THE 1meme OF THE SELF m MODERN JAPANESE " _
FICTION: STUDIES ON DAZAI, MISHIMA, ABE, AND KAWABATA

Thesis for the Degree of'Ph.-D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY ‘
ALYCE H. K MORlSHIGE
1970

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THF‘E‘S

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

"The Theme of the Self in Modern Japanese Fiction:
Studies on Dazai, Mishima, Abe, and Kawabata"

presented by

Alyce H.K. iorishige

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for English

Ph. D. (Comparative Literature)
_ degree in __

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ABSTRACT
THE THEME OF THE SELF IN MODERN JAPANESE
FICTION: STUDIES ON DAzAI, MISHIMA,
ABE, AND KAWABATA
By

Alyce H.K. Morishige

A predominant concern in the modern twentieth—century
Japanese novel is the realistic psychological depiction of
the self in a social, cultural, and individualistic context.
This study examines the fictional portrayal of the self as
a definable core of the individual, a psychological being who
t moves toward some type of fulfillment, and an entity deter-

mined and influenced by the social and cultural milieu in
F which it finds itself. These general criteria are applied
to the works of four representative modern Japanese writers:
Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo, and Kawabata Yasunari.
i The protagonists of these novelists are uncertain not only
of their identification in their world, but also of their

identities as selves. They wish to return to the elements

vV'

of culture and tradition in which the self was once able to
~ come to terms with its problems through identification with

nature, meditative philosophy, traditional aesthetic practices,

WW1

and viable social norms, but at the same time they find that
these concerns do not suffice in themselves when they are ulti-
mately faced with an encounter with the self.

The self in this study is seen from the point of view
l of humanistic psychology which visualizes the healthy indivi-

dual as one who works toward self-actualization. The self-

 

 

A

 

Alyce H.K. Morishige

actualizing individual puts into effect in his life, such
qualities as creativity, growth motivation, acceptance of
self, others, and nature, autonomy and freedom of will, abi-
lity to form non-destructive relationships with others, open-
ness to experience, and a firm grounding in reality. The
novels discussed in this study do not portray their main charac-
ters as positive, self-actualizing heroes. Rather, they are

i negative and pessimistic delineations of the self as anti—hero.

 

i These negative portrayals of the self are accompanied by ironic

implications as the protagonists are presented as tragic victims
i , of their self-concepts. These self-concepts fall into two major
i categories: the deceptive and the unaware. The self-deceptive

. individual feels that he has come to terms with life and him-
self when in actuality he has fallen short of his actual poten-
' tialities. The unaware individual feels that he has failed as
a human being, but he has overlooked much in his life which
could be considered as avenues to his self-actualization. There
is also irony in the fact that the more the protagonists strive
to have a self, the more they lose themselves in their strivings.
l The protagonists of Dazai Osamu's fig Longer Human and

Egg Setting §u§ fail to actualize themselves ostensibly because
they are pitted unfairly against the rules of society. They
seek self-destruction through drug—addiction, alcoholism, and
suicide because they feel impotent in the face of a society that
demands the wearing of masks instead of the real self. They are

tragic and ironic figures who ultimately make themselves outcasts

 

of their society, failing to realize that acceptance of their own

 

 

gentleness and get
as positive steps

In llis‘nisa i;

 

Csnfessions of a V
x _ _ _

my fantasies thw
is an intolerable
between fantasy 8
no feel that Ill:
when they have 0
PSE’C'hopathology .

.le Kobo' 3
Present. central

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Alyce H.K. Morishige

gentleness and genuine feelings for others could have served
as positive steps toward self-affirmation.
In Mishima Yukio's The Temple 2f the Golden Pavilion and

Confessions 2: a Mask, the protagonists are destroyed by the

 

very fantasies they have created to escape from what they feel
is an intolerable and dangerous reality. Unable to distinguish
between fantasy and reality, they are self—deceptive individuals
who feel that they have achieved some mode of self—actualization
when they have only become more firmly entrenched in their
psychopathology.

present central characters who seek values or standards outside
of themselves. Their preoccupation with the scientific method
ironically leads them away from life and reflects the tragedy

of the alienated self.

§ggg Country and Thousand Cranes by Kawabata Yasunari
delineate the life styles of the aesthete-protagonist who takes
flight from a meaningful existence and self into a world of
heightened perceptions. Aesthetic values are substituted for
real experiences, and the protagonists are victims of a world
which is fated to remain as they see it.

Because all of the novels offer uniquely artistic treatments
of the theme of the self, this study also attempts to determine
from analyses of the structural and aesthetic elements of the
works, how certain cultural determinants affect the literary
presentation of the self and its actions.

The theme of the self in modern Japanese fiction revolves

*7

Alyce H.K. Morishige
around.the reasons why individuals fail to actualize themselves.

It is a theme which is coupled with effective stylistic tech—

niques, and therefore carries with it great dramatic urgency and
literary impact.

 

l'ti'fi WEE
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THE THEME OF THE SELF IN MODERN JAPANESE
FICTION: ST IES 0N DAZAI, MISHIMA,
AB , AND KAWABATA

By

Alyce H.k. Morishige

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

1970

C9- 0555#
/~ .1; — 7/

3 Copyright by
ALICE HISAE KAWAZOE MORISHIGE

1 971

 

To Howard, who listens and cares,
in the good times and rough

ii

 

‘iith feeling
to acknowledge th€
following peI‘SOUS
E) committee, who
pariences helped
..3negger, who i
and Professor \‘i
zize and advice

V- .
ufi SpeCl'd

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With feelings of deep gratitude and joy, I should like
to acknowledge the assistance and concern shown to me by the
following persons: Professor C. David Mead, the chairman of
my committee, whose calm, understanding, and openness to ex-
periences helped me to finish; Professor Maria Elisabeth
Kronegger, who inspired me with her discipline and dedication;
and Professor Virgil Scott, who was always generous with his
time and advice.

I My special appreciation goes also to Professor John Yunck,
who encouraged me with his many kindnesses, and Professor James
Pickering who was never too busy to be cheerful and helpful.

I should also like to thank Professor Sam Baskett, Professor
Lore Metzger, Professor Herbert weisinger, and Dr. Thomas
Gunnings for their favors.

Without the cooperation of Howard and Vanessa, I would
not have completed this study. Not the least of those who
helped in sundry ways were the graduate assistants in Merrill 9,
especially the friendliness of Kristin Lauer, Linda Edison, Elena

Polo, and Jane Nelson .

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION .
II. "THE WORLD IS OUT OF JOINT": DAZAI . . . . . . . .15
III. THE MOBIUS STRIP: MISHIMA . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
IV. "THE STANDARD OF VALUE": ABE . . . . . . . . . 98

V. "IN THE WORLD AS IT IS": KAWABATA . . . . . . .. 145
VI. CONCLUSION . . . 185
BIBLIOGRAPHY . 189

iv

 

w< --_.

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

The theme of the self has played an increasingly
important part in modern Japanese literature since the
flourishing of naturalism as a literary school in Japan
between the years of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904—1905, and
the end of the Meiji Era in 1912. There has been a lack of
consensus as to what precisely constitutes naturalistic lit—
erature in Japan, but as W.F. Sibley points out, it has repre-
sented generally "a decisive orientation toward the realistic
portrayal of the individual and his immediate surroundings."1
The words "realistic" and "individual" must be emphasized here
for although Japanese naturalism, like the western, concerns
the relationship of the individual to society as a conditioning
force, this concern "seldom extends beyond the narrow scope
of particular social institutions and conventions as they
directly affect the characters."2

The modern twentieth—century Japanese novel has somehow

 

1 W.F. Sibley, "Naturalism in Japanese Literature," Harvard
Journal 2; Asiatic Studies, (XXVIII:1968), p. 158.

2 Ibid., pp. 158-159

. --.-—.

 

 

2
gone beyond the limitations of post-Meiji naturalistic lit—
erature in that it has dealt more and more with the psychology
of the individual who is not only estranged from his social
environment, but who is also alienated from himself.3 The
modern Japanese protagonist wishes to return to the elements
of culture and tradition in which the self was once able to
come to terms with its problems through identification with
nature, meditative philosophy,4 traditional aesthetic practices,
and viable social norms, but at the same time he finds that
these concerns do not suffice in themselves when he is ulti—
mately faced with an encounter with the self. He is then forced

to see himself without the intermediary of certitudes, or even

 

3 An analysis of American critical reviews from 1956 to
1966 of the major novels of Dazai Osamu, Kawabata Yasunari,

Abé Kobo, and Mishima Yukio shows two fundamental approaches:
one approach emphasizes the universal theme of the psychologi—
interest in the self, while the other approach implies that an
understanding of the social and literary cultural traditions
from which these novelists write is necessary for a full appre-
ciation of the works.

4 van Meter Ames, in his article "Aesthetics in Recent
Japanese Novels," Journal pf Aesthetics 12d Apt Criticism, (XXIV:
1965), points out that Zenki, or the spirit of Zen in art, "the
spontaneous naturalness of ordinary activity, free of form and
flowing from the formless self," and the feeling of oneness with
nature, found in Noh drama and other early Japanese literature,
are"sad1y absent" in "existential" Japanese novels such as Dazai's
Th3 Setting Sun and_Ng Longer Human, Mishima's Confessions g: a
Mask, and Kawabata's Snow Country and Thousand Cranes. According
to Ames, Zen and Existentialism differ in that one reflects a
positive pre-industrial outlook on nature, while the other tries
to cope with the insecurities of the industrial revolution which
has "bulldozed" nature away.

 

 

 

 

--~-.---—-~.. _. 1

‘C-‘vv'v-f A - ~._._

 

 

3
of an "existential faith born of subjective immediacy,"5 the
trust which he can place in his immediate sensory perceptions
of the world. He strives to work out his identity, to say
firmly, "I am," but he cannot say it with any spontaneous
conviction because he is enmeshed in the psychological webs
which have not only been spun out by himself, but which have
also been largely predetermined by his culture.

This study, then, is concerned with the analyses of the
theme of the self as it is treated in the novels of four repre-
sentative modern Japanese novelists: Dazai Osamu,6 Mishima Yukio,
Abe Kobo, and Kawabata Yasunari. These novelists all portray
the Japanese anti-hero who is uncertain not only of his identi—
fication in his world, but also of his identity as a self. As
one critic notes: "The philosophical problem of identity has
deviled Western man for almost as long as we have a record of
philosophical thought; but the treatment in Japanese fiction has
the greater urgency and poignancy because the problem is not
philosophical but national and immediate."7 The Japanese novel-
ists write pessimistically of the self, the individual's consa'
cious sense of who he is and what kinds of experiences he under-

goes. Their pessimism is shown in the patterns of failure of the

 

5 Charles Glicksberg, The Self i3 Modern Literature (Pennsyl-
vania: 1963), p. xi.

All Japanese names of writers living in Japan used in
this study will follow the conventional Japanese practice of
giving the family name first; e. g., Abe Kobo instead of Kobo Abe.

ames Kor es, "Abe and Ooka: Identity and Mind-Body,"
Critigue (X: 1968 , p. 132.

fi—
4
self. Irony is associated with pessimism as their protago-
nists become tragic victims of their self—concepts. These
self—concepts fall into two categories: the deceptive and
the unaware. The self—deceptive individual feels that he
has come to terms with life and himself when in actuality
he has fallen short of his potentialities. The unaware in-
dividual feels that he has failed as a human being, but he
has overlooked much in his life which could be considered
as avenues to his self-actualization. There is also irony
in the fact that the more the protagonists strive to have a
self, the more they lose themselves in their strivings.

In any discussion of the theme of the self, it would
be misleading to omit or deny the importance of cultural
influences. On the other hand, it would be equally falla-
cious to assert that the notion of self is entirely determined
by cultural and social factors. Thus, the present study is
essentially a two-fold attempt: first, it is interested in
: examining the fictional portrayal of the self as a definable
core of the individual, a psychological entity which moves

toward some type of fulfillment, and second, it tries to

.~‘.— _. g--‘—.-

determine from analysis of the structural and aesthetic ele—

ments of the novels, how certain cultural determinants affect

?

the literary presentation of the self and its actions.
Although many studies of cultural influences on persona—
lity have been undertaken, there is very little, at present,

in Japanese psychology which formulates a non—cultural theory

   

K

'1lIIIFF'-""""""""""""""""""-"----"---'----'----IIII
5

I of the self8 as comprehensively as the Western psychologist

Abraham Maslow does in his conceptualizations of the self-

actualizing individual. Maslow's major concern is the defi-

nition of the healthy self:

So far as motivational status is concerned,
healthy people have sufficiently gratified
their basic needs for safety, belongingness,
love, respect and self-esteem so that they
are motivated primarily by trends to self-
actualization (defined as ongoing actualiza-
tion of potentials, capacities and talents,
as fulfillment of mission (or call, fate,
destiny, or vocation), as a fuller knowledge
of, and acceptance of, the person's own in-
trinsic nature, as an unceasing trend toward
unipy,9integration or synergy within the per-
son .

In the ensuing chapters of this study, I shall examine the
failure of the self in modern Japanese literature primarily

in the light of a more descriptive and operational definition
of Maslow's characteristics of the self-actualizing individual.

i The following outline, adapted from Heinz Ansbacher's chart on

 

8 Richard K. Beardsley, in "Personality Psychology," (1965)
{ notes that the study of personality in culture had barely begun
' before World War II. Hence, Beardsley goes on, "it was something
of a pioneering step to apply its concepts and techniques to the
wartime analysis of Japan under the sponsorship of the United
States government. Interest in Japan has continued to be keen
among students of personality in postwar years, though actual
research has been limited mostly to work done by a few persons
qualified both in the Japanese language and in personality
psychology. Thus, we are dealing with a field that is young in
Japan and elsewhere and underpopulated with researchers. (p. 350)"

9 Abraham Maslow, Toward 2 Psychology 2: Being (Princeton,
1962), p. 25.

   

r——_—__———_

Maslovian concepts, summarizes the major points in Maslow's

theory of the actualizing self:

Object g: Concern Growth motivation

Self Acceptance of self, others,

'—_" nature.

Opinions 2: Others Independence, autonomy,
detachment.

Problems outside 2: Self Focused on problems outside
oneself.

Fellow M33 Effective interpersonal

relationships and friendships;
democratic rather than autho—
ritarian character structure.

Mankind Identification with mankind.

Realities g: Life Comfortable relations with
reality, efficient perceptions
of it.

Universe Oceanic feelings; cosmic
experiences.

Ethics Clarity in ethical norms

and dealings, religious in
social-behavioral way.
Esthetics Freshness of appreciation
of beauty, creativeness, spon-
taneity ip inner life, thoughts,
impulses. 0
Maslow sees the self—actualizing person as one who is
interested in growth and in life. Fulfillment of self is
basically positive and life—enhancing. Living becomes a value
in itself. The self-actualizing individual affirms life and
the uniqueness of himself; he is not bound to a crippling depen-
dence on the opinions of others, yet he is fully aware of the

possibilities of meaningful interpersonal relationships with

others. Not only is he free to experience the full range of

 

1O Heinz Ansbacher, "The Concept of Social Interest,"
Journal 2: Individual Ps cholo , (XXIV: 1968), p. 138.

 

Q.—

.-.'

7

his outer reality, but he is also able to come to terms with
his own inner reality. His perceptions of reality are not pre-
determined and distorted; they serve, instead, as creative and
reliable modes of apprehending positive ethical, cosmic, and
aesthetic experiences through his feelings.

Subjectively, says Maslow, one can confirm whether or not
self—actualization or growth towards it takes place by examining

one's feelings:

These are the feelings of zest in living, of
happiness or euphoria, of serenity, of joy,

of calmness, of responsibility, of confidence

in one's ability to handle stresses, anxieties,
and problems. The subjective signs of self-be-
trayal, of fixation, of regression, and of 11-
ving by fear rather than by growth are such
feelings as anxiety, despair, boredom, inability
to enjoy, intrinsic guilt, intrinsic shame, aim-
lessness, fpelings of emptiness, of lack of iden-
tity, etc.

Maslow's conceptualizations of the actualizing self bring
into clearer relief the extent to which the self in contemporary
Japanese literature is non-actualizing. The uncertain position
of the individual in Japanese society, among other things, appears
to give rise to what is a fundamentally negative element in
Japanese thought. The philosopher Charles Moore calls attention
to the fact that "the status of the individual in Japan is a
problem that leaves one bewildered because of the widely varying

interpretations available. The emphasis has always seemed to

 

11 Maslow, pp. cit., p. 157.

8
be on the group rather than on the individual, on duties
rather than rights, on loyalty to group or hierarchical

superior, and this emphasis has seemed to be stronger in

Japan than in any other major tradition."12 There are, Moore

goes on, many indications of the concept of the absolute

devotion to the unique social nexus of Japan:

There are many ... aspects or indications of this
feature of Japanese culture: the hierarchical
structure of society generally; the universal
sense of social rank -— as evidenced even in lan-
guage usage; the many-sided fact of and demand for
discipline (inner and outer); and the over-all
spirit and fact of authoritarianism (allegedly
adopted from Confucianism but, if so, reaching an
extreme degree that Confucianism would certainly

have rejected) in all walks of life and in thought.13

Therefore, although there are philosophers like Nakamura Hajime14

who see the dominance of the individual over the group because
of the Japanese emphasis on experience and the anti-intellect-
ualistic rejection of concepts and universals, their arguments
do not seem strong enough to override the basic problem of the

individual in Japanese culture:

And yet, the groupism which unquestionably prevails
from family to state and the monism which so many

interpreters find in Japanese culture would seem to
conflict seriously with individualism ... . Part of
the solution comes, perhaps, from the fact that, to
the Japanese, the family is not a conceptual group

or universal and that the.state is not an institution
or a universal comprehending all 1nd1v1duals as members,

 

1 12 Charles Moore, "Editor's Supplement: The Enigmatic
A Japanese Mind," The Japanese Mind (Honolulu, 1967), p. 299.

‘13 Ibid., p. 299.

14 Nakamura Hajime, "Consciousness of the Individual and
f the Universal Among the Japanese," The Japanese Mind (Honolulu,

-lIIlgIlI-III---------'-"'----"-_---_——_——__—_—_____—_______"'-

«cow-v-

9

but an all-inclusive family in which the
emperor is not a sovereign as such but a
person, the head of the family of all the
people -— and so superior, as one Japanese
has said that the very problem of the rela-
tive status of the individual could not even
arise. But the conflict between what seems to
be the individualistic implications of these
basic traits on one hand, and the tendencies
or facts that are so anti—individualistic, on
the other, remains and is seriously puzzling:
just where does the individual stand?

The ambiguity of the individual's position as a self in
Japanese society has caused many literary personages to flee
from a fundamentally uneasy situation and to resort even to
the extreme of self-destruction. Its Sei in a penetrating
essay articulates this subjective reaction in Japanese thought,
as well as another significantly pessimistic personality charac—

teristic:

Self—destruction or flight and perceptions de-
riving from an awareness of death or emptiness

seem to be two basic modes of Japanese thought,

and they are similar in that both seek to appre-
hend life through a consciousness of death, but
they pursue this objective in opposite directions.
By this I mean that the former mode is a descent
from real life in society, an escape from it, and
seeks self-destruction as a means of experiencing
life to the fullest. The latter mode, even where

an invalid is concerned, involves an affirmation

of life which may be likened to the desire to
ascend from the murky depths of death to the sun-
1it surface of the sea of real life. This is the
positive desire to go on living, to enjoy nature

to the fullest, which derives from the knowledge
that one is confronting death. Both modes, however,
seek the ultimate sense of existence in the eterna-
lity of emptiness. Just as we feel insecure when our
two feet are not firmly placed on the ground, danger
makes us terribly anxious because we cannot be sure

 

15 Moore, pp. cit., p. 300.

 

 

 

 

10

that our existence is linked to some absolute.16
The emphasis here is clear; the values of existence in con—
temporary Japanese thought appear not to come from a straight—
forward affirmation of life and the growth of the self in life,
but rather are those which come from a pervading awareness of
the evanescence of life and the imminence of death. The self,
in this view, is less concerned with its actualization than
with its destruction and with its flight from the contingencies
of life. Insecurity and anxiety are "normal" states of the
self because they reflect the human condition; affirmation of
life comes only as a desperate reaction to the dark and ulti-
mate negation of death.

Living with the idea of the imminence of death may be
important existentially in that the self should not be deceived
about the nature of all living things, that they must one day
confront the reality of death. This is a position which
Frederick Hoffman elaborates upon in his discussion of a

major characteristic of literary existentialism:

Literary existentialism usually begins by denying
that an appeal to religious forms can successfully
explain the self; it begins with the naked fact of

an isolated self. In these terms, the problem of

the "absurd," which is after all what the violence

of our century has given us, can be and must be
considered. It is related to the defeat of rationa-
listic expectations, and it begins with the acceptance
of such a defeat. In these circumstances, the entire

 

16 -
Ito Sei, "Modes of Thought in Contemporary Japan,"
Japan Qparterly (XII: 1965), pp. 510-511.

r—_

. - ..— _-__m_,fi"—.er

 

 

11

growth of the sensibility is seen with death as a

terminus. At least for the purpose of present reali-

zation, there is nothing beyond death. It is impor-

tant that there be nothing, because self-awareness

ought not to be mitigated by promises or prior soothing

knowledges. The terror of life which, at least in some

of its manifestations, is consonant with the century's

violent history. ... One endures, not because man is

good and "will prevail," but because he exists ,pgcause

he will die some time and meanwhile must live.

But an abiding unconscious or conscious preoccupation
with death and the emptiness of life is crippling to man. The
self‘s perception of reality is predetermined and distorted by
a predominantly negative and pessimistic preoccupation with the
futility of a life which only recognizes death as an absolute.
Not only is growth of the self difficult or even impossible in
this view, but meaningful interrelationships with others in the
world become burdensome and frightening. However, this is not
to say that the process of self-actualization is entirely free
from pain and the awareness of the negative aspects of life. As
Maslow points out, the "loss of illusions and the discovery of
identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilara—
ting and strengthening."18 A totally pessimistic approach to
life can be criticized on the grounds that it is both incomplete
and unrealistic, for "most people experience both tragedy and
joy in varying proportion (and) any philosophy which leaves out

19

either cannot be considered to be comprehensive."

 

17 Frederick Hoffman, The Mortal Np: Death and the Modern
Imagination (Princeton, 1964;, p. 18.

18 Maslow, pp. cit., p. 16.

‘9 Ibid., p. 17.

‘r————
12
The difference between the pessimistic and the optimis—
tic approaches to life can be further clarified by Colin Wilson's
thesis of the two "selves" of man which are continually at war

with each other.20 One of these selves, says Wilson, "is cau-

 

i tious, limited, materialistic, confined to the present." This
l self is also a "born slave and coward" and "only pain or incon-
l venience keep him on his feet." The other self is "geared en-

} tirely to purpose and evolution;" he

has glimpses of a joy that is beyond anything

possible to the born coward: the ecstasy of

power and freedom. He knows about the miseries

and insecurities of human existence, about

weakness and contingency. But he does not be-

lieve in them, since he is certain that freedom

is an absolute power. He knows that man is only
subject to pain and misery insofar as he allows

f himself to be dominated by the coward, and that

' most human misfortune is another name for stu—

I pidity and self-pity. Consequently, he is inclined

to suspect that even death may be a disguised form
of suicide, and that human contingency will prove

to be an illusion in the light of ultimate freedom.

3 In short, he is totally the optimist and the adven—

; turer; he cannot believe that human reason, powered
' by the human will to freedom, can even encounter
insurmountable obstacles.21

The underlying assumption of the present study is that
the optimistic view of man, presented by Maslow and Wilson as
a self which is capable of successfully controlling his exis—

tence and thereby finding positive values in living, is a

 

, V
20 Colin Wilson, Introduction pp the New Existentialism
(London, 1966), p. 180.

l- 2‘ Ibid., pp. 180-181.

 

 

 

 

‘r———

13
viable one and that the recurring pessimistic portrayals of
the main characters in modern Japanese fiction are really
delineations, consciously or unconsciously derived by the
authors, of different patterns of the failure of the self.
Chapter Two analyzes two novels by Dazai Osamu,

Np Longer Human22 and The Setting Sun23

in which the central
characters fail to realize themselves ostensibly because they
are pitted unfairly against the rules of society. Chapter Three
is a discussion of the two protagonists in Mishima Yukio's
novels, Epp Temple pf ppg Golden Pavilion24 and Confessions pf

a Mask,25 who lose their selves in the fantasy existence of

their own creation. Chapter Four is an explication of Abe Kobo's
The Woman in the Nppp§26 and Npp Eppp pf Another37novels which

view the self primarily via the nexus of scientific knowledge.

 

 

22 Dazai Osamu, Np Longer Human (Norfolk, 1958).

23 Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun (Norfolk, 1956).

24 Mishima Yukio, The Temple pf the Golden Pavilion (New York,
1959).

25 Mishima Yukio, Confessions pf p Mask (New York, 1968).
26

27 Abe Kobo, The Face pi Another (New York, 1966).

 

Kmhata Iasnn
which are aboa
tic tradition,
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nents of the ‘
the novelists
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14
Kawabata Yasunari's works §ppy Country28 and EQQEEEEQ §£§22§29
which are about the self in the context of the Japanese aesthe-
tic tradition, are analyzed in Chapter Five.

All of the novels studied offer uniquely artistic treat-
ments of the theme of the self. This dissertation analyzes
the novelists' use of aesthetic structure in the novels and
lists the varied metaphors employed for the self. The use
of Impressionism, whenever applicable, in the novels are dis-
cussed also, since the Japanese novel uses Impressionism as a
major stylistic technique.

Finally, all of the works discussed here are from the
vast field of translated literature from the Japanese. I am
in agreement with G.L. Anderson's position that for a truly
"unprovincial criticism," in the humanities, examples from
Asian literature must be readily accessible for the Western
reader.3o Modern Japanese fiction is a rich field for the
investigation of fiction theory and comparative fiction; the
goal of the present study isto contribute a small, but impor-
tant step not only to the understanding of a specialized area
of fiction, but also to the broader appreciation of the complex-

ities of literary art.

 

28 Kawabata Yasunari, Snow Country (New York, 1968).

29 Kawabata Yasunari, Thousand Cranes (New York, 1965).

30 G. L. Anderson, "Asian Literature in Comparative Courses:
Some Practical Problems, " in Approaches to the Oriental Classics,
ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press ,1966),

pp. 224-225.

 

 

"TE

In 1947.
al'l'StocrauC

interest by 1

N

IE mg c
rechers of t]
who are “Dab
society. Na
\‘llh 837313th
th
-e proté‘gOn

\i. .,
.lQOles

—F,._—_______

CHAPTER TWO

"THE WORLD IS OUT OF JOINT": DAZAI

In 1947, Sha 3,1 Dazai Osamu's novel about a moribund
aristocratic family, was published and received with great
interest by the Japanese public.2 The plot of Sha 3, or
3p; Setting Spp, revolves essentially around three former
members of the aristocracy, Naoji, Kazuko, and their mother,3
who are unable to adjust to life in the post-war Japanese
society. Naoji, the profligate son, is particularly portrayed
with sympathy by the author and therefore can be considered as
the protagonist of the novel. At a crucial point in the novel,
Naoji’s sister Kazuko, the central narrator of the story, dis—
covers a journal written by Naoji, who is in a state of extreme
narcotic addiction, in which he sums up what seem to be the
reasons for the desperate direction of his life:

When I pretended to be precocious, people started
the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like

W.. _.__ -

 

1 Shayo, in Japanese, means "the setting sun." Whenever pos-
Sible, I shall give the Japanese titles for the novels used in

E this thesis; however, textual references to the novels will always
refer to the translated versions cited in my Introduction.

[ 2 The popularity of this novel made its title a tag phrase
far Japan's post-war social and moral "twilight" conditions.

Kannishi Kiyoshi compares the structure of the society in
the novel to a symphony by Mozart with the theme of dissolution

15

 

 

i

r————————_—

‘fi-wu-Vh 5'7"-” "

 

16
an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When
I pretended I couldn‘t write a novel, people
said I couldn't write. When I acted like a
liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like
a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich.
When I feigned indifference, they classed me as
the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently
groaned because I was really in pain, they
started the rumor that I was faking suffering.

The world is out of joint.

Doesn't that mean in effect that I have no choice
but suicide?

Naoji commits suicide soon after the death of his mother who

represents the last of the genuine aristocrats to her children;
and Kazuko, a divorcee, sets about creating her own private social
revolution by conceiving out of wedlock a child by Uehara, a
dissolute writer friend of Naoji‘s.

Although stylistically different from Npp Setting Spp in
that Ningen Shikkaku, or Np Longer Human (1948), is written
entirely in the form of a notebook confession, there are marked
similarities in the male protagonists. Yozo, like Naoji, is
addicted to drugs and attempts suicide on several occasions in
order to escape from a "world that is out of joint." Yozo's

notebooks contain the history of himself as a "social outcast":

People talk of "social outcasts." The words
apparently denote the miserable losers of

the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as
though I have been a "social outcast" from

 

Appearing on three levels, that of the displaced mother, the

weak-strong daughter, and the completely helpless son, being

interrelated into a fpagile yet definite symphonic movement;

see his article "Shayo no Mondai," in Dazai Kenk , ed. Okuno
Takeo (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1963).

4 The Setting Sun, pp. 66-67.

‘

r———____—‘

 

17

the moment I was born. If ever I meet some-
one society had designated as an outcast, I
invariably feel affection for him, an emotion
which carries me away in melting tenderness.

His notebooks end as he is released from a mental institu-

tion which he is committed to after his decision to give
himself ten shots of morphine and to throw himself into a
river is suspected. His thoughts upon his commitment are

a shrill outcry against a world from which he finds himself

inextricably separated:

I was no longer a criminal -— I was a lunatic.
But no, I was definitely not mad. I have never
been mad for even an instant. They say, I know,
that most lunatics claim the same thing. What

it amounts to is that people who get put into
this asylum are crazy, and those who don't are
normal.

God, I ask you, is non-resistance a sin?

I had wept at that incredfliy beautiful smile
Horiki showed me, and forgetting both prudence
and resistance, I had got into the car that took
me here. And now I had become a madman. Even if
released, I would be forever branded on the fore-
head with the word "madman," or perhaps, "reject."
Disqualified as a human being. 6

I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.

The theme of the failure of the individual in The Set—

ting Sun and Np Longer Human is linked closely with Dazai's
interpretations of the Japanese social milieu in which Naoji
and Yozo find themselves. Social life throughout Japan, as

Richard Beardsley notes, is characterized by a strict adherence

 

5 Np Longer Human, p. 67.

6 Ibid., pp. 166-167.

 

,r, ....Wfi 4-9—9-

 

18

to the solidarity of group associations; to "be Japanese
is to be involved in close, complex, and enduring relationships

with one's famil one's nei hbors and other 5 ecific associ—
’ !

"7

ates.

In The Setting Sun, Naoji's intensity of feelings for
his mother and his sister is apparent in the testament he leaves

upon committing suicide:

I should have died sooner. But there was one
thing: Mama's love. When I thought of that I
couldn't die. It's true, as I have said, that
just as man has the right to live as he chooses,
he has the right to die when he pleases, and

yet as long as my mother remained alive, I felt
that the right to death would have to be left in
abeyance, for to exercise it would have meant
killing her too.

Now even if I die, no one will be so grieved as
to do himself bodily harm. No, Kazuko, I know
just how much sadness my death will cause you.
Undoubtedly, you will weep when you learn the
news —- apart, of course, from such ornamental
sentimentality as you may indulge in -— but if
you will please try to think of my joy at being
liberated completely from the suffering of living
and this hateful life itself, I believe that your
sorrow will gradually dissolve.

The measure of regard that Naoji has for his family is directly
proportional to his painful awareness of his own inadequacies.
He is unable even to have positive feelings about his love and
concern for his mother and sister. Instead, he becomes increa—

singly self-punitive and despairing as he continues his confession

7 Richard K. Beardsley, "Personality Psychology," in
Twelve Doors pp Ja an, ed. John Hall and R. Beardsley (New York:
McGraw—Hill, 1965 , pp. 361—362.

 

3 The Setting Sun, p. 158-159.

K

r—_——_——

. 1 "— --.:pw. .

 

19
to Kazuko:

Kazuko, you are beautiful (I have always been
proud of my beautiful mother and sister) and
you are intelligent. I haven't any worries
about you. I lack even the qualifications to
worry. I can only blush —- like a robber who
sympathizes with his victim! I feel sure that
you will marry, have children,9and manage to
survive through your husband.

Like Naoji, Yozo's self exemplifies the influence of
a Japanese social tradition which has stabilized group associa-

tions by its stern expectation of each member to "subordinate

"10

his personal wants to the requirements of the group. Yozo's

deeply embedded negative self-image in part comes from his early
perceptions of his relationships with his family. His inter—
actions, too, with his family and servants are all involved in
shaping his attitudes toward life, which comprise the crippling

obsession to hide his true feelings and self from others:

As a child I had absolutely no notion of what
others, even members of my own family, might

be suffering or what they were thinking. I

was aware only of my own unspeakable fears and
embarrassments. Before anyone realized it, I
had become an accomplished clown, a child who
never spoke a single truthful word.

Again, I never once answered back anything said
to me by my family. The least word of reproof
struck me with the force of a thunderbolt and
drove me almost out of my head. Answer back!
Far from it, I felt convinced that their repri—
mands were without doubt voices of human truth
speaking to me from eternities past; I was

 

9 Ibid., p. 160.

0
Beardsley, pp. cit., p. 362.

'IIlE5E--------------------------'---"-"-"--l

-v . --.- —f—u—“

 

20

obsessed with the idea that since I lacked

the strength to act in accordance with this
truth, I might already have been disquali-

fied from living among human beings. This

belief made me incapable of arguments or
self-justification. Whenever anyone criticized
me I felt certain that I had been living under
the most dreadful misapprehension. I always
accepted the attack in silence, though inward- 11
1y so terrified as almost to be out of my mind.

In the Japanese family, the individual's insecurity is

further heightened by the authoritarian relationship which exists

between father and child.12 This relationship is especially

noticeable in Yozo's recounting of an early childhood incident
involving his father. Yozo is asked by his father, who is
leaving for a short trip to Tokyo, what he would like as a
gift. Unable to answer immediately, Yozo senses the extreme
displeasure of his father and later furtively tries to "undo"

his misdeed:

What a failure. Now I had angered my father

and I could be sure that his revenge would be
something fearful. That night as I lay shiver-

ing in bed I tried to think if there were still

not some way of redressing the situation. I

crept out of bed, tiptoed down to the parlor,

and opened the drawer of the desk where my

father had most likely put his notebook. I

found the book and took it out. I riffled through
the pages until I came to the place where he had
jotted down our requests for presents. I licked
the notebook pencil and wrote in big letters LION
MASK. This accomplished I returned to my bed. I
had not the faintest wish for a lion mask. In fact,
I would actually have preferred a book. But it was
obvious that Father wanted to buy me a mask, and my
frantic desire to cater to his wishes and restore

 

11 Np Longer Human, p. 27.

 

12 Mamoru Iga, "Cultural Factnrs in Suicide of Japanese
Youth with Focus on Personality," Sociology and Social Research

(nvn1961), p. 79.

‘r—_———_

i
I
K
E
i

21

his good humor had emboldened me to sneak
into the parlor in the dead of night.

