Akutagawa Ryunosuke and I-NovelistsAuthor(s): Kinya TsurutaReviewed work(s):Source: Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (1970), pp. 13-27Published by: Sophia UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2383739 .Accessed: 28/03/2012 07:13

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Akutagawa Ryiunosuke AND I-NOVELISTS

by KINYA TSURUTA

OF all the modern Japanese writers introduced to the West, none has been so fully translated as Akutagawa Ryuinosuke (I892-I927), though other more prolific authors may fill more space on Western bookshelves.

Few of Akutagawa's significant works have been left untranslated, and some have been rendered not only into several European languages but more than a few times into English.

It might be argued that the form he chose-the short story-is linked with this popu- larity among translators, but it is a myth that the short story is the easiest form to trans- late. In fact, no one literary form can have a monopoly of traditores. Akutagawa's choice of subjects may have something to do with the phenomenon, as suggested by the slightly sensational title of Glenn W. Shaw's translation of some of his stories, Tales Grotesque atld Curious (Hokuseid6, I930). The power of exoticism to stimulate interest in foreign literature should never be minimized, but obviously this alone cannot account for the frequent translation of this particular writer, because there are other Japanese writers who would more readily satisfy the demand for something outlandish. One quick solu- tion would be to declare Akutagawva the best modern Japanese writer, but this would be certain to provoke many Japanese literary critics and even to make some translators uneasy. There is in fact no clear-cut answer to the question, but at least part of the answer must lie in some of the qualities that set Akutagawa apart from his contemporaries.

Few men have suffered from the sense of estrangement from family, society and nature as intensely as did Akutagawa. Alienation is the common 'bond' for modern men in the West, but at the turn of the century when youngJapanese intellectuals were euphorically trying to 'liberate' themselves, Akutagawa was already sulking in the 'post-liberation blues'. During his early childhood Akutagawa tasted the classic ingredients that go into the making ofan estranged man: his mother's insanity, her death, his father's half-hearted desertion, the smothering love of an intense spinster who appointed herself as his mother.

Perhaps more significant than these biographical factors was the way Akutagawa dealt with this alienation. At least on the conscious level, most conspicuously revealed in his earlier writing, he rejected the traditional Japanese method of coping with loneli- ness and hostility, namely minimizing one's ego to such an extent that it finally evaporates into a much larger entity. Instead of working on his ego, as his teacher Natsume S6seki

I4 Monumenta N.ipponica, xxv, I-2

did in his sokuten kyoshi (molding oneself on Heaven and eliminating selfishness),' Akuta- gawa set out to remold the world. His view of life was that the world was sick, chaotic and in need of drastic surgery. This outlook was responsible to a considerable degree for his pungent sense of irony, urge for a definite structure, precision and economy of style- all unparalleled in the Japanese literature that preceded him.

If some Westerners have found AkutagaNva palatable, it may be because they have discovered, together with exoticism, qualities strikingly similar to those of short stories in the West. Akutagawa was the first thoroughly 'modern' Japanese author in that he was not enthusiastic about the typically loose, episodic, lyrical and intensely private writing, and showed the keenest interest in well-defined form, a beginning, middle and end-for the purpose of debunking the established order. A voracious reader, he dis- covered in many Western writers a rich source of literary inspiration both in form and subject-matter. Prosper Merimee, Anatole France, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, to mention a few, exerted a considerable influence upon Akutagawa, and he is credited with introducing Ambrose Bierce to Japan.

The purpose of this paper is first to contrast Akutagawa with a group of 'novelists' who wrote in a strongly autobiographical vein and who are often said to reflect a uniquely Japanese attitude to life, and then to explore the aesthetic principle embodied in Akuta- gawa's earlier works. This peculiarly Japanese autobiographical form is called watakushi- shosetsu, or the I-novel, and most scholars agree that it started in I907 with Futon or The kuilt, by the leading naturalist writer Tayama Katai (I87I-I930).2 It deals in exhaustive detail with the one-sided love affair of the author-hero with a young woman who happens to be his student. A confessional element strongly flavored this autobiographical work and was the chief reason for the critics' loud applause for the author's 'boldness and sincerity'. The kilt thus became the pace-setter for the autobiographical prose that soon flooded the literary market.

It appears that the term 'I-novel' was well established in the early twenties; it was being used in I92I by a few writers. As early as I920 Uno Koji criticized the strange literary trend in which 'the incomprehensible hero called "I" is suddenly introduced into a novel without much description of his appearance or occupation or disposition', and 'the I-hero is apparently the author himself'.3 In I925, giving his whole-hearted endorse- ment to the I-novel, Kume Masao wrote an essay entitled 'Shinky6-sh6setsu to watakushi- sh6setsu' or 'The Psychological Novel and I-novel', in which Kume called the I-novel 'the essence of prose writing' and branded War and Peace, Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary as 'great popular novels, and fabricated stories just for entertainment'.4

ATHE AUTHOR is Associate Professor of Japa- nese Language and Literature at the University of Toronto in Canada.

