Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 1
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"Not Much Power in a Dead Man's Voice": Perfected Memory, Configured Ideology, and the Representation of Self in Kawabata Yasunari's Jyurokusai no nikki / James A. Wren
". . . none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a 'real' person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so the simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided improvement. A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
"Ideas are enclosed and almost bound in words like precious stones in a ring. Truly they become incorporated in them like the soul in the body, so as to constitute one whole. Ideas are therefore inseparable from words, and if divided from them they are no longer the same."
Leopardi, Zibaldone (27 July, 1822)
ABSTRACT: Contrary to its title, the 1968 Nobel Laureate for Literature Kawabata Yasunari's early diary Jyurokusai no nikki (Diary of a Sixteen Year Old) is anything but an unassuming chronicle of a single year in a young man's life. The complicated structure of reality in this work is constituted by homologous realities belonging to several distinct discourses which when read together co-signify something that none separately could. Certainly, we become privileged readers who, as we read, share a quest not just to perfect the mandate of self-knowledge but also to perfect the language of memory, identity and culture as the privileged, precarious instruments of its representation. But the very illusion of reality is revealed, illusion, as reality breaks down into questioning and circular subjectivity. Hence, a reading of the diary cannot help but hold a dual focus. On the one hand, it calls attention to the importance of component texts, insisting that the autonomy of individual texts--or the sedimentation that I have read as abstracted story--is a misleading notion and that a work has the meaning it does only because certain things have previously been written. Each is the artifact of a performance we recognize as self-discovery, and when taken together, the resultant hierarchy of discourses signifies a dynamic performance corresponding to a synergic reality not necessarily manifested in any single instance of specific discourse. Yet, insofar as it focuses on intelligibility, on meaning and the configuration of meaning, such a reading on the other hand acknowledges the contributions of component texts to a composite code via an overt instance of manipulation that makes possible the various effects of signification. In fact, the structuring itself signifies that each component text cannot be seen as analogous to--reduced to, as it were--individual perspectives of some amorphous reality. In addition to the failures and confusions of memory, these representations are inscribed within an infinitely complex process of deciding what from a lifetime of experience is to be included, what can be left out, what and whom, where and when to stress, and when to subordinate.
KEYWORDS: configured ideology, perfected memory, representations of self, mediated realities
<1> "Crack, boom, crack"(Kawabata 1: 9). However interminable or frequent the interruptions by an old man's death rattles, a grandson finds a certain bittersweet consolation in the knowledge that there is "not much power in a dead man's voice." Nor, perhaps, should we expect there to be, for having endured the transition from feudally-structured Tokugawa Japan and having survived the mad rush toward a modernization that infected the Meiji period like a plague, only to learn that his standing in society has gone from bad to worse, this particular old man has suddenly found himself teetering precariously on the edge of an abyss that was Japan under the mad Emperor Taishô. His favorite laments, among them "I live in sorrow," are as his grandson ventures "his true feelings." But how does an adolescent come to terms with his own true feelings concerning the imminent death of his grandfather, his caretaker and his provider, his sole living near-relative, and his only connection with his family's history and with who he is? If Kawabata Yasunari's Jyurokusai no nikki (1916, Diary of a Sixteen Year Old) is any indication, he privileges intuitive insight over literal recording as he writes of his grandfather--and of himself.[1] And as he records his struggle to understand himself, he simultaneously comes to terms with a newly-emerging Japan; in fact, the text stands on one level as a romantic manifesto proclaiming his new role as a writer in just such a world.
(The adolescent Kawabata Yasunari [photo in the public domain])
<2> From the beginning as he writes of the images of his grandfather, the narrator sees a connection between writing and memory. He realizes that the act of writing simultaneously provides both the means by which he may confront the inevitability of death and a mechanism to distance the unpleasant; he does this by conventionalizing, familiarizing, taming the very structures of his telling:
After I have finished writing a hundred sheets of stationery as part of my rough draft, I wonder how my unfortunate Grandfather is doing. [I had prepared the draft and thought how I would like to add it to my diary, but I was concerned that he might die before I had finished. Once I had finished this much, only then I could go help Grandfather. … I wanted somehow to express these feelings in my diary.]
Giving expression to his personal feelings at such times, tantamount to acknowledging and writing of the discontinuous nature of his "self" while transposing fragments of the world around him into subtle parts of a larger, if never fully articulated whole, provides the narrator a necessary means toward the restoration of a sense of balance, of control, and specifically of controlling his own destiny (Vance, 1975; Pascal, 1960). The act of writing defines the realm of his existence on a higher plane than mundane life.
<3> Ironically, a central concern to the whole of this diary is the mundane, in the narrator's desire to be a dutiful grandson during his grandfather's final days. In spite of his gallant attempts, it proves no easy task, he begrudgingly acknowledges, since his grandfather's words do not make for good conversation. "It always seems like pointless small talk," he laments,
and I have to repeat things over and over. Anything I say goes in one ear and out the other. So, [grandfather] has to ask me the same details over and over again. What's becoming of his mind?
