Paragons of the Ordinary: The Biographical Literature of Mori Ogai 9780824840327

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Paragons of the Ordinary

A publication of the S C H O O L OF HAWAIIAN, ASIAN & PACIFIC STUDIES

University of Hawaii

Paragons of the Ordinary THE BIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE OF MORI OGAI MARVIN MARCUS

SHAPS Library of Asian

Studies

University of H a w a i i Press Honolulu

© 1993 School of Hawaiian, Asian & Pacific Studies All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 93 94 95 96 97 98

5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marcus, Marvin, 1944Paragons of the ordinary : the biographical literature of Mori Ogai / Marvin Marcus, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-1450-9 1. Mori, Ogai, 1862-1922—Knowledge—History. 2. Biography as a literary form. 3. Japan—Biography. I. Title. PL811.07Z768 1993 895.6'342—dc20 92-26583 CIP

University of Hawaii Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources

Designed by Ken

Miyamoto

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction: The Biographical Literature of Mori Ogai 1. Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

1 8

2. O n Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

30

3. The Shiden of Mori Ogai: A Critical Overview

59

4. What Has Ogai Wrought? A Compendium of Shiden Topics and Themes

87

5. The Biographer and His Sources: O n Documents, Informants, and the Literature of Fact

121

6. Mori Ogai and the Biographical Quest

143

7. A Genealogy of Exemplary Lives: Shibue Chusai and the Idealized Episode

177

8. A Miscellany of Biographical Anecdotes and Vignettes from Shibue Chusai and Izawa Ranken

241

9. Conclusion

274

Abbreviations Used in Citations

287

Notes

289

Bibliography

339

Glossary

345

Index

353

v

Preface

This book is about discovery. It is about the process of discovery, the literary mechanism of discovery, and the ways in which a search for the other inevitably leads back to the self. We call this sort of thing biography, and this is the subject of my book. Mori Ogai is a very important figure in the development of modern Japanese culture, and the people I've spoken with about my " O g a i book" have naturally assumed that the project was to be a biography o/the man. When I explained that the book would deal with a series of biographies written by Ogai, late in life, concerning a circle of obscure nineteenth-century Confucianist literati, the reaction was typically puzzled. " W h y bother with that material? Why not just write about O g a i ? " In a rather roundabout way, I have written about Mori Ogai, for the nine biographies he wrote between 1916 and 1921—collectively referred to as the shiden—say as much about the author as those many lives he detailed. This book is also about anecdotes, stories, accounts, "slice-oflife" episodes—the building blocks, in other words, of biographical narrative. For this reason, I think it only appropriate to relate the tale of my acquaintanceship with this particular Japanese author. M y discovery of Mori Ogai occurred during a year of intensive language study in Tokyo at what used to be known as the "Stanford Center." It was December 1979, and I was a grad student struggling with J a p a n and the Japanese language. Back then, hardware-store Japanese presented difficulties no less formidable than those encountered with esoteric literary texts. T h e rigorous program of study was intimidating. Happily, we vn

viu

Preface

were encouraged to do a tutorial on a chosen area of specialization. This would remind us that we were actually adults and not large "language babies." M y own bun'ya (field of interest) was modern Japanese literature. But at that stage in my career, I had at best a dim notion of what Japanese literature was, modern or otherwise. I consulted with my tutor. Noto sensei was one of the more informal members of the faculty, and we got along well from the start. T h e decision of an author was to be mine. For want of any specific favorite, I chose Soseki. I would go with a known quantity. After all, I ' d m u c h enjoyed reading Botchan and Kokoro in the literature-intranslation course at Michigan. In retrospect, this was to be a critical career choice. "Soseki ni shiyo to omotte imasu ga" (I'm thinking of choosing Soseki), I reported to Noto sensei. "So desu nee," sensei responded, in a distinctly disapproving manner. "Mákasu san no koto da kara, yappari Ogai no ho ga ii to omoundesu" (Hmm. I ' m not so sure. I think Ogai would be better for someone like you). Although I had enjoyed reading Soseki, I was by no means a devotee, and it therefore seemed reasonable to attribute a certain intuitive gift to Noto sensei (although I never did learn what he discerned in my character that inspired the match with Ogai.) And so our tutorial on the writings of Mori Ogai commenced. Thanks to sensei's guidance, I acquired a taste for this difficult and demanding writer. I returned to A n n Arbor sufficiently schooled in Japanese to survive the graduate seminars, and when it came time to choose research topics, I unhesitatingly chose Ogai. I suspect that if Noto sensei had approved of my Soseki choice—or had instead suggested Kawabata, or Mishima, or perhaps a career in management— things would have turned out quite differently. For my M . A . thesis I wrote on Ogai's trilogy of autobiographical novellas (1890-1891), each set in Germany. T h e n , before I knew it, I had to decide on a dissertation topic. In the midst of my ruminations, Professor Edwin McClellan of Yale visited Michigan to give a talk on Shibue Chüsai. T h e n a m e meant little to me at the time—some biography that Ogai had written toward the end of his life. By the end of McClellan's talk, my decision was made.

Preface

IX

T h e r e is a good deal of self-hypnosis that goes with taking on a large project, especially one that isolates you from the world and sits you in a small room with books and documents and the assorted paraphernalia of writing (diskettes and hard drives having displaced the trusty yellow pad and bucket full of #2 pencils). Distractions threaten to become permanent. T h e " O g a i book" has been a decade in the works, and more than once during that period I considered abandoning it. H a d I understood early on exactly what it would take to write this book, I would have fled the field in terror. But I didn't. And this is not merely because the subject matter has proved so durable, so compelling (which it has). It is also because I came to believe that Noto sensei knew something that I didn't, and that to abandon this project, which has been truly arduous in so many ways, would mean turning my back upon myself. T h e title I have chosen for this book, Paragons of the Ordinary, refers to the m a n y unexceptional men and women whom Mori Ogai spent years of his life researching. But I wish it to be understood also as an expression of my personal faith in the enduring value of humanistic study and in the "ordinary virtue" of teaching.

Introduction The Biographical Literature of Mori Ogai Thirty-seven years, no more than a fleeting instant, Studying medicine, succeeding to the family calling, Making use of my meager talents. Attainment and honor—these I entrust to Heaven. Peace of mind is more important than wealth. I lament not my poverty.

With this rather undistinguished verse begins a work that has been hailed as a masterpiece of modern Japanese literature—Mori Ogai's Shibue Ckusai. This remarkable account of obscure scholarly lives, whose title identifies its central subject, is most conveniently spoken of as biography, although the Japanese prefer a related term, shiden (historical biography). The Chusai work initially appeared in a series of 119 newspaper installments early in 1916. It was not to appear in a separate edition until 1940. 1 Readers of the original text, with its mass of names and dates and scholarly digression, will no doubt wonder what makes this literature in the first place, much less great literature. Part of the answer can be found in the lofty reputation of its author. Mori Ogai (1862-1922) is an authentic Japanese cultural property, a figure enshrined in its literary pantheon. H e has himself been the subject of more biographies and memoirs than one would want to count. Ogai's extraordinary career has assumed the status of legend. The facts are common knowledge (especially among high school students, who are expected to memorize significant cultural data): the brilliant young medical graduate, heir to a samurai lineage, embarks in 1884 upon a four-year course of stu4y in Germany and, upon his return, almost single-handedly transforms the Japanese literary establishment (bundan). Ogai introduced German ro1

2

Introduction

manticism and idealism, together with aesthetic philosophy and modern literary criticism. H e founded m a j o r literary journals, developed a new genre of autobiographical fiction, produced some of J a p a n ' s first truly distinguished literary translations, and before long emerged as one of the leading cultural arbiters of his day—while somehow finding time to pursue a career within the A r m y Medical Corps, where he would eventually rise to the rank of surgeon-general. Whatever else can be said about the man, Mori Ogai has wielded unparalleled authority in J a p a n as writer, intellectual, and culture critic. It is not without reason that the eminent author and critic Sato H a r u o (1892-1964) would designate 1884, the year of Ogai's departure for Germany, as Year O n e of modern Japanese literature. Later, the Ogai biography takes a curiously Japanese turn. A growing aversion toward the headlong course of Westernization led to a rejection of " i m p o r t e d " modes of expression in favor of native sources of inspiration. T h e end of the Meiji era (1868-1912) marked the beginning of Ogai's infatuation with events and figures from the past. H e wrote a series of historical novellas (rekishi shosetsu) and spent the last five years of his life buried in the documentary remains of individuals whom history had left behind. During this time he produced his shiden—nine biographies ranging from a brief sketch of several pages to a monumental study in 371 chapters. Despite its convincing historicity, Ogai's work is at the same time curiously selfreflexive, autobiographical in the broad sense of the term. Each of the shiden bears the n a m e of its central subject: Suginohara Shina, Shibue Chusai, J u a m i no tegami (The J u a m i Letter), Izawa Ranken, Toko Tahei, Suzuki Tokichiro, Saiki Koi, Kojima Hoso, Hojo Katei. T h e centerpiece is a trilogy that appeared between 1916 and 1921—Shibue Chusai, Izawa Ranken, and Hojo Katei. Set in the late Tokugawa period, these biographies trace the careers of a circle of Confucianist literati and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine. Shibue Chusai was born in Edo, the capital of the Tokugawa Shogunate, in 1805 to a family of physicians who served the lords of the Tsugaru han, a remote domain some 450 miles to the north. Like m a n y of his class, Chusai was a m a n of scholarly and literary taste, a product of the orthodox Confucian scholasticism that reigned in official circles. H e was a quiet, abstemious man, quite unlike his

Introduction

3

delightfully eccentric colleague Mori Kien. As a faculty member at the Shogunate's medical academy, the Seijukan, Chùsai studied old Chinese medical texts. H e wrote kanshi and kanbun (poetry and prose in classical Chinese) and dabbled in calligraphy and art, the typical refinements of the Edo gentry. H e was a devotee of kabuki. Chùsai fathered a large family and enjoyed the company of a wide circle of colleagues. His wife, a spirited and unusually modern woman named Io, managed the household with skill and ease. An elder son, Yasuyoshi (later known as Yutaka), had a rebellious streak that sorely provoked his normally placid father. A younger son, Shigeyoshi (later known as Tamotsu), was obedient and studious. Chùsai died in the cholera epidemic of 1858, along with m a n y people he knew. His children went on to pursue various careers after the Meiji Restoration, a difficult time for members of the erstwhile samurai class. T h e proud Hirano Sadakata, a m e m b e r of the Shibue family circle, was reduced to abject poverty. Yutaka, the black sheep, became a success. And Tamotsu, the good son, moved from place to place and j o b to j o b and never quite settled down—that is, until his life and that of Mori Ogai happened to intersect. Izawa R a n k e n (1777-1829), a physician in the service of the Fukuyama han, was Chùsai's mentor. R a n k e n ' s life, like that of his protégé, was uneventful—a successful if not brilliant career coupled with the genteel pursuit of scholarly and artistic cultivation. His friends included K a n Sazan and Rai San'yô, two of the great literary figures of the age. His own poetry was competent. R a n k e n had a crippling leg disorder but still managed to lead an active life. H e loved cats. Two sons, Shinken and Hakken, succeeded to their father's vocation and went on to achieve modest reputations. T h e brothers maintained close ties with the Shibue family, and both died, like Chùsai, before the upheavals that would transform their world. Hôjô Katei (1780-1823) was descended from an elite warrior family that later turned to traditional medicine and Confucian study. Raised in Matoya, a village south of Kyoto, Katei had a taste for wanderlust as a youth, preferring travel and aesthetic réclusion to the daily routine of teaching in Confucian academies. H e married a niece of K a n Sazan and eventually established himself as a scholar, but a sense of fulfillment seemed to elude him. H e remained devoted to his family in Matoya, with whom he kept up a long and faithful

4

Introduction

correspondence. While in Edo he befriended a congenial neighbor. This was Izawa Ranken. Katei drank to excess and died of a kidney disorder at the age of forty-three. Ranken, one of a number of physicians he frantically consulted, could do nothing for him. Katei left a single daughter, who died almost exactly a year after her father. A box containing letters and poetic memoirs survived him. The subjects of the minor shiden are equally obscure. Suginohara Shina was a mistress of Date Tsunamune (1640-1711), third lord of the Sendai domain. Mashiya Gorosaku, known as J u a m i , was a literatus and theater aficionado with close ties to Chusai and Ranken. His "biography" is actually an extended commentary on the contents of a single letter he wrote in 1822. Toko Tahei was a samurai of the Hosokawa clan whom legend had come to associate with the celebrated swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645). Suzuki Tokichiro, an Edo magistrate suddenly dismissed from office in 1858 and imprisoned, was rumored to have been an eta (outcaste). Saiki Koi (1822-1870) was a daitsujin, a connoisseur, bon vivant, and patron of the arts who had received medical treatment from Izawa Shinken. Of all the shiden figures, he is the only one with whom Ogai had been acquainted. Finally, Kojima Hoso (1797— 1846) had been one of Chusai's mentors in Confucian scholarship. Given the abundance of likely candidates for biography, one naturally puzzles over the fascination that this odd assortment of individuals held for Ogai. And the learned, pedantic voice with which he reconstructed their lives hardly seems the sort of literary fare calculated to appeal to readers enjoying a diet of more accessible writers like Soseki, Toson, and Kafu, not to mention promising newcomers such as Tanizaki and Akutagawa. As with the classics of Western biography—Plutarch's Parallel Lives or Johnson's Lives of the Poets or Carlyle's Life of Sterling—Ogai's shiden are not widely read in J a p a n . For that matter, how large a following can there be for Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, the acknowledged masterpiece of the genre? Boswell's name has long been our eponym for the dedicated biographer, but as consumers in the burgeoning biographical marketplace, our tastes understandably incline us toward more up-to-date fare—lives of Elvis, Warhol, Belushi. But in spite of its antiquarian tone and intimidating erudition, the shiden represent a new point of departure for Japanese biographical

Introduction

5

writing and a challenge to contemporary conceptions of the proper boundaries of literature. Moreover, there is general agreement that their author created a truly unique body of literature, one that bore his inimitable style. Admirers—and there are many—insist on the transcendental, ineffable quality of the Ogai style and wax eloquent concerning the spirit of The Way (michi) that it embodies. Detractors, on the other hand, have branded the work as inhuman, obsessive, and unreadable, the elitist plaything of a handful of self-indulgent antiquarians and stuffed shirts. That much Ogai criticism is biographical reflects prevailing conventions of bungei hydron (literary criticism) as well as the unusual "visibility" of Ogai's career. I will have a good deal to say about this criticism. My purpose in so doing will not be to score points with learned colleagues, but rather to come to terms with important issues this particular author has engendered. Overall, the symbiotic relationship between literary and critical writing in J a p a n is an uncharted territory I wish to explore, if only tentatively. Ogai's shiden affords an especially good access. Mori Ogai's unique status in J a p a n has not earned him much of a reputation abroad. Tanizaki, Sóseki, and Kawabata have proved more translatable (which is not to suggest, though, that they are exactly household names). Nevertheless, a fair sampling of material spanning Ogai's thirty-year career is available in English. A twovolume collection of some of the historical and biographical works edited by David Dilworth and Thomas Rimer is especially relevant to the study at hand. 2 The Chüsai biography is the subject of Edwin McClellan's elegant and affecting Woman in the Crested Kimono, essentially an adaptation of the novelistic " m e a t " of Ogai's work (its scholarly gristle having been deemed, quite rightly, indigestible by modern-day readers). McClellan's work retells the accumulated Shibue family lore, which happens to center not on Chüsai himself but on his wife Io, and in so doing the author blends biographical vignettes and personal commentary in precisely the Ogai manner. Woman in the Crested Kimono conveys the spirit of Ogai's narrative with remarkable fidelity, and it is my hope that this study will enhance our appreciation of the biographical masterpiece that, thanks to McClellan, has become accessible to readers outside J a p a n . The major scholarly studies of Ogai in English have been literary

6

Introduction

biographies: T h o m a s Rimer's Mori Ogai and Richard Bowring's Mori Ogai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture. Bowring's is the more exhaustive treatment, blending intellectual biography and literary analysis, and the attention given to Ogai the poet, playwright, and literary translator is welcome indeed. Bowring, in his far-ranging discussion of the series of autobiographical essay-stories that Ogai wrote between 1909 and 1912, collectively terms them " a literature of ideas." 3 Ogai's venture into rekishi shosetsu was spurred by the celebrated suicide of General Nogi Maresuke in September 1912, although the author had been engaged in historical and annalistic research for more than a decade. Representative works, which include some of the author's best-known stories ("Sansho dayü," " T a k a s e b u n e , " and " A b e ichizoku," for instance) are available in translation in Dilworth and Rimer's Sakaijiken volume. 4 W h a t Bowring, Rimer, and Dilworth do they do well, and it would be pointless for me to duplicate their efforts. But they give short shrift to the m a j o r shiden trilogy, treating these long and difficult works almost as an afterthought, a postscript to the Ogai biography. Their studies end where I propose to begin—with the shiden as an integrated body of literary texts that deserves serious study. T h e biographical determinism so characteristic of Japanese literary writing has been responsible for situating the shiden at the end of a well-marked path leading the author away from experiments with Westernized fiction and toward the more congenial terrain of one's native culture. Critics speak of the shiden as the "inevitable culmination" of the literary career. They point to the conflicting demands of the other career, the constraints imposed by official rank and public accountability. T h e biographical approach is not without merit, but it obscures certain contexts within which the author operated. I examine two particularly crucial contexts at the outset. First, in Chapter 1, I situate the shiden within the mainstream of Japanese biographical and historiographical literature. T h a t these works share so much with the classical Chinese histories of antiquity is no mere coincidence. Chapter 2 focuses on the newly emergent conventions of literary journalism and publishing, which fostered the development of many varieties of personal narrative. T h e move toward literary self-referentiality beginning in the late-Meiji period had a profound impact on Ogai no less on than on more "autobiographic"

Introduction

7

contemporaries such as Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943) and Tayama Katai (1872-1930). Journalistic conventions, I argue, affected not only the limited domain of narrative technique but the very terms of one's relationship with self, text, and audience. Shibukawa Gyo,. a prominent scholar of modern Japanese literature, once remarked that Mori Ogai was a journalist first and a biographer second. I was long puzzled by this assertion. Now I realize that it captures an essential quality of the shiden. Chapters 3 and 4 concern matters of formed structure, theme, and technique in the shiden. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the question of source materials and the central motif of the biographical quest. Since the cornerstone of biography is characterization, I accordingly pay close attention to Ogai's treatment of character, especially in his most "biographic" work, Shibue Chusai. In Chapter 7, I examine the author's use of the telling anecdote and his manipulation of source manuscripts to enhance the idealized portrayal of certain figures. As a biographer, Ogai was in the business of rewriting prior texts —source biographies, memoirs, diaries, and so forth. Therefore no discussion of the shiden can afford to overlook the intertextuality at its core. What makes Shibue Chusai the jewel in Ogai's biographical crown has to do with a truly fascinating memoir, written by Chusai's surviving son Shibue Tamotsu, that served as his crucial source text. To demonstrate the degree of intertextual linkage, I contrast selected passages with the corresponding accounts in Tamotsu's memoir. In Chapter 8, I present a selection of anecdotes and episodes taken from the Chusai and Ranken works. These include some of the most engaging narratives in the entire shiden literature. Finally, I comment on the "Ogai legacy," in particular the lineage of discipleship that has produced several generations of admirers whose writing—biographical, fictive, critical, and discursive (or all of them at once!)—testifies to the spiritual authority of Mori Ogai as sensei.

