The Critical Response in Japan to Langston Hughes Toru KIUCHI
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日本大学生産工学部研究報告B Article 2008 年 ６ 月 第 41 巻 The Critical Response in Japan to Langston Hughes Toru KIUCHI (Received June 15, 2007) Abstract Langston Hushes was first introduced to Japan when the cover of the September 1932 issue of the Japanese monthly literary journal, New English and American Literature［Shin Eibei Bungaku］1 (8) (Sep.1932),featured a photograph of Hughes on the cover,although this is as many as ten months before Hughes actually came to Japan for the first time in June 1933. This essay traces the history of the critical reception of Langston Hughes in Japan between 1932 when Hughes was first introduced to Japan and the present in 2007,considering translations,essays,reviews,and journal and newspaper articles on Hughes, published in Japan. Keywords: Langston Hughes, African American, Critical Response, Ethnicity, History bit. (242) I. Before World War II Hughes just turned thirty in 1932 and began his liter- Langston Hushes was first introduced to Japan ary career as Arnold Rampersad writes in his fore- when the cover of the September 1932 issue of the word in the collection of essays: Japanese monthly literary journal, New English and American Literature［Shin Eibei Bungaku］,featured a If he had died when he was thirty, in 1932, he photograph of Hughes on the cover,although this is would doubtless be remembered as one of the as many as ten months before Hughes actually came brightest stars of the Harlem Renaissance, with to Japan for the first time in June 1933. This means his two important books of poems The Weary that a small group of Japanese literary critics already Blues (1926)and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927),his noticed the importance of Hughes as a poet. Hughes novel,Not Without Laughter (1930),and his land- was later shown the cover of the journal while he was mark essay of 1926 in the Nation, “The Negro staying in Japan, and he himself wrote about the Artist and the Racial Mountain.” impression of this photograph much later in his 1956 autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander : However, in addition of two children’s books, The Dream Keeper and Popo and Fifina (1932), it is no Some of my poems already had been translated small wonder that his reputation must have reached and published in a Japanese literary magazine Japan as early as in 1932. The literary journal, New and my picture had appeared on the cover－a English and American Literature［Shin Eibei Bunga- drawing made from a photograph－in which I ku］, just founded in February 1932, carried on the appeared quite Japanese,with my eyes slanting a cover, other than Hughes, portraits of then newly Professor,Department of Liberal Arts and Basic Sciences,College of Industrial Technology,Nihon University ― 1― rising English and American writers, such as James The Crab Factory Ship［Kanikosen］(1929). Hughes Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and did not know that the theater was already that much Sinclair Lewis. under a dark political cloud. The tension lying From 1932 to 1933, Hughes was traveling from between Japan and China was extremely heightened. Europe to the Soviet Union. He crossed the Sea of In 1933, after Japan’s founding of Manchuria, the Japan and entered the country late afternoon on June League of Nations dispatched the Lytton Commission 23, 1933. He recalls in his autobiography as: “Late to Manchuria to do research there and took the one afternoon we were at Tsuruga on the western League of Nations’s recommendation of Japan’s with- coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island”(Hughes 238). drawal from Manchuria to Japan, based on the This news was reported in the Japanese newspaper, research result. On March 8, 1933, Japan decided to Tokyo Everyday Newspaper［Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shin- break out of the League of Nations, because it was bun］.Hughes noticed that the police were keeping an angry at this decision, and began to isolate itself eye on him when“they inspected our papers and asked internationally. Hughes’s biographer Rampersad us why we had been in Russia,how long,and for what reveals that : good reason”(Hughes 238). On June 24, Hughes went by train to Kyoto,which He also found the degree of militarism frighten- is 94 kilometers South of Tsuruga.And then,on June ing. The country was covered with restricted 25,he took the train to Tokyo,which is 513 kilometers zones; foreigners were watched closely. ‘The East of Kyoto. He stayed at the beautiful Imperial Japanese militarists are quite open about all this,’ Hotel because he already knew that the building was Hughes wrote. ‘They make no secret that they designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and opened ten years are shadowing you, and that they are suspicious earlier in August 1923. After spending a few days of everyone’”(272). doing nothing in Tokyo, Hughes went to the Tsukiji Theater, which had been suggested to visit by Seki One night he thought he heard tractors were passing Sano he met in Moscow, a former director of the in front of his hotel,“but they were tanks,more than theater, who “promised to alert their colleagues at a dozen of them. Where they were going down a big home Hughes’s coming trip”(Rampersad 271).Hughes city street in the middle of the night,I do not know” was interested in the fact that DuBose Heyward’s (Rampersad 272-73). Hughes thought of Japan as a play, Porgy, and other foreign plays were performed tyrannical and dangerous country as was shown in his at the theater.Hughes recollects of the play he saw at poem,“Columbia,”“a highly sensational attack on the theater: United States”(Rampersad 266),which was published in the 1933 first number of International Literature. I saw a play by a contemporary Japanese writer about a strike of fishermen in feudal days－one of Being one of the world’s big vampires, the few plays not modern in setting. But it was Why don’t you come on out and say so performed in the naturalistic manner of the West, Like Japan, and England, and France, not stylized as traditional Japanese plays are.” And all the other nymphomaniacs of power (Hughes 241). After the visit to the Tsukiji Theater, “The next This contemporary Japanese writer must be Takiji day several Japanese writers and actors, artists and Kobayashi (1903-1933), who was just arrested by the newspapermen came to see me at the Imperial Hotel” Japanese police on February 20,1933 under suspicion (Hughes 242),as the August 1933 issue of New English of the violation of the Maintenance of the Public and American Literature［Shin Eibei Bungaku］report- Order Act and was tortured to death by the Tsukiji ed on his alleged meeting with a well-known Japanese Police station just before Hughes came to Japan.His writer,Kan Kikuchi,and a poet-critic Yone Noguchi, memorial service happened at the Tsukiji Theater on whose son became a famous Japanese-American March 15, 1933. The play Hughes saw at the theater sculptor, Isamu Noguchi. Matsuo Takagaki, an must be a play made out of Kobayashi’s short novel, American literary scholar, and Kenjin Ono,an editor ― 2― of the journal, met Hughes, who brought to them his he had done in Russia and China, what he had unpublished poems and the English translation of discussed with Madame Sun Yat-sen,what organi- poems by a Cuban poet and surprisingly even promis- zations he belonged to, and what his intentions ed to continue to contribute to the Japanese journal. were in Japan... ‘I realized that the Tokyo and Poems by this Cuban poet must be Cuba Libre by Shanghai,’he wrote later. ‘I was amazed as well Nicholas Gullien,whom Hughes met in Cuba in 1930. as flattered that my activities had been so closely When Hughes recalls in his autobiography, “The watched.’”(195) translations of my Harlem blues poems,so I was told, were quite well done and attracted considerable atten- Ordered by Japanese authorities to have no more tion in Tokyo”(Hughes 242),one of the Harlem blues communication with Japanese in Tokyo,Hughes was poems is “Black Belt”and “Moon-Colored Nymph” told to leave the country within two days and not to and other twenty-one poems, which were down by return to Japan again. Takagaki in the original text with an annotated The news that Hughes was deported from Japan Japanese translation in the September 1933 issue of appeared as an article,“Negro Writer Ordered Out of New English and American Literature［Shin Eibei Japan by Police,”in the July 25, 1933 issue of Japan Bungaku］.Although other twenty-one were later Times and Mail.Ki Kimura, a Japanese writer and republished in Opportunity and other magazines,these literary critic,also states in the left-wing and reform- two poems,were only and for the first time published ist journal Reorganization［Kaizo］that the Japanese in the Japanese journal. “Black Belt”reads, police ordered Hughes out of Japan, though they did not even know who Hughes was before Kenjin Ono There stands the white man, and Kimura let them know that. Followed by Boss of the fields－ Kimura’s essay was a Japanese translation of his new Lord of the land poems “Share-Croppers”and “Dream.” And all that it yields. Even after Hughes left Japan for the United States, Here bend the niggers, ［Matsuo Takagaki］,one of the group of the journal’s Hands to the soil－ critics,continued to annotate with the original text of Bosses of nothing, Hughes’s poems, such as “October 16,” “Desire,” Not even their soil.