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Comparative Literature Graduate Theses &
Dissertations
Comparative Literature
Spring 1-1-2014
Oscillating Between Modernity and National
Identity: the Intellectual Dynamics of Manchukuo
Literature from 1937 to 1941
Chao Liu
University of Colorado Boulder, [email protected]
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OSCILLATING BETWEEN MODERNITY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY: THE
INTELLECTUAL DYNAMICS OF MANCHUKUO LITERATURE FROM 1937 TO
1941
by
CHAO LIU
B.A., Nanjing University, 2003
M.A., Nanjing University, 2006
M.A., University of Colorado, 2009
A thesis submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Colorado in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Comparative Literature Graduate Program
2014
This thesis entitled:
Oscillating Between Modernity and National Identity: The Intellectual Dynamics of Manchukuo
Literature from 1937 to 1941
written by Chao Liu
has been approved for the Comparative Literature Program
(Pall Kroll)
(J. Edwin Rivers)
(Faye Kleeman)
(Eric White)
(Timothy Weston)
Date
The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we
Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards
Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.
iii
Liu, Chao (Ph.D., Comparative Literature Program)
Oscillating Between Modernity and National Identity: The Intellectual Dynamics of
Manchukuo Literature from 1937 to 1941
Thesis directed by Professor Paul Kroll and Professor J. Edwin Rivers
During the golden age of Manchukuo from 1937 to 1941, there emerged a
large number of writers, who came from different nations and held ramified cultural
identities, and literary works of various styles, subject matters as well as intellectual
traditions, which coexisted, contradicted, and conflated with each other to make
Manchukuo literature as a whole and a supreme example for comparative literature
studies.
My research, the first endeavor in the English academic world to explore
Manchukuo literature in its entirety, puts it within the specific cultural lineages and
social-political background to illuminate its underlying intellectual dynamics with a
focus on four major literary groups, the Manshū rōmanha, Sakubun writers,
Yiwenzhi intellectuals, and the Wenxuan School. Through an in-depth investigation
into their theoretical proposals and literary praxes, it turns out that oscillating
between modernization and national identification, Manchukuo literature took on
the features of multiplicity, ambiguity and self-reflexivity which transcended the
dichotomy of romanticism and realism and that of the colonizers and the colonized.
If we can liken Manchukuo’s literary history during this period to a coordinate
system, then it was modernity and national identity that formed its horizontal and
vertical axes. The Manshū rōmanha and Sakubun writers respectively adopted an
iv
anti-modern and modern perspectives and unanimously headed towards an
intellectual stance of denying their own national identity and merging into the
colony’s indigenous society; in comparison, Manchurian intellectuals, as epitomized
by the Yiwenzhi School and the Wenxuan School, started from the same purpose of
promoting national consciousness, but at last embarked on a bifurcated path to
either modernization or retraditionalisation. Moreover, although the literary
writings of these four groups differed much from each other in topics, stylistic
features, and narrative modes, they all showed a deep concern for the sufferings of
the Manchurian people brought by colonialism, coincidentally directed their
criticism or sarcasm against the colonial rule, and thereupon endowed Manchukuo
literature with the keynote of “darkness.”
v
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1
II. “OVERCOMING MODERNITY” AND THE MANSHŪ RŌMANHA ... 20
Emergence of the Nihon Rōmanha
and Their Theoretical Appeals...................................................... 22
Founding of the Manshū Rōmanha
and Publication of Manshū Rōman .............................................. 36
The Romantic Spirit and the Idea of “Mainland-ity” ................... 40
Similarities and Differences Between the Manshū
Rōmanha and Their Counterpart in Japan ................................. 49
Literary Praxis of the Manshū Rōmanha .................................... 61
III. THE SAKUBUN SCHOOL AND THEIR PROPOSALS OF
LITERARY REALISM .......................................................................... 88
External Information about Sakubun Writers............................. 88
“Quarrel about Colonial Literature” and “Debate
on Independent Manchukuo Literature” ...................................... 94
Features That Informed the Intellectual
Dimension of the Sakubun School .............................................. 113
Thematic Types and Narrative Styles of
the Fictional Writings in Sakubun ............................................. 120
vi
IV. THE MODERNIZATION DISCOURSE FORMULATED
BY YIWENZHI INTELLECTUALS .................................................... 145
Debut of Mingming and the Yiwenzhi School ............................ 147
Controversy of “Native-Land Literature” and
“Write-and-Print-ism” ................................................................. 151
Yiwenzhi Writers’ Argument for Literary
Modernization and Mass Enlightenment ................................... 165
Reconciliation of Modernity with National Identity .................. 178
Textual Worlds of the Yiwenzhi School’s Fictions...................... 194
V. THE NATIONALIST DISCOURSE PROPOSED
BY THE WENXUAN SCHOOL ............................................................. 230
An Intellectual Pose of Radical Nationalism and
the Ideologization of Literature .................................................. 230
Native-Land Literature and Its Anti-Modern Tendency
That Pervaded the Wenxuan School’s Literary Works .............. 247
VI. CONCLUSION AND EPILOGUE ...................................................... 268
BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………..…………………………………………280
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
During the life span of Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945, there emerged a large
number of writers, who came from different nations and held ramified cultural
identities, and literary works of various genres and subject matters, which
altogether contributed to a sham of cultural prosperity. The distinct literary
traditions, styles, as well as political and cultural appeals they represented
coexisted, contradicted, conflicted and conflated with each other within the public
sphere of Manchukuo, thus forming an intertangled and multi-layered relationship.
In this sense, Manchukuo literature, as a unique example in world literary history,
offers supreme materials for studies in comparative literature and cultural studies.
Besides, given the fact that Manchukuo was established as a puppet state under the
Japanese occupation, the aforementioned diversity of Manchukuo literature relied
heavily upon the colonial system and formed an integral part of the colonial culture.
Through a thorough-going research on the Manchukuo literature, we can not only
reveal the operative mode, basic characteristics and inner tensions of Japan’s
colonial apparatus, but also grasp a better understanding about the evolution of
modern literature and even the entire process of modernization on the side of the
colonized. On this basis, power relations among East Asia that were constructed by
2
virtue of modernity in the fields of literature, culture and intellectual history might
also be somehow illuminated.
As a matter of fact, investigations of Manchukuo literature started from the
late 1930s. For the Japanese part, it was as early as 1936 that two major disputes
broke out among Japanese literati about how to define Manchukuo literature,
namely the “Quarrel about Colonial Literature” and the “Debate on Independent
Manchukuo literature.” These disputes involved Nishimura Shin’ichirō 西村真一郎,
Ōtani Takeo 大谷健夫, Aoki Minorsu 青木実, Jō Osu 城小碓, Ehara Teppei 江原鉄
平, Kizaki Ryū 木崎龍, Kanō Saburō 加納三郎, and other renowned writers and
critics, who were either eager to determine the nature of Manchukuo literature, or
endeavored to specify its overarching guidelines. With the culmination of diverse
cultural enterprises in this newly-emergent state, Manchukuo literature had drawn
more and more attention from Japan’s domestic literary circle ever since 1939. A
series of crucial Japanese literary journals, including Bungei 文芸 (Literature and
Art), Nihon Hyōron 日本評論 (Japan Review), and especially Shinchō 新潮 (New
Tide), competed to publish reviews and treatises on Manchukuo-related issues. Even
such big shots as Tokunaga Naosu 徳永直 wrote articles like “On the Mainland
Literature” to popularize the so-called idea of “Manchukuo literature.” At the same
time, Sanwa Books published the first volume of Anthology of Short Stories by
Manchurian Writers translated by Ōuchi Takao 大内隆雄, a practice that marked
the acknowledgment of Manchukuo literature by the Japanese print industry. In
3
1940, Yamada Seizaburō 山 田 清 三 郎 compiled Anthology of Short Stories by
Japanese, Manchurian and Russian Writers in Manchukuo and had it published by
a highly-reputed book store, the Shunyōdon Publishing Company in Tōkyō. Within
the same year, Takemura Books and Sanwa Books printed Anthology by Nine
Manchurian Writers and the second volume of Anthology of Short Stories by
Manchurian Writers, which were respectively edited by Asami Fukashi 浅見淵 and
Ōuchi Takao. Afterwards, under the editorship of Kawabata Yasunari 川端康成 and
Kishida Kunio 岸田國士, Sōgensha published The Anthology of Literary Works by
Different Peoples of Manchukuo in two volumes. Apart from that, Manshū bunwakai
(The Association for Literary Talks in Manchuria) circulated The Yearbook of Art
and Literature in Manchukuo annually from 1937 to 1939 that included an
abundance of reviews, criticisms and comments on Manchukuo literature. Manshū
Rōman 満洲浪曼 (Manchurian Romanticism) also released a special issue entitled
“Studies on Manchukuo Literature” in May, 1940, not to mention Ōuchi Takao’s
pioneering research in his Twenty Years of Manchukuo Literature. All of them
provided firsthand materials for future scholarly discussions of Manchukuo
literature. For the Chinese part, during the wartime period, those who expressed
serious concerns for Manchukuo literature were primarily its direct participants,
such as Wu Lang 吴郎 and Xiaosong 小松, who regularly contributed to Mingming
明明, Qilin 麒麟 (Kirin), Yiwenzhi 艺文志, Wenxuan 文选, Zuofeng 作风 (Writing
Wind), and other literary journals in Chinese to articulate their own visions on the
4
very issue. It was worth noting that some Chinese critics like Guan Yongji 关永吉
and Shangguan Zheng 上官筝 in inland China also showed their deep interest in
Manchukuo literature, with whose efforts, the “Special Column Featuring
Manchurian Writers” came out in Zhongguo Wenyi 中国文艺 (Chinese Art and
Literature) in November, 1942. Taking this opportunity, Guan Yongji theorized the
essential features and techniques of “native-land literature,” a literary form he
regarded as the mainstream of Manchukuo literature.
Except for the circulation of Dan Kazuo 檀一雄, Ushijima Haruko 牛島春子
and Yamada Seizaburō’s memoirs referring to their personal experiences in interwar
Manchuria, studies on Manchukuo literature subsided in Japan for a long period
after the World War Two due to the harshness of political environment. However,
things changed in 1971, when Ozaki Hotsuki 尾崎秀樹 spared a whole chapter for
Manchukuo literature in his groundbreaking monograph Research on Literatures in
Former Colonies. From then on, concerns for this subject began to exceed the literary
circle and entered into the vision of scholarship. Among all academic achievements
that have been made so far by Japanese scholars, investigations into “Manchurian
writers” by Okada Hideki 岡田英樹 and Tamura Hiroko 田村裕子, into Korean
writers by O Yanho and Chai Hun and into Japanese writers by Nishihara Kazumi
西原和海, Tanaka Masuzō 田中益三 and Kurokawa Sō 黒川創 prove to be the most
outstanding ones. It was Kawamura Minato 川村湊 who took the lead to explore
different constituents of Manchukuo literature in an integrative way. His serial
5
books by the titles of “Shōwa Literature on a Foreign Land,” “The Breakdown of
Manchukuo: The Greater East Asian Literature and Its Writers,” “A Fantastic Trip
along the Manchurian Railroads” and “Manchukuo through the Lens of Literature”
offered us a panoramic view of various aspects of Manchukuo literature, followed
and developed by Hayama Hideyuki’s 葉山英之 Fragments of “On Manchukuo
Literature” and In Tōsan’s 尹東燦 Research on Literatures in “Manchukuo.” In
addition, a variety of academic journals, as represented by Colonial Studies and
Studies on Colonial Literature, also constituted a public forum for correlative
discussions of Manchukuo literature. By contrast, in China, as most Chinese writers
who
kept
writing
under
the
Japanese
occupation
were
considered
as
“collaborationists,” it was a long-existing taboo to study Manchukuo literature before
the 1980s when Shanding 山丁, Huang Xuan 黄玄 (Qiuying 秋萤), and some other
former participants started to write articles in memory of the literary landscape of
Manchukuo. Moreover, a group of Chinese scholars, including Huang Wanhua 黄万
华, Feng Weiqun 冯为群, Li Chunyan 李春燕, and Zhang Quan 张权, initiated their
examinations of “native-land literature,” “write-and-print-ism,” and other critical
issues in the meantime, approaching Manchukuo literature from the angle of
Chinese writers and literary productions in Chinese. Two collectanea, “Literary
Series of Northeast China” and “Literary Series of Occupied China,” were compiled
successively in the 1990s as collections of historical documents. It was also
noteworthy that “The International Symposium on Literature in Occupied Northeast
6
China” was held in Changchun in 1992, which brought Chinese researchers a rare
opportunity to be exposed to Japanese references and to communicate with their
companions from Japan and Korea. After almost a decade of deadlock, recent years
witnessed a revival of studies on Manchukuo literature by Chinese scholars as
epitomized by Liu Xiaoli’s 刘晓丽 The Spiritual World in a Ramified Chronotope,
the first monograph in Chinese entirely dedicated to this topic.
Generally speaking, wartime reviews on Manchukuo literature were
overwhelmingly influenced by political demands. As a consequence, on the one hand,
they proved to be ideology-oriented and of considerable subjective intentions, thus
lacking a safe distance to treat the research object justly enough; on the other hand,
being fragmentary and atheoretical, most of them merely lingered on a superficial
interpretation without touching upon the ultimate issue of the colonial rule. In
comparison, postwar studies have overcome these limitations to a large extent. On
the Japanese side, through years of accumulation, there exist a fundamental
consensus and an established mode of research among the academic circle: the
officially recognized mainstream of Manchukuo literature was the so-called
“kokusaku bungaku” 国 策 文 学 (state policy literature), which served Japan’s
militarism as a way of ideological propagandas and had close relations to the
Manshū rōmanha 満洲浪曼派 (School of the Manchurian romanticism) for their
advertisement of “the founding spirit of Manchukuo” and aestheticization of social
realities; on the contrary, there thrived an opposite trend of literary realism
7
embodied by the journal called “Sakubun” (Composition), whose contributors were
mainly composed of the Mantetsu 満鉄 (South Manchuria Railway Company) staffs
and proposed to expose and criticize various social problems in Manchukuo,
especially those of the colonial oppression and ethnic conflicts; struggles between
these two movements, among other things, constituted the main thread of the
Japanese-based Manchukuo literature. As opposed to the colonizers, Manchurian
(Chinese) writers tended to employ literary praxis to manifest their resentment and
resistance, who then grouped into two literary schools that were respectively named
after Yiwenzhi (Record of Art and Literature) and Wenxuan (Selection of Writings),
the most representative Chinese literary journals in Manchukuo, and mounted
hostility to each other: the former group, led by Gu Ding 古丁, as Ozaki Hotsuki
stated, “obeyed in the face, but rebelled behind the scenes,” while the latter one
directly challenged the colonial power by “describing” and “revealing realities” under
the banner of “native-land literature.” This mode of binary opposition profoundly
informed the Japanese studies on Manchukuo literature, as was demonstrated by In
Dōsan’s generalization of “the political character of Japanese literature [in
Manchukuo] and the non-conformism of its Chinese counterpart.” On the Chinese
side, relevant researches were mainly limited within the scope of “native-land
literature,” and not unlike those conducted by Okada Hideki and Kawamura Minato,
focused on its resistant sense. All these discussions I mentioned above, though
roughly outlining major characters of Manchukuo literature and insightfully
8
pointing out such key concepts as coloniality, resistance, romanticism, and literary
realism, were still inflicted with a series of problems. First of all, the binary
opposition between colonizers and the colonized, and that between romanticism and
realism obscured the ambiguity and complexity that were characteristic of
Manchukuo literature: for example, the Manshū rōmanha not only argued for an
ultimate return to nature, but also engaged an enduring faith in humanism; despite
the fact that Liang Shanding’s 梁山丁 “native-land literature” was undoubtedly
realistic in terms of its subject matters, it treated social realities from the
perspective of “neo-heroism and neo-romanticism,” and the like. In the second place,
they overestimated the role of literariness by subordinating it to colonial politics,
accordingly denied the relative autonomy of literature in the cultural arena, and
failed to explain such “bizarre” phenomena as Aoki Minoru’s claim that “Manchurian
writers should dominate the mainstream of Manchukuo literature,” the enthusiastic
embrace and introduction of Chinese writers by Ōuchi Takao, and regular
gatherings held between Wenxuan and Sakubun intellectuals. Thirdly, paying little
attention to close reading, the aforementioned studies usually fell victim to intuitive
analysis and overlooked the specific narrative strategies adopted by both sides, let
alone various tensions and paradoxes inherent in the texts. Furthermore, they were
inclined to take Manchukuo literature as an isolated being, seldom examining it in
its relatedness with world history as well as the literary and intellectual traditions
of China and Japan, e.g. the similarities and differences between the Nihon
9
rōmanha (School of the Japanese Romanticism) and the Manshū rōmanha, the
transmission of the May Fourth discourses by Manchurian writers, the influence of
multifarious anti-capitalist thoughts on Manchukuo literature, and so on. Last but
not least, Manchukuo literature, as a unified entity, relied upon certain dynamics to
maintain the interaction among each constituent and to guarantee its normal
process of production and reproduction. However, in these studies, Japanese and
Chinese writings were either discussed separately or simply juxtaposed with each
other in lack of a central argument and a consistent thesis to string them together.
No wonder that Kawamura Minato caustically used “poorness” to evaluate them. On
this account, my research, the first endeavor in the English academic world to
explore Manchukuo literature as a whole, will try to avoid these drawbacks by
analyzing and clarifying the underlying intellectual dynamics of Manchukuo
literature against corresponding social-political backgrounds. By means of
theoretical and textual analysis, I’m going to examine the multiplicity, ambiguity
and inconsistency of various literary trends and the general relationship between
the colonizers and the colonized, and on this basis, reveal the essential
characteristics and the historical significance of Manchukuo literature.
Out of this consideration, I will limit my research to the writers and writings
that prevailed in Manchukuo from 1937 to 1941. The reason why I choose this
specific time span is that before 1937, with sporadic literary activities initially
making their debut in major cities like Changchun (Xinjing), Dalian, and Harbin,
10
there were no substantial output of literary products, no regional networks or
nationwide organizations, and most important of all, no self-consciousness of the
specialty of Manchukuo literature. As for the Japanese writers who later dominated
the literary circle, most of them had not settled down in Manchukuo yet, and those
who had grown up there as “the second generation of Japanese immigrants” were too
young to be involved in literary praxis. Manchurian writers were also temporarily
absent from the stage after the exile of Xiao Jun 萧军 and the close-down of Night
Sentinel, the literary supplement of Datong Newspaper, in 1933. From the
perspective of theoretical awareness, the concept of “Manchukuo literature” had not
been widely accepted as a replacement of “Manchurian literature,” and the literary
production of Japanese writers in Manchukuo was considered as “an extension of
Japanese literature” rather than something distinctive and independent. It was not
until 1937 when Manshū bunwakai was founded throughout Manchukuo that a
clear sense of national literature eventually came into being. By the end of 1940,
Manshū bunwakai had already owned nine local branches and more than 1,000
members from various ethnic groups and published its public organ Bunwakai
Correspondence in both Japanese and Chinese, thereby forming a unified literary
network among different regions and peoples. At the same time, Gu Ding and his
companions launched Mingming in March, 1937, one of the most influential Chinese
journals in the history of Manchukuo, whose emergence anticipated the incoming
prosperity of Manchukuo literature. Nevertheless, in order to enforce a tighter
11
control over the increasingly diversified colonial culture, the National Propaganda
Bureau (Kōbōsho) of the colonial government formulated its “Guidelines on Arts and
Literature” in 1941 that highlighted a direct intervention of the colonial authority,
subsequently dismissed Bunwakai and replaced it with the state-operated Geibun
renmei (Literary League), and reduced a variety of literary journals to two
government-owned periodicals, Geibun 芸 文
and Yiwenzhi. These policies
interrupted the natural evolution of Manchukuo literature and finally turned it into
mere propagandas for the Japanese military expansion, draining out all its
autonomy and creativity. Therefore, only if we focus our attention on those years
between 1937 and 1941 can we track down the normal trajectory of Manchukuo
literature and fully exhibit its multiplicity and ambiguity. Of course, I will refer to
events before 1937 and after 1941 on certain occasions to render my research a
necessary historical depth, but there should be no doubt that the object of my
research is Manchukuo literature at its full height.
The new dimension I want to introduce into my research is the dilemma of
modernity and national identity, which haunted on both China and Japan from the
second half of the 19th century on. In modern Japanese history, the clash between
“bunmei kaika” 文明開化 (civilization and enlightenment) and “sonnō jōi” 尊皇攘夷
(reverence for the emperor and elimination of the barbarians) had never ceased ever
since the Perry Expedition. Although concerns for cultural tradition gave way to
holistic westernization during the Meiji period, the reflection on capitalist modernity
12
gradually occupied the center of social ethos, as Japan soared up to the first class of
imperialist powers within less than fifty years but was still oppressed by and
excluded from the Western world. To make things worse, it suffered from a wide
range of severe problems brought by rapid modernization, such as social
discrepancy, class struggles, and particularly the loss of traditional culture, which
were further intensified with the outbreaks of the Kantō earthquake in 1923 and the
Great Depression in 1929. At this historic juncture, the Nihon rōmanha appeared on
the scene, proposing to reconstruct the cultural identity of modern Japan by means
of “poetry.” Within the social context of Manchukuo, some previous members of the
Nihon rōmanha underwent dramatic changes in their standpoints and proposals.
Compared to the alienated state of the Japanese society, Manchukuo’s vast virgin
land, exotic sceneries, mysterious history and simplicity of social mores offered them
much richer natural and cultural resources to actualize the aesthetic spirit that
could help them “transcend” modern civilization. That was why in their writings on
Manchukuo, these romanticists were either fascinated with the free and tough
characters of the Manchurian people, or eulogized the beauty and greatness of the
nature of Manchuria. Once exposed to the otherness, the Manshū rōmanha and their
cultural agendas inevitably absorbed heterogeneous elements from the Manchurian
society, the so-called “mainland-ity” as they generalized, and gradually broke away
from the bondage of the colonial ideology. Hence the argument that “Manchukuo
literature stood for the mother current of Japanese culture” and was thus “critical to
13
its revival” as well as their eager desire to foster a new cultural identity and a new
national consciousness that went along with the Manchurian society. Obviously, this
unexpected development posed great challenges against the existing cultural
hierarchy imposed by the colonial ideological apparatus and enormously
undermined its validity of existence. Little wonder that the Kōbōsho eventually
ceased the publication of Manshū Rōman in 1941 for its “excessive individualism”
and “inappropriate emphasis on the idea of art for art’s sake.” The literary school
presumably looming at the other pole were Sakubun writers, who were primarily
composed of the “salarymen” of South Manchuria Railway Company, the biggest and
the most modernized industrial plant in Manchukuo. Performing as the pioneering
force of Japan’s colonial adventures, the Mantetsu was not only devoted to the
construction of various modern infrastructures, but also strongly supported colonial
cultural enterprises throughout Manchuria, among which Sakubun turned out to be
the most significant one. In correspondence with their tendency for modernization
and on behalf of Japan’s national interests, Sakubun intellectuals advocated a
realistic method to “describe the everyday life” of the social underclass and to
investigate “how the Manchurians who feed on sorghum…live and think.” On the
very ground, they expected to illuminate “the livelihood of the Japanese whose life
completely depends on the Manchurian people,” accordingly “contriving for the
undertakings of military expansion” and even “providing references for the
governors to reflect upon.” However, in the process of objective observation and
14
scientific analysis, the Sakubun School, along with the realistic trend they
represented, laid bare the real state of Manchukuo characterized by ethnic hatred
and social conflicts in the disguise of “harmony among the five ethnic groups” and
the “Elysium of the kingly way.” Furthermore, their adherence to reason and
progress belied the irrational nature of colonial policies with the perspectives of
cosmopolitanism and class struggles held by Sakubun writers under the influence of
Marxism also constituting a dire threat to the colonial ideological discourse. That
was why Sakubun became the main target of the cultural purge launched by the
Kōbōsho. In this sense, the ostensible dichotomy between romanticism and realism,
and more specifically, between the Manshū rōmanha and the Sakubun School
manifested a bifurcated pursuit of modernity and national identity, which altogether
shaped modern Japan as well as its colonial apparatus like two sides of the same
coin. It was tricky that after being responsibly associated with the otherness, these
Japanese intellectuals unanimously transformed their original intentions, aspired to
merge into the local society, and marched towards an inevitable denial of the colonial
rule as well as a new national and cultural identity indigenous to Manchukuo.
In a similar way, Chinese intellectuals had been oscillating between
modernization and cultural traditions ever since the end of the Opium War in 1842.
As Kirk Denton insightfully put it, on the one hand, for Chinese people,
modernization, or Westernization, represented the origin of wealth and power; on
the other hand, the hegemonies of the West hidden in the depth of the capitalist
15
modernity gravely threatened China’s independence and unity. By contrast,
although traditional culture laid a solid foundation for the unified national
consciousness, it contradicted with the modern spirit in all aspects and was
considered as the most serious impediment to social reforms. Therefore, it received
vehement criticism from May Fourth elites and lost out to holistic Westernization in
the intellectual world. Nonetheless, confronted with the increasingly intensified
threat of Japan, more and more intellectuals started to realize the prominence of
cultural traditions in mass mobilization, especially those who lived directly under
the Japanese occupation in Manchukuo. They were torn apart between their
national identity and the modern civilization now embodied by the Japanese
colonizers, and to make things more complicated, they had to invoke localism and
the idea of “native land” to disguise their interest in Chinese culture because all
references to China in public had been banned by the colonial government. Against
this background, there arouse two rivaling literary schools who gathered around
Yiwenzhi and Wenxuan: the former school were composed of such celebrated writers
as Gu Ding, Xiaosong, Xinjia 辛嘉, and Yichi 疑迟, while the latter one bore the
leadership of Shanding and included Qiuying, Chen Yin 陈因, Wu Lang 吴郎, and
Wang Mengsu 王 孟 素 . Devoting themselves to the movement of “native-land
literature,” Wenxuan writers advocated composing “literary pieces with an intense
local color” based on “a realistic exposure of realities” in order to deliver “local
awareness” and even “national consciousness” as opposed to the colonial ideology
16
among the common readers. The Yiwenzhi school, on the contrary, objected to
restricting literature within “the narrow world” of fixed subject matters or “isms”
and demanded that Manchurian writers should imitate the distinguished example of
modern Japanese literature and “write and print” as much as possible in “a
directionless direction” to facilitate the modernization of their own literary works.
What’s more, carrying forward the tradition of May Fourth literature, they stressed
the crucial role played by literature in promoting social changes, popularizing
modern culture and enlightening the commoners. Apparently, Yiwenzhi and
Wenxuan epitomized the different intellectual choices of modernization and national
identity, and their relations to the colonial power were also full of paradoxes. The
acceptance and appreciation of Japanese culture by Yiwenzhi writers, as an instance
of the lure of modernity, though reconfirmed the cultural superiority of the
colonizers and the validity of colonial subordination from the angle of the colonized,
enabled them to establish a close relationship with the Japanese intelligentsia and
to perform as a cultural mediator in the Manchurian society. Purposefully taking
advantage of the cultural resources provided by the colonizers, they were able to
utter their own words and struggle with wartime propagandas for discursive power
by mimicking, domesticating, transforming, and replacing the colonial discourse in a
strategic way. (For example, they complied with the official ideology of Manchukuo
on the surface, but intentionally emphasized the autonomy and distinctiveness of
the state to deny any excuses for Japanese intervention; their efforts to modernize
17
Chinese literature also aimed at an ultimate replacement of its Japanese rival. In a
similar way, even if the Wenxuan school insisted on a non-cooperative and militant
attitude towards the Japanese colonizers and claimed to expose the cruelty of the
colonial oppression and social strives in Manchukuo, not unlike the Manshū
rōmanha, they also intended to create “a new type of heroes pervaded with the
romantic spirit of fighting” so as to “overcome today’s atmosphere of pessimism and
nihilism.” More important, since under such a high political pressure they could by
no means openly touch on the subject of traditional culture and had to resort to
“nature” and “native land,” the new heroes they expected were “son of nature, who
grow up in wilderness and are isolated from the civilized world,” and their works
were characterized by an obsessive worship of “primitive vitality.” These
anti-modern appeals foregrounded the irreducible gap between the colonizers and
the colonized, but coincided with the civilizational hierarchy underpinning the
colonial ideology and paradoxically made up a variation of the “fascist literary theory
of fantasies” as well as an unconscious vehicle of “the founding spirit of Manchukuo.”
On this account, Prasenjit Duara argued that “native-place literature” abandoned
the modernization agenda of the New Cultural Movement and ironically joined in
the chorus of colonial propagandas, albeit its rejection of Japanese culture in the
name of Chinese nationalism; furthermore, to invoke localism would not necessarily
lead to a reinforcement of national consciousness, but indeed fostered a new distinct
identity that was bound with the indigenous.
18
Overall, oscillating between modernization and national identification,
Manchukuo literature took on the features of multiplicity, ambiguity and
self-reflexivity, which could never be accommodated by the dichotomy of
romanticism and realism and that of the colonizers and the colonized. For the same
reason, it embodied a unified entity and obtained a distinctive, independent and
hybrid nature with all interactions and confrontations of its constituent parts.
On this ground, the dissertation is divided into the following six chapters: in
the first chapter, I give a brief introduction to the content, framework, methodology
and historical background of my research; centering on Hasegawa Shun’s 長谷川濬
“Private Argument for a Nation-Building Literature” and Kitamura Kenjirō’s
北村
謙次郎 “Exploration and Contemplation,” the second chapter mainly deals with the
Manshū rōmanha and intends to point out their associations with the Nihon
rōmanha in intellectual dimension and literary praxis; in the third chapter, I
examine the stories on “Manchurian topics” that were composed by Aoki Minoru,
Ehara Teppei (Yoshino Haruo 吉 野 治 夫 ), Akihara Kasuji 秋 原 勝 二 , Takeuchi
Masaichi 竹内正一 and other Sakubun writers and pay a particular attention to the
thematic types and narrative modes they employed in order to reveal the inner
dynamics of their accounts; the fourth chapter focuses on the dispute over
“native-land literature” and the “write-and-print-ism” and explores how Yiwenzhi
intellectuals articulated their proposals of social reforms and parodied the sham of
colonial discourse through a close reading of Gu Ding’s Glass Leaves, Small Alley, A
19
New Life, Xiaosong’s Iron Threshold, Yichi’s Syringa Flowers, and the like; in the
fifth chapter, Shanding’s The Green Valley, Mountain Wind, In the Town of
Turchiha, and other important literary pieces serve as the primary objects of my
analysis, and on this basis, I try to unravel the ideological pursuit of the Wenxuan
school in the disguise of literary realism and their unconscious complicity with
colonial narratives; in chapter six, I will disclose the dialectical relationships among
these four literary groups and therein outline the intellectual dynamics of
Manchukuo literature in its entirety. By virtue of my analysis, I attempt to
systematically present the fundamental features of Manchukuo literature within its
specific historical context and accordingly offer a new perspective to later studies on
East Asian literary relations and modern intellectual history.
20
CHAPTER II
“OVERCOMING MODERNITY” AND THE MANSHŪ RŌMANHA
In the eighth issue of year 2008’s Chūō Kōron 中央公論 (Central Review), an
interview with Koyasu Nobukuni 子安宣邦, a well-known scholar specializing in
Japanese intellectual history and cultural theory, about his newly-published book
What Is Overcoming Modernity? constituted the main topic of the special column
called “Chūō Reading Room.” When asked about the relationship of the theory of
“overcoming modernity” proposed by Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹内好 and that by the
Nihon rōmanha 日本浪曼派, Koyasu concluded as follows:
Various researches on “overcoming modernity” emerged after the Second
World War, but almost no historians placed them within the context of Shōwa
昭 和
intellectual history for a further understanding and
readdressing…Takeuchi reevaluated the Nihon rōmanha in the post-war era,
revitalizing Yasuda’s [Yojūrō] 保 田 与 重 郎 argument of “overcoming
modernity” that works as an irony and positioning his own theoretical
standpoint. While Yasuda looked at the classical Japan for a cultural
foundation to make this overcoming effort possible, Takeuchi resorted to the
newly-emergent People’s Republic of China for its realization. He discovered a
resistant subjectivity not from a modernized Japan modeling on the West, but
from an Asia that “continuously failed but kept struggling. ”1
In order to restore the lost chain between the pre-war and post-war discourses,
Koyasu added three wartime debates on how to transcend the modern to this
genealogy, namely the symposium with the title of “Review on Ten Years’ Mainland
Policy” hosted by Ozaki Hotsumi 尾崎秀実 and Tachibana Shiraki 橘樸 in October,
1
“Kindai no chōkoku wa nani ka?” 近代の超克は何か, Chūō Kōron 中央公論 (2008.8): 262.
21
1941, the conference of “Stance of World History and Japan” that convened the
Kyōtō Philosophical School in December, 1941, and the subsequent seminar on
“overcoming modernity” held from July to August in 1942. 1 Not unlike Koyasu
Nobukuni, Harry Harootunian generalized three types of the overcoming theory
prevailing in the World War II on the basis of these three discussions in his book
Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan: the
first type was represented by Kobayashi Hideo’s 小林秀雄 proposal, which intended
to restore “the original feelings and sentimental structure” of the Japanese people by
means of a reinterpretation on the literary classics of ancient Japan; the second type
referred to the theoretical stance of Kamei Katsuichirō 亀井勝一郎, who aimed at a
revival of Japanese folk culture and traditional beliefs to lay the foundation for a
new unified cultural identity; the third type echoed what Nishita Kitarō’s 西田幾多
郎 most outstanding disciple Nishitani Keiji 西谷啓治 argued for, which suggested
replacing the “subjective self” with “subjective nothingness”, the “real subjectivity”
as Nishitani claimed, so that the once-severed subject and object would be reunited
again and thus relieve the intensifying spiritual crisis of the modern society. 2
According to this lineage Koyasu and Harootunian offered to us, during the prewar
and interwar period, the discourses of “overcoming modernity” mainly drew upon
1
2
See Ibid., 261.
Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 91.
22
Japan’s own cultural resources, and notwithstanding their “ostensible theme of
modern world history,” they intentionally avoided “Chinese issues” that “turned out
to be the key problem of the Shōwa era.”1 On this account, there might arise a series
of questions that we have to figure out: was it really the fact that those who
celebrated the idea of “overcoming modernity” during the war provided no
conceptual preparation for Takeuchi Yoshimi to formulate his methodology of
“taking China as an approach” in 1959? Did the Chinese experience of Japanese
intellectuals dwelling in wartime China really impose no influence on their opinions
about how to overcome modernity? And, did the evolution of this theory really follow
a linear developmental trajectory as Koyasu hinted at? An in-depth inquiry into
China-based Japanese intellectual groups like the Manshū rōmanha 満洲浪曼派
will definitely help us foster a more comprehensive understanding of the answers to
these questions.
Emergence of the Nihon Rōmanha and Their Theoretical Appeals
In order to identify the position of the Manshū rōmanha within the
aforementioned theoretical tradition, it is necessary to illuminate their congenetic
relationship with the Nihon rōmanha in thoughts, and at first, I will briefly trace the
Koyasu Nobukuni 子安宣邦, “Riben de jindai yu jindaihua lun” 日本的近代与近代化论, in Dongya Lun:
Riben Xiandai Sixiang Pipan 东亚论：日本现代思想批判, trans., Zhao Jinghua 赵京华 (Changchun: Jilin renmin
chubanshe, 2011), 233.
1
23
historical background that enabled the emergence of the Nihon rōmanha as well as
their intellectual appeals. As Lenin incisively pointed out in “On the Slogan for a
United States of Europe,” “uneven economic and political development is an absolute
law of capitalism,”1 which appeared to be more severe in Japan as a latecomer of
modernization. In the economic field, the Japanese economy suffered from a
prolonged stagnation after the Meiji Restoration, and until 1913, outputs of
agriculture and other conventional industries still accounted for 60% of Japan’s
domestic product. Although the outbreak of the First World War provided a supreme
opportunity for the economic development of Japan, facilitating its transition from a
light-industry-dominated state to a state based on heavy industry, and at the same
time, capitals and populations competed to throng into metropolises like Tōkyō,
Yokohama, Kōbe and Ōsaka, greatly contributing to their expansion and prosperity,
as the national census conducted in the 1930s manifested, “only 18% of the Japanese
people lived in cities that had a population of over 100,000”2 and a majority of them
were still peasants. In sharp contrast with the thriving cities, rural areas not only
acquired nothing in this process as Yanagita Kunio 柳 田 國 男
stated, but
increasingly declined due to the Matthew effect caused by urbanization. This dual
economic structure set up a wide gap between the urban and the rural societies.
Even metropolis itself was shadowed by the imbalance of economy. While bankers,
1
Vladimir Lenin, Lenin Collected Works, vol. 21 ( Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 342.
2
Fujiwara Akira 藤原彰, Nihon Kindaishi 日本近代史, vol. 3 (Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 1977), 2.
24
entrepreneurs, speculators as well as the Zaibatsu 財閥 (financial cliques) families
profited from the economic development and accumulated a huge amount of riches,
the lower middle class were inflicted by low wages, desperately struggling for mere
subsistence. It was estimated that the consumption expenditure per capita merely
accrued by 67% from 1885 to 1920.1 This grim reality was further exasperated by
the Kantō earthquake of 1923 and the Great Depression of 1929, thus resulting in a
long-term economic crisis that swept over the entire Japan. As the aftermath of The
Great Kantō earthquake, 100,500 people died, 554,000 households deserted their
homes, and 250,000 workers became unemployed, not to mention a direct economic
loss of 30 billion Yen, which was ensued by a rampant run on banks and the
abandonment of the gold standard system. To make matters worse, the economic
crisis starting from 1929 “decreased Japan’s export by 32% and import by 30% in
1930, and seriously ruined its international trade with the U.S., Britain, France, and
Germany.”2 Under this influence, the export-oriented economy of Japan soon sank
into a state of breakdown, as stock markets crashed, banks closed down, businesses
went into bankruptcy, and “the number of unemployed people soared up to
1
See Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 4.
2
Rekishi kenkyūkai 歴史研究会, ed., Taiheiyōsensō Shi 太平洋戦争史, vol.1 (Tōkyō: Tōyō keizai
shinhōsha, 1953), 112.
25
315,000.” 1 This deteriorating unemployment status intensified the recession of
economy in turn, inevitably leading to a vicious cycle of economic inequality.
In the socio-political field, as Nakamura Takafusa 中村隆英 concluded, “the
influence of the traditional society remained strong.”2 On the one hand, it was the
old social institutions characterized by Tennō (the Emperor) worship and hereditary
politics that constituted the superstructure of the Japanese society ; on the other
hand, rapid urbanization and industrialization introduced a variety of new social
elements, such as modern corporate system, class consciousness, public spheres,
social activism, and so on. With their rising power, the Bourgeois class were eager to
break the old order so as to reform and restructure modern Japan. In Frank B.
Tipton’s eyes, the transfer from elite nationalism to populist nationalism proved to
be one of the most significant social transformations of this era: the masses sought “a
claim to represent the ‘whole’ nation in a way that the existing system did not. When
in opposition, they insisted that existing government had betrayed the nation. When
in power, they insisted that only an inspired dictator could adequately represent the
nation’s interests.” Taking Kita Ikki 北一輝 as an example, Tipton explained that it
1
2
Tōkyō Nichinichi Shimbun 東京日日新聞 17 Mar. 1930: 1.
Nakamura Takafusa 中 村 隆 英 , Lectures on Modern Japanese Economic History (Tokyo: LTCB
International Library Foundation, 1994), 14.
26
was this new nationalist agenda that triggered the May 15 Incident and the
February 26 Incident, entailing the fascist control over the civilian government.1
The severity of economic and socio-political crisis also beset modern Japanese
culture. At the microscopic level, the tension-ridden, ever-changing reality estranged
people from their familiar living conditions and elicited a deep anxiety about
“instability” and “homelessness.” Therefore, as Miki Kiyoshi 三 木 清 described,
“being unable to engage social activities and losing their faith in the society, people
must be more and more willing to explore their inner world.”2 At the macroscopic
level, Western material civilization, as epitomized by the American pop culture,
continually impinged on and undermined the traditional value system, religious
beliefs and local customs of the Japanese people with such social ethos as
utilitarianism, pragmatism, money worship, commodity fetishism, and material
determinism, which were closely bonded with the capitalist modernity, causing a
wide gap in the continuum of national culture and a deep confusion of cultural
identity. Characterized by the prevalence of the so-called “Ginza culture” and “moga”
モガ (modern girls) and “mobo” モボ (modern boys) cultures, this process, defined
by later Japanese sociologists as “Americanism,” reached its height during the late
1920s.
Against
this
historical
background,
Japanese
intellectuals
became
See Frank B. Tipton, “Japanese Nationalism in Comparative Perspective,” in Sandra Wilson, ed. Nation and
Nationalism in Japan, New York: Routledge, 2002, 152-154.
1
2
Miki Kiyoshi 三木清, “Fuan no shisō to so no chōkoku,” in Gendai Nihon Bungaku Ronsō Shi 現代日本
文学論争史, vol. 3, eds., Hirano Ken 平野謙, et al. (Tōkyō: Miraisha, 1957), 11.
27
increasingly interested in cultural affairs. It was widely acknowledged among them
that the restoration and reconstruction of national culture would not only stitch
fragmented everyday life together, reunite the separated and misplaced experience,
understanding and consciousness, and cure the “modern symptoms” of stress and
solitude brought by human alienation, but also make it possible to break away from
the cultural hegemonies imposed by the West, to endow the entire Japanese nation
with a unified cultural identity and to resolve the intense social conflicts via an
reinforcement
of
national
solidarity.
Furthermore,
owing
to
the
relative
independence of culture from political and economic arenas, it might be able to
provide a safe place to pose a well-rounded critique upon the extant socio-political
institutions and to convey Utopian aspirations.1 The persecution of Marxists by the
Japanese government also urged many left-wing intellectuals to abolish the activist
stance and redirect their concerns to literary enterprises.2 As Kurahara Korehito 蔵
原惟人 was incarcerated and Kobayashi Takiji 小林多喜二 died of tortures, the
social movement called “literary and artistic renaissance” began to unfold itself in an
overwhelming way, and the praxis of the Nihon rōmanha turned out to be its most
important part.
1
2
Overcome by Modernity, xxiii.
Kamei Katsuichirō and Hayashi Fusao 林房雄, two core members of the Nihon rōmanha, both renounced
their loyalty to Marxism at this time and participated in the “renaissance” movement.
28
As early as 1932 when the movement of “literary and artistic renaissance” just
made its debut, Yasuda Yojūrō, who then studied aesthetics at the Department of
Literature of Tōkyō Imperial University, launched the belletristic magazine Cogito,
which aimed to “resist the mainstream literature and deny all established things in
the literary arena,”1 together with Tanaka Katsumi 田中克己, Matsushita Takeo 松
下武雄, Odakane Tarō 小高根太郎, Itō Shizuo 伊東静雄, Nakajima Eijirō 中島栄次
郎, and his other schoolmates. In the December, 1934 issue of Cogito, he went a step
further to publish the renowned “Manifesto of the Nihon Rōmanha,” proclaiming the
establishment of a new organization dedicated to literary romanticism. Those who
signed their names on the manifesto as initiators included Yasuda, Kamei,
Nakajima, Jinbō Kōtarō 神保光太郎, Nakatani Takao 中谷孝雄, and Ogata Takashi
緒方隆士. With the participation of Hagiwara Sakutarō 萩原朔太郎, Satō Haruo 佐
藤春夫, Dazai Osamu 太宰治, and other big shots of the literary circle, the number of
confirmed members extended to 56, making the Nihon rōmanha one of the most
influential societies of literature in Japan. The companions of the Nihon rōmanha
also founded an eponymous journal as the official organ of the group, which had 29
issues in total and ceased publication in August, 1938.
By making an overall survey of the theoretical dimension presented by the
Nihon rōmanha, especially by Yasuda Yojūrō, we are able to construe the following
1
Yasuda Yojūrō 保田与重郎, “Nihon rōmanha no jidai” 日本浪漫派の時代, in Yasuda Yojūrō Zenshū, vol.
36 (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1988), 42.
29
characteristics it implicitly embodied. In the first place, what the Nihon rōmanha
attempted to transcend and overcome was not Western culture as a whole, but the
ideology of holistic Westernization embraced by modern Japan ever since the Meiji
era and epitomized in such slogans as “bunmei kaika.” From their perspective, the
bureaucratic authoritarian rule and the popularization of Western ideas forcibly
imposed by the Japanese government not only brought about a “cultural loss,” but
also ensnared Japan in a state of class struggles and social fragmentation. They
believed that it was only on the basis of cultural critiques that this ideological state
apparatus could be formally repudiated and systematically uprooted. Therefore,
Yasuda identified Japan’s statist policies with an “inhumane” political opportunism
and stated in “Premier Baldwin” ( ボールドウイイン首相 ) that “I realized the
constant inability of Japan to shed off the backward form of a Bismarckian state...At
the point when our state could not adhere to the principles of faith and justice, the
Japanese literary circle proved to be the best guardian for modern ethical codes.”1
In the second place, in the light of a particularistic view of Japanese culture
and an alienated experience of Modern Japan, the Nihon rōmanha fiercely contested
historical determinism and the unitary mode of modernization. When Nietzsche
declared “I am every name in history,”2 it seemed that all human history inevitably
See Yasuda Yojūrō 保田与重郎, “Bōrudowaiin shushō,” in Yasuda Yojūrō Zenshū 保田与重郎全集, vol. 2
(Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1985), 543-544.
1
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Letter to Jacob Burckhardt,” Turin, 4 January 1889.
30
performed as a prelude to modernity and should be overcome for the latter’s sake.
Moreover, by virtue of his account on “oriental despotism,” Hegel distinguished the
heterogeneity of the oriental world with such labels as “a great hindrance to the
development of the sciences” and “remaining locked in a condition which, by
restricting the role of the individual, does not permit any evolution,”1 condemning it
to be “anti-modern” and “anti-historical.” In this sense, history presented itself as a
self-evolution of the modern spirit, which was monopolized by the Western
civilization, and in opposition, there left no vacancy for traditional Japan within the
progressive movement of history; the Japanese traditional, due to its non-modern,
non-Western
character,
was
doomed
to
extinction.
What
modern
Japan
unconditionally accepted in the process of modernization turned out to be nothing
but this hegemonic ideology informed by Euro-centrism, which forced it to draw a
clear distinction from its past and constantly fall into self-denials, giving rise to an
unprecedented chaos in the cultural and intellectual fields. In view of that, the
Nihon rōmanha were eager to break through the Euro-centric discourse on
modernity and place modern Japan in the successive flow of its cultural traditions
with “a new perspective of history” and “the otherness of the East,” the first step for
them to overthrow the Hegelian mode of modernization and redress modernity
according to the distinctive modern experience of Japan.
1
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History: Introduction, Reason in History,
trans., John Sibree (London: H. G. Bonn, 1861), 111.
31
Furthermore, on the surface, their discourse of “overcoming modernity” hinged
on a return to classical Japanese culture; nonetheless, this return by no means
indicated a simple restoration of the cultural past. As Kevin Doak argued, “for the
Nihon rōmanha, ‘the reversion to Japan’ formed an indispensable mark to separate
themselves from the modern. It was both deeply rooted in the historicity of this era
(present) and constituted a movement towards the future.”1 Apparently, the Nihon
rōmanha might have understood that there existed no possibility to realize this
restoration, as the Japanese people had been baptized with modern ideas, and as the
product of the modern world, they had much more in common with their Western
contemporaries than their Japanese ancestors. In fact, the “classics” merely provided
them with a “shell,” a “form with meaningless content.” What really mattered for
them was how to utilize traditional cultural resources in the modern global context
and how to create a “cultural unity” shared by the whole nation at “this critical
juncture when old social orders start to collapse and the new ones are about to
burgeon.” In this sense, Yasuda stated with great expectations, “we love ancient
classics most, the classics that are being forgotten by people of this state. We love the
ancient classics as if they were a shell. We also love the will to break through the
shell.”2 It was in the same sense that Doak considered modernity as the father of the
1
Kevin Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 41.
2
Yasuda Yojūrō 保田与重郎, “Cogito henshū kōki” コギト編集後記, in Yasuda Yojūrō Zenshū, vol. 40
(Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1989), 159.
32
Nihon rōmanha and traditional culture as the mother, implying that the concept of
“overcoming modernity” resembled nothing more than an Oedipal fantasy.1
In addition, it was poetry that the Nihon rōmanha primarily relied upon to
conduct their cultural critiques, and they did not take the spontaneous overflow of
emotions as their ultimate goal, but aimed at a restoration of the totality of the
everyday world and hereof a reconstruction of national cultural identity. Examining
the difference between the romantic schools of the Meiji era and the Nihon rōmanha,
Karatani Kōjin 柄 谷 行 人 pointed out that the former viewed natural scenes
described in Man’yōshū 万葉集 (Collection to Last Ten Thousand Ages) as the origin
of the Japanese romanticism, whereas the latter “instead emphasized its artificial
and decadent beauty.”2 Accordingly, the standpoint of the Nihon rōmanha did not
lie in real objects or individual sensibilities, but was related to a transcendental
subjectivity and a “sense of dream,” which would find poetry as their best conveyor.
In the initial issue of Nihon Rōmanha, Yasuda Yojūrō discussed the effect of poetry
as follows, “at this moment, calling each other romanticists, our companions worship
arts, carry forward the spirit of poetry, and demonstrate the individuality of
artists...We will sing the epochal song of youthhood and eliminate the vulgarity of
popular literatures...I have heard that poetry is able to invent spiritual illusions
1
Kevin Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 21.
2
Karatani Kōjin 柄谷行人, Kindai Nihon no Hihyō: Shōwa Hen 近代日本の批評：昭和篇, vol. 1 (Tōkyō:
Kōdansha, 1997), 168-169.
