Contemporary Japanese Literature

Keikoku bidan belonged to the genre of the so- called ‘political novel’, then very popular in Japan. Yano Ryūkei was a bureaucrat, a politician – he was one of

Echoes of Ancient Greek Myths in Murakami Haruki’s novels and in Other Works of

Giorgio Amitrano

the organizers of the Constitutional Reform Party – a journalist and a writer. His aim in writing Keikoku bidan was to create a novel which would encourage young Japanese men to build a constitutional government. Th e remote Greek setting helped to avoid censorship, but the choice was also determined by the author’s desire to project Japan’s democratic ambitions onto a foreign mirror.

Not just any western mirror, but the mirror that could represent to Japanese people the very cradle of western civilization. Th e book chronicles the struggle of Th ebes and other city- states to overthrow Sparta’s rule in the Peloponnesian war. Th e author acknowledges ancient sources and mentions both Xenophon and Plutarch, whose works he supposedly read in English translation. ⁴

I mentioned the cultural distance that separates modern Japan from ancient Greece, but the cultural distance of contemporary Japan from what Japan was at the dawn of modernity is, aft er more than a century and a half, no less signiﬁ cant.

Following the Meiji Restoration (1868), which in itself marked a social revolution, Japan underwent a series of changes of unprecedented intensity. Few countries have experienced such a traumatic encounter with modernity. And this was just a prelude to a much more dramatic string of painful events and traumas, which culminated in the tragic results of the Second World War. It is not my intention to summarize in a few sentences a long and complicated history, but it may be useful to remember that the Japanese population suﬀ ered shocks much greater than seeing the dream of the power of the Japanese Empire turning into a nightmare of impotence. Th ey saw the aft ermath of two atomic bombs which, besides killing so many, left a trail of ailing people for decades; they lived through the trauma of hearing the Emperor, direct descendant of the gods, publicly deny his divinity. Th e symbolic impact of this event was devastating and implied a dramatic crisis of identity. Th ey experienced poverty, hunger and humiliation, then slowly recovered, and eventually became protagonists of one of the most amazing phenomena of economic growth in the twentieth century, becoming the world’s second largest economy aft er the United States.

One might wonder whether the Greek world, aft er having been used as a sort of founding myth for the establishment of democracy in Japan, would remain resonant during the turmoil of the twentieth century and retain its signiﬁ cance for Japanese culture. Surprisingly enough, it did. So many references to Greek history, art, philosophy and literature can be found throughout the twentieth century in most ﬁ elds of Japanese culture that it would be right to say that ancient Greece made a signiﬁ cant contribution to the construction of modern Japanese identity.

Traces of this inﬂ uence are still so conspicuous that one of the most celebrated recent novels from a world- famous Japanese author – Kafk a on the Shore ( Umibe

no Kafuka, 2002) by Murakami Haruki – draws inspiration from the Oedipus myth, of which it oﬀ ers a new and original reinvention. In the interval between Yano Ryūkei’s Confucian approach to Greek history and Murakami’s sophisticated version of Greek myths, there have been innumerable references to ancient Greek culture in Japan, and to Greek myths in particular, by far too many writers to be presented here. Nonetheless, providing a few more relevant examples of the Greek heritage in modern Japanese culture could be useful for a better contextualization of Murakami’s work.

I will begin with Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), an internationally recognized author who, in pre- global Japan, anticipated some aspects of the post- modern world (i.e. the emphasis on images, a singular capacity for using the media as a means of expression and self- promotion etc.). Ancient Greece plays a very important role in Mishima’s work. Even though he meant, particularly in his later years, to enhance the value of traditional Japanese culture, his passion for Greek myths was incomparably stronger than his interest in Japanese mythology.

