I
I casually agreed to this talk today, not realizing how unpleasant it would be to deliver remarks before my play. These talks normally go well, but I fear this one will go badly and that my tempo will be a bit off. I really had no idea that so many people would attend.
In truth, I have been busy directing the play up until the last minute and so really haven’t prepared anything by way of remarks. Well, I generally don’t prepare much beforehand. If I have a general idea in mind, then I am confident of being able to fill things in well enough, but the problem is that today I don’t even have that. I brought something with me, but this is not anything I spent a great deal of time working on. Rather, I happened to find something in a magazine that I thought might be helpful and so simply folded up the magazine and brought it here. My talk will probably be a bit rambling, but please be patient. The play following this talk will make a lot more sense.
I happened to randomly open this magazine. A book had been wedged into one of the pages, which featured an ad for a Unimat small machine tool. I dog-eared this page because the tool seemed wonderful. It was cheap, and I actually considered buying it. I really wanted to buy this tool.
Now that I have just advertised this tool, it would be very nice for any of you who might be affiliated with the company to give it to me as a gift.
That is a joke, but when I considered buying this tool, I also suddenly came upon an idea for a play. If one wanted, one could write a play about someone who bought a small machine tool.
Perhaps I’ll write this play next year, but this tool is great. It can do anything, functioning like a lathe, drill press, slicer, grinding wheel, fret saw, circular saw, screw-thread cutter, and electric drill. Its functions range from metal tools to plastic and wooden ones, tools of extreme precision with an error range of 0.01 millimeters. This is a tool with an astonishingly high performance, priced at only 30,090 yen. You really want it now, don’t you? Perhaps some of you don’t, but I bet that there are some of you who do.
But I imagine that if you actually bought this tool, you probably wouldn’t make anything with it. You’ll surely need help when you consider the time and effort involved, no matter how versatile this machine tool might be. If I bought this tool, it would be a real problem. Once I began making something, I would have no time leftover to write fiction, not to mention plays. In the end, it would be faster to buy something ready-made than to purchase this tool. Ultimately, then, I’m interested in the circumstances involved in buying such things as well as what happens after one buys them. Well, capitalist society is defined by the privatization of the means of production. Since machine tools are the very basis of the means of production, I could if I wanted buy this high-precision instrument and use it to make things—not everything, of course—so as to become perfectly self-sufficient. But these things would be so inefficient that the plan wouldn’t work. Actually, I’m fully aware of this. It’s just that when I see this tool, I want to buy it. Perhaps I will buy it, but I still won’t make anything worth mentioning.
Well, despite the fact that I have already spoken so much, I’m sure you don’t have a clue as to what this play is about. Don’t get me wrong, though. I certainly don’t say this to make fun of you.
But I’m not here to speak about machine tools. While reading a page in a magazine that was necessary for my talk, I simply happened to come across this ad. It’s a bit of a stretch, I know, but this topic is somewhat connected to my talk. My remarks today are related to my essay “Uchi naru henkyō” [The Frontier Within], which appeared serially in the journal Chūō kōron. As to why I have entitled this talk “The Frontier Within, Part II,” it is because urban society has now become a major issue. One constantly hears such phrases as “urban society” or “fall into everydayness.” In my own fashion, I wrote about these things under the heading of “The Frontier Within,” but I didn’t receive the response that I expected. I wrote the essay hoping for a slightly larger reaction, but it was not to be. It thus seemed that I needed to be more persistent in dealing with this matter, which is why I have entitled today’s lecture “The Frontier Within, Part II.”
I’m sure there are some of you in the audience who have not read this essay, so let me simply mention that the theme focused on the question “What are we human beings?” When we inquire into the nature of our society, status quo and present, we begin to see that a sense of security of everydayness (in which today appears like yesterday and tomorrow appears like today), as for example the sense of security one feels in a community, pervades us. We then gradually extend the continuum of everydayness until we finally enter the framework of the state. Everyone has now grown used to the fact that such frameworks as the native hometown or household come naturally to be destroyed and reorganized. Upon encountering the state, however, the particular sense or perception one has is that it possesses a different level or character than such frameworks as family, native hometown, society, or school. Ultimately, the question here concerns what exactly this means.
Recently, however, the expression “I am a stateless person” appeared in both the slogans from the Zengakuren student association and the dialogue between Mishima Yukio and the Zenkyōtō movement at Tokyo University. I myself of course more than sympathize with such a notion of transcending and negating national borders; indeed, this is a basic premise of my work. This was precisely the theme of my essay “The Frontier Within.”
But in such talk of transcending national borders, I wonder if the pain, difficulty, and hardship involved in this act are not casually watered down by empty oratory. Although I did my best to claim that possibilities existed to transcend these borders, that fissures in the state could be seen right in front of us—indeed, even within our very everydayness—those who insisted from the beginning that they were rejecting the state found my appeals to be all too obvious, and they seemed to have no effect whatsoever. But I wonder if such a view of the state is not somewhat naïve.
For example, we find ourselves in a money economy. The value of things is measured not by themselves but by money. Thus we live in an age where everything is measured by money rather than by bartering or commodity exchange. Well, this point is quite obvious.
There are various theories that reject the money economy, however, beginning of course with Marxism. Such rejection is easy. “But I have no luck with money!” some might say. So you have no luck with money. I know that, and I’m sure that you have considered cutting yourself off from money, believing that you have no relation to it. And then you’d go someplace like the book stall below Kinokuniya Bookstore and say only that you now have nothing to do with money. I imagine there might be some problems.
In other words, money has created a certain universality of value. Compared with the era of commodity exchange, money has led to a far greater universalization of value. To this extent, the penalty for destroying money has become commensurably severe. No matter how much one confirms for oneself one’s detachment from the money economy, actualizing this idea makes one a thief.