C H A P T E R

1

Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

The classics of biography are as diverse as the cultures and ages that produced them: the imperial Rome of Suetonius, the Confucian court of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, the London salon of Johnson and Boswell. Diversity is the rule. The Icelandic sagas, the Bible, the plays of Shakespeare—the biographical urge has profoundly influenced many of our most treasured literary creations. As a literary genre, biography occupies territory that borders uneasily on neighboring terrain, especially the domains of autobiography, history, memoir, and the novel. In a formal sense, one may ask, how can any of these genres in fact be differentiated? Some novels read exactly like biographies and, by the same token, some biographies are convincingly novelistic. History and biography freely intrude upon one another. Certain biographies are conspicuously autobiographical, and all are at least implicitly so. In this age of collapsing genre distinction and wholesale restructuring of the entire literary canon, one is tempted to include drama, film, song lyrics, even graffiti in the grab-bag of biographical "texts." After all, what does not reflect, on some level or another, the telling of a life? While it is entirely possible that the very notion of genre may not survive the current theoretical inquisition, we should be grateful for the average reader's intuitive understanding that biographies are about real people, lives actually lived, and that real people mean differently than the made-up variety. For all its susceptibility to deconstruction, then, genre classification serves as our common-sense guide to an otherwise chaotic literary landscape. 8

Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

9

Despite its extraordinary popularity, biography has only recently been accorded the status of a full-fledged literary genre. But is a literary art, as m a n y practitioners have pointed out, with strings attached. Its author is expected to be eloquent and engaging, while never straying too far from the factual record. O n e must be moved by one's subject, yet rigorously honest and objective. This is a tall order, indeed, and we are reminded of Carlyle's observation that " a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one." Biography has been likened to a tug-of-war between the great antagonists, Science and Art. But as Andre Maurois would insist, Art must have the upper hand. 1 Biography as a literary genre owes much to the British. With the seventeenth century, an awareness of biography as a distinct narrative form became evident in the writings of Dryden and Izaak Walton. 2 T h e rejection of the classical tradition of moralizing biography in favor of the anecdotal summation of ordinary lives can be traced to J o h n Aubrey's Brief Lives.3 An emerging sense of the authenticity—not to mention the sheer delight—conveyed by accounts of h u m a n foibles and curiosities would mature with the eighteenth century, a golden age of biographical art that produced the masterworks of J o h n s o n and Boswell. T h e age also produced Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, and it is by no means coincidental that the rise of biography paralleled the rise of the novel, for both genres shared a new concern for portraying individual character, whether fictitious or real, with subtlety and depth. 4 And each would be influenced by the concurrent expansion of journalism and the literary adaptation of journalistic conventions and styles. T h e landmarks of biography would continue to be British, and they echo analogous developments in the novel: the romanticism of Carlyle, followed by a period of decline into the staid moralism of Victorian life writing. With the twentieth century, a moribund genre would find new life in the self-conscious artistry of Lytton Strachey. Biography was to be revolutionized by its rapprochement with psychology. Freudianism, together with the host of Freudian notions and terms that were absorbed into popular culture, would prove especially seductive. T h e assumption of essential selfhood stored away in the Unconscious, with its mother lode of tantalizing secrets awaiting the skilled prober of psychic depths, has become a given of modern biography. Early on, the term "psychobiography" was used

10

Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

to differentiate the new technique from more traditional ones. Now, virtually all biography is psychobiography. And although the occasional sensationalized smut dredging will have critics up in arms, invoking ethical standards and decrying their outright violation, biography and psychology are virtually inseparable. It is here that the contrast with East Asian biography, and with Ogai's work in particular, is most evident. Biography enjoys an unprecedented popularity in our day, having supplanted the novel, according to Denis Donoghue and others, as our storytelling genre of choice. 5 Relatively resistant to the ebb and flow of literary theorizing, biography has been accorded a privileged status—a kind of "generic purity," as William Epstein has put it. 6 Few would dispute the universality of its appeal, but the quality and quantity of life writing have hardly remained constant. A glance at the m a p of East Asian literature reveals little terrain marked as biography. Chinese Confucianism did help establish a long tradition of biographical narrative, with the epochal Shih chi of Ssu-ma C h ' i e n providing the canonical model until the twentieth century. 7 T h e Japanese literary realm, however, long identified with indigenous forms such as monogatari (narrative tale), waka (the orthodox poetic genre), and Noh d r a m a , would seem positively alien to biography. Nothing in Japanese literary history matches the remarkable achievement of eighteenth-century English literature. T h e so-called rise of the novel and its biographical counterpart heralds the ascendency of the individual and the universe of the private, inner m a n . In J a p a n , however, a Western-style conceptualization of selfhood was simply not part of the cultural or political milieu. And even after the "discovery," toward the end of the nineteenth century, of Franklinian self-reliance and Victorian success striving and Rousseauesque self-dramatization, absorbing such notions into the linguistic (and literary) code would prove far more difficult than, say, building railways or setting u p a postal system. This is not to say that biographical writing simply failed to materialize prior to the dissemination of Western literary models late in the nineteenth century. Taken in the broad sense, biography in J a p a n can be traced to some of the earliest written records, for instance the clan annals (ujibumi, kaden) that predated the N a r a period (710-784). T h e early clan-centered civilization had long fostered a genealogical

Biography in theJapanese Literary Tradition

11

tradition in which lineage, hierarchy, and prestige were dominant concerns. Then, with the rapid dissemination of imported Chinese institutions and values, this rather simplistic genealogical formula would come into contact with far more sophisticated historiographical models. The Shih chi, for instance, readily acquired canonical status in J a p a n . Its biographies exemplify a Confucian moralism whose ultimate aim was to guide the conduct of statecraft. Traits of character are skillfully revealed through narrative commentary, the subject's own actions, and recreated dialogue. And the telling anecdote, as well, is brilliantly employed. A series of official histories produced during the Nara period, collectively referred to as the Rikkokushi, relied upon the Chinese model. But the aim of ethical instruction was replaced by the more pragmatic need to legitimate the new imperial ruling class. Accurate biographical portrayal was therefore irrelevant; what counted was the preservation of a hierarchy of kinship relations and the maintenance of a stable political order. This tendency to embed the individual in a group context has been a feature of Japanese biography up to the present day. And it is more than evident in Ogai's shiden, with the blurring together of individuals and their overlapping social spheres. The OED defines biography as "the history of the lives of individual men, as a branch of literature." Biography in the Japanese literary tradition might be defined as " a series of individual lives that make up a group, as a branch of history." Under the pervasive influence of Western models, Meiji biographers and those that succeeded them have been faced with the dual challenge of liberating the individual subject from the dominion of the group and viewing themselves as something other than secondclass historians. A similar challenge faced writers of fiction, and in neither case can it be said that the ambitious goal of literary modernization was ever truly achieved. Even thornier is the ever-shifting perception of the Western models themselves and the very feasibility of "achieving goals" by emulating "superior" generic examples. Leaving this aside for the moment, I would like to point out that a concern for individual character was not exactly alien to premodern Japanese literature. During the long medieval period (1185-1600), a narrative literature focusing on actual lives had begun to take shape.

12

Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

This literature is perhaps best viewed as legendary and anecdotal, but it reflects a keen interest in the careers of particular individuals and in the broad question of h u m a n nature. H e r e we need to recognize the important role of setsuwa, that vast grouping of folk tale and legend that would gain widespread popularity during this period. T h e m a j o r compilations of setsuwa—the early-twelfth-century Konjaku monogatari (Tales of Past and Present), for instance—are repositories of vignettes and anecdotes featuring an array of figures, historical and legendary. T h e Konjaku is an extraordinary mélange of accounts involving priests, courtiers, children, provincial officials, commoners, and assorted spirits and creatures. Clearly, objective documentation gives way to a concern for storytelling, for the crafting of dramatic episodes. This merging of fact and fiction, historical actuality and legend, characterizes much early biographical writing in J a p a n . And equally important is the compilation itself, the orderly combination of individual episodes into a larger narrative structure. T h e medieval period also witnessed the emergence of several distinct biographical genres—the gunki monogatari (warrior tales), eden (illustrated accounts of Buddhist figures), and kosoden (accounts of eminent Buddhist clerics). These genres reflect two of the great forces at work during the age: the warrior class (bushi), which had come into political power on a national scale, and the imposing edifice of Buddhism. As one might expect, the warrior in Japanese biography is no newcomer, and once established he remains a fixture for centuries. A host of samurai make their entry into Japanese literature during the very height of the courtly splendor of the Heian period (7941185), in works such as the tenth-century Shomonki (Accounts of Taira Masakado). But the literature of the twelfth century marks the origin of the warrior tale. Here one thinks of the early rekishi monogatari, historical accounts of courtier lives and legends such as the Eiga monogatari (Tales of Splendor) and the Okagami (Great Mirror). T h e lively narrative style of these works, coupled with the " h u m a n i z i n g " effect of personal anecdote and lore, mark a significant departure from the dry, annalistic model adapted earlier from the Chinese histories. W h a t emerges is a group biography of the great Fujiwara courtiers of the mid-Heian period. In particular, the frankly masculine portrayal of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966-1027) in the Okagami

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stands in stark contrast to the reigning feminine sensibility of the H e i a n court romances, most notably Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji). But it is with the thirteenth-century Heike monogatari (Tale of the Heike Clan) that a tradition of the warrior biography really develops. T h i s beloved account of J a p a n ' s late-twelfth-century feudal wars is in effect a great serial biography, each of whose m a n y subjects, hero and villain alike, becomes identified with specific episodes and legends. T h e legends of Yoshitsune, Kiyomori, Atsumori, and others u n d e r g o a remarkable series of transformations that eventually encompass m a n y diverse art forms. O n e such transformation is the Gikeiki (Accounts of Yoshitsune), a fifteenth-century anthology that gathers the m a n y accounts of this ever-popular figure, J a p a n ' s archetypal failed hero. A n d although the tales themselves are hardly factual, the work as a whole suggests a proto-biographical urge to tell a life. W i t h the eden and kosoden, medieval Buddhism furthered a hagiographical tradition that, together with early J a p a n e s e historiography, had its origins in the N a r a period and benefited m u c h from Chinese prototypes. Beginning with the H e i a n period, biographical narratives of m a j o r Buddhist clerics were compiled in multivolume sets (kosoden) or presented in the form of a narrative picture scroll {eden, literally "picture-biography"). These scrolls consisted of a biographical text, typically based on legendary exploits, together with a pictorial rendering of the episodic sequence. T h e best known examples of this fascinating genre—the I p p e n scroll of 1299, for instance, and the H o n e n scroll of the mid-fourteenth century—portray m a j o r episodes in the lives of great figures of popular Buddhism. Art historians have long treasured these works as masterpieces ofyamatoe, the native painting tradition, a fact that partially explains why so little attention has been paid to the accompanying texts. To be sure, the eden narratives themselves fall short of literary brilliance. T h e y belong more properly in the d o m a i n of Buddhist setsuwa. Nevertheless, the application of the emaki tradition of pictorialized oral narrative to the telling of exemplary lives is of interest as a syncretic biographical form. T h i s genre of illustrated saints' lives survived well into the Tokugawa period. But with the growing secularization of J a p a n e s e society in the last decades of the sixteenth century, biographical subjects were increasingly found outside the confines of Buddhism. For instance, with the emergence of a " p o w e r

14

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elite" during the century of civil strife that preceded the Tokugawa period, prominent daimyo began to commission semiofficial biographies as a badge of their newly elevated status. Despite their questionable objectivity and conspicuous lack of literary sophistication, these narratives are rich in legend and lore, and as such they merit consideration as part of the pervasive tradition of oral narrative that Barbara Ruch has called J a p a n ' s first national literature. 8 The Tokugawa period witnessed the regimentation of Japanese society on an unprecedented scale. As with so many other cultural forms, the biography of the period would reflect the larger concern for group identity and lineage, for individuals assigned to appropriate categorical headings and "defined" with genealogical precision. As I have suggested, models of biographical narrative were in no short supply. But one in particular stands out. Few aspects of Tokugawa culture were untouched by the revival of Chinese studies that followed in the wake of the Shogunate's official policy of neo-Confucianism. The historiography practiced by the jugakusha—the community of Confucian scholars that included Chusai, Ranken, and Katei—was adapted from Chinese prototypes such as the Shih chi.9 The officially sponsored histories, of course, were intended to convey the full weight and authority of tradition. Probably the single most ambitious scholarly undertaking of the period was the Dai Nihonshi (Great History of Japan). A massive kanbun chronicle spanning the period from the Age of the Gods to 1392, the work recapitulates the tradition of Chinese-inspired historiography, with its relentless particularism and meticulous attention to detail. 10 And in line with ancient precedent it incorporated biographical accounts as a vehicle of state-sponsored hagiography. As mentioned earlier, another biographical genre that derived from Chinese models, the kosoden, thrived during this period. The earliest Chinese collection of such accounts dates to the sixth century. Thereafter, each successive dynasty, in a manner paralleling the compilation of the official histories, would produce its own anthology of priestly lives. The Japanese adopted this genre, along with many other Chinese prototypes, early in the Tokugawa period. Its culmination was the Honcho kosoden (Accounts of Eminent Clerics), a monumental anthology of more than sixteen hundred clerical biographies compiled in 1702. Subdivided into ten sectarian catego-

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ries, the work parallels the political biographies contained in the Dai Nihonshi. This tradition of biographical anthologizing, and the language and style of its narrative, exerted an influence upon Japanese historiography well into the modern period. T h e impact of this literature upon Mori Ogai, who was thoroughly acquainted with it, bears noting. I should emphasize that the compilation of priestly biographies was a far-ranging enterprise, with individual temples and sects engaged in an ongoing process of biographical record keeping. This would only be natural, given a setting in which matters of hierarchy and lineage were of paramount importance. But such concerns were by no means the exclusive domain of religious institutions. T h e compilation of biographical sketches (shoden, ryakuden) was a comm o n practice among a variety of groups: poets, tea masters, calligraphers, actors, artisans, and the like. Typically, such accounts were compiled with the genealogical records (keifu) of the given "school" (ha, ryu). Or, as in the case of the Honcho kosoden, they comprised retrospective biographical surveys of entire institutions. In the case of the martial arts, for instance, one can point to the Honcho bugei shoden, a survey of traditional Japanese martial arts through brief accounts of 150 exemplary practitioners. Compiled in 1714 by Hinatsu Shigetaka, this biographical "who's w h o " contains ten chapters on nine different martial arts (bugei), and one assumes that the widely circulated Honcho kosoden served as prototype. Hinatsu's work was the result of years spent amassing historical and genealogical details and sifting through the accumulated legend and lore. T h e third chapter, on archery, contains the following representative sketches: Nakagawa Shogen Shigekiyo A brave and good archer, Nakagawa Shogen Minamoto no Shigekiyo first served Oda Nobunaga and then Tokugawa Ieyasu and Tokugawa Hidetada. Hidetada always kept Shigekiyo in his camp and learned archery from him. Shigekiyo's son, Saheita Shigenaga, carried on his father's art, but also studied under Yoshida Okura Shigeuji, Yoshida Rokuzaemon Shigekatsu, and Itami Hanzaemon Shigemasa, and mastered their techniques. Itami was a student of Yoshida Insai and later taught archery to Tokugawa Iemitsu at his request.

16

Biography in theJapanese Literary Tradition Yamaguchi Gumbei Yamaguchi Gumbei was taught by Yoshida Insai and was a splendid archer. According to one story, he once shot an arrow four cho [440 meters], where it split a willow sapling. Praising Gumbei highly, Insai cut down the sapling without pulling out the arrow and, writing the word "magnificent" on it, presented it to Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi later served Matsudaira Tadanao. He became famous when he shot at the Sanjusangendo with an additional ten ken [20 meters] added to the veranda. 11

H i n a t s u ' s orderly, topical a p p r o a c h to the compilation of brief lives stands in opposition, say, to the r a n d o m , eccentric style of J o h n Aubrey. O n c e a g a i n , it is the fact of anthologizing, of a p p r o a c h i n g b i o g r a p h y as a roster of g r o u p m e m b e r s h i p , that deserves o u r attention here. W o r k s such as the Honcho kosoden a n d the Honcho bugei shoden point to a conception of b i o g r a p h y as a n encyclopedic compilation of short narratives, a sequence of episodes—often a p o c r y p h a l — t h a t together come to define a given collectivity. I n d e e d , the concise, f o r m u l a i c account of one's pedigree a n d accomplishments, enlivened b y a representative anecdote or two (historical verifiability b e i n g quite beside the point), m a y b e said to represent the n o r m of biographical writing in the T o k u g a w a period. S a m u r a i biography, which p r e d a t e d the T o k u g a w a period, flourished u n d e r the aegis of the T o k u g a w a hegemony. A r o u t i n e f o r m of biographical record k e e p i n g was instituted a r o u n d 1645, with the first in a series of a n n u a l l y u p d a t e d s a m u r a i registries (bukan). I n effect a n a n n u a l y e a r b o o k of the s a m u r a i class, the registries compiled the n a m e s of every r e t a i n e r attached to a given daimyo, together with i n f o r m a t i o n r e g a r d i n g lineage, official r a n k , a n d stipend. I n fact, M o r i O g a i was a collector of T o k u g a w a bukan, a n d it was in the course of e x a m i n i n g certain v o l u m e s in his collection that he chanced u p o n the figure of S h i b u e C h u s a i , w h e r e u p o n the shiden project b e g a n to take shape. As m i g h t be expected, l o w e r - r a n k i n g s a m u r a i m e r i t e d little m o r e t h a n a n a m e entered into the bukan record. But the m o r e lofty personages b e c a m e biographical subjects in their o w n right. Typically little m o r e t h a n thinly veiled p a n e g y r i c written in p o n d e r o u s chronicle style, such accounts of the bushi elite were based on actual events a n d d o c u m e n t e d fact a n d did reflect a concern for individual por-

Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

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trayal, in contrast to the folk-tale cast of earlier works. Here one may cite O t a Gyuichi's seventeenth-century biography of the great warlord O d a Nobunaga (1534-1582), Nobunaga koki, as the model for m a n y accounts that would follow. 12 Still, the idealization of the samurai elite, at whose head stood the Tokugawa Shogun, all but insured that their official biographies (which were much indebted, in both style and substance, to the ancient Chinese dynastic histories) would be anything but objective. These works amounted to a secularized hagiography, a variant of the kosoden tradition. T h e Tokugawa regime has commonly been accused of impeding the development of Japanese literature, of imposing barriers such as the policy of national seclusion (sakoku seisaku), which all but eliminated access to foreign literature, and a censorial apparatus that monitored cultural activity and punished offenders. 1 3 Japanese literature did indeed develop in relative isolation and was subject to official scrutiny, but I would not argue that this stunted its growth or impoverished it. These are judgments that reflect what has been referred to as the tyranny of the Eurocentric perspective. And they must be tempered, if not discarded, if we are to achieve a balanced view of Japanese literature both during and after the Shogunal era. In sharp contrast with the ponderous, encomiastic tone of the official histories and biographies is the chonin (merchant townsmen) literature with which the period (especially the Genroku era, circa 1675-1725) has long been identified. T h e age that exalted the ethics and aesthetics of the warrior class would gradually witness the rising fortunes of the merchant class, whose depiction in the tales of Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693) and the plays of Chikamatsu M o n z a e m o n (1653-1724) marks the pinnacle of Tokugawa fiction. In his celebrated choninmono (merchant tales), Saikaku may indeed be credited with creating a genre of fictionalized biography whose impact would be felt well into the twentieth c e n t u r y . H i s comic (but not unsympathetic) deflation of the poseurs, schemers, and charlatans in his midst established a convention of episodic, anecdotal narrative that would act as a corrective to the self-righteous formalism of official biography. Nevertheless, Saikaku's anecdotal realism did not directly inspire a corresponding genre of biography. Writers instead set out to imitate the Saikaku style, and what developed was a genre of caricature (katagimono) that reduced Saikaku's comic genius to extremes of trivi-