1 Q,II'X -t -

2 , ,jk , EBs k 3 Uno K-ji i 'Amai yo no hanashi'

# " , e 0)9 o, Chio koron, xIx, no., 9, p. 29. 4 Kume Masao A i SE it, 'Shinky6-sh6setsu*

TSURUTA, 'Akutagawa Ryuinosuke' I5

Kume's essay understandably triggered a series of heated arguments about the I-novel and they are still often revived, although the points of argument are much finer and more sophisticated. The reluctance with which some Japanese writers parted with the I-novel in the I950s, and the persistence with which critics have continued to pursue this particular issue, indicate the complexity of the problem of fiction in Japan.

The term watakushi-shbsetsu (I-novel) is an unfortunate coinage, perhaps influenced by the German Ich-Roman, because it is misleading on two counts. First, it lacks the Ger- man consistency in naming the hero 'I'. In a sizeable number of I-novels the hero appears in the third person, but of course the reader assumes the hero is the author himself. The second drawback, probably more important, concerns the term shosetsu or novel. If the term suggests to the reader's mind a work of fiction in the Western tradition, the majority of Japanese I-novels frustrate his every aesthetic expectation of a 'novel'.

Perhaps the Japanese I-novel can be compared with an autobiographical novel, at least for the factuality of its events and the identification of the protagonist with the writer. In this regard Kume Masao qualifies the I-novel as one in which the author exposes him- self most candidly, but says an I-novel is art, not a mere record. He rejects Tolstoy's 'My Confession' as something short of an I-novel and judges Strindberg's Confessions ofa Certain Fool to be an I-novel.5 Hasegawa Izumi finds a more elaborate distinction between autobiographical literature and I-novels. He conceives of autobiographical literature as a record of the process by which the author-hero develops, within a historical perspective, his individual and social personality. An I-novel, however, slices a chunk out of the author's life at any point in the time span, and is thus free from restrictions of time, particularly of the past. An autobiography is open to the past, while an I-novel relates itself to the future.6 Although Hasegawa fails to clarify this link with the future, it is true that many I-novels are not oriented to the past. They seem to ignore the relationship between time and events, which is the most important factor in autobiographical litera- ture. As a result, I-novels tend to revolve around a few incidents or perhaps only one, and to be much shorter than the average autobiographical novel in the West.

Ema Michisuke says the I-novel is a depiction of one's immediate surroundings, often 'narrow, non-ideological, modest, sometimes egoistic, but more often sincere and above all artistically ultra-sensitive.'7 The loudest criticism of the form is directed against the narrowness of its scope and the obvious absence of interest in society. Marxist critics are understandably disapproving, though a good number of proletarian writers produced

*to watakushi-sh6setsu' &. + A- Ef A + OJX, S. Aono and Y. Nakano, eds., Gendai bungakuron taikei 5 f: * U 4i A ,r, Tokyo, Kawade, I956, III, p. 288.

5 ibid. 6 Hasegawa Izumi *4)1Jl,, 'Watakushi-

sh6setsu to jiden bungaku' ;4 - b 4: )t

Kokubungaku kaishaku to kansho 11 : T N f K S XXVII, no. I2, p. 64 (hereafter cited as KKK).

7 jI Ma 0- 1. Inagaki Tatsuro "E RaN1 5, 'Wa- takushi-sh6setsu o megutte' JA4'0 e -, -C, Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyozai no kenkyui 0 S ? f 9w E, XI, no. 3, p. 9 (hereafter ab- breviated as KKKK).

i6 Monumenta Nipponica, xxv, I-2

works along the lines of I-novels in the I930s. Sugiura Mimpei, one such critic, believes this limited scope was the basic cause of the I-novel's failure to grow into a full-scale novel.8 Ivan Morris looks at the I-novelists' nonchalance toward society historically:

The late collapse ofJapanese feudalism and the fact that important changes have always come from above rather than as a result of popular effort resulted in a peculiarly wide gulf between individual and social life and made Japanese far less interested in political and social life questions than peoples in mnost Western countries. Strong authoritarian traditions gave rise to a widespread feeling of indifference or resignation to outside problems and official censorship discouraged Meiji writers from voicing any criticism of current conditions. Writers who wished to present life strictly on the basis of facts concentrated on their direct personal experiences tending to neglect the wider subjects that had been treated by Zola and other naturalists of the West.9

One might comment on the German Ich-Roman, which is not totally dissimilar. The distance between the hero and the author is far less in the Japanese form, and the Ich- Roman boasts a much longer sustaining structure, but both tend to dwell on the confined emotional aspects of the author-hero's world with a resulting indifference to the wider world.

