What, one might ask, is distinctively Japanese about Japanese literature? Several key features distinguish Japanese literary sensibilities within the context of world literature. First, one cannot overstate the importance of lyric in the Japanese literary tradition. Even as drama and mimesis played a key role in the development of Western literary arts, lyric is at the center of Japanese literary origins. Prior to the arrival of a writing system, Japanese literature consisted of an oral tradition that placed great emphasis on poetry. When the Chinese writing system came to Japan in the fifth through seventh centuries, Japanese soon used the sounds of Chinese characters to transcribe whole collections of poetry from the preliterate age, such as those found in the eighth-century Man’yôshû (Ten Thousand Leaves). During the Heian period (794–1186), Chinese was used as the language of the court and for composing formal literature in Chinese, but the adaptation and stylization of Chinese characters (kanji) to represent the syllabic phonemes of Japanese led to a new alphabet, called kana, that was employed to write poetry, diaries, narratives, and songs in Japanese.
Over time both kana and kanji came to be used together, allowing writers to imbue their writing with layers of depth that worked because Japanese contains many homophones that offer the possibility of multiple interpretations. For example, one common pun that has been employed in Japanese for centuries is the term matsu, which includes the meanings “wait,” “pine (tree),” “final,” “grind,” and “depend upon,” among others. The particular meaning of each use of the word matsu is clear when writers use the respective kanji. However, when a writer employs the phrase matsu using only kana (which have been stripped of their specific meaning through stylization), any or all of the meanings may be implied. This gives all forms of Japanese literature richness and depth, even as it adds to the difficulty of translating into foreign languages. Hence, playfulness and lyric richness is a major characteristic of Japanese literature, both classical and modern.
Another characteristic of Japanese literature is a heightened aesthetic sensibility. Throughout the centuries poetry contests and other forms of literary competition created different schools of judgment and volumes of treatises devoted to determining what defined the essence of beauty in literary art. Numerous factions of critical theory arose, beginning in the Heian period, devoted to classifying and prescribing essential aspects of aesthetic sensibility. A prevailing concern for beauty imbues Japanese literature with both elegance and highly self-conscious aesthetic regard.
That aesthetic regard is often evoked by descriptions of nature, and Japanese literature is rich with allusions to nature and man’s relationship to it. To an almost Romantic degree, nature has been employed to reflect the narrator’s or poet’s internal state. Many natural phenomena, such as the blossoming of cherry trees or the death of vegetation in autumn, become metaphors for life, love, death, and parting. Nature is never very far from the surface in Japanese literature; in even the most urban of stories or plays, the characters make frequent allusions to the changing of the seasons or use other nature metaphors.
Finally, the ongoing themes of Japanese literature reflect the physical and social conditions of Japan. Located in an earthquake and typhoon zone, Japan has always been a place where things could come quickly to an end with little or no warning. This physical insecurity has led to a particular emphasis on the Buddhist notion of mujô (impermanence). Life’s evanescence, manifest in nature, can also be seen in the fleeting pleasures of the ukiyo (floating world), the setting for many urbane narratives and dramas. Socially, Japanese hierarchies based on occupation, gender, rank, and status determine one’s course of life and even the very words one may use in communicating, and this social and linguistic stratification is mirrored in the variety of literary genres tailored to the higher and lower classes. A finely balanced social structure is not without its share of tension, and in Japanese literature the class and gender tensions manifest themselves in great contrasts: opposite the reflective, contemplative mode of lyric poetry, one finds the violence of samurai tales; in contrast to verse that describes love and yearning, one finds puppet plays filled with tragic double suicides. These and other characteristics of Japanese literature not only distinguish it from other literatures but also make it attractive to audiences both within Japan and around the world.
The literary heritage of Japan runs long and deep. During the Heian period (794–1185), the cultural arts flourished in present-day Kyoto, yielding a rich collection of literary works, including the Tale of Genji (ca. 1008), seen by some as the world’s first novel of psychological depth. Civil war shattered the peace of the Heian period and the subsequent unrest lasted for centuries, throughout which stories describing the military valor of both the noble and the nameless made their way from oral tale into the literary canon. Ghost stories were also a popular genre during this time of warring clans, reflecting the decay of order and the fears that reigned among the populace. Buddhism, which brought solace to many, also created the archetype of the wandering poet-monk that added a rich lyric dimension to Japanese literature. Portuguese missionaries landing in Japan in the 16th century opened up new worlds with both Christianity and technology that, in turn, led to the consolidation of power in the hands of one reigning clan.