18

Biography in theJapanese Literary Tradition

ality and mannerism. In due course, though, actual chonin biographies did appear, and they bore little resemblance to the hagiographic lives of elite samurai. For instance, there was Mitsui Takafusa's Chonin koken roku (1727), a series of brief didactic accounts of failed Kyoto businessmen. 15 One of the wealthiest merchants in J a p a n , Takafusa was in effect presenting the urban bourgeoisie with what amounted to a biographical "how-not-to" guide, a reversal of the success-story genre that would become prominent in the postRestoration period. The satirical artistry associated with Saikaku's choninmono inspired a host of imitations. But no mention of Tokugawa satire can overlook the unique contribution of Hiraga Gennai (1728-1779). Among his many other accomplishments, Gennai wrote a fictional biography, Furyu Shiddkenden (The Dashing Life of Shidoken, 1763), that can be said to parody the staid conventions of the genre. A Japanese Gulliver's Travels, the tale tells of the unlikely adventures of one Fukai Shidoken, who, having been taught to fly, visits strange lands and encounters giants and midgets and assorted exotic creatures. 16 In stark contrast to the fanciful and entirely irreverent artistry of Saikaku and Gennai, one can cite the biographical miniatures of the eminent scholar Rai San'yo (1780-1832). San'yo deserves mention for two reasons. First, he figures in the shiden as a member of Ranken's literati circle. Second, he compiled one of the greatest Tokugawa histories, the Nihon gaishi (Unofficial History of J a p a n , 1827), which both rivals and complements the official Dai Nihonshi. As a biographer, San'yo drew upon the prevailing kanzen choaku (encourage virtue, chastise vice) moralism of the age; but his assorted vignettes, with their anecdotal flavor and sympathetic characterization, point to a concern for individual lives rarely reflected in the official historiography. 17 Some of the autobiographical writings of the period, too, feature anecdotal narration of unexceptional lives. An excellent example is Musui dokugen (Soliloquy by Musui, 1843), written by a samurai of minor rank named Katsu Kokichi (1802-1850). 18 This often hilarious account of a self-styled vagabond and street-fighter is presented as a cautionary tale: "There can't be many in the world as foolish as I am. So let me say this to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren—listen to what I have to say, and may the scoundrels and fools, especially, take my story as a lesson." 19

Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

19

With the Meiji period, Kokichi's mode of self-deprecation would become the hallmark of much confessional shdsetsu (fiction) that explored the "meaningless" lives of writers. Many heretofore neglected works of Tokugawa autobiography have been brought to light largely through the efforts of Saeki Shôichi. In addition to Musui dokugen, Saeki has resurrected texts such as Yamaga Sokô's Haisho zanpitsu (1675) and Matsudaira Sadanobu's Uge hitogoto. One has only to glance through his recent twenty-five-volume compilation of Japanese autobiographical literature (Nihonjin nojiden, 1982) to recognize the richness and diversity of personal narratives written before the modern period. 20 One final category of Tokugawa life writing deserves mention: the disciple memoir. In the West, the memoir is commonly regarded as a hybrid of biography and autobiography, somehow lacking the authority of the foregrounded autos. In J a p a n , however, reminiscence and private reflection, the personal sphere referred to as shinpen, or one's "experiential environment," has been the preferred vehicle for a wide range of autobiographical narrative, including fiction. During the Tokugawa, it was common for disciples to memorialize a deceased mentor or to honor him on an auspicious occasion with a set of reminiscences, written either collectively or individually —a biographical Festschrift, one might say. For instance, some years after the death of Ishida Baigan (1685-1744), the founder of the highly influential shingaku movement, his surviving deshi (disciples) compiled a remarkable account entitled Ishida sensei jiseki.21 As might be expected, the compiled accounts and anecdotes extol the sensei's many virtues. But they also touch upon his personal habits and workaday routine. As we will see, Ogai would base much of his Chusai biography on precisely this category of source narrative. Late Tokugawa culture has long been associated with images of decadence, epicureanism, and fin de régime hedonism (with thanks, in part, to the Wildean vision promoted by Tanizaki and Akutagawa and the nostalgic lyricism of Nagai Kafu). Fiction writing, which had perhaps never freed itself of the Confucianist prejudice against frivolity and fabrication, had been reduced to the level of popular entertainment. By the end of the period, commercial interests had taken over, with large publishing houses employing writers at piece rate to produce pulp fiction for the mass marketplace. New ideas were in short supply, and the conventionalized literary language was

20

Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

badly out of date. In short, with the demise of the Shogunal regime in the 1870s and the wholesale adoption of Western standards and models, writers would seek new directions. Mori Ogai was in the vanguard of those who traveled abroad in search of knowledge and inspiration. In order better to understand the shiden, which seem anything but "modern," we need to place them in the Meiji literary context. For it was during this period that biographical writing gained unprecedented popularity in J a p a n . Among its acknowledged literary peaks, however, biography per se is at best poorly represented. Even today, it would be difficult to cite a work of Japanese biography—and this includes Ogai's work—that enjoys the status of, say, Boswell's Life of Johnson. As was the case with shosetsu, the development of Meiji biography would initially be tied to the rather indiscriminate importation of Western models, under the aegis of the rallying cry of bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment). Much has been said concerning the infatuation with the West that marked the first Meiji decade. It was during this extraordinary period that the nation first confronted a new vocabulary of selfhood: individualism, democracy, freedom, independence, and the like. Of the texts that "encoded" Western civilization for the Japanese, biography played a significant role. The very first work to be translated following the Restoration, in fact, was Samuel Smiles' Self Help,22 a collection of short didactic biographies extolling the Victorian virtues of thrift, ambition, and hard work. Entitled Saikoku risshi hen (Accounts of Western SelfMade Men, 1871), the highly influential translation was the work of Nakamura Keiu (1832-1891), a Shogunate-appointed Confucianist who had studied in England. The book became so popular that it eventually came to be known as Meiji no seisho, the Meiji Bible. 23 At the same time that Smiles' Victorian worthies were purveying Western values for the new nation, one of the key figures in the Meiji Enlightenment, Nishi Amane (1829-1897), composed the first Japanese treatise on biography as a genre. 24 Critical of the lifeless, annalistic quality of the Dai Nihonshi and the entire tradition of orthodox historiography that it represented, Nishi called for a more humanistic approach to both history and biography. Specifically, he advocated the compilation of short biographical sketches rather than large, single-subject studies. 25

Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

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Meiji Westernization of course hinged on the acquisition of knowledge, and the utilitarian ethic popularized by N a k a m u r a ' s landmark translation established biography as a major conduit for new information and ideas. To help slake the public's thirst for knowledge of the West, biographical accounts of every description were translated. Encyclopedia entries became an especially important source. In general, this fascination with Western culture packaged in biographical form had a twofold effect. First, it acquainted people with the basic form and content of Western biography; and second, it affirmed the value of the autonomous, self-sufficient individual. During this early phase, translators were too busy merely deciphering texts to pay attention to literary values. But this situation was to change as the translations improved and the reading public became more sophisticated. In the meantime, Japanese biographies continued to resemble those written during the late Tokugawa, being little more than thin dramatization bordering on caricature—holdovers of late-Tokugawa gesaku (popularized "light reading") that bespoke an indifference toward objectivity and serious character portrayal. T h e first hero of Meiji biography, and the subject of countless subsequent studies, was Saigo Takamori (1827-1877), the legendary hero of the Satsum a Rebellion of 1877. A significant turning point in the development of a modern biographical attitude occurred in the 1880s, with the burgeoning People's Rights movement (minken undo). T h e libertarian political mood inspired a new genre of fiction, the so-called seiji shosetsu, or political novel. While ostensibly proclaiming the dawn of democracy in J a p a n , works with such lurid titles as " T h e Stormy Sea of Love," "Strange Encounters With Elegant Females," and " T r u e Lives of the Nihilists" mixed political allegory and gesaku romance in a highflown style virtually unreadable today. 26 Despite their minimal clout in the Meiji political arena, these and related works did attempt sustained portrayals of individual character, and as such the genre constitutes a break with the earlier tradition of caricature. Fictionalized biography plays a key role in many of the seiji shosetsu, and here the influence of Western political fiction has often been cited. T h e translation of Disraeli's autobiographical novel Coningsby (1844), a tale of political careerism written by no less a figure than a former prime minister of Great Britain, was significant as

22

Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

m u c h for its elevation of the status of fiction writing as for its model of biographical narrative. 2 7 As a literary vehicle of the People's Rights movement, the seiji sh& setsu of the 1880s incorporated features of the m o v e m e n t ' s political idealism. In retrospect, the fervent advocacy of true democracy and authentic constitutional government appears hopelessly naive and ineffectual. However, some of the m o v e m e n t ' s biographical writing had real literary merit. T h e most impressive work is K o m u r o Angaido's Toyo minken hyakkaden (People's Rights in the Far East— O n e H u n d r e d Biographical Sketches, 1883), a compilation of authentic accounts, based on careful research, of rural folk who struggled against oppression and hardship d u r i n g the Tokugawa period. 2 8 K o m u r o (1852-1885) was a m o n g the more gifted political writers associated with the minken undo. It bears noting that he was on the staff of the Jiyu shinbun, one of the movement's newspapers: this employment stands as an early example of the journalistic context within which subsequent literature would develop. Biography was thus an important vehicle of early-Meiji Westernization. Amazingly, though, a mere twenty or thirty original biographies were published between 1868 and 1888, and a n u m b e r of these centered on heroic figures such as Saigo. T h e n the floodgates opened. Between 1888 a n d the end of the Taisho period (19121926), more t h a n a thousand biographies appeared in print. 2 9 Meiji biography truly " a r r i v e d " in the 1890s, with the so-called denki bumu (biography boom). T h i s p h e n o m e n o n must be seen within the context of rapid expansion within journalistic and publishing circles and in particular with the rise to prominence of the M i n ' y u s h a , one of the more influential literary coteries of the age. Its leader, Tokutomi Soho (1863-1957), was a humanist who a m o n g other things admired the biographical writings of T h o m a s Carlyle. But it was as a journalist that his influence would be widely felt. 30 As editor of the Kokumin shinbun and Kokumin no tomo, Soho and his cadre of writers reached an ever-growing audience d u r i n g the 1890s. In 1893, in fact, K i t a m u r a Tokoku remarked that " t h e influence of Soho's Kokumin no tomo . . . is felt throughout the nation. In the Meiji era no one else has produced such influential writing." 3 1 F u r t h e r m o r e , over a period of some fifteen years, the M i n ' y u s h a sponsored publishing house produced a great deal of biography. Its most important project was a seventeen-volume series of Western

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23

and Japanese literary lives, The Twelve Men of Letters (1894-1903). 3 2 T h e model for this encyclopedic approach to biography was the wellknown English M e n of Letters series, together with its American counterpart. Actually, most Meiji biography appeared in serial compilation, a format that evidently appealed to both publishers and readers. But of greater relevance here is that talented young authors, including several who would achieve real distinction, were being hired to write biographies. In the 1890s, the demand for biographical manuscripts meant money in the pocket for a n u m b e r of fledgling writers looking for work. In the course of its decade-long project, the M i n ' y u s h a contracted Soho's younger brother Tokutomi Roka (1868-1927) to do a biography of Tolstoi, whom he had once met in Russia. Tokoku took on the Emerson project, and Uchida R o a n , who would himself become a mainstay of MeijiTaisho literary journalism, wrote the biography of Dr. Johnson, a figure whom he held in the highest esteem. Another promising young writer, Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908), received his literary baptism as a M i n ' y u s h a writer. In 1897, Doppo was asked to compile the Shorten denki sosho, an eight-volume series of biographical accounts, both Japanese and Western, intended for young readers. His first published work, the series was a compilation of risshiden (success-story biographies) in the Smiles tradition, featuring the likes of Lincoln, Franklin, and Wellington. Doppo's enthusiasm for his subjects is evident. Like so m a n y of his contemporaries, he was particularly taken with the young Franklin, whose autobiography he read with great relish. 33 At the same time, a growing n u m b e r of so-called bungaku seinen (literary youth) who were being recruited into the bundan became avid readers of Western biography in the original. T h e English M e n of Letters series, which had been the M i n ' y u s h a model, provided a crucial first exposure to the lives of admired Romantics. For the generation of Toson and Doppo, an apprenticeship in Wordsworth and Byron no less than Saikaku and Basho would contribute toward one's literary education. 3 4 Outdoing even the M i n ' y u s h a as an outlet for biography was the H a k u b u n k a n , one of the largest and most prominent Meiji publishing houses. By the early 1890s, the peak of the denki bumu, the house had to expand its staff in order to supply copy for three separate biographical series it had begun issuing. 35 T h e n , beginning in 1899,

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Biography in the Japanese Literary Tradition

H a k u b u n k a n embarked on the two most ambitious biographical projects undertaken in J a p a n u p to that date. Reflecting the enorm o u s appeal of biography as a pedagogical genre, both series were intended for young readers. T h e first, entitled Shonen dokuhon (A R e a d e r for Young People), was a massive fifty-volume compilation of Tokugawa biography. To meet the publication schedule, the house staff was again expanded, and once again promising young writers anxious for manuscript fees found work as piece-rate biographers. 3 6 K o d a R o h a n (1867-1947), an O l y m p i a n presence in the following period, contributed a biography of Ino T a d a t a k a , the late-Tokugawa geographer who produced the first accurate m a p of J a p a n . T a y a m a Katai, a key figure in the development of m o d e r n J a p a n e s e fiction, wrote a biography of the great eighteenth-century literati painter Ike no Taiga. This series was followed by yet another biographical tour de force, a thirty-six-volume edition of world biography, Sekai rekishi dan (Discussions of World History). Comprising a broader biographical spectrum, the subjects included m a n y cultural and religious figures. J e s u s and B u d d h a were a m o n g the " n o t a b l e s " rendered in the now standard format of biographical narrative. 3 7 I should note that one of the a n o n y m o u s staff writers for the H a k u b u n k a n , a career hack who turned out h u n d r e d s of mass-market pieces, both original and in translation, was none other than Shibue T a m o t s u , son of the Confucianist exemplar resurrected by M o r i Ogai. In fact, toward the end of the Chusai biography, the author expresses rather open contempt for what he regarded as the outright exploitation of workaday writers like T a m o t s u by the factorylike publishing houses. Setting aside the question of ethics, the e n o r m o u s influence of the m a j o r publishers cannot be overestimated. T h e development of Meiji biography (not to mention fiction) is intimately tied to the emergence of literary journalism on a mass scale. And the market was by no m e a n s restricted to the multivolume sets. Of equal significance was the introduction of biography and memoir as standardized j o u r n a l fare. Almost as soon as H a k u b u n k a n began publishing its popular monthly magazine, Taiyo, in 1896, a regular biographical feature was introduced: the jinbutsuron (character sketch) column. 3 8 As we will see, what developed f r o m this journalistic practice was not the conventional "culture h e r o " approach pursued in the serial biographies. Rather, journals and even newspapers promoted remi-

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niscence and impressionistic commentary. T h e style of the informal chat (danwatai) was carefully cultivated. And as I will argue, this aspect of Japanese literary journalism would profoundly affect both the style and the very conception of literary discourse beginning in the late Meiji. With the mid-1890s, biographers began to apply more rigorous standards to their research. U p to that time, most biographical writing in J a p a n had relied almost solely on secondary sources—armchair biography, one might say. But in 1895 a work appeared that demonstrated unusual care in the acquisition and treatment of primary source materials. This is Katsuda Magoya's five-volume study of (once again) Saigo Takamori. In order finally to tell the "authentic tale" of J a p a n ' s last great samurai, Katsuda examined Saigo's correspondence, diaries, and various personal records, then went off to interview acquaintances who could provide firsthand information. From a technical standpoint, at least, the resulting work can be considered J a p a n ' s first modern biography. 39 In the final Meiji decade, Western-inspired biography continued to flourish, as did autobiography—but not among members of the bundan. It is true that Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) adapted the style of Franklinian self-portraiture in his celebrated Fukuo jiden (1898-1899), a work routinely cited as one of the great Japanese autobiographies. But writers showed little interest in the artistic potential of summing up one's life in narrative form. Western autobiography appears to have been of interest primarily as a vehicle for learning about admired individuals. As a genre, then, it was hardly distinguished from biography. In fact, autobiographies (Franklin's being a case in point) were principally regarded as source material for the host of exemplary lives that glutted the publishing market. Once mined for their factual content, the source works were essentially discarded. As a community of readers, the bundan demonstrated a healthy appetite for " a u t h e n t i c " accounts of Western culture and character. But as creative artists, these same writers were not much attracted to Western modes of self-representation. Intrigued with selfhood and individuality as idea and ideal, yet at the same time living in a world that virtually denied the possibility—or desirability —of attaining independence or autonomy, writers in the late Meiji produced curiously halting, fragmented portrayals of self (that is, if one takes Rousseau or Franklin as standards of such narrative). To

26

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speak of ^//"-referentiality, then, in the context of such a tenacious group orientation seems almost a contradiction in terms. In other words, the very same writers who speak in reverential terms of personal enlightenment gained through readings of Rousseau's Confessions or (of all things) Peter Kropotkin's autobiography studiously avoid such " s y m p h o n i c " versions of self in their own work. Toson is a case in point. T h e question of selfhood, literary and otherwise, presents formidable difficulties at almost every level of inquiry. Nonetheless, one is naturally tempted to make the obligatory reference to conflicting perceptions of self, East versus West. H e r e the air is thick with metaphor: the "diffuse," "osmotic," "permeable," "centrifugal" J a p a nese sense of self versus the "concrete," " h a r d , " "assertive," "centripetal" Western self. Ogai was one of m a n y Meiji intellectuals who struggled with gaps and discontinuities, both generational and cultural. But more so than his bundan contemporaries, he employed biography as a vehicle for addressing these fundamental concerns.

Ogai's Early Biographies Mori Ogai was both contributor to and beneficiary of the biography boom of the 1890s. Shortly after returning from G e r m a n y in 1888, he wrote and translated several biographical essays. These were nothing more than literary études on admired figures—Robert Koch, for instance, a medical mentor at the University of Berlin. Ogai's first major biographical undertaking was a life of his great benefactor, Nishi A m a n e (Nishi Amane den, 1898), written at the family's request. As the authorized account, the work observes some of the conventions of official biography. To Ogai's credit, though, he clearly took pains with his source material, especially Amane's diaries. And as T h o m a s Havens points out in his study of Nishi Amane, Ogai's biography also provided a detailed assessment of the m a n ' s intellectual career, in particular the philosophical shift from neo-Confucian to Western thought. 4 0 Nevertheless, there is no probing of character, no inner view of the man—surprising, perhaps, considering the role A m a n e had played as guardian during Ogai's student days in Tokyo (1872-1876). W h a t is more, even in his informal reminiscences there is hardly a reference to the extended stay in the A m a n e home. T h e n again, Ogai was not especially forthcoming when it came to reconstructing his own past.

