Authors of Japan: Yasunari Kawabata

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

The first, and currently only one of two, Japanese nationals to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata is one of the original so-called ‘Big Three’ of Japanese literature. For such a successful writer, the main themes that define his work can be hard to pin down. Having lived through the second half of the Meiji, the entirety of the Taisho era and the first forty years of the Showa era, and therefore through countless important historical events, Kawabata's work was generally apolitical. Even after the Second World War, apart from a few references to it happening, his work remained generally unaffected, especially when compared to his protégé, Yukio Mishima, whose life was greatly impacted by his experience of the war. Though some of his works can feel slightly dream-like and strange when taken at face value, his work generally, apart from one exception, stays away from the supernatural and surreal. The dichotomy between the modern and the traditional, though present, is far less evident than it was in the works of other writers, again, especially when compared to Mishima.

How, then, can we define Kawabata’s work? The answer might lie in his youth. Born into a well-to-do family in Osaka in 1899, Kawabata’s early life was certainly a sad one. Both of his parents passed away by the time he was four, and his sister and paternal grandparents had also died less than ten years later. With almost all of his close family gone, Kawabata was to be heartbroken once more when his engagement to Hatsuyo Ito was broken off due to unforeseen complications. This distance, therefore, both physical and emotional, that he experienced when he was younger, and the impact this distance has on people’s relationships, might be best lens with which to view Kawabata’s work. 

After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924, Kawabata worked as a journalist and was involved in literary magazines and journals such as Hiroshi Kikuchi’s Bungei Shunju and Riichi Yokomitsu’s Bungei Jidai. Kawabata’s first major success, The Dancing Girl of Izu (1926), follows a lonely and melancholic student from Tokyo who meets a group of traveling musicians and falls in love with one of them, the young girl Kaoru. Kaoru’s innocent and child-like antics bring the narrator, a stand-in for Kawabata himself, out of his melancholia and he returns to Tokyo refreshed and in higher spirits. The novel contains two themes, both of which revolve around how the narrator cures his depression. At the start of the novel, the narrator is lonely and miserable, but after his interaction with the musicians, particularly with the young Kaoru, he returns to Tokyo refreshed. It is his time with the musicians that cures his depression, thereby showing the importance, to Kawabata, of social interaction, something which he was personally lacking in his youth. It is worth stressing that the student leaves Tokyo, a huge sprawling industrial city, for Shimoda in the far more rural land of the Izu Peninsula. This leads back to a theme common in the writings of almost every Japanese writer of the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras; the constant dichotomy of the modern and the traditional. Does swapping the smoke and factories of Tokyo for the cool sea breeze and mountains of Izu parallel the misery of the narrator and the youthful innocent of Kaoru? 

Both of these themes are appears again in another of Kawabata’s work. In my personal opinion, Snow Country (1948) might be one of the greatest pieces of Japanese literature ever written and its opening scene provides one of the clearest example of the modern-traditional dichotomy. The novel starts late at night with the nouveau riche Shimamura making his way by train through the dark snow-covered mountains of Niigata to the remote onsen town of Yuzawa. The imagery of the industrial coal-powered steam train making its way through the dark and frozen land of Tohoku, a heart land of traditionalism, seems to reverse the accepted narrative of ‘old good, new bad’. The warmth and light of the train, the new, cutting its way through the cold and dark mountains, the old. Though it would be foolish to think that Kawabata’ is attempting to fully reverse this accepted point of view. As the novel progresses, Shimura’s complex relationship with Komako, one of the Geisha of the onsen, possibly mirrors Japanese society’s complex relationship with the balance of the modern and the traditional. Shimura and Komako is comparable to the unnamed narrator and Kaoru, though is not the same. As for the narrator and Kaoru, though they are not allowed to pursue each other romantically, their relationship is clearly defined, and their story ends far more positively, whereas Shimura and Komako’s relationship is remains ambiguous, leaving room for conflict. Their story ends with a fire in the town in which one of the passengers on the train, Yoko, perishes. With Shimura and Komako’s relationship still not clearly defined, the end comes in a terrible tragedy and loss of life, possibly foreshadowing Japan’s own final confrontation with the modern against the traditional and the terrible sorrows of war that conflict brings. 

In 1938, the legendary former Go player Hon'inbō Shūsai came out of retirement to play the then up-and-coming prodigy Minoru Kitani. At the time, Kawabata was working as a journalist and covered the game for the Mainichi Shinbun. More than 15 years later, Kawabata adapted a semi-fictionalised version of the game into the novel The Master of Go (1954). On the surface, the novel appears to be nothing than a piece of historical fiction, retailing the epic struggle between an aging grand-master against a young prodigy looking to carve out his own legacy in the world of Go. The American historian and translator Edward Seidensticker thought differently. Seidensticker argued that Kawabata used the game as an allegory for the war between Japan and the West, particularly with the United States. Shūsai representing traditional culture, stood in for Japan, whilst Kitani filled in as the US, a new emerging power posing a threat to the established Empire. Kawabata’s last reference to the modern-traditional dichotomy appeared in the novel The Old Capital (1962). 