33
from emptiness for human beings ever since the primeval times and the emergence
of language.”1 In this connection, the “pure imagination” of poetry and its reference
to subjective agency were employed by the Nihon rōmanha to build an unreal space
out of the bondage of history, within which, fragments of modern life as well as the
past, present, and future were united with each other through imagination to
symbolically restore the totality of the world. Moreover, “insinuating a vertical
continuum with the cultural past and emphasizing a horizontal distinction from
Western countries,” this unity would be easily “transformed into a symbol of
national community and the foundation for cultural identity” under the guidance of
a nationalist vision.2 As a consequence of the symbolic union of the subject and the
object in poetry, Yasuda asserted, the subjective sovereignty of individuals as a
modern symptom might also be decentralized and thus turned into something
generical and culture-bound. Therefore, poetry, among other things, “performed as a
common strategy employed by the Nihon rōmanha.”
Last but not least, in order to promulgate the so-called “poetic spirit” to the
extreme, the Nihon rōmanha consciously took the sublime as their highest aesthetic
principle. This sublimity was reified in the fierce confrontation of an “ironical”
1
2
Yasuda Yojūrō 保田与重郎, “Sōkan no ji” 創刊之辞, Nihon Rōmanha 日本浪曼派 (1935.1): 92.
See Kevin Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 42.
34
literary romanticism with the “mundane realities,“ 1 often adopting the form of
tragedy and finally evolving into an “aesthetic of death” that pursued a union
between the individual and the universal and a reconstruction of totality by means
of self-destruction. For the same reason, naturalism, which was said to be obsessed
with trivialities and go against the “poetic spirit,” became the major target of attacks
by the Nihon rōmanha. As Yasuda clarified in “The Manifesto of the Nihon
rōmanha,” what they “are coveting and longing for are the noblest and fiercest
things. The sublimity stands for the ultimate goal of the Nihon rōmanha as well as a
true modern spirit...For the sake of protecting those most beautiful and most
sublime objects, it is hereby necessary to undertake the task of reviving traditional
arts in a lofty and urgent manner.”2 On this account, the promotion of “poetic spirit,”
the resistance against naturalistic methods, the stress on sublime things, and the
resurrection of cultural traditions were merging together as a quadruple mission.
In Five Faces of Modernity, Matei Calinescu distinguished between the concept
of “aesthetic modernity” and that of “contemporary spirit.” As far as he was
concerned, “aesthetic modernity,” as represented by Baudelaire, denied the validity
of “mundane realities” and resisted any types of literary realism,3 while advocating
1
In the wartime discourse that aestheticized politics, this confrontation was further articulated as the decisive
battle between Japan and the Western world.
Yasuda Yojūrō 保田与重郎, “Nihon rōmanha kōkoku” 日本浪漫派広告, in Yasuda Yojūrō Zenshū, vol. 40
(Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1989), 330.
2
3
See Charles Pierre Baudelaire, “Since It Is a Question of Realism,” in Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, trans.,
Lois Boe Hyslop (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964), 85-88.
35
the beauty of “the artificial” and viewing the poet as a “future herald” and the poetry
as the most “avant-garde” artistic form. Depending on the aesthetic foundation of
“imagination,” it embodied an antagonistic attitude towards the capitalist modernity
that took on the features of materialism and utilitarianism and the banality of
“modern life.” On the contrary, although the “contemporary spirit” also focused on
art, literature, and other cultural projects, it “referred to the other modernity, to the
modernity of reason and progress, to the bourgeois modernity” and in Mathew
Arnold’s sense, replaced religious belief with “culture” after the declaration of the
death of God by Nietzsche. Comprising “whatever was rationally valid and relevant
in the whole cultural heritage of mankind,” incorporating different value systems as
“timeless existence,” and finally setting up a conceptual hierarchy based on the
principle of raison d’être, the “contemporary spirit” enabled “the socialization of the
anti-social, the acculturation of the anti-cultural, and the legitimization of the
subversive,” not to mention a presentation of itself as the mainstream ideology and
the universal truth of the modern society. 1 According to this classification, the
theoretical appeals of the Nihon rōmanha indeed reflected the characters of both
“aesthetic modernity” and the “contemporary spirit.” Their resistance against the
Euro-centric mode of modernization, their assault on the state apparatus of modern
Japan, their stress on the “aesthetics of imagination” in poetry, and their promotion
1
See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 91-92.
36
of the sublime and grotesque styles were obviously identical to what “aesthetic
modernity” invoked; however, the ultimate goal of the Nihon rōmanha that was
characterized by unifying the past, present, and future via a “rediscovery” of the
classics and establishing a constant, unitary and authoritative national cultural
identity coincided with that of the “contemporary spirit.” In other words, the
antithetic poles of “modernity” and “national culture” erected by the Nihon rōmanha
in their discourse of “overcoming modernity” constituted two sides of the same coin:
starting from a critique of the capitalist modernity, Yasuda Yojūrō and his
companions eventually reconfirmed its universal significance through a paradoxical
detour. As a result, “overcoming modernity” was utilized by the Japanese regime in
the Second World War and lapsed into its official ideology that lent legitimacy to the
military expansionism.
Founding of the Manshū Rōmanha and Publication of Manshū Rōman
As for the Manshū rōmanha, how were they associated with the Nihon
rōmanha? What kind of intellectual group they formed? How did they develop and
reform the vision of “overcoming modernity”? And, most important of all, what
influence did the social reality of Manchukuo impose on their intellectual turns in
the process of literary praxis. In order to shed light on these important issues, we
need to set our eyes on the moment when Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼, the official
37
organ of the Manshū rōmanha, first came into being. At the beginning of 1938,
Kitamura Kenjirō 北村謙次郎, a former member of the Nihon rōmanha who arrived
in Manchuria in 1936 and had been working at the Manchukuo Film Association
since then, formed the idea of launching a new literary magazine in Manchukuo
along with his colleague Yahara Reisaburō 矢原禮三郎, a highly-reputed poet at that
time. They paid a visit to Kizaki Ryū 木崎龍, an editor of the official organ of the
Kōbōsho 弘報所, and under his recommendation sought help from the “Association
for Manchurian and Japanese Cultures.” 1 With its financial support, Manshū
Rōman and the literary school called “Manshū rōmanha” formally emerged in
August, 1938, whose major members included former Nihon Rōmanha writers like
Kitamura Kenjirō, Midorikawa Mitsugu 緑川貢, and Yokota Fumiko 横田文子, and
a great many Japanese intellectuals settling in Manchukuo like Kizaki Ryū,
Hasegawa Shun 長 谷 川 濬 , Henmi Yūkichi 逸 見 猶 吉 , Ōuchi Takao 大 内 隆 雄 ,
Aramaki Yoshio 荒牧芳郎, and so forth. The first volume of this journal was divided
into four parts, namely short stories, poetry, essay, and criticism, and published
works by the aforementioned members and contributors from other literary
societies, such as Yoshino Haruo 吉 野 治 夫 and Sakai Enji 坂 井 艶 司 of the
Sakkubun 作文 School, Imamura Eiji 今村栄治 of the “Xinjing Group of Literature
and Art,” and Ushijima Haroko 牛島春子 as an independent writer, representing a
1
See Kitamura Kenjirō 北村謙次郎, Hokuhen Bojōki 北辺慕情記 (Tōkyō: Daigaku shobō, 1960), 66-67.
38
great diversity. It was also worth noting that from the first issue on, Manshū Rōman
was keen to publish writings composed by Manchurian litterateurs1 and translated
from Chinese to Japanese by Ōuchi Takao, among which the most outstanding ones
were Tian Bing’s 田兵 Alyosha, Gu Ding’s 古丁 Day and Night, Yuan Xi’s 袁犀
Three Neighbors, Yichi’s 疑迟 Fall of Pear Flowers, and the like. As Okada Hideki
岡田英樹 claimed, “Manshū Rōman was the pioneer among Japanese journals to
include the literary outputs of Chinese writers and thus embodied a particular
significance.”2 The second volume of Manshū Rōman came out in March, 1939 under
the editorship of Hasegawa Shun and set up a new column called “Words by
Members” at the end of the journal. The third volume that was printed in July of the
same year conformed to the previous layout and stylistic rules, characterized by a
supplementary section devoted to interviews with Aoki Minoru 青木実, the head of
Dalian Library, Yoshino Haruo, the chief secretary of the Manshū bunwakai 満洲文
話会 (The Association for Literary Talks in Manchuria), Negishi Kan’ichi 根岸寛一,
a famous playwright from Man’ei 満映 (the abbreviation for the Manchukuo Film
Association) and other renowned Japanese men of letters about the cultural
achievements of Manchukuo in various aspects. Starting from the fourth volume, the
journal changed from a quarterly to a publication issued at irregular intervals and at
1
Since before the end of the World War II, Chinese people who lived in Northeast China (Manchuria) were
known to the Japanese public as Manchurians regardless of their ethnicities, I will follow this parlance to show my
loyalty to historical facts.
2
Nishihara Kazumi 西原和海, Okada Hideki 岡田英樹, and Nishida Masaru 西田勝, “Manshū Rōman o
dō hyōkasuru ka” 満洲浪曼をどう評価するか, Shokuminchi Bunka Kenkyū 殖民地文化研究 (2002.1): 9.
39
the same time, experienced a comprehensive transformation in both substance and
form: the issue number and the words “Manshū Rōman” on the cover page were
replaced by a headline of “Collection of Works by Writers in Manchuria” and a
subtitle “Special Issue of Manshū Rōman”; poems, lyrical essays, and literary
reviews completely disappeared from the journal in sharp contrast with the
overwhelming presence of short stories and novellas by Yoshino Haruo, Hasegawa
Shun, and such left-wing novelists as Kitao Yōzō 北尾陽三 and Ōtaki Shigenao 大瀧
重直. As a matter of fact, this volume performed as the first anthology of fictions in
the history of Manchukuo literature. Likewise, the fifth volume of Manshū Rōman
also took the form of anthology and was marked as a “special issue of theoretical
studies,” focusing on literary criticism and theoretical issues rather than creative
writings. The ensuing volume was published in October, 1940 by “Xinjing Xingya
Culture Press” instead of “Bunshōdō” 文祥堂, a publisher formerly designated by the
colonial government. In the meantime, the editorial board of Manshū Rōman moved
out of the state-run “Association for Manchurian and Japanese Cultures,” a
watershed event considered by Kitamura as “the novel sail of Manshū Rōman,” and
at the center of this novelty was the participation of Dan Kazuo 檀一雄, another
important figure of the Nihon rōmanha. The last volume of Manshū Rōman came
out in May, 1941, which was named as “Hekido zanka” 僻土残歌 (Remote Land and
Residual Song) after Dan Kazuo’s poem. Compared to that of the previous issues, the
number of works decreased sharply in this volume with its headline changed again
40
to “Manshū Rōman Book Series,” which anticipated “a sudden ending of the
journal”1 not long after the official enactment of “Guidelines for Art and Literature”
and the forcible establishment of the “Society of Artists and Litterateurs in
Manchuria.”
The Romantic Spirit and the Idea of “Mainland-ity”
The first section of the special issue of theoretical studies was dedicated to “a
general overview on the nature of Manchukuo literature,” within which Kitamura
Kenjirō, the patron saint of the Manshū rōmanha, and Hasegawa Shun, the writer
claimed by Nishihara Kazumi 西原和海 to be “most typical of Manshū Rōman’s
spirit,” successively elaborated on the essential viewpoints possessed by the whole
group.
At the beginning of his article titled “Private Argument for a Nation-Building
Literature,” Hsegawa Shun clearly proclaimed that “the state-building spirit” of
Manchukuo opened up a new possibility in human history for its invention of “a
distinctive new lifestyle” and accordingly called for the construction of Manchukuo’s
“state-building literature” that served as “an embryo fostering this pioneering
1
Hayama Hideyuki 葉山英之, “Manshū Bungakuron” Danshō 「満洲文学論」断章 (Tōkyō: Sankōsha,
2011), 307.
41
spirit.” He then went on to analyze what formed the “uniqueness” of Manchukuo
literature:
In accordance with the ethnic composition of Manchukuo that the Japanese
and the Manchurians constitute a majority of the entire population, there
arise the need for these two sides to work and cooperate with each other in the
field of literature; otherwise, Manchukuo literature cannot exist...Manchukuo
literature is unique, because its two constituents revolve and move forward
like wheels of the cart...To follow the developmental trend of the state, it is
necessary to own a self consciousness of being part of the Manchukuo nation.
Within the spiritual entity realized by the fusion of these two ethnic groups, I
find the great dream of this state.1
In this connection, Hasegawa defined “the state-building spirit” of Manchukuo as
fostering a collaborative, equal and synthetic relationship between the Chinese and
the Japanese people and claimed it to be the guideline of Manchukuo literature,
whose fundamental role, he emphasized, was to facilitate the formation of a unified
nation as well as a new national consciousness. Moreover, Hasegawa pointed out
that in the main, there were three problems that Manchukuo literature had to
resolve for its future development. The first problem refers to the relation of
literature to politics. Taking the Soviet Union as a poor example, he strongly
opposed its mode of literary production that “puts literature under the government
control and seriously constrains the individuality of writers”; for him, the fact that
even such masterpieces as Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don was inevitably
reduced to the appendage of the “Bolshevik policy” appeared to be the most
frustrating thing. On this account, he came up with the slogan of “literary liberation
1
Hasegawa Shun 長谷川濬, “Kenkoku bungaku shiron” 建国文学私論, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼
(1939.5): 1-2.
42
movement” and assumed the promotion of world literature and the construction of
national culture to be the ultimate goal of Manchukuo literature, suggestively
defying the endeavor of the colonial regime to politicize and domesticate literary
activities. The second problem was about the status of the Manchurians and
Manchurian writers in the newly-forged Manchukuo literature. As Hasegawa
argued, “for all our companions in Manchukuo who commit to literature, there is one
thing they have to take into account that is the concern for the Manchurians,
particularly Manchurian writers.” 1 This concern was not only required by “the
necessity of the experienced environment,” but also proved to be “a conscientious act
that touches on the nature of Manchukuo literature.” Gu Ding and other Chinese
authors’ “observation on the Manchurian society” and their depictions of “the
impoverished masses struggling at the bottom of the society” and “the educated
youth perishing in the metropolis,” in Hasegwa’s opinion, provided Japanese men of
letters in Manchukuo with “numerous suggestions and references.” Because of that,
he suggested that Japanese intellectuals should pay close attention to the literary
activities of Manchurian writers, actively communicate with them, and imitate their
example of “loving this homeland and striving for an independent literary entity.” In
a similar way, Korean and Mongolian literati were also welcomed by him into this
“particular literary gathering of five ethnic groups.” It was from this eager longing
1
Ibid., 3.
43
for transcultural union in terms of literature that Hasegawa discovered a
representation of the “great artistic spirit” as manifested by Man’yōshū and the
classics of the ancient Greek. The third problem revolved around nature, the
desiring object of Manchukuo literature. In this regard, Hasegawa proposed to
“search for the agitating spirit of purity among all natural things” and
enthusiastically explained as follows:
Once those who were caressed by the peaceful landscape, trees, springs,
flowers, and birds in inland Japan come to the mainland, their interest in
literature will be awakened by its wild sceneries and grim weathers. They
cannot help framing a magnificent imagination...How [wonderful] is this real,
omnipresent beauty of nature and human life! There is nothing we can do
except for a dialogue and a fusion with it.
On this ground, he demanded that Manchukuo literature should “stand in the face of
nature,” dealing with “boundless plains, barren alkaline lands, the Mongolian steppe
surrounded by mountains and rivers, the Cossack tribes in the delta area of three
rivers, Russian villages, and the towers belonging to anonymous races,” and the
Japanese writers in Manchukuo should “go deep into dense forests, ascend to high
mountains, and swim along big rivers” to “obtain inspirations for their thoughts” and
to achieve “a great harmony with the beauty of nature,” so that “the state-building
spirit” that impenetrated Manchukuo literature would “soar at heart due to this true
affection for nature.” 1 Little wonder that at the end of the article, Hasegawa
reiterated the importance of nature, calling for “a divorce from stereotypes, an
1
Ibid., 4-5.
44
elimination of the stinks of old-styled literature” as well as “the romanticist
invention of a legend” modeling on the “magnificence” and “grandness” of the natural
and historical relics in Jehol, the so-called “romantic capital” of Manchukuo. This
legend, Hasegawa believed, could also “presage the tendency and crisis of all human
beings” and thus contribute to the reform of world literature by virtue of its
“cosmopolitan dimension.”1
In comparison with Hasegawa’s review informed by violent passions, the
“Exploration and Contemplation” by Kitamura Kenjirō seemed much more straight
and plain. Unlike Hasegawa, who began with a recourse to the transcendental spirit,
Kitamura discussed the essence of literature first. As opposed to the concept of “art
for art’s sake,” he stated, “even they (the art supremacists) themselves have their
own lives, and in this sense, life performs as the starting point and the destination of
all human beings. From a broader perspective, no matter how different a litterateur
is, he must write ‘for the human life.’”2 In other words, it was impossible for writers
to avoid the task of “observing human lifestyles” and “exploring the value of man’s
life.” On this ground, Kitamura proceeded to specify that when writers “put [pieces
of life] together and contemplated on the [real] world, a sense of beauty will emerge
as the cornerstone of the contemplative world,” and as a consequence, “the career of
writers was to observe on the one hand, and to contemplate on the other hand,” that
1
Ibid., 7-8.
2
Kitamura Kenjiō 北村謙次郎, “Tankyū to kanshō” 探求と観照, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1939.5): 61.
45
is to say, they “do not depict the external objet for its own purpose, but attempt to
make our lives meaningful through this depiction.”1 In this connection, Kitamura
intentionally divided literary production into two correlated layers: the basic layer
denoted a description of social realities and a reflection on “the way of life,” whereas
the upper one focused on a sense of beauty that transcended the real world,
requiring writers to keep a safe distance from the reality and approach its totality
through an aesthetic introspection. In the process of creative writing, these two
layers composed an organic and unified whole with realities serving as the
foundation of aesthetics and aesthetics sublimating the reality, and jointly
contributed to a realization of the significance of literature and the meaning of
human life. According to this understanding, Kitamura resisted any applications of
literary formalism, took “individual characters” as the essence of literary production,
and suggested writers to “return to the real world from the literary circle for
resources that could guarantee their distinctiveness.” When it came to Manchukuo
literature in his following discussion, the issue of individuality also played a vital
role as he particularly emphasized the importance of originality and creativity,
confronted with the intervention of political demands. That was why Kitamura
announced, “[Manchukuo] literature should not mention ‘harmony’ [among five
ethnic groups] as demanded by the national policy, or invoke the name of
1
Ibid., 63-64.
46
state-building literature to cater for the government. What occupies the center [of
Manchukuo literature] proves to be nothing but a craving for the purification of the
artistic soul...If that formalized literature in the name of state policy continues to
rampage unrestrainedly, the role of litterateurs will be reduced to nothing.”
Conversely, he argued that Manchukuo literature should involve “a reflection on the
entrenched life patterns” by individual writers and should overcome “the spiritual
poverty of the modern era” with “an unparalleled jouissance that ensues the chagrin
caused by thinking.” Apart from that, Kitamura also stressed the communal
character of Manchukuo literature, proposing to discuss “how Japanese people as a
group could survive in Manchuria and what characterizes the meaning of their lives”
via “the exploration of individualities” and “the ever-deepening process of
self-introspection.” The discussion of these common problems inherent in
Manchukuo literature, he claimed, would offer “a set of rules for their way of life,”
the rules termed by himself as “Manshū rōman in its conceptual form,” which
opposed the tendency of “legitimatizing the reality [of the colonial rule]” and
centered on the necessity to “confirm our resolution to be a mainlander” and to
“achieve enough passions for the accomplishment of this enterprise.”1 In order to
clarify why it was unavoidable to “access and get assimilated into the mainland-ity,”
Kitamura drew a profound comparison between classical Japanese aesthetics and
1
Ibid., 72.
47
that of the mainland China. As he analyzed, such Japanese aesthetic concepts as
wabi-sabi 侘び寂び (transient and aging beauty), yūgen 幽玄 (profound grace and
subtlety), and mono no aware 物の哀れ (sensitivity to ephemera) all originated from
the “bright and mild” environment of Japan; nonetheless, embodied by “the frigidity
in January and the yellow dusts in March,” the aesthetic ideals of the mainland
China relied heavily on “an endless and cyclic history” and took on the appearance of
“eternal darkness” as Manchurian writers portrayed. When the Japanese beauty of
“lightness,” “delicacy,” “sentimentality” and “triviality” encountered the mainland’s
“solemn and dismal countenance,” it would “suddenly dissolve.” In summary,
Kitamura asserted that lacking “the sociality and humanity modern literature
entails,” Japanese aesthetics were unable to “form a true spirit of resistance” and
betrayed “the romanticist nature ”; as “an evil way of romanticism,” they must be
eliminated from the sense of beauty. On the contrary, inspired by the “tragic
connotation” of “mainland-ity,” the Japanese writers in Manchuria should not only
learn from their Manchurian counterparts to convey “the eternal darkness” via a
literary representation of the natural landscape, the traditional culture and the
social customs of Manchuria, but also forsake their original cultural identity for “an
internalization of the mainland-ity” and “an accomplishment of the romantic spirit.”
This process was vividly depicted by Kitamura as “the expectation of death,” which
required the Japanese writers to deny themselves like “committing suicide” and to
get fused into the long history of the mainland as a “vain” “stepping-stone-like
48
object.” It was only in this way, Kitamura imagined, that “their emotions would be
purified, their souls would be reshaped,” and “their rebirth would be guaranteed in
the name of [historical] eternity.”1
On the ground of these two representative treatises of the Manshū rōmanha,
we are able to generalize some fundamental appeals underlying their literary
discourse. Firstly, placing their hopes of transcendence on the founding of
Manchukuo and such ideas as “harmony among five ethnic groups” and “the Elysium
of the kingly way,” members of the Manshū rōmanha tended to view Manchukuo as
a new possibility in human history and thus proposed to construct a corresponding
new form of literature and culture. Secondly, they identified with Manchukuo as an
idealized existence, but were adverse to the grim reality of the colonial rule.
Therefore, they emphasized the individuality of artists and insisted on the purity
and independency of literature, defying political intervention and cultural control in
any forms. Thirdly, at the same time of promoting the romantic spirit and a sense of
beauty, the Manshū rōmanha fully recognized the importance of daily life and
argued that literary production should be based on life experiences and aim at an
eventual union between passion and observation, poetry and truth. Fourthly, in
their eyes, Manchuria’s vast land, long history, diversified culture and multinational
symbiosis constituted a totally different world from Japan. In order to access this
1
Ibid., 76.
49
new reality, the Japanese intellectuals needed to negate themselves and
enthusiastically embrace it by means of literature. Fifthly, for the same reason, they
took literary outputs by Manchurian writers as the predominant part of Manchukuo
literature and accordingly advocated a close communication and an intimate
cooperation
with
them.
In
addition,
they
also
incorporated
writings
by
Manchuria-based Korean, Mongolian and Russian writers into the scope of
Manchukuo literature, appearing to be both accommodative and cosmopolitan.
Similarities and Differences Between the Manshū Rōmanha and Their
Counterpart in Japan
In fact, not long after the closure of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Yasuda
Yojūrō embarked on his initial journey to mainland China. In his travelogue titled
“Mongolian Frontiers,” he wrote, “at first, our state should take the lead to bid
farewell to the ideology of the 19th century. The problem is that Japan, a state that
has not yet finished its modernization enterprise, attempts to make a more
significant turn...This mission has been known to us and put into action since our
national concepts first came into being...It is the ‘Mongolian frontiers’ that symbolize
the beginning of Japan’s turn. I was totally disappointed with Beijing, and when I
50
arrived at the ‘Mongolian frontiers,’ this idea was instigated again.”1 Two years
later, Yasuda published another piece of literary criticism in Cogito with the title of
“About ‘Song Dedicated to Banners of the Manchukuo Emperor’” and directly related
the establishment of Manchukuo to his idea of “overcoming modernity”:
The incident in Manchuria shocked the soul of a great number of youths in
this era for the purity of its worldview...We don’t know the facts, but we
understand that Manchukuo is indeed marching forward. That is to say,
Manchukuo stands for the first bold experimentation of a new civilizational
concept and a new outlook succeeding the establishment of the French
Republic and the Soviet Union. In the process of viewing Manchukuo as a
revolutionary idea, we Nihon rōmanha manifest a state of germination.
In this regard, Manchukuo was considered by Yasuda Yojūrō to be a spiritual being
that transcended modern Western civilization, whose emergence, from his
perspective, not only created a new epoch for modern Japan and world history as a
whole, but also provided the Nihon rōmanha with a promises of new theoretical
dimensions. In other words, through his understanding about Manchukuo as a
turning point of modern Japanese intellectual history, Yasuda discovered a
possibility for the Nihon rōmanha to reform their previous proposals and to
germinate innovative hypothetical issues. As Hiromatsu Wataru 広松渉 concluded,
“he suddenly noted the revolutionary ideal of civilization Manchukuo conveyed in its
state-building ideology as well as a sheer transcendence over all modern Western
1
Yasuda Yojūrō 保田与重郎, Mōkyō 蒙彊 (Tōkyō: Seikatsusha, 1938), 9.
51
notions.”1 Hence his concerns for the “Asian continent” and the anticipation of a
rebirth of the Nihon rōmanha on this land.
Due to this anticipation, the publication of Manshū Rōman and the staging of
Manshū rōmanha turned out to be an intellectual breakthrough inherent in the
conceptual evolution of the Nihon rōmanha. Besides the fact that Manshū Rōman
emerged only two months after the cessation of Nihon Rōmanha as well as the
overlaps between them in name 2 and contributors, Kitamura Kenjirō explicitly
acknowledged the inheritance of the latter by the former: “Kemei Katsuichirō used
to summarize the volitions of the Nihon rōmanha with the following principles: the
advertisement of the poetic spirit as opposed to the mundane realism of modern
times, the acknowledgment of the national bloodline, and the impeachment against
the disguise of modern intellectuals. The spirit contained in Manshū rōman
(Manchurian romanticism) inherits what the Nihon rōmanha promoted not in the
sense of organizational consistence, but as its flooding and implementation. [Unlike
them], we should hold on to the virtue of silence.”3 As for the implication of the word
“flooding” used here, Japanese scholars had different interpretations. Nishihara
1
Hiromatsu Wataru 広松渉, “Kindai no Chōkoku” Ron「近代の超克」論 (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1989), 11.
It was worth noting that both the Nihon rōmanha and the Manshū rōmanha used 浪曼 instead of the
normal expression of 浪漫 in their names in order to indicate the distance of their stance from traditional notions of
romanticism.
2
3
72-73.
Kitamura Kenjiō 北村謙次郎, “Tankyū to kanshō” 探求と観照, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1939.5):
52
Kazumi thought that the juxtaposition of “inheritance” and “flooding” was an
application of the rhetoric device of “irony” that the Nihon rōmanha frequently
employed and suggestively expressed Kitamura’s objection to “the march of the
Imperial Army from northeast China to north China” and his hope that “the
Japanese expansion would stop within the boundaries of Manchukuo” lest a threat
to the stability of the colonial rule. Nishida Masaru 西田勝, by contrast, argued that
“regardless of what rhetorical devices are used in the aspect of language, it is
reasonable to explain it as a radical acceptance of the influence of the Nihon
rōmanha.” 1 Since Kitamura organized his discussion completely around their
relationship with the Nihon rōmanha and mentioned no current events or political
issues, Nishihara’s comment seemed to be an overinterpretation. Nevertheless,
Nishida oversimplified the statement for his omission of possible overtones. In
Japanese, hanran 氾濫 (flooding) literally denotes a situation in which an area of
land becomes covered with water and thus embodies a derogatory connotation of the
rampage of unpleasant things. In his definition on the spirit of Manshū rōman, it
was obvious that Kitamura adopted “flooding” to criticize the Nihon rōmanha as a
comparison other rather than refer to themselves negatively. Given the context of
the whole essay, this possibility turned out to be more plausible. Right after his
proposal of “the virtue of silence,” Kitamura continued to write, “though endless
1
Nishihara Kazumi 西原和海, Okada Hideki 岡田英樹, and Nishida Masaru 西田勝, “Manshū Rōman o
dō hyōkasuru ka” 満洲浪曼をどう評価するか, Shokuminchi Bunka Kenkyū 殖民地文化研究 (2002.1): 5.
53
chattering, what’s the use of it? We should explore the eternal value in silence and
start this arduous task of approaching and dissolving into the mainland-ty.”1 In this
connection, by ascribing “flooding,””endless chattering” to the Nihon rōmanha and
“practice,” “the virtue of silence” to themselves and setting up a sharp contrast
between these two groups, this statement implied a criticism against “the illusory
beauty” and “compulsory artificiality”2 of Nihon rōman (Japanese romanticism) as
well as a manifestation of their own distinctiveness. For the bifold purpose of
clarifying the origin and highlighting the difference, only words like “flooding” might
be able to communicate this indispensable subtlety and ambiguity.
Generally speaking, not unlike the Nihon rōmanha, Kitamura and his
companions also took an anti-modern stance in their reaction against the capitalist
modernity and as the starting point of their literary praxis. Among all their critiques
of the Western civilization, what Kizaki Ryū conducted proved to be the most typical
one:
A fin-de-siècle disturbance is pervading all modern states. It is needless to say
that this disturbance was by no means a novel thing, which sprouted at the
early stage of capitalism and became mature in the age of Imperialism. Hence
its prevalence all over the world. Those who attempt to change this situation
split into two powers, the left and the right wings, who have been engaged in
an continual conflict with each other. To make things worse, conservative
forces are still badgering us, bringing about a state of extreme disorders. Due
to this formidable pandemonium, the innocent soul of the youths is eroded
away. They are either depressed or irascible, endlessly altering their
1
2
Kitamura Kenjiō 北村謙次郎, “Tankyū to kanshō” 探求と観照, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1939.5): 73.
Kitamura Kenjirō 北村谦次郎, “Jihyō no shi to shinjitsu” 時評の詩と真実, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼
(1938.2): 169.
54
appearance with the ever-changing society and losing their original
nature...Gasping and groaning, they are bogged down deeper and deeper in
the mud.1
The “fin-de-siècle disturbance” Kizaki mentioned here referred to various social
problems brought by the uneven development of capitalism, “the left and the right
wings” indicated liberalism and socialism, the overarching social ethos of that time,
and the “pandemonium” pointed to what Kizaki called “the foul result of modern
capitalism” and the “predicament that should be removed from the evolutionary
path.” Undoubtedly, the attitude Kizaki held towards the capitalist society was
critical and militant, and the focus of his critique lied in a revelation of the spiritual
crisis modern social institutions evoked: the “ever-changing” character of modern life
forced people to transform their epistemological modes and cultural identities from
time to time and inflicted them with diverse symptoms of intellectual disability,
whose most intensive representation, as Kizaki concluded, was “the flooding of
Dadaism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Pragmatism, Neo-classicism, and other
isms.” Denouncing these modern intellectual trends as “trivial derivatives that are
short of originality,” he resonated with Yusuda Yojūrō in taking “the fulfillment of
the kingly way” and “a realization of the grand ideal of ethnic harmony” as the
foundation for “overcoming modernity.” Like Yasuda, he also intended to undertake
this task via literary creations and thereupon declared that “only Manchukuo
1
Kizaki Ryū 木崎龍, “Kensetsu no bungaku” 建設の文学, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol.
2 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 38-39.
55
literature can stand aloft outside the modern state of confusion.”1 His argument was
confirmed by other members of the Manshū rōmanha, including Kitamura Kenjirō,
who requested his companions to “combat the specious cultural [of modern times]
with a lofty manner of literary romanticism, a challenge against current fashions
and an advocation of poetry,” and Dan Kazuo, as he passionately proclaimed as
follows: “who will be called a poet in the future? Previous poets and men of letters
are not qualified for the title of litterateur any more. Except for them, our future
poets should not be entitled to the heroic reputation of the great warriors of national
reconstruction?” 2 Apparently, these claims all accorded with what the Nihon
rōmanha generalized as the “unrestrained uprising spirit of poetry” in nature.
However, the Manshū rōmanha was anything but “a Manchurian copy of the
Nihon rōmanha” as Nishida Masaru judged. Starting from the basic propositions
raised by the Nihon rōmanha, they eventually achieved an intellectual
breakthrough that enabled them to transcend and overcome the limitations of their
counterpart in Japan. In this process, it was the unevadable otherness of Manchuria
that played a vital part. Although Yasuda had already involved Manchukuo into his
agenda of a new civilizational mode and endowed it with a particular significance, it
performed merely as an ideological symbol with all its realities being intentionally
neglected. For one thing, whether the significance of Manchukuo could be realized
1
Ibid., 39.
2
Dan Kazuo 檀一雄, “Bungei hōkansetsu” 文芸奉還説, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1940.6): 191.
56
entirely depended on the agency of Japan, and what occupied the center of his
concerns was Japan’s own reorientation and reform, while the “mainland” was
utilized as a mere tool to serve this purpose. That was why Yasuda claimed “the
ideal of Manchukuo” to be “a mode of thinking that would transform the current
situation of Japan from a global perspective” and deliberately associated it with the
fabricated tradition of Japan’s “national concepts.” For another thing, Manchuria
was not only marginalized and symbolized, but also entered a hierarchy of
civilizations formulated by Yasuda Yojūrō:
Strictly speaking, the mainland has nothing to do with topography or natural
conditions. It belongs to the Imperial Army and exists as a sacred symbol of
romanticism. It was an obscure embryo that leads to the new idealism in the
future, that is to see, as an embryo of literature, the mainland constitutes an
expression of this obscurantism.1
As it turned out, Yasuda deprived Manchuria of its natural and social realities and
subordinated it to the symbolic system of the Japanese romanticism, within which, it
was defined as a primitive and obscure being, waiting for the colonization of the
Imperial Army, the pioneering force of modern civilization, to break away from its
backward state and to enter the vision of “history” for a progress into the future.
This dichotomy between Japan/civilization and mainland Asia/savagery had
dominated the relationship of Japan with its neighboring countries ever since the
Meiji era, and in this connection, ironically underpinned the epistemological pattern
1
Yasuda Yojūrō 保田与重郎, “Tairyku to bungaku” 大陸と文学, Shinchō 新潮 (1938.11), 65.
57
applied to Manchuria by the Nihon rōmanha, who claimed to have “overcome”
Japan’s modern experience.
In the discourse of the Manshū rōmanha, the aforementioned hierarchy was
fundamentally inverted. What they focused on was to “construct a distinctive culture
that perfectly fits the newly-emergent Manchukuo” and to explore “the independent
form and subject matters of Manchukuo literature” that were “anything but
derivatives of Japanese literature.” 1 Conversely, the influence of the Japanese
literary tradition was considered to be a form of “cultural invasion” exerted from the
outside, and therefore “there is no need to preserve it.”
2
Besides this
decentralization of Japanese culture in the cultural arena of Manchukuo, the
Manshū rōmanha proceeded to identify it with the very product of the capitalist
modernity, making it an object to be overcome. As Nishimura Shin’ichirō 西村真一郎
put it, “even if Japan has never belonged to America...the social ethos characterized
by the Ginza culture that she presents undoubtedly exposes a colonized worldview.”3
In the field of literature, as far as he was concerned, this zeitgeist also caused a
lamentable situation:
Kawabata Yasunari 川端康成 casts an incisive glance with his “terminal
eyes, ” and the “purity” of Yokomitsu Ri’ichi 横光利一 glares coquettishly, but
1
Kitamura Kenjiō 北村謙次郎, “Tankyū to kanshō” 探求と観照, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1939.5): 78.
See Tomita Kotobuki 富田寿, “Bungaku no mondai ni tsuite” 文学の問題について, Manshū Rōman 満
洲浪曼 (1938.1): 232.
2
3
Nishimura Shin’ichirō 西村真一郎, “Manshū bungaku no kihon gainen” 満洲文学の基本概念, Manshū
Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1939.5): 44.
58
both of them get lost in the process of self-fulfillment...Their addiction to
egotism disables the reflection on universal humanity with various noises and
leaves insignificant details in vain. For those who cannot find their standpoint
in reality, what to blame is not the poverty of literary criticism or that of
literary production, but the poverty of “life.”1
Due to the “meaningless and feckless” character of modern Japanese literature,
Kizaki believed that it only had “the demonstrative effect like the anatomy of apes,”
and for the development of Manchukuo literature, “it was necessary to draw lessons
from the Japanese literature, especially the literary pattern after the Meiji
Restoration, and to criticize and uproot it in a ruthless way.”2 In the same sense,
Kitamura Kenjirō defined Japanese literature represented by Man’yoshū and Genji
Monogatari 源氏物語 as an “evil way of romanticism” and proposed to “replace its
sentimental aspect” with the essence of “mainland-ity” so as to “open up a new
possibility for the romanticism to develop.” In accordance with that, Manchuria no
longer performed as the stagnant and obscure embryo, but turned into a dynamic
historical subject, which stood for a higher level of civilization for its denial of the
“outdated” modern Japan and foreshadowed “the future promise of the Great East
Asia” as Dan Kazuo enthusiastically commented.3
Because this conceptual turn, the discourse of “overcoming modernity” realized
its own transcendence by means of self-negation (e.g., the denial of the Japanese
1
Kizaki Ryū 木崎龍, “Kensetsu no bungaku” 建設の文学, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑,
vol. 2 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 41.
2
Ibid,. 38.
3
Dan Kazuo 檀一雄, “Gendai” 現代, in Shikyō Fūbutsuchō 新京風物帖 (1942), 2.
59
classics worshiped by the Nihon rōmanha) and immersion into otherness, the
“mainland-ity” in Kitamura’s sense. In the aspect of intellectual history, from
Kukuzawa Yukichi 福 澤 諭 吉
holistically
accepted
the
onward, modern Japanese intellectuals had
dichotomized
structure
of
West/civilization
and
East/anti-civilization, which served as one of the apriori premises of the Eurocentric
mode of modernization, and applied it to their outlooks on China. While emphasizing
Japan’s departure from Asia by virtue of modernization, they shaped China as the
epitome of the “stagnant Asia” and hence a “negative other” as opposed to the
civilized modern Japan. Even the sporadic reference to China by Asianists like
Okakura Tenshin 岡倉天心 as a state “sharing the same intellectual legacies with
Japan” was subsequently overshadowed by their statement that China had already
lost its traditional culture due to foreign invasions, and since “only Japan inherited
and deeply studied Asia’s rich historical resources,” it was “Japan’s great privilege”
to “accomplish the representative mirror of the entire Asia.”1 Notwithstanding their
self-claimed repudiation of the modern value system, the Nihon rōmanha also
paradoxically acceded to this Eurocentric worldview. As a consequence, in lack of a
firm standpoint in reality for detachment and transcendence, they had to rely on the
Japanese “classical culture,” which turned out to be a very reconstruction of modern
concepts, and the so-called “poetic spirit” that was framed by baseless
1
Okakura Tenshin 岡倉天心, Tōyō no Risō 東洋の理想 (Tōkyō: Tsukuba shobō, 1968), 8.
60
“self-imagination” and accordingly fell into a Münchhausen trilemma in logics; on
the other hand, by ascribing “obscurantism” to mainland Asia in their later
argument, they justified the military expansion of Japan as an overcoming
experimentation and transformed China into an “abject object” that could be
unscrupulously exploited and sacrificed for this “sublime” mission. In Yasuda’s
exclamation that “Japan initially experienced this romantic epoch and got rid of all
traces of pessimism; even though this great leap forward was implemented by
conquest and invasion, it still abounded in aesthetic values,” their discourse of
“overcoming modernity” completely became an ideological excuse that served
Japan’s imperialist policies. Nonetheless, the Manshū rōmanha reshaped and
revitalized this discourse by equipping it with a reality-based foundation and a new
historical orientation that were epitomized by the “mainland-ity,” because of which,
the long-existing Euro/Japan-centric mode of epistemology was overthrown, the
subjective agency of Asia/mainland was recognized, and an intersubjective
coexistence was promised. On the same ground, Takeuchi Yoshimi went on to “take
China as an approach” and base his idea of “overcoming modernity” on “China’s
resistant subjectivity.” To a certain degree, the Manshū rōmanha set a precedent for
Takeuchi, and given frequent cultural exchanges throughout the occupied China, it
might be possible that the formation of Tekeuchi’s idea was directly influenced by
them.
61
Literary Praxis of the Manshū Rōmanha
In the aspect of literary praxis, the “mainland-ity” was reified by the Manshū
rōmanha as the humanity, sociality, diversity and vigorousness of Manchukuo
literature.1 In short, the so-called humanity and sociality suggested that literary
production should be conducted on the basis of objectivity and for the purpose of
human life. As discussed above, Kitamura Kenjirō took “for the human life” as the
guideline of Manchukuo literature and put the “observation on man’s lifestyles” in
the first place in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding about the essence of
social realities. Moreover, to reconcile their appeals for objectivity with the intended
romantic spirit, Kitamura divided the writing process into two mutually
complementary steps of “exploration” and “contemplation,” claiming an integration
of them to be the prerequisite of a masterpiece. In “‘The Poetry and Truth’ of Current
Reviews,” he went a step further to use the image of “immersing into the beauty that
follows the flow of reality” to illustrate how to effectively integrate “exploration” and
“contemplation” in literary praxis and call the union of reality and beauty on this
ground “magnificent romanticism” that served as the highest aesthetic principle of
the Manshū rōmanha. As Kitamura emphasized, although this “magnificent
romanticism” bore the name of “romanticism,” it “by no means contradicts with
1
Henmi Yūkichi 逸見猶吉, “Kotoba o Karite” 言葉を借りて, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1938.2): 175.
62
literary realism or the beauty of reality; on the contrary, it is on the ground of realist
literature that magnificent romanticism could achieve its fully development.” 1
Comparatively, Kizaki explicitly argued that “literature should be conveyed by
everyday things” and “realism constitutes the precondition for all literary products.”2
Taking reference of Lunacharsky’s opinions, he advocated a “realism” that exceeded
the scope of “simple sketches of the real world” and reflected an explorative spirit
and a reality-oriented life attitude. This “realism as a life attitude” not only opposed
“a compromise with or an escape from social realities,” but also requested the
integration of “subjective ideals” and “scientific objectivity” and of “a critical spirit
for reality” and “the awareness of life struggles.” Obviously, the “realism” in Kizaki’s
sense formed a synonym for Kitamura’s “magnificent romanticism,” which was
termed as “mainland romanticism,” “ideal Manshū rōman,” and “pure romanticism”
by other members of the Manshū rōmanha and proved to be their common tenet.
Even if this “magnificent romanticism” agreed with the Nihon rōmanha on its
resistance against “literature of trivialities” and “vulgar naturalistic techniques,” it
drew a clear line between itself and their anti-reality and imagination-based literary
stance. Therefore, Kitamura vehemently criticized the Nihon rōmanha as he
stressed that “we need a down-to-earth position instead of an illusory one to
Kitamura Kenjirō 北村谦次郎, “Jihyō no shi to shinjitsu” 時評の詩と真実, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼
(1938.2): 169.
1
2
Kizaki Ryū 木崎龍, “Bungaku no hyōjō” 文学の表情, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1938.2): 151.
63
interpret the romantic spirit.” 1 For the same reason, fiction, which is able to
“describe possible things under a seemingly impossible condition,” rather than
poetry became the most popular genre for the Manshū rōmanha.
What corresponded to the respect for reality was an accommodative attitude
towards literary works of different styles and different subject matters. According to
Kitamura’s saying, the contributors of Manshū Rōman were “not limited to its
members, but included writers from various places; since its very beginning, it aimed
at an inter-disciplinary journal rather than a little magazine.” 2 Therefore, the
writings published in Manshū Rōman covered literature, fine art, music, films, and
other cultural fields and involved a series of genres like fiction, poetry, miscellaneous
essays, literary criticism, and so on. From a stylistic perspective, in the journal,
there were not only Yokota Fumiko and Imai Ichirō’s 今井一郎 lyrical pieces, but
also realistic works that exposed serious social problems in Manchukuo by such
writers as Takeuchi Masaichi 竹内正一 and Ushijima Haruko, not to mention
stories like Hasegawa Shun’s The Ursul River, which engaged the fantasy of the
ethnic harmony and exuded exuberant romantic passions: “romanticism, realism,
and modernism crisscrossed the journal with each other and jointly composed a vivid
1
Kitamura Kenjirō, “Batsu ni kaete” 跋にかへて, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1940.6): 249.
2
Kitamura Kenjirō 北村謙次郎, Hokuhen Bojōki 北辺慕情記 (Tōkyō: Daigaku shobō, 1960), 74.
64
and impassioned literary existence.”
1
As noted before, Manshū Rōman’s
contributors encompassed litterateurs from the Sakkubun School, the Ika 医科
School and the “Xinjing Group of Literature and Art,” and the participation of Ōuchi
Takao, the patron saint of Manchukuo literature who held a Marxist vision on
literary activities, made the diversity even more conspicuous. To explain why he
volunteered to be a member of the Manshū rōmanha, Ōuchi persuasively argued, “I
think the name ‘Manshū rōman’ does not refer to a specific literary school and is
used only for the sake of convenience. In my personal opinion, it actually stands for
Manchukuo literature as a whole.”2 It was in this sense that Kawamura Minato 川
村湊 considered the magazine of Manshū Rōman to be “the vehicle of Manchukuo’s
mainstream ideology.”3 No wonder that when Manshū Rōman ended its publication,
Hagasewa and Kizaki both joined the Sakubun School, who were mainly engaged
with literary realism. This diversity was also intensively reflected in the acceptance
and promotion of literary outputs by Manchurian writers. How Kitamura and
Hasegawa favored Manchurian authors in their theoretic analysis has been
examined before, and in the literary praxis of Manshū Rōman, it appeared to be
more intelligible to us. There were Manchurian writers’ writings in each volume of
Hayama Hideyuki 葉山英之, “Manshū Bungakuron” Danshō 「満洲文学論」断章 (Tōkyō: Sankōsha,
2011), 292.
1
2
3
Ōuchi Takao 大内隆雄, “Watashi no hata” 私の旗, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1938.2): 171.
Kawamura Minato 川村湊, Bungaku kara Miru “Manshū” 文学から見る「満洲」, (Tōkyō: Yoshikawa
kōbunkan, 1998 ), 50.
65
Manshū Rōman, which added up to nine fictions and four critical essays in total and
accounted for more than one fifth of the entire collection, and the later the
publication came out, the larger their proportion was. Insomuch as only Ōuchi Takao
was able to translate Chinese literary works into Japanese among the Japanese
intellectuals in Manchuria, little wonder that Kitamura so urgently invited him to
join the group. Those Manchurian writers related to Manshū Rōman not only
included Yiwenzhi 艺文志 companions, who kept close contact with the Manshū
rōmanha, but also comprised authors of the “native-land literature” like Shi Jun 石
军 and Tian Bing 田兵 and even such anti-Japanese intellectuals as Yuan Xi 袁犀,
an underground CCP member, and Wang Ze 王则, who died later in prison for his
resistance activities. In addition, the Manshū rōmanha often organized symposiums
to communicate with Manchurian writers, whose involvement into Manshū
bunwakai also depended on Kitamura’s strong support.1 The stories Manchurian
writers presented in Manshū Rōman mainly dealt with the miserable life of the
working class and took on a dismal and gloomy tone, which constituted a literary
representation of the “eternal darkness” in Kitamura’s sense. For that reason,
Nishita Masaru called these works “an unfolding of Chinese proletarian literature,”
emphasizing that their existence in Manshū Rōman brought an “usual sense of
1
Nishihara Kazumi 西原和海, Okada Hideki 岡田英樹, and Nishida Masaru 西田勝, “Manshū Rōman o
dō hyōkasuru ka” 満洲浪曼をどう評価するか, Shokuminchi Bunka Kenkyū 殖民地文化研究 (2002.1): 8.
66
heaviness” to the journal. 1 It was also worth mentioning that Manshū Rōman
published the “On Film Acting” by Iris Barry, a highly reputed American female film
critic, and offered detailed introductions to Russian literature. This cosmopolitan
pose made up another important facet of the diversity of the journal.
The character of vigorousness imposed by the Manshū rōmanha on Manchukuo
literature, among other things, found its embodiment in the depiction of the
imposing and grim natural environment of Manchuria as well as the obdurate
personality of the Manchurian people. As was discussed before, Kitamura Kenjirō
regarded “the frigidity in January and the yellow dusts in March” as the natural
symbol of the “mainland-ity,” whereas Hasegawa Shun invoked Jehol’s “boundless
plains” and “barren alkaline lands” to convey his romanticist ideals. In the same
sense, Oka Masutarō 丘益太郎 wrote an critical essay titled “Longing for Natural
Descriptions” and borrowed Brandes’ theoretical framework to examine the
relationship among nature, diasporic literature and romanticism in a more
systematic way. In his opinion, romanticism derived from the literary products by
exiled French writers: in order to escape wars and turmoils caused by the French
Revolution, they either led a reclusive life in “the serene villas of Switzerland“ or
roamed around “the desolate wasteland in North America”; inspired by “the
“wilderness, primary forests, virgin lands” and distinctive “natural sceneries,” they
1
Ibid., 9.
67
spontaneously fostered “a potential longing for a new world” as well as a sense of
resistance against the eighteenth-century literature that “denied imagination and
sentimentality,” “lacked natural temperaments,” and “had a tendency for dogmatic
rationalism.” The new form of literature that they invented to convey this longing
and resistant sense, according to Oka Masutarō, was the predecessor of diasporic
literature, and its “overwhelming passion” and “rebellious consciousness” elicited by
nature formed a synonym for literary romanticism. On this account, Oka asserted
that “the romantic spirit originated from nowhere else but the primitiveness of
nature.” 1 By tracking down the causal relationship between nature, diasporic
literature and romanticism in history, he accordingly claimed Manchukuo literature
with its diasporic origin to be a literature that should carry forward the romantic
spirit against modern civilization, and this literary romanticism, as he put it, should
be reified in an unparalleled affection nature. Therefore, he highlighted the
magnitude of “the wilderness in north Manchuria, the Hulunbruir pasture land,
deep forests along East frontiers and mountainous areas of Jehol” for the
Manchurian romanticism and took “a hunger for the depiction of nature” as the most
urgent task of Manchukuo Literature. 2 To supplement Oka’s viewpoint, Ōuchi
Takao foregrounded the “the oppression of severe natural conditions on the
Oka Masutarō 丘益太郎, “Shizen byōsha ni ueru” 自然描写に餓える, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼
(1939.5): 110.
