RAINOBE or RAITO NOBERU. See LIGHT NOVELS.
RAKUGO. Rakugo (punch line talk) is a form of comic oral storytelling. During the Tokugawa period, itinerant oral storytellers would gather crowds and recite war narratives, romances, humorous stories, and other tales for profit. By the Meiji period, oral performance theaters (yose) were found in nearly every urban neighborhood, and professional storytellers would make their nightly rounds reciting the latest installment of a long human drama or delivering a brief comic monologue with a punch line at the end. San’yûtei Enchô, one of the most famous storytellers of the 19th century, incorporated adaptations of Western stories into his repertoire and became the model for stenographers employing the newly invented Japanese shorthand system who published his oral stories as printed texts.
Writers used these examples of written colloquial style in their experiments to unite spoken and written Japanese (see GENBUN ITCHI). By the turn of the 19th century, yose were losing customers to the cinema, and some professional storytellers became benshi (silent film narrators). The remaining storytellers focused primarily on humorous tales, or rakugo, and today professional storytellers are almost exclusively raconteurs of these comic monologues.
Storytellers limit their use of props to a hand towel and a fan and dress in formal kimono as they tell their stories, sitting on a cushion before the audience. Each story is concluded with a pun (ochi). In the later part of the 20th century, rakugo witnessed something of a revival in popularity, and Katsura Shijaku (1939–99) performed many rakugo shows abroad, using English. See also ADAPTIVE TRANSLATIONS; FUTABATEI SHIMEI; KAWATAKE SHINSHICHI III; KÔDAN; PUBLISHING HOUSES.
RANOBE. See LIGHT NOVELS.
RASHÔMON. “Rashômon” (1915; tr. Rashomon, 1952), a short story by Akutagawa Ryûnosuke, is based on an old Japanese tale and deals with moral ambiguities in a life-or-death situation. The story tells of a man, recently fired from his job, who encounters a poor, elderly woman stealing hair from corpses on the second floor of the Rashô Gate in Kyoto. She meets his disgust with the explanation that the hair will allow her to make wigs to sell to survive, upon which he, in turn, steals her kimono and runs off. The story was adapted for a film of the same title by Kurosawa Akira (1910–98), which blends “Rashômon” with another of Akutagawa’s stories, “Yabu no naka” (1921; tr. In a Grove, 1952).
REALISM. Shajitsu shugi (realism) is the Japanese literary and artistic term used to describe the depiction of reality without interpretation or exaggeration, in contrast to Romanticism. The term shajitsu implies the sketching or copying of reality, and it appeared during the late 19th century as a translation of the realism and naturalism of European artists and writers. Tsubôchi Shôyô’s critical essay Shôsetsu Shinzui (1885; tr. The Essence of the Novel, 1956) helped establish the realist movement by criticizing earlier forms of comic narrative (gesaku) and morality dramas (kanzen chôaku). See also KEN’YÛSHA; LITERARY CRITICISM; OKAMOTO KIDÔ; SERIOUS NOVELS; TRAGIC NOVELS.
RED BIRD. See AKAI TORI.
RELIGIOUS LITERATURE. See BUDDHIST LITERATURE; CHRISTIAN LITERATURE.
RÔMAN SHUGI. See ROMANTICISM.
ROMANTICISM. Romanticism (roman shugi), a late 18th-century European philosophical and literary movement, privileged emotion as the supreme manifestation of individual will. Romanticism came to Japan through translations and adaptations in the Meiji period, and resonated with such writers as Kitamura Tôkoku, Shimazaki Tôson, and Yosano Akiko. Although Romanticism was eclipsed by naturalism and realism, it saw resurgence during the war years in 1935 when Yasuda Yojûrô created the Nihon Rôman-ha, or Japan Romanticism School, calling for a return to Japanese tradition and criticizing modernization. See also HIGUCHI ICHIYÔ; IZUMI KYÔKA; KUNIKIDA DOPPÔ; MIYAZAWA KENJI; MORI ÔGAI; TOKUTOMI ROKA.
RYÛKYÛ LITERATURE. What is called Okinawa today has historically been called the Ryûkyû (or Loo-Choo) Kingdom. Situated between China and Japan, the people of the Ryûkyû islands have mediated between the two larger countries, and their culture represents a fusion of both with its own unique religion and language. Historically Ryûkyû literature was an oral tradition containing several genres, including epic poetry, ballads, ritual prayers, and short lyric poetry called ryûka that is similar to tanka. The Japanese government formally annexed the Ryûkyûs following the Meiji Restoration and, as Japanese language education became the norm, Ryûkyûan writers, such as Oshiro Tatsuhiro (1925–) and Higashi Mineo (1938–), began publishing stories in Japanese. See also AINU LITERATURE; COLONIAL LITERATURE.