As order was restored to Japan with the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603), the subsequent peace and urban development allowed a new kind of cultural flowering, one that was intensified by the expulsion of Christians from Japan in the early 17th century. With Japan adopting a policy of isolation from the West and the Tokugawa family shifting the capital from Kyoto to Edo (present-day Tokyo), the literary focus shifted as well to the urban space. A rising merchant class, eager to enjoy the privileges of nobility, used their growing wealth to refine themselves culturally, in the process subsidizing artists, playwrights, storytellers, and writers who created a constant flow of new books, plays, prints, and stories about and for the city dwellers. Theaters and yose variety halls catered to a booming population, lending libraries and bookstores distributed the latest serialized illustrated novels, and schools of poetry flourished around the country. Chinese novels, imported through Nagasaki, were published as wildly popular Japanese adaptations. The government, from time to time, sought to rein in the excesses of the age, forbidding, for example, the depiction of contemporary events in the theater or in print. Writers and playwrights quickly circumvented the restrictions by resetting their stories in earlier times and changing the names of the characters. Occasionally an author’s flouting the law led to his being manacled or fined, but overall the Tokugawa period was a time of great literary flourishing.
In the middle of the 19th century, as the Tokugawa regime grew more and more complacent and ineffective, the Western powers, with sights set on Asian empire, posed a serious threat to Japan. The whisper of information about the West entering Japan through the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki spoke volumes about the superiority of Western technology and military strength and described in alarming detail the fate of Japan’s Asian neighbors. The looming visage of colonization threatened Japan, precipitating a series of internal struggles that resulted in Japan opening its ports to Western trade in the 1850s and a complete change of government in the 1860s. This political development led, in turn, to widespread social and cultural changes over the following decades that had a profound impact on the literature of Japan, bringing about a sea change in how literature was perceived, created, and consumed. Modern Japan was born.
The restoration of the Meiji sovereign to political rule in 1868 signaled Japan’s entrance into the modern, global world. Although much of the change was gradual, particularly in cultural matters, within one decade the opening of Japan to trade with the West had changed a trickle of information and cultural influence into a torrent. Western merchants settled in trading ports in Japan, bringing with them not only technological artifacts, such as telegraphs and trains, but also their families, books, and music. They established newspapers, which helped spawn Japan’s own newspaper industry. Their Victorian novels and poems were adapted and translated into Japanese versions. Their amateur productions of Shakespeare were soon copied on the Japanese stage. And over time Japanese traveled to the West, bringing back language skills and firsthand knowledge of current Western artistic and literary tastes.
Often the influence of the West on Japanese literature is seen as a one-way flow, but the West developed an equally passionate interest in Japan as well. As Japanese craftsmen and performers made their way to the grand expositions of late 19th-century Paris, London, and Chicago, they fueled a movement called japonisme, which brought elements of Japanese culture to art, music, literature, fashion, and dance. Westerners, in turn, traveled to Japan seeking new perspectives, themes, and insights. Some, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, returned home and exercised a great influence on modernist art. Others, such as Lafcadio Hearn, remained in Japan and helped nurture Japanese appreciation for traditional culture.
As Japan modernized, its literature modernized as well, and not solely by imitating Western models. Even as some avant-garde writers and playwrights sought inspiration in the works of Western realism and modernism, other writers, such as Higuchi Ichiyô, found their muse in the writings of Heian- and Tokugawa-period authors. These works, written in the style and language of classical Japanese, were elegant but largely inaccessible to the masses, whose colloquial speech had deviated from the written form of Japanese centuries before. One of the central challenges, then, for a modernizing Japanese literature specifically, and culture in general, was how to unify the written and spoken languages. This so-called genbun itchi (unification of speech and writing) debate reached an impasse when intellectuals who were exploring the issue realized that the divide paralleled that of class and education and saw language reform as a huge challenge.
This challenge was met, however, and surmounted when young writers turned to the storytelling stage for a style of literary language that was both accessible and flexible enough to be used for casual and formal purposes. The Japanese storytelling tradition had a rich repertoire of memorized tales that were performed nightly in theaters across Japan, improvised to suit their audiences by skilled raconteurs who had undergone years of apprenticeship and training. The style of language was deferential at times, as befits a performer before an audience, but it also imitated a host of stock characters as it sought linguistic realism within the performance of the stories. In 1884, Kaidan Botandôrô (The Ghost Tale of the Peony Lantern) became the first of these stories to be transcribed, using Japanese shorthand (another Meiji period innovation), and subsequently published as a very successful serialized novel. Writers then had a pattern of written language, both formal and informal, that allowed them to create literature that mirrored contemporary speech and could be read by the masses. The result was a host of new novels to usher in the 20th century. Among these experimental products of the new Japanese literature were both works of mass appeal, echoing those from the Tokugawa period boom, as well as works of philosophical and aesthetic depth, reflecting high-minded intellectual tradition and imported Western writing.
