JAPANESE LITERARY STUDIES: THE TRIALS AND REWARDS

James T. Araki

Language is a medium for communication at all levels, from the rudimentary and solely functional to that of artistic expression. Serious students of a foreign language at the college level generally aspire to read in that language, and in the classroom they will eventually be reading literature which represents the most highly polished form of verbal expression. Though not without some difficulty, a student having completed two years of Russian might read Pushkin, Lermontov, and start to explore Chekhov in the original. A student of French may at that stage read the works of Stendhal, Baudelaire, Valery and Camus, to name but a few, not only for purposes of linguistic comprehension but to analyze characteristics of style and apprehend elements of the aesthetic. A student of Japanese, at the same stage, would be at least a year or two away from achieving a comparable fluency in reading and, hence, from being able to read and savor Japanese literature.

In times past, let us say before the 1960's, a student of Japanese in his third year might have read a modern novel such as Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country or Ogai Mori's Wild Geese in the original, with considerable difficulty and without the aid of English translations. His learning endeavor up to that point, however, would have been almost entirely in the area of reading comprehension; moreover, he studied Japanese in order to read literature, both modern and classical, and utilize standard Japanese reference works for purposes of research and translation. Today, at the University of Hawaii and surely other institutions of higher learning, Japanese is taught for the purpose primarily of imparting to the student a functional knowledge-that is, the ability to engage in direct conversational exchanges with speakers of Japanese, read newspapers, and so forth-and so, quite naturally, oral production and aural comprehension are given much emphasis. Consequently, the audio-lingual method plays as much a part in the teaching of Japanese as it does in the teaching of French, German, and other Western European languages.

The audio-lingual method came as a blessing to the teaching of many foreign languages; the results attained in the first year are factors that later contribute to an accelerated development of reading skills. The same method, in the teaching of Japanese, has been a blessing in a gossamer disguise, for, though students acquire certain skills as a result of many hours spent in the language laboratory, they do not attain the level of linguistic sophistication required for the reading of literature. Students do not, in other words, learn to read well enough, soon enough, to study Japanese literature in depth during their undergraduate years. Nothing would be accomplished, however, by discarding the audio-lingual method and focusing exclusively on reading to produce mute readers as in years gone by.

A culprit does exist but we may not eliminate it, for it is the subject itself: the Japanese language, which often cannot be used in a fully compre-hensible manner even by its native speakers and which employs an orthographic system that is best described as chaotic. The borrowed Chinese graphs, each with one or more denotations and two or more phonetic values, must be memorized individually. A potential reader must learn thousands of these graphs, for sophisticated writings in modern Japanese are heavily invested with them. The novels of Yukio Mishima, for instance, are studded most generously with erudite lexical items, many of them drawn from classical Chinese and Buddhist sources; the stories cannot be comprehended, much less apprehended as works of art, unless the reader has had at least four years of Japanese as it is taught in the larger, systematized language training programs.

The Study of Japanese literature at the University: the Initial Trials

It is obvious from the foregoing that the study of Japanese literature is not feasible in the high school, where the rate of language learning is slower, or the junior college, which may offer only a two-year program of training; but I have raised the question of its feasibility even at the level of the

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university. Certainly Japanese literature in English translation may be read and enjoyed and discussed with profit at all levels of the educational system. 11 may be "taught" in high schools and colleges by any teacher of literature who is alerl to symbols, imagery, peculiarities of narrative struc1ure, and so on; parallelisms, both illuminating and amusing, with Western literature may become focal points for discussion.

Studying Japanese literature in the original is another matter, and works must be studied in the original if the subtleties that lend them greatness are to be apprehended. I might cite just one example to clarify this assertion. The English 1ranslation of Akiyuki Nozaka's The Pornographers is in many ways an arresting work and surely has been analyzed and discussed in many American classrooms. What makes it so in1eresting in the Japanese is the ingenuity and originality of Nozaka's style: the dialogue throughout is in the inimitably racy street vernacular of 1he Osaka area, and the narrative style is modeled on a genre of popular fiction of the seventeenth century that focuses on characters from among the Osaka townspeople. In English what is lost is the vibrancy and humor, without which the novel assumes a pornographic shading not present in the original. The novel's essential qualities can no more be properly assessed through an English translation than those of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury may be through the Japanese-language version, which is a literary disaster.

