The Portrait of the Artist in Japanese Fiction

IN Japan, as in the West, the novelist has become his own favorite character. But the Japanese novelist (or short-story writer) seems less anxious to conceal his predilection than to flaunt it, so many frank self-portraits are there in the gallery of shosetsu. He appears in his fiction as a writer. We see him at work-pressed to meet a deadline, interrupted by the visits of literary friends, smoking and sipping tea over a hibachi, or at a desk cluttered with books, papers, pens and pencils, brushes and inkstone. We go with him on a holiday or to a rendezvous; we follow, in quotidian detail, his ordinary monotonous routine. Novels, stories, and sketches elaborate this rather seedy character, which the reader is allowed-sometimes encouraged-to accept as autobiographical. The book-haunting author is thus a familiar apparition, one has haunted Japanese critics of the past three decades. If these critics have now and then seemed over-credulous in identifying an author with his hero, they have nevertheless shown autobiography and fiction are easily confused in Japan. Still, their obsession with the problem of autobiographical fiction is itself a problem, or at least a curiosity, since Western criticism displays no such interest in the genre. It is natural for a novelist to be autobiographical, a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement observes; that is what distinguishes him from mere writers of fiction.' Natural, but hardly worth investigating. Although life and works can never be disentangled, even their obvious correspondences do not tell us why a certain book is, in fact, worth reading. They may help the critic to explain the genesis of a bad book, but this, he knows, is an unrewarding task. Each new season will bring its luxuriant crop of confessional first novels. Writers will go on studying themselves, their unpleasant childhoods, and their unhappy love affairs. Narcissistic, self-lacerating, nostalgic, bitter-they will go on wearing their hearts (or livers) on their sleeves. Yet Japanese literary criticism since the late Taishoperiod has largely been engaged in an attempt to suppress the autobiographical shosetsu. Extravagantly praised by some, it has been called a monstrosity by others, most

Art · Art history · Portrait · Visual arts · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Japanese History and Culture · Narrative Theory and Analysis

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