Shuko as "Novelist"

We have thus far considered the major cycles in a generally positive light, stressing Shuko's ability to "see" the diversity of lived experience within a consistently idealized vision. This vision is maintained in his next series of stories as well, the "Ko no ai" (Doting parent) cycle, beginning with Ko no ai no tame ni (For the love of his child, 1924), in which the object of the hero's demeaning adoration merely shifts from an elusive beloved to two sickly daughters, whom he fathered in his late forties.

We must not, however, overlook the fact that Shuko's experiments' in narrative replay, specifically in Futari no hitori mono and the "Kyuren" cycle, harbored contradictions that ultimately called the very medium in which he worked into question. In the first place, while a "rereading" of episodes in the author's life could provide new insights through a changed perspective, it could just

[37] See Hirano Ken, "Sakuhin to sakka," 424-25. Nakajima Kunihiko has since challenged Hirano's link between Shuko's establishment of a new relationship and his writing about a past one. He argues convincingly that Shuko did not need time for emotional recovery so much as time for artistic inspiration and that he found it, in the case of his "Estranged Wife" cycle, in the works of Arthur Schnitzler (through Mori Ogai's translations). He concludes that even in Shuko's case art imitates art more than life. See "Kyakkan shosetsu e no yume," 47-48; and “Shujaku , Giwaku o sasaeru mono," 166-7. Yet the fact remains that Shuko consistently wrote his best work months and even years after the incidents in question had taken place—by which time Shuko was indeed involved with another woman.

as easily result in an excessive milking of material. Futari no hitori mono, Kyuren , and Kyuren zokuhen are clearly derivative texts. In the second—and far more important—place, the later texts suffer from a loss of what might be called a narrative identity. Shuko attempted not simply to reinterpret experience when he wrote his sequels to the "Kurokami" cycle but dearly also to grasp it in terms that transcended the shishosetsu's epistemological limitations. In short, he attempted to recast the Japanese narrative form into one that would have greater narrative autonomy and would accommodate, in the manner of a western-language novel, several points of view. In Kyuren , for example, the partially omniscient narrator frees us from the Kyoran hero's myopic perspective and, by anticipating events before they develop, generates ironies not to be found in the earlier story. Yet these seemingly requisite conditions for a successful narrative in fact produce an inferior story. Presented by a narrator who ventures tentatively into omniscience, Kyuren loses the gripping authenticity of Kyoran . In Futari no hitori mono the trend is even more pronounced. The tunnel-visioned, first-person narration of the "Dark Hair" cycle gives way to a self-consciously omniscient narrative that adopts the point of view of each of the two main characters. Yet the reader's sympathies are never fully engaged in either of them.

In Futari no hitori mono especially, Shuko seems to be battling with the Japanese language itself. Alert as we have become and as any bundan reader would be to the shishosetsu narrator's use of the written reportive style to present himself as a personal authenticator of experience, we want to ask: how does the omniscient narrator know what he knows, and by what authority? The linguistic and epistemological distance that such a narrator places between himself and his principal characters inevitably drives a wedge between narrator and reader as well; for we as readers, observing the grammatical signs (discussed in Chapter 2) that link narrating and acting consciousness, sense that the narrative has shifted from a "sincere" (because epistemologically immanent) recounting to an "insincere" (because epistemologically transcendent) fabrication. By revealing information about the hero's situation that the hero himself does not know, the narrator, in this reading, trivializes the latter's perceptions and discredits the narrative itself as an authentic account.

Thus it is that Shuko's most myopic presentations (texts like Giwaku and Kyoran )—because they so successfully replicate a personally authenticated telling—make the most powerful impressions on the reader. Shuko was doubtlessly aware of his achievement. Yet he spent a great deal of creative energy attempting to overturn the shishosetsu's restrictive epistemology. Throughout his career, he repeatedly announced his intention to transcend personal experience and write "true novels" (honkaku shosetsu ) that dealt objectively with the lives of others.^[38] Nakajima Kunihiko, commenting on that intention, suggests that Shuko was not equipped with the narrative skills needed to produce truly well-crafted and autonomous verbal artifacts? Yet no less a writer than Akutagawa Ryunosuke thought highly of Shuko's honkaku shosetsu . He singles out Shuko's "Rin o nonde shinda hito" (Suicide by phosphorous poisoning, 1926) for special mention. It is the story of a man who, unhappily married to a member of the pariah burakumin , bungles his affair with a mistress he has installed in his home to tutor his children. Despairing of his situation, he finally kills himself. The work cannot in fact be counted among Shuko's best, but it is easy to see what attracted Akutagawa's attention. The story's omniscient narrator reveals the consciousness of the three main characters in turn: the man, his mistress, and his wife. Because the narrator engages the reader's sympathies in all three characters (more successfully, it might be added, than in Futari no hitori mono ) by relating events from diverse points of view, one is not sure until the end who will actually commit suicide; all have their pressing reasons. Indeed, Shuko very likely entitled his work "... shinda hito" ("person who died") rather than" ... shinda otoko" ("man who died") precisely in order to keep the reader in the dark.

