Japanese literature, the body of written works produced by
Japanese authors in Japanese or, in its earliest beginnings, at
a time when Japan had no written language, in the Chinese
classical language.
Both in quantity and quality,
Japanese literature ranks as one of the major literatures of the
world, comparable in age, richness, and volume to English
literature, though its course of development has been quite
dissimilar. The surviving works comprise a literary tradition
extending from the 7th century ad to the present; during all
this time there was never a “dark age” devoid of literary
production. Not only do poetry, the novel, and the drama have
long histories in Japan, but some literary genres not so highly
esteemed in other countries—including diaries, travel accounts,
and books of random thoughts—are also prominent. A considerable
body of writing by Japanese in the Chinese classical language,
of much greater bulk and importance than comparable Latin
writings by Englishmen, testifies to the Japanese literary
indebtedness to China. Even the writings entirely in Japanese
present an extraordinary variety of styles, which cannot be
explained merely in terms of the natural evolution of the
language. Some styles were patently influenced by the importance
of Chinese vocabulary and syntax, but others developed in
response to the internal requirements of the various genres,
whether the terseness of haiku (a poem in 17 syllables) or the
bombast of the dramatic recitation.
General considerations
The difficulties of reading Japanese literature can hardly be
exaggerated; even a specialist in one period is likely to have
trouble deciphering a work from another period or genre.
Japanese style has always favoured ambiguity, and the particles
of speech necessary for easy comprehension of a statement are
often omitted as unnecessary or as fussily precise. Sometimes
the only clue to the subject or object of a sentence is the
level of politeness in which the words are couched; for example,
the verb mesu (meaning “to eat,” “to wear,” “to ride in a
carriage,” etc.) designates merely an action performed by a
person of quality. In many cases, ready comprehension of a
simple sentence depends on a familiarity with the background of
a particular period of history. The verb miru, “to see,” had
overtones of “to have an affair with” or even “to marry” during
the Heian period in the 10th and 11th centuries, when men were
generally able to see women only after they had become intimate.
The long period of Japanese isolation in the 17th and 18th
centuries also tended to make the literature provincial, or
intelligible only to persons sharing a common background; the
phrase “some smoke rose noisily” (kemuri tachisawagite), for
example, was all readers of the late 17th century needed to
realize that an author was referring to the Great Fire of 1682
that ravaged the shogunal capital of Edo (the modern city of
Tokyo).
Despite the great difficulties
arising from such idiosyncrasies of style, Japanese literature
of all periods is exceptionally appealing to modern readers,
whether read in the original or in translation. Because it is
prevailingly subjective and coloured by an emotional rather than
intellectual or moralistic tone, its themes have a universal
quality almost unaffected by time. To read a diary by a court
lady of the 10th century is still a moving experience, because
she described with such honesty and intensity her deepest
feelings that the modern-day reader forgets the chasm of history
and changed social customs separating her world from today’s.
The “pure” Japanese language,
untainted and unfertilized by Chinese influence, contained
remarkably few words of an abstract nature. Just as English
borrowed words such as morality, honesty, justice, and the like
from the Continent, the Japanese borrowed these terms from
China; but if the Japanese language was lacking in the
vocabulary appropriate to a Confucian essay, it could express
almost infinite shadings of emotional content. A Japanese poet
who was dissatisfied with the limitations imposed by his native
language or who wished to describe unemotional subjects—whether
the quiet outing of aged gentlemen to a riverside or the poet’s
awareness of his insignificance as compared to the grandeur of
the universe—naturally turned to writing poetry in Chinese. For
the most part, however, Japanese writers, far from feeling
dissatisfied with the limitations on expression imposed by their
language, were convinced that virtuoso perfection in phrasing
and an acute refinement of sentiment were more important to
poetry than the voicing of intellectually satisfying concepts.
From the 16th century on, many
words that had been excluded from Japanese poetry because of
their foreign origins or their humble meanings, following the
dictates of the “codes” of poetic diction established in the
10th century, were adopted by the practitioners of the haiku,
originally an iconoclastic, popular verse form. These codes of
poetic diction, accompanied by a considerable body of criticism,
were the creation of an acute literary sensibility, fostered
especially by the traditions of the court, and were usually
composed by the leading poets or dramatists themselves. These
codes exerted an inhibiting effect on new forms of literary
composition, but they also helped to preserve a distinctively
aristocratic tone.
The Japanese language itself
also shaped poetic devices and forms. Japanese lacks a stress
accent and meaningful rhymes (all words end in one of five
simple vowels), two traditional features of poetry in the West.
By contrast, poetry in Japanese is distinguished from prose
mainly in that it consists of alternating lines of five and
seven syllables; however, if the intensity of emotional
expression is low, this distinction alone cannot save a poem
from dropping into prose. The difficulty of maintaining a high
level of poetic intensity may account for the preference for
short verse forms that could be polished with perfectionist
care. But however moving a tanka (verse in 31 syllables) is, it
clearly cannot fulfill some of the functions of longer poetic
forms, and there are no Japanese equivalents to the great
longer
poems of Western literature, such as
John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
and
Dante’s
The Divine Comedy. Instead, Japanese poets devoted
their efforts to perfecting each syllable of their compositions,
expanding the content of a tanka by suggestion and allusion, and
prizing shadings of tone and diction more than originality or
boldness of expression.
The fluid syntax of the prose
affected not only style but content as well. Japanese sentences
are sometimes of inordinate length, responding to the subjective
turnings and twistings of the author’s thought, and smooth
transitions from one statement to the next, rather than
structural unity, are considered the mark of excellent prose.
The longer works accordingly betray at times a lack of overall
structure of the kind associated in the West with Greek concepts
of literary form but consist instead of episodes linked
chronologically or by other associations. The difficulty
experienced by Japanese writers in organizing their impressions
and perceptions into sustained works may explain the development
of the diary and travel account, genres in which successive days
or the successive stages of a journey provide a structure for
otherwise unrelated descriptions. Japanese literature contains
some of the world’s longest novels and plays, but its genius is
most strikingly displayed in the shorter works, whether the
tanka, the haiku, the Noh plays (also called No, or nō), or the
poetic diaries.
Japanese literature absorbed
much direct influence from China, but the characteristic
literary works are strikingly dissimilar. The tradition of
feminine writing, especially of such introspective works as
diaries, gave a colouring to Japanese prose quite unlike the
more objective, masculine Chinese writings. Although the
Japanese have been criticized (even by some Japanese) for their
imitations of Chinese examples, the earliest Japanese novels in
fact antedate their Chinese counterparts by centuries, and
Japanese theatre developed quite independently. Because the
Chinese and Japanese languages are unrelated, Japanese poetry
naturally took different forms, although Chinese poetic examples
and literary theories were often in the minds of the Japanese
poets. Japanese and Korean may be related languages, but Korean
literary influence was negligible, though Koreans served an
important function in transmitting Chinese literary and
philosophical works to Japan. Poetry and prose written in the
Korean language were unknown to the Japanese until relatively
modern times.
From the 8th to the 19th
century
Chinese literature enjoyed greater prestige among
educated Japanese than their own; but a love for the Japanese
classics, especially those composed at the court in the 10th and
11th centuries, gradually spread among the entire people and
influenced literary expression in every form, even the songs and
tales composed by humble people totally removed from the
aristocratic world portrayed in classical literature.
History
Origins
The first writing of literature in Japanese was
occasioned by influence from China. The Japanese were still
comparatively primitive and without writing when, in the first
four centuries ad, knowledge of Chinese civilization gradually
reached them. They rapidly assimilated much of this
civilization, and the Japanese scribes adopted Chinese
characters as a system of writing, although an alphabet (if one
had been available to them) would have been infinitely better
suited to the Japanese language. The characters, first devised
to represent Chinese monosyllables, could be used only with
great ingenuity to represent the agglutinative forms of the
Japanese language. The ultimate results were chaotic, giving
rise to one of the most complicated systems of writing ever
invented. The use of Chinese characters enormously influenced
modes of expression and led to an association between literary
composition and calligraphy lasting many centuries.
Early writings
The earliest Japanese texts were written in Chinese because no
system of transcribing the sounds and grammatical forms of
Japanese had been invented. The oldest known inscription, on a
sword that dates from about ad 440, already showed some
modification of normal Chinese usage in order to transcribe
Japanese names and expressions. The most accurate way of writing
Japanese words was by using Chinese characters not for their
meanings but for their phonetic values, giving each character a
pronunciation approximating that used by the Chinese themselves.
In the oldest extant works, the Kojiki (712; The Kojiki: Records
of Ancient Matters) and Nihon shoki, or Nihon-gi (720;
Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697), more
than 120 songs, some dating back to perhaps the 5th century ad,
are given in phonetic transcription, doubtless because the
Japanese attached great importance to the sounds themselves. In
these two works, both officially commissioned “histories” of
Japan, many sections were written entirely in Chinese; but parts
of the Kojiki were composed in a complicated mixture of
languages that made use of the Chinese characters sometimes for
their meaning and sometimes for their sound.
Origin of the tanka in the Kojiki
The Kojiki, though revered as the most ancient document
concerning the myths and history of the Japanese people, was not
included in collections of literature until well into the 20th
century. The myths in the Kojiki are occasionally beguiling (Japanese mythology), but the only truly literary parts of the
work are the songs. The early songs lack a fixed metrical form;
the lines, consisting of an indeterminate number of syllables,
were strung out to irregular lengths, showing no conception of
poetic form. Some songs, however, seem to have been
reworked—perhaps when the manuscript was transcribed in the 8th
century—into what became the classic Japanese verse form, the
tanka (short poem), consisting of five lines of five, seven,
five, seven, and seven syllables. Various poetic devices
employed in these songs, such as the makura kotoba (“pillow
word”), a kind of fixed epithet, remained a feature of later
poetry.
Altogether, some 500 primitive
songs have been preserved in various collections. Many describe
travel, and a fascination with place-names, evident in the
loving enumeration of mountains, rivers, and towns with their
mantic epithets, was developed to great lengths in the
gazetteers (fudoki) compiled at the beginning of the 8th
century. These works, of only intermittent literary interest,
devote considerable attention to the folk origins of different
place-names, as well as to other local legends.
Japanese mythology
Susano no Mikoto preparing to kill
the fight-headed dragon,
1832, by Keisei.
The Sacred
Mountain
Amaterasu
Hides Away
Redesdale Freeman-Mitford "Tales of Old Japan"
(PART
I,
PART II,
PART III)
Japanese mythology,
body of stories compiled from oral traditions
concerning the legends, gods, ceremonies, customs,
practices, and historical accounts of the Japanese
people.
Most of the
surviving Japanese myths are recorded in the Kojiki
(compiled 712; “Records of Ancient Matters”) and the
Nihon shoki (compiled in 720; “Chronicles of
Japan”). These works tell of the origin of the
ruling class and were apparently aimed at
strengthening its authority. Therefore, they are not
pure myths but have much political colouring. They
are based on two main traditions: the Yamato Cycle,
centred around the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami,
and the Izumo Cycle, in which the principal
character is Susanoo (or Susanowo) no Mikoto, the
brother of Amaterasu.
Genealogies and
mythological records were kept in Japan, at least
from the 6th century ad and probably long before
that. By the time of the emperor Temmu (7th
century), it became necessary to know the genealogy
of all important families in order to establish the
position of each in the eight levels of rank and
title modeled after the Chinese court system. For
this reason, Temmu ordered the compilation of myths
and genealogies that finally resulted in the Kojiki
and Nihon shoki. The compilers of these and other
early documents had at their disposal not only oral
tradition but also documentary sources. A greater
variety of sources was available to the compiler of
the Nihon shoki. While the Kojiki is richer in
genealogy and myth, the Nihon shoki adds a great
deal to scholarly understanding of both the history
and the myth of early Japan. Its purpose was to give
the newly Sinicized court a history that could be
compared with the annals of the Chinese.
The purpose of the
cosmologies of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki is to
trace the imperial genealogy back to the foundation
of the world. The myths of the Yamato Cycle figure
prominently in these cosmologies. In the beginning,
the world was a chaotic mass, an ill-defined egg,
full of seeds. Gradually, the finer parts became
heaven (yang), the heavier parts earth (yin).
Deities were produced between the two: first, three
single deities, and then a series of divine couples.
According to the Nihon shoki, one of the first three
“pure male” gods appeared in the form of a reed that
connected heaven and earth. A central foundation was
now laid down for the drifting cosmos, and mud and
sand accumulated upon it. A stake was driven in, and
an inhabitable place was created. Finally, the god
Izanagi (He Who Invites) and the goddess Izanami
(She Who Invites) appeared. Ordered by their
heavenly superiors, they stood on a floating bridge
in heaven and stirred the ocean with a spear. When
the spear was pulled up, the brine dripping from the
tip formed Onogoro, an island that became solid
spontaneously. Izanagi and Izanami then descended to
this island, met each other by circling around the
celestial pillar, discovered each other’s sexuality,
and began to procreate. After initial failures, they
produced the eight islands that now make up Japan.
Izanami finally gave birth to the god of fire and
died of burns. Raging with anger, Izanagi attacked
his son, from whose blood such deities as the god of
thunder were born. Other gods were born of Izanami
on her deathbed. They presided over metal, earth,
and agriculture. In grief, Izanagi pursued Izanami
to Yomi (analogous to Hades) and asked her to come
back to the land of the living. The goddess replied
that she had already eaten food cooked on a stove in
Yomi and could not return. In spite of her warning,
Izanagi looked at his wife and discovered that her
body was infested with maggots. The angry and
humiliated goddess then chased Izanagi from the
underworld. When he finally reached the upper world,
Izanagi blocked the entrance to the underworld with
an enormous stone. The goddess then threatened
Izanagi, saying that she would kill a thousand
people every day. He replied that he would father
one thousand and five hundred children for every
thousand she killed. After this, Izanagi pronounced
the formula of divorce.
Izanagi then
returned to this world and purified himself from the
miasma of Yomi no Kuni. From the lustral water
falling from his left eye was born the sun goddess
Amaterasu Ōmikami, ancestress of the imperial
family. From his right eye was born the moon god
Tsukiyomi no Mikoto and from his nose, the trickster
god Susanoo. Izanagi gave the sun goddess a jewel
from a necklace and told her to govern heaven. He
entrusted the dominion of night to the moon god.
Susanoo was told to govern the sea. According to the
Kojiki, Susanoo became dissatisfied with his share
and ascended to heaven to see his older sister.
Amaterasu, fearing his wild behaviour, met him and
suggested that they prove their faithfulness to each
other by bringing forth children. They agreed to
receive a seed from each other, chew it, and spit it
away. If gods rather than goddesses were born, it
would be taken as a sign of the good faith of the
one toward the other. When Susanoo brought forth
gods, his faithfulness was recognized, and he was
permitted to live in heaven.
Susanoo, becoming
conceited over his success, began to play the role
of a trickster. He scattered excrement over the
dining room of Amaterasu, where she was celebrating
the ceremony of the first fruits. His worst offense
was to fling into Amaterasu’s chamber a piebald
horse he had “flayed with a backward flaying” (a
ritual offense).
