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Koreans whose parents or grandparents were originally forced to come to
Japan as laborers before and during World War II. There is also an Ainu
indigenous tribe living in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. In the
seventeenth century, the Tokugawa Shogunate claimed that Hokkaido was
Japan s territory. The Ainu people subsequently suffered a lot of inequali-
ties and sometimes resorted to minor insurrections, but on the whole, they
managed to survive under the Japanese political control. When the na-
tional development project started in the middle of the nineteenth cen-
Japanese Writers Encounter Faulkner 119
tury in the Meiji era, however, and many Japanese settlers moved into
Hokkaido, the Ainu population drastically declined, and the tribe s primi-
tive way of living in accordance with nature was fundamentally destroyed.8
There are also the Burakumin people, who descended from a social, rather
than an ethnic outcast group in Japan. The outcast class was officially dis-
criminated against until the start of the Meiji era, and it was only after
World War II that both public and private efforts to eradicate the discrimi-
nation became gradually effective.9
The presence of Koreans, Ainu, and Burakumin proves that Japan is
not as homogeneous a nation as even most Japanese believe. The Japa-
nese government exploited and then discarded or ignored these minority
groups in the name of modernization and development. But mainstream
Japanese still take for granted that they, the majority, are by nature and
blood the legitimate successors of homogeneous Japanese society, just as
they take the Emperor system for granted.
Obviously, not all the Japanese writers attracted by Faulkner after World
War II were aware of these similarities between the American South and
Japan. There was little information about the American South in Japan
until Faulkner s acceptance of the Nobel Prize. However, the first rec-
ognition of Faulkner in Japan had come very early. In 1932, A Rose for
Emily was translated by Naotaro Tatsunokuchi in a quarterly literary
magazine called Bungaku. Bungaku means literature in Japanese, and
Yukio Haruyama was the poet editor in chief of the magazine. In the pre-
vious issue, Haruyama, who was interested in French symbolism and mod-
ernism in general, introduced Faulkner based mainly on the information
he had obtained through French literary magazines.10 The translations of
four poems by Faulkner were also published in Bungaku in June 1933.11
These publications emphasized Faulkner s cosmopolitan rather than his
American nature. Unfortunately, the international situation surrounding
Japan got worse, and there was no more translation of Faulkner s texts
until after World War II.
The political situation in Japan in the 1930s was becoming quite tense
with militarism and international isolation, but some Japanese intellectu-
als were eager to acquire cultural information from abroad. For instance,
Junzaburo Nishiwaki translated some poems of James Joyce into Japanese
in 1933, the same year that Japan withdrew from the League of Nations.
Nishiwaki was an intellectual modernist poet and English linguist, and a
constant contributor to Bungaku, the magazine that published the transla-
tion of A Rose for Emily. 12
In the 1930s, art was a spiritual escape from the suffocating political mi-
lieu for many Japanese writers, unless they turned to communism. Those
120 takako tanaka
who loved Western art, especially, felt a strong pressure. Though the art
for art s sake tendency in French Symbolism and modernism served as
an excuse to separate art from politics, admiring literature from hostile
nations alienated the artists from their society. Japan, with her imperi-
alist desire and increasing militarism, cannot easily be compared with the
American South in the 1920s; but some Japanese artists desire to tran-
scend local community and chauvinistic nationalism for high art, repre-
sented mainly in France, is common to that of young Faulkner. Faulkner
was not satisfied with the parochial and genteel atmosphere in Southern
culture, and as a young man would rather identify himself with French
symbolists, British aestheticists, or international modernists.
After World War II, the U.S. influence was overwhelming in Japan, and
American popular culture rushed in. But France was still, by tradition, the
first love for Japanese artists and intellectuals. It is no coincidence that
some Japanese writers who appreciated Faulkner in the early period after
World War II were well versed in French literature. The vigor of American
culture was certainly felt, but the French existentialists strong interest in
Faulkner helped fuel his reputation.13
Some Japanese writers who loved Faulkner were aware of the danger
of unqualified admiration for the Occident. They tried carefully to see the
concrete common ground between Faulkner s texts and Japanese litera-
ture. One Japanese writer, Shin ichiro Nakamura, analyzed the unique-
ness of classic Japanese narratives in comparison not only with Western
classics but with the techniques of Flaubert, Proust, and Anglo-Saxon
modernists, and fully appreciated Faulkner s language experiment.14 A few
others, like Takehiko Fukunaga and Mitsuharu Inoue, made an attempt to
create a fictional town like Jefferson and tried to focus there the problems
of Japanese local communities.15 Still, the French influence on Faulkner s
early reputation suggests that Japanese artists appreciated Faulkner first
as a cosmopolitan, modernist writer. If the separation of universal art from
politics barely worked before the war, the belief in the universality of art
acquired more support after World War II, now that Japan had returned
to the international stage in peace.16 The emphasis on universality, how-
ever, may have blocked some writers from recognizing the local aspects of
Faulkner s texts, which, though apparently specific to the South, also sug-
gest the common patriarchal problems with Japanese society.
Patriarchy, the rule of the Father, plays an important role both in South-
ern society and in Japanese society. Some people in these societies, espe-
cially men, are sensitive to any damage done to patriarchal authority, while
they are rather insensitive about its harm done to different ethnic or social
minority groups. We have to wait for Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel Prize
Japanese Writers Encounter Faulkner 121
recipient for literature, to deeply appreciate Faulkner s examination of
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