Translating Mount Fuji
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Translating Mount Fuji

Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity

Dennis Washburn

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eBook - ePub

Translating Mount Fuji

Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity

Dennis Washburn

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About This Book

Dennis Washburn traces the changing character of Japanese national identity in the works of six major authors: Ueda Akinari, Natsume S?seki, Mori?gai, Yokomitsu Riichi,?oka Shohei, and Mishima Yukio. By focusing on certain interconnected themes, Washburn illuminates the contradictory desires of a nation trapped between emulating the West and preserving the traditions of Asia.

Washburn begins with Ueda's Ugetsu monogatari ( Tales of Moonlight and Rain ) and its preoccupation with the distant past, a sense of loss, and the connection between values and identity. He then considers the use of narrative realism and the metaphor of translation in Soseki's Sanshiro; the relationship between ideology and selfhood in Ogai's Seinen; Yokomitsu Riichi's attempt to synthesize the national and the cosmopolitan; Ooka Shohei's post-World War II representations of the ethical and spiritual crises confronting his age; and Mishima's innovative play with the aesthetics of the inauthentic and the artistry of kitsch.

Washburn's brilliant analysis teases out common themes concerning the illustration of moral and aesthetic values, the crucial role of autonomy and authenticity in defining notions of culture, the impact of cultural translation on ideas of nation and subjectivity, the ethics of identity, and the hybrid quality of modern Japanese society. He pinpoints the persistent anxiety that influenced these authors' writings, a struggle to translate rhetorical forms of Western literature while preserving elements of the pre-Meiji tradition.

A unique combination of intellectual history and critical literary analysis, Translating Mount Fuji recounts the evolution of a conflict that inspired remarkable literary experimentation and achievement.

