And if you ever see anything about Ishikawa Jun, too, let me know– there’s not a whole lot out there in English.

Relevant excerpts:

‘Soseki’s approach to the modern novel as art was substantially different from the dominant trends among young Japanese writers of the time. Soseki resisted naturalism, for example, a style popular among Western writers [...] and which was especially attractive to most aspiring Japanese writers during Meiji. Some scholars consider this naturalist approach to be the real origin of modern Japanese literature (Benl 1953, 33). [!!!] Soseki, however, was more attracted to the Chinese and Japanese classics.’

‘Karatani Kojin has suggested that Soseki was greatly influenced in his style of writing by an approach called shaseibun (“sketching”). During his student days in Tokyo, Soseki was good friends with Masaoka Shiki. Shiki had developed this new approach to writing and he and Soseki practiced it together in the composition of haiku poetry. Soseki apparently intended his first novel, Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat), as an experiment in “sketching.” This approach to writing was “an attempt to revitalize language in all its diversity.” [...] Also, Soseki relied heavily on a narrator in his works. [...] Soseki compared this approach “in every way” to that of haiku poetry.’

(Obviously he would be talking here about post-Shiki haiku rather than pre-Shiki haikai/renku/senryu…)

About Shiki, I think Ishikawa blames him in one of his essays for reducing linked-verse haikai to single-verse haiku, and for giving rise to the “cult of haiku.” I’ll have to go back and dig up that quote.

But I confess I know very little about Shiki, so I’ll have to get back to you on your question about his relation to the Edo poets, and his particular modernist project.

Yuki: コメントありがとう。是非、現代や未来の日本人のために、その昔ながらの「日本らしさや良さ」を再発見するよう頑張ってください。見つけたら教えてちょうだい。

「江戸の人々を思う方法」についての感想
開国してから日本は外国に追いつけ追いこせで、背伸びして西洋の真似ばかりしていました。サムライから刀を取り上げ、マゲをざんばらがみにして、和服を洋服へ･･･それまで築いてきた自分たちの文化はどこへやら。
そうなってくると、どうしても「江戸文化」というものは、古くて下品で恥ずかしいと思ってしまう。
それを石川淳は戦時中に江戸の平民文化を再発見して発表した。それは当時としてはすごい事だと同じ日本人として感じます。
まだ開国から155年しかたってないんですよね。
なのに日本らしさや良さはどんどん日常から消えている気がします。
こういう現代だからこそ、過去から学ぶ事も大切なのかもしれないと、記事を読んで感じました。

こういう私も「今」に流されやすい人間なんですけどね。
ライアンは、私よりも日本文学をいろいろ読んでいる気がします。
私は石川淳の作品を読んだことないんです。
これを機会に読んでみようかと思います。せっかくの夏休みですしね。
オススメの本や、面白いエピソードがあったら、ぜひそのトピックに書き込んで下さい。

He does come off as stern and grandfatherly nowadays, but he wrote an awful lot of comedy on the theme of “rowdy/unruly plebes vs pompous, arrogant blowhards”. (That’s basically the entire plot of Botchan, for example.) This bears some similarity to the common Edo theme of witty and unruly city types messing with, and besting, out-of-their-depth bumpkins and blowhards.

The lack of sexiness I will not argue with…

Re haikai poets, this doesn’t really address the point, but Soseki once said that although there’s nothing like haikai in European poetry, there’s plenty that resembles senryu (俳諧の趣味ですか、西洋には有りませんな。川柳といふやうなものは西洋の詩の中にもありますが、俳句趣味のものは詩の中にもないし、又それが詩の本質を形作つても居ない). This is potentially interesting because it seems to me, judging from the books that they left behind, the true plebes of Edo were much fonder of senryu than haikai. (Making fun of haikai poets for being pompous but cheap in the pleasure quarters was pretty common IIRC.)

Different topic: Did Ishikawa have anything to say about Shiki in re this topic? My understanding is that Shiki loved and drew on pre-Meiji traditions to propose by example his own idea of “modernity” in literature: fewer in-jokes (e.g. renku), less wordplay, more impartial observation, etc. I guess these ideas bear some similarity to the “Fukuzawan” literary project, but I feel like there’s a difference in that Shiki did not reject the entire Japanese literary canon — aside from the obvious haikai poets, he was also a big fan of the man’yoshu as opposed to the kokinshu, etc.

Also (again IIRC, sorry) didn’t Shiki’s criticism help shape the understanding of what had, in retrospect, been the “high art” of the Edo period?

My general impression is that Sōseki lacked the kind of nostalgia for Edo that we see in later writers like Ishikawa Jun and Nagai Kafū. Perhaps he was still too close to the period to feel any nostalgia for it, or perhaps things had gotten that bad yet.

Sōseki did, however, appear to relish his role as critic of modernity (particularly of the Fukuzawan sort), but he seemed to come at it from a different angle. I think he was altogether too stern, ethical, and grandfatherly (even though he died before reaching a grandfatherly age) to enjoy the relatively rowdy and sexualized culture of the Edo plebes. Then again, I could be totally off here.

One example: Sōseki constructs a sort of alternative to the Fukuzawan modern in his novel Kusamakura, in which a first-person narrator leaves the modern city to pursue his solitary, utopian vision of art. But the sources of this vision seem to be Rousseau and the solipsistic Romantics, and the wenren literati of China and Japan, rather than the Edo poets.

But if anyone knows of any instances of him drawing from Edo culture (particularly from the haikai poets), do let me know.

Final note: My apologies for the excessive 渋み of this article! I’ll try to add a little 軽み to the next one!