Many of Kawabata’s novels concern the idea of love; Thousand Cranes (1952), The Sound of the Mountain (1954), The Lake (1954), The Dandelion (1964) and Beauty and Sadness (1965). But there are two in particular that deserve to be discussed in further detail. The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930) follows the narrator’s journey through the former entertainment district of Asakusa in Tokyo. Throughout his time there, the narrator meets numerous young prostitutes and brothel workers who explain their way of life and the inner machinations of Tokyo’s dark underbelly. Unlike Kawabata’s other works on love, Asakusa is far more overtly sexual. Although, this is not the only time Kawabata did this. The House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961) follows an old man, Eguchi, who visits a hotel where customers can pay to sleep next to naked girls but are forbidden to engage in sexual activity with them. It is possible that Eguchi is a stand in for Kawabata and that the house represents Kawabata’s inability to truly connect with others; constantly surrounded by people but never able to truly commit himself to them. 

Unfortunately, like seemingly many famous Japanese writers, alongside Dazai, Akutagawa, Arishima and Mishima, Kawabata was another victim of suicide. Mishima's death in 1970 seems to have impacted him greatly and, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, suffered from nightmares and regularly made jokes about his own death. Despite leaving no suicide note, he was found dead in April 1972 after gassing himself. 

The Blue Sky Library: Japan's Project Gutenberg

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

The Blue Sky Library, or 'aozora bunko', is a Japanese digital library founded in 1997 with the aim of digitizing and storing Japanese literature and Japanese translation of foreign literature so that anyone, from anywhere, may access them freely. The site is ran by volunteers who gather works of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, whose copyright have expired or from authors who have given permission to have their work stored. 

The library has faced some problems with finances and copyright law. Since the group is ran on an entirely voluntary basis and that material can be accessed for free, the library is heavily reliant on donations to pay for server costs. Since 2006, the library also functions as a public-policy advocacy organisation and has been involved in disputes with the Japanese government over copyright law. In 2005, at the suggestion of the US, the Japanese government was urged to extend the date of copyright expiration from 50 years after the author's death to 70 years. This would have meant that many of the books published by the library would now be illegal. However, due to the pressure from volunteers and members of the public, the Japanese government decided not to implement this change, allowing the library to continue its mission of preserving Japanese literature undisturbed. 

You can access the Blue Sky Library here: https://www.aozora.gr.jp/

Authors of Japan: Takeo Arishima

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

Arishima was born to an upper-class family in Tokyo on March 4th 1878. He had two brothers, Ikuma Arishima and Ton Satomi, both of which also became writers. His son, Masayuki Mori, was an actor and regularly starred in Akira Kurosawa films in the 1950s. Arishima entered the Gakushuin school at 10 years old, and, after graduating, enrolled in the Sapporo Agricultural College in Hokkaido. After a brief time in Imperial Army, he took English lessons and moved to the US in 1903. During his time in the US, he studied at Haverford College and Harvard University, before working briefly as a foreign correspondent for the Mainichi Shimbun. 

Arishima's literary career began in 1910 when his two brothers introduced him to four other writers: Shiga Naoya, Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Yanagi Sōetsu and Nagayo Yoshirō. Together, the six men formed the shirakabaha, 'White-Birch Society' and published a literary magazine of the same name. The two of Arishima's most famous works worth discussing are The Descendants of Cain (1917) and A Certain Woman (1919). 

The Descendants of Cain was Arishima's first taste of fame and its defining theme of one of  is undoubtedly, nature. In particular, the darker crueller side of nature, The story follows the lives of farmers in Hokkaido and the challenges posed by nature that they must over come in order to survive. This was no doubt inspired by his time studying agriculture at university in Hokkaido. The vicious nature is also seen in his later short story The Siblings Who Almost Drowned (1921). 

Arishima's second work, A Certain Woman, is arguably his most famous. The story follows a young woman called Yōko Satsuki. Yōko is pressured into an arranged marriage with a journalist but ends up divorcing him and moves back home. After the death of her parents, she is encouraged by her friends to marry Kimura, a wealthy Japanese expatriate now living in Chicago. On the boat from Yokohama to the US, Yōko meets a married man known as Kuraji and embarks on an affair. By the time they arrive in the US, Yōko decides not to marry Kurama and takes his money before returning home with Kuraji. It is not until she starts living with him that Kuraji's dark persanlity is revealed. He constantly fights with Yōko before disappearing after being hunted by the police. Repeatedly heartbroken, Yōko resigns herself to the idea that she will never find love in the current socially conservative climate of Japan. She dies not long after her younger sister passes away from illness. Yōko is believed to be based on Nobuko Sasaki, who was the ex-wife of his friend and fellow writer Doppo Kunikida. Considering that the novel was written in the 1910s, the themes of promiscuity and sexual freedom were decades ahead of there time, thereby cementing Arishima's place in the list of great Japanese writers. 