Significantly, the influence of feudalism also persisted in Germany, which had to wait a long time for Mann and Kafka to appear. There is an intrinsic relationship between the decline of a political system like feudalism and the development of a literary genre like the novel in the sense of, say, Dickens or Balzac, because any authoritarian political system stifles man's critical spirit and consequently is hostile to a literary form like the novel in which the author portrays, with a good deal of detachment, the dynamic relation- ship between the protagonist and his fellow man. Indeed, Nakamura Mitsuo attributes the paucity ofJapanese novels to the fact thatJapanese in general lack this critical spirit.10

Edward Seidensticker disagrees with the host of Japanese critics who denounce I- novels merely because they do not treat social problems. On the contrary, he finds great writers of this century more and more directing their gaze towards the inner world of memory. 'The real issue', says Seidensticker, 'is not whether or not a writer writes about himself or members of his family, but how he writes about them.'11 What he does object to is some I-novelists' lack of discrimination in putting down detailed 'facts' about them- selves:

8 Sugiura Mimpei * ij R *, 'Watakushi- sh6setsu', S. Hisamatsu and M. Nishio, eds., Nippon bungaku jiten, Tokyo, Gakus6, I952, p. 88i.

9 I. Morris, ed., 'Introduction', Modern 7apanese Stories, Tokyo, Tuttle, I96I, p. i5.

10 Nakamura Mitsuo '4 e 96 A, Nippon no kindai shdsetsu 1 * c) ifs 4V/' - , Tokyo, Iwana- mi, I954, pp. I37-8.

11 E. Seidensticker, Gendlai Nippon sakka-ron, Tokyo, Shinch6, I964, p. 90.

TSURUTA, 'Akutagawa Ryuinosuke' I7

There is something very arrogant about the assumption on the part of a writer that because an incident is related to him, be it only a routine trip to the bank, it is by virtue of that fact worth setting down in print.12

Morris also calls it 'a rather dangerous form of conceit, based upon the idea that there is something intrinsically interesting in an honest account of one's inner life.'13

It may help us to understand the nature of I-novels if we find out how this 'dangerous form of conceit' came about. In his controversial essay Kume Masao says that art is not the creation of another life but a re-creation of one's own life. He proceeds to the con- clusion that the real base of all the arts is in 'I'. In other words, whatever an artist creates is an extension of himself, and so it is best for a writer to produce a work that is a faithful representation of himself. When he writes about somebody else or about himself in the third person, truth evaporates, for there is a dangerous distance between the work and its model.14 Naive as it may sound, the theory had many loyal followers. Just how deeply rooted this attitude has been among Japanese writers was demonstrated in I962, thirty- seven years after Kume's declaration, when Takami Jun (I907-65)-voicing the senti- ment of many fellow writers-publicly stated that he distrusted any form of prose writing except the I-novel because this form could bring out the best in him.15

Among the I-novelists the writers who belonged to the Shirakaba school in particular had unshakable faith in the 'self'. They believed that if they succeeded in becoming 'themselves', they could realize truth which was hidden in each of them. This attitude stemmed from their belief that truth in oneself corresponds to truth in others. In short, a Shirakaba writer felt that by writing faithfully about himself, even if this involved the most trivial things such as 'his routine visit to the bank', he could communicate im- portant truths to his reader. Senuma Shigeki says these writers were convinced that underneath truth in oneself lay the absolute truth, which apportioned itself to each in- dividual. According to Senuma this conviction led them to pursue their daily experiences with ardent religiosity.16

This eagerness to realize one's full potential is not difficult to understand. The history of the Japanese literary world ever since the Meiji 'revolution' of i868 was a series of romantic movements under various names to emancipate the individual's ego from feu- dalism. The salient feature of these movements was the basic idea that an individual could best be liberated by cutting all possible human bonds. In their overanxiousness to be free and to be themselves they neglected to see the possibility of dynamic relationships with other people. Instead, together with their Buddhistic psychological heritage and the

12 E. Seidensticker, 'Strangely Shaped Nov- els', J. Roggendorf, ed., Studies in 7apanese Culture, Tokyo, Sophia, I963, p. 2I7.

13 I. Morris, Modern Yapanese Stories, p. i6. 14 Kume, op. cit. p. 289. 15 Takami Jun ri )'IA, 'Watakushi-sh6setsu

no honshitsu to mondaiten' A o 0) *t 4 f rvl KKK, XXVII, no. I4, p. 6i.

16 Senuma Shigeki Wi g it*, 'Watakushi- sh6setsu to shinkyo-sh6setsu' JA'1A f :A ,J'f, KKKK, Xi, no. 3, p. I7.

MN: XXV, I-2 B

i8 Monumenta Nipponica, xxv, I-2

ascetic tradition of seeking freedom from the stifling and ritualistic complexity of human relationships, these writers began to concentrate on ego-realization in isolation. This explains at least in part the I-novelists' preoccupation with what seems to be a pursuit of trivialities in their daily life.

In this regard one might add that the important figures in the Naturalist school, which is commonly agreed to be chiefly responsible for the prototype I-novels, began their careers as tanka poets. The lyrical quality of tanka, conspicuously present in the I-novel, is characteristic of Japanese romanticism which is preoccupied with the limited, if con- centrated, world of an individual's emotions. As tanka began to lose its vitality in modern times, people whose mentality was suited to this lyrical form turned more and more to 'novel'-writing, especially after observing what a few forerunners of the I-novel had done. Thus by softening the structure of the novel wherein a dynamic human drama can be best developed, the I-novel accommodated under the misleading title of 'novelist' a good number of tanka-oriented lyrical writers.

