning, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom. Also in paperback ed. The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en, by Judith A. Berling The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis, by Chün-fang Yü Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, by Wm. Theodore de Bary Yuan Thought: Chinese Thought and Religion Under the Mongols, ed. Hok-lam Chan and Wm. Theodore de Bary The Liberal Tradition in China, by Wm. Theodore de Bary The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology, by John B. Henderson

1963 1967 1970

1975

1979 1980 1981 1981 1982 1983 1984

Modern Asian Literature Series Modern Japanese Drama: An Anthology, ed. and tr. Ted T. Takaya. Also in paperback ed. Mask and Sword: Two Plays for the Contemporary Japanese Theater, Yamazaki Masakazu, tr. J. Thomas Rimer Yokomitsu Riichi, Modernist, by Dennis Keene Nepali Visions, Nepali Dreams: The Poetry of Laxmiprased Devkota, tr. David Rubin Literature of the Hundred Flowers, vol. 1: Criticism and Polemics, ed. Hualing Nieh Literature of the Hundred Flowers, vol. 2: Poetry and Fiction, ed. Hualing Nieh Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919-1949, ed. Joseph S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee. Also in paperback ed. A View by the Sea, by Yasuoka Shötarö, tr. Kären Wigen Lewis

1979 1980 1980 1980 1981 1981

1981 1984