SOURCE: Moore, Evelyn. “Aesthetic Records: A Comparison of Max Frisch's Tagebuch 1946-1949 and the Diary of Kenkō, Essays in Idleness.” Comparative Literature Studies 25, no. 2 (1988): 167-81.

[In the following essay, Moore finds parallels between the diaries of Frisch and Kenkō, asserting that the books include “the authors' reflections on their own creative process.”]

Max Frisch's diary, Tagebuch 1946-1949, breaks from the tradition of most Western diaries, i.e., historical treatments and autobiographies, and approaches the diary form as it had evolved in the Japanese tradition: art diaries in which fiction was intertwined with facts to reveal universal themes. This study, a comparison of Tagebuch 1946-1949 and Kenkō's Essays in Idleness, does not assume the derivation of form and content. It rather attempts at a clearer understanding of each of these works, and of the tradition from which each emerges. My thesis is that the diary form of two such different cultures converges when the question of creativity is approached. The diaries of Frisch and Kenkō express the authors' reflections on their own creative process. Through this process, the diarist reveals the aesthetics of his own culture, even if the traditional methods of accomplishing this are different in each culture.

Because Kenkō's diary is in prose—really a combination of the reflective essay and narrative—it compares more closely with Frisch's diary than other more representative works of the Japanese diary tradition. Both diaries present a non-narrative structure, a mixture of various genre—poems, narrative, dialogue, reflective essay, etc. In addition to sharing the features of the reflective essay and the narrative form, the diaries of Frisch and Kenkō are both a-fictional; both are also public diaries—meant to be published and not written for strictly private enjoyment.

Mixture of genre within a single work characterized Japanese classical literature from the first prose diary Tosa nikki to the Genji monogatari, the most famous of the “tales” composed in the Heian period. These works contain numerous poems. Early collections of poems were organized through seasonal, associational, or other modes. Prose writing, a manifestation of which is diary literature, develops in the attempt to provide contexts for the numerous occasional poems written during the Heian period. The diary format provides a narrative context in Tosa nikki (939 A.D.), which adhered to the daily entry as an organizing device.¹ But diaries in the Japanese tradition soon turn to other means of organization. Earl Miner says that “the breaking away from the daily entry as a formal device” is one of the chief characteristics of the Japanese diary tradition (9).² A work related to this diary literature in the Heian period is the Makura no soshi, the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagan (c. 965 A.D.) This work is often considered to be the forerunner to Kenkō's Essays in Idleness.³The Pillow Book consists of 325 brief notes or sections, which are classified according to names of things, random thoughts, or narrative.⁴ Sei Shonagan left an aesthetic record of her feelings and perceptions—a record which not only reflects a prevailing aesthetic, but also continues to influence Japanese aesthetics.

Essays in Idleness, written in the 14th century by Kenkō, a Buddhist priest, expresses the aesthetic ideals which delineate the relationship of life and art. In writing an artistic diary, Kenkō was following a diary tradition long established in Japanese literature.⁵ The aesthetic principles outlined by Kenkō do not reveal a break from the past.⁶ Rather, Kenkō's formulation of aesthetic principles integrates the aesthetic of the Heian period with the sensibilities of the Buddhist priest and the warrior society of the Japanese Middle Ages.

Unlike the traditional Western diary, the diarist in the Japanese tradition does not attempt to give us an accurate historical accounting of events. There is little attempt at an “objective view.” Within this tradition, an objective detailing of facts is not more truthful, and therefore more valuable, than a subjective view. In fact, the question of the truth value of an objective as opposed to a subjective recording of events does not really exist as it does in the West. The Tosa nikki, for example, is told by a woman, but its author is a man. This fact does not disturb the “truth-value” inherent in this diary, which is considered to be historically truthful because it is the true expression of its author's experience. The assumption in the Japanese diary tradition is that truth lies within the perception of the perceiver and in his ability to express this reality in an aesthetically persuasive manner.⁷

In the Western tradition the diary had been valuable as a biographical tool, a way to understand the life of a famous person or an instrument with which one could clarify some literary work; in the Japanese tradition the diary had value if it succeeded as an aesthetic product. It had truth value because of its aesthetic value. This aesthetic continues to define Japanese preferences today.⁸

Frisch, on the other hand, is not drawing upon a long-established aesthetic norm. His purpose in writing his diary seems to have been to restructure a traditional form.⁹ He uses his diary to explode assumptions which have often been associated with the diary form within the Western tradition, where the diary is characteristically a linear record which reports for posterity the events in the life of a famous person.

