Tenth Anniversary Issue || The Historical Satires of Yokomitsu Riichi

The Historical Satires of Yokomitsu RiichiAuthor(s): Alan CampbellSource: The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 8, No. 1, TenthAnniversary Issue (Nov., 1972), pp. 26-33Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489090 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 22:23

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

American Association of Teachers of Japanese is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.79.179 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 22:23:38 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=atj

http://www.jstor.org/stable/489090?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


26

THE HISTORICAL SATIRES

OF YOKOMITSU RIICHI

Alan Campbell

The University of Wisconsin



27

Yokomitsu Riichi wrote only one historical novel, even assuming a fairly loose definition of the term, Therefore it may seem presumptuous of me to place him in the company of the other novel- ists who are represented on today's panel. My only excuse is pro- vided by the tantalizing phrase, "the historical process," in the title for our session. For I am immediately reminded of the myste- rious deterministic forces that are so often hinted at in Yokomi- tsu's works. The self-conscious over-analytical character type who appears in many of these works often feels that he is at the mercy of some obscure process or mechanism that is going on around him. Without being able to explain why, this character suspects that the changing relationships between various natural objects in his envi- ronment are somehow determining his own fate.

A .concrete example is Yokomitsu's well known story entitled "Machine" (Kikai, 1930), a tale of suspicion and violent strife among the employees of a small name-plate factory. The story is told by one of the workers. In the course of his work with the shop owner's chemical formulae, this man has discovered that there are "delicate organic movements in inorganic substances,,... that in the tiniest things a law, a machine is at work,..," He ends his painfully vivid account of the fighting among the metal shavings and vats of corrosive chemicals by speculating as follows:

In any case, some invisible machine was constantly meas- uring us all, as if it understood everything that went on, and was pushing us according to the results of its measurements.

He does not explain. The reader is left to ponder the meaning of the statement for himself,

This kind of thinking appears with such regularity in Yokomi- tsu's works that it might be described as an obsession, not only of the characters, but of the author himself,and it plays a part in the strange combination of modern scientific imagery and oriental nothingness that characterizes the Shinto mysticism of his last years. However its use as a theme is most striking in, and perhaps had its origin in, a group of satirical stories that Yokomitsu wrote during the period in the middle 1920's when he, along with Kawabata Yasunari, presided over a group of young writers who came to be known as The School of New Sensibilities(Shinkankakuha). I shall concentrate my remarks on a few of these satires, but before doing so I feel that in fairness to Yokomitsu I should mention that, brilliantly written as they are, they are not his best works of this period. His greatest artistic achievement of the twenties, and perhaps of his entire career, is the series of semi-autobiographical stories and novelettes that he was writing at about the same time. However that series has little bearing on today's topic.



28

In 1923, the year of the Kanto Earthquake, Yokomitsu was 25 years old. He had been publishing for some six years and had already written two of the works that in retrospect would have to be numbered among his best. Real recognition as a writer, however, had only come with his historical novel of 1923, The Sun(Nichirin), and he therefore considered that novel his literary debut. The earthquake was a great turning point for him as it was for other writers like Nagai Kafu and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, each in his own way, of course. Here is how Yokomitsu later described the situa- tion in which he found himself.

No sooner had I made my literary debut than I was over- whelmed by the great earthquake of 1923. The beliefs I had held concerning beauty were shattered by this disaster, and I entered what people call my New Sensibilities period. As far as the eye could see, the great city stretched out around me in a vast, unbelievable plain of ashes. Such was the scene within which the automobile, that monstrous incarnation of speed, first began to prowl among us. Suddenly the radio ap- peared, that abnormal offspring of sound. The artificial bird called the airplane first began to fly the skies as a thing that could be used. All these concrete embodiments of modern science first sprang up in our country just after the earthquake. The sensibilities of people who were in their youth when such vanguards of modern science took shape one after another on the burned out plain simply had to change.

Yokomitsu hoped to develop new sensibilities to respond to this strange new age, which he deemed writers of the "old style" ill equipped to cope with; thus his interest in various forms of European modernism, his self-styled "bloody war of utter rebellion aginst the Japanese language," his experiments with novel visual techniques such as verbal montage and startling angles of view. However, as Yokomitsu goes on to tell us in the piece I quoted from, the Marxist view of history had already been sweeping over the Japanese literary world in the form of the Proletarian Literature Movement. Yokomitsu saw it as a dark cloud that threatened to blot out the light of the sun, he tells us, and felt that he must turn his fragile literary weapons against this powerful enemy.

