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Japan Literature
Japanese literature dates from about the fifth century
A.D.,
when the Chinese writing system began to be used by
scribes at the
Yamato court. As soon as the Japanese courtiers learned to
read,
they began to write, compiling between the sixth century
and the
eighth century both a state history of epic proportions,
the
Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and one of the
world's
oldest poetry anthologies, the Man'yoshu
(Collection of Ten
Thousand Leaves), both of which contain many older works.
They also
composed Chinese-style poetry, which they found suitable
for more
difficult, lengthy, and profound thoughts. By the eighth
century,
the elite had already come to grips with the problem of
assimilating difficult foreign ideas in a complex new
language. The
dichotomy between native expression and the use of
prestigious
imported forms became a pattern of Japanese artistic life.
Buddhist
commentary appeared after several centuries of copying,
translation, and study. In the ninth century it found a
strong
voice and skilled brush in the monk Kukai, through whose
inspiration religious themes became a part of the literary
fabric.
Prose works had reached a high level by the tenth
century, when
the literary diary made its appearance. In the eleventh
century the
world's first novel, Genji monogatari (Tale of
Genji), was
composed by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu. Her acute
psychological
observations molded by a subtle feminine sensibility wove
a deft
picture of the hothouse Heian court society. It remains a
matchless
source for all subsequent writers and an important part of
the
classical education of every Japanese. In the medieval
period,
women's vernacular writing dominated prose in the form of
diaries
of court ladies, supplemented by recollections of
courtiers, the
wry comments and musings of monks, and a wide variety of
tales and
legends, both secular and profane. Heike monogatari
(Tale of
the Heike) captured the samurai spirit of the Kamakura
warriors'
age, while the melancholy thirty-one syllable waka
poems (in
a five-seven-five-seven-seven syllables-per-line
arrangement) of
the twelfth-century monk Saigyo reflected the mood of a
militant
era. Writing of the Muromachi period was
characteristically the
work of exiles from the capital and monastic authors who
contemplated the fleeting vanities of this world, and the
theme of
death and the spirit world, setting the tone for the No
plays of
Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443). Comic relief was provided by
kyogen, using the vernacular to reveal something of
the life
of the commoner.
The peace and prosperity of the Tokugawa age produced a
new
mercantile class--the chonin--whose antics were
humorously
described in the vigorous seventeenth-century novels of
Ihara
Saikaku, dispelling the lingering melancholy of the late
feudal
period. A major poet of this age, Matsuo Basho, lifted his
voice to
extol the qualities of loneliness, of getting away from
the new
crowded towns by taking the "narrow road to the deep
north," a
celebrated journey whose three-hundredth anniversary was
widely
commemorated in the late 1980s. Basho's matchless
renku
(linked poems) of thirty-six verses and his lighthearted
seventeen-
syllable haiku (five-seven-five) set a norm for modern
emulators.
A
third literary genius of this period was the great
dramatist
Chikamatsu Monzaemon, whose historical and domestic plays
formed
the soul of the Kabuki theater. In the eighteenth century,
Chinese
novels were translated into Japanese, the poet Yosa Buson
infused
a new romantic spirit into haiku poems, and Kobayashi Issa
made
interesting subjects out of the "ordinariness" of the
common folk
and the ugly, starveling sparrow.
Japanese literature clearly draws on a tradition rich
in poetic
and prose forms. The writing of poetry in both the classic
thirty-one syllable waka and the seventeen-syllable
haiku
remained a national pastime and a skill expected of the
educated,
among whom competitions were frequently held. Japanese
renga
parties, at which poets and the intelligentsia composed
poetry in
groups, continued as a major literary pursuit. Haiku poets
were
among the most honored of all creative artists, and a
haiku museum
was established in 1976 as a public center for the study
of
poetry. The ancient waka in modern usage is called
a
tanka, or short song (also with a
five-seven-five-seven-seven syllabic formula). Many
writers
continued to use this form for less profound thoughts.
Even more
striking were the modern permutations of older literary
forms: such
experiments as two syllable haiku, tanka in
romaji
(romanized form of kana), and Zen ideas expressed
in
Western-style free verse, or iambic pentameter.
