5. THE MIRACLE OF MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE

Universities and creative geniuses may seem strange bedfellows when it comes to art, including literature. Of course, plenty of universities nowadays offer courses on creative writing that are taught by acclaimed writers. Yet the romantic in us wants to believe in geniuses who dwarf the annoyingly erudite in their ivory towers. That romantic belief harks back to the golden age of national literature, an age when literature was separated from academic disciplines and transcended them as a source of knowledge. But in non-Western countries, universities had to play a crucial role in creating a national literature—however unromantic the fact may be. Genius was not enough.

The previous chapter was devoted to the discussion of three conditions that enabled the rapid establishment of the national language in Japan after the Meiji Restoration: a mature written language when the country was still part of the Sinosphere, a robust print capitalism during the preceding Edo period, and freedom from Western colonization at a time when nearly all the non-West was colonized. We will begin this chapter by first directing our attention to something that was made possible only by the last of the three: Japan’s founding of its own universities.

First, let us revisit the question of what might have happened to the Japanese language if Japan had become a colony of the United States. Quite assuredly, the Japanese universities we now know, where classes are taught in Japanese as a matter of course, would never have existed. The children of the wealthy would have crossed the Pacific to study in American universities, and other bright youths would have been selected in large numbers to do the same. Sooner or later, universities would surely have sprung up on Japanese soil, but the courses would have been taught in English. (When Japan founded universities in its colonies, Taiwan and Korea, the courses were taught in Japanese.) Only the escape from colonization allowed Japan to build its own universities, which, in turn, made it possible for Japanese people to pursue knowledge in their own language.

Nothing better illuminates the truth of this statement than the fact that, at the outset, most university courses in Japan were not taught in Japanese by Japanese professors. Universities erected brick buildings modeled on Western architecture and purchased mounds of leather-bound books from the West, but no Japanese could teach the necessary subject matter of “Western learning”—the Western academic disciplines. Universities therefore hired foreign teachers, turning not just to qualified Westerners already residing in Japan but also to scholars from afar. These teachers were considered so invaluable that many are said to have earned more than cabinet members. Only gradually were they laid off and replaced by Japanese back from studying in the West. And it was when such returnees began teaching in their own language what they had learned abroad that the Japanese language began transforming into a language in which the pursuit of knowledge was legitimately possible—that is, into a national language not only in name but also in practice.

This was a good start, yet such is the nature of asymmetry between West and non-West that this auspicious turn of events did not make Japanese universities centers of learning in quite the same sense as Western universities. Rather, they came to function above all as major institutions for translation. Early in the Meiji period, there naturally were no Japanese books in which to study the Western subjects that students were supposed to learn; acquiring knowledge necessarily went hand in hand with acquiring proficiency in Western languages. The main role of Japan’s higher education was therefore to teach Western languages. Entry to national universities, which resembled today’s graduate schools, was preceded by preparatory classes at national colleges where students were required to learn two of the three major European languages, one as a major, the other as a minor. Learning these languages played such a fundamental pedagogical role that students were grouped according to the language of their concentration and, after intensive training, often formed a lifelong bond with their classmates, like troops in a hard-won battle. Students earned pocket money through translation.

After graduating from universities, some of them went on to become educators-cum-translators, making what they had learned accessible to the general public by writing straightforward translations or introductory, explanatory, or interpretive books in Japanese. They were called “scholars” in Japan and certainly considered themselves as such, but from a larger perspective (and I say this without any intention of disparaging their endeavors), they were basically translators—transmitters, not creators, of knowledge. Generation after generation of these dedicated men—and later women—ultimately made it possible for nearly all important Western knowledge to be available in Japanese, so that today’s university students no longer have to read a single book in the original to know what the world expects them to know. Other bilingual or polyglot university graduates who did not become educators or translators per se read widely in European languages and then wrote in Japanese, contributing en masse to transforming Japanese into a language that presumed a global consciousness. The ideology of national language would later have it that a humble peasant who tilled the soil and did not know what “democracy” meant even in Japanese was held up as the true sage, possessing a kind of wisdom that the educated could not possibly attain. This jaundiced view of higher education was possible only for those Japanese who could take for granted the existence of the Japanese language as it is today, who came late enough to be blissfully ignorant of how their language and literature developed.

The Englishman Daniel Defoe was, as we have seen, one of the pioneers of the novel. Writing in English in the eighteenth century already meant writing in one of the universal languages, and Defoe had no need for an Oxford or a Cambridge education to achieve what he did. The same was not true for Japanese writers. Of all the male Japanese writers born in the nineteenth century, each one a pioneer in his way, the number who attended Tokyo Imperial University or its college (both of which were closed to women) and thus were bilinguals, if not polyglots, is astonishing. In fact, it is mind-boggling, bizarre even. Beginning with Natsume Sōseki, the list is virtually endless: Tsubouchi Shōyō, Mori Ōgai, Masaoka Shiki, Yamada Bimyō, Ozaki Kōyō, Ueda Bin, Osanai Kaoru, Suzuki Miekichi, Saitō Mokichi, Shiga Naoya, Mushakōji Saneatsu, Naka Kansuke, Kinoshita Mokutarō, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yamamoto Yūzō, Uchida Hyakken, Kishida Kunio, Kume Masao, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Osaragi Jirō, and Kawabata Yasunari, among many others. As if that weren’t enough, well-known private universities such as Keio and Waseda simultaneously produced their own schools of literature and their own set of leading writers. Going to university meant being at least bilingual, and, however counterintuitive it may seem now, bilingualism was a sine qua non of becoming a standard-bearer of Japanese national literature—for male writers, anyway.