In defense of "Rin o nonde shinda hito," Akutagawa cautions against judging honkaku shosetsu by the standard of the shishosetsu . Nothing can compare with the latter as a vehicle for confession, he allows, but its superiority in just this one respect should not lead

[38] In the preface to a single-volume anthology entitled Keien (1915), Shuko writes, "I have no intention of spending my entire career detailing the follies of my love life.... I wish to write about the broad social scene after the manner of Zola." Shuko expresses a similar wish in "Honrai no negai" (1926).

[39] "Kyakkan shosetsu e no yume," 58.

critics to reject the honkaku shosetsu out of hand? "Should not," Akutagawa writes; but reject it (or at least view it suspiciously) the bundan did. Although critics of the time did not spell it out in so many words, what bothered them, as we can deduce from our examination in Chapter 3 of the mode of reading literature in the Taisho period, was the question we asked shortly before: how does the narrator in a text like "Rin o nonde shinda hito" know what he knows, and by what authority? And if that knowledge does not derive from lived experience, how can he convey it with the same degree of authenticity as one whose knowledge does? The answer is that he cannot. The mechanics of the Japanese language, reinforced by a long cultural tradition that has associated a transcendent epistemology with fabrication and ultimately with "nonliterature," simply will not let him. That is why Shuko's shishosetsu , above and beyond any actual defects in his other fiction, have had the greater appeal, his several pronouncements about honkaku shosetsu notwithstanding. Autobiographical "fact" is not at issue here; the crucial equation is between the narrator, not the author, and his hero. Shuko succeeded in utilizing the genius of the language to project the narrator-hero's consciousness as if it were the author's very own, knowing that the reader would interpret it in no other way.

Shuko learned well his lesson from Futabatei's Heibon : that the hero who speaks in Japanese directly to his audience speaks most persuasively. In his Bundan sanju nen (My thirty years in the bundan , 1931), Shuko recalls a conversation he had with Futabatei about literature and truth. Art, according to Futabatei, is mere fabrication, and life too important to be transformed capriciously into a pack of lies. But if you must write at all, Futabatei then admonished, then at least write as if you are telling a truth that you have personally lived—which is to say from your own limited perspective and not from the privileged perspective of an omniscient observer.^[41]

[40] "Chikamatsu-san no honkaku shosetsu" (1926), in Akutagawa Ryunosuke zenshu 8:165-67.

[41] P. 197. Sawa Toyohiko is perhaps the only Japanese scholar to note Futabatei's influence on Shuko. See “Wakaretaru tsuma to sono hen'yo," 42-43. Futabatei's words of course represent a major change from the narrative philosophy that guided him in the writing of Ukigumo . Indeed, we can see in Ukigumo, Sono omokage , and Heibon a transition from a narrative form approaching (although never equivalent to) that of the western novel to the epistemologically immanent mode that would only later be termed shishosetsu .

Futabatei published Heibon soon after this interview; we have already noted its impact on Shuko in Chapter 5. Elsewhere, Shuko elaborates on how he himself wrestled with the problem of narrative presentation in the "Dark Hair" cycle:

Once I had decided to write a self-exposé, I confronted the question of whether to narrate it in the third person or first person. During a discussion with Tokuda Shusei and Kume Masao about the problem, Shusei recommended the former and Kume the latter. I myself felt that using a third-person narration for such brazen confessions would only blunt the overall effect. I told Kume later ... that I would employ a first-person narration, as I believed it the more convincing conveyor of my true feelings.... I have often expressed to younger colleagues my desire in recent years to distance myself and write coolly objective stories in third-person narration, and my utter distaste for recording the painful experiences of private life. Yet I ended up doing just that, once again, in Kurokami and Kyoran .^[42]

