The Uses of Memory
The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyô
by Timothy J. Van Compernolle
Harvard, 215 pp., $39.95
Higuchi Ichiyô (1872-1896) is one of a number of Meiji period writers who died of tuberculosis at a young age. In those closing days of the 19th century, anyone with literary ambition headed like a moth for the bright cultural lights of Tokyo, where tuberculosis, the AIDS of its time, was an urban scourge. This is not to say that country people did not contract the disease, because they did, but it probably spread even more easily in closely populated urban areas.
Masaoka Shiki, father of the modern haiku and a great diarist, died of tuberculosis at 35 after suffering terribly for several years. Ishikawa Takuboku, another great diarist as well as a marvelous poet, died of it, too, in his twenties, as did the talented woman poet Yamakawa Tomiko, and many others.
Transitional epochs like the Meiji period make unique demands, both physically and psychologically. Great resilience, and the ability to maintain one's equilibrium in the face of the tremendous fissures that open up, are necessary for survival in all senses of the word--economic, physical, psychological. No one is spared. Many young writers had the necessary courage, creativity, and intellectual brilliance to make their way; but their bodies faltered.
Such was the case with Higuchi Ichiyô. A supremely talented writer with a mostly self-taught classical education, she lived in poverty from early adolescence on, enduring habitual malnutrition of a kind that is no more than a second-hand memory, if that, for almost everyone in developed countries today. An ambitious writer from her teens, she achieved fame in the last few years of her life, writing in the space of 14 months all the works for which she is now best known. Then she was diagnosed with tuberculosis at 24 and died within a space of months, mourned in Japan by the literary world and by many readers. Her reputation has never faltered since.
Higuchi Ichiyô is the only canonical female fiction writer of the Meiji period and, quite understandably, The Uses of Memory is not the first book about her in English. The earliest distinguished translation of her work--Edward G. Seidensticker's almost complete translation of her masterpiece, the novella Growing Up (Takekurabe), which he made for Donald Keene's Modern Japanese Literature--is now a half-century old and still reads as beautifully as the day it was born. After Seidensticker, we had to wait another 25 years for the late Robert Danly's masterful biography, In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyô, a Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan. This included fine translations of nine of her stories (including a retranslation of Takekurabe, which Danly titled "Child's Play"), the bulk of her fiction oeuvre.
Here, the reader skids to a stop, exclaiming: only nine short stories, and a canonical writer! Think of "our" canonical 19th-century fiction writers: Melville, James, Eliot, Dickens, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. Did any of them earn canonical status for their short stories or, if you insist on Growing Up/"Child's Play" being a little too long for a short story, their novellas? But then, trying hard not to impose "our" values on other cultures, perhaps our imaginary reader remembers the haiku, that brief 17-syllable form, and the fact that its most famous practitioner, Matsuo Bashô, is also accorded canonical status, and concludes that Japanese writers write in such brief forms that nine really good short stories--or, straining the point, eight and a novella--may be really all that is needed to achieve canonical status.
But no, a cultural penchant for brevity is not the answer. There are plenty of full-length Japanese novels, even some multivolume ones, both within and without the canon. The most famous, of course, is Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, but Meiji period writers wrote novels just as long as any of their European and American counterparts were writing.
So the question remains: How could just nine stories make a writer so beloved--because Ichiyô is not just respected, she is also loved--that her portrait now graces the 5,000 yen note, a denomination small enough (about $30 at current rates) that most people encounter it at least once a week in the course of daily shopping? (For that matter, unlike some other Meiji writers, most people cannot even read her stories in the original anymore, largely because Ichiyô, so conversant with the medieval Japanese classics, adopted her style from them and the Tokugawa period writer Ihara Saikaku.)
So why is a writer of such small output, all of it now so difficult to read that there are numerous translations into contemporary Japanese, so revered, so persistent in the national memory?
