--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two important zuihitsu discursive essays are from the Kamakura
period: the Hojoki (Account of My Hut), written in 1212 by Kamo
no Chomei (11531216), and the Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness),
written by Yoshida Kenko (12831350) early in the 14th century.
Though held to be in the proper line of succession from The Pillow
Book of Sei Shonagon, the Kamakura works are altogether more melancholy,
having in them something of the austere beauty of the Shinkokinshu
and the gloom of a day when the court nobility, to the lesser
ranks of which both men belonged, was in eclipse and rough east-country
warriors held power. The earlier work tells of a series of disasters
that overtook the capital during Chomei's lifetime and of his
withdrawal to a mountain hermitage. The later work is nearer The
Pillow Book in form and is dominated by nostalgia for the heyday
of the court.
There are also diaries and travelogues from the Kamakura period, the most important of them probably being the Izayoi Nikki (Diary of the Sixteenth Night), by the nun Abutsu (died 1283), a daughter-in-law of Teika, which tells of a journey from Kyoto to Kamakura and a stay in the latter city.
The most original contribution of the Kamakura period to prose literature is the gunkimono, or military chronicle. The earliest, and the best, is the Heike Monogatari (Tale of the Heike), which tells of the rivalry between two clans, the Taira (Heike) and the Minamoto (Genji), that led to the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate. It was probably brought to its present form no later than the mid-13th century. Here one finds the epic heroes who were so curiously missing from the earliest chronicles, for the civil wars of late Heian stirred the Japanese imagination as no other episode in their history. Yet for all this quasi-epic quality, the Heike at its best is gently, sadly lyrical. It tells the story of the brief glory and sudden fall of the Taira family and is therefore a parable upon the evanescence of things.
The Muromachi Period
Although no single work stands out sufficiently from the mass
to deserve special mention, lyrical discursive writing, in the
various forms of the diary, the travelogue, the utamonogatari,
and the zuihitsu, did not disappear in the Muromachi period. Nor
is the period wanting in writings of a historic or semihistoric
nature. Probably the most important historical treatise is the
Jinnoshotoki (Chronicle of the True Line of Divine Emperors) by
Kitabatake Chikafusa (12931354). Chikafusa's argument for the
legitimacy of a line of emperors that had fallen upon bad days
adumbrates the ultranationalist imperial cult of the 19th and
20th centuries.
The military chronicle meanwhile moved further and further from history and in the end became scarcely distinguishable from popular fiction, of which a considerable body, mostly short, survives from the Muromachi period. It grows out of the short anecdote of late Heian and Kamakura and looks ahead to the vast flood of fiction that was to come in the Tokugawa period.
None of this offers anything strikingly new. In the drama and in poetry, on the other hand, the contributions of Muromachi were striking and original.
Dramatic Forms in the Muromachi Period. The first important Japanese dramatic form, the No, has very complex origins in forms imported very early from China and in Japanese farm rituals. In the Muromachi period, at the hands of an extraordinarily talented father and sonKannami Kiyotsugu (13331384), a shrine performer from Nara, and Zeami Motokiyo (13631443)No became high art, both as a mixed dramatic form heavily dependent on music and the dance, and as literature. The aesthetics of the No derive from the severe restraint of late Heian and Kamakura poetic theories and from Zen tenets imported later. The action is slow, stately, and formalized, the language highly evocative.
In the No of Kannami and Zeami there is little dramatic confrontation. Even when the germ of the action is violentas, for instance, in an episode from the Heike Monogatari, a favorite source for No playsthe violence is far away, reenacted by a tortured ghost at the climax of the play. Not all protagonists are ghosts; but when they are represented as still living, the other characters do little but query and listen. Later generations of playwrights tended to bring more drama and conflict into the No, and perhaps it would presently have developed in the direction of realism. It was already under the protection of the shogunate in Kannami's lifetime, however, and the patronage of the Tokugawa military aristocracy only brought further formalization.
