intentions in her work. His point is that in the complex process of understanding the meaning of a text, such intentions may become diminished, blurred, or even completely lost to the reader. As a result, any given literary text can be interpreted in infinitely different ways; literature ispolyphonic, or speaks with many voices. Woven within the ‘‘main’’ story, or that which follows the author’s apparent intentions, are various other stories or subtexts, meanings produced beyond the author’s control and which frequently speak louder than the author’s intentions. Highlighting subtexts is a critical strategy that allows ethically questionable texts (for example, openly racist, classist or masculinist texts) to be re-imagined for the groups such texts seek to oppress. In simple and cynical terms, the apparent message of ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ is that it is acceptable for a man to kill his wife if she stands in the way of his ‘‘true’’ self’s development. But by turning one of the dominant messages of the story back upon itself, a subtext emerges that challenges this and more generally misogynistic ways of thinking.

‘‘Han’s Crime’’ is a story about storytelling. It examines the forces at work in relating a story to a reader or hearer and points out that the process can be arbitrary and biased. The text also warns against taking the implications of certain ‘‘facts’’ at face value. When placed in certain contexts, objective facts can take on specific implications, but these implications do not necessarily represent the truth. Depending on what implications are accepted as ‘‘true’’ and how the ‘‘facts’’ are presented and assembled, the resulting story can lean towards certain biases and points of view. In the case of Han’s wife’s death, the owner-manager of the performing troupe, a Chinese stagehand, and Han himself are called upon to provide objective and relevant bits of information. It is the job of the judge to arrange these bits to reconstruct the story of Han’s wife’s death. Han’s guilt or innocence depends on how the judge puts these pieces of information together and what implications he consciously or subconsciously accepts as truth. The reader is put in the position of judge. Both rely on second-hand information—the testimony of the characters— to construct a logical picture of the events.

To construct a ‘‘true story’’ is a rather difficult task, as it is a common temptation to accept the implications of certain ‘‘facts’’ as truth. For example, that Han did not get along with his wife is on the one hand a simple piece of descriptive information. In the context of everyday life, this information takes on no sinister meaning. But when followed by the information that a knife from Han’s hand killed his wife, this factoid takes on new importance and damning connotations. It can be interpreted as a partial motivation for murder and increases the possibility of Han’s guilt. The stagehand is aware of the powerful implication in this context, but also knows that he should be careful of too easily accepting implication as truth. He tells the judge: ‘‘I thought that my thinking he’d murdered her might . . . simply have been because I knew a good deal about their relationship.’’ Had he not known about the couple’s unhappy marriage, the stagehand might not have personally suspected Han of murder. Though the fact of couple’s bad marriage implies a murder is possible, it does not prove it. Han himself argues along these lines:

‘‘Everyone knew we’d been on bad terms, of course, so there was bound to be a suspicion of murder. . . . That we’d gotten along badly might make people conjecture, but it was no proof.’’

Han’s admission that his marriage was miserable, and that he even wished his wife were dead, certainly implies that Han may likely have killed her, but it is not definitive proof.

In this way, Han’s guilt or innocence depends in part on which implications are accepted or rejected. In addition, the verdict is influenced by the arrangement of ‘‘facts’’ and the implications of the procession of events. Because of the suspicious procession of events, Han himself believes, at first, that he is indeed guilty. But that events happen in a certain order does not necessarily mean that one event was caused by another. Han reconstructs the incident: he had an unusually heated argument with his wife the night before; unable to sleep he passed the night thinking upon his wife’s hindrance of his ‘‘true nature’’ and thought ‘‘It would be good if she died’’; the next day he felt ‘‘insanely keyed up,’’ perhaps from a lack of sleep; and during the performance he doubted his steadiness. Presented in this order, the information constructs a causal, teleological (facts arranged to move towards some conclusionary endpoint) narrative that likely incriminates Han: because of A (his fight with his wife), B happened (he wished she were dead), and ultimately resulted in C (the murder). But before Han convinces himself and the judge that he is definitively guilty, he points out that just because the events transpired in the order that they did, it does not mean that one event caused the following one. Han explains: ‘‘The night before, I had thought about killing her, but was that alone a reason for deciding, myself, that it was murder?’’ and ‘‘between my thinking about such a thing and actually deciding to kill her, there was still a wide gap. . . .’’ In other words, there is no necessarily causal relationship linking the events preceding the murder. Though the order of events certainly implies causality and seems to incriminate Han, that they happened in that order and at the times that they did was random and arbitrary, a matter of chance. Han could have wished his wife were dead all his life without harming her as well as he could have easily planned to kill her without thinking upon it the night before. The judge apparently agrees with Han, as well as the stagehand, and declares him ‘‘innocent.’’