Just as money is merely a piece of paper or concept while also containing a theoretical and objective principle, the state clearly holds some kind of value for us. Even if one personally abides by a theory of rejecting the state, it is nonetheless an established fact that the state, like money, exists in reality as a universal value or force. Just as one would be immediately penalized if one actively trampled on money, the state possesses the same power. As some say, the formation of the state and the formation of the money economy are really two sides of the same coin.
The state has now arrived at the status of universal idea. Yet it seems to me that the actual existence of the state’s universal value and power must be conceived as separate from its accompanying attributes (such as patriotism or people being forced to act in certain ways for the state).
It is not that I am agitating here for the means to overthrow the state, nor was I attempting to do so in my Chūō kōron essay. Rather, I wish to consider the state’s attributes or relativity as based on these undeniable facts. In truth, all our actions and measures are very much bound by these attributes. For example, people are bound by money, as can be seen in the fact that all of you here had to pay 250 yen to get in. Regardless of whether one is conscious of this or not, the fact is that the presence of the state already announces itself here. Your actions themselves have already been stamped by the state. We live without being especially conscious of this fact. Instead, the state’s attributes very powerfully appear in our consciousness. Of course rejection of these attributes does not amount to rejection of the state. That is completely unrelated, but my aim in writing “The Frontier Within” emerged from the need to thoroughly expose the real strangeness of these attributes.
In that essay, I sought to demonstrate that the state is ultimately a form of fixity or settled condition, something that was constructed especially against the background of agrarian society. I then went on to discuss those multiple concepts that were constructed upon agrarian society: the connection to the land, the mystification of the land, and the sense of loyalty toward landowners who ruled over the land. These concepts also produced the notions of hatred and negation of the city.
Jews, for example, were confined to the city, and one of the reasons behind the emergence of anti-Semitic discrimination was the fact that they were then unable to live elsewhere. Today people freely drift toward the city. This isn’t simply free movement, however, for the population influx there is also a demand of capital. Yet in feudal society, a phenomenon that was strictly unique to Japan and Europe could be seen in the fact that cities were places of confinement. People did not flee to the city; rather, they were trapped there. For example, Jews were strictly denied the right to buy land. They were denied the right to engage in any labor involving land. Instead, they could enter the moneylending business, for instance, which was then very small in scale due to the fact that the money economy was not yet highly developed. Christians, in particular, had a code of morals in which involvement in moneylending was regarded as impure. This is precisely why they permitted Jews to engage in such work. In the general scope of the economy at this time, the field of moneylending occupied a very small place.
As a rule, society develops. With the increasing power of the money economy, those Jews who had been confined to the city became increasingly powerful. Cities had previously been mere dwellings for the luxury of regional feudal lords and landowners, but now they acquired special meaning. Despite the fact that moneylending violated Christian law, these businesses were also confiscated from Jews. This era clearly marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
Hence the desire to expel the Jews had less to do with racial discrimination than this dense economic background. There was no such opposition in the case of Japan, where the gradual process of urban expansion went smoothly.
In Japan, the relation between merchants and warriors was such that, by the end of the Edo period, merchants were no doubt effectively judging these overlords by the amount of their crop yields. In principle, a commodity exchange economy ruled, but what actually took precedence was the money economy. Samurai were as a result forced to go to the moneylenders in town to exchange their salary (which was measured in rice) for money. Ultimately, samurai were controlled by the merchants. This led to the emergence of a kind of samurai stock, which was purchased by many merchants as a symbol of their success and given to their sons and grandsons. In this way, merchants became samurai. If one looks at such figures as Katsu Kaishū, one finds that there were in fact many samurai whose families had been merchants several generations earlier.
Most of the outstanding figures who emerged from the backward samurai class at the end of the Edo period originally came from merchant families. These men provided new blood. The so-called samurai became a mere guarantee of social position, one that could be bought and sold with money. By infusing this class with new merchant blood, the samurai class was also able to harness the energy that in part shaped the period.
In the case of Japan, the conflict between merchants (i.e., those who controlled money) and those who ruled over land did not emerge as flagrantly as it did in Europe, with the result that no figure comparable to the European Jew ever appeared. Of course theories of racial difference exist as well, and I do not necessarily deny them, although I have no evidence. When one asks Europeans about this, however, they reply that it is generally difficult to determine whether someone is Jewish simply by looking at their face, although there are exceptions to this. They add that they can tell after speaking with someone for five minutes. More or less recognizing whether someone is Jewish after five minutes means that they cannot determine this at a single glance.
As proof, there is for example the Yiddish language, which is spoken by many Jews. Yiddish is actually a special regional dialect from southern Germany. In terms of word form, it is simply German. While there are many Jews who speak Yiddish, the difference with the German language is so slight that these Jews would be able to communicate with someone from southern Germany. Of course there are also Jews who speak Hebrew, but many more speak Yiddish.
In fact, there are many Jews who live in the region stretching from central Europe to southern Germany. It is unclear why this is. Or rather, the question of whether these people were originally Jews or a group that was widely considered to be Jews is virtually impossible to answer. Perhaps this was simply a case of religious discrimination. It is difficult to verify anything here.
One hears that the Jews, confined within the city, acquired the ancient traditions of urban society, but that is untrue. The point is that the Jews were confined within those traditions. During periods in which rule over land predominates, residents of cities are in a sense alienated. Although this trend is reversed with the advance of urban society, the conditions for building a uniquely urban Jewish culture—which was absent in both Europe and Japan—were in any event long imposed from outside. This actually led to the extreme universalization of Jewish culture.
For that period marked by rule over land has now imperceptibly disappeared. Our age is nearly everywhere characterized by urban society. Even farming villages, for example, are dominated by structures that are quite urban in nature. Having now arrived at a period in which urban structures dominate the state, the ideas and cultural forms of the Jews, which were previously considered peripheral, have now become quite universalized.
