Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/36

 essential is the close construction, the casting of all the material round a single central image and the overall compression that have become the marks of the successful modern short story in the West.

By these general standards a considerable proportion of tampen-shōsetsu are not short stories at all; frequently they appear to be sketches, essays or truncated novels. A large number of Japanese story writers are primarily novelists for whom stories tend to be what Miss Elizabeth Bowen has called “side-issues from the crowded imagination”. Since the novel and the modern short story are two totally different genres it is most unlikely that a writer will be equally at home in both, and this applies in Japan quite as much as in the West. The plethora of literary magazines in Japan has encouraged many writers to produce stories when their style was better suited to the novel. As a result, their work frequently lacks the stylistic compression that is the essence of the modern short story. This is not primarily a matter of word-length (though it is worth noting that Japanese stories are as a rule far longer than their modern Western counterparts), but of failure to apply the indirect, suggestive and dramatic methods which are indispensable for economy of style. In a country that has produced the most compressed forms of poetry in world literature it is remarkable that stories should so frequently be marked by a turgid verbosity which cries out for the ministration of a red pencil.

Fortunately a number of good modern writers in Japan have treated the short story as an equal and separate genre of literature, not merely as an abbreviated novel or as a sketch. Of the authors represented in the present collection, the three who stand out in Japanese letters as short-story writers are Shiga Naoya, Akutagawa Ryūnosuké and Nakajima Ton. The fact that these three writers are all masters of literary style is not irrelevant. Like the poem, the short story is undoubtedly type of writing in which style or form is all-important. An indifferently written or poorly constructed novel may impose