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Between 1899 and 1900, Ogai followed the biographical trend and published a series of five sketches of Western literary figures in his journal Mezamashigusa. Of these, Gerhard H a u p t m a n n (1862-1946) was to become something of a personal favorite, and in 1906 Ogai came out with a critical biography (hyoden) of the German playwright, several of whose plays he would go on to translate and stage. 41 Then, in 1908, Ogai was commissioned to write an official biography of Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa (1847-1895), a member of the imperial family. There was little reason for this exercise in the most conventionalized form of biography to be anything other than decorous, factual, and monotonous. And so it was. A final study, a life of Goethe, appeared in 1913. Ogai's admiration for Goethe bordered on reverence, and his artful translation of Faust remains a standard. The work can thus be said to have repaid a spiritual debt, although I should note that it is largely adapted from an earlier biography published in Germany. 42 By the time his Chusai researches were under way, in other words, Ogai could already claim an extensive background in biography. But the fact remains that the earlier works generally fail to overcome the formalism that had gradually become the generic norm. 4 3 And the two authorized biographies (of Amane and Yoshihisa) would in any event have been expected to stand as public monuments to their respective subjects. A much more interesting body of pre-shiden biographical narratives originated not in writing but in the form of oral reminiscence. Like many of his better-known contemporaries, Ogai was regularly sought after for interviews (danwa), the publication of which became an important convention of journalism toward the late Meiji. As we will see in the next chapter, Ogai retained a cynical attitude toward what he regarded as media tomfoolery, but he made his share of "personal appearances" through transcribed danwa. In January 1900, his remarks on a recently deceased friend, the artist Harada Naojiro (1863-1899), appeared in the Tokyo Nichi nichi in four separate installments. 44 The personal voice, the expressions of grief over the loss of a close friend—this is a private face rarely if ever shown in the formal biographies. Then, in February 1904, a danwa reminiscence of his colleague Ochiai Naobumi (1861-1903), the classical literary scholar, appeared as part of a memorial edition of fifteen such interviews published in the journal Kokubungahu. Using his given name, Mori Rintaro, rather than the more public pen name, he

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speaks candidly of the long friendship with Ochiai, the m a n ' s gentle and cheerful nature, the tragic illness that cut short his life. Ogai would contribute similar reminiscences throughout his career. As narratives, the transcribed danwa obviously lack the formal structure and informational detail of biography. Speakers ramble. T h e y forget things. But these very "imperfections" would count as virtues. T h e personal tone, the authenticity of emotional expression, the immediacy of the conversational situation—this is precisely the naturalistic quality that came to be so valued in late Meiji and Taisho fiction. A n d as we will see, it is Ogai's (or is it Rintaro's?) personal voice as m u c h as his depiction of others that most distinguishes the shiden. I n this introductory chapter I have tried to indicate how the develo p m e n t of biography in the Meiji period was conditioned by diverse factors: a long tradition of Chinese-inspired biographical writing, vestiges of late-Tokugawa literature and culture, readings and translations of Western literature, an ever-changing political and intellectual climate, and the rise of literary journalism and publishing on an unprecedented scale. T h e native biographical tradition was itself conditioned by the widely disseminated warrior tales, Buddhist and secular vignettes, and of course the official (i.e., Chinese) historiographical model. T h e first two genres fall short as biography, given current literary standards, insofar as they fail to go beyond folklore and the narration of fictionalized episodes in a heroic or exemplary life. T h e third fails because the fossilized kanbun chronicles patterned on the classical model were b a r r e n chronologies, ledgers full of factual detail devoid of this essential ingredient we call character. Small wonder, then, that the critic Isogai H i d e o has labeled J a p a n e s e biography a b r a n c h of "masculine literature" (otoko bungaku), whose central feature, he claims, is a " t r e a t m e n t of surfaces." Feminine literature (onna bungaku), conversely, is characterized as introspective, lyrical, and private. 4 5 Isogai's neat bisection of J a p a n e s e literature reflects a time-honored tradition of dichotomous thinking within the J a p a n e s e intellectual and literary community, with "masculine-feminine" counting as one of a constellation of related oppositions (native versus foreign, authentic versus ersatz, pure versus adulterated). Ogai's writing has long been regarded as a paradigm of otoko bungaku. But only the most

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u n r e p e n t a n t reductionist would actually believe that " d e e p " expressiveness was the exclusive domain of the gender that h a p p e n e d to claim M u r a s a k i Shikibu and Izumi Shikibu and O n o no Komachi. Rather, certain genres (waka and nikki, for example) were by convention the domains of lyrical expression. A n d in the case of Meiji biography, one of the m a n y literary venues in which M o r i O g a i performed, it can be said that the genre itself had not been licensed, as it were, to speak in a personal voice. But there was no shortage of outlets for this voice, and m a n y of them were accessible through journalistic practices that would become widely standardized by the Taisho period. Ogai's early danwa reminiscences indeed foreshadow some of the qualities of personal expressiveness that distinguish the shiden. Therefore, before t u r n i n g to these works, I would like to explore f u r t h e r the institution of J a p a nese literary journalism and the self-referentiality it so vigorously promoted.

C H A P T E R

2

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

As I have argued, contextualizing the biographical literature of Mori Ogai involves much more than merely tracing its monolineal descent from earlier biographical forms. The shiden series was a product of its own time as much as a branch of its generic tree. But Ogai was always one to write both within and against the literary and cultural Zeitgeist, engaging in an ongoing commentary on the contemporary scene. His much-cited Vita Sexualis (1909), for example, employs the very conventions of autobiographical confession to lampoon the tawdry exhibitionism of the so-called Naturalist coterie and their "anguished-youth" fiction. In like manner, the shiden borrow from the prevailing conventions of literary journalism, and in the very incongruity of the borrowing they take issue with the journalistic establishment itself. Ogai persisted in administering daily doses of documentary minutiae to the nation's readers, thus challenging their values by trying their patience. From another viewpoint, though, the shiden project can be interpreted as the culmination of attempts to consolidate one's position vis-à-vis the bundan (and an uneasy relationship it was, marked by years of ambivalence and even insecurity), to assert one's identity as writer and artist. 1 The author can certainly be said to have staked an undisputed claim in his serialized biographies, which rank among the most unusual (certain irate readers preferring terms such as "maddening," "pointless") literary events of the period. Ogai's culture criticism is never truly polemical. Then again, given the curiously apolitical stance of most Meiji-Taishô writers, he appears outspoken. 2 In particular, a series of essay-stories written 30

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

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between 1909 and 1912 challenge contemporary institutions in an unambiguous way. 3 The shiden, however, are studies in understatement. But this understatement is loudly proclaimed, in view of the trend toward overstatement within the literary and cultural milieu. Overall, though, the hallmark of Ogai's original work—spanning the autobiographical Hannichi of 1909 (his fictional debut following an eighteen-year hiatus), the essay-stories, the rekishi shosetsu, and the shiden—is the foregrounding of the author's personal voice. Ogai's characteristic use of literary outlets for intellectual rumination and culture commentary has been widely recognized. The series of essay-stories is most often cited in this regard. Aptly labeled a "literature of ideas" by Richard Bowring, this diverse group of narratives takes on, by turns, the Meiji state, venal bureaucrats, nineteenth-century German philosophy, and contemporary bundan trends. In keeping with an already-established convention of literary name-dropping, Ogai identifies himself as a conspicuous consumer of Zola, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Tolstoi. But the learned asides and intellectual tone, which have long been identified with the Ogai style, are equally a study in literary self-referentiality, simultaneously opposed to and part of the widespread personalization of bundan writing. According to Okazaki Yoshie, the "literature of ideas" is not so much serious philosophical discourse as variation upon the central Ogai theme: resignation (teinen).4 Okazaki's thesis suggests that intellectual content is overshadowed by the tone of detachment and the narrator's carefully contrived stance as onlooker (bokansha), disinterested malcontent (fuheika). Mori Ogai the self-styled "Apollonian," then, was no less involved in constructing a literary selfimage than were the more Dionysian souls of the Naturalist coterie, writers like Toson and Katai who struggled to confess sins both imagined and real. How are we to approach the question of literary personalization, and in what ways can Ogai's shiden be understood as sharing this essential quality of Meiji-Taisho (and subsequent) literature? First, it should be understood that discussions of "Japanese literary selfhood" have centered on Naturalist writing, the category of confessional fiction allegedly inaugurated by Toson's Hakai (Broken Commandment, 1906) and Katai's Futon (The Quilt, 1907). Each has been endlessly discussed and interpreted over the years, and like

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On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

Futabatei's Ukigumo (Drifting Cloud, 1886-1889) both stand as signposts along the path of modern Japanese literary history. But the Naturalist movement was only one coterie within the bundan, the literary establishment, the world of writers, editors, publishers, artists, friends, students, readers, disciples, and hangers-on. Bundan is at best an amorphous entity, in its broadest aspect virtually coterminous with the entire literate population of J a p a n . It is, in short, as much abstraction as reality, as much an artifact of writers' imaginations as it was their actual "address." But it is a powerful and enduring abstraction indeed. As a cultural phenomenon, the bundan remains largely obscured by its own mythology and accumulated lore. In J a p a n , it has so long been a cultural given that few have dared to take it on as an object of study. As outsiders looking in, Edward Fowler and J a y R u b i n have both succeeded in situating their work within the bundan context. Irena Powell's Writers and Society in Modern Japan, the only study thus far that focuses specifically on the bundan, is curiously much less informative. 5 W h a t each lacks (although R u b i n is clearly on the right track) is a sense of bundan not as a sociological entity but as a journalistic institution, not so much an array of discrete coteries (although there is no denying that groups and factions existed) as a network of writers, literary periodicals, publishers, and journalistic conventions. Also lacking—and this is particularly true of the Japanese studies —is the notion of bundan as literary artifact and abstraction. In an important sense, what both readers and writers " k n e w " about the literary scene they gleaned from periodicals. I choose to regard the bundan, then, as a byproduct of its journalistic milieu, a sort of ongoing literary text in which a n u m b e r of individuals interpreted and reinterpreted what it meant to write, what it meant to live the way a writer was supposed to live. T h e point I wish to make is that the personalization of literature in the late Meiji was by no means an isolated phenomenon, something to be identified exclusively with a given group. It involves, rather, the very forces that helped mold Meiji-Taisho literature in general. There is the vernacularization of the literary language (genbun itchi), an important transitional phase lasting m a n y decades; the breakdown of the sort of feudalized literary establishment associated with Ozaki Koyo and his K e n ' y u s h a group; the gradual erosion of late-

On Literary Journalism and Self-Rejerentiality

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Tokugawa literary and cultural tastes; increasing openness to Western literary values and forms. With due acknowledgment to R u b i n ' s important study, there is the institution of state censorship, to which writers and intellectuals were subjected until the end of World War II. These have long been recognized as crucial factors in the development of modern Japanese literature. An entirely neglected matter, in my opinion, has been the role of literary journalism. And this role is nowhere better displayed than in the molding of self-referential narrative, the personal voice. T h e chronic indifference a m o n g J a p a nese literary people actually extends beyond the question of journalistic underpinnings and takes in the vast proportion of personal writing (essay, random jotting, vignette, diary entry, reminiscence, and the like) in the work of Meiji-Taisho authors. T h e conventional view has focused attention on shosetsu, and on Naturalist fiction in particular, as the exclusive vehicle for selfreferentiality. But even those staunchly opposed to Naturalism found themselves drawn into the web of journalistic self-promotion. Fictional self-reference was merely one facet (although by no means an insignificant one) of a broader concern for introspection and personal reflection. To put it another way, literary production came under the domination of journalistic conventions that favored selfpresentation. Writers were asked to speak to their readers, to " b e themselves." And this new personalism—not to be confused with conventional autobiography—would come to dominate m u c h lateMeiji and Taisho literature. Given this context, I want to stress that the shiden biographies, despite their imposing facade of erudition, are both a product of and a commentary upon the rising tide of personalism and the journalistic institution that helped foster it. With Mori Ogai as a case study of sorts, then, I would like to examine the journalistic makeup of the bundan, its conventions and practices, and the unique personal voice it helped promote. 6

Ogai and the Bundan Mori Ogai became active in the Tokyo literary scene almost as soon as he returned from G e r m a n y in 1888. T h e mid-Meiji bundan was a wide-open literary marketplace, home to numerous small coterie journals (dojin zasshi) catering to an equally large n u m b e r of view-

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On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

points and styles. Ogai did what many other young writers did: started his own magazines, thereby seeing to it that his very progressive literary vision would have an audience. Nevertheless, the typical dojin zasshi was unlikely to sell more than a handful of copies and would probably not last more than a year or so. The standard Ogai biography traces the sequence of literary editorships the man created for himself. First there was Shigarami zoshi (1889-1894), in which he published his famous "German Trilogy" of autobiographical novellas. Following his return from the SinoJapanese war, Ogai established Mezamashigusa (1896-1902), which became the chief outlet for his many literary translations. (The period from 1891 to 1909, commonly spoken of as Ogai's extended "retreat from fiction," was a time of extraordinary productivity as a translator.) With his return to Tokyo in 1902 from his posting in remote Kokura, Ogai started the journal Mannenso (1902-1904), another outlet for his translations. And together with his brother Tokujiro (known by his pen name, Miki Takeji), he founded the journal Kabuki (1900-1915). 7 Remarkably, while Ogai the writer edited literary journals, Ogai the physician edited medical journals. The first of these, Eisei shinshi, appeared concurrently with Shigarami zoshi, and there would be a series of dual editorships over many years. With the rise of Naturalism in 1907 came a vigorous opposition from within bundan ranks. A large and diverse group of writers, united in their opposition to what they saw as a debasement of the literary currency, established journals to help counter the insidious trend. Although not a founding member, Ogai was a regular contributor and editorial consultant to these journals, most notably Subaru (1909-1913) and Mita bungaku (1910-1962). Between 1909 and 1912, hardly an issue of Subaru was without the latest in the series of essay-stories. By this time, the Naturalist heyday had already waned, but the personalism identified with the movement was now firmly embedded in journalistic practice. So it was that in 1915, the Tokyo nichi nichi daily newspaper went shopping for a name author. In a move intended to counter the enormously popular Natsume Soseki, who had already been under contract with the Asahi for some eight years, they hired Mori Ogai as resident literatus (in retrospect, something akin to one of the major networks scheming to attract Super Bowl viewers by scheduling Col-

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

35

lege Bowl reruns in the same time slot!). This was Ogai's first experience with daily serialization and its steady regimen of installmentsized chapters and his first prolonged exposure to a mass readership. But it was no secret that the author took a dim view of newspapers as a public institution and of writers who allied themselves with the press. At the conclusion of Kaijin (The Ashes of Destruction, 19111912), he had his protagonist Yamaguchi Setsuzo devise a plan to write a brilliant cultural satire, to be entitled Shinbunguni (A Nation of Newspapers): In this country one is not allowed to own anything except newspapers. The citizens of the country can be divided into three categories: the people whose actions become the subjects of the stories in the newspapers, the people who gather the topics and write about them for the newspapers, and those who buy the newspapers and read them. Of course, sometimes the person who is the subject of an article also writes the article and then reads it. A person who does certain things so that he will be written about may not like the way another person handles the story, so finally he decides to write it himself. He has it published . . . The majority of writers for the newspapers are failures. They attempted to become politicians, but failed. . . . And readers [in this country] do absolutely nothing but read the papers. It is their entire life. . . . But if no judgment is provided [by the writer], the reader has to make one on his own. That is as painful for the reader as it is for a cripple who is told to walk. The reader, for his own part, wants by all means for the writer to stand in his stead and think for him. 8 T h e sheer incongruity of Ogai's research biographies and their readership of housewives and train conductors leads one to interpret the shiden project as Ogai's version of Setsuzo's journalistic satire, his personal assault on Taisho J a p a n as shinbunguni.

T h e Bundan and Literary Journalism O n e casually speaks of the bundan, its members, its movements, without fully appreciating the fact that the job of writers was to fill periodicals with print. (Keep in mind, too, that these periodicals could r u n up to three hundred pages each.) To put it simply, the bundan was a factory of words. A n d almost all of these would appear first in periodical form. W h a t is more, the movement of writers in and

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On Literary Journalism and Selj-Referentiality

out of journalistic posts, one's relationship with editors and publishers, standardized procedures for manuscript submission, the fact of a regular schedule of installments, serialization, deadlines—these aspects of a writer's circumstance figure not merely as sociological backdrop but as an essential part of bundan literature. I am not suggesting that the development of modern Japanese literature is coterminous with its journalistic history, but the importance of their interconnectedness must not be overlooked. An early landmark in this relationship was the appointment, in 1887, of Tsubouchi Shoyo as chief literary editor of the influential Yomiuri shinbun. This event is generally seen as marking the birth of the Meiji bundan, an institution that for many years resembled a journalistic fiefdom, with aspiring writers having to apprentice themselves to an influential sensei in order to get into print and establish a career. Perhaps the most notorious bundan autocrat was Ozaki Koyo, who inherited Shoyo's "power base" as literary editor of the Yomiuri. As mentioned earlier, his death in 1903 marked the end of the bundan's feudalistic phase. Another milestone in the development of a journalistic orientation within modern Japanese literature was Natsume Soseki's decision in 1907 to abandon a promising academic career to become staff fiction writer for the Asahi shinbun. This event shocked many for whom shosetsu, long regarded as the lowly undertaking of the hack writer, was unthinkable as a career alternative for a university professor. It thus marks both the coming of age of shosetsu as a literary calling and a triumph of sorts for literary journalism. The journalistic orientation within the late-Meiji bundan was such that many young writers sought employment with publishers, with the hope of being "posted" to editorships or reportorial positions in the house journals. Being an insider had obvious advantages. Tayama Katai, for instance, served as editor of Bunsho sekai, a literary monthly put out by Hakubunkan, for some seven years. During the period of his editorship, Katai was in a position not only to publish his own work on a regular basis, but also to decide upon which writers to include, what kinds of writing to feature, what special topics to explore—in short, he became a key arbiter of bundan tastes and styles. At the same time, as an employee of Hakubunkan, Katai would clearly not have been in a position of autonomy. And Hakubunkan, in turn, was itself subject to the supervision of governmen-

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

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tal authorities. Toson, Soseki, R o a n , Katai, Kikuchi K a n (18881948)—the careers of these and other figures who freely mixed the roles of editor, critic, writer, and administrator clearly suggest the thin line separating professional journalism and literature. T h e chief difference between Ogai's editorship of Shigarami zoshi and Katai's editorship of Bunsho sekai was one of scale. Companies such as H a k u b u n k a n , Shun'yodo, and Shinchosha in effect ushered in J a p a n ' s mass-media age, and literary publishing was to become big business, catering to an ever-expanding complex of readerships —housewives, students, bureaucrats, and so forth. By contrast, the dojin zasshi, whose circulation rarely approached four figures, were increasingly marginalized. Consequently, the literary refrain of "alienation" and " A n g s t " uttered by a host of pained protagonists, often typified as romantic or existential cri de coeur, can also be interpreted as an expression of an author's plummeting value in the literary marketplace. In the course of its thirty-year history, then, the Meiji bundan underwent dramatic changes, and these inevitably mirrored the larger societal transformation. N a m e writers were sought after to address a multiplicity of audiences that expanded beyond the comfortable confines of one's coterie. Bundan spokesmen were especially in demand among the increasingly prominent katei zasshi ("household magazines," intended for the female reader) and seinen zasshi (youth-oriented magazines). So it was that Soseki, Toson, and others held forth on the role of modern womanhood, the educational mission of J a p a n ' s schools, the need for dedication in the pursuit of excellence. Writers learned to become role models. O n e detects in the pieces solicited by different categories of periodical a palpable shift in narrative voice. C o m p a r e , for instance, the Toson writing for children (which he did, incidentally, with astonishing regularity) and the same author lecturing to young women. O r addressing fellow writers. This of course stands to reason. W h o , after all, would knowingly foist abstruse rhetoric and learned asides upon ten-year-olds? Prestige and even a degree of financial security went with the newfound renown. But the increasing profitability of the publishing trade was hardly reflected in writers' salaries and commissions (especially in light of our own hyper-inflated wage structure for slam-dunkers, literary and otherwise). Actually, " p u r i s t " writers

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On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiaiity

cultivated the persona of poverty (genteel and abject) as part of an artistic credo, material affluence constituting a barrier to the Way. Be that as it may, for the underclass of nameless hacks and literary has-beens, life in the bundan meant a hand-to-mouth existence. 9 O n e further remark on the reluctance to view the bundan as hierarchy or to examine its very unequal distribution of power and influence. In fact, precious few Japanese cultural institutions, of which the Meiji bundan is a case in point, have been seriously studied as political or economic entities. 10 By way of explanation, one may point to the tried-and-true notion of "Japanese groupism," the stereotype of antlike oneness insidiously conspiring to obscure an objective view. In the extreme, this sort of image borders on the grotesque. But the fact remains that the bundan power brokers themselves—editors, publishers, wealthy sponsors, established writers and their aggregation of underlings—rarely reflect upon the influence they wielded. In their personal writings, bundan figures trace their network of friendships and literary affiliations in distinctly personal terms; and critics, at one further remove, use these very narratives as source material to situate writers within an overall project of bundan biography. Again, the journalistic web entangling writer, critic, and reader is woven tightly indeed.

