A Dark Night's Passing Read online

  Naoya Shiga

  A Dark Night’s Passing

  Translated by EDWIN MCCLELLAN

  KODANSHA INTERNATIONAL LTD.

  Tokyo, New York and San Francisco

  UNESCO COLLECTION OF REPRESENTATIVE WORKS JAPANESE SERIES

  This book has been accepted in the Japanese Series of the Translations Collection of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

  Published by Kodansha International Ltd.,

  2-12-21 Otowa, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112 and

  Kodansha International/USA Ltd.,

  English translation © Unesco 1976 All rights reserved. Printed in Japan.

  LCC 76-9351 ISBN 0-87011-279-1 JBC 1093-785381-2361 First edition, 1976

  Jacket design by S. Katakura

  Cover Notes

  This is the translation of Anya kōro, one of Japan's literary classics of modern times. Written in the early twenties (though not finished until 1937), this novel may be regarded as the most important of contemporary works, whether one measures its success by the number of readers it attracts half a century after it was written or by the degree of influence it has had on subsequent writers in Japan. It is still read by almost every Japanese in his youth, and its personal, self-examinatory approach was an innovation in literature that was adopted by innumerable later writers. For its time and place it is an extraordinarily bold work, revealing one man's search for his individuality against a background of "family" and the conventions this represented.

  The protagonist, a sensitive young writer who is the second son of a wealthy family, passes through a series of emotional incidents and crises that expose his self-doubts and his lack of confidence. These culminate in the discovery that his own birth was the result of his mother's affair with her father-in-law, a discovery that forces him to face the horror it arouses in him and embark on a lonely journey to self-knowledge. He gains temporary respite and calm through marriage, only to have further disasters overtake him when his son dies in infancy and his wife is seduced by her cousin.

  No other Japanese writer has used language quite as Shiga has done. "His is the language of the traditional Japanese poet translated into modern prose," writes the translator, Edwin McClellan. The style is taut and tense and devastatingly effective, and in combination with the author's insights into human nature, it makes this work compelling reading.

  THE AUTHOR

  Naoya Shiga was born in 1883 and received his early education at Gakushin (the Peers' School). In 1906 he entered the University of Tokyo, first studying English, then Japanese literature, but he was never a dedicated student and withdrew in 1910. By then he was an aspiring writer, and with a group of friends, many of whom were destined to become famous, he started a journal called Shirakaba, which did much to familiarize educated Japanese with contemporary Western art. Through publication of shorter pieces in this magazine, he established a reputation as a writer. The first half of A Dark Night's Passing (Anya kōro) was published in 1921, followed by a substantial part of the second half in 1922 and 1923. It was not finished, however, until 1937. From then until his death in 1971, he wrote very little, but despite his small output, Shiga remains to this day one of the most revered of modern Japanese writers. Even without this novel he would be well remembered for his short stories, several of which have become minor classics.

  THE TRANSLATOR

  Edwin McClellan was born in Japan in 1925. He studied at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and later received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He is presently Professor of Japanese Literature at Yale University. He is the author of Two Japanese Novelists: Sōseki and Tōson, and the translator of Sōseki's Kokoro and Grass on the Wayside (Michikusa). He has published in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Yale Review, The New Yorker, etc., and in several Japanese journals.

  Table Of Contents

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

  PROLOGUE THE HERO’S REMINISCENCES

  PART I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART III

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  PART IV

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  This translation is for my friend Jun Etō

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

  Shiga Naoya—from here on I shall observe the Japanese custom of putting the surname first—was born in 1883 in the provincial town of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture, where his father, then an employee of the Dai-ichi Bank, had been posted. Both his father’s and mother’s families were of the shizoku class, i.e., ex-samurai. This fact in itself is of little significance, however, for after the Restoration of 1868, membership in that class simply meant that one was of gentle birth, more or less, and it did not necessarily guarantee one a place in the modern middle class. What is of more interest to us is that both Shiga’s grandfather and father happened to be very capable businessmen, and that by the time he was ten, his family were unquestionably of the upper bourgeoisie.

  Shiga received his early education at Gakushūin, or the Peers’ School, which was a school reserved for sons of the nobility and of the more successful bureaucrats and businessmen. He was there from 1889 until 1906, when he entered the University of Tokyo. He remained an officially registered student at the university until 1910, at first in the English literature department, then later in the Japanese literature department. He was never a dedicated student, and it would seem that his formal withdrawal from that illustrious institution in 1910 was long overdue.