In the case of America, for example, eighty or possibly even ninety percent of the country’s famous fiction writers are Jewish. This includes a very broad swath of writers, from urbane and sophisticated writers like J. D. Salinger to such wild and unruly writers as Norman Mailer. The range is considerable, but Jewish writers have become a significant presence in America.
What this means is that Jewishness has gone beyond Jewish society and has come to be accepted among non-Jews as a certain universality.
In the case of Europe, there have been a large number of Jews working at the core of revolutionary movements. It was for this reason that many Jews poured into Russia, but with the rise of Stalinism, they were eventually driven out and exiled, with many fleeing to America and England. With the exception of such figures as Ilya Ehrenburg, then, the early Soviet Union also saw a great number of Jews engaged in cultural activities. Many were later vindicated.
In Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribes against this Jewish culture, however, it is clear that his image of the good German was really an image of the good farmer. This point appears in his own writings.
I have already written about this, but in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist period Tolstoy was more readily accepted than Dostoevsky. Neither writer was seen as part of revolutionary literature, but Tolstoy was regarded more favorably. This was due to the fact that Tolstoy saw the future in terms of the peasants. In contrast, while it might be too much to say that Dostoevsky saw the future in terms of the urban lumpen proletariat, he did perceive a certain kind of history. The Soviet Union thus began supporting the policy of one-nation socialism through the mediation of the state as Jews and other urban elements gradually came to be hated and boycotted.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in Japan. People’s experience very much differs according to age, and I am sure that all of you react with quite different nuances of feeling, but there are two types of people: the first associates the good and beautiful with the earth or land, that is, the rural. This type senses or feels that good things can be found in the countryside, whereas the second type finds only brutal and vicious things there. Even among us, it is actually more common to regard the city as the root of all evil. I suspect that all of you would feel this way if confronted with the same choice.
When one looks at such paintings as Millet’s The Angelus, everything appears blissfully peaceful, with a peaceful bell ringing and people praying for the bounty of the earth. Yet we must sharpen our sensitivity to our surroundings so as to perceive all manner of brutal and vicious evil here. If we don’t sharpen our sensitivity, in fact, I fear that we will become unable to investigate such horrible attributes of the state as its dangers and deceits. Hence I wrote about this at length in my essay “The Frontier Within.”
In other words, what role has land played throughout history? Also, what historical role has been played by landless peoples or ethnic groups, as for example the equestrian tribes of central Asia? What is the difference between the laws and morals established by these equestrian tribes and those morals set forth by agrarian tribes, whose existence was more settled? The point here concerns which type of laws or morals is more suitable to the city—which type does the city require?
To come right to the point, it seems to me that cities actually require morals that are closer to nomads and equestrian tribes than to the more settled agrarian tribes. I also believe that any discussion of going beyond the state is only so much empty talk if people lack the ability to not only understand but viscerally internalize such morals as their own.
Although this is not directly related to my topic, the other day I read a book called Dōketsugaku koto hajime [Introduction to Speleology]. This book of course focuses on various explorations of caves. The image of caves calls up many artistic associations as well. I’m sure that this word alone evokes various images among all of you. Such images differ among individuals, from the innocent association of treasure and completely other worlds to the more shady and sexual. These kinds of things are not to be found in the book, which is completely scientific in nature. But what really fascinated me were the various things one learns while classifying those insects that live strictly in caves. No one has ever researched this topic, so one is forced when classifying these insects to distinguish between different and similar species. As a matter of habit, we first think about differences when comparing things. For example, we perceive differences in the shape of fangs or the distance between the eyes. Of course it is true that differences are important. In the case of people, what little I have seen of all of you is enough to reveal that you are each individually different. While there may be some of you with the same width or distance between your eyes, the width of your nose might be different. All people are slightly different in some sense. It would be frightening if people were identical to one another.
Yet if one didn’t actually discover some commonalities within these differences, it would be impossible to classify the latter within a single species or genus. Such things as small insects that live strictly in caves are of no great value, and so they have not been accurately classified. As to why there is a need to study these insects, however, the fact that they never appear on the earth’s surface is useful information not only in terms of the history of caves—as, for example, when they were first formed—but also in geological considerations. Thus the classification of insects is revealed to be meaningful. In the case of criminal investigations, however, there are as many different types of fingerprints as there are people. All fingerprints are different, which distinguishes this from insect classification. Yet in order to differentiate according to species and genus, commonalities must be discovered. No matter where one looks, however, there is hardly any mention of commonalities. This book contains various research results and quite fascinating observations. Different features are used as criteria, as for example jaws and eye width. In truth, however, the key to solving this mystery can be found in the number of hairs found on the insect’s posterior section. No one had ever realized this before. Actually, it is not that one grasps that commonalities are to be found in the number of hairs on the insect’s posterior section; but rather that, upon making this discovery, one can now systematize and brilliantly analyze these previously disparate classifications. This point is quite fascinating.
In the real world, we too distinguish and discriminate between things. To discriminate—this word might be too strong given the link with such phrases as racial discrimination, but that is ultimately where I’m leading—means to distinguish or discover differences. We do this all the time and it is not always wrong. Indeed, it is necessary. In particular, when we are in a community, it is in fact necessary to discover the difference between who belongs to the community and who does not so as to discover who is the enemy—that is, who exists outside the community.
Agrarian society would be an example of a community with a clearly defined frame or border. The borders of land must be quite distinct. For agrarian peoples, therefore, trespassing has long been a serious offense. In urban society, however, the attachment to land has gradually faded. Of course one can say that everyone wants to buy land, but such desire to buy land and build a home is completely different in character from the farmer’s attachment to land.
