Social Trauma, Narrative Memory, and Recovery in Japanese Literature and Film

David Stahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351595995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria asiatica

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of major works in Japanese literature and film through the interpretive lens of trauma and PTSD studies. Focusing critical attention on the psychodynamics and enduring psychosocial aftereffects of social trauma, it also evaluates the themes of dissociation, failed mourning, and psychological defence fantasies.

Building on earlier studies, this book emphasizes the role of protagonists in managing to effect partial recovery by composing memoirs in which they transform dissociated traumatic memory into articulate, narrative memory or bring about advanced recovery by pioneering alternative means of orally communicating, working through, and overcoming debilitating personal histories of traumatization and victimization. In so doing, Stahl also demonstrates that what holds true on the individual and microcosmic level, also does so on the collective and macrocosmic level.

This new critical approach sheds important new light on canonical Japanese novels and films and enables recognition and appreciation of integral psychosocial aspects of these traumatic narratives. As such, the book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese film and literature, as well as those of trauma studies.

Part I
Trauma, narrative memory, and partial recovery

1
Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro

Natsume Kinnosuke was born on February 9, 1867, in Ushigome, Edo (Tokyo), to a father who was over 50 years old and a mother who was 40. An unwanted child, he was sent out for adoption to Shiobara Masanosuke and his wife Yasu when he was two. He lived with them for about six years, believing – as they had told him – that they were his birth parents, until domestic violence and divorce, following Yasu’s discovery of her husband’s ongoing affair, culminated in young Kinnosuke being returned to his natal family.¹ Treated coldly and dismissed by his father as an unwelcome burden on the family, the boy was allowed to believe that he had moved in with his grandparents until a maid took pity on him and whispered the truth to him one dark night after he had gone to bed.

Kinnosuke studied the Chinese classics in middle school but switched to the English studies track thereafter. In 1884, he matriculated to a higher school and graduated four years later. In 1888, he officially changed his legal family name from Shiobara back to Natsume, and the following year he adopted the eccentric penname “Sōseki” (“gargle with stones”). In 1890, he entered the English literature department of the First Upper Middle School (subsequently known as Tokyo Imperial University), and following graduation three years later, he continued on to graduate school. Upon completing his graduate degree in 1895, he accepted a job teaching English at a middle school in Matsushima on Shikoku Island, and then transferred even further away from the capital to a high school in Kumamoto, Kyushu, the following year.

Sōseki married Nakane Kyōko the same year he started his new teaching post in Kumamoto, and four years later he was sent to study English in London for two years at the behest of the Ministry of Education. Given that his stipend was woefully inadequate to support much in the way of formal education in England, Sōseki spent much of his time cloistered in his room reading broadly in the fields of literature, philosophy, psychology, science, etc., with an eye to establishing for himself the foundations for developing his own literary theory (Theory of Literature was subsequently published in incomplete form in 1907). Returning to Japan in January 1903, he taught at Tokyo Imperial University (replacing Lafcadio Hearn) and at two other institutions in order to provide for his growing family (soon after his return, his wife gave birth to their third daughter). Unhappy, unfulfilled, and overworked as an academic, he eventually quit teaching after serving out his contractual obligation.

Sōseki had befriended the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki as a student of the First Upper Middle School and spent time with him again when they both found themselves in Shiki’s hometown of Matsushima. Shiki founded the literary magazine Cuckoo (Hototoguisu) when they were still classmates and had encouraged his friend to pursue a career in writing. Not long after returning from overseas, Sōseki was asked by another Cuckoo editor to contribute a manuscript, which in time expanded through serial publication to become his first sustained work of fiction, I Am A Cat (1905–1906), a sprawling satire of Meiji intellectuals such as himself. This was quickly followed in 1906 by the publication of Botchan and Pillow of Grass. In 1907, Sōseki made the shocking announcement that he would quit his prestigious professorship to take up a full-time staff position as literary review editor for the Asahi Newspaper with the understanding that he would thenceforth serialize at least one novel a year for the firm. From this point until his death on December 9, 1916, he would, in addition to penning many short stories, essays, and influential lectures,² go on to write novels such as The Miner (1908); his first trilogy consisting of Sanshirō (1908), And Then (1909), and The Gate (1910); his second trilogy composed of Before the Spring Equinox (Higansugi made 1912), The Wayfarer (Kōjin 1913), and Kokoro (1914); and his last complete work, Grass on the Wayside (1915).

