Volume 26, Number 14 · September 27, 1979
Hooray for Monsters
By D.J. Enright
Secret Rendezvous
by Kobo Abe, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter
Knopf, 179 pp., $8.95
Japanese fiction resembles British drama in that it started off at its peak and thereafter slid downhill. The Japanese peak came earlier: The Tale of Genji was written in the first quarter of the eleventh century. And it was written by a woman—at times it is advantageous to be a second-class citizen—since men of the Heian period had more important things to do, though it is hard to fathom what these were, beyond writing in Chinese, the equivalent of genteel 'Latinizing.' Subsequently persons of a serious literary disposition devoted themselves to poetry or meditative and discursive prose. In the seventeenth century Saikaku made a stir with his racy tales of the merchant classes and the ephemeral pleasures and pains of 'the floating world.' With some exceptions, later fiction was either solemn and moralistic or vulgar and smutty. The introduction from the late nineteenth century onward of European novels in translation brought new conceptions of what fiction could do, for better and for worse, but before long government repression closed down the kinds of writing which in one way or another could be described as 'decadent' or 'degenerate' or simply foreign. Give fiction a bad name—and it had never had a very good one—and you might as well ban it.
Review, 2178 words
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