1
2
Ibid, 114.
68
Manchurian people” and their “bold, generous, and steadfast characters” in the face
of the “vastness and grandness of nature” in terms of “northern properties,” a
concept that was employed by him to substitute “mainland-ity.”1 In other words,
Ōuchi not only requested the Japanese writers in Manchuria to “take root in the
specific natural environment of this land,” but also suggested that they “depict the
Manchurian laborers as much as possible” and present “serious harms brought by
the semi-feudal social structure to them.”2 These concerns for nature and the rural
society were integrated with the romanticist style and evolved into a series of
eulogies for the natural landscapes and the impoverished people of Manchuria,
which epitomized the Manshū rōmanha’s literary praxis.
Generally speaking, the fictional writings of the Manshū rōmanha could be
classified into three types according to their thematic traits. The first type was
informed by the theme of natural origins of mankind and the encroachment of
human nature by modern civilization, which was most commonly seen in Manshū
Rōman. Hasegawa Shun’s Myth, the first literary work published in the journal,
offered a supreme interpretation of this theme. Dealing with “my” personal
experience and jumping back and forth between memory and the real world, Myth
told us an uncomplicated story. Not long after the founding of Manchukuo, “I,” who
Ōuchi Takao 大内隆雄, “Manshū bungaku no tokushitsu” 満洲文学の特質, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼
(1939.5): 58.
1
2
Ibid., 58-59.
69
had just got married, was ordered to leave Japan for Da Hinggan Mountains located
in the northeastern frontier areas of Manchukuo to work there as a surveyor. In the
second year, “my” wife gave birth to Reiko, the first daughter of “my” family. In the
admirable and mystical natural environment and with the loving care of the Russian
peasant girl, Reiko sturdily grew up and lived a cheerful life, which also made “me”
“incomparably happy.” Due to “my” change of job, “I” had to move to Xinjing, the
capital and the biggest metropolis of Manchukuo together with the entire family.
Having experienced “a winter full of smokes from burning coals,” Reiko contracted
with acute cerebral meningitis on the eve of her four-year-old birthday and hereof
passed away. “My” wife and “I” lapsed into endless grief, due to which, the
psychological gap between “us” became increasingly wide. By accident, I encountered
Keiko at a street cafe, who looked charming and just like a grown-up Reiko, and was
uncontrollably fascinated with her appearance. With a clear sense of absurdity and
after a closer contact, “I” surprisingly found “my” affection for her. When exposed to
the carnal beauty of Keiko’s naked body as she intentionally tried on swimming suit
in the presence of “me,” “I” could not help but kissed her out of sexual desire. At the
very moment, the dead face of Reiko loomed before my eyes and made “me”
extremely remorseful. For that reason, “I” cut off any communications with her from
that day on. Soon after, “I” heard that Keiko died from peritonitis in hospital, and at
the same, “my” wife had pregnancy again. In this allegorical story, Hasegawa Shun
subtly arranged a dichotomized structure. On the one side, there were colorful and
70
lovely natural sceneries of Da Hinggan Mountains as well as the happiness “my”
family enjoyed there, both of which were well preserved in “my” reminiscence: “I”
still remembered that “blooming flowers sent forth their fragrance in mountains,”
“white clouds shrouded the sun and cast gigantic shades over the peak,” “the breath
of birch trees lingered on below to purify the air,” “stars scintillated before the set of
the red moon,” and our “house made of stones” was “surrounded by birch forests and
sunflowers a couple of meters tall” and embellished with “creamy walls,” “big
chimneys” and “dark blue blinds,” “quite resembling that in a fairy tale”; from “my”
perspective, they represented “an unreal beautiful dream.” On the other side, there
were “streets paved with asphalt,” “sickrooms under the dim light,” “inauspicious
funeral songs sung by fowls outside the window,” “sentimental depressions,”
“endless regret and chagrin,” and “flashy neon lights that symbolized the ugliness of
the carnal world,” all of which constituted the realities “I” was experiencing.
Undoubtedly, the natural world composed by the former was bright, beautiful, and
vigorous, while the civilized world represented by the latter appeared to be gloomy,
hideous, and always pertinent to death. This antithesis, as Hasegawa depicted, was
further embodied and intensified by the nexus between Reiko and Keiko, two central
characters of the story. Despite their homogeneity in nature implied by the exterior
resemblance, Reiko, who was nourished by nature, had “big black eyes glittering like
stars” and was born as “a mysterious symbol of starlight”; she always “kept smiling
and offered her hands,” bringing “me” and “my” wife “dream-like” gaieties. In sharp
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contrast, Keiko possessed “plumb and firm hips,” “curvaceous stature,” and “slender
waist” and continuously tempted “me” as a modern femme fatale, swamping me into
the “hell” of fleshliness and a fear for incest. When Reiko and Keiko both entered the
depth of “my” thoughts and confused me with their ambiguous relationship in the
labyrinth of memory and reality , they were not real existence any more, but proved
to be the projection of “my” inner consciousness at certain stages: what Reiko
incarnated was a well-rounded “I” in the natural state; with “my” arrival at Xinjing,
this “I” also “perished” like Reiko under the threat of modern civilization and
degenerated into another “I” full of desires and destructive powers as embodied by
Keiko; I was torn apart between the memory of Reiko and “my” intimate contact
with Keiko, and it was not until the crucial moment when I was about to be
conquered by the alienated self once and for all that “the dead face of Reiko emerged
in my mind like that of a goddess” and saved me out of the “myth” of modern
civilization, guiding me back to “austerity” and “innocence”; the death of Keiko and
“my” wife’s new pregnancy, among other things, symbolized a restoration of the
original “I.” Attributing nature and modern civilization to the opposite poles and
taking “my” entanglement with Reiko and Keiko as a symbol of human struggles
against self-alienation, Hasegawa not only figuratively revealed the potential of sins
and destructions inherent in the modern society, but also anticipated a possibility of
self-redemption by virtue of the symbolic return to nature.
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Compared to Myth, Kitamura Kenjirō’s Crane told a different story, but
transmitted a similar scenario: the heroine Mizuki Aiko often heard that she was the
daughter of the crane since her childhood. Although this rumor turned out to be a
fraudulence by servants, Aiko still firmly believed in it. One day, she felt an
uncontrollable urge and asked her mother where she came from. In an outburst of
reprimands, she began to know that she was a bastard born by her father’s mistress.
At the age of seventeen, Aiko lost her father, and her family was in straitened
circumstances. In order to make a living, she went to Harbin and worked as a
saleswoman at a grocery store. The shopkeeper’s son Reisaburō fell in love with her
and took her to a suburban forest. At the juncture when he held Aiko in arms and
tried to molest her, she suddenly recollected the rumor that she was the crane’s
daughter. In great surprise, she fled to the depth of the forest and soon disappeared
from the scene. In this connection, though carrying the original sin of civilization as
a product of adultery, Aiko was able to break away from this sinful identity under
the natural influence and grew into the crane’s daughter, a symbolic child of nature.
Nevertheless, when stepping into the world, she successively encountered her
father’s death, the decline of the family, the abandonment of her by her step mother,
and a series of misfortunes caused by the evilness of the modern civilization and
barely became a rich man’s plaything like her real mother. It was her faith in nature
as represented by the rumor of her natural origin that saved her. As she disappeared
in the depth of the forest, Aiko eventually realized her return to nature and fulfilled
73
the process of self-redemption. If we can claim that Myth focused on the
estrangement from humanity in the modern society, Crane, by contrast, dealt more
with how heavily mankind depended on nature for his resurrection.
The same theme also informed Yokoda Fumiko’s Beautiful Elegy and was
interpreted in a more sketchy and more sentimental way: two Japanese and one
Russian juveniles formed a company and wandered about the grassland, who found
a nascent sparrow, caught it, and played with it as a toy. Then another Russian boy
came, whose left arm totally disappeared below the shoulder and legs withered like
straw. Falling over to the ground, he was cursed and left alone by the company. He
then sat still with the dead body of the sparrow in his hands and felt wholeheartedly
joyful. On the surface, Yokota merely presented a simple episode of daily life without
much reference to the beauty of nature and the evil of civilization; however, the
images and characters of this story were even more symbolic and suggestive. The
abuse of the sparrow by three juveniles signified the exploitation of and the damage
to nature by human beings, and their cruel attitude to the disabled boy typified how
human beings treated their intimate fellows. Those who committed sins were just
adolescents and from different races, which demonstrated that the innermost part of
human nature had been encroached by modern civilization. The deformed and
emaciated body of the Russian boy who came later, on the other hand, hinted at how
vulnerable the benign part of humanity was. Although the image that he held the
dead sparrow in his hands symbolized a reunion between man and nature, his
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helplessness and the sparrow’s impossibility to revive overshadowed the happy
ending with a sense of death. In comparison with the affirmative belief in
self-redemption held by Myth and Crane, what Beautiful Elegy conveyed took on a
pessimistic feature. Through a touch of sadness, Yokota Fumiko not only expressed
her despairing visions on the modern civilization, but also suspected the romantic
spirit per se.
The second familiar type encompassed works that intended to promote a
transcendent spirit of freedom based on the celebration of nature, among which,
Hasegawa Shun’s short story Wang Riding on the Duck proved to be the most
outstanding one. It adopted the form of a fairy tale and depicted the ephemeral but
unrestrained life of Wang, a vagabond by nature: Wang was born to be a vagabond
with no parents, siblings, or relatives, and he could not remember anything that
happened before. It was said that he “originated from water drops condensed by
white clouds flowing in the sky” or was “the innocent baby brought from an unknown
state and left behind by the fierce wind of dusts that shaded the sun over the
Mongolian Steppe.” He himself also regarded begging as a “holy mission rendered by
the heaven to him,” deciding to live a vagrant life forever. Every day, he would come
to the earth mound outside the city where “grew a couple of tall willow trees, covered
tender green grass, and meandered a small river at below” and took a rest there.
“Showered by beautiful moonlight at night” and “looking up at the vast free sky,” he
felt extremely happy in the embrace of the nature and with an aspiration for
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freedom. Wang had visited different places and seen various natural sceneries.
These experiences altogether composed a “beautiful poem” in his heart. Though
despised by other people and suffering from every hardship of life , he still
maintained his initial innocent nature “just like a god.” One day, he went to a
restaurant in the city to beg for food, whose chef gave him a piece of roasted duck.
The shopkeeper next to them happened to see that, snatched the duck from his
hands, and kicked him out down to the street. The delectable smell of duck that
lingered on his fingers, along with “colorful neon lights, flows of traffic, charming
film posters, and the crowded night fair”, constituted a seductive picture looming
large in his mind, due to which, he gave up begging at the age of twenty and became
a coolie who chopped down woods for a living and “slept in filthy trucks.”
Constrained in the working camp, he heard his colleagues talking about the disgrace
of begging and its violation of social institutions, and spontaneously doubted that
statement: “I was born of a vagabond. Is that not a mandate of heaven? The attempt
of great politicians to discipline us as workers really counts as a lofty task? Does it
really make sense to look down upon vagabonds but venerate politicians as a
so-called common sense of the society?”1 In the meanwhile, the “wind-like” Wang
was increasingly disgusted with the monotonous travails and chose to be a vagabond
again in response to “the summons of the boundless wilderness.” When he once
1
Hasegawa Shun 長谷川濬, Ahiru ni Notta Ō 家鴨に乗った王, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1938.2): 26.
76
again “took the earth as his bed” and felt “the spirit of freedom” permeating his body,
he forgot his name in “the all-inclusive embrace of nature,” and “the surrounding
flowers and trees, the glowing sun in the sky, and the flowing clouds were all
internalized as an integral part of himself.” From this moment on, “a new
consciousness secretly germinated in his brain,” driving him to “open his free wings”
and disseminate “his unrestrained soul” around “every corner of desert, grassland,
forests, seashores and cities.” With the advent of the frigid winter, the entire world
was covered by snows. However, Wang still strolled in the streets as other people
comfortably cuddled in their cozy houses. His consciousness gradually faded away,
and his nose also became senseless. At this point, he surprisingly found that the
roasted ducks hung in the restaurant flew down in succession and walked to him,
one of which grew as big as a pony, carried him on the back, and soared up. They
passed through clouds and crossed over forests, rivers, and seas. The sight below was
no longer that of the winter, but turned into a spring scene in which plum blossoms
all came out, green meadows spread hither and thither, and livestock grazed
everywhere. The duck finally stopped at a peasant house with Wang’s parents and
siblings coming out and crying, “hey, Wang, welcome back.” In the imagined
laughter of his “family members,” Wang’s respiration grew fainter and fainter, and
he soon felt himself sinking into an eternal darkness. In the early morning of the
next day, Wang’s frozen body was found by the side of the street. In this story, for
one thing, Wang was consciously portrayed by Hasegawa as the son of nature, who
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bore no historical memories, had no blood bonds with the human society, and was
considered to be the descendant of yellow dusts, the natural symbol of
“mainland-ity” in Kitamura’s eyes. For another thing, he represented a spirit of
freedom, which was reinforced by his choice of begging, an independent and drifting
way of life, as the predestined life-time pursuit. As nature’s son, he had never been
contaminated by evils of human civilization and was able to pursue an absolute
liberty without any concerns; the homeless and unrestrained lifestyle of a
vagabonds, in turn, enabled Wang to access and get faded into nature at his
pleasure. The characters of naturalness and freedom, which conflated and thrived
with his spiritual exploration in the textual world, jointly typified the essence of the
romantic spirit. When Wang was tempted by the material world and accordingly lost
his freedom, it was the call of nature that awakened him, making him deeply doubt
political propagandas and social institutions and acquire a clearer understanding
about how valuable freedom was. As he returned to his previous lifestyle and
wholeheartedly embraced nature once again, the last sense of distance from nature
that lurked deeply in his mind eventually vanished. As a consequence, he suddenly
realized his union with all natural objects and the birth of a new consciousness
underpinned by nature. That was why Hasegawa symbolically described that
“towards the surging cloud seas over the horizon,” Wang, who had confirmed his
faith in begging, “marched forward with a swifter and sturdier stride than ever
before.” In the last part of the story that quite resembled Anderson’s The Little
78
Match Girl, Hasegawa proceeded to contrive the plot that as Wang was approaching
his end, the roasted duck that epitomized the temptation of the material world since
his childhood submitted to him, helping him to cross over the formidable winter and
unite with his family in fairyland. This plot setting not only symbolized Wang’s final
return to the home of nature by means of death, but also implied a transcendence of
the free spirit over all earthly beings, including physiological desires (the roasted
duck), severe natural conditions (the frigidity of winter), and even the threat of
death.
In Hasegawa Shirō’s 長谷川四郎 A Madman’s Diary, the spirit of freedom, in
comparison, was intensively represented by tens of thousands of ordinary
Manchurian laborers in the real world. As he vividly depicted, Manchurian peasants
had an inborn tendency for freedom and tended to transmit it through pieces of
hymns to nature and life:
We will sing for the soy in Manchuria, for the soy disseminated all over the
world from our peasants’ hands. We will sing for the tough geographic
conditions, for the coldness of the grim winter, and for the authenticity of life
under a heavy pressure. We will sing for the incessant sunset and sunrise, for
the starry night interspersed with northern constellations, for the steppe that
lay in the depth of silence accumulated for centuries, for the real happiness
underlying all tribulations. Listen! The sound from the gears freely operated
by those muscular arms was impending.1
No matter how hard the life was and how austere the natural environment
appeared, Manchurian peasants, as Hasegawa Shirō glorified, had never stopped
1
Hasegawa Shirō 長谷川四郎, Kyōjin Nikki 狂人日記, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1938.2): 63.
79
working for centuries. They “freely” used tools in their travails and “freely” extolled
nature, labors, and all lovely things; it was freedom that formed the authenticity and
the foundation of their life. Moreover, this free spirit also took root in the
Manchurian dock coolies who “were stained all over with coal dusts,” but owned
“unlimited strength like big trees,” and permeated their “voiceless cries.” Inspired by
them, the “madman” himself also would like to take “a lonely skiff” to a “virgin green
island” and “sang aloud there,” or “passed over barren mountains and wastelands” to
express his “vitality of youth” to the fullest. In this sense, he proved to be a
personification of the romantic freedom.
As the Manshū rōmanha’s vehement assault on modern civilization departed
from its symbolic scope and headed into the real world, it would be inescapably
involved into a fierce conflict with the social realities of political coercion, national
confrontation and cultural depression under the colonial rule. As a result, to satirize
and criticize the colonial politics constituted another important theme of their
fictions. For example, at the end of Wang Riding on the Duck, Wang was frozen to
death on the eve of the National Day of Manchukuo. Hasegawa wittingly described
the grandeur of the celebration ceremony in details, mentioning national flags
fluttering everywhere, glittering badges worn by the imperial soldiers, parades
playing military marches and wandering along the street, and the bright-colored
fireworks that pervaded the sky. In this seemingly happy and peaceful circumstance,
Wang’s dead body “lay bare by the street” and was then thrown into a truck and
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“carelessly taken away.” On the one side, Wang died miserably from hunger and
coldness with nobody caring about him; on the other side, the colonial government
spent a huge amount of money on the national day celebration to acclaim its power
and merits. This stark contrast exerted a remarkable sarcastic effect, challenging
and undermining the legitimacy of the colonial ideology. Furthermore, Wang’s death
corresponded to his colleague’s prophecy that “the emergence of beggars betokens
the collapse of a state,” which foreshadowed the upcoming breakdown of the colonial
empire. In a similar way, A Madman’s Diary drew a marked comparison of
prostitutes “made in China” with their Japanese clients, and of Chinese coolies in
rags with well-dressed Japanese managers in order to highlight the unequal power
relationship between the colonizers and the colonized and to reveal “how feeble we
(the Japanese people) are” while hearing the cries of the Manchurian masses. Among
all fictional writings included in Manshū Rōman, Hasegawa Shun’s another
masterpiece Datong Street was the one most deeply engaged in this sarcasm. Taking
the Datong Street as its setting, this novella comprised seven stories that were
either sorrowful or amusing and touched on the everyday life of various social
classes and different ethnic groups in the capital of Manchukuo. By stringing these
fragments together, it presented a panoramic image of the dire situation of the
Manchurian society. In street cafes that were called “Xinjing’s cultural zone,” people
struggled with each other for a vacant seat and viewed those who just ordered a cup
of water and refused to leave as “cultural enemies,” transforming this elegant place
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into “the realm of asuras” and a “sample of the strife for subsistence”1 ; in the
ballroom, wearing sunglasses and fancy foreign dresses, women from the upper
social class frivolously flirted with a rich man in American-styled black shirt, while
the player couple next to them could hardly make a living and suffered from the
forthcoming unemployment, abuses by perverse officials and reprimands from their
clients, all of which were conveyed the “grieved melody” they played; at the
department store, male customers took the saleslady as a commodity, telling dirty
jokes in her face and even sexually harassing her; as the climax of the novella,
someone mischievously scattered fake one-hundred-dollar notes in the gust, causing
an “unprecedented havoc” in the Datong Street: “gentlemen” and “fair ladies” who
just “looked graceful” and “behaved politely” competed to rush into the brawl for
money regardless of their social status,” “typists forgot working, people left the
ballroom completely empty, coffee gave off its heat in vain, and everybody walked
around with the wind to grab more notes, blocking out the traffic albeit the warnings
of the policemen.”2 All these scenes, especially the aforementioned climactic farce,
drastically revealed the hypocrisy, cupidity and peremptoriness of the colonial ruling
class as well as how hard and miserable the life of the oppressed majority was. In
sharp contrast, the accounting-report-like enumeration of “endless rows of modern
architectures, flat and smooth roads paved with asphalt, neatly planted street trees”
1
Hasegawa Shun 長谷川濬, Daidō Daikai 大同大街, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1939.3): 11.
2
Ibid., 20.
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and “the beautiful leg contour of office girls” in Xinjing, a “newly-prospering
metropolis” full of amazing surprises,” at the beginning of the novella indeed made a
mockery of all the clichés of the colonial propaganda. As a matter of fact, this
sarcasm not only derived from the immanent hostile attitude held by the Manshū
rōmanha towards the modern society, but was also directed against the state
apparatus of Manchukuo in a suggestive way by linking the so-called “state policies”
with ironical matters. For example, “the diaper for the horse’s exclusive use” was
exaggerated by Hasegawa as “a world-famous invention of sanitary facility” by
Manchukuo; on the surface, Manchukuo’s young officials went to the cafe for
“implementing state policies and carrying out the works,” but in fact, they merely
gossiped and shirked their duties there; those company staffs who called themselves
men of letters unscrupulously squandered public funds and employed “an elegant,
refined and pure language to eulogize Manchukuo” with their “great talents of
boasting of the pig as a seraph”; a number of cultural elites of the colonial
government were planning to establish a national club for artists “to meet the
demand of state policies and to improve the healthy development of Asian
literature,” but the first thing that came into their mind was to open a top-grade pub
in the club so that they could “quaff beers in a roof garden during the summertime”;
when the politicians who were delivering a speech on state policies in public saw the
fluttering of the money notes, they also jumped and stretched to get them as if they
were playing a “mass game.” In these ridiculous acts, the ideological veil that
83
wrapped over “state policies” and the colonial discourse was gradually ripped off.
Hence the betrayal of their hypocritic and empty interior.
Although the Manshū rōmanha seemingly took Manchukuo’s “state-building
spirit” as the tenet of their literary praxis and a civilizational ideal that enabled
them to transcend the capitalist modernity, in the writing process, the very spirit
was overweighed and neutralized by depictions of the reality. This ambivalent
stance reflected a distinctly ambiguous relationship between them and the colonial
regime. In his monograph on the origin of the Japanese colonialism, Karatani Kōjin
柄谷行人
used the concept of “approximate similarity” to define its most
distinguished feature, indicating that the Japanese colonists tended to highlight
their racial and cultural similarities with the colonized people as well as a bond of
common interests under the threat of the Western invasion in order to involve them
as volunteers into the colonial enterprise and to provide validity for the military
expansion.1 The “state-building spirit,” as characterized by the slogans of “harmony
among five ethnic groups” and “Elysium of the Kingly way” that dominated
Manchukuo's official ideological discourse, undoubtedly formed an ultimate
expression of the “approximate similarity.” It deliberately evaded the social reality of
Manchukuo as Japan’s colony, ostensibly stressed an intimate collaboration between
the colonizers and the colonized on the basis of Confucian ideals to overcome the
1
See Karatani Kōjin 柄谷行人, “Nihon shokuminchishugi no kigen,” 日本殖民地主義の起源, in Kindai
Nihon to Shokuminchi 近代日本と殖民地, vol. 4 (Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 1993) , 57.
84
Western mode of modernization, and disguised this puppet state as a political
experiment opposing the modern polity of nationalism and thereupon a
ground-breaking invention in world history. This false revolutionary discourse had
much in common with that of the Manshū rōmanha and was consequently utilized
by them to carry on their appeals for “overcoming modernity.” Obviously, the
colonial regime had noticed this commonality, trying to domesticate the Manshū
rōmanha’s literary praxis for the propaganda purpose. Therefore, it accommodated
and even supported their activities, as was manifested by the fact that when
Kitamura Kenjirō sought funding from the public, it was the “Association for
Manchurian and Japanese Cultures” that helped him, and this association was
launched by Koiso Kuniaki 小磯国昭, the chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, and
directly placed under the government control. In addition, among members of the
Manshū rōmanha, Kizaki Ryū worked for the Kōbōsho, Kitamura was hired by the
Man’ei, and other key figures similarly held posts in state-operated cultural
organizations. This conspicuous official background also contributed to the
magnitude of the “state-building spirit” in the Manshū rōmanha’s conceptual
system. Nonetheless, from the very beginning, their borrowing of the official ideology
was indeed of a strategic selection. In fact, as prescribed by the “Manifesto of the
Founding of Manchukuo” that was promulgated on March 1st, 1932, the
“state-building spirit” not only referred to “ethnic harmony” and “the kingly way,”
but also included the “open-door policy” and the principle of “conforming to the
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mandate of heaven and pacifying the subjects”1, which were respectively related to
colonial exploitation and “the divine right of kings” and consciously filtered by the
Manshū rōmanha out of their theoretical concerns. With the escalation of the
Sino-Japanese War, the colonial government imposed stricter control over the
cultural realm and elicited a strong sense of resistance among the Manshū rōmanha.
Kitamura, Hasegawa, and their companions unanimously showed a hard-line stance
of “protecting the autonomy of literature and the freedom of writing” and defied any
forms of political interference. Even Kizaki Ryū, as an official of the Kōbōsho, set
literature against politics by promoting a “critical spirit for the reality.” At the same
time, Kitamura Kenjirō kept seeking other funding and printing sources to extricate
Manshū Rōman from the government control. Owing to his effort, the sixth volume
of Manshū Rōman was printed by Xingya Cultural Press instead of the publishing
company designated by the regime. Considering this change as “a new start” and
meaning to celebrate it, Kitamura wrote a special postscript to this volume with the
following expectations: “it was not my duty to assist in the affairs of publication;
however, looking forward to a new cooperation, I have to do something for the
alteration of Manshū Rōman so as to enthusiastically set forth a true literary path.”2
What’s more, the close attention paid by the Manshū rōmanha to Manchukuo’s
1
Tsukase Susumu 塚瀬進, Manshūkoku: “Min oku Kyōwa” no itsu ō 満洲国「民族協和」の実像 (Tōkyō:
Yoshigawa kōbunkan, 2002) , 67.
2
Kitamura Kenjirō, “Batsu ni kaete” 跋にかへて, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1940.6): 250.
86
social realities prevented them from degenerating into the accomplice of the colonial
rule in the process of “overcoming modernity.” Differing from the Nihon rōmanha,
who appealed to a radical nationalist discourse, they relied heavily on the concept of
the “mainland-ity” that performed as a cultural symbol of otherness. On this ground,
they denied the so-called “guiding effect” of Japan’s cultural products, conducted a
comprehensive critique of the colonial rule, and regarded the culture of the colonized
people as “the right way of the romantic spirit,” proposing to give up their own
national identity and thoroughly assimilate into the colonial society. This cultural
viewpoint not only inverted the unequal relationship between the colonizers and the
colonized, but also suggestively associated their transcendence over modern Japan
with a resistance against the colonial polity. For that reason, they considered Xiao
Jun 萧军 and other Chinese resistant writers’ works to be the most important canon
of Manchukuo literature1 and satirized the grim situation of the colony with their
own literary praxis. All these performances went beyond the forbearance the colonial
regime. No wonder that not long after the enactment of “Guidelines for Art and
Literature” by the Manchukuo government, Manshū Rōman was forced to end
publication for its “excessive promotion of the freedom of art.” However, Kitamura
and some other members still endeavored to explore “a new form of literature” for
For example, Oka Masutarō put The Third Generation by Xiao Jun, who was wanted by the Japanese police
and exiled into Shanghai in 1934, on a par with Chateaubriand’s Atala and Rousseau’s The New Heloise. This novel
was also highly redeemed by Ōuchi Takao and Kizaki Ryū.
1
87
Manchukuo, and their efforts continued until the doomsday of the puppet state.1 As
Okada Hideki insightfully pointed out, “under close reading, [we can find that]
Kitamura Kenjirō’s works manifested his denial and repudiation of the politicized
mode of writing. What he stuck with was not a catering for political currents, but a
consistent dedication to the belletristic enterprise.”2
1
2
See Kiyama Shōhei 木山捷平, Tairyku no Hosomichi 大陸の細道, (Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 1962), 132.
Nishihara Kazumi 西原和海, Okada Hideki 岡田英樹, and Nishida Masaru 西田勝, “Manshū Rōman o
dō hyōkasuru ka” 満洲浪曼をどう評価するか, Shokuminchi Bunka Kenkyū 殖民地文化研究 (2002.1): 6.
88
CHAPTER III
THE SAKUBUN SCHOOL AND THEIR PROPOSALS OF LITERARY REALISM
External Information about Sakubun Writers
In this history of Manchukuo literature, Sakubun, a Dalian-based literary
journal under the banner of literary realism, proved to be the single rival of Manshū
Rōman and the one that had the longest duration time and the greatest influence.
This journal was launched in a fever of jingoism in October, 1932 when Manchukuo
just came into being, whose original name was Buka 文科 and changed to Sakubun
from the third issue on. The initial members of the Sakubun School included
Takeuchi Masaichi, Jō Osu 城小碓, Machizono Kōji 町園幸二, Yadachi Yoshinobu 安
達義信, Aoki Minoru 青木実, and so on. Later on, Kosugi Shigeki 小杉茂樹, Akihara
Katsuji 秋原勝次, Hinata Nobuo 日向伸夫, Kanō Saburō 加納三郎, Yoshino Haruo,
Nogawa Takashi 野川隆, Ōtani Takeo 大谷健夫, Furugawa Tesuichirō 古川哲一郎,
and Sakai Enji also joined the school. At the beginning, Sakubun published four
issues each year and then turned into a bimonthly in 1935. Up until its ending in
December, 1942, there were 55 issues in total. Since it originated from the anthology
of the poets who contributed to Shiinoki 椎の木, it focused poetic writings at the
early stage. It was not until year 1938 that the columns of essays and literary
89
criticism were added to the journal, “making its substance enriched enough.” 1
Among all external information about Sakubun, there were several points worth
particular attention: at first, members of the Sakubun School were mainly composed
of employees of the South Manchuria Railway Company. For instance, Aoki Minoru
and Takeuchi Masaichi worked as librarians at Dalian library that belonged to the
Mantetsu 満鉄 system, Hinata Haruo was hired by the Harbin Station under the
Mantesu’s management, and Akihara Katsuji was even sub-chief of the managing
department of the Mantetsu. Accordingly, Yamada Seizaburō 山田清三郎 , who
became the chair of the state-controlled “Society for Writers and Artists of
Manchukuo” afterwards, remarked on “the situation of the literary circle in
Manchuria” as follows:
It was reasonable to say that the literary circle in today’s Manchuria was
mainly founded on the initial achievements of the Mantetsu
employees...Sakubun, the most representative literary journal of Manchukuo,
was launched by those who loved literature among them. Many contributors
of the journal also belonged to the Mantetsu system.2
As modern-styled professionals, Sakubun companions were not only deeply
immersed in science, reason, progress, and other modernity-bound ideas, but also
inclined to observe and depict the real world with empirical approaches. Moreover,
the pragmatic property of their jobs also offered them a rare opportunity to access
Hayama Hideyuki 葉山英之, “Manshū Bungakuron” Danshō 「満洲文学論」断章 (Tōkyō: Sankōsha,
2011), 254.
1
2
Asami Fukashi 浅見淵, “Batsu” 跋, Byōkai: Manshū Sakka Kuninshū 廟会：満洲作家九人集 (Tōkyō:
Yumani shōbo, 2000), 259-260.
90
the bottom level of the Manchurian society and to keep close contact with the
ordinary working class, which exerted a profound influence on the orientation of
their literary praxis.
Secondly, Aoki Minoru, Osugi Shigeki, Jō Osu, and Machizono Kōji left Japan
for Manchuria in their young age and had stayed there for more than a decade.
Differing from those Japanese colonial officials who just assumed their new posts in
Manchuria in a mood of “travelers,” the Sakubun School were aware of the deep
psychological gap between them and the Japanese culture and a weakening
emotional bond with Japan. From their perspective, it was Manchuria, not Japan,
that stood for their inseparable homeland in reality, and on this basis, they
gradually formed a sense of resistance against the colonial ideology and a strong
desire to get assimilated into the local society. This resistant sense and desire for
assimilation were even more intensively reflected in the so-called “nisei 二世 (the
second generation of Japanese immigrants) consciousness” proposed by Akihara
Katsuji and Yoshino Haruo, who were born and grew up in Manchuria and bore little
memory of Japan. As Asami Fukashi 浅見淵 insightfully concluded, “[the members
of the Sakubun School] mostly viewed Manchuria as their native place and earnestly
aspired to integrate with its vast land.”1
1
Ibid., 260-261.
91
Thirdly, by virtue of the interesting contrast Kitamura Kenjirō made between
“Xinjing ideology” and “Dalian ideology,” in which the former was represented by
Manchukuo’s Japanese officials and consortia members in Xinjing who “always
talked about the state-building spirit and the ideal of harmony,” while the latter
appeared to be of liberalism and remarkably informed “the Mantetsu people,” Aoki
Minoru and his companions undoubtedly belonged to the faithful adherents of the
“Dalian ideology.” It was well known that the city of Dalian was founded in 1898 as a
part of the Russian concession in northeast China, designed for the purpose of free
trade and modeling on the blueprint of Paris with plazas, cafes, and other public
spheres scattered everywhere. In the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan
took over Dalian and established Kwantung Governorate and the South Manchuria
Railway Company here, making it the political, economic and cultural center of the
Japanese-occupied China. On the ground of the constructive achievements of the
Imperial Russian era, the Japanese colonizers proceeded to transform it into a
highly modernized metropolis with prospering market economy and advanced urban
facilities after twenty years’ effort. Correspondingly, various modern ideas
penetrated deep into people’s mind, and cultural enterprises also thrived there in an
exuberant way. On this point, Shimamura Hōgetsu 島村抱月, a famous Japanese
critic of the Meiji period, admiringly commented during his second visit to Dalian,
“the Japanese people living in Dalian look much like ancient Greeks. Even the lower
working class love arts and sports here. There are no peremptory soldiers or officials,
92
but only free civilians. Those who are experiencing the below-the-freezing-point
freedom in Japan will invariably hope to visit Dalian to enjoy this Western-styled
liberty.”1 Actually, before the emergence of Sakubun, Dalian had owned A 亜, a
magazine of modernist poetry, Junker, a quarterly devoted to Dadaism, and many
other literary journals. Sakubun, which was launched in this open and cosmopolitan
cultural atmosphere, naturally inherited the tradition of modern liberalism, and
with an intensive manifestation of the “Dalian ideology,” it embodied an inherent
antipathy against the politicizing and propagandizing tendency of the literary
production in Xinjing, the center of the colonial power. The semi-independent status
of Dalian2 from Manchukuo also ensured its possibility of free development out of
the fascist cultural manipulation. As a result, it attracted the participation of
Nogawa Takashi and other Marxist intellectuals who exiled to Manchukuo to avoid
persecutions of the leftists in domestic Japan, which endowed the journal with a
theoretical dimension of Marxism.
Fourthly, with Akihara Katsuji moving to Jilin, Yoshino Haruo settling down
in Xinjing and Takeuchi Masaichi transferring to the Mantetsu Library of Harbin,
most of Sakubun intellectuals departed from Dalian to various places throughout
Manchukuo around 1937. For that reason, their influence exceeded the boundary of
See Ōtani Takeo 大谷武男, “Manshū no kaisō arekore” 満洲の回想あれこれ, in Manshū Bungei
Nenkan: Betsusaku 満洲文芸年鑑：別冊 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 10.
1
2
It was interesting that the name of the city came from the Russian word “Dal'nij” Дальний, which means
“remoteness” and indicates its autonomous status from the very beginning.
93
the city and reached the whole state. Taking this chance, Jō Osu inaugurated G’s
Prize, the first national literary prize in Manchukuo, whose winners were all
members of the Sakubun School, including Osugi Shigeki, Yoshino Haruo, and
Takeuchi Masaichi. Besides, the executive committee of the prize also published
three volumes of The Yearbook of Art and Literature in Manchukuo respectively in
1937, 1938 and 1939. With its editing board composed by Jō Osu, Aoki Minoru, and
Yoshino Haruo, the first volume contained eight short stories in total, seven of which
were written by the Sakubun School, a fact that reflected how large a part they
played in the literary circle of Manchukuo. Little wonder that most of the pieces that
were incorporated into The Anthology of Literary Works by Different Peoples of
Manchukuo edited by Kawabata Yasunari 川端康成 and other Japanese literary
authorities were published in Sakubun before. On this basis, Sakubun writers took
full advantage of their nationwide networks and founded “The Association for
Literary Talks in Manchuria,” a national self-governing organization of litterateurs,
in Dalian on June 30th, 1937. Although they elected Shidō Teiichirō 紫藤貞一郎, the
head of Mantetsu Sanitary Research Institute, to be the chair of the Manshū
bunwakai to win permission from the colonial government, its routine operation was
totally in the charge of Yoshino Haruo, and all executives of its local branches were
members of the Sakubun School. Under their continuous effort, this “purely
non-governmental fellowship that kept a distance from the colonial power” not only
actively “recruited new members, developed local branches, and received visitors
94
from Japan, but also published yearbooks, recommended films for the public, and
publicized the literary prize, taking most of the responsibilities in the literary
realm.”1 As late as 1941, the Buwakai had “owned nine branches and over one
thousand members from the Han Chinese, Koreans, Russians and other ethnic
groups, who indeed formed a concerted whole and carried out works together.”2
Given the intimate relationship between the Sakubun School and the Manshū
bunwakai, they turned out to be the representatives of Manchukuo literature and
constituted “the mainstream of the literary circle in Manchuria.”3
“Quarrel about Colonial Literature” and “Debate on Independent
Manchukuo Literature”
Given these external factors, then what composed the specific proposals of
Sakubun intellectuals and what characterized their literary praxis? Since the
fifty-five issues of Sakubun are mostly lost and the rest of them are preserved in
Changchun Archives and not available to public readers, I will mainly take reference
of Manshū Nichinichi Shimbun 満洲日日新聞, literary journals like Manshū Rōman,
Okada Hideki, “Wei Manzhouguo wenyi zhengce de zhankai” 伪满洲国文艺政策的展开, in Dongbei
Lunxian Shiqi Wenxue Guoji Xueshu Yantaohui Lunwenji 东北沦陷时期文学国际学术研讨会论文集, ed., Feng
Weiqun 冯为群 (Shenyang: Shenyang Chubanshe, 1992) , 159.
1
2
3
Yoshino Haruo 吉野治夫, “Manshū bunwakai” 満洲文話会, Bungei 文芸 (1941.7): 22.
Nishihara Kazumi 西原和海, “Manshū bungaku no taidōki” 満洲文学の胎動期, in Manshū Bungei
Nenkan: Betsusaku 満洲文芸年鑑：別冊 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 17.
95
Shin Tenchi 新天地, and Hokusō 北窓 and such anthologies as The Yearbook of Art
and Literature in Manchukuo, Byōkai: Collection of Works by Nine Manchukuo
Writers (Takemura shobō 竹村書房, 1940), The Anthology of Literary Works by
Different Peoples of Manchukuo (Sōgensha 創元社, 1942, 1944), and The Anthology
of Japanese Colonial Literatures: Manchukuo reprinted by Mayuri Press in Tōkyō,
which maintained a large number of literary works by the Sakubun School and could
give us a telling clue to the answers to the above questions. Before we get to our
answers, it might be helpful for us to briefly review the “quarrel about colonial
literature” and the “debate on independent Manchukuo literature,” which took place
in succession from year 1936 onward.
With the anti-Japanese military forces being driven way from central areas
and the increasing stability of the Japanese colonial rule in Manchukuo, Japan’s
political policies focused more and more on the mainland China and instigated
popular campaigns for westward expansion throughout the country. In the
meantime, the number of the Japanese intellectuals who immigrated into
Manchukuo greatly increased. They vigorously participated in literary activities and
facilitated the formation of a self-consciousness of Manchukuo literature. Against
this background, how to define Manchukuo literature as well as the socio-political
status of Manchukuo became the focus of their concerns. It was Ōsumi Kōji 大住孝二
who took the lead to bring the concept of “coloniality” into account. In his critical
essay “Hopes for Writers in Manchuria,” he stated, “the literary form of Manchuria
96
must follow the pattern of colonial literature. To be honest, the coloniality [of
Manchukuo literature] is a political issue. However, a majority of the writers in this
place are salarymen and cannot realize this problem. In a word, they still stay at the
level of self-improvement in literary techniques.” 1 Apparently, in Ōsumi’s eyes,
Manchukuo was nothing more than a Japanese colony. In order to serve the political
purpose by means of literature, he not only defined Manchukuo literature as a form
of colonial literature, but also took those who insisted on literariness as the main
target of his sarcasm. It was also highly possible that the “salarymen” he mentioned
here referred to Sakubun writers, who were mostly the Mantetsu employees.
Compared to Ōsumi’s argument, that of Yagihashi Yūjirō 八木橋雄次郎 turned out
to be more barefaced. Regarding Manchukuo to be the “gaichi” 外地 (oversea
territory) of Japan like Taiwan and Korea, he accordingly put Manchukuo literature
into the category of Japan’s “local literature”: “all of sudden, there emerged various
discussions on the so-called local literature, and writings of this category also
competed to come out. Although they primarily centered on local customs and rural
matters, a call for colonial literature arose from their influence.”2 In Yagihashi’s
opinion, Manchukuo literature was merely a clumsy local copy of Japanese
literature, which was even not qualified for the identity of colonial literature, not to
1
2
Ōsumi Kōji 大住孝二, “Manshū sakka e no kibō” 満洲作家への希望, Shin Tenchi 新天地 (1936.1): 78.
Yagihashi Yūjirō 八木雄次郎, “Shokuminchi bungaku no saikentō: shokuminchi bungaku no tanjō” 殖民
地文学の再検討：殖民地文学の誕生, Manshū Nichinichi Shimbun 満洲日日新聞 16-19 Apr. 1936: 7.
97
mention that of an autonomous literary being. On this ground, Nishimura
Shin’ichirō 西村真一郎 presented the most systematic analysis of the viewpoint of
colonial literature. In his “Reexamination of Colonial Literature,” he explicitly
proclaimed, “it is needless to say that Manchukuo literature indicates works by
Japanese authors from different places of Manchuria, including the Kwantung
Governorate, and does not encompass literatures in Korean, Chinese, Mongolian, or
any other languages.” Under this “general premise,” Nishimura identified
Manchukuo literature with a type of colonial literature and went on to emphasize
that this literary construct “should be based on colonial policies,” should “undertake
the tasks of facilitating cultural constructions, fostering a native spirit among the
colonizers and guiding the colonized people to self-refinement,” and should finally
“perform as a propaganda machine that is more pioneering than any political
movements.”1 It was worth noting that Nishimura not only ascribed the role of
“consolidating and guiding the colony” to “Manchukuo literature,” but also asserted
that “as a shield has two sides, there must be anti-colonial literary products with s
consideration of common benefits and a sympathy for the feelings of the colonized
under the colonial rule; they also made up an integral part of the colonial literature
in spite of their political inclinations.” Through this interpretation, Nishimura
placed all literary activities of the Japanese writers in Manchukuo under the
Nishimura Shin’ichirō 西 村 真 一 郎 , “Shokuminchi bungaku no saikentō: shokuminchi bungaku no
ippanron toshite” 殖民地文学の再検討：殖民地文学の一般論として, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑,
vol. 1 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 21.
1
98
scrutiny of colonial politics and turned “Manchukuo literature” into a synonym for
ideological propagandas of the colony.
As opposed to the proposal of “colonial literature” that politicized literary
enterprises, Sakubun writers competed to bring forward their dissenting opinions
from various perspectives. Albeit his admission of the diasporic nature of
Manchukuo literature, tracing the evolutional trajectory of literature form a local
existence to that of global influence, Ōtani Takeo highlighted the decisive effect of
land (nature and social life) on literary production, and on this ground, claimed that
“the culture of Manchuria has almost never been influenced by its Japanese
counterpart so far with totally different language and social customs, which lays a
cultural foundation for literary reforms that will necessarily arise from this changed
environment.”1 That is to say, although the Japanese-based Manchukuo literature
was transplanted from Japan, when it confronted the distinctive social and cultural
background of Manchuria, it would definitely make corresponding changes and
become something tremendously different from Japanese literature. In this sense,
Manchukuo literature was neither a local literature of Japan, nor its colonial
version , but referred to the literary writings that were in perfect harmony with the
Manchurian society. Ōtani Takeo’s argument was reinforced by Furugawa
Testsujirō, who advocated an in-depth investigation into both “the general situation
1
Ōtani Takeo 大谷健夫, “Tochi to bungaku” 土地と文学, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol.
1 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 19.
99
of the working class” and “the specific state of Manchukuo’s politics, economy and
culture” and accordingly viewed “the concern for the life of the working class who
lived in a foreign land and dealt with foreign people” as the most distinguished
character of Manchukuo literature. 1 His understanding not only marked the
significant impact of otherness, but also introduced a dimension of class division.
Following this logical process, Aoki Minoru broke through the conceptual limit of
coloniality and rendered a new subversive definition on Manchukuo literature.
According to him, “it is not right to define Manchukuo literature in a narrow sense
with no regard to the existence of other peoples in Manchuria; if we merely start
from our own standpoint to carry out the literary work, we will indeed violate the
highest principle of literature.” For that reason, “literary works by all of the five
ethnic groups in Manchuria should be generally referred to as Manchukuo
literature.” Furthermore, Aoki confrontationally rebuked Nishimura for his
subordination of literature to political purposes in a bold way:
From a literary perspective, this forcible opinion that urged people to compose
Manchukuo literature in Japanese just because Japanese is used in official
documents is really a despairing thing...Especially at present, when the
Manchurian writers are even afraid of speaking, it is of utmost significance for
them to write freely. What Nishimura proposed about the orientation towards
colonial policies elicited an inadvertent sense of fear from me, which also
impels me to assume the identity as a spokesman for the Manchurian people
and to take exposing realities as my literary task.2
Furugawa Testsujirō 古川哲次郎, “Zai Man hōjin no geijutsuteki tachiba” 在満邦人の芸術的立場, in
Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol. 1 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 24.
1
2
Aoki Minoru 青木実, “Manshū bungaku no shomondai” 満洲文学の諸問題, Manshū Hyōron 満洲評論
(12.20): 34.
100
In this connection, the lingual and cultural oppression imposed by the colonists on
the colonized was vehemently criticized and replaced with sympathetic and
supportive actions, and at the same time, the assumed privilege of politics over
literature was thoroughly overthrown via an emphasis on the “free writing of real
life.” Aoki’s idea of Manchukuo literature indeed brought a ground-breaking vision
to the Japanese intellectuals, under whose influence, it was “commonly
acknowledged among Manchukuo’s Japanese literary circle” that Manchukuo
literature should comprise literary productions by different ethnic groups and in
various languages of Manchuria.1
Since the beginning of 1937, even if the dispute remained in progress, its focus
had been transferred from the definition of “Manchukuo literature” to its
relationship with the literary tradition of Japan. Hence the “debate on independent
Manchukuo literature.” Reaffirming Manchukuo’s political independence, Jō Osu
took the lead to recognize the corresponding autonomy of Manchukuo literature:
Of course there is no national boundary for arts; however, at the request of
national sovereignty, there must be a certain form of literature that could
represent the nation, especially for a powerful state. On this account, we have
to establish an autonomous Manchukuo literature in order to highlight the
independency of the state.
In his eyes, this autonomous Manchukuo literature should “take root in a love for the
native land, carry out the state-building spirit, facilitate the fusion of the five ethnic
1
In Tōsan 尹東燦, “Manshū” Bungaku no Kenkyū 「満洲」文学の研究 (Tōkyō: Akashi shoten, 2010), 77.
101
groups,” and “improve itself to the highest level of world literature.”1 Although Jō
Osu also examine Manchukuo literature from a political perspective not unlike
Nishimura, what he strategically supported was not the manipulation of literature
by colonial politics, but the literary appropriation of the “state-building” ideology.
Insomuch as Manchukuo was disguised as an independent and prosperous regime,
the very disguise provided a supreme excuse for the free and all-around development
of literature as opposed the recession of literary enterprises in Japan under the
fascist cultural control. That was why Jō Osu cared so much about the identity of
Manchukuo literature and was eager to draw a clear line between it and Japanese
literature. After his repetition of the “state-building” clichés, he directed his
discussion back to literariness, suggesting the Japanese writers in Manchukuo to
imitate the example of literary masterpieces all over the world so that the
Manchukuo literature created by them could rival its Japanese counterpart and
equally become a prominent part of world literature. In opposition, Ueno Shinotani
上野凌峪 proposed his counterview and claimed Manchukuo literature to be the
“extension line of Japanese literature.” In his article titled “The Literary Foundation
of Manchukuo Culture,” Ueno at the very beginning straightforwardly pointed out
that “the so-called Manchukuo literature was Japanese literature after all, which
specified the latter’s mainstream and guiding principles.” He then analyzed the
1
Jō Osu 城小碓, “Manshū bungaku no seishin” 満洲文学の精神, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸
年鑑, vol. 2 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 29.
102
difference of the Manchukuo-Japan relationship from that between the U.S. and
Britain in order to justify the Japanese domination over Manchukuo, a nominally
independent state. As far as he was concerned, “U.S. is a state deriving from an
integrated economic entity that had nothing to do with Great Britain,” while
Manchukuo was “founded on its integration with Japan” in the aspects of economy,
national defense and even culture; as a part of the “comprehensive and creative
culture shared by Japan and Manchukuo,” Manchukuo literature should undertake
“the task of creating a new moral code for the East Asian people” and thus formed “a
crucial step for the reform of Japanese literature as well as it mainstream.” 1
Actually, as a literary version of the imperialist discourse that “Manchuria was
Japan’s lifeline,” the identification of Manchukuo literature with the “extension line”
of Japanese literature purposively established a genealogical hierarchy between
them to highlight their so-called “spiritual nexus” and to give prominence to the
dominant and privileged status of the metropolitan culture. Even if Ueno revised the
“lifeline” theory by determining Manchukuo literature as “the mainstream of
Japanese literature,” this revision still subordinated Manchukuo literature to its
Japanese counterpart and confirmed Japan’s cultural ascendancy in Manchukuo,
reiterating the colonial discourse in an alternative way. With an increasingly
growing interest in mainland China among the Japanese society, the development of
Ueno Shinotani 上野凌峪, “Manshū bunka no bungaku kiso” 満洲文化の文学基礎, in Manshū Bungei
Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol. 2 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 53.