Arishima was not, however, confined to just fiction. In 1922, he published the political manifesto Sengen hitotsu, 'A Manifeso', on the plight of the agricultural and working classes. He argued that it was up to the workers to bring about their own salvation and that he, a member of the upper-class, was powerless to help. This may have been inspired by his time studying in Sapporo as well by the plot of The Descendants of Cain. 

In that same year, like many other great Japanese writers, Arishima, alongside his lover Akiko Hatano, took his own life. Hatano worked as an editor for the women's magazine Fujin Koron but was still married. It is believed that the extramarital affair drove them both to suicide. He had attempted suicide once before during his time in Sapporo College with the economist Kokichi Morimoto but had failed. Arishima and Hatano were found hanged in a forest in Karuizawa in Nagano. 

Three Books for Japanese Reading Practice (Beginners)

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

Are your Japanese reading skills not quite at the level to read a full-blown novel but still want to practice? Then this is the article you've been looking for. Lingo Mastery have published three books that, if studied in the order suggested below, can improve your skills enough to move onto short stories and novels.

Conversational Japanese Dialogues (2021)
This first book is the simplest out of the three. It contains 105 example conversations on topics ranging from order a meal at a restaurant to being hunted by pirates. Each line of Japanese is followed immediately by the same line in romaji. This creates a repeating pattern of kanji and kana followed by romaji. The Japanese text is then followed by an English translation. All Japanese is covered with furigana. 

Japanese Short Stories for Beginners (2020)

Japanese Short Stories for Beginners contains twenty simple 2-3 page stories ranging from a self-replicating machine that writes novels to a woman whose house is broken into by mute dwarf that is being hunted by the police. Each text is followed by an English translation and a summary, which also has its own translation. This is then followed by a list of important vocabulary covered in the text and then by five reading comprehension questions to test how well you understood the text. All Japanese is covered with furigana. 

Intermediate Japanese Short Stories (2021)

This intermediate version contains almost the exact same features as the beginners, but with one added twist: there is no translation for each main text. This means that learners cannot rely on a translation to help them, and must instead use their own understanding of the text to answer the comprehension questions. The ten texts are considerably harder than the beginners version and cover topics ranging from short horror stories to brief biographies on famous Japanese figures. Like the beginners version, all Japanese is covered with furigana.

 

Japanese Horror Novels for Halloween 2021

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble 

Horror has long has a strong presence in Japanese literature. The kaidan, literally 'strange narratives' originate from the late 15th and early 16th centuries, with other specific legends, such as yuki-onna, going back even further. To celebrate this, the spookiest time of the year, I've put together a suggested reading list to enjoy the very best of modern Japanese horror. 

The Crimson Labyrinth (Yusuke Kishi, 1999)

A  sort of survival horror mixed with battle royal, The Crimson Labyrinth stars with a group of nine strangers wakening up in an unknown desert landscape with no knowledge as to how they got there. Though at first believing they are on Mars, the group eventually discover they have been drugged and taken to the Australian outback where they where they must complete a series of tasks before fighting each other to death for the amusement of their captors. 

Parasite Eve (Hideaki Sena, 1995)

As the only true sci-fi horror on this list, Parasite Eve follows a scientist, Toshiaki, who's wife, Kiyomi, is killed in a car crash. What he does not know, however, that Kiyomi's cells have been infected with a conscious life-form, known as Eve, that is composed of mitochondria. Eve attempts to manipulate Toshiaki so that she can take over the world.  Interestingly, the author, Hideaki Sena, had a background a pharmacologist and so had considerable knowledge of biology that allowed him to write such a scientifically accurate book. The novel has been adapted quite extensively as a series of three video games, two manga series and a film. 

The Graveyard Apartment (Mariko Koike, 1986)

The token haunted house style horror of the list, The Graveyard Apartment is a horror/suspense novel about a young family who move into a new apartment building that was built next to a graveyard. Their new life seems to going well until strange noises start coming from the basement and the other tenants start moving out. Before long, only the family are left in the entire apartment building, left alone with whatever lurks in the basement. 

The Ring Series (Koji Suzuki, 1991-2013)

It is interesting to speculate if Suzuki could have predicted that his original 1991 novel Ring would become the genesis of one of Japan's most famous franchises, a franchise that spawns countless novels, movies, spin-offs, sequels and prequels and even international adaptations. The novel series contains an original trilogy that was followed by a collection of in-universe short stories as well as two sequels written in the 2010s. The novels shares the same general premise as the films; after watching a curse video tape containing the spirit of a vengeful ghost, Sadako Yamamura, a person receives a phone call telling them they will die in seven days. Unlike the films, however, the novel series goes deeper into the lore of Sadako's past and the exact nature of her curse. 

Out (Natsuo Kirino, 1997)

If you're interested in how women are depicted in horror, then this is the novel for you. Though perhaps more of a crime than a true horror, Out follows four women, all factory workers, and their attempt to cover up a murder after one of the group, Yayoi, strangles her abusive husband to death after suspecting him of having an affair with a hostess at a bar in which he regularly gambles. The novel has been adapted into a 2002 film of the same name. 

