Search for Origins in Japanese Literature

The purpose of this research is to examine issues and themes relating to the discovery of origins in twentieth-century Japanese fiction. The plan of the research will be to set forth the literary and historical context in which origins have become relevant factors of textual analysis, and then to discuss, with particular reference to Tanizaki's Bridge of Dreams and Kyoka's The Holy Man of Mt. Koya, the narrative strategies behind the pattern of ideas relating to the search for origins and the means by which these ideas emerge in the works.

The traditions of Japanese history and culture cannot be ignored in any fair exploration of its art, including literature. Three major periods of Japanese government and culture, each of which followed the other in Japanese history, may be considered in this connection: the Heian, which flourished in the tenth century A.D.; the Shogunate under the Tokugawa dynasty, which flourished from about the twelfth century until the nineteenth century; and the Meiji period, which lasted from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War II.

Lines of continuity that run through all of these traditions position Japanese culture as highly authoritarian, elitist, and hierarchical, and defined by codes of social behavior. Nakane cites "the all-inclusive web of regulations emanating from the Shogunate and the feudal territories" that prevailed in the Tokugawa period, "not simply a reflection of the power of the Shogunate . . . but issuing in large

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ciousness. According to Ito, this articulation is consistent with Tanizaki's own memoir of his mother in a way that "delineates a beauty distilled and essential. . . . This tendency to portray his mother as a concept other than a person frequently colors Tanizaki's depictions of her" (17). The same kind of coloration can be seen to be at work in The Bridge of Dreams, where Tadasu recalls only the beautiful, magical, dreamlike perfection of Mother and more or less spends his life trying to reclaim that perfection and make that vital reconnection. DeZure connects The Bridge of Dreams to the notion of amae psychology, the name given to what she says are "personality syndromes particular to Japan" that refer to "reciprocal dependence, denial of separation, passive love, passivity, loss of self, and, in its more neurotic forms, mother fixation and obsession" (DeZure 46). The last-named attribute is consistent with the action of The Bridge of Dreams inasmuch as Tadasu's very exercise of writing down his memories of Mother and stepmother can be interpreted as such a fixation. But the impulse toward recovery of memory is also a feature, as DeZure points out, of Remembrance of Things Past, just as mother fixation has a Western analogue in

Category: Literature - S