Text: James Roy King, “Richmond in Tokyo,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 194-205

[page 194, unnumbered:]

James Roy King

WITTENBERG UNIVERSITY

 

Richmond in Tokyo:
The Fortunes of Edgar Allan Poe
in Contemporary Japan

 

WITH THE traditional culture of Japan, Westerners have come to associate lovely groves of cherry trees, quiet rock gardens set in beautifully raked beds of pebbles, the strictly disciplined tea ceremony, the masked faces of actors in the Noh plays, and the austerity of Mount Fujiyama. Yet novels and short stories by several of Japan's most celebrated modern writers hint at an element of violence, cruelty, and the bizarre which contradicts these dominant impressions. Actually, for the Western observer, there is a good deal of evidence of an irrational or a sadistic element in the Japanese character: the haunting quality of their motion pictures, the enormous demands which the Samurai make upon themselves, the so-called ‘”direct-method” of Zen teaching, and the forceful molding of the young Japanese child into traditional patterns of behavior. Thus we ought not to be completely surprised by the almost unbelievable actions described by Ryunosuke Akutagawa in his short-story, ‘Hell-Screen,” or by Junichiro Tanizaki's sophisticated explorations of various bizarre forms of eroticism, or by the fact that Harai Taro, founder of the “Mystery Writers of Japan,” eventually took the name of Edogawa Rampo — the Japanese form of Edgar Allan Poe. I am not prepared to estimate how deep this interest in the exotic and the terrifying runs in the Japanese character, and, indeed, the question may be quite irrelevant: Poe's stories do not compel us to [page 195:] search for some hidden perversion at the heart of early 19th-century American culture. On the other hand, the gods and goddesses proliferate fantastically in Chinese and Indian mythology; popular Taoism stresses the supernatural; and there is a good deal about magic in that highly characteristic Chinese novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Each fact suggests that what is bizarre or fantastic is of more than casual interest to the Oriental.

For example, a sense of disgust with man's evil nature is extremely common in the Nara Buddhism of Ancient Japan:

The esoteric Buddhism of 9th-century Japan reduced the innumerable deities of earlier periods to thirteen, among the most striking of which was Fudo, who is often pictured with a fierce blue countenance, surrounded by flames, carrying a sword to destroy evil and a rope to bind sinners. The heretical Tachikawa School of Buddhism has often been accused of demonism, and there are vivid accounts of both hell and heaven in the famous Essentials of Salvation by the Buddhist monk, Genshin (942-1014). In this work Genshin describes the ten levels of existence which stretch out between the best and the worst aspects of human experience, finding in the rejection of evil and the turning to a “Pure Land” the very essence of religion. Sinners in hell, Genshin writes,

But as if such words were not enough to convey his awful vision, Genshin next turned to painting, creating fresh and highly imaginative treatments of the joys of paradise and the sufferings of hell. One JAMES ROY KING of his hell-screens was so vivid that it caused nightmares for the court ladies who saw it. Genshin's idea was apparently copied widely in the 12th century by monks who found paintings of hell, demons, and disease an effective way to encourage people to stick close to the narrow road to salvation. As we shall see, these paintings in their turn became the subject of later short stories.

Other important medieval influences on contemporary Japanese literature were the tales of the strange and miraculous which Buddhists introduced from China and the vivid descriptions of barren and desolate landscapes which are so common in early Japanese novels. John McVittie, for example, has noted that Akutagawa's “Hell-Screen” evokes the essential spirit of the Medieval Period, with its opposition to every form of orthodoxy and its love of all that bewitches. Important influences from later periods have been the last chapter of the greatest of all Japanese novels, The Tale of Genji, with its supernatural overtones and its mood of dream-like reverie, and the accounts of court trials brought from China in the 19th century. These records, along with the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, appear to have inspired much of the contemporary Japanese interest in detective-story writing.

A survey of standard modern works on the Oriental mind does not support the assumption that there is something pathological about the Japanese personality. Hajime Nakamura's distinguished work, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples (Honolulu, 1964), analyzes in great detail the connections between certain aspects of the Japanese language and assumptions that the Japanese make about their world. Nakamura notes that the ancient Japanese endowed all kinds of objects with spirits and that Japanese Buddhism — even while describing the evil in man's nature — stressed the fact that man could be redeemed. Nakamura also asserts that the Japanese normally have demonstrated very limited imaginative powers, preferring to copy rather than to create anew, and that typically they dislike cruel punishments.