We can see that Shuko's narrative strategy here is essentially identical to the one that informs his "Estranged Wife" cycle. In both cases, he opts for the nontranscendent consciousness available with first-person narration. "I may choose of course to write what I observe or imagine someone else to be doing," Shuko writes early in his career, "but art is by its very nature concrete and therefore tied irrevocably to one's own perceptions.... The more closely a story is linked to those perceptions, the greater its power."^[43]

Yet even more important, this strategy informs such "third-person" narratives as the stories in the "Osaka Courtesan" cycle, where the acting "he" merges with the narrating "I." In stories like "Otoko kiyohime" (and most strikingly in Watashi wa ikite kita ), the third-person narrator is in every sense an extension of the hero, never straying from the latter's epistemological realm. Of course, Shuko's narrative method is hardly unique. Shiga Naoya also makes effective use of a nonautonomous third-person narrator in An'ya koro (A dark night's passing), as we shall observe in the following chapter. Shuko's stories simply demonstrate that the hero in an "I-novel" is neither an autonomous "I" nor "he" but rather a

[42] “Kyoran gakuyabanashi," in Yomiuri shinbun , 2 and 4 Apr. 1922, pp. 7 and 7, respectively.

[43] "Omotta mama."

discerning, personless (in the grammatical sense) eye that perceives the world through the narrator's senses.

Although Shuko wrote prolifically in several other forms, including honkaku shosetsu , criticism, historical fiction, and travel essays, we have focused primarily on his shishosetsu because his success in that form, combined with the difficulties he had creating a viable narrative voice for his other fiction, have provided us with insights into his overall technique and its import for modern Japanese literature. This technique, which matched perfectly the traditional epistemology, provided a modus operandi for scores of writers to follow. Among them were writers like Shiga Naoya, with a finer, more carefully crafted style, and like Kasai Zenzo, with a greater commitment to the shishosetsu form, but none with a clearer awareness of the stakes involved in choosing one narrative form—and its supporting epistemology—over another.

Not that Shuko was a deep thinker. Yet neither can he simply be dismissed as the raving degenerate that Akagi Kohei and others would make him out to be. Although Shuko very likely pursued in real life every foolish escapade he describes in his work, too facile an equation between life and art can only blind us to Shuko's purpose as a writer. Masamune Hakucho writes that Shuko wanted to create love stories after Ozaki Koyo or Chikamatsu Monzaemon; that he was a frustrated Chubei or Jihei searching for his Umekawa or Koharu but finally unable to find her.^[44] Perhaps. But his failure in real life was not necessarily detrimental to his literary project. On the contrary, it provided a vision radically different from the fulfilled if tragic loves of Umekawa and Chubei or Koharu and Jihei in Chikamatsu's dramas. "Looking back on my life," Shuko writes in a "retrospective" essay in 1910, near the beginning of his career as a fiction writer, "I see that I have achieved no memorable successes. Indeed, the more I reflect, the more painful experiences I can recall. And yet for one like me who does not entertain any ambitions for the future either, there is no other pleasure in life than recollecting past failures and savoring the excruciating ecstasy of suffering."^[45] Already Shuko has discovered the keynote of his literature, fashioned from emotions recalled in barely contained

[44] Chikamatsu Shuko , in Masamune Hakucho zenshu 4:521.

[45] "Bungei hyaku homen."

hysteria and centering on a lost and never-to-be regained ideal. "Even though he [this 'he' that is synonymous with 'I'] was starved for feminine affections," the Shuko narrator writes three years later of his hero in "Otoko kiyohime," "he/I had no interest in seeking out a flesh-and-blood woman and becoming intimate with her. He/ I had grown weary of real women; he/I preferred the women of his/my dreams. Recalling past associations and giving him/myself over to the exciting memories was far more pleasant, he/I found, than burdening him/myself with an actual relationship."^[46]

The women in his life understandably wearied of his irresponsible ways and abandoned him; but Shuko fashioned out of them a coy siren destined to elude for all time his heroes' grasp. We have seen how he rewrote the events in his own life in a way that conformed to his ideal vision. However eccentric in real life, he remained faithful to his literary aesthetic. And if we end up admiring the work more than the real-life man, are we not in fact paying Shuko the ultimate tribute as an artist?

[46] Shinsen Chikamatsu Shuko shu , 232-33.