1
103
Manchukuo literature also attracted particular attention from the domestic literary
circle of Japan. Japan’s major literary journals competed to publish critical essays to
introduce Manchukuo literature, and its general situation became known to the
Japanese public. Nonetheless, for most Japanese intellectuals, the independency of
Manchukuo was nothing more than a political sham that conceal the real state of
Manchukuo as Japan’s colony for the sake of diplomatic convenience, and as a result,
the so-called Manchukuo literature was by no means a distinctive literary being but
the derivative of Japanese literature. Out of this understanding, Shinchō 新潮 (New
Tide), the most influential literary journal in Japan, published an editorial that
proclaimed:
Because of a dissatisfaction with the pop fictions on Manchurian topics, those
literature-lovers settling in Manchuria made up their mind to found a new
Manchukuo literature...What they intended to establish is not really the
Manchukuo literature by the Manchurian people. It is obvious that they can
only write a certain kind of Japanese literature, whose particularity should be
noted. That is to say, [this particularity] extends the arena of Japanese
literature and enlarges its vision.1
In this way, the great ambition held by the Japanese writers in Manchuria to create
a new literary tradition was reduced to a release of negative emotions, and
Manchukuo literature itself was renounced as a local variation of its Japanese
counterpart. Undoubtedly, these voices from domestic Japan fueled the intensity of
the debate. Stimulated by them, Akihara Katsuji, Yoshino Haruo, and other
1
121.
“Shinchō hyōron: Manshū bungaku e no iyoku” 新潮評論：満洲文学への意欲, Shinchō 新潮 (1939.4):
104
Sakubun writers came up with the so-called idea of “homelessness” and diverted the
“debate on independent Manchukuo literature” from political aspect to the
discussion of cultural identities.
The issue of “homelessness” was initially raised by Akihara Katsuji in Manshū
Nichinichi Shimbun 満洲日日新聞 with a sentimental tone as he overwhelmingly
expressed his agony that as a Japanese immigrant who left Japan at the age of
seven, he knew little about his mother country, but had to wear kimono, speak
Japanese and pretend to be a foreigner among the Manchurian people.1 Based on
these sentimental fragments, the review on “Homelessness” published later by
Yoshino Haruo in the pen name Ehara Teppei 江原鉄平 proceeded to render a
theoretical interpretation on this concept and relate it to the intellectual
underpinning of Manchukuo literature. At the beginning of the review, Yoshino took
the liberty to direct his criticism against Japan’s colonial cultural policies enforced in
Manchuria:
I studied at a Manchurian primary school...The text books we used at that
time were the same as those issued by the Japanese government in Japan.
Even if we dwelt in Manchuria, what we were taught everyday turned out to
be sceneries and customs of Japan...As a result, we learned nothing about
Manchuria. Manchuria’s things loomed in front of our eyes, but we could not
describe them with words; conversely, we were able to tell Japanese objects
that only existed in books, but we entirely didn’t know what on earth they
were...As residents of Manchuria, we knew little about her; as Japanese
people in blood, we had no idea what Japan was. Then how to define us in this
unexpected ambivalent state?
1
See Akihara Katsuji 秋原勝二, “Kokyō soshitsu” 故郷喪失, Man Nichi 満日 29-31 Jul. 1937: 3.
105
At this point, Yoshino incisively imputed the spiritual dilemma of the Japanese
immigrants to colonial politics: their parents were forced to leave Japan to serve the
purpose of colonialism and consequently cut off their cultural bonds with the mother
country; reared up in Manchuria, they ought to have been familiar with this
homeland and shown deep affections for her, but were transformed by the colonial
education into strangers at home; the so-called “homelessness” or “a sense of
vagrancy” epitomized the uncertainty of their social and cultural identities, which
proved be a by-product of Japan’s colonial expansion. On this ground, Yoshino
started his analysis of Manchukuo literature and intended to reconstruct a new
reality-based national cultural identification by means of literary praxis. In his
opinion, although the Japanese intellectuals in Manchuria always claimed to create
“a literature deeply rooted in the Manchurian society,” there were few
representative works emerged after long-term empty talks, and the reason for this
situation was “a lack of specific objects that could convey our love for Manchuria.” In
order to make a fundamental change, it was indispensable to conduct an in-depth
research on the social realities of Manchukuo. In other words, “an understanding,
analysis, and interpretation prior to love constituted the premise of [Manchukuo]
literature. ” In the meanwhile, Yoshino stressed that the establishment of a real
literary existence of Manchukuo required thoroughgoing critiques of the cultural
legacies of colonialism based on an anti-colonial stance. According to him, the
literary works that celebrated the arrival of the colonizers in Manchuria as well as
106
their achievements in major cities like Dalian, Fengtian and Xinjing “actually did
not belong to Manchukuo literature, but were products of colonial thoughts,” which
contradicted with the principle of literariness and should be “completely eliminated.”
As opposed to all the eulogies of colonialism, Manchukuo literature ought to reflect
“the reality about how Japanese people behaved peremptorily and unscrupulously
and how the Manchurians sufferer from discriminating treatment.”1 By virtue of
this anti-colonial and realism-oriented Manchukuo literature, Yoshino discovered a
breakthrough to get assimilated into the Manchurian society and laid a theoretical
foundation for its independent development from Japanese influence. Likewise, after
“exploring inland Manchuria along the railway, entering the villages inhabited by
Korean settlers and observing the real life of Manchurian commoners,” Aikihara
Katsuji brought forward his principle of “discarding Japan and gazing at
Manchuria,”2 advising the Japanese intellectuals to “get rid of old Japanese habits,”
“focus on the Manchurian society” and “fulfill the reform of themselves.”3 Under this
principle, he went a step further to analyze the urgent need to take “Manchurian
topics” as the overarching subject matter of Manchukuo literature:
Yoshino Haruo 吉野治夫, “Manshū bungaku to Manshū umare no koto” 満洲文学と満洲生まれのこと,
Man Nichi 満日 18-21 Aug. 1937: 5.
1
Akihara Katsuji 秋原勝二, “Kachū no hito to tabinin” 渦中の人と旅人, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan:
Betsusaku 満洲文芸年鑑：別冊 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 8-9.
2
Akihara Katsuji, “Tada hitotsu” ただ一つ, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol. 1 (Fukuoka:
Ashi shobō, 1993), 239.
3
107
We can neither deny the existence of the Manchurian people, nor alter the fact
that we and our descendants will live together with them in Manchuria.
Because of this, we have to understand what they are thinking and wanting
as well as what we are thinking and wanting, the literary examination of
which necessarily evokes works on Manchurian topics...Our emotional bond
with the Manchurians echoes the resolution of us as Japanese immigrants to
fuse into [the Manchurian society]. It is only on this ground that we can find
out the way to live in this land.1
For Akihara, Manchukuo literature hardly differed from the field notes he took in
his survey tasks for the Mantetsu, and in the process of depicting “Manchurian
topics,” his understanding about Manchuria would be deepened and extended after a
series of epistemological steps and would provide valuable references for his daily
life. To support Akihara’s pragmatic view on Manchukuo literature, Kanō Saburō,
another central figure of the Sakubun School, presented a similar argument in “A
Visionary Literary Form: for the Sail of Manchukuo Literature”:
Starting from this point [of realism], our Manchukuo literature should loyally
observe and research “the reality displaying in front of our eyes”...We have to
rely on our own “sight” and “feelings” and break away from the conceptualized
and propagandized literary framework...At present, the most important thing
for us is to promote the realistic spirit...and to make clear the living conditions
of Manchurian peasants, including what they eat, what they wear, what they
think, what their superiors impose on them, and what political policies bring
to them. [We also need to fully understand] what are in common between the
Japanese people and the Manchurian people in the mental and political
aspects as well as how races feeding on rice think and live and its natural
association with the way people feeding on sorghum think and live. We should
make every effort to figure out the basic situation of the Manchurian society
and reconstruct a total image out of our understandings of its separate parts
and a subsequent literary generalization.2
Akihara Katsuji 秋原勝二, “Manjin mono o naze kaku ka” 満人ものをなぜ書くか, Man Nichi 満日
14-17 Nov. 1937: 3.
1
2
Kanō Saburō 加納三郎, “Gensō no bungaku: Manjin bungaku no shuppatsu no tameni” 幻想の文学：満洲
文学の出発のために, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol. 2 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 46.
108
Employing literature as an effective method for “observation” and “research,” Kanō
emphasized the “profound” influence exerted by different lifestyles on the cultural
psychologies of disparate ethnic groups and proposed an epistemological mode that
developed from “partiality” to “totality,” and from “sensibility” to rational
generalization. These proposals conspicuously manifested a strong tendency for
scientism in literary production. Little wonder that Kizaki Ryū, his primary
opponent in the debate, incisively noticed the possible danger of submerging into
insignificant details and reducing literature to scientific report inherent in this
tendency and accordingly retorted:
[On the one hand,] there lurks the danger of jejune theoretical bluffs with the
concept of ‘Manchukuo literature’; [on the other hand,] if caring too much
about details, we might also fall into a perilous state of fetishism for trivial
things. We are unable to understand the reality through transitory
semblance, as we cannot claimed ourselves to be familiar with Manchuria just
by making acquaintance with a Manchurian household or having a glance at
the wilderness of Manchuria. Then how shall we familiarize ourselves with
this land? The so-called reality in common sense merely refers to the existence
of ephemerality and contingency rather than that of totality and regularity.
Therefore, we have to look at the future to realize the nature of our life. Those
who describe the world as it appears to us will be overwhelmed by trivialities.1
From a similar perspective, Nishimura Shin’ichirō also condemned Kanō’s focus on
“Manchurian topics” for its “excessive reliance upon interpersonal relations, social
customs and other common-sense knowledge” and thus claimed that “Manchukuo
Kizaki Ryū 木崎龍, “Kensetsu no bungaku” 建設の文学, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol.
2 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 40.
1
109
literature should not mechanically deals with Manchurian topics, let alone describe
various life details of the Manchurian people, important or trivial.”1
Confronted with Kizaki and Nishimura’s criticism, Aoki Minoru went on to
clarify specific references of “Manchurian topics” and introduced a moral orientation
into Manchukuo literature though on the basis of objectivity:
[Our lives] not only need material food, but also require a luxuriant spiritual
tree, so does literature...Consciously or Unconsciously, we have to deal with
the Manchurians in most cases. In a word, we completely depend on them...If
all of a sudden we are cursed by someone else as an idiot, we will either
question him in a peaceful mood or become irritated. However, if the victims
are the Manchurian people surrounding us, although they understand the
curse word, they will “keep silent to themselves. ” No matter how they think
at heart, there will be seldom resistant performances. If those who are scolded
are Manchurian intellectuals, this silence will lead to a more deeply-rooted
complex...When we depict the Manchurians in fiction, of course we should
examine the traits of their psychologies; nevertheless, in the final analysis, we
need to adopt a sense of justice as our standpoint. The literary works on
Manchurian topics can neither simply describe them in an exotic way, from
which no masterpieces will come out, nor recount their stories from the angle
of an outsider. On the contrary, we need to rest ourselves on them and create
works that are spiritually connected with their souls. Besides the difference of
sensibilities, issues like interest clashes and national conflicts are all
unavoidable [in our writings]. Authors of literary works should perform as
representatives of justice. Regardless of racial distinctions, we ought to write
under the principle of justice...Akihara points out the characteristic of
weakness in my works, which derives from a sense of shared destiny with the
weak of the Manchurian society and my employment of their perspectives
during the writing process...Then what social class among the Manchurians
deserves a particular attention? It must be the ordinary laborers. [We should]
try our best to present how they silently protect their shabby home and live an
unfavorable and suffering life in the face of wars, turmoils, robberies, soaring
prices, political changes and various natural disasters, showing our caring
love for them and bringing a humanitarian charm to the works...The
1
Nishimura Shin’ichirō 西村真一郎, “Manshū bungaku riron no seiri” 満洲文学理論の整理, in Manshū
Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol. 3 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 84.
110
introduction of wedding ceremonies, funeral arrangement, house layout and
other exotic details by books on Chinese customs has nothing to do with the
reality of Manchuria. We need to speak for the unvoiced Manchurians, depict
their real lives, and if possible, urge the ruling class to reflect on their policies
for the benefit of the state.1
In comparison with Akihara and Kanō, who maintained a Japanese-centric
viewpoint and took the Manchurian people merely as the unvoiced other and a
dehumanized object for scientific research in their emphasis on Manchurian topics,
Aoki Minoru thoroughly challenged this self-centered perspective. Noticing the
“silent” reaction of the Manchurian people to everyday abuses, he consciously
realized that the domination and oppression imposed by the colonial power
constituted the most crucial reality of Manchukuo, and on this account, Manchukuo
literature should not focus on ethnographical information or exotic descriptions, but
needs to confront various social problems in the colonial society, display the
miserable life of the colonized Manchurians and boldly expose and criticize all the
crimes committed by the colonial regime. Moreover, Aoki also revised their appeals
for realism by instilling humanistic concerns into the realistic method that made
literature “a mirror carried along a high road.”2 In his opinion, buttressed by a
strong sense of moral conscience, the “spiritual tree” of Manchukuo literature should
be implanted in a vicarious sympathy and affection for the common Manchurians,
Aoki Minoru 青木実, “Manjin mono ni tsuite” 満人ものに就て, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年
鑑, vol. 3 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 52-55.
1
2
Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972), 414.
111
which required the Japanese writers to identify with them in the depth of mind and
to earnestly cry, speak and argue for them with great compassion. On the ground of
humanitarianism, he transcended his Japanese identity as well as a closely related
Japan-centric perspective and aspired to establish a new form of Manchukuo
literature that fully recognized the subjectivity of the Manchurian people, took their
vital interests into account, and centered on their sufferings under the colonial rule.
By means of this fundamental shift of viewpoint, he revealed the primary cause of
the independent state of Manchukuo literature in a clearer way:
It is only among the Manchurians that we can find real Manchukuo writers.
In the coming future, the Manchurian writers will certainly represent the
mainstream of Manchukuo literature, and the Japanese writers in Manchuria
will merely play an auxiliary role.1
In the same sense, “what the Japanese writers have done is supposed to serve as a
stepping stone,” with whose help, “one day, Manchurian writers will pick up their
own pens and publish their articles in Chinese on the front page of every literary
journal.”2 This sort of “Manchukuo literature” created by Manchurian writers and
written in Chinese was naturally irrelevant to Japanese literature, and its
autonomy was accordingly self-evident. In view of this Manchurian-oriented theory
of “Manchukuo literature,” Yoshino Haruo proudly announced to Japan’s literary
circle that “Manchukuo literature is by no means a derivative of Japanese literature,
Aoki Minoru 青木実, “Zai Man hōjin bungei hyōronka e” 在満邦人文芸評論家へ, Man Nichi 満日 24
Jun. 1936: 4.
1
2
Aoki Minoru, “Manjin mono ni tsuite” 満人ものに就て, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol. 3
(Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 55.
112
but the literary output of the Manchurian people, which is characterized by an
exploration of distinctive Manchurian topics, an exclusion of the Japanese influence
and a discovery of the appropriate literary form for Manchuria, features that
altogether drive the development [of Manchukuo literature] like an outbreak of
avalanche.”1 Owing to the joint effort made by the Sakubun School, to “take root in
the social realities of Manchukuo and to get assimilated into the Manchurian
society” eventually became the “overarching appeal” of the Japanese intellectuals in
Manchuria in their creations of Manchukuo literature.2 Against this background,
Kanō Saburō summarized the consensus reached by these two disputes in his article
titled “The Independency of Manchukuo Literature” as follows:
Discussions that tried to prove its independence mainly focused on two
aspects, the psychological state of the Japanese intellectuals in Manchuria
and Manchukuo’s social realities. For those who aimed at a complete union
with this land, the idea of constructing a unique culture will definitely struck
them. No matter he is a second-generation immigrant or a new comer moving
to Manchukuo recently, he will spontaneously experience this mental change.
The historical tradition and social foundation of Manchukuo literature
enormously differed from those of Japanese literature, not to mention the
human elements, its most important factor among other things. As for the
object of description, what Manchukuo literature portrays are the life of the
Manchurian masses, which is beyond the imagination of any Japanese
literary works, and that of the Japanese immigrants, who prove to be totally
different from their fellow countrymen in thoughts and feelings. As for the
writers, those who create Manchukuo literature are the “second-generation
1
Yoshino Haruo 吉野治夫, “Manshū bungaku no genjō” 満洲文学の現状, Serupan セルパン (1939.4):
2
In Tōsan 尹東燦, “Manshū” Bungaku no Kenkyū 「満洲」文学の研究 (Tōkyō: Akashi shoten, 2010), 103.
58.
113
immigrants in Manchuria” and most important of all, the rising-up
Manchurian authors and critics.1
Features That Informed the Intellectual Dimension of the Sakubun School
Taking both the external information of the Sakubun School and the
arguments they made in the debates into account, we can comb out a series of
characteristics that featured their literary proposals. To begin with, it was such
modern concepts as science, reason, and progress that dominated the conceptual
world of Sakubun writers. For them, realities constituted an objective existence
independent of man’s will and outweighed subjective motivations in human life, and
accordingly, all social and cultural activities should be based on and informed by
them; as a result, each individual should adopt an objective standpoint and a
scientific approach to observe, analyze, and understand reality under the guidance of
reason and take his rational understanding as the guideline for his daily behaviors.
Within the specific context of the Manchurian society, as pioneers of the colonial
modernization enterprise who were sent out by the Mantetsu for field trips and
survey tasks,2 Sakubun intellectuals inevitably encountered the real situation of
Manchukuo that was typified by political oppression and economic exploitation
1
Kanō Saburō 加納三郎, “Manshū bungaku no tokujisei” 満洲文学の独自性, Man Nichi 満日 24 Dec.
1939: 3.
2
For examples, as a result of these investigations, Yadachi Yoshinobu published his well-known monograph
on the working conditions of the Chinese workers who moved from Shanghai to Manchuria, and Ōtani Takeo also
achieved a great academic breakthrough in his research on Chinese social history.
114
imposed by the colonial power and gradually realized that their life “entirely
depended on that of the Manchurians,” therefore demanding a comprehensive and
in-depth understanding about the Manchurian people and intending to reconfigure
their own cultural identification as well as the socio-political order of the colonial
society in accordance with the interests of the Manchurians and the principle of
rationalization. The so-called “ideology of the second-generation Japanese
immigrants” that declared “they are part of the Manchurian people rather than the
Japanese, and Manchuria is their native place, mother land and eternal home”1
turned out to be the most intensified representation of this “self-reconstruction”;
their stress on the sovereignty of Manchukuo, resistance against the politicization of
literature and exposition of the various crimes committed by the colonial regime, on
the other hand, intensively reflected the great efforts they made for the sake of social
reforms. It was the intellectual stance based on the modern spirit that enabled them
to break through the limit of national identity and finally arrive at the opposite side
to colonialism.
Next, the Sakubun School deemed highly of the social function of literature and
considered literary realism as the key to fulfill the aforementioned task. As Lennard
Davis indicated, realism/journalism posited an ideal correspondence between text
and “lived” experience and promised novel’s “privileged position of observation and
1
Yokota Ichiji 横田一路, “Manshū bungaku no bekken” 満洲文学瞥見, Shinchō 新潮 (1939.8): 135.
115
commentary.”1 It was firmly believed that the appeals of realistic literature for
objectivity could help writers to break away from cultural conventions and subjective
biases, and the breadth and width of its explorations into the human society would
ensure that the external world associated with the text was integral and all-around,
a factor that allowed writers and readers to be exposed to broad and authentic social
realities. In addition, as a type of mass media, literature proved to be more popular
and more forceful in spreading knowledge and promulgating modern concepts for the
purpose of social enlightenment. That was why literary realism was particularly
favored by the Sakubun School and became the predominant style of their literary
works. As Kanō Saburō discussed, just like Tolstoy, who overcame his class
limitations and protested against aristocratic privileges under the inspiration of the
realist spirit, and Pearl S. Buck, who knew Chinese society better than any Japanese
sinologists through her realistic depiction of Chinese peasants, the Sakubun School
also needed to carry forward the great tradition of realism and applied it to the
unique context of Manchukuo literature in order to “delineate a cultural blueprint
that really fits the Manchurian society based on new social realities.” 2 In
comparison with its Japanese counterpart, this newly-forged Manchukuo culture
1
Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: the Origin of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of
Philadelphia Press, 1997), 212.
2
Kanō Saburō 加納三郎, “Gensō no bungaku: Manjin bungaku no shuppatsu no tameni” 幻想の文学：満洲
文学の出発のために, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol. 2 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 46
116
was distinctive and stood for a “more progressive cultural existence.”1 Conversely,
Sakubun writers not only rejected a kind of “visionary literature” that “was
compulsorily drawn from the surface of self-conceit” “regardless of reality” and the
“literature for national policies” that performed “as a mere propaganda machine,”
condemning them to be “fascist literary products” and conducting a vehement
criticism against them, but also protested the tendency for “formalism” and
“exoticism” as represented by “the exaggeration of the Manchurians’ vanity habits”2
and “the feckless reference to exotic images like donkeys, horse bandits, illicit
prostitutes, and red earth.”3
Then, what the Sakubun School favored were not fragmented and
sentimentalized life fragments, but literary techniques of the “socialist realism” in
Gorky’s sense, which proposed to “contemplate over the real world with a
commanding worldview, reveal its most essential, unique and typical characters,
and exclude the insignificant, unnecessary and normal elements at a philosophical
height.”4 From the perspectives of
Sakubun writers, it was humanistic concerns
that occupied the center of this philosophical worldview, which was further specified
Yoshino Haruo 吉野治夫, “Manshū bungaku no hōkō” 満洲文学の方向, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼
(1939.5): 79.
1
2
Hinata Haruo 日向伸夫, “Manshū bungaku shikan” 満洲文学私観, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1939.5):
106.
Ōtani Takeo 大谷健夫, “Tochi to bungaku” 土地と文学, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol.
1 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 19.
3
4
Kanō Saburō 加納三郎, “Gensō no bungaku: Manjin bungaku no shuppatsu no tameni” 幻想の文学：満洲
文学の出発のために, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan 満洲文芸年鑑, vol. 2 (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 44.
117
as “the principle of justice,” a “vicarious compassion” for the Manchurians and a
sense of mission to speak for the weak in Aoki’s sense, or as an unprecedented stress
on universal humanity claimed by Hinata Haruo’s:
Our moral senses are identical to theirs. The truth of humanity crosses
national boundaries, makes our souls united with each other, and brings us
exceptional warmth. As this point, even the tiniest discovery will provide us
with courage and gaiety...I deeply believe that the nature of literature will
never change no matter it describes the Japanese or the Manchurian people.
Before we conceive of Manchurian topics, we have to take universal humanity
into account; before we deal with the Manchurians’ social customs, we have to
present their human nature first. Is it not the case that the gravity and
beauty of universal humanity that pervade Manchurian topics indicate the
true path of Manchukuo literature?1
Replacing the hierarchical relationship between the Japanese colonizers and the
colonized Manchurians with the equality based on universal humanity, Hinata and
his companions undermined the nationalistic cultural view and the discursive
system of Japan’s supremacism from the viewpoint of modern humanitarianism and
accordingly raised a great challenge against the validity of the colonial domination.
Finally, it was worth noting that Sakubun intellectuals were inclined to use
“class,” “proletarian masses,” “capitalism,” “feudality,” and many other Marist
concepts and thus manifested a profound influence of Marxism on their analysis of
Manchukuo’s social structure and their particular concerns for the underclass
Manchurians. As discussed above, due to the prohibition of leftist social movements
in Japan, numerous Japanese Marxists exiled to Manchuria, and not a few of them
1
107.
Hinata Haruo 日向伸夫, “Manshū bungaku shikan” 満洲文学私観, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1939.5):
118
became major contributors of Sakubun, a fact that further proved its intellectual
tendency for Marxism. In an essay with the title of “Understanding the Asiatic
Society,” Koyasu Nobukuni insightfully analyzed how the Marxist theory of “Asiatic
productive mode” was utilized by the ideological state apparatus of the imperialist
Japan to legitimatize its military expansion in China. As far as he was concerned,
the vision of Asia in Marxism was inherited from that of the Hegelian philosophy,
both of which relied heavily upon the presumption of “Asian despotism” and “Asia
blocked in history.” As reinterpreted by Japan’s wartime ideology, the stagnation of
the Asiatic society was imputed to “war-lordship,” and the military occupation by the
Imperial Army was depicted as an unavoidable path for China to shoulder off its
traditional yoke and to get into the civilizational world. As Koyasu clarified, “the
historical understanding about China from the perspective of ‘Asia blocked in
history’ engendered a discourse among Japanese Marxists that it was the task of
Japan’s militarism to break down and transform the outdated Chinese society.”1
There was little doubt that most of the Japanese leftist intellectuals in Manchukuo
accepted this ideological discourse, and in this sense, Ueno Shinotani came up with
his statement that “the founding of Manchukuo will liberate the oppressed East
Asian peoples from the enslavement of feudal warlords.” Even Ushijima Haruo, “the
only qualified writer of Manchukuo” in Ikejima Shimpei’s 池島信平 eyes, who joined
1
Koyasu Nobukuni 子安宣邦, Dongya Lun: Riben Xiandai Sixiang Pipan 东亚论：日本现代思想批判,
trans., Zhao Jinghua 赵京华 (Changchun: Jilin Renmin Chubanshe, 2011), 73.
119
the Japanese Communist Party as early as 1932 and was put into prison for two
years for organizing socialist movements, imputed sufferings of Manchurian
peasants to the “inhumane residues of the warlord period” and considered the
historical mission of Manchukuo literature to be an expulsion of these residues
based on “the positive elements of the kingly way.” Nevertheless, facing the grim
social reality of Manchukuo, Ushijima was clearly aware that “the remnants of
feudality and the exploitation of rural areas by the highly developed and misshaped
Japanese capitalism formed a bifold constraint,”1 implying a suggestive criticism
against the colonial oppression. On the one hand, as the aforementioned discourse
highlighted, colonialism, along with the modern material civilization and ideas it
represented, forcibly pulled the colonial society out of the stagnant state and sent it
to a “more advanced developmental stage”; on the other hand, when it came to the
reality, colonialism would necessarily cause tremendous violence and disturbance
and bring a total disaster to the colonized people. Sandwiched between ideas and the
reality, Ushijima Haruko was perplexed by the choice of anti-feudalism or
anti-colonialism and eventually opted for the former with an expectation to realize
the illusory “Elysium of the kingly way.” This ambiguous attitude was also shared by
Sakubun intellectuals, as Jō Osu, Ōtani Takeo, and Furugawa Tetsujirō insisted on
racial differences as well as the leading role of the Japanese people in Manchuria,
1
Ushijima Haruko 牛島春子, “Nōson o egake” 農村を描け, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1938.1): 253.
120
and such second-generation immigrant writers as Yoshino Haruo and Akihara
Katsuji affirmatively argued that “the Japanese are more culturally advanced than
the local people of Manchukuo.” However, with the deepening of the debates, their
concerns for Manchukuo’s social realities gradually outweighed the restriction of the
Marxist historical determinism, and as a consequence, they turned to discourses of
universal humanity and a critical attitude towards colonialism.
Thematic Types and Narrative Styles of the Fictional Writings in Sakubun
Applying these theoretical proposals to their fictional writings, the Sakubun
School mainly engaged four thematic types and four narrative styles.1 The four
thematic types included an objective record of the colonial modernization enterprise,
an
expression
of
the
consciousness
of
“homelessness”
owned
by
the
second-generation immigrants, a description of the living conditions of ordinary
Japanese colonizers, and an exposition of the life miseries of the oppressed
Manchurians, which were normally interwoven in a single fiction with the fourth
type occupying the center of its accounts. The four narrative styles, among other
things, respectively referred to reportorial narratives interspersed with expository
details, sentimental narratives informed by fierce emotions, sarcastic narratives full
As Miyai Ichirō 宮井一郎 pointed out, Sakubun primarily centered on the genre of fiction and was not that
good at poetry. See Miyai Ichirō, “Sakubun yonjūshō made” 『作文』四十輯まで, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼
(1939.6): 154.
1
121
of ironical devices and exaggerated images, and naturalistic narratives based on
calm and dispassionate depictions. Each thematic type and narrative style
corresponded to a series of fictions composed by Sakubun writers, and through a
close reading of the most representative ones among them, we are able to form a
more comprehensive understanding about their literary praxis.
The novel that epitomized the first thematic type was Hinata Haruo’s The
Number Eight Switch Machine. Moving into Manchukuo in 1934, Hinata had
worked at the Shuangchengbao Station located on the main railway line between
Xinjing and Harbin for a long time. During this period, Japan acquired the Chinese
Eastern Railway once controlled by Russia and took over all its facilities and
Manchurian staff members. Hinata’s personal experience of the drastic changes
brought by this take-over provided a blueprint for this novel, which told a pathetic
story “directly from the perspective of the Manchurian people” and with the objective
voice of a detached spectator: in the year 1935, as the Chinese Eastern Railway was
transferred to the hand of the Mantetsu, the switchman Zhang Deyou and his
colleagues also became its employees, an unexpected event that completely changed
their life. For one thing, the outdated operational system adopted in the Russian era
was replaced by Japanese managers with more advanced equipments and skills,
which were extremely hard for these old switchmen to handle. For another thing,
under the management of the Russians, there was only one train running between
Xinjing and Harbin every day; however, at the request of the Mantetsu, the number
122
of runs was added up to four and each run was required to be exactly on schedule,
which made the workload of the employees quadruple. In addition, Chinese was
employed before as the working language, and the Manchurian workers merely
needed to know simple Russian in receiving orders, but the Mantetsu demanded that
they should all speak Japanese in any event. For that reason, Zhang Deyou and his
colleagues had to take courses to learn Japanese, who could hardly remember a
single Japanese word due to senility. To make things even worse, their incomes
sharply decreased from over one hundred dollars to twenty dollars per month, and
they were successively laid off for poor performance in annual assessment with
merely Zhang Deyou and Li Lianfu being left out of the eight former switchmen.
Confronted with the impendence of this year’s assessment, Li persuaded Zhang to
resign from his job and run a bakery together with him. After careful consideration,
Zhang Deyou dared not to start a new career at the age fifty and rejected Li’s
suggestion with an excuse of “having no choice.” Although Zhang stayed alone and
worked even harder, his anxiety about losing his job increasingly aggravated.
Finally, after finishing his night duty, he heard that an employee from the
neighboring station was fired and he was spared. At the point when he felt somehow
relaxed but still worried about the assessment of the next year, Li Lianfu’s
newly-opened bakery was burnt to the ground. In the first part of the novel, Hinata
intentionally compared the applied technologies and the management mode Russian
managers employed to those under the Japanese administration in order to present
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the image of the Japanese colonizers as pioneers of modernization and their
privileged position in the hierarchy of modernity. As he described, the Russian
people “still used old-styled semaphores and switches just as ten years ago,” which
“quite resembled children’s toys” “in the face of the highly-developed Japanese
technology”; in the Russian period, it often happened that trains arrived a couple of
hours late, and whenever a train passed, the staff members would go back home,
plant vegetables, feed goats, and rear bees, living a care-free life due to managerial
slack. By contrast, the Japanese administrative board required that “trains should
arrive and depart on time,” and for a strict compliance with the schedule, they even
encouraged illegal shunting and speeding. Moreover, they also possessed a strong
sense of responsibility in personnel management, treating their subordinates
harshly and asking them to patrol at regular intervals with regardless of the
lunchtime. In order to offer more convenience to the passengers and cut off the
transportation cost, the Mantetsu also slashed the salaries of the Manchurian
employees and substantially increased the number of runs. These measures of
introducing new technologies, regulating the time schedule, enforcing daily
management, reducing operation cost and enhancing working effectiveness
undoubtedly constituted a significant aspect of colonial modernization, representing
the modern spirit of capitalism in Weber’s sense that was characterized by
rationalization, professionalization and top priority of efficiency. Nonetheless,
Hinata made a sudden turn in his narrative with the statement that “for them, the
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adoption of this most accurate technology all over the world was the origin of their
misfortunes” and began his portrayal of Zhang Deyou and other Manchurian
switchmen’s encounters. What Hinata touched on first was the issue of language.
With the departure of the Russians from Manchuria, “all critical posts were occupied
by the Japanese people,” and Japanese was also compulsorily prescribed as the
working language. Although Japanese and Chinese were both official languages of
Manchukuo, “once the station master found someone speaking Chinese, he would
immediately fly into a rage, and as a result, the Manchurian colleagues had to speak
clumsy Japanese on the phone, which sounded not funny but miserable.” Besides,
“all Manchurian staff members were required to attend” the Japanese course, whose
“attendance ratio was always one hundred percent.” Those who knew little about
Japanese would easily lose their jobs, while the employees proficient in Japanese
would be promoted exceptionally. As Hinata commented, “the Japanese language
and the knowledge about Japan’s social customs became a practical trickery for
self-protection.” He then dealt with the income problems. After the take-over by the
Mantesu, Zhang Deyou’s salary dropped sharply to twenty dollars; however, even the
most inferior Japanese employee could earn eighty dollars per month, and the
Manchurian workers who passed the Japanese test would also get an additional
subsidy of twenty dollars. It was impossible for Zhang to make both ends meet with
so little payment, and consequently, he was always cursed by his Jewish wife. At
last, Hinata focused on the constant threat of unemployment. On account of a total
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inability to adapt to new working conditions and their awkward Japanese, the
Manchurian employees were perpetually exposed to the menace of being fired. Most
of Zhang’s colleagues became out of work, and Zhang himself also fell into a mental
state of extreme angst, having to “forbear any forms of cruel enslavement and
agonizing fatigues of the body” to maintain his post. In comparison, Li Lianfu was
forced to leave by himself and subsisted on a small amount of pension. Although
Zhang temporarily survived the assessment after working over night, his joyfulness
was instantly submerged by a strong anxiety for the future. At the same time, Li’s
bakery was destroyed in fire, and he accordingly lost all his assets, becoming entirely
impoverished. By means of these “experimental” depictions that “delved into the
deepest part of the Manchurians’ psychology,” in the second half of this novel,
Hinata revealed the unequal relationship between the colonizers and the colonized
around the most fundamental elements of daily life like language, income and career
as well as the life sufferings and psychological traumas it brought to the Manchurian
underclass. Under the domination of the colonial mechanism that wore the disguise
of modern spirit and consisted in various discriminating social orders, most of the
colonized people would either struggle under the outrageous enslavement for a
humble living like Zhang, or attempt to resist their fate but inescapably suffer the
deprivation of everything like Li. As Peattie persuasively concluded, the Japanese
authority “intended from the outset that the enlightenment and progress of the
indigenes were to be consistent with the limited and distinctly inferior position
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which they were to occupy within the empire.” 1 In other words, hierarchical
differentiation and national oppression always ensued and guaranteed the colonial
modernization enterprise, and vice versa. This kind of description that indisputably
belonged to the fourth thematic type was oddly juxtaposed with the image of the
colonial power as the incarnation of reason and progress in the first half, therefore
making up a remarkable tension and contrast within the text, which neutralized the
validity of the colonial modernization discourse and exposed its inhumane and
irrational nature. It was also worth mentioning that this novel mainly adopted the
fourth narrative style. Taking a limited third-person point of view and avoiding any
forms of subjective intervention and judgment, it “calmly and objectively” described
the details of everyday life in a “plain and straightforward way” 2 and used
dialogues, actions, and other external performances to track down the complicated
psychological movements of the characters. As Hinata himself figuratively wrote,
“[the author] should stand in front of the window with no delight or sadness and
gaze at them in peace and calmness.” That is to say, he wished to faithfully record
the original appearance of the real world through the lens of literature and
composedly enter the other under the guidance of reason. On this account,
notwithstanding his deep sympathy for the impoverished Manchurians like Zhang
1
Mark R. Peattie, and Ramon H. Myers, eds. The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 40.
2
Asami Fukashi 浅見淵, “Batsu” 跋, Byōkai: Manshū Sakka Kuninshū 廟会：満洲作家九人集 (Tōkyō:
Yumani shōbo, 2000), 261.
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Deyou and Li Lianfu, he transmitted his critical attitude towards the colonial
institutions primarily via descriptions of the characters’ own behaviors like “when
several of them gathered by accident, their talks would naturally involve a
reminiscence of the past and complaints about the current situation.” This narrative
mode was somehow subjected to “flatness” and “sketchiness” as Yamai Ichirō
claimed; however, under the highhanded cultural control, its appeals for objectivity
and authenticity would strategically evade possible political impediments and more
effectively disclose the inherent tension between colonial discourses and the reality
of the colony, empowering the novel to be a convincing exposition of the ideological
fraudulence and a voiceless criticism against the colonial rule.
Akihara Katsuji’s Night Talks was representative of the second thematic type,
which dealt with the narrator’s experience during his three days’ stay in Jilin for a
visit to his friend M: in an extreme snow weather, taking one night’s train and
viewing the magnificent sceneries of the Manchurian wilderness as well as the
misgivings Japanese passengers had for “bandits,” the narrator “I” finally arrived at
the destination. M didn’t come to pick “me” up, so “I” had to ride on the carriage
driven by a Manchurian coachman to look for his house. Because of the totally
strange environment and languages barriers, “I” felt unprecedentedly anxious and
depressed. When “I” got to the address M told me before, “I” surprisingly found that
there lived a Korean household. Having no other choice, “I” went back to the train
station and noticed that “I” was surrounded by Manchurians and Koreans and their
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unintelligible languages, which made “me” full of vigilance. At this crucial juncture,
an old Japanese man emerged and led “me” to his residence. “I” began to know that
he was an immigrant who moved to Manchuria long time ago, could speak Chinese
fluently, and was conversant with everything of this city. In the bookshop he
operated, a couple of Manchurian assistants worked there and they all got along
with him. The old man told “me” that M happened to be away on a business trip and
invited “me” to stay at his home for M’s return. During night, after a pleasant
drinking with “me,” the old man took out his photo with a Japanese youth called
Yokoyama Jirō. “I” discovered that Yokoyama Jirō looked just like “me” at “my” first
glance and heard that he was also a salaryman who came to Manchuria at a very
young age though forty years before my arrival. Out of curiosity, I read the long
letter he wrote to the old man and hereby accessed his interior world. As a Japanese
immigrant living in Manchuria since his childhood, Yokoyama always regarded
Manchuria as his homeland, while considering Japan to be an abstract and remote
existence and feeling restless for his upcoming visit to Japan. At the same time, he
was also deeply upset for not being able to assimilate into this land like the
Manchurians. When he went back to Japan, he found himself to be entirely
unfamiliar with its people and matters as if he were in a foreign country. Even his
own grandfather showed an utmost indifference to him, which elicited a strong sense
of fear from him that he would not step onto the land of Manchuria again. After
numerous inward struggles and introspections, he more clearly realized the
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importance of Manchuria in his life, determined to indulged himself to the vast
forest of the Hinggan Mountains, and eventually attained to a psychological peace.
Enlightened by Yokoyama’s letter, “I,” who had undergone the same spiritual
journey, started to understand that “people will never be separated with his living
environment,” deciding to take root in the Manchurian society “like a transplanted
tree” no matter how big the difficulties would be. With this awareness and a great
confidence, “I” went out again and saw the approaching silhouette of M in the frigid
wind. As a typical bildungsroman, Night Talks was characterized by a wide range of
symbolic images. “My” departure from Dalian, the previous center of the colonial
power, to Jilin, one of the oldest cities in inland Manchuria, symbolized a bold trial
to enter the interior of Manchukuo and to closely contact the local society; the
imposing view of Manchuria’s natural sceneries “I” witnessed on the train caused an
initial shock on “my” consciousness, and the Japanese passengers’ worries about
“bandits” represented a sense of vigilance commonly held by the colonizers against
the colonized people; M’s unexpected leave, the extreme weather, serious language
barriers, and the embarrassing surrounding by Manchurians and Koreans signified
various frustrations and difficulties “I” came across during “my” first encounter with
the indigenous world. The emergence of the old man constituted the turning point of
the novella, whose image as a China hand betokened the possibility and promise of a
real union with Manchuria; in the same sense, Yokoyama’s story not only echoed the
intellectual change of the old man in his early years, but also formed an external
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projection of “my” inner psychological activities. Not unlike Yokoyama, who look the
same as “me,” “I” also found “myself” ground between blood origin and native bonds
and suffering from a dull agony due to the uncertainty of national identification; at
the end, Yokoyama returned to Manchuria, wholeheartedly embraced its natural
and social objects, and accordingly rediscovered his own value, a symbolic choice that
gave “me” a way out of the spiritual predicament; when “I” finally put off all “my”
doubts and made a resolution to give up the Japanese identity and become part of
the Manchurian society, I was able to meet M again, and the ultimate fulfillment of
this visit stood for “my” growth in the mindset. In his discussion about the origin of
anti-colonial ideology, Benedict Anderson put forward the concept of “cramped
pilgrimage,” arguing that the institutional discriminations imposed by the
metropolis state against colony-born functionaries would naturally encourage them
to imagine the colony as their mother country and the indigenes as their fellow
compatriots.1 In this sense, the journey “I” embarked on in Night Talks turned out
to be nothing but an intensive representation of the “cramped pilgrimage.” As a
member of the colonizers, the protagonist reached the hinterland of the colony “by
chance” and acquired a lived experience of the real state of the colonial society after
a series of hardships. Taking this journey as a rare opportunity, he found his
“traveling companions,” and inspired by them, realized the inseparable relationship
1
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1986), 58-59.
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between him and the colony. Hence his estranged and militant attitude towards the
metropolis state and suspicions of the legitimacy of the colonial rule. What the
“cramped pilgrimage” produced, among other things, was an anti-colonial
“second-generation consciousness” instead of an extension of the colonial ideology,
which informed the story of Night Talks and endowed it with a profound intellectual
significance. Moreover, the strongly subjective and impassioned tone of this novella
proved to be more compatible with the depiction of the characters’ internal struggles
and could accordingly affect its readers in a more deeply and more intimate way by
virtue of an emotional empathy. For that reason, Night Talks was claimed by Miyai
Ichirō as “a beam of light cast on our chaotic life in Manchuria.”1
Takeuchi Masaichi was the most outstanding writer focusing on the third
thematic type, and his two short stories Friendship and Baimiantang Path
comprehensively embodied its major characteristics. The protagonists of Friendship
were two Japanese dandies, Murayama and Kimura, who owed a huge amount of
money and had to “flee” to the ghetto community composed by Russian refugees in
suburban Harbin at the onset of the story. Although at first they were not
accustomed to the dirty and dilapidated environment there, they soon “settled down
at ease” with the excuse of “forbearance.” Every day, they were nicely dressed and
roamed around the whole city. If their money was used up, they would ask for loan
1
Miyai Ichirō 宮井一郎, “Sakubun yonjūshō made” 『作文』四十輯まで, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼
(1939.6): 148.
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from a Chinese restaurant; if they felt hungry, they would call on Russian dancing
girls and scrounged free meals at their homes. At night, they always stopped by
ballrooms, playing and drinking till morning. However, two months later, they
suddenly found themselves unable to maintain this carefree life since nobody would
like to lend money to them or treat them anymore. Murayama bought two bottles of
beer with all their remaining cash and went to the river bund along with Kimura
after dancing the whole night. Lying sluggishly on the beach, they complained about
the hot weather, which made them impossible to sell fur clothing, and planned to
escape from the landlord again. They then went back home in stealth, selling their
bed to a poor Manchurian household and running away with a broken suitcase.
Afterwards, Murayama was hired by a department store as a tailor, whereas
Kimura became a vagabond and slept outdoors on a filthy board along with bugs
every day. When the winter came, Kimura moved to Murayama’s house and his
friendship with Murayama lingered on. At the moment when Kimura successfully
joined in a fur company as he always wished and their lives appeared to ameliorate,
Kimura stole clients’ clothes and pawned them out for money to squander. The
company reported the theft to the police, who searched Kimura and Murayama’s
house and put them into prison. Even if in the prison, they cried bitterly for the
frightening cell and coarse food and vowed to make a clean break with their past
errors, once they were released, they immediately returned to their old habits,
strolling, whistling, and continuing to live the “unrestrained” life. In comparison
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with Friendship, Baimiantang Path focused on a fierce brawl breaking out among
the Manchurian people, but the Japanese intervention played a crucial part in its
development and resolution. The brawl originated from a substantial rise of heating
cost caused by soaring prices. In order to compensate for her economic loss, Wang
Xiufang, the landlord of Baimiantang, conspired to collect a heating fee of six dollars
from each household of her tenants. According to the old convention of the
Manchurians, heating fee was included in rent; however, the Japanese colonizers
brought their custom of calculating them separately to Manchuria. With this excuse,
Wang Xiufang forced the tenants to pay the exact amount and met fierce opposition
from them, especially from Y and his wife, who provoked a collective protest against
the suggestion. As things seemed to reach a dead end, Xiufang recalled by accident
that her daughter Xiugui recently fell in an intimate relationship with the Japanese
tenant M and planned to utilize M to achieve her goal. She thus feasted M with
delicious food and Xiugui’s hospitable accompany, under whose temptation, M
volunteered to follow Xiufang everyday and argued for her as a “translator.” Due to
the assistance of the Japanese, most tenants began to waver in their long-standing
position, but Y still stubbornly clang to his own views and demanded others to
“stand on the side of the Manchurians” against the Japanese coercion. Wang Xiufang
had no other choice but to send the dispute to the arbitration agency, where the
Japanese arbitrator asked them to make a compromise by paying half of the heating
fee. Even though Y rejected the suggestion, Xiufang forcibly withhold six dollars
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from Y’s payment of rent. Y’s wife felt very angry with this cheating behavior and
complained about it in front of her fellow tenants, who all appeared to be indignant
and competed to denounce the treachery of the landlord; nonetheless, once they saw
Xiufang passing by along with M, they immediately changed their countenance and
loudly scolded the family of Y, some of whom even came to flatter M with the
compliment that “we are comrades of the Japanese and hate the self-conceited Y; we
know the Japanese are particularly friendly to the Manchurians.” As M was
imagining his date with Xiugui in the evening, the first snow of this winter fell down
in all these clamors. Differing significantly with the image of the Japanese colonizers
as pioneers of modern civilization in the colonial ideology, Kiyama and Yamamura
consistently performed as scoundrels and swindlers. They not only indulged
themselves to dissipation and fraudulence, but also took this way of life as a norm
with no sense of shame, playing a series of embarrassing burlesques. As Takeuchi
delineated in the story, they were “just like planktons leisurely living in a big pool.”
However, the maintenance of their parasitic lifestyle was totally based on their
privileged social status as colonizers, and that was why they could easily cheat the
Manchurian restaurant keeper, the Russian dancing girls, the coolie who bought
their bed, and other underclass laborers of money and food without punishment.
Obviously, Takeuchi did not limited his sarcasm to these two protagonists, who were
reduced by him to animality, but intended to employ them as epitomes to
exaggeratedly reveal the real living state and mental symptoms of the Japanese
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commoners in Manchuria: as an integral part of the colonizers, they were
unanimously attached to the colonial social dynamics for a living and thus took on a
marked parasitic feature; likewise, the colonial regime itself also had to exploit and
plunder the colonized Manchurians to maintain its existence, which did not differ
much from Kiyama and Murayama by nature. In this sense, the protagonists of this
story constituted an epitome of the colonial power, and their ridiculous deeds
drastically parodied what the Japanese colonialism committed in the colony.
Furthermore, the scenario that Kimura and Murayama had never regretted their
wanton performances but felt proud of them manifested a psychological state shared
by the Japanese commoners that featured an indifferent attitude towards colonial
sins and an amoral sense of privilege as well as the hypocrisy and absurdity of the
colonial propaganda. Baimiantang Path, in a different way from Friendship, did not
directly depict the Japanese people’s living state, but introduced M as crucial figure
to reflect it through the lens of the Manchurians. In this short story, M proved to be
rude, foolish, ludicrous, and bawdy and was consequently utilized by Xiufang as her
accomplice in intimidating the tenants. Nevertheless, even a mediocre Japanese like
him could instantly create a fundamental shift in the balance of power, make the
Manchurians ingratiate themselves with him, and enable Xiufang to behave
unscrupulously. What lay behind him was the absolute authority of the colonial
power over the colonized people, and from their both resentful and fearful response
to him, it was not difficult to imagine how domineering and peremptory the
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colonizers were in everyday life and how cruelly the Manchurian commoners were
treated by them. Under this subordinating power relationship, the so-called slogans
of “ethnic harmony” and “the kingly way” turned out to be no more than an elegant
rhetoric that concealed the harsh reality. To make the exposition and criticism more
trenchant and more subversive, Takeuchi adopted a mocking and burlesquing voice
and various sarcastic narratives. Moreover, in both Friendship and Baimiantang
Path, he took an omnipotent third-person point of view, condescendingly explored
and dug into the deepest secrets of the characters’ consciousness, and intentionally
drew a comparison between their evil thoughts and seemingly respectable
performances, and between their motivations and the unexpected turn in reality,
thus creating a remarkably ironic effect by means of dislocation. For example, in the
last part of Friendship, when Kiyama and Murayama came across the headwaiter of
the Chinese restaurant, they thought he would ask them to pay debts back, so they
gave a loud shout of astonishment, “hastily run into crowds, and crossed the street
from an opposite direction.” As they rejoiced at their escape, the headwaiter cut
corners and caught them face to face. Hearing his ridicules, they awkwardly made
up the excuse of “please wait till the end of this month, and we will pay off the loan,”
but were surprisingly told that he just did job-hopping and there was no need for
them to fear. Similarly, in Baimiantang Path, after M got drunken, the family of
Xuifang all laughed at his disgusting manners and conceived at heart that “this
clown was merely preoccupied with his own enjoyment without knowing that he was
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treated by others as an idiot.” Having no idea about what was happening to him, M
yelled out, “both the Japanese and the Manchurians are citizens of Manchukuo. We
Japanese never fear bullets or arrows and will never show any mercy. What’s
nonsense of the harmony among five ethnic groups and the Elysium of the kingly
way? Ah, Xiugui, I love you so much...Please give Xiugui to me.” These surprise
twists in the storyline and the juxtaposition of ambivalent matters naturally
conveyed a sense of irony and formed the overarching means of this sarcastic
narrative style. In addition, Takeuchi also widely used such rhetorical devices as
metaphor and exaggeration in order to strengthen the force of his sarcasm. For
instance, the dissipated life of Kiyama and Kitamura was referred to as “opium
addiction” and “infection of disease,” and M’s drunken behaviors were exaggeratedly
depicted as “he held Xiugui’s head to bite her in haste with his shirt stained by
sauces of the braised fish” and “picked his nose as if nobody saw him, murmuring
and puffing.” These literary techniques carried Takeuchi’s sarcasm to the fullest and
strategically parodied the colonial ideological discourse to a certain degree.
