Editor's Note

Mountain / Home presents new translations of Japanese works from the medieval period to the present. The volume opens with selections from "One Hundred Literary Views of Mount Fuji," a collection of Japanese writing showing the ways in which the mountain, more than any other national symbol, has represented the soul of the country. Sacred home of the gods and an emblem of romantic love in medieval Japan, the mountain becomes, in the Edo Period, a symbol of the transcience of all life. In the darkest years of the twentieth century, a dramatic change occurs when the image of Mount Fuji is manipulated to reinforce Japanese imperialism. The national self-image changes once again after World War Two, and despite the commercialization of an icon, the mountain retains its integrity.

When Emperor Meiji ascended the throne in 1868, modernity swept into the country, upending centuries of traditional culture. To match the strength and influence of America and the great European nations, the Japanese government mandated an effort to industrialize and to stockpile advanced military weaponry. Factories and smokestacks marred the landscape and darkened the skies; workers crowded into the cities; social relationships changed. The government began to invoke Fuji not for its association with beauty, spirituality, and refined emotions, but as a symbol of a divinely sanctioned fascist, militarized version of Shintoism. Going to war with its neighbors, the country defeated China and then Russia, and expanded its borders through brutal overseas colonization, which further coarsened the Japanese soul. Seeking the latest knowledge of modern science, economics, weaponry, and military tactics, the government encouraged the translation of books from English and European languages and inadvertently set in motion an intense curiosity about Western literature and art. Some of the foreign authors the Japanese discovered endorsed the dark logic of total war; others expressed existential despair and anti-government resistance. Natsume Sōseki, Dazai Osamu, Yoshioka Minoru, and Ayukawa Nobuo were among the Japanese writers who adapted experimental techniques as a reaction to the troubled times. Meanwhile, propaganda posters showed Mount Fuji standing protectively over the nation, and Japanese fighter planes silhouetted against the mountain's serene beauty.

Natsume Sōseki, one of the greatest novelists of the Meiji Period (1868–1912), is represented here by an excerpt from his coming-of-age novel Sanshirō. Born shortly before Commodore Matthew Perry forced the Tokugawa shogunate to allow American business interests to operate in Japan, Sōseki was disturbed by the headlong industrialization that enthralled the Japanese soul to alien values. In Sanshirō, the young protagonist from the countryside is encouraged by a Western-educated scholar to look critically at the military propaganda exploiting Mount Fuji to glorify Japan's aggression.

Dazai Osamu, another important fiction writer of the period, wrote vividly about his generation's helplessness during the rise of fascism, and about the cost that Japan paid after its defeat in 1945. To survive the spiritual darkness that seemed to swallow up all hope, Dazai depended on alcohol and morphine. After multiple suicide attempts, he died at the age of thirty-eight, drowning himself with his mistress in a Tokyo aqueduct. The protagonist in his short story "Villion's Woman" is like Dazai himself, a self-destructive, non-conformist poet who is unable to cope with reality. He speaks of a terror that drives him to suicidal thoughts, yet he clings to life.

For many Japanese poets of the period, free verse seemed the truest style in which to describe the world's traumatic, spiritual dislocation. The fractured indirection of Surrealism's modernist language allowed the poets to avoid revealing their opposition to the government and to the "thought police," who hunted for subversives everywhere. In the two early books by Yoshioka Minoru printed here, the poet shows the influences of abstract art and experimental dance forms. Reading the poetry, says one translator, is like looking at a Cubist painting. Images and objects appear in unnatural juxtaposition, held in place by a geometry that expresses the social chaos and spiritual angst of the times.

In a similar search for new forms, Ayukawa Nobuo was attracted by the imagistic tension he found in T. S. Eliot...