J. C. Moloney, an American psychiatrist and author of the controversial Understanding the Japanese Mind (Tokyo, 1954), confirms Nakamura's comments on the poverty of the Japanese imagination when he notes that Japanese psychoanalysts have tended to copy not only Western methods of analysis but also Western assumptions about the qualities that ought to be encouraged in their patients. Moloney also has a good deal to say about the compulsive way that the Japanese practise their customs, about their rigidity in social situations, and about the “devastating self-destructive process that [page 197:] sooner or later occurs’ in every manifestation of their immaturity. Similar points are made by Ruth Benedict, in her celebrated work, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. The Japanese, Professor Benedict notes, feel enormous pressure to repay all the debts they accumulate during life, to maintain their good names, and: to live out the roles assigned them. They seem to fear and perform badly in unforeseen situations and they make terrible demands upon themselves. The fact that in Japan pleasures are carefully learned and eagerly enjoyed — and yet ethically condemned — keeps life “at a particularly high tension.”

Perhaps someone with more insight into human character than I may find in Nakamura or Maloney or Benedict some explanation for the modern fascination with the bizarre and fantastic that I have missed. But until then, it seems best to assume that the contemporary Japanese horror story is a literary phenomenon, influenced by Medieval Japanese theological writing and painting and by a few Western writers who have been widely read in the 20th century — Wilde, Baudelaire, and especially Poe. According to A Bibliography of Translations: American Literary Works into Japanese, 1868-1967 (International House Library of Tokyo, 1968), translations of the complete works of Poe appeared in 1931-33, 1943, 1948, and 1963, and another is currently in progress. Most stories appeared separately at earlier dates: “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Black Cat” as early as 1887, “The Pit and the Pendulum” in 1896, “The Masque of the Red Death” in 1907, “The Gold Bug” in 1908, “The Cask of Amontillado” in 1912, and “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1913.(4)

Edogawa Rampo, the first Japanese writer to cultivate the field of the Western-style mystery, was born in 1894. In 1923 he published his first short story, and since then has produced over thirty booklength mysteries and many stories, some of which have won the praise of Ellery Queen. It appears that Rampo is largely responsible for the popularity of the genre in Japan and for encouraging numerous adaptations of an originally Western product. Poe's sense of nostalgia seems to be missing from Rampo's pages, but Rampo sounds most of Poe's other chords.(5)

Rampo is at his best describing the way people who are thoroughly acquainted with criminal theory and stories about crime allow themselves to be tricked, even lured into forms of death which they assume they are quite capable of recognizing. He is fond of the kind of cat-and-mouse situations which Dupin describes with such delight [page 198:] in “The Purloined Letter” as “the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber.” A grimly humorous story of this kind, which explodes for a moment into what looks like a terrible mistake, is “The Red Chamber,” in which the newest member of a mystery-story society describes his interest in various deviant amusements and his extraordinary success in committing murders — some ninety-nine in all — through “kindly warnings” to old ladies crossing busy streets or bits of advice that at worst could be taken as blunders. He lures one member of the audience into shooting him, staging his apparent death so effectively that the mystery club is disbanded forever. Both here and in “Two Crippled Men” there are hints of the psychological manipulations which Poe describes so well. A far more intricate game is played in “The Cliff,” however, as a young woman describes to her present husband how she lured her former husband into a situation where she would have to shoot him in self-defense. And all the while she weaves this intricate web she is luring her current spouse into a situation where — again in self-defense — she will have to push him over the cliff where they stand. Oris it into a barrel of sherry? Luchesi was confused too. Also reminiscent of Poe — especially of “A Descent into the Maelström,” with its repeated circle images — is Rampo's bizarre “Hall of Mirrors,” which recounts the ghastly fate of a madman whose obsession with optical instruments leads him to construct a hollow sphere, lined with mirrors, in which he locks himself up.(6)

Owing more to Doestoevsky than to Poe (Rampo mentions Raskolnikov by name) is “The Psychological Test,” which describes the way a student murders an old woman and then, to complete the perfect crime, manages to implicate his best friend in the deed. In pages that bring to mind Porfiry Petrovitch's examination of Doestoevsky's young student, Rampo describes the police investigation of the reaction-time of both men to various words bearing on the case. The crime is solved when highly detailed charts reveal that the responses of the apparently innocent young man came so fast that he must have anticipated the test and prepared for it in advance. The outcome of this case supports a generalization of Poe in his “Murders in the Rue Morgue”: “Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.” By contrast, a completely non-intellectual, thoroughly sadistic note is struck in a fearful bit of gratuitous grotesquerie called “The [page 199:] Caterpillar,” a story that captures a mood foreign both to Poe and Doestoevsky. In this story Rampo describes the strange and terrible joy a wife takes in stimulating, by her caresses, the erotic impulses of her husband, who has lost both of his legs and both of his arms, and most of his sense organs, in a recent war. When these pleasures pale, she amuses herself by torturing him physically, eventually blinding him and then deriving her ultimate pleasure from seeking his forgiveness. His response is to roll what remains of his broken body down into an abandoned well in the garden.

