The Dilemma of Faith in Modern Japanese Literature

Metaphors of Christianity

Massimiliano Tomasi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367424169
• eBook ISBN: 9781351228046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first book-length study to explore the links between Christianity and modern Japanese literature, this book analyses the process of conversion of nine canonical authors, unveiling the influence that Christianity had on their self-construction, their oeuvre and, ultimately, the trajectory of modern Japanese literature.

Building significantly on previous research, which has treated the intersections of Christianity with the Japanese literary world in only a cursory fashion, this book emphasizes the need to make a clear distinction between the different roles played by Catholicism and Protestantism. In particular, it argues that most Meiji and Taish? intellectuals were exposed to an exclusively Protestant and mainly Calvinist derivation of Christianity and so it is against this worldview that the connections between the two ought to be assessed. Examining the work of authors such as Kitamura T?koku, Akutagawa Ry?nosuke and Nagayo Yoshir?, this book also contextualises the spread of Christianity in Japan and challenges the notion that Christian thought was in conflict with mainstream literary schools. As such, this book explains how the dualities experienced by many modern writers were in fact the manifestation of manifold developments which placed Christianity at the center, rather than at the periphery, of their process of self-construction.

The Dilemma of Faith in Modern Japanese Literature will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese modern literature, as well as those interested in Religious Studies and Japanese Studies more generally.

Part I
Introduction

1
Christianity and modern Japanese literature

The reopening to the Western world that followed the Meiji Restoration (1868) ignited a process of Westernization in all sectors of Japan’s culture, economy, and society, leading to the influx of new technology, the birth of new ideas, and the proliferation of new schools of thought. In the field of the humanities, this exposure to the West and its philosophical and intellectual legacy led to vibrant debates that fostered new notions of literature and the arts, spurring a critical discourse that sought in many instances to either disparage or recapture the essence of traditional Japanese ethics and literary heritage.

Exposure to the Western world also led to a renewal of contact with Christianity. Christianity thrived among the younger generations of intellectuals who viewed it as the true repository of the Western cultural tradition and an as effective tool for the understanding of Western thought and civilization. Its rapid spread was facilitated by a major political development: in 1873, the government began to ease its prohibitionist policies against the religion, and the missionary force more than doubled that year, leading to an exponential growth in the number of churches and believers around the country. The socio-political dynamics of the 1870s also added significantly to this development: the “new” religion – as it was perceived by many – soon became associated with social protest and political reform. Christianity, in fact, found important common ground with the Meiji Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, sharing with it the notion that all men are born free and equal. This movement, with its emphasis on people’s rights and their aspirations, and its commitment to social issues and women’s emancipation, characterized the religion as a source of moral values that superseded power, hierarchy, gender, and the State.

It was of course not the first time the Japanese had encountered the Western religious tradition. The arrival of the Jesuits and Roman Catholicism in the mid-sixteenth century had already provided such an opportunity. Their missionary work had met with considerable success during the so-called “Christian Century” (1549–1639), resulting in a significant number of converts (about 300,000, amounting to approximately 2 percent of the entire population), but at the same time, causing the bakufu or Shogunate to consider taking drastic measures against what was deemed an imminent threat. Government decrees issued in the early seventeenth century mandating the banning of Christianity, the persecution of Christians, and the expulsion of all foreign priests were the response to concerns that further evangelization might alter the social stability and the delicate balance of power in the nation.¹ These events would leave an indelible imprint not only on the cultural and political landscape of the Tokugawa years (1603–1868), but also on the literature of the modern period, inspiring, for example, the verses of such poets as Kitahara Hakushū (1885–1942) as well as the narrative, in particular, of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), whose literary accomplishments in the exploration of Christian motifs, as analyzed in this book, cannot be overstated.²

Christianity’s return to Japan in the late nineteenth century was marked by one significant difference: this time, it was not Catholicism but Protestantism that led the evangelization. Few scholars have captured the importance and implications of this distinction: the type of Christianity to which most Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–26) intellectuals were exposed was almost exclusively Protestant and mainly of Calvinist derivation, and it is against this eschatology and world-view that the intersections between Christianity and modern Japanese literature ought to be assessed. The acknowledgment of the centrality of Protestantism in the literary developments of the modern period does not imply, however, that the dialectics of its relationship with Catholicism should be ignored. On the contrary, the relationship between the two religious systems continued to inform the reception and the metaphorical appropriation of Christianity by the literary world for decades to come, defining the interactions between the realm of faith and literature in Japan across the threshold of modern times in ways that have yet to be thoroughly analyzed. Akutagawa’s kirishitan mono or Christian stories, which, as noted earlier, drew inspiration from the religious experience of the pre-modern period, sat squarely within that complex discourse, exemplifying the complexity of these negotiations in the evolving literary landscape of the modern years.

The rise of Protestantism generated excitement among intellectuals, and a considerable number of writers converted during their youth: Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864–96), Tokutomi Roka (1868–1927), Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–94), Kinoshita Naoe (1869–1937), Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908), Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), Arishima Takeo (1878–1923), Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962), Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976), Miki Rofū (1889–1964), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and Nagayo Yoshirō (1888–1961) are only some of the notable young intellectuals who were either baptized or were deeply influenced by the teachings of the faith throughout their lives. The ideas of an absolute God and an independent and free self promoted by Christianity often overlapped with these writers’ search for answers to the meaning of human existence and the purpose of life, prompting them to probe meaningfully into the possibilities of the Christian doctrine and its beliefs.