Perhaps the most important single change brought about by the first I-novel, The uilt, in I907, was its profound effect on the concept of fiction in novels. Three years prior

to the publication of The tilt, Shimazaki Toson published Hakai17 or The Broken Com- mandment, which caused a sensation all over the country. Although it was his first attempt to write a novel after gaining a reputation as a tanka poet, the skill he displayed established him as Japan's first realistic novelist. However, when The qilt was published, the impact of its confessional element was so staggering that Shimazaki discarded the fictionality of The Broken Commandment and tirelessly produced many autobiographical 'novels'. Shima- zaki is one of many Japanese writers who are deeply impressed by factuality or, perhaps more accurately, are keenly aware that Japanese readers in general tend to reject fiction as something false, and to accept only too easily what seems to be fact. Japanese literary history teems with non-fiction such as essays and diaries which,

with only a few exceptions, are taken much more seriously than fictional stories and romances. Senuma Shigeki considers respect for factuality and a great curiosity about one's immediate surroundings to be Japanese characteristics.18 This tendency to be in- fatuated with phenomena of one's restricted habitat and the curious reluctance to fly into the world of imagination, have often resulted in what one might describe as the confusion of ethics and aesthetics. The literary critic Hasegawa Ken once flatly stated:

I would like to emphasize this well-known truth that only a good life can produce good literature.19

During World War II Hasegawa urged Japanese writers to take up some 'regular work', since such an experience would enhance the quality of their writing. At the same

17 %A 18 Senuma, op. cit. 19 Hasegawa Ken -6)JI, 'Sakka seikatsu

e no hansei' 4} * I ;--0) K , Y. Usui, ed., Kindai bungaku ronsd o * 'an'--, Tokyo, Cliikuma, I956, II, p. I96.

TSURUTA, 'Akutagawa Ryuinosuke' I9

time he rejected a theory that one needs no actual experience if one is sufficiently talented, dismissing it as abstract nonsense.20 Hasegawa's assertion is not altogether surprising, what with the war-hysteria and the national policy of turning white-collar workers into instant factory hands for ammunition production, but in I966 the literary critic Asami Fukashi voiced what was commonly held to be the I-novelists' basic assumption about the relationship between life and art:

Again, it is because they needed the 'writer's eye' in order to grasp the Universal Truth of life from the triviality of their daily experiences. However it must be remembered that the 'writer's eye' can never develop itself independently, but the growth of the 'eye' goes hand in hand with the self-training of the writer's own person.21

As life merges into art, the borderline between ethics and aesthetics loses its clarity. Kawasaki Ch6taro, perhaps one of the most representative postwar I-novelists, comment- ing on the confessional aspect of novel-writing, has this to say:

Writing requires the courage to expose to the broad daylight things one could not possibly tell people. Every one of us has more or less some kind of infirmity and things he is much ashamed of. However, being an I-novelist, if he attempted to resort to any tricks to smooth them over or to be dishonest Nvith them, it would be a disgrace to his pen.22

How did this enthusiasm for truth-telling in a 'novel' come about? It6 Sei23 explains that the literary world in the Meiji period consisted of people who had not been able to function inJapanese society, and had fled from it. These people had refused to compromise with many social restrictions inherited from the previous age, which they thought pre- vented them from enjoying freedom and being true to themselves. Many were determined to seek out truth by living freely, and writing and publishing a true and frank account of their lives. In literary circles such works were valued and respected as revelations of truth, especially since publication of a writer's private life risked social ruin for himself and the members of his family. It6 calls the Japanese literary world a 'collective body of ascetics', and their writing a 'truth contest' in the atmosphere of 'let's see who lives more truthfully and confesses more truth'.

It is a bit of irony, explains Ito, that these writers stimulated by their exposure to the Western concept of individualism, suddenly took on a mentality similar to that in the middle and Edo periods when many samurai, disgusted with the egoistic power plays of

20 ibid. 21 Asami Fukashi 5A i) A, 'Watakushi-

sh6setsu kaishaku no hensen', KKKK, Xi, no. 3, p. 12.

22 Kawasaki Ch6tar6 P1-* lA05, 'Wata-

kushi-shosetsu ni tsuite', KKK, XXVII, n. I4,

P. 52. 23 It6 Sei 4i *&, Kaitei bungaku nyiumon T g( S; -k A , Tokyo, Kobunsha, 1954, pp.

I09-23.

20 Monumenta Nipponica, xxv, I-2

the lords, sought freedom in temples by forsaking human ties. In the Edo period, to many people the pure and true life represented not the active life of a merchant or samurai but a subdued life away from the dirt of society, where one might enjoy writing a haiku or two.

