Karin Kukkonen
Literature makes you feel and it can get you thinking too. But how do you move from signs on a page to thoughts and feelings? And why does fiction sometimes feel more real than the world around us? My name is Karin Kukkonen, and together with my colleagues from the Literature, Cognition and Emotions project, LCE for short, we will discuss these and other questions in the coming weeks. Today's guest is Professor Reiko Auestad, professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Oslo, and our topic is emotions and affect in Japanese literature. And I'd like to start by asking you about, yes, the particular relevance of emotions in literature, but also of course for your work. What is it that is so fascinating about studying these things?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yes, well thank you for your introduction. In the context of Japanese literature, I think this renewed interest in emotion and in recent decades is a very welcome trend, because emotions have always played an extremely important role in Japanese literary aesthetics. Starting in the Heian period, 10th century, the tale of Genji is a very famous and good example, which is full of powerful emotion. Aristocratic men and women were very easily moved to tears in these days.
Karin Kukkonen
And falling in love all the time!
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yeah, they were falling in love. They were crying, and they had absolutely no reservations about crying in front of others, because tears was a sign of your refined emotional sensibility, in a way. It probably has to do with the Buddhist-inspired aesthetics of appreciating emotional ups and downs, connected to the transiency of life, which brings suffering to everyone. But life is suffering — full of suffering — so the most important thing is to come to terms with them [the emotions, ed.] rather than avoid them.
Karin Kukkonen
So would that mean that, if you have emotions and if you can express them, that that is a way of showing that you're alive?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yeah, you're alive. And another thing is that, I think, coming to terms, in the process of coming to terms with your emotions, you start writing self-narratives, actually, because that is thought of as having therapeutic or meditative value for you as a person, so writing poetry or a diary – that was supposed to be therapeutic, and it was very much encouraged in the Heian period.
Karin Kukkonen
And is this something that you still see in Japanese literature in the 20th century or today?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yes, definitely. We might come back to that when we talk about a narrative, the modernization of Japanese literature and the modern novel. But the emotional aspect, therapeutic aspects, of self-narratives had definitely impact on the ways in which Japanese authors would try to incorporate Western influences in the Meiji period, which was the beginning of the modern period.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, so this was a time when Japan opened itself up to the Western world?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Right, after 200 years of self-isolation, in 1868, the modernization process started and everyone were frantically trying to modernise everything, you know, including literature, and trying to catch up with the West, so to speak. But, I guess, when we talk about emotions and my research, I am very much interested in this Meiji author called Natsume Soseki, who wrote this very canonical novel called Kokoro. Soseki is almost as canonical as Ibsen for Norwegians, I would imagine. And Kokoro is probably comparable to Ibsen's A doll's house.
Karin Kukkonen
Okay – in what way?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Well, it had a very strong moral impact, but maybe I should say a few words about what is... About what Kokoro is about. To make it very simple, Kokoro is about two male friends, who compete with each other to win the love of the same woman – with the tragic consequence, that the one who loses takes his own life, giving the other a terribly guilty conscience. So much so, that the other one too takes his own life. So two dead men leaving this poor woman all alone. And it is of course the latter, who atoned for his so called betrayal of his friend, who becomes the tragic hero of the novel. I of course omit the details, but there are certain things in the narrative that suggests that the protagonist, who takes its life at the end of the novel, he was not being very fair to the other friend. He asked for this lady's hand behind his back, so to speak, so he is sort of suffering from guilty conscience. And this whole narrative is full of emotions, affects, ugly feelings, jealousy, resentment, rivalry, you know, and whatnot.
Karin Kukkonen
It sounds like the perfect setup for big emotional drama. Can you describe a little bit what, I mean, what does this look like in Kokoro? As far as I understand, it means heart? So it refers to an emotional place, but where else do we...?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Right, but – I think, you know, we were talking about it a little while ago, about how Kokoro actually strikes the Western reader as not very dramatic – and it's not sentimental by any means. And I guess the part that everyone talks about, is the last part called "Testament", in which this protagonist regrets that he had been mean to his friend, who had committed suicide long time ago... And he starts sort of describing, I mean, he starts giving us a very detailed and vivid account of his emotional landscape prior to this friend's death, and of course, after his death – you know how traumatic it was. So this landscape, this emotional landscape is, at least to me — the strength of the novel lies there. But interestingly enough, many conservative literary critics read it in a very different way, not paying too much attention to these emotional movements in the last testament part. I think many conservative Japanese readers, especially male critics, read it as a moral guide book, almost. You know, how not to behave. And some of these conservatives, especially with a nationalistic bent, you know, praised this novel as a timely criticism of modern egotism disguised as American individualism, which suited their agenda very well. So I guess what is fascinating about Kokoro is the striking variations of its reception. So my reading is not very canonical, I would say, but they are gaps and rooms in the text which makes it possible to read in many different ways.
