Tayama Katai and His Novel Entitled Futon/Chapter 2

by Motoko Reece

Chapter II

Katai's Literary Background up to 1907

Tayama Katai was born near Tokyo in Gumma Prefecture in 1872, four years after the Meiji Restoration.^[1] His given name was Rokuya and he was the fourth of five children. His father Shōjurō was a lower class samurai and his mother Tetsu was a daughter of Tayama Gazō of a related samurai family. When Katai was five years old, he lost his father who had been a metropolitan police officer. His father was killed in Higo during the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 in a fight between the government forces and the samurais; as a result of this misfortune Katai completed only three years of elementary schooling. When he was nine years old, he went to Tokyo with his grandfather to work as an apprentice in a bookstore.^[2] About a year later Katai, due to some wrong doing on his part, was sent home to Gunma prefecture accompanied by his elder brother Miyato.

When he was eleven Katai went back to school in his home town in Gumma to improve his education, as he found that he was not cut out for the type of merchant's work he was doing in a bookstore. He studied literary Chinese under Yoshida Rōken, formerly a teacher of several feudal lords. Three years later his family went to Tokyo where his brother Miyato had secured a position.

It was about 1885 when Katai started to send poems composed in Chinese to the magazine Eisai Shinshi, or New Magazine for Talented Men. Katai writes about Eisai Shinsai in Bunshō Sekai, or The World of Writing.^[3]

About that time [1833–35] I attended the elementary school at Kanrin [Gumma Prefecture] where I learned Chinese. Studying Chinese was regarded as more important at that time than nowadays. Therefore, I learned to compose Chinese poems . . .

As in the case of all contributors, when I saw my poems in the magazine [Eisai Shinsi], I was very proud. I showed my poems in the magazine to everyone. I was interested in composing poems and was permitted to buy the magazine by my family who said it was better to spend by money in this way than for some other useless purposes, even though my family was so poor that they could barely afford the two pennies for one copy of the magazine. This magazine could be regarded as becoming my sole consolation and moral support. I looked forward to the publication of each issue of the magazine and I was disappointed when my poem was not printed; however, generally speaking my compositions were printed in the magazine and I was flattered.^[4]

At seventeen, he started to study waka under Matsuura Tatsuo, a disciple of the Keien school of waka.^[5] Katai later affectionately recalls his teacher Matsuura in his memoirs.^[6] Katai learned from Matsuura the most important attitude of a poet for composing poems, the precept of the Keien school: "Kanjyō o itsuwaranai," or "Be true to your emotions." Matsuura's quiet personality and his realistic principles of art inspired Katai to write about ordinary daily events as his emotions dictated.

At the age of eighteen, Katai began to study English from Nojima Kinhachirō, the son of a former clansman, whose father was working at the Ministry of Home Affairs in Tokyo, and from whose library Katai borrowed European books.

He continued to study English at Meiji Gakkan, a private school, for about three years. During this time Katai stayed with his elder brother Miyato.^[7] In 1891 Katai wrote in his spare time his first story Uribatake, or the Melon Field.^[8] Uribatake is a short story written in the Saikaku style.^[9] The princiapl characters in this story are three children of ten and eleven years old. They go to a farm field to steal melons. They succeed, only after receiving a beating by the field keeper, but the melons are not yet ripe and are tasteless. The story is simple but it is noteworthy because Katai has written in Uribatake about his own personal experience, which often was his source in later stories.

From 1892 to 1899 Katai wrote twenty short stories. He studied the Japanese stories of Saikaku and Chikamatsu,^[10] as well as the Russian novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Gorky at the Ueno Library in Tokyo. It was at this library that Katai met the critic Takase Bunen who inspired Katai in his literary ambitions.^[11] Katai's translation of Cossacks by Tolstoy and his own Mumeisō, or A Nameless Flower, were outstanding works of this period. During this time Katai became acquainted with the writers Shimazaki Tōson and Kunikida Doppo. In January 1899 at twenty-seven Katai married Itō Risa, the sister of his friend Ōta Gyokumei. In December of the same year Katai began to work for a publishing house, Hakubunkan, with the help of Ōhashi Otowa, one of its editors.^[12]

Katai's works written from 1900 to 1905 reflect his leaning towards European naturalism. No no Hana written in 1901 shows this inclination, as does his essay "Rokotsu naru Byōsha," written in 1904.

During the Russo-Japanese War Katai participated as a private photographer in a compilation of A Pictorial Report of the Russo-Japanese War for a publishing company called Geographical Description of Japan.

In January 1905 Katai published an account of his war experiences, Dainigun Jūsei Nikki, or The Diary of the Second Regiment. In June he wrote Nabari Shōjo, or Girl of Nabari, for a literary magazine. In July he published travel sketches Kusamakura, or The Grass Pillow.

Bunshō Sekai, or The World of Writing edited by Katai, was published in March 1906, and in June his travel sketches Tabisugata, or Traveling.

In May 1907 he wrote Shōjo Byō, or The Maiden's Malady, in June Negi Hitotaba, or A Bunch of Green Onions, and in September Futon.