When one enters urban society, the clearly defined frame or border of community as found in rural society quickly disappears. For example, when one imagines daily life within these very insular and closed rural areas, how many people can one discuss things with? When one compares this with the number of people whom each of you speak with as urban residents, the difference is considerable. But perhaps this gap is not so great. When one considers how many people one happens to see every day, however, the difference becomes unimaginable. If one includes such people whom one happens to see in the city as part of one’s everyday contacts, then the number is extraordinarily high. These contacts are virtually infinite, in contrast to the finite number of community contacts one has in rural society. For better or worse, this difference in human relations brings about a change in the concept of community.
It might seem easy to acknowledge this point, but one cannot be so blithe. In fact, various contradictions and points of resistance arise here. Internal conflicts emerge within communities, the same land-based communities in which we have long been confined. These land-based communities have affected our culture in various ways; they permeate so deeply that we barely notice them. This creates a great deal of anxiety.
At the same time, however, we also sense the cramped and suffocating nature of community. For example, gangster films typically depict men who become drifters and leave their village. Although this is fine in and of itself, these men then invariably begin to feel anxious and find it impossible to remain as drifters. Rather, they feel the need to belong somewhere. There is currently a labor shortage in Japan, so it is easy to find a place to belong, but in the past the absence of labor shortages made such belonging difficult. Those men who had fled a certain community would then find other communities to enter. And the easiest community to enter was the gangster organization. Gangster films thus have a strong sense of realism to them; they possess a certain reality. Here we see an extremely sad self-contradiction: one flees someplace in order to gain entry elsewhere. At the same time, it is also fairly easy in the gangster world to enter somewhere in order to flee. Yet it is not my intent here to extol gangster films; rather, it is simply undeniable that these films reflect a certain reality.
To make an extremely needling remark, I would say that there is essentially no difference between working in a company somewhere and leaving the countryside to become a gangster and look cool. It might be a bit of an exaggeration to claim that no difference exists between these two things, but the difference is not great. In contrast, the notion that we need to cultivate concerns the state of sustained flight. What does this mean? Whereas settling down somewhere is a basic condition, remaining in a state of sustained flight is a process. We carry within ourselves a prejudice that this process invariably involves settling down somewhere. My point here consists in shedding doubt on this prejudice. Such doubt arises only with great difficulty.
If we wish to create such morality, then we must formulate ways to rediscover human relations as based on commonalities rather than on discriminations or distinctions between people. Otherwise urban life will be virtually buried by contact with strangers. In other words, urban life will feel as if one has been thrown among mere others. One often hears the expression “loneliness in the big city,” in which loneliness is used in a negative sense. But I wonder if this usage is correct. We must rethink this prejudice.
The city is certainly a hodgepodge, something that is all mixed up. It also doesn’t provide the same sense of safety or security that one feels in rural communities. This is precisely why cities are good. I wonder if one cannot see that cities thus contain the potential to act as a bridge to the future. I would like to ask these questions. We casually speak now less about morality than about our inner sense of alienation. “People who live in cities suffer from a sense of alienation”: these words are of course used negatively. However, it is unclear whether such alienation is negative in a logical sense. Is it not simply the case that we feel lonely at an emotional level? The fact that we are so easily given to such expressions as “urban alienation” suggests that we somehow feel ourselves to be already part of an ancient communal morality. Also, what would be the nature of a state outside loneliness? This is a state in which one forms companions, but that is not easy to do. In order to clarify things, one first forms enemies.
In other words, one establishes who it is that exists outside the community. If you yourselves in any way subscribe to such an approach, it can quickly be taken advantage of. For example, in Japan there is no concept or actual presence of “the Jew,” so fortunately this has not become an issue here, but anti-Semitism immediately makes use of this approach. Surprisingly enough, anti-Semitism often appears among those who live in cities. Although city dwellers realize that they cannot return to the village, they nevertheless continue to view urban life from this village perspective. The sense of alienation and loneliness is here transformed into a weakness.
For example, I propose that we posit the various notions as expressed by such words as “lonely” and “alienated” as mere objective facts and to refer to them without feeling or emotion. Of course, other people are quite unpleasant. In truth, I myself am not a particularly sociable person. I don’t always act cheerful when I’m with others, but I don’t believe there is any need to. My point, in other words, is that we must try to break out of a naïve idea of the other in which those who do not act cheerful or display the stamp of ally are simply regarded as the enemy.
This might sound as if I were propagating Christianity, but in fact the reverse is true. To clarify things, Christianity actually speaks of increasing the number of neighbors. That is fine, but everybody cannot be a neighbor. In other words, it is strictly because there exist people who are not neighbors that one can steadily increase the number of neighbors as far as possible. The desire to increase the number of neighbors is predicated on the border between neighbors and others. It is perhaps best to reject the neighbor from the start. Such rejection of the neighbor causes us to experience a kind of internal, visceral pain. I believe that we must fight against this visceral quality. That is, we must fight it as a cultural rather than political concept. If we disregard this point and simply reject the state conceptually, then we will fail to do it much damage. Hence I want to question whether the wall that is the state represents the final wall while at the same time point out the danger of idle talk if we simply negate the state without confronting this problem at an internal level.
In truth, this talk is nothing more than an introduction. The play will be staged later, so this setup is a bit embarrassing. I’m afraid that it might appear rather impudent on my part to direct my own play in addition to giving a talk beforehand. I am quite conscious of how incredibly brazen this must seem, but the play is very short. This is my first time to do something like this, since I’ve actually never delivered a paid lecture before. It is not the case that I added the play because I feel so bad about this. Rather, I need to do both the lecture and play in order to fill the allotted time. That’s why I added the play. The mood or atmosphere of the play and lecture are completely different. There is no intermission, so please forget all that I have said during my talk and simply watch the play with an open mind. Thank you.