Sometimes important events were captured in the diaries of an obscure person swept up by the tide of history. When a diary was a private record, not meant for publication, it became significant when the diarist was or became a public figure or when an important event was illuminated through such a record. Examples of the latter are Samuel Pepys Diaries (1660-69) and the diary of Anne Frank (1942-44). If a writer kept a diary—which seems to have been the rule rather than the exception—it is not given equal status with his other literary products.¹⁰ Both Goethe and Tolstoy kept a private journal. Goethe's diary was a kind of hypomnemata—a memo-record of events which helped to jog his memory.¹¹

Writers also used the diary as a kind of workshop—a place where ideas could take shape in crude or unfinished form, representing a prolegomenon for future work.¹² The private diaries of Novalis, Rilke, and Kafka would seem to serve this function.

But Frisch's thoughts, couched in diary form, are significant because of their aesthetic value. His diary detaches itself from the author, as does a novel. And yet, unlike in the novel, its author remains as the protagonist and true voice. We perhaps should view Frisch's diary apart from the historical entity “Max Frisch, the writer,” but not apart from Frisch the person creating himself. By interweaving poems, essays, plays, and reportage, Frisch restructures the diary form to provide an antidote to the traditional structure and concerns of the Western diary form. Frisch's diary is no longer a historical footnote, but a record of a creative process—an aesthetic record.

The diaries of Frisch and Kenkō share formal elements of style, and they share aesthetic concerns—topics which reveal the author's reflections on aesthetics. But these similarities do not obscure the differences which are inherent in each because each arises from completely different cultural contexts. A comparison of their differences and similarities underscores the achievements of both.

Fragments (essays in which ideas and observations are deliberately not fully developed) are characteristic of the style of both Kenkō's and Frisch's diaries. In the Japanese tradition, this type of diary is not to be read as a series of disconnected episodes, but as an aesthetic whole, analogous to a novel or any other work of fiction. Such fragments joined together belong to “the random mode of composition known as zuihitzu (follow the brush).”¹³ These fragments are given coherence by the subtle thematic connection of successive episodes. Max Frisch expresses an analogous conception of form when he tells his readers that his work resembles a mosaic. If pulled apart, these pieces will not convey an aesthetic unity. He addresses his readers with the following plea:

der Leser täte diesem Buch einen großen Gefallen, wenn er, nicht nach Laune und Zufall hin und her blätternd, die zusammensetzende Folge achtete; die einzelnen Steine eines Mosaiks, und als solches ist dieses Buch zumindestens gewollt, können sich allein kaum verantworten.

(7)

In addition to being a stylistic device, the concept of fragmentation, of leaving things incomplete and of not exhausting any subject, is of great significance in the work of Frisch and Kenkō. Kenkō resolves the problem of how beauty can be communicated in images or words by articulating an aesthetic precept in which allusion and outline form the basis for aesthetic choices. The flower in bud, for example, indicates the beginnings of things, and moves us because it conveys the hint of the lushness of the flower in full bloom:

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring—these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. … The moon that appears close to dawn after we have long waited for it moves us more profoundly than the full moon cloudless over a thousand leagues.

(115-18)

Japanese aesthetics dictates that multi-faceted layers of reality can be captured only through suggestion or outline. This aesthetic principle, yūgen, found its ultimate realization in the Nō play.¹⁴ Here the gesture of an actor is symbolic and highly stylized. When levels of meaning are reduced or compressed into gestures of great simplicity and mystery, the concept of yūgen is realized. Outline and simplicity are the features inherent in this aesthetic principle—indeed, they are its defining elements. Yūgen is always allied with mystery. We must fill in with our minds the context suggested by the images the poet presents. Heian aesthetics had already expressed through miyabi the conventional, elegant tastes reflected in the sensibilities of an aesthete. Yūgen, particularly as manifested in Nō, combines these conventional expressions of elegant beauty (miyabi) with the teachings of Zen Buddhism. The expression of yūgen as an aesthetic principle in Essays in Idleness does not represent a new direction in Japanese aesthetic thought. Kenkō states, perhaps more profoundly, what the Heian courtier had valued and written about centuries earlier. Life was seen by the Heian noble, as well as by Kenkō (a Buddhist priest) through the prism of a unifying aesthetic.

