(3 of 5)
Mishima's abrasive career ended in seppuku (disembowelment, then decapitation by a member of his private "army"). Kawataba and Dazai were not given to such self-dramatization, but they too died by their own hands. Indeed, it is no mere verbal swagger to define contemporary Japanese writing as a matter of life and death. In the '70s one Tokyo scholarly journal devoted an entire issue to "The Writer and Suicide." There is a death wish operating through Japanese literature. Says Masao Miyoshi, a Japanese lit erary scholar (Accomplices of Silence):
"Writing in Japan is always some thing of an act of defiance. Silence not only invites and seduces all would-be speakers and writers, it is in fact a powerful compulsion throughout the whole society."
Yet there are those writers who refuse to be seduced. And when they speak out, readers respond by the thousands. Internationally prominent novelists like Kobo Abe (Woman in the Dunes) and Kenzaburo Oe regularly sell 150,000 copies of each book. Other novelists, like Hisashi Inoue, 47, have enjoyed even greater success (see box). Shusako Endo's spare and elegant studies of Christian faith and martyrdom (Silence; The Samurai) have brought the 60-year-old author the title of the Japanese Graham Greene and made him one of the nation's most widely translated writers.
Oe, 48, has been strongly influenced by the disruptive fantasies of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. Oe writes about themes as disparate as nuclear catastrophe (Hiroshima Notes) and brain-damaged children (A Personal Matter) in a manner that Howard Hibbett, Harvard professor of Japanese literature, considers "the most exciting and most imaginative of the postwar novelists."
Other writers, discontent with the standard forms of literary expression have begun to create a new genre, blurring the already eroded line between fiction and nonfiction. Shohei Ooka's The Long Slope recalls the Imperial Army's crimes of World War II through courtroom records of the Far Eastern Military Tribunal; Otohiko Kaga's Ship Without an Anchor is the story of a Japanese ambassador who was sent to America to forestall the war.
In addition, notes Tokyo Professor Shoichi Saeki, "the Japanese literary scene is now showing a return to ancient times when women were engaged in creative writing.
Today women writers, both young and old, are very, very active."
Novelist Chiyo Uno, 85, recently published a series of memoirs and autobiographical pieces (The Sound of Rain, The Tale of a Certain Woman). Perhaps the most respected woman currently writing is Taeko Kono, 67. Her novel Revolving Door deals with protagonists whose ordinary lives cloak sadomasochistic and pathological behavior. The Cheeverish approach of Yuko Tsushima, 36 (A Bed of Grass), examines the roots of family distress and false nostalgia. Taeko Tomioka, 47, is a poet turned novelist, celebrated for her unflinching analyses of social despair. For these women, says Anthologist Yukiko Tanaka, "writing is the antithesis of the selfless submission prescribed by Japanese culture. Women writers have needed great courage to surmount the many obstacles to their attempts at such self-assertion."