Along these lines, ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ makes a comment about constructing a story. By arranging scattered pieces of information together and giving weight to various implications, different narratives can emerge. These resulting stories can have powerful effects, as in Han’s case, determining whether he spends the rest of his life in jail. But this is not to say that these stories represent the ‘‘truth.’’ The judge’s verdict of ‘‘innocent’’ indicates that he recognizes the questionable ‘‘truth’’ of a story especially when based on random bits of information arranged in a certain order and taken for their obvious implications. But at the same time ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ offers this challenge to ‘‘truth’’ based on reconstructed, implication-based narratives, the text is guilty of its own unfair storytelling, namely in regard to Han’s wife.

Though her murder is central to the text, Han’s wife—her personality, her desires, her opinions— are barely discussed. The details revealed about her are scant, but in a masculinist fashion focus on her sexual behavior. As in the testimony provided in the trial, each bit of biographical information about Han’s wife has its implications and connotations. For instance, Han believes that his wife remained in the miserable marriage because: ‘‘she knew that no respectable man would marry a woman who’d been the wife of a road-player.’’ There are at least two assumptions in this statement. First, that road-performers, especially women, are sexually promiscuous, or at least popularly considered to be so, and second, that in the case of a divorce, Han’s wife would need to remarry; that is, she would be unable to support herself as an independent woman. These misogynistic assumptions are supported by the stagehand’s similar statement: ‘‘Even if she had left Han and gone back [to her family], nobody would have trusted a woman who’d been on the road four years enough to marry her.’’ Han also reveals that his wife had conceived another man’s baby before their marriage and tells the judge that this is his primary source of hatred. He even feels that the baby’s death was a ‘‘just’’ punishment for her sexual transgression:

‘‘I felt that the baby’s death was a judgement on her for what she’d done . . . [But m]y feeling remained that the baby’s death wasn’t enough of a judgement. At times, when I thought about it by myself, I could be rather forgiving . . . [But a]s I looked at her, at her body, I could not keep down my displeasure.’’

Slowly, a picture of Han’s wife emerges from the information provided by Han and the stagehand. This picture is not a favorable one as the men’s descriptions construct her as an insensitive, dependent, and sexually promiscuous woman that deserves punishment for expressing her sexuality outside of marriage. Clearly this image of Han’s wife is onesided, but the judge seems to give it credence by never questioning this biased representation. Han argued that though thinking about murder may imply that he carried out the murder, there was still a ‘‘wide gap’’ between these two events. But Han’s dead wife never has the chance to similarly argue against the implication of certain facts; for instance, the assumption that because she had a relationship with another man before her marriage to Han she was sexually promiscuous. In fact, the circumstances of that relationship are never discussed. Its implications are merely taken at face value.

Furthermore, the judge’s verdict of ‘‘innocent’’ seems to partially rely on his implicit condemnation of Han’s wife for her ‘‘scandalous’’ sexual behavior. Rather than asserting his innocence, Han’s testimony is inordinately concerned with describing and disparaging his wife’s pre-martial sexual liaison and the pregnancy that resulted. The judge’s patient listening to Han’s sexual defamation of his wife, which also forces the reader to hear this evidence, implies that her so-called ‘‘promiscuity’’ is indeed a weighty matter and is perhaps a reasonable excuse for murder. In these moments, it seems that Han’s wife rather than Han is the one on trial, namely for her so-called sexual promiscuity.