Journalistic Solicitation of Personal Narratives By the time Ogai began his decade-long foray into historical and biographical writing (1912-1921), the typical literary periodical had become a mixed bag of original fiction, poetry, literary/cultural essay, translated fiction, and drama. 1 1 But most conspicuous of all was the category of personal narrative. Early in 1906, writers of repute began to contribute anecdotalia, reminiscences, "questionnaire" responses, and impressionistic accounts, and the demand for their remarks on this or that topic increased dramatically over the next several years. This is not to say that a "Hollywood mentality" prevailed or that the bungei zasshi collectively degenerated into so m a n y competing gossip columns (although some did). But the widespread solicitation of self-referential narrative does offer a unique window upon the bundan. Let us look at a representative literary periodical—Buns ho sekai.12

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

39

Under the editorship of Tayama Katai between 1906 and 1912, Bunsho sekai was both a bastion of Naturalist writing and a vehicle for sophisticated literature in general. The journal appeared monthly, with two special issues annually, and its circulation averaged twelve thousand. Individual issues ran approximately 230 pages, of which the bulk was devoted to solicited material. The final hundred pages or so were reserved for unsolicited pieces contributed by readers not "officially" tied to the bundan. Like other literary journals of the period, Bunsho sekai strikes one as encyclopedic, with published material arranged according to a system of genre classification and topical heading that underwent considerable change. Between 1906 and 1909, the chief categories included featured critical essays ("lead articles," in effect); transcribed interviews (danwa); shosetsu (predominantly short stories, with occasional longer works of serialized fiction); critiques of individual writers and works; poetry (subdivided into waka, haiku, kanshi, and modern free verse); essays on literary and compositional techniques; biographical sketches; travel narrative (kikobun); personal musings and vignettes (kansobun, shohinbun). These categories would undergo a shift in relative emphasis over the years. In 1911, for example, the preferred forms of personal writing were travel narratives, a new (in name, at least) category of impressionistic narrative known as inshoki, and diary writing. Coverage of foreign literary trends had also expanded. 1 3 The contents of the April 1908 issue, chosen at random, will serve to illustrate the format: Danwa (interview feature: the literary opinions of Kosugi Tengai; Yanagita Kunio's remarks on Naturalist fiction; Soseki's remarks on his recent novel, Kofu [The Miner] and its thematic content) Hyoron (critical essays on Naturalism by Fukumoto Nichinan and Hasegawa Tenkei) Poetry (selections by five poets) Meiryu keirekidan (the first of a three-part danwa feature on personal reminiscences by major literary figures: in this issue, five discussions concerning "How I Became a Writer") 14 Short story by Mishima Sosen Homonki (narrative of a visit with Inoue Tetsujiro, noted philosopher and poet)

40

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality Poetry criticism (pieces on English poetry, Basho's Sarumino [Monkey's Straw Raincoat], and modern waka) Gettan (literary sketches and reviews: Yamaji Aizan comments on eight Meiji fiction writers15)

Together with other m a j o r bundan journals, Bunsho sekai became in effect a monthly anthology, a serial compilation of " s e r i o u s " literature (as distinguished f r o m the rising tide of popular literature— taishu bungaku), whose form and content reflected the ebb and flow of contemporary trends and tastes while at the same time helping establish certain n o r m s of literary activity. But the solicitation of personal narratives was fostered even more vigorously by the mass-circulation periodicals—general-interest magazines such as Taiyo and newspapers such as the Asahi, Yomiuri, and Kokumin shinbun. As early as 1907, the h u n d r e d s of thousands of readers who sat down with their daily paper would get their news of the literary crowd together with the events of the day. Cultural reportage had arrived. T h e media were particularly interested in "real-life" features— episodes f r o m one's youth, the struggle to establish oneself in the bundan, details of one's personal life. T h e writerly reminiscence became a popular journalistic feature. T h e unwritten rules of the solicitation game allowed for either written or oral narrative (the latter subject to the vagaries of transcription and editorial tinkering) and encouraged m u c h personal latitude regardless of the specified topic. To ensure at least a token response to the request for publishable material, the questionnaire (anketo) became a standard format. I was initially taken aback at the spectacle of admired writers responding to inane questions of the "Your Favorite C o l o r ? " and "Your Pet Peeve?" variety. But the often ironic or dismissive tone of the responses m a d e it clear that not everyone took the game all that seriously. Ogai, for one, remained aloof from the anketo solicitation, but his published reminiscences are nevertheless considerable. Several pieces touch u p o n his youth, and these are of obvious interest, especially given the lack of such narratives elsewhere. A very moving essay in m e m o r y of Futabatei, one of a compilation of memorial essays, deserves mention. But Ogai's reluctance to dwell u p o n his

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

41

past or to divulge "feelings" in print is tantamount to an article of faith. Understatement and restraint, his literary signature, mark even the reminiscences. H e inserts the following caveat in the midst of his remarks on Futabatei: " M e m o i r s must be read with care. Such accounts may be purposely distorted, or memory may fail. All of us are guilty of revising and rationalizing the past in our minds. Knowingly or unknowingly, we deceive ourselves and others." 1 6 Nevertheless, by the end of the Meiji, the personal memoir was to become a fixture of literary journalism. And although Ogai was not especially productive here, 1 7 the significance for his shiden project is unmistakable. For the very heart of Shibue Chusai is the refashioned reminiscence of Chusai's son Tamotsu, himself a journalist and published memoirist. But before turning to the shiden, I wish to comment on two significant features of Meiji-Taisho literary journalism: serialization and danwa transcription.

Serialization It goes without saying that literary journalism is not a static enterprise. Indeed, the very fact of serial publication, whether daily or monthly, constitutes a mode of sequencing. T h e serialization of fiction in J a p a n has long been recognized as a conventional literary practice, although its implications have rarely been considered. W h a t is more, the practice was not restricted to works of fiction. Literary debates, travel sketches, interviews—these and other features would also appear in multiple installments. Manuscript length was a determining factor. T h e typical journal, with its variety of features and contributing writers, was simply unable to accommodate excessively long material, which would be subdivided into an appropriate n u m b e r of installments. Installment length for narratives appearing in Japanese literary periodicals, while not standardized in any absolute way, ranged from three to six printed pages. T h e average length was somewhat shorter for newspaper serialization, although here, too, no fixed rule applied. T h e periodical installment, then, became the de facto unit of prose narrative length. In somewhat the same sense that the threefoot by six-foot tatami mat constitutes a standard of area in Japanese interior design, so too does the fact of a relatively short installment

42

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

length in the realm of Japanese literary journalism. Both condition one's creative choices. Serialization affected not only the compositional styles and strategies of individual authors but also the ways in which works were read. For Soseki, who was under contract to produce some three hundred installments of "newspaper fiction" (shinbun shosetsu) per year, the fact of daily serialization meant having to produce a relatively steady stream of installments to meet the publication schedule. H e evidently kept several weeks ahead of this schedule, writing his novels (which averaged slightly more than a hundred installments each) with a clear sense of the daily installment as his basic narrative unit. For Ogai, on the other hand, whose shiden were a form of serialized biographical research, the chapter installment was not a discrete chunk of plot. Instead, it served as a framework for the ongoing narrative—the space, for instance, in which to " f i t " a year in a subject's life, or a given anecdotal account, or a learned aside. And it was the "work-in-progress" aspect of serialization as a literary medium that supplied much of the narrative thrust to the project. T h e corresponding element of audience feedback, which Ogai was to exploit so skillfully, would not otherwise have been feasible. 18 We need to recognize serial publication itself as the indispensable "feedback mechanism" within the bundan, whose group esprit may be seen as a form of journalistic promotion. T h e clubby ambience of the bungei zasshi is unmistakable. Free rein was given to personal commentary, reader correspondence, and informal " c h a t s " on topics of current interest. Social notes appeared, too, along with travel accounts, records of visits made and callers received. Periodicals would serialize a literary work together with its reviews and related commentary (some by the author himself), thereby enhancing the degree to which the work is situated in and identified with the life of its author. These parallel modes of serialization carried out within bundan journals—one "fictional" and formalized and the other "personal" (whether by the author in question or about him)—establish a degree of intertextuality that is virtually osmotic. Again, from the reader's vantage point, the conventions of literary journalism effectively collapse any meaningful boundaries of genre, despite the proliferation of genre terminology, and promote a sense in which author and text are indistinguishable. Which is to say, the crucial subtext of

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

43

Meiji-Taisho literary journalism is the ongoing tale of a community of kindred souls, people who write, talk about writing, visit one another, then go home to write some more—a great, serial bundan monogatari, T h e Tale of Tokyo Writers. 1 9 Few foreign readers of Japanese fiction (survey-course students and the rest of us) have failed to perceive here and there a certain lack of closure, a characteristic aimlessness ("plotocide, pure and simple," as one disenchanted undergraduate once put it). Whether serialization is a root cause or merely a consequence of a more basic resistance to clear-cut beginnings and endings is one of the m a n y chicken-and-egg questions one confronts. Arguably, there is as m u c h diversity in serial literature as in the nonserial kind. But the proper focus here ought to be the reader as opposed to the author. An author is not in fact bound to keep in lockstep with the schedule of serialization, writing standardized chunks at regular intervals. T h e periodical reader, however, must wait for the next issue (although m a n y readers would likely choose to avoid the middlem a n , so to speak; one would "wait for the book to come out," as it most assuredly would in the case of n a m e writers). Nevertheless, bundan writers and their readers alike were conditioned by the conventions of literary journalism to a particular mode of fragmentation (the installment) and integration (serial "linking" of installments). For Soseki and Ogai, who were both u n d e r contract to write for newspaper serialization, the end of one project would signal the beginning of the next one in sequence. But the major works would often be linked by shorter pieces, each bearing some sequential relationship to the contiguous works. Naturally, the shorter pieces themselves would conform to the dictates of journalistic convention. For example, Soseki wrote a fascinating series of autobiographical vignettes (shohin) inserted as a sort of intermission feature in between his novels. 20 Ogai's minor biographies played an analogous role in the shiden project. " J u a m i no tegami," for one, was specifically intended to bridge the Chusai and R a n k e n works. And as things turned out, the R a n k e n biography grew so large that the author declared a time-out and served up, in medias res, some smaller pieces as refreshment. For both of these authors, the routine of daily serialization engendered extended literary sequences, a blur of beginnings and endings. For obvious reasons, the Soseki novels are regarded as inde-

44

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

pendent entities. Even so, I would argue for greater attention to their overall sequentiality, especially in view of the interspersed shohin narratives, which both highlight and comment upon the adjacent fictional works. All the more reason, then, to regard the shiden as an integrated sequence. Unfortunately, the tendency to ignore journalistic factors has meant that questions concerning the sequentiality of contiguous narratives, the narrative status of the serial installment, and its reception by readers have simply not been raised. 2 1 Regrettably, sufficient space cannot be devoted here to these concerns, but I hope to address them in a separate study.

The Transcribed Chat It has been argued that achieving the goal established in the mid18808 of genbun itchi, the vernacularization of prose narrative, constituted the necessary condition for developments such as Naturalism and, by extension, modern Japanese fiction in general. It can equally be argued that the vernacularization movement itself was inextricably tied to the rise of journalism and the absorption of journalistic conventions and practices within the bundan. O n e practice that did much to establish the personal, colloquial voice within modern Japanese literary narrative was danwa hikki, the transcription of writers' chats. Recalling Barbara Herrnstein Smith's notion of the "written utterance," we can say that the literary chat as a genre of personal narrative was known during the Tokugawa period. Kabuki actors frequently held forth on their life and career in a form known as the geidan (art talk). 22 And disciples in a n u m b e r of different areas would occasionally transcribe the sensei's remarks, say, on matters of technique or " q u o t e " a deceased sensei as a memorial gesture. T h e r e also existed a category of informal discourse on literary topics, the bunwa, although this particular essay form did not employ the colloquial style. 23 In Meiji J a p a n , the transcription of writers' personal remarks as a journalistic convention can be traced to the Sakka kushin dan (Accounts of Writers' Trials and Tribulations), a danwa series that appeared in the journal Shincho gekkan in 1897-1898. Rather slow to develop, the practice became widespread between 1906 and 1910, 24 as illustrated in the following chart tracing the published interviews of four representative authors:

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality Izumi Kyoka 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926

M o r i Ogai

.— 1

— —

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

1

—

—

—

—

7 8 3 11 4 2 1 —

3 1 —

1 2 2 1 1

.— —

—

1 2 2 5 25 8 6 3 1 2 2

Shimazaki Toson*

—

1 2 2

Natsume Soseki

2

— —

45

1 1

1 7 17 7 18 18 2 6

— —

3 4 4 4 2 1 1 2

—

1 3 2 2 lb

— —

3 3 4 1 3 6 4 1

— — — —

— — —

—

—

2 2

a

Toson continued to grant interviews up until his death in 1943. In fact, the frequency of danwa was to increase toward the end of his life. b Posthumous publication of a danwa conducted in September 1915

Aside from their content, which ranges from a dismissive remark to an elaborate personal reminiscence or episode, the danwa convey a rough sense of one's popularity or notoriety (not all writers, after all, were invited to chat in public). Also, as the chart makes clear, the form itself had what amounted to a bell-curve history, its heyday corresponding almost exactly with the Naturalist period. It would seem that 1909 was the "year of the interview." (One can only wonder at the fact of Izumi Kyoka's twenty-five danwa, quite possibly a bundan

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On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

record for a single year.) But as early as 1906, Soseki, his novelistic career off to a brilliant start, was the subject of seventeen published interviews. These appeared in no fewer than thirteen separate periodicals, which ran the gamut of literary and popular journalism. By their own account, beginning around 1907 m a j o r writers were barraged with requests for publishable material. Articles, interviews, fiction—virtually anything would do. T h e demand was evidently so great that a n u m b e r of periodicals resorted to the homon kisha strategy of filling the monthly quota of personal narratives. Homon kisha (home-visit reporters) were staff members—little more than glorified pitchmen in some cases—whose job was to beg, borrow, or steal something publishable from writers whose residences they visited door-to-door. As with any unwelcome solicitation, consent to be interviewed was often refused, or granted on the condition that nothing appear in print. Some writers—Koda Rohan, for one —simply barred homon kisha from the house. As we will see, Ogai's attitude toward this most intrusive of journalistic practices was characteristically ambivalent. First, let us examine the chronology of his most noteworthy danwa pieces. Date Feb. 1897

Subject observations on bundan

Periodical Taiyo

Nov. 1897 Jan. 1900 Feb. 1904 Apr. 1906 Apr. 1906 June 1906

remarks on G e r m a n trilogy reminiscences of H a r a d a Naojirö b reminiscences of Ochiai Naobumi shintaishi (New Poetry movement) theater going

Shinchö gekkan

Myöjö

art education for girls

Kofi

Oct. 1906Aug. 1907

Western drama

Kabuki

Tokyo nichi nicht

Remarks transcription oitaiwa*\ mixed literary and colloquial style 12th installment in the Sakka kushin dan series serialized in four daily installments

Taiyö Mainichi shinbun transcription of zadankai (group discussion) involving eight writers danwa series entitled Kanchoro issekiwa

On Literary Journalism

and Self-Referentiality

47

Date Jul. 1908

Subject poetry

Periodical Hanmen

Dec. 1908

"Late-Night Thoughts" b

Kofi

Jan. 1909

on the proposed Com- Kokumin shinbun mittee on Literature (Bungei iinkai) on a recent play of his Subaru interesting remarks on (Omuishi) problems with his publisher, Hakubunkan current bundan scene; Shincho taiwa transcription his recent reading of Futon on his new status as Tokyo Asahi remarks rendered in the bungaku hakase (Doctor formal literary style of Literature) reminiscences of memorial unusually moving, lyrical Futabatei b edition' narrative reminiscences of Shorten sekai entitled "Waga jushigosai no youth b toki"; Ogai refers to it as a shohin thoughts on literary Bunsho sekai part of a seven-author danwa translation feature on literary translation on Harada Naojiro Kokumin shinbun three-part danwa serialization, on occasion of opening of Harada exhibition

May 1909 June 1909 July 1909

Aug. 1909 Sept. 1909 Oct. 1909 Nov. 1909Jan. 1910 Dec. 1909 Oct. 1910 Apr. 1911 May 1911 Jan. 1912 Apr. 1912

" H o w I Stand"

Shincho

literary chat

Mainichi denpo

reminiscences of Taguchi Ukichi on the Bungei iinkai

Tokyo keizai zasshi Jiji shinpo/Chuo shinbun

onhaiku b

Haimi

reminiscences of the Shigarami zoshi days

Yomiuri

Remarks transcription of taiwa, entitled Kanchoro shiwa very personal voice, echoing similar pieces by Futabatei and Toson

"Yo ga tachiba," oft-cited statement of Ogai's teinen (resignation) stance interesting prefatory remarks by the interviewer thoughts on the well-known economist and historian two danwa conducted on the same topic by different papers reminiscences of exposure to poetry as a young boy

continued

48 Date Dec. 1914

Sept. 1915

Oct. 1917-

Jan.

