There are many ways in which this story is typical of the work of Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993), one of the finest authors of modern Japan. It is set in western Japan, near Hiroshima (Ibuse's birthplace), and depicts the lives of poor villagers rather than city folk; the spare, economical style omits all unnecessary information but deftly focuses the reader's attention on significant details; moral judgments are implied rather than stated outright, and are tempered by compassion and gentle humor; furthermore, what seems at first to be incomplete and fragmentary turns out to have unexpected wholeness and depth.
While a student at Waseda University, Ibuse majored in French literature--like many other prominent authors, including Oe Kenzaburo--but he also studied painting at the Japan School of Fine Arts; the unerring eye for telling visual detail displayed in his fiction is often attributed to his artistic training. For nearly seventy years from his 1923 debut until shortly before his death, he produced a large body of critically acclaimed and popularly successful novels, short stories, essays, and other writings.
Ibuse is probably best known for Black Rain (translated by John Bester, available in a Kodansha paperback, and not to be confused with Ridley Scott's silly 1989 Michael Douglas vehicle). This beautifully written 1965 novel describes the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath with almost unbelievable restraint. As he cuts from depictions of the postwar medical, emotional, and social problems of survivors to flashbacks to their experiences during and immediately after the destruction of the city, Ibuse vividly depicts horrific suffering and devastation with great compassion, and yet without sensationalism or sentimentality.
The same delicacy and control are apparent in his
short stories, a representative selection of which can be found in Salamander
(Kodansha; trans. John Bester). In addition to the quirky, abstract
title story (his debut work) and "Yosaku the Settler," this collection
contains stories of rural life (including "Old Ushitora," an amusing account
of a old man's close relationship with his stud bull) and city narratives
which gently mock young intellectuals who resemble Ibuse himself (including
the marvelous "Carp," the brief tale of a student's attachment to a large
white fish given to him by a dead friend).
One of the best of these short works is "Lieutenant Lookeast"
(1950), a bitter satire of wartime nationalism which tells the story of
Yuichi, an insane young veteran who is unaware that the war has ended and
believes that the citizens of his small town are troops in his unit.
Ibuse's hilarious mockery of the fascist "pep talks" and imperious orders
given by Yuichi would be preachy if the story did not also make fun of
the easy platitudes of postwar reformist rhetoric and the endless gossip
of the villagers; one of the great strengths of this antiwar story is the
uncompromising honesty of its postwar setting, an asset it shares with
Black Rain.
Ibuse is also well known for his many works of historical fiction, an immensely popular--and under-translated--category of Japanese literature. Luckily, four excellent short novels with historical settings are available in two Kodansha editions: Castaways (1987) and Waves (1986), both translated by David Aylward and Anthony Liman. Historical fiction can be hard to follow if one is not familiar with the locations and eras it depicts, but these two paperbacks have good introductions, maps, and notes, and the novels themselves richly reward the effort put into reading them.
Castaways contains "A Geisha Remembers" (1950), an account of a brief affair between a spirited geisha named Oshima and Takashima Shuhan, a famous expert in Western-style artillery, and "John Manjiro: A Castaway's Chronicle" (1937), the amazing true story of a shipwrecked Japanese fisherman who is rescued by an American whaler, educated in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and eventually returns safely to his native village.
The shorter of the two works in Waves, "Isle-on-the-Billows" (1946), tells of an exiled bird-catcher whose island penal colony is engulfed by a weird natural disaster. The title story, "Waves: A War Diary" (1930-38), boldly rewrites events narrated in one of the greatest Japanese classics, The Tale of the Heike (trans. Helen McCullough; Stanford University Press, 1988). The novel takes the form of a diary (copied from an old document, a fictional introduction claims) describing the dramatic exploits--and gradual loss of innocence--of a young lord caught up in the savage civil warfare of the late 12th century. Although his clan is doomed to defeat and eventual extermination, the diary trails off at a lull in the fighting, leaving the reader with a curious mix of relief and apprehension.
Copying or excerpting real and imagined documents is a favorite device of Ibuse's, one which is central to most of his historical fiction. Even his works that have modern settings are usually concerned with the passage of time, with aging and its consequences, and with the workings of memory. To read--and reread--Ibuse Masuji is to encounter a self-conscious and meticulous grave-robber, an author whose carefully constructed narratives reveal how delicately he has plundered the past.
