read the English versions, was a kind of shock."26 This need not discourage, but it should caution the reader or critic to mind his characters.
He must also mind the fact that he operates with a set of critical assumptions and approaches which may be quite unlike those of the authors he sets out to study. Westerners often insist on a form or structural consistency which a Japanese novel may not exhibit. Edward Seidensticker comments about such "unshapen" examples, suggesting that a new literary category might be necessary to properly account for them. "One wonders whether a more embracing genre might not be established, without reference to the degree to which a particular work is fictional and perhaps given some such name as 'discursive lyric.' If so, it would embrace a great deal of what is most pleasing in Japanese literature, even if the best of that literature might have to be excluded. The genre would be characterized by the want of concern with over-all form and dramatic conflict and by a compensating emphasis upon a succession of lyrical moments."27 One thinks of certain of Kawabata's works as partly within such a tradition. And one should note that the "I-novel" (watakushi shosetsu), or autobiographical fiction, has a long history in Japan and, though somewhat in disrepute in the West, it is one of the major motifs (some say the mainstream) of Japanese fiction. Further, there is a difference between the Western autobiographical novel and the Japanese "I-novel." "In the Western autobiographical novel," says Jun Eto, "the life of the protagonist is usually presented against a wide social background because the confrontation of the protagonist's self with his social and cultural environment is the fundamental problem for the author. On the other hand, the Japanese watakushi shosetsu is a genre in which the assertion of the protagonist's (and therefore the author's) sensibility or passion is the main point."28 An awareness of such a difference could of course profoundly affect one's reading of a given work.
But when these and other apologies and allowances have been made, the novels and the identity theme, happily, remain. The identity theme in fact suggests that while the postwar Japanese novel may retain much that is Japanese, it also speaks to contemporary man, is relevant to his deepest preoccupations. Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, for some weeks America's best-selling novel in 1969, illustrates the currency of the theme. The book shows, among other things, the narrator's continuous struggle with his identity. There are other themes in the novels considered here, of course, and one could approach them in different ways. They speak of love, death, alienation, loneliness, hope, despair, tragedy, and triumph; the motifs are universal. Each of the novels could be thought of as representing a quest for affirmation, a search for a frame of reference that would confirm the worth of modern man. Thus, the troubled young high school graduate struggling to reach university might find his frustrations embodied in diminutive Bird, the hero of Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter. Perhaps the problems he outlines in his letter to the Yomiuri will even find a solution through Bird's courage in quitting the academic world and achieving satisfaction through other work in a way which carries an implicit challenge to the assumption that a university diploma is the magic ticket to job and success. For the boy's father, approaching retirement on an inadequate income, the zesty lust for life of Tanizaki's mad old man may prove heartwarming; or he may find a different kind of consolation in the fellow-suffering of Kawabata's aging protagonist, Eguchi, in House of the Sleeping Beauties. A young woman who feels trapped by obligations to her parents and fears that life is passing her by may gain a sense of liberation from Osaragi's resourceful women in Homecoming. Or again, salary men, teachers, government workers, and others caught in the routine of the organization may find a kindred spirit in the estranged hero of Abe's Woman of the Dunes. As such persons join in the fictional quest, they will find pleasure, challenge, sometimes even medicine.
More often than not, the quest will be introspective. Due in part to the theories of Freud, Jung, and their followers, twentieth-century man will more than likely turn inward for the answer to who he is. The terrain of his search will be the landscape of the mind; the quest will be into the depths of his own consciousness, as it is for Eguchi, Niki, Mizoguchi, and Bird, the heroes of Kawabata, Abe, Mishima, and Oe. Under the particular stresses and strains of his time he may feel himself a schizophrenic victim, divided against himself like the troubled speaker of Theodore Roethke's poem, "In a Dark Time," who asks, "Which I is I?"29 And having tunneled within, he may have to turn outward again, looking beyond himself for any certainty or affirmation. Rituals, declares Margaret Mead, are man's ways of showing that his humanity depends on the traditional wisdom of society. But what if the traditional wisdom should fail? "When men lose this sense that they can depend upon this wisdom, either because they are thrown among those whose behaviour is to them no guarantee of the continuity of civilization or because they can no longer use the symbols of their own society, they go mad, retreating slowly, often fighting a heart-breaking rear action as they relinquish bit by bit their cultural inheritance, learned with such difficulty, never learned so that the next generation is safe."30 In Shohei Ooka's Fires on the Plain, the bewildered protagonist, finding indeed "no guarantee of the continuity of civilization" in his death-ridden surroundings, goes mad. He retreats into schizophrenic isolation. Artists, in pursuing the quest, sometimes find disturbing answers.
The quest begins at the war's end, "in a dark time." From defeat comes the need for redefinition. After the bomb drops and the paralysis ends, one must try to discover in past remembrances, present facts, and future unknowns some purpose for rebuilding. Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain directs one to elemental needs, suggesting that hope may be in the form of the everyday. For the self-preoccupied expatriate of Homecoming, however, such comforts are inadequate. He fails to find himself. The trapped man of Abe's Woman in the Dunes finds his existence a prison, but reduced to elemental considerations is able to reconcile himself to his fate. Kawabata's old man is not so fortunate; his attempt at symbolic escape ends in frustration. Mishima's alienated young acolyte in Temple of the Golden Pavilion reveals an artist's sensibility; his quest for freedom ends in ambiguity. Oe's version ends more positively. The hero of A Personal Matter discovers within himself the courage to fight; when he decides it shall be on behalf of others, he at last realizes who he is. But if the quest ends happily for Bird, it begins on a note of terror for the victims of the great war in the Pacific. In the Philippine jungles at war's end, dying soldiers see a way of life turn to nightmare, a holy cause turn to madness and disease. The quest for identity begins with all pretenses stripped away. Ooka's Private Tamura is the incarnation of a horrifying possibility. Could contemporary man, could a Japanese, be a cannibal?
2
THE WAR AND THE CANNIBALS
Fumiko Hayashi's short story "Bones" records a nightmare:
The man woke up, aroused by his own cries. "Oh, I had a terrible dream," he said....
"What kind of a dream was it?" she asked.
"Well, I killed a soldier. I killed a dying man... fried his flesh and ate it...."1
The apparition haunts the Japanese literary imagination in the immediate postwar era. The Japanese, however, are not alone. A host of more or less illustrious literary witnesses, from Montaigne to Mailer, testify that cannibalism continues to provoke men to creative response.2 On one level, the taboo-ridden specter of humans eating human flesh calls to mind primitive rites of identification, the eating of something to become like the thing eaten, a practice which persists symbolically in the Christian sacrament. On another level, the one most exploited by modern writers, cannibalism is an emblematic projection of the darkness of man's mind, of all that resists the civilizing conventions of society, an actualization of the savage, sexually assaulting, death-dealing potential we sometimes suspect, but may deny, lies within us.3 At its dramatic worst, it is reversion to chaos, annihilation, the ironic vision of man consuming himself in an ultimate madness. Cannibalism, in the hands of the ironist, is a powerful theme, portraying man as glutton, rapist, madman, killer, and—under a compassionate touch—as man in need.
Part of the theme's shock value is that such an act, almost universally considered unnatural, can occur at all among modern, technologically advanced, "civilized"
