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 part from the nature of the structure of social groups" (Nakane 102). The social pattern of the Shogunate survived into the Meiji period, which followed it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the Meiji period political and social institutions alike expressed imperial and centralized political and social hegemony.
A highly structured, rule-bound culture dominates Japan, particularly among the elite classes. When the formal abolition...