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Year
2006
ISBN
9780231511155
1
Ghostwriters and Literary Haunts
THE SOURCES OF THE language of values and the rhetoric of authenticity in Japan from the Meiji Restoration to the present may be traced back to developments dating from the eighteenth century. During the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), the project of uncovering the origins of the Japanese language became a near-obsessive concern for a number of key intellectual movements, most notably National Learning (kokugaku). Although scholars of this movement did not imagine “nation” (koku) either in the spatial sense of the political and class boundaries that took shape in Meiji Japan or in the social sense of a unified ethnic or racial category, their search for a pure language and culture, which they believed existed in the distant past, had a decisive effect on modern representations of nation and identity.
The Tokugawa conception of Japanese as a culturally unifying language made it possible to imagine the existence of a common identity as well. However, as Naoki Sakai has observed, the unity implied by a shared ethnic identity was divorced from the social order that existed at the time because a pure Japanese language, the source of Japan’s ethnic communality, existed only in antiquity. As Sakai puts it:
Ethnic unity was always projected into the past, into antiquity. In this sense, a certain reification of an anonymous collectivity, which social action establishes, had already taken place, but it was not directly equated to the existing order. This ethnic identity came into being primarily as a loss, as that which had existed a long time ago but was no longer available. Thus, Japanese was born into eighteenth-century discourse long dead; Japanese was stillborn.1
Since a pure language (and culture) could be inferred from research but never actually recovered, the discovery of nation and folk in an imaginary original language was also a discovery of loss. And the sentiment of loss, as Maruyama Masao has argued, was responsible for the consciousness of crisis that emerged in the nineteenth century.2 The effect of a sentiment of loss is seen most immediately in the idea of authenticity, which not only arose as a means to compensate for the threat of cultural relativism, but also served as a palliative for the anxiety of loss, drawing affective power from the implied, nostalgic hope of a return to a lost unity of language and identity.
The sense of loss of a shared past was radically transformed during the nineteenth century by the obsession with discovering an authentic identity for the present. Increased emphasis on the autonomy of the subject, a heightened historical awareness, and an interiorization of the sources of belief made it seem possible for the past to be projected onto the present, for original identity and language to be recovered. At the same time, anxieties over external threats made efforts to enunciate a national identity seem a necessity. The eighteenth century’s sense of loss became less a phantasm of linguistic research and more an immediate problem with real-world consequences that gave the discourse on identity a more virulent nationalist quality.3 Pre-Meiji conceptions of cultural and ethnic identity thus provide a point of reference from which to gain a better sense of the evolution of the concepts of autonomy and authenticity as they relate to the modern ethics of identity.
Few works of the eighteenth century are as preoccupied with the distant past, exhibit such a profound sense of loss, and assume such a close connection between values and identity as Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Rain and the Moon). Published in 1776,4 this collection of nine ghost stories was composed by Ueda Akinari (1734–1809) at a time when he was involved in a number of literary and intellectual pursuits as a doctor, a scholar of National Learning, and a haikai poet. These pursuits placed Akinari at the center of some of the most important intellectual and literary movements of his day, and their presence is apparent in the language and structure of Ugetsu, a work written with the aim of recovering, if only fleetingly in the realm of fiction, the undivided ethical consciousness that characterized the authentic culture of the past.
Given his interest in the ethical consciousness of ancient Japan, why did Akinari choose to write fantastic tales about the supernatural—a choice that on its face suggests that he believed in the primacy of the value of literature for its own sake? Why did he compose his stories in the manner of adapted fiction, hon’an shōsetsu? Why did he develop a style that combined elements of both elegant and vulgar idioms and paid particular attention to historically accurate detail? These questions point to the most salient feature of Ugetsu, its hybrid form, language, and aims. Akinari’s fiction was the product of a complex set of interests, and it is important to note that during his lifetime he never publicly acknowledged his authorship of Ugetsu.5 This decision, though not at all an unusual practice at the time, indicates a deeply ambivalent attitude about the value of fiction. He was willing to use ghost stories as a means to explore questions of values and identity, yet the view held by the preeminent scholar of kokugaku, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), that the practice of fiction was autonomous and not bound by moral considerations, was never seriously challenged by Akinari. The method of composition of his masterwork is evidence that his primary concern was working toward a synthesis of art and morals.
Kokugaku and the Subordination of Morals to Art
Kokugaku arose in avowed opposition to Neo-Confucianism and to all other foreign systems of thought. Its methodologies and the structure of its ideology, however, were indebted to an earlier Neo-Confucian scholarly movement, kogaku (ancient learning).6 Kogaku scholars, who established a systematic approach to the study of ancient Chinese texts, brought together the rationalism implicit in their empirical linguistic research with an antirational, fundamentalist tendency to accept the authority of the ancient past in all areas of intellectual inquiry, especially the ethical authority of the ancient sage-kings of China.7 By stressing research into the past, they encouraged the growth of nativist movements that adapted kogaku to an examination of Japan’s ancient history and literature.
The primary aim of kokugaku research was to recover the linguistic origins of Japanese. This research was empirical insofar as it was based on the observation of linguistic changes over time. Yet underlying the kokugaku project was an acceptance of the belief that ancient society was characterized by an absolute correspondence between words and the objects, thoughts, and actions they signified. Only with the passage of time, as the original meanings of words were forgotten or as new systems of thought were introduced, did the original unity of word and world begin to break apart. Kokugaku research sought to move between and reconcile the intellectual poles created by what was perceived to be the corruption of the language, and thereby recover authentic culture and with it the ethical consciousness of the Japanese people.
