(Act One, Scene 1 can be found here.)

Disclaimer: The following is for reference only. Its sole purpose is to give readers an overview of the history of modern Japanese literary criticism. I have avoided using all features common to the dramatic form, including plot, character development, word play, humor, Verfremdungseffekt, involution, and any explicit or implicit references to myself, Ryan Morrison, and the narrow world I inhabit.

Dramatis personæ, in order of appearance

• Akagi Kōhei 赤木桁平 (1891-1949)
• Ikuta Chōkō 生田長江 (1882-1936)
• Orikuchi Shinobu 折口信夫 (1887-1953)
• Satō Haruo 佐藤春夫 (1892-1964)
• Nagai Kafū 永井荷風 (1879-1959)
• Nakano Hideto 中野豪人 (1898-1966)
• Arishima Takeo 有島武郎 (1878-1923)
• Hirotsu Kazuo 広津和郎 (1891-1968)
• Kikuchi Kan 菊池寛 (1888-1948)
• Satomi Ton 里見弴 (1888-1983)
• Chiba Kameo 千葉亀雄 (1878-1935)
• Kume Masao 久米正雄 (1891-1952)
• Edogawa Rampo 江戸川乱歩 (1894-1965)
• Aono Suekichi 青野季吉 (1890-1961)

Act 1: The Meiji and Taishō Periods (Continued)

  Act 1, Scene 2

It is now 1916, and despite the portentous chill felt by Ōsugi Sakae and others, Taishō (1912-1926) is turning out to be a rather pleasant and prosperous era. The early-Meiji spirit of liberalism has been revived, and the Blue Stockings (Seitō, 1911-1916), Japan’s first feminist group founded by Yosano Akiko and Hiratsuka Raichō at the behest of Ikuta Chōkō, wages war against the patriarchy and its essentialist myths. Such progressivism, however, has produced a wave of conservative detractors, including the reactionary disciple of Sōseki, Akaki Kōhei.

Akaki Kōhei: The moral fabric of our society is unraveling! Everywhere is depravity and corruption! I hereby call for the extirpation of all profligate literature (yūtō bungaku no bokumetsu), including that of the whore-mongering, self-obsessed Naturalists! Those in the Aestheticist (tanbishugi) camp shouldn’t sit too comfortably, either. They too shall be eradicated!

Ikuta Chōkō: Now, now, don’t be so hard on the Naturalists. They’ll dig their own graves just fine without us. To me, the worst are the “ludicrously idealistic” (medetai risōshugi) Shirakaba writers, who write in a bloated, lofty style as if Naturalism had never happened. Even as we speak, they’re building some absurd utopian village (Atarashiki mura, 1918-present) in the hills of Kyūshū, led by their Tolstoy-inspired guru Mushanokōji Saneatsu. What would Nietzsche — whom I was the first to translate, mind you! — have to say about such puerility (osanago-shugi)?

Orikuchi Shinobu: Yeah, the Shirakaba group is pretty lame. But who fares better? The Aestheticists? They’re just as out of touch with reality — look how they gush like schoolboys over every new exotic fad, whether it’s from Edo, China, the West, or the Southern Barbaries.

It is now 1919, and Satō Haruo, Nagai Kafū, and Nakano Hideto are discussing the various modes of criticism.

Satō Haruo: All criticism is ultimately impressionistic, despite Kikuchi Kan’s claim that subjective criticism is the preferred method of charlatans. Criticism — regardless of what it’s “about” — is ultimately a discourse of the self. [Kobayashi Hideo, as we'll see in the next act, would later build on this.]

Nagai Kafū: I’d much rather wander the shitamachi streets half-drunk than get lost in the labyrinth of the self. Yet I can understand your reluctance to confront the world directly. As I explain in my recent essay “Hanabi” (“Fireworks”), I was enraged by the High Treason Incident of 1910, which the authorities used as an excuse to establish a surveillance state. Yet I did nothing. A coward, I am capable only of retreating into the long-vanished world of Edo. If anyone needs me, you can find me in one of its brothels, courtesan breast in mouth.

Nakano Hideto: Solipsistic impressionism, anti-modern escapism . . . when are we going to get serious about confronting reality? Let this moment mark the beginning of Japan’s proletarian movement — a “people’s arts” (minshū geijutsu) for and by “the fourth class” (daiyon kaikyū)!

It is now 1922, and Arishima Takeo and Hirotsu Kazuo are discussing their role in the class struggle, while Kikuchi Kan and Satomi Ton are engaged in their “Content Value Controversy” (Naiyōteki kachi ronsō), which, like most literary debates, will end without conclusion.