The kyogen comedies that are performed between No plays seem to have come generally to their present sophisticated level when No was reaching its heights, although the texts were not written down until later. Yet a third Muromachi form survives: the kowakamai, a combination of song and dance with resemblances to the No. Its texts derive, as in part do those of No, from Kamakura and Muromachi military chronicles.
Muromachi Poetry. In lyric poetry, the Muromachi contribution was renga linked verse and its lighter companion, haikai. Actually haikai is the more venerable of the two, since playful verse-capping had a very long history. But it was in the Muromachi period that what had been dalliance became serious art.
Both renga and haikai are made up of an alternation of 17-syllable (575) and 14-syllable (77) links, to an indefinite length, although 100 links and 36 links tended to become standard. A poet could, if he chose, compose a whole sequence by himself, but in the best linked verse no poet composed any two successive links. The fascination of the form lies in the interplay between discipline and freedom: the rules for any link are set before the poet, and his own talents determine whether anything is to come of them.
The subject matter of serious renga is for the most part that of the courtly waka tradition, nature and muted love, and the poet's approach to his material has much in common with the restraint of the No and the autumnal quality of Shinkokinshu nature poetry. The most admired of renga masters, Iio Sogi (14211502), another wandering mendicant, was of plebeian origins. An age of harsh civil wars was bringing new classes into the production of literature.
Haikai takes unto itself everything that is considered inappropriate for renga. Sometimes the departure from the proprieties is slight, having to do only with matters of diction, but it can be radical, including as subject matter the indecent and the slapstick. Yamazaki Sokan, of whose life almost nothing is known, is the great Muromachi figure in haikai. Late in the period he compiled the first anthology given over exclusively to the form.
Tokugawa PeriodHaiku
The great importance of the first link in a renga or haikai sequence
led, in the first century of the Tokugawa period, to its complete
independence, and so to that shortest of poetic forms, the 17-syllable
haiku. In view of the intense seriousness of a great deal of haikumany
will say the best of itthe fact that it traces its ancestry to
haikai and not renga may seem curious. Like haikai masters, however,
early haiku masters thought of themselves as welcoming anything
that, even in small matters of diction, lay outside the approved
realm of the courtly waka and its derivative, renga.
It was Matsuo Basho (16441694), yet another wanderer, who raised the form to the highest and most serious of literature. He was a devotee of Zen Buddhism, and for him poetry was a religion. Though he could also be bland and lighthearted, he sought, as he put it, to have poetry stand at the intersection of the fleeting and the eternal through delicate seasonal references broken up and brought back together to sometimes startling and even incongruous effect. The remarkable thing is that in the best of his poetry this ideal seems not in the least unrealistic. Basho is not an easy poet to understand, especially when he is approached with the notion that haiku is no more than delicate surface imagery, a series of pretty pictures. This prejudice operates less to the disadvantage of haiku poets.
A modern rereading of haiku history credits Yosa Buson (17161784) with the principal role in a mid-Tokugawa revival. Buson was also a major painter, and a strong pictorial element, along with a painter's cool detachment, is to be seen in his work. Against the intense professionalism of Basho, he may seem to have something of the dilettante in him. Kobayashi Issa (17631823), thought by most literary historians to be the best haiku poet of the late Tokugawa, has a certain genial, poignant appeal, but must be described as a minor poet compared with Basho. His best haiku offer little glimpses, sometimes wry and tart, of life in the mountain country where he was born. The usual verdict of very late Tokugawa haiku is that it is trite.
A great deal of Tokugawa waka is revivalist, looking back to the Manyoshu and the early imperial anthologies. Much of its interest lies in its association with the school of "national learning," a movement that rejected Chinese influences and urged investigation of the Japanese classics in search of "the national essence," and thus produced some of the finest of Japanese scholars. The finest of them all was Motoori Norinaga (17301801), the first man who really took The Tale of Genji on its own terms.
Comic Verse. Tokugawa literature is also rich in comic verse, the 31-syllable waka and the 17-syllable haiku each having its humorous counterpart. Comic verse had its best day in the late 18th century, when it gave pungent expression to the spirit of the Edo townsman. Edo, the shogun's seat and the present Tokyo, had by then replaced Kyoto and Osaka as the literary capital of the country. There were experiments in the Edo period with freer verse forms, and lyrical prose as well as prose mixed with verse continued to be written in great volume, following upon the tradition of the utamonogatari and the zuihitsu of the Heian period.