That said, remaining in academia and pursuing a career there in nineteenth-century Japan was not an attractive choice to young men of aspiration, especially those with literary inclinations. Virtually all the university curriculum consisted of Western disciplines that seemed to have no direct bearing on the country at the dawn of its modernity. The two societies, Western and Japanese, were too far apart. Natural sciences, of course, had universal relevance to any society. Yet it was not so with other disciplines, especially those falling under the rubric of “liberal arts.” Aside from traditional fields of learning—Buddhist studies, the classics of China and Japan—all other disciplines in the liberal arts were basically Western: philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics, history, anthropology, aesthetics, musicology, literature, and so forth. Their study was inseparable from the study of Western languages. There was an underlying Eurocentrism in all of them, a tendency to perceive the world from the Western perspective and find human universality in Western modes of being.

The pursuit of that kind of knowledge in academia was bound to prove frustrating and alienating for Japanese men of talent and ambition. First, no matter how brilliant such a man might be, his work could not really enter the global chain of “texts to read” as long as he wrote in Japanese, which he almost inevitably did. He had to remain in the role of a translator, introducing Western learning to Japanese readers. Second, no matter how much he wrote in Japanese, as long as he remained within the confines of academia, his prose had to read like a translation of some Western treatise and so be cut off from Japan’s rich literary tradition. No allusions to poetry could be allowed, either Japanese or Chinese, nor any of the rhetorical devices specific to Japanese prose that make fine writing so much more than a mere message. Third, the Western academic disciplines gave a writer no way to capture vividly the excitement of what was happening right in front of him—the messy reality of a Japan rapidly transforming after the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships. From trams and gaslights to hats and shoes, the everyday look of Japan was mutating at dizzying speed, and how was one to write about that? Writing as an academic must have felt to many men of talent and ambition like being forced to write with both hands tied.

And yet these challenges were a blessing for modern Japanese literature. Remember, this was the era that celebrated national language, the era when the language of literature was regarded as transcendent over the language of scholarship. And precisely because of the challenges that Japanese intellectuals faced, there was a far greater urgency in Japan than in the West for the language of literature to transcend. The language of literature carried the heavier intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic burden of making sense of the maelstrom of change. Writing fiction was a somewhat disreputable profession at the time, but these men overcame the opposition of teachers, parents, and wives and chose that path, forsaking the chance for a more stable and respectable career.

It often happens when a national language is formed that there emerges, almost magically, a national figure who single-handedly comes to embody that historical process. In Japan, Natsume Sōseki, the author of Sanshirō, was such a figure. After having spent two and a half years in London, Sōseki returned to Japan in 1903 and became the first Japanese to teach English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, replacing Lafcadio Hearn, an English-language writer best known for introducing Japanese ghost stories to the West. Sōseki naturally conducted his classes in Japanese, thus heralding the conversion of university instruction to the vernacular and elevating the language in the process. Moreover, because he went on to leave the university after only a few years to become a novelist, he also came to embody the dilemma faced by Japanese intellectuals then and now.

THOSE IN SANSHIRŌ WHO READ EXTERNAL LANGUAGES

Let us take a closer look now at Sōseki’s novel Sanshirō, which was cited earlier.1 It is a sort of bildungsroman about a naïve young man who leaves his family—probably landowners—in the rustic southern island of Kyushu to attend Tokyo Imperial University. As the novel progresses, he meets urbanized, sophisticated people for the first time in his life; develops an unspoken infatuation with a woman who breaks his heart by abruptly marrying someone else; and, amid confusion and turmoil, achieves a measure of growth.

A fine novel captures the hearts of readers across time, and I am sure that many Japanese identify with Sanshirō even today, especially those who, like him, have left the countryside to study in a big city. It is natural that even today, many readers should identify with the innocent young protagonist so full of the future, so full of dreams.

Nonetheless, a very different Sanshirō emerges when we take a step back and see the novel as a kind of metanovel. Set in and around the university campus, it could first be read as an analysis of how a university functions in Japan. But it could also be read as a work that allows the reader to see, more lucidly than any work of scholarship, why so many Meiji intellectuals turned to writing novels and why novels were destined to flourish in Japan. To push our interpretation further, Sanshirō highlights the historical necessity for national literature to thrive during this time of rapid modernization.

Let us go back to the scene on the train bound for Tokyo. The night before, Sanshirō has had a rather humiliating experience. When he got off the train in Nagoya for the night, the woman sitting across from him got off as well and asked him to help her find an inn. He did not have the nerve to say no. He found a seedy-looking inn befitting the third-class passengers that they were; the innkeeper instantly mistook them for a couple, and before Sanshirō knew it, he was forced not only to stay in the same room with the woman but also to share the same futon with her. Hastily making up some nonsensical excuse, he rolled up a towel to create a barrier between them and spent the entire night lying beside her wide awake, rigid with tension. When they parted in the morning, she broke her silence, saying suddenly with a mocking smile, “Quite a coward, aren’t you?” Now, on the train from Nagoya, Sanshirō ruminates on her words: “Not even his mother could have hit home so accurately.” He recalls the woman’s mocking smile. He cannot help but feel depressed. Then, to lift his spirits, he imagines the bright future awaiting him: “He was going to Tokyo. He would enter the university, associate with famous scholars, befriend students of taste and character. Do research in the library. Write books, win acclaim. Make his mother happy.” He goes on self-indulgently in this vein.

While all this is going on his mind, spread on Sanshirō’s lap is a book that he took from his bag a little while ago and has been pretending to read: Francis Bacon’s Essays. Now, here is a question few Japanese readers may have bothered to ask: Is the book a translation or the English original? The novel does not tell us. The present-day reader, long accustomed to the idea that every important book from the West has been rendered into Japanese, is likely to assume that it’s a translation. But if one stopped to consider that the novel was written over a hundred years ago, one might conjecture that the book was in the original—which I think would be the case. At the time, translations of Western books were rare. Once we can picture Sanshirō perusing a book in English, we have already taken an important step. We can expect this novel to be about bilingual intellectuals of the Meiji period in whose lives reading Western languages, particularly English, played a central role.