In fact, suffering the pangs of increasing anger, marginalization, isolation and abandonment, the young narrator seeks to restore balance and give meaning to his life by coming to terms with those same elements that characterized his grandfather's life. His inordinate emphasis on the pangs of death and loneliness implies that his writing about them is an attempt to soothe the pain they have produced in his life, but the details of his diary lend credence to the extraordinary efforts required to come to terms with his grandfather's failings--in the fields of divination and housing construction, even as the living head of a household.
<4> Similar Herculean efforts were required as the narrator faithfully records changes in his grandfather's day-to-day condition. The foul smells emanating from his feverish body, the five minutes it takes for him to urinate, or other equally minute details of his other bodily functions, for example, are never overlooked:
Two people give a sigh of despair but continue to talk. [Grandfather had eaten often but was not able to use the bathroom; it was something he had eaten. Prior to this time, he had eaten much but had passed it through his system.] "Strange! What shall we do?" they ask. [The animal in his stomach liked sake. I had read from a scroll and had burned incense throughout the room.] "This animal is bad; it makes him go at different times. There have been bits of dried tuna shavings in his stool, and more recently the tail end of a piece of sushi."
The process of writing his story, however, is hardly quite as uncomplicated or naive as it might first have seemed. In fact, a conversation between them suggests the nature of those problems underlying their current relationship:
"What are you doing?"
"Go on. Use the chamber pot and give it to me."
He grunts and groans as he tries to turn over toward the pot. "Piss in here? Okay, I'm okay. . . . Aargh! …aargh! It hurts! …too much pain …aargh! …aargh!" He feels the pain when he tries to force it. I can hear the labored breathing, his voice; I can hear the sounds of a crystal-clear mountain stream crashing down onto the bottom of the pot."Ouch." Listening to his voice as he endures this pain, I begin to cry.
All too often short, yet by virtue of their conciseness, complex, these conversations come to a screeching halt, with a singularly-worded entry: "Later." Then, the entry simply breaks off, not exactly in mid-sentence but not at any clearly defined point either. On another level, this abrupt break suggests that in attempting to put his grandfather's pains into written form, this young man is simultaneously confronting a radical redefinition of assumptions about himself. Ultimately, when he does finally come to terms with his grandfather's anguish, it results not in his ability to relate to the world in a new and more comprehensible way but in an increased understanding of himself. In truth, it is his story that becomes the narration.
<5> It is altogether too easy, therefore, to focus on those aspects of Kawabata's diary that smack of first-person retrospective narratives wherein the author and the narrator are indistinguishable and the so-called confessional details are prescribed to be wholly objective representations of reality.
<6> Furthermore, to read the rich details of personal life as an accurate accounting of the author Kawabata's adolescence, as critics as fond of doing, is concomitantly to perpetuate a disingenuous misreading of the text as no more than autobiography. Certainly, the similarities between the author's lived life and that of the narrator do frequently converge, merging at times one into the other, but we should not overlook those points of divergence, the difference between the two, underscored in the examples above by the ubiquitous presence of an interpreting voice who is quick to embrace, whether appropriately or duplicitously, a particular view of the situation and, in doing so, to emboss his interpretation upon the moment. "I think," the narrator submits, "he feels really lonely." Or "today, he has a fever and there's a really bad smell. I read from the book on my desk. The rains of early May finally fall this evening." Whether offering an explanation about the nature of the illness (e. g., a certain animal who likes to consume sake) or manipulating the entire scenario by introducing elements of a pathetic fallacy of sorts in which both the urine and the early rains are said to be late in coming, the evidence for the manipulative authority of an ever-present narrator whose intervening hand has already interpreted the events is hardly subtle. Neither, I suspect, was it meant to be.
<7> Nowhere is this authority more discernable than in those moments when the narrator asserts that he is doing one thing and, in practice, does another. He initially indicates, for example, that he is keeping a diary, a point given credence by the title of the work itself. [2] But even titles can betray larger patterns of involvement and manipulation, in this particular instance functioning ideologically on a number of communicative levels. Doubtless, the writing of a nikki, or diary, suggesting a controlled frame of reference and embossing a degree of structure onto the written life, necessitates that the narrator impose a clear and discernible beginning, middle, and end onto an otherwise amorphous sense of reality characterizing a particular moment. But the term, too, implies less a sense of definition than the convenience of a readily understood label or convention. The narrator's conscious and conspicuous reliance upon retrospection permits him, it is true, the freedom to enter the realm of fiction in the protective guise of the diary--protective in the sense that it relieves him of certain social sanctions and emotional constraints. He is free to assert himself through candid self-expression and to deal with his own personal disappointments and frustrations at a time when he might not otherwise be permitted to do so. By providing clear and undisputable evidence of that control, these actions ensure and reassure the narrator of his control over those events comprising his current situation and over his own life, as well. Keeping a diary signals the narrator's desire to render the seeming unsurmountable as tame and mountable by granting him the authority as its writer. In at least this one instance in his life, he wields control. He becomes the creator, agent, originator (Chandler, 1990: 31-41).
