Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/113

Rh more usual that the hero, offered the choice of a comfortable job in Texas or badly paid work as a battler for eta rights in Japan, would have chosen the latter. In this the Japanese novel is realistic as European works are not.

The Broken Commandment is an example of one important result of European influence of Japanese literature, the increasing interest in social problems. On the whole Japanese poetry remained true to the old spirit, in spite of the innovations in the forms, but other branches of literature came increasingly to serve as vehicles for new thought. When we look at lists of European novels translated in the early years of Meiji, we are struck and perhaps by the preponderance of political novels, such as those of Disraeli or Bulwer Lytton, and in the work written under European influence this political element is equally conspicuous. The realism of such writers as Zola was, initially at least, not of great interest to the Japanese because many of the subjects which Zola treated were the most common themes of their own literature, and the realism with which he shocked Europe was quite matter-of-fact to the Japanese. The real challenge for them lay in the field of political and social writing, something quite new in their fiction. The Broken Commandment attempted to discuss the problem of the eta in such a way as to arouse sympathy for those unfortunate people, but always within the limits of an interesting story. Other attempts at social questions were usually more crudely done.

The concern with social problems showed itself most clearly in the adaptations of European works. For example, A Fool’s Love (1925) by Tanizaki Junichirō seems to have been based on Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. It tells of a man who falls in love with a waitress and lives with her for a time. Her essential coarseness often repels him, but he is so fascinated by her that even when she indulges in some particularly offensive