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (Yōko Ogawa, 1998)

Revenge is the only anthology book on the list and contains a collection of eleven different short stories. The stories are generally distinct from each other but some have over lapping setting or motifs. For example, kiwi fruits are mentioned in a couple of stories. The book is noted for being quite gruesome at times and contains stories from genres ranging from crime, the supernatural and body horror. 

Goth (Otsuichi, 2002)

Goth follows two death-obsessed high school students who discover in a café the diary of a local serial killer who mutilates his victims bodies by removing their hands. The novel is split into six short stories, each of which follows a different case linked to the serial killer. Goth has been adapted into a film and a manga series, both of the same name.

Audition (Ryū Murakami, 1997)

Audition is a novel that places women in the centre of the horror. The story follows a forty-two year old widower who, under the guise of auditioning for a non-existent film, attempts to find a new wife. Aoyama, a young aspiring actress, catches his eye and he instantly falls in love her. What he doesn't know, however, is that Aoyama is hiding a dark and unstable past. The novel was adapted into a 1999 film of the same name. 

Dark Water (Koji Suzuki, 1996)

Known in Japanese as From the Depths of Dark Waters, Dark Water is a short story anthology collection. As well as the titular Dark Water, of which the 2002 film of the same name was adapted from, the book contains six other stories, all in which water appears as a motif. Interestingly, the anthology contains some historical value as every story is set in the 1990s and so contains references to the asset bubble crisis and how ordinary people dealt with the economic instability that was sweeping Japan at the time. A manga adaptation of the collection was released in 2004. 

The Another Series (Yukito Ayatsuji, 2009-2020)

A mixture of horror and mystery, Another takes place in 1998, Kouichi Sakakibara and the class pariah Mei Misaki in their attempt to rid their school of a terrible curse known as 'The Calamity'. The curse presented in the novel is quite complicated. In 1972, a student died tragically in a house fire. To remember him, the rest of his class and teacher pretended that he was still alive; talking to his empty desk, pretending to walk home with him, and left a space where he would have stood in their graduation picture. Next year's class find that they are short desk, and there seems to be one extra student in the class then there should be. That extra student, yet no one can tell who it is is, is the 'extra' a dead soul who doesn't know they're dead. For as long as the extra remains unknown, the curse will kill members of the class and people around them indiscriminately. The series consists of the original novel, a spin-off novel 'Another: Episode S/0' and a sequel 'Another 2001'.

The Summer of Ubume (Natsuhiko Kyogoku, 1994)

The Summer of the Ubume is both  a mixture of mystery and horror as well as the first novel in Natsuhiko Kyogoku's series about the amateur investigator Akihiko Chuzenji. Chuzenji is tasked with investigating the mysterious case of a woman who has been pregnant for twenty weeks and still hasn't given birth. This seemingly impossible case is believed to be connected to the Ubume, a creature in Japanese folklore that is created by the spirit of a woman that had died in childbirth. It was adapted into a 2005 film of the same name. 

In the Miso Soup (Ryū Murakami, 1997)

The only the book on this list to properly involve people from outside of Japan, In the Miso Soup is an interesting look at how foreigners, specifically Americans, are perceived in Japan. The book follows Kenji, a tour guide working in Tokyo's red-light district of Kabukichō during the midst of a serial killer spree. One day, he is contacted by a suspicious American tourist, Frank, to show him around the underbelly of Tokyo's nightlife. Kenji begins to wonder if Frank has any connection to the on-going killings.

Confessions (Kanae Minato, 2008)

After the traffic death of her daughter, the life Yuko Moriguchi, a mother and middle school teacher, begins to fall apart. She breaks of her engagement to her husband and becomes obsessed with tracking downing and getting revenge on the group of students in her class that contributed to her daughter's death, The book was adapted into a film 2010 with the same name. 

Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse (Otsuichi, 1996)

Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse is, technically, an anthology collection and contains two stories. The first story is similar to the Western novel 'The Lovely Bones'. It's set in the POV of a dead girl who's killer are attempting to hide her body. The second story is about a young girl loses an eye in an accident, but receives a transplant. In this new eye, however, she can see experience the memories of its previous owner. This story is possibly the basis for the 2002 Hong Kong horror film 'The Eye' and it's many sequels and remakes. 

Battle Royale (Koushun Takami, 1999)

As the progenitor of the entire battle royal genre, Battle Royale might be one of the most important books in, not just within the horror horror, but in the whole of Japanese literature in the last 25 years, especially when considering the impact that the genre has had on world-wide media since its release. Interestingly, though published in 1999, Takami actually finished writing the book in 1996, but delayed publication due to the novel's rejection from a horror fiction contest due to its graphic subject matter. The book follows a middle school class who are sent to a deserted island and ordered to fight each other to the death until only one student remains. This creates a scenario where middle school issues that may seem trivial to adults, such as teenage relationships, friendship groups and bullying, are resolved extremely violently as student take revenge on each other during the game.

