what is Japanese literature?
Like many literary systems in eastern Asia, Japanese literature derives from the Chinese one. As it is believed, Japanese islands knew no system of writing before the introduction of kanji (logographic Chinese characters, used also to write the Japanese language). What is curious, the process of introduction of Chinese cultural patterns, in the 5th century AD, was due to immigration rather military conquest. At the end of the 8th century, the Heian period (794-1185) brought about the development of more idiosyncratic modes of expression, including the invention of kana scripts (the name may refer to various syllabaries used to capture the Japanese phonological units, morae). Heian literature, with its evergreen classic, Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) is perhaps the most lively corpus of medieval texts, with the greatest productivity in contemporary culture, anywhere in the world.
The following, sombre Kamakura period (1185-1333), with its many civil wars, is relatively lesser known. Nonetheless, it is the period of the formation of the warrior aristocracy that is so often treated as emblematic of the Japanese culture. The subsequent Muromachi period (1333-1603) brought about, to the contrary, the dissolution of that aristocratic culture and the advent of popular forms of expression. It was a time of new poetic blossoming and the origin of many new genres, such as renga (linked verse). Also Noh theatre derives from the popular tradition.
The peaceful Tokugawa shogunate led to another golden age in Japanese history, the Edo period (1603-1868). It was the time of the early modern theatrical form, kabuki, as well as the famous haiku poetry. Lesser known, but also fascinating tradition born in this period is the genre of ukiyozōshi ("the floating world"), with its humorous tales set in the pleasure quarters. Quite a different body of writing is resumed under the designation rangaku. It is the fruit of an intellectual movement wishing to absorb the Dutch (and western) knowledge in all domains, from anatomy to linguistics.
The Meiji period is know as a period of opening of Japan to exterior influences. This is from 1868 on that Japanese literature can be bent to fit into the western grid of literary periodization, with such concepts as Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism, even if the precise chronology and aesthetical choices obviously diverge from the original, West European pattern of literary movements. Just to give an example, Japanese Naturalism brings about not the objective "photography" novel, as postulated by Zola, but the "I novel", designated Watakushi-shōsetu, in which the writers tried to capture their own inner states. Some decades later, this line of experimentation will bring the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner, Yasunari Kawabata, reputed as an author of psychological fiction.
The post-war period, in spite of military defeat, brought about a great cultural expansion, as we are all aware, because we all have read at least Murakami. But at the same time, few people realise how diversified Japanese literary tradition actually is: from its tiniest little jewels such as haiku to its great prose cycles that expand over hundreds and even thousands of pages.
The following, sombre Kamakura period (1185-1333), with its many civil wars, is relatively lesser known. Nonetheless, it is the period of the formation of the warrior aristocracy that is so often treated as emblematic of the Japanese culture. The subsequent Muromachi period (1333-1603) brought about, to the contrary, the dissolution of that aristocratic culture and the advent of popular forms of expression. It was a time of new poetic blossoming and the origin of many new genres, such as renga (linked verse). Also Noh theatre derives from the popular tradition.
The peaceful Tokugawa shogunate led to another golden age in Japanese history, the Edo period (1603-1868). It was the time of the early modern theatrical form, kabuki, as well as the famous haiku poetry. Lesser known, but also fascinating tradition born in this period is the genre of ukiyozōshi ("the floating world"), with its humorous tales set in the pleasure quarters. Quite a different body of writing is resumed under the designation rangaku. It is the fruit of an intellectual movement wishing to absorb the Dutch (and western) knowledge in all domains, from anatomy to linguistics.
The Meiji period is know as a period of opening of Japan to exterior influences. This is from 1868 on that Japanese literature can be bent to fit into the western grid of literary periodization, with such concepts as Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism, even if the precise chronology and aesthetical choices obviously diverge from the original, West European pattern of literary movements. Just to give an example, Japanese Naturalism brings about not the objective "photography" novel, as postulated by Zola, but the "I novel", designated Watakushi-shōsetu, in which the writers tried to capture their own inner states. Some decades later, this line of experimentation will bring the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner, Yasunari Kawabata, reputed as an author of psychological fiction.
The post-war period, in spite of military defeat, brought about a great cultural expansion, as we are all aware, because we all have read at least Murakami. But at the same time, few people realise how diversified Japanese literary tradition actually is: from its tiniest little jewels such as haiku to its great prose cycles that expand over hundreds and even thousands of pages.