To recapitulate, then, Katai's literary career before the publication of Futon can be broken down into three periods according to the nature of his work and his intentions: (1) His early period began in 1885 when he started composing Chinese poems, as befitted the son of a samurai, and ended in 1889, the year he married. (2) His formative naturalistic period ended in 1905. (3) His experimental stage began in 1906. In September 1907 he was recognized as a naturalist with the publication of Futon.

(1) The characteristics of Katai's early works were those of a "nature" poet who was taught to express his emotions freely.

(2) Katai started as a writer at an early age, but during this period he had not grasped an understanding of the prose medium. It was in this formative naturalistic period (1900–05) that Katai was inspired by Maupassant's works. Katai relates his impression of Maupassant in his memoir Tokyo no Sanjūnen:

How my mind, eyes, and body were struck with wonder at these twelve volumes of exciting After-Dinner Series!^[13] I had previously been deeply moved by Emile Zola's Térèse Raquin but my wonder at After-Dinner Series was not at all that sort of thing. . . .

Perhaps my state of mind might have reached the right sort of transitional stage. In any case I was completely changed by these After-Dinner Series.^[14]

Katai was searching for a new descriptive style, a new path initially opened up by Zola's naturalism, but it was Maupassant who decisively pointed Katai in a new creative direction. The following description of Katai's state of mind upon reading Maupassant's After-Dinner Series supports this point in more detail.

Until then I had yearned only after Heaven. I didn't know about earthly things. Absolutely nothing. I was a shallow idealist! From now on I would become a child of the earth. I would no longer disdain to creep on the ground like an animal. Rather than dreaming in vain of a star in Heaven. . . .^[15]

Another characteristic of this naturalistic period was his publication of travel sketches. Katai by nature liked to travel and seemed to enjoy writing with what he called "Heimen byōsha," or "Plain delineation," of what he saw and heard.^[16] For example, from January 1901 to April 1902 Katai wrote eighteen essays, two poems, and forty travel sketches for publication in his employer's newspaper Taiheiyō, or The Pacific.^[17]

(3) It was after the year 1906 that Katai's naturalism became assertive. He advocated naturalism through his literary magazine, Bunshō Sekai, founded in 1906. The characteristics of Katai's works of this period can be summarized as follows: among the fourteen stories that he wrote during this time, seven are subjective narrations, wherein the author uses the first person singular, and an equal number are objective descriptions, wherein the principal character is referred to in the third person; however, the subjective narrations show a gradual decrease in romantic sentimentality, while the objection descriptions tend increasingly to take up the problem of sexual desire. These two tendencies gradually blend together and finally completely merge in the form adopted in Futon.^[18]

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1. Hauptmann was born in Salzbrunn, Silesia, in 1862, the same year that Bismarck was appointed Prime Minister of Prussia.
2. When Hauptmann was about nine years old, owing to the decline of his father's business, he was sent as an agricultural apprentice to his uncle's farm in the Silesian country-side where he did not prove to be a success. Soon he returned to Breslau, this time to study art, for which he had displayed a promising talent. His chronic rebellion against the discipline of the Royal Art School brought his connection with that institution to an early close.
3. Tayama Katai, ed., Bunshō Sekai, Vol. III, no. 13, Oct. 1908, quoted in Yanagida Izumi, Tayama Katai no Bungaku ("The Works of Tayama Katai") (2 vols.; Tokyo, 1956–58), II, 85.
4. Ibid.
5. A school for waka, or Japanese poetry, founded by Kagawa Kageki, a critic of the late Tokugawa period. He attempted to restore the poet's simple and original style as was the case of Japanese-forms of poetry of the Heian period that appeared in Kokinshū, the first imperial anthology collected around 905. The basic form of Waka consists of 31 syllables arranged in 5-7-5, 7-7.
6. Tayama Katai, Tokyo no Sanjūnen ("Thirty Years in Tokyo"), Vol. XCVII of Gendai Nihon Bungaku Zenshū (99 vols.; Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1953–59), pp. 304–05.
7. Hauptmann likewise lived for a while with his brother Karl and his sister-in-law (who became models in Einsame Menschen) at Zürich.
8. In the same year 1891, Hauptmann wrote Einsame Menschen.
9. Ihara Saikaku. Seventeenth-century prose stylist and haiku poet. His style was both elegant and colloquial.
10. Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Eighteenth-century playwright. His plays are characterized by a refined style and deep insight into psychology.
11. Tayama Katai, Tokyo no Sanjūne, op. cit., pp. 292–93.
12. Katai resigned from Hakubunkan in 1912. During the years 1899 to 1912 Katai wrote his own literary works in his spare time.
13. Maupassant's short stories were compiled and published under the title of After-Dinner Series by Mathieson & Co., London, England, in the years 1896–97.
14. Tayama Katai, Tokyo no Sanjūnen, op. cit., pp. 335–36.
15. Tayama Katai, Tokyo no Sanjūne, op. cit., pp. 335–36.
16. Plain delineation means a method of relating, with no subjectivism, the author's experiences in the real world just as they had been when he had seen, heard and felt them.
17. Wada Kingo, Shizenshugi Bungaku ("Naturalism Literature") (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1966), p. 168.
18. Wada Kingo, op. cit., pp. 154–58.