The Classic Literature Club Series (Honobu Yonezawa, 2001-2017)

Though less of a true horror and more of a mystery, the Classic Literature Club Series, also known as the Hyouka Series, follows the members of a high school literature club and their amateur detective work. The club has tackled a wide range of mysteries ranging from their schools troubled past during student protest movement of the late 1960s as well as more supernatural incidents like the case of a supposed ghost haunting a rural hot spring. The series has been reproduced as both an anime and a manga and contains six main books and one collection of short stories. Yonezawa has confirmed on social media that a seventh novel is currently being worked on. 

Four Books for Japanese Reading Practice

 By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

Are you looking to improve your Japanese reading skills but don’t feel confident enough to jump headfirst into that volume of manga you bought from eBay or that novel you scoured Amazon for? Then this is the list for you. 

Japanese Stories for Language Learners (2018)

As probably the easiest of the four books, Japanese Stories for Language Learners is one in a series of Asian-language study books published by Tuttle. The others being Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese. The book contains numerous extras to help you with your studies. Every story has not just an English translation but translation notes, a vocabulary list and reading comprehension and discussion questions. As an added bonus, it also comes with a CD containing audio versions of all five stories. This means that, if you want to practice both your reading and listening comprehension together, you are able to try a sort of audio-assisted reading using the CD. If you have an interest in Japanese mythology, it is worth noting that this is the only book to contain stories written before the 20th century. The introduction contains a brief overview and analysis of each story. 

This book contains five stories:

• Urashima Taro (Unknown, c. 8th century)
• Snow Woman (Unknown c. 14th century)
• The Spider's Thread (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1918)
• The Siblings Who Almost Drowned (Takeo Arishima, 1921)
• Gauche the Cellist (Kenji Miyazawa, 1934)

Breaking into Japanese Literature (2012)

The first of the two Giles Murray books on this list, Breaking into Japanese Literature contains four stories in seven chapters. One of the stories, Natsume Sōseki's Ten Nights of Dreams is in four parts. Each of the seven chapters contains an introductory page explaining the story and its relation to the rest of the author's work. Both writers, Natsume Sōseki and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, receive their own biographies, containing information about both their professional lives as writers and their personal lives. In terms of educational value, it does not contain any comprehension questions, but every chapter is followed by a vocabulary table, allowing you to revise the words you've just practiced. It also uses furigana in a way that forces the reader to memorise the readings of kanji by showing every reading only once.  

This book contains four stories, one of which is in four parts:

• 1st, 3rd, 5th & 7th nights of Ten Nights of Dreams (Natsume Sōseki, 1908)
• In a Grove (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1922)
• The Nose (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1916)
• Rashōmon (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 1915)

Exploring Japanese Literature (2013)

The second of the two Giles Murry books is almost identical to its predecessor in every way other than its different selection of stories. Exploring contains works from Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata, a change from the same late-Meiji/early-Taisho era seen in the previous two books. Like Breaking, it contains the same biographies and vocabulary lists. 

This books contains three stories:

• Snow Country (Yasunari Kawabata, 1948)
• Patriotism (Yukio Mishima, 1960)
• The Secret (Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, 1911)

New Penguin Parallel Texts; Short Stories in Japanese (2011)

As what is probably the most challenging of the four, this book is a part of a much larger series of parallel texts by Penguin that includes Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, French and Soviet/Russian. Short Stories in Japanese does not contain any of the more education aspects of the other three, other than an English translation; there are no reading comprehension questions, discussion questions or vocabulary lists. The book, however, does contain a very interesting introductory chapter discussing how the book was put together as well as an overview of each of the stories and their position with modern Japanese literature. Given the highly complex and philosophical nature of some of the stories selected, this is almost certainly the most difficult of the four. Yet, for for the same reasons, it is also possibly the most rewarding. 

This book contains eight stories:

• On the Efficacy of Fiction (Haruki Murakami, 1995)
• A Little Darkness (Banana Yoshimoto, 2000)
• Genjitsu House (Masayo Koike, 2004)
• The Silent Traders (Yūko Tsushima, 1982)
• Mogera Wogura (Hiromi Kawakami, 2001)
• The Maiden in the Manager (Kazushige Abe, 2004)
• Where the Bowling Pins Stand (Shinji Ishii, 2005)
• Love Suicide at Kamaara (Sueko Yoshida, 1984)

Amazon Links

• Japanese Stories for Language Learners (2018): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Japanese-Stories-Language-Learners-Bilingual/dp/4805314680
• Breaking into Japanese Literature (2012): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Breaking-Into-Japanese-Literature-Classics/dp/1568365896
• Exploring Japanese Literature (2013): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Exploring-Japanese-Literature-Tanizaki-Kawabata/dp/477003041X
• New Penguin Parallel Texts; Short Stories in Japanese (2011): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Short-Stories-Japanese-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0143118331/

Authors of Japan: Haruki Murakami

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble 

On April 1st 1978, a young jazz bar owner from Kyoto stood in the stands of the Meiji Jingu Stadium watching his beloved Yakult Swallows take on Hiroshima Carp. This baseball match launched the careers of two men, both 29 years old. One of the men was Dave Hilton, a third baseman from Texas, and the other was the young bar owner from Kyoto. That bar owner was Haruki Murakami and watching Hilton play would inspire him to write a novel that would launch him into a highly successful writing career and make him a known around the world by the end of the century. 