This desperate expedient was rewarded by
the great success I had hoped for.1

The great emphasis and value which the Japanese place

upon the achievement of approved behavior, especially on the

successful accomplishment of acting correctly and honorably

within the family and society may confer upon the "unsuccessful"

self not only a sense of inadequacy but feelings of ineradicable

guilt.

Beardsley clarifies the position of guilt in the Japanese

society as follows:

In the

Before examining the link between guilt and
achievement, we should note that early person-
ality—in-culture studies included the Japanese

among a group of cultures that were said to

rely for social control entirely on shame (one's
reaction to his image as measured in the eyes of
others) and to lack any sanctions operating through

a sense of guilt (self-judgment through internalized
standards). Hence, to discover that guilt is also a
means of social control (in addition to shame, which
exists beyond any doubt) is a matter of more than
passing theoretical interest, for it throws doubt on
the validity of sweeping distinctions between shame
cultures and guilt cultures, especially if guilt
plays an important role. In accumulated Japanese
psychological materials, feelings of remorse do, in .
fact, appear frequently and play a significant role.
Hitherto, however, they have been difficult to iden—
tify because they are not linked to a universalist
ethic using transcendent symbols comparable to Judeo-
Christian concepts of sin and grace; Westerners accus-
tomed to looking for such symbols and failing to find
them in Japan have been unable to see that Japanese
do suffei guilt or even to see that an ethical system
exists.

light of Beardsley's explanation of the general nature of

 

 

13 fig Longer Human, p. 31.

14 Beardsley, pp. cit., pp. 369-370.

T"?—

guilt in Japanese culture,

22
15 Naoji's and Yozo's association
of their mother and father, respectively, with their feelings
of remorse become understandable. "Mama's goodness," writes
Naoji in his Journal, "is unsurpassed. Whenever I think of

her, I want to cry. I will die by way of apology to Mama."16

 

15 A more specific explication of guilt in the Japanese

and its effect upon the psyche of the individual may be seen from
' the standpoint of the following sociological, philosophical, and
psychological studies. Sociologist James Moloney gives a succinct
example of the Japanese social structure which is still extant in
contemporary Japan in varying degrees ("Selections from Understand—
ing the Japanese Mind," in Japanese Character Egg Culture, ed. B.
Silberman Z_Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1962_7, pp. 379-
380): "Let us recall the prescribed life pattern of an individual
in Japan before the war: At birth he became nothing at all(mimpi).
From infancy the Japanese child, especially the male, was taught
and even forced to practice kg toward his father. Every Japanese
had to preserve a carefully prescribed pattern of respect toward
members of any higher caste than his own -- toward emperor, guild,
employer; i.e., he was expected to perform 'icho, or that which
was expected of him. And he had, at all times, to perform giri; i.e.,
he had to show a sense of obligation toward family, society, and/or
individuals." Nakamura Hajime presents a philosophical view which
appears as a largely favorable social interpretation ("Consciousness
of the Individual and the Universal Among the Japanese," p. 182):
"The Japanese in general did not develop a clear-cut concept of
the human individual 922 individual as an objective unit like an
inanimate thing, but the individual is always found existing in a
network of human relationships. It means that the Japanese wanted
to locate the individual in experience, not in the abstract. Largely
because of the Japanese emphasis on concrete immediacy in experience,
the individual was grasped as a living thing, and not as a bloodless,
inanimate thing in the realm of the abstract. The living individual
is always located in various kinds of human relationships." The
psychological effects of living within the Japanese social structure,
however, are not entirely conducive to developing a healthy self.
William Caudill and Takeo Doi's studies(?Interrelations of Psychia—
try, Culture and Emotion in Japan " in Man's Image 2g Medicine 99g
Anthro olo , ed. Iago Galdston New York: International Universi-
ties Press, 1963_7, pp. 383-384) have shown that a predominant
characteristic of patients undergoing psychotherapy in Japan is a
pervading feeling of jibun g2 221, that is, of "not having a person-
al sense of self."

---a—"

3*“

1.
v

16 The Setting Sun, pp. 67—68.

 

A

 

.-A,.. a~ ‘0‘?

a: -

 

 

23

Yozo, at the end of fig Longer Hgmgg, learns from his
brother who comes to release him from the asylum, that his father
had died a month ago. Yozo's reaction to this information is one
of unmistakable ambivalence; he feels both relief and intense
guilt, and these feelings in turn result in a sense of an ulti-
mate loss of his emotional integrity. Yozo's conscious and uncon-
scious relationship with his father has been so intense that he
feels part of himself draining away with his emotions when he

learns about the death:

The news of my father's death eviscerated me. He
was dead, that familiar, frightening presence who
had never left my heart for a split second. I felt
as though the vessel of my suffering had become
empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had
lost even the ability to suffer.

Guilt is always negative and crippling. That the parti-
cular social structure which Dazai's characters are in fosters
guilt and prevents them from coping with their feelings of
inadequacies and anxieties is a devastating social commentary.
But what is more significantly tragic in Dazai's novels is that
his protagonists have certain talents which they recognize as
important parts of their selves, but which they do not cultivate
because they have become cynical prisoners of their negative
emotions.

Naoji is ovefly self—critical and self-conscious about
his talent as a writer:

I can swear even before Goethe that I am a
superbly gifted writer. Flawless construction,

 

17 fig Longer Human, p. 168.

 

. W7r,’$ ..——-v _

*- “-3- my

 

‘#——_

24
the proper leavening of humor, pathos to
bring tears to the reader's eyes —- or

else a distinguished novel, perfect of its

kind, to be read aloud sonorously with the

deference due it, this ... I claim I could

write were I not ashamed. There's something
fundamengally cheap about such awareness of
genius.

Yozo has confidence enough in his talent as an artist

to be free from the opinions of others concerning his work:

Ever since elementary school days I enjoyed
drawing and looking at pictures. But my pic—
tures failed to win the reputation among my
fellow students that my comic stories did. I
have never had the least trust in the opinions
of human beings, and my stories represented to
me nothing more than the clown's gesture of
greeting to his audience; they enraptured all
of my teachers but for me they were devoid of
the slightest interest. Only to my painting,

to the depiction of the object ... did I devote
any reaa efforts of my original though childish
style.

However, Yozo turns away from his interest in painting because

of the threat which it represents to him; his real talents are
capable of revealing too much of himself to others. He does

some self—portraits and finds that

The pictures I drew were so heart-rending as

to stupefy even myself. Here was the true

self I had so desperately hidden. I had smiled
cheerfully; I had made others laugh; but this

was the harrowing reality. I secretly affirmed
this self, was sure that there was no escape

from it, but naturally I did not show my pictures
to anyone except Takeichi. I disliked the thought
that I might suddenly be subjected to their sus-
picious vigilance, when once the nightmarish

 

18 The Setting Sun, p. 63.
19 fig Logger Human, p. 54.

_P—

25
reality under the clowning was detected. On
the other hand, I was equally afraid that they
might not recognize my true self when they saw
it but imagine that it was just some new twist
to my clowning -- occasion for additional snick-
ers. This would have been the most painful of
all. I therefore hid the pictures in the back of
my cupboard.20

The attitudes of Yozo and Naoji are ineluctably defeatist.
They are all too aware of the ills of society, of other people;
they are also all tooconscious of their weaknesses and vulnera-
bility, but too little cognizant of the possibility that their
own weaknesses as well as those of others need to be more clearly
examined and evaluated. Their egocentricity prevents them from
expanding themselves, from becoming self-actualizing individuals.
They live less in the "real world of nature" and more "in the
verbalized world of concepts, abstractions, expectations, be-
liefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the real
world."21

Naoji, for example, has not only completely convinced
himself that he is a "victim" of the world, but he has also
convinced his sister who goes as far as to defend her brother
as a "beautiful" person because he is victimized: "In the pre-
sent world," she writes to Uehara, "the most beautiful thing is
a victim."22 But what Kazuko does not see is that Naoji's

confession is one of confusing abstractions ("What is self-

esteem? Self esteem! It is impossible for a human being —-no,

 

20 Ibid., p. 56.
21 Abraham Maslow, 22. cit., p. 137.
22

The Setting Sun, p. 174.

 

 

26

a man -- to go on living without thinking ’I am one of the

\ elite,"I have my good points,‘ etc."), destructive expecta—

‘ tions ("I detest people, am detested by them. Test of wits.

Solemnity = feeling of idiocy."), and unshakeable cynicism

(“Anyway, you can be sure of one thing, a man's got to fake

just to stay alive.").23 Naoji is a victim of a different

5 sort, not of the world, but more of his own self—pity and

paranoia:

I wonder if we are to blame, after all. Is

it our fault that we were born aristocrats?
Merely because we were born in such a family,
we are condemned to spend our whole lives in
humiliation, apologies, and abasement, like
so many Jews.2

He is also hopelessly entangled in the meshes of sentimentality

and meaningless egocentric pride:

mao- ~

- -,.;._

He has

In the last analysis my death is a natural
one -- man cannot live exclusively for prin—
ciples. I have one request to make of you,
which embarrasses me very much. You remember
the hemp kimono of Mother's which you altered
so that I could wear it next summer? Please
put it in my coffin. I wanted to wear it.
Once more, good-bye.

Kazuko.

I am, after all, an aristocrat.25

Yozo, also, lives in a world of abstractions and beliefs.

the ability to "reason" with himself, to arrive at rational

 

 

23 Ibid., p. 68.

 

24

Ibid., p. 158.
25

Ibid., p. 169.

'1IIIP5"""""""""""""""""'______-'______—____—______—___—“"'

 

27
conclusions through analytical thinking. This ability is
shown when he reacts to his friend Horiki's admonishment that
he should stop "fooling around with women" because "society

won't stand for more."

What, I wondered, did he mean by "society"?
The plural of human beings? Where was the
substance of this thing called "society"?

I had spent my whole life thinking that so-
ciety must certainly be something powerful,
harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk
made the words "Don't you mean yourself?"
come to the tip of my tongue. But I held
the words back, reluctant to anger him.
From then on, however, I came to hold, almost
as a philosophical conviction, the belief:
What is society but an individual?

Yozo's conception of society is arrived at rationally and this

gives him a momentary sense of freedom from his fear of others:

Society. I felt as though even I were beginning

at last to acquire some vague notion of what it
meant. It is the struggle between one individual
and another, a then-and-there struggle, in which
the immediate triumph is everything. Human beings
cannot conceive of any means of survival except in
in terms of a single then-and-there contest. They
speak of duty to one's country and suchlike things,
but the object of their efforts is invariably the
individual, and, even once the individual's needs
have been met, again the individual comes in. The
incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehen—
sibility of the individual. ... This was how I
managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror
at the illusion of the ocean called the world. I
learned to behavn rather aggressively, without the
endless anxious worrying I knew before responding
as it were to the needs of the moment.é7

Yozo finds, too, that abstractions formed about the

 

26 fig Longer Human, pp. 119-120.

 

7 Ibid., pp. 124—125.

 

FF———————i

l 28
world release him from the frightening power of individual
concrete things which, when encountered in immediate experiences,

call forth feelings and sensations that are difficult to control:

This too I came to understand. I had been so
terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten
million people each leave over three grains

of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of

rice are wasted in one day; if ten million
people each economize one paper handkerchief

a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that
whenever I left over a single grain of rice,
whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I

was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper,
and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had
committed some terrible crime. ... I felt

pity and contempt for the self which until
yesterday had accepted such hypothetical si-
tuations as eminently factual scientific truths
and was terrified by them. This shows the degree
to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge
of what is called the world.28

However, he realizes that all of his rationalizations and his
ability to generalize about the "real nature of the world," had
not changed anything within himself: "Having said that, I must
now admit that I was still afraid of human beings, and before
I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify
myself by gulping down a glass of liquor."29
Naoji and Yozo are clearly aware of themselves as indi-
vidual and social failures. As writers of their notebooks, they
engage in an endless rhetoric of introspection, but their activi—
ty is nonetheless only rhetoric and affords them no true relief

or insight into themselves. Their eloquence in describing their

plight provides no illumination leading to positive solutions to

 

28
29

Ibid., pp. 126-127.
Ibid., pp. 127-128.

 

A

. 29
life, to an achievement of a healthy acceptance of self and
living. Thus, Naoji's analogy of himself as a plant living

in an inimical environment is a description without any construc—

tive significance:

It is painful for the plant which is myself
to live in the atmosphere and light of this
world. Somewhere an element is lacking which
would permit me to continue. I am wanting.
It has been all I could do to stay alive up
to now.30

Having described his feelings and his assessment of his present
state of existence, Naoji can go no further into an understand-
ing of the element he lacks to survive in the world.
Yozo similarly recognizes that his unhappiness is due '
to his own actions, yet he unconditionally "accepts" himself

as an entirely helpless being:

My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own
vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.

If I had ever attempted to voice anything in
the nature of a protest, even a single mumbled
word, the whole of society ... would undoubted-
ly have cried out flabbergasted, "Imagine the
audacity of him talking like that!" Am I what
they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a
man of excessively weak spirit? I really don't
know myself, but since I seem in either case to
be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably,
into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to
stave off my descent.3

Herbert Read provides an interesting insight in his
chapter on "The Frontiers of the Self" as to what Dazai's

protagonists may be involved in when presenting their notebook

 

3° The Setting Sun, p. 154.

l
31 fig Longer Human, pp. 157-158.

30
introspections. "The self," says Read, "is a fluctuating
element" which cannot be focused at any point by an individual
or by artistic media, such as portraiture or literary descrip-
tion. What individuals abstract at any moment as the "self"
is merely a fixed point where their "attention forces certain
images to converge and constitute a 'state of consciousness,’
a moment of reflection." This state of consciousness, Read
points out further, is "not a consciousness of a 'self,’ but

only of certain points on the frontiers of the self."

we therefore cannot know a self; we can only
betray our self, and we do this, as the phrase
indicates, fragmentarily and unconsciously. We
betray ourselves in our gestures, in the accents
of our speech, in our handwriting, and generall

in all those forms or configurations (Gestalten
which automatically register the track of the
stream of consciousness. All art is in this sense
an unconscious self-betrayal, but it is not neces-
sarily an awareness of the self betrayed.32

Thus Read provides a possible explanation for the
peculiar emptiness of Naoji and Yozo's confessions of them-
selves as failures. Their confessions are actually fragmentary
self-conscious verbal posturings which are put on for the bene-
fit of their readers. They are not only telling their readers
that they have been putting on a "fake" self before everyone in
their world, but they are also betraying to their audience that
their confessions are parts of their false selves. Their real

selves are still hidden from themselves and their readers; selves

 

32 Herbert Read, Icon and Idea (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1955), p. 111.

31

do not automatically or necessarily appear with the protago-
nists' relating or "confessing" what has happened in their
lives.

The confessions, then, in the notebooks of The Setting

 

figg and fig Longer Hgggg center around their writers' externa-
lizations of their conscious selves. That is, Naoji and Yozo
find a convenient scapegoat in a "world that is out of joint"
to which they may attribute their loss of a personal sense of
selfhood. Although they acknowledge that they have a role to

play in creating their own unhappiness because of certain un-

I'

defined "deficiencies" within themselves, they would prefer to
project the blame onto a callous, unreasonable, and hostile
society and view it as the major cause of their hateful lives.
Society, and the protagonists do realize that individuals
comprise this abstraction, inflicts unbearable suffering upon
Naoji and Yozo. Society, writes Naoji, is capable of making
an odious remark like "All men are alike." He evaluates this
ambiguous phrase and judges it in terms of what it means to

himself as an aristocrat:

All men are alike.

What a servile remark that is. An utterance

that degrades itself at the same time that

it degrades men, lacking in all pride, seek—

ing to bring about the abandonment of all
effort. Marxism proclaims the superiority of

the workers. It does not say that they are all
the same. Democracy proclaims the dignity of

the individual. It does not say that they are
all the same. Only the lout will assert, "Yes,
no matter how much he puts on, he's just a
human being, same as the rest of us."

Why does he say "same." Can't he say "superior"?
The vengeance of the slave mentality!

The statement is obscene and loathsome. I believe

32
that all of the so-called "anxiety of the age"--
men frightened by one another, every known prin-
ciple violated, effort mocked, happiness denied,

beauty defiled, honor dragged down —- originates
in this one incredible expression.

Thus, by making himself a victim of philistine society,
one which overlooks the human qualities of the individual and
ignores the differences of levels of sensitivity in individual

34

men, Naoji, although he admits that he "must be weak," that

he would be "better off dead" because he lacks "the capacity
35

to stay alive," is a creature of his imagination. His drama-
tic pronouncement "I am, after all, an aristocrat," shows that
his true identity, the thing that is destroyed when he dies,
is something outside of himself -- not a man, but a style of
life and a kind of meaning.

Yozo imagines himself as part of a category of being
that is outside of himself. He is always conscious of the
fact that he is the son of a "rich man" and this consciousness
comes at a time when one would expect a more dire concern with
the meaning of his existence. Yozo and Tsuneko, "a lover of one

night," both decide to commit double suicide. After they have

a light meal, she asks him to pay for it and Yozo findsto his

 

dismay that he has only three copper coins, less than a penny, in

his wallet. Tsuneko asks him if that is all the money he has,

and Yozo's reaction to her remark is one of profound and devas-

 

33 The Setting Sun, pp. 156-157.

34 Ibid., p. 157.

35 Ibid., p. 159.

33

tating humiliation:

Her voice was innocent, but it cut me to the
quick. It was painful as only the voice of
the first woman I had ever loved could be
painful. "Is that all?" No, even that sug-
gested more money than I had —- three copper
coins don't count as money at all. This was
a humiliation I could not live with. I sup-
pose I had still not managed to extricate my—
self from the part of the rich man's son. It
was then I myself determined, this time as a
reality, to kill myself.36

But like Naoji, Yozo though conscious of his extreme
vulnerability to his "role" as a person who might be someone
respectable in his society, nonetheless blames any unhappiness
that his weaknesses engender unto the individuals who make up

the world, on society:

One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to
add some sort of embellishment to every situ-
ation —- a quality which has made people call
me at times a liar -- but I have almost never
embellished in order to bring myself any ad-
vantage; it was rather that I had a strangula—
.ting fear of that catclysmic change in the atmos-
phere the instant the flow of a conversation
flagged, and even when I knew that it would later
turn to my disadvantage, I frequenly felt obliged
to add, almost inadvertently, my word of embellish-
ment, out of a desire to please born of my usual
desperate mania for service. This may have been
a twisted form of my weakness, an idiocy, but the
habit it engendered was taken full advantage 0%
by the so—called honest citizens of the world. 7

Dazai's protagonists know that there are ways to lead
them out of their miserable existence, but these are all nega—

tive ways. They find that self-destruction is the fastest

 

36 fig Longer Human, p. 87.

37 Ibid., pp. 106-107.

 

‘r‘: . I‘D: -‘

34
recourse they are able to take and destruction comes in the
form of drug addiction, alcoholism, and finally, suicide. Drug
addiction, in particular, represents to Naoji and Yozo the pro-
phetic quality of death-in—life. In Naoji's notebook, a short
list of different types of drugs follows, in glaring juxtaposi-

tion, an original poem on the burgeoning of life:

(New Year's Poem)

The years!

Still quite blind

The little stork-chicks
Are growing up.

Ah! how they fatten!

Morphine, atromol, narcopon philipon, pantopon,
pabinal, panopin, atropin.

Yozo plays a word game of"tragic and comic nouns" with

a friend, and in a bantering way reveals his morbid concern with

drugs and death:

I began the questioning. "Are you ready?
What is tobacco?"

"Tragic," Horiki answered promptly.

"What about medicine?"

"Powder or pills?"

"Injection."

"Tragic."

"I wonder. Don't forget, there are hormone
injections too."

"No, there's no question but it's tragic.
First of all, there's a needle -— what
could be more tragic than a needle?"

"You win. But, you know, medicines and doctors
are, surprisingly enough comic. What about
death?"3

Alcoholism in Dazai's novels is less of a serious matter than

 

38 The Setting Sun, p. 68.

39 fig Longer Human, p. 141.

I.

E‘:' ' fi-fih-“g-

35
drug addiction which leads to the ultimate destruction of
the individual through suicide. Naoji's and Yozo's suicides
fall in the first of the three "major types of suicide in
modern literature," as categorized by Frederick Hoffman --40
"To take one's own life because one cannot 'simplify' him-

self is to act from weakness in a sense, but primarily from an

excessive awareness of weakness." But what is more relevant

”1P—'

here is that their suicides constitute an act of passive rebel-
lion.

As George De Vos notes, "in both China and Japan suicide L
gr

 

was a means of protest against rigidities in the social system"

and "it has been so used by women as well as men in situations

41

in which no other form of rebellion seemed possible." But

the nature of rebellion, like that of guilt, is "negative and

 

40 Frederick Hoffman, Samuel Beckett: The Langgage of
Self (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962):
pp. 25-26. The second type of suicide, according to Hoffman,
is that which is "an act of pure strength," to kill oneself to
prove that one can do so; or "more than that, to defy the fear
g: death." The third type of suicide is the "underground man
who retreats to the ultimate 'cave,' 'hole,‘ 'cellar,' from
motives of the ultimate despair, or merely from a sense of the
absurdity of continuing."

41 George De Vos, "Deviancy and Social Change: A Psycho-
cultural Evaluation of Trends in Japanese Delinquency and Sui-
cide," in Jgpanese Culture, ed. Robert J. Smith and Richard K.
Beardsley (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1962), pp. 162-163.
De Vos also stresses that in Japan, "occupational achievement
and success symbolically keep an individual bound to life"
and lead to the internalization of guilt. "Failure, conversely,
is construed by some as being cut off from a life purpose and
leads to an empty, pointless life."

 

 

 

 

destructive,
of suicide as

confession of

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36

42

destructive, whatever else it may prove to be." The act

of suicide as rebellion is for Naoji and Yozo, the ultimate
confession of their pessimism concerning the nature of life.
They do not affirm any positive values in life. Theirs is a
death which derives from their excessive awareness of them-
selves as failures in a world which they feel is stronger than
they in its hostility and destructiveness.

Rollo May sees a close relationship between anxiety
and death. Anxiety, as defined by May, is the "individual's
apprehension at a threat to values which he identifies with
his existence as a self." Since the ultimate threat causing
anxiety is death itself, the "only way to meet the anxiety of
death in the long run is to have values that are stronger than

43 The values of Dazai's protagonists are

the fact of death."
built on precarious foundations. They are fragile structures
upon which inordinately heavy odds are placed.

0

Naoji's value is to qualify as a "friend of the people"

at all costs. To achieve this goal, he resorts to liquor and

 

42 Philip Hallie, "Indirect Communication and Human Exis-
tence," in Restless Adventure: Essays on Contemporary Expressions
.2: Existentialism, ed. Roger L. Shinn TNew York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1968), p. 33. Hallie notes that a characteristic of literary
and philosophical existentialism is the spirit of rebellion that

 

pervades it.

43 Rollo May, "Existentialism, Psychotherapy, and the
JProblems of Death," in Restless Adventure, ed. Roger L. Shinn
(New York:Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968), pp. 210-211.

T” ..‘-l Wm ~¢nw

37

drugs, and even to the sacrifice of his family feelings:

I had to forget my family. I had to oppose
my father's blood. I had to reject my
mother's gentleness. I had to be cold to

my sister. I thought that otherwise I would
not be able to secure an admission ticket
for the rooms of the people.44

But all of his attempts to be accepted by others fail and
Naoji concludes that he is a "defective type," with no

other recourse but to seek death:

It may be true that in any society defective
types with low vitality like myself are doomed
to perish, not because of what they think or
anything else, but because of themselves. I
have, however, some slight excuse to offer. I
feel the overwhelming pressure of circumstances

which make it extremely difficult for me to live.45

Yozo's values are also like Naoji's in that he desires
to be both liked and respected by others, but his conception
of the respected individual is so negative that he recoils

from the thought of having to pay the price for respect:

My definition of a "respected" man was one
who had succeeded almost completely in hood-
winking people, but who was finally seen
through by some omniscient, omnipotent per—
son who ruined him and made him suffer a
shame worse than death. Even supposing I
could deceive most human beings into res-
pecting me, one of them would know the truth,
and sooner or later other human beings would
learn from him. What would be the wrath and
vengeance of those who realized how they had

been tricked! That was a hair-raising thought.46

 

44 The Settigg Sun, p. 154.

45 Ibid., p. 155.

46 Ng Longer Human, p. 33

"FF ~ ‘15- ”'T.’ a“;
1“.

38
Paradoxically, however, Yozo's whole life is one of paying
the price of not having the respect of himself. The "omni-
scient, omnipotent person" who sees through and ultimately
ruins him, ironically, is Yozo himself.

Both Naoji and Yozo are blind to the psychological fact
that "it is not impossible to be a man,"47 and that it is not
impossible to have a self. They cannot see behind the brutal
forces of society and their helpless deterministic view of
personal weaknesses, into a world of objective nature to which
they might hopefully give themselves. Instead, they look to
death as the solution to all that is intolerable in their lives.48

The discussion of Naoji and Yozo thus far has been on
the literal level; that is, the critical analysis has been
primarily focused on their problems of selfhood from the points

49

of view of psychology and sociology. Naoji and Yozo as

 

47 Wylie Sypher, Loss g: the Self lg Modern Literature
and Art (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 164-165.

48 An autobiographical comment can be made here about
Dazai's own suicide and his popularity as a writer. Yamagishi
Gaishi in his chapter on "The Smiling Death Face" (Ningen Dazai
Osamu A Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo,196§7 mentions that in 1948, the
year Dazai committed suicide with his mistress, many young people
were grieved by the death of this modern author. Yamagishi sur-
mises that it was this spectacular suicide which attracted many
young readers to Dazai's works later on, particularly those who
were caught up in the uncertainties and anxieties of the war-torn
years of Japan. Yamagishi's premise is that they undoubtedly found
in Dazai a spokesman for their own loss of identity as citizens of
a nation suffering a shattering defeat in a war which they believed
carried their pride and honor.

49 The discussion of the selfhood of Naoji and Yozo thus
far has centered around them as revealing their problems in their

 

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39

protagonists, however, do not merely hold the readers' inte—
rest as realistic portrayals of individuals who are particu-
larized by their psychological and socio-cultural problems.
They are more than individuals in that they hold dramatic
significance as literary types that are a part of a larger
tradition in modern literature. These protagonists fit into
the literary tradition of the superfluous hero and the under- L-

ground man, or the more general type of the anti-hero.

'. “IL—a. “---- -

Modern literature has crystallized the creation of the

fi‘r' .v 12x.

superfluous man or the underground man to the extent that although
he is not a stereotype exactly, he is capable of undergoing
certain well-cut definitions. Marleigh Grayer Ryan, for

example, uses the term "superfluous hero" in a sense that

is restricted "to characters in fiction of the period from

50 although she

the mid—nineteenth century to the present,"
notes the possibility of categorizing many earlier heroes of
both European and Japanese literature as superfluous or posi-
tive.

Characters are classified as superfluous, says Miss

Ryan, in that they are "failures in life." The superfluous

hero is the man who lacks all the qualities of the positive

 

notebook confessional. It is of interest here to find that Edward
Seidensticker posed the question of why "the Japanese should have

put relatively so much more emphasis upon confession and lyricism
and so much less upon meaty drama and narrative than we have" in

his article "The Unshapen Ones," (Japan Quarterly [il:196fiz p. 189).
He suggests that the answer to this question can be supplied by
sociologists and psychologists. Caudill and Doi (See supra, p.390)

in their psychoanalytic study of Japanese patients have observed that
the Japanese generally have a difficult time expressing their perso-
nal problems verbally and find it easier to write in notebooks.

50 Marleigh Grayer Ryan, Japan's First Modern Novel(New York:

 

hero who

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4O
hero who is "the man of action, assertion, and aggressiveness;"
the positive hero is a conglomerate type who "sets a goal for
himself -- economic, political, moral, or emotional --" and

51 In

proceeds to move toward its successful attainment.
Maslow's psychology of being, the positive hero can be seen as
one who moves toward self-actualization. The superfluous man,
on the other hand, is blatantly non-actualizing in his drama-
tic portrayal. If he attempts to lead others, circumstances
thwart his efforts; when he falls in love, there is little
chance of fruition; when he thinks he has found a cause or
philosophic system which he might believe in, he will eventually
find it deficient or reject it completely.

The superfluous hero's personality is generally one
of potential attractiveness, and he is usually both sensitive,
intelligent, and artistic. However, his inevitable affinity
for either material or spiritual failure may so cloud his out-
look on life that he appears not only stupid and unsympathe-

tic to others, but also even to himself. Miss Ryan gives a

composite portrait of the superfluous hero in the following:

The superfluous hero has become a symbol of
the sensitive, intellectual, or artistic man
who lives outside the mainstream of modern
life. He cannot find faith or philosophy or
love in his world because the old beliefs have

 

Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 178. The term "superfluous
hero" became widespread in Russian and world literature after
Turgenev's story, "The Diary of a Superfluous Man," was published
in 1850.

51 Ibid., p. 179.

 

‘.a!\
.¢\
\1.

1..-

\

 

41

proved mortal and the new ones are not yet
acceptable. The faith he seeks may be reli—
gious, intellectual, or emotional. The love

he needs will take him from his confined
universe, that is, from himself, and bring

him closer to other people or even to one

other person. He must learn to give -- to

a cause, to an ideal, or to a person. He

must learn to sympathize, to see why the
positive man wants what he wants. The super-
fluous man pictures all life as a reflection

of himself, as if he were somehow looking

at a distorted mirror in which his image filled
every inch. As a consequence he cannot fully
appreciate anyone else; in some cases he is

led to reject everyone completely. Some super-
fluous heroes are merely quiet and ineffectual;
others are completely mad, exhibiting the whole
range of classic paranoiac symptoms favored by
the literar world. Most are situated somewhere
in between.

 

Apart from the more general qualities contained in the
composite picture of the superfluous man are the more specific
elements brought out in the description of the underground man.
Charles Glicksberg's explication of the underground man53 is
that of a brooding intellectual who "dwells masochistically
on his sense of inferiority, the injuries he has been made to
suffer; he is a curious mixture of submissiveness and vindic-

54

tiveness, humiliated impotence and assertive pride." These

qualities are especially noticeable in one of the principal
manifestations of the underground man in modern literature:

55

the clown image.

 

52 Ibid., p. 182.

53 Charles I. Glicksberg, The Self in Modern Literature
(Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1963). The
underground man as a "literary type" is a descendant of the pro—
tagonist in Dostoevski's influential work, Notes from the Under-
ground, published in 1864.

4 Ibid., p. 182.
55 Frederick Hoffman, Samuel Beckett, p. 40. The three

 

haoji, f
\hiCh ta
others,
painful
over in'

himself

PCT loz

42

The clown figure is predominant in Dazai's novels;56

Naoji, for example, is a character with a compulsive masochism,
which takes the form of a distorted sense of "affection" for
others, that forces him to make a fool of himself no matter how
painful this role is to him. His sense of inferiority reaches
over into the one talent which he can claim to be genuine in

himself:

I will write my novel clumsily, deliberately
making a botch of it, just to see a smile of
genuine pleasure on my friend's face —- to
fall on my bottom and patter off scratching
my head. Oh, to see my friend's happy face!

What is this affection which would make me
blow the toy bugle of bad prose and bad

character to proclaim, "Here is the greatest
fool in Japan! Compared to me you're all
right -- be of good health!"5

For Yozo, the role of the clown is related to his egocentricity:

I am convinced that human life is filled with
many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity,

 

principal literary metaphors of the marginal self, says Hoffman,
are the Christ figure, the underground man, and the clown, a
general image which also includes the poet, the artist, the
acrobat, and the juggler.

56 An example of the autobiographical criticism common in
Japanese literary analysis is Nojima Hidekatsu's article "Dazai
IBungaku no Eikyo" (Dazai Kenkyu, ed. Okuno Takeo) which mentions
Dazadfls own need to please people as a direct influence on his
'utilization of the artificial poses and burlesques which his charac-
‘ters assume in his novels. Dazai's obsession with the artistic person-
ality'in his works, according to Nojima, was a manifestation of his
:rbtempts to seek out his personal salvation through his created acts.
lki'this sense, Nojima compares Dazai to Jean-Paul Sartre who also
sought "redemption" through the artistic mode.

57 The Setting Sun, p. 63.

‘rM e. L“”'_-- _. -'.P
‘a

43

truly splendid of their kind -- of people
deceiving one another without (strangely
enough) any wounds being inflicted, of
people who seem unaware even that they

are deceiving one another. But I have no
special interest in instances of mutual
deception. I myself spent the whole day
long deceiving human beings with my clown-
ing.

The contrast between the positive hero and the under—
ground man is seen most strikingly in their respective physical
appearances. One can point to the example of Prince Genji of
the twelfth—century novel, Egg Tglg gfi 92211 by Lady Murasaki
Shikibu. Genji, the epitome of the positive Japanese literary
hero, is renown for his physical attractiveness. In the novel,
Genji's command "over his world is symbolized by his charisma-
tic beauty, a 'radiance' illuminating every person anieverything
it encounters."59

On the other hand, the description of Yozo by the un-
named novelist who "edits" Yozo's notebooks is that of Yozo's

childhood photograph showing a child of incredible physical

repulsiveness:

It is a monkey. A grinning monkey—face. The
smile is nothing more than a puckering of
ugly wrinkles. The photograph reproduces an
expression so freakish, and at the same time
so unclean and even nauseating, that your
impulse is to say, "What a wizened, hideous
little boy!"60

 

58 fig Longer Human, p. 37.
59 Earl Miner, "Some Thematic and Structural Features of
Genj_i Monogatari," Monumenta Nipponica (XXIV:1969), p. 6.

60 fig Longer Human, p. 14.

44

A second photograph reveals Yozo as a youth who is "extraordi-
narily handsome," but whose expression produces "an unpleasant
sensation of complete artificiality," an impression of one not
"belonging to a living human being." The viewer concludes: "I
have never seen a young man whose good looks were so baffling."61

Besides his masochism and his lack of physical appeal,
the underground man is, in Glicksberg's words, a "bitter out—
cast, a denizen of the universe of the absurd, unable to make
any sense of the world in which he lives."62 He is pathetically
out of touch with reality, a man who feels left out of the circle
of ordinary human discourse. Yozo is an instance of one who lives
in "hell" because he feels that there is a secret key, forever

hidden from him by others or by circumstances, to surviving in

the world:

I find it difficult to understand the kind
of human being who lives, or who is sure he
can live, purely, happily, serenely while
engaged in deceit. Human beings never did
teach me that abstruse secret. If I had only
known that one thing I should never have had
to dread human beings so, nor should I have
opposed myself to human life, nor tasted
such torments of hell every night.

The “universe of the absurd," the world which Dazai's
protagonists conceive of as being "out of joint" is only partly

the real world; it is also partly a world which they, as selfi

 

61 Ibid., p. 15.

62 Glicksberg, gp. cit., p. xiii.

63 .119 14.02.8331 m, pp. 37-38.

‘I" L.

 

 

 

 

45
conscious creatures of imagination, fashion. Hoffman cogently

explains what happens in the "soul" of the underground man:

In effect, the underground of the narrator

is his soul, the quality and character of

his soul; it is the extreme of ugly intro-
spection. Instead of projecting beyond it,

he has introjected, finding in consciousness,
in sensitivity, a value in itself, and thus
welcoming the "disease" an over—reaching con-
sciousness stimulates.

