Organizer and Chair: Marvin Marcus, Washington University
The early twentieth century saw a remarkable rise in literature for children. Numerous magazines, such as Red Bird (Akai tori) were inaugurated to help meet the demand for adult-authored children’s stories. Additionally, a new niche was created for stories, poems, and artwork by children. Amidst this surge of interest in the newly discovered "child’s heart," arose a nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood and an attempt by adult writers to recreate childhood through literary reminiscences. The re-creation of childhood in these reminiscences invites readers into a liminal space beyond lived experience where childhood becomes the idyllic "furusato" of the poetic spirit and by extension the native soil of a distant and long-lost imaginary nation.
Marvin Marcus will open discussion with a brief introduction to the rise of children’s literature in Japan and will then explore the interplay between literary self-presentation and the creation of a childhood idyll in Shimazaki Tôson’s Chikaramochi. Janine Beichman will further this exploration of an imaginary and idyllic furusato in her analysis of Yosano Akiko’s prose memoirs for children. Tomoko Aoyama’s discussion of Mori Mari and Kobori Annu reveals the way the liminal site of furusato is replaced in their memoirs by the figure of an idealized father. Martin Holman brings our discussion up to the present, showing how Inoue Yasushi refracts the childhood idyll through the broken lenses of the post-war adult.
Childhood Reminiscence in the Work of Shimazaki Tôson (1872–1943)
Marvin Marcus, Washington University
This paper will examine the childhood reminiscences of Shimazaki Tôson, one of the dominant figures in modern Japanese literature. Although better known as a pioneering poet and writer of fiction, Tôson produced an extraordinary range of autobiographical narratives over a forty-five year period and was instrumental in establishing the personal voice as a mainstay of Japanese literary narrative.
Tôson’s childhood reminiscences are of interest both for their unique perspective on the far-reaching social and cultural changes that transformed late-19th century Japan and as part of the author’s ongoing literary self-presentation. In addition to remarking upon the range of Tôson’s childhood writings, I will focus on his last and most important work in this vein—Chikaramochi (Ricecakes for Stamina, 1940). This collection of 83 episodes sequentially reconstructs the author’s life from his childhood in rural Magome to his experiences as a young teacher in Komoro. In so doing he recapitulates themes developed in earlier works—the idyll of one’s native place (furusato), coming of age in Tokyo, youthful vagabondage—and succeeds in creating an unusually powerful autobiographical narrative.
By way of background, I will remark on the rise of children’s literature in early 20th-century Japan and the interplay of child as reader and as literary subject. Also, I will draw some comparisons between Tôson’s childhood writings and those of his great contemporary, Natsume Sôseki (1867–1916).
Ambivalent Memories: Yosano Akiko’s Chronicles of Childhood
Janine Beichman, Daito Bunka University
Nothing in the poetry or prose of Yosano Akiko, the foremost female poet of modern Japan, is comparable to the liminal vision of childhood that has been familiar in English poetry for centuries, from Wordsworth’s "The Prelude" to Dylan Thomas’s "Fern Hill." In Akiko’s poetry, the equivalent golden age was pushed back to a time before the child even existed, to a world before birth, for she identified her true home, or "furusato," as the world of the sky and herself as a star fallen from heaven.
The reason why there was no golden age of childhood in Akiko’s poetry was largely that there had been none in her life. Akiko’s memories of childhood were premised by a fundamental paradox. Her love for the natural beauty of the mountains and valleys among which she was born was countered by a sense of alienation from her own parents and the provincial society into which she was born. The outward color and sensuality of many childhood memories remained a bright spot, but the inner reality, the emotional desolation, was just as real and unforgettable. A close reading of her prose memoirs for children, Watakushi no Oitachi (My Childhood, 1915) reveals a subtle and moving fusion of the two streams. I will deal with two stories from this work—"Mushroom Picking" and "The Fire."
Mari and Annu: Childhood Re-Imagined
Tomoko Aoyama, University of Queensland
This paper examines the way childhood is re-imagined in the writing of Mori Ogai’s two daughters, Mori Mari and Kobori Annu. Like many other "literary daughters" such as Kôda Aya and Hagiwara Yôko, Mari and Annu began their writing careers with memoirs and essays following their father’s death. What distinguishes them from these others, however, is their recollection and recreation of a blissful childhood under a father’s loving protection. Their texts reveal not only the private face of the revered literary patriarch but also how writing helped the daughters cope with the spell of the dead father.
My examination of their childhood memoirs will center on two key phrases: ‘atmosphere-like-love’ and ‘the sweet honey room.’ The former is used by Annu to describe her father’s affectionate aura. More than simply recreating the loving relationship between father and children, Annu invokes with this phrase her acute awareness of what constitutes the simulacrum of a love affair. The ‘sweet honey room,’ on the other hand, is the title of Mari’s 1975 novel Amai mitsu no heya, which deals with the pseudo-incestuous love between father and daughter. ‘Electra complex,’ ‘spoilt child,’ and ‘infantile’ are labels commonly attached to the person of Mari, but the father-daughter relationships she creates might be better understood as an artistic rendering of an idealized world.
In this presentation, I will compare Mari and Annu’s re-constructed childhoods with those of other "literary daughters" and of male writers such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirô and Naka Kansuke.
Shadows of Trees and Tracks in the Sand: Inoue Yasushi’s Post-War Stories of a Taishô Childhood
Martin Holman, University of Western Ontario
Inoue Yasushi (b. 1907) is best known in both Japan and the West as the author of such works of historical fiction as Tun-Huang and Confucius; however, he also produced a substantial body of semi-autobiographical literature. Although his historical works are generally regarded as distinct from these semi-autobiographical pieces, both display similar narrative strategies, as narrators grope uncertainly along paths of memory.
Inoue began writing fiction full time just a few years after the end of the War. His recreations of both historical figures and his own childhood explore and exploit the newly found freedom and the newly lost authority of the fragmented post-War narrative self. Like so many other writers of the late 1940s and 1950s, Inoue sought to craft voices that could speak from the ruins about both the present and the past. His works raise questions about the reliability of depictions of childhood judgement and motivations as filtered through adult sensibilities.
Inoue once stated that he admired the shi-shôsetsu greatly but was incapable of writing one himself. The focus of this paper will be the alternative narrative strategies Inoue employed in post-War Japan to tell his childhood stories of the Taishô. It will examine the manner in which Inoue’s portrayals of childhood reflect his concern—which also characterizes his approach in historical works—about forgetfulness and discovery, about myopia and insight, and the limitations and opportunities of narrative in post-war Japan.