Theater. No having become the private preserve of the military aristocracy, the Tokugawa merchant and artisan classes set about making their own drama Two dramatic forms are original to the Tokugawa period: the puppet theater and the Kabuki theater. Although they derive from different sources, each was an influence upon the other as they reached maturity through the 17th century. Each is much given to bluster and swagger, in a style quite as different from No as one dramatic style can be from another, providing sufficient evidence that not all is restraint in Japanese notions of beauty.
The puppet theater (joruri) had its great flowering in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, after which the Kabuki emerged dominant. Joruri is probably the most interesting of the two as a performing art, and it certainly is the more interesting as literature. Kabuki, which tends to be a series of set pieces designed to show off virtuoso actors, is not on the whole very compelling on the printed page. The best texts for the puppet theater, on the other hand, have a beauty of language that makes good use of the traditional poetic devices and have dramatic unity and a sense of human urgency as well. The most gifted of playwrights for the puppet stage was Chikamatsu Monzaemon (16531725). In the plays most admired today he writes of a pull between emotion and duty that becomes intolerable and leads to suicide.
Tokugawa Fiction. The sheer bulk of Tokugawa fiction is enormous, exceeding the quantity of fiction from all earlier periods combined. The great master of fiction was Ihara Saikaku (16421693). The origins of his art are in haikai of a particularly free and unrestrained sort. His fiction has a gay, slapdash quality about it and is full of lacunae and abrupt transitions. Saikaku's favorite material is the life of the merchant class, centered upon the ritualized lovemaking of the pleasure quarters and upon moneymaking. He has been called a realist, but if that term is appropriate, it is more the realism of the journalist than the deeper humanistic realism characteristic of Murasaki Shikibu.
Middle and late Tokugawa produced no fiction writer as forceful as Saikaku, but it produced an enormous amount of fiction. The fiction most highly regarded in its own day stems from the Chinese, tends heavily toward the didactic and the fantastic, and has its climax in the most solemn and pedagogic of late-Tokugawa writers, Kyokutei Bakin (17671848). Another strain deals with the pleasure quarters, offering advice and guidance to him who would be a connoisseur of their usages.
Severe literary censorship was imposed in the late 18th century. As a result, fiction writers began to search for topics and styles that were unrestricted, and they found several. One was the didacticism of Bakin. Another was the world of love, this time not purchased but pure, the best literary exponent of which was Tamenaga Shunsui (17901844). A third was garrulous comedy, as in the Dochu Hizakurige (Journey by Shank's Mare) of Jippensha Ikku (17651831), which sees two Edo townsmen through numerous mishaps and small triumphs on a walk to Osaka.
The Modern Period
With the beginning of the Meiji period (18681912) came the full
opening out of Japanese intellectual and artistic life to the
same kinds of influences that were to bring vast changes to the
material culture. Japanese literature was to change profoundly.
The influx of new possibilities in language, form, and literary
content were to produce a modern tradition that, in its richness,
variety, and reach, would rival the great Heian period in accomplishment.
All genres of literary expression in premodern Japanfrom poetry
and fictional narrative through drama and the literary essaywere
to be renewed and revivified through new contacts with the West.
Modern Japanese literature rests on a legacy of high excellence well over a thousand years old. Therefore, even the most avant-garde experiments need to be viewed against a millennium of assumptions concerning style, the function of language, the role of fact in fiction, and the primacy of the poetic impulse. In this context the great traditions of the past, both as inspirational and cautionary modes, have remained never far from sight.
Each genre in modern Japanese literature has been shaped by the dynamics of its own internal developments, and a certain number of writers worked in a wide variety of styles and forms. To the extent that they can be explicated chronologically, five successive periods might be indicated. Some overlap.