Language plays a large part in the underground man's
world of extreme self-consciousness. For the underground man,

"the Quality of the self is contained within the language it

65

uses." The inability to verbalize a simple phrase may be a

portent of "hell," as it is for Naoji:

A sensation of burning to death. And excru—
ciating though it is, I cannot pronounce even
the simple words "it hurts." Do not try to
shrug off this portent of a hell unparalleled,
unique in the history of man, bottomless!

Naoji mistakenly equates strength with coarseness in language

usage and soon discovers that others are offended by his condescen-

ding affectation:67

I wanted to become coarse, to be strong --
no, brutal. I thought that was the only way

 

64 Hoffman, pp. cit., pp. 30-31.

65 Ibid., p. 69.

66 The Settipg Sun, p. 62.

67 Yasuoka Shotaro, another autobiographical critic, relates
Dazai's own concern with language and its effect on his literary
style in the article "Mijika na Kotoba" (Dazai Kenkyu, ed. Okuno
Takeo): "In order to avoid an exaggerated style, Dazai sought to
write novels using the language of the self. This fact makes one

46

I could qualify myself as a "friend of the
people."

I became coarse. I learned to use coarse
language. But it was half -- no, sixty
percent -- a wretched imposture, an odd
form of petty trickery. As far as the
"people" were concerned, I was a stuck up
prig who put them all on edge with my af-
fected airs.

Yozo's use of language comes in the form of a game

played with his friend, in which they are to categorize accu-
rately whether certain nouns are tragic or comic. The success
of the game hinges upon the understanding that the players

alone possess the insight necessary to grasp the transcendent

significance of words:

we began a guessing game of tragic and
comic nouns. This game, which I myself
had invented, was based on the proposi-
tion that just as nouns could be divided
into masculine, feminine and neuter, so
there was a distinction between tragic
and comic nouns. For example, this sys-
tem decreed that steamship and steam
engine were both tragic nouns, while

 

doubt if Dazai's language usage is really the prose of a novel

and not merely the language of Dazai's self. As soon as one

becomes overly conscious of using language, no matter how moderate—
ly or reservedly this language is used, it comes through as the
grossest of exaggerations. It is precisely for this reason that
Dazai's style is weak and comical. Dazai himself probably retained
many doubts and uncertainties as to what type of language he should
use, and it is this uncertainty and insecurity Dazai had as a
writer that seems most embarrasing to me." (My translation.)

68 The Setting Sun, pp. 154—155.

 

 

 

47
streetcar and bus were comic. Persons
who failed to see why this was true were
obviously unqualified to discuss art, and
a playwright who included even a single
tragic noun in a comedy showed himself a
failure if for no other reason. The same
held qually true of comic nouns in tra-
gedies. 9

The ambiguously esoteric and stringent rules of the game have
the effect of excluding others from playing it. Yozo, as the
originator of the game is put into the position of judging whe-
ther people are qualified or unqualified as artists or even as
human beings, by their ability to use words. It is clear that
the game affords Yozo the opportunity to vindicate his feelings

of not being qualified as a human being on the world's terms.

The superfluous hero, or the underground man, is notable
for his passivity as an individual. From the point of view of
the stylistic analysis of literature, the portrayal of the
passive protagonist is a characteristic feature of the impres-
sionistic or lyrical style in fiction.70

Naoji and Yozo as non-actualizing individuals unable
to act positively in their own interests are unquestionably

the passive protagonists of the impressionistic novel. Dazai's

use of the notebook form to present the inner life of his main

 

69

70 I have found that the term lyrical novel can be used
interchangeably with the impressionistic novel. Many of the ele-
ments of the lyrical novel discussed by Ralph Freedman in The
Lyrical Novel [New Jersey: Princeton University Press,1957)—Ean
be used to describe the mode of Impressionism in fiction. The
major characteristics are: the presentation of the passive prota-
gonist's self in a "self-reflexive" method, inclusion of subcon—
scious and conscious imagery, a crystallized point of view of a

Ng Longer Human, p. 141.

TnTJ '3“ h&- _ ....“—

48

characters is also a feature of the impressionistic style;
it is an aesthetically effective device in that the notebooks
contain the protagonists' rhetoric of subjectivism, a rhetoric
which carries with it an hypnotic power on its user. That is,
the protagonists come to believe ineluctably in their impotence,
their inability to find joy in their lives, even as they write
about it. The mode of presenting the protagonists as self-
defeating individuals through their own writings about themselves
increases the credibility of the novels' thematic structure of
the failure of the self.

The notebook style not only illustrates the Impressionism

in The Setting Sun and Ng Longer Human, but it also serves as a

 

convenient stylistic vehicle for the two types of irony present
in these novels: the irony of the protagonist and the irony of
the reliable and unreliable narrators.

The protagonist in the ironic mode is best defined by

Northrop Frye:

If inferior in power or intelligence to our-
selves, so that we have the sense of looking
down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or
absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic

(mode. This is still true when the reader feels
that he is or might be in the same situation,
as the situation is being judged by the norms
of a greater freedom.7

 

 

sensitive protagonist who perceives his immediate surroundings
in a pattern of images or symbols corresponding to his inner
moods, and monologues. The impressionistic or lyrical novel
differs from straight narrative fiction in that the "inner "
and the "outer" worlds of the protagonist are reconciled in
some way, and fulfill adequately the aesthetic exigencies of
literary art.

71 Northrop Frye, Anatomy gf Criticism (New Jersey:Princeton
University Press, 1957), p. 34.

 

 

 

 

49

The portrayal of Naoji and Yozo in Dazai's novels is ironic
in that they are caught up in the dilemma of the self in society.

C. David Mead72

points out that Naoji represents the ironic con-
temporary image of a man who is able to survive and come away
from the war but who cannot live in a peace time situation.
Naoji feels, too, that it is a disgrace to belong to the upper
class, but he cannot successfully meld himself with the common
people. Yozo, Mead continues, is the ironic character of the
contemporary novel who rebels against the culture of his time.
He can find only distorted or no values in society; and he
believes that man's fate lies only in increasing his insecuri-
ty and extending his directionlessness.

The desires and beliefs of the ironic protagonists are
made to appear larger than the reality they are actually found
in. They speak of living in:a terrifying, salvationless hell
in life. Their eyes turn to self-induced death as the only
solution to their miseries, which may be as petty as Naoji's

73

inability to "quarrel with people over money," or Yozo's
humiliation over his three copper coins. The slightest offense
takes on tragic proportions. Frye notes that this phenomenon
in literature is part of tragic irony which views life from
below, "from the moral and realistic perspective of the state

of experience"; tragic irony also

stresses the humanity of its heroes, minimizes
the sense of ritual inevitability in tragedy,

 

72 c. David Mead, "Dazai to Aironi Keishiki," Gengo pp
Bungei, (V:1963).

73 The Setting Sun, p. 159.

"‘1“: :i. “a

50
supplies social and psychological explanations
for catastrophe, and makes as much as possible
of human misery seem, in Thoreau's phrase, "super-
fluous and evitable."
Such tragic irony differs from satire in that there
is no attempt to make fun of the character, but only

to bring out clearly the "all too human" as distinct
from the heroic, aspects of tragedy.74

Yozo and Naoji, whatever their faults as individuals
may be, are far from being non-human; in fact, they carry certain
virtues as human beings to such excesses that they become ineffec-
tual. In Ng Longer Hgggg, the madam of the Kyobashi bar, who
knew Yozo and was entrusted with his notebooks, makes a telling
statement about Yozo's excessive and defective humanity: "When
human beings get that way, they're no good for anything.75 The
qualities of awareness, sensitivity, and gentleness are no longer
positive traits for Naoji and Yozo; they are ultimately destroyed
by these traits instead of being able to use them to grow as
healthy selves.

Dazai's use of the convention of the person or persons
entrusted with the notebooks of the deceased protagonist-writer
brings us to the problem of the subjective outsider who comments
or narrates ironically on what he has found in the writings. In
order to clarify the problem in part, we might refer to Wayne
Booth's definition of the reliable and unreliable narrators in
fiction:

For lack of better terms, I have called a
narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts

 

74 Frye, gp. cit., p. 237.

75 Ng Longer Human, p. 176.

 

51

in accordance with the norms of the work
(which is to say, the implied author'g
norms), unreliable when he does not.7

 

In order to judge, then, whether Kazuko, the narrator of
Naoji's notebooks, and the unnamed writer and the madam of
the Kyobashi bar, narrators of Yozo's notebooks, are reliable

or unreliable narrators, we must try to determine what the norms

If. I?"

of The Setting Sun and Ng Longer Human are. we have seen that

there are no objective norms in the notebooks in both novels;

D'h« -..- ...-o In.

that they contain solely intensely subjective observations of E,
the outer and inner worlds of their writers. The manner in
which the narrators react to the protagonists, therefore, be-
comes the criteria by which we must judge their reliability or
unreliability.

Kazuko in Egg Setting Sgg is a complexly ironic reliable
narrator. She is totally sympathetic to Naoji's plight as a
failure and a victim in the world; in fact, she might rightly
be called the feminine alter ego of Naoji. In explaining to
Uehara her plans for a private revolution of love in a cold and
untrustworthy world, Kazuko discloses the extent to which she

identifies with Naoji:

I am convinced that those people whom the
world considers good and respects are all
liars and fakes. I do not trust the world.
My only ally is the tagged dissolute. The
tagged dissolute. That is the only cross

on which I wish to be crucified. Though ten
thousand people criticize me, I can throw
in their teeth my challenge: Are you not all

 

76 Wayne 0. Booth, The Rhetoric 2; Fiction (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 158-159.

 

52

the more dangerous for being without tags?

Do you understand?

There is no reason in love, and I have gone
rather too far in offering you these rational-
seeming arguments. I feel as if I am merely
parroting my brother.

The only ostensible difference between Kazuko and Naoji is
that Kazuko has the ability to focus on a goal in her life;
she says, "This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born

78

for love and revolution." However, her desire to realize

love and revolution in her life is accompanied by a strangely
disturbing emotional resolution; she, like Naoji, does not
really come to terms with her self and her world. Instead,
Kazuko feels that she must plunge herself into the role of a

calculating revolutionist:

Call it low—minded of me, if you will, I
must survive and struggle with the world
in order to accomplish my desires. Now
that it was clear that Mother would soon
die, my romanticism and sentimentality
were gradually vanishing, and I felt as
though I were turning isto a calculating,
unprincipled creature.7

Ironically, Kazuko at the end of the novel is far from

becoming "a calculating, unprincipled creature"; she remains a
highly emotional and sentimental individual, incapable of think-

ing clearly about the many contradictions which her resolution

encompasses. In her letter to Uehara explaining why she will

hear his child, there is a confusing array of sentimentality and

 

77 The Settigg Sun, pp. 97-98.

78 Ibid., p. 114.

791bid., p. 125.

(For; “a- ...... .... “... ......”
..‘n ‘ ‘ '

53

condescension towards a man she claims to love unconditionally:

Recently I have come to understand why such
things as war, peace, unions, trade, politics
exist in the world. I don't suppose you know.
That's why you will always be unhappy. I'll
tell you why -- it is so that women will give
birth to healthy babies.

From the first I never set much stock by your
character or your sense of responsibility. The
only thing in my mind was to succeed in the ad—

venture of my wholehearted love. Now that my L
desire has been fulfilled, there is in my heart h
the stillness of a marsh in a forest. 1
I think I have won. .
Even if Mary gives birth to a child who is not 1
her husband's, if she has a shining pride, they
become a holy mother and child.

 

Kazuko, like Naoji, is a creature of her romantic imagination.
She seeks an identity outside of herself; and fundamentally the
accomplishment of her "moral revolution," to give birth to the
child of the man she loves, is a negative act. It is her private
rebellion against external forces which she cannot control, a
rebellion which mirrors her insecurity and her bitterness towards
her frustrations in life.

The unnamed writer who gains access to Yozo's notebooks
from the madam in fig Longer Human is an ironic unreliable nar-
rator. He merely reacts subjectively to Yozo, to the pictures
of him which have a "genuinely chilling, foreboding quality"
about them; his reactions are to the negative aspects of Yozo
as a physical being. He says of a photograph: "it rubs against

me the wrong way, and makes me feel so uncomfortable that in

 

80 Ibid., p. 172.

the on:
novel,
ooteho
do do
harm

hush

 

 

reliabl
‘L.
.U‘; COD

1. .
”3193}

8/
82

53
E1131 p t
\h (1...

54

the end I want to avert my eyes."81 At the conclusion of the

novel, he tells the madam, "If everything written in these

notebooks is true, I probably would have wanted to put him

in an insane asylum myself if I were his friend."82 The

narrator's completely unsympathetic attitude to Yozo as a

human being prompts one to doubt the absolute validity of

hisjjudgment of character. 1
The madam of the Kyobashi bar frequented by Yozo is

probably the most reliable narrator of all. Her disarmingly t

succinct but penetrating double view of Yozo as a failure in L

life because of his excessive self-consciousness ("when human I

beings get that way, they're no good for anything") and as an

individual with potentialities for living with himself and

others ("he was a good boy, an angel") is the truest picture

the reader can get of Yozo. However, she is still an ironic

narrator in that she places the entire blame for Yozo's failure

on his father ("It's his father's fault") when, in fact, as

83 there is not sufficient evi-

Donald Keene observes correctly
dence in the novel to place the source of Yozo's condition total-
ly upon his relationship with his father.

The irony of the protagonist and the irony of the
reliable and unreliable narrators in Dazai's novels transform

the confessions into an intricate work of fictional art. Psycho-

logical realism, in the form of the immediate notebook rendering

 

81 Ng Longer Human, p. 16.

82 Ibid., p. 177.

83 Donald Keene, "The Artistry of Dazai Osamu," East-West
Review, (1:1965), p. 252.

55
of the protagonists' feelings and perceptions, is combined
with a problematic view of life through the narrators' reactions

and commentary. The Setting Sun and Ng Longer Human do not

 

contain well-defined norms as such; rather they are novels of
experiences which the readers must be willing to share subjec-
tively at first, and later to evaluate from as objective a
position as possible.

An objective approach to the novel may involve the

analysis of the author's use of symbolism. The Setting Sun

 

and Ng Longer Hgggg contain a number of symbols which might

be analyzed in the light of Dazai's successful or unsuccessful
use of aesthetic structure in his novels. It is helpful to
first make a distinction between the symbol in the realistic
novel (the realistic symbol) and the symbol in the symbolic
novel (the traditional symbol). Ursula Brumm shows the dif-

ference in the two types:

[The realistic novel7 seeks meaning in actual
egperience and is content to be taught by it;
[the symbolic novel7 imposes a particular meaning
on reality. Correspondingly, the symbol in the
realistic novel is always causally related to
its meaning -- the symbol always represents the
hidden cause; whereas in the symbolic novel it
is a transcendent embodiment of the intended
meaning: for example, a lamb can stand for an
innocent victim or a bird with a broken wing
for a frustrated longing.84

Symbolism, according to Miss Brumm, becomes questionable when

it is imposed upon a novel which treats themes concerning

 

84 Ursula Brumm, "Symbolism and the Novel," in The Theor
g: the Novel, ed. Philip Stevick (New York:The Free Press, 1967;,
p. 359.

 

56
contemporary man and his dilemma in a world of facts and real
problems; when this happens, there is a "discrepancy between
theme and technique."85
Probably the most questionable technique in Dazai's

novels is his use of Christianity as an all-dominating symbol

as we see in The Setting Sun.86 The concrete and direct refer-

ences to Christian symbols are used by Kazuko the narrator. The ‘
snake in the garden of Kazuko's home is undoubtedly the snake in

the garden of Eden. Her mother dies soon after she dreams of

the snake whose eggs Kazuko had once destroyed. Kazuko's mother's

 

expression in death reminds her of Mary in a Pieta.87 Kazuko
herself tries to relate the meaning of her own life to the teach-

ings of Jesus:

I cannot go on living unless now I cling
with all my force to love. The words of
teaching spoken by Jesus to his twelve
disciples, when he was about to send them
forth to expose the hypocrisies of the
scribes and Pharisees and the men of autho—
rity of this world and to proclaim to all

 

85 Ibid., p. 366.

86 Donald Keene (gp. 933,, p. 248) makes an interesting
translator's observation on Dazai's use of Christianity: "In
The Setting Sun ... there is such excessive quotation of the
Bible that this was the one place where I felt it necessary to
abridge in making a translation. The quotations and frequent
references to Christianity at no point suggest sincere belief
or even the desire to believe. Dazai is intrigued by Christianity,
and he is delighted to discover appropriate passages to insert in
his books, but whatever degree of faith he may have attained in
private life, in his writings Christianity is a disconcerting and
not very important factor. It failed to give his works the addi-
tional depth he sought."

87 The Setting Sun, p. 128.

57

men without the least hesitation the true

love of God, are not entirely inappropriate

in my case as well.
The snake as a symbol of evil and death, the mother as a figure
of purity and goodness, and Kazuko as a contemporary disciple
of the teachings of Jesus all appear as forced and unconvincing
symbolism in a novel which has its roots in the realistic por-
trayal of the self and society. What leads to this conclusion ‘
is the idea that if Kazuko and her mother are to be linked in a
the transcendent sense as Christian figures, then Naoji, who ';
is in the eyes of Kazuko a beautiful "little victim,"89 too L
must be included; the implication is that Naoji is a type of
Christ figure, "crucified" by the society he lived in.90 However,
this logical conclusion is impossible to accept, for the Naoji
0f the notebooks is far from Christ-like; he is only too real as
a victim of his own defective humanity.

Dazai is much more successful when he uses symbols in
the

realistic sense. The mask is an example of such a use.

Upon learning that his mother's tongue hurts her, Naoji tells

 

\
88 Ibid., p. 129.
89 Ibid., pp. 175-176.
90

, Sako Junichiro in his article on "Dazai to Kirisutok o"
“Ll—1.1m Bungaku Kansho Koza, Vol. 19, ed. Kamei Katsuichiro Tokyo:

Eadokafira Shoten, 19527) suggests that Dazai's intense preoccupa-
{ion Yl‘bh Christianity came from a deeply personal consciousness

cesgullt and sin. Sako speculates that deep down in Dazai was a

fi re 'PO encounter Christ and possibly to incorporate the Christ—
gure 111 his protagonists. However, Sako concludes, Dazai was

luilfiimately unable to realize this encounter both in his personal
and in his art.

 

58

her 'tkmi.he is sure the pain is "psychological" and prescribes
a gauze mask soaked in a Rivanol solution for her to wear.

Kazuko is offended by Naoji's suggestion and demands to know

whai; :sort of treatment the mask is. Naoji replies, "It's called

the zaeesthetic treatment."91 As a realistic symbol, the mask is

cogeirrtly'used for it makes a significant comment on what Naoji

has laeaen using in his own life: an aesthetic mask worn in the

preswerice of others to cover up his "psychological" disorder.

No Longer Human contains several successful realistic

Syuflac>].s, two of which will be discussed briefly here. Paintings,

for- 3(c>zo, represent two symbolic approaches to life. They are

either the vehicle through which the "frightening ghosts" of the
true self can be seen, or they become modes by which one can

hidéi liimself in innocuous conventional portrayals of objects:

There are some people whose dread of human
beings is so morbid that they reach a point
where they yearn to see with their own eyes
monsters of ever more horrible shapes. Painters
who have had this mentality, after repeated
wounds and intimidations at the hands of the
apparitions called human beings, have often come
to believe in phantasms -- they plainly saw mons—
‘hers in broad daylight, in the midst of nature.
lknd they did not fob people off with clowning;
‘bhey did their best to depict these monsters

;just as they had appeared.92

IEn school drawing classes I also kept secret
Iny'"ghost-sty1e" techniques and continued to
Ipaint as before in the conventional idiom of

pretty things .93

fleSides paintings, the symbol of the toad is used realistically

 

\
91 The Setting Sun, p. 60.

‘9
2 & Longer Human, pp. 53-54.
Ibid., p. 56.

r‘fi“ A. I t a...“ do“. an",
.
it“... ,, f‘

59

in sliowing how the animal's lowliness illustrates the measure

of'Yk)zo's self-contempt. After reading a poem by Guy-Charles Cros

in tvtrich.the image of a toad appears, Yozo says:

The toad.
(That is what I was —- a toad. It was not a

question of whether or not society tolerated

me, whether or not it ostracized me. I was

an animal lower than a dog, lower than a cg}.

A toad. I sluggishly moved -- that's all.)
The .iinage here is relevant and illuminating. As one of the
metaphors for Yozo's conception of his disturbed selfhood, the
toaél :successfully relates theme to artistic technique.

My intention here was not to analyze all of the symbols
in ])adzai's two novels; instead I attempted to show how Dazai's
interest in aesthetic structure in his works amplified or

diminished his artistic presentation of the theme of failure

in 111:3 protagonists, Naoji and Yozo.

 

 

94 Ibid., p. 122.

firm. 3...; u..._. w

CHAPTER THREE

THE MOBIUS STRIP: MISHIMA

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in the preface to his classic
sttuiy of sexual psychopathology, makes an intriguing statement

aborrt the literary artist as a psychologist:

The poet is the better psychologist, for he
is swayed rather by sentiment than by reason,
and always treats his subject in a partial
fashion.

This statement is especially relevant in our consideration of
MiSIIiJna Yukio's novel, Kgggg ng Kokuhaku (Confessions gf g flggfi),
written in 1949, which is told from the point of view of a homo-
sexllafll in Japanese society. The protagonist is a nameless first
Per-Son narrator who is both intelligent and articulate, with the
abiJ-ifty'to describe with absolute candor his sexual dilemma and
its :rwalationship to his selfhood. Halfway through the novel,
whicll is entirely an "autobiographical" narrative, the protago—
niSt engages in a lengthy analysis of his feelings which accompa-

nylnigg ‘varied sexual fantasies and daydreams. He concludes his

\

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychgpathia Sexualis (New York:

1965) , p. xiii.

6O

61
self—disquisition with what appears to be an unremittingly
rational understanding of self:

And yet my powers of self-analysis were con-
structed in a way that defied definition, like
one of those hoops made by giving a single

twist to a strip of paper and then pasting the
ends together. What appeared to be the inside

was the outside, and what appeared the outside
was the inside. Although in later years my
self-analysis traversed the rim of the hoop

more slowly, when I was twenty it was doing
nothing but spin blindfolded through the orbit

of my emotions, and lashed on by the excitement
attending the war's final disastrous stages, the
speed of the revolutions had become enough to
make me all but completely lose my sense of ba-
lance. There was no time for a careful considera-
tion of causes and effects, no time for either
contradictions or correlations. So the contradic—
tions spun on through the orbit just as they were
rubbing together with a speed that no eye could
comprehend.

This; penetrating use of the Mobius Strip as a metaphor for his
modle of insight into the nature of his self is deceptive, how-
eVSEI’, for at the end of the novel, the protagonist is seen as
an, iarrevocable captive of his homosexual tendencies. He has
literally given up any attempt at self-understanding, and has
beC‘OIne completely immersed in the feelings and emotions engen-
dered by his fantasy world.
The second novel by Mishima which we shall treat here,

alsC’ <ieals with the psychopathology of an individual caught up

i113,151 existence of fantasy and distorted perceptions of reality.

\

2 Confessions gf g Mask, pp. 177-178.

 

PW“&A .—
L _

62

Kinkakuji, or The Temple g_f_ the Golden Pavilion,3 was written

 

 

in 1959 after an incident which horrified the Japanese nation.

Ihi 1950, a young Zen Buddhist acolyte, frustrated by his physi-
ca]. ugliness and obsessed with a pathological envy of the beauty
of 'the ancient structure, set fire to the five-hundred-year—old
Golxien Pavilion in Kyoto, a monument which had been designated

as :1 historical and religious National Treasure by the Japanese
GOV1xrnment. The novelistic form of Golden Pavilion is similar

to 'that of Confessions gf g_Mgg§; Mizoguchi, the acolyte, narrates

his <3wn story and presents a portrait of himself as an individual

caPaJDIe of rational self-analysis:

As can easily be imagined, a youth like myself
came to entertain two opposing forms of power
wishes. In history I enjoyed the descriptions

of tyrants. I saw myself as a stuttering taci—
turn tyrant; my retainers would hang on every
expression that passed over my face and would
live both day and night in fear and trembling

of me. There is no need to justify my cruelty

in clear, smooth words. My taciturnity alone was
sufficient to justify every manner of cruelty.

0n the one hand I enjoyed imagining how one by
one I would wreck punishment on my teachers and
schoolmates who daily tormented me; on the other
hand, I fancied myself as a great artist, endowed
with the clearest vision -- a veritable sovereign
of the inner world. My outer appearance was poor,
but in this way my inner world became richer than
anyone else's. Was it not natural that a young
boy who suffered from an indelible drawback like

\

 

Will 3 The translated title The Temple gf the Golden Pavilion

onl hereinafter be designated as Golden Pavilion, which is not

theyJa more economical form, but in some ways a more accurate one;

Iknm3£119anese term Kinkaknji literally means "Golden Pavilion Temple."

as" 3' 1n.the text of the novel, Kinkakuji is translated either
golden temple," or simply "temple."

 

 

 

 

 

:3

H .

tn
T1

of his

unattl

the HE

self-:

63

mine should have come to think that he was
a secretly chosen being? I felt as though
somewhere in this world a mission awaited
me of which I myself still knew nothing.4

This Imssage illustrates the lucidity of Mizoguchi's explanation

of 1115 retreat into fantasy as a compensation for his physical

Inuittractiveness and his fundamentally passive character. Like

thee.narrator in Confessions g: g Mask, the limits of Mizoguchi's
sele-analysis and his power to overcome his personal deficiencies

in ii realistic way are defined by his emotional commitment to his

belcief that something outside of himself holds the secret of his

life and selfhood.
The reasons that the protagonists give for their reliance

on iTantasy comprise an important part of both novels. The inci-

Pierrt psychopathology in their family backgrounds is manifested

in-‘tlme narrators' explication of their early life patterns. The

 

iSCJIELted_and pampered childhood of the narrator of Confessions g:

9 §§1§§§ is associated with his fascination for fairy tales and

gauxibr theatrical entertainment. He is, from the very beginning,

rmnC>tHely indifferent to the world of objective occurrences, from

"the eruption of a volcano" or "the insurrection of an army,"
to 1"125.43 grandmother's fits of illness and the quarrels of his

fami 1y:

I could not believe that the world was any
more complicated than a structure of building

 

\
4 Golden Pavilion, p. 6.

 

‘hla..A

64

blocks, nor that the so-called "social community,"
which I must presently enter, could be more daz-
zling than the world of fairy tales. Thus, without
my being aware of it, one of the determinants of
my life had come into operation. And because of my
struggles against it, from the beginning my every
fantasy was tinged with despair, strangely complete
and in itself resembling passionate desire.

Forfloidden by his grandmother to play with the neighborhood boys
becuause of his frail health, surrounded by indulgent but at the
seine time restrictive women servants, he learns how to find plea-
surwa in his isolation, in reading and drawings, activities which
soorl nurture the arousement and expression of his sexuality in
the :form of onanism and daydreams of inversion. Later, as an
adolxescent, he makes a plangent observation concerning his homo—
SQXEuil tendencies and his unsuccessful attempts to establish

heterosexual interests:

In time m obsession with the idea of kissing

[a woman became fixed upon a single pair of
lips. Even here I was probably inspired by
nothing more than a desire to give my dreams
pretensions to a nobler pedigree. As I have ...
neither desire nor any other emotion in regard

to those lips, I nevertheless tried desperately
to convince myself that I did desire them. In
short, I was mistaking as primary desire some-
thing that actually was only the irrational and
secondary desire of wanting to believe I desired
them. I was mistaking the fierce, impossible
desire of not wanting to be myself for the sexual
desire of a man of the world, or the desire that
arises from his being himself.

\

Confessions g£ g Mask, p. 15.

6 Ibid., p. 119.

 

.. a”. ' u '\ .'.- I 'm; c-1'-‘ V'FT'T‘.’

65
His efforts to convince himself of his love for the sister of
a classmate contain a desperation which leads to a fatiguing
conflict within himself and leads him further into the practice

mf onanism and a subsequent sense of extreme self—deception:

Between the intervals of these mental efforts I
was making toward artificiality I would sometimes
be overwhelmed with a paralyzing emptiness and,
in order to escape, would turn shamelessly to a
different sort of daydream. Then immediately I
would become quick with life, would become myself, ,
and would blaze toward strange images. Moreover, E
the flame thus created would remain in my mind as 3
an abstract feeling, divorced from the reality of L
the image that had caused it, and I would distort ‘
my interpretation of the feeling until I believed ’
it to be evidence of passion inspired by the girl

herself. ... Thus once again I deceived myself.7

Unalile to resolve the contradiction in himself, the narrator
mmrecrver cannot accept the fact that he is capable of holding
bottl genuine and superficial feelings. The escapist tendency,
59911 :Ln his immediate recourse to physical self—satisfaction,
becc>nues a characteristic gesture for him in times of stress. He
is 1Inable to come to terms with an "internal locus of evaluation"
Of Self, to use a phrase of psychologist Carl Rogers, for his
choixzea of action. Rogers explains that an important part of the
Pr°c<esss of "becoming a person" relates "to the source or locus

0f c11C>ices and decisions, or evaluative judgments":

The individual increasingly comes to feel that
this locus of evaluation lies within himself.
Less and less does he look to others for appro-
val or disapproval; for standards to live by;

\
7 Ibid., p. 121.

66

for decisions and choices. He recognizes that

it rests within himself to choose; that the

only question which matters is, "Am I living

in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and

which truly expresses me?"8

Throughout his confessions, the narrator shows that
his; locus of evaluation is far from an internal one; he is
coristmntly under the unconscious pressure of the belief that
he :is an abnormality, not only in the eyes of his society, but
alsc) in his own stringent judgment of self. His introspection
leads him nowhere: "my tenacious uneasiness," he says, "concern—
ing what I called the basic condition of being a human being,
concerning what I called the positive human psychology, did
nothing but lead me around in endless circles of introspection."

COnwtiriced of his abnormality, then, he is doomed to lead a life

of unhappine s 5:

How would I feel if I were another boy? How
would I feel if I were a normal person? These
questions obsessed me. They tortured me, in-
stantly and utterly destroying even the one
splinter of happiness I had thought I possessed
for sure.

Tormented by self-doubts and trapped by a rationality

w ‘ - . . .
hlcll Ils divorced from hls emotions, the narrator cannot act

 

ontsixiee of his sexual fantasies. A psychological pattern observed

by "iililiam Caudill in the Japanese family of the emphasis on non-
\

8 Carl Rogers, 9n Becoming a Person (Boston: 1961), p. 119.

Confessions gf a Mask, p. 152.

 

‘ICD
Ibid., p. 152.

67

sexual satisfactions and an avoidance of sexual references and
physical displays of affection as a rule11 suggests that such
cultural restrictions have an adverse effect on the emotional
and social attitudes of Japanese youths. The narrator of
C£nfessions 91 _a_. Mis thus partly a product of his cultural
taboos. This realization, however, which might help him break
out of his "endless circle of introspection" about his "abnorma—
lity," is closed off to him, a fact which illustrates the degree
of pessimism which Mishima holds regarding the potential growth

in the protagoni st .

The explication which Mizoguchi, in Golden Pavilion,

 

gives regarding his obsessive relationship to the Golden Temple
is an object of his fantasies reveals both conscious and uncon-
scious understanding of the processes involved in his entangle-

ment. It is. his father, "a simple country priest, deficient in

"12

vocabulary, who nevertheless eloquently conveys to Mizoguchi

his feelings about the beauty of the temple. Shortly before the
father dies, he takes Mizoguchi to entrust him to the care of

the Head Superior of the temple. Mizoguchi's first View of the
temple disappoints him, and it is not until much later that the

3emP1e becomes firmly established as an object of his fantasy:

After my return to Yasuoka, the Golden Temple,
which had disappointed me so greatly at first
sight, began to revivify its beauty within me

\

n J- 11 William Caudill, "Patterns of Emotion in Modern Japan,"
, W @3133, ed. R. Smith and R. Beardsley (Chicago:1962),

‘2 Golden Pavilion, p. 21.

 

 

68

day after day, until in the end it became a

more beautiful Golden Temple than it had been be—
fore I saw it. I could not say wherein this beau—
ty lay. It seemed that what had been nurtured in
my dreams had become real and could now in turn,
serve as an impulse for further dreams.‘I

The; inchoate merging of dream with reality is accompanied by
Mizoguchi's growing sense of being divorced from his own emotions;
he :feels no sorrow, for example, at his father's death. He finds,
tocr, that sadness is completely unrelated to a specific event or
motjhve: "When I am sad, sorrow attacks me suddenly and without

reason: it is connected with no particular event and with no

14

IMDti‘Teu" Life is seen not in terms of his human, inner rela-

tionship to it, but in the dreams and sensations of exaggerated

powers and external occurrences:

As I have already said, I was hopelessly weak
in human feeling. Father's death and Mother's
poverty hardly affected my inner life at all.
What I dreamed of was something like a huge
heavenly compressor that would bring down dis-
asters, cataclysms and superhuman tragedies,
that would crush beneath it all human beings
and all objects, irrespective of their ugli-
ness or their beauty. Sometimes the unusual
brilliance of the early spring sky appeared to
me like the light of the cool blade of some
huge axe that was large enough to cover the
entire earth. Then I just waited for the axe
to fall -- for it to fall with a speed that
‘would not even given one time to think.

Mlzoguchi reveals later in the novel that his mother had commit-

t
ed an adulterous and incestuous act in the presence of Mizoguchi

 

___‘-~‘_‘
13 Ibid., p. 29.
14

Ibid., p. 40.
15 Ibid., pp. 47-48.

“3'. 1‘. ‘4 F-jl—Tnn’ I” -§

69
841d.his father, who literally attempted to shield his son

:fxwam this fact.16 It is ostensibly this early exposure to
tlre ugliness of life that leads Mizoguchi to reject his emo-
15113ns and past and to view the beauty of the Golden Temple as
-t1Le only "reality" acceptable to him, as a model of order and
11agrmony which would, at a point of time in the future, help
-bc) eliminate the chaos and meaninglessness of his existence:

I felt no intimacy with anything in the world
except the Golden Temple; indeed, I was not

even on intimate terms with my own past experi-
ences. Yet one thing I knew was that among all
these experiences certain small elements --
elements that were not swallowed up in the dark
sea of time, elements that did not subside into
meaningless and interminable repetition —- would
be linked together and would come to form a cer-
tain sinister and disagreeable picture.

Which, then, were these particular elements? I
thought about it on and off. Yet these scattered,
shining, fragments of experience were even more
lacking in order and meaning than the shining
pieces of a broken beer bottle that one sees by
the roadside. I was unable to believe that these
fragments were the shattered pieces of what had
been in the past shaped as a thing of perfect
beauty. For, in their meaninglessness, in their
complete lack of order, in their peculiar un—
sightliness, each of these discarded fragments
still seemed to be dreaming of the future. Yes,
nwre fragments though they were, each lay there,
:fearlessly, uncannily, quietly, dreaming of the

\

G 1 16 Louise Duus suggests that a subsidiary theme of
E%—1223 Ihwilion concerns the relationship between Mizoguchi and
Mizh£ather; see her footnote to her study, "The Novel as Koan:
(X0111D8.Ynkio's The Temple 2: the Golden Pavilion," Critique
fath968)’ p. 129. Miss Duus says that the act of Mizoguchi's
does‘al‘ turns "the boy's vision inward into darkness, but he
or shnot know whether his father has acted out of compassion
a'Ine."