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality Subject " T h e Lost Manuscript" on his rumored retirement plans "Kanchôrô musings"

Periodical Kabuki

Remarks "Nakunatta genkô," account of danwa hikki as art of deception

Yomiuri Teikoku bungaku

personal reflection, in two parts, on his career as "newspaper biographer"

1918

"both participants in the discussion b submitted in manuscript form, in the conversation style (danwatai) 'compilation of essays edited by Tsubouchi Shôyô and Uchida Roan

The personal narratives that appeared so widely in late-Meiji and Taishô periodicals have been called by many names, among them kansd (private thoughts), zuihitsu (discursive essays), insho (personal impressions), and shdhin (vignettes). Such terms are virtually impossible to differentiate, so for the sake of simplicity I will use them interchangeably. Overall, this self-referential writing can be divided into narratives published in the original written form and those that originated as chats (danwa), dialogues (taiwa), or group discussions (zadankai). These seemingly disparate categories resemble one another to a surprising degree. Each combines aspects of informal oral communication and the more formal requirements of the written essay. (Paradoxically, there were even danwa rendered in classical Japanese, as Ogai's July 1909 piece indicates.) Each is a variety of personal reportage, contributed in response to journalistic solicitation. So it was that by 1908 the danwa hikki and personal essay had essentially merged into a uniform conversational style (danwatai). This style of personal discourse, firmly rooted in journalistic practice, would also become the standard of literary discourse. Ultimately, perhaps, danwa as journalistic practice was intended primarily to obtain publishable material in a competitive marketplace. And what counted was authenticity rather than artistry. Thus, two or three throwaway remarks by Sôseki or Toson would be "worth" more than a novel by a nobody. The feature format was widely employed, whereby manuscripts from a number of writerrespondents would be combined in a single article. Ogai's October 1909 danwa on literary translation, for instance, was actually one of a

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

49

compilation of chats by seven bundan figures (the normal range of interviewees was four to eight). As was the case with longer works, danwa features were serialized as the need warranted. O n e format involved the serialization of features that drew an unusually wide n u m b e r of respondents. (Bunsho sekai's " K e i r e k i d a n " feature mentioned earlier is a case in point). T h e n there was the danwa series focusing upon a single literary figure. As editor of Gakuto, Uchida R o a n featured himself in a series of monthly literary chats, entitled " R o j o zatsuwa" (A Miscellany of Balcony-top Talks), which appeared from March 1902 until J u n e 1905. 25 And Ogai, who was a lifelong devotee of theater, published a year-long series of drama-related chats ( " K a n c h o r o issekiwa" [Evening Talks from Kanchoro]) in Kabuki, the journal edited by his younger brother. These were essentially a sequence of plot summaries and commentary on m a j o r Western plays. 26 Ogai found himself so caught up in the retelling of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac that his remarks on this one play had to be carried in six consecutive issues of the journal! I would like to comment here on the danwa as a unique convention of modern Japanese literary journalism, one whose narrative status is particularly intriguing. Interviews conducted, as was often the case, by individuals personally acquainted with the writer in question would likely have assumed a tone of easy informality, perhaps even intimacy. But the process whereby a friendly chat would be converted into a published narrative ordinarily involved a good deal of editorial manipulation. As a consequence, what appeared in print would be a simulation of an actual dialogue, a synopsis, in the conversational style, of key points raised. In the absence of recording technology, of course, there was as yet no " t r u e " transcription of the sort of dialogue that danwa hikki ostensibly reproduces. It was not uncomm o n for interviews to ramble on for hours, in which case even a Boswellian capacity for recall would be hard pressed. 2 7 Therefore, all danwa transcriptions rendered prior to the advent of such technologies are inevitably inaccurate, with the degree of inaccuracy hinging on the memory of the hikkisha (interviewer/transcriber) and the subsequent manipulation of the written transcription. 2 8 At worst, danwa hikki amounts to outright fabrication. And although it is impossible to compare the published transcription (which in any event would " s o u n d " realistic) with the original remarks, one can

50

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

cite instances of disgruntled writers, angered at having been misquoted and otherwise hoodwinked, publishing disclaimers. In the course of his final Cyrano chat (Kabuki, July 1907), Ogai related an episode that sheds much light on the day-to-day realities of journal solicitation. The situation is bad enough when one turns over written manuscripts to the periodicals. Even then they rarely manage to produce errorfree work. How much worse in the case of interview transcriptions [danwa hikki], where there's scarcely any resemblance to the original. . . . Therefore I've been refusing to see any reporters stopping by on official business. But I have made exceptions, time permitting, if the caller has come to talk privately. It so happened, then, that I was recently approached by a certain young man. He identified himself as a reporter for the Engei gaho [a journal of the performing arts], and I immediately informed him that if he intended to print my remarks, I ' d have nothing to say to him. "No, the matters I'd like to discuss are for my own edification. Won't you please hear me out?" Well, the fellow's manner of speech was so convincingly artless [mujaki] that I consented. " N o problem at all," I responded. "I'll be of whatever assistance I can." We spoke for a while and the young man left. I'd put the incident out of my mind completely when it came to my attention that the J u n e 1907 issue of Engei gaho contained a two-page article entitled " M o r i Ogai, Doctor of Medicine, 29 Discusses Naturalism and Modern Drama—as told to Tencho, staff reporter." Well, I was quite taken aback. And when I got hold of the issue in question, I was even more stunned. . . . It is not worth attempting to rebut each of the misrepresentations in this factually groundless bundan gossip-mongering [bundan no uwasabanashi]. What I do want to mention, though, is the fact of my amazement—at my own gullibility. This Tencho was as crafty as I was naive. 30 Ogai's resentment, although mitigated here by the tone of selfmockery (a c o m m o n self-referential strategy among writers of the period), extends to the entire institution of popular journalism. And rather more to the point, this little episode prefigures the obsession with factuality and textual accuracy that would characterize the skiden project. I have already hinted at the ambiguity of authorship inherent in

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

51

the danwa hikki narrative. Danwa transcription centers on the interviewee's remarks, thus creating the illusion of a monologue when in fact a give-and-take would have occurred. (As the Ogai listings illustrate, though, taiwa and zadankai transcriptions were also published.) With the "monological" danwa, one's remarks would normally have been subject to manipulation by the interviewer, who was in a position to interject questions and generally steer the conversation. This sort of authorial ambiguity is further complicated by the fact that the danwa transcriptions were occasionally (though not always, as the Ogai episode makes clear) subject to the editorial scrutiny of the interviewee. Soseki and Toson are known to have liberally revised the transcribed manuscript, whether to alter the substance of the remarks or merely to adjust the speech level. Precisely this kind of composite authorship, involving overlapping editorial functions, characterizes the literary journalism of the period in question. Again, what finally appeared in print can best be understood as a journalistic species of prose narrative—a style of oral discourse modeled, more or less faithfully, upon "actual" remarks. The conversational style of danwa hikki obscures the layers of editorial polish applied in converting a natural dialogue, with its hesitations, asides, nonverbal gestures and cues, into conventionalized synopsis. Only certain remarks would be included (again, not even the most skilled interviewer would have had perfect recall of a long dialogue, and verbatim transcripts, even if available, would still require substantial editing), and these would be arranged so as to afford a degree of narrative continuity. Distractions would be "laundered," and just enough linguistic cues to orality would be included to simulate the original discourse. The key point here is that the conversational style that emerged from the convention of danwa hikki, with its heightened sense of immediacy and authenticity, was incorporated into the narrative repertoire of Meiji-Taisho writers. Thus, a written reminiscence by Toson on his childhood in Magome becomes virtually indistinguishable from a transcribed danwa on the same subject. And when Ogai or Soseki agree to write about their early years or reflect on their day-to-day activities, they employ a danwatai that effectively erases the line between oral and written discourse. Thus, the " t r i u m p h " of literary vernacularization by 1909 has as much to do with the avail-

52

On Literary Journalism and Selj-Referentiality

ability of journalistic models of informal oral discourse as it was the product of a self-conscious movement or some sort of artistic evolution. As I have suggested, many writers of note granted journal interviews at least occasionally. Some, like Kunikida Doppo, expressed a positive fascination with danwa.zl But a more interesting body of evidence points to a general resentment of the liberties taken by aggressive homon kisha in their quest for publishable material.

The Writer Besieged Ogai's Engei gaho episode is only one of nearly a dozen references among his personal narratives (including, ironically, danwa hikki) to run-ins with aggressive and/or unscrupulous journalists. The Futabatei reminiscence (August 1909), an unusually moving account of his all-too-brief friendship with the recently deceased writer, is prefaced by an indictment of prying reporters who steal one's precious time. Ogai recreates the typical exchange: "Write something, anything!" "I can't." "You'vegot to write something!" He goes on to tell of his attempts to refuse interviews with the press. These people invariably manage to talk their way into the house, though, and something ends up in print somewhere. They are a ruthless breed. But if you happen to offend one of them, watch out. Your name is publicly rubbed in the dirt. So he's had to make himself available to all comers, at all hours, and this has left little time for his own social calls. All of this serves as backdrop for the account of a regrettably slight acquaintanceship with Futabatei. "I am simply no good at managing either time or money," he concludes. "This is an age of confession, after all, so I herewith confess my own ineptitude." 32 Ogai relates a particularly vivid encounter with journalistic solicitation at its most egregious in "Nakunatta genko" (The Lost Manuscript), one of the danwatai pieces he contributed to Kabuki: In this world of ours, where the strong prey upon us weaklings, reporters must be counted among the former. Every single day, with-

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

53

out fail, four or five of them come by. Two in the morning, two more in the afternoon. I meet them, we speak at length, and in the end I'm left with no time to do anything else. Each one wants something from me. If I were to consent to them all, my whole life would be spent doing danwa or writing personal essays. And if I go so far as to refuse, they'll argue with me. What a vexation this is. Some reporters will curse me if I refuse to comply. Once, when I had a colleague conduct the interview in my stead, the reporter accused me of arrogance and physically attacked me! And I've even been threatened with revenge. The person in question, to my amazement, identified himself as a Waseda graduate, not yet twenty years old! Yes, we have indeed fallen upon hard times. O g a i goes on to relate the strange tale of a clever homon kisha, " a fellow with long hair and a big, brawny b u i l d " who announced that he was with a certain j o u r n a l (identified only as " j o u r n a l x " in the narrative). " I ' v e never even heard of the j o u r n a l , " he replied, in response to the m a n ' s request for an essay. " B u t I must get you to write something." H e r e we go again, thought Ogai. "Will you kindly tell m e why you have to get something f r o m m e ? " W h e r e u p o n the fellow used a novel mode of argumentation. " I ' m from the provinces, you see, and was just hired by the journal. My first assignment was to come here and get an article. If I don't succeed, they may fire me. This visit is my trial run, you might say, so please, please write something. Anything will do, long or short." "But I don't have anything, long or short. I ' m afraid it's your bad luck having been assigned to me." "Well, how about something you've already written. T h a t ' d be fine." " I don't bother keeping them." " H o w about a piece you've sent off somewhere?" " I don't have the time to look around for that sort of thing." " D o n ' t worry, I'll do the looking." So the reporter left. Several days later he returned, O g a i tells us, with an old j o u r n a l that contained one of his transcribed danwa.

54

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality It was evidently a danwa of mine, but looking the thing over I had no idea what it was. An amateurish piece, with fragments of swindled words stuck together. Certainly not the sort of thing I'd want reprinted.

But this time the fellow had come equipped with a letter of introduction and therefore could not easily be turned away. With this in mind, Ogai decided to write something and be done with it. H e worked up a critical essay—actually, a response to a vicious review of his translation of an Ibsen play 3 3 —and handed it over to the reporter. And that, believe or not, was the last he saw of him. What became of the man, or my manuscript—which I don't really regret having lost—is beyond me. This, then, is just another instance of my having been hoodwinked by the press. 34 There are two sides to every story, as borne out by several danwa that contain prefatory remarks by the hikkisha himself. T h e Mainichi denpd transcription of October 1910 begins as follows: " I absolutely refuse to grant interviews or write essays for the daily newspapers. There is nothing I have to say about the 'current state of the bundan' or anything of the sort, and that is that." In such a manner Dr. Ogai made it clear that he would have nothing to do with me. But then I ventured my own thoughts on the censorship issue, which has been the focus of so much bundan concern of late. And Dr. Ogai began to respond, grudgingly at first, with a "yes, that's right" here and a "no, you're wrong" there. And this is how we spent an hour together, chatting about this and that. Much that will appear in my version of what was a very fragmented talk may not accurately reflect Dr. Ogai's intended meaning, and for this I must apologize both to him and to my readers. Our discussion, which centered on the relationship between literature and individualism [kojinshugi], anarchism [museifushugi], and socialism [shakaishugi] was quite interesting. But it is no simple matter to capture the entirety of it after the fact. For one thing, a great many names were mentioned, and some of these I either missed or failed to hear correctly. However, this cannot be helped. I will now attempt to record Dr. Ogai's remarks as accurately as possible. 35 Other writers shared Ogai's distaste for unscrupulous reporters. In February 1909, at the height of the danwa boom, Uchida R o a n spoke in an interview on the "evils" of the homon kisha phenomenon.

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

55

(Roan's remarks were transcribed, incidentally, in the Kokumin shinbun, a newspaper at the forefront of danwa publication.) H e tells of having been called upon by a member of the roving band of reporters while another visitor happened to be in the house. Since there was no other space available, the man was shown into the room where Roan and his caller were talking. After quietly waiting in a corner for about half an hour, the reporter took his leave, saying that he'd call again. Lo and behold, one of the bungei zasshi subsequently printed a Roan danwa, one Roan had no recollection of ever having granted. And then it dawned on him. It was the talk he'd had while that reporter was in the room! "You simply cannot let down your guard with such people around." 3 6 Shimazaki Toson, known for his strategy of peaceful coexistence with literary journalism, demonstrates his conciliatory attitude when on several occasions he is forced to cite glaring inaccuracies in his published danwa.37 After a point-by-point refutation of remarks attributed to him, Toson makes the gesture of taking personal responsibility for the botched transcriptions. " I suppose I ' m just not very good at being interviewed." Natsume Soseki, ever one to lament the demands being made upon him by friends, relatives, and just about everyone else, submitted a piece to the Kokumin shinbun in October 1909. This was one in a series that the paper had been running of "day-in-the-life" sketches by major writers. 38 As Soseki tells it, all he had wanted to do that day was sit down and read the news about Ito Hirobumi's assassination in Harbin. But first this person stops by, then that person, and then the wife is all in a flutter about a wedding in Yokohama. Then, to top it off, someone comes by wanting to do an interview! There is an obvious comic element in these accounts of scheming literary paparazzi descending upon their defenseless prey, who just happen to rank among J a p a n ' s most prominent writers. How is one to interpret the tone of noblesse oblige in Ogai's homon hisha anecdotes—the prince knowingly allowing himself to be duped by the pauper, then the obligatory note of self-deprecation? Is this "genuine," or merely part of the inside joke? We need to recall that writereditors such as Roan, who on the one hand bemoaned having been had by predatory reporters, were themselves aggressive in their solicitation of material from noteworthy bundan colleagues.

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On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality

T h e recurrent victimization motif in writer danwa will doubtless strike one as ironic, but it is worth keeping in mind that male protagonists throughout Meiji-Taishô literature are conventionally identified with inertia and passivity. Consider Futabatei's hapless Bunzô, J a p a n ' s first U n d e r g r o u n d M a n . And what of the ineffectual O t a Toyotarô of Ogai's celebrated first work of fiction, " M a i h i m e " ? There are others: the feckless lover-boy of Ozaki Kôyô's Konjiki yasha, the pathetically repressed Takenaka Tokio of Katai's Futon, the brooding Kenzo of Sôseki's Michikusa, beset by predatory relatives and a wife who cannot understand him. In other words, the "modal protagonist" of early modern Japanese fiction is very much a victim, a passive observer acted upon by circumstance. These are highly subjective judgments, of course, and my very choice of adjectives—ineffectual, feckless, hapless—betrays a strong bias, no doubt culturally conditioned. T h e notion of character type in literature threatens to transform into cultural stereotype, to the extent that literary characters come to represent "essential" cultural traits. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to refute the observation that the Japanese male as represented in Meiji-Taishô literature— including the personal narratives under discussion—is not a doer. H e watches, waits, thinks, reacts. This state of affairs has been ascribed to the alleged social marginality of the bundan, to the repressive censorial apparatus, even to the Japanese language itself. In his study of the shishdsetsu (personal fiction) genre, for instance, Edward Fowler has identified linguistic features of Japanese that bias literary discourse (self-referentiality in particular). O n e could further argue for the influence, say, of Russian literary models. This is what M a r leigh R y a n does in her study of Futabatei Shimei when she claims that "Bunzô, the hero of Ukigumo, is a superfluous m a n , a direct literary descendent of the Russian type." 3 9 (And Futabatei, who probably knew more about Russian literature than anyone in late-Meiji J a p a n , himself never ceased claming that his work was a "pale reflection" of Turgenev, Dostoevski, and Gogol.) T h e danwa narratives of Meiji-Taishô literary figures are never included among their serious work. Nor am I suggesting they should be. Yet they provide m a n y intimate and unrehearsed glimpses of character. Ogai's danwa reveal, among other things, a chronic ambivalence toward bundan journalism. T h e author "reluctantly" consents to be interviewed, bemoaning his inability to cope with aggressive reporters; he markets his personal anecdotes, all the while

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inveighing against the danwa as "bundan uwasabanashi," as mere gossip with no basis in fact. And as if to isolate this informal, personal voice from that of the "serious" author and public figure, he literally gives this voice a separate identity. Ogai signed his danwa pieces and reflective essays Mori Rintaro, using his given name. (The February 1904 reminiscence of Ochiai Naobumi begins: " M y name is M o r i Rintaro.") O n e may consider this bifurcation of literary voices to be schizophrenic, or disingenuous, or merely beside the point. But I would argue that for Ogai, aka Rintaro, a keen awareness of the proper compartmentalization of public and private domains, both in his literary and medical careers, was very much to the point. It is significant, too, that the title chosen by Ogai's brother J u n z a b u r o for his highly regarded memoir, Ogai Mori Rintaro, embodies both identities: the self in counterpoise, a perfect symmetry of familial trunk flanked by branches separate but equal. Like Futabatei, Ogai turned to the available literary and journalistic conventions as avenues of self-expression. H e experimented with Naturalist fiction and historical novellas, granted journal interviews, wrote personal essays, and in so doing simultaneously validated and critiqued these forms and practices. As with any author, he sought a congenial repertoire of literary selves. Peevish culture critic, dilettante, scholar, folklorist, workaday writer—these were among his m a n y creations. But in a sense only two really count, and these two names—Ogai and Rintaro—embody perhaps all we know of the m a n . Yet the Rintaro who jokes about prying journalists and reminisces about his youth is as much a literary contrivance as the Ogai who devotes himself to the study of old documents and obscure lives. T h e very same question that Mori Ogai would ask of his shiden subjects—Who was Ranken? W h a t sort of person was Katei?—may be asked of him. W h o was Ogai? His own answer to such a question, recorded at the close oilzawa Ranken, is as follows: " W h o is to say? A life is a multistoried edifice built of m a n y evidentiary pieces. We must each of us judge it for ourselves." 4 0 Fittingly, Ogai's last will and testament, written three days before his death, is a final act of self-naming. I wish to die Mori Rintaro of Iwami. I have had connections with both the Department of the Imperial Household and the army, but at

58

On Literary Journalism and Self-Referentiality the very moment of death I repudiate all outward signs of this connection. I wish to die Mori Rintaro. All I want written on my grave are the words "The Grave of Mori Rintaro," not a single word more.41

In conclusion, I wish to point out a significant (and equally unexpected) feature of the shiden: their debt to the convention of danwa hikki and to oral narrative in general. I am referring here to the contribution of Shibue Tamotsu. This matter will occupy me at length in Chapter 7, but it should be recognized that Tamotsu's extensive memoir was written in the conversational danwatai style, and many other episodes were related to Ogai in private discussions and through frequent written correspondence. Furthermore, Ogai would come to rely on Tamotsu as his personal homon kisha, whom he dispatched on a round of interviews and research-related errands. The resulting notes and transcriptions would become an important documentary source, especially in Izawa Ranken. Whether or not one chooses to see any irony here, journalistic practice, together with the narrative style it promoted, is a defining feature of the shiden project.

C H A P T E R

3

The Shiden of Mori Ogai A Critical Overview

Sometime in the summer of 1915, while foraging through old documents and annals, Mori Ogai discovered the existence of an obscure late-Tokugawa scholar named Shibue Chusai. Ogai had already established himself as J a p a n ' s premier belletrist. H e had written fiction, poetry, history, biography, essays of every description. And like his contemporaries, he was affected by the autobiographical mood that had taken hold within the bundan in the wake of the Naturalist movement. His series of biographical studies, in other words, share with their respective subjects a lineage of sorts, a context. Keeping in mind this context, as outlined in the first two chapters of this book, I want to examine the shiden as an integrated body of literature.