  Shiga had by then become an aspiring writer. In the year that he withdrew from the university, he and a group of friends who had also been at Gakushūin began a journal called Shirakaba (“white birch”), which was to continue until 1923, although Shiga’s active participation in the group lasted only a couple of years. This coterie—it was not entirely literary—included a number of people besides Shiga who were to become famous, such as Mushakōji Saneatsu, Arishima Takeo, Arishima Ikuma, and Satomi Ton. They could not have constituted a “school” in any meaningful sense, for in looking at the works of Shiga, Mushakōji, and Arishima Takeo, for example, one would be hard put to it to find much that they had in common as writers. What they shared was little more than their upper-class background, an intelligent interest in the arts (their journal did much to familiarize the literate Japanese with the works of Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, van Gogh, Rodin, etc.), and a more optimistic regard for their own individuality than might have been possible for their fellow countrymen born some years before them or into less well-placed families. At any rate, it was through the publication of shorter pieces in
Shirakaba that Shiga quickly established his reputation as a young writer of promise; and by 1913 his standing was such that Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916), then the literary editor of Asahi Newspaper and a writer of the utmost distinction, asked him if he would care to write a novel for the newspaper, to be published serially. It was to follow Sōseki’s own Kokoro (“the heart”) which was then being serialized. Shiga had started on an autobiographical novel, tentatively entitled Tokitō Kensaku, in the previous year, and thinking that he would give that to Soseki when he finished it, he accepted the invitation. But for whatever reason he was unable to progress very far with it, and in 1914 he reluctantly told Soseki he could not keep his promise. “Tokitō Kensaku” was the name he would later give to the hero of A Dark Night's Passing (Anya kōro in the original).

  In 1914 Shiga married Kadenokōji Sadako. She was of an old and aristocratic family, and a cousin of Shiga’s friend, Mushakōji. Theirs was a lasting marriage, and on the whole a harmonious one. Of the seven children that were born to them, two died shortly after birth: their first child, a daughter, in 1916, and their first son in 1919.

  Shiga’s marriage to Sadako was opposed by his father, with whom he had been on very bad terms for some years. Their quarrel over the marriage led Shiga to renounce his right of inheritance; and later, when his first child died, his father retaliated by refusing to allow her to be buried in the family plot. They were reconciled in 1917, however, and the reconciliation lasted until the father’s death in 1929.

  Shiga’s mother had died when he was twelve, and his father had remarried very soon after her death. In a short autobiographical piece he published in 1912, Haha no shi to atarashii haha (“mother’s death and the new mother”), Shiga writes, “Two months after mother died, they started looking for her successor.” But he was very fond of his stepmother, and it is as likely as not that the estrangement between father and son began later, when it became clear that Shiga was not going to be the son and heir that a successful businessman father would have wished for.

  The first half of A Dark Night's Passing appeared in 1921. A substantial part of the second half then appeared in 1922 and 1923. It was left unfinished until 1937, when at last the concluding chapters were published. From then until his death in 1971, Shiga wrote surprisingly little. Indeed, he was never prolific (between 1914 and 1917, for example, he published nothing), and for a Japanese writer who lived so long, his output was remarkably small. Yet he remains to this day one of the most revered of modern Japanese writers.

  Even if Shiga had not written his one full-length novel, he would have been remembered for his short stories, the best of which are considered minor classics,{1} his earlier autobiographical pieces such as Haha no shi to atarashii haha and Wakai (“reconciliation,” 1917), and his lyrical, contemplative near-essays such as Kinosaki ni te (“at Kinosaki,” 1917){2}and Takibi (“bonfire,” 1920), which again have become minor classics. But it is after all his novel that has been responsible for his immense reputation in Japan. A Dark Night's Passing of course has its detractors, who are sometimes offended by the extravagant praise it has received from its less restrained admirers. But whatever may be our opinion of the justice of its reputation, the fact remains that its stature among modern Japanese novels is virtually unequalled.

  A Dark Night's Passing belongs, somewhat uncertainly, to that genre known in Japan as the watakushi shōsetsu—the “I”, or the “private,” or more loosely, the “autobiographical” novel—which reached the height of its popularity in the 1920’s. I say “uncertainly” because A Dark Night's Passing contains a far greater element of fiction than other, more typical examples of the genre. Shiga’s paternity was never in question (except perhaps in his own imagination), and there never seems to have been a family skeleton of the sort he describes in the novel. There was an older son, but he died before Shiga was born. There was no counterpart in real life to Oei, the woman who brings Tokitō Kensaku up. Indeed, most of the pivotal events in the novel are of Shiga’s imagining, and if it is autobiographical, it is so in the sense that it is a fictional realization of the author’s fantasies, fears, and aspirations.

  But whether we call it a watakushi shōsetsu or not, it is certainly an intensely private and self-centered novel. The larger concerns of society have no place in it. The secondary characters exist only so long as they touch the hero’s life. The identification of the author with his hero is complete, and the predilections of one are those of the other. And though Shiga drops the use of “I” after the prefatory chapter, its implied presence is obvious throughout.