While often unforgettable, Rampo's stories are generally marred by a certain hollowness at the core, which is perhaps inevitable in works that are primarily the product of a clever manipulation of data. It is evident, too, that Rampo did not take seriously the moral implications of his many descriptions of extreme human cruelty. Neither structurally nor morally do his standards come up to those of Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), who was far more than a writer of exotic tales. Akutagawa's most famous story, “Rashomon,” with its description of ghastly environs of an old Kyoto gate, decaying corpses, and the old woman who makes her living by collecting hair from the skulls of the dead, is a commentary on the dregs of society which implies that one more bit of cruelty is irrelevant in a world already full of horrors.(7) As Akutagawa says of Obaba of Inokuna, an old woman in another story, “The Robbers,” “Even to steal and to kill had become as household tasks; perhaps it was that her heart had grown wild like the highways and byways overgrown with weeds, and no longer did such things distress her” (Exotic Japanese Stories, p. 60). “Nezumi-Kozo,” a picaresque tale, creates a medieval world with the flavor of the famous opening lines of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and thereby supports the view of many of Akutagawa's commentators that Poe was indeed an important influence upon him. Primarily allegorical is “The Spider's Thread,” which first appeared in a collection of stories for children. Its protagonist is a notorious robber named Kanadata, who thinks that he has found the way to escape from the torments of hell. Unfortunately, the thread up which he is trying to climb in escape eludes him because he will not allow others to climb it, too: “‘You damned sinners!” Kanadata shouted in his loudest voice. ‘This spider's thread is mine. Who told you to climb up? Get down! All of you get down!’” (Japanese Short Stories, p. 191). Both Akutagawa's vivid descriptions of a man all wrapped up in his own rage and Masakazu Kuwata's stunning woodcuts in the Liveright [page 200:] edition give a distinctly Japanese flavor to what could have been a Doestoevskean exploration of the theme of man's responsibility for his fellow men.

Yet another dimension of the exotic — terror in the grandest baroque manner — is explored by Akutagawa in his startling novella, “Hell-Screen,” a work which merits comparison with various medieval paintings on the temptation of St. Anthony and with Poe's description of the splendors of the great hall in “The Mask of the Red Death.” The establishment of Prince Prospero, Poe writes, was “an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. ... His plan was bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre.” Akutagawa's Prospero is the Grand Lord of Horikan, “the greatest Lord that Japan ever had”; he lives in a mansion of extraordinary magnificence; he gives lavish gifts; he treats his servants in bizarre, inhuman ways; he owns a hell-screen which was painted for him by the “mad and sinister” Yoshihide. This celebrated painter is both scorned and feared by those who have heard about his shocking habits and his bizarre imagination. Akutagawa's description of the figures on the hell-screen which Yoshihide paints may owe something to Genshin:

But the explanation for the overwhelming power of the court lady “writhing in agony” amidst the flames of her burning carriage is Akutagawa's own. To achieve the last word in realism and terror, the author explains, Yoshihide, with full knowledge of the Lord Horikan forced his own beloved fifteen-year-old daughter into a carriage, which he then had set afire so that “in ecstatic transport” he could study his child's last agonies. The day after the painting was hung in Lord Horikan's mansion, the painter hanged himself.(8) [page 201:]

