Here is the final instalment of the first complete English translation of Saneatsu Mushanokoji’s Good Natured Man (1911), aka Good Natured Person, acknowledged prototype of the Japanese autobiographical genre of shishosetsu or I-novel. Recall that the narrative-proper concluded eight instalments ago: the internalized account of the narrator’s obsessive, […]
Five mysterious, anonymous figures discuss the passing of our protagonist, the onion skins of imagined identity ritualistically peeled away. An ironic tone stems, on the one hand, from the premise of living entities speaking of what truly may not be known to them, perhaps in a sense the […]
The true and innate attraction between Ichiro and Shizu is interrupted. Yet at the same time, Ichiro and the woman he married do share a form of happiness—if merely a “conscious” happiness, with a lack and a longing at the centre of it. The anti-naturalistic narrative recedes from objectivity, […]
Key to unlocking the piece is again the notion of individuals entangled at an unconscious level, with the result that their feelings irrationally affect each other at a distance, quantum-style (if decades in advance of the actual science). The characters are unaware of the deep nature of their […]
Not unlike a Brechtian ‘alienation‘ or ‘estrangement effect’, Mushanokoji’s ‘supplementary record’ creates a distance from the naturalism of the original story. These addenda are intended to be read as though written by Jibun, the character in the story, not the author as such. Thus they are located at […]
Quantum entanglement, seriously? It may seem a leap to read this little piece as anticipating anything like, say, the profoundly amusing caricatures of Italo Cavino’s Cosmicomics of 1965. I will indulge the whim, however, aiming to underline the originality of Mushanokoji’s characterizations, for we of the 21st century […]
Herein ends the explicit narrative of the incorrigible Jibun’s hunger for a woman vis-à-vis the schoolgirl Tsuru. However, the book continues with several addenda, what Mushanokoji refers to as a ‘supplementary record, to be seen as something written by the protagonist of The Good Natured Man’. The supplementary […]
Reflecting on his yearning for the beautiful young Tsuru—and reflecting on his reflections—Jibun invokes a classic Japanese love suicide, “a tragic tale of unrestrained desire” (Brownstein). The scandalous affair of Onatsu and Seijuro occurred in the mid-seventeenth century and inspired poetry, novels, plays for bunraku puppet theatre, and […]
A Japanese character (kanji) compound, ‘mede’ (目出: “eye” + “go out”) is the basis for the expression, ‘good natured’ in Mushanokoji’s translated title Omedetaki-hito. The compound appears in the common congratulatory phrase, ‘omedetou gozaimasu’, as in, for example, ‘tanjoubi omedetou gozaimasu’ (Many happy returns of the day!) However, […]
It is tongue-in-cheek, and with a measure of self-deprecation, that Jibun compares himself and Tsuru to Dante and Beatrice. At the same time, Mushanokoji subtly acknowledges Dante as a model. Like Jibun, Dante enjoyed only the most scant face-to-face encounters with his beloved Beatrice. In the Vita Nuova, […]
Furin Chime 