244

The European Reception of Japanese and

DOUWE FOKKEMA

The topic of this symposium， “ in the World,” makes me feel an outsider, an amateur. I do appreciate, of course,

that Professor KODAMA has invited me to participate in the discus­

sion, but when I accepted to take part in the symposium, it had a

wider title : “East Asian Literature Seen from Abroad.” And originally

I had in mind to discuss mainly the position of Chinese literature in

the West, comparing the fate of Chinese literature to that of Japanese

literature. In order to prevent my observations from becoming tcx)

amateurish, I think I should more or less stick to my original plan. In

any case, you will be hearing statements and debatable generalizations.

Almost everyone is interested in success. Not only businessmen,

but also historians are in general more interested in success than in

failure. Historians who study the reception of literary works, however,

are more balanced people. They are interested not only in the success­

ful reception of certain works, but also in cases where no response

has been elicited, or where the reception of literature is negative.

This is because reception theorists, working in the tradition of Felix

Vodicka, Hans Robert Jauss and Gunter Grimm, focus on characteristics *

* これは本学会第49回全国大会における国際シンポジウム「世界の中の日本文学」 (1987年6月20日，同志社女子大学）での発題講演の原稿を， F o k k e m a 氏から 許可をえて，印刷したものである。本号の全国大会の報告のページを参照された い。 243 of literary systems and are able to draw conclusions about the features of a particular literary system when it is distorted or ignored by an­ other literary system as well as when it is easily assimilated by the other system. The implicit or explicit rejection of works from another culture is often more revealing than their acceptance, in particular when arguments for the rejection are given.

Of course, my treatment of the reception of Chinese and Japanese literature in —and in general in the Western world—cannot be adequate within the short span of time that I have. Yet, I would like to ask one major question and propose certain ways for answering it.

The answer itself may then be given in a more general discussion, in which the audience should participate.

My question is : why is modern Japanese fiction more popular with European and American readers than modern Chinese fiction ?

The question implies that we assume that Japanese fiction indeed is more popular, and this assumption needs of course further testing. I must restrict myself here to rather vague impressions such as the translation into English and other European languages of the main fiction of FUTABATEI, NATSUME, AKUTAGAWA, KAWABATA,

TANIZAKI, MISHIMA, DAZAI and other modern Japanese writers.

Many of these translations appeared in paperback, notably in the U. S.

Nothing of the kind happened to Chinese authors. A quick look at the titles published by Penguin in England and available in May 1987 yields that modern Japanese fiction, with five editions of fiction by

Mishima and three novels by Kawabata, is better represented than modern Chinese novelists of whom we find neither Lu Xun n o r

ル/^ o Dww 茅盾 o r ル JY/z 巴金 or Lao *S7ぱ老舎，nor any other twen- tieth-century writer of fiction in a Penguin edition.

Perhaps the qualification should be made that recently modern

— n — 242

Chinese short stories have appeared in various volumes in English,

French, German, Italian, Dutch etc., and perhaps the attention for

Chinese literature is growing, notably for the new fiction published in the last ten years. W e also should not forget that we are talking about modern fiction, not about older literature, nor about philosophy.

No doubt, the work of Chinese philosophers, such as the L u n yu 「論

語」 with sayings of Confucius， or the Dacuieル这■ 「道徳経」 ascrib ed to i^aozi 老子 ， o r th e 「右:子」， ascribed to Z/zwa呢• ZAow

莊周 ， is more popular than any of the philosophical writings of Japa­ nese origin. And I wonder whether the great T }ang poets, Li Taibai

李 太 白 （701-762), Dw 杜 甫 （712-770)， 5 • 白 居 易 （7 7 2 -8 4 6 ) have been surpassed in popularity in the West, by any classical Japa­ nese poet. Perhaps BAbHO Matsuo, the famous -poet, is equally well-known, and in this case we even see that the genre of the haiku has been more or less assimilated in the Western system, as was recently argued by Dirk de Geest, a young Belgian scholar, at the annual meeting of the Belgian Association of General and Comparative

Literature which was held less than a month ago in Brussels.

The examples I mentioned call for further specifications. When we wish to investigate the reception of Cninese and Japanese literature in the W est, we must distinguish between different genres and between different periods in the history of these literatures. But we also must distinguish between different periods in W estern literary history. In addition, the creative distortions of gifted translators must be accounted for : our knowledge of traditional Chinese poetry owes much to the tireless efforts of Arthur Waley. The popularity of Japanese fiction was very much stimulated by the excellent translations and introduc­ tions by Donald Keene and Edward G. Seidensticker.

If the W estern reader of the 1930 s and 1940 s preferred Chinese

一 i n — 241 poetry—after the Second World W ar Japanese fiction became highly popular. TANIZAKI Junichiro, KAWABATA Yasunari, MISHIMA

Yukio and others were frequently translated and appeared in paperback editions. Did Cnma not have fiction that could equal the Japanese wave ? I can make only a few intuitive remarks about the difference between modern Japanese and modem Chinese fiction, and I will make them only in order to elicit comments from the au d ien c e.