The fact that at the University of Hawaii students may work toward the B.A. in Japanese in the Department of East Asian Literature would suggest strongly that a meaningful study of Japanese li1era1ure may be undertaken by undergraduate students. A student entering the 8.A. Program in Japanese may select a track emphasizing either "Japanese language" or "Japanese literature." Should he select the latter, his studies will be under the supervision of the Department of East Asian Literature (those who select the former will adhere to a different curriculum within the Department of East Asian Languages). During the junior and senior years he will study modern Japanese literature (1855 to the present) in two, year-long reading courses, have at least a semester's experience in reading select examples of classical Japanese literature, and participate in a senior colloquium in which the literatures of Japan, China, and Korea are discussed in a comparative context. By way of preparing for the senior

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colloquium, in addi1ion to the reading courses, he will have had a two-semester survey (sophomore level) of traditional and modern Japanese literature in English translation, as well as a semester each of comparable courses in Chinese and Korean literature. Hope! ully the student majoring in Japanese literature will leave the university with a B.A. degree signifying broad experience in the humanities in general, and considerable knowledge about Japanese literature and its role in the shaping of Japan's cultural tradition. Should he wish to further his studies, he would be well prepared to pursue a graduate degree in the subject.

Given the unusual difficulty of learning the Japanese language, one might well wonder how an undergraduate program in Japanese literature may achieve even a modicum of success. For one, the teaching staff would have to be qualified and versatile. Fortunately the department, despite its modest size, has three specialists in Japanese literature who offer diversity in areas of expertise (classical, medieval, and modern) and in academic orientations represented by doctoral studies undertaken at three major centers for Asia-related studies (Columbia, Harvard, and California). Furthermore, the three maintain working relationships with their professional colleagues on the mainland and in Japan, and also enjoy personal associations with many of Japan's leading contemporary authors; the latter is invaluable in assessing the validity of biographically-oriented criticisms of contemporary fiction. The presence also of a specialist in Japanese folklore and yet another in Japanese grammar adds unusual breadth to the scope of competence of the teaching staff.

Secondly,·there must be an efficient program of study designed to meet the needs of majoring students; this, however, is where efficacy has not yet been attained. Efforts to develop fully effective courses have been fettered by an administrative technicality that overrides academic considerations: the fact of life is, simply, that a department may not teach subjects that are basic in the curriculum of another department or, in this instance, the department of "literature" may teach Japanese literature but may not impart instruction in the Japanese language, with which the department of "languages" is primarily concerned.

The creation of the Department of East Asian literature in 1971 gave to Japanese literary studies a disciplinary distinction it had never before known; at the same time it conferred upon the staff of the new department the task of having to teach

Japanese literature in the abstract. The study of literature is a study, among other things, of ways in which language is used for expression and description; and, for students with a limited mastery of the Japanese language, it includes the study of unfamiliar sentence construction, points of grammar, and new vocabulary items, all of which may, unfortunately, be categorized under " language teaching." This administrative inconvenience has been circumvented technically by developing junior and senior-level reading courses, the texts for which consist entirely of short stories, poems, and excerpts from novels. For a student who has had only two years of Japanese, the difficulty of reading such material might be comparable to that of a student of French proceeding directly into Moliere following an introductory one-semester course in French. Extensive vocabulary notes are, therefore, provided to enable students to make the transition from reading elementary material to comprehending writings of major authors. The works were selected with care and ordered sequentially according to the relative degree of linguistic complexity. Some selections were included on the basis of easy accessibility of reasonably accurate English translations, which may help students experience the full aesthetic import which is so elusive when efforts become concentrated in attempts to comprehend the linguistic contents of literary works. All the selections are also perceived aurally by the stude nts ; they are recorded on tapes, which are available for listening in the language laboratory.

The flaws in the above program are evident, as are the potential remedies. The four years a student spends at a university are among those in which his capacity for intellectual endeavor is seemingly boundless. Rote learning of the rudiments of the Japanese language is necessary in order to acquire the basic tool for literary studies, and it can be an exciting adventure in learning. For the motivated student who aspires to the reading of literature, however, the period of excitement might endure only until it appears, perhaps after one or two years of language study, as though the goal of reading adult-level material has receded beyond the pale of attainability. The seeming impossibility of overtaking the mirage of competence will surely bring about disenchantment, at which point learning will probably become an exercise for inducing tedium.