Enraged at the
pranks of her brother, the sun goddess hid herself
in a celestial cave, and darkness filled the heavens
and the earth. The gods were at a loss. Finally,
they gathered in front of the cave, built a fire,
and made cocks crow. They erected a sacred evergreen
tree, and from its branches they hung curved beads,
mirrors, and cloth offerings. A goddess named
Amenouzume no Mikoto then danced half-nude.
Amaterasu, hearing the multitudes of gods laughing
and applauding, became curious and opened the door
of the cave. Seizing the opportunity, a strong-armed
god dragged her out of the cave.
The myths of the
Izumo Cycle then begin to appear in the narration.
Having angered the heavenly gods and having been
banished from heaven, Susanoo descended to Izumo,
where he rescued Princess Marvellous Rice Field
(Kushiinada Hime) from an eight-headed serpent. He
then married the Princess and became the progenitor
of the ruling family of Izumo. The most important
member of the family of Susanoo was the god
Ōkuninushi no Mikoto, the great earth chief, who
assumed control of this region before the descent to
earth of the descendants of the sun goddess.
Before long,
Amaterasu, the leader of the celestial gods—the gods
of Izumo were known as earthly gods—asked Ōkuninushi
to turn over the land of Izumo, saying that “the
land of the plentiful reed-covered plains and fresh
rice ears” was to be governed by the descendants of
the heavenly gods. After the submission of Izumo,
Amaterasu made her grandson Ninigi no Mikoto (ninigi
is said to represent rice in its maturity) descend
to earth. According to the Nihon shoki, Amaterasu
handed Ninigi some ears of rice from a sacred rice
field and told him to raise rice on earth and to
worship the celestial gods. The grandson of the sun
goddess then descended to the peak of Takachiho
(meaning “high thousand ears”) in Miyazaki, Kyushu.
There he married a daughter of the god of the
mountain, named Konohana-sakuya Hime (Princess
Blossoms of the Trees).
When Ninigi’s wife
became pregnant and was about to give birth, all in
a single night, he demanded proof that the child was
his. She accordingly set fire to her room, then
safely produced three sons. One of them, in turn,
became the father of the legendary first emperor,
Jimmu, who is considered to mark the watershed
between the “age of the gods” and the historical
age; but Jimmu’s eastern expedition and conquest of
the Japanese heartland was also a myth.
Nobuhiro
Matsumoto
Donald Keene
|
The significance of the Man’yōshū
A magnificent anthology of poetry, the Man’yōshū (compiled after
759; Ten Thousand Leaves), is the single great literary monument
of the Nara period (710–784), although it includes poetry
written in the preceding century, if not earlier. Most of the
4,500 or so poems are tanka, but the masterpieces of the
Man’yōshū are the 260 chōka (“long poems”), ranging up to 150
lines in length and cast in the form of alternating lines in
five and seven syllables followed by a concluding line in seven
syllables. The amplitude of the chōka permitted the poets to
treat themes impossible within the compass of the tanka—whether
the death of a wife or child, the glory of the imperial family,
the discovery of a gold mine in a remote province, or the
hardships of military service.
The greatest of the Man’yōshū
poets, Kakinomoto Hitomaro, served as a kind of poet laureate in
the late 7th and early 8th centuries, accompanying the
sovereigns on their excursions and composing odes of lamentation
for deceased members of the imperial family. Modern scholars
have suggested that the chōka may have originated as exorcisms
of the dead, quieting the ghosts of recently deceased persons by
reciting their deeds and promising that they will never be
forgotten. Some of Hitomaro’s masterpieces so convincingly
describe the glories of princes or princesses he may never have
met that they transcend any difference between “public”
expressions of grief and his private feelings. Hitomaro’s chōka
are unique in Japanese poetry thanks to their superb combination
of imagery, syntax, and emotional strength; they are works of
masculine expression. He showed in his tanka, however, that he
was also capable of the evocative, feminine qualities typical of
later Japanese poetry.
The chōka often concluded with
one or more hanka (“envoys”) that resume central points of the
preceding poem. The hanka written by the 8th-century poet Yamabe
Akahito are so perfectly conceived as to make the chōka they
follow at times seem unnecessary; the concision and
evocativeness of these poems, identical in form with the tanka,
are close to the ideals of later Japanese poetry. Nevertheless,
the supreme works of the Man’yōshū are the chōka of Hitomaro,
Ōtomo Tabito, Ōtomo Yakamochi (probably the chief compiler of
the anthology), and Yamanoue Okura. The most striking quality of
the Man’yōshū is its powerful sincerity of expression. The poets
were certainly not artless songsmiths exclaiming in wonder over
the beauties of nature, a picture that is often painted of them
by sentimental critics, but their emotions were stronger and
more directly expressed than in later poetry. The corpse of an
unknown traveler, rather than the falling of the cherry
blossoms, stirred in Hitomaro an awareness of the uncertainty of
human life.
The Man’yōshū is exceptional in
the number of poems composed outside the court, whether by
frontier guards or persons of humble occupation. Perhaps some of
these poems were actually written by courtiers in the guise of
commoners, but the use of dialect and familiar imagery contrasts
with the strict poetic diction imposed in the 10th century. The
diversity of themes and poetic forms also distinguishes the
Man’yōshū from the more polished but narrower verse of later
times. In Okura’s famous “Dialogue on Poverty,” for example, two
men—one poor and the other destitute—describe their miserable
lots, revealing a concern over social conditions that would be
absent from the classical tanka. Okura’s visit to China early in
the 8th century, as the member of a Japanese embassy, may
account for Chinese influence in his poetry. His poems are also
prefaced in many instances by passages in Chinese stating the
circumstances of the poems or citing Buddhist parallels.
The Man’yōshū was transcribed
in an almost perversely complicated system that used Chinese
characters arbitrarily, sometimes for meaning and sometimes for
sound. The lack of a suitable script probably inhibited literary
production in Japanese during the Nara period. The growing
importance, however, of Chinese poetry as the mark of literary
accomplishment in a courtier may also have interrupted the
development of Japanese literature after its first flowering in
the Man’yōshū.
Eighteen Man’yōshū poets are
represented in the collection Kaifūsō (751), an anthology of
poetry in Chinese composed by members of the court. These poems
are little more than pastiches of ideas and images borrowed
directly from China; the composition of such poetry reflects the
enormous prestige of Chinese civilization at this time.
Kakinomoto Hitomaro
Kakinomoto Hitomaro
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Kakinomoto
Hitomaro, also called Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (d.
708, Japan), poet venerated by the Japanese since
earliest times. He was also Japan’s first great
literary figure.
Among his surviving
works are poems in the two major Japanese poetic
forms of his day—tanka and chōka. Probably he also
wrote sedōka (“head-repeated poem,” consisting of
two three-line verses of 5, 7, 7 syllables), a
relatively minor song form that seems to have been
first adapted to literary purposes by Hitomaro and
to have barely survived him. All of the poems
accepted as indisputably authored by Hitomaro (61
tanka and 16 chōka), as well as a large number of
others attributed to him, are to be found in the
Man’yōshū (“Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”), the
first and largest of Japan’s anthologies of native
poetry. These poems, together with notes by the
compilers, are the chief source for information on
his life, about which very little is known.
Hitomaro is
believed to have been born and reared near Nara. He
entered the service of the court in a minor
capacity, serving successively two imperial princes;
imperial activities are celebrated in some of his
most famous poems. Later he became a provincial
official, and he is believed to have died in Iwami
province (now Shimane prefecture). He seems to have
had at least two wives.
Standing on the
threshold of Japan’s emergence from a preliterate to
a literate, civilized society, Hitomaro achieved in
his poems a splendid balance between the homely
qualities of primitive song and the more
sophisticated interests and literary techniques of a
new age. He inherited the stiff techniques, plain
imagery, and restricted range and subject matter—the
traditional “word hoard”—of preliterate song. To
that inheritance he added new subjects, modes, and
concerns, as well as new rhetorical and other
structural techniques (some of which may have been
adapted from Chinese poetry), along with a new
seriousness and importance of treatment and tone.
Many of his longer poems are introduced by a kind of
solemn “overture,” relating the present with the
divine past of the Japanese land and people.
All of Hitomaro’s
poems are suffused with a deep personal lyricism and
with a broad humanity and sense of identity with
others. Outstanding among his works are his poem on
the ruined capital at Ōmi; his celebration of Prince
Karu’s journey to the plains of Aki; two poems each
on the death of his first wife and on parting from
his second; his lament on the death of Prince
Takechi; and his poem composed on finding the body
of a man on the island of Samine.
|
Classical literature: Heian
period (794–1185)
The foundation of the city of Heian-kyō (later
known as Kyōto) as the capital of Japan marked the beginning of
a period of great literary brilliance. The earliest writings of
the period, however, were almost all in Chinese because of the
continued desire to emulate the culture of the continent. Three
imperially sponsored anthologies of Chinese poetry appeared
between 814 and 827, and it seemed for a time that writing in
Japanese would be relegated to an extremely minor position. The
most distinguished writer of Chinese verse, the 9th-century poet
Sugawara Michizane, gave a final lustre to this period of
Chinese learning by his erudition and poetic gifts, but his
refusal to go to China when offered the post of ambassador, on
the grounds that China no longer had anything to teach Japan,
marked a turning point in the response to Chinese influence.
Poetry
The invention of the kana phonetic syllabary, traditionally
attributed to the celebrated 9th-century Shingon priest and
Sanskrit scholar Kūkai, enormously facilitated writing in
Japanese. Private collections of poetry in kana began to be
compiled about 880, and in 905 the Kokinshū (A Collection of
Poems Ancient and Modern), the first major work of kana
literature, was compiled by the poet Ki Tsurayuki and others.
This anthology contains 1,111 poems divided into 20 books
arranged by topics, including 6 books of seasonal poems, 5 books
of love poems, and single books devoted to such subjects as
travel, mourning, and congratulations. The two prefaces are
clearly indebted to the theories of poetry described by the
compilers of such Chinese anthologies as the Shijing (“Classic
of Poetry”) and Wen xuan (“Selections of Refined Literature”),
but the preferences they express would be shared by most tanka
poets for the next 1,000 years. The preface by Tsurayuki, the
oldest work of sustained prose in kana, enumerated the
circumstances that move men to write poetry; he believed that
melancholy, whether aroused by a change in the seasons or by a
glimpse of white hairs reflected in a mirror, provided a more
congenial mood for writing poetry than the harsher emotions
treated in the earlier, pre-kana anthology Man’yōshū. The best
tanka in the Kokinshū captivate the reader by their perceptivity
and tonal beauty, but these flawlessly turned miniatures lack
the variety of the Man’yōshū.
Skill in composing tanka became
an asset in gaining preference at court; it was also essential
to a lover, whose messages to his mistress (who presumably could
not read Chinese, still the language employed by men in official
documents) often consisted of poems describing his own emotions
or begging her favours. In this period the tanka almost
completely ousted the chōka, the length of which was indefinite,
because the shorter tanka were more suited to the lover’s
billet-doux or to competitions on prescribed themes.
For the poets of the Kokinshū
and the later court anthologies, originality was less desirable
than perfection of language and tone. The critics, far from
praising novelty of effects, condemned deviation from the
standard poetic diction—which was established by the Kokinshū
and consisted of some 2,000 words—and insisted on absolute
adherence to the poetic codes first formulated in the 10th
century. Although these restrictions saved Japanese poetry from
lapses into bad taste or vulgarity, they froze it for centuries
in prescribed modes of expression. Only a skilled critic can
distinguish a typical tanka of the 10th century from one of the
18th century. The Kokinshū set the precedent for later court
anthologies, and a knowledge of its contents was indispensable
to all poets as a guide and source of literary allusions.
Love poetry occupies a
prominent place in the Kokinshū, but the joys of love are seldom
celebrated; instead, the poets write in the melancholy vein
prescribed in the preface, describing the uncertainties before a
meeting with the beloved, the pain of parting, or the sad
realization that an affair has ended. The invariable perfection
of diction, unmarred by any indecorous cry from the heart, may
sometimes make one doubt the poet’s sincerity. This is not true
of the great Kokinshū poets of the 9th century—Ono Komachi, Lady
Ise, Ariwara Narihira, and Tsurayuki himself—but even Buddhist
priests, who presumably had renounced carnal love, wrote love
poetry at the court competitions, and it is hard to detect any
difference between such poems and those of actual lovers.
The preface of the Kokinshū
lists judgments on the principal poets of the collection. This
criticism is unsatisfying to a modern reader because it is so
terse and unanalytical, but it nevertheless marks a beginning of
Japanese poetic criticism, an art that developed impressively
during the course of the Heian period.
Prose
Ki Tsurayuki is celebrated also for his Tosa nikki (936; The
Tosa Diary), the account of his homeward journey to Kyōto from
the province of Tosa, where he had served as governor. Tsurayuki
wrote this diary in Japanese, though men at the time normally
kept their diaries in Chinese (perhaps it was in order to escape
reproach for adopting this unmanly style that he pretended a
woman in the governor’s entourage was the author). Events of the
journey are interspersed with the poems composed on various
occasions. The work is affecting especially because of the
repeated, though muted, references to the death of Tsurayuki’s
daughter in Tosa.
Tosa nikki is the earliest
example of a literary diary. Although Tsurayuki pretended that
it was written by a woman, most of the later Heian diarists who
wrote in the Japanese language were, in fact, court ladies;
their writings include some of the supreme masterpieces of the
literature. Kagerō nikki (The Gossamer Years) describes the life
between 954 and 974 of the second wife of Fujiwara Kaneie, a
prominent court official. The first volume, related long after
the events, is in the manner of an autobiographical novel; even
the author confesses that her remembrances are probably tinged
with fiction. The next two volumes approach a true diary, with
some entries apparently made on the days indicated. The writer
(known only as “the mother of Michitsuna”) describes, with many
touches of self-pity, her unhappy life with her husband. She
evidently assumed that readers would sympathize, and often this
is the case, though her self-centred complaints are not
endearing. In one passage, in which she gloats over the death of
a rival’s child, her obsession with her own griefs shows to
worst advantage. Yet her journal is extraordinarily moving
precisely because the author dwells exclusively on universally
recognizable emotions and omits the details of court life that
must have absorbed the men.
Other diaries of the period
include the anecdotal Murasaki Shikibu nikki (“The Diary of
Murasaki Shikibu”; Eng. trans. Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and
Poetic Memoirs), at once an absorbing literary work and a source
of information on the court life the author (Murasaki Shikibu)
described more romantically in her masterpiece Genji monogatari
(c. 1010;
The Tale of Genji) and in Izumi Shikibu nikki (The
Diary of Izumi Shikibu), which is less a diary than a short
story liberally ornamented with poetry.
Murasaki Shikibu
Murasaki Shikibu "The Tale of
Genji"
(PART
I,
PART II)
Murasaki Shikibu, (b. c. 978, Kyōto, Japan—d. c.
1014, Kyōto), court lady who was the author of the
Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), generally
considered the greatest work of Japanese literature
and thought to be the world’s oldest full novel.
