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Seamus Heaney recently visited our school, and our campus weekly magazine interviewed him. A question and answer that I found particularly interesting:
FM: With [the Nobel Prize in Literature], you join the ranks of fellow Irishmen William Butler Yeats and George Berna
rd Shaw. What do you think is behind Ireland's rich literary tradition?SH: I don't know the answer to that, really. I don't believe that sociological conditions produce the oddity of talent. Talent is unpredictable. But it does seem to flourish when societies are in search of definition.
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It's a bit frightening to think of it this way, but I've been studying Japanese literature (with varying degrees of interest and competence) for nearly eight years now, all of high school and all of college. The process has been at times bumpy but always fascinating and always rewarding, and I like to think that I've come out on the other end of this journey a better person in some ways.
While I hate to admit it, from a normal person's point of view, Japanese literature is a somewhat obscure topic. And the natural question that people ask when it is revealed that I spend so much time studying something so weird and useless is:
"Why Japan?"
I don't have a good scholarly answer for this, but I have a sincere answer. (Sincerity is a rather rare commodity around here, so please appreciate this.)
Japan had an experience of modernity so unusual as to deserve to be called unique. Far more than Western nations, Japan had a visceral sense of modernity and modern society coming from outside, being something alien to itself. The process of modernizing was so drastically accelerated that it produced vast, weird fractures in people's understanding of the world around them. This is why so much early Japanese literature is obsessively concerned with tradition and modernity.
The Japanese experience of the social forces that affected the rest of the developed world during the 20th century was also wildly exaggerated--socialist labor movements--an incredibly brilliant flowering of popular rights, democracy, and liberalism--militarism and fascism--being both perpetrator and victim of some of the most horrific military actions of the modern world--the experience of being an occupied nation--the most sudden and dramatic economic growth imaginable--the unbelievable pace of technological development--extreme urban spaces--and now a crippling demographic transition (少子高齢化).
This is so simplistic and reductive that I'm almost embarrassed to admit to it, but this really is what I think--that the experiences of modernity and postmodernity have been somehow traumatic for people in developed nations. Our perception of our current experience as somehow severed from our past and the sinister ways we view modern life (pervasive fear and demonization of urban space and technology) suggest, simply put, that we are not comfortable in the world we live in.
To me, that is the power of Japanese literature. The Japanese historical experience of all of these changes and dislocations and traumas has been almost uniformly extreme, and so Japanese literature bears the scars of modernity very clearly. More than most other "national literatures" (I recognize that the term is deeply problematic, forgive me), Japanese literature touches directly on the issues that are the most painful and intimate for, I think, everyone living in a developed nation today. We are all in, as Heaney said, "societies in search of definition."
I have always wondered if I would be just as fulfilled studying, say, Irish literature, or African literature, or even Chinese literature. Does it matter that it's Japan?--yes, yes, it decisively does. Choosing Japanese literature was not arbitrary for me. I won't say it answers my questions, but it asks the same questions as I do.
1 comments:
I score 50% in your Japanese-author-recognition game ;_;
I find your answer deeply intriguing. The modern and the post-modern are endlessly fascinating (though I think I am only intellectually equipped, at this point, to comprehend the modern. It's post- variety escapes me completely), though I am skeptical of the claim that Japan's experience of modernity is unique. Modernity, as I understand it, implies universal alienation: we are traumatized,alone, and in crisis, but we are equally traumatized, alone, and in crisis. To speak of a "unique" experience of modernity seems to undercut the very concept of modernity.
To stray off topic, the notion of home and nation seems so central to "third-world" or post-colonial literatures. Amitav Ghosh argues that the way India figures in the imaginations of its diasporic writers is unique (unique in its epic quality, in its spatial emptiness). And much of modern Chinese literary tradition is dominated by a fetishizing of homeland, what C.T. Hsia terms "obsession with China." Literature produces multiple iterations of national narrative, which becomes individualized, criticized, and eulogized.
So, to wander on-topic again, I find your interest in Japanese literature because of Japan's modernizing experience (its entire national project) very compelling and more than an adequate answer for "Why Japan."
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