 

PM. i‘ no. “-.-__ ...—w
#53; E’
., k

70

future! Of a future that would never be cured or
restored, that could never be touched, of a truly

unprecedented future!

Indistinct reflections of this type sometimes gave
me a kind of lyrical excitement that I could not
help finding unsuitable for myself. On such occa-
sions, if by good chance there happened to be a
moon, I would take my flute and play it next to

the Golden Temple.17
Bui; biizoguchi is also able to particularize to some degree
the :feelings of repulsion he has towards the ugliness in his
lifWe. This is seen when he acknowledges the physical ugliness

0f IliJS mother and of the quality of life which she represents

to IliJn:

As I gazed at her soft sash, which hung down

in the back, I wondered what it was that made
IMother so particularly ugly. Then I understood.
What made her ugly was -- hope. Incurable hope
like an obstinate case of scabies, which lodges,
{damp and reddish, in the infected skin, produ-
cing a constant igching, and refusing to yield to

any outer force .

{The protagonists of Confessions gf'a Mask and Golden
lfilénlggigp, then, are capable of narrating the beginnings of their
fanteasszy life and even of expressing how this life becomes their

way ()1? escaping an unbearable reality. But their articulations

Of tlliazir past experiences and of where they are in the present

do nta-t; in any way help them to become self-actualizing individuals;
instead, they are shown as creatures increasingly driven by their
nemj '13<> nmintain the ideals of their fantasy, ideals WhiCh are

al
so as sociated with their images of themselves. Psychologist

\

.1
.7 Golden Pavilion, p. 156.
‘3 E3

 

Ibid., p. 200.

 

71
LKaren Horney gives a useful summary of the insidious inter-
iwarkings of fantasy and reality and the constant efforts

vdxich are exerted by the individual to increase this psycho—

pathology:

But daydreams, while important and revealing
when they occur, are not the most injurious

work of imagination. For a person is mostly
aware of the fact that he is daydreaming, i.e.,
imagining things which have not occurred or

are not likely to occur in the way he is ex-
periencing them in fantasy. At least it is

not too difficult for him to become aware of

the existence and the unrealistic character

of the daydreams. The more injurious work of
imagination concerns the subtle and compre-
hensive distortions of reality which he is

not aware of fabricating. The idealized self

is not completed in a single act of creation:
once produced, it needs continuing attention.
For its actualization the person must put in 19
an incessant labor by way of falsifying reality.

It :is interesting to note that the objects of the protagonists'
fa'Il‘tasies take the form of ideal images of grace which serve to
relate them to a world or culture from which they are otherwise
E11i4$nated. I am using the term "grace" in the sense that Frederick
HOffmandoes when he refers to "the essence of a culture," that
Tuiy' take the form of "the architecture, the gardens, the visible
EHDIWDS of a cultural that inspired."20 Hoffman adds that grace

lnfluences "the relationship of human life to the ideal of immor-
ta; ity; " for example ,

\

q 19 Karen Horney, Eggrosis and Human Growth (New York: W.W.
Orton & Company, Inc., 1959), p. 33.

20 Frederick Hoffman, The Mortal fig: Death and the Modern

E .
\gma 1nation, p. 7.

"any

34'. Ana

72
the cathedral and the abbey are symbols of
tradition, forms of immortality; when they
are destroyed, man is reduced to despair.

The culture is linked to goodness, to vir-
tue, to a spigitual world that is otherwise not

clearly seen.

Mizoguchi's fantasies of the Golden Temple is based
upon his awareness that it is a National Treasure, an archi-
‘tecrtural embodiment of beauty for his culture, and that, in
a. “mar time situation, it was in danger of complete annihilation.
Tflie~ degree of his psychopathological desire to be completely
ixle11tified with the cultural and aesthetic grace which the temple
possessed is seen as Mizoguchi contemplates the fact that it

luis survived the holocausts of the war:

"The bond between the Golden Temple and myself

has been cut," I thought. "Now my vision that

the Golden Temple and I were living in the same
world has broken down. Now I shall return to my
previous condition, but it will be even more
hopeless than before. A condition in which I exist
on one side and beauty on the other. A condition
that will never improve so long as this world
endures."

While: Mizoguchi desires to be identified with the tenple as a
Symbcxl of the grace which is missing in his life, he is also
consI‘lmed with envy at the thought of its objective claim to
immolrtality, a thought which can only increase his sense of
inferiority and his realization of the fundamental meaningless-

ness of his own existence.

——-\

21 Ibid., p. 8.

22 Golden Pavilion, p. 64.

 

73
The grace which the main character in Confessions 2f
2,!EEEE seeks takes the form of his desire to experience normal
heternosexual love for Sonoko, the eighteen—year-old girl who
appears as the personification of pure Japanese womanhood. He
descrribes her beauty in the highest idealistic sense: "In all

my life my heart had never before been so touched by the sight

of beauty in a woman. My breast throbbed; I felt purified. "23

Sonoko's beauty, is not only physical; she also arouses
a spixritual response from the narrator which forces him to "re-
cognize a different quality" in her. In an almost mystical way,

his feelings for Sonoko serve as a reminder of the nature of

his existence:

To my perplexity, my instinct was forced to
recognize a different quality in Sonoko alone.
This gave me a profound, bashful feeling of
being unworthy of Sonoko, and yet it was not

a feeling of servile inferiority. Each second
while I watched Sonoko approach, I was attacked
by unendurable grief. It was a feeling such as
I had never had before. Grief seemed to under-
mine and set tottering the foundations of my
existence. Until this moment the feeling with
'which I had regarded women had been an arti-
ficial mixture of childlike curiosity and
feigned sexual desire. My heart had never be-
fore been swayed, and at first glance, by such
a deep and unexplainable grief, a grief gore-
over that was not part of my masquerade. 4

TThe grace which Mishima's protagonists seek is never

rea ° . . . . .
llzed in their lives. Grace, by its very nature, is a

\
23

 

Confessions g£_g Mask, p. 142.

24 Ibid., pp. 143-144.

1th.... -mw

 

74
poijtive quality, a state of life which enhances its pleasurable-
ness; it.affirms life by making it beautiful. Mishima's protago-
nisins do not achieve grace; Mizoguchi fails to be inspired by
the (ibjective beauty of the temple, to recognize its value as
art Vflhich embodies the humanistic ideals of a cultural past.
Instenad, Mizoguchi feels compelled to destroy it because it
has loecome, through his fantasies, merely a subjective extension
of hi4; desire to impose meaning upon his life via an external
source:

Thus my thoughts led me to recognize more and

more clearly that there was a complete contrast

between the existence of the Golden Temple and

that of human beings. On the one hand, a phantasm

of immortality emerged from the apparently destruc-

tible aspect of human beings; on the other, the appa—
rently indestructible beauty of the Golden Temple gave

rise to the possibility of destroying it. Mortal things
like human beings cannot be eradicated; indestructible
things like the Golden Temple can be destroyed. Why had

no one realized this? There was no doubting the origina—
lity of my conclusion. If I were to set fire to the Golden
Temple, which had been designated as a National Treasure
in 1897, I should be committing an act of pure destruction,
of irreparable ruin, an act which would truly decrease the
'volume of beauty that human beings had created in this world.

.As I continued thinking on these lines, I was even over-
come by a humorous mood. If I burn down the Golden Temple,
I told myself, I shall be doing something that will have
great educational value. For it will teach people that it
is meaningless to infer indestructibility by analogy. They
‘will learn that the mere fact of the Golden Temple's having
continued to exist, of its having continued to stand for
five hundred and fifty years by the Kyoko Pond, confers no
.guaranty upon it whatsoever. They will be imbued with a
sense of uneasiness as they realize that the self-evident
axiom which our survival has predicated on the temple can
collapse from one day to another.2

\

25 Golden Pavilion, pp. 194-195.

'Wtumnm row

75

Like Mizoguchi, the protagonist of Confessions g: a

 

gggggg alienates himself from grace by his destructive behavior.
He refuses to confront his positive feelings for Sonoko and
to seek out, even experimentally, a meaningful relationship
wdrbkl her. He chooses, instead, to deny his real feelings and

to assume the role of a romantic libertine:

Even though my heart was filled with uneasiness
and unspeakable grief, I put a brazen, cynical
smile upon my lips. I told myself that all I had
to do was clear one small hurdle. All I had to
do was to regard all the past few months as ab-
surd; to decide that from the beginning I'd never
been in love with a girl called Sonoko, not with
such a chit of a girl; to believe that I'd been
prompted by a trifling passion (liar!) and had
deceived her. Then there'd be no reason why I
couldn't refuse her. Surely a mere kiss didn't
obligate me! ...

I was elated with the conclusion to which my
thoughts had brought me: "I'm not in love with
Sonoko."

What a splendid thing! I've become a man who can
entice a woman without even loving her, and then,
when love blazes up in her, abandon her without
thinking twice about it. How far I am from being
the upright and virtuous honor student I appear
to be .... And yet I could not have been ignorant
of the fact that there is no such thing as a
libertine who abandons a woman without first
achieving his purpose. But I ignored any such
thoughts. I had acquired the habit of closing my
ears completely, like an obstinate old woman,

to anything I did not want to hear.26

Although Mishima's main characters do not achieve grace

1n ‘1ztlteir’lives, they exhibit very clearly, the need of the indi-

v'
ulna]. to be engaged in some form of creativity. Grace is a

\

26 Confessions g: a Mask, p. 212.

\ruifnnmw

76
concomitant of the positive or constructive creative act, but
creativity itself is not restricted to any particular content.

The explanation which Carl Rogers gives concerning the general

nature of creativity will be referred to here. According to

Rogers, "there is no fundamental difference in the creative
process as it is evidenced in painting a picture, composing a

Symphony, devising new instruments of killing, developing a

scientific theory, discovering new procedures in human rela

tionships, or creating new formings of one's personality in

Psychotherapy." Rogers defines the creative process as the

1! . . . .
emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing

out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and

the materials, events, people, or circumstances of his life on

the other."27
Rogers sees the creative impulse as existing in every-

One , as a tendency which is similar to man's tendency to become

a. self—actualizing individual, to become his potentialities.
The position of Rogers on the self-actualizing individual is
Very similar to that of Abraham Maslow; like Maslow, Rogers
sees that there is a directional trend evident in human life,
"the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature -— the tendency
to eJ'EII'ress and activate all the capacities of the organism, or

t
he S elf." This tendency, however, is subjected to various

Psycho logical obstacles put out by the individual himself who

\

M'ff- 27 Carl Rogers, 9.”. 13492231118 9. 2.11.392. (Boston: Houghton
1 -
‘1 1n 00.,1961),p. 350.

 

77

may bury it under a heavy layer of psychological defenses or
hide it under elaborate facades which deny its existence.28

In order to evaluate the actions of Mishima's protago-

nists as beings engaged in the creative process, we must con-

sider the question of how constructive creativity differs from

destructive creativity. Rogers cites three inner conditions of

constructive creativity: openness to experience, an internal
locus of evaluation, and the ability to toy with elements and

Concepts.29 Openness to experience entails a lack of rigidity

in the individual's concepts, beliefs, and perceptions; it also

means that he is tolerant of ambiguity where ambiguity exists,

and is sensitively aware of all phases of experience. An inter-

nal locus of evaluation signifies that the individual is not
dependent on others to know what is totally satisfying to him-
self; it does not mean that he is oblivious to the feelings of
others, but rather he is able to appraise his own production

as being a true actualization of his own potentialities. Finally,
the constructively creative person is able to "play" spontaneously
with ideas, objects, and relationships and translate them into
new and significant forms which are of positive value. Rogers
Stl'esses the point that the individual who creates constructive-

1
y- behaves in a harmonious, integrated fashion only if he can

b
e aware of his hostile impulses and at the same time accept his

 

\

28 Ibid., p. 351.

29 Ibid., p. 351.

78

«desixre for friendship and acceptance, be aware of the expec-
'ta1xi<xns of his culture yet equally aware of his own purposes,
and be aware of his selfish desires and also aware of his concern
:for' zanother. In other words, positive creativity tends in the
direction of constructive social living only if the individual
0841 (:ome to terms with the negative feelings which all beings
possess at one time or another.

Creativity which is essentially destructive, says Rogers,
Ccnn£es about when the individual closes himself to large areas of
11143 experience and awareness. The differentiation between con-

EStHriictive and destructive creativity may be put briefly as follows:

To the extent that the individual is denying to
awareness (or repressing, ...) large areas of

his experience, then his creative formings may

be pathological, or socially evil, or both. To

the degree that the individual is open to all
aspects of his experience, and has available to
his awareness all the varied sensings and per-
ceivings which are going on within his organism,
then the novel products of his interaction with
his environment will tend to be constructive both
for himself and others. To illustrate, an indivi—
dual with paranoid tendencies may creatively deve-
lop a most novel theory of the relationship be-
tween himself and his environment, seeing evidence
for his theory in all sorts of minute clues. His
theory has little social value, perhaps because
there is an enormous range of experience which 0
this individual cannot permit in his awareness.

T
1163 JFKrotagonist of Confessions pf a Mask engages in destruc-

 

t'
.rvr£3 (creativity because he has closed himself to a large portion

of -
11;1_=3 experience as a self which might possibly rid itself of

\
3O

 

Ibid., p. 352.

79
:its :paralyzing dependence on fantasies of inversion by esta-
‘blijihing a satisfying and meaningful relationship with Sonoko.
Instead, he views himself as a romantic personality who must

resort to "that immoral action called daydreaming" because of

31

his; "subtle mistrust of intellectualism." He is capable of

intellectually comprehending his dilemma, but he resists this
understanding and chooses to remain in a state of self-defeating

emotionality:

But this does not mean that my emotional life

was set to rights by my intellectual under-

standing of these scientific theories. It was
difficult for inversion to become an actuality

in my case simply because in me the impulse went

no further than being a dark impulse crying out

in vain, struggling helplessly, blindly. Even

the excitement aroused in me by an attractive

ephebe stopped short at mere sexual desire. To

give a superficial explanation, my soul still
belonged to Sonoko. Although it does not mean

that I accept the concept outright, I can con-
veniently use the medieval diagram of the strug-

gle between soul and body to make my meaning clear;
in me there was a cleavage, pure and simple, between
spirit and flesh. To me Sonoko appeared the incarnation
of my love of normality itself, my love of things of
the spirit, my love of everlasting things.

But such a simple explanation does not dispose of
the problem. The emotions have no liking for fixed
order. Instead, like tiny particles in the ether,
they fly about freely, float haphazardly, and pre—
fer to be forever wavering... . 2

Un -
wllling to create a viable union between Sonoko and himself

Whi
(:11 ‘would enable him to fulfill his spiritual needs and live

wit
11 1lis sexuality, the protagonist's thoughts turn to death as

\

31 Confessions gf a Mask, p. 192.

 

32 Ibid., p. 192.

8O

tflle only alternative out of his dilemma:

I seriously contemplated suicide for the first
time in my life. But as I thought about it, the
idea became exceedingly tiresome, and I finally
decided it would be a ludicrous business. I had
an inherent dislike of admitting defeat. More-
over, I told myself, there's no need for me to
take such decisive action myself, not when I'm
surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of so

many types of death -- death in an air raid,
death at one's post of duty, death in the mili—
tary service, death on the battlefield, death
from being run over, death from disease -- surely
my name has already been entered in the list for
one of these: a criminal who has ggen sentenced
to death does not commit suicide.

Thus nueaning of death for the protagonist in this passage
deserves a few comments because it represents a crucial turn—
ing point in his life. The main character refuses to take
any responsibility for his life and even his death; he relin—
quishes his control over any reality which might be imposed
‘xPOIl 111m. In this sense, he is the true passive anti-hero,
'the’ iridividual who cannot act because he wills not to. His
reifile<3tions on death, however, are not as devastating as his
unconscious committal to death-in-life, a fact which is repre-
sented by the final scene in the novel. He is seen with
Sonoko, but his presence is merely a physical one, for he

is psbrchologically far removed from the reality of their
meeting. He has withdrawn himself completely from life into

tile,

‘VtDrld of his fantasies as his characteristic inversion
da.
y
dream shows:

I had forgotten Sonoko's existence. I was
thinking of but one thing: Of his‘going out

\

33 Ibid., p. 208.

81

onto the streets of high summer just as

he was, half-naked, and getting into a
fight with a rival gang. Of a sharp dag—
ger cutting through that belly-band,
piercing that torso. Of that soiled bel-
ly-band beautifully dyed with blood. Of
his gory corpse being put on an improvised
stretcher, made of a window shutter, and
brought back here.34

Sonoko's voice brings him back briefly to the present moment,

‘fiunr

anti :it is at this time, in an instantaneous flash of insight
that his condition of non-being, of the total lack of his

selfhood comes to him:

‘mhmh --W‘ .—

vi

At this instant something inside of me was
torn in two with brutal force. It was as
though a thunderbolt had fallen and cleaved
asunder a living tree. I heard the structure,
which I had been building piece by piece with
all my might up to now, collapse miserably to
the ground. I felt as though I had witnessed
the instant in which my existence had been 35
turned into some sort of fearful non-being.

Destructive creativity is also manifest in Mizoguchi
‘dlerl he decides to burn the Golden Temple. His decision is
bafseél upon his creating an original theory which fulfills both
his need to carry out the details of his obsessional fantasies
and t0 relate in some fashion to the larger world outside of
himself,

At the beginning of the Tsukumogami-ki, a medieval

book of fairy tales, we find the following passage:

"It is written in the Miscellany on the cosmic

forces, Ying and Yang, that, after a hundred years
have passed and objects have been transformed into

..__‘~_‘_¥
34 Ibid., p. 252.

35 Ibid., pp. 252-253.

I“3‘V Ilife begin that was made specially to order for myself."

reneVVed life.

_.-~_§_q

82

spirits, the hearts of men are deceived; and
this is given the name of Tsukumogami, the year
of the mournful spirit. It is the custom of the
world to remove one's old household utensils
each year before the advent of Spring and to
throw them into the alley; and this is known as
the house-sweeping. In the same way, every hun-
dred years men must undergo the disasters of the
Tsukumogami."

Thus my deed would open the eyes of men to the
disasters of the Tsukumogami and save them from
those disasters. By my deed I should thrust the
world in which the Golden Temple existed into a
world where it did not exist. The meaning of the
world would surely change.3

1316 Tsukumogami—kl which Mizoguchi refers to as the rationale
fCNr’ his "mission" in burning the Temple is a "book of fairy
tales"; he acknowledges this fact yet acts as though he be—

ljuexred.in the truth and validity of the ideas in this ancient

It appears necessary for him to believe in a "fairy

tailea" which articulates a part of his obsession with the
"dark forces" compelling him to his destructive act: "Yes,

I IDust burn the Golden Temple after all. Only then could a

Hi43 role as the fulfiller of the Tsukumogami-k3 mandate is
made to justify his need to have a "new life," a life which
he ILas envisioned as an escape from all of his frustrations

a . .
11d 1nadequac1es as a self.

The culmination of Mizoguchi's "theory," the actual

Soci<3pathic act of arson, affords him an illusory sense of

36’Golden Pavilion, pp. 195-196.

37 Ibid., p. 197.

37

His intention to kill himself after the destruction

5 if!”

 

h-

83
of 1ihe temple is immediately abandoned and the novel ends

(n1 at note of pathological optimism:

I looked in my pocket and extracted the
bottle of arsenic, wrapped it in my hand-
kerchief, and the knife. I threw them down
the ravine.

Then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in

my other pocket. I took one out and started
smoking. I felt like a man who settles down
for a smoke after finishing a job of work. I
wanted to live.38

I have tried to show how the need to be engaged in
t>118 creative process is presented in Mishima's main characters
aS cassentially destructive and non-actualizing. Mizoguchi and

thug :narrator of Confessions pf a Mask are individuals of high

 

 

iIrtealligence and capabilities. However, they choose, to their
oWII Iloss as selves, to close themselves off from certain phases
of their experiences. It is not that they are unaware of the
POSSibilities open to them for a constructive way of life, as
MiZOguchi shows in his weighing of the alternative to his act.
This happens when he sees a young station official whose actions

Show an evident enjoyment of and absorption in life:

For a moment I felt that I was on the verge

of being caught up once more in the charm of
life or in an envy for life. It was still pos-
sible for me to refrain from setting fire to
the temple; I could leave the temple for good,
give up the priesthood agd bury myself in life
like this young fellow.3

38 Ibid., p. 262.

39 Ibid., p. 197.

 

84
Ibaxbher than confronting their selves in the light of their
real experiences and their actual feelings, the protagonists
«zlioose to be entangled in the contorted Mobius Strip of their
:inaagination and fantasy where their inner and outer worlds
sizre nmde deliberately indistinguishable. Engagement in fantasy
Inznkes them so distrustful of their own powers to lead a life
()1? positive action that they literally become the fantasy
(:Jreatures they have used for defenses against their frustrations.
fiftiis confusion of the real and imagined self is epitomized in

Confessions o_f a Mask when the narrator skillfully "teases"

 

 

IiiJnself out of the reality of accepting the fact that there
agree contradictions between his intellectual views and his
eincrtions, and thus arms himself with more reasons for taking

refuge into a life of fantasy:

I was made to distrust both my will and my
character, or at least, so far as my will
was concerned, I could not believe it was
anything but a fake. On the other hand, this
way of thinking that placed such emphasis
upon the will was in itself an exaggeration
amounting almost to fantasy. Even a normal
person cannot govern his behavior by will
alone. No matter how normal I might have
been, there certainly might have been a
reason somewhere for doubting whether

Sonoko and I were perfectly matched at
every point for a happy married life, some
reason that would have justified even that
normal me in answering "H'm, perhaps so."
But I had deliberately acquired the habit

of closing my eyes even to such obvious
assumptions, just as though I did not want
to miss a single opportunity for tormenting
myself. ... This is a trite device, often
adopted by persons who, cut off from all
other means of escape, retreat into the safe
haven of regarding themselves as objects of tragedy.

\

4O Confessions g; a Mask, pp. 203-204.

 

85

Mizoguchi and the narrator in Confessions o a Mask

 

3A3 literary types are underground men in that although they
have been given in Hoffman's terms, "the present of a will,"
‘tliey will not "subscribe either to rational schemes which ad-
xr<>cate a brilliant new social future or to the disciplines

41 Furthermore, they fit pre-

<>i? stoic moral containment."
cisely the description given by Hoffman of the underground
Inavn's renunciation of reality for the endless cycles of

:iIitrospection:

In a curious and even distorted way, the
underground man renounces both the real
world (of which he is nevertheless a
victim) and the prospects of a world as
it 'reasonably should be,‘ in favor of
what amounts to a perverse interest in
tortured self-analysis.42

1X :Sbnnbol of this condition of "tortured self-analysis" in
'tlie~ underground man is the double, or the individual who
rePI‘esents an aspect of the protagonist which has been sup—
PreSsed to some degree, but which is nonetheless recognizable
in another person.

For the narrator of Confessions 2: a Mggk, two friends
Serve as a double; they represent purity, strength, and sexual
normality. As a fourteen-year-old, the protagonist "falls in

l
0‘79" with the physically appealing Omi:

My blind adoration of Omi was devoid of any ele-
ment of conscious criticism, and still less did
I have anything like a moral viewpoint where he

41 Frederick Hoffman, Samuel Beckett (Carbondale, 1962),

42 Ibid., p. 7.

'_‘n hr‘-__.._.Ai _

86

was concerned. Whenever I tried to capture
the amorphous mass of my adoration within
the confines of analysis, it would already
have disappeared. If there be such a thing
as love that has neither duration nor pro-
gress, this was precisely my emotion. The
eyes through which I saw Omi were always
those of a "first glance" or, if I may say
so, of the "primeval glance." It was purely
an unconscious attitude on my part, a cease-
less effort to protect my fourteen-year-old
purity from the process of erosion.4

Later in his life, the protagonist finds himself on intimate
terms with Nukada, a youth who is completely the opposite of

Omi in many respects:

Nukada's friendship contained something that
appealed to this weak point of mine -- because
he was the object of much jealousy on the part
of the "tough boys" in our school; because
through him I caught faint echoes of communica-
tions from the world of women, in exactly the
same way that one communicates with the spirit
world through a medium.

Omi had been the first medium between me and the
the world of women. But at that time I had been
more my natural self, and so had been content to
count his special qualifications as a medium as
but a part of his beauty. Nukada's role as a
medium, however, became the supernatural frame-
work for my curiosity. This was probably due,

at least in part, to the fact that Nukada was
not at all beautiful.44

(”Di txnd Nukada, as doubles, serve a functional purpose for
thenarrator. By identifying with them and using them as
ConVenient media through which the world can be viewed and
approached, the narrator avoids a direct and immediate
\
43 Confessions gf a Magk, pp. 71-72.

44 Ibid., p. 120.

..A" &OM_ _.

K.‘

87
confrontation with life. He can thus escape the responsibi-
list37 (xf living, of facing an unmediated vision of reality which
frightens and overwhelms him.

Three persons function as Mizoguchi's double; they are
TSHI‘ULkawa, Kashiwagi, and Father Zenkai. Tsurukawa repre-
serrts; the"positive picture"45 of Mizoguchi; when he dies, H
Mizoguchi feels that "the one and only thread that connected
11.1127 with the bright world of daylight" is severed.46 The

crippled Kashiwagi signifies for Mizoguchi an "agreement"

 

wistkl the conditions of darkness and perversity in which he LI
filldjs himself.47 Father Zenkai is a much more complex figure

tluirl either Tsurukawa or Kashiwagi; he represents the potentia-

lifbises which Mizoguchi may realize if he were to accept himself

as a. self-actualizing individual instead of a creature of his

Obsessions and distorted self—analysis:

Father Zenkai was devoid of vanity. High-

ranking prelates, who are constantly being asked
to judge everything from human character to paint—
ings and antiques, are apt to fall into the sin of
never giving a positive judgment on anything for
fear of being laughed at later in case they have
been wrong. Then, of course, there is the type

of Zen priest who will instantly hand down his
arbitrary decision on anything that is discussed,
but who will be careful to phrase his reply in
such a way that it can be taken to mean two op-
posite things. Father Zenkai was not like that.

I was well aware that he spoke just as he saw

and just as he felt. He did not go out of his way

\

45 Golden Pavilion, p. 83.

46 Ibid., p. 127.

47 Ibid., p. 91.

88

to search for any special meaning in the

things that were reflected in his strong,

pure eyes.48
Mizoguchi lacks the complete honesty and acceptance of things
and self which Father Zenkai possesses; but instead of realizing
this lack, and seeking to rediscover himself, Mizoguchi uses
Father Zenkai's insight into his personality as a condoning
Of his preconceived plans to destroy the temple. When Father

Zenkai answers Mizoguchi's plea to "Please see into my heart,"

With the reply, "There's no need to see into you. One can see

11.315.“ in. _-‘—__- ...“:‘w

everything on your face," Mizoguchi says:

I felt that I had been completely understood

down to the deepest recess of my being. For

the first time in my life I had become utterly

blank. Just like water soaking into this blank-

ness, courage to commit the deed gushed up in me

afresh.49

The fact that Mizoguchi's encounter with Father Zenkai
does not serve any active positive purpose in his life illus-
trates the relationship of the double to the underground man.
1319 :interaction between the double and the underground man
dramatizes the inner conflicts of the positive and negative
qualities in the main character. But the underground man learns
nolflling, or at least chooses not to learn from the encounter.
TheINB is no affirmation of life in the underground man's
Setuflne of things. The negative picture of life is the only
one Which registers in his soul.
______~_

48 Ibid., pp. 245-246.

49 Ibid., p. 247.

89

The double serves, in the words of Hoffman, as an
"ever—present reminder of the sins of self—omission,"so of
the sacrifice of completeness for the transitory satisfaction
or relief at escaping the efforts of self—actualization. The
use of the double in Mishima's two novels brings out in sharp
Perspective, the deficiences of his protagonists and their
favilure to come to grips with the contradictory elements of
their selfhood.

The aesthetic interest in the structure of Mishima's
two novels is defined by the contents of the protagonists' day-
dreams and fantasies. The psychopathologically sexual daydreams
013' the narrator in Confessions 91 a M, and the temple as a
Palpable entity and an object of fantasy for Mizoguchi in Golden
PnaVilion, function as realistic symbols, for these daydreams and
favlfltasies are actual components of the protagonists' lives. As
realistic symbols they are not manipulated by the author to con-
vey a transcendent meaning beyond what is actually being related
in the novels themselves. As Ursula Brumm indicates, the author
Who uses realistic symbols desires "to see the phenomena of this
World in their objectivity, and he sees them in all their charac-
teristic configuration and multiplicity, for their particular
configuration is precisely what holds at least a partial meaning

for him."51 Thus we see why Mishima's narrator in Confessions 9_i_‘_

 

E % relates in vivid detail his numerous fantasies. By des-

\

5° Hoffman, pp. cit., p. 12.

1 Brumm, 9p. ci ., p. 360.

I
I

~. In?! {Cum o-m- q; ~q

9O

cribiing his daydreams, he concretizes the meaning which
sadisnn, pain, and homosexual attraction have for him; we
a11321ed.by'his descriptions to an "existential" understanding
of Iris psychological dilemma. We begin to see why his fanta-
sies afford him satisfaction when he can overcome his guilt
freelgings about them. They represent an aesthetic, emotional,
arui :intellectual order which he cannot realize in his "endless
Cixrcrle of introspection"upon his life in the world of empiri-
cafll :reality. In his fantasy existence, he is able to act,and
‘tO «clioose without any hesitation, how he and those in his dream

worl (1 should act:

There,in my murder theater, young Roman
gladiators offered up their lives for my
amusement; and all the deaths that took

place there not only had to overflow with
blood but also had to be performed with

all due ceremony. I delighted in all forms

of capital punishment and all implements of
execution. But I would allow no torture devices
nor gallows, as they would not have provided
a spectacle of outpouring blood. Nor did I
like explosive weapons, such as pistols or
guns. So far as possible I chose primitive
and savage weapons -- arrows, daggers, spears.
And in order to prolong the agony, it was the
belly that must be aimed at. The sacrificial
victim must send up long-drawn-out, mournful,
pathetic cries, making the hearer feel the
unutterable loneliness of existence. There-
upon my joy of life, blazing up from some
secret place deep within me, would finally
give its own shout of exultation, answering
the victim cry for cry. was this not exactly
similgi to the joy ancient man found in the
hunt?

\

52
Confessions gf a Mask, pp. 92—93.

1‘ “ML -_:..'. M

H.351:

91

It :is; important to point out that in his fantasies, the
nairrEitor deludes himself into thinking that he has some
meaasrrre of freedom and control over his life. What is
patnarrtly ironical here is that the main character is unaware
of ‘tlie fact that it is the fantasy which controls him in its
sauueriess of content, and the inevitability of the outcome of
eacli :imaginative sexual foray.

However, it is not only in the narrator's fantasies
'thaxb Ibis psychopathology emerges. His ultimate desire to
escape from realizing a self in the real world is also made
Clezixr in his impressionistic perceptions of nature and objects.
‘At £1 jpoint in the novel when he has reached a form of emotional
CriSis, he observes that

The blossoms seemed usually lovely this year.
There were none of the scarlet—and-white-striped
curtains that one has come to think of them as
the attire of cherry blossoms; there were no
bustling tea-stalls, no holiday crowds of flower-
viewers, no one hawking balloons and toy wind-
mills; instead there were only the cherry trees
blossoming undisturbed among the evergreens,
making one feel as though he were seeing the
naked bodies of the blossoms. Nature's free
bounty and useless extravagance had never
appeared so fantastically beautiful as it did
this spring. I had an uncomfortable suspicion
that Nature had come to reconquer the earth for
herself. Certainly there was something unusual
about this spring's brilliance. The yellow of
the rape blossoms, the green of the young grass,
the fresh-looking black trunks of the cherry
trees, the canopy of heavy blossoms that bent
the branches low -- all these were reflected in
my eyes as vivid colors tinged with malevolence.
It seemed to be a conflagration of colors.

\

53 Ibid., pp. 178-179.

inst
7

‘F‘. 3‘1: 1 8 "area-.... ‘1‘
I .
‘7 I
‘
' .

92

flflnis. short passage illustrates how the narrator's subjective
staxbea of mind is mirrored in the objective reality of nature,
and. 110w this relationship between his emotions and his outer
worfilél somehow implicitly justifies why he is unable to resolve
the nryriad confusions of his selfhood. There is malevolence
eveqi in the beauty of flowers. There is also an anthropomor—
jphiJ: jpurpose attached to Nature -- "she" is suspiciously viewed
as 1111 entity "come to reconquer the earth for herself." In—
stueaxi of seeing the generosity of nature's display of beauty,
iflie ruirrator views her display as a "useless extravagance."
In other words, the impressionistic descriptions given by the
nainreitor of his surroundings reflect a growing inability to
relate rationally to external events and objects. Toward the
Close of the novel, he sits in a dance hall with Sonoko and
firuis; himself uncontrollably fantasizing a sado-sexual scene
Witll ‘bhe males in a group he sees there. The final scene is
one cxf unforgettable irony. As the narrator stands up to
198376! the hall, he glances at the spot where the group of
yolrtlls had been sitting and finds only a vignette of empty
desolation:

It was time. As I got up, I stole one more

glance toward those chairs in the sun. The

group had apparently gone to dance, and the

chairs stood empty in the blazing sunshine.

Some sort of beverage had been spilled on

the table top and was throwing back glittering,
threatening reflections.54

\

54 .
Ibid., p. 254.

 

93
His attempt to seek out the real objects of his fantasies is
futile and abortive. All he sees are "threatening reflections"
which graphically symbolize his unconscious abandonment of
his search for selfhood.

In figlden Pavilion, the impressionistic perception of
(flxjects and nature by Mizoguchi is not so much an unconscious
Pheruomenon on his part as it is deliberate and willed as an
exezw:ise of his powers of imagination. As the passage below
indixzates, Mizoguchi has literally staked his life on his
abiIJity to fantasize the beauty of the temple:

Whatever happened, it was essential that the

Golden Temple be beautiful. I therefore staked

everything not so much on the objective beauty

of the temple itself as on my own power to ima-
gine its beauty.55

Unlike the protagonist in Confessions 2: a Mask who sees

 

his emotional states unconditionally and automatically in the
nattlzre which surrounds him, Mizoguchi perceives consciously

and, czonditionally. He is firmly convinced that by articulating
his Iperceptions of things, he is able to achieve a mode of
Ixuriggn.re1ationship with his environment. This self—decep-
tive» attitude is seen in two impressionistically rendered

Passilges -— one which deals with nature and the other with

the temple:

"Why doesn't the snow stutter?" I wondered.
Sometimes when the snow brushed against the
leaves of the atsude,it fell to the ground

as if it were in fact stuttering. But when I
felt myself bathed in the snow as it descen—

ded mildly from the sky without any interrup-
tion, I forgot the kinks in my heart, and seemed

\

55Golden Pavilion, p. 19.

 

94

to return to some more gentle spiritual
rhythm, as if I were being bathed in music.

