was to survive but at the expense of other lives. Now, with the death of Karajima and the imminent death of the husband, Sugi comes to learn the meaning of being the strong, the survivor, or as he expresses it aboard ship, the meaning of everything that concerns being alive. As he has survived Karajima and the sick man, being alive is assuredly surviving, but the realization of the absurdity, as the sick husband says, of some staying alive while others are dying overwhelms the narrator and initiates him into a further recognition that the living owe the dying the fact of living, that the strong are strong because of the weak. This recognition of the link between survivor and survived may be called compassion or responsibility.
Thus This Outcast Generation considers man as a tension between individuals and history and as a contradiction in that tension. The theme is a far cry from the survival of the fittest; it is rather a hymn to humanitarianism, to the links in the great chain of existence.
But if to stay alive is to survive even if one has to mur der, it requires only a further step for Takeda to insist that the survivor must, at the same time, be prepared to be survived or even to be murdered to help others to survive. Luminous Moss [Hikarigoke, 1954) is the dramatic presentation of this further step.
Before being confronted with the most unusual of unusual events, the reader is introduced to scenes of quite ordinary human lives in a calm natural environment. These scenes may serve as effective contrast; but, more important, they reveal Takeda's conviction that human existence itself, however serene in appearance, contains a mysterious tension, a horrifying contradiction. In Takeda's apparently leisurely and relaxed travelogue style, the reader can notice many suggestions of conflict, movements against life to perpetuate life. In fact, Takeda's first reference to cannibalism is made immediately after the narrator has observed the humblest of plants, the luminous moss, which survives so precariously inside the cave. The implications behind the episode of cannibalism and the life of the plant are instantly fused in the narrator's mind: "... I was so fascinated by this 'incident of eating human flesh' that I could almost feel the 'creases of my mind' contract with a snap... I was conscious that the subject was turning from second to second into small black pellets in the depths of the 'Makkaushi Cave' of my mind, beginning to function furiously and to rave, urging and imploring for the earliest possible release." This peculiar mode of identification is based on a fundamental attitude that regards every living thing, human or plant, as equal in the continuation of life itself. The outlook is obviously religious, ascribable to the underlying spirit of Buddhism to which Takeda is so closely related by family and race.
The Captain, who has committed the gravest of sins, does not offer any legal or religious argument of self-justification. He does not try, through retaliation, to degrade the whole of humanity by marking it with the Sign of the Beast. He does not flaunt the courtroom spectators with the truth, a truth so horrible that mankind has been careful to avoid confronting it: that all life feeds upon itself to keep itself going. The Captain simply acknowledges the factual character of human existence, its tension and contradiction, under which he has learned to endure. Eventually the reader is forced to feel the full weight of the Captain's repetition of "bearing up." And the very acknowledgment of this "bearing up" points to Takeda's faith in man's peculiar capacity for transcendence in spite of the earth we are so mired in.
The profound questions raised by Takeda are difficult to present and answer in the conventional structure of the novel. Thus Takeda has sometimes been criticized for his narrative techniques. Yet the essay-in-story that is peculiarly Takeda's is pungently provocative. Takeda's existential-Buddhistic identity-of-all reveals him as a writer at once religious while equally committed to the brutality and illogicality of life itself. This Outcast Generation and Luminous Moss place Takeda at the very center of a compassionate view of troubled man and foreshadow the creation of the first serious religious novel in postwar Japanese literature, a task Takeda has recently indicated he wishes to make his lifework.
Yusaburo Shibuya
Meiji University, Tokyo
Sanford Goldstein
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
Footnotes
* Mamushi no Sue, the Japanese title of Takeda's story, translates as Generation of Vipers. See Matthew 23:33: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?" A new title has been chosen for this translation in order to avoid confusion with Philip Wylie's book.
THIS OUTCAST GENERATION
I
—PERHAPS it's easier to go on living than you think.
I had laid my pillow on the concrete platform used for drying laundry, and I was relaxing in the sun. I took a sunbath there every morning after coming out of my dim back room. In the corner, as usual, were two chickens pecking away at leftover rice and withered vegetables. From the alley below came the almost threatening voices of Chinese haggling over bargains from the Japanese. The voices of the Japanese were low, feeble, and confused, so their customers sounded even more overbearing in their abuse. Only the voices of Japanese children at play were full of energy and happiness. Oddly enough, those joyful cries made the parents even more irritable.
—Since everyone's apparently able to get along like this.
With my weak vision it looked to me as if the wall of a theatre beyond the house roofs stood out garishly white. It seemed to float radiantly white out of the blue winter sky.
—You can lose a war, see your country collapse. And still you can go on living.
Before I had realized it, the shop windows of even the Japanese were decorated with flags of Nationalist China and photographs of Chiang Kai-shek and his wife. I too had bought a small photograph from an old man peddling pictures of the couple. The snapshot had sold like hotcakes.
—All you need is a guardian angel.
To prepare for the inspection tours of the Chinese police, I had put the photograph between the pages of a notebook. When the Chinese national anthem was sung at the movies, the audience stood up and so did I, my eyes obediently on the flag and a framed picture of Sun Yat-sen, I had stood up apathetically, like a puppet, and then sat down, and the movie over, I had gone out through the crowds of Chinese teenagers pushing me around. I had merely listened indifferently as the agitated audience cried out simultaneously over a violently anti-Japanese film. Sometimes I had no expression on my face, sometimes I smiled reluctantly. Whatever the occasion, the only thing I really marveled at was my own ability to somehow continue living when I so easily might have been dead. At first, I believed that bearing the humiliation kept me going. But when I thought over the defeat and its aftermath, I felt no shame, nothing in fact. My blank face and reluctant smile were merely the mask by which-1 was simply living without any humiliation whatsoever.
I started to earn my keep by writing out documents in Chinese. There was no end of callers. Since my landlord was a broker, his customers of the past fifteen years came to me in a constant stream. They were so totally confused that they even talked respectfully to me! Even in defeat life marches on. As if to confirm this principle, clients came to me to lodge complaints of various kinds. A pale old man once asked me to help him after his employer had been robbed and kidnapped. Unless the police were notified immediately, his boss would be in for some real trouble. So urged, I had gone into my dark back room on the second floor. Even in broad daylight I turned on the electricity. I spread out my carbons on a tangerine crate. I sluggishly went about my task with the help of a Japanese-Chinese dictionary. And the job finished, I was paid off. I would hesitate in giving my fee. The currency of the puppet-government was still in circulation, and I had to figure out the price of four packs of cigarettes. The money I earned came out of human
