# Japanese Literature/Chapter 5

V. JAPANESE LITERATURE UNDER WESTERN INFLUENCE
The first Europeans to visit Japan were some Portuguese adventurers who reached one of the outlying islands in 1542. Seven years later St. Francis Xavier introduced Christianity to the country with considerable success, and for almost a hundred years from the time of the first Portuguese visitors, the Japanese engaged in trade and other relations with Europeans, including Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch and English. Converts to Christianity were made even among important members of the military aristocracy, and some Japanese dignitaries went on embassies to Europe and America, chiefly in connection with religious matters. But increasingly repressive measures against Christianity were adopted by the government, beginning in the late sixteenth century, in an effort to wipe out what was considered to be a threat to the security of the country. The government feared that Christian converts might divide political loyalties, and might even facilitate the invasion of the country by a European power. The example of the Philippines, conquered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century after intense missionary activity, served as a warning to the Japanese, and by 1639 both the Spaniards and Portuguese had been forbidden to visit the country. Of the other nations which had traded with Japan, England had left voluntarily, finding the business unprofitable. The Dutch remained and were the only Europeans allowed in Japan until the country was opened to foreigners in the middle of the nineteenth century.
During the time that the Catholic missionaries were most active in Japan, at the end of the sixteenth century, they printed ​a number of books there, both to teach religion to their converts and for their own use as manuals of instruction in the Japanese language. The only important European literary work of a non-religious character which was translated into Japanese at this time was Aesop’s Fables, although some scholars believe that at least the general outlines of the story of the Odyssey were transmitted to their Japanese acquaintances by the foreigners. This, they say, is evidenced by the curious set of stories dating from the seventeenth century about a man named Yuriwaka, whose name itself they derive in part from that of Ulysses. These stories tell of the adventures of a man who, after scoring a great triumph abroad, is abandoned on the way back to Japan at a lonely island by his wicked companions. With much difficulty the man Yuriwaka returns to his country, to find his wife the subject of the unwanted attention of various suitors. He arrives just at the time of the New Year festivities, and as part of the amusements of the day several men attempt to bend the iron bow that Yuriwaka left behind, but all fail. Whereupon Yuriwaka takes up the bow and bends it to good effect, shooting the most troublesome of his wife’s suitors. He is thereupon recognized by members of the court, reunited to his wife and granted high rank.
The resemblances in the story to the Odyssey are evident, and some of the other episodes show similarity to parts of Camoens’ epic The Lusiads. However, certain Japanese scholars have adduced arguments to show that the elements in the story are indigenous, and that resemblances to European works are mere coincidence. If the story of Yuriwaka was indeed a case of European influence on Japanese literature, it was the first, and remained the only important one for 150 years, for with the prohibition of Christianity and the virtual annihilation of the converts in 1637–8, Japanese lost all contact with European literature.
​From time to time in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries European works of an obviously practical nature, such as texts of astronomy or botany, were admitted to the country, either in the original languages, or in Chinese translations made by the Jesuits in Peking. But it was not until the close of the eighteenth century that any interest was shown in European writings of a more literary nature. It was at this time that the Japanese first began to concern themselves with what they might learn from the few Dutch traders who were kept virtual prisoners on an island off Nagasaki, and a number of scholars went there to find out what they could about the West. One of them heard this story:
   “One of the giants went out and the opening was shut as before. The other giant caught the two men and stared at them for a long time. Suddenly he seized one of them and began to eat him from the head downwards. The other man looked on in terror and astonishment as though he were watching demons in a nightmare. He could not think how he might escape. While the giant was devouring half of the first man, the other covered his face and could not bear to look. The giant then fell into a drunken sleep, snoring like thunder.
It is interesting to speculate how this bit of the Odyssey happened to reach the ears of a traveller to Nagasaki in 1774. Perhaps it was a final remnant of the material which had been used for the Yuriwaka stories, or perhaps it came more directly from one of the Dutch traders. It was in any case the type of European literature most likely to interest the Japanese; one of the first translations of a work of European belles-lettres was the Record of Wanderings “written by an Englishman, Robinson Crusoe”.