“Hell-Screen” is not the only Japanese horror-story to give some prominence to the ties between figures in a painting and the real world. In “An Autumn Mountain” Akutagawa himself describes the widely differing responses of two Chinamen to what is reportedly the same painting and the way they finally “laughed and clapped their hands in delight” at the suggestion that even if the painting never existed “there is not really much cause for regret!” (Morris, p. 173). In his Stories of Mystery, a collection of retellings of old Japanese tales, Lafcadio Hearn notes (paraphrasing Hakubai En-Rosui) that “In Chinese and in Japanese books there are related many stories, — both of ancient and modern times, — about pictures that were so beautiful as to exercise a magical influence upon the beholder.”(9) Hearn himself retells several — one about a lovely maiden who steps out of a painting in which she appears to minister to the needs of a young scholar; another, about Kogi the priest, a fish-painter, who has had a terrifying dream about being a fish himself, and whose paintings of fish often swim off their silk backgrounds into nearby streams. A third such story deals with the adventures of the blind priest Mimi Nashi-Heichi, who is spirited back to medieval Japan to entertain Heike warriors with his biwa or lute. But the most complicated tale of all deals with a man named Kwashi Koji, who “made his living by exhibiting Buddhist pictures” of the torments of hell. This tale of magic and of a return from hell is designed to prove, the story-teller observes soberly, that “in any picture of real excellence there must be a ghost; and such a picture, having a will of its own, may refuse to be separated from the person who gave it life, or even from its rightful owner. There are many stories to prove that really great pictures have souls” (p. 93).

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Oval Portrait,” Poe touches on the breakdown of barriers between the world of art and the real world, and the same theme is given a chilling, oriental twist by Junichiro Tanizaki, one of the most distinguished contemporary Japanese authors, in his story, “The Tatooer.” The plot should be clear already: the young tatoo master Seiichi, who takes all his delight from driving needles into “swollen, blood-red flesh,” has only one dream left in life — to create his masterpiece “on the skin of a beautiful woman” (Seven Japanese Tales, p. 126).(10) Having found her, he turns her entire back into a black spider “wreathed in flames,” thus imprisoning her spirit in his forever. A preoccupation with the bizarre is especially strong in Tanizaki's early work, though his great popularity in Japan and his power both “to alarm and delight the [page 202:] Japanese reading public,” as Howard Hibbett puts it, obviously have a broader base than merely the exotic and fantastic. Again, Poe has often been mentioned as a primary inspiration, though the peculiar tone which Tanizaki usually achieves seems to be less a product of Western Gothicism than of the current Japanese obsession with hormones, vitamins, injections, blood pressure, and the reproductive organs.

In his fictional Diary of a Mad Old Man Tanizaki handles such details in a chillingly clinical fashion, constructing from them a shattering vision of all the physical facts with which a human life comes to its end. Reports of blood pressure readings mix with accounts of the latest urinalysis and details of a stroke, but the old man in question retains enough consciousness to continue to enjoy, erotically, glimpses of a favorite nurse's foot. The sick-old-man theme is further explored in the short-story “Aguri” and in The Key, a double diary which offers back-to-back accounts of the same events as seen by both husband and wife. The quality of the marital relationship described here can be judged from the degree of pleasure the husband derives from taking Polaroid photographs of his naked wife, in drunken sleep, and by the way she lures him to his death with her constant sexual demands. Ultimately, though, such sexual vagaries are less terrifying than the low-pitched moments which Tanizaki describes so well-like the scene when the husband hears from his wife's room the almost noiseless rustling of rice-paper and realizes that she is keeping a diary — and trying to conceal the fact from him. Husband and wife now begin to maneuver skilfully to hide their diaries, to read what each other is writing, to communicate through the diaries, and to determine — by clever use of precisely measured lengths of “Scotch Tape”’ — whether one spouse is indeed reading what the other has written. Poe was, of course, a master in his ability to focus devastating light on the tiniest details of a situation: witness his treatment of the broken nail in “Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

Tanizaki's “A Portrait of Shunkin” begins quietly enough at the graves of a famous teacher of the samisen and her loyal servant Sasuke, but it, too, builds to a powerful climax as it surveys in retrospect their youthful passion for each other, her savage treatment of various students, her disfigurement by an enraged pupil, and Sasuke's blinding of himself so that he might not see her ruined face. The most powerful moment of the story comes at the very end, as Tanizaki meditates on the meaning of such sacrifices: [page 203:]

Tanizaki's story “Terror” is strongly reminiscent of Poe's “Tell-Tale Heart” and of Edward Munch's famous painting on the same theme, though the particular context is a young man's insane fear of riding on trains. Psychologically more penetrating is “The Thief,” which deals with a young student at Tokyo Imperial University who is both bitterly cynical and pathetically sad about the failure of his classmates to grasp the most important fact about him — his most compelling drive is to steal. Such lack of insight, he is sure, will eventually destroy them — a fact that both delights and saddens him, since he desperately wants their friendship. The emotional currents that flow through this story are very complex, probably going beyond anything in Poe: the skilful blending of self-doubt, chilling fear, ugly suspicion, respect, contempt, yearning, and disappointment make this a true 20th-century tale.

