The opening scene in which the hero spins out endless fantasies in the refuge of his bed has also been read as a metaphor for the alienation that characterized this period. Masamune Hakucho suggests that Giwaku represents in fictive form the skepticism-and self-conceit-of post-Russo-Japanese-War society first articulated in the criticism of Shimamura Hogetsu.
His love life is a shambles, the Shuko hero freely admits, but a shambles, at any rate, of his own making. It is this narrative claustrophobia, however, this absence of any link to any palpable, external reality, that gives this text and so much of Shuko's writing its distinctive flavor.
Giwaku, like Shuko's other shishosetsu, has no political or social or even familial backdrop indeed, we hardly get a sense of the hero's own day-to-day existence other than his misguided passions. Hirano might have picked an earlier text, but what matters here is his recognition of the Shuko hero's myopic preoccupation with private life. The critic Hirano Ken, for example, calls Giwaku (Suspicion, 1913) modern Japanese litera. We begin our examination of individual authors with Chikamatsu Shrike, in deference to the critical consensus that he was the first of the shishosetsu writers par excellence. Experience, Spontaneity, and Artistic Creation For these writers to have placed their experiences in some broader social context or other "novelistic" framework would have actually detracted from their authenticity. Confession as perception was not primarily a means of exposing self or society but an end in itself, the raison d'être of the work. These records represent a culmination of the naturalists' desire to transcribe lived experience and the language's genius for grammatically assigning "truth" to experience related in the written reportive style, whether in the first or third person. In place of a "milieu" ( shakai ) is a map of the hero's "mental state" ( shinkyo ), fully legible only to those who read it as no more-and no less-than a record of the author's own perceptions. In the writings of Shuko, Shiga, and Kasai, however, we encounter a far more restricted world.
In Katai's Sei, for example, or Toson's Ie or Shusei's Kabi, there is an attempt to present what we would call a "milieu" (whether family or, less distinctly, "society" at large) that provides an external backdrop against which the hero's thoughts and actions are set. "Naturalist" authors like Toson, Shusei, and Tayama Katai wrote stories that are every bit as autobiographical as those of the writers examined here, but their writings are generally populated with a varied cast of characters whose mere presence on the same stage helps counterbalance that of the author-hero. If these three highly diverse authors can be said to have anything in common, it is in how they let their heroes' sensibilities totally dominate a story. More important, it is a matter of how they present themselves as characters in their writings. It is partly a matter of historical chance that their names inevitably appear in discussions of the form: their debuts as writers all coincided with the shishosetsu's rise in late Meiji-early Taisho. No matter that actual practice may have differed significantly from the general critical perception: their image as the "purest" of the shishosetsu writers persists. The decision in this book to focus on two relative unknowns along with Shiga instead of on more familiar writers like Toson or Shusei is based on the pervasive critical perception of all three-Shuko, Shiga, and Kasai-as particularly instrumental fig.
Nagata Mikihiko's 1953 collection of essays ( Bungo no sugao ) is perhaps more significant for its inclusion of a chapter on Shuko alongside such literary giants as Shimazaki Toson, Arishima Takeo, Mori Ogai, Izumi Kyoka, Tokuda Shusei, and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro than for the information it contains. Before then, even article-length essays on him were a rarity, and longer studies, with the exception of Masamune Hakucho's biographical memoir ( Chikamatsu Shuko, 1950), nonexistent. Shuko, however, was little studied until the last decade. There is a mountain of Shiga criticism and a substantial if much smaller amount on Kasai. Two definitive Kasai collections came out only recently, and Shuko's complete works have yet to appear. Chikamatsu Shuko and Kasai Zenzo are rather less well-known. Shiga's works were anthologized several times during his career and finally in the definitive Iwanami edition shortly after his death. Of the three writers singled out here for extended examination, only Shiga Naoya is widely read today. To what depths has literary fashion sunk now that Chikamatsu Shuko's cheap, sordid tales are being printed five and ten times over? I pale at the very thought. Why should I have to earn a living by exposing my private life to the public eye? I have not yet sunk so low that I must prostitute myself in order to pay for my next meal.
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