The
author’s real name is unknown; it is conjectured
that she acquired the sobriquet of Murasaki from the
name of the heroine of her novel, and the name
Shikibu reflects her father’s position at the Bureau
of Rites. She was born into a lesser branch of the
noble and highly influential Fujiwara family and was
well educated, having learned Chinese (generally the
exclusive sphere of males). She married a much older
distant cousin, Fujiwara Nobutaka, and bore him a
daughter, but after two years of marriage he died.
Some critics believe that she wrote the entire Tale
of Genji between 1001 (the year her husband died)
and 1005, the year in which she was summoned to
serve at court (for reasons unknown). It is more
likely that the composition of her extremely long
and complex novel extended over a much greater
period; her new position within what was then a
leading literary centre likely enabled her to
produce a story that was not finished until about
1010. In any case this work is the main source of
knowledge about her life. It possesses considerable
interest for the delightful glimpses it affords of
life at the court of the empress Jōtō mon’in, whom
Murasaki Shikibu served.
The
Tale of Genji captures the image of a unique society
of ultrarefined and elegant aristocrats, whose
indispensable accomplishments were skill in poetry,
music, calligraphy, and courtship. Much of it is
concerned with the loves of Prince Genji and the
different women in his life, all of whom are
exquisitely delineated. Although the novel does not
contain scenes of powerful action, it is permeated
with a sensitivity to human emotions and to the
beauties of nature hardly paralleled elsewhere. The
tone of the novel darkens as it progresses,
indicating perhaps a deepening of Murasaki Shikibu’s
Buddhist conviction of the vanity of the world.
Some, however, believe that its last 14 chapters
were written by another author.
The
translation (1935) of The Tale of Genji by Arthur
Waley is a classic of English literature. Murasaki
Shikibu’s diary is included in Diaries of Court
Ladies of Old Japan (1935), translated by Annie
Shepley Ōmori and Kōchi Doi. Edward Seidensticker
published a second translation of The Tale of Genji
in 1976, and Royall Tyler translated a third in
2001.
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The Tale of Genji
The Tale of Genji, Japanese Genji
monogatari, masterpiece of Japanese
literature by Murasaki Shikibu. Written at
the start of the 11th century, it is
generally considered the world’s first
novel.
Murasaki Shikibu composed The Tale of Genji
while a lady in attendance at the Japanese
court, likely completing it about 1010.
Because Chinese was the court’s scholarly
language, works written in Japanese (the
literary language used by women, often in
personal accounts of life at court) were not
taken very seriously; so too, prose was not
considered the equal of poetry. The Tale of
Genji, however, differed in being informed
by a comprehensive knowledge of Chinese and
Japanese poetry and in being a graceful work
of imaginative fiction. It incorporates some
800 waka, courtly poems purported to be the
writing of the main character, and its
supple narrative sustains the story through
54 chapters of one character and his legacy.
At its most basic, The Tale of Genji is an
absorbing introduction to the culture of the
aristocracy in early Heian Japan—its forms
of entertainment, its manner of dress, its
daily life, and its moral code. The era is
exquisitely re-created through the story of
Genji, the handsome, sensitive, gifted
courtier, an excellent lover and a worthy
friend. Most of the story concerns the loves
of Genji, and each of the women in his life
is vividly delineated. The work shows
supreme sensitivity to human emotions and
the beauties of nature, but as it proceeds
its darkening tone reflects the Buddhist
conviction of this world’s transience.
Arthur Waley was the first to translate The
Tale of Genji into English (6 vol.,
1925–33). Waley’s translation is beautiful
and inspiring but also very free. Edward
Seidensticker’s translation (1976) is true
to the original in both content and tone,
but its notes and reader aids are sparse, in
contrast to the translation published by
Royall Tyler in 2001
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These “diaries” are closely
related in content and form to the uta monogatari (“poem tales”)
that emerged as a literary genre later in the 10th century. Ise
monogatari (c. 980; Tales of Ise) consists of 143 episodes, each
containing one or more poems and an explanation in prose of the
circumstances of composition. The brevity and often the
ambiguity of the tanka gave rise to a need for such
explanations, and, when these explanations became extended or
(as in the case of Ise monogatari) were interpreted as
biographical information about one poet (Ariwara Narihira), they
approached the realm of fiction.
Along with the poem tales,
there were works of religious or fanciful inspiration going back
to Nihon ryōiki (822; Miraculous Stories from the Japanese
Buddhist Tradition), an account of Buddhist miracles in Japan
compiled by the priest Kyōkai. Priests probably used these
stories, written in Chinese, as a source of sermons with the
intent of persuading ordinary Japanese, incapable of reading
difficult works of theology, that they must lead virtuous lives
if they were not to suffer in hell for present misdeeds. No such
didactic intent is noticeable in Taketori monogatari (10th
century; Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), a fairy tale about a
princess who comes from the Moon to dwell on Earth in the house
of a humble bamboo cutter; the various tests she imposes on her
suitors, fantastic though they are, are described with humour
and realism.
The first lengthy work of
fiction in Japanese, Utsubo monogatari (“The Tale of the Hollow
Tree”), was apparently written between 970 and 983, although the
last chapter may have been written later. This uneven,
ill-digested work is of interest chiefly as an amalgam of
elements in the poem tales and fairy tales; it contains 986
tanka, and its episodes range from early realism to pure
fantasy.
The contrast between this crude
work and the sublime Genji monogatari is overwhelming. Perhaps
the difference is best explained in terms of the feminine
traditions of writing, exemplified especially by the diaries,
which enabled Murasaki Shikibu to discover depths in her
characters unsuspected by the male author of Utsubo monogatari.
The Genji monogatari is the finest work not only of the Heian
period but of all Japanese literature and merits being called
the first important novel written anywhere in the world. Genji
monogatari was called a work of mono no aware (“a sensitivity to
things”) by the great 18th-century literary scholar Motoori
Norinaga; the hero, Prince Genji, is not remarkable for his
martial prowess or his talents as a statesman but as an
incomparable lover, sensitive to each of the many women he wins.
The story is related in terms of the successive women Genji
loves; each of them evokes a different response from this
marvelously complex man. The last third of the novel, describing
the world after Genji’s death, is much darker in tone, and the
principal figures, though still impressive, seem no more than
fragmentations of the peerless Genji.
The success of Genji monogatari
was immediate. The author of the touching Sarashina nikki
(mid-11th century; “Sarashina Diary”; Eng. trans. As I Crossed a
Bridge of Dreams) describes how as a girl she longed to visit
the capital so that she might read the entire work (which had
been completed some 10 years earlier). Imitations and derivative
works based on Genji monogatari, especially on the last third of
it, continued to be written for centuries, inhibiting the
fiction composed by the court society.
Makura no sōshi (c. 1000; The
Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon) is another masterpiece of the Heian
period that should be mentioned with Genji monogatari. Japanese
critics have often distinguished the aware of Genji monogatari
and the okashi of Makura no sōshi. Aware means sensitivity to
the tragic implications of a moment or gesture, okashi the comic
overtones of perhaps the same moment or gesture. The lover’s
departure at dawn evoked many wistful passages in Genji
monogatari, but in Makura no sōshi Sei Shōnagon noted with
unsparing exactness the lover’s fumbling, ineffectual
leave-taking and his lady’s irritation. Murasaki Shikibu’s aware
can be traced through later literature—sensitivity always marked
the writings of any author in the aristocratic tradition—but Sei
Shōnagon’s wit belonged to the Heian court alone.
The Heian court society passed
its prime by the middle of the 11th century, but it did not
collapse for another 100 years. Long after its political power
had been usurped by military men, the court retained its
prestige as the fountainhead of culture. But in the 12th
century, literary works belonging to a quite different tradition
began to appear. Konjaku monogatari (early 12th century; “Tales
of Now and Then”; partially translated into English as Ages Ago
and as Tales of Times Now Past), a massive collection of
religious stories and folktales drawn not only from the Japanese
countryside but also from Indian and Chinese sources, described
elements of society that had never been treated in the court
novels. These stories, though crudely written, provide glimpses
of how the common people spoke and behaved in an age marked by
warfare and new religious movements. The collection of folk
songs Ryōjin hishō, compiled in 1179 by the emperor
Go-Shirakawa, suggests the vitality of this burgeoning popular
culture even as the aristocratic society was being threatened
with destruction.
Medieval literature: Kamakura,
Muromachi, and Azuchi-Momoyama periods (1192–1600)
Kamakura
period (1192–1333)
The warfare of the 12th century brought to undisputed power
military men (samurai) whose new regime was based on martial
discipline. Though the samurai expressed respect for the old
culture, some of them even studying tanka composition with the
Kyōto masters, the capital of the country moved to Kamakura. The
lowered position of women under this feudalistic government
perhaps explains the noticeable diminution in the importance of
writings by court ladies; indeed, there was hardly a woman
writer of distinction between the 13th and 19th centuries. The
court poets, however, remained prolific: 15 imperially sponsored
anthologies were completed between 1188 and 1439, and most of
the tanka followed the stereotypes established in earlier
literary periods.
The finest of the later
anthologies, the Shin kokinshū (c. 1205), was compiled by
Fujiwara Sadaie, or Teika, among others, and is considered by
many as the supreme accomplishment in tanka composition. The
title of the anthology—“the new Kokinshū”—indicates the
confidence of the compilers that the poets represented were
worthy successors of those in the 905 collection; they included
(besides the great Teika himself) Teika’s father, Fujiwara
Toshinari (Fujiwara Shunzei); the priest Saigyō; and the former
emperor Go-Toba. These poets looked beyond the visible world for
symbolic meanings. The brilliant colours of landscapes filled
with blossoms or reddening leaves gave way to monochrome
paintings; the poet, instead of dwelling on the pleasure or
grief of an experience, sought in it some deeper meaning he
could sense if not fully express. The tastes of Teika especially
dominated Japanese poetic sensibility, thanks not only to his
poetry and essays on poetry but to his choices of the works of
the past most worthy of preservation.
Teika is credited also with a
novel, Matsura no miya monogatari (“Tale of Matsura Shrine,”
Eng. trans. The Tale of Matsura). Though it is unfinished and
awkwardly constructed, its dreamlike atmosphere lingers in the
mind with the overtones of Teika’s poetry; dreams of the past
were indeed the refuge of the medieval romancers, who modeled
their language on the Genji monogatari, though it was now
archaic, and borrowed their themes and characters from the Heian
masterpieces. Stories about wicked stepmothers are fairly
common; perhaps the writers, contrasting their neglect with the
fabled lives of the Heian courtiers, identified themselves with
the maltreated stepdaughters, and the typical happy ending of
such stories—the stepdaughter in Sumiyoshi monogatari is married
to a powerful statesman and her wicked stepmother humiliated—may
have been the dream fulfillment of their own hopes.
Various diaries describe
travels between Kyōto and the shogun’s capital in Kamakura.
Courtiers often made this long journey in order to press claims
in lawsuits, and they recorded their impressions along the way
in the typical mixture of prose and poetry. Izayoi nikki (“Diary
of the Waning Moon”; Eng. trans. in Translations from Early
Japanese Literature) tells of a journey made in 1277 by the nun
Abutsu. A later autobiographical work that also contains
extensive descriptions of travel is the superb Towazu-gatari (c.
1307; “A Story Nobody Asked For”; Eng. trans. The Confessions of
Lady Nijō) by Lady Nijō, a work (discovered only in 1940) that
provides a final moment of glory to the long tradition of
introspective writing by women at court.
Although these writings in the
aristocratic manner preserved much of the manner of Heian
literature, works of different character became even more
prominent in the medieval period. There are many collections of
Buddhist and popular tales, of which the most enjoyable is the
Uji shūi monogatari (A Collection of Tales from Uji), a
compilation made over a period of years of some 197 brief
stories. Although the incidents described in these tales are
often similar to those found in Konjaku monogatari, they are
told with considerably greater literary skill.
An even more distinctive
literary genre of the period is the gunki monogatari, or war
tale. The most famous, Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike),
was apparently first written at the court about 1220, probably
by a nobleman who drew his materials from the accounts recited
by priests of the warfare between the Taira (Heike) and the
Minamoto (Genji) families in the preceding century. The
celebrated opening lines of the work, a declaration of the
impermanence of all things, also states the main subject, the
rise and fall of the Taira family. The text, apparently at first
in 3 books, was expanded to 12 in the course of time, as the
result of being recited with improvisations by
priest-entertainers. This oral transmission may account not only
for the unusually large number of textual variants but also for
the exceptionally musical and dramatic style of the work. Unlike
the Heian novelists, who rarely admitted words of Chinese origin
into their works, the reciters of the Heike monogatari employed
the contrasting sounds of the imported words to produce what has
been acclaimed as the great classic of Japanese style. Although
the work is curiously uneven, effective scenes being followed by
dull passages in which the narrator seems to be stressing the
factual accuracy of his materials, it is at least intermittently
superb, and it provided many later novelists and dramatists with
characters and incidents for their works.
Heike monogatari was by no
means the earliest literary work describing warfare, and other
writings, mainly historical in content, were graced by literary
flourishes uncommon in similar Western works. Ōkagami (c. 1120?;
“The Great Mirror”; Eng. trans. Ōkagami), the most famous of the
“mirrors” of Japanese history, undoubtedly influenced the
composition of Heike monogatari, especially in its moralistic
tone. Hōgen monogatari (Eng. trans. Hōgen monogatari) and Heiji
monogatari (partial Eng. trans. in Translations from Early
Japanese Literature) chronicle warfare that antedates the events
described in Heike monogatari but were probably written somewhat
later.
War tales continued to be
composed throughout the medieval period. The Taiheiki
(“Chronicle of the Great Peace”; Eng. trans. Taiheiki), for
example, covers about 50 years, beginning in 1318, when the
emperor Go-Daigo ascended the throne. Though revered as a
classic by generations of Japanese, it possesses comparatively
little appeal for Western readers, no doubt because so few of
the figures come alive.
Characters are more vividly
described in two historical romances of the mid- to late 14th
century: Soga monogatari, an account of the vendetta carried out
by the Soga brothers, and Gikeiki (“Chronicle of Gikei”; Eng.
trans. Yoshitsune), describing the life of the warrior Minamoto
Yoshitsune. Though inartistically composed, these portraits of
resourceful and daring heroes caught the imaginations of the
Japanese, and their exploits are still prominent on the Kabuki
stage.
Another important variety of
medieval literature was the reflective essays of Buddhist
priests. Hōjō-ki (1212; The Ten Foot Square Hut) by
Kamo Chōmei
is a hermit’s description of his disenchantment with the world
and his discovery of peace in a lonely retreat. The elegiac
beauty of its language gives this work, brief though it is, the
dignity of a classic. Chōmei was also a distinguished poet, and
his essay Mumyōshō (c. 1210–12; “Nameless Notes”) is perhaps the
finest example of traditional Japanese poetic criticism.