On the other hand, Tanizaki's novella, “The Bridge of Dreams,” captures much of the nostalgia of Poe's lyric poetry, though there are also echoes here of the Noh plays and of the famous last chapter of The Tale of Genji. Tanizaki's account of the unutterably lovely woman who offers her son every imaginable kind of security is Poe-like too, bringing to mind Signora Mentoni and Eleonora and Ligeia, though it reverberates with erotic overtones that I do not hear in Poe. Inevitably, the lovely young woman dies, and she is replaced — not so inevitably, perhaps — by another woman who bears a striking resemblance to the dead woman and who continues to offer the boy the satisfactions he had come to crave from his own mother. Eventually, as in “Ligeia,” the two women merge in the boy's consciousness and the second woman's possessive attachment to the boy is made plain when she casually surrenders a child of her own to strangers for adoption. Even as a teen-ager, the boy is lured by this lovely woman into infantile erotic acts, and he does “crazy things” — as he himself admits — and feels profound shame. When this woman dies after being bitten by a centipede, the boy (now a young man) reflects with the greatest care on the manner of her death: Was it an accident [page 204:] or the fault of a servant? Was he himself responsible? He yearns to get back to his real mother to escape from the present burden of guilt and shame.

Tanizaki is so deeply involved in needles, catheters, massages, and lingerie that one is tempted to say that these are the archetypes of the new myth-makers of post-war, industrialized Japan. But he never allows us to harbor this assumption for long: behind the maker of contemporary myths is the figure of the laughing artist, the laughing artist who is also a protestor, a man very unhappy about the gadgets and manipulative practices which his people have somehow mistaken for life. By comparison, Poe seems very normal, very healthy, very much a man who has learned how to use both the rational and irrational parts of his personality because he has learned to keep both in balance. Tanizaki's work is often marred for us by a streak of almost defiling grotesquerie; yet he has no doubt read with approval Poe's comment at the end of “Premature Burial”: “There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell.” Perhaps it makes more sense to apply phrases like “social critic” to Tanizaki than to Poe, but at the same time we must admit to a feeling that Poe's yearning for better times and more love in the world gives his tales of horror and ratiocination a universal appeal that none of his Japanese imitators may ever achieve.

[page 204, continued:]

NOTES

1 From Ryusaku Tsunoda, William de Bary, and Donald Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York, 1958), p. 104. Called hereafter DeBary.

2 There are reproductions of Fudo paintings in Akiyama Terukaza, Japanese Painting (New York, 1961).

3 Reproductions of hell-screens or jigoku-zoshi can be found in Akiyama Terukaza, pp. 86-7.

4 For this information I am indebted to Mr. Yukio Fujino, of the International House Library, Tokyo, and to my colleague, Professor Eugene Swanger. Also helpful is an article by Miyata Shimpachiro, “Translated Literature in Japan,” Japan Quarterly, IV (1957), esp. p. 176.

5 See James B. Harris, trans., Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Tokyo and Rutland, Vermont, 1956).

6 Similar parallels p to Poe are to be found in certain stories in Ivan Morris, ed., Modern Japanese Stories (London, 1961): Ogawa Mimei's “Wager in Midair”’ (a tale of risk-taking in terrifyingly dangerous circumstances); Hayama Yoshiki's “Letter Found in a Cement Barrel” [page 205:] (the “MS. Found in a Bottle” in an industrial setting with overtones of social protest), and Yokomitsu Riichi's “Machine” (the bella vendeta pursued in a metal-plating factory).

7 The Akutagawa bibliography in English includes Rashomon and Other Stories (New York, 1952); Glenn W. Shaw, trans., Tales Grotesque and Curious (Tokyo, 1930); Takashi Kojima and John McVittie, trans., Exotic Japanese Stories (New York, 1964); and Takashi Kojima, trans., Japanese Short Stories (New York, 1961)

8 Akutagawa records the details of Horikan's own bizarre death in a sequel, the short-story “Heretic.” The theme of the mad, young lord is treated fully by Kikuchi Kan, “On the Conduct of Lord Tadano,” in the Morris collection.

9 Ichiro Nishizaki, ed., Stories of Mystery from Lafcadio Hearn (Tokyo, 1939), p. 45.

10 The Tanizaki bibliography includes Howard Hibbett, trans., Seven Japanese Tales (New York, 1963); Howard Hibbett, trans., The Key (New York, 1961); and Howard Hibbett, trans., Diary of a Mad Old Man (New York, 1965).