Karin Kukkonen
So there are the emotions of the things that are going on between the two protagonists, and then you talked about this emotional landscape of one of the protagonists, who is the narrator? Through whom we get access to the story. And then in the last bit you talked about the responses of critics — and it seems these are also sort of emotional.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yes, well emotional, I guess, uh, these male critics were, I guess, looked at the protagonist as the paragon of moral virtue — Meiji moral virtues.
Karin Kukkonen
Can you describe a little?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Well, you know this, maybe. This was written at a time when Japan had just modernised itself, so to speak, and the author, Soseki, was born in the second year of the Meiji period, which means that he belongs to the last generation of the Meiji intellectuals, who received very conservative, classical Chinese confucian education as a kid, as a child, right? But as he grew up and in college, he received a very western education, and he ended up becoming a professor of English literature, so he was sort of... There was a tug of war in a way emotionally, I think, in the author himself about the many new intellectual ideas, but his emotional disposition, which was formed in his childhood, maybe did not agree with everything he was learning. So this gap between mind and body materialises itself in the protagonist's struggle to cope with different streams of emotions. And one thing I should probably mention is, that in the Meiji period: It's a time of drastic change of course, and many things were changing and, maybe most important for reading of Kokoro, is that sexual morals — customs, practises that have to do with marriage and courting — were changing. The ideology of love was imported to Japan, very Christian inspired. So you know, you have to have love in marriage. That was a pretty exotic idea for many of these intellectuals, who were used to, I mean, arranged marriage, most of the time. And so Sensei, I mean, the protagonist's effort to court this woman, and to sort of achieve this love marriage was prevented, or, you know, hindered by many confucian social restraints, that did not make it possible for them to speak up, opening about their feelings, or... The matter of heart, he says famously, was not supposed to be a man's domain. And he wonders if it had something to do with the lingering sentiment from the from the confucian upbringing that he received. And he is talking of course to this younger narrator, who has received a completely different education, or more western education. And it's kind of interesting that Kokoro was written in 1914, but, you know, the elder, the protagonist, talks about the present age with relative freedom, so for him it had become much more free in terms of sexual morals too. So there are signs of changes all over the place.
Karin Kukkonen
And that then gets integrated into this narrative that dramatizes a conflict, between what seems to me, on the one hand, something that you feel, and then, on the other hand, the different sort of social categories that you need to put your feelings into?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Right, I mean, or you can say that the feelings, that you are... Spontaneous feelings, that you had, were restrained because of the gendered codes of behaviour that they had to follow. And men were not supposed to talk about feelings, and women were not supposed to be outspoken. And this coded gendered behaviour is really prominent in the novel. So this lady, who both men fell in love with, she is not given an opportunity at all to express her feelings. She just blushes and laughs. That was the standard kind of behaviour that the young women did. I think that was a comment that the protagonist makes at one point.
Karin Kukkonen
And this is a way of sort of safely giving vent to something that you might be feeling, but there is a very clear protocol for how you can express it? Would you say that that's something that's really changed? I mean, we were talking about Genji earlier, and how emotions are expressed very strongly.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yeah, well that's true. Yes, yes, I mean the emotional, I mean, sexual sort of practise morals changed drastically in the Meiji period. I mean, in the modern period, Heian, were much freer. Sexual socialisation... There were protocols of course, and there were differences between men and women, but it was much freer in a way. There was no Victorian moral about, you know, sticking to one man for the rest of your life.
Karin Kukkonen
Or Genji sticking to one woman. I mean, he spends a lot of time with many different women in your book.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yeah, I mean, I guess this notion, that you have to have both sex and love — that love and sex have to coincide — and that's when you have a happy marriage. That was a very exotic notion then, and it was almost tragic that many Japanese intellectuals tried to follow that new protocol, which didn't really agree with how they were brought up.
Karin Kukkonen
So the way in which you've talked about these emotions, and how they relate themselves to, yeah, let's say cultural or social protocols... That seems to be something that has also very much to do with the kind of stories that you can tell about yourself. I mean, if you're a man in a Soseki novel, you can't talk about yourself in terms of the love that you feel – or if you do, that leads to a lot of problems, it seems.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Well, except in a letter. So, in a way, a letter... the testament was written in a form of letter, and you notice that in these early modern novels, the narrators are often taciturn – very minimalistic. They don't really comment on other people's feelings. And it almost seems like you had to write letters, to be able to really give free rein to your emotions. Otherwise there were so many social protocols and restraints that made it unnatural.
Karin Kukkonen
So there are certain genres where you can do that?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yes. And another exception are these self-narratives, autobiographical novels, in which you are supposed to be relentlessly honest with your own emotional... Often unflattering details in your emotional life. But that's after the modernisation, right? I mean, this is a very big topic – the Japanese encounter with Western novels. Japanese authors were very preoccupied with the notion of modernising literature, because they felt that the literature that they had was too superficial, lacked realistic depth and was too moralistic. And there are all kinds of ideas and -isms that flooded Japan at the time. But it so happened, that when this most urgent and acute need to modernise their literature in the 1880s was felt, the reigning mode of literature was thought to be realism. So this lack of realistic depth... They were really preoccupied with that – how to achieve realistic depth. And for them, the technique of omniscient narration, third person narration in past tense, was a literary instrument to give a sense of depth to their narratives. But they found out, that it was very difficult to do in Japanese, because there are certain grammatical features in Japanese that makes it... That encourages omissions of subjects and objects in the sentence, as well as the use of dramatic presence. It means that the distinction between first and third person narrative and between narrative and non-narrative parts of discourse is not very easy to maintain in Japanese. So the narrator and the character readily merged into a single voice, shifting focus from the narrator to the character's thought is extremely easy. So free indirect speech celebrated in modernist writers, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce — it's almost the rule in Japanese, rather than the exception.