The Period of Transition, 18681890. At the beginning of the Meiji period, when Japan opened its doors to the West, relatively little was known in the country about European literature. Nevertheless, Japanese curiosity concerning the West had been high during the preceding Tokugawa period. A small quantity of Western books, mostly in Dutch, as well as reproductions of artistic works and scientific documents, had made their way into Japan; but the country's writers and intelligentsia knew virtually nothing of the development of Western literary traditions.
In order for a modern Japanese literature to emerge, certain changes had to come about. First, the literary language employed at the end of the Tokugawa period was far removed from the spoken language. Often, as in waka or haiku poetry, it was highly ritualized; or, in the case of prose, it was larded with phrases and tags from classical Chinese texts. The literary language had to be simplified, standardized, and brought closer to the nuances of contemporary speech. Second, the Japanese literature of the past had a focus on interiority. That, plus the censorship of the Tokugawa government, meant that social and political issues were seldom included in literary discourse. Now, however, in a rapidly changing society, a need was felt for a kind of literature capable of commenting on the vast social upheavals of Meiji society.
Modern Japanese literature was begun by a young generation of men who were as much intellectuals as artists. Their youthful enthusiasms first turned to questions of translation in an attempt to grasp the role that the literary arts might come to play in what was for them a new society, uninhibited by tradition and ready to join the modern, Western world. This alliance of artistic skill and intellectual vigor can nowhere better be seen than in the results of a remarkable friendship between Tsubouchi Shoyo and Futabatei Shimei, both in their twenties when they made their greatest contributions.
Shoyo became fascinated as a student in Tokyo, through his British university professor, with English literature in general and with Shakespeare in particular. Soon aware of the differences between the Japanese and Western traditions, he wrote the first modern treatise on the history of Japanese literature. In this work, Shosetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel), by emphasizing prose fiction and evaluating past Japanese accomplishments in it through a comparative method, he laid out a whole new course of action for his generation of writers.
The still younger Futabatei had studied Russian at the Foreign Language School. In translating Turgenev, he had begun some linguistic experiments in creating a written Japanese close to the spoken forms. He sought out Shoyo for advice, and their enthusiastic encounter resulted in Futabatei's first novel, Ukigumo (Floating Cloud), first published in parts in 1887 and 1888. A remarkably satisfying recapturing of the inner life of a small group of modern young Japanese, it is sketched in a fresh kind of language so responsive to the nuances of human speech that it seems wholly authentic even today. This experiment provided a model of wide application.
The Influx of Western Ideas, 18901915. Futabatei and Shoyo worked by intelligence and intuition. Now, following in their wake, a whole group of major writers were to experience the European traditions through actual exposure to the various cultures concerned. Through their work, French, German, and English literature were to become compelling models of inspiration for a developing Japanese modern tradition.
Mori Ogai, trained in Tokyo as a doctor, was sent by the Japanese army to study hygiene in Germany from 1884 to 1888. His excellent command of German enabled him to become acquainted with the writings of Goethe and the German romantics. After his return, his prodigious efforts as a translator, cultural critic, and novelist were to bring a new set of possibilities to modern literature. By the same token, Ogai's deep admiration for German culture gave him an awareness both of himself and his times. This consciousness led him to turn back, in his later historical stories, to an examination of the older historical and literary traditions of Japan, in order to grasp what he felt was the real significance of the past for the present.
In 1900, Natsume Soseki, already an accomplished young scholar of English literature, went to London. There, in an agonizing period of reflection he would come to realize, as he once put it, that he could never truly become an Englishman. He returned to Tokyo to find some means to understand what it meant to be a Japanese of his generation, first as a teacher and critic, then as a writer of fiction. Soseki's literary models owed something to the English authors he admired. But the novels he wrote, beginning with topical satire and ending in the dark tragedies of such books as his masterpiece, Kokoro, served to express his sense of the terrible dislocations that had come to Japanese culture. As he pointed out, cultural changes had been forced from the outside, rather than being, as in the West, self-generated.