A later priest, Yoshida Kenkō,
writing during the days of warfare and unrest that brought an
end to the Kamakura shogunate in 1333, the brief restoration of
imperial authority under the emperor Go-Daigo from 1333 to 1335,
and the institution of the Ashikaga shogunate in 1338, barely
hints at the turmoil of the times in his masterpiece
Tsurezuregusa (c. 1330; Essays in Idleness); instead, he looks
back nostalgically to the happier days of the past. Kenkō’s
aesthetic judgments, often based on a this-worldly awareness
rather surprising in a Buddhist priest, gained wide currency,
especially after the 17th century, when Tsurezuregusa was widely
read.
Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike)
Heike monogatari,
English The Tale of the Heike, medieval Japanese
epic, which is to the Japanese what the Iliad is to
the Western world—a prolific source of later dramas,
ballads, and tales. It stems from unwritten
traditional tales and variant texts composed between
1190 and 1221, which were gathered together (c.
1240), probably by a scholar named Yukinaga, to form
a single text. Its poetic prose was intended to be
chanted to the accompaniment of a biwa
(four-stringed lute). A version recited by the blind
priest Kakuichi and recorded by a disciple in 1371
is considered the text’s definitive form. Several
translations into English have been published.
Based on the actual
historical struggle between the Taira (Heike) and
Minamoto (Genji) families, which convulsed Japan in
civil war for some years, the Heike monogatari
features the exploits of Minamoto Yoshitsune, the
most popular hero of Japanese legend, and recounts
many episodes of the heroism of aristocratic samurai
warriors. Its overall theme is the tragic downfall
of the Taira family. It opens with the tolling of a
temple bell that, proclaiming the impermanence of
all things, reveals the truth that the mighty—even
the tyrannical Taira Kiyomori, whose powers seem
unlimited—will be brought low like dust before the
wind. The Taira suffer a series of defeats,
culminating in a sea battle off Dannoura (1185) in
which the seven-year-old emperor and many nobles are
drowned. The work concludes with an account of the
subsequent life of the empress mother, born a Taira.
She dies in a remote convent to the tolling of a
bell.
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Kamo
Chōmei
Kamo Chōmei, also called Kamo no Chōmei (b.
1155, Japan—d. July 24, 1216, Kyōto), poet and
critic of Japanese vernacular poetry, one of the
major figures in the history of Japanese poetics. He
is best known as a classic example of the man of
sensibility turned recluse and as the author of
Hōjō-ki (1212; The Ten Foot Square Hut), a
description of his life in seclusion.
The son of a Shintō
priest of Kyōto, Chōmei was given a thorough
artistic training. Despite his comparatively humble
origin, his poetic gifts brought him grudging
recognition from the court and, eventually, a
court-appointed office. Shortly after his position
was established, Chōmei took Buddhist orders (1204)
and turned his back on the world. He lived first for
four or five years in the hills of Ōhara and then
built his tiny hermit’s hut in the Hino foothills
southeast of the capital and completed his Hōjō-ki.
The work is a series of brief accounts of the
disasters that had befallen Kyōto during Chōmei’s
lifetime, followed by a contrasting description of
the natural beauty and peace of his hermit’s life.
The whole is dominated by a characteristic Buddhist
view of the vanity of human endeavour and the
impermanence of material things. The Hōjō-ki bears a
more than coincidental resemblance to the Chitei-ki
(“Account of My Cottage by the Pond”) of Yoshishige
Yasutane (934?–997), a work in Chinese prose dating
from 981.
Chōmei, in fact,
kept in touch with the court and the poetic world
after his retirement. In 1205, to his great delight,
10 of his poems were included in the first draft of
the Shin kokinshū, the eighth imperial anthology of
court poetry. About 1208 or 1209 he began work on
his Mumyō shō (“Nameless Notes”), an extremely
valuable collection of critical comments, anecdotes,
and poetic lore. In 1214 or 1215 he is believed to
have completed his Hosshin shū (“Examples of
Religious Vocation”). His other works include a
selection of his own poems (probably compiled in
1181) and the Ise-ki (“Record of a Journey to Ise”),
no longer extant. Chōmei’s poetry is representative
of the best of an age that produced many poets of
the first rank. His poetry was unusual in its
extreme difficulty but possessed great tonal depth
and resonance.
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The Muromachi (1338–1573) and Azuchi-Momoyama (1574–1600)
periods
In the 15th century a poetic form of multiple authorship
displaced the tanka as the preferred medium of the leading
poets. Renga (linked verse) had begun as the composition of a
single tanka by two people and was a popular pastime even in
remote rural areas. One person would compose the first three
lines of a tanka, often giving obscure or even contradictory
details in order to make it harder for the second person to
complete the poem intelligibly. Gradually, renga spread to the
court poets, who saw the artistic possibilities of this
diversion and drew up “codes” intended to establish renga as an
art. These codes made possible the masterpieces of the 15th
century, but their insistence on formalities (e.g., how often a
“link” about the Moon might appear in 100 links and which links
must end with a noun and which with a verb) inevitably diluted
the vigour and freshness of the early renga, itself a reaction
against the excessively formal tanka. Nevertheless, the renga of
the great 15th-century master Sōgi and his associates are unique
in their shifting lyrical impulses, their moves from link to
link like successive moments of a landscape seen from a boat,
avoiding any illusion that the whole was conceived in one
person’s mind.
While of considerable
historical interest, the short stories of the 15th and 16th
centuries, commonly known as otogi-zōshi, cannot be said to
possess high literary value. Some look back to the world of the
Heian court; others contain folk materials or elements of the
miraculous that may have been included to interest barely
literate readers. Promising stories are sometimes ruined by
absurdities before their course is run, but even the less
successful stories provide valuable glimpses of a society that,
though afflicted by warfare, enjoyed the possibility of welcome
change. The stories are anonymous, but the authors seem to have
been both courtiers and Buddhist priests.
Unquestionably the finest
literary works of the 15th century are the Noh dramas,
especially those by Zeami. They were written in magnificent
poetry (often compared to “brocade” because of the rich pattern
created by many allusions to poetry of the past) and were
provided with a structure that is at once extremely economical
and free. Many are concerned with the Buddhist sin of
attachment: an inability to forget his life in this world
prevents a dead man from gaining release but forces him to
return again and again as a ghost to relive the violence or
passion of his former existence. Only prayer and renunciation
can bring about deliverance. Zeami’s treatises on the art of Noh
display extraordinary perceptivity. His stated aims were
dramatic conviction and reality, but these ideals meant
ultimates to him and not superficial realism. Some Noh plays, it
is true, have little symbolic or supernatural content. But, in a
typical program of five Noh plays, the central elements are the
highly poetic and elusive masterpieces that suggest a world
which is invisible to the eye but can be evoked by the actors
through the beauty of movements and speech. Unhappiness over a
world torn by disorder may have led writers to suggest in their
works truths that lie too deep for words. This seems to have
been the meaning of yūgen (“mystery and depth”), the ideal of
the Noh plays. Parallel developments occurred in the tea
ceremony, the landscape garden, and monochrome painting, all
arts that suggest or symbolize rather than state.
Literature during the Tokugawa
period (1603–1867)
The restoration of peace and the unification
of Japan were achieved in the early 17th century, and for
approximately 250 years the Japanese enjoyed almost
uninterrupted peace. During the first half of the Tokugawa
period, the cities of Kyōto and Ōsaka dominated cultural
activity, but from about 1770 Edo (the modern Tokyo) became
paramount. From the mid-1630s to the early 1850s Japan was
closed, by government decree, to contact with the outside world.
Initially, this isolation encouraged the development of
indigenous forms of literature, but, eventually, in the virtual
absence of fertilizing influence from abroad, it resulted in
provincial writing. The adoption of printing in the early 17th
century made a popular literature possible. The Japanese had
known the art of printing since at least the 8th century, but
they had reserved it exclusively for reproducing Buddhist
writings. The Japanese classics existed only in manuscript form.
It is possible that the demand for copies of literary works was
so small that it could be satisfied with manuscripts, costly
though they were; or perhaps aesthetic considerations made the
Japanese prefer manuscripts in beautiful calligraphy, sometimes
embellished with illustrations. Whatever the case, not until
1591 was a nonreligious work printed. About the same time,
Portuguese missionaries in Nagasaki were printing books in the
Roman alphabet. In 1593, in the wake of the Japanese invasion of
Korea, a printing press with movable type was sent as a present
to the emperor Go-Yōzei. Printing soon developed into the hobby
or extravagance of the rich, and many examples of Japanese
literature began to appear in small editions. Commercial
publication began in 1609; by the 1620s even works of slight
literary value were being printed for a public eager for new
books.
Early Tokugawa period (1603–c. 1770)
Poetry underwent many changes during the early part of the
Tokugawa period. At first the court poets jealously maintained
their monopoly over the tanka, but gradually other men, many of
them kokugakusha (“scholars of national learning”), changed the
course of tanka composition by attempting to restore to the form
the simple strength of Man’yōshū. The best of the waka poets in
the courtly tradition was Kagawa Kageki, a poet of exceptional
skill, though he is less likely to leave an impression on modern
readers than the unconventional Ōkuma Kotomichi or Tachibana
Akemi, both of whom died in 1868, during the first year of the
Meiji era.
The chief development in poetry
during the Tokugawa shogunate was the emergence of the haiku as
an important genre. This exceedingly brief form (17 syllables
arranged in lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables) had originated in
the hokku, or opening verse of a renga sequence, which had to
contain in its three lines mention of the season, the time of
day, the dominant features of the landscape, and so on, making
it almost an independent poem. The hokku became known as the
haiku late in the 19th century, when it was entirely divested of
its original function of opening a sequence of verse, but today
even the 17th-century hokku are usually called haiku.
As early as the 16th century
haikai no renga, or comic renga, had been composed by way of
diversion after an evening of serious renga composition,
reverting to the original social, rather than literary, purpose
of making linked verse. As so often happened in Japan, however,
a new art, born as a reaction to the stultifying practices of an
older art, was “discovered,” codified, and made respectable by
practitioners of the older art, generally at the cost of its
freshness and vitality. Matsunaga Teitoku, a conventional
17th-century poet of tanka and renga who revered the old
traditions, became almost in spite of himself the mentor of the
new movement in comic verse, largely as the result of pressure
from his eager disciples. Teitoku brought dignity to the comic
renga and made it a demanding medium, rather than the quip of a
moment. His haikai were distinguishable from serious renga not
by their comic conception but by the presence of a haigon—a word
of Chinese or recent origin that was normally not tolerated in
classical verse.
Inevitably, a reaction arose
against Teitoku’s formalism. The poets of the Danrin school,
headed by Nishiyama Sōin and Saikaku, insisted that it was
pointless to waste months if not years perfecting a sequence of
100 verses. Their ideal was rapid and impromptu composition, and
their verses, generally colloquial in diction, were intended to
amuse for a moment rather than to last for all time. Saikaku
especially excelled at one-man composition of extended
sequences; in 1684 he composed the incredible total of 23,500
verses in a single day and night, too fast for the scribes to do
more than tally.
The haiku was perfected into a
form capable of conveying poetry of the highest quality by
Bashō. After passing through an apprenticeship in both Teitoku
and Danrin schools, Bashō founded a school of his own and
insisted that a haiku must contain both a perception of some
eternal truth and an element of contemporaneity, combining the
characteristic features of the two earlier schools. Despite
their brief compass, Bashō’s haiku often suggest, by means of
the few essential elements he presents, the whole world from
which they have been extracted; the reader must participate in
the creation of the poem. Bashō’s best-known works are travel
accounts interspersed with his verses; of these, Oku no
hosomichi (1694; The Narrow Road Through the Deep North) is
perhaps the most popular and revered work of Tokugawa
literature.
The general name for the prose
composed between 1600 and 1682 is kana-zōshi, or “kana books,”
the name originally having been used to distinguish popular
writings in the Japanese syllabary from more-learned works in
Chinese. The genre embraced not only fiction but also works of a
near-historical nature, pious tracts, books of practical
information, guidebooks, evaluations of courtesans and actors,
and miscellaneous essays. Only one writer of any distinction is
associated with the kana-zōshi—Asai Ryōi, a samurai who became
the first popular and professional writer in Japanese history.
Thanks to the development of relatively cheap methods of
printing and a marked increase in the reading public, Ryōi was
able to make a living as a writer. Although some of his works
are Buddhist, he wrote in a simple style, mainly in kana. His
most famous novel, Ukiyo monogatari (c. 1661; “Tales of the
Floating World”), is primitive both in technique and in plot,
but under his mask of frivolity Ryōi attempted to treat the
hardships of a society where the officially proclaimed Confucian
philosophy concealed gross inequalities.
The first important novelist of
the new era was Saikaku. Some Japanese critics rank him second
only to Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, in all
Japanese literature, and his works have been edited with the
care accorded only to great classics. Such attention would
surely have surprised Saikaku, whose fiction was dashed off
almost as rapidly as his legendary performances of comic renga,
with little concern for the judgments of posterity. His first
novel, Kōshoku ichidai otoko (1682; The Life of an Amorous Man),
changed the course of Japanese fiction. The title itself had
strong erotic overtones, and the plot describes the adventures
of one man, from his precocious essays at lovemaking as a child
of seven to his decision at age 60 to sail to an island
populated only by women. The licensed quarters of prostitution
established in various Japanese cities by the Tokugawa
government (despite its professions of Confucian morality), in
order to help control unruly samurai by dissipating their
energies, became a centre of the new culture. Expertise in the
customs of the brothels was judged the mark of the man of the
world. The old term ukiyo, which had formerly meant the “sad
world” of Buddhist stories, now came to designate its homonym,
the “floating world” of pleasure; this was the chosen world of
Saikaku’s hero, Yonosuke, who became the emblematic figure of
the era.
Saikaku’s masterpiece, Kōshoku
gonin onna (1686; Five Women Who Loved Love), described the
loves of women of the merchant class, rather than prostitutes;
this was the first time that women of this class were given such
attention. In other works he described, sometimes with humour
but sometimes with bitterness, the struggles of merchants to
make fortunes. His combination of a glittering style and warm
sympathy for the characters lifted his tales from the borders of
pornography to high art.
Saikaku was a central figure in
the renaissance of literature of the late 17th century. The name
Genroku (an era name designating the period 1688–1704) is often
used of the characteristic artistic products: paintings and
prints of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) style;
ukiyo-zōshi (“tales of the floating world”); Kabuki; jōruri, or
puppet theatre; and haiku poetry. Unlike its antecedents, this
culture prized modernity above conformity to the ancient
traditions; to be abreast of the floating world was to be
up-to-date, sharing in the latest fashions and slang, delighting
in the moment rather than in the eternal truths of Noh plays or
medieval poetry.
Another, darker side to Genroku
culture is depicted in Saikaku’s late works, with their
descriptions of the desperate expedients to which people turned
in order to pay their bills. Saikaku seldom showed much sympathy
for the prostitutes he described, but the chief dramatist of the
time, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, wrote his best plays about unhappy
women, driven by poverty into their lives as prostitutes, whose
only release from the sordid world in which they were condemned
to dwell came when they joined their lovers in double suicides.
In the world of merchants treated by Chikamatsu, a lack of
money, rather than the cosmic griefs of the Noh plays, drove men
to death with the prostitutes they loved but could not afford to
buy.