  For those Japanese critics who assume that the “larger,” less self-centered world is the proper material for fiction, the “privacy” of A Dark Night's Passing has always been the major source of irritation. What they often seem to overlook, however, is that self-centered or not, it is an extraordinarily bold novel for the time and place in which it was written. For against the reality of family and the order and conventions that it represents, Shiga affirms the greater reality of his own sexuality, his own search for love, his own communion with nature and participation in myth, his own fantasies and dreams.

  No modern Japanese prose writer before him used the language quite as he did. For him it was a means of expressing what I can only call a profound trust in what he saw and heard and intuitively sensed. In this respect, his is the language of the traditional Japanese poet translated into modern prose. It is not a language that is precise in any intellectual, analytical sense. (He did not have a particularly articulate intelligence, and the weakest passages in the novel are where he tries to describe explicitly his ideas concerning the future of mankind, etc.) Rather, its precision lies in the author’s ability to convey with clarity and without adornment his sensuous awareness of the immediacy of nature, of voices and gestures, of his own intuitive responses to them. His prose is not as flowing or as rich as Tanizaki’s. It is simpler and tauter, dependent on a much simpler vocabulary, and less explicit; but it is wrought with great care, and its direction is always sure. And if sometimes his sentences, or even paragraphs, seem to stand in austere isolation, it is because he is less concerned with unity and rational transition than with the cumulative effect of separate impressions or memories which are felt by him to have some deep, emotional bond between them.

  Despite his fastidiousness and good manners, then, despite the control of his prose, there is something unmistakably primitive about Shiga. His perceptions, it seems to me, were largely those of a superstitious man. Fears concerning one’s own paternity, obsessive childhood memories of one’s mother, dreams peopled by hobgoblins of sexual desire, the longing for reconciliation with nature—all these had a certainty for him not because he had any academic understanding of their significance (he was not learned enough for that), but because they were very real ghosts that haunted him.

  There are three people I should like to thank in particular for their help and encouragement while I worked on this translation: Rachel McClellan, Thomas J. Harper, and Jun Etō.

  Edwin McClellan

  A Dark Night's Passing

  PROLOGUE

  THE HERO’S REMINISCENCES

  It was about two months after my mother died in childbirth that I first laid eyes on my grandfather. I was six years old at the time. Until that sudden encounter, I had not even known of his existence.

  It was evening, and I was sitting idly outside our front gate. A strange old man came and stood over me. He stooped a little, his eyes were sunken, and there was about him a general air of seediness. I took an instant dislike to him.

  Smiling unnaturally he made as if to talk to me. In spite I refused to meet his eyes, and stared at the ground. The turned up mouth, the deeply creased skin around it—everything about him was common. “Go away,” I wanted to tell him. I refused to look up. But the old man continued to stand in front of me, until I could not bear his presence any longer. I got up and ran through the gate. The old man called out from behind, “Hey, are you Kensaku?�
�

  I felt as though the words had struck me a blow. I stopped and turned around. I was as wary as before, but from habit perhaps, my head nodded obediently.

  “Is your dad home?” he asked. I shook my head. The familiarity of his tone filled me with foreboding.

  He walked up to me and put his hand on my head. “You’ve grown.”

  I had no idea who this old man was; but already I had the premonition that here was someone closely tied to me by blood. I stood there rigidly, almost suffocating.

  The old man said no more, and left.

  He appeared again two or three days later, and this time my father introduced him to me as my grandfather.

  Then, ten days after that, I was sent off to live with him. His was a small, old house, hidden deep in a side street near Ogyōmatsu in Negishi. And here with my grandfather lived a woman in her early twenties named Oei.

  My new surroundings were quite different from what I had been used to. Now everything smelled of poverty and vulgarity. And I could not but wonder resentfully why of the children in my family I alone should have been made to come and live with this common old man. But it did not occur to me to ask anyone why I had been so unfairly treated, for since my infancy I had come to expect injustice. Of course there were times when I would become vaguely aware that for the rest of my life I would continue to encounter such unfairness; and then I would feel forlorn, and miss my mother who had died two months before.

  One could not say that in the years I lived with my parents, my father was ever positively, openly cruel to me. But always, always he was cold. I suppose I had come to take his coldness so much for granted that any other kind of relationship between father and son was inconceivable to me. I did not think to ask myself whether his behavior toward his other children was in any way different; and I felt no particular sadness that he should treat me as he did.

  My mother was inclined to be harsh with me, and scolded me at every turn. True, I was a willful and disobedient child. But often, it would seem, she would punish only me for doing exactly what my brother, too, was doing. I loved my mother deeply, nevertheless.