The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature

Polygraphic Desire

Nina Cornyetz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135985127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

This is an innovative, scholarly and original study of the ethics of modern Japanese aesthetics from the 1930s, through the Second World War and into the post-war period. Nina Cornyetz embarks on new and unprecedented readings of some of the most significant literary and film texts of the Japanese canon, for instance works by Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kôbô and Shinoda Masahiro, all renowned for their texts' aesthetic and philosophic brilliance.

Cornyetz uniquely opens up the field in a fresh and controversial way by showing how these authors and filmmakers' concepts of beauty and relation to others were, in fact, deeply impacted by political and social factors. Probing questions are asked such as:

• How did Japanese fascism and imperialism ideologically, politically and aesthetically impact on these literary/cinematic giants?
• How did the emperor as the 'nodal point' for Japanese national identity affect their ethics?
• What were the repercussions of the virtual collapse of the Marxist movement in the 1960s?
• What are the similarities and differences between pre-war, wartime and post-war ideals of beauty and those of fascist aesthetics in general?

This ground-breaking work is truly interdisciplinary and will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature, film, gender, culture, history and even psychoanalytic theory.

Part I
Woman as second nature and other fascist proclivities in Kawabata Yasunari¹

1 Myth-making

Kawabata’s expository writings on literature and many of his narratives – both the earliest and some of his last – were decidedly modernist, influenced by Western stream-of-consciousness writers such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust.¹ It is curious, then, that he insisted that it was the Japanese classics alone that inspired him. Kawabata fiercely distinguished his ideal associative narrative from the Western avant-garde because they, Kawabata felt, reveled in psychological depravity and neglected the real, so-called natural world.² However, by “natural” Kawabata meant something quite specific: Japanese classical poetics, insisted Kawabata, were rooted in mediated impressions of the material – rather than purely psychic – world and were thus superior to Western modernism (which reveled in mental unbalance). From the 1920s forward, Kawabata sought a “new mode of Japanese literature” inspired by Japanese literary conventions. In 1934 he insisted:

I believe that the classics of the East, especially the Buddhist scriptures, are the supreme works of literature of the world. I revere the sutras not for their religious teachings but as literary visions. I have had in mind for the last fifteen years the plan for a work to be entitled “The Song of the East,” which I would like to make my own swan song. In it I will sing, in my fashion, a vision of the classics of the East. I may die before I can write it, but I should like it at least to be understood that I wanted to write it. I have received the baptism of modern literature and I have myself imitated it, but basically I am an oriental, and for fifteen years I have never lost sight of my bearings.³

Such a rejection of things Western and valorization of things Japanese in the arts and literature was by no means uncommon for Kawabata’s generation. Many of his contemporaries felt Japan had become excessively Westernized. As did others, Kawabata sought to find in Japanese tradition (before Japan had been tainted by Western materialism and rationalism) a spiritual superiority to offset perceptions of Japanese technological inferiority.⁴

For Kawabata this Japanese inspiration began with formal concerns (although it did not end there). Throughout his corpus are woven citations of, references to, and other reminders of Japanese literary and art forms from the Heian period (794 –1185) through Edo, that in the modern era have been canonized as signifiers of Japanese convention. For example, the separate poetic episodes and images that together comprise one text, most notably perhaps in Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1948, first begun in 1935, added to over the years, and then rewritten many times), are not necessarily cumulative. Each is intricately related to the words and imagery immediately surrounding it, but not bound to the overall shape of the narrative. Thus, Kawabata’s writing has been likened to renga (long sequences of multiauthored linked verse, originating around the twelfth century).⁵ Kawabata’s writing is highly referential to the classic Heian-period monogatari (tale fiction) tradition, as attention is lavished on decorative details, such as the scent of perfectly brewed tea, or the crane-pattern adorning a kimono.⁶ Causal or plotted elements are subordinated to descriptive aspects. This is the sort of “fetishization of the trivial” that also informed so much classical monogatari – such as the famous The Tale of Genji.⁷ From Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes (Senbazuru, 1949), “When a red oleander floods into bloom, the red against the thick green leaves is like the blaze of the summer sky; but when the blossoms are white, the effect is richly cool. The white clusters swayed gently, and enveloped Fumiko.”⁸ Kawabata’s episodic brevity and reliance on contrastive images are believed born of early modern Japanese poetics such as the 17-syllable haiku. Edward Seidensticker wrote,

Kawabata has been put, I think rightly, in a literary line that can be traced back to seventeenth-century haiku masters. Haiku are tiny seventeen-syllable poems that seek to convey a sudden awareness of beauty by a mating of opposite or incongruous terms. Thus the classical haiku characteristically fuses motion and stillness. Similarly Kawabata relies heavily on a mingling of the senses.⁹

An English translation of Snow Country was illustrated by the contemporary Japanese artist Kuwamoto Tadaaki with stark, bold, abstract shapes in red, white, and black.¹⁰ Kuwamoto’s visual interpretation of the text suggests that Snow Country indeed uses a prose narrative to explore the play of contrasts, colors, and shapes, and not simply to tell a story. In this sense Kawabata’s reference to a literature that was as much about extra- and nonnarrative textualities, such as visual, aural, or figural elements, is clear.¹¹ Yet I believe Kuwamoto’s rejection of illustrations representative of traditional art forms in favor of modern abstract art was brilliant. What Kuwamoto appears to have understood is that Kawabata’s references to convention are never recapitulations of the same, but thoroughly modernist in their redeployment of signifiers of tradition in innovative and non-traditional contexts.

