Modern Japanese Prose Narrative

This paper examines one of the most striking examples of the battle which every society, culture, and civilization inevitably fights with its individual members. Each configuration which involves more than one single human being sets up an inevitable conflict between the separate participants and the group as a whole. Nowhere is this more dramatically demonstrated than in the ferocious struggle that characterized Japan's domestic history during the early part of the twentieth century. The battle engaged every member of society, and this study analyzes one of the bloodiest battlefields of all: the literary one. Shimazaki Toson's The Broken Commandment and Natsume Soseki's Kokoro stand in for their nation's struggle to decide how far an individual's choices and compelling need to join an unfamiliar "modern world" can go before they obliterate everything that defines Japan itself. James Fujii, in Complicit Fictions, argues that "texts constitute history." As the conflict of these novels demonstrates, he could not be more right.

Until the mid-1800s, the Japanese had succeeded in sustaining a complex, entrenched, formalized way of living that left little room for self-determination or individual change--or even for its members to consider that they could make such choices. Then, suddenly, Japan's radical collision with the West forced the society as a whole to choose. Under Emperor Meiji, Japan was strong-armed i

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origins but longs to confess the truth. He becomes a popular schoolteacher and witnesses the suffering of other eta before finally deciding he must tell his students the truth: "I would like you to remember that you had a teacher called Segawa once, in the fourth year of the upper school, who taught you in this room--who told you, when he confessed to you that he was an eta and said goodbye to all the class, that each first of January he had welcomed in the New Year with the same sweet wine as you do, that on the Emperor's birthday he had sung 'May They Glorious Reign' as fervently as you, and wished you well, praying in his heart for your happiness and success . . . I have done my best each day to teach you only what is right and true. Please remember this, and forgive me if you can for having kept the truth from you till today" (Toson 229). Toson was heavily influenced by his reading of Western authors including Shakespeare; this passage in particular echoes Shylock's famous plea in The Merchant of Venice for understanding of the Jews. Critics have debated whether Toson meant his novel to be a cry for social justice toward members of the society who were still outcasts despite legal and cosmetic changes. They argue instead
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Approximate Word count = 2778
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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