Thanks to the snow, the three-dimensional
Golden Temple had truly become a plane
figure, a figure within a picture, and no
longer did it bid defiance to what existed

outside itself.5

.‘mw

Glue snow represent; to Mizoguchi, an element of nature which
not (Inly transforms objects into something which they were not
bekare, but also into a higher level of existence. Thus, when
Mizoguchi asks the strange question, "Why doesn't the snow
stutter?" it is because he is undergoing a self-conceived process
0f elevation -- as a self—conscious stutterer he wills that his
Physical defect be the part of nature which is represented by
the snow. He perceives of the snow as "stuttering," but in an
Obje‘c‘tive fashion, as it brushes against the leaves of a tree
in tllfia yard. It is after he has established the snow as "stut—
terillgg" in its own way, that he feels himself transformed by
the Ifiilling snow into a state of almost mystical well-being,

as t11<>ugh he were "being bathed in music." The highest stage
0f tfirwinsformation comes about when the snow changes the Golden
Temple into what can only be called a scenic metamorphosis --
it becomes a "plane figure, a figure within a picture" --
Sonmytliing which Mizoguchi can look upon without feeling
threatened or inadequate. Indeed, the temple, transformed by

t
he Snow, becomes a controllable object of beauty.

\\

56 Ibid., pp. 72-73.

95
In the following passage, Mizoguchi's perception of
the Golden Temple appears as a frightening psychopathic occur-
rence:

At first it was as small as a miniature painting,
but in an instant it grew larger, until it complete+
ly buried the world that surrounded me and filled
every nook and cranny of this world, just as in that
delicate model which I had once seen the Golden Tem-
ple had been so huge that it had encompassed every-
thing else. It filled the world like some tremendous
music, and this music itself became sufficient to
occupy the entire meaning of the world. The Golden
Temple, which sometimes seemed to be so utterly
indifferent to me and to tower into the air out-
side myself, had now completely engulfed me and

had allowed me to be situated within its struc—
ture.57

The Golden Temple which Mizoguchi fantasizes is a realistic
Symbol of the unknown which lies within himself. He tries
deSPe rately to attach meaning to it, to fantasize its powers
as a. ‘thing of beauty, with transcendent significance known
only- ‘to himself. But Mizoguchi cannot understnad that ulti-
matellzy the temple is what it is and nothing more. His deli-
beraxt13 attempts to make it stand for more than what it is,

to gii‘re it complete subjective significance, ends in failure,
for ‘deat the Golden Temple symbolizes for him is the poten-
tiality for beauty which he refuses to realize in himself.

Thufi‘: when he sets fire to the temple, he has symbolically

 

destroyed the burden of actualizing himself.58 As he waits
\

57 Ibid., p. 125.

58

le‘t. Carl Rogers makes a very interesting note of the com-
fih: £3 Ifreedom of symbolic expression in the creative process

\ W a m, p. 359). "To express in behavior," says

96
for the moment when he will actually commit the act of arson,
he feels a deceptive optimism. His final act, in his analysis,
will be an act of liberation:

The rusty key that opened the door between
the outer world and my inner world would
turn smoothly in its lock. My world would
be ventilated as the breeze blew freely be- g
tween it and the outer world. The well buck— ;i
et would rise, swaying lightly in the wind

and everything would open up before me in the
form of a vast field and the secret room would
be destroyed. ... Now it is before my eyes and
my hands are just about to stretch out and
reach it ... .

M

 

yr
' ‘

In destroying the Golden Temple, Mizoguchi destroys a symbol
0f IliJmself. Hence, he feels no guilt over his act; on the
Contrary, he states that by accomplishing this act he "felt
like a man" who has finished a "job of work" and that this
a9t C=Ieates in him the desire to live. We can only interpret
Mizogglachi's feelings as the sense of relief he has at being

free (of the awful burden of being responsible for the creation

Of a self.
Although the psychopathologies in Confessions 2f a Mask
and (}(>lden Pavilion differ radically in their nature and conse-

quentzees for the main characters, Mishima has presented in both

\

11.30gers, "all feelings, impulses, and formings may not in all
Inrtaalces be freeing. Behavior may in some instances be limited
1136300 iety, and this is as it should be. But symbolic expression
mottl I10tbe limited. Thus to destroy a hated object (whether one's
free?r or a rococo building) by destroying a symbol of it, is
Psycfing‘ To attack it in reality may create guilt and narrow the
What C>logical freedom which is experienced." In the light of
the '9gers says about symbolic destruction, Mizoguchi has avoided
Pars falnful alternative of attacking the hated elements of his own
nevernality. Mizoguchi's pathology lies also in the fact that he
13eels guilty about his actions; in his case, guilt would be

aseiry'to prevent him from his sociopathic act.

59 Golden Pavilion, pp. 247—248.
JIIIIII-__ ___

Dace;

 

 

97
novels a consistently dramatic and pessimistic view of his

protagonists' abilities to cope with their inner and outer

worlds. He has created works which treat the problem of

pathological deviancy and selfhood with powerful literary

and subjective intensity.

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

"THE STANDARD OF VALUE": ABE

The values of individuals living in the twentieth-

ceniniry are in many ways inextricably related to the pressures

 

‘firicli are exerted upon them to expand and rely on the scienti-
fic lxnowledge of an industrialized society. The impact of

the~ czontemporary scientific emphasis on Japanese culture has
lmfil riotable effects in the fields of philosophy and literature.
:h1'19938, the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro succinctly
sumfluacrized the prevailing tenor of modern thought in a rapidly
deveilcoping Japanese nation. In a series of lectures entitled
"The Problem of Japanese Culture" (Nihon Bunka E). Mondai),
Nishgi<ia called for the necessity of incorporating the scienti-

fic spirit in Japanese culture:

The saying that "Oriental culture is doctrinal

in character, occidental culture scientific"
would seem to apply quite well to Chinese cul-
ture [but not to Japanesg7 Japan, it is true,

has been called a country where people "'fol-
lowing the way of gods implicitly' are not ar-
gumentative." But this means only that argument
is not indulged in for argument's sake and con—
cepts are not bandied about for their own sake.
As Motoori Norinaga explained in Naobi 22 mitama,
"It [the way of the God§7 is nothing but the way
of going to things," which should be taken in the
sense of going straight to the true facts of
things. Going to the true facts, however, does

 

98

99

not mean following tradition out of the
mere force of custom or acting in direct
response to subjective emotions. To go

to the true fact of things must also
involve what we call a scientific spirit.
It should mean following the true facts

of things at the expense of self. "Not to
be argumentative" should be understood as
not to be self-assertive, but to bend one's
head low before the true facts. It ought
not to be a mere cessation of thinking or
readiness to compromise; to penetrate to
the very source of fact is to exhaust one's
self [and to become objectivg71

Wha1; Nishida has interpreted in a philosophical and optimistic

V6111, Abe Kobo has treated artistically and pessimistically in

° I . .
his :novels. Abe, as one of the modern Japanese writers interes-

tEdinthe larger world of political and social change as oppos-

ed ‘t<> the relatively closed world of the family,2 reflects the

lucxweasing emphasis on science and objective thought in his works.

1k? Sllows how the influence of science, specifically the implicit

trU§rt placed upon the scientific method as a norm for rational

llVing, determines precariously the course and outcome of indi—

Vidruals living in modern society. Abé's protagonists may be

\

So

Nishida Kitaro, "The Problem of Japanese Culture," in

—_Eflfigg§ of the Japanese Tradition, comp. Ryusaku Tsunoda, wm.

85

J
(

a,
BOston, 1968), p. 45. Hibbett notes that contemporary Japanese

godoreTe Bary, and Donald Keene (New York, 1958), pp. 858-

 

Howard Hibbett, "Tradition and Trauma in the Contemporary
:Panese Novel," in Fiction in Several Languages, ed. Henri Peyre

 

writers like AHe do not limit themselves to the changing conditions

Q

tkn

family life in Japan, an area which reflects most noticeably the

(zonfrontation of modern values with traditional ties and the ensu-

~ng traumatic results for the individual. However, Hibbett goes on,
ere appears to be a stylistic shortcoming in novels by these wri-
ers in that while they portray journeys into the interior world

of the self that are "rapid, purposeful, and comparatively well-

0I‘ganized," these are made "perhaps at the sacrifice of random in—
Sight as well as of leisurely grace," qualities which characterize

the literature of the old Japan.

v 1 .‘r‘ ‘i-u—I. LM‘M

LJL. “

T

 

 

 

100
called.prototypical figures of the contemporary age as they
seekLanswers to their probing questions about the nature of
selfhood and the fate of men from the context of science.

In Suna 22 Onna, or The WOman in the Dunes, written in

 

 

196(), Abe establishes the atmosphere of scientific interest through
the~ character of Niki Jumpei, a school-teacher who is a semi-pro- %
fesssional entomologist, a thoroughly "dedicated collector" of

inseacts. Niki's enthusiasm for and commitment to his scienti-

fic endeavors take the ideal form of a "true entomologist" whose "g

 

rea]. pleasure is the simple and direct one of "discovering a w
neW'type." The reason behind this pleasure, however, is more
(xnnrilex, for through scientific discovery, Niki hopes to put in
his claim to immortality:

When this [discovery of a new typg7 happens,

the discoverer's name appears in the illus—

trated encyclopedias of entomology appended

to the technical Latin name of the newly

found insect; and there, perhaps, it is pre-

served for something less than eternity. His

efforts are crowned with success if his name

is perpetuated in the memory of his fellow

men by being associated with an insect.3
The ‘value attached to the self here is that which is determined
bythe norms of scientific knowledge. Niki's apprehension of
a iiubjective self is invested in the amount of objective infor—
nuttion he has in his possession about things outside of himself.
:[t is clear, for example, that Niki's absorption in his entomo-

log'ical quest is neither patent nor dilettantish. He is syste-

Inatic and conscientious in his undertakings; he takes into care-

\

3 The WOman in the Dunes, p. 11.

101

ful consideration the environmental variations and degree of
adaqflmbility among the various types of flies which he seeks.
His nmthodical approach, at one point, leads him to make a
hyIMDthetical extrapolation of the scientific knowledge which
In; possesses about the flies he collects:

He had best begin by observing environment. B
That there were many environmental variations g
simply indicated a high degree of adaptability
among flies, didn't it? At this discovery he
jumped with joy. His concept might not be alto-
gether bad. The fact that the fly showed great
adaptability meant that it could be at home even
in unfavorable environments in which other insects
could not live -— for example, a desert where all
other living things perished.4

1flI—“—.1 s 1W ram-g.,“

The implications of this passage are far-reaching in
that; Niki's concept about the adaptability among flies will
be aqpplicable to his own situation as a captive in the strange
Villiage. His capture by the inhabitants of the seashore village
wherwa he goes on his entomological quest, will show how he him-
self"will be able to adapt to an unfavorable environment.

Niki's will to escape from his imprisonment with the
““3811 in her sand pit dwelling is at first motivated by his
senise of his identification as a member of human society in the
Citbr; later this sense is forcibly transformed into a sheer strug-
3143 for survival at all costs. When Niki is faced with the res-
Poonsibility of helping the woman clear her but of the sand which
threatens daily to cover it up, he is at first adamantly resis-
tatnt to the idea. The reason for this, we learn, is that his

\

4 Ibid., pp. 11-12.

102
interest in sand and his involvement with "insect collecting
were, after all, simply ways to escape, however temporarily,
from his obligations and the inactivity of his life."5 He
has no interest in encountering his "avocations" in terms of
the nmndane necessities of life.

However, as the novel unfolds, we see Niki's conceptual
gretsp of the world increasingly coming about from his constant
apIilication of objective scientific information and theory to
the: contingencies of existence. Not only is he absorbed in
the; details of entomological information, but his interest in
the! physical properties of sand take on encyclopedic proportions.
Fasczinated by the minuteness of the individual grains of sand,
he atttempts to grasp the larger significance which lies behind
the existence of sand. His scientific curiosity goes beyond
teclmnical analysis into the metaphysical contemplation of the
Physsical nature of the universe. He ponders, for example, the
fac1b that "sand is sand wherever it is; strangely enough, there
is aleost no difference in the size of the grains whether they
come; from the Gobi Desert or from the beach at Enoshima."6 Later,
as kle surveys the terrain of the beach where he searches for his
flieas, he observes that there is "no escaping the law of the

sand,"7 This rather casual statement takes on ironic significance

 

 

5 Ibid., p. 30.

6 Ibid., p. 13.

7 Ibid., p. 17.

 

103

if we view it in the light of Niki's concept of himself. He
is proud of the store of knowledge that he, as a scientific
man, has about the "law of the sand." Thus, when the woman
informs him that sand rots, he answers rudely, "Impossible!"
aiui feels that "his own personal concept of sand had been
(hafiled by her ignorance."8 However, he discovers later that
the; woman was right, that the house in the sand is "half dead,"
"ists insides ... half eaten away by tentacles of ceaselessly
fltywing sand."9 Faced with this astonishing and unexpected
rexrelation, Niki concludes to his own satisfaction that the
resison behind the phenomenon is a metaphysical one:

Sand, which didn't even have a form of its

own -— other than the mean 1/8 mm. diameter.

Yet not a single thing could stand against

this shapeless, destructive power. The very

fact that it had no form was doubtless the

highest manifestation of its strength, was
it not?1

DJ £1 moment of associative reflection, Niki recalls that the
destructive qualities of sand have always been intertwined scien-
tiftically and historically: "the sabulation" of the Roman Empire,
"the village of something or other, which Omar Khayyam wrote
0f, the cities of antiquity, whose immobility no one doubted; ...

YBt', after all, they too were unable to resist the law of the

x

8 Ibid., p. 27.

9 Ibid., p. 32.

10 Ibid., p. 31.

104

flowing 1/8 mm. sands."11

Niki's need to refer constantly to life in terms of

a scientific nexus has the quality of what Horney calls a

rheumatic attachment to the ideal of the intellect.12 The

inyrld, and life in the world, in Niki's view, must be made
apprehensible through his knowledge of its physical propen-
ijties and limitations. He feels compelled to comprehend
1&Lings intelkntually. He is most comfortable when he is
atfile to reduce natural phenomena into general hypotheses, to
ai"ticulate with scientific precision, the unwieldy quality
of “things as they are experienced. A telling illustration
Of ‘this tendency is shown when he summarily pronounces that

his; "own viewpoint in considering the sand to be a rejection of

11 Ibid., p. 41.

12 Karen Horney, pp. 313., pp. 182-183. Horney explains

?h&ft.one of the general measures of the neurotic is his belief
1n 1bhe supremacy of the mind. She notes that "while feelings —-
§eczause unruly —- are suspects to be controlled, the mind --
imaggination and reason -— expands like a genie from a bottle.
Thuss ..Z-a;7 dualism is created. It is no longer mind Egg feelings
bUt mind versus feelings; no longer mind 23d body but mind versus
bod3r; no longer mind and self but mind versus self." Horney con-
Cluéies that this belief, like other fragmentations of neurotic
S9111tions to life, "serves to release tensions, to cover up

1n11er47 conflicts, and to establish a semblance of unity" of

the self.

 

105

the stationary state was not madness ... a 1/8 mm. flow ...

a world where existence was a series of states."13 B
A y the

sanmrtoken, abstractions must be made tangible and referable
1m) concret things; "Hope" is a "trap to catch crows."14 Hope
as: an abstract quality of human aspiration, has meaning for
Nilii only when it is defined as a "state of existence." This
is evident when Niki discovers that the structure of his crow
trwap has accidentally functioned as a device for collecting
waster from the sand. This discovery is a revolutionary one
in. the sense that with its occurrence, "hope" has literally
anxi figuratively taken on a new form, and Niki feels that the
enizire nature of his captivity has changed into a different

"s13ate of existence":

The fact that he was still just as much at the
bottom of the hole as ever had not changed, but
he felt quite as if he had climbed to the top

of a high tower. Perhaps the world had been
turned upside down and its projections and de-
pressions reversed. Anyway, he had discovered
water in this sand. As long as he had his de-
vice the villagers would not be able to inter-
fere with him so easily. No matter how much they
cut off his supply, he would be able to get along
very well. Again laughter welled up in him at the
very thought of the outcry the villagers would
make. He was still in the hole, but it seemed as
if he were already outside. Turning around, he
could see the whole scene. You can't really judge
a mosaic if you don't look at it from a distance.
If you really get close to it you get lost in
detail only to get caught in another. Perhaps

13
The Woman 1g the Dunes, p. 120.

14 Ibid., p. 138.

.1-
- uz’

 

A...“
r

f.

 

106

what he had been seeing up to now was not the
sand but grains of sand.1

Niki makes, moreover, a correlation between his discovery of
a scientific phenomenon with his notion of discovering a
"new self":

The change in the sand corresponded to a change

in himself. Perhaps, along with the water in

the sand, he had found a new self.1

It is noteworthy that Niki sees himself as gaining a
reliewed sense of selfhood because he has made an amazing objec-
tixre discovery which will ensure his physical survival in what
is for him an extremely hostile environment. In other words,
wheat Niki is blatantly equating here is psychological value
wi11h scientific fact. The standard of value for his life lies
0u15side of himself; therefore, what Niki imagines to be a "new
se]_f" is a self which has meaning only in terms of external
Phenomena.17 Another way of viewing Niki's illusory sense of
selgf is to look at the primary metaphor of his "salvation" as

a Sielf. "Hope" in the form of Niki's crow trap is a failure,

and what is substituted for "hope" is scientific discovery.

 

'5 Ibid., pp. 153-154.

‘6 Ibid., p. 154.

17 Several critics have interpreted the novel's ending as
an <3ptimistic commentary of the protagonist's self. One critic,
Betll Schultz, argues that Niki's discovery is the source of his
SFCSFess as a self (The East-West Review [11:19627). She interprets
Nl"kll's conscious realization that he had not understood the sand
as at whole as the awareness he has that he had not always under—
?t°<>d.himsel£ and the other wholly; "in the knowledge of himself.
In 13he sense of responsibility to the woman, in the possibility for
Sha¥fiing his discovery and for making new discoveries, there is se-
curl‘tywithout fear and resignation; there is reason for being, room

“re reativity, and joy."

- flay, -
7' .
i

 

 

107
Hence, what keeps Niki at the bottom of the sand pit at the
end of the novel is not hope, but scientific preoccupation. He
attempts to find meaning in work, but as Colin Wilson notes,
'“to work without hope is almost a contradiction in terms, for

lnyrk without hope is work without real drive, without motiva-

18

tion."

It may be argued that scientific discovery acts for
Nilii as a kind of Joycean epiphany of selfhood. However,the
laalguage of the novel's conclusion reveals a curiously uneasy
pr 0 tagonist:

Something moved at the bottom of the hole.

It was his own shadow. Just near it stood

the water trap. One part of the framework

had come loose. Perhaps someone had acci-
dentally stepped on it when they had come

to take the woman out. He hastened back

down the ladder to repair it. The water, as

his calculations had led him to expect, had
risen to the fourth mark. The damage did not
appear to be too great. In the house, someone was
singing in a rasping voice on the radio. He tried
to stifle the sobbing that seemed about to burst
from him; he plunged his hands into the bucket.
The water was piercingly cold. He sank down on
his knees and remained inert, his hands still

in the water. There was no particular need to
hurry about escaping. On the two-way ticket

he held in his hand now, the destination and
time of departure were blanks for him to fill

in as he wished. In addition, he realized that
he was burning with a desire to talk to someone
about the water trap. And if he wanted to talk
about it, there wouldn't be better listeners
than the Villagers. He would end by telling
someone -- if not today, then tomorrow.

He might as well put off his escape ultil some-
time after that.1

18 Wilson, 2p, cit., p. 96.

1
9 The Woman 13 the Dunes, p. 156.

 

.. ....J
1'
:

Tr—W _. «E‘Y—‘moufi

108
The protagonist feels that he has a choice now, to escape
whenever he desires, but the choice is put into the limited
alternatives of the existential situation. As Philip Hallie
phrases it, the "greatest weakness in existentialism is that
it is not faithful enough to the phenomena of choice."
Choice and escape are significant when they are made in terms
of the conditions of the self, when one can find avenues to
free oneself from the shackles of the limited consciousness.
Niki has not found a self, but has instead found a way to
avoid self-knowledge by readily and uncritically accepting
the limitations of his life. He chooses to stay in the sand
pit but for an indefinite period of time, a choice which re-

fl ects what Hoffman calls the action of the contracting self.

20 Philip Hallie, pp. 339., p. 51. The Woman i_n t_h_e_
Dunes can be called a novel with an existential theme, which
I define here as a theme which concerns the individual who is
Cut off from the traditional sources of meaning, power, and
Purpose. Such an individual is determined to live according
to the "values" of day to day existence. These values include
the belief in the integrity of an individual's subjective
Perceptions of the objective world, and the belief that the
1110 0d of pessimism is closest to the real nature of existence.
The shortcomings of Existentialism are those of its strengths --
that is, because the individual has postulated himself as the
be ginning and end of all of his actions, he is in constant
da'Ilger of succumbing to a crippling egocentricity which fails
to recognize any possibility of an objective value system.

annifi‘um - “3'
1m... g .’
5.

109

The literary presentation of the contracting self, says
Hoffman,

is frequently described in terms of the
circumstances of escape, of hiding from

a formidable authority, or of withdrawal

into impenetrable securities of fantasy,
dream, and madness. Not only do the images

of "cave," "cellar," "cage," "shell" in-
crease. Since the self has become a refuge
from the non-self, from an inexplicable, a
domineering "father," it assumes the several
roles of the scurrying animal or insect, hi-
ding both itself from the view of the outside
and its own view from itself. Ultimately this
reductive process re-creates the entire, ex-
tensive scope of problems concerning self-
knowledge. In its extreme cases, the reduced
self suffers the complex and confusing respon—
sibility of self-determination on the most pri-
mitive and most unsophisticated levels of in-
sight and outlook.21

1316: contraction of Niki's self is seen as he remains at the
bOthom of the sand pit to which he, like a fly, has adapted.
His; superior intellect has shown him how to adapt, but it is
an_ intellect focused only on the concrete and tangible elements

22 which

0f experience. Niki's is not the "visionary intellect"
gTVres man purpose and authenticity as a self; it is rather the
in‘bellect limited by the dictates of the here and now.

Niki's reliance upon the externalities of existence

to "inform" himself of the nature of the universe and of man

21 Hoffman, Samuel Beckett, pp. 43-44.

22 Wilson, gp. cit., p. 128. Man, says Wilson, is "in-
authentic without purpose" which must be "grasped by the vision-
ary— intellect."

 

110

takes a heavy toll not only upon his development as a self,
but also upon his relationships with other individuals. The
following analysis is an attempt to show that the novel por-

'trays Niki's relationships with the "other" as fundamentally

negative experiences .

When Niki first encounters a villager, he still re-

iniins the manners of his past social behavior in which he re-

acrts to the surfaces of things:
"I should be very grateful if you would.

Of course, I will expect to show my appre-
ciation ... . I am particularly fond of

staying in village houses."23
Burt it is not long before his external "good manners" are stripped
awmay like the facade of a mask. In his initial interaction with
'filee woman in the dunes, we see his indifference to her as a per—
8011, and the possibility of using her as a sexual object occurs
to him:

He was not particularly interested in what she

had to say, but her words had warmth in them

that made him think of the body concealed be-
neath the coarse work trousers.

He is impatient of what he considers to be the woman's "blind
adklerence" to her fate: "Why must you cling so to such a vil-
lflége? I really don't understand. This sand is not a trifling
matrter. You're greatly mistaken if you think you can set your-
sel;f up against it with such methods. It's preposterous! I give

uP° I really give up. I have absolutely no sympathy for you."25

23
24

Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid. , P. 28.
25 Ibid., p. 30.

 

111

His superior attitude and passionately exhibited indifference,
however, soon turn to a nagging fear that the silent, seemingly
docile woman has had a part in his imprisonment:

The ladder had probably been removed with

her knowledge, and doubtless with her full
consent. Unmistakably she was an accomplice.

Of course her posture had nothing to do with
embarrassment; it was the posture of a sacri-
ficial victim, of a criminal willing to accept
any punishment. He had been lured by the beetle
into a desert from which there was no escape --
like some famished mouse.2

In his continual anger at being duped by a seemingly
ignorant and worthless woman, he is put into a struggle against
the lure of the woman as a sexual object and his need not to be
controlled either by his emotions or by another person. Thus,
when he tells her "Stop looking so stupid!" we learn what he is
undergoing emotionally:

He was angry; he wanted to make her admit her
guilt even if he had to force it out of her.

At the very thought his hair bristled and his
skin felt scratchy like dry paper. "Skin" seemed
to establish an association of ideas with the
word "force." Suddenly she became a silhouette
cut out from its background. A man of 20 is
sexually aroused by a thought. ... But for a
man of 30 a woman who is only a silhouette is
the most dangerous. He could embrace it as
easily as embracing himself, couldn't he? But
behind her there were a million eyes. She was
only a puppet controlled by threads of vision.
If he were to embrace her, he would be the next
to be controlled.27

Thié threat of being an object himself comes from the powerful

\

26 Ibid., p. 36.

27 Ibid., p. 60.

 

112

forces of sexuality which are capable of making him lose

the tense control which he tries to maintain over himself.
In a monologue, he articulates his deep need: "Saying you
want to become a writer is no more than egotism; you want
to distinguish between yourself and the puppets by making

yourself a puppeteer."28 The struggle to keep one's self

figs!

intact from the invasion ofothers, is also the struggle to

cling to some vestige of protection from the awful task of

Tflmfir'fi. 3

'. ‘r-

facing one's self -- the self which is reduced to its lowest

3 i x‘.’
t' .

common denominator, to its most existential mode when masks,
roles, manners, and other accoutrements of society are no
longer available. The luxury of rational self-consciousness,
of mirroring one's self and the other in a "game" which one
plays is no longer possible for Niki. This idea is brought
out most forcefully as he compares the sexual encounter he
has had with his mistress to that of the physical debacle
with the woman in the dunes:

On that bed -- with the other one -- they

had been a feeling man and woman, a watching
man and woman; they had been a man who watched
himself experiencing and a woman who had watched
herself experiencing; they had been a woman who
watched a man watching himself and a man watch-
ing a woman watching herself ... all reflected
in counter-mirrors ... She limitless conscious-
ness ofthe sexual act.2

The sex which he experiences in his new situation lacks the

\

28 Ibid., p. 75.

29 Ibid., p. 94.

113

dissolute sophistication and self—consciousness of the past
encounters, and literally sweeps him into a chasm of primitive
urges. The intensity of Niki's sexual experiences with the
woman in the dunes has the effect of momentarily restoring him
to the source of power and strength within him. But, like the
liaison he has had with his former mistress, he has failed to
establish any warm or meaningfully intimate relationship with

the woman. Their sexual union significantly results in a mis-

. . . 3O
carrlage of its issue.

The irony of Niki's situation lies in the fact that al-
though he attempts desperately to control the other, the entirely
new conditions of life with the woman call forth unexpectedly
humane results. As he lives and struggles for survival with
the strange woman, he comes to a point of feeling a pure and
simple generosity which he lacked in his former life:

"You're really a great help," she had said. ...

And someday, maybe I'll be able to buy a radio

or a mirror or something."

(Radio and mirror ... radio and mirror ...) As if all
of human life could be expressed in those two things
alone. Radios and mirrors do have a point in common:
both can connect one person with another. Maybe they
reflect cravings that touch the core of our existence.
All right, when he got home he would buy a radio right
away and send it off to her.31

30 In his study "Abe and Ooka: Identity and Mind—Body,"
(Slritigue [2: 19687, p. 135), James Korges interprets the mis-
CElirriage as ultimately favorable: "At the end of the novel, the
wc"man is taken to the hospital, to finish a miscarriage. The sex-
luiil relationship of the two has ended in a dead thing; but during
tllse nine months the action of the novel covers, the man has him—
SE3lf reconceived himself, redefined himself. The moment of the mis-
caLJPriage is the moment of his rebirth."

31 The WOman 1g the Dunes, p. 123.

_ _.:J

4"“.—

-As —. --

1?

 

114

Even the jeering, obscene request of the villagers to have

Niki perform a debasing sexual exhibition with the woman becomes

not a source of frustration and anger, but rather a means for
comprehension:

The man stood numbly, as if someone were

strangling him, but slowly he began to

understand exactly what they meant. And

he began to understand that he understood.

Once he had comprehended, their proposal

didn't seem particularly surprising.32
His feelings of generosity and his new grasp of comprehending
the "humanness" of the villager's cruel request help him to
locate emotions in himself which join him to a common human-
ity. In a sense, Niki has obtained with these feelings an
insight of what it means ta 23, a form of epiphany of a
larger, unlimited freedom which transcends his narrow ego-
centric vision of his own needs and desires.

In his "new" world, Niki's old view of life is
constantly called into question. He begins to discover that
the present is significant, that the moment or the instant
takes on new dimensions and importance:

The idea had come to him rather suddenly.

But it was not necessarily true that only

a time-tested plan would be successful. Such

sudden inspiration had sufficient basis in

itself, even though the process of its emer-

gence had been unconscious. The chances of

success were better in spontaneous cases than
with plans that had been fussed over.33

32 Ibid., p. 149.

33 Ibid., p. 107.

“'3‘: . An‘ ..

‘, ..---.._.

115
The woman, whom he first regards as "animal-like," "thinking
only in terms of today ... no yesterday, no tomorrow ... with

34

a dot for a heart," also makes him realize gradually that
her menial tasks can be important:
There was an importance about the dancing
needle that made him feel it was the center 5
of the world. Her repetitious movements gave 35 1
color to the present and feeling of actuality. ‘4
Earlier, Niki reads the headlines of some outdated newspapers
that are brought into the but by the villagers, and is struck

by the meaninglessness of what he sees. He then equates the

 

27-

headlines with life, and comes up with a statement of exis-
tential significance:

But everyday life was exactly like the headlines.
And so everybody knowing the meaninglessness of
existence3 sets the center of his compass at his
own home. 6

At the center of all of Niki's experiences is the
realization that the task of Sisyphus, the "infernal punishment

Precisely because nothing happens,"37

is really a fitting analo-
gy of life. Niki's need to exist and survive no matter what
happens is basic to its extreme: "What was the use of indivi-

duality when one was on the point of death? He wanted to go on

\

34 Ibid., p. 47.

35 Ibid., p. 139.

36 Ibid., pp. 62-63.

37 Ibid., p. 124.

116

living under any circumstances, even if his life had no more

38

individuality than a pea in a pod." And his subsequent

actions make him think of various ways by which he may exist:

He adjusted himself to the life of the

hole, as if it were a kind of hibernation,
concentrating his efforts on making the
villagers relax their vigilance. Repeti-
tion of the same patterns, they say, pro-
vides an effective form of protective color-
ing. If he were to melt into a life of sim-
ple repetition, there might possibly come a
time when they could be quite unconscious of
him.39

 

He also realizes that the essence of loneliness is an "unsatis-
fied thirst for illusion."4O The inference that can be made
from this statement is that without illusion, or the need for
illusion, one ceases to be lonely. Relationships with others
on a meaningful level do not exist in reality, and the sooner
one comes to the conclusion that this is so, the sooner he is
able to live with himself. The self that one lives with in
this novel, however, is not the self that is fulfilled; it

is rather a self that sees no real need for communication with

41 Thus,

Others except "to talk to someone about the water trap."
it is a curiously uneasy and empty peace that Niki finds at the
e11dof the novel. Wilson states that one of the chief charac-
teristic of the human being is that his interest extends far

\

Ibid., p. 133.
Ibid., P. 139.

Ibid., p. 140.
Ibid., p. 156.

117

beyond mere survival and comfort.42 The ending of The Woman 1g

 

the Dunes demonstrates that the protagonist does not go beyond

his need for survival and comfort -- his acceptance of his limit-

ed freedom makes him a captive of his circumstances and his needs.
The theme of the alienation of self in the novel is rein-

forced by the setting of the action.43

The landscape plays a 91
vital role in the novel in defining the tone of hostility and
violence that accompanies the protagonist's stay in the strange

village. The relation of landscape to theme is explained below:

 

iv
1

The history of violence in the twentieth century

(and in its literature) follows somewhat along

these lines, in terms of the character of the
assailant: the assailant as human being, as in-
strument, as machine, as landscape. In this last

case, the assailant is neither human nor mechani-

cal but the entire environment, the land itself,

or the world or the solar system: whatever extent

of space the instrument of the assailant has put at

his disposal. Many of the literary expressions of

this circumstances have been given in terms of vast
landscapes of desert, or ice-bound images of terror,

or mountain perspectives; they are the reverse of

the spiritual metaphors I have already discussed.

They have the double function of separating man from
time and eliminating most associations with ordinary
reality. The strategy of adjustment to this kind of
violence usually takes the form of making the generali-
zations defining it as vast, unreal, unavailable to ra-
tional explanation as the circumstance itself. The
natural reaction to them is to trust nothing that is 44
vague, abstract, not associated with immediate experiences.

42 Wilson, gp. cit., p. 80.

43 Harry Levin, "Thematics and Criticism," in The Disci-
-E51ines of Criticism, ed. P. Demetz, et. al. (New Haven, 1968),
E3- 134. Levin lists varied ways in which— thematics is related to
c<Dncrete representations in literature -- one of these is the set—
1Zing in some works taking on a thematic aspect.

44 Hoffman, The Mortal E2, p. 14.

 

118

The landscape Niki finds himself in is impressionistically
rendered. The beach, first of all, is presented as a kind of
lunar landscape which is inimical to human life:

The landscape was a mixture of hillocks and hollows,
... in the direction of the seashore the soil gradual-
ly became whitish and dry. ... Now and again clumps of
dry grass cast shadows in hollows in the sand. As if
by mistake, there was occasionally a meager plot of
eggplants, the size of a straw mat. But of human sha-
dows there was not a trace. The sea, toward which he
was headed, lay beyond.4

When he finds himself inextricably caught in this landscape,
several bizarre states take place within him. The "omniscient
face" of the sand cliff tells him of the "meaninglessness of
resistance,"46 and a feeling of overwhelming impotence paraly-
zes his entire body. He wishes to believe in his ability to
maintain control over his environment, but he cannot do so

with conviction:

Certain types of insects and spiders, when unexpected-
ly attacked, fall into a paralytic state, a kind of
epileptic seizure .. an airport whose control tower
has been seized by lunatics .. a fragmented picture.
He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement

had stopped all movement in the world, the way a
hibernating frog abolishes winter.4

The landscape is portrayed as a detached entity which
defies all human attempts to control it. For a moment, Niki
futilely toys with the idea of using the landscape, to capitalize
on its inimical qualities by changing it into a commercial asset:

There was something strangely tense in the

45 The WOman ig the Dunes, p. 9.

 

46
47

Ibid., P. 36.
Ibid., p. 39.

.m- 2|. Dig.

 

‘I-l oifi“: I.” ~—
1"
V‘ ,.

119

spatial composition, and he shuddered with

an uncanny loneliness for people. (Yes, this
certainly is a romantic landscape ... A set-
ting like this would be a great attraction for
young tourists these days. Precious, gilt—edged
stock it is ... . I can guarantee its future
development as someone who's experienced in this

profession. But if you're

going to develop it,

first you've got to advertise' Even flies won't

come if you don't advertise.)48 M
r.

He admits, however, that the idea~ is actually thought up tie

"in a fit of spleen," and he changes his viewpoint by formu-
lating a theory of nature and beauty: "Beautiful scenery need

not be sympathetic to man." He pictures this scenery as one Lf

of violence, "the beauty of sand
"it was the beauty of death that
of its ruins and its great power
The landscape of violence
cosmic beauty and significance.
sode, Niki looks upon an awesome

and finds himself pleading to it

 

1* ~
"V‘V." 4- v _‘

... belonged to death" and
ran through the magnificence
of destruction."49
also becomes the scene of
In a poetically moving epi-

display of natural phenomenon

as to a universal Judge:

A milky mist billowed and swirled above the cliff.
Spaces of shadow, speckled with the remains of
night... spaces that sparkled as if with glowing
wire ... spaces flowing with particles of shining
vapor. The combination of shadows was filled with
fantasies and stirred limitless reveries in him.
He would never tire of looking at the sight. Every
moment overflowed with new discoveries. Everything
was there, actual shapes confounded with fantastic
forms he had never seen before.

