[In the following essay, Lippit examines the types and major characteristics of the Japanese "I-novel. "]

The most peculiarly characteristic form of the modern Japanese novel is the I-novel, in which the author appears as the protagonist and describes his private affairs and experiences. Avoiding the use of fictional devices, the author presents his state of mind, ideas and realization almost directly. Not only is the subject matter narrowly confined to the author's personal life and experience, but the perspective is almost entirely limited to that of the author-protagonist, and the novel typically lacks such structural and fictional mediation as plot, story-development, dramatic tension and characterization. The author's inward-turning eye observes his inner self in minute detail, leading to a profound insight, a distilled and crystallized sensibility, and a heightened awareness of life which make this type of novel close to poetry, while the lack of fictional devices brings it close to the impressionistic essay and diary.

At the same time, writing about oneself is an act of exposing the hidden self and desire, and often constitutes a challenge to the norms of social morality. It involves a confrontation between the individual and society, resulting in the sacrifice of the individual's (author's) social respectability. The author engages in this confrontation for the sake of art and the pursuit of truth. The self-exposure that characterizes the confessional I-novel is thus at once exhibitionistic and self-destructive.

Two distinct types of I-novel can be discerned in modern Japanese literature. The poetry-like, essay-like I-novel, usually called the "state-of-mind novel" (shinkyo shosetsu), reached its peak in the works of Shiga Naoya. It expresses the writer's understanding of life—his realization. It is not necessarily confessional and in most cases is not rebellious toward society, however unconventional and individualistic the author may be. It most characteristically expresses the author's sincere and stoic determination to search for the self, for a higher knowledge of life. Rather than being destructive both to society and to the self, the shinkyo shosetsu is a purified form of autobiographical novel in which the author meditates upon himself or herself with a profound, if egocentric, inward-turning eye and with the accurate eye of a realistic painter. It becomes a presentation of the heightened moments of the author's life and thus a philosophic novel as well as a realistic one. In the author's endeavor, the "I" is purified and even approaches selflessness. The optimistic, idealistically humanistic belief that the expansion of one's ego means the expansion of all human consciousness supports this process.

The other form of I-novel, the confessional novel, was established at the same time, in the late Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) periods, by the works of Tayama Katai, Shimazaki Toson, Iwano Homei and Chikamatsu Shuko, and was further developed in the Showa period (1926-present) by the works of Dazai Osamu. All of these writers depict their sinfulness, perversity, shamefulness and irrational contradictions without presenting any explicit aspiration for a solution or salvation. The act of exposure becomes the purpose in itself, yet with their persistent, unsentimental presentation of themselves, their novels gain an existential dimension and become expressions of the sinfulness of human nature itself. Underlying this destructive type of I-novel is a view of human beings and of literary expression that is essentially naturalistic. Thus it is not surprising that the first confessional I-novels were produced by such naturalist writers as Katai, Toson and Iwano Homei.

The confessional novel is usually considered to have been initiated by Tayama Katai's Futon (The Quilt, 1907), a work strongly influenced by naturalism. Although the unveiling of the self is not an essential element of the original French naturalism and the confessional I-novel is not a simple extension of European naturalism, the basic concepts of the Japanese confessional novel were fundamentally influenced by the tenets of naturalism, and the form or genre of the I-novel emerged from the short-lived movement of naturalism in Japan. Indeed we can even say that the mature era of naturalism in Japan started when the writers became engaged in writing about themselves.

According to the naturalistic view, people are controlled basically by their instinctive drives and conditioned by their social and biological environment. People either struggle unsuccessfully to control their drives through reason and moral will or achieve success only superficially. To understand people's lives as they are, the writer unveils the false social masks they wear and describes the naked human self in all its contradictions as baldly and as truthfully as possible. The reality of human life and nature is understood as determined by objective forces, and thus it can be described precisely through "flat description" (heimen byosha) and "one-dimensional description" (ichigenteki byosha). Not only is the unfictionalized exposure of one's ugly and secret side thus justified, but also the self and the author's life become the most suitable materials for his art serving as the basis for both intellectual scrutiny and the detailed, realistic description which exists as the core of the naturalists' theory of description.

Both types of I-novel (the shinkyo shosetsu and the confessional novel) are also based on the author's sense of crisis, a sense which is not abstract, metaphysical anxiety or despair but the result of a specific crisis in life (such as his wife's love affair or his infatuation with a young girl). While the shinkyo shosetsu is an expression of the writer's victory over the sense of crisis or of his effort to overcome it, however, the confessional novel is an expression of the sense of crisis as it is. The sense of crisis in the destructive I-novel stems from the sinfulness and shamefulness inherent in human existence which, unless overcome, leads people to self-destruction. The shinkyo shosetsu, on the other hand, is based on a belief in struggle to transcend the sense of crisis and attain enlightenment. The shinkyo shosetsu reflects a belief in life according to which art is used as a means for arriving at a higher consciousness of life, while the destructive I-novel reflects an effort to find salvation in art, that is, in the act of writing the novel itself.

In both cases, the question of the relation between art and life is central. For the writers of the I-novel, art was a path of mental and spiritual training, and their ethical passion to live honestly made the artists expose their thoughts and desires openly and frankly, thus converting life to art and making art serve life.

Both types of I-novel dominated the development of the modern Japanese novel. Although there were such writers as Natsume Soseki and Tanizaki Junichiro who strongly opposed both the I-novel and naturalism, it continued to be the dominant form of Japanese novel until the emergence of proletarian literature in the Showa period. For new writers, the I-novel was a heavy burden of tradition to struggle with and to surpass, and in the period following World War II, a major critical effort was devoted to criticism of the I-novel.