The introduction of European literature in the late
nineteenth
century brought free verse into the poetic repertoire; it
became
widely used for longer works embodying new intellectual
themes.
Young Japanese prose writers and dramatists have struggled
with a
whole galaxy of new ideas and artistic schools, but
novelists were
the first to successfully assimilate some of these
concepts. A new
colloquial literature developed centering on the "I
novel," with
some unusual protagonists as in Natsume Soseki's
Wagahai wa neko
de aru (I Am a Cat). Two modern literary giants whose
works
were deeply rooted in Japanese sensibilities were Tanizaki
Jun'ichiro, who captured the East-West value struggle in
Japanese
life prior to World War II and Kawabata Yasunari, a master
of
psychological fiction during the mid-twentieth century and
a Nobel
Prize winner. Capturing the immediate postwar atmosphere
were Dazai
Osamu and Mishima Yukio, both of whom committed suicide.
Dazai's
writing reflected the quiet desperation of living with
personal
defeat, while Mishima provided a glowing vision of
traditional
morality, gradually overcome by new Western values.
Prominent writers of the 1970s and 1980s, such as e
Kensabuo,
were identified with intellectual and moral issues in
their
attempts to raise social and political consciousness.
Inoue
Mitsuaki had long been concerned with the atomic bomb and
continued
in the 1980s to write on problems of the nuclear age,
while Endo
Shusaku depicted the religious dilemma of Roman Catholics
in feudal
Japan, as a springboard to address spiritual problems.
Inoue
Yasushi also turned to the past in masterful historical
novels of
Inner Asia and ancient Japan, in order to portray present
human
fate.
Avant-garde writers, such as Abe Kobo, who wanted to
express
the Japanese experience in modern terms without using
either
international styles or traditional conventions, developed
new
inner visions. Furui Yoshikichi tellingly related the
lives of
alienated urban dwellers coping with the minutiae of daily
life,
while the psychodramas within such daily life crises have
been
explored by a rising number of important women novelists.
The 1988
Naoki Prize went to Todo Shizuko for Ripening
Summer, a
story capturing the complex psychology of modern women.
Other
award-winning stories at the end of the decade dealt with
current
issues of the elderly in hospitals, the recent past
(Pure-
Hearted Shopping District in Koenji, Tokyo), and the
life of a
Meiji ukiyo-e artist. In international literature,
Ishiguro
Kazuo, a native of Japan, had taken up residence in
Britain and won
Britain's prestigious Booker Prize.
Although modern Japanese writers covered a wide variety
of
subjects, one particularly Japanese approach stressed
their
subjects' inner lives, widening the earlier novel's
preoccupation
with the narrator's consciousness. In Japanese fiction,
plot
development and action have often been of secondary
interest to
emotional issues. In keeping with the general trend toward
reaffirming national characteristics, many old themes
reemerged,
and some authors turned consciously to the past.
Strikingly,
Buddhist attitudes about the importance of knowing oneself
and the
poignant impermanence of things formed an undercurrent to
sharp
social criticism of this material age. There was a growing
emphasis
on women's roles, the Japanese persona in the modern
world, and the
malaise of common people lost in the complexities of urban
culture.
Popular fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature
all
flourished in urban Japan in the 1980s. Many popular works
fell
between "pure literature" and pulp novels, including all
sorts of
historical serials, information-packed docudramas, science
fiction,
mysteries, business stories, war journals, and animal
stories. Best-sellers in the late 1980s were several books
by a
young woman, "Banana" Yoshimoto, and Murakami Haruki's
spectacularly successful Norwegian Wood and A
Wild Sheep
Chase. Nonfiction covered everything from crime to
politics.
Although factual journalism predominated, many of these
works were
interpretive, reflecting a high degree of individualism.
Children's works reemerged in the 1950s, and the newer
entrants
into this field, many of them younger women, brought new
vitality
to it in the 1980s.
Manga (comic books) have penetrated almost every
sector
of the popular market. Widely used for soft pornography,
they also
have included a multivolume high-school history of Japan
and, for
the adult market, a manga introduction to
economics, which
was also available in English. Manga represented
between 20
and 30 percent of annual publications at the end of the
1980s, in
sales of some ¥400 billion per year.
Data as of January 1994
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