<8> More to the point, characterized by a combination of detailed descriptions interspersed alongside of personal recollections written at a later date, the term nikki invokes a particular tradition and thereby positions Kawabata's text within "the general discursive space that makes a text intelligible," [3] in this instance, an identifiable historical context alongside of other works comprising nikki bungaku, a distinctly Japanese literary genre of diary literature predating the introduction of Western-styled narration. The nature of this positioning, as well as the conscious articulation of his affiliation with its long-standing tradition, is important to our understanding of the ideological implications underpinning this particular text, I believe.
<9> The title, for example, clearly positions this work within a discernible configurational matrix wherein ideology is configured or organized in a less obtrusive manner from without, through comparisons, associations, or recognitions that require the active participation on our part as members of the reading audience. Consider that Western approaches to the form assume without question that the intended audience of a diary is limited to the reader (Childs, 1994: 43), and at precisely the historical moment of enunciation of Kawabata's text, these alien expectations were fast becoming internalized by a Japanese readership, as well. But insofar as Japanese diaries, comprised of an overview of a portion of an individual's life actively compiled and edited with the benefit of hindsight and with the clear knowledge that others will eventually have access to and read them, were meant to be read by others, and the narrator's use of the term represents an overt act of deception. More to the point, Jyurokusai no nikki subverts the expectations of either group by providing us with his intended "reader," an older self. As actualized readers, we represent little more than the nuisance of passers-by who happen inadvertently to "peep in" on the very process of memory engaging this older self and the youthful narrator. [4] Both benefit from the delicate sensibilities and strong passions characteristic of a confessional mode of narration.
(An Older Kawabata [photo in public domain])
<10> As a concatenation of those fragments of lived-life repositioned into a fictitious universe acceptable to the remembering subject, the diary ultimately depends on the precarious dynamics of memory, as the narrator has taken great pains to demonstrate, a wonderfully subversive thing. As such, it becomes the principle vehicle by which he manipulates the very notions of the temporal as a linear construct, while its presence lends credence to the fact that his goal is the interpretation of the past and not the past itself. Any sense of reality that such a form perpetuates depends by its very nature upon the "artless" spontaneity of the non-retrospective, metaphorical process by which the narrator searches for isolated fragments in his past (e.g., recollection of village life and celebrations at various temples), as he renders his reminiscences neither categorically nor chronologically but temporally, in terms of the time it takes him to progress from one fragment to another.
<11> The meanings we find in the text may also come into being because we as readers recognize in this move from one space of memory to another a shared system of signification linking the particular text at hand to broader structures of meaning outside itself--hence, the importance of the intertext of memory in providing prior texts. As a metonymical approach to the past, however, memory is not simply a temporary aid in the constitution of a fictional universe; indeed, it establishes for the narrator an interpretive context in the guise of a clear metaphor of his involvement with the past. Furthermore, within this particular approach to self-exploration, the writing self is incapable of coinciding with the subject in the past and therefore can only articulate a vision that allows him to see himself in the past as a series of images, as the product of his writing alone. Without the power to alter the past, he is restricted to seeing himself qua subject and deriving any ensuing sense of emotional involvement neither from the performance of the act nor from its representation. Rather, the intensity of his involvement results from the re-presentation of the performance itself as the narrative of memory produces a vignette in which he longs to be a voyeur. A participating subject, the older self celebrates himself as he recovers and peruses a certain moment from his past.
<12> Midway through the text, however, we are introduced to a seemingly innocuous detail both supporting and undermining both this structural integrity and the importance of the diary form to our understanding of the emerging self:
So, I turn my desk, lay out my writing paper, sit down, and prepare to write down the story I hear. [I thought I could write down just what Grandfather had told me.]
This admission that he intends faithfully to record the details of conversation evidences a further shift away from diary toward what might more accurately be described as memoir. But this shift is already problematic, for it is given a name only after the narrator has already been doing so for at least half of the text. Additionally, the very ambiguity of format implicated in such a shift compels us to face issues of interpretation arising ultimately from the questions of configuration. The narrator's words, for example, betray a moralizing subtext, an internal debate granting him the freedom to lament the sad state of his own life-- but to do so only within a highly regulated and extremely personal frame, in his writing:
There is absolutely nothing in this world that you can control. I am more aware of the next world than this one. But my mind is not filled with the right thoughts.
His words bear out the futility, as well as the uncertainly, of his position. They also bear out the polysemy of his written text, allowing it to be read and understood by multiple audiences who may see in it what they please. Powerless, he dwells on the emotional reactions to the vicissitudes of his life in a manner quite similar to that of the earlier female diary tradition--but with one important difference. These are not his reactions but those expressed by people somehow connected with his household. Within this particular frame, the only way that he can control the events as they unfold is to record how they have affected the lives of those around him.
<13> But what initially began in a reserved stance as a diary where the self is its own audience and, then, shifted to the context of memoir, eventually moves toward an overt autobiographical stance as the narrator has a change of heart and represents himself openly, for others to see. He abstractly pursues the role and function of his memory of himself via his recording of his relationship to his grandfather as Death approaches, but as he does so, he must admit
I had forced myself to forget those sincere feelings from my past, but as I read of my Grandfather, I realized that I have since made him out to be much nobler than I had thought at the time. Clearly, I had as time passed whitewashed over his bad points.