We soon find out that Sanshirō is enrolled in the Department of English Literature at Tokyo Imperial University. We see him reading English—or trying to. The bearded man he met on the train in the scene quoted in the previous chapter, Professor Hirota, is not just a teacher at the university’s affiliated preparatory college but a teacher of English. We see Hirota reading English all the time. Another important character, a research physicist named Nonomiya who comes from Sanshirō’s hometown and is a few years his senior, also reads English as a matter of course. Even the beautiful Mineko, with whom Sanshirō eventually falls in love in his timid and inarticulate way, reads English, though she is “merely” a woman. Her pronunciation, Sanshirō thinks, is excellent.

The university library is quite naturally filled with books from the West: “Some of the books were piled so high you needed a ladder to reach them. Books darkened by handling and greasy fingerprints, books with titles of shining gold. Sheepskin, cowhide, two-century-old paper and, piled on top of it all, dust. Precious dust that took two or three decades to accumulate.” These books piled with “precious dust” are books that the university has been working hard to acquire, volume by volume, language by language, since the Meiji Restoration.

Sanshirō is stunned to realize the diligent use people have made of the library: “He was amazed to discover that every book he handled, no matter what it was, had been read at least once. There were pencil marks scattered throughout. Once, just out of curiosity, he picked up a novel by an author named Aphra Behn. Nobody will have read this, he told himself before opening it. But again, there they were, the neat pencil marks. This was really too much.”

And who should be one of those people who have read Aphra Behn but Professor Hirota! Of the main characters, Hirota reads English the most and hence uses the library the most. He informs Sanshirō that Aphra Behn was England’s first female writer to become a professional novelist. He even tells him that a man by the name of “Southerne” subsequently wrote a play based on her work. Professor Hirota also has a substantial private collection of books in English, which he seems to lend out generously. Indeed, although he has never traveled abroad, he knows more about the West than anyone else, having read more books in Western languages than anyone else. He tells Sanshirō the curious story of Leonardo da Vinci injecting arsenic into the trunk of a peach tree experimentally, to see if the poison would circulate to the fruit. He also informs him about the construction of a Greek theater and explains the meaning of certain Greek and Latin words: theatron, orchêstra, skêne, proskênion. Sanshirō learns from him that, according to some German or other, the theater in Athens could seat seventeen thousand, which was on the small side, as the largest one could seat fifty thousand. The professor even knows that there were two kinds of tickets, ivory and lead, and that a day’s performance cost the equivalent of twelve sen; a full three-day program, thirty-five sen. Professor Hirota, who seems to know everything, is a seeker of knowledge par excellence.

Professor Hirota represents not only the most knowledgeable but also the wisest character in the novel, universally respected. This comes out in the scene at the very beginning of the novel where Sanshirō looks at him and sees only a shabbily dressed, middle-aged man with a mustache who, at his age, is still riding third class; Sanshirō inwardly looks down on him, comfortably contrasting the man with himself and the bright future he has in store. Yet the man says things that Sanshirō has never heard before: Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War hardly made the country a first-class power; it’s actually a sorry place with just one thing to be proud of—Mount Fuji, a product of nature. The professor’s unmincing words astonish Sanshirō, who is fresh out of Kyushu. He feels compelled to offer a counterargument:

. . . He said defensively, “But from now on, Japan is sure to develop.”

“Japan’s headed for a fall,” the man said coolly.

Say a thing like that in Kumamoto and you’d get a punch in the nose, or be called a traitor. The atmosphere Sanshirō grew up in left no room in his head for such an idea. Just because he was young, was the man having some fun at his expense? The man kept on grinning. Yet his way of talking was perfectly composed. Not knowing what to think, Sanshirō held his tongue.

His companion went on, “Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And what’s bigger than Japan is . . .” He paused and looked at Sanshirō, who was listening intently. “. . . the inside of your head. That’s bigger than Japan. Don’t let yourself get bogged down. You may believe your way of thinking is for the good of the nation, but you could actually be bringing it down.”

When he heard this, Sanshirō felt he had indeed left Kumamoto. And he realized, too, what a small person his Kumamoto self had been.

What makes the inside of one’s head “bigger” than a nation? It is thinking in a national language that came into being through translations of universal languages. On his way from Kumamoto to Tokyo, Sanshirō encounters for the first time his own language used as a national language—a language that can transcend and critique one’s own nation-state, a language that presumes a global consciousness. A naïve young man, Sanshirō does not fully appreciate the invaluableness of someone like Professor Hirota. The first chapter ends: “The bearded man never told Sanshirō his name. There were bound to be men like this everywhere in Tokyo, Sanshirō thought, and never bothered to ask.”

Needless to say, this portends that even in Tokyo, the likes of Professor Hirota are hard to find.

Professor Hirota appears as someone who can use Japanese in such a way precisely because he is constantly reading books in Western languages and thinking, while mentally translating what he has read into Japanese. Indeed, scenes abound in which the subject of translation comes up. Meeting Sanshirō again in Tokyo, Professor Hirota recognizes him and asks out of the blue: “Did you ever try to translate Mount Fuji?” When some young people, including Sanshirō, help the professor move into a new rental house with all his foreign books, he asks them how to translate the English proverb, “Pity is akin to love.” And a discussion on how to translate ensues. Easily influenced, even Sanshirō, as he thinks of Mineko, starts having thoughts like this: “Beautiful women could be translated any number of ways.” Mineko herself puzzles Sanshirō with a question: “Do you know the English translation for ‘lost child’?”