The limitations of both types of I-novel are quite obvious. The I-novel excludes almost completely the elements of the outer world, of others and of social problems. It tends to be narcissistic, self-satisfying dialogue with oneself or an exhibitionistic exposure of oneself. The most fundamental problem of the I-novel, a problem which has been pointed out by such critics as Kobayashi Hideo, Nakamura Mitsuo and Hirano Ken, is the writers' lack of a concept of the modern self. The reader can readily discern the easy assumption of the I-novelists that the self could be grasped by themselves and that to know the self was to know human beings in general. While the I-novelists justified their egocentric interest in writing about themselves accordingly, their works in fact present merely impressionistic and often sentimental and self-righteous, if realistically accurate, observations of themselves.

The I-novelists also assumed too easily that to expose oneself was to rebel against society. Their effort, although understood by themselves as an essential part of their struggle to establish the modern ego, became too often merely a personal reaction to their narrow and immediate circumstances, reflecting a fundamental lack of insight into the relationship between the individual and society in the modern age.

The I-novel was originally the product of writers who were influenced by such French writers as Rousseau, Flaubert, Maupassant and Gide, all of whom were concerned with the question of the "I" in society and in the novel. In criticizing the Japanese novelists' superficial understanding of the French writers, Kobayashi Hideo points out that when Rousseau declared in his famous Confessions that he would undertake the unprecedented act of exposing himself to society, he was not really concerned with knowing himself or with how he would describe himself, but was concerned with the question of the individual in society. Above all, the Japanese writers never experienced the desperation of Flaubert, Maupassant or Gide over their lack of faith in the possibility of understanding the self and reality with the methods of positivistic science—the French writers were concerned with the question of how to restore the "I" which is killed by positivistic science. For Gide, to believe in the "I" meant to believe in the "I" in his experimental studio. Although the French writers esteemed daily life in art, they did not seek salvation in life itself, unlike the basically ethical Japanese I-novelists, whose primary concern was salvation in life. Kobayashi states that the I-novelists were sentimental and romantic, and that they were fundamentally feudalists with a naturalistic outlook.

The other principal criticism directed toward the I-novel concerned its form and method of expression. The I-novel rejects fictionalization and the mediation of materials through fictional devices. Although the author's limited perspective and firm grasp of the materials convince the reader of the truthfulness and accuracy of the description, the essay-like novel, with its crude, bare facts, hardly entertains the reader; nor does it evoke understanding of people's complex relation to society. It tends, rather, to be boring and irrelevant. Thus it leads to such violent reactions as that of Tanizaki Junichiro, who stated that he loses interest in the work immediately if he senses that the author is going to talk about himself, and who declared that he loves made-up stories with complicated, shocking plots.

In fact, the question of form and the necessity of structural and fictional mediation in the novel became one of the central points of the critical controversy among the young writers of the Taisho period who, dissatisfied with the I-novel and naturalistic writing, began writing neo-romantic literature. The debate carried out between Akutagawa and Tanizaki—which is usually referred to as "the plot controversy"—is typical of the critical disputes which arose during this period.

Dissatisfaction with the I-novel spurred as well the arguments for the honkaku shosetsu (the orthodox novel), whose model was the works of European, English and Russian realism. Such dissatisfaction also aroused a critical dispute concerning the difference between the I-novel and the German Ich Roman, in which the process of the protagonist's mental growth is traced. Since the critics who favored the honkaku shosetsu were usually enthusiastic about the German Ich Roman, they could base their arguments against the I-novel only on the grounds that it lacks social scope and fictional devices, both of which the I-novelists deliberately excluded as irrelevant to their endeavor.

The pursuit of the question of the self is a major concern of most modern novelists and a characteristic of the modern novel which distinguishes it from the early nineteenth century and Victorian novels. Although the Meiji I-novel narrowed novel writing to the pursuit of the self, excluding the possibility of social novels, its modernity exists exactly in this fact, that is, in the writers' search for the self in art and indeed in the very act of writing novels during the overly utilitarian Meiji period, when writers were excluded systematically from the mainstream of society's efforts to modernize itself. Although the protected, hothouse situation of the writers' in-group literary circle, the bundan, isolated them from the reality of social life and forced them to coil into themselves, it did create a fertile environment for radical and abstract literary and philosophic experimentation. The modernity as well as the fundamental weakness of the I-novel stems, therefore, from the basic isolation of the writer from the reality of society in the process of industrial development, the very situation which characterizes modern Western writers as well.

Underlying the emergence of the genre of the novel, there existed the diaries, confessions and letters in which the private experiences and feelings of individuals are expressed with varying degrees of fictitiousness. The novel as a form and as a literary perspective absorbed these underlying forms of expression. The novel is often a concealed form of autobiography and in particular in modern literature, the modern literary technique of stream of consciousness facilitates this concealment, enabling the author to expose the inner self of the protagonist without necessarily making the work overtly autobiographical, and often resulting in the fusion of dramatic confession with autobiographical confession. Writing about oneself using the device of confession, thus, is an inherent part of the novel as a form. In modern confessional novels, the confession was deliberately isolated by the author and made into the sole basis of the novel. Restoring the self in the novel through confession was a new, if desperate, literary venture for the modern author at a time when writers had become isolated from social reality, and thus the spontaneous relation between the individual and society, life and art, a relation which the novel had taken for granted, had ceased to exist. The I-novel must be viewed then not only in the context of the unique development of the Japanese novel, but also in the context of this overall history of the development of the modern novel in which the self became a major theme—indeed the sole theme—and the artist and art turned increasingly and exclusively to themselves.