I have readYoko Ogawa, Chinmoku Hakubutsukan 沈黙博物館 | The Museum of Silence (2000)
Shusaku Endo, The Samurai 侍 (1980) Kaizan Nakazato, Dai-bosatsu tōge 大菩薩峠 | The Sword of Doom |
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I have writtenPowszechna ulotność. Haiku i haiga jako formy transkulturowe
"Nie tańczę w miejscu, ja tańczę miejsce". Człowieczeństwo na krawędzi kondycji kulturowej (an essay on Min Tanaka) |
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on the narrow road to the Kashima shrineWhat does it mean to travel? What kind of advantage comes from this? Strangely, traveling, as modest as it might be materially, coming closer to asceticism than splendor, brings status and distinction in so many cultures. Long before the modern invention of grand tour or aristocratic travel, and then of mass tourism, Bashō traveled on his narrow road to the deep north to accomplish and to distinguish himself as a cultured subject (1). Travel was his way of fulfilling literature, getting back to the source of ancient poetry. Stepping into the path of the dead poets, he was gradually becoming a poet himself. Going beyond received education, coming down to the source, to the primary emotion connected to a place, a view, a certain pine tree that was not even the same any more. Into the deep North means down to the illo tempore of the first text. Also down to an initiatic death, becoming a weather-exposed skeleton, the sore wind blowing through his heart (2).
I reconsider my rejected application for that grant destined to vulgarize knowledge among high-school students and young adults. I'd proposed to write and promote a website, a blog, offering weekly a kind of literary reportage, presenting difference and otherness, and also the adventure and thrill of being a scholar. I thought it's important to supplement somehow our closed horizons, the narrowness of our identity, our blindness to universalism, to the uniqueness of human condition, inside and outside the European Union. They considered this proposal unworthy of attention. Nonetheless, I am myself the last instance to judge which of my projects should be realized and which are truly unworthy of attention. Yes, in its primitive version this project shouldn't be realized. I see no point in writing such things in Polish, trying to tempt high-school students and young adults into reading them, advertising them on book markers and pencils distributed in public libraries. But still I believe it's worth the while to write it in English, as I do now, searching for my own definition of a cultural travel. Somewhere between Bashō, Victorian aristocrats, itinerant scholars of the Islamic world (3), and many others, and myself. Bashō travels to places he had read about in ancient poetry, and it is a curious way of taking literature seriously. I think we miss it, we are too Borgesian. We believe that books are worlds in themselves, and that humanities are just a game like soccer, in which novelty is the score, no matter what we actually do talk about. This is the shallowness of our peripheral minds, yet another aspect of it: we think the world is unreal. There is a deep, a secret correspondence between literature and travel, far beyond seeing the autumnal full moon over the mountains of Kashima Shrine exactly as described by Teishitsu (4). In such a sense, my own travel to any country would only partially be a true one, because I might see so many places that correspond to no dead poet of mine. Nonetheless, those blank spaces are essential as the sources of future readings. Serendipity of a travel is a way of stepping outside a received cartography. Or a way of finding most unexpected correspondence with internal reality. In Sighișoara, I saw on old cemetery of German settlers. Strangely, it corresponds to a dream I had once and again, years ago. Perhaps the deepest point of the travel is such an immersion into the inner landscapes, palimpsests forming a world that is truly mine, and so pervasively, so essentially real. The emergence of meaning appears at the intersection of place and that interior image, unseen – and yet seen. And that dream was in itself a palimpsest of a different place I saw as a child, traveling: another German cemetery, in northern Poland. An early discovery of a cultural absence. I wrote about a similar dream on my other blog (Temptation of the Desert), and I called it Père Lachaise. I wrote about my strange tenderness towards the remnants. Perhaps it was the moment of an unconscious discovery of my own presence confronted with absence, my own responsibility for the things gone by. Epiphany, not only of a live culture in books actually read, but also of a world fulfilled and made real in the actuality of a travel. The pathos of a live poet in front of the Kashima Shrine. 1Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin Books, 1966. 2Expression used by Bashō in a haiku embedded in the haibun under the title “The records of a weather-exposed skeleton”, in The Narrow Road, op. cit., p. 51. 3This in a special reference to the Malaysian scholar Farish A. Noor and his travelogues Qur'an and Cricket. Travels through the madrasahs of Asia and other stories, Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish Books, 2009. 4“A Visit to the Kashima Shrine”, in The Narrow Road, op. cit., p. 65. |
vernacular versions
As I pack my Polish-speaking library, I'm surprised at how many books about Japan I actually had. Apparently, over recent decades, Japanese studies in Poland have been productive, even if I give no warranty of their quality. And here is a book that testifies to their modest beginnings. Wacław Sieroszewski (1858-1945), a writer and explorer of Siberia under duress (the fight against the Russian empire was a tradition in his family, and he was condemned to forced settlement in Siberia for his patriotic activities), is famous mostly for his writings on Yakutia. After various escapes from Russian custody, he was condemned for "eternal settlement" at a distance not smaller than 100 viorsts from the nearest road, river, or town. After twelve years of such a life in the wilderness, filled with studies on shamanism and Yakut ethnography, he got a "settler's passport" and was finally permitted to move to Saint Petersburg. His Russian-speaking publications earned him the financial support of the Russian Geographical Society and even its gold medal for his monograph on the Yakuts. Nonetheless, in 1900 he got into political trouble again, and it was the Society that saved him, exchanging a new prison term in Siberia for an exploration journey to the farthest parts of Siberia and the Nipponese Islands. In 1903 he was in Hokkaido, making research on the Ainu.