Arishima Takeo: As much as I’d love to keep fighting for the workers, Mr. Nakano, I’m afraid the movement has no place for educated aristocrats like myself. [Arishima, sadly, would die in a love-suicide (shinjū) the following year.]

Hirotsu Kazuo: Come on, people! What’s all this talk about class? Art transcends class! The tent of literature is big enough for us all… so long, of course, as you find your proper, class-determined role within it.

Kikuchi Kan: You know, I’ve recently stopped giving a shit about “formal or aesthetic beauty” (biteki kachi). For me, “content value” (naiyōteki kachi) is the only thing that matters. Even the most poorly constructed story can move me to tears if its subject is powerful enough.

Satomi Ton: Horseshit, Kikuchi. Subject alone is worthless. Value is to be found only in form.

Two years have passed, and the discussion has moved to the merits of prose versus that of poetry.

Hirotsu Kazuo: Forget about the form-content problem for now. I want to talk about prose versus poetry. Prose, I claim, is superior to poetry, as it is that which mediates between poetry and life. Of all the arts, prose is closest to life and cannot be disentangled from it. Hence, it is meaningless to speak of “pure form” in works of prose. Wouldn’t you all agree?

Satō Haruo, Arishima Takeo, and Kikuchi Kan (in unison): We agree.

Ikuta Chōkō: Ignorant clods! I’m entirely unconvinced. Life is contingent, subordinate — even irrelevant — to art! Art exists for its own sake, and should be assessed by standards that are independent of life. [With this begins the famed "Debate on the Art of Prose" (Sanbun geijutsu ronsō), which would run out of steam before the year's end.]

Chiba Kameo: I’m starting to notice some trends in your bickering. Since the Great Kantō Earthquake last year, writers have split into two camps: the Proletarian camp, rallied around the magazine Bungei Senzen, and the New Sensation School — Shinkankaku-ha, a word I coined, mind you! — centered around the magazine Bungei Jidai. My allegiance is with the latter, which boasts two of our greatest writers, Kawabata Yasunari and Yokomitsu Riichi.

It is now 1925, the last year of Taishō, and writers are largely unprepared for the turbulence that would come in the first two decades of the Shōwa period (1926-1989).

Kume Masao: Nakamura Murao and Ikuta Chōkō insist that the “authentic novel” (honkaku shōsetsu) is superior to the “I-novel” (shishōsetsu), but they are wrong. The “I-novel” — or, as I call it, the “state-of-mind novel” (shinkyō shōsetsu) — is Japan’s only true novel. All else is vulgar, artificial and commercial and should be renamed “light fiction” (tsūzoku shōsetsu). [Ikuta and Nakumura counter, and the famous "I-Novel Debate" (Watakushi shōsetsu ronsō) continues for several more months.]

Edogawa Rampo: Kindly add to your list, Mr. Kume, the “detective novel” (tantei shōsetsu), of which I am Japan’s foremost practitioner. Yet recently I’ve come under attack from leftists like Maedakō Hiroichirō, who dismiss the genre as “bourgeois” frivolity. What they fail to understand, however, is that the “detective novel” is more than a game of cat and mouse: it is the purest representation of the enquiry into the human psyche. It is akin to — no, it is symbolist poetry. For the pursuit of the fantastic (gensō) is the pursuit of human knowledge itself!

Aono Suekichi: Right, right, whatever. Now help me hand out these pamphlets, which include excerpts from my recent translation of Lenin’s What Is To be Done? Now the revolution can begin in earnest!

(To be continued…)

On February 20, 1909, French newspaper Le Figaro printed a piece called “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” on its front page — written by a relatively-unknown 32 year-old Italian poet named F.T. Marinetti. (I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the full text.) The bombastic and incendiary tract sent shock waves through the European artistic community in its call for a total upheaval of preexisting artistic convention. The poet advocated the demolition of museums, libraries, and traditional morality. And in the ruins, Marinetti wanted to foster a new aesthetic called Futurism that would embrace technology and the modern psychology of the machine age, echoed in the famous line that “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Although Picasso’s cubist paintings had ushered in the age of modern art years before Marinetti’s writing, the Manifesto articulated the Modernist ethos as a philosophy for all artistic pursuit, and in the process, provided a high-energy clarion call for the subsequent century’s avant-garde artists, social visionaries, trouble-makers, and all-around punks.

