The Heart of Japan

...So the question remains: How could just nine stories make a writer so beloved—because Ichiyo is not just respected, she is also loved—that her portrait now graces the 5,000 yen note, a denomination small enough (about $30 at current rates) that most people encounter it at least once a week in the course of daily shopping...

...Often, as Timothy Van Compernolle remarks, the landscape is awash in tears, and yet the bedrock of the stories is reality...

...Your heart often breaks for Ichiyo's characters, but at the same time they inspire love and admiration...

...His basic aim is to "situate a literary text" in "the historically specific...

...Van Compernolle is very aware of his predecessors, particularly Danly, to whom he dedicates his own book...

...The other chapters offer interpretations of the stories "Troubled Waters," about the prostitute Oriki...

...But then, trying hard not to impose "our" values on other cultures, perhaps our imaginary reader remembers the haiku, that brief 17-syllable form, and the fact that its most famous practitioner, Matsuo Basho, is also accorded canonical status, and concludes that Japanese writers write in such brief forms that nine really good short sto-ries—or, straining the point, eight and a novella—may be really all that is needed to achieve canonical status...

...Higuchi Ichiyo is the only canonical female fiction writer of the Meiji period and, quite understandably, The Uses of Memory is not the first book about her in English...

...With Van Compernolle's theoretically sophisticated study, we can now add to Seidensticker and Danly a third fine contribution to Ichiyo studies in English...

...Her reputation has never faltered since...

...So why is a writer of such small output, all of it now so difficult to read that there are numerous translations into contemporary Japanese, so revered, so persistent in the national memory...

...There are plenty of full-length Japanese novels, even some multivolume ones, both within and without the canon...

...Although some of his historical description of maid-employer relations is confusing, taken all together, these intertextual readings illuminate parts of the story that we would otherwise ignore or be puzzled by...

...Think of "our" canonical 19th-century fiction writers: Melville, James, Eliot, Dickens, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy...

...The earliest distinguished translation of her work—Edward G. Seidensticker's almost complete translation of her masterpiece, the novella Growing Up (Takekurabe), which he made for Donald Keene's Modern Japanese Literature—is now a half-century old and still reads as beautifully as the day it was born...

...He is trying to reproduce the zeitgeist, the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of the time, so that we can read as if we were part of Ichiyo's contemporary audience, while remaining readers in our own time...

...This is the story of Omine, a young maid still in her teens, who wants to borrow the paltry sum of two yen so that her family can pay off the interest on a loan and be saved from financial ruin...

...I have probably missed some of the nuances of the theoretical scaffolding that grounds The Uses of Memory, but these insightful readings are the brick and mortar, and they alone make the book a success, a worthy addition to the growing corpus of work in English on one of Japan's best writers...

...No one is spared...

...Omine is saved, and we can conclude that Ishinosuke, who she thought was dozing by the fire while she stole the money, had actually seen her and decided to cover for her...

...After Seidensticker, we had to wait another 25 years for the late Robert Danly's masterful biography, In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi Ichiyo, a Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan...

...But the narrator allows no easy conclusions, leaving us with this teasing sentence: "Would that we could know what happened next...

...Ichiyo, who lived outside the licensed quarters for some time, tells the story in a way that captures the sadness of all children as they put on the yoke of adulthood, and yet also evokes the particular tragedy of Midori's own fate...

...Rather, she employed traditional language to critique modernity, in particular such new ideals as worldly success, or shusse, as seen from the viewpoint of marginal people who were unequivocal failures according to modern values...

...Here, the reader skids to a stop, exclaiming: only nine short stories, and a canonical writer...

...Then she was diagnosed with tuberculosis at 24 and died within a space of months, mourned in Japan by the literary world and by many readers...

...but their bodies faltered...

...This included fine translations of nine of her stories (including a retranslation of Takekurabe, which Danly titled "Child's Play"), the bulk of her fiction oeuvre...

...This is not to say that country people did not contract the disease, because they did, but it probably spread even more easily in closely populated urban areas...

...Relying on readers to familiarize themselves with the biography and stories through Danly, Van Compernolle devotes his entire book to examining Ichiyo through the lens of literary theory...