He turned toward the swirling mass and appealed to
it involuntarily.

--Your Honor, I request to be told the substance of
the prosecution. I request to be told the reason for

 

48
49

Ibid., Pp. 119-120.
Ibid., p. 120.

120

my sentence. You see the defendant before
you, awaiting your pleasure.50

It is not only the landscape which is rendered impres-
sionistically and which effectively defines Niki's emotional
and perceptual states. we see also that the protagonist's
consciousness of his own being and of abstract, metaphysical
concepts, such as time, is portrayed with vivid impressionistic
detail. He sees others and himself as chromatic objects: "He
sank into an unbearable self-aversion with the thought that
among the glum and gray people other than he had colors other

51 When Niki is exhausted,

52

than gray -- red, blue, green."
"his fatigued senses become like wet paper," or "his fatigue
spread out into a sluggish circle, like India ink dropped in
water -- it was a jellyfish, a scent bag, a diagram of an

atomic nucleus."53

His sensations after the scene of sexual humiliation

before the villagers are equally vivid: "It seemed that what
remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her

body,"54 and, "It was as if his stomach were being tickled

by a paper balloon filled with some special light gas; he felt

 

5° bi ., p. 141.
51 Ibid., p. 65.
52 Ibid., p. 83.
53 Ibid., p. 106.
54 Ibid., p. 151.

1H
p.

 

 

 

 

 

'rt'i Dunn-2.1; ‘ Q 11. eggs—-

tl'r an:

121

that the hand he held to his face was floating free in the air."55

Not only are his senses aroused to a preternatural degree,
but he also finds very early that his new existence throws him
into a surreal, dreamlike state, a condition which renders him
helpless to control his immediate situation and which recalls
him startlingly to his absurd condition:

His memory had completely stopped functioning.

Then it had gotten confused with a long, oppre-

ssive dream. In the dream he was astride an old,

used chopstick, floating down some unknown street.

It was not bad on the chopstick, rather like riding

a scooter, but when he relaxed his attention he sud—
denly lost his buoyance. ... At the end of the deal,
the dealer suddenly gave him the last card and cried
out. He took the card involuntarily and looked at it;
it was not a card at all, but a letter. The letter
had a strange, soft feel to it. When he exerted pres-
sure with his fingers, blood came Spurting up. He had
screamed and awoke.

Niki's senses also perceive time graphically; time is a
tangible object "folded in endless, deep, bellows—like pleats,"55
a sensation associated with a specific action: "Time cannot be
spurred on like a horse. But it is not quite so slow as a push-
cart. Gradually the morning temperature attained its usual inten-
sity; his eyeballs and brain began to seethe; the heat pierced
his innards; his lungs burned;"58 -- time is also a state of
being: "You can't spend time vertically. It's an accepted fact

that time really goes horizontally. -- What happens if

you try spending it vertically? - - You're a mummy

 

55
56

Ipid., p. 153.
lpid., p. 56.

57
58

Ibid., p. 80.
Ibido , PP. 83-840

 

122
59

if you do!" The protagonist's concern with time here is
associated with the concern over an inevitable human condition.
John Cohen in his article "Subjective Time," defines the con-
dition as follows: "Thought of time brings to mind the ideas

of corruption and decay, the knowledge of inexorable and irre-

60 The examples given above illus-

versible aging and death."
trate the fact that the presentation of the theme of the self

in The WOman 12 the Dunes is intricately related to the varied

 

 

metaphors of landscape and time, and to the threads of impres-
sionistic descriptions which run through the fabric of the
action. Clearly, there is a satisfying and functional aesthe-

tic pattern underlying this novel.

Aesthetic patterning is also present although in dif-
ferent degrees and form in Abe's second novel, Tagig pg Egg,
or Th3 £222.2i Another (1964), which treats the theme of the
self and an individual's quest for human values from the stan-
dards of scientific knowledge. The novel's basic structure
is in the form of notebooks which are kept by a nameless
chemist whose face has been totally disfigured in a laboratory
accident. The novel is comprised of three notebooks, supplemen-
ted by marginalia, added bits of notes called "excursus," and

a letter. The notebooks are kept with the intention of having

 

59 Ibid., p. 118.

60 John Cohen, "Subjective Time," in The Voices pf Time,
ed. J.T. fraser (New York, 1966), p. 275.

'm nm- a gun g... m

123
the protagonist's wife read and understand the innermost
feelings and motivations of the writer who has found himself
suddenly a physical and spiritual outcast in society. The
"plot" of the novel is not so much the confessions of an in-
dividual tortured by self-doubts as a complicated seduction
of the "significant other" in the person of the protagonist's a
wife. The theme of the novel resides in the examination of .

the scientific, social, moral, psychological, metaphysical,

 

and aesthetic definitions of a face and its relevance to the

TIER“; :-

self. The Face pf Another is a novel demonstrating the idea
that questions raised about the self do not call forth facile
answers and that the choice of a convenient answer or one
made in desperation may have tragic consequences for the
chooser.
The tone of the novel is set in the following passage:
Finally, I tired of this soliloquy about a face,
this soliloquy that made no progress. But there
was no particular reason, either, to abandon the
plans that I had been at pains to begin. I began 61
to devote close attention to technical observations.
The protagonist, after leaving the hospital where he is treated
for his facial wounds, feels that while his wife still lives
with him, she has ceased to think of him as a husband, and per-

haps even as a person. Faced with the loss of her regard, the

protagonist embarks on his plans "to put the stopper for the

 

6‘ as F_ac_e 9i __Anot_h_er. p. 32.

123a

hole" in his face.62 The task looms before him with a formi-
dable range of possibilities and implications. His thoughts
about his projected mask threaten to overwhelm him. Thus,
his decision to "pay close attention to technical details"

is a way of determining how to bring order out of the chaos
of his seemingly endless "soliloquizing." His efforts to
search out standards of values through the use of scientific
method and knowledge comprise a wish to control phenomena

which actually defy control. It is a control which is essen-

‘m’mflm u ion-«av ‘53,

tially dehumanizing because it reduces personal relationships
and selfhood to an equation. The following marginal note
exemplifies how the protagonist achieves a theoretical victory
in his efforts to objectify his self, but it is a victory gained
at the risk of dehumanization:

It would be a mistake to settle this whole

thing with vague standards. Rather I should
doubtless take into consideration my inner
impulse to reject standards. Choosing a stan-
dard, in other words, is to commit oneself

to others. However, at the same time, men have
the opposite desire of trying to distinguish
themselves from others. Perhaps the two could be

related thus:
A=f(_;.
B N

A = the factor of commitment to others; B = the
factor of resistance to others; n = age; f = one's
degree of viscosity [its decrease is the hardening
of the self and at the same time the forming of the
self; generally it stands in inverse proportion to
age, but in a locus curve one can observe a number
of individual differences among people according to

62 Ibid., p. 19.

124

sex, personality, work, etc¥7 In short, with
age the degree of my viscosity was decreasing
very much, and I felt strong opposition to
changing faces at this late date.

Although the protagonist formulates with numerical precision

the concept that his age has "formed" his self to an irrever-
sible point, he nonetheless decides to change his face in accor-
dance with a "standard for faces." His efforts lead him to an
unexpected and anxiety-provoking dialectic:

If I did not come to some decision about what
sort of face to make, I could not advance a
step further. But no matter how much I thought
about it, my head, like a museum storeroom, was
in utter confusion with a thousand sample faces.
Yet, if I kept shrinking from making a choice,
I would never come to any decision. I borrowed
a warehouse storage list, deciding there was no
other course open to me except to gather my
courage and check the faces off one by one.
However, on the first page of the list appeared
some unexpectedly obliging instructions, "rules
for classification," which I read with pounding
heart:

1. The standard of value for faces is definitely
objective. If one is involved in personal feelings,
one makes the error of being taken in by imitations.

2. There is no such thing as a standard of value
for faces. There are only pleasure and displeasure,
and the standard of selection is cgntinually culti-
vated through refinement of taste. 4
This dialectic is grounded in the idea that life constantly
eludes efforts to standardize it. But the protagonist ignores

“this idea, to his consequent distorted comprehension of the

rurture of existence. He is, for example, unable to appreciate

 

63 Ibid., pp. 42-43.

‘64 Ibid., p. 44.

e—qu

 

tyi‘fii

125
the beauty of life's infinite opposites.

As long as the protagonist harbors the illusion that
life must, and can be unremittingly subjected to controls, he
cannot abandon his search for a tenable scientific paradigm.
His efforts to draw up a list of human facial expressions
reflect this strenuous and ultimately futile search:

Concerning the content and distribution of

the expressions, I drew up the following tenta-
tive list as ratios of 100 percent.

1. Concentration of interest 16 percent
2. Curiosity 07 percent
3. Assent 10 percent
4. Satisfaction 12 percent
5. Laughter 13 percent
6. Denial 06 percent
7. Dissatisfaction 07 percent
8. Abhorrence 06 percent
9. Doubt 05 percent
10. Perplexity 06 percent
11. Concern 03 percent
12. Anger 09 percent

It cannot be considered satisfactory to analyze

such a complicated and delicated thing as expre—
ssion into these few components. However, by com-
bining just this many elements on my palette, I
should be able to get almost any shade. The per-
centages, needless to say, indicate the frequen-
cy of occurrence of each item. In brief, I pos-
tulated a type of man who expressed his emotions
in approximately such ratios. I should be hard
pressed for a ready answer if I were asked what
the standard of judgment was. I weighed these
expressions one by one on the scales of my in-
tuition, placing myself in the position of a
seducer and imagining the scene when I would 65
confront you who were the symbol of "the others."

The fact that he admits to the difficulty of adhering to strict

objectivity in explaining his "standard of judgment" and that

 

65 Ibid., p. 102.

‘Jr‘

can!

.._. ".

126

he relies on the "scales of [fhi5_7 intuition," however, does
not mitigate the protagonist's essential preoccupation with
scientific norms. The list of expressions he draws up indi-
cates a certain amount of trust which he has in his intuitive
powers, but this trust is secondary to his major concern which

is the application of his ratiocinative ability.

5357

It is evident that the protagonist places his confidence
in science because of his belief that it is an instrument for

revealing man's freedom. The lesson that science teaches man

fimmomm 9W
*1 .

is that he is an evolutionary, not a static creature. Man is
capable of changing his environment through knowledge, and
by his actions the quality of life need not be as it is found.
However, this view of science creates a potentially dangerous
situation in that man's ability to control and manipulate
matter becomes his sole avenue to freedom. The danger arises
when he is faced with this freedom and discovers that there
are no certain ways to carry it through to a logical conclu-
sion.

The protagonist in Th: £323 pf Another is clearly
aware of what his use of scientific research in creating a
mask means in terms of the result which he desires to accom-
plish —- namely, a reunion with his estranged wife, -- but he
is not prepared to deal with the freedom which his research
also entails:

"The goal does not lie in the results of research,
the very process of research is itself the goal."

127

Yes ... words that any researcher would utter

as a matter of course. While at first blush

they seemed unrelated to my case, I could not
help but feel that I was after all saying the
same thing as they. The process of research, in
short, was merely the expenditure of freedom up-
on matter. The results of research, on the con—
trary, by being calculated in terms of value, en-
courage the preservation of freedom. The point of
the words was to warn against the tendency to
overemphasize only results and to confuse means
and ends. I thought this was a much more en—
lightened logic, but on reflection what I had

put forth was quite like the alcoholic babblings
of the mask. I was not at all satisfied with the
explanation. Was it not simply that, although I
had intended to control the mask, I had actually :
found it to be unmanageable? Or was freedom like
some powerful medicine which, though beneficial
in small quantities, produces ill effects as soon
as one exceeds the given dosage? ...

 

t
i
t
.'

F :1

Well nog how shall I deal with this excessive
freedom? 6

As the ending of the novel shows, the protagonist finally

decides on how he should "deal with this excessive freedom."
It is a decision, first of all, which is qualified by his
explanation of what freedom signifies for him:

But however tedious, I think it best to tell

you what the grounds were: that the purest

expenditure of freedom is actually the satis-

faction of sexual desires. The expenditure

of freedom, however pure, has no value in it-

self; value is rather in the production of

freedom.67
It is clear what the protagonist is trying to say here. If
'value is in the "production of freedom," then the goals of
science, specifically those of research, are uppermost in all

(If his discourse. Scientific research, however, is not used

Ixy the protagonist to derive findings which would give evidence

 

66 Ibid., p. 153.
67

Ibid., p. 161.

128

to the belief in objective values. Rather, it is a process
manipulated by his obsessive needs, and which is used to
confirm what he has already subjectively experienced. We are
able to see why his decision in the final notes is one made in
despair and fraught with violence and pessimism. Since the ex-
penditure of freedom has "no value in itself," there is nothing
to bar the protagonist from pursuing any action, moral or immo-
ral, that he desires.68 His final choice is an immoral one, to
destroy "the other" who he feels has betrayed him and driven to
desperation by her rejection of his efforts to communicate with
her:

There are two indications that your sniping

at me was fatal. One is the cruel revelation

that while you had seen through the real charac-
ter of the mask, you had nonetheless gone on

 

68 The immoral and non-self-actualizing nature of the
protagonist's decision is a characteristic of the ethical di-
rection inherent ineexistential fiction. Frederick Karl and
Leo Hamalian in their Introduction to The Existential Imagination
(New York, 1963), p. 17, explain this direction as follows:
"Paradoxically, for a movement so concerned with ethics, exis-
tential fiction has provided little of an ethical theory or
guide. Existentialism frequently becomes trapped by its own
virtues: for if everyone is motivated ethically by his own sub-
jectivity, then there is not only chaos, but potential immora-
lity. If all objective values are rejected, then one's personal
behavior can be arbitrarily immoral, even though one wishes to
set others free. And the latter is really the transcendent aim
of existentialism. Existentialism would seem, then, to work well
only for those who have a personal ethic derived from the exist-
ing legal or religious codes. It would work least well for those
who have wrong responses, or bad faith, and who would simply
perpetuate their subjectivity along immoral lines."

 

129

pretending to be deceived. The other is
the merciless chastisement of claiming
that I tediously talked on and on about
alibis, anonymity, pure goals, and the
destroying of taboos. In actual fact I

did not perform a single real act but
simply went around in<ircles writing these
notes.

The standards of value of his wife, he concludes, are no better
than those of the rest of the world; they concentrate on the
face, on outer appearances rather than "on life itself."70
The irony of the protagonist's efforts is that he himself adopts
these standards and because of this, becomes both the victim and
assailant of people like his wife. In the following entries, we
see the line of ethical and metaphysical reasoning which leads
him into such an ironical situation. He appears to want to be-
lieve that inherent moral worth lies in the self and its crea-
tive activity rather than in outward appearances:

I can hardly believe that the face is so impor-

tant to a man's existence. A man's worth should

be gauged by the content of his work; possibly

the convolutions of the surface of the brain have

something to do with it, but his face certainly

does not. If the loss of a face can cause conspi-

cuous changes in the scale of evaluation, it may 71
well be owing to a fundamental emptiness of content.

Moreover, he notes that the mask is essentially "a serious act
of violence against the custom of the world." He gives this

point additional force by stating the mask's destructiveness

 

69 The Face 2: Another, p. 227.

70 Ibid., p. 232.

71 Ibido , PP. 15-160

 

 

130

in theoretical and hypothetical terms:

Ihlthe first place, the mask was itself a serious
actcfl violence against the custom of the world.
Whether arson and murder would be more destructive
than a mask could not be answered with pure common
sense. To put it succinctly, it would be best to
begin mass production of an elaborate mask, like
the one used for myself, and presuppose a public
opinion that in time would be favorable. In all
likelihood, masks would attain fantastic popula-
rity, my factory would grow larger and larger,

and even working full time it would be unable to
meet the demand. Some people would suddenly vanish.
Others would be broken up into two or three people.
Personal identification would be pointless, police
photographs ineffective, and pictures of prospec-
tive marriage partners torn up and thrown away.
Strangers would be confused with acquaintances,
and the very idea of an alibi would collapse.
Unable to suspect others, unable to believe in
others, one would have to live in a suspended
state, a state of bankrupt human relations, as

if one were looking into a mirror that reflects

nothing.72

The protagonist's hypothetical projection, however, is

transformed abruptly into a metaphysical "reality" in which
he sees the "nation," or society, as an enormous and destruc-

tive mask. By reasoning that the anarchist becomes in his

metaphysical "reality," the "most harmless thing in the world,"

.he is able to justify and validate his final act:

IDoes the nation consider the mask something evil
and subversive? I wonder whether the nation it-
self is not an enormous mask intolerant of the
:rivalry of individual masks. Then the most harm-
less thing in the world must be an anarchist.
II have proved that a mask by its very existence is
basically destructive. Equivalent to premeditated
murder, the mask can stand shoulder to shoulder,
'witfli no feeling of inferiority, with arson or ban-
<litryu It was not surprising that the mask, which

72 Ibid., pp. 161-162.

.1

 

 

131

itself was a form of destruction, was not
inspired to such crimes as arson and murder,
although it was in the act of walking now through
the ruins of human relationships destroyed by its
existence. Despite the throbbing cancer of its
cravings, it was satisfied simply to be.73

 

Psychologically, the protagonist's inability to come
to terms with the significant "other" and with himself arises
from the conflict between the feelings and attitudes he holds
about the necessity of creating a mask for himself. He is
fully cognizant of the fact that the major "function" of a

face is the support it lends to one's concept of self; hence,

 

his proclamation -- "to accustom others to my face was the best

short cut to getting used to it mysel and "a face is not

something to show off to others, but something that serves

f!"75

 

one's sel But he is never able to realize this function
in himself. His mask ultimately fails to serve his self. In-
stead, he is completely occupied in carrying out the secondary
function of the mask as an object which can be used to seduce
his wife into an intimate relationship. He stakes his entire
efforts upon his wife, for she symbolizes the precious, but
illusory as he discovers later, contact which he hopes to es-

tablish with the "world":

For me, whatever you may say, you are the most
important "other person." No, I do not mean it

 

3
Ibid., p. 167.

74 Ibid., p. 13.

75 Ibid., p. 59.

 

132

in.£L negative sense. I mean that the one who
Inust;:first restore the roadway, the one whose
nanma I had to write on the first letter, was
firmit on my list of"others." (Under any cir-
cumstances, I simply did not want to lose you.

TR) lose you would be symbolic of losing the
world.)7

It is because the protagonist largely ignores himself and
focuses on external relationships that he is caught up in
such things as the "Jungian analysis" of the four basic facial

types listed in Henri Boulan's _L_e_ Visage:

l. Concave type, bony: strong projection of
the flesh in forehead, cheeks, and chin.

2. Concave type, fatty: slight swelling of
the fatty tissue in forehead, cheeks, and
chin.

3. Convex type, bony: sharply pointed face,
centering around the nose.

4. Convex type, fatty: slight frontal projec-
tion, centering around the nose.

A Jungian analysis of the four basic facial
types would suggest that the first two types
are introversial, and the second two are extra-
versial. Also, numbers one and three tend to be
antagonistic to the outside world, while numbers
two and four tend to be conciliatory. It is pos-

sible to make up a personality combining the two
odds and the two evens.

The significance of the protagonist's prolonged attention to

vmat one critic calls the "surfaces of life"78 lies in the
charachnfls repressive behavior. He attempts to dam the flow
of deep feelings and the effort of encountering them directly

by channeling his interests into complicated and time-consuming

76 Ibid., p. 83.

77 Ibid., p. 52.

 

78 Howard Hibbett, "Tradition and Trauma in the Contem-
porary Japanese Novel," p. 41.

I ‘

smash ‘
I
I
b.

'L __
v - ‘.‘-’. ‘ - .W_a_'g . ~190-‘B [any
‘.. ' ‘ '
’s—A"
1'
’ r

 

133

disquisitions on the external aspects of life.
The protagonist confesses that his psychic conflicts

arise from two sources -- first, his inexplicable ambivalence

toward his wife:

I wanted to get close to you, and at the same

time to stay away from you. I wanted to know

you, and at the same time I resisted that know-
ing. I wanted to look at you and at the same

time felt ashamed to look. My state of suspen-
sion was such that the crevice between us grew
deeper and deeper, and holding the broken glass
together with my two hands, I barely preserved its

form.7

and second, feelings of debilitating anxiety over the respon-

sibility he must assume for his real self:

No matter how different I might be from my
real face, I was still myself. Since I was

not under the influence of hypnotism or

drugs, whatever the acts of the mask --

even the concealing of an air pistol in

my pocket -- it was the real I who would

have to assume the ultimate responsibility.
The personality of the mask was certainly

not something that, rabbit-like, popped out

of a magician's hat; it must really be a

part of me that had come into being with-

out my being aware of it, because the gate-
keeper, my real face, had been so severely
forbidden access. And while I theoretically
understood this to be so, nevertheless, it

was as if I were suffering from amnesia; I
could not conjure up the whole of the person-
ality. Imagine my irritation at not being able
to provide a content consonant with this abstract

self.80

There is no attempt on his part, however, to resolve his con-

.flicts sn3'that he may live with the "other" and himself. His

 

'79 The Face 2; Another, p. 93.

80 Ibid., pp. 126-127.

 

134

.hmighhsremain fragmented and separated from his real self;

he'hmatstmem as though they have no relevance for his future

actions because he does not know where he is in the present
The self is in a state of uneasy divisiveness.

Ikmoubtedly, the protagonist is in anguish over his
divided self. .An important clue to this torment resides in
the fact that his self-image is basically a negative one.

is convinced, for instance, of his worthlessness as a self:

--You understand, I suppose ... I'm no one.
Since I have had to undergo the anguish of
being someone up till now, I shall deliberate-
ly take this opportunity to withdraw again
from becoming someone. Even you don't really
think you would like to make someone of me,

do you? As a matter of fact it would be impos-
sible even if you did, so shouldn't we let

things go as they are?
Because he cannot be sure of himself, he cannot be sure of
"the other." Furthermore, his feelings of impotence and

desolation in the presence of "the other" are constant and

painful reminders of his weaknesses:

I had begun to feel an intolerable desolation

at the great cleavage between the mask and my-
self. Perhaps I was already anticipating the
catastrophe that was to come. The mask, as the
name inqflied, would forever be my false face;

and although my true nature could never be con-
trolled.by such a thing, once it had seen you it
*would fly off somewhere far beyond my control,
alul I could only watch it go in helpless, blank
amazement. Thus, contrary to my purpose in making
a.1mask, I had ended by recognizing the victory of
the face. In order to consolidate myself into one
personality, I must bring this masked play

He

 

8‘ Ibid., p. 128.

 

 

135

to an end by tearing off the mask.

But as I expected, the mask was not so stub-
born. As soon as it perceived my determina-
tion, it retreated in haste, smiling bitterly,
and I stopped my empty musings there. I inflic-
ted no further chastisement on it.82

The protagonist's negative self-image is largely responsible

for his turning bitterly against "the other" who has refused

to cooperate with him in his venture. He does not recognize

his wife as "the other" who is an individual, with a right

to her own thoughts and private motives. He points, instead,

an accusing finger at her, and holds her responsible for the

violent and destructive act which he feels compelled to carry

out:

of violence against the other has an underlying note of tragedy.
For it is a decision which is made in the face of severe disen-

chantment with the possibility of ever establishing human rela-

For you did not cooperate with me as much as

the boy did with his sister. Even though you
recognized the necessity of the mask, it was
only a domesticated mask that would never trans-
gress the taboo. So, this time, you had better
be careful. The mask that descends on you this
time will be a wild animal. Since you have seen
through it already, the mask will concentrate on
its lawlessness, unweakened and unblinded by
jealousy. You have dug your own grave by your-
self. I have never had the experience of having
anything in writgng produce such results as
these notes did. 3

The protagonist's decision to commit himself to an act

tionships.

82 Ibid., pp. 142-143.

83 Ibid., pp. 236-237.

 

 

 

136

All of his experiences with others are painful re-

minders that rejection or acceptance hinges upon the outer

appearance of the individual. It is especially painful for

him to read rejection, even in the simple reactions of children

 

When some young boys who were playing catch in
a narrow lane saw me, they changed color and

pressed away from me against the fence. Their
faces looked as though they were dangling by .
their ears on Clothespins. If I took off the :
bandage and showed them gale real thing, they'd

be a lot more surprised!

 

 

The only human being who can apparently accept him is a

mentally retarded girl; but his interaction with her is no

less filled with anxiety and conflicting feelings:

All at once I felt like laughing out loud. I

was relieved and at the same time wanted to
tease her some more. There was also something
that worried me, and I was not altogether
trifling with the girl, who once before had
shrieked at my bandage disguise. In spite of
her low IQ, the girl had the charm of a mis-
shapen sprite. If things went well, the situa-
tion could go far in helping me recover some
little power over the mask, which was beginning

to become dangerous.
It appears at first that the protagonist has real

cause for anguish and bitter feelings when he learns of his

wife's rejection in her letter:

The contents of your letter far exceeded any
of my expectations and took me completely by
surprise. No matter how much I had been afraid,
perplexed, worried, distressed, and upset, such

feelings meant nothing now. With a dash of the
as in a puzzle where a flea is transformed

Pen,
into an elephant, the outcome had been changed
into something different from what I had planned.

84 Ibid., p. 29.
85 Ibid., pp. 115-116.

 

 

137

Tmanmsk's determination, its thoughts, its
struggle with my real face, and the petition
toymu that I had tried to get across through
theINWes -- all had been made into an absurd
Inudesque. It was a terrible thing. Who could
imagine that one could be so ridiculed, so

humiliated by oneself.86

Humver, lfls wife's assessment of his motives and intentions

behimilfis efforts to communicate with her is too penetratingly

accurate to'beldismissed as the comments of a selfish and inr

sensitive woman. Like the retarded "girl with.the yoyo," she

sees through the protagonist completely, into his damaging pride

and self-defeating egocentricity:

It was not the mask that died among the boots,
but you. The girl with the yoyo was not the

only one to know about your masked play. From
the very first instant, when, elated with pride,
you talked about the distortion of the magnetic
field, I too saw through you completely.8

She cuts into the heart of the matter by summarizing his actions:

At first you were apparently trying to get your own
self back by means of the mask, but before you knew

it you had come to think of it only as your magician's
cloak for escaping from yourself. So it was not a mask,
but somewhat the same as another real face, wasn't it?

You finally revealed yggr true colors. It was not the
mask but you yourself.

Not only does she remind him of his failure to realize himself,
she also points out his real inability to relate with others:

‘While you spoke of the face as being some kind
(xf roadway between fellow human beings, you
'were like a snail that thinks only of its own

86 Ibid., p. 221.
87 Ibid., p. 222.
88 "“7

Ibld.’ P. 223.

 

138

doorway. You were showing off. Even though
you had forced me into a compound where I
had already been, you set up a fuss as if
I had scaled a prison wall, as if I had
absconded with money. And so, when you be-
gan to focus on my face you were flustered
and confused, and without a word you at
once nailed up the door of the mask. In-
deed, as you said, perhaps death filled

the world. I wonder if scattering the seeds
of death is not the deed of meggwho think

only of themselves, as you do.

The theme of the disintegration of the self in The

 

Face o_f_ Another is reiterated in its structure with unequivocal

pessimism. The protagonist's observations on the self and the

meanings of a mask lead to despair and the final desire to
annihilate the self through the destruction of the "other."
The protagonist is able to intellectualize with skill, the
myriad possibilities of being, but he cannot identify emotional-

ly with a single one; the only response that he can make to life

is the bitter and negative one of revenge. The pessimistic

quality of the protagonist's responses confirms an important

psychological concept which Glicksberg observes as underlying

twentieth-centurly literary portrayals of the individual --

that "the reality of the self is not to be grasped by rigid
9O

concepts, the abstractions of science."

The
Face of Another resides in his descriptions of experiences

"truth" of the protagonist's character91 in The

 

89 Ibid., p. 224.

90 Glicksberg, pp. cit., p. xvii.

91 LBJ—d” , p. xvii. Although Glicksberg does not define
it as such, the "truth" of an individual derives from his uncon-

139

which have been registered in the repository of his uncon-

These are experiences which invalidate the idea that

scious.
From a subjective

rational man lives in a rational universe.

and experiential point of view, scientific laws turn into

mere high order probabilities, and the necessary turns into

the contingent. The world that the protagonist inhabits be-

comes extremely unstable, and what is impressed upon him, con-

sciously or unconsciously, is that scientific knowledge can hard-

ly serve as a short-cut to self-knowledge. It is the uncon-

scious life of the protagonist, revealed through his dreams,

hallucinations, visual images, free associations, and uncon-

trollable feelings, which comprise an authentic portrait of

his inner self.
The recounting of the dream of his father's hats pro—

vides a revealing glimpse into the origins of the protagonist's

psychological conflicts:

I recalled a dream of a day when summer had
come to an end and autumn had just begun. It
was a dream like some old silent movie that
began with a most peaceful scene, in which my
father, back from his work, was taking off his

shoes in the vestibule and I -- I was perhaps
not quite ten -- was at his side absently watching

But suddenly the peace was broken. Another

him.
father came back from work. This one, curiously
was identical to the first; the only thing

enough,

scious processes such as memories, dreams, impressions, and
spontaneous imagery. Glicksberg points out that the inner life

of the individual is totally different from his socially pre-
The fictional mode which conveys the individual's

scribed roles.
inner life is Impressionism, which Glicksberg trenchantly defines
"experiments with the refraction of experience through the

as the
spectrum of a given sensibility."

 

-~ng\k"'."f“‘i:

- -dfim‘ ‘ v

. ‘13.,

- cl

140

different was the hat he wore on his head.
In<xmtrast to the straw hat that my first
father was wearing, the second wore a creased
softfelt. When the father with the soft hat
saw'fim one with the straw hat, he looked
clmufly contemptuous and gave an exaggerated
shudder in rebuke for such evident bad form.
Whereupon the one in the straw hat smiled
nmurmhflly in quite unbecoming confusion and
left as if he were furtively escaping, the
shoe he had removed dangling in his hand. The
child that I was looked heartbrokenly after the

retreating figure of my straw hat father ....

... I wonder whether it would be possible after
several decades for the memory of such an insig-
nificant incident to remain so vivid. I can't
believe it. The two hats I saw were surely some-
thing quite different. Something, for example,
like symbols for the unforgivable lies that
exist in human relationships. Yes, I can say
only one thing for sure: the trust I had had

in my father up to then was completely betrayed
by the exchange of hats. Perhaps, since then, I
have cggtinued to suffer shame in my father's

place.

 

In a hallucination of the mask as a growing object, there is

evidence of his cowardice:

The mask was growing thicker and thicker. It had
grown at last into a concrete fortress that en-
veloped me; and I crept out into the night streets
wrapped in concrete armor, feeling like a member
of a heavily equipped hunting party. Through the
:peepholes, the streets looked like the haunts of
deformed stray cats. There they loitered, their
noses suspiciously in the air, looking greedy,
seeking their own tattered tails and ears. I hid
beneath my mask, which had neither name nor sta- 93
tus lnxr age, elated at the security guaranteed me alone.

When the protagonist engages in spontaneous visual imagery,

92 The Face _q_f_ Another, pp. 97-98.

93 Ibid., pp. 152-153.

141
this activity is not creative or fertile. It is rather an
indication of the degree of alienation which he feels toward
the world of things. In an essay which treats the literary
presentation of alienation, WkJ. Harvey notes that the effects
of a character's breakdown are "discernible in every aspect
of life, including man's relation to the world of things."
One of the forms which this alienation or breakdown takes,
says Harvey, is the common Romantic nightmare in which the
material world is seen through a creative mind which "fails

in its seminal function; a universe of little things, dry, dis-

94

connected, dead." The protagonist in The Face 2; Another is

indeed in this tradition as he images the following:

Closing my eyes, I conjured up meaningless frag-
ments of scenes one by one, starting with the
rain-drenched window: a blade of grass sprouting
from a crack in the pavement; a splotch on the
wall in the shape of an animal; the bump on the
old, scarred trunk of a tree; a spider's web on
the point of breaking under the weight of dew-
drops. It was my ritual at times when I could
not fall asleep.

But now it didn't work. Indeed, for no reason my
restlessness grew more and more intense. Suddenly
I thought how good it would be if the fog outside
were poison gas. Or else, how nice if war erupted,
or a volcano exploded, all the world were asph i-
ated, the realities of life smashed to pieces. 5

His "free," or immediate and spontaneous association of

ideas and objects in the following passage indicates how much of

 

94 W. J. Harvey, "Character and the Context of Things,"
in The Novel: Modern Essays 32 Criticism, ed. R.M. Davis (New
Jersey, 1969), p. 133.

 

95 The Face 2: Another, p. 120

 

 

142

a prisoner he is of his obsessions. His perceptions all lead

to a single focal point which is that of the mask and its

functions:

I happened on a curious photograph of a mask
in'fluamorning paper. It was a mask used by a
prnmiive people. Over the whole surface, traces
ofihmressed rope formed a geometric pattern, and
a.centipede-like nose began in the middle of the
facezum.rose above the head, while from the jaw
womesuspended a number of oddly shaped, meaning-
less objects. The image was not clear, but I

stared at it in fascination for a long time. The

face of a tattooed man imposed itself over the
picture, and then the veiled heads of Arabian

girls; I was reminded of the story I once heard

of the women in Th2 Tale gf_Genji who thought that
revealing the face was the same as exposing the
privates. I did not hear it from just anybody, I
heard it from you. The mask had got the story from
you at one or another of our meetings. What was your
purpose, for heaven's sake, in telling such a tale?
They thought their hair was the only thing to show
men, and they covered their faces with their sleeves
in death. I mused about those women who hid with
their faces, trying to penetrate your design, and
this faceless period of history was unexpectedly 96
brought home to me, unrolled like a picture scroll.

Finally, the protagonist's feelings of uncontrollable

and passive panic are an index of how much he is out of touch

with his (nun reality. In an entry already mentioned above, he

shows this psychic aberration:

The mask, as the name implied, would forever be
my false face; and although my true nature could
never be controlled by such a thing, once it had
seen you it would fly off somewhere far beyond
my control, and I coulg7only watch it go in help—

less, blank amazement.

The theme of the self and the aesthetic structure rein-

96 Ibid., pp. 210-211.
97 Ibid., p. 142.

.' _'
p
D

.-.... ...... “can

inf-H .. '5" l ..