Chikamatsu wrote most of his
plays for the puppet theatre, which, in the 18th century,
enjoyed even greater popularity than Kabuki. His plays fell into
two main categories: those based, however loosely, on historical
facts or legends, and those dealing with contemporary life. The
domestic plays are rated much higher critically because they
avoid the bombast and fantastic displays of heroism that mark
the historical dramas, but the latter, adapted for the Kabuki
theatre, are superb acting vehicles.
The mainstays of the puppet
theatre were written not by Chikamatsu but by his successors;
his plays, despite their literary superiority, failed to satisfy
audiences’ craving for displays of puppet techniques and for
extreme representations of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and other
virtues of the society. The most popular puppet play (later also
adapted for Kabuki actors) was Chūshingura (1748; “The Treasury
of Loyal Retainers”; Eng. trans. Chūshingura) by Takeda Izumo
and his collaborators; the same men were responsible for half a
dozen other perennial favourites of the Japanese stage. The last
great 18th-century writer of puppet plays, Chikamatsu Hanji, was
a master of highly dramatic, if implausible, plots.
Bashō
"Haiku"
Bashō, in full Matsuo Bashō, pseudonym of Matsuo
Munefusa (b. 1644, Ueno, Iga province, Japan—d. Nov.
28, 1694, Ōsaka), the supreme Japanese haiku poet,
who greatly enriched the 17-syllable haiku form and
made it an accepted medium of artistic expression.
Interested in haiku
from an early age, Bashō at first put his literary
interests aside and entered the service of a local
feudal lord. After his lord’s death in 1666,
however, Bashō abandoned his samurai (warrior)
status to devote himself to poetry. Moving to the
capital city of Edo (now Tokyo), he gradually
acquired a reputation as a poet and critic. In 1679
he wrote his first verse in the “new style” for
which he came to be known:
On a withered
branch
A crow has
alighted:
Nightfall in
autumn.
The simple
descriptive mood evoked by this statement and the
comparison and contrast of two independent phenomena
became the hallmark of Bashō’s style. He attempted
to go beyond the stale dependence on form and
ephemeral allusions to current gossip that had been
characteristic of haiku, which in his day had
amounted to little but a popular literary pastime.
Instead he insisted that the haiku must be at once
unhackneyed and eternal. Following the Zen
philosophy he studied, Bashō attempted to compress
the meaning of the world into the simple pattern of
his poetry, disclosing hidden hopes in small things
and showing the interdependence of all objects.
In 1684 Bashō made
the first of many journeys that figure so
importantly in his work. His accounts of his travels
are prized not only for the haiku that record
various sights along the way but also for the
equally beautiful prose passages that furnish the
backgrounds. Oku no hosomichi (1694; The Narrow Road
to the Deep North), describing his visit to northern
Japan, is one of the loveliest works of Japanese
literature.
On his travels
Bashō also met local poets and competed with them in
composing the linked verse (renga), an art in which
he so excelled that some critics believe his renga
were his finest work. When Bashō began writing renga
the link between successive verses had generally
depended on a pun or play on words, but he insisted
that poets must go beyond mere verbal dexterity and
link their verses by “perfume,” “echo,” “harmony,”
and other delicately conceived criteria.
One term frequently
used to describe Bashō’s poetry is sabi, which means
the love of the old, the faded, and the unobtrusive,
a quality found in the verse
Scent of
chrysanthemums . . .
And in Nara
All the ancient
Buddhas.
Here the musty
smell of the chrysanthemums blends with the visual
image of the dusty, flaking statues in the old
capital. Living a life that was in true accord with
the gentle spirit of his poetry, Bashō maintained an
austere, simple hermitage that contrasted with the
general flamboyance of his times. On occasion he
withdrew from society altogether, retiring to
Fukagawa, site of his Bashō-an (“Cottage of the
Plantain Tree”), a simple hut from which the poet
derived his pen name. Later men, honouring both the
man and his poetry, revered him as the saint of the
haiku.
The Narrow Road to
Oku (1996), Donald Keene’s translation of Oku no
hosomichi, provides the original text and a
modern-language version by Kawabata Yasunari. The
Monkey’s Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of the
Basho School (1981), a translation by Earl Miner and
Hiroko Odagiri, presents a celebrated linked-verse
sequence in which Bashō took part, along with a
commentary.
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Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Chikamatsu
Monzaemon, original name Sugimori Nobumori (b. 1653,
Echizen [now in Fukui prefecture], Japan—d. Jan. 6,
1725, Amagasaki, Settsu province?), Japanese
playwright, widely regarded as among the greatest
dramatists of that country. He is credited with more
than 100 plays, most of which were written as jōruri
dramas, performed by puppets. He was the first
author of jōruri to write works that not only gave
the puppet operator the opportunity to display his
skill but also were of considerable literary merit.
Chikamatsu was born
into a samurai family, but his father apparently
abandoned his feudal duties sometime between 1664
and 1670, moving the family to Kyōto. While there,
Chikamatsu served a member of the court aristocracy.
The origin of his connection to the theatre is
unknown. Yotsugi Soga (1683; “The Soga Heir”), a
jōruri, is the first play that can be definitely
attributed to Chikamatsu. The following year he
wrote a Kabuki play, and by 1693 he was writing
exclusively for actors. In 1703 he reestablished an
earlier connection with the jōruri chanter Takemoto
Gidayū, and he moved in 1705 from Kyōto to Ōsaka to
be nearer to Gidayū’s puppet theatre, the
Takemoto-za. Chikamatsu remained a staff playwright
for this theatre until his death.
Chikamatsu’s works
fall into two main categories: jidaimono (historical
romances) and sewamono (domestic tragedies). Modern
critics generally prefer the latter plays because
they are more realistic and closer to European
conceptions of drama, but the historical romances
are more exciting as puppet plays. Some of
Chikamatsu’s views on the art of the puppet theatre
have been preserved in Naniwa miyage, a work written
by a friend in 1738. There Chikamatsu is reported to
have said, “Art is something that lies in the
slender margin between the real and the unreal,” and
in his own works he endeavoured accordingly to steer
between the fantasy that had been the rule in the
puppet theatre and the realism that was coming into
vogue.
The characters who
populate Chikamatsu’s domestic tragedies are
merchants, housewives, servants, criminals,
prostitutes, and all the other varieties of people
who lived in the Ōsaka of his day. Most of his
domestic tragedies were based on actual incidents,
such as double suicides of lovers. Sonezaki shinjū
(1703; The Love Suicides at Sonezaki), for example,
was written within a fortnight of the actual double
suicide on which it is based. The haste of
composition is not at all apparent even in this
first example of Chikamatsu’s double-suicide plays,
the archetype of his other domestic tragedies.
Chikamatsu’s most
popular work was Kokusenya kassen (1715; The Battles
of Coxinga), a historical melodrama based loosely on
events in the life of the Chinese-Japanese
adventurer who attempted to restore the Ming dynasty
in China. Another celebrated work is Shinjū ten no
Amijima (1720; Double Suicide at Amijima), still
frequently performed. Despite Chikamatsu’s eminence,
however, the decline in popularity of puppet plays
has resulted in most members of the theatregoing
public being unfamiliar with his work, except in the
abridgments and considerably revised versions used
in Kabuki theatre, on film, and elsewhere. Eleven of
his best-known plays appear in Major Plays of
Chikamatsu (1961, reissued 1990), translated by
Donald Keene. Mainly historical plays are in
Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays (2001), translated by C.
Andrew Gerstle.
Donald Keene
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Late Tokugawa period (c. 1770–1867)
The literature of the late Tokugawa period is generally inferior
to earlier achievements, especially those of the Genroku
masters. Authentic new voices, however, were heard in
traditional poetic forms. Later neo-Man’yōshū poets such as
Ryōkan, Ōkuma Kotomichi, and Tachibana Akemi proved that the
tanka was not limited to descriptions of the sights of nature or
disappointed love but could express joy over fish for dinner or
wrath at political events. Some poets who felt that the tanka
did not provide ample scope for the display of such emotions
turned, as in the past, to writing poetry in Chinese. The early
19th-century poet Rai Sanyō probably wrote verse in Chinese more
skillfully than any previous Japanese.
Later Tokugawa poets also added
distinctive notes of their own to the haiku. Buson, for example,
introduced a romantic and narrative element, and Issa employed
the accents of the common people.
A great variety of fiction was
produced during the last century of the Tokugawa shogunate, but
it is commonly lumped together under the somewhat derogatory
heading of gesaku (“playful composition”). The word playful did
not necessarily refer to the subject matter but to the professed
attitude of the authors, educated men who disclaimed
responsibility for their compositions. Ueda Akinari, the last
master of fiction of the 18th century, won a high place in
literary history mainly through his brilliant style, displayed
to best advantage in Ugetsu monogatari (1776; Tales of Moonlight
and Rain), a collection of supernatural tales. The gesaku
writers, however, did not follow Akinari in his perfectionist
attention to style and construction; instead, many of them
produced books of almost formless gossip, substituting the
raciness of daily speech for the elegance of the classical
language and relying heavily on the copious illustrations for
success with the public.
The gesaku writers were
professionals who made their living by sale of their books. They
aimed at as wide a public as possible, and, when a book was
successful, it was usually followed by as many sequels as the
public would accept. The most popular of the comic variety of
gesaku fiction was Tōkai dōchū hizakurige (1802–22; “Travels on
Foot on the Tōkaidō”; Eng. trans. Shank’s Mare), by Jippensha
Ikku, an account of the travels and comic misfortunes of two
irrepressible men from Edo along the Tōkaidō, the great highway
between Kyōto and Edo. Shunshoku umegoyomi (1832–33; “Spring
Colours: The Plum Calendar”), by Tamenaga Shunsui, is the story
of Tanjirō, a peerlessly handsome but ineffectual young man for
whose affections various women fight. The author at one point
defended himself against charges of immorality: “Even though the
women I portray may seem immoral, they are all imbued with deep
sentiments of chastity and fidelity.” It was the standard
practice of gesaku writers, no matter how frivolous their
compositions might be, to pretend that their intent was
didactic.
The yomihon (“books for
reading”—so called to distinguish them from works enjoyed mainly
for their illustrations) were much more openly moralistic.
Although they were considered to be gesaku, no less than the
most trivial books of gossip, their plots were burdened with
historical materials culled from Chinese and Japanese sources,
and the authors frequently underlined their didactic purpose.
Despite the serious intent of the yomihon, they were romances
rather than novels, and their characters, highly schematized,
include witches and fairy princesses as well as impeccably noble
gentlemen. Where they succeeded, as in a few works by Takizawa
Bakin, they are absorbing as examples of storytelling rather
than as embodiments of the principle of kanzen chōaku (“the
encouragement of virtue and the chastisement of vice”), Bakin’s
professed aim in writing fiction.
Japanese literature in general
was at one of its lowest levels at the end of the Tokugawa
period. A few tanka poets and the Kabuki dramatist Kawatake
Mokuami are the only writers of the period whose works are still
read today. It was an exhausted literature that could be revived
only by the introduction of fresh influences from abroad.
Buson
Buson, also called
Yosa Buson, original surname Taniguchi (b. 1716,
Kema, Settsu province, Japan—d. Jan. 17, 1784,
Kyōto), Japanese painter of distinction but even
more renowned as one of the great haiku poets.
Buson came of a
wealthy family but chose to leave it behind to
pursue a career in the arts. He traveled extensively
in northeastern Japan and studied haiku under
several masters, among them Hayano Hajin, whom he
eulogized in Hokuju Rōsen wo itonamu (1745; “Homage
to Hokuju Rōsen”). In 1751 he settled in Kyōto as a
professional painter, remaining there for most of
his life. He did, however, spend three years
(1754–57) in Yosa, Tango province, a region noted
for its scenic beauty. There he worked intensively
to improve his technique in both poetry and
painting. During this period he changed his surname
from Taniguchi to Yosa. Buson’s fame as a poet rose
particularly after 1772. He urged a revival of the
tradition of his great predecessor Matsuo Bashō but
never reached the level of humanistic understanding
attained by Bashō. Buson’s poetry, perhaps
reflecting his interest in painting, is ornate and
sensuous, rich in visual detail. “Use the colloquial
language to transcend colloquialism,” he urged, and
he declared that in haiku “one must talk poetry.” To
Buson this required not only an accurate ear and an
experienced eye but also intimacy with Chinese and
Japanese classics. Buson’s interest in Chinese
poetry is especially evident in three long poems
that are irregular in form. His experimental poems
have been called “Chinese poems in Japanese,” and
two of them contain passages in Chinese.
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Ueda Akinari
Ueda Akinari,
pseudonym of Ueda Senjiro (b. July 25, 1734, Ōsaka,
Japan—d. Aug. 8, 1809, Kyōto), preeminent writer and
poet of late 18th-century Japan, best known for his
tales of the supernatural.
Ueda was adopted
into the family of an oil and paper merchant and
brought up with great kindness. A childhood attack
of smallpox left him with some paralysis in his
hands, and it may have caused his blindness late in
life. Ueda became interested in classical Japanese
and Chinese literature around the age of 25. He had
started to write ukiyo-zōshi, “tales of the floating
world,” the popular fiction of the day, when in 1771
the business he had managed since his stepfather’s
death (1761) burned down. He took that as his
opportunity to devote his full time to writing. In
1776, after eight years of work, he produced Ugetsu
monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain). These
ghost tales showed a concern for literary style not
present in most popular fiction of the time, in
which the text was usually simply an accompaniment
for the illustrations that formed the main part of
the books.
A student of
history and philology, Ueda called for a revival of
classical literature and language reform. His late
years were spent in poverty-stricken wandering. His
Harusame monogatari (1808; Tales of the Spring Rain)
is another fine story collection. Ugetsu monogatari
was the basis for the film Ugetsu (1953), directed
by Mizoguchi Kenji.
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Modern literature
Even after the
arrival of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s U.S. Navy fleet in 1853
and the gradual opening of the country to the West and its
influence, there was at first little noticeable effect on
Japanese literature. The long closure of the country and the
general sameness of Tokugawa society for decades at a time
seemed to have atrophied the imaginations of the gesaku writers.
Even the presence of curiously garbed foreigners, which should
have provoked some sort of reaction from authors searching for
new material, initially produced little effect. The gesaku
writers were oblivious to the changes in Japanese society, and
they continued to grind out minor variants on the same hackneyed
themes of the preceding 200 years.
It was only after the removal
in 1868 of the capital to Edo (renamed Tokyo) and the
declaration by the emperor Meiji that he would seek knowledge
from the entire world that the gesaku writers realized their
days of influence were numbered. They soon fell under attack
from their old enemies, the Confucian denouncers of immoral
books, and also from advocates of the new Western learning.
Although the gesaku writers responded with satirical pieces and
traditional Japanese fiction deriding the new learning, they
were helpless to resist the changes transforming the entire
society.