He uses themes taken from classical Greece in various forms, as sources of inspiration for creating stories, and as instruments for plunging into the unconscious and exploring its depths. On each occasion, Mishima shows a deep aﬃ nity with the Greek world, and even his vision of suicide as a noble and beautiful death, fostered by the samurai tradition, is inﬂ uenced by Greek suggestions. A few days before he committed suicide, Mishima mentioned in a letter to a friend that Plato’s Phaedo , where suicide is considered to be an honourable choice under the right circumstances, was one of his recent readings. ⁵ He must have been impressed by observations like the following:

Th en, perhaps, from this point of view, it is not unreasonable to say that a man must not kill himself until God sends some necessity upon him, such as has now come upon me. ⁶

Probably Mishima perceived what Sylvia Plath in her poem ‘Edge’, probably the last poem she wrote before she committed suicide, called ‘the illusion of a Greek necessity’. ⁷ It may not be by chance that Plath’s poem evokes the ﬁ gure of the same Medea from whom Mishima drew inspiration for his short story ‘Shishi’

(‘Th e Lioness’, 1948). ⁸

Th e story, declaredly based on Euripides’ Medea , is set in post- war Japan. Th e heroine, Shigeko, daughter of a wealthy family, has married a man who neglects her and who has aﬀ airs with other women. Th ey met in Mukden, in the Manchuria occupied by the Japanese army in 1931, where the young woman’s father had tried to build a business. Memories of the Japanese retreat from

Manchuria and its horrors linger in Shigeko’s memory. But the tragedies of war do not make her individual drama less intense, nor her feeling of having been betrayed less painful. On the contrary, human passions such as jealousy and hatred seem to relegate history to the background. Shigeko, aft er having heard from her husband that he has betrayed her for another woman, makes her decision. She poisons her rival and her father and then, in order to complete her vengeance and give her husband the cruellest punishment, she kills their child by strangling him.

A less sombre reinvention of Greek classics by Mishima is his novel Shiosai ( Th e Sound of the Waves , 1954), a love story set in a ﬁ shing village of a Japanese island, between a young ﬁ sherman and the beautiful daughter of a rich islander. Th e novel, inspired by Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe , was written a few years aft er Mishima’s visit to Greece in 1951. To judge from his travel diary Aporo no sakazuki ( Th e Cup of Apollo , 1952), in Greece he experienced absolute bliss. He wrote:

‘Greece is the land of my dreams . . . Now I am in Greece. I am drunk on supreme happiness.’ ⁹ He visited the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Temple of Zeus and watched Greek tragedies performed at the theatre of Dionysus. He loved everything about Greece. When he returned to Japan, he enrolled in a course in Greek at Tokyo University and, although he did not pursue the study of the language for long, he continued to cultivate his passion for the country. Several works are homages to Greek mythology, among them a tragedy called Nettaijū ( Th e Tropical Tree , 1960), whose story is inspired by the myth of Electra, and a comedy, Niobe (1949), published in a literary magazine and never produced on stage. ¹⁰

Mishima, who was considered by many the epitome of narcissism, dedicated great attention to this theme. In his essay ‘On Narcissism’, he maintains that narcissism (and self- consciousness) cannot exist in a woman, because she is protected by nature – more precisely by ‘the gravitational pull of the womb’ – from seeing her true face in a mirror.

Narcissus, obsessed by the beauty of his own self- reﬂ ection seen in water, plunged into that water and drowned. Th at he was a man, and not a woman, is evidence of the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks. For Narcissus must, of necessity, be a man. ¹¹

Mishima’s provocative exclusion of woman from the experience of the utterly masculine process of self- consciousness could be read as an attempt to give a philosophical justiﬁ cation to what is basically a homoerotic fantasy. ¹²

One of the most interesting literary experiments based on reinvention of Greek myths is by a woman writer, Kurahashi Yumiko (1935–2005). Her

Anti-Tragedies (Hangeki, 1971) is a group of ﬁ ve short novels, based on themes from Greek tragedy. Th e book appeared just a year aft er Mishima’s death and showed some similarities to his approach in the way Kurahashi borrowed characters and stories from the Greek world and transplanted them in contemporary Japanese settings. Th e most famous among these ﬁ ve novels is To Die at the Estuary ( Kakō ni shisu , 1971), a bizarre and eccentric version of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus .

Takayanagi, an old man, returns to his old hometown, where he has bought a house by the estuary of a river. When the old man sees the house for the ﬁ rst time – it was bought by a friend on his behalf – he is shocked to see the landscape of his childhood turned into a bleak industrial area. Nature has been destroyed and where the summer grasses grew, an oil reﬁ nery and chemical plant have been built. Takayanagi is accompanied by his daughter, Asako. She is so young that she looks more like his granddaughter and although everybody, including the girl herself, ignores it, she actually is his granddaughter, her real father being Takayanagi’s son. Her mother, Takayanagi’s wife, hanged herself when Asako was a little child. Th at is not his only secret. Aft er his father remarried, he slept with his stepmother. ‘He had been driven by the idea that it was something he had to do in order to fulﬁ l the prophecy made about him . . .’ ¹³ Th e prophecy that he would couple with his mother had been made by a blind beggar who, in his turn, had received the same prophecy. Th is man, who had been unable to escape from his fate, had blinded himself aft er killing his father and taking his mother as his wife.

It is not easy for the reader to ﬁ nd a way through such a narrative labyrinth.

But what matters is not shedding light on the plot or understanding the complicated relations among the characters. Th e real interest of the story lies in the sense of an ominous prophecy lurking in an ordinary environment. Th e ancient myth of Oedipus has come a long way from the world of Greek tragedy to settle in a desolate industrial landscape of contemporary Japan, merging into people’s daily life, being completely absorbed in Japanese culture. Kurahashi Yumiko’s choice of Anti-Tragedies as title for her book could not be more appropriate. ¹⁴

Also in Murakami Haruki’s Kafk a on the Shore (Umibe no Kafuka, 2002) a prophecy hangs over the young hero, the ﬁ ft een- year-old Tamura Kafk a (‘Kafk a’

is the name he gave himself as homage to the writer he admires).

At times like that I always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water. ¹⁵

(8)

It is the same Oedipal prophecy echoed through To Die at the Estuary , this time told to Tamura by his father: he will commit patricide and sleep with his mother and – there is a variation here – his sister. Trying to escape the prophecy, Tamura leaves his Tokyo home and goes to Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku, where he ﬁ nds shelter in a private library run by a middle- aged-woman, Miss Saeki, and a friendly young transgendered gay man, Ōshima (he describes himself as a female with a male mind). Tamura, who ﬂ ed from the prophecy as well as from a cruel, malevolent father, feels at home in the library. He likes both Ōshima, who takes him under his wing, and the elusive, attractive Miss Saeki. He is a voracious reader and enjoys choosing books that he reads and discusses with Ōshima. But this idyllic situation is shattered when one night Tamura wakes up in the grounds of a Shintō shrine with his T-shirt soaked in blood, a pain in his shoulder and no memory of what has happened. When he learns from a newspaper that his father (the reader discovers for the ﬁ rst time that he was a famous sculptor) has been brutally killed, he fears that he himself could be the murderer. Although he could not realistically have gone to Tokyo and back in a few hours, he is aware that in a separate reality all sorts of things can happen.

And they do. Miss Saeki’s spirit as a girl of his own age manifests in his room every night. In a forest Tamura meets two soldiers who stepped out of time during the Second World War and live in a parallel dimension.

Th e existence of parallel worlds is reﬂ ected in the structure of the book. As in other Murakami novels, the story is split into two distinct but gradually converging stories, told in alternating chapters. Tamura Kafk a is the hero of the odd- numbered chapters, whereas the even- numbered chapters tell the story of an elderly man, Nakata, who – despite being illiterate and having suﬀ ered some brain damage – has the ability to talk with cats. His brain damage was caused by a mysterious incident at the end of the Second World War, when a group of schoolchildren lost consciousness during a school trip in the local woods. Th e other children recovered and he was the only one permanently aﬀ ected. Nakata, in spite of his innocent and trusting nature, is forced to commit a murder. But his purity remains unpolluted by this episode and his disarming simplicity wins him the respect of Hoshino, a young truck driver, who transports and takes care of Nakata on his trip to Takamatsu. Th e man Nakata killed is no other than Tamura Kōichi, the sculptor, Kafk a’s father, who introduced himself to Nakata under the name of Johnnie Walker.