Accordingly, characterizations of Kawabata as continuous with tradition must, I believe (as do many others who have written about Kawabata), be countered with the fact that Kawabata was also impacted by contemporary literary issues and debates. The indeterminate or overdetermined nature of Kawabata’s fragmentary mining of Japanese literary and artistic convention is, of course, clearly modern and even modernist.¹² This fact did not escape all Kawabata commentary. Kosai Shinji mused,

As I lay down my pen, now, I think, maybe, Kawabata Yasunari’s symbolist aesthetics are, however, after all, dependent upon a tradition of “Japanese verse” (Yamato uta) that permeates throughout the Kokinshū, the Shinkokinshū, Basho’s haikai [renga]. Nonetheless, the fact that I think the passage in Snow Country looks like Mallarme’s symbolism, The Lake assimilates George Bataille’s eroticism, and moreover House of the Sleeping Beauties even seems like it is a sort of Platonism [means that] this “essence” of our Heian aesthetics is imbued throughout with the essence of French symbolism.¹³

It is well known that prior to the war, Kawabata was affiliated with the Neo-Perceptionalist literary coterie (Shin kankaku ha, sometimes translated as Neo-Sensualist or New Senses School) during its formative stages in the 1920s. The coterie rejected the then-dominant naturalist literature that followed the principles of scientific observation and reportage. Kawabata’s narratives emerge as influenced by, yet distinct from the group. In his “Shinshin sakka no shinkeikō kaisetsu” (“On the new directions of up and coming writers,” 1925) Kawabata elucidated his belief that foregrounding sensory perception in the writing of literature would originate a new mode of Japanese literary expression.¹⁴ Faithful to his own literary ideals as influenced by the Neo-Perceptionalists, Kawabata’s narratives access the world through the varied perceptual senses. Accordingly, his characterizations are vibrantly tactile, auditory, and visual: a woman is described by the contrasts of black hair and white skin, the sound of her voice or the touch of her finger. Perhaps inspired by the haiku and renga, contrasts are indeed everywhere: stillness is offset by sudden movement, sadness by a moment of joy, the brightness of red against black, purity against the soiled. At the end of his life, Kawabata returned to an abbreviated form of impressionistic writing that he had experimented with toward the beginning of his writing career – short, descriptive, and often surrealist vignettes he called “palm of the hand stories” (tanagokoro no shōsetsu). Hence, one can easily characterize Kawabata’s literary project as one that moved forward while gazing backwards – or one that incorporated and combined signifiers of premodernity in a quest for innovation and originality.

This incorporation or combination of references to and/or signifiers of now-canonized conventions is perhaps most overt in his Nobel prize acceptance speech. It wound its way through references to one traditional Japanese art form after another, including poetry, landscape painting, and the tea ceremony – art forms that range over time from Heian to Edo and even into the twentieth century. On Ikenobō Sen’ō, he quotes: “‘The ancients arranged flowers and pursued enlightenment.’ Here we see an awakening to the heart of the Japanese spirit, under the influence of Zen”; two pages later, on the topic of Heian-period women-authored tale fiction (monogatari) Kawabata holds, “So was established a tradition which influenced and even controlled Japanese literature for eight hundred years.”¹⁵ In between a discussion of the Buddhists Ryōkan (1758–1831) and Ikkyū (1394–1481) he quotes the twentieth-century writer, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity” (63–2). On the tea ceremony he wrote:

The snow, the moon, the blossoms, words expressive of the seasons as they move one into another, include in the Japanese tradition the beauty of mountains and rivers and grasses and trees, of all the myriad manifestations of nature, of human feelings as well. That spirit, that feeling for one’s comrades in the snow, the moonlight, under the blossoms, is also basic to the tea ceremony.

(68)

These different arts and personages are linked as continuous in signification over history, in large part because of the dominance of the “natural” or “nature” as a conceit or inspiration. Elsewhere Kawabata put it: “To be natural, to be true to nature – this has been the basic principle pervading all the arts in Japan, both past and present.”¹⁶ Thousand Cranes laments the deteriorization of the (traditional art of the) tea ceremony in contemporary, modern, declining Japan. The mountainside to which protagonist Shimamura travels in Snow Country is facilely interpreted as symbolic of pre-industrialized Japan – a quest reiterated within the text in Shimamura’s (unfulfilled) desire to find Chijimi linen, purported to still be snow-bleached in the pre-industrial manner. Snow Country, written before and during the war, valorizes a pre-industrial, pre-mass Japan, in which nature dominates, albeit neatly transposed into the periphery of a modern bourgeois context.