Unlike Tekeuchi Masaichi, who paid a close attention to the life of the ordinary
Japanese people in Manchukuo, Aoki Minoru took the lead among Sakubun writers
to direct their literary praxis towards “Manchurian topics” and to regard the
representation of the Manchurians’ miserable life caused by colonial oppression as
his primary task. Among all his short stories, A Peasant was the one that received
the most attention from the literary circle and was included respectively in Byokai:
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Collection of Works by Nine Manchukuo Writers and the second volume of The
Yearbook of Art and Literature in Manchukuo. This story mainly dealt with the poor
Manchurian peasant Meng’s pitiful encounters: Mengjiatun was originally
established by Meng’s ancestors; owing to natural disasters and the robbery by
bandits, only a small piece of land was left to Meng. However, by planting corns and
millets on this land, Meng not only made a decent living, but bought extra horses
and furnitures. There was also a good harvest this year. Meng borrowed three carts
from the landlord, loaded two bushels of corns, and planned to sell them at the
market of the county town. Although it was said that bandits were rampant these
days, Meng fortunately arrived at his destination, selling out all the grains at a high
price. He went back to the inn where he took lodge in the evening, drank some
sorghum wine, and took a nap on the bed. In dreaminess, he recalled that his wife
requested him to bring some groceries home and hurriedly went out in darkness.
After buying sugar and eyedrops, he got into a candle shop and found some Japanese
soldiers there, who fiercely shouted at Meng with words he didn’t understand. Out of
fear, Meng fled out of the shop, but was subsequently shot and put into prison. As it
turned out, the Japanese military police received an information that the candle
shop colluded with bandits and therefore ambushed there. Since Meng happened to
burst into the shop, whose panics looked very suspicious, he was arrest as an
accomplice. Given that Meng had not come back for two days, his fellow villagers
anxiously went to the county town to look for him. Realizing that it was a mistake,
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the police finally released Meng after much difficulty and jolting. On their way
home, the weather was bright and breezy, but Meng had become mad. In this story,
even though Aoki mentioned the harms brought by natural disasters and the
feudality of the Asiatic society as represented by bandits and warlordship to
Manchurian peasants, he also depicted that even under this severe environment,
Meng could live a peaceful and abundant life. What really destroyed him was the
violence of the colonial state apparatus. The bandits who infested the county town
actually implied the anti-Japanese military force, and despite the irrelevance of
Meng to them, he was indiscriminately viewed as part of them due to his
Manchurian identity. Meng’s arrest persuasively manifested that the colonists held
suspicions and hostilities towards all the colonized, who would fall into victims of the
colonial violence at almost any time. As for Meng’s experience in prison, there were
no direct clues; nevertheless, it was not hard to infer what cruel abuses and torments
were imposed on him from the single fact that he transformed from a sophisticated
peasant to an insane person within merely two days. On the surface, Meng’s tragedy
was a contingency triggered by misunderstanding, but underlying it was the violent
and inhumane nature of the colonial rule. Starting from this point, Aoki subverted
the interwar Japanese Marxist discourse that claimed Japan’s colonization as an
anti-feudal emancipatory enterprise, ascribed colonialism to the social origin of the
tribulations Manchurian peasants suffered from, and forcefully censured the
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colonial violence as most intensively embodied by the sorrowful contrast between the
beautiful sceneries and Meng’s madness at the end of the story.
The colonial violence was implemented not only among rural areas, but also in
the urban society, not only by the state organ, but also by ordinary Japanese
colonizers, and not only via torments and slaughters, but also in the form of
emotional abuses. Aoki’s another distinguished work Sun’s Misfortunes happened to
deal with how cold violence was applied in the city and its harms to the psychology of
urban Manchurian residents. Centering on the adversities that occurred in
succession to Sun, a poor factotum working at a Japanese construction company,
within three days, this short story epitomized the trauma of the common
Manchurians subsisting under the colonial rule: because of food poisoning, Sun
suffered from sweating and stomachache for the whole night and became
exhaustively feeble the next morning. His mother persuaded him to take a rest at
home, but he still dragged his sick body to the working place and cleaned up all
stained teacups and flowerpots before the arrival of the Japanese employees.
However, he was “blamed in rage” by them for not wiping desks and had to endure
the pain to serve them with smiles in his face. Finishing all his duties like buying
breakfast and delivering photos as required by the Japanese manager, who knew
Sun was badly ill but ordered him around as usual, Sun almost keeled over in faint
and thus asked for leave to take a rest at home. Though permitting Sun’s leave, the
manager believed that Sun was lying and malingering and became dissatisfied with
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him. The next morning, Sun heard that his neighbor died of starvation, so he gave
all the money he had to the wife of the deceased and told the grievous story to his
Japanese colleagues, who only cared about how the funeral was held and what was
its difference from wedding ceremonies and doubted why Sun could donate so much
money. In order to attend the funeral, Sun asked the manager for a two hours’ leave
again, which made him more unpleased. On the third day, encountering his
cousin-in-law in the street, who informed Sun of the death of his daughter and
suggested him to return to his native place at once. In uncontrollable sorrows, Sun
realized that he even didn’t have money to buy a coach ticket and had to seek help
from the company. So he implored the manager to give him an advance on the
salary, but was immediately declined by him and driven away with angry shouts.
Imagining the death of his daughter, Sun lost all his hopes, wept and walked
towards his home. In this regard, what led to Sun’s agony seemed to be those three
accidental events, yet they were wittingly targeted by Aoki at the unequal power
relationship between Sun and his Japanese colleagues, which constituted the center
of the narratives and the real driving force of the misery of Sun. The Japanese
employees, from the very beginning, appeared to be indifferent and arrogant,
showing a contemptuous, wary and antagonistic attitude to Sun. They not only
enslaved and exploited Sun in an arbitrary way even at his sickness, but also
biasedly took Sun’s pleadings as a lie out of an ingrained mentality of repulsion. This
mentality was continually reinforced and amplified with the development of the
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storyline, burst out in the manager’s angry shouts, and sent Sun to a hopeless
situation. Undoubtedly, the attitude and mentality held by the Japanese characters
in this story epitomized the universal psychological state of the ordinary colonizers
and the operational mechanism of the colonial power on the periphery of the society.
As a matter of fact, at the microscopic level, the enforcement of colonial violence
usually did not resort to state apparatus in a direct manner, but relied on the
internalization of the subjugating power relations in people’s consciousness and was
conveyed by various social bonds and principles of everyday life. In the context of the
story, it was the constant suppression and prejudice imposed by his Japanese
colleagues in works, words and emotions that inflicted Sun most, and at the juncture
when he lost his daughter and became most psychologically vulnerable, this cold
violence gave him a lethal blow and caused an irreparable trauma in his mind. If A
Peasant was supposed to criticize the colonial state organ of violence with the
purpose of “urging the ruling class to reflect on their policies,” then Sun’s
Misfortunes directed its assault onto the microscopic operation of the colonial
mechanism and rigorously interrogated those who volunteered to carry out the
colonial violence in daily practices. In addition, it was worth noting that as
representatives of the colonized majority, both Meng and Sun chose not to argue or
resist, but either fled in silence or kept smiling in the face of the violent threat. In
this sense, they preformed as examples of what Aoki called “the unvoiced
Manchurians,” and similarly, these two stories also formed part of the defense
143
conducted by Aoki for the Manchurian people under the colonial oppression.
Correspondingly, in this story, objectivity was celebrated as the highest principle of
description with a mixture of the first and the fourth narrative styles: by introducing
interpretations and expository comments from time to time, Aoki tried to display his
scientific and authentic stance and expand the coverage of the fiction; by means of
objective and dispassionate portrayals, he intended to make the reality speak by
itself so that the ideological illusions would be more pertinently and more
convincingly laid bare; at the same time, his cordial sympathy for the Manchurian
masses was hidden in and transmitted by plot settings, image contrasts and
rhetorical uses, which generated a somber and grave aura.
The exposition of the social problems brought by the colonial modernization
project, the sarcasm of the despicable behaviors of the ordinary Japanese people, the
exploration of the Manchurians’ miserable life, and the promotion of a distinct
cultural identity jointly posed a great challenge against the colonial ideological
discourse and shook the foundation of the colonial rule in reality with the growing
influence of the Sakubun School. As more and more Japanese intellectuals joined the
Bunwakai, to some extent, they also shared the viewpoints proposed by Sakubun
writers, a phenomenon that intruded on the awareness of the state propaganda
organ. At the order of the Kōbōsho, the Bunwakai’s headquarter was moved from
Dalian to Xinjing and put under the direct surveillance of the “Association for
Manchurian and Japanese Cultures” in August, 1939. Subsequently, Yoshino Haruo
144
and his companions were forced to reshape the organizational framework of the
Bunwakai, transforming it from “a group focusing on literature to that of multiple
cultural disciplines” as well as its ultimate goal from “the reinforcement of
communication and friendship to an active pursuit of cultural politicization.”1 On
July 27th, 1941, the state-operated “Association of Litterateurs and Artists in
Manchukuo” was founded, and in the meanwhile, the Bunwakai was dismissed as “it
was not a literary group inspired by the government.” The journal of Sakubun was
also not spared. Owing to increasingly strict censorship and a shortage of paper
supplies after the outbreak of the Pacific War, it ceased publication in December,
1942. As it turned out, all Japanese literary writings in Manchukuo were invariably
incorporated into the paradigm of “national-policy literature” from then on, and the
“writers of pure literature” like Kitamura Kenjirō and Aoki Minoru were blamed and
forbidden to write for their “excessive liberalism and individualism.” In the
aftermath of these events, the literary arena of Manchukuo fell into a state of
deathly stillness.
1
Furugawa Testsujirō 古川哲次郎, “Manshū bunwakai no dōkō to hihan” 満洲文話会の動向と批判,
Hokusō 北窓 (2.5): 89-90.
145
CHAPTER IV
THE MODERNIZATION DISCOURSE FORMULATED BY YIWENZHI
INTELLECTUALS
The modern literary praxis conducted in vernacular Chinese on the land of
Manchukuo started from the early 1920s and received a decisive influence from the
May Fourth Cultural Movement. Among those literary societies that initially came
into being, the most renowned ones were the White Birch Society launched by Mu
Mutian 穆木天 in Jilin and the Association for Enlightenment initiated by Mei
Foguang 梅佛光 in Fengtian, with over ten literary journals being published in
succession, such as White Birch, Enlightenment Biweekly, Water Flower, Northern
Land, and the like. Major newspapers also set up a wide range of literary columns
devoted to modern-styled vernacular literature, which had a profound effect on the
modernization project of Manchuria. In the aftermath of the Mukden Incident and
Manchukuo’s establishment, the development of the Chinese “new literature”
suffered a temporary setback due to social disturbances. Nevertheless, it soon
recovered within one year with publishing activities gradually returning to
normality. In South Manchuria,
particularly the city of Fengtian, there arose more
than twenty literary organizations, including the Drifting Society, Cold Mist Society,
White Light Society, Red Leaf Society, Wild Dog Society, and so on, within which,
the Drifting Society mainly dedicated itself to literary criticism and miscellaneous
146
essays and involved members like Qiuying 秋萤, Wang Mengsu 王孟素, and Chen
Yin 陈因, while the Cold Mist Society and the White Light Society were respectively
devoted to vernacular poetry and short stories. It was noticeable that most of these
literary societies had no stylistic preference and no theoretical pursuits, let alone the
distinctive proposals of their own. In other words, their literary praxis remained to
be a spontaneous and individualized one. By contrast, productions of the “new
literature” in North Manchuria were guided by the Chinese Communist Party and
embodied explicit anti-Japanese appeals. Since the Manchurian branch of the CCP
was located in Harbin, it also became the center of the North-Manchuria-based
literary circle. In this city, Jin Jianxiao 金剑啸, Luo Feng 罗烽, Jiang Chunfang 姜
椿 芳 , Shu Qun 舒 群 , and other party members inaugurated such literary
supplements as “New Waves” and “Night Sentinel” on Harbin News and Datong
Newspaper, making the latter the official organ for party propagandas. Besides
them, those who regularly contributed to “Night Sentinel” consisted of numerous
left-wing writers like Xiao Jun 萧军, Xiao Hong 萧红, Bai Lang 白朗, and Liang
Shanding 梁山丁, whose writings were preoccupied with class struggles and the
national salvation. No wonder that this supplement was eventually banned by the
colonial government after four months from its birth. Subsequently, they moved
their forum to “Literature and Art,” another newspaper supplement, and resumed to
publish literary works for the sake of resistance. With the stabilization of the
colonial rule in Manchuria, the Manchukuo government gradually shifted its
147
attention from the political arena to cultural spheres. Against this background, the
security and life of the Manchurian cultural leftists were put under a dire threat.
With the help of Lu Xun 鲁迅 and the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, Xiao
Jun, Xiao Hong, Shu Qun, and Luo Binji successively fled to inland China in 1935,
while Jin Jianxiao was killed by shooting in June, 1936 as a crucial political
criminal. Moreover, the colonial regime also outlawed almost all literary journals in
Chinese as well as modern Chinese literary canons like Mao Dun’s 茅盾 Midnight
and Ba Jin’s The “Torrents” Trilogy. This suffocating cultural control pushed the
Chinese “new literature” within the boundary of Manchukuo to the brim of
extinction.
Debut of Mingming and the Yiwenzhi School
It was the emergence of Mingming 明 明 that broke the silence of the
Manchurian literary realm. In November, 1936, Shirojima Shūrei 城島舟禮, the
Japanese chief editor of Manchuria Monthly, got permission from the Kōbōsho and
planned to initiate a Chinese popular magazine for common Manchurian readers. He
then contacted Gu Ding 古丁, Teng Geng 藤庚, Chen Songling 陈松龄1, and other
Manchurian officials working at the National Statistics Bureau for help and
1
Chen Songling was more often known to us in his penname Xinjia 辛嘉.
148
entrusted all the editing affairs to them. According to Gu Ding’s suggestion, this new
magazine should be of a knowledge level higher than that of the average educated
Manchurians in order to enlarge their vision and should spare at least one third of
the printed sheets to publish modern-styled literary works. Teng Geng also advised
the journal to take Eastern Miscellany, the most influential interdisciplinary
cultural magazine in modern Chinese history, as an example to “contain education
in amusement.” On the basis of this blueprint, Mingming was launched on March
10th, 1937. Although it was marked on the colophon that the publisher was
Shirojima Shūrei and the editor was Inakawa Asajiro 稲川朝二路, Chen Songling
proved to be the real director who took charge of regular operations of the magazine.
At the request of the Kōbōsho to celebrate the success of Japan in the
Russo-Japanese War, the first issue of Mingming published a memoir on General
Nogi Maresuke’s 乃木希典 military feats in the most important place, followed by
essays about the history of the founding of Manchukuo, the geomancy of royal
mausoleums of the Qing emperors and how to prevent epidemics in spring, whereas
Gu Ding’s novella Another Year and the translation of Gorky’s In a Mountain Defile
by Yichi 疑迟 were put at the end. According to the content of the initial issue, it not
only took on the features of a catch-all journal, but also served the purpose of
colonial propaganda to a certain degree. Conversely, literature was marginalized as
a supplementary part that somehow contradicted with other sections. Nonetheless,
from the second issue on, propagandistic writings decreased sharply, and literary
149
works began to play an increasingly larger part with Gu Ding, Xiaosong 小松,
Xinjia, Yichi and other Manchurian intellectuals competing to publish reviews and
creative writings in the journal, which transformed Mingming into a coterie
publication focusing on belles letters. As far as Yichi was concerned, among these
literary works, Gu Ding’s Wilderness, Violin, Leather Suitcases, Xiaosong’s The
Shade of Floods, News from the Evening Paper, Xinjia’s eponymous epic adapted
from Lu Xun’s historical story Forging the Swords, and his own fictions like Syringa
Flowers, The Northern Wasteland, and Geese Flying Southwards” proved to be the
most outstanding and most influential ones. 1 Apart from the wirings by the
Mingming companions, other renowned Manchurian writers’ literary products, such
as Shi Jun’s Camel Hump Ridge, Yuan Xi’s Mother and Daughter, Shanding’s
critical essay “Native-land literature and Syringa Flowers,” and Qiuying’s review
titled “The Footprints of the New Literature in Manchuria,” were also included in
the journal and attracted tremendous attention from the Manchurian intelligentsia.
In this sense, Mingming offered a public forum for Manchurian intellectuals to
express their opinions and to make their own voice heard. In addition, it even came
up with three special issues separately on “Literary Creations,” “Commemoration of
Lu Xun,” and “Introduction to Japanese literature” within its duration of one and
half years. Around the first anniversary of Mingming, Gu Ding and his friends went
1
Yichi 疑遅, “Zasshi Mingming no kaisō” 雑誌『明明』の回想, in Bugaku·Shakai e Chikyū e 文学•社会へ
地球へ (Kyōto: San’íchi shobō, 1996), 103.
150
on to circulate the “Shirojima Book Series” and accordingly opened up a new
possibility for Manchurian writers to display their literary talents. For economic
reasons, Mingming finally ceased to appear in September, 1938, comprising
forty-nine issues in total.
Not long after, Gu Ding, Yichi, and Xiaosong organized the “Yiwenzhi Office”
and initiated their own literary quarterly Yiwenzhi 艺文志 (Record of Art and
Literature) in June, 1939 in Xinjing. Assuming the responsibility of the chief editor,
Xiaosong keenly declared in the “Foreword to Yiwenzhi” as follows: “[we] hereby
hope the insightful people in our state will brandish their halberd-like pens and
reclaim the waste land in our literary realm so as to improve art and literature,
ameliorate the social ethos, and carry forward our national prestige.”1 Out of this
consideration, Yiwenzhi augmented the number and the size of printed sheets
compared to those of Mingming and paid much more attention to the publishing of
fictional writings, particularly novellas and novels. Gu Ding’s Flat Sands, which won
the Japanese Welfare Ministry Prize in August, 1940, Xiaosong’s novella
Dandelions, Jueqing’s 爵青 novel Wheat, and such distinguished short stories as
Shijun’s Marshland and Yichi’s The Tropic were all initially published in Yiwenzhi.
Given the similarity of Yiwenzhi’s major contributors and literary tenets to those of
Mingming, scholars were inclined to treat Mingming and Yiwenzhi as an
1
Yiwenzhi shiwusuo 《艺文志》事务所, “Yiwenzhi Xu” 艺文志序, Yiwenzhi 艺文志 (1939.1): 2.
151
undifferentiated whole and termed Gu Ding, Yi Chi, Xinjia, Jueqing, Xiaosong,
Waiwen 外文, Bailing 百灵, and some others as the Yiwenzhi School.
Controversy of “Native-Land Literature” and “Write-and-Print-ism”
In addition to the aforementioned achievements Mingming made in the
publishing field, it also aroused the interests of Manchurian intellectuals in literary
criticism and their violent controversies over the theme, styles and orientations of
the Chinese-based Manchukuo Literature as well as how to treat the influence of
Japanese culture. That was why Ōuchi Takeo proclaimed that Mingming played a
significant role in the literary circle of Manchukuo and illuminated the direction of
its future development. These controversies not only endowed the literary praxis of
the “New Literature” by Manchurian writers with theoretical significance, but also
elicited two antithetic intellectual groups, the Yiwenzhi School and the Wenxuan
School, who respectively appealed to literary modernity and national cultural
identity and engaged in an ambiguous relationship between each other as
manifested by their literary proposals.
The so-called controversy of “native-land literature” and “write-and-print-ism”
derived from disparate interpretations on Yichi’s short story Syringa Flowers, which
recounted a Manchurian peasant’s bitter life experience: inflicted by incessant wars
and natural disasters, the family of Zhang Delu became more and more
152
impoverished. After the death of his father, Zhang had to do odd jobs at a very young
age in order to make a humble living for his family. However, since it was most hard
to get job opportunities in the village, he had been unemployed for half a year and
thus reluctantly entered the mountain along with his neighbor Zhao Yongshun to
work as a wood chopper. Wearing thin clothes and suffering the rigidity of the snowy
winter, they fell woods assiduously from day to night without a moment’s repose
even on the Chinese New Year; nevertheless, after several month of hard toils, they
only earned forty dollars. With the arrival of the spring and the bloom of syringa
flowers, Zhang and Zhao embarked on their journey to home. Finding that their
money was even not enough to cover the expense of the train ticket, they decided to
go back on foot. The next morning, they strode towards the East Mountain when it
started to dawn, whose heart was full of gaiety and excitement. Published in the
third issue of Mingming in May, 1937, Syringa Flowers instantly caused a sensation
among Manchurian intellectuals right after its debut and “was considered as an
epoch-making work in the Manchurian literary history.”1 In the light of Shanding’s
memory, he happened to read this story brought to him by Chen Songling, felt deeply
moved, and thereupon composed a piece of commentary on it with the title of
“Native-Land Literature and Syringa Flowers,” which was published by Chen in the
1
Xiasong 小松, “Yichi jiqi zuopin” 夷驰及其作品, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北
现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 212.
153
fifth issue of the journal. 1 In this article, Shanding explicitly argued that “the
literary circle of our state should lay a particular emphasis on native-land
literature,” and “in view of the intellectual tendency and the literary skills Syringa
Flowers embodied, it was undeniably a representative work of the native-land
literature,” whose “author Yichi, on this account, was a brave native-land-literature
practitioner as well as a pioneering figure in the Manchurian literary realm.” In
terms of Shanding’s definition, the so-called native-land literature referred to
“literary works whose ideas and techniques both focus on the reality” and was
supposed to “reflect the real life of a majority of people” and “undertake the
righteous task entailed by human history” on the basis of “an in-depth
understanding about the zeitgeist.” To conclude, Shanding announced, “what
Manchuria needs is the native-land literature, which is realistic.” 2 In order to
support Shanding’s argument, Wu Lang 吴郎 also attributed the direction of the
future development of Manchukuo literature to Syringa Flowers as it “aims at a
vivid representation of the real world,” suggesting that “Manchukuo literature’s
promise should lie in the literary praxis informed by the native place.” As opposed to
Shanding and Wu Lang’s interpretation, Yichi traced his original intention in
See Liang Shanding 梁山丁, “Wo yu Dongbei de xiangtu wenxue” 我与东北的乡土文学, in Dongbei
Lunxian Shiqi Wenxue Guoji Xueshu Yantaohui Lunwenji 东北沦陷时期文学国际学术研讨会论文集, ed., Feng
Weiqun 冯为群 (Shenyang: Shenyang Chubanshe, 1992) , 370.
1
2
27.
Liang Shanding 梁山丁, “Xiangtu wenyi yu Shandinghua” 乡土文艺与《山丁花》, Mingming 明明 (1.5):
154
writing this story and straightforwardly denied the classification of Syringa Flowers
into the category of “native-land literature.” He explained that this story derived
from his personal experience at the River Wujimi train station as he witnessed
“those peasant workers who felled woods for almost one year, earned little money,
plodded the path of toil in vain, and had to return to their gray-colored hometowns,”
and what he did was just to “fragmentarily record his sympathetic feelings as if
writing a diary,” which had nothing to do with a purposive practice of the
native-land literature.1 It was Gu Ding who conducted a much more vehement
criticism against “native-land literature” and enormously escalated the controversy.
In his opinion, the concept of “native-land literature” turned out to be nothing more
than “a pretty tag,” which was put by Shanding on Syringa Flowers to promulgate
his own proposals by virtue of the story’s great influence, not unlike the labels posted
onto wine bottles by crafty merchants; this far-fetched “ism” or “color” would not only
make the readers’ understanding “metamorphosed and distorted,” but also
“constrain literature within its own little world” as “something bigoted” and “destroy
both its criticism and the author it critiques”; moreover, “native-land literature”
itself indicated a “rural exotic style,” which “indulges itself in novelties for a
sensational effect” as if “someone uses a Jade pot to hold the spin of ‘sorghum and
beans’” and thus could not count towards a real literary paradigm. On the ground of
1
1937: 7.
Yichi 疑迟, “Wo zenyang xie de Shandinghua” 我怎样写的《山丁花》, Manzhou Bao 满洲报 16 Jul.
155
this castigation, Gu Ding proceeded to present his own theoretical stance dedicated
to the free development of Manchukuo literature. On the one hand, he protested
“any self-conceited advisers who made indiscreet criticisms with their self-conceited
canons” and “any forms of isms or colors,” but insisted that Manchurian writers
should “steadily write and print for our literary circle and our literary history” in “a
directionless direction.” On the other hand, he stressed that this “directionless
direction” did not signify a lack of faith and accordingly consisted in three writing
principles, namely “not to write works that elicit a sense of pleasure or beauty from
the readers,” “not to write works that are baffling and unaccountable,” and “not to
write works that make people optimistic.”1 These viewpoints, especially the demand
to “steadily write and print,” were commonly referred to as “write-and-print-ism”
and shared by the Yiwenzhi School in common.
Confronted with Gu Ding’s blame, Shanding and Wu Lang chose to keep
silence with no published refutation. In spite of that, from year 1938 on, this
controversy was reignited in another form. Under the impulsion of Gu Ding and his
companions, the “Shirojima Book Series” formally came out in March, 1938,
including collections of short stories like Striving to Fly, Bats, and Flowers and the
Moon, and poetry anthologies like Sparks, which were mostly written by the
Yiwenzhi School or published in Mingming before. They also jointly presented the
1
Gu Ding 古丁, “Ougan ouji bing yutan” 偶感偶记并余谈, Xin Qingnian 新青年 (1937.64), 49.
156
“Preface to the ‘Shirojima Book Series’” in the anniversary issue of Mingming to
publicize their literary aspirations. In this preface, they at first reviewed the current
situation of cultural undertakings in Manchukuo, criticizing that “our press has
never understood what [modern] culture seeks and what common people need, and
thus causes a wide gap between the culture and the masses,” and then divulged their
pursuit of mass enlightenment in reality:
Common people are by no means insulated from modern culture, which in
turn will automatically wither if separated from common people. Therefore,
we published Mingming in order to bridge the gap between them. Since its
emergence, our magazine has been deemed highly by the insightful ones and
exerted a tiny effect so far. We hereby intend to carry forward this pursuit,
thus coming up with the “Shirojima Book Series. ” Notwithstanding our
limited capital, we will go all out to include various books on literature,
philosophy, social sciences and natural sciences and to map out a long-term
plan. At the first stage of this project, we will publish literary works that could
access the common people most easily and select translations of the
masterpieces of world literature, presenting them to [our readers] in a
continuous way.1
By surprise, this short essay of merely over one hundred words triggered a
tremendous stir among the Manchurian literary circle with Wu Lang, Zhenglang 铮
郎, and many other critics launching a bitter diatribe against the Yiwenzhi School for
the inconsistency of their allegations with the actual progress of the publication
project. As they intensely censured, although the preface claimed to widely collect
masterpieces by domestic and foreign writers, what the Yiwenzhi School promoted
were their own writings, and no matter how the they aspired to shorten the distance
1
2.
Shirojima Shūrei 城島舟禮, “‘Chengdao Wenku’ kanxingci” “城岛文库”刊行辞, Mingming 明明 (3.1):
157
of modern culture from common people, the deluxe binding and the high price of the
book series scared commoners away; most important of all, this book series was
named after a Japanese cultural official, and its financial support might also come
from the colonial government. On this account, Wu Lang condemned such
statements like “understand what common people need” and “bridge the gap
between the culture and the masses” to be “deceptive nonsense” and explained the
motivation of Gu Ding and his companions as “to enhance their standing by virtue of
luxury covers.” Differing from Wu Lang, Shanding primarily enforced his criticism
from a nationalistic perspective. In his eyes, the attempt of Yiwenzhi writers to
facilitate the development of the “new literature” via a collaboration with Japanese
men of letters was a self-anesthetizing trick, whose tendency for “not distinguishing
between friends and foes” would definitely lead to “self-contempt” and “self-abuse” as
well as an inevitable degeneration of them into “spies” of the colonial regime and
thereupon should be “undermined without hesitation”; on the contrary, the “new
literature” of Manchukuo could only find its way out in “describing the reality” and
“exposing the reality” and in an “epic-styled” representation that “employs exquisite
literary techniques in all possibilities.” Shanding’s opinions were shared by Qiuying
and other radical nationalists, who published a range of articles on Datong
Newspaper, besieging the Yiwenzhi School with such curses as “impotent and
shameless writers,” “playing hackneyed tunes in vain,” and “sycophantically
assisting the power [of the colonists]” and even alleging that “each issue of
158
Mingming as well as the newly-published ‘Shirojima Book Series’ would bring an
unparalleled crisis to the Manchurian literary circle” and “destroy its future promise
in a really hideous manner.”1
Facing all these reproaches, Gu Ding, Xinjia, and Xiaosong were unable to
refrain from joining in this controversy, pleading for their cultural stance and
answering back on the basis of the freedom and the artistic value of literary praxis.
By taking examples of Balzac and ancient Chinese literati, Gu Ding took the lead to
clarify that “binding itself also engages a creative process” and imputed the
“prejudice held by the intelligentsia against bindings” to an ignorance of cultural
preservation:
The custom of binding luxuriously do not start from me or from this [book
series]. We are indeed inferior to the ancient people in bindings. Certainly, I
have no knowledge about bibliology, but it is said by relevant specialists that
the ancient people devoted particular care to every detail [of binding]. Even in
Shanghai, where the publishing enterprises were not that developed, any
regular books will have a pursuit of both quality and beauty. In our state,
those who always talk about artistic creations ironically don’t understand that
bindings were also a form of creation. As far as I know, writers in Japan tend
to bind books on their own. In case they are not able to do so by themselves,
they will invite professional designers and mark their names on the cover
page to manifest that it is a creative act. Nonetheless, we unreasonably reject
binding as an extravagance. In addition to the sake of beauty, bindings will
contribute a lot to the maintenance of books. Of course for those who think
their books are not worth preserving, the story is different.2
1
2
Wumingsheng 无名生, “Guanyu ‘Chengdao Wenku’” 关于“城岛文库,” Mingming 明明 (3.5): 22.
Gu Ding 古丁, “Tan yi·sishu” 谈一•私淑, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春
燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 92-93.
159
In this regard, delicate bindings were interpreted as an integral part of literary
production and an intensive manifestation of the writers’ free volitions, which stood
for the indefatigable pursuit of admirable things and aesthetic values as well as
another important facet of the construction of Manchukuo literature; the
aforementioned suspicions of and biases against the binding of the book series, by
contrast, transgressed the freedom of writing, impeded the fulfillment of the artistic
value, and jeopardized the overall development of Manchuria’s “new literature.”
Subsequently, Gu Ding composed another article entitled “Bull Fighting,” continuing
to compare the difference of “coterie journal” from business journal in a purposeful
way. According to him, operators of the former “tend to pursue the merit of arts
rather than profits” and accordingly had to “gather funds and do the editing jobs all
by themselves”; in order to “resume the publication” at a high cost, they “must at
least recoup most of their expenses” and “never bargain away [their magazines].” In
opposition, those who profit from the latter were not only “supported by their
masters and able to squander money lavishly,” but also conspired to canvass for
“their own business” by accusing the “coterie journal” of being too expensive. It was
apparent that the “coterie journal” Gu Ding mentioned here specifically referred to
Mingming, and “those Lord Editors of the business journal” directly pointed at
Shanding, Qiuying, and other opponent critics. In this sense, the high price of the
“Shirojima Book Series” was of a great necessity to maintain the independence and
purity of literature, while Shanding’s impeachment turned out to be a malicious
160
speculation, and his funding sources as well as the “masters” in the background were
most dubious among other things. Gu Ding went on to expound the reason why he
get close to Japanese culture in “Dream World”:
If without energetic and abundant introductions of world literature, there
won’t be energetic and abundant germinations of local literature, as can be
discerned easily from the case in Chinese literary history that the translation
of Buddhist sutras determinatively influenced classical Chinese
literature...Japan’s publishing industry counts as one of the best all over the
world. If we can employ [Japanese] to dig up the treasures from the Japanese
cultural thesaurus, it couldn’t be more convenient. The reason why we learn
Japanese was not only to do the translation work, but also to absorb their
knowledge and skills to fill in our own mind. I have often heard the biased
suggestion of not reading Japanese books, which is indeed a fallacy. If [you] do
not hold this opinion, that would be fine, and if [you] believe in the very idea,
[you] should get rid of it as soon as possible.1
Admitting the progressiveness of Japanese culture in the sense of modernity, Gu
Ding fiercely objected to the proposal of excluding all Japan-related things based on
radical nationalism and requested Manchurian intellectuals to learn from and take
reference of the advanced cultural form of the Japanese colonists to draw on its
modern knowledge and thoughts and to facilitate the modernization process of
Chinese culture in Manchuria. By virtue of this defense, Gu Ding not only provided a
legitimate foundation for their close relationship with the Japanese intelligentsia,
but also cast a doubt on the nationalist discourse itself. From the same perspective,
Xinjia also criticized Wu Lang for his appeals to political propagandas regardless of
the backward state of Manchuria. Some Yiwenzhi writers even called their
1
Gu Ding 古丁, “Tan san·mengjing” 谈三•梦境, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan
李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 116.
161
adversaries “fighters of the cultural front” and condemned that they schemed to
forbid all dissenting writings and printings under the banner of “purifying the
literary circle.” With Mingming ending its publication in September, 1938 and the
critics who took Datong Newspaper as their public forum successively taking leave
due to job changes, these two opposite sides of the controversy both temporarily
halted their attacks. However, what ensued this transient peace was a more serious
clash.
In March, 1939, Gu Ding and his fiends published the “Poetry Series” in the
name of “Yiwenzhi Office” and launched the magazine of Yiwenzhi in the October of
the same year. They further elaborated on the concept of “write-and-print-ism” as
follows:
The most important matters of literary praxis are writing and printing; no
matter their topics are as big as heaven and earth or as small as sesame
seeds, writings permeated with true feelings will be passed down forever; no
matter their significance is as great as the vast sea or as tiny as the millet
grain, printings informed by virtuous ideas will eternally survive.1
To make use of the long interval between each issue, the “Yiwenzhi Office” also
initiated a piece of supplementary reading, the monthly called “Literati Series.”
Exasperated by these ambitious literary activities of the Yiwenzhi School, Qiuying,
Chen Yin, and Wang Mengsu established the “Wenxun 文选 (Selection of Writings)
Publishing Association” in Fengtian and inaugurated the literary journal Wenxuan
in December, 1939. At the same time, Shanding, Wu Lang, and Wu Ying 吴瑛
1
Yiwenzhi Shiwusuo 《艺文志》事务所, “Yiwenzhi Xu” 艺文志序, Yiwenzhi 艺文志 (1939.1): 2.
162
founded the “Wencong 文丛 (Collections of Literature) Publishing Association” in
Xinjing and initiated the belletristic magazine Wencong. Since these two literary
societies both originated from the same group of writers who took Datong Newspaper
as their writing platform and held similar viewpoints on Manchukuo literature, they
were known collectively to us as the Wenxuan School. To a large extent, Wenxuan
and Wencong were intentionally schemed out to rival and offset the influence of
Yiwenzhi. Like Yiwenzhi, they also adopted the layout of sixteenmo and 230 pages,
but “start from a entirely different standpoint,” constituting “an equal rival [of
Yiwenzhi] in both north and south.” As opposed to the “Foreword to Yiwenzhi,”
Qiuying published his “Reasons for the Publication” in the initial issue of Wenxuan,
systematically summarized the overarching ideas of the Wenxuan School, and
pointedly critiqued “write-and-print-ism” and the “directionless direction,” two major
concepts proposed by Yiwenzhi writers:
Even if our publishing industry is not that meager, there prevails a fashion of
political speculation and vulgar plagiarism, which not only has nothing to do
with cultural construction, but feeds the readers with toxins...At last, I will
take the liberty to clarify the tenets and goals of Wenxuan. Firstly, we have to
admit that literature at this stage is not an ahistorical art for art’s sake or a
sentimental expression of individualism any more, but proves to be an
efficient tool for understanding the reality and educating the masses. That’s
why we cannot evade objective realities or obscure the objective
truth...Secondly, everything in this society is bound to develop historically, so
is literature. What’s more, any literatures created by human beings are
unexceptionably connected with the cultural past as the literature of later
generations validly carries forward the previous ones. As a consequence, we
must accept literary legacies from the past so as to enrich [the resources of]
modern literature. Literary history is by no means a record of failures or a
meaningless amassment, but the process of reflecting objective realities via
163
literature with no regard to differences of times or races. Exaggeratedly
speaking, there won’t be any new literature without the absorption of the old
ones...Thirdly, since we do not regard literature as self-expression, it is unable
to ignore the power of collectives in order to extend its influence and to
consolidate its foundation...1
In this article, the three principles Qiuying put forward mounted a counterattack
against the Yiwenzhi School’s literary proposals. From Qiuying’s perspective, the
emphasis laid by Gu Ding and Xinjia on the independency and diversity of literary
creations was considered to be an “ahistorical” fantasy of “art for art’s sake,” and
likewise, literature was unable to freely develop in a “directionless direction,” but
had to serve the nationalistic goal of cultural resistance and social mobilization. In
marked contrast with Yiwenzhi intellectuals, who relied on the strategy of
promoting the modernization of Chinese literature in Manchuria through an
emulation of its modern Japanese counterpart, Qiuying tuned back to Chinese
literary traditions and proposed to conduct practices of the “new literature” on the
ground of traditional culture and to transmit a determinate national consciousness
by tracing history through literature. In addition, his assertion of being “unable to
ignore the power of collectives” was in diametrical opposition to the tendency for
literary individualism and the outlook that considered literature to be a way of
self-cultivation as advocated by Gu Ding. On this account, he questioned if the
literary praxis of the Yiwenzhi School could “validly carry forward” the tradition of
previous Chinese literature and denounced their “writings and printings” as
1
Qiuying 秋萤, “Kanxing yuanqi” 刊行缘起, Wenxuan 文选 (1939.1): 1-4.
164
“political speculation” and “vulgar plagiarism,” affirming that they “have nothing to
do with cultural construction, but feed the readers with toxins.” Similarly, Li Jifeng
李季疯 identified the “directionless direction” with “fecklessness” and “fatalism,”1
while Shanding mainly concentrated his criticism on the “pro-Japanese inclination”
of Yiwenzhi writers, castigating them for treating and respecting the Japanese
colonizers from a “Mahayana perspective” (perspective of cosmopolitanism) but
attacking their fellow countrymen “through tinted glasses.” To react against
“write-and-print-ism,” he went a step further to bring forward the slogan of “heat
and force” and “expected the masses to obtain heat and force from the readings” that
could encourage them to throw themselves into the anti-Japanese movement. 2
Other members of the Wenxuan School were also militantly adverse to the Yiwenzhi
School’s intimate contact with Japanese men of letters. For example, in his critical
essay called “The Aberrant Cultural Fashions,” Wu Lang upbraidingly argued that
Yiwenzhi writers were “selling Manchurian culture with fluent Japanese” and the
publication of their works was totally dependent on the support of their Japanese
“friends,” unrelentingly disparaging them as a disgrace of “Manchurian literati.” It
was curious that the Yiwenzhi School almost made no response to these censures
and humiliations, but continually immersed themselves in wring and printing. The
1
2
Jifeng 季疯, “Manzhou wentan xinyu” 满洲文谈新语, Huawen Daban Meiri 华文大阪每日 (5.9): 36.
Shanding 山丁, “Xianhua Manzhou wenchang” 闲话满洲文场, Huawen Daban Meiri 华文大阪每日
(4.5): 27.
165
journal of Yiwenzhi ceased its existence after the third issue, and Gu Ding also
resigned from his official post to found the privately-run “Yiwen Press” so that he
could get down to the editing and publishing affairs. As a result, the controversy that
lasted for four years and polarized Manchurian intellectuals into two opposed
literary groups finally came to an end.
Yiwenzhi Writers’ Argument for Literary Modernization and Mass
Enlightenment
Considering what the Yiwenzhi School argued in this controversy and other
public cases, it was not hard to sum up the most essential features of their literary
appeals. In the first place was a firm insistence on the autonomy of literature.
Starting from this point, Gu Ding and other Yiwenzhi companions formulated the
idea of “directionless direction” as their writing criterion, repulsed the “guidance”
and interference of any “isms” or “creeds” in literature, and resisted the utilitarian
outlook that subordinated literature to political demands. As Gu Ding emphatically
proclaimed, “litterateurs are not politicians, and literature is not a loudspeaker...The
endeavor to daub different literary works with the paint of the same color will
undoubtedly paralyze our literary circle.”1 The second feature referred to a steadfast
1
Gu Ding 古丁, “Shuo meng” 说梦, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕
(Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 71-72.
166
persistence in the freedom and diversity of literary creations as intensively
represented by the concept of “write-and-print-ism,” which suggested that
Manchukuo literature should touch on various topic no matter they were “as big as
heaven and earth or as small as sesame seeds” and encouraged Manchurian writers
to “enlarge their vision,” “abandon all hesitations” and “be bold to open up their own
distinctive literary paths” in an earnest way.1 Moreover, because the free writing of
literature was considered by the Yiwenzhi School as the key to realize the subjective
agency of individual writers, “write-and-print-ism” also represented their consistent
ambitions and efforts to “assiduously spur, motivate and cultivate themselves” in
“this great hard times.”2 It was the promotion of cosmopolitanism and “grabbism”
(nalai zhuyi 拿来主义) that constituted the third feature of Yiwenzhi intellectuals’
proposals. In their eyes, “in spite of its use of different languages, literature itself is
by no means nation-bound,” and that was why “[Manchurian readers] could be
moved by both Lun Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q and Shimazaki Tōson’s 島崎藤村
Before the Dawn”3; even if Lu Xun and Shimazaki were of “different nationalities,”
their masterpieces “had crossed national boundaries and become the treasures of all
Gu Ding, “Fenfei zixu” 《奋飞》自序, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕
(Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 154.
1
See Okada Hideki 岡田英樹, “Manshūkoku no Chūgokujin sakka” 満洲国の中国人作家, in Bunka no
Naka no Shokuminchi 文化のなかの殖民地, eds., Ōe Shinobu 大江志乃夫, et al. (Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 1993),
173.
2
3
Gu Ding 古丁, “Xianhua wentan” 闲话文坛, Mingming 明明 (1.1): 9-10.
167
human beings.” 1 Besides, they insightfully recognized that “the tradition of
[Chinese] ‘new literature’ does not stemmed out of the local society, but comes from
foreign countries,” and as a result, for Manchurian intellectuals who “had been left
behind by modern knowledge and technologies for such a long time,” it was
necessary to cast off “the mentalities of self-contempt or self-conceit,” boldly “absorb
foreign languages” as well as “useful learnings and skills,” and construct “our own
modern cultures and literatures” in order to “advance at an equal pace with people
in other countries.” As they put it, although the Japanese were colonizers, their
“publishing industry counts as one of the best all over the world,” and given that
many Manchurian intellectuals could read Japanese and Japanese publications
were most available in Manchuria, it might be no more convenient to access the
modern world through the “window” of Japan. On this account, the Yiwenzhi School
not only kept in frequent touch with the Japanese intelligentsia, but also showed “a
deep concern for Japanese literature.”2 Mingming used to circulate a special issue
with the title of “Introduction to modern Japanese Literature,” which included
“Literary Quotations” from famous Japanese writers and such modern masterpieces
as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s 芥川龍之介 Aphorisms by a Pygmy and Mori Ōgai’s 森
鴎 外 The Abei Family; in comparison, Yiwenzhi paid more attention to the
1
2
Gu Ding 古丁, “Xianhua wentan” 闲话文坛, Mingming 明明 (1.3): 29.
Hayama Hideyuki 葉山英之, “Manshū Bungakuron” Danshō 「満洲文学論」断章 (Tōkyō: Sankōsha,
2011), 171.
168
popularization of Japanese literature, not only continuing to introduce canonical
works like Bashō’s 芭蕉 haikus and Ihara Saikaku’s 井原西鶴 townspeople stories,
but also publishing numerous essays composed by the Japanese writers in
Manchuria on modern Japanese literature, such as Ōuchi Takeo’s “The Property of
Modern Japanese Literature,” Kizaki Ryū’s “On Two Masterpieces in the Meiji and
Taishō period,” and so on. This favor for the literary enterprise of Japan turned out
to be one of the major reasons why the Yiwenzhi School were accused of a
“pro-Japanese” posture. As a matter of fact, besides Japanese literature, world
literature as whole became the object of emulation by Yiwenzhi writers. For
instance, taking James Joyce’s Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
as examples, Jueqing discussed the possibility for Manchurian authors to
experiment on psychoanalysis and the philosophy of biology in their writings.1 The
last feature, among other things, denoted a keen anticipation of mass enlightenment
by virtue of literature. As mentioned above, the Yiwenzhi School repetitively
emphasized that “thinking of the common people” did not mean to produce
“hackneyed” “pop fictions” to cater for their vulgar tastes, but on the contrary,
indicated that “writers should perform as the technician of soul-transformation,”
should “lead the masses instead of being led by them,” 2 and should “cure the
See Jueqing 爵青, “Xiaoshuo” 小说, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大
系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 490.
1
2
Gu Ding 古丁, “Tan yi·sishu” 谈一•私淑, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春
燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 88.
169
incorrigibly dumb and deaf” via serious literary creations.1 Comparing this tough
task to Don Quixote’s attack on windmills, they expected to “build a bridge” by their
praxis to “connect the past with the future” and to ferry those “unfortunate people”
who were insulated from the “new literature” to the other shore of modern
civilization. 2 In this sense, their endeavor to “bridge the gap between modern
culture and common people” in the “Preface to the ‘Shirojima Book Series’”
manifested a strong sense of mission for this enlightenment enterprise.
The protection of literary autonomy, the promotion of artistic individuality, the
imitation of modern Japanese literature, and the ambition to educate the masses
were all unfolded around the central undertaking of literary modernization or
“modern-culture building.” As he analyzed the status quo of the Manchurian culture,
Gu Ding resentfully stated:
The popular literature blindly supported by backward social classes
maintained its evil power before death. Newspapers and Journals throughout
Manchukuo competed to publish “works” of popular literature, and their
authors took full advantage of the backwardness of the urban petty
bourgeoisie to fabricate a series of old-styled knight-errant, sentimental,
erotic and detective fictions, thus thwarting the advancement of the new
literature.3
Gu Ding 古丁, “Dazuojia suihua” 大作家随话, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan
李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 33.
1
See Gu Ding 古丁, “Lun wentan de xingge” 论文坛的性格, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed.,
Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 40-41.
2
3
Gu Ding 古丁, “Ping Hongloumeng Bieben” 评《红楼梦别本》, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed.,
Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 14.
170
Not limited to literary realm, the entire cultural field was dominated by “those who
hold Confucian classics firmly and think they are urbane” with common people
“being omitted.”1 On the other hand, Gu Ding believed that “mankind was born for
the sake of happiness and progress,” and history would “never move in a repeated or
cyclic way,” but “renew itself every day.” On the ground of the modern concepts of
“linear development” and “progressive history,” he was eager to break away from the
bondage of traditional literature, to facilitate the “fundamental growth” of
“Manchukuo literature,” and to thoroughly transform its “backward” and “stagnant”
state. Furthermore, in Gu Ding’s opinion, the most basic difference of modern arts
from their traditional counterparts lied in the fact that “the former were
underpinned by the foundation of philosophy,” and for that reason, the formation of
the “new literature” “is not only a matter of literary techniques, but also needs a
mastery of the [modern] spirit, a fusion with souls, and an introduction of
imagination for the greater and deeper agitation.” In other words, what informed the
“new literature” were a set of modern ideas, and in turn the establishment of “new
literature” would be naturally beneficial to the ascendancy of modern social culture
in Manchuria and thereof a profound change of the Manchurian society. On this
account, Gu Ding defined the literary praxis of the Yiwenzhi School as “writing
1
Gu Ding 古丁, “Lütu suiji” 旅途随记, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕
(Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 70.
171
works and making the platform at the same time”1 and went on to formulate the
concept of “write-and-print-ism”:
Manchukuo literature, or at least literature by Manchurian writers, is not
qualified to have its own theories. Things at work are merely “writing” and
“printing,” which we term as “write-and-print-ism.” As for what to write and
how to write, that might be a future problem. Generally speaking, we have to
make every effort to produce literary works first since we do not have any of
them at present. This feeling and thought were shared by Manchurian
litterateurs in common.”2
In view of that, “write-and-print-ism” was not Gu Ding’s ultimate goal, but a
tentative strategy in accordance with the immatureness of the Chinese literature in
Manchukuo, designed to foster more writers and writings, to protect them from the
constraints of any entrenched theoretical modes, and to enable a free, rapid and
diversified development of the “new literature” and “new culture” as opposed to the
predominance of “popular fictions” and cultural traditions in Manchuria. Even
Qiuying, one of the major opponents of the Yiwenzhi School, admitted that “the
so-called ‘writing and printing’ was merely directed against the prevalence of erotic
and knight-errand novels at that time; he (Gu Ding) proposed to write and print as
much as possible so as to extend the influence of ‘new literature’ and struggle for
publishing sources with these vulgar readings” in his retrospect of this controversy
Gu Ding 古丁, “Tan san·mengjing” 谈三•梦境, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan
李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 108.
1
Gu Ding 古丁, “Manzhou zuojia suibi,” 满洲作家随笔, Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan
东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 601.
