Familiarity of the Strange: Japan's Gothic Tradition

Criticism, Wntr, 2000 by Henry J. Hughes

Introduction

CHARLES SHIRO INOUYE'S introduction to his English translations of Izumi Kyoka's Japanese Gothic Tales (1996) attempts for the first time in English to contextualize the idea of Japanese Gothic fiction. Inouye, a gifted translator, is unwilling to defend the centrality of the Gothic in Kyoka's work beyond a connection to Poe and an interesting "dissonance" that might creak open if the traditions are compared.

   Kyoka's writing flows from assumptions very different from those that
   provide the bedrock for Poe's dank and desolate creations, but to the
   extent that the term gothic can hold meaning in a cross-cultural dimension,
   it is worth applying to both writers, if only to bring attention to the
   dissonance the category creates. If anything, Kyoka's writing is a frontal
   attack on the barbarous and uncouth values to which European gothic
   supposedly owes its genealogy Yet Kyoka does share with Poe a decadent
   romanticism, and this point of sameness leads us to consider how it is
   possible that writers of the uncanny and the macabre can be highly regarded
   at all.(1)

The title Japanese Gothic Tales, printed on a black cover framing a beautiful witch slipping off her kimono, is advertising reminiscent of purported translations from the Italian or Spanish that would sell more copies in eighteenth-century England if alluringly appended: "Gothic Romance." But in the humble, yet sometimes insular tone of Japanese literary criticism, Inouye sets Kyoka apart as the consummate artist who disparaged the "barbarous and uncouth values" fueling the European Gothic. Still, do Kyoka's stories reflect more genteel values? A witch calms a peddler she has turned into a horse by disrobing beneath him, a castle hag licks blood from a severed head, a man drives a pin through both eyes to seal a love pact, and a countess sits up in the middle of heart surgery to stab herself. Japan, like the West, has no shortage of medieval or modern literary barbarity to draw from. And yet Kyoka's delicate, visual language suspends the Gothic violence over moments of horrible beauty. In "One Day in Spring," a man gazes on the drowned bodies of two people he knew. "The boy's head was like a jewel pressed against the woman's breast, the red lion's cape still wet and tangled around her white arm. Beautiful and alluring, Tamawaki Mio had finally discovered the destination of the dead."(2)

Japanese critics like Inouye seem to be afraid that Kyoka and other accomplished native writers will be cheapened by the label Gothic, Goshikku ([JAPANESE TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). Goshikku is written in katakana, the form reserved for foreign words and phrases, as opposed to Kaiki shosetsu ([JAPANESE TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), written in kanji as a more distinctly native term for fiction of the strange or extraordinary. Critics are willing to sacrifice an author like Edogawa Rampo to a Gothic jacket because, like Stephen King, he is considered a writer of pulp horror, but canonized masters are, for the most part, protected from such affiliations.(3) Surveying literary criticism of Western Gothic in Art of Darkness, Anne Williams laments that in America as well, "Twentieth-century keepers of the House of Fiction have always treated Gothic as a skeleton in the closet."(4) Extolling "Realistic fiction" as the great fiction of the century, critics like F. R. Leavis, Jan Watt, and Wayne Booth "minimize discussion of Gothic and shove it into the closet of a separate chapter."(5) But if the Gothic is what G. R. Thompson describes as "the epitome of the radiant darkness within the Romantic mind,"(6) Kyoka becomes a shadow partner in a rich, protean genre distinguished in East Asia by Duhkha (Bon'no in Japanese), Buddhist suffering arising out of desire and craving in a spirited world. Desire may cause self-division, dramatized by the dangerous doppelganger, but the Japanese solution is rarely found in the reaffirmation of the self. It is, instead, the emptying of the self that constitutes cosmic achievement. In addition to the quest for an empty self, the Eastern Gothic more often depicts not a mission against some perceived singular evil but the discovery of an undivided world of good and evil. In translation, life is not a battleground for God and the Devil--the two grow naturally together in the field of life.

It may be argued that this essay calls for a genre appropriation in the form of colonialism, but the Japanese Gothic shares with the West its subversion of religious and social norms, an obsession with sex and death, and a fear of the supernatural or unknown. These are human qualities, not the province of one culture. "Gothic" is a translation term, and only definitions that expressly limit the Gothic to Christian themes or German forests could exclude Japanese writers like Ueda Akinari (1734-1809), Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939), Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), and Mishima Yukio (1925-70). Moreover, Eastern Gothic has a long tradition stretching back centuries to origins in ancient China.