Kawabata’s insistence that his literature, and that of the canon, is about nature notwithstanding, as he himself may have intuited given his description already cited, classical Japanese literature celebrated mediated impressions of the material world. In fact premodern Japanese literature was less about nature itself, and more about a cultured notion of nature.¹⁷ For example, Andrew Feenberg has noted that “Haiku . . . are often said to be concerned with the experience of nature. But in fact they articulate the natural world poetically in all its rich emotional and historical associations without distinguishing a purely material content from the contributions of culture and the subject.”¹⁸ The aesthetic rendering of the natural world in Kawabata likewise celebrates a nature anchored in a cultural specificity – and his acculturated apprehension and representation of nature has at its core a Zen Buddhist sensibility. Throughout his Nobel prize speech Kawabata quoted poems about Zen, written by Zen monks, connecting these Zen-inspired poems to a putative timeless essence of “the deep quiet of the Japanese spirit”(69), “the emotions of old Japan, and the heart of a religious faith” (65). Claiming that the premodern “Ikkyū of Zen comes home to me with great immediacy” (58), Kawabata concluded the speech with the following:

Here we have the emptiness, the nothingness, of the Orient. My own works have been described as works of emptiness, but it is not to be taken for the nihilism of the West. The spiritual foundation would seem to be quite different. Dōgen entitled his poem about the seasons “Innate Reality,” and even as he sang of the beauty of the seasons he was deeply immersed in Zen.

(41)

Kawabata’s rendering of Zen as the aesthetic sentiment of Japan throughout the ages is, however, a modern construct.

Let me digress for a moment. From Meiji onward, Western theories on aesthetics and other philosophic inquiry poured into Japan (alongside Western novels, texts on science and technology, health and hygiene, and other discursive and material imports). Aesthetics became a field within university by 1881.¹⁹ However, the high academic discourses tended toward explications of Western aesthetic theory. There were apparently only limited philosophic treatments exclusively dedicated to inquiry into so-called traditional Japanese aesthetics. Among these were several essays, and later a thick study by philosopher Onishi Yoshinori attempting to apply logical rationalism to, and integrate with, Western aesthetical discourses the three categories he identified as the core of Japanese aesthetics: yūgen (mysterious depth), aware (strong emotive sense of the sad and beautiful transience of all things) and sabi (restrained melancholy or loneliness). Ueda Makoto notes that his studies were met with hostility. There was, held one reviewer, no need to dissect these categories, and moreover, wasn’t everything that Onishi discovered in this contorted logical approach already a priori selfevident to all Japanese?²⁰ The point I want to make is not at all that Japanese aesthetics were unimportant to Japanese of the time. Rather, the objection to the separation of aesthetics out of discourses on ontology and culture pinpoints, I think, an important aspect of how aesthetics were then conceived in a rapidly modernizing Japan. That is, it evidences the prewar naturalization of an environmentally and ethnically particular “sensibility” as a constitutive component of Japanese being.

Aesthetics was of paramount importance; it was inseparable from (Japanese) being itself, in a manner not unlike that of the (in)famous national-socialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose analysis of temporality in Being and Time Peter Osborne has summarized as “an aestheticization of ontology or ontologization of transcendental aesthetics.”²¹ In the works of eminent modern Japanese philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō, Miki Kiyoshi, and Watsuji Tetsurō, Japanese being is not only aestheticized, but also conceived as intertwined with an experiential-aesthetical immediacy.²² And eventually all three of Onishi’s categories become (well after the fact) linked to a Zen aesthetic.

By 1968 when Kawabata accepted his Nobel award, as Robert Sharf has convincingly argued, Zen Buddhism in particular signified something quite different than it had prior to the twentieth century, and had in fact become the favored vessel for this aesthetical-ontic constellation. With modernity, Zen had become linked to Japanese being, in a newly individualized formulation well suited to the modern subject. The result was that, unlike premodern Zen Buddhism, the “heart” of modern Zen now lay “in a private, veridical, often momentary ‘state of consciousness.’”²³ But this private “state of consciousness” is simultaneously communal and national because it was perceived to be (potentially) shared by all Japanese. In other words, with Japan’s modernity, the meaning of Zen shifted from an institutionalized religious practice by a dominant aristocratic-military minority to a subjectively individual, yet culturally communal, ontology available to the masses and linked to nationalism. In short, Zen Buddhism had been reconceptualized as “the ground of Japanese aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. Virtually all of the major Japanese artistic traditions are reinterpreted as expressions of the Zen experience, rendering Zen the metaphysical ground of Japanese culture itself.”²⁴ Because the various arts are now all linked to Zen, and Zen to Japanese being, both Zen and being are at once aestheticized, nationalized, and bound to a type of contemplative experientialism.

Kawabata’s Nobel prize speech expressed this sentiment as follows:

Seeing the moon, he [the poet Myōe (1173–1232) ] becomes the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Woman as second nature and other fascist proclivities in Kawabata Yasunari
• Part II The politics of climate and community in Woman in the Dunes and “the idea of the desert”
• Part III Naming desire Mishima Yukio and the politics of “sexuation”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works cited