And it is through the character of Professor Hirota that the novel stealthily asks the critical questions: What does it mean to pursue scholarship in Japanese? Is it truly possible to do so? Such questions underlie the fact that Professor Hirota, with all his knowledge and wisdom, can be seen as little more than a walking encyclopedia, someone who makes no good use of the vast store of knowledge and wisdom he has acquired. Though he reads more Western books than anyone else, he never writes anything himself. He absorbs all the glories of the world’s knowledge and never emits any light of his own. This is why he is referred to as “the Great Darkness” by Sanshirō’s classmate Yojirō, the clown in the novel, who lives with Professor Hirota as his disciple-cum-houseboy. Professor Hirota is always smoking a cigarette and, in Yojirō’s words, “emitting his customary puffs of philosophy.” He does not have a single published book to his name. He occasionally writes essays of sorts, but nobody pays any attention. And he is content with teaching English at the preparatory college.

Feeling sorry for Professor Hirota and frustrated at the same time, Yojirō works behind the scenes to try to get him a position on the English literature faculty at Tokyo Imperial University. He first publishes a long magazine essay entitled “The Great Darkness” in which he sings the professor’s praises in extravagant terms. The essay is “particularly severe on foreigners teaching foreign literature in the university” and argues that the university should hire Japanese professors: “Of course, the situation cannot be helped if there is no one suitable, but here is Professor Hirota.” Yojirō then goes on to organize a student gathering where he delivers a ringing speech: “We’ve got to get hold of someone who can satisfy the youth of the new age. A foreigner won’t do. They don’t have what it takes.”

Yojirō’s efforts are in vain. The position goes to someone “who had until recently been studying abroad under government orders”—in other words, to a man like Sōseki himself, who in real life obtained the very position in question after studying abroad under government orders. Sōseki’s mischievous humor has Yojirō say he heard a rumor that “the other fellow was pulling strings.” This subplot is a light sideline in which Yojirō ends up causing trouble for all concerned. But the historical background of the subplot is anything but light. The incident symbolizes the incremental replacement of foreign faculty by Japanese that had to take place for the Japanese language to be elevated into a language used in academia.

Professor Hirota himself does not seem the least bit disappointed at the failure of Yojirō’s scheme. He scoffs at Yojirō’s long essay and goes on teaching at his college, unruffled. The reader is led to believe that this is because he is a man who transcends the worldly. Yet I would argue that there is a deeper significance. Professor Hirota attaches no great importance to becoming a professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. Indeed, how on earth could he or any Japanese become a true scholar of English literature? Even if the Japanese were able to pursue scholarship in their own language, so long as they all wrote in their own language, how could anybody’s writing enter the world’s chain of “texts to read”?

Though he has no publications to speak of, Professor Hirota seems to be idly working on a magnum opus that, Yojirō fears, will amount only to “a heap of scrap paper” when he dies. He is a lazy scholar not despite having read more books from the West than anyone else, but precisely because he has. He understands all too well how ultimately futile it is for a liberal-arts scholar like himself to write and publish in Japanese, how impossible it is for him to make a contribution in the field that way. And yet the West is too far, psychologically as well as geographically, for him to try writing in English—or in any other European language for that matter. Furthermore, even if, against all odds, he did write his book in English, what Western scholar of the time would read it? What Western scholar in his right mind would trouble to read a book on English literature written by a Japanese?

True, some Japanese people around the same period did write in English, notably the Christian reformer and writer Uchimura Kanzō, as we have seen, and the government official and artist Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913). Westerners welcomed the former’s How I Became a Christian as gratifying proof of their religion’s universal validity, and the latter’s The Book of Tea (1906) as a source of wisdom embodied in the exotic tea ceremony. But a treatise on English literature by a Far Eastern man would have been unlikely to find a publisher. Even if Professor Hirota were promoted and thus given more time to write his magnum opus, his role from a global perspective would remain that of a translator introducing Western scholarship to Japan.

A character in Sanshirō who is Professor Hirota’s polar opposite is Nonomiya, the young physicist. In many ways, the two are similar. Nonomiya, too, is a man who transcends worldly matters. He, too, is content with low pay and goes about doing the same thing for ten long years, secluding himself in a cellar-like laboratory, staring into a telescope, and conducting research on the pressure exerted by light, a subject that seems remote from everyday life. He, too, is unknown to the general public. And yet there is a crucial difference between him and Professor Hirota: he is known to those around the world who are engaged in research similar to his. “Everyone in that field, even Westerners, knows the name of Nonomiya,” we are assured. “Nonomiya is celebrated in foreign countries.” As a scientist, Nonomiya not only reads but writes and publishes in English, for the language of science is close to the language of mathematics, the universal language par excellence. His writings can thus enter the chain of “texts to read.” This is why, even though he is a man with little worldly interest, he is highly sensitive to trends in his field. “Research nowadays moves fast; if you don’t stay alert, you’re quickly left behind,” he tells Sanshirō.

Sanshirō astutely grasps the difference between the two men:

Around Professor Hirota he felt easy and relaxed. Competition just didn’t seem to matter anymore. Nonomiya had an otherworldly air too, like the professor, but in his case lofty ambitions seemed to distance him from conventional desires. So when Sanshirō talked with Nonomiya one on one, he would start to feel that he too must hurry and do his share, make his contribution to the world of scholarship. He grew anxious. By contrast, Professor Hirota was tranquility itself. He was just a college language teacher and that was it—not a very nice thing to say, granted, but he hadn’t published any research. And yet he seemed totally unconcerned. That must be what put Sanshirō so much at ease.

That Professor Hirota should remain “the Great Darkness”—a master of mere trivia—is structurally imposed by the futility of pursuing Western scholarship in Japanese, and that futility itself is imposed by the historical dynamics of modernity, manifesting itself in the linguistic asymmetry.