The destruction of the chronological format and the preference for the fragment become for Frisch a revolutionary means to achieve new vision. Within this restructured form, Frisch confronts and also seeks to heal the rift which characterizes the modern age: the old forms are no longer adequate; they no longer possess the ability to pierce through the veil of illusion. But the modern writer distrusts not only the old forms but words as well. Hofmannsthal's letter to Lord Chandos is a well-known example of the artistic crisis in which words seem to have lost their power to communicate ultimate truths. Although conscious of this problem, Frisch does not respond by rejecting writing. Rather, he sees writing as the only means out of the crisis of alienation, mechanization, and the loss of identity produced by the modern age.

Essays in Idleness articulates the main themes common to earlier diaries—love, death, and the nature of time. Although all diaries deal with time, the Japanese diary's approach to time—and specifically Kenkō's—as a theme and a formal device of organization illustrates the differences and similarities between the Japanese and the Western diary. The diary form is tied to a certain extent to “temporal progression, whether of the hours of the day, the days of the week, the months of the year, or even the years of a lifetime” (Miner 1969: 17). But in the Japanese diaries, unlike the traditional Western diaries, the daily entry form was not strictly adhered to. According to Miner, “The higher ripples and waves in the stream of time were more important to diary literature than lesser units, because they gave shape to the pressure of the stream” (17-18). Very often poetry was used to stop the flow of time. Poetry appears in all Japanese diaries in varying degrees as a literary device which not only heightens and delineates emotion, but also brings into sharp relief the narrative episodes. These poems indicate time—frozen moments which take us out of the ordinary piling up of days lived in “linear” or historical time. Kenkō's Essays in Idleness includes fewer poems than other Japanese diaries. But Kenkō's diary takes us out of “linear” time through a different formal device: that the essays are undated reveals that time here is also not measured sequentially. These essays in the zuihitzu are like a collection of poems, moments of perception, organized in the manner of Japanese poetry anthologies. The aesthetic concerns expressed by Kenkō provide a link to “linear” time. Kenkō's reflections about time encompass aesthetic principles, in which a heightened perception of life is bound to the knowledge of its impermanence.

Kenkō's essays demonstrate and articulate very clearly the aesthetic principles which are traditionally expressed in the Japanese diary form. The most pervasive of these principles is the awareness of beauty in the transience of life—in its evanescence. It is beauty which invokes the poet to glorify the cherry blossom, the dew, the waning moon. We can appreciate their beauty because we are always aware of their impermanence. Linked to the appreciation of beauty is the knowledge of its immanent decay. About the power of beauty to move us (mono-no-aware)¹⁵ Kenkō says: “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty” (7). Throughout Kenkō's diary, the transience of man's life on earth is a central motif. He says that people who do not appreciate life also do not fear death. A man, he says, “who fails, even for a short time, to keep in mind the preciousness of time is no different from a corpse” (92).

Any diary, Eastern or Western, can be seen as a symbol of man's journey through life, a journey which inevitably reveals a consciousness of time heightened by the prospect of death ahead. When a writer abandons the daily entry format, as in Kenkō, the diary functions as a frame in which moments in time are made to stand still; and these moments are brought into close relief when a universal truth is conveyed through the subjective images and reflections of the diarist. The idea of allusion, of fragmentation, typifies Kenkō's perception of time. He introduces his diary thus: “What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head” (3). These thoughts convey his perception of the world, a reality always brought into relief by the awareness of the fleeting nature of life lived in linear time.

Joined to this apprehension of time is the idea of the incomplete, of the fragment. “In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable,” Kenkō remarks. “Leaving something incomplete makes it more interesting, and gives one the feeling that here is room for growth” (70). Everything must be alluded to; nothing should be fully delineated. Essentially, the outline conveys meaning. To state anything explicitly destroys the ability of words to express universal truths because that limits the reader's ability to expand upon these things, to fill the gaps with imagination. Completeness forces upon the reader a vision that, if it is too concrete and complete, he cannot accept as authentic.