For the most part, however, the enthusiasts for European learning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries confined themselves to books of science and general information, if only because a Dutch novel or play would have been far too difficult for any but the most skilful interpreters, while a Dutch mathematical book could be deciphered by anyone familiar with the general principles of that science.
From about 1860 there were Japanese translations of European ​novels and poetry, often crude, but very popular. Most of the translations were from English, the language preferred by Japanese once they had discovered that the Dutch which they had so painfully mastered in the days before the opening of the ports was of little use in dealing with English and American traders. The choice of books for translation was dictated in part by the necessity of finding works which were readily intelligible to Japanese readers. Thus, a novel by Jules Verne, for all its fantasy, was not difficult for Japanese to understand, for it required only the confidence in the progress of science which they quickly acquired. On the other hand, a novel by Dickens such as Bleak House would have been virtually unintelligible because the complex society which it described could not be demonstrated to Japanese readers like the workings of a locomotive, nor did it represent a European version of problems with which they were familiar at home.
The first important monument in the creation of a new Japanese literature in which the lessons from the West were incorporated came with The Essence of the Novel written by Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), published in 1885. Tsubouchi, deploring the poor quality of the literature of his time, sought to analyse what was wrong with it, and how it might be rectified. For the first time, he said, improved methods of printing had made it possible for there to be an almost unlimited circulation of books, and this had initially resulted in the publication of huge numbers of clumsy imitations of Bakin and other early nineteenth-century writers, for want of any new ideas. Such works conformed on the surface to the doctrine that literature is for the encouragement of virtue, and contained various pseudo-moral elements, but they were in reality of an extremely low order. Whose fault was this, asked Tsubouchi, and answered that it resulted not only from ​the inferiority of the writers but also from the lack of discrimination on the part of readers. He wrote, “It has long been the custom in our country to consider the novel as a device for education, and its chief function is frequently proclaimed to be the encouragement or chastisement of morals, but in practice the only books which are read are horror stories or works of pornography.” According to Tsubouchi the way out of the literary difficulties in which Japan found herself was to adopt the Western view of literature and abandon the old concept of literature as an instrument of didactic intent. He had heard an American scholar speak in Tokyo about the meaning of art, and subscribed to his views. According to him, art fulfilled its functions to the extent that it was completely decorative, for was not something which entertained people and elevated their tastes an essential thing to society?
Tsubouchi’s arguments approach the familiar belief in art for art’s sake, but he was not content with merely urging Japanese to abandon their old views on the function of literature; he called for new forms which were better suited to the complexity of modern man than verses in 31 syllables or tales of wild adventure. He declared, “How extremely uncomplex a thing Japanese verse of all sorts appears when compared with Western poetry … When I say this I may be slandering the poetry of the Imperial Land as being very crude, but with the general development of culture and the advance of our knowledge by several stages, our emotions cannot help changing and becoming more complex. The men of old were simple and they had straightforward emotions. Thus they could vent their full feelings with just 31 syllables, but we cannot completely express all we feel with so few words.”
Tsubouchi’s remarks have been quoted at some length because of their great historical significance. He was one of the first ​Japanese to have had a good understanding of European literature, and, incidentally, made a complete translation of Shakespeare’s works which remains the standard one in Japan. He was perhaps the key figure in the development of literary taste in the country, attempting as he did to create a Japanese literature which would bear comparison with that produced in England and in other parts of Europe. He sought to find examples in the earlier Japanese literature of parallels to the things which he praised in European literature, and so to give a native tradition for writers to follow. Thus, he rejected the plays of Chikamatsu which had fantastic elements, in favour of the domestic tragedies which could more easily be compared with European plays. Realism and complexity were the two things he advocated in all forms of literature.