Sōseki specialist Ishihara Chiaki observes that it has been about a century since Sōseki’s fiction first began to appear in print (2010, 13) and that although he certainly wasn’t a popular novelist (ryūkō sakka) during his lifetime in terms of overall book sales, he became so during the decades after his death (2014, 4). Ishihara cautions us not to project his posthumous stature as “national writer” back to the relatively short period during which he was active as a novelist (2010, 29).³ Indeed, this exalted stature took shape gradually from the mid-1920s (Ishihara 2014, 4–5), when early Shōwa period scholars began to look back on and reconstruct the literary history of the Meiji and Taishō periods and identified representative modern authors (Torii, Miyazono, and Arai 2013, 343), and the third part of Kokoro (“Sensei and His Testament”) became a fixture of the postwar Japanese language curriculum from the 1960s onward (Ishihara 2014, 4–5).

Although Sōseki never belonged to any particular literary school, he became widely recognized as the preeminent figure in modern Japanese letters. To give some evidence of this: Edwin McClellan writes that with Sōseki, “the modern realistic novel in Japan reached its full maturity” (1971, vii); William Tyler hails him as “one of Japan’s foremost writers of modern fiction” (quoted in Doi, 1976, 1); Donald Keene variously notes that “the vast majority of [Japanese] readers … would surely name him as the greatest Japanese writer of modern times” and that many critics see his late works as “masterpieces” (1984, 305); Van Gessel lauds him as “Japan’s first world-class writer in modern times” (1993, 11); and Etō Jun praises him as one of the “greatest figures in modern Japanese literature” and “one of the best exemplars of the inner struggles of the Meiji intellectual” (2007, 503). That said, as will be touched upon in the next section on critical approaches to Sōseki and his fiction, there is considerably less agreement on exactly what it is that makes Sōseki such a towering literary figure. This, of course, depends largely on how and from what perspective one engages and appreciates the man and his works.

Critical approaches to Sōseki and his literature

It may be useful at this point to reflect on some of Kuwabara Takekazu’s critical insights regarding the dominant trends he observes in approaches to and evaluations of modern Japanese writers and their fiction before turning to consider the particular case of Sōseki and his creative writings. While Kuwabara’s main focus of concern is Ōe Kenzaburō, who in 1994 became the second Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, the critical problems, pitfalls, and shortcomings he identifies are pertinent to other Japanese writers such as Sōseki,

There is a marked proclivity [among literary critics] to bind novelists and novels too tightly together. On the one hand, there is the tendency to view novels as reflections of authors themselves; on the other, there is that of seeing novels as reflections of the times…. When one focuses on the stories themselves, however, one realizes the unsuitability of criticism that inadequately deals with “objectification.” … I have previously observed that there are pitfalls into which it is easy for literary critics to fall when interpreting a particular novelist, and this is not limited to Ōe Kenzaburō. First, there is the trap of critics adopting the terms authors themselves use to discuss their works and then using them as the starting points of their own inquiries. In addition, there is the tendency to uncritically adopt and employ the terminology other literary critics use intuitively (kankakuteki ni).

(1997, 10–12)

Many literary scholars working on Sōseki and his literature in Japanese and English have apparently succumbed to the temptations of biographical criticism, the conflation of author and times (or vice versa), and approaching individual works by adopting and (re)applying the concepts, terminology, and perspectives established by earlier critics and the writer himself in his own comments, essays, lectures, etc. These critical tendencies and their concomitant pitfalls and shortcomings are not only problematic but may also function to limit – perhaps even exclude – alternative critical methods, understandings, and insights.

