Toward the end of this most agreeable essay on the local comic spirit, Howard Hibbett observes: "To analyze a national 'sense of humor,' that most dubious aspect of the dubious concept of national character, is to venture into the perilous realm of ethnic humor itself."
So it is, but the author, master translator of Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata and a noted Japan scholar, is well able to traverse this precarious ground. He knows that, as Saul Steinberg once said, "trying to define humor is one of the definitions of humor." Consequently, he lets Japanese humor speak for itself and discovers whole worlds of merriment, a place "far more expansive than any stereotyped view or single theory can accommodate."
Distinguishing among the various kinds of humor, one can discern that much of the best is concerned with "deflation," as indeed one might expect in such a status-stuck culture as this one is. Looking at a hanging scroll, one viewer asks another: "What on earth do you make of it?" The other answers, "That's a carp swimming up a waterfall." To which the first says: "Is that so? I thought it was eating noodles."
This example is from "Tokaidochu Hizakurige," the highly successful comic novel series by prolific Edo Period author Ikku Jippensha. A chronicle of the misadventures of travelers Yaji and Kita, the series was widely imitated, and even included a comic role for the author himself. (It is said that Ikku's funeral was enlivened by the fireworks he had concealed in his coffin going off during the cremation.)
Often what is forbidden is considered funny, and current readers may feel a frisson at such jokes as this: An unfortunate pregnant serving girl dies and the corpse is dumped into one of the barrel-shaped coffins used at the time. The father looks in and says that it contains only "the hairy-chested body of a headless man." This is because the body had been carelessly dumped in upside down.
The repulsed reader is now, in these politically correct times, in a position to appreciate the shock of much of this humor. Indeed, as Hibbett says: "Vulgarity may be the garlic in the salad of charm." It may also make for popularity. The best-selling 19th-century author Bakin Takizawa once said a work that was two-thirds vulgar and one-third elegant would always sell, one that was one-third vulgar and two-thirds elegant would not sell very well and one that was completely elegant would not sell at all.
Typical is the apotheosis of the humble fart in Gennai Hiraga's "Discourse on Flatulence," an 18th-century tract described by Hibbett as "expressing contempt for modern society and commenting upon the part played by the haphazard and the irrational in human affairs." As background, the text describes a learned practitioner of flatulence who used to have an attraction at the Ryogoku sideshows where he opened with an imitation of the kabuki curtain-raiser drum pattern and culminated with a rendition of the sonorities of a watermill, performed while doing cartwheels.
Humor, being by nature transgressive, was continually reprimanded by the authorities. The Tokugawa government "prohibited everything that it did not require" but, at the same time, was selective in its punishment. This could be draconian -- books banned, publishers fined half their assets, guild representatives banished, the writer himself placed in manacles under 50-day house arrest -- but more usually the discipline was internalized. Self-censorship was encouraged so that government censorship could be avoided, a ploy still found useful by the government today. Hibbett rightly points out that "discretion, rather than subversion, is the dominant characteristic of Edo humor."
Political discretion, that is. Otherwise the envelope could be dramatically pushed. As Donald Keene has remarked of humor during the age of the shoguns: "When someone has a bucket of excrement dropped over his head the humor is neither subtle, nor literary, but the situation remains impervious to the passage of time."
In traversing the expansive realm of Japanese humor, Hibbett ranges from 17th-century poet and writer Saikaku to contemporary playwright and novelist Hisashi Inoue, from early rakugo to the films of Yasujiro Ozu and Juzo Itami. He locates the humor in Soseki Natsume and shows the satire in Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "Kappa." He leads us from the first Edo doubters to the latest -- TV's Tamori is quoted as saying that political cartoons are boring because politics in Japan is already a parody, and a parody of a parody just isn't interesting.
In 1959 Hibbett wrote "The Floating World in Japanese Fiction," one of the most important (and elegant) studies of Edo Period literature. In this new work he has created a more earthy but just as worthy successor.
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