One thing that Yokomitsu had against the Marxist writers was what he saw as their insistence that literature should serve a useful purpose. He himself believed at this time that art should create a new reality, independent of human life, and he directed a series of polemical essays against the Marxists on this point. As for the Marxist dialectical view of history, with its emphasis on economic determinism, he was obviously fascinated but skeptical. His reaction was probably like that of the central character of



29

Dazai Osamu's No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku, 1937). Dazai's character explains his eventual disillusionment with the Marxist study meetings he has been attending in the following words: "I wasn't sure what it was, but I felt that there was something in- explicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics,,,, that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings." Later he speaks of the "mechanism" of the world, which he finds "incomprehensible." No doubt the mechanism Yokomitsu sensed was different from Dazai' s, but the reaction to Marxism in both cases seems to have been an impatience with a single orthodox explanation of human society and a feeling that other, perhaps unsuspected, factors might be worth looking for, Yokomitsu offered no coherent, logical explanation of society of his own in opposition to Marxism, Instead he attempt- ed to expose what he saw as the weaknesses of the Marxist view in a series of satirical fictions.

The Marxist writers' insistence on the importance of class struggle seems to have been especially irritating to Yokomitsu, and he directed a number of his satirical attacks against this point. An example is "The Trial of Marx" (Marukusu no shimpan, 1923). The central character is a pre-trial judge. He is inter- rogating a railroad crossing guard who has been held responsible for the recent death of a drunken pedestrian, struck by a freight train. There had been a violent argument between the guard and the drunk an instant before the latter's death. The judge suspects that he has a murder on his hands. He has two theories about forces that could have driven the guard to commit such a crime, One concerns the sex drive: the drunk was on his way to a prosti- tution quarter which the guard himself had sometimes visited, hence jealousy may be a factor. But it is the second theory that really fascinates him. The drunk was a rich man. The guard was one of the signers of a demand for shorter hour which had circulated among the railroad workers. Perhaps he is in league with the socialists, The judge has read a book about Marxism; he knows all about the theory of class struggle and that sort of thing. Thus the motive is clear. Carried away by his theory, the judge, by a combination of eloquence and clever psychological needling, drives the guard to a sobbing confession. But the judge remains uneasy. Later that night he realizes what is already apparent to the reader. The guard is a wretched, lonely being, whose only passion in life is the sense of power he gets from being able to stop traffic. Far from really wanting shorter hours, he works overtime. He often goes so far as to stop the traffic long before it is necessary, as he had in fact done on the night of the death. The drunk, enraged at the guard's high-handedness, had struggled with him, finally breaking free at the very moment the freight train actually arrived. Thus while the guard is clearly guilty of something, it is not



30

murder. The judge feels that he himself has committed a crime, for in his self-assurance he has almost delivered a false verdict, Then he remembers having read the book on Marxism, It was the

theory that made him reason falsely. He therefore declares that it is Marx who is guilty and not he.

The most interesting of Yokomitsu's satires take the form of what might be called historical fantasies, in which deterministic forces other than economics are imagined as the ultimate mechanisms of history. An obvious alternative to economics is the sex drive, which I have already mentioned in connection with "The Trial of Marx," There is a passage in Yokomitsu's early novelette The Price in Sorrow (Kanashimi no daika, 1921?), in which the hero decides that not only his own, but all the problems of civilization can be traced to the division of human beings into two sexes. Even if the most ideal form of communism imaginable could be put into effect, he muses, nevertheless, as long as one person continues to be more beautiful than another, strife and discord will not die out. He eventually concludes that genuine revolution could only be achieved by surgery,

I mention this passage, with its opposition of sex and communism, because of the light I think it throws on Yokomitsu's pur- poses in the historical novel of 1923, The Sun. The novel deals with the rise to power of Queen Himiko, who on the basis of early Chinese accounts of Japan is thought by some to have welded to- gether a number of small kuni, or tribes, in the third century A. D,, ruling the resulting country under the name of Yamato, Yokomitsu's story, which is of course fiction, ends before the unification is effected. The action takes place in the three kuni of Yamato, Umi, and Na,