One hundred years later, Marinetti’s Manifesto no longer succeeds in épater les bourgeois, and many of its core ideas — once intended to stab directly into the eye of the aging establishment — sound like romanticized justifications for powerful forces of reactionary evil. The Futurists’ push to “glorify war” sounded righteous in the nationalistic atmosphere of the early 20th century but almost instantly became abominable as millions were slaughtered in the trenches of the Great War. Marinetti’s misogyny (“contempt for women”) and racism (comparing factory sludge to the breast-milk of a Sudanese wet nurse, for example) have not accompanied the arc of progressive Western society. Even Marinetti’s cavalier espousal of “the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness” takes on a sinister ring as we seek to hose down the conflagration of the Bush presidency. Marinetti is often roundly dismissed as a proto-Fascist. True, he was an early supporter of Mussolini. And even if we counter that the poet eventually felt betrayed by his old pal when Fascist Italy took on a necrophilic infatuation with ancient Rome, you can still draw a straight line between the idea of Futurist “cleansing violence” to Nazi and Fascist Europe. And in our new battle against environmental depletion, Marinetti is again on the wrong side of history. He loves industrial waste and factory exhaust — his verse potential PR copy for the defenders of polluters on K Street.

The Manifesto does, however, contain sympathetic and benevolent ideas, but these have lost their impact for a totally opposite reason. Futurism now suffers from its success: the last century has been Marinetti’s. The Italian poet’s revolutionary embrace of automotive beauty is no longer novel in the shadow of dime-store hot-rod culture and widespread SUV mania. Marinetti’s preference for youth and novelty has morphed into the central philosophical engine to consumerist culture. Creative destruction is not just for poetry, but guided American capitalism to international dominance. Technology has permanently nestled into creative culture and can no longer be cleanly removed. The power-drill pulse of gabba music, for example, would surely overshadow the wildest ambitions of Russolo’s intonarumori. Like all great cultural innovators, Marinetti has seen his legacy suffer by being successfully subsumed. His angry manifesto now graces a million creased textbook pages — the kind of yellowed volumes he would want drowned in a diverted Venetian canal.

And like all prophets, he was completely wrong about the future. The Manifesto does not make specific predictions, but Marinetti tied the particulars of the Futurist aesthetic to his own historical circumstances. The idea of cacophonous technology is pure nostalgia: ancient dynamos may have been ear-piercing, but our cornucopia of truely life-integrated personal gadgets make no external sound at all. Marinetti heard the future as a bang, but the art of product design has offered a century of softer and softer whimpers. Our latest and greatest vision of the future wants technology to design itself out of the picture: eco-consciousness is poised to erase the modern era with the same scorn as Marinetti feels for classical times.

And yet, the Manifesto can still be a useful corrective for any contemporary artist and writer and thinker, with applicable lessons for this deeply Futurist-inspired future. Despite the familiarity of the Manifesto’s convictions, I still swoon in its romantic energy. Even in translation, Marinetti’s prose jabs against familiar rivals with the speed of a master pugilist, almost proto-gonzo. Thank god for the historical detail of good newspaper placement, or otherwise he could be easily charged with unbearable pretension and self-indulgence. But it is exactly Marinetti’s choice of romantic idealism over cynicism that allows the text to still feel alive today. His belief in belief comes in stark contrast to our sour generation, who protest equally at no one and everyone, spit at meaning, conviction, and hope. Ha, you say: these “suspect” virtues recently elected a president! That may be true, but they are still fundamentally unwelcome in the corrosive culture of cool that permeates every part of the youth culture experience. We are stuck in a strange corner: worshiping the romantic idealism of the past while immediately tearing down anyone attempting a modern analog.

The word “futurism” now regrettably refers mainly to Alvin Toffler types, sober armchair sociologists trying to predict coming waves of complex patterns for an audience of Sunday afternoon dreamers and long-term stock analysts. Marinetti had no aims on Nostradamus, but instead, aspired to be a kamikaze pilot nosediving towards stale convention, walking the walk, dreaming of poetic suicide — and yes, counting the days until “younger and stronger men” would throw him “in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!” So what would Marinetti think of our rotting shell of a pop culture, still looking to its 1960s Old Masters, judging all success against the unrepeatable case studies of Lennon/McCartney, Zimmerman/Dylan, Keroauc, slouching against the canonical ideas of 20th century art under the legitimizing banner of post-modernist sampling and pastiche. Marinetti’s call for constant artistic progress still inspires! But alas, the irony: when we waste “the best part of our strength in a useless admiration of the past,” this time Marinetti is part of the problem. To love Marinetti is to bury him. You cannot just kill your idols, but you must also burn your “Kill Your Idols” T-shirt.