In Japanese literature in particular, the I-novel emerged from the naturalistic investigation of the self, but it was modified by and integrated into the romantic tradition of the pursuit of the self, a tradition which was first introduced to Japan through Emersonian romanticism and to which many of the naturalist writers subscribed even before turning to novel-writing. In particular, the confessional I-novel integrates the naturalistic unveiling of the self with the destructive expose of the inner self inherent in the tradition of Western dark romanticism. Iwano Homei, for example, defined his confessional works as neo-naturalistic and was a proponent of the naturalistic theory of expression which he called "one-dimensional description," yet he was also deeply indebted to the romantic literature both of the West and of Japan in the mid-Meiji period. An ardent admirer of Poe and Baudelaire, he was a proponent of the "diabolism" in the literature of dark romanticism. Thus he embodies the link between the naturalistic unmasking of the self and the diabolical self-exposure inherent in the literature of dark romanticism, a link which is of particular significance in the development of modern Japanese literature. This link between naturalism and dark romanticism in the confessional novel's investigation of the self is responsible for rendering the Japanese confessional novel uniquely modern and is one of the major factors which enabled the I-novel to continue as a dominant form even after naturalism died as a literary movement and when anti-naturalistic—in fact anti-I-novel—aesthetic literature, strongly influenced by the Western decadent literature of Poe, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde especially, came to be a major literary force in the Taisho period.

Indeed, many of the overly hasty denunciations of the I-novel are due to critics' uncritical identification of the novel with the author's life and their inability to assess the works as part of the emerging modern genre of the confessional novel. Japanese literary criticism ironically has been dominated by a view and method which form a counterpart to the I-novel; it is characterized by the critics' heavy emphasis on the study of the authors' lives rather than their works. Instead of appreciating the works as autonomous works of art, critics have used them as documents which illustrate the writers' minds and lives, reducing too readily every element in the works to the authors' ideas, attitudes toward life and actual experiences. Most of the severest critics of the I-novels failed to analyze the works as separate from the authors' actual life experiences and attacked the authors rather than the works, basing their attacks on their uncritical identification of the authors with the protagonists.

Even if the concern with the author's life is recognized as legitimate in some cases—since the subject matter of the I-novel is usually the author himself or is derived from his life—evaluation and reading of the works solely in the light of the author's life becomes absurd in most cases. Hirano Ken, for example, argues in his essay on Shimazaki Toson's Shinsei (New Life, 1920), a confessional I-novel in which the protagonist confesses his illicit love affair with his niece, that the author had no literary or artistic purpose in confessing the love affair in the book but did so in order to end the relationship with her when it became a burden to him. He argues that Shinsei thus cannot be understood fully without understanding Toson's real motivation for writing the novel, that is, to rid himself of his niece. Hirano believes that it was only Toson's consistent egotism which caused him to sacrifice others' social life by exposing them in his novels, pretending that he did so for the sake of his art while in fact using art to solve his personal problems.

It is striking that Hirano's criticism lacks completely any analysis of the work itself. Shinsei in particular uses the confession of the protagonist as the basic plot, and the confession provides the climactic point toward which the novel develops. Although the story is based on the author's life, the novel assumes the form of an art novel in which the protagonist struggles to bring himself to write a confessional novel (Shinsei is the product), and the theme of the novel becomes the process of a man being born anew as an artist. Although Hirano's essay reveals unintentionally the basic structure of the Japanese I-novel (true in particular of the works of T son)—the interweaving of actual life and art in the works, with actual life frequently receiving priority over art and art serving life—his complete failure to analyze the work itself renders the relations between his essay and literary criticism tenuous at best.

One of the central questions of the I-novel is indeed the extent to which it can be appreciated meaningfully without reducing it to the author's actual experiences, and it is to this question that I now turn with an analysis of Tayama Katai's Futon (The Quilt), which is considered to be the starting point of the I-novel. I try to show that Katai uses an ironic perspective in portraying the protagonist, creating a critical distance between the author and the protagonist, and that consequently the protagonist emerges as an ironic dramatization of the author, not as a faithful portrayal or subjective self-dramatization. Thus, the protagonist can be viewed as a fictional representation of the Meiji high-collar intellectual or as an ironic representation of the author's self, comical as well as tragic, who is made to typify the Meiji intellectual. According to this reading, the demarcation which is usually made between Futon and Shimazaki Toson's Hakai (The Broken Commandment, 1906)—treating Hakai as a genuine modern novel of realism and Futon as a distorted, pseudo-modern I-novel—is not acceptable. Instead, Futon is a work close to Ukigumo (Floating Cloud, 1888, the "first" modern Japanese novel and a work which Katai himself admired), a work in which the Meiji intellectual, infatuated with the new Western ideas, is portrayed as a quixotic hero with a touch of self-parody on the part of the author. This point will be illustrated in the following analysis of the ironic dual perspective which Katai carefully implants in Futon but which is also inherent in the confessional novel in general.

To grasp the dual perspective, it will be necessary to clarify some of the confusions which led critics to read Futon exclusively as a document of the author's life. These confusions stem from the very basic fact that the I-novel exists in the "slender margin" between art and life (or fiction and reality) and exploits this fact artistically and intellectually, although sometimes without clear self-consciousness on the part of the author. The fascination of the confessional I-novel, of the masochistic self-expose of Iwano Homei and Chikamatsu Shuko or of Henry Miller, for example, exists precisely in this artistic exploitation of the "slender margin" between reality and fiction as the sole basis of the genre. Although it is one type of autobiographical novel, the confessional I-novel forms a distinct genre of its own on the basis of its manipulation of the confession and of its ironic perspective in particular, which facilitates both self-search and self-expose, and both self-glorification and self-parody.