Himiko begins her career as Princess of Umi. On her wedding night the Prince of neighboring Na breaks into the bridal chamber, kills the bridegroom, and carries Himiko away. By this time he has already done away with an imposing number of people, including those in his father's court who opposed his plan for the attack, The father demands Himiko for himself, and is quickly added to the list of dead. The new king is prevented from enjoying his prize, however, for the son of one of his earlier victims spirits her

away. This young man and Himiko vow mutual vengeance and become man and wife, but they are soon captured by the king of Yamato, and Himiko's second husband is killed. It is clear that both the

King of Yamato and his younger brother are lusting after her like all the rest, and at this point a change begins to take place in

Himiko, who has been so far a rather passive figure, mourning for the husband of her all too brief first marriage. She now begins to despise men for the brutality that their desire for her body



31

brings forth in them, and at the same time to realize what power over them she has. She decides to use that power against them, destroying them and gathering their power to herself. "Behold, kings of the earth," she cries, " I will shine above you like the sunt" She begins to play the king of Yamato and his brother against each other, intending to use the stronger in her planned attack on Na and its hated king. The younger brother murders the elder and becomes king in his stead, Himiko agrees to become his queen, but refuses to consumate the marriage before Na is subju- gated. The king makes feverish preparations for war. The king of Na hastily gathers an army and rushes to meet them, thinking only of Himiko, There is a great battle, in which the army of Na is routed. The two kings meet in single combat and run each other through with their swords. The king of Na, run through as he is, staggers toward Himiko with open arms, but she administers the coup de grace with her own sword. Her armies sweep on towards Na, and with Umi hers by birth and Yamato hers by her power over men, she presumably goes on to found the Japanese nation.

I must admit that this bald summary, which I give to show how heavily Yokomitsu underscores his point, does an injustice to The Sun as a work of literary art, Yokomitsu labored for over two years in the writing of this short novel, developing a lucid, rhythmical style over which he maintained absolute control. And even aside from the beauty of the language, the book has virtues such as the relentless pace of the narrative, and the symbolic use of nature images to reinforce the central theme of violence. Never- theless it is too much a caricature to be taken seriously as a novel. The action consists almost entirely of murders and wars caused by desire for Himiko, and after the first dozen or so kill- ings it loses its novelty. So simple and single minded are the characters that we can anticipate their actions with monotonous ease. As a view of history, its single motive force is lust, uncom- plicated by any of the counterforces that we can assume to have existed even in the primitive society that Yokomitsu has invented, And since Yokomitsu's other works demonstrate that he did not lack skill, taste, and insight as a novelist, it seems best to consider The Sun a satire on one-sided interpretations of history, even though the author himself did not make his intentions clear.

There is little doubt as to Yokomitsu's satirical intentions in the other two examples I wish to cite, "Silent Ranks"(Shizuka naru raretsu, 1925) has no individual human characters at all. It is an allegory of history in the form of the story--seen as it were, from some vantage point high in space--of the birth, develop- ment, and ultimate destruction of two civilizations in the parallel valleys of the rivers S and Q. In broad strokes the successive stages of the political and economic evolution of the states of S and Q are sketched. Simple monarchy is followed by a stage of



32

feudal warfare in which the two states subjugate each other in turn. Then the feudal lords are overthrown by the merchant class as the latter gain economic power. Still the struggle between the states of S and Q goes on until, in a sort of synthesis, they com- bine to form the capitalist state of SQ. Strife continues, however, for within this new state there is a division of classes in which the wealthy exploit the workers, The have-nots rise up against the haves in class warfare so violent that the entire civilization is utterly destroyed, and the joint delta of the two rivers is left barren. The process I have outlined seems to follow, more or less, the lines of the Marxist dialectic, except for the absolute blank which follows the class warfare. But the story is much more com-

plex than I have so far suggested, for Yokomitsu is not content to interpret his history purely in terms of economic determinism, From the beginning to the end, he depicts the military and economic