The reason is that Higuchi Ichiyô is a writer who helps to tell the narrative of modern Japanese history, the history of the heart as it made its way from the premodern to the modern. Like Natsume Sôseki, author of the equally canonical Kokoro, she is a national writer, someone whose stories seem to express the experience of the Japanese in the 19th century and yet at the same time touch on universal human experience. Her protagonists are marginalized people, left behind by modernization. Prostitutes, seamstresses, concubines, maids, they are almost all women, almost all poor, but their male friends and lovers--wastrels, rickshaw drivers, small-time crooks--are just as fully depicted. Often, as Timothy Van Compernolle remarks, the landscape is awash in tears, and yet the bedrock of the stories is reality.
"Child's Play" tells the story of Midori, a young prostitute in the licensed quarter--prostitution was legal but government-controlled in the Meiji period--as she moves from the freedom of childhood to the beginning of selling her body. Ichiyô, who lived outside the licensed quarters for some time, tells the story in a way that captures the sadness of all children as they put on the yoke of adulthood, and yet also evokes the particular tragedy of Midori's own fate. Such characters had been depicted in earlier fiction, but not in a way that was so realistic and yet made the reader sympathize with their aspirations and affections. Your heart often breaks for Ichiyô's characters, but at the same time they inspire love and admiration.
With Van Compernolle's theoretically sophisticated study, we can now add to Seidensticker and Danly a third fine contribution to Ichiyô studies in English. Van Compernolle is very aware of his predecessors, particularly Danly, to whom he dedicates his own book.
Relying on readers to familiarize themselves with the biography and stories through Danly, Van Compernolle devotes his entire book to examining Ichiyô through the lens of literary theory.
His thesis is that Ichiyô used "memory"--by which he means primarily the conventions of traditional poetry and fiction, but not in a simple, imitative way. Rather, she employed traditional language to critique modernity, in particular such new ideals as worldly success, or shusse, as seen from the viewpoint of marginal people who were unequivocal failures according to modern values.
His basic aim is to "situate a literary text" in "the historically specific." He is trying to reproduce the zeitgeist, the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of the time, so that we can read as if we were part of Ichiyô's contemporary audience, while remaining readers in our own time.
My eyes were opened to the excellence of Ichiyô's "On the Last Day of the Year" by Van Compernolle's treatment. This is the story of Omine, a young maid still in her teens, who wants to borrow the paltry sum of two yen so that her family can pay off the interest on a loan and be saved from financial ruin. She approaches her employer, a woman notorious for her stinginess, and is rejected; and then, in desperation, steals the money. But just as her native honesty has made her decide that she must confess, the employer calls for the money box and it turns out to be totally empty except for a scrap of paper on which is scrawled a note from the family heir, the wastrel Ishinosuke, saying that he has "borrowed" the contents.
Omine is saved, and we can conclude that Ishinosuke, who she thought was dozing by the fire while she stole the money, had actually seen her and decided to cover for her. But the narrator allows no easy conclusions, leaving us with this teasing sentence: "Would that we could know what happened next."
In his analysis, Van Compernolle touches on the changes in maid-employer relations, Ichiyô's borrowings from the 17th-century author Ihara Saikaku and the medieval poetic tradition, and then the resonance between Omine's savior, Ishinosuke, and Japanese folk tales about the mysterious stranger who brings salvation. Although some of his historical description of maid-employer relations is confusing, taken all together, these intertextual readings illuminate parts of the story that we would otherwise ignore or be puzzled by. Van Compernolle has found the hidden threads that sew the story together, and which a reading based only on what is evident to readers in the 21st century would inevitably miss.
The other chapters offer interpretations of the stories "Troubled Waters," about the prostitute Oriki; "The Thirteenth Night," about Oseki, a girl of an impoverished family who tries, unsuccessfully, to run away from a rich but cruel husband; "Child's Play" and "Separate Ways," about a poor seamstress who decides to escape her poverty by becoming a kept woman.
I have probably missed some of the nuances of the theoretical scaffolding that grounds The Uses of Memory, but these insightful readings are the brick and mortar, and they alone make the book a success, a worthy addition to the growing corpus of work in English on one of Japan's best writers.
Janine Beichman, professor of Japanese literature at Daito Bunka University, Tokyo, is the author of Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry.