There is a certain privilege in looking at a group of novels-in-translation from a single country originally written and published across almost a century. What appears at first glance to be a disparate assortment of texts gathered solely by the date of their reissue in a new language reveals an unexpected coherence. That the following five short Japanese novels-in-translation are being made available to a wider audience now, in the middle of the 2020s, feels timely.
Whether written under overt authoritarian censorship or under the disempowering pressures of late modernity, these texts, taken together, beg the question of what art’s role might be in liminal times, what it can do—what should it do?
Originally published in 1927, Kappa[1] is one of the last works Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927), perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for “Rashōmon” (1915), wrote before his death later that year at the age of thirty-five. That his death was a suicide after a long battle with mental health has led to biographical evaluations of this short work, otherwise considered to be a satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The comparison, reinforced on the back cover of this 2023 New Directions edition, is not unapt. Written two centuries after Gulliver’s Travels, at a time of Japan’s rise as a global power, Kappa is decidedly more dystopian, more existentialist, and oddly postmodernist in its fundamental submission to indeterminacy. By turns playful and cynical, the color of Akutagawa’s humor comes through in Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell’s unfussy translation, and what feels singular about this sharp Swiftian tale are the layers of storytelling that mediate the text, each contributing storyteller anxiously dissolving into a single transparent “I” and raising salient questions about truth and fiction, myth and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, and our decreasing ability to trust the stability of our knowledge and being in an increasingly technocratic, capitalist world.
Mediated by three contributing agents—four, if one includes the reader—Kappa, transcribed by a narrator who claims to have “made every attempt to copy down his story here just as he told it to me,” is an account of the adventures or misadventures of a psychiatric patient, Patient No. 23, who, chancing a foggy hike up Mount Hotaka without a guide, finds himself tumbling into the realm of the kappa. Three feet tall, with webbed hands and feet, and a characteristic water “dish” atop its head, the kappa is a culturally ubiquitous folklore creature that dwells near waterways. Imagined by Akutagawa, Kappa Land turns out to be less mythical than defamiliarized (though less Brechtian than Swiftian) and uncannily close to home, even today in the twenty-first century.
According to Patient No. 23, our cultural mediator who admits possibly to having gotten some details of the story wrong, kappas do not wear clothes. Their dominant religion is Nowism, a kind of inverted Christianity, in which the genesis of life begins not with God and an Adam but with God and an Eve, its core tenets Nietzschean in flavor: “Eat, copulate, and live avidly.” Yet, the society it has spawned is, as Patient No. 23 admits, “not much different from ours—at least not from Japanese civilization.” A nakedly capitalist society in which hundreds of new mass-produced goods are pumped into the market every month without a labor force and where a big-bellied “capitalist among capitalists” kappa, who stirs his coffee with a solid gold spoon and controls the media and government with his purse strings (in turn controlled, we are told, by his wife), Kappa Land could just as easily be describing the twenty-first century as Taishō-era Japan (1912–1926). In retrospect, even what might have appeared to be an absurd exaggeration has proven unsettlingly prescient. In Nowist Kappa Land, the literati cavort with the wealthy at the Übermensch Club, healthy kappas are encouraged by the genetics corps to marry unhealthy kappas to “eradicate bad genes,” and surplus workers, displaced by machines, are not only laid off but legally killed and processed into food under the Workers’ Slaughter Rule—a state-sanctioned solution to “the nuisance” of workers’ strikes and unemployment-induced starvation and suicide. “Just this month,” a kappa explains, “44,764 laborers were dismissed, so the price of meat has gone down accordingly.” The dismissed, the kappa adds, are simply given a “little toxic gas, it doesn’t hurt a bit.” Writing in 1927, Akutagawa couldn’t have known that just over ten years later, Japan would form an alliance with Nazi Germany, and Hitler, a self-proclaimed Übermensch, would authorize the use of the first gas chamber to carry out his genocidal eugenics program. The implication is chilling.
Where Kappa feels dated is in its blatant misogyny, some of it an extension of Patient No. 23’s conflicted misanthropy, itself a result of his baptismal tumble into Kappa Land. Where once he pined to return to human civilization, Patient No. 23 is now a cultural hybrid and exile institutionalized in an invalidating psychiatric ward. Not unlike a Shakespearean fool, Patient No. 23 unsettles because he defies Manichean reduction. After all, if we are encouraged to understand that Patient No. 23 has been psychiatrically committed because of his trip to Kappa Land, we’re ultimately encouraged to understand that it is human barbarity that has pushed him into madness, “madness” (“dementia praecox,” now known as schizophrenia) being an institutionally, that is to say socioculturally (and I would add historically), defined term. We should also be reminded that, besides the work, what also dates are the translations, as may be evident from Kappa’s previous English translations: Shiojiri Seichi’s 1947 version subtitled “Gulliver in a Kimono”; Kojima Takeshi’s 1964 version anthologized in Exotic Japanese Stories: The Beautiful and the Grotesque; and the English Japanese Studies scholar Geoffrey Bownas’ 1970 version. Collaboratively translated for the first time by women attentive to current approaches to text and translation, this 2023 edition is a timely, exciting addition.