Murakami went home that night and began writing immediately, although, he could only afford to work for an hour each night as he had to maintain the bar he ran with his wife, Yoko. It took him four months, but he completed his first book, Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and published it a year later in 1979.  First, in the monthly literary magazine Gunzo in June and then again, as a book, in July. The book was received well; it won the 1979 Gunzo Prize for New Writers and was nominated for an Akutagawa Prize in the same year of it's release. Within Japanese literary circles, Hear the Wind Sing is understood as being an example of an 'I-Novel'. I-Novels are, unsurprisingly, always written in the first-person, and are usually a mixture of fictional prose and an autobiography. Many I-Novels are often grounded in reality; usually a fictional adaption of real events and real people, normally based to some extent on the author's own life. Murakami, however, seems to present completely fictional stories as he merges surrealist themes of the supernatural within the frame of supposedly 'real' I-Novels. Murakami followed Hear the Wind Sing up with two sequels: Pinball, 1973 (1980) and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). A fourth sequel, Dance Dance Dance (1988), was released four years later, but it's status as a part of the 'Rat-Trilogy' is debated. These three, or four, books got their name by all revolving, in some way, around a young man called 'Rat'. In Hear the Wind Sing, Rat is a fellow student and close friend of the protagonist as they often go drinking together. In Pinball, 1973, he is recalled in the memories of the protagonist as friend back when they were students in the early 1970s. In A Wild Sheep Chase, Rat is a friend of the protagonist, who this time is a detective not a student, who sends the protagonist a letter explaining that he has accidently unearthed a conspiracy exposing the Japanese economic and political elite. 

Three themes can be seen in this trilogy; youth and the student movement, surrealism and the supernatural and a combination of both into historical fiction. The protagonists of Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball are both students and they both take place, specifically, during the Japanese student protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both of these themes are found in another famous Murakami novel; Norwegian Wood (1987). The plot of all three novels revolve around the lives of the main characters during those relatively unstable times. The past remains an important theme in two other pieces of Murakami's work; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) and 1Q84 (2010). In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the main character explains to a young girl his actions in China and Mongolia during the war in the 1930s and 1940s. 1Q84 is set in an alternate version of 1984 where the protagonist, a killer-for-hire must defeat an evil cult to get back to her own timeline. Despite being set in an alternate timeline, 1Q84 still falls within the theme of the past as there are still numerous references to historical events and figures from the 'real' 1980s. 

It is in the last of these five books, however, that another of Murakami's favourite themes is most clear; surrealism and the supernatural. That which is real and that which is is not becomes extremely blurred in 1Q84. Partially because of the protagonist's struggle to return to her own timeline, the 'real' 1980s, but also because of the references to evil cults, mysterious disappearances and magical powers. Though discussing much about the past, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle also references the supernatural as a curse is suggested as an explanation for the main characters missing cat, and a clairvoyant is consulted to help find it. Whether it's mysterious disappearing twins, clairvoyants or mysterious tattooed sheep, the second third, and quasi-fourth books of the Rat-Trilogy, Pinball, 1973, A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance all contain some sort of allusion to the strange and supernatural. The most surreal of all Murakami's books, however, would be Kafka on the Shore (2002). Other than being named after the founder of the darker side of literary surrealism, Kafka on the Shore explores themes of metaphysics, the debate between free-will and determinism, and the mind-body problem. The book contains two seemingly unconnected stories; one of which is about the titular Kafka Tamura and his journey of running away from home. Whilst the other follows Satoru Nakata, an elderly and  intellectually-disabled illiterate man who goes on the run with a truck-driver after killing a cat-murderer. Nakata flees to the city of Takamatsu in Kagawa, the same place Kafka travels to after leaving home...

And still, in almost all of Murakami's work, the idea of the I-Novel still lurks in the background. Being born in 1949, Murakami would have been a student in the late 1960s and so it's possible that the events of Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 and Norwegian Wood are all grounded, to some extent, in the memories of his time as a student. And the former soldier in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, was said to have been sent to China during the war, the same as Murakami's own father. So, excluding some of the more supernatural parts of his work, it's possible that Murakami has been greatly influenced by both his own memories, but also by the memories of those around him.