But considering the dominant message of the story—that information, implications and narrative construction are arbitrary and suspect—the attentive reader is equipped with a powerful tool to refute and overturn the misogynist strains of ‘‘Han’s Crime,’’ and to re-imagine the story from a feminist angle. As discussed, the confusion regarding the ‘‘facts’’ or evidence in the murder case, as well as the judge’s verdict, encourages the reader to question or challenge stories constructed from an assemblage of ‘‘facts’’ that tend to rely on implications. In this light, the text requests that the reader reconsider Han’s guilt, as the facts of the incident are only provided through patchy, second-hand information hastily arranged to form a narrative whole. As the truth of Han’s story can never be known, the text warns the reader of easily accepting such artificially assembled, teleological narratives. The same can be said for Han’s wife’s ‘‘story.’’ Her sexually degraded characterization is similarly conveyed through scattered bits of information that, because they are arranged in a specific way, create a negative picture of her. There is much information left out, and among the details included, the implications are taken for face value. For instance, the assumption that if a woman is a road performer, she is automatically promiscuous; or that her sexual liaison with the unnamed man was an act of wantonness. If the reader is warned not to believe constructed accounts like Han’s story (A does not necessarily lead to B and C), she can also be equally wary of the ‘‘truth’’ of Han’s wife’s characterization: having a baby with a man one is not married to does not have to render a woman sexually degraded, and her relationship with the unnamed man is a much more complicated situation, not an automatic indicator of her sexual immorality. Though the men in the text cooperate in describing her as weak, dependent, and promiscuous, the general lesson of the text empowers the reader to recognize such characterizations as artificial, biased, and constructed.

By focusing on the subtext, misogynist, racist, classist, and other oppressive forms of literature can be re-imagined. Rather than turn away in disgust and reject such texts, the careful reader can interpret them in empowering ways often by using such texts’ terms against themselves. As a misogynistic story, ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ undoes itself, providing the reader with the very tools to dismantle such messages, denoting perhaps the untenability of such oppressing structures of thought. Whether or not the authors would agree with such antagonist interpretations of their stories is irrelevant. Because they are mediated through ‘‘dialogic’’ language, words once separated from their authors immediately become transformed and reinvented in the hands of their thoughtful and diverse readers. In a way, all literary texts are like testimonies provided in court cases— information arranged to assert a specific point of view with an aim to convince its audience of something. Noting that authors have various personal interests, it is the very powerful position of the reader to choose what to believe.

Source: Yoonmee Chang, ‘‘An Overview of ‘Han’s Crime’,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. Yoonmee Chang is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania.

Several years after publishing the story, ‘‘Han’s Crime,’’ Shiga Naoya became seized with the desire to ‘‘write of the wife, dead and quiet in her grave, from the wife’s point of view,’’ according to Edward Fowler in The Rhetoric of Confession. Shiga wrote in his journal, ‘‘I would call the story ‘The Murdered Wife of Han.’ I never did write it, but the urge was there.’’ Shiga’s journal entry reveals that although the character Han questioned his own motives, and the judge in the story exonerated him of any crime, Shiga himself believes his hero to be guilty of murder. Shiga’s comment is especially striking given that while the death of Han’s wife is clearly central to the story, as a character, she is all but absent.

The story concerns Han’s realization that, through living with his wife, he has become alienated from his ‘‘true identity.’’ In the story, Han believes that he can only achieve his ‘‘true self’’ through the death of his wife. He even tells the judge that for him ‘‘there was a great difference’’ between leaving his wife and killing her, and that leaving her did not have the same ‘‘desired result.’’ But what can it mean that the realization of Han’s ‘‘true life’’ comes at the expense of his wife’s death? Or that in recognizing his true self, Han violates the laws of society and the judge seems to reward him for doing so? In order to answer these questions, we must first address the philosophy of the self that Shiga espoused.

