Japanese Literature
Early works of
Japanese literature were heavily influenced by cultural contact with
China and
Chinese literature, often written in
Classical Chinese.
Indian literature also had an influence through the diffusion of
Buddhism in Japan.
Eventually, Japanese literature developed into a separate style in its
own right as Japanese writers began writing their own works about Japan,
although the influence of Chinese literature and Classical Chinese
remained until the end of the
Edo period. Since Japan reopened its ports to Western trading and diplomacy in the 19th century,
Western and Eastern literature have strongly affected each other and continue to do so.
Ancient literature (until 794)
Before the introduction of
kanji
from China, Japanese had no writing system. At first, Chinese
characters were used in Japanese syntactical formats, and the result was
sentences that look like Chinese but were read phonetically as
Japanese. Chinese characters were further adapted, creating what is
known as
man'yōgana, the earliest form of
kana, or syllabic writing. The earliest works were created in the
Nara period. These include
Kojiki (712), a work recording Japanese mythology and legendary history;
Nihon Shoki (720), a chronicle with a slightly more solid foundation in historical records than
Kojiki; and
Man'yōshū (759), a poetry anthology. One of the stories they describe is the tale of
Urashima Tarō, which has been identified as the earliest example of a story involving
time travel
Classical literature (794–1185)
Classical Japanese literature generally refers to literature produced during the
Heian period, referred to as the golden era of art and literature.
Genji Monogatari (early 11th century) by a woman named
Murasaki Shikibu is considered the pre-eminent masterpiece of Heian fiction and an early example of a work of fiction in the form of a
novel. Other important writings of this period include the
Kokin Wakashū (905), a
waka-poetry anthology, and
Makura no Sōshi (990s), the latter written by Murasaki Shikibu's contemporary and rival,
Sei Shōnagon, as an essay about the life, loves, and pastimes of nobles in the Emperor's court. The
iroha poem, now one of two standard orderings for the Japanese
syllabary, was also developed during the early part of this period.
The 10th century Japanese narrative,
Taketori Monogatari, can be considered an early example of proto-
science fiction. The protagonist of the story, Kaguya-
hime,
is a princess from the Moon who is sent to Earth for safety during a
celestial war, and is found and raised by a bamboo cutter. She is later
taken back to her extraterrestrial family in an illustrated depiction of
a disc-shaped flying object similar to a
flying saucer.Another notable piece of fictional Japanese literature was
Konjaku Monogatarishū, a collection of over a thousand stories in 31 volumes. The volumes cover various
tales from India,
China
and Japan. In this time, the imperial court particularly patronized the
poets, most of whom were courtiers or ladies-in-waiting. Reflecting the
aristocratic atmosphere, the poetry was elegant and sophisticated and
expressed emotions in a rhetorical style. Editing the resulting
anthologies of poetry soon became a national pastime.
Medieval literature (1185–1603)
During this period, Japan experienced many civil wars which led to
the development of a warrior class, and subsequent war tales, histories,
and related stories. Work from this period is notable for its insights
into life and death, simple lifestyles, and redemption through killing. A
representative work is
The Tale of the Heike (1371), an epic account of the struggle between the
Minamoto and
Taira clans for control of Japan at the end of the twelfth century. Other important tales of the period include
Kamo no Chōmei's Hōjōki (1212) and
Yoshida Kenkō's Tsurezuregusa (1331).
Other notable genres in this period were
renga, or linked verse, and
Noh theater. Both were rapidly developed in the middle of the 14th century, the early
Muromachi period.
Early-modern literature (1603–1868)
Literature during this time was written during the largely peaceful Tokugawa Period (commonly referred to as the
Edo Period). Due in large part to the rise of the working and middle classes in the new capital of
Edo (modern
Tokyo), forms of popular drama developed which would later evolve into
kabuki. The
jōruri and kabuki dramatist
Chikamatsu Monzaemon became popular at the end of the 17th century.
Matsuo Bashō wrote
Oku no Hosomichi (1702), a travel diary.
Hokusai, perhaps Japan's most famous woodblock print artist, also illustrated fiction as well as his famous
36 Views of Mount Fuji.
Many genres of literature made their début during the Edo Period,
helped by a rising literacy rate among the growing population of
townspeople, as well as the development of lending libraries. Although
there was a
minor Western influence trickling into the country from the
Dutch settlement at Nagasaki,
it was the importation of Chinese vernacular fiction that proved the
greatest outside influence on the development of Early Modern Japanese
fiction.
Ihara Saikaku
might be said to have given birth to the modern consciousness of the
novel in Japan, mixing vernacular dialogue into his humorous and
cautionary tales of the pleasure quarters.