Ishihara also notes that there have been clearly identifiable trends regarding critical approaches to and interpretive frameworks (wakugumi) for examining and appreciating Sōseki and his literature in general, and Kokoro in particular, and that this can be understood as resulting from the relatively small circle of literary scholars and critics active in Japan (2014, 8). This observation would certainly be applicable to Japanese literary scholars working in English as well, although the circle of domestic and foreign academics has expanded considerably in recent times to include those approaching Sōseki’s novels from innovative critical perspectives such as linguistics, narratology, feminist theory, and in the present book, trauma/PTSD studies. As will be touched upon below, the major trends in Sōseki scholarship leading up to contemporary times involve among other things: tensions between author-oriented criticism (sakusha ron) and text-oriented criticism (tekusuto ron) (Sakaki 1999, 39), the related conflation of man and works, and what Keith Vincent has discussed in terms of “symptomatic” readings in the sense of being

less interested in what the text itself is doing on its own terms, and more in what the text is telling us about something else. That “something else,” is often referred to as the “context.” … When one “reads for context,” one looks to an author like Sōseki, for example, for what his texts can tell us about Japan in the Meiji Period, about homosocial relations between men, how people thought about money, or about Japan’s colonies overseas.

(2016, 76, emphasis in original)

In another essay on sexuality and narrative in Kokoro, Vincent makes the following insightful observations about literary critics and the potentially problematic critical perspectives they bring to their craft, “whether one reads it as ‘queer as a three-dollar bill,’ as a national allegory about responsibility and friendship, or about the triumph of a future-oriented heterosexual love over a morbid homosociality, says much more about the critic and his or her historical moment than it does about Kokoro” (2010, 237). With these precautions in mind, I will rely on Ishihara’s work to survey some of the representative aspects of the history of Japanese literary criticism of Sōseki’s fiction on the whole before turning to consider prominent approaches to and understandings of Kokoro.

One of the first and most influential Sōseki critics was Komiya Toyotaka, who from the late 1930s began constructing an overarching view of his literature based on the “myth” (shinwa) of sokuten kyoshi, or “following heaven, overcoming the self/ego” (Ishikawa, 2010, 95, 102), which William Tyler has characterized as oriental transcendentalism, “According to Komiya, Sōseki’s life and works are the record of his struggle with the evil of egoism and of his eventual attainment of an enlightened state called sokuten kyoshi” (quoted in Doi 1976, 5). Komiya stressed the fundamental ethicality of the author and his works (Bourdaghs 2016, 640) and went on to establish his views as orthodoxy both through his scholarship and the many commentaries (kaisetsu) he published in collections of Sōseki’s fiction (Ishihara 2014, 6). Komiya’s critical “master narrative” held firm until the mid-1950s, when a young, up-and-coming literary critic named Etō Jun weighed in decisively to dislodge Komiya’s Sōseki myth and replace it with one of his own making (Ishihara 2010, 102).

In establishing this new image of Sōseki and his fiction, Etō, under the influence of the postwar existentialist philosophy of the time, rejected sokuten kyoshi and introduced a new set of influential concepts/keywords such as “deep tone(s)” (teionbu), “the depths/abyss” (shinen), and “the other” (tasha). In so doing, he effectively replaced Komiya’s concept of ethical/spiritual transcendentalism with existentialism and focused more attention on egoism, which later scholars came to set in opposition to sokuten kyoshi (ibid., 103–104). Ishihara vividly pictures the differences between Komiya and Etō’s perspectives by saying that while the former imagines Sōseki gazing up toward the heavens, the latter sees him falling/sinking into the depths of humanity. Etō’s new approach, moreover, seeks to understand the author not as an isolated individual but as one in relation to others,

As Sōseki descended more deeply into himself (naimen), he faced others and groped for relationship. [Etō] sought to grasp Sōseki’s literature as one of conflict between these two vectors. This was not a matter of an intellectual’s anguish of suffering alone in isolation, but one of an educated man suffering in isolation from his connections with others in his everyday relations with them.