The great problem for Japanese who sought to write in the new style was also touched on by Tsubouchi. Western literature in the late nineteenth century was dominated by the expression of individual impressions and beliefs. A century before, Rousseau had begun his confessions with the assertion that regardless of whether he was better or worse than other men he was certainly different, and this attitude coloured the entire romantic movement. In Japan there existed no such tradition of individualism, at least not since the civil wars of the twelfth century and afterwards had led to the formation of a rigid feudal society, where the claims of the individual were sternly denied. When we read Lady Murasaki’s diary, written in the early eleventh century, we feel that she is a complex living being, whom we can understand, but even the most personal writings of the eight centuries that followed her time seldom arouse any such feeling. One has the impression always that people are acting within a situation which has implicit in it certain regular reactions. At first these reactions have to be ​learned as a part of everyday etiquette, but later they become the spontaneous expression of feelings. Thus, in taking leave of one’s host after a party one had to apologize for one’s bad behaviour, and thus when viewing the falling cherry-blossoms or foam on the water, one had to utter exclamations on the brevity of life. A pattern of behaviour was developed which all but cancelled out individual preferences. This gives a certain ornamental flatness to the people of history and fiction. We are perhaps most aware of this quality in the plays, where there is no real attempt at characterization. There is nothing in the personalities of the heroes of Chikamatsu’s plays to distinguish them one from the other. Given the different set of circumstances, they would behave in exactly the same manner as their counterparts in other plays. In poetry too the prevailing note is one of impersonality, rather than that of the romantic cry from the poet’s heart. The reluctance to use the word “I” may remind us of our own Augustan poets, but the subjects of the poetry, unlike the general truths of the Essay on Man, are brief flashes of perception and would seem to us to require a greater personal touch. In the long centuries between Lady Murasaki’s day and the late nineteenth century, there is seldom a voice that speaks to us with a truly personal note.
The blame for this situation may be laid on the feudal society and its dictates, but it should not be imagined, however, that Japanese writers were impatiently waiting for a liberation so that they might express their pent-up individual sentiments. As Tsubouchi indicated, complex emotional reactions could be developed only along with other Western accomplishments. And though it was relatively easy for poets to write stanzas of irregular lengths instead of the tanka or for novelists to turn from the style of their predecessors in favour of works closely approaching European realism, the expression or creation of ​individuality remained, and I think still remains, the great problem. Again and again the European reader is likely to ask of a character in a novel or a play, “What is he really thinking?” Only gradually does one come to the conclusion that he is really thinking just what he says, or if he is silent, just what the conventional response would be. This tends in a way to make modern Japanese writing harder for us to understand than the older varieties. That is, when we read a book describing the court life of the eleventh century, we enter a completely unfamiliar world and are prepared to accept all its curiosities. Did the ladies in The Tale of Genji blacken their teeth to attain greater elegance? Very well, we say, they did. But when we read a novel in which the characters worry about vitamin shortages, spend their Sunday afternoons taking photos with a miniature camera, and model their coiffure on that of their favourite Hollywood star, we do not expect to find emotional blanks behind the characters, and when we do it is most disconcerting. Thus, in Tanizaki’s novel The Thin Snow (1946–9), where the central theme is the finding of a husband for a young lady, we are at no point told what her reactions are to the search, what she thinks of her different suitors, or even of the man she is finally to marry. We expect at least to find hints of Freudian repression or some other literary device which belongs to the same world as vitamin shortages. The submissive and inarticulate Japanese lady seems altogether remote.