I could not remember all of the daily occurrences recorded in the diary--the first time the doctor visited, for example--but as might be expected, I did still have memories of Grandfather's last few days.
The observable distance, however, insinuates that he, too, is moving and that all that constitutes himself is somehow being repositioned, as well. Thus, in the end, via a number of structural manipulations, the narrator succeeds in rendering problems of self-knowledge of epistemological rather than of autobiographical concern.
<14> The narrator's final act in the main text, significantly, is to shift, but this time, the nature of the move is questionable:
As for myself, deep in this otherwise peaceful heart is sorrow. I smile at his ancient face and follow his every word. Omiyo's smile changes as I rest my chin in my hands and prepare to listen.
This image of the narrator's having settled in as an appreciative audience for a long night of listening to tales woven before him pushes the text as a whole further and further away from the personal toward the realm of fiction. It, too, suggests a stance within which all such representations of self are conventionally understood to be fictitious and crafted with an awareness of their intended reading audience clearly in mind. Specifically, his actions recall the long tradition of oral narrative and remind us that as narrator he is, in fact, ultimately caught up in something more than just listening. He is actively framing his desire to write, but more to the point, he is writing himself into the story, albeit one in which the contexts have once again shifted and are now clearly subversive. He intends to write the self as a novel.
<15> And how are we to understand these shifting fields of definition? Certainly, attempts to establish some sort of link between the reconstruction of an individual past and the history of the world, to incorporate personal experience as a part of objective understanding, may be seen as characteristic of Kawabata's later writings. But there is more to it than that, I believe. The overt shifting of contexts, for example, illustrates de facto that the autonomy of texts is an impossibility; instead, on one level, a text has the meaning it does only because certain things have been written earlier, a situation as it were that forces us as members of the reading audience to focus on intelligibility, on meaning and the configuration of ideology. Certainly, the invocation of prior texts is in and of itself a strategy for configuring ideology within a text, but in this particular instance, by implicating the importance of prior texts on the present moment, the narrator demonstrates for us as his audience that reality is neither a mere "flux" nor a mechanical collision of fragments. \Rather, it possesses an "order" which he has rendered in a particularly "intensive" form by activating prior readings as contributors to a code that makes possible the various effects of signification. Specifically, his use of impersonal texts focusing on such diverse topics as house building, the making of tea, or his grandfather's miraculous kampō treatments for diarrhea, actually lend themselves to the construction of topoi as spaces where we can examine the various social and intellectual roles that our readings of these texts suggests.
<16> As manifestations of memory, all such texts also constitute a radical transformation of its function and offer insights into the interpersonal, textual forms that memory may take. What is at one moment peripheral and remarkably forgettable can quickly be given a sense of immediacy and take center stage, so to speak. As the grandfather laments,
"Is it funny? Laugh for me. Tell me I am the fool. Feel sorry for those of us under someone else's thumb. Sure, I'm crushed under the weight of this seven hundred year old house that's falling in all around me. So, that's the way it is. Soon the spirit of heaven will pull up my corpse. I am filled with the poisons of illness."
Following an admission by the narrator that he intends to record the details of his grandfather's conversation faithfully, we suddenly become aware, witness and understand all that were once private memories suddenly merging with that segment of culture, a seven-hundred year old house, already intent on remembering itself as culture. With transformations comes transfiguration, as these memories assert their viability as culture, both across human interaction and in external systems of notation that span generations, by turning concrete historical evidence into epistemic knowledge (cf. Assmann, 2011).
<17> Ironically, the grandfather's pleas for others to understand his personal plight implicate an even larger movement away from the personal and into the public-and the quotidian. The merger between private memories and larger issues of history connotes the fragmented nature of this text. In fact, the structure of Jyurokusai no nikki, demarcating the public and the private, treats self-division and fragmentation as normal rather than problematic while it implicates role-playing as an essential characteristic of self-awareness. The narrative self in the public arena, as a loyal subject mourning the death of the Empress Dowager or as a schoolboy, for example, is subject to external time not only physically but also in the sense that he must at least tacitly organize his diary along chronological lines.
<18> On the personal level, however, he remains governed by internal time and, above all, by memory. In fact, the structuring of the diary intimates that the basis for meaning lies not in the realm of the metaphysical but in the text of memory.
<19> Thus, any reading of Kawabata's diary must necessarily consider these component discourses, as well as account for how they exist together and how their existence mediates and thereby subverts our expectations for the reading experience. A hybrid text constituted of a plurality of distinct, often obstructive, intrusive and contradicting discourses, each having its own specific function and discernible limits, its purpose, then, ceases to be only that of presenting certain narrated actions. It becomes rather that of configuring reality and of understanding the roles of and interrelationships between memory and the representation of knowing. Both are equally valued for their durability and as being great enough to be worthy of being remembered. [5]
<20> Again and again, our attentions are drawn to the fugitive nature of memory in the narrative process linking the narrator with the historical matrix of ideology. But perhaps the largest source of this confusion lies in Kawabata's mode of writing and his penchant for rewriting. As with each of his major works, he wrote, revised and rewrote, circulated and appended in place of a single text at the very least three discernible texts co-existing within a single artifact that frames them, what we recognize as the diary per se. Even what appears in print to be the main text is, in fact, interwoven with still other texts, as the following passage illustrates:
In a village of some fifty households, there was said to be at least one victim of dysentery to every house. There was more trouble when the quarantine hospital was built. …grandfather's medicine proved to be a comparably easy cure for the sickness. While in the hospital, these victims of dysentery discarded their hospital medicine and took grandfather's, and they were saved by that very medicine kept hidden away from view. Its curative properties were not understood, but somehow the facts bore out that grandfather's medicine had wondrous effects.
