Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/108

96 individuality remained, and I think still remains, the great problem. Again and again the European reader is likely to ask of a character in a novel or a play, “What is he really thinking?” Only gradually does one come to the conclusion that he is really thinking just what he says, or if he is silent, just what the conventional response would be. This tends in a way to make modern Japanese writing harder for us to understand than the older varieties. That is, when we read a book describing the court life of the eleventh century, we enter a completely unfamiliar world and are prepared to accept all its curiosities. Did the ladies in The Tale of Genji blacken their teeth to attain greater elegance? Very well, we say, they did. But when we read a novel in which the characters worry about vitamin shortages, spend their Sunday afternoons taking photos with a miniature camera, and model their coiffure on that of their favourite Hollywood star, we do not expect to find emotional blanks behind the characters, and when we do it is most disconcerting. Thus, in Tanizaki’s novel The Thin Snow (1946–9), where the central theme is the finding of a husband for a young lady, we are at no point told what her reactions are to the search, what she thinks of her different suitors, or even of the man she is finally to marry. We expect at least to find hints of Freudian repression or some other literary device which belongs to the same world as vitamin shortages. The submissive and inarticulate Japanese lady seems altogether remote.

If Tsubouchi’s Essence of the Novel did not lead to any general outburst of individual emotions, it did encourage the development of types of fiction previously unknown in Japan. European realism, as found in the numerous translations of mid-Victorian novelists and, to a lesser extent, certain Russian writers, led Japanese to turn from the ponderous historical