Appetite for Literature

By Stefan Kanfer

Readers devour tragedies, comics, an author or two

The custom is called tachi-yomi, literally standing-reading. The Japanese practice it on commuter trains, buses, street corners and in stores. Especially bookstores. With almost 100% literacy and book sales of more than $3 billion a year, Japan may have the world's most voracious readership.

The national appetite cannot be satisfied at libraries: there are only 1,300 public libraries in the country, and they account for only 1% of annual book sales. Instead, most readers head for the bibliophile's paradise, Tokyo's Kanda district, which houses hundreds of shops with miles of volumes. Here almost all the classics of Japanese and Western literature are available for about a dollar. The softcover books are wallet-size and encased at the store with a protective paper wrapper. About 10% of those volumes are titles originally published in English, German, French and Italian. Tolstoy's novels have been available for nine decades; Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge is now being prepared. "The number of translations is on the rise," says Hiroshi Hayakawa, an executive with the nation's major foreign book publisher. "The trouble is, you can never tell which book will become a bestseller in Japan. A popular novel in America does not necessarily sell well here. I always trust my sixth sense." Among Hayakawa's trusted novelists: John Gardner, Dick Francis, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Wambaugh.

In the U.S., publication of nonfiction outnumbers fiction 8 to 1; in Japan, "serious" novels account for 20% of new titles. Optimists regard this activity as the newest event in Japan's long history of literary interest, reaching far back past wars and courts, before the start of printing itself.

Westerners tend to locate the origin of the modern novel in the pages of Don Quixote. In fact, the first instance of fully developed narrative occurred 600 years before Cervantes in The Tale of Genji, a 1,135-page work by Lady Murasaki, a member of the court of the Empress Akiko. The 11th century work offers a panoply of "modern" elements; analyses of character, elisions of time and place, divisions into chapters.

Up to the time of The Genji, Japanese prose works of the Heian period (794-1185) derived from the legends of Japan, China and India, and from realistic poems describing past heroes and wars. The streams were united in Lady Murasaki's work.

In the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1185-1573), glorious war tales were the fashion. Then several emperors were driven into exile, and the country was beset with wars and rebellion; stories of the samurai, themes of death characterized Japanese prose. When peace was restored at the beginning of the 17th century, the literature of the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) first reflected the new epoch by turning to eccentric verse and frivolous tales. Soon the merchant class replaced warriors as subjects for fiction, and novels examined the lives of the commoner instead of the aristocrat. Still, Japan was more interested in itself than the world. The country's isolation was interrupted by the appearance of Europeans, principally Portuguese priests and Dutch merchants. Ironically, it was their very presence that led to further isolation. The rulers of Japan, fearful of unrest, turned against the missionaries and eventually prohibited Christianity altogether. In 1640 the country was closed to the outside world, and under the rule of the shoguns, literature again turned inward.

But in the nearly four decades between the Meiji restoration of 1868 and the Russo-Japanese War, notes Scholar and Translator Donald Keene, literature in Japan "moved from idle quips directed at the oddities of the West to symbolist poetry, from the thousandth-told tale of the gay young blade and the harlots to the complexities of the psychological novel." Western works were translated; Japanese readers graduated from Self-Help by Samuel Smiles to the political novels of Disraeli and the naturalistic fiction of Zola. Expatriates like Lafcadio Hearn began to appraise the strange culture: in Japan, "we find ourselves bewitched forever . . . like those wanderers of folktale who rashly visited Elf-land."

The exotic country produced its first major novelists since the 17th century: Soseki Natsume (1867-1916), Ogai Mori (1862-1922) and Toson Shimazaki (1872-1943), writing in everyday speech rather than in the florid style of the earlier romances. The next generation of writers, informed by the experiments and traditions of the West, returned to native concerns. In Thousand Cranes and Snow Country, Yasunari Kawataba (1899-1972) addressed the themes of erotic obsession with an oblique sensitivity that won him a Nobel Prize in 1968. Osamu Dazai (1909-48) was Japan's Albert Camus. He sounded the dissonant chords of postwar malaise and romantic nihilism in works like The Setting Sun ("Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality.

That is what we certainly are").

The most celebrated of 20th century Japanese novelists remains Yukio Mishima (1925-70), a writer of almost operatic sensibility.

From the surreality of Confessions of a Mask ("I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends") to The Temple of the Golden Pavilion ("A reality that has lost its freshness . . . and that gives off a half-putrid odor"), Mishima looked backward to military epochs and derided the indulged, secularized Japan he saw around him.

Mishima's abrasive career ended in seppuku (disembowelment, then decapitation by a member of his private "army"). Kawataba and Dazai were not given to such self-dramatization, but they too died by their own hands. Indeed, it is no mere verbal swagger to define contemporary Japanese writing as a matter of life and death. In the '70s one Tokyo scholarly journal devoted an entire issue to "The Writer and Suicide." There is a death wish operating through Japanese literature. Says Masao Miyoshi, a Japanese lit erary scholar (Accomplices of Silence):

"Writing in Japan is always some thing of an act of defiance. Silence not only invites and seduces all would-be speakers and writers, it is in fact a powerful compulsion throughout the whole society."