Not everyone is blessed with the kind of mind that allows him to spend his days in peace when entrapped in such a situation. Sōseki must have admired men who possessed such tranquility of mind, must have aspired to be like them. Yet he was no Hirota. He accepted the position on the faculty of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, replacing Lafcadio Hearn—and thus becoming what he later sarcastically called a “captain of Western learning.”

Sōseki’s next step, however, was extraordinary. He tried to explore the only path that seemed meaningful and valid to him, the only path in which he would be more than a “captain of Western learning,” more than a transmitter of knowledge. The result was the notoriously hard to read book Theory of Literature (Bungaku ron, 1907), a compilation of his lectures at the university from 1903 to 1905. The book begins with a rather startling declaration:

One can perhaps approach the form of literary substance with the expression (F + f). F here indicates impressions or ideas at the focal point of consciousness, while f signifies the emotions that attend them. In this case, the formula stated above signifies impressions and ideas in two aspects, that is to say, as a compound of [the] cognitive factor F (“large F”), and the emotional factor f (“small f”).2

In other words, the impressions a reader receives from literature derive from the combination of F, which stands for cognitive function, and f, which stands for emotive function—a contention so basic that it is difficult either to agree or to disagree. It is less what he says than the way he says it that concerns us here. Sōseki had a highly analytical and scientific mind. In trying to teach English literature in the Japanese language to Japanese students, he tried to step outside not only English literature but also the literary language commonly used in discussing literature, and to address, in a most formalistic way, the fundamental question of what literature is.

What Sōseki avoided was repeating the ideas of Western teachers in Japanese and thus acting as a mere conduit. A good example of what he presumably did not want to do as a teacher can be found in Sanshirō. On Sanshirō’s first day of classes at the university, he waits for the professor to enter the classroom, his heart filled with awe. Then a “distinguished-looking old man, a foreigner” walks in and begins “to lecture in fluent English.” What does Sanshirō learn from this guru? He learns that the word “answer” derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “andswaru.” He learns the name of the village where Sir Walter Scott went to grammar school. In short, he learns things that are hardly relevant to Japanese people. It would not be worth Sōseki’s while to teach in Japanese if he only replicated this sort of class. It was the mission of him or someone like him—a person who could look at English literature from the outside—to relativize works in English as variants of literature’s universal formula.

Modern history forced Sōseki to become a formalist, more than a decade before the Russian formalists came on the scene. And yet he was unsatisfied with Theory of Literature, which he later called a “deformed corpse”: Why did he feel so bitter about it that he felt compelled to doubly degrade it, calling it not just a “corpse” but a “deformed corpse”? “Circumstances compelled me to give up my contemplated task long before it was completed. My Theory of Literature is thus not so much a memorial to my projected ‘lifework’ as its corpse—and a deformed corpse at that. It lies like the ruins of a city street that has been destroyed by an earthquake in the midst of its construction.”3 Was Sōseki frustrated by the limitation of pursuing academic learning in the Japanese language? We do not know. All we know is that he quit his teaching post after only four years. By that time, he had already earned a considerable reputation as a writer through works he wrote in his spare time, such as the satirical comic novel I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru, 1905–1906). The Asahi Shimbun offered him a full-time position as an in-house novelist who would write serially for the paper. His decision to walk away from what was then one of the most exalted positions in Japan, that of faculty member at Tokyo Imperial University, to become a full-time novelist created a sensation. Yet in fact, it symbolized a typical predicament of intellectuals in modern Japan: there was a structural necessity for bright minds to leave the university behind to write.

Let us go back to the beginning of Sanshirō when, during his train ride to Tokyo, Sanshirō tries to cheer himself with self-indulgent dreams. He would “do research in the library. Write books, win acclaim. Make his mother happy.” The novel ends a year later, when his first year of the university life has come to an end. What will become of Sanshirō now? Is he going to write books in academia, as he first dreamed of doing? Or, like Sōseki, is he going to leave the university behind to write books as a standard-bearer of national literature? I cannot read Sanshirō without wondering what the future holds for him.

Writing outside academia, someone like Sanshirō could write books that would enter the chain of “texts to read,” at least in Japanese. His language would not need to be cut off from Japanese literary tradition. He would be free to pose urgent questions for which academia had no room: What does the West mean for Japan? Does the Western construct of “Asia” really exist? What is modernity? Indeed, many men besides Sōseki left universities in order to pose these questions, and in the process some became writers, critics, and preeminent public intellectuals.

To be sure, fine Japanese scholars did exist back then, and not just in the natural sciences. Yet they were in the minority. Most Japanese scholars stuck to absorbing Western scholarship, translating it, and introducing it to Japanese readers. A barrage of new ideas arrived almost daily from across the ocean. They had to scramble just to keep up, without the luxury of clarifying how a new idea related to the one before. Those writing outside academia, meanwhile, tried to capture the reality of Japan, a country suddenly confronted by what is often referred to as the “shock of the West,” leaving behind the fine writing that still captivates readers today.

THE DISJUNCTION OR “SUDDEN TWIST”

The birth of modern Japanese literature did not come without a price: the “shock of the West” created a deep disjunction in the Japanese literary tradition. Today’s Japanese readers cannot browse literature from before 1887, the year Futabatei Shimei began writing Floating Clouds. A man only three years Sōseki’s senior, Futabatei was thoroughly schooled in Russian, loved its literature, and is considered Japan’s first modern novelist and translator of Western literature.