II
There should of course be no one here today who also came yesterday. Yesterday, in fact, I felt some stage fright. It was the first time in my life that I got nervous giving a speech. Something was a bit off. That was the first time in my life that I felt this way, although it is not as if I began giving speeches while still a baby. Fortunately, I don’t feel any stage fright today. Well, I at least feel comfortable enough to look at my notes. What I have before me now, however, are not notes but actually the budget sheet for the play.
Nerves can cause a great deal of damage. First of all, I simply spoke as I pleased yesterday without explaining the reasons why we were holding this event. And then I got nervous, and these nerves spread to the actors, with the result that things were quite a bit off. One really must avoid getting nervous.
The reason why I felt such stage fright was that it was my first time directing and the play, which I wrote and directed, is being put on after the talk. I hadn’t realized how unpleasant it would be to give a talk beforehand. I suppose it was a case of a lack of imagination. I was all set to take on this challenge only to discover that I felt nervous and had trouble breathing. I soon began trembling and it was all quite awful. I feel calm today, however, since I have already told myself that things will be awful.
The flier for the play you will see afterward lists my opening lecture in large print while the words “Trial Performance of the Play Kaban [The Bag]” are barely legible. My real intent was for the lecture to supplement the play, since it’s the play that I want you to see. I’m very sorry that it has turned out this way. For me, of course, the lecture that now appears first is clearly the supplement. Nonetheless, I would like to briefly introduce the Drama Department of Tōhō Gakuen College. Tōhō Gakuen is the first professional acting school in Japan and was created as a university. Four years have passed since it took over the training school of the Haiyūza Theatre Company. In truth, such professional acting schools exist in all countries, where they are generally state run. The training of actors costs a lot of money. This is not something that can be run privately, but the school has managed to overcome various adverse conditions. The actors today have received four years of training and may rightly be considered semiprofessional. I don’t want to engage in any more self-advertising, but I will simply mention now that, as part of my own seminar, I will be directing there in the fall my Bō ni natta otoko [The Man Who Turned into a Stick]. Since I’m a bit worried about the opening performance, as I’ve never directed before, I decided to do a practice run here. I firmly believe that people can do anything if they have one talent, and that’s why I took this on.
I’ll explain this point later, but I’m finally going to direct. I’m trying this because I was a bit worried. I think that things have gone surprisingly well. Generally, trial performances are performed only at the school, but I wanted this to be seen by an outside audience. Fortunately, many students or people around the same age often come to this playhouse—well, it is a play house, since the space is too small to be a real house. I decided that the play should be seen in a theater.
The directing here is completely different. Today’s play is only the first scene of Bō ni natta otoko, which will be performed in November, but the direction is utterly different. I’m sure you will see for yourselves how varied it is.
I sent Mishima Yukio an invitation to come today, but of course I knew that he wouldn’t. He called to tell me that he wouldn’t be able to attend. It’s fine that he’s not here. He mentioned that he’s been directing a Kabuki play, which will debut on November 5. “So it’s a contest, then. It seems that I’m always competing with you,” I replied. “But it’s Kabuki,” he said, “so I only have to direct for five days.” I told Mishima that I am now going to start preparing for the play in November, which means rehearsing for the next three months. He answered, “I don’t get involved with all that tiresome stuff.” “If you have enough time to spend with the Self-Defense Forces,” I replied, “then why don’t you work on making more effective plays?” “Stop messing around,” he said. “This is not just a hobby. I participate in the Self-Defense Forces for my country.” To which I responded, “Then it can’t be helped. I’ll focus on the art of a ruined nation while you go ahead and fight for the country.” This explains why one corner of the reserved seats is empty.
Of course I’m only joking, but compared with the Self-Defense Forces, plays may well represent the art of a ruined nation. Yet I’ve come to believe, in fact, that the art of a ruined nation is something positive. This is all the more reason for me to speak today about a ruined nation. But I know that such exaggerated talk will only bring about negative effects later. It will affect the play. I had some stage fright yesterday and so became a bit too excited and ended up speaking about very difficult things. Of course the play has its flaws, but it is actually a comedy. Yesterday, however, the audience didn’t react as if they were watching a comedy, and that was a bit disheartening, to be honest. I suspect that this was partly because my lecture raised the pitch of things, so today I’m trying to lower the pitch.
Very broadly, then, Mishima focuses on the Self-Defense Forces while I work on plays. The Self-Defense Forces is certainly much more effective. They carry weapons and would respond powerfully if you ran into them. But if one wishes to destroy the nation, then art is the more powerful. I call this art of a ruined nation because it matches up well against the Self-Defense Forces.
Although this expression “ruined nation” is a mere figure of speech, I hadn’t heard it in a long time and so actually felt rather nostalgic when Mishima used it. But I suspect that the nuance of this expression will in the future come to affect us in various ways. That is to say, this notion corresponds to its opposite, which has gradually achieved a certain effectiveness. When discussing the question of the usefulness of art, for example, there is nobody in Japan, for better or worse, who claims that making art more useful will help rally a spirit of patriotism. Nevertheless, art was often used for this purpose in the past, and there are still countries that use art in this way. In general, however, art is intrinsically not something that serves the state; rather, it must ruin the nation. I don’t believe that art that ruins the nation exists alongside art that makes the nation flourish. In speaking with Mishima, I again realized that what we call “art” must ruin the nation, but let me conclude this point.
In a word, art is quite plainly expression. Art is also knowledge, but knowledge can be transmitted simply through essays and reviews. I of course have no intention today to comment on the play, for such commentary is extremely unpleasant. It seems that everyone assumes that writers understand their works best. I always find it off-putting when people ask me about the aim or theme of my work.