Virtually all of these writers, however, eventually relinquished their faith, thus casting doubt on the possible impact that such religious experience had on the development of their narrative. The irreconcilability of religion and literature became a truism of Meiji intellectual discourse, and critics have seen in the personal tragedies of some of these authors – who actually took their own lives after years of intense engagement with the Christian religion – the epitome of a shallow and paradoxical journey of faith that defied conventional wisdom.³

The conflict between religion and literature

The notion that there may be a real danger in overestimating Christianity’s role in the development of modern Japanese literature is a theoretically legitimate concern.⁴ That modern literature, largely identified with Naturalism and its literary tenets, aimed at portraying truth and reality, while rejecting conventional morality and the authority of any creed or religion, seemed in itself to imply its impracticable coexistence with any idealized view of art that might put the Christian faith at the center of its practice. The conflict between sexuality and Christian morality that surfaced during the naturalist years further exacerbated this tension, because while emphasizing individuality and equality, the teachings of Christianity stressed the sinful nature of sexual desire, deepening the conflict between the spirit and the flesh, and rendering many of these young authors unable to delve effectively into such themes as sexuality within the framework of Christian discourse. This inability to reconcile the dictates of Christian morality with the artist’s desire to explore all aspects of human existence – including sexuality – ultimately translated into a mutually exclusive relationship between literature and religion that became a truism of early twentieth-century literary discourse.

Many autobiographical writings attest to the reality of this conflict. In “Meiji Gakuin no gakusō” (Recalling the Years at Meiji Gakuin) of 1909, for example, Shimazaki Tōson wrote about the tension between religious rigor and free artistic thought that he experienced during his college days, and in his short piece “Ware wa ika ni shite shōsetsuka ni narishi ka” (How I Became a Writer) of 1907, Kunikida Doppo similarly described the sense of uncertainty that afflicted him in his younger years as he pondered whether to devote his life to religion or literature.⁵ Mushanokōji Saneatsu recalled the existence of similar dualities within himself, as did poet Yamamura Bochō (1884–1924), who experienced this conflict in especially ambivalent terms, “always carrying the Bible in one hand and a work of literature in the other.”⁶ The semantics of this tension between the realms of art and religion would be brilliantly exploited later by Nagayo Yoshirō in his 1923 novel Seidō no kirisuto (The Bronze Christ); set at the time of the Christian persecution, this story narrated the fate of Hagiwara Yūsa, an artist who is ironically sentenced to death not because of his faith – he is seemingly a detractor of Christianity – but because his artistic reproduction of Christ, which was supposed to expose hidden Christians through the practice of fumie (stepping on a sacred image), is so vividly beautiful and realistic that, according to prosecutors, “a non-Christian could have never achieved such perfection.” There is a logic reversal in this work that cleverly drew from the dichotomy of art and faith; at a historical juncture when faith in God and failure to apostatize signified almost certain death, it is art, and not religion, that becomes the paradoxical cause of the protagonist’s demise.

For many modern writers, the debate over the irreconcilable nature of these two apparent opposites was more than a mere sophistic exercise; it was a fundamental dilemma of their existence. Even in the case of Iwano Hōmei (1873–1920), a baptized Christian whose works are not typically associated with Christianity, this conflict was at the foundation of his self-construction. As he once wrote in a letter to critic Yoshino Gajō (1867–1926):

It was a time when I suffered from unhappy love affairs and agony of the soul; it was a time when I had freed myself of the Christian understanding of God, which I had had since childhood, but I had not yet found out what course to take on the great sea of literature.⁷

Masamune Hakuchō is another author who continued to profess the impossible coexistence of the two domains throughout his life; as the last survivor of a generation of Meiji writers who were influenced by the encounter with Christianity and as one of the few true apostates among them, Hakuchō personified his era’s inability to reconcile the practice of religion with the impulse of artistic pursuit.⁸

The opposition between literature and religion was therefore a major topic of contention in the literary debates of the time and was, of course, hardly a controversy about matters of sexuality alone. In a broader sense, it was a dispute about the autonomy of art and the place of literature in society. The heated exchange that unfolded between critic Yamaji Aizan (1865–1917) – himself a Christian Methodist – and poet and literary critic Kitamura Tōkoku in the early 1890s is but one example of the complexity of the debate. Aizan maintained that writing was a practical enterprise that ought to have at the root of its reason for being the specific goal of contributing to society. Literary embellishments were meaningless, he argued, unless they benefited humankind. Tōkoku, however, rejected this utilitarian view of literature. In his famous essay “Jinsei ni aiwataru to wa nan no ii zo” (What Does It Mean “To Benefit Mankind”?) he maintained that the poet’s mission by far surpassed the need to respond to such practical purposes. For Tōkoku, the dignity of literature was such that it could not be measured in practical terms.⁹

On the other hand, the conflict with literature was not the only challenge faced by Christianity during the mid-Meiji years. The fierce debates that took place within the intellectual and political circles of the time often pitted Christian advocates against different sets of foes, be it nationalism, rationalism, social Darwinism, or even the internal feuds that splintered the Japanese Christian Church within its own ranks. Despite the importance of those debates, it is nevertheless a fact that the controversy between art and religion remained the most relevant to the literary developments of the modern period, and that such controversy was almost exclusively perceived as a clash between the moral dictates of Christianity and the exploration, artistic or otherwise, of sexuality.

The question of sexuality

Responsibility for the exacerbation of this tension between the two domains has been attributed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General editors’ preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Narratives of conversion
• PART III Metaphors of Christianity
• Epilogue: “a poetic religion, rife with paradoxes”
• Bibliography
• Index