The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Modern Asian Literature Series) Read online

  The Columbia Anthology

  of Modern Japanese Literature

  ABRIDGED

  MODERN ASIAN LITERATURE

  The Columbia Anthology

  of Modern Japanese Literature

  ABRIDGED

  Edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel

  With poetry selections by Amy Vladeck Heinrich, Leith Morton,

  and Hiroaki Sato, Poetry Editors

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW YORK

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-53027-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The Columbia anthology of modern Japanese literature / edited by

  J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel. — Abridged ed.

  p. cm. — (Modern Asian literature)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  “With poetry selections by Amy Vladeck Heinrich, Leith Morton,

  and Hiroaki Sato, poetry editors.”

  ISBN 978-0-231-15722-3 (cloth : acid-free paper)

  ISBN 978-0-231-15723-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

  1. Japanese literature—1868—Translations into English. I. Rimer, J. Thomas. II. Gessel,

  Van C. III. Title. IV. Series.

  PL782.E1C554 2011

  895.6'4408—dc22

  2010049627

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. First Experiments

  Fiction

  Mori Ōgai

  “The Dancing Girl”

  Poetry

  Ochiai Naobumi

  “Song of the Faithful Daughter Shiragiku”

  Shimazaki Tōson

  “The Fox’s Trick”

  “First Love”

  Takeshima Hagoromo

  “The Maiden Called Love”

  2. Beginnings

  Fiction

  Izumi Kyōka

  “The Holy Man of Mount Kōya”

  Kunikida Doppo

  “Meat and Potatoes”

  Masamune Hakuchō

  “The Clay Doll”

  Nagai Kafū

  “The Mediterranean in Twilight”

  Ozaki Kōyō

  The Gold Demon

  Poetry in the International Style

  Kodama Kagai

  “The Suicide of an Unemployed Person”

  Ishikawa Takuboku

  “Better than Crying”

  “Do Not Get Up”

  “A Spoonful of Cocoa”

  “After Endless Discussions”

  Kitahara Hakushū

  “Anesthesia of Red Flowers”

  “Spider Lilies”

  “Kiss”

  Takamura Kōtarō

  “Bear Fur”

  “A Steak Platter”

  Kinoshita Mokutarō

  “Nagasaki Style”

  “Gold Leaf Brandy”

  Yosano Akiko

  “Beloved, You Must Not Die”

  “In the First Person”

  “A Certain Country”

  “From Paris on a Postcard”

  “The Heart of a Thirtyish Woman”

  Poetry in Traditional Forms

  Kanshi

  Tanka and Haiku

  Ishikawa Takuboku

  Masaoka Shiki

  Tanka

  Haiku

  Yosano Akiko

  “The Dancing Girl”

  “Spring Thaw”

  Essays

  Natsume Sōseki

  “The Civilization of Modern-Day Japan”

  “My Individualism”

  3. The Interwar Years

  Fiction

  Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

  “The Nose”

  “The Christ of Nanking”

  Edogawa Ranpo

  “The Human Chair”

  Hori Tatsuo

  The Wind Has Risen

  Inagaki Taruho

  One-Thousand-and-One-Second Stories

  Kawabata Yasunari

  “The Dancing Girl of Izu”

  Page of Madness

  Kuroshima Denji

  “A Flock of Circling Crows”

  Origuchi Shinobu

  Writings from the Dead

  Shiga Naoya

  “The Paper Door”

  Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

  “The Two Acolytes”

  Uchida Hyakken

  “Realm of the Dead”

  “Triumphant March into Port Arthur”

  Poetry in the International Style

  Takamura Kōtarō

  “Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain”

  Hagiwara Sakutarō

  “On a Trip”

  “Bamboo”

  “Sickly Face at the Bottom of the Ground”

  “The One Who’s in Love with Love”

  “The Army”

  “The Corpse of a Cat”

  Miyazawa Kenji

  “Spring & Asura”

  “November 3rd”

  Nishiwaki Junzaburō

  Seven Poems from Ambarvalia

  No Traveler Returns

  Kitasono Katsue

  “Collection of White Poems”

  “Vin du masque”

  “Words”

  Two Poems

  “Almost Midwinter”

  Kitasono’s First Letter to Ezra Pound

  Nakano Shigeharu

  “Imperial Hotel”

  “Song”

  “Paul Claudel”

  “Train”

  “The Rate of Exchange”

  Poetry in Traditional Forms

  Kitahara Hakushū

  Okamoto Kanoko

  Saitō Mokichi

  Sugita Hisajo

  Taneda Santōka

  Drama

  Kishida Kunio

  The Swing

  Essay

  Kobayashi Hideo

  “Literature of the Lost Home”

  4. The War Years

  Fiction

  Dazai Osamu

  “December 8th”

