Lecture 2005-09-26
"100 Years of Writing Back: Confrontations with Western Modernity in the Writing of Mori Ōgai, Endō Shūsaku and Tawada Yōko "
Dr. Charles R. Cabell

Dr. Cabell, a native of Alabama and associate professor in the Department of Literature of Toyo University, took as his theme the Japanese response to their encounter with the Western sense of superiority towards other races, as exemplified in the works of three writers spanning a century between them, who "wrote back", depicting in the experiences of their protagonists their own confrontations with the West, which also involved issues of gender, race and class.  In so doing the writers wrestled with the Western sense that only the West was developed, and other races were still in varying stages of primitivism.

Dr. Cabell took as his first example Mori Ōgai's Maihime ('The Dancing Girl'), published in 1890, at a time when Japan was only just beginning to emerge on the international scene.  Mori was an army lieutenant who spent four years in Germany from 1884-1888, having been sent to study sanitation and army medicine.  There he enjoyed a comfortable salary and was able to mingle with members of the German upper class.  The protagonist of the book, Ōta Toyatarō, after living for a few years in Berlin, where he has been sent at government expense, undergoes a metamorphosis in which he rebels against the paths laid down for him by his family and his superiors.  He becomes alienated from the Japanese community, and feels himself emasculated and lacking the courage to approach "women soliciting for customers". He then meets a dancing girl, Elise, helpless and penniless, who is attracted to this yellow man because of his kindness to her in helping her financially, thus saving her from turning to prostitution.  Here Ōgai reverses the Western kind of story in which a colonial rescues a woman in distress from cruel male natives.  The privileges of his class and male gender enable Ōta to overcome his feelings of inferiority within the racial hierarchy.  His union with Elise leads to his losing his job; at the same time, his mother dies and he transfers his affection to Elise – symbolic of his segregation from Japan and immersion within popular German culture. His conquest of Elise transforms him from a shy student to a supremely confident teacher.  He gets a new job as a foreign correspondent, and dedicates himself to mastering the popular culture of the masses, which he encounters through newspapers. For a while, he goes to Russia and rejoins the elite modern fraternity as a skilled interpreter, and resumes his role as an elite Japanese acquirer of European culture.  Elise begs him to return, saying she is pregnant with his child, but when he returns he is overwhelmed by the thought that he might lose his homeland, and accepts an offer that enables him to return to his country.  He deserts Elise, and instead of giving the child his name he leaves money for its support.

On the face of it, Ōta has confirmed his masculinity and modernity and his integration with European society, as attested by his total domination of a European woman.  On closer examination, however, one sees that Ōta's temporary union with Elise is achieved precisely because of their common marginalization, hers because of her gender and social position, and his because of his race and nationality.  Because he is not accepted in Europe as a modern man, his masculine authority in Europe is confined to the squalid interior of Elise's house, and it is impossible for him to join the European male fraternity of the modern. His recognition of the impossibility of a lasting integration with Europe realistically reflects the unyielding racialism of the time in which the story was written, a racism that could be lethal for Japanese males economically severed from Japan.

Dr Cabell took his next example from a contrasting period, that following World War II, selecting Parts I and III, "A Summer in Rouen" and "And You, Too", from Endō Shūsaku's Foreign Studies, published in 1965.  By contrast, Endō's protagonists demonstrate greater desire for European recognition and thus experience greater frustration.  The first story deals with a Japanese student Kudō, who is granted a scholarship by the Catholic church to study Christianity in France, thus becoming surrounded by people convinced of their Christian duty to enlighten benighted Asians.  There is a parallel here with Endō's own experience of going to France in 1950, and travelling fourth class, where a friend told him that he would be joined by many black Africans. In contrast to Ōta, Kudō's inferior position as a Japanese is worsened by his total economic dependence. His impotence in French society is revealed by the fact that a French family with whom he stays during the summer rob him of his identity by calling him not by his own name but by that of their dead son. When he attempts to gain French recognition of Japanese civilization he only succeeds in reinforcing their ideas of the Japanese as primitive. Again unlike Ōta, who tried to show himself as modern by his ability to dominate a European woman, Kudō attempts to do so by distinguishing himself from Africans, demonstrating his contempt of the behaviour of a Moroccan he meets at a church lunch, and he is outraged when a priest compares Japan to Africa. But he cannot move from his inferior position in the racial hierarchy, and is treated in the way natives were treated in the European colonies, as needing to be civilized. He was even instructed in the use of a fork and was condemned for reading a book by Gide, whereas in Japan he would have enjoyed elite status as a student of European literature.

At the end of the story Kudō gropes for words that will allow him to challenge French fixed ideas.  But he never gains the authority to articulate his thoughts, and concludes that his story can only be conveyed to other Japanese; there is an unbridgeable cultural divide forever separating Japan from Europe.

In "And You, Too" the protagonist is a lecturer, Tanaka, who travels to Paris around 1965 to conduct research on the Marquis de Sade; he becomes estranged from the Japanese community there while yet being unable to connect with French culture. Though Japan is by now economically on a par with France, he finds himself totally without self-confidence when he arrives in Paris, without the social status he enjoyed in Japan.  This loss of status is confirmed when a noted Sade scholar Ruby keeps repeating "I have no idea why an Oriental like you should be studying Sade."  In this story the Japanese intellectuals and artists accept their inferior position in European society, even if they are highly honoured in their own country.  At the same time, Ruby's comments convince Tanaka of the futility of any Japanese student's trying to understand European culture. 