If Tsubouchi’s Essence of the Novel did not lead to any general outburst of individual emotions, it did encourage the development of types of fiction previously unknown in Japan. European realism, as found in the numerous translations of mid-Victorian novelists and, to a lesser extent, certain Russian writers, led Japanese to turn from the ponderous historical ​romances or the fantastic stories which Tsubouchi so deplored to accounts of contemporary life. The first important novel to follow Tsubouchi’s essay was The Drifting Cloud (1887–9) by Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909), a work which is often considered the pioneer novel of the new literary movement. This is the story of a young man, a member of the emancipated intelligentsia, who leaves his job in the Civil Service to live in the country in his uncle’s house. He is ineffectual and irresolute, earning the scorn of his aunt, a woman of peasant disposition, and eventually of his cousin, with whom he is in love. The cousin finally marries another man, but the unhappy hero is still unable to arouse enough energy to do anything. The Drifting Cloud can scarcely be said to boast a plot, but when compared with the other novels which were being written in its day, its importance can quickly be realized. Here was a leading character who, far from possessing the ability to quell demons, like the heroes of most of Bakin’s novels, is thoroughly mediocre in every way. Sometimes he arouses our pity, but seldom our real sympathy. Foreign influence, particularly the writings of Turgenev, was important in Futabatei’s work. This he shows not only in his manner of telling the story, but in the language he uses. Novels written in Japan during previous centuries were couched for the most part in the literary language, an artificial, sometimes highly ornamented style. Futabatei’s readings in Turgenev and other European writers convinced him that the language of books must be the same as that which is used in speech. The Drifting Cloud is the first novel to have been written under this principle, and it was of great importance, both in its subject-matter and style. With few exceptions all subsequent novelists abandoned both the traditional types of subject and the traditionally employed language.
The quantity of literature produced during the Meiji era ​(1868–1912) was vast. Much of it is no longer of any real interest, but this is not surprising, for neither is much of the literature produced in England during the same period. Some of it, particularly the novels and poetry written in the first flush of enthusiasm for Western ways, is distinctly comic today, as for example this poem translated by Sansom:
O Liberty, Ah Liberty, Liberty O! Liberty, we two are plighted until the world ends. And who shall part us?. Yet in this world there are clouds that hide the moon and winds that destroy the blossoms. Man is not master of his fate. It is a long tale to tell But once upon a time There were men who wished To give the people Liberty And set up a republican government. To that end. …
But it is really unfair to deride such poems or the translation of The Bride of Lammermoor entitled “A Spring Breeze Love Story”. They were products of the dilemma of Japanese writers faced at the same time with an avalanche of new ideas and new ways of expressing them, and with the problem of how much, if anything, to retain of the old ideas and ways. The man who wrote the ode to liberty, with its utterly foreign ideas, nevertheless used the Japanese images of the clouds that hide the moon and the winds that destroy the blossoms. Similarly, even in novels written after The Drifting Cloud there were usually passages or themes or solutions which seem false to the new medium, although they are true to Japan.
The conflict between old and new forms of expression is ​apparent in the writings of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), often considered as the most important novelist of the period. His works are tranches de la vie in the naturalistic manner of late nineteenth-century European literature, by which he was much influenced. However, Natsume’s naturalism did not lead him to the portrayal of the lower depths of society, as frequently in European works. He preferred instead to treat the day-to-day experiences of quite ordinary people, usually of the middle class. Sometimes Natsume describes moments when the lives of such people are touched by dramatic events, but he was especially interested in the quiet routine of daily living. Natsume’s works still delight Japanese, largely because of his beautiful style, but a Western reader may find the oriental calm achieved by Natsume to be at times insufficiently engrossing.
