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

As a seeker of knowledge par excellence, as someone with a scientific bent, and as a man driven by ambition, both unworldly and worldly, what would Sōseki have done if he had been born today? Let us assume that as he grew up, he would again decide to become a scholar. His scientific curiosity, hand in hand with his ambition to make a name for himself, might well have led him to become a scientist. He would then be writing articles in English, the universal language of academia, especially science — articles filled with mathematical formulas. Today, the international prominence of Asians is well recognized in all fields of science, from mathematics and physics to biology, engineering, and medicine. Sōseki, too, might have come to be known as a world-class scientist. Yet suppose he was not content to write scientific articles, which, however brilliant, can ultimately be replaced with a “textbook”? Suppose he aspired to work in the field of humanities and write texts in English so that his writings might enter the world’s chain of “texts to read”? How would he fare?

Probably not very well, I’m afraid. Our fictional Sōseki would still be Japanese, an East Asian, and not Indian, for example. Thanks in large part to India’s colonial past, many Indian nationals and ethnic Indians are now recognized not only as fine scientists but also as fine writers in English. That Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu all belong to the Indo-European family of languages, as does English, may also have something to do with it. Yet as far as the world knows, East Asians — Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese — are a race of people who have brains only for mathematics. This is mainly because, to a degree that Westerners can scarcely imagine, writing a good text in English is a nearly impossible task for those whose mother tongue is so distant. Our Sōseki may attempt to write texts in English, but the chance of those texts entering the world’s chain of “texts to read” will be slight. If he decides to persevere in his attempt, he will probably spend much of his precious time wrestling with the English language; cursing his mother tongue, so distant from English; and envying those more fortunate. To be sure, the actual Sōseki was not a happy soul, but a Sōseki who struggled to write literary works in English would have been even less so.

And yet, however frustrating writing in English might be, would a man of Sōseki’s caliber today take to writing literature in Japanese? Would he do what Sōseki did over a hundred years ago — walk away from a prestigious teaching post to concentrate on writing novels in Japanese? What in the current Japanese literary scene would allure a modern Sōseki?

THE JAPANESE LITERARY SCENE TODAY

Today, if one goes into a Japanese bookstore and looks around, it is evident that Japanese as a written language is alive and well. Over seventy-five thousand new titles are published yearly, a robust number. A century and a half after Western languages first began to be translated into Japanese, concepts that were once foreign but critical in understanding and building a modern nation are now an integral part of the language, and the quality of Japanese that circulates in newspapers and magazines may be higher than ever before. The state of Japanese literature, however, is a different matter. In any mass consumer society, literature that circulates widely is seldom deserving of the name. It is the same in Japan — with one difference: the degree to which the status of literature itself has fallen in people’s minds. If the word “literature” still evokes some respect, it is only because it is associated with the works of earlier writers who made Japanese literature a “major literature.” In the past, Japanese people were avid readers of literature, including works in translation. Compared with that in other countries, the national reverence for literature perhaps bordered on the extreme. But now it is the national indifference to literature that borders on the extreme.

Today, Japanese seekers of knowledge still read books, but hardly any literature — not even the modern classics. The younger they are, the truer this is. They read books in Japanese when they want to know about alternative energy, say, or the latest discoveries in brain science, or what’s taking place in the world of Islam. They also read books in Japanese on issues like the aging country’s pension system and possible correlations between the sliding economy and the suicide rate. It’s as if knowledge seekers already sense that Japanese literature is turning into a literature of the local language — a local literature. Perhaps because they have lost interest in Japanese literature, their interest in literature of any kind has also waned, and even translations of Western literature, once so popular, languish unread. Translations do continue to be read, but the vast majority of them are nonfiction, and from English.

The demise of literature in Japan began sometime early in the 1970s, as members of the postwar generation (who, as we shall see in the next chapter, were steadily cut off from prewar society) first began writing. That is, the demise of Japanese literature began long before the unquestioned advent of the age of English and the steep decline of print media brought on by the Internet. Collected works of literature had already become a thing of the past, as had coterie magazines. Some of the major literary journals had also begun to disappear. Shinchō , the oldest and most prestigious of those journals, with a history of more than one hundred years, is one of the few still in circulation, but its numbers have plummeted from a peak of 100,000 immediately after the war to fewer than 10,000 now — many of which are sent out as complimentary copies.

A striking manifestation of this demise is the dwindling number and prestige of literary critics. In the past, someone like Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983) was all but deified, with photographs of his distinguished face appearing everywhere from literary journals to magazines to newspapers. He and his fellow critics not only wrote books and articles but gave public talks, alone or in pairs or threes, speaking of Japanese literature in the context of world literary trends. Yet for decades now, seekers of knowledge have had little interest in discussing Japanese literature. And who can blame them? Aside from genre fiction such as historical novels, detective stories, and science fiction, representative works of today’s Japanese literature often read like rehashes of American literature — ignoring not only the Japanese literary heritage but, more critically, the glaring fact that Japanese society and American society differ. One hundred years from now, readers of those works will have no idea what it was like to live in the current Heisei period (starting in 1989) of Japan. Though well received in the global market, such works contrast starkly with Sōseki’s writings, which have an uncanny ability to transport readers back to the Japan of the Meiji and Taishō periods. The idiosyncratic and inventive style of Sōseki’s texts makes them nearly impossible to translate, so they are little appreciated outside the country, although highly regarded by foreigners who read them in the original. Compared with Sōseki’s works, works of contemporary fiction tend to resemble global cultural goods, which, like Hollywood blockbuster films, do not require language — or translation — in the truest sense of the word. No wonder Japan’s best and brightest have turned their backs on literature.

Let me ask again: Today, would a man of Sōseki’s caliber even try to write novels in Japanese? I know this may sound ungracious to the many writers of Japanese fiction active today, myself included, but I strongly suspect that he would not. How literature suffered such a sharp loss of prestige in Japan, we will explore in the final chapter.