Writers were frequently harbingers of individuation, in Japan as elsewhere. Even in traditional society, individuation had never been entirely absent. Authors, together with artists, saints, schol-'ars, and military heroes, were customarily regarded as exceptional beings deserving a certain independence of thought and life. Yet, in Tokugawa times at any rate, most writers had a storyteller’s and not a romantic poet’s view of the individual. They saw him as but one element in a wider mosaic of nature and society.
Unassuming individuation of this traditional type marked the work of two early and mid-Meiji writers: Masaoka Shiki (18671902) and Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-96). Shiki was of samurai parentage. He made his living as a journalist but came to be ranked with Basho, Buson, and Issa as one of the four great masters of the classical haiku tradition.
Hibari ha to Kaeru ha to uta no Giron kana
Izakaya no Kenka mushidasu Oborozuki
On how to sing.
The skylark school and the frog school Are arguing.
The tavern quarrel Persists
Under a hazy moon.
Higuchi, a woman writer of great talent, was fated to live in poverty and to die early, but not before she had given a perceptive, lyrical account (“Takekurabe" [Growing Up]) of the capital’s famous Yoshiwara amusement quarter, near which she ran a small shop for a while. In keeping with its subject, her book is in true Edo style—episodic, and painting a genre picture of an entire floating-world district and its way of life, as seen through the eyes of a group of adolescents. In other works, notably the short stories “Nigorie” (Muddy Bay) and “Jusan’ya” (The Thirteenth
Night), Higuchi was more directly concerned with the circumstances and sufferings of a single individual; had she lived longer, this is a theme she might well have come to exploit.
By the end of the Meiji period, and as a direct result of European influence, the fate of the individual was beginning to be almost a literary commonplace. In Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) Japan had already produced one master of a new literary form: the modern novel. Soseki eventually held a professorship at Tokyo Imperial University, which he later left to work for the Asahi newspaper, and he was in the forefront of the literary renaissance. He wrote many novels, which were short, well contrived, and reflective. His preoccupation was the role of the individual in society, and while his earlier books have a light, satirical tone, he became increasingly pessimistic about individuals achieving any real happiness. In short, with Soseki the process of individuation had gone far enough to be frightening.
Soseki’s only peer in the late Meiji literary world was the novelist and short-story writer, Mori Ogai (1862-1922). Mori was an army surgeon, and so resembled Soseki in being a member of the new professional upper middle class, with good opportunities to travel and study abroad. He was an extremely proficient translator, especially from German, and his own original writings, acclaimed in their own time and since, are polished compositions in a psychological-realist style which he did much to make popular. Mori saw modernization as an awkward, but on the whole promising, necessity. In this he was at one with most of the age’s intelligentsia. Alienation was a thing of the future, perhaps first revealed in the blacker moods of Natsume Soseki.
Soseki and Mori, each in his own way, wrote the sort of “naturalistic” novel which has dominated modern Japanese fiction. Though the term “naturalism” has by now been so overworked as to be virtually useless as an aid to appreciation, when it was first invented around the turn of the century it did signify an important and definite break with the past. Late Tokugawa habits of writing prose fiction either as light satirical sketches or as moralistic tracts continued well into the Meiji period. Denying the validity of both these approaches, naturalism stood for an emphasis on reality which was completely serious in intent and which expressed the whole range of human emotions, noble or otherwise. The new view was pioneered by the renowned critic Tsubouchi Shdyo, and by the novelist Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909). Both these men used their excellent knowledge of European literatures (primarily French, Russian, and English) to condemn prevailing Japanese vogues. In Europe the nineteenth century produced a maturing of the novel as an exploration of human personality. This made it the West’s major literary form, and ensured that before long it would retrieve among the Japanese the standing it once had in the Heian period.
As elsewhere, concentration on realism in Japan was linked with the use of unvarnished prose; the Japanese naturalists cannot be acclaimed as polished stylists, though they did establish a solid and worthwhile convention of writing novels in the colloquial. Japanese writers diverged most markedly from their European counterparts in their relative lack of objective concern with society. Reality for them was primarily what happened to them, however trivial. As a result, though unadulterated naturalism did not last very long as a literary movement, it set a persistent trend not only for writing in everyday speech but also in the autobiographical, confessional style of what is commonly called the “I-novel.” Fiction was downgraded along with the fine language, and loosely structured emotional subjectivity has been the main ingredient of many a Japanese novel since 1900. In part this was a baffled, semi-Romantic, and “internal emigrant” reaction to what some regarded as the unwholesome speed of modernization, coupled with the pressures of kokutai. It is possible also to detect overtones of the ancient traditions of journal (nikki) and miscellany (zuihitsu) writing.
At its worst, the “I-novel” is vapid and unartistic, but only at its worst. In fact, Japanese culture owes a great debt to its early exponents of naturalism and to a galaxy of later writers like Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943), Nagai Kafu (1879-1959), Shiga Naoya (18831971), Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965), and Akutagawa Ryuno-suke (1892-1927). Between them, these and lesser talents have produced a great body of literature, which inevitably varies in quality but is indisputably modern, and undeniably Japanese. Moreover, in a society shot through with Confucian disdain for the novel and its begetter, they have succeeded in asserting the artistic integrity of the one and the social respectability of the other. Most important of all, however, their efforts bear witness to the vehemence and versatility of Japan’s modernization, which alfected all areas of life and all sections of the population in a thoroughgoing, and often painfully bewildering, fashion.
World History