The novel of the Meiji era which I believe has the greatest interest for the Western reader of today is The Broken Commandment (1906) by Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943). This is the story of a young man who is a member of the eta or pariah class. Although discrimination against members of this class has long been prohibited by law, feeling is still rather strong among Japanese on the subject, and fifty years ago it must have been far more intense. The young man of the novel is commanded by his father never under any circumstances to reveal to others that he is an eta, and he manages in fact to conceal it from even his closest friends during the time that he is at school, and later, when he becomes a teacher. But he cannot help showing his sympathy for the eta in spite of all his efforts to keep the vow ​he made to his father. When an eta is thrown out of the inn where Ushimatsu, the hero, lodges, he immediately moves, even though he knows that this action may arouse suspicion. Again, when an eta boy at the school can find no one else with whom to play tennis, Ushimatsu joins with him. But it is especially in the interest he shows towards the writings of an eta who has become a celebrated champion of the class that Ushimatsu, in his own eyes at least, reveals his identity. He accordingly in a moment of fright sells all the books he has by the eta author and denies to others that he has any special interest in him. Later, when this author visits the town, Ushimatsu sees him secretly. He longs to tell him that he too is an eta, but, remembering his father’s commandment, controls himself. It becomes increasingly difficult for him to hide his anxiety and depression from his friends, who almost push him to the point of revealing his secret. Then, quite by chance, the director of the school, who is unfriendly to Ushimatsu, learns that the young man is an eta. The fact spreads among the teachers of the school, and finally to the pupils just at the moment when Ushimatsu decides that he must break his vow to his father. The effect is beautifully managed, the two currents meeting at the moment when Ushimatsu makes his supreme effort and tells the truth. What can the ending of the novel be, we wonder, as we approach the last few pages with no solution in sight. It comes, a pure deus ex machina. The eta who was driven from Ushimatsu’s inn at the outset of the novel reappears with an offer of a job on a ranch in Texas, and Ushimatsu accepts, setting off with the young lady who has remained faithful to him in spite of the awful truth of his background. The ending vitiates the story for us, but it was perhaps the only possible one for Japan. I think it likely that in a European novel of the same date, it would be far ​more usual that the hero, offered the choice of a comfortable job in Texas or badly paid work as a battler for eta rights in Japan, would have chosen the latter. In this the Japanese novel is realistic as European works are not.
The Broken Commandment is an example of one important result of European influence of Japanese literature, the increasing interest in social problems. On the whole Japanese poetry remained true to the old spirit, in spite of the innovations in the forms, but other branches of literature came increasingly to serve as vehicles for new thought. When we look at lists of European novels translated in the early years of Meiji, we are struck and perhaps by the preponderance of political novels, such as those of Disraeli or Bulwer Lytton, and in the work written under European influence this political element is equally conspicuous. The realism of such writers as Zola was, initially at least, not of great interest to the Japanese because many of the subjects which Zola treated were the most common themes of their own literature, and the realism with which he shocked Europe was quite matter-of-fact to the Japanese. The real challenge for them lay in the field of political and social writing, something quite new in their fiction. The Broken Commandment attempted to discuss the problem of the eta in such a way as to arouse sympathy for those unfortunate people, but always within the limits of an interesting story. Other attempts at social questions were usually more crudely done.
The concern with social problems showed itself most clearly in the adaptations of European works. For example, A Fool’s Love (1925) by Tanizaki Junichirō seems to have been based on Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. It tells of a man who falls in love with a waitress and lives with her for a time. Her essential coarseness often repels him, but he is so fascinated by her that even when she indulges in some particularly offensive ​vulgarities he can find ways to excuse her to himself. Eventually he discovers that she is unfaithful to him, attempts to break away but cannot. The novel ends with his abject surrender to her. He agrees that she can have whatever male friends she chooses, can live as she pleases, and need only remain as his wife. In Maugham’s novel the emphasis was on the sensitive young man and his struggles to discover some way of surmounting a passion which completely possessed him. In Tanizaki’s version of what is essentially the same story, the emphasis is rather on the terrible results of a fondness for Western things. What attracts the hero to the waitress is first of all her European features, which make him think of Mary Pickford’s, and her curiously un-Japanese manners. When he asks her if she would like to go to the films, she replies in Mildred’s words, “I don’t mind if I do,” instead of with the usual polite protestations. The hero is captivated by her unusual behaviour and encourages her to be modern—that is, European. This accentuates her naturally wayward inclinations. At the end of the novel, we find them married, living in a Western-style house, and his wife’s new friends are European men.