What with the 'truth-telling contest' and the literary heritage of essays, diaries and a good number of tanka and haiku which tended to stress what is 'genuine' rather than tricks and fiction, on the whole the modern Japanese literary world was not particularly well-disposed to the notion of fiction. Hiraoka Toshio points out that the Meiji period stepped into the atmosphere of fiction-contempt of the previous era, which regarded fiction and romances as fit to be read only by women and children.24

This aversion to fiction (which was considered to be practically synonymous with dishonesty) is best expressed in a comment by Shiga Naoya of the Shirakaba school, on one of the rare occasions he reviewed his contemporaries' works. Of Nakamura Seiko's 'Kokus6'25 or 'A Granary' (I9I6) Shiga said, 'It is a pleasing work both in its style and material. The dialect used also adds a quality to the novel. The work imparts no sense of fabrication.' In the same review he dismissed Iwano's26 'Geisha ni natta onna' or 'The Woman Who Became a Geisha' by saying, 'it reeks of fiction.'27

Aversion to the concept of fiction seems to have much to do with the attitude of the Japanese to nature. Their infatuation with nature, generally speaking, is inclined to make them approve of things as they are, in contrast to a Westerner's urge to confront it and change it to his liking. The reluctance of the Japanese to change things drastically, and the high value they place upon things in their natural form, are best expressed in an ancient instruction book on landscaping. It says that a garden should be made 'in imita- tion of natural hills and water', 'incorporating exciting sights well known in the various provinces', but flatly states that no matter how cleverly one may contrive, one should remember that 'the rocks that man erects can never excel the ones in nature.'28 Defend- ing I-novels, Kume Masao echoes this sentiment when he uses a similar comparison: 'I think that no matter how beautifully produced, an artificial flower falls too far short of one in wild nature.'29

What do all these things add up to? Do they imply that I-novelists believed in pro- ducing a photographic representation of their daily experiences and calling it a novel? Is what an I-novelist called truth the exact duplicate in writing of his physical actions, emotions and thinking? Actually the distance between the experience and the record which was supposed to faithfully represent it is much greater than many Japanese I-

24 Hiraoka Toshio * 1AI O A, 'Watakushi- shosetsu no kyok6sei' }A4 K 0) 1 * KKKK, XI, no. 3, pp. 83-4.

25 tffl , 26 &f 27 K6no Toshio U fctZk 0, 'Watakushi-sho-

setsu ni okeru Shirakabaha no yakuwari' }4 ;t I - r, t ;; 63 A CD e V , KKKK, XI, p. 27.

28 Okamoto Tar6 1A -* K13, Nippon no denti H * 0) e AA, Tokyo, Kobunsha, pp. 57, I97.

29 Kume, op. cit. p. 290.

TSURUTA, 'Akutagawa Ryuinosuke' 2I

novelists would have liked. For one thing, it is impossible that an action in a given time and space be duplicated elsewhere with absolute fidelity. Obviously I-novelists were not thinking in these theoretical terms, but many were obsessed with being 'honest' with themselves. Postwar scholarship turned up considerable evidence, however, that con- tradicts many I-novelists' claims to honesty, if the term is interpreted to mean that every incident in a 'novel' is based on an actual happening. For instance, Wada Kingo has found that Tayama Katai sometimes used plots derived from his imagination. In fact, Tayama is quoted as saying:

If it were a fact, I would not write about it. Because it is a work of imagination, one is stimulated to write it.30

When Tayama's The uilt was published, many writers and readers accepted it as his honest confession. Hiraoka Toshio explains this particular phenomenon by saying that 'the work had so much reality in it that it was mistaken for a "fact".'31 Hiraoka agrees with many critics that The ?uilt was an important work, but not that it established the non-fiction tradition of I-novels. He contends that it established an entirely new approach to the concept of fiction, by allowing the reader to indulge himself in a 'fact' while really consuming fiction.32 Tayama's attempt to salvage fiction from the general milieu of con- tempt did, however, result in narrowing its scope. Ever since, many writers, whether they were aware of it or not, have used this structure to disguise fiction as fact, exploit- ing the reader's eagerness to accept the work as a faithful account of the author's private life.

The I-novel, which still lingers on in a much less conspicuous form, exerted varying degrees of influence on many writers, including Mori Oogai. Hasegawa Izumi includes in his list of thirty-five representative I-novels two by Mori-'Hannichi' or 'The Half- Day' (I909) and 'M6so' or 'A Wild Fancy' (I9u I).33 Kume Masao, while dismissing Natsume's first novel 'Wagahai wa neko de aru' or 'I am a Cat' (I905) as a 'popular and entertaining work', says that Natsume's 'Garasudo no naka' or 'Inside the Glass Door'34 (I9Is) comes close to being what he considers an I-novel.

The impact of the I-novel did not bypass Akutagawa. He was keenly aware of the trend, since his career-I9I4 to I927-was in the middle of the earlier phase of its de- velopment. However, when his tightly constructed 'The Nose' (I9I6) shot Akutagawa into the orbit of the Japanese literary world, people were beginning to tire of many I- novels written by naturalists, with their peculiar flair for the details of the darker side of life. The appearance of 'The Nose', the antithesis of the I-novel in every conceivable way, coincided with the public's vague desire for something new and different.

30 Wada Kingo FE m 'Watakushi-sh6- setsu ni okeru sh6setsu to jisseikatsu' IA'I';iA1- r,t 'fY *;-, KKKK, xi, no. 3, p.96.