  Ishikawa Tatsuzō

  Soldiers Alive

  Ōoka Shōhei

  Taken Captive

  Poetry in the International Style

  Takamura Kōtarō

  “The Elephant’s Piggy Bank”

  “The Final Battle for the Ryukyu Islands”

  Kusano Shinpei

  “Mount Fuji”

  Oguma Hideo

  “Long, Long Autumn Nights”

  Poetry in Traditional Forms

  Toki Zenmaro

  “Evidence”

  Essays

  Kobayashi Hideo

  “On Impermanence”

  Sakaguchi Ango

  “A Personal View of Japanese Culture”

  5. Early Postwar Literature, 1945 to 1970

  Fiction

  Abe Kōbō

  “The Red Cocoon”

  Ariyoshi Sawako

  “The Village of Eguchi”

  Enchi Fumiko

  “Skeletons of Men”

  Endō Shūsaku

  “Mothers”

  Hayashi Fumiko

  “Blindfol
d Phoenix”

  Hirabayashi Taiko

  “Demon Goddess”

  Hotta Yoshie

  “The Old Man”

  Ibuse Masuji

  “Old Ushitora”

  Inoue Yasushi

  “The Rhododendrons of Hira”

  Kanai Mieko

  “Homecoming”

  Kojima Nobuo

  “The Smile”

  Kōno Taeko

  “Final Moments”

  Mishima Yukio

  “Patriotism”

  Noma Hiroshi

  “A Red Moon in Her Face”

  Takeda Taijun

  “The Misshapen Ones”

  Yasuoka Shōtarō

  “Prized Possessions”

  Poetry in the International Style

  Ayukawa Nobuo

  “In Saigon”

  “The End of the Night”

  “Wartime Buddy”

  Ishigaki Rin

  “Roof”

  “Shijimi Clams”

  “Life”

  Katagiri Yuzuru

  “Christmas, 1960, Japan”

  “Why Security Treaty?”

  “Turn Back the Clock”

  Shiraishi Kazuko

  “The Phallus”

  Takamura Kōtarō

  “End of the War”

  “My Poetry”

  Tanikawa Shuntarō

  “Growth”

  “Drizzle”

  Tomioka Taeko

  “between—”

  “Still Life”

  Yoshioka Minoru

  “Still Life”

  “The Past”

  Poetry in Traditional Forms

  Baba Akiko

  Kaneko Tōta

  Nakajo Fumiko

  Drama

  Betsuyaku Minoru

  The Little Match Girl

  Kinoshita Junji

  Twilight Crane

  Essay

  Kawabata Yasunari

  “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself”

  6. Toward a Contemporary Literature, 1971 to the Present

  Fiction

  Furui Yoshikichi

  “Ravine”

  Hirano Keiichirō

  “Clear Water”

  Hoshi Shin’ichi

  “He-y, Come on Ou-t!”

  Kaikō Takeshi

  “The Crushed Pellet”

  Murakami Haruki

  “Firefly”

  Nakagami Kenji

  “The Wind and the Light”

  Ogawa Yōko

  “The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain”

  Shima Tsuyoshi

  “Bones”

  Shimizu Yoshinori

  “Jack and Betty Forever”

  Takahashi Takako

  “Invalid”

  Tawada Yōko

  “Where Europe Begins”

  Tsushima Yūko

  “That One Glimmering Point of Light”

  Yoshimoto Banana

  “Newlywed”

  Poetry in the International Style

  Itō Hiromi

  “Underground”

  “Glen Gould Goldberg”

  “Sexual Life of Savages”

  Shinkawa Kazue

  “The Door”

  “When the water called me . . .”

  Poetry in Traditional Forms

  Tawara Machi

  Drama

  Inoue Hisashi

  Makeup

  Kara Jūrō

  The 24:53 Train Bound for “Tower” Is Waiting in Front of That Doughnut Shop in Takebaya

  Essay

  Ōe Kenzaburō

  “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself”

  Bibliography

  PREFACE

  An anthology can look only backward. Even in the process of assembling and editing this collection, which has taken us several years, other, newer works of high merit have appeared, and older ones have asserted fresh claims to be included as well. For The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, we have attempted to assemble a series of works from the 1870s to the present. The issues at stake here, however, are complex. To many readers, the written word as a primary and privileged means to engage with the “deep sense of self that comes from the act of reading, in a true spirit,”1 now seems to be in the process of being replaced by the culture of the electronic image. In contrast, most of what is contained in this anthology moves the reader backward from what might be termed a postmodern stance toward those decades before the rise of the electronic media. We have provided what we hope is a representative sample of works that convey, for their authors and their readers alike, the thoughts and feelings that only the culture of the printed word can offer.