I recently spoke with Donald Keene, who remarked that Shakespeare was very fortunate in Japan. When I asked why, he replied that it was because Shakespeare doesn’t appear in Japanese textbooks. As I’m sure all of you know, one immediately forms a negative impression of writers whom one hears a lot about through textbooks. Students encounter many pages and are forced to write summaries at the end. From this perspective, literary works appear quite silly. In England, one typically learns about Shakespeare in textbooks from childhood, with the result that one grows fed up. In Japan, this would be similar to—actually I don’t know what materials appear in textbooks these days. Apparently some of my work is included, but I find this quite regrettable. Only a small portion of my work appears, however. As for those writers who appear frequently, I too received a permanently negative impression of them as a child. Many English people grow up in such a way as to come to appreciate Shakespeare’s value only after graduating and reaching adulthood.
Appearing in textbooks is of course something negative and unfortunate; one is characterized as an authority and part of the orthodoxy. This is bad because students are immediately forced to interpret and summarize these works.
Yet it seems that some of Donald Keene’s writings also appear in textbooks, with the note that these are passages written by a foreigner, and students are asked to correct the mistakes. That sounds about right.
These textbooks include my “Akai Mayu” [Red Cocoon], which is a short piece. Students are nevertheless asked to summarize it, which is quite depressing. There is just no way to summarize a story like that.
I thus won’t offer any commentary on the play but simply say that it is an expression. As an expression, I cannot project the play onto a surface of knowledge. I have no desire to summarize, interpret, or outline it.
As to why I have decided to direct plays, there are of course many directors in the world. There is really no need for me now to so arrogantly begin directing. As a matter of principle, I believe that writers should not direct, for this results in a limitation of images.
In other words, it is the conflict between writer and director that makes it possible to create new images. If one directs one’s own work, then, there is a danger that one will become absorbed by set images. This is why I oppose as a matter of principle writers’ directing their own work. Despite this premise, however, I felt something else in my desire to direct. I began to suspect that, in the case of writing—or literature in the broad sense, which includes plays—there might be two ways of emphasizing expression: writing and style.
The difference between writing and style can be found not in the encyclopedia but rather in the Kōjirin and other such dictionaries. My original plan was to research this and then very grandly inform you of the results, but I’m afraid I ran out of time. In fact, I don’t have a very rigorous grasp of this difference myself, but I thought I might speak intuitively and define these terms in my own fashion.
In terms of the meaning of writing, there are people known as fine writers. Here it would be sufficient for you to call up your own image of fine writers. This is an expression with a certain meaning. It refers to whether or not writing skillfully expresses a given content. A good writer is thus someone who writes skillfully.
However, one doesn’t typically say that someone has a skillful style. As for what I specifically mean here by this notion of style, I would like you to think about translated novels, although this is perhaps not the best example.
Translation never transmits the author’s writing as such. Yet the style is conveyed. When we read the novels of Dostoevsky, for example, the Japanese and Russian are completely different. Despite this difference, Japanese people are fond of Dostoevsky’s novels and have been greatly influenced by them. How is this possible? It is due to the fact that one goes beyond writing to the style that lies behind it. Style is structure: it conveys structure through language. Writing conveys a sentiment—this might sound odd, but it conveys something mysterious about expression. Style conveys that structure.
Seen in this way, translated novels of course become something very different for us. Such languages as Japanese, Russian, French, and English each have their own unique expressions and traditions, which cannot be conveyed as such. Yet Japanese culture would become quite impoverished and shallow if translated novels were completely removed. With no difficulty whatsoever, the reception of these novels has gradually increased. I suspect that this is because style is more important than writing for the expressing subject. If you agree with this point, I’m sure you will understand what I mean by this notion of style.
This is a bit of a leap in logic, but writing individualizes the details of something by means of various individual, detailed expressions. In contrast, style might be described as an operation of universalization. This may suggest that writing contains an appeal to more nuanced emotions or feelings, unlike style, but it is not the case that our emotions themselves are so individualized and expressed. Rather, it is communication as or through various structures that actually strikes our emotions and touches our soul. Translated novels thus possess something appealing to the soul in a way that differs from merely following a story or reading a philosophical text. This is not just an expression, for structures themselves have the potential to trigger something within our souls.
When I thus refer to style as structure, as complicated as this sounds, I am in no way suggesting that it is anything unique or unrelated to our everyday sensibility.
I would like to consider this shift from writing to style as one of the defining features of contemporary art. This might appear to be a leap in logic, but it seems to me that directing plays can also be divided into the writerly and stylistic. I feel that directing in Japan today is too writerly, and that there is a real need to establish a stylistic type of direction. It might be a bit of an exaggeration to use the word “establish” here, but I thought that I should at least try, without knowing if this is possible. I feel that I’ve gone a bit too deep into this.
I suspect that part of the reason behind this shift from writing to style is that it is characteristic of the present age. The novel is now gradually tending to surpass national borders. That is to say, if one compares Japanese novels with French or American novels, one can now more often find commonalities in works between these countries. If, for example, French novels contain elements A and B while Japanese novels contain elements A′ and B′, there might be more commonalities between A and A′ than between A and B. Japanese literature is still separated out from world literature in the Japanese edition of the Complete Works of World Literature, but I believe that this division is gradually disappearing.
Rather than bracketing American writers together and dividing literature between French novels and American novels, for example, one must recognize that it is not at all unusual to find greater commonalities between certain American and French writers.
I spoke about this yesterday, actually, and so won’t touch upon this subject again today, but there are various opinions both for and against the transition from the cultural forms of agrarian society to those of urban society. Yesterday I spoke very much in favor of this transition, but I’m going to avoid such talk today. Although I approve of this transition, I would like to leave aside the question of pro and con. One thing that can clearly be said about this period change is that regional links and commonalities are extremely powerful in agrarian societies whereas urban societies center much more on temporality, that is, contemporaneousness, a shared sense of the age. In other words, a shared sense of the age is much more powerful in urban societies than a shared sense of land. Although regional distinctions, divisions, and differences do in fact exist, it is a much more important task for us to discover common traits through the filter of the age, which transcends such differences. Our own sensibility is already moving in this direction.