Kenkō was writing at a time of great political and social upheaval. The world of the Heian nobles—the world of the “Shining Prince”—had come to an end, to be replaced by the harsh realities of a military aristocracy. This new breed of nobles saw no need for the “decadent” aesthetics of the Heian noble, nor the pacifistic precepts of the Buddhist priest. Kenkō clearly adapted himself to this new ruling class. Although he examines Buddhist philosophy in his diary, he essentially celebrates life. He expresses an aesthetic which was palatable to the warrior class, and one which also reflected the aesthetic ideals of the past. Looking with nostalgia, he calls the past a time when words were authentic and meaningful: “In all things I yearn for the past. Modern fashions seem to grow more and more debased” (23). He takes great pains to record the ritual and the accoutrements to ritual behaviour which provided a link to a more perfect past. Through an awareness of the old, man linked himself with the future. Time lived in the present was only a passage—and an imperfect one at that: “This world is a place of such uncertainty and change that what we imagine we see before our eyes does not really exist, […] We cannot be sure that the mind exists. External things are all illusions. Does anything remain unaltered even for the shortest time” (77). Because nothing remains unchanged, the diarist is compelled to create a frame which freezes experience. Thus Kenkō seeks a prescribed way to perceive the world in the imitation of patterns which go back to the beginning of “culture”—that is, to an aesthetic system which aimed at shaping the emotions and at guiding social intercourse. Although Kenkō owes a debt to Buddhist perceptions of transience, he celebrates temporal existence through a recreation of ritual behaviour, the thrust of which was to heighten one's appreciation of a fragile beauty possible only through an acute consciousness of time.

Kenkō lived in a world in which man was steeped in the Buddhist view of life as an illusion, a cycle which repeats itself, and in which man's life was apprehended as chained to an unstopping wheel of time. It was a world in which the past was as real as the present and where events were inexorably tied to the past. Yet by writing a diary celebrating individual perception, Kenkō seems to break out of the cycle into historicity. Max Frisch, on the other hand, uses his diary to escape from historicity. Both succeed, but each is ruled and guided by the thrust of the past—the Western obsession with a linear history and the Eastern with a cyclical history.

Frisch's Tagebuch breaks from the Western tradition, which records for posterity facts about an individual or an event. Thus this diary is not a linking together of events, but an unfolding of the individual in time, seen through an ever-changing frame. He tries to answer the question: What is an authentic existence? The answer exists in multiple perspectives and possibilities. Perceptions frozen in words, printed on a page, create a framework. This framework forms a vessel which the reader must fill with his imagination, but guided by markers, to an awareness created by the author's perception of reality. This record of fleeting and momentary perceptions is given dimension by the associational connections provided by form. In the case of Frisch that form is the diary.

Frisch states that to frame experience is to prevent it from becoming part of the chaos and void of existence in linear time; “und die Form wo immer sie einmal geleistet wird, erfüllt uns immer mit einer Macht des Trostes, die ohnegleichen ist” (45). About Marion, the puppeteer, who surely represents the Schriftsteller, Frisch says: “Etliche, als der Puppenspieler sich erhängt hat, nennen ihn einen Ästheten, weil er so sehr des Spieles bedurfte, der Form, um leben zu können—weil er so nahe am Chaos wohnte” (45). This “puppeteer” dwells in a place where prosaic reality interfaces with the eternal—the formless void. From this precarious perch he retrieves for us the images of eternal significance and frames them. The writer-artist, homo ludens, thus restores the world to its primordial wholeness through images which transport us out of a historical present. The essence of creation is thus to go back to the beginning through mythic images which heal the rift caused by a linear concept of time.