<21> When memory is invoked by the narrator, for example, it creates a sense of place, as well as a sense of being for him. Furthermore, the narrator's presentation of one text stands as an uninterrupted accounting of events while a second is introduced into it as fragments, citations, references, and the like. Such a structuring requires that the reader somehow unite these fragments into a unified whole, an autonomous text, suggesting that all individual experiences contribute to a continuing process of cultural self-preservation. Any sense of unity inherent to the narrator's subjective experiences is contingent upon his ability to establish via memory a repository of universal figures and tropes. [6] To this end, the historical matrix impinges upon how he positions notions of the self within the greater contexts of time, space, and culture. Hence, with memory as a vehicle facilitating self-representation, the past can conceivably be rendered as an eternity transcending the specificity of a single moment, the here and now. That people, experiences and things all appear through the tremendous prism of memory inscribing the diary, however, creates the impression for those of us outside of the text that the narrator has succumbed to the seductive allures of what William Boelhower (1987) has termed a "politics of memory" as he attempts to preserve the autonomy of his personal experiences intact. But, in point of fact, Andrew Fields cautions, "the past is not searched out." It is, rather, "carefully selected--the changing form … likened to breathing--and poetically fixed"(cf. Bruss, 1976: 135). Within the imaginary space of this diary--and subsumed as a part of its imaginary topology--the ordered "stacking" of memory signals to a world beyond itself. The rhetoric of memory, therefore, problematizes the self as both the producer and the consumer of figures and implies, ipso facto, those historical facts ordinarily left concealed within the moment of self-enunciation.
<22> To understand how this is possible, consider for a moment two seemingly unrelated events of particular ideological significance to the emerging self-representations of the narrator, the death of the Empress Dowager and the narrator's becoming an orphan. Following Hayden White's argument that all events of history are value-free in themselves and take on value only when they are organized into a particular kind of story (1984), these events in their presentation betray an image of a narrator both who struggles to organize his materials and whose decisions are governed by the genre in which he is working. Illustrative of how a moment from Meiji-focused history comes to enter the text through the eyes of a child, the entry following the appended text insinuates on several levels just such an interpretive stance:
Grandfather died on the same evening as the Empress Dowager's funeral. I had just begun the "Worshipping-from-afar" Ceremony for her at my middle school, about two and a half miles to the east of my village. I could not say why, for although I wanted to attend, I felt quite ill at ease about the Ceremony. In my absence, Grandfather might die. Only Omiyo was there to listen in on Grandfather.
"Go do your duty to the Japanese nation," he says.
"Will you live until I get back?" I ask.
"I'll live. Now, go on."
I had to hurry to make the eight o'clock Ceremony at school. I was in such a hurry that I ripped the straps to my geta. [My middle school still wore kimono at this time.] I returned home to get new footwear--call it superstition, I guess. I changed geta and hurried off to school.
The Ceremony at school finally came to an end, while the pangs of my uneasiness only grew stronger and stronger. The streets of the town were deserted, thanks to the Ceremony; it looked as it might on a dark night. I took off my geta and walked barefoot down the two-and-a-half mile road toward home. Grandfather was still alive past midnight.
<23> Essential to this scene, these highly descriptive details further underscore the narrator's marginalization, his distance from the center of such actions. He remains a child (as opposed to an adult) who lives in Osaka, an area of economic prowess far removed from Tokyo, the center of modern culture and Imperial power, and this detail connects the text with that particular cultural tradition, bringing into focus often-digressive descriptions of Osaka manners and customs, facts of contemporary life in villages outside of the "center." And he is a child who must walk for several hours, in spite of broken straps of his geta, in order to attend this Ceremony. The unconscious linking his grandfather's death with that of the Empress Dowager, moreover, embeds into the narrative a particular Confucian ideological stance peculiar to the historical moment. The world of the narrator's childhood is one in which traditional sociopolitical constructs privileging family loyalty and filial piety had been reconfigured along patriarchal lines into loyalty and piety to the Emperor as head of the nation. The appropriation by the State of those values traditionally reserved to the ie system of lineage, a hierarchy preserved by a rigid adherence to differences of gender and age, primogeniture, and the respect for autocratic authority, has left the school, as a State-erected institution espousing centralized authority, as the model of contemporary Japanese integrity and piety. Hence, the scene linking the broken geta, the death of the Emperor's mother, and a fear of superstitions positions the narrator squarely within a greater field of contestation, that of State-formation wherein traditional values could and were being appropriated, repositioned, and in some instances erased. [7]
<24> Such a subversive counter-punctual reading of the moment also represents both the potential for breaking with tradition and the potential for adhering to traditional ideals.