French literature was to receive its most persuasive introduction to Japan through the work of two writers, Nagai Kafu and Shimazaki Toson. Kafu managed to get to his long-admired France for only a few months. After his return from Paris, he produced evocative translations of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and others that were to serve as a major impetus for the development of a new kind of Japanese modern poetry. In his own work he explored contemporary life with nostalgic and erotic overtones in fictional narratives that, while they may owe something to French attitudes about the aesthetic possibilities of literature, remain in their wayward authenticity altogether unique.
Kafu's passion for France was mirrored in the attitudes of Toson, another poet and novelist of high talent, who encountered France as a mature writer. He left for Paris in 1913 and returned to Japan only when the confusion of World War I forced his evacuation from Paris. Toson wrote extensively on contemporary European culture, introducing such important figures as Cezanne and Debussy to the Japanese public. As with Soseki, Toson's sojourn abroad had made him all the more concerned about the realities of Japanese culture. It allowed him to conceptualize his own plan for composing his longest and arguably greatest novel, Yoakemae (Before the Dawn), a moving account of the political and spiritual travails that his countrymen had undergone during the early years of the Meiji Restoration.
The high tide of Western influence brought a complex combination of true admiration for Western accomplishment coupled with an acute self-awareness of what it meant to be a modern Japanese. The writers, dramatists, and poets who were to follow may have thought and written in a bewildering variety of modes; yet much of the greatest literature composed in subsequent decades was to exist in the contexts established in the atmosphere created through these preoccupations.
In the development of modern poetry, the translations of Ogai and more particularly those of Kafu and his colleagues provided inspiration to a new generation of poets. Takamura Kotaro, the son of a gifted sculptor, went to France in 1908 and fell under the spell of Rodin. He later wrote on many occasions of his sense of excitement and release at having experienced France in the great decade of creativity in the arts that preceded World War I. Hagiwara Sakutaro never left his country. However, the structural devices and emotional nuances so evident in his first collection, Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon), published in 1917, owe much to his profound admiration for French poetry.
Even in the area of the traditional waka and haiku, Western influences were felt. Masaoka Shiki's new ideas of an appropriate poetic style championed the ancient Man'yoshu collection as a model; yet they owed as much to shasei ("sketching from nature"), a new kind of naturalistic aesthetic developed in consonance with the ideas of his friend the young Western-style painter Hayashi Fusetsu. Saito Mokichi, one of the greatest of the modern waka poets, studied psychiatry in Vienna and brought a thoroughly contemporary sensibility to the form. Ishikawa Takuboku in particular transformed the waka into a vehicle that provided opportunities for an intense examination of the self.
First Maturity, 19151940. A third phase of modern Japanese literature, extending out from the second, might be loosely characterized in terms of a sophisticated series of polarities within which writers could move in a variety of directions. Writers and readers alike were genuinely comfortable with such possibilities. The brilliant poet Nishiwaki Junzaburo might move into realms consonant with the kind of surrealism then being practiced by the European avant-garde; others, like the novelist Shiga Naoya, would, in his 1937 masterpiece An'ya koro (A Dark Night's Passing), combine an examination of the modern anguish of soul with themes of timeless spiritual enlightenment. Akutagawa Ryunosuke combined a reworking of Japanese medieval folk stories with a mordant wit and irony worthy of his heroes Poe and Baudelaire.
It was in such an ambiance that the two most consistently admired novelists of modern Japan, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Kawabata Yasunari, created their early works. Their novels, moving back and forth from contemporary to traditional modes of expression and themes of concern, reveal, each in their own way, a sureness of touch and an aristocratic self-awareness.
Tanizaki, in his earlier stories, pursued a desire to shock that suggests his enthusiasm for Wilde and Poe; later works such as Chijin no ai (Naomi) reveal his skill and wit in satirizing a Westernizing urban Japan. Nevertheless, Tanizaki's sojourn in the Osaka-Kobe area after the Tokyo earthquake in 1923 put him in touch with certain modes of thought that were more traditional than those of the Tokyo area with which he had long been familiar. Tanizaki's novel of manners Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles), completed in 1929, chronicles with astonishing effect the disjunctures and overlappings of attitude in the case of a husband and wife in the throes of a protracted and aimless divorce; the protagonist's father-in-law's interest in the traditional puppet theater provides a powerful foil to the young man's Western enthusiasms. Tanizaki, like Kafu, was able to explore the eroticism that lies under the sometimes placid surface of modern Japanese gentility. Extending his fascination backward in time, Tanizaki set out in the 1930's to translate The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, and he soon commenced the composition of what for many remains his masterpiece, Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters).