2
172
fifty years later. 1 Not unlike “write-and-print-ism,” the idea of “directionless
direction” also embodied an internal motivation to modernize the Manchurian
literature as reflected by Yiwenzhi writers’ literary experimentations on various
genres and subject matters. Notwithstanding their advocation of artistic autonomy
and writing freedom, owing to a firm stance of mass enlightenment, they still set up
three guidelines for their literary praxis, namely “not to write works that elicit a
sense of pleasure or beauty from the readers,” “not to write works that are baffling
and unaccountable,” and “not to write works that make people optimistic.” As Gu
Ding specifically explained, “not to write works that elicit a sense of pleasure or
beauty from the readers” indicated an uncompromising refusal of “literatures that
would please only one generation” and the action of gaining “interests” and “favors”
from the “mundane people” by “searching for exotic anecdotes” or “fabricating a
heaven” that could “comfort the masses.” The so-called “not to write works that are
baffling and unaccountable,” if not explicitly, referred to rejecting the adoption of
“prevalent formalism” and “incomprehensible vocabularies”2 in literary creations
and resisting the “transmission of propagandas by means of literature,” insomuch as
“it is certainly not an evil way to convey truth through writings, but to feed on
Huang Xuan 黄玄, “Gu Ding lun: wenxue wutuobangmeng zhe de beiju” 古丁论：文学乌托邦梦者的悲
剧, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995),
573.
1
2
Xinjia 辛嘉, “Weizhuangde ‘jianshe pipingjia’” 伪装的“建设批评家,” Mingming 明明 (3.5): 33.
173
illusions was hardly a common sense of our intellectuals.”1 “Not to write works that
make people optimistic,” in comparison, insisted that “only the clarion call could
awaken the flagging souls, and ostentatious smirks would further compress our
exploding blood vessels” and defied any cultural controls that “merely allow us to
smile and praise, but forbid us to cry or sigh.”2 In this connection, the first guideline
was directed against the “popular fictions” prevailing in Manchuria, while the
second one was opposed to the literary works characterized by a traditional format of
couplet-headed chapters, a careless use of slangs and jargons, or exotic descriptions
of local produces or customs, such as “sorghums and beans,” to satisfy the curiosity of
readers. Obviously, Shanding’s proposal of “native-land literature” was mistook by
Gu Ding for a “passport” and “defense” of this literary form of exoticism and
thereupon received vehement criticism and blames from him. On the ground of these
three guidelines, Yiwenzhi writers applied them to specific issues of their literary
praxis and raised a strong demand for “realism” and as well as “writing for the
human life.” As far as they were concerned, “unable to be separated from the
animated world,” literature “constitutes the consummation of the real life no matter
what its ethics are,” and mankind will be attracted, moved and transformed by
Gu Ding 古丁, “Shuo Meng” 说梦, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕
(Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 72.
1
2
Gu Ding 古丁, “Dazuojia suihua” 大作家随话, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan
李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 32.
174
human-oriented literary products alone.” 1 As a consequence, “vivid pieces of
literature could only arise from its intimate union with life details,”2 a principle that
proved to be of the most significance for Manchukuo literature, which was “still not
prescribed by any determinative ethics” “in its infancy” and accordingly embodied a
great necessity to “undertake the task of life exploration in a comprehensive and
faithful way.” Furthermore, the literary representation of life had to “portray the
lively condition of human life in an unbiased and undistorted way,” and this
“unbiased and undistorted” writing attitude signified the nature of “realism.” In
order to put their “realistic approach” into effect, Manchurian writers must “jump
out of the [small] circle of art and literature” and find out “on earth how people
psychologically and physiologically behave,” depending on the “answers by the
common people themselves.” No wonder that Yiwenzhi intellectuals regularly went
on field trips around urban slums or rural areas to explore the hardships of the
social underclass and to identify themselves with their mental struggles. On the
other hand, “realism” had a deeper implication in the sense of the Yiwenzhi School,
appearing as an urgent request “for authors to eliminate and decry the evil and ugly
parts of the real life.” In other words, the proposal of “realism” by Yiwenzhi writers
was basically directed towards an exposition of social darkness and an
Gu Ding 古丁, “Yizhibanjie suichao” 一知半解随抄, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li
Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 36.
1
2
Gu Ding 古丁, “Tan er·douniu” 谈二•斗牛, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春
燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 103.
175
implementation of the critical outlook on reality, which turned out to be by all means
similar to Shanding’s appeals of “describing the reality” and “exposing the reality.”
Nonetheless, its ultimate goal was not to mobilize courages and morales for the
common people to resist the Japanese colonial rule, as expected by the Wenxuan
School, but to “elicit the consciousness of self-reflection and self-rectification from
readers who lived a sufficient life.” 1 In this regard, the “readers who lived a
sufficient life” stood for Manchurian intellectuals in their entirety, and “the
consciousness of self-reflection and self-rectification,” among other things, referred
to a thoroughgoing reform in mindset guided by the rational spirit and modern
ideas. What the Yiwenzhi School intended to fulfill was the modernization of the
Manchurian intelligentsia as well the dominance of modernity throughout
Manchukuo, and their literary praxis, which aimed to arouse the depressed literary
circle and revitalize it with abundant and diversified works, formed the first step
towards the final destination. To follow up, Gu Ding dreamed of establishing a
national institute of literature, fostering professional writers, formulating a law of
copyright, regulating the minimum amount of the author’s remuneration and
publishing a whole collection of word literatures for Manchurian commoners. He
Gu Ding, “Fenfei zixu” 《奋飞》自序, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕
(Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 155.
1
176
“expected and believed” that under persistent efforts, “there would definitely emerge
at least one or two ‘great masters’ like Balzac in Manchuria within twenty years.”1
From the perspective of literary and cultural modernization, the Yiwenzhi
School held a militant attitude towards traditional Chinese culture. As Gu Ding
resolutely claimed in his “Comment on Other Versions of Dream of the Red
Chamber,” “if [we] are still longing for the revival of literature, [we] have to discard
and ruthlessly criticize [the traditions].” Reiterating Lu Xun’s view of “not reading
Chinese books,” he argued that “those who read classics but have not been eroded by
them are rarely seen,” and therefore “it is rather better no to read them, or in case
that there is no way to avoid the reading, [we] should find something new from the
traditional culture instead of being buried in it”; that is to say, the inheritance of
literary legacies should not “pour old wine into a new bag,” but instead required “an
absorption of them in a critical manner” by reevaluating and reinterpreting classical
Chinese literature in a modern context and dispelling its “bad influence.”2 It was
also worth noting that in their discussions, even if Gu Ding and his companions
defined traditional literary canons like Dream of the Red Chamber as “realistic
works,” they were still ascribed to the category of “popular fiction” and were
repudiated in a stout manner, which manifested an extremely pragmatic viewpoint.
See Gu Ding 古丁, “Tan san·mengjing” 谈三•梦境, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li
Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 107-111.
1
2
Gu Ding 古丁, “Ping Hongloumeng Bieben” 评《红楼梦别本》, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed.,
Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 32.
177
No wonder that Xiaosong considered “literary legacies” to be “a rotten wood bridge
unable to serve heroes of this generation any more” and affirmed that “they are not
meaningless as historical displays,” but “no more than that.” 1 The phrase of
“historical displays” undoubtedly alluded to “Grabbism,” one of Lu Xun’s most
renowned miscellaneous writings (zawen 杂文), in which Lu divided various cultural
resources into four categories and formulated different strategies corresponding to
them. As for “opium pipes and opium lamps,” he stated, “[they] could somehow count
as the quintessence of our country...[We] should send few of them to the museum
and destroy the rest.” In Xiaosong’s opinion, traditional literature was something not
quite different from opium smoking sets and ought to be swept away for its
“potential harms.” Likewise, Gu Ding took the literary tradition as an impediment to
the “new literature” and judged that “there was no need to inherit it.” Nevertheless,
in another context, he confirmed “the coherent poetic spirit” of traditional literature
as “the most important thing to be carried forward.”
2
According to his
understanding, this “coherent poetic spirit” signified a “wisdom” and a “natural
disposition” “passed down” by each generation of the Chinese people from Qu Yuan
屈原, Du Fu 杜甫 to Lu Xun. Even if modern litterateurs engaged their own
Zhao Mengyuan 赵孟原 (Xiaosong 小松), “Yizhibanjie Ji xu” 《一知半解集》序, in Dongbei Xiandai
Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang
chubanshe, 1996), 5.
1
2
Gu Ding 古丁, “Tan yi·sishu” 谈一•私淑, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春
燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 86.
178
languages, social ethos and thinking modes, it was impossible for them to get
divorced from this common consciousness; although the traditional culture was
outdated in form, its inherent spiritual power still inspired Manchurian intellectuals
under the colonial rule. In this sense, the specific content of “literary legacies” was
not noteworthy, and what really mattered was their symbolic significance as a
long-existing embodiment of national consciousness. Redefined and relocated by Gu
Ding with a modern sense, they were accordingly modernized to serve the purpose of
nationalism.
Reconciliation of Modernity with National Identity
Then, was it the truth that the Yiwenzhi School, especially Gu Ding, dedicated
themselves to “the implantation of Japanese literature” and “acted evilly in collusion
with the Japanese colonists” as “collaborationists” or “historical reactionaries” as
claimed by later Chinese scholars?1 What standpoints did they hold in patriotic
issues? And how was national consciousness related to their appeals for
modernization and transmitted via their literary praxis? Those critical essays
composed by Gu Ding and “modeling on Lu Xun’s style” offered us some necessary
clues to the preceding questions. At the beginning of “Essays of the Great Writer,”
1
See Shanding 山丁, “Kyōto bungaku ronsō kara Daitoa Bungakusha Daikai made” 郷土文学論争から大
東亜文学者大会まで, in Bugaku·Shakai e Chikyū e 文学•社会へ地球へ (Kyōto: San’íchi shobō, 1996), 92.
179
Gu Ding straightforwardly clarified his viewpoint on national identification: “[we]
should always maintain our lively identity as Manchurians and resolutely defy the
far-fetched policy of Japanization.” On this ground, he poignantly satirized the strict
censorship imposed by the colonial government for “declaring those who bought
Ciyuan 辞源 (a modern encyclopedic Chinese phrase dictionary) guilty” and “leaving
Four Books and Five Classics alone on the desk” and then turned to the evaluation of
Lu Xun’s literary career. As far as he was concerned, “Lu Xun’s critical essays were
several times more than his fictions and poems in number, and they all proved to be
daggers that were used to combat the society”; in this sense, “he (Lu Xun) was not
only a great writer, but also a great fighter,” and “he could become a great writer
only if he was a great fighter.”1 Inspired by Lu Xun, Gu Ding called on Manchurian
writers to imitate Lu Xun’s example, to “awaken the flagging souls” with “a clarion
call,” and to resist the oppression of the “cultural dominators” through their own
literary praxis. Moreover, he also targeted his criticism at the so-called “grateful
tone” of the literary works that eulogized the colonizers’ merits and presented a false
appearance of peace and prosperity, thereby bringing forward the third writing
guideline of “not to write works that make people optimistic.” In another critical
essay, he proceeded to term the literary products “bought over by the government”
and “filled with various auspicious words” as “auspicious literature,” and “those men
1
Gu Ding 古丁, “Dazuojia suihua” 大作家随话, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan
李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 31.
180
of letters selling auspicious literature” as “auspicious salesmen,” calling them “the
kindred of parrots” and censuring them for “making out sounds like those of
parrots.”1 In fact, at the point when Manchukuo just came into being, the colonial
regime had decided to use “datong” 大同 (great unity) as its reign title, which
implied the ideals of “Elysium of the kingly way” (wangdao letu 王道乐土) and
“conforming to the mandate of heaven and pacifying the subjects” (shuntian anmin
顺天安民), two major points of the “Manifesto of the Founding of Manchukuo,” and
stressed the crucial role of “daode ren’ai” 道德仁爱 (morality and benevolence) in
“neutralizing national hatreds and international struggles.” The concept of “datong”
originated from the “Datong Chapter” of the Book of Rites, representing the highest
ideal of Confucianism, and wangdao letu, shuntian anmin and daode ren’ai all
proved to be important Confucian ideas. However, they were unanimously
appropriated by the Japanese colonists as part of the colonial ideology to justify their
domination. For example, the notion of “the kingly way,” according to Tsukase
Susumu 塚瀬進, contained the connotation of “divine right of kings” and served as
“the legitimacy theory of the Chinese Empire before the prevalence of nationalism,”
which was anachronistically recruited by the colonial regime to “compete with the
‘Three Principles of the People’ worshiped by the Republic of China.”2 Besides, in the
Gu Ding 古丁, “Yizhibanjie suichao” 一知半解随抄, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li
Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 35.
1
2
Tsukase Susumu 塚瀬進, Manshūkoku: “Min oku Kyōwa” no itsu ō 満洲国「民族協和」の実像, (Tōkyō:
Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2002) , 68.
181
field of education, Manchukuo government also laid down a set of policies with a
particular emphasis on Confucianism, incorporating Four Books, the Classic of Filial
Piety, and other Confucian classics into the “Nationally-Regulated Textbooks” and
conspiring to domesticate the Manchurian people as subjects obedient to the colonial
rule with such traditional concepts as “loyalty,” “courtesy” and “sense of shame”; in
publishing industries, the colonists not only banned or restricted Chinese
publications on the “new literature,” but indulged the circulation of literary pieces in
classical Chinese and popular fictions that dealt with the topics of “loyal officials and
filial sons” and “gifted scholars and beautiful ladies.” The “Association for
Manchurian and Japanese Cultures” also “recruited numerous scholars having long
white hair and litterateurs sagaciously plagiarizing Dream of the Red Chamber.”1
Similarly, in the aspect of social economy, the colonial regime had never enforced
any fundamental reforms on land property and other “backward” institutions,
completely depending on the old semi-feudal structure to maintain their domination
over the Manchurians with “the most significant basis of Chinese support for the
Manchukuo regime coming from the landed classes who tacitly promised support in
return for stability and anticommunism.” 2 Therefore, the colonial government
turned out to be the defender of the old cultural and social institutions, and the
Gu Ding 古丁, “Shuo meng” 说梦, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕
(Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 72.
1
2
Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 64.
182
Yiwenzhi School’s appeals to forge a modern-styled literature and culture
accordingly embodied a profound significance of anti-colonialism. Given these
backgrounds, it was not difficult to discern a deeply-rooted national consciousness as
well as a strong sense of resistance underlying the “modernization” project Yiwenzhi
intellectuals meant to implement. Little wonder that in the confidential document
numbered 1414 and secretly issued by the “Capital Police Department,” Gu Ding
was marked as a “famous left-wing writer,” Jueqing was noted for his anti-Japanese
ideas, and Yichi and Xinjia were both listed as dangerous figures who deserved
particular surveillance and wariness.” 1 The Japanese writers in Manchuria,
including Yamada Seizaburō 山田清三郎, the chair of “Association of Litterateurs
and Artists in Manchukuo” also insightfully discovered “a common sense of
resistance” from the Yiwenzhi School’s literary works, calling them “resistant
literature” and considering that the Japanese literary arena at that time was short
of any strong-mined writings like them.2
Under the high-handed political pressure, Yiwenzhi writers were not allowed
to express their anti-colonial visions in public, but “adopted a suggestive and
detoured maneuver” and “hid the theme of anti-imperialism in anti-feudal subject
“Diwei mijian” 敌伪秘件, Dongbei Wenxue Yanjiu Shiliao 东北文学研究史料, vol. 6, eds., Liang
Shanding 梁山丁, et al. (Harbin: Harbin wenxueyuan, 1987), 158.
1
See Yamada Seizaburō 山田清三郎, Puroretaria Bungaku Fūdoki プロレタリア文学風土記 (Tōkyō:
Aoki shoten, 1954) , 223.
2
183
matters strategically.” 1 For one thing, persisting in writing and publishing in
vernacular Chinese, the Yiwenzhi School broke through the situation that Japanese
readings dominated the cultural scope of Manchukuo and competed with the
colonists for the discursive power. As early as 1937, the new school regulation
enacted by the colonial regime had been widely carried out around Manchuria,
which publicly underlined that “according to the spirit of the wholehearted solidarity
between Japan and Manchukuo, Japanese ought to be given prominence as a
national language.” Against this backdrop, Japanese established its total supremacy
over Chinese and Mongolian, turning into the first official language of Manchukuo.
All Manchurian students were required to take Japanese courses for more than ten
hours per week, much longer than the time they spent in learning Chinese, and in
the meanwhile, Manchurian public employees were also uniformly forced to use
Japanese in their daily communications, among whom, those who failed in the
“Official Language Test” would be immediately dismissed. Confronted with the
looming threat of being deprived of the native tongue, Gu Ding described his
psychological movement as a Manchurian civil servant in the following passage:
Because of my profession, I seldom speak Chinese while at work, and in order
to pursue knowledge, I seldom read Chinese books too even off work; I often
feel that Chinese slowly departs from my mouth and eyes...If the situation of
not using Chinese lasts for a couple of days, I cannot bear up and have to
randomly pick up a book written in Chinese, no matter whether it is a boring
popular novel or not, to read it in an unrestrained manner. During this
1
Zhang Yumao 张毓茂, “Zongxu” 总序, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学
大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 17.
184
process, my nostalgia will be diluted bit by bit with my withering heart
gradually coming back to life as if moisturized by the merciful rain.1
Gu Ding’s spiritual trauma for not being able to speak Chinese and his
overwhelming desire to read Chinese books undoubtedly articulated the internal
voice of all Manchurian intellectuals. In this sense, the publication of Mingming and
Yiwenzhi epitomized Gu Ding and his companions’ consistent effort to protect their
native language and to satisfy the demands of their national sensibilities in the alias
of nostalgia, constructing a literary platform for the Manchurian intelligentsia to get
close to Chinese. For the same reason, Gu Ding claimed himself to be “a man of
letters possessing nothing if without Chinese” and sternly rebuked the one who
urged him to write in Japanese as follows: “writers are technicians of language; if
they could not even carry forward their own mother tongues, what on earth are they
creating?”2 Apart from their eager promotion of the Chinese language, the Yiwenzhi
School also consciously formed a public cultural space that could accommodate
relatively free expression of opinions by Manchurian intellectuals via Mingming and
Yiwenzhi, thus reversing the unvoiced state of the Manchurians under the colonial
rule and challenging the discursive power manipulated by the colonists to a large
degree. As for this point, Qiuying disclosed more historical details and made a fair
judgment in his retrospect. According to him, on the eve of the Macro Polo Bridge
Gu Ding 古丁, “Tan wu·tongxiao” 谈五•通宵, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan
李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 129.
1
2
Ibid., 131.
185
Incident in 1937, the Manchukuo government markedly reinforced its control over
the press, closing down a series of newspapers and “showing a portent of cultural
fascism” in order to neutralize possible revolts provoked by the upcoming
Sino-Japanese War. As these oppressive measures enormously impinged on the
Manchurian intelligentsia, the emergence of Mingming rescued them out of a
hopeless quandary and conducted what they “craved for but had little ability to put
into effect.” Furthermore, the success of Mingming also relied on Yiwenzhi writers’
strategic utilization of the Japanese support. The Kōbōsho originally conspired to
make up a “sordid” magazine that bragged about “Elysium of the kingly way” and
focused on anecdotes like “Oriental aphrodisiacs,” but the Yiwenzhi School took full
advantage of the “beneficial condition” that “the right of editorship was in their
charge” and correspondingly transformed the magazine’s content and format,
turning it into “their own courtyard” as well as a literary “banner” that “encouraged
and mobilized the progressive youth.” That was why Mingming not only published
such anti-colonial works as Yuan Xi’s Three Neighbors and Yichi’s Syringa Flowers,
but also bravely put forward the “Special Issue in Memory of Lu Xun” in a perilous
situation of “being separated by the enemies from their mother country,” which
helped the readers in the occupied Manchuria to “form a comprehensive
understanding about Lu Xun” and thus carried forward the tradition of the May
Fouth Movement. Qiuying’s comment fully recognized the strategies employed by
Yiwenzhi writers in fighting for the discursive power with the colonists, as they
186
uttered their own voice by utilizing the mass media and various social resources
monopolized by the colonial government and raised a great challenge against it from
within. On this account, it was not hard to understand why Yiwenzhi intellectuals
kept a close contract with Japanese men of letters, volunteered to join the Manshū
bunwakai, and even attended the notorious “Conference of Greater East Asian
Writers.”
For another thing, the Yiwenzhi School were keen to learn from modern
Japanese literature and tended to absorb its advanced elements into the local
culture as a most substantive counterattack against the unequal power relationship.
In his discussion of the interactions between the colonizers and the colonized, Homi
Bhabha argued that the latter usually held a paradoxical attitude towards the
former that was characterized by a mixture of admiration and resistance and
featured a psychological and cultural state of ambiguity. 1 This ambiguity also
profoundly informed the orientation of the Yiwenzhi School, ensnaring them into a
dilemma of how to keep balance between the appeals for nationalism and
modernization; however, it was the strategy of “grabbism” that opened up a
possibility for them to resolve the aforementioned paradox. As Lu Xun
metaphorically stressed, on the one hand, “if [you] wander about and do not wish to
get into a house since [you] dislike its old owner and are afraid of being sullied by his
1
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 142.
187
articles, you just perform as a coward; if [you] burst into a sudden rage and burn
down the house to the ground to manifest [your] innocence, [you] prove to be no more
than an idiot.” Complying with this principle, Gu Ding and his friends implied that
in the specific context of Manchukuo, Manchurian intellectuals should not decline
the modern ideas and cultures brought by the Japanese just because they were
colonizers, but on the contrary, ought to “use [your] head, broaden [your] horizon,
and actively absorb them on [your] own.” On the other hand, in the process of
“possessing and choosing,” one must be “composed, bold, insightful, and unselfish” to
transform himself into “a new owner” and the old house into “a new house”; that is to
say, Manchurian intellectuals could not holistically accept the colonizers’ cultural
inventions regardless of right or wrong, but needed to carefully discern and filter out
all the pernicious influence of the colonial ideology and internalize modern elements
as an integral part of the indigenous culture under the guidance of national
consciousness. It was merely in this way, according to both Lu Xun and the Yiwenzhi
School, that people could “have new personality” and literature could “grow into a
new literature.” In this connection, modernization served as the final destination of
national culture-building, and nationalistic proposals in turn formulated the
guideline for becoming modern. These two seemly antithetic aspects were reconciled
and unified as a whole by Yiwenzhi writers. That was why Gu Ding proclaimed that
“someone takes land routes and someone takes sea routes, but they both head
towards the homeland of literature; there solely exists one way to this homeland,
188
which is to start from one’s own national cultural identity.”1 If we can consider that
the image of “heading towards the homeland of literature” here symbolized an
aspiration for literary modernization, then this transformation must be based on a
firm national identification in Gu Ding’s sense. As a matter of fact, the Yiwenzhi
School were not only longing for the modernization of Manchukuo literature, but
also expecting that of the Chinese language:
In order to make our beloved Chinese more abundant, more delicate, and
more beautiful, [we] are indeed willing to open the door wide open and
welcome foreign languages; [we] should incorporate not only their
vocabularies, but also their syntaxes and pragmatics...Even though these
alien elements have entered Chinese, if they are not able to get assimilated,
they will be naturally eliminated, and if they indeed get assimilated, they will
be not of foreign languages anymore, but a part of our beloved Chinese.
Since the colonizers represented modern civilization, modernization, to some extent,
indicated an initiative acceptance of the colonial influence and a critical review of
the national cultural tradition. While Shanding and other radical nationalists
suspected that the emphasis on modernization would “weaken the resistant force”
and “endorse the colonial policies,” Gu Ding confidently predicated the ability of the
Chinese language to internalize foreign elements and to render itself “more
abundant, more delicate, and more beautiful.” This optimistic attitude must derive
from his strong belief in the effectiveness of “grabbism” as well as his expectation
that “China will certainly rejuvenate” as Kitamura Kenjirō noted in his Records of
Affections for the Northern Frontiers. Out of this expectation for the revival of China,
1
6.
Ji Gang 纪刚, “Miancongfubei 一 Gu Ding” 面从腹背——古丁, Zhonghua Ribao 中华日报 21 Oct 1981:
189
Gu Ding frankly stated in the presence of Ikejima Shimbei, the chief editor of
Bungeishunshū 文 藝 春 秋 (Spring and Autumn of Literature and Art), “I’m
particularly glad that Japan develops heavy industries, paves railways, and builds
various architectures in Manchuria; no matter how strong Japan is, she is unable to
take these facilities away.”1 In another private case, he told the Japanese literati
who boasted of skyscrapers in Xinjing and glorified Japan’s merits in modernizing
Manchukuo that “we will possess all these buildings, and it’s none of your business.”2
Even in early 1940s, Gu Ding had anticipated the eventual breakdown of the
Japanese
colonial
empire
and
impolitely
counted
the
colonizers’
modern
achievements in Manchuria as the assets of all Chinese people, manifesting an
unparalleled faith in the maneuver of “grabbism.”
In addition, following the principle of “not to write works that make people
optimistic” and “striving to expose the darkness of the Manchurian society,”
Yiwenzhi companions intentionally imparted a “dismal and gloomy” character to
their literary works and posed “an indicative resistance without resistant slogans”
against the colonists. As the colonial propaganda organ was eager to preach its
concept of “cultural revolution” and ordered Manchurian writers to “praise the great
ideals of Manchukuo” as well as “their fresh new lives” with an “aggressive spirit of
Okada Hideki 岡田英樹, Bungaku ni Miru “Manshūkoku” no Isō 文学にみる「満洲国」の位相 (Tōkyō:
Genbun shuppan, 2002), 66.
1
2
Ozaki Hostuki 尾崎秀樹, Kyū Shokuminchi Bungaku no Kenkyū 旧殖民地文学の研究 (Tōkyō: Keisō
shobō, 1971), 223.
190
creation,” the writings of the Yiwenzhi School were characterized by “decadence and
nihilism” and pervaded with such “passive” moods as “tires, fatigues, depressions,
dissatisfactions, and even antipathies.”1 A majority of the Japanese intellectuals in
Manchuria also clearly realized the “problem of darkness” deeply rooted in Gu Ding
and other Yiwenzhi writers’ fictions, rebuking them for their “stylization of
literature” and advising them to abandon their “dogmatic realistic approaches” and
to express “the common sense of this epoch” with an “ardent romanticist pose.”2 In
response to the censures from the Japanese men of letters, Gu Ding sarcastically
argued:
At the beginning of each year, our literary circle will repeat the cliché that
“fire crackers reactivate our dreary heat and give off furious passions, ” (I
don’t know why fire crackers are so powerful to them), and it will suddenly
resurrect with the number of newspapers increasing and the layout of
journals being renewed, as if fire crackers were the Muses of literature.
Someone also happily sings for ‘the arrival of the spring, contracting with a
symptom called “hysteria” in clinical medicine. I’m not a doctor and cannot
define what is hysteria, but in common sense, it refers to the situation of
having a fevered head and an ice-cold body...It needs scientific diagnosis and
to be frank, the injection of sedatives.
In this regard, Gu Ding pungently satirized the so-called “revival of the literary
circle” as a cliché reiterated by hackneyed writers, and political propagandas (fire
crackers) as a blasphemy against the sanctity of literariness (Muses); although the
reality was “ice-cold,” the colonial regime still prattled about “furious passions” and
Kawamura Minato 川村湊, Bungaku kara Miru “Manshū” 文学から見る「満洲」, (Tōkyō: Yoshikawa
kōbunkan, 1998 ), 85.
1
2
Kizaki Ryū 木崎龍, “Manjin sakka ron jōsetsu” 満人作家論序説, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪曼 (1939.5):
130-131.
191
eulogized the “springtime” of the colony with “a fevered head,” a conduct condemned
by Gu Ding as a manic “hysteria.” On the ground of this refutation, Gu Ding went a
step further to analyze the necessity of focusing on rural topics:
To writer about the rural society will by no means narrow down the range of
literature, but expand it...Of course literary topics are not limited to rurality,
but why there are so many manuscripts that deals with the countryside piled
in the editorial office?...You might detest the rural area, but the literary circle
will not “change according to your likes or dislikes.1
In other words, the rural society of Manchukuo was beleaguered by severe national
tensions and class struggles, which led to the extensive popularity of rural topics
that could not be rooted out by cultural repressions. In line with their anti-colonial
and anti-feudal stances, the Yiwenzhi School either loyally recorded the hard life of
the oppressed underclass in urban slums or rural villages, or presented the
psychological state and the degenerative life of the educated Manchurian youth
facing foreign occupation and social disorders in order to reveal the deceptiveness of
the colonial ideology and to evoke national consciousness and resistant sense among
the Manchurian people for their voluntary devotion to anti-Japanese movements.
Because Yiwenzhi writers employed the aforementioned strategy of “ostensibly
collaborating with the colonizers” but “conducting a substantive and voiceless
criticism against Manchukuo” via their literary praxis, 2 Ozaki Hotsuki, Okada
Gu Ding 古丁, “Xin” 信, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang:
Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 74.
1
2
Kawamura Minato 川村湊, Bungaku kara Miru “Manshū” 文学から見る「満洲」, (Tōkyō: Yoshikawa
kōbunkan, 1998 ), 96-97.
192
Hideki, Kawamura Minato, Nishihara Kazumi, Hayama Hideyuki 葉山英之, and
most other Japanese scholars all regarded them as practitioners of “obedience in the
face and treason behind the scenes.” The term of “obedience in the face and treason
behind the scenes” was originally used to describe the behavioral mode of the
converted Japanese leftists during wartime period and in this case applied by Ozaki
Hotsuki to the Yiwenzhi School, an interesting coincidence that betrayed a spiritual
similarity between these two intellectual groups. In fact, they indeed kept in a close
contact with each other and established a tacit cooperative relationship in reality.
The Japanese intellectuals who were most intimate to the Yiwenzhi School appeared
to be Ōuchi Takeo and Yamada Seizaburō, both of whom were highly reputed
Marxist converters 1 in Manchuria. Ōuchi used to participate in the Chinese
proletarian movement as early as 1920s and made acquaintances with Tian Han 田
汉, Yu Dafu 郁达夫, and other famous Chinese revolutionaries. Even after the
founding of Manchukuo, he maintained his Marxist outlook and took the growth of
Manchukuo literature as an opportunity of “cultural revolution,” “linking it with the
revolutionary spirit of the Chinese socialist activism.”2 In 1935, Ōuchi was accused
of promoting leftist ideas and had to leave the propaganda department of the
Mantetsu for cultural organizations like Manshū Shimbun 満洲新聞, where he
Tenkō 転向, or the conversion of Japanese Marxists, referred to the historical phenomenon that a majority
of Japanese left-wing intellectuals were forced by the fascist government to renounce their socialist beliefs in the
1930s.
2
Kawamura Minato 川村湊, Bungaku kara Miru “Manshū” 文学から見る「満洲」, (Tōkyō: Yoshikawa
kōbunkan, 1998 ), 85.
1
193
translated almost all the literary pieces by Tian Bing, Shi Jun, Yuan Xi as well as
the Yiwenzhi School and communicated the information of their resistance to the
Japanese cultural arena. Besides, he repeatedly declared in public that “Manchukuo
literature derives from modern Chinese literature” and “it will finally get back into
the latter”1 together with Gu Ding. Denying the legitimacy of the puppet state in an
indirect manner, this statement and his translation works constituted a vivid
example of how Japanese and Manchurian intellectuals united together to carry out
the tactics of “obedience in the face and treason behind the scenes” as opposed to the
colonial regime. Similarly, according to Yamada’s reminiscence, in his private talks
with Gu Ding, both of them felt it necessary to pretend to be submissive under the
authoritarian cultural control so as to “secretly” “preserve the promise of proletarian
literature in Manchuria” for its future growth. Afterwards, he also introduced Gu
Ding to Matsumoto Masao 松本正雄, a famous antiwar Marxist theorist, during
their stay in Japan for the “Conference of Greater East Asian Writers.” They
altogether discussed how to resist the Japanese colonialism in a devious but more
effective way.2 On this account, In Tōsan’s 尹東燦 comment that “the resistance
embodied by Gu Ding’s literary works merely stayed at a spontaneous stage and was
See Ōuchi Takao 大内隆雄, “Manshū bungaku no tokushitsu” 満洲文学の特質, Manshū Rōman 満洲浪
曼 (1939.5): 55-57.
1
2
Yamada Seizaburō 山田清三郎, Puroretaria Bungaku Fūdoki プロレタリア文学風土記 (Tōkyō: Aoki
shoten, 1954) , 227.
194
not a conscious performance”1 turned out to be untenable. And their practices of
“obedience in the face and treason behind the scenes,” as Ozaki Hotsuki concluded,
“undeniably fostered a national consciousness [among the Manchurian people] by
virtue of literature.”
Textual Worlds of the Yiwenzhi School’s Fictions
In his explanation of Yiwenzhi writers’ “laudatory speeches” on Manchukuo,
Okada Hideki specially emphasized that “these ostensible words probably
contradicted with their internal minds, and it is only through the textual world that
[we researchers] can find out their real appearance under the decorated phrases.”
On this account, we have to explore specific literary works, especially the fictional
writings, by the Yiwenzhi School in details so that their intellectual tendencies could
be more concretely revealed. Overall, there were mainly three thematic types of their
resistance-informed fictions: the depiction of the deaths, exiles and bankruptcies of
ordinary Manchurian laborers due to the colonial oppression, a reflection of the
spiritual quandary of the educated Manchurian youths who refused to collude with
the colonists or old social institutions, but sank into a state of unrest and depression
because of the inability to fulfill their ambitions, and the record on the imbroglio and
1
In Tōsan 尹東燦, “Manshū” Bungaku no Kenkyū 「満洲」文学の研究 (Tōkyō: Akashi shoten, 2010), 117.
195
breakdown of old-styled gentry families under the impact of various social struggles.
The first type contained Gu Ding's Glass Leaves, Small Alley, Xiaosong’s Iron
Threshold, Yichi’s Syringa Flowers, Homesickness, and so on; the second type
included Gu Ding’s Decadence, Leather Suitcases, A New Life, and Jueqing’s Harbin;
and the third type comprised a series of novels like Gu Ding’s Flat Sands,
Wilderness, Xiaosong’s Back to the North, and Jueqing’s The Ouyang Family.
As the most representative work of Gu Ding’s rural-topic writings, Glass
Leaves described the decline of Huojiayu, a village of “a long history,” and the ruin of
the sericultural peasant Huo Youjin’s family with six theatrical episodes: owing the
rampage of sparrows, the silkworms bought by Huo Youjin through loans were
totally eaten up by the birds. Youjin and his son Erhu strenuously brandished whips
in vain to drive sparrows away, but they became even greater in number. Previously,
villagers of Huojiayu were accustomed to using gunpowder to dispose of bird flocks,
an act now strictly inhibited by the colonial government. At the same time, the price
of cocoons plumbed with the influx of “cheap” and “beautiful” artificial silk. This
situation aggravated the economic crisis of the Huo family, who had to feed
themselves with sorghum chaffs and elm leaves every day. Soon after, Youjin was
starved to death, and Erhu hastily buried him in feebleness. Viewing that there was
nothing to eat for the family, he stopped by to ask the landlord Siye for help, but was
immediately turned down for no food left to the landlord too. Without any official
reliefs, Erhu’s wife went to the city to make a living as a prostitute, and the rest of
196
the family also embarked on a flee from the famine. On the halfway, Erhu’s mother
and son both died from starvation, and although Erhu himself fortunately arrived at
the city, he was cruelly abused by police officers as a “madman.” Unable to find a job
and badly sick, he unconsciously knelt down and became a beggar who fed on stinky
food and suffered from the stings of lice. In comparison with his fellow countrymen,
Erhu proved to be much luckier. In the famine, “all leaves on the elm trees were
picked off,” “tree roots and grasses were completely unearthed,” and “nobody knows
how many people died, whose bodies were laid bare, and how many people were at
their last gasp, lying prostrate throughout the mountain with emaciated faces.”
Afterwards, people even “scrambled with each other for dead bodies to eat.” Except
for the deceased, the left-overs either “fled away” or “waited for death,” turning the
village into a deserted wasteland. These horrible scenes presented by Glass Leaves
not only formed a shocking contrast with the eulogistic ideological propagandas, but
also fiercely denounced the crimes of the colonial rule. On the surface, all the
miseries should be imputable to this accidental natural disaster; however, by means
of antithesis, the story attributed their immanent social origin to the oppressive
policies imposed by the colonists. Even if Huo Youjin and other villagers “were not
clear about the vicissitude of Huojiayu, they all seemed to remember that their
ancestors did not eat tree leaves or sorghum chaffs and Huo’s grandparents could
even accumulate enough money to purchase two cupboards for the family, who might
have hardly thought of the ‘hopeless starvation’ of their posterities”; in the past, gun
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shootings would easily scare sparrows off, but at present, the colonial regime
prohibited peasants from using guns in order to prevent possible military revolts
against its own dominance and thus exasperated the damage of the catastrophe;
with the substantial import and dumping of the artificial silk produced by Japanese
manufacturers, the silk cocoon market in Manchuria shrank sharply and the
purchase price considerably dropped, which caused a sweeping bankruptcy of
silkworm peasants; to react against famine, the imperial China kept the tradition of
sending relief to disaster areas throughout history, but the colonial regime adopted
no measures to alleviate the emergency and let the famine spread unchecked. As a
result, the village of Huojiayu, which survived the imperial and warlord eras and
had a history of hundreds of years, collapsed in a short moment. Hence Huo Youjin’s
complaint that “I have reared silkworms for forty-seven years but never undergone
days like this.” In comparison with “feudal” officials and warlords, the colonists
appeared to be much more cruel, savage and despotic, who were not “liberators
overcoming the stagnant status of the Chinese society” as they publicly proclaimed,
but exploiters and oppressors bringing bitterer sufferings to the colonized people. It
was ironical that in this story, the landlord class, who were usually taken as the
representative of feudal authorities, became the object that Erhu thought he could
rely upon, who also suffered from shortage of food and deprivation of riches under
198
the colonial rule. As Siye mournfully sighed, “[I] myself don’t know when [I] still
have porridges to eat, and my family only maintains an empty shell nowadays.”1 In
this connection, the Manchurians uniformly fell victims to the colonial oppression
regardless of their social classes, and with all these complaints about “nowadays,”
national conflicts overweighed class struggles as the narrative focus of the textual
world.
Introducing a direct portrayal of anti-Japanese military forces and divided into
four interconnected parts, Xiaosong’ novella Iron Threshold touched on a broader
social background and a more deeply-hidden historical undercurrent. The first part
recounted how the poor peasant Qiu Qing was forced by the colonial organ of
violence to join the “bandits.” At the juncture of spring plough, the state-organized
militia ordered Qiu Qing to serve them every day and confiscated his firewood for the
use of the “expedition army.” Witnessing the newly-sowed wheat seeds getting rotten
in the soil due to a lack of attendance, Qiu felt that “[the ill-treatment he received]
not only infringed on the right of his family, but also deeply humiliated him” and
formed the idea of resistance in secret. Before long he was enlisted again to send
provisions for the Japanese troops. Carrying the burden of over one hundred pounds
and walking in virgin forests for three consecutive days, he was extremely steamed
out and had to take refuge in the Anti-Japanese United Army hiding in the
1
Gu Ding 古丁, Fenfei 奋飞, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang:
Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 178.
199
mountain to avoid punishments by the colonists. In the second part, Qiu Qing’s wife
Ersao was coerced to commit adultery with the village agent Liu in a despairing
circumstance that various colonial offices “urgently extorted money and grains from
her.” Because of Liu’s snitching, Qiu Qing, who went back home by stealth, was
almost killed by his son Huzi in darkness, who perceived a profound regret about
what he had done to his father as well as an intense sense of shame for his mother’s
aberrant relationship with Liu and vowed to take revenge against the social
institutions. Thereafter, Liu intended to marry Huzi’s lover Xiaoyun to the
seven-year-old son of the village head to reinforce his power, a conspiracy that urged
Huzi to elope with Xiaoyun for “a happy future.” The setting of the novella then
transferred from the countryside to urban areas. To make a living, Huzi and
Xiaoyuan, who just fled into the city, had to part from each other with Huzi working
as a waiter inflicted by strenuous toils and the “metropolitan symptom” of neurosis
and Xiaoyun becoming a dance girl often abused by colonial officials who resembled
“inhumane gigantic monsters.” In view of that, Huzi decided to “break down this
world” and bring Xiaoyuan back to their homeland “full of bucolic atmospheres.”
However, at the same time, he also “realized that “as the time requires, he will once
again come to the metropolis.” In the last part of the novella, Huzi returned home by
himself, but surprisingly found that the homeland presented before his eyes was
totally different from that in his memory as it had turned into an “extremely perilous
place” where Huzi’s mother bore Liu’s child and Huzi was incarcerated by Liu as a
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rebel. In all these disorders, Qiu Qing commanded his forces to attack the village,
who revenged themselves against Liu by killing him and burnt Qiu’s house down to
the ground. Three years later, Xiaoyun sank into a street hooker, and Huzi
accompanied her as a wonton vendor. They raised the question about “why the day
has not dawned yet,” waiting for the moment of the sunrise. In this novella, Xiaosong
wittingly shaped a set of dichotomized characters. On the one side, there were Liu,
the village head, the militia supervisor, the commander of the Expedition Army, and
the functionaries bullying Xiaoyun, who performed as the representatives of the
colonial power at the bottom level and taxed, exploited, plundered, abused, arrested,
tortured, and even killed poor peasants in a “unscrupulous” and “cruel” way to
sustain the colonial rule. They were figuratively depicted by Xiaosong as
“dehumanized” “wrathful demons.” On the other side, there stood Qiu Qing, Zhang
Delu, Yang Laoda, and other United Army’s soldiers, who used to be ordinary
peasants and wished to live a peaceful life, but were “urged by man-made disasters”1
to leave their families and struggle against the colonists for revenge. As Xiaosong
enthusiastically described, they turned out to be “protectors of life” as well as a
symbol of “happiness” and “brightness.” Those who lay between the oppressors and
the resistants were the humiliated and insulted majority as represented by Huzi and
his mother. Intimidated by the village agent, Qiu Ersao chose to obey him and thus
1
Gu Ding 古丁, “Tan si·youqing” 谈四•友情, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李
春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 119.
201
betrayed her husband and son. As she submissively fell into a dependent of the
colonial power, she altered her “friendly” and “intimate” attitude towards her rural
folks, but adopted a “nonchalant” and even “excessively callous” countenance. By
contrast, Huzi refused to work for the militia, showed a deep contempt for Liu, and
dared to resist him by taking Xiaoyun away. At the end of the story, both Liu and
Qiu Ersao died from the vindictive shots of the anti-Japanese military force, but
Huzi obstinately survived, harboring the steadfast faith of “breaking down the old
world” and anticipating the arrival of the dawn. By means of the derogatory or
commendatory descriptions of these characters and the arrangement of their
disparate fates, Xiaosong obviously endorsed Huzi and the United Army and
expressed a militant and critical view on the colonial regime and its deputies.
Moreover, Qiu Qing’s fulfillment of his revenge and the complete victory gained by
the United Army would definitely mobilize the morale of the Manchurian readers,
and such statement that “it is going to dawn,” in a symbolic way, prophesied the
eventual collapse of the puppet regime. In addition to the anti-colonial theme,
Xiaosong also consciously set up an opposition between the “bucolic” village and the
“evil” city: the formerly muscular body of Huzi was emaciated by modern symptoms
as his “nails took on a purple color and arms lost elasticity,”1 and Xiaoyun also
rapidly changed from a “shy” country maid to a coquettish prostitute in the urban
1
Xiaosong 小松, Tiekan 铁槛, in Zhongguo Lunxianqu Wenxue Daxi: Xin Wenyi Xiaoshuo Juan 中国沦陷
区文学大系：新文艺小说卷, vol. 2, eds., Qian Liqun 钱理群, Huang Wanhua 黄万华, et al. (Nanning: Guangxi
jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 705.
202
environment. Nevertheless, the stance Xiaosong took was by no means anti-modern.
The homeland in Huzi’s dreams had become a “perilous place” and his own home was
destroyed in fire; that is to say, it was undoubtedly impossible for Huzi to return to
the past. His hope of “going back home” referred more to the subversion of the
colonial rule rather than a restoration of the idyllic life. On the contrary, he began to
hold a sense of linear temporality and firmly believed “as the time requires, he will
once again come to the metropolis”; in other words, he understood that modern
civilization as represented by the metropolis was an irreversible tendency of human
history and he himself had no other choice but to comply with it. As a matter of fact,
since the metropolis happened to be the center of the colonial power, his modern
symptoms might stand for a by-product of the colonial oppression, not to mention
Xiaoyun’s degeneration, which evidently had its root in the abuse she received from
the colonial officials. No wonder that Huzi finally came back to the city, took it as the
main stage for “breaking down the old world,” and yearned for its forthcoming bright
future. In this sense, appeals for anti-colonialism and modernization were reconciled
in Iron Threshold as an integrated unity.
Unlike Grass Leaves and Iron Threshold, what Small Alley, another
masterpiece of Gu Ding, presented was the deadly struggle of urban pariahs: one
night, the thirty-year-old illicit prostitute Jinhua squatted at the street corner to
solicit for clients despite the fact that the needle holes on her body resulting from
morphine injections itched a lot and her private parts felt “piercing pangs.” However,
203
because she was senile and ugly, nobody patronized her even at the price of ten
cents. Knowing that she earned no money, her husband “crazily” beat her, and in the
disorders caused by the patrol of the policemen, she was hit in the face again and her
clothes were also ripped off. Weeping and walking, she was extremely hungry and
nearly got faint, but could not buy a single roast corn. When she arrived at home, she
noticed the “deadly pale face” of her husband, who told her that he was “so hungry”
and had to loot someone else to “sustain his life.” However, staying up the whole
night in fears and anxieties, Jinhua didn’t see her husband anymore. Out of the
unbearable hunger, she swallowed several grains of uncooked rice left in the urn and
then went out for prostituting. At the “long and cold autumn night,” Jinhua, who had
not eaten a meal for a couple of days, could not help quivering and finally fell down
to the ground, dying from starvation and frigidity. The passers-by stumbled over her
dead body and but complained for their bad luck just as Jinhua did before. In this
story, the whole story composed a singularly “hideous” world, which was always
shrouded by “a black veil” of “horrible” darkness and pervaded by “disgusting
stinks,” “gross curses” and “obscene talks.” The small alley, as the center of this
textual world, also “submerged in darkness” and “eternally” featured “opium lamps,
morphine tubes, sexual orgies, street hookers” as well as widespread “naked dead
bodies.”1 Those who came back and forth in the alley were all “ghost-like crowds,”
1
Gu Ding 古丁, Xiaoxiang 小巷, Mingming 明明 (1.5): 53.
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who either “got extremely tired and hungry” or desperately “struggled for a breath”
like Jinhua and her husband. In his well-known investigation into Lu Xun’s
writings, Fredric Jameson proposed that “third-world texts, even those which are
seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily
project a political dimension in the form of national allegory.”1 From the perspective
of “national allegory,” Small Alley made up an allegorical representation of the
Manchurian society under the colonial oppression. Not unlike its counterpart in the
text, the Manchurian society was constantly surveiled and disciplined by the
colonists as if placed in a timeless and boundless darkness. Suffused with decadence,
violence, and terrors, it featured various “dreadful” sins like drug addiction,
prostitution, robbery, and slaughtering. In these circumstances, the Manchurian
masses not only appeared to be as “gaunt” and “sluggish” as “ghosts,” but were also
deprived of self-consciousness and even the fundamental right to live. Although they
struggled with all their might to “sustain their lives,” they were not able to evade the
fate of a violent death. The awful tribulation of the entire nation was more
intensively embodied by the sufferings of the subaltern women, and in this
connection, the heroine Jinhua, whose body suffered from arbitrary ravages and
maimings and became prematurely old with “festered private parts,” “arms full of
needle holes,” the “wrinkle-ridden forehead,” and “protruding eyes in her hollow
1
Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text (1986.15): 69.
205
cheeks.” It was this senile, misshapen and drug-encroached female body that
constituted a metaphor for the horrifying state of the colony being occupied, looted
and wrecked by the colonial power. For that reason, Hayama Hideyuki called Small
Alley “a literary work that trampled on the ruins of Manchuria” and took it as the
most typical footnote to “obedience in the face and treason behind the scenes.”1
Apart from antithesis, as reflected by Small Alley, metaphor served as another
important rhetorical device applied by the Yiwenzhi School to this type of fictional
writings. For example, the image of “night” signified Manchukuo’s dark realities,
and conversely, the “dawn” in Iron Threshold and the “the bright place ahead”2 in
Syringa Flowers stood for the future promise of overthrowing the colonial
domination and regaining liberty. In addition, it was worth mentioning that the
figurative depictions of natural sceneries also played a vital role in highlighting the
theme. At the moment when Qiu Qing’s anti-Japanese troops were about to capture
the village, the author wrote:
In a gust of wind, dogs’ barks were fluctuated and dispersed by the wind and
eventually disappeared. What a magnificent and horrible accompany of the
revolt in this remote desolate village and deep forest, where ancient peaks
held their rock heads high towards constellations in the sky. Listen! The shots
rang out from the west, astonishing mountains, shaking woods, and more
fiercely assaulting on the silent valley with the overwhelming gust.3
1
Hayama Hideyuki, “Manshū Bungakuron” Danshō 満洲文学論断章 (Tōkyō: Sankōsha, 2011), 181.
2
Yichi 疑迟, Shandinghua 山丁花, Mingming 明明 (1.3), 85.
3
Xiaosong 小松, Tiekan 铁槛, in Zhongguo Lunxianqu Wenxue Daxi: Xin Wenyi Xiaoshuo Juan 中国沦陷
区文学大系：新文艺小说卷, vol. 2, eds., Qian Liqun 钱理群, Huang Wanhua 黄万华, et al. (Nanning: Guangxi
jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 726.
206
As it turned out, the once sleeping nature was suddenly aroused by the gunshots and
acquired an unprecedented vitality in its accompany to the revolt and as a
inalienable part of the resistant force. Furthermore, the magnificence of the
landscape, the fortitude of the rock peaks, the ferocity and overwhelmingness of the
gust, and other characteristics natural environment embodied undoubtedly pointed
to those of the revolting spirit held by Qiu Qing and the entire United Army.
Through the personification of nature that mixed human and natural characters
together, the situational effect of the story was emphatically reinforced, and more
importantly, the resistant consciousness Xiaosong attempted to transmit received a
ringing endorsement from the nature and thus proved to be more valid and more
provocative. As a consequence, personification also played a large part in Yiwenzhi
writers’ literary techniques.