Among ways to cope with this pedagogic difficulty, the most obvious would be to provide

motivated students with the opportunity to concentrate heavily from the start on developing reading proficiency in Japanese. Very fortunately, the Department of East Asian Languages happens to be in the process of planning a series of two courses designed to do just that. Should the requirements for those courses be as rigorous as those in which most of the currently established specialists in Japanese literature learned their Japanese, the students might become fascinated with the intricacies of the language, so different from our own, and willingly devote considerable time outside of class to the learning of Chinese graphs. The light intellectual exercise of studying graphs, each invested with its own semantic, historical , and aesthetic significance, will serve to offset the occasional dryness of constantly repeating sentence patterns in drills. A simpler solution overall would be the fusion of endeavors in the teaching of literature and language, which would mercifully relegate to oblivion the nonsense of treating the study of literature and that of the language in which it is written as mutually exclusive academic fields.

The Study of Japanese literature in the Graduate School: the Ultimate Rewards

All graduates of an American university, we may assume with some optimism, read English with a high degree of fluency. Yet many would fail dismally if they were thrust into a graduate program in American literature without sufficient preparatory training in the discipline of literature. Similarly, the ability to read Japanese with relative ease, though prerequisite to any serious study of Japanese literature, does not ensure success in an advanced program of study. An important qualification is a degree of sensitivity to words and larger verbal units, and to human sensibilities. Important, also, is the ability to enter a work subjectively, to achieve harmony with a poetic mood, for instance, or apprehend the psychological state of characters in a novel, and, at the same time, view the work objectively, with detachment, in order to e valuate the total reading experience and the relative worth of that experience. Students are expected, of course, to be familiar with basic critical concepts and terminology, as well as the methodology and analytical techniques which are fundamental in literary studies.

Given the curricular and time restrictions of a normal four-year undergraduate program, not every student entering a graduate program in Japanese

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literature will have acquired all the above qualifications in addition to the desired linguistic competence. However, through further training literary sensitivity may be cultivated to an extent, concepts and terminology may be learned, methodology may be acquired, and linguistic competence developed. What is exceptionally difficult to overcome is the inability to express oneself lucidly and intelligently, if not eloquently, in English. This may well be a fatal shortcoming in view of the purpose of graduate studies in Japanese literature, which is the cultivation of expertise in the subject, and the ability to teach it in the American classroom and discuss it within lhe English-speaking community of scholars. Speakers of Japanese for whom English is a foreign language, therefore, tend to be beset with progressively increasing difficulties as they pursue the study of their own literature at an American university.

The greatest pleasure a student of Japanese li1erature may derive from his studies is the sense of discovery. A vista of new experiences will be opened to him as he begins to read the works of Kawabata, Tanizaki, Mishima, Natsume, Akutagawa and other twentieth century writers, and begins to recognize the subtleties and levels of meaning that become lost in the process of lranslation. Students generally study modern works first and then begin to explore the three major periods of traditional Japanese literature. They may study parts o(The Tale of Genji and marvel at the difference in experience between reading Lady Murasaki's masterpiece of the Heian Period (794-1185} and Arthur Waley's English translation. They may delight in the richness of the language of the Noh drama or the delicacy of the imagery linking the verses of chain poems that were composed in the Medieval Era (1185-1600). They may savor the erratic, elliptical, haikuesque style of Saikaku, best known of the novelists of the Edo

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Period (1600-1868), and come to understand why Saikaku and Kawabata might somehow be linked together in a general discussion of prose style. They will understand why the Japanese often insist that certain poems, tales, or dramas may not be fully apprehended without some acquaintance with the geographical and historical settings of the works or the biographies of the literary figures that created them; these are among considerations that would be regarded as "extrinsic" and thereby eschewed by some teachers of Western literature. They will become familiar with the cultural values expressed in the writings, and with the realities of Japanese society and the individual which are not documented in histories but are to be discerned only in literature.

Japanese literary studies have begun to flourish only recently in the West. Although many of the classics have been studied and translated since the 1950's, there are yet a great many important Japanese writers who have not been honored by so much as a paragraph's description in the English language. The field remains to be explored by writers of doctoral dissertations, and each new exploration will result in a significant contribution to our knowledge of works which many readers throughout the world have come to regard as among the most fascinating writings in existence.

James T. Araki received the B.A. from U.C.L.A. and the M.A. ,md Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. After teaching for several years at U. C.l.A.. he came to the Universily of Hawaii in 1965 as Professor of Japanese Literature. During 1971-73 he served as the frrsr chairman of the Department of East Asian Lilerature. Dr. Araki was a recipienr of Fulbright grants for research in Japan rn 1957 and 1964, Senior Fellow awarc/s from the East-West Center in 1967 and 1970, and an American Councr/ of Learned Societies grant for summer research in Japan in 1970 anc/ 1971. He is the author of The Ballad -Drama of Medieval Japan and numerous article$ on 1raditional fiction and modern novP/s