Yet there are those writers who refuse to be seduced. And when they speak out, readers respond by the thousands. Internationally prominent novelists like Kobo Abe (Woman in the Dunes) and Kenzaburo Oe regularly sell 150,000 copies of each book. Other novelists, like Hisashi Inoue, 47, have enjoyed even greater success (see box). Shusako Endo's spare and elegant studies of Christian faith and martyrdom (Silence; The Samurai) have brought the 60-year-old author the title of the Japanese Graham Greene and made him one of the nation's most widely translated writers.

Oe, 48, has been strongly influenced by the disruptive fantasies of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. Oe writes about themes as disparate as nuclear catastrophe (Hiroshima Notes) and brain-damaged children (A Personal Matter) in a manner that Howard Hibbett, Harvard professor of Japanese literature, considers "the most exciting and most imaginative of the postwar novelists."

Other writers, discontent with the standard forms of literary expression have begun to create a new genre, blurring the already eroded line between fiction and nonfiction. Shohei Ooka's The Long Slope recalls the Imperial Army's crimes of World War II through courtroom records of the Far Eastern Military Tribunal; Otohiko Kaga's Ship Without an Anchor is the story of a Japanese ambassador who was sent to America to forestall the war.

In addition, notes Tokyo Professor Shoichi Saeki, "the Japanese literary scene is now showing a return to ancient times when women were engaged in creative writing.

Today women writers, both young and old, are very, very active."

Novelist Chiyo Uno, 85, recently published a series of memoirs and autobiographical pieces (The Sound of Rain, The Tale of a Certain Woman). Perhaps the most respected woman currently writing is Taeko Kono, 67. Her novel Revolving Door deals with protagonists whose ordinary lives cloak sadomasochistic and pathological behavior. The Cheeverish approach of Yuko Tsushima, 36 (A Bed of Grass), examines the roots of family distress and false nostalgia. Taeko Tomioka, 47, is a poet turned novelist, celebrated for her unflinching analyses of social despair. For these women, says Anthologist Yukiko Tanaka, "writing is the antithesis of the selfless submission prescribed by Japanese culture. Women writers have needed great courage to surmount the many obstacles to their attempts at such self-assertion."

That assertion would seem to present new evidence of Japan's literary resurgence. But there is an equal and opposite force at work in the country, and pessimists cite it as an indication of decline. "It used to be that every potential intellectual in Japan read Hegel or Kant," laments Keene. "But no more. The people who seven or eight years ago were reading Romain Rolland are now reading comics."

That is not an exaggeration. Manga, Japanese comic books, are more adult and more insidious than TV. Unlike the pulpy, stapled American product, manga are well bound and published in paperback size. The drawings are cinematic, displaying heroes and heroines in explicit sexual and military-war adventures. In recent years, manga have grown into a billion-dollar publishing venture. Doraemon, an atomic-powered robot cat, makes Garfield look like something the human dragged in. Created in 1970, Doraemon has now appeared in a 26-volume collection with sales of $50 million. In 1980 Akira Toriyama sold 15 million copies of his 17-volume sci-fi comic Dr. Slump. There is even a manga temple outside Tokyo where, above the central altar, a legend is inscribed: THE IDEAL PRIEST:

CARTOONS AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH.

Comic books, educators agree, have played a distressingly important role in lowering literary standards. Junzo Iwase, president of K.K. Bestsellers, a thriving Tokyo house, gave up publishing novels several years ago. His 100 annual titles range in subject matter from moneymaking to politics, from sports to erotica. Says Iwase: "Our readers are sarariman (salary men) whose favorite topics of conversation are office affairs and professional baseball. We knew there was a tremendous market there." Last year K.K. presented the market with How to Enjoy Baseball Ten Times More by Takenori Emoto, a former professional baseball player ("You feel tempted to make fun of the 50,000 spectators"). The book was ghosted like many of K.K.'s assembly-line products. "Sometimes we think of the title first and then make the book to fit it," Iwase explains. "Take the new bestseller It's a Fun World Because Politics Stinks, which has sold 100,000 copies since last May. The title is provocative and eyecatching because it contradicts common sense. I knew it would tickle the readers' curiosity." Few bestsellers have tickled as successfully as Totto-Chan, The Little Girl at the Window--childhood reminiscences of TV Celebrity Tetsuko Kuroyanagi.

Is the Japanese writer's life beset with the hazards of suicide and silence, commercialism and inattention? Or does it take place in an unusually literate arena, where new works are still given an avid and intelligent reception? The evidence is conflicting. To be sure, every year, potentially serious readers turn from Kawataba to Mighty Atom. But every year fresh contestants enter poetry and fiction competitions. If some serious publishers have closed their doors, others offer a profusion of monthly, bimonthly and weekly magazines, about 2,000 in all.

It took almost a thousand years for The Tale of Genji to reach the West. In this century, the works of Kawataba, Abe, Mishima and their colleagues took only a few years to reach across two oceans. Today Japanese literature, like everything and everyone else in the country, is in a greater hurry. Translations are being feverishly prepared; America and Europe will see some 50 unfamiliar novels and histories in the next year. Whether those volumes make their way into foreign mainstreams remains to be seen, read and discussed. What is certain is that Japanese literature, which has earned only one Nobel Prize and to a large extent is still the region of specialists, at last seems ready for international competition. Says Hibbett: "The language has kept Japan fenced off longer than other countries. But old rules no longer apply. In literature there is no culture gap any more." --By Stefan Kanfer. Reported by

Yuki Ishikawa/Tokyo and Rosemarie Tauris Zadikov/New York

With reporting by Yuki Ishikawa, Rosemarie Tauris Zadikov This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.