Bearing a different focus, fictions like Decadence and A New Life faithfully and
vividly betrayed the psychological trauma of Manchurian intellectuals who subsisted
within the fascist cultural system. For instance, the dissipated life led by those
college students portrayed in Decadence epitomized the depravity of the educated
Manchurian youths ensuing the full occupation of Manchuria by Japan. On the one
hand, they had no interest in studies, but played mahjong, solicited prostitutes,
flirted with opera actresses, and stayed in bed late every day, unscrupulously
squandering energy and time; on the other hand, they regretted the loss of their
previous ideals and aspired to be “resistant” poets, but felt that what they had
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learned were all “nonsense” that could help them nothing at all. As a result, there
arose a pervading mood of “annoyance” and “despairs” as well as the cry that “we
cannot live in this condition anymore” from them. Their self-ambivalent
performances, as the narrator commented at the end of the story, originated from a
habit of “constantly daydreaming, denying anything and abusing their bodies when
they got confused.” With regard to the social causes of this habit, the narrator
proceeded to pointed out that “they used to have great ambitions like their former
generations, but the outside wind and rain diverged their attention from studies and
forced them to escape into a self-made bliss.” 1 The “outside wind and rain”
mentioned here apparently hinted at Japan’s invasion and occupation of Manchuria,
which was claimed to be the fundamental reason for the spiritual quandary of these
students. Confronted with this tremendous socio-political catastrophe, they
maintained a clear national consciousness, remained reluctant to serve the colonial
regime, and accordingly considered book learnings to be futile and the social
condition to be unbearable; although they intended to implement a certain form of
“resistance” in reality, they could find no way about and thereupon took refuge in
vagaries and carnal desires to seek temporary emotional comfort. Through the
mouth of the narrator, Gu Ding directed the seemingly grotesque plot towards the
psychological trauma of Manchurian intellectuals, not only showing a deeply
1
Gu Ding 古丁, Tuibai 颓败, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang:
Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 172.
208
compassion
for
them,
but
also
severely
criticizing
their
demeanors
of
self-abandonment and self-hypnotization and suggesting that effective resistance
should be based on actions in the reality, whose first step, in his opinion, was to get
rid of the “self-made bliss” composed of mahjong, whores, opium and other vehicles of
old-styled corrupt customs. At this point, anti-feudalism constituted the prerequisite
and a guarantee for national salvation.
In works like Leather Suitcases, Gu Ding sentimentally dealt with how the
educated Manchurian youths gradually marched towards death under the bifold
yoke of colonialism and old ethical codes. The heroine Zhe was born in “a family
looking up to men and down on women” and coerced by her father to drop out of
school for such houseworks as dish washing, rice cooking, clothes rinsing, floor
cleaning, and so on. Afterwards, by means of her own efforts and protests, she
entered an state-run elementary school with scholarship and then ranked first in the
entrance examination of a girls’ high school. Receiving new-styled education and
baptized in modern concepts, she grew up to be “a maid taking fresh new breaths.”
She not only cut off her old hairstyle, but also firmly rejected the marriage arranged
by the education director, eventually getting married with Xinyi, a self-educated
poor dentist, with a pair of used suitcases. Nonetheless, their pleasant life did not
last very long. With the founding of Manchukuo, Xinyi’s clinic was taken over by
Japanese doctors, and he himself had to pursue a degree from a Japanese accredited
institute in order to maintain his career. Zhe originally planned to follow her
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husband to study at a women medical school in Japan; however, the whole family
objected to this plan and urged her to stay in Manchuria. Carrying the burden of
heavy debts and having to support her husband’s studies, Zhe worked as a nurse at a
Japanese-operated hospital, where the director’s wife “often bullied and menaced
her” and some Japanese physicians even sexually harassed her. In order to “break
away” and seek an emotional comfort, she had an affair with her brother’s friend Wei
Sheng. This extramarital relationship caused a storm in her family. All her family
members and relatives denounced her behaviors and compelled her to leave Wei
Sheng. Considering that if she eloped, “people intimate to her” might receive
“unimaginable distain from the secular world,” she did not “jump out of the circle of
the old ethics,” but chose to “destroy herself” by refusing to eat. After her death, her
father “kept smiling” as if nothing had happened. Obviously, this novella mainly
castigated the patriarchal society for its lethal detriments to women. The
indifference, malignance and discriminations of her father and other family
members as well as Xinyi’s “callousness” and “treachery” all profoundly contributed
to Zhe’s suicide as incarnations of the patriarchal power. As Gu Ding wrote in an
indignant way, although the pigtails that represented imperial China had been
deserted, “feudal ideas” were still “buried deep in the senseless heart of each man
and woman” as “a fossil of pests.” As a consequence, despite that Zhe continuously
struggled for equal right of education and free choice of marriage, the resistance at
the expense of her life was easily nullified by the omnipresent bondage of patriarchy
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as if “a ball hits on a solid wall and bounces back, but the wall itself does not move at
all.” In fact, what formed this “solid wall” were not only “old ethical codes” and “old
concepts,” but also the overwhelming authority of the colonists. Zhe’s death certainly
resulted from the patriarchal suppression, it also had much to do with the seizure of
Xinyi’s clinic by Japanese dentists, the tyranny of the director’s wife, and the sexual
harassment from her Japanese colleagues, which drastically changed her life
trajectory and decisively pushed her to the brim of tragedy: it was because the
Japanese hospital did not “treat Manchurian nurses as human beings” that Zhe
sank into an unprecedented psychological crisis and chose to commit adultery.
Furthermore, the warning of ordering Xinyi to punish Zhe by the director’s wife
manifested a utilization and reiteration of the patriarchal tradition by the colonists;
that is to say, traditional forces and the colonial power colluded with each other and
jointly enslaved the Manchurian people. Facing this twin-layered “solid wall,” even if
Gu Ding pointed out that “to break it up, if without dynamite, [we] at least have to
use sharp blade”1 and proposed to adopt a more fierce critical posture, he was not
able to bring forward a feasible way to realize its destruction, an impasse that
render the whole story sorrowful and grievous. At the end of this novella, Gu Ding
quoted the metaphor of the death of the “corn of wheat“2 from the Gospel of John,
1
2
Gu Ding 古丁, Pixiang 皮箱, Mingming 明明 (1.3): 36.
“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit.” See King James Bible Online, John 12:24.
211
expecting to awaken more Manchurian intellectuals via Zhe’s decease and resting
his hopes on the future.
This somber and grave tone also permeated other fictions by Gu Ding on
intellectual topics like Jisheng and Mo Li. The eponymous protagonist of Jisheng
“was not willing to become a colonial official and earnestly devoted himself to
children’s education,” but died in his early years from heavy workloads and his
father’s selfishness as a victim of colonial exploitation and patriarchal oppression;
Mo Li, the main character of the eponymous story, who abominated the degenerative
lifestyle of his classmates during undergraduate years and “learned new knowledge
like a hungry wolf,” became a police officer after his graduation and soon after
“practiced everything that he had despised before,” incorrigibly addicting to
alcoholic, whores and drugs and having the appearance of “a walking ghost.” These
presentations of the spiritual or corporeal decay of Manchurian intellectuals that
typified Manchukuo’s cruel social reality inevitably lent a pessimistic air to these
literary works. However, in Gu Ding’s later intellectual-centered fictions, this
pessimism was entirely swept away with the replacement by “a bantering style.”1
Integrating the lofty missions of modernization and anti-colonialism into “humors”
and “ironies” and assuming a “leisurely tone” to “tell jokes to the commoners,” Gu
Ding symbolically resolved the spiritual predicament that beset Manchurian
1
Xinjia 辛嘉, “Guanyu Gu Ding” 关于古丁, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代
文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 368.
212
intellectuals over a long period. As the most distinguished piece among his later
works, A New Life recounted an uncomplicated story about the outbreak of plague as
well as the encounters of “me,” “my” family members and other Manchurian
neighbors during fifteen days of compulsory quarantine at a state-designated
hospital, focusing on the conceptual conflicts between “me,” a “great man of letters,”
and the Manchurian populace. The story began with “my” quarrel with the cobbler
Chen Wanfa, who insisted that there were no such things as virus and infectious
disease, wittingly ignored “my” introduction to scientific knowledge of medicine “as if
“he has heard nothing at all,” and even “shows contempt for me” on the matter of
“preventive injection” by answering back that “countless people died from
inoculations in the plague of the Guangxu reign period.” In response, “I” was
angered and amused by his “distance from science” and regarded his performance as
“an ignorant drollery.” Subsequently, a neighbor of “mine” dropped dead, and all
Manchurian people, including “my” mother, refused to report his death to the
government for fear that their houses would be burned down as a measure of
disinfection. This thought of “privileging money over life” considerably “irritates
me,” who “gives them a severe warning” of how detrimental the virus proved to be
and how urgent it was to “protect our own lives.” Under “my” threat, they informed
the “Headquarter of Immunization” and were all forcibly quarantined. Even in the
environment of limited freedom, “my” disputes with the Manchurian neighbors still
continued. They “never mind wearing shoes on the mattress and placing shoes over
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their heads when sleeping” and bridled at my suggestion that “it is not sanitary to do
this.” At the time of disseminating food, they also “scramble with each other and
cause a terrible confusion,” whereas “I” took “order” as a “mark of civilization,”
demanding them to “keep order in any event.” With nobody deferring to “me,” a
Chinese herbalist doctor even retorted that “I don’t believe the existence of virus,
and headaches or fevers must have nothing to do with it but are related to the five
elements.” Even though the herbalist’s argument “wins favor from a vast majority,”
“I just find it amusing” and “resume to explain the possible contagious paths of
plague and its horrible symptoms according to my common sense.” Due to the
extension of the quarantine days and the deterioration of the epidemic situation,
more and more Manchurian neighbors perceived the impending threat of death,
paying increasing attention to “my” modern discourses. At first, it was the young
generation who “agree with me,” and then all of them begin to follow “my” requests.
“Nobody puts shoes on the mattress anymore,” food “is also handed around in peace
without tussles,” and someone even “wore breathing masks” “for fear of the invasion
of the virus.” As a result, “I feel a strong power of enlightenment” and realized the
importance of “understanding” for the common people, thus drawing a conclusion
that “we have to inspire the masses at any rate and make them understand where
their own stakes lie” in order to “achieve the desired effect of enlightenment.” In this
way, the long-existing tensions between intellectuals and the common people and
between modern ideas and traditional thoughts that remarkably informed Yiwenzhi
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writers’ works were theatrically neutralized within the text, and Gu Ding hereby
discovered a new possibility of mobilizing the populace to give up their old outlooks
and to embrace the dynamics of modern culture. Hence an uplifted and optimistic
sentiment pervading the story. Besides, he also inserted numerous digressive stunts
into his narrative, such as brawls among Manchurian neighbors, laughing matters
over gamboling and so on, and purposefully adopted a multitude of cants, slangs,
and “techniques of old-styled fictions” to add more fun to the novel.1 Although this
narrative style “disregarded plot settings” and “transgressed the boundary of a
serious literary work” as Qiuying censured, it was able to “delight the heart of the
masses” and proved to be more acceptable to them, cohering with the proposal that
“we should help the common people to understand” brought forward by Gu Ding
through the narrator’s monologue. In addition, with the “spirited sarcasm” on the
old-styled characters and the “pungent criticism” against traditional customs,
modern discourses and ideas were enhanced as the driving force of the story and
acquired a predominant ascendancy over the tradition.
From the moment when “my” enlightenment project had achieved its initial
success on, there emerged more and more episodes focusing on the conflicts between
“us” and the Japanese people, which turned out to be the overarching motif of the
second part of A New Life. Prior to this moment, since the hospital prohibited the
Huang Xuan 黄玄, “Gu Ding lun: wenxue wutuobangmeng zhe de beiju” 古丁论：文学乌托邦梦者的悲
剧, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995),
575.
1
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Manchurians from communicating with their Japanese roommates and only “I”
understood Japanese, contact between these two sides was rare and primarily
conducted by “me” in a “seemingly criminal” way; nonetheless, thereafter, the
subject who dealt with the colonizers all of a sudden transformed from “I” to “we,”
and the image of the Japanese also evolved from representatives of “modern
civilization” to incarnations of the “domineering” colonial power. On this ground, the
text betrayed a deeply rooted sense of national identity and posed a great challenge
against the ideological foundation of colonialism by means of mimicry. In
Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest, Duke Prospero and his daughter Miranda
were banished to a waste island and coerced Caliban, a deformed monster and the
virtual master of the island before their arrival, into servitude. As a measure to
enforce her enslavement of Caliban, Miranda taught him human language, but
regarded his affection for her as an utmost effrontery, cursing him as follows: “I
endowed thy purposes/With words that made them known. But thy vile race/Though
thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures/Could not abide to be with.” In his
counterattack, Caliban retorted that “you taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is,
I know how to curse.” In view of that, Lee Gandhi formulated the idea of “Caliban
paradigm” to generalize the irony-based endeavor of the colonized people to abrogate
the colonists’ sovereignty through an appropriation of their discourses.1 Likewise,
1
Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 148.
216
Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry also revealed the distortion of and the deviation
from metropolitan norms by the colony’s cultural construct that was “almost the
same, but not quite,” whose ambiguity exerted a strong ironical effect as opposed to
the authority of the colonial power1. In A New Life, what Gu Ding employed turned
out to be nothing but the strategy of mimicry or the “Caliban paradigm.” Applying
such figures of speech as irony and oxymoron to a variety of episodes, he mimicked
and overwrote the colonial discourse and accordingly exposed its ambivalent and
irrational nature so as to undermine the validity of colonialism in a strategic
manner. For instance, “I” assumed the tone of colonial propagandas to explain the
government’s forcible measure of burning houses as “a respectable sacrifice of the
civilians for their welfares,” but subsequently made a sudden twist by stating that
“my heart seems to be crushed by a heavy stone” and depicting the utter panic it
brought to Manchurian commoners. As a matter of fact, the fear for “burning houses”
formed the deepest psychological trauma of all Manchurian characters as well as the
crux of the national conflicts throughout the story, and “My” repetition of the
political cliché and its contrast with what “I” was thinking and seeing, in this sense,
carried a poignant irony of the violence and the sham of the colonial rule. Similarly,
on the one hand, “I” noticed the official news that “the plague has been somehow
eliminated from the city, [the government] now concentrates on the task of catching
1
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 95.
217
rats, and a movement of wearing breathing masks are being strictly enforced.” On
the other hand, when “we” responded to the call of the colonial government and
asked the Japanese nurse to “’confer’ some masks on us,” she “impatiently” declined
“our” request and became inflamed by “my” quotation from the newspaper that “the
one who doesn’t wear masks will be fined two hundred dollars.” By contrast, as “I”
ironically stressed, “she herself is fully armed against the virus.” In this regard, the
sarcastic irony implemented by Gu Ding was unfolded in three interconnected
layers. Firstly, albeit the frequent reiteration of “wearing masks” by the colonial
regime, there were no mask supplies even in the hospital, let alone among the local
society, a vivid comparison that suggestively demonstrated the malfeasance of the
colonial government and the ludicrousness of laudatory propagandas. Secondly,
“my” appropriation of the official legal code ushered in a discursive dilemma that
embarrassed the Japanese nurse as a deputy of the colonial authority in front of
Manchurian “patients” and compelled her to conceal the voidness of colonial
discourses with a sham of fury; her “peremptory” rejection of “our” request, among
other things, reflected the violent feature of colonialism with its legitimatizing
disguise being stripped off. Thirdly, the description of the Japanese nurse as “fully
armed” not only satirized the differentiated treatment of discrepant nations under
an unequal power relationship, but also mocked at the swaggering and bluffing
deportment of the average colonists. It was also worth noting that Gu Ding
intentionally used byōin 病 院 (hospital), yishi 医 師 (doctors), kangofu 看 護 婦
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(nurses), and other Japanese words instead of their Chinese counterparts in the
novel in order to mark the separation between the world of the colonizers and that of
the colonized and turned the whole quarantine system into an object of his mimicry
by directly poaching on the Japanese language. This quarantine system, as “I”
concluded, was characterized by “our phobia about doctors.” Standing on the same
point of “modern medicine” that lent legitimacy to forcible measure of insulation, “I”
condemned the ferocity of the Japanese doctors in the following way: “although I
believe in modern medicine, I’m still frightened by the doctors here...I’m afraid that
they ask about me. Even healthy people will be suspected of illness by these gods of
death. The pains they bring to [our] psychology are unbearable to the utmost.” In
this sense, the Japanese doctors and the colonial power hidden behind were
figuratively compared to “gods of death,” and the quarantine system that treated
healthy people as patients and engendered severe psychological traumas among
them intensively embodied the “terror” of the colonial tyranny. As portrayed by the
text, this terror was so striking that “when children hear about the ‘medicine guys,’
they will instantly stop crying.” On the ground of reifying the fundamental
opposition between the colonizers and the colonized as the animosity held by
Manchurian commoners against the Japanese doctors and their “unnecessary
estrangement from each other,” Gu Ding went on to lampoon the irrationality of the
quarantine system and the colonial modernization project through “my” objective
observation and scientific analysis. In “my” opinion, a real quarantine should require
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that “people carry nothing into the hospital, take a bath and get sterilized, and live
in separate rooms with their family members,” but in reality, “they bring their own
belongings from various places and live together,” a situation that “could only
culture bacteria and viruses.” The doctors’ injunction “forbidding us to contact the
Japanese roommates” seemed even more “ridiculous and laughable” to “me,” who
pointed out that “since no partition is set up within the room, even if there does not
exist direct contact, the air itself remains flowing,” and therefore, it was completely
impossible for the quarantine to check the rampage of the virus. Since masks could
not be renewed regularly, they equally became the culture vessel of viruses. That
was why “I” felt “ironical” and “self-deceptive” when wearing them and thus
hastened to take them off, immersing “myself” in the “cool and fresh air.” Most
important of all, overlooking “the city below enveloped by black smokes five times
bigger in size,” all at once “I” discovered that “where the plague took place are all
former plant areas of the Mantetsu” and the reason why the plague spread so
rampantly was that “we breathed in the black smokes every day, an extremely
insanitary living condition.” In this way, the social root of this scourge of disease was
attributed to the harms done by the colonial modern construction to natural
environment, which seriously interrogated the validity of the colonial rule based on
ideas like reason and progress. By means of these mimicking depictions,
Manchurian intellectuals, as represented by “I,” not only manifested their good
mastery of scientific knowledge and modern concepts, but also gained a discursive
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privilege over the colonists. Taking advantage of this intellectual ascendancy, Gu
Ding went on to condescendingly satirize that the sole function of the quarantine
measure was to “accelerate the development of the neighborhood administrative
system” as a centerpiece of the fascist control and claimed the so-called “ethnic
harmony” to be a policy of national assimilation that “offers [you] food only if [you]
wear Japanese clothes.” 1 On the ground of mimicry, he also opened up a new
possibility for Manchurian intellectuals to realize their anti-colonial appeals, as was
implied by the tile of “A New Life.”
In comparison, the Yiwenzhi School combined criticisms against socio-cultural
traditions, the colonial state apparatus and the dual character of the educated
Manchurian youths together in such panoramic novels as Wilderness, Flat Sands,
and The Ouyang Family by presenting to us declines of the old-styled gentry clans.
Among all these works, Gu Ding’s Wilderness was the most representative and most
multidimensional one, which reflected the transformation of Qian Caishen’s family
from “the richest household in the county” to that having to sell most of its
possessions to make a living: starting empty-handed, Qian Caishen accumulated a
huge amount of riches via timber trespass, not only purchasing three hundred acres
of land throughout the countryside, but also opening a big pawnshop in the city.
Inflicted by continuous attacks from bandits, he moved to the county town to live
1
See Gu Ding 古丁, Xinsheng 新生, in Zhongguo Lunxianqu Wenxue Daxi: Xin Wenyi Xiaoshuo Juan 中国
沦陷区文学大系：新文艺小说卷, vol. 2, eds., Qian Liqun 钱理群, Huang Wanhua 黄万华, et al. (Nanning:
Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 810-811.
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with his son Chief Qian. For one thing, Chief Qian had resigned from the official
office long time ago and sustained considerable losses in the business of the
pawnshop due to his partner’s embezzlement. In the meanwhile, wheat and cotton
crops of the Qian family in rural areas suffered from flooding and drought in
succession, and their tenants could reap nothing at harvest time, who persistently
asked for a reduction of the land rent and even discontinued farming to flee from the
famine. Against this background, the main financial sources of the Qian family were
all cut off. For another thing, they remained to eat shark’s fins and sea cucumbers,
wear silk clothes and gold jewelries, and kept a large number of servants. To make
things worse, Qian Caishen married his third concubine who stole all cashes and
valuable things away, and Chief Qian also became an opium addict wasting much
money every day. Unable to make both ends meet, the Qian family were pushed to
the brim of bankruptcy. To alleviate the economic pressure, Qian Caishen made a
usurious loan at an interest rate of 40% each year from Director Wei, his old
acquaintance who borrowed money from himself before, but still could not rescue the
household. In view of that, clamoring to divide up family properties and thereupon
infuriating Qian Caishen to death, Chief Qian eventually sold out the land owned by
the family and made all his kinsmen addicted to opium. Hence the ruination of this
formerly prosperous household. As the author intentionally displayed, Qian
Caishen, Chief Qian, Director Wei, and other defenders of the old social structure
always talked about filial piety, righteousness, and ritual disciplines and were
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laughingly called “son of Confucian classics” by the narrator; however, in reality,
what they conducted were merely ruthless, dissolute, immoral and mutually
cheating deals. For example, Qian Canshen often complained that the contemporary
youths even didn’t know how to address their seniors in a respectful and appropriate
way and instructed his grandson to keep away from “wine, women, avarice and
pride,” but he himself took a concubine “five years younger than his grandson.” Chief
Qian, on the one hand, repeated that “[The offspring] must be filial and should not
violate the order of his parents,” but on the other hand, “behaved unfilially, driving
his father to death in an abrupt way.” Not unlike them, although Direct Wei could
“rattle off the Four Books backward,” at the juncture when his daughter Yuzhen
attempted to commit suicide, he turned into “a tyrant of the family,” “grabbed hair,
and beat her harsh.” As the narrator’s following comment told us, “the Four Books’
descendants do not love their own sons and daughters.” These paradoxical
performances vividly revealed the hypocritic and vicious aspect of traditional ethics
that served as the ideological basis of the Manchurian society and ridiculed the
entire social structure with a strong ironical effect. On this ground, Gu Ding not only
focused on the discipline of the youths, the exploitation of the tenants and the
tyranny over their wives by the male patriarchs, three most profound forms of the
oppression imposed by the old social system on Manchurian commoners respectively
at the levels of generation, class and gender, but also symbolically anticipated the
breakdown of the traditional society, as manifested by the Qian family’s decline,
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under the impact of new social elements, including Yuzhen’s pursuit of free love, the
tenants’ protest against rent collection, and the elopement of Qian Caishen’s third
concubine. In a similar ridiculous way, Qian Caishen thrived because of land and
died from a division of land, and Director Wei coveted “longevity” for all his life, but
was finally poisoned to death by his self-made elixir, ironies that exposed the
ingrained self-ambivalence of the traditional culture and its upcoming extinction.
Even if criticisms against the colonial domination did not constitute the main
thread of the story, they consistently permeated Wilderness from the beginning to
the end. For example, the novel started with a sarcasm of the “achievements” of
colonial modernization. As Qian Jingbang, the eldest son of Chief Qian, observed
when he just arrived after five years’ separation from his homeland, “the old
appearance of the county town is seemingly changed” with electric light being
installed, but buses parking at the station “just looked like toys”, and there was
“only one asphalt-paved road” and “one flushing toilet” that would be soon
demolished due to the protest of the gentry class. All these modern constructs turned
out to be a pretension of false prosperity under the colonial rule. The administrative
organ of the Manchukuo government also fell into an object of ridicules. Qian
Jiangbang’s duty at the Department of Civil Affairs was to routinely smoke
cigarettes, read newspapers and drink tea, and the director “always uses a
newspaper to hide his bald head.” In order to reinforce the effectiveness of the
sarcasm, the narrator spared no trouble to list that “for the first day he drank ten
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cups of tea, smoked forty cigarettes, and read five newspapers, and for the second
day he drank ten cups of tea, smoked forty-two cigarettes, and read four
newspapers...” and supposed what the director read to be tabloids like “being
smashed for not paying prostitutes off,” ironically calling them “great social events”
and suspecting if a political system like this was worthy of existence. In addition, the
novel also involved episodes that mentioned the censorship of Chinese publications
at school and the coercive promotion of cash crops among rural areas, both of which
were implemented by the colonial regime and threatened the livings of Manchurian
writers and peasants. In the last part of Wilderness, the narrator proceeded to
comment that “nowadays, the official posts are not occupied by those who can write
and calculate, but people speaking foreign language,” thus directly exposing common
readers to the cruel reality of the alien rule and repining at all social injustices
suffered by the Manchurian people.
Compared to literary works of the second thematic type, Wilderness examined
and criticized the educated Manchurian youths in a more incisive way and reflected
a clear consciousness of self-introspection.” In his preface to Flat Sands, Gu Ding
explicitly clarified, “even if Wilderness is not my autobiography, it features a
silhouette of me...My blood not only flows in the vessels of Qian Jingbang, but was
also shared by other characters. I pampered myself with a jibe at them as well as a
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jibe at myself.”1 As he pointed out, this jibe in Wilderness primarily centered on the
protagonist Qian Jingbang, whose three major characteristics were given particular
prominence. In the first place was his ignorance. Despite that Qian earned a J.D.
from Japan’s Hosei University, he actually indulged himself into mahjong everyday
during his stay in Japan and plagiarized other’s monograph as his own dissertation;
when working at the Department of Civil Affairs, he knew nothing about the
operational procedure and always wrote wrong characters in the paperwork, having
to make revisions for hundreds of times to finish a curriculum vitae; the only thing
he did well in was to drink foreign wine, smoke foreign cigarettes and draw naked
women on the paper. The second characteristic referred to his entrenched sense of
class superiority. Regarding himself to be one of the few cultural elites among a
majority of illiterates, Qian often “sank into narcissistic self-delusions” and
derisively condemned the underclass laborers for their “feudality,” “servility,” and
“superstitions”; afterwards, he not only ordered around the servants in an arbitrary
manner, but also cursed them with such vitriolic words as “disgusting” and “ill-bred
bastard,” not unlike his father and grandfather. A blind faith in filial piety embodied
the third characteristic of the protagonist. Although Qian pretended to be
“anti-feudal,” when confronted with inhumane old customs like arranged marriage
and concubinage, he knew they were unreasonable, but still persuaded himself to
1
Gu Ding 古丁, “Pingsha zixu” 《平沙》自序, in 《古丁作品选》, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选,
ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 392.
226
show obedience according to the idea of “filial piety” and speciously vindicated his
indifference as follows: “to be filial is the most important thing for men of letters and
the essence of our East Asian spiritual civilization.” On this account, he never defied
his father’s orders and completely obeyed to him, even “refusing to say no” as his
mother forced him to marry an illiterate wife. So did Yuzhen, Qian Jingbang’s
extramarital lover, who was obsessed with old-styled romances represented by
Dream of the Red Chamber and Love Affinities (Tixiao Yinyuan 啼笑因缘) and took
their worldviews as her own standpoints in the real life. Notwithstanding that they
both received modern education and got familiar with new words and concepts, in
the depth of their mind, they were by all means subject to the traditional culture and
thoughts. As for this intellectual inconsistency, Gu Ding consciously adopted the
rhetorical device of exaggeration to render a poignant criticism against these “feudal
residues.” For example, as Gu Ding depicted, Qian Jingbang went to the bus station
by carriage for many times each day in order to use the flushing toilet there for the
sake of “sanitation”; Yuzhen imitated every detail of the traditional romantic story
even at the moment of her suicide by leaving a posthumous letter with the title of
“your sister’s last words,” and the like. In all these farces, the embarrassing and
paradoxical mental state of the educated Manchurian youths were theatrically
displayed and sternly inspected. Nonetheless, as opposed to their aforementioned
negative side, Gu Ding also revealed a potential sense of resistance among them by
touching on Qian Jingbang’s detestation of “this hideous family” and his longing for
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“an instant flight out of the wilderness” as well as the desperate struggles of Yuzhen
for a freedom of personal choice. From the mouth of the narrator, Gu Ding went a
step further to clarify that it was impossible to “move that evil power by one’s own
death” since “the society will only pay this folly a cold mockery,” and on the contrary,
people should pluck up “their courage to combat the surrounding evilness,” that is to
say, to defy the old social morals and conventions in reality. As a conclusion, at the
end of this novel, Gu Ding cited the metaphor of the salt that “has lost its savor”
from the fourteenth chapter of The Gospel of Luke: “if the salt has lost his savour,
wherewith shall it be seasoned? It is neither fit for the land, nor yet for the dunghill;
but men cast it out.”1 In the subsequent blank verse he attached to the story, he also
made the following statement: “to howl, you wilderness! The savorless salt has
already had no use for you...It makes you ugly and dispirited. You should become
fertile and beautiful. The new salt will be born at sea!”2 In this connection, the
“wilderness” undoubtedly symbolized the crisis-ridden Manchurian society, and “the
savorless salt,” if not quite, stood for the traditional culture that contradicted with
modern ideas; from his perspective, the latter mired Manchuria in an “ugly” and
“dispirited” state and thus must be thoroughly abandoned for the establishment of a
new culture that enabled its “beautiful” and revitalized future. On the basis of these
1
King James Bible Online, Luke 14:34-35.
2
Gu Ding 古丁, Yuanye 原野, Mingming 明明 (3.1): 43-44.
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symbolic depictions, Gu Ding poetically called for an overwhelming recognition of the
modern spirit among Manchurian intellectuals.
It was also worth mentioning that Gu Ding not only adopted irony, antithesis,
exaggeration, and other figures of speech in Wilderness, but also borrowed and
absorbed a wide range of vocabularies and narrative modes, especially the
“simulated rhetoric of the storyteller” from old-styled Chinese fiction. For instance,
such parentheses assumed by traditional Chinese storytellers as “no need to
prattle,” “I recollect a past event at this point,” “let us listen to what she is going to
talk,” “at last I wanna say something,” and the like and huge paragraphs of the
narrator’s personal judgment were commonly seen throughout the novel, whose
effect, as Patrick Hanan indicated in his analysis of the essential characteristics of
traditional Chinese fiction, was to create a simulated context for readers and to
enhance the verisimilitude of the fictional writing.1 According to Andrew Plaks, this
narrative strategy at the same time would impart a public perspective to personal
events and lead the readers’ attention away from the “linear sequentiality” and the
simulated triviality of narrative details into a much broader social sphere.2 In other
words, with an authoritative voice over epistemology and an apriori social/cultural
outlook, the storyteller tended to transmit values of a public significance to common
See Patrick Hanan, “The Nature of Ling Meng-chu’s Fiction”, in Chinese Narrative, ed., Andrew Plaks
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 87.
1
2
Andrew Plaks, “Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative”, in Chinese Narrative (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1977), 328.
229
readers through his accounts, which would not only prevent them from addicting to
trivial details and exotic reading experiences, but also arouse their consciousness of
self-reflection and offer them vivid and concrete moral “teachings.” Apart from the
didactic function, Manchurian readers’ familiarity with and fondness for this
narrative style also contributed to Gu Ding’s choice of it as a means to “bridge the
gap between modern culture and the masses.” No wonder that the Yiwenzhi School,
who wholeheartedly devoted themselves to mass enlightenment, contradictorily
assumed the voice of the storyteller that featured traditional Chinese fiction. As a
consequence, the task of modernization and the promotion of national cultural
heritage were judiciously integrated together in Wilderness, an epitome of Yiwenzhi
writers’ literary praxis.
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CHAPTER V
THE NATIONALIST DISCOURSE PROPOSED BY THE WENXUAN SCHOOL
An Intellectual Pose of Radical Nationalism and the Ideologization of
Literature
In his “General Preface” to Modern Chinese Literary Thought, Kirk Denton
generalized the discursive choices of modern Chinese intellectuals as follows: “the
eternal threat of imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and
China’s weakness fostered two major responses in the intellectual discourse, at once
inextricably intertwined and locked in an uneasy tension: nationalism and
iconoclasm.” 1 The “iconoclasm” Denton mentioned here, according to his own
definition, signified “the discourse of liberation from tradition,” while “nationalism,”
in comparison, referred to “the idea of national salvation from the imperialist
threat.” On the one hand, modern nationalistic thoughts “opened the way for the
iconoclastic assault on tradition by offering an alternative basis for unity,” and this
militant stance in turn “intensified the psychological need for nationalism”; the
discourses of iconoclasm and nationalism turned out to be interconnected and
overlapping with each other. On the other hand, there always existed a potential
1
Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996), 7.
231
tension between them: nationalism required to inherit and carry forward cultural
traditions as the intellectual foundation for a new consciousness of national
community, but iconoclasm entailed a holistic denial of the traditional culture,
“depicting the core of that tradition as malignant tumor needing immediate
excision.” 1 From Denton’s perspective, the very tension was determinatively
responsible for the complexity and heterogeneity of modern Chinese culture. In the
same sense, Chang Hao focused on the development of modern Chinese literature
ever since the May Fourth period and claimed its most prominent trait to be a waver
between “nationalism and internationalism,” “rationalism and romanticism,”
“individualism and collectivism,” and “skepticism and religiosity.”
On this account, the ramification of the Yiwenzhi School and the Wenxuan
School, to a large degree, embodied a continuum of this critical issue of May Fourth
literature, which was further intensified due to the colonial rule and characterized
by the seemingly irreconcilable opposition between modernization and national
identification. If we can ascribe “internationalism,” “rationalism,” “individualism,”
and “skepticism” to Yiwenzhi intellectuals’ literary proposals, then those put forward
by Shanding and his companions explicitly invoked “nationalism” and “collectivism.”
Among the Wenxuan School’s major appeals respectively for “describing social
realities,” “inheriting literary traditions” and “writing by the common people” as
1
Ibid., 8.
232
Qiuying summarized, the first two points obviously manifested a firm nationalistic
stance, and the last one highlighted the importance of collective participation and
socio-political function of literature by denying the individuality of literary creation.
On the surface, what Shanding argued for as “depicting the reality and exposing the
reality” was quite similar to Gu Ding’s opinion of “undertaking the task of life
exploration”; however, they fundamentally differed with each other in nature. The
“reality” stressed by the Yiwenzhi School was completely based on lives of individual
writers: since “each individual is increasingly bound with the society” and unable to
“escape it by resorting to the cultural past,” “a situation that personal life identifies
with social realities” came into being, and therefore, a writer’s faithful
representation of his own life would equally reflect the real state of the whole
society.1 For that reason, even those “sentimental,” “decadent” or “degenerative”
works formed “an integral chain of the society” too, which could not be “wiped out or
cast away.” As Jueqing stated, “works that evade social realities also manifest a
negative influence of the real world on their authors in a dialectical way” 2 ;
conversely, the forcible imposition of the duty of “exposing realities” that required
writers to delineate unfamiliar social phenomena for a certain political purpose, in
his eyes, was not unlike a farce of “forcing oneself to discuss factory steam whistles
See Jueqing 爵青, “Guanyu Manzhou wentan” 关于满洲文坛, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi:
Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996),
487-488.
1
2
Ibid., 487.
233
and the laborers’ toils in a luxury salon.” On this account, the Yiwenzhi School
privileged the reality of “perception and contemplation” over that of “sublime ethics
and grave national affairs” and termed the theoretical tendency for the politicization
of literature as “doctrinism.” Arguing that “in novels of doctrinism, the author often
loses ‘himself’ and the readers are often not able to find ‘themselves,’” they claimed
“the reality” presented by these novels to be “empty,” “meager,” and “inferior” no
matter how “sublime and grave” their subject matters appeared to be.1 By stark
contrast, Wenxuan writers steadfastly held onto the belief that “novelists are born to
be members of the nation and the society, and accordingly, novels at the highest
level must be those really informed by national and social consciousness,” thus
disavowing the authenticity of individual life and contingent events and defining
“reality”
to
be
a
“socio-historical
necessity” “extracted”
by
writers
from
everydayness. 2 In the light of this understanding, they rebuked works by the
Yiwenzhi School for their “unsound and declining petit-bourgeoisie character” and a
sense of “hesitation, suspicion, and confusion” inherent in them. Viewing Gu Ding
and his friends as the spokesmen of the “anti-realist” tendency featuring
“decadence,” “fantasy,” and “self-abandonment,” they called for a conquest over “the
See Xiaosong 小松, “Manxi xiaoshuoren de dangqian wenti” 满系小说人的当前问题, in Dongbei
Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang:
Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 217.
1
2
See Shanding 山丁, “Qugu Ji de zuozhe” 《去故集》的作者, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun
Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 205.
234
individual-oriented literature” that “only shows off one’s own emotion and fate” as
well as “a literature for the new society” based on anti-colonial awareness.1 In a
critical essay titled “On Liu Jueqing’s Writings,” Qiuying clarified what counted as
“the reality” in a more detailed way. In his opinion, “the reality” was not composed of
“individual,” “current” and “trivial” life fragments, but denoted “summons of history
and slogans of the times,” and consequently, writers “should not present the as-it-is
appearance of human life according to the scientific or mechanical methodology of
naturalism,” but ought to find out “the force underlying semblances of life” and “the
prospect of future” by virtue of “a high-level worldview” plus “a penetrating insight
into the front.” Staring from this point of view, he went on to define the zeitgeist of
his epoch as “the coexistence of decline and resurrection where germinates a new life
out of all the ruins.”2
On the basis of these understandings and interpretations of “the reality,” the
Wenxuan School opted for a completely different narrative focus and writing attitude
from those of Yiwenzhi writers in order to demonstrate their self-claimed social ethos
and zeitgeist. Depending on individual observations and first-hand experiences, Gu
Ding and other member of the Yiwenzhi School insisted on a “realistic” approach
See Yifu 夷夫, “Manzhou wentan de jige wenti” 满洲文坛的几个问题, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan
Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe,
1996), 276-278.
1
Qiuying 秋萤, “Lun Liu Jueqing de chuangzuo” 论刘爵青的创作, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi:
Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996),
398.
2
235
that “would guarantee an unbiased and faithful representation of human life,”
refused to “write works that make people optimistic” and “elicit a sense of pleasure
or beauty,” and aspired to “awaken the flagging souls” with the depiction of cruel and
hideous matters. As far as they were concerned, even if sometimes it was inevitable
to involve subjective elements, this subjectiveness “should be permeated by rational
thinking” and naturally integrated into objective descriptions rather than override
the demand of objectivity; otherwise, it would be tantamount to a manifestation of
“fecklessness” and “ignorance.”1 That was why their fictions not only depicted life
miseries of the social underclass and the psychological traumas of young
Manchurian intellectuals “almost without any heroic characters” or “happy
endings,”2 overflowing with “an unbearable gloomy aura,” but also mainly adopted a
straightforward style of writing that was characterized by “plainness” and
“simplicity” and rejected “an intended impressive or rough effect.”3 As opposed to
Yiwenzhi writers’ proposals of “rationalism” and “objectivism” as well as the “dark”
character of their literary topics, the Wenxuan school insisted on a confrontational
orientation towards “brightness.” In their opinion, the standpoint of “reason”
promoted by Yiwenzhi intellectuals manifested their deeply-rooted sense of cultural
See Gu Ding 古丁, “Lun wentan de xingge” 论文坛的性格, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed.,
Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 39.
1
Gu Ding, “Pingsha zixu” 《平沙》自序, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕
(Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 392.
2
3
Ibid, 391.
236
elitism, and the appeals for an objective representation of individual lives “purely
derived from their intermediate petit-bourgeois status” and their “waver and
division” in thoughts: because they were not willing to “surrender” and could not see
“a progressive way out,” they had to linger on the surface of everyday life and
“wander in the between” with “an extremely pessimistic attitude” that frustrated
their literary praxis. 1 Imputing the realistic and pessimistic inclinations of the
Yiwenzhi School to their limitations as petit-bourgeoisies, Shanding and his
companions suggested to transcend the “scientific and mechanical reflection” of
social darkness with a romantic or symbolic presentation of “the bright other shore”
and to mobilize Manchurian commoners to throw themselves into anti-Japanese
struggles by revealing the “evolutionary direction of social history” and catering for
the particular needs of the masses; accordingly, as they pointed out, the
fundamental tone of literary writings should be “positive and optimistic” rather than
“pessimistic or dismal,” which would change Manchukuo literature into “a
complimentary hymn” based on “the pursuit of brightness for the entire nation.”2 As
for the specific measures to realize this “brightness” through literary praxis,
Shanding proposed “heat and force” as his writing guidelines, expecting to embrace
Qiuying 秋萤, “Lun Liu Jueqing de chuangzuo” 论刘爵青的创作, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi:
Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996),
399.
1
Wu Lang 吴郎, “Women wenxue de shiti yu fangxiang” 我们的文学的实体与方向, in Dongbei Xiandai
Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang
chubanshe, 1996), 330.
2
237
“the vigor of the youths,” “the indomitable will to life of the masses,” and all “ongoing
new forces” in literature. In the same sense, Chen Yin summarized his principle of
“calling for life and turning down death” and deemed highly of Shanding’s
“treatment of subject matters” that defuses the cruel realities...prevents their [tears]
from dropping, and in turn makes them (readers) happy with a consolation.” 1
Similar to Chen, Wang Mengsu also proclaimed that “writing about the miserable
destiny of the insulted weak” only formed “the first step towards the real world,” and
thereafter the author should offer them “opportunities of advancement” and guided
them to the enterprise of revolution. Although Wang admitted “the inexistence of
these advancing possibilities in reality,” he strongly objected to “shaping literary
characters” according to the fact that “most of them have been dead, and others lose
their freedom” and conversely suggested “an emotional support” for them based on
“class consciousness” as well as an exhibition of the “dream-like” future.2 In this
sense, as Shanding concluded, “descriptions of darkness” only made sense as “a
promise and an omen of brightness.”3
Chen Yin 陈因, “Jiji cao” 季季草, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：
评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 362.
1
See Wang Mengsu 王孟素, “Shanfeng jiqi zuozhe” 《山风》及其作者, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi:
Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996),
440-441.
2
3
Shanding 山丁, “Qugu Ji de zuozhe” 《去故集》的作者, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan
东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 206.
238
For the Wenxuan School, it was the proletarian class that embodied this hope
and “brightness.” Unlike Yiwenzhi writers, who viewed the masses as “ignorant
mobs” and demand that “fictions should not fawn on the blind and the silly, but are
solely comprehensible to a minority of people,”1 Shanding and his companions took a
Marxist perspective to claim them to be the driving force of social development and
the masters who would “create the future.” On this account, for one thing, literary
activities were by no means “an individual leap,” namely the embodiment of
individual writers’ volitions, but “ought to take roots in the masses,” “draw upon
their blood” and “converge their spirit” so as to endow literature with a
social-political significance2; literature was accordingly dispossessed of its direct
relationship with specific authors, but became “the product of a certain group” or
“class” and a notional cultural construct whose copyright “belongs to the common
people.” For another thing, in the process of literary production, writers should not
only compose works that could be comprehended and favored by the masses,” but
also subordinate themselves to the populace’s “passions, thoughts and wills,” aiming
at “a mass literature in Ilyich’s (Lenin) sense”; In order to achieve this goal, they had
to “mingle with the masses” and “learn from them” to compensate for a lack of life
Jueqing 爵青, “Xiaoshuo” 小说, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：
评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 494.
1
See Wu Lang 吴郎, “Women wenxue de shiti yu fangxiang” 我们的文学的实体与方向, in Dongbei
Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang:
Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 326.
2
239
experience. Moreover, when depicting the underclass laborers, writers ought to
“unconditionally love them” and “take them as completely positive figures” no matter
how “ordinary” they were.1 Shanding’s statement that “the primary duty of literary
works is to create typical characters” undoubtedly summarized and affirmed this
descriptive mode of characters. In view of these conceptual conflicts between the
Yiwenzhi School and the Wenxuan School, Qian Liqun proposed that the
development Chinese literature in the occupied areas was characterized by “a
mutually opposite and mutually complementary relationship” between the literary
trend of “native-land literature” and that of “writings focusing on daily life”: the
latter emphasized “individuality and humanity” and represented a tendency for
“anti-heroism and anti-romanticism,” whereas the former gave a particular
prominence to “national identity” and “relied upon the very literary romanticism and
heroism.”2
As a matter of fact, taking national salvation as their ultimate goal, Wenxuan
intellectuals carried on the nationalist discourse of the May Fourth New Cultural
Movement. Confronted with the highhanded domination of the colonial regime and
the depressed spiritual state of the Manchurians, Shanding and his companions
See See Wang Mengsu 王孟素, “Shanfeng jiqi zuozhe” 《山风》及其作者, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan
Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe,
1996), 438.
1
Qian Liqun 钱理群, “Zongxu” 总序, in Zhongguo Lunxianqu Wenxue Daxi: Shiliao Juan 中国沦陷区文学
大系：史料卷, vol. 2, eds., Qian Liqun 钱理群, Huang Wanhua 黄万华, et al. (Nanning: Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe,
2000), 7-8.
2
240
were clearly aware of their powerlessness in reality and thereupon rested their
hopes on Manchurian commoners, the vast majority in Manchukuo, endeavoring to
evoke their national consciousness and pluck up their courage to join in actual
struggles. Out of this utilitarian viewpoint on literature, on the one hand, the
masses occupied the center of literary works with their substances and forms being
intentionally brought in line with the popular taste and the average knowledge level;
on the other hand, the representations of the populace in literature, as a
consequence, featured a purposive “positivity,” a glorification of the typical
characters full of “heat and force,” and a romantic revelation of the “bright” prospect.
The former aspect made literary works more understandable and acceptable to
commoners, but compromised with trite epistemological mode and traditional ideas
and manifested an anti-rational intellectual proclivity; even though the latter aspect
might provide motivations and examples for the masses, it accordingly deserted the
scientific writing attitude and the principle of objectivity, submitting social realities
to nationalist concepts and political propagandas and embodying a conspicuous
property of ideologization. In this sense, no matter how Wenxuan writers resorted to
the concept of “realism” or “reality” to justify their proposals, their literary praxis
was by all means subject to a certain “high-level worldview.” On the surface, this
“necessary worldview” referred to the Marxist theory of proletarian revolution;
however, its implications of modernity and cosmopolitanism were suspended, while
the appeal for anti-imperialism took over the central position and transmitted a
241
strong sense of national identity through the theoretical shell of Marxism. As
Levenson insightfully analyzed, Marxism attracted particular attentions from May
Fourth Chinese intellectuals for its specialty of being from the West and against the
West and was endowed by them with a bifold request to “destroy their past
(anti-feudalism)” and to “combat the West (anti-imperialism).” 1 In the extreme
environment of the colonial rule, the Wenxuan School once again reinterpreted and
reformed the Marxist socio-political theory and turned its discourse of class
struggles into that of national liberation. It was on the ground of this nationalist
discourse that they considered the anti-feudal stance of the Yiwenzhi School to be a
folly that “intentionally deflects our current fight [against colonialism] and confuses
the direction of our writings” and even predicated to “repel everything
international,” not only “abominating and keeping away from all the Japanese
people in Manchuria no matter whether they were invaders or not,” but also
“showing utter contempt for them (the Yiwenzhi School) for their reliance on
Japanese funds to promote literary modernization.”2
Wenxuan intellectuals’ cultural radicalism might remind us of the idea of
“literature for the proletarian revolution” proposed by Qian Xingcun 钱杏邨, the
most prolific theorist of the Sun Society, in 1928. From Qian’s perspective, the
1
Joseph Levenson. Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1965), 134.
Huang Xuan 黄玄, “Gu Ding lun: wenxue wutuobangmeng zhe de beiju” 古丁论：文学乌托邦梦者的悲
剧, in Gu Ding Zuopin Xuan 古丁作品选, ed., Li Chunyan 李春燕 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1995),
573.
2
242
“literature for the proletarian revolution” comprised all literary works conforming to
the writing principle of “socialist realism,” which was also sometimes referred to as
“new realism” and differed much from the traditional view of realism in that the
latter postulated “an enhanced subjective status” of the author and insisted on a
possibility for him to bestow an undisputable objectivity on the text through calm
observation, faithful depiction and a transcendence of his own social limitations,
while the former denied the possibility of objective representation and adhered to a
“fighting stance of the proletariat” in the process of literary production due to the
inevitability of the class nature of literature. On this account, Qian argued that
traditional realism was “static,” “individualistic,” and “bourgeois,” and by contrast,
the “socialist realism” was “dynamic” and bound with the masses.1 Staring from the
demand of “socialist realism,” he criticized Lu Xun and members of the Association
for Literary Research (Wenxueyanjiu Hui 文学研究会) like Mao Dun 茅盾 and Ye
Shengtao 叶圣陶 for their excessive focus on intellectual topics and social darkness
as well as the pessimistic tone of their literary writings that not only failed to
provide directions and hopes for the masses, but also concealed “the universal reality
determined by history” and consequently proclaimed that writers could not simply
describe life details as how they appeared to us, but ought to reveal the
developmental trend of the future, respond to the call of the times and facilitate the
Qian Xingcun 钱杏邨, “Zhongguo xinxing wenxue zhong de jige wenti” 中国新兴文学中的几个具体问
题, in Geming Wenxue Lunzheng Ziliao Xuanbian 革命文学论争资料选编, vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan
chubanshe, 2010), 930-931.
1
243
fulfillment of revolutionary ideals by means of literature.1 Li Chuli 李初梨, another
famous critic of that time who joined the Society of Creation later, also claimed
literature to be a reflection of “the will to live” and “the praxis of a certain class” and
replaced the realistic appeal for a “literature of blood and tears” to criticize social
realities with the slogans of “machine guns and trench mortars” that promulgated a
politicized literary agenda. These theoretical viewpoints owned by the Sun Society
and the Late Society of Creation, two major literary groups under the direct
leadership of the CCP, were entirely compatible with what the Wenxuan School
proposed. On the one hand, to meet the political demands, they both laid a particular
emphasis on the social function of literature and held a deep fear for that “the
unrestrained objectiveness would result in a mechanical worldview as well as a kind
of fatalism that deprives the readers and the writers of their enthusiasm for life,”
therefore decrying a naturalistic portrayal of the dark side of the society, desiring to
present “brightness,” “promise” and “ the ardor of the new epoch,” and intending to
transform literature into the propaganda vehicle of certain ideologies. On the other
hand, they strongly protested the individualistic expression of writers and the elitist
pose of mass enlightenment and turned to the proletarian class for their
“advancement” in thoughts and vital role in social reforms, suggesting writers to
hold onto the orientation of mass literature, describe the scenes and subject matters
1
See Qian Xingcun 钱杏邨, “Siqule de A Q shidai” 死去了的阿 Q 时代, in Geming Wenxue Lunzheng
Ziliao Xuanbian 革命文学论争资料选编, vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 180-194.