31 Hiraoka, op. cit. p. 85.

32 ibid. 33 + B ,-L 34 11a k6, M

22 Monumenta Nipponica, xxv, I-2

In his enthusiastic letter to Akutagawa, Natsume referred to three merits of 'The Nose': its refined humor, the novelty of its material, and its style, terse and always to the point.35 The I-novel is characterized by the conspicuous absence of these three attributes, for it lacks the distance between the author and the work necessary for humor, the material is always drawn from the author's limited environment, and the style, in the tradition of the ancient essay, is often long-winded and rambling.

Akutagawa was quite conscious of the role he assigned himself to play in the naturalist- I-novel oriented literary circle. Akutagawa thrived on his 'fiction' stories by tossing Poe, Ambrose Bierce, France, Merimee and many other Western writers into his cocktail- shaker, and did achieve a 'rare position', as Natsume predicted in his letter.

As we have already discussed, a confessional element is a vital ingredient of the I- novel, and the confession must be bold, frank and honest. Akutagawa flatly rejected this by claiming that 'to be honest, or not to deceive others is not an issue of any literary law but simply a question of moral code (V, 63).' Akutagawa defined an I-novel as a 'novel with a certificate saying "this novel is not a lie," ' and he laughed away the whole matter by pointing out that it stems from the confusion of ethics with aesthetics (V, 62). This does not imply that Akutagawa was not interested in the confessional aspect of creative writing, for there is evidence to indicate that he was intrigued with it.

Characteristically, Akutagawa revealed this interest through his unconventional attitude toward confession. Shimazaki T6son (I872-I943) shocked Japan with a bold account of his entanglement with his niece in Shinsei36 or The New Life (I9I8), which actually led Tayama Katai to believe that Shimazaki planned to commit suicide, for 'a confession of such an immoral affair' would surely invite severe social sanctions. But Akutagawa called the hero of The New Life 'the greatest hypocrite' (IV, 64). Likewise, Confessions of a Certain Fool by Strindberg, hailed as the Western classic of I-novels by Kume Masao, was not stark confession according to Akutagawa. He explained his rea- soning in a typically paradoxical comparison of Rousseau and Merimee:

It is impossible for any person to confess the entirety of himself and it is impossible for him to engage in art without expressing himself. Rousseau was fond of con- fession but you will not see Rousseau stark naked in his Confessions. Merimee abhorred confessions, but does not his Colomba reveal Merimee between its lines? The borderline between the literature of confessions and others is not so clear as one might suppose. (V, 76)

This could be taken as part of Akutagawa's answer to the frequent charge that he could not confess frankly about himself.

It is true that Akutagawa simply refused to write directly about himself in his stories,

3N5 Natsume Soseki zenshii, Tokyo, S6gei-sha, 1954, X, p. 523.

36 #

TsU RUTA, 'Akutagawa Ryiinosuke' 23

at least until a few years before his suicide in I927. Critics have speculated as to why he was so reluctant to expose himself Kawazoe Kunisue attributes it to his 'vanity',37 and Sat6 Haruo reports that Akutagawa himself confided this reason to him.38 However, such critics as Fukuda Tsuneari, Ikuta Ch6ko and Kataoka Ry6ichi argue that this reticence is characteristic of a sensitive person who has grown up in a large city such as Tokyo.39 They point out that the majority of confession-happy naturalists came to Tokyo from the hills. This is an interesting theory but fails to explain why many other Tokyo writers inclined toward I-novels. Furthermore, Fukuda suspects that Akutagawa was afraid that if he wrote about himself too candidly, he would dispel his creative incentive.

The reason Akutagawa kept his personal affairs out of his stories was to ensure the truth of his own self. He had to feel guilty about the ugliness of his person and his sins in order to secure a ring of truth in the beautiful metaphors he spun out. Furthermore, the most crucial thing was that nobody should know Akuta- gawa's guilt feeling, because purity of all emotions is attained by prohibiting the expression of them. Akutagawa thus feared that his guilt would cheaply evaporate through the process of confession in his stories.40

Hirotsu Kazuo, however, thinks that Akutagawa did write about and reveal himself.41 He simply embroidered himself, and we can easily see him through the transparent device of fiction. This view is seconded by Sayama Yrz6,42 who points out that many of his stories in which the hero is an artist tend to be inore convincing than others, and suspects that Akutagawa transferred himself to the artist-hero.

