The Broken Commandment by Shimazaki Tôson as a Harbinger of Diaspora Literature

As a historical term, "Diaspora" refers first to the dispersion of the Jews from Judea by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. In its recent use in literary and cultural studies, "diaspora" points to "dispersed people; persons without a homeland; wandering people" and "any scattering of people with a common origin, background, beliefs, etc."¹

Particularly in the comparative study of literature, the concept of diaspora has become increasingly important in critical analysis of an author's life course, plot construction, characterization, motifs, and themes. A diasporic perspective can yield fresh insights and allow new assessments of novelists and their works. It is applicable in critical appraisal not only of many major writers who physically crossed national and cultural borders in real life, but also of their protagonists whose diasporic lives reveal a broader range of worldviews and human relations hitherto undetected by traditional approaches.

In this global age, when postmodern and transnational tendencies are expected to increase in literature, many past and present masters merit review using the latest criteria. To cite just a few examples, Lafcadio Hearn and Kazuo Ishiguro seem well-suited for diasporic studies. They left their homelands, settled in distant countries, produced literary works in English, and attained worldwide renown.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was born in Greece of an Irish father and a Greek mother, educated in Ireland, worked as a journalist in America, reached Japan in 1890, and naturalized under his wife's surname in 1895 as Koizumi Yakumo. He avidly absorbed Japanese traditions and folklore, fleshed them out to evoke a charming narrative realm of his own, and introduced Japanese stories to the world through Exotics and Retrospective (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1890), and Kwaidan [Supernatural tales] (1904; movie filmed by director Masaki Kobayashi in 1964), and others. In his diasporic visions, Hearn was a century ahead of the global-age scholars of international relations and literary theories.²

A contemporary exemplar is a London resident, Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki of Japanese parents in 1954 and has been living in England since the age of 5. Is he a Japanese writer or a British one? His literary identity has been a matter of debate in Japan. His award-winning works range from Japanese stories such as A Pale View of Hills (1982, the Winifred Holtby Prize) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award), followed by the British stories The Remains of the Day (1989, the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, short-listed for the Booker Prize), and most recently the chillingly original futuristic novel set in a school for cloned children, Never Let Me Go (2005, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize). Ishiguro continues to pose fresh challenges for literary critics due to his transmutation from realism to postmodernism, Orientalism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, "glocalism," and even to diasporism and far beyond.³

An examination of the literary history of modern Japan reveals the presence of a pioneer of diasporic literature at the beginning of the twentieth century. Shimazaki Tôson (1872–1943) is honored as a Japanese trailblazer in naturalism for his first novel, Hakai.⁴ Its protagonist Ushimatsu is a young school teacher forced to hide the fact that he is a descendant of outcasts, displaced from the four feudal classes of samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant. As Tôson refers sympathetically to the suffering of the Jews abroad in his own time, a diasporic analysis can be duly applied by plumbing the depth of Ushimatsu's agony, revealing his desperate search for a way to open up new horizons of hope as a universal experience.

This critique aims to contribute global-age insights to the long established evaluation of The Broken Commandment by focusing on the pioneering role it played in giving birth to a Japanese version of literature of the diaspora.

Hakai (The Broken Commandment): A Novel of a Unique Type in Japan

This fiction work has attracted the attentions of many renowned cultural political and literary critics. Hirano Ken (1907–78) in...