The structure of a Tanizaki novel, novella, or short story, while highly inventive, remains unproblematical for most modern readers, either in the original or in translation. Kawabata Yasunari, however, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, often combines structural elements adapted from traditional Japanese literary forms with contemporary psychological analysis. Some critics have pointed out, for example, that his Yukiguni (Snow Country) owes its evocative construction to the form of the medieval No play, while his postwar Yama no oto (The Sound of the Mountain) connects its progressions in linked-verse renga style. These astonishing works continue to fascinate, and occasionally baffle, Western readers. They are in fact, as Kawabata insisted that they were, altogether modern in their spirit.
Political and Social Criticism, 19251950
The kind of free aesthetic shifting among divergent motifs drawn
from the past and the present represents one kind of high accomplishment
in modern Japanese literature. In a sense, however, such writing
might be deemed as conservative: for in consonance with traditional
canons of Japanese taste, matters dealing with political and social
issues were not considered appropriate for extended treatment.
Running virtually concurrent with the kind of aesthetic modernism
exemplified by Tanizaki and Kawabata was a literature that attempted
to chronicle directly the stresses and strains of a painful period
in Japanese history, particularly after the worldwide depression
between World Wars I and II brought widespread poverty, especially
in rural areas.
One impetus for the development of such a literature came through the importation of the doctrines of socialism and Marxism into Japan by the beginning of the 20th century. These doctrines had a profound effect on the urban intelligentsia until well after World War II. For many people, Marxist analyses appeared to produce the most cogent of explanations of the malaise of the time. It was in such a climate of understanding that the writings of a new variety of authors, men and women who had lived through these problems, took on a special poignancy and a special significance.
The early stories and journals of Hayashi Fumiko, for example, offer a first-hand glimpse into the life led by drifting workers and vagabonds, an existence hardly imaginable to middle-class readers. Hayashi's encounters with her anarchist lover also suggested an increasing and perhaps potentially dangerous level of political awareness that was developing among the poor and disenfranchised. Kobayashi Takiji's 1929 novel Kamikosen (The Factory Ship) provided a shocking witness to the kind of brutality practiced on the labor force. Kobayashi was forced to go underground, only to end his brief life beaten to death by the police. At a time of increasing political and social repression, such writers emerged as authentic heroes, who were seen as virtually alone in their resistance to militarism.
Even a novelist like Dazai Osamu, who came from a well-educated family and attended Tokyo University, was strongly affected in his thinking by the Marxist attitudes of students and professors during the prewar years. Indeed, Dazai's acute pain at being unable to become "one of the people" colors portions of his remarkable 1947 novel Shayo (The Setting Sun). This work chronicles the decay of an aristocratic family whose values, buffeted first by militarism and then by defeat, could only disappear.
The modern Japanese drama took much of its inspiration from the opportunities for social criticism provided by the coming of Marxism. Modern spoken theater was slow in getting under way in Japan. By the turn of the century Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov were being translated into Japanese, and the excitement their works created was profound. By 1924, with the establishment of the Tsukiji Little Theater in downtown Tokyo, the possibility existed for effective stage productions. But with the death in 1928 of the company's founder, the playwright and director Osanai Kaoru, the troupe split into factions. The politics of the majority of the members of the company turned sharply left.
Some first-rate dramatists committed to social reform developed, notably Kubo Sakae. But an increasingly repressive government closed companies and jailed many of those involved. It was left to Kishida Kunio, who had studied with the French director Jacques Copeau in Paris after World War I, to attempt in his own plays the creation of an ironic and lyrical form of dialogue that was to serve as another model for modern drama. In this regard he was successful in capturing the inner world of the upper-class Europeanized Japanese during the interwar years.