Calls for Neo-Futurism will go unheeded, and I doubt I will see a day when artistic manifestos are screamed to the world from the front pages of a major daily news publication. The Futurist Manifesto, in the end, never embodied an eternal, absolute, and ahistoric philosophy, able to be adopted afresh by every waking generation, but instead is merely a single, well-executed love poem to the future of Marinetti’s present — a grip of the razor edge and sharpened point, a vivid dream of routing a long list of gray demons and sagging enemies, an artistic mission to realize the perfect human community. Marinetti seems more charming in the haze of hindsight — a contemporary version would rightly feel like an obnoxious demagogue — but admit your admiration: who does not dream of standing on the world’s summit and launching once again an insolent challenge to the stars!

“Have you ever tried to translate Mount Fuji?”
“‘Translate’…?”
“You translate nature and it all turns human. It’s noble, or great, or heroic…”
         —Natsume Sōseki, Sanshirō

For most of Japan’s literary history, Fuji was a distant, rather mystical presence, only seen by adventurous souls far from the western capital. Take Manyōshū poem #317, by Yamabe no Akahito:

Heaven and earth:
Since the time they parted,
Of manifest divinity,
Reaching the heights of awe,
In Suruga stands
The high peak of Fuji…

…And so on. By the time Japan’s center of cultural mass shifted east to Edo a thousand or so years later, though, Fuji had become a much more everyday presence. Some people reacted to this by taking it more seriously than ever and building religious sects around it. Others preferred to make light of it, like Bashō with his famous bit about it being nice to not see Mount Fuji for once.

It wasn’t until the Meiji restoration, however, that Mount Fuji really attained its current status as national symbol. It was perfect for the job: awe-inspiring yet simple, unique to Japan yet easily-grasped as a concept by outsiders, and convenient to access through public transport. Once the existing body of work in praise of the mountain was retconned into proto-nationalism, Mt. Fuji became the perfect white screen on which everybody could project their agenda.

Yosano Akiko’s short poem “Mount Fuji at the Dawn of the Year” (「元朝の富士」) is a product of this trend. Written while the Japanese body politic was high as a kite on the economic and diplomatic successes of World War I, the poem is as subtle as a brick to the head. It begins with the portentous line “Now, the first sun of 1919 shall rise” and wastes no time in describing Mount Fuji as the “eruption of a new world” at the “edge of the eastern sky.” Then it gets better:

Behold! There stands
The silhouette of some giant Dante,
Colossal in the center of the Heavens.

It is that young poet’s form
As painted on a Bargello wall:
Blue hat, red robes,
Narrow face,
Handsome gaze turned to the skies,
There, there, the Dante of La Vita Nuova. [...]

O people, in this first year after war,
If you would you see the mysteries I do,
Lo! Gaze heavenwards with me,
At Fuji in this vermillion dawn.

Yosano’s vision has a striking universalism to it. In one line, Mount Fuji is described as an amalgam of exotic and primitive materials (coral, lava); in another, it is an echo of High Art or an avatar of one of European civilization’s greatest poets. Parallels to Japan’s post-Meiji drive to preserve an unsullied core of “Japaneseness” in the belly of a national machine built on the best ideas of the West could not be accidental.

In retrospect, of course, Japan at the time looks more like the Dante of the Inferno (mi ritrovai per un selva oscura/ ché la diritta via era smarrita) — and once everything went to hell, being hitched to the nation’s bandwagon became a liability for the mountain.

Hence, the backlash: epitomized by Fukao Sumako‘s How Lovely For Mount Fuji That She Is Beautiful (「ひとりお美しい富士山」, excerpt here), published in 1949:

Hmph — so you’re Miss Fuji?
How tiresome!
That classic white New Look reflected
In the clear and unkind mirror of mirror
Honestly/ Who are you supposed to be?
From Tokyo with its barrack roofs
You’re a regular “crane on a pile of trash“.

Continued »

“Vision” (【洞察】) is a poem by Hirato Renkichi (平戸廉吉) — the author of the 1921 Japanese Futurist Manifesto 「日本未来派宣言運動 東京＝平戸廉吉 MOUVEMENT FUTURISTE JAPONAIS Par R-HYRATO」.

English / 日本語

“Fish” (【魚】) is a poem by Hirato Renkichi (平戸廉吉) — the author of the 1921 Japanese Futurist Manifesto 「日本未来派宣言運動 東京＝平戸廉吉 MOUVEMENT FUTURISTE JAPONAIS Par R-HYRATO」.

English / 日本語