The "evils" of the I-novel are usually traced back to Futon. The publication of Futon in the fortieth year of Meiji (1907) was received as a shocking event by Katai's contemporaries. Futon and Toson's Hakai, which appeared a year earlier, mark the beginning of the late naturalism period, a period in which major naturalistic works integrating crude, imported theories into Japanese milieus and themes were produced. Futon alone, it has been argued, also determined the direction of the mainstream of Japanese literature in the post-Russo-Japanese-War period by establishing the genre of the confessional I-novel. Thus, Nakamura Mitsuo argues that the I-novel warped and distorted the Japanese literature of realism and that Futon played a decisive role in making the autobiographical I-novel the mainstream of modern Japanese literature.

He argues, moreover, that the success of Katai's Futon overshadowed Hakai, relegating Hakai to a state of complete neglect and thus foreclosing the possibility of developing Japanese realism along the lines of the social novel Hakai. Even Toson himself followed the path of Katai and after Hakai began to write autobiographical I-novels (Haru [Spring, 1909], Ie [The Family, 1912], and Shinsei [New Life, 1920]), until in the end he left the form to write Yoake mae (Before the Dawn, 1935), an historical novel describing his father's life and the struggle of the intellectual caught up in the process of cultural dissolution. Thus, according to Nakamura, although Hakai and Futon are usually recognized as the first modern Japanese novels, the two are almost diametrically opposed in nature; while Hakai is a genuine modern novel of realism, Futon is representative of the typically Japanese brand of pseudo-modern novel, the I-novel, a confessional, exhibitionistic, egocentric, narcissistic, autobiographical novel.

Toson's Hakai is the story of a young man who, belonging to the Eta caste, receives a command from his father not to reveal his Eta identity. Obeying this command faithfully, the protagonist, Ushimatsu, successfully progresses through the educational hierarchy and becomes a teacher in a local town in Nagano prefecture. His colleagues and pupils never suspect his Eta identity. Ushimatsu's self-contempt at his own life's deception increases, however, as he witnesses the merciless ostracism of other members of the Eta caste. His admiration for the Eta intellectual Inoko Rentaro, a humanistic ideologue who openly admitted his Eta identity, increases his desire to lead a life of self-respect and moral and intellectual integrity, and he finally overcomes his fear of social ostracism. At the climax of the novel, Ushimatsu confesses his Eta identity and leaves the school and, in fact, Japanese society altogether.

The central question of Hakai is the dilemma of the new Meiji intellectuals who were torn between the desire for an ideal life with moral and intellectual integrity and the feudalistic social values and system which hindered the development of the modern individual ego. The essential tension of the novel, Ushimatsu's fear of social ostracism and his contempt for his own moral and intellectual deception, is that of the modern intellectual of the Meiji period.

Tayama Katai's Futon also deals with the inner conflict or dilemma of the new intellectual writer. Takenaka Tokio, a middle-aged writer, feels weary frustration over his lack of success as a writer and his drab marital life. The novel is a bald exposure of his inner struggle over his sexual attraction to his young female pupil, Yoshiko, an attraction which turns into an obsession when he comes to conceive of their relationship as the sole and absolute solution for his life of frustration. Yoshiko is a "high-collar" girl, the new breed of modern Meiji girl.

Infatuated with the new Western ideas, she had come to Tokio to be his apprentice, to have him teach her to be a writer.

Takenaka Tokio finds consolation in teaching Yoshiko foreign literature and what the modern woman should be. When he discovers that she is in love with a young man who has given up his religious studies and followed her to Tokyo to become a writer himself, he is tormented by jealousy. Yet he also supports their love, for love is what a new individual must celebrate, and he even defends the young couple before Yoshiko's parents.

His infatuation with Yoshiko is not solely sexual; in fact, his infatuation is with ideas—the new ideas of man, of life and of literature. Katai writes: "Into Japanese literature, which had only Chikamatsu and Saikaku, the great European thought came with the full violence of a typhoon.… Every young man aspired to it." Feminine liberation, that is, the creation of the new woman, was one of the imported ideas which inspired Meiji writers. Reading Ibsen to Yoshiko, Tokio urges her to grow out of feudal submissiveness and to develop her modern personality. Free love was central in this female liberation, the establishment of the modern self. Tokio argues the importance of love, yet love of the flesh, sexual love, he rejects as morally wrong.

Tokio's inner conflict is thus dual in nature. On the one hand, he aspires to be a liberated modern individual, and finding life with his old-fashioned, unintellectual wife deplorable, dreams of having an intellectually vital life with the modern Yoshiko. He cannot force himself, however, to act according to his desire and dream, for his moral sense as a teacher, husband and father prevents him from doing so. His romantic ideals meet defeat before his moralistic concern for social integrity, and he emerges as a compromising realist to his own great sorrow.

