Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

To be sure, of the astonishing quantity of literature published since Floating Clouds , not all is of fine quality. Full-length novels that deserve to be called masterpieces are rare; unlike their Western counterparts, Japanese writers generally do not excel in constructing a fictional universe that stands on its own. Yet the corpus of modern Japanese literature is filled with such diverse linguistic and literary wonderment that it is a true embarrassment of riches. It is also filled with “truths” visible only through the Japanese language — in passages often highly resistant to translation. Foreigners who tackle them in Japanese may at first be baffled, but the deeper they delve into the treasure house of modern Japanese literature, the more certain they are to be captivated by the discovery of just how perversely complex and generously all-encompassing a written language can be.

And to think that modern Japanese literature might never have existed! Its path was perilous. Only a precarious combination of historical conditions — conditions largely beyond the control of the Japanese people — allowed it to blossom. What else to call the rise of modern Japanese literature but a miracle?

FORGETTING THE ORIGINS

National literature, just like national language, is established through the forgetting of its origins. It is true in the case of modern Japanese literature as well. The new kind of Japanese, which was written by and read among intellectuals during the early years of Japan’s modernity and was to become the medium of Japanese literature, was obviously different from the written Japanese circulating in everyday life. Reading it must have felt somehow awkward, foreign, and pretentious to ordinary people, like eating with knives and forks instead of chopsticks. Only in the mid-Taishō era did the language used in newspapers shift from the traditional literary style to the new genbun itchi style, prose that was closer to the spoken language. And it was probably well into the Shōwa period that this new style of written language, through compulsory education, newspapers, and magazines, no longer seemed foreign even to people whose lives had nothing to do with universities: farmers, factory workers, shop owners.

As the written language that ordinary people used in writing diaries and letters became more similar to the new language, and as that new language became the norm, the origins of modern Japanese literature itself — the fact that it was initiated through acts of translation by bilinguals who had studied Western languages in universities — were quickly forgotten. Some people today may know that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), who wrote in a particularly modernistic style, read an astounding amount of English at an astounding speed: he is rumored to have finished War and Peace in English in just four days. But few realize that Ozaki Kōyō (1868–1903), known for an ornate, “reactionary” style reminiscent of Genroku-era literature, was no less avid a reader of novels in English. It thus caused a stir in 2000 when his most famous work, The Gold Demon ( Konjiki yasha , 1887), was proved to be an adaptation of an American dime novel. 8How many are aware that Nakazato Kaizan (1885–1944), known for his long Buddhist novel Daibosatsu tōge (Bodhisattva pass, 1913), was an avid reader of Victor Hugo in English translation? Or that Osaragi Jirō (1897–1973), author of the swashbuckling Kurama tengu series (1924–1959), started writing to pay off his debt to Maruzen, a bookstore that specializes in imported books?

To reflect back on the origin of modern Japanese literature is itself incompatible with the “ideology of national language,” which claims that national literature, written in one’s own language, is an outpouring of the writer’s inner soul, a direct expression of what he or she saw, felt, and imagined. No deliberate suppression was needed. Rather, forgetting the origins of modern Japanese literature was an unconscious process that ended inevitably in obfuscation and oblivion. The process accelerated as the spoken and written languages converged. The normative spoken language, initially forced on people through compulsory education in the Meiji period, began to spread uncoerced with the proliferation of radios and later television sets; it spread rapidly from living room to living room, over mountains and across rivers and prefectural borders. It is no wonder that the Japanese people came to feel as if their language was something they were born with and came to embrace their national literature as a natural manifestation of who they were. Being bilingual no longer mattered. Many fine works — masterpieces, some of them — began appearing from writers who could not be considered bilinguals. Monolingual writers eventually became the majority.

The triumph of the Japanese language as truly the people’s language could not be better exemplified than by a longtime best seller first published in 1958: Yasumoto Sueko’s Ni-anchan (My second brother, 1958). The diary of a preadolescent ethnic Korean girl, it depicts her everyday life with her three siblings in a Kyushu mining town. Though orphaned and destitute, the four of them help one another to somehow complete their schooling, her older brother even managing to be often at the top of the class. The style is simplicity itself. “One should write as one sees and feels; therefore, even those who have not read much can also write”—that is the view of language underpinning the ideology of national language. Such a view of language ends up flooding the world with pap, but it sometimes also allows a child with a beautiful mind to produce a gem. The power of the ideology of national language reached an apex, in Japanese, in writing by this girl of Korean nationality. Having read Ni-anchan over and over during grade school, as an adult I have kept questioning whether my own writing could possibly move the reader with similar force.

Indeed, the one hundred years since the Meiji Restoration were years in which modern Japanese literature spread to, and blossomed in, every corner of Japan. These were years when public education expanded and literacy grew, even among the poorest of the poor. They were also years when books became more and more affordable, including translations. Western-style leather-bound books were once a symbol of wealth, but by the end of the Taishō period, cloth-bound, mass-produced books that sold for only one yen per copy became popular in multivolume collections. Literary collections appeared in quick succession and in all sorts of variations, from Japanese novels to translated novels, for young adults or children or even aimed specifically at girls, like the set I read avidly as a child. Paperback versions followed, making a literary masterpiece as affordable as a bowl of noodles.

Japanese, moreover, were fortunate to enjoy a century of peaceful daily life, fecund ground for literature to flourish. Although the country turned other nations into battlefields and pillaged them in war, not until the end of World War II did its own land come under fire. Even after total defeat in World War II, Japan eventually enjoyed not only peace but also rapid economic growth. The number of people who attained higher education further expanded, books became even more affordable, and multivolume collections of all kinds circulated. Virtually the entire population read literature madly, not only Japanese works but a wide array of world classics by everyone from Strindberg to Borges. Japan became a nation so literary that it would have been the envy of all literature-loving people of the world — if only they had known! (Japanese literature finally attracted the world’s attention in 1968, exactly one hundred years after the Meiji Restoration, when Kawabata Yasunari was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)