Jippensha Ikku wrote
Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige, which is a mix of travelogue and comedy. Tsuga Teisho, Takebe Ayatari, and Okajima Kanzan were instrumental in developing the
yomihon, which were historical romances almost entirely in prose, influenced by Chinese vernacular novels such as
Three Kingdoms and
Shui hu zhuan. Two
yomihon masterpieces were written by
Ueda Akinari:
Ugetsu monogatari and
Harusame monogatari wrote the extremely popular fantasy/historical romance
Nansō Satomi Hakkenden in addition to other yomihon.
Santō Kyōden wrote yomihon mostly set in the gay quarters until the
Kansei edicts banned such works, and he turned to comedic
kibyōshi. Genres included horror, crime stories, morality stories, comedy, and pornography—often accompanied by colorful woodcut prints.
Nevertheless, in the Tokugawa, as in earlier periods, scholarly work
continued to be published in Chinese, which was the language of the
learned much as Latin was in Europe
Modern literature (1868–1945)
The
Meiji period marks the re-opening of Japan to the West, and a period of rapid industrialization. The introduction of
European literature
brought free verse into the poetic repertoire; it became widely used
for longer works embodying new intellectual themes. Young Japanese prose
writers and dramatists struggled with a whole galaxy of new ideas and
artistic schools, but novelists were the first to successfully
assimilate some of these concepts.
A new colloquial literature developed centering on the "
I novel", with some unusual protagonists such as the cat narrator of
Natsume Sōseki's
Wagahai wa neko de aru (
I Am a Cat).
[dubious – discuss] Natsume Sōseki also wrote the famous novels
Botchan and
Kokoro (1914).
Shiga Naoya, the so called "god of the novel," and
Mori Ōgai were instrumental in adopting and adapting Western literary conventions and techniques.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa is known especially for his historical short stories.
Ozaki Kōyō,
Kyōka Izumi, and
Ichiyo Higuchi represent a strain of writers whose style hearkens back to early-Modern Japanese literature.
In the early Meiji period (1868–1880s),
Fukuzawa Yukichi authored Enlightenment literature, while pre-modern popular books depicted the quickly changing country. Then
Realism was brought in by
Tsubouchi Shōyō and
Futabatei Shimei in the mid-Meiji (late 1880s–early 1890s) while the Classicism of
Ozaki Kōyō, Yamada Bimyo and
Kōda Rohan gained popularity.
Ichiyō Higuchi,
a rare woman writer in this era, wrote short stories on powerless women
of this age in a simple style in between literary and colloquial.
Kyōka Izumi, a favored disciple of Ozaki, pursued a flowing and elegant style and wrote early novels such as
The Operating Room (1895) in literary style and later ones including
The Holy Man of Mount Koya (1900) in colloquial.
Romanticism was brought in by
Mori Ōgai with his anthology of translated poems (1889) and carried to its height by
Tōson Shimazaki etc. and magazines
Myōjō and
Bungaku-kai in early 1900s. Mori also wrote some modern novels including
The Dancing Girl (1890),
Wild Geese (1911), then later wrote historical novels.
Natsume Sōseki, who is often compared with Mori Ōgai, wrote
I Am a Cat (1905) with humor and satire, then depicted fresh and pure youth in
Botchan (1906) and
Sanshirô (1908). He eventually pursued transcendence of human emotions and egoism in his later works including
Kokoro (1914) his last and unfinished novel
Light and darkness (1916).
Shimazaki shifted from Romanticism to
Naturalism which was established with his
The Broken Commandment (1906) and
Katai Tayama's
Futon (1907). Naturalism hatched "
I Novel"
(Watakushi-shôsetu) that describes about the authors themselves and
depicts their own mental states. Neo-romanticism came out of
anti-naturalism and was led by
Kafū Nagai,
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki,
Kōtarō Takamura,
Hakushū Kitahara and so on in the early 1910s.
Saneatsu Mushanokōji,
Naoya Shiga and others founded a magazine
Shirakaba
in 1910. They shared a common characteristic, Humanism. Shiga's style
was autobiographical and depicted states of his mind and sometimes
classified as "I Novel" in this sense.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, who was highly praised by Soseki, wrote short stories including
Rashōmon (1915) with an intellectual and analytic attitude, and represented Neo-realism in the mid 1910s.
During the 1920s and early 1930s the proletarian literary movement, comprising such writers as
Takiji Kobayashi,
Denji Kuroshima,
Yuriko Miyamoto, and
Ineko Sata
produced a politically radical literature depicting the harsh lives of
workers, peasants, women, and other downtrodden members of society, and
their struggles for change.
War-time Japan saw the début of several authors best known for the
beauty of their language and their tales of love and sensuality, notably
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Japan's first winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature,
Yasunari Kawabata, a master of psychological fiction.
Ashihei Hino wrote lyrical bestsellers glorifying the war, while
Tatsuzō Ishikawa attempted to publish a disturbingly realistic account of the advance on Nanjing. Writers who opposed the war include
Denji Kuroshima,
Mitsuharu Kaneko,
Hideo Oguma, and
Jun Ishikawa.