Masks tells the story of a middle-aged poet named Mieko, her widowed daughter-in-law Yasuko, and two men whom Mieko manipulates into affairs with Yasuko. In a lush atmosphere redolent with traces of the past--old treatises on spirit possession in classic literature, mysterious portraits, austere masks and ornate costume robes from the Noh drama--Mieko weaves a complicated plot to resurrect her lost son and revenge herself on her long-dead husband. Though she is frequently described as a witch, she does nothing which can be taken as actually supernatural; the title of the novel, which seems at first to refer to the contrast between Mieko's expressionless face and her tumultuous inner life, also implies that stories of witches and possession are themselves masks for women's frustration and anger at their inability to control their own lives.
Enchi Fumiko was born in the Asakusa section of Tokyo in 1905. After dropping out of the Girls' High School of the Japan Women's University, she was tutored in French, English, and classical Chinese; she also read widely in European and Japanese literature. At the age of twenty, influenced by early experiences attending the Kabuki theater with her parents and grandmother, she began her writing career as a playwright. Following her debut publication, a 1935 collection of plays, she turned to fiction as well.
In 1945 Enchi's home and all her possessions burned during an air raid, and for several years immediately after the war she struggled with uterine cancer and surgical complications. Although she had trouble gaining recognition once she began writing again, after winning an award in 1954 her output dramatically increased, and she produced one acclaimed work after another. She was awarded the Cultural Medal in 1985, a year before her death at the age of eighty-one.
Enchi is well-known for her extensive knowledge of and use of material from the Japanese classics, especially works of the Heian (794-1185) and Edo (1600-1867) periods. Her father, Ueda Kazutoshi (1867-1937), was a famous scholar of literature and linguistics; in addition to being influenced by his passion for the theater, she was exposed to his personal library of classical works from a very young age. As well as providing material for her fiction and other original works, this experience led to one of her most demanding undertakings: a complete modern Japanese translation of the Tale of Genji, the most celebrated of the Heian classics.
This long narrative, written by Murasaki Shikibu, an early 11th century court lady, is often called the world's first novel. Stretching over a period of 75 years, it centers on the life of a prince who is made a commoner for lack of political support; through his mastery of courtly arts (and strategies) he achieves de facto control of the land amid many romantic entanglements. The fairy-tale aspects of this plot are balanced by the narrative's intense psychological depth and concern for the consequences of Genji's amorous adventures. At present, there are two full-length English versions: Arthur Waley's, a classic in its own right for its stately prose (Everyman's Library, Knopf, 1993) and Edward Seidensticker's, which attempts to preserve the atmosphere of the original (Random House, 1983). Incidentally, a third English version, by Royall Tyler, is due from Penguin in the near future.
This great work, which Enchi first began reading at the age of ten, is also an important source for much of her fiction; although "Masks" is immediately accessible without such prior knowledge, its richness and complexity are more easily grasped if the reader is familiar with the Tale of Genji. Many events of the novel are eerie echoings or reversals of occurrences in its classic source; furthermore, Mieko's own interpretation of the Heian classic both reveals an affair she had with a younger man and explains Enchi's themes of resentment, manipulation, and revenge.
An older woman's illicit relationships with younger men are also taken up in "Blind Man's Buff" (1962; trans. Beth Cary, in The Mother of Dreams and Other Short Stories: Portrayals of Women in Modern Japanese Fiction, ed. Makoto Ueda; Kodansha, 1986), a disturbing account of a middle-aged former geisha's delayed response to the mountain-top suicide of a young artist with whom she had been in love.
Another example of past suffering taking on poignant new meaning is provided by the blistering conclusion of the other Enchi novel available in English, The Waiting Years (1957; trans. John Bester; Kodansha, 1971). Tomo, the long-suffering heroine, puts up with years of callous mistreatment by her powerful politician husband. The story opens with her on a mission to find a concubine for him; as time goes by, she is forced to care for a series of women whom he brings into the house for his own purposes, including even their own daughter-in-law. Enchi's vivid scenes of domestic life in this disturbing setting subtly depict the inner lives of several of those involved, especially Tomo herself and Suga, the oldest concubine. It is not until the very end of the novel that Tomo allows herself to protest her husband's behavior, and even then it is by a means so implicit that it is likely to leave the reader with a desolate sense of futility.
"The Flower-Eating Crone" (translated by Lucy North and included in the excellent Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, ed. Theodore W. Goossen, 1997) is a less depressing look back at an aging woman's past. This whimsical story tells how an encounter with a nearly blind, blossom-gobbling old woman leads the narrator to re-experience an affair-that-never-was.