(Ishihara 2014, 7)

After observing that criticism during the decade following Etō’s challenges to Komiya in the mid-1950s consisted of little more than the rehashing of his perspectives and conclusion that Sōseki “confronted the abyss of human existence,” Ishihara goes on to point out that no one at the time even bothered to interrogate what this abstract phrase actually meant. Be that as it may, by 1965 the consensus regarding the author’s writings came to rest on the fraught formation of modern subjectivity and the suffering of the intellectual, and eventually came to encompass critiques of modernity itself (ibid.). And in time, Sōseki subsequently came to be engaged from a greater variety of theoretical and interpretive perspectives. As Michael Bourdaghs explains,

Another major turning point in Sōseki’s reception came in the 1970s and 80s, when a new generation of critics – including Karatani Kōjin (b. 1941), Komori Yōichi (b. 1953), and Ishihara Chiaki (b. 1955) – published influential new interpretations that again transformed Sōseki. No longer the hero of the modernization of Japanese literature, he was now celebrated as the first great critic of Japanese modernity.

(2016, 640)

The 1980s, which witnessed the “Kokoro Debates (ronsō)” involving Komori, Karatani, Ishihara, and others, were followed by the “Sōseki boom” in the 1990s. John Nathan summarizes the diverse state of critical engagement with Sōseki’s fiction from this time until the present as follows, “[S]ince the 1980s, Japanese scholars have produced dozens of books and hundreds of articles about Sōseki every year. A number of Western scholars have also contributed to this corpus of criticism. In the main, the new work is linguistic, structuralist, and narratological, examining Sōseki’s fiction in light of gender studies, feminism, queer theory, and a heightened sensitivity to imperialism” (2018, xi).

As Kuwabara has observed, however, there have been conspicuous and pervasive tendencies in Sōseki scholarship to conflate the author with his times and protagonists. While this may be informative and insightful to some extent, doing so also runs the risk of neglecting to recognize or pay adequate attention to what Sōseki himself may have been seeking to convey to his readers through his creative fiction and imaginative portrayals of characters. In other words, while we all naturally “stand on the shoulders of giants,” the full range of our perspectives and direction of our gaze can also be unnecessarily limited or obstructed thereby. Below, I will draw attention to several aspects of Sōseki scholarship which I believe may benefit from reconsideration and advocate for the ongoing expansion of critical thinking to incorporate largely neglected – or untried until more recent times – approaches, such as feminist criticism, queer theory, and trauma/PTSD studies.

While a number of the following orientations are traceable back to Etō’s initial interventions, and were subsequently echoed and built upon by Keene, Van Gessel, Howard Hibbett, and others, McClellan’s comments on Tōson and Sōseki can be taken as representative of the “man and times” orientation,

But for all their differences, they were both very much children of Meiji. They were uprooted people, intellectually and socially; and as novelists, their major concern was to depict the condition of those who had to pay a price for having been born in a time of great change. One important aspect of their modernity was that they were the first to write articulately about intelligent, sensitive men for whom the values of the past had been destroyed, and who could not identify themselves with the values of a success-minded society bent on material progress. Their typical heroes are isolated intellectuals who … are destroyed by loneliness.

(1968, xi–xii)

It would be hard not to recall here Sensei’s famous statement in Kokoro, “[L]oneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves” (McClellan 1957, 30).⁴ Here is another example from Hibbett that both mirrors this overarching point of view and in effect entails the conflation of Sōseki with his fictional “alter egos,”

[Light and Darkness] demonstrates the artistic powers which he developed in the course of a career of expressing his own deepest feelings and, inevitably, those of his time. If his early novels reflect more clearly the surface changes of his society, it is in the later novels, in which he probes his own darkest psychological problems, that he symbolizes the widespread anxiety beneath those exciting changes. And his efforts helped create an instrument – the modern Japanese psychological novel – of unequaled sensitivity for the recording of the forms of consciousness which emerged so dramatically in this era.

(1971, 346)

Bearing in mind Kuwabara’s warning about “binding novels and novelists too tightly together,” McClellan goes on to write that “when we read Grass on the Wayside, we see how much of himself Sōseki put into the heroes of his preceding novels” (1971, ix). Hibbett, too, notes that “critics have usually identified Sōseki with [his later novels’] unhappy protagonists,” and that “an analysis of his achievement as a writer of psychological fiction requires some confrontation of the psy...