Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature (review)

Spirit Matters is an attractive book. The front of the dust jacket features a sepia-look photograph of birches, and the back offers praise from two authors of previous well-received studies on modern Japanese authors. Van C. Gessel (see particularly The Sting of Life: Four Contemporary Japanese Novelists; Columbia University Press, 1989, on four writers of the "Third Generation," daisan no shinjin) assures us that no one but Philip Gabriel "could have undertaken such an ambitious work," while Mark Williams (author of Endō Shūsaku: A Literature of Reconciliation; Routledge, 1999) calls it "groundbreaking and highly original." A look at the summary on the front and back flaps reveals an unexpected lineup of postwar authors: the female Christian writers Miura Ayako and Sono Ayako, the internationally popular Murakami Haruki, and the Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō, whose criticism of Murakami as superficial and consumerist is well remembered. What themes, what manner of spirit is it that holds the book together, we wonder. We learn that the author, initially "enamored" of postmodernist Japanese literature, has come to agree with Fredric Jameson's verdict of "depthlessness" on postmodernist writing. Gabriel hopes for a literature that will "attempt to address, not to defer or to deflect, some of the major issues of life" (p. 2). He notes a scarcity of English-language studies on "spiritual" themes in modern Japanese literature, despite the popularity in Japan of new religions and of fictional or nonfictional books on religious subjects. The decisive impulse leading to the writing of Spirit Matters, however, came from literary reactions to the sarin gas attacks on Tokyo subways in 1995: Murakami's Yakusoku sareta basho de (1998; translated as "The Place that was Promised," in Underground, 2000) and Ōe's novel Chūgaeri (1999; translated as Somersault, 2003). Gabriel then combined the issues raised by these works with another strand of research concerning Japanese Christian writers "in an attempt at a broader look at spirituality and literature" (p. 4).

Unfortunately "spirit" or "spiritual" are never really defined or distinguished from neighboring terms (e.g., religious or divine) or related to Japanese near equivalents (e.g., seishin); Gabriel only lists some "spiritual" themes treated by contemporary Japanese writers: "the existence of a soul or inner being, of an afterlife, of a god or spiritual forces beyond the everyday; and the possibilities of the supernatural or the miraculous" (p. 2). He thus embarks on his literary readings without a clearly defined set of coordinates.

In chapter 1, "The Frozen Soul: Sin and Forgiveness in Miura Ayako's Freezing Point," Gabriel deals with Miura's Hyōten (1964-1965; translated as Freezing Point, 1986) and its sequel Zoku hyōten (1970-1971; Freezing Point II), "arguably amongst the most widely read novels of the past three decades" (p. 12). Despite her avowedly missionary aims, Miura initially held back more nuanced discussions of her theme of original sin in favor of creating a popular story—the first novel was her debut, after she won a lucrative writing competition organized by the Asahi newspaper. At the center of the plot is the family of a successful doctor whose daughter is kidnapped and murdered after her mother has sent her outside to play, in order to be alone with an admirer. Both works together show how everyone concerned is in some way guilty, but equally, nearly all the characters find a way of seeking deliverance from their sinful state. Gabriel criticizes Miura for not adequately illustrating the problems of original sin and repentance as defined by Christian doctrine, especially in the first novel; he points out, however, that a full explication of theology is too much to expect of a novelist and that, in any case, Miura dared to go further towards an openly missionary approach in the sequel. On the place of this writer in the context of Japanese literature, he concludes that her work "raises in interesting ways the whole question of the possibilities of 'evangelical literature...