It thus seems to me that the most suitable expressions for our age are those shaped by style, the sense of linguistic structure, rather than the analytically individualized form of writing. In short, it is not so much that stylistic expressions have come to be demanded more than writerly expressions as fit for this age. Rather, it is the age itself that demands this change.
While it is true that various artists and authors each write in their own way, artistic expression is something in which the age itself is forced to express itself. At such times, the age speaks through people’s hearts and mouths. Artists just happen to be the receiver and transmitter. If the age remains silent, artists can do nothing regardless of how much they struggle. The age itself now demands stylistic expressions. The age speaks through style. The artist receives this message and is forced to choose these expressions.
More generally, it is extremely important in agrarian society, where one shares a certain sense of community, to create a shared sensibility with one’s neighbors—that is, those people who recognize one another regionally or locally. Hence festivals create a shared sensibility among people who know one another by means of detailed regional conventions. Today, however, what we need is a shared sensibility of the age and of the other.
This can be seen in our daily lives, in fact. For example, those of you here probably recognize at most five people in this venue. The rest are complete strangers. Even in such a small place as this, it would not be at all strange if you developed a common sensibility with these strangers. I don’t particularly wish to use the term “urbanization” here, since people use it both positively and negatively, but in our present age urbanization is such that a shared sensibility with others is required.
This shared sensibility of the age that we have with others will of course go beyond regional communities and national borders to spread throughout the world. Detailed analysis of this point is difficult and various theories exist, but the student movement, for example, has spread largely throughout the world at the same time. Revolution in underdeveloped countries has in the past typically taken the single form of a national liberated front, but one now finds an image that goes beyond national borders, as can be seen in the liberation movements taking place in Latin America. This surpassing of national borders has been accomplished fairly smoothly.
Also, the problem of Vietnam War deserters has now appeared. You are perhaps not very shocked when you read about this in the newspaper. Yet in the past, during wartime, for example, people would have been shocked by such news as if suffering from an allergic reaction, no matter where the deserters were from.
In other words, escaping or betraying the state would have been seen as horribly shocking, the greatest of evils. Deserters would have been regarded as loathsome and unfit as human beings. If deserters had appeared on the American side during the war with Japan, Japanese people would have viewed them with tremendous scorn. Today, however, news of deserters is reported rather casually, comparable to news of earthquakes and typhoons. A difference in our sense of the age—a certain kind of shared sensibility—has unconsciously emerged in such a way that the act of desertion or renouncing the state is now reported as a cold, objective fact.
Various explanations are offered about this different sensibility: it is a result of urban alienation, we have become disassociated from others, etc. It is true that urbanization has led to greater disassociation among us, but is this fact so sad and disturbing? On the contrary, it is only because of this disassociation that the demand for and imagining of a shared sensibility with the other first emerges.
Although the expression “shared sensibility with the other” sounds very abstract, it means that we have come to possess a shared sensibility of the age by shifting away from an age of space to one that is shaped around time—what I have called “style” or the structure of the age. The change from a shared sensibility of space to a shared sensibility of contemporaneousness seems to have prompted, whether one likes it or not, an artistic shift from writing to style. If I were to use the phrase “avant-garde art,” such art must be stylistic if it is to be truly avant-garde. This expression “stylistic art” is abstract and impreci¡se, but I would insist that defining such art as avant-garde means that contemporary art—that is, art that truly fits our present age—must be avant-garde art.
It’s strange that the time should have passed already, but it has not. I can end this talk at any time, but I feel as if I’ve just finished.
I can’t really do anything about that, so let me return to the topic that I discussed yesterday.
Speaking of shared sensibility, I read a fascinating study the other day. This has nothing at all to do with literature. The book I read was a study of caves, entitled Dōketsugaku koto hajime. In sum, a person who likes to climb mountains decided to explore caves. The more he studied caves, however, the more he came to realize that what first appeared as very particular actually led to the formation of a universal type of research.
That is to say, there were insects that lived strictly in caves. Having evolved in a very particular manner, these insects would die upon emerging on the earth’s surface. Given that these insects evolved exclusively in caves over a very long period of time, their existence helps us understand how long ago it was when these caves first appeared. If those insects did not exist, then that would prove various things, as for example the fact that the caves sank into the ocean at a certain point in time. In sum, it is by examining the distribution of insects that live strictly in caves that we can understand changes in Japan’s long geological age as well as the extremely complex structural changes in the earth’s crust under Japan. In this way, universal facts can come to be discovered on the basis of apparently trivial research. It seems that there have not been many instances of such research.
This point is interesting in and of itself, but what I also find fascinating here is that the undeveloped field of entomology is such that it is quite difficult to determine the criteria for species distinctions, as for example whether insects truly belong to the same species or if, despite certain similarities, they actually belong to different species. One variously examines cave-dwelling insects from around the world—for example, small rice insects of some kind. By examining documents from other countries, one determines which insects are the same. One could see the shape of their jaws or whether they have three eyes or two. In fact, there are insects with three eyes. One would then look at such features as the distance between their eyes, and on this basis one could variously classify them. But this manner of classification is inconsistent and logically disjointed. In studying this problem more deeply so as to identify the most crucial point in determining species, one comes to focus on the number of hairs on the insect’s posterior section. It has been discovered that classifying the genus of insects as based on the number of hairs on their posterior section is actually the most systematic. No one had ever realized the importance of these hairs since this feature seemed so trivial. Researchers had instead focused on the eyes.
The fascinating point here concerns how easy it is for us to discriminate or differentiate, whereas it is very difficult to discover the commonality of belonging to the same genus. You might not be able to tell with this lighting, but I just returned from the sea and am now darker than most people of the yellow race. But I don’t think anyone really suspects me of being otherwise. I’m sure people look at me and think, “Well, he’s probably Japanese.”