Karin Kukkonen
So they were actually the more modern ones.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Right, right. So they ended up writing modernistic prose rather than realistic prose, which is kind of funny to think about in retrospect. But about the question of the impact of the modern novel as a port in Japan, and what narrative forms that eventually came out of it, we also need to go back to this Japanese traditional aesthetics. Because Japanese authors absorbed, of course, Western narrative techniques in a way that suited their native or Japanese sensibility as writers. And what I have referred to as the focus on emotions and self-narrative, of course, did have an impact on how they incorporated these Western techniques. And I think, maybe one thing I should mention, in their traditional preferences for self-narratives, is their scepticism toward fiction and design. So it's not a coincidence, in a way, that the "I-novels" and autobiographical novels became extremely popular, and the focus on the emotions, that were traditionally important in aesthetics, merged with these self-narratives. So the autobiographical novel in modern Japanese prose is very much focused on the emotions of the protagonist, who reminds us of the author, and not very focused on other people.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, so there's no dividing out of different sort of emotional...?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Right. I was just thinking that the Japanese "I-novel", autobiographical novels, is very different from Karl Ove Knausgård's novels, for example, which are much more focused on dynamic personal relationships within a larger group than just on one person.
Karin Kukkonen
So you don't respond so much to another person, as you look to yourself to...?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Right, yeah, very introspective. Very strong focus on your emotional movements — yours.
Karin Kukkonen
And you're trying to, in other words, trace these ups and downs, that you were talking about from the Buddhist tradition, or?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Well, I don't think they really think of it as Buddhist now, but I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, I would imagine it's not unrelated. This therapeutic meditative effect of self-scrutiny is very much ingrained in their sensibility, I think.
Karin Kukkonen
So I can see why an author would want to write about themselves and investigate their inner states. What do you think makes Japanese readers... Why are they interested in that?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Well, that's a very good question, because many Western readers think they are pretty boring. You know, because, why do you want to read about someone else's diary?
Karin Kukkonen
Maybe that is a very Western question?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yeah, or it might be, because they are extremely popular even now. Japanese self-narratives tend to be boring in the eyes of Western readers, because there is so much focus on one person, and digressions — there is hardly any plot. But they would probably say that real life doesn't have a clear plot, and real life is uneventful. So literature should not be more eventful than the real life.
Karin Kukkonen
So they wouldn't like Kokoro?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Well, Kokoro is kind of uneventfully narrated, at least until this letter.
Karin Kukkonen
Yeah, I mean, you don't see it coming when you read the beginning. It's very restrained.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Subdued and restrained, yeah.
Karin Kukkonen
Maybe this would be an opportunity to give your Western listeners a recommendation.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yes, Soseki's Kokoro. And well, he has written many other novels... The Three-Cornered World, which is considered to be a, like, haiku novel.
Karin Kukkonen
Haiku novel? How? What does that look like?
Reiko Abe Auestad
Haiku novel, yeah. Absolutely no plot, very impressionistic. It's about this man who goes up in the mountains and does a lot of thinking, and there's hardly anything dramatic that happens. But it's beautifully written. And contemporary writers... I have many recommendations. My students like Ekuni Kaori's Twinkle Twinkle. Akutagawa Ryunosuke is another traditional – fairly traditional – writer, who has written many short stories. "In a Bamboo Grove"... Is Kurosawa Akira's famous film called Rashomon is mostly based on "In a Bamboo Grove". Tawada Yoko's The Emissary, which has just come out in Norwegian, called Sendebudet. Murakami Haruki, of course I tend to forget about him.
Karin Kukkonen
He's a big star.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Um, I like Hard Boiled Wonderland and the end of the world. I have to admit, I'm not an enthusiastic Murakami fan, but he has written some... Some good novels.
Karin Kukkonen
So that gives us a whole Advent calendar of recommendations.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Yeah, Kawakami Mieko's Heaven, which my earlier student – Norwegian translator – is working on. It will come out in Norwegian probably next year. It's really good.
Karin Kukkonen
We shall keep an eye out. Yes, thank you very much for this inspiring conversation about emotions, affects, the uneventfulness of autobiographical narratives, and the long history of Japanese literature and its emotional engagements. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Reiko Abe Auestad
Oh, thank you very much for giving me this opportunity.
Karin Kukkonen
And thanks also to everyone who's listening to the LCE Podcast. Our next episode will air in two weeks – until then.