As the 20th century began Japan was in between two important wars. In 1894–95, Japan fought and defeated China over control of Korea and other territories, and in 1904–5 Japan fought and defeated Russia over control of Manchuria. Both victories earned Japan the respect, if not the fear, of Western powers and set in motion aggressive industrial and military development that had a profound effect on society and culture for the first half of the century. In the literary realm, Japanese writers sought to meet or better their Western peers as well. In rapid succession, Japanese writers and playwrights experimented with Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and free verse poetry. Women writers formed the Seitô (Bluestockings) Society, from which emerged a nascent feminist movement. Humanist writers joined together into the Shirakaba (White Birch) Society, and others focused on perception or consciousness. The more politically minded authors took inspiration from Russian authors and the Bolshevik Revolution, and Marxism found an outlet among proletarian writers.
During the 1920s Japan’s rising militarism led to new government clashes with writers who spoke out against strong-arm policies and censorship. When Japan entered into conflicts with China in the 1930s, an effectual curtain eventually fell on the literary stage as writers were either imprisoned or coerced into cooperating with the war effort. The growing anti-Western sentiment fostered by the military was echoed in a strongly nationalist literary output marking a dark period for Japanese literature.
When the war ended, Japan entered a new era of literary productivity. Within a decade, four distinct “generations” of writers were publishing a variety of novels, short stories, poetry, and drama dealing with the war and its aftermath. The Allied Occupation, like the merchant trading posts of the Meiji Era, introduced new, primarily American, cultural influences to Japan, and soon the imports and impacts reverberated into novels, plays, and the cinema. Authors wrote of the challenges of living in postwar poverty, of the tensions of occupation, and of the effects of the atomic bomb. In the 1950s, Japan’s film industry, led by such directors as Kurosawa Akira, produced international award-winning films, many of them based on literary works. The popularity of these films abroad, combined with a growing cadre of Japanese-speaking Westerners, led to the first wave of English translations of Japanese literature and the establishment of Japanese studies programs at universities in the English-speaking world.
In the 1960s some writers saw Japan as a phoenix rising from the ashes of defeat, best symbolized by the successful hosting of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Others focused on the unrest, where Japanese college students staged protests and campus sit-ins over the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo). Marxism was the dominant ideology of literary critics, and some writers, such as Abe Kôbô, incorporated existentialist philosophy into their works. A growing number of atomic bomb victims documented their stories in narrative, poetry, and drama, and an underground theater movement thrived. Owing in part to an increasing number of English-language translations of Japanese literature, the author Kawabata Yasunari became the first Japanese to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, signaling the arrival of Japanese literature on the global stage.
The 1970s opened with nationalist author Mishima Yukio staging a failed coup and committing ritual suicide inside a Japan Self Defense Forces office. The move shocked writers and critics alike and underscored a penchant for suicide among Japanese writers. The country continued to grow economically, and the social and environmental consequences of rapid and unpredictable growth found their way into literature as well. The oil shortages of 1973 sent tremors throughout society, undermining a growing sense of economic security. Underclass (burakumin) writer Nakagami Kenji wrote of the prejudice suffered by his fellow untouchables.
By the 1980s, as Japan’s economy and influence burgeoned, many writers were questioning the growing Japanese sense of global superiority. A renewed interest in things Japanese led to the growth of Japanese studies programs in America, Europe, and Australia. When the real estate bubble burst at the end of the decade, writers articulated strong disenchantment with the Meiji-born dream of a Japan dominating the world stage. Postmodernism emerged in Japan as well, and such writers as Murakami Ryû and Yamada Eimi wrote of the fallout of the Occupation and a prolonged U.S. military presence in Japan. The decade ended with the death of the Shôwa emperor and a reevaluation of his role in World War II. During the final decade of the 20th century, author Ôe Kenzaburô won the 1995 Nobel Prize, and Murakami Haruki’s apathetic protagonist from his magical realist novels found widespread appeal among readers in Japan and, as the century turned, among a global audience.
In recent years, Japanese literature and theater have continued to undergo transformation and change. The impact of postmodernism, with its blurring of generic boundaries, is obvious in some developments, such as the emergence of hypertext novels. Some of the changes have technological roots, such as the cell-phone novels that have taken hold among younger readers. Graphic novels (manga) also grow more and more popular, and many works of modern literature, such as Kobayashi Takiji’s 1929 proletarian novel The Factory Ship, have been redone in comic book form. Foreign authors writing in Japanese constitute a growing presence on the literary scene, and Japanese literature finds a wider distribution abroad as more and more works are translated into English and other languages. Many literary critics today, as in years past, fear they are witnessing the final days of Japanese literature. Others find new hope for the future in the playful fusion of forms and genres. Historically, modern Japanese literature has weathered storms and sustained challenges before. At the dawn of the Meiji period there was also a perception of literary decline that found, in the chaotic transformations of the time, an infusion of strength and innovation. That heritage should guarantee a vibrant, if unpredictable, future for modern Japanese literature.