Th is fact does not, however, resolves the riddle of the boy’s involvement in the murder. He knows that responsibilities do not exist only in the domain of reality.

As Yeats pointed out, ‘In dreams begin responsibilities’. ¹⁶ Th e sentence is quoted in a note written by Ōshima which Kafk a found in a book about Adolf Eichmann.

I shut the book, lay it on my lap, and think about my own responsibility. I can’t help it. My white T-shirt was soaked in fresh blood. I washed the blood away with these hands, so much blood the sink turned red. I imagine I’ll be held responsible for all that blood. I try to picture myself being tried in a court, my accusers doggedly trying to pin the blame on me, angrily pointing ﬁ ngers and glaring at me. I insist that you can’t be held responsible for something you can’t remember. I don’t have any idea what really took place, I tell them. But they counter with this: ‘It doesn’t matter whose dream it started out as, you have the same dream. So you’re responsible for whatever happens in the dream. Th at dream crept inside you, right down the dark corridor of your soul.’ Just like Adolf Eichmann, caught up – whether he liked it or not – in the twisted dreams of a man named Hitler.

(141–142) So, even though Kafk a tried to escape from the prophecy, he was fated to fulﬁ l it – just like Oedipus. Whether he sleeps with his mother and his sister is not clear. Miss Saeki, with whom he has sex, might be his mother, and Sakura, a young woman he meets during his trip to Takamatsu, might be his sister, but Murakami leaves this mystery, as he does many others, unsolved. Kafk a discusses the prophecy with his mentor, Ōshima, who is familiar with the Greek world and is keen on introducing it to Kafk a.

‘If I had to say anything it’d be this: Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.’

‘Kind of an ominous prophecy.’

‘Like Cassandra.’

‘Cassandra?’ I ask.

‘Th e Greek tragedy. Cassandra was the princess of Troy who prophesied. She was a temple priestess, and Apollo gave her the power to predict fate. In return he tried to force her to sleep with him, but she refused and he put a curse on her.

Greek gods are more mythological than religious ﬁ gures. By that I mean they have the same character ﬂ aws humans do. Th ey ﬂ y oﬀ the handle, get horny, jealous, forgetful. You name it.’ . . .

‘What kind of curse was it?’

‘Th e curse on Cassandra?’

I nod.

‘Th e curse Apollo laid on her was that all her prophecies would be true, but nobody would ever believe them. On top of that, her prophecies would all be unlucky ones--predictions of betrayals, accidents, deaths, the country falling into ruin. Th at sort of thing. People not only didn’t believe her, they began to despise her. If you haven’t read them yet, I really recommend the plays by

Euripides or Aeschylus. Th ey show a lot of the essential problems we struggle with even today . . .’

(164) A reviewer of Kafk a on the Shore writes: ‘Kafk a’s guilt is biblical, linked to sexual maturity and the sins of the fathers.’ ¹⁷ I am not completely sure if his guilt is really biblical, but certainly Tamura is dominated by it, like one of Natsume Sōseki’s heroes. Sōseki, whose work is discussed in the novel by Kafk a and Ōshima, excelled in portraying male heroes whose lives were ruined by a sense of culpability that was not entirely justiﬁ ed by the gravity of their errors.

In another dialogue between Ōshima and Kafk a, the assistant librarian uses examples from Greek wisdom to lecture his young protégé.

Ōshima gazes deep into my eyes. ‘Listen, Kafk a. What you’re experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn’t choose fate. Fate chooses man.

Th at’s the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy – according to Aristotle – comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.’

‘But it’s a hopeless situation.’

‘Th at depends,’ Ōshima says. ‘Sometimes it is. But irony deepens a person, helps them mature. It’s the entrance to salvation on a higher plane, to a place where you can ﬁ nd a more universal kind of hope. Th at’s why people enjoy

Im Dokument Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 (Seite 102-134)