For category #1 of the Challenge, I needed to read a "19th century classic," and you'd think that wouldn't be hard to find, because so many of the books we think of as "classics" were published in the 19th century. But I'm reading Japanese literature this year. In the 1800s, Japanese literature was not in a good place. Apparently there is almost nothing from that time that's worth reading now. By the 1800s, Japanese fiction consisted mainly of genraku, or frivolous writing meant only for entertainment, as if American literature today consisted entirely of romance novels.
In 1868, the Meiji era began, and Japan began to open up to the West and Western ideas. By the late 19th century, classics of Western literature were frantically being translated into Japanese. Some young Japanese writers were trying to write in more of a modern, Western style, but they weren't doing it very well. One who did manage it, however, was Higuchi Ichiyo, a woman who published very briefly, from 1892 to 1896. (She died in 1896, at the terribly young age of 24, of tuberculosis.) She, with a minimal education and so little money that she and her mother and sister were almost starving, managed to write stories and novellas that were better than anything the young men of the time were producing. She is still highly thought of today, in Japan. I decided that I wanted to read a novel by Ichiyo.
But she didn't write anything long enough to be called a "novel." She wrote roughly 21 short stories, a couple of which were maybe long enough to be called novellas. Only 5 or so of the last 10 are rated truly excellent. The story/novella that is considered her masterpiece is "Takekurabe" which has been translated variously as "Child's Play," "Growing Up," and "Comparing Heights" (the last is the most literal translation). The translation I read is only 34 pages -- we wouldn't call it a novella today. But Ichiyo and "Child's Play" are the best that 19th century Japan has to offer, so that's what I'm counting for the Challenge.
I couldn't find a translation of "Child's Play" on its own. Instead, I found In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo with Nine of her Best Short Stories by Robert Lyons Danly. This is a revision of Danly's dissertation (he was a professor of Japanese language and culture at the University of Michigan and died fairly young himself, at age 50, from a brain tumor). As the title suggests, it consists of a biography of Ichiyo and translations of nine of her stories (including, of course, "Child's Play"), plus a collection of photos (of Ichiyo, other writers of the time, and scenes from Japanese life in the 1890s). In addition to tracing Ichiyo's short, simple life, Danly analyzes her stories and helps place them in the context of Japanese literature as a whole. Ichiyo also kept a journal, and Danly quotes from it extensively.
I kept flipping around in the book -- I would read Danly's description of how Ichiyo came to write a story, his analysis of the story, and perhaps some relevant journal entries, and then enjoy the story itself. It was a good way to read Ichiyo, but perhaps not the best way to read a book -- rather distracting. The photos are in their own section in between the biography and the stories, and I kept turning back to them as well. And then there are the extensive notes -- I would have preferred footnotes (I'm still dipping into them). I hate to say it, but this is a book that might work better electronically, so that you can click back and forth among all the different parts easily.
OK, so, "Child's Play." As I noted above, this is considered Ichiyo's masterpiece, and I ended up reading it last, after I'd finished all the other stories and the complete biography. I was expecting not to be too impressed by it, or to like one of the other stories better. And so, I was really taken by surprise by how affecting it is. It is a very slight story, almost no plot at all. A group of "children" -- they're actually what we would call young teenagers, but maybe Meiji Japan didn't have the concept of teenager -- play, fight, and suddenly grow a little older and colder. That's it. That's all it is. But the last couple of pages both froze and broke my heart.
You can't help thinking, wow, what would Ichiyo have written if she had lived, even just a few more years? What if she'd died at 34, not 24? But this is all we've got, so there you are.
One of the great things about the book, In the Shade of Spring Leaves, is that it brings you about as close to Ichiyo's thought process as it's possible to get. You learn about her family, the death of her oldest brother, and the disappointment associated with her second brother. Ichiyo (whose real name was Natsuko) was recognized as the family genius early on, and her father tried to give her as much education as possible, but her uneducated mother insisted on pulling her out of school. Natsuko/Ichiyo eventually was allowed to go to a poetry school, and at some point even her mother recognized that her success was going to come from intellectual pursuits. But nothing came easy. Her father died, leaving Natsuko/Ichiyo and her mother and sister to muddle along as best they could, which wasn't well. Finally they sold almost everything they owned (furniture, kimonos) in order to start a small paper goods shop in the "pleasure district" where the courtesans worked and lived. The shop was a failure, but its location gave Ichiyo the experience that she used to write her greatest stories, including "Child's Play."
"Child's Play" is only obliquely about prostitutes. The only one mentioned by name is Omaki, the sister of major character Midori, and we don't actually meet Omaki. But she is important. She is the reason Midori always has a lot of spending money and her parents treat Midori like a princess (Danly's phrase is "as though she were a Strasbourg goose being fattened for pate") because they expect her to follow in her sister's footsteps. Midori hangs around with the boys and girls in a sort of childish gang, and some of them are in love with her, including a boy from a rival gang, Nobu. Another boy, Shota, perhaps has vague dreams of marrying her. But one day Midori starts acting differently. She no longer wants to hang out. She has already dropped out of school. The story ends before anything definite happens, but the future is as clear as if Ichiyo had laid it all out in a report.
The beauty of the story is clearer for being read after Ichiyo's early stories, which are less subtle. You watch as she becomes a better writer before your eyes. In the Shade of Spring Leaves is an impressive book and has probably done a lot since its 1981 publication to keep Ichiyo in English-speakers' eyes. It's worth reading, and Ichiyo herself is so worth reading. I'm very happy to have found her.
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