244
familiar to them and convey either the class consciousness or the national
consciousness through topics of workers and peasants. These tendencies for
ideologization and popularization, as Marston Anderson put it, marked a rupture
with the May Fourth tradition, especially the cosmopolitan and independently
critical stance May Fourth writers employed to break away from the bondage of the
traditional culture, and represented an unavoidable reaction against their proposals
of holistic westernization as well as the cultural hegemony of the West lurking
behind the scenes.1 In fact, as discussed above, nationalism itself fostered one of the
two social trends that triggered the outbreak of the New Cultural Movement and
subsequent nationwide remonstrations with the Paris Peace Conference. Although
under the dominance of cultural traditions during the May Fourth period, the
mainstream discourse of Chinese intellectuals still concentrated on “democracy,”
“science” and other modern ideas, with the rapid decline of the traditional culture
and the growing intensification of external threats, the nationalist appeals turned
out to be more and more urgent. Against this background, it was not difficult to
understand why realism, as a literary mode introduced from the West, received
vehement assaults and disavowals, and what “the era needs” was “a radical form of
art that could organize and unite the Chinese people.”2 The so-called “literature for
1
See Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990), 70-71.
2
See ibid., 70-74.
245
the proletarian revolution” based on “socialist realism,” to a certain degree,
performed as a specific epitome of this nationalism-informed radical art. Even if
during the ten years’ civil war between the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) and the
CCP in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the idea of “revolutionary literature” might
be directed more towards proletarian consciousness and class struggles, on the eve of
the Second Sino-Japanese War, Hu Feng 胡风, Zhou Yang 周扬, Feng Xuefeng 冯雪
峰, and other CCP’s most renowned literary theorists successively put forward the
slogans of “national defense literature” and “mass literature in the national
revolutionary war” and officially confirmed the nationalistic orientation of
“revolutionary literature” as the times required by linking the leading role of the
proletariat with the establishment of the anti-Japanese united front. Likewise, the
Wenxuan School’s strategy of using the concepts and the theoretical framework of
“revolutionary literature” to mobilize the Manchurian masses for the purpose of
national salvation not only inherited the dimension of nationalism inherent in the
proposal of “revolutionary literature” or “literature for the proletarian revolution,”
but also proceeded to reinforce its dependence on nationalist or anti-colonial
discourses, dislocating such foreign ideas as “realism,” “proletariat,” and “class
consciousness” out of their West-centric context and rendering them new
nationalistic formulations.1
1
For example, in the Marxist theory, the proletariat class were represented by workers, but in the sense of the
Wenxuan School, mainly referred to peasants. Furthermore, class consciousness was intentionally confused with
246
It was interesting that the contradictions received by the Sun Society (Taiyang
She 太阳社) and the Society of Creation (Chuangzao She 创造社) comprehensively
resonated with Yiwenzhi writers’ arguments. For instance, as opposed to the
viewpoint that “all arts are propagandas,” Han Shiheng 韩 侍 桁 analyzed the
inseparable relationship between individual experiences and social realities in the
following way: “I am a receiver who is sensitively open to the external world and
unavoidably involved into the broad world of social lives; as long as the litterateur
expresses himself, he in the meantime deals with the modern society, modern
concepts and everything modern.”1 To supplement Han’s vision, Hu Qiuyuan 胡秋
原, the representative of “the third party” between the leftists and the liberalists,
stressed that literature’s social function lied in “an in-depth exposition of crimes,
sufferings and grievances of the society” and was thus adverse to “taking literature
as a toy to please the masses.”2 Not unlike them, the Yiwenzhi School also made
every effort to defend the individualistic tendency and the critical attitude of the
May Fourth New Literature that came into being under the profound influence of
Western modern thoughts. Nonetheless, owing to the aggravation of national crisis,
national consciousness by Wenxuan writers, let alone the concept of “mass literature,” which originally indicated
popular literary forms like detective fictions and love romances in Japan, but was reinterpreted as a synonym for
proletarian literature within the context of Manchukuo.
Han Shiheng 韩侍桁, “Gerenzhuyi de wenxue ji qita” 个人主义的文学及其他, in Geming Wenxue
Lunzheng Ziliao Xuanbian 革命文学论争资料选编, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 465.
1
2
See Hu Qiuyuan 胡秋原, “Geming wenxue wenti” 革命文学问题, in Geming Wenxue Lunzheng Ziliao
Xuanbian 革命文学论争资料选编, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 343-344.
247
this objective and rational stance was increasingly assaulted by radical nationalists,
and Yiwenzhi intellectuals themselves were even condemned as “collaborationists”
not long after the collapse of Manchukuo. In 1942, Mao Zedong 毛泽东, as the
highest leader of the CCP, delivered his well-known Talks at the Yan’an Forum on
Literature and Art, authoritatively regulating the official mode of literature and
directly neutralizing the socio-political foundation for traditional realism in China.
As he clarified in this historic document, “cultural, literary, or artistic products all
belong to a certain class,” and consequently, a right worldview was much more
important than literary objectivity; out of the demand of Marxism, literature should
serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers as well as various political purposes in
reality, extol the bright side of the proletariat, and direct its fierce criticism against
the Japanese imperialism and other class enemies. In the meanwhile, he
enthusiastically called for a “popularization of literature” and a “replacement of the
Western literary mode with prevailing national forms.” In this sense, the literary
praxis of Shanding and his companions was endorsed by the mainstream ideology of
the CCP, turning into part of its literary canons constructed by this “fresh-new
artistic orthodoxy.”
Native-Land Literature and Its Anti-Modern Tendency That Pervaded the
Wenxuan School’s Literary Works
248
In the eyes of the Wenxuan School, “native-land literature” constituted the
most efficient vehicle of their nationalist discourse. The concept of “native-land
literature” was initially proposed by Lu Xun, who wrote in his “Preface to Chinese
New Literature Series” as follows:
Jian Xian’ai 蹇先艾 dealt with Guizhou and Pei Wenzhong 裴文中 cared
about Yuguan, both of whom (being exiled by their hometowns) used brushes
to express their inner feelings in Beijing. [The literary works created by
them], subjective or objective, are all native-land literature. From the angle of
Beijing, they are writers of diasporic literature.
In this sense, even if Lu Xun did not clearly defined what was “native-land
literature,” he touched upon several crucial aspects of it in its earlier form. In the
first place, the writers of the “native-land literature” were mainly born in the
countryside and sojourned in urban areas, not only bearing a deep memory of their
homelands, but also being baptized in the modern civilization. Secondly, as for the
subject matters of “native-land literature,” they owned a prominent indigenous
character and primarily focused on the local customs and social lives of the villages
that were still dominated by the traditional culture and existed in a relatively
isolated state from the outside world. Thirdly, in the aspect of writing motivations,
“native-land literature” was composed to convey the writers’ “inner feelings” of
sentimentality and nostalgia and to inspect their hometowns “from Beijing’s
perspective,” that is to say, to expose and criticize the patriarchal institutions and
the old-styled ethical relationship of the rural society through the lens of modern
ideas. Lu Xun’s own short stories that centered on rural topics and committed to “the
249
reform of national characters” also inaugurated the narrative tradition of Chinese
“native-land literature,” setting up an canonical example for later generations.
Thereafter, the development of “native-land literature” embarked on a polarized
trajectory: on the one hand, left-wing writers were more and more inclined to unfold
conflicts between the old and the new as well as various class struggles in the
ongoing disintegration of the traditional society and accordingly carried forward Lu
Xun’s proposal of exposition and criticism to the extreme; on the other hand, the
deep fascination of Lu Xun with the peaceful sceneries of the countryside and the
simple and innocent dispositions of his fellow villagers in such works as Hometown
and Village Opera was wittingly inherited by Zhou Zuoren 周作人, Shen Congwen
沈从文, Feiming 废名, and other liberalist men of letters in Beijing, who dedicated
themselves to a variety of exceptionally idyllic stories and portrayed the rural world
as a pure land of souls and a place where “poetically man dwells” as opposed to all
the turbulences brought by the modern civilization. With the occupation of
Manchuria by the Kwantung Army in the early 1930s, these two divergent trends of
“native-land literature” were reoriented and reconciled by Manchurian writers like
Xiao Jun, Bai Lang, and Duanmu Hongliang 端木蕻良 in their writings to transmit
an intense sense of national identity and anti-colonial resistance. The target of
“exposition and criticism” changed from the outmoded conventions and pernicious
customs of the rural China to ferocities of the colonial rule, and similarly, their
praise of Manchuria’s loft mountains, boundless wastelands, imposing landscapes as
250
well as the endurance and fortitude of the Manchurian people did not aim at a
pastoral Utopian world, but meant to elicit an ardent affection for their native place
from common readers and to arouse their latent resistant conviction. Apparently,
the proposal of “native-land literature” promoted by the Wenxuan School, in this
lineage, directly originated from Xiao Jun and his associates’ literary praxis.
According to Shanding’s reminiscence, it was Xiao Jun himself who incited him to
invoke the notion of “native-land literature”: “to work on ‘native-land literature’ was
not my decision, but could be traced back to Xiao Jun’s exhortation to me; I only
fulfilled their entrust after they left Northeast China.” 1 For that reason, the
conflation and the remolding of these two oppositional trends of “native-land
literature” were also clearly unfolded in Wenxuan writers’ fictional works.
As for what was “native-land literature,” Shanding made the following
definition: “literary works reflecting our real lives or dealing with the indigenous
people and things in northeast China all belong to the category of native-land
literature.” 2 The first half of this definition foregrounded the exposition of the
colonial tyranny and a denial of the implantation of modern Japanese literature in
Manchuria, while the second half stressed the necessity to display local
characteristics and to curry favor with Manchurian commoners; the former part
Liang Shanding 梁山丁, “Wo yu Dongbei de xiangtu wenxue” 我与东北的乡土文学, in Dongbei Lunxian
Shiqi Wenxue Guoji Xueshu Yantaohui Lunwenji 东北沦陷时期文学国际学术研讨会论文集, ed., Feng Weiqun
冯为群 (Shenyang: Shenyang Chubanshe, 1992) , 381.
1
2
Ibid., 370.
251
targeted the “dark side” of the Manchurian society, and the latter part disclosed a
promise of “brightness” represented by the peasant class and their distinctive life
experiences. On this ground, Wu Lang explicitly expounded how to achieve the goal
of localization and popularization in specific literary praxis:
What determined the foundation of mass literature are language, locality, and
culture...[Therefore, we must] collect various resources from the affluent
natural world of Manchuria and absorb the cultural essence among the
Manchurian society. In order to really access the masses, we had to rely on
‘the noumenon of culture’ instead of “an exotic taste.”1
In other words, it was necessary to present the distinctiveness of Manchukuo in the
aspects of nature, culture and language to produce literary works that were
pervaded with nostalgia and favored by the masses, and these three aspects must be
united at the level of “the noumenon of culture,” a suggestive expression of national
consciousness. In this sense, “native-land literature,” as Shanding declared, “is a
synonym for patriotic literature since in Russian ‘native land’ and ‘mother country’
are signified by the same word.”2
For the purpose of clarifying how the Wenxuan School carried on the exposition
of “darkness” and the glorification of “brightness” as well as the inherent tensions
between them, we ought to turn back to their specific fictional writings to form a
more comprehensive understanding. As a matter of fact, their descriptions of the
Wu Lang 吴郎, “Women wenxue de shiti yu fangxiang” 我们的文学的实体与方向, in Dongbei Xiandai
Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系：评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang
chubanshe, 1996), 327.
1
Liang Shanding 梁山丁, “Wo yu Dongbei de xiangtu wenxue” 我与东北的乡土文学, in Dongbei Lunxian
Shiqi Wenxue Guoji Xueshu Yantaohui Lunwenji 东北沦陷时期文学国际学术研讨会论文集, ed., Feng Weiqun
冯为群 (Shenyang: Shenyang Chubanshe, 1992) , 371.
2
252
sufferings of the Manchurian laborers were not much different from those of the
Yiwenzhi School, both of which focused on the miserable life of the social underclass
as epitomized by starvation, homelessness and the omnipresent threat of death. In
Shanding’s own words, he intended to write about “pains of [the Manchurian people]
as slaves of the alien race.”1 Nonetheless, unlike Yiwenzhi writers, the Wenxuan
School seldom delineated the psychological traumas of Manchurian intellectuals
except for Shading’s In the Madhouse, which recounted the transformation of Nie Jie
from an ambitious poet to a lunatic under the persecution of the colonial regime, and
several other stories like Books, but were predominantly preoccupied with the
misfortunes of the peasant class. Furthermore, this exposition almost embodied no
criticism against old social institutions and cultural traditions and consciously
avoided the issue of class conflicts, firing at the colonial oppression in a more biting
way. For example, in the short story Twins, Shanding exhibited the destruction of
Old Jiuye’s family due to the forcible emigration policy enforced by Manchukuo
government: in order to cut off provision supplies for the anti-Japanese military
force, the colonial power applied a policy of “merging villages into towns” to the
widespread rural areas and drove Old Jiuye and his family members away from
their homeland. Soon after, Old Jiuye died from resentment. Unable to put up with
this exiling life, Tiezhu, the son of Old Jiuye, fled back to their home village by
See Li Shuquan 李树权, “Duocaide xiangtu huajuan yu aiguozhe de nahan” 多彩的乡土画卷与爱国者的
呐喊, in Dongbei Lunxian Shiqi Wenxue Guoji Xueshu Yantaohui Lunwenji 东北沦陷时期文学国际学术研讨会论
文集, ed., Feng Weiqun 冯为群 (Shenyang: Shenyang Chubanshe, 1992) , 260.
1
253
stealth. Discovered by the local government, Tiezhu was arrested and put into
prison, and his mother, wife, and nascent twins all starved to death. In this
connection, the colonists’ willful banishment, incarceration and persecution of the
colonized peasants formed a marked facet of the colonial violence, and the demise of
Old Jiuye’s family theatricalized the agonies of tens of thousands of ordinary
Manchurian households under the ferocious colonial rule, lodging a heavy charge
against its existence. In comparison, Mountain Wind, another masterpiece of
Shanding, provocatively revealed the disasters brought by the colonial economic
exploitation to the indigent peasants: the “breadwinner” of the family sold the
futures of forty bushels of beans to a “foreign gang” at the price of four hundred
dollars per bushel so as to buy livestock and grain seeds. According to the contract, if
he could not deliver the goods on time, he had to pay fines two times as much as the
market value. When it came to the harvest season, the bean field suffered from a
continuous storm, and all beans were soaked in the rain. Trying his utmost to reap
these beans and carrying them home, the “breadwinner” found them “as soft as
dough.” In the meanwhile, under the manipulation of the foreigners, the price of
beans soared up to one thousand and six hundred per bushel. Hastened by the clerks
of the foreign gang, the “breadwinner” had to transport the sodden beans to the
grain depot, but was immediately turned down with the excuse that “sodden beans
will swell in cabins and wreck the ship at hot sea.” To pay off the large fines, he sold
out all his left land and livestock and was thus completely reduced to penury. The
254
grain depots owned by Manchurian merchants and purchasing sodden beans were
also closed down by the government with all their warehouses and grain fields being
monopolized by foreign companies. Eventually, beans’ price plumbed to eight
hundred dollars per bushel. “Mountain-like piles of beans are taken away by foreign
gangs,” and “the peasants who hoard sodden beans all became bankrupt by
bargaining away their produces.”1 The “foreign gangs” repetitively mentioned in
this story indicated such huge Japanese consortiums as Mitsubishi and Mitsui,2
which served as the pioneering power of Japan’s economic expansion. By involving
the entire agricultural production of the colony into their futures trading system and
arbitrarily manipulating its ups and downs, they not only reaping exorbitant profits
from these transactions, but also usurped various capitals and natural resources
from Manchurian peasants and thereupon controlled the economic lifeline of
Manchuria. It was the colonial regime that offered them protections and assistances
in the background, prepaying the peasants with official funds, compulsorily
promoting the exchange system and confiscating the Manchurians’ properties in the
disguise of fairness; all these beans that were purchased at a staggeringly low price
would be shipped to Japan to meet the routine demand of the metropolitan state. On
the contrary, a multitude of Manchurian peasants were bereaved of their means of
1
Liang Shanding 梁山丁, Shanfeng 山风, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan Daxi: Duanpian Xiaoshuo Juan 东
北现代文学大系：短篇小说卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 254.
2
Liang Shanding 梁山丁, Lüsede Gu 绿色的谷 (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1987), 99.
255
livelihood and production and lapsed into an increasingly impoverished state. It was
also worth noting that this economic expropriation was targeted at the colonized
people as a whole regardless of their class differentiations with peasants losing their
farmlands, workers getting unemployed and the formerly wealthy being forced to
exile. In addition, the protagonist bore no name and was generally referred to as “the
breadwinner” to represent all Manchurian peasants, who invariably fell victim to the
colonial oppression as repeatedly stressed by the narrator: “countless households are
sacked, innumerable ploughmen weep and implore like him (the breadwinner), and
everyone’s heart burns with nameless anger.” Owing to this anger, people were all
eagerly longing for revenge “as if they are carrying a lot of bombs that would blast at
any time.” In this connection, for one thing, Shanding’s revelation of the operational
mechanism of the colonial apparatus in the economic field broke new ground in the
anti-Japanese writings by Manchurian novelists for the novelty and depth of this
unprecedented topic, a theme that reemerged again and again in Wenxuan writers’
literary works; for another thing, in response to their ideological appeals for
nationalism and collectivism, Shanding intentionally portrayed the peasant
characters in Mountain Wind as an uniform ensemble and omitted their
individualities and complicated psychological movements under the principle of
“epitomization,” afflicting the story with an oversimplified and formalistic
inclination. However, the fundamental tone of Mountain Wind was no longer as
gloomy and despondent as that of the Yiwenzhi School’s fictions, but overflowed with
256
a strong sense of resistance that was embodied by the omnipresence of “anger” in the
story and made “native-land literature” stand out among all critical works.
Although the trait of “nativeness” was not that self-evidential in Wenxuan
writers’ “exposition and criticism” except for their focus on the “deadly struggles” of
Manchurian peasants, by eulogizing the landscape and human life of the rural
Manchuria, they carried forward Lu Xun’s affective description of the native place
and related nostalgia to the nationalist spirit. As Wu Lang concluded, in the specific
process of writing, this nostalgia could be transmitted by virtue of nature, culture
and language. The nature in the Wenxuan School’s writings was magnificent and
admirable and engaged in an everlasting cyclic movement of birth, death and
rebirth, standing for the eternal source of life and containing bounteous treasures
and infinite forces; more important, it took on a remarkably personified character
and appeared to be empathetic with the ability to share human feelings and
emotions as if it “lamented” the Manchurians’ misfortunes and “roared” for their
resentment. Correspondingly, the fictional heroes created by Shanding and his
companions were mostly “son of the nature” who “grows up in wilderness,”
maintained an intimate spiritual bond with natural environment, and partook of the
nature’s innocence and strength. As Fan Zhihong 范 智 红 pointed out, they
preserved a “stout, harmonious and wonderful humanity” in “the filthily suffocating
257
world.” 1 At the level of culture, Wenxuan intellectuals persisted in presenting
indigenous customs and cultural conventions of the rural society, sparing no troubles
to describe such life details as shamanistic dances, ice fishing, and entertainment on
the brick bed and drawing a vivid picture of the harmonious symbiosis between man
and nature. Besides, their usage of language was also permeated with a heavy local
flavor in that not only dialogues among Manchurian characters were recorded in
native dialects, but the narration of their literary works also impersonated the
language customs of the lowbred peasants, not to mention their “austere” and
“simplistic” writing form, which was characterized by a frequent insertion of ballads,
folk tales and anecdotes and accordingly incorporated into the grand tradition of
local culture and history. These thematic, cultural and lingual elements jointly
formed a distinctive chronotope that was “distant but extant,” within which
Manchurian peasants and the land of Manchuria were symbolically united with each
other: the latter conferred life on the former, shaped their personalities, and afforded
them ceaseless vitality and impetus; the former incarnated the latter in the human
world, sharing its fate and being responsible for guarding and preserving it; the
union of them, as a result, led to a utopianized peaceful and sound state. On this
account, Prasenjit Duara insightfully analyzed that the pursuit of locality and
authenticity by the Wenxuan School made their native land “an object of
Fan Zhihong 范智红, “Daoyan” 导言, in Zhongguo Lunxianqu Wenxue Daxi: Xin Wenyi Xiaoshuo Juan 中
国沦陷区文学大系：新文艺小说卷, vol. 1, eds., Qian Liqun 钱理群, Huang Wanhua 黄万华, et al. (Nanning:
Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 7-8.
1
258
identification and hence an object of political desire” and thereupon lent a legitimate
foundation to the Manchurian people’s claim to national sovereignty.1 Conversely,
with the invasion of the colonial power, this original ecological world was encroached
and eroded by trains, machines, specialized market, financial trading, and other
modern material constructs, which destroyed the previous harmony, collapsed and
degenerated the rural society, and brought irreparable damages to both the
peasantry and the natural environment. Through this binary opposition between
native place/authenticity/goodness and colonialism/modernity/evilness, Wenxuan
intellectuals not only imputed all the social problems to the colonial rule, but also
mixed up the goals of expelling the colonists, protecting their homeland and
returning to the imagined natural state. For that reason, they depicted and lauded
the characters who were “son of the nature” as great heroes, calling them “the lion
among beasts and the king of the people” and pinning their hopes of national
salvation entirely on them.
Nonetheless, this mix-up also caused a series of paradoxes deeply hidden in
this strategy of “glorification.” To begin with, since it was impossible for the
Wenxuan School to directly defy the colonial regime under its highhanded control,
they accordingly redirected their criticism against the modernization projects like
mining and infrastructure construction promoted by the colonizers and portrayed
1
See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 229.
259
them in a non-objective and demonizing way. By contrast, for the sake of “restoring”
the “authenticity” of the nature and the rural life of Manchuria, they were fascinated
with a worship of primitive forces and obscurantic conventions and thus turned the
“native place” into a mysterious being on the basis of the aforementioned dichotomy.
In this sense, they betrayed the scientific and rational spirit of the May Fourth
Movement and regressed into a xenophobic and anti-modern cultural stance that
existed before the large-scale mass enlightenment in the early twentieth century. In
fact, from a historical perspective, it was the railway that brought Chinese
immigrants to Manchuria and enabled them to fill in the whole region as its
indisputable owners. That was why Duara assertively stated that “the railroads
enabled the settlement of the Chinese agricultural community, which became the
major force reshaping the environment.”1 The negation of this fact dislocated the
Wenxuan School’s fictional writings from their deserved historical background,
manifesting the illusory nature of the appeal for authenticity and undermining the
validity of their radical nationalist discourse to a large extent.
Next, even if the emphasis on geographical bonds and cultural distinctions
might be conducive to eliciting a deep sense of local identification as well as a
resistant spirit against the foreign occupation, this regionalism would not
necessarily foster or reinforce a national identification with one’s fellow people
1
Ibid., 172.
260
among other regions. On the contrary, in most cases, it posed a tricky challenge
against the unified national identity. Against the background that Manchukuo had
achieved its nominal independence and became severed from inland China in both
politics and culture, an excessive concern for locality might aggravate this
estrangement and weaken the emotional intimacy between the Manchurian people
and their Chinese compatriots, opening up a possibility for the imagination of a new
autonomous community.
Finally, in order to neutralize the national consciousness of Manchurian
intellectuals as Chinese and promulgate the ideology of “ethnic harmony,”
Manchukuo government aggressively promoted literary productions that dealt with
rural Manchuria and conveyed “an affection for the native land” and directly
formulated the slogan of “native-place literature” in the essay competition it
organized to celebrate the arrival of year 1937. It was said that Shanding “drew
necessary inspiration from” the activity1 and consciously appropriated and refigured
this slogan. However, the “native-land literature” Shanding proposed was hardly
distinguishable from that forged by the colonial propaganda organ in both subject
matters and stylistic features, both of which centered on “Manchuria’s native
tradition, simplicity, vigor and natural beauty,” and the former’s reliance on the
style of “new heroism and new romanticism” and the concept of “heat and force”
See Xu Sai 徐塞, “Shanding xiangtu wenxue de zhuzhang jiqi shijian” 山丁乡土文学的主张及其实践, in
Dongbei Lunxian Shiqi Wenxue Guoji Xueshu Yantaohui Lunwenji 东北沦陷时期文学国际学术研讨会论文集, ed.,
Feng Weiqun 冯为群 (Shenyang: Shenyang Chubanshe, 1992) , 241.
1
261
ironically “celebrated ‘the spirit of blood of soil’ promoted by German and Italian
fascists in native-place literature.” Little wonder that the literary praxis of the
Wenxuan School was inevitably incorporated into the context of the colonial ideology
and deprived of its original pursuit of the identification with the Chinese nation, as
was made clear by Shanding’s celebration of Greater East Asianism before he fled
away from Manchuria. As Duara concluded, “while the group had collaborationist
elements but was intellectually autonomous from the dominant paradigms of
Japanese and Manchukuo writing of the native place, Shanding, who once had a
clear political position, was intellectually and discursively much more part of the
world of this writing.”1
Among all glorification-oriented fictions of the Wenxuan School, Shanding’s In
the Town of Turchiha proved to be the most problem-ridden one. At the very start,
this short story wrote about the derailment of a train in “the desolate wilderness”
and introduced the encounter between the narrator “I,” a resident of the metropolis,
and the “groom” who called his horse “my old spouse.” After a lengthy talk with him,
“I” came to know that he was a descendant of the Oroqen people, “an aboriginal
ethnic group living in deep mountains,” and kept repenting of the mistake he
committed in his youthhood: at the age of twenty, he went to the Turchiha Town and
got obsessed with a “demon-like” mistress, not only giving her all his money, but also
1
Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 228.
262
implicating his beloved horse in an intentional injury that mutilated it. From then
on, the “groom” vowed to “revenge himself for the horse” and decided to return to
Turchiha to realized his retaliation. Following him to the small town and viewing his
“boorish greetings” to his old friend, “I” felt “deeply moved” and exclaimed that “I
have never seen that before in my little world.” Then, “I” saw the “groom”
interrogating and torturing his mistress and heard his indignant cry: “I hate your
temptation! I hate you!”1 On “my” way back to the train station, the crippled horse
pulling “my” carriage fell down to the ground and was whipped to death. With a deep
suspicion about whether this horse was the one mentioned by the “groom,” “I”
guessed that he must had got back to his “homeland at Hulunbuir” and wondered
how he would resume his revenge plan. In this story, the narrator “I” undoubtedly
stood for a messenger of the modern civilization, whereas the “groom” constituted an
incarnation of the “son of the nature,” whose encounter with “me” unveiled the
long-term antagonistic relationship between natural and civilizational worlds. On
the one hand, in the past time, the civilization had been always encroaching and
depredating everything that was related to nature, as was represented by the
mistress’ lethal enticement to and deception on the “groom,” the abuse and
mutilation suffered by the horses, the invasion of railways into the heartland of
Manchuria and the unscrupulous destruction of virgin forests. On the other hand,
1
Liang Shanding 梁山丁, Zai Tuerchiha Xiaozhen Shang 在土尔池哈小镇上, in Dongbei Xiandai Wenxuan
Daxi: Duanpian Xiaoshuo Juan 东北现代文学大系：短篇小说卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang:
Shenyang chubanshe, 1996), 234.
263
with the return of the “groom,” the natural world began to retaliate against the
modern civilization at the present time. The train was trapped in the wilderness and
subject to momentary attacks from bandits, the “groom” “grabbed his mistress on
her greasy hair” and spurned on her with lashes and reproaches, and the maimed
horse even dared to toss “me” off the carriage with its expiring breath. As for the
forthcoming future, through “my” imagination, the author anticipated the “groom’s”
reunion with the nature of Manchuria as he went back to his hometown as well as
his more fierce reprisal against the civilizational world. It was obvious that between
the confrontational powers of nature and civilization, Shanding decidedly took sides
with the former. As illustrated by him, the modern civilization was not only viciously
associated with sins like avarice and lechery, but also appeared to be vulnerable and
exhausted: in the face of the “perilous” and “mystical” nature, all Japanese
passengers became extremely restless, so did “I”; confronted with the “incisive look”
of the “groom,” “I” felt it was so scary that “I” had to “cover my cowardly face” with a
book; although the mistress was bitterly belabored by the “groom,” she “submissively
accepts his tyranny” and knelt down to “beg his pardon.” On the contrary, the
natural power was incomparably formidable as represented by the all-devouring
wasteland, the ferocious bandits, the uninhibited groom—no less than a “beast-like”
“tyrant”—and even the firewood used on the train that made “mocking” noises at the
passengers while burning. On the ground of this contrast, Shanding hinted at the
decline of the civilizational world as well as the nature’s “bright prospect” of an
264
overwhelming success. Nonetheless, to give more prominence to the goodness of the
native place, Shanding excessively prettified the “groom” in a romantic way,
especially his brutal, violent and anti-intellectual side, and thus went against the
rational spirit of the May Fourth “new literature.” Moreover, by identifying the
colonial with the modern, he demonized every aspect of the modern civilization,
including the railway, the metropolis, and his fellow Manchurian intellectuals like
“me,” claimed all the “civilizational world” to be evil, and tried to overcome it by
means of an illusory primitiveness and authenticity. Hence the diversion and the
attenuation of the nationalistic appeals of this story.
As the most comprehensive and most profound work of the Wenxuan School,
The Green Valley attached equal importance to exposition and glorification and
constructed a much more complicated textual world. At the level of “exposition and
criticism,” this novel dealt with intricate social problems of the Manchurian society,
including the conflict between the tenants as represented by Yu Qiye and the
landlord Lin Shuzhen, the fight of the Lin family and their supporters against the
bandit head Little White Dragon as well as the exploitation of Manchurian peasants
and the devastation of the natural environment by the comprador Qian Rulong and
the Japanese companies that directed him behind the plan, which were also
presented via such familiar motifs as their manipulation of the produce futures
trading system and coercive pavement of railways. Furthermore, the story paid
much attention to Lin Shuzhen and her nephew Xiaobiao’s struggles for the freedom
265
of Marriage, who respectively fell in love with the family’s butler Huo Feng and Yu
Qiye’s granddaughter Xiaolian but suffered from the bondage of old ethical codes
and class separations. Although these anti-colonial and anti-feudal contents once
occupied the center of the novel, with the unfolding of more episodes and the change
of the story setting from rurality to urban surroundings, their importance was
gradually outweighed by that of the evilness of the modern metropolis as highlighted
by the aforementioned binary opposition. In The Green Valley, the countryside was
portrayed as “an earthly heaven that featured ineffable glamours, brightness and
loveliness,” whereas the metropolis had “cobweb-like streets,” “fly-like outposts,” and
wire nettings “with mouths wide open,” got suffused with “filthy water, phlegms,
excrements and germs,” and looked just like “a human hell”; those who inhabited it
also “contended, congested, fought and intrigued with each other” and committed
“cruel and destructive crimes” everyday. In view of that, Yu Qiye and his fellow
peasants took the “metropolis” as their biggest threat, denounced and protested it
with the following blame: “the boys growing up in the city are all wicked scoundrels
who are often seen steal grains in the market and bully plough-men in crowds; many
country girls are cheated by them and sold to the brothel after being insulted.” This
deflection of the critical target intensively reflected Wenxuan writers’ confusion of
modernity with colonialism, and of authenticity with sovereignty, and resulted in
266
the predominance of the anti-modern theme, which, as Xu Sai thought-provocatively
analyzed, “partially blurred the nationalist tendency of their works.”1 In addition, to
highlight “brightness” and promise, Shanding wittingly used a great number of
deliberate digressions in his portrayal of these conflicts. For example, Huo Feng, the
son of a poor peasant family, was able to become the real master of the Lin family by
virtue of his fortitude and competence; under the impending threat of the bandits,
Lin Shuzhen voluntarily vacated her houses to accommodate the villagers and
protected the green valley together with them; Qian Rulong eventually lost all his
capitals in his investment in the railway and had to flee away; despite the fact that
the railway construction took up lands along the riverbank, the villagers reclaimed
new fields over hillsides and obtained harvests better than ever before; Huo Feng
and Lin Shuzhen managed to get married and gave birth to their child. These
digressions that were typified by a farfetched appeasement of the acute
contradictions between classes and nations and an introduction of contingent events
to solve the preceding problems were not only inimical to the strength of the
criticism and the pertinency of the exposition, but also made the “bright” side
baseless and absurd with all these factitious twists. In the last part of the story,
Shanding even offered the surprise ending that Xiaobiao disseminated the entire
property of his family to the villagers and felt “extraordinarily warm” for his return
Xu Sai 徐塞, “Shanding xiangtu wenxue de zhuzhang jiqi shijian” 山丁乡土文学的主张及其实践, in
Dongbei Lunxian Shiqi Wenxue Guoji Xueshu Yantaohui Lunwenji 东北沦陷时期文学国际学术研讨会论文集, ed.,
Feng Weiqun 冯为群 (Shenyang: Shenyang Chubanshe, 1992) , 247.
1
267
to the green valley, “transcending” and denying the grim reality of colonial
oppression via a symbolic restoration of the natural state and ensnaring his
expositional depictions into a self-paradoxical situation. Actually speaking, this
literary fantasy that was considered by Shanding himself to be “an odd fairy tale”
had its precedents in his other fictional writings like The Story of Silver, in which
Manchuria was described as a pure land where “people are never jealous, never
suspicious, always happy, and always intimate to each other.” These descriptions
would reminded us of the ideological propagandas of “the harmony among five ethnic
groups” and the “Elysium of the kingly way” and involuntarily confirmed
Manchukuo’s founding spirit in a tricky way. Besides, Xiaobiao’s affection for Miko,
a Japanese girl who “owns a graceful personality of oriental characteristics” and
“worships the mainland as a fanatic lover” carried on the clichés and plot patterns of
the “goodwill literature” propagated by the colonial government and betrayed the
ambiguous and incoherent character of Wenxuan companions’ works. As a result, the
novel started from an anti-colonial consciousness but at last lapsed into the
framework of the colonial ideology.
268
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION AND EPILOGUE
Those five years from 1937 to 1941 turned out to be an exceptionally special
period in Manchukuo’s history. Before 1937, the CCP still maintained its provincial
branch in Manchuria, under whose leadership, anti-Japanese military forces
developed rapidly throughout Manchukuo and were subsequently merged into the
United Army, which launched numerous resistant campaigns against the colonial
regime and severely threatened its political rule. However, the Manchurian
headquarter of the CCP was abolished under the order of the Comintern in 1936,
and its local organizations were also exterminated by the Japanese military police in
succession. Due to a lack of single command, there emerged deeply splits among
different divisions of the United Army that caused great disorders and endless
apostasies and made the Army soon collapsed. At the same time, Manchukuo
government also forcibly implemented the policy of “clan grouping” in rural areas,
moved scattered Manchurian villagers into centralized residence zones for stricter
surveillance and control, and strengthened the neighborhood administrative system
(baojiazhi 保甲制) and the interlink penalty system (lianzuozhi 连坐制) to uproot
the social foundation of armed resistance. These new historical changes lent an
unprecedented stability to the colonial rule. In the field of economy, Manchukuo
government started to enforce its economic integration plan since 1937 and
269
established a variety of state-run monopolies according to the principle of “one
enterprise for one industry,” such as Manchuria Heavy Industry Co. Ltd.,
Manchuria Mining Company, Manchuria Telecommunication Company, Manchuria
Agriculture Corporation, and the like, which greedily tapped into human and
natural recourses throughout Manchukuo and sent it onto the journey of rapid
industrialization. Furthermore, Italy, Germany, and other fascist states successively
recognized Manchukuo’s independency from China around 1937, a diplomatic
breakthrough that expanded its living space in the global arena. Preoccupied with
the Sino-Japanese War, Japan also relaxed its control over Manchukuo and
ostensibly ceded a few rights to the Manchukuo government in formality with the
abolition of its exterritoriality in 1938, the passage of the New Concession
Agreement thereafter, the transfer of its jurisdiction over the Mantetsu’s dependent
territories, and so on. Obtaining autonomy and effective administration to a certain
degree, Manchukuo embraced its golden age at the turning point of year 1937.
What ensued political stability, economic growth, and a relative freedom of
social environment was the prosperity of cultural enterprises, namely the
“Renaissance of Manchuria” promulgated by Japanese intellectuals, which featured
a multitudinous emergence of intellectual groups, a profusion of literary journals
and opuses as well as the establishment of nationwide self-governing artistic
organizations like the Manshū bunwakai. It was worth mentioning that those who
participated in the Bunwakai not only comprised such Japanese men of letters as
270
the Manshū rōmanha and the Sakubun intellectuals, but also included the
Manchurian literary writers like the Yiwenzhi School and the Wenxuan School. They
kept close contact with each other, engaged in frequent cultural communications,
and accordingly turned Manchukuo literature into a unified whole. For one thing,
the Yiwenzhi School and the Manshū rōmanha routinely hosted symposiums and
private gatherings at intervals and tended to share writing experiences and even
political viewpoints with each other, so did the Wenxuan School and the Sakubun
School. Almost every issue of Sakunbun and Manshū Rōman had Manchurian
writers’ works, which also occupied an important position in various literary
anthologies compiled by Japanese intellectuals, and notwithstanding their
animosity towards anything relevant to Japan, Wenxuan companions also published
a wide range of literary works by such Japanese litterateurs in Manchuria as
Takeuchi Masaichi and Hasegaewa Shun in their magazines, not to mention the
Yiwenzhi School, who constantly devoted themselves to the publication, translation
and introduction of modern Japanese literature. In the process of the Japanese
writers’ debate on the direction and nature of Manchukuo literature, the positioning
of Manchurian authors and their writings as well as how to treat “Manchurian
topics” formed the major focus of both their theoretical proposals and literary
creations; the dissents about what attitude they should take to Japanese culture and
Japanese literati in turn caused a serious split among Manchurian intellectuals, and
271
the depictions of the colonists and the colonial power also ineluctably loomed large in
their fictions.
For another thing, apart from these external commonalities, the literary
praxes of both the Japanese and the Manchurian writers complied with the same
intellectual dynamics and embodied similar textual characteristics though out of
bifurcated cultural traditions. On the ground of the Nihon rōmanha’s fundamental
appeals for “overcoming modernity,” the Manshū rōmanha urged against the
modern state apparatus that brought about class and national antagonisms as well
as various modern ideas informed by scientism and materialism and rested their
hopes of transcendence on the founding of Manchukuo. Differing from their
Japanese counterpart, who resorted to classical Japanese culture and literature to
nullify the capitalist modernity with a nationalism-based “poetic spirit,” they
discovered the so-called “mainland-ity” and its aesthetic representations from the
imposing natural sceneries and the tenacious people of Manchuria and viewed this
otherness as a ground-breaking opportunity to reform the modern. Therefore, they
called upon the Japanese intellectuals in Manchuria to discard their former cultural
identity and national consciousness and wholeheartedly embrace “mainland-ity” in
order to identify themselves with Manchukuo, “the pioneering undertaking in world
history.” Out of this understanding, the Manshū rōmanha either enthusiastically
eulogized the nature of Manchuria, its local customs, and the adamant and free
nature of the Manchurian people, or suggestively flouted or criticized the colonial
272
regime and the capitalist social institutions it represented, manifesting a political
tendency for anti-colonialism. Carrying a Marxist worldview and the tradition of
modern Japanese literary realism, the Sukubun School took science, reason,
progress and other premises of the modern spirit as their writing guidelines and
proposed to conduct objective observations on and scientific analysis of social
realities through their literary praxis so as to facilitate the development and the
reconfiguration of the Manchurian society. Under the influence of the class theory
and the cosmopolitan inclination of Marxism, they cast off their Japan-centric
standpoint, realized that the Manchurians, particularly Manchurian peasants,
constituted the main body and the driving force of the society of Manchuria but were
still suffering from the cruel oppression imposed by the colonial regime, and thus
aspired to transform the suffocating situation of the colonial rule and to reconstruct
the political structure and the mainstream culture of Manchukuo according to the
Manchurian people’s fundamental interests. The second-generation immigrants
among them even proceeded to claim that they were Manchurians rather than
Japanese in view of their identity crisis and cultural dilemmas, and were eager to set
up a new national identification with the Manchurian people based on the
distinctive language, culture and social conditions of Manchuria. On this account,
Sakubun writers primarily adopted realistic techniques in their literary works,
focused on the severe tribulations brought by the colonists to Manchurian
commoners, and transmitted a strong wish to assimilate into the Manchurian
273
society as well as a voiceless criticism against the colonial domination. Not unlike
the aforementioned Japanese intellectuals, Manchurian writers also took root in
their own literary traditions, especially the tradition of the May Fourth “new
literature.” As Wu Lang asserted, “without the success of China’s New Cultural
Movement, there won’t be any new literatures in Manchukuo.”1 As the direct heir to
the modernization discourse of the May Fourth Movement, the Yiwenzhi School not
only argued for an active learning from foreign literatures, particularly modern
Japanese literature, and a bold experimentation on literary creations with no
restriction of styles or topics in order to overturn the dominance of popular fictions in
Manchurian culture and establish the autonomy and self-consciousness of
Manchukuo literature, but also endeavored to transmit modern knowledge and ideas
through their literary praxis for the sake of mass enlightenment and social reforms.
Though holding a negative attitude towards cultural traditions, they had never
compromised their nationalistic stance, and on the contrary, from their perspective,
the modernization enterprise served as a necessary implementation means and the
foundation in reality for anti-colonial pursuits. In other words, they tried to reconcile
the appeals for modernity and national identity and convey the latter via the
expression of the former. By portraying the miserable life of the social underclass
and the psychological traumas of Manchurian intellectuals, Yiwenzhi companions
Wu Lang 吴郎, “Women wenxue de shiti yu fangxiang” 我们的文学的实体与方向, in Dongbei Xiandai
Wenxuan Daxi: Pinglun Juan 东北现代文学大系:评论卷, ed., Zhang Yumao 张毓茂 (Shenyang: Shenyang
chubanshe, 1996), 330.
1
274
not only mounted a vehement charge against the “feudal” conventions and ethical
codes, but also committed to an explicit or implicit interrogation of the Japanese
colonialism. Moreover, by virtue of a creative mimicry of the ideological discourses of
the colonial regime, they parodied and revealed its violent and irrational nature and
strategically foregrounded a deep sense of national consciousness. In sharp contrast,
the Wenxuan School inherited and carried forward the nationalist discourse that
underlay the May Fourth “new literature” and further radicalized it in their literary
works. On the basis of this exclusive radical standpoint, they partially emphasized
the socio-political function of literature, opposed a naturalistic depiction of
individual realities, and attempted to turn their literary praxis into a vehicle of
political propagandas as required by the ideology of nationalism. For that reason, on
the one hand, Wenxuan companions repelled all modern technologies and cultures
that were associated with the colonists and dedicated themselves to exposing and
criticizing the devastating impact of the colonial oppression; on the other hand, they
tended to replace the rational spirit with a primitive vitality of nature and suggested
to fervidly celebrate Manchurian peasants, natural sceneries, and local customs
under the principles of heroism and romanticism, thus betraying a strong
anti-modern tendency.
In conclusion, if we can liken the literary history of Manchukuo from 1937 to
1941 to a coordinate system, then it was modernity and national identity that
formed its horizontal and vertical axes. The Manshū rōmanha and Sakubun writers
275
respectively adopted an anti-modern and modern perspectives, but unanimously
headed towards the intellectual stance of denying their own national identity and
merging into the colony’s indigenous society; in comparison, Manchurian
intellectuals as epitomized by the Yiwenzhi School and the Wenxuan School started
from the same purpose of promoting national consciousness, but at last embarked on
a bifurcated path to either modernization or retraditionalisation. As it turned out,
they each corresponded to a certain quadrant of the coordinate system, which
interlocked and overlapped with each other and altogether constituted the unified
image of Manchukuo literature. In fact, this pattern of oscillating between
modernity and national identity was by no means unique to Manchukuo literature,
but also inflicted modern Chinese literature and its Japanese counterpart from the
very beginning. Within the specific context of Manchukuo as a Japanese colony, the
face-to-face confrontation of these two literary traditions rendered this intellectual
dilemma a more intense and more theatrical presentation.
Although the literary writings of these four groups engaged disparate topics,
stylistic features, and narrative modes, they all showed a deep concern for the
sufferings of the Manchurian people brought by colonialism, coincidentally directed
their criticism or sarcasm against the colonial rule, and thereupon endowed
Manchukuo literature with the keynote of “darkness” as opposed to such ideological
propagandas as “ethnic harmony” and “the kingly way.” On this account, Nishihara
Kazumi concluded that “it was owing to the common ‘darkness’ of these works that
276
Manchukuo literature could exist as an entity.”1 That was why the colonial regime
kept alert and hostile to this developmental trend of Manchukuo literature that
gradually marched towards its opposite side and employed various approaches to
strengthen its cultural control, including a strict system of press censorship and the
forcible reorganization and disbandment the Manshū bunwakai. In the tense
political atmosphere on the eve of the Pacific War, the Kōbōsho formulated and
publicized the “Guidelines for Art and Literature” as an official regulation of the
literary activities in Manchuria, forbidding to produce works that dealt with the
dark side the society, jeopardized “the solidarity among citizens,” and impeded
“national construction enterprises” and imperatively demanding an absolute state
control over Manchukuo literature. 2 Soon after, it proceeded to replace the
self-governed Bunwakai with the “Association of Litterateurs and Artists in
Manchukuo,” which was directly managed and commanded by the colonial
government and encompassed all famous writers in the Manchurian literary arena,
even including Wulang, one of the most steadfast anti-Japanese activists, as a
member of its executive committee. These writers were required to carry out the
propaganda policy of “serving the state with literature” and put under forcible
registration, surveillance and even life threat. Manshū Rōman, Sakubun, Yiwenzhi,
Nishihara Kazumi 西原和海, “Kaidai” 解題, in Manshū Bungei Nenkan: Betsusaku 満洲文芸年鑑：別冊
(Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 1993), 24.
1
2
See “Geibun shidō yōkō” 芸文指導要綱, Geibun 文芸 (9.6): 86.
277
Wenxuan, and other belletristic magazines were also forced to cease publication in
succession around the Attack on Pearl Harbor with merely two literary journals
existing in Manchukuo, Geibun 芸文, the Japanese official organ of the “Association
of Litterateurs and Artists in Manchukuo,” and its Chinese version Yiwenzhi 艺文
志. Due to the escalation of the Pacific War, Japan reinforced its political control and
economic exploitation over Manchukuo, depriving it of almost all autonomous rights
and making it a veritable rear base for the empire’s military adventures. In the
meanwhile, the colonial regime vigorously agitated for “a decisive battle through
literature,” required authors to write about “being productive for the military
purpose,” “being diligent to serve the imperial soldiers,” and other ideological
themes, and extensively hunted for left-wing intellectuals throughout Manchuria.
Against this background, writers of the aforementioned literary schools were mostly
silenced, among whom, Shanding even took refuge in inland China to avoid the
possible arrest. It might be safe to claim that it was the outbreak of the Pacific War
in 1941 that ended the golden age of Manchukuo and diverted Manchukuo literature
away from its original trajectory of free development to the paradigm of Japan’s
wartime “state policy literature.”
Following the collapse of Manchukuo, Manchukuo literature had no longer
existed as a living cultural construct and got intentionally neglected for its relation
to historical taboos for such a long time. Most of the Japanese writers of
Manchukuo’s literary circle gave up writing during postwar period and were
278
reluctant to talk about their experiences in Manchuria, while Gu Ding, Shanding,
and their companions were fiercely denounced as either collaborationists or rightists
in various political movements after the founding of P.R.C. Nevertheless, the
breakthroughs made by them in their confrontations with the otherness left
profound and valuable legacies to both the Chinese and the Japanese intellectual
traditions. The Manshū rōmanha turned the standpoint of “overcoming modernity”
from Japan’s national culture to the “virile” and “indomitable” characters of the
“mainland-ity” and indirectly inspired Tekeuchi Yoshimi to take “the resistant
China as an approach” in the 1950s. Although the Sakubun School inherited the
great tradition of Japan’s proletarian literature, they abandoned the Marxian
understanding of China as “a state being locked in stagnancy” and repudiated the
ideological discourse that celebrated the Japanese colonization as a necessity for
China’s social reforms via their literary praxis, an intellectual pose that
foreshadowed the anti-war literature composed by Miyamoto Yuriko 宮本百合子,
Tokunaga Sunao 徳永直 and other Japanese left-wing writers after 1945. On the
ground of the modernization discourse of the New Cultural Movement, Gu Ding and
his friends creatively combined the theme of anti-colonialism with that of
anti-feudalism and subversively challenged the legitimacy of the colonial rule with
the strategy of mimicry. In comparison, Wenxuan writers built up an intrinsic
relationship between “native-land literature” and nationalistic appeals, advocating a
positive portrayal and an enthusiastic glorification of Manchurian peasants. Under
279
their influence, Shangguan Zheng 上官筝 went on to proposed that “for our literary
production, the topics should be of the native land and the treatment of them should
abide by neo-heroism and neo-romanticism.” 1 Compatible with Mao Zedong’s
request to “eulogize the merits of the revolutionary people and mobilize their will to
fight and faith in success,” this proposal in fact became the overarching writing
principle of China’s mainstream literature officially endorsed by the CCP. Because of
these pioneering explorations, Manchukuo literature attracted exceptional attention
from Chinese and Japanese scholars at the turn of the twenty-first century and was
endowed with a new historical significance via multifarious reinterpretations.
1
See Chu Tiankuo 楚天阔, “Sanshiér nian de beifang wenyijie” 三十二年的北方文艺界, Zhongguo
Gonglun 中国公论 (10.4): 78.
280
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