<25> But perhaps most obvious to the moment is the overt effacement of the paternal. Mirroring a larger, society-wide break-down of those values characteristically espoused within a family and in their place the substitution of the State and its particular ideologies, this particular scene illustrates a moment within which the traditional family unit is being reconfigured. Here, parent-child (oyako) bonding, already stretched across generations to its limit, gives way to the grandson's assumption of the role as caretaker and "head" of his household. The grandson's impious remark, "I cannot make sense of his reply," is as quickly tinged with sincere regret as he realizes that he is "the one suffering--knowing that I am giving up a part of my life for him." Or a moment of particularly intense concentration when he focuses on his grandfather's weakened state, his "thin and bony" face barely hidden beneath "that scantily clad white head of hair" and "shuddering bones and leathery hands," is rent by the grandfather's own awareness that death is imminent. The latter forces the narrator to accept "with my own eyes" the significance of "his pale face." But all of these clues are quickly rendered insignificant at that moment when, against the backdrop of wall clocks and thunder, emerges the despair and the anguish of the grandfather's final days, "'I'm dying! Dying! Aagh, I'm dying!'" For no amount of knowledge, no amount of preparation, and certainly no amount of pity or sorrow could ameliorate the overwhelming sense of pathos inherent to such cries.
<26> And just as quickly, we are forced to move again, in this instance toward the narrator's own self-pity as he thinks to himself, "Will this voice ever calm down?" In fact, each of these images contradicts those notions of family so painstakingly erected by the post-Meiji Restoration authorities, and the manner in which they do so does not always position the narrator in the best possible light. Perhaps nowhere is the nature of this contradiction more apparent than when the grandfather lectures his grandson on the evils of cheating--at precisely the same time as he is opening his "English books for tomorrow's test…[in order to]…cram my thoughts onto 1.4 inches, just sufficient enough to give me the confidence I need." Furthermore, as a measure of just how successful the transpositioning has been and of the shift away from group-centered values toward those of a far more personal nature, we need only take note of those moments when the narrator laments that school, still a recognizable center of group activities, has become "my paradise," or when he unquestioningly accepts, even internalizes, the priority of a highly stylized show of respect given to the late Empress Dowager over an intensely personal show of his grief over his grandfather's death. For not only has the grandson lost his grandfather, but also the grandson as loyal subject has lost the "first mother," the only maternal relationship that he seems to have knowledge of. As with all other Japanese subjects at this particular moment, he is not only orphaned. He has been abandoned, left without a moral guide.
(The Nobel Laureate Kawabata [photo in public domain])
<27> This juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events points to another serious concern, as well. If I may consider the text in its various forms not so much as a single, sublime and perhaps absolute "fiction," but as one which is in some ways "about" reality and even in some ways "true," then, what is the nature of that reality and what of its truth? Is it empirical? Metaphysical? Or both? These questions hint at their own answer, if we remember that larger notions of cultural memory are based in fateful events of the past, on fixed "figures of memory" whose "memory is maintained through cultural formation and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)" (Assmann 1995: 129). For the text as a whole, characterized by the marvelous and frequent collisions of differences, must be judged a hierarchical configuration of multiple discourses. First is what I recognize as the "primary text," that text I can readily discern to have been Kawabata's original diary. Onto this text is embossed a second, what I call the "configurational text," composed of recognizable parenthetical expressions and explanations the purposes of which are to configure meaning, at times naively through clarification, and whose function is often antithetical to the primary text. Ideally, their collision creates a synthetic discourse for the reading audience. [8] In fact, from the outset of the diary, the presence of a secondary text is rendered unmistakable in the inscription, "Author's Note: The parenthetical commentary was written as an explanatory postscript when I was twenty-seven years old." We are introduced almost immediately to their use:
May 4
I return home from middle school around 5:30 and entered by the side gate, since the front gate was kept closed to discourage unwelcomed guests. Grandfather is the only person around; he sleeps, has run into some more trouble. [Grandfather was very ill and was blind at this point.]
"I'm home," I mutter. Grandfather doesn't answer. He is as still as death, perfectly quiet. A lonely and sorrowful experience. I now stand six feet away from Grandfather's bedside.
"I'm home."
Acknowledged by the narrator to have been written on a number of occasions after either the primary or the configurational texts is what I have termed the "adhering text." Consider, for example, the following addition:
Here the diary ends. Ten years after writing it, I discovered it in Uncle Shiki's cellar. I had written about thirty some odd pages of it while I was in middle school. I probably did not write anything more than that. Sometime after that, I must have filled in the blanks, since Grandfather died on May 24. The final entry is on May 16, and he dies eight days later. His illness was really quite bad during his final days, and the house was in such disarray that I had no time to continue the diary.
When I discovered this diary, however, I had such a wonderful feeling of curiosity. I could not recall all of the details of my everyday life I had written about in my boyhood home. I did not remember, in spite of the fact that I went to the same old places every day. I do not even remember the places. For myself, these people from somewhere in the middle of my past are forgotten. I have to think on this and let it sink in.