Eight years after the publication of Akutagawa’s Kappa, Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), an admirer of Akutagawa, published The Flowers of Buffoonery (1935).[2] The novel is the first of two that share the protagonist, Ōba Yōzō, the principal narrator of No Longer Human (1948), perhaps Dazai’s best known novel outside of Japan. Deeply affected by Akutagawa’s suicide, Dazai himself made several attempts, surviving the war years but not the Occupation (1945–1952). In one of these attempts, a failed double-suicide near a beach, Dazai was rescued, but not his companion. Set in 1929, The Flowers of Buffoonery opens on a beach, Ōba Yōzō just having been rescued by a fishing boat, the young woman with whom he had jumped nowhere to be found. Yōzō, losing consciousness, awakens not in Kappa Land but at the Blue Pines Manor, a seaside sanatorium for convalescing tuberculosis patients. If Kappa Land offered Akutagawa a mirror world for satirical defamiliarization, Blue Pines Manor offers Dazai a circumscribed petri dish in which to scrutinize the human condition refracted through Yōzō and his visiting coterie of fellow no-name artists and their at once petty and deeply existential rivalries.
If this sounds like a quintessential Dazai shishōsetsu, a quasi-autobiographical, quasi-confessional literary form that saw its heyday in 1920s to mid-1930s Japan, it should. The Flowers of Buffoonery, replete with Dazai’s characteristic humor—more sardonic and absurd than playful, an important flavor dexterously captured by Sam Bett’s attentive translation—delivers just that. What is unusual about this short work is its use of a metafictional narrator, the alleged writer, who breaks through “the fourth wall” to address the reader: “Time to face the facts,” he announces. “I’ve been exploiting my narrative position to hoodwink readers, using this first-person narrator to infuse the work with idiosyncratic nuance. I was arrogant enough to think that I could be the first Japanese author to employ such a sublimely Western style. And yet, I failed. But no, even this confession of failure can be counted as part of the novel’s grand design.” It is one thing for a novel to call attention self-reflexively to its own artifice, its own constructedness, but to do so through a self-conscious narrator-writer who (albeit artfully) unbares his private feelings, thoughts, and aesthetic motivations is arguably the ultimate self-exposure. In this sense, The Flowers of Buffoonery is perhaps an epitome of the shishōsetsu form.
A deeper discussion of the Japanese shishōsetsu, often misguidedly translated as the “I-novel,” is beyond the scope of this review,[3] but it may be worth noting that the shishōsetsu, characteristically focused on the author’s individual, private life, has been variously criticized for reactionary navel-gazing, raising questions about the role of art and the responsibility of the writer. One can argue that at a time of extreme state repression and censorship, when the right to individual selfhood itself is being attacked and denied, an inward turn affirming the self is an act of survival, perhaps of resistance. Either way, in the 1920s and 1930s, Imperial Japan was rapidly militarizing, the increasingly authoritarian state sliding toward fascistic totalitarianism as it prepared for total war. While The Flowers of Buffoonery, unlike Kappa, makes no overt reference to these sociopolitical realities, the subtext may be telling a different story. Here is a typical passage dissecting the frivolous behavior of Yōzō and his friends:
To them, laughing was safe, but not laughing posed a serious risk. They found it irresistible. [. . .] The sad thing about all of this, however, is that [. . .] [e]ven as they doubled over laughing, they took notice of the way they looked to one another.
And it should come as no surprise that they loved making other people laugh as well, even if they had to hurt themselves to do so. Another instance of their nihilism, to be sure. But should you scratch below the surface, I think you’ll find a personal imperative to serve. Call it a sense of sacrifice. An aimless sense of sacrifice, lacking a clear objective. Any acts of heroism they had managed to achieve, as we define such things in terms of moral law, could be explained away as the byproduct of this latent need to serve.
Scratching below the surface, under what appears to be a purely Camusian dissection may be pointed statements that could have landed very differently in 1935. They suggest that we, existentially predisposed to serve, are always already ready to be recruited to self-sacrifice. In times of war, called to mobilize, it is precisely this—our generalized, “aimless” inclination to serve—that is given a clear, even heroic, objective. Under an authoritarian state, this call becomes an imperative. Ten years later, willing or unwilling, young men like Yōzō and his friends were dispatched as kamikaze pilots. If Dazai, a known left-wing sympathizer, is as self-conscious a writer as he presents his writer-narrator to be, The Flowers of Buffoonery, an exemplary shishōsetsu written under intensifying censorship and repression, may be courting an entirely different reading.