Inoue was born in 1907 in Hokkaido, but because his father was an army doctor who moved from post to post, he was raised from the age of six by his grandmother in a village on the Izu peninsula. After failed attempts to follow his father's footsteps into medicine and to study law, he enrolled in Kyoto University, eventually earning a degree in aesthetics at the unusually advanced age of 29. In addition to judo, he displayed a youthful interest in poetry; while still a student he published poems, fiction, and plays in literary magazines, and even worked as a movie screenwriter for a while. Although he continued to write poetry, after graduating from college he found work as a newspaper correspondent for the Osaka edition of the Mainichi.
In 1948 Inoue won the Akutagawa prize, a prestigious award for emerging novelists, and his career as an author took off. Although many of his stories and novels had contemporary settings, his best known and most successful works were historical, and often set in China or along the Silk Road. His interest in these and other foreign locations led him abroad repeatedly, while his penchant for detail spurred him to research his novels so thoroughly that many can be relied on as sources of historical information. Inoue was awarded the Cultural Medal in 1971; he continued to write until shortly before his death twenty years later, at the age of 83.
Although he is best known for his fiction, he also published volumes of poetry, essays, travel writing (an account of a trip through Central Asia is available as Journey Beyond Samarkand, trans. Furuta Gyo and Gordon Sager, Kodansha 1971), and memoirs. This last category is well represented by two English-language editions, both translated by Jean Oda Moy. Shirobamba (Weatherhill, 1993) is a charming and vividly written description of Inoue's rural childhood, while Chronicle of My Mother (Kodansha, 1982) is a restrained but deeply moving account of the mental decline and death of his mother. The autobiographical impulse that produced these works is also apparent in some of his fiction: all three of the stories included in The Izu Dancer and Other Stories (trans. Leon Picon; Tuttle, 1974) employ settings or experiences from the author's own life. The most interesting of these, "The Counterfeiter," describes a reporter's attempt to reconstruct the past of a man who combined art-forgery with firework production.
Perhaps the best place to start reading Inoue in English is Lou-Lan, a collection of beautifully translated short stories available from Kodansha (1979; trans. James T. Araki and Edward Seidensticker). "The Rhododendrons" is a bleak tour-de-force of unreliable narration which turns on a central irony: the protagonist is an expert in the anatomy of the circulatory system whose selfish obsession with his work estranges him from his blood relations. "The Opaline Cup" combines another retrospective narrator with a moving meditation on the powerful aura of ancient artifacts, and the marvelous "Passage to Fudaraku" is a chilling account of quasi-voluntary one-way trips to sea in medieval Japan. Characteristically, three historical narratives of China and Central Asia end with brief descriptions of modern archaeology or geography; Inoue's fictions of the past are rooted in the present, in the modern experience of wonder at and curiosity about ancient times.
He also wrote several full-length historical novels with Chinese settings. Confucius (trans. Roger K. Thomas; Peter Owen Publishers, 1992) is a vividly imagined depiction of the legendary sage, narrated by one of his followers. Similar scenes of a spiritual master and his disciples can be found in Roof Tile of Tempyo (trans. James T. Araki; University of Tokyo, 1982), an account of 8th century Japanese monks who succeed in escorting a famous Buddhist priest back to Japan after decades in China and several failed ocean-crossings. A less peaceful encounter between Japan and its neighbors is described by Wind and Waves (trans. James T. Araki; University of Hawaii, 1989) a novel devoted to the frequently ignored experiences of Koreans during the attempted invasion of Japan by the Mongols in the 13th century.
Currently, the most readily available English translation of a historical novel is Tun-Huang (trans. Jean Oda Moy; Kodansha, 1978), which stems from one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century: a massive cache of thousands of Buddhist sutras and other manuscripts found in caves in northwestern China. Inoue's novel provides an imaginative answer to the central mystery of these precious artifacts: why, and by whom, they were hidden over 900 years ago. It follows the exploits of Hsing-te, a former scholar who finds himself caught up in warfare raging on the frontier of the Chinese empire; the reader is exposed to a great deal of information about western peoples like the Hsi-hsia and the Uighurs. This attention to detail can be off-putting, especially in a work with such an unfamiliar setting, but the narrative drive of this well-constructed fiction compensates for the occasional disorientation caused by unfamiliar proper names. The motivations and emotions of the characters are briskly sketched when they are explained at all, but this is because the focus of the novel is the overall drama of the period rather than the lives of individuals; in its depiction of jewel-laden caravans, desert battles, and burning oasis cities, Tun-Huang is a novel of adventure on a massive scale -- surprisingly so, given that it sets out to explain how a bunch of documents found their way into a cave.
Page created 24 November 2001