Sunday, April 26, 2009

Hell on Earth: A scene in Yurakucho, central Tokyo, after the Great Kanto Earthquake of Sept. 1, 1923, which is thought to have claimed more than 140,000 lives. In his diary, Kafu grimly noted that modern Tokyo was "a sham hallway, a grand acc facade with nothing behind it, a device for deceiving the foolish. There is no reason at all for regretting that it has been reduced to ashes." KYODO PHOTO

By MICHAEL HOFFMAN

Special to The Japan Times

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Back in Japan, Kafu wrote a second love story — his last, though 50 years of life and writing still lay before him. "Sumidagawa" ("The Sumida River") reveals the depths of his disillusion. The five years separating it from "Two Days in Chicago" ("Sumidagawa" appeared in 1910) have clearly aged him. Youth is gone, and the youth he confers upon his young protagonist is sickly and helpless, drained of all vigor. The "new era" has come but sounds no "triumphal tune," either for character or author. Japan's soaring ascent from isolated backwater to world power in the space of a generation seems to have crushed the life out of both of them.

Man of the moment: Kafu sports the Imperial Order of Culture after the award ceremony on Nov. 3, 1952. The citation accompanying the award referred to "his many works replete with a warmly elegant poetic spirit, with an elevated form of social criticism, and with a penetrating appreciation of reality." KYODO PHOTO

Chokichi, the lovesick protagonist, is a fly caught in the web of Meiji Era industrialism, authoritarianism, relentless progress. The authority figure is not a father or an oppressive government but a widowed mother, a shamisen teacher and rather a helpless person herself, though firm enough where her only son is concerned — he is to be trained for a career in the Meiji bureaucracy, and if his natural bent leads him to music or acting or similar "vulgar" pursuits, then that natural bent will just have to be suppressed. The "new era" has no place for laggards with artistic yearnings.

Chokichi loves O-ito, and has since the two were childhood playmates. But O-ito, at 15, is a geisha in training and has little time for the mooning 17-year-old Chokichi. Chokichi trudges off to school, more miserable each day. He falls ill. A convalescent spring walk ends by chance at a kabuki theater in Asakusa, where he meets an old friend, now an actor. Perhaps that is what he, Chokichi, should be. If he can't have O-ito, he can at least live in the alternate reality of the floodlit stage. Perhaps, after all, life on stage is more real than the drab daily round conventionally styled "real life." Certainly it is more vivid, the assigned roles more satisfying. At any rate, an acting career would represent a rapprochement of sorts with O-ito, busy in another corner of alternate reality.

His mother's obdurate opposition is only to be expected, but the betrayal by his beloved uncle is shattering. Wayward himself, a poet with a libertine past, the uncle had always been a source of encouragement and understanding. Now, unexpectedly, he defects to the mother's side of the argument. To Chokichi, the truth stands starkly revealed: the world's hostility is unremitting, and life on these terms is impossible. His health fragile to begin with, he goes tramping through a flood in quest of mortal illness. The story ends with him being rushed to hospital, the remorseful uncle vowing eternal support if the boy survives.

Did Kafu experience a similar betrayal? The souring of his personality — his perverse courtship of unhappiness, the morose satisfaction he took in bewailing miseries he heaped on himself, his sullen withdrawal from every facet of life not harbored in his study, his garden, or the back alleys and pleasure quarters of Tokyo's shitamachi — dates from around that time.

Not betrayal but self-betrayal, as Kafu himself tells it, was the issue. One must give Kafu credit: He never claimed to be better than the fellow creatures he so richly despised.

The Meiji Restoration, though a revolution, was no liberation. It was a stern, despotic, top-down overhaul of an antiquated nation badly out of step with a rapidly advancing world. Its animating slogan was "Rich country, strong army." In October 1908, two months before Kafu's Fukagawa journey, the government was declaring a "campaign of national mobilization" to "stem the evil tide of extravagance and frivolity."

"To a government obsessed with dangerous thoughts," writes Jay Rubin in "Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State," "all 'isms' were the same — socialism, naturalism, anarchism, individualism, egoism, free love."

In 1910, elementary-school textbooks began propagating the "family-state" — the Emperor as father to all his citizen-children.

"From this time," writes Rubin, "Japanese children were taught Shinto myth as historical fact. . . . Filial piety for the individual family head was one and the same as loyalty to the warm, loving father of the national family, which in turn was synonymous with patriotism."

What was there in all this for a man of Kafu's wayward temperament? Hadn't his own family and father weighed heavily enough on him? He was no candidate for membership in a family-state.

"Literature," Rubin continues, "stood in direct opposition to the state's orthodoxy whenever it questioned the sanctity of the family, or implied a change in the family structure by portraying liberated women, or suggested that an individual might live for himself and not for his family as part of the family-state, or that the fulfillment of his own sexual drives was a legitimate end in itself, quite apart from the maintenance of the family line."

No portrayer of liberated women, Kafu in other respects qualified as dangerously individualistic. In 1909, his book "Furansu Monogatari" ("French Stories") was banned for this very reason.

In 1910, a shadowy leftist plot to assassinate Emperor Meiji became the pretext for a mass police roundup of radicals. Twelve supposed plotters, including the famous anarchist Kotoku Shusui, were executed in January 1911.