Floating Clouds, which appeared two decades after the Meiji Restoration, was the first work of fiction written in the new prose style of genbun itchi, which was closer to spoken language. Born out of translations of Western writings, the genbun itchi style emphasizes the referential function of language—how words refer to reality rather than to literary traditions—and thus places importance on representing facts, things, and human thoughts as they “actually” are. Hence the importance of realism. Inevitably, this new prose style entailed change in content as well. Floating Clouds has as its protagonist an ordinary clerk, albeit one of the samurai class; it also gives unheard-of prominence to the internal monologue as the feckless protagonist agonizes over his one-sided love. Though Floating Clouds still stirs readers, probably more people in the Meiji period read traditional gesaku works such as Agura nabe (Sitting around the beefpot, 1871), written only sixteen years earlier by Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894). Agura nabe, however, is linguistically and thematically a mere curiosity for present-day readers. Anything earlier, no matter how popular or culturally important it may have been, is even more inaccessible now. The disjunction in the Japanese literary tradition is all but unbridgeable.

As a result of this disjunction, the word “modern” (kindai) has taken on a peculiar usage in Japanese, one that separates the Western literary tradition from that of Japan (and probably other non-Western countries). In the Western literary tradition, “classical literature” usually designates literature written in Greek and Latin, while “modern literature” remains a vague notion, its meaning shifting depending on the context. Vernacular literature before the advent of print is often called “early modern,” but after that, literature is more often divided by century: the eighteenth-century novel, twentieth-century poetry, and so on. Since the establishment of the vernacular as “print language,” Western literature has followed more or less a smooth trajectory until the present. There is no clear break that marks the beginning of “modern literature.” English-speaking teenagers can pleasurably read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) or even Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). French people today have no trouble reading a classic like The Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in 1782, or even The Princess of Cleves, going back to 1678, probably written by Madame de Lafayette. German youth can easily dip into Heinrich von Kleist’s Collected Short Stories (1810–1811) or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). This is not the case with Japanese literature. “Modern literature” in Japanese designates literature written after the “shock of the West”; the term implies the disjunction created in the Meiji period.

Nowhere is this disjunction more manifest than in the loss of ties with the Chinese literary tradition. To translate the Western languages that were new universal languages, Japanese writers retained the use of Chinese characters but distanced themselves from Chinese literature, which had long been the pillar of their literary tradition. Over time, the number of Chinese-literate Japanese dwindled to a few specialists, and thus Chinese writing in Japan eventually died. Japanese literature was severed from a major part of its past.

Again, no writer better exemplifies the path of literature in Japan’s modern era than Sōseki. As we have seen, he became the first to teach English literature in Japanese in a Japanese university. He then left the confines of the university to become a full-time writer, and by so doing he came to symbolize the inevitability of the language of literature surpassing the language of scholarship in conveying an understanding of the world in which the Japanese lived. But Sōseki as a writer symbolizes yet another path that modern Japan had to follow. Because of his lifelong love of the Chinese Classics and his outstanding knowledge of them, he perhaps more than anyone else experienced the disjunction brought on by the “shock of the West” as a personal loss.

In the well-known preface to Theory of Literature, Sōseki ruminates on his different emotional connections to Classical Chinese and English literature. Fond of studying the Chinese Classics from a tender age, he eventually yielded to the tenor of the times and devoted himself to studying English literature. But he did so on the assumption that English literature would be similarly rewarding, only to feel “cheated.” He writes, “[W]hen I graduated, I was bothered by a notion that lingered at the back of my mind—that somehow I had been cheated by English literature.”4 How was it possible for his “sense of like and dislike between the two to be so widely divergent despite [his] having roughly equal scholarly abilities”⁵ in Classical Chinese and English? Why was he so attached to Classical Chinese and so disenchanted with English literature?

In Grass Pillow (Kusamakura, 1906), which he wrote in roughly the same period, Sōseki compares the poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley with those of the Chinese poetic geniuses Tao Yuanming (365–427) and Wang Wei (655–759), coming to this damning conclusion: “Western poetry . . . however poetic it waxes, scurries over the ground, never forgetting to count its small change.” In contrast, he writes, quite predictably, that Eastern poetry is “emancipated from the worldly.” Sōseki repeatedly professes his aversion to English literature—and the English language—around the same time, perhaps because that literature symbolized certain personal disappointments: the unpleasantness of his stay in London, the proprietary airs of foreigners in Japan, his need to teach English to make a living. In a letter he wrote after quitting the university, he declares, “If I cannot make a living, I will become anything, even a dog. Teaching English is about the same as barking like a dog, so I’ll do it if I have to. It was through a misfortune that I began to study English.”6

And yet, despite his avowed distaste for the world of English letters, Sōseki’s own novels swiftly departed from Chinese tradition, coming more to resemble Western novels. The Poppy (Gubijinsō, 1907), which he wrote shortly after leaving the university, was written with constant reference to an ancient anthology of Chinese poetry. Heavily Sinicized, classical, and ornate, it is also the work of Sōseki’s that was most popular during his lifetime. In contrast, his final, unfinished novel Light and Dark, written some ten years on, shows the greatest influence of the West both in its plot and in its use of language, one example of the latter being the repetitive use of personal pronouns equivalent to “he” and “she”—which, amazing as it may seem to Westerners, did not exist in premodern Japanese. The main character is a man about twenty years younger than Sōseki, someone who “could not read books dense with nothing but square, multistroke characters”—in other words, a man no longer capable of appreciating Chinese literature. While Sōseki’s own life was imbued with a deep familiarity with the Chinese Classics, he was well aware that a generation of Japanese quite different from him was emerging. And he is still read today precisely because, seeing the inevitability of that historical change, he wrote novel after novel for readers who, like his own protagonist, were losing touch forever with the Chinese literary tradition, with “books dense with nothing but square, multistroke characters.”

Indeed, Japanese readers today, including Sōseki scholars, mostly read Sōseki’s later novels. Those novels offer no clue about how closely entwined Sōseki’s life was to the Classical Chinese literary tradition, quite unlike the lives of today’s readers. While Sōseki was writing Light and Dark, after working in the morning he would spend his afternoons composing Chinese poetry to escape what he saw as the all-too-mundane world of the novel. During his lifetime, he not only wrote a considerable number of Chinese poems but, following the Chinese literati tradition, practiced calligraphy and painting as well (though his painting was not very good). Any Japanese museum-goer who encounters Sōseki’s Chinese calligraphy and poetry in the original is bound to be brought up short. Despite his beloved place in our hearts, despite his towering stature in Japanese literature, a portion of Sōseki’s oeuvre close to his heart is illegible to Japanese people today.