The Postwar Years. In 1945, at the end of World War II, everything seemed to have come to a stop; by the same token, everything had the potential to begin freshly again. Older writers, whose spiritual concerns and literary forms had been established before the war, resumed publishing, and indeed some of the best work of Tanizaki and Kawabata appeared in the postwar years. Others who had begun their careers before the war, such as Ibuse Masuji and Inoue Yasushi, continued to write with increasing mastery along the lines they had chosen. Sometimes, as in the case of Ibuse's 1966 novel about Hiroshima, Kuroi ame (Black Rain), they took on political and social themes as well.
Younger writers, however, began from different premises and revealed another range of concerns. A writer like Mishima Yukio, whose romantic, often erotic writings earned him a wide readership abroad, attempted to seek in both his life and art a sort of spontaneous purity that ultimately may have led him to his militant suicide just after the completion of his final tetralogy of novels, Hojo no umi (The Sea of Fertility) in 1970. Other prominent postwar writers maintained an avant-garde stance in both their artistic and political attitudes. Chief among them was Abe Kobo, who presented his absurdist and satiric visions of contemporary life in such works as the 1962 novel Suna no onna (The Woman in the Dunes) and the play Tomodachi (Friends), first produced in 1967. The modern theater, in fact, produced in the postwar years gifted playwrights composing in the same vein, including Shimizu Kunio, Terayama Shuji, Kara Juro, and Betsuyaku Minoru. The 1962 play Zo (Elephant), by Betsuyaku, represents a surprisingly successful attempt to encompass in a theatrical form his vision of the significance of the bombing of Hiroshima. Modernist poets also continued to show a new and heightened level of political awareness, as the works of such important figures as Anzai Hitoshi and Yoshioka Minoru often revealed.
Perhaps the contemporary writer most admired for his ability to mix political and polemical understanding with high style and a sense of humanity was Oe Kenzaburo. Kojin teki na taiken (1964; A Personal Matter, 1968) is a fictionalized account of his raising a brain-damaged son; in Ikani ki o kovosu ka (1984; How to Kill a Tree) he explores his local village roots. His complex and ambitious 1967 novel Man'en gannen no futtoboru (The Silent Cry, 1974) represents a major landmark in postwar Japanese fiction. In 1994 Oe became the only writer from Japan beside Kawabata to receive the Nobel prize.
Social criticism in a different framework was provided in the work of the novelist Endo Shusaku, who, from his position as a Roman Catholic, representing a tiny minority in Japan, could examine Japanese culture from what was to most of his readers an unusual perspective. Endo sometimes approached his task through his treatment of certain incidents in Japanese history, notably in his trenchant account of apostasy in 17th century Japan in his 1966 novel Chinmoku (Silence). Many of his books, however, dealt with the vicissitudes of modern life.
Representative works of postwar Japanese literature have been translated. Yet the work of women writers, crucial through their sensibility in their contribution to the development of a modern consciousness, remained less well known abroad, despite their fame in Japan. One exception was Ariyoshi Sawako, whose eloquent, often elegant stories and novels provide a special glimpse into the social and cultural attitudes that the feminine spirit faced in a society where men's conceptions often created the definitions. Kono Taeko and Kurahashi Yumiko are two outstanding contemporary writers.
In poetry, Yoshioka Minoru wrote sensual lyrics, while Shiraishi Kazuko brought a jazz sensibility to her poems.
If the end of the war in 1945 represents the beginning of a new efflorescence of Japanese literary activity, that area may well be coming to an end because of the influence of popular culture on the literary marketplace. Murakami Haruki and Tanaka Yasuo have both written on the semiotic signs of this culture. Writers and readers alike debate the uses and purposes of the traditional genres of poetry, drama, and fiction, as television, comic books, and romance novels take on an increasingly greater share of the market. In this newest phase of postwar culture, the battles being waged to keep contemporary Japanese literature in good health resemble more and more those being fought in Europe and the United States.
Edward G. Seidensticker
University of Michigan
J. Thomas Rimer *
University of Maryland Modern Period by
|
|
|
|
|