His actual stay in Japan was short due to the approaching Russian-Japanese war. This is what could explain the meagreness of his Japanese writings published in Polish. The most famous is his novel Miłość samuraja (1926), thematising the love of a ronin and a geisha from Yoshiwara. What I'm reading now, collected in an anthology Miłość i śmierć (Love and Death) are mostly versions of Japanese stories, found not at the source, but in the western writings: Lafcadio Hearn's Shadowings and A.B. Mitford's Tales of Old Japan. This is why I leave the volume so unsatisfied. The explorer celebrated by the Poles proves to be just this: the maker of a vernacular version, too proud to admit the status of a mere translator. Yet of course I can guess that it was a great novelty for the readers in Lviv, in 1907, to read about the harakiri of the prince Asano Naganori. Or the determination of O-Shichi (Polish O-Sici) who, having encountered his love during the great fire of Edo, decided to provoke a new conflagration.
It is just to remember that it was a time of many meagre vernacular versions of the Far East all over Europe. Such a sensation of meagreness haunted me while reading Chinese and Japanese appointments in Portuguese, left by Venceslau de Moraes. And the Portuguese, who reached Japan in 1540, occupiers of Macau till 1999, apparently had the opportunity to do much more.
Perhaps the Japanese culture was particularly hard to roe. Certainly, Sieroszewski had neither previous linguistic competence nor time to acquire it. No wonder he remained a very superficial travel writer, providing the Polish reader with just introductory notes, sketching in rough, although not unpicturesque lines the Japanese nature, life, and history. But he hardly had time to see anything, and he is back on a ship taking him to China. In his travelogue, he speaks more of the improper behaviour of a German consul than of the deep conversations with a Japanese poet he met during this trip.
So that's it, superficial, full of stereotypes and nationalistic-militaristic ideals of the time that did not yet have time to prove their falseness. And I part with this book, too modest to occupy the place in my library, and put it in my package destined for the foundation supporting libraries in rural areas.
Wacław Sieroszewski, Miłość i śmierć. Opowieści z Japonii (utwory wybrane z tomu Z fali na falę), ed. Witold Nowakowski, Bydgoszcz, Diamond Books, 2007.
Kraków, 21.10.2021.
His actual stay in Japan was short due to the approaching Russian-Japanese war. This is what could explain the meagreness of his Japanese writings published in Polish. The most famous is his novel Miłość samuraja (1926), thematising the love of a ronin and a geisha from Yoshiwara. What I'm reading now, collected in an anthology Miłość i śmierć (Love and Death) are mostly versions of Japanese stories, found not at the source, but in the western writings: Lafcadio Hearn's Shadowings and A.B. Mitford's Tales of Old Japan. This is why I leave the volume so unsatisfied. The explorer celebrated by the Poles proves to be just this: the maker of a vernacular version, too proud to admit the status of a mere translator. Yet of course I can guess that it was a great novelty for the readers in Lviv, in 1907, to read about the harakiri of the prince Asano Naganori. Or the determination of O-Shichi (Polish O-Sici) who, having encountered his love during the great fire of Edo, decided to provoke a new conflagration.
It is just to remember that it was a time of many meagre vernacular versions of the Far East all over Europe. Such a sensation of meagreness haunted me while reading Chinese and Japanese appointments in Portuguese, left by Venceslau de Moraes. And the Portuguese, who reached Japan in 1540, occupiers of Macau till 1999, apparently had the opportunity to do much more.
Perhaps the Japanese culture was particularly hard to roe. Certainly, Sieroszewski had neither previous linguistic competence nor time to acquire it. No wonder he remained a very superficial travel writer, providing the Polish reader with just introductory notes, sketching in rough, although not unpicturesque lines the Japanese nature, life, and history. But he hardly had time to see anything, and he is back on a ship taking him to China. In his travelogue, he speaks more of the improper behaviour of a German consul than of the deep conversations with a Japanese poet he met during this trip.
So that's it, superficial, full of stereotypes and nationalistic-militaristic ideals of the time that did not yet have time to prove their falseness. And I part with this book, too modest to occupy the place in my library, and put it in my package destined for the foundation supporting libraries in rural areas.
Wacław Sieroszewski, Miłość i śmierć. Opowieści z Japonii (utwory wybrane z tomu Z fali na falę), ed. Witold Nowakowski, Bydgoszcz, Diamond Books, 2007.
Kraków, 21.10.2021.