143
forcing this theme with detailed precision in Abe Kobo's two
novels are cogent arguments against the scientific tendency

1m mflibrauaor standardize all manner of things, not the least

of finch hathe individual. As the powerful and pessimistic

condhwion'mlThe Face pf Another illustrates, one can seek

(fistraotUHlin the world of facts but cannot avoid indefinitely
the confrontation with one's self, for in the avoidance lies

'Hueseeds of incipient madness and self-destruction:

But think a minute. I wonder if I shall become

a swan with an act like this. Can I make people

feel guilty for me? It is useless to think. What

is amply clear, at least, is that I shall be lone-
ly and isolated, that I shall only become a lecher.
There will be no other reward outside of being
freed from the crime of being ridiculous. Perhaps
that's the difference between movies and actuali-
ty. Anyway, I shall have to go through with this,
for doing so is the only way to conquer the face.
Of course, I do know that the responsibility is

not the mask's alone, and that the problem lies
rather in me. Yet it is not only in me, but in
everybody; I am not alone in this problem. True,
indeed, but let's not shift the blame. I shall hate
people. I shall never admit the necessity of justi-

fying myself to anyone!
The footsteps are coming closer.
So Inrthing will ever be written down again. Perhaps

the act of writing is necessary only when nothing
happens.98

Abé's novels are essentially about what one philosopher
calls the "existentialist's sharp break between subjectivity and

objectivity" which "obscures and ignores human experience
99 Abé's main characters

as

much as it illumines this experience."

are unable to resolve effectively their need for objective

calculation and subjective passion in their lives. And the

98 Ibid., p. 237.
99 Hallie, pp. cit., p. 52.

‘rnlm 1 mam-m an.
‘v-rr- . '

_l

144
result of this inability is the abandonment of the under-

standing of the self.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

"IN THE WORLD AS IT IS": KAWABATA

The1kqmnese emphasis on the aesthetic point of view
has been discussed by countless artists, historians, and litera-
ry critics, but it may be helpful by way of introduction to
the present study of Kawabata Yasunari's two novels, to refer
to Charles Moore's trenchant overview of this cultural trait:

So important is the aesthetic in Japanese culture
that it has been accepted by many students of Japan
as the outstanding positive characteristic of Japan-
ese culture as a whole -- as of the very essence of
Japanese life. In comparison with other cultures, the
aesthetic has been considered to be the essentially
unique expression of spirituality in Japan, as is
ethic in China, religion in Indian, and possibly,
reason in the West. Their love of beauty; their
extreme and seemingly universal love of Nature;
their attempt to express beauty in all aspects of
life (the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, gardens,
«etc.); the spirit and fact (or, at least, ideal) of
harmony in philosophy, in religion, and in the social
and.}x£1itical order; their obvious emphasis upon
feeling and emotion; their almost all-pervading roman-
and possibly, the "feminine" characterization

ticism;
that is so often cited -- these are all well known
and accepted as characteristic.

The first of Kawabata's novel to be discussed here is

Yukiguni, or Snow Country, a work written in 1948 and which

 

1 Charles Moore, "Editor's Supplement: The Enigmatic

Japanese Mind," pp. 296-297.

145

 

 

146

poses an intriguing critical problem because of its aesthetic
structure which recalls the essence of Japanese culture. More

specifically, the novel's structure resembles the classic Japan-
ese poetic form, the seventeen-syllable haiku, in its concise

presentation of nature and its evocation of feelings and

thoughts in the sensitive individual. The protagonist of a

Snow Countr , Shimamura, is an aesthete who appears to be

 

committed totally to the aesthetic values of the haiku vision;

however, this commitment actually tells us very little about 1.
the total significance of Kawabata's literary creation. As :3
Wayne Booth reminds us, the total form of an artistic work,
the "intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole"

expresses the "chief value" to which the implied author is
real

committed, regardless of what the creator "belongs to in

life."3 There are works, however, and Snow Country is one of
these, which because they lack a readily comprehensible literary
structure pose a specific difficulty in criticism. Bernard

Paris points out that "in a work that lacks organic unity, but

James Araki's article, "Kawabata and His Snow Country"

2
(Centennial Review, gIII:19627, pp. 319-323), is the best
study in English of Kawabata's use of traditional haiku imagery.

3 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric 2: Fiction (Chicago,1968),
pp. 73-74. Booth uses the term "implied author" to refer to the
created "second self" in the frame of the novel as distinguished
from the creator or the biographical author.

Japan Quarterly

4 Edward Seidensticker ("The Unshapen Ones,"
"whatever genre

fiI:196§-7, p. 68) observes that the Japanese,
they have thought themselves to be writing in, with the possible

exception of the drama, have not been as interested in form as

certain other peoples have."

 

147

has a coherent thematic structure, thematic analysis can
reveal the implied author's interpretation of experience, but
5 If

it cannot produce apprehension of the work's total form."

a work tells us one thing in its aesthetic structure and another

 

’1:-
'7

thing in its thematic structure, as I have found Snow Country

to do, one can anticipate obvious critical difficulties in

attempting to resolve the work's conflicting structural affirma-

 

.P.‘ r -' “i

!

tions.
The thematic assertions in Snow Country appear to be

at odds with the aesthetic values brought out in the implied

author's choice of the central artistic structure which is in
But these conflicts do not neces-

the form of the haiku vision.
6 It will be seen in

sarily imply a nugatory literary work.
the ensuing discussion that the thematic and aesthetic conflicts

in the structure of Snow Country may be resolved through the

use of psychological analysis of the protagonist's selfhood.

A major idea in Snow Country is that of the vulnerability

5 Bernard Paris, "The Psychic Structure of 'Vanity Fair,'"
Victorian Studies (X:1967), p. 390.
6 I am operating on the premise that while Snow Country
is a work almost completely concerned with the main character's

immediate subjective responses, there are ideas or themes definitely
Newton Stallknecht's persuasive essay "Ideas and Lite-

 

in evidence.
(Carbondale, 1961,] pp. 117-118) defines idea as a term which "refers

rature," in Comparative Literature (ed. N. Stallknecht and H. Frenz
to our reflective or thoughtful consciousness as opposed to the

immediacies of sensuousness or emotional experiences." I have found
that an author's structuring of a protagonist's subjective experi-
ences call forth the shape of the ideas in a work. I feel it neces—
sary to make this distinction because I am also in agreement with

“*5.

148
of man to the painful contingencies of life which include
separation, death, loneliness, and a sense of human futility.
It is the fate of man to live and love through a "thin, smooth
skin;" there is nothing that can protect man, albeit physical-
ly, like the "tough, hairy hide" of an animal, from being hurt
and pained in his efforts to live from day to day.
Shimamura and the geisha Komako? with whom Shimamura
forms a tenuous alliance, represent two different solutions in
coping with the necessity to exist with the fundamental vulnera-
bility of man to loneliness. Komako uses her existential situa-
tion, her "very loneliness" to "beat down sorrow and [to foster_7
a wild strength of will."9 Shimamura, on the other hand, tries
to exempt himself from the necessity of coping with life. He
takes refuge in a "sentimental longing for the human skin"10 by
devoting himself to the aesthetic contemplation of life. His

values are ostensibly those of the haiku vision which celebrates

 

Stallknecht's critical tenet that while the presence of ideas in
a work does not in itself enhance the value of an author's contri-
bution, without some reference to "the ideas expressed in a poem

or nov)el we can hardly speak intelligently of its value "(gp. cit.,
p. 152 .

7 Snow Country, p. 28.

8 Because I am limited in time and space in this chapter,

I am dealing mainly with the analysis of Shimamura's character.

Analysis of Komako will therefore be confined to those of a com-

parative nature. It is interesting to note here that one critic,

Francis Mathy ("Kawabata Yasunari: Bridge Builder to the West,"
Monumenta_Nipponica [XXIVz1969_7, p. 217), indirectly points

to the theme of the failure of the self in Shimamura by his ob-
servation that it is primarily through the portrayal of Komako
and Yoko that affirmation of humanity is seen in Snow Country.

9 Snow Country, p. 63.

10 Ibid., p.28.

-_ ‘1 *- a i i."-
"as
}

 

149
a refinement of one's perceptual and conceptual powers. The

ideal of the haiku vision is to concern oneself "entirely with

 

the simple, trivial, usually overlooked material of everyday

life; with things which, however insignificant on the surface,

are nonetheless 'precious treasures and inexhaustible riches'
11
In

to anyone who has learned not only to look but to see."

the narrative or aesthetic structure of Snow Country, which

patterns itself after the brevity and economy of expression with

 

the perceptual richness of the haiku vision, Shimamura functions

as the central consciousness who perceives keenly nature and

human relationships. Since Shimamura is the predominant

reflector and interpreter of experiences in the novel, it is

evidently important to determine what his system of values con-

That is, what kinds of things seem to Shimamura to be

sists of.
Shimamura's role in life, his life work, so

worth living for?
to speak, is that of a critic of the arts; he is both a scholar

11 Nancy Wilson Ross, The World o_f_ Zen(New York,1960),p.112.

12 The character of Shimamura is also in the tradition of
the central "I" figure in the Japanese fl-shosetsu, or "I-novel."
Howard Hibbett in his study, "The Portrait of the Artist in Japan-
ese Fiction" (T_he_ F23 Eastern mlarterly [XVI:195_5_7, p. 352) pre—
sents a good elaboration of this fictive tradition: "In many EB}.-

shosetsu a zuihitsu-like [essay sketch of some slight experi—
ence -- a walk in the snow, sitting at home on an autumn afternoon,
going boating with friends on a tranquil lake at evening -- is
deepened by the implication of the narrator's harmony with the

surroundings which he contemplates. The "I," the central figure,
is here only a sensitive recorder of these delicate moods and

impressions, but it is this poetic sensitivity, in the tradition
of the haiku poet and the writer who "knows mono-no-aware,"[the

poignancy of thing_s_7that gives the sketch its valu—e'."

 

 

 

150

and a researcher. But Shimamura is also an "idler who had
3 a privileged member of the upper class

inherited his money,"
who lives in a world separated by economic and social, as well

as psychological, distance from the arena of the working class.

He is seen in direct contrast to Komako, the geisha who must

work for a living.
Shimamura the rich idler lives by the code of ffir ,14

the ideal of Japanese aesthetic life which celebrates all that

is elegant, tasteful, and refined, particularly in poetic accom-

plishments. The hero-prince Genji, in Lady Murasaki's The Tale
The

2; Genji, is the classic literary prototype of Shimamura.

 

men and women of the Heian Court which is the setting of The Tale
2£.§£2119 spend their days in a socio-economic order which allows
for and indeed encourages the cultivation of the ability to

write polished verses, to dance with graceful ease, and to con-
verse wittily in an atmosphere of quiet music and scented flowers.
The legacy of this Heian aesthetic past is carried on in Shimamura
who is the modern representative of the classical ideals of m
In his role as a man devoted to aesthetic dilettantism, then,

Shimamura is a literary type, an illustrative character, which

13 Snow Country, p. 108.
: An Ideal of Japanese

14 Jinichi Konishi's article, "Fl'l'r
Tokyo, 1965_7, pp. 271-278)

Esthetic Life," (The Japanese Image
is an excellent explication of the literary and historical impli-

cations of this aesthetic concept.

 

151

can be traced back to Japanese cultural and artistic history.

 

But Shimamura's characterization in Snow Country is pri-

marily a mimetic portrayal of the psychological dimensions of

an individual with inner conflicts. For despite Shimamura's

 

acceptance of himself as an aesthete, he is constantly seen

engaging in self-criticism. This self—criticism suggests an a

inner conflict over his choice of a way of life and his vague {1

dissatisfaction with the "values" of a passive aesthetic life

which is essentially inimical to complete psychic satisfaction. __
Li

Thus, for example, the implied author tells us that Shimamura
pampers "himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneer-

ing at himself through his work;" and he also laughs "at him-

self and his work." 5 When he sees himself in relationship

to others, he is often placed in a negative light: his desire
16

for Komako makes him view himself as "rather repulsive;"
Komako's vigorous way of pursuing relationships with him makes

him "wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living

as completely," 7 and he is filled with "nagging, hopeless
impotence" at the strong emotional reaction of Komako to a

simple misunderstanding. The thought that the nameless, dili-

gent weavers of Chijimi cloth produce "playthings" for men "like

15 Snow Country, p. 108.

16 Ibid., p. 27. An indication of how negative Shimamura's
self-concept is, can be seen in R. Beardsley's findings in "Person-
ality Psychology," that for the Japanese, "sensuality is more ego-
syntonic or consciously acceptable to the ego" than to the Western
mind, and so does not need repression in Japanese culture.

17 Ibid., p. 126.

152
18 . .
One may ask at this p01nt

him" strikes him as "remarkable."
whether Shimamura is totally convinced that his mode of life

as a highly sensitive aesthete is the most enriching experience
The answer is patently negative.

he is capable of attaining.
A partial understanding of the implications of Shimamura's self-

criticism can be gained by looking at him from a socio-economic
point of view. Shimamura's life style as it is portrayed in this
twentieth-century novel is curiously anachronistic. His way of
life, his devotion to the aesthetic ideals of m seem to i j

 

 

fr?“-
1

be more appropriate to an earlier age in which social and econo-
If we place

mic goals tolerated and encouraged such practices.

Shimamura as a citizen of a modern economic age, one which stres-
ses an active striving for the material improvement of one's

lot, and active involvement in social and cultural activities --,

Shimamura is a misfit, an individual who might very well judge
19

himself harshly for his empty way of life.

18 Ibid., p. 128.

19 Shimamura's attitude toward his "work," is closest to
the widespread idea in Japan since the Meiji Era that the founda—

tion and development of self may be accomplished only through art.
It'o’ Sei in "Modes of Thought in Contemporary Japan," (Japan garter—

;x 13611:: 1962] pp. 501-514), extends this idea to its social end
when he relates self-salvation through art to reclusive and self-

destructive thought. Henri Peyre in his Introduction to Fiction
Q Several Languages (Boston,1968), p. xxi, presents an interest-
ing reinforcement of this idea from a Westerner's point of view

in the following: "Cultivation of aloofness from the circumambi-
and of purity in art is sometimes a confession of

ent world,
Writers abdicate from the momentous crises lived by their

defeat.
readers . "

153
But it is evident that the implied author does not

only show Shimamura in the negative view suggested above, but

that he also associates positive qualities with Shimamura. A

cogent reason for this view is that Kawabata the implied author

 

uses the haiku vision not only to define Snow Country's aesthe-

O__\ ’1. .7 ti,
'A
'l
P"'

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{255. .
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. _ _

tic structure, but also to define Shimamura's mode of perception.
The natural imagery of the haiku not only renders the foreground

of the novel with vivid clarity, but it also provides, in the

 

words of Hibbett, "a symbolic relevance to the human situation

that goes beyond fragmentary visual metaphor to compose a har-

monious world in which nature is neither adversary nor merely

the setting for an unrelated drama."20 The mode of perception

which operates in the haiku moment, that is, the immediate, in-

tuitive and sensuous response to people, objects, and places,

 

defines the central character's point of view in Snow Country.
Inner conflicts, moods, fleeting thoughts, immediate and
direct impressions of people, places, and objects, are all
represented by the haikg vision which is the way of mirroring
the interior world of the individual through natural scenes.

A night scene in the novel, for example, is described as coming

"together in a clear tranquil harmony;" Shimamura sees the

pale green color of a moth as being "oddly like the color of

20 Howard Hibbett, "Tradition and Trauma in the Contempo—

rary Japanese Novel," p. 43.

21 Snow Countr , p. 42.

154

2 a view of a mountain, silver in the autumn sunlight,

death;"2
23

nmkes "something in Shimamura" call out, "Ah, I am here."

While the aesthetic structure in Snow Country "offers a striking
example of severe reduction in fictional paraphernalia, of poe-

tic economy which increases the value of every glimpse into the

interior world of a character,"24 it also increases the diffi— H

culty of determining precisely what this "interior world" of

the character is supposed to represent.

But before one can understand what the inner world of

 

i? ,.
{Egan-L ‘
L:

!

Shimamura is like, it is necessary to be informed of his appre-

hension of his outer world. The perceptual mode of Shimamura

gives us a picture of the direction in which his value system

operates. The dominant impulse of Shimamura's personality is

to keep as emotionally detached as possible from people and
objects, while at the same time keeping himself open to varied

perceptual experiences. We see that in the novel Shimamura

perceives both intuitively, or unconsciously, and intellectual—

ly, or consciously. Nature, as shown in the constant references

to landscape, is the predominant medium of the protagonist's
intuitive perceptions, while his social community, that is,
his relationships with people, and the relationships among

people around him, comprise the major part of his intellectual

 

22 Ibid., p. 77.

23 Ibid., p. 80.

24 Hibbett, gp. cit., p. 45.

155

perceptions. It is important to note that the conscious and

unconscious processes of his perceptual modes are not mutual-

ly exclusive; rather, they show in many places areas of over-
lap. For example, when Shimamura observes the sick young man
and his companion on the train, the implied author tells us

that the sight of the two figures conveys to Shimamura "none of

the pain that the sight of something truly sad can bring;" it
25 a phrase

has, instead, the quality of a tableau in a dream,"
of the

which captures beautifully the unique characteristics

dream perception, one which allows the viewer to be simultaneous-
ly emotionally and perceptually involved, yet detached.

Shimamura perceives nature primarily in three ways:
(a) as an aesthetic "object" which gratifies and satisfies
his refined sense of beauty, his sensibility as an aesthetic
hero who acts as a highly selective filter of the physical
world around him; (b) as a means by which he gains intuitive
insight into the meaning of his way of living or his life, to
line degree that his keen awareness of nature may be said to

be the only reason for him to live; and (c) as a reflector,

and at times, an influencer of his psychological and emotional

states.
Shimamura's perceptions of social and individual relation-

that is, his own relationships with others and the rela-

ships,
tionships among people around him, are characterized by an ego-

25 Ibid., p. 15.

 

 

riv

4 HI"

156

centric view of human relationships. First, he sees people

as objects of great intellectual interest; they are objects
lending themselves to engrossing intellectual scrutiny. Se-
cond, in his relationships with others, he tends to use

people to suit his particular psychological and emotional

m

:51

7".”

,._—- _-

needs. It must be added that his manipulation of others

is largely an unconscious act, and one which takes the form

of his capitalizing on the weaknesses and needs of others in

 

1E“ .
I

If“ .-

other to enhance or complement his own psychological needs.
Third, people around Shimamura serve as reflectors of his

own psychological condition; they are often a means by which
he gains some insight, however transitory, into his own self.

The foregoing schematization of Shimamura's perceptual

modes suggest that for some reason, he has a great need to

systematize and structure his world. I feel that his reason
is closely related to the central theme of the novel. Earlier

it was said that Snow Country was a novel about man's fundamen-
tal vulnerability to the anguish of living in the face of

death, separation, loneliness, and a pervading sense of futi-

lity. It is through a "thin, smooth Skin" that man lives and
loves. The human condition is such that man must somehow cope

with a "sense of the false and empty" in life; man tries to

live with the awareness that all strivings may be a "wasted

effort."26 But at the same time that man is aware of the

basic futility of life, he has an inexplicable attraction to it.

26 Snow Country, p. 63.

157

This sense of the paradox of man's condition is brought out

in the well-known haiku by Issa (1762-1862) which captures

the evanescence of life and the poignancy of human attach-

ment to it:

This Dewdrop World
Is a dewdrop world, 27
And yet, and yet

Shimamura is both attracted and repelled by the human con-
dition. His attraction takes the form, however, only of
the passive "sentimental longing for the human skin," a

feeling which has merely an ephemeral, sighing, and dream-

like quality about it. His revulsion is manifested in the
elaborate aesthetic measures which he takes to avoid confron-
8

ting the dreadful "transparent emptiness deep in his entrails."
He adopts the value of artistic detachment which is so prized
in the haiku vision, and turns it into neurotic detachment

which is a psychological solution used by the individual to

deal with his inner conflicts.
Horney's analyses29 of the major characteristics of

the neurotic personality can help us to understand the dynamics
She

of the fundamental detachment of the neurotic from life.
points out that neurotic solutions to life do not really work

for the individual; -— at best they serve as temporary maneu-

vers for the individual to avoid grappling with his inner

27 This is my translation of the original which reads:

Tsuyp-pp-yg—/yg-/tsuE-pp-yq-/nagara-/sari- nagara .
28 Snow Countpy, pp. 62-63.
29 Horne , pp. 933., pp. 182—185.

 

158

conflicts.

In her chapter on "General Measures to Relieve Tension,"
Homunrtraces the processes by which the neurotic individual
somumtes mind and self, thus increasingly becoming alienated

frmnlfis real self, a self which is different from his idealized

self and his despised self. In the neurotic personality, says

Horney, "the mind ... is always detached -- as if looking at
a.stranger with whom it has been accidentally thrown together."30

Thus, the neurotic may be extremely interested, even to the
extent of being totally engrossed, in self-observations, but

his "interest in them is rather a delight in the astuteness

of his observations or in the mechanics with which they operate,
much in the manner that an entomologist may be fascinated by

the functioning of an insect ...; [.he_7 is quite uninterested

in the meaning his findings have for his life."31 The neuro-

tic has successfully separated himself from the painful neces—

sity of looking at his inner struggles and his problems. He

may also be very astute in observing others and their problems

but he always does so in the same detached, unrelated way that

he does in looking at himself. Horney adds that "this detached

interest may also be openly fault-finding, gleeful, sadistic.

In these instances it is often externalized, both in an active

and in a passive way.32

_

30 Ibid., p. 183.

31 Ibid., p. 183.

32 Ibid., p. 183.

 

159
The neurotic individual puts his trust in the supremacy
of the mind because feelings are unruly and are "suspects to
be controlled."33 The mind, the arena of imagination and
reason, creates for the neurotic personality "a semblance

of unity"34 which can "release tensions [—andy7 cover up

conflicts."35 But the paradox of the neurotic's trust in

pure intellect is that the more he tries to function solely
upon the ideals of the mind, the more difficult it becomes

for him to "acknowledge the existence of unconscious factors"
in himself. When unconscious factors do unavoidably intrude,
says Horney, they make him extremely anxious, and he subse-
quently tries to disavow them or reason them away. There may
come a moment when the neurotic is forced to face the conflict
in himself with a flash of clarity. When this happens, and he
realizes that he "cannot make incompatibles compatible," he

may experience a suffocating feeling of being trapped and

may respond with great fright.36

The characteristic pattern of Shimamura's life clearly
shows the neurotic's detachment from life as described by

Horney. The rationale, for instance, of Shimamura's trip

to the mountains near the hot-spring village of the snow country

 

33 Ibid., p. 182.

34 Ibid., p. 183.

35 Ibid., p. 185.

36 Ibid., p. 185.

 

160
is plain to him: "Shimamura, who lived a life of idleness,
found Hun>he tended to lose his honesty with himself, and

be frequently went out alone into the mountains to recover

something of it."37 Throughout the novel, Shimamura displays

Ins immense capability for looking at himself with detachment.

Thus, while he is aware of himself as "an idler who might well 5}

spend his time in the mountains as anywhere, he looked upon ;
;

mountain climbing as almost a model of wasted effort;" but

it is for "that very reason [_that_7 it pulled at him with 5 3
LT
38 The striking aspect of

 

the attraction of the unreal."
Shimamura's self-observations is that his findings, although

astute, really have no significance for his life. The Shima-

mura we meet at the beginning of the novel is fundamentally
unchanged from the Shimamura we see at the end of the book.

Nothing that Shimamura does contains a sense of urgency

or necessity, or even of vitality. What he does is always

carefully calculated to preserve a sense of equilibrium.
When he "sneers at himself through his work," it is a
sneer which.only pampers himself with a "somewhat whimsical

pleasure."39 Moreover, the implied author tells us that

'Hht'may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little

37 Snow'Country, p. 21.
38 Ibid., p. 94.

39 Ibid., p. 108.

161

dream world sprang."40 On his trip to the snow country,

Shimamura feels absolutely "no need to hurry himself;"41

thnsis an appropriate statement from an idler who has in-
kmritmllfis money, but it also shows how this "idler" has

(Heatedzilife where unruly feelings have been meticulously

compartmentalized and put under control.

The life which Shimamura has constructed for himself
is decidely a comfortable one, free from all painful intro—
spection -- a world which he creates from an armchair, with

books, pictures, and imagination. His approach to his work

contains all of the elements of the neurotic's removal from

the realities of living:

Nothing could be more comfortable than writing
about the ballet from books. A ballet he had
never seen was an art in another world. It was
an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from
some paradise. He called his work research, but
it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He
preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh;
rather he savored the phantasms of his own dan-
cing imagination, called up by Western books
and pictures. It was like bging in love with
someone he had never seen.4

Life, for Shimamura, has no appeal in its harsh and
untouched.fmankness. It is something to be approached through
the nfiinl's eye, to be called forth from the depths of one's

imagiiurtion, to be observed through a carefully controlled

 

reason.
40 Ibid., pp. 108-109.
41 Ibid., p. 109.
41

Ibid. , p. 27.

u “(m)mu t-Mti‘sfin

. a.

I |\ ‘
a:
J

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J

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J

l-'i ‘
ms ‘
1.

162
Shimamura's neurotic need to have his environment con-
trolled by his mental acuity does not interfere with.his abili-
tw'to observe sharply others and their problems. He is quick
to criticize others, as shown in his telling Komako that her

cataloguing of the literature she has read is a "complete

waste of effort."43 He even goes so far as to recognize that

what he deplores in Komako's attitude towards literature is

really a passive externalization of what he deplores in his

own attitudes toward art:

Her manner was as though she were talking of a
distant foreign literature. There was something
lonely, something sad in it, something that ra-
ther suggested a beggar who has lost all desire.
It occurred to Shimamura that his own distant
fantasy on the occidental ballet, built up from
words and photographs in foreign books, was not
in its way dissimilar.

However, what Shimamura does not realize is that not only is
his work on the occidental ballet a distant fantasy, but that

his whole way of life is a fantasy. Shimamura is aware that

he and Komako share the same human fate, that of having to
cope with unbearable existential loneliness by creating a

world of fantasy to act as a buffer against despair; but his

realization is purely an intellectual exercise. Shimamura

does not allow himself to be caught up in the intensity of
feeling and commitment which Komako has invested in her life.

Komako has come to terms with the "note of wasted effort"45

 

43 Ibid., p. 40

44 Ibid., pp. 40-41.

45 Ibid., p. 41.

 

163
in her life; Shimamura, on the other hand, feels that "were
he to give himself quite up to that consciousness of wasted

effort, he would be drawn into a remote emotionalism

that would make his own life a waste." In order to pro-

tect himself from becoming a victim of his emotions, Shima-
mura takes refuge into a life of the mind, where aesthetic
perceptions and an intellectual and detached appreciation of

them can serve as semblances of unity in his life and thus

release him from confronting himself.

But it is apparent that the more Shimamura tries to
rely on his capacity to function solely from his intellectual
powers of reason and imagination, the more difficult it becomes

for him to cope with the existence of unconscious conflicts in

himself. Thus, when he is forced to acknowledge such conflicts

in unexpected moments of clarity, he reacts with mild panic,

fear, and even self-revulsion. This is shown in two places

in the novel, both involving his relationship with Komako.

The first occurs as he listens to Komako's highly affective

concentration upon and devotion to her music:

And in spite of the fact she was in a small
ITHHH, was she not slamming away at the instru-
ment as though she were on the stage? He was
being carried away by his own mountain emo-
tionalism. Komako purposely read the words in
a monotone, now slowing down and now jumping
over-ti passage that was too much trouble; but
gradually she seemed to fall into a spell. As
her voice rose higher, Shimamura began to feel

 

46 Ibid., p. 41.

D
"I.
fl
.3429!)
.L

rmamuaJ—onizgv‘ .1» .
‘2.
1w“

164

a.little frightened. How far would that strong,
sure touch take him? He rolled over and pillowed
Ins head on an arm, as if in bored indifference.

The end of the song released him. Ah, this woman
is in love with me --4put he was annoyed with him-

self for the thought.

ffluesecond "incident" occurs when Komako explains to him

the social risks she is taking in continuing her relation— 5%

ship with him: .

"And I can't complain. After all, only women
are able really to love." She flushed a little

and looked at the floor. % 1‘

 

"In the world as it is," he murmured, chilled 8
at the sterility of the words even as he spoke.

Shimamura's feelings of fear, however mild, and his
coldness in these passages are evidences of his underlying
uneasiness about having to face the thought that there is
something lacking in his detached approach to life and his
persistent strivings to keep himself from being emotionally
involved in his relationships with people and with nature.
He is unable to let himself go, so to speak, and to enter
into a satisfying and meaningful relationship with others.
His neurotic need to keep himself distant from people takes
on obsessional dimensions.

This brief psychological analysis of Shimamura demon-

strates how much he fits the description of the neurotic

 

47 Ibid., p. 63.

48 Ibid., p. 108.

165

individual who is alienated from his real self because of

his refusal to acknowledge his inner conflicts. His conflicts,
the war between his need for human relationships and his need
to preserve an isolated sense of individuality, remain irresol-
vable because he continues to detach himself emotionally from
people and experiences. His aesthetic defenses, the construc- ah
tion of an elaborate system of perceptual modes which resembles
the hgikg vision, do not really work for him. His way of life

has meaning only in that the values of aesthetic detachment --

 

perceptual and conceptual astuteness which create the illusion
of self-unity -- function as a convenient means of escape from
having to find the painful answers to the questions of who

and what he really is. He structures, through the haikg
vision, the world and himself in the hopes of avoiding the
separation of himself from nature and from others. The

result is a life which is perceptually rich but emotionally
sterile.

The thematic structure of §22E Country suggest‘that
perhaps the neurotic detachment of Shimamura, which is really
a defense against man's helplessness and vulnerability to
loneliness, death, and separation, is necessary in order for
him to live in the world. For if Shimamura were to know
more than what he undertakes to structure, he takes the awful
risk of being split, and of being overwhelmed by the uncertain-

ties of existence. Hence, in order to avoid falling completely

166

into the chasm of existential uncertainty symbolized in

49

the novel by the image of the Milky Way flowing down in-

50

side of Shimamura "with a roar," he structures himself

and the world.

The ending of Snow Country is an effective metaphor

J

for the dramatic confrontation that could occur within an

_ .—

"fl

individual coming face to face with the fact of his existence
and experiencing its complete emptiness and futility. It is

a vision of Shimamura's situation as a man forced to see his

M1.

 

fate without the intervening medium of the aesthetic point gin
of view.
§22E Country is a novel which says many things: it is
a celebration of the aesthetic values of the haikg vision,
as well as a highly convincing because psychologically realis-
tic portrait of the neurotic detached personality. It is also

a novel about man's existential dilemma, treating the question

 

49 T.W. Swann's criti ue, "Yukiguni: One View" (East-
‘West RevieW'Z-II:1965-1966_ , p. 172) is an astute analysis
of the ending in particular. Swann mentions that the Milky
Way also stands as a "master symbol for abstract beauty of a
jpure and other-worldly quality," and that when Shimamura be-
cxnnes entranced with it, it "becomes a vivid representation of
Shimamura's break with Komako and his final devotion to beauty."

50 Snow Country, p. 142.

167

of how one might live with a sense of emptiness and hopeless-
ness. Psychological analysis of the novel makes us aware of

the extent to which the neurotic detached personality is chained
to his own solution to life, to the point where he is kept

from realizing his self. Thematic analysis shows us the reasons
why an individual may find it necessary to adopt such a self—
alienating solution. The fine aesthetic perceptions in the
narrative structure of the novel, conveyed by the language

and imagery of the ppikp, give us a unique view of the beauty

of the natural surroundings which the protagonist, albeit

neurotic, interprets for us.

Sembazuru, or Thousand Cranes, written in 1952 by Kawa-

 

bata is a brief novel which treatSessentially the same prob-

lem of the failure of the protagonist to actualize himself
because of his need to detach himself from the world. The
predominant literary technique in Thousand Cranes is the impres-
sionistic creation of the decadent aesthetic ambiance surround-

51

ing the main characters. Kawabata uses the tea ceremony, a
highly respected cultural tradition in Japan, as the setting

for a negative and pessimistic portrayal of the protagonist.

 

51 In an interview conducted by Ivan Morris ("Fiction in
Japan Today: An Exchange of Views," Jappn Quarterly Z-IV:19517,
p. 167), a well-known Japanese literary critic, Yoshida Kenichi,
states that on the whole, Kawabata's characterization is weak
and his plots "uniformly uninteresting." I feel that this criti-
cism of Kawabata's craftsmanship is refuted and explained away
by Edwin McClellan's provocative critique ("The Impressionistic
tendency in Some Modern Japanese Writers," Chicago Reyiew’ZXVII:
19627, pp. 57-58) on the use of Impressionism by the Japanese

 

168

In an essay, Kawabata gives his personal interpretation of

his use of the tea ceremony:

I may say in passing that to see my novel
Thousand Cranes as an evocation of the for-

mal and spiritual beauty of the tea ceremony

is a misreading. It is a negative work, an
expression of doubt about and a warning against
the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has
fallen. 2

However, despite Kawabata's explanation of his professed use
of the tea ceremony, it is still the self of the protagonist

Kikuji, who rejects not only the corruption of those who engage

 

in the ceremony but also the ceremony itself, which is delineated .3.
in negative terms. For the plot of the novel revolves around

Kikuji, a young unmarried office worker, who is not only haunted

by memories of his dead father, who in life was a successful

businessman and an avid connoisseur and practitioner of the

art of the tea, but who is also involved in unhealthy relation-

 

novelist: "To say that the Japanese novelist returns time

and time again to impressionism because he cannot be completely
happy in a world which is opposed to it, a world which requires
sharp delineation and a sustained creative imagination, may seem
too sweeping a generalization. Yet, when a Japanese writer tries
to connect everything his characters do in his novel so that it
has a place in some overall scheme, so that it is meaningful in
the sense that it lends significance to their final acts --

that is, when he concerns himself with plot and characterization -—
he begins to seem arbitrary, even melodramatic. And this is so,
one suspects, because he does not at the bottom quite believe in
all that is implied by our assumption that plot is a valid, indeed
a necessary, part of the novelist's attempt to imitate reality."

52 Kawabata Yasunari, Ja an the Beautiful and M self,
trans. Edward Seidensticker (Tokyo, 1969), pp. 67-68.

169
53

ships with the women who knew his father. The two women
are Chikako Kurimoto, an instructor of the tea ceremony, and

Mrs. Ota, a widow with a grown daughter; both Chikako and Mrs.
Ota are former mistresses of Kikuji's father. The novel opens

as Kikuji goes to a tea ceremony to which he has been invited

by Chikako, ostensibly to meet a young lady protege of hers.

 

On the way to the ceremony, Kikuji recalls how, as a child of ; A
eight or nine, he accidentally caught a glimpse of Chikako's

birthmark on her left breast, on a visit to her home with his

 

father. It is a scene which has never left Kikuji, and the 51%
birthmark comes to symbolize for him both the repulsiveness

of Chikako's domineering, "sexless" personality and her alliance
with his father:

Kikuji never forgot the mark. He could sometimes
imagine even that his own destinies were enmeshed

in it.

When he received the note saying that Chikako meant
to make the tea ceremony her excuse for introducing
him to a young lady, the birthmark once more floated
before him; and, since the introduction would be made
by Chikako, he wondered if the young lady herself
would have a perfect skin, a skin unmarred by so much
as a dot.

Had his father occasionally squeezed the birthmark
between his fingers? Had he even bitten at it? Such
were Kikuji's fantasies.

 

53 James Araki, in a brief critique of Thousand Cranes
in his essay, "Kawabata: Achievements of the Nobel Laureate"
(Books Abroad 31.111: 19627, p. 321) implies that Kikuji's
relationships with the women are unhealthy primarily because of
their incestuous overtones. I am, of course, using the concept of
health.in terms of the individual's ability to maintain self-enhan-
cing and non—manipulative relationships with others.

54 Thousand Cranes, p. 14.

170

The young lady he meets is the "Inamura girl," a girl who
comes to the ceremony carrying a "thousand-crane kerchief;" and
he finds to his quiet surprise that she is exactly the opposite
of Chikako in her pure beauty and freshness:

The light was really too bright for a tea

cottage, but it made the girl's youth glow.