The creator-artist walks a tightrope. He spins a gossamer web of form which catches ever so subtly the outline of time, of life, of aesthetic experience. To capture it totally is to kill it. If the goal of artistic creation is to reveal, then revelation for Frisch is possible only in incompleteness (Unvollkommenheit). The idea that fragments are more profound than something which is completely defined—that this provides room for growth—was claimed by Kenkō as well. But Kenkō articulated the prevailing aesthetic principles of his time. He defined an aesthetic which emerged from a heightened sensitivity to time. Such an awareness demanded that discrete moments be captured within the flow of time. Indeed, Kenkō attempts, again and again, to freeze moments and take them out of the wheel of cyclical time. But Kenkō does not seek revelation in originality but through a cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities based firmly on tradition. Frisch links Unvollkommenheit to the idea that our apprehension of people should be free from stereotypic notions or expectations: “Du sollst dir kein Bildnis machen” (31). That is, revelation takes place only when we see other people as they “really” are and not when we superimpose roles on them, which they are then forced to act out. This concept was alien to Kenkō. He lived in a world which celebrated the role in which one's life was judged according to one's position in society. That position always carried with it prescribed ways of behavior and ritual. Frisch's desire to avoid pre-judgment, to create a new mythos, is alien to Kenkō's world, where there was no authenticity ohne das Bildnis. Indeed, many of the essays in Essays in Idleness detail the prescribed way one should apprehend a person according to his standing in society. Reality and authenticity are here modeled and related to the past. Kenkō says he yearns for the past. He doubts whether any modern poet could display the same mastery of style and power to evoke strong feeling. “Why is it,” he asks, “that even the most careless utterance of the men of former days should sound so splendid” (16-17). The ancients created poems which are “simple and unaffected, and the lovely purity of form creates a powerful impression” (13).

Although Frisch cites past masters, his is not an uncritical stance. Poetry from the past, for him, does not necessarily break through to our own experience. He is ultimately concerned with the process of creation—what makes a work timeless is part of that process. The apprehension of time becomes an essential component of the aesthetic process and the work of art. The function of art, analogous to the experience of time in dreams, is to restructure our consciousness. About the consciousness of time and art he says: “Unser Bewußtsein als das brechende Prisma, das unser Leben in ein Nacheinander zerlegt, und der Traum als die andere Linse, die es wieder in sein Urganzes sammelt; der Traum und die Dichtung, die ihm in diesem Sinne nachzukommen sucht—” (23). The writer thus restores the flow of time and brings it back to its beginnings—sein Urganzes.

Frisch uses the diary form to blend fact and fiction to create a mythical geography which reveals the nature of authentic existence. Like the mythical Robinson Crusoe, the writer must invent an island, a place where the chaos of man's life is made whole. The writer-artist stands outside linear time—he is like a clairvoyant who sees an image of an event but does not know where or when this event will occur.

Er sieht nicht das Nacheinander, und das scheint mir bemerkenswert: er sieht nicht Geschichte, sondern Sein, die Allgegenwart des Möglichen, die wir mit unserem Bewußtsein nicht wahrnehmen können, und offenbar müssen auch jene, damit sie aus dem Urganzen heraus sehen können, das Bewußtsein ausschalten, das unser Sein immer in Ort und Zeit verlegt; sie brauchen die Trance.

(24)

Frisch is clearly delineating the restoration of a mythical time when he says, “In dunkler Vorzeit. So beginnen die Sagen, die nicht Geschichte sind sondern Bildern unseres Seins” (25). We are doomed to perceive a linear dimension of time because we are blinded by the present. But the writer provides an escape from the prison of linear time. He resembles the shaman who has the power to see our connections to a mythical reality. His creations transport us to the dimension of a cyclical perception of time.

Frisch's diary contains a combination of essays, sketches of plays, and poetry. Particularly intertwined is the essay with fiction, which defines but never reveals completely—es sagt nicht das Unsagbare. Dates of real-life events are interspersed with the signposts of a mythical geography. The reader is thus aware of historicity—time piled up in a linear path—but historical time only underscores the reality of the mythical landscape. It is this landscape which is the foreground, while the passing of historical time moves to the background. The topics—creation, form, theater—are discussed over and over again. For Frisch, these are all ways to restore the flow of time, to reveal an authentic reality—that is, to create a nonlinear view of man's existence in time. The present, which is indicated by reference to events such as the explosion off Bikini Island, emerges only dimly. The real world becomes visible in the process of an inner journey leading to self-revelation. Frisch says: “Die Gegenwart bleibt irgendwie unwirklich, ein Nichts zwischen Ahnung und Erinnerung, welche die eigentlichen Räume unseres Erlebens sind; die Gegenwart als bloßer Durchgang; die bekannte Leere, die man sich ungern zugibt” (23). This passage reminds one of Kenkō's awareness of the world as illusion. Indeed, the Japanese aesthetic principle of mono-no-aware is present as well—for example, in the passage which reads:

wir spüren dieses immerwährende Gefälle zum Nichtstein, und darum denken wir an Tod, wo immer wir ein Gefälle sehen, das uns zum Vergleich wird für das Unvorstellbare, irgendein sichtbares Gefälle von Zeit: ein Ziehen der Wolken, ein fallendes Laub, ein Wachsen der Bäume, ein gleitendes Ufer, eine Allee mit neuem Grün, ein aufgehender Mond […] erst aus dem Nichtsein, das wir ahnen, begreifen wir für Augenblicke, daß wir leben.

(179)

The diary of Kenkō and Max Frisch's Tagebuch 1946-1949 were written about 600 years apart. Kenkō's diary did not break new ground. The artistic diary form had long been established in Japan as a standard literary genre. Frisch, on the other hand, in the creation of an artistic diary is one of a handful who stand at the unveiling of a new literary genre. From the earliest Western biography, Isocrates' Life of Ivagoras, written about 380 B.C., to the spiritual autobiography of St. Augustine, the significance of diary, autobiography, and biography has been largely historical. The value of an individual's life lies in the historical significance of that life. Frisch breaks with this tradition.¹⁶ In his diaries he offers us no historical significance; rather he presents us with a life which is significant because it manifests an aesthetic form, which is both timeless and universal. He uses his own life and the diary form to present us with a metaphor of the aesthetic experience and sensibility of the creator artist. His diary is ultimately an escape from the linear time of history, and thus stands as a reversal of previous biographical and autobiographical writing in the West. This does not place him within the tradition of the Japanese diary.

The aesthetic principles of aware and yūgen governing this form aim at manifesting in literary form an awareness of beauty in the transience of life. Frisch seeks these things less than he does an awareness of the process of artistic creation itself. Though he is at odds with the traditional concerns of a diarist in the Japanese tradition, a comparison is nevertheless instructive because in breaking from the Western tradition of autobiography he has attempted to create a pattern in the form of a diary that has the mythic force of a universal aesthetic form. In doing this, he takes as his model the dream, and constructs a mythical landscape against which the consciousness of the artist attempts to break the cycle of historical time and of his own individual life in that time, and return to the timeless beginnings of creation itself.

If the work of Frisch and that of Kenkō have any significant similarities it is because both offer us their lives as artists in the form of a diary—lives which are not a random series of unconnected events but an attempt at a general aesthetic form. It is on the point of form that the two artists, so far removed in time and culture, enter the same territory. They both use the diary to break the constraints of everyday time and to climb onto the plateau of the timeless formality of an aesthetic. Here the work of the original, struggling Frisch and that of the traditionally guided Kenkō intersect.

Notes

1. Poetry headnotes also lead into the development of narrative forms like the “tale” or monogatari. The poetry anthology of Narihira (823-80) demonstrates the problems inherent in genre divisions within the Japanese tradition; this anthology, the Ise monogatari or Tale of Ise, has been called a record Ise ki, as well as a diary Zaigo no chujo nikki (Miller 80).

2. Miller also notes that in the Japanese tradition “diaries based on daily entries or chronological time are by no means rare, but they are not so frequent as to be the rule” (82).

3. Donald Keene, in his introduction to his translation of Essays in Idleness, says that this was the greatest influence on Kenkō's work; Keene calls Sei Shonagan's Pillow Book the first masterpiece of the zuihitzu (xvi).

4. Putzar summarizes this organization: “1) names of things, such as mountains or rivers; and cataloguing, such as ‘beautiful things,’ ‘humorous things,’ and so forth; 2) random thoughts on palace life, human affairs and nature, without reference to any particular occasion; 3) diaristic and narrative sections, chiefly concerning the author's experiences at the imperial palace.” Putzar also notes that the manuscripts are not arranged alike (58).