  We cannot say that no contemporary Japanese literature of scope and ambition is now being written and read. The newest works included here have been composed with a level of skill, sophistication, and purpose as appropriate to the current moment as any of the works were that came before them. Whatever the level of young people’s interest in Japanese manga (comics) and video games may be, literature, as opposed to simple entertainment, often remains the best way to grapple with the problems, and ironies, of the present generation in Japan. Indeed, we have assembled this anthology because we believe that it provides a relevant, resonant experience of Japanese culture not otherwise available.

  The students and other readers who use this book will find a generous sampling of the literary corpus of Japan since the 1870s, Japan’s so-called modern period. The intellectual sketch map that this book provides needs to be absorbed before moving on to a higher engagement with the texts, theories, and multitudinous disciplinary readings that belong to Japanese (or any other) literature. Just as attempts to allow students to “perform” in a foreign language are doomed to failure unless they have been given a basic vocabulary and a sense of the grammar, so an intelligent study of literature requires that students have a body of texts to discuss.

  Other anthologies of what is generally termed “modern Japanese literature” have preceded this one, and surely many others will follow. One difference, however, between this volume and some of the earlier collections is related to the evolving view of both Japanese and foreign scholars as to what constitutes “literature.” Many of the earlier collections sought, consciously or unconsciously, to privilege the long and elegant aesthetic traditions of Japan as they were transformed and manifested anew in modern works. For several generations, this view of Japanese literature prevailed and perhaps culminated in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Kawabata Yasunari in 1968. By common consent, some of the greatest twentieth-century Japanese literary works can be categorized in this fashion. But many other kinds of writing, ranging from detective stories to political accounts—always valued by Japanese readers but neglected by translators in the early postwar decades—can now be sampled here.

  In addition, our own definition of what constitutes literature extends beyond the prose fictional narrative. In this book, we also have included poetry, in both its traditional and its modern forms, as well as representative play texts and essays. But one shortcoming of this anthology—an inevitable one, in our view—is the absence of longer works of prose fiction, simply for reasons of space. It would be a serious misrepresentation of the period, however, if readers thought that some of the most significant writers of the past hundred years—Natsume Sōseki, Shiga Naoya, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Shimazaki Tōson, Mishima Yukio, Ōe Kenzaburō, and so many others—wrote only short pieces. In a few cases here, we provide excerpts from longer works as a way of calling attention to their importance, from both a literary and a historical point of view. The bibliography at the end of this volume lists a variety of the longer works that have been translated into English.

  The items that we have chosen for this book reflect the convictions and enthusiasms of both of us as editors. We have attempted to chronicle a long native tradition’s encounter with and response to the newly introduced writings of W
estern nations. Japanese writers of the modern age—which begins with the opening of the country to the West in the late 1860s—were conscious of the weight of their own traditions. But they also were inspired by the different approaches to writing they discovered in Western literature, first made available to them at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Consequently, the history of modern literature in Japan is largely the story of the interactions between the native tradition and the imported forms and styles, in every genre of writing. The Meiji period (1868–1912) was a time of grand experiment in literature, and since then the pendulum has swung back and forth as writers have tried to imitate what they saw in Western drama, fiction, and poetry or, alternatively, to hang on to what they regarded as the essence of their past.

  For the two centuries preceding the opening of Japan to the West, native literary traditions had been developing inside the boundaries of what Donald Keene called a “world within walls.”2 In the early seventeenth century, the new Tokugawa military regime sealed off the country to virtually all foreign interaction, prohibited Japanese citizens from leaving the islands, and wiped out the vestiges of the initial Western influence by expelling the Catholic missionaries and “reconverting” the swelling Japanese Christian population through brutal torture—all in the name of preserving domestic tranquillity and social stability. Although poetry, drama, and the prose narrative flourished early in the seclusion period—the haiku of Bashō, the new dramatic forms of kabuki and the puppet theater, and the detached, witty stories of Saikaku—by the mid-nineteenth century the literary pond, bereft of outlets and with all fresh streams dammed off, had become increasingly stagnant. It was, to paraphrase Bashō’s famous verse, time for a new frog to jump into the old pond.

  The “black ships” of Commodore Matthew Perry that came steaming into Edo Bay in the summer of 1853 started in motion the ripple effect that stirred the waters of this isolated pond and opened new vistas to writers of every persuasion. One of the most influential intellectual imports in these early years was the literature of Europe and, later, of the United States. Over a hundred-year period, starting with the founding of the Meiji era in 1868, the Japanese literary scene became a kind of experimental laboratory in which many new ingredients were brought in from foreign suppliers—new notions of the self; theories of romanticism and naturalism, democracy and individual freedom, gender and social equality; the rights of the working class; modernism and postmodernism; an après guerre existentialism in tandem with a dedicated Marxist materialism—and each new ingredient was tested, reinvented, transformed, retested, and either ingested or disgorged. The resulting literary creations are at times amusing—particularly in the earlier periods—yet always instructive and usually of extraordinary quality.