Post-war literature
World War II,
and Japan's defeat, deeply influenced Japanese literature. Many authors
wrote stories of disaffection, loss of purpose, and the coping with
defeat.
Osamu Dazai's novel
The Setting Sun tells of a soldier returning from
Manchukuo.
Shōhei Ōoka won the
Yomiuri Prize for his novel
Fires on the Plain about a Japanese deserter going mad in the Philippine jungle.
Yukio Mishima, well known for both his
nihilistic writing and his controversial suicide by
seppuku, began writing in the post-war period.
Nobuo Kojima's
short story "The American School" portrays a group of Japanese teachers
of English who, in the immediate aftermath of the war, deal with the
American occupation in varying ways.
Prominent writers of the 1970s and 1980s were identified with
intellectual and moral issues in their attempts to raise social and
political consciousness. One of them,
Kenzaburō Ōe wrote his best-known work,
A Personal Matter in 1964 and became Japan's second winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Mitsuaki Inoue had long been concerned with the atomic bomb and continued in the 1980s to write on problems of the nuclear age, while
Shusaku Endo depicted the religious dilemma of the
Kakure Kirishitan, Roman Catholics in feudal Japan, as a springboard to address spiritual problems.
Yasushi Inoue also turned to the past in masterful historical novels of Inner Asia and ancient Japan, in order to portray present human fate.
Avant-garde writers, such as
Kōbō Abe, who wrote fantastic novels such as
Woman in the Dunes
(1960), wanted to express the Japanese experience in modern terms
without using either international styles or traditional conventions,
developed new inner visions.
Yoshikichi Furui
tellingly related the lives of alienated urban dwellers coping with the
minutiae of daily life, while the psychodramas within such daily life
crises have been explored by a rising number of important women
novelists. The 1988
Naoki Prize went to
Shizuko Todo for
Ripening Summer,
a story capturing the complex psychology of modern women. Other
award-winning stories at the end of the decade dealt with current issues
of the elderly in hospitals, the recent past (Pure- Hearted Shopping
District in
Kōenji, Tokyo), and the life of a
Meiji period ukiyo-e artist. In international literature,
Kazuo Ishiguro, a native of Japan, had taken up residence in Britain and won Britain's prestigious
Booker Prize.
Haruki Murakami
is one of the most popular and controversial of today's Japanese
authors. His genre-defying, humorous and surreal works have sparked
fierce debates in Japan over whether they are true "literature" or
simple pop-fiction: Kenzaburō Ōe has been one of his harshest critics.
Some of Murakami's best-known works include
Norwegian Wood (1987) and
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–1995). Another best-selling contemporary author is
Banana Yoshimoto.
Although modern Japanese writers covered a wide variety of subjects,
one particularly Japanese approach stressed their subjects' inner lives,
widening the earlier novel's preoccupation with the narrator's
consciousness. In Japanese fiction, plot development and action have
often been of secondary interest to emotional issues. In keeping with
the general trend toward reaffirming national characteristics, many old
themes re-emerged, and some authors turned consciously to the past.
Strikingly,
Buddhist
attitudes about the importance of knowing oneself and the poignant
impermanence of things formed an undercurrent to sharp social criticism
of this material age. There was a growing emphasis on women's roles, the
Japanese persona in the modern world, and the malaise of common people
lost in the complexities of urban culture.
Popular fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature all
flourished in urban Japan in the 1980s. Many popular works fell between
"pure literature" and pulp novels, including all sorts of historical
serials, information-packed docudramas, science fiction, mysteries,
detective fiction,
business stories, war journals, and animal stories. Non-fiction covered
everything from crime to politics. Although factual journalism
predominated, many of these works were interpretive, reflecting a high
degree of individualism. Children's works re-emerged in the 1950s, and
the newer entrants into this field, many of them younger women, brought
new vitality to it in the 1980s.
Manga
(comic books) have penetrated almost every sector of the popular market.
They include virtually every field of human interest, such as a
multivolume high-school history of Japan and, for the adult market, a
manga introduction to economics, and pornography. Manga represented
between 20 and 30 percent of annual publications at the end of the
1980s, in sales of some
¥400 billion per year.
Cell phone novels appeared in the early 21st century. Written by and for
cell phone users, the novels—typically romances read by young women—have become very popular both online and in print. Some, such as
Love Sky,
have sold millions of print copies, and at the end of 2007 cell phone
novels comprised four of the top five fiction best sellers.
Hebrew literature consists of ancient, medieval, and modern writings in the Hebrew language. It is one of the primary forms of Jewish literature, though there have been cases of literature written in Hebrew by non-Jews.
Hebrew literature was produced in many different parts of the world
throughout the medieval and modern eras, while contemporary Hebrew
literature is largely Israeli literature.