All these arguments-admittedly of a non-aesthetic nature-can be summarized in Akutagawa's own reaction to his contemporaries' pressure for 'bolder confession':

They often tell me 'to write more about your life and make a bolder confession'. I too make confessions; my stories are confessions of my own experiences to a degree. What they want is for me to make myself the hero of a novel, write of actual events concerning me without reservation, and furthermore attach to the book an identification chart of the names of the characters and the real persons. Let it be clear that I have no intention of writing such a work. Firstly, it disagrees with me no end that I exhibit my private life to those curiosity-seekers. Secondly,

37 Kawazoe Kunisue )II f'J 1X1 , Kindai Nippon bungakuron, Tokyo, Waseda, I959, p. 303.

38 Sat6 Haruo, 1IR 44 A, 'Akutagawa Ryiu- nosuke o omou', S. Yoshida, ed., Akutagawa Ryinosuke kenkyi, p. 247.

39 Fukuda Tsuneari 4 Es lt i!, 'Akutagawa Ryiunosuke', Bungei tokubon, Dec. I954, p. 240, p. 240; Ikuta Choko I IE - it, 'Akutagawa-shi no seikaku', Tomiuri, 4 Jan. I925; Kataoka Ry6-

ichi )t 1AI k-, 'Akutagawa Ryuinosuke no saku- hin', Kokugo kokubun, June I924, p. 8.

40 Fukuda Tsuneari, Sakka no taido 4' * 0) St , Tokyo, Chuo K6ronsha, I947, p. I38.

41 Hirotsu Kazuo i,&' 5*;3, 'Akutagawa no uso to shinjitsu' -Pl lo e A t, S. Yoshida, ed., Akutagawa Ryiunosuke kenkyu, p. 8i.

42 Sayama Yuzo It di t_ -, Akutagawa Ryui- nosuke, Tokyo, Ichigaya, I945, p. 99.

24 Monumenta Nipponica, xxv, I-2

it gives me no pleasure to turn such a confession into profit and fame. Let us suppose that I wrote my sexual experiences like Kobayashi Issa43 and published it in the New Year issue of, say, Chuj kiron. My readers would be thrilled; my critics would shower me with praise: Akutagawa's great leap forward etc., and my friends would be happy, saying 'Akutagawa is now naked and truthful,' etc. Just thinking of it gives me bone-chilling shivers. (IV, I4I-2)

As Akutagawa said, any writing reveals something about the author, and his stories are confessions in that sense. However, the real reason for not wanting to write his own expose is not given above. Akutagawa once wrote:

The only time we do not feel ashamed of revealing our foolishness is when we are with snmall children or with dogs or cats. (V, I04)

This statement seems to come much closer to the real reason for Akutagawa's ret- icence than the theories of his vanity or his metropolitan sensitivity or his fear of losing his creative incentive. It shows Akutagawa's sense of confrontation with the world he lived in. The world will deride, attack and demolish you, but children and domesticated animals will not. For Akutagawa, to write about his private experiences would have been to expose his vulnerable self to open attack. To reveal his weakness to the hostile world was not a function of Akutagawa's art; on the contrary it was to expose the absurdities, injustices and evil of the world and, hopefully, to bring it to its knees to ask Akutagawa's forgiveness for all the injuries it had inflicted upon him. The uniqueness of Akutagawa lies in the thoroughness and precision with which he channeled this intense resentment into the meticulously calculated world of his art.

Having said that, we must discuss a curious ambivalence in some of his work before returning to the issue of confession. This ambivalence is to be found in a series of stories which may be grouped under the heading The Idiot Theme. They are 'Christophoro' (I9I9), 'Juliano Kichisuke' (I919), 'Christ in Nanking' (I920), 'Salvation Scroll' (I92I) and 'The Hermit' (I922).44 The central characters of these stories, who are all idiots to varying degrees, are distinguished from his others by the conspicuous absence of hostility to the world. The interpretation that in these tales Akutagawa demonstrated the folly of the world by bestowing happiness only upon persons with an enfeebled rational faculty is reasonable enough, but it is to ignore that Akutagawa was unmistak- ably envious of the serenity of these idiot-heroes.

More dramatic evidence of the ambivalence is in the tales Akutagawa wrote for Akai tori,45 a progressive children's magazine. His stories for children present a view of life diametrically opposed to that in his works for adults: in the former Akutagawa endorses the existing order of workaday reality by rejecting things supernatural, while in the

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TSURUTA, 'Akutagawa Ryiinosuke' 25

latter he is preoccupied with turning reality upside down. As Akutagawa seemed eager to embrace the value of this world in his children's stories, some critics say that it was only in them that Akutagawa dropped his defenses and revealed his real feelings. It is a tempting theory but sounds no less one-sided than saying that Akutagawa's basic at- titude was one of sheer resentment against his immediate environment.

One finds further proof of the ambivalence of Akutagawa's attitude to the world in some of the best earlier stories, where he showed a more active interest in re-ordering reality. Take for instance 'The Nose'.46 Naigu47 is greatly worried about the loss of priestly dignity caused by the disheartening proportions of his nose. The poor priest works extremely hard to shrink the source of his obsession to a more respectable size. The irony of the story, in typical Akutagawa fashion, is that when Naigu thinks he has finally succeeded in his esoteric orthopedics he finds he is farther removed than ever from the crowd he so earnestly wants to join. The story ends with a masterful scene in which Naigu is described as being relieved and indeed contented when his nose returns to 'normal giant size', murmuring to himself, 'Now, nobody is going to laugh at me any more.'

