Japan's Literary Battle

As travel became little complicated, book production less expensive, and literacy more than widespread, building literary movements across cultures also became easier. Writers in Russia, Britain, France, and elsewhere read cardinal another's books and found new ways of expressing themselves with each new work. To Nipponese students with sudden access to this wealth of typography, the impression mustiness redeem been overwhelming. Fujii writes, "The concept of a private, emancipated individual worthy of self-reflection reached Nipponese sources in the form of the nineteenth-century European realist novel" (1). Japanese writers descend out to contribute to that literature, creating works that were structured like the literature of the West but that could not help being unambiguously Japanese. They retained the flavor and sensibilities of their native land much more strongly than did those of Western writers because their authors were so new to the game.

They began exploring the, for them, uncharted land of a world where the private individual had the right and the opportunity to choose an occupation, a mate, and even a race without consulting the beau monde at large. This was a radical, heretical concept. It went completely against the grain of what bein

Fujii's title for his analysis of groundbreaking Japanese literature is provocative: Complicit Fictions. He seems to use "complicit" to suggest that writer experiences an accomplice of the reader; it is not clear if he intends to imply in this the sense that usually associates complicity with wrongdoing. He defines narrative complicity as the situation "where the effects of piece subvert thematic intentions and unknowingly reveal a position antithetical to the 'content'" (Fujii 200). His own writing supports this contention, though apparently in a way he did not intend.

He proposes that, because Japanese literature is a diverse creature than the Western writing it appears to be at freshman glance, it demands fresh approaches and new thinking, but he makes this proposal victimization some of the densest writing of which the English language is capable. The result is that his writing creates the "antithetical position" that genuine understanding of these texts is beyond roughly readers. Unless this is indeed the true message of his medium, simpler language would help him to make his otherwise quite valid points.

Critics of maintaining traditional ways objected that "the system of weights of family obligation bore heavily on ambitious small men, preventing them from achieving individuality and from succeeding in the world" (Pyle 135). Soseki, however, argues that, however difficult, the Japanese must struggle to find a path betwixt the old and the new. It is a struggle that every society has been forced to play out in order to enter the modern world. Fujii stresses that, in understanding this struggle in Japan, the reader must comprehend "the vital links between the discourse of nation building, Japan's colonialist behavior on the Asian continent, and the sense of lost autobiography that deeply colors Japan's experience of the modern" (Fujii 126). This loss gives mall and poignancy to the literature both of Shimazaki Toson, who illustrates the triumph of individual choice, and Natsume Sos
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