Thus pulling at its own seams, the novel inevitably threatens to disassemble. “This novel is a failure,” the writer-narrator laments. “It has no climax, no denouement. It seems I paid too much attention to the style.” But, half a page later, the writer-narrator hedges. “Shall I write the rest? The last scene at Blue Pines. It can only go one way.” Surrendering to the teleological logic of the conventional novel, the writer-narrator fuses with Ōba Yōzō’s perspective, and the novel speeds toward its climax, an indeterminate open precipice—one on which we, nearly a hundred years later, perhaps also precipitously find ourselves.
Though speculation also surrounds the unexpected death of this luminary of Japanese literature, unlike Akutagawa and Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) continued to write into his seventies, becoming the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1968). Perhaps most famous for Snow Country (serialized 1935–1937; published 1948), Kawabata is popularly known for his graceful, understated style through which he captures the poignant, sensual beauty of the complicated, even ugly, ever-changing facets of human life and relations. Initially serialized between 1950 and 1951 during the tail end of the American-led Allied Occupation of Japan, The Rainbow[4] is a recognizably Kawabata novel. That it has taken seventy years to appear in English begs the questions why and why now. While it is beyond this review to venture an answer, the work, carefully translated by Haydn Trowell, may be Kawabata’s most direct engagement with the consequences of World War II and, notably, the question of art and patriarchal responsibility in its aftermath.
Set shortly after the Second World War in a changing Japan beginning to show the first signs of recovery from total war and defeat, The Rainbow opens on a train, a view of a winter rainbow occasioning a conversation between two strangers, a lone father with his infant daughter, and a woman, Asako, one of the novel’s central characters. In the liminal space between Kyoto, the old capital, and Tokyo, the strangers are friendly, but their conversation edges with tension as each reveals more than a passing stake in the emerging topics: the unusualness, perhaps unnaturalness, of the winter rainbow; the changing roles of men and women threatening the family structure; the unknown future of a world in which babies can be born in the care of fathers, unwanted by mothers. Delicately woven with Kawabata’s signature economy and sensitivity, this brief opening chapter introduces the threads the novel will spend its pages unraveling, uncovering the core of violence that had lain hidden in the domestic and other unseen spaces cracked open by the war.
Written at the height of his career, one might expect the complexity and nuance Kawabata extends to The Rainbow’s three principal characters: Asako, her half-sister Momoko, and their shared father Mizuhara. What is remarkable is the multitude of commonly unseen peripheral lives drawn with palpable specificity: a lone war widow struggling to maintain a connection with her children whom she must work to raise but also, for this reason, send away; an unskilled elderly woman who, aware of her own exploitation, continues to toil for a temple without recourse or end; a new mother, just now debuting as a geisha, choosing her career over motherhood even if it means a more difficult life; a temple preceptor, reclaiming his Ainu heritage, gaining a new lease on life in modernizing Kyoto. More than mere backdrop, the textured realities of these characters remind us of the war’s uneven social impact and provide a gendered social context in which Asako, Momoko, and Mizuhara’s intertwined stories unfold. If Kawabata’s work has been accused of insularity, The Rainbow is socially embedded. Through Momoko’s story, for example, we see how war perverts and destroys life that should have been nurtured, like the budding love between teenagers of conscription age brutally cut short, scarring survivors, like Momoko, whose grief self-destructively reproduces itself in subsequent relationships. Yet we also see, relative to other women in the novel, Momoko’s privilege, her social and economic freedom and her access to resources, however violating it turns out to be, for a different future.
It is tempting to read The Rainbow as yet another novel by a traditional male writer obsessed with the fantasy of female promiscuity and its control. Interestingly, in a text in which change is marked by the shifting sexual power of men and women, promiscuity functions as a litmus test, a barometer of social change. After all, Momoko’s own father, a revered architect, has not only produced multiple children by different women but spends the novel considering the effect this has had on his daughters, their late mothers, and the health of the family structure itself. In a world ruined by not only war but the unsustainability of both modern and feudal values that have lain humanity “at the mercy of the destructive power of the atomic bomb,” how, Mizuhara wonders with “paternal affection,” can he, tasked with reconstruction and the transformation of the prewar order, build an “appropriately beautiful house” for his independently minded daughters left in his care?
The Rainbow could have easily taken an unsavory paternalistic turn. Fascinatingly, written with an uncommon depth of sympathy for mothers and daughters, it is almost feminist in its exploration of the destruction wrought to women and families by not only the war and its aftermath, but Japan’s deeply entrenched patriarchal social order. What finally complicates the novel’s paternalism is its self-reflexive meditation on patriarchy’s own failure to meet the needs of those in its care. And instead of the all-too-common blind and self-congratulatory prescription, the novel contemplates without closure or absolution the question of what paternal responsibility patriarchs and artists like Mizuhara can and must assume to right the destruction wrought. The novel walks a precipitous line, but it is this self-reflexivity that is most striking.