Serving to append and to introduce some bit of unclear detail, to clarify a specific purpose, or to correct previous misinformation, this third level shifts the overall purpose of the text and, as it does so, problematizes how I as a member of the reading audience set about reading the diary in the first place.
<28> Corresponding to a structuring of reality that cannot be manifested in any instance of a specific discourse, these three different texts are hardly analogous to individual perspectives of a single event. Instead, they compete for positions within the hierarchy I recognize as the diary per se. [9] In accepting such a structure, I concede that what we apprehend in its entirety as Kawabata's text is comprised not only of separate discourses but, more important, that it belongs to a larger cluster of texts, the multifaceted diary tradition in Japan, whose pragmatic purposes, however different on the surface, are nonetheless complementary. To read the Jyurokusai no nikki, then, is to see first an instance of one given discourse in its implications with instances of other discourses.
<29> Accepting such a reading has the added advantage of allowing us to understand the process by which the narrator's vision can, at once, be both fragmentary and complete. On the one hand, it offers segments momentarily cut off from the chronological sequence that subsumes them and whose succession they now delay. On the other, these segments now constitute scenes which, while unfinished, have the power not only to interrupt or even delay the narration of the remainder of the narrative but to reshape the past, the present, even the future of the narrator, as well. From the perspective of the narrator, this diary may, in fact, have represented an attempt on his part to master certain bitter personal and psychological conflicts by displacing their expression from one discourse to another within the hierarchy, but to read this diary from the perspective of a member of the reading audience, then, is simultaneously to question the presumptions of a monologism the likes of which the Meiji State had so zealously erected and which the Taishô had resolved to preserve and strengthen--not as a fait accompli but as a permanent rhetorical struggle to control the inherent rhetorical of language and of memory (Tomasi, 2004). It is also to recognize its dangerously dialogical tendency to fragment and dispense truth.
<30> Furthermore, from my understanding of this hierarchy in general, I may now make three assumptions about how ideology functions within the representation of self in this particular text. First, the diary is grounded in a story that, whatever its archetypal presuppositions bearing upon an ideal self, nevertheless expresses some degree of truth about the writer Kawabata's lived life, understood as that of an empirical self. Second, Kawabata as a writer is sufficiently lucid about his rhetorical strategies to understand--and to allow us to understand--that, although he could not in good faith carry to completion a narrative unless its events were licensed by what existentially occurred, he could complete that story by passing from a narrative of empirical events to a closure that was ideal, conjectural or speculative. From a reader's perspective, however, this displacement from the discourse of narrative to that of speculation constitutes another equally valid story whose trajectory as fiction is comprised of discursive, rather than narrative, events. And third, the relationship of the narrated self both to the grandfather and within the structure of the family as a whole remains unresolved in and during the writing of the narrative level of the text. Accordingly, he does no less than to adopt modes of closure that are exegetical on the one hand and speculative on the other.
<31> Suffice it to say, then, that the structure of reality in this work is constituted by homologous realities belonging to several distinct discourses which, when read together, co-signify something that none separately could. We recognize in the narrator and in our own readings a quest not just to perfect the mandate of self-knowledge but also to perfect the language of memory as the privileged, precarious instrument of its representation. But the very illusion of reality is shown for what it is, illusion, as reality breaks down into questioning and circular subjectivity. Hence, a reading of the diary cannot help but have a dual focus. On the one hand, it calls attention to the importance of component texts, insisting that the autonomy of individual texts--or the sedimentation that I have read as abstracted story--is a misleading notion and that a work has the meaning it does only because certain things have previously been written. Yet, insofar as it focuses on intelligibility, on meaning and the configuration of meaning, such a reading on the other hand acknowledges the contributions of component texts to a composite code via an overt instance of manipulation that makes possible the various effects of signification.
<32> Thus, if Jyurokusai no nikki makes a point about self-representation, it is that representations of self-awareness need not be limited in their expression to a single, unified text; in the gaps between the narrator's emerging understanding of memory on a theoretical level and the divergent personalities that comprise those memories in practice, rather, they may in their fragmentation give way to multiple texts co-existing within a single artifact. In fact, the hierarchical complexity of this diary stands as an extended conceit for the futility of representing selves that, by their very existence, challenge each one another for supremacy, ostensibly for their "right" to be read. Each is the artifact of a performance we recognize as self-discovery, and when taken together, the resultant hierarchy of discourses signifies a dynamic performance corresponding to a synergic reality not necessarily manifested in any single instance of specific discourse. Rather, the structuring itself signifies that each component text cannot be seen as analogous to--reduced to, as it were--individual perspectives of some amorphous reality. In addition to the failures and confusions of memory, these representations are inscribed within an infinitely complex process of deciding what from a lifetime of experience is to be included, what can be left out, what and whom, where and when to stress, and when to subordinate. That is to say that, while the process indicts the very possibility of objectivity as no better than the widespread manipulations imposed from without, it nonetheless cunningly betrays a fact that the grandfather perhaps never came to see but that his grandson's diary would eventually bear out. There remains a great deal of power inherent to any man's voices, be they dead, dying, or fixed by memory somewhere in between.