Tanizaki’s novel thus represents a rather subtle return to the didactic works so scorned by Tsubouchi. Of Human Bondage does not, as far as I am aware, seek to impart any moral lesson, but contents itself with describing a hopeless love-affair and its eventual resolution. But in Tanizaki the hero is condemned for his adulation of the West. He is represented as being ashamed of his shortness, dark complexion, protruding teeth—all typically Japanese features. He feels it somehow an honour even to be insulted by his European-looking mistress, and the thought that he possesses her fills him with pride, even when he sees her coarsely made up, and looking for all the world ​like a Eurasian prostitute. Undoubtedly a feeling of racial inferiority existed and still exists in Japan, and Tanizaki’s novel was an attempt to combat it, rather than a simple description. His characters, when compared with those in Of Human Bondage, lack complexity and depth, but this is true, as I have indicated, of almost all Japanese literary personages.
Problems of another sort were treated by writers of the so-called proletarian literature, who flourished especially in the 1920’s. The most famous work of this school of writing was The Crab-Canning Boat (1929), by Kobayashi Takiji (1903–33). This is the account of a voyage to the coast of Kamchatka by a small combination fishing and canning boat fleet. There is very little plot, and no attempt at characterization, in The Crab-Canning Boat, but the descriptions of the conditions under which the men live are extremely vivid. Among the crew are some students, who are unaccustomed both to the disagreeable work and to the uncouth sailors among whom they live. The officers and petty officers of the ship are fiendish and take sadistic delight in inflicting punishment on the crew, especially the students. The company which sends them out is represented as an organization of monsters. When, then, the ship comes in contact with a party of charming Soviet subjects, and a Japanese-speaking Chinese communicated the glad tidings of Marxism, it spreads with powerful effect among the crew.
If the Communist propaganda in such works as The Crab-Canning Boat seems excessively crude, it should be remembered that it was about the same time that in America such works as Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935) were written. This play features a scene in which a young man asks for bread and is given a copy of the Communist Manifesto which, he is told, is as necessary for his soul. Indeed, the similarities between almost any aspect of Japanese literature produced between 1900 ​and 1941 with works produced at the same time in Europe and America are such that to give a full account of the trends in Japanese literature during the period would necessitate an equally long study of the European trends to which they are intimately connected. This is not to say that Japanese literature lost its individuality, but it now assumed the shape of local or regional variations on the main stream of modern literature, and not, as earlier, of an entirely independent tradition. This was particularly true of the novels, somewhat less true of poetry where, in spite of vigorous new movements which followed on the heels of European avant-garde experiments, the traditional forms continued to exert a powerful attraction for writers. In the field of the drama, European methods were most frequently employed, even when the subjects were taken from medieval Japanese history.
The older genres of Japanese literature were not abandoned, however. The diary, for example, came back into its own as a popular literary medium with the publication of a series of war diaries by Hino Ashihei, which reflect the day-to-day life of a soldier during the so-called China Incidents in the 30’s. The popularity of these works was such that no Japanese soldier or sailor would have dreamt of being without his diary, if only to record that it rained, or that he got up at six o’clock. But the diary was also used in the 30’s for impressionistic reflections, as it was in earlier days. An example of this use of the diary is Hori Tatsuo’s The Wind Rises (1938–9), a sensitive, poetic account of the death of his wife by a young writer. The diary form is typically Japanese, but there is more than one suggestion of Gide’s Symphonie Pastorale in the method of narration. The work indeed represents a blending of native and foreign forms seldom so successfully achieved.
