This Country, Japan by Edward SeidenstickerReview by: Marian UryThe Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Apr., 1980), pp. 110-112Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488986 .

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110 Vol. 15 No. 1

THIS COUNTRY, JAPAN, by Edward Seidensticker. Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco: Kodansha Inter- national, 1979, x, 332 pp. $15.00.

Reviewed by Marian Ury

University of California, Davis

The book under review is a miscellaneous collec- tion of pieces written over a period of eighteen years, from 1957 through 1975, most of them published before but some not, and if it has the look, more than most collections of this sort, of rummagings in the closet, the closet is one richly stocked. Professor Seiden- sticker is a consistently interesting writer, well- read, with well-defined sympathies and a fine curmudgeonly style. At least one of the essays included, "The 'Pure' and the 'In-Between' in Modern Japanese Theories of the Novel," proves itself, upon rereading, to be not only lasting schol- arship but a kind of tour-de-force. Other notable items reprinted here include his review of Madly Singing in the Mountains, well worth anthologizing because, while in part devoted to pleading the case for his own approach to Genji--something he has also done elsewhere--it raises significant questions about Arthur Waley that none of the contributors to that memorial volume saw fit to ask; a short story, "The Matter at Hand," in its delicious grossness only slightly less wonderful than one had remembered it; and an essay on Mishima's suicide (paired with a prev- iously unpublished one on his tetralogy) which comes as close as any obituary essay I have seen to admitting fully into the argument the hypothesis with which most of us who are not especially admirers of Mishima would start out, namely that the late novel- ist was a pathological creep. (The expression is mine, not Seidensticker's, but he notes "the union of self-destruction and sexual joy" in Mishima's well-known story "Patriotism"; and the explicitly

Journal of the

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Association of Teachers of Japanese

sexual symbolism of the suicide might bear some care- ful examination, should anyone care to undertake this repellent task.) The volume concludes with some three dozen brief articles that were written for the Yomiuri shimbun between 1958 and 1962. They are rather a distraction, in that it is hard to resist the temptation when one is engaged in more scholarly reading to sneak off to the back of the book for yet another look at them. They are dated, as Seiden- sticker admits, but many are engrossing even when one is not quite sure what they are about. What awful disaster befell the Japanese judo team in Paris, and what were they doing there in the first place? And were the Yomiuri Giants no better than they should be, or no worse, or what? Only a pedant would ask for explanatory footnotes, though answers to these and other mysteries, printed upside down or at the back of the book, might have been appropriate. Japan, in these articles, is referred to as "This Country," hence the title of the book, the only really bland

thing about it.

Of the new articles, some are themselves rather miscellaneous, as is the one with which the book opens; discussing nature and the seasons (mostly but not invariably treated as synonymous) in the Tate ojf Genji, Seidensticker contrasts Murasaki with Jane Austen and Dickens, drifts for the space of a para- graph to Toson, whose social consciousness and self- awareness are found callow but whose landscapes are

praised, to Kafu, with his fine feeling for the sea-

sonality of the city, and on to Kawabata (on whom there is also a separate essay). One understands why Jane Austen is brought in, although she probably had

stronger feelings for the outdoors than Seidensticker credits her with, but why, for Heaven's sake, Dickens?

Hardy, or Emily Bronte, Proust, or among lesser but

entirely worthy novelists, Elizabeth Bowen, whose

wintry landscapes reflect the chill that invades her characters' souls, would provide a more productive contrast; or if Dickens it must be, then a comparison

111

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112 Vol. 15 No. 1

with Saikaku would surely be more appropriate. The answer, I think, is that he felt like talking about Murasaki and he felt like talking about Dickens; which, to be sure, he does very well. The conclu- sion he tentatively suggests is that the "lack of thresholds" (p. 22) separating the indoors from the outdoors in Japanese life has its correlative in a lack of mental thresholds and thus has much to do with the way in which the Japanese have been able to accept disasters, notably the defeat in 1945. Well, maybe. Neither Austen nor Dickens ever exper- ienced anything of the sort, and it is hard to know just how they and their countrymen would have reacted.

What is important in this essay, though, is the emphasis on the Japanese genius for the particular; if there is a single thread running through it and the rest of the book, it is Seidensticker's distrust of abstractions and of intellectuals, Japanese intel- lectuals in particular, who are committed to them. This distrust finds its most complete expression in an essay on the critic Kobayashi Hideo (Seidensticker prefers, he explains, to call him a "cultural critic" rather than a "literary critic"). Kobayashi is con- cerned with art as act; he believes that "the greatest of vices is conceptualizing" (p. 153), and he presents the paradox, as Seidensticker admits, of the prolific writer whose call is for silence. His critical vocabulary is that of his countrymen, simultaneously cool and exuberant, highly personal in its metaphori- cal content. It is impossible not to admire the patience with which Seidensticker, functioning here as both translator and commentator, teases meaning out of his labyrnthine statements. One admires also the tolerance--something more, perhaps than toler- ance--with which Seidensticker responds to the crit- ic's own inconsistencies. The essay, the product of two vigorous temperaments and very much a personal statement for its author, is a splendid piece of writing. The fact that it is printed here for the first time provides justification, if any is needed, for the publication of this book.

Journal of the

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