The significant thing about this story is that in the end, little has changed; Naigu comes back to the starting point when he gains a degree of happiness with himself and the world. 'Yam Gruel'48 reveals a similar motif; Goi's lifelong ambition is to eat yam gruel to his heart's content, but when this is miraculously realized he finds himself longing to go back to the old state where he still had a dream of eating a bellyful of yam gruel. To be sure there is that unmistakable sense of irony, suddenly betraying our heightened expectation at the end, but there is more flirtation with the immediate Nvorld than ex- plicit hostility to it.

Let us go back to the issue of confession. When Akutagawa called the hero of Toson's The New Life the 'greatest hypocrite', it was not the ethical issue that irritated him but rather what seemed to him the extraordinary ease with which Toson perpetrated his so-called confession about the love affair with his niece. If confession is meant to gratify the need for self-punishment, to gain subsequent absolution from society and admira- tion for the courage of participating in the 'truth-telling contest', T6son succeeded in his purpose. This is an act of great faith in society and this Toson had, even if he was not a consummate writer. Akutagawa may have had literary talent, but, however much he may have desired it, he did not have T6son's faith in people. Akutagawa's irritation with T6son contained a mixture of contempt and envy strikingly similar to that which he expressed in his idiot heroes.

This brings us to the question, did Akutagawa make any 'confession' at all? If we accept his statement on the subject, it follows that all writing is confessional. Obviously this is not the kind of answer we are seeking here. Confession should be initiated by a

46 A 47 I4JIM 48 *f

26 Monumenta Nipponica, xxv, I-2

deep sense of shame, should fulfil the need of self-punishment and result in deliverance from shame.

When Akutagawa was a child, he was sickly and puny, the favorite target of the neighborhood bullies. His notes, diary, essays, and his friends' testimonies bear witness to the fact that he nursed an acute feeling of physical inadequacy. Equally important was his nagging awareness that his mother died insane and that he might have inherited the seed of her madness. What he feared most in this regard was the possibility of becoming extraordinarily different in the eyes of people in general. As he sought for signs of his deviation and managed to find them, he began to praise what he called geniuses, a category of deviants to which Akutagawa persuaded himself that he belonged. While he was nervously chanting eulogies to genius on the one hand, he was busily creating characters who bore the stamp of Akutagawa's awareness of his own freakishness. Naigu of 'The Nose' and Ein of 'The Dragon'49 suffer from noses of monstrous dimensions, and Goi5O in 'Yam-Gruel' is marked by, among other things, his bright red nose. jiikichi of 'Genkaku Samb6'51 is very ashamed of his body 'which looked like a plucked rooster' and the short English teacher of 'Mr Mori', says Akutagawa, 'reminds one of a spider- man in a freak-show.' The list is fairly long. Obviously no I-novelist could accept them as a confession. But this was as far as Akutagawa would go, for he was not interested in relating every detail of his physical and mental peculiarities; only enough to spin out effective metaphors and consequently to create ambivalence.

If the most enthusiastic reader of Akutagawa is made uneasy by the resolution of some of his earlier works, his discomfort may derive from the discord between Akuta- gawa's two contradictory desires: to be a part of the world and to revenge himself upon it. But there are cases where this tension worked creatively. 'Jigokuhen',52 or 'The Hell Screen' (I9I8), marks the peak of such creativity. It is a powerful story about an eccentric painter, Yoshihide,53 who commits suicide after having chosen to witness his own daughter's death by fire in order to finish a commissioned painting, 'The Hell Screen'. Yoshihide, who is described as ugly and repulsive, may be acting out his author's fanta- sies; he is heroically egoistic, behaving as if beyond good and evil. Two things are of supreme importance to him: painting, and his beautiful daughter. Confronted with the necessity to choose between them, he chooses art. His suicide immediately after finishing his painting fulfils his two contradictory needs: self-punishment, and punishment of the world. Thus Yoshihide joins the world while destroying it.

The work takes on a sinister prophetic cast when we realize that nine years later Akutagawa carried out exactly what he had Yoshihide do at the end of 'The Hell Screen'.

I-novels concentrated on diary-like accounts of what their authors actually did in

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52 t -

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TSURUTA, 'Akutagawa Rylinosuke' 27

their daily life. Only a few of them managed to wring out of trivialities the genuine moment of poignancy and lyricism so cherished by the Japanese; the majority were deluded into thinking that merely publishing their social secrets constituted a literary achievement. Since they scarcely questioned the reason for their existence, and were basically secure in their society, the relationship between their sense of shame and the 'truth-telling contest' amounted to no more than a light-hearted game of hide-and-seek.

While Akutagawa had his full share of shame and social inadequacies, he was operating at a much deeper level when he dealt with the alienation of an individual. At his best he was trying to seek the meaning of the world, which he seriously questioned. It is true that Akutagawa was not at ease with so-called confession, but he detected and resented the I-novelists' presumption of society's indulgence. If his best works offer something more than I-novels it is because he rejected surface trivialities and tried to get to the root of the absurdities of human existence.

The creation of Yoshihide in 'The Hell Screen' was in a way a truer confession than anything dredged up from the past by I-novelists; none of their confessions were so revealing as to foreshadow the author's own fate.