Japan's Meiji Era and the soul of Japan: part 1

JAPAN TIMES
FEB 20, 2016

‘Japan’s first modern novel” was published serially between 1887 and 1889.

A magazine article of 1887 helps us get our bearings: “It is now over 20 years since the Restoration; our Meiji society will soon have gone through a whole generation. … The ways of the East will disappear; the ways of the West will soon overtake us. The period for destroying the old will end and the time for building the new will be upon us.”

The novel’s title is “Ukigumo” (“Drifting Cloud”) — which strikes rather an odd note. The Meiji Era (1868-1912) was characterized by pell-mell modernization, industrialization, commercialization and devil take the hindmost. “Drifting clouds” fell by the wayside. There was no time for them. Before we even open the book, therefore, we know, more or less, that the hero is an antihero: sensitive, intelligent, idealistic, sincere, loving — a hopeless failure. To the wayside with him.

“Ukigumo” and its author, Shimei Futabatei (1864-1909), are largely forgotten nowadays. Read today, the novel falls flat, its interest more historical than literary. A crude summary of it might run something like this: Nice boy (Bunzo) falls in love with nice but superficial girl (Osei) and wages a contest for her heart with Noboru, a “new man” of Meiji — bold, enterprising, stupid as a post but with success written all over him because he, unlike Bunzo, can bow and scrape to his official superiors without degrading himself in his own eyes. He’ll go far; Bunzo will go nowhere. Though the novel ends without revealing which of the two gets the girl, the smart money would be on Noboru.

Thin as this seems to us, Futabatei’s first readers would have seen in it things we no longer do: a new type of novel of new types of people in a brand new Japan. Marleigh Grayer Ryan, in an exhaustive introduction to her translation of “Ukigumo,” quotes strange praise from a leading critic of the day: “There is nothing especially funny or amusing in the novel. It is not magnificent or elegant. It is a banal, domestic novel.”

That’s praise? Yes — because, the critic continues, “although the events in the novel seem extremely random, limited, trivial and pedestrian, (Futabatei) observes them with his penetrating eye, portrays them, analyzes and explains them. … ‘Ukigumo’ is a study of the human mind; its author is a master of analyzing human emotions.”

Cont'd
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