The Shirakaba group, of which Shiga was a founding member, wholeheartedly embraced the development of one’s individual personality as the overarching purpose of art. As supporters of Humanism, the Shirakaba group reacted strongly against the aspect of Japanese society that valued social harmony over the development of the individual personality. Indeed, the writings of the Shirakaba school focus on the life of the individual almost exclusively. In 1911, Mushakoji Saneatsu, one of Shiga’s fellow group members, wrote the following manifesto in Shirakaba magazine: ‘‘The value of one’s existence is acquired only by giving life to one’s individual personality.’’ Furthermore, Mushakoji contended that ‘‘Those who commit themselves to work that cannot make the best of their individual personality are insulting their own selves.’’ In order to understand how Han can feel no remorse about murdering his wife, then, we need to recognize that in addition to personal honesty and psychological acuity, one of the primary tenets of the ‘‘I-novels’’ and fiction of the Shirakaba group was the idea of allegiance to one’s self above all. The only person to whom Han is responsible, given the ideas of the Shirakaba group, is himself.

For the writers of the Shirakaba group, art is a means of ‘‘developing and realizing their ‘true selves’,’’ explains Tomi Suzuki in Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity. Shiga himself wrote, in a diary entry dated May 27, 1911, ‘‘The mission of art is to achieve a deeper understanding of nature’s beauty.’’ But for Shiga and the members of the Shirakaba group, nature meant ‘‘human nature,’’ unconstrained by society, rather than the celebration of the natural world of flora and fauna exemplified by haiku of earlier generations. Literary critic Makoto Ueda explains that for Shiga, ‘‘A person who behaved ‘naturally’ was not a mere eccentric who pays little attention to conventional norms; he was a person who, having awakened to his innermost nature, was trying to return to it.’’ To be true to nature, then, is to be true to one’s inner self. The Shirakaba sense of ‘‘the self’’ seems to resemble the id in Freudian psychology, in which the id represents our most primal urges and needs. In the Freudian model, the id is held firmly in check by the superego (internalized rules of society), and it is our ego—or conscious self—that negotiates the demands of the id versus the restraints of society. In ‘‘Han’s Crime,’’ Shiga represents the self as pure id, certain only of what it wants, unable to analyze its motivations.

What was it about this young woman that her death gives birth to Han’s ‘‘true self’’? For what has she given her life? Shiga does not reveal much about this mysterious young woman, not even her name or her nationality, though the fact that she wears a ‘‘gaudy Chinese costume’’ suggests that, like her husband, she is Chinese. Since marrying Han and going on the road with him as a circus performer, her family has broken up and disappeared, so she has nowhere to go if Han leaves her. The ownermanager and the stage manager of the circus speak highly of her (‘‘she was a good person, too’’), except to note that Han and his wife, ‘‘who were so kind, gentle and self-effacing with others, when it came to their own relationship, were surprisingly cruel to each other.’’ However, by the stage manager’s estimation, the unhappiness in the marriage came about only after the death of her child, of whom Han suspected he was not the father.

A foreigner in Japan, unhappily married to an unforgiving husband, Han’s wife finds she can never please her husband, who is always off reading Christian literature and expressing dissatisfaction with everything she does, such as preparing the evening meal. She tells her husband that if he ‘‘divorced her she could not survive’’ because ‘‘she knew that no respectable man would marry a woman who’d been the wife of a road-player. And her feet were too small for ordinary work.’’ Although she does not love her husband, she attempts to be a good wife to him; he tells the judge that their sexual relations were ‘‘probably not much different than those of an average couple.’’ By Han’s own account, then, Han’s wife is a beautiful, impoverished young woman with no family, dependent on her husband for her livelihood and safety, who committed the ‘‘crime’’ of loving another man before she married her husband.