Introduction of Western literature
Translations from European languages of nonliterary works began
to appear soon after the Meiji Restoration. The most famous
example was the translation (1870) of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help;
it became a kind of bible for ambitious young Japanese eager to
emulate Western examples of success. The first important
translation of a European novel was Ernest Maltravers, by the
British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which appeared in 1879
under the title Karyū shunwa (“A Spring Tale of Blossoms and
Willows”). The early translations were inaccurate, and the
translators unceremoniously deleted any passages that they could
not understand readily or that they feared might be
unintelligible to Japanese readers. They also felt obliged to
reassure readers that, despite the foreign names of the
characters, the emotions they felt were exactly the same as
those of a Japanese.
It did not take long, however,
for the translators to discover that European literature
possessed qualities never found in the Japanese writings of the
past. The literary scholar Tsubouchi Shōyō was led by his
readings in European fiction and criticism to reject didacticism
as a legitimate purpose of fiction; he insisted instead on its
artistic values. His critical essay Shōsetsu shinzui (1885–86;
The Essence of the Novel) greatly influenced the writing of
subsequent fiction not only because of its emphasis on realism
as opposed to didacticism but because Shōyō, a member of the
samurai class, expressed the conviction that novels, hitherto
despised by the intellectuals as mere entertainments for women
and children, were worthy of even a scholar’s attention.
The first modern Japanese novel
was Ukigumo (1887–89; “Drifting Cloud”; Eng. trans. Japan’s
First Modern Novel), by Futabatei Shimei, who was familiar with
Russian literature and contemporary Western literary criticism.
Futabatei wrote Ukigumo in the colloquial, apparently because
his readings in Russian literature had convinced him that only
the colloquial could suitably be used when describing the
writer’s own society. Despite Futabatei’s success with this
experiment, most Japanese writers continued to employ the
literary language until the end of the century. This was due, no
doubt, to their reluctance to give up the rich heritage of
traditional expression in favour of the unadorned modern tongue.
Western influences on poetry
Translations of Western poetry led to the creation of new
Japanese literary forms. The pioneer collection Shintaishi-shō
(1882; “Selection of Poems in the New Style”) contained not only
translations from English but also five original poems by the
translators in the poetic genres of the foreign examples. The
translators declared that although European poetry had greater
variety than Japanese poetry—some poems are rhymed, others
unrhymed, some are extremely long, others abrupt—it was
invariably written in the language of ordinary speech. An
insistence on modern language and the availability of many
different poetic forms were not the only lessons offered by
European poetry. The translators also made the Japanese public
aware of how much of human experience had never been treated in
the tanka or haiku forms.
Innumerable Western critics
have sarcastically commented on the Japanese proclivity for
imitating foreign literary models and on their alleged
indifference to their own traditions. It is true that without
Russian examples Futabatei could not have written Ukigumo, and
without English examples such poets as Shimazaki Tōson could not
have created modern Japanese poetry. But far from recklessly
abandoning their literary heritage, most writers were at great
pains to acquaint themselves with their traditional literature.
The outstanding novelists of the 1890s—Ozaki Kōyō, Kōda Rohan,
Higuchi Ichiyō, and Izumi Kyōka—all read Saikaku and were
noticeably influenced by him. Ichiyō’s short novel Takekurabe
(1895; Growing Up) described the children of the Yoshiwara
quarter of Edo in a realistic manner quite unlike that of the
usual stories about prostitutes and their customers, but she
used the language of Saikaku for her narration. Kyōka, though
educated partly at a Western mission school, wrote superbly in
the vein of late Tokugawa fiction; something of the distant
Japanese literary past pervaded even his writings of the 1930s,
the final years of his life.
In poetry, too, the first
products of Western influence were comically inept experiments
with rhyme and with such unpromising subjects as the principles
of sociology. Tōson’s “Akikaze no uta” (1896; “Song of the
Autumn Wind”), however, is not merely a skillful echo of
Percy
Bysshe Shelley but a true picture of a Japanese landscape; the
irregular lines of his poem tend to fall into the traditional
pattern of five and seven syllables.
A decade after the works of
English Romantic poets such as Shelley and
William Wordsworth
had influenced Japanese poetry, the translations made by Ueda
Bin of the French Parnassian and Symbolist poets made an even
more powerful impression. Ueda wrote, “The function of symbols
is to help create in the reader an emotional state similar to
that in the poet’s mind; symbols do not necessarily communicate
the same conception to everyone.” This view was borrowed from
the West, but it accorded perfectly with the qualities of the
tanka.
Because of the ambiguities of
traditional Japanese poetic expression, it was natural for a
given poem to produce different effects on different readers;
the important thing, as in Symbolist poetry, was to communicate
the poet’s mood. If the Japanese poets of the early 1900s had
been urged to avoid contamination by foreign ideas, they would
have declared that this was contrary to the spirit of an
enlightened age. But when informed that eminent foreign poets
preferred ambiguity to clarity, the Japanese responded with
double enthusiasm.
Shimazaki Tōson
Shimazaki Tōson,
pseudonym of Shimazaki Haruki (b. March 25, 1872,
Magome, Nagano prefecture, Japan—d. Aug. 22, 1943,
Ōiso, Kanagawa prefecture), Japanese poet and
novelist, whose fiction illuminated the clash of old
and new values in a Japan feverishly modernizing
itself during the period of the Meiji Restoration
(1868–1912).
Tōson was educated
in Tokyo at Meiji Gakuin, where he was also
baptized, although Christianity did not lastingly
affect either his life or his thought. In the early
1890s he began to write poetry and joined the
short-lived romantic movement of young poets and
writers, which he later described in his novel Haru
(1908; “Spring”). The first of his major novels,
Hakai (1906; The Broken Commandment), the story of a
young outcast schoolteacher’s struggle for
self-realization, has been called representative of
the naturalist school, then the vogue in Japan,
although it more clearly reflects the influence of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau than of Émile Zola. Ie
(1910–11; The Family) depicts the stresses Japan’s
modernization brought to his own family. Shinsei
(1918–19; “New Life”) narrates the unsavoury affair
of a writer with his niece in a manner that carries
the confessional principle to embarrassing excesses.
Tōson began
research in 1928 for Yoake mae (1935; “Before the
Dawn”), his greatest work and one of the
masterpieces of modern Japanese literature. This is
a story of the struggle for the Imperial Restoration
in the 1860s as mirrored in a rural community. The
tragic hero of the novel, modeled after the writer’s
own father, eventually dies an embittered death,
convinced that the cause of pure patriotism had been
betrayed by the glib modernizers of post-Restoration
Japan. A final novel, Tōhō no Mon (“Gate to the
East”), incomplete at his death, seems to invoke the
Buddhist wisdom of medieval Japan as a way out of
the impasse of the present.
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Izumi Kyōka
Izumi Kyōka,
pseudonym of Izumi Kyōtarō (b. Nov. 4, 1873,
Kanazawa, Japan—d. Sept. 7, 1939, Tokyo), prolific
Japanese writer who created a distinctive, often
supernatural fictional world.
Kyōka was born into
a family of provincial artists and artisans. He went
to Tokyo in 1890, hoping to be accepted as a
disciple of Ozaki Kōyō, the leader of the literary
scene at that time, but he was too shy to announce
his presence. The next year he summoned up the
courage to meet Kōyō and was immediately taken in as
a houseboy. He lived with Kōyō until 1894. In return
for cleaning the house and performing errands, he
was given careful instruction by Kōyō, who went over
every word in Kyōka’s manuscripts.
Kyōka’s first
successful work, “Giketsu kyōketsu” (1894; “Noble
Blood, Heroic Blood”), is melodramatic and
implausible, but the characters are so vivid that
the story was easily turned into a play. “Yakō
junsa” (1895; “Night Patrolman”) and “Gekashitsu”
(1895; “Surgical Room”) are short works that depict
persons who are so moved by their convictions that
they perform unbelievable acts of self-sacrifice.
Kōya hijiri (1900; “The Holy Man of Mount Kōya”)
gives full play to Kyōka’s fascination with the
weird and the mysterious.
In 1899 Kyōka met a
geisha whom he later married. In Yushima mōde (1899;
“Worship at Yushima”), one of his most popular
works, he described the world of the geisha, which
reappeared in important works such as Onna keizu
(1907; “A Woman’s Pedigree”) and “Uta andon” (1910;
“A Song Under Lanterns”; Eng. trans. “The Song of
the Troubadour”). Kyōka remained aloof from
contemporary changes in literary taste, writing for
devoted followers and refusing to abandon his highly
individual art. Japanese Gothic Tales (1996),
translated into English by Charles Shirō Inouye,
contains four of Kyōka’s stories together with an
extended discussion of his art.
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Revitalization of the tanka and haiku
Even the traditional forms, tanka and haiku, though moribund in
1868, took on new life, thanks largely to the efforts of Masaoka
Shiki, a distinguished late 19th-century poet in both forms but
of even greater importance as a critic. Yosano Akiko, Ishikawa
Takuboku, and Saitō Mokichi were probably the most successful
practitioners of the new tanka. Akiko’s collection Midaregami
(1901; Tangled Hair) stirred female readers especially, not only
because of its lyrical beauty but because Akiko herself seemed
to be proclaiming a new age of romantic love. Takuboku emerged
in the course of his short life (he died in 1912 at age 26) as
perhaps the most popular tanka poet of all time. His verses are
filled with strikingly individual expressions of his
intransigent personality. Saitō Mokichi combined an absorption
with Man’yōshū stylistics and a professional competence in
psychiatry. Despite the austere nature of his poetry, he was
recognized for many years as the leading tanka poet. In haiku,
Takahama Kyoshi built up a following of poets strong enough to
withstand the attacks of critics who declared that the form was
inadequate to deal with the problems of modern life. Kyoshi
himself eventually decided that the function of haiku was the
traditional one of an intuitive apprehension of the beauties of
nature, but other haiku poets employed the medium to express
entirely unconventional themes.
Most tanka and haiku poets
continued to use the classical language, probably because its
relative concision permitted them to impart greater content to
their verses than modern Japanese permits. Poets of the “new
style,” therefore, were readier to employ the colloquial.
Hagiwara Sakutarō, generally considered the finest Japanese poet
of the 20th century, brilliantly exploited the musical and
expressive possibilities of the modern tongue. Other poets, such
as Horiguchi Daigaku, devoted themselves to translations of
European poetry, achieving results so compelling in Japanese
that these translations are considered to form an important part
of the modern poetry of Japan.
Masaoka
Shiki
Masaoka Shiki,
pseudonym of Masaoka Tsunenori (b. Oct. 14, 1867,
Matsuyama, Japan—d. Sept. 19, 1902, Tokyo), poet,
essayist, and critic who revived the haiku and
tanka, traditional Japanese poetic forms.
Masaoka was born
into a samurai (warrior) family. He went to Tokyo to
study in 1883 and began to write poetry in 1885.
After studying at Tokyo Imperial University from
1890 to 1892, he joined a publishing firm. During
his brief service with the Japanese army as a
correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War, the
tuberculosis he had first contracted in 1889 became
worse, and from that time on he was almost
constantly an invalid. Nevertheless, he maintained a
prominent position in the literary world, and his
views on poetry and aesthetics, as well as his own
poems, appeared regularly.
As early as 1892
Masaoka began to feel that a new literary spirit was
needed to free poetry from centuries-old rules
prescribing topics and vocabulary. In an essay
entitled “Jojibun” (“Narration”), which appeared in
the newspaper Nihon in 1900, Masaoka introduced the
word shasei (“delineation from nature”) to describe
his theory. He believed that a poet should present
things as they really are and should write in the
language of contemporary speech. Through his
articles Masaoka also stimulated renewed interest in
the 8th-century poetry anthology Man’yō-shū
(“Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”) and in the
haiku poet Buson. Masaoka frequently wrote of his
illness, both in his poems and in such essays as
“Byōshō rokushaku” (1902; “The Six-foot Sickbed”),
but his work is remarkably detached and almost
entirely lacking in self-pity.
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Takahama Kyoshi
Takahama Kyoshi, (b. Feb. 22, 1874, Matsuyama,
Japan—d. April 8, 1959, Kamakura), haiku poet, a
major figure in the development of haiku literature
in modern Japan.
Through his friend
Kawahigashi Hekigotō, he became acquainted with the
renowned poet Masaoka Shiki and began to write haiku
poems. In 1898 Takahama became the editor of
Hototogisu, a magazine of haiku that was started by
Shiki. He and Kawahigashi, the two outstanding
disciples of Shiki, became pitted against each other
after Shiki’s death.
Kawahigashi became
the leader of a new style of haiku, one that
disregarded the traditional pattern. For a time
Takahama was preoccupied with writing novels in a
realistic, sketchlike style, but he eventually
returned to haiku. Writing in Hototogisu, he opposed
Kawahigashi’s new movement and advocated realism in
haiku, stressing that haiku poets should contemplate
nature as it is. He published these beliefs in
Susumu beki haiku no michi (1918; “The Proper
Direction for Haiku”). His numerous collections of
poetry have been compiled into the two-volume
anthology Takahama Kyoshi zenhaiku shū (1980; “The
Complete Haiku Poems of Takahama Kyoshi”). Takahama
also wrote several novels, including Haikaishi
(1909; “Haiku Poet”).
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Hagiwara Sakutarō
Hagiwara Sakutarō,
(b. Nov. 1, 1886, Maebashi, Japan—d. May 11, 1942,
Tokyo), poet who is considered the father of free
verse in Japanese.
The son of a
prosperous physician, Hagiwara enjoyed a sheltered
and indulged childhood. At age 15 he discovered
literature and began writing classical verse, which
he submitted to literary magazines. He refused to
become a doctor, which precluded him from inheriting
the hospital his father had founded. He left college
without graduating, turned to studying mandolin and
guitar, and spent time in Tokyo. At 18 he had become
infatuated with a woman who would later appear
throughout his work as “Elena,” but her family
frowned on Hagiwara’s failure to finish college and
secure regular employment, and she eventually
married a doctor. Hagiwara’s arranged marriage in
1919 produced two daughters, and he moved
permanently with his family to Tokyo in 1925. His
wife deserted him four years later.
Hagiwara’s style
developed slowly; support from his father throughout
his life relieved him of financial worries and
enabled him to work at his own pace. By 1913
Hagiwara had abandoned classical metrical schemes
for free verse. In 1916 he cofounded a poetry
magazine with the poet Murō Saisei, and a year later
Hagiwara self-published his first book of poetry,
Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon), which
irreversibly transformed modern Japanese verse.
Hagiwara contended that “psychic terror”
distinguished his work, and the first poem of the
collection describes the nightmare of being buried
alive. In his second poetry collection, Aoneko
(1923; “Blue Cat”), Hagiwara presented himself as a
cheerless and tormented man thirsting for affection.
These two collections established his reputation as
a poet. His difficult style was not immediately
understood, although one of the leaders of the
Japanese literary world, the novelist Mori Ōgai, was
impressed by his mode of expression.
Hagiwara’s last
collection of free verse, Hyōtō (1934; “Isle of
Ice”), explores his sense of having never been
accepted; its first poem concludes, “Your home shall
be no place!” Prose poems appear in Shukumei (1939;
“Fate”), which critiques the smothering of
individuality by group life. Hagiwara also published
a collection of aphorisms, Atarashiki yokujo (1922;
“Fresh Passions”), which expresses his sensual
philosophy, and several collections of essays.