5. For the purposes of this cross-cultural study, I call Kenkō's work a diary, even though the Japanese do not always include Essays in Idleness within the genre of the artistic diary. But the reasons for this are culture specific—the Japanese make finer distinctions among various sub-genre of the diary. These classifications are not easily compared to the genre distinctions made in the West about autobiographical literature. Earl Miner in his introduction to Japanese Poetic Diaries discusses the overlapping that characterizes the Japanese diary, poetry, history, and narrative. Marilyn Jeanne Miller in The Poetics of Nikki Bungaku discusses the Japanese artistic diary at length. Her decision to include Sei Shonagan's Pillow Book in her discussion of diary literature supports my comparison of Kenkō and Frisch. By the time Kenkō wrote his Essays in Idleness the artistic diary had been defined as genre by Japanese, and had already received scholarly attention. The term for diary literature in Japan is nikki bungaku. Miller takes six models of such literature and compares them to analogous Western works. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagan is compared to the Essaies of Montaigne and Gide's Journals. Miller notes that this work is “often treated as a genre separate from nikki bungaku by Japanese scholars” (244). This genre is called sôshi and its later form zuihitzu, although many scholars do not differentiate between the two (see, for example, Putzar, and Keene's introduction to Essays in Idleness). Miller justifies the inclusion of sôshi/zuihitzu historically and through the logic of a comparative analysis. This type of analysis points out the culture specific nature of genre division; here the genre categories of each specific culture begin to lose their contour. The Japanese, for example, may more easily accept notebooks, such as Gide's Journals, as independent works of literature. The Westerner, on the other hand, “is less likely to see the connection of the fragmentary jottings of a notebook with a miscellany of essays but not object to its connection to diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies” (245). Miller explains that the Japanese, “because of a need to differentiate among works within their own tradition, have tended to separate notebooks of stray thoughts and loosely connected essays and other prose fragments from diary literature—a distinction that the Western literary term, ‘journal,’ clearly blurs since it may mean both a daily record and random jottings in a notebook” (245). Elias Canetti includes the Japanese diary tradition in his discussion of diaries, “Dialog mit dem grausamen Partner.” He notes that Sei Shonagan's Pillow Book “das vollkommenste an ‘Anzeichnungen’, das ich überhaupt kenne …” (64).

6. Putzar calls Kenkō “one of the last representatives of the old Court” (84). Unlike his predecessor Kamo no Chōmei, whose zuihitzu, An Account of My Hut, reflected the rejection of “the world,” Kenkō's work is more reminiscent of the Sei Shonagan's Pillow Book, written during the Heian period.

7. History in Japan is often written as fiction might be in the West. “In this sense the Okagami (c. 1115) uses dialogue to present an actual historical event” (Miner 10).

8. In his introduction, Keene points out that Essays in Idleness is one of the ten classic works of Japanese literature, known to every schoolboy. He calls it a “central work in the development of Japanese taste” (xxii).

9. See Georg Misch's Geschichte der Autobiographie for the ancient roots of autobiographical writing in the West. Misch is looking particularly at the historical perspectives revealed in the genre. Gustav Rene Hocke's Das Europäische Tagebuch deals more specifically with the diary in the European tradition. Hocke's book contains an extensive bibliography of European diaries, as well as an anthology of representative works beginning with Francesco da Fiesso (1409) and ending with Pope John XXIII (1961). Like Misch, Hocke is more interested in examining the diary as a repository for historical knowledge, hence the differentiation and importance of the true (echtes Tagebuch) and the fictional and public diary (332 ff.).

10. John N. Morris provides an interesting discussion of William Cowper's Memoir, which examines the events and state of mind that led to his conversion, but which Cowper decided not to publish. Morris notes the literary value of Cowper's Memoir. Cowper, unlike Frisch, felt this to be an experience which would not “be useful to any public” (144).

11. I am referring here not to Goethe's important autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, but to the daily records he kept and in fact destroyed. According to Thomas Saine, Goethe had destroyed so many of these records that “he was compelled to read a large number of historical works about the mid-eighteenth century … and also to rely on the memory of others in the process of writing Poetry and Truth” (5). I should like to distinguish between the diary and autobiography. Frisch's Tagebuch I and Kenkō's Essays in Idleness are not autobiographies—that is, they are not reflections on the past. Both Frisch and Kenkō maintain the illusion that their journals contain responses to events as they are being experienced, and not reflections of a life-time already lived out. See Peter Boerner for the characteristics of diary as opposed to other kinds of autobiographical forms of writing (11-33).