For some reason or another Japanese fiction seems to be more relevant to a European audience than Chinese stories—with the possible exception of Chinese fiction which appeared since the death of Mao

Zedong. (I am using the word “relevance” in the way Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann use the term in their book The Social Con­ struction of Reality (1967).) Japanese fiction seems to be more relevant to European readers because it deals with a life world that is pertinent to the interests and problems of the modern W estern reader. In Chinese fiction, whether by Lu Xun, Mao Dun or Ba Jin, there is a strong preoccupation with ’s attempts to come to terms with Western influences. We should remind ourselves that China’s opening up to the West came much later than that of . FUTABATEI Shimei preceded Lu Xun by almost a generation. Many Chinese writers—among them Lu Xun and Moro 郭沫 若 一went to Japan to come into contact with so-called “modernity.” Guo Moro himself testified that

“Modern Chinese literature has for the most part been created by

Chinese students from Japan” (quoted by Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement (1960), p. 32). W hereas the generation of Mao Dun and Ba Jin was still fully engaged in adjusting itself to Western models, later writers had even less chances to choose their own way of life, living in a country at war or, later, in a society with clearly

——iv — 240 set ideological goals. If for Ba Jin the transition from feudalism to capitalism was a personal experience, later Chinese writers saw their freedom channeled by strict social rules. For none of them psycho­ logical details could become a central issue. I guess that Western readers—who, in fictional narrative, were looking for psychological explanations一 could not find much of their interest in Chinese fiction.

The Japanese had had more time and more opportunities to assimilate the legacy of the great Russian realists, such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev, of Proust, Gide and Thomas Mann. I believe it is psychological subtlety that made modern Japanese fiction attractive to

W estern readers.

Another point may be that most Japanese writers know the prob­ lems of the big cities too well and know how to write about them.

In this way, they present knowledge of a world which is very much pertinent to the average W estern reader.

One may object that certain Japanese stories， such as MISHIM A’s The Sound o f Waves {Shiozai, 1954), avoid the theme of the city.

That is indeed true, but in this novel the setting of the plain fisher­ men^ life is fully compensated by the fine psychological treatment of the idyllic love between Shinji and Hatsue. Chinese writers seem not to have time for the anthropological invariant of love, and if they do pay some attention to it, it never reaches the candidness the Japanese writer may offer and the W estern reader enjoys. Sex, rudeness, nausea, despair, violence are factors in Japanese fiction which appeal to the

W estern reader, I assume, because they provide points of recognition in an otherwise culturally different world.

The excellent short story by the contemporary Chinese author

ぎ高魄声， published under the title “A Most Simple

S to ry ” （“J /が j ï a n J a ” みぎ •” 极 其 簡 単 的 故 事 ）， which deals with

— y — 239

the heroic struggle of a political prisoner in the countryside to extract

methane gas from the dung of pigs, for its theme alone, cannot

compete with Japanese fiction about modern city life. This says

nothing about the value of these Chinese stories, for value attribution is

a relative thing depending on the position and interests of the reader.

Perhaps there are more readers in the world, though mainly in China,

who like Gao Xiaosheng than readers who admire TANIZAKI. This

shows that a comparison between Japanese and Chinese literature also

includes a sociological dimension.

Let me conclude by saying that each literature tends to be involved

in problems that are relevant to the society to which it belongs. There

are problems in China which do not exist in Japan, just as there are

problems in Japan that are not considered relevant in China. There

are also problems in the contemporary Western world which seem to

be irrelevant in Japan.

I would hazard the following generalizations. The dominance of a

Symbolist poetics in the W est was favourable to the reception of Chi­

nese traditional poetry. The expectations of a Western public well

aware of the conventions of the psychological novel and of Modernism

were favourable to the reception of modern Japanese fiction. But the

present Western interest in Postmodernism seems to put an end to

the auspicious reception of Japanese fiction. Since the 1970 s Latin-

American fiction has taken the prominent place once occupied by

Japanese narrative : Borges, Cortâzar, Garcia Mârquez, Fuentes and

Llosa receive primordial attention now and seem to have relegated

the translations from Japanese literature rather to the periphery—as

Tynjanov would say.

Edward Bond^ distortion of the life of Basho in his play Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968) coincided with the beginning of the

— vi — 238

Postmodernist neglect of Symbolist values, psychological realism and

Modernist coherence, embodied in current W estern literature and pro­ jected into modern Japanese fiction. It seems that the wheel of the succession of literary systems has temporarily turned against the favourable reception of Japanese fiction in the West.

I regret that I cannot bring a more optimistic message, but you may set your hopes on the word “temporarily”， or on possible Japanese

Postmodernist literature, of which I am not aware, but which, if it exists, in due time will certainly be well received in the Western w o rld .

— vii —