The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature

4. The Gothic Novel: Izumi Kyōka and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

C H A P T E R 4 T H E G O T H I C N O V E L Izumi Kyòka and Tanizaki Jun’ichirò As we enter the seventh sphere, you will discover a thin layer of ice just beginning To form on your limbs Do not be alarmed, this is normal You will experience difficulty breathing, this is normal The breathing you experience is difficulty, this is normal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prepare executions and transfusions Put on your latest gear —Michael Palmer Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing and the night cold and the night long and the river to cross and the jack-muh lanterns beckoning beckoning and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going —Robert Hayden T he gothic mode of fiction began in Europe, specifically in England, in the eighteenth century. However, the gothic as a mode of fantasy has persisted until the present day, and it has now spread beyond the novel to encompass several other art forms, most notably, in recent times, the cinema . The characteristics of Gothic fiction in the eighteenth century were the motifs of wrongful imprisonment—the classic plot is an innocent immured 98 • Chapter 4 for years in a castle or abbey—madness, death, and evil spirits or ghosts. The horrors of the French Revolution served as fertile territory for eighteenth-century English Gothic novelists to explore. Although Gothic fiction was almost always exaggerated and melodramatic, there was an element of realism in the portrayal of evil monks and wrongful imprisonment. In parts of eighteenthcentury Europe, aristocrats exercised considerable control over the lives of the peasants who worked their fields. And anticlericalism can easily be traced to the excesses of the pre-Reformation medieval Christian Church. Then in the late nineteenth century, with the growth of large urban conurbations in Europe, especially London and Paris, gothic fiction underwent a revival. But this time, especially for the fin-de-siècle artistic movement, gothic stood for the territory of the unconscious. The isolated urban worker produced by the industrial revolution had generated a form of literature in which ghosts, demons, and wild, romantic landscapes were, more often than not, metaphors for the psychological stress and utopian fantasies of alienated city-dwellers. Gothic fiction, which had been often been denounced by contemporary critics but was widely popular with readers, became respectable in Europe, and many of the leading writers of the day tinkered with the genre. It was the fiction produced by these writers that was translated and consumed by Japanese readers and writers alike in everincreasing quantities as the nineteenth century drew to a close.1 Gothic has been defined as a mode of romance, as an elaboration of fantasy, and in a variety of other ways. One thing that gothic writing in both Japan and the West shared was a link to the Modern movement, the turn towards a literature of the unconscious, and this aspect of Japanese gothic will also come under scrutiny in this chapter. Hence I define gothic in the broadest possible sense to cover a number of related modes of writing, and by applying the term to two practitioners of fiction in early-twentieth-century Japan, I intend to illuminate stylistic and thematic affinities common to these writers without drawing any specific historical parallels to the Western mode of gothic. My approach will be generally comparative, utilizing the notion of gothic for specific hermeneutic ends, but I will make no sustained effort to trace historical influences from the Western to the Japanese tradition, notwithstanding the fact that such cross-cultural influences certainly existed. The Gothic Mode of Fiction Hashimoto Yoshiichirö, in a brief history of aestheticism in modern Japanese literature, traces a tradition of the decadent (which later developed into diab- Izumi Kyöka and Tanizaki Jun’ichirö • 99 olism) from late-nineteenth-century thinkers like Takayama Chogyü (1871– 1902)—known as the foremost interpreter of Nietzsche to Meiji Japan—to such romantic theorists as the poets Kitamura Tökoku (1868–1894) and Ueda Bin. Hashimoto constructs a chain of influence that results in such novelists as Nagai Kafü (1879–1959) and Tanizaki Jun’ichirö (1886–1965), who, Hashimoto argues, are the inheritors of this decadent tradition of...