In the writings of the early Meiji period there was often ​little to suggest that the author was aware of the Japanese literary traditions, and only inadvertently, as it were, does he betray in his use of imagery or in his descriptions the non-European aspects of his writings. But some writers continued deliberately to use the traditional styles, even when the subjects were dictated by the new tastes, and other writers who had at first gained celebrity for their works in the modern vein turned back to the old classics for inspiration. After Tanizaki had written A Fool’s Love, with its condemnation of the mania for Western things, he himself began to show in his works a more active interest in traditional writing. This tendency culminated in 1938–41 with the publication of his modern-language translation of The Tale of Genji. During this period he began also to plan the writing of a novel which would bear the same relation to the present time as The Tale of Genji did to that of Lady Murasaki. But with the advent of war in 1941 and the adoption of increasingly repressive measures by the Japanese Government in an effort to eliminate all traces of what they considered to be decadent culture, The Tale of Genji itself fell into disfavour, and Tanizaki’s projected novel had to be put aside.
During the war itself little literature of importance was published and the production after the war at first promised to be extremely sickly. In the terrible years of 1946 and 1947, when most of the people were forced to devote their entire energies to the one question of staying alive, there was little interest shown in literary production. Certain left-wing writers who had been imprisoned or exiled returned to write memoirs, and their books, together with translations of foreign works, especially American, took up a large part of the booksellers’ lists. But of genuine literary production there was very little. Pornographic novels, detective stories, and other types of escapist ​literature began to appear, reflecting the low standard of the tastes of the reading public. One magazine publisher I know of, in order to sell his monthly, was forced to put a nude figure on the cover of each issue, and to disguise even the serious stories with titles of a vaguely indecent nature.
This phase of post-war fiction was succeeded by that of the war memoirs, not as in this country by famous generals and admirals revealing how it all happened, for most of the top-ranking Japanese officers were dead or imprisoned, but by ordinary soldiers. Some of them had been captured by the Americans and wrote of their experiences as prisoners. Others, and these were more interesting, told of the return of the conquerors of South-East Asia to the cold, miserable Japan of 1945. One of the best of these books was by a woman, Hayashi Fumiko (1904–51), and like an earlier novel by Futabatei Shimei was entitled The Drifting Cloud (1951), this being a familiar Japanese symbol for a person with no aims or occupation. The book tells of a young woman who goes to Indo-China to serve as a typist with the Japanese army of occupation. After years of austerity life in Japan, the luxury and luxuriance of Indo-China dazzles her, and under these exotic influences she turns from a mousy little typist to a femme fatale. In a small town in the hills behind Saigon she has a tempestuous love-affair with one of the Japanese army employees. The intensity of their love is perhaps increased by their feeling that, since Japan was fated to lose the war, they must exhaust the possibility of happiness which each moment gave them. When the war does end and they are repatriated, everything in Japan seems mean and ugly. Their love is killed by the drab surroundings and the difficulty of earning a living. The man returns for a time to his family and the woman has an affair with an American soldier. The days pass monotonously and ​meaninglessly, without pleasure and without hope of better. And it is always raining.
I can think of few gloomier books than The Drifting Cloud. As an evocation of the Japan of 1945–7 it was extremely successful, and in its tone it sometimes suggests the Japanese medieval accounts of the sorrows of this world. But such a book is too close to the facts which inspired it to permit any real literary quality.
Above the mass of Japanese post-war literature, with its cheap pornography and its masochistic recollections, stands one work to which I have several times referred already, Tanizaki’s The Thin Snow. In Japan it has been acclaimed as a masterpiece, and perhaps it is one, of a kind, but to a Western reader it never quite comes off, although at its best it approaches greatness. As far as I am aware, Tanizaki has not divulged the theory which he was following when he wrote this work, but if one compares his monumental trilogy with, say, Jules Romains’ Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté, one can see his methods quite clearly. Romains, in attempting to portray a whole society, rather than one or two individuals, declared his dissatisfaction with the usual methods employed in long novels—having an entirely unlikely number of events happening to the hero or perhaps to one or two families. He instead preferred to take a large number of people, some of whom will never know each other in the course of his work, because only in this way could a great variety of experiences be naturally furnished. Tanizaki’s method is the exact opposite. He takes a few people and allots to them only the number of experiences which they could normally have been expected to have in the course of five years, which means of course that there is almost no plot. The Thin Snow is as exact a recreation of life as exists in fiction, and Tanizaki, in choosing so photographic an approach, ​deliberately sacrificed all dramatic possibilities. How great a change this represented from his earlier work may be seen when we recall that his reputation was built as a writer of gruesome stories, and his middle period deals chiefly with highly theatrical monomaniacs. In The Thin Snow, Tanizaki is at pains to make everything exactly and completely true to life. His naturalism does not consist merely in the presentation of commonplace or unattractive details, although the book does contain a remarkably complete account of an attack of dysentery; Tanizaki sees to it that every dramatic moment is followed by its natural let-down, that the continuous movement of life is not interrupted by the ends of chapters. Here, then, is a true roman fleuve, a slow and turbid river of a book, which moves inevitably and meaninglessly to its close.