Hagiwara focused on
intimate glooms, never on the charms of nature or
the transience of beauty. With its reliance on
self-exploration and its confession of vulgar
secrets using the vernacular, Hagiwara’s poetry
represented a revolutionary trend in 20th-century
Japanese literature.
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The novel between 1905 and 1941
The dominant stream in Japanese fiction since the publication of
Hakai (1906; The Broken Commandment), by Shimazaki Tōson, and
Futon (1907; The Quilt), by Tayama Katai, has been naturalism.
Although the movement was originally inspired by the works of
the 19th-century French novelist
Émile Zola and other European
naturalists, it quickly took on a distinctively Japanese
colouring, rejecting (as a Confucian scholar might have rejected
gesaku fiction) carefully developed plots or stylistic beauty in
favour of absolute verisimilitude in the author’s confessions or
in the author’s minute descriptions of the lives of unimportant
people hemmed in by circumstances beyond their control.
By general consent, however,
the two outstanding novelists of the early 20th century were men
who stood outside the naturalist movement, Mori Ōgai and Natsume
Sōseki. Ōgai began as a writer of partly autobiographical
fiction with strong overtones of German Romantic writings.
Midway in his career he shifted to historical novels that are
virtually devoid of fictional elements but are given literary
distinction by their concise and masculine style. Sōseki gained
fame with humorous novels such as Botchan (1906; “The Young
Master”; Eng. trans. Botchan), a fictionalized account of his
experiences as a teacher in a provincial town. Botchan enjoyed
phenomenal popularity after it first appeared. It is the most
approachable of Sōseki’s novels, and the Japanese found pleasure
in identifying themselves with the impetuous, reckless, yet
basically decent hero. The coloration of Sōseki’s subsequent
novels became progressively darker, but even the most gloomy
have maintained their reputation among Japanese readers, who
take it for granted that Sōseki is the greatest of the modern
Japanese novelists and who find echoes in their own lives of the
mental suffering he described. Sōseki wrote mainly about
intellectuals living in a Japan that had been brutally thrust
into the 20th century. His best-known novel, Kokoro (1914; “The
Heart”; Eng. trans. Kokoro), revolves around another familiar
situation in his novels, two men in love with the same woman.
His last novel, Meian (1916; Light and Darkness), though
unfinished, has been acclaimed by some as his masterpiece.
An amazing burst of creative
activity occurred in the decade following the end of the
Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Probably never before in the history
of Japanese literature were so many important writers working at
once. Three novelists who first emerged into prominence at this
time were Nagai Kafū, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and
Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke. Nagai Kafū was infatuated with French culture and
described with contempt the meretricious surface of modern
Japan. In later years, however, though still alienated from the
Japanese present, he showed nostalgia for the Japan of his
youth, and his most appealing works contain evocations of the
traces of an old and genuine Japan that survived in the parody
of Western culture that was Tokyo.
Tanizaki’s novels, notably Tade
kuu mushi (1929; Some Prefer Nettles), often presented a
conflict between traditional Japanese and Western-inspired ways.
In his early works he also proclaimed a preference for the West.
Tanizaki’s views changed after he moved to the Kansai region in
the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, and his
subsequent writings traced his gradual accommodation with the
old culture of Japan that he had previously rejected. Between
1939 and 1941 Tanizaki published the first of his three
modern-language versions of Genji monogatari. He willingly
sacrificed years of his career to this task because of his
unbounded admiration for the supreme work of Japanese
literature.
Tanizaki’s longest novel,
Sasameyuki (1943–48; The Makioka Sisters), evoked with evident
nostalgia the Japan of the 1930s, when people were preoccupied
not with the prosecution of a war but with marriage
arrangements, visits to sites famous for their cherry blossoms,
or the cultural differences between Tokyo and Ōsaka. Two postwar
novels by Tanizaki enjoyed great popularity, Kagi (1956; The
Key), the account of a professor’s determination to have his
fill of sex with his wife before impotence overtakes him, and
Fūten rōjin nikki (1961–62; Diary of a Mad Old Man), a work in a
comic vein that describes a very old man’s infatuation with his
daughter-in-law. No reader would turn to Tanizaki for wisdom as
to how to lead his life, nor for a penetrating analysis of
society, but his works not only provide the pleasures of
well-told stories but also convey the special phenomenon of
adulation and rejection of the West that played so prominent a
part in the Japanese culture of the 20th century.
Akutagawa established his
reputation as a brilliant storyteller who transformed materials
found in old Japanese collections by infusing them with modern
psychology. No writer enjoyed a greater following in his time,
but Akutagawa found less and less satisfaction in his reworkings
of existing tales and turned eventually to writing about himself
in a sometimes harrowing manner. His suicide in 1927 shocked the
entire Japanese literary world. The exact cause is unknown—he
wrote of a “vague malaise”—but perhaps Akutagawa felt incapable
either of sublimating his personal experiences into fiction or
else of giving them the accents of the proletarian literature
movement, then at its height.
The proletarian literature
movement in Japan, as in various other countries, attempted to
use literature as a weapon to effect reform and even revolution
in response to social injustices. Although the movement gained
virtual control of the Japanese literary world in the late
1920s, governmental repression beginning in 1928 eventually
destroyed it. The chief proletarian writer, Kobayashi Takiji,
was tortured to death by the police in 1933. Few of the writings
produced by the movement are of literary worth, but the concern
for classes of people who had formerly been neglected by
Japanese writers gave these works their special significance.
Other writers of the period,
convinced that the essential function of literature was artistic
and not propagandistic, formed schools such as the
“Neosensualists” led by Yokomitsu Riichi and Kawabata Yasunari.
Yokomitsu’s politics eventually moved far to the right, and the
promulgation of these views, rather than his efforts to achieve
modernism, coloured his later writings. But Kawabata’s works
(for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968) are
still admired for their lyricism and intuitive construction.
Though Kawabata began as a modernist and experimented with
modernist techniques to the end of his career, he is better
known for his portraits of women, whether the geisha of Yukiguni
(1948; Snow Country) or the different women whose lives are
concerned with the tea ceremony in Sembazuru (1952; Thousand
Cranes).
Japanese critics have divided
the fiction of the prewar period into schools, each usually
consisting of one leading writer and his disciples. Probably the
most influential author was Shiga Naoya. His characteristic
literary form was the “I novel” (watakushi shōsetsu), a work
that treats autobiographical materials with stylistic beauty and
great intelligence but is not remarkable for invention. Shiga’s
commanding presence caused the I novel to be more respected by
most critics than outright works of fiction, but the writings of
his disciples are sometimes hardly more than pages torn from a
diary, of interest only if the reader is already devoted to the
author.
Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke
Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke, pseudonym Chōkōdō Shujin or Gaki (b.
March 1, 1892, Tokyo, Japan—d. July 24, 1927,
Tokyo), prolific Japanese writer known especially
for his stories based on events in the Japanese past
and for his stylistic virtuosity.
As a boy Akutagawa
was sickly and hypersensitive, but he excelled at
school and was a voracious reader. He began his
literary career while attending Tokyo Imperial
University (now the University of Tokyo), where he
studied English literature from 1913 to 1916.
The publication in
1915 of his short story “Rashōmon” led to his
introduction to Natsume Sōseki, the outstanding
Japanese novelist of the day. With Sōseki’s
encouragement he began to write a series of stories
derived largely from 12th- and 13th-century
collections of Japanese tales but retold in the
light of modern psychology and in a highly
individual style. He ranged wide in his choice of
material, drawing inspiration from such disparate
sources as China, Japan’s 16th-century Christian
community in Nagasaki, and European contacts with
19th-century Japan. Many of his stories have a
feverish intensity that is well-suited to their
often macabre themes.
In 1922 he turned
toward autobiographical fiction, but Akutagawa’s
stories of modern life lack the exotic and sometimes
lurid glow of the older tales, perhaps accounting
for their comparative unpopularity. His last
important work, “Kappa” (1927), although a satiric
fable about elflike creatures (kappa), is written in
the mirthless vein of his last period and reflects
his depressed state at the time. His suicide came as
a shock to the literary world.
Akutagawa is one of
the most widely translated of all Japanese writers,
and a number of his stories have been made into
films. The film classic Rashomon (1950), directed by
Kurosawa Akira, is based on a combination of
Akutagawa’s story by that title and another story of
his, “Yabu no naka” (1921; “In a Grove”).
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Kawabata Yasunari
Kawabata Yasunari,
(b. June 11, 1899, Ōsaka, Japan—d. April 16, 1972,
Zushi), Japanese novelist who won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1968. His melancholic lyricism
echoes an ancient Japanese literary tradition in the
modern idiom.
The sense of
loneliness and preoccupation with death that
permeates much of Kawabata’s mature writing possibly
derives from the loneliness of his childhood (he was
orphaned early and lost all near relatives while
still in his youth). He graduated from Tokyo
Imperial University in 1924 and made his entrance
into the literary world with the
semiautobiographical Izu no odoriko (1926; The Izu
Dancer). It appeared in the journal Bungei jidai
(“The Artistic Age”), which he founded with the
writer Yokomitsu Riichi; this journal became the
organ of the Neosensualist group with which Kawabata
was early associated.
This school is said
to have derived much of its aesthetic from European
literary currents such as Dadaism and Expressionism.
Their influence on Kawabata’s novels may be seen in
the abrupt transitions between separate brief,
lyrical episodes; in imagery that is frequently
startling in its mixture of incongruous impressions;
and in his juxtaposition of the beautiful and the
ugly. These same qualities, however, are present in
Japanese prose of the 17th century and in the renga
(linked verse) of the 15th century. It is to the
latter that Kawabata’s fiction seemed to draw nearer
in later years.
There is a seeming
formlessness about much of Kawabata’s writing that
is reminiscent of the fluid composition of renga.
His best-known novel, Yukiguni (1948; Snow Country),
the story of a forlorn country geisha, was begun in
1935. After several different endings were
discarded, it was completed 12 years later, although
the final version did not appear until 1948.
Sembazuru (Thousand Cranes), a series of episodes
centred on the tea ceremony, was begun in 1949 and
never completed. These and Yama no oto (1949–54; The
Sound of the Mountain) are considered to be his best
novels. The later book focuses on the comfort an old
man who cannot chide his own children gets from his
daughter-in-law.
When Kawabata
accepted the Nobel Prize, he said that in his work
he tried to beautify death and to seek harmony among
man, nature, and emptiness. He committed suicide
after the death of his friend Mishima Yukio.
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The postwar novel
The aggressive wars waged by the Japanese militarists in the
1930s inhibited literary production. Censorship became
increasingly stringent, and writers were expected to promote the
war effort. In 1941–45, as World War II was being fought in the
Pacific, little worthwhile literature appeared. Tanizaki began
serial publication of The Makioka Sisters in 1943, but
publication was halted by official order, and the completed work
appeared only after the war. The immediate postwar years
signaled an extraordinary period of activity, both by the older
generation and by new writers. The period is vividly described
in the writings of Dazai Osamu, notably in Shayō (1947; The
Setting Sun). Other writers described the horrors of the war
years; perhaps the most powerful was Nobi (1951; Fires on the
Plain) by Ōoka Shōhei, which described defeated Japanese
soldiers in the Philippine jungles. The atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 also inspired much poetry and
prose, though it was often too close to the events to achieve
artistic integrity. A few works, especially Kuroi ame (1966;
Black Rain) by Ibuse Masuji, succeeded in suggesting the
ultimately indescribable horror of the disaster.
The Japan of the immediate
postwar period and the prosperous Japan of the 1950s and 1960s
provided the background for most of the works of Mishima Yukio,
an exceptionally brilliant and versatile novelist and playwright
who became the first Japanese writer generally known abroad.
Mishima’s best-known works include Kinkaku-ji (1956; The Temple
of the Golden Pavilion), a psychological study, based on an
actual incident, of a young monk who burned a famous
architectural masterpiece; and Hōjō no umi (1965–70; The Sea of
Fertility), a tetralogy, set in Japan, that covers the period
from about 1912 to the 1960s. Abe Kōbō was notable among modern
writers in that he managed, sometimes by resorting to
avant-garde techniques, to transcend the particular condition of
being Japanese and to create universal myths of suffering
humanity in such a work as Suna no onna (1962; The Woman in the
Dunes). The unique nature of traditional Japanese culture, which
made it infertile ground for Christianity in the 16th century,
was treated in several moving novels by Endō Shūsaku, notably
Chimmoku (1966; Silence). The novels of Kita Morio were
characterized by an attractive streak of humour that provided a
welcome contrast to the prevailingly dark tonality of other
contemporary Japanese novels. His Nire-ke no hitobito (1963–64;
The House of Nire), though based on the careers of his
grandfather and his father (the poet Saitō Mokichi), was saved
by its humour from becoming no more than an I novel.
Ōe Kenzaburō achieved fame
early in life, winning a major literary award, the Akutagawa
Prize, in 1958, when he was 23. His early works were mainly set
in the remote valley on the island of Shikoku where he was born
and raised, and he returned to this setting in some later works,
finding in it an essential key to his life. In 1994 he received
the Nobel Prize for Literature, the second awarded to a
Japanese. Although his style is complicated and difficult, he
was able to move readers, particularly through his accounts of
life with his brain-damaged son. Unlike most authors of the
preceding generation, Ōe devoted his efforts also to political
concerns, bringing him popularity especially with university
students and others committed to political and social reform.
For more than 20 years after he
won the Akutagawa Prize, Ōe was considered to be the youngest
writer of importance, and critics lamented the dearth of
promising new writers. However, a new generation, represented by
Nakagami Kenji and Murakami Haruki, found favour not only in
Japan but abroad, where their novels were translated and
admired. Nakagami, the son of an unwed mother, was born into the
burakumin (Japan’s traditional underclass). His background,
which he did not attempt to hide, gave his novels an intensity,
a deliberate coarseness, and sometimes a fury not to be found in
the works of his contemporaries, most of them from prosperous
families. Murakami’s novels, though looked down on by Ōe because
he perceived them to lack intellectual concerns, drew critical
acclaim and sold remarkably well. This popularity was due in
part to his familiarity with American popular culture, an
integral part of the lives of young people all over the world,
but also to his skill as a highly accomplished storyteller, able
to mix real and unreal events convincingly.
Mishima Yukio
Mishima Yukio,
pseudonym of Hiraoka Kimitake (b. Jan. 14, 1925,
Tokyo—d. Nov. 25, 1970, Tokyo), prolific writer who
is regarded by many critics as the most important
Japanese novelist of the 20th century.
Mishima was the son
of a high civil servant and attended the
aristocratic Peers School in Tokyo. During World War
II, having failed to qualify physically for military
service, he worked in a Tokyo factory and after the
war studied law at the University of Tokyo. In
1948–49 he worked in the banking division of the
Japanese Ministry of Finance. His first novel, Kamen
no kokuhaku (1949; Confessions of a Mask), is a
partly autobiographical work that describes with
exceptional stylistic brilliance a homosexual who
must mask his abnormal sexual preferences from the
society around him. The novel gained Mishima
immediate acclaim, and he began to devote his full
energies to writing.
