JAPANESE LITERATURE

PROSE appeared in the early part of the 8th century focusing on Japanese history. During the Heian Age, the
members of the Imperial court, having few administrative or political duties, kept lengthy diaries and
experimented with writing fiction.

1. The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, a work of tremendous length and complexity, is
considered to be the world’s first true novel. It traces the life of a gifted and charming prince. Lady
Murasaki was an extraordinary woman far more educated than most upper-class men of her generation.
She was appointed to serve in the royal court of the emperor.
2. The Tale of Haike written by an anonymous author during the 13th century was the most famous early
Japanese novel. It presents a striking portrait of war-torn Japan during the early stages of the age of
feudalism. ∙
3. Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko was written during the age of feudalism. It is a loosely organized
collection of insights, reflections, and observations, written during the 14th century. Kenko was born into a
high-ranking Shinto family and became a Buddhist priest.
4. In the Grove by Ryunusuke Akutagawa is the author’s most famous story made into the film Rashomon.
The story asks these questions: What is the truth? Who tells the truth? How is the truth falsified? Six
narrators tell their own testimonies about the death of a husband and the violation of his wife in the woods.
The narrators include a woodcutter, a monk, an old woman, the mother-in-law of the slain man, the wife,
and finally, the dead man whose story is spoken through the mouth of a shamaness. Akutagawa’s ability
to blend a feudal setting with deep psychological insights gives this story an ageless quality.

Novels and Short Stories

 Snow Country by Kawabata tells of love denied by a Tokyo dilettante, Shimamura, to Komako, a geisha
who feels ‘used’ much as she wants to think and feel that she is drawn sincerely, purely to a man of the
world. She has befriended Yoko to whom Shimamura is equally and passionately drawn because of her
virginity, her naivete, as he is to Komako who loses it, after her affair with him earlier. In the end, Yoko
dies in the cocoon-warehouse in a fire notwithstanding Komako’s attempt to rescue her. Komako
embraces the virgin Yoko in her arms while Shimamura senses the Milky Way ‘flowing down inside him
with a roar.’ Kawabata makes use of contrasting thematic symbols in the title: death and purification
amidst physical decay and corruption.
 The House of Sleeping Beauties by Kawabata tells of the escapades of a dirty old man, Eguchi, to a
resort near the sea where young women are given drugs before they are made to sleep sky-clad.
Decorum rules it that these sleeping beauties should not be touched, lest the customers be driven away by
the management. The book lets the reader bare the deeper recesses of the septuagenarian’s mind.
Ironically, this old man who senses beauty and youth is incapable of expressing, much less having it.
Thus, the themes of old age and loneliness and coping become inseparable.
 The Makioka Sisters by Tanizaki is the story of four sisters whose chief concern is finding a suitable
husband for the third sister, Yukiko, a woman of traditional beliefs who has rejected several suitors. Until
Yukiko marries, Taeko, the youngest, most independent, and most Westernized of the sisters, must
remain unmarried. More important than the plot, the novel tells of middle-class daily life in prewar Osaka. It
also delves into such topics as the intrusion of modernity and its effect on the psyche of the contemporary
Japanese, the place of kinship in the daily life of the people, and the passage of the old order and the
coming of the new.
 ∙ The Sea of Fertility by Mishima is the four-part epic including Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The
Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel. The novels are set in Japan from about 1912 to the 1960s.
Each of them depicts a different reincarnation of the same being: as a young aristocrat in 1912, as a
political fanatic in the 1930s, as a Thai princess before the end of WWII, and as an evil young orphan in
the 1960s. Taken together the novels are a clear indication of Mishima’s increasing obsession with blood,
death, and suicide, his interest in self-destructive personalities, and his rejection of the sterility of modern
life.
 The Setting Sun by Ozamu is a tragic, vividly painted story of life in postwar Japan. The narrator is
Kazuko, a young woman born to gentility but now impoverished. Though she wears Western clothes, her
outlook is Japanese; her life is static, and she recognizes that she is spiritually empty. In the course of the
novel, she survives the deaths of her aristocratic mother and her sensitive, drug addicted brother Naoji, an
intellectual ravage by his own and society’s spiritual failures. She also spends a sad, sordid night with the
writer Uehara, and she conceives a child in the hope that it will be the first step in a moral revolution.
 In the Grove by Akutagawa is the author’s most famous story made into the film Rashomon. The story
asks these questions: What is the truth? Who tells the truth? How is the truth falsified? Six narrators tell
their own testimonies about the death of a husband and the violation of his wife in the woods. The
narrators include a woodcutter, a monk, an old woman, the mother-in-law of the slain man, the wife, and
finally, the dead man whose story is spoken through the mouth of a shamaness. Akutagawa’s ability to
blend a feudal setting with deep psychological insights gives this story an ageless quality.
 The Wild Geese by Oagi is a melodramatic novel set in Tokyo at the threshold of the 20th century. The
novel explores the blighted life of Otama, daughter of a cake vendor. Because of extreme poverty, she
becomes the mistress of a policeman, and later on of a money-lender, Shazo. In her desire to rise from the
pitfall of shame and deprivation, she tries to befriend Okada, a medical student who she greets every day
by the window as he passes by on his way to the campus. She is disillusioned however, as Okada, in the
end, prepares for further medical studies in Germany. Ogai’s novel follows the traditio of the watakushi-
shosetsu or the confessional I- novel where the storyteller is the main character.
 The Buddha Tree by Fumio alludes to the awakening of Buddha under the bo tree when he gets
enlightened after fasting 40 days and nights. Similarly, the hero of the novel, Soshu, attains self-
illumination after freeing himself from the way of all flesh. The author was inspired by personal tragedies
that befell their family and this novel makes him transcend his personal agony into artistic achievement.