Among all of you here, no individual looks like any other. It is surprisingly easy to discern differences, for this is what we tend to focus on. However, it is very difficult to discover commonalities. This is the gist of the book that I have been reading with such excitement.
For example, racial discrimination arises all too easily. There are obvious, very clear differences between us and black people. But it is actually quite difficult to discover commonalities between us. Today we must shift from a regionally shared sensibility to a shared sensibility based on contemporaneity. If we try to accomplish this and learn about our shared sensibility with others, we must discover not distinctions and discriminations so much as essential commonalities. This point about discovering essential commonalities struck me while I was reading the book about caves. If I may sing my own praises, I believe that this is how the book must be read.
I don’t need to boast, but it is in fact crucial in our daily lives to discover essential commonalities. We Japanese people are opposed to racial discrimination in the abstract and don’t really have an actual, everyday sense of it, but everyone is highly sensitive to this issue. However, it is surprisingly difficult to discover these commonalities. It’s very hard. We must be extremely perceptive and observant. We must work hard at this.
For we are part of a very old agrarian society with a long commitment to the land. We thus share commonalities as a community bloc, and yet differences can be seen, for example, in language. The Japanese language contains various dialects and regional differences. Some people tend to stress these distinctions. While I won’t mention any names, those who praise the beauty of the Japanese language typically emphasize such differences.
More important, however, if for example older people from Kagoshima and Aomori met and suddenly began speaking to one another, they would not be able to communicate. (Young people would understand one another, given the spread of television.) They would have no idea what the other was saying. Yet people from Aomori and Kagoshima possess the same linguistic structure. This is indisputably the Japanese language. It is this commonality that is crucial.
There are those who claim that standard Japanese is frail, while regional dialects possess vitality, but I disagree. Such dialects do not possess much vitality but rather have a writerly quality. However, what is crucial is style or structure. This structure remains the same whether one writes in an Aomori or Kagoshima dialect, which is minor.
We are sensitive to distinctions and don’t make efforts to see commonalities, perceiving them as suspicious. We thus feel uncomfortable to speak about urbanization. There seems to be something dubious about it. But this is absolutely false. It is not simply that urbanization is inevitable. Rather, it marks our inner anticipation of an ideal future, in which a narrowly spatial shared sensibility gives way to a shared sensibility based on contemporaneity.
As a process, urbanization is clearly part of our reality. As I mentioned yesterday, for example, few people are sensitive enough to regard Millet’s painting The Angelus as anything other than peaceful and beautiful. I would feel a great deal of respect for anyone so sensitive as to perceive in this work an awful brutality, something suggestive of the Nazis. But this is how the painting must be seen.
This gesture of praying to the land is virtually always appropriated by right-wing forces. Both Hitler and Stalin appropriated this image. Throughout every age, such images as the sweet-smelling and beloved land have been appropriated by such people, while the city has been used as a symbol of evil, something suspicious and negative. Yet this is impossible.
For example, although one hears about the frequent crime in Tokyo, the percentage is negligible when one considers how many people live here. I believe that human beings are basically peaceful. Now consider the amount of crime in rural areas as based on this same percentage. Surely there should be many more murder cases. The rate is surprisingly small. People have been very rapidly forced to live in close contact with the other. All of you are probably only three or four generations removed from village life, where people lived strictly among neighbors. Or five generations if your family married early, but there is perhaps no one like that here. Nevertheless, you have already grown accustomed to this contact with the other—or rather, you have overcome this difficulty. The question remains, however, whether this represents an unhappy development for us.
People are unhappy at all times and in all places. Isn’t this why people from rural areas long to leave and come to Tokyo? Aren’t there many popular songs about longing for Tokyo? That is why people come. All people from rural areas long for the city. Once here, they take part in surveys and complain that the city is too noisy and the people too cold. But it is hardly the case that people in rural areas are so warm. Rather people are cold wherever one goes. But that doesn’t mean one would just kill everyone.
I once wrote a short piece called “Hakuchō goroshi no uta” [A Song of Swan Killing] based on someone who had killed a swan in Kichijōji or some such place. I can empathize with this person’s feelings. That is, I would not kill a swan if I couldn’t understand his feelings. The only reason why people don’t kill swans is because they have no such opportunity or are afraid of botching the job and getting arrested. Would you let something like that live? Swans are not so important. A person’s life is much more valuable than a swan’s. Yet the story focuses on someone who killed swans being regarded as more evil than someone who killed people.
Regarding the desire to kill swans, one must feel a certain disgust in one’s love for them. There must be a certain sense of revulsion in the idea that it’s natural for one to consider the beauty of swans and wonder why anyone would want to kill something so beautiful. That is one way to develop a method or sensitivity required to go beyond the neighbor and connect directly to the other. I wrote somewhat sarcastically that the role of art consists largely in killing the swan, but the piece was mostly ignored.
In a manner of speaking, this seems to more or less illustrate the difference between writerly art and stylistic art.
However, the play will suffer if I take such a high-handed attitude now. Fortunately, my time is now at an end so I’ll finish up.
I already explained the circumstances of this lecture at the beginning of my talk but hope to have similar opportunities in the future. All of you here seem quite young, and this is perhaps the first time for many of the actors in our play to perform under these conditions. This represents a chance to interact with the other. The actors typically perform at school in front of people they know, such as their parents. There are many of you here today who know the actors, but also many who do not. This is an excellent chance for these actors to broaden themselves, professionally and otherwise, through interacting with others.
These actors are in acting school, of course, and are not amateurs. So please don’t be afraid to scrutinize them and view their acting critically. At the same time, they are not yet full professionals, so please cheer them on critically yet generously, to use a strange phrase. I don’t mind if you critique my directing. We will now take a five-minute break and then begin. Thank you.