struggle between the two states as determined by (and as a func- tion of)an eon-long struggle between the two rivers themselves. As one river becomes swift and vigorous, the other becomes sluggish and clogged. Then the process is reversed. These geological shifts of balance are eventually followed by a change in the balance of power between the two states, Yokomitsu doesn't bother to tell us exactly how the two rivers wrest water from each other or

through precisely what causal links these changes change the lives of men, but even when the two states are united, it is "thanks to the two rivers that had fought for power so long." But this is not all, "There was a ceaseless observer of this give and take between the two rivers S and Q: the Great Bear," The Great Bear

eventually loses to Perseus its place as the northernmost of the constellations. Finally, even Perseus is in danger of being re- placed by Andromeda, And each of these changes among the constellations seems somehow to be reflected in the changing balance of

power between the rivers. This hint that there may be in the stars a determining force behind the force exerted by the rivers seems to be confirmed at the end of the story. For then "new life" is

brought by "silent meteorites" to the delta left barren by human war.

In "Napoleon's Ringworm" (Naporeon to tamushi,1926) the theory of the cause of human war is on a less than stellar scale. The

story opens not long before Napoleon's campaign against Russia, Napoleon has begun to act a little crazy. The reader is let in on the secret, known only to his former wife Josephine, that he has on his belly a large patch of ringworm of an itchiness so violent that it drives him mad. The attacks are at their worst late at night when he lies alone in bed. Then the marble halls of the palace echo with the wild laughter brought on by the itching. "I am Napoleon Bonaparte," he screams in his madness. Each of these violent attacks is followed by a new campaign of conquest.



33

And whenever he scratches, as scratch he must, the patch of ringworm grows, assuming like a map the shape of the territories he is

conquering. Napoleon has been extremely careful to keep his afflic- tion a secret from his new empress, the Austrian princess Louise. However on a certain night, after his advisors have been particular- ly stubborn in resisting his scheme of invading Russia, the itching is worse than usual. His fingers scratch frantically. The chart on his belly expands. His insane laughter echoes so loudly in the

palace that it brings the Empress Louise from her own chamber to see what is the matter. She finds Napoleon crawling with his naked

belly against the cool marble floor in an effort to soothe the itch-

ing. Impulsively he bares his oozing belly to her. She is suit-

ably aghast. The scene that follows can, under the circumstances, only be described as a rape. The next day Napoleon starts deci- sive preparations for his invasion of Russia, and the story ends with his armies advancing across the plains even as the tiny fungi that make up the ringworm advance across his belly.

Thus Yokomitsu suggests that war and conquest might be better

explained by some tiny, hitherto unsuspected thing than by the causes usually advanced. However he once again complicates the

problem by hinting at other causes such as class conflict (Napole- on, a loutish commoner, unable to bear the shame of the aristocrat- ic Louise's knowledge of his vulgar disease, invades Russia to

prove that he is her equal) and the sex drive (he also hopes by his

display of military skill to win back the love he lost by his insensitive assault). Finally, Yokomitsu suggests that there is a cause even more mechanical than the ringworm itself. The ringworm, he tells us, has no will. It expands its map of conquest only when Napoleon's fingers scratch it. Thus the fingers, themselves mindless, become the ultimate cause. But then, on the other hand, it is the ringworm's itching that makes the fingers move. And so Yokomitsu cannot resist turning this satirical historical fable into an endlessly revolving paradox in which the final moral is placed in doubt.

These stories are written in a style so forceful and with an

imagery so suggestive that the reader is almost persuaded that he has been given a revelation of some previously unimagined truth, and it is obvious that the author himself is strongly attracted to his own fantasies. However it is equally clear that one purpose of these works is to satirize the Marxist view of history by ex-

tending deterministic analysis to the point of absurdity. In them Yokomitsu admits economic determinism as one possible explanation for strife and historical change, but then goes on to suggest that there are other, more basic forces working behind and through the

former, offering a dazzling array of possibilities--sexual deter-

minism, geological determinism, fungal determinism, even sidere- al and digital determinism--and casting over the whole mixture such an atmosphere of uncertainty that one comes to doubt them all,



Tenth Anniversary Issue || The Historical Satires of Yokomitsu Riichi

Documents

Transcript of Tenth Anniversary Issue || The Historical Satires of Yokomitsu Riichi