On the other hand, the novel presents the protagonist as a middle-aged man who, though driven by the dark force of sexual desire, is basically a conventional, feudal moralist. Although he desires Yoshiko himself, he finds her sexual relations with her lover morally unacceptable. He can approve only of spiritual love as necessary for the attainment of the modern self. Thus the inner conflict he experiences is not only between his romantic ideal vision of life and the drab reality of his daily life, and between his uncontrollable sexual longing for a young pupil and his moral social integrity, but also between his Western, radically modern ideals and the old feudal values to which he himself still subscribes. His moral outrage (and subsequent rejection of Yoshiko), which is based on the young lovers' physical relations, exposes his inner feudal self. The most devastating revelation is indeed the fact that the Western ideology of the modern man and the romantic, humanistic idealism to which he enthusiastically subscribed proves to be superficial attire for him. He emerges as a conventional moralist as well as a sentimental dreamer who is unable to accept the burdens and responsibilities of man's daily life.

The novel was accepted as a shocking yet brilliant achievement by Katai's contemporary writers. The main reason for the shock is the bold exposure and description of the protagonist's inner secret, his sexual longing for a young girl. A year before the publication of Futon, Katai had written an essay entitled "Rokotsunaru byosha" (Bald Description) in which, rejecting what he called "gilded literature," he advocated the presentation of reality as it is by the one-dimensional, bald description of facts. Futon is the implementation of this naturalistic theory of description. Following its appearance, heated debates took place with regard to the legitimacy of sexual description as literary and artistic expression. Erotic realism as a part of the naturalistic theory of literary creation came into focus.

At the same time, the work was considered to be a bold confession of the writer, who was regarded as willing to sacrifice his social respectability, family life and even his relation with his model for the sake of artistic creation. It was considered a confrontation with and even a revolt against the social values confining individuals within the framework of feudal morality. In this way, the novel was accepted as a radically modern novel, a confessional novel through which the writer challenged society fundamentally at the risk of his own social destruction. Katai himself later wrote, using Maupassant's expression in a somewhat different way, that he experienced the pain of peeling off his skin, of exposing himself. It is exactly on these grounds that Nakamura Mitsuo defines Futon as the prototype of the confessional I-novel.

It is not incorrect to call Futon a naturalistic novel, for we can discern the strong influence of the naturalistic concept of man in Katai's portrayal of the protagonist. Katai presents man as basically controlled by his instinctive drives and conditioned by his social environment. He struggles to control his desire by reason and moral will. In order to understand man as he is, the author unveils the false social mask he wears and describes him as baldly and as truthfully as possible. Before this task of unveiling the truth of human nature, fictionalization or rhetorical devices seem superficial and unnecessary. Indeed, with the publication of Futon, the mature era of Japanese naturalism began. The naturalistic concept of man found a congenial genre, the I-novel, the subject of investigation being the author himself. The I-novel supplied a form in which Japanese writers could dramatize their investigation of man in a milieu where a tradition of literary realism was lacking.

What is problematic, therefore, is not the question of the naturalistic elements in Futon, but the question of the confession in this I-novel, that is, the relation between the author and the protagonist, and the author's treatment of the protagonist. Nakamura Mitsuo argues that Katai, moved by the protagonist Johannes in G. Hauptmann's Lonely People, tried to recreate his own image accordingly without understanding Hauptmann's treatment of his hero. He criticizes Katai for what Tokio is: a sentimental intellectual, fundamentally alienated from the reality of his life, who is infatuated with Western ideas of humanism and the modern self—a romantic dreamer who laments over the drab reality of mundane life yet is himself a conventional, feudal man.

Hirano Ken, on the other hand, disagrees with Nakamura's contention that the protagonist's drama is the direct portrayal of the author's. He states that the author himself behaved perfectly as a teacher and a family man, and that the publication caused no problem to those who were directly related to him or to the events in the novel, for it was evident to them that the story was indeed fiction. He says that Katai's intention was ethical, that the central theme of the novel is the author's struggle for moral growth, for self-reform even at the risk of social respectability. Hirano says that Katai, unlike Toson in Shinsei, had no need to reveal or confess his secret infatuation with his pupil. The deliberate confession of his secret desire served only his literary and ethical ambition, his desire to break through the deadlock he felt both as an artist and as a modern man. While Nakamura argues that the hero-author genuinely suffers from the loneliness of modern man in the mold of Hauptmann's Johannes and thus is a self-dramatization as a tragic figure, Hirano argues that the protagonist is the old self which the author outgrew by writing the novel.

While on the surface the point of divergence between Nakamura and Hirano appears to exist in their assessment of the critical and aesthetic distance between the hero and the author, an essential and crucial point in the assessment of the I-novel, in actuality both accept the protagonist as a direct and faithful portrayal of the author, or assume that it was the author's intention to make him so, whether the protagonist is the author in the present or the past. The novel, according to them, is a direct autobiographical confession, and their critical efforts are directed at evaluating the author, present or past, as a person and his motivation for writing the novel.

Here again a simplistic identification of the protagonist with the author exists behind their critical assessment. It is a truism that Katai had both the ethical intention of reforming himself—enabling himself to be reborn as a writer and to break the artistic deadlock from which he felt he suffered—and an urge for self-dramatization, an emotional urge to reveal his inner feelings through his protagonist as a projection of the self. To argue these points can only reveal the motivations of all writers in creating works of art. The central issue is to evaluate the author's artistic treatment of the self, his relation to his art, in terms of the literary or even philosophic perspective of the novel. This is particularly to the point in the confessional novel, in which the treatment of the inner self and the artistic expose of the self provide the sole structural and thematic basis of the novel.

It is exactly in the ambiguity and complexity of the author's treatment of the protagonist that the main point of Futon lies. Indeed, Tokio is portrayed as a hopelessly sentimental intellectual who can see himself only by comparing himself to characters in Western literary works. Western novels are always open on his desk, and when he lectures on them to Yoshiko he is in a heightened or drunken state of consciousness, having identified himself with the heroes of the novels. In his mind he is Johannes, and he believes that his sorrow is that of a high-minded intellectual who has confronted premodern social norms and human relations and met defeat. Tokio believes that he is a tragic hero and is not aware of the fact that his pathetic despair may appear comical to others. He is not himself aware that he has exposed the superficiality of his belief in Western ideas and that his tragic posture reveals only the puerile sentimentality of the intellectual who cannot see himself in the light of reality.

This is exactly how Nakamura sees Katai himself. Basing his opposition on this book, he defines not Tokio but Katai as a product of bummei kaika ("the flowering of civilization," a phrase in vogue in the Meiji period), a man who believed joining international society as a modern military power meant the modernization of the Japanese mind. Nakamura states that the comical nature of Tokio's drama, the drama of one who is drunk with ideas, escapes from the author's eye and that to appreciate this novel, it is necessary for the reader to be as drunk with the same ideas as is the author. Thus, according to Nakamura, for the sober reader the book cannot bear critical evaluation.

Actually, however, Tokio cannot simply be Katai, for the author presents a dual perspective for observing his protagonist: Tokio's subjective view of himself and the perspective of ordinary people absorbed in everyday life. Although Tokio himself does not understand fully the complexity of his inner conflicts and above all is not aware of the comical nature of his tragic posture, Katai is aware of it and presents Tokio both from Tokio's own point of view and from this antithetical point of view. Tokio's lack of self-knowledge as well as his genuine suffering becomes the main point of the novel, and according to the dual perspective which Katai presents, Tokio is a comical hero as well as a tragic one.

Tokio's change of mood and obvious high spirits caused by Yoshiko's presence in his house is viewed from the perspective of daily life simply as a nuisance, as an obvious brightening of the spirit any ordinary middle-aged man would experience. Nakamura states that Tokio's infatuation with the young girl is too ordinary for a man of the world to take seriously, and that his inner suffering is not at all intellectual or tragic as Tokio believes it to be. He points out the comical nature of the self-dramatization of an ordinary, mediocre man who thinks his drama is unique and tragic. Yet this is exactly what Katai wishes the reader to think about his protagonist. This is exactly how he is viewed by his wife and his sister in the novel, although they, being old-fashioned women, never articulate their views. His wife and sister, both of whom he ignores or constantly compares to the modern Yoshiko as old-fashioned, ignorant women, consistently present the "healthy," although conventional, realistic viewpoint of daily life and regard him as a big child.

Moreover, Yoshiko is portrayed as she turns out to be—a superficial modern girl who was only attracted to Western ideas as if to fashionable clothes; she was actually interested in men, and her intellectual pretension was an unconscious device to attract them. Katai reveals this true nature of the Meiji "high-collar" girl mercilessly. In fact, Tokio's wife and sister see this from the beginning, and the reader too is led to see Yoshiko from their perspective. Only Tokio is blind to it and continues to defend her free behavior with men (until he finds out that her object of interest is not him but a young man), telling his wife that she does not understand the new woman or the ideas in which she believes.

Yoshiko's lover also turns out to be a vulgar, superficial fellow, and this time even Tokio recognizes it. Although he is critical of the lover, however, he never blames Yoshiko for choosing him. It is his wife who takes the lover's superficiality almost for granted since Yoshiko is herself superficial. Tokio's wife, as if watching the play of children, observes a drama whose ordinariness is hidden from its participants by high language, and it is she who comes to fetch and mother Tokio when, overwhelmed by his misery and frustration, he drinks himself into a stupor. Katai views this drunken, middle-aged man, lying on the floor of the bathroom, through the eyes of his wife, a woman rooted in the business of her daily life and domestic cares. His self-pity and pathetic drunkenness lack dignity and are viewed as such by people in daily life. A stranger passing by Tokio, who is lying drunk in the park and brooding over his loneliness, regards him simply as an ordinary drunkard, a good-for-nothing, while Tokio compares himself to an intellectual hero in Russian literature who is insulted by a crude common citizen.

Tokio's lack of understanding and self-knowledge are also clearly portrayed. Even when he finds out about Yoshiko's sexual involvement with her lover, he does not realize the fundamental shallowness of this "high-collar" girl. On the contrary, he tries to believe that her love is still platonic, while her own father simply laughs at such an idea, taking their sexual relation for granted. When Tokio learns the truth, he believes that they have betrayed the high ideals of love which he advocated, and acting like a severe, moralistic guardian with uncompromising standards, he decides to send her back home. Yet after Yoshiko leaves, he breaks into tears, still dreaming that someday she may become his wife.

Even Yoshiko and her lover Tanaka are somewhat at a loss over Tokio's high language and persistence in advocating ideal, spiritual love. Yoshiko knows too that what Tokio sees in her is not herself as a person but the idea of love, the egotistical projection of his aspiration. Yoshiko knows well, however, that in order to stay in Tokyo, she must please Tokio by pretending to go along with his high ideals. Even when her sexual involvement is revealed, she tries to justify herself to Tokio in terms of the high ideals of the modern woman, while Tokio, torn between his desire to accept her high language and his moralistic indignation over her corrupt love, merely indulges himself in his own misery and loneliness. At this point it is clearly Tokio alone who believes he is the Johannes of Lonely People.

The scene in which Tokio sees Yoshiko off describes Tokio's blindness and lack of self-knowledge mercilessly. Tokio, wrapped up in his feeling of sadness, speculates that Yoshiko's mistake, the fact that she is no longer a virgin, might enable her to marry him who is much older and has many children. He then compares his fate to that of the protagonists in Turgenev's novels. He firmly believes that Yoshiko is in the same state of sorrow over their imminent separation; Katai informs his readers that only Tokio did not see that another man was at the station secretly bidding farewell to Yoshiko.