1995 was not a good year for Japan. On January 17th, a massive 6.9 MMS earthquake struck the city of Kobe in the south of Hyōgo Prefecture. This was the worst earthquake in Japan since 1925; more than six thousand people were killed and over forty thousand were injured. Then, two months later, on March 20th, the apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo released highly poisonous sarin gas onto the Tokyo subway. Thirteen people died and over six thousand were injured. Murakami had been living in the United States since 1986, but returned home in the aftermath of the two tragedies. In January 1996, he began interviewing people who been affected by the subway attack. These interviews, along with his own thoughts, were published together a year later as Underground (1997), Murakami's first non-fiction book. In his new book, Murakami criticised the Japanese press for being overly sensationalist and focusing on the perpetrators of the attack rather than the victims. It also helped to shine a light on the Japanese national psyche, as many of the victims revealed that their priority, regardless of their injuries, was to make sure they got to work on time. Three years later, Murakami released another book After the Quake (2000). This was a collection of fictional short stories all set in February 1995, after the Kobe earthquake but before the subway attack. These stories were a departure from Murakami's usual surrealist style of writing as only one contained any obviously supernatural themes. Interestingly, though, none of the characters were directly involved in the earthquake. Instead, it's only something that is mentioned in newspaper or on the television. This, combined with a move to a third-person style, away from his usual first-person, creates a strong sense of detachment from the events, perhaps reflecting Murakami's own sense of distance, as he was away living in America at the time. 

Outside of writing, Murakami's main hobby is running. He started in the early 1980s as a way to keep healthy after spending most of his time at his desk writing. He has ran numerous marathons and completed an ultramarathon around Lake Saroma in 1996. Murakami has also published a memoir of his running career, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008). 

 

Authors of Japan: Yukio Mishima

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

To both historians and literacy critics alike, Yukio Mishima remains an extremely divisive figure. Even after the fifty years since his death, people remain divided over his legacy as both a writer and a public figure. On one hand, Mishima was an incredible writer; only beaten to a Nobel Prize for Literature by his fellow countryman and teacher Yasunari Kawabata. Yet on the other, he represents those in Japan’s Post-War years who refused to abandon the old traditions of the Imperial era. The three main themes that permeate Mishima work, closeted homosexual characters, a strongly romanticised understanding of suicide and staunch right-wing political views, are all deeply intertwined within his own life. This combination of thoughts and beliefs created a type of writer that Japan had never seen before and may never see again.

Born in Tokyo in January 1925 as the oldest son of a government official, Mishima spent the first twelve years of his life living with his grandmother, Natsuko, and extended family. Natsuko was extremely strict and refused to allow Mishima to play sports or with other boys his own age. This meant he spent a lot of his time either alone, or with his female cousins. When he moved in back with his family, Mishima was enrolled in the gakushūin, an elite school originally for the children of Japanese nobility and other upper-class families. During his school days, Mishima read both Japanese and Western mythology, as well as joining the editorial board of his school’s literary society. This was Mishima’s first taste of literature. However, like his grandmother, Mishima’s father was extremely strict, and refused to accept Mishima’s love of writing. Support for Mishima’s new passion came from two sources: his mother, Shizue, and fellow member of the literacy society’s editorial board Zenmei Hasuda. It was at the literacy society that Mishima began to hone his voice as a writer. Mishima’s work relied upon complex vocabulary and a heavy use of metaphors, alongside themes of the natural world and the supernatural, often intertwined with a right-wing flavour. Mishima is understood to be a part of the nihon rōman ha, the Japanese Romantic School, of the 1930s. 

In April 1944, around six months before he graduated high school, Mishima received his draft notice from the army. However, due to poor health, Mishima was incorrectly diagnosed with tuberculosis by army doctors and declared unfit for duty. Like many young men at the time, Mishima had assumed that he would be able to fight, and possibly even die, in the on-going war with China and the West. His parents were extremely relieved to know that their son would be spared conscription, but Mishima’s reaction was less positive. Mishima had been strongly influenced by the ultra-nationalist philosophy that had gripped Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. He held a deep love for his country and a strong, perhaps even fanatical, devotion and reverence to the emperor to such a great extent that he wrote in his diary that he wished to join the tokkō, or ‘Special Attack’, units of the Japanese army. These units included the infamous kamikaze; Japanese suicide pilots instructed to crash their planes into British and American ships during the Pacific War. It’s speculated that Mishima’s guilt stemming from the failure to die his idealised ‘glorious death’ in the war combined with his weak constitution as a child, lead to an overcompensation by the prevalence of traditional Japanese culture in his later works.

After the war ended, Mishima joined the Law Department at the University of Tokyo, at the suggestion of his father, despite his wish to study literature.  Despite this, Mishima managed to juggle both his writing and law studies and graduated in 1947. He then joined the treasury department and began working as a government bureaucrat. After a year at the treasury, however, it was obvious where Mishima’s true passions lay. After persuading his father to let him leave his job in the civil service and pursue writing full-time, Mishima made a name for himself with his breakthrough novel Confessions of a Mask (1949). Confessions of a Mask follows a young boy named Kochan, a physically weak boy who was kept away from boys his own age and later becomes obsessed with the male physique and an almost erotic-sense of the macabre. Later in the story, Kochan develops homosexual feelings towards one of his male friends. He attempts to suppress these urges and tries to force himself to love a woman, Sonoko, though he admits he never truly can. These hidden feelings are the titular ‘mask’ that Kochan believes everyone hides behind. It doesn’t take Edogawa Ranpo to figure out who Kochan was a stand in for.

