Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature

Two Dreams and the Alphabet of Trauma

Dreams and the Alphabet of Trauma I want to succeed in writing works of a living person. This seems like a spell for me. For people to understand me clearly, there must first be a greater sacrifice. Shimao Toshio, 1953 The Alphabet of Trauma In the lexicon of postwar Japanese literature , dreams and the work of Shimao Toshio are nearly synonymous. In a burst of creativity just after the war (1946–1948) Shimao wrote eighteen stories, twelve of them dream narratives, that is, short stories based on the logic of the unconscious. Several of these, most notably “Yume no naka de no nichijō” (1948; trans. 1985, “Everyday Life in a Dream”), have become modern classics.1 Shimao continued to use the unconscious as a major source for his literature throughout his career. In addition to some thirty stories classified in one way or another as dream stories, he wrote essays on dreams, lectured widely on dreams and the unconscious, and even published two volumes of dream diaries: Ki mu shi (Record of dreams, 1973), and Yume nikki (Dream diary , 1978). Okuno Takeo’s often-repeated statement that he “staked the future direction of Japanese literature” on Shimao’s literary dream project is indicative of the high regard with which critics generally held these early stories.2 While the stories created Shimao’s reputation among the lit51 erati as a critically admired “writer’s writer,” among the general readership they created an image of a difficult avant-garde writer more concerned with literary experimentalism than the reading public, a reputation that was to follow him throughout his career.3 The early 1950s Daisan no shinjin (Third group of new writers) closely associated with him—Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, Shōno Junzō, Kojima Nobuo, Endō Shūsaku —soon went on to both critical and public acclaim. However, Shimao would wait until late in his career for acclaim when he adopted a style even more subtle than the dream stories, a complex mix of realism and the surreal, coupled with themes the other writers had successfully exploited: closed-in male-female relations (Yoshiyuki), shishōsetsu like details of domestic life and recovery from crisis (Shōno), sympathetic characters in time of war (Kojima), and, albeit muted, a concern for faith and religion (Endō).4 Why dream stories, and why the profusion of them at one time? One answer lies in what Tom Wolfe calls the “damnable problem of material ,” the notion that “literary genius, in prose, consists more on the order of 65 percent material and 35 percent talent.”5As a writer who felt constitutionally incapable of constructing “tales” (monogatari), Shimao throughout his career found material for fiction a particular problem , and dreams proved a convenient well of inspiration. Weaving together remembered scenes from dreams, often in one sitting, produced a manuscript, he discovered, of just the right length.6 A second answer lies in the influence of Kafka. As Shimao writes in his essay, “Honyaku bun de yonda Kafuka” (Reading Kafka in translation , 1949), soon after the end of the war he found Kafka’s approach to writing, and his dream-like stories, a revelation. Kafka, it is said, “became a major writer when he discovered his dream narrative,”7 and the same can be said of Shimao. Having read a portion of “The Trial” in translation soon after the war, Shimao was drawn to character Joseph K’s dream-like “field of vision.” “Narrow and abrupt” though it was, this vision held an appealing “symbolic meaning” that, for Shimao, who was obsessed with the search for ways to connect inner and outer worlds, provided a model for his own fiction.8 Intriguing parallels, too, can be found between Shimao’s method of composition and Kafka’s. Kafka wrote “The Judgment,” the first story he considered a success, in one night, “in a kind of seizure in which his ordinary constraints and inhibitions fell away so that the story seemed to write itself.” 52 Chapter 2 Only so could Kafka write. What he abominated was “constructions,” the deliberate contrivances of the calculating consciousness. . . . Inspiration meant the spontaneous expression of his more intuitive, more unconscious side, with its truer grasp of reality, with its grasp of the hidden living rather than the mentally constructed reality.9 Shimao has spoken of his early dream stories as written, much like Kafka ’s, in an “extremely spontaneous way” (hijō ni shizenhatsuteki ni...