Japanese critics have long made a distinction between taishu bungaku, "popular literature," which is simple entertainment, and jun bungaku, "pure literature," which is "serious" and aspires to art.
Popular literature, a concept that matured in the 1920s with the emergence of a mass media, posits innocent storytelling against intellectual depth and sophisticated expression, and implies a populist intention, as contrasted to the unavoidable elitism of pure literature.
Authors of popular literature include Shin Hasegawa, Eiji Yoshikawa, Shugoro Yamamoto and Ryotaro Shiba, among many others. These names are well known all over Japan -- but almost nowhere else because it has been mainly pure literature that is translated: Natsume Soseki, Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, etc.
Consequently, there have been quite a number of attempts to balance Western apprehension of Japanese reading tastes by including more translations of popular literature.
None has been successful, so recently a body was formed, the Japanese Literature Publishing Project, run by the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center (J-Lit Center) on behalf of the governmental Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan. It aims not only to present new translations of serious literature (Natsume Soseki's "Botchan" has recently appeared), but also to make available more samples of popular literature.
Having already arranged for the translation and publication of a work by the best-selling author Ryotaro Shiba, it now midwifes a selection of stories by Shuhei Fujisawa (1927-1997), whose works, including the famous "Semi Shigure," often proved the basis for popular films and television programs. Such movies include last year's popular favorite, "Katsushi-ken: Oni no tsume (The Hidden Blade)," directed by Yoji Yamada, who also made "Tasogare Seibei (The Twilight Samurai)" in 2002.
This latter picture is based on the title story in the present translation, "The Bamboo Sword." Through it, one may perhaps better understand the attractions of pop-literature and the appeal of writers such as Fujisawa.
Most of these stories begin with a familiar situation. "The Bamboo Sword" begins with one that has introduced many historical entertainments: A masterless samurai, complete with picturesquely impoverished wife and child, presents his letter of introduction to the authorities, hoping for a new appointment. His hopes are dashed. This is the beginning of Kawatake Mokuami's 1873 kabuki play "Tsuyu Kosode Mukashi Hachijo," as well as Sadao Yamanaka's 1937 film, "Ninjo kami fusen (Humanity and Paper Balloons)," and many other plays, stories and films in between.
After this initial exposition, it is common for the popular author to reverse loop into flash-back mode and to fill in any information thought needed. This can be so sententious that most of the story is taken up with antecedents.
Or, it can be comfortingly explanatory. In "The Bamboo Sword," during the final sword fight, "beads of perspiration streamed down [the villain's] face" because the hero "had failed to mention that he was a master of the Toda School of short-sword fighting."
In any case, the aim of the author is to reassure and to guide the emotions of the reader. Among his other methods is a reliance on cliche, a hackneyed term that reassures us through familiarity. Characters "breathe sighs of relief," are "worried to distraction," and appear "every inch a figure of authority."
(The fact that the originals are in Japanese and these are translations begs no questions. Both languages are rich in cliches and the serious translator would have no difficulty in appropriately matching them. Gavin Frew's translation is noticeably and fittingly anodyne and, as such, creates a trustworthy parallel to the author's style.)
One of the duties of the cliche is to suggest that everyone is the same, that we all react in similar ways. This approach is reassuring. Hence, no matter the troubling differences in which pure literature usually makes its interest; popular literature is about similarities.
Thus the characters in these Fujisawa stories are "just like us." No real complications are allowed, no deeply moving emotions are tolerated. Both of these are upsetting to agreed upon opinion, and it is the affirmation of just this to which taishu bungaku owes its popularity.
With this collection, the interested foreign reader can indeed learn more about the appeal of popular literature in Japan. But the appeal is not literary, it is sociological. Or anthropological. Or political.
Coming up is a more recent piece of pop literature: Shintaro Ishihara's "Undercurrents," which is being marketed by Kodansha International as "episodes from a life on the edge."
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