Endō introduces into the story another man, Kohara, who had once been a student in the law faculty at Tokyo University and had been posted to France by the Bank of Japan, but has chosen to stay in Europe and marry a French woman.  Unable to become a French citizen, he has become a man without a country, and cautions Tanaka not to do what he has done. He now finds repellent what had once attracted him in his youth. He cannot even reminisce with Tanaka and sing a Japanese children's song without being shouted at and ridiculed by his wife, who also sends him out to buy groceries, the ultimate in humiliation. Tanaka treats his own wife as being completely subservient to his authority, his insistence on the masculine authority obtaining in Japan making his emasculation in France that much more difficult to bear.

Soon after Tanaka's arrival in France, an architectural historian, Sakisaka, suggests he might like to pick up a white woman. The "despicable longing" to sleep with a white woman is aroused in Tanaka several times during his stay in France, yet in the end he lacks the courage to go ahead.  Even in Japan his fragile masculinity had prevented him from approaching women; his marriage had been arranged.

Eventually Sakisaka contracts tuberculosis, which he regards as a painful defeat in his struggle to come to grips with French culture.  Tanaka also seems to have developed tuberculosis, and lies in a hospital bed, physically and mentally exhausted by the effort to come to terms with French literature. Both "A Summer in Rouen" and "And You, Too" show the crises suffered by the protagonists, who find themselves excluded by French racism from the circle of male privilege to which they have been accustomed in their home country.

Dr. Cabell drew his third example from Persona, a work by Tawada Yōko, published in 1992; Tawada has lived in Germany since 1988, and has written in both German and Japanese.  Like the two previous stories, this one takes up the taboo against sex between an Asian male and a white woman.  It opens with an allegation of rape being levelled against a Korean male nurse, Seong-ryong Kim, by a mentally disturbed white accuser.  At first the German staff dismiss her charge, but gradually they begin to suspect Kim.  When Michiko, the female protagonist, learns of this, she identifies with Kim and is outraged by his treatment.  By contrast, her brother Kazuo, an ardent nationalist, feels no empathy with Kim.  He has chosen to study medieval German literature as it gives him a chance to triumph over German scholars, and is outraged when he feels he is being treated like a Vietnamese refugee.

In comparison with the earlier stories, the element of racism seems little changed, yet Japan's economic growth seems to have rearranged the traditional hierarchy. Japanese housewives are now characterizing the people of Thailand, Spain and China as backward, just as a German housewife who is preparing to go to Japan similarly dismisses Turks, Serbs and Greeks. In contrast to the earlier male protagonists, Michiko does not desire to penetrate German modernity or align herself with it through a sexual union.  Rather, she turns away from Western modernity to a group of immigrants living a marginalized existence.  There she has anonymous sex with a young Albanian, Hashim.  In so doing, she resembles Ōta in seeking out a poor person as a lover.  In fact, however, she is attempting to break free of the racial hierarchy that Ōta does not question, and in so doing overturns the sexual hierarchy in which the most desirable women are possessed by the most dominant men. This in turn represents her refusal to be categorized as belonging to one particular nation, which also comes out in her study of Turkish women writers who live in Germany and write in German. For Michiko such categories resemble masks forced on one by others.  Her ethnicity and nationality simply shape others' perceptions of her.

In the concluding pages, Michiko actually slips on a mask and goes out into the street.  She feels a new freedom in wearing the mask, because her actual face has been another mask imposed on her by society. In fact the text indicates the masklike qualities of faces throughout. Tawada's challenge to essentialism is perhaps most clearly seen in the largely absent character of Kim.  At one point, one of the Japanese housewives wants to know the kanji for his name, otherwise he might vanish, which in fact he does.  His name means "become a golden dragon", and Michiko looks for a Chinese restaurant of that name, but cannot find it.

In sum one could say that the three stories represent the silencing of stereotyping, racial stereotyping in the first two, and gender stereotyping in the third.

In the brief question time that followed, one questioner asked if the speaker was aware of the film adaptation of Mori Ōgai's Maihime (he was, but had not yet had an opportunity to see it and was offered a copy). Two questioners challenged what they felt to be Dr. Cabell's implicit acceptance of the belief that a feeling of racial superiority over the Japanese was universal in European society. One quoted Claude Monet's Japanese garden and the great appreciation of Japanese art in nineteenth century Europe as a counterargument to this theory. Dr. Cabell maintained that this was not his own viewpoint; he had merely been referring throughout his talk to what he believed to be the viewpoint of his authors as expressed through their protagonists' experiences in Europe. Another questioner said that the experiences of the protagonists recounted in this evening's talk reminded her of the diaries of Takamura Kōtarō, who had studied sculpture and woodcarving in France in the 1930s, had fallen in love with a French girl but then looked at himself in a mirror and wondered at how strange he himself seemed in such a Western and alien environment.

The vote of thanks was given by Dr. Charles De Wolf, who thanked the speaker for sharing his insight into these works of Japanese literature and praised him for his enthusiasm. He said how pleased he was that nowadays, via the Internet, the works of authors such as Mori Ōgai were accessible to a much wider audience, especially young people.