When I contemplate the distance between the literary culture that Sōseki lived in and our own, I am struck by the loneliness he must have felt. It is the loneliness of the writer who knows that his readers will never share the same world that he lives in, never share the same culture that he is part of. It is the very loneliness experienced to some degree by all Japanese people of Sōseki’s time.

In a public talk, “Gendai Nihon no kaika” (The development of contemporary Japan), Sōseki describes the cultural transformation Japan had to go through as a “sudden twist [kyokusetsu].” According to him, the development within the West was “internally driven,” that in Japan “externally driven.” He argues that although in the past Japan certainly developed under the influence of Korea and China, that influence was of a nature that prompted gradual, internally driven development. In contrast, the “shock of the West” experienced by modern Japan was of unprecedented magnitude, forcing on Japan a “sudden twist”:

From that moment on, Japan’s development took a sudden twist. It experienced a shock so great that it could not help but do so. To use the phrase that I used earlier, Japan until then had been internally driven but suddenly lost the power of self-determination and, pushed by external forces, had no choice but to do as it was told. . . . Since Japan probably cannot exist as Japan without forever being pushed in the way it is today, there is no other way to put this than being externally driven.7 (Emphasis added)

Sōseki concludes in a slightly comical tone: “Call us unfortunate, call us wretched or what you will—we Japanese have fallen into one hell of a predicament.” But in fact, it was not only Japan that was forced to go through this type of “externally driven” development.

It was a drama that continued in all the non-Western regions throughout the twentieth century and that continues to this day. Since the fifteenth century, with the advancement of maritime technology, and on through the age of colonialism, externally driven development spread through the non-Western world and is now omnipresent under the name of “globalization.” Beginning over one hundred years ago, modern Japanese literature told this narrative from the non-Western standpoint—a narrative that will likely continue to be told in various parts of the world.

THE MIRACLE OF MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE

What a fascinating body of literature emerged in Japan, though, precisely as a result of what Sōseki calls the “sudden twist”! The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding. Japan’s historical “twist” forced—condemned—Japanese writers to struggle with their language in ways they had never imagined. Using the tragedy of the twist as a launching pad to come up with a new language that could capture the new Japan, they traced their language back over a thousand years, examining each and every word as in a treasure hunt and exploring all the possibilities that the language possessed.

In the early years of modern Japanese literature, all writers—including those not endowed with a particularly great gift—were forced to address the issue of language. And in so doing, they produced a body of literature that often seems to transcend the individual writer—one in which layers of tradition sing in mesmerizing polyphony.

The new genbun itchi prose flourished in many variations. At one end of the spectrum, there initially was even a surge of heavily Sinicized writing, exuding manliness, which befitted the newly found ground for political discussion, heroically exhorting freedom and civil rights. At the other end of the spectrum were the writings based on hiragana—the “women’s hand”—where the use of ideograms was sparse; stylistically these ran the gamut, by turns feminine, innocent, elegant, colloquial, or vulgar, often treating the imported concept of romantic love. Whether it took the form of a novel or an essay, all prose could draw from the various tones in between these disparate styles. There was also a brief reaction against the genbun itchi movement, reviving the language of the literary height of the Edo period—the seventeenth-century Genroku era—and reconnecting readers to that bygone era in a new way.

Poetry thrived, too. Stimulated by the genbun itchi prose, which aspired to realism, both waka and haiku poetry also tried to depict the “real,” rather than engage in intertextual play with tradition, and in doing so experienced a golden renaissance. Free verse joined the parade. Katakana, which had been closely associated with Chinese characters, came almost overnight to represent the sounds of Western loanwords, transforming itself into a chic set of letters that reeked of the West. The more one sprinkled Western loanwords using katakana in one’s writing, the more modern one sounded. Meanwhile, translations of Western works ended up with a marked style, often quite distinct from that of works written originally in Japanese; even today when Japanese read translations, they tend to shift modes of reading, like a driver shifting gears at the wheel of a car. I know of no Western literature that has mixed such a diverse array of writing systems and literary traditions and, moreover, so clearly retained the historical marks of each of them, so that layers of different heritages are visible on almost every page.

To be sure, of the astonishing quantity of literature published since Floating Clouds, not all is of fine quality. Full-length novels that deserve to be called masterpieces are rare; unlike their Western counterparts, Japanese writers generally do not excel in constructing a fictional universe that stands on its own. Yet the corpus of modern Japanese literature is filled with such diverse linguistic and literary wonderment that it is a true embarrassment of riches. It is also filled with “truths” visible only through the Japanese language—in passages often highly resistant to translation. Foreigners who tackle them in Japanese may at first be baffled, but the deeper they delve into the treasure house of modern Japanese literature, the more certain they are to be captivated by the discovery of just how perversely complex and generously all-encompassing a written language can be.

And to think that modern Japanese literature might never have existed! Its path was perilous. Only a precarious combination of historical conditions—conditions largely beyond the control of the Japanese people—allowed it to blossom. What else to call the rise of modern Japanese literature but a miracle?

FORGETTING THE ORIGINS

National literature, just like national language, is established through the forgetting of its origins. It is true in the case of modern Japanese literature as well. The new kind of Japanese, which was written by and read among intellectuals during the early years of Japan’s modernity and was to become the medium of Japanese literature, was obviously different from the written Japanese circulating in everyday life. Reading it must have felt somehow awkward, foreign, and pretentious to ordinary people, like eating with knives and forks instead of chopsticks. Only in the mid-Taishō era did the language used in newspapers shift from the traditional literary style to the new genbun itchi style, prose that was closer to the spoken language. And it was probably well into the Shōwa period that this new style of written language, through compulsory education, newspapers, and magazines, no longer seemed foreign even to people whose lives had nothing to do with universities: farmers, factory workers, shop owners.

