Organizer and Chair: J. Martin Holman, Berea College
As postwar Japanese writers explored and exploited new techniques, forms, and themes, literature set in the historical past—long a popular genre in Japan—became the object of innovation and experimentation in a nation drawn alternately to confront, ignore, and revise its past.
The papers examine the work of authors who depict both the recent and the distant past, analyzing the many tensions that animate their literature: the disjuncture between fact and fictionality or traditional worldviews versus those of modern society. The panel will consider the conflict between received notions of history and writers’ creative redress of the past, reconsideration of popular conceptions of historical figures in light of shifting ideas about gender and power in postwar Japan. The existence of these conflicts and the cacophony of voices that attempt to lead readers back into the murky recesses of the past despite the questionable nature of their narrative authority suggest that historical fiction offers potentially fruitful ground for the study of the kinds of stories that can and cannot be told in contemporary Japan.
As this panel addresses general questions of the Japanese writing literature with the nation itself as the subject, it raises, among other problems, questions of the applicability of criticism of the I-novel to the self-referential corpus of historical literature of modern Japan. The panel proposes to generate discussion of constraints and potential of the genre of historical fiction in Japan and its relationship with other modes of Japanese literature.
Note on Panel Format:
The papers will be posted on a website— http://publish.uwo.ca/~mholman/aaspanel —with panel members presenting only short (10–12-minute) summaries of papers during the session itself, without a designated discussant. The website will solicit e-mailed comments to be sent in advance of the conference to which panelists will respond during the session. Also, anyone interested may request in advance to be recognized during the panel session to present comments on the papers.
Fiction and History in Mishima’s Sea of Fertility
Roy Starrs, University of Otago
In the culminating work of his career, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, Mishima ambitiously attempts a grand overview of mid-twentieth-century Japanese history as a process of moral and spiritual decline. On the other hand, the work’s fictional superstructure is founded upon an ahistorical or antihistorical worldview: that of the Buddhist idea of reincarnation as colored somewhat by the Nietzschean idea of the eternal recurrence of the same. This paper will address the question: does this "conflict" between the fictional and historical dimensions of the tetralogy represent a fundamental flaw at the core of its conception or is it the source of an ongoing and powerful creative dialectic? Furthermore, is the conflict made explicit in Mishima’s work already implicit, albeit under various other guises, in the "hybrid" genre of historical fiction in general? If so, is historical fiction as "illegitimate" a form as fictionalized history, or does fiction realize its full potential only in a "dangerous" interplay with history?
Silvered Mansion: Women in the Historical Fiction of Nagai Michiko
Linda H. Chance, University of Pennsylvania
Given that historical fiction crosses genre boundaries, twisting expectations for both history and fiction, it might be amenable to challenging traditional notions of the past. Nagai Michiko (born 1925) has successfully exploited that potential since 1952. Her mission to reassess the role of women in Japanese history animates Hôjô Masako and Gin no yakata (Silver Mansion, 1980). The former countered the popular image of Minamoto no Yoritomo’s jealous, power-grasping wife Masako (1157–1225); the latter rehabilitating the image of a scorned "evil woman" of the Japanese past, Hino Tomiko (1440–1496), wife of the ineffectual shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. Nagai’s Tomiko is no money-grubber who dragged the country into war. She is the savior of the government, skilled at finance and politics.
Nagai is praised for reading documents (like a historian) while translating universal emotions into contemporary terms (like a novelist). The focus of critics on the imaginative part of her method, however, raises questions: Is it so different from males who write historical fiction? Does audience reception differ? Does reception depend on the behavior of her female subjects? Or that of their husbands? (Nagai finds the relatively positive reputation of Yoshimasa puzzling.) Her novel was the basis for NHK’s year-long dramatization of Masako’s story in 1979, but not of Tomiko in 1994—why ? And what is Nagai’s place in the literary establishment? The historical, the fictional, the feminine, and the popular in postwar Japan, played against the symbolic role of the medieval era, are touchstones for a treatment centered on Gin no yakata.
Tearing a Hole in the Wall: Ishikawa Jun’s "Anti-Historical" Fiction
Helen Weetman, University of London
From critical attacks on the very concept of the historical novel during the 1940s, Ishikawa Jun (1899–1987) went on to write a number of fictional works between the late 50s and the mid 80s which have a historical setting, or which involve a thematic use of history. Viewing the production of these works as a reaction against the growing demand for popular histories and historical novels (the so-called ‘history-booms’), this paper will demonstrate how Ishikawa subverts the accepted norms of historical novels (as his pre-war work subverted the norms of the shishôsetsu) to cast doubt upon their artistic merit, and how he insistently questions the reliability or impartiality of those histories which provide the source of material for such novels.
This will involve, first, an examination of the use of the fantastic as a rejection of the realism of mainstream historical fiction, and the construction of characters and plots which undermine the romantic treatment of the past. It will go on to examine the implications of Ishikawa’s choice of historical subject matter and the form of its representation. This will show how he encourages connections between the manipulation of history in the past and the threat of such manipulation in the present, and how he challenges the compartmentalization of history, such as the perceived rupture between Edo and Meiji, by claiming the inevitability of historical repetition and the consequent identity of past and future.
Tea for Two Ages: Voices of Communion and Rejection in Inoue Yasushi’s Memoirs of the Priest Honkaku
J. Martin Holman, Berea College
Inoue Yasushi (1907–91) claimed to have admired the shishôsetsu, but he confessed an inability to write in the form. However, his best-known works—historical novels of Japan and the Asian mainland—offer a veiled challenge to the narrative legitimacy of the I-novel in the form in which it had dominated pre-War Japanese literature.
In Memoirs of the Priest Honkaku (Honkakubo ibun), Inoue’s first-person narrator, a disciple of Rikyu, begins a quest to reconstruct the history of his master decades after the master’s death. Inoue probes the past by employing a narrator who himself must plumb the depths of fading or false memories and sift through crumbling, conflicting evidence from a time of turmoil only a few years previous but now grown quite distant with the changes that the a new age has brought. Add to this earthly investigation the ghostly visitations to which Honkaku is subject, and Inoue’s novel begins to submit commentary on the validity of I-novel form and the potential of narrative in post-War Japan, even as it tells an intriguing story. His narrator suffers from the painful recognition that the reality he had assumed he would find intact exists only in scattered shards, but he also realizes the beauty of these fragments and the prospect for understanding what they offer.