The tea napkin, as became a young girl, was

red, and it impressed one less with its soft-

ness than with its freshness, as if the girl's

hand were bringing a red flower into bloom.

And one saw a thousand cranes, small and white,

start up in flight around her.55
Throughout the novel, the "Inamura girl" stands for all that
is pure and unsullied, the ideal of womanhood which Kikuji is
attracted to but which he cannot come close to in his life be-
cause of his crippling passivity and detachment. As the follow-
ing passage suggests, the sensations or perceptions he has of
immaculate beauty whenever he thinks about the girl are fated
to remain an "illusion" for him:

He had the illusion that the Inamura girl was

walking in the shade of the trees, the pink

kerchief and its thousand white cranes under

her arm. He could see the cranes and the ker-

chief vividly. 56
He sensed something fresh and clean.

The Inamura girl is the woman who "will always be far away"57
for Kikuji, for despite his initial attraction to her at the

tea ceremony, he is to enter into a physical liaison with

Mrs. Ota, a relationship which sets off a chain of events which

 

55 Ibid., p. 26.

56

Ibid., Pp. 48-49.
57

Ibid., pp. 52-53.

 

MPH—- ...-. g

'1 |
fi4?‘!_ .t.‘ -

171
foreshadows his failure, and loss, of self at the end of the
novel.
Although it has been four years since he last saw Mrs. Ota
at the funeral of his father, Kikuji finds that she maintains a
youthful, and unconsciously seductive appearance, and that her

looks contrast sharply with the serious mien of her daughter:

She had hardly changed in four years.

The white neck, rather long, was as it had been,

and the full shoulders that strangely matched

the slender neck -- it was a figure young for

her years. The mouth and nose were small in pro-

portion to the eyes. The little nose, if one

bothered to notice, was cleanly modeled and most

engaging. When she spoke, her lower lip was thrust
forward a little, as if in a pout. The daughter had
inherited the long neck and the full shoulders. Her

mouth was larger, however, and tightly closed. There

was something almost funny about the mother's tiny

lips beside the daughter's. - 58
Sadness clouded the girl's eyes, darker than her mother's.

liming.“ ‘11:“qu in... m
1:

The careful observations and detailed distinctions which Kikuji
makes between mother and daughter not only reflect his charac-
teristically keen perceptions, but also serve as reasons for
his growing feelings of sensuality and justification for his
physical attraction to his father's former mistress. we see

59 but

that Kikuji puts a great deal of faith in his feelings,
it is a faith which is ultimately misused, for feelings alone
and not self-actualizing actions considered in terms of thoughts

and emotions, will govern his life.

 

58 Ibid., pp. 22-23.

59 Earl Miner (An Introduction 33 Japanese Court Poetry
‘ZStanford, 19687, p. 9) notes that "Faith in human feeling --
belief in its integrity and truth -- is probably the most con-
sistent feature of Japanese literature from the earliest to

contemporary times."

172

Kawabata relates technique and theme in an irrevocable
manner. He accounts, for example, for every use of dialogue
as well as description. For instance, conversation in Thousand
Cranes is always underplayed, and the purpose of it appears to
be what Laurent Le Sage observes in the French new novel, that
"conversation occurs as something floating on the surface of F}
consciousness, trivial or inoffensive in appearance but indi-

6O

cative of mysterious activity beneath." In the scene

quoted below, conversation is used not so much to advance

 

story or to create a lifelike atmosphere to setting and charac— é“
ter, as to convey the innermost psychological motives of the

participants:

Chikako poked at the embers in the hearth.

"Miss Inamura, suppose you make tea for Mr. Mitani.
I don't believe you've had your turn yet."

The girl of the thousand cranes stood up.

Kikuji had noticed her beside Mrs. Ota. He

had avoided looking at her, however, once

he had seen Mrs. Ota and the daughter.

Chikako was of course showing the girl off for

his inspection.

When she had taken her place at the hearth, she
turned to Chikako.

"And which bowl shal I use?"

"Let me see. The Oribe should do," Chikako answered.
"It belonged to Mr. Mitani's fatheg1 He was very
fond of it, and he gave it to me."

Chikako's manipulative behavior is foremost in this passage.
Her nmtive in introducing Kikuji to the girl is so that she

can assert her control over him. She reads his character well,

 

6O Laurent Le Sage, The French New Novel (Pennsylvania,
1962) 9 P0 39-

61 Thousand Cranes, p. 23.

173

for she knows that he is passive and unable to act out his
hostilities, even in extreme anger. She knows also how Kikuji
feels towards her, as a repulsive person, that he is resentful
of her brief affair with his father and the meaning that affair
held for his mother. Chikako's vindictiveness, too, toward
Mrs. Ota is evident here. We learn that the Oribe bowl is
originally that of Mrs. Ota's husband, which his wife gives
to Kikuji's father, and which is subsequently passed on to
Chikako.
The use of the Oribe bowl in the foregoing passage
has interesting implications in that tea objects in the novel
are given significances which go beyond their "thingness." This
idea is perhaps best stated by Van Meter Ames:
Tea things glow again in Kawabata's Thousand Cranes.
Though the ceremony is falling into desuetude, res-
pect clings to its formality and especially to the
bowls. When taken from elegant boxes, the rich tints
are admired with a powerful sense of the presence of
a mother, a father, and a mistress who had used them.
Faults and sins are purified by association with the
bowls. Persons are blended with beauty cherished for

centuries, through vicissitudes subduing the trans-
gressions of a mere lifetime to insignificance.

 

Chosisme, the focus on objects by Robbe—Grillet and
others in the nouveau roman, is different. There an
ashtray on a dusty table may take on importance, a
bit of string, anything. No art qualities need to be
appreciated. An accidental highlight of attention
will do, regardless of the sensuous, formal, or
associational values which have belonged to beauty
in the west and still count aesthetically in Japan.
Japanese tea bowls demand connoisseurship, because
made by master potters and used by a succession of
tea masters before being sold by impoverished old
families to collectors. One should know whether a

 

 

174

piece is authentic, the best work of its kind

and time, inferior, or an imitation, and its

story, though only the knowing can know.
However, what Ames says about the associational values of
the tea bowls is only partially true. While there is definitely
a positive aesthetic connotation given to the tea things,their
associations are not always pleasant for Kikuji. It is true F“

that Kikuji tries to "forget" the unpleasantness surrounding

the Oribe bowl, for example, by focussing on its venerable

 

aspects as a historical artifact, but his attempt is virtually

futile because he cannot avoid its "weird" career: _;

‘I
.

"But what difference does it make that my
father owned it for a little while? It's
four hundred years old, after all -- its
history goes back to Momoyama and Rikyu
himself. Tea masters have looked after it
and passed it down through the centuries.

My father is of very little importance." So
Kikuji tried to forget the associations the
bowl called up.

It had passed from Ota to his wife, from the
wife to Kikuji's father to Chikako; and the
two men, Ota and Kikuji's father, were dead,
and here were the two women. There was some-
thing almost weird about the bowl's career.

The tea bowl bears the mark of the corruption of its "owners."
We see this idea in another form, in the very complicated, yet
highly suggestive gesture of Kikuji's to retrieve the pieces

of a tea bowl which Fumiko has smashed to bits at his home be-
cause of the associations of her mother which the bowl calls up:

The evening before, Fumiko had flung the Shino
against the basin before he could stop her.

 

62 van Meter Ames, 22. cit., p. 34.

63 Thousand Cranes, p. 25.

175

He had cried out.

But he had not looked for the pieces in the
shadows among the stones. He had rather put

his arm around Fumiko, supporting her. As she
fell forward in the act of throwing the Shino,
she seemed herself about to collapse against
the basin.

"There is much better Shino," she murmured.

Was she still sad at the thought of having
Kikuji compare it with better Shino?

He lay sleepless, and an echo of her words

came to him, more poignantly clean in remem-
brance.

Waiting for daylight, he went out to look for
the pieces. Then, seeing the star, he threw
them down again.

And looking up, he cried out.

There was no star. In the brief moment when

his eyes were on the discarded pieces, the
morning star had disappeared in the clouds.

He gazed at the eastern sky for a time, as if
to retrieve something stolen.

The clouds would not be heavy; but he could not
tell where the star was. The clouds broke near
the horizon. The faint red deepened where they
touched the roofs of houses.

"I can't just leave it," he said aloud. He picked
up the pieces again, and put them in the sleeve
of his night kimono.

This is a passage rich with implications. Fumiko's act of
breaking the bowl comes after she and Kikuji have spent the
night together, and is symbolic of her desire to break away
from the hold which her mother's life has had upon her. It

is an act which has positive overtones, for Kikuji's and
Fumiko's relationship only begins in the wake of Mrs. Ota's
death, a probable suicide precipitated by an intolerable guilt
feelings about her liaison with Kikuji and an inability to live

in the present. As for Kikuji, however, the fact that he picks

 

64 Ibid., pp. 140-141.

 

176

up the pieces after Fumiko is indicative of his weakness
and inability to act as she has done. Kikuji's act is a
negative one, that of clinging to unhealthy relationships
with others because he cannot keep his gaze upon the "morning
star," a symbol of idealism and hope ushering in a new day.
The strongest statement Kikuji makes concerning his distaste
for what is occurring around him is the following verbal
"mockery" and repudiation of the tea ceremony when Chikako
proposes to hold a ceremony commemorating the fifth anniver-
sary of his father's death:

"I suppose so. It would be fun to invite all

sorts of connoisseurs and use imitation pieces
from beginning to end."

"This cottage always smells of some mouldy poi-

son, and a really false ceremony might drive the

poison away. Have it in memory of Father, and

make it my farewell to tea. Of course I severed

relations with tea long ago."65
Kikuji's remark about the poison in the cottage, we see,
is merely a pointed, but passive aggressive, rebuke at
Chikako. Were his suggestion carried out by him, there might
be a possibility that Kikuji's self would be different; but
Kikuji remains a passive person, utilizing his aggressiveness
in a way that is both futile and self-defeating. The pattern
Of his life, the pattern which he will not break away from,

has been merely to feel intensely his unhappiness and his

‘

65 Ibid., p. 109.

 

‘ p .
autumn. .

177
anger at the life which goes on around him, but to leave it

essentially as it is.

The conclusion of Thousand Cranes is ironic in two
readily discernible ways. It comes after Kikuji has searched
for Fumiko and discovers that she has left him without telling

him of her destination:

She had said that death was at her feet. Kikuji's
own feet were suddenly cold.

He wiped his face with his handkerchief. The blood
seemed to leave as he wiped, and he wiped more vio-
lently. The handkerchief was wet and dark. He felt
a cold sweat at his back.

"She has no reason to die," he muttered.

There was no reason for Fumiko to die, Fumiko who
had brought him to life.

But had the simple directness of the evening before
been the directness of death?

Was she, like her mother, guilt-ridden, afraid of
the directness?

"And only Kurimoto is left." As if spitting out all
the accumulated venom on the woman he took for his
enemy, Kikuji hurried into the shade of the park.66

The first ironical implication in this passage is Kikuji's
misinterpretation of Fumiko's leaving. It is not guilt
which underlies Fumiko's departure, but rather her intui-
tion that only destructiveness can come out of her relation—
ship with Kikuji; rather than continue the vicious cycle of
ruined lives, she even considers death. The crowning irony,
however, is Kikuji's self-deceived attitude toward Chikako --
he needs "the woman he lftakes47 for his enemy" in a patholo-

gical way. For Kikuji's need for Chikako, like his need for

 

I .-"'u' ."' M-Itxvixun ‘.'~.' ._

 

W
LI. 7.3:; I_ _
L

‘ 1'.

178
Mrs. Ota, and later her daughter, is one that is defined
by £222, a trait which psychologist Doi sees as characteris-
tic of most Japanese psychiatric patients. Doi explains amae,
and its non-actualizing qualities:

Amae is the noun form of "amaeru," an intransi-
tive verb that means "to depend and presume

upon another's benevolence" (Doi, 1956). This

word has the same root as amai, an adjective

that means "sweet." Thus amaeru has a distinct
feeling of sweetness and is generally used to
describe a child's attitude or behavior toward

his parents, particularly his mother. But it

can also be used to describe the relationship
between two adults, such as the relationship
between a husband and a wife or a master and

a subordinate. I believe that there is no sin-

gle word in English equivalent to amaeru, though
this does not mean that the psychology of amae

is totally alien to the people of English-speak-
ing countries.

At first I felt that if the patient became fully
aware of his amae, he would thereupon be able to
get rid of his neurosis. But I was wrong in this
assumption and came to observe another set of
clinical phenomena following the patient's recog—
nition of his amae. ... Many patients confessed
that they were then awakened to the fact that they
had not "possessed their self," had not previously
appreciated the importance of their existence, and
had been really nothing apart from their all-impor-
tant desire to amaeru. I took this as a step toward
the emergence of a new consciousness of self, inas-
much as the patient could thgn at least realize his
previous state of "no self." 7

 

Seen.in terms of Kikuji's attitude toward Mrs. Ota and Fumiko,
amae is the damaging, ego-consuming dependence upon these

'women to have them love him. Kikuji's amae is also a form

 

67 L. Takeo Doi, "Amae: A Key Concept for Understanding
.Japamese Personality Structure," in Japanese Culture, ed. R.J.
Smith and R. Beardsley (Chicago, 1962, pp. 132—133.

 

179

of detachment, for it ignores the separateness and indivi-
duality of the other. It is not what Kikuji can give the
other that is important to him, but what the other can or
do give him. His grief at losing Fumiko, for example, is
phrased in egocentric terms: "There was no reason for Fumiko
to die, Fumiko who had brought him to life."

Kikuji's amag is mingled with helpless anger, especially
at his father. We see that Kikuji's unhealthy need for Chikako

is somehow related to the deep anger and resentment against his

 

father which he cannot express:

It was perhaps because of her [the Inamura girl7
that the meeting with two of his father's women
had upset him no more than it had.

The two women were still here to talk of his
father, and his mother was dead. He felt a surge
of something like anger. The ugly birthmark came
to him again.

Also, Kikuji deals with his anger and his desire to amaeru
in devious ways. An outstanding example is given below in
his relationship with Mrs. Ota where he is seen drifting into

his father's role and identifying with his fantasies of his

father:

If Kikuji had regretted the encounter, he
would have had the usual sense of defilement.
uite aside from the question of the miai
Earranged meeting with a prospective marriage
partner -- for Kikuji the Inamura girl7, she
was his father's woman.
But he had until then felt neither regret nor
revulsion. He did not understand how it had
happened so naturally. Perhaps she was apolo-
gizing for having seduced him, and yet she had

 

68 Thousand Cranes, p. 29.

180

probably not meant to seduce him, nor did
Kikuji feel that he had been seduced. There

had been no suggestion of resistance, on his
part or the woman's. There had been no qualms,
he might have said.

They had gone to an inn on the hill opposite
the Engakuji, and they had had dinner, because
she was still talking of Kikuji's father. Kiku-
ji did not have to listen. Indeed it was in a
sense strange that he had listened so quietly; h}
but Mrs. Ota, evidently with no thought for the ‘l
strangeness seemed to plead her yearning for the ”
past. Listening, Kikuji felt expansively benevo-
lent. A soft affection enveloped him. It came to 1
him that his father had been happy.69 1

However, Kikuji's metamorphosis into his father is not wholly

 

unaccompanied by disgust and anger. Although he verbalizes
his dislike for Chikako and his desire to keep away from her
"poison," (he tells the Inamura girl: "I have bad memories of
Kurimoto" ... "I don't want that woman's destinies to touch

70) his feeling is not the simple one of

me at any point."
disgust with Chikako, the schemer and defiler of relationships.
It involves also disgust at himself who, in a moment of clarity,
he envisions as being exactly like his father:

The dirtiness was not only in Chikako, who

had introduced them. It was in Kikuji too.

He could see his father biting at her birth-

mark with dirty teeth. The figure of his 71

father became the figure of Kikuji himself.
iBy'the same token, Kikuji's anger at Mrs. Ota for failing to
see the difference between himself and his father is really

zinger at himself for his inability to work out his own identity

and thus sharing in his father's guilt and impurity:

 

69 Ibid., PP. 36-37.

70 Ibid., p. 56.
7' Ibid., p. 57.

181

He shook her roughly.

As if to strangle her, he grasped her with

both hands between throat and collarbone.

The collarbone stood out sharply.

"Can't you see the difference betwen my father
and me?"

Kikuji had spoken less to her than to his own dis-
quieted heart.

He had been led easily into the other world.

He could only think of it as another world, in
which there was no distinction between his father
and himself. So strong was the sense of the other
world that afterward this disquietude came over
him.

He could ask himself if she was human. If she was
pre-human, or again if she was the last woman in
the human race.

He could imagine her in this other world, making no
distinction between her dead husband and Kikuji's
father and Kikuji.

"You think of my father, don't you, and my father
and I become one person?"72

The idea of "ghosts" of dead people haunting the main
characters is an important sub-theme in Thousand Cranes. Two
striking examples, one which evokes poetically, the reality of
this idea, and the other which is a realistic depiction, are
given below. Chikako, while visiting Kikuji, notices fire-
flies in his home:

"Fireflies? At this time of the year?" She thrust

her head forward. "It's almost fall. There are still
fireflies, are there? Like ghosts."

The maid bought them."

"That's the sort of things maids do. If you were study-
ing tea, now, you wouldn't put up with it. You may not
know, but in Japan we are very conscious of the seasons."
There was something indeed ghostly about the fireflies.
Kikuji remembered that autumn insects had been humming
on the shores of Lake Nojiri. Very strange fireflies,
alive even now.

 

72 Ibid., pp. 64-65.
73 Ibid., p. 119.

 

182

This provocative scene not only conveys the Japanese meti-
culousness about observing things in season and the related
superstitious, but widely held notion, that doing things
out-of-season, either by way of decor, food, or clothing

is unnatural and bodes ill for the doer. But it also evokes
the atmosphere, totally congruent though inexpressible, of , a
something which has been violated and which is therefore f
unnatural and strange, pervading the theme of the self's

failure in the novel.

 

The other example occurs when Fumiko and Kikuji, after
Mrs. Ota's funeral, display the tea bowls used by Mrs. Ota
and Kikuji's father:

Kikuji could not bring himself to say that the
Shino bowl was like her mother. But the two

bowls before them were like the souls of his
father and her mother.

The tea bowls, three or four hundred years old,
were sound and healthy, and they called up no
morbid thoughts. Life seemed to stretch taut over
them, however, in a way that was almost sensual.
Seeing his father and Fumiko's mother in the bowls,
Kikuji felt that they had raised two beautiful
ghosts and placed them side by side.74

Indeed, ghosts more painful and destructive than beautiful,
are raised in Fumiko's and Kikuji's life. Fumiko is haunted
lxy her mother's death and guilt; and literal death is also
at the doorsteps of Fumiko's life:

"Death, waiting at your feet, I'm frightened.
I've tried so many things. I've tried thinking

 

74Ibid., p. 137.

183

that with death itself at my feet I can't
be forever held by Mother's death."

And Kikuji's answer to Fumiko is one which is wrenched from

the depths of his heart, a disturbingly true commentary on

the nature of his own existence: "When you're held by the

dead, you begin to feel that you aren't in this world yourself."75
The self which Kikuji fails to realize is his sense of

identity which is smothered by his father's past. Kikuji

never fully realizes the fact that he is reliving, in essence

and actuality, his father's life in his involvement with Mrs.

 

Ota and Chikako. Kikuji's portrait is that of a weak and
passive man who cannot extricate himself from a hated and des-
tructive life. Kikuji's behavior is a lesson in pessimism
because he is the epitome of a man who denies himself the free-
dom to create a self and to assert his individuality.

It appears in the novel that the only hope for Kikuji's
salvation is his perceptions of the purity and individuality
of the two young women, Fumiko and the Inamura girl. However,
because of his psychological enslavement, Kikuji's perceptions
of the pure and beautiful war unevenly with those of the impure
and unsightly -- it is the latter which overwhelm and defeat
his potentiality for living with the beauty and dignity of self.

Thousand Cranes, like Snow Country, is a novel of the

 

Ikeen perceptions but limited approach to experience of the

central character. Kikuji's openness to experience is limited

 

————i

75 Ibid., p. 138.

184

to his sensitive discrimination of his own feelings and
moods; because he fails to resolve the crisis of his present
identity, he cannot live meaningfully or completely with him-
self. His character is an example of the unadmirable aspect
of 232 ga mama,76the Japanese tendency to accept things as
they are. Because Kikuji does not resist or reject, in a
constructive, self-actualizing manner, those things which

he despises, he is as much a violator of human relationships
as are his father and Chikako. Weakness of self-in Thousand
Cranes is presented as a tragic element in man because it
taints everyone and everything around the individual who

denies himself his potential to be strong.

 

76 William Caudill and L. Takeo Doi ("Interrelations of
IPsychiatry, Culture and Emotion in Japan," in Man's Image 1g
IMedicine and Anthropology, ed. Iago Galdston Z New York, 19627 ),
:refer to a£g_ga mama as an unfavorable psychological trait in the
.hrpanese which carries the passivity of an individual to patholo-
(gical.extremes. I have found a philosophical equivalent to this
psychological trait in Nakamura Hajime's "Time in Indian and Japan-
ese Thought" (Thi Voices 2: Time, ed. J. T. Fraser [New York,
196673 In 85) in which he elaborates on the Japanese reaction to
'Hmccept, even to welcome, the impermanence and fluidity of the
phenonmnal world."

 

CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION

A prevailing concern in the contemporary Japanese
novel has been the plight of modern man who attempts to work

out the meaning of his existence. The works of the four novel—

 

ists studied in the preceding chapters show this plight speci—
fically as the difficulties which their protagonists encounter
in their efforts to actualize their selves. Actualization of
one's self involves the individual's putting into effect such
traits as creativity, growth motivation, acceptance of self,
others, and nature, realizing one's autonomy and freedom,
forming constructive relationships with others, being open

to experience, and having a firm grounding in reality. The
novels discussed here, however, do not give positive portrayals
of their main characters according to the criteria listed
above. Instead, they present negative and pessimistic deli-
neations of the self.

In Dazai Osamu's N2 Longer Human and The Setting §EE2
the central characters choose self-destruction through drug
addiction and suicide after discovering that they cannot cope
'with a society which they feel demands that they wear "masks"

over their real selves, and assume artificial "poses" in the

185

186
presence of others. They long for a security which they
cannot realize because this security means that they must
ultimately compromise themselves, to become the masks and
poses they put on in the presence of other people. They
are tragic and ironic figures who feel that because they
are outcasts of their society, they have failed to actualize E“
themselves. However, they are blind to the fact that their
gentleness and genuine feelings for people in a world that

is "out of joint" could have been positive steps toward self-

 

affirmation and realization. ins

The Temple 2: the Golden Pavilion and Confessions 2: a

 

Mask by Mishima Yukio are about an arsonist and a homosexual,
respectively, who try desperately to take flight from an in-
tolerable reality and their selves through their psychopathic
fantasies. Ironically for them, fantasy and reality become
virtually indistinguishable, and the symbol of their powers

of self-analysis takes on the form of the contorted Mobius
Strip -- "what [—appears_7 to be the inside [fis47 the out-
side and what [appearsg7 to be the outside is the inside."
They are self—deceptive individuals who feel, at the end of
the novels, that they have achieved some mode of self-actuali-
zation when they have only become more firmly entrenched as
'victims of their psychopathology.
.Another, the main characters pride themselves on their intel-
Iligence and their ability to see things scientifically. The

Ixrotagonists are an entomologist and a scientist who are governed

187
by the need to find external "standards of values," rather
than their selves. They are products of the twentieth-
century preoccupation with scientific method, yet at the
same time, they are hopeless victims of their own perceptions
which arise from a heightened awareness of the emptiness of
their lives. Their experiences and observations of life
lead them ultimately to an uneasy and unstable compromise
which reflect the fact that they have accepted neither them-
selves nor others.

Kawabata Yasunari's works, Snow Country and Thousand

 

Cranes, concern themselves with protagonists who take flight
from life and self into a world of sharp aesthetic perceptions.
Both are aesthetes who are convinced that life is a wasted
effort, and this view distorts their perceptions of their
experiences. Openness to experience for them only means

escape from knowing themselves and from becoming committed

to healthy relationships with others. Ironically, they are
passive self—made prisoners "in the world as it is," a

world which is fated to remain as they see it.

The theme of the self in modern Japanese fiction revolves
around the reasons why individuals fail to realize themselves.
It is a theme which is coupled with effective stylistic tech-
niques, and therefore carries with it great dramatic urgency
and literary impact. We often find that the modern Japanese
novel is difficult to read, not only because of the cultural

gap it implies for the Western reader, but also because the

 

188
reader is forced to engage in an intensely private experi-
ence. In order to get at the full value of the literary
work, the reader must attempt to understand completely the
inner and outer world of another person, to enter his pri-
vate self, as it were, and see the way life appears to him
without the novelist's direct evaluative interpretations.
These novels, to use a phrase by Erich Auerbach, give one
an unmediated "problematic-existential representation" of
life.* In reading these novels, the reader runs the risk
of being changed or becoming lost in the world of the pro-

tagonist, but he is also accorded a vision of life which

not only transcends cultural time and space, but which, when

taken by itself, makes a significant commentary about the

human condition.

 

*

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (New York, 1957), p. 433.
An example of "problematic-existential representation" in
fiction is Flaubert's style which Auerbach calls "a syste-

matic and objective seriousness, from which things themselves
speak, and, according to their value, classify themselves be-

fore the reader as tragic or comic, or in most cases quite
unobtrusively as both."

11‘" II"; "iv ,‘

 

BIBL IOGRAPHY

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. PRIMARY EDITIONS

Abe, Kobo. The Face Lf Another. Translated by E. Dale Saunders.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.

 

Abe, Kobo. The Wbman in the Dunes. Translated by E. Dale Saunders.

New York: Berkley Publishing Corp., 1965.

Dazai, Osamu. N2 Longer Human. Translated by Donald Keene. Con-
necticut: New Directions, 1958.

 

Dazai, Osamu. The Setting Sun. Translated by Donald Keene. Con-
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Kawabata, Yasunari. Thousand Cranes. Translated by Edward Seiden-
sticker. New York: Berkley Publishing Corp., 1965.

Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. Translated by Edward Seiden-
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Mishima, Yukio. The Temple Lf the Golden Pavilion. Translated
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Mishima, Yukio. Confessions Lf a Mask. Translated by Meredith
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‘ ...,—

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Duus, Louise. "The Novel as Koan: Mishima Yukio' s ThJ Temple Lf
ThJ Golden Pavilion." Critigue. X(1968), 120-129.

Freedman, Ralph. ThJ Lypical Novel. New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1963.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy_ of Criticism. New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1957

 

, L
F‘"
v13
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21,
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07-,
I

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v

 

191

Glicksberg, Charles I. ThJ Self Ln Modern Literature. Penn-
sylvania State University Press, 1963.

Hallie, Philip T. "Indirect Communication and Human Existence. "
Restless Adventure: Essays Ln Contemporary Expressions Lf
Existentialism. Edited by Roger L. Shinn. New York: Charles
Scribner' 3 Sons, 1968.

Harvey, W'.J. "Character and the Context of Things." ThJ NOVJI:
Modern Essays Ln Criticism. Edited by Robert M. Davis.
New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1969.

Hibbett, Howard. "The Portrait of the Artist in Japanese Fiction."
The Far Eastern Qparterly. XIV (May,1955), 347-354.

"Tradition and Trauma in the Contemporary Japan-
ese Novel." Fiction Ln Several Languages. Edited by Henri
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Hoffman, Frederick J. Samuel Beckett: ThJ Language Lf Self.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962.

 

. The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagi-
nation. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964.

Horney, Karen. Neurosis anJ Human Growth. New York: W.WkNorton
& Company, Inc., 1959

Iga, Mamoru. "Cultural Factors in Suicide of Japanese Youth with
Focus on Personality." Sociology anJ Social Research. XLVI
(1961), 75- 90.

Ito, Sei. "Modes of Thought in Contemporary Japan. " Japan Qparter-
ly, XII (October-December, 1965), 501- 514.

Kannishi, Kiyoshi. "Shayo no Mondai" (The Problem in ThJ Setting

Sun). Dazai Kenk . Edited by Okuno Takeo. Tokyo: Chikuma
Shobo, 1963. (In Japanese)

IKarl, Frederick R. and Hamalian, Leo, Editors. The Existential
Imagination. New York: Fawcett world Library, 1963.

 

3Kawabata, Yasunari. Japan thJ Beautiful anJ Myself. Translated
by Edward Seidensticker. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1969.

Keene, Donald. "The Artistry of Dazai Osamu." Ea__s__t-W__est Review.
I (Winter, 1965), 233-253.

Konishi, Jinichi. "Ffiryp": An Ideal of Japanese Esthetic Life."
The Japanese Image. Tokyo: 1965.

 

«Mm-e: rem-J! are“ '
I g ‘.Q BIO-’e‘t‘1i"1

u-o

I.
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in
.59
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192

Korges, James. "Abe and Ooka: Identity and Mind-Body." Critigue.
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Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis. New York:
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Le Sage, Laurent. The French New Novel: Ag Introduction and a

Sampler. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University
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Levin, Harry. "Thematics and Criticism." The Disciplines of
Criticism. Edited by P. Demetz, T. Greene, and L. Nelson, Jr.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press,1968.

 

Maslow, Abraham. Toward g Psychology'p£ Being. Princeton, 1962.

May, Rollo. "Existentialism, Psychotherapy, and the Problem of
Death." Restless Adventure. Edited by Roger L. Shinn. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968.

McClellan, Edwin. "The Impressionistic Tendency in Some Modern
Japanese writers." Chicago Review. XVII (1965), 48-60.

Mead, C. David. "Dazai to Aironi Keishiki" (Dazai and the Ironi-
cal Mode). Gengo pp Bungei. V (January, 1963), 76-79.

Miner, Earl. An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford.
Stanford— University Press, 1968.

. "Some Thematic and Structural Features of Genji
Monogatari." Monumenta Nipponica. XXIV (1969), 1-19.

 

 

Moloney, James C. "Selections from Understanding the Japanese
Mind." Japanese Character and Culture. Edited by Bernard
S, Silberman. Arizona: University of Arizona Press,1962.

Moore, Charles. "Editor's Supplement: The Enigmatic Japanese
Mind." The Japanese Mind: Essentials pi Japanese Philo-
§ophy and Culture. Edited by Charles Moore. Honolulu:
East-West Center Press, 1967.

 

Morris, Ivan. "Fiction in Japan Today: An Exchange of Views."
Japan Quarterly. IV (1957), 159-168.

Nakamura, Hajime. "Consciousness of the Individual and the
Universal Among the Japanese." The Japanese Mind. Edited
by C. Moore. Honolulu: East-west Center Press, 1967.

. "Time in Indian and Japanese Thought. " The
Voices o?_Time. Edited by J. T. Fraser. New Yotk: George
Braziller, 1966.

 

 

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‘l Iv .',- o‘JoQQg
.lola'n - -‘I "'1 ."

rf‘ "1.”! , 1'

 

193

Nishida, Kitaro. "The Problem of Japanese Culture." Sources
Lf the Japanese Tradition. Compiled by Ryusaku Tsunoda,
Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene. New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1958.

Nojima, Hidekatsu. "Dazai Bungaku no Eikyo" (The Influence of
Dazai Literature). Dazai Kenk Edited by Okuno Takeo.
Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1963. (In Japanese)

Paris, Bernard. "The Psychic Structure of 'Vanity Fair'.
Victorian Studies. X(June,1967), 389-410.

Peyre, Henri, Editor. Fiction in Several Lapguages. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968.

Read, Herbert E. Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the

Development Lf Human Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1955.

 

Rogers, Carl R. 9p Becoming 2 Person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
COO, 1961.

Ryan, Marleigh Grayer. Japan' s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo Lf
Futabatei Shimei. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967

Sako, Junichiro. "Dazai to Kirisutokyo" (Dazai and Christianity).

Kindai Bungaku Kansho Koza. Edited by Kamei Katsuichiro.
Volume 19. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1959. (In Japanese)

 

Seidensticker, Edward. "The Unshapen Ones." Japan Qparterly.
XI (January-March, 1964), 64-69.

Sibley, William F. "Naturalism in Japanese Literature." Harvard
Journal Lf Asiatic Studies. XXVIII (1968), 157-169.

Stallknecht, Newton P. "Ideas and Literature." Comparative
Literature. Edited by N.P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961.

 

Swann, T.E. " uki uni: One View." East-West Review. II (Winter,
1965-196‘Y‘L6 , 165-'172. "— _ _—

Sypher, wylie. LLss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art.

New York: Vintage Books, 1962.

Wilson, Colin. Introduction to the New Existentialism. London:
.Hutchinson & Company, Ltd., 1966.

Wilson, Nancy Ross, Editor. The World'pg Zen. New York: Random
House, 1960.

Yamagishi, Gaishi. Ningen Dazai Osamu (Dazai Osamu,the Man).
Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1962. (In Japanese)

 

 

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“can.

’ ' 1.31 VII—I" ~91} (II "AIR-I'I'V" ‘",‘.4_ ‘9‘: A .“4 75-..1‘ LL11 ‘..' I'1_.1' Q.J- '
“v; '1'.“ '0' V““_‘ y, . 4.» 9 5 i ‘ r7 0 ¢ 0 "L .1" ,Cl .‘ ““‘I ....
. r' 9 n . a vl- . .0... '5 _o-h- ’ F '. - ‘ ...: . . l . , .‘ , , .9
,f- ’411O 1 ~ O.n-. .h an °|Ftt 4.. I. ., .

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194
Yasuoka, Shotaro. "Mijika na Kotoba" (The Language of the

Self). Dazai Kenkyp. Edited by Okuno Takeo. Tokyo:
Chikuma Shobo, 1963. (In Japanese)

III. GENERAL REFERENCES

Benl, Oscar. "Naturalism in Japanese Literature." Monumenta
Nipponica. IX (April, 1953), 1-33.

 

Edel, Leon. "Literature and Psychology." Comparative Litera-
ture. Edited by N. P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz. Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961.

Etiemble, Rene. The Crisis 1p Comparative Literature. Trans-
lated by Herbert Weisinger and Georges Joyaux. East Lan-
sing: Michigan State University Press, 1966.

Falk, Eugene H. Types Lf Thematic Structure. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1967

Frank, Joseph. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature." Critiques
and Essays in Criticism. Selected by Robert Stallman.
New York: The Ronald Press, 1949.

 

Freedman, Ralph. "The Possibility of a Theory of the Novel. "
The Disciplines Lf Criticism. Edited by P. Demetz, et. al.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968.

Gabo, Naum. "On Constructive Realism." Three Lectures Ln Modern

Art. Katherine S. Dreier, James Sweeney, and Naum Gabo.
New York: Philosophical Library, 1949

 

Lifton, Robert J. History and Human Survival. New York: Random
House, 1970.

Ooka, Shohei. "WOrld View of Japanese Literature." Japan ar-
terly. XVI ( January-March,1969), 61-63.

Scholes, Robert and Kellogg, Robert. The Nature 9; Narrative.
New York: Oxford Univelsity Press, 1968.

 

'Ueda, Makoto. Literary and Art Theories ip Japan. Cleveland:
Western Reserve University Press, 1967.

Uitti, Karl D. The Concept Lf Self in the Symbolist Novel.
The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1961.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1967

 

 

  
  
  
  
 

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