He followed up his
initial success with several novels whose main
characters are tormented by various physical or
psychological problems or who are obsessed by
unattainable ideals that make everyday happiness
impossible for them. Among these works are Ai no
kawaki (1950; Thirst for Love), Kinjiki (1954;
Forbidden Colours), and Shiosai (1954; The Sound of
Waves). Kinkaku-ji (1956; The Temple of the Golden
Pavilion) is the story of a troubled young acolyte
at a Buddhist temple who burns down the famous
building because he himself cannot attain to its
beauty. Utage no ato (1960; After the Banquet)
explores the twin themes of middle-aged love and
corruption in Japanese politics. In addition to
novels, short stories, and essays, Mishima also
wrote plays in the form of the Japanese Nō drama,
producing reworked and modernized versions of the
traditional stories. His plays include Sado kōshaku
fujin (1965; Madame de Sade) and Kindai nōgaku shu
(1956; Five Modern Nōh Plays).
Mishima’s last
work, Hōjō no umi (1965–70; The Sea of Fertility),
is a four-volume epic that is regarded by many as
his most lasting achievement. Its four separate
novels, Haru no yuki (Spring Snow), Homma (Runaway
Horses), Akatsuki no tera (The Temple of Dawn), and
Tennin gosui (The Decay of the Angel), are set in
Japan and cover the period from about 1912 to the
1960s. Each of them depicts a different
reincarnation of the same being: as a young
aristocrat in 1912, as a political fanatic in the
1930s, as a Thai princess before and after World War
II, and as an evil young orphan in the 1960s. These
books effectively communicate Mishima’s own
increasing obsession with blood, death, and suicide,
his interest in self-destructive personalities, and
his rejection of the sterility of modern life.
Mishima’s novels
are typically Japanese in their sensuous and
imaginative appreciation of natural detail, but
their solid and competent plots, their probing
psychological analysis, and a certain understated
humour helped make them widely read in other
countries.
The short story
“Yukoku” (“Patriotism”) from the collection Death in
Midsummer, and Other Stories (1966) revealed
Mishima’s own political views and proved prophetic
of his own end. The story describes, with obvious
admiration, a young army officer who commits
seppuku, or ritual disembowelment, to demonstrate
his loyalty to the Japanese emperor. Mishima was
deeply attracted to the austere patriotism and
martial spirit of Japan’s past, which he contrasted
unfavourably with the materialistic, Westernized
people and the prosperous society of Japan in the
postwar era. Mishima himself was torn between these
differing values. Although he maintained an
essentially Western life-style in his private life
and had a vast knowledge of Western culture, he
raged against Japan’s imitation of the West. He
diligently developed the age-old Japanese arts of
karate and kendo and formed a controversial private
army of about 80 students, the Tate no Kai (Shield
Society), with the idea of preserving the Japanese
martial spirit and helping protect the emperor (the
symbol of Japanese culture) in case of an uprising
by the left or a Communist attack.
On Nov. 25, 1970,
after having that day delivered the final
installment of The Sea of Fertility to his
publisher, Mishima and four Shield Society followers
seized control of the commanding general’s office at
a military headquarters near downtown Tokyo. He gave
a 10-minute speech from a balcony to a thousand
assembled servicemen in which he urged them to
overthrow Japan’s post-World War II constitution,
which forbids war and Japanese rearmament. The
soldiers’ response was unsympathetic, and Mishima
then committed seppuku in the traditional manner,
disemboweling himself with his sword, followed by
decapitation at the hands of a follower. This
shocking event aroused much speculation as to
Mishima’s motives, and regret that his death had
robbed the world of such a gifted writer.
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Abe Kōbō
Abe Kōbō, pseudonym
of Abe Kimifusa (b. March 7, 1924, Tokyo, Japan—d.
Jan. 22, 1993, Tokyo), Japanese novelist and
playwright noted for his use of bizarre and
allegorical situations to underline the isolation of
the individual.
He grew up in
Mukden (now Shenyang), in Manchuria, where his
father, a physician, taught at the medical college.
In middle school his strongest subject was
mathematics, but he was also interested in
collecting insects and had begun to immerse himself
in the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lewis
Carroll. Abe went to Japan in 1941 to attend high
school. In 1943 he began studying medicine at the
Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of
Tokyo), but he returned to Manchuria in 1945 without
obtaining a degree. Repatriated to Japan in 1946, he
was graduated in medicine in 1948 on condition that
he never practice. By this time, however, he was
deeply involved in literary activity. He published
in 1947 at his own expense Mumei shishū (“Poems of
an Unknown”), and in the following year his novel
Owarishi michi no shirube ni (“The Road Sign at the
End of the Street”), published commercially, was
well received. In 1951 his short novel Kabe (“The
Wall”) was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, establishing
his reputation. In 1955 Abe wrote his first plays,
beginning a long association with the theatre.
Since the early
1950s, Abe had been a member of the Japanese
Communist Party, but his visit to eastern Europe in
1956 proved disillusioning. He attempted to leave
the party in 1958 when the Soviet army invaded
Hungary, but he was refused, only to be expelled in
1962. In that same year Suna no onna (The Woman in
the Dunes), Abe’s most popular (and probably his
best) novel, was published to general acclaim. It
was made into an internationally successful film in
1964.
From the mid-1960s
his works were regularly translated on both sides of
the Iron Curtain. They include Daiyon kampyōki
(1959; Inter Ice Age 4), Tanin no kao (1964; The
Face of Another), Moetsukita chizu (1967; The Ruined
Map), Hako otoko (1973; The Box Man), Mikkai (1977;
Secret Rendezvous), Hakobune Sakura-maru (1984; The
Ark Sakura), and Kangarū nōto (1991; Kangaroo
Notebook). Beyond the Curve, a translation into
English of short stories drawn from various periods
of his career, was published in 1991.
Abe formed the Abe
Kōbō Studio, a theatrical company, in 1973. He
regularly wrote one or two plays a year for the
company and served as its director. The best-known
of his plays, Tomodachi (1967; Friends), was
performed in the United States and France. In
theatre, as well as in the novel, he stood for the
avant-garde and experimental. Several of his most
successful plays appear in Three Plays by Kōbō Abe
(1993), translated into English by Donald Keene.
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Ōe Kenzaburō
Ōe Kenzaburō, (b. Jan. 31, 1935, Ehime prefecture,
Shikoku, Japan), Japanese novelist whose works
express the disillusionment and rebellion of his
post-World War II generation. He was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994.
Ōe came from a
family of wealthy landowners, who lost most of their
property with the occupation-imposed land reform
following the war. He entered the University of
Tokyo in 1954, graduating in 1959, and the
brilliance of his writing while he was still a
student caused him to be hailed the most promising
young writer since Mishima Yukio.
Ōe first attracted
attention on the literary scene with Shisha no ogori
(1957; Lavish Are the Dead), published in the
magazine Bungakukai. His literary output was,
however, uneven. His first novel, Memushiri kouchi
(1958; Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids), was highly
praised, and he won a major literary award, the
Akutagawa Prize, for Shiiku (1958; The Catch). But
his second novel, Warera no jidai (1959; “Our Age”),
was poorly received, as his contemporaries felt that
Ōe was becoming increasingly preoccupied with social
and political criticism.
Ōe became deeply
involved in the politics of the New Left. The murder
in 1960 of Chairman Asanuma Inejirō of the Japanese
Socialist Party by a right-wing youth inspired Ōe to
write two short stories in 1961, “Sebuntin”
(“Seventeen”) and “Seiji shōnen shisu,” the latter
of which drew heavy criticism from right-wing
organizations.
Married in 1960, Ōe
entered a further stage of development in his
writing when his son was born in 1963 with an
abnormality of the skull. This event inspired his
finest novel, Kojinteki-na taiken (1964; A Personal
Matter), a darkly humorous account of a new father’s
struggle to accept the birth of his brain-damaged
child. A visit to Hiroshima resulted in the work
Hiroshima nōto (1965; “Hiroshima Notes”), which
deals with the survivors of the atomic bombing of
that city. In the early 1970s Ōe’s writing,
particularly his essays, reflected a growing concern
for power politics in the nuclear age and with
questions involving the Third World.
Ōe continued to
investigate the problems of characters who feel
alienated from establishment conformity and the
materialism of postwar Japan’s consumer-oriented
society. Among his later works were the novel Man’en
gannen no futtōbōru (1967; The Silent Cry); a
collection of short fiction entitled Warera no kyōki
o ikinobiru michi o oshieyo (1969; Teach Us to
Outgrow Our Madness); and the novels Pinchi rannā
chōsho (1976; The Pinch Runner Memorandum) and
Dōjidai gēmu (1979; “Coeval Games”). The novel
Atarashii hito yo meza meyo (1983; “Awake, New Man”)
is distinguished by a highly sophisticated literary
technique and by the author’s frankness in personal
confession; it concerns the growing up of a mentally
retarded boy and the tension and anxiety he arouses
in his family.
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Murakami Haruki
Murakami Haruki,
(b. Jan. 12, 1949, Kyōto, Japan), the most widely
translated Japanese novelist of his generation.
Murakami’s first
novel, Kaze no uta o kike (1979; Hear the Wind
Sing), won a prize for best fiction by a new writer.
From the start his writing was characterized by
images and events that the author himself found
difficult to explain but which seemed to come from
the inner recesses of his memory. Some argued that
this ambiguity, far from being off-putting, was one
reason for his popularity with readers, especially
young ones, who were bored with the self-confessions
that formed the mainstream of contemporary Japanese
literature. His perceived lack of a political or
intellectual stance irritated “serious” authors
(such as Ōe Kenzaburō), who dismissed his early
writings as being no more than entertainment.
Murakami’s first
major international success came with Hitsuji o
meguru bōken (1982; A Wild Sheep Chase), a novel
that acquires an eerie quality from the mysterious
sheep that comes to possess the narrator’s friend,
known as “the Rat.” The narrator and the Rat
reappeared in Murakami’s next important novel, Sekai
no owari to hādoboirudo wandārando (1985;
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), a
fantasy that was successful with the public and won
the prestigious Tanizaki Prize. Murakami adopted a
more straightforward style for the coming-of-age
novel Noruwei no mori (1987; Norwegian Wood), which
sold millions of copies in Japan and firmly
established him as a literary celebrity.
Disaffected by the
social climate in Japan and by his growing fame,
Murakami sojourned in Europe for several years in
the late 1980s, and in 1991 he moved to the United
States. While teaching at Princeton University
(1991–93) and Tufts University (1993–95), Murakami
wrote one of his most ambitious novels,
Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (1994–95; The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle). The narrative represents a departure
from his usual themes: it is devoted in part to
depicting Japanese militarism on the Asian continent
as a nightmare.
In 1995 Murakami
returned to Japan, prompted by the Kōbe earthquake
and by the sarin gas attack carried out by the AUM
Shinrikyo religious sect on a Tokyo subway. The two
deadly events subsequently served as inspiration for
his work. Andāguraundo (1997; Underground) is a
nonfiction account of the subway attack, and Kami no
kodomo-tachi wa mina odoru (2000; After the Quake)
is a collection of six short stories that explores
the psychological effects of the earthquake on
residents of Japan.
The novel
Supūtoniku no koibito (1999; Sputnik Sweetheart)
probes the nature of love as it tells the story of
the disappearance of Sumire, a young novelist.
Subsequent novels include Umibe no Kafuka (2002;
Kafka on the Shore) and Afutā dāku (2004; After
Dark). 1Q84 (2009), its title a reference to George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), shifts between
two characters as they navigate an alternate reality
of their own making; the book’s dystopian themes
range from the September 11 attacks to vigilante
justice.
The short-story
collections The Elephant Vanishes (1993) and Blind
Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006) translate Murakami’s
stories into English. His memoir, Hashiru koto ni
tsuite kataru toki ni boku no kataru koto (2007;
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running),
centres on his love for marathon running. An
experienced translator of American literature,
Murakami also published editions in Japanese of
works by Raymond Carver, Paul Theroux, Truman
Capote, Ursula K. Le Guin, and J.D. Salinger.
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The modern drama
The modern Japanese theatre had its origins in the translations
and adaptations of Western plays at the end of the 19th century,
when the public was still too much under the influence of Kabuki
to appreciate plays without music or dance. The development of
modern drama was also impeded, paradoxically, by the fact that
Kabuki (unlike traditional fiction or poetry) was in good shape
at the opening of the modern era. The plays of Kawatake Mokuami,
composed both before and after the Meiji Restoration, made for
exciting theatre, and no urgent need was felt for reform. Change
did occur, but both traditional puppet and Kabuki theatres
managed to survive the era of rapid modernization. Tsubouchi
Shōyō, who translated the works of
William Shakespeare, wrote
several successful plays based on Japanese historical events
that combined the structure and characterization of European
plays with the acting techniques of Kabuki. It was left to
novelists such as Mori Ōgai to attempt to create a theatre in
the tradition of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen rather than
that of Kabuki.
The development of modern drama
was otherwise hampered by the introduction of motion pictures,
which had a much greater appeal for the public. The successful
playwrights of the 1910s and 1920s, such as Okamoto Kidō, wrote
works that, although the products of a modern mind, preserved
the traditional stage language and historical themes. Mayama
Seika wrote both traditional and modern works, but even in his
most traditional, such as his version of the classic Kabuki play
cycle Chūshingura, the dramatist’s stance was that of a modern
man.
The first truly modern
playwright was probably Kishida Kunio, whose plays, with their
contemporary settings, do not depend for their effects on
elaborate scenery, music, or histrionics. Kishida was
handicapped by the scarcity of actors capable of performing
roles that gave them little opportunity for a grandiose display
of emotions. Not until after World War II were modern dramas
that were capable of moving an international audience written
and competently staged. The plays of Mishima Yukio and Abe Kōbo
were the first Japanese plays to be successfully performed
abroad in many languages.
Modern poetry
At the beginning of the 20th century it was predicted that the
traditional forms of Japanese poetry would be abandoned by poets
who craved freedom in their choice of subjects and vocabulary
and who did not wish their poems to be squeezed into 31 or 17
syllables. Masaoka Shiki conjectured, drawing on mathematics,
that sooner or later it would become impossible to compose a new
poem in the traditional forms. But the Japanese continued to
find the short poem congenial: a momentary perception that would
be diluted if expanded into several stanzas can be captured
perfectly in a haiku, and, if the traditional forms are too
short to narrate the poet’s emotions in detail, overtones can
hint at depths beyond the words, just as traditional paintings
suggest rather than state.
By no means did all poets
“return” to traditional forms. Hagiwara Sakutarō wrote only free
verse, and this was true of most other modern poets. Some poets
were strongly affected by modern European and American poetry;
during the postwar period a school of poetry that took its name
from
T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land echoed
Eliot at his
gloomiest. Some poets used poetry for patriotic purposes during
the Pacific campaigns of World War II or to express political
views during the turbulent days following the defeat in 1945.
But most Japanese who wrote modern poetry in the second half of
the 20th century were closer to their counterparts in other
countries than ever before, sharing their anxiety over the same
crises and feeling the same intense need for love.
Donald Keene
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