Blackwell Reference Online

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Early in 1942, Nakajima Atsushi (1909–42), then teaching Japanese at an elementary school in the occupied territory of Palao, published a short story set in ancient Assyria (669–633 bce ): “Mojika” (“The Curse of Letters”), centers on a scholar who comes to discover the accursed nature of writing. “As he stared at length at a single letter,” Nakajima writes, “that letter would, without his noticing, dissolve and he could only see it as a tangle of individual lines with no meaning. And he could no longer understand how a simple grouping of lines had come to have a particular sound and a particular meaning” (123). And this is essentially how it is with the Japanese novel: the more one looks at it, the less sense it seems to make and the more artificial it seems, based purely on convention. To understand the problem posed in writing the history of the Japanese novel, consider the following anecdote. In 1968, Kawabata Yasunari became the first Japanese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and toward the end of his Nobel lecture he briefly remarked upon Genji Monogatari (early eleventh century ce , The Tale of Genji ), describing it as “kokin wo tsūjite Nihon no saikō no shōsetsu” (the pinnacle of the Japanese novel past and present). Kawabata continued: “gendai ni mo kore in oyobu shōsetsu wa mada nakute. Jūseiki ni, kono yō ni kindaiteki demo aru chōhen shōsetsu ... log in or subscribe to read full text