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Inoue Yasushi (1907-1991) |
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Prolific Japanese novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and poet, whose subject matters ranged from modern Japan to ancient China, but he gained fame with his historical fiction. Inoue Yasushi began his literary career after reaching middle age. Among his best-known works is Tempyo no iraka (1957, The Roof Tile of Tempyō), set in the 8th-century, and describing the journey of a group of Japanese Buddhist monks in China. Inoue received several awards and was honored as a "Living National Treasure" of Japan. "With the arrival of the new year, nine devout Buddhist monks, chosen from among many throughout the nation, were sent to the Shinto shrines of Kashii, Munakata, and Aso, to the state Buddhist monasteries, and to the Shinto-Buddhist temples. There they prayed for the success of the forthcoming voyage to China. In order to quell the wrath of the sea god, the Sutra of the Dragon King was recited in the five home provinces as well as in the seven districts in the outer reaches of the empire. Court emissaries made offerings at Grand Isé and at other Shinto shrines throughout the country." (The Roof Tile of Tempyō by Yasushi Inoué, translated by James T. Araki, University of Tokyo Press, 1975, p. 5) Inoue
Yasushi was born in Asahikawa on the northern island of
Hokkaido. His father, Hayao, was an army doctor, who was transferred
several times. At the age of forty-eight, he retired and returned to
his home village in Izu, where he grew vegetables on a small plot in
back of the house. Inoue's mother, Yae, came from a family of doctors
in
several generations. At the age of six Inoue was sent to his
grandmother, a former geisha. He grew up in the family's native village
in Shizuoka Prefecture. While in the Numazu Middle School, Inoue
started to read poetry. In 1926 Inoue moved to Kanazawa where his
parents lived and attended the Fourth Higher School. During this period
he trained obsessively at a judo club and wrote poetry. To his
family's disappointment, Inoue failed the entrance examination for the
medical school at Kyushu Imperial University. His father, who retired
from his work, spent his last years in semi-seclusion raising chickens.
Inoue was accepted into the University's English department, but he did
not pay much attention to his studies. After entering the Kyoto
Imperial University, where he studied aesthetics and philosophy, Inoue
received his degree in 1936. His thesis dealt with Paul Valéry's "poésie pure." Inoe had became acquainted with Valéry's work through translations when he started composing his own poetry. In 1935 Inoue married Adachi Fumi (d. 2008), whose father was a
professor of anthropology. Inoue published some poems and short stories
in magazines, but he abandoned his career in literature and became a
reporter for the weekly magazine Sande Mainichi in
Osaka.
After serving as a foot soldier in northern China in 1937-38, Inoue
continued in the culture department of the Mainichi newspapers. His
diaries – three notebooks – in which he wrote about his life around the
end of the war, were found in 2017. On hearing about Japan's surrender,
Inoue wrote: "I looked at the moon in the night sky. It is the moon on
the night that the Japanese people took their first step toward a new,
unparalleled fate." ('Writer Yasushi Inoue's previously unpublished diaries from end of WWII found,' The Mainichi, December 13, 2017) After the war Inoue made his breakthrough as a prose writer in 1949
with two short novels, Ryoju (The Hunting Gun) and Togyu
(Bullfight) – the latter, which was published in the magazine Bungakukai, won in 1950 the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for
literature. The Hunting Gun is a love story set in the post-war
period. It is told from three points of view in letters written to the
male protagonist, Josuke. Shoko, his mistress' daughter, has found her
mother Saiko's diary and learns that there are secrets between mothers
and daughters; his wife goes through their unhappy marriage, and his
mistress reveals her true self before her death. Midori is the unhappy
wife of Josuke, the husband-lover. The novel originated from a prose
poem, inspired by the relationship between a hunting gun and human
loneliness, which Inoue wrote for the magazine The Hunter's
Companion. It appears at the beginning of the story in a slightly changed form: "A large seaman's pipe in his mouth, / A setter running
before him in grass, / The man strode up the early winter path of Mount
Amagi, / And frost cracked under boot-sole. / The band with five and
twenty bullets, / The leather coat, dark brown, / The double-barrelled
Churchill— / What made him cold, armed with white, bright steel, / To
take the lives of creatures?" (The Hunting Gun, translated by Sadamichi Yokoö and Sanford Goldstein, Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1961, p. 16) Gosho Heinosuke's screen adaptation of
the epistolary novel, told in flashback, was structured more
conventionally, but was otherwise faithful to Inoue's plot, characters,
and themes. Inoue's serialized samurai novel published in the Sunday Mainichi was filmed in 1952 by Hiroshi Inagaki, starring Toshiro Mifune. Inagaki wrote the sceenplay for the film, Sword for Hire, with Akira Kurosawa. In the story civil war and another woman separate a warrior and his lover, a chambermaid, but eventually they are reunited. Sword for Hire was filmed in black-and-white. When it was shown in the United States, it was paired with an Italian sex comedy. Kurosawa also wrote the screenplay for Asunaro monogatari (1955), directed by Hiromichi Horikawa, and based on Inoue's story. Honkakubo Ibun (1981) inspired Kei Kumai's film Sen no Rikyu – honkakubo ibun (1989). It told of a famous tea master, Sen Rikyu, who was an adviser to warlord Hideyoshi. Twenty-seven years after Rikyo's death his disciple Honkakubo tries to determine, whether the tea master committed suicide by his own volition, or whether he was compelled to commit seppuku by Hideyoshi. The film won the Venice Film Festival's Silver Lion Award. Inoue
moved in 1951 to Tokyo and devoted himself entirely to
writing. Inoue visited China in the late 1950s, where later he also
travelled several times, and in 1964 he was elected to the Japan
Academy of Arts. He was also a founding member of the Japan-China
Cultural Exchange Association. Inoue's wish to spend the Chinese New
Year in China came true in 1983, when he stayed in Beijing. The
influential politician Liao Zhongkai invited the author and his family
to his house. Many of Inoue's postwar bestsellers have Chinese
settings. From 1969 to 1972 Inoue served as chairman of the board of directors for the Japan Literary Association. In 1976 he received the Order of Cultural Merit, the highest honor bestowed by the Japanese government. Following Kawabata Yasunari, Inoue was elected an international vice president of PEN in 1984. Inoue Yasushi died on January 29, 1991 in Tokyo. His name was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature. Inoue's
tales are often autobiographical and had an essayish
objectivity and calmness. His stories are composed both with the
precision of a poet and journalist's economy with words. "At first
encounter, the potential appeal to
Western readers of Inoue's writings may seem somewhat limited," wrote
the American scholar of modern Japanese theatre and literature J.