The last scene of the novel depicts Tokio after Yoshiko's departure, indulging himself in inhaling the body odor retained in the futon (quilt) which Yoshiko had left in her upstairs room in his house. It is this last scene of the novel which was considered the most shocking.

When he opened one shutter of the eastern window as he did on the day of separation, the sun's rays streamed into the room. The desk, bookcase, bottles and cosmetic dish were left there as they had been before, and he was caught by the illusion that his beloved was at school, as it had been in the past. Tokio opened the drawer of the desk. An oil-stained ribbon had been left there. Tokio took it in his hand and inhaled the odor. After awhile, he stood up and opened the closet door. Three large chests were packed there, ready to be sent off, and behind these chests was the bedding which Yoshiko used to use—the bottom quilt in pale yellow with an arabesque plant design and a top night-cover with the same design and thickly stuffed with cotton were folded on top of each other. Tokio took them out. The nostalgic odor of oil and the perspiration of the woman made his heart swell. Putting his face to the velvet collar of the night-cover where it was particularly soiled by use, he inhaled to his heart's content the odor of his beloved woman.

Sexual desire, sadness and despair struck his heart immediately. Tokio spread the quilt, covered himself with the night-cover and burying his face in its soiled velvet collar, he cried.

Outside the dark room, the wind blew fiercely.

Nakamura Mitsuo expresses his disgust over Katai and over his sentimental treatment of this folly of a middle-aged intellectual who, after everything is over, still remains without self-knowledge and indulges himself in this pathetic outburst. On the other hand, Hirano Ken argues that the scene is obviously a fiction, that this is not what Katai himself actually did. He says that Katai could not have done this because of what would have happened if his wife had come upstairs and seen him. He also argues that it is highly improbable that a young girl whose father came from far away to take her home would leave her personal belongings behind.

As I have shown, however, Futon is not meant to be the author's truthful expose of his inner self; nor is it simply a moralistic novel in which the author criticizes away his past self by deliberately exposing his inner secret. As Yoshida Seiichi points out, Katai had previously dealt with basically the same theme as that of Lonely People in Onna Kyoshi (Woman Teacher, 1901), a novel which is not based on his real experience. He had also written a novel called Shojyobyo (Young Girl Fanatic) in which a middle-aged, frustrated and sentimental writer who has a "bad habit" of falling in love with young girls is mercilessly parodied. The protagonist, Kojyo, is a sentimental dreamer who, completely lacking self-knowledge, comically becomes isolated from the reality of his life. He is almost the same as Takenaka Tokio, yet is presented clearly as a comical anti-hero. Thus it is not possible to regard Futon as a direct dramatization of the author's inner self.

What we see in Futon is a dramatization of the sentimentality as well as of the despair and loneliness of the Meiji intellectual who was infatuated with Western ideas and thus was alienated from society; it is a dramatization of the artist's alienation in its tragicomical duality. Viewed from the perspective of daily life, Tokio appears to be a comical, quixotic hero, yet the reader also feels the frustration of a middle-aged writer living in an environment hostile to art and modern ideas, and the despair of a man who fails to find a sense of life. The man who cries in the quilt of the young girl whose very superficiality is the cause of his misery is indeed comical as well as pathetic, and Katai portrays this well. The point of the novel lies in the fact that it is neither a clear self-parody nor an empathetic self-portrayal, but a representation of the Meiji writer in his tragicomical duality. The ironic perspective and use of confession facilitate the presentation of this duality: the novel is indeed an ironic self-dramatization.

The basic structure of such novels as Futon is the expose of the protagonist's inner self—an exposé which destroys his social respectability before the reader. Whether the confession is autobiographical or dramatic is not important, for the reader, forced to hear the confession, is taken into an alliance with the protagonist. The confessor masochistically abandons himself before the reader, who is fully exposed to his embarrassing contradictions or disgusting criminality. The reader's complex reaction to the confession, his disgust and empathy, is caused by the complex psychological relation between the confessor and his audience. Confession, whether it is that of the extrovert or that of the introvert, to use Northrop Frye's terminology, is a masochistic exhibition of the self and thus an aggressive challenge to the consciousness of the other. By deliberately exposing himself, the protagonist becomes a clown, challenging the reader's consciousness but also glorifying his own subjectivity, a subjectivity which is established by the reader's disgust over or moral rejection of his clowning self-dramatization. In most cases it is the reader more than the protagonist himself who is embarrassed by the self-expose.

The confession of the secret self of the protagonist has been used by various authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, who was influential in Japan, to establish a complex relationship between the protagonist and the reader. Poe's "mad" heroes confess their gratuitous crimes, exposing the perversity of their criminal selves which desire to do wrong for its own sake. Not only do they challenge the reader's moral and social sensibility by fascinating the reader, they also establish their singularity by evoking the reader's sense of disgust at being forced to see something which he does not desire to see. Thus the reader is caught between feelings of disgust over the hero's persistent self-dramatization without self-knowledge and the fascination of glimpsing some forbidden truth about human nature. Poe skillfully draws the reader into the inner world of the protagonist, but at the same time does not forget to remind us that the heroes are mad. Through the use of the confessional technique, therefore, the author introduces dual perspectives for regarding the hero, one involved and the other detached.