...For that matter, unlike some other Meiji writers, most people cannot even read her stories in the original anymore, largely because Ichiyo, so conversant with the medieval Japanese classics, adopted her style from them and the Tokugawa period writer Ihara Saikaku...

...In his analysis, Van Compernolle touches on the changes in maid-employer relations, Ichiyo's borrowings from the 17th-century author Ihara Saikaku and the medieval poetic tradition, and then the resonance between Omine's savior, Ishinosuke, and Japanese folk tales about the mysterious stranger who brings salvation...

...Masaoka Shiki, father of the modern haiku and a great diarist, died of tuberculosis at 35 after suffering terribly for several years...

...Transitional epochs like the Meiji period make unique demands, both physically and psychologically...

...An ambitious writer from her teens, she achieved fame in the last few years of her life, writing in the space of 14 months all the works for which she is now best known...

...Many young writers had the necessary courage, creativity, and intellectual brilliance to make their way...

...The most famous, of course, is Murasaki Shiki-bu's The Tale of Genji, but Meiji period writers wrote novels just as long as any of their European and American counterparts were writing...

...She approaches her employer, a woman notorious for her stinginess, and is rejected...

...A supremely talented writer Janine Beichman, professor of Japanese literature at Daito Bunka University, Tokyo, is the author of Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry with a mostly self-taught classical education, she lived in poverty from early adolescence on, enduring habitual malnutrition of a kind that is no more than a second-hand memory, if that, for almost everyone in developed countries today...

...Did any of them earn canonical status for their short stories or, if you insist on Growing Up/"Child's Play" being a little too long for a short story, their novellas...

...But just as her native honesty has made her decide that she must confess, the employer calls for the money box and it turns out to be totally empty except for a scrap of paper on which is scrawled a note from the family heir, the wastrel Ishinosuke, saying that he has "borrowed" the contents...

...My eyes were opened to the excellence of Ichiyo's "On the Last Day of the Year" by Van Compernolle's treatment...

...Van Comp-ernolle has found the hidden threads that sew the story together, and which a reading based only on what is evident to readers in the 21st century would inevitably miss...

...by Janine Beichman Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896) is one of a number of Meiji period writers who died of tuberculosis at a young age...

...Child's Play" and "Separate Ways," about a poor seamstress who decides to escape her poverty by becoming a kept woman...

...Prostitutes, seamstresses, concubines, maids, they are almost all women, almost all poor, but their male friends and lovers—wastrels, rickshaw drivers, small-time crooks—are just as fully depicted...

...Like Natsume Soseki, author of the equally canonical Kokoro, she is a national writer, someone whose stories seem to express the experience of the Japanese in the 19th century and yet at the same time touch on universal human experience...

...But no, a cultural penchant for brevity is not the answer...

...Child's Play" tells the story of Midori, a young prostitute in the licensed quarter—prostitution was legal but government-controlled in the Meiji period—as she moves from the freedom of childhood to the beginning of selling her body...

...Her protagonists are marginalized people, left behind by modernization...

...The reason is that Higuchi Ichiyo is a writer who helps to tell the narrative of modern Japanese history, the history of the heart as it made its way from the premodern to the modern...

...Such characters had been depicted in earlier fiction, but not in a way that was so realistic and yet made the reader sympathize with their aspirations and affections...

...Ishikawa Takuboku, another great diarist as well as a marvelous poet, died of it, too, in his twenties, as did the talented woman poet Yamakawa Tomiko, and many others...

...The Thirteenth Night," about Oseki, a girl of an impoverished family who tries, unsuccessfully, to run away from a rich but cruel husband...

...Such was the case with Higuchi Ichiyo...

...His thesis is that Ichiyo used "mem-ory"—by which he means primarily the conventions of traditional poetry and fiction, but not in a simple, imitative way...

...and then, in desperation, steals the money...

...In those closing days of the 19th century, anyone with literary ambition headed like a moth for the bright cultural lights of Tokyo, where tuberculosis, the AIDS of its time, was an urban scourge...

...Great resilience, and the ability to maintain one's equilibrium in the face of the tremendous fissures that open up, are necessary for survival in all senses of the word—economic, physical, psychological...