Thomas Rimer. "While his work is not difficult in terms and style, a
certain
amount of close attention is needed from readers learning to respond to
his celebrated re-creations of life in classical China and early
Japan. All of Inoue's work will amply repay in fascination and pleasure
any efforts expended on the reader's part, but his remarkable
historical works are composed in a grave kind of poetic mode which does
require some adjustment." (A Reader's Guide to Japanese Literature by J. Thomas Rimer, Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1988, p. 165) 'The Counterfeiter,' written in 1951, is a tragedy of a mediocre artist. The story is narrated by a writer who has been asked to compose the biography of a famous artist. "My decision to accept the commission—which I did with alacrity—was prompted in the first place by my admiration both for —Ōnuki Keigaku the man and for his works; but also, and more importantly, but the realization that, in order to compile such a biography, I would essentially have to write a history of the entire Kyoto painting establishment, or indeed of painting at the national level." (Life of a Counterfeiter and other Stories, selected and translated by Michael Emmerich, London: Pushkin Press, 2014, p. 13) He finds out that Keikagu had only a few friends, the most important of them the mysterious Shinozaki. The narrator suspects that Shinozaki was in fact Hara Hosen, who had devoted his life to counterfeiting Keigaku's works. Haunted by the fame of Keigaku, Hara Hosen is not able to pursue his own career in the arts. Waga haha no ki (1975, Chronicle of My Mother) tells without
sentimentality about Inoue's strained relationship with his father, and his
mother's illness (Alzheimer's disease?), when she declines into
senility. His father's attempt to reach his son with a simple gesture,
shaking hands, ends sadly: ''Just that—two hands gently holding onto
each other. Then in the next instant I felt my hand being softly pushed
away. It was a sensation similar to the slight jerk of the tip of a
fishing rod.'' (Chronicle of My Mother, translated by Jean Oda Moy, Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1982, p. 18) In
his mother's fate the author examines the themes of
loss, resignation, and loneliness – she forgets her marriage and
husband and sinks into a timeless world of childhood images. "I had
thought of several things that I, as a son, had wanted to say to
Father, things I should have told him before his death but never had.
In Mother's case, however, it was different. I had said everything I
wanted to say to her while she was still alive, and there was nothing
left." (Ibid., p. 115) Inoue's historical works include Ro-ran (1959), about
the rise and fall of a small state in Central Asia, Tonko
(1959), which deals with Buddhist manuscripts hidden in the Tun-huang
caves, Aoki okami (1960, The Blue Wolf:), a fictional account of the life of
Genghis Khan, which was originally published in the cultural journal Bungei
shunju in 1959-60, and Futo (1963, Wind and Waves), about
the Mongol attacks in the 13th century. Its material was partly based
on Inoue's travels in Korea. His visit in the United States produced Wadatsumi
(1977, God of the Sea), an account of Japanese immigration to America. Seiiki monogarari (1968, Journey Beyond Samarkand) drew on Inoue's experiences in Central Asia. Inoue paid much attention to historical accuracy and frequently consulted with academic historians; for Tun-Huang he sought advice from Fujiara Akira (1911-98), a specialist on manuscipts and for Tempyo no iraka (The Roof Tile of Tempyō) he consulted with Ando Kosei (1900-70). For further reading: Inoue Yasushi no bungaku: ichizu de hageshii sei no tankyū by Takagi Nobuyuki (2022); Inoue Yasushi no genkyō: fukuryūsuru minzoku sekai by Nomoto Kan'ichi (2021): Inoue Yasushi "Ryōjū" no sekai: shi to monogatari no yūgō emaki = The world of Inoue Yasushi's "The hunting gun": the fusion of poetry and narrative by Fujisawa Matoshi (2017); 'Translator's Note' by Joshua A. Fogel, in The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan (2008); The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke: Laughter Through Tears by Arthur Nolletti (2005); 'Inoue Yasushi's Reception of Valéry's "Poésie Pure" during the 1930s' by Matoshi Fujisawa, in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, East-West Issue (2000); 'Inoue Yasushi,' in World Authors 1980-1985, edited by Vineta Colby (1991); 'Introduction' by Leon Picon, in The Counterfeiter and Other Stories (1965) Selected works:
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