The Shiden and Newspaper Serialization Leon Edel, as part of his manifesto for a modern biography, has called upon biographers to invent the narrative form that best suits their subject. 1 In the case of Ogai's shiden, narrative form was dictated by the publication format itself. M u c h in keeping with the conventions of literary journalism established earlier in the century, Ogai wrote his biographies for serial publication in the Tokyo and Osaka editions of the Nichi nichi shinbun, one of J a p a n ' s leading dailies. 2 Almost every day for two full years the installments appeared —632 in all for the trilogy alone. (The n u m b e r would have been greater, but mounting criticism from readers caused the management to suspend publication with chapter 57 of Hojo Katei.3) W h e n 59

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we speak of the Chüsai or Ranken biographies, then, we are not referring to handsomely bound volumes, for no separate "hardcover" editions would ever be produced, but rather to an extraordinary series of daily newspaper installments. 4 In short, Ogai's work falls squarely in the domain of literary journalism, a fact largely ignored by critics. And the most intriguing aspect of the shiden as a journalistic enterprise, I would suggest, is its subversive quality. I have already pointed out that the late-Meiji bundan became an arena for the activity of large publishing houses and major newspapers. In a sense, Ogai's shiden project was a byproduct of their competition. In signing on Natsume Soseki as their staff novelist in 1907, the Asahi shinbun had established a certain literary standard for the daily press. As we have seen, in due course the rival Nichi nichi countered with a writer of equal stature. In 1915, Ogai agreed to an offer that would allow him to write anything he chose, the expectation being, presumably, that the eminent man of letters would attract readers no matter what he wrote. But the deal was to backfire. To the management's dismay, Ogai embarked upon his serialized life and times of unknown Confucianists. In due course, very unflattering letters from some of the paper's 750,000 readers started coming in, but the dean of Japanese letters reacted with benign indifference. In the meantime, on December 9, 1916, Soseki passed away in the midst of serializing his complex psychological novel, Meian. Ogai had reached chapter 158 of Izawa Ranken and showed no signs of letting up. But Soseki's death would prove small comfort to the management of Ogai's paper, since their man remained as contemptuous as ever of popular literary tastes and trends. Takagi Takeo, who has written extensively on the history of Japanese literary journalism, speaks of the running battle Ogai had with the Nichi nichi staff, who were as frustrated with the author's arrogance and endless nitpicking as he was with their incompetence. "They would have been more than happy," Takagi notes, "to be rid of their 'cultural liability' [bunkateki akaji]."5 (He goes on to note the contrast with Soseki, who had established an enviable rapport with the Asahi editorial staff.) I have already commented on the rise of literary journalism within the Meiji bundan, where publication in the print media was de rigueur. 6 Since 1909, Ogai had been regularly publishing in the

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major anti-Naturalist journals and elsewhere as well. But daily serialization was new for him. 7 And it would have a dramatic impact on the shiden narrative. Most significantly, it would allow the author to publish while continuing to assemble and study his materials. New information received in mid-stream, so to speak, would simply be incorporated later on. We must bear in mind that Ogai began writing Shibue Chusai before his research was very far along. In fact, by J a n u a r y 13, 1916, the date that chapter 1 appeared in print, he had digested only a small fraction of the source material provided by Tamotsu. 8 His lengthy narrative preface (chaps. 1-9), so admired for its deeply personal voice, effectively bought time needed to further digest the sources. Ogai would not require such a delaying tactic with either Izawa Ranken or Hojo Katei, though, since his materials were essentially in place before their serial publication. Before turning to the question of Ogai's narrative techniques and their journalistic aspect, let us look at the chronology of the shiden serialization. Work

Serialization dates 9

"Suginohara Shina" Shibue Chüsai " J u a m i no tegami" Izawa Ranken "Tokö T a h e i " Izawa Ranken (cont.) "Suzuki Tokichirö" "Saiki K ö i " "Kojima Höso" Höjö Katei

Jan.1-7 1916 J a n . 13-May 20 M a y 21-June 24 J u n e 25-Dec. 28 Jan.1-7 1917 J a n . 8-Sept. 5 Sept. 6-18 Sept. 19-Oct. 11 Oct. 14-28 Oct. 30-Dec. 26

Höjö Katei

Feb.1918-Jan.1920

Höjö Katei's Final Year

Oct. 1920-Nov. 1921

Installments 6 119 32 177 7 194 12 15 13 57 (in Nichi nichi) 107 (in Teikoku bungaku) 17 (in Araragi)

One's immediate impression is of uninterrupted flow. A work ends on one day and a new one begins the next. Shorter pieces mix in among the three longer works. "Toko Tahei" is thus a sort of intermezzo to the symphonic Izawa Ranken, and the sequence of Suzuki, Saiki, and Kojima biographies provides a counterpoint to the larger trilogy. The analogy of the Japanese emaki comes to mind —a long, unbroken narrative meander. 1 0 The shiden serialization (and by extension, serialization in general)

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The Shiden ofMori Ogai

is a study in narrative continuity and discontinuity. T h e individual works and their constituent episodes start and finish, to be sure. But in a larger sense there exists only one beginning and one ending. T h e evolving, interconnecting, ongoing nature of the literary project ultimately obscures whatever gap separates the individual works. A n d such gaps would have been barely perceptible to readers of the original work as serialized (by all accounts, admittedly, a small minority of the Nichi nichi's subscribers). They would be absorbed, so to speak, within the daily narrative flow.11 It is only retrospectively that one can speak of separate and separable works. 12 Even so, I would still maintain that a coherent sequentiality remains at the core of the shiden as a literary project. Its ramifying, open-ended nature calls to mind Angus Fletcher's remark that "history may be understood to be that literary mode most deeply committed to endless expansion of its materials through discourse." 1 3

The Shiden as Literary Narrative Narrative technique is as crucial an issue in modern biography as in fiction, for biographers no less than novelists may be seen as engaged in storytelling, in crafting plot and molding character. Within the borders defined by the material, one is granted considerable creative latitude. O r one may eschew creativity and opt for the chronicle or annal as one's model. And this is precisely how Ogai the biographer has styled himself—a faithful compiler of fact and data. Be that as it may, recent narratological studies of factual discourse have sought to overthrow the " n a i v e " conception of fact as a purely objective category. T h e notion of biography as narrative art owes much to Andre Maurois' Aspects of Biography (1929), which initiated the genre into the literary brotherhood. Sir Leslie Stephen echoes the idea in his essay "Biography": " A study of biographies by the dozen, though it often leaves one pretty m u c h in the dark as to the people biographised, ought perhaps to give one some view as to the art of biography." 1 4 In recent years, the literary study of biography has enjoyed a considerable resurgence. In large part this is due to the appearance of the journal Biography, which has been a forum for far-ranging explorations of what is now called "life writing"—biography, autobiogra-

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phy, memoir, diary. In the area of biography alone, major studies by Dowling, Epstein, Folkenflik, Nadel, Siebenschuh and others have expanded the scope of critical inquiry. (Books on autobiography and literary selfhood are appearing at a truly astonishing rate.) One speaks these days of a poetics of biography, following Ira Nadel's lead, of Self and Other as literary constructs. And thanks to William Epstein the genre has been skillfully deconstructed. 15 In sharp contrast, the Japanese critical establishment has studiously avoided (wisely or naively, depending on one's point of view) the treatment of biography and its neighbors as literary genres. The grand exception is Ogai, whose shiden have been admired, reviled, and anatomized for well over a half century. My own work is much indebted to the painstaking scholarship of generations of Ogai scholars and enthusiasts. Many have remarked on the author's techniques of biographical narrative. As we will see, these are part of the very surface texture of his work. Indeed, the shiden may be said to constitute a discourse on methodology. Or, as several critics have suggested, method gone mad. Mori Ogai is nothing if not methodical, a n d a r a n d o m c h a p t e r or two of Shibue Chusai or Izawa

Ranken

will convey a sense of the overall design.

Watakushi: The Biographer Speaks My acquaintanceship with Chusai was the result of an odd coincidence. I graduated from University with a degree in medicine and went on to become a government official. But I have enjoyed writing ever since I was a child, so it came to pass that I was enlisted in the ranks of the literary fraternity. (Shibue Chusai, chap. 3)

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of the shiden is the ubiquitous watakushi (Japanese first-person pronoun) of the narrative. Ogai's " I " is at times a writer addressing his readers, at times a researcher discussing his work. The term watakushi appears 227 times in Shibue Chusai alone, a recurrence that points to the extraordinary foregrounding of the author in the context of his literary project. 16 Ogai's shiden persona is actually the culmination of much trial and error with autobiographical expression. The author had turned to literary self-referentiality, following the fashion of the times, in 1909.

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But it was his venture into serialized biography in 1916 that provided him with a particularly congenial voice—by turns familiar, stodgy, engaging, pedantic. And always in control. In the shiden, the first-person narrator maintains a running commentary upon his research: how he manages to get hold of a particular source; his frustration when a promising lead fails to develop; the explication of a source document; an aside concerning some exotic plant, or an unexpected caller, or a rare Chinese medical text. The biography-in-progress narration is a laying bare of what one does, day after day, as a researcher. Although conspicuously lacking in "action," the ongoing personal narrative nonetheless introduces an element of detective-story drama—a convincingly realistic account of the biographical quest. In short, the biographer has insinuated himself as the "ur-subject" of his narrative. 17 One can readily understand why so many critics have commented on the shiden as Ogai's truest autobiographical expression. Beginning with Andre Maurois' seminal remarks on the subject, biographers have been encouraged to yield center stage to their subjects. But biography is by its nature a literary tango, and its great choreographers—Johnson, Boswell, Strachey—have emerged as equal partners in the dance. Admittedly, Ogai's work is a far cry from the biographical flights of a Boswell, but in his highly visible role of project director, he is no less aggressive. And the journalistic medium at his disposal enhances the effectiveness of the first-person narration. The daily serialization format enabled the research biographer literally to communicate with his newspaper readership, which is to say the "implied audience" of kindred souls for whom he was writing. 18 In the course of things, Ogai posed questions and solicited needed materials. 19 He had much trouble, for instance, outlining the life of Ikeda Keisui. Upon reaching such an impasse, he would turn to his readers, as he did on February 5, 1916, in the midst of chapter 20 of Shibue Chusai: " I should like to solicit any information that may assist me in unraveling this puzzle." And when useful information is forthcoming, the grateful biographer duly introduced the new material into the record and acknowledged the donor by name. Several respondents would be accorded the ultimate distinction—a biographical sketch of their very own added to the acknowledgment! As project director, Ogai regarded his readers as part of a research team, a reserve corps of informants and collaborators available for

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mobilization when the need arose. Much like a desk-bound academic assigning busy work to graduate students, Ogai orchestrated the enormously involved labor with efficiency and dispatch (a model of organization and order, one is inclined to say, in contrast with the inefficiency and slack performance he so often detected in others). Critics have cited the "uniqueness" of Ogai's biography-inprogress narrative. Yahagi Katsumi, one of very few Japanese scholars of biography, has claimed that Ogai's watakushi established a new convention of denki bungaku (biographical literature), one that greatly influenced subsequent work in the genre. 20 But Yahagi's evidence for this influence is rather thin, and the "new convention" he argues for was actually on loan from newspaper journalism. Ogai's watakushi is distinguished not by its newness as a technique but by the extraordinary authority that this particular voice commands, as the author constantly positions himself vis-à-vis his biographical subjects and reading audience. One senses, finally, that the kinship he shared with disembodied "sages of the past" was by far the more intimate and unequivocal. In his insightful comparison of Mori Ogai and Jean-Paul Sartre as biographers, Thomas Rimer observes that "Sartre and Ogai . . . seized the possibilities of a rich reciprocity between themselves, as authors, with their chosen material." 2 1 The "profoundly human dimension" that Rimer discerns in the work of these two transcends the facts and methods that each applied to his art.

Kôshô: Biography as Documentary Research I have tried to be as precise about the meeting between Musashi and Tokô Tahei as I can. To understand the significance of their meeting, it is necessary to look not at the career of Musashi but at the historical facts concerning Tahei. Tahei was taken into service by Hosokawa Tadatoshi in Buzen sometime after Genna seven [1621], that is, after Sansai Tadaoki retired, but before his successor Tadatoshi was reissued lands in Higo in Kan'ei nine [1632]. Then again, Musashi must have discovered Tahei before he had risen to any position of eminence, that is to say, no later than the fall of H a r a castle during the Shimabara Rebellion. ("Tokô Tahei," chap. 2)22

The watakushi voice in the shiden is not typically that of the peripatetic biographer in midquest. More often than not it is the voice of the textual scholar emending his sources. Ogai employed the very

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The Shiden ofMori Ogai

method of Confucian empirical research—koshogaku—practiced by Chusai and his circle. 23 Overall, the shiden project is marked by an unmistakable shift toward what can only be termed unvarnished scholarly exposition. T h e move toward " p u r e kosho," in the words of Okazaki Yoshie, was finally realized in the author's last projects, annalistic compilations of imperial posthumous names and era names that once and for all eliminated any vestige of literary manipulation. 2 4 Even in Shibue Chusai, where the author's personal reflections and literary manipulations are given relatively free rein, the spirit of documentary investigation prevails. Here, Ogai's own sense of discipleship is amply reflected in his lengthy digression upon the koshogaku tradition itself and Chusai's m a n y works of kosho scholarship. 25 Again, the audience for such conspicuous erudition would necessarily be minimal. Edwin McClellan prefaces his version of the Chusai biography by addressing this very matter: The reader may wonder why I did not simply translate Shibue Chusai. There are several reasons why I did not: one is that it is so full of esoteric detail—which even the educated Japanese reader finds daunting —that I could hardly expect the lay Western reader to tolerate it in its entirety. 26

As we will see, Ogai often seems to assign deeper significance to his source material than to the individual subject. This is certainly the case with Izawa Ranken and Hojo Katei, where the perfectly explicated document comes to stand for the subject. It is even more so with the Suzuki and Kojima pieces, where the respective subjects are buried under the weight of documentary exposition—kosho with a vengeance. In Shibue Chusai, however, narrative voice is considerably more varied: the enthusiastic seeker, the discursive scholarcritic, the committed researcher. Ogai finds opportunities to intrude first-person commentary on a wide range of topics. H e takes time to discuss, and occasionally defend, his own biographical techniques. 2 7 And thanks to the regular "feedback loop" made possible with daily serialization, Ogai was also able to publish a separate corrigenda column (seigo ran), an ongoing record of emendations based on the information being submitted by interested readers. H e published a total of one thousand emendations, for the most part minor revisions of names, dates, and other factual morsels. T h e cor-

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rigenda section often was longer than the corresponding shiden episode—much like an essay whose footnotes overwhelm the main text. 2 8 Ogai's unabashed perfectionism in matters of scholarly detail has been the subject of ridicule as well as reverence. What one considers "obsessive" and "inhuman" another hails as "a true reflection of the kosho spirit," a "selfless labor." Whatever the case may be, the corrigenda column is further evidence of the scholarly mission at the heart of the shiden project. Ogai's kosho voice is intrusive, digressive, and discursive—qualities likely, one might think, to undo the narrative m o m e n t u m of biography (in fact, such discontinuities may actually enhance one's work). T h e learned remarks do revolve around interests shared with Chtisai: namely, Confucian studies, medicine, and theater. Nevertheless, the sheer quantity of documentary material and learned commentary is so vast that one is inclined to agree with Kobori Keiichiro's assessment of the shiden (and the Ranken work in particular, where the scholarly apparatus is most impressive) as a great documentary history of late-Tokugawa Japan.

G e n e a l o g y : A L i n k i n g of L i v e s Hatsuko, who served Tsunamune before Shina, was a person of excellent lineage. Iijima Saburo Hirotada, the eighth-generation grandson of Mutsu no kami Mankai, who was in turn the fourth son of Rokusonno Tsunemoto, was lord of Misawa in Izumo; Hirotada's great-grandson was Misawa Rokuro Tamenaga. The tenth-generation grandson of Tamenaga, one Sakyonosuke Tametora, had moved to Fuchu in Nagato . . . Tametora's eldest son, Tanomonosuke Tamemoto, had a dispute with his father and fled to Omi. This Tamemoto had a son and a daughter. The older brother Gonnosuke Kiyonaga became the adopted son of Ujiie Hirosada, lord of the castle of Ogaki in Mino. . . . The younger sister, Kii, through the sponsorship of Tadaoki served in the inner court of Edo castle, and became the lady-in-waiting of Tokugawa Ieyasu's adopted daughter, Furihime. Since Furihime became the wife of Date Masamune in the third year of Genna [1617], while Kii was serving her in the inner court, Kii also accompanied the bride to Sendai. During this time Kii's older brother, Kiyonaga, wandered about and ended up in Tottori in Inaba, where Hatsuko was born to him and a daughter of Kutsuki Nobutsuna. ("Suginohara Shina," chap. 3)29

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The Shiden ofMori Ogai

Katsumoto Seiichiro has remarked that the very soul of the shiden is its genealogical structure. 30 And Yamazaki Kazuhide, whose scholarly research is particularly impressive, not only regards genealogy as the basic ordering principle of the shiden, a claim not easily refuted, but invests it with a larger metaphorical meaning as a formula for creating order and closure (matomari) in the otherwise chaotic sphere of human existence. 31 The extraordinary edifice of names that Ogai has fashioned—the proper name itself serving as its basic building block—is held together by the mortar of lineage and pedigree. Even the Chusai work, where bloodline is overshadowed by character portrayal, has been called a "genealogical romance" (keifuteki roman).32 The Ranken biography is framed by the narrator's professed concern for genealogy. In chapter 2, he remarks: A Ranken biography entails considerably more difficulty than what I encountered in the Chusai work. . . . A major stumbling-block is the problem of ascertaining decent chronological records, in contrast to the relative abundance of annalistic material at my disposal for Chusai. . . . I am simply at a loss to produce an accurate chronological narrative of events.

In his conclusion to Izawa Ranken, which spans the final three chapters, the narrator reflects upon two years of biographical research: The lives of [my subjects] are very much interwoven with the lives of their descendants. I have sought to preserve the integrity of this kinship network, to avoid severing ties that bind the generations together.

However, Ogai's interest in genealogy predates the shiden by many years. During his posting in Kokura at the turn of the century, he began to delve into regional history and lore and even put together several genealogies of local figures. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest in gathering and organizing genealogical data. His biographies of Nishi Amane and Harada Naojiro contain much information of this kind, together with personal chronologies (nenpu). And the historical fiction, as one might expect, is marked by frequent genealogical citations. This is especially true of "Abe ichizoku" and "Yasui fujin." But here the author has borrowed heavily

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from his source accounts. With the Chusai work, as Ogai himself admitted, he would be spared the frustrations of disorderly chronology thanks to Tamotsu's efforts on his behalf. Again, Ogai's passion for meticulous order is amply reflected in the mission he set for himself in the shiden: namely, establishing as complete and accurate a documentary record as humanly possible. Here as elsewhere the technique per se is not in the least innovative. (An early critic of Ogai's compulsive record keeping, Iwakami Jun'ichi, wrote an essay entitled " T h e Bankruptcy of the Genealogical Approach." 3 3 ) But this is precisely the point. By restoring lost names to their proper place, so to speak, Ogai is validating the great classical tradition and honoring its exemplars. 34 At the risk of stating the obvious, here I am aligning myself with the tradition of Ogai discipleship that has promoted such an image of the master.