As the written language that ordinary people used in writing diaries and letters became more similar to the new language, and as that new language became the norm, the origins of modern Japanese literature itself—the fact that it was initiated through acts of translation by bilinguals who had studied Western languages in universities—were quickly forgotten. Some people today may know that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), who wrote in a particularly modernistic style, read an astounding amount of English at an astounding speed: he is rumored to have finished War and Peace in English in just four days. But few realize that Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903), known for an ornate, “reactionary” style reminiscent of Genroku-era literature, was no less avid a reader of novels in English. It thus caused a stir in 2000 when his most famous work, The Gold Demon (Konjiki yasha, 1887), was proved to be an adaptation of an American dime novel.8 How many are aware that Nakazato Kaizan (1885–1944), known for his long Buddhist novel Daibosatsu tōge (Bodhisattva pass, 1913), was an avid reader of Victor Hugo in English translation? Or that Osaragi Jirō (1897–1973), author of the swashbuckling Kurama tengu series (1924–1959), started writing to pay off his debt to Maruzen, a bookstore that specializes in imported books?

To reflect back on the origin of modern Japanese literature is itself incompatible with the “ideology of national language,” which claims that national literature, written in one’s own language, is an outpouring of the writer’s inner soul, a direct expression of what he or she saw, felt, and imagined. No deliberate suppression was needed. Rather, forgetting the origins of modern Japanese literature was an unconscious process that ended inevitably in obfuscation and oblivion. The process accelerated as the spoken and written languages converged. The normative spoken language, initially forced on people through compulsory education in the Meiji period, began to spread uncoerced with the proliferation of radios and later television sets; it spread rapidly from living room to living room, over mountains and across rivers and prefectural borders. It is no wonder that the Japanese people came to feel as if their language was something they were born with and came to embrace their national literature as a natural manifestation of who they were. Being bilingual no longer mattered. Many fine works—masterpieces, some of them—began appearing from writers who could not be considered bilinguals. Monolingual writers eventually became the majority.

The triumph of the Japanese language as truly the people’s language could not be better exemplified than by a longtime best seller first published in 1958: Yasumoto Sueko’s Ni-anchan (My second brother, 1958). The diary of a preadolescent ethnic Korean girl, it depicts her everyday life with her three siblings in a Kyushu mining town. Though orphaned and destitute, the four of them help one another to somehow complete their schooling, her older brother even managing to be often at the top of the class. The style is simplicity itself. “One should write as one sees and feels; therefore, even those who have not read much can also write”—that is the view of language underpinning the ideology of national language. Such a view of language ends up flooding the world with pap, but it sometimes also allows a child with a beautiful mind to produce a gem. The power of the ideology of national language reached an apex, in Japanese, in writing by this girl of Korean nationality. Having read Ni-anchan over and over during grade school, as an adult I have kept questioning whether my own writing could possibly move the reader with similar force.

Indeed, the one hundred years since the Meiji Restoration were years in which modern Japanese literature spread to, and blossomed in, every corner of Japan. These were years when public education expanded and literacy grew, even among the poorest of the poor. They were also years when books became more and more affordable, including translations. Western-style leather-bound books were once a symbol of wealth, but by the end of the Taishō period, cloth-bound, mass-produced books that sold for only one yen per copy became popular in multivolume collections. Literary collections appeared in quick succession and in all sorts of variations, from Japanese novels to translated novels, for young adults or children or even aimed specifically at girls, like the set I read avidly as a child. Paperback versions followed, making a literary masterpiece as affordable as a bowl of noodles.

Japanese, moreover, were fortunate to enjoy a century of peaceful daily life, fecund ground for literature to flourish. Although the country turned other nations into battlefields and pillaged them in war, not until the end of World War II did its own land come under fire. Even after total defeat in World War II, Japan eventually enjoyed not only peace but also rapid economic growth. The number of people who attained higher education further expanded, books became even more affordable, and multivolume collections of all kinds circulated. Virtually the entire population read literature madly, not only Japanese works but a wide array of world classics by everyone from Strindberg to Borges. Japan became a nation so literary that it would have been the envy of all literature-loving people of the world—if only they had known! (Japanese literature finally attracted the world’s attention in 1968, exactly one hundred years after the Meiji Restoration, when Kawabata Yasunari was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)

Reading engenders the desire to write. The notion of democracy that Japanese people eagerly embraced after World War II gave further impetus to that desire: every individual should be able not only to read but to write fine literature. More and more venues opened so that anyone could become a writer who so desired and was not totally devoid of talent. Aspiring writers from all walks of life got together and self-published coterie magazines called dōjin-shi (literally, “magazines for the like-minded”), usually cheaply printed on flimsy paper. These sprang up like mushrooms after the rain. Established publishers with their own monthly literary journals featured not only renowned authors but also those just making names for themselves. Authors awarded newcomer prizes gained full recognition as writing professionals on winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize; after that, by continuing to receive a succession of yet more important prizes, they went on to gain expert status. Literary awards proliferated until literally hundreds of them existed, covering every conceivable genre and age-group. In time they spread a wide and tight-knit net over the country that generously rewarded every literary talent, however slight. The ideal world where every individual is both a reader and writer of literature had already materialized in Japan, well before the advent of our “utopian” Internet age of blogs and fan fiction. Yet, however idyllic that world may have been, underneath the surface modern Japanese literature was indeed, in the words of Professor Hirota, “headed for a fall.”