No indignation was heard from Kafu, and years later, in a 1919 essay titled "Hanabi" ("Fireworks"), he judged his silence harshly. "Of all the public incidents I had witnessed or heard of," he wrote, "none had filled me with such loathing. I could not, as a man of letters, remain silent in this matter of principle. Had not the novelist Zola, pleading the truth in the Dreyfus Affair (in which a French army officer was convicted of treason in 1894, then cleared when proved to be the victim of anti-Semitism and conspiracy) had to flee his country? But I, along with the other writers of my land, said nothing. The pangs of conscience that resulted were scarcely endurable. I felt intensely ashamed of myself as a writer. I concluded that I could do no better than drag myself down to the level of the . . . writer of frivolous and amatory fiction."

Two shortlived marriages brought Kafu little joy, and his long life unfolded in a solitude that would have deadened less hardy spirits. He seemed to thrive on it, however.

He had anticipated it. "To write good poetry," he wrote in 1909, "one must prize solitude. One must insulate oneself from family encumbrances, from the sanctions of society. . . . I am utterly indifferent to what my family thinks of me. I am a poet; they are ordinary human beings."

He was a poet. His words, if not always his thoughts, were beautiful, and he expected the world to offer him beauty in return. When it didn't, he sulked. He had only one sense, the aesthetic, developed to a peculiar acuteness. No advantage, no goodness, no prosperity or progress, could make up for artistic deficiency. Nonpoetic humanity left him cold.

He showed no capacity for love. Art was a different matter. Love was redundant, but sex without art was mere dreary necessity. Art made it beautiful. Hence his lifelong fascination, to the exclusion of almost all other intimacy, with the sexual artists of the pleasure quarters. They alone, amid the grating and clangorous newness it was his bad luck to be born into, preserved something of the taste, manners and graces of the past. If the past was sad, so much the better; so much the more poetic. In an essay in praise of ukiyo-e (the "floating-world pictures" of old Edo), he wrote: "The print of the courtesan who has sold herself to the cruel life for 10 years so that she may help her parents — it makes me want to weep."

An abusive social system, Kafu seems to be saying, is worth its weight in beautiful self-sacrifice.

The Meiji Era ended with Emperor Meiji's death in 1912. The ensuing Taisho (1912-26) and Showa (1926-89) eras dragged Kafu deeper and deeper into a future he hated. His early infatuation with the West had long since faded. "With the passing of the years," he wrote in 1913, "I have at length shaken off foreign influences, and so become able to grasp the mood and spirit of what we have from our ancestors."

He looked on in despair as the geisha gave way to the cafe waitress, kabuki to the movies, street singers to radios. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 afforded him grim satisfaction. Modern Tokyo, he noted in his diary, is "a sham hallway, a grand facade with nothing behind it, a device for deceiving the foolish. There is no reason at all for regretting that it has been reduced to ashes."

"In illness and in loneliness," he recorded the following year, "I have found the desire to write decreasing day by day."

Fukagawa, once a hallowed sanctuary, had long since ceased to enchant: "As I amble down the new concrete highways and observe the Fukagawa of the new age, I see . . . that I must shed my old notions of beauty as a cicada sheds its shell."

Wandering the streets one evening early in the 1930s, the noise of the neighbors' radios having driven him from home, he stumbled upon a new refuge. This was Tamanoi, a pleasure district across the Sumida River from the most famous licensed quarter of them all, the Yoshiwara. Seidensticker enumerates Tamanoi's attractions: "Low prices, outdoor side shows, 700 bawdy houses with 1,600 women in them. And all this for a four-sen bus ticket from Asakusa."

Tamanoi inspired Kafu's 1936 novella "A Strange Tale from East of the River," considered a late masterpiece. Its aging writer-narrator, accustomed to geisha, accepts the ministrations of a common prostitute. On the one hand it is a symbol of Tokyo's, Japan's and Kafu's decline; on the other, the young woman demonstrates talents above her station: "O-yuki was the skilful yet inarticulate artist with power to summon the past." Higher praise than that is not in Kafu's repertoire.

The dalliance is not a dignified one; we catch the narrator at one point scurrying into the toilet to hide from another customer. But dignity was never what Kafu was after; perhaps indignity was. Be that as it may, "The figure of O-yuki, her hair always in one of the old styles, and the foulness of the canal, and the humming of the mosquitoes — all of these stirred me deeply, and called up visions of a past now dead some thirty or forty years."

Kafu never wavered in his faith that art redeemed even foulness — maybe especially foulness. Why, then, had Meiji Japan cast off its art? It is the question that resounds throughout his life and work, and the militarism rising in the 1930s deepened its resonance.

Kafu hated it. He had warned as early as 1912: "The morals of a country are in danger when they are cut loose from the beauty of its soul and its seasons. The makers of our new age have been careless in many ways."

In 1944, he wrote in his diary of the militarists: "Let their crimes be recorded for eternity."

His wartime silence — "Strange Tale" was his last publication until after 1945 — made him a hero of the postwar pacifist age. It was not every Japanese writer, after all, who had withheld his talent and voice from the war hysteria that was then sweeping all before it.

"However malicious and arbitrary may be the ways of the government," Kafu wrote in the early 1940s in his diary, published after the war, "it cannot keep one's fancies from running free. There will be freedom while there is life."

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