By the late 1950s, Mishima had risen to celebrity-level fame. His major works at the time included his break-out novel Confessions of a Mask as well as; Tobacco (1946), Middle Ages (1946), Forbidden Colours (1951), The Sound of Waves (1954), The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956) and Kyoko’s House (1959). By 1960, however, Japanese society had gone through some quite radical changes. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party had cemented itself as the strongest political force in the country since the merger between Shigeru Yoshida’s Liberal Party and Ichirō Hatoyama’s Japan Democratic Party in 1955. Meanwhile, the Japanese Communist Party had lost some of its impact since the days of the Mountain Village Operation Units earlier in the decade. Now under the control of the more moderate Kenji Miyamoto, the JCP aimed for more peaceful and democratic means of achieving their revolution and they regularly competed in elections. The position of Japan’s most radical leftists had fallen, instead, to the zengakuren, a left-wing student organisation that had already proved their commitment to the socialist cause in the Sunagawa Struggle. They were complemented in the diet by the Japanese Socialist Party, which had been in opposition since 1948. Since the end of the war, the left had made major gains in both their political and public presence. The big issue facing Japan in 1960 was the US-Japan Security Treaty, or anpo, which would allow permanent US military bases in Japan. The treaty, that was being put through the Diet by the current LDP prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, was met by firm opposition from a wide section of the public and by left-wing opposition groups, particularly the Socialist and Communist parties. In June 1960, hundreds of thousands of protesters, including members of the zengakuren, socialists and communists, marched to the National Diet in Tokyo. The protesters smashed their way in the Diet but were beaten back by a mixture of police and right-wing thugs secretly hired by the government. Hundreds of people were injured and a Tokyo University student and member of the zengakuren, Michiko Kanba, was killed by the police. In the literary world, these protests highlighted the widening gap between left-wing and right-wing writers. To Mishima, the protests had been hijacked by socialists and communists, and he regularly contributed newspaper articles on the anpo debate to the mainichi shimbun. Although he didn’t particularly agree with the treaty, he would rather support a strong right-wing figure like Kishi than the leftists, and was therefore often critical of the protesters themselves, rather than the cause they were actually protesting about.

This wasn’t the only time, though, that politics had spilled over into the literary world. In November 1960, a magazine called chūō kōron published Shichirō Fukazawa’s short story The Tale of an Elegant Dream (1960). The Tale of an Elegant Dream tells the story of a socialist revolution that sweeps Japan and contains a scene where Emperor Shōwa, Empress Kōjun and the young Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko are publicly guillotined in front of a jubilant crowd. Rightists were outraged. They thought it was treasonous to depict the imperial family in such a graphic way. Both Fukazawa and chūō kōron received countless letters of complaints, some even going far as to mail in death threats. The magazine argued that they were allowed to publish whatever they wanted on the grounds of their right to freedom of speech and artistic freedom. Tensions boiled over in February 1961 when a seventeen-year-old ultra-nationalist by the name of Kazutaka Komori broke into the house of the magazine’s president Hōji Shimanaka in an attempt to assassinate him. In the commotion, Komori killed Shimanaka’s maid and severely injured his wife. Concerned that writers had now become a target for political fanatics, the police put Mishima and a few other writers on round-the-clock police protection. Although he did not agree with the narrative, Mishima had recommended Fukazawa’s story to the editors of chūō kōron on the grounds of its literary merits. To rightists, this meant that Mishima had a become valid target.

All of the political chaos that had engulfed Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s, manifested itself in Mishima’s work. Patriotism (1960) is a piece of historical fiction set during the ‘February 26 Incident’, an attempted coup by a rogue faction of the Japanese army that sought to take control of both the military and the government. The story follows a young army lieutenant who is ordered to execute his fellow soldiers for their role in the rebellion. Unable to kill his fellow soldiers, both the lieutenant and his wife commit harakiri. The two major themes in Patriotism are suicide and right-wing politics. Two other of Mishima’s stories share these two themes: The Sound of Waves and The Middle Ages. In a way, these three stories foreshadow Mishima’s own suicide.

On November 25^th 1970, under the pretence of a meeting with an army commander, Mishima and four members of a nationalist paramilitary group, the Tatenokai, barricaded themselves in an office of Camp Ichigaya, a JSDF military base. Whilst wearing a white headband bearing the red sun of Japan that was strongly reminiscent of fanatics of the Imperial era, Mishima went out to a balcony to address a group of soldiers and hopefully inspire a military coup to overthrow the civilian government and restore the emperor to direct power. Mishima’s speech was not well met by the soldiers, and he was repeatedly heckled and jeered. Knowing that his coup would never come to fruition, Mishima returned to the office where, using a traditional Japanese sword he’d bought on a previous holiday to Kumamoto, committed ritual suicide, or seppuku. Mishima had finally died the glorious death he’d written about for more than twenty years and had craved since he was a teenager. His dream was complete, and he was engraved forever in the pages of both Japanese and literary history.