Gaiden: Collateral Lives When [Saiki Koi's father] Ryuichi went to the gay quarters his boon companions were such denizens of the Fukagawa district as Sakuragawa Yoshijiro, Tobaya Kosanji, Masumi Waju, Kenkonbo Ryosai, Iwakubo Hokkei, Onomaru Kokane, Chikunai, Sanchiku, Kisai, and their like. Yoshijiro later moved to the Yoshiwara and became the second-generation Zenko. Waju was a master chanter of katobushi; Ryosai was a rakugo performer; Hokkei a painter of ukiyoe who left the Kano for the Hokusai school. Chikunai was a physician, Sanchiku and Kisai were masseurs. ("Saiki Koi," chap. 2)35

The "linked-biography" quality of the shiden is the result of many hundreds of collateral accounts (gaiden) of those associated with the main subjects. In a sense, Chusai and Ranken are gradually absorbed within their ever-widening circle, as the biographer braids many related accounts around a central chronological axis. The effect produced by this network of interlocking lives may be likened to a biographical fugue, whose elaborate counterpart is developed along two dimensions: first, synchronically, to "catalogue" a host of individuals mentioned in connection with the focal subject (and the connection is often quite remote); and second, diachronically, to trace family fortunes to the present day. Those with a preference for single-subject biography will find the shiden a hopeless labyrinth of names. The onion metaphor, with its

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layers of peel and no core, is a fitting one. With the shiden we have entered the realm of the shadow subject ("onion biography" is not a felicitous term, after all). For Shibue Chusai is not really " a b o u t " Shibue Chusai. Izawa Ranken is not really " a b o u t " Izawa Ranken. (In puzzling over my own conundrum, it strikes me that a fair analogy would be: the Bible is not really " a b o u t " God. In absence, as the Zen adept understands all too well, there is presence.) To be sure, both Chusai and Ranken exert a spiritual gravitation upon their respective worlds, but one is afforded mere glimpses of their human form. In his Woman in the Crested Kimono, Edwin McClellan follows the lead of many Japanese critics in acknowledging that the "actual" subject of the Chusai biography is his wife Io. As we will see, Ogai had every reason to find her more interesting than the husband. Izawa Ranken is as much an account of Ranken's eminent colleagues, Sazan and San'yo, and his two sons, Shinken and Hakken. Ranken himself has even less dimension than Chusai. H e is a bloodless exemplar who gains a sort of depth primarily by association and contrast. Only in Hojo Katei does the central subject dominate his own biography. It is sadly ironic that by the time Ogai got around to working on Katei, who had initially seemed such an enticing figure, he had lost his earlier enthusiasm in the course of pursuing the man's traces through several hundred badly written letters. There is a geometry to the shiden, especially to its central trilogy. And I mean this in more than the metaphoric sense. Ogai's style possesses a truly architectonic quality, a classical symmetry of design. And his arrangement of gaiden accounts may be said to describe a series of concentric biographical circles (the onion peels mentioned above) surrounding the core(less) subjects. In something akin to biographical dominoes, Ogai provides a genealogical account, however brief, of even the most obscure names that find their way into the narrative. 36 In a typical case, mention is made of Chusai's son Osamu having for a time studied mathematics with Yamazumi Kichizo. No sooner does the name appear than the narrator follows suit with a biographical sketch of the man, in the course of which he mentions several of Kichizo's more prominent students. Each of these in turn becomes the subject of a separate account, at one further remove from the main chronological axis. In such a way Ogai regularly suspends his central chronological narrative to

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explore enticing biographical side roads. 3 7 Angus Fletcher's remarks on the "rhetoric of the ancillary detail" may profitably be applied to Ogai's gaiden.38 T h e number of collateral figures chronicled in the shiden reaches well into the thousands, 3 9 and they represent the entire spectrum of late-Tokugawa and Meiji society—artists, sumo wrestlers, heads of learned academies, herbalists, prostitutes, local politicians, traveling companions, actors, sushi dealers, artists, gamblers, shopkeepers, priests. 40 Interestingly, when a number of related collateral accounts are clustered together, they appear in hierarchical sequence. W h e n he introduces key figures in Chusai's circle, for example, Ogai begins with Chusai's mentors, followed by senior colleagues, then his contemporaries (yet another bow to the Confucianist model). 4 1 But in its broadest manifestation, the network of biographical asides and detours yields what one typically refers to as the subject's "circle." H o w are we to gauge the extent of this phenomenon, at once sociological, biographical, and literary? (The analogy with the modern-day bundan immediately comes to mind.) To give an indication of its range, consider the following passage from "Saiki Koi": K5i's hangers-on were almost uncountable. Among them there were also persons to whom we should probably be doing injustice by ranking them as mere "hangers-on." However, it is not easy to draw the line, to make a distinction among them. Among haikai masters, in addition to Izan and Eiki already mentioned, there were Torigoe Tosai, Harada Bainen, Maki Toei, and Nomura Shuitsu. Bainen was later the eighth-generation Setchuan. . . . Koi's favorite kyoka masters included Katsura Moromochi and his son Fukutaro, Murota Kakuju, and Ishibashi Makuni. Fukutaro had the nickname of Abura Tokuri (Oil Bottle). . . . His best friends among playwrights included Kawatake Shinshichi and Segawa Joko. Shinshichi originally was Shiba Shinsuke. Among his favorite woodcarvers there was a certain Ishiguro. As for artists, there were innumerable men among his favorites, but these included Matsumoto Kozan, Kano Ansen, Tsukioka Honen, Shibata Zeshin, Torii Kiyomitsu, Tsuji Kasetsu, Fukushima Chikaharu, and Yomo Umehido. Among copyists, there was Miyagi Gengyo. Merchants and those retired from commercial houses in K5i's entourage included Ogura Asaru (later Zeami), the retired pawnbroker of Dangozaka; Ashin'an Zebutsu, who was the master of the

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The Shiden of Mori Ogai Yanaka Mikawaya, and Otsuya Koboku, the retired master of the Funayado; and Kanaya Sennosuke (Chikusen), a peddlar of kimono material in Takekawa-cho. There was also a medical doctor, Ishikawa Hojun, a surgeon by profession who had the haikai pen name of Gango. Among his favorite comic storytellers, there were Kenkonbo Ryosai, Gomeiro Tamasuke, Shumputei Ryushi, and Irifune Yonezo. . . . Among professional storytellers, there were the second Bunsha, Momokawa Enkoku, and Matsubayashi Hakuen. ("Saiki Koi," chap. 6)42

And this is only part of a longer roll call of Koi's cronies and playmates. O n e can make of this listing of names what one will, but it surely says something about literati life in the late Tokugawa a n d — at the risk of resorting to platitude—the transcendence of the individual by the group (circle, network, onion) of which one is part.

Names and the Ritual of Naming Malcolm Bradbury has noted that "biographers are always in collusion with the heresy of the proper n a m e . " 4 3 As the preceding passage from "Saiki K o i " makes clear, Ogai's shiden constitute a biographical encyclopedia, a great linking of names. 4 4 Names are crucial for Ogai, as is the act of naming. He carefully notes each of the names by which an individual was known (in the premodern tradition, one would acquire new names throughout life and a posthumous Buddhist name at the time of death). T h e genealogy would entail its own accounting of names, and these might be traced back ten or fifteen generations. A given individual would simultaneously occupy several lineages—familial, official, professional, artistic (with multiple and ever-changing names in each of these areas). T h e very conception of "individuality," therefore, is irreducibly relational, a locus of crosscutting hereditary, familial, and affinitive lines. What is more, the central subjects merit genealogical naming that spans several chapters. For example, Ogai devoted a total of thirty-five chapters to a quest for the parentage of one of Chusai's medical teachers, Ikeda Keisui. In the Confucian reckoning of things, a name possessed iconic significance, and the proper recording of names for posterity was a meritorious act. Once again, genealogy is no mere formulaic device

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in the shiden. We are constantly reminded of our inevitable ties to hierarchy and heredity; and while Ogai does not exactly preclude the idea of individualism as we tend to think of it, he nonetheless suggests the boundaries within which it must function. Proper names carry great semantic (as well as semiotic) weight in Ogai's biographical writing. In the absence of sustained plot or descriptive narration, n a m i n g can be said to assume the function of storytelling. It is as though the very act of naming—one is tempted to say the sacrament of naming—was sufficient unto itself, conferring identity, dignity, and perhaps even a degree of immortality upon those named. It is no exaggeration to suggest a quality of litany, of solemn incantation. (One is reminded that Nagai K a f u , not an insensitive literary soul, wrote of the enormous pleasure he derived from reciting aloud passages from the shiden.) Seen in the broader perspective, Ogai's insistent cataloging of names brings to mind the time-honored narrative device of monozukushi, the exhaustive listing of items in a given category.

Botsugo: The Link with the Present As a rule, biographies are brought to a close with the death of one's subject. But having been personally moved by admiration and respect for a sage, I cannot be indifferent to the fate of those who survived him. So it is that in spite of my having formally concluded the life of Chusai, I find myself reluctant to set down my pen. I have therefore decided to trace the subsequent course of events in the lives of Chusai's descendants, kin, friends, and colleagues. (Shibue Chusai, chap. 65) Ogai's digressive narration notwithstanding, chronology remains the dominant organizing principle of the biographies, and the passing of the years, months, and days is recorded with meticulous care. Each work revolves around a central time line, but the concern for uninterrupted chronology is particularly evident in the R a n k e n and Katei biographies. Collectively, the central trilogy encompasses a span of more than two centuries. But the narrative calendar measures only h u m a n lifetimes, not the "external" chronology of historical event. Personal milestones are recorded with statistical precision, and at regular

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intervals—typically at year's e n d — a "family census" provides a r u n n i n g account of names and ages. H e r e is the record of one such milestone: It was around two in the morning of the 29th when Chusai breathed his last. He was 53 years old, and his remains were buried in Yanaka, in the Kannoji. Chusai's survivors included his 42-year-old widow, Io, along with six children: Yutaka, age 23; Kuga, age 11; Miki, age 5; Osamu, age 4; Suizan, age 3; and Tamotsu, one year of age. With the exception of Yutaka, all were borne by Io. Eight children had preceeded their father in death: Tsuneyoshi, Ito, Yoshi, Hachisaburo, To, Genko, Kishi, and Saki. (Shibue Chusai, chap. 53) In the shiden, time lines are thus demarcated m u c h in the way a child's growth is recorded by height lines m a r k e d on a wall. But there is a simultaneous " t r a c k i n g " of chronology for each of the core families, and this is no m e a n feat of biographical bookkeeping. Certain events (together with the obligatory digressions and asides) m a y span several chapters. T h e n the clock suddenly speeds u p , and whole decades m a y be compressed into a single chapter. For instance, chapter 111 of Shibue Chusai traces the chronology f r o m 1900 to 1915. But this is nothing compared to the final chapter of Hojo Katei, which takes in nearly a century in the lives of Katei's descendants (1833-1919). 4 5 A biographer's modification of chronological pace normally reflects the availability of source material for different periods of the subject's life. Boswell, for instance, speeds through the early decades of Samuel J o h n s o n ' s life, about which he knew little, then lingers on the years for which he had accumulated his extraordinary record of the m a n . But while the typical Western biography is f r a m e d by one's birth and d e a t h — w h e n the subject dies, the story ends—Ogai portrays his subjects as m e m b e r s of social networks that survive one's passing. At least this is how he approached Shibue Chusai and Izawa Ranken. A n d while one is moved by Ogai's stated intention, cited above, to extend his work to the present day, the fact remains that there existed ample material to w a r r a n t such a decision in both cases. Chusai and R a n k e n depart the scene approximately halfway through their respective biographies, and the r e m a i n d e r of each work, the botsugo (posthumous) section, traces the family circle to the

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present. In a subtle but eloquent tribute to these worthies, Ogai establishes the year of their passing (for Chusai, 1858; for Ranken, 1829) as the "Year O n e " of the botsugo calendar. For instance, Meiji 13 (1870) is reckoned as "the twelfth year following Chtisai's death," while Koka 2 (1845) becomes "the sixteenth year following Ranken's death." The so-called Ranken botsugo, which begins with an account of his death (chap. 187), focuses on the two sons, Shinken and Hakken, in a relatively unbending chronological sequence. From the point of view of plot and novelistic flair, Ogai is without a doubt most effective in the second half of Shibue Chusai, the celebrated "Chusai botsugo" (chaps. 66-119). Here we witness the family's passage through the turbulent final years of the Shogunate and the chaotic early decades of the Meiji—a broad sweep of historical and social change intimately revealed in the lives of the Shibue family circle. Critics have spoken of the "age in transition" (jidai no hensen) motif so movingly represented here. And readers cannot help but regard the family drama as an oasis in an otherwise arid literary landscape. Shibue Tamotsu's memoirs are to be recognized, of course, but so too must the biographer's sustaining belief in the worthwhileness of his labors, his sheer persistence in the face of an indifferent and occasionally hostile public. In a sense, then, the two major shiden works can be said to begin when their respective subjects die. But as suggested earlier, one risks overlooking the moral, perhaps even spiritual, authority exerted by the shiden's two patriarchs following their demise. The effect Ogai achieves here, through characteristic restraint and understatement, is masterful—a communion of kindred souls, both living and dead.

Itsuwa: The Telling Anecdote Io was eleven when she became an attendant in the main residence of the Shogun's castle in Edo. . . . Each day toward dusk, she or one of the other girls would be responsible to go and close the window at the end of a long corridor. Now, rumor had it that a demon haunted this particular corridor. Nobody had gotten a very good look at it, but the demon was said to be dressed in men's clothing and to have horns growing out of its forehead. What is more, it would go around throwing stones and scattering ashes on its victim. No wonder, then, that the girls hated this particular chore, and each would try getting some-

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The Shiden ofMori Ogai one else to go. But Io was bold beyond her years, and she had been trained in the martial arts. So she volunteered to close the window. As Io made her way down the dark corridor, sure enough something came darting out of the shadows, and in a flash her cheek was covered with ashes. In the confusion she hadn't seen it clearly. But the episode had all the earmarks of a boyish prank, so Io pounced upon her attacker and grabbed hold. "Let me go! Let me go!" screamed the demon, struggling to get free. But Io would not relax her grip. Then the other girls came rushing to the scene, and the demon surrendered and took off his mask. It was none other than young lord Ginnosuke, the Shogun's son. (Shibue Chusai, chap. 31) Chusai would always take three bowls of rice in the morning and afternoon, and two and a half in the evening. (Shibue Chusai, chap. 62)

Anecdote is an essential building block of biographical narrative, a category of "symbolic episode" that, in Siebenschuh's words, highlights character and contributes to the unfolding account of a life. Plutarch, with w h o m the Western biographical tradition can be said to have originated, points to the proper d o m a i n of anecdotal narrative when he remarks, " A slight thing like a phrase or jest often makes a greater revelation of character t h a n battles where thousands fall." 4 6 W i t h the renaissance of biography in eighteenth-century England, this emphasis u p o n the large significance of small incident receives fresh inspiration with Boswell. A n d one can point as well to Samuel J o h n s o n the biographer. I n his well-known Rambler essay on the genre, he remarks that " t h e business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies and display the m i n u t e details of daily life." 4 7 T h e deflating, epitomizing power of anecdote has long been recognized. Nietzsche, for instance, was to remark that " t h r e e anecdotes m a y suffice to paint a portrait of a m a n . " 4 8 In his enlightening study of character in literature, Baruch Hochm a n defines anecdote as a form of synecdochy. 49 T h u s , our image of historical figures such as George Washington is inextricably b o u n d u p with certain crucial narratives—"crossing the Delaware," " c h o p p i n g down the cherry tree," and the like. Some of these are factually based, some apocryphal, others clearly fabricated. But historical authenticity is entirely beside the point. T h e m a n and the

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myth are one. And so it is with "fictional" characters as well. O u r "knowledge" of individuals, then, may be said to consist of the stories that have come to represent them. A number of overlapping terms apply to this kind of narrative: anecdote, episode, account, vignette, incident, story, tale. This is obviously not a coherent literary genre, but instead a category of brief narratives that possess a degree of autonomy and tend to be applied illustratively in some larger context, including formal biography. 50 Rather than attempt to distinguish among the terms, I will continue to use them interchangeably. In the Chinese historiographical tradition, anecdote is commonly made a vehicle of Confucian didacticism by helping define a universe of ethical conduct and exemplary value. 51 The revealing episode serves to identify categories of traits that guide our interpretation of the "meaning" of individual lives. Ogai's shiden follow in the orthodox tradition of anecdotal characterization—whenever, that is, the author had access to the appropriate source material. For the most part he did not. Nevertheless, admirers have applauded the novelistic quality of his anecdotal narratives. Kafu was especially moved by the Izawa Ranken anecdotes, which he saw as "standing in the place of fiction [.shosetsu]." Others have emphasized Ogai's debt to his various source texts. At the opposite extreme, Katsumoto Seiichiro has maintained that Shibue Chiisai, the undisputed novelistic gem of the shiden, "fails to achieve the human feel of even second-rate biography." 52 Still, for the average reader, what makes the shiden at all palatable is the anecdotal content, for the most part concentrated in the Chusai work. Ogai's anecdotal characterization will be treated at length in Chapter 7. Here I wish only to point out a traditional narrative convention that he revitalized: the posthumous anecdotal synopsis. This refers to the collection of epitomizing episodes appended to the account of an individual's death. (When such episodes could be accurately dated, they were normally inserted into the appropriate chronological slot, as with the Io episode cited above.) Here, as elsewhere, the author ordered his material topically. In the case of Izawa Shinken, for example, Ogai assigns his narratives to categories such as "Shinken the educator," "Shinken the healer," and so forth. Fully eighteen chapters of anecdotal recapitulation would be devoted

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to Shinken (Izawa Ranken, chaps. 263-280), as opposed to twelve for Chusai (Shibue Chusai, chaps. 54-65), six for Ranken (Izawa Ranken, chaps. 188-193), and six for Hakken (Izawa Ranken, chaps. 321326). Oddly, major figures such as Sadakata and Yutaka receive no biographical "ave" whatsoever. As part of their gaiden, lesser figures would typically merit one or two telling episodes. The case of Tozawa Isei (?—1891) is illustrative. Tozawa figures briefly in the Chusai botsugo section as middleman in plans for Osamu to be adopted into the family of Yamada Gengo. Although mentioned only once, Tozawa was evidently the subject of a "story" passed on by Tamotsu, and Ogai dutifully adds it to his record of virtuous conduct. It so happens, as Ogai retells the tale, that Tozawa was being taken somewhere as part of his official duties when he noticed that an attendant hobbling alongside his palanquin had broken his sandal thong and was bleeding. Tozawa halted the procession immediately and had the attendant brought to his side, where he personally ministered to the man's wound and saw to it that he was transported in another palanquin. 53 Buntai: Style as Mystique Perhaps because of semantic associations with the superficial and the decorative, we are prone to think of literary style as icing that one spreads, more or less artfully, upon the narrative cake. But as Proust once observed, "Style is in no way a decoration. . . . It is not even a technique; it is—as color is with painters—a quality of vision." 54 Style inheres in art and is an artist's most personal signature. It is that by which we know and recognize him. Of course the notion of style is not exclusive to fine art, literary or otherwise. Theorists such as Hayden White, applying the tropological schema of Northrop Frye, have challenged the traditional privileged status of "literary" narrative, extending stylistic analysis to the so-called factual genres—biography, historiography, and the like. Boundaries of fact and fiction have been dismantled like the Berlin Wall. Put simply, style is now understood as an intrinsic property of all narrative. Consequently, the notion of "poetics" has become fully democratized, its narratological scalpel applied with equal authority to all manner of writing: prison memoirs, the Bible, movie scripts, dirty jokes. Admittedly, literary style does not exist in splen-

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did isolation from the lower orders. But it would be folly to deny the element of personal genius that sets a handful of artists above others of lesser gifts. In J a p a n , there appears to be less contention with respect to the question of literary style (buntai). O n e speaks less self-consciously about writers (or artists, potters, and calligraphers, for that matter) possessing a style much as one owns a set of fingerprints. T h e mark is indelible, and no two are alike. Of Japanese authors, none has been more revered as a stylist than Mori Ogai. A virtual cult following has developed over the years, to which m a n y literary luminaries have been drawn, a m o n g them Nagai K a f u (1879-1959), Saito Mokichi (1882-1953), Kinoshita M o k u t a r o (1885-1945), and Ishikawa J u n (b. 1899). These and other admirers, in the homage they have paid to the awe-inspiring Ogai style, have had recourse to such occult terminology as shinnetsu (heart-heat) and denshin (transmission of spirit) in an attempt to get at its essence. It would appear that the ancient kotodama tradition, which invests a transcendent power to words, survives in modern Japanese literary circles. Takahashi Yoshitaka is slightly less mystifying when he contrasts the "centripetal" quality of Ogai's shiden with Soseki's "centrifugal" style. Exactly what this is supposed to mean is anyone's guess, but Takahashi is more to the point in claiming that the Ogai buntai was "the last of its kind; there were no inheritors of such a style." 55 Yamamoto speaks for the critical majority when he claims that the shiden mark the "perfection of Ogai's literary style." But Takahashi outdoes him when he cites Shibue Chusai as "the pinnacle o f j a p a n e s e prose style." 56 T h e younger generation of critics, m a n y of them Western-trained and utterly conversant with the newest theoretical trends and buzzwords, have upgraded their discourse, to be sure, but an underlying prejudice still obtains with respect to the native literature. A "code of ineffability" is commonly invoked in the case of the canonical writers, and until recently it had been considered decidedly bad form to attempt to dissect buntai. (And what often passes as "stylistic analysis" [buntai no bunseki] is often a mindless exercise in image hunting and word counting, with charts and graphs and piles of undigested data crowding the page.) Putting aside the question of its critical reception, the so-called Ogai style refers to at least three distinct phases, which culminated