It is difficult to give even an outline of the plot of the novel, so rambling and diffuse is it. The central figures are four sisters, and the most important single theme is that of finding a husband for the third of these sisters. But The Thin Snow is not really a novel in which the plot is of great importance. It is an effort of memory to recreate what must have seemed to Tanizaki in 1947 to be a vanished world. Here we have a prosperous family living in the Japan of 1936–41, and Tanizaki lovingly recalls each detail of their lives, as some Roman historian might have done five years after the fall of Rome under the Barbarians. The people in the novel never go merely to a “restaurant”, but always to the “Oriental Grill” or some other specific place, and when they go to meet their friends or lovers, we are told the number of the bus that they take. At first the precision of Tanizaki’s reporting is likely to puzzle us, for accustomed as we are to the Proustian method of sounding faintly leitmotivs that must be retained in our minds until the moment of their full development, we feel sure that there must be some reason, ​for example, why Dr. Kushida is carefully described as being abrupt and short-tempered. Perhaps, we think, there will be a future moment at which the doctor’s abruptness will be the focal point of a great scene, but in so supposing we are mistaken. Tanizaki says that the doctor is abrupt because he is abrupt. When people in other novels fall ill, they are likely to die, or at least to reach the very brink of death, but in The Thin Snow people who are taken ill usually get better after a few days in bed. The effect of all this realism at the end of 1,400 pages is quite overpowering. We feel exactly as if we have lived with the family, and we are certain that we should instantly recognize any of its members if we met them again. I do not mean that we have any deep insights into the characters of the personages of the novel. Tanizaki does not claim any more knowledge of what they are really thinking than we should have had if we were living in the same house. If they smile on a sad occasion, we can infer that they do not mean it, but Tanizaki never informs us that the heroine’s heart was really breaking. In fact, we feel more strongly in this work than any other that there may be an emotional blank behind the Japanese. The author keeps nothing from us—not the brand of the toothpaste they use, nor the frequency with which they go to the lavatory—but when the lover of the fourth sister dies, a man for whom she was prepared to sacrifice everything, we have not the slightest indication of what she felt. Perhaps, we may end up by thinking, she did not feel anything at all.
The manner of The Thin Snow may not appeal to many Western readers, but we cannot fail to be impressed by the grand lines along which Tanizaki has conceived his story. It may be that Japanese literature, as exemplified by this novel, is entering a new period—one in which European influences have finally been absorbed into the native traditions, and techniques ​ivolved with which we are as yet unfamiliar. The level of accomplishment of Japanese writers can now compare with that of any country, and as there is every likelihood that it will continue to improve, it may well happen that Japan, which has produced The Tale of Genji, the Nō plays, and other works of remarkable beauty, will again add to that small body of immortal works which belong not only to herself but to the entire world.
* ↑ Translated in Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, pp. 95–6.
* ↑ Sansom, The Western World and Japan, p. 428.
* ↑ The eta are an outcast class in Japan, somewhat resembling the untouchables of India. Their traditional occupations included those of butcher, tanner, sandal-maker, etc. Although it has been forbidden since 1871 to discriminate against eta, or even to refer to them by that name, the prejudice against them still persists.