Critical Overview
Although he only wrote one novel, three novellas and a few dozen short stories, Shiga Naoya has had a significant impact on twentieth-century Japanese literature. He occupies a dominant place in modern Japanese fiction. As Donald Keene writes, ‘‘No modern writer was more idolized than Shiga Naoya. A half-dozen writers were recognized as his disciples, and innumerable others were so greatly influenced by his writings as to recall Shiga on every page.’’ Such prominent writers as Akutagawa Ryunosuke, who wrote the story Rashoman, have admired Shiga’s writings. Among his contemporaries, he has been called ‘‘the god of literature.’’ Even when critics question the value and significance of his work, they concede that he remains an important figure in Japanese literary history, not only for his contributions to the development of the I-novel, but for his precise, compressed, and carefully controlled writing style, which has been praised for its ability to convey complex psychological states through suggestion, implication and allusion.
Aside from his novel A Dark Night’s Passing and a few short stories, Shiga’s work has not been translated into English. In Shiga Naoya, Francis Mathy rightly points out that Shiga’s literary reputation must be considered in both Eastern and Western traditions. In the Eastern tradition, perfection of art is linked to perfection of life; traditional Japanese literature is not mimetic (i.e., does not try to represent the world ‘‘realistically’’ in the way that some Western novels do). Mathy writes:
Without a philosophy of history, without a notion of a meaningful whole of human experience to which each individual part of it is related and from which it can derive a meaning, Japanese tradition could form no concept of the individual human personality (upon which characterization is based) or of the significance of any segment of human life (upon which plot is based) or of the wide causal reverberations of human decisions and actions (upon which the development of the action in a literary work is based).
What Japanese writers and critics value is the attempt to capture as much of the reality or life of the passing moment as possible. Japanese literature tends to emphasize the present moment, isolated from the past or the future, complete and whole unto itself. The present moment is meaningful unto itself, without reference to either the past or the future.
Japanese fiction, then, emphasizes the intuition and sudden understanding of the ‘‘heart’’ of things in a way the Western literary tradition does not. When Shiga published ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ and his other works, Japanese critics responded to what Nakamura Mitsuo called kokoro no fukasa, or ‘‘depth of heart.’’ According to Mathy, Mitsuo wrote: ‘‘When we consider Shiga’s works in the context of all the other literature that surrounds it, it seems so simple that it gives the impression of being the expression of a man that is always on the verge of silence. But who can mistake the depth of reality that is depicted there?’’ For Japanese critics, Shiga is a ‘‘pure’’ writer who is completely true to himself and rejects everything false and impure. It is this purity and depth of heart that inspired his Japanese readers.
This relationship of art to life has led many Japanese critics to respond to Shiga’s work as a facet of his own personality. In Narrating the Self , Tomi Suzuki notes that responses to Shiga’s work have also been responses to him as a personality. Of his contemporaries, for example, she observes that Akutagawa Ryunosuke has described Shiga as ‘‘a sensitive, moral soul,’’ but that Kobayashi Hideo labeled him an ‘‘ultra-egotist’’ and ‘‘a man...
(This entire section contains 919 words.)
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of action.’’ Inoue Yoshio called Shiga ‘‘a primitive man,’’ Tanigawa Tetsuzo found him to be ‘‘a man of moods,’’ and Ito Sei and Hirano Ken celebrated him as ‘‘a man of harmony.’’ Just as Shiga’sShirakaba group in the Taisho generation were critical of the Naturalists from the generation before, after World War II, Japanese readers became critical of the isolation of the self from society that they found in Shiga’s fiction.
In the West, Shiga has not been widely read, so it is difficult to place him within a context. Several Western critics and translators have noted that Shiga’s precise language and subjective representations of the individual at a specific moment in time are difficult to translate from the Japanese. According to Mathy, one translator bemoaned, ‘‘try as I might, the English that emerged was but a pallid reflection of the original. . . . It was as if Shiga’s style was such a rare and subtle perfume that it evaporated as I transferred it from one bottle to another.’’
Of the few Western critics who have written about ‘‘Han’s Crime,’’ all find it a fascinating piece for both its ambiguity and psychological acuity. For Suzuki, the story explores ‘‘the relationship between imagination and action, the connection between motives and interpretations, and the interrelated questions of spontaneity, moral effort and freedom.’’ For William Sibley, author of The Shiga Hero, ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ is striking in its presentation of the ‘‘hero’s private morality: the proposition that when one commits what the world calls a crime out of deep-rooted and largely unconscious motives, there can be no guilt and should be no crime.’’ Reviewing a recent translation of Shiga’s stories in the New York Times, Hiroaki Sato calls ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ a ‘‘psychological drama that is extraordinary in the simplicity of its narrative structure and the depth of its intellectual honesty.’’