Notes
[1] Sylvia Platt's poetry resulted from precisely this scenario. Unable to speak freely about her childhood pains, she was advised by her psychiatrist to give them a discernible "body" by writing them through poetry. H. Porter Abbott (1984) has argued for a similar value in fictional diaries. On a more general level, Marilyn Chandler (1990: 47-ff) has observed that writers who have experienced extreme trauma may employ autobiographical writing as an effective therapy, having as it does for them profoundly valuable therapeutic effects.
[2] But we should not forget the unidirectional usage of the words of the narrator of Natsume Sôseki's Kôfu (1906), spoken sometime earlier, about the general perceptions of the diary in general:
"If I kept a diary, say, of my feelings just as they were at the moment, I'm sure the result would have been infantile, affected thing full of lies--certainly nothing that I could have presented to people like this and asked them to read" (30).
[3] Although the use of the protean term intertextuality has heretofore neither been extensive nor widespread, its basic lines of development can be enumerated. But a general caveat about commentarial theory and those commenting: after elaborately arguing and ultimately concluding that intertextuality is by definition all-encompassing and after having failed to see the inherent imperialization behind such a definition, critics-notably Julia Kristeva, who is credited with having first introduced the term as early as 1966, and Harold Bloom--proceed to undermine their very arguments by identifying specific allusions in specific texts and thereby claiming that some are more "valid" or "meaningful" than others. In spite of their words, their deeds are other: in Langue, discours, société (1975), Kristeva's intertextuality in practice is limited to cases of identifiable instance and, thus, smacks of the very discussions of source and influence that she so fervently fights to refute; and Bloom's earlier use in Anxiety of Influence (1973) depends in practice on a highly restrictive, even subjective, notion of intertextuality.
[4] In fact, with the awakening of a consciousness to the self in the modern period, these narrators' expressions of a metaphorical inner voyage shares the same discursive space with Mori Ogai's Uta nikki (1907, Lyrical Diary), Natsume Sôseki's Mankan tokorodokoro (1909, Out and About in Manchuria and Korea) or Nagai Kafû's Shinkichôsha nikki (1909, Diary of a New Returnee). Although Ogai's Uta nikki details his movements during the Russo-Japanese War, it characteristically represses--in doing so, it all too often trivializes--the brutality in favor of a celebration of the clichéd in the absence of any expressions of genuine depth of emotion (19: 138-139). Or in his Shinkichôsha nikki, written after a five-year sojourn in the United States and in France, Kafû confronts in no uncertain terms the disgust he feels from the rapid move of Japan to modernize, especially toward what had become of metropolitan society. See, for example, Hutchinson (2012).
[5] Germane to my understanding, I am reminded that the Greek term ἔργα (erga) denotes both "deeds" and their "records of such deeds."
[6] In fact, Mori Ogai came to a similar realization as he reflected on the life of fellow novelist Futabatei Shimei:
Memoirs must be read with care. Such accounts may be purposefully distorted, or memory may fail. All of us are guilty of revising and rationalizing the past in our minds. Knowingly or unknowingly, we deceive ourselves and others. (26: 347-348)
[7] Recall, as well, the several references to the Fox God Inari who was believed to bring good luck. In his 1909 novel Kompira, Ogai would go so far as to argue for the value of superstition in an otherwise thoroughly "modern" world. Specifically, the narrator's son has just died from whooping cough, and his father stands beside the deathbed and implores a reliance upon superstition as he tries to comfort his wife (5: 555-556).
[8] Telling of the historical moment, a similar technique is used with some frequency by Ogai, beginning with his 1912 novella "Okitsu Yagoemon no isho." Ogai's reliance on narratorial address to sway a reading audience, likened to a theatrical aside, however, serves to detail the sources from which the "factual" information came. That is to say, they serve the purpose of a priori authenticity.
[9] The multiple layers of text resulting from these rewritings is yet another affiliation Kawabata's diary shares with the classical diary tradition. In the Murasaki Shikibu nikki, written sometime in the first decade of the eleventh century, for example, Lady Murasaki frequently uses such markers as the verb haberi or the sentence-ending particle yo, both of which suggest that those passages were appended sometime later (cf. Bowring, 1996: xlix).
Works Cited
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Contributor's Note
James A. Wren has spent much of the last decade confronting the creative process. In addition to writing for the stage, he experiments with Abstract Expressionism in his use of oils and multi-media, pushes the boundaries of word craft with his poetry, and composes outrageous cacophony for wind and string ensembles. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from The University of Washington, a DPhil in modern Japanese literature and cultural studies from Niigata University (Japan), and a DSc in immunogenetics and Silk Road Studies from The Chinese University of Mining and Technology (P.R.C.). Hitherto, he pursued a career in medicine, before moving into literature and language at Rhodes College and The University of Hawai'i and has widely published in the areas of modern Japanese and Indonesian literature, as well as in Pacific Island Studies, medical history and narrative theory. Since his retirement as Professor of Modern Japanese and Comparative Literature and Languages at San José State University, he has become a self-proclaimed provocateur in search of new voices. "It's an armchair journey," he jokes from his wheelchair, "But a journey nonetheless." Wren will serve as guest editor of reconstruction 16.1: Regionalism, Regional Identity and Queer Asian Cinema.
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