Han’s biggest complaint against her is that she feels no sympathy for him: ‘‘My wife simply observed, with cruel eyes, the gradual destruction of my life . . . without the slightest wish to help.’’ But Han does not seem to recognize that he feels little compassion for her, though ‘‘for my wife living with me was an extraordinary hardship’’ that she endured with a patience ‘‘beyond what one would have thought possible even for a man.’’ Unable to feel compassion or forgiveness, Han needs to punish his wife for the failure of the relationship, the death of their romantic love: ‘‘My feeling remained,’’ he tells the judge, ‘‘that the baby’s death wasn’t enough of a judgment.’’ His hatred for her consumes him, and in order to be free of it, he begins to think ‘‘that it would be good if she were dead.’’ For a Western, feminist reader, what remains most frustrating about ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ are Han’s claims that divorcing his wife does not produce the same ‘‘desired result’’ as murdering her and that through her death, he becomes liberated to ‘‘live [his] own life.’’ Certainly, in granting Han his innocence, the judge literally liberates Han to lead a new life. But just as for Han ‘‘a wide gap’’ exists between thinking about murder and actually doing it, so too a gap exists between exactly how it is that the annihilation of one person’s life results in another’s development of his ‘‘true self.’’ On one level, ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ is a story of domestic violence, in which the woman gets punished for her transgression (sleeping with another man prior to her marriage to Han), but Han gets rewarded for his.

Shiga’s endorsement of supreme selfishness makes ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ all the more shocking, for what kind of natural self does Han celebrate? For Han, murder is a means of developing and realizing his ‘‘true self.’’ In ‘‘Han’s Crime,’’ this celebration of self seems anti-social and violent in the extreme. Like Raskalnikov in Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, who murders an old woman for her gold, or Mersault in Camus’s The Stranger, who has murdered his own mother, Han finds a perverse freedom in transgressing society’s laws. But unlike those European novels, society in ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ does not exact a punishment. instead it acknowledges, in the person of the judge, that it too has had these fleeting feelings of ‘‘excitement’’ that one ‘‘could not put a name to,’’ and condones Han for having acted on the impulses most members of society never consciously acknowledge.

And what, if anything, does ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ reveal about the id, the true nature of Han? Although ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ is an unsavory and unsettling examination of how to get away with murder, Shiga does not elaborate on what exactly Han’s ‘‘true self’’ might be. The story suggests that Han was a passive person who was in an unhappy marriage. The external character of Han is quite passive. At several points in the story he describes himself as ‘‘weak,’’ ‘‘suspended in midair’’ and unable to take any kind of action. Although he thinks his wife is pregnant by another man, he does nothing. He is unhappy in the marriage, but does not wish to leave. When the judge asks him why, if he was so unhappy in his marriage, he was ‘‘unable to take a more assertive, resolute attitude,’’ Han answers only that he ‘‘wanted to act in such a way as to leave no room for error.’’ Although he blames his indecisiveness and lack of courage on his relationship with his wife, to the judge’s inquiry, ‘‘Why didn’t you think of leaving your wife?’’ Han has no answer except that in his mind there is a great difference between leaving one’s wife and wishing her dead. As a character, Han is so alienated from himself that he cannot be certain he consciously murdered his own wife. He seems to suggest that the only way he can take action is through his unconscious.

Much of the tension and power of ‘‘Han’s Crime’’ comes from the question of how responsible people are for their own antisocial thoughts and feelings if they do not consciously act on them. Han tells the judge that ‘‘between my thinking such a thing and actually deciding to kill her, there was still a wide gap.’’ He repeatedly tells the judge that once his murderous thoughts were over he ‘‘no longer thought of killing her.’’ Han is guilty of murder if he consciously plots murder and of manslaughter if he acts without premeditated thought. During the knifethrowing act, Han becomes aware of consciously trying to control his unconscious urges: ‘‘I could feel in my arm the constraint that comes from a thing’s having become conscious.’’ Before throwing the final, fatal knife, Han sees a ‘‘premonition’’ of ‘‘violent fear’’ come over his wife’s face. He describes a battle between his conscious and unconscious minds in which ‘‘dizziness’’ strikes him and he throws his knife ‘‘almost without a target, as though aiming in the dark.’’ On the one hand, his description makes him sound ‘‘out of control’’ and ‘‘beside himself’’ as though he were not the agent of his actions; on the other hand, his awareness of throwing the knife suggests that his conscious mind was an active participant as well. In the final analysis, in terms of realizing his ‘‘true self,’’ it seems that Han is still perhaps not being as honest with himself as he might be. What Shiga’s story fails to answer is the question of whether the self can exist outside of society.