Thirty-seven years after The Rainbow, long after the Second World War, Banana Yoshimoto published in quick succession two novels: Kitchen (1988), her famous debut, and Kanashii yokan (Sad Premonition, 1988). Curiously, it took thirty-five years for the latter to be translated by Asa Yoneda and released as The Premonition (2023).[5] Written by a woman in a stable Japan still at the height of its economic power, The Premonition, longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, is a contemporary rite-of-passage novel told by a retrospective first-person narrator, Yayoi, a nineteen-year-old girl beset by multiple interconnected hauntings accessible only through the psychic breadcrumbs of her premonitions. Her journey involves a train (like The Rainbow) and a visit to the mountains (like Kappa), but it is primarily one of psychic self-retrieval necessary for her to “begin to live the rest of my life.” And her journey begins with a stay at an old house, “cut adrift from the world outside,” where “time had no foothold” and where Yayoi’s ethereal aunt, Yukino, had been living “as though asleep, for years.”
At once an antithesis of Yayoi’s own home, a conventional bourgeois household, and a retentive place, overgrown and cluttered, where nothing is lost, only buried or forgotten, Yukino’s house is a kind of mausoleum holding all that mainstream society and the conventional bourgeois family has no room for. Visited for the first time in years, the space opens up memories, half-heard conversations, and transgressive secrets never spoken aloud, and Yayoi begins to regain her premonition, which triggers a physical journey through which she recovers the psychically severed parts of herself and, eventually, her primal trauma. Her return isn’t easy, but what she finds is no longer a mausoleum but a memorial, a place of remembrance and mourning, from which she can move forward, an integrated self. Though Yayoi’s primal trauma turns out to be personal, it is compelling that 1988, the year of the novel’s original publication, saw the release of two films that resurrected unresolved memories of World War II: Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies and the landmark dystopian anime film Akira. That Akira negotiates the palimpsestic images through psychic characters is provocative.
Thirty years after The Premonition—after Hirohito’s death,[6] the long recession, and several disasters, including Fukushima—Atsuhiro Yoshida’s Goodnight Tokyo (2018) emerged in a different, more hunkered Japan.[7] Set in the interstitial nocturnal backstage of Tokyo during the liminal hours of 1:00 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., the novel follows over several months a variety of lively third-shift denizens as they crisscross one another, forging human connections that are whimsical but shadowed by the atomized realities of late capitalist modernity. Pellucidly conveyed by Hadyn Trowell, Yoshida’s warm humor lends these ordinary characters extraordinary charm, spotlighting them in the urban dark, as their highly specialized jobs—a film company procurer who hunts for obscure set pieces; a secondhand shop owner who gives broken objects a new imaginative function; a family-owned funeral home associate running a telephone disposal service—propel highly specific trajectories that serendipitously intersect one another.
A rumination on the nature of fate, chance, coincidence, and crossroads, in Goodnight Tokyo, we’re no longer in the realm of monadic individuals, solitary as each might be, but in an anonymously interlinked world of sprawling “networks spread out in a myriad of intricate ways.” Yet, even in a world where nuclear families have irrevocably fissioned, paternalistic office culture has disbanded, and technology insists on human connection at a distance, chained together by happenstantial association, Goodnight Tokyo produces the feeling that anyone can be a link in the chain, that around the corner of the ordinary there is an edge beyond which lies an uncharted territory, and, given the chance, an entire life, an entire community, a whole new plot, will unfold. The anticipation is its own delight, and perhaps this is Yoshida’s offer: an antidote to the existential solitariness of an increasingly unpredictable and unglued modern life.
[1] KAPPA, by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, trans. by Allison Markin Powell and Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda. New Directions. $13.95p.
[2] THE FLOWERS OF BUFFOONERY, by Osamu Dazai, trans. by Sam Bett. New Directions. $14.95p.
[3] Though a little dated, Edward Fowler’s Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction (1992) is a good place to start.
[4] THE RAINBOW, by Yasunari Kawabata, trans. by Haydn Trowell. Vintage International. $17.00p.
[5] THE PREMONITION, by Banana Yoshimoto, trans. by Asa Yoneda. Counterpoint. $24.00.
[6] Hirohito, who lost his divine status after World War II, reigned as Emperor from 1926 to 1989. His death in 1989 was a symbolic watershed moment.
[7] GOODNIGHT TOKYO, by Atsuhiro Yoshida, trans. by Haydn Trowell. Europa Editions. $18.00p.