12. For analyses of Frisch's diary which try to avoid the traditional pitfalls, i.e., the diary as workshop, diary as either fact or fiction, see Horst Steinmetz, who argues that the fictional elements found in Frisch's Tagebuch I are not first drafts of later works but have a special function in the diary (1982: 57). Steinmetz points out that Frisch's diary, unlike an autobiography, deliberately withholds personal information (1982: 61). He sees Frisch's technique of fictional projections of self as “Brechtian”—alienation techniques which provide reflective distance (1982: 65). In Max Frisch: das literarische Tagebuch, Rolf Kieser also deals with the problems of Frisch's diary. In his “Man as his own Novel: Max Frisch and the literary Diary,” Kieser discusses the philosophical necessity involved in applying the characteristics of the diary for Frisch—that is, the fragment is not seen as an aesthetic construct, but primarily as a necessary means for the revelation of a modern consciousness.

13. Keene, xvi. See also Miller 245 ff. for the interaction between reader and text in the “re-construction” of the writer's personality.

14. My discussion of yūgen is endebted to Sources of Japanese Tradition, Literary and Art Theories in Japan, and Japanese Court Poetry.

15. Keene translates the phrase mono-no-aware as “the power of things to move us” (8).

16. I do not want to suggest that Frisch lacks antecedents or models in Western literature. He refers several times to Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge in his Tagebuch 1946-1949. Alex Kurczaba discusses the debt Frisch owes Montaigne's essays, which provide a spiritual model for Frisch's search for self-definition through the writing of the reflective essay.

Works Cited

Boerner, Peter. Tagebuch. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969.

Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1961.

Canetti, Elias. “Dialog mit dem grausamen Partner.” Das Tagebuch und der moderne Autor. Ed. Uwe Schultz. München: Carl Hanser, 1965. 49-71.

Frisch, Max. Tagebuch 1946-1949. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1950.

Hocke, Gustav Rene. Das europäische Tagebuch. Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1963.

Kamo No Chōmei. An Account of My Hut. Trans. G. Donald Keene. Anthology of Japanese Literature. New York: Grove 1955. 197-213.

Kenkō. Essays in Idleness. Trans. Donald Keene. New York: Columbia UP, 1967.

Ki, Tsurayuki. The Tosa Diary. Trans. William N. Porter. London: Henry Frowde, 1912.

Kieser, Rolf. “Man as his own Novel: Max Frisch and the literary diary.” Germanic Review. March 1972: 109-18.

———. Max Frisch: Das Literarische Tagebuch. Frauenfeld: Huber, 1975.

———. “Das Tagebuch als Idee und Struktur im Werke Max Frischs”. In Max Frisch: Aspekte des Prosawerks. Bern: Peter Lang, 1978. 157-72.

Kurczaba, Alex. Gombrowicz and Frisch. Aspects of the Literary Diary. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1980.

Miller, Marilyn Jeanne. The Poetics of Nikki Bungaku. New York: Garland, 1985.

Miner, Earl, trans. Japanese Poetic Diaries. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

Miner, Earl, Hiroko Odagiri, and Robert E. Morrell. The Princeton Companion to Classical Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.

Misch, Georg. Geschichte der Autobiographie. 2 vols. Bern: A. Francke A. G. Verlag, 1950.

Morris, John N. Versions of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 1966.

Putzar, Edward. Japanese Literature: A Historical Outline. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1973.

Saine, Thomas. Introduction. Goethe From My Life: Poetry and Truth. By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. New York: Suhrkamp, 1987. 1-15.

Steinmetz, Horst. “Frisch as a Diarist.” Perspectives on Max Frisch. Ed. Gerhard Probst and Jay Bodine. Kentucky: U of Kentucky P, 1982. 56-71.

Steinmetz, Horst. Max Frisch: Tagebuch, Drama, Roman. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1973.

Ueda, Makoto. Literary and Art Theories in Japan. Cleveland: Western Reserve UP, 1967.