Source: Jean Leverich, ‘‘An Overview of ‘Han’s Crime’,’’ in Short Stories for Students,The Gale Group, 1999.Leverich has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Michigan and has taught composition and literature at Georgetown University, New York University School of Continuing Education, and the University of Michigan.

[‘‘Han’s Crime’’] begins with a succinct account of the crime:

It was a very strange incident. A young Chinese juggler by the name of Han in the course of a performance severed his wife’s carotid artery with one of his knives. The young woman died on the spot and Han was immediately arrested.

The body of the story consists of the examining judge’s interrogation of the director of the theater, of Han’s assistant in his juggling act, and finally of Han himself. The question is to decide whether the killing was deliberate murder or merely manslaughter.

The director testifies that Han’s act is very difficult and requires steady nerves, complete concentration, and even a certain kind of intuitive sense. He cannot say whether the killing was intended or not.

The assistant tells the judge what he knows about Han and his wife. Han’s behavior was always correct. He had become a Christian the previous year and always seemed to be reading Christian literature. Both Han and his wife were kind and gentle, very good to their friends and acquaintances, and never quarreled with others. Between themselves, however, it was another matter. They could be very cruel to each other. They had had a child, born prematurely, that had died soon after his birth. Since its death their relationship had become strained. Han never raised his hand against his wife, but he always looked at her with angry eyes. He had confided to the assistant that his love for her had died but that he had no real grounds for a divorce. The assistant thinks that it was to overcome his hatred for her that Han had taken to reading the Bible and collections of Christian sermons. The wife could not leave Han because she would never have been able to find anyone else to marry her and she would have been unable to make her own living. The assistant admits that at the moment of the accident the thought had flashed through his mind, ‘‘he’s gone and killed her,’’ but now he is not so certain. It may have been because of his knowledge of Han’s hatred for her that this thought had entered his head. He concludes his testimony by stating that after the incident Han had dropped to his knees and prayed for some time in silence.

Interrogated next by the judge, Han admits that he had stopped loving his wife when the child was born, since he knew it was not his. The child had died smothered by its mother’s breasts and Han does not know whether this was accidental or not, though his wife had told him it was. Han thinks that she never really loved him. After the child’s death she would observe him ‘‘with a cold, cruel look in her eyes’’ as he gradually went to pieces. ‘‘She never showed a flicker of sympathy as she saw me struggling in agony to escape into a better, truer sort of existence.’’

Han never considered leaving his wife because of his ideals: he wanted to behave in such a way as not to be in the wrong. When asked if he had ever thought of killing her, he admits that at first he often used to think how nice it would be if she were dead. Then, the night before the incident, the thought of killing her had occurred to him but never reached the point of decision. They had had a quarrel because supper was not ready when it should have been. He spent a sleepless night, visited by many nightmarish thoughts, but the idea of killing his wife gradually faded and he ‘‘was overcome by the sad, empty feeling that follows a nightmare.’’ He realized that he was too weakhearted to achieve a better life than the one he had.

The next day he was physically exhausted, but the idea of killing no longer occurred to him. He did not even think of that evening’s performance. But when the time came to take up his knives to begin his act, he found himself without his usual control. The first two knives did not miss their mark by far, but the third knife lodged itself in his wife’s throat. At that moment Han felt that he had done it on purpose. To deceive the witnesses of the scene, he made a pretense of being grief-stricken and fell to his knees in prayer. He was certain that he could make others believe it was an accident.