Iwano Homei, a writer of confessional I-novels who was greatly influenced by the "diabolism" of Poe and Baudelaire, exploits this existential-psychological challenge of the confession to its extremity in his novels. His persistent exposure of the protagonists' shamefulness, lack of integrity, and self-destructive indulgence in sex is as masochistic and intimidatingly obnoxious as that of Henry Miller's protagonist in Tropic of Cancer or Erica Jong's in Fear of Flying, yet because of his persistence and extremity, the self-exposure becomes almost an act of conscious self-parody. In the confession, therefore, self-glorification and self-parody, the expression of the singularity of the self and of the universality of human nature, are presented simultaneously. Iwano Homei's novels clarify the integration in Japanese confessional novels of naturalistic self-investigation with the self-destructive self-search inherent in the tradition of dark romanticism. Tanizaki's early works also demonstrate this unique mixture clearly. Dazai Osamu, whose deliberate use of the confession as a fictional device comes very close to that of Poe, also integrates these elements skillfully.

The tragicomedy of the Meiji intellectual, whose radical ideas and Western influence isolated him or her from the reality of contemporary life, is indeed the main theme of Futon. This has been one of the major themes of modern Japanese literature. Such major writers as Futabatei Shimei, Mori Ogai, Natsume Soseki, Shimazaki Toson, Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Yokomitsu Riichi pursued it with obsessive concern, revealing both the superficiality and the tragic despair of the Japanese intellectuals in their struggle to modernize themselves. The confessional novel proved to be an effective vehicle for the expression of the theme, enabling the author to present his ironic understanding of the self both as a clown and as a tragic hero. Above all, the dual perspective which the confession itself contains enables the author to present an ironic self-dramatization, a uniquely modern treatment of the self.

Despite its egocentric narrowness and narcissistic obsession with the self, and despite its lack of articulate artistic devices, the confessional I-novel emerged as an extension of the Meiji writers' awareness of realism, as advocated by Tsubouchi Shoyo, and it realizes one extreme possibility of the modern novel. For Meiji writers, isolated from society in the closed world of the bundan, the question of one's self and one's relation to art was the sole matter of import. There is no doubt that Meiji writers did not and could not fully understand the struggle of French writers against bourgeois society and against science. Yet the Japanese writers, living in an overly utilitarian yet feudal society that was hostile to art and the artist, shared with them the same isolation and the same concern with the question of the restoration of the self in art. It was only natural that Tsubouchi Shoyo's hito no nasake (human feelings) made sense to these isolated artists only as his own nasake.

The conflict between art and life is central in their confessional novels. Toson's Shinsei, although seriously colored by Toson's desire for purification and self-punishment (bringing the novel closer to shinkyo shosetsu), exploits fully the psychological, social and above all literary challenge the confession itself contains. The reader's disgust over the protagonist's egotism stems from the deliberate self-exposure, contrary to Hirano Ken's contention, and the self-righteous insistence that the protagonist's rebirth as an artist will be achieved by it.

Almost all modern confessional novels are in fact art novels, with the protagonist trying to write or to be reborn as an artist. Whether an artist will be reborn, as in the case of Stephen Daedalus, or whether the protagonist continues to be unable to create is irrelevant with regard to the fact that in confessional novels, art and life are curiously interwoven. The confessional novel becomes a form of art novel in which the artist's self-search, the process of making an artist, is the structural basis and major theme. Although the life of the artist is the subject, it is a life justified in terms of art. The art or the seriousness of the protagonist in his attempt to become an artist supplies the fundamental justification for writing about oneself. Thus confessional novels are curiously philosophic and intellectual despite their narcissistic, egocentric perspective.

Yoshida Seiichi dismisses the confession in Futon as a pointless display of inner experience, for the protagonist does not suffer from any sense of guilt and his secret infatuation with his young pupil does not merit being called a crime. He argues that in the absence of an absolute God or established religious and social orthodoxy in Meiji Japan, there could not be any serious, uncontrollable urge for confession, except the vague fear of social criticism. Yet in modern confessional becomes not that of a moral sinner seeking religious salvation or spiritual resurrection, but that of an artistic failure trying to be born or reborn as an artist. The loss of imagination or creative sterility is the crime (sin) for which the protagonist seeks salvation. Artistic sterility rather than religious sinfulness drives the artist-hero to confess, and the artistic sincerity or commitment to art justifies the exposure of the inner self as material suitable for art. The Japanese confessional novelists, because they were exempt from religious struggle, were able to attain radical modernity in this sense, presenting the wasteland of art in modern society and the struggle of modern man, for whom art has replaced God as the sole means of salvation.

The interweaving of art and life, one typical characteristic of the Japanese I-novel, is thus a characteristic of the modern confessional novel in general. The protagonist of confessional novels, who is neither an aloof artist nor a realistic social existence, appears tragicomical. He appears to be a comical, quixotic hero without self-knowledge when regarded from the perspective of everyday life, but a tragic hero who suffers enormously in a hostile society and from the artistic sterility caused by it when regarded from the perspective of art. This tragicomical quality itself expresses the isolation of the artist in a utilitarian, industrial society in which art and life are incompatible with each other. Unlike Tanizaki Junichiro, who abandoned life without reluctance for the sake of art, or Shiga Naoya, who assumed responsibility for life by placing it above art, the authors of the confessional I-novels based their artistic creation on this very duality. The confessional novel is a form which enables the author to convert life into art and art into a means of serving the artist. Its raison d'etre is its exploitation of the "slender margin" between the real and the unreal, between truth and fiction, and between the author's self-glorification and self-parodization, integrating the artist's egotistical insistence on his artistic self and his awareness of life's retaliation against it.