Kokugaku scholars viewed the importation of foreign doctrines, Confucianism in particular, as one of the major causes of this linguistic rupture. That assumption, however, did not result in an outright rejection of Neo-Confucianism, which remained deeply embedded in kokugaku beliefs and practices. This apparent contradiction may be attributable in part to the pressure exerted by official Tokugawa support of Neo-Confucian doctrine, which few individuals were willing or able to challenge. Another explanation is that kokugaku scholars did not sense that contradiction, since they were engaged in an ideological adaptation of kogaku practices to a Japanese context. Consequently, kokugaku scholars carried forward a number of Neo-Confucian assumptions: belief that improving the present depends upon an understanding of the past; belief in the limits of human knowledge; acceptance of the past as the source of ethical authority, with the major difference being that scholars like Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) and Norinaga naturalized that authority by turning to texts like the Manyōshū (compiled between 752 and 772) and Kojiki (712) instead of the Confucian classics; and an acceptance of a historical approach to the study of ancient texts.
These assumptions had important ramifications for Akinari in that they came to serve as the basis for justifying the study of literature. Maruyama notes:
The natural human sentiments that Sorai released from the fetters of moral rigorism moved, as one might expect, in the direction of “refined tastes and literary talents.” The Ken’en’s reputation for putting literature above everything else was not completely unmerited. Just as Sorai rejected moralistic restrictions in politics and history, he insisted that literature should be independent of ethics.8
Sorai’s work led to a reevaluation of critical standards that decoupled literature from the normative values of Confucian or Buddhist doctrines and liberated the study of literature in general from the narrow interpretive frameworks that had previously held sway. This idea later found its most famous critical formulation in the concept of mono no aware, which Norinaga identified as the underlying aesthetic principle of Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji). Norinaga argued in his study Genji monogatari tama no ogushi (The Tale of Genji: A Small Jeweled Comb) that “because the novel [Genji monogatari] takes as its main purpose the understanding of what it means to be moved by things [mono no aware o shiru o], it often follows that tendency and turns its back on the teachings of Confucianism and Buddhism.”9
Akinari’s research on Japan’s early literature suggests that he concurred with this approach to literary studies. Indeed, one of the turning points in his life was his shift toward kokugaku activities around the time he began composing Ugetsu monogatari in the late 1760s. Under the influence of Katō Umaki (1721–1777), who had been a disciple of Kamo no Mabuchi, Akinari began to focus his work on the study of words and texts. His undertook investigations of poetic devices, such as the kireji (literally, “cutting words”) ya and kana and makurakotoba (pillow words), and engaged in a famous debate with Norinaga over the reliability of the text of the Kojiki and over the presence of a final nasal syllabic -n in ancient Japanese.10 Although he located his ideals in the past and saw the present as having diverged or regressed from those ideals, Akinari did not blame foreign influences, and he rejected the xenophobic leanings of Mabuchi and Norinaga.11 He did agree with them that ancient society held pure values, but he did not believe it possible to recover that purity, and his disagreement with Norinaga over the indisputable truth of Japan’s myths led him to adopt the relativist position that different ages have different characteristics.12 Still, Akinari deferred to the authority of the past, and in that respect he is very much in general agreement with both Neo-Confucians and fellow kokugaku scholars.
Akinari’s views are on full display in his short study of Genji monogatari titled Nubatama no maki (Black-Jewel Scroll), written under the pseudonym Muchō. The preface dates this work to 1779, and explains that it is a translation into modern language of a treatise written by Sōchin, who lived in the late years of the Muromachi period (1392–1573). Sōchin is devoted to the study of Genji, having copied the work in its entirety twenty-four times. One night, while working on yet another copy, he falls asleep over the manuscript and dreams that he is walking along the strand at Akashi. He meets Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, the great Man’yōshū poet, and they begin discussing Genji monogatari. Sōchin wonders if Murasaki Shikibu herself had once strolled along this same beach, given how her work so vividly describes the place. Hitomaro replies:
[Genji monogatari] has always delighted people because it recreates so completely and interestingly the world as it was then. Yet the book is mere empty words of trifling value. The officials of the capital thought of such writing as nothing more than playing with beautiful phrases. Since it was quite natural for them to set down things just as they were, it is extremely foolish now to take such idle pastimes for the wisdom of the world.13
Hitomaro notes Murasaki’s ability to capture reality in her words, but he is unwilling to praise her for something that came naturally, that was not the product of the artistic imagination.
Sōchin then questions Hitomaro about the value of fiction. Even though fiction is treated in China as “empty words” containing no truth, the ideas of an author, whether grieving over the world, lamenting the decline of the state, or criticizing high officials, may still express, even if only in a vague, roundabout way, the realities of the present.14 Such ideas contain a measure of truth, Sōchin asserts, citing as support the so-called monogatari ron (theory of the tale) that appears in the “Hotaru” (“Fireflies”) chapter of Genji. There Genji sets forth the argument that fiction performs a moral function by instructing in the manner of hōben, the expedient teachings of Buddhism, or by providing important details of the past not contained in historical chronicles.
In rebuttal, Hitomaro insists that Sōchin is in error because he holds a divided conception of fiction, considering it either a diversion that allows for...

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