But then he began to doubt that he had done it on purpose. Perhaps he had only thought he had done so because of his reflections of the previous night. The more he thought about it, the less certain he was about the actuality. It was at this point that he realized that his best defense would be admission of the truth. Since he himself did not know whether he was guilty or innocent, no one else could possibly know either. When the judge asks him if he feels any sorrow for her death, Han admits candidly that he does not, that he never imagined that her death would bring him such a sense of happiness. After this testimony the judge hands down a verdict of not guilty.

‘‘Han’s Crime,’’ like ‘‘Seibei’s Gourds’’ [another short story by Shiga], is a skillful objectification of Shiga’s state of mind at the time of its writing. The story was written in the brief period between his release from the hospital after his accident and his departure for Kinosaki. Leisurely reflection at Kinosaki upon the implications of his encounter with death was to drastically change his attitude toward life and to mark a turning point in his work—away from the posture of confrontation and self-assertion to one of harmony and reconciliation. It is therefore ironic that in the person of Han, Shiga should have sung his most triumphant song of self.

Han suffers greatly from the hypocrisy forced upon him in having to live with a wife he despises. He is a man of unusual intelligence, great sensitivity, and an ‘‘overwhelming desire to enter into a truer sort of life.’’ His feelings the night before the event are certainly those of Shiga himself at the time when he was determined to ‘‘mine’’ what was in him.

. . . I was more worked up than I had ever been. Of late I had come to realize with anger and grief that I had no real life of my own. At night when I went to bed, I could not get to sleep but lay there in an excited state with all kinds of things passing through my mind. I was aware of living in a kind of daze, powerless to reach out with firm determination to the objects of my longing and equally powerless to drive away from me the sources of my displeasure. I came to see that this life of suspension and indecision was all owing to my relationship with my wife. I could see no light in my future, though the longing for light was still aflame. It would never die out but would continue smoldering pitifully. I was in danger of dying of the poison of this displeasure and suffering. When the poison reached a certain concentration I would die. I would become a corpse among the living. I was nearing that point now. Still, I was doing my best not to succumb. Then the thought came: if only she would die! That filthy, unpleasant thought kept running through my mind, ‘‘In fact, why don’t you kill her? Don’t worry about what happens after that. You’ll probably be sent to prison. But life would be immeasurably better than the life you are leading now. Besides, that will be another day. When that day comes, you’ll be able to break through somehow. You may have to throw yourself again and again against the obstacles and with no success. But then your true life will be to continue hurling yourself against whatever is in your way until you finally die of the effort.’’

Kobayashi Hideo, in an early essay on Shiga Naoya (1929), cites the latter portion of the above passage as an excellent statement of

the basic form of Shiga’s thought, or, more accurately, the norm of his action. He is never aware of the gap separating thought and action. Or else, if he does occasionally seem to take cognizance of it, it is only when his thought has not yet come ripe, and even then passion unfailingly jumps in to bridge the gap. For Shiga, to think is already to act, and to act is to think. To such a nature doubt and regret are equally absurd.

At the end of Han’s confession, the judge asks him ‘‘aren’t you the least bit grieved at your wife’s death?’’ and Han replies frankly: ‘‘Not the least. Even in moments when I hated her most, I never imagined it would be so pleasant to speak of her death.’’ Whether by chance or design, Han has triumphed and entered into what he feels is ‘‘a truer sort of life.’’ This note of personal triumph was never again to be sounded so loudly and clearly in Shiga’s work. . . .

But if ‘‘Han’s Crime,’’ is an excellent expression of Shiga’s state of mind at the time of its writing, it is not for this reason that it is one of the finest stories of modern Japanese literature. The excellence of ‘‘Han’s Crime,’’ is due rather to the abundant life and individuality Shiga was able to give to the characters of Han and his wife, to the interest and tight unity of the plot, and to the masterful use of language.

Source: Francis Mathy, ‘‘A Golden Ten’’ and ‘‘The Achievement of Shiga Naoya,’’ in Shiga Naoya, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1974, pp. 105-36; 165-75.